Dicky looked at Yvonne. Yvonne shrugged. ‘We don’t know,’ he said. ‘How long?’
‘Only so long!’ the stranger cried, and suddenly rising to his feet, he pulled from his pocket, where it had been tucked since the beginning of the interview, his right hand – only there was no right hand! He hauled up his sleeve to show how the wrist ended in a smooth, round, dimpled stump. Wordlessly the three Babylonians gazed at the stranger’s stump. They’d not met a story like this one before, and Lily slipped out to get them all a drink.
‘You can still do it with your left one, I suppose?’ said Yvonne.
‘Masturbation guilt drove me to it,’ said the stranger, resuming his seat. ‘Yes, masturbation guilt! I hacked it off myself, and I should have drowned it, I suppose, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it . . .’ There was a pregnant silence. ‘I come from a sentimental race, you see,’ he went on. ‘I put it in a shoe box and kept it under the sink instead.’
‘A shoe box,’ said Lily, who had returned with drinks. ‘Cute.’
‘Oh, there were holes in it,’ said the stranger, taking a long swallow of his Guinness. ‘But anyway, for a week I wasn’t troubled by the curse of human desire – yes, for the first time since puberty I didn’t feel the itch! Can you imagine it – a world without breasts, without skin, without bums and lips and legs . . . a world free of desire, where everything is what it seems and your brain isn’t polluted with longing and your loins aren’t constantly stirring with a life of their own . . . can you imagine what it is to be free of human desire?’
They all nodded.
‘It couldn’t last. It returned in the depths of the night, as I slept. I felt it creep under the blankets. I felt its fingers on my thigh, soft as silk. I felt it gently laying hold of me – and I rose up from my bed with a shout and I hurled the thing from me! Oh, I couldn’t have it starting again, not after all I’d been through! “Back to your box!” I shouted; and to see it drag itself out the door and into the kitchen — it was a pathetic sight, so it was. But I had to be firm, you see that?’
They all nodded.
‘I never saw it again,’ said the stranger. There was a long pause. A muted roar of conversation was audible from the bar beyond. At last Dicky spoke. ‘And you think it’s your hand that’s been causing the trouble here?’ he said.
‘I do,’ said the stranger, who had finished his Guinness and pulled out another cigarette. ‘I was in here the night before – before I cut it off. I think it remembers. I think it came back.’ He clutched his face in his hand. Oh, God,’ he sobbed, ‘if only I’d been strong. If only I’d flushed it down the toilet in the beginning–’
‘It wouldn’t have done any good,’ Dicky cut in. ‘It’s amphibious.’
‘No!’ said the stranger.
‘But more to the point,’ said Dicky, ‘how can we catch it?’
‘Oh, I’ll tell you how to catch it,’ said the stranger. ‘And I’ll tell you what to do with it once you’ve caught it.’ And he pulled from inside his coat a hefty meat cleaver — the very same one, he told them, he’d used on the hand in the first place. And then he outlined his plan. . . .
DER TOD UND DIE HAND
Late that night – very late, when the club had emptied and everyone had gone home to bed – or to the after-hours place on Avenue B – Lily de Villiers sat alone in the ill-lit mood lounge of Babylonia. She was looking her best. Her red hair was piled up on top, with thick strands curling saucily down around her face and throat. Her eyes were heavily mascaraed, and her lips were scarlet. Rouge highlights on her cheeks created an impression of mounting inner passion. She was in deep décolletage, her cleavage shadow sharply accentuated by the subdued lighting of the mood lounge, and her little leather skirt riding high up thighs sheathed in black seamed nylon stockings with runs and ladders and other tarty insignia. Her legs were crossed and her heels, as ever, were like needles. She was heavily perfumed. She exuded availability. She was the whore of Babylonia, and she was there to bait the hand.
An hour passed, and Lily sat smoking cigarettes and pouting provocatively. She crossed and recrossed her legs every few minutes, and the ashtray on the couch beside her gradually filled. Lily got to her feet and, unsure what strange eye might be watching, tottered sexily over to the bar and emptied the ashtray into a garbage can. Then she returned to the couch and resumed sitting, smoking, pouting, waiting, and crossing and recrossing her legs.
