Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  He pushed the swinging glass doors open and entered once more into that familiar harsh blue fluorescence. Warm, doughy, meaty odors came at him in waves—meat patties sizzling on a griddle, the smell of coffee in a large aluminum urn, sodden pickles in a plastic counter bowl, stale pound cake in cellophane encased in a thumb-stained cake-saver, all evoking in him the pleasant sensation of homecoming.

  The place was empty except for the black counterman who instantly recognized the lumbering figure looming in the doorway. Quickly he tossed a number of frozen patties onto the grill and turned up the coffee.

  Before the detective left that morning, somewhere near 5:00 A.M., having excoriated the police, harangued the judges, and denounced the entire penal system in general, he had consumed four hamburgers, three plates of fries saturated in packet ketchup, and four cups of a lethally treacly coffee.

  2

  “I will in a minute if you just give me a chance.”

  “I don’t have a minute.”

  “I have a perfectly good excuse.”

  “You always do.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “What’s good about being gone four days? No call. No communication. What could be good about that?” Her voice grew increasingly shrill. As she spoke she flung clothing into the yawning mouth of a Gladstone bag.

  “Where do you think you’re going at four in the morning?”

  “Anywhere. It can’t be far enough for me.” Watford watched her with an air of quiet amazement. The lurches and charges, the sweeping, scythelike motion of her arm chucking clothing, as if she were fencing with some invisible adversary. “Put the bag away, Inez. Let’s try and talk.” When he made a gesture toward the bag, she darted, snatched a lead paperweight, and brandished it above her head. “Put your hand on that again and so help me, I’ll bash you.”

  “Inez—”

  “Don’t touch it. I warn you. Don’t touch it.”

  “Okay, okay. Just stop shouting. It’s four A.M.”

  “Shouting?” She was ashen, her body so taut she appeared to vibrate like a plucked string. “You want shouting. I’ll give you shouting.”

  “Inez, the neighbors …”

  “Fuck the neighbors. You just stay where you are. Not a step closer or, so help me, I’ll brain you.”

  He watched her fling clothing with an air of quiet awe. The energy level she’d achieved inspired wonder in one for whom lassitude was virtually a way of life. “Won’t you just let me try to explain?”

  “I don’t want explanations. I’ve heard all of them by this time. I told you, I’m nobody’s nigger. I don’t sit around the house. I don’t twiddle my thumbs. I wait for no one.”

  “I said there’d be times when I’d go off like this.”

  “You did. You sure did.” A spray of spittle arched outward from between her snarling lips. “But I’m dumb, you see. Slow on the uptake. I didn’t realize what it really meant.”

  “That was all part of the arrangement.”

  “Agreed. It was. Only now I’m finished with the arrangement. Finito. Kaput. Up the arrangement.” She jammed a toilet kit into the overflowing lip of the bag and, breathless, panting, pushed down with the full weight of her drab, frail body. Grunting, as if for punctuation, she wrestled the bag’s zipper closed. “What kind of fucking arrangement, for God’s sake? I sit around here. Clean your house. Cook your supper. Do your stinking wash. I was better off on my own. At least I was independent. What I made I kept. And I was beholden to no one. Least of all, some weirdo screw who thinks I should be grateful to him just for taking me off the streets. You lost your job again, didn’t you?” She laughed at the stunned, rather hurt expression in his eyes. The laugh was more a cackle. It rose shrill out of a slightly crooked, heavily painted mouth.

  “Who said so?”

  She laughed again, cheerlessly, forcing it, using the laughter like a goad. “Your office called wanting to know where you were. That was yesterday. They said you hadn’t been in for five days. I said you were away on personal business. Just like you told me. That I’d have you call the moment you got back. They said not to bother. They’d be sending your severance check along in the next day or so, along with the junk in your desk. Whadya think of them apples, Charley?”

