The Throat

by Peter Straub

  Wonderfully, my friends distracted me from this sense of disarrangement by fussing over my injury and demanding to hear the story of how I had managed to get myself shot in the shoulder by a distinguished professor of religion. The story was a long story, and it took a long time to tell. They wouldn’t settle for summations, they wanted details and vivid recreation. Maggie Lah was particularly interested in what had happened on the morning I got lost in the fog and told me that it was simple, really. “You walked into your book. You saw your character, and he was yourself. That’s why you told the man in the ambulance that your name was Fee Bandolier. Because what else is the point of this book you’re writing?”

  “You’re too smart,” I said, flinching a little at her perception.

  “You better write this book, get it out of your system,” she answered, and that was perceptive, too.

  When Vinh brought plates of delicious Vietnamese food up from Saigon’s kitchen—an internal takeout—Maggie insisted that he go back downstairs for soup. “This is a person who requires a great deal of soup,” she said, and Vinh must have agreed, because he went right back down and came back with enough soup to feed us all for a week, most of it parceled out into containers that he put into my refrigerator.

  Michael Poole wanted to know about the Franklin Bachelor period of Fee Bandolier’s life and if I thought I understood what had happened when John Ransom reached Bachelor’s encampment. “Didn’t he say that he got there two days before the other man? What did he do there, for two whole days?”

  “Eat soup,” Maggie said.

  These friends clustered around me like a family, which is what they are, at various times and for various periods, separately and together, for two or three days, and then, because they knew I needed it, began giving me more time by myself.

  Using one finger, turned at an unfamiliar angle to the keyboard, I started typing what I had written in John’s house into the computer. What would normally have taken me about a week dragged out to two weeks. The hooks and ratchets in my back heated up and rolled over, and every half hour or so I had to stand up and back into the wall to press them back into place. My doctor gave me a lot of pills that contained some codeine, but after I discovered that the codeine slowed me down even further and gave me a headache, I stopped using them. I typed on for another couple of days, trying to ignore both the pain in my back and the sensation of a larger disorder.

  Byron Dorian’s painting arrived via UPS, and five days later April’s Vuillard turned up, wrapped in foot-thick bubble wrap within a wooden case. The men who delivered it even hung it for me—all part of the service. I put the paintings on the long blank wall that faced my desk, so that I could look up and see them while I worked.

  Tom Pasmore called, saying that he was still “fooling around,” whatever that meant. John Ransom called with the news that he had found a place for Alan in Golden Manor, a nursing home with lake views from most of the rooms. “The place looks like a luxury hotel and costs a fortune, but Alan can certainly afford it,” John said. “I hope I can afford it, or something like it, when I’m his age.”

  “How is he doing?” I asked.

  “Oh, physically, he’s improved a lot. He’s up and around, he doesn’t look so small anymore, and he’s eating well. I meant that in both senses. The food at the place is better than it is in most restaurants around here.”

  “And mentally?”

  “Mentally, he goes in and out. Sometimes, it’s like talking to the old Alan, and other times, he just disconnects and talks to himself. To tell you the truth, though, I think that’s happening less and less.” Without transition, he asked if I had received the painting. I said I had and thanked him for it.

  “You know it cost about a thousand bucks to get it packed and shipped by those guys?”

  Around eight o’clock one night, three in the morning for him, Glenroy Breakstone called me from France and announced that he wanted to talk about Ike Quebec. He talked about Ike Quebec for forty minutes. Whatever Glenroy was using these days, they had a lot of it in France. When he had finished, he said, “You’re on my list now, Tim. You’ll be hearing from me.”

  “I hope I will,” I said, telling him nothing but the truth.

  The next morning, I finished typing out everything I had written in Millhaven. To celebrate, I went straight to bed and slept for an hour—I’d hardly been able to sleep at night ever since I’d returned. I went downstairs and ate lunch at Saigon. After I got back up to my loft, I started writing new scenes, new dialogue again. And that’s when my troubles really began.

