Toplin

by Michael McDowell

  15

  Before I set out with the pills and the note, I had anticipated a homecoming shot through with a victorious glee. I would have provided Marta with the means to die. The Maintenance Man, however—a revolting example of the Third Sex, no less demanding of extinction than Marta herself, it seemed to me—had defiled all that.

  Instead of an ecstasy of fulfillment, I felt only anxiety. I changed my suit. I still felt distraught. I took off my suit, put on a coarse white robe, and wandered room to room in my apartment. I sometimes lost myself in the corridors and found myself where I had not thought I would be.

  I fretted.

  I worried that Marta would not “do her duty.”

  She would find the pills, she would read the note, she would tear up the note, and broadcast the pills from her apartment window.

  I had neglected to take into consideration that Marta was a flawed vessel. My perfect plan in my perfect mind had not made allowance for imperfection. Perhaps, after all, I should have taken Howard’s advice: secreted a pistol and ammunition and gone that route. Pills befitted a subtle mind and a sensitive imagination. Pills might very well prove insufficient to the task.

  I fretted too about the Maintenance Man in Marta’s apartment building.

  Away from there, I was no longer certain that he was not Howard Dormin after all. The single female breast was real enough, but that might always have been hidden beneath the loose shirts that Howard affected. In that case, the half-moustache might indeed have been faked. Certainly their voices were the same.

  Supposing Howard was masquerading as the Maintenance Man: what did that mean?

  Was he for me, or was he against me?

  Was he there to make certain that Marta died, or that she lived?

  And if the hermaphroditic Employee was not Howard, would he warn Marta against me? Or, supposing Marta died from the pills, would he alert the police to my presence and my appearance?

  The possibilities, which branched out even further than this, were too vague and too numerous for me to puzzle through on a single rainy afternoon. I sat at the window that overlooked the street and watched for Marta’s appearance on her way to work.

  Marta did not appear.

  Late that Sunday evening I went out to get something to eat. I passed the Baltyk Kitchen. For the first time since I had moved to that neighborhood, the restaurant was closed. I did not know why.

  The next morning, which was still rainy, I sent my Employer the following message, by telegraph:

  DEATH IN THE FAMILY

  I knew he would realize who sent the message when I did not appear at the office.

  That Monday was the first day I had taken off since I first went to work for my Employer.

  The Baltyk Kitchen remained closed. I peered through the curtains. I could detect someone moving about inside.

  I walked around all day long, carefully avoiding Number NINETY-FOUR. Several streets over, at the edge of my neighborhood, I came up half a block behind a young woman.

  Even without the evidence of the striped trousers and the polka-dot blouse, I knew it was Annie. There is something characteristically gooselike in Annie’s walk that becomes pronounced when she hurries.

  I did not call out. I went forward, decreasing the distance between us. I determined to ask her what she knew about Marta. I’d be subtle, however. Sneaking, I’d bring the Baltyk Kitchen into the conversation and judge what effect the name had upon her.

  Annie, to my astonishment, went up a broad flight of concrete steps and entered a church—The Church of All Souls. I wondered if, having sensed that I was following her, she sought to avoid me. I lingered a few minutes on the steps. The rain beat down all around me. Annie did not come out. I pulled open the heavy oaken doors and went inside.

  In the vestibule I shook my umbrella dry. The rainwater splashed into the font of holy water.

  I went into the sanctuary of the church and seated myself near the back in a dim unlighted corner. I heard the rain beating against the stained glass windows, barred against vandals. And beneath the rain I heard a confused murmuring from one of the confession boxes.

  Presently, the curtain of the box opened and Annie crawled out. She hurried up the lateral aisle, tying a scarf around her head.

  I slipped farther into the shadows. The pew whined beneath my trousers.

  Annie genuflected before the altar and disappeared out the back of the church. For a few moments, as she opened the outer doors, I heard the rain more clearly.

  I rose and crossed the aisle, not genuflecting or even nodding or crossing myself before the altar. I pulled aside the curtain of the confessional Annie had left so hurriedly.

  I heard the priest murmuring before I even entered the confession box. If he could begin without me, I could begin without him.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I whispered, as I pulled the curtain back into place. “It has been sixteen years since my last confession.”

  Alone together then, the priest and I fell silent at once.

  The box was claustrophobic. Perhaps it was only that when I was last in one I was myself much smaller. There seemed to be no room for my legs. I had to fold my arms across my chest.

  I peered at the priest through the grate. I saw his heavy-lidded eyes staring back at me.

  The air was close in the confession box. It stank of schnapps and slime.

  “Sixteen years,” whispered the priest. He was drunk. He cast his bloodshot eyes over my face.

  “Yes, Father,” I replied. “But I came not to confess my sins but to proclaim the good that I have done.”

  “None of us is good,” said the priest, slurring every one of the words.

  “I am helping a young woman to die,” I said. “I’ve given her sleeping pills and a note encouraging her to swallow them.”

