by Ann
Silence. All wait breathlessly for the next sound. The other two make arm-in-arm for the master bedroom, stuffing hors d’œuvres – crusty remains of Swedish meatballs (toothpicks and all), sliced pickles and pimentoes – into their mouths, in the act of pocketing (solely by conditioned reflex) the plastic spoons, the forks and the last of the cocktail napkins. From the other side of the bed, a blue night-lamp throws its pool of ghoulish light across the pimpled ceiling. It’s so quiet they can hear the purr of the digital clock with its phosphenescing numbers, green diodes that seem to hover in the black space of the wall. The bed smells of wool and eiderdown with just the faintest trace of an aroma that might pass for vicuna buried in the heap of overcoats and furs. A patent-leather toe sticks out from under the box spring, and a blue-tinged hand. Someone sleeping it off. Someone wearing an expensive watch, a signet ring mounted with a black stone to tempt the prankster’s friends. Oblivious to the silence around them, to the barely audible pulsations of the clock, they burrow like moles, digging a tunnel into the pile of wraps, tossing one after another over their shoulders onto the floor, over the chairs, the dresser, the mirror wardrobe, the vanity, every which way until the four corners of the room seem littered with shadowy corpses. Blue owls, blue lizards, blue foxes. It’s been a long night. They’re ready to drop on the still-cluttered bed. Too tired to go on. Wanting nothing more than to sleep through the murky morning. With any luck the lull will hold a few hours of forgetfulness. No one will move from his place. They’ll close their eyes. Wait for sleep by looking into the blue pool on the ceiling. Switch off the night-lamp until, slowly, it begins to oscillate. So slowly, it intermeshes. Touches waves. Carries them through the tunnel of concentric rings. Into sleep.
Sleep. It eludes them, passing dreary shadow-smoke across their eyes as they lie, shoulder to shoulder, on the bed, half submerged by rumpled sleeves, coattails and the vague perfume of ladies’ handbags. The curtains are drawn, but it makes no difference. Someone might enter, creeping around the foot of the bed to the window. An abrupt screech of metal rings across the curtain rod and their eyes would water, squeezing shut against the flood of light that would not come. Awake, yet paralyzed in all but the movement of their eyes. They pan slowly over the furniture tops, locked in a smooth leftward glide along the commissure of ceiling and wall, from the window – a gray, undulating haze – into the shadowed recess that vibrates in tune with the purr of the digital clock, and vanishes in the yellow behind a silhouette standing in the doorway. It walks toward the bed. Leans in close to their sweating faces. Is satisfied that they are not asleep. Then quietly tiptoes out, slamming the door. And its voice blends with other, louder voices. To the left of the mirror wardrobe, the closet is open. They can hear, without taking time to leave the bed and put an ear to the partition, a scuffling on the other side, as though fists, shoes and heads were knocking against the closet wall. It’s a long time before they can free their legs. Move enough to get out of bed. To follow the silhouette’s path to the door.
Confusion. Standing pat like a head waiter in the smoke and crush of dewy bodies, a ripped pair of stretch-nylon panty briefs (garnished with lace and a fleece-lined gusset) draped over his arm with that casual elegance which bespeaks an impromptu retreat from the shallow depths of a closet, the prankster pays scant attention to the man of corpulence got up as a Roman Catholic bishop, who has just requested, in no uncertain terms, the prompt return of his skullcap. A voice in the crowd says meow. The prankster daubs his fevered brow with panty shreds. Another voice sobs and sneezes mothball dust behind the empty coats and dresses. A secret panel slides away, and the owner of this voice tumbles backward into blue light, just in time to hear a door close and footsteps shuffling up the L-shaped passage toward the party room. Crisping snippets of hatbox tissue adhere to her elbow as she crawls, knees and flattened palms sinking in the carpet nap, from the closet to a narrow space between the mirror wardrobe and the foot of the bed. A sleeper’s hand peeps out from under the springs, hair bristling on knuckles, camouflaged by a heap of fallen coats, each finger curled in direct ratio with its proximity to the thumb. If she were to put her cheek to the rug, she would almost be able to see his black form stretched out in the darkness. The hiss of his breath comes more and more like a welter of pebbles and shells washed onto the beach by an evening tide. The blue pool. Reflections. The ceiling, high in the wardrobe mirror. Softly, with a delicate creak to break the near silence, the bedroom gives a lurch and reels away behind her image into aromatic depths, blocked by a rack of plastic and cellophane shrouds. Her hand, pushed through heady cedar, gropes wildly between rasping coat hooks. The tips of her fingers brush the sticky inner wall in search of corners they never seem to reach. She closes the door. The room glides into place behind her reflection, delimited by the borders of the mirror. An oblong sheet of glass and silvering that begins less than a foot above the rug. In which she turns, limned by the blue of the night-lamp, hiking her tattered skirt above the waist to have a glance at her bruised posteriors. Head cocked over the shoulder. Damp curls falling into her bloodshot eyes.
