第2章 WEDNESDAY

1

When he woke up he couldn't move.

Not a shoulder, not a limb, not a finger. Every muscle felt paralyzed, useless. There was no sense of body.

He lay there on the bed and stared up at the ceiling and tried to remember. What had brought him there, where he was and, even, who he was. His brain was a sluggish current that slid like lava over the effort to know. He could almost feel it shift and slough like a turgid river against the walls of his brain.

Silence.

It was quiet outside. It was almost never quiet outside. Not in the city, not where he lived. He wondered where the elevated trains were and the trucks and the cars and the people hurrying.

Silence. His brain tried to work.

It was an effort. It was like standing in sweating impatience over an obdurate machine, cursing it, kicking it, trying to get it running. And, all the time, the lump of an engine sat there like a stubborn mule and refused to turn. It mocked. The very lack of motion was an insult flung in the teeth. That was what his brain was like then. He could not know: Where am I? What day is it? What time? Why did he feel as though encased in cement?

His sleep-crusted eyes rolled down. He looked at the floor.

He saw his overcoat there, dropped or thrown, all bunched up and wrinkled. It was a mountain of wool, ridged and cliffed with silk slopes of lining and great hidden caves of sleeves.

His eyes shifted and he saw his hat in the chair, leaning slanted against the back. The same color and the same motionless pose. As if all things were frozen in time and space and he looked at them from some timeless attitude. He stared at the hat and he thought—Odd, how did I manage to get it there in the dark without even trying when…

The memory clouded. A fog of forgetfulness suddenly exploded its mist over all recall. He could not remember the slightest incident from what seemed to have been "the night before." He was thrown back to the room and there he was, lying stock still on the bed and feeling as though he had turned to stone, as though he were a rock there.

Further away on the thread-bare brown rug he saw the money.

It was spilled out on the floor, dozens of dark green bills. It looked as if, from the ceiling, a strange financial cloud had formed and rained green money to the rug. A manna, a benefit from the skies of his room. There were the perfectly shaped drops. It had rained bills. His eyes collected them, fives and tens, and twenties. He couldn't tell how many. Bills hung under each other, hiding numbers. All in clumps of green. And his eyes were not good enough.

Still only silence.

Why? In the city? Impossible. Unless he had caught a moment of rarity when all motion and all effort were suddenly ended. When the strands of traffic and commerce had parted completely for a moment before reuniting into its noisy weave.

He looked up again, still groggy. The room shifted about him. It was made of cloudy rubber. No shapes would form with sharpness, no edges gain the knife-like clarity they should have had. He blinked and blinked his eyes, feeling the tiny daggers of residue stab at the corners of his eyes.

He tried to wake up. He wanted to get up and wash his face.

He thought maybe he was exhausted. He thought maybe that was why he couldn't move. He looked down inspecting over his long immobile body. It was like standing behind a battlement and staring out over the terrain of a rumpled and torn battlefield. He was still not awake. He wasn't sure he wasn't still sleeping. It might have been, he thought. Things like that happened.

His left leg was on the bed. The shoe on his left foot was pressed against the paint-scratched foot of the bed. He felt the pressure. Strangely. Not a direct, located pressure. It was vague, without definition; as though he felt it in his mind because he saw the foot pressing and knew there should be a pressure somewhere.

And he thought again he might be asleep because that was how things felt in a dream. Nothing was etched on ligament and tissue with the true sensation of those pressures and touches of actual waking. In dreams you felt pain but there was no pain; and sensuality when there was no physical cause for it. It was a thing of the mind completely.

His eyes shifted.

His right leg curled over the edge of the bed and hung to the floor. All he could see was the ridge of the knee cap bulging through the worn material of his pants. He couldn't see his right foot. It was on the side of the bed, lost to his eye.

Now, either the dream grew more real or sleep departed, veils withdrawing one by one.

He began to feel.

His right shoulder was aching. Slowly, like the pain rising after one had burned himself. A delicate and clocklike flaring of uncomfortable sensation. In slow, rather than faster waves of pain, all gnawing fragile toothed at his brain centers. He found his lips pressed together when he grew conscious of them.

He grew conscious of them because his lips were dry, very dry.

He saw his arms. His left arm was at his side, fallen and inert, like a toppled warrior. The thumb of his left hand was pointing out as if he were trying to hitch a ride with it. The rest of the fingers were bent slightly, arches of motionless flesh. They were white, almost leprous. The streaks of dirt in the knuckles were like tiny roads over the tops of his flesh.

He couldn't feel his left arm or his left hand.

He felt sure then it was a dream. For he might have been looking at someone else's arm. He knew it was his and yet how could the eye insist when the body would not recognize the testimony?

He looked at his other arm because he felt it. The arm was running down along the edge of his body, so close to the edge that it might have been a growth on it. His right hand was pinned beneath the thigh. It was white too, what he could see of it. But he felt it. It was aching dully. It seemed as though he could say definitely that it was his. He could identify the location of that dull aching.

A breeze washed over him from the opening in the window.

He had opened it six inches. He remembered that. Suddenly he saw himself standing by the window and hitting the sides of the window to loosen the grey, dusty ropes and raise up the window six inches. He remembered that there had been neon lights shining down in the street. He had seen people walking.

This was his room then. And he had opened the window two days ago. Or was it three days ago? After it had rained, he thought. Yes, after it had rained. And now the wind was coming through the window. Cold and sharp.

Outside, sound flared.

The moment of unnatural silence ended as though in keeping with his dream. He heard the noises that he was so used to hearing. A truck grinding into gear, wheels turning. An elevated train rumbling into the station, raking to a halt, starting up again and howling off in to the greyish glaze. And the entire amalgam, the intangible pattern of noise that a city formed of its own.

He thought—It must be early morning, I'd better get up.

He couldn't move.

The ends of his mouth turned down. Eye edges wrinkled. His face, in dream or waking, reflected the rising ire he felt. It was not fear or foreboding. He was just getting angry. Because he said it was morning. He saw clearly that it was morning and yet when he told himself to get up, he couldn't do it.

So he told himself again—Get up, get up, never mind this. But added to himself quickly, secretly—If it turns out that you can't move then obviously this is a dream because only in a dream could such a thing happen because…

He tried to draw in his arms. But his arms wouldn't draw in. They might have been riveted to the bed. His entire body might have been nailed down like some outlandish horizontal Christ. The fingers of his right hand only twitched. He saw them. He kept looking from arm to arm, feeling a rising sense of unreality about everything.

The room was shifting again, quivering and trembling. Clouds were forming in the corners again. A dream, patently, a dream, he began to assert. But kept trying anyway. Come on, he said to his body, draw up your left leg, drop it over the side of the bed and sit up.

He couldn't do it.

Forgetting his idea that he was dreaming he let a sound of alarm fill his throat like a whine. He tried to talk.

Then he was sure it had to be a dream. Because when he tried to talk, he couldn't. Words were glued together into a sticky irresolvable gum. Unmirrored thoughts piled up squirming in his head. His brain became an ant hill throbbing with mute life. His tongue tried to push out between dry, flaky lips. But it couldn't and, suddenly, he tasted the fetid, decay of food in his mouth, the repugnant hot cloud of his own breath. A groan flooded from the cavern of his mouth before he could control it. It sounded like a hum, as if he were humming a crazy, tuneless song in the morning air. But his ears seemed to be clogged. Because it sounded like a noise coming from miles away.

And the room was not shaped correctly. And he was growing stronger in his conviction that it was a dream. It had to be. It hadn't the slightest element of reality. Life was a thing of facts and definite sensations. Life was not this vague and mixed up series of moments in which he could not feel or move or even discover to his own satisfaction where he was and in what condition.

His voice spoke then and he didn't recognize it it was so grating and mechanical. He said,

"What is this?"

What is this? The question. What was this feeling of inability to move? Why couldn't he move and why couldn't he either drift into final sleep and then wake up in the morning or find himself truly awake and get up and wash his face?

Breezes covered him again. The room grew brighter as the wind puffed in the brown muslin curtains on the window. In a gap of sound from the street he heard the rustle of the curtains against the table that stood before the window. He saw in his mind the porous material, dusty and light brown, the thick, hardy weave, the rents in the torn threads.

He heard a bus hiss open its doors. He heard garbage men tossing cans on the sidewalk noisily and one of them shouting, "Come on, mac!"

Oh my God, what is this?

He wasn't moving in either direction, to sleep or to wakefulness. He was being given no sign as to whether he slept or was awake. It was the first moment he could sense actual fear. In definition one could find an answer, one could adapt. But when you were suspended between possibilities, there were no hand holds and you were alone and fear was irrational.

He tried to get up. It was all he could think of doing.

His muscles contracted, forming hard blocks, useless blocks. His eyes expanded into wide elliptic orbs as he tried to get up. A whine hung in his taut throat like a low rasping note on a violin. The clarity of the sound made his heart beat in fear. In dreams the sounds you heard were without location, out of context. You heard them in your flesh. Senses intermingled. You not only heard them, you felt and tasted and smelled them.

But this was clear, sharp sound, the sound of his own whining as he struggled to clutch together strands of ligament and pull his body to a sitting position so he could get up and wash his face.

And he couldn't move.

Blood ran gushing through his body. He felt the rising heat. Except in his back; his back was cold and clammy. As if he were stripped to the waist, lying in wet morning grass.

Abruptly he saw himself, years before, in camp when he and another boy had gone hiking before anyone was up and walked in a big field of tall grass and clover. And took off their shirts and lay on their backs in the cool, dewy grass and watched the sky suffuse with color and laughed and shivered and felt mysterious.

He felt that body sensation now.

It was too clear to be a dream sensation.

He tried to move again. The more he felt that he was awake, the more savage grew the need to rise up and wash his face. For if all this rigidity, this inability to move were a thing of wakefulness, he could do nothing to stop terror from swallowing him. He had to immerse himself in frantic efforts to rise.

He tried to move. He fought to move. All things in the universe parted from him but the struggle to rise up.

Which he couldn't do.

"Why?"

He muttered it. Confused and, now, sinking into fright. Why couldn't he move? There was no reason for it. He'd come back there the night before and went to bed and…

But why was he dressed and why that cold clammy feeling in his back.

It was because of… For a moment he thought he had it. Scenes of the night before threw themselves on the screen of memory and he thought he knew.

But the recollections were thrown one on the other in too great a confusion. Images piled up on each other. He couldn't see.

Get up! His brain cried out to the sullen, sleeping armies of his body.

But all his orders went unanswered. He was stuck fast. Like clay picked up in the hand and driven down on a sticky wooden surface. Like hardened wax, like solidified metal. Trying to get up only made his chest and stomach heave, rise and fall quickly. It only made the tortuous breaths flare out his nostrils and gush down over his lips in a hot torrent. He couldn't move.

And struggling suddenly to clutch the belief that he was dreaming caused a maelstrom of unbidden terror to billow out from his brain and suck him in. He whimpered. He couldn't help it. Over and over he thought—I don't understand, I don't understand, I don't under…

He tried desperately to think it out.

His body trembled and shook and every thought that tried to form in logic was shoved aside and mangled by an enlarging bolt of fear. He tried to remember, struggling to arouse a little ration from the mounting chaos of his mind. He closed his eyes tightly and tried to concentrate.

At first, nothing would come. The harder he tried, the more confused and jumbled everything grew.

Then the mists tried to clear. Jigsaw pieces tried to clutch elusive arms, lock hands to show their picture. The shop. The old man. The bee that plunged far into the reaches of his flesh. He knew these things. They flashed across his brain like pictures that a speeded camera hurled across a glossy screen.

Running. He remembered running and running. He remembered the room. He remembered throwing off the coat. He remembered the flock of bills fluttering down in blackness. He remembered falling and…

The meat cleaver across his body.

It was getting clearer.

But, suddenly, he didn't want it to get clearer. He wanted it to cloud.

He was afraid to see anymore. He wanted desperately to believe it was a dream.

It had to be a dream. He kept his eyes closed and his throat drew itself in. Under his jaw bones, the arteries pulsed and he felt them pulse. In his mind a timid, frightened voice asked the questions over and over, in a terrified longing to know: How can a man not get up? How can a man not move at all? How can this be when it is only a little thing in the shoulder? Why?

Paralyzed.

The word formed before he could stop it.

It seared him mercilessly. Paralyzed. It chanted its own hideous suggestions of hopelessness to him. And the thin voice went on under it, sighing and moaning—How can a man not move? How can a man not get up when it is only a little thing in his shoulder, a thing he hardly feels at all?

He fought again to believe he was dreaming. Every cloud he saw in the room was encouraged. Every blurred outline, every unsteady object was embraced as a sign that he was still asleep. He reasoned it and struggled to convince himself with this reason.

Well, wasn't it impossible after all? Could such a thing be? No, for listen, there in the hall someone just unlocked their door and went to the bathroom and, listen, there is the lock on the bathroom door being slid into place.

He suddenly realized that he was trying, at once, to convince himself that he was asleep and that he was awake. And the confusion of not knowing which way to turn let fear pour into the vessel of his thoughts again. He poured it back out desperately, plunging back to the only salvation he could think of.

It was a dream.

He caught at it, held tightly to it. It had to be a dream. Soon to awaken, he was enmeshed in a last flurry of nightmare. Why, that happened very often. He knew that. He reasoned it out. Sometimes, no lots of times, when you were dreaming, you knew you were asleep and that no matter what was happening to you, there was actually nothing to worry about. It was just a nightmare. Yes, you actually told yourself that right smack dab in the middle of the dream.

The monster loomed over you with its dripping fangs. The spiders started dropping all over you. You were threatened with death, dismemberment, any of the manifold horrors that an unshackled brain can envision.

And right in the very center of this hideous panic you calmly told yourself—Oh don't worry about this, you're dreaming, can't you see that? Why, you're dreaming this. You're lying in your own bed in your own room and all this supposed horror is just an emanation from the brain. That's all.

This situation was just like all the others. Oh, perhaps it was a little more notable for details but outside of that…

He smiled. He forced himself to smile. Let it flow, he thought. A dream is just a dream. It cannot harm me really. He let it flow and did not fight. Instead he tried to flow along with it, see it through to its inevitable conclusion when he would jolt up on the bed in sudden sweating wakefulness, stare at the wall and then, a moment later, chuckle and say—God what an awful dream.

So it was his room. All right. Fuzzy at the edges, of course, as in all dreams. As seen through a glass darkly. All right though, my room without a doubt. So what? No reason why one couldn't dream of his own room. So look at it then. Enjoy this dream. Try to remember it. Then when you awake, write down every detail of it and, following Freud's dictums, you should be able to analyze it and find out what's bothering you as if you didn't already…

He stopped that train of ideas because thinking of what bothered him smacked too strongly of reality and he didn't wish to dwell on reality now.

So he looked.

At the pale green walls. Who said, he asked himself, that you don't see colors in your dreams? Am I seeing colors or am I not seeing colors? I am seeing colors. Pale green. That's the color of my true love's… He looked at the thick steam pipe by the door. He looked at the yellow-brown paneled door with its porcelain knob the color of a fish's belly. Over the door, he saw the double-paned transom, each pane black with coated dust.

Well, well, observed some irritating portion of his brain, isn't it a remarkably realistic dream. Rather overpowering in its detail, isn't it?

He felt his chest shudder once. Caught in the need for pretending, he went on, fighting to convince himself at last that it was a dream, knowing that he could if he only took enough time, knowing that at last he could make it so that he really was dreaming.

He looked at the wardrobe closet at the foot of the bed. It was black and shellacked with two round glass knobs screwed in and fancy plywood curlycues glued to the surface of the door.

Well, said that part of his brain again, if it's a dream, why don't you have Sally come walking in naked and jump into bed with you? You know that anything you want in a dream is yours, you know that the sky's the limit when you're dreaming.

He fought it off. Never mind, he told himself. It's not clear at all. Yes it is, said the part of his mind, it's incredible in its detail. Why look at those glass knobs and those curlycues, now come on, 'fess up, have you ever in your life seen anything so clearly lifelike?

His eyes fled about looking for vindication of his theory. No, the corners weren't clear, they were fuzzy like in a dream. That's the sleep in your eyes, that's myopia. Not so, it's a dream I tell you, everything is fuzzy, without detail. What about that single bulb hanging down from the high, white, dusty ceiling on a chain with the dusty black wire snaking in and out among the links? It's not as clear as that, it's a mile away. It's the moon. No, it's not as clear as that, it's a mile away. It's the moon. No, it isn't and what about the dresser, look at how black and chipped and clear it is. See? Only the bottom drawer is pushed in and there's that white towel on the top and the dusty-surfaced mirror perched up on those two lathed arms. See that? No, it's a dream! The box of soda crackers and the half-empty jar of peanut butter, look, you can even smell the peanut butter if you sniff hard. I tell you it's a dream!

His eyes shifted wildly, twin planets dipping in swimming milky space. It's a dream, a dream!

And the chair with the brown hat and the bunched up brown overcoat, see the fine strands, the weave of the wool and the swirling mounds of bills and the stolid white table over against the wall with the black typewriter on it and the yellow, sleeveless sweater and…

OH, MY GOD!!

Terror struck him dumb.

His eyes plunged sight into blackness and the wind on his flesh was cold.

It was real.

He was in his room on Third Avenue in the city of New York. He was really there, lying paralyzed. It was his own body he saw on the bed, actually his own paralyzed body. To his left the old woman was in her room wheezing in the heavy slumber of the aged. To his right, the drunk was gagging on his bed, gurgling and coughing and spitting in a waste basket. All there, hard and vital and measurable, now that he could no longer delude himself.

And, outside, the city, concrete and steel and unseeing in its merciless separation, was stirring itself for another day.

2

The building was made of brick.

It was square, a four-floored dingy box of rooms, sagging and standing off the sidewalk like a fat old woman too tired to go on. Its face was sprinkled with dirty-paned windows and scarred with jagged, rusty scars of fire escapes. It stood on the corner hemmed in on one side by the elevated structure, on the other by a piano factory.

Its front door led into a dim hallway that smelled of lye and rot and eternal stews. The walls were spattered with all manner of long dry and unidentifiable liquids. The faded rug ran like a colorless fungus from wall to wall and, creeping up the stairs, died at the doorway to the roof.

The house stood still in the early morning.

Once, at five a.m., a laborer in hashhouse-spotted work clothes had shuffled out to catch a bus for Jersey. His slamming of the front door had bounced back into the sleepy shell.

Now it was quiet again, its tenants all tucked away neatly in their respective shells, turning lethargically on bumpy mattresses or lying in stupefied slumber.

Alone or in arms strange and familiar, they blended together into the flat batter of lost hopes that swelled and ran dead through the halls of the old grey house. On the first floor and on the second and the third.

And on the fourth…

3

He was lying there shivering when it struck him.

"Uh!"

His face twisted in agony as exploding heat pressed against the walls of his bladder. His stomach bubbled and contracted. Bolts of fire branded it. Oh my God! His mind cried, I have to get up! His eyes ran over the room as if seeking some sign of rescue.

Again!

A flaming mallet pounded against the nerve-sensitive lining of his body.

"No, this is im…" Impossible! His mind finished in a shriek as his tongue was caught up in a rushing tide of hot pain.

His eyes narrowed and almost closed. His teeth clicked together, clenching. He saw the ceiling ripple through pain-clouded eyes, watched it flow waterlike through his contorted gaze. He sucked in wincing breaths as his bladder shot blunt waves of agony through him again. The pain swept over him like a wind, like a horde of crushing hands pawing at him.

He tried to look down at his stomach to see if it was swollen as it felt. It felt like a pus-filled gourd about to explode and shower the bed and the walls with its loathsome cream of rot. His shaking gaze ran down over the heap of his body. And, in the center of pain, the thought came again, sickening in its clarity…

This is real. This is actually happening.

Then, as the spasm passed for a moment, he cried out in his mind—Get up! You have to get up!

He fought. He panted, trying to move, his teeth grating together until he thought they would grind each other to dust. Breaths whistled through his nose and mouth. His eyes bulged out from their sockets as titanic effort screamed for the maximum from his body. His right hand trembled, his legs ached and burned. Only his upper back and shoulders were still cold and damp.

Now there was a numbness running around his waist and moving into the small of his back. He ignored it, thinking only that he must get up and wash his face. He had to get up. It was the only thing left to do in the world. What was to be done after he got up didn't matter. But he had to get up.

Get up, damn you! He raged and fumed at the stubborn mass of his body. Get up, get up, get up! His entire body trembled spasmodically like a land suffering earthquake. He almost expected to see his chest yawn open like severed earth and see his innards spout out like lava.

Suddenly. A click in his throat.

Everything went. His straining muscles let go without his wish, helpless to obey his will. He slumped back on the pillow and felt a large drop of sweat trickle down his right temple and get crushed between his cheek and the pillow.

It seemed beyond belief. Now he became incredulous with outrage. He was the dumbfounded one. "I can't do it!" he gasped as though the information were utterly astounding.

My God, I can't move myself!

Abruptly his mind plunged into investigation. Come on, get it figured out. He could not accept that there was no hidden key, no ridiculously simple and uninvolved answer to all this. Some minute panacea which could be instantaneously applied and thus enable him to rise and walk as if the entire thing had never happened.

Let's see now. The old man said—Stop! Yes, that much was clear. But he didn't stop. And then the old man had coughed. No, it just sounded like a cough. The old man shot at him. That was it. And he ran and ran. And he got back to the room. But there was more to it than that. His brow drew itself together into long wavering lines. There had to be more. Why wouldn't his brain wake up so he could get it all solved and get up to wash his face?

He had to get up.

There was no question about that. For Christ's sake he had to get up and go to the bathroom and then he had to pack and put on his hat and coat and stick the money in his wallet and leave. He blinked and tried to remember why. But he knew he had to leave anyway. The reason would come later. Right now what mattered was that he get up and wash his face.

But he couldn't.

He tried to understand that, searching in repressed fright for the answer.

It was a race. Either fear or realization would come first. It had to be realization. There was an answer and he would find it. Let's see.

He couldn't leave. As of now, of course, he meant. He wanted to leave. He willed himself to leave. To get up and walk out of there. But something kept him from it. What? Was something torn or split? Was something broken, shattered, severed? Because he couldn't move his body. Yes, that was better. There was a bullet in him and it had done something to his system. Simple enough.

Then, fear came again. Knowing it was hardly enough. Knowing he could not move wasn't much help in getting him to move. And what was going to happen? Hours in the room?

Days?

His mouth fell open. But there was no water and no food and he was hungry and thirsty. And his body, what about that? Already it was swelling with undischarged wastes. What was he to do?

His throat contracted. It was so easy to go over the facts. So hard to accept and understand them. Paralyzed. It was an easy word to speak and to think. But what did it mean? It meant he couldn't move. Did it mean he would never move again …?

No!

He heard the word shouted out in his mind and it echoed down the corridors.

It was impossible that such a thing be true. He wouldn't believe it. He couldn't afford to believe it. He was just in a state of shocked exhaustion. How many times had he read about men in shock? They were like this too, their functions gave way, they couldn't move.

Well, that's all it was. What he needed was rest and sleep and warmth. He couldn't pull the blanket over himself true. He was right on top of it. But it wasn't cold. The sun was coming up now and the window was only open a little and not much wind was coming in.

Anyway, it was April.

He closed his eyes. With all his will he refused to believe that he couldn't move at all. Maybe for the moment, yes. But that was shock. That meant only that it was a matter of waiting a while until he was rested up. Until he'd gathered a little strength. That was all.

"I'll rest a while."

He said it to himself, casually, straining to believe it was all a thing of simple values.

He turned his head and looked at the rose on the table.

It was drying up. The petals were shriveling and moisture was leaving them. In the glass, the still water was filled with tiny bubbles that clung to the sides like minute glass balloons.

There was something else on the table. He tried to see. Two things. One was a little higher than the other. He couldn't make them out because he couldn't focus out of the corners of his eyes.

He turned his eyes back and listened to the traffic sounds.

A car bellowed like a tone-deaf calf bawling. A truck ground up the block in first gear, its gears spinning faster and faster, the pitch of its driving engine rising until it sounded like a human groan. He listened intently until the truck switched into second gear.

He wanted to listen intently to all sounds.

It seemed as though he must be in complete tune with everything so that he could understand and thus adapt his state to the entire state of things and find the way to move again. There was only the trick of learning that held him back from motion.

So he listened and tried to find the pattern behind all the noises so that they would fit into the puzzle and he could see how to rise up and walk.

It didn't make sense. The better part of his judgment knew it was senseless. But he went on with it anyway, like an intellectual with his religion, blindly devoted to those regimentations which he realizes are anathema to the slightest application of reason. Just a little more and you'll find the key, he thought, and then you'll rest and you'll be fine, you'll see.

Through his lowered eyelids, he saw the increasing light of day. I wonder what time it is—he thought. And, automatically, tried to raise his left arm so he could look at his wrist watch. His hand stayed limp and still at his side.

He drove down rising fear as one would drive a rising ant hill into sidewalk cracks with a rubbing stamp of ones sole. All right, all right, he told himself, shutting his eyes tightly. Never mind that, in a little while you'll be out of this. Never mind what time it is, it doesn't matter what time it is.

Breathing heavily, he listened to the drunken man in the next room, snoring. He tried first to ignore, then to quell the insistent throbbing in his bladder. I wonder if it's distending or anything, the annoying, grating portion of his brain asked.

Think of something else! he yelled back defiantly.

And forced repose on himself.

Now you listen to me, he lectured smugly. You're going to be all right, do you understand that? In a while, in a little while. All you need is some rest do you see that, you do see that, don't you? You're in a state of shock from that small wound in your shoulder or back or wherever it is. And you need rest. That's all. Then you can get up and wash your face.

His throat tickled.

I could use a little water, he thought.

4

He opened his eyes.

He thought it must be about ten o'clock. It was five minutes to seven. In the sky, the sun climbed. The streets were growling with morning activity.

He looked down at himself.

His pants were tented at the crotch. His pupils expanded. He was very surprised. He hadn't been thinking about sex, he wasn't sexually aroused at all. What the hell is this, he thought, why is it so hard?

He blinked at it, couldn't feel it. He couldn't understand. It was like some strange construction in the crotch of his trousers going on without his knowledge. An unbidden erection effected by invisible builders.

