by Неизвестный
Jamsie and Lydia tried to hold him down, but Ara fought them off. He scrambled out of bed in his bloodstained nightshirt, hobbled into the living room, unlocked the drawer where he had hidden his clarinet. He took it out of its case and screwed on the mouthpiece.
“Just a few more hot licks before we kick the bucket, heh!” gibbered Ara, spittle drooling from the corners of his mouth. The silver stops of the clarinet twinkled in the sunlight.
“Me old stick!” Jamsie heard him mumble.
Ara blew a few uncertain notes, tried some scales, went into a few bars of the upper register, then low down, all the time gaining fullness of tone and sureness.
As Jamsie and his mother watched, Ara began to adlib some blues. He tottered and stumbled unsteadily around the room, scraping over the worn carpet, bumping into furniture. He paused for a moment in front of Lydia's handwritten memento and cackled at it derisively. Then, playing again, he stumbled away and then back, until he stood looking at the old icon still covered with the black cloth. His face got serious. There was silence for a second. Jamsie remembers holding his mother's hand in anguish as they both watched Ara.
Then Ara played the first bars of an old Armenian hymn to the Virgin. He started to sway back and forth. Lydia and Jamsie both moved quickly to help him, but they were too late. Trailing off in the middle of his song, he doubled over, coughed violently, and fell forward, clawing the air for support. His hand caught the black drape over the icon, and it came away as he fell.
When they reached him, he was on his back, the black drape clutched in one hand, the clarinet in the other. Above him, the icon glimmered in the morning light with its old gold, blue, and brown colors. For the first time in many years, Jamsie looked at the tranquil eyes of the Virgin.
Then he looked at his father's face, and a weight was lifted off him. In death the “look” had gone. Ara's features had returned to something resembling what they had been ten years before. Jamsie never forgot that change at his father's death. He still could not understand the “look,” but he was glad for Ara that it had gone. Ara was buried in Brooklyn's Greenwood to sleep with the other 400,000 people already there.
The following week Lydia told her son he was on his own. Except for two visits, Jamsie was not to be with her again until her death in 1959. As he walked up Broadway that day of parting with his mother, all he heard were Lydia's words: “You're on your own now.”
The old el had been torn down; and they were starting the 6th Avenue subway. Jamsie stood for a long time watching the workmen. A flood of resentment took hold of him. They were spending $65 million on that subway, he had read in the newspaper. But his own father was dead, his mother was an aging prostitute, and he had been helpless to change any of that. It all made no sense.
A curious new feeling was building up in him. Without moving, without seeing anything different or hearing an ethereal voice, he felt as if an alternative to his misery of loneliness was being offered him. It was accompanied by fear. But he experienced also the same strange sense of companionship as on the night he first knew his mother would be a prostitute. He was alone, but he was not really alone. He felt the loss of his father very deeply. He had deep misgivings for his mother's well-being. Yet both of them slipped into the background of his mind. In the forefront was this new, unsettling, but rather welcome feeling of being wanted, of not being really alone.
In that moment, for the first time, he was certain that there was, indeed, some presence, someone or something present to him, and that to accept it meant renouncing any genuine love for his father and mother as he had known them in childhood and early youth.
In 1940 Jamsie was promoted to guide at NBC. Then, on the invitation of a very close friend of his father, he went to live and study in Oklahoma City. The friend provided him with enough money to follow courses in journalism and broadcasting; he did part-time work to supplement his income.
The years in Oklahoma City were tranquil ones for Jamsie. There was no recurrence of the “funny look.” He rarely had a sense of the strange presence, and he formed some solid friendships.
He moved back to New York in 1946, at the age of twenty-three, and started to build a career in radio. Outside work, he lived a quiet life. He spent most of his time either at home listening to records and reading, or wandering the streets of midtown and lower Manhattan.
He always hoped he would find his mother. Nobody in her old haunts seemed to know where she was or what had happened to her. Eventually word reached him from an old family friend that she was living in Flushing. He had one long visit with her there.
