The Essential Ellison Part 30

"No doubt about it," he said; but he wouldn't.

Then she left. He sat up in bed for a while, thinking that it was odd how people couldn't leave it alone. Like a scab, they had to pick at it. He'd dated her rather heavily for a month, and they had broken up for no particular reason save that it was finished. And tonight the party, and he was alone, and she was alone, and they had come together for an anticlimax.

A returning. To a place neither had known very well. A devalued neighborhood.

He knew he would never see Martha again.

The bubble of sadness bobbed on the surface for a moment, then burst; the sense of loss flavored the air a moment longer; then he turned off the light, rolled over onto the dried wet spot, and went to sleep.

He was hacking out the progression of interrogatories pursuant to the Blieler brief with one of the other attorneys in the office when his secretary stuck her head into the conference room and said he had a visitor. Rubbing his eyes, he realized they had been at it for three straight hours. He shoved back from the conference table, swept the papers into the folio, and said, "Let's knock off for lunch." The other attorney stretched, and musculature crackled. "Okay. Call it four o ' clock. I've got to go over to the 9000 Building to pick up Barbarossi's deposition." He got up and left. Kirxby sighed, simply sitting there, all at once overcome by a nameless malaise. As though something dark and forbidding were slouching towards his personal Bethlehem.

Then he went into his office to meet his visitor.

She turned half-around in the big leather chair and smiled at him. "Jerri!" he said, all surprise and pleasure. His first reaction: surprised pleasure. "My G.o.d, it's been... how long...?"

The smile lifted at one corner: her bemused smile.

"It's been six months. Seem longer?"He grinned and shrugged. It had been his choice to break up the affair after two years. For Martha. Who had lasted a month.

"How time flies when you're enjoying yourself," she said. She crossed her legs. A summary judgment on his profligacy.

He walked around and sat down behind the desk. "Come on, Jerri, gimme some slack."

Another returning. First Martha, out of the blue; now Jerri. Emerging from the mauve, perhaps? "What brings you back into my web?" He tried to stare at her levelly, but she was on to that; it made him feel guilty.

"I suppose I could have cobbled up something spectacular along the lines of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against one of my compet.i.tors," she said, "but the truth is just that I felt an urgent need to see you again."

He opened and closed the top drawer of his desk, to buy a few seconds. Then, carefully avoiding her gaze, he said, "What is this, Jerri? Christ, isn't there enough c.r.a.p in the world without detouring to find a fresh supply'!" He said it softly, because he had said I love you to her for two years, excluding the final seven months when he had said f.u.c.k off, never realizing they were the same phrase.

But he took her to lunch, and they made a date for dinner, and he took her back to his apartment and they were two or three drinks too impatient to get to the bed and made it on the living room carpet still half-clothed. He cherished silence when making love, even when only s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g, and she remembered and didn't make a sound. And it was as good or as bad as it had ever been between them for two years minus the last seven months. And when she awoke hours later, there on the living room carpet, with her skirt up around her hips, and Michael lying on his side with his head cradled on his arm, still sleeping, she breathed deeply and slitted her eyes and commanded the hangover to permit her the strength to rise; and she rose, and she covered him with a small rap-robe he had pilfered off an American Airlines flight to Boston; and she went away. Neither loving him nor hating him. Having merely satisfied the urgent compulsion in her to return to him once more, to see him once more, to have his body once more. And there was nothing more to it than that.

The next morning he rolled onto his back, lying there on the floor, kept his eyes closed, and knew he would never see her again. And there was no more to it than that.

Two days later he received a phone call from Anita. He had had two dates with Anita, more than two-and-a-half years earlier, during the week before he had met Jerri and had taken up with her. She said she had been thinking about him. She said she had been weeding out old phone numbers in her book and had come across his, and just wanted to call to see how he was. They made a date for that night and had s.e.x and she left quickly. And he knew he would never see her again.

And the next day at lunch at the Oasis he saw Corinne sitting across the room. He had lived with Corinne for a year, just prior to meeting Anita, just prior to meeting Jerri. Corinne came across the room and kissed him on the back of the neck and said, "You've lost weight. You look good enough to eat." And they got together that night, and one thing and another, and he was, and she did, and then he did, and she stayed the night but left after coffee the next morning. And he knew he would never see her again.