He kept staring at it. He lay there and looked at it dizzily. He kept blinking. He kept looking at that lump down there and not understanding what had caused it.

It moved.

He was fascinated.

He lost interest.

Somehow it was like the rest of him; detached, something that belonged to another person. In his plight, of what interest was anything that had to do with another person? That bulge in his trousers simply had nothing to do with him.

He looked around the room again. There was no attempt to convince himself that it was a dream now. He knew he was awake, very much awake. The pain in his back was more severe. It felt like a cramp; as if he must raise up and twist his shoulders to unknot the kinks in his back muscles.

He tried at first, when he forgot that he couldn't move. Then he lay there trembling again, trying to force a screen of blankness on his mind so that the fears would not return and the debilitating imaginations not clutch at him so.

He looked at the room.

Everything was the same. The coat, the hat, the money, the dresser and closet, everything.

His gaze ran over the floor. The rug was dirty and spotty brown. There was a piece of blackened gum scuffed into it.

He'd never noticed it before. It must have been put there by a former occupant of this room. He looked at the piece of gum and imagined the man or woman stepping on it and then lifting their foot gingerly with a muffled curse and looking at the threads of gum their soles were pulling from the rug.

He wished that person was here now to help him.

It seemed very telling that a person had stood right on that spot and stepped on a piece of gum. An actual, living person had stood there. But now he was alone here and that person did not know of him and couldn't help him. In his sleepy, half-conscious daze, it seemed strangely important and valuable to him. He kept thinking of it as he stared at the rug and the gum. He saw that the rug was made up of three irregularly sized pieces that were sewed together with thick brown twine. He had never seen that before either. Odd, how many things you notice when you have the time, he thought.

There was a magazine lying at the foot of the table that stood by the window. He looked at it.

MOVIES read the cover, 10.

He saw Ava Gardner sitting in a creamy blue nightgown looking up at him. Her eyes were sleepy and sultry. Her moist red lips were parted a little. There was a lock of dark hair dangling over her creamy forehead. The bodice of her nightgown was cut very low. He could see the healthy brownish-white flesh, the entrance to the valley that ran between her upright breasts. He could feel the softness of her flesh with his eyes. Her shoulders were back and she had her right hand pressed against her hip. Through the silken transparency of the flaring sleeve, he could see her smooth, lightly-haired arm.

His mind asked Ava Gardner—What are you doing down there, how did you fall on the floor?

Ava Gardner looked at him and, to his question, gave no answer. He looked back at her.

In the dreary, waking drone of a city morning they were immobile and gazing at each other.

He looked over her torso and saw her firm, rising breasts and his organ was erect and stiff. But he didn't feel a thing. He might have been in church so pure and unsullied by libidinous thoughts was he. He looked at her breasts and his eyes observed how lovely they were, how soft and curved and…

He lifted his eyes to the ceiling without caring anymore.

His eyes fastened on the ceiling, the brownish white tint of the ceiling plaster. It was almost the same shade as her flesh. How different the source. Yet the same too. Both the result of thirty odd years of wear and maturation. His eyes saw that, deep-set, lack-lustre eyes. He looked at the plaster falling off. How can a room be so dirty, he wondered, how can it possibly be so dirty and ugly?

The ceiling wavered. His brain slid off its perch and for a split second, he wondered where he was again. Then his eyes, as if to answer the question of his mind, dropped their gaze and he was looking at the money again. And he remembered.

There were five twenty-dollar bills, six, no, seven of them. He could see them by squinting. He tried to remember where his glasses were. He couldn't remember. He wished he had them though. He felt that if he could see the world more clearly he would be more a part of it and able to return to it the sooner. But the way it was, his myopia caused the world to be blurred. It was not sharp and pin-pointed in detail. It separated him. He was in another bourne. He was apart, just a little bit yes, but still apart, some distance from the maximum point of being alive in the world.

Since he could not see his way back completely, there was only one thing to do.

He must sit up and wash his face.

He had to get out of there. He couldn't wait. He'd rested. Now he had to get up. The shock must have worn off, he told his system. "All right," he said. And said it calmly as he could as if by cajoling his body, he could soothe it into motion.

"Now," he said.

Very calmly, and with a thin assured smile on his face, he tried to sit up.

Muscles pulled in their slack. They tightened. The levers of his skeleton and covering cables began to pull. They jerked once like a mulish derrick, trying to lift him up.

The pain in his back began to throb. He felt as if he were being held against a great spinning carborundum wheel.

And his body stayed. And the smile stayed, frozen hard as his flesh tightened. Rocklike, struggling to sit up, he looked like a pop-eyed, grinning idiot.

"All right!"

His voice became shaky and alarmed again. He lost calm detachment. He lost his assurance and his cloak of forced confidence. He struggled. He pushed and clutched and strained every muscle, his body aching and burning. Breaths blew great bubbles of saliva through the spaces between his clamped teeth. They popped from his lips and broke, running down over his chin. His right hand twitched under him, his body shook like a piece of metal caught and spun by a buzzing drill bit.

He heard the bed springs squeaking, outside the busses roaring and hissing and the cars running along and the trains grinding on their tracks while he, like a shuddering statue, tried to sit up.

"No!"

He could not stifle the cry as his muscles lost grip and strength slid from him. And, although he had not risen at all, it seemed as if he fell back, slumping heavily on the mattress, gasping with open mouth, his body swelling and throbbing with great waves of pain.

One brown-trousered leg was thrown over the edge of the bed. His hands were motionless, five pronged lumps of dry, dirty flesh. He looked like a marionette taken from its box and tossed there carelessly, unable to move or compose its floppy limbs.

Oh, my God, it's true.

The inner chamber of his mind spoke as if alarmed but he knew it wasn't. Its work was undiminished, its scope unlimited by this paralysis. It could go on clicking until he rotted. But the words came anyway.

It is true. I am awake. I am paralyzed. I am in my room on Third Avenue and I cannot move myself.

He turned his gaze and looked dizzily at the dying rose.

It was pallid and curling up. His eyes moved. He saw the other two objects. His head must have moved, he thought in surprise.

One of the objects he still didn't remember. But suddenly he recalled that the other one, the higher one, was a bar of candy.

I'm hungry, said his brain as if cued in.

For a moment it enraged him how predictable the body was. He saw a candy bar and his stomach bespoke the need for food. And he saw the water and immediately his body called for water.

For a long moment, he felt superior to the childish expectable dictates of his body.

Then he forgot it, then he didn't care. He could not follow any train of thought fully. His brain slipped and slid over thought like a poor, bundled-up traveler walking over slick winter ice. He looked at the candy bar again. I'm hungry, said his stomach.

He was.

His stomach felt empty. The more he thought about it the emptier it seemed. The walls seemed to be sucking themselves in just to be annoying, to make him hungrier. He tried to raise a hand to push against his stomach, forgetting. Only his right hand stirred slightly under his leg. He closed his eyes. I'm hungry, he said to force out the other thoughts. I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry…

Until he was hungry.

Now his organ was subsiding. He watched as the small hill in his pants began to sink, quivering as it fell. My bladder is distended, he thought, my God I have to go.

For a moment the spasm of burning and pain gripped him tightly. Then it passed, leaving him cold and shaky.

And wondering, in rising terror, what was going to happen to him because he was hungry and thirsty and had a terrible need to empty his body of its piling wastes.

But he couldn't move.

5

He was back in the army.

He was in bed and it was Sunday morning so he didn't have to get up. He was exhausted. They had just come back from a twenty mile hike. He felt exhaustion in every muscle of his body.

He had his eyes open and was looking at the ceiling. There was a bar of sunlight falling across the floor and bending up and over the foot of his bed. Through the sheet he felt the warmth, like the caressing of a hand. The heat traveled up his legs and into his body.

He was thinking about sex.

His hands were under the blanket feeling and pressing. The heat made him feel soft and pliable and he was breathing heavily, pressing insistent fingers into his groin.

Leonora came down the long barracks aisle.

He knew she was coming, he didn't even have to look. He felt her slippers on the floor. He heard their soft blueness and smelled their clicking. The other men in bed all whistled softly but they knew she was his.

And she came to him and the cot springs squeaked as she sat down beside him, wearing a blue silk nightgown and smiling down at him, stoking his tousled hair.

"Hello Ava," he said and when he said it, her mouth turned down and her face grew very stern.

"Why did you call me Ava?" she asked.

"Oh, I'm just kidding you," he said, "Because I saw a magazine on the rug in my room and the rug has a piece of gum scuffed into it and it was a picture, a photograph of Ava Gardner on the cover and she had on a blue silk nightgown like the one you have on so I thought it would be pretty funny to call you Ava."

She smiled. She said, "Oh," and she smiled again. She bent over to kiss him and the bodice of her gown fell away from her small firm breasts.

He felt her hair fall over both his cheeks and he was in a house of warm hair and her lips were warm and she was tickling his mouth with the tip of her tongue. And while she was kissing him he said, "Say John," to the boy sleeping in the next cot, "You don't mind if I lay her, do you?"

"Golly, it's all right with me Erick," John Foley said in his sleep, hugging his rifle.

He felt all right then. And he opened his mouth and she pulled the sheet off his body and everybody was laughing and whistling but he didn't care. "Do you care?" he asked Leonora and she said, "I don't care."

He kissed her neck and pulled the gown over her shoulders and pulled it down until it slid out and over the hills of her breasts and slipped off her rigid nipples and dropped whispering to her waist. He kissed her hot flesh.

Everything sped and ran. She was lying under him and moaning Oh darling, oh darling, keep it up, keep it up but all of a sudden he had to stop. I'm sorry Leo honey he said I have to go to the No you don't she said and she was angry and hot. But I have to Leo don't you understand I'll only be a minute. No! she said angrily or I'll scream and wake up your mother. I have to Leo and he ran naked down the long splintery barracks aisle and jumped down the stairs to the latrine and stood leaning his head against the damp wall over the urinal and watching himself and John was next to him in the Central Park toilet and he said to John—Say, John is this the pause that refreshes or is this the pause that…

He woke up with a shudder.

His organ was erect again and urine was pouring out of it. He felt it running and splashing down his stomach and crotch, dribbling over his thighs. It was hot. He saw the enlarging spot of wetness in his pants, saw a tiny spurt of yellow fluid come out between the buttons on his pants. It soaked him.

He didn't care.

He was smiling and his eyes closed again and he shivered and relished the feeling of hot urine pouring over him. He felt excited and happy, breathing in deeply through gritted teeth as the urine flooded over him endlessly, soaking down under him, blotted up by the bed clothes. He didn't feel his bladder working. He just felt the hot wetness and it seemed as if someone were pouring it over his lower extremities.

When it finally stopped he sighed in sleepy satisfaction, still half in the dream. I don't care Leo, he either said or thought. I'll do it again. I love it, it's wonderful, I love it, I love it, I love it.

The room began to drift and melt away. Blackness, warm and comforting dropped over him and shut his eyes with gentle fingers. He slept, his long body warm and moist and comfortable. Slept without dreams.

Like in a warm place, very nice. A warm, wet, dark place.

6

It was almost nine.

People hurried to work. They jumped down from bus steps. They came from the earth, a disgorged flow of pumping legs and arms and bobbing heads. They came thumping down the steps from the elevated platform, a swelling line of them, hurrying to work under the grey blue April sky.

The sun was up but not yet visible in the sky. It lay hidden behind a thin layer of grey. The sky was filled with an endless column of puffy continents drifting along slowly.

No one in the street looked up at them.

Everyone's eyes looked down at the dirty sidewalk or straight ahead toward their destination; the office or the shop or the factory. Some of the people stopped for brief moments to gaze in brief coveting at the window displays. Some of them gazed dumbly and passed on, unsold. Others made mental notes to return when pay day came. Others simply looked with neither the intent to buy nor interest in the product, drawn in by a sign, a picture, a certain twist of display.

The street was turgid with yellow-topped busses, bulky, thick-wheeled garbage trucks, their bodies a pale white, their tires black and spiked. And streams of private cars and taxicabs. The heavy rumble of their forward movement shook the house. It made the dirty walls tremble, sent tiny clouds of plaster dust into the air, formed motes of dust in the air. It stirred the bubbly water in the glass. It made the wilting rose jiggle in its place.

He was still asleep, cold and shivering, dreaming of snow and winter.

The room was chilly and the soggy underwear and pants clung to his flesh like cold wet paper. He stirred restlessly, his right hand jerking a little. Then it pulled out completely from beneath his leg as a wintry blast struck the him that dreamed.

He shuddered and moaned and his eyes fluttered open.

He looked dully at the ceiling.

His eyes felt caked over with a hard dry crust. It still stabbed at the corners of his eyes. It annoyed him and he wanted to wipe it away.

His throat was dry. His tongue shifted sluggishly as he licked his lips.

There he was. Still there. Whatever hope that it had been a dream was now gone for good. It was as real as anything was real. He tried to sit up. But there was no point in it. He couldn't sit up. He just lay there without moving, staring up at the ceiling.

His back and right shoulder were still cold.

Now his crotch and thighs and upper legs were cold too. The rest of his body was more or less comfortable. It was getting warmer outside. Sunlight was beginning to pierce through to the ground. It was easing out the knotted muscles of the city and himself. Everything was running smoother.

The traffic sped and parted and throbbed and rumbled, never ending. And lives come and go, he thought, and eyes open on the mystery of life and eyes close on the mystery of death and still the traffic moves on, the elevated trains fleeing from station to station and back again. And back again. And again.

Or do they?

He drew in a shuddering breath.

There was an odor to the room. He was beginning to get it. An odor of the old, the drying and the decaying. All mingled with the pungent, musky odor of his urine-soaked trousers. It was the smell of dying things.

He asked the question of no one.

"What am I to do?"

And when he asked to know, his eyes flickered like pictures on a haunted screen and no one could tell what things were in his eyes.

Again, he looked at the rose, still drying, still shriveling, the outside petals pulling away from the center folds.

It was like some rare fruit being peeled by the atmosphere. The petals would pull away, one by one through the coming hours and drop onto the white dusty towel which was supposed to be a table cloth.

And suddenly a feeling of intense might dropped on him and he closed his eyes, his heart beating quickly.

What does it mean to lie paralyzed? To lie paralyzed and look at a dying rose? It had to mean something. The complete thing, the affair in its entirety.

How many times had he been walking or standing or sitting, no matter where, and, suddenly, looked up and said or thought in the profoundest wonder—how long has this been going on?

But this portion of it; lying paralyzed in a room on Third Avenue in New York in April.

What did it signify?

It had to mean something. It simply had to have some intimation of purpose. What was it in the wide world, in the vast universe that he should be here in this ugly, rotting room, unable to get up? What did it mean that his overcoat was a jumbled, caverned lump of wool on the dirty, spotted rug, that bills of large denomination made a pattern of scroll-worked green on the light brown rug?

And that he, a human being, an amalgam of nerves and tendons and muscles and flesh and skin and a brain and vague hopes for a soul—was shot? Shot in the back by a wizened, miserly old man.

Was there a meaning? Certainly there were facts. The facts were clear. He was in room 27 of this particular house on Third Avenue and the walls were green and thickly, clumsily plastered and cracked. And there was one wall board showing over there where the plaster had fallen off. That was by the other table on which his typewriter rested, silent and aloof. The wardrobe closet door was slightly ajar and so were all the drawers in the dresser but the bottom one and the mirror on top had a thin layer of dust hanging on its surface and the rose was dying.

Was there a pattern for all that?

He felt dizzy, trying to discover it. As he had always grown dizzy when he sought a meaning to everything, a template that fitted over all the parts.

And, in the dizziness, the edges of the room clouded again and he blinked his eyes.

"Is there?" he asked

But the walls were silent. And he tried to sit up so he could wash his face. But he couldn't move. Only his right hand twitched a little.

I can't move.

That was the crux of it. That he had soaked himself like an impotent child or that there was money on the floor or that the rose was dying—all that was unimportant.

He couldn't move. That was the only thing.

The rest was emptiness. The rest might as well not exist for all its importance.

If there were no coat on the floor and no hat tilted against the chair back and no scraps of financial paper on the rug and no peanut butter assailing the air with its putty flavor and no shriveling rose—what difference would it make to him?

Those things revolved about him. And he couldn't move. Therefore they were worthless. The coat was worthless because it was of value only to wear and keep him warm. He couldn't get up to put it on so it was of no value. The money was worthless because he didn't have the means to get up and spend it.

That was why he had wondered if the trains really went on running after a person died.

It could have been that the entire universe was just a ruse to fool him and that everyone had their own universe of the mind. And it could also be that he was the only one and that it was all—the people and the cars and the trees and the skies and stars and all—put there to dupe him. And when he died there would no longer be any need for it to go on. So that the trains might disappear and the world and the universe go—pop!— just like that, the very instant breath ceased in his lungs.

He didn't care. He stopped thinking about it and listened because the church bells were ringing.

He listened carefully, not because he wanted to hear everything, not because he felt any longer that he must catch every single element of his surroundings so that he could be that much more alive and present in them.

Simply because he wanted to know the time.

He cursed the traffic for its noisiness and its lack of consideration. He gave half a thought to dying for an instant until the traffic had disappeared and then becoming alive again so he could hear the bells ringing.

Ding-dong-ding-dong. That was fifteen minutes before the hour. What hour? He'd have to wait.

He thought again. He wondered if that mattered either.

Because what was time of intrinsic worth to him? Without his movements to be guided by its instructions, time was nothing but a worthless set of partial measurements. So they followed the revolving about the sun and the spinning about the axis. So who in hell ever told the Earth to spin around in something like 24 hours?

Did he?

All these things, tangible and otherwise were not worth a penny to him. Because they were apart from him.

Odd, he thought. Being here in this room. So ugly. How was it to end? Would the police come and find him? Would the landlord? No, the rent wasn't due for two weeks yet.

Would Leonora come? No, she hated him and the room too. This is the ugliest, dirtiest room I ever saw in my life, haven't you got any self respect at all? She was in her tan jacket when she said that. And he had said, no one asked you to come. And said something else which made her suddenly breathless with a vicious anger and she couldn't find the right words to yell at him and finally she stamped out and flung the door open because she knew he was right.

But she was right too.

He looked at the room through hot, dry eyes.

It was. Ugly. Absolutely. You go on and on and time passes and you accept anything. He simply didn't notice it anymore. She had mentioned it and it had come as a sort of mild surprise. Because he had grown accustomed to the dirt and no longer saw it.

It wasn't always like that. He was brought up in a clean immaculate home. And would have felt uncomfortable if he weren't living in a clean immaculate home. Once he had to have clean walls and nice furniture all dusted and everything spick and span. And himself always clean and immaculate.

He remembered college, the bathroom down the hall from his room. He used to spend an hour at a time down there taking a bath, washing his blonde hair, shaving and, very carefully, brushing his teeth and using dental floss. Then he'd clean his nails. And he dusted his room often and had clean sheets sometimes twice a week.

It seemed fantastic to recall that now. He'd had the same sheets on the bed for a month and a half. And had never thought about it until then. It simply had become a world where thoughts of how many sheets you had on your bed did not exist. And one could go down and down to that world and never once see the steps on which he descended.

He began to think about his old home when his mother and his sister Grace and he lived together. He remembered how nice his mother kept it.

What would she think of this?

God, he could almost see her stricken and terrified face as she stood over his bed and looked down at him. He thought—it's good she's in her grave and can't see into this room. See him in it, lying urine-soaked and helpless, an old man's bullet in his back.

And what would his father say, he thought. Never mind this Erick, he'd say, be a gentleman and all will follow. He felt his features tighten in uncontrolled anger. You stupid old drunken failure! cried his mind.

And Grace—what would she say?

He didn't know. He wasn't sure whether she'd be annoyed or sympathetic. There was no way of knowing.

Grace would be home now. In her clean and pleasant Brooklyn home with the two girls. No, Susan would be at school because she was eight and had started school soon after he'd departed from their home.

Lying there on the wet, uncomfortable bed, he thought of Susan's chubby body, her limbs sturdy with health, her cheeks apple red, her energy boundless. He saw himself in the backyard with her, pushing her on the swing, her arcing up into the sunlight, her brown legs flopping, the skirt of her dress fluttering up over her ruffle-edged slip and her laughing and crying—Higher, Uncle Erick, push me higher!

Laura May was probably playing in the backyard with the boy next door. They would be digging in the sand pile probably, erecting fallible castles of the young. He could almost feel the warmth of her arms in the sun and see the speckled gold of her pigtail-braided hair sticking out from beneath the little red sailor's cap she wore.

Life, its visions and enticements were full on him as he lay there helpless, unable to move his limbs. It tortured him to be cursed with such violent imaginings at such a time.

And Grace, where was Grace?

In the kitchen perhaps, maybe washing clothes in the creamy white machine, watching the shifting soapy waters soak through and press dirt from the material. He could almost smell the pungent, nose-wrinkling odor of the soap. Stocks of odor committed to memory were released and what he had not used before he utilized now and tortured himself with the using.

Maybe she was baking a cake. Like a crazed torturer he stood over himself and pounded in memories of her strong, white hands beating up the flour and the eggs and the baking powder. He watched her pour it into the pan, slip it into the oven. He felt the hot blunt blast from the oven as she opened it. Suddenly remembered standing in Sally's kitchen and smelling the lamb chops while she smiled at him. The hot, delicious tang seeped into his brain. Oh Sally, he said, if you only knew how…

The drunk in the next room was hacking and gagging.

The sound filled all space and drove away thought. For a split moment there was nothing else in the universe but the drunk coughing bloody phlegm into his fetid mouth and spitting it into the side-dripping wastebasket. If the universe were only an illusion for his benefit, it had suddenly become an unbearable one for everything had disappeared but the sound of the drunk spitting fat greenish oysters from his grayish lips.

He listened to it, caught fast in the room.

His mouth spread out into a thin white line. He hated the drunken man. God damn you—die! his mind raged bitterly. He wanted to shout the words at the drunk, stand over him with a gun and fire endless bullets into his stale, reeking body.

But he couldn't move to kill. And even the words of hate would not form properly and the fury lashed back into him and shook him. Die, you pig! You gagging horse, you useless, brainless idiot!

The coughing broke off. Silence spread itself on the slice of his brain. But he still saw the drunken man, thudding back onto his grimy pillow, panting exhaustedly, his drawn, unshaven face half red, half yellow with subsiding apoplexy.

Erick couldn't stop it. He broke wind.

The sound was a gassy rush of air that sounded like a pathetic old man looking up to the heavens and crying—Ah! There was no rifle shot quality, no explosive sound. It slid from his body. Without his will. He hadn't meant to do it. Again it felt as if someone had taken charge of his body and given it the command to break wind. Now his bowels would perform unbidden he thought in teeth-gritted anguish. What good were the bowels if he couldn't control them?

The odor reached his nostrils.

It was sweetish and clinging and he could almost see the air dancing with fetid particles of smell. They glistened green like the backs of fat blow-flies. He closed his eyes and grimaced savagely.

Duck or you're a goner!—yelled the whimsical portion of his brain, the portion that enjoyed everything from misery to elation.

Groggily he looked down at Ava Gardner, feeling somehow embarrassed to have broken wind in her presence. "Sorry," he said to her and then wondered why it was that people talked to photographs and pet dogs and curly-headed dolls.

He looked over her swelling bosom, the inward curve of her ribs, the slight prominence of her stomach, her smooth legs, the blue nightgown folds gathering at her navel.

He looked up at her face. Who are you? he asked. Who am I? Who are any of us? The entire spectacle of the world and its people came over him again and he would rise up and cry—How long has this been going on? Or say like Lynn in a rare moment of self-revelation that night so long ago—Stop the world, I'm getting off.

He looked at her. He wasn't trying to think. Yet his brain clicked out its endless progressions.

There you sit frozen in time, he thought to her, showing the people the nice barely veiled teats for ten cents a throw. What's the point?

What is the goddamn point may I ask? He closed his eyes. He saw the picture still, meaninglessly. And kept asking pointless questions. There he was paralyzed and he kept asking questions of a photograph on a movie magazine. That was the true callousness of the brain. Its innate viciousness. For, in moments of deepest despair, observation went on, and heedless of the pain it caused, analyzed the current scene, the world in general as if itself were not a functioning part of the body but its own entity, a detached, impartial investigator carrying out its never-ending probe into the meaning of things.

What made you leave home, he asked. What made you go to that studio? Was it private or was it part of your movie studio? What impelled you to strip naked and then to slide that cool silk nightgown over your dark hair, down over your soft nude body and to sit down in it, posing, shoulders back, breasts outflung to the universe?

Ava, what?

He stared at her, eyes opened for the clinching question.

She didn't answer him.

Oddly enough, for a moment, it almost surprised him. Sometimes every proportion became so distorted in the mind that the prospect of pictures talking became normal, even expected and common.

But she didn't talk and the fact of it brought him back. But the questions went on unsatisfied, probing and needling. Why do I call you by your first name? Miss Gardner then. What made you do this strange thing? Money? Notoriety? What notoriety is there in placing your torso on the newsstands for ogling idiot minds? What glory in residing in dark toilet booths where twist-fingered men spill out the one remaining indication of their manhood and flush it away like dirt?

He became embarrassed again.

I'm sorry, he said, apologizing for the barbarous rudeness of his other mind. He looked at her and his mind said like some Pontius Pilate of the cinema—I find no fault in her.

Beauty, he thought. And looked at her. He framed the word soundlessly with his lips. Beauty.

And knew; beauty was nothing. It was a dream, a vague imperfect concept, a gimmick, a make-believe factor, an advertising man's valuable commodity.

He recalled that once in college, Doctor French had told the class in General Semantics about a gorgeous girl, the most gorgeous girl in town. He told them that all the men were pop-eyed and drooling over her. He said that every time they thought about her they got a lump in their crotch. They gaped at her, at her firm carriage, her pointy breasts, her clear eyes, her fine nose, her ears, her wonderful glossy black hair, her full exquisite lips. The professor said here's a picture of her and it was a Ubangi girl with big black saucers for lips. We laughed, Ava, pardon, Miss Gardner, he thought. And I'm laughing now.

