What Comes Next

by Jonathan Baumbach

  He was holding her from behind. “Hit her in the face,” he said. I pulled her away from him, knocking her into a wall. Went for him. He stumbled back, scared of me. I pointed a finger at him and he disappeared.

  “Are you all right?” I said to her. She was sitting at the base of the wall. “He won’t bother you again.” She made no sound. I shook her. “Are you all right?” I was shaking her. Her head rolled from her shoulders, cracking open on the sidewalk. Her body limp like cloth, her flesh surgical rubber. I held her against me like one of Phyllis’ broken dolls.

  I’m not afraid to do what I have to do. I’m not afraid of it.

  A blond man in a light-gray suit stopped me, asked if I had a cigarette. I gave him the pack, which had one left.

  “It’s a most generous gesture to give a stranger your last cigarette. I must say I’m touched.”

  He was standing in my way, looking at the cigarette in his hand. “I’d like to reward such unstinting generosity. Come with me to my place, I’ll give you ten dollars.”

  He looked familiar. I asked him if he had been following me.

  “I would certainly like to follow you, if that’s what you want. I would have no objection to following. Fifteen dollars, which is what I used to pay my analyst for a session. That’s absolutely my best offer.”

  “What are you?”

  “You won’t have to do anything. Just keep me company for an hour. Twenty dollars.”

  “You’re a liar. You’ve been following me, haven’t you?”

  “I’d like to,” he said. “I’d genuinely like to have the pleasure of your company. I’m being totally honest and above-board with you.” His hand flew toward my shoulder.

  I brought my fist into his stomach, the knife like a rock in my hand. He bent forward. I hit him in the side of the head. Four times. Four times I hit him, twice in the head and twice in the neck, until he went down. He was smiling, drool on his lip. Pants bulging. A big smile on his face as he went down.

  A woman yelled “Police,” was calling “Police,” running up and down. Heads out the window, staring. A man tried to grab me but, pumping him in the mouth with my fist, I got away. I ran two blocks, not looking back, running heavily, legs like weights. A police siren somewhere. Blasting my mind, following me. I couldn’t shake it out.

  I got into a phone booth and sat down on the floor to catch my breath. My chest aching. Thousands of cracks in my chest, aching, like slivers of bone out of place. I kept my head down. Something sticky under me. Orange peel. Hard to breathe without pain.

  His wife lying on her back. Entering her. Digging deeper and deeper. Trapped, I watch a cop car cruise toward me, its lights flashing in reflection, its siren in my head. I think of flying somewhere. Holding my breath. The glass walls on fire. Letting go. Her hair like a veil covering my face. A blanket of her hair. God help me.

  ELEVEN

  THE COP CAB, its siren whining, cruised the block three times. My head between my legs at the floor of the booth.

  His wife answered. I asked if I could speak to her husband, Mr. Parks. Please, Mrs. Parks. Very polite. Using my hand to disguise my voice. Put your mister on, missus.

  She said he wasn’t there, didn’t know when he would be back, her breathing like whispering.

  I didn’t say anything, didn’t want to talk to her.

  “Is this Christopher? Curt’s student Christopher?”

  It was near dark. I said I would call back later, wanting to get to my place before night.

  “Why won’t you identify yourself?”

  “You know who it is.”

  “Why do you pretend you don’t know me?” Her voice like splinters of glass on linoleum. “Did you find another place to stay? Is that what happened? Curt and I were under the illusion—mistakenly, obviously—that you were staying with us. We kept expecting you to come back.”

  “Can I come back?”

  She was slow to answer, listening to herself. Too slow. “I’ll have to think about it.” She laughed.

  I asked her when Parks would be back.

  “If you have no other plans, why don’t you come to dinner tomorrow night?”

  “Do you know when Parks will be back? I have to talk to him.”

  “Christopher, I really don’t give a good damn. Where he is is his business, isn’t it?”

  I hear the cop car again, its siren. I sink, covering my face with my hands, to my knees.

