Toplin

by Michael McDowell

  In my relief I looked up at her retreating figure. I must have looked up too quickly, for she turned to glance at me. I hadn’t expected that. I hadn’t counted on being made to suffer once more that terrible, uneven gaze.

  I was hideously shocked—not by the difference in the color of those eyes, I was almost used to that now—but rather by the sudden realization that I had seen those eyes before, that particular gaze.

  And what was worse, I remembered where.

  I stiffly shook my head, signifying: No sorry I don’t want anything you can go away now and sit down.

  She did just that, seating herself at one of the tables behind me. If I didn’t go to the trouble of turning around, I wouldn’t see her. I could pretend she wasn’t there at all and eat the stew she had brought me.

  I lifted a spoonful to my mouth and tried not to remember that, with her hands, the waitress had touched the bowl, and the plate beneath the bowl, and the spoon I was lifting to my lips.

  On the edge of the plate I noticed a bloody fingerprint—hers, the waitress’. Probably she had cut her finger while retrieving one of the Negro’s coins from the welter of plaster shards on the floor. I lifted the bowl from the plate and discovered a pool of the waitress’ blood, lurking beneath my stew. It boiled and sizzled.

  As I carefully lowered the bowl of stew to hide that bubbling pool, I again remembered where I had seen that gaze before.

  When my mother died, I was left alone with my father and my two older brothers. My eldest brother fled, and what became of him my father and my second brother and I never found out. My second brother drove a taxi. My brother’s taxi was involved in an accident with a city bus on a narrow street in this very neighborhood—out in front of this very restaurant if I remembered correctly. It was an unpleasant coincidence and savored of a malicious if not actually malevolent force of Fate in the Universe. The driver of the bus was killed. One passenger suffered a broken arm, the others—all Negroes—were unhurt. My brother’s body was crushed in the impact. His face was lacerated with glass from the smashed windshield. I went to visit him in the hospital, and I saw, walking into his room, that he would never be presentable again.

  My brother, carefully examining my expression, saw it too.

  He died of his wounds, the doctor said.

  My brother committed suicide. He willed himself not to live. He saw in my eyes that he would never be presentable again, and he gave up the ghost. His spirit was exhaled through his lips. I saw his parched, shredded lips open. A gust of fetid air that was my brother’s soul puffed out of his mouth and rose up toward the ceiling.

  My presence gave my brother the strength to die. The horror in my eyes, on seeing him, took away his hope of living but encouraged him to perish.

  I stood at the foot of the bed, looking at him, disgusted but unable to look away. My brother spat out his soul between his parched, lacerated lips.

  In a puff of oily smoke it rose up to the ceiling, hovered a moment in a corner, frustrated of egress. It left a stain, but the nurse and the doctor, when they came, did not notice it.

  The ceilings of hospital rooms are stained with the oily residue of souls spat out of dying patients’ parched mouths.

  The waitress sat behind me. Now and then she shifted her weight and her chair scraped grittily on the tiled floor. I thought of her eyes, understanding why, despite their alien qualities, they were so familiar.

  I don’t speak of the difference in their color. I couldn’t be entirely certain of that difference anyway. The diminution of my sense of color didn’t allow me to gauge it.

  In those marble eyes, those jewel-like eyes, I saw what I had seen once before, and unmistakably, in my brother’s ruined face in the hospital. I saw the desire to be dead. Nothing more, and nothing less.

  4

  Like a mustard seed blown by mischance into the narrow crevice in a granite wall, the waitress of the Baltyk Kitchen took root in my life-hardened soul, weakening it, threatening to split it, spoiling its wholeness and symmetry. She was a foul blade rising from a grain buried the very moment I first saw her.

  She was the latch, the spring, the key, to everything that came after. She blinded me with a harrowing Stygian light. Her halo was forged in hell.

  She was a burnt puppet on a charred string, and I decided to follow her home.

  Unmerciful to myself, I swallowed the stew, gagging bite by gagging bite. At the end I lifted the bowl. Her blood still boiled on the plate beneath.

  I pushed away the plate and the bowl and ordered coffee and strudel. I bowed my head and became the fourth guardian at the bar, but without the benumbing benefit of alcohol. When she brought the plate with the strudel, she left a bloody thumbprint on the rim. Her blistered thumb had been wrapped with a paper napkin, but that improvised and inadequate bandage was now soaked through with blood. I pushed away the strudel untasted and drew back as she brought my coffee.

  She left a thumbprint on the saucer. I carefully lifted the cup and pushed the saucer away.

  I drank slowly, holding my hand over the cup to prevent a too rapid cooling. I did not know how long I would have to wait before she went home. I tried without success to imagine her on the street, presenting her Medusa-face and Medusa-form to the most casual passerby.

  Other customers came in and took places in the booths and looked at the menus and placed their orders and did not object when the dishes with the bloody thumbprints were placed before them.

  I sat and drank my coffee and laid the plans for my great project.

  I would help this young woman. I would wring my heart and sprinkle the pity of my heart’s blood on her parched life. I would validate my own perfection, and at the same time I would ease her out of her trudging misery.

  I would help her die.

