“I wish you to answer me a question. What has become of the building that was standing there”—Kenny pointed—“a few weeks ago.”
The man stuffed the dollar into his pocket quickly. “Ain’t been no buildin’ there fo’ years,” he said.
“I was afraid of that,” Kenny said. “Are you certain? I was here in the not-so-distant past and I distinctly recall …”
“No buildin’,” the wino said firmly. He turned and walked away, but after a few steps he paused and glanced back. “You’re one of them fat guys,” he said accusingly.
“What do you know about … ahem … overweight men?”
“See ’em wanderin’ over there, all the time. Crazy, too. Yellin’ at thin air, playing with some kind of animals. Yeah. I ’member you. You’re one of them fat guys all right.” He scowled at Kenny, confused. “Looks like you lost some of that blubber, though. Real good. Thanks for the dollar.”
Kenny Dorchester watched him return to his stoop and begin conversing animatedly with his colleagues. With a tremulous sigh, Kenny rolled up the window, glanced at the empty lot again, and bid his driver take him home. Him and his monkey, that is.
Weeks went dripping by and Kenny Dorchester lived as if in a trance. He went to work, shuffled his papers, mumbled pleasantries to his coworkers, struggled and schemed for his meager mouthfuls of food, avoided mirrors. The scale read 367. His flesh melted away from him at a precipitous rate. He developed slack droopy jowls, and his skin sagged all about his middle, looking as flaccid and pitiful as a used condom. He began to have fainting spells, brought on by hunger. At times he staggered and lurched about the street, his thinning and weakened legs unable to support the weight of his growing monkey. His vision got blurry. Once he even thought that his hair had started to fall out, but that at least was a false alarm; it was the monkey who was losing hair, thank goodness. It shed all over the place, ruining his furniture, and even daily vacuuming didn’t seem to help much. Soon Kenny stopped trying to clean up. He lacked energy. He lacked energy for just about everything, in fact. Rising from a chair was a major undertaking. Cooking dinner was impossible torment—but he did that anyway, since the monkey beat him severely when it was not fed. Nothing seemed to matter very much to Kenny Dorchester. Nothing but the terrible tale of his scale each morning, and the formula that he had Scotch-taped to his bathroom wall.
ME + MONKEY = 367 POUNDS
He wondered how much was ME anymore, and how much was MONKEY, but he did not really want to find out. One day, following the dictates of a kind of feeble whim, Kenny made a sudden grab for the monkey’s legs under his chin, hoping against hope that it had gotten slow and obese and that he would be able to yank it from his back. His hands closed on nothing. On his own pale flesh. The monkey’s legs did not seem to be there, though Kenny could still feel its awful crushing weight. He patted his neck and breast in dim confusion, staring down at himself, and noting absently that he could see his feet. He wondered how long that had been true. They seemed to be perfectly nice feet, Kenny Dorchester thought, although the legs to which they were attached were alarmingly gaunt.
Slowly his mind wandered back to the quandary at hand—what had become of the monkey’s legs? Kenny frowned and puzzled and tried to work it all out in his head, but nothing occurred to him. Finally he slid his newly rediscovered feet into a pair of bed slippers and shuffled to the closet where he had stored all of his mirrors. Closing his eyes, he reached in, fumbled about, and found the full-length mirror that had once hung on his bedroom wall. It was a large, wide mirror. Working entirely by touch, Kenny fetched it out, carried it a few feet, and painstakingly propped it up against a wall. Then he held his breath and opened his eyes.
There in the mirror stood a gaunt, gray, skeletal-looking fellow, hunched over and sickly. On his back, grinning, was a thing the size of a gorilla. A very obese gorilla. It had a long pale snakelike tail, and great long arms, and it was as white as a maggot and entirely hairless. It had no legs. It was … attached to him now, growing right out of his back. Its grin was terrible, and filled up half of its face. It looked very like the gross proprietor of the monkey treatment emporium, in fact. Why had he never noticed that before? Of course, of course.
Kenny Dorchester turned from the mirror, and cooked the monkey a big rich dinner before going to bed.
