The Weird

by Ann

  Incipient ticks of metal, enamel to enameled wood, replace the ticking of all the rundown clocks. Still some places left in the gaps between them to find refuge from these hazy lights. Prowl the streets and your shadow comes just short of reaching through the mist; it sweeps across the pavement, stretching out till it is one with the dark at the far end of a wide ellipse that reduplicates itself endlessly on other streets whenever someone, or something, moves off under the burning lamps. And if the light carried only a bit farther, the three of them would be going to meet the doubles of their hulking silhouettes. Now they are far from home, lost beyond any reckoning back. It is useless to hope that anyone would come to answer the door, if they knocked. An upstairs window might open then slam quickly shut again, but often not before some object had come flying down: a flowerpot, shattered into a thousand fragments on the walk, scattering its contents from a mound of loam and upturned roots; or a wrench; or a rubber teething bone, after which they would hear the plaintive yelp of a dog. But no one came down to answer. The first of the three walks on ahead, trying to keep track of the house numbers. All that can be said is that they believe they’re headed roughly in the right direction. The numbers are odd and diminishing. Not far behind him, the second figure drags his heels, staggering under the weight of the third – the yellow plume cuts an S with each uncertain step – who rides him pickaback, arms pendent, like an ape in sleep. Now and again, the two who are walking have to step over a man or woman who seems still to be breathing. Even if there were trash bins to dump them in, it would hardly be worth the effort. They might have come across three or four bodies in the last half hour, though no one awake seemed to be about. The prankster was getting heavy. Every so often, when he felt he could bear no more, the second figure would unburden himself on a stoop, if there was a stoop, and stretch out on the bottom step as though he, too, were given up to the sickness. He would not be able to close his eyes. Something of the marble’s coldness penetrated his clothing as he watched the fog scud over the lamppost. Once or twice he thought he discerned hitherto secret irregularities, as though the mist were not all of a piece but a mixture of smoky densities that came together like ghosts in the air around the lamp nearest to his lying place. It is probably long past morning. The streets are lost, so quiet now that when the first one’s footsteps cease to echo back, his only waking companion thinks he hears the wind breathing like a man, and turns to see if someone else is there behind him. This, to fill in the lacunæ. Thin margins of silence where the first of the three stops walking to check the front of a house, and the third, slumped over the back of the second, pauses before emitting a pebbly rattle. There can be no rest for a while longer. They carry him, stretched between them, by the ankles and under the dangling arms. His coattails drag the concrete, catching the tin ring of a beer can, which adds its scraping noise to all the other muffled echoes that neither ‘one’ nor ‘two’ is of a mind to squelch. ‘Three,’ with closed eyes, head thrown back, the fuzzy tip of the panache stuck to his upper lip, breathes easier, blissfully unaware of the quickening pace of his bearers. A pulsing blot lies just ahead, tinging the mist with an orange glow that gradually sharpens into a neon arrow, pointing down a subterranean stair to a restaurant or an inn or a bar that has, in spite of everything, remained open. A descent into the dark below street level. The scrap of metal sounds a ticking ring on the narrow steps, all the way to the bottom puddle. It foretells their coming to those who listen from within.

  Areas of deep shadow. The cool marine obscurity masks a no man’s land between the pool tables. Eddies of cigarette smoke drift toward low, canopied lights with the dust. Green baize and clicking balls. They come in by an old spittoon that keeps the inner door ajar, past nearly empty coatracks to a smell of stale tobacco juice and grease-stained leather, arm-tired and out of patience to carry the prankster to the gallery lost in darkness behind a brass rail at the other end of the hall. There, beyond the farthest lamps, a smoke cloud seems to hover above a few dim forms, barely distinguishable, as one’s eyes become accustomed to the murk, from the high-backed chairs they sit in. One of the players is making a run of the table. After a pause to take in the new arrivals, he bends to shoot again. The cue ball caroms off three cushions, grazes the five ball with a brittle click, and sends it rolling into a corner pocket. The other player, wooden chair tipped back against the rail, cue cradled between his knees, stares blankly as the two figures make their way among the tables, in and out of the greenish pools of light, their ponderous burden jackknifed so low between them that his knuckles scrape the musty floorboards. One shot before the table empties. The prankster is carried to the rail amid growls of displeasure, blocking all view of the table as his bearers stretch him. One hears the chalked nub tapping the cue ball, a rolling, a muffled bounce, more rolling…then a click. The two dark figures are silhouettes forming an H; the third, their umbilicus. They grope about with their knees, answering the jibes of irate devotees with noncommittal shrugs, in the not-unreasonable hope of finding an empty chair to dump the prankster in for the duration of their visit. The ostrich plume droops and stirs with his breathing as they sit him down, crossing his arms so he won’t lean too far back. The game is at a standstill. Everyone has missed the last shot – even the second player, who had turned in his chair at the crucial moment to watch the helpless newcomers fend off blows from the few diehards still awake in the gallery. Now no one but the standing player will ever know how the shot fell. True, there were no more balls on the green bed cloth, but no one had heard anything like the sharp rattle at the end of a brief descent in any of the six pockets. The standing player, on a point of honor, refuses to claim victory. He, too, if they are to believe him, glanced away when he heard the fracas in the gallery. When he looked back, less than a second later, the table was cleared – only the cue ball, rolling to a stop, remained on the felt.

