My Petition For More Space

by John Hersey

  All around us there is quick chatter. Hope bubbles up as we approach the windows. The pompon bobs.

  A sturdy woman off to the left, beyond the cigar man, throws her head back to laugh; the mass of her hair squashes into the face of a totally bald man behind her, who shakes his head back and forth and spits to get hairs out of his mouth. He protests cheerfully. Was she laughing at a joke of his? I look closely at his face to see whether I can detect signs of his having developed a relationship with the woman against whom he is pressed by the waitline. He has liver blotches on his skin, and a bumpy nose like a gnarl on a maple tree. What does the woman imagine he looks like?

  The painter still croaks out his urgings. ‘Come on, come on, come on!’ he shouts. Here near the doors his voice now has a resolute ring.

  Each time he barks, the black woman beside him and behind the janitor makes one of her sounds of tested patience. I sense that she is carrying on a teasing game with the painter; making wild eyes; she is unable to believe there could be anyone so ill-equipped to stand and wait.

  All these impressions of rising excitement, together with countless new pictures of bits of heads in the line—a pierced ear with a gold circlet hanging from it, a greenish-purplish bruise like a slice of an unripe plum, the beginnings of a goiter, a woman’s hairy upper lip—enter my mind at its fringes. They are all distractions. In the middle ground of my attention, at the point where the rays of sunlight through the lens converge to set things on fire, there are only the janitor’s warning and the definite encouragement I now think I am getting from Maisie. All the excitement around us is drawn down to this hot, ambiguous point.

  4

  LIKE A NAGGING younger brother the janitor hisses, ‘But it is my business. I might be next to you at the windows. It is my business.’

  Fire is in the back of my mind.

  Before my father’s hands began to shake, he made exquisitely realistic cardboard and wooden models of boats and airplanes and racing cars for me. I marveled at his skill with those hands, which had black hairs on the backs of the fingers between the knuckles. As I grew older and he slid into his illness, I came to love the surface textures of the cheap violin he had bought me, its graceful neck and scroll, its ebony pegs, the sweep of the f-hole, the powerful architecture of the fragile bridge; and in my envy of his former skill I dreamed of making something more marvelous than he had ever made—a real violin. One day I read in the back pages of a comic book about an eccentric tinkerer who had made a violin by gluing wooden kitchen matches together in layers. I began to glue up some of my mother’s matches. When she came home from shopping she was panicked by the heaps of blue-tipped match heads that had accumulated after the first hour; I was saving them to make little homemade fireworks, of the sort we called torpedoes, by wrapping them in tight little packages mixed with grit. She screamed when she saw the match heads on the table and floor—the only scream I ever heard from that gentle and serene woman. She forbade me to work with matches, and I was saved from the humiliation of my father’s laughter, which I would surely have earned when he eventually found out what I was trying to make, and with what materials.

  The crux of this memory has come and gone in an instant. The janitor is still after me. ‘I was talking to you,’ he says. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘I could turn you in, the way you’re fooling around.’ His nose, which serves for an index finger now that his arms are pinned to his sides, points at Maisie.

  ‘I am not fooling around,’ I say. ‘Ask her.’

  I have put myself ridiculously on the defensive. I have let his charge get under my skin. Brotherlike, he immediately realizes his advantage. ‘I got eyes,’ he says.

  ‘They don’t see so well.’

  ‘I’m not deaf.’

  ‘I told you before. Mind your own business.’

  ‘I told you before—the thing you’re going to ask for, it is my business. You’re not going to put in for that.’

  ‘I have a right to enter any petition I want.’

  ‘Oh, brother!’ he exclaims, raising his eyes to the sky. His casual use of this everyday expression of outrage frightens me more than any threat he has made up to now.

  But what he says next restores my anger right away—and my desire. ‘I’m going to make sure,’ he says, ‘that you don’t get to those windows.’

  * * *

  —

  MY ANGER and my desire are hand in hand. Both need space. To fight, to make love—a ring, a bower. In a fleeting fantasy I have plenty of room to wind up and throw a haymaker and I hear that rudder of a nose on the janitor’s face crack like wood, and at the same instant I have put my hands gently on Maisie’s shoulders and have turned her around facing me, and in a capsule of privacy I pull her body close to mine.

