Cockpit

by Jerzy Kosiński

“Not inside,” she reaffirmed.

  I paused. “What if, to go inside, I pay you three times as much as you asked?”

  “I told you: no inside.”

  “If I pay you five times as much?”

  “No inside.”

  “Ten times?”

  “No inside, no matter what you pay.” Then she threw up her hands in exasperation. “What kind of man are you? Why inside? Nothing special there.”

  “I’ll look for another girl,” I said.

  She stood with her legs apart, inhaling deeply to expose her breasts even more. “In this town, no street girl goes inside,” she insisted.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I’ll show you. Fornarina! Fornarina!” she screamed at a woman who stood near us. “This one here,” she pointed at me, “wants to pay ten times as much to go inside. How about inside, Fornarina?”

  “No inside,” Fornarina shouted back.

  “Amorrorisca! Amorrorisca,” she yelled to a woman across the street. “For ten times the price, he wants inside.”

  “No inside,” yelled Amorrorisca.

  “Ask any girl. Go ahead; ask Selvaggia, ask Gradisca, ask Alcina, anyone …” She gave me a withering look and left me for another man.

  I walked on into the night and each time I passed a girl, I stopped.

  “Ten times your price if I go inside?” I proposed.

  They all gave me cold, haughty looks. “No inside,” every one of them sputtered, looking at me with contempt. Soon others learned about my predilection and jeered, “No inside,” even before I propositioned them.

  I moved to another section of town, and approached a much older woman. “I want to go inside,” I said. “I’ll pay ten times your price.”

  “No inside,” she said, wagging her finger at me.

  “But you are on the street,” I said.

  “I am. That’s why I do everything you ask for. Just like that!” She snapped her fingers. “You don’t need inside.”

  “But I want inside,” I said.

  “Go north. There the women go inside, because they don’t know how to excite men.”

  “But why won’t you?” I persisted.

  She came closer. “I am a virgin,” she said. “One day I take the money I make here and go way down south, back to my family. I want to marry a nice man. His family will suspect me. They will check me with their fingers to see if I am still a virgin. Only when I marry a man I love, he goes inside. Not before.”

  I recall the whores and the incident at La Mole as vividly as if I had been in Paris two days ago, in Italy yesterday. Though I wish now I could forget the Paris incident, and wonder why I remember the whores so clearly, I can’t free myself from either memory.

  When I was ten, a psychologist visiting my secondary school gave me a routine memory test. She was astonished by its results and arranged for me to be tested by a group of psychologists. They showed me pages of technical jargon and statistics, complex drawings, film strips and dozens of photographs. Careful to question me on different days, they would ask me to describe what I had seen, to identify fragments of films and photographs, to extend a single curved line from a drawing or to recall the precise location of a particular face in a photograph of a crowd. After extensive testing, they concluded that I retained whatever I concentrated on, but they warned me to memorize only useful information. Otherwise, my mind would become an overcrowded attic, steadily but unselectively storing up everything I saw. One day, they added, the attic might collapse, wrecking the house beneath.

  I began to experiment with my memory. I found that it automatically intensified while I slept. If I misplaced something, such as a set of keys, I took a nap. It was as if I were dreaming a film about losing the keys that was being run backward in slow motion. By the time I woke up, I recalled where I had left them. During exam periods, when my fellow students were staying up all night to study, I slept, to their disgust, twice as much as usual. In my sleep I reviewed all the texts which I had originally only skimmed, and by exam time had total recall of all the necessary material.

  At the university, I enrolled in three separate degree programs, in the humanities and sciences, and took all available electives. Often, when asked questions in oral examinations, I took more time than I actually needed to answer. Carefully watched by those professors anxious to expose my ignorance, or my system of cheating, I produced correct answers only when I was sure they expected I did not know them.

  Since my childhood, I have learned to guard my memory from becoming overloaded with unnecessary data. I have developed a set of mental exercises that prevent me from concentrating involuntarily on useless details. When I don’t use the method and, for instance, allow myself to look at people on a subway, I instinctively memorize every detail of their features, coloring and expression, the clothes they wear and what they are carrying.

  In searching out ways to make use of my memory, I occasionally help friends engaged in scholarly research. Many years ago, one of them was preparing an extensive critical study of a certain author, whose every work he had to read. I told my friend I had devised a program of speed-reading and memory-training that I wanted to test by skimming everything the writer had published. In order to evaluate my method effectively, I needed to know what to look for in various texts. My friend thought I was joking, but proceeded to give me a list of the writers’ favorite topics and ideas.

  Surrounded by the man’s collected works, I began reading. Soon my mind took off, soaring above the jumble of words, expressions and notions, which slowly became abstracted into predictable patterns, just as rough farm fields seen from the air look like a neatly sown quilt of velvet smooth patches. As I read, I dictated brief bursts of thoughts into a tape recorder. Only when I finished scanning everything the writer had produced, did I become aware how flat and unchallenging the topography of his work was.

  I gave the tape to my friend, who promptly had it transcribed. Later, he called to thank me for it and said that, if used indiscriminately, the map I supplied could not only discredit the author’s work to date but might cripple his self-confidence and stifle his desire to write. He suggested that if I ever undertook another such survey I should extend my method to detect plagiarism.

