Cockpit

by Jerzy Kosiński

  The older man pleaded, “There’s no need for that. Please. It’s not necessary. Nothing happened.”

  By then the sailor was getting up groggily. He shoved the old man aside and stepped out of the booth, shouting, “That old faggot came right into my booth. He grabbed me and said he would pay me if I let him … you know. When I told him no way, he sprayed me with some kind of poison gas and I passed out. Call the cops!” he shouted at the manager. “Call the goddamned cops!”

  The old man was shaking with fright and blinking compulsively. “Please don’t call the police. It’s not necessary. I’ll pay you; I’ll pay all of you.” I realized that without his glasses he was almost blind.

  “I saw what happened,” I interjected. “The sailor is lying.” Now I pointed to the old man. “He threatened this gentleman and demanded money from him. It was a holdup.”

  The sailor lunged at me, stopping short of contact, and said menacingly, “You didn’t see nothing, man.”

  “You’re not on board ship now, sailor,” I retorted. The old man edged toward me and I put my hand on his shoulder. To the manager I said, “Go ahead; call the police, but just remember you’re in trouble, too. You may run a clean place, but you don’t provide adequate protection for your customers.” The manager said nothing and the sailor brushed off his uniform. “Would any of you have the time and the money to press charges and pay bail lawyers and court costs?” I asked, looking at all three of them.

  The sailor picked up his cap, shrugged his shoulders, and left the theater, grumbling. I took the old man’s arm, led him to the exit and invited him to have a drink with me.

  We sat at a table in a nearby bar. The old man was short and lean, his cheeks pink with a network of tiny broken veins. When he spoke, his lips gaped like a rubber ball slashed in half. He told me that since the death of his wife, ten years before, he had lived alone. Because he was retired, he had to budget his pension and social security money carefully to cover the rent on his one-room apartment, food and other necessities. He ate less than when his wife had cooked for him, exercised every morning and rarely drank anything stronger than wine. Minor illnesses occasionally prompted him to consult doctors, but, once seated in the waiting room, he was always bothered by the fact that the appointment was as expensive as a night with a whore.

  Only the week before, he said, a scrubbed young nurse had called his name as he sat in a doctor’s office. She led him into one of the examining cubicles, asked him to undress and told him the doctor would be right along. When she left, he overheard her and the other nurses down the hall chatting about cosmetics, interns, Caribbean vacations and diets.

  He told me how he pretended to appear uninterested when the young nurse pushed his shoulders forward and spread his legs to prepare him for an x-ray. As she manipulated his body with her cool hands, he wanted to express the same contempt for her that she showed for him. After all, he said, collecting feces and urine didn’t make her any better than a hooker, who at least provided pleasure while she earned her money.

  He said that during the first months following his wife’s death his most important needs were shelter and sex. As he sat watching television all day, he dreamed of the evening ahead.

  He had invented a continuous fantasy of sexual sequences, in which the only element left to chance was the climax. Some women could relieve him, but others, who had initially aroused him just as much, could not. Over the years, he had compiled a list of erotic qualities to shop for in a woman, even though he often failed to find what he wanted.

  When he went out at night, he dressed in his most threadbare clothes in order to get away with paying as little as possible. He carried only one identification card.

  He was as aroused by his need to overcome his sense of a woman’s disapproval of him as he was by her looks or love-making techniques. Whenever a prostitute could make him articulate his desires, and not make him feel guilty, he would pay her an additional amount.

  Frequently, he would accost a prostitute and tell her she had gone with him once before, describing the tricks she had supposedly performed for him. If she denied knowing him but not the tricks, he would ask her how much she charged for gratifying such needs. By then, she would have sized him up as a lonely old man. Thinking he might become a steady client, she would often offer a special introductory rate.

  The man was proud of the hard bargain he drove with every woman. Since a whore usually demanded more money for each successive climax, he had developed a sexual con. He turned off everything but a night light while she undressed. As she smoked or drank, he caressed her until he climaxed without her noticing it. She would have to work twice as hard, not knowing it would be his second orgasm. He would rate each of his orgasms by the rapidity as well as by the number of its spasms, and would keep a record of the most intense spurts. No woman, he bragged, had ever suspected how many orgasms he managed to get for the price of one.

  One night, he picked up a whore and went to a hotel room with her. She offered him a rubber and he refused, insisting he was too eager to feel himself inside her. After he had caressed her for a while, she moved on top of him with his head under her belly. He split her open like a black melon. The flesh inside was pulpy and pink, and he licked and sucked and bit until her raw flesh smeared his face with slime. He strained to engulf all of her with his mouth, inhaling her steamy warmth. When her belly contracted and she bent forward to gaze down at him, he could see the dim, red glow of the night light reflect in her eyes.

  After the woman left, he fell asleep. Minutes later he awoke in a sweat, stricken with a sensation that an infection she carried had seeped into him. He was terrified. The disease would spread like fire, swelling the roof of his mouth, the base of his tongue, the narrow passage of his throat. It would inflame his windpipe and his voice would die. Neither food nor breath would pass through his swollen mouth. His own flesh would suffocate him.