  I couldn’t sleep. Too heavy. The bed, triple-size, like a field. Too many possibilities of place. No spot precisely mine. Belonging to me. I spread my arms out, brought them to my sides. Held myself. No spot mine. Moved from back to side to back. Holding on to myself, afraid of falling. (Have fallen, have fallen, have fallen, have fallen, have fallen …) Why do they come after me? What do they think I’ve done? I lie on my back in the middle of the bed, my arms out.

  “Go,” I tell myself. “Now. Now.” It takes a moment to get going. (I am nine and have short legs for my age.) The traffic heavy. I sense that I am not going fast enough. A steel pulley between my legs weighing me down. The cars. I anticipate the impact, a slow-motion runner (again and again I watch myself cover the same few feet of ground), but nothing happens. Some kind of providence protects me.

  I would like to take this opportunity to thank the good Lord for making it possible for me to spend my adult life in American sports.

  My father rushing through the house with a carving knife. My mother holding the door against him, leaning her weight against it. Phyllis and I were hiding behind the sofa. We didn’t know who he was after. Phyllis crying. I had my knife in my pocket. My mother telling him to go away. Go away. He forced his way in, knocking the door against her, knocking her down. “You’re crazy,” Phyllis said. “You’re crazy,” I said, pulling away from her, yelling at him. He dropped his knife at our mother’s feet, staring at us as if he had been waked from a dream.

  In the dark, my mother coming into my room, saying not to worry about anything. Not to worry. “I don’t want to die,” I said. “I’m afraid of dying.” “I won’t let you,” she whispers. “Do you think your mother will let you die?” My father calling her. “Are you all right now, my big boy? Don’t worry so much. Smile.” Tucking me in. In the night I died.

  My mother and father, years younger, making time on a dark-red couch. A memory or a dream? She puts her fingers through his eyes.

  “What’s the spirit of the bayonet?”

  To kill.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “To kill.”

  “Can’t hear you. Sound off like you have a pair.”

  “Kill. kill. Kill.”

  This middle-aged woman was shaking me. “What are you doing here, young man? Who told you you could stay in our bed? Are you a friend of Kenneth’s?” I said I didn’t know his name.

  She said unless I was gone in five minutes she was going to call the police. Her husband in the living room. Her lips as if something burning in her mouth. There was nothing to do but get away.

  On Riverside Drive, wearing Parks’ shirt and pants—the clothes his wife had given me. Looking at the shiny river, sun flashing off it like jewels. My plan to hitch a ride somewhere. Get out of the city until the heat was off. A pair of red-tinted glasses on a bench stopped me. The glass hardly bigger than the eye. Really nice. I put them on, the wire pinching my ears. Everything seemed on fire. Wanting to keep the glasses, in my hurry I left my briefcase behind. When I came back there was a cool-looking Negro with a beard where the glasses were. The case gone.

  I asked if he had seen a black briefcase.

  He didn’t answer, puffed on his cigar. “Where did you get those tiny shades, Jack?” he said.

  “You can have the glasses if you let me know where the case is.”

  “Jack, are you intimating that I took your case? Shi-it. Is that what you’re trying to tell me? What every black man wants is a white man’s black briefcase in his black hand. Is that what you think?”

  �
�Just let me have the case.”

  “What?”

  “I said, just let me have the case, please.”

  “What?”

  “I won’t call the police.”

  Somebody I didn’t see grabbed my arms from behind. Taking his time, the fellow on the bench got up. The teeth of his smile like flames. “It’s not polite to accuse someone you don’t know of taking from you, Jack. Your black briefcase—you think I need that to be human. I don’t even want your gangrenous gray skin. Even if you were willing to give it up, to cut it off and hand it over, I wouldn’t take a suit of it.” Like a surgeon, he removed my glasses.

  “Don’t hurt him,” the guy holding my arms said. “Just take the glasses and let him go, Omar.”

  “Do you think it would give me any pleasure to hurt you?” he said, his face very close. The heat of his stump of cigar. “It wouldn’t give me the slightest bit of pleasure. Not the slightest.” He held the glasses as if he were going to smash them into my eyes.

  “It wasn’t very propitious to get him mad,” the one behind me said. “A bad mistake of strategy.”

  There were some people watching, the man in the hat in back, winking at me.

