by Tito Perdue
“So are you going with someone now, Philip?” she asked suddenly, taking a drink of water.
“I suppose you could call it that.”
“I see.”
Everyone in that establishment knew that he was lying. Far from “going,” it was a veteran Greenwich prostitute who came to him, usually on Thursday. Thus his famous coolness, knowing as he did just how much and how little to wish for in these matters. Meantime the lasagna had arrived and his colleague from the office already had besmirched herself about the mouth and chin with what looked like gore. He could just feature the stuff working down her gullet by peristaltic action, undifferentiated masses running for the lowest level. None too soon, he watched as she at last took up her napkin and used it. She was older than he liked to see in a woman and her eyes had a sort of whey that collected at the corner. She seemed to know what he was thinking.
“The world just isn’t good enough for you, is it Philip?”
“Sometimes. When it’s raining.”
“What about thunder and lightning?”
“Even better.”
“And nuclear war?”
“Now you’re talking!”
They laughed. She thought that he was joking.
He waited for a taxi and because it was raining, asked the driver to carry him as far as 122nd Street before then turning and coming back to his apartment. He might almost be said to have been fond of Manhattan in the rain, a situation that allowed him to imagine that life was nearly finished while the few people still remaining had taken to their beds. Or were watching television screens glowing greenly in the stores and taverns. Never ask him how he had come to this “outpost,” as he thought of it, so remote from Georgia and/or Alabama.
“What now?” the driver inquired in New York fashion, his patience having for no obvious reason already come to an end. He did so loathe them, Philip, these stunted people, Jews and Mongols and Latin Americans of all description, each new layer superimposed upon those already here. How he longed for Georgia or Alabama, where houses were made of candy and looked out upon actual horizons!
“Just keep driving. Till I’ve used up twenty dollars.”
“Got twenty dollars, do you?”
Philip showed it to him.
They moved past a group of unspeaking New Yorkers huddled beneath an awning, their faces hidden in the shade. As to the automobiles, traveling more cautiously than usual, they seemed to form a worm that twined this way and that in agony, and no doubt extended the full length of the island. All about the town the waters were rising, and he could foresee the day when only the tallest of the buildings would mark this once-famous site.
He had to abandon the taxi at twenty dollars and proceed on foot to his accustomed pharmacy, a tidy place where all manner of medicines in antique bottles had been arrayed on wooden shelves. He saw a yellow chemical that could be sulfur, and next to that a beaker containing perhaps five pounds of dark red crystals. The pharmacist appeared to be drugged on the encompassing scents, or surfeited at least, or mayhap simply bored. And yet he did honor the prescription that Philip with great effort had wheedled from his physician.
“You don’t want to take more than one of these things a day,” the man said. (The pills were tiny, very much so, about the same dimension as the very smallest sort of flower seeds.)
“They must be very powerful then,” said Philip, smiling back in friendly style, “to be as small as they are.”
“Oh, I see. And how big do you want them to be? Christ. They go to a lot of trouble to make them like this.”
“For our benefit, yes.” His smile remained. The man was bored after all, and had been waiting a long time for the chance to quibble with someone. “And I’ll be careful not to take more than one a day.”
His change came to two dollars and 76 cents, including by accident a dime too much. Right away Philip laid the coin in the counter and turned to leave. Even in these trivial matters he was scrupulous to extreme degree, wishing never to give the world any least grounds for punishing him. The rain had deteriorated, it is true, but seemed likely to come back again. He went another block without using his umbrella, hesitating when he happened upon a bookstore with its wares on display. How grotesque it seemed to him that the issuance of books continued to be at the whim of mere business people. In any case, he was not comfortable with the condition of modern literature, a self-congratulatory exercise in indicting the best people and slobbering over the worst.
He moved on. These writers, would they have wanted to be compassionated over? “But they don’t hesitate,” he said half-aloud, “to inflict it on others.” He paused in front of an all-night café and contemplated having a last-minute cup of coffee before returning to his rooms, which is to say until he perceived two full-blooded negroes at the counter, large men chortling in each other’s faces. He had just a couple hundred yards before arriving at his own place, where he could allow his face to lapse back into its routine arrogance without being seen. Thus far the rain had refused to return in full force. However, he was willing to delay that satisfaction until around nine o’clock, when he planned to be under the covers with a book in his paw.
But first he wasted two minutes fuddling with the locks on his door and repositioning the television antennae. He had a way of using the dials to summon a slowly-changing diagram on the screen, an abstract painting as it almost were. With a cup of amaretto in one hand and a book (Anglo-
Saxon Wortcraft) in the other, he then stood for a time gazing down into the abnormal city where the usual human vices were replicated eight million fold. Each light, every umbrella represented someone searching in the dark to find how he or she had first veered off to this most execrable of places.
The sofa, of red leather, was long enough and he had small need of blanket or pillow. It was his good fortune that from his position he could keep watch on about twenty per-cent of the city while also reading and, from time to time, checking on the ever-changing green and yellow pattern on his television screen. But soon the book also grew disappointing, offering as it did the sort of vacant patter endemic to academicians.
