COLD
Driving at
night, one night, one of many, many, all black pearls strung together, all
death instinct skies. Julia, sitting in
the passenger seat beside self, is not liking any of it, she doesn't want to
know. I said I don’t want to talk
about it, she said. A while back. She is
leaving, she is tightlipped, she looks out her window at the black masses we
are passing with a gaze that endows the general landscape with the malediction
of her present anger and unhappiness.
Self has been drinking, self, in fact, is drinking, - he holds a
Fosters oil can with one hand, he holds the wheel with the other. He'd had several scotches with his pasta and
clams, he'd revved himself up to a pitch of jollity as Julia sipped her white
wine, lingered on her one glass, become,
before self’s very eyes, what with his newfound ability to see the very pith of
the human soul, colder and colder,
crystal and crystalline.
You're the ice queen, he says once, to state a fact. Let’s
not forget that, he says. Let’s not forget who’s forgotten, uh, how to have
fun.
The drunkenness, lately, has had a cosmological aspect -
really, it has! The drinks segue into the road, the darkness, the speed, the
music, motion and the space a certain black
throb he can wring out of the radio when it is late and the DJ can play what he
wants to, going out to nobody, homeless listeners out there, in their cars, the
congregation, or out of all of his old
tapes, which he keeps in a brown paper sack in the back seat and roots through,
one hand still on the wheel. Surprise
me, he says outloud. And before his
eyes he sees ... he sees the road uncoil, alive. The road, a creature dry and dead by day, a
sloughed skin, twitches now, come back from its mock death, which of course
self, magus that he is becoming, sees through anyway. The road is hostile,
prepared to do battle, self has felt this through miles of asphalt and on up
through the engine and the steering column and the spinal column and through
the neck bone and through the medulla oblongata and the pineal gland, where he
is connected to the divine, he has felt it in his palms, he gets in a sweat
about it; his idea is that the hostility is so specifically, personally
directed like a ray at him because he
knows, having been witness many times
in the past couple of weeks to that moment after sunset when the road gets up on its hind legs for a second and
gazes around with its own viperish purposes out of eyes all black, pixellated
pupil. It is then that he feels the road
working on his car - taking the lining out of his brakes, putting a tiny hole
of rust in his radiator, its weevil, evil consciousness fucking with his
machinery. The road’s eyes and his
have met, and for a moment he’ll be ... nothing at all. The car ploughs between
mountains, the road twitches, and the car soars, an invisible man at the wheel.
Wreck the ship, scuttle the barnacled, the oh so corrupted soul here! And then
the ancient mariner returns. Yes, then self rematerializes, the moment passes.
And self is like a lovely bottle on these nights, tonight too, filled up with a
golden liquid. In fact, coming out of
the restaurant self ran into a table and the contact resulted in a thick,
glassy clink. He distinctly heard it, he would have pointed it out but, but
what’s the point of that? They have spiritually castrated themselves, they
refuse the evidence of their senses. He’s
a sailor of glass, a vase Popeye, and if
the road leaps upon him, he will shatter. Julia doesn’t see the poetry in this,
and self likes to think that he doesn’t tell her things, why worry her, but
sometimes things get out of the gate, sometimes he doesn’t even realize it, she’ll
repeat to him later come crucial bit of esoteric wisdom self has cultivated for
his lonesome and he’ll think damn, why’d
I tell her that. These lyrical nights, these white nights, the white the other
side of black, how his body becomes
a fractaled line holding to the pattern
of a former transparent cohesiveness by
thousands of thin, icy filaments - an image self has carried away from
junk yards where cars, twisted and crushed hulks from accidents, will have webs
of blind broken glass hanging low over dashboards where the windshields once
were. Classical, isn’t it? Michaelangelo
finds the body of the mangod in the raw block of marble, Street Early finds the
wreck in the windshield. The golden liquid in self's mind splashes out into the
cold night, splashes headlong out over the hood of the car, and freezes into
tiny pearls as it drops.
