Moon Palace (5 page)

As I sold off the books, my apartment went through many changes. That was inevitable, for each time I opened another box, I simultaneously destroyed another piece of furniture. My bed was dismantled, my chairs shrank and disappeared, my desk atrophied into empty space. My life had become a gathering zero, and it was a thing I could actually see: a palpable, burgeoning emptiness. Each time I ventured into my uncle’s past, it produced a physical result, an effect in the real world. The consequences were therefore always before my eyes, and there was no way to escape them. So many boxes were left, so many boxes were gone. I had only to look at my room to know what was happening. The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself disappear.

T
hose were difficult days for everyone, of course. I remember them as a tumult of politics and crowds, of outrage, bullhorns, and violence. By the spring of 1968, every day seemed to retch forth a new cataclysm. If it wasn’t Prague, it was Berlin; if it wasn’t Paris, it was New York. There were half a million soldiers in Vietnam. The president announced that he wouldn’t run again. People were assassinated. After years of fighting, the war had become so large that even the smallest thoughts were now contaminated by it, and I knew that no matter what I did or didn’t do, I was as much a part of it as anyone else. One evening, as I sat on a bench in Riverside Park looking out at the water, I saw an oil tank explode on the other shore. Flames suddenly filled the sky, and as I watched the chunks of burning wreckage float across the Hudson and land at my feet, it occurred to me that the inner and the outer could not be separated except by doing great damage to the truth. Later that same month, the Columbia campus was turned into a battle-ground, and hundreds of students were arrested, including day-dreamers like Zimmer and myself. I am not planning to discuss any of that here. Everyone is familiar with the story of that time, and there would be no point in going over it again. That does not mean I want it to be forgotten, however. My own story stands in the rubble of those days, and unless this fact is understood, none of it will make sense.

By the time I had started classes for my third year (September 1967), my suit was long gone. Battered by the soaking it had taken in Chicago, the seat of the pants had worn through, the jacket had split along the pockets and vent, and I had finally abandoned it as a lost cause. I hung it in my closet as a souvenir of happier days and went out and bought myself the cheapest, most durable clothes I could find: work boots, blue jeans, flannel shirts, and a secondhand leather jacket from an Army surplus store. My friends were startled by this transformation, but I said nothing about it, since what they thought was finally the least of my concerns. The same with the telephone. I did not have it disconnected in order
to isolate myself from the world, but simply because it was an expense I could no longer afford. When Zimmer harangued me about it one day in front of the library, grumbling about how difficult it had become to reach me, I dodged the question of my money problems by sailing into a long song and dance about wires, voices, and the death of human contact. “An electrically transmitted voice is not a real voice,” I said. “We’ve all grown used to these simulacra of ourselves, but when you stop and think about it, the telephone is an instrument of distortion and fantasy. It’s communication between ghosts, the verbal secretions of minds without bodies. I want to be able to see the person I’m talking to. If I can’t, I’d rather not talk at all.” Such performances were becoming more and more typical of me—the excuses, the double-talk, the odd theories I propounded in response to perfectly reasonable questions. Because I did not want anyone to know how hard up I was, I saw no choice but to lie my way out of these scrapes. The worse off I was, the more bizarre and contorted my inventions became. Why I had stopped smoking, why I had stopped drinking, why I had stopped eating in restaurants—I was never at a loss to devise some preposterously rational explanation. I wound up sounding like an anarchist hermit, a latter-day crank, a Luddite. But my friends were amused, and in that way I managed to protect my secret. Pride no doubt played a role in these shenanigans, but the crucial thing was that I didn’t want anyone to interfere with the course I had set for myself. Talking about it would only have led to pity, perhaps even to offers of help, and that would have botched the whole business. Instead, I walled myself up in the delirium of my project, clowned at every possible opportunity, and waited for time to run out.

The last year was the hardest. I stopped paying my electricity bills in November, and by January a man from Con Edison had come to disconnect the meter. For several weeks after that, I experimented with a variety of candles, investigating each brand for its cheapness, luminosity, and long-lastingness. To my surprise, Jewish memorial candles turned out to be the best bargain. I found
the flickering lights and shadows extremely beautiful, and now that the refrigerator had been silenced (with its fitful, unexpected shudderings), I felt that I was probably better off without electricity anyway. Whatever else might have been said about me, I was resilient. I sought out the hidden advantages that each deprivation produced, and once I learned how to live without a given thing, I dismissed it from my mind for good. I knew that the process could not go on forever, that eventually there would be things that could not be dismissed, but for the time being I marveled at how little I regretted the things that were gone. Slowly but surely, I discovered that I was capable of going very far, much farther than I would have thought possible.

After I paid the tuition for my final semester, I was down to less than six hundred dollars. A dozen boxes remained, as well as the autograph collection and the clarinet. To keep myself company, I would sometimes put the instrument together and blow into it, filling the apartment with weird ejaculations of sound, a hurly-burly of squeaks and moans, of laughter and plaintive snarls. In March, I sold the autographs to a collector named Milo Flax, an odd little man with a nimbus of curly blond hair who advertised in the back pages of
The Sporting News.
When Flax saw the array of Cub signatures in the box, he was awe-struck. Studying the papers with reverence, he looked up at me with tears in his eyes and boldly predicted that 1969 would be the Cubs’ year. He was almost copy, of course, and if not for a late-season slump, combined with the lightning surge of the ragtag Mets, it surely would have happened. The autographs fetched one hundred and fifty dollars, which covered more than a month’s rent. The books kept me in food, and I managed to squeeze through April and May with my head above water, finishing up my schoolwork with a flurry of candlelight cramming and typing. At that point I sold my typewriter for twenty-six dollars, which enabled me to rent a cap and gown and attend the countercommencement that had been organized by the students to protest the official university ceremonies.