  In reality she has heard what the janitor has said. She turns her head to the left and murmurs, ‘How can you justify what you’re asking for?’

  It is not that she is on the janitor’s side; I understand that. She does not know what the janitor plans to do to keep me from the windows; whatever he says or does, she wants me to have a strong case. Her question is solicitous. I translate it: She really means she wants me to turn her around and hug her. I am not so afraid now as I was earlier of the consequences of breaking the law.

  In my mind space is positive. Some people make space for themselves by holding themselves aloof. Half closing their eyes, which bright light hurts, they see others through a distorting, rainbow-tinted film of their own eyelashes, and they think loud thoughts in order not to hear what their neighbors are saying. Theirs is negative space. For me space gives, derives from, and is peace of mind. One has to make it for himself. One has to seek it, strive for it, if necessary fight for it—certainly ask for it.

  ‘I need it,’ I answer Maisie. ‘I’ll never get it by waiting for it to come to me.’

  ‘That’s not going to satisfy them.’

  The grandmother is laughing; I feel her body shaking and her guffaws assail my left ear. She is now very jolly. She has at last found a talker in Handlebars. He has nothing to say to her that hasn’t to do with his enjoyment of his six senses—for he seems to have one more than the rest of us, the extra one being seated, evidently, in his glans. His talk is lusty, stupid, and endless, but it finally justifies the grandmother’s morning.

  A shriek in my right ear shoots terror to my gut. It is the janitor—rage and frustration.

  After the cry he shouts at the top of his voice, ‘Everybody listen to me! This guy to the left of me! His petition! More space! The son of a bitch is asking for more space in his sleeping-hall!’

  * * *

  —

  THE TEACHER, directly in front of the janitor, starts and cries out, ‘Hoo-oo! You scared me!’

  Everyone around me has been alarmed by the loudness of, and the sharp edge on, the janitors voice. Faces from ahead all turn to see where the outburst came from. Many pedestrians, shuffling slowly along against the current of our line, show that they are startled and baffled. The cigar man looks annoyed.

  Maisie groans, ‘Oh, no!’

  After the first gasps and exclamations there is something like silence—the city’s blank roar. This lasts only a few seconds. Then everyone is talking at once.

  The janitor is ecstatic. He has turned his chopper toward me and is muttering, ‘There! You see? You bastard. I told them. Now you’re going to see. You wait. Everybody—they know, see? I told them. I told you I was going to stop you. Didn’t I? You bastard, you’ll see! You aren’t going to bollix me up….’

  The stab of dread that the janitor’s first outcry sent through me put my body on alert. My heart is pounding. My arms are held tight. My buttocks prickle. I feel a new energy. The handclasp of my anger and my desire is tightened. The sympathy in Maisie’s groan has vibrated in my chest. I am more conscious than ever of my pressure against her. I am breaking the law. I am definitely breaki
ng the law.

  My eyes sweep the faces turned our way. The first response is like that of people having heard the first sharp crack of a thunderstorm. There is a primitive reflex—close the windows! get under the beds!—and then anger at the thunder, anger at the assault on the eardrums, anger at the anger in the electric bolt.

  The faces are disapproving—of the janitor. I hear shouts. ‘Shut up!’ ‘Pipe down!’ ‘Go to hell!’ ‘Hang it up!’ Some of those nearest us—the painter behind me, and the teacher in front of the janitor, for two—must remember their outrage at the janitor’s own loud complaints about space not long ago, about having all his things moved and stacked up in a single space after he took his wife to Connecticut Valley; I hear the painter now barking, ‘Look who’s talking!’ The teacher, recovered from her start, has resumed her natural habit of disapprobation, with which she now scalds the janitor; she has some skill in this line, and her voice crackles.

  Gradually the janitor, his monologue trickling down like a spilt pitcherful to the end of its run, has become aware of this surprising reply to his screams. He looks around. Is suddenly ready for lunch. Begins to swallow air again.

  For the second time this morning Maisie is inclining her head back toward mine. She knows what has happened to me. Yes! She is my accomplice now. She will certainly not report me, for after her manner she, too, is breaking the law.