But he began to have an unsettling feeling that something strange was happening to him.

Over the next month, in reverse order of having known them, every female with whom he had had a liaison magically reappeared in his life. Before Corinne, he had had a string of one-nighters and casual weekends with Hannah, Nancy, Robin and Cylvia; Elizabeth, Penny, Margie and Herta; Eileen, Gail, Holly and Kathleen. One by one, in unbroken string, they came back to him like waifs returning to the empty kettle for one last spoonful of gruel. Once, and then gone again, forever.

Leaving behind pinpoint lights of isolated memory. Each one of them an incomplete yet somehow total summation of the woman: Hannah and her need for certain words in the bed; the pressure of Nancy's legs over his shoulders; Robin and the wet towels; Cylvia who never came, perhaps could not come; Elizabeth so thin that her pelvis left him sore for days; having to send out for ribs for Penny, before and after; a spade-shaped mole on Margie's inner thigh; Herta falling asleep in a second after s.e.x, as if she had been clubbed; the sound of Eileen's laugh, like the wind in Aspen; Gail's revulsion and animosity when he couldn't get an erection and tried to go down on her; Holly's endless retelling of the good times they had known; Kathleen still needing to delude herself that he was seducing her, even after all this time.

One sharp point of memory. One quick flare of light. Then gone forever and there was no more to it than that.

But by the end of that month, the suspicion had grown into a dread certainty; a certainty that led him inexorably to an inevitable end place that was too horrible to consider. Every time he followed the logical progression to its finale, his mind skittered away... that whimpering, crippled dog.

His fear grew. Each woman returned built the fear higher. Fear coalesced into terror and he fled the city, hoping by exiling himself to break the links.

But there he sat, by the fireplace at The Round Hearth, in Stowe, Vermont... and the next one in line, Sonja, whom he had not seen in years, Sonja came in off the slopes and saw him, and she went a good deal whiter than the wind chill factor outside accounted for.

They spent the night together and she buried her face in the pillow so her sounds would not carry. She lied to her husband about her absence and the next morning, before Kirxby came out of his room, they were gone.

But Sonja had come back. And that meant the next one before her had been Gretchen. He waited in fear, but she did not appear in Vermont, and he felt if he stayed there he was a sitting target and he called the office and told them he was going down to the Bahamas for a few days, that his partners should parcel out his caseload among them, for just a few more days, don't ask questions.

And Gretchen was working in a tourist shop specializing in wicker goods; and she looked at him as he came through the door, and she said, "Oh, my G.o.d, Michael! I've had you on my mind almost constantly for the past week. I was going to call you -"

And she gave a small sharp scream as he fainted, collapsing face-forward into a pyramid of woven wicker clothing hampers.

The apartment was dark. He sat there in silence, and refused to answer the phone. The gourmet delicatessen had been given specific instructions. The delivery boy with the food had to knock in a specific, certain cadence, or the apartment door would not be opened.

Kirxby had locked himself away. The terror was very real now. It was impossible to ignore what was happening to him. All the birds were coming home to roost.

Back across nineteen years, from his twentieth birthday to the present, in reverse order of having known them, every woman he had ever loved or f.u.c.ked or had an encounter of substance with... was homing in on him. Martha the latest, from which point the forward momentum of his relationships had been arrested, like a pendulum swung as far as it would go, and back again, back, back, swinging back past Jerri and Anita, back to Corinne and Hannah, back, and Nancy, back, and Robin and all of them, straight back to Gretchen, who was just three women before...

He wouldn't think about it.

He couldn't. It was too frightening.

The special, specific, certain cadence of a knock on his apartment door. In the darkness he found his way to the door and removed the chain. He opened the door to take the box of groceries, and saw the teenaged Puerto Rican boy sent by the deli. And standing behind him was Kate. She was twelve years older, a lot less the gamin, cla.s.sy and self-possessed now, but it was Kate nonetheless.

He began to cry.

He slumped against the open door and wept, hiding his face in his hands partially because he was ashamed, but more because he was frightened.

