Finally, as the sounds of the shooting got louder, we all drifted inside—it was pure mindless instinct. A light, almost invisible drizzle had begun, so we pretended to ourselves that we simply were going inside to keep dry. There were ominous silent flashes—a bluish tint to the air. And the dusk deepened.
Inside, we stood in the kitchen, moving unnaturally slowly and quietly, no one standing too close to anyone else. “Listen,” Bob said. We all listened; and we heard birds approaching. Flapping, flapping—an almost equestrian sound—sort of like the proverbial “thunder of hooves.” “Well,” Father said, “I’m not exactly known as a superstitious man”—and the flapping got a notch louder—“but the appearance at such a moment of such an enormous cloud of birds . . .”
And then no one spoke for a long time—each one just shifting his weight from foot to foot in his own little circle. I suddenly felt a terrible cramp in my stomach, and I bent over. And then I opened my mouth, and light seemed to pour out of it onto the ground. I could feel, as if it were happening to me, the penis of every man in the room slowly starting to rise. I was crouched over, close to the floor, surrounded by a forest of men, each with a branch at the groin sticking sharply up.
And then, with a crack, the rain was suddenly beating down on the garden, rattling wildly on the windows. And after a little time, through the roar of the rain, I heard the sound of breaking glass, as if bottles were being thrown and broken. And then the grinding gears of a truck pulling up, stopping in the driveway just where the milkman’s truck always used to stop. Would they ring the bell the way the milkman used to do, to give us the bill?
We drifted into the living room. Arthur sat in a chair—so did Bob, Mary—and their bodies slowly curled up in the chairs. Their expressions, really, were just of waiting, a little bit puzzled, like patients sitting in their pajamas in hospitals. Then there were sounds of commotion in the garden, and at first no one even went to the window to find out what was happening. I finally did, though, and in the darkness and rain the light from the house picked out a few spots I could see on the lawn. A patch of flowers. Some dishes, food. I saw a blur of men moving quickly around. Then, by the table where we’d all had our meal, I saw a dead person lying—an old man—his skull had been crushed. He lay in the mud, face downward, the rain pouring over him, the inside of his head washing out onto the lawn.
As a child I’d always read about “biting down on cyanide capsules”—I’d imagined the faint taste of the gelatin of the capsules—or the frightening, painful bits of glass if the capsules were of glass. And I actually wondered, as all this happened, if such things as cyanide capsules existed anymore.
I thought of the weight, the heaviness of Jack as he lay on top of me. And then—it was almost funny, simply because it was so exactly like what one had always imagined—they knocked on the door.
So yes, we landed exactly where we knew we would land, like parachutists. Like the last pieces of a puzzle, we floated down into the space that had been waiting. And once it was happening, it seemed right, and all the times we’d prayed, God, don’t let it happen, seemed far away.
I excused myself, went upstairs to the toilet, and vomited. Then I brushed my teeth, went back downstairs, and I was more or less fine. Shivering a bit as we went out into the rain, but still perfectly able to walk to the truck.
God, I’d spent a lifetime being afraid of being locked in a cell, of being slapped in the face, of being punched, of being watched by someone while I sat on the toilet—in one second, it all dropped away. I let go of it in a second. Like opening a fist. Letting a bird out of a cage. Not the sound of a door closing—it felt like the sound of a door opening: a girl whom someone has locked in her room; then the sound of her footsteps clattering as she bursts out, then runs outside.
JACK
Judy and Howard and their friends went to prison. Ha ha ha—it seems fantastic to say that—I never thought I’d be saying that sentence about people I knew—“They went to prison”—ha ha ha. And it was a hard time, and a long time—five years. Arthur and Bob—well, they died fairly soon. You know, if there was a draft coming through a window in a restaurant, it was too much for Arthur, so I suppose you can imagine that the famously cold, famously damp climate of our rather famous local prison didn’t agree with him at all, or with Bob either. They shriveled up like little mice and died. Mary, a bit hardier, lived three years, and Herbert four. Then, finally, Sam died, and—well—by the end of the five years, only two of the old gang were there to be released—Judy, by decades the youngest, and—can it be true?—guess quick before I say—yes—in fact—the other one was—that terribly delicate, terribly infirm old man—Howard! Ha ha ha—oh God, what a surprise! Strangely, of course, by the time they got out, although Howard naturally found himself in the best of health, Judy was sick with something or other—one of those illnesses that keeps going away and then coming back.
One night when Judy and Howard were in prison, I was at a party, sort of stuffing myself with cheesecake and pie, and I started talking with this rather eccentric, rather dizzy older woman. I guess she was drunk. I know I was. She looked like she didn’t go to parties all that often, and the outfit she wore was somewhat bizarre. All of a sudden I had a blinding intuition. “Wait—you’re Joan!” I suddenly said, and I was absolutely right. Isn’t that amazing? It was the legendary Joan. And because we were drunk we had a long, frank talk, and at one point she asked me, “Well, what was your problem with Howard, basically?” “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it was how much I hated him, really.” “Yes, exactly, that was my problem too,” she heartily agreed.