  The prankster remained impassive throughout the whole of this discussion. His two friends had quietly slipped off to the manager’s cage to scrounge a couple of cups of coffee. The manager pours out his heart, glad to have someone other than the seedy pool enthusiasts to share in his sorrows. Now that interest in the game has waned, he’s playing to the gallery as well which, with the exception of the prankster, comprises a somewhat limited but attentive audience. In a glowing stage voice, racked with emotion, he runs through the unabridged catalogue of domestic aggravations. The wife was giving him an ulcer. Since the outbreak of the sickness, she had been afraid of the bed. One morning, having taken the advice of a friend, she brought home two white mice in a cage. The ticks, always the ticks. It was driving him crazy. They liked to stick their tails through the bars and whip the metal feeder all night long, or chase each other in the wheel. Two days of that and he was fit to be tied. So he told her, ‘This is it, I can’t take no more!’ Put a cot here in the back, tucked between the wall and a pile of crates, and now, after twenty-nine years, his worries are over. He’s even cut the telephone cord so she can’t get through to him. The mails aren’t running. She’ll never find him in this fog. They say it comes as a sudden black-out. Being tired isn’t enough. No way to make the diagnosis. You could go to sleep tonight in your bed and never wake again, without realizing that the rest of your life is a dream. He could be dreaming this pool hall, down to the detail of that smoke-blackened door.

  You can’t quite make them out. The manager finishes his monologue. Two figures, faces blurred or turned away, lost under their night-hat brims, drain their cups to the dregs and set off once more for the gallery, across a space of darkness and green rectangular islands.

  The game resumes. The losing player racks up the balls, carefully lifts off the triangular frame, sets it down on a neighboring table, chalks his cue, bends, lets his mouth hang open, makes two passes at the white sphere (multiple shadows, faint ellipses cast on felt, the shape of a star), then gives it a hard shot into the phalanx of colored balls, which scatter, spinning out in all directions, banking off the cushions befor
e slamming into one another on a field of altering trajectories. The cue ball alone, through some dreadful miscalculation or ineptitude, rolls to a corner pocket and plummets out of sight.

  – That’s scratch.

  But who hears him now? The manager bounds out of his cage like a man possessed. Gesticulating wildly, he overtakes the two figures less than halfway to the gallery and shoves them under the light of the nearest table. They turn out their pockets in the smoke to prove they have nothing but an old button left with which to pay for the coffee. The manager dabs his brow with a wad of Kleenex. It’s not enough. Not nearly enough. Catching sight of the yellow plume (it rises and falls in the gallery darkness), he indicates the figure breathing beneath it to the two men, and that this figure might be brought to him to have its pockets searched.

  Silence descends. Not a whine, not a murmur as they raise the prankster up, arms crooked around his back, hands clasped under his knees to make the throne of an imaginary palanquin, and bear him over the brass rail into the place of light. They prop him up between them, head slumped and open-mouthed, teetering from side to side, oblivious to one and all. The manager unbuttons the prankster’s overcoat, emptying his pockets of: some panty shreds garnished with lace, a pair of manicure scissors, seventeen plastic cups, a match, two Swedish meatballs, a variety of hors d’œuvres (slightly damaged), nine plastic forks, a pocket flashlight, three cocktail napkins (one with the dried imprint of a ring), a penknife (containing bottle opener, nail file/emery board, skeleton key, and four blades of various size), a hickory duck-call, half a railroad tie with a dangerously splintered edge, a tube of airplane glue, a small screwdriver, some gravel, a handful of grass, two dog biscuits (half eaten), a stuffed canary, the cracked hand of a porcelain figurine (three fingers missing), one hypodermic syringe (empty, the needle broken off), seven pieces of colored chalk.

  To make an end, the manager plucks the yellow plume from the prankster’s hair, raises his pudgy hand above the table, opens his fingers, and lets it drop, a lentitudinous meander against the dark, rocking on a cushion of air.

  The shadow I had lost in the streets could not have been as far off as the registrar had led me to believe the Omega was. Time passed. The lines crumbled into heaps of confetti that blew away when I slipped the map from its frame and held it to the open window.

