by Hari Kunzru
Day after day, I walked the blocks or rode the subway. Though the weather was cold and windy, I came to feel as if I were burning up, that some source of radiation, lodged in my chest, was threatening to incinerate me, just like Chester Bly. I drank gallons of water, carried around a big plastic jug. Because I was afraid, I tried to rush things. I went to the address on 28th Street given on the Key & Gate flyer. When I passed a young woman taking pictures on her phone, I knew it was hopeless. On the wrong side of a gulf of years I found a condo building, the ground floor occupied by Kailash Perfumes, a misspelled inkjet sign taped to the door reminding the customer that “We Sell Only Orignal.” The men knew nothing. They’d had the lease for a while, I would have to ask the boss. They did not run a retail business so minimum purchase would be ten units.
And so I tried to take my mind off my fear. I walked the blocks, I guzzled water. I went to listen to the musicians playing in Washington Square. Sometimes, when I went uptown, the elevated railway was a park. At other times, I made my way beneath the thunder of trains passing overhead. Once, there was nothing but a bridle path through farmland. I walked until the heels of my shoes had worn down. Then one afternoon I found myself there and all at once I had always been there, standing in the doorway of a Chinese laundry, looking at a row of buildings whose façades were caked with a hundred years of soot. Painted signs advertised services: Booking, handbills, printing, scenery and costumes. From open windows came the sound of people banging at pianos, three or four pianos playing different dance tunes all at once.
I pushed open a door and climbed a winding staircase with a rickety rail, squeezing past men carrying horns and violin cases, folders of sheet music. I climbed past the Solomon DeVere Agency, the Rabbit Foot Company. I climbed until I was short of breath and the light faded and I had the familiar sensation of going down as I climbed, into the bowels of the earth. There, on the frosted glass of a door, gold letters announced the offices of Key & Gate Recording Laboratories. I knocked and someone on the other side made a sound. It was not the sound of a voice, exactly. More like an object dropping with a thud onto a heavy carpet. I turned the handle and opened the door.
Stepping through into the dark. Excuse me, excuse me.
Behind a cluttered desk sat an exophthalmic young woman with dyed black hair. Her bug eyes were ringed with shadow and she was conducting a telephone conversation in a language I could not identify. Behind her, a half-glass door was closed on what was presumably her boss’s office. As I stood there, waiting for the woman to finish her conversation, shadows flitted across the glass, as if there were people inside, two or three or more. If they were conducting a meeting, it was completely silent. In fact, as I realized with a chill, the whole office was acoustically dead. We were in an old building, a box of quivery joists and planks. Outside was a busy street. It was not possible. Wearily the secretary cupped the receiver and suggested I take a seat. Her voice fell without leaving a trace. My panic rising, I tried to leave but nothing came of it, my will did not translate into action, and instead of escaping out onto the street I found myself moving some old copies of Variety and sinking into an armchair.
The chair was snug and dark and deep. I felt like a sleepy child, a feeling accentuated by the unusual height of its arms, which rose almost to my shoulders. So I rested my hands on my knees. In my nose was the scent of rose water, under my feet a thick Persian carpet into which my broken shoes were sinking like mud. On the walls of the dark cluttered room I saw posters and handbills, so many. All the memories of all the theaters, all the stages. A starlet looked out of a frame made of the text Oh But How She Could Play A Ukelele! Another was dancing That Egyptian Glide. As the secretary chatted, in a low murmur suggestive of a conversation with a lover, they strummed and shimmied. I sank on down until the arms of the chair were above my head and the room seemed far and I began to grow suspicious of my sudden sense of ease. Dimly I remembered that I had no reason to feel easy. On the contrary. My panic rising again, I struggled back to the surface and stood and moved a stack of papers from another chair. The secretary watched me without emotion as I sat down. It was a hard upright chair, a chair in which I thought I would not be so quick to lose myself. However, another unpleasant sensation soon arose. I began to feel that something was behind me, which was not possible, because the back of the chair was against a wall. This feeling grew until it became a definite presence. Though I looked round more than once, I could see nothing out of the ordinary on the patch of wall behind my head, or the back of the chair itself. Then perhaps my eyes or mind became accustomed to the light, because the next time I turned, looming over me was a poster in a gilt frame, the kind made to hang outside a theater. It depicted a winking black face, a wide grin flowering between white gloved hands:
Here comes Wolfmouth! Famous Figure of Fun!
