DERANGEMENT
Ethan had acquaintances who believed that with the new millennium would come a new reality. He didn’t know exactly what they had in mind—which was the central, most frightening problem of dealing with other people. You never knew what was in their heads. But he imagined it as some sort of complex movie transition: a slow dissolve of the current reality as the new world wipes across the screen. Not very subtle, but certainly dramatic. The colors of this world would no doubt be brighter, more electric, as if created utilizing the latest photographic developments.
These acquaintances—he was too shy to risk calling them “friends”—spent the last few months of 1999 simply waiting for the new reality to kick in. No doubt they had sat in their little clusters pointing out to one another where the current picture was beginning to show signs of deterioration. Social and industrial systems, which had worked fine up until then, simply weren’t suited to the new ways the new physics the new world, et cetera.
Now it was April and he’d had plenty of time to think about this new world or lack thereof. And he was sure that when the proper time came, these people indeed had their new reality, that when they looked at the world outside on January first everything was as they had expected.
Ethan himself had much more modest aspirations for the millennium. He simply hoped that he would wake up to the New Year a bit less anxious, a bit less alienated, a bit less crazy. He had no idea how he might determine if he’d accomplished this.
Ethan could pinpoint the beginnings of his difficulty: that moment five years earlier when he’d climbed the steps out of his wet-smelling garden-level apartment, opened the outside door, and found himself confronted by hundreds of pairs of his stained underwear hanging from every available bush and tree. He’d blinked his eyes and waited for some significant change. There was none. “Jesus …”
Then he’d recognized that not all of the displayed undergarments were his own. He’d felt slightly relieved by this although he couldn’t say exactly why. There were boxers unlike any he might have owned and undershirts monogrammed with initials not his. Bras and panties and long, diaphanous stockings also hung from branches and littered lawns like personal belongings and body parts scattered from some massive airline disaster, making a disturbing collage of intimacy and destruction.
Now this arrangement of undergarments had become a major theme of his daily landscape. Each morning he walked to his bus stop, a long five blocks. Red-stained bras hung from telephone poles. T-shirts ripped into webbing stretched across radio and television antennae. Panties had been pulled over hot street lamps until they were spotted with scorch patterns. Dirty socks lay balled up in the flowerbeds. Tattered lace slips and ragged shorts gathered in waves along the gutters. The sun lay low and clouded, as if drowning in cotton.
Each day the scenery was much the same. Only the specific characters varied.
Today, a couple of fellows he knew from the old YMCA days were already on the bus. He was tempted to ask them if they had noticed anything different about the day, any articles of clothing displayed in an unexpected manner, but decided that caution was the better course. He watched them as they gazed out the windows, searching their faces for alarm or surprise or even mild interest. He listened in on their conversation: what they’d watched last night on TV, what they were going to have for lunch, a litany of bowel and abdominal complaints, but nothing about the dark catalog of undergarments arrayed throughout this section of the city. Ethan kept his mouth shut. Now if he could just shut down his mind.
The bus turned on to Sparrows Avenue, grinding its way through a wave of discarded negligees. Now and then one would wrap itself around a wheel and fly off at high speed, so that the air seemed filled with ghosts. Ethan continued to watch the faces of the men he knew. As much as he knew anyone; in his life days might pass without a glimpse of a familiar face, so recognizing anyone seemed somewhat significant. It was not the sort of life he would have picked; it was a life that seemed, simply, to have happened to him.
These two men struck a particular chord, no doubt, because there was something about each of them that reminded him of himself, although sometimes he forgot what that point of resemblance was. Self-reference was important, however—some therapist had told him that at some time or other. He wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, but he assumed it went something along the lines of if you couldn’t recognize yourself in the world then the world was lost to you. Or maybe that was from the Bible. But he didn’t think so.
If anything, Ethan thought he saw too much of himself in the world, his business laid out nakedly for everyone to see. Other people, however, were practically unreachable. When he talked to them it was as if he were invisible—their eyes didn’t register his presence.
These two, though, sometimes said hello. At least this time they had nodded when he climbed aboard the bus. John with the handlebar mustache, eyes lost in folds of weathered skin. Allan of the subtle twitch who could not keep his hands clean, who from time to time pulled a thin bar of soap out of his pants pocket and rubbed briskly over his palms and the backs of his hands which were gray and shiny from the repeated action.
Perhaps Allan and John saw what he saw, or perhaps they were forced to watch their own movies. He would never be sure. Even direct questions were unreliable. Liars told the truth as best they could imagine. The honest ones were too dumb to understand the distinction between lies and imagination.
Suddenly John had a small fit, if any fit could be said to be small.
Allan shouted at him, “Don’t fit! Don’t fit!” hands clapped over his eyes, like a manic child complaining of too-tight shoes.
John leaned forward, mumbling rapidly to himself or to audiences unseen. Ethan didn’t recognize any of the words.
Ethan had come to the conclusion, after much private study, that the insane were merely bad writers, unable to adequately compose the parts they had to play in the world. Some of them tried to overcompensate for bad writing by means of voluminous writing, filling page after page with their analyses of conspiracies and historic manipulations, the secret meanings to be found in advertising, and their prescriptions for and descriptions of the secret tragedies of the world.
