Steps

by Jerzy Kosiński

  The second group of drivers was now ready to compete. As the winner of the first round, I could race again. The referee spun a coin. Again I drew the right-hand side as my course. The first driver began his run. Moments later we heard the sharp crack of contact: the man had held too tight a course and his fender had hit a parked car; his slowing-down lost him the race. My turn came again.

  I recalled a man who had lost his arms during the war. He claimed that despite his loss he had not ceased to feel his hands and fingertips; he said it was as if his absent limbs had become organs sensing through echoes, which had the effect of extending the other parts of his body to objects and places they could not otherwise reach. I too felt such echoes.

  I slipped a stereo tape into the car’s player, and as the music heightened my tension, I accelerated; my nerves gauged the steering, the speed, and the distance. I sensed I was knocking off one book after another. I won.

  Weeks passed. The game continued in different areas of the city. I became well known and raced against many drivers, never losing to any of them. One night these games came to an end.

  There was a couple in one of the parked cars along the course. The roar of the passing cars and the angry revving of the engines must have disturbed them. Suddenly one threw open the car door and got out, standing there amazed, shielded momentarily by the door. In that instant a competing car rammed into the door, slamming it closed. The body disappeared. Only the head remained outside, as if balanced on the knife-edge of the door; then it rolled down and hit the asphalt like one more book that had been struck off

  The crowd and the drivers panicked and dispersed. In the days that followed there was an intensive police investigation.

  How did you meet her?

  She lived in my building.

  Then it was by accident?

  Not exactly. There were several hundred tenants in the building—it’s a whole city block long, you know—and I had listened in to the voices of a considerable number of them. Her voice was among the voices.

  What do you mean “among their voices”?

  I mean their voices; you see, I signed my lease when the building was still under construction, and I was able to wander around the unfinished apartments. At that time I was interested in electronics. In all the apartments on my floor and on the two floors directly beneath, I concealed a miniature microphone, which also acted as a transmitter. The device was no larger than a button, yet it picked up every sound and could transmit a signal for a quarter of a mile. I installed a specially designed radio in my apartment with which I could receive transmissions at any time I chose—and so I listened to their voices.

  But that’s incredible! How did you get those microphones?

  The same way everybody else does—they’re advertised in magazines and sold by mail-order.

  How long did you listen to those voices, those people?

  For months. Of course, at first I had difficulty identifying the voices. On my radio I could monitor one voice at a time, but I was not able to pinpoint the apartment it came from. I had to be very careful. For instance, I could not walk around the corridors for too long, waiting to see who came out of the apartments where I had hidden microphones. In trying to identify those I suspected, I had to be very casual—starting conversations in the elevators and greeting people in the hallways. I spent almost three months attempting to match the voices with the people I supposed I had been listening to.

  But—were you able to do this?

  Yes. I’ve identified all of them. But, of course, very few really interested me.

  I suppose that woman did.

  Yes. She had an apartment on my floor. I recognized her voice when she was greeting someone in the lobby. She was among those I had been listening to for a long time.

  What did you do?

  I stayed at home for several days and monitored her apartment. She lived done, and she didn’t work. I could listen to her all morning when the “other voices” were away.

  How did you manage to meet her?

  I started collecting signatures for a complaint about the untidy corridors and the faulty air conditioning. I called on her among the other tenants. Then I began to date her.

  Wasn’t that unfair? I mean, you had such an advantage over her.

  To a degree, yes, I did have an advantage. But before I actually met her, there was still a lot I didn’t know about her life. For example, there had often been long silences in her apartment; I had heard noises I could not identify: even what I recognized as her voice would suddenly change as if purposely controlled. At other times there were whispers and conversations which were sometimes drowned out by the radio, the record player, or the television.

  After you began dating her—did you tell her that you had been listening in on her?

  No.

  Did you still go on listening to her apartment?

  For a while I did. But I soon stopped. I felt like a scientist who has completed his study: the specimen he has observed and recorded and analyzed for such a long time has ceased to be a mystery. Now I could manipulate her: she was in love with me.

  It occurred to me then that if I introduced her to drugs of a certain kind, and if she became addicted, she might free herself from what she had been. She might emerge as a very different woman, and though I retained possession of her, my knowledge of what she had been would have no more value. A new relationship would begin.

  Her addiction might regenerate all that had become flabby and moribund in her and at the same time break down what was stiff and rigid; she would acquire new desires and new habits and liberate herself from what she thought of me, from what she felt for me. Like a polyp she would expand and develop in unpredictable directions.

  When you are inside me, why do you urge me to caress myself at the same time? I feel you, so why must I touch myself?

  You admitted my love-making forces you to become more aware of your body.

  It does, but doing that to myself: it seems perverse.

  Surely it stimulates you and excites you more?

  Yes, it does.

  Then simply give yourself up to what you feel: enjoy that awareness. Lovers are not snails; they don’t have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.

