by Peter Straub
Bunting felt as if he had been mugged on a dark street. It was like having Frank Herko yell at him about manhood all over again.
“Let me ask you something,” he said, and pulled another mouthful of Popov out of the Ama. “Have you ever thought that you saw what reality really was?”
“Jesus wept.”
“Wait. I mean something by that. Didn’t you ever have a time when you saw that everything was alive?”
“Stop right there, Bobby, I don’t want to hear this shit all over again. Just shut your trap, if you know what’s good for you.”
“What do you mean?” Bunting was almost yelling. “You mean I can’t talk about it? Why can’t I talk about it?”
“Because it’s crazy, you dummy,” his father said. “I want you to hear this, Bobby. You’re nothing special. You got that? You worried your mother enough already, so keep your trap shut. For your own good.”
Bunting felt astonishingly small. His father’s voice had pounded him down into childhood, and he was now about three feet tall. “I can’t talk anymore.”
“Sleep it off and straighten up,” his father said. “I mean it.”
Bunting let the phone slide back into the cradle and grabbed for the Ama.
By the time he decided to get out of bed, he was so drunk that he had trouble navigating across the room and into the bathroom. As he peed, a phrase of his father’s came back to him, and his urine splattered off the wall. I don’t want to hear this shit all over again. All over again? If he weren’t drunk, he thought, he would understand some fact he did not presently understand. But because he was drunk, he couldn’t. Neither could he go outside. Bunting reeled back to his bed and passed out.
He woke up in the darkness with a headache and a vast, encompassing feeling of shame and sorrow. His life was nothing—it had always been nothing, it would always be nothing. There could be no release. The things he had seen, his experiences of ecstasy, the moment he had tried to describe to Marty, all were illusion. In a week he would go back to DataComCorp, and everything would return to normal. Probably they would just take him back—he wasn’t important enough to fire. The only difference would be that Frank Herko would ignore him.
His whole problem was that he always forgot he was nothing special.
He promised himself that he would stop making things up. There would be no more imaginary love affairs. Bunting walked over to his window and looked down upon men and women in winter coats and hats who had normal, unglamorous, realistic lives. They looked cold. He got back into bed as if into a coffin.
12
The next morning, Bunting poured all of his vodka and cognac down the sink. He washed the dishes that had accumulated since his last washing. He looked at the sacks of garbage stowed away here and there, put the worst of them into large plastic bags, and took them all downstairs to the street. Back in his apartment, he swept and scrubbed for several hours. He changed his sheets and organized the magazines and newspapers into neat piles. Then he washed the bathroom floor and soaked in the tub for half an hour. He dried himself, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, and went straight back to bed. One of these days, he told himself, he would begin regular exercise.
The next day, he fought down the impulse to get another bottle of vodka and went to the supermarket on Broadway and bought a bag of carrots, a bag of celery, cartons of fruit juice and low-fat milk, a loaf of whole-grain bread, and a container of cholesterol-free margarine. Such a diet would keep the raging Jesus at bay.
Bunting spent most of Thursday lying down. He ate two carrots, three celery sticks, and one slice of dry bread. The bread tasted particularly good. He drank all of his fruit juice. In the evening, he tried switching on the television, but what came out was a stream of language so ugly it squeaked with pain. He fell soundly asleep at nine-thirty, was awakened by the sound of gunshots around three in the morning, and went promptly back to sleep.
On Friday he rose, showered, dressed in a conservative gray suit, ate a carrot and drank two or three ounces of papaya juice, put on his coat, and went outside for the first time since Monday morning. It was a bright brisk day, and the air, though not as fresh as that of the Montana plains in 1878 or Los Angeles in 1944, seemed startlingly clean and pure. Even on upper Broadway, Bunting thought he could smell the sea. The outline of a body had been chalked on a roped-off portion of the sidewalk, and as Bunting walked between two parked cars and stepped down onto unsanitary, untidy Broadway to walk alongside the traffic in the dazzling sunlight, he merely glanced at the white outline of the body and then firmly looked away and continued moving toward the traffic light and the open sidewalk.
Bunting walked for miles. He looked at the watches in Tourneau’s windows, at the shoes in Church Brothers, the pocket calculators and compact disc players in a string of windows on lower Fifth Avenue. He came at length to Battery Park, and sat for a moment, looking out toward the Statue of Liberty. He was in the world, surrounded by people and things; the breeze that touched him touched everyone else, too. To Bunting, this world seemed new and almost undamaged, barren in a fashion only he had once known and now wished nearly to forget.
If a tree fell in the forest, it would not make a sound, no, none.
He began walking back uptown, remembering how he had once sat comfortably astride a horse named Shorty and how a worried perfume executive in a flannel suit had handed him a photograph of his mother. These experiences too could be sealed within a leaden casket and pushed overboard into the great psychic sea. They were aberrations: silent and weightless exceptions to a general rule. He would get old in his little room, drinking iced tea and papaya juice out of baby bottles. He would outlive his parents. Both of them. Everybody did that.
