Coming Through Slaughter

by Michael Ondaatje

  *

  There is only one photograph that exists today of Bolden and the band. This is what you see.

  As a photograph it is not good or precise, partly because the print was found after the fire. The picture, waterlogged by climbing hoses, stayed in the possession of Willy Cornish for several years.

  *

  The fire begins with Bellocq positioning his chairs all the way round the room. 17 chairs. Some of which he has borrowed. The chairs being placed this way the room, 20′ by 20′, looks like it has a balcony running all the way around it. Then he takes the taper, lights it, stands on a chair, and sets fire to the wallpaper half way up to the ceiling, walks along the path of chairs to continue the flame until he has made a full circle of the room. With great difficulty he steps down and comes back to the centre of the room. The noise is great. Planks cracking beneath the wallpaper in this heat as he stands there silent, as still as possible, trying to formally breathe in the remaining oxygen. And then breathing in the smoke. He is covered, surrounded by whiteness, it looks as if a cloud has stuffed itself into the room.

  Horror of noise. And then the break when he cannot breathe calm and he vomits out smoke and throws himself against the red furniture, against the chairs on fire and he crashes finally into the wall, only there is no wall any more only a fire curtain and he disappears into and through it as if diving through a wave and emerging red on the other side. In an incredible angle. He has expected the wall to be there and his body has prepared itself and his mind has prepared itself so his shape is constricted against an imaginary force looking as if he has come up against an invisible structure in the air.

  Then he falls, dissolving out of his pose. Everything has gone wrong. The wall is not there to catch or hide him. Nothing is there to clasp him into a certainty.

  Under the sunlight. I am the only object between water and sky. There can be either the narrow focus of the eye or the crazy chaos of white, that is the eyes wide, wishing to burn them out till they are stones.

  In the late afternoon I walk back along the shore to the small house and it is against me dark and shaded. Robin and her friends. I am full of the white privacy. Collisions around me. Eyes clogged with people. Yesterday Robin in the midst of an argument flicked some cream on my face. Without thinking I jumped up grabbing the first thing, a jug full of milk, and threw it all over her. She stood by the kitchen door half laughing half crying at what I had done. She stood there frozen in a hunch she took on as she saw the milk coming at her. Milk all over her soft lost beautiful brown face. I stood watching her, the lip of the jug dribbling the rest onto the floor.

  Jaelin and the others in the room silent. I very gently placed the jug on the table, such a careful gesture for I wanted her to see I was empty of all the tension. Then getting one of the big towels and placing it over her wet shirt. And then like a wise coward leaving the house till late evening when they had all gone to bed. When I got back she was still in the living room, almost asleep in the armchair.

  Let’s go for a swim. I want to get the milk out of my hair.

  I’m sorry, try and forget it.

  No I won’t forget it, Buddy, but I know you’re sorry.

  Well it’s just as well it happened.

  Yeah, you’ll be better for a few days. But which window are you going to break next, which chair.

  Don’t talk Robin.

  You expect to come back and for me to say nothing? With Jaelin here?

  Look you’re either Jaelin’s wife or my wife.

  I’m Jaelin’s wife and I’m in love with you, there’s nothing simple.

  Well it should be.

  How do you think he feels. He said nothing, even when you went out. Do you really expect me to say nothing.

  Yes. I’m sorry, you know that.

  Ok … let’s swim Buddy.

  She grins. And there is my grin which is my loudest scream ever.

  In the water like soft glass. We slide in slowly leaving our clothes by the large stone. Heads skimming along the surface.

  As long as I don’t hurt you or Jaelin.

  As long as I don’t hurt you or Jaelin she mimics. Then beginning to imitate loons and swimming deeper, her head sliding away from me. Below our heads all the evil dark swimming creatures are waiting to brush us into nightmare into heart attack to suck us under into the darkness into the complications. Her loon laugh. The dull star of white water under each of us. Swimming towards the sound of madness.

  See Tom Pickett.

