Where do they go, these little ones who disappear – the uncreated? Safely curled inside their mothers, for a while; but then what? I have an intractable presentiment (maybe a hope, maybe a fear) that one night I will glimpse them, in Tod’s dream… Some mornings, as we prepare to turn in, and go through the heavy routines, of mussing, of miring, we can feel the dream just waiting to happen, gathering its energies from somewhere on the other side. We’re fatalistic. We make no attempt to go to sleep. We lie there, with the lamp burning, while dawn fades. In quickening series, tepid sweats slowly form, and briefly shine, and instantly evaporate. Later, Tod’s heart rate begins to steepen: even his ears thump with the new blood. There follows a timeless and pitiable period of steadily worsening confusion. By now the bed reeks of fear. I have to be ready for when Tod makes his lurch for the light switch. And then, in darkness, with a hot shout which gives a savage twist to his jaw – we’re in it. The dream. We’re in it right up to our neck. The enormous figure in the white coat, his black boots straddling many acres. Somewhere down there, between his legs, the queues of souls. I wish I had power, just power enough to avert my eyes. Please, don’t show me the babies!… Where does the dream come from? It must come from the future. The dream must be about what Tod will some day do.
It’s mildly encouraging, now, in the street, when Tod looks at a woman. For once his eyes point where I want them to point. Our priorities or imperatives are by no means identical, but at least they overlap. We like the same kind of woman – the womanly kind. All ages. Now, Tod looks first at the face; then the breasts; then the lower abdomen. If it’s a back view, we go: hair; waist; rump. Neither of us, it would seem, is much of a leg man – though I could do with a bit more than I get. Another thing bothers me: the time spots Tod allows for each section. Tod is done with the face way too soon. A single downward swipe of the eyes. Whereas I’d like to linger. Maybe the etiquette forbids this. Still, I’m mildly encouraged. There’s hardly any of the usual vertigo effect, when I’m trying to see things that he’s not looking at, when I’m trying to look at things he’s not seeing.
Vivified, perhaps, by all this fieldwork we’re doing, our solitary sex sessions have become a lot livelier of late. The missing component, the extra essence is generated, of course, by the toilet, by the trash. You just daub it on. And you’re away.
Where would Tod and I be without the toilet? Where would we be without all the trash?
There is a thing out there called fashion. The young observe it. In footwear, head-wear, eyewear; the experiments in mortification they perform on their own faces – the piercings, the pallor. Are they telling the story of the armoured dinosaurs, in chronological miniature, with horns of hair and collars of hide? Fashion is for youth and all its volatility, but Tod and I occasionally dabble. For instance, we went to the Thrift Store and got given two pairs of flared pants. Naturally I wanted to try them on right away; but for months he let them languish in the closet upstairs, growing the wrinkles and air pockets that would eventually fit his shape, the peculiar wishbone of his shanks. Then, one night, he unceremoniously slipped into them. Later, after work, I got a pretty good look at these new pants of ours, as Tod stood before the full-length mirror, unknotting his tie. Well, they weren’t actually outrageous, Tod’s flares, nothing like the twin-ballgown effect we would soon start seeing on the street. But I found them thoroughly disgraceful, all the same: aesthetically, they worked on me like violence. This packed, cuboid, still elderly party (always growing, always getting stronger) – and his slobbering calves. Where have his feet gone, for Christ’s sake? I knew then, I think, that Tod’s cruelty, his secret, had to do with a central mistake about people’s bodies. Or maybe I just discovered something about the style or the line of his cruelty. Tod’s cruelty would be trashy, shitty, mistaken, bassackward: flared… Still, the pants caught on and now everyone is into them. They move down the street like yachts – the cashiered, the landlocked sailors of the city! Next thing you know, women’s hemlines go up by about three feet. The sudden candour and power of female haunch. They’re already coming down again, slowly, but Jesus.
A war is coming. Just a little one, for now. I’m intellectually prepared for it, I suppose – I suppose I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. Several times now, in bars, looking up briefly from our Bud or our Molson or our San Mig, we have seen that same shot on the mounted TV: like a eugenic cross between swordfish and stingray, the helicopter twirls upward from the ocean and crouches grimly on the deck of the aircraft carrier, ready to fight. War nears, with all its violence and renewal. To the question of violence (this most difficult question), certain answers will no doubt be offered. The streets churn and wait, but celebrations are so far muted.
