Ice And Fire

by Andrea Dworkin

  people die from the cold each winter. We have called and

  written every department of the city. We have withheld rent.

  We have sued. No one cares. We know that we could die from

  the cold. But fire— they must care about fire, they have a fire

  department, we see the fire engines and the flashing red lights

  and we hear the sirens. No cold department, no whore department, no vagabond department, no running-pus-and-sores department, no get-rid-of-the-drug-dealers department: but fire

  and dogs-on-the-leash departments seem to abound. I am

  always pleasantly surprised that they care about fire.

  The disco music is so loud that we cannot hear our own

  radio: we call the police. There is an environmental-something

  department. They will drive by and measure the decibel level

  of the sound. This is a great relief. Can someone come and

  take the temperature in our apartment? The policeman hangs

  up. A crank call, he must think, and what with so many real

  problems, so much real violence, so many real people dying.

  My pale blond friend sleeps, his skin bluish. I call the police

  about the noise.

  The landlord has installed a lock on our building. The lock

  must be nearly unique. You turn it with a key and when you

  hear a certain click you must at that second push open the

  door. If you miss the click you must start all over again. If

  your key goes past the click, the door stays locked and you

  must complete the cycle, complete the turn, before you can

  start again, so it takes even longer, and if you miss it again you

  must still keep going: you must pay attention and put your ear

  right up against the lock to hear the click. The fetal vagabonds

  run pus at your feet and the drooping prostitutes come at you,

  perhaps wanting one second of steadiness on their feet or

  perhaps wanting to tear out your heart, and this is a place

  where men follow women with serious expectations not to be

  trifled with, pursue in cars, beep from cars, follow block after

  block in cars, carry weapons, sneak up behind, rob, need

  money, need dope, and you must stand there at exquisite attention and listen for the little click.

  The cement on the corner has been stained by its human

  108

  trash: it is the color of a hundred dead junkies somehow ground

  into the stone, paved smooth, running like mud in the rare

  moonlight. Sometimes there is blood, and sometimes a savage

  dog, belonging to one of the drunken men, chases you and

  threatens to tear you apart and in terror you edge your way

  inside: listening carefully for the little click. In a great urban

  joke, God has given us all the trappings of a civilized society.

  We have a huge intersection with a traffic light. We have a bus

  stop. Across the street there is a bank and a school as well as a

  disco. Next door there is a large church with stained glass and

  ornate and graceful stonework. The intersection has the bank,

  a hospital diagonal from us, and a fast-food chicken place.

  And then, resting right next to us, right under us, tucked near,

  is the home of the hamburger itself, the great gift of this

  country, right on our corner, with its ascending ordure. I laugh

  frequently. I am God’s best fan.*

  The windows are open, of course, and he sleeps, pale and

  dreamless, curled up and calm, nearly warm except that his

  skin has become a pale blue, barely attached to the fine bones

  underneath. Outside the sirens blast the brick building, they

  almost never stop. Fire and murder. Cars rocketing by, men

  with guns and clubs and flashing lights that climb five flights

  in the space of a second and turn us whorish red, like great

  wax museum freaks in a light show.

  I listen to the music from the disco, which is so loud that the

  Mozart on my poor little $32 radio is drowned out. Tonight,

  perhaps, is the Italian wedding, and so we have an imitator of

  Jerry Vale to a disco beat that carries across the wide street,

  through air freighted with other weight, screams and blasts,

  and into the epicenter of my brain. If I close the windows,

  however, I will probably die. But it is the vibration, in this

  case the endless clucky thumping of the badly abused instruments, that worms its way under my skin to make me itch with discontent, irritation, a rage directed, in this case, at

  Italian weddings, but on other nights at French crooners, at

  Jaggerish deadbeats, at Elvisian charlatans, at Haggardish

  kvetchers, and even, on occasion, at Patti Pageish or even Peggy

  Leeish dollies embellished by brass.

  I watch the limos pulling up, parking in front of the fire

  109

  hydrants and no-parking signs. I see a man in a tux tear down

  with his bare hands a no-parking sign. I see an endless supply

  of kids attending these adult parties. The house used to be a

  synagogue. One day it was empty. Then a man with many

  boys moved in. The boys had tattoos and did heavy work and

  had lean thighs. They all lived on the top floor. The parties

  were on the lower two floors. The boys flew a flag from the

  top floor. I called it never-never-land. The parties drove me

  mad.

