He saw me. “Did you see that?” he said angrily. Howard’s not tall, and he isn’t fat. His skin’s not good, and his clothes don’t fit. He probably isn’t as young as he looks. “Did you see what the Nazis did to my radio?”
“Could it be the battery?” I asked. I don’t often speak, but I was moved by Howard’s evident distress.
“Fucking Nazis,” Howard breathed, “fucking around with my radio.”
He had brought medicine for my Employer. My Employer was out so I took the package and put it on his desk. My hand was still on the package when something brown and square fell past the window and landed with a noise of shattering glass on the blind courtyard pavement below.
Howard was right behind me.
“Did you see what it was?” I asked.
“Fucking Nazis up there,” said Howard definitely and pointed to the ostensibly empty loft above. “Throwing shit out the fucking window. Destroying innocent people on the ground.”
I went to the window and raised it. The ledge was caked with pigeon stool, uninterpretable even in such mass. Howard and I leaned out. I couldn’t make out, in the heap of detritus below, what had been thrown out of the window above.
Howard hurled his radio against the back wall of the building opposite. It shattered and spilled down the bricks. Karl came to his window and mouthed imprecations at us. As Karl raised his window, I lowered my Employer’s.
Howard and I went to the front of the loft. I see Howard frequently—as frequently as I see anyone in the world actually, except my Employer—but we rarely talk at any length. I offered Howard a cup of coffee, but he had brought his own.
I sat behind my desk. Howard sat behind me, perched on the window ledge. Over my shoulder, he complained about his job, which was neither more nor less than delivering small packages for the pharmacist two streets over.
“Fucking cows,” he said darkly. “Old cows always trying to kiss me. They say to me, ‘You from the pharmacist?’ I say, ‘Yes.’ They say, ‘I can’t get up. Bring it in the bedroom.’ So I fight my way to the bedroom. Old cows lying in wait, jump on my back, kiss me. What’s a man for? Just to kiss old cows? I got this trick, see? I learned how to vomit. Any time. Like there’s a trigger in my throat. Old cow wants to kiss me, I let her, see. I let her get her lips up to mine, and I pull the trigger. Pull the trigger, and vomit on the old cow’s mouth. I say ‘Sorry, I guess I got sick.’ Then their whole place stinks, and they got to move out ’cause the whole place stinks like my vomit forever. Fucking cow tries to kiss me, she’s got to find a new place to live. That’s revenge.”
Howard’s conversation didn’t please me. I knew it wouldn’t. It never had before. There had been no reason to believe that this day’s exchange would be pleasanter. And yet I had asked him to talk to me. I wanted something from him. I had the feeling when I first saw him in the elevator, shaking the defunct radio at his ear, that Howard would be of some use to me. I wasn’t sure how. Time and circumstance would show that. I let him talk on. He sipped loudly at his coffee behind me. He was bored, I could sense that. I wasn’t used to talking to people. I didn’t know how to make Howard feel at ease. I tried to think of something to say.
I said, “If you don’t like the job, why do you stay in it?”
“Big tips,” said Howard.
I gave him a small bill.
He seemed disposed to linger.
“Shitty job,” he remarked after a while. He crushed his coffee cup.
“What would you rather do?”
“Join the army,” he said.
“Why don’t you?” I asked. “The army’s frequently recruiting.”
“Tried,” said Howard. “Wouldn’t let me in. I was too smart. Broke all their fucking rating machines when I took their fucking tests. That was it. Too smart. I saw too much. I saw the right answers like they was written in the margins. Broke the fucking machines. Army sent me a bill for breaking their goddamn fucking rating machines, I said, ‘You let me in, and you take the money out of my paycheck.’ ”
Howard took a walk around my office. He picked up the things on my desk. He was restless again, but I didn’t want to let him go yet. I had the feeling that I was supposed to learn something from him, or more precisely, I sensed that he had been sent there to tell me something and only waited for the password to deliver his message. My Employer’s medicine was only a blind. I was afraid he’d go without telling me what it was needful for me to know. Moreover, I had to get him to speak before my Employer returned, and my Employer was expected back at any moment.