On arising to start the day, around midnight, perhaps, when he’s still drunk, Tod Friendly will create things. Wildly he will mend and heal. Taking hold of the woodwork and the webbing, with a single blow to the floor, with a single impact, he will create a kitchen chair. With one fierce and skilful kick of his aching foot he will mend a deep concavity in the refrigerator’s side. With a butt of his head he will heal the fissured bathroom mirror, heal also the worsening welt in his own forehead, and then stand there staring at himself with his eyes flickering.
At last. Give thanks. Give thanks. It’s started to happen. Oh my God, I think I love her.
Irene didn’t catch me completely on the hop – I had fair warning. The arrival of my love life was preceded by the arrival of a whole new bunch of love letters. But these weren’t love letters from Irene. These were love letters to Irene. Written by Tod. In his squat and unvarying hand. They came from the trash, of course, from the innards of a ten-gallon Hefty: we bent over the bag and kind of airlifted them out of there. Then Tod went and sat in the living room with this red-ribboned bundle on his lap. He got his blue tin out too. We sat there for about a half-hour. The suspense was killing me. Finally Tod took a letter from the middle of the stack, opened it out and stared at it with an unfocused, an uncommitted eye. I took in what I could. ‘My dear Irene, Thank you again for the cushions. I do like them. They brighten up the room, as well as making it more “cosy”… Give the key to Johnson and if he isn’t there never mind until next time… You must not get obsessed by this matter of your veins, which are fairly superficial (no pigmentation, no oedema). If you are decided then of course I will help but remember I like you just the way you are… I look forward with the usual impatience to seeing you on Tuesday though Friday might be better… ‘ Blankly Tod removed the letters from his lap and replaced them with that tin of his, in which, after a pause, he began to rootle. The photograph Tod wanted was all creased and bent but he soon healed it with a firm squeeze of his fist. Wow, I thought. So I guess that’s the one. No spring chicken. Not by any means. And a really big old broad. Smiling, in a tan pants suit. When he left for work that evening Tod left the letters by the front step, encased in a white shoebox on which someone – presumably Irene – had scrawled the words FUCK YOU. It didn’t seem like an awfully good sign.
Nine nights later we woke up in the small hours and lay there coldly. ‘Shtib,’ he grunted. Tod’s been doing this quite a bit lately – grunting: Shtib. Shtib. I thought it might be a cough, or a half-suppressed eructation, or just some unalluring new vagary. Then I realized what it was the guy was saying. He climbed out of bed and opened the window: in stages, in subtle gusts, the room began to fill with the warmth and spoor of an alien being. Most noticeably, and surprisingly, cigarette smoke! – which Tod has a big thing about. Also something paste-like and candyish, something sweet and old. These were the smells she was sending across the city. Oh boy: here we go. Come to me baby. Unhurriedly Tod climbed out of his pyjamas and donned his fibrous dressing gown. As he discomposed the bedding I noticed that my feeling tone was markedly at variance with his: his was resigned, unengaged, inconvenienced. Still, at least he prepared her cigarettes for her, filling a saucer with a couple of butts and plenty of ash. We shut the window and went downstairs and waited.
It showed good form – and was, I thought, rather romantic of Tod – to go outside like that and stand in his slippers on the wet sidewalk. Very soon we heard her car, its slithering approach, and saw the twin red lights at the end of the street. She parked, and opened the car door loudly, and jumped out. She walked forward across the road, shaking her head in sorrow or denial. A really big old broad. Irene. Yeah.
‘Tod?’ she said. ‘This is it. Happy now?’
Happy or not, Tod preceded her through the front door. She wrenched off her coat while Tod went on up, and then she pounded after him. I was discouraged, I have to admit. I guess I’d been hoping it would all be beautiful – that there would be sweet words. But no. I have to go and catch her on a really bad day. Tod and I reclined on the wrung bedding as Irene advanced into the room, swiping a hand at her streaming eyes and calling us a piece of shit.
Then she started taking her clothes off. Women!
‘Irene,’ Tod reasoned.
She undressed quickly; but the speed of her movements had nothing to do with avidity, with desire. She talked quickly too, and wept, and shook her head. A big old broad, in big white sweater, big white pants. Her breasts formed a sharp bluff beneath her chin, triangular and aerodynamic, kept aloft, ultimately, by a kind of GI Joe backpack of straps and winches. Off came the armour, the chain mail of her girdle. Then that big white tush was ambling toward me. And I thought her clothes were white. What was she saying, Irene, what was she going on about, in words half heard, half drowned – in gasps and whispers? In summary, this: that men were either too dumb or too sharp with nothing in between. Too dumb or too sharp. Too innocent, too guilty. Tod, at any rate, listened to her in frank exasperation, his nostrils tensely flared, his upper lip shaped like a mean little beak.
