All Fall Down

by James Leo Herlihy

  Now this return to physical pain, this sense of weariness, emptiness, weakness of body, came to him like a sweet breeze to a soul in Purgatory: the gates swayed gently open and he drifted easily into sleep. It was like freedom.

  Berry-berry was the first to awaken. In his restless sleep he had moved so close to the edge of the bed that he was virtually hanging there in such precarious imbalance that a sharp sense of falling from some great height brought him with a shock of fear to full wakefulness. He opened his eyes to the daylight that touched the floor. This gave him a momentary sense of physical safety, but it was followed too quickly by a memory of all that had taken place on the previous day. He forced his eyes to close and tried to will himself back to unconsciousness. But his body resisted these efforts: there was a dull pain at the base of his skull, his mouth and throat were unbearably dry. These residual effects of heavy drinking were too familiar to allow him to pretend for long that sleep might, by some miracle, return to him.

  In one last futile effort against these odds, he turned to lie flat on his back; it was then that he saw Clinton, slumped awkwardly in the chair, still fast asleep.

  He rose quickly to a sitting position on the edge of the bed; and his eyes came in contact with the gun on Clinton’s lap. It rested there, between his legs, upside down, the barrel pointed toward the bed. When Berry-berry had looked at the gun for a moment, and back to his brother’s face, and suddenly knew the meaning of what he saw, the knowledge affected him like a poisonous gas that caused not only the discomforts of nausea and a deep visceral spasm of pain, but an overwhelming wave of self-hatred as well. The sound that came from him then was not a word; it was more like a sound of vomiting when there is nothing to be emitted but emptiness. And it was followed by a high and interminable moan that he himself could not even hear. He buried his face in his knees and gave way to it; it was like a prayer so dismal that it became a blasphemy.

  When this moment had ended, Berry-berry raised his head and looked at the floor, at Clinton’s feet. He was almost afraid to look again at the boy’s face. But now, in fact, he had no need to, because in an instant he had become totally absorbed in his brother’s foot. He kept looking at it, the soiled black gym shoe, the white fragment of sock that showed above it, the bare ivory-colored portion of leg partly covered by a new adolescent growth of hair. Suddenly he knew that this foot had something to say to him; it clearly held for him some message, perhaps even the secret of some profoundly mysterious riddle. His eyes danced over the shoe, the ankle, the lower calf of the leg, like some crazy moth bent on deciphering the mystery of light.

  And then, though he did not move from the bed, Berry-berry saw himself kneeling on the floor and he took the foot in his lap. In his imagination, he saw himself touch, with his hand, gently, the incredible living flesh of his brother’s leg; and as he did so, he knew instantly, and in a way that he had never known before, that there is life in other people than himself, blood and spirit, vulnerability, a heartbeat, a pulse; and he experienced as well, at that instant, in that imagined contact with the livingness of another being, a wave of tenderness so profound that he yearned for its continuance. It seemed that all that he had sought to find with his fists and his tongue and his sex had been yielded to him in a moment, with no effort at all. But coming to him, as it did, from the depths of his own sense of sin, he was fearful of the experience, as if it had in it all the cunning of some supreme punishment: it was his only to be withdrawn from him. Clinton had come here to do violence to him, but he had brought instead a knowledge of love, a knowledge that Berry-berry would be forced to relinquish at the moment his brother awakened. And that would be his doom. He would never in the future be able to submerge himself in purely carnal pursuits, because this moment was inscribing in him the indelible knowledge of their limitations. He would be condemned to go along always, all through his life, carrying with him the intolerable memory of what he had surrendered: the power to know and respect and love the living truth of another.

