Toplin

by Michael McDowell

  More terns, screeching, flew at me.

  I shaded my eyes with one arm and folded the other arm over the top of my head. I staggered to my feet and shuddered along back toward the tidal river. The terns continued to dive at me.

  The bill of one tern pierced the back of my wrist. I felt horrifyingly sharp pain and jerked my hand away. I felt the weight of the bird, temporarily caught by its beak in my flesh. It did a little staggering dance in the air, regained its aerial balance, and veered off.

  Another bird attacked my unprotected head. I felt as if a pick had been dropped from a height onto my skull.

  I struggled forward, waving my hand in front of me. I could see blood on it. I looked down at the ground, not daring to look up. A tern swooped down from above, up under my outstretched, protecting arm, and went for my eye. I jerked my head aside just in time. It pierced my cheek. I could smell the bird’s sun-dried stink. I could feel its beak opening and closing inside my mouth. I reached up, grabbed the bird by its legs—breaking one of them, I think—and pulled it out of my cheek. Its beak, at that moment, closed over the edge of my tongue, and as I pulled it out, it took away a little wedge-shaped morsel. I flung the bird aside and staggered onward.

  I do not know how long I continued thus, but it was for some time. Only once did I look up, and then for but a fraction of a second. Here is what I saw: what must have been fifty or more terns, wheeling in a tight circle about twenty feet above me and about thirty feet ahead of me. They were anticipating my onward flight. But above them, in a much larger circle, flew the gulls, crying in their raucous stupid voices, voyeurs of the attack.

  One of the terns dropped out of the tight circle and dived at me.

  My entire body jerked to one side, and the bird glanced shearing up my bare arm. I heard my skin rip like cellophane.

  I stumbled on in the heat. I remember now quite precisely what I was thinking. Oddly, I did not think of how to save myself. Defense had become automatic. My body knew what it must do to protect itself; or at any rate, my mind could do no better. It seemed to me, as I stumbled forward, that the terns were mocking me—and that that mockery was their purpose even more than, say, defense of their nesting area. They mocked my helplessness, they mocked my stupidity and my sad, stumbling flight. Terns are shining white with at most a cap of black. They were, I knew, angry that I imitated their black-and-white plumage, but failed to reproduce the concomitant grace of their flight. To them I was an ugly, stupid thing; so ugly and so stupid that I deserved punishment for my innate shortcomings and ineptitude. My presence, in black and white, was an affront to their dignity and station.

  Those were my first thoughts.

  I fell into the water of the tidal river, spilling sideways. The brackish water entered my mouth, and the terns dived and pierced my side. I pulled myself up, spewing out the salty water from my mouth, and dragged myself on.

  The shock of the water—for I had fallen into it unawares—changed the direction of my thoughts entirely. The terns were no longer birds in my mind. They were mankind itself, mankind at its worst, malicious and stupid. They knew—or ought to have known—that I had no designs upon their nests, their eggs, or their young. They attacked me because attack was a concept tattooed on the convolutions of their minuscule brains. And above them, in the larger, looser, noisier circle, the gulls displayed mankind at its best, passive and stupid. The gulls were unable to make sense of a situation whose parameters were patently obvious. I was surrounded by all humanity, and all humanity was either a tern or a gull. All stupid, and all either passive or dangerously malicious. And I, the perfect outcast, the faultless stranger, stumbled along through the salt water, pecked and bleeding and—in one final swoop of two terns in tandem—blinded.

  I was hospitalized briefly.

  Unable to see, I had groped along the edge of the river back toward the concession stands, where the afternoon exodus from the beach was starting up. Very probably I was an unwelcome, unwholesome sight to that burned pack of the damned.

  A Groundsman led me back to my office. A Cashier took my head on her lap and wiped the blood from my scalp and my face, crying out in disgust at the wounds that were revealed underneath. A Fry Cook telephoned for the ambulance.

  I was told that my eyes would heal properly. The birds’ slicing beaks had scratched but not punctured the corneas. My head was bandaged for eight days.

