by Julius Fast
On a sudden impulse he put a call through to Steve in Canada. She could straighten him out, and it would be good to talk to her again, and to Rhoda too. He found himself smiling as he dialed the number, for the first time, it seemed, in ages. Catching the thought, he shook his head. Man's emotions were indestructible.
But after a few rings the operator cut in to tell him that the phone was disconnected and there was no forwarding number. Then Steve and Rhoda had pulled up stakes and were on their way to New York, or were already here. He would have to wait till they contacted him, or he could call Albert Einstein Medical School tomorrow. It was too late now.
He toyed with the idea of calling Stiener, but decided against it. Yet he had to talk to someone. He started to dial Clifford's number, and then hung up. Clifford had his number, and he'd call when he finished work. His most productive hours were in the afternoon, often he'd work at the drawing board till nine or ten and then break for supper and the long night.
He finished the coffee and looked at his watch. He had to get out of the apartment, walk in the street where there were people and noise. He couldn't bear the loneliness of these rooms.
And yet, downstairs, he found himself drifting towards the quiet of the park. He walked through it, westward, as the last traces of light left the sky, and then he walked uptown along Central Park West.
He remembered the sleeping man on the bench and the stolen coat. If he could return that somehow, perhaps through the police—was there a lost and found for Central Park? "I stole it, but I had to. I was naked." A simple explanation.
He grinned crookedly and fumbled in his pocket for a cigar and matches. He drew in the smoke gratefully, inhaling just enough to feel the bite in his lungs. The odor of the cigar on the cold autumn air, the clean lights of the buildings around him, and the edges of starry sky—it was a beautiful night, clear and clean and cold. Like last night. But now there was less of the vivid scent of the park and city.
He walked along slowly, puffing at the cigar, trying to fight back the edge of fear and pain. If last night had been vague and half-remembered, like a dream, it wouldn't have frightened him half as much. It was the brilliant recall of every moment of his race through the park that troubled him. No dream, no hallucination could have been that real. Then what did it mean? What had happened?
He kept walking north to the end of the park, and then he cut west again towards the drive. He ambled uptown slowly, and ahead of him the lights of the West Side Highway snaked their way up the Hudson. He stood leaning on the parapet of the drive at 160th Street, staring at the George Washington Bridge, dark against darkness, outlined in light, yellow and hard white, reflected in the water in gemlike patterns.
He had walked how far? Five or six miles and he felt no fatigue. He pressed his side and probed deep, below the ribs, but the ache that had seemed so much a part of him was gone.
Or was his perception of it gone? Did that mean the nerves were affected now? That feeling was gone? Was that why he had been able to walk so far without fatigue?
The fatigue would come. You paid for all you spent, and the payment was never easy. He gripped the stone of the parapet. This must end, this perception of life, this feeling, this identity.
"We all die," Clifford had said, but not like this, eking out your last few days. And when it became really bad, when he was bedridden, whom could he call, to whom could he turn?
He bit his lip. "I won't. By God, I'll go on my own terms. When I can get up the guts to do it, clean and quick."
Maybe tonight. Well, why not? Tonight when all was clear and clean and good. End it all on a high note. No more hallucinations; no last dying agonies.
He felt tears wet on his cold cheeks and he stirred, and then walked on till he was just under the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. To his right, a hill climbed steeply past the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center to Washington Heights and the entrance to the bridge. He climbed steps and zigzagged up a cobbled street and finally came out at the bridge's entrance.
He was surprised to find that there was no pedestrian toll, and he walked out on the bridge slowly, hesitantly. For a while, in the center of the span, he watched the traffic race past, then he leaned over the railing and stared below at the dark water. There was a bitterly cold wind out here, tearing across the bridge, blowing downstream towards the harbor and the lights of the boats.
He watched a brilliantly lit riverboat head towards the bridge, and he crossed his arms, feeling his muscles tense under his fingers. This was his body, flesh and blood and bone. It had never betrayed him before. Why now? Why? A fragment of poetry, learned how many years ago, passed through his mind. Here where the world is quiet, Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds' and spent waves' riot In doubtful dreams of dreams...
No, it should be cold winds' riot. It was his life that was dead and spent. The world about him was still alive, still rilled with sound and color and feeling. It was he who dreamed the doubtful dreams of dreams.
Why had he thought of Swinburne now? What poem was it from? "Atalanta in Calydon"? The hounds of spring on winter's traces. No, that was last night. The hound of spring. Could you call a wolf a hound?
This was a different poem, and he racked his memory trying to identify it. "Green Grapes of Proserpine"? Suddenly it was terribly important that he know, but the title was buried in his memory. Was that at fault now? Was this another sign of degeneration? How long ago had he seen Dr. Turel? How much time had he been given? "Two months, at the outside three," Turel had said. What about the inside? A month, a week?
Suddenly he remembered the two lines so often quoted from Swinburne's poem, so overdone. That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. What went before? Of course. We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives forever, That dead men rise up never...
He turned his back to the railing and suddenly screamed into the wind, "Oh, Christ! No, no, no!"
Let him live. He didn't welcome death. He didn't want death. There was no sense of relief, no sense of wanting to die. He wasn't tired of life. Let him have life, what little of it was left.
