Toplin

by Michael McDowell

  Here, on Saturday, I was alone.

  If I were attacked, the drunks in the abandoned car would not come to my aid. They knew it was I who telephoned the police against them every weekday.

  I was pleased to reflect that the elevator operated only with the use of a key. Therefore I was safe so long as I remained in my Employer’s loft.

  But what would happen when I decided that it was time to return home? There was the possibility that the five members of the gang had crowded into the tiny entrance of the building, waiting for me to appear at the end of my sixth work day. I would be attacked as I left the elevator. I fancied the sensation of my cheeks pressed against the grimy linoleum. I seemed to hear the cracking of the bones of my right arm.

  I leaned out one of the front windows and gazed down the front of the building for several minutes. I could detect no movement there. When the drunks caught sight of me and began yelling imprecations, I withdrew. On a sheet of stationery bearing my Employer’s name I drew an hourglass and attached wings to it. I taped it to the window directly behind my chair.

  I remained uneasy. I decided to go home early. This was not my custom, but then, none of my days recently had gone according to form. And anyway, who was to stop me? My Employer did not even know I was there, and had he known, he might even have objected.

  I returned to his office just to make certain that everything was in its place. It would not do to have traces of my sixth day occupancy.

  Almost against my will, I glanced out again at the array of buildings behind. At first I was relieved to find all of the windows black, dark, and empty.

  Only Karl was there, standing with his back to the windows, in his white kimono shot with large black ideographs. He held his tin coffee pot aloft. He turned his head and leered at me over his shoulder, the way crowds at Tyburn leered at the neck-doomed.

  I walked home, giving not a thought to the possibility that I would be waylaid by the Fuggits.

  I did not even remonstrate when the alcoholics in the abandoned automobile flung a bottle at my head.

  My resolve was shaken.

  I worried, as I said, that the oath to help Marta to die was an alien implant in my brain.

  My soul’s vow was no more than a metal chip engraved with a cold command.

  Howard, Annie, and the gang were all part of the business.

  I was undecided what I should do.

  I went into the long hallway between my living room and my bathroom, and let the door swing shut. I sat down with my back against the closet door there and, in the dark, pondered what ought to be my course.

  It seemed impossible to think ahead. There was too much I did not know.

  The connections between Howard, Annie, and the gang might, after all, exist only in my mind.

  I’d keep my appointment with Howard. It was possible that Howard would make all things clear.

  I had several hours to pass before I was to see him.

  I continued to ponder the events of the past few days. I began with the wanting spice and the sign upon the grocery door. I ended with myself, slumped against the closet door in the darkened hallway.

  It all came down to Marta.

  She was the kernel.

  Everything proceeded from her.

  Only by returning to her would things be made clear again in my soul.

  It was possible that an attempt was being made to control me from without. Such things happen with a frequency undreamt of in most men’s minds. I did not finally doubt, however, my ability to withstand such external manipulation. When I saw Marta again, I would know whether my vow were soul-forged or no.

  There was a bond between us, our antipodean essences.

  No one could come between us.

  I was nervous. I did not like to consider these contingencies or to imagine there was some connection between all these persons who touched my life.

  While waiting for the time to go to Howard’s, I might have cleaned my apartment. Yet my concentration wasn’t what it should be for that task.

  I decided I would make an effort to clear my brain and cleanse my soul.

  I stripped and put on fresh underwear. I went into the living room and seated myself on the sofa facing my self-portrait and took up my sketchbook.

  I am a splendid draftsman. I do not count that talent as part of my superiority. A man, theoretically, may be whole as a human being, but lack any particular talent as an artist, say, or as a mathematical theoretician. My skill with a pen is on top of my basic perfection. The gravy, Annie would say, on the icing. My self-portrait is a truer image of me than anything I have ever seen thrown back at me from a mirror. A mirror shows me a fleeting image of my essence, but at one isolated moment in eternity; the self-portrait, on the other hand, is not rooted in a particular moment. It is timeless. Anyone looking at my self-portrait would instantly say:

  Ah, there is a man born to perfection, who is now—as it were—at the peak of perfection. Here is a man who will sigh away perfection with his dying breath.

  I draw one picture a night, and that picture is the theme—as it were—of my masturbation.

  I never know what I will draw. Each night’s work is different. I have volumes of these drawings, and oddly enough, each drawing has power over my libidinousness for that one night alone. Then it is novel and almost harrowing in its ability to arouse me. It has, in its freshness, more reality than real life itself can show. After it has served its purpose, however, it is stale, flat, and lifeless, and no more to be regarded than a billboard advertisement for something I’ve no interest at all in obtaining.

  Only occasionally do I even glance through the volumes and volumes of drawings I have done, and then it is only out of a cold curiosity to determine some pattern in my unconsciousness. I’ve never made out that pattern. The sequence of drawings seems random. All are finely wrought, of course, but it’s as if they had been done by as many different artists as there are drawings. These pictures, however, are primarily a means of nocturnal release and only incidentally a matter for even superficial personal investigation. As I draft, I do not trouble myself with what has come before and what may come after. I am wholly involved with the present page. I think of nothing else.

  As I took up my pen, I wondered briefly.