But his face registered nothing. It all drifted away. He was back. Sorry that he couldn't have remained in a reflected bliss but back nevertheless.

Now in the midst of growing agony again. His back and shoulder burned with a cool liquid flame. He didn't know how to react. It felt hot and cold at the same time as if someone pressed hot ice against him pulling it away and then pressing it in so that at first he felt cold and then felt the burning.

What am I thinking about? he wondered. What am I supposed to do here? Just lie and think? What does a man do when he's in a dirty room and

Paralyzed.

His throat contracted. He tried to think of what might have happened. He had to think of something, anything to forestall the creeping of irrational fear.

The bullet had struck his spine. It was the only idea he could think of. It had struck his spine and cut some link between will and execution.

Then he remembered sitting down on the bed the night before and the sudden violent blow across his back as if the small of his back had been a baseball and Ted Williams had swung at it with all his might and hit it right on the nose. A crushing, breath-snapping blow.

He tried to sit up.

He couldn't move. He couldn't move at all.

The drunk was awake. Erick could hear him shuffling around his room. He'd turned on his radio and was listening to a newscast. Odd, he thought, that you can find a newscast no matter when you rise. The drunk changed the station and Erick heard a shred of Beethoven's Eroica before the drunk cut it off. And it made him think of the park and the merry-go-round that day.

He wondered abruptly if he should call the drunk and ask for his help.

His lips twitched. He felt them twitch and knew the answer.

In his mind he saw a vision. Of the night he came up the stairs and saw the drunk throwing a quick frightened glance over his shoulder like a rat cornered and frenzied. The drunk was stealing out of someone else's room, holding something in his hand. He had slammed that someone else's door and gone scuttling down the hall to his own room.

Erick saw that in his mind. And saw the money on the floor, his only escape from the city. He couldn't call the drunk. Not only would the money be taken but the drunk might call the police on the phone and that would be the end of it.

The worse part of it was that the inner portion of his brain, ever frank and brutal, told Erick that if he were the drunk living a life as brutalized he would take the money too and forget about the poor slob of a man lying helpless on his bed. But that would only be if I were like him, he fought back as if impelled to. He couldn't make it come off. And it made him shiver and suddenly become afraid of the world to think that even in his own mental state he would do the same thing, leaving behind the paralyzed man and fleeing with the money.

He closed his eyes and tried to think of something else. Because the sight of his own naked morals proved the ugliest view he could ever remember.

No, you can't tell the drunk, he told himself, he isn't an honest man, not to be trusted.

And, in perverted homilies, he lost the uncomfortable sense of self that had stolen unwished upon him a moment before.

He blew out a heavy, impatient breath.

It was becoming maddening to lie there immobile and helpless and hear the radio, hear the announcer talking loud as life, hear the drunk coughing and spitting and shuffling about his room. And to hear doors slamming everywhere in the house as if to torture him and to hear feet on the stairs and know that there were people all around him. And the only one who was awake and close enough was not to be trusted even in such a moment of desperation.

It seemed unnatural to be fussy at such a moment. But he had to be. He had gone to terrible forced lengths to get that money and he couldn't lose it now. There was time to think, he could find a better way. Maybe he could contact the old woman. There must be many ways. It seemed impossible that in a world rich with variegated circumstances he should be faced with only one alternative.

But he couldn't spend too much time thinking.

Time was passing. He was hungry. And what happened when he really got hungry? And thirsty? He was thirsty now. His stomach felt like a vacuum and his mouth and throat were clinging dry. He licked his lips. How long can a man go without water? he wondered to himself. Food, he knew, you could get along without for quite a while. After a long while it wasn't even a necessity.

But what about water?

He'd never thought about it much. He recalled reading or hearing that the body was over 90% water. The thought was appalling. We're practically walking lakes, he thought. One never thought of himself as being so much fluid.

He had lived in the city and there was always water. He drank it without thought. He absorbed it from all foods and all liquids. He constantly refueled the huge reservoir in his body without a single thought as to what he was doing. Now he was faced with depletion.

How long could a man go without water? He thought.

It was a thought that never occurred to one who lived in a city where artificial veins brought him all the supply he needed. In abundance the consciousness of need disappeared entirely. No, not entirely. But it was held in abeyance in that strange cluttered storehouse where all fixations and doubts and hungers resided in dusty, tranquil silence waiting for the bidding of necessity.

He seemed to recall having read about some Mexican Indian who had lasted ten days without water. Of course that had been in a desert. But the Mexican had been able to move. He had drunk his own urine over and over until evaporation had used it all up. He had just managed to reach an outpost. Otherwise he would have died. To die without water must be a terrible way to…

He stopped breathing.

Two hands had clamped him sandwich like between them and were suddenly crushing the breath from him. His lips trembled and, speechless, horror-stricken, he stared at the ceiling.

Die?

The word was a knife in him. He remembered that from the war.

No! He fought the idea. It was ridiculous to think of dying. He was only 24 years old, at a peak of physical life. There was too much to be done, too much writing to be finished. No, it was out of the question. He tried to force the thought aside as one did when a thought seemed to have no weak point but must be shunted aside in its entirety lest it displace everything else.

He pushed it aside. Scoffed at it. "Absurd", he muttered defensively.

Never mind, he argued, hadn't he felt imperiled by death when he was in combat? It was a natural and predictable concomitant of frightening moments. But he hadn't died in combat had he?

How do you know? asked his inner mind. He pushed it aside weary of its roguish insertions.

No, he hadn't died than and he wasn't going to die now either. Everyone was afraid of death, it didn't mean a thing to be afraid of it. The thing that mattered was not bowing to the fear. He flung it aside. There's nothing in that, he told himself and decided the issue was closed.

There were other things. Admitted things. He was hungry and he was thirsty. Something had to be done about…

His eyes turned as if on activated swivels.

Well, of course.

How could he have been so stupid? There was a glass almost three quarters filled with water. That was the answer right there. Nothing could be more obvious. Oh, it might not taste like water from a sparkling stream but what did that matter? He wasn't sleeping at the Waldorf Astoria either. It was water, that was the essential point.

And-of course!

The candy bar. There it was all placed before him like the simple plan it was. What was there to fuss over? In the world of possibilities, one had come forward with simple tread.

He had water, he had food.

Now then.

This condition couldn't last indefinitely. He was convinced of it. It just didn't make sense that it should. The body was a wonderful agency for self healing.

All right, say it would last half a day. All right. Give it twenty-four hours at the outside.

One day then. By then the shock would have worn off, nerve centers would have re-knit and he would get up and wash his face, enjoy his long-deferred washed face. That was all. No point in hysterics. Life was not a hysterical thing. Only the weaker minds made it so.

But first he had to move his hand, his right hand. That was necessary at least. So he could get at the water and the candy.

He tried to lift it.

His eyes were fastened to the quivering arm. He watched the fingers tremble. He poured all the energy of his will into that arm. In ordinary circumstances, recited his mind, you could climb a tree or run a mile with all the energy you are piling into the lone flaccid arm.

As he drove spurts of energy into it, he tried to ignore the throbbing pain in his back.

Lift up!

He closed his eyes as if conserving that effort required to hold up the lids might be just the added increment needed to raise his arm. He pulled and fought at it savagely, his mouth sagging open unheeded and breaths pulsing through the tooth cavity.

Effort. More severe. His lips drew back from coated teeth. "Come on, come on!" He heard the voice grating in his mind. His legs were taut, so taut that he thought they would shatter like glass if struck with a hammer. He felt his bowels and glands like twisted balloons with hands dragging over them, squeaking the tight rubber, threatening to burst them. He saw with a glance that his penis was hardening again, completely without his voluntary effort. And he knew that strength was going and threw in every last reserve of power.

His hand lifted from the bed.

Up. Up. Slowly. Slowly now. He jerked open his eyes and watched it eagerly as if it were some separate creature, some fantastic Sandor performing an unbelievable feat of strength for him, sitting in the grandstand, enthralled. His face was tight and expectant, twisting and quivering emphatically with the performer.

Get it up! That's it, that's it, you've got it, you've got it!

He felt his mouth trembling violently, his eyes wide open and staring. There. There! His mind shrieked. You're doing it! You're doing it!

His hand flopped on the bed.

Fallen. Beaten.

And his lips drew back suddenly as a tortured sob contorted his face beyond the resemblance to a human face.

"No, no, no, no, no…"

All resolve left him. The strength of body gone, the strength of mind sapped too. As if he had converted even brain energy into fuel for his muscles.

Wrinkling skin encased his eyes and tears ran down his dry cheeks. His pale lips shook and he cried as though his heart had broken. Wept like a helpless, frustrated baby, his lips forming a twisted square of flesh, his chest jerking with fitful sobs.

The tears ran into his mouth.

In the first moment of sudden excitement at feeling moisture, he sucked at them eagerly.

But they were salty and they made him gag and cough. Then a load moan collapsed his chest and he cried in hopeless pain, in anguish, his body a throbbing mass of twisted muscles, raw and numb and aching.

"Mother." He sobbed it again and again,

"Mother. Help me."

7

Something thumped down on the floor.

He opened his eyes in fright and looked down.

It was a cat, a scrawny, brown-striped cat. It had come in through the six inch opening in the window. It was crouching on the floor looking at Erick in suspicious fear, leveling its yellow-green eyes at him.

It extended one paw, still looking at him, then took a cautious step into the square of sunlight on the splintered, dust-coated floorboards. Its wide orbs of eyes never left him. They were two untrusting moons.

Erick stared at it.

In the first half-waking moment, he thought it was a visitation. He was too groggy to be sure. He forgot where he was. He blinked at the cat and heard an elevated train grind to a stop at the station. Was that the ghost of a cat?

He blinked.

No, it was a cat. A real cat. He saw it now as he blinked away the crust of sleep.

The cat was advancing into the room, eyes wide and still very suspicious, ears flattened back on its head, looking as if it really lived in that room and had just come back from a weekend trip to find this strange usurper in his quarters.

It moved another step and one dirty paw pressed down on Ava Gardner's face. The cat lowered its head and sniffed in momentary speculation at the magazine. Erick saw the black nostrils dilate. Then its head sprang up again as though he had moved threateningly. It jumped to the side, looking at him.

"What do you want?" he asked.

He spoke seriously as though the cat would answer back–I've just dropped in to borrow a cup of sugar.

The cat looked at him warily with the never-ending fear of harm from all strangers that tenement cats had. Erick ran his gaze over its gaunt mottled body from the tip of its bleak nose to the tip of its straggly tail.

The cat moved across he rug as if stalking a mouse, eyes always on him. He didn't know what it was looking for.

It belonged to the old woman in the next room, the old, thin-lipped woman who was a desiccated and frayed bit of ancient bone and skin. She had lived in the house for years and years. She had a large sitting room. It had the only easy chair in the entire house.

Once Erick had looked in there the door was slightly ajar. He had seen her sitting in the easy chair in an old red patterned wool wrapper and staring down at the street. He had seen her bony ankles, the tallow-white skin of her calves knotted with purplish, bulging varicose veins. She had sat there without moving, the breeze ruffling her flat, gray hair, her dried-up old lips puckering and flattening as though she were preparing kisses for some spectral lover.

Her cat had been on the fire escape sunning itself that day.

Now the cat was in his room. It was moving around like a four-footed house detective looking for clues. It sniffed and it pried. And always it kept looking at Erick with its suspicious yellowish eyes.

He thought – I'll write a message in blood and put it in the pussy's teeth and the pussy will carry it straight to the old lady and she'll come and rescue me, she'll come bobbling and shuffling in with hot soups and water and ancient Florence Nightingale touches.

He closed his eyes with a shudder. He was awake enough to lack appreciation for thoughts of what he considered the impossible.

When he opened his eyes the cat was on his overcoat

It was spread out over it, half crouching, digging and pumping its long black scimitar claws into the silk lining, pressing its dirty body against it. Erick heard vibrating purrs rise up from its scrawny throat and saw the throat pulsing with them when he squinted his eyes.

He watched the body writhing with life and motion.

It looked as if its were greased and sliding back and forth in the tight sheath of its skin. He watched the claws drawing back and forth, clutching and tearing. The coat was worth something after all, he thought. He looked at the magazine. You look as though somebody stepped on your face, he thought.

He chuckled quietly.

For some strange, suddenly born reason, he felt comfortable. He wasn't too hungry. His throat was only a little dry.

And he had company.

He guessed that that was the most important thing. He wasn't alone. The most awful thing is being alone. The phrase occurred to him, dredged up from some hole he had dug in the clouded past.

Pussy cat pussy cat where have you been? The chant rose up singing in his mind. And he watched the cat sniffing at the bills.

It drew back one paw and cuffed one of the bills playfully. No. it wasn't playfully, he amended. It just struck out at the bill. Cats that lived in squalor seemed to lose their sense of humor in the relentless drive to survive. It just hit at the bill as though it were an enemy. Erick watched idly. It was a twenty dollar bill.

And that's all the money is good for too, he thought, to give a pussy cat some toys to bat around.

The cat turned then and moved to the door in a low-slung, supple motion.

It reached up one paw and scratched. "Meow." It said and scratched.

Without a thought, he tried to get up so he could let out the cat.

But it was as if he were tied down fast. Only his right hand twitched. His right leg and ankle and foot were numb. His right leg felt like a huge heavy block of fragile glass that might at any moment break off and shatter on the floor.

He looked back at the cat.

"Sorry, pussy, "he croaked.

It startled him to hear his voice. One moment he could talk and then he couldn't. When the cat had come in, his voice had been more or less normally pitched. Now it was a gurgled rasp. He swallowed the lump in his throat.

The cat kept scratching.

Scratch, scratch, scratch as if it had decided to claw its way through the door. It irritated Erick now. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. God damn stupid pussy cat! He thought angrily. I'd like to stand over you and pump bullets into your body.

In his mind he saw the bullet torn body lying in a pond of blood on the floor and it made him shudder.

He tried not to listen to its scratching. He thought of something else. He thought of the door to the hall. He thought of the dusty hall itself and the scuffed rug out there with the floorboards showing through in places.

And he thought of the bathrooms.

He thought of himself sitting in the bathroom. Planning. Sitting and planning in the bathroom with the sickly yellow bulb light glowing over his loins.

8

It stank there.

The man in room 28 had just finished using it. He was drunk again and he'd urinated all over the front part of the toilet seat. Erick had to wipe it off and it soaked through the toilet paper and got his fingers wet and almost made him sick.

It was silent and airless in there. Like a tucked away cell, an illuminated closet.

The wall he leaned against was cold. It was a green wall bumpy and plastered over and over and over. Whenever any of the plaster fell off, they slapped more of it on. It was so misshapen that Erick often thought it could have been the wall from Poe's story, the lumps conceivably taking on the shape of Montressor's enemy stashed away for good.

The toilet seat was green too.

It was scraped through to the wood in various places, in swirls that looked like segments of a circle edge. Around where the crotch rested mostly, the paint worn off by endless sitting people and their eroding groins.

He thought of all the different kinds of crotches that had rested there on that toilet seat. A history of groins that stretched back through the years crossed his mind. Dirty and scabrous and diseased groins most probably; the house was a hang-out for the refuse of the city.

He used to worry about getting diseases from sitting there. He used to pull off reams of toilet paper and wipe the seat clean with brisk motions. Then he pulled more paper off the rack and spread it over the worn word of the seat and sat down gingerly lest he push aside one part of the paper covering and come in contact with the germ-laden wood and they pounce on him.

Now he just sat there and thought about all the ugly people who had sat there before him, emptying their bowels and their bladders. He thought of them as a vast, faceless army of defecators and urinators, totally without name or personalities; exuding vegetables.

He sat there and thought of them but only vaguely, without caring. Way down underneath he was thinking about something else.

It had a unique smell, that bathroom.

Like some rare kind of gas, some new subtle odor that some deranged munitions maker had devised to unhinge the reason of enemy troops. Blended of old urine and old excrement and old tobacco; the piquant and delicate amalgam hanging in the air.

Bathroom. Half his mind on the fantasy of it. That would be a good name for a perfume. Sell it to misanthropes and anti-sexual old maids. Bathroom. Eau De Urine. Essence of Shit. Fragrance of The Crotch. All these and many more. The names crowded his brain. It was a true and frightful discovery.

He listened to his urine dribble down and join the swill-heavy water below. His eyes were fastened on the toilet paper. Palmer's No Waste, said the rack, proudly. You pulled at the paper and it snapped back sharply and cleanly. Disappoints a man, he thought, he cannot find surcease for sorrow.

But only thought of it in small part. Most of his brain, the inside part, the important part, was working on something else.

A problem.

He stared at the bath tub with his flecks of green pupils.

The bathtub was designed for a midget who had no legs. The base of it was green. The faucets were almost green too but not because they were painted green. They were a discolored green, stained brass.

He looked at the tub and wondered if anyone had ever bathed in it. Had anyone ever actually stripped naked in this dingy, wall-undulating cubicle, run hot water and sat down in that dusty enamel bin and washed away the grime of the city?

Never. No one. The people who lived in this house didn't care for cleanliness of the body. It meant little.

No, he had to take it back. Maybe the old lady scrubbed off her parchment flesh at periodic intervals, then leaped out onto the dirty bath mat so she wouldn't dissolve and go down the drain with the rest of the lost and the used.

He looked around still, his brain working on something else. The problem.

Crooked. That was the keynote of the bathroom. (And his room and the house too, everything was crooked.) The towel rack there on the door and the mirror and the sink and the floor.

He looked at the floor.

The little tiles were six-sided. Like the paving in the zoo, he thought suddenly, brain still at work.

It made him sit up straight for a moment and forget the other thing. It was strange to find as if by accident that his brain was still alive with memories. It made him shake his head. It was a strange unnatural feeling. He felt as a prisoner might who, after twenty years, is returned to the world and the people he knew. An unfamiliar, strange, drawing back sensation. As if he could no longer adjust to being a part of the world. That was how he felt when he saw that the tiles on the floor were like the tiles in the zoo.

For he remembered the past.

He shook his head, clamped himself back inside the dungeon of the bathroom. With his eyes, he followed the crazy line of the crack that ran through the small tiles.

It was a highway, a madman's highway. It was constructed from a blueprint drawn up in melancholia by a paranoiac engineer.

He imagined for a moment an actual man in a great, soaring building late at night bending and poring over his drawing table and meticulously, designing the blueprints for that crack through the tiles in this tiny bathroom.

Look at it run, his mind observed. Look at it meander and wander and roam across the floor like an indented snake. "Roaming in the gloaming". He was humming it unconsciously.

It became conscious and he stopped and went back to his other problem.

Not consciously, not with the strained effort of study, with the teeth-clenched effort to concentrate that he used to effect when studying for college examinations. Here the work was picked at deep in the lowest mines of his brain. Patterns formed unseen. The secret invisible builders made the edifice of decision within him but he could not hear or feel their hurried steps and hammering.

Money. He knew that was the starting point. But the working out was something else.

He sat silently, looking down at himself.

I'm even, half his brain observed. Yes, I'm very even. I have two legs on each side, I mean one. And one in the middle to satisfy the dirty purists. The third leg. Pivot of such a great to do. Fulcrum of chicanery.

He drew back his army shirt and looked at it.

There you are, he thought. There you are, caught between two beefy, lard-encased thighs. Look at you, poor, misguided macaroni, your pubic hairs aglow in the dingy bulb light. Your head adrip with the rain drops of the bladder. Safety catch of the flesh machine. Subject to the whim and fancies of your mother lust. Ho, you penis. Ho.

He let his shirt drop and looked at his hairy legs.

Those are my legs, he decided. Mine. He had to repeat it. For it was hard to believe. A man could drift away and stop up his thoughts and let them lag behind like drugged children while he wandered on ahead.

Then he was without thought and stared with bovine eyes, wondering nothing, seeing nothing, knowing nothing. And his body was someone else then. It did not belong to him. That underwear. It wasn't his. It was someone else underwear. He was a watching specter, hovering and looking in the bathroom reek. He was nothing, certainly not an underwear bearing animal.

It is this, the planning went on unfettered by his fancies and rising to the top for a second. You simply must have this money. There's no other point to argue. And the end justified the means. Therefore…

He ran a finger over his legs. The finger pushed the dark hairs out of its way. Then the hairs curled back into place. He did the same thing again.

He pressed his finger into his left leg. He pressed hard. Then he pulled away the finger and looked at the white spot. Me? He kept asking. Me?

He took hold of his penis. It was warm and soft. Incredible, he thought, here in this center of nothing, in this cavern of green plaster and hanging odors. I hold a penis, warm and malleable It must be a sign, a message from up there.

He looked up there.

There was a cockroach on the far wall, hanging head down over the bathtub.

Its quivering antennae reached out and searched, brushing threadlike over the plaster. He watched the cockroach as it walked in tiny spurts. Beastie, he thought, thing that goes bump in the night. He thought of Kafka's hero and wondered what his reaction would be if that cockroach were to suddenly swell up and be as large as him.

The thought of it dropping heavily into the bathtub and then clambering over the side and reaching out for him with its fish pole antennae made him shudder.

His face grew hard. He swept away everything, crying out without a sound – Why do I think! I want to stop thinking!

The answer formed quickly. Some sort of answer always did.

Because you are poor, it said, because you are victimized. That is why you think on and on.

No. He had to throw over the answer. It was too pat, too encompassing. He did not trust it.

Inner machinations spreading. Inner plans creeping into light. The reasoning went on, breaking surface. Well, it was true. Wasn't it true? Leo didn't love him. That was a lie right from the start, a rationalization on her part to coalesce her libido with her imagined moral code. And, whether she was aware of it or not, she was out to get what she could from him.

Who else was there? Lynn? No, Lynn didn't care anymore either. That was a thing of the past; as dead as a rusty doornail. And he didn't like Lynn. The antipathies evened out and flattened the surface of their once intense relationship.

There was no one else.

He stared at the floor angrily and bitterly, feeling again the sense of betrayal that had some upon him with more and more frequency in the past few years. A sense that he had not been given the chance others had been given. A sense that all events conspired to defeat him.

Looking up, he snatched a piece of slimy-bottomed soap from the sink and hurled it at the cockroach.

The gold-green insect bulleted down the wall and disappeared behind the bathtub.

Bastard! He raged, stupid, futile bastard!

And his writing was no good. It was impossible. How could he write when he lived in this trap of hopes? Was it possible to write when bugs did dances on the walls, when cars and busses roared and yelled out their deafening growls twenty-four hours a day and the elevated trains came grinding and screeching into the station, disgorging people, waking him, distracting him, whipping him down the path to failure?

"No!" was the answer, half shouted in a voice hollow and dry.

No. You can't write under such conditions. No. He said it again to emphasize it on himself and was almost content in accepting the fact. At least it made excuses easier and gave the entire problem an air of simplicity, of understandable justification. No matter what I do, he told himself, I have it coming to me. It was not possible to hope for any other good in this haven for all things bad.

He was sick of the bathroom.

He got up quickly and jerked paper from the rack. It snapped at him like an irate turtle. He wiped and dropped the paper down and flushed the toilet. Flushing this, the thought occurred to him, is like trying to make a horse's ass fragrant by dusting it.

He unfastened the door lock and went into the dim, dust-hanging hallway.

Then at the door to his room…

He stopped, his heart suddenly pounding.

No seeming reason. The joints were invisible. What had formed the links was unknown to him.

But, abruptly, he thought of the old man in the pawn shop. The old man with his money in a lead box. The crouched ugly old man with the hair-sprouting wart on his chin. The old man who would offer him nine dollars for the watch his mother gave him.

Money and the old man.

Quickly rising now, a strange excitement possessed him as he went in his room and locked himself in. Like some trembling conspirator who had suddenly deduced the method by which to overthrow the tyrant's throne.

How fantastic! He thought elatedly. How utterly fantastic that I never thought of it before.

He walked quickly to the bed and sat down, leaned back against the head that was like a prison window. He heard an elevated train come grating to a halt and there was thunder far away.

You think in layers.

That was it.

Incredible that he'd never realized it before. You think in layers and each layer you build up or have built up for you makes you more a victim of society's mores. Each added layer weighs you down more, makes you more vacillating and will-less.

But they wear away. His eyes were bright and almost feverish as he understood it at last; this fabulous secret. Yes, that was the weakness – they wear away! You lived like this, you were forced into grasping path and soon the layers wore away.

The bottom layer was the animal.

He'd almost reached it. He had just stripped off another layer. Sitting there in the bathroom, the last remnants of it had fallen off. Through the last week, month, year, he had been working it off, thread by thread, all unseen, until now, when he was walking from the bathroom to his room, the last fragment of morality had fluttered down and died.

And he realized for the first time that a man who had not should not cry out – pity!

A man who had not should take by any means, fair or foul.

Fair or foul!

The words suddenly enraged him and his face contorted into a bestial snarl.

Words! He thumped the mattress with his fist and almost gagged in fury. It was almost frightening how quickly and powerfully temper came to him now.

Fair or foul, bah! What idiot glue kept that asininity in his skull? What inane retention was this, this never-ending devotion to the black and white? Why had he not purged himself of words long before this? Had he not seen the light, the better way? Was he not committed to action now instead of words?

That was the question, newborn and crowding.

Never mind.

He calmed himself. Even in rage, he could not choke all reason lest his plans fall through. It's all right, he told himself. Better late than never. A cliché but true. That was the charm of clichés. If they became clichés they were usually estimable if not pluperfect generalizations.

It was all simple, simple and direct. That too was the charm of the new layer he'd reached. It made all things straight and simple. If you needed, said the new rule, you took. If you hungered, you ate.

And if you hated…

He lay there shivering excitedly as the church bells rang out hollow throated above the cacophony of traffic and the blowing spatter of the beginning rain.

Ding dong ding dong. Ding dong ding dong. Pause. One… two… three… four (Lost beneath the screech of someone's brakes)… five… six…

Seven o'clock, getting dark.

He raised up on an elbow and looked out through the window.

Far away he saw a building outlined against the dull, grayish sky. He saw a tiny water tank against the sky too and thought of the plow that stood against the sunset in Willa Cather's book.

Below the water tank was a single light in one of the building windows. It is the engineer, said his casual brain, and he is working overtime in order to complete the blueprints for that highway which runs through the tiles in the bathroom. He saw the man in his shirtsleeves, thin lipped, drawing and checking, elbow deep in cluttering slide rules and T-squares and triangles and half-moon protractors.

