Killing Time: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  He could not endure the display of violent emotion. It was as if the earth revolved in a blur, growing ever larger, while he stood motionless but dwindled. This terrified him, and if it continued he sobbed in a miniature voice commensurate with his size.

  On one such occasion, head buried in a pillow, face down, minuscule, he felt a touch upon his tiny shoulder.

  “Are you O.K.?”

  He turned quickly, instantly magnifying, for only when others engaged in it did violence disturb him, and said, truthfully, “Sure.”

  Betty stood at the bedside, a sad-sweet moonface. “I thought you were feeling badly.”

  “And I thought you were,” Detweiler said.

  “Me?” She winced as if trying to remember, then shook her head vigorously, hair swinging.

  He did not want to bring up a painful incident. He shrugged and lifted himself to a sitting position.

  “Oh,” Betty said, “you mean our fight. Billie and I are always at one another’s throats. That’s normal.”

  Detweiler listened carefully. “It is?”

  “Really,” Betty assured him. “Don’t you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I’m sorry…. When I was little I had a baby sister for a while, but she died. What I meant was, I don’t know what it is like to grow up alongside a brother or sister and whether it is usual to quarrel with them.” What a nice girl Betty was, her face so yielding and blurred.

  He asked: “Do you have any pictures of yourself as a baby?”

  She joked: “Bare skin on a bearskin? I don’t know if I am safe, alone in this room with you.”

  Detweiler failed to answer. His little sister had died badly. Alongside the kitchen stove in her highchair, she had clambered up on rubbery feet, reached with infant fingers at the glass coffeemaker from the lower globe of which boiling water was surging into the upper through the hollow crystal column; a stimulating event to Detweiler himself, aged seven, who watched from across the room, milk-mug lowered. For a breathless moment all water bubbled and danced in the superior sphere, the lower was magically void; then it would descend, transformed to another liquid, leveling up as black, then brown, then amber. It always had. But this time his sister’s stubby, groping fingers had sent the wondrous progression awry. The topheavy device leaned towards her, soon crashed in a boiling sheet of deadly transparency, beautiful but killing, and scalded her out of life.

  Detweiler explained: “I believe that life is never destroyed but transformed. However, I don’t think my sister is living in any kind of heaven and looking down in an anthropomorphic shape.” That had to be said because his mother very much did hold such a belief and talked, in séances and dreams, with a host of the deceased.

  Betty sat delicately upon the foot of the bed, laid her head on a shoulder, and squinted at him, saying: “That’s intriguing.”

  “But I am convinced that life or energy or spirit exists forever as a sort of current or fluid—the trouble is that when you try to express it in words you run into the problems of language. Words have traditions and histories of their own.” Detweiler said, grinning: “So you are talking about something that cannot be talked about. Odd, eh? Paradoxical.”

  Betty’s eyes narrowed. She asked: “Were you having some sort of fit before?” She touched his forearm quickly and withdrew. “You don’t mind me prying? Tell me to go away anytime.”

  “Why?” Detweiler meant: about the “fit,” having no memory ot such. But Betty took it as a reference to her leaving.

  “Because it’s your room.”

  Matters of possession made him uneasy. He traveled light so as to escape the despair of ownership, the tyranny of material. He left his seat on the bed that was no more his property than the other: a demonstration of the difficulties you got into when the subject of belonging arose.

  “I can take a hint,” said Betty, rising too but moving little.

  “No,” said Detweiler. “You have a lovely apartment. It’s the nicest room I have ever had. I hope I can continue on. I won’t make a mess. I have given up sculpture, so there won’t be any clay around to get on the carpet.”

  “Sculpture?” Betty said.

  Detweiler repeated that he no longer practiced the craft, but to no avail; she kept after him, she loved all manifestations of the urge to create, and at length, because she was a girl with a woman’s natural sympathy, he finally agreed to do her head. Thus he was led, through his inability to refuse a plea, by his wretched vanity, to commit another crime: to represent life and so to despise the actuality which sat as his model. But Betty was so innocent as to believe she was being celebrated.