  “What I want is to dismember you,” he said in a soft drawl. “To take you apart piece by piece, limb by limb, skin by skin, to make a white briefcase out of you to keep my important black papers in. Remember that, though I’m a nonviolent man, I want to kill you.” Like flame moving toward oil, he went back to the bench and, putting the glasses on, sat down.

  My arms were freed. I turned to see who was behind me. A bald light-skinned Negro, older-looking than the other, my briefcase between his legs. He dusted it off with his hand and, laughing, handed it to me as if it might blow up if it were dropped. “No hard feelings,” he said.

  I smiled back, put my knee in his balls. His face turning white. Ran. Hiding out in the men’s room in the basement of Philosophy Hall at Columbia. Sitting in a booth, the door latched. Voices, people, going in and out, washing hands, looking for something. Washing hands. I stayed put. My black case between my legs.

  At night, wanting to tell him something, I went to his house for dinner. The beginnings of a plan of action. I had a drink in a metal glass and some cheese and salami on Wheat Thins. (My briefcase on the couch next to me.) Sweat like acid in the raw lines of my hands. I didn’t ask where he was. Give up the peace movement, Curtis. Support our Boys in the Trenches.

  Not listening to his wife, looking at her voice, I felt better than I had for a long time. Out of danger. She was nice to me.

  I sat on the red-and-gray horse, tried my weight on it, rode back and forth. Gently. Pressing my knees to its sides.

  “Curt built that,” she said. “It’s one of the few things he’s ever finished.”

  His name in the room like a presence. I looked around; he was in his chair, a gray hat on his head, making a speech. If we all loved each other, he was saying, there’d be no more love.

  Her anger, like the sudden touch of something cold, rode past me. “Have you seen him recently?” she said, her eyes behind me. The horse’s tail flying.

  “Have I seen who?”

  She gave me a cunning look. “It doesn’t become you to play dumb, Christopher. You’re going to break that horse if you keep riding it that way.”

  She wanted it broken. “I haven’t seen him recently,” I said.

  “Would you tell me if you had? Your activity on the horse is making me nervous. I don’t know whether to believe you or not.”

  I looked around the room again, the tilt of instinct. The furniture deformed, mad. Parks had gone.

  Carolyn was laughing.

  “Why didn’t you tell me he was gone?” I said. “I came here to see him.” I got off the horse, her anger pricking me.

  Like a sleepwalker, her face clouded over, she walked away. Deserted me. The horse rocking, riderless, dying to a stop.

  Unable to sit, needing to move, I walked around the room. There was a letter to Parks left out on top of the desk (a paperweight on it with two fishes head to head inside) from some magazine. Complimenting some essay he had written—“The Murders of Lincoln and Kennedy: The Assassins in Our Mirror”—but saying it wasn’t for them.

  I called to Carolyn and got no answer, called again. Went through the drawers of the desk, which were full of useless things—souvenirs, photos, blank paper. A picture of Carolyn, much younger, in a bathing suit standing between two men in uniform, neither of whom was Parks.

  I found her lying across the width of their double bed, her head in her arms, as if she were holding something breakable, the room without light.

  As I approached, Carolyn lifted her head to see who was there, her hand shading her eyes to no purpose. “Sometimes I need to withdraw,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you answer when I called?”

  “Why don’t you go home, Christopher? I think I want to be alone now.” Her hips squirming. Wasn’t bad-looking for an older woman.

  I wondered what it would be like to be against her body, to feel the heat between her legs. “I’m waiting for your husband,” I said.

  She raised herself on an arm. “If that’s why you’re here, you’d better go. He’s not coming back.”

  “I didn’t know that you weren’t living together. It’s not my fault.” I closed my eyes not to look at her, but they flicked open, staring irresistibly.

  She put on the lamp next to her bed, trembled at something. At seeing the way I was looking at her. The light made her squint. “You didn’t know that Curt had moved out? I don’t know whether to believe you or not, Christopher. It’s possible, of course, that you didn’t know. If you hadn’t spoken to Curt, as you say, though I imagine you have other sources. Have you spoken to his girl?” Something broken in her face gleamed.