Lowering his gaze, he watched an elevated train pull into the station. He saw lights in the windows, saw blurs and decided they were people. He squinted. They were people. He watched them interestedly. The world was new again. With each new layer, the outlook changed. And the world was reborn, repainted in different colors by a new, more interesting landlord.

Lights from windows on Third Avenue reflected on the roof of the elevated platform, forming blurry, fluted gold streaks. They reminded him of the wristbands on the pawnshop watches.

He smiled darkly and fell back on the pillow.

How simple.

He shook his head and chuckled softly. How very simple. How could he have missed it all these months, through this last year of trial? How could he have overlooked the obvious, the insensately tabooed masterpieces of will?

No matter. He had it now.

He heard another train rumble into the station. It shrieked out as it stopped and set his heart to violent beating. He felt it thudding his body against the bed.

Afraid? Asked his enraging mind.

No! he screamed back defensively, I'm not afraid! But screw your courage to the sticking point – the phrase emerged from the library of quotations in his mind.

He shut his eyes and thought of the pawn shop.

He thought of the little dumpy display case in front of the shop, like a glass island, filled with shiny cameras staring out a passers-by through unblinking eyes; lensed cyclops

He thought of the windows; hanging gardens of saxophones and clarinets and trumpets and guitars; music never to be heard. Typewriters, fishing reels, grindstones and barometers, violins and shotguns.

And the watches. Especially, he thought of the watches. Rows and rows of them hanging head down on their velvet beds with their shiny expansion bracelets or their cheap new leather bands.

The old man had wanted his watch there.

In that morgue for time pieces. For nine dollars. The watch his own mother had paid seventy five dollars for when he got out of the army.

He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, his heart still thudding slowly and heavily.

My mother is dead, he told himself again and again, working himself into an even greater pitch of self justification. There is no place to go. There is no place to rest and there is no escape. I must do for myself what must be done. No one else cares.

Very well then!

His teeth clicked together and fury at a world shook him. He shut his eyes, lips tight, hands clenched at his sides. I'll kill the old man, he thought suddenly, Oh God, how I'd love to do it. I'd like to be like Raskolnikov, I'd like to hide an axe underneath my coat and go into the shop and corner the old man and chop open his shiny, greasy head and cut up his brains into mincemeat!

Imagination without control. He trembled on the bed. Oh God, my temper! He cried within, I have to keep it checked! I can't do anything if I lose my temper.

But the brief battle was quickly ended. He let himself go and lay shivering and smiling coldly and murderously.

"Why, of course," he said.

And shuddered at the studied sound of venom in his voice. For a brief moment he was a complete and frightening stranger to himself. But then, like a well-taught actor, he caught up the script for his new role and became Hyde and relished it.

Of course, he thought. The layers above are gone. They had fallen off the old, dirty robes. He was free of them, next to naked, cruel and powerful with a new strength of clear detachment, armed with the might of trapped animals and raging, desperate men.

He drew in a shaking breath that made his chest throb.

Tonight, he pledged.

But I'll be smart. I won't murder the old man. No, that would be foolish. Why murder when it is such a great thing in the code? It puts a spotlight on the incident and, in the blackness, you might be picked out.

That's it. It was decided. He'd think of killing the old man and enjoy the thinking. But he wouldn't do it, actually. Beside the simple perils of it, he didn't think it would be good for him. Not killing. It might cause a reaction in him that he wouldn't be prepared for. He might break down, become panic-stricken. There was no point in that. It was the money he wanted anyway. He'd just lie here and think of chopping up the old man and driving the sharp blade edge over and over into his…

Again. The trembling. Almost, the sexual excitation. An ecstasy of committing unpunished violence. His organ was hard. His hand clutched eagerly at it, taut bent pieces of bone and flesh, white and bloodless. He began to tear open his pants.

He commanded himself then—no! I must not! It weakens resolve, it makes me think too much. It builds up the layers again. Oh, how clever a method nature had evolved for building up dispassion. He caught her at the game. It made him chuckle. He took his hands away. And went back to his plan.

Anyway, he thought, the old man will wish he were dead when his money is taken away. Yes, of course. What was there precious in the old man's life that was worth the taking? Life must have been a hideous rack for the old man. He would be better off dead. Why should he be the instrument of release?

The case is clear, he told himself. But, inside, wondered if he were rationalizing, backing away from it.

No! It was true. There was no point in killing. As he had already calculated it was too great a risk.

He rolled on his stomach and laughed; a short brutal laugh that tore from his throat and sprayed itself around and hung in dripping vindictiveness from the walls.

He turned his head and, in the twilight dimness looked at the rose.

It was still new and fresh.

He had found it that afternoon. He had just come from the post office where he'd been buying some stamps. He saw the rose in the gutter, like a splash of blood it seemed at first. A crimson splash of blood.

He picked it up. It was broken off and its sap was oozing from the green stump. He looked at it, instinctively, smelled it. He didn't notice the people watching. He had come to the point where he always walked alone.

The rose smelled sweet. The perfume of it went deep into his head. The petals were all curled around the center as though they concealed from sight some precious thing, embracing it in their soft, gentle folds.

Underneath, like the thick strands of a hula skirt, were the green fronds. And glued by spit or sap or hope was a tiny piece of decorative leaf. He had touched it, the delicate green needles all like silken threads and green lace.

"Beautiful," he had whispered. And, somewhere in him, there was a tiny sense of resentment. For, through the months and years he had been building himself a picture of the world, painted in hues of dull unpleasant grey. And this sudden brightness, this sudden dash of beauty in the overall squalor seemed to destroy his picture, gave it falsity and showed the lie.

He took it to his room. The beauty of it overcame the inner feeling of dislike. It was instinctive. It was natural to take a flower to your room for decoration. So he had taken it and put water in the glass on the window table and set the rose to standing there in the sunlight.

Now he was looking at it.

What is it? he mused, once again caught up in the search for meanings and connections. What is it beyond a rose and a bit of delicate lacework? Why did I find it? Does it mean anything? When there is no one to give it to? came the thought. For what is a flower if there is no one to give it to?

He bit his lips and fought back the tears that, suddenly, wanted to fall.

"No!" he said hoarsely. And almost jumped up to hurl the glass and flower on the rug and crush them with raging feet.

Instead, he closed his eyes tightly, so tightly that it contorted his face, driving lines along the edges of his eyes and making ugly ridges and valleys on each side of his nose bridge.

Forget those thoughts, he commanded himself. And, once more, felt a strong resentment toward the rose which had broken his pattern and hated himself for bringing it up as an evidence of the broken pattern.

There is no love or beauty in the world! He demanded that it was the truth. The world is hard and cruel and mean. It is empty and fruitless. It is a neon sign glowing out its blatant insults to the night. It is a drunk lying dead in the gutter with the rain soaking into his white, flaccid face. It is hate and corruption and greed and hunger and thirst!

He lay very still, trying vainly to empty his mind of sickening thoughts, all thoughts. God, if only there were Ex-Lax for the brain, his mind ran on, some cathartic that would purge the aching swollen mind of all its stored up dung of thought. If only you could think it out and pull the cord and watch a whirlpool suck it down and be free to fill your mind again with food, with better, cleaner food.

But there was none of that, he thought.

The mind was a sponge. It sucked in and in and in. And never out until the hand of death crushed it in an icy fist and squeezed it dry in an instant.

Don't fight it. He told himself to relax.

He relaxed. It's simple, he thought, regimenting his body, wiping away unheeded tears. I need money, that's all. I must have it. There's no other point to debate. I need money and I'll get it from the old man, the old man, the old man, the old man, the old…

* * * *

He got up from the bed and turned on the light.

It was nine thirty. The old man always stayed open late. He'd get there in a while. The shop was usually empty around ten.

He stood up sleepily on the patched rug, watching his shadow sway on the blue striped bedcover as the bulb swung in short choppy arcs overhead. The shadow of the radiator moved back and forth and the shadow of the rose moved on the white towel that was supposed to be a table cloth. The glass shadow seemed to get longer and shorter, longer and shorter.

Wearily he sank down on the bed. It squeaked. Squeak ahead mousie, spoke his slowly awakening brain. He licked his lips. It was such a dry room, such an airless room when there was no breeze coming in. He had to have a drink of water, his throat was parched.

He bent over with a grunt and slipped the shoes over his feet. They are old, those shoes, his mind observed in sleepy abandon. Look at them. They are caked with dirt and there are threads coming out at the seams and the sides are white where the shoes rub together as I walk.

He slanted his feet on their outside edges and looked at the heels. How can I walk so cockeyed, he wondered. The heels were like hills running from inner to outer edge.

He sat there staring at the shoes.

And began to wonder if his plan to rob the old man was just a dream. He had to concentrate very hard before he realized he had made up his mind before he went to sleep and not while he was asleep.

It took a little while for resolve to return. He had to go over all the arguments again in his mind, citing fact after fact that made it irrefutable he must rob the old man and leave town. He was angry with himself for going to sleep and making it necessary for him to stand up again in the court of his mind and argue his case through again in its entirety.

It was a waste of time.

Finally, he stood and walked to the door, opened it and went down to the bathroom. There he ran water from the sink faucet and threw it in his face. He looked up at himself in the mirror and made a face as he realized he'd forgotten his towel.

He pulled paper from the rack. "No waste, "he muttered drowsily. "That a boy, Palmer."

He felt quietly assured now, somehow, pleased with himself. He watched himself rub his hands with the dry, antiseptic smelling paper and it seemed to him as though his hands were very strong looking and assured. He dried his face and wrinkled up his nostrils at the musty smell of the paper. Then he threw the paper down the toilet.

"That son of a bitch has pissed on the seat again," he muttered and shook his head, more amused than annoyed, not trying very hard to keep the edges of his mouth from twitching up as he visualized the drunk wavering over the toilet and spraying the floor and walls and toilet seat with his urine.

Everything is set, his mind reported. Tomorrow I'll be away from it all. And she can go scratch. Ditch delivered by a drab, another phrase dripped appropriately from a corner of his mind.

He ran some water into his palm and drank it. Palm, no waste. The water was warm and it tasted stale. He spit most of it back into the sink. Some of it splattered on the bottom part of the mirror.

He looked.

That's me.

His eyes were lost in dark circles, his hair a tangled mass of unwashed sallow strands. His hair looked like a dirty blonde plant going berserk, firing up clumps of threadlike shoots in every direction with the utmost abandon. His ears looked like whitish tabs, like scar flesh that had been ripped up and hung off each side of his head.

He looked closely at the blackheads in his nose. Around the puffy flesh of his nostrils the pores were big and black. He pressed out a blackhead between two nails. The blackhead squished out and there were two red lines left on his nose where the nails had dug in. The pore gaped empty.

In the dim light his beard looked more blonde than it was. The hairs were light until they ran over his chin and jaw line where, abruptly, they became black and wiry. He ran his knuckles over the bristle on his chin. It sounded like wood being sandpapered.

As he stood there, idly rubbing, he wondered what he should use for a weapon. He had to have a weapon.

He left the bathroom and went back to his room. There he looked around. He looked at the toothbrush holder, the tube of toothpaste, the peanut butter jar, the knife, the glass, the fountain pen. He could not help chuckling as he spoke quietly, "I know I'll use the rose, I'll beat in his skull with it."

He decided to use his pocket knife. He'd keep it shut and press it against the lining of his pocket. The old man couldn't tell the difference. And, without effort, came the plan—if he cries out, I'll press the button on the knife and plunge the long razor blade into his scrawny old throat!

It made him shudder and once more he gripped himself in a vice of forced rage. The bastard! He wants my watch for nine dollars, does he? For nine, lousy, stinking, son of a bitch dollars! The watch my own mother gave me after I served in the war and her dead too! I'll cut out his fucking heart!!

It was enough. He was ready to go.

He dropped his knife into his coat pocket, a cloud of icy resolution seeming to fall over him. He felt calm and capable. He knew exactly what he was going to do. It was simple mathematics. The old man had money and he wanted it.

Simple.

He jerked down the light bulb string and went out of the room, closing the door behind him. As he pulled the brim of his hat over his forehead, he heard the drunk explode into a frothy bubbling cough.

God, this place stinks, he thought as he went down the stilted stairway. It's lousy and lopsided and it stinks. The air was pungent with the musty stench of heavy dust and old, uncleaned rugs and molding walls and ceilings and stairs. It was like walking down the stairs of an old listing schooner as it slid below the waves. He tried not to breathe through his nose as he trudged down. He could taste the air. He kept moving down, listening to the stairs squeak as he shifted his weight from foot to foot.

He reached the third floor and turned, his palm running over the dusty, splinter-topped bannister.

He looked dully at the three red pails hanging on the wall where the stairwell started down again. The words—For Fire Use Only—were printed on the wall. He thought about a fire in this place. He thought of whores and laborers running naked in the halls screaming. He thought of the drunk lying comatose in his bed while flames ate his flesh away without him even knowing it.

It made him smile.

Vaguely, the thought occurred to him, of setting the house on fire to punish them all. They would be in flames soon enough, he thought, why not hasten the process and make their hell on earth an actual one?

He went down and turned again and started along the second floor, a trudging phantom in brown.

"Aah, shut the hell up, ya fuck!" a high woman howl came clawing through an open transom. He shrugged. The words meant nothing. They could be words of love.

He reached the first floor and went down the hall and out through the doorway into the night.

It was raining.

Raining on Third Avenue. There were dark ghost clouds smoking through the black sky. There was a train rattling over his head on the elevated tracks, the wheels drumming in rhythm. Da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum,—Rob the old man, kill the old man, stick in the knife, cut out his heart—da-da-da-dum,—he had no heart Da-da-da…

The brakes squealed and a hundred pigs were stuck and screamed out—Murder!—in the night.

He walked on and the train started again, the moan of it disappeared and there were only horns and motors and the clicking of heels on wet sidewalk. He tried to locate the sound of his own feet. There was a slight sucking sound where his worn sole pressed down on the wet concrete.

Rain, drizzling, misty rain on Third Avenue.

It sprayed him as he walked. All in brown he was. His hat was brown. It glistened under the street lamps and there was a stain, a beginning puddle on the greasy crown. His coat was huge and heavy and brown. It was a shapeless box of wool on his body. It was as though he walked in a tight-fitting brown coffin, his legs sticking out the bottom and he had decided not to wait for the hearse but to walk to his grave and get a good eternity's sleep. A coffin-like coat all wool and heavy and threadbare.

He passed bars and bars, bars, bars. They sat leering and secret behind their green and red neon eyes. They chuckled out from behind glass, filled to the gorge with men standing in shoulder to shoulder camaraderie, friends to the end—of the drink. Men drinking and talking and making up dreams and trying to forget and forgetting. Men, word-sprinkling the past with a glamour it never had. Men painting the future with hues it never would have.

And drinking.

He looked in at them and watched them drink. Drink me one, he thought, drink me a long drink of forgetfulness and violence. Tonight I am going to rob. He shivered. And tomorrow I am gone from the lot of you.

And his pants were brown. They were brown and wet and unpressed and the cuffs were caked with dry mud and frayed.

His shirt was brown, khaki brown. And the socks and the shoes were brown. Oh what has become of our little boy brown? He thought it as he came closer to the shop.

Soon he'd be there. Was that why he felt himself trembling as if he were approaching doom? Was that why his stomach was slowly turning and turning, turning and

God damn all weakness!

He screamed it suddenly into his own face, fleck-lipped and furious.

He tensed himself, crying out in fury at his mind—that layer is gone. Fear and conscience and holding back are all undone. They are no more.

He kept himself walking firmly, forcing his feet on, ignoring the mounting desire to turn and flee back to his room. His mind kept him going. The old man is alone, alone with his money in the lead box, with my money in the lead box.

That's it!

The idea suddenly appealed to him, reasonless or not. He had hocked endless things there. The old man had no right to that money. He would just be taking what was rightfully his. You call that robbery, judge? Well, I'm telling you, if the law calls that robbery then the law is a son of a bitch set up by rich men and userers.

He felt almost convinced. And, convinced or not, his feet kept carrying him toward the shop. Tomorrow, he told himself, I'll be free of this blight called a city, this infested jungle and its designing denizens, this alien bug heap. Alone. Without memories or regrets. Far from Leo and her acid demanding, far from past and failure. To a new life. On this walk, he thought, I'm dealing in positive terms. It is not like the other one, a futile, maudlin, self-searching. This time he was dealing in actions.

"I'll do it," he muttered anxiously, angrily, that he should still have to argue with himself over what seemed the obvious to his mind.

Of course he'd do it. Only a degraded coward would stop.

He passed a barbershop and saw the still pole, no longer spinning out its never ending streamers of color.

He passed a cleaning store and the words—Pressed While U Wait— settled on his mind, then slid away.

He passed a spaghetti house, a grocery store, a fish restaurant, and bars, bars and bars. "Drink," he changed slowly under his breath to forget where he was going, "Drink." Without ever changing pitch. "Drink, drink, drink, drink…"

The shadow of the el made the street a latticed cave. The elevated tracks stood on great rusty legs like an endless giant centipede curling its body through the dark city and carrying the city's people on its back.

He passed the lost legions of Third Avenue.

I'm not one of you, he thought, no, not ever. He almost wished one of them would stop him and ask him for money just to prove he wasn't one of them.

He kept thinking of it in order to forget where he was going.

Was it possible, he wondered, that they all knew him and saw him and, in their silent aloofness, called him brother?

He was sorry he'd thought of it. The idea caused a hot sinking sensation in his stomach and loins as though someone were pouring rich, scalding coffee into his stomach and it was running into his arteries and veins.

He walked on past never ending ranks of empty men, staring and stumbling, asking for pennies, plunging black-nailed hands into trash cans. Not alive, he thought, not alive at all.

An old man stopped in front of him.

They looked at each other.

The old man had yellow, stained teeth. He wore an old tattered grey overcoat that was too small for him and was torn off the right shoulder. The greasy black of a suitcoat sleeve extended down his right wrist and over the top of his hand.

The man bore himself like a prince. He might have been a nobleman approaching a fellow.

He ran a trembling, filthy hand over his long and greasy black hair. You're going to lie, Erick thought as the old man spoke.

"Sir," said the man in a fine, proud voice, "Could you help me out, sir?" As though it were really something laughable, a delicately amusing trifle between wealthy comrades, "You see sir, I meant to get a haircut but I find myself a nickel short."

He inhaled the old man's fetid breath and smelled whiskey and all the odor of unclean things. I find myself a nickel short. It was so ludicrous that he felt impelled to laugh out loud and pound the man on the back for making such a good joke.

"Could you help me out?" asked the old man. There was a break in his voice, "I need it badly, sir."

Erick felt himself tighten.

You give away the game, old fool! He wanted to scream into the man's lost face. You show the truth in all its bald horror, you turn over the stone, throw up the filth and the stench and the maggots crawling. Get away from me, you are out of the club!

"I'm sorry," he said flatly, "I haven't any change."

He always said that automatically. That's what his mother used to say to "panhandlers." Most of the time, in his case, it was true.

The old man bowed a little, instantly regaining the pain-taught pride and poise of a truly degenerated man.

"I thank you, sir," he said, "I thank you."

He put his right hand on his right lapel like some casual orator and passed by grandly. The separated.

The old man had said thank you, he thought. They always said thank you. They were always gentleman, proud in their emptiness. They were always well-mannered skeletons. Why was it that only the doomed were gentlemen? And they were doomed. Doomed and dead before death. That would be a book he would never write someday.

Dead Before Death by Erick Linstrom.

He passed a bearded man in a grease-hardened dark suit. The man was selling chestnuts. The fat-laden, reeking smoke gushed from the wagon top and filled Erick's nostrils and made his eyes water. It made him cough, a hollow, fretful cough like that of an old lady with incurable consumption who wastes away in elegant poise.

He halted abruptly.

Everything was caught up in the shock.

There it was across the street. The shop.

He shuddered violently and was suddenly conscious of the rain spattering heavily on his hat. He held up his hands and saw that they were wet too but not with rain. His throat contracted. Abruptly, the plan seemed ridiculously conceived, impossible to execute. There was the shop. Could he actually go in there and rob?

Imagining was easy. One could grow used to any idea, could adapt oneself to accept the most vile, the most hideous of mental suggestions. But to actually carry it forth into physical terms; that was something else. There he was in full view of the shop and the entire plan seemed new again as if he had just stopped there accidentally and it had suddenly occurred to him to rob the old man. He tried to reinforce his already established arguments but they seemed hollow and unconvincing.

Across the street he saw the scissors and the drafting instruments and the binoculars and the telescopes.

His feet moved unguided. He crossed over and stood by the right hand window. There were the rings and under each a neatly printed card—Unredeemed Pledges.

Unredeemed.

Slowly, in calculated rhythm, he began to drive back the needed rage. Under the coat, his chest moved more quickly with self-tensed breaths.

And who, he asked himself, were all the men who had come to the old usurer and groveled before his dried-up body, holding out beloved things to his white, liver-spotted hands, smelling the breath from his unclean mouth?

Unredeemed. He incensed his brain with the double meaning of the word.

Lost forever. Death spot for souls. Burial ground for honor. He trembled. And it was not forced. Why hang rings and watches there! raged his unbridled mind. Why not have the men themselves hanging head down on biers of blue and maroon velvet?

He must take advantage quickly before the rage abated. In his judging mind he knew that.

Closing a tight shaking hand over the knife, he edged over to the door.

The shop was empty.

The sight of it made his heart jolt as his hands shook violently in his pockets as if he were now irrevocably committed. As if circumstances were playing their role and he had now perforce to play his.

He saw the old man in the back, checking the ledger.

He had on a black coat sweater. His shirt was a light violet, striped with dark purple stripes and he had a red, spotted tie pulled into a finger-thin knot under his Adam's apple. His skin was like leather under the fluorescent tube; like old, greased and well-kept leather.

The old man, alone.

Erick moved to the door, feeling his heart drum loudly in his chest. His hands felt slick and nerveless. God help you if you back down now, he warned himself, you've got to do it!

He turned his head quickly as the old man lifted his small eyes to peer out through the doorway. He looked at the second-hand typewriters, his lips trembling. He swallowed a hard lump in his throat. I said you have to do it! Do you think Leo won't get what she wants? You know damn well she will. Go on in there. It's your only choice. Go in there, you fool, and take what belongs to you. Didn't he want your watch in his filthy window for nine dollars, the watch your mother gave you, your own mother who's…

The door bell tinkled as he pushed in convulsively, praying that his face wasn't white and frightened as he felt. He took a deep, quavering breath and, with shaking fingers, pretended to examine a guitar on the counter.

"Closing, what d'ya want?" the old man asked in his thin, grating voice.

Erick cleared his throat. "I came…" he started and then his throat clogged up again.

"I came to pawn my watch," he said.

In the first second he felt a rush of humiliated terror that he really meant it. Then his mind flung away the idea. Yes, that's it. That's it! Play the ruse. He urged himself on, swallowing and forcing a casual smile to his lips.

The smile disappeared. It was not a smiling incident. Inside, he felt as clever as he could for having thought of a ruse so quickly. But his hands shook for fear that he would actually go through with it.

All this in a second as the old man spoke immediately.

"Too late," said the old man, scowling. He waved one thick-veined hand toward the door and looked back to his ledger.

It supplied the strength Erick needed. Suddenly Erick was filled with a complete hate for the old man.

Yes!—his mind shouted—you're sweet enough and cringing enough when they come to buy, aren't you? But when they come to sell, it's different isn't it?

His muscles clamped tight and his face grew hard and white. He moved toward the old man, his right hand feeling numb on the knife he held it so tightly. He grew dizzy as he moved and thought that the floor was undulating. It seemed as though all the merchandise hanging from the ceiling was trembling, preparing to fall down and crush him as he moved. His heart thudded in slow, tortured beats, like a muffled gong being struck in powerful, rhythmic strokes. He imagined a huge hammer against the gong. A.J. Arthur Rank Production, contributed his other mind. He gritted his teeth fiercely, cheeks drained of blood.

The old man looked up, greyish lips moving back from his teeth.

"You heard me." he snarled and peered over his bifocals.

Erick couldn't speak. He stared at the old man, his hands shaking, his entire body shaking. He felt suspended in time, struck dumb by nervousness.

"Ya deaf?" the old man snapped irritably.

"I need some money," Erick said.

He didn't recognize his own voice. It sounded so weak and trembling and, almost, silly. He couldn't believe it was his own. The entire thing seemed like a dream. The walls and floor ran away in crazy, unparallel lines. He felt as though he were leaning forward at a sharp angle and the old man were leaning away at a different angle. He wanted to scream. He kept staring at the old man's blue-veined skull covered with a thin matting of white hair. He thought of chopping it in half. He thought for a moment that it really was an axe he held in his hand and he was going to pull it out suddenly and chop the old man's head in half. He heard the sound—plock! as the axe blade sank into bone and flesh.

"What did you say?" asked the old man, sharply.

Erick looked dizzily into the washed out blue eyes.

"Money," he said.

The repetition of the all-important word seemed to drive back meaning to his presence there. The shop drew back into sensible proportions. The old man seemed to shrink and he to expand to grow mighty. Power and resolution filled him. He was not afraid of the old man. He hated him and loathed him. He was a bug to be squashed and his resources to be taken away. A sense of fierce elation filled him such as he had not felt since that day in Germany long before.

"Money," he repeated again, sucking strength from the word. This time his voice did not shake so. It was guttural and threatening.

Then, suddenly, a terror of uncertainty swept through him again and he shook again. He almost sobbed at its debilitating return.

The old man was looking thunderstruck.

His right cheek twitched. He threw a nervous glance toward the door and suddenly Erick shoved out his right hand in the pocket, seeing in his mind some juvenile punk trying to be tough.

"Put up your… hand!" his voice cracked, "Hands!"

It made him furious to be so revealed in front of the old man. A sob of rage broke in his throat then and he pressed against the counter, a snarl bubbling up from his throat.

"Give me your money!" he cried.

"What?" asked the old man, unbelieving, incredulous.

"I said your money!"

"What money?"

"You know what money!"