  Watford was a fairly good-sized man, easily six foot, who contrived somehow to convey the impression of someone smaller. His stride was tentative, his shoulders stooped, and he went along at something of a crouch. Standing still, he could achieve a sense of motionlessness that was extraordinary in a human being, as if all his vital signs had closed down and he was in a state of suspended animation.

  In a room full of people one had to look hard to see Watford. He had the gift of assimilating himself perfectly into the surrounding landscape.

  Now he could feel something starting to stir and swell within him. For a moment his vision dimmed and there was no air left in the room to breathe. The sensation that he was on the brink of blowing apart passed, followed by a strangely impressive calm. “You can go now, Inez.”

  That wasn’t exactly the reply she’d been expecting. Her eyes opened and she gaped at him. Then once again that shrill, grating laughter. “Oh, may I? Well, thank you. I’m so grateful to you for permitting me to leave. ‘Cause I can’t breathe in this place anymore—this house with its doilies and lace and the funny little chintz chairs. All of that goddamned ditsy old-lady porcelain locked up in cabinets and your precious cranberry glass. It all smells of old lady. Camphor and mustiness and rubber stockings.”

  “It was my mother’s glass.”

  “I know very well whose glass it was.” She peered hard at him. Whatever coarse, slatternly attractiveness there was in her had now turned pinched and haggish. “So I’m very glad it’s okay for me to leave this house now; leave you here with your antiques and your art-i-facts.” She pronounced the word in mocking imitation of him, then watched him walking slowly toward her. She watched him warily, the way a rabbit, paralyzed and quivering, is transfixed by the approaching snake.

  “You better go now, Inez.”

  “I don’t need no second invitations, Buster,” she murmured under her breath, grabbed the Gladstone, then lunged for the door, yanking it open so hard that it banged against the wall. In the next moment she was clattering down the stairs to the outside door.

  Following her out to the head of the stairs, he stood there weaving, slightly dizzy, peering down at her, his legs trembling and nauseous the way ugly scenes had always made him nauseous.

  At the bottom of the stairs, standing in the open frame of the door, with the damp chill of early morning rushing in, she glared up at him, all pinched and mean. “Fucking creep,” she jeered, then slammed the door and was gone.

  Long after she’d gone he stood at the top of the stairs, peering down at the place she’d just vacated. He half expected her to reappear, weeping and contrite. And if she had, he’d have taken her back, even though he didn’t want her any longer. But Charles Watford was basically a generous man with a streak of antique chivalry—that same kind of fatuous comic gallantry that had done so much to turn a serious talented father into a music-hall buffoon. Old Cyril Watford, horologist, master clockmaker, a man of awesome reputation within the narrow compass of a small rarefied field, who as late as 1949 was still delighting the neighbors by attiring himself with spats and a boutonniere.

  In his time Cyril had been summoned across oceans by kings, ministers, archbishops and heads of state, invited to climb dizzying towers and there enter the multichambered steel hearts of cathedral clocks, parliamentary spires, university belfries.

  Like the anatomist or the great physician, Cyril Watford’s whole being existed solely for the purpose of charting the inner workings of exquisitely complicated time machines. Cardiologist, pathologist, even psychoanalyst to the great clocks of the world, he could chart their diseases and effect their cures. Sprockets, gears, springs, spinwheels, balances were the vital organs he could transplant. His long,
delicate fingers could probe their way through the lead-copper vascular system of a giant tower clock, locating stenosis and occlusion. Rooting out rust, he could restore a sixteenth-century masterwork to all of its former glory.

  For this rare gift he was paid handsomely. His services were in great demand. But quixotic to his lyric Gaelic core, he gave away every penny he earned; emptied his pockets to strangers encountered in saloons or railway stations in foreign cities, subsequently reducing his family to the brink of penury. The sum effect of this on Cyril’s wife, never strong in either body or spirit, was that she took to her bed with a vague disorder one day, and then later, to a bottle of barbiturates which ultimately proved her undoing.