Once you ‑ now we have to imagine you as a
little fellow, a tyke, a Mommy's helper, a little man, the train that could,
Pooh, Street‑come‑here! ‑ once you were locked outside the house on a very cold
winter's evening. It was snowing, and
you had been thrust into your clumsy mittens, your furry hat with the button on
the band to make the visor stiffer or (unbuttoned) looser, your heavy blue coat
with black checks like a checker board, your clunky boots which made diamond
patterns in the snow or the mud, and kicked outside by Dita, shoved out the
door, told to play.
Play!
Dita loves snow, she loves making
snowballs and bombarding her friends with them and being bombarded in shrieking
turn by them and smooshing one down your collar (you darting away I'll‑tell‑Mom),
Dita says she loves the hills covered with snow, isn't it pretty, Dita says her
favorite picture (it is up in her room,
over her bed) is a Winter Wonderland, which shows a country landscape, a sleigh
pulled by horses (arrested, here, in mid prance, the bells on the harnesses in
mid jingle) passing through it, and the snow, in easy drifts, extending way
back through some pine trees and one deciduous tree radiating woeful, leafless
dignity to a house, curls of smoke cosily rising over its chimney from a cherry
red fire you can just imagine crackling in the fireplace, Dita loves warm breath
becoming smoke in the cold air, she loves coming in and saying see how cold it
is and without any more warning than that putting her cold hand on your warm
cheek, she likes igloos and Eskimos and says when I'm eighteen, I'm going to move to Canada, she likes ice
skating, she likes to whiz around on the Robbins' pond which freezes up at the
end of December, she likes saying I can't wait until winter when it is autumn
(you like autumn), Dita likes to trudge
home over a snowy path around six o'clock, unabashed by the winter darkness,
not to be swallowed up in the big open jaws of winter, not she (unlike you, who
are too small, who have to hurry behind Dita, worried that like Pinocchio and
Jonah you too might be a mouthful for some giant creature, wait‑up‑Dita‑wait‑up),
Dita likes to go over to the Laramies who own horses, four of them, on December
days and creep into the stable with Sarah Laramie where when you shut the
rickety wooden door it is shadowy and the light only comes in through the
narrow, transom windows up overhead and there is a smell of sour, mildewing
straw and horsepiss and the cold is fleeced through only by the warmth that
comes out of the grill of the electric
floor heater glowing angry orange in a corner, and Sarah and she like to pat
the horses, Dita likes to roll in the snow and make snow angels, Dita likes
coming home and taking a warm bath, leaving a puddle of skirt socks and boots
on the bathroom floor like the dregs of a body left by some angel risen to
heaven, and she likes to come to the table in dry clothes with her long blond
hair wet.
Self finds a parking place, everything is
fine, Goddamn fine, I got you here in one piece didn’t I? and Julia, who can’t
put her life in his hands (isn’t that the only thing that counts - putting your
life in somebody’s hands?) taking her suitcase out of the back, her eyes blazing
up (the beauty of which does not, even in the slightly disordered state of mind
self finds himself in, go either unnoticed or unappreciated) I don’t want to
talk about it now, and self, doggedly, wait, going over to a pillar what is it,
ten o clock? and pulling down his zipper, the stream of piss God it is nippy
tonight sending up smoke in the air, wait, turning at the smart rap of Julia’s
heels on the concrete among the pillars
one side burdened down with her suitcase, wait, and he turns back, go
faster, jiggling his pizzle, then zipping and rushing to catch up with her,
echoes in the cold vaulted air, then out into the street between parking lot
and the glass doors of the lobby, I got you here in one piece Goddamn it,
knowing that this is a stupid thing to say, let me help you with that, hand on
the handle and her hand not loosening its grip, Julia still blazing even here
(where the wind is tackling a potato
chip bag and tackling it again all the way down to where the street curves
under the cone of light from a streetlamp) turning don’t touch me, I don’t want
your help, for God’s sake Street if you don’t give a damn about yourself I don’t
at least want you killing some innocent driver, don’t drive back to Santa Fe
tonight!
