by Peter Straub
The extremely uncomfortable thought came to him that maybe terror and grief were holy too, and that Jesus had appeared before him in a Battle Creek located somewhere north of Greenwich Village to convey this.
A white cloud of steam vaguely the size and shape of an adult woman rose up from a manhole in the middle of Broadway and by degrees vanished into transparency.
Bunting felt the world begin to shred around him and hurried into Fairway Fruits and Vegetables. He bought apples, bread, carrots, tangerines, and milk. At the checkout counter he imagined the little engine on the cover of the Tolstoy novel issuing white flags of steam and launching itself into the snowstorm. He had the strange sense, which he knew to be untrue, that someone was watching him, and this sense followed him back out onto the wide crowded street.
A woman-sized flag of white steam did not linger over Broadway, there was no sudden outcry, no chalked outline to show where a human being had died.
Bunting began walking up the street toward his building. Brittle pale light bounced from the roofs of cars, from thick gold necklaces, from sparkling shopwindows displaying compact discs. In all this brightness and activity lurked the mysterious sense that someone was still watching him—as if the entire street held its breath as it attended Bunting’s progress up the block. He carried his bag of groceries through the cold bright air. Far down the block, someone called out in a belling tenor voice like a hunting horn, and the world’s hovering attention warmed this beautiful sound so that it lingered in Bunting’s ears. A taxi slid forward out of the shadows into a shower of light and revealed, in a sudden blaze of color, a pure and molten yellow. The white of a Chinese woman’s eyes flashed toward Bunting, and her black hair swung lustrously about her head. A plume of white breath came from his mouth. It was as if someone had spoken secret words, instantly forgotten, and the words spoken had transformed him. The cold sidewalk beneath his feet seemed taut as a lion’s hide, as resonant as a drum.
Even the lobby of his building was charged with anticipatory meaning.
He let himself into his bare room and carried the groceries to his bed and carefully took from the bag each apple and tangerine, the carrots, the milk. He balled up the bag and folded it neatly, and then poured the milk into three separate bottles. These he took back across his sparkling floor and set them beside the bed. Bunting took off his shoes, the suit he was wearing, his shirt and tie, and hung everything neatly in his closet. He returned to the bed in his underwear and socks. He turned back the bed and got in on top of the fakir’s blanket of baby bottles and pulled the sheets and blanket up over his body without shaking off any of the objects on the bed. He doubled his pillow and switched on his lamp, though the cold light from outside still cast large bright rectangles on the floor. He leaned back under the reading light and arranged the fruit, carrots, bread, and bottles around him. He raised one of the bottles to his mouth and clamped the nipple between his teeth. There was a brisk pleasant coolness in the air that seemed to come from the world contained in the illustration on the cover of the book beside him.
Bunting drew in a mouthful of milk and picked up the copy of Anna Karenina from the bedside chair. He was trembling. He opened the book to the first page, and when he looked down at the lines of print, they rose to meet his eyes.
15
The super of the building looked down as he fit the key into the lock. He turned it, and both men heard the lock click open. The super kept looking at the floor. He was as heavy as Bunting’s father, and the two sweaters he wore against the cold made him look pregnant. Bunting’s father was wearing an overcoat, and his shoulders were hunched and his hands were thrust into its pockets. The breath of both men came out in clouds white as milk. Finally the super glanced up at Mr. Bunting.
“Go on, open it up,” said Mr. Bunting.
“Okay, but there are some things you probably don’t know,” the super said.
“There’s a lot I don’t know,” said Mr. Bunting. “Like what the hell happened, basically. And I guess you can’t be too helpful on that issue, or am I wrong?”
“Well, there’s other things, too,” the super said, and opened the door at last. He stepped backward to let Mr. Bunting go into the room.
Bunting’s father went about a yard and a half into the room, then stopped moving. The super stepped in behind him and closed the door.
“I fucking hate New York,” said Mr. Bunting. “I hate the crap that goes on down here. Excuse me for getting personal, but you can’t even keep the heat on in this dump.” He was looking at the wall above the bed, where many of the bottles had been splashed, instead of directly at the bed itself. The bed had been cracked along a diagonal line, and the sheets, which were brown with dried blood, had hardened so that they would form a giant stiff V if you tried to take them off. Someone, probably the super’s wife, had tried to mop up the blood alongside the cracked, folded bed. Chips of wood and bent, flattened bedsprings lay on the smeary floor.
“The tenants are all mad, but it’s a good thing we got no heat,” the super said. “I mean, we’ll get it, when we get the new boiler, but he was here ten days before I found him. And I’ll tell you something.” He came cautiously toward Mr. Bunting, who took his eyes off the wall to scowl at him. “He made it easy for me. See that police bolt?”
The super gestured toward the long iron rod leaning against the wall beside the door frame. “He left it that way—unlocked. It was like he was doing me a favor. If he’d a pushed that sucker across the door, I’d a had to break down the door to get in. And I probably wouldn’t have found him for two more weeks. At least.”
“So maybe he made it easy for whoever did it,” said Bunting’s father. “Some favor.”
“You saw him?”
