He set the timer at nine minutes and wandered over to the window, brushing absently at imagined lint on his trousers. Suddenly he caught sight of an unexplained stain on his pant leg. He bent down and scraped at it, imagining a foul smell. Straightening, he stared through the window, trying to relive the time, to pinpoint the moment when that filth could have touched him. And staring vacantly at the buildings outside, his lucidity impaired by the low-level fever, he imagined he saw the Monster from the North Pole looming over the skyscrapers downtown.
5
THE FEVER PUZZLED and intrigued him. He sat in his little office, the phone held a few inches away from his ear to mute Gaylord’s aggrieved shouting, examining the sensation of fragility. His limbs could have been made of glass, and although he was not aware of discomfort, pain seemed imminent. His skin felt susceptible—there was the ghostly sense of knowing pain without feeling it. The closest he could come to an example was the silent statement, “My hair hurts.”
“ ‘Got no pressure,’ they yell to me, ‘got no pressure.’ ” Gaylord brayed from the phone. “What am I suppose to do? Top floor they got no water at all, rest of the house just a trickle, like a baby peeing. I say, ‘I’m no plumber, got to call the agent.’ They say, ‘Well do something,’ all mad at me, like I took their water away. I get the brunt, they pick on me, probally figure him, that swarsa, he’s to blame. You better get on over here, Moonbloom, get this straighten out ’fore I lose my temper and tell them times change, slavery gone out, man got to be treat with a little dignity.”
“You’re too sensitive, Gaylord. Take it easy, I’ll call the plumber.” Sensitive—the word made the tiny hairs on his forehead stand up. He gave a slight shudder at the thought of bumping his arm against something hard.
“Sure, you’re there, you say, ‘Take it easy.’ You come here and get abused like I get abused, see if you take it easy. ‘No water, no water’—you think they dying of thirst middle of the desert. I’m going over Thirteenth Street; got plenty to do. I’m not about to stand here and listen. . ..”
“All right, Gaylord, all right.”
He hung up, and put his hand to his head to check his temperature; but he could feel neither his hand nor his head. Before him, the letters on the window were haloed by the noon light.
“tnegA,” he read aloud. “tnegA—moolbnooM namroN.” But there was this pressure on his heels, something forcing him to stand on his head and crash through a hoop of pain. “Okay already . . . plumber, plumber . . .” He held his finger poised over the buttons of the memo pad. Bodien! He pressed the B, and the device popped open to a page of names. Delightful. He looked at the swim of calligraphy, blinked, and read names.
Binkerman
Boroff
Battapaglia
Brass Pipe & Foundry
Xotichitl
Beerbau . . .
“Xotichitl?” What in the . . . Oh, but stop this, Seventieth Street was without water. He put his finger on each name, intent, not fooling now. His ears rang.
He told the plumber to meet him at the Seventieth Street house and made ready to leave the office. He took the check for the insurance company and put it in an envelope, made a note to himself to look at the name on the elevator so he could call the repairman, wrote down the name and number of the electrical contractor, the exterminator, the roofing company. He tried to think who would take care of the swollen wall, ended up just writing “Basellecci.” He went out patting his pockets.
•
A delegation of women was waiting in the lobby, aproned, together in accusation but not speaking to each other. Eva Baily was more than ever like a fierce squaw; Carol Hauser merely looked peevish under the burden of her bleached hairdo and the tugging of the blond child; Sarah Lublin stood with melancholy serenity. Betty Jacoby was there, too, but in the artless light of the lobby, she seemed to be fading away.
“Well?” Carol Hauser said menacingly.
“It’s two hours now. I was right in the middle of . . .” Eva suddenly preferred to leave it at that.
“The plumber is on his way. Don’t worry about a thing. We’ll take care of it,” Norman assured them. They were no more than pasteboard figures, and he smiled at how harmless they seemed. They went away as though a gust of wind had taken them.
Bodien, the plumber, came ten minutes later, just as Norman was beginning to imagine the fake manorial motif of the lobby was real. They tried to go down the narrow steps abreast and then spent almost two minutes, jammed between the rail and the wall, arguing politely about who should go first. Norman, not himself, said brusquely, “Okay,” and pushed out of the impasse. In the cellar he trained Bodien’s flashlight on the dust-furred pipes while the plumber tapped and felt them uncertainly. Norman waited patiently; for what he was permitted to pay he didn’t expect great professionalism. Bodien was a sort of amateur, a handy man, an unfrocked plumber whose only qualification for the trade was a where-angels-fear-to-tread audacity.
He took a Stillson wrench out of his toolbox and began to unscrew a particularly large and menacing-looking pipe.
“Don’t you have to turn something off or something?” Norman asked, noticing an ooze of water around the threads.
“Oops, heh, heh, that’s right,” Bodien said with a wink. His face was mangy, there were bristles on his nose, and he never took offense at constructive criticism. He turned off the main and went back to his wrench. A little squirt of water struck Norman’s face and startled him disproportionately.
“Whaa-a . . .”