Around her mouth there are lines. Lately self has noticed that she has started
to frown in her sleep ‑ a deep, painful frown.
You stand there, immobile, wondering what
you did. I‑didn't‑do‑anything, filling
the phrase with a tearful indignation and astonishment that is natural, because
you really didn't do anything. I‑didn't‑do‑anything
is sometimes filled with hollower tears because you really did do something and
you know you really did do something and the I‑didn't‑do‑anything is a way of
calling on an organic depth of essential innocence that will wipe away the
verbal level, where you really did this thing, for instance did‑you‑kick‑your‑sister‑Street,
or did‑you‑throw‑a‑rock‑at‑the‑Laramies ‑truck.
No, this time what were you doing, you were sitting there placidly,
minding your own business, watching the last cartoon show of the day, which is
right before the news. The next thing you know you are descended upon by a lot
of wraps and scooted outside and the door shuts. You hear the lock click. Dita‑Dita, you say, and try to turn the
doorknob. The knob doesn't budge, your
hand in its mitten slides around it, Dita through the door says play.
Well, with who? Looking around, you notice lights in the
other houses on the street. This stabs
you right in the heart (under the coat, the shirt, the undershirt), because you
know in each of these houses people are sitting down to dinner in their warm
dining rooms. Some of them are watching
tv. If Mom and Dad were here, this is
exactly what you would be doing. Mom and
Dad, though, have gone out, so you had macaroni and cheese, which Dita made. Now, suddenly, you are out in this terrible
weather. When it gets too cold in the
house, there's a sound, like a metal hiccup, then there's the sound of air
coming out of the vents, and it gets warm again. But outside it gets colder and colder, that's all. So probably, like the little matchstick girl,
this is it. The little matchstick girl, at
least, had matches. You, on the other
hand, are going to die without a chance. Like a match soaked in water before
it's had a chance to be lit and burn its fool head off.
It is hopeless.
This is such a sad thought that you have
to cry. Crying makes a blur out of the
snow and the house. The blur gets
interrupted when you slip on the icy front porch stairs. You barely catch
yourself
on the handrail. Then, still crying, you head out into the snowdrifts in the
yard. Then you fall, plop, right into a
snowdrift that is pretty deep. Snow gets
inside your boots, your mittens, and paws down your back. You swing your arms around, kick your legs,
Dita‑Dita‑please. The echo of your total innocence bounces around inside you
like the bouncing ball in those cartoons where they say follow the bouncing
ball and this little ball bounces from one word to another of a song, so you
know which word to sing.
Self has a bad night.
He decides Julia's right, why make that
drive? It isn't just Santa Fe, then it's
twenty five more miles to the Glorieta exit, and ten more miles from there, up
an unpaved mountain road, used to be a lumber road, which can flip a Cherokee
Rover like that. He's seen it happen. That is, once he passed a Jeep that was
upside down by the side of the road. It
had started to snow when he left Glorieta this morning. Best find a hotel. Best go to Jack's and have a few drinks. Best explain the mountain road, explain his
artistic vision, politics, language, peculiarities of women, to Freddy. Freddy and self swap drinks. Sweeping gestures sweep a Busch and a tumbler
of scotch off the bar and into Freddy's lap.
Freddy rises, the bartender comes over, I'm cutting you off. Inexplicable, the likes and dislikes of
bartenders. Self puts down his money, I
want one more, one more for my buddy, and the bartender just looks at him.
I want one more, one more for my buddy.
I said, the bartender says slowly, that
I'm cutting you off. Get out of here.
There's a Mexican guy in a stained white
apron behind self's chair. He just
appears there. He doesn't say
anything. Freddy and self go out to the
parking lot. Self is screaming, he's
been screaming since he got off his bar stool.