The rain did return but Philip was too unconscious to appreciate it. He needed a good five or six hours of unmixed sleep if he wanted to continue the social performance expected of people drawing wages.
Three
Having now been introduced to the reader, Philip arose the next morning and made his way by foot from his well-secured apartment toward his place of work some half-dozen blocks toward the east. Strange, that he had lived in these surroundings for better than ten years, and yet knew almost nothing of the world above 22nd Street.
He moved at a moderate pace, in concert with a clump of people dressed approximately like himself. His shoes were shiny, and his light blue shirt with sea shell buttons held a kerchief in his left breast pocket. (He always wanted his appearance to be as laudable as possible, lest he be recognized for what he actually was.) And if his tie was a little bit gaudy, it reflected his taste for the blue and purple segments of the color spectrum.
His face was a non-committal sort of thing, and helped to hide that the underlying man was by nature cold, cold as ice and steel on the planet of Uranus. And yet he could make himself seem like a pleasant person, capable of smiling and full of concerns for the welfare of his company. At such times his forehead might be slightly wrinkled and his eyes take on a certain perturbation just this side of true anxiety. He could still laugh of course, even if sometimes he had trouble carrying it out quite as convincingly as he might wish. He knew the price of things, the names of actors, and by and large knew how to participate in discussions regarding television shows. And in short he was a handsome, pleasant, and noncontroversial attractant for employers, queers, colleagues, and unmarried women.
Also he knew too much. He had to take care not to use his vocabulary, or allow anyone inside his stark apartment. He paid more taxes than required, gifting the excess to the government. As for his subversive nature, a r
ich golden bloom nourished on thought and literature, that took place solely in his head. And although he knew six languages (six and a half really), he never permitted himself to resort to them in routine conversations.
Now, at 8:19 in the morning, he passed out of the crowd and crossed the intersection into the rich district with its shops and stores. Clothing fashions were changing over to spring, evident everywhere in displays of ladies’ footwear. Two weeks ago they were offering high-heel galoshes, but now all that had been put away in favor of pink satin and alligator skin. The skirts were perhaps just a little bit longer than the same time last year, a modification that had enriched the industry and turned a considerable number of scoundrels into millionaires. His mind turned back to the waitresses and country girls of his youth, all of them now desperately letting out their hems in their afterhours.
He was in an area of twenty- and thirty-storey buildings straining under the weight of people rehearsing for their eight hours at the desk. Strange system! Pushing his mind forward, he liked to imagine new modes of living that would astound the present day and stretch human capabilities to the breaking point. But would it represent a real improvement, the new mode he was thinking about? He was not as naïve as that.
He passed an outlet for expensive cutlery from Thailand, and then a women’s emporium with some dozen elegant, slim, and snotty-looking manikins posturing in the window. Came next a jewelry store, a narrow site displaying a few hundredweight of high-cost rubbish that filled to overflowing the glass-top counters. How they do so love it, ordinary people, slop like this. He strode past a restaurant wherein a crowd of carefully-suited brokers, agents, adjusters, and insurance men were whispering confidentially into one another’s ear. The city was full of such people, organisms with aspirations and round heads, extended limbs, paired feet, and eyelids with cilia on them. Really, did it matter whether such a country should continue to exist?
It was considered the pre-eminent city in the world, but already he could see that the founding principles were proving inadequate, and that a certain accidie was increasingly evident in the faces that came up to greet him. Truth was, it rested on mistaken assumptions, the town and outlying hinterland, all the way to the eighteenth-century and back.
It was 8:43 when he came to his own building, just time enough to ride the elevator and come to his desk a few moments earlier than necessary. It was his best moment of the day, a time for coffee and sweet rolls and a brief interlude for looking down abstractedly into the pullulating neighborhood. Outside his door the girls were chatting more noisily than he liked, wherefore he arose, went to the opening, and looked at them severely. (It was his unfortunate habit at this time in the morning to see a jumble of kidneys, lungs, and spleens each time he looked into a crowd of people.) Finally, surrendering to the duties of the day, he made a long-distance call to France and spoke at length in French to one of the world’s most abominable human beings.
He had hoped to have a few inactive hours without interference from his associates, but especially from the brown-headed woman, admittedly good-looking, who more and more frequently these days was apt to come into his office and, with her left breast finding support on his right shoulder, speak lewdly into his ear about business matters. At times like this it had become his practice to look down into his papers with a worried expression, his cigarette ash growing longer as he unleashed his mind to go running and jumping among memories dredged up from experience, from literature, cosmology, and the whole range of recorded human information in its current state of preservation. He cared for nothing else, nothing else, that is to say, except for what might be transpiring just then in a few cubic inches of the world’s best heads. The world’s best heads, tomorrow’s weather (situated where he was, he was among the first to see tomorrow’s weather making its approach), and the sound of airplanes crossing overhead.