Erick felt trapped. He felt as if this useless exchange of words was going to go on all night and nothing would be accomplished. He wanted to run for the door and never come back. But he was trapped now, he had to have the money.

The old man was moving back. "Look out now," he said, "Look out."

"Give me your money!"

Money, money, money, mimicked his mind, is that all you can say?

"All right now, all right," said the old man, "Now you just watch yourself. You just watch yourself." He kept backing away, glancing nervously toward the front door.

"I said no one is coming!" Erick said furiously and then realized that he hadn't said it before. And he almost added—What I mean is I meant to say no one is coming, you see.

"Stop talking and stop wasting m-my time or I'll kill you!"

He blurted out the words and the sound of his own harsh and brutal voice at once appalled and excited him.

"God, I'd love to kill you, you old bastard!" he heard himself cry. And the word so excited him that he said it again. It gave him a shivering thrill to cry it in someone's face.

"You old fuck!" he snarled and shook with rising excitement. He felt a wild, raging confidence course his body. He stepped behind the counter through a small opening and reached out one clenched hand for the old man's throat.

The old man's Adam's apple dipped down suddenly and up again and what color there was in his face fled. He turned quickly toward his lead box, sucking in breath.

"Keep your hands off me!" he cried hysterically. "Just don't ya touch me!"

"Open the box."

His voice was clear now, really clear. The old man's abject fear had given him reassurance, complete assurance. He took a deep, exulting breath. I'm all right, he thought. I'm all right!

The old man turned to face him with money sprouting from his fists. Erick grabbed it with a sneer and stuffed it into his left coat pocket remembering calmly that it was the only pocket that didn't have a hole in it.

"You'll be sorry for this," the old man suddenly snapped in a burst of unexpected defiance, "They'll get ya for this."

"Shut up!" he cried and suddenly wished the world could hear him, see him standing there, indomitable and frightening. Complete sense of power poured over him. He felt as if he could pick up the old man with one hand and hurl him across the store.

"You have more money. Where is it?" he asked, now almost loathe to end it he was enjoying it so.

"I haven't no more," protested the old man, sounding almost offended, "I don't keep no more on hand."

Words tore from Erick's lips almost by themselves.

"No, you don't need any more to give poor guys nine dollars for watches their m-mothers gave them, do you!" he cried, "You don't…"

He felt the terrible numbing realization that he had given himself away. The old man's eyes had narrowed, he could not hide it. The room blackened for a second before Erick's eyes and almost spun away.

Then, suddenly, impelled by some hidden instinct of rage and self protection, he jerked out his right hand that clutched the knife and drove the hard white fist into the old man's mouth.

The old man went staggering back with a cry of astonished pain, his arms flailing at the air for balance. His elbow shattered the glass door of a counter cabinet and, as he fell, his glasses slid off one ear and flopped down over his open mouth.

Erick whirled and plunged out into the aisle, sprinting for the door over the squeaking floorboards. He almost tripped over a paint-chipped blue and white kiddie car that stuck out from under a table in the middle of the aisle. My God, the irrelevant thought flew through his brain, how could a man sell a kiddie car for drink?

He skidded over the floor and hit against the door and fumbled for the handle.

He couldn't imagine how the old man got up so fast.

"Stop!" yelled the old man.

Erick threw a frightened glance over his shoulder and saw the old man pointing something at him. He couldn't see what it was, the old man seemed to blend into his surroundings of junk. But he saw the old man's hand wavering and he thought he saw great dark drops falling from the old man's right arm.

"Don't you move!" ordered the old man.

He jerked open the door and plunged out into the night.

It didn't sound like an explosion. More like someone coughing loudly.

Then it seemed as though a been had stung him in the right shoulder. He had been stung once in camp and it felt just the same. Only this time the bee didn't back off leaving only his stinger. The bee kept on flying, its whirring wings carrying it into him until it had buried not only its stinger in his back but its entire hot, buzzing body.

He staggered as he turned the window corner and started up Third Avenue. At the corner he turned again and his long shaking legs carried him up the dark street. Wild excitement shook his heart and his limbs.

His shoulder felt numb for half a block, he was too excited to feel anything. But then, as he kept running, it began to burn and he felt his body twitch with a sudden knifing of pain.

He kept running. No one chased him and there were no shouts behind him. He couldn't understand that. He kept running, his hands still in his coat pockets clutching the bills and the knife.

The night swept by him, dark wavering buildings rearing up and jumping past, the black sky rolling overhead like a stage backdrop on rollers. The pain in his back flared up once more, getting worse and his left leg almost buckled. A streak of red-hot pain gouged the flesh all the way down to the ankle. It felt as if someone had pressed the end of a redhot branding iron against his leg and drawn it down quickly.

It was like running in a dream. The city moved by him and yet seemed to bring him no closer to his room. He felt the air scorching down his throat as he sucked it in. His hat almost flew off and when he threw up his right arm to catch it, he almost screamed at the nerve-searing pain. He felt a stitch in his right side.

People watched him run. He paid no attention to them. It was only when he saw a policeman at one corner that he slowed down and, gasping for breath, walked slowly by him. He wondered if there were any blood on the back of his coat. His heart throbbed like a bat struggling to free itself, as he walked past the policeman.

Oh God, if he should stop me, he thought. And his legs trembled and he thought he was going to fall down. He tried not to grimace at the awful white pain in his shoulder that was like a ripple slowly spreading and encompassing his entire body. He tried not to whimper as he walked. He tried to force himself to think of the money he had now and the freedom.

I'll get this thing fixed tomorrow, he planned. It's just a flesh wound as the hero always says. There are doctors who will fix it. There are plenty of them who'll do anything for money. Then he wondered if it were true or if he had imagined it because he'd seen it in a movie. And he worried that he wouldn't have enough money to get the wound fixed much less have enough to get out of town.

Sure you will, he told himself, you have plenty of money. I saw twenties in that pile you got. He wanted to take the money out and see. But he didn't dare.

Then the pain drove away all thoughts. He bit his lower lip to keep from screaming out. I'll get it fixed and I'll get out of here, he insisted to himself. I'll do it, I'll do it, Oh God!

The house.

It seemed to have sprung up from the dark earth. He groaned, suddenly thinking about the three long, slanted flights of stairs he had to climb.

He stood at the bottom looking up in terror. Suppose he couldn't make it? Suppose he fainted and they found him unconscious on the stairs and took his money?

No! He hadn't gone through all this just to give up now. He'd get up those stairs. There wasn't a power on Earth that could stop him.

He started up.

Every step was an agony that shot twisting bolts of pain through him. With every step, he felt certain that he was about to collapse and roll back down the stairs. He gripped the bannister frenziedly and held on until his palms hurt. Then, after hesitating a moment, he started up again.

He reached the second floor and stumbled around the landing and started up again.

The stairs creaked and groaned and whispered under his awkward, unsteady feet. Oh God, don't let anyone see me, he begged without knowing who he was begging. He pulled himself up, using his arms and wrists more than his legs.

The burning was growing worse. His shoulder ached and throbbed and felt as if it were aflame. He felt jabbing knifelike twinges in the back of his neck and down to his fingertips. He felt as if he were coming apart. For the first time he felt a thin trickle of blood running down the small of his back.

Third floor.

He turned around and moved along the landing, holding tightly to the bannister.

A door opened suddenly and he jumped as a tangle-haired woman staggered down to the bathroom in a wrinkled pink slip. He saw her unsheathed buttocks jiggling as she moved. She belched loudly and it rang in the still musty air. He heard the bathroom door slam as he moved up the last flight.

He had to make it now. Only one more flight. Oh God, God help me. All right so I broke your rule. I stole. I know I stole. But I had to. You know that. Help me up. Just one more flight. Please help me up. One more little flight. If you do I'll

Oh, God help me!

He groaned in agony and sank down to his knees half way up the flight. The stairs ran like water under his eyes. His legs felt like melting rubber. His back and shoulders were on fire.

He gritted his teeth and his face drained completely white and etched itself with sudden pain-crazed fury.

All right, don't help me! I'll help myself!

He drove himself up, pulling on the bannister with all his strength. He cursed at everything, mostly at God who had not answered him.

"I'm stronger than you," he gasped crazily, "I'll get there without you, damn you!"

Sweat ran in rivulets down his temples and across his cheeks. He groaned, then cut it off, afraid someone would hear. Breaths fell from his mouth like bursts of hot air. His white fingers clutched at the bannister as he pulled himself up, whining and trying not to whine. You've got the money, he kept encouraging himself, you're free now! You can leave her. He fired the message to shuddering, weakening muscles. Get a good night's sleep and tomorrow you'll…

He reached the fourth floor with a convulsive lurch.

He stood there trembling violently, looking down the bottomless stairwell with a look of wild, defiant triumph on his face.

"I made it," he hissed, "I made it. Alone."

Then he stumbled toward his door, fumbling for the key.

"Oh God, it hurts," he muttered.

The key slid in, the door flew open as he fell against it. It crashed against the wall and he staggered in and slammed it behind him. The lock caught fast. He reached up and swept off his hat and threw it into the darkness, gasping at the pain his lifted arm caused.

He pulled out the money.

But his fingers wouldn't hold it. He heard it all fluttering down and thumping lightly on the rug.

He didn't care. Forget about it! He twisted his shoulders back in agony and let his coat slip heavily to the floor as he moved for the bed.

He tried to reach up and turn on the light.

The motion sucked the breath from him. He felt his legs vibrating helplessly and he reached out one palsied hand to find the bed.

Muscles lost control.

Suddenly he found himself falling in the darkness. Falling, falling, it seemed he'd never land. He clawed out wildly for support and his fingers brushed over something flat and smooth and it thudded down on the floor.

He landed on the bed. Heavily.

PAIN!!!

A scream tore up through his throat breaking off into a bubbling croak of utter physical agony as someone clouted him across the back with the razor edge of a huge meat cleaver.

He fell back on the bed, his left leg jerking up spasmodically and the room spun around, the night ran. He wallowed in pain, sank in it, felt it soaking over him like waters from a black vat.

"Mother!"

The scream went echoing down the hallways of his brain.

Then his head lolled to the side and the crushing agony swallowed him alive.

9

Later, the cat got tired of scratching at the door and went out the window again. Erick heard it meowing to the old lady and the old lady meowing back.

10

Staring.

Room gets dark gets light Sunlight a tide that swells and ebbs Smile of God bless us all bless 'em all long short tall What does Lynn do He's a public relations man He does all right for himself doesn't he Yes Leo bitch witch itch titch He does does not Roof leaks spot on ceiling proves it Proves what What? Ceiling sport on ceiling what? Ceiling wax No sport Ceiling Waes new branch O, a branch on a limb and a limb on a tree and a tree in the woods and the green grass grew all round all round, the green grass grew all There that will hold the little bastards Church bells ringing dinging donging ding dong up yours with gauze ding dong anyone show just cause why this man this woman ought not be Hungry thirsty light bulb chain hanging down Marley dead as doornail polish with deepest regrets Armpits stink they reek Next reek East Lynne and here I am hidden away like a black pit in a watermelon ave pit arm pit snake pit pit pendulum Poe woe moe ain't gwine be no more anamotopoeia pickle nickel I'm a nickel short sir I need it badly OLD FOOL!!…

Face hardening. Struggle. Reluctant easing of fury.

What's going on it's Perkins sir we're 'aving a bit of a time below stairs I said where did that damn chain come from God knows I'm hungry I'm thirsty I want to get up so I want to When you wish upon a star Oh! Pain chain gas and water main thirsty there it goes Nose itches Time is it? Afternoon guess break swords into ploughshares no bomb casings ho ho that's rich that's Sam you made the day too long Male and Female created he Gloria Swanson based on teeth sticking out Drop da gun Louie Here's my plan John to hell with the Germans I say let's declare war on the second looies It's okay with me Erick John you John I John… hungry Feel sick Must Please must get up Think I'm God, what am I going to do?… Wall dirty Odd yes messy dirty hurty wakey wakey pip pip righto There'll always be an England seven inch cigar Bless land God bless 'em all long short and tear her tattered ensign down long has she was mine I tell you all wall floor money shoo shot in the back Paralyzed here now No move I'm hungry thirsty hunger thirst Hunger and Thirst good title for a book What is the hunger for food to compare with the hunger for knowledge What is the thirst for water beside the thirst to know I saw that What a fool I was who made his prayer to Our Father with Art in heaven Harold be thy name How now brown cow cow cow now I have to shit I have to crap I have to God damn it all I have to oh PAIN PAIN!…

Head rolling on pillow. Lips drawn back. Sweat breaking out on forehead and upper lip.

Oh my God that was awful it felt like fire in the belly Judge Holmes sweet home The closet door is ajar when isn't a door a look the rose is opening It's dying Look at it makes me want to cry it's so beautiful We die in order to live Each moment of life prepares us for death The petals are so delicately colored Yellow in the middle Deep pink on the edges They'll fall in the water Look at that will you I'm so thirsty I could My throat is dry Stop off at the next oasis Ali and don't dare When I think of all the times I spit and threw water away and pissed it out and was glad to get rid of it What the hell was wrong with me It's true Food isn't as important When you lie still like this it doesn't bother you I wonder what it's like to fast to slow fast slow past snow know Mahatma knew Jesus knew Why did they fast There must be something to it I'll learn, no I won't I'll be out of here by late tonight at the most I'll get this dam wound treated somewhere Where shall I go I always wanted to go to California Calif hr I k Took me three months to learn that damn speed-writing and what for So I can write dirty jokes on bathroom walls without anyone understanding My head itches damn my underwear is still wet God is that my foot itching for Christ sake it feels like somebody else's foot wonder what time it must be late in the afternoon Soon to pass to leafy bowers and crying out for rains and moon struck cloudy hours What in hell is that Poetry you horses ass Where am I Oh On Third Avenue All alone by the what happened to my Take it easy will you! Stop being so scared There's nothing to be afraid of Okay Oh Kay You too George poor guy cut off in his prime Who has it in for us poor wonder boys You include your meager pen in this majestic scrap pile? Well didn't I sell a story Yes one story and for twenty five dollars So what you ass Great oaks from little What are you going to do with it Retire or put it back into the capitalistic system to rejuvenate used up factories or buy boats and send wheat to the Indians Hunger they know what real hunger is They are born with hunger live and die with hunger It bestrides their frail backs like old men of the sea made of lead It cackles obscene death jokes in their ears It grinds them to dust Hunger Hunger Hunger it is all it is everything when it is anything It crowds out mind and spirit unless it is deliberate but we are not holy men Congress almighty I am a child and do not care for freedom of this and that when my belly is swollen for lack of eating Sir do you not understand Who gives me good in my hunger gives me everything Give me bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who…

Eyes closed. Sense of holiness, of martyrdom. Passing.

I don't feel like thinking. I wish I were there you are lettuce and cabbage take me out of this to the ball game Coat go too and the hat and shoes dirty and my dirty mud caked memories Dreams of long ago and far away I dream a dream one day and night night and the music music music…

God will you look at that water right there beside me My throat is drying up I can feel the flesh evaporating There goes some I wish it would rain or something or I said it once and I'll say it again this room is too damn dry and airless Oh stop thinking will you Isn't there a way to stop it? Throw a bridle on the mind and stop it Oh the church bells again The half hour Ava get off the floor you naughty girl Ava what kind of name is that Ava Maria Ava Avavavavavava…

Take up your bed and walk…

I wonder what he was like No crap now What would he say to me now The carpenter the Jew the healer the master the Christ? I wonder God I do I really wonder seriously Did he smile often Did he work hard Did he have big muscles Did he have a good tan Was his beard well kept Did he lux his Now stop that Well why? It's a weakness when you can't joke about something Anyway Jesus laughed sure he must have laughed Could such a man not laugh Could he love children and be a solemn pill No sire not Jesus Jones Wonder if he had a last name middle name Christian name Ha ha What does it matter anyway? Was he tall How much did he weigh Did he never have a woman in his arms whom he loved with a sensual love He must have He was human wasn't he? It is all so hidden in mists Nail Him Up Boys or How to Build a Church in One Easy Lesson. He was a man I say this and I am alone and helpless and hungry and thirsty and I am thinking hard on this thing He was a man a wonderful man who loved and hated but loved more Who healed and scourged but healed more Who lived and died but did not die Did he get up? Big question no one can answer not the books and scrolls the parchments dry with age the holy men dry with age I say he died he never got up My word is as good as any other Here I am shot in the back on Third Avenue in New York City and my word is as good as any other in the world What's the difference if he died He was good and kind he died for his beliefs What more could any God do He gave us love Us? Are you including yourself You who stole and struck and hated and SHUT UP!!!…

Face contorted, angry, hating, murderous. Then, plaintive.

Shut up your doors Nail shutters on the windows of your mind Oh for God's sake how long can I lie here like this staring at the ceiling and a rose and money and a jumbled up overcoat How long before it all bursts out in a crazy scream How long before it clamps my teeth and sets my face in a gaping grin? When do I start drooling and blubbering and befouling the walls with idiot soliloquies When? WHEN? Oh stop…

No it doesn't stop It won't stop It runs on and on like a berserk machine I was wrong to start it Wrong to press the button tug the string and set the top to buzzing Wrong? Wrong I didn't know I should have known but I didn't know I thought… I thought… grind to a halt.

No…

Hopelessness.

Leo where are you At the office aren't you wondering about me Why did I meet you Who planned it? Well I don't want to think about it Think of something else Think of California maybe Here I come right back where I Who did? Me did Maybe in another life When I was a mongoose No a burro No I know I was the jerk who discovered gold at Sutter's Mill or Alexander No that's too grand I was the little man the fuckup the fubar boy the guy who drove nails into his palms The slob who invented gunpowder The last one to maintain that the world was flat I was the J. Wesley Smith of all time Oh get me out of here shut off the steam tighten the faucet pull the cord Get me out of…

Sudden resolution. Face relaxing. Thin smile.

I know I'll close my eyes and pretend I'm back at college I just finished my last examination I got an A in it and tonight I'm going over to Sally's house for dinner we'll be alone and we'll eat together and love together and we'll sleep in each other's arms Oh God no don't think of that Think of something else To have thrown that diamond aside I… God leave me be! Stroke me a mental mute Tear all memories from my mind Tip me oh lord and pour me empty of recollection Let me become a jelly let me grow into the bed into the floors into the walls Let me be the room creaking and dumb and never remembering The log is a happy creature He cannot mourn He cannot hope He cannot think…

Close your eyes Darkness sweep black over the city Robe the day with night Muffle the cars and the bedlam of the strains Strike the busses dead Let heavy silence hang like a mist Let silence and peace fall like a curtain at the end of this my lay Let me sleep in peace and when I wake up Oh God let me rise and depart and I'll never bother you again I'll be good if you'll just do this for me I swear it by my soul if soul I have Just let me sleep oh please let me sleep The ceilings are black velvet the walls are black velvet the screen is black velvet except for one word in white the word is Sleep Sleep Sleep Sleep Sleepsleep sleepsleepsleep…

Brain slowing down. Descent. Into the pit of unconsciousness.

11

The church bells were chiming six as he woke up.

He only heard four of them. But it couldn't be four o'clock, he thought. It was getting dark. It's April and it doesn't get dark until later in April. He guessed it was six o'clock. There was more noise at five o'clock with people running up the steps to the elevated platform and cars and buses rushing through traffic and the elevated trains running more often. And it would be dark if it were seven.

So it was six.

He felt a slight yet definite satisfaction in knowing what time it was. It got him more or less back in tune. He was part of the world again. He had caught up with the schedule and now he could get up, put on his coat and walk back into the world again.

He lay very still. He didn't try to get up. He was wondering with a twinge of fear whether he should wait; a little while anyway. Let reserves build themselves up, let the muscle tone rejuvenate. Then he could get up. It would probably be much better to wait a little while longer. Maybe until seven o'clock. When it was too dark to see anything but the hall light through the dust-thick transom. Then he'd get up. His throat moved nervously as his mind ranted—Oh stop the crap will you? You're not going to get up and you know it.

I am! He fired back in anger.

After a little more rest. Then he'd get up.

He turned his head as if turning away from his insulting mind. He looked at the rose. The petals were more loose now, hanging like blushing lettuce leaves in sloppy folds around the still tight heart. Dying from the outside in, he thought. How different from man. Our heart stops and then we unfold from the inside out. It is better to die that way because…

He drove his lips together furiously.

Stop this idiotic prattle about dying! he ordered his mind. What in the hell's the matter with you? Are you crazy? Don't you know that there's nothing so desperate in the world except that thinking makes it so. Get some perspective boy, get some… it all sounded so ridiculous to him that he shoved the entire series of thoughts over the cliff of attention.

He looked at the water in the glass and his drying tongue ran over his lips. His throat was parched. The air was so lacking in moisture in the room. It was dusty air.

He kept staring at the bubbles rise and licking his lips. One, two, three, four, five… oh, for Christ's sake stop going so fast. Then—Oh, for Christ's sake stop trying to count them.

But he couldn't help feeling a growing disquiet for every bubble that disappeared. It was water evaporating and gone, sucked into the great rotting maw of the room. There was that much less water to drink. And it seemed that each drop was a symbol of part of his existence.

Evaporating slowly, ceaselessly…

He shut his eyes, blotting out the sight and the train of thought. So what? he thought in studied belligerence, what in the hell difference does it make? I'll get all the water I want when I get up. All I want. Cool torrents of it. Glasses of it, bottles of it pouring cold and wet down my dry throat. Rivers of it to plunge in, lakes of it to float in, oceans of water to drink and drink and…

He cut that short too, trembling a little, frightened at the insistence with which the stream of water associations had torn through his brain as though they had a vitality all their own; like a rampaging animal, unstoppable. That's bad, he thought, don't start rhapsodizing about water and food for Christ's sake. That's the fastest way to the… never mind!

Just watch it.

He smiled. He forced his lips to raise in token of his calculated amusement.

Why get so upset? What's the difference? Why am I making so much of it? I'll be up and around in no time. There, listen to the bells, the loud alarm… never mind.

Six fifteen already. Only forty five minutes and I'll be up and… it seemed obviously forced to him. To say that in forty five minutes he'd get up. If he could get up in forty five minutes why not get up immediately? Muscles didn't rejuvenate by the clock, they didn't knit by stopwatch.

But he had to hold on to that belief. He had to keep stalling it. And convince himself that he wasn't stalling but was actually doing the only thing possible, the sensible thing. Sure. Me and my overcoat and my hat and the money. And I'll, oh, I won't forget the money, never fear. I'll be—California here I come. He found himself humming it, straining to be composed and easy.

The inside of his throat felt as if it were rattling as he hummed. A lump moved up into his throat. He had to cut short the humming and gulp down the lump. He began again. The lump came again. Oh, this is silly, he thought, this goddamn humming. What's the matter with me, am I off the trolley tracks humming goddamn songs to myself?

He stopped and swallowed the lump. It felt like a different lump. He wondered if it was the same one. It might be a different one, suggested his other mind, weary of being serious. No, it must be the same one, he argued seriously, what the hell have I got, a lump factory in my throat?

Of course it was the same one. He swallowed it. It came back. He swallowed it again. It popped up again.

He kept swallowing until it stayed down. Eight times he had to do it before it stayed down. It made him shiver at its mute ridiculous insistence.

I wonder if, just for now, he thought, I can reach out and get hold of the glass and get myself a sip of water. Oh, I realize full well that it's stale water but that makes very little difference under the circumstances, that is really immaterial to me, really I don't mind so what do you say now, may I have a little sip of water just a tiny little…

A croaking sob of rage puffed out his cracked lips.

God damn it! Stop this puerile, idiotic monologue up there!

He forced his mind to blank itself as well as it could. He concentrated on darkness. He made himself think of the time he'd gone to a lecture on hypnotism at college and had gone up on the stage at the request of the lecturer to see if he could be put under hypnosis.

The man had said that it would be as refreshing as a good night's sleep. And Erick was exhausted. So he went up there.

It didn't work.

His mind was trying. He did exactly what the man said but nothing happened. He never even came close to being hypnotized. He thought maybe he could do it now.

Yes! The idea suddenly occurred to him. He saw Jose Ferrer in a movie do it. Ferrer hypnotized himself to walk after a major operation. Maybe he could do the same thing.

Remembering what the hypnotist had said he told himself that he was in a strange theatre whose walls were all black velvet, whose ceilings were black velvet, whose every seat and whose rugs were black velvet, whose curtain was black velvet…

Velvet.

Watches hanging head down in the pawn shop. Silent, unticking watches. Lost men. The shop and the robbery. He saw himself there again shouting and yelling at the old man, calling him vile names, striking his old dry face. He felt the sensation of his bunched fist striking the hard bony cheek. He felt the bullet digging into him.

He was paralyzed. He couldn't move. God, isn't there another road, he thought. Doesn't any path of thought lead away from this room? Why does every train of…

"I can't wait."

His cracked, dried up voice announced sudden intention. He couldn't wait like a lump of mushroom on a rotting log.

He tried to clench his right hand and almost cried out in joy.

It closed easily!

He flexed it suddenly, opening and closing it rapidly, thinking that it was the most beautiful muscle action he had ever felt or seen in his entire life. He did it again and again until he began to realize that he was almost in the same mental condition that before required him to wait forty-five minutes before trying to get up. He was flexing the hand just to stall, to put off the inevitable moment when he must attempt to move the rest of his body.

He shut his right fist abruptly at the realization. And kept it shut.

He tried to lift his arms.

His lips drew back in a rasping inhalation of breath as he struggled. Violent heart beats began throbbing in his ears. It felt as though the opening to his eardrums were expanding and contracting sharply, almost fluttering like window shades in a gale. The beating seemed to shake his skull and, slowly, his head began to ache. It began to feel hot and swollen. But he couldn't, he wouldn't stop trying. A feeling of now or never beset him and he was sure that if he slipped back now he would be lost forever.

He tried to move his right leg, his left. An unwanted chant began to fill his brain as he fought to move. Mountain coat and piles of money, plaster cracked and ceiling cobwebbed help me up up UP! Mountain coat and piles of…

The church bells chimed once for the half hour but he hardly heard them.

"Come on!"

For the two words and no more, his voice rang clear.

