334

by Thomas M. Disch

  There was time to watch a cloud move across the sky from Jersey, over the Hudson, and past the sun. Unseen winds nibbled at its wispy edges. The cloud became his life, which would disappear without ever having turned into rain.

  Later, and the old man was walking up the sea promenade toward the Castle. He stalked him, for miles. And then they were alone, together, at the far end of the park.

  “Hello,” he said, with the smile reserved for grown-ups of doubtful importance.

  He looked directly at the dim-bag, but Little Mister Kissy Lips didn’t lose his composure. He would be wondering whether to ask for money, which would be kept, if he’d had any, in the bag. The pistol made a noticeable bulge but not the kind of bulge one would ordinarily associate with a pistol.

  “Sorry,” he said coolly. “I’m broke.”

  “Did I ask?”

  “You were going to.”

  The old man made as if to return in the other direction, so he had to speak quickly, something that would hold him here.

  “I saw you speaking with Miss Kraus.”

  He was held.

  “Congratulations—you broke through the ice!”

  The old man half-smiled half-frowned. “You know her?”

  “Mm. You could say that we’re aware of her.” The “we” had been a deliberate risk, an hors d’oeuvre. Touching a ringer to each side of the strings by which the heavy bag hung from his belt, he urged on it a lazy pendular motion. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  There was nothing indulgent now in the man’s face. “I probably do.”

  His smile had lost the hard edge of calculation. It was the same smile he’d have smiled for Papa, for Amparo, for Miss Couplard, for anyone he liked.

  “Where do you come from? I mean, what country?”

  “That’s none of your business, is it?”

  “Well. I just wanted … to know.”

  The old man (he had ceased somehow, to be Alyona Ivanovna) turned away and walked directly toward the squat stone cylinder of the old fortress. He remembered how the plaque at the entrance—the same that had cited the 7.7 million—had said that Jenny Lind had sung there and it had been a great success.

  The old man unzipped his fly and, lifting out his cock, began pissing on the wall.

  Little Mister Kissy Lips fumbled with the strings of the bag. It was remarkable how long the old man stood there pissing because despite every effort of the stupid knot to stay tied he had the pistol out before the final sprinkle had been shaken out.

  He laid the fulminate cap on the exposed nipple, drew the hammer.

  He said “Ha!” And even this, rather than being addressed to the boy with the gun was only a parenthesis from the faintly aggrieved he resumed each day at the edge of the water. He turned away and a moment later he was back on the job, hand out, asking some fellow for a quarter.

  334

  Part I: Lies

  1. The Teevee (2021)

  Mrs. Hanson liked to watch television best when there was someone else in the room to watch with her, though Shrimp, if the program was something she was serious about—and you never knew from one day to the next what that might be—, would get so annoyed with her mother’s comments that Mrs. Hanson usually went off into the kitchen and let Shrimp have the teevee to herself, or else to her own bedroom if Boz hadn’t taken it over for his erotic activities. For Boz was engaged to the girl at the other end of the corridor and since the poor boy had nowhere in the apartment that was privately his own except one drawer of the dresser they’d found in Miss Shore’s room it seemed the least she could do to let him have the bedroom when she or Shrimp weren’t using it.

  With Boz when he wasn’t taken up with l‘amour, and with Lottie when she wasn’t flying too high for the dots to make a picture, she liked to watch the soaps. As the World Turns. Terminal Clinic. The Experience of Life. She knew all the ins and outs of the various tragedies, but life in her own experience was much simpler: life was a pastime. Not a game, for that would have implied that some won and others lost, and she was seldom conscious of any sensations so vivid or threatening. It was like the afternoons of Monopoly with her brothers when she was a girl: long after her hotels, her houses, her deeds, and her cash were gone, they would let her keep moving her little lead battleship around the board collecting her $200, falling on Chance and Community Chest, going to Jail and shaking her way out. She never won but she couldn’t lose. She just went round and round. Life.

