by Susan Daitch
Waking a few hours later I could now hear my neighbor’s television through the wall. He was watching Entertainment Live from Andrews Air Force Base, singing along with Bob Hope as if his heart would break. I didn’t want to interrupt his pleasure, but during a commercial for L’Oreal Eye Defense I banged on the wall. He turned the sound down, but it was still impossible to sleep.
I had become conscious of men in crowds, found myself turning around to see who was behind me, and felt a little haunted by the fact that Jack knew what I looked like while my image of him was blurry and vague; he refused to hold still for the camera. He knows what you look like, Antonya had said, his letters, his quotes from Man Ray’s memoirs were little fluttering baits at the end of a line. He was taunting me, terrorizing me into finding him. Jack could have been anyone, the kind of person who faded into the woodwork, going unnoticed unless you knew where to look, or he could be daring and flamboyant, right there in front of you, an irritant in the public eye all along.
Perhaps he was someone I grew up with, but I never knew him. This new possible Jack tapped me on the shoulder and jerked his thumb north, to indicate that other, much smaller city I hadn’t thought about in a long time. Had we ridden school buses together, stood in line at the Great Adventure or Storytown? Had he snickered when others called me Hawkeye, and by snickering so included himself in their group? There had been no surprise smart alecks at my school. No one who would grow up to drop notes about Méliès under my hard-to-find door. If there was someone who had pretended to be Orwell writing about the Spanish Civil War between shifts at Mr. Subb’s I think I would have known. Still, I could imagine Jack in a diner, sitting cross legged in one of the booths, shunned by everyone, even the few who protested the war. Had he been one of those who dealt drugs bought in the projects, exploded illegal fireworks, shoplifted from time to time? The boy, Jack, turns around. He’s been kicked, beaten, glasses on the ground, Orwell tossed in the gutter. He’s teased, gets angry in turn, sets fire to some derelict building in which an illegal squatter is accidentally killed. Never convicted, Orwell smiles and offers him an escape. He wears a beret to school, which is a big mistake. Life gets worse for him. The beret is grabbed, fit over a Frisbee. It flies through the air, little felt tag stiff in the breeze.
This time the note contained a Xerox of a letter that had been printed in a newspaper, but the margin had been torn off so that where it had appeared was impossible to determine.
January 13, 1969
President Richard M. Nixon
The White House
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. President,
As I watched my draft card burn last night I imagined what it would be like to be an herbicide, say, Agent Orange. Okay, here we are in Vietnam, and I am a molecule of exfoliant, floating toward a banana leaf, dissolving through it, landing on a woman’s arm, eating through bone, finally resting on the ground, burning a monkey’s paw, or searing a snake as one or the other passes over me. With a wind I drift into a rice paddy, and anyone who eats me becomes a mutant and has mutant offspring for many generations. As a molecule, or if I really were a molecule, I would want to thank you for putting me to work in such an exotic setting, and I would ask you what more could I do that would be as mindlessly destructive of innocent civilians and verdant jungle? Advancing up the food chain of weaponry I might prefer to be a mine, a piece of shrapnel, a bullet or a bomb. Unleashed in the middle of a firestorm I aim my pointed head at bamboo huts because you never know, there might be tunnels to Moscow underneath. I pass through walls and limbs as if they were no more substantial than crackerjacks. I’ve never had so much fun, but I’m none of these things. My card is burnt. I flush the ashes down the toilet.
I write to accuse, to point a finger at you, Henry Kissinger, and the other architects of this degrading and inhuman war. We should let the people of Vietnam decide their own future. I am writing to you to express alarm and outrage over the war. We have no right to be there. Like the bully on the playground who gets his own way by force, not by compassion or by engendering reason among others, nothing can be won or achieved because there is nothing to win by bombing Vietnam into the Stone Age. American actions in Southeast Asia are nothing short of genocide.
