Toplin

by Michael McDowell

  “What is the name of this street, sir?”

  “Hodges,” I said and realized with misgiving that the gypsy had maneuvered herself so that she now stood between me and the steps up to the door of Number FORTY-SEVEN.

  “Would you write that down please?”

  I did so and stepped around her. I hurried up to the outer door of my building. I had the key in the lock when I was arrested by her imperative voice. “Sir! Sir!” She ran up the steps after me.

  If I had been faster or more adroit with the latch key I would have fled inside, but she caught me there at the top of the steps. She handed me the scrap of paper on which I had written:

  HODGES STREET

  Unaccountably, the black ink had begun to run. The words were now almost illegible.

  The woman asked me to write down the number of the building before which the overturned basket lay.

  I pointed up at the number painted in large numerals above the door.

  She shook her head uncomprehendingly. “Write it, please.”

  I wrote the number down and handed back the paper.

  The woman smirked at me, whether in derision or simply thanks I couldn’t make out, but she made no motion to move away.

  I turned and placed myself between her and the door. I heard her shuffling uneasily behind me. I inserted the key and opened the lock. I slipped inside and went halfway up the first flight of stairs before I turned around and looked back. The gypsy had not moved. She glared at me through the glass panes. She rattled the knob of the locked door, trying to gain entrance. She beckoned me to open the door. I ignored her.

  There was something vaguely sinister about this incident. By the time I reached the fourth floor, hugging my recorder and my tapes to my breast, I was no longer certain that the gypsy woman had nothing to do with Howard or Annie or the gang. I was convinced that she only wanted a specimen of my handwriting or something that belonged to me, that she might practice her sorcery on it. I discovered, when I had put down my burdens, that my pen was missing, too. She had somehow contrived to keep it.

  My stomach rolled loudly with hunger, and I realized that I must keep up my guard.

  I plugged in the tape recorder, unwrapped one of the blank tapes I had purchased, and set it inside the machine. I turned the machine on and took up the instruction book to read.

  To my astonishment, the tape wasn’t blank. A voice came on a few moments into the tape and said in a voice that sounded like my own in my head:

  Philosophy? I am a mysosophist! All

  wisdom is vanity, and I hate it!

  Autology is my study, autosophy my

  ambition, autonomy my pride. I am the

  great Panegoist, the would-be Conservator

  of Self, the inspired prophet of the

  Universal I. I—I—I! My creed has

  but one word, and that word but one

  letter, that letter represents Unity, and

  Unity is Strength! I am I, one,

  indivisible, central! O I! Hail and

  live for ever!

  The rest of the tape was blank. When I played it over again, even that single speech—intoned in my mind’s voice—was gone.

  I recorded my own real voice into the machine. It came out another’s. I repeated all that I had said to the priest. My words were strident, false, wheezing, and garbled. I wondered if I should have bought so inexpensive a machine. The fault might lie in the mechanism of the recorder. It might be in the tape. I switched tapes, I plugged in the recorder at a different outlet. The result was the same.

  I recorded and re-recorded, and listened, and played back all day long. Soon the rumblings of my belly became loud on the tapes, louder than my squeaking voice.

  I sounded like a ghost.

  I desisted. The truth was not to be got out of machines. I took a knife and slit open the electrical cord, exposing the colored wires within. I took the tapes and ground them beneath my heel.

  It was night, and I presumed, very late. The gilded clock on the mantel was no good to me. It had stopped at the hour of Marta’s death.

  I was no longer convinced, however, that Marta was dead. I think, had I alone been involved in this business, I would have rested secure in the thought of Marta’s corpse, unmoving and unmourned, in apartment ONE-EIGHT of Number NINETY-FOUR. But here were Annie and Howard, the Fuggits, the hermaphroditic Maintenance Man, and even the spuriously drunken priest all concerning themselves with the death of this one, supremely hideous waitress.

  Yet the fact was, I no longer cared. Whether Marta lived or was dead was a matter of indifference to me. I was only interested in getting my life in order again. I wondered, for instance, if I shouldn’t return to work the following day.