She gave the boy a tip, took the box, and edged inside the apartment, moving Kirxby with her, gently. She closed the door, turned on a light, and helped him to the sofa.

When she came back from putting away the groceries, she slipped out of her shoes and sat as far away from him as the length of the sofa would permit. The light was behind her and she could see his swollen, terrified face clearly. His eyes were very bright. There was a trapped expression on his face. For a long time she said nothing.

Finally, when his breathing became regular, she said, "Michael, what the h.e.l.l is it? Tell me."

But he could not speak of it. He was too frightened to name it. As long as he kept it to himself, it was just barely possible it was a figment of delusion, a ravening beast of the mind that would vanish as soon as he was able to draw a deep breath. He knew he was lying to himself. It was real. It was happening to him, inexorably.

She kept at him, speaking softly, cajoling him, prising the story from him. And so he told her. Of the reversal of his life. Of the film running backward. Of the river flowing upstream. Carrying him back and back and back into a dark land from which there could never be escape.

"And I ran away. I went to St. Kitts. And I walked into a shop, some dumb shop, just some dumb kind of tourist goods shop..."

"And what was her name... Greta... ?"

"Gretchen."

"... Gretchen. And Gretchen was there."

"Yes."

"Oh, my G.o.d, Michael. You're making yourself crazy. This is lunatic. You've got to stop it."

"Stop it!?! Jesus, I wish I could stop it. But I can't. Don't you see, you're part of it. It's unstoppable, it's crazy but it's h.e.l.lish. I haven't slept in days. I'm afraid to go to sleep. G.o.d knows what might happen."

"You're building all this in your mind, Michael. It isn't real. Lack of sleep is making you paranoid."

"No... no... listen... here, listen to this... I remembered it from years ago... I read it... I found it when I went looking for it..." He lurched off the sofa, found the book on the wet bar and brought it back under the light. It was The Plague by Camus, in a Modern Library edition. He thumbed through the book and could not find the place. Then she took it from him and laid it on her palm and it fell open to the page, because he had read and reread the section. She read it aloud, where he had underlined it: "'Had he been less tired, his senses more alert, that all-pervading odor of death might have made him sentimental. But when a man has had only four hours' sleep, he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are; that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice-hideous, witless justice.'" She closed the book and stared at him. "You really believe this, don't you?"

"Don't I? Of course I do! I'd be what you think I am, crazy... not to believe it. Kate, listen to me. Look, here you are. It's twelve years. Twelve years and another life. But here you are, back with me again, just in sequence. You were my lover before I met Gretchen. I knew it would be you!"

"Michael, don't let this make you stop thinking. There's no way you could have known. Bill and I have been divorced for two years. I just moved back to the city last week. Of course I'd look you up. We had a very good thing together. If I hadn't met Bill we might still be together."

"Jesus, Kate, you're not listening to me. I'm trying to tell you this is some kind of terrible justice. I'm rolling back through time with the women I've known. There's you, and if there's you, then the next one before you was Marcie. And if I go back to her, then that means that after Marcie... after Marcie... before Marcie there was..."

He couldn't speak the name.

She said the name. His face went white again. It was the speaking of the unspeakable.

"Oh G.o.d, Kate, oh dear G.o.d, I'm screwed, I'm screwed..."

"Cindy can't get you, Mike. She's still in the Home, isn't she?"

He nodded, unable to answer.

Kate slid across and held him. He was shaking. "It's all right. It's going to be all right."

She tried to rock him, like a child in pain, but his terror was an electric current surging through him. "I'll take care of you," she said. "Till you're better. There won't be any Marcie, and there certainly won't be any Cindy."

"No!" he screamed, pulling away from her. "No!"

He stumbled toward the door. "I've got to get out of here. They can find me here. I've got to go somewhere out away from here, fast, fast, where they can't find me ever."

He yanked open the door and ran into the hall. The elevator was not there. It was never there when he needed it, needed it badly, needed it desperately.

He ran down the stairs and into the vestibule of the building. The doorman was standing looking out into the street, the gla.s.s doors tightly shut against the wind and the cold.

