by Barry, Mike
Delicately, very carefully, he sniffed at it. The odor seemed to be about right. He carried the glass back to the bedroom where Cicchini lay, resisting an impulse to whistle. He passed the telephone on the way. How long did he have with four and a half corpses here? he wondered. Not too damned long, he supposed, but long enough. There was something to do. No matter what happened to him he would not leave here until it had been done.
“Here,” he said extending the glass toward Cicchini, “here, this will fix you up. Drink it down.”
The man’s eyes flickered. There was intelligence in that face and perception. You would have to shoot Cichini in the brain to take that quickness away and then where would the fun be? No, he wanted the man whole. Cicchini twisted on the floor.
“No,” he said, “I won’t do it.”
“Of course you will. It’ll take away the pain.”
“I know what that is,” Cicchini said. “You think I’m crazy?”
“I doubt it very much. You’re as sane as I am, anyway. Drink up.”
Cicchini shook his head. “I won’t,” he said, “I won’t do it.”
“Yes you will,” Wulff said, already getting weary. The glass was becoming heavy in his hand. He knelt, extended it. “Take it now.”
“You’re crazy,” Cicchini said, “that’s junk in there.”
“Is it?”
“You don’t drink that stuff.”
“Of course you do,” Wulff said. “You can shoot it, roll it, sniff it, taste it, smoke it, fuck it or shove it up your ass. Shooting happens to be the fastest way, but different strokes for different folks. It’ll get into the bloodstream, Cicchini. Have no fear. It’ll go right through the stomach wall and hit the nervous system and you’ll feel better than a triple dose of morphine. Come on.”
Fear came across the man’s face. It was a diferent fear than the one before; it opened into a chasm. “It’ll kill me,” he said.
“I’m not a doctor,” said Wulff. “It might, though. But what the hell? You were asking to die just before, weren’t you? What a way to go!”
“No,” Cicchini said.
“Yes,” said Wulff. He fumbled for his gun, patted it, took it out of his pocket and showed it to the man. “Drink it,” he said, “or I’ll shoot. Not to kill. Just in the neck. You ever been hit at close range by a bullet in the adam’s apple? I know a man who was once, in Vietnam. He was trying to tell me all about it for forty minutes but he couldn’t make a sound until he died. He wanted to die very badly, though. I could read that in his eyes.”
“I don’t want to take it. I don’t—”
“Of course you don’t,” Wulff said softly, holding the glass trembling against the man’s chin, “I know you don’t. You never touch the stuff, you see. You’ll build a palace on it and kill to keep it moving but actually, of course, you don’t indulge. You’re the Pied Piper, Cicchini, except that you’re tone-deaf and that’s not a flute you’re playing, it’s a needle. But you’re going to get a taste of it now. You’re going to get a taste of what you’ve been doing.”
The man’s cheeks bulged. He gagged from deep inside, retched thinly. When he opened his mouth to let it run out a little blood came with the sputum.
“Internal injuries I guess,” Wulff said. “It must have gotten in somewhere, that shoulder wound. So you’re in trouble anyway, Cicchini, you might as well enjoy yourself.”
He cocked the gun. He did not think that it was going to be necessary to shoot the man but he was perfectly willing to do so if it were necessary. He did not care. He would just as soon shoot Cicchini in the adam’s apple if it came down to that. The Vietnam story had not been a lie. The man he had seen it happen to had been someone who he cared about; he guessed that it would be much more interesting in the all-around sense to see it happen to Cicchini.
Cicchini saw it. He saw the purpose in Wulff and the movement of the gun and this was what broke him. He did not want to be shot there. Wulff could hardly say that he blamed him. Cicchini reached for the glass. Wulff let it slide into the open hand like a block of wood.
“All of it,” he said, “every bit.”
Cicchini’s hand fluttered. The fluid shook in the glass but did not spill. He raised his hand and put the glass against his lips, drank.
The first swallow made him gag. His stomach heaved, mouth opened, it ran out of him. Wulff saw that the man was not faking, he was genuinely sickened. All right. “Try again,” he said, “now that you know how it tastes.”