  2

  SLEEPLESSNESS must have been part of the trouble. In the same way that the fingers of my left hand had mysteriously lost the ability to type, my body had lost its capacity to sleep. During my first nights back in New York, I came awake about four in the morning and spent the rest of the night lying in bed with my eyes closed, waiting until long past dawn for the gradual mental slippage, the loosening of rationality, which signals the beginning of unconsciousness. To make up for the lost sleep, I took hour-long naps after lunch. Then I began waking at three in the morning, with the same results. I tried reading and wound up reading until morning. By the end of the first week, I was going to bed at eleven and waking up at two in the morning. After another four or five nights, I never went to sleep at all. I took off my clothes and brushed my teeth, got into bed, and instantly felt as though I’d just gulped down a double espresso.

  I couldn’t blame the cast or the pains in my back and shoulder. These were uncomfortable, awkward, and irritating, but they were not the problem. My body had forgotten how to sleep at night. I went back to my doctor, who gave me sleeping pills. For two nights, I took the pills before going to bed, with the alarming result that I’d come out of a lengthy daze at six in the morning, standing by the window or sitting on the couch, with no memory of what had happened since I had stretched out on my bed. Instead of sleep, I’d had amnesia. I threw the pills away, took two-hour naps in the middle of the day, and waited it out. By the time I began writing fresh material, I had stopped going to bed—I took a shower around midnight, changed clothes, and alternately worked, read, and walked around my loft. Sometimes I turned off the lights and wrote in the dark. I took a lot of aspirin and vitamin C. Sometimes I wandered into the kitchen and gazed at the surreal buildings that Tom’s computer had invented. Then I went back to my desk and lost myself in my made-up world.

  Despite my fatigue, my work went leaping ahead of me like some animal, tiger or gazelle, that I was trying to capture. I was scarcely conscious of writing—the experience was more like being written. I saw everything, smelled everything, touched everything. During those hours, I ceased to exist. Like a medium, I just wrote it down. By the time I began to awaken to my various aches, it was seven or eight in the morning. I tottered to my bed, lay down, and rested while my mind kept pursuing the leaping tiger. After fifteen minutes of exhausted nonsleep, I got up and went back to the machine.

  Sometimes I noticed that I had spent an entire night writing Fee Bandolier instead of Charlie Carpenter.

  All of this should have been joyous, and most of the time it was. But even when I was most absorbed in my work, during those periods when I had no personal existence, some dormant part of me flailed about in an emotional extremity. After I stopped typing, my fingers trembled—even the fingers trapped in the cast were quivering. I had entered the childhood of Fielding Bandolier, and dread and terror were his familiars. But not all of the trouble came from what I was writing.

  During my two-hour naps, I dreamed of being back on the body squad and plunging my hands into dead and dismembered bodies. I encountered the skinny young VC on Striker Tiger and froze, blank and mindless, while he raised his ancient rifle and sent a bullet into my brain. I stepped on a mine and turned into red mist, like Bobby Swett. I walked across a clearing so crowded with dead men that I had to step over their bodies, looked down to see purple-and-silver entrails spilling out of my gut, and fell
down in acknowledgment of my own death. Paul Fontaine sat up on his gurney with his gun in his hand and said, Bell, and blew my chest apart with a bullet.

  For twenty years, the afternoons had been the hours when I did the bulk of my work. After I forgot how to sleep at night, after I began walking into hell every time I took a nap, those hours turned to stone. What I wrote came out forced and spiritless. I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t write. So I tucked my notebook into my pocket and went out on long walks.

  I trudged through Soho. I passed unseeing through Washington Square. I hovered distracted in the Three Lives bookstore and came back to myself in Books & Co., miles away. Now and then, some grudging little incident found its way into the notebook, but most of the time I was in Millhaven. People I had never seen before turned into John Ransom and Tom Pasmore. The lightless eyes and rusty face of Ross McCandless slanted toward me from the window of a passing bus. Block after block, I walked along Livermore Avenue, finally saw the sign outside the White Horse Tavern, and realized that I was on Hudson Street.