  To kill the germs within him, he gargled with a powerful antiseptic until his mouth burned and ached. He bathed with antibacterial cleanser, but her scent seemed to persist as though it had permeated the deepest layer of his skin. Although he scrubbed himself raw, he was convinced the woman’s odor lingered for days.

  In recent years, he told me, he had begun sensing disaster everywhere. Each time he rode the subway, he was convinced that his train would stall between stations and catch fire. He visualized hysterical young men and women stampeding while old people like himself stumbled and fell under them, suffocating or choking on their dentures.

  The subway also terrified him because he felt it a bearer of cancer. He believed that all living creatures grow new cells to replace the sick, decaying or dead ones. All the defective cells are steadily pressed out onto the surface of the body, where they are killed by soaps and detergents or released into the environment. He insisted that crowds discard these cells in such quantity that soon malignant clouds of cells form and hang in the air. The subway, with its many stations and miles of tunnels, is an ideal breeding place for the decay. Every time a crowded subway train moves through the tunnels, it farts billions of freshly shed cells. They accumulate like bacteria in a cesspool, adhering to the humid walls of subway tunnels, where they incubate for years. During the incubation, the cells interact spontaneously with other living tissues, such as mold and mosses, and begin to mutate. The mutants are many times stronger and more malignant than the original cells and have double strength to penetrate the body.

  Even before he became aware of this ubiquitous contamination, he confessed, he had never liked the city. He had dreamed of traveling across Europe in search of the perfect place for a peaceful, solitary death. It would be a small village, he told me, on a high slope, above the moist vineyards yet below the frigid breath of the glacier. Every sunrise, he would step outside to gaze at mountain peaks. Serenity would come to him from measuring the insignificance of his own life against these peaks. Later in the day, he would walk down to the square, greeting other villagers who accepted
him as one of their own. He would sit at the town café watching the tourists pass, amused by their accents.

  Every week he would go alone to the local church to gaze at the medieval frescoes and sculptures of the saints. After the snows melted, he would ask a neighbor if he could borrow a horse, and, of course, would be urged to take the handsomest animal in the stable. At first, he said, he would let the horse walk so he could hear the dogs barking and the branches rustling in the orchard. Then he would urge it into a canter, soon coming upon unknown roads, crossing glittering brooks, whipping past the motionless black pines that cling to the slopes. He drew from his wallet a creased and crumbling magazine photograph of a small Swiss village, and told me he dreamed of a place like that.

  These days, he went on, he had taken to visiting the porn shops, where he could browse at leisure through the magazines and books. He would buy a few inexpensive ones, go home and spend the afternoon poring over the pictures. As he prepared for the evening, he would study himself in the mirror for a long time; then his desire would propel him onto the street.

  One night, he said, he stumbled into a midtown peep-show. As the projector whirred, he gazed at two women and a man locked in a circle, each face gripped by the other’s thighs, each mouth tasting the other’s flesh. Enlarged by the camera, tongues flicked in and out, penetrating and licking layers and mounds of tissue. Strands of transparent fluid stretched like gossamer from the tongues. Only after repeatedly viewing these close-ups did it occur to him that he had never paid attention to the shape, texture or color of his women’s tongues.

  He had begun frequenting porn theaters to make contact with men. At least twice an evening, his glance and nod would be acknowledged. The rapidity of the transaction aroused him. He would follow the other man into the booth and drop a quarter in the slot. In the darkness, he could not see the face of the stranger squatting in front of him. When the three minutes were up he would drop another quarter into the slot to make sure the red light would keep others outside.

  Staring at the film, he felt the stranger’s disembodied touch on him and was excited by the anonymity of the exchange. Like the quarter dropped into the slot, the other’s mouth triggered a silent film inside him. In the darkness of the booth, he and his screen confronted each other.

  His only fear in the peepshows, he confessed to me, was that he might encounter the Snapper, a well-built blond youth who prowled the porn houses. None of his victims could describe him accurately because he had never been seen in bright light. Like everyone else, the Snapper would stand in front of the booth and nod at an older man, who would promptly follow him into a booth. The young man would squat on the floor while the older one dropped a quarter in the slot and unzipped his pants. The boy would take the man’s flesh into his mouth, easing it gently into his throat, then suddenly bite down. With one bite, the victim’s organ was severed. The Snapper would push through the booth and run down the center aisle, his mouth full of blood and scraps of flesh. Once on the street, he would disappear into the crowd. The man left in the booth would crash against its screen and walls like a blind moth, then stagger out, mad with pain and terror, screaming, his guts erupting. The other customers would scurry from their booths like silverfish and flee into the street. With blood oozing through his pants, the victim would clutch his groin and beg the peepshow manager not to summon the police.

  Listening to the old man, I recalled the war experiences of one of my associates in the Service. He had been a Nazi officer, attached to General Andrei Vlasov, the Soviet general who had defected to the Wehrmacht, and had been stationed on the Eastern front. Clad in specially designed uniforms, unbound by military discipline, the Vlasovites made punitive raids on towns sheltering Jews or partisans. They raped, looted and murdered with a zeal that revolted even their Nazi superiors. The Vlasovite deputies were notorious for the pride with which they displayed the trophies of their amorous conquests: necklaces of female nipples, which they had bitten off, strung together, and dried like the strings of mushrooms the peasants hang up in winter.

