Need

by Nik Cohn

  Perhaps she was. Lord knows that mental frailty ran in the family. Look at her own brother Leon who worshipped Apollo. Or her cousin Driskill that became a mime. One of those whiteface loons that pretended to be a statue on Oglethorpe Square, made her puke, praise the Lord for pigeons. But that was not the point. The point was lunacy and the Crows, you could write a book. Remember her in Shalimar, after all. God help her, she sounded as bad as those flowerpots. Remember me in Shalimar, Pale hands beside the cookie jar, but that had been different, a breakdown with all the trimmings, howling at the moon. This time around, it didn’t feel like barking madness, more like bone stupidity, and where was the cure for dumb? How could you go to a medical man and explain to him I’m a moron, Doctor, a hopeless imbecile, can you give me some pills? He would look at you funny.

  But that was not the point.

  The point was she had the rope, now, Shut up. Time to get her ankle out of her ear, and set about her business, dress up for the night ahead. The Faking Boy was a poem she’d never done before, and vernacular was never her strong suit, she needed a deep breath before she plunged. Especially after this morning’s fiasco with La Belle Dame sans Merci.

  She should have smelled a rat when Verse-o-Gram told her it was a birthday gift. What kind of friend or lover would send a poem like that, after all, only a dumped boyfriend trying to scare off his replacement. So she’d found herself reciting to a stud who looked like a young Marlon Brando, except without the fat ass, and a Lady in the Meads wrapped in a bed sheet, and by the smell they’d been at it like minks in heat, when in walked Miss Thing declaiming I saw their starved lips in the gloam with horrid warnings gaped wide, perfect timing, Ah! Woe betide! that rattle at the window was her tip flying out.

  Of course, she should have known she was in trouble the moment she passed Kate Root on the stairs, that woman was doom in blue mules. If anything, her new schtick, this Chatty Kathy act, seemed more sinister than the basilisk eye of yore. At least when she’d put the whammy on you openly, you knew you had been zapped. But this morning was more sinister. Too much perkiness by half, the flushed face and that bird-bright gleam in her eye—Anna sniffed dirty work at the crossroads, a storm of fanshit brewing.

  But that was not the point.

  The point was, she had a gig to do, a costume to put on. Back through the kitchens she led John Joe, into the storage space with soiled tablecloths and canned chickpeas, and stripped off her leotard, and cooled her skin with a hairdryer, “And how was your day?” she asked, stretching.

  “The Master called me Ananias.”

  “You poor lamb.” But she hadn’t the patience to hear the gruesome details. Far as she was concerned, the Black Swans were a royal pain, good for nothing but grief. These sects and millennial cults, they always ended in tears if not worse. Just look at Leon, one day an investment broker, the next day handing out pamphlets with a scarlet sun stamped on his forehead in Oglethorpe Square right next to Cousin Driskill, and that was nothing compared to Jim Jones in Guinea, or was it Guyana, or that rock guitarist in Waco. Waiting in the subways until the Rapture hit, you couldn’t call it healthy. Certainly not hygienic. What did they use for bathrooms, she’d like to know, though it might not seem a respectful question with The End so nigh, still you had to ask yourself, at least she did, or had their shit vaporized into spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, being freed souls and all?

  She wouldn’t have minded, only she worried for John Joe, which was odd to say the least, but it was a fact, the worm had wriggled under her skin.

  Amazing when she thought of it. Considering her reaction the first time she’d clapped eyes on him in poor Godwin’s room that night the roof caught fire, look what the cat drug in was putting it mildly, though even then he’d seemed restful. But what she’d never have imagined was how useful he would prove, the man was born to cater.

  Some change from Willie fucking D. Strange, no make that bizarre, to think how she’d been lost in lust fathoms-deep for that creep. That preening five-timing carwashing piece of nothing, well, piece of ass, it was true, but nothing else, although his hair, of course, but absolutely nothing else, yet she’d bitten her nails down to the knuckles for him, she had climbed walls, Anna wants a little kiss, she’d said that night of the cockfight; had actually spoken those words in front of God and everyone, why the earth hadn’t swallowed her up she would never know, couldn’t stomach her she guessed.