What they failed to understand was that the best writing took place off the page. It took enormous skill, he thought, to write yourself as a figure moving with some sense of satisfaction through a difficult world.
A car pulled up alongside the bus at the intersection of Gypsy and Grant. Looking down, Ethan watched as a young woman in the front passenger seat rearranged the baby in her arms. No child carrier, not even a seat belt. How could she not know what might happen to her baby in an accident? Obviously she’d scripted herself as someone to whom such things did not happen. A common error, but infuriating.
When he looked down at the woman again, she was eating her baby, chewing at tiny arms and legs as if at a blanket full of leftovers. He stared at the scene for a time, then turned away. No sense punishing himself with repeats.
One difference between the sane and the insane was that the hallucinations of the sane were more plausible somehow. Once to please his parents he’d told them he intended to become a doctor, an idea as essentially fantastic in his case as a woman eating her child. But people found it believable. Healthy even.
It was when you started to doubt—or worse, disbelieve—your own fictions that trouble started, true horror began.
He got out of the bus down by the docks. John and Allan said goodbye with Miss America waves. Men in clothing almost identical to his own—old grungy jackets, hole-ridden sweaters, filthy watch caps, irritated eyes an extension of their outfits—wandered the trashed-out lanes. They tried not to look at each other, but sudden, often violent, impact was unavoidable. A dangerous clash of realities.
Despite their superficial similarities to himself, such men frightened Ethan. Yet day after day he was inexplicably drawn to this part of the city, and spent almost every morning here. He imagined these peo
ple had started out much as he was now, perhaps even the way he’d been before: a professional with wife and children, two-car garage and a mortgage to pay. Then something had happened, someone had opened the wrong window and they’d fallen into this, this other world.
When Ethan was a kid his favorite books had been about travel to alternate or hidden worlds: the lands at the back of a wardrobe, through the door in the base of the hill, over the rainbow. Places where a child might go to escape an indifferent or abusive adult world. What he never could understand was why children would ever want to leave such a place, why “home” retained such a powerful hold on them. Why would Dorothy want to leave Oz for Kansas? These men (and he included himself here)—who so often reminded him of children with their ill-fitting clothes and bow-legged toddling—were the ones who had never returned from the lands beyond.
So perhaps they had important lessons to impart. As frightened as he was by their habits and appearance, he told himself they would not hurt him. They might even befriend him, make of him some sort of mascot. Insane, but it was enough to keep him from running away.
A dark figure shambled to the street corner where Ethan was standing. The greasy coat hung low to the ground: tendrils of gray flesh now and then strayed from the bottom edge of the coat to graze the pavement as if feeding. Then the man stood upright, gazed at Ethan with an intensity suggesting he was trawling his memory for some correspondence.
One look into the man’s face told Ethan that, behind that pale gray mask of rough flesh and hair, scenery was ponderously shifting, pages were being turned, crumbling foundations were slowly slipping out of position. The derelict’s shapeless clothes looked as if they’d been molded to his body in one sloppy piece.
He stumbled past, out into the street itself where brakes screeched and horns blared. The man turned his puffy face toward the brightness of sound as if suddenly awakened, peering out the newly opened window of consciousness to check the day’s weather. Then he maneuvered his mouth vaguely into a smile and completed his crossing, struggling over the curb onto the opposite corner.
Where other derelicts in similar clothes waited. Where a large man in a heavy dark coat peeled away from the crowd to greet him. And began beating him.
Ethan stared in wonder as the man in the dark coat pummeled the first man, landing blows square in his face and deep into his belly, pushing blood out of pores and cracked-open places, grunting with each blow he landed and yet speaking no discernible words.
And the first man did not fight back, did not even attempt to shield himself. Just stood there, soft and pliant and completely open to every greeting the man in the dark coat gave him. Until finally he fell to his knees, but holding his head up, eyes closed, mouth wide, as if in worship.
This posture appeared to make the man in the dark coat even more determined, and he increased the force of his blows, knocking the man’s head back with each impact. Blood sprayed in baptism.
Finally the first man was completely on the pavement, a bundle of bloody rags. Ethan looked around for a phone or the unlikely police officer. But then to his amazement, the pile of rags pulled out his head and kissed the leather-gloved fingers of the man in the dark coat, lips smiling into the traces of his own blood. Then he settled back into his rags, and into unconsciousness.
The sky began to change, slowly at first, then more rapidly as increasing numbers of clouds gathered and passed, the sky gaining reds and blues and greens which darkened into bruise-like patterns. Across the street some of the unconscious derelict’s buddies tried to awaken him, in obvious panic as they shouted and gestured toward the sky. Ethan visualized apes on the brink of some evolutionary discovery.
He thought he could last it through this time, witness whatever the derelict’s wishes or dreams or lies might create, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t so much what he would see about the derelict’s mind that terrified him, but what he might discover about his own.
He turned and ran, pursued by the derelict’s waking laughter.