Lydia was much deteriorated. There was still a deep feeling between them; but both felt and tacitly decided that, except for some serious personal crisis, they should see each other rarely. Meeting was too painful.
At the same time, Jamsie was also engaged in a search of a very different kind. Once he set foot in New York again, he caught glimpses of that “look”—in the subway, from the middle of crowds, aloft among the neon signs, in movie houses, and sometimes late at night, before he went to bed and when he stood looking out the window at the lights of Manhattan.
And he now felt something else that was new and, in its own way, reassuring: a violent and unconquerable persuasion that he had always known what “it” was, who “it” was. His old fright was transformed into an insatiable urge to remember. If he could only remember what “it” was.
Sometimes, in off-moments, he seemed to be on the verge of realizing what or who “it” was, of recalling the place and the time when he had been told about it. He could not shake the idea that he had been told about it.
But his efforts always ended in frustration. Just as names and places were about to rush into his mind and to his lips, something would happen inside him, and he would lose his grip on them. His frustration at this continual defeat began to produce a rage in him.
Jamsie had one last meeting with Lydia. She had moved from Flushing to lower Broadway. During those few hours he spent with her, all his rage and frustration was dissipated. Lydia, by now living on church welfare, spoke to him slowly and quietly about his father and about his own future. This was the last experience of human tenderness Jamsie was to have for many years. Later he left word of his whereabouts with the local precinct and the church authorities who helped Lydia, promising to keep them posted of any change in his address. He kept that promise.
It was during this period of Jamsie's life that his colleagues at the radio station began to notice that he talked to himself; even more oddly, he occasionally flew into solitary rages. Of course, the moment Jamsie realized other people were watching, he became a very amiable and smiling man, to compensate for any unpleasant impression he might have given. Yet, time and time again, he could be seen walking alone on the streets or in the corridors of the radio station, or standing in the washroom, his eyes wide and staring, his nostrils flaring, and his lips drawn back over his teeth as if in some deep, internal, all-absorbing effort.
After two years in New York, Jamsie was transferred to Cleveland. Here he had his first paralyzing dose of what became commonplace in his life a few years later.
One evening he was walking down Euclid Avenue on his way home.
All day his mind had been opening and closing on the endless puzzle: when and where had he been told about “it,” about that “look”? Since his arrival in Cleveland, all appearances of the “look” had ceased. But this only seemed to increase his curiosity and his need to know the answer. Tonight, it seemed to him, he was very near to recalling exactly.
As he walked on, memories and words began to gather up out of a deep darkness of recollection and slowly to take shape. He was almost craning forward as he peered within himself with profound intensity to catch them. He began to feel excited, as he felt a growing realization that this was the moment.
Suddenly, just as he was about to see those images and say those words, the words and pictures—as he describes it—seemed to form themselves into a long,
quickly moving stream and “floated like lightning” out of the top of his head and up into the sky. It had all escaped him!
He jumped up and down on the pavement in frustration, looking up at the night sky with tears in his eyes. Then, when he saw nothing up there but clouds, he turned away and went dejectedly toward the small restaurant where he normally took his supper.
At the door of the restaurant he stopped in astonishment. It was too much! There, at the back of the dining room, among the crowded tables and chatting people, he saw a face with that “look.” He pushed his way past waiters and packed tables. But when he reached the place where the “face” had been, he found two staid people, an aging man and woman, eating their dinner in stony silence. They looked at him briefly and disinterestedly, then went on eating.
From that moment, Jamsie was convinced that somebody or something was playing hide-and-seek with him. But he could not figure out how it was all done or why. It became frequent in his daily life for words and memories to behave like the floating lightning and to “dive” out of his skull. Sometimes he saw them silhouetted against the sky before they disappeared far, far up into the clouds; sometimes they went so fast he could not catch sight of them at all.
In successive years and at various stations where he worked (Detroit, 1951; New Orleans, 1953; Kansas City, 1955; Los Angeles, 1956), the story was always the same. He tried once to explain it all to a psychiatrist in Los Angeles, but he found the sessions with him unproductive and infuriating.