He took a bus up Broadway, and got off several blocks before his building because he wanted to walk a little more. On the corner a red-faced man in a shabby plaid coat sat on a camp chair behind a display of used paperback books. Bunting paused to look over the titles for Luke Short or a Max Brand, but saw mainly romance novels with titles like Love’s Savage Bondage or Sweet Merciless Kiss. These titles, and the disturbing covers that came with them, threatened to remind Bunting of Marty seated across from him in a Greenwich Village restaurant, and he stepped back from the array to banish even the trace of this memory. A cover unlike the others met his eye, and he took in the title, Anna Karenina, and realized that he had heard of the book somewhere—of course he had never read it, it was nothing like the sort of books he usually read, but he was sure that it was supposed to be very good. He bent down and picked it up and opened it at random. He leaned toward the page in the light of the street lamp and read. Before the early dawn all was hushed. Nothing was to be heard but the night sounds of the frogs that never ceased in the marsh, and the horses snorting in the mist that rose over the meadow before the morning.
A thrill went through his body, and he turned the page and read another couple of sentences. A slight wind rose, and the sky looked gray and sullen. The gloomy moment that usually precedes the dawn had come, the full triumph of light over darkness.
Bunting felt a strange desire to weep: he wanted to stand there for a long time, leafing through this miraculous book.
A voice said, “World’s greatest realistic novel, hands down.”
Bunting looked up to meet the uncommonly intelligent gaze of the pudgy red-faced man in the camp chair. “That right?”
“Anybody says different, he’s outta his fuckin’ mind.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “One dollar.”
Bunting fished a dollar from his pocket and leaned over the rows of bright covers to give it to the man. “What makes it so great?” he asked.
“Understanding. Depth of understanding. Unbelievable responsiveness to detail linked to amazing clarity of vision.”
“Yeah,” Bunting said, “yeah, that’s it.” He clutched the book to his chest and turned away toward his apartment building.
—
He placed the book on his chair and sat on the b
ed and looked at its cover. In a few sentences, Anna Karenina had brought shining bits of the world to him—it was as close as you could get to the Buffalo Hunter experience and still be sane. Everything was so close that it was almost like being inside it. The two short passages he had read had brought the other world within him, which had once seemed connected to a great secret truth about the world as a whole, once again into being—had awakened it by touching it. Bunting was almost afraid of this power. He had to have the book, but he was not sure that he could read it.
Bunting jumped off the bed and ate two slices of whole-grain bread and a couple of carrots. Then he put his coat on and went back to the cash machine at the bank and to the drugstore across the street.
That night he lay in bed, enjoying the slight ache in his legs all the walking had given him and drinking warm milk from his old Prentiss. Beneath him, odd and uncomfortable but perfect all the same, was the construction he had made from eighty round plastic Evenflos and a tube of epoxy, a lumpy blanket of baby bottles that nestled into and warmed itself against his body. He had thought of making a sheet of baby bottles a long time ago, when he had been thinking about fakirs and beds of nails, and finally making the sheet now was a whimsical reference to that time when he had thought mainly about baby bottles. Bunting thought that sometime he could take off all the nipples and fill every one of the Evenflos beneath him with warm milk. It would be like going to bed with eighty little hot water bottles.
He held the slightly battered copy of Anna Karenina up before him and looked at the cover illustration of a train which had paused at a country station to take on fuel or food for its passengers. A snowstorm swirled around the front of the locomotive. The illustration seemed filled with the same luminous, almost alarming reality as the sentences he had found at random within the book, and Bunting knew that this sense of promise and immediacy came from the memory of those passages. Opening the book at all seemed to invoke a great risk, but if Bunting could have opened it to those sentences in which the horses snorted in the mist and the wind sprang up under a gray morning sky, he would have done so instantly. His eyes drooped, and the little train in the illustration threw upward a white flag of steam and jolted forward in the falling snow.
13
Monday morning the telephone rang with a fussy, importunate clamor that all but announced the presence of Frank Herko on the other end of the line—Bunting, who was in the fourth day of his sobriety, could imagine Herko grimacing and cursing as the phone went unanswered. Bunting continued chewing on a slice of dry bread, and looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock. Herko had finally admitted that he was not coming in again, and was trying to bully him back to DataComCorp. Bunting had no intention of answering the telephone. Frank Herko and the job in the Data Entry room dwindled as they shrank into the past. He swallowed the last of his papaya juice and reminded himself to pick up more fruit juices that morning. At last, on the thirteenth ring, the telephone fell silent.
Bunting thought of the horses snorting in the cold morning mist when everything else was silent but the frogs, and a shiver went through him.
He stood up from the table and looked around his room. It was pretty radical. He thought it might look a little better if he got rid of all the newspapers and magazines—his room would never look ordinary anymore, but what he had done would mean more if the whole room was a little cleaner. The nipples of baby bottles jutted out from two walls, and a blanket of baby bottles, like a sheet of chain mail, covered his bed. If there were very little else in the room, Bunting saw, it would be as purposeful as a museum exhibit. He could get rid of the television. His room would be stark as a monument. And the monument would be to everything that was missing, but he didn’t think it could be summed up easily.
He washed his plate and glass and put them on the drying rack. Then he unplugged his television set, picked it up, unlocked his door, and carried the set out into the hall. He took it down past the elevators and set it on the floor. Then he turned around and hurried back into his apartment.
