Around him, the walls were alive with the dead. They ringed the room, their luminous tatters blowing in the winds of limbo. They reached out their glowing hands to him, elongated claws hooked with hunger. Scores of mouths yawning wide…
But the ceiling, mercifully, was still white. He kept his gaze trained there. And then, Sheila’s face entered his vision, her long hair falling down, touching his face. Somehow, the dead did not dance in the black of her eyes.
“Ron,” she whispered. “I love you.” And she touched the face she didn’t know.
“I love you,” Johnny Belfast said, and then died.
John
It was raining hard on this fall night—but so much the better. In clear weather, his outlandish garb had inspired people to follow and harass him, to lift his long black cape for a look. Tonight, at a distance, he could pass for an old man bundled against the elements, hunched over as he walked with the aid of a cane. But of course, wet weather or no, his great cap would be considered odd…and especially the sack-like veil which hung down from it, a slit cut into the material for him to see through.
“Dear God!” many women had cried, when they saw the face shrouded behind that veil. But he didn’t hear this so much any more. No, not since dear Mr. Treves had rescued him from a pitiable life of exhibiting his terrible condition. No; in his small rooms at the back of the London Hospital, his mantel was overcrowded with portraits sent to him by lovely ladies of good standing. It was two years now since his life had changed so drastically, largely due to the efforts of his friend, the esteemed surgeon Frederick Treves. It was as though he had been reborn into an utterly different realm from that squalid hell he had known for over two decades.
So why should he have returned to it tonight, having sneaked out of his rooms where they opened up into a hospital courtyard? What would Treves think of this furtive nocturnal adventure? Even as he hobbled along, guilt weighed heavy in the already unwieldy head of John Merrick…formerly known as the Elephant Man.
But Treves, above anyone, should understand him. Treves should know that his yearnings, his dreams, his desires were as strong and vital as those in any man. They were as intact as the genitals that God had, out of mercy or out of cruelty, left totally unaffected by the hideous disorder.
His genitals and his left hand were both unaffected. And Merrick had previously combined the two so as to find relief from his great loneliness…usually while staring longingly at one or more of his many framed photographs. He had felt guilty enough on those occasions…but tonight was so much worse. Still, though both his body and his shame conspired to burden him, on he went through the night. It must have been well past midnight by now…closer to one.
The great sprawl of the hospital was looming there behind him as he turned into Aldgate. It wasn’t too far from here that he had been exhibited at the time Treves found him. He shuddered at the memory of that long-ago life. The rain had diminished but the wind flapped his veil as if trying to peek beneath it.
A woman was walking toward him from the opposite direction. Merrick swallowed involuntarily. Despite the course his life had taken in recent years, the pretty face of a woman could still frighten him as much as his twisted visage frightened her.
Was she pretty, this woman? Beautiful, perhaps, as his mother had been? Yes, his mother had abandoned him as a child. Yes, left him at a workhouse, never to see him again. Another man might harbor hatred for such a mother…but she had been so beautiful.
Merrick stopped at the entrance to Mitre Square, and watched fidgeting as the woman came closer. She was petite and slender, wearing a green dress with a print of lilies and daisies, a cloth jacket too light for the weather and a black bonnet. Merrick knew why she was out at this early hour. This was why he could summon the courage to beckon to the woman. When she reached him she stopped. It made his stomach gurgle the way she squinted to see into the black hole in the gray flannel of his shroud.
“Can I,” Merrick began, “may I…”
“What d’ya want, old man?” the woman asked, mistaking him for such.
“I’d like to…to pay you…to pay you, dear lady. For…for some kindness.”
“Dear lady?” she chortled. “Kindness?” Her bark of a laugh smelled strongly of gin. She cocked her head a bit as she squinted again at the mask. “What’s wrong with you, then?”
“Please?” Merrick began backing timidly into the square.
