Interzone, Page 3

  “Let me talk to this man,” said Branch Morton. He worked his fingers over the fleshy shoulder of his wife and pulled her under his armpit.

  “This little woman is a mother,” he said. The sailor blew his nose on the deck. Morton grabbed the sailor by the biceps.

  “In Clayton, Missouri, seven kids whisper her name through their thumbs before they go to sleep.”

  The sailor pulled his arm free. Morton dropped both hands to his sides, palms facing forward.

  “As man to man,” he was pleading. “As man to man.”

  Two Negro musicians, their eyes gleaming, came up behind the two wives. One took Mrs. Morton by the arm, the other took Mrs. Bradshinkel.

  “Can us have dis dance witchu?”

  “THAT OUR FLAG WAS STILL THERE”

  Captain Kramer, wearing Mrs. Norris’ kimono and wig, his face heavily smeared with cold cream, and carrying a small suitcase, walked down to C Deck, the kimono billowing out behind him. He opened the side door to the purser’s office with a pass key. A thin-shouldered man in a purser’s uniform was stuffing currency and jewels into a suitcase in front of an open safe.

  The captain’s revolver swung free of his brassiere and he fired twice.

  “SO GALLANTLY STREAMING”

  Finch, the radio operator, washed down bicarbonate of soda and belched into his hand. He put the glass down and went on tapping out S.O.S.

  “S.O.S.…S.S. America … S.O.S.…off Jersey coast … S.O.S.…son-of-a-bitching set … S.O.S.…might smell us…S.O.S. … son-of-a-bitching crew … S.O.S.…Comrade Finch … comrade in a pig’s ass … S.O.S.…Goddamned captain’s a brown artist … S.O.S.…S.S. America…S.O.S.…S.S. Crapbox …”

  Lifting his kimono with his left hand, the captain stepped in behind the radio operator. He fired one shot into the back of Finch’s head. He shoved the small body aside and smashed the radio with a chair.

  “O’ER THE RAMPARTS WE WATCH”

  Dr. Benway, carrying his satchel, pushed through the passengers crowded around Lifeboat No. 1.

  “Are you all all right?” he shouted, seating himself among the women. “I’m the doctor.”

  “BY THE ROCKETS’ RED GLARE”

  When the captain reached Lifeboat No. 1 there were two seats left. Some of the passengers were blocking each other as they tried to force their way in, others were pushing forward a wife, a mother, or a child. The captain shoved them all out of his way, leapt into the boat and sat down. A boy pushed through the crowd in the captain’s wake.

  “Please,” he said. “I’m only thirteen.”

  “Yes yes,” said the captain, “you can sit by me.”

  The boat started jerkily toward the water, lowered by four male passengers. A woman handed her baby to the captain.

  “Take care of my baby, for God’s sake!”

  Joe Bane landed in the boat and slithered noisily under a thwart. Dr. Benway cast off the ropes. The doctor and the boy started to row. The captain looked back at the ship.

  “OH SAY CAN YOU SEE”

  A third-year divinity student named Titman heard Perkins in his stateroom, yelling for his attendant. He opened the door and looked in.

  “What do you want, thicken thit?” said Perkins.

  “I want to help you,” said Titman.

  “Thtick it up and thwitht it!” said Perkins.

  “Easy does it,” said Titman, walking over toward the broken wheelchair. “Everything is going to be okey-dokey.”

  “Thneaked off!” Perkins put a hand on one hip and jerked the elbow forward in a grotesque indication of dancing. “Danthing with floothies!”

  “We’ll find him,” said Titman, lifting Perkins out of the wheelchair. He carried the withered body in his arms like a child. As Titman walked out of the stateroom, Perkins snatched up a butcher knife used by his attendant to make sandwiches.

  “Danthing with floothies!”

  “BY THE DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT”

  A crowd of passengers was fighting around Lifeboat No. 7. It was the last boat that could be launched. They were using bottles, broken deck chairs and fire axes. Titman, carrying Perkins in his arms, made his way through the fighting unnoticed. He placed Perkins in a seat at the stern.

  “There you are,” said Titman. “All set.”

  Perkins said nothing. He sat there, chin drawn back, eyes shining, the butcher knife clutched rigidly in one hand.