  Why?

  Cos he, cos Buddy cut him up.

  Why Pickett?

  Go ask him.

  Where’ll I find him?

  Don’t know.

  Tell me, Cornish.

  Try Chinatown. Opium.

  Was that why?

  No.

  Ok I’ll find him.

  Then as Webb is almost out of the door, Cornish saying

  Listen what he’ll tell you is true. I saw his face afterwards. You won’t believe it but it’s true.

  Thanks Willy.

  After a day he found Pickett in the room of flies. The air damp and thick. He had to practically sweep the flies off his face and hair.

  Don’t kill one you bastard or you’ll be out, in fact get out’f here, willya.

  What the fuck is all this. Not the dope but this mess. The flies.

  I invite them in, ok? If you don’t like it get out.

  Cornish wouldn’t know about this or Cornish would have told him. Cornish would never come here. Webb could hardly breathe without one going in his nose or into his mouth. Early evening and the windows closed, no breeze, just Tom Pickett and open food on plates around the room.

  You’re the first to come here since I started. Don’t tell others.

  I came to talk about Buddy.

  I guessed. That’s what everyone wants to talk about.

  Pickett lying on the floor bed while Webb stood over him.

  He did this. Pickett clapped his hands near his face so the flies left it for a moment and then settled back. Five or six scars cut into his cheeks. Pickett had been one of the great hustlers, one of the most beautiful men in the District.

  Did they try to arrest him, is that why he went?

  No.

  Why did he go?

  Don’t know. I don’t think it was this you see, he accepted what he did, he could do this and forgive himself. Shame wasn’t serious to him.

  How did it happen?

  The flies moved over the roads on his face.

  Nine o clock. Storm rain outside. Cricket work finished. Don’t want to think. The kid has been around with the bottle and I haven’t opened it yet. I watch the wall behind me in the mirror. Alone. Want to think.

  Tom Pickett walks in. Black trousers and white shirt, the thunderstorm making it stick to his skin. Got time for a good haircut, Buddy? I think he said that, something like that. I was looking at the shirt speckled with long water drops, making it brown there. I get up and give him a small towel to dry his hair, unscrew the top and hand the bottle to him. Jesus it hasn’t been touched, you sick? Shrug and point to the chair for him to sit in. Tells me, as always, exactly what he wants. Beautiful people are very conservative. And puts his feet up on the sink as usual. I lay the towel over his shirt and knot it at the back of his neck. He passes the bottle to me and I put it away.

  ‘I started talking about his mood which was so quiet you know so fuckin strange for him and he still wouldn’t say much. I guess if you want to find out what happened you should find out why he was like that. After a while I threw in a few cracks about the band playing too much and he didn’t say much about that either. He was cutting the hair then, he was doing what I told him. But he was … tense, you know. I started telling him this joke about, jesus I still remember what it was, aint that something? It was about the guy who is feeling good but everybody he meets tells him he looks terrible, well anyway he just said he’d heard it, so I shut up. I could see him in the mirror all the time. The
n we started talking, I wasn’t pushing him now. About my pimping. We always did that. That was our one real connection. Usually it was good talk cos even though he wasn’t involved with the money he was a great hustler. I don’t know if you knew that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well he always had a sense of humour about it. He didn’t come on like a preacher. So I was going on casual about trade, he’d done the left side of my head, and then he starts shouting at me, I mean real filth. So I thought it was a game right and I joked back. I thought he was joking. I started to heckle him about Nora and me, smiling at him in the mirror all the time and then he slips the towel round behind my neck and pulls back, pulls my neck back over the chair. He got his left arm under my chin—like this—then he opens the razor with his other hand, flicks it open in a movement like he was throwing it away and puts it in my shirt and slits it open in a couple of places. Once the shirt’s open he starts shaving me up and down my front taking the hairs off. I wasn’t moving or saying anything. Thought I’d keep still. Then he slices off my nipple. I don’t think he meant to, was probably an accident. But that got me shouting. Then he lets go my neck and starts shaving my face very fast now small cuts now I was crying from the pain and the tears were going into the cuts, then I got my thumb into the wrist with the razor and got free, that’s when I got really badly cut on the face, this one here. But I got loose and took a small chair against him.’