Michael Kirxby ran past him, head down, arms close to his body. He heard the man say something, but it was lost in the rush of wind and chill as he jammed through onto the sidewalk.

Terror enveloped him. He ran toward the corner and turned toward the darkness. If he could just get into the darkness, where he couldn't be found, then he was safe. Perhaps he would be safe.

He rounded the corner. A woman, head down against the wind, b.u.mped into him. They rebounded and in the vague light of the street lamp looked into each other's faces.

"h.e.l.lo," said Marcie.

VIITO THEMATTRESSESWITHMEAN DEMONS.

"The great lizards owned the planet for something like 130,000,000 years, but they didn't have slant-well drilling, pesticides, pollution, fast breeders, defoliants, demagogues, thermonuclear warheads, non-biodegradable plastics, The Pentagon, The Kremlin, The General Staff of the People's Army, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and the FBI. [...] Had they not been so culturally deprived, they might have sunk into the swamps in a mere three thousand years."

"Reaping the Whirlwind," Introduction to APPROACHING OBLIVION, Walker, 1974 Anyone alive is bait for demons.

Whether we recognize them or not, each of us feels the influence of demons. Some are personal demons, hatched out of the id to stoke our paranoia, to cast self-doubt in our paths, to distract us with lies of spectacular success or spectacular failure. Some are societal, monstrous things which work to send entire cultures over the precipice into the madness of jihad or indolence or plastic lives. And some are in between; here, nudging a group of neighbors away from sense and sanity; there, teasing an individual with the frozen carrot on a stick. Conformity, complacency, maintaining the status quo-or ma.s.s nonconformity, misdirected anger, street violence as a subst.i.tute for revolution; demons play both sides of the coin and work the edges as well.

Harlan has spent much of his life wrestling with demons, recognizing their curious differences and similarities, reporting on their odd and terrible mating habits, alerting us when he can to their special seductiveness. Here, a look at seven demons.

A societal demon is at the core of "The Tombs" (1961), a lengthy excerpt (somewhat condensed) from MEMOS FROM PURGATORY, Harlan's gripping account of his ten weeks with a Brooklyn street gang in the mid-1950s and its 24-hour aftermath seven years later in Manhattan's Tombs. (His undercover research into gang violence provided materials for many short stories, a novel [WEB OF THE CITY], and MEMOS, which was even adapted for tv's Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k Hour, airing in 1964.) As the greed and self serving of the 1980s abandoned whatever it was that let us sleep through the 1970s, we come at last to the American killing fields of '90s gang nations. Organized gang violence is on the rise and the book has, alas, become timely again, but Harlan found grimmer truths during his stay in jail. His succinct unfolding of the everyday degradation and demoralizing found in such places makes us recoil in horror, but even more chilling is his identification of who the true victims are.

Another time, another place, another demon shows its ugly face...on television. "Our Little Miss" (1970) was exposed by Harlan in The Gla.s.s Teat column, and even his tough hide of cynicism was flayed by the horrors he witnessed. Even something as seemingly sweet and innocent as a children's talent and beauty pageant is quickly revealed for the morally penurious obscenity it makes little pretense to hide. Watching Harlan pin that demon to the mat is particularly satisfying.

The next two demons hara.s.s the world's artists from two sides: the one without the other within. "A Love Song to Jerry Falwell" (1984) is a moving, impa.s.sioned plea for the special madness of the "mad dreamers" who enrich our lives in the ways that the censors and self-appointed moralists never can. "Telltale Tics and Tremors" (1977), originally published as a column of advice for fledgling writers, swats at the pervasive and ubiquitous demon of mediocrity; and in an implicit argument from the lesser to the greater, Harlan says something, too, about the possible mediocrity of our own lives.

The sneakiest demon comes next. "True Love: Groping for the Holy Grail" (1978), in an edited and ret.i.tled version, appeared in Los Angeles magazine. In that city plagued by the bigger demons, one would hardly think it worth Harlan's time to zero in on this little fiend who gets in the way of True Love. But its thrusts, feints, defenses and bogus retreats dazzle and distract and, as Harlan learns to his chagrin even had him tricking and outwitting himself. Harlan's self-discovery gives himself and us a clue to a better way to outwit the demon.