  When the bandages were removed and once the blurriness had subsided, my visual perception seemed to me as keen as before. That is, I still tested out at 40-20, able to see at a distance just about twice as well as normal. But there was one vast difference. I no longer saw colors as before. The intensity had faded dramatically. It was as if before I had dealt with a spectrum several meters wide, and now all the color range I had would fit onto a graph not more than a few centimeters in width. Everything—excepting blacks and whites—was only various shades of gray to me. The whole world looked washed-out, faded, as if every object, every plane, every vista had a hole in the bottom of it out of which the color had seeped for a long while, leaving only a suggestion of the brilliance and variety of former hues. I could distinguish red and blue and yellow, though sometimes only with concentration—but for me, magenta, heliotrope, viridian, vermillion, cobalt, umbre, ochre, sienna, crimson, and canary—all these subtle differentiations of the palette were lost.

  The Park Service was obligated to pay for my hospital bills, and those coworkers involved in the practical joke were discharged, but still I did not return to my job at the beach. I began, in those weeks of my recuperation, to ignore the tiny range of color that was left to me, and I concentrated on what I still could see—the whites and blacks. And in those antipodes I discovered almost infinite variation. It was for this reason that I maintained the black and white Park Service uniform as my normal dress and have retained it, with some small changes, ever since. Older now, and with my Employer to mollify, I wear a suit. But still I have the black trousers, the black shoes, the white shirt, the black socks.

  The wounds inflicted by the birds were, for the most part, superficial. I have a triangular incision in my tongue that produces a whistle whenever I talk rapidly—but I rarely talk at all. I have a small round scar, rather like a concave mole, where that tern pierced my cheek. And on my scalp are four small places where hair will not grow. I was told that the birds had actually pierced the skull and that beneath my scalp the bone is fractured like tiny spiders’ webs.

  I was perfectly well, but at the expense of the City Park Service, I recuperated for the remainder of the summer. My father died in August. For his funeral I purchased my first suit (S-1) and, in my brother’s taxi on the way back from the crematorium, I began reading the Help Wanted advertisements in the newspaper. On the following day I was hired by my Employer, and the day after that I found the apartment where I live now. My brother offered to give me half the furniture that had belonged to my mother and father, but I declined. I had never liked my parents so much that I wished to be reminded of them every time I walked into a room.

  I returned, now and then, to the hospital. I was advised to have plastic surgery to deal with the scars, but these, I maintained, were not noticeable. Such surgery would have been much more at my expense than for my profit. I never spoke of the diminution of my sense of color. That was a very private thing. It was, of course, the price I had paid.

  I had traversed Purgatory. I had come as near Hell as any man might and live to tell of it. I was given knowledge and insight and was forever branded—by those four wounds on my scalp and the fifth wound in my cheek—as an outcast of humanity.

  In exchange for my eyes’ paltry ability to distinguish the narrow range of light we call color, I had gained nothing short of Vision Itself.

  3

  I flushed away my vomit, washed my face, and retied my tie, all the while inwardly screwing my courage to the sticking-place. A man who had suffered as I had suffered, to win such a prize as had been vouchsafed to me, was not the m
an to tremble before a woman, be she Basilisk or Gorgon or Medusa. When I left that tiny, evil-smelling washroom, I’d look the waitress in the face. My eyes would sweep down her body and seek out the farthest limit—the very frontier—of her repulsiveness.

  I opened the door of the washroom cautiously and stepped out. I looked about. The first of the guardians—the one who had sat nearest me—was awake now, drowsily swilling a beer. My first renewed glimpse of the waitress was from the back. Beneath her uniform, her flesh roiled and seethed with contagion. I was revolted and staggered back to my place at the bar.

  The waitress was placing a glass of water before a Negro who had just come in and seated himself at one of the tables between the bar and the booths. I turned and watched him, for I still could not bring myself to look at her. He was handsome in his way, with slicked-back hair and an oiled black beard. He wore black clothes and carried two large white shopping bags without logos. He had placed these at the side of the table and was rummaging in them. He had not seen the waitress. I waited for him to sit up straight and catch sight of her. I wanted to gauge his stupefaction and terror.

