by Peter Straub
—
Go home, you little asshole, said Jesus. You’re never gonna get it, never. But neither do most people, so that part’s okay. Go home and read a book. That’ll do—it’s a piss-poor way to get there, but I guess it’s about the best you can do.
Suffer the little children, said Jesus, suffer everybody else, too. You think this shit is easy?
—
Still muttering to himself, Jesus turned off on a side street, his bloody footprints following after, his thin robe whipping around him in the wind, and Bunting saw the frame houses of working-class Battle Creek all around. Some were covered with hideous brick-face, some with grainy tar paper that peeled away from the seams around the window frames. Most of these houses had porches where skeletal furniture turned brittle in the cold, and birdbaths and shrines to Mary stood in a few tiny front yards. Before one of these unhappy two-story frame houses his parents had posed for the only photograph ever taken of the two of them together, a testament to ignorance, incompatibility, resentment, violence, and disorder. His father scowls out from under the brim of his hat, his mother twitches. Holy holy holy. From this chaos, from this riot, the overpowering sacred bounty. He was standing on his old street, Bunting realized, the ultimate sample in this dwindled and partial world of blazing real life. Jesus’ bloody palm print shone from the ugly wall, even uglier now in winter when the dirty chipping paint looked like a skin disease. Here was his childhood, which he had not been intended to escape—its smallness and meanness had been supposed to accompany him always.
Bunting stared at the shabby building in which his childhood had happened, and heard the old screams, the grunts and shrieks of pain and passion, sail through the thin walls. This was the bedrock. His childhood reached forth and touched him with a cold, cold finger. He could not survive it now, he could not even bear to witness a tenth of it. But neither could he live without it.
He turned around and found that he had left Battle Creek and walked all the way from Washington Square to the Upper West Side. Across the street, on the other side of several hundred jostling, honking cars, stood his apartment building. Home again.
11
Bunting’s weekend was glacial. He had trouble getting out of bed, and remembered to eat only when he realized that the sun had gone down. He felt so tired it was difficult to walk to the bathroom, and fell asleep in front of the television, watching programs that seemed without point or plot. It was all one great formless story, a story with no internal connections, and its incoherence made it watchable.
On Sunday afternoon Bunting scratched his face and remembered that he had not bathed or shaved since Friday evening. He took off the clothes he’d worn since Saturday morning, showered, shaved, and dressed in gray slacks and a sport jacket, put on his coat, and went around the corner through brittle wintry air to the diner. The man at the register and the counterman treated him normally. He ordered something from the enormous menu, ate what he ordered without tasting it, and forgot it as soon as he was done. When he walked back out into the cold he realized that he could buy more baby bottles. He had to finish the wall he had begun, and there was another wall he could cover with bottles, if he chose—he was under no real compulsion to do this, he knew, but it would be like finishing an old project. Bunting had always liked to complete his projects. There were several other things he could do with baby bottles, too, once he got started.
He walked to the cash machine and took out three hundred dollars, leaving only five hundred and change in his account. At the drugstore he bought a gross of mixed bottles and another gross of mixed nipples, and asked for them to be delivered. Then he walked again out into the cold and turned toward his building. His entire attitude toward the bottles, even the redecoration project, had changed—he could remember his first, passionate purchases, the haste and embarrassment, the sheer weight of the need. Bunting supposed that this calm, passive state was a dull version of what most people felt all the time. It was probably what they called sanity. Sanity was what took over when you got too tired for anything else.
He stopped off at the liquor store and bought two liters of vodka and a bottle of cognac.
This time when he walked out into the cold, it came to him that Veronica had never existed. Of course he had always known at some level that his executive, Swiss-born mistress was a fantasy, but it seemed to him that he had never quite admitted this to himself. He had lived with his stories for so long he had forgotten that they had begun as an excuse for not going back to Battle Creek.
Battle Creek had come to him instead, two nights ago. Suffer the little children, suffer everybody, suffer suffer. The furious, complaining Jesus had shown what was real. This dry, reduced world was what was left when he stormed back into his cave to lie down dead again.
Bunting walked past the leavings of BANGO SKANK and JEEPY and let himself back into his room. He switched on the television and poured cold vodka into an Ama. Words and phrases of unbelievable ugliness, language murdered by carelessness and indifference, dead bleeding language, came from the television. People all over the nation listened to stuff like this every day and heard nothing wrong with it. Bunting watched some of the action on the screen for a moment, trying to make at least some kind of primitive sense out of it. A blond man ran down a flight of stairs and punched another man in the face. The second man, taller and stronger than the first, collapsed and fell all the way down the stairs. A car sped down a highway, and lights flashed. Bunting sighed and snapped off the television.
Bunting wandered through the stacks of magazines and newspapers and picked up The Lady in the Lake. He wondered if the buzzing of the delivery boy would pull him out of the book and then remembered with a deepening sense of gloom—with something very close to despair—that he probably would not have to be pulled out of the book. He was sane now. Or, if that was an error in terminology, he was in the same relationship to the world that he had been in before everything changed.
Bunting held his breath and opened the book. He let his eyes drop to the lines of print, which resolutely stayed on the page. He sighed again and sat down on the bed to read until the new baby bottles arrived.