  The women who went into the house were never contemporary cosmopolitan women. They always wore fluffy dresses or full skirts and frilly blouses, very fifties, suburban, dating,

  heavy makeup. Even the youngest women wore wide formal

  skirts, maybe even with crinolines, in pastel colors, and their

  hair was set and lacquered. They were deferential and flirty

  and girlish and spoke when spoken to. Sometimes they had a

  corsage. Sometimes they wore female hats. Sometimes they

  even wore female gloves or female wraps. Always they wore

  female shoes and female stockings and stood in a female way

  and looked very fifties, virgin ingenues. They never met the

  rough boys from the top floor, or not so that I could see. They

  came with dates. There were floral arrangements inside, and

  white tablecloths, and men in white jackets. Then, during the

  day, the boys from the upper floor would ride their bikes or

  get wrecked on drugs. Once my favorite, a beautiful wrecked

  child who at fifteen was getting old, too covered with tattoos,

  with hair hanging down to his shoulders and some beautiful

  light in his eyes and thighs, had a young girl there. She too was

  beautiful, dark, perfect, naked, exquisite breasts and thighs,

  they hung out the window together and watched the sun rise.

  They seemed exquisitely happy: young: not too hurt yet, or

  young enough to be resilient: he must have been hurt, all

  tattooed and drugged out and in this house of boys, and she

  had been or would be, and I prayed for her as hard as I have

  ever hoped for myself. That she was and would be happy; that

  she was older than she looked; that she would be all right. It

  was only at dawn that the human blood seemed to have washed

  out of the cement and that injury seemed to disappear: and

  men began emerging from the park where they had been

  fucking and sucking cock all night: they were weary and at

  110

&nb
sp; peace: and there seemed to be a truce just then, for the duration

  of the dawn, between night and day, between people and despair. The boy and girl, radiant and tender with pleasure, hung out of the window. Underneath them men dragged themselves

  toward home, tender with fatigue. I sat by the open window

  and smiled. It was the only time to be awake and alive on that

  Lower East Side street corner. The light would be not quite

  daylight: night was still mixed in with it: and there was peace.

  Then the sun would be up, glaring and rude. The night would

  be defeated and angry, preparing to return with a vengeance.

  The vagabonds would shit and move. The fumes would begin

  anew for the day, inevitably thicker and more repellent than

  before, more repulsive than it was possible to be or to imagine

  or to engineer or to invent. The whores would go home short

  and lose more teeth. The boys across the way would shoot up,

  sleep, eventually ride their bikes or go stand on street corners.

  I would go to the small distant room and try to sleep on the

  Salvation Army mattress under the open window. I would hear

  the sirens. I would wake up burning, with ice not fire.

  *

  I would sit by the open windows in the living room and watch

  the dark, then the light: dawn was my pleasure, a process

  pungent with melodrama, one thickness edging out another,

  invading it, permeating it: dark being edged out, a light

  weighing the night down until it was buried in the cement.

  You could slice the night and you could slice the day, and it

  was just the hour or two, some parts of the year it seemed like

  only minutes, in which both mixed together resembling peace.

  The light would begin subtly and I could just see some tree-

  tops up the street in the park. At first they looked like a line, a

  single line, an edge of jagged mountaintops etched against a

  dark eternity with a sharp, slight pencil, and gradually the line

  filled in, got deeper and deeper until the shape of each tree got

  filled in, and then color came, the brown branch, bare, the

  leaf-covered branch, green, the blossom-covered branch,

  chartreuse. I could see some dogs being walked early, the first

  ones of the day coming, forms under artificial light turning

  into creatures of flesh and blood when the real light came. I

  could see, in the next room, the tousled head of my love, the

  boy I live with, sleeping. Soon he would wake up and I would

  111

  go to sleep and he would go to work and I would have stopped

  working: now while he still slept and I was a vigilant consciousness I opened the windows that had been closed in the living room and sat down next to them to watch the dawn, the

  kindest time.

  In the hour before my turn came, my turn to sleep, night

  would brand me: it would go through my brain, and make

  pictures there of itself: every figure of horror would escape the

  night and enter my brain: and each mundane piece of a living

  day, the coming light, would grow huge and induce fear: a

  drip under the sink was a torrent, irresolvable, menacing: so

  there was no time to sleep: and the plaster falling from the

  ceiling would become the promised disaster: and there was no

  time to sleep: and the crack in the toilet threatened sewage and

  flood: and so, it was impossible to sleep: and there was the

  landlord to be called, and the windows were open, and congestion in the chest, and shopping to do, and noises on the roof, and some strange sounds from below: and so it was

  impossible to sleep. The drip under the sink would mean calling

  the super: and this meant no sleep: because he was a small,

  mean, angry man, aloof but radiating hot cruelty, one little

  man knotted into one fist of a man. His wife, having no English, would answer the phone and in terror stammer out

  “ asleep” or “ not here” or “ no, no. ” Once she begged me in

  splatters of languages I did not speak: do not make me get

  him, miss, he will hurt me. The sink would be stopped up

  beyond help, or there would be no heat or no hot water, for us

  in this cold place a disaster of unparalleled dimensions, and

  she would whisper in chokes: do not make me get him, miss,

  he will hurt me. I knew the sound of the swollen larynx waiting

  to burst.