Of course that sneaky demon has a big brother. "Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Lat.i.tude 38 54' N, Longitude 77 00' 13" W (1974) is, like so much of Harlan's best work, about love, lost childhood, self-trust, self-love. The icthyimp inside all of us, each of us, that won't let our discontent die, must be conquered if we are to find maturity. Note here, amid all the Universal paraphernalia of horror movies, the need to find our own symbols for what we once lost and what we have to find. This is the demon that can torment us to the grave.

"The Function of Dream Sleep" (1988), one of Harlan's favorite stories, deals with the ultimate demon of them all: not death per se, but rather the role it usurps in all we try to build together. Here the downwinding, entropy-dealing finality of death is put into full focus, both for the ruin it causes and for the courage and simple human decency it can bring. The opening scene, incidentally, happened to Harlan, and was the spur to his writing this piece.

Anyone alive is bait for demons. But the struggles against them make for fascinating reading.

"It's not often people will tell you how they really feel about gut-level things. [...] They play cozy with you, because n.o.body likes to be hated, and large doses of truth from anyone mouth tend to make the wearer of the mouth persona non grata. Particularly if he's caught you picking your nose and wiping it on your pants. Even worse if he catches you eating it. Now, honest, how many people will cop to that?"

"Brinkmanship," Introduction to OVER THE EDGE, Belmont 1970

The Tombs: An Excerpt from MEMOS FROM PURGATORY I had brought away from the Barons some implements used by the kids-the set of knucks I'd used in the rumble, the billy club, a.22 revolver, the bayonet, the Italian stiletto without a switch I had used in the stand with Candle-and these were to become visual aids in lectures and panels on juvenile delinquency for PTA groups, YMCA gatherings, high school cla.s.ses, youth organizations.

In seven years I had lectured many times on the subject; had even gone on television and radio with my experiences. I had said, "You can't stop a rumble or a kid gang once it gets rolling. There isn't much you can do when the only pride a kid has is in a bopping club; not in his family, or his heritage, or his religion, school, country, or himself.

"But as long as there is a solid family unit that will recognize the kid as an integral part, that will respect his intelligence, his honesty, his status, a family he can run to when the city closes down on him and the world snaps and snarls, as long as the parents and the school and the church and the local government stop looking at delinquency as a recent cultural leprosy, get off their a.s.ses, and try to understand the kid, try to aid him in helping himself grow up, not shove him the way they think or half-think he should go, there's a chance.

"When everybody stops pa.s.sing the buck and blaming it on girlie magazines or television or the H-bomb, then a start will be made toward solving the problem."

That's what I'd said, and showed the knives that had ripped, and the knucks that had smashed. That was what I'd said, though I'd known that wasn't the whole answer, perhaps not even the right answer.

But I'd known it was a start, and they had to start somewhere.

I tried to get across the idea of action on the part of parents too busy with churchkey and time-card, action on the part of school boards too hypocritical and stingy to persuade good teachers to stay in education, action on the part of clergy and government too busy dredging up the proper indignant expressions and the proper flowery phrases for "the present outrageous situation" to get out in the streets where the kids play stickball.

I wanted them to talk to their kids, and to listen.

Many lectures, many showings of the weapons the kids used, and in seven years-nothing. The same. No change, unless it was to get worse.

So my interest turned in futility to other things. I wrote about other things, saw different scenes, and the ten weeks in 1954 began to fade.

It was all to come back to me, much more forcibly, later that month...September, 1960.

I had gone to a party in the Bronx, and there met a fellow named Ken Bales, someone I'd known in 1955, a fellow I'd loaned a typewriter to. He had p.a.w.ned it; he had been a deadbeat then, and in 1960 he was no better. I advised him if he didn't pony up the cost of a new typer, or get me that one back, I would lean on him. That happened early in September. It was to result in an experience I never want to relive, an experience that brought back my memories of the Barons so sharply I felt I had never left Brooklyn. It happened like this...

Bales, frightened by my determination to make him pay up, and aware of the weapons I had in my apartment (locked in a filing cabinet), which had never been a secret, as I had displayed them on television, anonymously phoned the police.