A red maw, a tongue like a receding highway, white teeth framing an enormous darkness. The eye was full of malice. The eye was turned on me.
—I’m sorry, sir.
Involuntarily, I had already risen to my feet. I could barely hear the secretary’s small dead voice.
—Mr. Khatchadourian is not available at this time.
I muttered an apology—something about having made a mistake, not wanting to waste anyone’s time—and backed out towards the door. If, a few moments before, the poster had depicted Wolfmouth, now it seemed merely to contain him. He was hanging inside it, lolling, floating, one leg lazily swinging backwards and forwards like a pendulum. For now he was a jolly minstrel, taking his rest. At any second, he might spring into lethal action.
From behind the door of the inner office came the crackle of a gramophone. I heard two voices, comedians doing a routine.
—Sam you sure am look like you got the miseries.
—The miseries? Why there’s another name for what I got.
I realized the terrible error I’d made, all the errors. The enormity of my mistakes overwhelmed me. Nothing would ever make up for them. I turned and fled down the stairs.
I could hear him behind me, Wolfmouth singing out, brimming with good humor. He followed me down onto the street, loping behind with an easy stride as I quickened my pace up Fifth Avenue and through the Garment District, trying to melt into the crowd. I dodged in and out of office lobbies, through revolving doors. How hard I tried to shake him, under the flag-flying midtown façades. He followed me along the great hollow blocks and the tight bustling blocks. He followed me over a bridge and along the cobbled streets squeezed under its great pillars, where the sidewalks were checkered with shadow.
I couldn’t always see him, but he was never far, somewhere just round the corner, scuffing and shuffling his patent leather shoes, laughing his great rich hearty laugh. A mouth like a trap. A mouth you could drive a carriage through. A fearful gap. He followed me back into the city, through the saltmarshes into the warren of Little Germany, the tenements by the garment factories. He nipped nimbly through the crowd of dirty bodies migrating through the Lower East Side, heading to the bathhouses for their morning ablutions.
Excuse me, excuse me. Into the dark.
Day after day. Always on the move. My boot heels quite worn away. Wolfmouth only left me alone when I came home at night. Even then he followed me through the hallways, tap dancing up the stairs. He followed me, he follows me. Step scuff smack step, step scuff smack step. Echoing in the stairwell at the end of another long day.
—The kooks, there are more of them all the time.
—That’s right, Mrs. Waxman.
Carrying my groceries past her door. The stink of her cats.
I hole up, lock the door, fix the chain. Step scuff smack step, shuffling in the hallway. Then, at last, silence. I am not sure if he goes away. Chain checked, door double-locked, I sit down at the kitchen table and write a letter. Some time ago I asked you to send me your wants and still I have received no list from you. I have offered to sell the whole collection, which as you know is a significant one. I urgently need money
. Without it I am unable to complete my plans. When darkness falls there are voices in the hallway. Other voices. I never open my door to look. Things happen in the hallway, fearful nameless things. The knife blades work like pistons, making dead men in the hallway. In the mornings I find stains, smears on the tile, covered up in newspaper.
When there is water, I fill up containers from the tub. Buckets, bottles, bowls, placed around the apartment. The burning coal in my chest sometimes drives me up to the roof, to loiter by the tank, ready to dive in. Up on the roof there are pigeon lofts and a silt of stolen purses, half-rotten, rat-eaten. Down below boys pass a bottle, rulers of the handball court. TITO + SWISS + ANGEL + L’IL MAN + JESTER + TONY + RICO = DIRTY DOZENS. I can hear them argue. Puta this, puta that. I can hear Wolfmouth laughing down in the handball court, dancing the Broadway Shuffle in the street. That big belly laugh floating upwards in the stairwell, through the hallway, oozing in under my locked door.