It was another book—the details were the same but all the essentials had changed. Chris Lavery was apparently still alive, and Muriel Chess had been found in Little Fawn Lake, not in the bathroom of a mountain cabin. Crystal Kingsley was Derace Kingsley’s wife, not his mother. All the particulars of weather, appearances, and speech, the entire atmosphere of the book, came to Bunting in a flawed and ordinary way, sentence by sentence. For Bunting, this way of reading was like having lost the ability, briefly and mysteriously gained, of being able to fly. He stumbled along after the sentences, remembering what had been. When the buzzer rang he put the book down with relief, and spent the rest of the night gluing bottles to his walls.
On Monday morning, Frank Herko came into his cubicle even before going into his own. His eyes looked twice their normal size, and his forehead was still red from the cold. Static electricity had given his hair a lively, unbridled, but stiff look, as if it had been starched or deep-fried. “What the hell went on?” he yelled as soon as he came in. Bunting could feel the attention of everyone else in the Data Entry room focusing on his cubicle.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
Herko actually bared his teeth at him. His eyes grew even larger. He unzipped his down jacket, ripped it off his body, and startled Bunting by throwing it to the floor. “Then I’ll try to tell you,” he said, speaking so softly he was nearly whispering. “My girlfriend Lindy has a girlfriend. A person named Marty. This is a person she likes. Particularly likes. You could even go so far as to say that Marty is a person very dear to my friend Lindy, and that what affects Marty affects my girlfriend Lindy. So the little ups and downs of this person Marty’s life, who by the way is also kind of dear to me, though not of course to the extent that she is dear to my friend, these ups and downs affect my friend Lindy and therefore, in a roundabout s
ort of way, also affect me.” Frank leaned forward from the waist and extended his arms. “SO! When Marty has a bad experience with a guy she calls a sleazeball and blames this experience on her friend Lindy Berman and Lindy Berman’s friend Frank HERKO, then Frank HERKO winds up eating SHIT! Is this starting to fall into place, Bobby? Are you starting to get why I asked you what the HELL happened?” He planted his fists on his hips and glowered, then shook his head and made a gesture with one arm that implored the universe to witness his frustration.
“It just didn’t work out,” Bunting said.
“Oh, is that right? You don’t suppose you could go into a little more detail on that, could you?”
Bunting tried to remember why his date had ended. “My mother didn’t make her doctor’s appointment.”
Herko stared at him pop-eyed. “Your mother…Does that make sense to you? You’re out with a girl, you’re supposed to be having a good time, you say, Gee, Mom didn’t get over to the doctor’s, I guess I better SPLIT?”
“I’m sorry,” Bunting said. “I’m not in a very good mood right now. I don’t like it when you yell at me. That makes me feel very uneasy. I wish you’d leave me alone.”
“Boy, you got it,” Herko said. “You have got it, Bobby, in spades. But there are a few vital bits of information it has become extremely necessary for you to have in your possession, Bobby, and I’m going to give them to you.”
He stepped backward and saw his down jacket on the floor. He raised his eyes as if the jacket had disobediently conjured itself off a hook and thrown itself on the carpet. He leaned over and picked it up, ostentatiously folded it in half, and draped it over one arm. All this reminded Bunting sharply, even sickeningly, of his father. The affectation of delicacy had been a crucial part of his father’s arsenal of scorn. Herko had probably reminded him of his father from the beginning; he had just never noticed it.
“One,” Frank said. “I assumed you were going to act like a man. Funny, huh? I thought you would know that a man remembers his friends, and a man is grateful to his friends. A man does not act like a goddamn loony and bring down trouble on his friends. Two. A man does not run out on a woman. A man does not leave a woman in the middle of a restaurant—he acts like a MAN, damn it, and conducts himself like he knows what he’s doing. Three. She thought you were a drug addict, did that get through to you?”
“I didn’t leave her alone, she left me alone,” Bunting said.
“She thought you were a junkie!” Herko was yelling again. “She thought I fixed her up with a fucking cocaine freak, right after she broke up with a guy who put a restaurant, a house, and a car up his nose! That’s…” Herko raised his arms and lifted his head, trying to find the right word. “That’s…MISERABLE! DISGUSTING!”
Bunting stood up and grabbed his coat. His heart wanted to explode. It was not possible to spend another second in his cubicle. Frank Herko had become ten feet tall, and every one of his breaths drained all the air from Bunting’s own lungs. His screams bruised Bunting’s ears. Bunting was buttoning up his coat before he realized that he was walking out of the cubicle and going home.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Herko yelled. “You can’t leave!”
Unable to speak, nearly unable to see through the red mist that surrounded him, Bunting hurried out of the Data Entry room and fled down the corridor toward the elevator.
As soon as he got out of the building he felt a little better, but the woman who stood next to him on the uptown bus edged visibly away.
He could still hear Frank’s huge, punishing voice. The world belonged to people like his father and Frank Herko, and people like himself lived in its potholes and corners.
Bunting got out of the bus and realized he was talking to himself only when he saw himself in a shopwindow. He blushed, and would have apologized, but no one around him met his eye.
