by Jerry
For a change, we used to fish in Central Park. Mildred, being better at it than I, would watch her float bob in the water while I stood guard with the rifle. We cooked out on the roof where, when first we had taken the apartment, I had had built a little barbecue. Water was now obtained with difficulty. Some we brought from Central Park, some we collected by damming up a section of our roof.
At this time there were very few people left in the city—only a few thousand—because everything had broken down with the breakdown of credit. People simply would not work without money. They were not even ready to save their lives by co-operative effort. So deeply had our competitive system bitten into us that they preferred to sit around and starve, or else they ran away and starved—except the few who, like ourselves, lived on what they could find or loot from the stores. The word “loot” persists, though obviously it was no longer looting. It remained, however, an operation of some danger because of the darkness of the stores and the maniacs who had taken up their abode in many of them—savages who resented any intrusion into their territory. I remember one man that I shot at Gimbel’s while Mildred held the flashlight on him. He was an immense man who ran at us roaring with rage as he brandished a meat cleaver. We had gone to Gimbel’s for caviar and pate de foie gras. They had a lot of it, for apparently the other looters, having less sophisticated tastes than ours, left it alone.
For anyone who liked adventure I suppose this would have been very interesting, but to us who had become almost sedentary and were quite unaccustomed to swift movement, hard living, or even loud noises, the adjustment was most difficult. Yet in this twilight world, we succeeded in living and forming a pattern of life, even remembering the days with some semblance of accuracy. I, who had always hated a schedule of any kind, now invented one. Monday: Central Park, fishing; Wednesday and Friday: food-looting expeditions. Inevitably, though, the human instinct being what it is, more was collected than food. We found some beautiful fur coats—stone marten, blue mink, Russian sable, and ermine. The ermine came in very handy for winter hunting in the snow. We picked up some wonderful diamond rings of fifteen or twenty carats, ruby clips, necklaces and bracelets. We both looked like pirates. We were far from clean but we were dressed in suede, silk and satin; we wore rare fur coats from which I had cut the arms to give greater freedom. We had silk sashes around our waists, carried an arsenal of daggers and pistols, and over our shoulders were slung the best guns New York could provide.
We had begun by this time to collect our big dogs. We needed them for protection and hunting. In the beginning we had a boxer and a police dog. We hunted other dogs to feed on. The transition of my wife from a charming, rather fastidious young American girl to a primeval savage was most interesting. She soon learned to use a knife and to skin an animal as well as I did. She was never a good shot, having difficulty in closing her left eye, so I got her a shotgun and a .32-caliber Colt. I told her that if anyone attacked, she was to wait till he was right on her, then push the muzzle of the pistol into his stomach—she would feel it go in—and then continue pulling the trigger till she passed out. No girl could have had better instructions. Fortunately, she never had to follow them. The only near disaster occurred once when I was some distance away, but her assailant was pulled down by the dogs, and when I arrived, the man who had approached her was dead. This reassured me because I had not been, until that moment, quite certain how the dogs would act, as they were young and unused to dangerous work.
This was about the time that we heard the first stories of the Red Death, the strange dancing disease that was, according to the information we had, sweeping not only the country, but the world. We soon saw evidences of it. In fact, one of these dancers was the second man our dogs killed. The disease was contagious. The first symptom was the appearance of great health and gaiety, which was followed by a mad happiness; we would see rosy-faced couples dancing and singing in the streets as the disease began to spread. In the later phase, the victim either fell into a coma or attacked anyone in the vicinity without warning. This is what happened one evening as we were about to cross Sixth Avenue: a man and a woman suddenly appeared and began pirouetting and jitterbugging. I hoped they would pay no attention to us, but the man saw us. I knew that we were in for trouble, for he suddenly got beyond the happy stage and became murderous. He reached me with incredible speed and had me down before I could do anything to defend myself. But as he gripped me, my wife fired three shots into him from her .32 and the dogs attacked him, the boxer grasping his thigh and the police dog his shoulder. They knocked him onto his back and quickly finished him off.