  That death was her only, her constant thought was obvious to me. It was in every gesture of her quivering limbs. It was in the light of the gaze of her mismatched eyes. Death was a song in her distended throat.

  For her poor, piteous, mangled sake, I would see to it that she died, and died soon.

  For my own sake, I would see that she died, and died as quickly as I could bring the deed about in a manner commensurate with the advancing of my spirit and—contrari­wise—the eclipsing of her own blighted soul.

  It was night out now, in my neighborhood. Inside the Baltyk Kitchen, the harsh fluorescent lights embedded in the tin ceiling had been switched on with a flick of her bloody thumb.

  One of the old women in the kitchen came out and called her by name: Marta.

  When Marta was dead, the world, unquestionably, would be a more beautiful place.

  I looked forward to the passage of years. Sometime, I said to myself, I would be able to walk by this place and think inconsequentially “Ah yes, this is the restaurant where Marta worked. Marta’s expiring breath blessed my compassion.” And the memory would be no more terrible than the knowledge that at this same corner but in the street, my brother’s taxi was struck by a bus full of Negroes and Negresses.

  Yet every time I allowed myself to be comforted by such a projection, I’d look up and there I’d see Marta herself.

  I had, in short, my work still to do.

  It would be my finest hour.

  Her shift ended at nine o’clock. So much I overheard her say to the third guardian, the one who was awake at the moment. Yet as he had not asked her anything of the sort and in fact had not spoken a word to her all evening long, I suspected that the information was meant for me.

  Half an hour remained.

  I went into the washroom and locked the door. It stank of my vomit, alien and unpleasant to me now.

  I closed the lid of the toilet, placed my kit atop it, and in my usual fashion of holding one end of the zipper with the thumb and middle finger of my left hand, unzipped it with the thumb and second finger of my right.

  I took out my scissors and cut off two small hairs that protruded from my nostrils. With clippers I snipped off an unevenness on t
he smallest fingernail of my right hand. I rubbed my lips with a finger of Vaseline. With tweezers I ripped a hair that I discovered growing on the curl of my ear.

  A man beat on the door to get in, but I said, “Go away!”

  I looked into the mirror and contemplated my reversed image with intense satisfaction. I remained in the washroom twenty-three minutes. My stool augured success. The condition of my stool is as infallible a prognostication as the endless, coiling bowels Manto ripped from the bleeding belly of the sacrificial calf and described for her blind father.

  When I came out again, Marta’s replacement had already arrived. Marta was not to be seen. I was panicked. All my resolutions were predicated on action taken tonight. I would not, could not return and begin all anew. Tonight, not any other night, I would follow Marta home and discover where she lived. I nervously paid my check and counted my change three times, glancing agitatedly all about me and particularly at the clock, hoping that Marta had not already left.

  The clock read eight-fifty-nine. The second hand surged up toward the Roman numeral XII. At exactly nine o’clock, Marta pushed aside the curtains into the kitchen. She had not changed out of her uniform but had merely added to it a black-and-white checked scarf.

  I stood very still and looked away, as if I were figuring out how much to leave as a tip. I left too much.

  I did not need to look at Marta. Her presence was too strong for me not to be cognizant of her every movement behind me. She went toward the door.

  “Marta!” cried the second waitress, who had taken her place. “This is for you.”

  The waitress had gathered up the coins I had left and held them out in her cupped hands.

  Marta came back to the bar.

  I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t even look away. Hell and Damnation itself might have stalked across the floor toward me, oozing pain and dribbling agony with every suppurating step, and I would not have been half so shaken.

  Marta took the coins in her own cupped hands and said, “Thank you, sir.”

  She spilled the coins into the pocket of her dress and went out.

  I wiped my brow and followed.

  I trailed her at a distance of some meters. It was night, the neighborhood was dark. The globes of the streetlamps had been broken long ago and repaired only along the principal thoroughfares. She took me along a side street. I watched her, not where she was leading me. I dropped back a few more meters in case she should turn. I had no difficulty in following her. She shone in the night, pale and sickly, a beacon on that ill-lighted street.

  She paused at the corner. I took the opportunity to look about.

  We were on my street. I was standing before the stoop of my apartment building.

  I bit my lip until I could taste the blood.

  Every night, I must then suppose, she walked by my own apartment building, while I was inside, preparing the day’s particular recipe. I involuntarily glanced upward. There were my windows, one, two, three floors above the ground. I might have glanced out any one of those three windows any particular evening and seen her, glowing, shambling along the sidewalk.

  With shame I contemplated my own former ignorance and innocence.

  How could I, all these years, have thought to maintain the framework of my existence when she passed ritualistically beneath my windows twice each day?

  She crossed the avenue there. Trembling with anger, I followed.

  I lessened the distance between us. If she heard me, she did not turn. She did not hurry her pace. A woman like that, I surmised, need not fear rape.

  Ahead, in the darkness of the street not lighted by her phosphorescence, I became aware of a sound, a compound noise of breath and small animals and shuffling feet and squeaking wooden wheels.

  Marta stopped. I stopped and ducked behind an elevated stoop.

