Toplin

by Michael McDowell

  I had no thought of going to bed. In the first place, I need very little sleep. Long ago, I weaned myself from the need of it, in quarter-hour increments. Night after night, quarter-hour by quarter-hour, I slept less and less. At three and three-quarter hours I hit a kind of plateau. Perhaps I might have gone further—indeed, I have no doubt that I might have gone further—but I did not see the need. To sleep for such a time is a pleasant, earned recreation, and I sleep the sleep of the happy dead; but even a quarter-hour longer would be a sickly self-indulgence.

  I am left, in consequence, with a great deal of time on my hands. But I am self-sufficient, a world unto myself, and not one moment of that time is wasted. I come home from work, I prepare dinner, and this is often a long and complicated process in itself. Afterwards, I perform certain tasks. I do work I’ve brought home from the office, and I clean the house. I am very particular about both activities. I am not required to bring work home from the office, but it pleases me to do so. I need no other reason. I am currently reworking, in careful and fine India ink, a careless and pencilled set of books from many years back, kept by my Employer for a customer who has since gone bankrupt. My Employer, should he know of this task, would doubtless consider that it was unnecessary and might even reprimand me for having slipped the ledger out of its particular place on the storeroom shelves; but any job is worth doing well, and a job well done redounds to the credit of the one who accomplished it.

  Simply because my life was fraught with new significance and infused with new pur­pose was an insufficient reason for abandoning my routine. I sat down at the desk that is pushed against the long living room wall, and I copied out two weeks of entries in my finest, carefullest hand. When I was through, exactly eighty-six minutes later, I blotted the last page and then glanced back at all that I had done in the past few months. That work was indistinguishable from the work I had done tonight, though I was, I was certain, a man entirely altered in form and purpose. That I had maintained my prowess with my pen, that I had not allowed my talents to be diverted by the nervous energy that infused me, was added proof of the rightness of my decision to press Marta toward her eagerly sought death.

  I closed the original ledger, with its pencil-smeared, dog-eared pages. I placed it atop the new ledger, with its crisp rag leaves indelibly and beautifully filled with India ink entries. I had executed thousands of graceful characters and numerals along perfectly executed ruled lines, without a single blot.

  I looked up into the mirror that hangs on the wall behind the desk. “Without a single blot,” I told myself aloud.

  It is not to be wondered at. I am, myself, the perfect human specimen. The mirror told me so, as did my self-portrait which hangs above the hearth mantel. I am one hundred eighty centimeters in height, of a pleasing medium build with natural musculature. I was born with blue eyes. They are, I assume, still of that hue. I have black hair and white skin and perfect white teeth. My features are regular in a most uncommon way. I draw strength from the mirrors, from the intensification of what I see thrown back at myself. I have at least one mirror in every room, and in most rooms there are two or even more. I have mirrors of all various sizes and in all manner of shapes and in a variety of frames. Mirrors, it is not commonly known, have textures. A mirror throws reality back in a way peculiar to itself. A man, looking at himself in two mirrors hung side by side on a wall, will see two entirely different men gazing back at him in astonishment at the difference. I am aware of this peculiarity of mirrors, but it affects me little. When I look into my many mirrors, I am shown, always, slightly varying pictures of my own perfection. This is anything but disconcerting.

  Marta, I was certain, had not a single mirror in her flat. Her windows were shaded at night so that the glass panes would not chance to throw her reflection back in her eyes. Would Medusa turn to stone if she gazed into a mirror? Polished surfaces Marta covered with clothes or sprinkled with powder. All her cookware was cast-iron, against the chance of reflection. All the pictures on her walls were framed without glass.

  I was, I saw then, slipping deeper into Marta’s life.

  7

  I found myself at work the following morning.

  I write those words carefully and with precision. That is to say, I found myself at work without recollection of having waked, evacuated, cleansed myself, dressed, drunk chocolate, spun my combination lock, descended my stairs, or traversed the sidewalks and the streets from my apartment, Number FORTY-SEVEN, to my Employer’s office. I have not, it is true, trained my memory to savor this unvarying week-daily routine. Occasionally, indeed, my memory may slickly pass over one or the other of these varied elements, but to have lost all of them on a single day seemed more than careless.

  I found myself that morning standing behind my desk, my back to the tall windows, facing a wall of empty shelving. I seated myself at my desk, and tried to reason it out.

  I was distracted immediately by the feel of the chilled smooth curved wood beneath me. The last thing I remembered was slipping into bed. Perhaps I was asleep even before I had pulled the spread up under my neck. But the next sensation after that one was of sliding along the polished wood of the seat of the swivel chair in my office. I had never connected those two sensations.

  I sat very still at my desk, unwilling that other sensations should crowd in upon me before I had had the opportunity to recapture what had been taken away. I closed my eyes. I placed my hands over my ears. I trembled with the realization that I did not even know the number of the suit I was wearing. I could not remember having consulted my schedule of sartorial propriety. I might, for all I knew at that moment, be wearing the wrong suit. I twitched some muscles at various points of my anatomy to see how they responded to the fiber of the suit. Because of a certain stretch over my left breast, because of a slight tension on the inside of my left thigh, I conjectured that I was encased in Suit S-1. I did not open my eyes to see. To have been wrong would have unmanned me.