  Infuriatingly, he remained immersed in his bags, peering into their depths, shoving about whatever was inside, blowing into them heartily.

  When he finally pulled up, the waitress was already walking away. He had not seen her.

  Despite my resolution in the washroom, I looked everywhere but where she was. She came and stood before me. My eyes drifted upward, and I saw a chalkboard, hung on a rope attached to a pulley. Every day, I supposed, it was lowered, and the daily special chalked on it. Then it was raised to a position of prominence above the bar.

  I couldn’t make out what the special was. It was written in the same incomprehensible language as the menu, but there was, fortunately for me, only one item on it.

  Without looking at the waitress, I pointed to the chalkboard above the bar.

  “The special,” I said, with such weakness I had difficulty in recognizing my own voice. “I’ll have the special.”

  She walked away toward the kitchen, and I lowered my eyes from the chalkboard with relief.

  She called out in the incomprehensible language and there was a brief, responding chatter from the hidden purlieus of the kitchen.

  The Negro called out an order for a beer.

  The waitress—I could tell by the sounds she made in doing it—opened the cooler, took out a bottle, snapped off the top, and brought it around. I still did not look.

  I turned and watched the Negro. Now surely he would see her.

  Would he be crushed by the sheer weight of her distortion, I wondered. Would he vomit, as I had vomited?

  In a crescented array on the table before him, the Negro had set out eight statues, in plaster, of a cartoon mouse and his cartoon mouse consort. Two pairs of the mice had been painted in what I supposed were vibrant colors. The other two pairs remained unpainted—pale, livid plaster figures, with chalky grins.

  He looked up at the waitress. “Which one for the beer?” he asked, with the same chalky grin as the mice.

  He stifled his repulsion so effectively that I, attending closely, did not see it at all. It was as if, for this man protected by his crescent of plaster mice, the waitress were a perfectly normal young woman, in a soiled white uniform, bringing him a bottle of beer.

  “No,” she said. “No trade. No money, then get out.”

  “Take two,” he urged. “Take a pair. Sweet, for your kids.” I was horrified on three counts. It seemed a gross insult for the Negro to hint that she might be a mother; the utter impossibility of it only called attention to the depth of her deformity. And in a deeper way I was horrified to postulate the existence of any child so star-crossed he must call her mommy. And, thirdly, what moral, aesthetic criminal could couple with such as she, so as to produce so unfortunate a child? No sane man.

  “No,” said the waitress. “Out.”

  “Painted. Plain,” said the Negro, pointing at his statues. “One painted, one plain.”

  The waitress put down the bottle of beer out of the Negro’s reach. She picked up two of the statues and thrust them down into one of the shopping bags.

  The Negro protested, and with a wide sweep of his arms, as if he were a black Niobe protecting the last of her grinning children, he gathered the mice against his breast.

  The plaster mice grated and cracked and split apart in his embrace.

  The Negro stood up in a wail of anguish. The plaster mice slipped and slid onto the floor, and collapsed in clouds of white powder. Fragments of grins and hands and button shoes remained of the painted figures, held together only by the paint.

  “Nobody come near!” he screeched, and with the only remaining whole figure—one that had fallen outside his embrace—he fled to a position of defense between the un­plugged juke box and the wall.

  “Look at this mess!” cried the waitress, in just such a tone of exaggeration as any normal young woman in soiled uniform, whose duty it was to keep the place clean, might have spoken.

  “Trash!” she cried, picking up the two shopping bags and tossing them out the door.

  The Negro, running toward the door, screamed, “I’ve been robbed! I’ve been robbed!”

  He tripped in the plaster dust and fell against one of the tables. It overturned, and he slipped along its smooth surface to the floor. The last of his plaster figures was crushed beneath him. In his frustration, he began kicking violently against other tables, overturning them. He pushed over chairs, spilled carnations and water and catsup bottles, salt shakers and little dishes filled with packages of sugar.