  I applied for work as a copy-machine operator in a large, prestigious law firm. Producing a reference letter from the printing shop where I had been employed, I got the job. I soon became a trusted member of the office, moving easily amid the bright, eager young lawyers and efficient secretaries. Because of the nature of my job, I often handled documents that junior executives of the firm were prohibited from seeing.

  If the text of a will, the draft of an industrial merger or secret corporate minutes had to be reproduced in the presence of a senior partner or his private secretary, I would scan the documents, apparently to decide on the correct setting. I was actually memorizing as much of the document as I could, and, as soon as I got home, would record the pertinent data on index cards for my files. Whenever I could safely do so, I made an extra copy. As if it had been a misprint, I immediately tore it halfway across or wadded it up and threw it into a wastebasket. Later, I would retrieve it and add it to my file.

  In the course of my job, I learned of a thirty-five-year-old businessman who had recently received a large legacy when both parents died in a plane crash. His was a wealthy industrial family, and he was by far the best of my candidates. Nominally the chief executive of his family’s multinational textile corporation, he frequently traveled on the pretext of inspecting the company’s plants in the U.S. and abroad. Actually, he made the trips to ski. He suffered from a skin problem that made it mandatory for him to avoid swimming and heat, but skiing seemed to improve his health. He was so passionately devoted to the sport that he had subsidized a ski school and established an international ski prize in his name.

  He had never married, but for several years had lived with a former stewardess whom he had provided with a substantial bank account. She had recently left him for another man. I knew I could use this man to great advantage without his even knowing I existed.

  During the time I was employed by the law firm, I came across a woman named Veronika. Her skin was too pale, her hair too fine, her nose too short. She was almost flat-chested, and her hands and feet were too large for her body. But she was striking nevertheless. Her broad smile, graceful bearing and engaging accent made up for her deficiencies. Like an actress who never lets down her guard, her every movement and gesture was studied and controlled.

  I learned that she was Belgian and, although only in her early twenties, had been divorced twice. Her first husband had been a Belgian count three times her age, sickly and impoverished. She had come to America with the few thousand dollars she got from the divorce and quickly became the mistress of a well-known theatrical agent.

  To allay his wife’s suspicions, the agent arranged for Veronika to marry his teen-aged nephew. While the marriage lasted, the agent developed the habit of lending Veronika to close associates or top clients. He did nothing to forward the movie career with which he had initially enticed her. When Veronika finally became a U.S. citizen, she divorced the nephew and broke with the agent. Finding herself alone, with little money and a bad reputation, she made her debut as the star performer of the wet set, a group of men with odd sexual inclinations.

  I called her for a date. Names of mutual acquaintances were not even necessary. Sitting across from her after a dinner in her apartment, I came directly to the point. I told her I knew a lot about her. She had been clever enough to transform her plainness to beauty, I said, but as her youth faded, it would take more and more time and money to maintain the masquerade. I warned her that now was the time to provide for her future.

  Because I liked her, I said, and because I had selected her for a certain role in my life, I was willing to help her, if she followed my advice. I knew of a man she could marry. He was rich and tolerable. In return, she would make herself unconditionally available to me sexually, whenever I needed her. She would have to be prepared for, and always accept, any number of additional partners that I might provide myself or procure through her. Her emotions were of no interest to me
, but her availability was imperative.

  I advised her that our relationship would continue as long as she had any connection with the wealthy bachelor. I cautioned her that I had direct access to this man’s private life and thus would be able to keep track of her at all times without her being aware of it.

  I then told her that I had already entered into similar relationships with three women. I admitted that two of them had reneged on my contract. I showed Veronika newspaper clippings that detailed their bizarre fates. One of them had married a well-to-do stockbroker. In the second year of their marriage, after they had returned from dining out one evening, she began complaining of headaches and abdominal pains and of alternate burning and numbness in her feet and hands. Their doctor was away for the weekend and his young associate came to see her. He prescribed a sedative. The numbness in her hands and feet persisted; her fingers and toes swelled and reddened, then blackened and shriveled. She was hospitalized and her condition diagnosed as acute gangrenous poisoning caused by eating a fungus-infected product. Her toes and fingers had to be amputated. No foul play was suspected.

  The second woman had married a restaurateur. Several years after her marriage, a stranger came to the door carrying a dead poodle he claimed to have found outside her gates. Distraught by the death of her pet, she was stammering her thanks when the man drew an aerosol can from a bag and sprayed her with an acid that hideously scarred her face and breasts. No motive was ever established and the man was never found. The third woman was still happily married. I emphasized the fact that she had never broken her agreement with me.

  I gave Veronika a dossier on her future husband and twenty-four hours to decide. If she was interested, I said, she would have to start changing her life immediately. She must disconnect her phone, cancel all her charge accounts, break the lease on her apartment, sell her car and tell her few friends she was moving without a forwarding address.