I can’t ever shake him. He follows me through deserted streets, hiding in doorways when I turn round. I see him in the distance, sauntering down the ghost blocks in a long coat, swishing past inscrutable wreckage. Outcroppings of masonry, anonymous piles of brick. I see him sitting on the fire escape. Sitting on the stoop. Sitting on an orange crate outside the Fiery Cross Ministries, bumping his back against the side of a parked car. Leaning on a lamppost at a windswept intersection. Rolling bones against the curb in a clean white tee shirt and shiny shoes.
I wait in the alley for the knife, the bat, the lead pipe. My breath exits in a little plume. His footfalls echo in the stairwells as I climb. My breath, like ectoplasm. Even in the cold of the night, my chest is burning. The coal in my chest. The cold. I have to keep writing letters. There are obstacles in my path. Everything I do seems to be in vain. This is a betrayal. I understood us to have a good business relationship. I expect a reply, I urgently expect one, a postcard at the very least, a simple acknowledgment that you have received my offer and are considering it. I have exigencies. The records must be sold. This price is absurdly low anyway. I offer it to you because I consider you a genuine collector. I believe my terms are more than reasonable. I have burdens to bear. If I don’t hear from you by the date above, I won’t be able to wait. You are delaying. Why would you introduce these difficulties? I absolutely cannot have any more delays.
All I want is to be able to reason with him. I just need to find out what it is I’ve done. It’s not fair to blame me for things that took place long before I was even born. That is what I want to say to him: I am not the one to blame. But I don’t know to whom I should address my complaints. Sometimes he is one person, sometimes many. He goes running, wilding through Central Park. A wolf pack, circling round, tongues lolling. I have rights, I want to say. I want to say, what about my rights?
I think my only hope is to outrun him. My only hope was to outrun him. To outrun him, but I was always slipping into the past. Is to was. The black mouth gaping, the wolf pack behind, and though I ran as hard as I could, it made no difference. I found myself slipping ever further into the dark. I opted to go North. Ultima Thule. The whitest place. I figured he would have no power there. I took the subway to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. I had always been on the subway, heading to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. At the gate I waited nervously, taking slugs of water from a gallon jug, feeling the eye on me. Wolfmouth was the beggar in the wheelchair, rattling a can. He was every one of the young men, hanging around, trying to sell things. A watch, a transistor radio. I turned away when they came near. The eye was on me.
All aboard the bus. Pleasure is the headlight, the devil is the driver. The smeared window glass. The bus pulled away. Outside it had begun to snow. By the time we reached the expressway, it was impossible to see. The city had faded into blessed forgetfulness.
—Ain’t no secret to geeks.
The voice like sandpaper, a shock. JumpJim’s claw of a hand on my back. He was wild and ragged now, wearing sweat pants and some kind of faded patchwork coat over a tee shirt advertising a community fish fry. He eased himself into the seat beside me.
—Thing about geeks. Any man will bite the head off of a chicken if he’s hungry enough or has enough taste for booze. The key is getting him to understand he’s a geek. You catch my drift?
I shook my head. JumpJim sighed.
—I’m sorry for you, son, really I am, but you ain’t the sharpest tool in the box. So where is it you think you’re headed now?
—Maine. Further on, probably.
—This bus ain’t going to Maine.
—Yes it is.
He turned and poked a finger into the ribs of a middle-aged woman hunched into her seat on the opposite side of the aisle.
—Where’s this bus going?
—You don’t know?
—I know. The kid doesn’t know.
—You want me to tell him where the bus is going?
—Give the broad a frickin medal.
—There’s no call to be rude.
—Just tell him.
—Why doesn’t he look on his ticket?
—Jesus, woman. North or south? Is the damn bus going north or south?
She turned her shoulder to us and pulled up the hood of her jacket, refusing further conversation. JumpJim gave the finger, doubled fisted, to her back. I told him I had to use the bathroom, and reluctantly he let me pass. At the back of the bus, I locked myself in the coffin-like toilet, bracing myself as the road vibrated underneath. I tried not to panic. When I came back out, I sat down in another row. For a few minutes he left me alone. Then he made his way back to where I was sitting.