In the next room the drunk stopped moving and held off his coughing. Erick felt an even more desperate need to rise now. It was as if retribution for his crime were in the person of the drunk in the next room and now he had heard him. And the drunk was going to investigate and have Erick punished.

His eyes bulged with the effort to move. He poured every last ounce of energy through his embattled system. His legs vibrated on the bed and his arms shuddered like bridges of flesh in a hurricane wind. His entire body twitched once.

!GET UP! GET UP! GET UP!

Too much.

Too much.

He felt himself falling backward again, down, down, like the night before. He tried to cry out but his breath was gone. He felt as though he was suffocating, being smothered to death beneath some great fluffy invisible pillow.

He landed.

And lay there, chest heaving with breaths, his body covered with perspiration. Every joint felt hot and swollen up to twice its normal size. Every inch of his body felt expanded or contracted. He felt as though his body were a land of feudal states raging at war with each other. Tendons were enflamed, muscles were spread with liquid fire, every nerve pulsed as though they were exposed to air and some fiend was driving white hot needles into their most tender spots.

His head began to roll on the pillow from side to side. He was in such pain he didn't even notice it. He only noted without comprehending, the added cramps and pains in his neck, the new flush of dry heat that flooded over him. He was in flames, chained down, set on fire, charring to a hideous black.

He closed his eyes and gasped for a breath of cooling air.

But the air was hot, too. It scorched his throat. He kept gasping and coughing and trying to clear his throat. Somewhere in his mind, the stranger, alien to his feelings, observed that he sounded more like the drunk in the next room than the drunk did himself.

Long moments passed.

And slowly, as though reluctant to depart, the flaring pain subsided, unable to maintain its fiery, agonizing peak.

A slow shifting ache took its place, running over his limbs and torso like a heavy bed of lava tearing up chunks of nerves as it moved.

Through pain-dimmed eyes he saw the darkness creeping on the walls.

Oh God, the night is coming, he thought in terror. It's bad enough in the day but—

Night.

Black and cold and full of grating, screeching, howling noises. He was suddenly afraid of the dark again as he had been almost to his eighteenth year, almost to the time he went in the army. He feared its creeping ebony, he wanted it to stay daylight. Stop the sun! his mind exploded out in a fevered burst.

"Joshua!"

His voice was bubbly and feeble again. It ran from his mouth like the strangle of a drowning man. The night, the night, stalking, hanging over him, its cruel dark mantle on his face.

He sobbed, "I'm going to die."

He said it in a phlegm thickened voice, full of self pity and horror.

He was sure of it. Sure that death would come pouncing out of the night and grab him and wrap him in its black paper and carry him away. I'm going to die in the night, he thought, alone and helpless.

He almost insisted on it now with the sudden reversal of all desire that had been a keynote of his life. The sudden petulant overthrowing of all resistance and the childish insistence that he was lost and knew it and would not raise a finger to fight it anymore. Would, on the contrary, rush to meet his doom screaming—What's the use anyway? I can't do anything. Come on, get it over with, damn you! A raging self-destruction, a monumental cutting off of the nose to spite the face. An acceptance of defeat rather than the expending of effort to lose stubbornness and continue the fight.

That's what he felt like then. Suddenly he wanted death. He didn't care. He didn't really think of what it meant. He didn't know what death was. But he thought it was inevitable and he was jumping to embrace it, to get it over with and show it he didn't care one damn bit for it.

He lay there for a long time, sobbing and not caring what happened to him. His right hand clutching the blue striped bed cover at his side.

It was only later that the feeling of utter depression and loss finally departed and he began to think of Leo.

He began to hope that she would come to see him. She only lived two blocks away. She should come. She'd want to keep an eye on him surely. The way he felt it wouldn't matter if she caught him now. Much good he'd be to her anyway, she'd probably bow out when she saw him paralyzed. But at least she'd get help and wouldn't steal the…

Wouldn't she?

His mouth tightened until he saw his own face in his mind—just like that of the old lady, petulant and unreasoning.

Sure she'd steal it, the bitch! What did she care about him? Wasn't it money she wanted anyway, didn't she say it clearly, hadn't she…

Oh God, Leo, please come and save me!

His eyes were staring wide into the falling darkness. He dribbled over his blonde-bearded chin as his lips formed her name soundlessly, "Leo, Leo, Leo…"

The church bells clanked a few introductory bars and then bellowed out the hour to the lowering sky.

12

There was a little light, thin bars and thick bars of it hanging on the walls.

One bar of light ran up a hill from the top of the dresser to the ceiling. Two of them lay blanket like over the typewriter table, making shadows hang like black leeches on the wall behind it.

Other bars of light stood motionless on the ceiling until a bus or a truck or a car passed on the street below and broke the spotlight from the street and made a shapeless black mass flit across the light blotting it out for a split second.

He lay there staring at the ceiling. From the bottoms of his eyes he saw the two transom panes that looked like dirty white sheets of paper tacked over the door.

He didn't make a sound. He hardly breathed. His face was set into a fixed unblinking mask. His eyes stayed open and his lips were immobile. It might have been a face carved from stone. The dirty tangled hair hung over his forehead. It might have been a dead man lying there in the darkness staring at the ceiling and the uneven patches of light.

In the street, buses still stopped at the curb with a hydraulic gasp and started up again, their motors growling sullenly, complaining wildly in second gear, then growling back into third. Trucks still rumbled over the black gum-blobbed pavement. Cars and taxicabs still honked and wove in and out among the heavier vehicles, forming a shapeless moving tapestry of traffic. The night and the street were alarm and motion.

The darkness shifted. The shadows moved. That one in the corner, the great shapeless one. It was a bat, a spider, a huge brittle-backed beetle. It hung loosely from the green plaster. It was waiting for him to shut his eyes. Then it would swoop or waddle or drop down heavily onto him and suck the life from him.

Like juice.

The room was a mass of shadows, moving and restless. He didn't think of it consciously. All thoughts dredged on through lower mental canals. Without being completely conscious of it, he wondered if perhaps the shadows were barriers and the light portions gateways to another dimension, another existence.

Maybe if a person could crawl through the gaps in those black barriers, he could escape to a better place.

The amorphous thought drifted away.

His face didn't change a trifle. The only evidence of life in him was the shallow rise and fall of his chest. He was immovable beneath a crushing weight of darkness. He didn't move, did not care to think of moving or to think at all. He felt, without conscious admission that he was as good as dead.

Once he had felt a similar lethargy and complete submission. It was one morning when he was in the army overseas and he woke up in a muddy hole in Germany with a blanket over him and didn't care if he ever moved for the rest of his life.

He sensed indirectly the mass of his body resting on the bed like a solid statue. He felt calcified, a sculptured figure of stone. He could not have picked out the sensation of one muscle in his body, one ligament, one tendon. They had all run together and frozen fast.

There was no point in fighting it.

He didn't say it or think it consciously. But his eyes reflected it, without a spark, without a hope, glazed, unblinking eyes. He had fought it and it had beaten him. Thirst no longer mattered. Hunger did not matter. All that mattered was that he was doomed.

Finally he thought it. The foundation was built. It was simple to raise the edifice of admission.

I am going to die.

If it had been light, he might not have thought it. He might have gleaned some added hope from the light. Nothing seemed so bad in the daytime as it did at night. The darkness brought some subtle depression, some weight of despair that took a problem and blew it up beyond all proportion until the expanded difficulty hid the world.

He accepted.

He was exhausted and paralyzed and was in the mood to accept it. Morbid submission seemed to flow through him, an invisible transfusion from some dark vein so morbid that his acceptance was more than negative. He went forward to meet it once more, arousing conscious thought and, in a somber effort at tidiness, putting his brain to the task of placing his death within the confines of the room.

He was on the right edge of the bed. In his mind he visualized his body, each twist of the limbs, each curl of the limp fingers.

His right shoe was resting on the floor. He couldn't feel it but he knew it was there because his right leg, and in the natural order, there was a right foot at the extremity of every right leg. Of course that was only syllogistic. There might be nothing there but a stump with dark, purplish artery and vein ends waving in the breeze. The idea pleased him vaguely as did all aggravated thoughts of self-torture when he was in the half-enjoyable throes of introspection.

On his right side was the table that faced the window, the window that was open a trifle. On this table were three things resting on the dirty white towel that was supposed to be a table cloth.

Closest to the window was the candy bar. It was almost against the brown muslin curtain. He didn't want to eat the candy. He hated all candy.

Next to the candy was the object he couldn't remember. It irked him not to remember, to place his regression in the room without seeing all surroundings. As though he was a stage actor in his big scene and the stagehands had placed an unfamiliar set behind his fevered pacing and soliloquizing.

Near the inside edge of the table where the drawer was, the rose sagged over the glass edge, its heavy pink head lolling like the great burdening skull of an idiot. The glass had water in it that was crowded with tiny bubbles which rose without him seeing them and disappeared into the stale air of the room. That thought displeased him vaguely too. It seemed unfair that there should be any process of tangible change going on when he had stopped and atrophied and was trying to identify his surroundings.

He comforted himself with the notion that the entire room was changing and he along with it; both undergoing a great physio-chemical change that made a new room each second although it appeared the same for years at a stretch.

He spent a little time thinking of that, taking time off from his black tour of the room. It gave him pleasure to think about things changing. It gave him a sense of comfort to know that he was merely part of a great process and that the entire thing was dying right along with him, if at a less fevered velocity.

He listened and tried hard to hear the house and the world dying by inches.

But he couldn't. So, rather testily, he went back to the room and his surroundings.

At the foot of the table was the movie magazine with its cover bent at the upper right hand corner. Ava Gardner still sat against the deep red background, looking up into the night with a pride of beauty and physical fulfillment. A goddess for the poorer kingdoms of the brain, he thought.

Against the locked, yellow-brown door that led to the drunk's room was the bureau. Next to it, a four-layered radiator. The mirror hovered above the squat little dresser propped on sticks that looked like bizarre elongated knights for some skinny madman's game of chess. On the dirty white towel was his toothbrush and the wilted tube of paste with the words Kolynos Toothpaste on it and next to it was the box of saltines and peanut butter, in a half-full jar and crusted on the old, dull-edged knife.

The dresser drawers, except for the bottom one, were pulled out.

The left top drawer was pulled out the farthest, pulled out evenly. The right top drawer was not out so far. And the middle drawer was pulled out unevenly so that the left end of it was farther out than the right end. The bottom drawer was in all the way.

The whole of the dresser stood like a fat little woman on bandy legs, smug and ugly.

Beside the dresser was the wastebasket with one of his stories in it, torn to shreds. With it was a wrapper from a package of gum and a grease-spattered brown bag that still held a few cold, greasy lumps of french-fried potatoes that he had brought up to the room three nights before.

Beside the basket was the spindly, curve-backed chair with its round bucket seat and the brown hat leaning against the back, its front brim curled beneath it by the weight of the crown.

On the dusty rug was the coat bunched into a lumpy swirl of wool and silk lining. Behind it the pattern of bills on the floor.

Against the far wall stood the stocky white table with the typewriter on it, the yellow second sheets next to it and the yellow sleeveless sweater tossed over the top of the case.

Next to it was the other chair, a grimy white towel hanging over its top.

The door and, back toward him, the closet with a jacket and a pair of blue trousers hanging in it.

And finally, back to him, lying there motionless.

Now.

At least mathematically, he was prepared. He knew the room, each crack and seam of it, he thought. He was familiar with each furnishing, with each position of clothes and money and crackers and candy and dying rose and all.

Thereupon, he closed his eyes.

There now, he thought, you're ready. It's coming. You don't have to move a muscle. Just wait.

He waited.

13

Someone was raking leaves in his stomach.

They were dragging razor-sharp rake points through his intestines, pulling away the soft, milky-fleshed walls.

They were piling up the leaves in the center of his stomach. They were bending over the pile with flaring matches. They were setting the leaves on fire.

He felt the heat rising, smelled the choking smoke in his mind. He grunted in his sleep, twisting his head on the pillow. He moaned restlessly. His face twitched. The fire was rising. The flames licked at the walls of his stomach. Someone kicked the leaves closer together, kicked them again into a tight pile so that they'd all ignite.

He lurched violently on the bed.

"Uh!"

His head snapped up from the pillow for a split second. He didn't know where he was. He stared down the dark length of his body. Then his head fell back and he heard the fire truck clanging by in the street screeching its message of help and axes on the way.

His stomach was on fire.

There were no flames to be seen but it was on fire. He felt the muscles curling up black and gutted with flame. He felt the crackling, eating fire and expected any moment that his stomach walls would burn through and the room would be filled with flaring yellow-orange light.

"Ohhhhhh!"

He groaned in a high-pitched, unbelieving tone, the pain seemed so incredibly, impossibly intense. He almost felt that it must be a joke. No pain could be that bad and be real.

"God!" The word came thickly and almost inaudibly. His right hand clamped shut, his teeth forced together. He heard his stomach gurgling and felt the spasmodic muscle contractions. A whine escaped his pale shaking lips. God help me! screamed out his mind. He dug his nails into his right palm.

His head rolled back and forth on the pillow. He groaned in agony, feeling as though his bowels were going to explode like a volcano, as though there were molten lead bubbling in them, weighing him down and scorching, eating up his nerves and flesh. He tried to speak. The words—all right, a joke's a joke!—rushed inanely through his tortured brain. But words wouldn't come. There were no words possible to express the unutterable screeching pain in his stomach. It ached and throbbed and burned and gurgled savagely.

Sweat broke out on his forehead. Sense of time disappeared. It seemed he must be in hell, suffering eternal agony. He couldn't even remember the start of the pain. It seemed to have been going on forever.

Sweat poured over his brow like tiny rivers in the beds of twisted lines that creased his flesh. His eyes were slitted in pain, his teeth slipped and dug in suddenly into his tender gums and the pain fled through the hallways of his brain screaming—Help!

Then his brain began to beg—kill me!

"Kill me, kill me, kill me," he muttered in a voice that sounded like that of a frog if frogs could talk. And, suddenly, he thought of Joan of Arc and thought it must have felt like that being staked down and burned alive.

Pain!

Abruptly, his bowels overflowed.

The thick, smoking excretion flooded from him and ran down onto the bed. He felt some of it thread hot and liquid down the back of his right leg. He felt it run over his calf, the mucky current splitting at the back of the knee joint. It ran over his sock and into his shoe and over the top of his shoe. He was helpless to stop it. He tried. He tried with all his power. But the bowels belonged to someone else.

He cried and sobbed and groaned and grunted and gasped in pain. He gagged at the swirling reek of the putrescence that ran from his body. He shuddered as it settled under his body clinging to his numbed flesh like hot ooze, building up on each side of his crotch, soaking his testicles and the end of his penis in its slime, lapping hot at the small of his back.

It seemed endless. His eyes were closed and his chest throbbed with jerking breaths. He prayed for death, life seemed too horrible to be endured. Oh God, kill me please!

His stomach gurgled to a halt.

And he wept.

Wept as he had never wept in his life. With complete loss of manhood, of humanity. He wasn't even a frightened child as before, an infant helpless before the terrors of night and inexplicable discharge. He had gone lower than that.

He was a terrified animal.

A mindless tortured beast. His teeth chattered together without control. His tongue got caught between them and he bit it without even being able to stop it and it flared up with raw pain and bled.

Tears flooded from his eyes, blinding him, making the shadows and the bars of light flicker like jumping monsters in a prism, like shivering gelatine-like horrors seen through bright lenses. The hot salty tears ran into his mouth and he was wild and lost and frightened out of his wits.

His eyes stared and his lips shook. The sounds that broke from his throat and mouth were animal sounds. Bestial. Stripped of all intelligence, senseless sounds that expressed nothing but the riot of fear and crazed grief that tore at him with hot fingers and tried to pluck away all sanity.

And he would have screamed if he could. Howled if he could. Roared if he could. Torn off his clothes if he could. Butted his head against the wall, ripped the bed clothes apart with his teeth, thrown himself through the window and shattered himself on the pavement four stories down—if he could. Anything to end the agony and the mental torture.

But he couldn't.

He could only cry.

It was only after a long while, after church bells had sandwiched an hour between their clanging, that his sobbing quieted down and his eyes dried.

Then he saw again. And knew he was still Erick Linstrom, wounded and in racking sickness. But still alive.

And with a mind to suffer through every last bit of it.

And, as he lay there, his body torn by agonies that scarred his every thought, he was carried back.

And, half comatose, dreamed of the past, remembering another time when his body wastes had gushed out uncommanded and he had been bound helpless in brain-cutting ties of revulsion.

14

They were marching along a pitch-black German road, their clothes soaked from the drenching rain that had ended only a few minutes before.

It seemed very silent without the sound of rain sheets tearing up scars from the face of the earth. All Erick could hear was the rattle and clanking of equipment and the sucking sounds of great dark boots sinking into the oozy mud and then pulling loose.

The thick slime clung to his soles and heels, making him feel as if his feet weighed a hundred pounds each. Added to that weight was his full field pack, his rifle, two bandoliers of cartridges, a bazooka, and a case with two bazooka shells in it. He was so loaded down that he was positive if he fell he couldn't possibly get up again.

He marched without strength, reverted, bent over like the old man he felt. His lower jaw hung down loosely and he gasped at the cold, black air and lolled his tongue and stared stupidly at the ground. In the far reaches of his mind an alien voice told him he was overdoing it. That he was being sorry for himself. But he couldn't straighten up.

In later years, at college he wrote in his diary,

I wouldn't throw out my chest and march along with sturdy strides murmuring the Star Spangled Banner under my breath. Murmuring, "Glory be, I'm going to fight for Old Glory, for My Country, for Liberty. This is my chance for immortality. I give my soul to The Stars and Stripes Forever. Give me my machine gun and I shall stalk out to a true Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer finish, taking several detestable enemies of Humanity with me and saving these ten feet of mud for Democracy. "

At the time, the most he'd said to John was — "To hell with the Germans. I say let's declare war on the second looies." And John had said, "It's okay with me Erick."

"Break!"

The word came fluttering back through the dark, slogging ranks and Erick stumbled off the road abruptly and fell down on the mucky earth.

He hung his head back on the top of his pack and opened his mouth like a goggling corpse. The rain drops from bare tree limbs fell and spattered on his tongue and yellow teeth and over his cheeks.

He didn't even notice.

He rested the bazooka over one shoulder and the M-l rifle over the other shoulder and let his hands flop in scrawny heaps of bone and flesh wherever gravity took them. His legs ceased functioning and lay like two khakied lengths of worm-eaten wood. I'm dead, the thought trickled over his brain. I'm breathing and my heart beats but I'm dead.

His thin chest rose and sank in shallow movements. He wondered for a second where John was but before he could think about it any more he was sound asleep in the mud.

He'd been having the same dream for days now. He was back on the ferry, standing beside John, watching dull-eyed as the glittering city passed by. It was a terribly realistic dream, more as if he were actually re-living the moment than going back to it in sleep.

He saw the Battery, the glowing top of the Empire State Building. Then they were riding into the dock. They were standing under the Queen Elizabeth, its huge grey structure looming over them like a mountain as they walked toward its gangways.

Distracted Red Cross women rushed about on clacking heels, giving everybody doughnuts and coffee. They worked desperately as thought it were some holy ritual the men must partake of before embarking for overseas lest they be doomed.

Erick drank the coffee and ate the hot crispy doughnuts and was sick inside. He wanted to scream, to throw himself on the dock and kick his feet and scream and scream—No, I'm not going! You wouldn't even let me go see my mother before you ask me to die for you so I'm damned if I'll go now!

But he didn't cry or scream. He didn't even speak. He filed mutely up the gangplank and the ship swallowed him.

At sea later, John, trying to comfort him, told Erick he was sorry it hadn't been him on K.P. duty the night twelve-hour passes were given.

John said that the train schedules were all off and it took him half the time to get home to Vermont. Then he had only about an hour to say goodbye. He had to drive like a bullet around his town to say goodbye to everyone. He'd only had the time to stop at his girl's house for a few minutes, kiss her and hold her close.

Erick never could imagine John making love to a girl. He was too boyish. But he guessed John had a girl all right. And he'd kissed her warm, shaking lips that night. And then—goodbye, goodbye I hope I come back, I may not, I may die. And her standing in the early morning light in her bathrobe, staring blankly at the receding car and feeling nameless dread tear her heart out.

"I wish I hadn't gone," John told him.

"Sure, it's easy for you to say that," Erick said bitterly.

His eyes jerked open on night and cold, wet air. In his ears was the soft sound of the whistle, resurrecting the dead.

He groaned and grunted as he pushed himself up. He wavered, thought himself incapable of standing, much less marching on again.

Then he'd fallen in with the rest of them into uneven formation and they'd started out again.

As they marched, his eyes kept closing. He kept stepping on the heels of the man in front of him and being snapped back into wakefulness by the cursing.

Then he kept slowing down until the man behind him gave him an impatient shove and he slipped in the mud and almost fell. A sudden mindless fury exploded in his chest. He trembled without control and felt like pulling the rifle from his shoulder and shooting the man behind him, emptying the clip into him. Shooting everybody and running away and getting shot to death himself. He didn't care what happened. He just hated everyone suddenly, the world itself. And he wanted to destroy. If someone had placed a button before him and said—Push it and the Earth will explode—he would have lunged for it.

In an hour they reached a great, open plain.

There, as morning light crept over the far hills, they all removed their heavy, soaked equipment and some of the men started to pick and shovel at the slimy rock and mud to make holes for themselves. But the holes filled up with water as quickly as they were dug. Most of them gave it up.

Erick didn't even start digging.

He didn't care if he had a trench or not. Somehow it just didn't seem to matter to him that he might die if the Germans started to shell them and he didn't have a hole to jump in for protection. He didn't care. He was so tired and disgusted that he almost enjoyed thinking about death.

There was no future anyway, he told himself. Every thought had to be memory. There was no room left for dreams or aspirations. Dreaming and aspiring were the height of impracticality then. Whatever he mulled over had already happened. And when they went into combat there would be neither past nor future but only blistering present. Then, every moment of life would be another moment to breathe in air, a little bit longer to get hungry for the cold slop they'd bring in from the rear. Then, every gut that stayed in his stomach would be that much more to be caressed by food. And the tongue that could still wag could taste coffee instead of maggots crawling.

But he thought only vaguely of what it would be like when they went into combat. He was too tired to think of it. And, long before, he had repressed all thoughts of battle because they were too frightening. It was better to go on pretending that it was never going to actually happen.

During the day he looked around for John.

Foley was a messenger for the platoon. He was kept running all over. Once in a while Erick got a brief glimpse of him with his helmet high on his large skull, flopping a little as he ran. And a grim fixed expression on his usually good-natured, florid face. With his rifle and his flimsy machine pistol, John Foley looked like an apple cheeked school boy playing war in the corner lot.

Years later, Erick thought that it might have been that way. That the plain was a great corner lot and they were all playing a melodramatic game which some inventive fool had titled "War."

It was only a game though and soon they'd all stop playing it and run home to the warm skirts of Ma and eat thick slices of white bread hot from the bakers all covered with great juicy blobs of jam and yellow butter. That was it.

That wasn't it.

* * * *

That night one of the squad got sick.

They all thought it was appendicitis. Because when the platoon medic pressed his palm into the boy's side, the boy screamed out loud and tried to bite the medic. Then he writhed on the muddy ground and cried like a baby and asked for his mother.

The rest of the squad lay around silently under their muddy shelter halves and listened to the boy groaning until some other medics came with a stretcher and took him away.

Erick lay shivering under his shelter half, his dirty hand slid under his jacket, pressed against his warm chest.

He tried to sleep but he couldn't. He listened to the sounds in the night. A far-off truck climbing a hill with gears grinding. Feet rustling in the mud. Voices calling softly. And the host of indeterminate sounds that a night is filled with.

His hearing was hypersensitive. True silence would not come. Even when the sound of the truck was gone and the footsteps died out, he heard metal rattling, a depressive wind sloughing over the wet earth, voices calling softly. It seemed they'd never stop. And his shelter half was wet and part of him was sticking out in the cold. When someone stumbled over his feet he told them, for Christ's sake, to watch where the hell they were going.

Then he suddenly realized that the voice was calling for him.

"Erick?" John was calling very softly, as if he didn't want to disturb anyone. He sounded lonely and afraid. "Erick?"

Erick lay there silently, without moving. He had looked for John all day and now John was there. A sort of selfish lethargy covered his limbs. He didn't speak. He started to wonder if there was enough room on the shelter half for the two of them.

"Erick?"

John's voice was plaintive. Erick thought of him wandering around the field all night in the damp blackness, afraid. With a sigh, he raised up on his right elbow, pulling the canvas from his face.

He waited.

"Erick?"

"Here," he said.

He heard John stumbling around. "Where, Erick? Where are you?" John sounded pathetically happy.

"Here," Erick repeated, almost sullenly.

John stepped on his right foot. "Look out, for Christ's sake!" he snapped.

"Oh gee, I'm sorry," John said anxiously. Then he crouched down. "Oh God, am I glad I found you," he said, "I was afraid I'd be walking around all night."

His voice shook a little. And suddenly Erick felt sorry he'd been so cold. He felt a surge of affection for John.

"Is there room under the shelter half?" John asked, feeling the canvas.

"I guess so." Erick's voice was still cold despite the fact that he really wasn't angry now.

John climbed under the shelter half with him. It didn't work.

"Wait a minute," Erick said. He pulled the canvas around so that it covered both of them and their legs and feet stuck out in the air. Then they lay down and were quiet a moment. John sighed.

"Wow, have I been walking around," he said.

"Yeah?" Erick said quietly, "Where?"

"Golly, I went everywhere."

"New York?"

"I wish I did. I wish I'd gone back to Vermont." Erick heard John's throat contracting in the silence. His voiced sounded so plaintive that he couldn't feel anything but friendly toward him. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a small can. After a moment's deliberation, he asked,

"Hungry?"

"I had a little stew and coffee this afternoon but that's all."

Erick had planned on having all of the can himself. Now it was too late. He wasn't sure whether he was pleased or not. His voice reflected the feeling. Almost reluctantly he said, "I have some crackers and cheese, want some?" In a tone of voice that wrought of visions of him shaking his head vociferously and etching a "say no" look on his features.

"Golly yes!" John said, "Thanks."

