by Peter Straub
Bunting began unpacking the baby bottles from the giant box, now and then stopping to suck cold Popov from the Ama. When he got to sixty-five, he saw that he was only one layer from the bottom, and was immediately sorry that he had not taken another hundred from the cash machine. He was going to need at least twice as many bottles as he had to fulfill his plan, unless he spaced them out. He did not want to space them out, he wanted a nice tight look. A nice tight look was essential: a kind of blanketing effect.
Bunting thought he would try to do as much this night as he could with what he had, then get more money from the bank tomorrow evening and see how far another seventy or eighty bottles got him. When he was done tonight, he would read some more— not The Buffalo Hunter again, but some other novel, to see if the same incredible state of grace, like the ultimate movie, would come to him.
Bunting did not understand how, but what he wanted to do with all the new baby bottles was tied to what had happened to him when he read the Luke Short novel. It had to do with…with inwardness. That was as close as he could come to defining the connection. They led him inward, and inward was where everything important lay. He felt that though his entire way of life could be seen as a demonstration of this principle, he had never really understood it before—never seen it clearly. And he thought that this insight must have been what he felt coming toward him at the coffee shop: what mattered about his life took place entirely in this room.
When all the bottles were out of the box, Bunting began slicing open the packages of nipples and attaching the nipples to the bottles. When this was done, he opened a tube of epoxy and put a few dots on the base of one of the bottles. Then he pressed the bottle to the corner of a blank wall and held it there until it stuck. At last he lowered his arm and stepped away. The pink-tipped bottle adhered to the wall and jutted out into the room like an illusion. It took Bunting’s breath away. The bottle appeared to be on the point of shooting or dripping milk, juice, water, vodka, any sort of fluid onto anyone in front of it.
He dotted epoxy onto the base of another bottle and held it to the wall snugly alongside the first.
An hour and a half later, when he ran out of new bottles, more than a third of the wall was covered: perfectly aligned horizontal bottles and jutting nipples marched along its surface from the entrance to the kitchen alcove to the door frame. Bunting’s arms ached from holding the bottles to the wall, but he wished that he could finish the wall and go on to another. Beautiful now, the wall would be even more beautiful when finished.
Bunting stretched and yawned and went to the sink to wash his hands. A number of roaches ambled into their hiding places, and Bunting decided to wash the stacked dishes and glasses before the roaches started crowding each other out of the sink. He had his hands deep in soapy water when a thought disquieted him: he had not thought about the loss of all Tuesday, all Wednesday, and most of Thursday since buying the box of nipples and bottles, but what if his radical redecoration of his apartment was no more than a reaction to that loss?
But that was the viewpoint of another kind of mind. The world in which he went to work and came home was the world of public life. In that world, according to people like his father and Frank Herko, one “counted,” “amounted to something,” or did not. For a dizzy second, Bunting imagined himself entirely renouncing this worthless, superficial world to become a Magellan of the interior.
At that moment the telephone rang. Bunting dried his hands on the greasy dish towel, picked up the phone, and heard his father pronounce his name as if he were grinding it to powder. Bunting’s heart stopped. The world had heard him. This unnerving impression was strong enough to keep him from taking in the meaning of his father’s first few sentences.
“She fell down again?” he finally said.
“Yeah, something wrong with your ears? I just said that.”
“Did she hurt herself?”
“About the same as before,” his father said. “Like I say, I just thought you ought to know about stuff like this, when it happens.”
“Well, is she bruised? Is her knee injured?”
“No, she mainly fell on her face this time, but her knee’s just the same. She wears that big bandage on it, you know, probably kept her from busting the knee all up.”
“What’s making her fall down?” Bunting asked. “What does the doctor say?”
“I don’t know, he don’t say much at all. We’re taking her in for some tests Friday, probably find out something then.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“Nah, she’s down in the basement, washing clothes. That’s why I could call—she didn’t even want me to tell you about what happened. She’s on this washing thing now, she does the wash two, three times a day. Once I caught her going downstairs with a dish towel, she was going to put it in the machine.”
Bunting glanced at his own filthy dish towel. “Why does she— what is she trying to—?”
“She forgets,” his father said. “That’s it, pure and simple. She forgets.”
“Should I come out there? Is there anything I could do?”
“You made it pretty clear you couldn’t come here, Bobby. We got your letter, you know, about Veronica and Carol and the rent and everything else. You tell us you got a busy social life, you tell us you got a steady job but you don’t have much extra money. That’s your life. And what could you do anyhow?”
Bunting said, “Not much, I guess,” feeling stung and dismissed by this summary.
“Nothing,” his father said. “I can do everything that has to be done. If she does the wash twice a day, what’s the big deal? That’s okay with me. We got the doctor appointment Friday, that’s all set. And what’s he going to say? Take it easy, that’s what, it’ll cost us thirty-five bucks to hear this guy telling your mother to take it easy. So as far as we know yet, everything’s basically okay. I just wanted to keep you up to date. Glad I caught you in.”
“Oh, sure. Me, too.”
