The Night Ocean

by Paul La Farge

  11.

  I bought morphine from Lee once a week, then twice a week. I roamed ancient kingdoms of waste; I swam in cold oceans and climbed desolate hills strewn with bodies and skeletons. It was a kind of underworld, but what made it endurable was my certainty that my lost family could be found somewhere within it, and that if I played by the rules, I could have them back. All I had to do was keep going. For that, though, I needed money. After some searching, I got a job at a French laundry on Fourth Street: the owner, an Italian named Esposito, was looking for a Frenchman, and my secondhand Québécois passed muster. When that wasn’t enough, I stole books from Lowndes’s library and sold them in the used-book shops on Fourth Avenue; and it was in this way that I ran into Sam Loveman again.

  He had his own store now, on the second floor of a building on Tenth Street. It was bright, tidy, and spare, the opposite of what Dauber & Pine had been. Either he had forgotten how our last meeting ended, or it didn’t matter to him. He was happy to see me and paid me generously for poor Lowndes’s books. His shop was mostly poetry and obscure French and British writers from the beginning of the century, but there was always room, he said, for a little fantasy. But when I brought him Lowndes’s copy of Marginalia, a collection of Lovecraft’s miscellaneous writings, which Arkham House had published, Loveman made a face. “I don’t think so, Leo,” he said. “I don’t think I can.” “Why not?” I asked. “I’ve learned some things about Howard,” Loveman said. He told me that he’d seen Sonia Greene, who had been Lovecraft’s wife, when she came to New York, in 1945, to shop around an idea for a book called The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft. She had somehow just learned that Lovecraft was dead, and in the freshness of her grief, she was unloading stories about him in every direction. So she confided in Loveman that Howard had been an anti-Semite. He’d always disparaged the Jews, but at first Sonia had imagined he was just repeating thoughtlessly what so many other people said. Over the years, though, she became convinced that Howard wasn’t speaking thoughtlessly at all. He never spoke thoughtlessly about anything. Howard hated the Jews: he’d told Belknap, in her hearing, that he wished a whiff of cyanogen gas from the tail of some passing comet would exterminate the inhabitants of the Lower East Side. “That’s horrible!” Sonia had said. “You can’t mean it!” “Why not?” Howard had asked, mildly. “But Howard . . .” Sonia hadn’t been able to understand him at all. “Do you want me dead?” she’d asked. “Certainly not,” Howard had said. “I’m speaking of a population, not of individual people.” “But Howard,” she’d said, making the obvious point, “what do you think a population is?” By this time, Sonia told Loveman, she was already worried about Howard’s mental stability. “But I don’t think his stability had anything to do with it,” she’d said. “I think that was what he really believed.” Loveman, for his part, was horrified by the personal betrayal. “He pretended to be my friend,” he said, “but all the while, he must have been thinking, There’s Sam Loveman, that dirty Jew . . .” It was unforgivable. Loveman could no longer support Howard or his work, not even in the form of a used book. I, too, was horrified. From Luiza, I knew that the Germans had used a cyanogen gas in Auschwitz. There might have been a big gap, an enormous gap, between wishing the Jews dead and actually building the gas chambers, between the words cyanogen gas and the barrels of Zyklon B that the Nazis put to their inhuman purpose, but I didn’t see it. From that moment on, I could only think of Lovecraft’s work as evil, and I was ashamed that I had ever admired him.

  Learning the truth about Lovecraft drove me further into despair; but, strangely, despair drove me closer to revelation. What, I wondered, if the trips I made to the kingdom of the dead could be made by others as well, and in the other direction? One day in the late summer of 1946, I went back to Loveman’s shop and asked if he really believed in the transmigration of souls. “I believe in it poetically,” he said. “What about practically?” I asked. “If the dead were to come back, how would they do it?” “You short-story writers are always looking for manuals,” he said, but the question pleased him. He danced through his shop, pulling from the shelves volumes I couldn’t possibly afford: Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Pythagoras and the poems of John Donne. I copied down the titles and went to the Public Library on Forty-Second Street, and there, in the cool vaults of the Reading Room, which seemed to me a kind of vast mausoleum for the living, a chamber that floated, silently, between the city’s noisy life and the rosy Heaven painted on the ceiling, I read about the mysteries of death and the miracles of life after death, of life after life after life. Most of what I read was gibberish and some of it was cynical trash; but here and there, I found sentences and paragraphs that rhymed with what I myself had experienced. It became clear to me that these books were describing the same thing under many names: transmigration, reincarnation, metempsychosis, and even possession, all meant but one thing, which was, that under certain circumstances, the soul could move from one body to another. What I wanted to know was how it happened—and how you recognized an old soul in its new flesh. I didn’t get far with the first question, which had been answered too many times in too many different ways, but I did acquire some interesting notions about the second. The new body, I read, might look completely different from the old one, but the soul that lived there would sign its name somehow: with a familiar gesture, a way of holding the head, even a purse or pin or tie, repurchased by the new person to remind him or her of a cherished item that had been lost a century earlier.