“Better step back there,” Bodien said sternly. He finished detaching the pipe and stood looking at the slow trickle with the gravity of a doctor examining a biopsy. “Mmm-mm, yeah . . .”
“What’s wrong?” Norman asked, feeling chilled in the stony dampness. His hand brushed against the thick dust of something, and he shuddered.
“Don’t seem to be anything . . .”
Norman felt like whispering; he was reminded of clandestine games.
“Bodien.”
“Yeah?” the plumber asked.
“There has to be something. The people upstairs have no water. This is not hypothetical. Something is clogging.”
“Well,” Bodien agreed, “there should be something.” He looked warily at the maze of pipes, then made a decision again. “I think that one there, the real thick one . . .”
“You’re the doctor,” Norman said, following the wrench with the flashlight. His head began to hurt, and the light became heavy in his hand. Something is happening to me, he thought. He had never felt quite like this. All his life he had been subject to colds and the minor illnesses, and he remembered the dark colors of his daydreams in his grandparents’ house on those winter afternoons when he had been sick in bed and had seemed to fill the room with the anticipation of another dimension. He could not remember what the illusions had been. In a way they had been purely sensory; his whole body had awaited some unimaginable experience. There had been a delicate salting of pain on his skin, a hollow, breath-taking spasm that involved him from heart to groin. Familiar sounds had broken through to brief and unbearable clarities. But always there had been the security of knowing he would sink back, that he would recover and go on as before. Now, for some reason, he felt the threat of permanent eviction. What, what is this?
Bodien leaned on the shaft of his wrench. Slowly it turned metal against metal. There was a fertile smell of refuse and water and the odd silence in the pipes. Bodien grunted. The pressure on Norman’s head grew. He looked around at the darkness with a frightened longing. No, no, he would just go right home, undress, pull the shades down, and get into bed with a heating pad. The thought of pain terrified him for the first time. Could a doctor help? He thought not, felt right then that the doctor would somehow be working against him. Bodien’s grunt was final. The pipe came apart with only a feeble trickle.
“’et’s see now.” The plumber put his hand cautiously into the pipe. His face showed a squeamish expression that
gradually evolved into complete revulsion. “Echh,” he said, drawing something toward him. His hand came out black and slimy and swollen four times its size. No, it was something in his hand, but you couldn’t see where hand left off and catch began. The pipe belched and gushed about a gallon of water onto Bodien. He gasped, cursed, then held the slop up triumphantly. “’ere we are, Moonbloom, ’ere’s the culprit.”
“What is it?” Norman asked weakly.
Bodien shook his head; that was not his concern. “Gook,” he said.
Norman held the light while the pipe was put back together and then tracked Bodien over to the main and illuminated the operation of turning the water back on. There were thuds and crashes and then the terrifying rush and flow. Norman could feel an impulse to fall and be carried along by it. He ran the light over the pipes and found it shocking to hear all that violence of movement while everything in sight remained motionless.
“Yessir,” Bodien said smugly, putting his wrench in his toolbox. “They got water now.” Norman looked up with him at the dark ceiling of the cellar, as though he could see the metal veins carrying the flow through the body of the house, and pictured the sudden resumption of things in all the apartments.
He went directly home and closed the door of his own apartment like a man pursued. The wind had left gashes on his tender face, and his eardrums felt pierced. With trembling hands he got undressed and burrowed into his bed. Brain fever, he told himself, trying to joke his way out of it. The daytime noises of the street were huge and hideous, and his limbs felt wrenched. He wondered whether he dared get up to take something, thought better of it, and lay where he was, conjuring up the figure of his crazy father and trying some unclear folk dance with him to the tune of imagined string instruments. But the city would not release him to daydream, and he dove desperately toward his usual dreamless sleep.
But it was occupied, filled like a vast hall with all the tenants. Katz tootled his trumpet in greeting, and a gelatinous note fell splat on the ballroom floor. Basellecci aimed a wide-mouthed cannon at him and smiled with his canonical face. Two people were screaming. He was screaming, and he woke up filled with embarrassment and fear and lying in a drenching sweat.
He tried to question but failed halfway, and all that came from his gaping mouth in the truant hour of afternoon was a long “Whaaa-aaahh . . .”
6
FOR FIVE LONG days he resided in the vessel of his bed, tied to the shore by the most tenuous mooring of consciousness. Feebly he trod the precarious gangplank to the bathroom and the kitchen and then back to the somnolent, rocking bed. He didn’t remember calling a doctor, but one came and gave him two kinds of capsules. Once Gaylord called about something, and he apparently made clear his situation, because the superintendent left him alone after that. He had some recollection of a silly conversation with his brother, Irwin, out of which he retained only a series of disgusted rannanas.