  “I’m thrilled at the prospect,” she said. “And wait until I tell Billie.”

  “Will you quarrel with her again?” Detweiler asked in trepidation.

  “Probably.” She smiled carelessly. Detweiler was amazed: he saw nothing to be lighthearted about in bad feeling. He hated so much to quarrel that, simply to settle the matter, he would try to kill his opponent.

  Walking the streets of the city, Detweiler summoned up this memory. Of course, such reminiscence was a kind of Realization, but of a low order, being part of his own history, brought back from only a few years before. But in a modest way it suggested what could be done even amid the distractions of a public thoroughfare. At the moment he was in a business district. Evening had come; office workers were homeward bound, moving along under clouds of steaming breath. Detweiler had exhausted the day but not himself, in miles of wander. He had not yet come up with a feasible means of locating a doctor, but he did not regard time as a material that could be wasted or expended: it was ever there and he was in it, as a fish is in the water.

  He dined on, and shared with purple-gray pigeons, a loaf of day-old bread purchased at small expenditure from a bin of stale products in a supermarket. He had seen the late-afternoon sun of winter celebrate the windows of high buildings. He had watched a man change a flat tire on a busy avenue, deftly work the well-oiled jack and spin off the precise wheel-bolts, at the curb opposite a shopwindow exquisite with eggshell china.

  “Do you want any help?” he asked the laboring motorist, merely as a courtesy, for he could see the man exerted perfect control over his devices and was furthermore a quick, coordinated, sandy-haired individual with a natural high temperature of personality and hence immune to cold, working indeed with bare, freckled hands.

  “Thanks no!” the man chirped brightly, between the windrush of passing vehicles.

  Obviously it was not the time or place, nor the person, to ask for a doctor.

  Detweiler had also ambled through an enormous department store. He assumed such a large establishment, dealing with the public, would keep a dispensary, complete with physician, to attend to the customer who fainted or suffered a heart attack or epileptic seizure while on the premises. But, attracted by the acres of colorful merchandise, he roamed throughout as if in a spring meadow, feeding his senses, touching the toecaps of display-shoes, fingering silks, smelling woolens. Never did he pretend intent to purchase, and never was he regarded with anything but consideration by the salespeople. However, he understood that he was in a potentially commercial relation to them. Any attempt to introduce personal particularities would alter the equilibrium. It could not be done unobtrusively. People were sympathetic. Were he to simulate sudden illness and be conducted to the house doctor by the salesclerk who at the moment had amiably accepted the statement that he was “only looking” at the neckties, Detweiler would have established a peculiar identity.

  “What was wrong with the guy I sent up yesterday?” the clerk would ask the physician, and perhaps receive an incredible answer.

  Anyway, here was Detweiler, walking along later in the evening, past shadowy bars and small hotels. He had recently had a cup of coffee and a doughnut, but their warmth soon leaked off in the intense cold, and his extremities felt brittle as twigs.

 
; It took severe conditions to make him uncomfortable, but once in that state he was no masochist: he tried to change it. He now, though not a drinker, stepped into a corner tavern and bathed with pleasure in the heated, though smelly, atmosphere. Contrary to his practice elsewhere, he took a stool as far away from the other customers as could be managed. Detweiler was leery of drunks: they were often so touchy, and tended to respond perversely to the friendliness which most sober persons were glad to accept from him.

  A beer was probably the least offensive beverage he could get away with, and he ordered one, thereafter taking an occasional mouthful of its soury chill and ignoring the circumvolution of foam which stayed behind in a sort of bathtub-ring as the level descended. The occupants of the nearest stools were two elderly men who muttered towards, but did not look at, each other. Then in louder tones the one on the left reviled the man on the right, in unspeakably foul epithets, his ancient, transparent ears quivering under a hatbrim stiff with dried rain. An old speckled fist trembled under an old purple nose. The men wore like overcoats, black, heavy, and both hung similar pairs of cracked shoes, with diagonaled heels, from the lowest rung of the stools.