  A hysterical crowd from second class began pushing from behind. A big-faced shoe clerk with long yellow teeth grabbed Mrs. Bane and shoved her forward. “Ladies first!” he yelled.

  A wedge of men formed behind him and pushed. A shot sounded and Mrs. Bane fell forward, hitting the lifeboat. The wedge broke, rolling and scrambling. A man in an ROTC uniform with a .45 automatic in his hand stood by the lifeboat. He covered the sailor at the launching davit.

  “Let this thing down!” he ordered.

  As the lifeboat slid down toward the water, a cry went up from the passengers on deck. Some of them jumped into the water, others were pushed by the people behind.

  “Let ’er go, God damn it, let ’er go!” yelled Perkins.

  “Throw him out!”

  A hand rose out of the water and closed on the side of the boat. Springlike, Perkins brought the knife down. The fingers fell into the boat and the bloody stump of hand slipped back into the water.

  The man with the gun was standing in the stern. “Get going!” he ordered. The sailors pulled hard on the oars.

  Perkins worked feverishly, chopping on all sides. “Bathtardth, thonthabitheth!” The swimmers screamed and fell away from the boat.

  “That a boy.”

  “Don’t let ’em swamp us.”

  “Atta boy, Comrade.”

  “Bathtardth, thonthabitheth! Bathtardth, thonthabitheth!”

  “OH SAY DO DAT STAR-SPANGLED BANNER YET WAVE”

  The Evening News

  Barbara Cannon showed your reporter her souvenirs of the disaster: a life belt autographed by the crew, and a severed human finger.

  “I don’t know,” said Miss Cannon. “I feel sorta bad about this old finger.”

  “O’ER THE LAND OF THE FREE”

  The Finger

  Lee walked slowly up Sixth Avenue from 42nd Street, looking in pawnshop windows.

  “I must do it,” he repeated to himself.

  Here it was. A cutlery store. He stood there shivering, with the collar of his shabby chesterfield turned up. One button had fallen off the front of his overcoat, and the loose threads twisted in a cold wind. He moved slowly around the shopwindow and into the entrance, looking at knives and scissors and pocket microscopes and air pistols and take-down tool kits with the tools snapping or screwing into a metal handle, the whole kit folding into a small leather packet. Lee remembered getting one of these kits for Christmas when he was a child.

  Finally he saw what he was looking for: poultry shears like the ones his father used to cut through the joints when he carved the turkey at Grandmother’s Thanksgiving dinners. There they were, glittering and stainless, one blade smooth and sharp, the other with teeth like a saw to hold the meat in place for cutting.

  Lee went in and asked to see the shears. He opened and closed the blades, tested the edge with his thumb.

  “That’s stainless steel, sir. Never rusts or tarnishes.”

  “How much?”

  “Two dollars and seventy-nine cents plus tax.”

  “Okay.”

  The clerk wrapped the shears in brown paper and taped the package neatly. It seemed to Lee that the crackling paper made a deafening noise in the empty store. He paid with his last five dollars, and walked out with the shears heavy in his overcoat pocket.

  He walked up Sixth Avenue, repeating: “I must do it. I’ve got to do it now that I’ve bought the shears.” He saw a sign: Hotel Aristo.

  There was no lobby. He walked up a flight of stairs. An old man, dingy and indistinct like a faded photograph, was standing behind a desk. Lee regist
ered, paid one dollar in advance, and picked up a key with a heavy bronze tag.

  His room opened onto a dark shaft. He turned on the light. Black stained furniture, a double bed with a thin mattress and sagging springs. Lee unwrapped the shears and held them in his hand. He put the shears down on the dresser in front of an oval mirror that turned on a pivot.

  Lee walked around the room. He picked up the shears again and placed the end joint of his left little finger against the saw teeth, lower blade exactly at the knuckle. Slowly he lowered the cutting blade until it rested against the flesh of his finger. He looked in the mirror, composing his face into the supercilious mask of an eighteenth-century dandy. He took a deep breath, pressed the handle quick and hard. He felt no pain. The finger joint fell on the dresser. Lee turned his hand over and looked at the stub. Blood spurted up and hit him in the face. He felt a sudden deep pity for the finger joint that lay there on the dresser, a few drops of blood gathering around the white bone. Tears came to his eyes.

