My Petition For More Space

by John Hersey

  I force myself to shout, ‘A writer needs——’

  ‘Nothing that a bus driver doesn’t need.’

  This time the voice has been excessively quick. Such speed has a bad name: curtness. Why a bus driver? What a strange choice! So many bus drivers are bad-tempered. One can hardly blame them, but it is a fact…. And suddenly I have lost my head, and I hear myself really shouting now.

  You can’t even let me have my last minute to say what I want to say!’

  ‘Say it, say it.’

  But now I don’t know what I want to say. I have nothing to say. I am shouting something, but it is nothing. My arms are flailing—warning a friend of imminent danger? Do my angry gestures have anything to do with the words that fly out of my mouth?

  The voice behind the window says, ‘Your time is up. Petition denied.’

  Now I distinctly hear the words I shout. ‘This has not been a fair hearing. You haven’t given me a chance to say what I want to say. You interrupt every time I start a sentence….’ My shouts get louder and louder.

  There is no expression at all in the voice as it says, ‘Shall I call the officers?’

  I have seen the athletic policemen smartly do their duty when called, and I remember that it was from this very window that they dragged that shouting man away. I do not answer out loud, but I shake my head to say, No.

  ‘Good,’ the voice behind the window says. ‘Move along, please.’

  * * *

  —

  I AM IN A DAZE as I walk away from the window. There is the painter—that sensible man—talking with his window quite reasonably, as far as I can tell. I have a stark impression of the drawn faces of the petitioners waiting at the turnstiles. I search my heart in vain for disappointment; in fact I feel some slight push of elation—but mostly I am embarrassed, like a schoolboy who has given the wrong answer and has set the whole class laughing. My face is hot; I am sure it is red. This has all happened exactly as Maisie said it was going to happen.

  Maisie! I expected to find her at the end of the room, beyond the two uniformed organists playing their tune of turnstiles; I thought she would be against the wall, near the street door at the end of the hall, watching for me, showing me for the first time her full face. She must have been too depressed by her time at the window to have wanted to stay any longer in this place; she must have ducked outside; she will be waiting out there beside the door, in the shadow of the archway. The street must still be crowded at this hour, but there will be room for her under the arch.

  Last night I lay awake most of the night, going over and over my expectations of this morning, without having been able to visualize anything so faceless as those opalescent windows, and without ever having put into words my yearning, my need. For some reason, even though I had heard the expression petition windows,’ I pictured a room crowded with desklets, beside each one a petitioner quietly talking with a visible bureau person. I was full of hope. I was inflated by hope, I lay light on my bed lifted above sleep by hope.

  Now as I hurry toward the street door, that hope having been let whooshingly out of me like compressed air from a tank, I am nevertheless full of hope all over again. My time at the window emptied me; pacing toward the door I am full again. One thought of that picture which I imagined earlier, of two people sitting on a bed, heels drumming on the wooden chest below, exchanging memories like traders bartering real goods, each trying not just to strike a bargain but really to get the best of the other—to gain those powers over the other that we sometimes call being a friend and being in love—one thought of that picture and I am as if I had not been at the window at all. In twenty paces I realize this, and I wonder: Did the space my father built around himself consist of his intimacy with my mother? Did Wordsworth and Hardy have anything to do with it? He used to speak their poems to her, I remember that.

  There are two policemen at the door; they are the hearty ones who rushed that poor man out who had overstayed his time at my window. I nod pleasantly to them, one after the other. There is a metal lock-bar across the door, and I lean on it; it clatters, and the door swings open. The amber light is diluted by a sudden pouring in of the clear day outdoors, and my dazzled eyes now see, as through a milky filter, a familiar reality: a teeming street.

  I look to the right. No Maisie. I look to the left. No Maisie under the arch of the doorway.

  For the pedestrians going toward Elm Street, there is a bottleneck here, caused by the waitline for the bureau building, which heads up to within a few feet of this archway. Quickly scanning the backed-up pool of these people who are trying to get to work, I hunt among their hats and scalps for a gather of swept-up hair. If Maisie is looking this way, I might not recognize her; I have not seen her face straight on. Was she swirled away from this doorway against her will by the current of humanity that slowly but inexorably flows off to the right?

  I stand two steps above the pedestrians. I look off to the right over their heads, searching for Maisie’s lifted hair, and I see the excited faces of those who are waiting to submit their petitions.

  The door clanks open behind me and hits me in the back. It is the painter coming out. Tucking bureaucrats,’ he growls, and he pushes past me.

  I step down into the crowd and am taken into its tidal motion. We eddy very slowly toward Elm; at least we move. The sky is almost cloudless now, and the air has the heaviness of eyelids when one is falling asleep.

  The siren hoots once.

  ‘What time is that—nine fifteen?’ I ask a man wearing dark glasses, on each lens of which I see a long-necked picture of me.

  ‘Yup,’ he says, and nods twice, and the two of me swoop up and down, my necks lengthening and shortening alarmingly as my heads and torsos rise and fall at varying rates of speed determined by the uneven convexities of the lenses.

  These double enormities, made of me yet distorting me, throw me into a violent temper. My anger surprises me; it is not at these lying dark glasses, nor at the prissy-voiced grasshopper-man behind the window of shimmering light in there, nor is it at careless, faithless Maisie, nowhere to be seen. It is at the filthy computer. It tells on me when I am late. I could get my reports in on time if I wanted to. It is nine fifteen; I have planned my morning very well, and I have an hour and a quarter to get to my desklet, enough time if I push along; but I am tempted to be late. Let it tattle!

  We have come to the head of the waitline, and it is my lot to be forced to shuffle along next to the outer row of the line—and rubbing shoulders hard with those who are waiting I think of the janitor’s complaint about the wear and tear on his right arm, ‘all futzed up’ by pedestrians, and as I look at the faces of these people who have almost reached the doors of the bureau building, and see their feverish excitement, I remember my own swirling emotions when I had reached this point in my long wait, and suddenly I am pressed hard, from all sides, in both my memory and my anger, by the grandmother and the crusty painter and by that hungry survivor of a janitor, and by Handlebars and the teacher and the seedy loophole hunter with his pathetic lottery and the cigar man flickering in moments of what seemed, then did not seem, mimicry of my poor faltering father—and, with nothing but hot wet cloth between us, by Maisie, who seemed to understand me so well, damn her eyes, damn her eyes. And while my anger still hovers around the computer, an idea hits me—and once again I feel an inflow of hope, which does not dissolve my anger but rather crystallizes it.

  The idea is this: Perhaps I should enter a petition for more time to write my reports. Yes, that idea has its appeal.

  I could get my reports in on time if I wanted to. But if I had more time…

  Not tomorrow. Perhaps the day after. That will give me a while to think through, more carefully than I did before this morning, what I will want to say at the petition window.

  The people in this part of the waitline are chatting with great animation, doubtless asking each other
what their petitions are. I see a golden tooth, a bouncing lip, a sexy eye.

  Yes, maybe I will come the day after tomorrow and enter a petition for more time.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.