  Want gave tongue, and at her howl, Sin awakened with a growl, whose was that, not Longfellow, but someone with an L, maybe Lowell, anyhow it didn’t matter. Not now, when all she wanted was clean sheets, and beauty rest eternal. Maybe this unending heat had sucked out all her hormones or the deadness in her head going round and round in circles, what’s the point, what’s the fucking point, had robbed her pussy blind, but the thought of sex made her yawn, and its image made her heave.

  Of course the lull wouldn’t last, it never did. In a day or a month or a year the curse would be on her again, but at this minute, in this storage cupboard, all she wanted was a Fig Newton and the comfort of John Joe watching.

  He did that nicely, just sat on the floor with his knees raised to let the trails of ants pass by undisturbed and looked at her out of his burnt eye as if she was a slide show when she walked naked and stretched and touched her toes with their broken blood vessels from too much hoofing in borrowed slippers, then dressed heself for The Faking Boy in Verse-o-Gram’s best Becky Sharp, an ankle-length white satin gown cut high at the waist and low in the bosom, with scarlet sash and white satin pumps, and pirouetted for his approval, thinking Wonder what he sees, which struck her as strange, normally she would have thought Wonder how I look, but that was typical, even the first-person pronoun was going south on her, so she simply stated without posing, The faking boy to the trap is gone, At the nubbing chit you’ll find him; The hempen cord they have girded on, And his elbows pinned behind him. “Smash my glim!” cries the reg’lar card, “Though the girl you love betrays you, Don’t split, but die both game and hard, And grateful pals shall praise you!”

  The accent was the main problem, she didn’t sound proper Cockney, more Birmingham England and Birmingham Alabama mixed, a bit like Kate Root in fact, and flat as a pancake to boot, “Smash my glim, smash my glim,” she said like an MC trying out a balky microphone, testing, testing, “The nubbing chit.”

  “I like that one,” said John Joe. “It rhymes.”

  “Anon’s always do.”

  “Having nothing to hide? Or on a hiding to nothing?”

  She really couldn’t say. Those were the kind of remarks he made sometimes she wondered if he was a few inches shy of a first down, not the full shilling as Yeats would say, but that was not the point. Mr. Sheridan was waiting, she had a job of work to do, so she put on a bicycle cape over the white gown, stuffed the rope up her sleeve, “The bolt it fell,” she said, “A jerk, a strain! The sheriffs fell asunder; The faking boy ne’er spoke again, For they pulled his legs from under. And there he dangles on the tree, That soul of love and bravery, bravery, bravery …”

  “Soul of love and bravery,” said John Joe.

  “And bravery, right,” she said, staring in his face. As if it might hold the answer. As if he carried the next line around with him like a spare toothbrush, that’s how befuddled she was, how lost and then found again, “Oh, that such men should victims be,” she said, “Of law, and law’s vile knavery.”

  Brinsley Sheridan, if that be his true name, had an address in Alphabet City on one of those barren blocks not yet gentrified that looked like a bombsite, East Berlin or Vienna at the end of World War II in an old newsreel, but the name on his bell read Handelman, and he looked like a Handelman when he opened his door four floors up, a small grey man in grey corduroys and a patched grey sweater, rimless glasses, wispy hair, a librarian’s look.

  His room was a high loft, with a handsome traverse beam that looked like solid oak, but its air was stale, thick with flies alive and dead. Books
were piled high on tables and chairs and the floorboards, old books and new, paperbacks and cloth, The Anatomy of Melancholy on top one pile, The Good Soldier another, Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me a third, and on top of Scaramouche an unwashed plate of sausages and congealed baked beans turning green and phosphoroid that caused Anna to shiver when she shucked her black cape. “Are you The Faking Boy?” she enquired.

  “I have that honour,” said Brinsley Sheridan.

  He sucked his teeth, they were yellow, this was not at all what she’d had in mind. When Verse-o-Gram had called her with the booking, she’d pictured a dining club, some pack of young bloods from the Ivy League perhaps, Elis or Crimsons on a toot, celebrating the Great Cham’s birthday or whatever with a champagne breakfast like Johnson and Boswell when they watched the hanging at Tyburn from a rented room. A table of wannabe Garricks and Oliver Goldsmiths in wigs and stockings and velvet coats, taking snuff and passing the port. Not this desiccated slice of limburger finicking over her cleavage and petulant with it, sniffing between sucks. “You’re out of period,” he whined. “I clearly stated pre-Regency.”