Departure. Propped against the wall, he teeters between them as they slip him into his herringbone coat, turning the collar up around his ears to cover one of the lobes, which trickles blood from a bite, fixing the yellow panache to his unctuous cowlick with a hairpin one of them has snatched up off the rug. Most of the food they will need, along with the pilfered utensils, the plastic cups and the bishop’s velvet cap, has already been stuffed into his pockets. Standing open-mouthed, swaying like a wooden Indian from one to the other of his tittering comrades, eyes closed, oblivious to the dowager who shakes a diamond-studded finger under his nose, shouting, ‘This is an outrage!’ the prankster has begun to keep his own counsel. He isn’t moving at all now. The two of them will have to carry him down the stairs, one taking him under the arms, the other under the knees. Someone who no longer thinks of saying meow has inched her way around the far side of the piano to close the window. It’s getting cold. The mist has begun to settle, leaving a vast expanse in its wake. Some rooftops, a few smokeless chimneys, the upper stories of tall buildings appear under an endless leaden cloud whose outer reaches merge with the haze in the distance. The sky of a snowy night. Without snow. Morning comes in a dead silence. Toward the middle space, amid the debris of what few landmarks remain, a massive dome covered in soot looms out of the fog. Where the tracks converge and are swallowed up.
A little faster, while there’s still time. I had come to it then, the dead end of a long perspective of top-heavy roofs and gables, its massive dome lost above the haze of the lampposts, where the last ramshackle houses leaned over rain-swept cobbles. The roundhouse, at last. So black, so huge against the crumbling façades, that its sides could not be seen. I followed the yellow glow hovering near its base: a distant star, a faint streak on the tracks as I walked, before the stones and puddles sloped into deep shadow. Light spilled over the porch from a narrow doorway at the top of a flight of wooden steps. For the first time in what seemed like hours, I could make out voices, rumblings over the muted hum of a generator, sounds the fog or the mask turned into dense, echoless murmurs. The edges of the steps, where they hadn’t already been chipped away by time and rot, made a splintery pattern – wave-like depressions with gaps of darkness diminishing between them as they went up. I put my hand on the iron post at the bottom and looked up the side of the building, a wide, dizzying curve of sooted brickwork whose upper reaches vanished in the mist. In a house across the alley, where the street pitched and cobbles gave way to slabs of concrete splotched with tar and loose pebbles, a weak light flickered in a dormer window. A silhouette passed behind the curtains and lingered there. A man. A woman. Indistinct.
