The nurse smelled of alcohol and talcum as she bent over Jamie’s bag of blood. She put the bag on a smaller scales that she carried with her and said, “Not quite full. Pump a little more.” Jamie didn’t see how one set of scales knew more than another. She opened and closed her fist several times. “All . . . right,” the nurse said, and Jamie quit. The nurse removed Jamie’s tourniquet and adjusted stoppers and tubes. “You’re going to feel the saline solution coming into your arm now,” the nurse said. “That’s just to keep the vein open.” She clamped and cut the tube that led into the blood, and carried the bag away to another room, where the plasma would be removed somehow.
Jamie thought her blood looked like good earth, rich and full and wet. “Used to take goldfish home from the carnival in plastic bags like that,” she told the departing nurse, who didn’t hear. She began shivering all over as the cool saline mixed into her system.
The man on her left said, “Fuck goldfish. Fuck ’em.” He was a bearded old guy and he was shaking like a machine.
The man on her right said, “Did you know this? Frogs fuck goldfish. That’s true. No fooling, now.”
“Hey,” Jamie said. “I can’t use that talk. Be a gentleman, how about.”
“How about if I whip it out and piss on you?” the man said. “How’s that for a gentleman?”
Jamie didn’t say anything. She decided to stab him with her nail file later on, on the way out.
The bearded old man on her left said, “Don’t pay no attention to these guys.” He turned toward her onto his side, careful not to disturb the needle in his vein. “Most of them,” he said, “are just wooden people.” His face seemed to be rotting: away on him. His eyes were shiny as a blind man’s.
Jamie said nothing, but the man wanted to talk “Most of the people you see are just wooden men,” he told her, his voice quaking as if he’d cry in a minute. “They’re dead people, walking around like the living.”
“Yeah,” Jamie said. “I noticed that myself.”
“You have?” The man was excited. “Then you’re one of the living.” He licked his mouth convulsively. “There’s not too many of us. We haven’t got much time. Are you filled in on the whole story?”
“What whole story? Hey. You’re bothering me.”
“I’m not bothering you. I’m saving your life. Your life is the truth. Listen: The world was made in 1914. Before 1914 there was nothing. Eleven people are in charge of the world. They make up the news and the history books, they control everything you think you know. They wrote the Bible and all the other books. Most people are wooden people, controlled by remote control. There’s only a few of us who are real, and we’re getting fooled.”
“I can’t use this,” Jamie said. “I mean, I’m just here trying to get some lunch money.”
“The world is flat. It’s two hundred and fifty-six square miles in area, sixteen by sixteen. When you go someplace on a plane, what they do is, they just use their powers inside your mind to make you think like the time is passing To make you think you’re getting somewhere.”
The nurse came back wheeling a cart piled high with plastic sacks of blood. She read the label on Jamie’s and said, “Name please?”
“They do things inside your mind,” the man whispered to Jamie.
“My name is Jamie Mays,” she told the nurse.
The nurse showed her the name on the label—Jamie Mays— and Jamie nodded, and the old man whispered, “They’re putting new memories into us right now.”
The nurse hung the blood up next to the saline solution and adjusted the tubes and stoppers, and one tube turned bright crimson as it fed Jamie’s own blood, minus plasma, back into her. “New memories is what’s inside that bag,” the man announced calmly.
“Great,” Jamie said. “I was sick of the old ones.”
“In Malaya, I killed a little Chink. Supposedly Malaya. I broke his head apart,” the man said.
“Jesus Christ,” Jamie told the ceiling.
“There were machines inside his head,” the man said quietly.
“Everybody in this town—they’re all the same,” Jamie told the ceiling.
“That’s what I mean!”
“No—I mean—oh, forget it.”
“There was machine stuff inside his head. He wasn’t a real person.”
“Why don’t you quit? I can’t use that baloney right now.”
“Everywhere you go, it’s the same people. Don’t you see what’s happening to your life, woman?”
“Not exactly,” Jamie said.
“You’re going to see, all right. Something is happening to your life, and you’re going to see what it is.”
“I was afraid of that,” Jamie said.
