I met Leo tonight and she told me.
It is two things. It is possibility and impossibility. I can believe it and accept it. I cannot believe it and cannot accept it. It is all so irrevocably bound up with memories, with half-recognized hopes. With long disappointment.
I love Sally.
I have no right to say it now. Not when it’s too late. No use trying to capture that magic. It was a particular brand that is not repeated.
Too late. That’s my trouble. I say things too late. I hope for something to happen. I lie awake at night and dream of possibilities. But never a concrete move do I make. Never a forward step do I make. I wait and dream. And then the bubble is burst and I am thrown down on rocks.
That is me.
I love her. I have loved her for some time now. Why didn’t I tell her that? Why didn’t I ask her to wait for me? To come to New York and be with me? Why didn’t I tell her I wanted to share my life with her and hers with mine. Why?
God only knows.
Hidden childish hopes for better things when, rationally, I knew there was nothing better than her, there is nothing.
I know I shall never find another woman in my life that will mean as much to me as Sally. Not because it is her, not just because of that. But because all the ties that bind us were of a non-weakening nature. She is always and always will be associated with the period of fruitage in my life, with the period when I first began to write and was successful with it. A time of rich fulfillment, not found since.
Because when I think of happiness I think of Sally.
I never knew one like her. Never. I don’t ever expect to find another like her. She could make me feel delight. She could make me feel happy and at ease. I liked being with her. I enjoyed her. I liked her. Love was long in coming but when it came it was no suspicious burst of juvenile fire. It was a growing realization that for a long time I had become increasingly fond of her and a further realization that I didn’t want to face life without her.
Then why? Why?
Why didn’t I tell her? Why didn’t I write, telegraph, phone and say—Sally I love you. I know I have no right to say it now. It’s too late. I’m sorry I’m such a fool. But I love you. Will you come to me and will you hope and work with me and will you let me share my poor life with you? Will you be my wife?
I never said it.
And I can never do it now. It is too late. Much too late. I am desolate to think that I shall never hold her in my arms and never have the warm, pervading comfort of her presence. To sleep with her. To have those warm arms around me. To feel that warm comforting body against mine. To talk to her in the darkness. To make love to her. To feel her love in the very nerves of my body.
Oh God, how powerful a love she had.
Well, what’s that to the matter? I’m lost, done for. I’ve not a chance of having her now. I surrendered. I gave up. I was a fool that didn’t know a miracle when it was in my own hands. I was cruel and stupid.
And, if I’m unhappy without her, if I’m ready to cry because I’ve lost the only girl I ever loved—then I deserve it! I deserve each moment of misery richly. I have been owed these moments of sorrow. First a consuming sickness came and now this mental agony that threatens never to end.
I deserve them.
I have forestalled them too long. They came before but not without a ray of hope. Hope. For my own possibilities. Blind hope that something would happen. Without me even lifting a finger. Providence. Fate. Good fortune. That’s what it amounted to. I’m a supernaturalist hoping for unnatural intervention, always unwilling to help it along myself. How stupid I am and always have been!
Well it’s over. I can’t have her. And now I shall never marry. I want too much, expect too much. In this day and age, my desires are mountainous. I expect another girl to be as sweet as Sally was … is. Is such a thing possible. No.
I hope she will be happy. I hope she will be brilliantly happy. I hope she has a fine home and beautiful children and I hope she is always at peace. I want that for her. At least I can send my love to her in that respect. I will not envy. I will not be jealous or hate because some other man has been intelligent enough to see her worth and marry her.
No. I wish her every happiness. I hope she will always receive everything and every goodness that she deserves. I love her.
Blood of my blood. Heart mine. I send my love to you. You will never know it. But my heart is with you. And always will be.
My Sally.
* * * *
Later that night, lying on his bed half asleep, he sat up suddenly and thought about Sally.
“Married huh?” he muttered dizzily, “Fuck the bitch then!”
