The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “I didn’t know you’d been in to see the doctor,” Crystal said. “Why …?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you,” I said.

  Dr. Bradshaw coughed into his fist and said, “Let me just test your reflexes.” He drew the bedclothes back and tapped my drawn-up knee, with results that seemed to satisfy him, though he wielded his mallet at length to obtain them. He flicked the point of a pencil across the soles of my feet, causing my toes to flex. “Babinskis seem all right. Now, look. I’m going to hand you a coin with your eyes closed. I want you to hold it in your fist and tell me what it is.”

  He pressed a half-dollar into my palm, which I clutched a moment and said, “This is a dime, Canadian, dated 1915,” with a little wan humor. He pocketed the coin and then instructed me to close my eyes and bring the tips of my two forefingers together in front of my face. My fingers sought one another in vain, passing repeatedly without making contact. “Now bring one of the fingers to the tip of your nose—slowly, from way out front, like this. With your eyes closed. No cheating.” I crooked my arm, and brought my hand carefully toward my face, poking myself in the eye.

  He turned away to cough again, and said, “That’s enough. Are you sure nothing’s worrying you?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Well, anyhow.” He sat down on the bed and wrote out a prescription on his knee. “Give him a few days’ rest,” he said. “This is a sedative so he can get a good night’s sleep.” Then he did something unexpected, which I alone saw, as Crystal just then turned to set the prescription on the dresser. Grasping my leg through the bedclothes he looked me rather archly in the eye and said, “I’m sure things’ll clear up in time. Sorry I have to run along so soon, but I have another call to make and it’s away at the other end of town. Over there on Beacon Street, you know. Miles to go before I sleep.” He winked and said, “You take it easy now, skipper. Everything will come out all right, I think, do you hear?”

  17

  CHARLES SWALLOW awoke from troubled dreams one morning to find that he had been transformed in his sleep into a great pig. It dawned first on him in the inkling that his posture, he was lying on his back, was for him not quite the comfortable one, it was eased somewhat by tumbling over onto his side. Resting in this position a moment he noted that his limbs themselves were not in any case at ease, but stiff and sore, as though from the strain of the mutation that had occurred during the night. Yet a more cogent source of apprehension lurked in the memory, still fresh in his ears, of the sound that had awakened him; not his usual snoring, instead it had a peculiar timbre, both more nasal and more guttural. It was all too renderable in the experimental noise which he now in waking gingerly made: “Oink, oink.” He fell back with a sense of grief.

  This was certainly not what he had expected. Of all the hopes and aspirations they had as schoolboys traded about what they would be when they grew up this was the last he would have chosen—and his poor parents likewise. He suspected in his first resentment that he was the victim of Symbolism, that crashing vogue of the writers in whom he had for a generation put his trust, though if they could see him now, their product, they would instead of standing by their mysticism turn tail and chatter a little about “auto-suggestion” and “somatically realized guilt delusion” and other such scientific terms. So much for them, the swine! He would have to see it through alone. Swine. There was the key to it! He had been called that by two women, one whose prey he was and one whom he had wronged, and it seemed fitting to be turned into such an animal for punishment. Ah, but in that very feeling that he deserved it, that he “had it coming to him,” lingered there not maybe a spark of evidence that he was not quite one yet? He had so far only the data of his ears and the sense of touch. He must make further tests.

  Opening his eyes cautiously he ran his gaze down the length of his body to observe its surface texture. The color that greeted him was not alas his normally pasty pale one but the loathsome faint pink of the species in question, no doubt about it, while kneading his flesh with his hands he found it to be of undue solidity. A memory drifted back to him of how the time on his uncle’s farm, “Gesundheit,” he had lifted into his arms a suckling pig and been amazed at the repulsive muscularity of the wriggling beast which he had expected to find fat and flabby. There seemed to be that heaviness in his members now, no two ways about it, coupled with that stiffness of the joints before noted. He kicked back altogether the bedclothes, which looked markedly more wallowed in than usual even after the most disturbed dreams. Henceforth his name must be S. Wallow, he could see it on a card over the little teat of a doorbell. He appraised the disgusting pinkness and hardness of his constituent parts in the light of this fine morning. The straight hairs upon them seemed to have become more dense and numerous toward the development of a true hide. He turned his head in sadness to the pillow against which he snuffled and grunted “Oink, oink,” once again. He remembered boyhood hours at “Gesundheit,” to whose green acres and sweet summer winds they had repaired every June. But he must not torture himself with nostalgia, rather examine if this was not a further vestige of the human condition. All the precincts had not been heard from. His face—that was the crucial test. He must obtain a glimpse of that with all haste.