  “Would a beauty spot help?”

  “Lydia Languish, I said.”

  “Or a fucking fan?”

  “That attitude will get you nowhere,” said Brinsley Sheridan. “Absolutely nowhere.”

  Well, he was right of course, it wouldn’t, it never had, or not since Charleston when she’d told that cop on King Street to take his filthy hands off her or he’d be wearing his dick for a bow-tie. But she mustn’t blow another tip, she really mustn’t, so she reined herself back, she simpered and took instruction, meek as any miss in school while Sheridan posed her beside a window bleared and smeared with toil. “Relax,” he said.

  “How about the rope?”

  “What rope? I know nothing of any rope.” His voice was a flinch and he snatched the hemp from her hand, he tossed it aside like a thing unclean. “I never requested a rope, I never,” he said. “Rope never entered my mind.”

  So humour him. Touch his wrist with shy fingertips, and make little gurgling sounds, perhaps they’d pass for contrition or at least compliance as she looked down across the patch of wasteland full of smouldering bonfires between a Chinese laundry and a gutted bodega, and the three men crouched in the rubble behind a burnt-out car, shielded from the street but not from overhead when they took turns to drag at the pipe, and she tried to picture the gallows, it wasn’t so hard. “Now,” said Brinsley Sheridan. “Now.”

  “The faking boy to the trap is gone.”

  “Not so fast. Take it slow.”

  “At the nubbing chit you’ll find him.”

  “More expression. Give it more emotion.”

  “The hempen cord they have girded on.”

  “Correct,” said Sheridan.

  He was behind her now and seemed calmed, there was no noise but a couple of books toppling and a light creaking like a rowboat, no movement but the flies on the windowpane, Though the girl you love betrays you, Don’t split, but die both game and hard, said Anna, and heard a sigh, could it be a muffled sob at her back in its white satin gown cut low, her shoulders too knobby she knew, still, a graceful neck, And grateful pals shall praise, she said, sneaking a peek at the sausages in their furry mittens although she knew she shouldn’t, she really shouldn’t, and the sobbing sounded louder, across the street one of the men was on his feet reeling, shaking his fist, The bolt it fell, she said, and heard a gasp, a palpable croak, that caused her to turn her head like Persephone against her better judgment and see Sheridan strung up from the oak traverse, the rope so deeply bitten into his throat that only the tag-ends showed, his head a puce balloon in rimless glasses about to go Bang, and thrusting from his corduroys a modest contribution that looked like a red-headed goldfish till it jerked. “Well, honestly,” Anna said, and snatched up her slicker to cover herself. “Cut me down,” said Brinsley Sheridan from inside the puce balloon, but she couldn’t stay, she really couldn’t.

  On the street, where she was running and running with no direction, a woman on a doorstoop laughed, and a dog darted out of a basement to snap at her ankles, a Jack Russell she thought, and the reeling man by the burnt-out car yelled something about cats, or it might have been carts, she wouldn’t have liked to say for sure, and then she was inside a bar, she was inside some bar, then she wasn’t running.

  The man behind the beer pumps was a beefhead, he looked like a Pole. There was a dartboard. The tube in the Bud sign was failing, its light kept flickering. Somebody was smoking a pipe.

  That dog was a Skye terrier.

  Not a Jack Russell at all. A Skye.

  She was almost sure of it.

  The bar was long and dark, the sunlight only touched the first two stools, its brightness slanting was full of motes. “You look Polish,” she said to the barman. “Are you married?”

  “Three children.”

  “What’s their names?”

  “Caithleen, Sinead, Sean Timothy.”

  “Are they safe?”

  The snapshot the man pushed across the bar showed three kids who looked just like kids posed on a beach somewhere. To judge by the state of the boardwalk and the two bikers loafing against the railing it might have been Coney Island. “Are you sure they’re safe?” Anna asked.

