Arc of the Comet

by Greg Fields

  ’Name your stroke, boys. The butterfly at ten paces? The breast stroke perhaps, if you wish? No matter. I’ll duel under any terms.’

  Respect, he had been led to conclude, was even sweeter when it had to be wrenched from reluctant hearts.

  The seminar, and McIlweath’s concurrent daydreams, came to a halt at 11:30. He had not said a single word during the discussion of Apuleus’s satiric techniques. He stacked his two books atop his notebook and left the room. Walking out of the old stone building he felt no compunction to study. The campus rose around him in its ennui like bars of a cage. Not knowing precisely how to fill the time before his next class but certain he had no stomach for anything academic, he headed for the student center. He was not hungry. His appetite had been almost nonexistent for several days, but at least he might grab the morning paper.

  McIlweath settled at a table in the small basement cafeteria after going through the line to pick up half a grapefruit and some orange juice. He had also pulled that morning’s Boston Globe. As he sat there reading and slurping what passed for an early lunch, an acquaintance from the English Department stopped by.

  “Tom McIlweath, how’re you doing?”

  “Hello, Joel,” said McIlweath looking up from his paper. He seemed to recall the other’s name as Joel, and he hoped that he wasn’t wrong about this, now that he had blurted it out. They had only met a few times on the bus from the west end to campus. Recognizing each other as graduate students, they had exchanged some superficial conversations. McIlweath had seen him around campus but this was the first time they had spoken while not in motion. “Care to join me?” McIlweath asked despite seeing that Joel carried a tray with an empty milk carton and two bare cardboard plates.

  “I’m on my way out. How are things with the Classics boys?”

  “Classically dull, but what can you expect? We’re a dull group.”

  “Aren’t we all? Listen, I’m having a little party this weekend—chasing away the winter doldrums and reacquainting myself with the pleasures of alcohol and loose women. You’re more than welcome to come if you can stand the company of English and history geeks. Bring anybody you want and spread the word. I want a large, raucous and generally disorderly crowd.”

  “I don’t know, Joel. I haven’t been in much of a partying frame of mind lately.”

  “That’s exactly the point. None of us are. Winter on this campus is oppressive like no place else. A good squawk will do you fine. Drive off a few devils. 134 Lexington, just inside the Boston city line. Big white house in a dumpy neighborhood. I share it with three other grad students. Park on the street or take a bus, but I hope to see your ass there Saturday. Like I said, bring whoever or whatever you want and spread the word.”

  “Don’t count on it, Joel, but thanks anyway. I’ll try to make it.”

  Joel smiled and raised his free hand in a gesture of resignation. “Suit yourself. Gotta run, Tom. Hope to see you Saturday night. If not, take it easy.”

  “You too. See you around.”

  McIlweath returned to his newspaper and read each section carefully, not to ingest any news but to pass the time. The grapefruit spat at his face when he cut it. It tasted of acid and started a small pin-sized fire in his stomach. At 1:00, having spoken to no one other than Joel, he rose with his tray. The room was nearly full, and as soon as he stood two young men took his table. McIlweath did not know if he had been holding them up, nor did he really care. He threw away the cellophane that had wrapped the grapefruit, the plastic spoon and the orange juice container, then placed the tray on the service sill. He walked back out into the daylight. For the next two hours he walked aimlessly around campus until it was at last time to go to his next class.

  When one lapses into despair, when he comes to believe that the whispers and winds of his existence have led him haphazardly into a blind alley, when he finds himself hamstrung by Fortune with the strings contracting, he tends to extremism. He becomes likely to act as rebelliously as the limits of his temper permit. He seeks an act outside his usual character, outside the run of things, something new or unimagined, just to break things up, to break the ischemia of routine, to shine a new light, however tiny and temporary, into his blind alley.