And he fell back onto the pillow and wished he had her throat in his white shaking hands.
The next day he got sick. And he was sick for two weeks.
15
There was a crackling in his ears as he watched shadows maneuver on the ceiling.
He listened closely.
It was familiar. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the crackling, the rustling, the murmuring …
The singing!
Voices. A chorus of pale, whispering voices in his head.
Saturn, The Mystic. Two high notes over and over.
Ahh Ahhhh
Quiet hypnotic voices. Ahh Ahhhh. Ahh Ahhhh. Ahh Ahhhh. Ahh Ahhhh.
Like whispering. Like wind, like tide, like stars, like the universe swinging in silent blackness.
Ahh Ahhhh. Ahh Ahhhh. Ahh Ahhhh.
He heard them clearly now, the singing voices, the beautiful bell like voices, like singing in a dream. They drifted away slowly, dreamily, like fog wisps in the grey of morning. Always singing the same two tones, only the two, high, peaceful, soothing, mysterious tones.
He listened to them go. He heard them growing softer and softer as they moved softly away.
Ahh Ahhhh. Ah Ahhhh. Ahh Ahhhh.
Softer, Softer. Carrying him away.
Ahh Ahhhh. Almost a breathed sigh. Ahh Ahhhh. Almost inaudible. Ahh Ahhhh. Drifting and gone.
Ahh Ahhhh. Memory whispering in the mind.
He sighed happily and felt at peace with the universe, ready to join it. Everything was gone. His body was gone. He floated above it, not conscious of it, not caring for it anymore. He whispered goodbye to everyone by name and then, just as the bells rang and told of midnight, added quietly,
“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should …”
Silence. No need for more. He smiled and accepted and was happier than he had ever been in his entire life.
SATURDAY
1
Knock knock.
He stirred on the bed. His hand twitched. His mind cranked over once, a dying engine.
Knock, knock. Knock. Knock, knock, knock!
He tried to listen. The knocking seemed real. It sounded as if it was coming from somewhere. They were coming for him, the thought dripped. They were coming in the black boots. It smells like the spaces between toes in here. He tried to open his eyes. They were hot and dry and almost caked shut.
Knock knock.
“Erick?” Questioningly, demandingly.
His body shuddered. He struggled to wake up. It couldn’t be a dream! He heard the voice too clearly.
He grunted once, managed to rip open his eyes, tearing the veils of crusted sleep asunder.
The room was silent, melting in licking heat, wavering like a mirage. He stared at the ceiling like a dope addict.
Knock knock. Irritably. “Erick, are you there?”
He looked at the door. It was ten miles away. He reached his hand to turn the knob but missed it by a few inches. Outside traffic was moving in the sky.
Someone knocked on the door. “Erick!”
His yellowish face contorted with shock.
Leo! It was really her.
“Yes! Yes! Here I am, here I am!” he shouted.
A dry gasp. A choke.
“Erick, wake up!”
“Leo! Save me!”
Knock, knock, knock, knock! In furious urgency. He shuddered. His legs and trunk, he suddenly noticed. They were cold, like ice. He threw back his hand and grabbed one of the bars on the head of the bed. He tried to shake it. His eyes were stark with fear.
KNOCK KNOCK!
“Oh, my God, Leo, I’m here, I’m here!”
He looked wildly toward the door, his chest heaving with hot savage breaths. He felt the knocking in his chest, every beat of it. He forgot everything in the world but that it was actually her standing there.
Water.
“Leo!”
The hall floor squeaked. A crushing fist of horror drove into his heart.
NO!!!
He grabbed feverishly for the piece of glass and threw it. It landed on his coat. He started to cry, his cracked lips curling and shaking like those of a baby. His heart was pounding. “Leo, come back.”
Knock. “Erick, goddamn you, if you’re there, let me in!”
“Leo!”
Soft voiced, menacing. He saw her standing there, her hard face, her dark jade eyes glaring at the door panels.