  But better than watching with her own children she liked to watch along with Amparo and Mickey. With Mickey most of all, since Amparo was already beginning to feel superior to the programs Mrs. Hanson liked best—the early cartoons and the puppets at five-fifteen. She couldn’t have said why. It wasn’t just that she took a superior sort of pleasure in Mickey’s reactions, since Mickey’s reactions were seldom very visible. Already at age five he could be as interior as his mother. Hiding inside the bathtub for hours at a time, then doing a complete U-turn and pissing his pants with excitement. No, she honestly enjoyed the shows for what they were—the hungry predators and their lucky prey, the good-natured dynamite, the bouncing rocks, the falling trees, the shrieks and pratfalls, the lovely obviousness of everything. She wasn’t stupid but she did love to see someone tiptoeing along and then out of nowhere: Slam! Bank! something immense would come crashing down on the Monopoly board scattering the pieces beyond recovery. “Pow!” Mrs. Hanson would say and Mickey would shoot back, “Ding-Dong!” and collapse into giggles. For some reason “Ding-Dong!” was the funniest notion in the world.

  “Pow!”

  “Ding-Dong!” And they’d break up.

  2. A & P (2021)

  It was the best time she could remember in how long, though it seemed a pity none of it was real—the rows and stacks and pyramids of cans, the lovely boxes of detergents and breakfast food—a whole aisle almost of each!—the dairy shelf, and all the meat, in all its varieties. The meat was the hardest to believe. Candy, and more candy, and at the end of the candy a mountain of tobacco cigarettes. Bread. Some of the brands were still familiar, but she passed by these and put a loaf of Wonder Bread in the shopping cart. It was half full. Juan pushed the cart on ahead, moving to the half-heard melodies that hung like a mist in the museum’s air. He rounded a corner toward the vegetables but Lottie stayed where she was, pretending to study the wrapper of a second loaf. She closed her eyes, trying to separate this moment from its place in the chain of all moments so that she’d always have it, like a pocketful of pebbles from a country road. She grappled details from their context—the nameless song, the spongy give of the bread (forgetting for the moment that it wasn’t bread), the waxiness of the paper, the chiming of the registers at the check-out counters. There were voices and footsteps too, but there are always voices and footsteps, so she had no use for these. The real magic, which couldn’t be laid hold of, was simply that Juan was happy and interested and willing to spend perhaps the whole day with her.

  The trouble was that when you tried this hard to stop the flow it ran through your fingers and you were left squeezing air. She would get soggy and say the wrong thing. Juan would flare up and leave her, like the last time, staring at some insane cloverleaf miles from anywhere. So she put the so-called bread back and made herself available, as Shrimp was always saying she didn’t, to the sunshine of here and now and to Juan, who was by the vegetables, playing with a carrot.

  “I’d swear it’s a carrot,” he said.

  “But it isn’t, you know. If it were a carrot you could eat it, and it wouldn’t be art.”

  (At the entrance, while they were waiting for a cart, a voice had told them what they were going to see and how to appreciate it. There were facts about the different companies who’d cooperated, facts about some of the more unusual products such as laundry starch, and what it would have cost the average person shopping for a week’s groceries in terms of present-day money. Then the voice warned that it was all fake—the cans, the boxes, the bo
ttles, the beautiful steaks, everything, no matter how realistic it might look, all just imitations. Finally, if you were still thinking of lifting something just for a souvenir, it explained the alarm system, which worked chemically.)

  “Feel it,” he said.

  It felt exactly like a carrot, not that fresh, but edible.

  “But it’s plastic or something,” she insisted, loyal to the Met’s tape.

  “It’s a carrot, bet you a dollar. It feels like a carrot, it smells like a carrot—.” He took it back, looked at it, bit into it. It crunched. “It is a carrot.”

  There was a general sense of letdown among the people who’d been watching, of reality having intruded where it didn’t belong.

  A guard came and told them they’d have to leave. They wouldn’t even be allowed to take the items they’d already chosen through one of the check-out counters. Juan got obstreperous and demanded his money back.

  “Where’s the manager of this store?” he shouted. Juan, the born entertainer. “I want to talk to the manager.” At last, to get rid of him, they refunded the price of both tickets.