  I would, I decided.

  This was a moment of great release to me.

  I felt as if my life had suddenly dropped back into the security of my pocket once more.

  It was late at night, but I dressed myself in Suit S-4 and went out. My own building was dark and still. The street was dark and empty. I walked up the street toward Number NINETY-FOUR. I was no longer afraid of it. I could gaze on its black windows with equanimity. Its smoke-drenched bricks held no terrors for me. The Maintenance Man might have lured someone into the basement and exposed his aberrant self, but I could stand without, on the sidewalk, and not care.

  An ambulance was drawn up before the building. If its light had been flashing, I would have seen it sooner. The street was dark and deserted, the ambulance parked double in the street. I took up a position across the way and watched.

  I heard a door open. I could just discern the figure of the Maintenance Man, pushing wide the outside door of the building. Two men in white uniforms emerged, bearing a stretcher between them. On the stretcher lay a sheet-covered body. They brought it down the steps and slid it unceremoniously into the back of the ambulance. As they climbed into the front of the vehicle, they called out thanks to the Maintenance Man. The ambulance pulled slowly away. The Maintenance Man went back inside. I continued to wait and watch. Two policemen came out of Number NINETY-FOUR a few minutes later. The Maintenance Man did not appear again.

  For me time stopped, though around me the world continued to tick away. I was pressed against the brick wall of an abandoned house across the street from Number NINETY-FOUR. The light increased around me. The emptiness of my belly expanded until I seemed nothing but a shell of skin, held in shape only by Suit S-4. I did not breathe. I did not blink my eyes.

  Now and then a vehicle passed. Now and then a rat hurled itself from one side of the street to the other. A man walking his dog passed me and glanced at me and glanced away.

  I closed my eyes. At last I felt the emptiness that suffused my body working its way up into my head. My face and scalp were no more than the skin of a balloon.

  I opened my eyes. I pressed my fingers against the clammy brick wall behind me and pushed away. Stiffly I walked to the curb. I paused for a moment, gathering strength and agility in my limbs—lighter now than if they had been thin rubber membranes stuffed with straw. I walked across the street and paused at the bottom of the stoop of Number NINETY-FOUR. I looked up at the door. I tried to tell myself that I wasn’t fearful of the Maintenance Man and discovered that, in actuality, I had no fear left to overcome.

  I went up the stoop. The front door was open. I went inside. I wondered which buzzer to push. I pushed Marta’s.

  Against all expectation, the lock on the inner door was released.

  Not even thinking what this might portend, I stepped inside.

  I went slowly up the stairs. I was weak with hunger. The staircase was unlighted. It was very soon after dawn. None of the residents of the house was stirring. I heard no noises behind the doors I passed. I felt the thick carpet beneath my feet and dragged my hand comfortingly along the banister. The door of ONE-EIGHT was wedged open.

  I stood there and called inside, “Marta?”

  It might, after all, have been someone other t
han Marta on the stretcher. A Mrs. Hodges had died just a few days before. Perhaps all the tenants were old, or perhaps they tended to be victims. Maybe one of them had stolen the pills I had left for Marta as well as the note. Perhaps it was Marta, expecting one of the many visitors the Maintenance Man claimed she entertained, who had wedged open her door. Perhaps she was herself inside, reclining on a sofa, with her peignoir pulled up above her waist. Perhaps, when I pushed open the door and stepped inside, the first thing I would see would be the gap between her thighs.

  I pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  On a sofa, with legs wide apart, sat the Maintenance Man with a leer.

  “Is Marta here?” I asked.

  “Marta went out,” said the Maintenance Man.

  I was no longer afraid of him. He stuck his hand into his shirt and began fondling his female breast. I looked around the room, and noted the furnishings.

  Marta had rented her pieces from the same place I had got mine. I recalled this set of Mediterranean from the showroom. I wondered if she had paid for it in full before the place went out of business.