“ ‘Cause you must be out a lot these days, huh? You must get out even more than you used to, right!?”
“I’m not sure,” Bunting said.
“I never could get a straight answer out of you, Bobby,” his father said. “Sometimes I wonder if you know how to give one. I been calling you for two days, and all you say is I’m not sure. Anyhow, keep in touch.”
Bunting promised to keep in touch, and his father cleared his throat and hung up without actually saying good-bye.
Bunting sat staring at the telephone receiver for a long time, barely conscious of what he was doing, not thinking and not aware of not thinking. He could not remember what he had been doing before the telephone rang: he had been puffed up with self-importance, it seemed to him now, as inflated as a bullfrog. He pictured his mother trotting down the basement stairs toward the washing machine with a single dish towel in her hands. Her bruised face was knotted with worry, and a thick white pad had been clamped to her knee with a tightly rolled Ace bandage. She looked as driven as if she held a dying baby. He saw her drop the cloth into the washing machine, pour in a cup of Oxydol, close the lid, and punch the starting button. Then what did she do? Nod and walk away, satisfied that one tiny scrap of the universe had been nailed into place? Go upstairs and wander around in search of another dishcloth, a single sock, a handkerchief?
Did she fall down inside the house?
He set the receiver back in its cradle and stood up. Before he knew he intended to go there, he was across the room and in front of the rows of bottles. He spread his arms and leaned forward. Rubber nipples pressed against his forehead, his closed eyes, cheeks, shoulders, and chest. He turned his face sideways, spread his arms, and moved in tighter. It was something like lying on a fakir’s bed of nails, he thought. It was pretty good. It wasn’t bad at all. He liked it. The nipples were harder than he had expected, but not painfully hard. Not a single bottle moved—the epoxy clamped them to the wall. Nothing would get these bottles off the wall, short of a blowtorch or a cold chisel, Bunti
ng was slightly in awe of what he had done. He sighed. She forgets, That’s it, pure and simple. Tough little nipples pressed lightly against the palms of his hands. He began to feel better. His father’s voice and the image of his mother darting downstairs to drop a single cloth into the washing machine receded to a safe distance. He straightened up and passed his palms over the rows of nipples, which flattened against his skin and then bounced back into position. Tomorrow he would have to go to the bank and withdraw more money. Another hundred to hundred and fifty would finish the wall.
He couldn’t go to Battle Creek, anyhow: it would be a waste of time. His mother already had an appointment with a doctor.
He backed away from the wall. The image of the fakir’s bed resurfaced in his mind: nails, blood leaking from punctured skin. He shook it off by taking a long drink from the Ama. The vodka burned all the way down his throat. Bunting realized that he was slightly drunk.
He could do no more tonight; his arms and shoulders still ached from gluing the bottles onto the wall; he would tip just a little more vodka into the Ama—another inch, for an hour’s reading—and get into bed. He had to go to work tomorrow.
As he folded and hung up the day’s clothes, Bunting looked over his row of books, wondering if the Buffalo Hunter experience would ever be given to him again, afraid that reading might just be reading again.
On the other hand, he was also afraid that it might not be. Did he want to jump down the rabbit hole every time he opened a book?
Bunting had been groping toward the clothes rail with the suit hanger in his hand while looking down at his row of books, and finally he leaned into his closet and put the hook on the rail so that he could really inspect the books. There were thirty or forty, all of them paperbacks and all at least five or six years old. Some of them dated to his first days in New York. All the paperbacks had curling covers, cracked spines, and pulpy pages that looked as if they had been dunked in a bathtub. Slightly more than half of these were Westerns, many of these taken from Battle Creek. Most of the others were mysteries. He finally selected one of these, The Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler.
It would be a relatively safe book to see from the inside—it wasn’t one of the books where Philip Marlowe got beaten up, shot full of drugs, or locked away in a mental hospital. As importantly, he had read it last year and remembered it fairly well. He would be able to see if any important details changed once he got inside the book.
Bunting carefully brushed his teeth and washed his face. He peered through his blinds and looked out at the dingy brownstones, wondering if any of the people who lived behind those lighted windows had ever felt anything like his fearful and impatient expectancy.
Bunting checked the level in his bottle and turned off his other lamp. Then he switched it on again and ducked into his closet to find an alarm clock he had brought with him from Michigan but never needed. Bunting extracted the clock from a bag behind his shoes, set it to the proper time, shoved various things off the bedside chair to make room for it, and wound it up. After he set the alarm for seven-thirty he switched off the light near the sink. Now the only light burning in his room was the reading lamp at the head of the bed. Bunting turned down his covers with an almost formal sense of ceremony and got into bed. He folded his pillow in half and wedged it behind his head. He licked his lips and opened The Lady in the Lake to the first chapter. Blood pounded in his temples, his fingertips, and at the back of his head. The first sentence swam up at him, and he was gone.