I picked up the sack I had been carrying and felt very shaken, for I was certain I had been contaminated, and now had to work out plans for a method of restraint that my wife could use which would prevent my hurting her when I reached the paroxysms of fury that were the final symptoms of the disease. I had my own theory and was certain that if she did not touch me she would be all right. Naturally, no one knew much about the disease, but I had the idea that with restraint there was the possibility of survival, death occurring through the berserk rage, which had the effect of burning up the victim. I therefore conceived the plan of going to the local police station—we had dumped our sack of loot—and getting a pair of handcuffs and some chains. The incubation period was said to be a week, but to take no chances I found a ring bolt, fastened it in the floor of the apartment and attached the chain and handcuffs to it at once. All I had to do now, the minute I got the first symptoms, the feeling of joy and the flush that went with it, was to handcuff myself and then hope for the best. I told Mildred of this plan and gave her her instructions. She was to keep out of my reach, give me no food but plenty of water. This she was to put in a tin measuring cup and push into my reach.
The precautions I had taken frightened my wife, and I had to spend the next few days reassuring her, telling her that there was nothing to fear and that it was all done “just in case.” For my own part, I, was certain that I could not have failed to contract the disease, and so we spent our time hunting furiously for more canned provisions and collecting a reserve of wood and water. I also obtained more ammunition for the shotgun, because this was the best weapon for Mildred: a scattergun to point in the general direction of anything that frightened her was more likely to be of use than any other kind.
What follows is all that I can remember of the days that ensued. I do not actually remember them at all and have reconstructed the story from what I remember of what Mildred told me when it was over.
It seems, according to what she said, that on the seventh day—our guess about the incubation period had apparently been right—I woke in great form in the morning and began to sing opera. The remarkable thing was that I sang in tune, which was extraordinary, for I have no ear for music. This proved that I was ill. With expanded chest and wide-open mouth I stood on the roof singing to the silent city. Then I dressed, putting on a brown suit with a white pin stripe. I also put on my gaudiest tie, one that I had bought when we were working in Hollywood. It was a red-white-and-green affair made of silk, hand blocked, and about a foot wide at the wide end. I had never dared to wear it before. I then danced all by myself, tripping lightly up and down to unheard music, and then undressed and broke into a series of Zulu War dances. At this moment some glimmering of sanity must have returned to me, because Mildred said I covered my face with my hands and burst into tears; when the paroxysm was over I picked up the handcuffs, clipped them over my wrists, and lay down like a chained dog to sleep.
What came next must have been completely terrifying for my wife. I am a big man, six feet two, and I weighed two hundred pounds. Having slept for some hours, I woke in the fury that is the secondary symptom of the disease. Having circled the room to test the length of my chain, I crouched on my haunches like an animal and leaped at her. Fortunately, the right bolt held and I was dragged back, being pulled onto my shoulders and falling on my back with my handcuffed hands between my legs. This seemed to h
ave knocked me out for a moment, but I was only playing possum. Forgetting what I had told her, and with a wife’s instinct of solicitude, she came to see if I were hurt. In a second I was up, and raising my manacled hands, I swung them down at her head in an attempt to stun her. She jumped back just in time and then decided to obey the instructions I had given her. Fetching a tin cup full of water, she pushed it into my reach with the tip of a jointed fishing rod. I seized it and tried to draw her to me, but the tip came off in my hand.
For ten days I remained in alternating states of animal fury and animal sleep. The sitting room resembled the den of a beast. Filthy, naked except for a blanket that I used not for modesty but for warmth, I growled and sulked, wringing my fingers and licking my wrists where the steel had bitten into the flesh and worn away the skin so that it was a ring of festering sores. I drank quantities of water, cup after cup, and each time I had done so I threw the cup at Mildred’s head with a clumsy two-handed throw. My ribs stood out in arcs about my chest, my stomach was sunken, my eyes stared wildly; my whole skin was pink shading into red, almost scarlet; while my face and neck, in contrast to the rest of my body, were swollen, apparently suffused with blood to the point where I was unrecognizable. For some reason, the sebaceous glands were stimulated by the fever, and hair grew in great profusion all over my body.