But why? To go from hallucination to hallucination? To hang on kicking and screaming for these last few days? Wasn't it far better to go out decently, cleanly, all at once?
He knew in that moment that he had the courage to do it now, but it must be quick before his will crumbled. Now, in one clean moment!
He kicked off his shoes and shrugged out of his coat. He heard a shout from the roadway and brakes screamed as a car pulled to a stop. Now, before he had time to reconsider or be stopped. He tore off his jacket and scrambled over the metal rail. He hesitated only a second and then flung himself into space.
It's 220 feet from the top span of the George Washington Bridge to the river below, and Jack fell the first 50 feet in blackness and bitter cold. The wind tore at his face and clothes, and a sudden shock of terror filled him.
What had he done? What insanity had driven him to this? With a frightening clarity he knew he was not ready for death, not now, not yet. If he had another day, even another moment, he had to live it. He couldn't end things like this, plunging down to smash his body against the water below!
He twisted in midair and heard his own voice screaming wildly, frantically. "No, no no!" He didn't want to die. Not like this, not now.
The horror that gripped him turned to rage as the will to live burned through him. He wouldn't die. A wild, almost insane conviction filled him. He would get out of this. He would fly out of this like a bird.
His scream changed to a shriek of triumph and pain ripped through him as he felt his arms lengthen and tear the fabric of his clothes as they changed into vast, feathered pinions. Another hundred feet and his flight was arrested as half bird, half man, his face elongating into a beak, his body feathered and stretched, his clothes hanging in shreds from his massive wings and clawlike feet, he beat the night air over the darkened river.
He fel
l more slowly, rising, gliding, struggling to free himself from the shreds of clothes that entangled him, a joyous sense of power mixing with anxiety as he struggled in the air, searched dim and hidden birdlike instincts to capture the updraft from the river, to stay airborne.
He fought the air, beat it with his giant angel wings, tensed the bands of muscle that laced across his chest and still lost altitude, sinking lower and lower towards the icy black water.
Once he thought that he had won, and he soared upward with a shrill scream of joy, but the tangle of cloth caught at his wings, ripped the feathers from them and he fell again, fluttering over the water.
Then one trailing pinion touched the waves. He beat the air frantically, but his bulk was too great. The bird-man he had become was never designed to fly, could never do more than glide. He sank back to the water, and as his feathers were soaked, the weight of his wet clothes dragged him under.
His bird-man brain struggled for life, and his strangely chambered heart raced faster, pumping blood through his new hollow-boned body. He opened his beak to scream and the icy salt water of the Hudson filled it, burning down to his lungs.
He floundered, just below the surface, coughing and choking, kicking free of his clothes, churning the water with his wings, and again the will to live, the burning savage will to live swept through him.
Not a man, nor a bird, but only a fish could exist here, and with this conviction the feathers fell away, the arms dwindled to radiating bones, the feet fused to a tail. Inside his body the heart changed again and lungs became gills as the bird head drew back and turned blunt and smooth. With an enormous twist the last shreds of clothing were flung aside and a sleek, deadly-looking shark cut deep into the water.
As man-bird brain faded and shark mind took over, he headed instinctively seaward, following the tide to where the salt concentration became richer and more livable, outward towards the vast harbor and the ocean beyond.
Chapter Seven
Clifford, back at his apartment, ate a light lunch and then sat down at his drawing board in the studio. He lived and worked at home, and with each passing year recognized his growing reluctance to leave the apartment for any reason.
"Step one on the road to becoming a complete recluse," Jack had once told him, but that was a snap analysis. He wasn't afraid of involvement with life, nor was he ignorant of it as Jack seemed to be. He had been involved, God knows. There were those crazy years in New Orleans, and then San Francisco, the stretch in Korea ... No, it wasn't fear of involvement that narrowed his world each day. It was a vast boredom more than anything else.
Had it always been like that? Surely there had been a time when life was exciting, when he had looked forward to every day, to every experience. When had it stopped?
Surely not in New Orleans. He had led a wild, exuberant life there. Nothing was too far out, not drugs nor sex, drink nor even perversions—the original mixed-up kid, but he had lived. And he had lived in San Francisco too, painted the way he wanted to paint.
Where then had it changed? In Korea, where he had learned that no perversion of his own could match the perverse way of war? Not really. He had come back still alive, and yet life had seemed worthless. His old friends, his old work—none of it added up. He had withdrawn from involvement with life after Sarah's attempt at suicide. He brushed the memory of that from his mind. Get back to Jack. Jack had never really been involved with life.
Clifford "buttered" the back of a sheet of repro proofs with rubber cement and then capped the can, unconsciously spreading his nostrils at the sharp odor of the thinner. With his razor in hand he stared around at the white, clean walls of the studio.
The rest of the apartment was papered with an olive green hand-blocked print, keyed with care to the drapes, the upholstery fabric and the rugs—a comfortable refuge, warm and lived in. Only in this room, the studio, was there a careless disregard for color or decoration of any sort. The walls were a functional white, the furniture, drawing table, chair, cabinets, shelves all picked only for utility. This room was like Jack's apartment, and it was only here that he was completely comfortable.