—Sulking?
—I’d just rather be on my own.
—Oh you would, would you? Well, that’s all right. We’ll come soon enough to the parting of the ways. Besides, you need some time to practice your act.
He did a kind of gnashing mime, which I supposed was biting the head off a chicken.
—I don’t know what you’re even talking about.
He sat down beside me, nudging me over with his hip.
—What’s your problem? I’m giving you the window. Look, you’re going to do what Charlie wants, sooner or later. Why not just get it over with? Bite and spit.
—You think it’s that easy? What does he want? I don’t know what he wants. If he’d tell me, then maybe I could sort this out.
—You want to reason with him.
—Exactly.
—Man to man. On a level.
—Right.
—You are fucking soft in the head. You think he wants to negotiate with someone like you? Look at yourself. What have you got to offer?
—I don’t know. I don’t know what he wants. I just want him to understand that, whatever happened to him, I’m not to blame. He shouldn’t be picking on me.
—Picking on you? Ha! You should get a tattoo of that one. My advice: accept it. You’re the horse and he’s the rider. You’re going to do what he tells you, in the end. Seems bad, probably, but beggars can’t be choosers and your old uncle Jim is going to give you a way of looking on the bright side. There’s a great breakfast place down where you’re going. Hear that? Start your day off right. Steak and eggs, tamales, they got a hot sauce’ll take the roof of your mouth clean off. All these fine old pictures on the walls. Convivial scenes from days gone by.
—Breakfast.
—Catch up, boy. Don’t fret, I’ll give you directions.
He reclined his seat and then twisted round and tried to force it back further, onto the legs of the person in the row behind. When banging and straining didn’t produce results, he petulantly folded his arms and went to sleep.
We traveled for some hours. I leaned my forehead against the window and watched the road, the signs, the place names passing by, and I saw that he had been telling the truth. We were heading south, we had always been heading south. I wondered how I had got on the wrong bus, the very last bus I wanted. Perhaps there would be a rest stop where I could get off aga
in. Could I escape without waking him? If only I could still turn around.
As I explored the mechanics of climbing over him into the aisle, JumpJim had a coughing fit, which woke him up. He spat into a wad of tissue paper and peeled off his patchwork coat, releasing a pungent unwashed odor into the already stale air of the bus.
—Damn bug in my throat. How about you share a little of that water?
I clutched my jug to my chest. He excavated something from his nose and flicked it at the sleeping woman, his enemy on the other side of the aisle.
—OK I’m awake now. Back in the game. You’re kind of a prick, you know? So, a question. Do you have any idea what the word miscegenation means?
—Sure.
—Sure, he says. You ever hear of Eddie Lang? No? I always forget it wasn’t you, it was your friend. Eddie Lang was a guitarist. Born Salvatore Massaro, in Philly. Played with Paul Whiteman’s band. Clue’s in the name.
He paused. When I didn’t show any reaction to his joke he shrugged and carried on.
—No one more sophisticated than Eddie Lang. He played with Bix on “Singin’ the Blues” for pity’s sakes. Smooth player, total pro, forget about it. Now, you ever hear of Blind Willie Dunn’s Gin Bottle Four? Probably not. But you couldn’t get a more downhome name. That’s got to be some gnarly old bluesman and his pals, am I right? That’s Lang with Lonnie Johnson. King of the fucking slickers. And who else is in the band? King Oliver and Hoagy Carmichael. Lonnie Johnson and King Oliver, Storyville Negro royalty, with Hoagy Carmichael from Bloomington, Indiana, and Italian Eddie Lang. So tell me, was that a black thing or a white thing? No, that was music.
—Why are you telling me this?
—Because you need to hear it, you little prick. You got the picture yet? It’s a business. The record company needed to give it a certain spin. Salvatore Massaro had to be Blind Willie Dunn because that’s the only way the product would sell. You and your buddy, mixing it up, trying to plug into the real like it’s some kind of amplifier. You’re the worst of them. Looking for that uncut hit. That pure. Fucking vampires! Why can’t you accept there ain’t no pure. There ain’t no real. It’s just people.