  Around seven o’clock on what turned out to be the last of these miserable journeys, I walked past a liquor store, stopped moving, and went back and bought a bottle of vodka. If what I needed was unconsciousness, I knew how to get it. I carried the bottle home in the white plastic carrier bag, set it on the kitchen shelf and stared at it. Sweating, I paced around the loft for a long time. Then I went back into the kitchen, twisted the cap off the bottle, and poured the vodka into the sink.

  As soon as the last of it disappeared into the drain, I went downstairs for dinner and told everybody I was feeling much better today, thank you, just a little trouble sleeping. I forced myself to eat at least half of the food on my plate, and drank three bottles of mineral water. Maggie Lah came out of the kitchen, took a long look at me, and sat down across the table. “You’re in trouble,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  I said I wasn’t too sure.

  “Sometimes I hear you walking around in the middle of the night. You can’t sleep?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “You could try going to one of those veterans’ meetings. They might help you.”

  “Veterans of Millhaven don’t have meetings,” I said, and told her not to worry about me.

  She said something about therapy, stood up, kissed the top of my head, and left me alone again.

  When I got back into my loft, I double-checked my locks, something I’d been doing four and five times a night since my return, took a shower, put on clean clothes, and went to my desk and turned on the computer. When I saw that my hands were still shaking, Maggie’s words came back to me. They sounded no more acceptable now than they had the first time. Years before, I’d gone twice to a veterans’ group, but the people there had been in another war altogether. As for therapy, I’d rather go directly to the padded rooms and the electroshock table. I tried to get back into the world of my work and found that I could not even remember the last words I’d written. I called up the chapter, pushed HOME HOME and the button with the arrow that pointed down, which instantly delivered me to the point where I had stopped work that morning. Then the nightly miracle took place once again, and I fell down into the throat of my novel.

  3

  SOMETHING ASTOUNDING, no other word will do, happened to me the next day. Its cause was an ordinary moment, banal in every outward way; but what it called up was another moment, not at all ordinary, from the archaic story ringed with warnings about looking back I had imagined concealed behind Orpheus and Lot’s wife, and this glimpse did turn me into something like a pillar of salt, at least for a while.

  My own cries had jerked me up out of the usual daymares, napmares mingling Vietnam and Millhaven. My shirt was stuck to my skin, and the cushion I used as a pillow was slick with sweat. I ripped off the shirt and groaned my way into the bathroom to splash cold water over my face. In a fresh shirt, I went up to my desk, sat down before the computer and searched for that capacity for surrender which gave me access to my book. I hated the whole idea of going outside again. As it had on every other afternoon for the past two weeks, the door into the book refused to open. I gave up, left the machine, and paced around my loft in a state suspended between life and death. My loft seemed like a cage built for some other prisoner altogether. It came to me that my strange afternoon treks around Manhattan might be an essential part of the night’s work—that they might be what allowed my imagination to fill itself up again. It also came to me that this was magical thinking. But worthless as it was, it was the best idea I had, and I let myself out of the cage and went out onto Grand Street.

  Warm summer light shone on the windows of art galleries and clothing stores, and women from New Jersey and Connecticut strolled like travelers from a more affluent planet among the locals. Today, most of the locals seemed to be young men in pressed jeans and rugby shirts. They were Wall Street trainees, embryo versions of Dick Mueller, who had taken over artists’ lofts when the rents in Soho had pushed the artists into Hoboken and Brooklyn. I tried to picture Dick Mueller hovering over the arugala at Dean & DeLuca, but failed. Neither could I see Dick bragging to his friends about the Cindy Sherman photograph he had picked up for a good price at Metro Gallery. My mood began to improve.