Another hour passed. Poor Lily was starting to yawn. The sun was coming up. Honest citizens were going to work. She was about to call it a night and go upstairs to the others when a tiny sound caught her attention. Could it be? It could; someone – or something — was coming down the stairs!
Lily smoked with a careless nonchalance honed to perfection by years of practice. She was very cool. And there it was! – pattering across the floor like a hideous pink crab, slapping the linoleum as it scampered toward her in lusty and intemperate haste. From fifteen feet it hurled itself upon her, groping like a maniac at her bosom! Lily rose into the air with a wild shriek of horror, then toppled backwards as from beneath the couch reared young Gunther, who had been waiting there all the while, and who now brandished aloft the stranger’s meat cleaver! Lily seized the hand and plucked it from her bosom like a limpet from a rock and hurled it with a cry of disgust against the wall. The hand fell, stunned, to the floor, and lay on its back, its white, tender, hairy underside exposed to the fierce lunge of the young German. Then down came the cleaver and mercilessly hacked the dazed hand in two! The shattered and bleeding half-hands lurched off in opposite directions, but far too shakily to escape Gunther’s terrible wrath. Slash! Down came the cleaver twice more, and hand was severed in four. From four to eight and from eight to sixteen; and when the cursed creature that had spilled the stranger’s seed so needlessly all those years was finally reduced to somewhere in the region of fifty parts, and none of them was moving, Gunther stopped. He mopped his brow and lifted his head, his breast damp and heaving, to the light, which Dicky Dee had just flicked on.
‘Good work, Gunther,’ said Dicky, his eyes burning with a morbid and unnatural gleam. ‘And Lily’ – he went to the poor girl, who was rising unsteadily to her feet after gazing aghast at Gunther’s grunty choppings; ‘my poor dear Lily. A hero!’
‘Heroine,’ gasped Lily.
‘Heroine!’ cried Dicky.
‘Heroine,’ murmured Yvonne, entering.
‘Heroine!’ thundered Gunther, brandishing the bloody cleaver.
At that moment the stranger’s hollow tones were heard. ‘The hand is dead,’ he said, from the doorway at the top of the stairs. ‘Feed it to the lizard. Long live the hand!’ And with a dry, bitter laugh – or was it just a bad cough, a dirty hack spawned of some putrid existential miasma that seethed within his guilt-ridden soul? – anyway, with a sound that chilled the racing, roaring blood of the four young people, the stranger waved his stump over his head and limped off into the sharp Manhattan dawn.
THE BOOT’S TALE
* * *
I AM, IT IS TRUE, a mere boot, and no longer young. My leather is wrinkled now, soft to the touch, and circumstance has shaped me to its whims. My sole flaps; my grommets, those that remain, are rusty; and I no longer gleam in the sunshine as I did before the war. In those days I was a working boot, and no stranger to turf, and soil, and the gravel of suburban driveways; and though I am old and stiff now, I still dream of once more lacing tightly to a healthy ankle and treading the mulch of a green and fertile earth.
A mere boot. Nevertheless, I speak, that those of you who come after — if such there be — may profit in wisdom from what I am about to impart. My service was not elevated, but I worked diligently for the old order, and would see its return. I stand to gain nothing from distorting the truth.
There were four of them to begin with. Gerty Murgatroid was the matriarch, a pale, fat woman who sat out her days with a bowl of junk food in the valley between her thighs and an unending dirge of negati
vity on her thin gill-like lips. Her eyes were like a fish’s, fixed and glassy, squeezed between lardy wedges of white fat whence they gazed constant and unblinking at a television screen. Her little bulb of a head was tufted with a few wisps of dry, fluffy hair, and it wobbled continually atop its vast immobile housing of flesh. In a faded housedress and defeated slippers Gerty endured the empty days; and her husband, Herb, a small, neat, compulsive man with bitten fingernails and a pencil-thin mustache, tinkered away in the den with his ‘projects’, and when forced to interact with his wife was unable to control a tic that flickered violently at the corner of his left eye and contorted his expression into a hideous rictus to which strangers reacted with horror but which Gerty herself had long since accepted as a manifestation of Herb’s ‘nerves’.