“I don’t want to. I want—”
“Take it again.”
Cicchini drank. The rest of the glass went down quickly. He took it down in a series of choking swallows like a freshman drinking beer from a pitcher. His eyes rolled. The glass slid away from him.
“How long?” Wulff said, still kneeling. “You’re the expert on this. Two minutes, three minutes to get into the bloodstream? That’s all right. However long it takes. Have fun, Cicchini.”
“You son of a bitch,” the man said. “You rotten, filthy—”
“Don’t tell me sons of bitches,” Wulff said, standing. “You scum, I could torture you to death for a year and you would still be getting off easy.” He felt the rage coming out of him in great gasps but held it back. No point, no point. Nothing would be accomplished. “You’ll never pay,” he said, “you’ll never pay for what you are.”
He stumbled out of there, the rage weakening him, taking almost the last of the physical reserve out of him. But there was still too much to be done; he could not stop now. He bypassed the three men in a tub, went back to the valise, closed the clips. This valise had travelled with him from San Francisco to Boston, it had cost him a lot, it had taken many byways and pathways to meet him again but he guessed that he was not going to give it up. Not quite yet. In a mystical way he felt united with it.
Leaving Cicchini already feeling the first effect of ten thousand milligrams of only slightly adulterated Turkish heroin, Wolff hoisted the valise and weaved his way the hell out of there.
XIX
He was a little boy. He was a little boy named Louis Cicchini who lived in a burning barn and then he was someone else, a man with the same name who lived in a castle but in between he had lost the touch, the connection, he was sliding on paper, encased in ice and the transition was so smooth and deadly that he could not make the connection between the one and the other. The boy was dead, the man in the castle was dead, they shared this but there was nothing else; they spoke a different language.
He felt the smooth, even flow of the drugs. They worked their way into his body like power through the distributor coils of a car. He was a machine. He was not a man but a machine; he had pistons and a crankshaft and distributor coils, through them the oils and waters of the drugs flowed. The machine was broken now, malfunctioned and burnt, it would be tossed soon enough into the junkyard for pressure-and-reconstitution but in the meantime there was just a little space left, enough space to know what was happening to him.
The boy and the man lay on the floor, the drugs working through the two of them. He had not known that they would take hold so quickly nor that they would do what they had to cancel sensation. He felt no pain, pain could not be recovered even though he sent his mind scurrying down the corridors of recollection looking for it; it had gone. There was blood but it was not his blood, there was emptiness and waste but that was not his either. He lay on the floor, his eyes locked to the ceiling, and he did not blink, the ceiling pressed down upon him but he could not close his eyes against it nor did he want to. The blink was supposed to be the only way in which men could survive in the world, the world being so unbearable to them that they had to close their eyes against it five or six times to the minute, once every ten seconds just to shut the world out but he did not feel that he had to shut it out nor could he have.
The boy lived in the burning barn and turned to him and said, “I don’t want to, I don’t want to do this.”
“You’ve got to,” the man Cicchi
ni said in the logical, reasonable voice of the adult. “You’ve got to do it son, because that is the world.”
“No it isn’t, it doesn’t have to be, I can’t take it, don’t you understand? It isn’t worth it,” the boy said, and the barn flamed around him, the shingles and cinders caving in toward ash, the animals trapped within, mooning and baying, and he reached toward Cicchini as if Cicchini could somehow pull him out of those spaces and save him but Cicchini could not. He lived in a castle by the sea and that castle arched far above the waters, being surrounded by gates on all sides and the gates were impermeable. He could no more get out through them than those outside could have broken through, and so the boy shrivelled and screamed in the barn, his cries for help falling away, weaker and weaker until at last Cicchini realized that he stood alone, the boy being quite dead, all of history smashed inside him, and yet that did not change the message, did it? Was there any change? You had to go on, that was all, you had to go on because all of the alternatives were worse. He would have told it to the boy if he had had any more chance, but all chances were gone….
