He tossed all his clothes onto the floor in the corner, proving to himself he knew it didn’t matter now if they got wet. He hesitated before he pulled down his underpants, as if this were sex where complete nakedness was the point of no return. Then he pulled them off and felt nothing different, not even naked, only long and bony. His body looked sickly, a hollow chest, a pale stomach that bellied out from his skinniness, a penis like a vulnerable pipe of skin. He touched his testicles and ran his fingers through the coarse kink and curl of hair, wanting to remember how much his body had meant to him once, but everything was numb or ticklish.
He was ready, but the water was still too shallow. He turned on the cold water with the hot, sat on the edge of the tub, and waited. There was no window and the little room was steamy and warm, yet Michael felt cold, his skin tightening around him. He picked up the note he had left on the corner of the sink, opened it, and read it, sitting with his arms and legs bunched together. The note made no sense, as if somebody else had written it, then made perfect sense. “I cannot live… You never understood before.” It was like a note to himself, a reminder. He had to do this. He set the note on the lid of the toilet, flattening it out with both hands. He took up the paper bag and took out the little box. He broke open the box—it was like peeling back the shell of a shrimp. He set the plastic and metal dispenser on the edge of the tub—it looked delicate there, almost electronic.
He reached over and turned off both faucets at once. The silence was sudden and perfect. Yet he was still conscious in this small white room, still alive. He lifted one foot over the bathtub wall. The water burned. He brought his other foot in. The water lightly lapped against the tub. He slowly lowered himself, his body freezing, his teeth chattering until he sat on heat, then in heat, then sank until warm water rose up to his neck and he was warm all over. Heat flowed into every fold and corner. It was like the sex in his dream, sex without any genitals involved. Maybe his dream hadn’t been about sex at all but about this. The clear water gently swung back and forth, his body dissolving in warmth. It would be beautiful, like a slow drowning in self.
Michael sat up and took the dispenser from the edge of the tub. He drew back the tiny shuttle and pushed it forward to squeeze out a blade. The first blade popped out, flew from the tub, and landed on the ceramic tiles with a surprisingly loud ping.
The deep pounding of water suddenly stopped, getting Jack’s attention. He listened to the silence and thought about baths. He often took a bath himself when he was depressed or wanted a long, deliberate wank—usually one and the same thing. He heard the slosh of water as Michael stepped in and a subtle change of pitch as the water rose. Then there was calm, perfect silence, so quiet one could hear a pin drop. Yes, a bath did make you feel—
Jack heard a pin drop.
He actually heard something small and metal click on the tiles.
Like a razor blade?
As soon as Jack thought it, he wondered why he thought it. “If you feel so bad you should…” His imagination had been crying wolf all day, but the idea jumped back into his head, stronger and clearer than ever. He leaned forward on his chair and listened closely, as if one could actually hear a soft whisper of skin being cut with a razor.
What if it were a razor blade? Michael had said he needed to shave. The toiletries in his bag: he had dropped a new blade on the floor. And why suicide? Why did that idea keep coming back to Jack? It was almost as if he wanted Michael to kill himself.
He tried out that possibility, imagining he knew for certain Michael was in there slashing his wrists and Jack would sit out here and let him do it. It was like a ghost story you invent to scare yourself, Jack trying to frighten himself out of his neurotic worry with the sickest scenario he could imagine. “I must be insane,” he thought, sitting back and settling into himself again.
Michael reached out to pick the blade off the floor. He used his fingernail to lift the metal sliver up enough to get a finger beneath it. It was such a tiny thing. He held it tight between his thumb and index finger, an inch and a half of sharp edge. He knew a common mistake was to cut across, when the correct way was to cut across and down, in a J. How did he know that? He wondered who had told him.
Blue lines were buried beneath the pale white skin of his left wrist. The tendons went flat when he bent his hand back. His hand looked new and unfamiliar, purplish lines in the joints of his fingers, the tips covered with fingerprints like the lines for mountains and ridges on a topographical map.