  Will this drawing be more than the others?

  By more, I meant, would it partake of the specialness of the night itself?

  How would that new beginning affect this drawing?

  I thought no more about it. The pen took on a life of its own. I did not attempt to dissuade it from any particular stroke it wished to make.

  My pen drew the curve of a muscular shoulder and arm.

  I was not surprised at this. Sometimes my pen begins with the man—as did Life itself—and only afterwards is the woman added. My pen, in light strokes, continued with the masculine figure. It laid him out on the floor, in the corner of an empty room. Shoulders pulled off the floor, head thrown back and featureless, one leg stretched out, the other bent sharply at the knee. A man, no more and no less, rising from a heavy sleep he did not remember having entered.

  The picture was different from any I had ever drawn, yet somehow it wasn’t an unexpected image. I thoughtlessly reflected a little disappointment, impatient with the drawing that was presenting itself to my perusal.

  With only a masculine figure before me, of course, my pen wasn’t done. Not even when it had drawn in the exposed sex of the man, dragging scrotum, high curving penis. I waited. Nothing more. My own sex stirred irresolutely, in futile search of prey that had been promised.

  My pen rose straight and then dropped down onto the paper. I awaited the outcome with curiosity and—I confess it—some alarm. Against accident, my left hand was thrust up under the hem band of my underpants.

  A pair of female buttocks planted themselves across the torso of the supine man. This was promising. I admired the effect. The satyrical penis now arched up toward the body that would doubtless be filled and filled
in.

  I breathed relief. I had drawn, I saw now, merely another brothel tableau. A gentleman of demented imagination has purchased the services of a whore, to sit upon his belly, to squeeze his internal organs till passion rose. It is the end of a long damp night. A sullen dawn glows glumly behind thick draperies my pen had seen no need to delineate. These two alone, old acquaintances perhaps, perhaps not, feast alone in the top-most room of the house of ill-fame. There is something elemental in this man’s warped passion, for at base—my brain informed me—all passion is base. The more strangled and engorged and squeezed a passion, the nearer it is to its essential self.

  I thought:

  I’ll finish the woman, sitting upon the man’s belly, study the picture for a few moments, imagining other details, and afterwards, make quick work of it.

  I believe in masturbation. No man should go to sleep with his testicles full of slime. In sleep, the slime seeps into the blood and pollutes the hidden corners of the body. Masturbation is a salutary, even necessary cleansing rite.

  I waited, a little impatiently, for my pen to finish the figure. Truth to tell, I was suddenly weary and seemed like to fall asleep. I believe I even closed my eyes for a few moments, trusting that when I opened them again, the second figure would be completed. It hadn’t to be a finished portrait of the whore after all. I was only seeing her from the back, and I had formulated the principal limits of the story already. A few quick strokes of the pen, and then a few quick strokes more, and I’d be done. I even willed my penis up, in expectation of a prompt release.

  I opened my eyes and was revulsed.

  The second figure had been completed, but not in any manner I could have predicted and certainly not in a manner that was conducive to my limited purpose.

  The buttocks of the woman were no longer buttocks. They were her immense dragging breasts. The completed figure was perched harpylike atop the man’s torso, serene, malevolent, disinterested. One clawed hand was reaching slowly toward his scrotum. Her skin was a waste of contagion, moled and suppurated.

  Then I saw something worse—that perhaps the buttocks that were breasts were not breasts at all, but merely an enlarged scrotum, engorged with slime. A detached scrotum with a woman’s dreadful head sewn atop it, a waddling, slopping monstrosity.

  My pen wasn’t done. It drew the beginnings of a frightful face upon the torso of the man who struggled beneath this enlarged, feminized scrotum. It drew another curving penis protruding from his forehead and a sac that spilled down the contour of his neck, so that yet the contents of a third scrotum rolled upon his chest.

  I studied the figures, and then I stared at my hand that held the pen, almost with the thought that it had betrayed me.

  My penis remained up, pressing against the fabric of my undershorts, uselessly. This picture would not serve. I willed it down.

  I put the pen aside. At the cost of destroying the perfection of the album, I ripped the stiff page free—the first time I had ever taken such a step—and took it to the mantel where I propped it against the mirror. For a few minutes I alternately stared at it and at my pained, perplexed reflection.

  It occurred to me suddenly that before I had placed the pen in my hand, I had wondered,

  Will this drawing be more than the others?

  That was the answer. This picture was different and more. It was somehow commen­surate with the change in my life.

  I stared at the second figure more carefully now, to see if I could interpret it. All violent anomalies have meaning.

  It is Marta there.

  I seemed to hear the words spoken in the room. Yet I did not speak them, and no one else was there.

  That didn’t matter, however. What mattered was that I had drawn a picture of Marta—or rather, Marta’s essence, her soul. She was an illogical, unparalleled, inescapable presence.

  For a few moments I fretted that she had spilled out of the pen reserved for the delineation of my masturbatory fantasies. Was there, irreconcilable as the thought might be, somewhere deep inside me an attraction to this aberrant changeling, this earth-bound moon-calf?