To be quite frank, one has to say those were not bad years for a lot of people. A lot of people were getting by, not doing that badly, or even doing a bit better than that. I myself had a pretty good job. I wrote a column on sex for “The Morning Urinal,” as everyone absolutely insisted on calling it. It wasn’t really such a terrible paper, but everyone just loved to make fun of it for some reason—it showed people’s boldly independent spirits, I suppose.
After all he’d gone through, poor Howard didn’t get to celebrate much after he got out of prison. Actually, it might seem to be, you know, a little absurd to lock somebody up for five years and then have someone come to his house and shoot him—all basically because of a couple of essays he’d written several decades before—but you have to understand that no one person plans these things: person A decides the first thing, person B decides the second, you know, I mean, that’s just how it works.
Someone had a fetish about mealtime shootings, one is bound to conclude. He was in his bedroom, and Judy had just brought him a plate of cold meat and salad. Once again it was, “Don’t get up,” the guy walking behind him, the hole blasted into the back of his head, the blood pouring endlessly onto the plate.
When I heard about it, I went over, of course, to see Judy. A month later she sold the house, and I went over again to help her pack things up.
Oh my God, that whole thing of moving. So depressing. The sale of effects. The garage, cleaned. Even the oil stains partially removed by some new process. The books in boxes carried down the stairs—ever so gently, as if they were crates of eggs. I felt a sadness on the stairs as we took down the books as I hadn’t really when we’d carried down the corpse.
Carrying the corpse down the stairs, I’d only thought, Well, he won’t be going down these stairs again.
JUDY
We went away together and spent the night in a dirty little town way out on the water. The hotels were closed, all the fancy places, the big restaurants—it was the off-season. For whatever reason, we didn’t bring anything warm enough to wear, we were both freezing. Well, it was a dark, black, starless, moonless night with gusts of wind banging like fists on the windows of the little inn where we’d finally found a place to stay.
JACK
We walked up a narrow flight of stairs with piles of old towels thrown on the landings. We turned a peculiar bent key in the doo
r.
JUDY
I had to hold on to the doorknob for a moment to keep from fainting. There was no heat in the room at all.
JACK
“What about me?” I asked her. “What about me? Did you worry about me when you were away?” I was thinking, We already are older and wiser. She told me she found my sweater quite nice—very nice colors. I cried a little, then a bit more—dribbling, you know. So love, apparently, was the last thing to go. And I was apparently the last one there to see the end of it. I watched the little flame as it sputtered and spattered, bent its head, and turned into a vague little plume of smoke. Oh well. So that’s how it turned out. Who would have guessed. I didn’t really want to, but I put my hand around Judy’s waist and held her next to me. It was a small gesture which could lead to nothing. My dick lay limply inside my trousers, like a little lunch packed by Mother.
I decided to untie the rope that served me for a belt, and it turned out there was a fireplace there in the room. We made a fire, and sat barefoot in front of it.
JUDY
Outside, the wind swept the boardwalk of sand, it swept the porch—and inside our little room I tried to hold him, console him—it was like holding on to a nervous little piglet, he kept slipping away. Meanwhile, some awful trick of the night or the mind made me remember him as he’d once been—his confidence, the warmth, the directness of his touch.
JACK
A burden was lightened now that love was gone. It had always been a difficult word for me.
JUDY
His skin felt like cold clay. I wanted to bathe him, play with him, bring him back to life. But that couldn’t happen. Almost all of him was dead.
JACK
In my dream, blue smoke was blowing through the room. The barn door creaked, the cows mooed. I lifted off the ground, feeling very dizzy, dropping ashes faster and faster.
JUDY
The next morning my head was hot—the old symptoms again. As soon as we got back to the house, I put the last of my cartons into a taxi, and then I was on my way to the apartment I’d found in that very quiet suburb out where Joan lived.
The first thing I did there was to buy some white shirts in the local market, and a pair of sandals. And almost every morning, long before dawn, while it was still pitch-dark, I’d get up, dress, and walk through the little town’s empty streets, then down the highway, down to the beach.
Darkness. The sea. The lighthouse. The gulls. The sand thick and wet like black ice cream.
Did I judge you? Sure. I did, of course, but never mind. You’ll be forgiven by cooler heads—probably after death, unfortunately, but that’s better than never.
The effort people make simply amazes me. Just to get up, get dressed—it’s not that easy. To feed oneself, to wash the dishes. I can’t believe people do it year after year.