He was frustrated he was still seeing and thinking. He had to stop thinking. He steadied his arms by pressing his elbows against his sides. The razor blade touched his wrist, then broke contact, without cutting. The razor blade wavered, like a pen hesitating over a signature. Where was his blinding pain and self-loathing when he needed them? Michael closed his eyes. Now. Or now. Or maybe now—
“Jack will be fine.” The crowded subway car trembled and swayed, Laurie swaying with the bodies pressed around her. “I should have said more but Jack can cope. Hope Carla’s home. Unload some of this crazy, jerky day on Carla.” She assumed Michael would be home too, his presence a nuisance that forced them to speak in whispers.
Carla sat in the gathering dark of the living room, enjoying the peace and quiet she had come home to. She briefly wondered again where everyone was, but it felt so nice to sit and think nothing after going against the bureaucratic mind at Bellevue all afternoon.
“We do not grieve for the living.” Or, “We do not grieve for the sick?” thought Ben, buttoning up the white shirt he had borrowed from the elderly volunteer—it would not do to speak at a rally in a sweatshirt. No, “We do not grieve for the living,” then words about grief being premature and the sick needing anger and care, and then his introduction of the speaker from Bailey House.
“My life is harder than yours,” Danny told the blue-eyed, angel-haired dog in Connecticut. “I get only twenty-three roubles a month, less what they take out for my pension, but I don’t wear mourning.” He was using his solitude to rehearse lines, but his heart wasn’t in it. An open-mouthed dog made a poor audience, and Danny was still miffed over Ben’s flight into town. He wondered if Ben’s political rah-rah was only an excuse for getting even with Danny for screwing up their threeway. He began again. “Why do you always wear black?” Chekhov could be so Hispanic.
“I wonder how they’re doing?” said Peter, watching the nightly news. “We should have everyone over for dinner soon, now that we’re all back.” Washing lettuce in the kitchen, Livy muttered, “I guess. Although we can’t have them without having Michael.”
“Michael’s all right,” Peter claimed, then groaned and added, “Poor Michael.”
And Jack, sitting at his kitchen table, thought, “Arcalli, you’re nuts,” wondering how he had gone directly from fear for Michael to annoyance with him, without even a moment of relief when he found the boy alive and sitting on his front stoop. He suddenly remembered the look Michael gave him out there when Michael snapped out of his dream. A look with none of the arrogance Michael usually hid behind. The look of a frightened child. What kind of pain and confusion did Michael mask with his arrogance?
Jack listened carefully, and heard no slosh or dribbling of water. You’re a buffoon, he told himself. A dotty, stupid buffoon. But he stood up and walked across the kitchen. He stood in the doorway and listened more carefully. He felt ridiculous, like a father worried that his son was playing with himself. But he drew a breath to call in to Michael.
Michael heard someone coming to stop him. He pressed his wrist against the blade and pulled.
He felt nothing, then a mild sting across his wrist. Watching a dark red globule appear at the center of the cut, he became frightened, excited. The globule broke. A drop rolled off and fell into the water, where it slowly opened like a rose.
“Michael?”
Jack was outside. He had to finish this or he would look like a fool to Jack, a coward, a wimp. He cut lengthwise and more blood well
ed up. It was hypnotically beautiful, his own blood dark on his arm, bright red in the water. The stinging through his arm was clean and satisfying.
“Michael!”
“What!”
There was a pause, then a sheepish, “How much longer will you be?”
“I’ll finish when I finish,” Michael called out.
Strings and skeins of red floated beneath his arm, unwinding through the water like smoke. He was sorry he would never see the look on Jack’s face when Jack found him here. He remembered the note. Had he said enough? It was too late to rewrite the note. And the fingers of his left hand were getting numb. He should do his other wrist while the fingers could still hold a blade. Very carefully, he passed the metal sliver from the fingers of his right hand to the fingers of his left. He cut across again. The thin red line looked like a little mouth before the incision filled with blood. The note was unnecessary. He was giving himself extra mouths to say what he needed to say.