  There you had the sort of inebriate situation that Detweiler was always at pains to avoid. In haste he signaled the bartender to come collect for the beer. He would have left the money and fled, but had only a dollar bill to his name.

  “Buy me one?” said a woman behind his left shoulder, where the bar met the wall. He was startled out of the fear engendered by the old-men’s quarrel; he had not looked for a human intervention from that locality, where there was scarcely room for a person to stand. But he had under judged the space. Not only had a woman slipped therein, but a substantial woman and vivid even in the dim barlight.

  Her face showed up as almost-orange beige; her hair, done in a big hedge-ball, of the next tone of the spectrum, almostred orange, her lips vermilion. Detweiler was taken by her appearance. She also smelled sweetly. She looked about forty, with the deluxe figure of that age though hesitating at the margin of what could be called weightiness: rather, solid; ample.

  Detweiler was conscious of a sudden appetite to have sexual knowledge of her: she seemed to exist for the purpose. For that reason he turned away, hard as it was for him to be rude: it was his peculiar torment that, in search of mutilation, he found but another argument in its favor.

  She said reproachfully: “I was only looking for company. You could just say yes or no.”

  Detweiler turned back and replied as earnestly as he could, as usual. “It isn’t that easy,” he said. “You don’t understand. I would like very much to go to bed with you right now. But it would take meaway from my work, you see.”

  “Aw hell, honey. Aw hell,” said this large fruit of a woman, pushing him with her hip, from which he assumed she wanted the stool, so he slid over to the next one and was thereby closer to the old men and their burgeoning altercation. He was now under greater pressure than before, but felt less desperation: such was the effect on him of comfortable women.

  “I’m Rose,” the woman told him, still leaning flagrantly against the stool he had vacated. “Who’re you?”

  “Joe,” he replied, and put out his hand. She accepted it and tickled the palm.

  Seriously he asked her: “Isn’t that a funny handshake?”

  “It’s supposed to be sexy, dear. Didn’t you do that when you were a kid?”

  “Never.”

  “Didn’t you play ‘show me yours and I’ll show you mine’?” She shook all of hers in robust merriment.

  Detweiler had spent most of his childhood by himself. If he approached other children he was extremely cautious: they often kicked, punched, and bit, girls as well as boys. It was true that a little girl had once proposed such an exchange and, when he asked for clarification, explained: “The secret thing.” So Detweiler reached into his jacket pocket and brought out to deposit on the grass the coil of his garter snake, a beautiful, gentle, trusting creature whose pleasure was to flow up his sleeve and peep out the vee of the shirt. The girl screamed and ran away to fetch a brother bigger than either Detweiler or she. Before Detweiler could ascertain his intent this lad had pounded the snake into a writhing foam.

  The memory made Detweiler feel awful, but it served to water down his lust. It also revived his painful awareness of the quarrel beyond his right shoulder: the furious old man was now threatening to disembowl the other with the point of his shoe. Detweiler began to gulp air into the back of his throat.

  “Won’t talk, hey?” said the woman with the red-gold hair. “Playing it safe.” She mounted the seat, put her left elbow onto the bar and her right hand, large and strong, into the descent of his lap and massaged him there.

  His attention returned to her. For the first time he appreciated that she was drunk, much of her high color taking its source in that condition, though her speech had clarity.

  “Excuse me,” Detweiler replied. “I did play that game once, and it ended badly.” An image of a coconut came to him briefly: the boy’s cropped head, which he had cracked with the baseball bat that killed his snake. The boy collapsed, weeping and bleeding—Detweiler was too small to have killed him—and the little sister looked at the snake’s remains, looked at her brother, threw her dress up and her drawers down, and said: “O.K., here it is…. Now I better go get him some iodine.”

  The woman’s hand persisted, as if she were diligently sifting sand in search of a lost gem. -Detweiler said in regret, referring to the dollar bill which the bartender had not yet taken: “I can’t pay you anything. This is all the money I got to my name.”