  When I was stationed in western Europe, I used to peruse the local literary journals and magazines in order to improve my linguistic skills. Every so often, I glanced at an influential weekly that carried a well-known critic’s reviews of contemporary foreign literature in translation. On one occasion, he reviewed a recent translation of an early novel by the writer whose work I had investigated.

  The critic cited examples of stylistic repetition that my friend had noted in a scholarly article he published years earlier, but my friend’s article wasn’t mentioned. It struck me how easy it must be for a critic to plagiarize foreign reviews: since a translation was usually published some time after the original-language edition, he could be reasonably certain that the source of his ideas about a book would never be discovered.

  To see if my memory could operate simultaneously in two languages, I selected several of the critic’s recent reviews, then looked up the original criticism of the same works. As I had expected, some of his opinions and turns of phrase were crudely disguised piratings of earlier foreign reviews.

  I passed the information on to the chief of my Service section. At first, he was baffled by my devoting so much effort to matters as insignificant and dull as fiction, literary criticism and translation, but once he realized how damning my evidence really was, he complimented me. He was sure that, confronted with the choice of cooperating with the Service or of having his plagiarism made public, the critic would make a sensible decision. The chief suggested we could always use an internal source at the weekly.

  About the same time, a fellow Service agent told me about an incident that had occurred in Washington, D.C. Within one month, a senator, a well-known journalist, two college students and five older people were all hospitalize
d with cases of acute hepatitis. The infected persons varied widely in age, medical history and lifestyle, and the doctors could not agree upon a single source of infection.

  Two hundred more cases were reported over the next few days, and, since some of the stricken worked for a sensitive government agency, the Service was called in to investigate. Their check established that, weeks before falling ill, each person, complaining of a nose and throat infection or of a respiratory inflammation, had consulted one of eight well-known physicians who shared office space in the center of the city. The search then zeroed in on the doctors, their staffs, the medications they prescribed and the sanitary conditions of their offices and equipment, but nothing suspicious turned up. Strangely enough, the epidemic died as quickly as it had begun, and the various investigating teams never did uncover the origin of the disease.

  A short time before his conversation with me, the agent had been talking to a middle-aged scientist in a bar. Accusing the medical profession of wholesale negligence, the scientist said that doctors made complex diagnoses based only on blood and urine tests, electrocardiograms and rapid check-ups, and felt free to take telephone calls about unrelated matters while examining a patient. Often, he complained, doctors prescribed drugs to alleviate particular complaints, but did not even attempt to review the patient’s history to find out whether a drug was toxic to the individual’s system or harmful under certain circumstances.

  The scientist decided to prove how corrupt and immune to investigation the medical profession had become. Since he was then working in a private laboratory, it was easy for him to obtain minute samples of many hepatitis viruses. He began experimenting with them, and after a few weeks had successfully developed a vicious new strain.

  Complaining of a severe pain in his chest, he made appointments with eight well-known Washington doctors. During the brief preliminary interview with each doctor’s nurse, he would give a different false name, address and medical history. In the examining room, the nurse would always weigh him and then leave.

  After an examination, the doctor would tell him to get dressed and come to his office. Alone in the examining room, the scientist would withdraw an aerosol vial of the compressed virus from his pocket, unseal it and quickly spray the hepatitis culture on disposable tongue depressors in an open jar and on metal nose and throat applicators. In addition, he sprayed stacked paper cups and the disposable rubber gloves used in rectal examinations.

  The scientist had followed this procedure in the offices of all eight doctors. By the time the victims were hospitalized, the infected depressors, cups and gloves had long since been incinerated and the applicators disinfected, so no traceable source of the germs existed. The scientist was incensed at the helplessness of the hepatitis victims in the hands of their negligent doctors and at the failure of the top medical researchers to uncover the origin of the infection. He claimed his test made a mockery of the sanitary conditions of the entire medical profession.

  The agent continued to listen intently to the scientist’s rantings, and then excused himself to go to the men’s room. Once out of sight of the bar, he went straight to the telephone and called his superior for orders on how to proceed. When he returned to the table, the scientist had disappeared.

  Years later, inspired by the story, I decided to conduct an experiment of my own. I placed in my raincoat pocket a syringe with a short, fine needle and a half-pint bottle filled with a harmless solution that had no odor or taste but merely turned purple after contact with saliva. I would drive to a shopping mall and wander through the aisles of a supermarket, the small syringe concealed in my hand. By inserting the needle through food cartons, I expelled the substance into cottage cheese, milk, cream, butter, margarine, ice cream and yoghurt. Using one hand, I would refill the syringe in my pocket; no one ever noticed what I was doing. Before leaving a store, like a legitimate shopper I would purchase a few items.

  In the first few days, I injected hundreds of containers in more than fifty shopping centers in the city’s suburbs. Toward the end of the week, the newspaper and TV news programs reported a poisoned-food scare that threatened to escalate into an epidemic. Days passed, and the media devoted more time and space to the epidemic. After two weeks, the poison scare became the subject of a TV special on which a Nobel Prize-winning professor of immunology stated that, even though the substance apparently was not fatal, its long-range effects on an unsuspecting consumer had yet to be analyzed.