That night he dreamed of how it had all started, back in the Slab when he had met Boney Moroney. In his nightmare a great evil white thing rode atop Moroney’s shoulders, eating slab after slab of ribs, but Kenny politely pretended not to notice while he and Boney made bright, sprightly conversation. Then the thing ran out of ribs, so it reached down and lifted one of Boney’s arms and began to eat his hand. The bones crunched nicely, and Moroney kept right on talking. The creature had eaten its way up to the elbow when Kenny woke screaming, covered with a cold sweat. He had wet his bed, too.
Agonizingly he pushed himself up and staggered to the toilet, where he dry-heaved for ten minutes. The monkey, angry at being wakened, gave him a desultory slap from time to time.
And then a furtive light came into Kenny Dorchester’s eyes. “Boney,” he whispered. Hurriedly he scrambled back to his bedroom on hands and knees, rose, and threw on some clothes. It was three in the morning, but Kenny knew there was no time to waste. He looked up an address in the phone book and called a cab.
Boney Moroney lived in a tall modern high-rise by the river with moonlight shining brightly off its silver-mirrored flanks. When Kenny staggered in, he found the doorman asleep at his station, which was just as well. Kenny tiptoed past him to the elevators and rode up to the eighth floor. The monkey on his back had begun stirring now, and seemed uneasy and ill-tempered.
Kenny’s finger trembled as he pushed the round black button set in the door to Moroney’s apartment, just beneath the eyehole. Musical chimes sounded loudly within, startling in the morning stillness. Kenny leaned on the button. The music played on and on. Finally he heard footsteps, heavy and threatening. The peephole opened and closed again. Then the door swung open.
The apartment was black, though the far wall was made entirely of glass, so the moonlight illuminated the darkness softly. Outlined against the stars and the light of the city stood the man who had opened the door. He was hugely, obscenely fat, and his skin was a pasty fungoid white, and he had little dark eyes set deep into crinkles in his broad suety face. He wore nothing but a vast pair of striped shorts. His breasts flopped about against his chest when he shifted his weight. And when he smiled, his teeth filled up half his face. A great crescent moon of teeth. He smiled when he saw Kenny, and Kenny’s monkey. Kenny felt sick. The thing in the door weighed twice as much as the one on his back. Kenny trembled. “Where is he?” he whispered softly. “Where is Boney? What have you done to him?”
The creature laughed, and its pendulous breasts flounced about wildly as it shook with mirth. The monkey on Kenny’s back began to laugh too, a higher thinner laughter as sharp as the edge of a knife. It reached down and twisted Kenny’s ear cruelly. Suddenly a vast fear and a vast anger filled Kenny Dorchester. He summoned all the strength left in his wasted body and pushed forward, and somehow, somehow, he barged past the obese colossus who barred his way and staggered into the interior of the apartment. “Boney,” he called, “where are you, Boney? It’s me, Kenny.”
There was no answer. Kenny went from room to room. The apartment was filthy, a shambles. There was no sign of Boney Moroney anywhere. When Kenny came panting back to the living room, the monkey shifted abruptly, and threw him off balance. He stumbled and fell hard. Pain went shooting up through his knees, and he cut open one outstretched hand on the edge of the chrome-and-glass coffee table. Kenny began to weep.
He heard the door close, and the thing that lived here moved slowly toward him. Kenny blinked back tears and stared at the approach of those two mammoth legs, pale in the moonlight, sagging all around with fat. He looked up and it was like gazing up the side of a mountain. Far, far above him grinned those horrible
mocking teeth. “Where is he?” Kenny Dorchester whispered. “What have you done with poor Boney?”
The grin did not change. The thing reached down a meaty hand, fingers as thick as a length of kielbasa, and snagged the waistband of the baggy striped shorts. It pulled them down clumsily, and they settled to the ground like a parachute, bunching around its feet.
“Oh, no,” said Kenny Dorchester.
The thing had no genitals. Hanging down between its legs, almost touching the carpet now that it had been freed from the confines of the soiled shorts, was a wrinkled droopy bag of skin, long and gaunt, growing from the creature’s crotch. But as Kenny stared at it in horror, it thrashed feebly, and stirred, and the loose folds of flesh separated briefly into tiny arms and legs.
Then it opened its eyes.