He had one friendship with a woman in Kansas City that might have become serious. But one evening, only a few weeks after they had begun dating, Jamsie treated her to such an uncontrolled exhibition of rage, frustration, and jealousy that she broke up with him then and there.
Just about a year after his transfer to Los Angeles, he had his first face-to-face meeting with the source of his trouble. He lived in Alhambra at the time, and drove each day to the radio station.
One evening, as he drove home in the dusk, he again sensed that curious presence for the fourth time in his life. The car radio was playing a medley of songs. Suddenly, as “California, Here I Come!” was being sung, the words seemed to plaster themselves all around the sky in front of him. He had already had a lot of crazy things like this in his life, and, while he could not ignore it, he could cope with it. As “California, Here I Come!” continued to plaster itself around him, Jamsie switched off the radio.
Then something caught his eye in the rearview mirror. It was a face.
As with so many of the strange things that kept happening to him, Jamsie felt neither fright nor surprise. He seemed to himself to have expected it, to have known it was there all along. The eyes of that face were looking at him and he knew—without knowing how—that he knew their owner.
There were no more words floating or plastered around him now. Jamsie slowed down, waiting all the time in silence. But there was no sound and no movement from the back seat.
He glanced again in the mirror: the large, bulbous eyes were still looking at him. He could not believe they were really red. Must be the reflection of the street lights, he thought. The face had a nose, ears, mouth, cheeks, a funny chin much too narrow for the rest of the face, a kind of high-domed forehead ending in a somewhat pointed head. The skin was dark as if from long exposure to sunlight. He could not make out if it was white or brown or black-skinned.
But something more than the vividness of that face puzzled him—the absence of something. The face was certainly alive—the eyes glinted with meaning, even laughingly. The head moved silently now and then. But something was lacking, something he expected in a face, but which this face did not show.
As he turned slowly into the driveway to his garage, he heard a voice, chiding and familiar, in tones he would expect a eunuch to have: “Oh! For Pete's sake, Jamsie! Stop acting the fool. We've been together for years. Don't tell me you don't know me.”
Jamsie realized that this too was somehow or other true: they had been together for a long time. Everything, even this, had the same curious familiarity about it.
As the car came to a standstill in the garage, he heard the voice again: “Well, so long, Jamsie! See you tomorrow. Wait for your Uncle Ponto!”
As Jamsie entered the house, he thought he smelled a strange odor. At the time he connected it in no way with Uncle Ponto. It was a momentary thing, and he forgot about it immediately.
This happened on a Monday evening. He could not sleep that night. And, although he did not know it then, Ponto's visits would multiply quickly until, for six years, he would be dealing with Uncle Ponto almost on a daily basis.
The following Sunday Jamsie was driving the short distance to Pasadena when out the window to his right he saw Ponto craning his head down from the roof of the car looking in at him upside down through the window. Ponto was moving his left hand as though pitching a ball, and with each gesture he seemed to throw a word, a phrase, or a whole sentence into the sky where it remained for a while and then danced away over the horizon.
“WELCOME TO JAMSIE MY FRIEND!” ran one message. “GREATEST BLOW-OUT FOR THE MIND!” was another. “PONTO! JAMSIE! PALS! REJOICE! PASADENA HERE WE COME!”
And so it went. Accordingly as Ponto threw each message into the sky, he turned back and grinned at Jamsie. When Jamsie swerved dangerously because of the distraction, Ponto shook his finger in mock reproof and flung a “LET ME DRIVE YOU!” sign across the sky. Then he disappeared.
This was the flamboyant beginning of Uncle Ponto's attendance on Jamsie: Uncle Ponto, the spirit that was to harass him for years, finally press his claims to be Jamsie's “familiar,” and twice drive him to the edge of suicide.