Sometimes self wants to murder everybody. Sometimes he has rage fantasies. The last six months he's had more rage
fantasies than sex fantasies. He will be
up in a tower with a rifle, his targets in Brownian motion below him, dots he
is disconnecting from the picture. Or he
will have a rifle, make that an AK‑47, an Uzi, and numerous explosives, and
he's walking down the street tossing fizzing sticks of dynamite in open
doorways of shops and houses. He has a
picture of this in his mind, slabs of conflicting perspective and cartoon
colors showing houses in flames ‑three orangish spikes‑ bodies of men and women
and children falling through the air, lying dismembered in the street or
hanging out of windows like limp dolls, dots of red everywhere. He will run berserk with a butcher knife,
gouging, cutting through to the spinal cord, crack, feeling in his hand and arm
the momentum of the blade meeting the bone, crack, and with maniacal strength
plunging the knife into and out of bodies, getting through the fatty outer
layers to the unnameable inner gore.
These fantasies pass, they are over in a second, but sometimes self is
vaguely shaken that he entertains them so much.
He has elaborated the imagery of them for his own amusement, but what if
this is how it starts? No, he knows himself, this can't be serious, right?
Freddy seems to know self too. He seems to think that swapping beers gives
him the right. What the fuck is this? Maybe it does, but Freddy doesn't know
self. Self finds himself making the
point. You don't know me, man, you think
you know me but you don't. Self has
given up the idea of a brick through the window. The Mexican guy is standing there at the door
with his arms crossed, first of all, second of all, where is he going to find a
brick? And if he is going to murder
everybody he is going to have to concentrate, go down the line. Freddy, for instance, his erstwhile ally,
would be there. Freddy just materialized
there in the barseat next to him and now, out in the parking lot, Freddy thinks
this gives him the right to boss self around.
Cool it, man, he keeps saying.
Freddy doesn't get it. Self says,
I didn't do anything, I didn't fucking do
anything. So self slams off to his own car and he's out on the road again,
which is bad. He goes past the
University, there are stop lights in this part of town every two blocks, and a
huge lid keeps shutting down on everything.
Self is attached to that huge lid, a fluttering appendage. Self's idea is that Julia is right, best not
go home with that huge lid falling and blotting everything out, but he never
remembers how to get around Albuquerque, he has a tendency to get on roads that
start going exactly opposite of where he wants to go and that won't let him off,
he has to go ten, fifteen miles before he finds an exit to take him to the highway
going the other way, which means he makes big circles. He thinks go east, and he thinks is this
east? Because sometimes the world turns around on self, it is a subtle thing,
the directions out there in the world get misaligned with his deep intuitions
about space. There's a glitch in the
inner radar. Maybe he has gotten too
dizzy too often in his life. Count up
the forms of dizziness: Pot, Rimbaud,
painting, alcohol, sex, Jan, Bella, Julia, go way on back and its glue, go up
money, success, failure, go on and on and he begins to get dizzy counting up.
But the main question now, before the lid
shuts entirely, is: does dizziness have a form?
Interesting question, but now self is pondering a sign. If the letters on the sign were all lit up,
they'd say Happy Trails Hotel. The R is
out, though. For some reason pulling in
to the parking lot self thought this was funny.
Now he is outside the car, shivering, and snow is sifting down. Self has on a big black coat which
smells. He'd left it on the porch a
couple of nights ago and when he came out in the morning, some creature had
pissed on it. Self looks at that sign,
and all the snow coming down from the dreary sky, and he thinks why not here? Although he knows the answer to that
question, he isn't capable of putting together such things as answers and
questions. He's part of a different
grammatical tribe. Right, in this tribe,
see, you can't pick out any bit of speech and say: here's a question. There are only statements that point to something
and sort of broken statements, which don't point to anything.
Walking across the parking lot, self is
trying to figure out if that makes sense.