“If you think you’re afraid now,” the man said.
2
Bill Houston’s elbows on the bar were numb. He couldn’t feel his mouth in his face. Respectfully he held his injured hand aloft, as if ready for some arm-wrestling. It was bandaged and sewn up like a teddy bear’s, but its throbbing was distant and nothing like pain. From the high place that was his head he looked down at the drink in front of him and saw that its ice was melted, a sign he was slowing down, because when he was drinking seriously he wasted no time and there was always plenty of ice banging around inside the glass when he was finished. “Hey—what is this place, anyways?” he asked the bartender. “What’s the name of this place?”
The bartender was very rapidly washing beer glasses two at a time, sticking them down into the suds and then into the rinse water, and then setting them in neat rows on a towel laid out by the sink. The bartender said, “Say what?”
“I says what is the name of this place?”
The bartender puffed a sigh upward, as if trying to blow his hair away from his eyes. But he was bald. “This bar has the electrifying name of Joe’s Bar,” he said.
“No—but what town is it, I mean to say. What town.”
“Don’t ask,” the bartender said. “You don’t want to know.”
“Fair enough. Okay,” Bill Houston said.
He watched the bartender wash glasses. He was always fascinated by small, deft movements of the hands and arms. His own arms were wrecked. His elbows made popping noises when he flexed them, and his fingers were blunt and misshapen. High living had worked some kind of bad influence on his nerves and caused his hands to quake and rattle when spooning sugar into coffee or raising a glass to his mouth. But he could lift the rear wheels of a V-8 Ford entirely off the ground. “I can’t feel my face,” he told the bartender. It took him a long time to say words.
“That’s the whole idea, isn’t it?”
“Can’t exactly feel the rest of my body, neither.”
“So? You complaining?”
Bill Houston knew that way of talking. “I’ll make you a bet,” he said. “Bet I can ask just one more question, and then I’ll know what town you got here.”
The bartender seemed to be ignoring him.
“Hey—does a bus stop out front there every now and then?”
“Well,” the bartender said, “it ain’t gonna come in here for you.”
Bill Houston guffawed, thumped the bar, pointed a triumphant finger at the bartender like the barrel of a gun: “Chicago!”
He was in the back of a spacious, empty establishment trying to woo a large woman named Gail Ann, for whom he was experiencing a tender fascination. They danced. Bill Houston was clumsy, and when they danced nearer the bowling game, he put in a quarter and began flinging the metal puck at the plastic pins hanging down from above the board. David Allan Coe sang on the jukebox as they traded glances across the width of the bowling game, alternately bold and shy glances. They sat at a small round table in the back, talking low, head-to-head. It was an orange table that made him think of things from outer space.
Now Hank Williams, Jr., began singing out of the jukebox like a swan, and Bill Houston’s heart grew large and embraced the universe. He wondered if the jukeboxes of all cafes and bar
rooms were owned by the Mafia, like they told you, and he wondered at all the juke-joints he’d walked into, marvelled at the number of them, saw every narrow dance floor stretched out end to end in a panorama not of what he’d traversed, but of what lay before him, as if it were his past he must start living now and not his future; and he asked Gail Ann, “Gail Ann, what time is it?” It was a question weighted with desperation, because he was seized suddenly with the idea there was not very much time. He grasped his drink more firmly. It was cold to the touch.
Gail Ann told him she didn’t have the slightest idea what time it was. She would get herself another beer maybe and find that out. She went in the direction of the bar, but walked right on past it to the coatrack, grabbed her coat, and strolled out the door into Chicago. The door had one of those vacuum devices on it that prevent slamming, and Bill Houston watched it shut quietly and slowly. He caught a glimpse of Gail Ann’s coat unfurling behind her as she threw it around her shoulders and the door closed. There was a wall-poster on this side of the door, an autographed picture of Frank Sinatra over the legend, “Old Blue-Eyes Is Back.” Bill Houston nodded goodbye to Frank Sinatra.