Gradually Jamsie got to know Ponto's general appearance. But he never saw him whole from head to foot at any one time. Ponto's face, the back of his head, his hands, his feet, his eyes, all were parts of Ponto he saw from time to time. To Jamsie's eye, somehow accustomed before the fact to all these bizarre happenings, Ponto was not misshapen, yet Jamsie knew that Ponto was hardly shaped like a normal human being. And then there was that funny lack in Ponto's face. Something was Jacking.
His head was too large and too pointed, the eyelids, too heavy, the nose and mouth always contorted by an expression Jamsie could not identify with any emotion or attitude known to him. The skin was too light to be black, too dark to be white, too reddish to be sallow, too yellow to be sunburned. His hands were more like mechanical claws. His body—seen in parts—seemed to have the flexibility of a cat and to be thinner than his enormous, pointed head. His legs were bandy and disproportionate-one knee seemed higher than the other. Ponto's feet were splayed, like a duck's, and all the toes were of even length and the same size.
Jamsie was sure Ponto was not human. Beyond that, he was sure of nothing except that Ponto was real—as real as any object or person around him. What Ponto did was real and concrete. So, for Jamsie, he had to be real. At the same time, Jamsie again and again found himself wondering why he was not frightened by Ponto. And occasionally he did ask himself if Ponto was a spirit or a being from another planet. But in the beginning each appearance of Ponto merely fired his curiosity.
After a while Jamsie realized that he could anticipate an appearance of Ponto by the queer smell he had noticed the first night; and, when Ponto disappeared, the smell lingered on afterward for about an hour. It was not a bad smell, as of sewage or rotting food. It was just a very strong smell; it had a trace of musk in it, but laced with a certain pungency. Jamsie could only describe it as the way “red would smell, if you could smell red.”
The smell always gave Jamsie a feeling of being alone with something overwhelming. In other words, the effect of the smell was not primarily in his nose but in Jamsie's mind. It did not repel, did not attract, did not disgust, did not fascinate. It made him feel very small and insignificant. And this bothered Jamsie more than all the other odd things.
As far as he could calculate, Ponto's overall height was about 4X2 feet. Yet
whenever Ponto appeared to him, he seemed to be the mirror image of something gargantuan hovering nearby, and in some confusing way the smell was tied closely to that sense of nearness of overwhelming size. If Jamsie felt any personal threat at that stage, it had to do with the effects of that smell.
At the end of his “visits,” and just before he disappeared, Ponto took to giving Jamsie a questioning look out of the corner of his eye, as if to say: Aren't you going to ask me about myself? Jamsie, naturally stubborn, resolved not to ask, not even to notice this gesture of Ponto—if he could bring that off.
Ponto kept on appearing at the oddest places. Since his first, chiding words to Jamsie, and except for the words he flung, floated, and plastered all over Jamsie's horizon, Ponto never said anything in these early visits. He appeared in the back of the car, sitting on the radiator in the living room, inside the elevator in the upper corner, swinging from one of the overpasses as Jamsie traveled on the freeway, in restaurants, on top of the cash registers, at Jamsie's desk in the studio, on top of the engineer's table in full view of Jamsie as he sat in the sound-room broadcasting.
Ponto pushed swinging doors in the opposite direction to Jamsie. He placed money on the counter of the delicatessen to pay for Jamsie's groceries, ripped the dry cleaner's plastic bags, turned on faucets, turned off the ignition of his car, switched on the headlights, and in a thousand ways kept a regular-though, for the first few months of 1958, not a frequent-reminder of his presence in front of Jamsie.
During the early months of 1958 Ponto never interfered with Jamsie's work, he rarely appeared in his apartment, and he never bothered him at night. In fact, Jamsie found he could sleep all night undisturbed. He had a feeling Ponto was somewhere near watching him—or perhaps watching over him; he did not know which. After a while, the bizarre antics began wearing on Jamsie and whittling his patience and control very thin. Jamsie became convinced that he had seen Ponto somewhere else or had known somebody very like Ponto in previous years, though surely he would not have forgotten so odd a figure as that little fellow!