This, then, is the story of my illness as reported by my wife and as I remember it. On the eleventh day it ended as suddenly as it had begun. My face was now white with illness; my eyes, no longer dilated, were sunken; and, instead of having the strength of ten, I could hardly lift my hands to my head. The fever had burned itself out, and I was alive. That was my first conscious thought. I was rational. I said, “I think it’s over.” Mildred said, “Yes,” and burst into tears. I said, “You can let me go now,” and for a while it seemed doubtful that she would be able to, because she had put the handcuff key away so safely that she could not remember where it was. She found it at last in an empty flower vase.
A period of convalescence and reflection followed. It is easy to reflect when one is ill; there is nothing else to do. Our reserves of food being ample, we just sat around and talked. The ten days of my illness had been notable for the final evacuation of the hotel. As far as we knew, we were now the only people in it.
I was now the most intelligent man in the world. I knew answers that should have been obvious by implication to everyone when the first bomb burst in the New Mexican desert. I had survived the Red Death by a miracle and was therefore even more special, because a lot of people had survived the blast, but so far as I knew, I was the only man to recover from the plague. All that came out of this period of reflection, during which I regained some measure of my strength, was the certainty that what had been wrong with us was nothing but stupidity. We had been too stupid to be afraid, or too afraid to acknowledge our fear.
What I’d feared now happened. Mildred came down with the fever. Her symptoms followed the accepted pattern of dancing and singing, but considering our differences in size (she was under five feet tall and weighed only ninety-three pounds) I could not bring myself to tie her up, with the result that when she turned on me, suddenly leaping like a tiger cat onto my shoulder and sinking her teeth into my neck, I had great difficulty in escaping her. As soon as I got my hands free I threw her down and put the handcuffs on her. Her hands were so small that she wriggled out of them till I succeeded in padding them with a handkerchief. She bit, scratched, and kicked fiercely all the time I was restraining her. Having recovered from the disease, I was “salted,” as we used to say in Africa of horses that had had horse sickness, and so I was able to take better care of her than she had of me. Nor was she hard to handle because she would seize any lure, like a bath towel, that I offered to her, and worry it, which kept her occupied till I could get right up to her—for a woman, like a horse or any other animal, is less dangerous when she is quite close to you. A kick or a blow has to travel to gain strength. Nevertheless, despite all my efforts—my keeping her covered and hand-feeding her—she weakened and died the day that the fever ended, curling up in my arms so that I thought she was just sleeping and did not know she was dead till I put her down.
This description seems somewhat cold and unfeeling, but there is no way of describing such an incident except by understatement. The point was that she had been and now was not. I was almost mad with sadness and loneliness. My brave little companion was gone and her body had to be disposed of. Burial was unthinkable, for no matter how deep I might have buried her, the hunger-crazed dogs would have dug her up. So, collecting furniture from the houses in the neighborhood, I made a great pyre, rested her body on the top of it, and set it ablaze, standing watch over it with a rifle in my hands. Like a Hindu widow, she was burned—utterly destroyed with the household goods of those who had died before her.
It was then that I thought of suicide and, deciding against it, began to take to the bottle. Oddly enough, the dogs were of no help, the wet noses of their sympathy doing nothing to alleviate my sorrow. Some days of this, or weeks—time, which had been getting vaguer, now ceased to exist entirely, because if you are alone there is no time—and then I made my decision to leave a home which no longer held anything but memories. Seeking a place to live, I moved first to the Hotel Pierre because of its proximity to Central Park; and then ten years or so later I moved to this cave in the Chelsea because of the sylvan beauties of its surroundings—its grottoes, pool and springs attracting me profoundly.