“You bastard!” She almost hissed the words. “You bastard!” As if she were chewing the words and then spitting them out.
He heard her footsteps on the stairs. Creak, bump, creak, bump, Slowly fading away.
Leo alive, breathing, going down the stairs away from his.
Going away, going away, going …
The only tears were in his mind. None flowed from his dried eyes. All anguish and despair flowed back onto him. The sense of well being, of peace, was gone. He was not at peace.
He was still, tenaciously, teeth-clenched, clinging to life.
His body wouldn’t let go. It was an obstinate mass of bones and flesh. It wouldn’t give up. It had to keep going.
Why doesn’t it stop!
He grabbed at his chest and clawed in feeble savageness at the place where he thought his heart was. He tried to tear open his shirt so he could tear open his chest so he could tear out his heart. All he wanted to do was hold it wet and dripping in his hand and hurl it across the room and watch it bounce off the wall like a pink spongy handball. His face was a fierce twist of heavy bearded flesh and yellow teeth and lifeless eyes that tried to pour out tears but could find no moisture to make them from.
His hand collapsed on his chest.
He tried to sit up and go to the bathroom for a drink of water. But something held him down. He couldn’t move.
I can’t move! He whimpered and gagged with unutterable wordless fury at his body and its stupid ugly persistence. He tore at his own throat when he felt strong enough. He tore at his face, dragging black nails across his cheeks and forehead, hating his body, hating life for a cruel and empty farce. He scratched an eyeball and felt dull pain flare up. He almost choked to death on the fury cry in his throat.
It had all been arranged his mind told him.
It was not cool and aloof now. It was a jaded wrinkled old man sitting crouched in ashes and spitting out vicious little complaints and insults at him and at the world.
It had been arranged that she come there. It had been carefully arranged that she stand no more than ten feet from him and still be unable to help him. That she not even be able to know he was there.
Oh God, the complete and overwhelmingly infuriating quality of it!
GOD!! I hate you and I hate your world. I hate it, do you understand? It’s ugly and cruel and stupid. Stupid!
He clawed weakly at his throat again. Life wasn’t worth living. It did everything that was wrong and cruel and stupid!
He felt beneath his trembling fingers the lump in his throat that could not be swallowed anymore. The thick, irritating bristle of his beard. He couldn’t get into the flesh. His fingers weren’t strong enough to gouge out flesh with the nails, to tear open veins and rip out arteries and let life spout away in red fountains on the bed. Once and for all.
Too weak. Too enervated. Too drained of control. Fingers closing when he wanted them to open. Shaking on his neck when he willed them to tighten and tear out flesh.
His hand lost grip. It slid down the side of his scratched bruised throat. His arm was twisted back and motionless. One tear popped out of its cave mouth, quivered, rolling across the dry skin like a wriggling jellyfish undulating over land. It fell to the cliff edge, hurled itself over the brink and, gaining speed, skittered crazily over the slope of his cheek, turning left and running into the whispers over his mouth, splitting, sub-dividing like generating amoebae, soaking in, settling, motionless, in a forest of bristles.
Pain started again, as if waiting for the call.
A pendulum of thick hot agony began swinging.
A little at a time, the arc widening, growing larger, the red hot sides banging crashing against his organs. Back and forth, clouting his brains on the upswing, his intestines, his stomach. Swinging, running through his body, its plane changing every moment. Thudding, cutting into his body. His body that was all dead thick glass waiting for one sharp hammer blow to shatter it into a million pieces.
In his mind words kept hammering in time with the pain.
She came, she came, she came!
Leo came and gone away, thinking him not there.
Oh my God, she was here, actually here, he thought. She was here and she could have saved me. She could have given me water. The thought drove deeply and painfully into him. An airplane roared overhead but he didn’t hear it. She was here, here! And nothing happened. She could have saved me. Less than ten feet away. Right there! She was standing right there and the bathroom is right down the hall. With a sink that has faucet that runs water, two faucets that run water. And a bathtub that runs water from a faucet, two faucets! Right there!!