Bunting spent the morning stuffing the magazines and newspapers into black garbage bags and taking them downstairs to the sidewalk. On his fourth or fifth trip, he noticed that the television had disappeared from the hallway. Bango Skank or Jeepy had a new toy. Gradually, Bunting’s room lost its old enclosed look. There were the two walls covered with jutting bottles, the wall with the windows that overlooked the brownstones, and the kitchen alcove. There was his bed and the bedside chair. He had uncovered another chair which had been concealed under a mound of papers, and this too he took out into the hallway for his neighbors.
When he came up from taking out the last of the garbage bags, he closed and locked the door behind him, pulled the police bar into its slot, and inspected his territory. A bare wooden floor, with dusty squares where stacks of newspapers had stood, extended toward him from the exterior wall. Without the newspapers, the distance between himself and the windows seemed immense. For the first time, Bunting noticed the streaks on the glass. The bright daylight turned them silver and cast long rectangles on the floor. Rigid baby bottles stuck out of the wall on both sides, to his right going toward the bathroom door and the kitchen alcove, and to his left, extending toward his bed. The wall above and beyond the bed was also covered with a mat of jutting baby bottles. A wide blanket of baby bottles, half-covering a flat pillow and a white blanket, lay across his bed.
After a lunch of carrots, celery, and bread, Bunting poured hot water and soap into a bucket and washed his floor. Then he poured out the filthy water, started again, and washed the table and the kitchen counters. After that he scrubbed even his bathroom—sink, toilet, floor, and tub. Large brown mildew stains blotted the shower curtain, and Bunting carefully unhooked it from the plastic rings, folded it into quarters, and took it downstairs and stuffed it into a garbage can.
He went to bed hungry but not painfully so, his back and shoulders tingling from the work, and his legs still aching from his long walk down the length of Manhattan. He lay atop the blanket of bottles, and pulled the sheet and woolen blanket over his body. He picked up the old paperback copy of Anna Karenina and opened it with trembling hands. For a second it seemed that the sentences were going to lift up off the page and claim him, and his heart tightened with both fear and some other, more anticipatory emotion. But his gaze met the page, and he stayed within his body and his room, and read. And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the day she had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do. With a light, rapid step she went down the steps that led from the water tank to the rails and stopped close to the approaching train.
Bunting shuddered and fell into an exhausted sleep.
—
He was walking through a landscape of vacant lots and cement walls in a city street that might have been New York or Battle Creek. Broken bottles and pages from old newspapers lay in the street. Here and there across the weedy lots, tenements rose into the gray air. His legs ached, and his feet hurt, and it was difficult for him to follow the man walking along ahead of him, whose pale robe filled and billowed in the cold wind. The man was slightly taller than Bunting, and his dark hair blew about his head. Untroubled by the winter wind, the man strode along, increasing the distance between himself and Bunting with every step. Bunting did not know why he had to follow this strange man, but that was what he had to do. To lose him would be disaster—he would be lost in this dead, ugly world. Then he would be dead himself. His feet seemed to adhere to the gritty pavement, and a stiff wind held him back like a hand. As the man receded another several yards down the street, it came to Bunting that what he was following was an angel, not a man, and he cried out in terror. Instantly the being stopped moving and stood with his back to Bunting. The pale robe fluttered about him. A certain word had to be spoken, or the angel would begin walking and leave Bunting in this terrible world. The word was essential, and Bunting did not know it, but he opened his mouth and shouted the first word that came to him.
The instant it was spoken, Bunting knew that it was the correct word. He forgot it as soon as it left his throat. The angel slowly began to turn around. Bunting inhaled sharply. The front of the robe was red with blood, and when the angel held out the palms of his hands, they were bloody too. The angel’s face was tired and dazed, and his eyes looked blind.
14
Tuesday morning, Bunting awoke with tears in his eyes for the wounded angel, the angel beyond help, and realized with a shock of alarm that he was in someone else’s house. For a moment he was completely adrift in time and space, and thought he might actually be a prisoner in an attic—his room held no furniture except a table and chair, and the windows seemed barred. It came to him that he might have died. The afterlife contained a strong, pervasive odor of soap and disinfectant. Then the bars on the windows resolved into streaks and shadows, and he looked up to the bottles sticking straight out on the wall above his head, and remembered what he had done. The wounded angel slipped backward into the realm of forgotten things where so much of Bunting’s life lay hidden, and Bunting moved his legs across the bumpy landscape of baby bottles, his fakir’s bed of nails, and pulled himself out of bed. His legs, shoulders, back, and arms all ached.
Out on the street, Bunting realized that he was enjoying his unemployment. For days he had carried with him always a slight burn of hunger, and hunger was such a sharp sensation that there was a small quantity of pleasure in it. Sadness was the same, Bunting realized—if you could stand beside your own sadness, you could appreciate it. Maybe it was the same with the big emotions, love and terror and grief. Terror and grief would be the hardest, he thought, and for a moment uneasily remembered Jesus slapping a bloody palm against the side of his old house in Battle Creek. Holy holy holy.