JACK
After the night I saw Judy, as the months passed, I lost my job, but I kept up with my habit of walking through the city. And there was something else that began to happen, where every time that I thought the word “I,” it sort of echoed or rang out in my mind, and I was troubled by it. The idea of the self was obsessing me now. What were we all constantly talking about? I didn’t get it. The self. The self. What was the self? Well, one afternoon, one cloudy, drizzly, late afternoon, I was sitting in my apartment writing in my diary, and unfortunately I’d managed to spill my tea, and my hands were wet, and so was my diary, and my clean laundry, and a bunch of forks, and the clothes I was wearing, and as I reached for a rag and started to wipe things up, I suddenly understood it, very very clearly—and the clarity made me queasy, as if a door had been opened, and bright light and oxygen had flooded into my brain. As the rag sat soaking in the tea on my lap, I understood that my self was just a pile of bric-a-brac—just everything my life had quite by chance piled up—everything I’d seen or heard or experienced—meticulously, pointlessly piled up and saved, a heap of nothing, a heap of nothing which had somehow been compressed into some sort of a form and which had somehow succeeded in coming alive, and which quite ridiculously now sort of demanded tribute, declared itself great. And the amazing thing was that I’d gone along with it. We all had! We all had bowed down, we all had worshipped, each one kneeling before his own separate self, each single-mindedly obsessed by his own self ’s fate, asking, desperately, What will happen to this self which is mine? Will “I” achieve magnificence and success? Will “I” be admired? And will my marvelous self finally have the chance to express itself? How idiotic! And how boring. How boring, how boring, how boring, how boring. And was this obsession even sincere? Did we honestly feel that no questions but these were of any interest? I wondered if the show of adoration wasn’t perhaps just a bit overplayed— whether all the overacting didn’t possibly reveal an element of pretense.
And as I thought all this, I felt I saw, standing by the window in the fading light, that very creature, that self which was mine, that ludicrous figure whom I’d approached till now with such ostentatious displays of respect—such fervor, groveling, hand-kissing and tears—and I went up to the figure, the unpleasant little self, and sort of pulled it by the arm in the fading light, and I spun it around toward me. And then I threw it on its back and kicked it smartly in the face, and then I sat on top of it, grabbed its neck and choked it and strangled it and bashed its skull against the floor until it stopped squealing, stopped howling, gasped and was gone.
And what a fucking relief it was. All that endless posturing, the seriousness, the weightiness, that I was so sick sick sick to death of—I’d never have to do any of it ever again.
I would walk the streets like a cheerful ghost, and no one would know my secret. It would really be funny.
And of course I saw immediately all the implications. I could be anything now, whatever I wanted. If I was a ghost, I could walk through walls. It would be so much easier than knocking on doors and begging someone to let me in.
And I thought of something simple to say to people, which they would all understand. I would simply say, “I guess I’ve always really been a lowbrow at heart.”
I guess I’ve always really been a lowbrow at heart.
So I made a new life, and I was so happy, because it was so easy. I walked down the street with a different step, a sloppier one. I ate in different places, developed different tastes. I’d decided years before what foods I would always say that I didn’t like, but I liked them now.
I found a new apartment, and some people might have said it wasn’t really very nice. It was smelly, I suppose. But I enjoyed it. There was a window looking out on a courtyard filled with dirt, and children played there—kind of slummy kinds of games.
And you know how I’d always treated books with such respect? I would never even write in a book, or fold down a page, or toss a book casually onto a table. But one morning in my new apartment I did something funny—at least I thought it was funny. I put a book of poetry in the bathtub, and I urinated on it. An interesting experiment. Then I left it in the tub, and then, later, when I needed to shit—I hadn’t planned this, it just came to me as an idea—instead of shitting into the toilet, I shat on the book. Just to see, you know, if it could be done. And apparently it was possible, despite what anyone might have told me. So, like a scientist, I noted in my diary that night, “Yes, the experiment has been a complete success.”
My diary, by the way, had a pretty good title. I called it “Experiments in Privacy.”
And you know, I’d never been able to stand dogs at all. All the dogs around Howard’s house had driven me to the point of paralyzing rage. But it just so happened that I met a boy who was playing in my courtyard, and he gave me his dog, because he was leaving the city, and so the dog moved in with me, and it worked out quite well. We really enjoyed each other, as a matter of fact. But then the dog ran around the wrong corner and got shot, and the sweet little love story came to an end—yes, I guess it came to an end as so many seem to, in a pool of blood. And things got much much quieter aft
er that.
Well, things were shrinking. Things were shrinking for me—everything was shrinking. Sometimes even trying to read the newspaper, you know, was sort of like spooning food into the mouth of someone who you happen to notice has suddenly died. So actually the thing that became most real, most visible, for me was this little collection of, actually, sex magazines that I’d found one day in a rather nice plastic bag just lying on the street near a puddle. So I spent a lot of time with the somewhat arbitrarily selected group of people who happened to appear in those particular magazines. In fact, I got to know them awfully well—their foibles, whatever—their idiosyncrasies—poses, gestures, expressions, smiles.
And then that too was gone one day. One day it went. I looked at the pictures and got absolutely nothing. I felt nothing. I saw nothing. The pictures were dead. They were paper. They were nothing.
JUDY
One day, inevitably, buying some flowers, I ran into Joan. And so what could she do but invite me to visit? Coffee and buns in her backyard—neat and tidy—but in the brilliant sunshine I couldn’t get warm. I felt soaking wet. The nice maid brought out a blanket and draped it carefully across my shoulders.
There was no feeling at all between Joan and me, so I talked about myself. I talked without stopping for two hours about myself, pulling little sounds of understanding out of poor Joan’s mouth the way in prison we pulled plates of food from slots in the doors.
The Designated Mourner Page 5