  I went over my week-daily routine in my fevered brain and attempted to trick myself into believing that I was remembering the events of that morning. Yet I knew I was only mechanically reviewing a cherished itinerary. The pattern in my hot brain was cold. It had the texture only of ice. Three times I went over the week-daily routine in my mind, desper­ately searching for the one detail that would distinguish this morning from every other morning. That detail would not present itself.

  It was as I began the fourth cycle, however, that I realized suddenly the motive behind my forgetfulness. I knew, with an unerrable certainty, why these hours of the early morning had been erased from my consciousness.

  In my mind, on the fourth cold iteration of my week-daily routine, I waked up, as I always do, with my fingers curved around the edge of the spread. As I always do, I carefully rolled the spread back toward my feet, sitting up gradually as I did so. I turned myself out of the bed and stood upon the bare bedroom floor. I knew I performed these actions every morning, you see, and my memory of doing them yesterday morning—the day I met Marta—was quite clear and distinct. I could recall, for instance, of yesterday morning, that the floor was colder than I had anticipated its being. A single detail such as that distinguished that day from all others in my mind.

  But of this morning, nothing at all.

  Every morning I went directly to the bathroom and evacuated my bowels. This I did, in my mind, for the fourth time, hoping nearly against hope for a single detail to bring the whole sequence back to me. If, for instance, I remembered some peculiarity of my stool this morning, then I was certain that all the other sensations would flood back in upon me. Yet, in my mind, as I arranged myself to stand above the toilet and examine my stool, I saw nothing but a kind of paradigm of stool—a dictionary drawing—prototypical but lifeless. Not any sort of stool to auger by.

  And that was the answer.

  That was the reason why my mind had blanked on the entire morning.

  Someone—whether my unconscious self or another being altogeth
er—wished me to forget the appearance of my stool that morning. The dis-remembering of everything else had been merely a blind, as a clever murderer will hide his one true victim among twenty-three others he does in quite at random and casually. That is to say, it did not really matter whether I recalled choosing my morning’s suit, or could bring to mind how deeply I thrust the spoon into my box of chocolate, or how many persons begged me for money on the way to work—but on the day following my vow to assist Marta in her heart-wish of death, the condition of my stool would be of supreme importance.

  Yet I could remember nothing of that morning’s evacuation.

  A certain recognizable hollowness below the waist told me it had occurred quite as usual, but the details of the business remained agonizingly beyond my grasp. With my eyes shut and my hands over my ears, I tried to construct some possibilities of appearance in the stool, but that was a fruitless task. Tiresias never augered from imaginary entrails. The guts were hot, bloody, and steaming that he wound about his arms and pressed against his cracked lips.

  I came quickly to the only possible conclusion: that this was to be a day of consummate importance in my life. Without the evidence of my stool, of course, it would be impossible to predict in what manner the importance would evidence itself. I knew better, of course, than to imagine, on the one extreme of good fortune, a lottery win when I did not even purchase tickets; or, on the other, a black safe falling upon my head from a tenth-floor window, when there were no buildings in this neighborhood so high as that. No, the importance would be manifested in some manner other than good fortune or bad fortune. It might, for instance, be a sudden turning of my mind, in a direction so new and surprising I would have been previously unaware of the existence of such a point on my mental compass. Or it might, I could conceive, be the precise and correct plan for shuffling Marta out of this vale of hot tears. But, most probably, I told myself, it would be something I did not expect at all.

  That is the way of auguries.

  That is the way of life itself.

  The office where I work is in the neighborhood that borders on my own, to the south. The office occupies the entire fourth floor of a narrow brick building with a much weathered cast-iron front. Similar buildings, but much larger, hem it in on both sides. On the floors below my Employer’s offices are three small independent firms. One of them is involved in some way with textiles, for scraps of cloth are baled out in front of the building every evening when I leave work. Another of them is involved, I conjecture, in the construction of furniture, for I hear saws and hammers when the elevator passes that door. The third appears to be a storage facility, for I see cartons taken in and out of the building nearly constantly, and the elevator is stuck at that floor for long and inconvenient periods of time.

  The floor above us is ostensibly empty, although now and again, when the radiator is quiet and my Employer is not coughing, I hear a surreptitious footpad above me, and now and again, when I look out one of the vast grimy windows at the back of the loft—for it is that, and nothing else—I see some object drop past. But I’m always so startled by its appearance there and it falls so quickly, that I’m at a loss to make out exactly what it is. Even when I’ve heard it crash below and looked out of the window, I’m unable to distinguish the fallen object from the detritus in the courtyard in back. But whatever it was, I know it must have been flung from one of the windows directly above.