  “It didn’t do anything,” he said in a broken child’s voice. He adjusted his face again, cleaned the blood off it with a towel, and bandaged his finger crudely, adding more gauze as the blood soaked through. In a few minutes the bleeding had stopped. Lee picked up the finger joint and put it in his vest pocket. He walked out of the hotel, tossing his key on the desk.

  “I’ve done it,” he said to himself. Waves of euphoria swept through him as he walked down the street. He stopped in a bar and ordered a double brandy, meeting all eyes with a level, friendly stare. Goodwill flowed out of him for everyone he saw, for the whole world. A lifetime of defensive hostility had fallen from him.

  Half an hour later he was sitting with his analyst on a park bench in Central Park. The analyst was trying to persuade him to go to Bellevue, and had suggested they “go outside to talk it over.”

  “Really, Bill, you’re doing yourself a great disservice. When you realize what you’ve done you’ll need psychiatric care. Your ego will be overwhelmed.”

  “All I need is to have this finger sewed up. I’ve got a date tonight.”

  “Really, Bill, I don’t see how I can continue as your psychiatrist if you don’t follow my advice in this matter.” The analyst’s voice had become whiny, shrill, almost hysterical. Lee wasn’t listening; he felt a deep trust in the doctor. The doctor would take care of him. He turned to the doctor with a little-boy smile.

  “Why don’t you fix it yourself?”

  “I haven’t practiced since my internship, and I don’t have the necessary materials in any case. This has to be sewed up right, or it could get infected right on up the arm.”

  Lee finally agreed to go to Bellevue, for medical treatment only.

  At Bellevue, Lee sat on a bench, waiting while the doctor talked to somebody. The doctor came back and led Lee to another room, where an intern sewed up the finger and put on a dressing. The doctor kept urging him to allow himself to be committed; Lee was overcome by a sudden faintness. A nurse told him to put his head back. Lee felt that he must put himself entirely in the care of the doctor.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll do what you say.”

  The doctor patted his arm. “Ah, you’re doing the right thing, Bill.” The doctor led him past several desks, where he signed papers.

  “I’m cutting red tape by the yard,” the doctor said.

  Finally Lee found himself in a dressing gown in a bare ward.

  “Where is my room?” he asked a nurse.

  “Your room! I don’t know what bed you’ve been assigned to. Anyway you can’t go there before eight unless you have a special order from the doctor.”

  “Where is my doctor?”

  “Doctor Bromfield? He isn’t here now. He’ll be in tomorrow morning around ten.”

  “I mean Doctor Horowitz.”

  “Doctor Horowitz? I don’t think he’s on the staff here.”

  He looked around him at the bare corridors, the men walking around in bathrobes, muttering under the cold, indifferent eyes of an attendant.

  Why, this is the psychopathic ward, he thought. He put me in here and went away!

  Years later, Lee would tell the story: “Did I ever tell you about the time I got on a Van Gogh kick and cut off the end joint of my little finger?” At this point he would hold up his left hand. “This girl, see? She lives in the next room to me in a rooming house on Jane Street. That’s in the Village. I love her and she’s so stupid I can’t make any impression. Night after night I lay there hearing her carry on with some man in the next room. It’s tearing me all apart…. So I hit on this finger joint gimmick. I’ll present it to her; ‘A trifling memento of my undying affection. I suggest you wear it around your neck in a pendant filled with formaldehyde.’

  “But my analyst, the lousy bastard, shanghaied me into the nuthouse, and the finger joint was sent to Potter’s Field with a death certificate, because someone might find the finger joint and the police go around looking for the rest of the body.

  “If you ever have occasion to cut off a finger joint, my dear, don’t consider any instrument but poultry shears. That way you’re sure of cutting through at the joint.”

  “And what about the girl?”

  “Oh, by the time I got out of the nuthouse she’d gone to Chicago. I never saw her again.”

  Driving Lesson

  The red-light district of East St. Louis is a string of wood houses along the railroad tracks: a marginal district of vacant lots, decaying billboards and cracked sidewalks where weeds grow through the cracks. Here and there you see rows of corn.