  No, I decided as I returned to the couch with the page, that could not be. This figure I had drawn was merely the antithesis of all that was desirable. Marta’s very existence argued an antipodal and perfected paradigm of beauty. She was the precise negative of the ultimate phantasm of desire.

  Staring at Marta’s soul, I pushed down the front of my underpants. Without my command and certainly without my willing it, the slime of my testicles gushed across the drawing.

  12

  I was unnerved by the thought that Marta might have slipped into my masturbatory fantasies. I imagined her having held her hand briefly over my head in the Baltyk. A single drop of her blood had dropped from a single finger onto my head. It had burned through hair and scalp and settled on my white skull. It had softened it, and she seeped through into my brain. That single drop of acid had invaded my head, and the image of Marta had established itself as a Venusian goddess who raised the sluice-gates of my slime.

  I had thought of her too much, I decided.

  I had scarcely thought of anything else was the fact.

  Was my memory of her perfect?

  Had I enlarged her? Had I shored up the statistics of her being? Was she as black as I had painted her—the very midnight of humanity?

  It was necessary that I re-establish her in my brain, without prejudice, unaffected this time by the shock of seeing her without forewarning.

  I’d be a very Perseus and walk upright into the bone-strewn temple.

  I changed into Suit S-5. I left the apartment and went directly to the Baltyk Kitchen.

  The afternoon was warm. Many people were on the street. Light streamed through the faded red curtains of the restaurant. The Baltyk Kitchen served food at all hours, but it had, I suppose, its slack times. This was one. Two old women were devouring a vast meal in one of the booths. Two old men sat at the bar with empty shot glasses before them. Now and then one of them pressed the glass to his mouth and darted his tongue inside, to lap up the film of liquor that remained.

  The waitress was not Marta.

  I sat at the bar, and pointed at the special on the chalkboard raised overhead.

  The waitress gabbled at me in some unrecognizable tongue, then gabbled again, more loudly though, through the curtain into the kitchen.

  I was disappointed not to see Marta but tried not to show it.

  I was seized with panic the next instant when it occurred to me suddenly that Marta might already be dead. Having waited in vain for me to act, she had taken her own life. I saw her blood boiling up out of her slashed veins.

  I recovered myself before anyone saw the horror in my eyes. Marta, I told myself, had never been possessed of the courage to kill herself. If she had possessed it, ever, she would never have hesitated a moment to tighten the noose. Marta, I was convinced, was still alive. I did not fear accidental death either. The mistake that brought her into the world was entrenched.

  I sipped my water and recovered my equanimity.

  An elderly, thin Negress came into the restaurant. In one hand she held an attaché case emblazoned with flags, and with the other hand she was holding up to her neck a rectangle of cardboard, which appeared to be fastened around her head with twine. She seated herself sidewise in one of the booths and, looking around the room sharply, caught my eye. She held it. She let the rectangle of cardboard fall. It was a collapsible sandwich board, neatly printed in capital letters in red and black.

  The Negress smiled at me as I read:

  SUCKING FAGGOT VOTE IN THE

  SEVEN BOROUGHS M.F. SEX

  FIEND GOVERNOR OF THIS

  COUNTRY CITY STATE TOWN IS

  KILLING MY DAUGHTER MRS

  J C HODGES 94 HODGES

  STREET APARTMENT NUMBER

  ONE SEVEN IN HER BATHTUB

  GOD MOTHER NATURE STOP

  THESE COCK AND CUNT

  SUCKERS ALMIGHTY GO
D HAS

  WRITTEN THAT COCK SUCKERS

  NEED TO KILL BLACK NIGGERS

  BEFORE THEY CAN KUM

  “This government,” she said loudly to the room in general, “is run by faggot priests and lesbian nuns.”

  The waitress brought her a glass of water and a menu.

  The Negress opened the menu and unhesitatingly pointed out three items. The waitress closed the menu and took it away.

  “Do you know,” the Negress asked me loudly, “what is ruining this country?”

  I said nothing.

  She opened her briefcase. “Pornography!” she shouted. She withdrew two glossy magazines, slipped a finger into each and held them up high. Two over-long pages unfolded themselves to reveal, in her left hand, two men performing a grotesque and repellant sexual act, and on the right, a woman in carnal connection with a large black dog.

  The Negress stood up and, with a stern pout on her face, showed the pictures to the two old women in the booth directly behind her. They averted their faces but said nothing.

  The Negress walked all the way around the Baltyk Kitchen, holding the two magazines at arm’s length before her, like obscene banners. She went back to her booth, carefully refolded the photographs, and placed the magazines back into her attaché case. She closed the case and locked it. She folded and hooked her sandwich board but left it around her neck like a wooden bib.

  She slipped along the banquette and turned sideways so that she was facing out toward me.

  “Do you know what’s driving this country into the dirt?” she asked me in a loud whisper.

  “No,” I returned. “I’ve no idea.”

  She pointed lewdly at her own crotch, laughed, and slipped back into the booth. She said not another word all the time I was there and ate her food even demurely.

  My food was brought. I smiled at the waitress and did not hesitate to eat what she had placed before me. It was a bowl of dark stew, containing beef, potatoes, carrots, leeks, and I know not what all else.