He finished his right wrist and laid the blade on the edge of the tub. He sat back and sank down, wanting to taste every second of his going. His arms lay in the water, a warm constant stinging, a comforting release of pain, as if his whole body were weeping through his arms. The water turned pink, then red. Time passed quickly even as it seemed to stand still, the way time passes when you watch the second hand sweep around the face of a clock. He was frightened he might change his mind before he was finished.
A book thumped shut.
Jack was still out there. Michael was annoyed he had to think about Jack. There was something else he should be thinking about now. But he had to keep Jack away. He had to assure Jack everything was fine until he was finished here. To assure Jack things were fine, Michael began to sing:
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily—
Jack remained in the doorway, chastened by Michael’s “I’ll finish when I finish,” but unwilling to go back to the kitchen. He automatically pulled a book from the stuffed bookcase there, just as he often pulled a book on his way to the toilet. He opened it and actually read a page before he realized what he was reading—Gore Vidal—then read another page to stop himself from thinking. Feeling distracted and calmer, he snapped the book shut and wedged it back on the shelf. He was returning to the kitchen when he heard Michael singing.
A child’s song. Sung cheerfully? Mockingly? Its tone was so different from everything else about Michael tonight, the song sounded bitterly sarcastic, then deranged. Michael sang it over and over, the song running down like a motor, then speeding up again. He sang like someone having a nervous breakdown.
Michael kept singing, not knowing how to stop once he started. He was getting lightheaded, even dizzy, but the song took over without his having to think about it. He sank down further, until his ears were underwater and his voice sounded very deep and echoey. The tub of water was an enormous ear, picking up sounds and voices through the pipes that branched all over the building, maybe all over the world. Michael stopped singing so he could listen to the world. Dishes were being knocked about in a sink. A toilet was flushed. A man and woman argued over how to bathe a baby. Michael could hear everything. When he was finished, he would know everything.
Already his mind was making connections he hadn’t known before. He was lightheaded with wisdom. Losing blood made you wise, put you in touch with the oneness of things, or nothingness of things. There had been a particular reason why he did this, but Michael could not remember it. Nevertheless, he was glad he was doing this, relieved he had done it. Soon he could go under, into a warm ocean where he breathed water instead of air and would never need to come to the surface again. Weightless and naked, he could swim among the dead, watching for—who? Clarence. He groped around with his legs and back, trying to find the underwater door that opened into that ocean. All he found was the smooth, watertight surface of a bathtub.
The singing wore down to a mumbled hum, and stopped.
“Where are you going dancing tonight?” Jack called out, just to check on the boy.
Something thrashed in the tub and water splashed on the floor, then there was a long silence.
“Michael?” Jack stepped toward the closed door. “Are you okay, Michael?”
No answer.
The arrogant little bastard. He was doing this deliberately, trying to spook Jack, wanting to make Jack think he was crazy and had drowned himself in a bathtub. Or maybe it was Jack who was having the nervous breakdown.
He knocked on the door. “I have to come in, Michael. I need to get something.” He reached for the doorknob, deciding to play the voyeur when he found Michael sitting naked and indignant in there. He preferred to be read as a dirty old man than as a nervous nelly panicked by worry. He turned the knob. The door was locked.
“Michael.” He pounded on the door. “Michael! Say something, dammit!” His mind raced with everything he had feared that afternoon, racing back against itself in an attempt not to believe any of it. “This isn’t funny! If you don’t say something, I have to break down my own fucking door, you ass!”
Nothing. Not a damn sound.