  In the urgent need to do so he dropped himself out of bed so that he landed on all fours on the rug with its pattern of forest creatures by a river with a dull thud. The thud was dull but the pattern was interesting. But he could not linger over it in artistic appreciation; in his impatience to learn the worst he trotted on all fours to the dresser, to find that locomotion natural, alas! Indeed the painful thing was to stand on his hind legs, as he now must proceed to do to reach the mirror of the highboy. He had to haul himself knob for drawer-knob up the façade of the highboy, like a mountain climber in a difficult portion of his ascent, finally clutching the bureau top, then securing his position with his elbows, on which he rested a moment. Now for the peep over the ledge to see his face.

  He had fancied that his vision had not been too clear, and now the reason was plain. His eyes had shrunk to half their former size or less. They had never been very large, little more than slits, but now they were mere beads. Yet the lids themselves and the surrounding flesh had swelled into reddish puffs, almost closing them—but not quite. Little blue swine’s eyes gazed at him. As for his nose, it had always been sizable, but now it had expanded into a fine snout of which the nostrils were somewhat splayed and straightforward. It rested on the bureau ledge as he contemplated the spectacle of himself. One more precinct remained to be heard from—his round bottom. Had it a tail?

  Fearfully he turned away, preserving this last moment of doubt. He tried to nurture his hope by walking on his hind legs to the window. See? He could do it still, there was a ray of encouragement. And he would keep his pajama trousers on even though it was all he wore, to declare that the metamorphosis was not complete and never would be—there was some resistance in him yet. Then his hand stole down the inside silk seat of his pajamas and felt—was it a crude appendage? No more than a twist of lemon peel but a beginning? Or was it a tangled strand of the garment’s drawstring? Such explorations would never be satisfactory by themselves anyway, he must see with his own eyes that too. Also the ache in his arms rendered them difficult. Yes, he must have a look.

  The bathroom medicine chest had a glass, but mounting the washbasin to avail himself of it was out of the question. The small Dresden wall mirror was of an altitude requiring that he pull the bed over to it and stand on that, too much monkey business in his present state, besides he would rather not have his backside wreathed in that mocking circle of pink Cupids around the glass. The dresser mirror did not tilt; the only means that remained, therefore, was to climb up on the chiffonier itself.

  Making sure the bedroom door was closed as far as it would go, which was not all the way because in the damp weather half the doors were swollen and would not shut, he wriggled out of his pajama trousers. He pushed across the rug a
chair up to the chiffonier, and by standing first on that, then hoisting-himself up on one leg, then painfully, slowly the other, he achieved at last a kneeling position on the dresser top, pushing aside hairbrushes and pintrays, some of which spilled to the floor. What a pigsty the room was getting to be! Now he was on all fours, but parallel to the mirror. To obtain a clear view of his rump, he must edge that around. The area of the dresser surface was limited for such a movement, however, nevertheless by inching with his forepaws as closely as possible to the corner edge and swinging his back thus, while at the same time straining his head to look over his shoulder, he managed a satisfactory clear view of the mirror. What met his gaze in the glass was the bedroom door thrust cautiously open and his wife’s face appearing in the crack, just a split moment before the door was clapped shut again on her soundless gasp.