  Lottie had been wretched through the whole scene, but even at the bar under the airfield afterward she didn’t bother to contradict his version. Juan was right, the guard was a son of a bitch, the museum deserved to be bombed. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the carrot. “Is it a carrot,” he wanted to know, “or is it a carrot?”

  Dutifully she set down her beer and took a bite. It tasted like plastic.

  3. The White Uniform (2021)

  Shrimp tried to focus on the music—music was the major source of meaning in her life—but she could only think of January. January’s face and her thick hands, the pink palms roughened with calluses. January’s neck, the tense muscles slowly melting beneath the pressure of Shrimp’s fingers. Or, in the opposite direction: January’s heavy thighs pressing against the tank of a bike, bare black flesh, bare black metal, its dizzying sound as it idled, waiting for the light, and then before it had gone quite to green its roar as it went tearing down the freeway on the way to … What would be a suitable destination? Alabama? Spokane? South St. Paul?

  Or this: January in a nurse’s uniform—brisk, crinkly, blinding white. Shrimp would be inside the ambulance. The little white cap rubbing against the low ceiling. She would offer her the soft flesh of her inner arm. The dark fingers searching for a vein. A little daub of alcohol, a moment’s chill, the hypodermic, and January smiling—“I know this hurts.” Shrimp wanted to swoon at that point. Swoon.

  She took out the plugs and let the music wind on, unheard, inside the little plastic case, for a car had left the street and pulled up to the little red charger. January lumbered out from the station, took the man’s card, and stuck it in the credit slot, which replied “Ding.” She worked like a model in a shop window, never pausing, never lifting her eyes, off in her own universe, through Shrimp knew that she knew that she was here, on this bench, looking at her, longing for her, swooning.

  Look at me! she thought at January fiercely. Make me exist!

  But the steady flow of cars and trucks and buses and bikes between them dispersed the thought-message as though it were smoke. Perhaps some driver a dozen yards past the station would glance up with momentary panic, or a woman riding the 17 bus home from work would wonder what had reminded her of some boy she had thought she had loved twenty years before.

  Three days.

  And each day returning from this vigil. Shrimp would pass in front of a drab shop with a painted sign, Myers Uniforms & Badges. In the window a dusty moustached policeman from another town (the sprinkles on his jacket were wrong for New York) brandished, in a diffident way, a wooden billy club. Handcuffs and canisters dangled from his black gunbelt. Touching the policeman, yet seeming not to notice, a fireman decked out in bright yellow rubber striped with black (another out-of-towner) smiled through the streaked glass at, in the opposite window, a tall black girl in a nurse’s white uniform. Shrimp would walk past slowly and on as far as the traffic light then, like a boat when its engine conks out and it can no longer fight against the current, she would drift back to the window, the white uniform.

  The third day she went inside. A bell clanked. The sales-clerk asked could he help her.

  “I’d like—” she cleared her throat “—a uniform. For a nurse.”

  He lifted a slim yellow tape measure off a stack of visored caps. “You’d be… a twelve?”

  “It’s not—Actually, it isn’t for me. For a friend. I said that since I’d be passing by here … ”

  “What hospital would she be with? Each hospital has its own little requirements, you know.”

  Shrimp looked up in his young-old face. A white shirt, the collar too tight. A black tie with a small, crisp knot. He seemed, in the same indefinite way as the mannikins in the windows, to be in uniform.

  “Not a hospital. A clinic. A private clinic. She can wear … whatever she likes.”

  “Good, good. And what size is she, your friend?”

  “A large size. Eighteen? And tall.”

  “Well, let me show you what we have.” And he led Shrimp, enraptured, into the farther twilight of the shop.

  4. January (2021)

  She’d met Shrimp at one of the open sessions of The Asylum, where having come to recruit she’d found herself, in the most shameful way, recruited—to the point of tears and, beyond tears, of confessions. All of which January reported faithfully at the next meeting of the cell. There were four cell members besides herself, all in their twenties, all very serious, though none were intellectuals or even college dropouts: Jerry and Lee Lighthall, Ada Miller, and Graham X. Graham was the link upward to the organization but not otherwise “leader” since one thing they were against was pyramidal structures.