“You self-centered little prick! You self-important little shit!” Jack turned the knob and pressed against the door. Anger replaced fear, and he threw his weight against the door. Once, then again, and the old wood around the template cracked and the door flew open. The door swung against the tub, blocking the tub from view so all Jack saw at first was an empty bathroom, clothes piled in the corner and his own absurdly bug-eyed, furious face in the mirror above the sink.
In a corner of his left eye he caught a bit of bright color. He glanced.
There was a roar from deep in his body, diaphragm, and lungs driving up a groan louder than any cry.
The bathtub was full of blood. White legs lay folded in blood. Behind the door, Michael’s face was slumped against the side of the tub.
His cry still rushing from his chest, Jack plunged both arms into the blood to pull Michael from it, as if it were the blood that hurt Michael. He swung the long body around and the head banged against the open door.
“Sorry! I’m sorry!” Jack cried and held the head to lift it around the door, wanting to rush the body into another room. The body felt hot and soaking against him. Then Jack saw a bleeding wrist and understood where the blood was from. He swept the weightless body down to the bathroom floor. The head hung over the threshold, stretching a pale throat over an enormous Adam’s apple.
Jack grabbed the boy’s jaw and shook the head. Nothing. But his white ribs rose and fell. He was breathing through his open mouth. “Help me!” Jack shouted into the apartment. “Somebody!” But he was alone with this. There was nobody here to help or to tell him what to do.
Dark blood crept through the net of seams between the tiles. The wrists still bled, slowly, steadily. Jack grabbed a wrist in each hand, pressing the wounds into his palms to stop the bleeding. Direct pressure, he remembered. But that was for arteries and these had to be veins. There had to be more water than blood in the bathtub. It was brighter than the fresh blood on the floor and nobody had that much blood in them. Jack saw a tiny silver blade set neatly on the white enamel, like a spot rubbed there.
He gripped the wrists more tightly, afraid to let go of them, yet horrified to think he was doing the wrong thing and Michael would bleed to death no matter how tightly Jack held him. He gripped so hard he could feel no pulse, but he looked and saw Michael still breathing. The boy’s face was relaxed, even content, mauve lips pulled back from his teeth like a smile.
Elisabeth Vogler appeared, and primly stepped around Michael’s head to sniff at the tiled floor, where there was blood.
“No, Elisabeth! Don’t!” Jack couldn’t let go to push her back. He brought his leg around and kicked at her.
She leaped through the door again, coldly looked on, then stretched her back and strolled toward the kitchen.
Do cats drink blood? Was Jack hurting Michael? He half sat, half
knelt over the boy and changed his position to give Michael more room. He lifted the boy’s arms so the blood would have to climb before it could bleed out. He felt the blood only as a hotness in his palms. How long did it take for a person to bleed to death? How much time had passed? Jack’s heart was pounding, but time seemed to stand still. Could he let go long enough to call the police or an ambulance? Or to tear a sheet in strips for bandages or something? Afraid to let go, Jack was trapped with a bleeding boy. If he shouted, was there anyone in the building who could hear him through the airshaft?
Then he heard somebody at the front door of the building.
“Somebody!” he shouted. “Somebody help me!” Would they hear him back here?
They did, because there was a knock at Jack’s door. “Jack? Is that you, Jack?” It sounded like Margaret, the stocky old lady who lived on the third floor. Her voice was frightened and croaky.
“Margaret! Whoever it is! Get in here! It’s life or death.”
The door clicked then rattled in its jamb. “Jack! Jack, dear! It’s locked!”
“Just a minute!” Of course it was locked. What should he do? Jack let go and jumped up, ran through the bedroom and opened the door, racing back to Michael without seeing who was there. “Call an ambulance!” he shouted. “911! 911!” He straddled the body again and tried to remember how he had done this. He crossed his arms and grabbed the wrists. The blood in his palms stuck to the blood of the wounds.
“Oh, Lord!”
Jack looked up and saw Margaret standing in the kitchen with her white hair and house dress, staring through the bedroom.
In Memory of Angel Clare Page 21