The wind was coming down from the North Pole, travelling across the flat of Canada for a thousand miles to slap him in the face as if he were a child. Wilson Street was covered with innumerable bits of trash that picked up and set down in flocks like paper birds feeding alongside the buildings. Bill Houston went, “Oooooooh!”—meaning to launch into a song, like a drunken sailor, but he faded off, forgetting what to sing. He wasn’t a sailor any more anyway. He was just a fool on the move, no less bitter than the wind. He was an ex-sailor, and an ex-offender—though he couldn’t, for the life of him, say who it was he had offended—and he was an ex-husband—three ex-husbands, actually—and he’d been parted from his money and from Jamie in Pittsburgh, spending like the sailor he no longer was, slapping Jamie’s little darling Miranda—who would almost certainly grow up to become a cheap sleaze—and spending fifty percent of their time together in an alcoholic blackout. Where had Chicago come from? It frightened him in his mind to wake up in unexpected towns with great holes in his recollection, particularly to understand that he’d been doing things, maybe committing things: his body mobilizing itself, perhaps changing his life all around, making raw deals he would someday have to pay the ticket for.
He rested with his back flat against a building, and had the sensation of lying down when he was standing up. The streets swung back and forth like a bell. No doubt about it, it was a dizzy life. Something was missing here. When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all—cash, booze, and a wife—he couldn’t be distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through him and never hit the ground. He should have gotten a damn job in Pittsburgh! He began to cry, each sob coming up slowly like something with a hook on it. Tears on his cheeks burned in the cold wind. Rolling his head from side to side against the bricks he hollered, “I wanna meet my responsibilities!” But in the commotion of city traffic it sounded like the tiniest thing he’d ever said, and he got going down the street.
Bill Houston was trying to draw near behind two women in overcoats carrying purses. His feet were a couple of burdens he yanked along because there was no discarding them. He wasn’t ready for this move, actually, but the energy would come to him when he was near enough: reach and get a fist around each purse-strap, hold tight and bust between the two of them like a couple of swinging doors, leaving them spinning on the sidewalk while he disappeared with their purses from their lives. He trawled along behind while the rush of fear dried his mouth and straightened his head. His legs and feet were coming to life.
He stood up straight, walking like a man again, taking in all the sights along Wilson. The street was all yellow in the artificial light. People were walking up and down it like a lot of fools. It was around nine-thirty, there was a chill in the air, the wind was gentle now, and he was moving inside it like the light of love, ringing without sound, giving himself up to every vibration, totally alive inside of a crime. The women turned down Clark and the song of the thief grew slow and mellow, beating like a bass viol now because the time and place were suddenly all wrong for a purse-snatch, and the real crime was not yet revealed.
He slowed with the rhythm of it all. The two women drifted farther ahead of him. He was relaxed, letting the whole thing happen, floating into a little hardware place crammed with everything necessary for the good life, including shelves of lumber. One man behind the counter—a young gentleman wearing an orange apron—dealing with one male purchaser and the purchaser’s two children, a boy and a girl who yanked on his arms and blew large pink bubbles out of their mouths. Bill Houston drifted along each of five aisles in turn. Gleaming pastel commode seats hung from the back wall. Plumbing accessories, assorted tools, screws, and nails, metal shelves, everything burning with an inner flame. From the back of one aisle he examined the clerk, messing him over with his eyes. Young. Disgusted. Pocket full of pens in his orange apron, sideburns, heavy-framed spectacles bespeaking sincerity. Hundreds of times, almost daily, he had lived this robbery in his mind, making all the right moves, playing the hero, beating the thief senseless and shrugging it all off as the police slammed the doors of the van. Bill Houston knew him like he knew himself. In this state of things Bill Houston claimed all the power.
The people left. Nobody else in the place. Everything was as solid as a diamond.
“Whatta you need tonight?” the kid called down the aisle.
“How much is this here?” Bill Houston held up a plumber’s helper.
The kid was disgusted. “I got ten thousand a dese items in here,” he said. “You think I got every price memorized?” He came around the counter and walked down the aisle.