“Are you sure you’re able, old man? I don’t wantcha dyin’ atop me!” the woman laughed huskily, but she followed him as he led her into a passageway bordered by a wooden fence, at its end a gate, and a building of brick with a window covered by a steel grate. It was not a romantic spot, admittedly. But even in his most fervid dreams Merrick knew that he could not purchase romance. He could only hope to purchase release from his physical craving.
“First show me yer face, my fine gentleman,” the woman said.
“Please, I can’t ,” Merrick slurred, agitated. “I am…very ill.”
“If you’re so ill then I shouldn’t want to be with you, should I, then?”
“Let me show you my purse instead.”
The woman smiled in the gloom of the passage. “That sounds good enough.”
Merrick reached into his heavy cloak nervously with his good left hand, his right club of an arm hanging helplessly with a mitten over its end. Thus, he was unable to stop the woman when, on impulse, she reached out and lifted the veil anyway.
“Dear god!” she cried.
The club of a right arm smashed her across the face, shattering the bone in her nose. The woman spun, fell against the brick of the building. Merrick seized her now by the collar with his good hand, and repeatedly pounded her face against the bricks until she slithered supine to the wet sidewalk.
He descended upon her, then, wheezing in his efforts. Wheezing in his lust. Wheezing in his anger.
And now she wheezed, as the knife tore horribly through her throat. He plunged its hard metal length into her abdomen, penetrating her, filling her with the heat of his passion as it opened her up to steam in the cold air. This knife he had stolen from his dear friend Treves, the surgeon, might have saved countless lives. But now it had a new function.
The knife had silenced the mocking laughter of another woman only a few minutes earlier tonight. She wouldn’t even consider his proposition. He had wanted to tear her more, but had nearly been seen and he couldn’t afford that. He was too easily identifiable.
There had to be a wonan who would not laugh, not scream, not draw away from his ugliness. These whores had been in their forties, had teeth missing, hair turning gray; he had thought surely one of them would accept him. But one after another had rejected him. One after another had enraged him.
“You will look at me, my dear lady,” Merrick whispered to the woman splayed beneath him. He had slung her inner organs up over her shoulder, cut a kidney free and hidden it away inside his great black cloak. A prize from the secret hot interior of her mysterious woman’s body, like an idol stolen from a temple. “You will look at me,” he wheezed, slicing away the lids of her eyes until the woman did indeed stare up at him like a rapt lover.
Merrick pushed himself off her; rose, panting. He felt guilty again. If Treves only knew…his dear friend Treves. And all the others who looked after his welfare. He should have returned to the hospital after the first one tonight. He should never have embarked on this quest in the first place…
But there had to be a whore in this wretched slum desperate or drunk enough to take his money. To take his lust. He knew, despite the guilt, that he would hunt for that whore again. And despite the guilt, he felt a secret thrill at the warmth of the kidney cradled inside his coat, like a child born of his nightmare union with this woman. He would find a further thrill mailing it to the police with a little note, perhaps. He didn’t fully understand the nature of this thrill. It was, like his face, too horrible to stand close scrutiny in a mirror.
He would not sign h
is own name, of course. Not John. But a nickname for John, instead.
Jack.
John Merrick hobbled back toward London Hospital, where he lived. London Hospital, which despite its great size and kind surgeons looked directly and helplessly upon the squalor of Whitechapel Road.
Empathy
—For Rose
They would call it a murder-suicide, though it was never fully understood. Perhaps it was one, actually—in its way. Or perhaps it wasn’t just that Marie empathized with the things at Blue Flamingos, but they with her.
Blue Flamingos Antiques and Collectibles was the name Edwin, Marie’s husband, had given the three-story brick warehouse, and it was a blue-painted lawn flamingo he had placed in the front window beside the blue lava lamp, though he could as easily have called it Pink Elephants or Flying Aardvarks to get his point across.