  Lee, who was fat and black and liked to talk, said what they were all thinking, that having emotions and showing them was a completely healthy direction. “Unless you said something about us?”

  “No. It was more just sexual things. Or personal.”

  “Then I don’t see why you brought it up here.”

  “Maybe if you told us something more about it, Jan,” Graham suggested, in Graham’s gentle way. “Well, what they do at The Asylum—”

  “We’ve all been to The Asylum, honey.”

  “Stop being a fucking bully, Lee,” his wife said.

  “Lee’s right, though—I’m taking up all our time. Anyhow I was there early, sort of sizing them up as they came in, and I could tell the minute this one arrived—her name is Shrimp Hanson—that she wasn’t one of the regulars. I think she noticed me right away too. Anyhow we started off in the same group, breathing and holding hands and all that.” Ordinarily January would have firmed up a narrative of this length with some obscenities, but any resemblance to bluster now would only have made her feel sillier than she did. “Then she started massaging my neck, I don’t know, in a particular way. And I started crying. For no reason at all I started crying.”

  “Were you up on anything?” Ada asked.

  January, who was stricter than any of them on that score (she didn’t even drink Koffee), could legitimately bridle. “Yeah, on your vibrator!”

  “Now, Jan,” said Graham.

  “But she was up,” she went on, “very much up. Meanwhile the regulars were swarming around us like a pack of vampires. That’s what most of them come there for, the sludge and the blood. So we went off into one of the booths. I thought we’d screw and that would be that, but instead we started talking. That is, I did—she listened.” She could remember the knot of shame, like the pain of a too sudden swallow of water, as the words came out. “I talked about my parents, about sex, about being lonely. That kind of thing.”

  “That kind of thing,” Lee echoed, supportively.

  January braced herself and took a deep breath. “About my parents. I explained about their being Republicans, which is all right of course, but I said that I could never relate sexual feelings wit
h love because of their both being men. It doesn’t sound like much now. And about being lonely I said—” she shrugged, but also she closed her eyes “—that I was lonely. That everyone was lonely. Then I started crying again.”

  “You covered a lot of ground.”

  She opened her eyes. No one seemed to be angry with her, though they might have taken the last thing she’d said as an accusation. “We were at it most of the fucking night.”

  “You still haven’t told us anything about her,” Ada observed.

  “Her name is Shrimp Hanson. She said she’s thirty, but I’d say thirty-four, or older even. Lives somewhere on East 11th, I’ve got it written down, with a mother and I can’t remember how many more. A family.” This was, at root, exactly what the organization was most against. Authoritarian political structures only exist because people are conditioned by authoritarian family structures. “And no job, just her allowance.”

  “White?” Jerry asked. Being the only nonblack in the group, it was diplomatic for her to be the one to ask.

  “As fucking snow.”

  “Political?”

  “Not a bit. But I think she could be guided to it. Or on second thought—”

  “How do you feel about her now?” Graham asked.

  He obviously thought she was in love. Was she? Possibly. But just as possibly not. Shrimp had reduced her to tears; she wanted to pay her back in kind. What were feelings anyhow? Words floating through your head, or hormones in some gland. “I don’t know what I feel.”

  “What is it you want us to tell you then?” Lee asked. “Whether you should see her again? Or whether you’re in love? Or if you should be? Lordie, girl!” This, with a heave of all that good-natured fat. “Go ahead. Have fun. Fuck yourself silly or cry your heart out, whatever you like. No reason not to. Just remember, if you do fall in love— keep it in a separate compartment.”

  They all agreed that that was the best advice, and from her own sense of being defluttered she knew it was what she’d wanted to be told. Now they were free to go on to basics—quotas and drops and the reasons why the Revolution, though so long delayed, was the next inevitable step. Then they left the benches and for an hour just enjoyed themselves. You would never have thought, to look at them, that they were any different from any other five people on the roller rink.