What Comes Next

by Jonathan Baumbach

  Twice in four days he noticed him (or thought he did) standing across the street about a block away. The first time was near the Forty-second Street library—Curt spending his holiday mornings in research—and might have been a coincidence. When he looked again, wanting to say hello, he wasn’t there. The second time, miles away in Brooklyn, he was out with his daughter taking a walk. It began to snow. Parks turned to go back and saw him (or thought he did), in an Air Force bomber jacket, his back to him, at the next corner. He brought Jacqueline up and, after a brief fight with his wife, who wanted to go for a walk herself, rushed back to see if it had been the student. Obsessed, he ran five blocks in the direction instinct suggested—the wind blistering his face—but found nothing like the figure he had seen. Had he hallucinated his presence? He was embarrassed to mention it to Carolyn, who would see it as an enormous presumption to think some twenty-year-old boy had nothing better to do than follow Curtis Parks. Who was Curtis Parks that anyone should want to follow him? He kept his secret to himself.

  Four days later he saw him again. As before, his watcher was across the street and a block behind. He continued in the direction he was walking, as if nothing were wrong, en route to the Frick. The block before, he abruptly turned the corner and ducked into a phone booth. The phone unluckily was out of order, the receiver torn loose from the box. Waiting, the noise of his breathing in his ears, he pretended to make a call. Someone had written on the wall in lipstick, “If your present brand doesn’t satisfy, try my ass,” and left a phone number. Underneath in pencil was scrawled, “Bomb Paris,” and under that, “Bomb All Whores and Commies.” To the left, lower down, “Kill for Peace.” He didn’t have long to wait. Someone, wild-haired, came steaming around the corner, his head bobbing. The figure seemed to move on a diagonal as if bent to one side, as if leaning away from some force that would pull it down. As he went by, Curt, head averted, talked into the dead phone, exhilarated at the discovery, frightened. “Operator,” he said, mouthing the words, “the crazy kid is following me.”

  That night at midnight his phone rang and when Carolyn answered no one was there.

  THREE

  MY FATHER taking me by the hand to the drugstore. I am wearing short pants, an oversize kid. Scared of what was next. Thinking it was an injection of some kind—for rabies or for cancer—or something worse. The old man pushes me through the door. “Give the boy a dozen Trojans,” he says to the druggist, squeezing my arm—one side of the man’s face scar tissue—“and if any of them leak, Spenser, we know where they came from.” The druggist guffaws. “How’s your daughter?” my father asks him. “A beauty,” the druggist says. “Good as new. Works like a charm.” I don’t understand but my father seems pleased with the answer and leads me, his arm around my shoulder, to the back of the drugstore, where a girl dressed in white is lying on a couch, the wall behind her lined with Tampax boxes.

  “Gee, I’m glad you’re back,” the girl says. I look around to see if she’s talking to my father or the druggist. No one else is there. “I saved you a dance,” she says, twitching her index finger at me like it was some kind of snake. I say I don’t like to dance. I know you’re supposed to but I just don’t enjoy it.

  She has a black wedding band on her middle finger, which means (I remember reading somewhere) that her husband died before the marriage was consummated. I move my weight from one foot to the other. She is rubbing her hand along her leg, which makes me nervous.

  “Have you seen my father?” I ask her. “I don’t want to lose him.”

  “Oh, I thought you were the father,” she says. “You look to me, honey, like a father.”

  I say no, I am the son.

  She beckons to me. Embarrassed, I turn away, look for my father in the closet.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she whispers. “Take your medicine like a man.”

  I have the feeling, I can’t get over it, that the old man’s watching me from somewhere.

  When I get to the couch, wanting my medicine, there is someone else with the girl, another man. “I’ll be through in a minute,” she says. “Don’t go anywhere.” Like slicing cheese, I cut his head off.

  She is waiting for me, her arms out, leering—her face scourged like her father’s. I plunge my knife between her legs.

  June 27

  I slept last night with the lights on. It does no good. The dreams get worse.

  Went with R. to the movies. About this war hero who goes out of his mind over a little girl. She was crying at the end, though pretended not. Turning her head so I wouldn’t see. I asked her if she liked it. She said it was fake. Which makes it true to life, I told her. Everything’s fake. Madman doesn’t kill little girl. Is killed by mistake. You read about things like that in the papers every day. I defended the movie until she backed down. It makes her feel superior to give in.

  Later she said she wondered why I don’t touch her. I put my hand on her head and she jumped. I think she knows, though other times not. Is she playing with me? When I close my eyes I see Parks on top of her. A bird flies out from between them. It is my mirror image. The bird.

  Some guy went berserk on Times Square at three in the afternoon. I missed seeing it by an hour. Wounding six people with a sawed-off shotgun before shooting himself in the mouth. It was on the radio; they didn’t even give his name. What did he think he was doing?