  I hadn’t really understood anything yet, and what I believed was close to madness; but it was scarcely less mad than anything anyone else in the Village believed, in 1946. On the advice of Dr. Fish, Lowndes had bought himself an orgone box, a kind of phoneless wooden phone booth in which he sat, naked, for half an hour every morning, while cosmic energy accumulated at the edges of his skin. Meanwhile, over on Grove Street, I heard that Pohl and his new wife were training white mice to follow telepathic commands. And Michel and Wollheim still believed in Stalin! Why shouldn’t I hope for the return of the dead? I looked sharply at certain people I passed in the street, wondering if they might be emigrants from my earliest memories. Could that long-necked fellow on the Number 6 train be Mihaly Rozen? What about the lady walking a toy poodle in Bryant Park: Had she been the friend of my mother’s who came to stay with us in the summer, the one whose dog—a schnauzer, I think—tried to nip my arm? And was her averted gaze a sign that I had seen more than she wished me to know? Never mind that the lady in the park had, by the look of her, been born thirty years before my mother’s friend was exterminated by the Nazis; the arithmetic of ages and dates didn’t interest me. What mattered was that souls could move. The lady in the park might, for all I knew, be one of what Loveman had called the double-souled: people hiding within other people, just as, in their former lives, they had hidden in attics.

  My visit to Loveman had another consequence, too, which was that I leafed through Marginalia before I put it back on Lowndes’s shelf, and discovered that it contained a memoir by Robert Barlow, of the time he and Lovecraft had spent together in Florida. Once again, I felt a pang of envy: it was as if Barlow was living the life I ought to have lived. I had to remind myself that Lovecraft had been an anti-Semite, and that I was lucky not to have known him. Anyway, I thought, Lovecraft had been queer, and Barlow was probably queer, too. I wondered if Barlow had been Lovecraft’s lover, which was something I would never have wanted to be, not under any circumstances. Then I put Barlow out of my mind again—although not before I’d noticed that, according to his memoir, he was living in Mexico City, and wondered, with another pang, what he was doing there. His life sounded very exotic and colorful, the opposite of gray New York.

  After that, I got high more and more often. Lee had run into trouble with the law and gone home to his family in Saint Louis, but I bought morphine and later heroin from other Village pushers. Sometime
s the high was strong and I was catapulted into the pen-sketched waves at the edge of the map. Sometimes I ended up in the kingdom of the winds. On no occasion did I rediscover the lake, or any of the people I had ever known. I heard children crying in the apartment above Lowndes’s. I heard the faint, dull thrum of the subway. I heard coughing and scraping, and saw a few stars framed by the top of the light well. One night in November, I woke up on the floor of my bedroom, the needle still in my arm. Lowndes was standing over me. “Jesus, Leo,” he said. “What?” I said. I felt fine. I took the needle out and dropped it on the night table. “Look at my rug,” Lowndes said. There was a spot of blood on the oval rug he’d loaned me as a welcome-back-to-New-York gift. The spot was the size of a palm, and I told him not to worry about it; I’d bring the rug to Esposito’s and get it out. “OK, but what about you?” Lowndes asked. I said that I was not dry-clean-only. A shower would put me right. And maybe some toast. I’d developed a thing for toast. It was enough like food that it fooled my body into going forward. “You need to see a doctor,” Lowndes said. “Look at my arm,” I said. “I’d go to jail.” I didn’t know if that was true, but I didn’t think a doctor would be much help with my peculiar problem. “I’m going to make you an appointment with Dr. Fish,” Lowndes said. “He cured my asthma, you know.” “You never had asthma,” I said. “It was psychosomatic. Aside from your buck teeth, there’s nothing wrong with you.” Lowndes blanched. “Don’t be hateful,” he said. “It’ll only make you more sick.” I said that I didn’t care. Then he discovered that I’d been stealing his books and threw me out of his apartment. I didn’t care about that, either. I moved into the YMCA at the west end of Jane Street, where plenty of other addicts lived. Any day now, I thought, I’ll find what I’m looking for.