  There were mirrors everywhere, at least two on every wall, some in gilt frames, some in silver frames, and some were merely squares of glass attached with adhesive. I could not but be surprised at this. Marta had not the sort of physiognomy that would do well so often reflected. But perhaps it would never have done to have forgot just what her appearance was. She could never risk being surprised by the horrible face of reality, thrown back at her by some chance reflection in a shop window or a still puddle.

  “Look around,” said the Maintenance Man.

  I glanced at him curiously, wondering if, after all, he were Howard Dormin, with half a false moustache glued to his upper lip.

  I couldn’t decide anything but that it no longer mattered one way or the other.

  I went into Marta’s bedroom. Her bed consisted of five mattresses piled one on top of the other. A single sheet and a single blanket covered the top mattress. Two pillows lay on the floor. The sheet and the cases were stained with slime. I went into the bathroom. I opened the medicine cabinet but did not find the bottle of pills I had left at the door. However, I did find several bottles of medicine that had been obtained from the pharmacy that employed Howard. Somehow, I was not surprised by this coincidence.

  I went back out into the living room. The Maintenance Man had removed his shirt. I looked carefully and this time without revulsion at his bi-partite chest. I refer to the Maintenance Man as he and him at the risk of accuracy; but I first saw him in a purely masculine guise and have been unable to think of him as otherwise since. The aureole of his female breast was wide and the nipple itself erect.

  He was leafing through an album of photographs open on a low table before him.

  “Marta’s pictures are very interesting,” he remarked. “Do you want to see?”

  I went over and glanced at the open album. I turned a couple of pages and looked at a few more of the grainy, black-and-white prints.

  “They don’t interest me,” I said. “I’ve seen them before.”

  “Are you sure?” said the Maintenance Man, insidiously. He turned the album page and pointed to a particular print. It was grainy and blurred, but the woman in it was unmistakably Marta.

  The man standing beside her was my brother, whose taxi wrecked just outside the Baltyk Kitchen.

  The Maintenance Man turned the page.

  There was a large print of the Fuggits, standing in a crescent at the top of the stoop of an apartment building. Marta herself stood only a step or two below them. She held up an imaginary camera to her face, pretending to photograph the photographer. The number over the door was FORTY-SEVEN. Marta and the Fuggits were standing on the stoop of my own building.

  I grew ill.

  The Maintenance Man turned the page.

  Here was Annie, on a bed, her naked belly crossed by the shadow of the photographer. In a mirror behind the bed was reflected the photographer’s face. It was blurred and dim, and I couldn’t quite make it out.

  “Is this you taking the photograph of Annie?” I asked, unsure. “Or is it my friend Howard Dormin?”

  “Photographs have no warmth,” said the Maintenance Man as he stood up and began to unbutton his trousers.

  “Will Marta be back?” I asked.

  “Doubtful,” replied the Maintenance Man. “But it don’t matter. I’m here. I’ll do, no matter what your taste is.”

  I turned away, just as he was lowering his pants.

  “I’m half of this,” he said quietly, “and half of that. I’m part Indian and part Negro. My father was a northern Protestant, my Mother a southern Catholic. I’m dark on the left and fair on the right. I’m generally on top but for the right person I don’t mind sliding under­neath.”

  I pulled the door of Marta’s apartment slowly shut behind me.

  Hunger had passed me. I no longer even desired food. My belly was quiet.

  I went down the stairs and out the front doors of Number NINETY-FOUR. The morning was advancing. The light was brighter.

  I walked toward home.

  17

  As I walked toward home I considered the question: Is Marta dead or alive?

  I had no real evidence either way. I had seen someone’s corpse taken from Number NINETY-FOUR, but there was no name emblazoned upon the sheet to tell me whose it was. The ambulance attendants did not announce the corpse’s identity as they came down the steps bearing the stretcher between them.

  Upstairs in Number NINETY-FOUR, the Maintenance Man had said only that Marta had gone away and that it was doubtful whether she would soon return. Such an assertion would be appropriate either for Marta’s death or her going to the shore for a few weeks’ vacation.

  I had not found the empty pill bottle in Marta’s flat, but this did not materially argue for her survival. Either the ambulance attendants or the police might easily have taken it away.