I had done what I had set out to do, but there was no chance to savor my triumph. I had come to my last hundred dollars, and the books had dwindled to three boxes. Paying the rent was out of the question now, and though the security deposit would see me through another month, I was bound to be evicted after that. If the notices started in July, then the crunch would come in August, which meant that I would be out on the street by September. From the vantage of June first, however, the end of the summer was light-years away. The problem was not so much what to do after that, but how to get there in the first place. The books would bring in approximately fifty dollars. Added to the ninety-six I already had, that meant there would be a hundred and forty-six dollars to see me through the next three months. It hardly seemed enough, but by restricting myself to one meal a day, by ignoring newspapers, buses, and every kind of frivolous expense, I figured I might make it. So began the summer of 1969. It seemed almost certain to be the last summer I spent on earth.

T
hroughout the winter and early spring, I had stored my food on the windowledge outside the apartment. A number of things had frozen solid during the coldest months (sticks of butter, containers of cottage cheese), but nothing that was not edible after it had thawed. The main problem had been guarding against soot and pigeon shit, but I soon learned to wrap my provisions in a plastic shopping bag before leaving them outside. After one of these bags was blown off the ledge in a storm, I began anchoring them with a string to the radiator in the room. I grew quite adept at managing this system, and because the gas was mercifully included in the rent (which meant that I did not have to worry about losing my stove), the food situation seemed well under control. But that was during the cold weather. The season had changed now, and with the sun lingering in the sky for thirteen or fourteen hours a day, the ledge did more harm than good. The milk curdled; the juice turned rank; the butter melted into glistening pools of
yellow slime. I suffered through a number of these disasters, and then I began to overhaul my diet, realizing that I had to shun all goods that perished in the heat. On June twelfth, I sat down and charted out my new regimen. Powdered milk, instant coffee, small packages of bread—those would be my staples—and every day I would eat the same thing: eggs, the cheapest, most nutritious food known to man. Now and then I would splurge on an apple or an orange, and if the craving ever got too strong, I would treat myself to a hamburger or a can of stew. The food would not spoil, and (theoretically at any rate) I would not starve. Two eggs a day, soft-boiled to perfection in two and a half minutes, two slices of bread, three cups of coffee, and as much water as I could drink. If not inspiring, the plan at least had a certain geometrical elegance. Given the paucity of options to choose from, I tried to take heart from this.

I did not starve, but there was rarely a moment when I did not feel hungry. I often dreamt about food, and my nights that summer were filled with visions of feasts and gluttony: platters of steak and lamb, succulent pigs floating in on trays, castlelike cakes and desserts, gigantic bowls of fruit. During the day, my stomach cried out to me constantly, gurgling with a rush of unappeased juices, hounding me with its emptiness, and it was only through sheer struggle that I was able to ignore it. By no means plump to begin with, I continued to lose weight as the summer wore on. Every now and then, I would drop a penny into a drugstore Exacto scale to see what was happening to me. From 154 in June, I fell to 139 in July, and then to 123 in August. For someone who measured slightly over six feet, this began to be dangerously little. Skin and bone can go just so far, after all, and then you reach a point when serious damage is done.

I was trying to separate myself from my body, taking the long road around my dilemma by pretending it did not exist. Others had traveled this road before me, and all of them had discovered what I finally discovered for myself: the mind cannot win over matter, for once the mind is asked to do too much, it quickly shows
itself to be matter as well. In order to rise above my circumstances, I had to convince myself that I was no longer real, and the result was that all reality began to waver for me. Things that were not there would suddenly appear before my eyes, then vanish. A glass of cold lemonade, for example. A newspaper with my name in the headline. My old suit lying on the bed, perfectly intact. Once I even saw a former version of myself blundering around the room, searching drunkenly in the corners for something he couldn’t find. These hallucinations lasted only an instant, but they would continue to resonate inside me for hours on end. Then there were the periods when I simply lost track of myself. A thought would occur to me, and by the time I followed it to its conclusion, I would look up and discover that it was night. There was no way to account for the hours I had lost. On other occasions, I found myself chewing imaginary food, smoking imaginary cigarettes, blowing imaginary smoke rings into the air around me. Those were the worst moments of all, perhaps, for I realized then that I could no longer trust myself. My mind had begun to drift, and once that happened, I was powerless to stop it.

Most of these symptoms did not appear until mid-July. Prior to that, I dutifully read through the last of Uncle Victor’s books, then sold them off to Chandler up the street. The closer I got to the end, however, the more trouble the books gave me. I could feel my eyes making contact with the words on the page, but no meanings rose up to me anymore, no sounds echoed in my head. The black marks seemed wholly bewildering, an arbitrary collection of lines and curves that divulged nothing but their own muteness. Eventually, I did not even pretend to understand what I was reading. I would pull a book from the box, open it to the first page, and then move my finger along the first line. When I came to the end, I would start in on the second line, and then the third line, and so on down to the bottom of the page. That was how I finished the job: like a blind man reading braille. If I couldn’t see the words, at least I wanted to touch them. Things had become so bad for me by then, this actually seemed to make sense. I
touched all the words in those books, and because of that I earned the copy to sell them.