Ten thousand milligrams of heroin working through the liver, spleen, digestive organs. He had a moment of relative lucidity during which he thought he could see them, could see the distinct granules oozing their way through the various organs, into the ruined blood and then at last to excretion, kidneys and bladder screaming with the weight of it. The granules were small and frail but they would not dissolve, in fact they became stronger in the blood, pelting through, and each of them had a face. Each of the granules had a face: mouth and eyes, personality and voice, and they were talking to him, talking inexhaustibly as they channeled their way into and out of the central nervous system. “How do you like it, Cicchini?” the little granules sang and spoke. “What do you say now, now that you’ve said that you’re sorry?” And he writhed on the floor, writhed because he could not answer them, how could you answer something inside of yourself? “You don’t like it at all Cicchini,” the granules noted as they bobbled and swam in the blood. “You don’t like it, well how are we supposed to like it? We’ve got our problems too, it’s not easy being junk you know. You’ve got a bad reputation, why, people won’t say a good word for you actually, and yet the fact is that junk is curative, junk is restorative, it acts to take people out of their lives when those lives are unbearable, and besides that, do you know that until 1913 it was actually approved for us by licensed medical practitioners at their discretion? But then there was a panic in Congress and a law was rammed through making it illegal and the hysteria began to build. Now isn’t that a point, Cicchini? Consider our position, here we are bum-rapped all over the states when actually it isn’t our fault at all, we’re just a neutral quality.”
“Right!” Cicchini said to the granules, “right, you’re right, now doesn’t that say something for me, that I allowed you to be used, that I helped people to use you?” Thinking that this was an important point, a vital point on his behalf in fact, and then the granules turned on him and began to laugh.
“You fool,” one of them, apparently the spokesman, said. “You stupid fool, don’t you know that’s all been taken into account already, and besides that times have changed? Times have changed a great deal, Cicchini, the whole nature of the business has changed, things aren’t the way they used to be in 1913 or even 1963:” and the granules laughed and spattered within him, then massed and began a sidewise thrust through the delicate membranes covering the old brain.
Cicchini knew he was dying. In and out of rationality all the time, he had a great roaring sensation of collapse as perspective began to slip in and out of him like a surgeon’s knife. He kicked and scuttled on the floor, still trying to raise himself but even though the drugs had cancelled pain they had done nothing to restore mobility. They whisked through him on ice skates. He was a frozen pond; he was a reservoir. Cicchini, lolling on the floor, felt his bowels open as if all of this was happening to another man somewhere and he voided thickly, everything below mixing and congealing toward the darkness.
“You killed us, Cicchini!” the little boy said, stepping from the burning barn, “you killed the two of us, it’s all your fault,” and Cicchini could only agree: yes, that was true, he had killed the two of them. It did not seem to matter whether he had or not. Flames arched from the barn and embraced the boy in arms of fire, dragged him back into the barn and everything collapsed around him, embers and ash.
Cicchini had one last moment of lucidity. In it he was staring not at the ceiling but toward the window. He had convulsed in a half-roll, now he saw the bodies of the three men sprawled throughout the living room; through the open door of the bedroom his fixated, staring eyes saw the clumped corpse of the professor. Four dead men in a room.
Four dead men in a room, soon to be a fifth. That was all that it came down to. He had spent forty-five years swinging wide of this pattern, avoiding it, moving in greater and greater circles from the burning barn of his childhood, but this was the way that it had all ended. Maybe it was supposed to be this way. In some dark, final abscess of the heart, Cicchini understood, accepted that his life was meant to end in this way and that everything that had preceded had only been a preparation for this moment. And all else had been lies. A man was only his ending, the rest meant nothing. The death defined the man. That was all. That was all there was to it. It was as simple as that.
He tried to let out one last bellow of anguish and rage but his lungs would not take the air. They choked on the inhalation, his eyes bulged and everything broke within and tumbled down. Submissive, he went inside himself.
And Cicchini died.