“Malcontent,” I said, hoping that was the code word. “Lettuce. Punctual.”
Howard shook his head slowly. I hadn’t guessed right. “Got to move on,” he said.
I couldn’t let him leave. Frantically, I said the first thing that came into my head: “What do you know about that gang?”
“What gang?” he asked quickly, and turned and looked at me closely.
I smiled with the certain knowledge that I had asked the right question. I had guessed the code words.
“The gang with the hourglass on their jackets.”
Howard said nothing, but he had stopped moving about the room.
“The hourglass with wings,” I said.
“The Fuggits,” said Howard.
“Tempus Fugit,” I corrected.
“They’re called the Fuggits,” Howard said, as if I’d said nothing. “That who you mean?”
I nodded. “Two women . . .”
“Shade and Shadow,” said Howard.
“Three men,” I said.
“Clay, Dust, and Ashes,” said Howard.
“What do you know about them?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Howard.
“I saw them attack a man last night,” I said. “They took off all his clothes and left him in an alleyway.”
Howard said nothing. He went to the window and looked out of it.
“The Fuggits?” I said. “You’re certain?”
“Come to my house tomorrow,” said Howard. “Meet my grandfather.”
“I don’t know where you live,” I said.
Howard took a map out of his pocket and marked his address with a black circle. He lived in another, but nearby, neighborhood.
“I work on Saturday,” I said.
“Come after work,” said Howard and left.
My Employer didn’t return for some time. I needn’t have hurried so with the code word.
The remainder of the day was uneventful, yet the emptiness of those hours reverberated with purpose and with meaning for me. Howard, I was convinced, was a Messenger. Whose I did not know. His message I could not conceive, but I was confident of receiving it on Saturday night when I visited him in his home—or in that place Howard in this venture had been instructed to call his home. I was proud that I had found him out. Not every one passing such a man as Howard Dormin on the street would have picked out his essential identity as a Messenger. His instructions, no doubt, had been to feel me out, to discover whether my discernment was sufficient, my instincts up to the mark. They were, most evidently, for Howard had scheduled another and obviously private meeting.
At his house, I was persuaded, I would discover what I needed to know.
My Employer returned. I continued to work on the tasks he had set out for me. Every once in a while I went to my window and looked down into the street, just in case there was something there I would want to be apprised of. Gradually, the trash and leavings of the manufacturing concerns in the lofts below us began to build up outside—barrels of sawdust, wired bales of fabric scraps, boxes of synthetic stuffing—until the sidewalk was nearly impassable with it. I sometimes wished that some of the workers spoke English so that I might discover, at last, what it was that was actually done in those lower lofts. If finished products of some description were ever taken out of those lofts and loaded into trucks. I never recognized them as such. There was something, I think I may say, sinister in all this, but the workers
never bothered my Employer or me, and the police never came with guns.
Below on the sidewalk, I watched a woman, about sixty years of age I should say, with a little hat and a clasped purse, as she moved what was apparently her whole household. She had six large suitcases, as many shopping bags, two wooden crates of manageable size, three hat boxes tied up, and a couple of cardboard cartons secured with twine. She moved them by hand, one by one, eight feet at a time, building up one heap of belongings to the west as she diminished her previous heap to the east. It reminded me of a mathematical game called the Pyramids of Luxor. That morning on the way to work, I remembered having passed her, but then she stood still, with her purse clasped before her, and I assumed she waited for a cab. As the day wore on, she moved from one end of the block to the other, but where she had come from and where she was going, I had no idea. When I left my Employer’s office late that afternoon, squeezing my way along the sidewalk between the wired bales of fabric scraps and the pyramided stacks of synthetic stuffing, I passed her again. A truck driver, his van empty, had stopped and asked if he couldn’t transport the things for her in his truck—it would be no problem, he assured her—but the woman berated him as ungentlemanly for approaching her without being properly introduced.