The lobby of the hotel is the size of a
bathroom, and it smells like one too, acrid odor of a debauched sea. A seaman,
a peeman. He does have to take another leak. They have a greasy green felt carpet on the
floor, and a counter to divide the small space into two even smaller ones, and
a man behind the counter who is fat and bored and doesn't check self's
identification. He asks for twenty dollars, which self fishes out of his
wallet, and then he just gives self his keys and goes back to watching his
television show. There is a cardboard
sign up that says in magic marker there are no, absolutely no, refunds for
rooms. There is another cardboard sign
up that says you can rent a video in another room in the back, and there's an
arrow to point you back there. Self goes
back there and it is all x rated films.
Hm, self is not feeling physically up to an x rated film, the rub his
poker until he gets something out of it, that would completely drain him,
cerebral sex diminishing his lobal capacities for normal genital stimulation
and response, for load and launch, for rooting and tooting, as the good doctor says, but he takes a look
at the boxes. Amazing how the colors of these pictures seem to be keyed by the
color of dick on a bad day for dick ‑ it
is exactly that dull frumpy pink and flesh and slightly purplish grayish color.
The shadow of dick is on every picture, on the paneling of the walls, on the
face of the man who, it turns out, has two counters he stands at, one in the
lobby and one back here. The shadow of dick is not happy tonight, self feels it
seeping into himself. Self gives the guy a ghastly smile, so long. Then he
takes his key and walks out of the lobby into a burst of cold, cold wind, and
goes the wrong way twice around the building which hides room 20B, his coat
flapping madly in the wind. The smell of
the coat bothers him more and more.
You are in bed now letting your hands hang
down. They are so heavy, like they are
made of concrete, and they keep growing.
They are almost as big as you are, how are you going to hold them
up? So you scream, you want Mom to make
them stop growing. But Mom comes in and
claims that they aren’t growing, and then she takes your temperature. The tip of the thermometer feels funny under
your tongue, it runs into a thing under the tongue and makes it feel like you
are choking.
One thing at least is that you don’t have
to go to school. You have to go to
Doctor Schrapper, though, which is alright.
You understand, you are green‑around‑the‑gills. Dad says that about gills, it means that
somebody is sick. If you really had
gills, you d have a big problem. You ve
proved this experimentally. Once you had a goldfish and you took it out of the
bowl to have a look at it. Then you put
it on the carpet, you were going to do something. But for some reason you had to leave for a
while, go to another room. Something you
had to do. Anyway, when you came back it
looked like the goldfish had run away, because it wasn’t there anymore. The next day Mom was vacuuming and she found
it in a corner. She said it must have jumped out of its bowl, and you said,
slyly, that you didn’t know that fish could jump that far. This was one of
those times when you had to forget something fast. You had to remember something, too ‑ putting
the goldfish back in the bowl. When you
pictured yourself putting the goldfish back in the bowl, that meant the fish
could only get out by jumping, which is how it died in the corner. Mom said that was what the fishs’ gills were all
about ‑ we have lungs, so we can’t breath underwater, but water is like air to
fishes. You told yourself that maybe
when you were sleepwalking you put the fish back into the bowl. You were fascinated with sleepwalking,
thinking that people did things when they were sleepwalking that they didn’t
remember. So maybe you had a whole other
life sleepwalking, which you would never know about. In any case, you got the pictue in your mind
of putting the goldfish back in the bowl instead of losing it on the carpet,
and this made you feel better.
In Doctor Schrapper’s office you spotted a
jigsaw puzzle box and started putting the puzzle together. Mom was sniffling. She had a feeling about you the way felt
about the goldfish, namely if you hadn t had to do something in another room
and left the goldfish alone, the goldfish would never have gotten lost and
died. Not that you cried about it, but Mom cried about things. In your opinion, since your hands had shrunk
back to normal size and you didn’t have to go to school, things were in pretty
good shape. What you really wish is that
you were going to Doctor Schrapper’s office with a bullet in your arm. Then, through clenched teeth, you’d say take‑it‑out‑Doc,
and he d give you a shot of whiskey.