  The day would be solidly established, that graceless light,

  and the people of the day would begin moving on the street,

  the buses would come one after another, the traffic would rev

  up for the day ahead, the smoke from all the motor engines

  would begin escalating up, the noise would become fearsome,

  the chatter from the street would become loud and busy, the

  click click click of shoes and boots would swallow up the

  cement, the voices would become various and in many languages: and I would make my way down the hall to the small 112

  room with the broken springs in the mattress under the open

  window and try to sleep.

  I dreamed, for instance, of being in a tropical place. It was all

  green, that same steady bright unchanging green under too

  much light that one finds in the steamy tropics, that too-lush

  green that hurts the eyes with its awful brightness, only it was

  duller because it seemed to know it was in a dream. And in the

  steaming heat of this too-green jungle with its long thin sharp

  leaves and branches resembling each other, more like hungry

  animals than plants, stretched out sideways not up, growing

  out wide not up, but still taller than me, there was a clearing,

  a sort of burnt-out, brown-yellow clearing, short grass, flat, a

  circle surrounded by the wild green bush. There were chairs,

  like the kinds used in auditoriums, folding chairs set up, about

  eight of them in a circle like for a consciousness-raising group

  or a small seminar. The sun burned down. I was standing.

  Others were sitting in the chairs, easy, relaxed, men and

  women, I knew them but I don’t know who they were by

  name, now or then, and I have a big knife, a huge sharp knife,

  and very slowly I walked up to the first one and I slowly slit

  her throat. No one moves or notices and I walk to the next

  one and I slit her throat, and I walk to the next one and I slit

  his throat, and slowly I walked around the circle of sitting

  people and I slit each throat slowly and purposefully. I wake

  up shaking and screaming, burning hot, in terror. In the dream

  I was truly happy.

  Or I dream the dream I hate most, that I am awake, I see

  the room, someone is in it, I hear him, he has a knife, I wake

  up, I try to scream, I can’t scream, I am awake, I believe I am

  awake, but I cannot scream and I cannot move, my eyes are

  open, I can see and hear everything but I cannot do anything, I

  keep trying to scream but I make no sound, I cannot move, so

  I think I must not be awake, and I force myself to wake up

  and it turns out that I wasn’t awake before but I am now, and

  I hear the man in the room, and I can see him moving around,

  and I am awake, and I try to scream but no sound comes out

  and I try to move but I cannot move, but I am awake, and I


  see everything and I hear everything, every detail of the room I

  know I am in, every sound that I know is there, every detail of

  reality, the time, the sounds of the neighbors, I know where I

  i i 3

  am and who I am and that I am awake and still I can’t say

  anything, I try to scream but I can’t, the vocal cords do not

  work, the voice does not work, my mouth works but no sound

  comes out, and I try to force myself to get up but my body

  does not move, and then I realize that even though I think I

  am awake I must not be awake and so I force myself to wake

  up, I fight and I fight to wake up, and then I wake up, and I

  hear the man in the room, I see him, I see his face, I see him

  and see every detail of who he is and how he is dressed and

  how he moves and where he goes and I see myself and I know

  I am in bed and he is in the room and I hear every sound and I

  try to scream but I cannot and I try to move but I cannot and

  so I try to force myself again to wake because I know I must

  be asleep and I am so terrified I cannot move from fear and I

  cannot scream from fear: and by the time I wake up I am half

  dead. Drenched in sweat, I try to sleep some more.

  I hear my love, my friend, moving around, awake, alive. I

  am relieved. The night is over. I can begin to try to sleep. I

  hear him turn on the water, he is there if it floods. I have left

  him a note, probably two pages long, filled with worries and

  admonitions: what must be done to get through this day

  coming up, the vivid imperatives that came to press in on my

  brain as night ended and I knew I would have to sleep, the

  dread demands of uncompromising daylight: more calls to the

  city, more calls to the landlord, more calls to the lawyers,

  more calls to the super: and buy cat litter: and remember the

  laundry, to take it in or to pick it up and I have left money,

  five dollars: and I love you, have a good day, I hope it goes

  well. I can’t sleep in his bed because in the day his room has

  fumes, even with the windows open. So I am down in this

  little closet under an open window to sleep. Somehow my

  friend comes home at night, it is a surprise always, and I am

  always, inevitably, without fail, a cold coiled spring ready to