He walked into the lobby of his apartment building and realized that it was not going to be possible for him to go back to work. He could never face Herko again, nor the other people who had overheard Frank’s terrible yelling. That was finished. It was all over, like the fantasy of Veronica.
He got into the elevator, thinking that he seemed to be different from what he thought he was, though it was hard to tell if this was for the better or worse. In the old days, he would have been figuring out where to go to get another job, and now all he wanted to do was to get back into his room, pour himself a drink, and open a book. Of course all of these had also changed, room, drink, and book.
By the time he pushed his key into the lock he realized that he was no longer so frightened. In the psychic background, the waves of Frank Herko’s voice crashed and rumbled on a distant beach. Bunting decided to give himself something like a week to recover from the events of the past few days, then to go out and look for another job. A week was a comfortable time. Monday to Monday. He hung up his coat and poured a drink into a clean Ama. Then he collapsed onto his bed and let his head fall back on the pillow. He groaned with satisfaction.
For a time he merely sucked at his bottle and let his body sink down into the wrinkled sheets. In a week, he told himself, he would get out of bed. He’d shave and dress in clean clothes and go outside and nail down a new job. He’d sit in front of another computer terminal and type in a lifetime’s worth of mumbo jumbo. Soon there would be another Veronica or Carol, an Englishwoman or a Texan or a Cuban with an MBA from Wharton who was just finding her sea legs at Citibank. It would be the same thing all over again, and it would be terrible, but it would be okay. Sometimes it would even be sort of nice.
He sucked air, and lifted the bottle in surprise and found that it was empty. It seemed he had just declared a private holiday. Bunting rolled off the bed and went through the litter to the refrigerator. He dumped more vodka into the bottle. Vodka could get you through these little blue periods.
Bunting closed the freezer door, screwed the top onto the bottle, and held the nipple clenched between his teeth while he surveyed his room. One week, then back into the world. Bunting remembered his vision of the raging Jesus who had stormed through working-class Battle Creek. Suffer the little children.
He crossed to his bed and picked up the telephone. “Okay,” he said, sucked from the bottle, and sat down. “Why not?”
“I ought to,” he said.
He dialed the area code for Battle Creek, then the first three digits of his parents’ number.
“Just thought I’d call,” he said. He pulled more vodka into his mouth.
“How are things? I don’t want to upset anybody.”
He dialed the last four numbers and listened to the phone ring in that little house so far away. Finally his father answered, not with “Hello,” but with “Yeah.”
“Hi, Dad, this is Bobby,” he said. “Just thought I’d call. How are things?”
“Fine, why wouldn’t they be?” his father said.
“Well, I didn’t want to upset anybody.”
“Why would we get upset? You know how your mother and I feel. We enjoy your calls.”
“You do?”
“Well, sure. Don’t get enough of ’em.” There was a small moment of silence. “Got anything special on your mind, Bobby?”
It was as if the other night had never happened. This was how it went, Bunting remembered. If you forgot about something, it went away.
“I guess I was wondering about Mom,” he said. “She sounded a little confused, the other night.”
“Guess she was,” his father said in an abrupt, dismissive voice. “She gets that way, now and then. I can’t do anything about it, Bobby. How’re things at work? Okay?”
“Things could be better,” Bunting said, and immediately regretted it.
“Oh?” His father’s voice was hard and biting. “What happened, you get fired? They fired you, didn’t they? You screwed up and they fired you.”
He could hear his father breathing hard, stoking himself up like a steam engine.
For a sec
ond it seemed that his father was right: he had screwed up, and they had fired him. “No,” he said. “They didn’t. I’m not fired.”
“But you’re not at work, either. It’s nine o’clock in the morning here, so it’s ten where you are, and Bobby Bunting is still in his apartment. So you lost your job. I knew it was gonna happen.”
“No, it didn’t,” Bunting said. “I just left early.”
“Sure. You left at eight-thirty on Monday morning. What do you call that, premature retirement? I call it getting fired. Just don’t try to kid me about it, Bobby, I know what kind of person you are.” He inhaled. “And don’t expect any money from the old folks, okay? Remember all those meals at fancy restaurants and all those trips to Europe, and you’ll know where your money went. If you ever had any, and if any of that stuff was true, which is something I have my doubts about.”
“I took the day off,” Bunting said. “Maybe I’ll take off tomorrow, too. I’m taking care of a few details around here.”
“Yeah, those kind of details are likely to take care of you, if you don’t watch out.”
“Look,” said Bunting, stung. “I’m not fired. You hear me? Nobody fired me. I took the day off, because somebody got on my back. I don’t know why you never believe me about anything.”
“Do you want me to remind you about your whole life, back here? I know who you are, Bobby, let’s leave it at that.” His father inhaled again, so loudly it sounded as if he had put the telephone into his mouth. He was calming himself. “Don’t get me wrong, you got your good points, same as everybody else. Maybe you ought to cut down on the wild social life, and stop trying to make up for never going out when you were a teenager, that’s all. There’s responsibilities. Responsibilities were never your strong point. But maybe you changed. Fine. Okay?”