I was glad of this momentary distraction. It made me realize that this was not a normal day and that I should not pursue my normal course home. Anyway, the previous day’s events had altered my whole life. My old ways and courses would no longer serve. I should not, I told myself, simply return directly home by my former, well-trodden path. For one thing, I did not want to pass the grocery that had begun this adventure with its false sign:
DEATH IN THE FAMILY
For another, I was certain that I had already accomplished what was required of me that day—I had seen Howard, I had subtly informed Howard that I saw through his disguise to his essential identity as a Messenger, I had accepted his invitation to a meeting. I felt, in short, that I had done my duty and that I ought to be rewarded for it. I decided to visit Annie.
I turned the corner suddenly and headed for the neighborhood where Annie works. It is close by, but entirely to be distinguished from, on the one hand, the neighborhood where I work and, on the other hand, the neighborhood where I live. It is quite distinct, moreover, from the neighborhood where Annie has her own flat.
Annie works in one of those areas made up entirely of vast city office buildings interspersed with such businesses as cater to the diurnal needs of city workers—cheap restaurants, stalls that provide umbrellas in rainy weather and sunglasses in clement, musty card shops, and shoe stores dealing in slightly damaged imports. Single-handedly Annie runs one of those small places that produce photographic prints in a matter of hours. Office workers drop exposed film off on the way to work and pick up the finished prints on their way home. Annie therefore has long hours, arriving well before the city offices are open and leaving only when the city offices are closed and the entire neighborhood appears deserted.
The shop is small, with wide plate-glass windows. Annie stands at a counter in the back, with lozenged shelves behind her—rather like wineracks—holding boxes of unexposed film for purchase. In front of the shop are two large machines, cumbersome and steely, which in one long sequence develop a roll of film, wash the negatives, and expose them to produce a long roll of colorful prints, which then—in equally ingenious manner—are snipped off by a knife operating by means of an electric eye. The two machines are arranged in the front windows so that the still wet rolls of photographic prints can be seen unrolling out of the bowels of the machine, thin, narrow, colorful tongues that speak with a wrenching eloquence of the banality of city office workers’ lives.
Before going inside Annie’s shop, I always stand outside for a few minutes, watching these rolls of photographs rolling by in stately, inexorable procession. I am thrilled by this undeserved insight into the lives of strangers. I imagine myself Howard, hovering on the threshold of a strange apartment, gazing at a tableau formulated by my ringing of the doorbell. Here, in Annie’s domain, are more tableaux, rectangular, regular, colored, smiling, silent, and dead.
My lingering before the window also gives Annie the opportunity to note my presence and to prepare herself to receive me.
I do not admire the mass of women. I find the ideal of beauty defined and perpetuated by advertisements and photographs of movie stars in popular magazines to be a kind of grotesquerie so pronounced that I can scarcely believe that it is not a deliberate joke. Annie’s style of beauty is distinctly different from this absurd norm. She is shorter than I. Her figure is gooselike and voluptuous. Her hips are wide, and her feet are dainty. Her hair is black, her skin an unblemished cream. Her lips and nails are painted red. Her smile is a sneer, and her black eyes are contemptuous. I appreciate her fully, but for the most of men, her beauty is of a nature too peculiar, prickly, and cactuslike to be desired with the whole of the heart and loins.
Annie wears a beauty mark, and by that mark I read her like a book. If it lies directly above her left eye, she is having a good day, in general. If it lies directly above her right eye, she is very much in the mood for masculine company. (In the past five months, two weeks, and two days, I am synonymous with masculine company. I am convinced Annie desires no one but me.) If the mark is affixed below her right eye, her mood is foul. I have seen it below her left eye only once, and that was the day she told me that her mother had died.
This day the mark, particularly black, was above her right eye, as I hoped it would be.