Yours very truly,
Jack Kews
A man (Jack Kews?) stared at me as I looked in the window of the appliance store next door to Burrito Fresca. Children were making faces at themselves in the self-broadcast television. I stood to one side so I could watch them and myself while they rolled their eyes back into their heads, stuck out their tongues, and called each other names. There were two of them, and the one who clearly had the upper hand was quick to goad the smaller one, taunting while her friend lagged a little, mesmerized by the process of seeing herself reflected on a regular television. See, this is you. This is what you look like. Someone who resembled my idea of Jack walked behind me. I turned around quickly, but as the man crossed the street he darted around a truck. I couldn’t see where he went, and traffic prevented me from following him. By the time the truck moved, and I was able to cross the street, he was gone, leaving nothing but an afterimage. It hits you between the eye and the eyeball, Louis Kahn also wrote, but I couldn’t remember what it was. The thing that hit me between the eye and the eyeball might have been an afterimage of a running Jack Kews, might have been Méliès’s lost negatives, might have been a bottle of Wet Gate smoothing the abrasions and scratches so that everything looked as if it were shot yesterday. 1-800-HISTORY turned out to be a useless number after all.
I went back to Jack’s apartment building. I didn’t think he’d be there, and I was right, he wasn’t, but the man who had read his mail in front of the building stepped out of Mail Boxes Etc just as distractedly as he had done the last time, stumbling and looking around. The hour was the same. He looked in my direction as if he recognized me as well. It turned out he was the building’s super; he lived on the ground floor and had keys to every apartment.
“I’m looking for Kews in 5B.”
“Haven’t seen him in weeks. Did you lend him money? One of the other tenants wanted me to break the door down because he was owed.” He stuck a thumb in a belt loop of his plumber’s pants, creating structural stress on the pants. There was a distinct possibility they would fall even further, perhaps down to his ankles.
“No, but I’d like to talk to him.”
“A lot of people would like to talk to him.”
Anticipating this, I reached into a jacket pocket and handed him a twenty. Jack’s building had a way of reaching into wallets.
“You know, this is highly irregular,” the super said as he gestured for me to follow him upstairs. “But I haven’t seen him in some time. It’s worth checking out. Once we had a tenant who ate rat poison. Didn’t find the body for days, and let me tell you, it wasn’t a suicide or an accident.”
“Somebody was forced to eat poison?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Well, no, sorry. I don’t think I do.”
“Suit yourself.”
Holes had been punched in the walls and dry plaster crumbled from them, yet the surrounding surfaces seemed damp and shiny as a result of a glossy red paint job. I heard a child’s voice screaming as we approached one apartment, and I banged on the door shouting to whoever it was to stop. The super grabbed my hand and told me the screaming wasn’t what I thought it was. We reached the entrance to Kews’s apartment. Even from the outside each door in the building bore the marks of a history of bolts and screws, presumably associated with locks, installed and then removed by successive tenants.
“It was the only time anyone died while I worked in this building. There were a lot of aliens here at the time. Some of the women were forced to do things, you know what I’m saying? One woman discovered the art of rat poison and thought that was her ticket to freedom. So what I learned is, it doesn’t hurt to be nosy once in a while, but don’t bang on that door,” he jerked his head in the di
rection of the apartment where the screaming had come from. It was quiet now. The pants shifted about an inch lower. “If a stiff’s in here, we would’ve smelled it, but’s still worth having a look, you know.” He took a last gulp from a bottle of orange soda and deposited the empty on the floor beside Jack’s door. Taking a key from a back pocket he unlocked the door and flipped a light switch.
Jack lived in a one-room apartment with a small kitchen stuck into a kind of alcove. A bathtub with ball-and-claw feet jutted out from beside the sink, but the first thing I saw was that his bed, pushed against a wall, was wrinkled. I walked over to it, put my hand on the dented pillow while the super made a beeline for the dripping tap. The sheets still felt warm. There was only one window, and although it faced the street, light was blocked by the adjacent building whose bay windows projected further out, encroaching on the sidewalk. It was mid-afternoon and very cold. The room darkened quickly.