The rest of the time was a long dream that bore a simplified resemblance to what he would have called his life up to that time, but it was disturbingly more appropriate to dream than life should be. He went back in time and found that his direction was more lateral than recessive. In his bed he was bruised by what turned out to be only a series of flat pictures, and he had the desperate feeling that he observed them from a position on the edge of a cold immensity and that the completion of his hallucinatory reminiscence would push him off into God knew what. And if there was pattern to how he observed that comic-strip chronicle, it was lost on him. He read in the manner of all the languages; left to right, top to bottom, right to left. Succeeding frames had him a reedy adolescent, a toddler, a blanket-sucker of seven. His eyes fixed on the ceiling or on the rumpled cloth of bedclothing, as though any surface could reflect the pale projection. “Norman Moonbloom,” he said from time to time, animating the machinery of memory. The city went on in its outside time. There were the sounds of the days rising to climax and settling back to half-sleep. Dimly came the footsteps of his neighbors going up and down the stairs and the voice of the endless belt of traffic. “Norman Moonbloom,” he said in incantation, and he studied hard the pictures of himself, wondering what had taken so long to leave him at this point of virginal terror.
Four years old on a rainy, preschool morning, sitting at the piano, playing delicate discord and pretending to be reading music with an opened dictionary on the stand. Under him, inside the bench, were all the mysterious songs locked into sheets of notes. Rain so sweet on the windows, and his grandmother humming “Melancholy Baby” from the kitchen.
Twelve and drawing an imaginary map of an imaginary continent, armied with split peas. On the edge of his game a scornful face—Irwin? He was seen as vaguely obscene, with the black down on his cheeks, still maneuvering those miniature armies.
Going on ten and happy in the radio light, snug in the sound of a man talking about such vivid horrors in Europe. A fairy-tale ease opens his mouth, his grandmother clucks behind him, he sees crayon colors, the blood red a little too waxy to believe.
Fourteen, standing in a summer evening and looking deliriously at a girl while a dangerous boy insults him, reduces him to a bed-wetter. He smiles, offering no target, the girl laughs, tree leaves move hauntingly, a summer night as huge as heaven, smells of warm pavement. He touches his hurt but feels no pain. The other boy and the girl move off laughing, and he is a straw figure with a painted smile. Something eludes him and he goes home and to bed while everyone else is still outside.
He is three and strawberry ice cream is New Year’s Eve. His grandmother drops tears on him and holds him close. He licks the sweet pink cold. She wraps him in something light and soft and very strong. In the morning he will find it has become his skin.
Eighteen, he writes on the form, though he feels the same as he did at eight. He picks up his suitcase and goes out onto the campus, directions clasped in his other hand. He is in a room with a desk. This is college, but when he opens the book it is as always; he expects momentarily to hear his grandmother humming.
His age not clear, he sits on the dusty ground, the king of the ants. He builds walls and prisons and murmurs edicts. Far over the fences he hears Irwin in a ball game. The afternoon is milky with heat, and he abides.
They are at the funeral chapel, with its electric-candle flames and maroon carpeting. His grandmother lies, beaky nose above the rim of the coffin, while the rabbi says some things about her that don’t seem familiar. He feels nothing painful, only a sort of nervous sadness, as though a disaster he cannot remember has happened. He looks at his brother, who is crying. His skullcap keeps shrinking up on his head, threatening to fall off. He takes a deep breath of the sweetened air and cries a little too.
He and a girl named Monica Alpert are sitting beneath the oldest tree in the Western Hemisphere, or the fattest. Mexicans are moving in the sunlight beyond the immense shadow of the tree, and Monica is talking to him, offering, it seems, some great loveliness to him. She looks like a younger Edith Sitwell, and he is aware of the fine romantic quality of the setting. But all he can do is observe the motions of her lips and think about the flow of the blood through his own body. He realizes that she is slipping away from him, running down like water in a drain. There is only a small puddle left, and he feels he should reach out for her in some way but doesn’t. Soon he is walking through the foreign town with a book under his arm. He is alone and searching for a regret he cannot feel. The town feels like his home town.
There are line drawings of teeth and jaws, skeletons of feet, engravings of Old Testament passions, the flayed Vesalius figure, “. . . and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” Outside this dormitory window or that one (leaded panes or honest wood) snow is Christmas-card pretty, and there are very few tracks, because most students are away for the holidays. He supposes melancholy but achieves only that numb cosiness. Moonbloom on campus concentrates on psych.
And,
most profoundly, he is being soaked in the words of his grandmother, marinated in the membranous belief she lives by. They sit, just the two of them, on the thousand and one Connecticut nights, listening to the radio and talking during the commercials while winter wind or summer mistral tumbles husband, wild son, arrogant older grandson. And he is all she has, so she preserves him in a shell of moderation, warns him against pain, and tells him how he can crawl beneath it and dwell in warmth and safety. . ..
He opened his eyes on the fifth afternoon to see his window shade aflame with sunshine. His beard scratched on the pillow, and his sheets were gray with sweat. Weak as a newborn, he nevertheless realized that he had no way of avoiding whatever it was that had happened to him. Timidly he got up, and found that something had been torn away from him, that all the details of the room made deep impressions on his eyes. There was a blistering of plaster at the junction of wall and ceiling, the doorframe had a painted-over cut, the window shade was like worn skin, and he shuddered for it. He went into the bathroom and adjusted the water in the shower, solicitous of his frail, skinny body. The water drummed on him, wakening all his nerves.
The Tenants of Moonbloom Page 8