Leaving home was a strange sensation. Each thing I looked at had a history. Given by friends, bought, inherited, each thing represented something other than what it was. They were objects certainly, some, of them objects of art, but they were also memories. This man and that woman came to the surface of memory; this place and that place; this year and that year. We were in New Orleans then, I thought. We bought those little brass cannons on our honeymoon. We bought this picture in New York, that ivory Buddha in Paris. What was it they said about Buddhas? That you should never use them for anything—not as paperweights or doorstops; you should just have them to look at. This was home, a collection of objects—chairs, tables, beds, chests of drawers, china, silver, pictures, books—that had been integrated into a personality by their possessors—by us. This was home in its final phase; built up slowly, it was now suddenly disintegrated.
Several times I went back to look at the apartment, to walk about in it as I had walked before, to feel die things I had handled in the past. I even collected a few things as souvenirs and took them over to the Pierre. It may have been these minor objects of art, or it may have been the location of my new abode, its convenience to 57th Street, that prompted me to make a collection of the smaller pictures in the art galleries there.
The galleries were intact, no one having bothered to loot them—jewels and gold being the things that attracted the robbers. I got some very lovely things: a Poussin, a Utrillo; I got pictures by Renoir, Ingres, Vermeer, Manet, Monet, Dali, and Winslow Homer. Later on, this picture collecting became a kind of obsession and no doubt helped me to retain my sanity, for I would hunt the more expensive apartments and houses of the city in search of works of art—pictures, bibelots, and books. I took things from museums and libraries, and so created a museum of my own in one of the large reception rooms of the hotel. The catholicity of my taste would no doubt have amazed the late curators of the Metropolitan or the Museum of Modern Art, but I have a very interesting collection to which, even now, I occasionally add an exceptional piece if I run across one. And it is very restful after a day’s hunting In Central Park to drop in and look at the masterpieces of our vanished civilization and reflect upon the marvelous capacity of man for variability.
It is interesting to look back now and see the devices I unknowingly employed to keep going. Had I not been alone, had Mildred lived, there might have been a great excitement in this life once we had got used to it. Even as it was, I grew to enjoy it. I see that today, when the even tenor of my life
has been shattered by the sudden appearance of the strangers. Had they been men, I should unquestionably have killed them, but since they were young women I could not. That I could not was not a matter of chivalry’, for chivalry needs a social context in which to function. The force that stayed my finger—which was on the trigger—was one much older than chivalry, being the force that had given birth to it. These were young females of my own species. No factor can be more disturbing to any man or animal.
It is hard to imagine the sport of hunting in North America at this time unless the game is described. The mutations mentioned earlier did not all appear suddenly—first one turned up and then another. I found the first sign of anything odd about six years after the blast. I was out looking for a deer in Central Park, and I came upon what looked like a dog spoor eight inches across. My dogs, however, became very excited and went off in full cry.
As I trotted after my pack (at that time it consisted of about fifteen couples of grown dogs, and ten half-and three-quarter-grown pups who were learning their business) I felt that they had bitten off more than they could chew. The spoor puzzled me. This was an immense beast—the stride was well over a yard—with imprints so deep that it must weigh at least half a ton. I had gone about a mile when I heard the baying of the dogs. I also heard some of them screaming the way a hurt dog does. I hurried and then, prompted by some instinct, decided to climb a tree to get a better view. It was a good thing I did because the dogs had surrounded a huge black wolf that stood as high at the withers as a horse. Three dogs were dead and, as I looked, the wolf caught another—a handsome red-colored dog called Fox—and tossed him in the air the way a good terrier does a rat. The dog fell howling with his back broken. As the wolf seized their companion, the other dogs darted in from all around to bite him, seizing his hind legs and tail, one bitch leaping at his throat. I had only the 303 with me, a rifle quite unsuited to this kind of beast had I been on the ground where he could get me, but a good enough weapon from my point of vantage in a tree. Resting the barrel along a branch, I emptied the magazine into him, and before he could decide what to do he was down and the dogs had swarmed all over him. He killed three more before he died, and hurt six. This experience taught me a very important lesson, and I never went out again without two guns, one of them a 450 express.
