After Gregory

by Austin Wright

I don’t think the teacher should encourage his students to think about suicide. Some students are close enough to the edge already. I think the teacher should keep his pessimystical ideas to himself. It may seem funny to him but students don’t consider pessimysm a laughing matter.

  I prefer not comment on Mr. Gregory’s shortcomings as a teacher or as a man.)

  You don’t really want to know why Peter Gregory committed suicide, do you? Depressing stuff, a shadow on those glorious free days when you crossed the country with new friends.

  ELEVEN

  Fast driver in a big car with finely tooled parts, kid who called himself Crazy James and claimed he was worth a million dollars, right hand man to the famous Jack Rome, took you the last stretch across Jersey. Drive you to your very door, he said. Talked about money. Crazy James loved money, which was better than sex, because if you had only money you could get sex, but if you had only sex, you couldn’t get money.

  It turned out Joe disapproved of money. He couldn’t live a life of ease at the expense of others. He said every country estate was haunted by ghosts from the slums, and in every fat broad field and foresty space he saw the absence of subway and ghetto. He believed all property was evil, since anything you own is something nobody else can own, and five percent of the world was sitting on the other ninety-five percent. We live on theft, he said. We stole the land from the Indians, and we stole the blacks from their land. Now we’re like the rich man with the cigar in the mansion on the hill, and everybody hates us.

  Why didn’t you tell that to old Free Enterprise when you had the chance? Amy said. And Crazy James: Don’t hassle me about the poor, man, because I grew up in the jungle, so don’t tell me about greed and envy. Hell, man, I was just like you until Jack Rome came along.

  Amy said, Who’s Jack Rome?

  What, never heard of Jack Rome? While Joe scoffed, Crazy James explained. Rome Enterprises, man. Electronics, computers, copying machines. Rome Spacification Company: space equipment, rocket engines, missiles, nuclear warheads.

  I’ve heard of him, Amy said. I just didn’t know what he did.

  Why he’s your playboy in the news, patron of the arts, he makes stars in both senses of the word. Read about him in People. Versatile sonofabitch, flies his plane and goes mountain climbing in Tibet and Nepal. “Financier conquers Everest,” you just wait. Popular guy, but the real Jack Rome is the power man, who makes the money grow and people do what he wants.

  So what’s your connection? Joe said.

  His right hand man, like I say, he made me what I am today. Before Jack Rome I was nothing, I was dirt on the streets of New York, I was zero. Now you see me a million dollars worth, the best cars, the best clothes, talking to the best people, all the women a man could need, doing what I like.

  How did you manage that?

  It’s called a Me Grant.

  What’s that?

  A personal grant from Jack Rome. A grant for being me. To live my style and be myself.

  How’d you get that?

  I asked and he gave.

  Does he give out other Me Grants?

  Ask him yourself.

  Meanwhile, you watched as Crazy James zipped you lane to lane in the thickened traffic. Grim hostile drivers of the speeding cars close alongside and truck drivers up in their cabs, while you crouched in your namelessness like a cage.

  Crazy James: You may have heard, when Jack Rome’s wife and son were kidnapped by a religious cult. I kidnapped them back. Grabbed them off the street, whisked them into the car. To deprogram them. That was me, in case you remember.

  A john stop, where you shied away from the crowds around the candy counter and the souvenir counters. The ride resumed and like a wild animal captured, you watched life in the strings of wires leaping in high tension webs across the fields. The brutal murderous highway was six black lanes crowded with fast trucks and tankers and the smell of diesel. Visiting animals stared at the office plants, the long low glass buildings, the fields of fat colored cylindrical oil tanks, the parallel roads running for miles with used car lots and pinwheels and drive-in banks and fast food. The city thickened all around. In the haze across the flats you saw the zigzag of a cantilever bridge and the deck house and lifeboats of an ocean-going ship looming over a field of grass. You saw a blocky horizon of apartment houses on a ridge and suddenly behind like magic the transparent blue skyscrapers of the city, carried by a trick of light over the curvature of the earth, over what you could not yet see: the broad river in between and the imaginary crowds and traffic around their invisible feet. Meanwhile Crazy James still talking about Jack Rome’s money dipped you into the poisonous tunnel. He was taking you to your fortune, though you didn’t know it then.