  There is so much chatter and turbulence around us that I take a big chance, say out loud to her, ‘Wait for me by the windows when you’re finished with your petition.’

  Her head, still leaning back, almost touching mine, nods ever so slightly.

  By the time the janitor has absorbed his surprise at the resentment of the waitline against him, I can see that the feeling of the crowd has already subtly shifted ground. The words he shouted have begun to sink in. The son of a bitch on my left is asking for more space!

  Only a few—my touchers and their touchers, perhaps—know exactly who the shouter was, and so who the person on the shouter’s left is. The eyes from up ahead are searching, searching.

  Even as I luxuriate in, am further excited by, the thought of Maisie’s nod, I see the change in those eyes and on the faces in which they are set. As alarm has given way to anger, so now anger shifts from accuser to accused. The eyes not only search; they begin to hunt.

  Since many do not know who these two are, accuser and accused, the anger is at first abstracted. They are angry at the idea that a person, some son of a bitch on somebody’s left, should even think of broaching a forbidden subject at the petition windows. The idea threatens them, they feel their own petitions jeopardized. I know that this is ridiculous—they are ahead of me in the line—but I suppose they do not think of this, such is the repulsive power of the idea.

  I look to my right. The janitor is still chewing his meager snack of disappointment. I see that my reading of the crowds temper has outpaced his. He will soon be happier. With my emotions strongly drawn down toward my breaking of the law, I am nevertheless (or perhaps therefore) clear-headed. My desire has made me hawk-sharp. I know I must build my defenses, prepare a counterattack.

  The place to start is close at hand—my touchers, and theirs. These few know who was meant. Maisie is with me. The janitor cannot be brought round. The grandmother—no; I was coy about my petition with her. The painter behind me—morose, fractious, in a blind hurry; yet it was he who made the merciful suggestion of passing the woman who had fainted up to the windows, and I have just heard him snarl, ‘Look who’s talking!’

  I turn my head around to the left to speak to him, but as I do so, I wonder what I can really say. The reason for his impatience with the janitor was precisely that the janitor had been bitching about space. Yet there does seem to be some sense of fairness in this sullen man, and I must try to enlist it.

  Can it be that one reason I think of appealing to him is that I cannot see his face?

  I firmly say, ‘Anybody’s allowed to make any petition he wants. Right?’

  Handlebars thinks I am speaking to him. He grins at me in his goofy way. Since he refers everything to an index of his senses, he has no way of dealing with this kind of generalization. ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘why not?’

  He is a self-centered fool. He will be of no help at all. I draw my breath to renew my appeal to the painter—when suddenly everyone around me is talking at once.

  I make out the grandmother’s reproach: ‘So that’s why you didn’t want to tell me!’ At the moment this is a harmless rebuke, having more to do with my inadequacy as a conversationalist than with the substance of my petition. But the Havana-cigar man is looking at me with a shocked expression. ‘You?’ he says. ‘You?’ The teacher, too, is jabbering at me, but I cannot make out her words. I sense that the janitor is, as I predicted he would be, getting high again. The lottery man’s head turns from side to side; he is calling out something or other. Beneath the gnarled nose in the liver-spot-splotched face I see a cavern of outrage opening and closing, opening and closing.

  Maisie is trying to say something—out loud—but her words seem snatched away by the noise around us, as if she were shouting into a gale of wind. Maisie! I want to slide my hands forward around your hips and clasp you, but the teacher and the cigar man would feel the backs of my hands creeping past their flanks.

  The janitor sounds off again at the top of his voice. ‘Here he is! On my left! Petition for more space!’

  This loud shout knocks back the hubbub again; there is another momentary lull.

  Then, as new gusts of sound start up, Maisie says aloud, and I hear her, ‘Sam! Couldn’t you change your mind?’

  I really could not. I feel that I am going to have my turn at shouting. I am going to shout, ‘You all ought to be asking for more space! What are you afraid of? What have you to lose? Come on! Join me!’

  How can I change my mind, when my need underlies every choice, every action, every gesture of my life? Acceptance is out of the question. I am a writer. I need space. I can almost hear Maisie saying, her voice muffled by kindness, ‘But you only write departmental reports.’ But I make something—something new. I am a writer—an enemy of Acceptance. The painter behind me—he must need space. Maisie—she has the female gift of creation that artists can only imitate. Open up! Give her room!