Kenny Dorchester screamed and suddenly he was back on his feet, lurching away from the grinning obscenity in the center of the room. Between its legs, the thing that had been Boney Moroney raised its pitiful stick-thin arms in supplication. “Oh, nooooo,” Kenny moaned, blubbering, and he danced about wildly, the vast weight of his monkey heavy on his back. Round and round he danced in the dimness, in the moonlight, searching for an escape from this madness.
Beyond the plate glass wall the lights of the city beckoned.
Kenny paused and panted and stared at them. Somehow the monkey must have known what he was thinking, for suddenly it began to beat on him wildly, to twist his ears, to rain savage blows all around his head. But Kenny Dorchester paid no mind. With a smile that was almost beatific, he gathered the last of his strength and rushed pell-mell toward the moonlight.
The glass shattered into a million glittering shards, and Kenny smiled all the way down.
It was the smell that told him he was still alive, the smell of disinfectant, and the feel of starched sheets beneath him. A hospital, he thought amidst a haze of pain. He was in a hospital. Kenny wanted to cry. Why hadn’t he died? Oh, why, oh, why? He opened his eyes and tried to say something.
Suddenly a nurse was there, standing over him, feeling his brow and looking down with concern. Kenny wanted to beg her to kill him, but the words would not come. She went away and when she came back she had others with her.
A chubby young man said, “You’ll be all right, Mr. Dorchester, but you have a long way to go. You’re in a hospital. You’re a very lucky man. You fell eight stories. You ought to be dead.”
I want to be dead, Kenny thought, and he shaped the words very, very carefully with his mouth, but no one seemed to hear them. Maybe the monkey has taken over, he thought. Maybe I can’t even talk anymore.
“He wants to say something,” the nurse said.
“I can see that,” said the chubby young doctor. “Mr. Dorchester, please don’t strain yourself. Really. If you are trying to ask about your friend, I’m afraid he wasn’t as lucky as you. He was killed by the fall. You would have died as well, but fortunately you landed on top of him.”
Kenny’s fear and confusion must have been obvious, for the nurse put a gentle hand on his arm. “The other man,” she said patiently. “The fat one. You can thank God he was so fat, too. He broke your fall like a giant pillow.”
And finally Kenny Dorchester understood what they were saying, and began to weep, but now he was weeping for joy, and trembling.
Three days later, he managed his first word. “Pizza,” he said, and it came weak and hoarse from between his lips, and then louder still, and before long he was pushing the nurse’s call button and shouting and pushing and shouting. “Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza,” he chanted, and he would not be calm until they ordered one for him. Nothing had ever tasted so good.
THE PEAR-SHAPED MAN
The pear-shaped Man lives beneath the stairs. His shoulders are narrow and stooped, but his buttocks are impressively large. Or perhaps it is only the clothing he wears; no one has ever admitted to seeing him nude, and no one has ever admitted to wanting to. His trousers are brown polyester double knits, with wide cuffs and a shiny seat; they are always baggy, and they have big, deep, droopy pockets so stuffed with oddments and bric-a-brac that they bulge against his sides. He wears his pants very high, hiked up above the swell of his stomach, and cinches them in place around his chest with a narrow brown leather belt. He wears them so high that his drooping socks show clearly, and often an inch or two of pasty white skin as well.
His shirts are always short-sleeved, most often white or pale blue, and his breast pocket is always full of Bic pens, the cheap throwaway kind that write with blue ink. He has lost the caps or tossed them out, because his shirts are all stained and splotched around the breast pockets. His head is a second pear set atop the first; he has a double chin and wide, full, fleshy cheeks, and the top of his head seems to come almost to a point. His nose is broad and flat, with large, greasy pores; his eyes are small and pale, set close together. His hair is thin, dark, limp, flaky with dandruff; it never looks washed, and there are those who say that he cuts it himself with a bowl and a dull knife. He has a smell, too, the Pear-shaped Man; it is a sweet smell, a sour smell, a rich smell, compounded of old butter and rancid meat and vegetables rotting in the garbage bin. His voice, when he speaks, is high and thin and squeaky; it would be a funny little voice, coming from such a large, ugly man, but there is something unnerving about it, and something even more chilling about his tight, small smile. He never shows any teeth when he smiles, but his lips are broad and wet.