  “Caithleen has a scholarship,” the barman said, and he said a whole lot more, only she didn’t follow him. Padgett, when he was her husband and raged at her, always used to claim she didn’t give a fuck for other people, she was only concerned with herself. Absolutely true, and who in his right mind would blame her? “I shot my boyfriend. I killed my true love,” she said.

  The man was a barman, he didn’t ask how or why, just poured her another shot and went back to polishing glasses. She was drinking mescal, she liked the thought of the mummified worm in every bottle, she liked the motes drifting in the sunlight down the bar, she was happy to be here.

  But that was not the point; the point was something else. At Camp Pocahontas one morning, or least she thought it was morning, inside that vat of feathers it was never easy to tell, Chase had been sleeping with his head cushioned on her belly, maybe even dreaming for all she knew. And when she bent to kiss behind his ear and make him surface, when his face turned towards her, he looked just like a drowned man washing up. Or being dragged up. And the sickness in his eyes then, hauled back to the light, she had thought he would never forgive her.

  His flesh not tan but burnished, like something wild, maybe dangerous. “What do I owe you?” Anna asked.

  “What can you afford?” the barman replied.

  Back on the street she walked with her head down, her eyes fixed on the sidewalk, and didn’t see the length of rope lying there until she’d almost tripped on it. There was somebody’s face in glasses at Sheridan’s window, but the sun was too bright in her eyes, she couldn’t tell who owned it. The rope beneath her shoe felt soft and squishy, degutted. What the fuck, it was a souvenir, she put it in her pocket.

  Was this stealing? She hoped so.

  On that day in Savannah after Chase woke up she’d lain in the feathers with their colours like tropical diseases, trying to rest but no such luck, some man who couldn’t play the trombone was playing the trombone across the boating pond, her brother Leon probably, and some other man was felling trees with an electric saw. She could not sleep and she could not lie awake with those undrowned eyes accusing her, she couldn’t do a thing in fact but throw her clothes on and haul ass, ride her bike downtown to the City Market and Franklin Square, where the longshoremen waited for work under the live oaks outside First African Baptist and she drank Stingers at an outdoor café, getting quietly but efficiently loaded while eavesdropping on the two women at the next table, two large and stately dames in Carmen Miranda hats who knew a girl called Sistra whose man had cheated on her with her own mother, then stolen her Bingo money, and when Sistra caught up with him he was shooting craps behind the Paradise Club, where she took her pistol and shot him t
ill no bullets were left, And that, gentlemen, she’d said then, concludes the entertainment for today.

  Anna’s sentiments exactly. Rolling uptown on the Broadway Local in the rush hour she didn’t know what she’d been doing, she only knew she was done. No more Verse-o-Gram, no more Zenaide from Zonguldak, no more faking boys of any stripe. No more free lunch, she thought, and let herself go limp, held upright by the crush of passengers, so that when the doors opened she was swept out like a rubber dinghy, borne away resistless on the tide.

  This was easy, this was not so terrible. On roars the flood came to her mind, John Clare when he was in the asylum. On roars the flood—all restless to be free, she was carried up the stairway and over Broadway, Like trouble wandering to eternity, up the block and inside the Zoo where Kate Root sat, her bulldog’s chin resting on her fist, staring out at nothing that Anna could see with that new pert and birdeyed look of hers, and scratching her ankle with fingernails freshly painted, all moist and gleaming.

  Fuchsia, no less.

  Wearied, Anna looked for some place to sit and rest a while, but there was no free stool, that pearl-pied cockatiel was perched on one and a pair of flesh-pink tights was draped across the other, there seemed no room to rest her bones anywhere, so she started to head upstairs to her own room, though that seemed weak, that seemed like giving in.

  The day she’d had, she couldn’t stand just to crawl away whipped. Even if she was. And something else held her back as well, she couldn’t think what. “Is something different?” she asked. “Did you move the cages around?”

  “The TV is off.”

  Of course it was. No Macmillan and Wife, or whatever was on at this hour, not a sound but the snakes and birds, it made the place seem unnatural. Spooked, almost. Then, looking at Kate, she had the oddest sensation, for a second she almost liked her, she felt a connection somehow.