  Right on my head. But I still have the razor and we stand looking at each other. The blood drooling off his chin onto the wet shredded shirt. He takes a quick look at himself in the mirror and the tears just rush out of his face. I am exhausted, sorry for him. Got no anger at him now. I’m finished I’m empty but I can’t tell him. What the hell is wrong with me? And Pickett’s face is hard waiting to come for me, looking around the room. With the chair he got me on the head with, he moves sideways to the sink. With the other hand he lifts the leather strop that has the metal hook on the end of it. He sways it out to the left and then sends it back slowly to the right and lands the hook in the centre of the mirror. $45. It falls onto the towel he has placed in the sink before. In large pieces which is what he wanted. I stand with the razor at the back of the room.

  He picks up a large piece of mirror and skims it hard across the room at me. It hits the wall to the left of my shoulder but it came really fast and it scares me. I know he will slice me. He takes the next piece and jerks it at me twenty feet away and it comes straight for me. My neck. Is coming for me I’m dead I can’t. Move. And then catches on a muscle of air and tilts up crashing above my head. Door opens near me. Nora. What! Stay back. And I run to him before he can get more and wave him from the sink with the razor. He holds me back with the chair in his left hand, with the right he swings the strop gets me hard on the left elbow. Broken. Just like that, no pain yet but I know it is broken. He swings the chair but it is too heavy for speed and I avoid it. Swings the strop and gets me on the knee. Numb but I can move it. Next time he swings the chair I drop the razor and wrestle it from him and push him backwards now able to keep the strop off but my left hand still dead. See Nora in another mirror. The parlor is totally empty except for the two of us and Nora shouting in a corner at the back screaming to us that we’re crazy we’re crazy.

  Pickett’s face swelled now, he cannot see too well over the puffs. Balance. His strop and my chair. I won’t swing the chair. If I go off balance he will go for the head. My knee is stumbling, pain coming through. Can’t feel my arm. Pickett swings and the strop tangles in the chair. I push hard hard he goes back the wood almost against his face that he doesn’t want me to touch. Push again and he goes over the ice through the front window. A great creak as the thing folds over him like a spider web, he goes through, the hook of the strop pulls the chair and me frantic I won’t let go and I come through too over the ice and glass and empty frame. And we are on the street.

  Liberty. Grey with thick ropes of rain bouncing on the broken glass, Pickett on the pavement and now me too falling on the bad arm he kicks but there is no pain it could be metal. We scramble apart. Three feet between us, still joined by strop and chair, the rain thick and hard. His shirt which was red in the parlor now bloated and pink, the spreading cherry at his nipple. Exhausted. Silent. Battle of rain all around us. Nora screaming through the open window stop stop then climbs out herself and runs to the rack of empty coke bottles and starts throwing them between us. Smash Smash Smash. And some which don’t break but roll away loud and we still don’t move. Then she aims them at Pickett. Hits him on the foot and he steps back unconcerned still watching me then hits him on the side of the head and he gasps for she has hit a cut, the blood down his face. Shakes himself and drops the strop, moves backwards his hand over his eye, and then lopes down the street shouting out I tried to kill him.

  So he leaves me Tom Pickett. Goes to tell my friends I have gone mad. Nora walking to me slowly to tell me I am mad. I put the chair down and I sit in it. Tired. The rain coming into my head. Nora into my head. Tom Pickett at the end of Liberty shouts at me shaking his arms, waving at me, my wife’s ex-lover, ex-pimp, sit facing Tom Pickett who was beautiful. Nora strokes my arm, don’t tell her I can’t feel her fingers. Her anger or her pity. The rain like so many little windows going down around us.