XX
Karen decided to go back. His conduct this morning had been impossible but she guessed that she was no great shakes either. As a matter of fact, she had said things to him that thinking it over she probably had no right saying. Anyway, better left unsaid. If he wanted to push drugs as a little sideline it was his business, and what was the difference anyway? one way or the other everybody was into it. Drugs were no big deal. Every freshman in the dormitories blowed a little pot, dropped some speed now and then. If Phil wanted to give them what they would have gotten anyhow and make a few dollars on the side, that was his business. She had no right to complain. Did she walk on water?
Anyway, staying with a girl-friend was a bit of a drag now. Admit it: she was twenty-four years old. She was no longer an undergraduate, it was one thing to hang out with roommates when you were still in college, or barely out, but the whole life was shallow, superficial. She had better things to do with herself now, even if she didn’t want to go to graduate school, and he had no right to push her. Maybe she would get a job. In any event, part of the point of fighting was the making up. He was never so tender and considerate of her as when she came back, and sometimes the good times would go on for weeks. Days anyway.
She got out of the cab in front of the building, paid off the driver and went inside. Five o’clock now, he ought to be back. It was possible that he had stormed out as he sometimes did after one of their fights, and might not come back until late at night or even early the next morning, but she had a feeling that Phil would be waiting for her. Usually he was. He would come toward her, his face open with gratitude, his arms already reaching and she would drop her things, hold out her arms and let him touch her. The touching was nice. Sometimes the sex wasn’t so good but she really liked the beginning of it at times, and because of his fear and gratitude he would hold back for quite a while and just touch her and let himself be touched. That was good. That was just the way she liked it.
Into the vestibule, up the elevator. She had never liked this building. She had wanted to get a house right away, rent one if not buy it, have some space, but Phil had said that houses in this area were ridiculous rentals, there was no point in getting into a mortgage situation at this time, and what was all that space necessary for anyway? It was just the two of them, and would go on being the two of them for a long time. She couldn’t
fight that, even their living in a tall apartment building was just so depressing that she could scream. It was her childhood all over again. She had grown up in Forest Hills and had sworn when she got out of there to go to Radcliffe, that she would never live high off the ground again. Well, everything just went to show you. The style of living here was just like Forest Hills too. People had no contact, they avoided one another. You could get killed here and it might take weeks for someone to find you. Well, it was the only defense, she supposed, against being piled on top of one another like this.
She walked down the hall, smelling a strange odor. Her senses peaked, curious, she found that she was slowing her pace, trying to find the source of the odor. It seemed to be in front of her. She continued down the hall. Phil would probably know what it was.
The apartment door was open.
That was strange right away: you never left a door open, even if you were just carrying a bag of garbage down to the incinerator. But worse than that, she now understood, the odor seemed to be coming from inside her apartment. Closer in, she felt she could identify it; it was a sticky, dense, trapped kind of smell, the kind you would get if you bent down to an ant colony.
Suddenly she did not want to go inside.
But that was ridiculous. That was ridiculous, too: it was her home, hers and Phil’s and what could be inside there that could keep her out? Karen pushed the door and calling Phillip’s name walked inside.
And saw all of it at once.
The bodies, two of them jammed together, lolling in the shroud of bloodstained clothing, fornicating in death it seemed to be, the wizened, transparent faces looking at and past her with the dead man’s peculiar perception; further behind, under her window another corpse, more shrunken than the other two, trapped in what seemed to be the odd, precise gesture of pulling down the windowshade; blood all over, congealed, dry blood already coming off the furniture, the floor, the corpses in scabs; the blood, the odor, the corpses almost casual in their posture, as if death had only been an interruption of something interesting and important that they were doing, were going to continue. Karen lifted her hands to her face, inhaled, waited for the scream to come but the scream did not, she tried to hawk it out, past her voice box, fill her throat with it and explode the syllables, but her throat was dry, nothing would come out of it, not even gagging, not even vomit. She knew instantly that she was not going to faint. Fainting would be easy, slide to the floor, collapse, be out of it, but then she would lie amidst the corpses, would be yet another body on the floor. She felt herself slide out of all relation to the room, walls and panels shifting. In some trick of neurasthenia she saw the corpses coming much closer, bearing down upon her, the bodies floating through the air, inflated, suspended, closing the gap, the death drawing her in….