He cut a column of type and positioned it on the layout. But he was comfortable because he worked here, and in the work there was a surcease from all thinking. If a man could work all his waking day...
He sat back, thinking of Jack, idly rubbing rubber cement off the clean white of the Bristol board. He had been shaken this morning, truly shaken, first by the phone call and then by finding Jack like that in the park. But he had been even more shaken by what Jack had said about the cancer.
Yet there was so much in Jack's story that didn't make sense. Where had reality ended and hallucination started? The whole story of his trip to Montreal had an unreal ring to it. The garden and the girl with the pale eyes, even this woman Steve Douthright. Would she have given him DNA just like that, an experimental dosage of the drug? If she did, had his hallucinations started then? Was that when he had seen the garden, or had he seen it before?
Clifford frowned, trying to track down an elusive memory. Just what was DNA? What effect could it have? Hadn't there been an article about it in one of the magazines he had bought last month?
He left the studio and took the pile of magazines from the bottom shelf in the bookcase, thumbing through them till he found the one he wanted. But the article, when he found it, only mentioned DNA briefly. It was about RNA and its link to memory. It described an experiment with planaria, flatworms about 5 /g inch long. Cut in half, they regenerated their heads or tails. They could be trained to react to certain stimuli, and the RNA extracted from trained planaria, fed to untrained planaria, caused the untrained ones to learn the same lesson more quickly than the original worms. RNA and possibly DNA as well, the article concluded, carried the answer to memory as well as to every other function of the body.
Then was RNA the same as DNA? In spite of what Jack had said, were they related to LSD? What a goddamned world of letters and numbers we were coming to. The computerized age. Break everything down to initials and take away its meaning, its good, its bad.
He looked up both DNA and RNA in the medical dictionary and then shook his head, as confused as before. Ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid—what did either of them mean? What was a nucleic acid anyway? He had never been strong in science.
Now he knew LSD was an hallucinogen, a drug kids used for kicks. What had made him think of it? There was no relationship between DNA and LSD. He looked at his watch and swore at the time, then he opened a can of beer and took it into the studio.
He approached the layout again and worked steadily till the late afternoon. Then he called for a messenger, packaged the mechanicals and closed the studio.
He had some frozen kidneys in the freezer and he thawed them out in a little broth for Pushkin. The cat watched him balefully from the refrigerator top, then sprang down and stalked around his dish in feigned disapproval while the meat was cooling.
"What's the matter?" Clifford frowned. "Those are damned good kidneys. You're spoiled. That's your problem."
The kidneys were good, so good their smell made him hungry. He searched the refrigerator hopefully, but it was empty. Today was his morning for shopping, but Jack had put a crimp in that. Maybe he ought to give him a ring now and have dinner with him. He wanted to get to the bottom of the whole business. But he hesitated about dinner. Was Jack—well, safe to be with? How unbalanced was he? He shrugged angrily. Hell, when a friend was in trouble you rallied round, and man, Jack was in trouble.
But Jack's phone rang unanswered and after a while Clifford gave up, relieved that he didn't have to see him. He had at least tried. He had a sandwich and coffee at the corner coffee shop, and tried to read the afternoon paper, but his thoughts kept returning to Jack and the whole problem of the cancer. What a lousy disease. And Jack had said it was incurable. Why?
Couldn't it be cut out, or treated with X ray?
He shivered, feeling an edge of fear at th
e thought of it. What an ugly word, cancer! He folded the paper with a sigh. It was a rotten deal, and why did it have to happen to someone like Jack, to such a decent guy?
How long had they known each other? It was over five years since they had worked together on that little magazine—what was its name, Spectrum? Scope? No, it was Medical Scope. He had done the layouts and artwork and Jack had edited it, and had done a damned fine job too. A shame it had folded.
He had asked him once, at one of those late bull sessions at his apartment, "You've got no responsibility, Jack. Why don't you get out of this advertising racket? Why don't you write? You can handle words."
Jack had turned his glass, squinting into the liquor. "I don't want to write, Cliff. Essentially I'm not a writer. I've got no drive to create. I'm an editor, a copywriter. I've got no ambition beyond that."
"But it's such a waste..."
"Not at all." Seriously he said, "It would only be a waste if I had the talent, if I were misusing that talent. Why do we all accept the cliché that the advertising man is a frustrated writer, that he's afraid to express his real talent or unable to. Just let him get away, off by himself, out of the rat race and he'll turn out a piece of significant writing.
"Well, I say bullshit. The advertising man is in advertising because he likes it. I like it. I like editing. That's my talent. That's my field. I've got no ambition beyond that."
"You've got no ambition, period!" It had slipped out, his tongue loosened by the drinks he had had.
But instead of taking offense, Jack had ruffled Pushkin's white fur and had grinned. "That's the heart of the matter. And if there were more ambitionless men, this would be a better society."
It wasn't just talk. After he had come to know him, he realized that Jack really felt that way. The original, noncompetitive man. And yet, it wasn't a trait he admired or approved of in Jack. He saw it as a weakness, a lack of real involvement with life.