  Brock Mumford

  ‘He was impossible during that time, before he went. I had a room on the fourth floor. Room 119A, where we were yesterday. I was avoiding people. A lot of fuss about Buddy at this time. Band was breaking up and I was being used as the go-between, made to decide who was being unfair this time that time. So I just stopped going out during the day cos I’d be sure to run into one of them. Buddy was always shouting. In any argument he’d try to overpower you with yelling.

  The last time I saw him … The door downstairs was locked. Bell rang, I didn’t want to answer and I just lay on the mattress smoking. Then minutes later he is tapping on the window, he had walked along the roof. In fact it was quite easy to do though he seemed so proud of himself I didn’t tell him that. You took anything away from him in those days and he’d either start shouting or would go into a silent temper. He was a child really—though most of the time, and this is important, he was right. A lot of people wanted to knock him down at that time. The Pickett incident had made him unpopular. Buddy didn’t leave at the peak of his glory you know. No one does. Whatever they say no one does. If you are at the peak you don’t have time to think about stopping you just build up and up and up. It’s only a few months later when it wears off—usually before anyone else realises it has worn off—that you start to go, if you are the kind that goes. But he was still playing fine.…

  He came in through the window and sat down on the foot of the bed I was lying on, and started talking right away. Just like you. He sat down and he talked, god he talked, just complaining. It was about Frank Lewis or something. Someone had passed him on the street and not spoken, probably hadn’t seen him. He went on and on. Then I started in saying how I was fed up too, that I didn’t want to be judge any more to all these fights. I had my own problems. This was the first time I’d said this you know and I thought he might be interested but within a minute he started to show how bored he was of it. You know, just irritated, looking around the room, sniffing, clucking, as if he’d heard too much of this sort of thing. So I shut up and he went on. Then left about an hour later. By this time even I wasn’t listening. Went out of the window saying they were probably watching the door.’

  If Nora had been with Pickett. Had really been with Pickett as he said. Had jumped off Bolden’s cock and sat down half an hour later on Tom Pickett’s mouth on Canal Street. Then the certainties he loathed and needed were liquid at the root.

  Nora and others had needed the beautiful Pickett that much. To see her throwing bottles at Pickett in the rain to brush him away gave her a life all her own which he, Bolden, had nothing to do with. He was aware the scene on the street included a fight which did not include him. Pickett earlier
so confident he knew her thoroughly, her bones, god he knew even the number of bones she had in her body.

  Bolden imagined it all, the wet deceit as she hunched over him and knelt down under him or drank him in complex kisses. The trouble was you could see all the way through Pickett’s mind, and so the moment he had said he had been fucking Nora Bolden believed him. In the very minute he was screening his laughter at Pickett’s fantasies he believed him. Tom Pickett didn’t have the brain to have fantasies.

  He called Cornish. Everybody’s ear. Made him drink and listen to him. LISTEN! Drinking so much the rhetoric of fury at everyone disintegrated into repetition and lies and fantasies. He dreamt up morning encounters between Nora and the whole band. Towards 4 o clock in the morning both of them were frozen with drinks in their hands, unable to move. Bolden was lying across three chairs muttering up to the ceiling.

  Well I got to go Charlie.

  NO! Don’t go just tell me what you think of the bitch.

  Well you don’t know that, she’s a beautiful lady Charlie.

  Well what the hell—he mimicked—I’m a beautiful. Bursting into peals of laughter and sliding arms first onto the floor in order to laugh more fully. And then as Cornish had finally reached the door, Bolden on the floor saying, You know … in spite of everything that happens, we still think a helluva lot of ourselves! And more laughter till Cornish was gone and his chest and his throat were tired from it.

  He lay there crucified and drunk. Brought his left wrist to his teeth and bit hard and harder for several seconds then lost his nerve. Flopped it back outstretched. Going to sleep while feeling his vein tingling at the near chance it had of almost going free. Ecstasy before death. It marched through him while he slept.