  Down under the river then up and out into plain daylight, a city street, a traffic light, and you terrified as if you had not climbed out of the river until now. Traffic jam, competitive driving, Crazy James and the cabdrivers trying to edge ahead, a game of intimidation with one inhibiting rule: don’t touch. Then suddenly free and the next moment they stopped, a cross street downtown, the middle of a block, heart of the great city.

  Everybody out. What? You stood on the sidewalk, shocked, this outcome you hadn’t given enough thought to. You watched Crazy James (see ya sometime guys) zip off down the street. Leaving you. No wooded groves here by the stoop of this old brown apartment building. You awkward while Joe rummaged in his jeans for his keys. Where they live, and time for you to go. Go where? You had landed in the city like a missile on a trajectory. Now on your own with no place to go, no ideas in your head, in all your brief lifetime you had never felt so miserable and low.

  Well, they took you in. Fourth floor, the hallway shabby and warm, stinky with cooking cheese, sweaty woodwork, and old laundry, with a sound of classical music. An old apartment, rooms off a corridor. Dark—only the front room and kitchen received outside light. A stereo set, a couch, cushions on the floor, posters. Amy and Joe slept in the back.

  You met the others that evening. There were Hank Gummer and Lucy Angles, who lived in the middle room, and Stowe Thompson, who slept on a cot in the front. Hank Gummer was a thick young man, almost bald, who had been a medical student and was now a cab driver. Hank’s depressed, they said. That’s why he’s so quiet. Lucy Angles, tall with black pigtails and large front teeth, was suffering through with him. She clerked in a typewriter store across the street. She would rather an arts and crafts store in the next block, but the store had failed. Stowe Thompson was short and fat and grinned like an elf. He worked in a stereo store, owned science fiction books, and wore a white shirt and red necktie.

  That evening the six of you ate dinner in the kitchen, cooked by Stowe Thompson. By now you knew Joe was a free lance photographer, and Amy was returning to a job in the library. They explained you to the others. They told how you had met on the road, and how Murry Bree was not your real name, and how Peter Gregory had done it because his wife left him—everything as they knew it. They all admired your daring, talked and talked (except Hank Gummer) and agreed to help you start a new life. They set up a cot in the front room. In the morning we find you a job, Joe said.

  Then the night. You lay on the cot sharing the room with Stowe Thompson, listening to the city outside the window. You heard your new friends walking up and down the hall, flushing the toilet, whispering between doors. You heard Stowe Thompson’s nose whistling in his sleep. The nights on the road flowed through you like a river. You realized you had achieved something, but time stopped here at this moment in the night, and you didn’t want any more, not tonight, or the morning, the next day, or any time to come. You were too tired.

  TWELVE

  Your friends got you a job as Murry Bree in a restaurant down the street. You went there at noon, wore a white coat, and washed dishes until ten at night. Joe said he envied you. The thing is you don’t have to be anybody, he said. Nothing to worry about but the necessities of life. This was an interlude in your life, no more than two months, but yo
u thought it was the future dragging on forever.

  What are the necessities of life? Good question. Food, shelter, clothes. Joe took you to buy a pair of jeans, a denim jacket, another shirt, socks, some underwear. Are there other necessities? When Amy said, Don’t you find it boring, washing dishes all day? you didn’t want to say. As Murry Bree, you were afraid of time—not its passing, but its accumulation, its way of massing into chunks of past spilling over boundaries.

  Your friends wanted to give you more versatility. You should try cab driving, Lucy Angles said, while morose Hank Gummer, who actually drove a cab, said nothing. Go everywhere, meet all kinds, never know what’ll happen next. But to do that you’ll need a license—which requires a birth certificate, which you ought to have anyway, for that’s the key to everything: license, passport, a certified name. You’ll have to change your name again, but now you’ll have something to show for it. You got your birth certificate by a method Stowe Thompson had seen in a movie. First you decide when you were born. Then out with your friends to Queens to find the death records of two-year old boy children thirty-three years ago. Though you did not know how they died, you found five names.