  In his confusion Swallow tumbled off the edge of the dresser. Luckily he caught at the arm of the chair, which broke his fall to the floor, where he sat a moment grieving by the broad-loom river taking stock. “Stock” was the word for it now all right! He was grateful he yet merited the adjective “live.” As he caught his wind and recovered his composure somewhat, a marked shift in his thinking occurred. How selfish he had been in dwelling on the problem only from his own narrow point of view. It was time to think of it from that of his loved ones, yes more than time. He blushed from top to bottom, in fact all the way up, at his self-absorption, and seated in the chair he put his mind to the crisis as a family one of accommodating the father they now had. It pleased him to retain these vestiges of human affection and sensibility despite the humble form in which his spirit was now immured. Even sitting in the chair itself was another point of satisfaction, being an anthropomorphic gift which his metamorphosis had yet left him. What were some others? He remembered an amusing pig he had once seen in a tent show near “Gesundheit.” It had been dressed in a bow tie. That was the sort of thing that must by all means for his dear family’s sake be cultivated, so they could see what a cunning member of the domestic circle he might yet be, sitting at table with a bow tie on as he raised a teacup to his snout. That was the direction in which to strike, without delay. He trotted on his hind legs to his tie rack, from which he selected a blue and white polka-dot bow tie, which he tied at the bathroom mirror on his bare neck. He minced about with it on, swinging gaily through the bedroom. He was waltzing across the carpet when the door opened again and another figure stood beside his wife—Dr. Bradshaw, looking rather pale this morning. “Oink, oink,” he said, bowing a little. His wife fled in full rout down the hall while the doctor entered, blenching, and closed the door behind him.

  “What seems to be the trouble?” the doctor said. Swallow tried to talk, to say it was nothing to worry about, but his voice was nothing but the hoarse gutturals that he had uttered up to now. By painful effort and much clearing of the throat, he forced out a few articulate enough words. “I’m all right,” he said. The doctor nodded, but his black bag was shaking so the contents rattled.

  Urging Swallow back onto the bed, he drew stethoscope and other implements from it. With a tender thumb he raised each of Swallow’s eyelids. Swallow was perfectly familiar with this method of studying the pupils for signs of hysteria. He knew his own were anything but distended. The doctor gave off physical examinations and in keeping with his known determination to practice psychosomatic medicine wherever called for, as most family physicians now feel they must, asked, “Do you have any feelings of guilt about something you’ve recently done that might make you feel you deserve to become …?” Swallow shrugged, and was about to answer further when the doctor asked, “Have you had any nourishment this morning?”

  This was the signal for Swallow to assume once more a kneeling position on the floor. Where by dint of shoving his snout around the carpet like a rooting boar, emitting the while grunts in keeping with the pantomime, he succeeded in conveying to the kindly doctor that he must have thrown to him a pan of slops. He would have added for a joke to lighten the dark moment a little, “Nobody knows the truffles I’ve seen.” But the doctor was shaking his head in horror, striving to deny that his patient was what he fancied himself to be, that it was all a product of his overwrought imagination. He spoke of contrition syndromes and symbolic self-punishment. “I am a pig,” Swallow persisted with a certain mulishness. The sound of his voice caused the doctor to fall back a step, perhaps more than the words themselves. In stumbling toward the dresser he brought to Swallow’s notice a banana that had also fallen off the bureau, where it had been left the night before. To assure the doctor that he must and could eat in the fashion indicated, he worried the peel down by hacking it about on the carpet with his snout and paws, at last succeeding in snapping off a portion of the white fruit. Seeing the doctor reel back yet another step convinced Swallow of the need to show further that his plight was not as tragic as might be thought, and therefore to strike again the note of whimsicality from which the bow tie had been the first resolve not to exile himself, he turned his face upward to the doctor with his lips curled back in a fetching grin, while with a forward thrust of his tongue he extruded banana through the crevices of his clamped teeth, to make the other feel better. This time the doctor fled in the direction Swallow’s wife had gone—to the kitchen, where together the two were heard in a whispered consultation, and then the doctor on the telephone booking accommodations at some establishment of which Swallow could not quite catch the name.