From the porch at the top of the steps, peering down through iron balusters, I saw the beginning of a chain of dim lanterns, swaying as though moved by an unknown hand, strung out above the windless void. Sections of track passed in and out of the reddish pools they m
ade, toward a crater hollowed out of smoke. No one could say where they led or whether they were broken. You had to imagine the dockside warehouse off in the distance, the old loading platforms, the silos at the end of the jetty, all long deserted. The open door beside me seemed to bristle with noise. Now the yellow light was brighter and would have fallen across my face, throwing my left eye into shadow. The sounds from within, though my ears were shrouded by oilcloth, lost their resonance in the groan of the generator, blending with its hum under the vast, domed space. For some reason the chain of lanterns, stretching into mist, held me. I couldn’t bring myself to leave the porch and go in, or even to turn my head toward the doorway. The light fell, a bit less yellow, across my gloved fingers and brought them into high relief against the dark. I tried, without success, to gauge the distance between my knuckles, bent over the iron railing, and the first of the red shunt lamps which seemed to meander, ever so slightly, in the immense perimeter of blackness beyond the roundhouse wall. The fog was driven back a little by the ashy light of a low-lying cloud, a morning light too pale to reach the ground. The misty hollow, which had camouflaged space and perspective, gave way to darkness. The more I looked, the more I sensed that the positions of the lanterns had somehow shifted. I could almost feel it happening under my eyes, without being able to pinpoint a movement which might have given the game away. I pictured a team of switchmen creeping from lamp to lamp, phantoms astray in the murk, bending to ring their subtle changes in the pattern, an inch here, an inch there.
It comes to a matter of inches. Inside, the sulfurous light. The halo around a dangling bulb. Behind the lintel. Other haloes hovered in groups of two and three on shadeless floor lamps to mark the edge of a thicket of tubes and hanging bottles. The center was in shadow. None of the lights could reach it. The massive dome, lost in a black gulf, echoed the breathing of those who slept beneath: men, women, children, laid out under bubbling IV tubes like spokes of a giant wheel, in concentric rings, each with a green number painted on the forehead. The numbers alone, where they glowed in the dark, gave indication of the true dimension of this circle of bodies. The floor was vast, at least a hundred yards in diameter. Less than ten feet remained between the outermost ring of sleepers and the rotunda wall. If you took away the upended glucose bottles, the flexible tubes, the phosphenescing numbers, there was nothing out of the ordinary. White faces. Their clothes had been left on them because of the cold. Those, here and there, who had been found in the nude were wrapped from chin to foot in heavy, olive-drab blankets. An armed guard made the long patrol around them, flashlights in hand, while others saw to it that the line of ‘witnesses,’ queued up to a makeshift office at the other end of the curve, kept close to the brick wall. Some had come hoping to identify a lost relative. Some wanted permission to admit a wife, a husband, a son, or a daughter who was lying motionless like all the others here, breathing imperceptibly on a couch, in a darkened bedroom, behind closed doors, somewhere in the city. The witnesses – many had turned up their coat collars against the damp – hid their faces in handkerchiefs doused with alcohol by the guards to kill the saccharine odor of urine passed off by the bodies in the course of their long sleep. There were small puddles wherever the floor sagged near the edge of the outer ring, pools reflecting the lights as I made my way past the first of the guards. The hiss I had taken for whispers was the sound of all these breathing bodies, asleep and awake; the hum of the ‘generator,’ an amalgam of snores which made a continuous drone. Diminishing circles. Pale, upturned faces gradually became blots. Green coals twinkling in a shadowy lagoon.