  I did not go to work after all. I stayed in my apartment. I took the gilded French clock from the mantel and placed it on the dining room table. I pried off the back and took apart the mechanism bit by bit, laying the innards out in orderly rows until the entire table showed rank upon serried rank of gears and springs and cogged wheels.

  I was buoyed, as I worked on the clock, by a feeling of freedom and contentment I had not enjoyed in a great while. I wondered whether this sense of completion, of union with myself, was not predicated upon an unconscious assumption that Marta indeed was dead. Would I be so happy, I wondered, if I happened to glance out my living room window and see Marta passing on the walk below, on her way to work at the Baltyk Kitchen?

  I went to the window and looked out. It was nearly dusk, and the sky was darkening in the east. I saw my neighbors on their way home from work. Someone was moving out or moving in, a few doors up the street, and the moving van was blocking traffic. Vehicles were lined up behind it to the next intersection, blowing their horns obstreperously. I did not see Marta. My good feelings persisted.

  I stood at the dining room table and admired my handiwork. I would not, for the pres­ent, put the clock together again. I wanted to savor its disembowelled state. When it got too dark to see the toothed wheels and the springs, I put some money into my pockets and went out in search of evidence that Marta was really dead.

  I went to the corner. The Baltyk Kitchen was still closed. Someone had washed off the chalked winged hourglass on the door. Around the corner I stopped at a newsstand and began picking out several of the city and neighborhood papers, even those printed in foreign languages I did not read. Standing next to me was a bundled-up little girl, who, I realized in a moment, was not a little girl at all but a very small old woman. She picked up a copy of a popular general interest magazine from the top of a stack, held it up to the light of the streetlamp, and suddenly shouted: “What the hell is it with these wrinkles?” She threw the periodical onto the sidewalk. She picked up another, whose cover had also been creased
slightly. “Why do I always get dumped on?” she protested loudly to me and overturned the whole pile, trying to find one, on the very bottom, that was unblemished.

  I reached forward with two bills, to purchase the newspapers I had selected, and inadvertently I suppose I trod upon the old woman’s foot.

  “Your leg!” she screamed and overturned another stack of magazines in her distress. “I know why you put it there! Take your foot off mine! You send them to school and they come back stupider than when you sent them. I’ll cut it off,” she threatened, but I did not attend to her. The proprietor of the newsstand hurried around and drove her away, execrating her for spoiling his merchandise.

  I entered a small cafe. As I went through each of the papers carefully, I broke my fast with a bowl of soup and, a little later, a plate of chopped rare steak.

  I found nothing in any of the three city dailies. I went even more carefully through the two weekly papers that are printed for the benefit of this and some of the adjacent neighborhoods.

  I ordered coffee and a pastry and then began to peruse the foreign language papers.

  In the third of these, printed in the Cyrillic alphabet, I came across a brief article, in a wide black border, which several times repeated the name:

  MARTA ALEKSANDROVNA BLYUSHKINA

  This I took to be notice of Marta’s death, though—when it came down to its being written in a language I didn’t know and in an alphabet I wasn’t familiar with—I couldn’t be absolutely certain.

  I tore out the page that contained the black-bordered tribute to the dead waitress, put it into my pocket, and left the cafe.

  The name of the cafe was Time and Tide, but I noticed that only as I left it.

  The evening was warm. Many old people were seated on their stoops, talking to one another and to their neighbors who passed on the sidewalk. Children played in the darkened street, and stumbled often, and cried loudly when they were hurt. I walked home slowly, wondering if I would ever know for certain if Marta was dead or not.

  I walked past Number NINETY-FOUR. Only one apartment was lighted, and that was Marta’s. Someone stood at the window and looked out. I glanced only to make certain it wasn’t the waitress. It obviously wasn’t, but the figure looked familiar. I did not, however, pause to study it. When I had walked past, I realized that the figure had resembled no one more than Annie. I retraced my steps, but when I got back to Number NINETY-FOUR, the figure in the window was gone and the lights in the apartment had been extinguished.