SIX
Nearly everything was different, the cloudy air, the loud ringing sounds, the sense of a wide heartbreak, his taller, more detached self, and one of the greatest differences was that this time he had a vast historical memory, comprehensive and investigatory—he knew that the city around him was changing, that its air was far more poisoned than the beautiful clean air of the meadow where the buffalo grazed but much cleaner than the air of New York City forty-five years hence: some aspect of himself was familiar with a future in which violence, ignorance, and greed had finally won the battle. He was walking through downtown Los Angeles, and men were tearing up a rubber sidewalk at Sixth and Olive. The world beat in on him, its sharp particulars urged him toward knowledge, and as he entered a building and was instantly in a seventh-floor office his eye both acknowledged and deflected that knowledge by assessing the constant stream of details—double-plate glass doors bound in platinum, Chinese rugs, a glass display case with tiers of creams and soaps and perfumes in fancy boxes. A man named Kingsley wanted him to find his mother.
Kingsley was a troubled man of six-two, elegant in a chalk-striped gray flannel suit, and he moved around his office a lot as he talked. His mother and his stepfather had been in their cabin up in the mountains at Puma Point for most of the summer, and then had suddenly stopped communicating.
“Do you think they left the cabin?” Bunting asked.
Kingsley nodded.
“What have you done about it?”
“Nothing. Not a thing. I haven’t even been up there.” Kingsley waited for Bunting to ask why, and Bunting could smell the man’s anger and impatience. He was like a cocked and loaded gun.
“Why?” he asked.
Kingsley opened a desk drawer and took out a telegraph form. He passed it over, and Bunting unfolded it under Kingsley’s smoldering gaze. The wire had been sent to Derace Kingsley at a Beverly Hills address and said:
I AM DIVORCING CHRIS STOP MUST GET AWAY FROM HIM AND THIS AWFUL LIFE STOP PROBABLY FOR GOOD STOP GOOD LUCK MOTHER.
When Bunting looked up Kingsley was handing him an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of a couple in bathing suits sitting on a beach beneath a sun umbrella. The woman was a slim blonde in her sixties, smiling and still attractive. She looked like a good-looking widow on a cruise. The man was a handsome brainless animal with a dark tan, sleek black hair, and strong shoulders and legs.
“My mother,” Kingsley said. “Crystal. And Chris Lavery. Former playmate. He’s my stepfather.”
“Playmate?” Bunting asked.
“To a lot of rich women. My mother was just the one who married him. He’s a no-good son of a bitch, and there’s never been any love lost between us.”
Bunting asked if Lavery were at the cabin.
“He wouldn’t stay a minute if my mother went away. There isn’t even a telephone. He and my mother have a house in Bay City. Let me give you the address.” He scribbled on a stiff sheet of stationery from the top of his desk—Derace Kingsley, Gillerlain Company—and folded the card in half and handed it to Bunting like a state secret.
“Were you surprised that your mother wanted out of the marriage?”
Kingsley considered the question while he took a panatela out of a copper and mahogany box and beheaded it with a silver guillotine. He took his time about lighting it. “I was surprised when she wanted in, but I wasn’t surprised when she wanted to dump him. My mother has her own money, a lot of it, from her family’s oil leases, and she always did as she pleased. I never thought her marriage to Chris Lavery would last. But I got that wire three weeks ago, and I thought I’d hear from her long before now. Two days ago a hotel in San Bernardino called me to say that my mother’s Packard Clipper was unclaimed in their garage. It’s been there for better than two weeks. I figured she was out of the state, and sent them a check to hold the car. Yesterday I ran into Chris Lavery in front of the Athletic Club and he acted as if nothing had happened— when I confronted him with what I knew, he denied everything and said that as far as he knew, she was enjoying herself up at the cabin.”
“So that’s where she is,” Bunting said.
“That bastard would lie just for the fun of it. But there’s another angle here. My mother has had trouble with the police occasionally.”
He looked genuinely uncomfortable now, and Bunting helped him out. “The police?”
“She helps herself to things from stores. Especially when she’s had too many martinis at lunch. We’ve had some pretty nasty sce
nes in managers’ offices. So far nobody’s filed charges, but if something happened in a strange city where nobody knew her—” He lifted his hands and let them fall back onto the desk.
“Wouldn’t she call you, if she got into trouble?”
“She might call Chris first,” Kingsley admitted. “Or she might be too embarrassed to call anybody.”
“Well, I think we can almost throw the shoplifting angle out of this,” Bunting said. “If she’d left her husband and gotten into trouble, the police would be likely to get in touch with you.”
Kingsley poured himself a drink to help himself with his worrying. “You’re making me feel better.”
“But a lot of other things could have happened. Maybe she ran away with some other man. Maybe she had a sudden loss of memory—maybe she fell down and hurt herself somewhere, and she can’t remember her name or where she lives. Maybe she got into some jam we haven’t thought of. Maybe she met foul play.”
“Good God, don’t say that,” Kingsley said.
“You’ve got to consider it,” Bunting told him. “All of it. You never know what’s going to happen to a woman your mother’s age.
Plenty of them go off the rails, believe me—I’ve seen it again and again. They start washing dishcloths in the middle of the night. They fall down in parking lots and mess up their faces. They forget their own names.”