  Swallow lay down on the bed again in a tired but at the same time satisfied state, relieved that the first shock had been absorbed by his loved ones, to whom would remain now the task of “adjustments” and “arrangements,” luckily always themselves something of a diversion from an ordeal. The bedroom door was now open as well as a window, and through these a faint breeze circulated about the room. Its cool caress was welcome to Swallow’s face, which suddenly seemed hot, no doubt from all the exertions. The poor doctor had not told him what the thermometer had said, or perhaps even paused to read it himself in his consternation.

  Over the summer sill, and above the urgent low murmur of kitchen voices, came the sound of Blitzstein barking—not his annoying loud baying but rather a gentle, questioning bark which seemed to establish in Swallow a gentle sense of kinship with him and with all dumb beasts. Swallow was gratified to note again this solicitude of which his spirit was capable despite the lowly house in which it was now lodged, and it was this happiness—mingled somehow with contrition, yes, and restitution—which Swallow cherished as, just as the tide of sleep carried him off, he called to the kitchen: “And don’t forget. Throw the dog out of the window a bone.”

  He awoke in a strange bed. Not awoke exactly, but felt it penetrate his consciousness that it was a strange bed in a strange place, before sinking into even deeper slumber …

  … Then for some reason he could not explain, except within the logic of dreams where no explanations are required but oddity itself imposes its kind of clarity, he was in one of those places where people take their laundry to wash it in automatic machines. The public Laundromat. It would be a mistake to say he was there in person: he was rather there in spirit, to witness the two old women who were the only customers as they drew the soiled family clothes from their bags and chucked them into the washers. The machines were side by side, the center pair in a glistening white row of perhaps ten. The women sat side by side on a bench to gossip, and as the machines simultaneously commenced the first of the cycles, the drone of their words mingled with the hum of the motors and the wash and splash of the water and the clothes, while all of it seemed to be going on in Swallow’s head itself, where it merged in an endlessly flowing river of dialogue.

  FIRST WOMAN

  It was a literary friendship. (Laughter from the toothless crones.) Can’t you see them in their trysting shanty, talking about books. Well, it’s the sterne realities they’ll be facing now.

  SECOND WOMAN

  What he minds most they say is the being a laughing
stock. It’s his rire end to be seen sticking through the britches he was too big for.

  FIRST WOMAN

  And hers out front. They must have known it would illicit comment.

  SECOND WOMAN

  That sort’s not practical, the artistic—and when it comes to the poets! I understand he could be treacly in his tastes for all that. Not even above a little Tennyson.

  FIRST WOMAN

  Chacun à son goo. And that’s not all. Think o’ them fancy composers they must have cuddled up listening to. Everything was fine and d’indy then, but I de falla now to see a bright side to the situation. Now don’t fly off the handel about the modern stuff, Molly, that’s not what the subject is about. Let’s stick to it for once, for a luscious one it is, my duck.

  SECOND WOMAN

  I’m not shootin’ me mouth off about that aspect of it either. There ought to be a law against all these illicit relations. What’s needed is some good plain penal reform.

  FIRST WOMAN

  Beginning with his. Cut it off without a pity—and don’t stop there either. Let him die intestate, him on his Castro convertible.

  SECOND WOMAN

  So he’ll never go whole hog again? (Laughter) But he won’t soon again anyway, I’ll be bound. Still, it’d be a stop in the right direction.

  (There is a pause and they suddenly turn silent and

  thoughtful, even sad. There is a transition in the

  machine and a change of tempo in the wash)

  FIRST WOMAN

  (Half humming) Ha hee ha ho a low … It’s keening the sound of these machines makes me feel like doing. A mournful ancient seadark sound it is, this in the Laundromat, as of all the waters washing all the shores in the weary world. The splash and swish of the suds reminds me of all the rivers running into the sea, yet the sea not full. There, the pre-rinse is over, and now it’s the water frothing and swirling in the seacove, lonely beyond knowing, my Molly, the last outlet of Time … the wash everything comes out in as they do be sayin’.