  Bill and Jack were drinking in a bar on one corner of the district. They had been drinking since early afternoon, and were past the point of showing signs of drunkenness. Through the door, Bill could hear frogs croaking from pools of stagnant water in the vacant lots. Above the bar was a picture of Custer’s Last Stand, distributed by courtesy of Anheuser-Busch. Bill knew the picture was valuable, like a wooden Indian. He was trying to explain this to the bartender, how an object gets rare and then valuable, the value increasing geometrically as collectors buy it up.

  “Yeah,” the bartender said, “you already told me that ten times. Anything else?” He walked to the other end of the bar and studied a Racing Form, writing on a slip of paper with a short indelible pencil.

  Jack picked up a dollar of Bill’s money off the bar. “I want to go in one of these houses,” he said.

  “All right … enjoy yourself.” Bill watched Jack as he walked through the swinging door.

  On the way back to St. Louis, Bill stopped the car.

  “Want to try driving a bit?” he asked. “After all, you’ll never get anywhere sitting on your ass. I remember when I was a reporter on the St. Louis News, my city editor sent me out to get a picture of some character committed suicide or something…. I forget…. Anyway, I couldn’t get the picture. Some female relative came to the door and said, ‘It would be a mockery,’ and they wouldn’t give me the picture.

  “And next morning I went in the john and there is the city editor taking his morning crap. So he asks me: ‘You got that picture, Morton?’ And I said, ‘No, I couldn’t get it—at least not yet.’

  “ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘you’ll never get anywhere sitting on your ass.’

  “So I start laughing, because that’s exactly what he is doing, sitting on his ass, shitting. And I’ll stack that up against any biographical anecdote for tasteless stupidity.”

  Jack looked at Bill blankly, and then laughed. The plain truth is, he’s bone stupid, Bill thought. He opened the door and got out and walked around the car, through the headlights, and got in the other side. Jack slid in under the wheel, looking dubiously at the gadgets in front of him. He had only driven twice before in his life, both times in Bill’s car.

  “Oh, it’s quite simple,” Bill said. “You learn by doing. Could you learn to play piano by reading a book about it? Certainly not.” He suddenly took Jack’s chin in his hand and, turning Jack’s face, kissed him
lightly on the mouth. Jack laughed, showing sharp little eyeteeth.

  “I always say people have more fun than anybody,” Jack said.

  Bill shuddered in the summer night. “I suppose they do,” he said. “Well, let’s get this show on the road.”

  Jack started the car with a grinding of gears. The car bucked, almost stopped, shot forward. Finally he got it in high and moving at an even speed.

  “You’ll never learn this way,” Bill said. “Let’s see a little speed.”

  It was three o’clock in the morning. Not a car on the street, not a sound. A pocket of immobile silence.

  “A little speed, Jackie.” Bill’s voice was the eerie, disembodied voice of a young child. “That thing under your foot—push it on into the floor, Jackie.”

  The car gathered speed, tires humming on asphalt. There was no other sound from outside.

  “We have the city all to ourselves, Jackie … not a car on the street. Push it all the way down … all the way in … all the way, Jackie.”

  Jack’s face was blank, oblivious, the beautiful mouth a little open. Bill lit a cigarette from the dashboard lighter, muttering a denunciation of car lighters and car clocks. A piece of burning tobacco fell on his thigh, and he brushed it away petulantly. He looked at Jack’s face and put the cigarettes away.

  The car had moved into a dream beyond contact with the lives, forces and objects of the city. They were alone, safe, floating in the summer night, a moon spinning around the world. The dashboard shone like a fireplace, lighting the two young faces: one weak and beautiful, with a beauty that would show every day that much older; the other thin, intense, reflecting unmistakably the qualities loosely covered by the word “intellectual,” at the same time with the look of a tormented, trapped animal. The speedometer crept up … 50 … 60 …

  “You’re learning fast, Jackie. Just keep your right foot on the floor. It’s quite simple, really.”

  Jack swerved to avoid the metal mounds of a safety zone. The car hit a wet spot where the street had been watered and went into a long skid. There was a squealing crash of metal. Bill flew out of the car door and slid across the asphalt. He got up and ran his hands over his thin body—nothing broken. Somebody was holding his arm.