This might hurt a bit, Kid, he d say, and roll up his sleeves. Then he d take some hot pliers looking things
and he d pull the bullet out. You’d
scream: AHHHHHHHHH!
But Doctor Schrapper isn’t about to give
you whiskey. Instead, he brings you into
a cold room and asks you to take off your shirt and undershirt, and your pants.
Doctor Schrapper is a
balding
old man with nose hair and gray hair on his arms, and he makes you lay down on
a reclining chair which, for some reason, is covered with a white sheet of paper. Then he sticks a stick
in your mouth and he takes a little flashlight and he peers into your mouth and
up your nose and in your ear, like he s looking for a quarter that he lost
inside your head. Then he kneads your chest and he makes you cough. He goes out then, and leaves you there to
contemplate your underwear. You have on
the pair that has bears printed on it.
Then he comes back with Mom. He says our
little boy here has pneumonia.
Self finds his room, finally, and the
first thing he notices is the door’s splintered on the bottom. Closing it he kneels on creaky joints and
sees that it is more than splintered, there is a hole kicked in it. A violent moment in some booted scene. He
relates, probably he could find a scene not unlike it in one of the films they’re
renting in the main office. He is too tired, he gets up and sheds his coat,
passing by a battered dresser with a tv on it and a dusty, cracked mirror, some
dim vampire back there, baby, not me, and hurries into the bathroom, where he
is suddenly looking down into a copious evacuation settled in the very maw of
the toilet. Great, he thinks, getting,
now, an answer to a question asked a while back, the answer being because it is
a shithole! And there is another
question, too, not fully formed but now answered in the bright indecent glare
of the bathroom’s light ‑ so this is why there are no refunds. The handle
produces a drizzle in which the coils of excrement are sucked reluctantly down,
and he pisses, starting to wake up to his surroundings. It is cold in here with the hole in the door
letting in the wind. He goes over and
turns the faucet on. The cold water
handle comes off in his hand. The hot water comes out cold, and he stoops and
tries to suck some of it into his mouth.
The water tastes like rust, and it runs down his chin. He gargles and spits the water out, then
checks out the shower. The shower stall
has mud, or maybe a more dubious substance on the floor of it. Self says
outloud they must have been renting this place to escaping cons or
something. To have orgies in. He turns
the water on in the shower, checks it with his hand. It comes out cold, so he decides to check out
his room again while it heats up. By that time, too, the water will have washed
away the dirt, he’s decided it’s dirt, on the stall floor.
Self goes back and takes as sturdy a look
around as he is capable of. His magus
powers are definitely low watt tonight. The hole in the door, he now sees, was
not kicked in, but kicked out.
Interesting, not something he wants to think about. There is a
television and a VCR, both coin operated, on a stand in one corner. There is the bed.
Self squeemishly settles his hams on the
bed. The mattress is soft. The cover is thin and red, and dotted over
with cigarette burn marks. Self stands
up and lifts the cover and gazes at the sheet underneath. The sheet is covered with yellowish stains.
Self puts back down the cover.
Then self goes back into the
bathroom. His clothes drop. He tears a sheet of toilet paper off the
roll, lays it on the counter, and blink, drops a contact, and blink, drops the
other. Then he barreled into the shower.
The water is lukewarm, and as he lets himself get soaked ‑ oh for the
water of life! ‑ it turns, with a malice expressive of the whole world’s
resistance to him tonight, cold. He
turns off the shower and comes out and he sees that he made a mistake not to
look around for the towels. There is only one cloth in the bathroom, which is a
washrag. He mops himself with that. Then he takes the toilet paper roll and winds
a skein around his hand. He tries to dry
himself with the toilet paper. The paper keeps breaking off and sticking to
him. He is starting to shiver. Oh shit, he says outloud. Oh fucking shit.