‘Mean?’ he began. ‘You live in your body. And now the body is giving out.’
She flung herself down beside me, awkwardly, abundantly. Tod’s words seemed to have a relaxing effect on her. I placed an arm around the white pulp of her shoulder.
Irene said in a frightened voice, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘All night, too.’
‘I make allowances,’ she said. ‘You deal with the sick all day.’
‘That’s something you don’t ever talk about.’
‘Were there kids?’
‘That’s something you don’t ever talk about.’
‘Were you this nice to your wife?’
‘Well. We wouldn’t know about that, would we, Irene.’
‘Except to your friends. Your loved ones.’
‘You have no obligation to be healthy.’
‘Also fatal.’
‘Do you really have to do that? It’s a disgusting habit.’
Tod started coughing and flapping his thick right hand about. After a while she quenched the cigarette of its fire and restored it to the pack. She turned toward us. There followed about ten minutes of what you’d call foreplay. Snuggling, grunting, sighing – that kind of thing. Then the act happened… And I thought: That’s it?
Afterward, it was all so very much easier. The atmosphere was first rate as we put our clothes back on and went downstairs to have something to eat. There we sat, side by side at the dinette feature, equably untwirling yard upon yard of the pale pasta. Then – another first – off to the movies! This passed off fine also. I was worried at first, when Irene started crying again before we had even taken our seats and I suppose the film was pretty depressing. All about love. The on-screen couple, quietly glowing with beauty and amusement – they seemed made for each other; but after various misunderstandings and adventures and other nonsense, they ended up going their separate ways. By this time Irene was emitting a faint gurgle of pleasure, when she wasn’t laughing her head off. Everyone was laughing. But not Tod. Not Tod. Actually, I didn’t think it was funny either. We ended up at a bar. Irene had Old Fashioneds. Tod with his steins. Our parting was marked by its cordiality and affection. I know I’m going to be seeing a lot more of her. We have our problems, clearly, but they’re nothing we can’t handle. On top of which I came out thirty-three dollars to the good. Make that thirty six with the popcorn.
Success. I loved it. Irene’s great. All that day at work I had a mellow feeling about her. In the small hours, there, I experienced some initial alarm, but she looked better and better as the date progressed. Such humanity in her young eyes, peeping out in embarrassment from behind the worn sneaker of her face, so puffed, so pinched, so parched. It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into other people. We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind steep walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the OK. So perhaps escape is possible: escape from the – from the indecipherable monad. But I still don’t know if Tod will ever really come across.
You’d think it might be quite relaxing, having (effectively) no will, and no body anyway through which to express it. Many administrative and executive matters, it’s true, are taken right out of your hands. But there is always the countervailing desire to put yourself forward, to make your mark or your stand as the valuable exception. We all yearn to believe in the religion of the will.
I don’t want to sound too flame-eyed and martyr-browed about it – and I know I’m a real simp in many other areas – but I reckon I’m way ahead of Tod on this basic question of human difference. Tod has a sophisticated sensing mechanism which guides his responses to all recognizable subspecies. His feeling tone jolts into various attitudes and readinesses: a more or less affable condescension towards Hispanics and Latinos, a mild disgust for Asians, a settled neutrality when it comes to Arabs of any kind; the old Red Indian who drains Tod’s tank at the gas station inspires a morbid relish. His most emphatic predispositions concern blacks and Jews. Blacks inspire hatred and rigorous contempt; he’ll call them special names under his breath – like jig or schwartzer or boogie. Jews, too, affect him violently, though he has no special names for Jews. And of course he has a secondary repertoire of alerted hostility toward pimps, hookers, junkies, the insane, the club-footed, the harelipped, the homosexual male, and the very old.
I’ve had to learn up on all these distinctions. Originally at least, I had no preselected feelings about anybody, one way or the other (except about doctors: now where did that come from?). I know this’ll sound unbearably cute, but it took me a while to realize that all Negroes have black skin; I was more interested in their eyes, their tongues, the way they moved. When I meet people, I look for a pulse from their inner being, which tells me things like – how much fear, how much hate, how much calm, how much forgiveness. I suppose I really am the soulful type. Visualize the body I don’t have, and see this: a sentimentalized foetus, with saintly smile. Naturally, women and children draw forth a reliable response from me, something long preprogrammed. Particularly children, with their purged look, with knowledge being slowly wiped from the mind. All that remains is the ecstasy of the body.