To tread again the mulch of a green and fertile earth . . . There is no green and fertile earth, not now. Your earth is cold now, strewn with rubble and dead things, and upon it lies an unmelting blanket of black snow. For months there was only night, as the sunlight which shone once upon my buffed and vaulted toecap was blocked by a great grimy veil of smoke and lofted soot, and the snow that fell was black. I survived that terrible winter; I went into the shelter with the canned goods and the blankets and the paperbacks and the tranquilizers, and was tossed into a corner. In the weeks that followed I observed the decline and fall of an American family.
• • •
Herb and Gerty’s relationship could not be called a loving one; and yet they managed to develop a habit of coexistence that permitted each to function according to his or her bent, and in this way they were not unlike a pair of boots, as I often remarked to my own mate and colleague, a trusty bit of footwear boiled, alas, in a soup in the days of famine that followed the war.
There were two children: Ann, a silent and delicate girl who took after her father; and fat Peter, an endomorph like Gerty. Fat Peter was a smelly, freckled boy with dirty hair and a grimy T-shirt that strained vainly to contain the jellied bulk of his tummy. A merry lad, he liked to tear the wings off houseflies and pepper the eyes of dogs. He put frogs in bottles and gleefully hurled them skywards, and small creatures scattered at his approach. His schoolmates, whom he bullied, avoided him like the plague, for to fat Peter all of Nature was a victim to be terrorized and mutilated without mercy. And thus did he discharge the pain of parental neglect, for Herb and Gerty, devoid of emotion themselves, were oblivious to the needs of their children.
But not oblivious to the impending catastrophe of Western Civilization. A plumber by trade, and a paranoid by nature, Herb had been painstakingly converting the basement into a long-term fallout shelter; and as luck would have it, on the very day he finished the job — it was a Sunday afternoon in late September — the fateful announcement was made. Gerty heard it first, and her voice sliced through the house like a carving knife.
‘Herb!’ she screeched. ‘Get up here!’
I was on the back porch at the time, enjoying the unseasonable sunshine. I counted slowly to seven; this pause permitted Herb to murmur a string of unspeakable blasphemies under his breath, and the tic in his face to start twitching. The familiar patter up the basement stairs; then, ‘Yes, dear?’
‘Turn it up! Turn it up!’
‘ . . . we repeat,’ said the TV, ‘reports are coming in that the Eastern Seaboard has been devastated by a missile strike. The President has ordered massive retaliation, and urges the American people to go calmly to their shelters and remain there until further notice. This has been a recording. We repeat . . .’
‘It’s war!’ shrieked Gerty. ‘Do something!’
It often takes a crisis to bring out the best in a man, and when Herb Murgatroid spoke again, there was a note of authority in his voice I had never heard there before.
‘Go downstairs, Gerty,’ he said firmly. ‘Take Ann. I’ll fetch Peter.’
There was a moment of silence; then Gerty assented, and could be heard heaving ponderously up out of her armchair, and shouting for her daughter. A few seconds later I was on Herb’s foot and running toward the playground where fat Peter was whiling away his afternoon. All down the street doors were opening and troubled citizens emerging to gather in small knots and gaze at the sky. We found fat Peter surrounded by a gang of little children, to whom he was demonstrating the correct method of eviscerating a bat. Herb laid a hand on his son’s plump shoulder.
‘Come home now, Peter,’ he said. ‘There’s an emergency.’
‘Not now, Pop,’ grinned the obese child, his fingers dripping with bat entrails, ‘I wanna —’
‘Now, Peter!’ barked Herb. The small children fell back, startled. Other parents breathlessly arrived to drag off their offspring. Whining all the way, fat Peter was marched home under the uncharacteristically firm hand of his father, and down into the family fallout shelter. And so it began.
• • •
Herb, being a plumber, had seen to all the life-support systems necessary to maintain the family underground for the duration. Odd, then, that he had not factored in the psychic strains that were bound to arise — for the nuclear family is very much like a hydraulic machine, and unless it’s adequately equipped with safety valves, pressure within the closed system may rise to dangerous levels. After a couple of weeks fat Peter, who had victimized the weak for most of his young life, found himself the target of collective family tension. Not only was he the youngest, he was also now the loudest; for his mother suffered a profound shock when the television networks closed down, and lapsed into a quasicatatonic stupor from which she would never be aroused. So fat Peter was unconsciously selected to absorb the psychological toxins generated in the desperate confines of the Murgatroid bunker, and his wheezy laughter was soon replaced by a dark and brooding sullenness.