Finally he dries himself with his pants
and shirt.
He is shivering violently now. At first he sort of likes it. When self was a kid he liked to play with
trembling. He’d let his hands tremble
and he’d let his voice tremble and he’d be an old man. He’d watch his hands do
this thing, holding them up, the hands shaking.
It was as if he’d opened up his chest and was watching his heart pump ‑
the sensation he got was of that same irretrievable objectness of the body
engaged in a blind, autonomous rhythm upon which the consciousness could only
settle as a supervenient irritant, a sort of mosquito on the very skin of
being. All the same, from another angle
these were his hands. He and his body,
at these times, formed a peculiar, totemic bond, like the bond between a player
and his marker on the Monopoly board, or between a chess player and the piece
he just touched. Go up twenty‑three years or so and here self is, again, fascinated
with the tremble running over his body, half willing it. A moment later, though, he regrets having
been complicit with the shaking, because he can’t stop it. Even his teeth are chattering.
He strides naked into the bedroom. There must be a heater in this place. He goes over to what looks like the heat, a
box with a grill and a panel that hangs under the window, and he opens the
panel. Yes. He turns on the heat, but nothing happens.
If only he could murder somebody right
now.
Instead, he essays the vain gesture of
gnashing his chattering teeth, and thinks why do the heathen rage? I can tell you. He sees himself standing there naked, drunk and
freezing. He ll either die of exposure
or use the bed. He retrieves his coat
from the floor and shakes it out, letting it settle full length on the bed. The coat is heavy and damp and seems to smell
more and more. The smell kills him. What is it, wool? Some wet wool smell and some animal
trace. Disgusting. He turns out the lights, then lays himself
gingerly down on the coat and wraps the blanket around him. It is as if he were lying on a cliff over an
abyss. As if he would be injured if he
crawled beneath the cover. Well, now,
who knows just what is crawling
beneath the cover. His legs are shaking
and he feels light, and there is enough alcohol in his body that, closing his
eyes, he falls headward in the unbalanced dark for years.
Self wakes up and the room is dark and his
feeling is that it is still dark outside.
Self is in a panic. He is freezing. The shakes seem to spring
awake all at once along with self, and he can't stop them. He has a minor problem with where he is. He doesn't know where he is.
However, self has made a big
decision. It came to him in the aimless
interval of sleep, from which he is emerging all charged up with fear, as if
sleep had suddenly shaped itself to this purpose and shook him awake. All he has to do is wait for the shakes to
subside.
He waits for a couple of minutes. It is cold, but he is paniced to the point
where he is actually sweating. He thinks
maybe he will go back to sleep and wake up tomorrow and from whereever he is he
will depart, with calmness and dignity.
But even though he closes his eyes, it doesn't help.
He's awake, and now is now.
Now is now, he says to himself, getting
out of bed and turning on the lights.
What I need is a knife, he thinks.
He looks in the drawers of the dresser.
In one of the drawers there is a mousetrap with a fuzzy thing in it;
maybe the thing used to be a mouse.
There is a candy bar wrapper in another drawer.
The dresser is useless.
If only he'd packed a razor. Packed, he
thinks, as if I came here with anything packed at all.
There is nothing sharp in the bathroom,
either. There's only a large puddle of
water in there. Self bangs around the
one drawer in the commode, he pulls it out and flings it down. It makes an amazingly loud sound. He kicks it.
AHHHH! he's broken his fucking foot.
No, it doesn't matter. He goes
back in the bedroom and takes the drawers out of the dresser in there and
flings them around. The mousetrap and
the thing that is in it fly out, landing somewhere on the floor. Probably I'll
step on that thing, he thinks. It would
be just like my life to do a thing like that.
Self stood there, and then he thought my
keys. He went into the bathroom and
searched in his pants and came up with his keys. Maybe this will work. He went back into the bedroom and sat down on
the bed, next to one of the overturned drawers.