Mr. Bunting turned back to look at the bottles above the bed. He turned slowly to look at the bottles on the front wall. “Sure I saw him. I saw his face. You want details? You can go fuck yourself, you want details. All they let me see was his face.”
“It didn’t look like anybody could have done that,” the super said.
“That’s real clever. Nobody did it.” He saw something on the bed, and moved closer to it. “What’s that?” He was looking at a shriveled red ball that had fallen into the bottom of the fold. A smaller, equally shriveled black ball had fallen a few feet from it.
“I think it’s an apple,” said the super. “He had some apples and tangerines, some bread. And if you look close, you can see little bits of paper stuck all over the place, like some book exploded. All the fruit dried out, but the book…I don’t know what happened to the book. Maybe he tore it up.”
“Could you maybe keep your trap shut?” Mr. Bunting took in the bottles above the bed for an entire minute. Then he turned and stared at the unstained bottles on the far wall. At last he said, “That is what I don’t get. I don’t get this with the baby bottles.”
He glanced at the super, who quickly shook his head to indicate that he did not get it either.
“I mean, you ever get any other tenants down here who did this kind of thing?”
“I’ve never seen anyone do this before,” said the super. “This is a new one. These bottles, I gotta take the walls down to get ’em off.”
Mr. Bunting seemed not to have heard him. “First my wife dies—three weeks ago Tuesday. Then I hear about Bobby, who was always a fuckup, but who happens to be my only kid. When they decide to give it to you, they really give it to you good. They know how to do it. Now on top of everything else, here’s this crap. Maybe I should of stayed away.”
“You saw his face?” the super asked.
“Huh?”
“You said you saw his face.”
Mr. Bunting gave the super the glance that one heavyweight gives another when they touch gloves.
“Well, I did too, when I found him,” the super said. “I think you ought to know this. It’s something, anyhow.”
Mr. Bunting nodded, but did not alter his expression.
“When I came i
n…I mean, your son was dead, there was no doubt about that. I was in Korea, and I know what dead people look like. It looked like he got hit by a truck. It’s crazy, but that’s what I thought when I saw him. He was smashed up against the wall, and the bed was all smashed…Anyhow, what got me was the expression on his face. Whatever happened happened all right, and pardon me, but there’s no way the police are ever going to arrest a couple of guys and get ’em on this, because no couple of guys could ever do what I saw in this room with my own eyes, believe me—”
He inhaled. Bunting’s father was looking at him with flat impatient indifferent anger.
“But anyhow, the point is, the way your son looked. He looked happy. He looked like he saw the greatest goddamn thing in the world before whatever the hell it was happened to him.”
“Oh, yeah,” Mr. Bunting said. He was shaking his head. “Well, he didn’t look that way when I saw him, but I’m not too surprised by what you say.” He smiled for the first time since entering his son’s room, and started shaking his head again. The smile made the other man’s stomach feel small and cold. “His mother never understood it, but I sure did.”
“What?” asked the super.
“He always thought he was some kind of a big deal.” Mr. Bunting included the whole apartment in the gesture of his arm. “I couldn’t see it.”
“It’s like that sometimes,” the super said.
Bar Talk
It was an ordinary side-street bar, its only oddity being its placement on the second floor over an Indian restaurant. The patrons of the bar never entered the restaurant, and the customers and staff of the restaurant never came upstairs to the bar. The people who went there liked the long dark dull wood of the bar, the mirror, the wooden paneling and old beer signs on the walls. Few people bothered to look anymore at the photographs of poets and novelists who had been regular patrons once, or at the pictures of boxers and anonymous show-business people who had also been regulars, though at another time. Nobody ever looked out of the windows, which were the unremarkable windows of the apartment the bar had once been. It was as if the new regulars did not wish to be reminded they were above the street, once they had climbed the stairs.
These patrons were the people of the neighborhood, and they used the bar to escape from their apartments. None of them were young or rich, and most of them seemed to have settled into their various lives. They did not talk very much, except to Max, the bartender. Sometimes they seemed to be waiting for the bartender to return to them, so that they could continue their conversation, and to be impatient with the customer who had delayed him. Max was often the youngest person in the room—he wanted to be a stand-up comedian, and he liked to present his own experience in a comic, representative fashion.
In the autumn, nearly on the first cold day of the year, a new person started coming upstairs to the bar. He dressed in camouflage fatigues, a leather jacket, and worn black running shoes. The fatigues seemed faded from thousands of washings, and darker patches showed where tags and insignia had been torn off. He had long thick black hair, and he wore heavy round glasses. The man always carried a book with him, and he sat down at the far end of the bar, ordered a vodka on the rocks, and opened his book and read for a couple of hours. He had three or four drinks. Then he closed the book, paid up, and left. Pretty soon he was there every day. Some of the regulars started nodding hello to him, and he nodded back or smiled, but he never said anything, even to Max.
After a couple of weeks, he turned up one day in a black turtleneck and a pair of jeans so faded they were almost white. One of the regulars, a woman in her sixties named Jeannie, couldn’t stand it anymore and went over to him when he opened his book. “What happened to the fatigues?” she asked. “You finally wash them?”
Max laughed.
“I have a lot of fatigues,” the young man said.