  PHONE CALL ABUSE

  SHOWS SHARP RISE

  OFFENSIVE PHONE CALLS TO FAMILIES

  OF THE DEATHS OF SOLDIERS

  I started to follow a girl in the park; I only wanted to look at her, her breasts like the nose cones of missiles. A cop on horseback was eyeing me.

  At dinner he said to my mother, “When is your son going to get himself a job? I won’t have him around the house like this. At his age I was supporting a mother, a sister, and two brothers.” Then he knocked over his chair and left the table. When my mother said, “Something’s bothering him,” I laughed until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Don’t laugh,” she said to me, laughing herself. “He worries about you. Don’t you know how much he worries about you?”

  June 28

  I dreamed him in the white mask coming at me with a knife. I ducked and he went out the window. The mask flying off, leaving him without a face. He hangs from the sill.

  I’ve been reclassified 1-A.

  I stayed in my room all day. He said he wanted to talk to me, banged on my door, but I didn’t come out.

  June 30

  Headline in the News:

  HINT BREAK IN

  CRIPPLE KILLINGS

  SEX MANIAC CLAIMS THIRD WHILE

  GIRL NINE WATCHES IN CLOSET

  All three victims women with slight physical defects. The killer does some strange sexual thing to them—it never says what—then mutilates the body. (Why don’t they say what he does?)

  GIS FLUSH ENEMY FORCE

  Went with Rosemary to the zoo. She called and asked if I wanted to go. More and more she’s like Phyllis. The way Phyllis was. Staring at the animals as if she were looking in the mirror. The male elephant trying to mount the female, who kept moving her ass away. Though I said I wanted to go, I couldn’t get her to move away. I stood with my back to the cage. The elephant’s piston like a giant rolling pin. Is that what she wants?

  We sat on a large rock in the park. On a hill over a playground. Kids on swings pushed by fat Negresses. The place crawling with police. I flinched when one came close. She saw. Seeing my sweat, she trembles.

  She tells me her father and mother divorced. The father in Cleveland, a tax lawyer. Says she feels like an orphan, glancing at me when she says it. Lives with her aunt (which I knew), her father’s sister, who works during the day. When I said why don’t we go up there, she said no.

  No mention of Curtis Parks.

  I told her I was an adopted child. Both parents died when I was born. She nods to herself. Even when I lie, it comes out true.

  If she didn’t suspect, she would tell m
e about the attack in the park, would invite me up.

  I have to find out if Parks is seeing her.

  July 2

  I dreamed I was pissing out the window. The stuff burning holes in whatever it touched. People scattering, falling. There was more, but it was gone in the morning, my mother shaking me awake.

  Police say they have a lead on the Cripple Killer. Some children reported to have seen him well enough to make identification. No description given.

  I followed Parks most of the day. Nothing interesting. He didn’t meet Rosemary.

  He asked me at dinner what kind of grades I expected. I said I didn’t know. He shook his head. “Tell him,” he said to my mother, “if he wastes his life, he wastes mine.”

  “He’s not wasting his life,” she said. “You think anything that’s not your life is a waste.”

  “You’re lucky you have a mother,” he said in his sarcastic voice. “She’d defend you if you went around slaughtering people in the street.”

  “I would,” she said. “Whatever he does, I love him.”

  After they went to sleep I took ten dollars from her pocketbook.

  July 5

  With Rosemary in Washington Square Park. (She said she wanted to watch me play chess. Two moves from mate, I let the old man take my queen. No one noticed—Rosemary looking away, daydreaming.) Then on the way to the subway, Parks is coming toward us. He looks like he wants to run but since I’ve seen him, keeps coming. We shake hands. His smile stuffed into his face. We are all pretending something. (Was he following us?) He invites us to have a drink with him. Rosemary says that she has to get somewhere. “What about you, Chris?” I say no. We stand around, Parks asking how she is, how I am. We are all well. He stares at Rosemary, who won’t look at him. When he leaves, my stomach hurts.

  In her aunt’s apartment on Central Park West she tells me that she and Parks were (I listen as if I didn’t know) close. She talks about it. Says she no longer sees him. Starts to cry. My pants bulge. Her confession.

  All ears and nose, I listen. I’m sorry, I say, hands in pockets. She kisses me on the forehead. I am stiff. Nothing happens. The aunt, a spidery bird of a woman, breaks in.

  When I get home my mother tells me someone named Curtis Parks called, left a number for me to call him back.

  I call Rosemary after dinner. The aunt says she’s out for the evening. When she asks who’s calling, I tell her Curtis Parks. “Oh, how are you, Professor?” she says.

  In my room at night, I mount Rosemary, watching myself, my rolling pin between her legs. She is screaming.