They lay in the darkness, their legs and boots sticking out in the cold air, crunching on hard crackers and nibbling on cheese. "I make sandwiches," said John. "Gee this tastes good," he said.

"You are starving," Erick said.

They were quiet a while. Erick became extremely conscious of himself and his surroundings. There he was six or seven thousand miles from home. Lying on a cold wet field and eating crackers and cheese with another boy. It was impossible to understand. The more he thought about it the more unreal it became. Why? All because some little man with a comedian's mustache decided to rule the world? That's what he thought then. In college he amended it to—just because some businessman decided to make extra profits for a while.

"Where do you think we're going?" he asked to end the thoughts.

"Gee, I don't know," John said, "I think the captain said something about Metz."

"We already went through Metz," Erick said irritably.

"Oh," John said, "I guess… that's what he meant then."

"I guess."

Erick turned on his side, away from John, and tried to sleep. It was hard though. He couldn't understand that because he was absolutely exhausted. Yet he couldn't sleep. He kept hearing footsteps slogging past in the night and all the other sounds.

Finally, he rolled irritably onto his back again. "Jesus, who can sleep?" he said in disgust.

John could.

* * * *

It was morning and John sat cross-legged and helmetless on the ground, cleaning his glasses.

Erick rested on one elbow watching him. He noticed the light curling fuzz on John's cheeks and his sandy hair stuck in flat clumps to his scalp and forehead. He watched him breathe the lenses cloudy and rub them carefully with a clean khaki-colored handkerchief. Then he watched John slip the glasses over his ears. He and John looked at each other. John half smiled. After a second Erick smiled back.

"I have to go," John said.

"Yeah," Erick said, yawning, "Give my worst to the captain."

"Okay," John said. John liked the captain. He got up and put on his helmet, slung the rifle and machine pistol over his shoulders and looked around.

"Did I forget anything?" He asked.

"You forgot to lock the front door."

John grinned a little. Then they looked at each other and, in the silence, they suddenly felt the wordless terror that clung to each of them because they were going into their first combat. Erick's throat moved.

"Take it easy, John," he said.

John's mouth twitched and his brown eyes were warm behind his glasses.

"You too Erick," he said. Then, "You're my best friend."

Then John turned away and Erick felt tears in his eyes before he could stop them. He wasn't sure whether to feel happy or enraged. Happy that he was John's best friend. Enraged that John's words should bring tears.

He closed his eyes a moment and let the feeling pass. Then he opened them and watched John walking slowly over the plain and, finally, disappearing behind a dip in the ground.

In the cold stillness he lay staring at the mud-flecked canvas and listening to himself breathe, very slowly, and very carefully, as though he wanted to remember how it went.

* * * *

It was oddly warm for December.

The sun was bright and the sky light blue and cloudless. The air was clear and crisp. All around the scattered troops were bare, deserted woods. The countryside seemed to be waiting patiently. As thought it knew what was coming and was rubbing its topographical hands together in anticipation.

Men were throwing their equipment away.

Gas masks were the first to go. Some of the men had thrown away their gas masks long before that day. Then, after the masks, blankets went and overcoats and shelter halves, tent pegs, rope, raincoats, parts of mess kits. Some men hacked off the bottom parts of their overcoats with their bayonet blades and made short jackets for themselves.

Erick threw away his overcoat entirely because it was so warm. In the back of his mind he knew it wasn't going to stay warm. But the sense of live for the present was still strong on him. What happened hours later seemed of no interest to him. And, admitted or not, he knew that he might never see what went on hours later.

He kept on his combat jacket and put his folded raincoat into his thinned out pack. He kept half of his mess kit and his canteen cup.

Men sat all over the plain checking everything. Some of them were cleaning their rusty, mud-caked rifles. Erick didn't even look at his. He gazed over the plain that was strewn with discarded equipment. It looked like a thinly-spread junk yard.

Then he took out his wallet and looked at the photographs. At his mother smiling lovingly at him. At Grace holding her new-born daughter proudly and smiling at him. At her husband George standing beside her, smiling at his baby. At his cousin Richard smirking at him. At the photograph of his father holding Erick in his arms.

He stared at each photograph, trying to imagine the family as they were when the photographs were taken, what they had said and what kind of day it was. What the rest of the world was doing as they posed and someone clicked a shutter and set them down on paper.

The escape didn't last long. He couldn't hold on to the past. It was too vague, too far from him. The present had fingers of steel and it kept on turning him around and crying—Now! Look me in the face! He could not hold on to memories. He kept on being thrown back to the long plain, a billion miles from home and life, sitting on a muddy patch of ground and waiting. And these pictures were only scraps of paper held in the hands. Scraps to be slid in between stitched pieces of black leather and shoved back into his pocket, alien and uncomforting. God, he thought.

And tried the concept on for size.

* * * *

They were in enfilade position, ready to move out.

He had his rifle over his arm in hunter fashion. Ahead of him he saw the squad leader and Old Bill and the man with the thick glasses who always kept his rifle and his clothes clean through everything and the rest of the squad all eighteen years old and afraid.

Someone blew a whistle.

They began to walk slowly, a vast staggered group of men that stretched over the plain as far as Erick could see. They walked and walked over the uneven terrain as though they were stalking someone, some animal.

After a while they moved down a gradual slope and through a shallow, rushing stream. The cold, sparkling water swept up over his shoes and up the sides of his legs, soaking his feet. When he started up the hill on the other side of the stream, he felt the water squishing inside his shoes as he walked.

The men moved quietly and slowly up the hill, into a shattered town.

There was nothing in it but rubble. The only building left standing was a skeleton church that seemed ready to collapse. There were no people in the town. It was silent and deserted. The only sound came from boots crunching over the rubble-thick streets and the jiggling of weapons on the troops shoulders.

Erick kept looking at the church, his heart beating quickly, thinking in training film alertness that snipers hung in batlike clusters from its walls.

His throat became clogged and he coughed. It sounded unnaturally loud, he felt. As though he were giving away the position of the United States army by his carelessness. His heart began to beat quickly and he held ready the cloak of divine protection he had forced himself to believe was just about slung over his shoulder.

As he kept walking, past the silent church ruins, he wondered how long it would be before the Germans decided they had gone far enough. He lost the feeling of his body and seemed to drift effortlessly through the town like some vaporous entity. Or else, he felt, he was not moving at all and the shattered town was rolling past him like broken stage flats. He wasn't sure which way it was. He only kept his eyes shifting suspiciously from side to side, ready to throw up his rifle and fire at the slightest promise of a target. He thought, if the man in front of me knew how jumpy I am, he'd walk backwards to keep an eye on me and take his chances on the Germans.

The squad passed the town and started down a rocky hill. His feet were becoming uncomfortable now. It was unpleasant walking with water in his heavy shoes.

They crossed a depression, then up and over into another long deserted plain. Since he hadn't noticed landmarks on the other plain, Erick thought maybe they were walking in circles. "Shit," he muttered, almost believing it. Then he was sorry he'd said it, feeling that any recourse to profanity at this moment was slightly perilous when he might be calling on God at any moment.

We walked slowly, his heart beating quickly. He kept looking for trees or bushes to hide behind but there was nothing. Well, that's a stupid thing, he told himself, you don't hide behind a prominent landmark; you were taught better than that.

And, suddenly, as in a dream, he began to believe that he had forgotten everything; how to load the rifle, how to fire it, how to adjust the bayonet, how to parry and thrust with it. Even, how to walk.

He trembled and his teeth clenched as he tried to go over everything in his mind. Mentally he loaded and unloaded his rifle, his head dipping in sudden jerks as he nodded when he remembered correctly. His face was tense and expectant as he kept walking without looking where he was going, trying desperately to recall how one sidestepped when he wanted to drive a bayonet into a man's stomach or how to parry so you can smash a man's face with the butt of your rifle.

Once, he whirled and looked behind himself suddenly as though he thought he was being stalked by a division of hand-picked German troopers.

They were a quarter of the way to the crest of the next downward slope. He was shifting the bazooka to his left shoulder. Then you pull back the… the thing and the clip flies out and then you… you…

Rushing sounds in the air.

Way over their heads. Sounding like a giant blowing on his soup.

Then, ear-splitting explosions behind and ahead of him. Someone yelled,

"Hit the ground!"

He wondered for an instant how he had possibly managed to get down on his stomach so fast with all the equipment he was carrying. It seemed as though the cry of "Hit the ground!" was still ringing in the air when he was groveling on the earth his face pushed hard into the hollow of his arms, eyes tightly shut.

Stop being such a fool—his other mind said casually, sitting cross-legged and relaxed above it all—do you think you're hiding yourself by closing your eyes?

He fought it off. It did help. It was as though by shutting out the world he was putting himself in darkness too.

Then he began to pray.

Without form, just words, spoken automatically, over and over like an entreaty, a command, a mathematical formula. Something taught in Sunday School and tutored endlessly by his mother.

God is my protection. God is myprotection. Godismyprotection. Over and over and over until the words became a glued-together jumble of sounds that lost all meaning.

Yet, meaningless or not, they filled his mind with their presence and kept fear from entering. He didn't feel afraid. Suddenly he knew he was safe. There was no reason for feeling that way, he certainly was not safe.

But he wasn't afraid. He knew, even taking a moment off to sympathize, that others were going to be killed. He felt sorry for them. But, as for himself, he was charmed. He couldn't possibly be killed. It didn't occur to him that all the other men might feel the same way. It wouldn't have mattered if he had thought of the possibility. They could feel any way they wanted. But some of them were going to die. And he couldn't die. It was impossible.

The shelling was brief. Silence swept over the open ground.

"Move out!" cried the same voice. It was the first sergeant, Erick recognized. He struggled up and joined the slow, uneven movement of troops across the plain.

For some reason, he felt confident now, almost cocky. In a minor way he had come through his first brush with death and hadn't even received a scratch. Hang on boy, said the irritator in his mind, it's only the beginning, only the beginning. Thank you, Captain Andy! the same portion of his mind bowed grandly to itself.

As they reached the crest of the hill, the shelling began again.

He had to fling himself down again, heart drumming fiercely, fingers clutching at the earth. Overhead the shells whistled and the sound of their exploding was like that of the giant, now pounding his huge fists into the ground, first one at a time, then both together, crashing them down in a brainless rage, trying to crush them all.

All over the plain, men dove forward with a clatter of equipment and hugged themselves to earth. The ground was dotted with their stretched-out immobile bodies.

Erick's mind was filled with the magic phrase again. It repeated itself over and over now. Once, when the shelling slackened for a moment, he whispered— "Is our protection."— in a sudden impulsive gesture of loving kindness.

But then the shells began to flutter over in great clusters and the air was torn with explosions. Great dirt clouds were flung up into the air and, abruptly, he drew in the folds of his protection and held it over himself alone, muttering the endless cant faster and faster, smelling the reek of the dead winter earth in his nostrils, feeling its chill wetness, hearing the scream of war all around him.

* * * *

After a while the shelling slowed down.

"Dig in!" yelled another voice.

He needed no encouragement. Tearing off his pack, he assembled the small pickaxe. Anxiously, he began to tear at the hard dirt, suddenly back to a practical plane and not wishing to stretch God's protection any farther than he had.

It seemed the earth was mostly rock. He pulled out big stones with his fingers. They were all wet and muddy and, as the sun disappeared behind grey clouds, the air grew colder and the wet mud froze and caked on the backs of his hands. His wet feet began to get colder.

Time fell away. It was as though he had devoted his life to digging a hole for himself. He kept going deeper and deeper, widening the hole, putting clumps of wet dirt and rock around the edge like a rampart.

It was only after he was about two feet down that he noticed he was digging right behind the slit trench being dug by Old Bill and the squad leader. He would have to shoot them down first before he could aim at any Germans. He kept digging anyway, trembling with fear that some officer or the squad leader himself would see him, yell at him and make him go dig another hole right on the crest of the hill.

Now exhaustion returned. He had used up what little energy a brief night's sleep had restored to his body. It felt as though all his muscles had stretched beyond shape and now were incapable of returning to their original state.

And the ground was getting rockier the deeper he went. He had to pry out small boulders and lift them up, teeth gritted, back aching and stiff.

What am I doing here? he wondered once. Like a fool in a place I've never been, digging a damn hole in the ground.

But it was his other mind. He couldn't think of it consciously. He kept digging like a dull-eyed robot, held in a vise of agonizing necessity.

When he'd finally finished, he lowered himself and all his equipment down into the cold trench. There he sank back against one muddy wall and stared at the muddy wall facing it.

Now.

There was nothing, absolutely nothing to do. But wait. He remained motionless, half sitting, half lying, his body throbbing with an exhaustion he could never abate, he thought. There wasn't that much rest left in a lifetime.

In a little while the shelling started again and grew intense. He fell down and stared at the mucky brown earth and listened to the whine and crash of the shells. And he was sure that he would be there forever, crouching in a hole.

"Eighty-eights," he heard someone say in the lull between shells. It was the man with the thick glasses and he sounded very smug and very self-important. Erick pressed his lips together and called the man a bastard.

Then he closed his eyes and tried very hard to forget where he was.

* * * *

Night came and there was no food.

It began to rain. A cold, drenching rain that poured over him mercilessly. He had nothing to cover himself with but his raincoat. He put his head under it and as much of his body as he could. He curled up into a muddy ball of wool and flesh.

But he couldn't get his feet under the raincoat. His shoes stuck out in the cold rain and it ran over them, re-soaking the leather, making his feet icy, then numb. After a while he could hardly feel them.

He slept a black exhausted sleep, without dreams.

Once in a while, for no seeming reason, he woke up with a start and rose up sitting to peer over the edge of the trench into blackness, hearing the tinny drumming of the rain on his helmet. Once he stood up and urinated over the edge of the trench. He stood wavering in the oceaned blackness, his eyes closed, feeling that it must be a dream. Then he buttoned up his pants and sat down in the mud again and pulled the raincoat over his head.

There was no sound but that of the rain. It hid all else behind its rushing curtain. For all the world he might have been alone in Germany, in the night and the drenching rain. He might have been a corpse who had just dug his own grave and was sitting in it waiting for the command to lie back and sleep so the rest of the men could throw down the mud over him as he had wrenched it up.

Then they could move on and leave him be.

* * * *

It was quiet and he heard someone crying.

He sat up quickly with a rustling of clothes. A puddle of rain held in his raincoat splashed down over his legs.

He looked around.

Two men were leading Old Bill away. He had slept all night in the cold rain bent over at the waist and now he couldn't straighten up. He looked like a little boy, hands clutched over his stomach as though he had eaten green apples. He was moaning and Erick saw big shiny tears dribbling down over his bearded cheeks.

He watched the two men and Old Bill until they disappeared. Then he glanced over at the squad leader.

"How are you?" asked the squad leader.

"All right," he said, surprised at the flat, dead sound of his own voice.

Then, after he stared mutely for a moment at the squad leader, he fell back against the wall of the hole again. He stared at rock and mud. He tried to wiggle his toes. At first he thought they were stiff and he couldn't move them. Then he realized that he was wiggling them all right but they were completely numb.

* * * *

"Hello Erick."

"John!"

"Can I sit in there with you?"

"You bet!" He drew up his legs and John stepped down into the hole. He sat down across from Erick.

The night had done something to him. His eyes were watery and circled with dark flesh. His face had lost its color. It was pasty hued and smudged with dirt, still covered with that thin fringe of curling whiskers.

"Where have you been?"

John leaned his rifle over one shoulder. "Gee, I don't know," he said shakily, "I've been everywhere. I'm so tired."

"Your rifle is all rusty."

"I know," John said quietly. Erick was sorry he'd said it. It seemed a ridiculous thing to speak of now. As if in atonement he held up his own rifle and said,

"Look at mine if you think yours is bad."

John nodded without changing expression. He looked doped.

"Didn't you sleep?" Erick asked.

"No. I've been delivering messages all night."

"God. That's awful John."

Silence a while. John stared exhaustedly at his drawn-up knees. Then he took off his glasses and held them in one inert hand. His eyes looked very weak. Erick thought—if he loses his glasses he'll be helpless.

"You know where we're going yet?"

John gestured wearily with his head. "Down that valley," he said.

"Did the captain say when they were going to bring up food?"

John shook his head. Then he reached into his overcoat pocket with a weary grunt and drew out a can of K ration cheese.

"Here," he said, "I got it last night."

"Swell!"

Erick took the can from John and opened it quickly. He looked up. "Can I have half of it?" he asked anxiously.

"Take it all," John said. Erick felt guilty. "No, you take some," he said. John shook his head. Erick held out a piece and John took it and looked at it as if it were something repulsive.

Erick paid no attention. He took a big bite of the cheese and chewed on it hungrily. It tasted good, creamy and tangy.

"Where'd you get this?" he asked mouth full of cheese. He took another bite.

"It belonged to Sergeant Jones."

Erick chewed noisily. "What'd he give it to you for?"

"He didn't," John said.

Erick's jaws stopped moving as he looked up.

"He's killed," John said.

"What?"

"An eighty-eight shell landed right in his trench."

Erick looked at the cheese gripped in his grimy hand.

"Oh," he said.

He didn't know what to say or feel. He wasn't sure whether he was sorry or not. He didn't know whether he should go on eating or whether he shouldn't.

Abruptly he remembered Sergeant Jones. He saw the man's face, remembered the exact sound of his voice. He remembered, once in England, when Sergeant Jones had taken the platoon for an exercise run around the countryside. When the men were out of breath Sergeant Jones laughed and told them to take it easy until they got their wind back. And while they all walked along slowly, he told dirty jokes and everybody laughed at them. And a little while later they all sang popular songs and the people leaned out their windows to watch as they marched past led by Sergeant Jones.

Now he was dead.

Erick tried to believe it. To understand it. Sergeant Jones. Dead. Not even dead in one piece.

That was when the cheese choked in his throat.

"How… did you…?" he started, holding up the cheese.

"The first sergeant gave it to me," John said, "He told me I was dumb if I didn't take it. He said there was nothing wrong with it."

"God," Erick muttered.

He put the cheese in his pocket. John gave him the other piece and he put that in his pocket too. They looked at each other.

"C-can you stay?" Erick asked.

"I don't know," John said, "The captain said he'd send for me when he needed me."

"Why don't you take a nap?" Erick suggested. He thought that maybe if John was asleep underneath his coat, nobody could find him and he could stay with him. He didn't want to be alone. The worst thing was being alone.

"I guess I will," John said quietly. He closed his eyes. He leaned his helmet against the side of the trench. He was asleep in a moment.

Erick sat looking into his face.

In repose it became once more the face of a boy. A dirty-faced boy placed by some strange and callous power in a place where even men could not survive.

He sat there a while. Then the first sergeant came over to the trench and stopped. He was walking from trench to trench finding out how the men were.

"How's it going, Linstrom?" he asked.

"All right."

"Who's that?"

Erick swallowed. "Foley," he said, reluctantly.

"He all right?"

"He's tired."

"We all are."

"Say, sarge, you don't happen to know where I could get some medicinal jelly, do you?" Erick asked then, knowing before he finished it that it was a silly question.

"What for?" the sergeant asked.

Erick held up his hands. They were caked over with hard mud. The skin was cracking and blood oozed out.

"If I could get some jelly," he went on, "Maybe I could soften them up. I tried to get it off with a bayonet but I couldn't."

The first sergeant shook his head. "I haven't got any, Linstrom," he said. Then he took a paper out of his pocket. "Here," he said, "A copy of Stars and Stripes."

Erick took it. "Thanks."

"Take it easy," said the sergeant and left. Erick watched him trudge over the crest of the hill. He wondered if the sergeant thought he was a cry baby for asking if he had any medicinal jelly.

No, why should he? he defended, Christ, look at my hands. They do need something.

He glanced at John. John hadn't stirred once. Erick leaned over to where John slept exhaustedly against the barrel of his rifle. He made sure the safety catch was on. Then he sat back and opened the paper.

When John woke up, Erick said, "Good news John."

"What?"

"Here's a story in the Stars and Stripes where a congressman promises that no eighteen-year olds will be sent overseas."

"I'm eighteen," John said sleepily, half conscious of what Erick was saying.

"Well, then," Erick said, "Aren't you glad you're not going to be sent overseas?"

John looked blank. Then he rubbed a hand over his cheek and smiled weakly.

"I'm glad," he said.

* * * *

The day was an endless grey passage of sky and earth and time blending together into one dull flat pattern. Everything was bare and dead. They sat in the hole and shivered once in a while from the cold wind that was blowing over the ground.

During the afternoon Erick took off his soggy shoes and socks and looked at his feet.

"Good God," he said.

"They're all white," John said.

They looked like the bellies of dead fish. They looked as if the flesh could be scraped away with the nails. He poked a finger into them gingerly. He couldn't feel them. He wrapped his hands around them and tried to press back warmth. It didn't work. He rubbed them. He could feel a prickling sensation in his insteps and into his ankles. But nothing in the feet themselves. The felt dead, numb, as if they had been cut off from his system and then carelessly glued back into place.

He took a candle from his combat pack, lit it and held it under one of his feet.

"Don't, you'll burn yourself," John said.

Erick grimaced and stared incredulously at his feet.

"I can't feel them John," he said, "I can't feel the flame. I can't feel it at all."

In a rush of outraged horror, he felt tempted to press the flame against his feet until he did feel it, even if it had to be the feet going up in flames. Then, quickly, with a shudder, he blew out the flame and shoved the candle back into his jacket.

He rubbed his feet a little more but nothing happened. He took out a pair of dry socks and put them on. Ten minutes after he put on his shoes, the socks were damp.

"How are your feet?" he asked John.

"They feel all right."

Erick didn't answer. But a look of dissatisfaction crossed his face. If he was a friend, his mind conceived the perverse notion, then he'd get his feet frozen too just to keep a pal company.

He closed his eyes and repelled the notion. In a little while.

* * * *

Hours and hours passing.

"Let's build a house," he said to John.

"How?"

Erick climbed out of the trench with a crackling of stiff bones. He straightened up with a groan and stamped his feet on the ground without feeling the impact except in his ankles and legs.

"Come on John," he said.

John got out of the hole. Erick walked over to the squad leader's trench. It was empty. He saw the sergeant's pack in the hole and took a pair of wire cutters from it.

"Let's go," he said and started down the hill toward a length of barbed wire.

"What if there's snipers?" John asked.

"There aren't any around here," Erick said, "Come on. We need a roof on the damn hole. If it rains again we'll both end up with pneumonia. We'll just put those logs over the top and stretch your blanket over them. Then we'll have ourselves a house."

"I don't think we…"

"Come on, John. What are you afraid of?"

John didn't answer but Erick thought of Sergeant Jones suddenly. He didn't say anymore. He just kept walking down the hill. If John didn't want to come, he didn't have to. He was going to get those logs. He glanced back once and saw John edging down the hill, looking around worriedly.

Erick reached the barbed wire. The thought of anyone taking a shot at him seemed absurd. It was a cold winter's day and he was out to get logs that was all. No one had ever shot at him in his life. Why should it start now?

He began to cut the wire at the log edge. It was brittle. The sound of it breaking was a sharp snap in the cold air. He went down the log, now crouching, putting the cutters over the wire and snapping the handles together.

Ping!—went the wire in the cold.

He was conscious of John a few paces from him. John wasn't standing still. He was moving about slightly as though presenting an imperfect target to some sniper in a tree.

"We'd better hurry," John said.

Erick said, "Take this log." John took the narrow log.

"Hey!"

They heard a call from up the hill. Erick turned and saw the squad leader outlined against the sky at the crest of the hill. What a target, he thought, the jerk.

"Get the hell up here!" roared the sergeant.

Erick's hands twitched. "He would come back now," he said, trying to sound unconcerned, "Cheap shit."

He snapped off the last wire on the second log and lifted it up from the ground. "Never mind that!" yelled the sergeant. John and he started up the hill carrying the logs.

"We should leave them," John said quietly.

"No!" whispered Erick, angrily.

As they came up to the sergeant he grabbed the log from Erick's hand and threw it down on the ground. It rolled a little way down the hill.

"Where do you think you are, on a picnic!" he snapped.

Erick felt himself flushing. "Getting some logs for the hole," he said his heart beating quickly.

"Jesus Christ!" moaned the sergeant, "Ain't there enough ways to get killed around here?"

Aren't there, amended Erick in his mind. "It's cold," he said. He didn't know why he said it. But he felt he had to have the feeling of resistance even if it was only token.

The sergeant gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. Then, abruptly, he threw an angry thumb over his shoulder and commanded, "Get the hell back in your trench and stay there!"

"Why can't I have the log?" asked Erick, "I risked my…"

"Did you hear me?" The sergeant's cheeks quivered with anger. His voice was taut.

Erick turned away sullenly and walked heavily back to the trench. John put down the log by the hole and they climbed down. Erick sat there in angry silence, trying to pretend he didn't notice the sergeant watching him and muttering highly audible curses at his stupidity. His fists clenched into blood-drained lumps of flesh.

"Bastard," he muttered, "Stupid bastard." John didn't speak.

When the sergeant went away, Erick got up from the hole resolutely and went down the hill to get the other log. He brought it back. John didn't say anything. He helped Erick put the two logs over the hole and then they put John's blanket over them. They climbed down into the dark hut that smelled of cold wet earth.

"This is better," Erick said, trying to sound unconcerned although his hands shook and his stomach felt strange and queasy.

"We shouldn't have gone down there I guess," John said.

"Why not? Nothing happened, did it?"

"No, but…"

"Shit," he said, "He's a fathead."

"Foley," came a voice outside. Erick jumped suddenly and his helmet clanked against the logs.

John drew back the blanket at his end.

It was the squad leader again. Erick slumped down painfully at the sound of his voice.

"Go draw some rations from the lieutenant's trench," he said.

"All right," said John. He climbed out of the trench and started off. Erick waited. Then he pulled back the blanket and saw the squad leader looking down coldly at him.

"What about me?" he said, half afraid.

The sergeant didn't speak. Then he turned toward John who had stopped when he saw Erick wasn't walking with him.

"Get Linstrom's," the sergeant told him. John nodded and turned away. Erick looked down glumly as the sergeant turned back.

"Got the log, didn't you?" he said.

Erick swallowed. "Yes," he said, his voice faint.