  Unable to sleep, Watford sat outside in the small backyard garden on a plastic chaise in what remained of the dampish misty night. Savoring the darkness, he thought of old Cyril, dead now some twenty years. The memory of the man was still a rancorous thing, fraught with a kind of terror.

  Badly rattled from his encounter with Inez, he let the darkness roll over him, lap at him, quietly engulfing him. Watford enjoyed darkness, for in darkness he became most himself. In the brilliant light of day he tended to be other people. People he saw and for a while imitated. He wore a mask of cheerful amiability. Outwardly, a model human being.

  But that was not the real Watford. The real Watford was a nocturnal creature. Like an owl or a cat, he came out only at night. Solitude and darkness were his métier. Mostly he was happy to sit all night in the garden on his chaise beneath the noble old tulip tree, vigilant, watchful, held in the exquisite tension of some forever nameless expectation. Muscles coiled, yet strangely calm, he dozed, but even then he remained keenly conscious of himself, aware of all the burrowing, digging, grubbing, stalking nocturnal life about him.

  At dawn he rose, brushed the residue of night from his clothing, the accumulation of dew and fallen insect life, then went upstairs to shower and shave and prepare for work. No need for that now. He had no work to go to this morning and Inez, his companion of the last several months, the last of his remaining responsibilities, was gone.

  3

  The young man, whose name was Kramer, pressed the lower lid of Watford’s eye down with his thumb, studying the pale pinkish pocket of inner flesh. From there his fingers strayed up behind Watford’s ears, then down beneath the fleshy folds under the mandible, palpitating as he went, seeking for areas of enlargement.

  “Stomach? Waterworks?” the intern asked.

  “Fine. All fine.”

  “Lie back a minute.” The young man gently guided Watford down on the bed till he lay flat, then ran his hands up under the hospital smock and completely explored the stomach and pelvic area.

  “That hurt?” He pressed the area above the appendix.

  “No.”

  “Have we had a BP on him?” the doctor asked the nurse hovering behind him, scribbling onto Watford’s chart.

  “One forty over seventy. On the low side, actually.”

  The internist appeared perplexed. “Okay. Want to pull up your shirt a minute?”

  Docile as a child, Watford hauled the robe up around his shoulders. “Last night directly after supper it just came on me. I got extremely warm and faint. And my head—” He groaned. “Is the fever high?”

  “Forty degrees centigrade. About a hundred and three Fahrenheit. That’s high.”

  “What about the leukocytic count?” Watford asked suddenly.

  The young man looked up from the chart on which he’d been scribbling. “Beg pardon?”

  “The leukocytes.” Watford smiled back archly. “The white blood cells. They ran some blood tests on me last night.”

  “Since you ask,” the tired young man sighed, “it was close to 200,000 cubic millimeters. That’s high too. And I hear a slight tachycardia in your chest.” Watford smoothed his smock back down around his spindly milk-colored thighs and lay back on the bed.

  “It’s obvious,” the young man went on, “you’re working some kind of infection. I can’t find the source of it. No focus of sepsis. I think you’d better plan to stay around a couple of days. I’d like to do some more blood workups. An IVN and a CAT scan. Will you get him set up for radiology first thing in the morning?” He addressed the nurse over his shoulder. “And let’s try him on a half gram of Valium for that headache.” The intern rose and was about to start out.

  “Doctor,” Watford called weakly from the bed. The young man turned. “The Valium won’t do it.”

  “Why won’t it?”

  “I’m an old friend of these headaches.”

  “You get them often, do you?”

  “At least one a month. They’re migraine. Valium won’t even make a dent in it.”

  The physician looked down at him, pondering. “Okay. We’ll try you on some ergotamine.” He took out his prescription pad.

  “Actually, I’ve had much better luck with meperidine.”

  The young man’s pen paused in midair. “Oh? How much?”

  Watford reflected a moment. “I’d say about seven hundred milligrams taken intravenously.”

  Outside in the hall, the young intern paused to chat with the nurse. “When did he come in?”

  “Last night. Around ten o’clock. Severe headache. Nausea. High fever. Claimed he was going to black out.”