  “That is a sin,” said the priest, comfortably. “Three Hail Marys at the altar. Go and sin no more. The Lord be with you, and—”

  “No,” I said. “It is not a sin! She is Nature’s blunder—an abomination before the eyes of the Lord. She apprehends this and desires sweet release! Marta—”

  “We are all martyrs,” said the priest, pressing his left hand against the grating. His ring finger was missing altogether, sheered off at the joint. The scar was recent.

  I was silent a moment.

  The priest began to sing, low and dismally, but with a strangely rollicking lilt:

  By the light of burning martyrs,

  Christ, thy bleeding feet we track . . .

  “Not martyr,” I said. “Marta. She accepts death. She has earned it. I’m her judgment, not her judge.”

  “Do you Flog the Bishop?” the priest demanded suddenly.

  I didn’t know what he meant.

  “Do you Paddle the Pickle?” he went on impatiently. “Jerk the Gherkin? Bang the Banjo? Strangle the Stogie?”

  I said nothing.

  “Do you visit with Mother Thumb and her Four Children?” he cried in a hot whisper. “Play Solo upon a Private Pump Organ? Are you stigmatized with a Dishonorable Dis­charge?”

  “This woman,” I resumed. “Before the eye of God, she’s—”

  “How often?” demanded the priest excitedly.

  “Once a day,” I said.

  There was a long pause. The priest breathed hard, harder, gurgled, groaned and sighed.

  “That is a sin,” said the priest in a strangled voice. “Five Hail Marys prostrate before the Altar.”

  He was as filthy as the gutters that wash away his vomit and his seed.

  I returned home to wait. I passed the Baltyk Kitchen on the way; it was still closed. I spoke to a policeman on the corner. The policeman said, “They’re on vacation, I heard.”

  A stranger, passing by at that moment and overhearing my question, differed. “No,” he said, “I think there was a death in the family.”

  Scrawled on the door, in white chalk, was a winged hourglass.

  Late into the night I sat at
my living room window and watched the street. Once or twice I saw movement in the shadows on the opposite side, between parked vehicles and the brick houses there.

  Late in the night, when the rain had left off and everything was still, I heard a woman’s voice, calling up to me out of the darkness. She said: “No man knows the hour of his death.”

  Then I heard laughter, from all sides of the street, and the voices and the shadows melted away.

  I stood up stiffly from my place at the window.

  The gilded French clock on the mantel suddenly stopped ticking.

  I was flooded with the certainty that Marta was dead.

  16

  I did not return to work on Tuesday. The day was warm. The previous evening’s rainwater steamed off the streets. I was waiting for something but didn’t know what.

  I don’t know now.

  I grew slovenly. I did not cleanse myself, I ignored my schedule of suits, I wandered around my apartment either in my coarse white robe or else in my coarse black robe. My cleaning was neglected. I ate only when I was hungry, and then picked food directly out of boxes or spooned it directly out of cans or poured it directly from brown sacks into a single bowl that I rinsed over and over again. The slime built up in my testicles, and I made no effort to release it. I felt its slow poison seeping through my body.

  I wasn’t losing power, I knew that. I was only loosening a rope I had held taut for too long.

  I wondered if all this didn’t have something to do with Marta. Such a conclusion seemed plausible, since my malaise followed so directly upon my carrying out my plan to help her to die. Yet that decision had not been a mistake. I had never once doubted the propriety of my resolve. And subconsciously I did not feel guilt, either. I was very nearly certain of that. My thoughts were muddled. My logical apparatus had gone by the boards. I decided to starve myself to see if my thoughts and dreams would become clearer.

  I put all the foodstuffs from my cabinets and my refrigerator into paper bags and carried them to the trash barrels in the basement. I wiped the shelves and counters free of crumbs. I burned incense in the kitchen to disguise the lingering odors of foods and dinners long past. I removed all the cookbooks from their twelve shelves in the corridor and stacked them neatly and in order, for purposes of easy reconstruction, on the kitchen floor. Then I nailed shut all the doors that led into the kitchen.

  I sat in the living room and waited for the pains of hunger to assail me.

  My thoughts remained muddled. My belly felt filled with food.

  I watched at the window and could think of nothing but the fact that I wasn’t eating, and that that appeared to make no difference to me.

  I fell asleep on the sofa in the living room. In those few minutes my slime spewed out in the crevasse between the cushions.

  When I awoke I tried to set the gilded French clock to ticking again. The mechanism required the turning of a key, but the key was missing. I did not remember having seen one at Howard’s.

  All my old patterns were smashed. I felt as if my life were falling apart.

  I knew that I should think the whole matter through. My intellect would put the pieces back together. But I couldn’t even decide what I should think of first. I tried beginning at the beginning, at the sign that read:

  DEATH IN THE FAMILY

  Yet each time I began so, I was lost again before I even entered the Baltyk Kitchen for the first time.

  I tried thinking of the persons involved, focusing on Howard or on Annie or on the hermaphroditic Maintenance Man of Number NINETY-FOUR. Yet each time I began so, my mind reverted to the inconclusive interview with the priest in the Church of All Souls.

  I indulged this unlooked-for bent. I thought about this brief encounter.