  I never thought of it as you see it; that would not come naturally to me. But you, what do you feel?

  I want you, you done. But beyond you and me together, I see myself in our love-making. It is this vision of myself as your lover I wish to retén and make more red.

  But you do want me for what I am, apart from you, don’t you?

  I don’t know you apart from myself. When I am done, when you are not here, you are no longer red: then, it’s only imagining again.

  Then, all you need me for is to provide a stage on which you can project and view yourself, and see how your discarded experiences become dive again when they affect me. Am I right? You don’t want me to love you; all you want is for me to abandon myself to the dreams and fantasies which you inspire in me. All you want is to prolong this impulse, this moment.

  You were asleep, you did not hear the bell.

  Who was it?

  The dealer, bringing the drugs.

  Oh, yes. The rich one. Is he making a lot of money?

  He’s making money now.

  What do you mean?

  He began as a delivery boy, working for a neighborhood pharmacist. He used to pick up the prescriptions from steady customers and then deliver the drugs to them. One day he was approached by a well-dressed, successful older man who asked him whether he would like to make more money—four or five times more than he was making then. The boy said he wanted to.

  All the older man asked him to do was copy down the names of the customers who repeatedly ordered certain drugs and who became irritable or angry when delivery was delayed.

  I walked through the districts where they lived surrounded by fetor and disease. They had nothing to possess or to be proud
of. They were united only by the shade of their skin—and I envied them.

  I walked the streets in the heat of the sultry day and peered into rooms full of screaming infants and rotten mattresses piled on the floor, the old and the sick lying flattened on their beds or bending low in their chairs. In the dead-end alleys I watched the girls in groups, giggling. I stared at the shouting boys playing ball in the empty lots, saw the paralyzed and the doped sprawled on the sidewalks—living obstacles for the blind and the half-witted. I watched the dirt-smeared children smashing bottles against the never-emptied garbage cans, chasing cats and dogs and each other around the abandoned cars from which everything of value and every shred of rubber and fabric had been stripped by persistent petty thieves.

  I envied those who lived here and seemed so free, having nothing to regret and nothing to look forward to. In the world of birth certificates, medical examinations, punch cards and computers, in the world of telephone books, passports, bank accounts, insurance plans, wills, credit cards, pensions, mortgages, and loans they lived unattached, each of them aware only of himself.

  If I could magically speak their language and change the shade of my skin, the shape of my skull, the texture of my hair, I would transform myself into one of them. This way I would drive away from me the image of what I once had been and what I might become; would drive away the fear of the law which I had learned, the idea of what failure meant, the yardstick of success; would banish the dream of possession, of things to be owned, used, and consumed, and the symbols of ownership—credentials, diplomas, deeds. This change would give me no other choice but to remain alive.

  Thus the world would begin and die with me. I would see the city as a mutant among the wonders of the world, its chimneys polluting the air, its roots poisoning the earth, its tentacles setting one man against another and strangling them both in their hopeless contest I would map the city’s highways and tunnels and bridges, its subways and canals, its neighborhoods adorned by beautiful homes filled with priceless objects, rare libraries, and fine rooms, its clever networks of pipes and cables and wires under the streets, its police departments and communications stations, its hospitals, churches, and temples, its administrative buildings crowded with overworked computers, telephones, and servile clerks. Then I would wage war against this city as if it were a living body.

  I would welcome the night, sister of my skin, cousin of my shadow, and have her shelter me and help me in my battle. I would lift the steel lids from the gutters and drop explosives into the black pits. And then I would run away and hide, waiting for the thunder which would trap in mute telephone wires millions of unheard words, which would darken rooms full of white light and fearful people.

  I would wait for the midnight storm which whips the streets and blurs all shapes, and I would hold my knife against the back of a doorman, yawning in his gold-frogged uniform, and force him to lead me up the stairs, where I would plunge my knife into his body. I would visit the rich and the comfortable and the unaware, and their last screams would suffocate in their ornate curtains, old tapestries, and priceless carpets. Their dead bodies, pinned down by broken statues, would be gazed upon by slashed family portraits.

  Then I would run to the highways and speedways that surge forward toward the city. I would have with me bags full of bent nails to empty on their asphalt I would wait for the dawn to see cars, trucks, buses approaching at great speed, and hear the bursting of their tires, the screech of their wheels, the thunder of their steel bodies—suddenly grown weak as they crashed into each other like wineglasses pushed off the table.

  And in the morning I would go to sleep, smiling in the face of the day, the brother of my enemy.

  IF I COULD become one of them, if I could only part with my language, my manner, my belongings.