Of course you know him. Everyone knows a Pear-shaped Man.
Jessie met hers on her first day in the neighborhood, while she and Angela were moving into the vacant apartment on the first floor. Angela and her boyfriend, Donald the student shrink, had lugged the couch inside and accidentally knocked away the brick that had been holding open the door to the building. Meanwhile Jessie had gotten the recliner out of the U-Haul all by herself and thumped it up the steps, only to find the door locked when she backed into it, the recliner in her arms. She was hot and sore and irritable and ready to scream with frustration.
And then the Pear-shaped Man emerged from his basement apartment under the steps, climbed onto the sidewalk at the foot of the stoop, and looked up at her with those small, pale, watery eyes of his. He made no move to help her with her chair. He did not say hello or offer to let her into the building. He only blinked and smiled a tight, wet smile that showed none of his teeth, and said in a voice as squeaky and grating as nails on a blackboard, “Ahhhh. There she is.” Then he turned and walked away. When he walked he swayed slightly from side to side.
Jessie let go of the recliner; it bumped down two steps and turned over. She suddenly felt cold, despite the sweltering July heat. She watched the Pear-shaped Man depart. That was her first sight of him. She went inside and told Donald and Angela about him, but they were not much impressed. “Into every girl’s life a Pear-shaped Man must fall,” Angela said, with the cynicism of the veteran city girl. “I bet I met him on a blind date once.”
Donald, who didn’t live with them but spent so many nights with Angela that sometimes it seemed as though he did, had a more immediate concern. “Where do you want this recliner?” he wanted to know.
Later they had a few beers, and Rick and Molly and the Heathersons came over to help them warm the apartment, and Rick offered to pose for her (wink wink, nudge nudge) when Molly wasn’t there to hear, and Donald drank too much and went to sleep on the sofa, and the Heathersons had a fight that ended with Geoff storming out and Lureen crying; it was a night like any other night, in other words, and Jessie forgot all about the Pear-shaped Man. But not for long.
The next morning Angela roused Donald, and the two of them went off, Angie to the big downtown firm where she was a legal secretary, Don to study shrinking. Jessie was a freelance commercial illustrator. She did her work at home, which as far as Angela and Donald and her mother and the rest of Western civilization were concerned meant that she didn’t work at all. “Would you mind doing the shopping?” Angie asked her just before s
he left. They had pretty well devastated their refrigerator in the two weeks before the move, so as not to have a lot of food to lug across town. “Seeing as how you’ll be home all day? I mean, we really need some food.”
So Jessie was pushing a full cart of groceries down a crowded aisle in Santino’s Market, on the corner, when she saw the Pear-shaped Man the second time. He was at the register, counting out change into Santino’s hand. Jessie felt like making a U-turn and busying herself until he’d gone. But that would be silly. She’d gotten everything she needed, and she was a grown woman, after all, and he was standing at the only open register. Resolute, she got in line behind him.
Santino dumped the Pear-shaped Man’s coins into the old register and bagged up his purchase: a big plastic bottle of Coke and a one-pound bag of Cheez Doodles. As he took the bag, the Pear-shaped Man saw her and smiled that little wet smile of his. “Cheez Doodles are the best,” he said. “Would you like some?”
“No, thank you,” Jessie said politely. The Pear-shaped Man put the brown paper sack inside a shapeless leather bag of the sort that schoolboys use to carry their books, gathered it up, and waddled out of the store. Santino, a big grizzled man with thinning salt-and-pepper hair, began to ring up Jessie’s groceries. “He’s something, ain’t he?” he asked her.
“Who is he?” she asked.
Santino shrugged. “Hell, I dunno. Everybody just calls him the Pear-shaped Man. He’s been around here forever. Comes in every morning, buys a bottle of Coke and a big bag of Cheez Doodles. Once we run out of Cheez Doodles, so I tell him he oughta try them Cheetos or maybe even potato chips, y’know, for a change? He wasn’t having none of it, though.”
Jessie was bemused. “He must buy something besides Coke and Cheez Doodles.”
“Wanna bet, lady?”
“Then he must shop somewhere else.”
Dreamsongs 2-Book Bundle Page 72