  He looked at Clinton’s hands, one of them making a fist in his lap, and the other supporting his head against the side of the chair. He looked at his face, untroubled, resting, the eyelids moist, lips slightly parted, pink as berries not quite ripe, cheeks pale from the strain of suffering, suffering that Berry-berry knew he had inflicted. He saw him there as he was, and as the four-year-old child who had followed him to school when he was in the fifth grade, the nuisance who had asked a thousand questions of him every day, questions he had seldom bothered to answer; he saw him as the peanut-butter thief, caught red-handed with the goods in his bed with him; a child in a household of older persons, hiding behind doorways and furniture to listen to conversations he could not have understood, or could he? and he saw clearly the arrival of the young boy in Key Bonita in the dead of night, inquiring after him in waterfront dives, at the police station, and in the flea-bag hotel, eagerly offering to a whore the gift of his innocence in gratitude for her company, her friendship, and being led by the dirty hand of Ramírez to the bus station without having found what he had come to seek, a hero who did not even exist, himself.

  These reflections, the alternating waves of regret, despair, tenderness for his brother, that Berry-berry experienced, had all taken place within so brief a span of time that they occupied a position in his life that can be compared only to a pause, a semicolon of truth in a long memoir of falsehood. In this pause, Clinton had become, for Berry-berry, a mysterious giant possessed of powers that he himself had little hope of attaining.

  When Clinton opened his eyes, he found Berry-berry looking at him, examining him with an expression on his face of dumfoundedness, awe. It took him a moment to realize how he had come to be there, in his brother’s room, asleep in a chair. And when suddenly he remembered, his first question to himself was: Does he know? Does he know why I came here?

  By this time, Berry-berry had averted his eyes. He pretended to be looking for his shoes, and in a tone of casualness so false that his voice cracked under it, he said: “Hi, kid. You sleep good?”

  Clinton murmured something that neither of them understood; and then their eyes met and the knowledge hovered there between them, caught like something black and bleeding and awful on an invisible spit. Berry-berry’s eyes dropped to Clinton’s lap, the revolver between his thighs. Clinton looked at it, too. And then, once again, neither of them able to avoid it, they looked at each other, and at the terrible thing that hovered in the air between them.

  Berry-berry was the first to speak; his voice was a soft dry sound produced without air: “Why didn’t you do it?”

  Clinton could not find the real answer to this question. He knew it must be somewhere in him, but it would not rise to his lips. His mind was too much occupied with what he saw in Berry-berry; or with what he did not see.

  For it was as if some devil had committed a serious robbery against him, and left him only a pale and damaged surface, one that clearly showed all the signs of its having been ransacked: eyes like windows in which one saw rooms that were unfurnished, unpeopled. These eyes did not even have Berry-berry in them any more. The robber had taken his brother away with him and left this effigy. But had there ever been a Berry-berry? On the hundreds of occasions when he, Clinton, as a child, had studied his brother’s sleeping body, wondering at all the mysteries it concealed, had he beheld an illusion, an invention of his own that had never had any real existence? Or, if he had been there, once, and had been robbed of himself, who was the robber? —It was these questions that Clinton answered when he looked at the figure seated on the bed and said:

  “I don’t know.”

  Berry-berry drew himself to his feet, and began to comb his hair at the mirror.

  “Well,” he said, “I can see why you blame me. It’s okay. I don’t mind. I’ve always been the sonofabitch of the family. Every place I go, I make trouble. I’m marked. It’s okay. I’m used to it. But in this case, I don’t happen to be to blame. I don’t happen to be to blame for th
e fact that she drove like a maniac. She always did. It wasn’t anything new, she was bound to get in a wreck sooner or later. —Okay, I know there was something eating her on Saturday, so she took off in the middle of the night. I knew she had something bothering her. That’s why I went down to talk to her. But she wouldn’t say a word.”

  This activity at the mirror, and the lies he was telling, seemed to have a curiously beneficial effect on Berry-berry’s appearance. Clinton witnessed the return of the old illusion: life, vigor, even a kind of beauty. But since he witnessed as well the actual mechanics of deception by which it was animated, the illusion contained for him no more fascination than the sudden appearance of a brace of rabbits holds for the stagehand who has prepared the magician’s props.

  “All right,” Berry-berry went on, “maybe she had some terrific problem. That’s not impossible. Christ knows life isn’t easy for anybody. It could have been cancer, or some other terrible disease, and she just couldn’t face it.”