  I was in a bar in a run-down section of the city beyond the covered bazaar. Without hesitating I walked over to the bartender. As he leaned forward I began my deaf-mute charade, signaling for a glass of water. The barman waved me away impatiently, but I stood my ground and repeated my pantomime. I could feel the stares of the people in the bar. When I jerked my shoulders and flapped my ear like a spastic they scrutinized me closely, and I sensed that to some of them I had suddenly become an object of interest I knew I had to be very careful of their suspicions, of any attempt to find out who I was or where I had come from.

  Two men and a woman edged nearer, and touched me. At first I ignored their overtures, giving the woman, the boldest and most silent, a chance to elbow the others aside.

  I continued to motion for water. A man came forward to order a drink for me, but I refused, grimacing my disgust for arrack and gesturing apologies for my refusal. A couple drew closer. They beckoned me to leave with them. I did not understand what they were saying, and making a show of being attracted to the bright jewelry they wore, I turned and slowly looked into their faces. Their gaze bore down on me.

  There was a store I entered several times. Nothing distinguished it from the others of the neighborhood. Most of the shops and bars in the vicinity had some connection with illegal activities—the blackmarket, stolen goods, or traffic in young country girls. Often I hung around the shop until closing time, and watched the patrons wandering out the back door to the barn in the yard. As a silent, gesturing spastic I was not a threat to the callers—I could be given a task, a few coins, and then be dismissed. Eventually I followed them, but was pushed back into the shop and out into the street The final time I stayed late and tried to join the men. No one stopped me, but at the bam door a woman motioned me to stand guard.

  From my vantage point I peered into the barn. I saw a great circle of naked men lying on their backs, their feet joined at the center like the spokes of a wheel A woman was standing at their feet, pulling off her ragged dress. She was gross and heavy, her skin moist and hairy. She was splashing water from a wooden bucket over her belly and legs. And as she washed herself and the water spattered on the ground, the men fidgeted, their hands playing at their thighs or their arms shifting behind their heads. It was as though she had become the healer of these broken men, and at the sound of the water a momentary surge went through these petty thieves and weary pimps. She plodded across to one of them, squatting over him. For a moment he grunted, cried out hoarsely, half rose, and then fell heavily back. The woman stepped away from him and passed on to his neighbor, picking her way like a bloated toad over the worn stones of a mudhole. One by one she served them; those she had not yet reached twitched in their efforts to restrain the energy that surged through their loins. One by one they fell back, like corpses laid out in shallow coffins. Now the bam looked as if it had been pressed into service for the dead and the dying from a derailed train. As she rose and walked around the silent men, the woman resembled a nurse checking the victims. She bathed, and again the water splashed. Now there was no answering sound, no movement.

  At times my disguise became a hazard. One day, wandering about longer than usual, I decided to have a meal before finding a place to sleep. I went into a place that I knew was usually crowded. The bar itself was almost empty that night. But I spotted several familiar faces—a group of manual workers in the front of the room and two or three of the local bosses, their heads together, at the private tables in the back.

  A surly peasant stood at the counter, mumbling as he drank. Away by the wall, half lost in the shadows, a man was slumped over his glass.

  Suddenly the street door blew open and a dozen policemen rushed in. Some stationed themselves between the door and the crowd; others followed a kitchen boy to the man drooping at the bar.

  The police first sat the man up, then pulled him off the stool. As his body swung around I caught sight of the knife that stuck out from his ribs. There was a bloodstain on the wall. The crowd broke into a frenzy of talk. Only then did I realize that I was the likeliest suspect of them all. There could be no explanation for my dress, my acts, or my presence.

  If I continued to be a deaf-mute, I would be accu
sed of this crime, the senseless act of a defective. My mask would trap me further. But if I were to bolt through the police cordon, I would risk a bullet I realized that within a few seconds I would be led away with the others. Turning toward the bar I picked up the bartender’s rag, and seizing a tray of dirty coffee cups, trotted into the kitchen.

  Occasionally I would attempt to get part-time jobs. One night, employed as a handyman in a neighborhood restaurant, I noticed the proprietor sitting and talking with the last customers—three men and a woman.

  There had been a short circuit downstairs; I approached the table, motioning to the proprietor. I met the woman’s startled, uncertain glance and instantly exaggerated my role: I slapped my right ear several times as the men guffawed. She blushed, as if ashamed of her companions, but she continued to watch me.

  The woman returned several days later accompanied by a man I had not seen before. It was late and most of the tables were empty. Since the proprietor was away, I went to the two as soon as they were seated. The woman’s left hand lay palm down on the tablecloth, and she was attentively rubbing her cuticles with her right forefinger. I emptied the ashtray and adjusted the napkins and cutlery. The man asked for something, and when I shrugged meekly, the woman spoke, perhaps explaining that she had seen me before and that I could neither hear nor speak. The man scrutinized me coldly, then relaxed as I brushed an invisible speck of dust from the tablecloth. The woman nervously crumpled her handkerchief, obviously conscious of my proximity. I withdrew without turning around and again slapped my ears.