  ‘Did you hear me, Sam?’ She, too, is shouting now.

  Her concern moves me, charges me with pleasure. Do I imagine that I feel her body moving—her hips? We need more space, more space! I need room to turn her altogether around, or, if not that, we need compass—room to flex and search. My illegality reaches in vain for her generosity. We are pressed from every side.

  While pressured this way I cannot budge, either physically or in principle. I am afraid I am stubborn. I am unwilling to accept under duress. If I had more space, perhaps I could be more open to persuasion and change. I am locked in.

  ‘No, Maisie,’ I say, using her strange name for the first time, ‘I’m sorry to say I can’t change my mind.’

  There is a great deal of loud, impatient talk around us, but I think I hear her say, ‘I’m afraid.’

  * * *

  —

  THERE IS A SCRABBLING movement at my right thigh. Once again the janitor is fighting to raise his arms.

  I know what this means, and I say quite loudly, ‘Knock it off.’

  He says, ‘You aren’t going to those windows.’

  ‘Why are you so upset by somebody asking for more space?’

  His hand still struggling for freedom, he shouts, ‘You trying to queer it for all of us?’

  ‘But you said you need more space yourself. Your rocking chair…’

  ‘Who don’t? Who don’t?’

  I can see that this is no time for reason. There is more and more turbulence around us. The circuitry printer is scolding me in a smothering maternal tone. The teacher badmouths me. Cigars is p
atronizing, Handlebars is jocular. I have heard nothing from the painter or from the black woman beside him. But these, my touchers and some of my touchers’ touchers, know me as a more or less real person. I realize that a much more unsparing hostility comes from farther out in the line, where I am nothing but a notion—a nonperson with an irresponsible urge to be a spoiler.

  * * *

  —

  MY FIRST EXPERIENCES of women, apart from that thirty-seven-year-old in caftan with zipper, were while I was on labor duty, in the former gym, where men and women workers were housed together at random. I never knew sex that had no audience. All my generation grew up both actors in, and viewers of, a whole-life movie. My parents clung to an old-fashioned sense of privacy; so long as we had a room of our own, and before my father’s illness was far advanced, they stole moments together when I was out; I never saw Father wrestling with Mother. I came into possession of the facts of life when I was seven, my informant an older man of nine. Graphic details were easy to come by. By the time I was eleven I had a thirty-seven-year-old’s ‘experience’ of sex, I had ‘done’ and ‘seen’ everything, normal acts and their variants—all in my head; and on my daybed by night I had fantasies, for a short time, that that other wrestler would quietly choke my father to death, and my mother would creep under the covers with me and teach me all that I already knew; with incestuous charity she would move the bank of my experience from my cranium to my scrotum. She would be capable of instructing me in extremely nice activities, and in extremely naughty ones. Many of my friends, their parents more modern than mine, had received exemplary teaching. History tells us that we have long been a nation of watchers. My first lessons in that gym were visual. Up to that time I had groped; I was immature; only the blind can see with their fingertips. I think I had caught a certain anachronistic fastidiousness from my parents. But sex in public—consummation on one cot, conversation on the next—was such a commonplace, ‘trying’ friends and friends of friends among friends was so matter-of-course, sharing and trading and seeing and touching and switching and not waiting were all so usual that I was soon in the swim—skinny-dipping in a sensuous sea of trial and error. With my generation, on which proximity forced early visual intimacies, something strange happened: The eyes hardened. One who too often handles hard things gets calluses on his hands; many of us who too often saw sweet things got scales on our eyes. And with the dulling of sight came a deadening of feeling, both in the fingertips and in the soul. I was perhaps a little bit different. This may be why I am special. I can still be surprised and thrilled by what I see. I am a writer. Powerful emotions are wired to my eyes. This is why I need space: I have to see sometimes at middle and long range. I cannot be forever thrilled and cross-eyed. It is all very well that my first sight of Maisie, one that enlisted something more than curiosity in me, was of the disorderly baby-fine curls at the back of her neck. Now that that something more has so quickly been mobilized, now that she and I are conspiring together to break the law, I need desperately to stand back and see her whole.