  I would probably have died looking, if Esposito hadn’t leased a new Bendix washer for the laundry and its motor hadn’t burned out. Esposito called a repairman, and I helped him install the new motor; he was impressed by how well I knew my way around the machine. “What are you working here for?” he asked. He introduced me to his boss, an old Czech Jew named Hungerleider, who had an office in Queens. The front was a garage for the repair truck, and the back was like Frankenstein’s laboratory, heaped with electric motors and hoses and couplings and mare’s nests of red and blue wire. Hungerleider was short, neatly dressed, and extremely solid—warrantied for life, he said. He shook my hand like he was pulling me from the water. He had me change the seal on a pump, and was interested to hear that I had been in the Canadian Army. When I told him about Luiza, he blew his nose into a handkerchief, and said I could start the next day. It wasn’t charity, Hungerleider said. He had more business than he could handle. All over Queens, people were buying washing machines; in Manhattan, they were buying stoves and refrigerators to replace the ones they had nursed through the war years. His repairman, Gus, was overwhelmed.

  I helped Gus for a few weeks, then Hungerleider decided my apprenticeship was over and explained his actual plan. Nassau County was where I would work, he said. New houses were going up by the hundreds, in what had been onion and potato fields. New houses meant new appliances, which would need to be repaired. Hungerleider bought a second truck, and day after day I drove to Wantagh, Plainview, Massapequa, Levittown, an eerie landscape of identical white houses on seventy-by-a-hundred plots, each with its white tongue of driveway and its huddled garage, bare trees, and brown lawn crusted with patchy snow, set, one after another, on roads that curved gently in order to efface their incredible monotony. I made five or six calls in the morning, four or five more in the afternoon. I was a great success as a repairman. I was polite, clean-shaven, a veteran. I drove under the speed limit and signaled my turns. And, nightly, I stuck a needle in my arm and went looking for people I knew in the kingdom of the dead. That was my life, until one soggy March afternoon I rang the bell of a brick-and-vinyl Cape Colonial in Lynbrook, and Doris came to the door. “Leo?” she said. She was wearing slacks and a paint-stained old sweater. “Washer on the fritz?” I asked. “Oh, my God,” Doris said. “Leo!”

  She was a mother now. Her daughter, Margot, was out with her grandparents, but had left behind, for the entertainment of the adults, many blocks and balls and a wooden chicken that pecked when you pulled its string. “I’m afraid she’s going to grow up to be a farmer,” Doris said ruefully. “She’s already got her eye on a patch of the yard.” Her husband, Tom Owens, sold tombstones. It was either a fitting job for a war hero or a crushing humiliation, and most days, Doris said, Tom thought the latter. What he wanted to be, what he was, was a painter: he’d done the portrait of Doris that hung over the sectional sofa, in oils, in Florida, against a backdrop of suggestive pink blossoms. But he also wanted to live decently; he and Doris had had their fill of hovels during the war. “Sheds, practically, and tents, too. Tom had it worse than I did, on those jungle bases.” He’d flown B-25 bombers over the Pacific, dropped countless tons of explosive on Japanese positions. He had a box of medals and was a legend in the community, now dispersed, of Pacific bomber pilots. “What it comes down to,” Doris said, “is that he wants to believe he was fighting for something. That we deserve something, now that the war’s over. So, this.” The vast room in which we stood had a freestanding fireplace and a picture window that looked out on the backyard. The radio was tuned to a classical station. “No down payment for veterans,” Doris said. “The opportunity of a lifetime. Would you like a drink?” She poured us each a glass of red wine. “I’d offer you whiskey, but Tom keeps track.” She was as beautiful as ever, I thought. More beautiful, now that she was a little heavier, and a little more worn. “Please tell me that you don’t live on Long Island,” she said. “In the Village,” I said. “With Doc Lowndes, actually.” I didn’t want to tell her where I really lived. “With Doc!” Doris was enchanted. “Is he still editing Crack Detective?” I said he was. “Good for him,” Doris said. “Tell him I say hi. And tell me about New York. We get over there about once a century.”