  At once her hand flew away. “You shit,” she cried. “What do you—Who do you—Are you calling me whore?”

  In amazement Detweiler stared into his amber beer.

  “You little fart,” said the woman. “My husband will destroy you.” She snatched his glass away and took a prodigious draught. Something struck Detweiler on the shoulder. It felt like a loosely wadded piece of newspaper, no bulk but thrown hard. The one old man had finally assaulted the other, hurling him against Detweiler.

  Detweiler left the stool, left the woman, left his last dollar. Before he reached the door, however, a man of about his own size though thinner, dark, saturnine, even sick-looking around the green-ringed eyes and pinched nose, stepped into his path and struck him in the mouth. It smarted rather than hurt. Detweiler covered up with crossed arms. His assailant continued to flail away. From the utterances shouted simultaneously, Detweiler gathered his attacker was the woman’s husband. He doubted that the man was in a state to listen to an oral self-defense, so he said nothing. Nor did he fight back: having naught to fight for, no anger and, since he understood that the man labored under a misapprehension, no resentment. He certainly was not being hurt by the ineffectual blows against his forearms.

  At last the assailant lowered his fists and, gasping from the exertion, said: “Will you apologize?”

  Detweiler wondered where the husband had been while his wife stood at the bar. It was an odd situation. But he saw no reason why he should withhold that which this gallant individual sought so ardently.

  “Of course,” he said.

  And the man seized his hand, saying: “No hard feelings?”

  Detweiler shook his smiling head, though his upper lip, where he had been struck before he put up his guard, had now begun to ache.

  “I’ll buy you one,” said the other. He retained Detweiler’s hand and with it pulled him to a table in the front corner of the room. “I have to sit down. I’m not well. Tubercular.”

  Hopefully, Detweiler asked: “Are you under a doctor’s care?”

  The husband proceeded to disappoint him: “Not me. Oh, I tried them, went to hundreds, but they’re all crooks and quacks and phonies, taking money unearned by the production of results. You can’t get away with that in any other line of work. Be in jail if you tried.” He chewed a mottled lip with yellow teeth, giving off an odor similar to that of th
e stale bread on which Detweiler had dined.

  “My real trouble,” the husband went on, “is my temper. It drains my strength. I didn’t have no quarrel with you just now. I saw her handle you. I got the right picture, but a man hasn’t any call to strike a woman, correct me if I’m wrong? But pride, my friend, you have got to serve pride and decency everywhere. What’s your line?”

  “Taxidermy,” Detweiler said, “preserving animals.”

  “I know what that is exactly,” the husband answered quickly, proudly. “Skin them and stuff ‘em! I used to be a rabbit hunter. Kill one and you should gut him on the spot, rip up from asshole to breastbone, take him by the two front legs, bend over and whip him between your legs and out fly the guts. I’m going to like you. What’s your name?”

  “Joe.”

  “Walt here. What’s your pleasure in the drinking line? I myself am beer all the way.” He put a bony finger towards Detweiler’s lip. “I connected there, Jesus, did I connect. Puffy, and also cut. Must have been this ring: cheap but cute.” He showed Detweiler a death’s-head on his knuckle, polished brass with red-glass eyes. “Serves to remind you nothing will last forever, not Mr. Money nor Mrs. Cunt, nobody and nothing. I find it healthy.”

  Detweiler flinched at the dirty words. He found this person unrewarding, but he did not know how he could get away from him without once again challenging the man’s pride.

  Then the wife appeared and put a half-filled glass of beer before him. “You forgot this,” she said, grimacing neutrally. She decorously sat down at the table, across from him.

  Walt told her: “You had too much.”

  “All right,” said she.

  “Well,” Walt informed Detweiler, “you got your beer. Drink up.” He poured himself a glassful from a bottle that had apparently just been opened, it being yet misted with cold. He seemed to be turning disagreeable once more. He said, with a melancholy stare into the middle murk of the room, “Oh, I got my principles, but what have I ever got for them?”