He knew that he could be seen from other buildings and that he comprised an easy target for anyone who might have discovered his underlying nature. Accordingly, he put on a modest expression and then swiveled in his chair to expose a kinder and more gentle profile. There was a wall of glass between Philip and all others, a defense against the gross realities of the quotidian world. Of course that was when the brown-headed girl came into his quarters for the second time that day, stood behind him and rested her considerable breast in the niche between his shoulder and face.
“Need you to sign these letters,” she said cheerfully.
He signed. She couldn’t know that he had been with his whore just three days ago and was immune to her inducements.
“Don’t forget your meeting. Two o’clock.”
“Oh, yes! Thanks for reminding me.”
They looked at each other. Gladly would she have copulated with him on the floor, the ceiling, or on top of his perfectly organized desk.
“I’m having trouble with one of the girls.”
“Oh?’
“It’s Debra. Late for work every day, and can’t get along with the others.”
“Fire her.”
“Could I?”
“Certainly! I want you to.” (He spoke in short sentences.) “I trust your judgment in these matters.” (Giving her a frontal view of his ten o’clock face, he smiled with warmth from about six inches away. She would have signed over to him her retirement account, had he but asked for it.) “Anything else?”
He worked for about fifteen minutes during the ensuing three hours and then retreated to the cafeteria where some score of his colleagues had distributed themselves among the tables. He could have chosen to sit with Edith or with Gwen, with Holly or with Glee; in the event he chose the new girl, the least likely person in the organization to wish to copulate with him at this early juncture. Putting on his best looks, the only tool he had to atone for his intelligence, he went to the woman, smiled, and then sat down just across from her.
“What do you recommend?” he asked.
“Sir?”
“Soup or salad?”
“Oh! Well I guess it depends…”
“Depends upon the person. No, I think I’ll just sit here and look at you.”
She blushed. It wasn’t that she was attractive, no, nor was it true that Philip imagined every woman wanted to bed down with him. In fact he estimated it as fewer than fifteen in twenty who harbored such desires with reference to himself. In the matter of this particular woman, her hair was of an indeterminate color and looked like a lampshade sitting askew her head. Suddenly, he reached across and adjusted a curl that had fallen out of place, a presumption that belatedly caused her to fall in love with him all at once. He gave her a few moments to think about it and then stood and sauntered over to where three mid-level supernumeraries had grouped themselves about one of the vice-presidents, a bald-headed man who maintained short-wave radio sets both at home and at his place of work. He also possessed a saltwater aquarium full of any number of seahorses and ferocious-looking little fish. Philip genuflected, smiled, and managed to establish himself just to the left-hand side of the man. Speaking of the war going on at that time, the Vice-President was describing his solution for the quandary that conflict had wrought upon our land.
“Bomb ’em,” he said. “Bomb ’em till their kidneys explode!”
“Seems to be the only language they understand,” Philip added agreeably. “Who do they think they are after all?”
“Aren’t you eating anything?”
“Diet,” Philip rejoined. His sentences were getting shorter.
“And what’s the story with that new girl over there? I saw you sitting with her.”
“Well! Just trying to welcome her, you understand.”
“She’s watching us.”
“Besides, she’s going to change her hairdo anyway.”
“Still watching.”
They, too, were being observed, Philip and the Vice-President, by half the people in the room. He who had turned down three promotions already, why was he currying the Vice-President at this late
juncture? “Practise,” the linguist would have said.
The days were growing longer and the nights concomitantly short. Nor did he find the slightest suggestion of rain anywhere in the sky. He paced hurriedly for about two blocks before diverging into a tavern and then jumping right back out again when he saw the place was crowded with homosexual queers. Refusing to look behind him, he entered a bank building by the side door and then exited out the front. The automobiles, as numberless as always, were especially testy today in this headquarters of the world’s most concentrated wealth. It was the most fortunate, most sophisticated and most tolerant locale — he tried not to laugh, failing — most tolerant and just plain best place anywhere. It smelled of fumes and burnt rubber, and there was a drunk sitting in the gutter. But what displeased him most of all was the vision of a disproportionate number of unambiguous negroes dressed in suits. Already mistreated by history, these people had recently been dislodged from their parallel society and thrown willy-nilly into direct competition with white people.
He arrived at his place, climbed two flights, and then came down again to knock at Chris Martin’s door. This splendid boy and splendid wife had taken it upon themselves to organize the incoming mail and make Philip’s available to him upon request. Nor had the linguist ever yet found any reason to believe they had opened his letters and magazines with the intention of surveying their contents.
This time it was the woman who answered his knock. She was a contained woman of the Italianate type, dark hair, loveliest face in New York State.
“Sorry to learn about Dr. Goldman,” she said in sympathetic tones.
“No!” He tore open the letter at once and supporting himself against the doorjamb, read of the death of his mentor, the person who more than any other had introduced him to the forbidden pleasures — thought, knowledge, beauty, and disdain.
“He must have been a wonderful person.”
He wanted to cry but smiled instead. Behind her he could spy the indoor laboratory her chemist husband had set up on the dining room table.