Oh, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
She wouldn’t come again. Not ever. She would go back into the living world again. Without him. Thinking for the rest of her life that he had run away because she was carrying his baby.
Baby.
His mouth moved. Dried up membranes tightened. His lips were pulled back into shape. For a moment a sensation of calm almost took him. And he heard himself whisper in his mind—I’m not dying at all. I’m still alive in her body and have another lifetime coming.
The idea passed. It flew past like wind. As though he ran along a dark beach and the winds, each a thought, rushed past him and he kept reaching out brittle fingers to clutch them and never could.
He looked at the ceiling. Last chance. Gone. There was nothing else. Why hadn’t he jumped up and opened the door for her? It was stupid of him to have lain there without moving. He blinked. He wondered if maybe the whole thing was a dream and he could go on after he woke up in his mother’s house, young and strong and loved again.
No, he couldn’t get up. That was the idea. That was the whole thing. He couldn’t move.
The pain had gone. He hadn’t noticed.
No it was coming back. He felt it rising in his back. Like a twisting cramp. As if he were being squeezed in a vise. Where the bullet had struck him the flesh was stiff and getting cold. It felt frozen. He could imagine little icicles hanging from it, white frost. He could see it white and dead and dripping with the fluids of rot. Cold. Very cold. He shivered without muscle control.
His head was hot through.
Very hot. He was in layers, like personality. All the way inside was the cold, dead, icy cold of the grave, the tomb, the winter sepulchre. The outer layer was a hot, burning, powdery dry hot. It made him gasp for air. But the air was hot too. It scorched in his throat. It burned there like the breath of a dragon in his mouth. The skin in his mouth was drying, drying. He could feel it contracting, shriveling up like a body being burned alive. It was drawing his lips in. All the membranes were joining into a hard dry film and drawing his lips in. The skin of his tongue was tightening and hardening too. As if it had on it a thin coating of cement. The tongue was dumb and dead, a piece of wood. And the gums wer
e shrinking, drying, crackling and shrinking, drawing back, retreating from his aching, filmy teeth. His face was almost totally numb. And his hands.
He felt his entire body drying.
It was like an empty cocoon in the hot sun. He was dry and dusty and crackling with heat. He felt he had to tear off his clothes because it made the heat and dryness worse.
Water.
It was a medicine of incalculable value. He would have given every dollar in the world for a cup of water. Every land and all their peoples and the whole planet would go on the block for a drink of cool water. Even though he felt sure it couldn’t even soak into his hardening dry body and would spill off it like water poured on a dry window pane. Or that it would gush right through him like water thrown into a hollow puppet. That it would swish around and finally like still in his body, like water in a bowl, never affecting the bowl.
That didn’t matter.
All he wanted was water. As the need grew more fierce, his mind devoted all its remaining energies to it. He forgot completely that Leo had just been there, knocking on the door. He just thought about water. An endless, dizzy, wandering concentration on water. When church bells rang nine o’clock he didn’t even hear them
Water. There was never a greater thirst. He was suffering from intense, excruciating thirst and his body was pulsing with white hot, cramping pains.
In spurts of pain he seemed to be walking up Broadway again. It was August and he was sick and hungry. And despairing. Fool! shrieked his mind. To despair when he could walk and, above all, when he could drink all the cold water he wanted to drink. What a fool he was not to have seen and loved the things that count, the things that were such complete blessings. Just to bend over a fountain and drink down mouthfuls, a stomachful of cold, sparkling water.
Oh, God, it would give him life. He would give his life for that.
To be able to drink water and walk. Walk and move and breathe cool air and drink water, endless water, drink water, water, water …
Mother, give me a drink.
2
He was born on a February morning before the sun came up. Outside the Jersey house the night hung in black and icy suspension, breathless with the silence of frozen things. Nearby, the face of the lake was hard and white.