  Depression seeped into McIlweath like a gas, invading each pore and weighing down his lungs so that it hurt him to breathe. He did so reluctantly. The oppressive burden of his embryonic sentiment of failure never left him during those days. He could not know if this sentiment would be transitory, a perverse outgrowth of some foul mood or dark circumstance, or just a period of adjustment to the contrast with what had come before. He feared it was more than this, though, something more substantial than a temporary ill humor. He sensed its logical base and, as a logical man, he could not escape it. If, then, he could not escape it, he must ultimately change it. He must change the circumstances that were dragging him subtly away from his true character, the character he had aspired to create for himself against all circumstance.

  After his brief conversation with Joel Whatever, McIlweath spoke to no one for two days. This was not his preference. He would have relished a long conversation into the night, probing and poking at his discontent with a close friend until his desolation could at least be partially expelled. McIlweath thought of Conor Finnegan, the accidental brotherhood they had formed through a proximity that McIlweath originally had dreaded. He wished Finnegan were near, that he were accessible for that conversation, for that cleansing. Washington was too long a drive for the weekend. They would have too little time together.

  McIlweath spoke to no one because, quite simply, there was no one. The realization of his stark loneliness pushed him deeper into his depression. He had only Anne to whom he might unburden himself, and that, of course, would not do. That would only intensify the problem, ripping another tiny shred of the shrinking fabric of his individuality. And so He came to see his situation as cyclical—the source of his problem was his only available comfort, and, should he try to embrace that comfort, to call upon the source to provide him an outlet from his deadening days, his problem would grow.

  On Friday, having heard no human voice directed his way for quite some time, Tom McIlweath paced his small apartment. As the circumstances of his existence had, he felt, abandoned him, he in turn abandoned them. He had not opened a book for three evenings, he had skipped his Friday classes to swim for two and a half hours at the university pool, he had not eaten a solid meal since the early part of the week, he had slept in sporadic naps and nods. In his apartment he watched television without knowing precisely what he watched, he stared at the traffic in the street below him, he looked through memorabilia—old campus newspapers and memos from the dean—from his undergraduate years. Twice he had begun a letter to his parents but, lacking words that did not sound morose, he had left off the effort. And at night he paced, music playing behind him, and did not sleep.

  McIlweath glanced out his window at the street—quiet, even on a Friday, and virtually empty. The impression sickened him, his stomach and bowels turned inside him. At once he began to gasp through a tinny metallic taste in his mouth; he drew for air. ’I have to get out of here,’ he thought desperately. ’I have to get out of this place. Now, without delay. Tonight.’

  He pulled on a jacket and ran down the narrow stairs in near panic. The cold air from the dead street slapped him hard and subsequently calmed him with his first breath. The frantic pace of his gasping softened. He filled his lungs to capacity with the harsh, sweet, sooty air, then turned to walk to his car, parked three houses down.

  He drove that night to downtown Boston, and found an open lot to park near the Common. He sought a radical act, although he did not perceive it as such; he did not know it. He needed to see people, real human beings in all their diversity and shared misery. Not homogenous, staid, bitterly cold people, or people bound to a single purpose, but people pushing and swearing and smiling, people reacting to human situations, people bridging themselves to other people and cre
ating something peculiar and profane and hallowed, something that he desperately missed.

  The young man had no goal in mind. Boston was enough. All he wanted was to walk its streets, see faces in motion, hear new and differently toned voices—the nasal twang of New England, the raspy snarls of the natives, Irish and Italians and Poles, redeeming their brawling individuality through a single night’s escape. McIlweath sought to see them, to reassure himself that life need not be sterile and rote, that man’s passions, even his basest, most hollow instincts, might still identify him. People, then—the primitive, gnarled, contentious, loud, brutal, swarming flood of mankind—that was what McIlweath sought. To observe it, to smell it, to hear it. Ultimately, to be reassured by it and, in so doing, to slacken the heavy chains around his throat. Around his heart.

  He had parked his car southeast of the Common, locked it, and set out. He wanted to walk a bit. He felt no apprehension at being downtown alone, even though he wasn’t familiar with the landscape. There were some clubs around here and, he thought, some theaters too. There would be people enough around.