  The compound noise left off, its components winding down variously.

  “Good evening,” said Marta.

  “Hey how you,” said a voice in return.

  Behind the stoop I heard Marta’s steps again. Then the shuffling, the squeaking wooden wheels, the animals’ breath. I jerked out from behind the stoop and followed after Marta.

  I met, on the sidewalk, a Negro, about sixty, down-trodden by life but not derelict. He was drawing behind him, on a stout white cord, a toy train: locomotive, three hopper cars, and caboose, each of wood and about a foot long. To each of the hopper cars, by a length of colored string, was tied a fat beribboned cat that progressed steadily with the train and looked to neither side, but moved with staid resolution. Nestled inside each of the three main hopper cars was another beribboned cat, these, however, being more curious, with their heads moving slowly from one side to another. A single kitten was strapped—cruelly it seemed to me—to the top of the caboose.

  “Hey how you,” said the Negro to me as I passed him.

  I nodded but did not speak.

  Ahead of me, Marta went up a stoop. I marked it well. I sneaked closer. I was near enough to hear her fumble with keys. I sank flat against the wall of her building. I heard the outer door open. Dimly then I heard the scrape of the inner door. Marta was inside.

  I counted three, then peeled away from the building. I came around to the foot of the stoop. There were her prints, glowing, up the stairs. A deeper, shimmering puddle right in front of the door showed where she had paused with the keys.

  I stood looking at her building with as much horror as, several hours before, I had first seen Marta herself. The brutal significance of her address pounded me into the earth.

  It was not that she lived on the same street as I—that I could have taken as merest coincidence. Five thousand men, women, and children live on that street. Similar ironic or bizarre situations arise all the time in cities of a certain density of population. Just because I found myself at the center of one of those statistical improbabilities was no reason for me to feel threatened. No, it wasn’t because she lived on my street that I was disturbed, it was for another reason.

  The Baltyk Kitchen was located at the beginning of our street, where the numbering commenced. It bore a large ONE painted on the glass above the doorway. Marta lived at number NINETY-FOUR.

  And I, I reflected bitterly, lived at number FORTY-SEVEN, exactly halfway between. That was more than coincidence. That was perfidy and plotting.

  On her way to the restaurant during the day, she would no doubt pause before my building and say to herself, I’m halfway there.

  And tonight, in following her away from the restaurant, I had noticed a hitch in her gait as she passed my building again. I’m halfway home, that said, and nothing else.

  It was as if my entire life were nothing but a milestone, a halfway marker for Marta. I felt used. I was sickened in the very well-springs of my existence.

  Events were moving rapidly forward.

  5

  I was walking away, walking home thoughtfully, through the dark night of my neigh­borhood. It wasn’t the same for me any longer. It was all changed. The similarities I noted in the buildings, in the streets, in the array of broken street lamps and bent and twisted signposts were only a mockery of verisimilitude. I hadn’t realized until that moment with what deep affection I had regarded that neighborhood. Now it was all spoiled, of course, by my knowledge of Marta’s existence.

  But would Marta’s departure restore the neighborhood to its former condition? I wasn’t certain, but I still saw no other way to proceed.

  It was in just such a reverie, thinking just such thoughts, that I proceeded down my quiet dark street, passing one by one in descending order the numbers from NINETY-FOUR toward FORTY-SEVEN, when quite suddenly I was jolted from behind. Upset. Nearly knocked to the pavement. I tripped and spun giddily in hope of maintaining my balance. And I heard laughter, women’s laughter. I lurched, swayed, and pressed myself upright against a lamppost. I could feel the sharp blistering paint through the sleeve of my suit jacket. (S-4 is worn thin toward the elbows.) I stared ahead
of me.

  There were two women bustling along. It was they who had knocked into me. The insulting timbre of their laughter told me the collision had been deliberate. They looked back over their shoulders. I was momentarily able to make out their faces in the light from a lamp shining out of a ground-floor apartment window.

  Their faces were identical, identically featured, unmirrored images of each other. Their laughter, cadenced and musical, might have been a tape recording, played at once on two machines.

  Yet though dressed alike, in black trousers, white blouses, and black jackets, they were readily distinguishable. The hair of one had been bleached a shining white; the hair of the other had been dyed a jetty black.

  They turned their heads and hurried on. Their jackets bore insignia—an hour glass with wings. And beneath the hourglass, ticked out in chrome studs, the legend TEMPUS FUGIT.

  The two women—they must have been twins—hurried on and disappeared around a corner. I continued straight on toward home. I reached my own stoop and paused. I looked up at my own darkened windows. I decided not to go in, after all. I was too keyed up, too full of my project. It seemed to me that I had been, before Marta, a mere automaton of a man, without purpose and without drive.

  Now I had a mission, a reason for even the smallest motions of my existence. Every­thing I did from this moment on, every raising of my foot, every lowering of my fingers upon a table, would be fraught with significance.

  I could retrace my steps to Number NINETY-FOUR and investigate which apartment was Marta’s. I knew she lived alone. Who could rest, knowing of her presence in an adjoining room? Or I could go on, past my own building, back toward the Baltyk Kitchen.