  The first of the guardians—the one who was awake during this—slowly slid off his stool and staggered over to the Negro. He reached down with his arms outstretched, caught the black man under his arms, and lifted him to his feet. The Negro’s feet shuffled comically in the plaster dust and painted grins of his smashed statues. One too-large shoe slipped off his foot. The buttons of his shirt popped and flew. His pants began to slip off his hips, and he made more comical attempts to hold them up.

  The guardian suddenly let the Negro drop onto the floor again.

  All the change then poured out of the Negro’s pockets and settled in the plaster dust or spun beneath the overturned furniture. I followed the progress of one particular quarter as it rolled purposefully toward the waitress and came to rest between her feet. I looked away again.

  “Throw him out,” said the waitress to the guardian.

  “My money!” cried the Negro.

  “That is for damages,” said the waitress and stood aside as the guardian lifted the Negro once more, pushed him toward the door, and propelled him out onto the sidewalk.

  The sun had set behind the tall buildings in the west of the city. Evening was falling over my neighborhood. It was a mockery of normalcy.

  Two old European women in shapeless flowered dresses came out of the kitchen, surveyed the wreckage without surprise or anger, and set about righting things, with the air of We’ve done this before.

  “Police!” the Negro shouted just outside the door. “Police! I’ve been robbed!”

  The waitress began picking up the Negro’s change and putting it into the pocket of her dress.

  Unperturbed, the guardian came back to his bar and his beer.

  The Negro continued to shout for the police. The police did not come. In the scuffle, he had lost both his shirt and his right shoe. The waitress picked them up and dropped them behind the juke box.

  When the place was very nearly set to rights again, the Negro came stealthily back inside the restaurant. He sat in the booth nearest the door.

  I and the waitress and the guardian who was awake looked at him.

  “I’ve got a gun,” said the Negro. “I’m going home and get it and come back and shoot your husband.”

  The Negro evidently thought that the waitress was married to the guardian who had thrown him out.

  “My husband in Novgorad,” said the wai
tress, still gathering up change.

  The Negro, as if he had forgotten that this money was part of his grievance, took no notice of her action.

  “I’m a lawyer,” said the Negro. “And I’m going to sue you and your husband for every penny you’ve got.”

  This made no impression. The waitress came nearer me. There were nickels around the base of the stool on which I was seated. I was nauseous with the thought that she might inadvertently brush against the leg of my trousers. I would burn the entire suit if she did. (Though it was Suit S-4, my favorite, I did not hesitate to make such a resolution.) I would spend the night in the bathtub. I might shave the hair from my legs.

  “I’m a doctor,” said the Negro. “And I’m going to write you a prescription that’s pure poison.”

  I moved around the corner of the bar, under pretense of looking at a newspaper that had been left there.

  The waitress gathered up the change from around my bar stool. When she had moved away, I returned. I brought the paper with me, not because I had any interest in it, but to maintain the fiction that my movement away from the waitress had been casual and unpremeditated.

  The Negro went through a long list of occupations and allied threats and finally concluded: “If you don’t give me twenty dollars, I’m going to take back my statues.”

  All his statues were smashed.

  “Where’s your shoe?” demanded the waitress. She went over to the booth where he sat. “Where’s your shirt?”

  The two old women went back into the kitchen, where—I supposed—they resumed preparation of the special I had ordered, some time ago now.

  “Get out!” said the waitress. “No shirt, no shoe. Get out!”

  My dinner was brought me: a stringy, gelatinous stew, cooked with misshapen lumps of discolored potato. I wouldn’t be able to eat any of it, I knew, if the waitress remained behind the counter where at any moment I might chance to look up and see her. She put down my plate and walked off.

  I was relieved. I would be able to eat. It wasn’t that I was hungry. I wasn’t hungry at all. I had other things on my mind besides my stomach. But I didn’t want to appear as if I were thinking of anything but the assuagement of my appetite. I wanted to seem normal, to the waitress and to the three guardians, two of whom were fast asleep again, still holding onto their empty bottles, snoring.