  McIlweath walked down streets whose names he did not know. They were not well marked. He passed restaurants, old ones with gouges in their doors and graffiti at the base of their walls but still issuing the rich, smoky aromas of meat being grilled. At the top of a rise nearest the Common, nicely dressed couples were plentiful—smart women on the arms of well-groomed men. No doubt they had come here directly from work, these professionals exuding confidence, control and place, exuding money and accomplishment.

  Music spilled out from some of the places he passed. McIlweath knew nothing of jazz—he would have been purely incapable of discerning the good from the bad—but the sound of it stalked him like a prowling jaguar as he walked by the clubs. Squealing staccato horns, throaty saxophones, jabbing piano riffs conspired a restless harmony. McIlweath heard it inside him for days. Years later, in places far away on the darkest of nights, he would hear it again, because its mournful, wrenching wailing, the melodic sobbing of hopeless desolation, never really left him. The soft jazz emanating from one old club which had stood on the same spot for decades, pouring forth its haunting blues, echoed McIlweath’s delicate mood. He stood outside its doors for uncounted minutes. People walked by, in and out of the club not noticing McIlweath, paying no heed but to each other.

  And here he was then, a thin young white man, in sweater and corduroys and jacket, a misfit of sorts. This was no place for boys, and McIlweath’s youth and naiveté shone forth like a beacon. The neighborhood of his wanderings began to change subtly, becoming as rough and forlorn as the music he heard. Even so, held by that music, attracted by the noise and movement of people in the street, breathing the crisp New England nighttime air, Tom McIlweath paid no mind. He was where he wanted to be.

  He walked on, turning one block left and two right. His surroundings continued to grow meaner. Gone were the stylish restaurants and clubs that ringed the streets leading to the Common. Gone, too, were the mystically forlorn jazz houses. The streets grew emptier, and those that were still on them appeared rougher. Like a priest in a leper colony, he was intrigued yet removed from it all, knowing full well that he had been spared this as a permanency, but compelled to be here now.

  What atmosphere there was had become glittery and false. Tawdry bookstores and dive bars spotted both sides of the street. The ubiquitous construction projects that never seem to come to completion chopped up the streets and threw barricades onto the sidewalks so that McIlweath had to step around broken concrete, hop off the curbs into mud puddles, and step carefully to avoid tripping on the uneven surfaces. There were no stylish couples here, no loners in search of an outlet for their blues. Some young men walked these streets, but they plodded their paths with neither bounce nor spirit.

  With them were older men, beaten by the years, unshaven, gray of face, gray of mind, with hard and brutal eyes lurking below perpetual frowns. Their sneering animalism mocked the life that had mocked them. They had shaken off any and all notions of human compassion; existence was merely survival, and survival was made palatable by the simplest pleasures, a cheap beer or a cheap hooker. They did what they needed to get by, that was all. They expected nothing beyond that, would not know what to do with it should something better come along. All their lives they had been flamed in a singular primitive crucible of which this was the softest and coolest corner. McIlweath regarded these hard figures without looking at them. He respected their anonymity and would not have wanted to violate it. And beneath the veneer of the cheap bars and the dirty, broken streets he sensed an eerie, corrupt, voluptuous glow.

  Tom McIlweath had had no conscious intention of walking these particular streets. Had he reasoned his course, or known the city better, he would have picked some other direction, perhaps Faneuil Hall or Beacon Hill, something less base and more removed from this subtly anarchic atmosphere. But now that he had happened upon it, this part of the city drew him in. He had sought human company, especially that company which stood in opposition to those who customarily filled his space. He had found what he had sought, and gone beyond it. He was Dante through the portals of the Inferno, lacking his Virgil but still able to observe the indulgences of man and the consequences of those indulgences. He sensed the nether side, that aspect of shared existence tinged with lust, with greed, with horror, with death itself. McIlweath walked on, transfixed by what he saw, but more so by what he sensed.

  Stumbling forth from the shadows of an alleyway between two bars, appearing so quickly that McIlweath could not be certain precisely from where he had sprung, a disheveled figure lurched forward to block his path. Each part of him seemed shaky, as if he might tremble apart altogether and fall to the sidewalk in pieces. McIlweath’s first glance at the intruder startled him. He felt a spear of adrenalin, a reflex of surprise tinged with fright, rocket through his chest and down his limbs.