She smiled at me through the window. As if she had known I was coming by, she wore a white blouse with large black polka dots, and white pants with long black stripes. The stripes were wide at her hips, but they tapered down to mere black lines at her tiny ankles.
I went into the shop. A customer stood at the counter, looking through prints. From beneath the counter Annie took a small white package and pushed it across the surface of the counter toward me.
“I have something for you,” she said.
I took up the package and opened it. Inside were perhaps two dozen photographic prints, grainy and so dim in respect to color that they appeared entirely black-and-white to me. I flipped through them quickly at first and then more slowly examined them one by one. In the photographs, two men and a woman performed a variety of athletic sexual acts on a long living room couch, on a narrow bed, and braced against a bathroom sink. The last photograph showed the three of them, naked but for some improbable leather accoutrements, standing in the kitchen, making flapjacks on a black range.
“I think you’ve made a mistake,” said I to Annie after a few minutes, slipping the photographs back into their envelope, “these are not mine.”
“Sorry,” said Annie and put the photographs back under the counter.
The single customer departed.
Annie said, “That was the only decent set that came in today. I don’t even know if they’re worth keeping a duplicate of.”
“I’d like a print of the kitchen scene,” I said.
Annie had still an hour of work before she could leave. I asked if I could visit her at her apartment later. She agreed to my proposal but said, “Don’t come until eleven. My mother and father are visiting me, and their train doesn’t leave until then.”
I acquiesced to this, but I recalled that Annie had once told me that her mother was dead. In fact, her mother’s death had been Annie’s excuse for disappearing from the city for three days the previous February. On another occasion, in March, Annie had told me that her mother had instituted divorce proceedings against her father, citing adultery as the cause. I did not see fit to point out these inconsistencies in Annie’s family history. They were as much a part of her as her goosey bust or her delicate ankles.
9
I walked home from Annie’s place of business, through the deepening twilight, along a route that was tolerably familiar to me. Nothing untoward occurred. I saw nothing but what I was accustomed
to seeing. I heard nothing but what I was accustomed to hear.
At home I went into my bedroom and took off my suit, S-4, brushed it, folded the trousers, slipped the jacket onto a wooden hanger and replaced it in the narrow closet that contains nothing but my six suits, S-1 through S-6. There is room enough there, though the closet is quite small, for other things. I might easily, for instance, have hung my six white shirts there alongside the suits—or even have used the shirts as white dividers. But the shirts are folded in the third drawer of my dresser. They are unnumbered, and I wear them quite at random. I might have placed on the floor of the closet my six pairs of black wing-tip shoes, for the boards there are completely bare. But my shoes are lined up beneath the foot of my bed. I might have placed my black socks in a shoe box on the shelf above the rack, but my socks are bundled in the top drawer of my dresser. I might have hung my slender black ties on a hanger pushed right against the side of the closet wall, or set on a hook that was already screwed into the back of the door, but my ties hang over one of the long bolts that holds my dresser mirror in place. The closet is empty but for my suits S-1 through S-6.
My Employer believes that I have but one suit and that I wear it day in and day out. I have told him that this is not so. I have explained, truthfully, that though the suits may appear identical, there are minute—and to my eyes, quite obvious—differences. The width of a lapel, the stitching in a sleeve lining, the pattern of buttons on a cuff—any one of these things will instantly declare the particular number of the suit to me, were I ever to forget which I had put on in the morning.
I have a schedule I’ve worked out in a small leather-bound notebook that lets me know which suit it is appropriate to wear on a particular day. It is a kind of perpetual calendar of sartorial propriety. The system I worked out is complicated and not of issue here. I ought perhaps simply to say that it is infinitely more subtle than, say, S-1 is to be worn on Monday, S-2 on Tuesday, and so on through S-6 on Saturday, with Sunday’s slack taken up by S-1 through S-6 in turn. Such a system as that would be merely rude, mechanical, and far beneath my dignity.
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