  I stopped in front of my local video shop, thinking about renting Babette’s Feast for the twentieth time. I could catch up on all the Pedro Almodovar films I hadn’t seen, or have a private Joan Crawford retrospective, beginning with Strait-Jacket. Along with all the usual Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise posters in the window was one for a line of film noir released on video for the first time. Now we’re talking, I thought, and moved up to inspect the poster. Alongside a reproduction of the box for Pickup on South Street was that for From Dangerous Depths, the movie that Tom said had been playing in our neighborhood at the time of the Blue Rose murders. I peered at the picture on the box, looking for details. From Dangerous Depths starred Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino and had been directed by Robert Siod-mak. I told myself that I would rent it someday and moved on.

  At the Spring Street Bookstore, I bought John Ashbery’s Flow Chart and took a quick, unforeseen spin into desperation while I signed the credit slip. I saw myself pouring the vodka into the drain the previous night. I wanted it back, I wanted a big cold glass of liquid narcotic in my hand. As soon as I got out of the bookstore, I went into a cafe and took a table at the opposite end of the room from the bar to order whatever kind of mineral water they had. The waiter brought me an eight-ounce bottle of Pellegrino, and I made myself drink it slowly while I opened the Ashbery book and read the first few pages. The desperation began to recede. I finished the water and devoured another hundred lines of Flow Chart. Then I left some bills on the table and walked back out into the sunlight.

  What happened next might have been the culmination of all these events. It might have been the result of getting only two hours of sleep every day or of the wretched dreams that jumped out at me during those hours. But I don’t think it was any of those things. I think it happened because it had been waiting to happen.

  A long gray Mercedes pulled into a parking space across the street, and a huge bearded blond man got out and locked his door. He looked like Thor dressed in artist uniform, black shirt and black trousers. His hair fell in one long wave to just above his collar, and his beard foamed and bristled. Although I’d never met him, I recognized him as a painter named Allen Stone who had become famous in the period between Andy Warhol and Julian Schnabel. He’d just had a retrospective, negatively reviewed almost everywhere, at the Whitney. Allen Stone turned away from his car and glanced at me with cold, pale blue eyes.

  I saw. That was all that happened, but it was enough. I saw.

  On a mental screen that obliterated the street before me, Heinz Stenmitz’s great blond head loomed over me. He was grinning like a wolf, pressing one hand against the back of my neck as I knelt in semidarkness, crowded between his vast legs, my arm across his lap, my fingers held tight around t
he great veiny red thing straining up at me out of his trousers. This, the center and foreground of the scene, pulsed in my hand. “Put it in your mouth, Timmy,” he said, almost pleading, and urged my head toward the other head, my mouth toward the other little mouth.

  I shuddered, recoiled, and the vision blew apart. Allen Stone had turned away from whatever he saw in my face and was moving past the front of his car toward a set of double black doors set into an ornate building at the level of the sidewalk.

  Heat blazed in my face. My scalp tried to peel itself away from my skull. My stomach flipped inside-out, and I stepped forward and deposited a pink mixture of Italian water and partially digested Vietnamese food into the gutter. Too shocked to be embarrassed, I stood looking down at the mess. When my insides contracted again, I drooled out another heap of the pink lava. I wobbled back on the sidewalk and saw two of the well-dressed suburban women, their faces stiff with disgust, standing stock-still about six feet away from me. They jerked their eyes away and hurried across the street.

  I wiped my mouth and moved toward the corner, separating myself from the spatter in the gutter. My legs seemed disconnected and much too long. Fee Bandolier, I said to myself.

  When I got back to Grand Street, I fell into a chair and began to cry, as if I had needed the safety of my own surroundings to experience the enormity of whatever I felt—shock and grief. Anger, too. A glance on the street had just unlocked a moment, a series of moments, I had stuffed into a chest forty years ago. I had wrapped chain after chain around the chest. Then I had dropped the chest down into a psychic well. It had been bubbling and simmering ever since. Among all the feelings that rushed up from within was astonishment—this had happened to me, to me, and I had deliberately, destructively forgotten all about it.