  Stanley Caruso

  Gregory McHenry

  Jasper Linkowitz

  John Figueroa

  Stephen White

  You picked one. When your chosen name, wrinkled by a seal with a number and date of birth, and registrar’s signature rubber stamped, came from The Bureau of Vital Statistics, they had a christening party. Your parents were Walter Jerome White and Mary Green White. Stowe Thompson thought any of the other names was more interesting, but otherwise it was a happy occasion.

  Stephen White got a job in the Corner Typewriter Shop. That was the end of Murry Bree. The new job was Lucy Angles’ former one when she found what she wanted in the Arts and Crafts Shop. He worked for Mr. Crestmeyer, who said, God knows I’d rather Lucy, but she says I gotta take you, so I take you. Mr. Crestmeyer had a tattooed number on his arm. They said he had lost everybody, wife, children, parents. He came to this country knowing nobody and without a language. He never mentioned it and was mild and gentle and sad.

  Stephen White worked from nine to six. People came in and he said, Can I help you? He spent most of the time at the table by the door looking out the window. Business was not good because everyone was using computers. God knows you a quiet fella, Mr. Crestmeyer said. In the evenings Stephen read the newspaper in the living room and listened to the others talk. He liked to listen as if he were participating, learning how to be Stephen White. He liked Amy especially, with her natural hair and unmadeup face, knowing all his secrets. Without jealousy. He had no wish to take her from Joe, and the threat of anything wrong between them would have alarmed him like the divorce of parents. Unfortunately, she brought him into time. She created a memory and made him look ahead. Of course Stephen White would need a memory and you would have to give him one, but you couldn’t do that until there was more of him. Until then, memory could only rebuild Gregory and deplete you.

  He got used to the face in the shaving mirror, mainly by not looking at it, or not looking at it whole. He hardly noticed it, but if he caught a glimpse unwarned in a store mirror or shop window, the frail body, the balding head, the baggy eyes, it still shocked him, requiring a deliberate effort to remind himself it wasn’t Peter Gregory following him around. He read newspapers and magazines, but books were out because they carried over from one day to the next. Movies were out too. Too many people in them, anger, jealousy, pride. He didn’t want to feel sad or grieved or guilty until he could feel them as Stephen White. No old music, either, recalling Peter Gregory’s taste, that broad sunny summit where he used to lie and think how civilized he was. A boast. From here the peak of civilization was indistinguishable from the vanity in Gregory’s soul. That soul loomed over the infant Stephen White like a cat waiting to eat him up. Everything was dangerous except news and the casual chatter of friends.

  What else was there to do? Out of a Gregory shadow came a sexual taunt: how free you are, if you only knew. He didn’t know if he knew or not. Weak and trembling, he went out. Looking. He saw the letter X, the word ADULT, and tried that, watched the rolling flesh, the magnified organs, the heavy groany sounds. So that’s what they do, Stephen White said. How uncurious he had been all this time. Odd, for Gregory would have gone crazy from celibacy. This must be puberty. You became conscious of virginity, another time-bound thought, wondering how to end it, replace X with real life. He couldn’t imagine real life, a live stranger’s eyes, real, too close looking into his face asking his name.

  The summer was heating up. On Sundays he rode on the bus to parks in far parts of the city. Days bright and full of thick strands of warm air, odor of flowers mixed with the smell of baking and trucks. On a bench looking at the harbor. It spread out, dazzling with silver shafts. The sun glared down and squinted his eyes shut. Sitting there, you thought what is he waiting for? If you give up waiting for things, you won’t need them. You won’t need real women, strange or not.

  In the glare of the sun, shining on his face, warming and slowing his brain, the pursuit of a woman seemed like someone else’s idea, not his own. Gregory’s no doubt. He leaned back in the bench, shifted his hams, watching a couple of tugboats with barges. He looks again at the harbor, now in the present tense. Sharp afternoon wind choppily whipping up waves across the bay. Nothing to come and nothing behind. Stephen White lives now. Untied from the past, free of the future. With eyes dazzled almost shut and scarcely any difference at all between the felt glare and the eventual cease of the glare. Makes you wonder why you tried so hard in the river.