While the super looked under the sink I walked over to Jack’s desk, which had been positioned in front of the window. Photographs of Jack with various people and photocopies of articles had been taped to the walls. I glanced at one about POW Garwood, falsely accused of something I couldn’t make out. Bug Suspect Got Campaign Funds. Radio Hanoi. . . . An article about mining strikes in England, written by Jack Kews, was tucked into a beat-up copy of Zola’s Germinal. I had to be careful the super didn’t catch me snooping. The articles were eclectic, and the walls’ contents made the room resemble that of a student writing papers for an array of classes that might not, at first glance, have much to do with one another. A jar of Wonderbond Plus glue and a staple gun lay on top of some papers, and enclosed in a paperweight was a scene of a hillside with a shovel stuck into it. When I shook the plastic bubble, snow fell. The desk served as a kitchen table as well. A plate of fried eggs and toast lay to one side, on top of a pile of books. I touched it, and to my surprise the food, too, was still warm.
“You sure you haven’t seen him?”
“I’m not always sitting out front. He could have left while I was next door picking up mail.”
While the super continued to inspect the dripping tap I began to open desk drawers as quietly as possible. I found a box of thumbtacks, envelopes, letterhead stationery taken from a London newspaper, and a yellowed clipping from a paper about, as far as I could read very quickly, a business which stored and collected personal information of all kinds, released to anyone for a fee. At the bottom of the drawer I found a list of names and addresses. The page, a sheet of lined legal paper, looked as if it had been compiled many years ago, but it was impossible to know for certain. DRL, Draft Resisters League had been written across the top, and I quickly folded the list and put it in my pocket. In the next drawer were two sealed letters addressed to me at Alphabet Conservation.
“No stiffs in here. As long as he pays his rent I can’t allow you to go through his drawers.” Having quickly confirmed that the tap did indeed leak and there was nothing he was going to do about it for the moment, the super had turned around and caught me riffling through Jack’s things.
I straightened up, embarrassed, but he hadn’t seen me pocket the DRL list.
After we shut the door and the key clicked in the lock, the door to 5C opened. A man in a wheelchair rolled into the hall.
“Let me into that apartment, Ed. He owes me fifty dollars.”
The super shook his head. Lewisohn rushed toward us, naked in his wheelchair, screaming that he had no money and he was sick of it; there were drugs he needed and medicines, and nobody cared if he lived or died. I ran to the edge of the stairs, but he blocked my getaway. Bald and rheumy eyed, he was simultaneously plaintive and terrifying. He had heavy bags under his eyes, and with a gold earring pulling down one earlobe, he was already the ghost of a pirate.
“Ever try to find a vein when you’re half paralyzed?”
His viciousness, directed at me, had to come from somewhere, but I’d done nothing to him that I could think of. His raw fury was spectacular. He was like a small animal, a rat or a snake whose frenzy seems personal although it really can’t be, and even though you’re much bigger, you feel cornered. It was impossible not to look at his veined, emaciated limbs and shriveled genitals, but in looking I felt even more vulnerable, as if he had baited me. Yes, I was caught looking at the forbidden, yet how can you not look? Lewisohn snarled, pulling back as if baring teeth or fangs, as if he was saying, I know you, I know all about you, don’t think for a minute I don’t. Once a woman pushed me aside in the subway saying, move, fuckhead, and I felt that although she was a stranger she knew some kind of hidden truth about me; a useless person who wastes time listening to a neighbor sing along with the radio, lacking the nerve to tell him to stop. Lewisohn unleashed a farrago of barely comprehensible accusations. I had betrayed him. I had made promises. I had no right to enter the building, to walk around, to breathe.
“Don’t shrink away from me. I can accuse you if I choose.”
His voice echoed down the stairwell.
Pinned to the wall, a stand-in for I didn’t know who or what, I never wanted to help him, didn’t want to listen to his insinuating incriminations. The super stood by in silence staring at the naked man in the wheelchair. I had no obligations to this Lewisohn snarling, nipping at my heels. Would I have pushed him before a moving train, given the chance? I don’t know.
“You didn’t go after him,” I accused Lewisohn, jerking my head in the direction of the super. The ability to run away was meaningless. I was sure he would flatten me even as I shrank down the stairs. Lewisohn’s anger had the force of a cartoon electric fan, high powered and out of control, blowing all the furniture to one side of the room. I threw twenty dollars at him.