  I felt the knife in my pocket, got out of the bedroom—the rest of the house in a fever of heat.

  “Chris, don’t go,” Carolyn said, coming after me. My back to her. Not knowing where to go. “It’s not you I’m angry at. I’m sorry.” Her hand on my arm, rubbing, patting it, as if it belonged to her. “I’m not always this way, am I?”

  “You don’t know what you’re sorry for.” I was suffocating, pulled her arm away so I could breathe, though it made no difference. Chest heavy.

  “You hurt me,” she said, her head hung like a child’s.

  I stood facing the wall, then I sat down on the couch, then I got up. “I can’t stay here.”

  “I’ll fix you another drink. Dinner should be ready in at most five minutes. I promise. I left Jacqueline at my mother’s so we could talk without interruptions.”

  “I don’t want any dinner,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”

  “I’ll have to throw it out if you don’t eat it.” Wheedling voice. Charm tuned up to pitch of dog whistle.

  When she said that, he used to get stiff with rage, banging his fist on the table, but then he would eat everything in sight. I used to move my hands from the table, afraid he would eat them too.

  “Throw it out, god damn it. I’d like to see you throw it out.”

  She was grinning, mouth twisted. “It bothers you, doesn’t it? I know, you can’t bear to see anything wasted.”

  “You threaten to throw things out but you never do it.”

  It was like a game. I went into the kitchen after her. She was tilting a yellow enamel pot over the garbage pail, brown stuff clinging to the sides. I took it away from her, twisting her arm to get it away.

  Sitting in his seat, I ate his dinner.

  CAROLYN: (Picking at her food, playing with it like some child.) Was Curt really a good teacher?

  CHRISTOPHER: (Shrugs. Shovels food into his face.)

  CAROLYN: Perhaps he was better than you were able to recognize. Isn’t that possible? One thing I’ve noticed about you, Christopher, is that you’re not very generous.

  CHRISTOPHER: (Continues to eat. Chewing noisily with ravenous mouth open.)

  CA
ROLYN: (Pops two tranquilizers in her mouth. Swallows them with wine, coughing.) I’m feeling like a person for the first time in years. (Sticking out her chest. Hate coming off of her in waves.)

  Not hungry, I finish everything, hungrier now that I was done. Words buzz through, sticking to the skin like flies on a damp day. My senses like pins. I couldn’t shut her out though she didn’t care whether I listened or not, looked at me without sight. (I could have died in the middle of her story and she wouldn’t have stopped.) Too many voices ticking in my head, women’s voices—the words senseless—the sound like being kissed to sleep.

  An all-out surprise attack in which all resources are devoted to counter-value targets …

  CAROLYN: Nothing he does satisfies him. He sits around looking miserable, suffering, blaming it on us. He’s incapable of any kind of real pleasure. Self. Self. Self.

  CHRISTOPHER: (Foot itches. Removes shoe to get at real pleasure.)

  CAROLYN: (SNIFFING. BLOWS HER NOSE. CHANGES SEAT.) He may be happier with her for a while but his unhappiness has nothing to do with who he’s with, and eventually he’ll blame her for his discontent and tell her he wants his freedom and take off and leave her.

  CHRISTOPHER: (Thinking: She’s mad, doesn’t know who she’s talking to, who’s drinking her red wine, eating her stew, corkscrew on the table leering at her. Breasts like soap bubbles. What does Parks want from us?)

  CAROLYN: One of the difficulties of our marriage from the start—I say this as a fact, you understand—is that I’m smarter than Curt. (Sniffing strange odor with exaggerated repugnance.) Christopher, put your shoe back on, please.

  CHRISTOPHER: (SCRATCHES HIS FOOT. DOES NOT PUT SHOE BACK ON.)

  CAROLYN: My husband has some illusion of himself as a great man. How boring he can be. Oh, God, how dull he is!

  My mother was telling us how my father was the most exciting man she knew—everything he said was original and brilliant. That’s why she married him, difficult as he is. “If you think he’s so brilliant,” Phyllis said, “why is it you never listen to him when he talks?” She said how cute we were, her eyes floating out of her head, hugging Phyllis, hugging us both. How cute.