  As the scare continued to build, other reports asserted that food products reached supermarkets already contaminated; countless people asserted that they had been poisoned by the substance fifteen to twenty minutes after swallowing the contaminated foods. They all agreed it caused shock, nausea and severe hallucinations.

  At that point, I altered the composition of the solution so that it turned red after thirty to forty minutes’ exposure to air.

  I also started injecting other foods, which until now were considered to be clean. Consumers were horrified to find themselves poisoned by breads, ready-to-eat meats, cold salads, frozen puddings and pastries that turned the tongue and inside of the mouth scarlet half an hour after being opened; many claimed the red poison to be more lethal than the purple one.

  The epidemic began to cause mass panic. Several food and packaging manufacturers, as well as supermarket chains and consumer organizations, initiated their own investigations, flooding the market with conflicting reports, accusations and demands for tamper-proof packaging. Meanwhile, several anonymous callers contacted newspapers and television and radio stations, eagerly claiming responsibility for the wave of terrorist acts, which included food poisoning on a massive scale. One of them sent a tape recording to the police in which he threatened to increase the power of the red poison and hit food shops and supermarkets across the country unless the unfair immigration laws were immediately changed. Because of his Middle European accent, the media labeled the substance “Polish poison.”

  While I was in the Service, I appropriated a number of eighteenth-century snuff and perfume boxes. They were all made of gold, platinum or silver, and were decorated with enamel and precious stones. The methods by which I acquired them were unusual, and I knew that if I was ever associated with the boxes I would have to leave the Service immediately.

  The boxes were very valuable when I first obtained them, but by the time I disappeared from the Service they had easily doubled in value and made me a very rich man. I realized that my post-Service survival depended on being able to move quickly from one hiding place to the next and on having a source of ready cash to buy my freedom if I were caught. The boxes provided that source.

  I began to think of suitable repositories for my boxes. The caches had to be located in a country to which I, with an American passport, would have free passage without police surveillance, a country that did not check too carefully into what objects or how much cash were carried over its borders. That narrowed my potential drop-sites to the few large democracies remaining in the West.

  To guarantee the absolute security of the boxes, I planned to store each one separately in the safest hiding place I could devise. Such a place had to be unobtrusive, offering easy access at all times. Above all, it had to be an unlikely storage place for an object of great value.

  It occurred to me that the water tanks above many old-fashioned public toilets contained simple, reliable mechanisms that almost never required cleaning or repairs. Toilets in large old hotels, restaurants, railroad stations and subways would become my safe-deposit vaults.

  I made several trips abroad, each time carrying a few boxes concealed in my luggage. Where I came across a toilet with a water tank, I securely wrapped one of the boxes in chamois and moisture-proof plastic, then positioned it in the water at the bottom of the tank.

  Eventually, I found all the toilets I needed and hid every box away. No map of these toilets has ever been drawn. I have committed every one to memory.

  So far, I have never failed to get a bo
x back when I wanted it, but each time I travel to reclaim one, I have to consider two contingencies: that the box has been discovered by a repairman, or that the toilet safe has been torn down.

  Recently, I was driving across the Swiss-Italian border on my way to Livigno. As I approached Lago Nuovo, I took my place in the enormous line of cars waiting to enter the one-way, four-mile tunnel. Certain that the heavy traffic meant at least half an hour’s wait, I left my car and walked to the public toilet. It was as clean as I remembered it, since people in line seldom risked losing their place or missing the green entry light by going to the toilet. I closed the bathroom door, stepped on top of the seat, pulled the chain and reached into the remaining cold water of the tank. The package was still in the right rear corner where I had put it years before. I lifted it out, threw away the wet plastic wrapper, put the box wrapped in chamois in my raincoat pocket and returned to my car before the tunnel light turned green.

  An hour and a half later, I checked into a hotel in a mountain town and placed a call to an art dealer in Milan. I told him I was putting a rare eighteenth-century box up for sale and referred him to an art catalogue that included a color plate of the object. I also quoted him a non-negotiable price and requested a decision within twenty-four hours. Three hours later he called back to accept the offer, and the following morning he and an expert appeared at my hotel. After thoroughly examining the box, they handed me the money I had asked for.

  Just this year I decided to put one of my most valuable boxes on the market. Remembering the name of a discreet London dealer, I sent him a letter describing the history of the box’s owners and enclosing a color photograph. I gave no return address and named my final price. A week later I telephoned the dealer, who told me he had been eagerly awaiting my call because a rich American woman was willing to meet the price.

  Since I was about to fly to Latin America on a Swiss passport and did not want to go through customs, both the dealer and the client agreed to make the exchange at Kennedy airport. I suggested we all meet in the international transit lounge to avoid attracting attention. The dealer met my plane and escorted me to the lounge, which to my surprise had been cordoned off from the public at his request. The woman was waiting with an important museum curator, who was armed with various instruments, chemicals and magnifying glasses. The woman’s lawyer and her current husband sat on either side of two suitcases.