I didn’t have to push through the line. The witnesses, clear up to the wicket, made way for me without comment. A few feet beyond the rail, the registrar, a seedy, balding man with flakes of dandruff on his coat, horn-rimmed glasses balanced precariously on the tip of his nose, and a cigarette butt between thin lips, sat hunched at a desk behind a litter of papers, too absorbed in his work to look up. No one at the head of the queue made any attempt to draw his attention. Perhaps they had been waiting for hours. From time to time he would lay his pen on the blotter, set his burnt-out cigarette in the scallop of a plastic ashtray heaped with other twisted butts and charcoaled matches, and blow into his mittens to warm his nose. Over his shoulder, in a small area shut off from the roundhouse proper by a hospital screen, two guards were bending over a rumpled cot. They had just finished stripping a young woman who had made no effort to resist. She was lying on her stomach, her blond head turned to the crumbling wall. Her flesh took color with the cold while the guards went through her clothes in silence, turning each piece inside out, the pockets too, without finding so much as a tube of lipstick. A foot or two from the head of the cot, a stretcher lay across the arms of a dilapidated captain’s chair, the canvas wound neatly around its wooden rods. The registrar closed his book, smoothed back what was left of his greasy chestnut hair and, almost mechanically, crushed his dead cigarette in the ashtray. Some witnesses near me pressed toward the gate. A nervous shuffle. Murmurs. Maybe he wasn’t looking at me at all. He seemed a bit dazed, as though he had come to the end of a prolonged stupor and had still to take his bearings. Behind him, one of the guards had found what looked to be a metal snuffbox in the inside pocket of the girl’s corduroy jacket. There was something, after all. Perhaps she was a student. No books. So early in the morning? Her watch had stopped at 4:20. I should have asked someone in line for the correct time. An absurd shyness after having walked through deserted streets for so long. The registrar’s eyes were set far apart. An effect, no doubt, of the glasses. Bifocals. Lunar crescents cast over the stubble of his beard. He appeared to be staring right through me. Dark circles under loose bags of skin. If he could have seen my bag it would have been less awkward for the two of us. The guard was turning the snuffbox over in his hand, pressing his thumb to the catch. I fished through my pockets for something I might use as a means of identification. All I could come up with was a prescription pad that must have crumpled when I fell at the end of the little footbridge. Down to its last few sheets. Enough to get me through, even though I had to inch my way along the rail to the wicket gate, knocking my knees against the balusters. Other hands were searching my pockets. I let them. There was nothing left to find. The registrar snatched up a half-squashed pack of cigarettes, tapped it against his fingers, and held it out to me.
– Sure you won’t have one? Menthol. Something to cool the lungs, eh? It’s the only kind I can stand now.
He put one to his lips, flicked his lighter a couple of times, producing a few sparks.
– Shit. Got a match? Please, sit down. Hey, one of you guys gimme a light?
He had turned to the guards. They were standing over the girl. Just standing. Looking at each other now and again as though they were reluctant, or merely too tired, to go on. The taller one, almost a silhouette between the top of the registrar’s head and the floor-lamp bulb which cast a white ellipse on the hospital screen (a nimbus lit the down along the turned-up ridge of his nose), worked his jaw in and out. But his lips were closed. He let his eyes wander from the cot to the registrar while his hand, absently, began to smooth the tousled hair of the girl.
– Sorry. Don’t neither of us smoke.
The two of them were bending over her as the registrar turned to me. Again, he was looking somewhere past my eyes. Slowly. Gently. They rolled her onto her side. Then, taking her under the arms and knees, they lifted her and laid her on her back so that her legs projected off the foot of the cot, and her feet, which had turned outward, rested on the cold cement.
– Anybody there got a light?
Someone tapped the back of my chair and handed me a book of matches. I passed it to the registrar. He opened it, tore out a match, struck its blue tip – a rasp, the sudden burst of fire – on the flint-strip. He cupped his mittens over the cigarette, drawing hard. The flame lent a warm glow to his face, two flickering glints in the curvature of his lenses. Shaking the match out, he tossed it into the as
htray. It fell, a thread of curling smoke in its wake.
– Of course, you must realize, we’re about to close this receiving station. Not an inch of room left, as you can see. Or are you here to make an identification?
They must have come for me before morning. A woman had been found lying in the gutter. I told the father to call the police. Have they brought her in yet?
– I’m sure you know how difficult it would be for us to locate this woman now. I’ve been sitting here since last night trying to put these affairs in order. It’s impossible. Even if she is here – and that’s highly unlikely, given the time of morning you claim to have answered the call – you’d have to get one of the custodians to take you around the outermost circle and, you can see for yourself, we’ve all got our hands full. I hope you’ll put that in your report. By then it’ll be too late to do any good. Not that I’m complaining! Far from it. Are you sure the old man remembered to phone the police? Maybe he was a bit deaf, or senile, and what you told him didn’t sink in. He might be waiting for you to go back there now. To claim the body. But I seriously doubt she’s here. You can look for her on your own, if you like. The odds are against it. This one here is the last sleeper I’ve accepted, and she came in late last night. The custodians are only getting to her now. We have to strip them, if only to look for a birthmark or some other physical identification when there are no effects. No stone left unturned. You understand. I don’t make the rules.