I start a treasure hunt of terror, around the inside of the room in the dark. First into the clothes closet, wheeling and twirling among the couple of things I have hanging in there like a hopped-up discothèque dancer, dipping in and out of pockets, patting some of them between my hands to see if they’re flat or hold a bulk. As if I were calling a little pet dog to me by clapping my hands to it. A little dog who is hiding away from me in there, a little dog called death.
Not in there. Then the drawers of the dresser, spading them in and out, fast as a card shuffle. A telephone directory, a complimentary shaving kit (if you’re a man), a complimentary manicure kit (if you’re a girl).
They must be down to the last screwhead by now.
Then around and into the bathroom, while the remorseless dismantling at the door keeps on. It’s all white in there, white as my face must be. It’s dark, but you can still see that it’s white against the dark. Twilight-colored tiles. I don’t put on the light to help me find them, because there isn’t enough time left; the lights in here are fluorescent and take a few moments to come on, and by that time they’ll be in here.
There’s a catch phrase that you all must have heard at one time or another. You walk into a room or go over toward a group. Someone turns and says with huge emphasis: “There he is.” As though you were the most important one of all. (And you’re not.) As though you were the one they were just talking about. (And they weren’t.) As though you were the only one that mattered. (And you’re not.) It’s a nice little tribute, and it don’t cost anyone a cent.
And so I say this to them now, as I find them on the top glass slab of the shallow medicine cabinet: There you are. Glad to see you—you’re important in my scheme of things.
As I bend for some running water, the shower curtain twines around me in descending spiral folds—don’t ask me how, it must have been ballooning out. I sidestep like a drunken Roman staggering around his toga, pulling half the curtain down behind me while the pins holding it to the rod about tinkle like little finger cymbals, dragging part of it with me over one shoulder, while I bend over the basin to drink.
No time to rummage for a tumbler. It’s not there anyway—I’d been using it for the rye. So I use the hollow of one hand for a scoop, pumping it up and down to my open mouth and alternating with one of the nuggets from the little plastic container I’m holding uncapped in my other hand. I’ve been called a fast drinker at times. Johnny used to say—never mind that now.
I only miss one—that falls down in the gap between me and the basin to the floor. That’s a damned good average. There were twelve of them in there, and I remember the label read: Not more than three to be taken during any twenty-four-hour period. In other words, I’ve just killed myself three times, with a down payment on a fourth time for good measure.
I grab the sides of the basin suddenly and bend over it, on the point of getting them all out of me again in rebellious upheaval. I don’t want to, but they do. I fold both arms around my middle, hugging myself, squeezing myself, to hold them down. They stay put. They’ve caught on, taken hold. Only a pump can get them out now. And after a certain point of no return (I don’t know how long that is), once they start being assimilated into the bloodstream, not even a pump can get them out.
Only a little brine taste shows up in my mouth, and gagging a little, still holding my middle, I go back into the other room. Then I sit down to wait. To see which of them gets to me first.
It goes fast now, like a drumbeat quickening to a climax. An upended foot kicks at the door, and it suddenly spanks inward with a firecracker sound. The light comes fizzing through the empty oblong like gushing carbonation, too sudden against the dark to ray clearly at first.
They rush in like the splash of a wave that suddenly has splattered itself all around the room. Then the lights are on, and they’re on all four sides of me, and they’re holding me hard and fast, quicker than one eyelid can touch the other in a blink.
My arms go behind me into the cuffless convolutions of a strait jacket. Then as though unconvinced that this is enough precaution, someone standing back there has looped the curve of his arm around my throat and the back of the chair, and holds it there in tight restraint. Not choking-tight as in a mugging, but ready to pin me back if I should try to heave out of the chair.
Although the room is blazing-bright, several of them are holding flashlights, all lit and centered inward on my face from the perimeter around me, like the spokes of a blinding wheel. Probably to disable me still further by their dazzle. One beam, more skeptical than the others, travels slowly up and down my length, seeking out any bulges that might possibly spell a concealed offensive weapon. My only weapon is already used, and it was a defensive one.
I roll my eyes toward the ceiling to try and get away from the lights, and one by one they blink and go out.
There they stand. The assignment is over, completed. To me it’s my life, to them just another incident. I don’t know how many there are. The man in the coffin doesn’t count the number who have come to the funeral. But as I look at them, as my eyes go from face to face, on each one I read the key to what the man is thinking.
One face, soft with compunction: Poor guy, I might have been him, he might have been me.
One, hard with contempt: Just another of those creeps something went wrong with along the way.
Another, flexing with hate: I wish he’d shown some fight; I’d like an excuse to—
Still another, rueful with impatience: I’d like to get this over so I could call her unexpectedly and catch her in a lie; I bet she never stayed home tonight like she told me she would.