He looked at each key. The car
key. No good. The mailbox key. No good.
The back door key. Now the
backdoor key was new, he'd had it made about two weeks ago. He ran a finger over the teeth and decided to
try.
He took the key off the ring and held his
left arm out stiffly. He waited to see
if the arm would shake. It didn't shake. Taking a firm grip of the key with his right
hand, he went to work, sawing at the wrist of his left arm.
After a couple of minutes he stopped and
looked at the marks on his wrist. His
skin was pink and abraded, but it didn't look serious.
Self thought has anybody ever slit his
wrists with a key? Surely somebody. Mayakovsky ‑ how did he die? Stepped on the throat of his own song, or
something, but probably not with a key.
Who was it, Cicero? Seneca? Slit his wrists. Probably used an obsidian blade. One thing this room isn't going to yield up, obsidian
blades. Perhaps he should have asked in
the video place. Got any obsidian
blades, buddy?
No this is ridiculous, nobody in history
ever slit his wrists with a key. Self
looks around the room wildly. His wrist
hurt a little from all the friction, and there was a tiny track of small red
beads where he'd been sawing, but you'd have to wait years to bleed to death
this way. Well, what if I eat my own
shit, he thinks. Self considers this,
then thinks about all he knows about E coli.
He doesn't know anything about E. Coli.
Gives you the trots or something.
Die on the john like Elvis Presley.
Then he considers the bed. What
if I ate that disgusting sheet? There
was probably new mega sexually transmitted diseases all over that sheet, ones
they've been breeding in prisons, from shower rape to shower rape, for
years. Self does his old‑miner‑come‑to‑town
cackle. There's gold in them thar
sheets! he says aloud. But the idea of
eating the sheets might be considered insane.
Really, the super AIDS virus lurking in the sheets, even if it really
were lurking in the sheets, would have to be a true monster to knock him off
all at once. Probably he'd have a decade
to wither and weather in. And by his
reckoning, even doing nothing he surely wasn't going to last a whole
decade. He'd die, in other words, before
his suicide was finished, which would give God a problem. And God has such a bureaucracy set up it
probably wouldn't even do that, self thought, probably the devil has merely to
fill out a change order form, one prematurely dead suicide.
It wouldn't do to eat the sheets.
Suddenly self gets up. Sometimes he cracks himself up. He stands in front of the mirror and he
closes his eyes. Don't think. He balls up his fist and swings with all his
might at the mirror. AHHHH! The impact
hurts, and when he looks at his fist there's a cut running across the
fingers. It was bloody. Finally, some blood. Just a little stupid pain, get over it.
He'd made a big crack in the mirror. Hitting it again, same hand, real pain this
time, he cracked a piece out of it. He
picked it up, don't think, don't think, sat down on the bed, don't think, don't
think, and closed his eyes. Raising the
piece of mirror, he slashed down at his arm.
The mirror made a jagged cut that slid
down over his left arm and slid over his left thigh. Seering pain, an assembly line bringing sheet
after bonging sheet of pain up the nerves.
A charivari of pain banging after self who is up on his feet now, in the
bathroom. Shit, he can't believe it,
head bent over arm, other hand with a broken faucet handle in it, shit,
throwing it down and not even hearing it hit the floor, barging over to the
shower. Shit, sticking his arm out, the
shock of the cold water nearly decimating him. Blood in earnest now, the comedy
is over. Self kneels in a puddle of
water on the bathroom floor. His blood,
which he can't seem to stop, is dripping in the puddle, turning it red. He is trying to whip the belt off his pants
which are sopping wet, so that he can bind the arm.
The main thing is not to bleed to death.
Which is how self came to emerge, oh vita
nuova! pantless, wrapped in a bloody coat (smelling of wet wool and some animal
trace) to greet a cold gust like all the bitterness in the world and the sun
rising up above the taco place across the street on his thirty‑third
birthday.
St. Nicholas Day, December sixth, 1993.