“You must like to read,” Jeannie said. “Every time I see you, you’re reading something.”
“I have a lot of books, too,” he said, and laughed, startled by his own words.
Everybody else in the bar, even Max, was staring at them, and Jeannie inexplicably turned red. She stepped away from the young man, but he put his hand on hers, and she moved back beside him. Max drifted up the bar, and everybody else went back to their conversations or their silences. After a while Max began talking to an old merchant seaman named Billy Blue, and Billy began to laugh. Max turned to another of his regulars and told the same story, and both customers started laughing. Everybody forgot about Jeannie after a while. Then Max or someone else looked down at the end of the bar, and she was sitting there by herself. The man had dropped some bills on the bar and left without anybody noticing. Jeannie had a funny look on her face, as if she were remembering something she’d be happier to forget.
“That guy say something to you, Jeannie?” Max asked. “He get nasty?”
“No, nothing like that,” Jeannie said. “He was fine. Really.”
She stood up and carried her glass over to the window and looked down onto the street.
“He was fine?” Max said. “What the hell does that mean?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Jeannie said. She turned away from all of them and looked down. Some of the regulars thought she might be crying, but they couldn’t really tell. Everybody was sort of embarrassed for a little while, and then Jeannie finally turned away from the window and went back to her old place at the bar. The guy with the book never came back; after a couple of weeks, Jeannie began going to a bar further down the block.
A Short Guide to the City
The viaduct killer, named for the location where his victims’ bodies have been discovered, is still at large. There have been six victims to date, found by children, people exercising their dogs, lovers or—in one instance—by policemen. The bodies lay sprawled, their throats slashed, partially sheltered by one or another of the massive concrete supports at the top of the slope beneath the great bridge. We assume that the viaduct killer is a resident of the city, a voter, a renter or property owner, a product of the city’s excellent public school system, perhaps even a parent of children who even now attend one of its several elementary schools, three public high schools, two parochial schools, or single nondenominational private school. He may own a boat or belong to the Book-of-the-Month Club, he may frequent one or another of its many bars and taverns, he may have subscription tickets to the concert series put on by the city symphony orchestra. He may be a factory worker with a library ticket. He owns a car, perhaps two. He may swim in one of the city’s public pools or the vast lake, punctuated with sailboats, during the hot moist August of the city.
For this is a Midwestern city, northern, with violent changes of season. The extremes of climate, from ten or twenty below zero to up around one hundred in the summer, cultivate an attitude of acceptance in its citizens, of insularity—it looks inward, not out, and few of its children leave for the more temperate, uncertain, and experimental cities of the eastern or western coasts. The city is proud of its modesty—it cherishes the ordinary, or what it sees as the ordinary, which is not. (It has had the same mayor for twenty-four years, a man of limited-to-average intelligence who has aged gracefully and has never had any other occupation of any sort.)
Ambition, the yearning for fame, position, and achievement, is discouraged here. One of its citizens became the head of a small foreign state, another a famous bandleader, yet another a Hollywood staple who for decades played the part of the star’s best friend and confidant; this, it is felt, is enough, and besides, all of these people are now dead. The city has no literary tradition. Its only mirror is provided by its two newspapers, which have thick sports sections and are comfortable enough to be read in bed.
The city’s characteristic mode is denial. For this reason, an odd fabulousness permeates every quarter of the city, a receptiveness to fable, to the unrecorded. A river runs through the center of the business district, as the Liffey runs through Dublin, the Seine through Paris, the Th
ames through London, and the Danube through Budapest, though our river is smaller and less consequential than any of these.
Our lives are ordinary and exemplary, the citizens would say. We take part in the life of the nation, history courses through us for all our immunity to the national illnesses: it is even possible that in our ordinary lives…We too have had our pulse taken by the great national seers and opinion-makers, for in us you may find…
Forty years ago, in winter, the body of a woman was found on the banks of the river. She had been raped and murdered, cast out of the human community—a prostitute, never identified—and the noises of struggle that must have accompanied her death went unnoticed by the patrons of the Green Woman Taproom, located directly above that point on the river where her body was discovered. It was an abnormally cold winter that year, a winter of shared misery, and within the Green Woman the music was loud, feverish, festive.
In that community, which is Irish and lives above its riverfront shops and bars, neighborhood children were supposed to have found a winged man huddling in a packing case, an aged man, half-starved, speaking a strange language none of the children knew. His wings were ragged and dirty, many of the feathers as cracked and threadbare as those of an old pigeon’s, and his feet were dirty and swollen. Ull! Li! Gack! The children screamed at him, mocking the sounds that came from his mouth. They pelted him with rocks and snowballs, imagining that he had crawled up from that same river which sent chill damp—a damp as cold as cancer—into their bones and bedrooms, which gave them earaches and chilblains, which in summer bred rats and mosquitoes.
One of the city’s newspapers is Democratic, the other Republican. Both papers ritually endorse the mayor, who though consummately political has no recognizable politics. Both of the city’s newspapers also support the chief of police, crediting him with keeping the city free of the kind of violence that has undermined so many other American cities. None of our citizens goes armed, and our church attendance is still far above the national average.