There were certainly enough traditional antiques to draw serious collectors, and some of them were willing to part with serious money. The vast ground floor was nearly as neatly laid out as a department store, with tables and counters and shelves, corridors built of merchandise. Clean, well-preserved merchandise; this was no flea market. Edwin had had his name, and the name Blue Flamingos, printed in a magazine article several years ago in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the jukebox. It was tacked up by the cash register, his brief quote on the restoration of jukeboxes circled.
But it was the collectibles rather than the antiques for which the place was best known. The article could indicate that. Edwin was a collector of ‘50s paraphernalia. Art Deco furniture. Old radios; a whole tall shelf just of those in the darker, quieter, somewhat less orderly second story. Primitive futuristic TVs, the sad, unlit shells of arcade games, the colorless, translucent bones of neon signs. Items so odd and unique that people were willing to drive here from Boston sometimes for the chic junk of yesterday. Art Deco, old radios and jukeboxes were always hip, but also a few years ago there had been the resurgence of interest in the ‘60s, and Blue Flamingos had done well for that. College kids in abundance, no doubt feeling very hip when they punched up old Roy Orbison songs on the gorgeously gaudy replica Wurlitzer 1015 by the counter where you first came in, drawn to it moth-like, like kids in the ‘40s, mindlessly lured by the green, orange, yellow plastic colors, the water bubbles tumbling corpuscle-like through lurid veins. Lights, movement, noise; a carnival in a futuristic sarcophagus, now a sacred American icon…the predecessor of the TV, and MTV. Today’s mall mentality served Edwin well. The allure of things.
And Marie’s husband knew what they wanted because he loved these things as they did. He might not have been able to part with any of it, jealous collector that he was, if there wasn’t a constant stream of new things coming in to replace those that left. Flea markets, field auctions. He read obituaries, contacted relatives about the possessions of deceased parents and grandparents. College kids and Bostonians didn’t know where to go, and didn’t want the bother of that anyway. They would pay double, triple and more for their cherished junk, while throwing away the stuff they bought in the malls, the treasure of tomorrow’s scavengers.
“It’s like the ultimate attic!” one woman enthused to Edwin at the counter, paying thirty dollars for a Barbie doll he had acquired for five dollars, along with three others in a box of toys at a yard sale.
From across the room, dusting variegated displays that would make the Smithsonian’s attic collections boring by contrast, Marie watched as Edwin smiled at the woman and offered some obligatory banalities. Edwin wasn’t very good with small talk, just with the large talk of his drinking companions. Basically, Marie’s husband preferred things to the human beings who made them. But then, who didn’t?
* * *
As every day, after showering and cleansing herself, Marie set about polishing and cleaning the other, inanimate tenants of Blue Flamingo.
Marie had just finished dusting a baby alligator, which reared on its hind legs like some mummified miniature dinosaur, now extinct. The bright pink feathers of the duster had snared on its grin of fangs and Marie dislodged them delicately with an apologetic smile. Lightly, with the ball of her thumb, she wiped the dust off its unblinking black eyes.
Marie also cherished the many things collected in her husband’s shop. She often felt more pained than he to see them leave. But hers was not the love of a collector. Marie had never collected anything in her life. As a deaf child, living in a school for deaf children during the week and with her mother in a two room apartment on weekends, she hadn’t had the private space to accommodate the luxury of collection. Marie was fond of malls in the way she was fond of museums. She loved to drink it all in, then went home full. She was not materialistic. She loved the collectibles and old things because they were bits and pieces of lives. She could see and smell the life—the love, often—still in them, soaked deeply in their pores from the hands of their owners. Now discarded, orphaned by unsentimental survivors of those gone before. They were sad things. Lonely things. Of course, she should feel happy to see them all here together in her home. She felt as one with them. She felt empathy with these dustily alive things.