  The sun came in through the picture window and turned the wall-to-wall carpet red. The trees on the horizon turned black. Eventually, inevitably, I took Doris’s hand. It was rough, from gardening, she said. Even in the winter there was work to do. I leaned over to kiss her, but she slid away. “Margot will be back any minute,” she said. “I’m sure she’d be thrilled to meet you, but I don’t feel like doing that much explaining.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s all right,” Doris said. I stood up. “I’d better take a look at your washing machine.” Doris laughed. “Leo! Don’t be offended. I want to be your friend. I’m terribly lonely out here, actually.” I opened the washer. A wire in the timer had been shaken loose, and I soldered it into place. “You’re all set,” I said. “Thank you, Mr. Spinks,” Doris said. She walked me out, and in the driveway, in full view of any neighbors who happened to be watching, she kissed my lips. “Tell Doc I’m going to send him a story,” she said. I got into my van. The sun had dropped below the roofline of the house; Doris was a blue shadow, waving to me, the only moving thing in that landscape. But all of Long Island came to life with her wave, and I was alive in it, too.

  12.

  I saw Doris perhaps half a dozen times that spring. If work took me anywhere near Lynbrook, I’d think, why not stop in? Or I’d finish my rounds early and find myself heading west on Highway 27. I suppose it was a form of addiction. But Doris was happy to see me, too. She confided in me that she was writing a novel about army wives, called Penelope. Was the title too obvious? Oh, she didn’t care. She was too old for subtlety. It was going to be a powerful book, a war novel for women. She had the outline of it in her mind but was flummoxed by how hard it was to get it on paper. Either too much was happening or too little, and always in the back of her mind there was a thought about Margot. Did the silence mean she was asleep, or had she gone outside? Was she eating bulbs out of the flower beds? “She did that, you know. I had to take her to the hospital.” Did Margot think Doris was a good m
other? Did Tom think she was a good wife? “Then I smoke a cigarette, and poof, the day is over.” I didn’t try to kiss her again. I was happy just to sit at the dining room table with her, swapping memories of other days or listening to her stories about the horrors of Long Island. Did I know that Levittown was systematically rejecting applications from Negroes? Even veterans. It was disgusting. Doris had joined an anti-segregation league, and she wanted me to join, too. “Leo,” she said, “you can’t live unless you do something.” “I am doing something,” I said. “I fixed a refrigerator today, and two electric ranges.” Doris made a face. “That’s sad. You’re running away.” “No, I’m not,” I said. “Leo!” Doris was really angry. “Do you even know what’s happening in the world right now?” It was June, and Truman looked to be starting a war with the Russians in Greece. Levittown was a disaster and a model for the future of the United States. “You can’t run away,” she said. “We need your help.” I didn’t want to listen, but Doris made my old hopes stir in their sleep. Maybe the world could be fixed after all.

  I stopped using heroin, which was easier than I’d thought it would be. I moved into my own apartment, on East Fourth Street: a basement apartment, with a view of a cracked gray courtyard. I bought a potted ficus tree and put it in front of my window. And one day I picked up a box of Anti-Segregation League leaflets from Doris and slipped them into mailboxes as I made my rounds. It didn’t take much effort on my part, and it made Doris happy. “That’s the spirit, Leo! Now, I want you to come to one of our meetings. You’ll meet a lot of interesting people.”

  I did go to the meeting, and I met her interesting people, but then something new happened: I thought of a story. It concerned a bank messenger in New York, who must deliver an important document to the European city of S. He takes a ship to Hamburg, and from there various trains conduct him farther and farther into what is, to him, a completely unfamiliar continent. The strange thing being that, when he gets to S, he has the feeling he has been there before. And, in fact, when he leaves his hotel and goes for a walk around town (it’s Sunday afternoon, so he can’t deliver his package yet), he finds his way without trouble to the city’s various landmarks: the tower where S’s last king performed his disastrous experiment with a pair of artificial wings; the park with its white gravel paths and its carousel; even a certain alley which leads first to a restaurant (you have to climb a single, high step to enter) decorated in blue and gold, then to a comically small piazza with a cinema. How does he know these things? What’s stranger, when he returns to his hotel, weary and perplexed, a message is waiting for him from a woman named D., whom he has never met, inviting him to dinner. D. lives in a far-off part of S, with her sister. After some preliminary conversation, D. reveals that they belong to a revolutionary organization, which is working to overthrow the government of S and reinstate the heir to the throne. Will the bank messenger help them? He hesitates—he is, after all, just a bank messenger. Why, he wonders, does D. want his help? He asks if he can take a day to think it over, and D. says, One day, but no more. The bank messenger returns to his hotel, and, moved by an intuition which is no stranger than anything else that’s happened in the story so far, he unwraps the package he is supposed to deliver. It contains a sheaf of documents. On the first page of the first document, the word inheritance catches his eye, and he reads on. The heir to the throne of S, it turns out, is him.