Oh yeah. There’s this one guy at AMS, who’s Japanese, over from Osaka on a six-month exchange. Companionable enough at first, he’s getting less and less relaxed. We call him Mikio: funny-looking kid. During his lunch break, in the commissary there, Mikio will sit hunched over a book. I’ve watched him. He reads the way I read – or would read, if I ever got the chance. Mikio begins at the beginning and ends at the end. This makes a kind of quirky sense to me – but Mikio and I are definitely in the minority here. How can we two be right? It would make so many others wrong. Water moves upward. It seeks the highest level. What did you expect? Smoke falls. Things are created in the violence of fire. That’s all right. Gravity still pins us to the planet. I’m not sure I’d say anything to Mikio anyway, even if I could, even if I had the power. What is it with him? His light-holding hair. His coated eyeballs and their meniscus of severe understanding. No – include me out. Go your own way, pal. I don’t want to get involved. Not with that little spook.
Many co-workers – Tod included – razz him about it and everything, but Mikio is free to do this, to read in his own way. People are free, then, they are generally free, then, are they? Well they don’t look free. Tipping, staggering, with croaked or choking voices, blundering backwards along lines seemingly already crossed, already mapped, never looking where they are going, they move through something prearranged, armed with lies. They’re always looking forward to going places they’ve just come back from, or regretting doing things they haven’t yet done. All kings of crap and trash. Signs say No Littering – but who to? We wouldn’t dream of it. Government does that, at night, with trucks; or uniformed men come at morning with their trolleys, dispensing rubbish, and shit for the dogs.
Rather as I feared they would, babies have started showing up in Tod’s dream. They’ve shown up. Or, at least, one of them has: one baby. Nothing gruesome happens and I am dealing with it fine so far.
You naturally associate babies with helplessness, with fragility, with enervation; but that’s not how it is in the dream. In the dream, this baby wields appalling power. It has the power, the ultimate power of life and death over its parents, its older brothers and sisters, its grandparents, and indeed everybody else who is gathered in the room. There are about thirty of them in there, although the room, if it is a room, can’t be much bigger than Tod’s kitchen. The room is dark. No, more than this: the room is black. Despite the power it wields, the baby, curiously enough, is weeping; perhaps the baby weeps precisely because of this sinister reversal of authority – the new and desperate responsibilities it brings. In the faintest of whispers the parents try to give comfort, try to quieten: for a moment it seems that they might even have to stifle. There is that excruciating temptation. Because the baby’s drastic ascendancy has to do with its voice: not its fat fists, its useless legs, but its voice, the sounds it makes, its capacity to weep. As usual, the parents have the power of life and death over the baby, as all parents do. But now, in these special circumstances and in this special room, the baby has the power over them. And over everybody else who is gathered there. As I said, about thirty souls.
The whole process is a lot tougher on Tod than it is on me. I’m always awake when the dreams happen. And I am innocent… The sick shine of an impostor reality, the aura of complicated accusation – I don’t get that. I just settle back, admittedly with some apprehension, and give witness to the late show screened by Tod’s head, by his hidden mind – by his future. When the time comes to experience the things that Tod’s dreams foretell (when we find out, for instance, how the baby came to have such power), then maybe I will take it harder than him. Occasionally, nowadays, Irene is around to gee Tod up before he goes in there.
I have to say that in physical terms Tod and I are now feeling absolutely terrific. Never better. In the morning, before the mirror, as I inspect Tod’s humanity – he shows no sign of noticing the improvement. Me, I want to click my heels, I want to clench my fist: ‘Yes.’ Why aren’t people happier about how comparatively great they’re feeling? Why don’t we hug each other all the time, saying, ‘How about this?’
On the rooftop, on the TV, on the ledge, high up, the crying man in the white shirt, holding the baby. Nearby, a policeman, urgently crouched, all cocked and bunched for this urgent encounter or transaction. The cop is saying that he wants to take the baby. In effect, he wants to disarm the crying man. The crying man has no weapon. The baby is the weapon.
That’s not how things stand in the black room, with its groping carbon and tracery, its stilled figures. I just know this. In here, the baby is not a weapon. In here, the baby is more like a bomb.