  I had not entered the confessional to obtain spiritual expiation for my crime. I had only followed Annie there. And once confronted with the priest, who did not know me and who was bound to keep my confession a secret, I had decided to tell him of my great project. I had wanted to indulge my pride—and that pride was perhaps my only sin. I did not trust Howard or Annie any longer, and for some time they have been the only persons I’ve been in the habit of speaking to at all. The priest was a mere convenience. Yet I suppose it was only right that he, ensconced in the confessional, should have imagined that I came to admit to some iniquity of conduct or thought. But if he had given me time, I feel sure I could have explained the whole matter to my satisfaction and his instruction.

  Over and over again in my mind, I reviewed what he had said and what I had said, his tone of voice, my volume. I reconstructed the entire brief exchange. Over and over again, on an endless tape, I played it in my mind.

  Why, I wondered, was the penance for masturbation greater than that for assisting a suicide?

  The two voices sang in my mind. The priest’s dialogue took on a rehearsed precision, his drunken accents sounded faked.

  The accents of my own voice began to sound alien to me. There is nothing more contemptible in a man than a squeaking voice. Listening over and over again to that interview, I began to detect a certain shrill, breaking quality in my own tones. I heard, as it were, an echo in everything I said. I heard first my voice as it sounded in my own ears: straight­forward, masculine, pointed. Then a fraction of a second later, I seemed to hear the echo of my voice: strident, nasal, squeaking, the antithesis of all that a man’s voice ought to be.

  I took cash and went out and bought a tape recorder.

  This required going to Annie’s neighborhood, the nearest streets where such items may be got cheaply. Around there, for the benefit of the narrowly paid government workers, there are a number of narrow-front stores specializing in overstocks and markdowns. Their wares are spread out in a widening triangle of cartons and boxes and baskets, down the front steps and along the sidewalks, as if the building itself were regurgitating its inventory. Only persons interested in purchase walk that way since the route is so impeded with junk that a quick progress is impossible. I wandered for some little while among the agglomerations of dented, faulty, unusable merchandise until I at last discovered a small tape recorder. I took it inside and ascertained that it worked. I purchased several tapes as well.

  I smiled as I came out the door again, for I had detected the first rumblings in my belly. Hunger showed that I was getting on the right track again.

  I did not go directly home. Since I was in Annie’s neighborhood, I decided to go by her store. I’d see if her belly had swelled.

  Though ostensibly Annie and I had had no break in our relationship—I often left her apartment in the early morning without saying good-bye—my attitude toward her was changed. She was, in some vague but undeniable way, the enemy. I did not trust her. I did not know with whom she might be in league.

  I went cautiously up to the storefront that housed her concern. I had no wish for her to see me before I was prepared to show myself.

  I stood against a concrete pilaster just out of sight. From my vantage I could see quite clearly one of the machines in the front window and even make out the figures on the belt of photographs that was pulled wetly out of it.

  The individual photographs were of Shade and Shadow, the twin female members of the Fuggits.

  The two young women were naked, sitting together on a sofa with their legs spread wide. The pubic hair of one had been dyed jetty black, like her hair; the pubic hair of the other had been bleached very nearly white. The photograph disappeared back into the machine, to be dried and snipped off the roll.

  But there were others, which I need not describe here.

  I decided not to show myself to Annie, for obvious reasons.

  I was making decisions. I was getting hungrier. Those were good signs.

  I waited until a group of government office workers came up behind me on the side­walk. Just as they were passing before the store, I joined their little group. Annie, if she looked up from her counter, would not notice me—she would see only a phalanx of workers such as
pass her shop every day.

  As I went by I glanced inside. There was Annie behind the counter. She wore a colored blouse, but my flawed eyes did not allow me to make out exactly what color.

  Before the counter stood a man who turned in profile just as I passed.

  I could not be surprised to find that it was Howard Dormin.

  Or perhaps the Maintenance Man. My brief glance would not allow me to distinguish, if indeed, they were different persons at all.

  I pressed the recorder and the tapes against the hollow of my stomach and turned into a street that would lead me back to my flat.

  I did not take my normal route home from Annie’s place. I did not know who might be lying in wait. Yet all the streets around there were tolerably familiar to me and I did not fear losing myself.

  I congratulated myself on reaching home without untoward incident. However, just outside my own building, Number FORTY-SEVEN, I happened to notice an overturned food basket against a lamppost. It had evidently been stolen from some supermarket, though I didn’t know of any in my immediate neighborhood.

  As I was taking my latch key from my pocket, a woman approached me and touched my arm. She was small and dark, in her late thirties perhaps. I took her to be one of those gypsies who are habitually to be found in the parks of this part of the city, trying to sell artificial flowers “to help the children” or “to feed the hungry” or “to alleviate the mental suffering of the politically downtrodden,” but really only to line their own pockets.

  “Sir!” she called to me. “Do you have a piece of paper?”

  “How large?” I asked warily.

  “Small,” she replied. “I want to let the supermarket know about their basket there in the middle of the street.”

  The woman spoke with a slight, indeterminate accent. I extracted a small sheet of paper from my pocket and handed it to her.

  “Do you have a pen?” she asked. I handed her one.