  “You ever see him in here before?”

  “No.”

  Something in the doctor’s manner conveyed uneasiness. “Aside from the high leukocyte count and the tachycardia, which comes from the fever,” he went on, “his life signs are fine. Heart. Blood pressure. Lungs. Can’t find a thing wrong with him.” He shrugged and started off, then turned abruptly. “If he asks you for any more Demerol, you let me know.”

  In Watford’s room they had turned the lights down, with only the coin-slot operated TV casting a pale violet glow over the semiprivate room. He was glad that the bed opposite him was unoccupied. He sipped a bit of cranberry juice through a plastic straw and wiggled his toes cozily beneath the blankets.

  Outside it had started to rain. The hard drizzle made a pleasant frying sound on the large panes. With a deliciously drowsy sense of well being, he watched the eleven o’clock news.

  Shortly the nurse came back with a small phial and a hypodermic. “All right, Mr. Watford, will you please turn over.”

  The soul of compliance, Watford rolled on his side and hiked his smock. In the next instant he felt the punch of the needle and the quick cold contraction round the point of entry. “That ought to take care of the headache for now.”

  “I hope so,” he sighed miserably. “I do hope so.” He let her pull the blankets up about him and tuck him in for the night.

  “Want me to turn off the TV?”

  “Leave it on, please. I like to fall asleep with it going. You can just turn the sound down.”

  After she left he finished his juice and watched the end of the news, feeling the Demerol slowly overtake him. In moments he was removed bodily from his immediate environment. Transported elsewhere, he savored the sense of unanchored weightlessness, of imminent levitation. There was the extra bonus, too, in that for Watford, Demerol taken intravenously was invariably attended by a surging penil erection.

  His skin was suddenly very cool and he could feel the darkness of the room slipping over him like a black silk gauntlet. It snuggled against him like an old cat as he smiled mischievously into the encroaching shadows.

  He dropped off, dreaming of a small child lying naked on an operating table. No more than possibly eight or so, the child was bathed in harsh white lights. Above him stood a surgeon with a gauze mask which tended to emphasize a pair of extremely kind eyes.

  Next to the surgeon stood the anesthesiologist, joking broadly, holding up a small rubber mask for the child to see. At one point he put the mask over his own face while several nurses, starched and immaculate, clapped and laughed. One of them, a grayhaired, rosy-cheeked eminence, held his hand and patted it energetically.

 
; “I’m going to slip the mask over your face now, Charles,” the anesthesiologist stooped slightly and spoke into his ear. “When I tell you to start counting …”

  Sometime later that evening Watford awoke. Someone, a nurse, no doubt, had turned off the television. The only illumination in the room now came from the corridor outside. Awake and keenly alert, like some small feral creature aware suddenly of a nearby predator, he listened to the nighttime squeak of cork-soled shoes hastening down the corridor, the rattle of a trolley full of medications, a moan from an adjacent room. Then silence.

  A short while later he was up and moving. He crossed the room to the lavatory. Once there he zipped open the small plastic toilet kit into which he’d packed toothbrush and shaving equipment. Within that kit was a shallow, zippered inner pocket designed to keep a mirror, or possibly a needle and thread. From out of that pocket, Watford withdrew a hypodermic syringe and laid it carefully on the side of the sink.

  In the next moment, he sat on the toilet and forced himself to have a bowel movement. When he’d finished, he took the hypodermic, plunged it into the bowl beneath him and filled the syringe with a solution of water and fecal matter. Then, still seated on the toilet, he lay back, pulled the hospital smock up above his pale, drooping belly and plunged the needle deep into the skin of the abdominal wall. So deftly had it been done that he scarcely felt the needle pinch or the fluid being injected into his system. Even the puncture was barely discernible.

  In the next hour he would rise again and take two one-ounce phials of ipecac he’d brought along with him in his bag. Then in another twenty minutes or so, he knew, the retching and vomiting would commence.