  “Maybe so,” Clinton said. He got up and put the gun away, in the bottom drawer of the bureau. For a moment his eyes came in contact with Berry-berry’s reflection in the mirror.

  “You going?” Berry-berry asked.

  “Yeah, I got to. I got to get home.”

  “You don’t want to have a cup of coffee or anything?”

  “I better not. Ralph’s probably worried already.”

  “You know,” Berry-berry said, “it could’ve been just an accident. I mean, there are such things as accidents. Did that ever occur to anybody?”

  “I guess we’ll just never know,” Clinton said, and he walked over to the door.

  Berry-berry stepped out of the wrinkled trousers he had slept in, and took a fresh pair from the closet. “Stay. Stay just long enough for coffee, will you?”

  “No, I really got to go.”

  “Okay, go ahead then. Go on. Only, I’d rather you’d just put all those bullets in me than—think what you think.”

  “You know what I’m really thinking about?”

  “What?”

  “About being late for work.”

  “Yeah? Then what were you doin’ up here with my gun in your lap?”

  Clinton stood at the door for a moment. Then he turned to look at Berry-berry: “You want me to just—say it?”

  “Yeah, say it.”

  ” ‘Cause I was out of my goddam head, that’s why, and I wanted to kill you.”

  “Why me?” Berry-berry wanted to hear the truth, not for its own sake, but for the pain it would cause him. Suddenly he had become like one of his own whores, begging to be wounded, punished. Clinton sensed this desire in him, but he did not want to take any part in it.

  “I don’t know.” Clinton left the room and started down the stairs. Berry-berry’s voice stopped him.

  “Clint! Why’d you want to kill me?”

  “I said I don’t know. Maybe I thought you had some disease. And you couldn’t face it.”

  He continued down the stairs, carefully picking his way through the mess of broken glass and bottles. At the bottom of the flight, he was stopped once again by his brother’s voice:

  “Clint!”

  “What do you want?”

  “The other night, Saturday night—were you listening?”

  Clinton looked at Berry-berry’s figure at the top of the stairs. He saw him only in silhouette. Berry-berry stood there perfectly still and in shadow. Clinton felt he had already revealed too much, and that if he did not give some definite answer, Berry-berry would remain there forever, a silhouette at the top of a dark staircase. This was his reasoning, and he did not consider right or wrong; he felt only that he had to lie, as much for himself as for Berry-berry.

  “Listening to what?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “See you later.”

  Clinton went out the back door. The sky was clear and there was a cold wind blowing. He started up the driveway at a good pace, not hurrying, but knowing that the sooner he had left this place altogether, the better off they would be, himself and Berry-berry.

  [Clinton’s Notebook]

  Annabel’s end of a conversation with Willidene Gibbs; she picked it up on the first ring.

  “Hello? —Merry Christmas to you. With whom am I speaking, please? . . . I’m afraid I don’t recognize the voice, I’m sorry. . . . Willidene! Do you know I’ve phoned you four hundred times, you’re never home; and I’m just dying to talk for hours, but I’ve got all these men to feed, and they’re clawing at my elbows right this second, how’s Mister Gibbs? . . . Oh . . . . Oh, Willidene, I couldn’t feel worse for you. Oh, you poor thing. (Three more “poor things.”) . . . Thank you, Willidene, mine are all healthy as mules, but you tell him we’ll come and see him during the holidays. . . . No, not Berry-berry, he’s in Santa Barbara, California. Oh, yes, keeping very swanky company. Came within inches of getting married this year—but it didn’t pan out. . . . Well, it’s plumbing, as a matter of fact, but on a very high level. Management. You know.”

  Ralph was sitting in the living room, working the diagramless crossword puzzle from the Sunday paper. When Annabel got to the part about Berry-berry, he looked at me the whole while, and then he went back to work on the puzzle. I write things down right in front of both of them once in a while, and they don’t even seem to notice it.

  Anyway, I missed some in-between stuff and when the talk came around to me, I got interested again.