Every afternoon Ethan took the bus to his job at the library. The trip required two buses and two hours travel, but he didn’t particularly mind—he needed at least that much time to make the transition, so that his brain was relatively empty of traumatic imagery by the time he began work.
Some people are like cups that have spilled over. He hadn’t read that, or made it up. One day on the long afternoon bus ride he’d fallen asleep, and then awakened with this woman sitting on the seat next to him, carrying her two severed ears in one hand. She’d imparted this particular bit of wisdom. He’d assumed, because of the severed ears, that he wasn’t expected to reply. So he’d ignored her until he departed the bus in front of the library. An indication that he’d grown much too accustomed to such events was that he hadn’t even bothered to look at her when he left.
What she’d told him sounded quite true, although he wasn’t sure he completely understood it. Was it their lives that had spilled over, their minds, or their sanity? Or were we talking butchery here? The higher animals always seemed to contain far more blood and viscera and spirit than their simple packaging suggested.
Actually, there had been another reason Ethan had not turned around to look back into the bus. He’d done so a few weeks ago when he’d just had to see if the windows were still painted in blood as they had the last half of his trip, and had seen a giant spider waiting for him where the bus driver usually sat. Or at least a spider-like creature—its legs were made of human arm and leg segments. It beckoned to him with mouthparts fashioned of a multitude of tongues and fingers. After he’d been staring at the thing for a minute or so, it broke apart into hundreds of bits, which skittered back into the dark recesses of the bus. The now-revealed bus driver had smiled nervously into Ethan’s stare.
So this time he chose not to look back. An earless woman was quite enough.
Once inside the building, Ethan encountered the head librarian who jerked her thumb toward the back room without greeting. She always did that when he was a little late (and how could he help that, when he depended on an inefficient municipal bus system?). So many people seemed to have this rudeness which lacked variety. But he went happily to work anyway.
His main job was to shelve, and re-shelve, books, and the task always brought him great satisfaction. Orderly arrangement. Everything in its precise position. It was a state which stubbornly eluded him outside the library. Occasionally he might find some of his dirty underwear or someone’s severed toe wedged randomly in the stacks, but for the most part his more creative perceptions did not pester him here. Things were arranged here. The library had a system which worked very well; he had not yet found a system for himself, of any sort.
For the next several hours Ethan shelved volume after volume. He performed his task quickly, but not so quickly that he neglected to savor the feel and heft of each book. He paid careful attention to the title, author, and relative position, thinking that eventually, after years spent in the library, he might very well memorize the appearance, name, and location of every volume there.
A harsh whispering began in his left ear, and then rapidly passed over into his right. A crazed spray of spittle showered him.
“All the new books contain cameras,” a man’s voice said. “They began it last year, all the major publishers. They’ve never been good at tracking readership, you understand. Now they can see who is reading what.” Ethan started to tell the voice what a ridiculous idea that was, then realized he believed it. He looked around for the source of the male voice. Several long-range lenses snapped suddenly back into the books which had deployed them. Ethan moved slowly down the rows, knowing he was being watched, but not particularly bothered by it. Pages rustled as lenses focused, refocused.
The small man at the end of the aisle moved away as Ethan approached him, apparently intent on maintaining a certain distance. All around them were the increasing sounds of machinery—gears engaging, pumps whirring, springs uncoiling—although there was no machiner
y in sight. The man kept looking around with each new sound, his face bathed in sweat. “I think they’re on to us,” he said, moving more quickly.
Ethan looked around at the shelves and saw nothing out of the ordinary, but still experienced that sensation of being watched.
“Don’t talk too loudly and don’t act too strangely,” the man said, and started running toward the front doors. Books began falling off the shelves, encumbering his passage. Ethan followed at a dead run, ignoring the outraged shouts of the head librarian.
Ethan was a block away from the library when he finally stopped running. He looked around at the unfamiliar neighborhood, angry with himself that he had allowed someone else’s lack of coping skills to draw him away from his one refuge. Surely he wouldn’t be able to go back—the head librarian had barely tolerated him as it was.
He started walking, thinking he’d circle back and find his bus stop. He didn’t like strange neighborhoods, and he especially didn’t like them at night, when he might think, and see, most anything.
He found himself gazing up at the windows of surrounding buildings. Any one of them might contain a pair of watching eyes. Sometimes the symmetrical arrangement of shades, curtains, windows, in and of themselves, made him think of visual receptors. Occasionally there would be shadowed activity at a window. Occasionally he would hear a click as of a camera shutter’s release.
It occurred to him that this was not such a strange situation. Certainly most of us as we move about in public at least entertain the possibility that we are being observed. We expect this witnessing to be accidental and intermittent, but this is because we do not consider ourselves interesting enough for sustained observation.
Yet we’d think nothing of gazing for periods of time at a particularly interesting tree, or some specific landmark in our daily landscape: a park bench, a fountain, an old house with weathered siding and a cracked front window—Who lives there? What do they do all day? But for most of us, he thought, living our regular lives in our regular cities, the people we encounter each day are our most common landmarks. And it is their very mystery which compels us to stare.
City Fishing Page 36