Herb’s assertiveness, meanwhile, increased in inverse proportion to Gerty’s collapse: he waxed as she waned, and thus was homeostasis preserved. However, he was pretty shaken when he learned that the heavy pall of radiation drifting overhead was a good deal more dense and slow-moving than he’d been led to expect. And with the realization that the family would have to spend a considerable period of time underground, Herb decided that rationing must be immediately introduced.
He made his announcement at the next family meal. Gerty, her mind now rarely active and her body increasingly inert, did not heed the message. Ann looked anxiously at her father, but said nothing. Fat Peter began to whine.
‘Hey, Pop, I’m sick of eating stuff out of cans. Ain’t there any real food, Pop; ain’t there any meat?’
‘No meat,’ snapped Herb. ‘Only canned food now, and less of it. It may be months before we can leave.’
‘Months? Hey, Pop, it ain’t so bad up there; can’t we try it for a while? I wanna go to the store.’
‘Shut up, Peter,’ said Ann. ‘Daddy knows what he’s talking about. He’s got instruments.’
Peter rounded furiously on his sister. ‘Blow it out your ass, shitface!’ he yelled. ‘I want some meat!’
‘Peter!’ bellowed Herb, rising to his feet and pointing to the back of the shelter. ‘Go to your room. Now!’
‘I want some meat,’ whimpered the fat, unhappy boy. ‘I hate this canned garbage.’
‘Go to your room, Peter,’ repeated Herb, his pointing finger aquiver with mounting anger.
‘Yes, Peter,’ said Ann. ‘Go to your room like Daddy says.’
Fat Peter started up, the tears cutting wide channels down his plump and dirty cheeks. The cold eyes of his father and sister gazed at him with implacable distaste. Gerty had already returned to her armchair, and slumped into the sleep that claimed her now for twenty hours out of the twenty-four. The weeping boy ran to his mother, and threw himself upon her gently heaving bosom; then he fumbled at her housecoat buttons, glancing furtively over his shoulder at the others. Suddenly he parted his mother’s garment and bared a vast milkwhite breast. Ann’s hands flew to her mouth and she turned wide-eyed to her father. Herb was still on his feet, still p
ointing, and speechless with rage. Fat Peter had meanwhile buried his face in his mother’s breast and was sucking lustily at a large purplish nipple. Herb strode across the room and, pulling his belt out of his trousers, lashed his son’s back. A muffled scream issued from deep within the wobbling lake of flesh that was Gerty Murgatroid’s breast, but the great mother did not awaken, nor did fat Peter loosen his grip upon her. Herb, livid with fury, lashed again, and this time the boy’s head came up. Herb grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him off his wife.
‘Go to your room,’ he commanded. ‘Now!’
Fat Peter was squirming on the floor of the bomb shelter, shielding his face from his father’s belt. ‘I’m hungry,’ he wailed in his distress. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘To — your — room,’ ordered his father again, and blinded by his own tears, the boy crawled off on his hands and knees, Herb following right behind. Ann had by this time recovered from her shock, and darted across the room to cover her mother’s bosom and rebutton the housedress. Then she returned to the table; and Gerty slept on, oblivious.
• • •
Four days later Gerty was again sleeping and Herb was at his instruments when fat Peter and Ann heard a scraping noise at the top of the basement steps. The two children looked at each other. ‘I’m going to tell Daddy,’ said Ann.
‘Wait,’ said fat Peter. In silent suspense they waited; and then came the scrape again. Fat Peter motioned to Ann to come with him, and the pair ascended the stairs till their ears were pressed against the thick, bolted, insulated door.
‘Who is it?’ said fat Peter.
‘Let us in,’ came a feeble voice. ‘We’re starving . . . we’re freezing . . . let us in.’
Now, fat Peter and Ann were too young to know it, but they were in fact caught in one of the knottier ethical dilemmas of the postapocalyptic era. It was the nuclear lifeboat question: does one hoard resources for one’s own family and turn away the needy stranger, to almost certain death; or does one share with the needy stranger, thereby reducing one’s own stocks and jeopardizing the family? It’s a meaty question, but fat Peter unfortunately did not have the moral equipment to do it justice.
Blood and Water and Other Stories Page 15