  “Oh, that little snotnose. Willidene, he may surprise us all. Not much in the charm department, but he’s deep, and that’s what counts. . . . Willidene, give me your number again, in case I’ve been dialing the wrong one all these years. (Pause) Good, I’ve got it, and I’m going to use it! (She didn’t even write it down.) Now, will you forgive me if I fly? It’s a soufflé, and you know how they are; look cross-eyed and they fall. Bless you, and a thousand Merry Christmases. Goodbye.”

  She hung up, and then she shuddered and went to the kitchen and started singing It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.

  After about ten minutes, when Ralph went to the bathroom, Annabel and I had the following conversation:

  “I don’t want to be a nuisance, lover, but I’m going to have to set that table now. Couldn’t you finish at my desk?”

  “Okay.”

  I moved to the desk. Annabel got out the tablecloth and put it on. For a while she was quiet, and all of a sudden she was standing behind me. When I looked at her, she said:

  “I’m not reading over your shoulder, Suspicious. I was just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Would you think I was prying?”

  “Huh?”

  “If I asked you something.”

  “Depends on what you ask.”

  “Well, thanks. That’s encouraging. Just skip it.”

  She got out the silverware, and started setting the table. “Would it be too much, do you think, if I put on the bayberry candles? Not because it’s Christmas Eve eve or anything, but they smell like a million dollars. What d’you think?”

  “Sure.”

  The truth is, Annabel is not going ape this year about Christmas, and I appreciate it. Naturally she gave the house a good cleaning this week, did all the windows and washed the bathroom ceiling. But she’s going pretty easy in the kitchen department, cookies and fruitcake as usual, but in fairly reasonable amounts, and Ralph’s not getting too nervous about it. I ordered her a vanity case. They’re going to put her initials on it, A.H.W., quite fancy with all the letters overlapping and all.

  “They’re a little bent,” she said, “but I don’t think it makes a particle, do you?”

  “Nah.”

  “Clinton, do you ever think of all the people there must be in the world doing the exact same thing you’re doing at the exact same second? Women setting tables, or lighting bayberry candles? Are you listening?”

  “Sure.”

  “Because I think it’s encouraging. Nice people doing nice things, all over everywhe
re. Clinton, I’m going to ask you something, the thing I wanted to ask you before. May I?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Will you answer me truthfully?”

  “Okay.”

  She came over and looked at me. “It’s about your notebook.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You write down things I say, don’t you.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, when you read it over, do I sound like a silly woman?”

  I thought for a minute. Then I said, “No.”

  She looked like she wanted to come over and kiss me, but there was an embarrassment problem. So I blew one to her and she blew one back. Then she went on setting the table and singing Tipperary.

  What I was trying to get at before all these interruptions started, I was trying to get at this thing about the dream I had, but it’s very complicated to get at.

  The point is, I don’t think I personally am going to have too many more nightmares about Echo and the wreck and Berry-berry and the tree and all. You have a certain number of them about things like that, and you cry a lot, and then you get to the point where you don’t have too many more of them. Naturally I’m no expert but I’m writing all this down from my own experience.

  Now, what I’m wondering about is this girl in the dream. We were in this double bed, the two of us, and it was like we were used to being in the same bed, as if I was married to her and everything was okay about us sleeping together. That wasn’t the point. The point was, this girl was having a nightmare. Not me, but her. And she hollered and sort of half woke up. Then I dreamt that I moved over to her side of the bed and turned on the light and held her in my arms.

  I said, “Wake up, honey, I’m here. Me, Clint.” I shook her in a very firm way and then she woke up completely and hugged me and all. She started to tell about this nightmare she was having. What it was, it was my old Willy nightmare about this creep coming along shaking all the kids out of the apple tree. So I explained to her about how it isn’t any real person that shakes the branches, it’s only the wind that does those things. And I just kept on holding her and telling her everything was okay because of me being right there with her all the time, right next to her. Pretty soon she went to sleep in my arms, and that was the end of the dream.