Edwin had disgustedly given in to her pleading, for a while, to let her keep a certain old doll or teddy bear or children’s book, and bring it up to their apartment on the third floor, which for its decor could very easily have been mistaken for part of the store. But now he told her she had enough things, and he had a business to run. He made her feel guilty for her sensitivity, made her wonder if she really had gone overboard with it. He mocked her, for instance, for no longer accompanying him to field auctions because she couldn’t bear to see the boxes of rain-soggy stuffed animals, once warm with children’s hugs, and the rest of the items left for junk in the field after the bidders had picked what they really wanted from the boxes they bought—a corpse-strewn, muddy battlefield.
What Marie didn’t tell her husband, however, was that she mostly didn’t accompany him because she sensed that he didn’t really desire her company. He no longer offered to buy her a hot dog under the snack pavilion. No longer talked to her on the way home.
You would think that he didn’t know how to communicate with a deaf woman. He had attended classes for signing when they had first met five years ago, knew how to sign perfectly well…but that would require him to show too much of an interest in her. His brusque signs now were more like impatient gestures of dismissal than sign language.
It was a rainy October day today, and in fact Edwin was at an auction, so perfectly scheduled for such weather. Marie wandered now throughout the second floor, dusting. The shop was tended presently by Mrs. Morris, who couldn’t sign a jot and thus moved her mouth with ludicrous exaggeration so Marie could read her lips.
Dangling from the high ceiling were antlers and pop guns, catcher’s mitts and musical instruments. Marie worked her way toward the back, dusting the rows of uglier, less artistic steel and glass jukeboxes from the ‘50s and ‘60s. She had once been afraid to come up here alone, before she had dared to let herself feel that this was her home. Now when she occasionally glanced over her shoulder, it was only because she felt Edwin would be standing there, arms crossed, some complaint ready. The sad deer head, the fluorescent, crumbling papier-mache ghoul from a carnival horror ride didn’t mean her any harm.
At the end window she gazed down at the rain-blurred street. A young couple were running toward the building, his coat spread over both their heads. They were laughing. Marie smiled. Marie herself was only twenty-five. Edwin was a decade older. She wondered if that were part of his change. Maybe he resented her youth. Maybe subconsciously the discard he saw on days like today ate at him, too…reminded him of his mortality, and the fact that he would never be remembered as a Barble doll or Wurlitzer 1015 is remembered.
As she did every day, now that she accepted the fact that her husband no longer loved her, Marie tried to fathom his change. The rain helped her abstract and liberate her thoughts, and to travel back in time.
He had never been a sunny man. She had made the error, as so many women do, of mistaking surliness for sexiness. And his artistic air had been even easier to interpret as romantic. For Edwin’s true desire had been to be a painter. He hadn’t painted in two years. When she first knew him he would still contribute to the town’s annual art show, and sold the occasional piece. But even before Marie had met him he had given up trying to get backing for his own show. Now he had retreated to his world of things, no longer attempting to create new things of his own. Maybe, Marie wondered, he even resented his collections for the preservation and interest he and his art would never know in future times. Or maybe vicariously he sought longevity through association. But it was all connected. Art was things too, and it was with mute things that Edwin best interacted. Because he didn’t seek true interaction. He just wanted to paint himself into an environment worthy of his complex identity. He had boasted to one drinking buddy that he was a cross between Salman Rushdie and Cat Stevens. He was misunderstood, and played that angry song by the Animals on the bogus Wurlitzer frequently. The booming vibration would rumble in Marie’s chest.
Marie hurriedly finished up so she could return downstairs and steal peeks at the attractive young couple. They didn’t notice her at first, so stealthy was she in her own silence, but the girl gave her a glance. The boy gave her a glance, and a second glance with a smile tossed in. Marie was beautiful—dark-haired, full-lipped, the lips ever sealed into a unit, it seemed, though she could speak in her difficult way when she occasionally chose. Large-breasted, small and slender. God, in His wise-guy’s wisdom, had given her all but the ability to hear. She would have deflated her breasts for that. But then, would Edwin have married her, had she been less attractive, though hearing? She doubted it, these days. Doubted it severely. Simply because his passion for her body was as strong now as it had been five years ago. He held onto her in his private collection for that reason alone.
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