“You sure you want to do that?” the super asked me, and I nodded. Between me and Antonya we’d paid off half Jack’s debt. As I walked down the stairs the building was completely silent. I couldn’t remember which door the screaming had come from, and still don’t know why I believed the super when he said the shrieking wasn’t what I thought it was.
“People think in packs,” Clarice said.
Her name had been written on the back of the DRL list, like a kind of recent afterthought, and her entry was in a darker, more liquid ink, like a fountain pen, where the others on the list had been written in ballpoint.
“There was no way Jack was going to get a fair trial, even representing himself, which might have been a stupid thing to do, looking back. He was convicted of violating the Selective Service Act. There were guys we knew who got five-year jail terms as conscientious objectors. Between conviction and sentencing, he jumped bail, getting to the UK through Canada.” She said “the UK” like an American who had lived there. “For a while he became interested in other people’s trials. I haven’t seen him in weeks. I’m going back to London. He wants to stay here.”
“When you lived with him, did he ever talk about silent movies?”
“Yes, often enough when he worked at an old film house. Omni something. I didn’t always listen, but I remember it got broken into a lot, not that there was much to steal. Some of the films disappeared, and Jack’s boss, who was a bit off, used to say, ‘If you knew what I knew, you’d be dead, my girl.’ He was murdered shortly before we were finally able to leave London and return here.”
“Did you find that strange, that he’d been murdered, after he said he was the man who knew too much? Do you think it’s true, that someone killed him because of his business?”
“How should I know? I only met him a couple of times. The last time I saw him, it had been raining, I remember that, so I went into the bathroom to comb my hair. There were never any paper towels, so I wiped my hands on the flocked paper, and the fuzz would come off, so then you had to wipe your hands on your pants. There was a big window, odd for a bathroom, and it didn’t have bars on it the way it would have in New York. That’s probably how they got in. Out in the lobby, there was a painting of a parade of actors, all of them together, cheek
by jowl as if they had all known each other as the most intimate friends: the Marx brothers, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant. The door to the projectionist’s booth, little more than seams in the wall behind the popcorn machine, was covered by Barbara Stanwyck with Peter Sellers at her elbow.”
“Jack was a projectionist?”
“Yes, what did he tell you?”
“Nothing.”
“The manager always had a telephone wedged between ear and shoulder. A large man wearing a tie that depicted flags of all nations, chain smoking, bits of ash falling on the tie, he was annoyed with me, with everyone. ‘Knock on that door and ask for Jack.’ Like I wouldn’t know that. ‘Nothing’s out of focus, my dear.’ As if I cared.
“So I knocked on someone’s left eye. A voice that sounded as if it came from far in the back of the booth told me to come in, but there was no doorknob, no way to push the panels in. After a few minutes the door swung open. At first I didn’t see anyone and banged my head against a shelf of empty reels. Several large projectors looked like army tanks capable of firing something, not necessarily waves of light. If I’d stumbled across them in a junkyard, I wouldn’t have been certain what they were, but they whined into life, reels spun, and a cone of light shot into the theater. The booth was a mess. Jack was distracted, looking for a film that he was never able to locate. He had this nervous habit of twirling empty reels, the smaller ones, around his index finger. Then the night shift guy came, and we left. The next day the manager was found with his throat cut.
“Jack was distraught when he heard. You might say, who wouldn’t be? One minute the man was there, the next day, gone. Jack was especially close to him and believed whatever nonsense the man spun about stolen films, conspiracies, bits changed and added on, scenes found at the very ends of reels. I only half listened, if that. I don’t believe there was some association of revisionistas tinkering with select bits of history. Who would bother? I can still see the big fat man in that little theater. He could barely move anywhere in it. When they came for him with a knife, whoever they were, where could he run to? Who would want to kill a harmless old bugger? Junkies, I’m guessing. The police wanted to question Jack because he worked there and all, so it was time for us to return home, but as I said, it’s nothing to do with me, and I’m not staying here.”