  The man was old, or so he looked. Most likely he had passed fifty, but quite possibly he could be younger than that, aged falsely through poverty or alcohol. He wore clothes that fit poorly—a tattered dark blue shirt, a black turtleneck underneath it, baggy pants stained here and there with some light-colored substance, like white or yellow paint, only thicker. His clothes hung from him. Most of his salt-and-pepper hair was covered by a ski cap with a deep rip on its front. His hair fell unevenly on the turtleneck and stuck out at odd angles on the sides beneath the cap. The old man had not shaved in several days, and a crusty gray-white stubble furzed his chin and cheeks. The old man’s eyes were black, and hollow as if a flashlight shone into them might have revealed the back of his skull. It was not pain he hid there, but disassociation, an incredible distance between the poor possessor of those eyes and the rest of humanity. He had abandoned himself to the wolves, and so become one of them—bitterly resentful of any whose life contained those forgotten elements that, once without, he had come to scorn, and therefore poised to strike at the throat to rip away the soft, vulnerable flesh that tasted even sweeter in its despoilment.

  The old man blocked McIlweath’s random path, and, from the thin line of his mouth, growled some words the younger man did not at first hear. “What?” said McIlweath, his voice at once taking on the familiar high pitch of accelerated tension.

  “I asked you if you could spare some change. Whaddaya say, buddy? I could use some help.” His face remained set in a permanently etched snarling frown. “I swear I won’t spend it for booze,” but the stale acridity of his breath, his clothing, his demeanor, made the pledge ludicrous.

  “Sorry, friend. Can’t help you.” It was true. McIlweath had no change in his pockets, and he was not about to part with a bill. Even in his malaise, he recognized the precarious financial position of a graduate student.

  “Come on, buddy,” said the old man harshly, taking a step to the side to block McIlweath again as he tried to walk around. Their chests bumped together and the old man, three or four inches shorter, drew himself up. The hot sten
ch of his foul breath burned into McIlweath’s face. He could feel it on his mouth, and the sensation sickened him. He detected a faint odor of urine from somewhere near.

  “Come on, buddy. You got some cash, I know you do. You’re gonna help me out now, God damn it.”

  “Listen, I’m telling you I got nothing. Find somebody else.”

  “No, you little shit, I found you.” The old man grabbed McIlweath’s left elbow suddenly with a calloused paw that felt more simian than human. He was strong, to be sure, despite his age.

  McIlweath wrenched his arm, but the man held fast. The panhandler tightened his grip and wrenched back. A shooting pain charged up McIlweath’s elbow to his shoulder. No one of the few figures on the street paid any mind to what was unfolding here, safe in their anonymity and choosing to be oblivious.

  The old man pulled McIlweath against the wall of the alley, away from any sidewalk traffic that might appear. His breath filled McIlweath’s ear. He had turned the younger man so that he now stood fast behind him while pressing McIlweath’s side hard into the wall.

  “Listen, you son of a bitch, come across with something or I’ll break your arm. You fuckin’ shitass kids.” He drew back his head and spat, the warm gob of saliva hitting McIlweath’s neck and then working its way down his back. “All your money, right now, boy. You ain’t gonna get laid tonight, not with no money. What would you say if I dragged you down this alley and stuck it up your ass myself? Huh? Would you like that, boy? That’d be fun, wouldn’t it? Now gimme your money, you son of a whore, nice and slow.”

  McIlweath moved slowly, his senses battered now, his world in spin. The man held his left arm tightly and relaxed his grip on the right only enough to allow McIlweath to turn enough so that he could reach into his back pocket. McIlweath’s hand was trembling badly, and he had trouble clutching his wallet. Involuntary tears welled up in both eyes to blur his already clouded vision. The night scene had grown misty shapes in bright lights, some flashing, forms walking to and fro in another dimension, removed from the terror he now felt.