Bill Houston moved to meet him halfway, his finger jamming up his coat pocket. The kid looked surprised a second, and Bill Houston grabbed him by the throat with his free hand, sticking the pocket-finger into the kid’s crotch, slamming him up against the shelves. “You motherfucker!” Bill told him. “You piss-ant kike! You’re a dead motherfucker! You’ve lived the slimiest fucking life you could live and now it’s over!” He could feel each hair and pore of himself as he spoke. Every tiny thing in the place cried out with the fire of God.
The clerk had no words on this occasion. He was going limp, so Bill Houston drew out his bandaged and swollen gun-hand and slapped him a couple of times. He turned the clerk around and kicked his butt down the aisle to the cash register. “Get the fuck around there you dead motherfucker! I want every dollar you can get your hands on and I want it now! Not later. You understand, dead man?”
The kid whipped open the cash register and started laying out the contents rapidly. He was all white, and his lips were turning purple. “Go! Go! Go! I’m clocking your ass!” Bill Houston watched him move. Time to shift gears. “You’re doing fine,” Houston told him softly. “You’re gonna live through this. You’re doing just like I tell you, you’re saving your life, we’re gonna get you through this alive. One pile for the bills, that’s right, now a bag for the change. Double-bag it. Good strong bag. Good boy, good boy, good boy.”
The clerk was doing all right, but he dropped the bags trying to get one inside the other, and had to stoop down to pick one up. Bill grabbed him by the hair and yanked him to his feet. “Move! Do like I tell you! You’re dying!” The kid got a grip and did correctly with the two bags. He poured the change into them and as if in a trance picked up his stapler, folded the bags, and fastened them shut with two staples: snap, snap. Bill Houston loved it. He put the bills in his pocket:, grabbed the kid’s apron front, and threw him onto the floor. “I want you to pray,” he said softly. “Pray for your life. Pray for a long time. Pray I don’t come back.” On the floor, beside the counter, the kid looked a little confused. “Pray.” The kid took his glasses off, and looked at them. “Put your ha
nds together and pray,” Bill told him. The kid put his hands together, holding his glasses between them. “Pray loud, so I can hear you.”
“Our Father, Who art in Heaven,” the kid whispered.
“Louder,” Bill Houston said, stepping out the door.
He could hear the clerk saying, “Our Father, Who art in Heaven, oh, Jesus Christ, oh, Jesus Christ,” as he headed rapidly up Clark.
Ten PM, and the town of Chicago was shining. He moved up Wilson and into the El station, paid his fare and was up on the platform at the best possible moment, ducking into a train one second before the doors shut.
The lives of strangers lashed out at him through their windows as the train sailed down to the Loop. He witnessed their checkered tablecloths and the backs of their heads and the images moving on their television screens like things trapped under ice. The train was warm, the light was right.
He realized that he was the greatest thief of all time.
The knowledge seemed to rise unendurably and then break inside of him, and he sat by the train’s window inhabiting a calm open space in the night. He sat still while his heart slowed down, moving where the train moved, listening to it talk to the tracks, feeling all right, letting the love pour through him over the world.
He opened his eyes.
He was lying on his back, his bandaged left hand resting carefully on his chest, the right one wrapped around the neck of a bottle of gin. He didn’t need a map or a clock to tell him he was in the wrong place at the wrong time again. It was three AM, and he was now a resident of the senselessly named Dunes Hotel on Diversy, floor number three. When he sat up and put his feet on the cold floor, the darkness seemed to rush up suddenly against his face and stop there, palpitating rapidly like the wings of a moth. He went over by the window and sat in the wooden chair and took a look out into the street, putting the bottle’s mouth to his lips and letting the gin touch his tongue, overcome by an acute sensitivity to everything. The few colors visible on the street seemed to burn. He could feel even the ridges of his fingerprints on the lukewarm bottle. The street out there was a mess of things—trash and rust and grease—all holding still for a minute. In his mind he was wordless, knowing what the street was and who he was, the man with the fingerprints looking out at the street, one bare foot resting on a shoe and the other flat on the chilly linoleum, a drunk and deluded man without a chance. It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he’d reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he’d never be able to guess what it was. He found a cigaret and struck a match—for a moment there was nothing before him but the flame. When he shook it out and the world came back, it was the same place again where all his decisions had been made a long time ago.