The squad leader stared at Erick until he grew nervous. Finally, he said,

"Wait'll they send up replacement before you kill yourself off, will you?"

Erick's throat contracted. He turned away. "Very funny," he said faintly.

"What did you say?"

"Nothing."

"What!"

"Nothing!"

"You better not. You better watch your step boy. You're gonna get killed off right quick!"

Erick closed his eyes and shuddered in rage. It ran through him like a shaking muscle contraction, making him feel tight and sick. He stayed that way until the sergeant went back to his trench. He had to dig right behind him, he thought. Then hoped there'd be an attack so he got a chance to shoot the sergeant. You poor fools, he thought, who think that fear outranks respect.

In the silence he sat staring at the ground. He didn't pull the blanket over his head. He took out his bayonet and started to scrape at the mud on the backs of his hands. He scraped angrily as if the hands offended him.

When he'd scraped them so hard that the backs of his hands began to ooze blood, he began spitting on the skin to soften the mud.

When that didn't work, he laboriously unscrewed the cap of his canteen and poured water on the backs of his hands, one by one, and kept on scraping.

Abruptly, he stopped. To hell with it! he thought, the back of his head thudding against the foxhole wall. Pulling the blanket over his head, he let his eyelids fall.

He sank into a restless doze, neither sleeping nor awake. Would he ever be able to move again? he wondered. He felt as if he couldn't rise to save his life. His blood flowed sluggishly and his limbs felt as though they had melted one by one. His eyes wouldn't open. Every time he tried, the accumulation of crust would pull them shut or the complete weariness would drag him down again. It was like being swallowed by a patient snake. He felt, half consciously, that he could spend the rest of his life in the hole.

* * * *

The blanket was thrown back. He felt a breeze on his face and tried to open his eyes.

"Moving out," said the squad leader in a flat voice tossing the blanket over the log.

"What?" he muttered drowsily. But the sergeant was gone. His words clung like glue to Erick's mind and repeated themselves. Moving out.

It hit him slowly. Suddenly then a complete rage jerked up his arm and he drove his fist into the ground, ignoring the flaring pain.

"Shit!" he snapped, "God damn it!" His mind kept looking for the right curse words to express his rage.

"What is it?" John asked in the dimness.

"We're moving out," Erick said slowly, bitterly as though angry with John. "How do you like that? Just when we get this place comfortable they… oh Jesus! It's a plot. By Christ, it's a plot!."

John sat up with a rustle of clothing and Erick saw his weary, drawn face as he drew back the blanket at his end of the trench.

"Here we go again," John said.

Erick had the feeling he got so often. A desire to throw it all off, to end it all, to throw up his hands and say—the hell with everything! The feeling that Lynn caught so perfectly years and years later when he cried—Stop the world, I'm getting off!

"Oh… to hell with the army," he said, "To hell with it." He started to jerk together his equipment.

"Anyway," John said, "They didn't call me back."

"Yeah," Erick said, disinterestedly. He threw C ration cans, mess kit, into the pack. He slid the disassembled pick into its holder. He grabbed his rifle. He sneered at it.

"Jesus, look at this thing!"

He looked at it with hate. "Go ahead," he said fiercely, "Fall apart! See if I give a good shit!"

He pulled himself up and stood swaying in the trench, his limbs cracking, feeling stiff and aching. "Oh!" he moaned as he climbed out with the jerky, attenuated motions of an old man. "I'm so happy," he muttered.

John came out and they threw the packs over their shoulders, loaded up with all their equipment. It seemed incredibly heavy to Erick. He began to wonder if something had drained him of strength during the night, then shoved it away, too tired for whimsy. "Get out o' here, will ya?" he muttered to himself.

As they trudged along the crest of the hill, he limped and grimaced at the feeling of deadness in his feet. "Oh Christ," he muttered, "They feel like wood."

Half consciously he wished he'd stop cursing. It didn't seem right. Death was still around. He might need to call suddenly on his convenient aegis. But the child in him was angry, it wanted to violate trusts, burn spiritual bridges behind him. He wanted to outrage everything because he had been outraged.

"Want me to carry your bazooka?" John asked.

Wordlessly, Erick slung it over. He moved forward, shoulders slumped, breaths exhuding wearily from his lungs. He wondered if he could ask John to take the bazooka shells too.

They walked about a mile to the left of their original position. Erick making noises of exhaustion all the way and twisting his shoulders irritably. "Jesus," he said three times, "What do they think we are, animals?"

Finally they stopped. Another deserted plain, with night creeping over it, looking for a place to rest.

"Dig in!" called out non-coms.

"Oh no!"

He said it over and over, shaking his head as if someone had asked him for a loan of a thousand dollars and he was a pauper.

"I'm not digging myself another goddamn hole! Not on your fucking life! Blow me to shit! Who cares?"

He flung down his equipment and slumped into a sitting position on the ground. He closed his eyes and shook his head dizzily. "Oh, God, I'm beat," he groaned.

John carefully took off his pack and began to dig.

"What the hell are you doing?" Erick asked, feeling guilty.

John looked at him. His voice was so patient it nearly made Erick scream with rage.

"We have to dig one," John said, "What if they start to shell us again?"

Erick didn't answer. He shook his head. "You're a ball breaker, John," he said and sat watching John spade out the dirt in slow, weary motions.

Then, after innumerable head shakings and mutterings he reached out with a loud groan and jerked the pick from its holder. He held himself tight for a moment, eyes slitted, face bitter and murderous.

"Oh. God. Damn." he said loudly and clearly for all the heavens to hear.

Then, pushing down onto one knee, he drove the pick savagely into the earth.

"This is the sergeant's head," he snarled, "Here you are, sarge, have another one!"

He tore up the jagged chunks of earth and flung them aside.

"Walk, walk, walk," he chanted furiously under his breath, "Dig, dig, dig, Sit, sit, sit, Walk, walk, walk, Dig, dig… Shit!"

John didn't speak. He dug slowly and ceaselessly, his face stolid, unutterably tired.

"God Bless America," snarled Erick, flinging a rock across the rilled ground.

When they were about two feet down, Erick sank the point of his pickaxe into the cold earth and left it there.

"I quit," he said, "I'm damned if I'll dig another goddamn inch."

John looked up from his work, his thin chest laboring. His brow was covered with a dew of perspiration. He blinked tiredly behind his glasses.

"Shouldn't it be a little deeper?" he asked, "They said…"

"Oh, come on, John!" Erick said irritably, "Where do you want to dig, to China?"

John put down his shovel with a sign. "All right," he said, "I'm too tired."

They crawled down into the trench and slumped back against opposite walls, knees touching, the tops of their helmets just below the surface of the ground.

"Jesus, am I tired," Erick complained.

"I am too," John said.

Erick slid his hands in to his jacket pockets. He felt something soft and dry and drew out the pieces of cheese. He offered them to John but John shook his head. So he flung them away, getting the odd sensation that he was throwing away pieces of Sergeant Jones. He didn't look that way anymore because he could see the pieces lying on the ground, whitish and still.

Darkness crept over them soon and covered their heads.

They didn't bother eating anything. They went to sleep immediately, motionless in their exhaustion. Only once in the night did Erick wake up. Then he didn't even bother looking around. He reached around with a grunt and took his canteen from its canvas holder. He held the icy metal in his hands and took a sip of the freezing, chlorinated water. Then he slid the canteen back and went to sleep again.

* * * *

He woke up to the sound of machine gun fire.

He saw John start up and then sink down again, his face white and afraid.

Looking up, Erick saw bright streams of tracer bullets skimming over the ground. They were down so low he could have reached up his hand and touched them.

"I almost got up," John said nervously.

"Good thing you didn't."

John swallowed, "You said it."

Then, after a few moments, John said, "Do you think they'll attack?"

"How should I know?" Erick said.

"If they attack, what will we do?"

"Run like hell," Erick said, then, "I don't know John."

"You can't run, can you?"

"I didn't mean we'd run. Who'd let us run, anyway?"

"No, I mean, if they have… tanks."

"Oh," he said, feeling a tremor in his stomach as he visualized the great monsters rumbling over the field at him.

"You can't run, can you?" John said.

He shook his head. "No."

"You're a… a pretty good shot, aren't you?" John asked. He seemed to be trying to make a plan. Plan on something that was way over his head.

"Pretty good," Erick said.

"Well. If they have tanks, maybe… maybe I can run out and drop a grenade on one." He looked at Erick. "Huh?" he asked.

"I don't know."

John swallowed. "You could cover me," he said. The words sounded false as if he had been abysmally cast in the role of the alert soldier by some bungling producer.

"I suppose so," Erick said, feeling miscast himself.

"What about the bazooka?" John asked.

Erick looked at it. It was lying beside the trench. He reached up cautiously and drew it down.

"My God," he said.

"What?" John asked, worriedly.

"The sight broke off."

"Oh no," John said, "We… can't aim it then."

"It's no good," Erick said, pushing it away. Then he had a twinge of fear and looked at his rifle. He grimaced at the heavy rust on it. He checked to see if the clip was still in the chamber and if the hammer slid back and forth. Now he was sorry had hadn't cleaned it. What a fool, he thought to have let it go.

"Maybe we can use the shells," John said.

"What?"

"The shells."

"What shells?"

"The bazooka shells."

"What are we gonna do with them?"

John looked scared. "Throw them?" he half asked, half told.

Erick felt like laughing and crying at the same time. "You can't throw them John," he said.

John's throat moved and he looked up gingerly at the tracers still flying over their heads like a mass migration of lightning bugs.

"This is like the movies, isn't it?" he asked.

At first Erick almost snapped at John angrily. Then he sighed. "Yeah," he said.

"You think it's silly?" John said.

"Silly?"

"I mean… oh, I don't know."

"I don't either," Erick said.

"Well," John said, after a moment, "What else can we do? If there's tanks, you'll have to… cover me and I'll…"

"Hey," Erick said.

The machine guns had stopped abruptly.

The air was suddenly silent.

Someone screamed.

"Look out!"

A burst of shots rang out. Erick pushed up and looked over the plain, his heart hammering violently.

He saw men kneeling in other trenches, lying prone on the ground, pointing their rifles and firing toward the edge of the wood. He threw over his glance and almost lurched with shock.

A scattered flurry of German troopers were running from the woods, bayonets fastened to their rifle barrels.

"Germans!" muttered John, horrified.

Erick glanced at him hurriedly and saw how white John's face had become.

Then, before his mind could realize it, he found himself grabbing up his rifle with shaking fingers and trying to aim at one of the running men. He heard whining sounds over his head, heard something tear up dirt behind him. His mind was clicking, it seemed to be working by itself. Track him, track him, came an impatient voice in his head. He squinted through the sight and, as his iris contracted, an overcoated German moved into his line of vision, heavy-footed and awkward, plodding forward.

Something twitched in Erick. He pushed the barrel over, caught the German again, lost him. He gasped, more in tight irritation that fear. He didn't look anywhere else. The world had emptied itself of all people but himself and the attacking German.

He found his teeth clenched, breaths puffing from his dilated nostrils. Nobody could hit the German, all around his hurrying body puffs of dirty sprang up.

"Fools!" Erick snapped breathlessly.

He threw over the rifle again and aimed a little to the side of the running soldier. He pulled the trigger, felt the jolt against his shoulder.

Dirt sprang up at the German's boots. He stopped, jumped clumsily to the side, almost tripping himself. Erick almost flung the rifle over, feeling his arms tremble excitedly. He fired once, twice, missed. His breath caught. He almost choked.

Then his eyes grew wide, his lips drew back from his teeth in an animal snarl. He held himself like a rock and fired straight at the turning German.

Something hot burst in his body as he saw the soldier lurch forward, heaving away his rifle with a spasmodic movement.

"Got him!" he heard himself cry and was only alarmed for a moment by the hoarse, unnatural jubilance in his voice. He forgot about John. He forgot about everybody. He was alone and someone had allowed him to shoot at men like targets.

He looked around anxiously.

Sudden fear jolted in him as he saw a German trooper rushing at him not more than fifteen yards away. He couldn't see the man's face, it was a white blur. He heard John firing. Then he saw the German throw up his rifle and, in angry offense more than fear, he raised his rifle quickly.

Before he could aim, the German threw up his arms and flailed forward onto the ground.

"Damn!" Erick blurted out the word in a fury.

His gaze snapped around, looking for more Germans. His heart throbbed with locomotive violence in his chest. His body shook with expanding, almost sensual, excitement.

Now the Germans were retreating. Their machine guns were opening up from the woods again, yammering hot death over the plain.

Erick paid no attention. He was veiled in armor. He took careful aim at a retreating trooper, feeling fear that someone would kill the German before he could aim.

The German weaved. Erick followed him, a thin, assured smile mounting into shape on his blood-drained face. Almost casually, he aimed to the side.

The German seemed to run right into the slug.

He stopped dead in his tracks, then pitched forward on his face like a felled tree. Erick looked for more. He saw one, pulled the trigger, cursed viciously because his rifle was empty. He fumbled hurriedly for another clip in one of the bandoliers that hung like deadly necklaces around his neck, sagging over his chest.

He happened to look at John.

It made him stiffen.

John was leaning back against the earth wall, motionless, staring at him unbelievingly. John's rifle lay on the stiff rampart of the trench, deserted.

Erick tried to ignore the look but he couldn't. The eyes were digging all the way in. His fingers slipped on the cold clip and it bounced off his leg into the trench.

"What are you…?" he started to yell over the noise and then threw himself down as the rushing sounds began in the air again.

"No!" he shouted.

He still felt John's eyes on him. "I guess we should have dug in deeper," Erick said quickly. John said nothing. Saliva ran from a corner of his mouth. His chest moved slowly.

The morning was burst asunder by the explosions.

The Germans were sending over anti-aircraft shells that exploded in the air and hit men in their trenches. Hot shrapnel came down buzzing and buried itself into the earth around them.

Erick cringed down as far as possible, drawing himself together, turtlelike. At first there was rage, irritation.

Then fear crept back again. The brief elation fled. And the magic phrase that didn't seem so magic now filled his brain again. He felt it wasn't worth anything now, not after what he did. But he began to murmur it under his breath, afraid to look at John, suddenly afraid he could never look John in the face again. He didn't know why. He just felt a terrible shame.

The phrase didn't help at all. Nothing helped. His heart began to hammer against the walls of his chest. His body started to shake, his breath catching, tearing loose from his throat in quick, choking bursts. His fingers trembled, he had to clutch at his ankles to give his fingers something to brace themselves on. He forgot everyone and everything but himself then—crouching there with death whizzing around him in fiery, metal chunks.

Something skidded off his helmet with a scraping shriek and he caught his breath suddenly. He felt his body shivering without control. He couldn't swallow the rising saliva in his mouth. Some of it drooled out a corner of his mouth. His chattering teeth slipped and he bit open a segment of his lower lip.

"We should have dug…" he started and was drowned out by the rush and burst of shells. He felt John's knees pressed against his and their shoes touching. It helped for a moment, in a lull. He started to straighten up. The shelling started again.

It seemed endless. Longer than any other time.

The explosions were deafening. His ears rang and his head began to ache dully, feeling as if it were expanding and contracting violently. He kept his eyes closed, his face pressed down with his chin digging into his chest. Where the hell is our artillery, he thought once belligerently, then lost everything except the phrase and the half-conscious shame he felt but could not understand.

* * * *

Only when the shelling had lifted completely did he catch his breath and lift his head saying, as if to clear the air,

"Jesus, let's dig this hole a little…"

Later they found him still in the same position, sitting in his own excretion and staring fixedly at his friend John Foley whose pitiful eyes were looking at him and whose helmet and head had been cut in half.

15

The church bells rang eleven thirty.

A train rushed into the station sounding like a gale of wind, then like the cries from a slaughter house. Horns still blew in the street. Motors vibrated and hummed. Lights flickered on the ceiling and on the walls. Shadow and substance, he thought. The shadow of night and the substance of me.

If he didn't try to squirm it was all right. If he lay still the soaking heaviness did not overcome him with nausea. The smell was easing too. Either that or his sense of smell was adapting to it. He was acclimated. And in this, his other mind commented, we see the salvation of the garbageman.

It was about over.

He couldn't imagine what made him decide it. It just came as an appropriate acceptance. It was over for him. He'd eaten nothing and drunk nothing since early the night before, Tuesday. Now he was purged of the food and the water in him was being blotted up by the dry pawing hands of the room. Nothing more could happen to him.

Except death.

How strange it was that the concept which men most struggled against proved the easiest to accept at last. It was probably, he thought, because all the work of acceptance was done inside the brain where a man has shoved down all traces of these unacceptable concepts. Then when he allowed the slightest consciousness to return to the subject, he realized suddenly that the work of accepting was finished beneath and he could accept, consciously now. So that the greater the problem, the more inside work was done on the job of acclimation and, thus, the easier is the acceptance of it the second time around.

And the greatest of these was death.

He could accept it.

It was so dark, so lonely and deserted in his room that he felt wholly amenable to accepting it. It did not seem out of place here in the dense, pitiless ebony of night. Living was the unnatural thing. He was bound to a pendulum that swung in an arc between life and death. And it had caught fast to the walls on the darker side. It was a long, frightening swing back to life. Long for his body and longer for his mind. All desire to leave town, to get up and wash and leave the room had disappeared. The battle had been too great. He was giving it up now, not with petulance or throbbing rage, but calmly, with a modicum of dramatics.

He was simply going to die.

He believed it preferable to living. He didn't realize at all that it was the darkness and the weakness of a hunger and thirst impaired body that made him feel as he did. He was weak and dizzy and the bed seemed to drift below him, rocking idly in some infinite swell. He believed that he had made the struggle the token effort to retain his hold on living.

And that now it was time to surrender.

Yet he was very much alive. He could not refute that. I am alive, he thought. Then—Am I alive?—he thought with equal emphasis.

He had to think about it for a moment but he could come to no other conclusion that that he was alive. I think, therefore I am, the words came into his mind while the second, baser portion chuckled out an abbreviated chorus of—Cockles and Mussels, Alive, Alive O!

I'm going to sleep now, he made up his mind. But there are a few things I must do before I die. Leo maybe, not likely, that was a memory he preferred to leave behind.

But Sally. I must remember Sally and everything we did. That was too good a part of life. Maybe it was the only nice thing that ever happened to him. He would not let himself die before he recalled those days.

I'll wake up at five, he told himself. At five o'clock sharp my eyes will open and I'll complete my recollections. Not now, I'm sleepy. At five. Then when I'm finished I'll be ready to…

He half wondered then if that was a concession to life.

If death was so imminent and acceptable why didn't he recall Sally now and be ready to die within a few hours? Instead of trying, almost ordering himself to live through the night. Wasn't that a rationalization and a clumsy one at that?

He closed his eyes.

Am I lying to myself? he wondered. At first it seemed almost an outrageous question to ask himself in the face of his seemingly calm and detached preparation for the end. It was the sort of question his inner alien mind would ask just to displease him.

But it stayed there, stuck fast to the walls of his attention.

He had to acknowledge it. And he thought himself very cool and wise to take a look at it without quailing.

He asked himself if he really knew what he was thinking about. He suggested to himself that life was not such an easy thing to let go of. And his second self hinted at coming pains to make the past ones seem like child's play. It told him that, even unaided by the will to live, the body clung tenaciously to the breath and motion that birth had shaken into it.

He ignored it then. It was the only thing to do. Trial and error, he decided. We'll see. What had he to lose? If he lived, he lived and would leave. If he died… okay.

He pretended not to see how ridiculous the thought was. Five o'clock, he left a studied call with his subconscious and went to sleep.

16

In his dream he couldn't stop moving.

He bounced on the soles of his feet.

He ran around.

He did an excited gypsy dance.

He jumped up and down.

He was chuckling and laughing and singing. God, I can't stop myself, he said. Wow! Am I full of pep! It was delightful as he jumped down the staircase. He jumped—way out! into the air and flew down, over the whole flight at one time. And hardly a bump at the landing.

Boom!

He scared the cat and it went scrabbling down the hall as if pursued by pussycat demons. But you live on the fourth floor, he analyzed, you live on the fourth floor with the old lady who has blue varicose veins in her legs but I jumped down a flight and if I jumped down to the fourth floor I must have come from the fifth floor but there isn't any fifth floor…

No matter!

He kept running around the landings and leaping down the stairs, running and leaping. His muscles felt like steel, his feet like rubber and there were springs in his shoes.

He felt wonderful!

After a while he thought it was time he reached the bottom of the stairs and he did. He ran out into the street in his sneakers and spun around the corner and rushed into the daytime. People were all rushing around. God they all have the bug, he thought, they're all full of everloving pep!

He kept bumping into people and they laughed and laughed—it was such fun!

He thought he bumped into John. He kept trying to turn the young boy around but the boy kept turning away, his shoulders shaking with giggles. Come on John, if that's you! he snapped, still laughing, now perturbed, then laughing again. He turned the girl toward him and she smiled at him and he said Gee, I thought you were someone I knew but she said No, I'm not someone you know but you can have it anyway and he pulled off her dress and she wrapped her arms around his neck and her lips were hot under his and she writhed and it was raining.

He noticed it. He didn't have anything on under his overcoat and he didn't have on his hat. It's on the chair, he thought. It rained harder and harder. He heard it drumming on the tin roof it was his helmet. He sat up in the hole and opened his mouth. God this is silly he said this is silly because I have a canteen full of water. Why should I bother drinking the rain? He felt it soak into his body.

He drank it and drank it. He opened up his coat and he was on Third Avenue and naked. He laughed as the people watched him and he shouted to them—what the hell are you staring for? I'm not a man, I'm a plant. He spread his legs and threw up his arms and threw off the coat completely and the water bubbled and spit on his body and ran in cool streams over him and his pores drank it in. He ran across the street.

He ran and ran. He held onto the rifle very tightly. I'll have to run like hell I want to get back to the squad before they move out. He kept running over the uneven ground. God I hope John has some food. He thought God am I hungry. Wait a minute, isn't he dead? But that was silly. Far off he saw a giant blowing on his soup. He sped around a corner and up the hill to the plain. He splashed through a bubbling stream and tripped and fell down in it, laughing and sputtering. He swallowed great mouthfuls of it, of the icy, rushing water and he laughed and laughed. Oh I'd better get out of here and move up before I get lost from the squad. He dropped down on one knee and shot three men as they attacked him. He jumped up. He ran and ran over the huge plain under a shadow and he said that's the shadow of the giant. So he thought he's eating his soup and I'll go across the street to the cafeteria and get some nice beef soup oh boy. He saw a rose in the gutter as he ran over it naked.

He saw another one. He saw roses all over the dark, wet street like blood drops. What in hell's the matter with the delivery men, he said to himself, grossly offended. Each rose was heavy with rain. He held the heavy, drooping bouquet of them against his face and the big drops ran over his cheeks and into his mouth. He spread open his arms and drank it all in. I'm a plant. Well I ought to get a haircut too because Leo doesn't like long hair but I find myself a nickel short. Ooh, I'm hungry. He pushed through the door into the food shop.

He sat down at the counter. He could smell bacon and eggs and hamburgers and frying potatoes. Ava Gardner came up to take his order.

What are you doing here?—he asked,—that's silly.

No, it isn't—she said—I'm going to play a waitress in my next picture and I have to do research.

Oh, yes, but why are you here wearing the blue nightgown?

I'm supposed to be wearing it in the picture. I'm a model who gets a job in a food shop.

Oh, I see.

You're hungry—she said.

This rose would look nice in your hair.

He put the rose in her dark, moist hair. She bent over to kiss him and the gown fell away from her arched breasts. You're so sweet—she said—but you mustn't do that, not in public. Well you sit against a red background in public—he said—do you realize that they hang you from Third Avenue stands and they call you the goddess of the poorer kingdoms of the mind?

Really! She was shocked. Yes, he said and not only that they call you the goddess of the poorer kingdoms of the I said that Can I order now?

Well that's a pretty kettle of fish—she said and he ordered fish and finished drinking down the fifth glass of water. My but you're thirsty, you all are—she said. You say you all but there's only one of me—he laughed and they kissed on it. Yes I am thirsty, he said, and I'd like some more. She ran a palm over his chin.

You're shaggy,—she said. That's what Leo says—he said. Why are you in that room when she's only two blocks away?—she said. I'd rather not say and if you don't mind I'd like some water for…

He heard her in the kitchen rattling dishes and utensils and pot covers.

Hey Leo,—he called,—when is it going to be ready.

Pretty soon—she said. He got up and made sure she was in the kitchen. Then he took the roses out of the vase and drank the water. He giggled and he said to himself—well, it's not exactly like water from a rushing stream but it's water. He lay down on the couch and started to take his pants off.

Leo came in. She was wearing a light brown silk blouse and a woolen skirt. She sat down by his side and helped him take off his pants. He jerked open the front of her blouse and it ripped. She held out her arms as he pulled it off her and threw it on the floor. I thought you wanted to eat—she said. I do—he said—I want to eat you. Cannibal—she said. He felt the exciting abrasiveness of the shaved hair in her armpits. He ran his hands over the warm flesh at her waist and felt down further. You have on your girdle—he said. Yes—she said—and you're shaggy. Would you rather I had peachfuzz—he said and she said—No. And he kissed her shoulder and her chest and caressed her soft, milky-white breasts. She ran her hands all over him hot and singing. You don't mind, do you?—she asked. No, the hell with it—he said—What do I care, all I want to do is lay you over and over. Oh darling, I love you so!—she said—I feel like a high school girl again. That's a load of shit—he said as he pulled off her clothes—but I won't tell you so.

They kept kissing. Her lips were hot and wet. He tried to drink the moisture. His stomach felt empty. The bed sprang beneath them, they were in the bedroom. She was underneath. Their bodies were sopping wet and clinging. You don't think Lynn is coming back do you?—she asked. That's funny—he said—you look like…

Oh Erick!

Hurry. Hurry. I'm hungry—he said—I'm thirsty.

17

While he slept motionless, in Readsville, Vermont, a graveyard lay flat and still on the edge of midnight, showing the teeth of its lettered stones to a bright moon. And in one corner of the graveyard there was a particular stone that read:

John Foley 1926-1944

Sleep Well, Brave Warrior.