  Under the blank marquee. The ticket booth stood concealed in an octagonal pillar of imitation marble whose blue glaze was dulled by a layer of soot, its window facing the entrance. No one there. Through the pane, behind its metal air vent, I could dimly see the calendar print of a wintry forest hanging on the wall, a wooden stool, an empty cash drawer to the right of the ticket slots. The telephone receiver was off the hook. It must have been dangling below. Silent, out of sight. The last one to inhabit the booth had not bothered to draw the curtain over the window or to empty the ashtray, which held a half-smoked cigarette with lipstick traces. By one of the entrance doors a poster in a cracked-glass frame depicted, in garish colors, a statuesque blonde clad in a negligée, the outline of her body a vague silhouette behind a muslin window. Farther into the room, a man was standing. His face, dull yet oddly menacing, lit from the side by a weak night-lamp near an unmade bed. I’d expected a line of ambulances (at least a paddy wagon or two) to be parked by the curb.

  There was nothing. The mist, which hid less from me than the shadow I had lost, shrouded the opposite walk so completely that, for all one could tell, only abandoned excavations were to be found there, or vast asphalt lots jammed with cars that were no longer allowed on the streets, some perhaps holding those who had gone to sleep behind the wheel and been left to rot. I hadn’t seen a car all morning, not even close within the precincts of the roundhouse. What kept me out there? Obviously another dreadful miscalculation. With no landmarks to follow, I had hoped for luck enough to stumble on the Omega theatre. This couldn’t have been the one. The letters, lost in fog. Markings of where the sleepers were kept. I tried the door by the poster. It wouldn’t budge. Then the one next to it. My hands on the iron crossbar, pushing through to the darkness.

  The foyer led up a carpeted ramp between two ranks of posts strung together by velveteen ropes. My reflection leapt from one wall panel to the next. A mottled blur, caged on both sides by netlike veins, seemed to flit through dim pools of yellow light across mirrors that reproduced its shrinking image to infinity down their endless corridors. The stale odor of popcorn and threadbare upholstery almost reached me. I made my way past humming soda machines – luminous buttons, glittering cup-wells in shadow – to the vacated counter which stood in a nook by the ingress, its shelves emptied of all but a few gum-drop boxes, some scattered candy bars and a bag of half-crushed salted peanuts. I went slowly, softly, after having trod so many unfamiliar pavements. Tufted swirls of orange and black flowers muffled my footsteps in a purple ground. Another more muted hum began to filter from the wormy umbra beyond the counter and the soft-drink machines. I slipped through the archway, turned right down a narrow passage, groping the inside wall for vague glimmers, and came at last to a water cooler in an alcove of mosaic tile. The light shifted over it in irregular pulses, from silver to black. A section of partition had been taken down behind the last row of seats, giving an odd view of the screen through a maze of silhouetted tubes and flickering bottles that left evansecent afterimages as my eyes moved over them. The hum I had caught faintly in the lobby was the dry sound of all those open mouths, those slumping heads with phosphenescing numbers, dashes of glowing paint, scattered over the middle section of seats in a dense clutter of hanging glucose bottles. Puddles of sick-sweet urine trickled out of the occupied rows into the aisle, where the floor took a sudden tilt, and widened the stains in the carpeting. The screen fluttered its half-light onto the sleeping audience, throwing off black-and-white images of what may or may not have been scenes from the movie advertised. Facing the sleepers, alone at its desk, in the limbo between the first row of vacant seats and the black matting under the screen, an egg-shaped head, completely bald, lit from beneath by a lamp that cast a liquid glimmer in its eyes, seemed to beckon me. Above the head, an old car with spoked tires and a running board sped off down a winding country road, crossed by shadows that writhed in a cloud of dust.

  The head was reading, arms folded on the pages of a dog-eared magazine, bending to decipher the last few lines in the haze of print. This was the caretaker. There were no other guards in the theatre. For all one knew, the projection booth had been left untended between reels. The sound was off. The caretaker closed his magazine, rolled it up, tossed it into an otherwise empty wastebasket, and rubbed his bleary eyes with ink-smudged fingers, speaking in a loud voice whose echoes rang off the distant walls to the corners of the balcony, at which he stared from time to time, as though preoccupied with the contrast of that wide, black recess to the light-box which sucked the dust in a beam through its little window.

  – Please. No need to stand on ceremony. We’ve still got plenty of seats left, but I wouldn’t want to predict how long that’ll last. I was told to expect you.

  He let out a booming yawn which died all around us, shaking his head rapidly like a dog trying to dry itself, as he began to rummage through his litter of papers, whistling under his breath. His eyes fell on the luminous hands of the desk clock.

  – Shit. Half an hour, is it? Then the alarm goes off and the two of us will have to start replacing the bottles.

  The two of us?

  – Oh! Don’t get the wrong idea. I was talking about the man up there. He likes to sit it out in the balcony between reels. Can’t take the heat in the booth. Can’t say as I blame him, either. It’s hell up there. Hope he remembers to set another one going before he has to come down. We could have used a blank white projection, you know, but it’s too hard on the eyes. And since we were told to keep the electrical expenses to a minimum, we had to settle for this old movie. Never seen the thing all the way through, myself. It was either that or shut off the coke machines.
Can I get you something? It’s free. We do get some concessions.