  The loft is long and narrow, with tall grimy windows at either end. The floors are of dark-stained woods, macerated, slightly rolling. The walls are brick, the ceiling is of patterned tin. There are, here and there, iron support poles, cunningly molded like narrow acanthus palms. In corners and along the walls are pipes of varying thickness, emerging through holes in the floor and disappearing into holes in the ceiling. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of a shred of wall in the loft below—the storage loft—if I stand just so. If I look up however, I see nothing but blackness in the loft above. These are waste pipes and heating pipes and water pipes, I suppose. They knock loudly. Water rushes through them in tor­rents. They give off heat sometimes, at other times a clammy chilliness. My Employer has erected a few partitions, giving himself a large office at the back, and me a small office at the front. In between are my Employer’s files, his duplicating machine, his punchers, his posting machines, his boxes of supplies, and his dictionaries.

  My Employer trusts me to do my work. He does not check up on me constantly. I go to his office and nod to him upon my arrival in the morning—if he is there before me. If I arrive first, he pokes his head around my partition and nods at me. Since we are infrequently visited and the floor above is ostensibly uninhabited, the elevator rarely rises above the third floor. My Employer suffers. He does not smoke, but he has a smoker’s cough. It is as loud as the jackhammer that once tore up the street outside my window. My Employer limps, sometimes on his left leg, and sometimes on his right. He does not drink, but he suffers from gout. Even in the worst weather, I’ve seen him in nothing but the softest slippers. His wife is dead, and he’s told me on more than one occasion that he has no interest in sex, but I have reason to believe he is syphilitic. My Employer does not have a secretary. He answers his own telephone. He types his own letters. He makes his own tea. I am his sole Employee, and many days go by in which we speak not a word to one another. In the storeroom between our offices, there is a rickety table, painted bright red. If my Employer wants me to do some work he puts it on that table, and eventually I find it. When I’ve done that work, I put it back on the table, and eventually my Employer picks it up again. He never gives me specific instructions as to what I’m to do, but by dint of practice and instinct, I am invariably correct in following his wishes. Sometimes when he goes out, I wander to the back of the loft and look out the windows there. It’s on those occasions I see things that have been hurled out of the windows of the ostensibly empty loft above. I pick up items on my Employer’s desk, and then I put them down again, exactly in the same place. I go through his files and read his correspondence. I count the pencils in his desk drawer and test their sharpness with the tip of my thumb.

  In the block of buildings behind are more lofts, some of them given over to business, some of them to storage, and some of them actually inhabited. I sometimes stand at the back windows and look out at the habited lofts as I read my Employer’s correspondence or count his pencils. Now and then I see a man in the loft directly across the way. He wears a short white kimono with large black Oriental characters painted on it. I call him Karl.

  Most of the time, however, I’m at the front of the loft, in my office. My windows look out onto the street. Directly across is a large, newish office building housing some depart­ment of the city government. I could, if I wished, stare into the city workers’ offices all day long, but I do not, and they have the courtesy to ignore me as well. The street itself is narrow and littered.

  At this time of which I speak, directly below and just beyond the door of my building, was an abandoned car with its front wheel over the edge of the curb. Six alcoholic men had taken up residence in the automobile in the previous week, three in the front seat and three in the back. Every morning they wakened just as I came into the office. But every day as well, I noted that another part of the car was wanting: a hubcap, a windshield wiper, the back bumper. It was my first duty in the morning to telephone the police and have them remove the six drunks, and it was the police, I suspect, who removed some portion of the automobile as they shooed away the derelicts. It would be only a matter of a few weeks until the six drunks were deprived of their home altogether. I experienced a curious satisfaction in watching the automobile disappear piecemeal.

  I do my work at my desk, with my back to the window. My office is illumined by the sun. I do not like fluorescent light. Now and then when the heat comes on unexpectedly and the office in a matter of minutes is suffused with hot steamy air from the hissing pipes, I’ll have to stand up and open one of my tall windows. I see derelicts and unhap
py women and policemen on the sidewalk below. I see trucks angled up over the curb, loading or unloading cartons from the storage loft directly below. I hear voices in half a dozen foreign languages I can neither understand nor even identify. The city office workers in their yellow-lighted offices ignore me, and I ignore them.

  Howard is our only regular visitor. Howard is the Delivery Boy for the pharmacy two streets over. He brings my Employer’s medicine. Howard comes at least three times a week, and during inclement seasons, once or even twice a day. Howard and I have exchanged words on several occasions, an intimacy in itself something of a marvel, for I am not accustomed to speech. I have no interest in making the acquaintance of shop boys. Yet Howard interests me, both in his character as our most frequent visitor and in his position as one who makes deliveries. He must see the interiors of many offices and many flats. In the doorway of how many living rooms has Howard stood, I ask myself frequently. Into how many lives has Howard Dormin entered, albeit in the most peripheral fashion? Has he been affected by this wide experience with the apartments and offices of total strangers?

  I do not understand how he could help but be affected. The accumulated wisdom of a Delivery Boy must, by the very nature of his peripatetic employment, be greater than that of a young man who is confined to a place behind a counter or, it might be, a desk.

  I must also admit yet a third reason for my indulgence toward this young man. Some­times, in the course of the day, I may hear no other voice but his speak in English.

  8

  “Fucking Nazis!” Howard shouted as the elevator door shrieked open. He held a transistor radio to his ear and shook it. “Fucking Nazis! They ruined my radio!”