  How small the world is now, he thinks in the present tense. How little exists in the present tense, a slight agitation of the mind, a few flapping images. How thin, like a strand of hair, is the new Stephen White, in contrast to that imaginary Gregory, whose present tense was so full of junk, such blocks of nonexistent past and future, such fictions of fantasy and memory.

  Take them away and you’re left with a physics and chemistry of light and convection currents that stir the air and water and make bodies circulate and move. Now in the empty white present, free of memory and hope, the only presences are Amy and some other vaguely felt, unidentified object, perhaps large. This object no doubt is himself, dim, bulky, blunt, monolithic, occupying an empty place. He locates it, the true identity, in his pants, tingling just slightly, stirring its rudimentary nerve ends. It makes a slight personality, a slight aggression into the space around.

  THIRTEEN

  The night before you got away (though you did not know that was coming), Hank Gummer was upset because he’d seen a man killed by a bus. This led to a conversation about death. For once, Hank Gummer talked at length, and everybody had a point of view.

  He said, The thing I can’t stand about life is death. Nobody seems to realize what an outrage it is.

  Joe said, If it happens to all of us, it must be natural. A bird flies away from a cat, but it doesn’t worry about death.

  Lucy Angles said, I expect to meet my father and mother in heaven. I am confident of that.

  Stowe Thompson said, Time is an illusion. But if time is an illusion, then so is change. If change is an illusion, likewise death. Quod erat demonstrandum.

  Hank Gummer said, You’re not listening to me. I’m depressed. I was reading this book which says the mind is just a computer, no center, no spirit, no self, just an illusion of software. The trouble is, I can’t refute it. Any objection I make is naive. I’m a chemical accident, the whole show’s a chemical accident, no way I can refute it. My mind’s a moment’s flickering that will vanish in the rocks and stones. That’s depressing, man.

  Stowe said, Depression is chemistry. You need a pill. You don’t need to be depressed, because it’s only chemistry making things look bad. It’s not so bad except for the chemistry.

  Hank Gummer said, Jesus, I got a right to be depressed. Think about entropy. You know? Everything r
unning down, stars, galaxies, ending up in a lukewarm soup. If that don’t depress you, nothing will, man.

  Lucy Angles said, Don’t you believe in life after death? I put my faith in God and heaven.

  Joe said, My job in life is to carry my weight. We’re all in it together. If there are people starving in Africa or being tortured in prisons, that’s my business.

  Hank Gummer said, You fill your life with achievements and crap, but when you die it will be as if you never lived. Don’t give me no heaven crap or floating spirits, dead is gone, out, dirt and rocks, don’t that depress you?

  Amy said, My grandmother lost her memory. If you lose your memory, you won’t mind dying.

  Hank said, Did you ever look into the future, any of you? Some day you’ll die and some day the sun will too. Any astronomer will tell you. The earth burns up, and then where’s your Beethoven and your Elvis and your Baseball Hall of Fame? Don’t that depress you? I’d get mad, but who can I complain to? It’s like the whole world an empty barn with the wind blowing through holes which is about to fall down.

  Stowe Thompson said, You’re just depressed, Hank. Go see a shrink and get a pill, for Christ sake.

  Death in the river lights was outrage, goading you to the opposite shore. Now as you lay in bed waiting for sleep, death seemed easy and sweet. Probably it wouldn’t seem so easy in the morning: you had a strong kicking body which would put up a fight. But it seemed easier than turning into Stephen White.

  Here you had done an amazing thing. You had boldly said, Enough, and by one quick act cleared out the ruined time like dead trees. Then by struggling across the open country, trying out names, you composed a new past to replace the old. Now they wanted you to stuff future into Stephen White. Add imagination to memory, fill him out a little. But if the figure of speech should fail, you’d be back where you started, stuck in the muck of Gregory’s memory and discredited hopes. Without knowing what to wish for, you could make no plans. You needed a miracle.