And yet another, blank with indifference, its thoughts a thousand miles away: And what’s a guy like Yastrzemski got, plenty of others guy haven’t got too? It’s just the breaks, that’s all—
And I say to my own thoughts dejectedly: Why weren’t you that clear, that all-seeing, the other night, that terrible other night. It might have done you more good then.
There they stand. And there I am, seemingly in their hands but slowly slipping away from them.
They don’t say anything. I’m not aware of any of them saying anything. They’re waiting for someone to give them further orders. Or maybe waiting for something to come and take me away.
One of them hasn’t got a uniform on or plainsclothes either like the rest. He has on the white coat that is my nightmare and my horror. And in the crotch of one arm he is upending two long poles intertwined with canvas.
The long-drawn-out death within life. The burial-alive of the mind, covering it over with fresh graveyard earth each time it tries to struggle through to the light. In this kind of death you never finish dying.
In back of them, over by the door, I see the top of someone’s head appear, then come forward, slowly, fearfully forward. Different from their short-clipped, starkly outlined heads, soft and rippling in contour, and gentle. And as she comes forward into fullface view, I see who she is.
She comes up close to me, stops, and looks at me.
“Then it wasn’t—you?” I whisper.
She shakes her head slightly with a mournful trace of smile. “It wasn’t me,” she whispers back, without taking them into it, just between the two of us, as in the days before. “I didn’t go there to meet you. I didn’t like the way you sounded.” But someone was there, I came across someone there. Someone whose face became hers in my waking dream. The scarf, the blood on the scarf. It’s not my blood, it’s not my scarf. It must belong to someone else. Someone they haven’t even found yet, don’t even know about yet.
The preventive has come too late.
She moves a step closer and bends toward me.
“Careful—watch it,” a voice warns her.
“He won’t hurt me,” she answers understandingly without taking her eyes from mine. “We used to be in love.”
Used to? Then that’s why I’m dying. Because I still am. And you aren’t anymore.
She bends and kisses me,
on the forehead, between the eyes. Like a sort of last rite.
And in that last moment, as I’m straining upward to find her lips, as the light is leaving my eyes, the whole night passes before my mind, the way they say your past life does when you’re drowning: the waiter, the night maid, the taxi argument, the call girl, Johnny—it all meshes into start-to-finish continuity. Just like in a story. An organized, step-by-step, timetabled story.
This story.
Afterword to “New York Blues”: “New York Blues” (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, December 1970) is the last, best, and bleakest of the original stories EQMM founding editor Frederic Dannay bought from Woolrich during their long association. Within its minimalist storyline we find virtually every motif, belief, device that had pervaded Woolrich’s fiction for generations: flashes of word magic, touches of evocative song lyrics, love and loneliness, madness and death, paranoia, partial amnesia, total despair. If this was the last story Woolrich completed, he couldn’t have ended his career more fittingly.
PART II
THE POETS
THE RAVEN
EDGAR ALLAN POE
West 84th Street
(Originally published in 1845)
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door—
“’Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
“’Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door;—
This it is and nothing more.”
Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, “Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door;—
Darkness there and nothing more.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”
Merely this and nothing more.
Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before. “Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore—
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;—
’Tis the wind and nothing more!”
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore; Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door—
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, “Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door—
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as “Nevermore.”
But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered—
Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before—
On the morrow He will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.”
Then the bird said “Nevermore.”
Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken, “Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore—
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of ‘Never—nevermore.’”
But the Raven still beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”
This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,
But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!
Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite—respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore;
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
“Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—
“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!
SELECTIONS FROM
CHELSEA ROOMING HOUSE
BY HORACE GREGORY
Chelsea
(Originally published in 1930)
LONGFACE MAHONEY DISCUSSES HEAVEN
If someone said, Escape,
let’s get away from here,
you’d see snow mountains thrown
against the sky,
cold, and you’d draw your breath and feel
air like cold water going through your veins,
but you’d be free, up so high,
or you’d see a row of girls dancing on a beach
with tropic trees and a warm moon
and warm air floating under your clothes
and through your hair.
Then you’d think of heaven
where there’s peace, away from here
and you’d go some place unreal
where everybody goes after something happens,
set up in the air, safe, a room in a hotel.
A brass bed, military hair brushes,
a couple of coats, trousers, maybe a dress
on a chair or draped on the floor.
This room is not on earth, feel the air,
warm like heaven and far away.
This is a place
where marriage nights are kept
and sometimes here you say, Hello
to a neat girl with you
and sometimes she laughs
because she thinks it’s funny to be sitting here
for no reason at all, except perhaps,
she likes you daddy.
Maybe this isn’t heaven but near
to something like it,
more like love coming up in elevators
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