  Running from the station, something fierce in him, unappeasable. Something mad in him.

  I sit on a bench across the street, smoke a cigarette. Wait for her to come home. He sits on my back, offering advice. “I bear the burden for both of you,” he says. I get up and throw him off. He clings. In a phone booth, I dial Parks. His wife says hellohello. Is he sleeping? Hellohellohello. “I’m sorry,” I say. A police car goes by. With my last dime I call home. My mother says who is it. I bang the receiver down. Choking her. I want him. With my scout knife I saw at the wire. Stab and saw. It is hard, a plastic spiral covering it. When there is blood on the blade I stop.

  Knife in hand, I move toward him. “Do you have change of a quarter?” He fiddles in his pocket, his eyes on my face. (What does he see?) No change. We pass. I sense him turning, following me. I don’t look back. Someone is coming from behind, goes by. A man in a flowered shirt, dark. He goes under the turnstile. A train coming on the other side. Afraid to commit himself to the wrong direction, he scrambles back and forth, looking for a way to the other side. For a moment, arms in front of him, he thinks of going across the tracks, of jumping the gap. There are policemen coming from both sides of the platform, two from one side, one from the other. In panic, he sits down on the floor. Rolls himself into a ball and moves, fuse in mouth, toward the pair of cops. The train comes and I get on. The cops are shouting at the human bomb. The lone one has his gun drawn and is saying something in a sweet voice. The other two go into the men’s room to hide. The train pulls out. My finger in my pocket bleeds a stain.

  July 7

  All morning I expect something to happen. In a dream the police pick me up as the Cripple Killer. My mother not home when they arrive. My father in his study yells at them through the door, doesn’t come out. A child on a pony identifies me. Also Parks and Rosemary, who have collected evidence against me, they say. Everything fits. I am unable to explain where I’ve been. And then, awake, I can’t shake the feeling that it is so. That they will come for me. It is a matter of time. I stay in bed till noon in a sweat. No one home. I have a half glass of my father’s Courvoisier for breakfast. And a Coke. I dress, clean my room. Call Rosemary. Have to tell her, get it over with. “Come over,” she says. “Please come over, Chris.”

  I delay. I call Parks, who is out. His wife, who has this cultured voice, says from what she’s heard she’d like to meet me. Has been looking forward to it. (What has she heard?) I say I am also looking forward to it. When I hang up I’m in a sweat again. My nerve gone. Regret everything. My skin like a sheet over a corpse. I give her the business in my room, the door closed, confess to her my crimes as she writhes under me. I am best alone.

  When I get there she isn’t home. I wait five minutes then leave, free of my promise to myself.

  Headline in Post:

  MAN IN WOMAN’S

  GARB, PERVERSE

  KILLER’S FOURTH

  MISTAKEN FOR A WOMAN,

  TRANSVESTITE IS KILLED IN HALLWAY,

  THOUGH NOT MOLESTED, POLICE SAY

  Someone taps my shoulder. I drop the paper. When I turn she looks frightened, her arms in front of her face. “Don’t be angry with me, Christopher.” She has been running after me. Was asleep when I rang the bell.

  In her apartment, I look out the window twelve flights down. Expect to see myself waiting on the bench across the street. Only a park. A flight of cars between. She is wearing a pink-and-white dress. Like a candy cane. I can’t look at her. She is too close. Sweat burns my neck.

  Nothing is said. I think of telling her—it pushes against the top of my head. The longer I wait, the heavier it is. Prick or conscience? Between my legs there is more eye than sight.

  I am sitting next to her. She pretends trust. Her head against my face. I want to smash the room. It is not the time. I tell her that I am in love with her. She looks frightened and shakes her head. Then, her face in her hands, she cries.

  She tells me that she doesn’t feel love for me. It is the reason she cries (she says). Wants to but doesn’t. It is the way it is. “Oh, Chris, I’m sorry.” Kissing my face.

  I hold her down on the couch, force my weight on her. (What more can I confess?) She whispers in my ear, sobs. Without resistance, there is nothing. I let her up.

  “Will you please go?” she whispers. We face each other. Her eyes dream my destruction. When I go to the door she calls me back. “Will you come over tomorrow?”

  I shake my head.

  “I want to see you again, Christopher.”

  “All right.” I want to get out, away from her, before the aunt comes.

  “Do you still love me?”

  I bury my face in her breasts. “I’ll be over in the afternoon.” (Leave hating her, feeling untouched.) I have the sense on the subway, riding home, that if I stop watching myself I won’t be there.

  The later edition of the Post: POLICE SAY NEW CLUES TO CRIPPLE KILLER’S IDENTITY. According to witnesses, killer is dark blond, medium height, between eighteen and twenty-five. “Looks like some ordinary college kid,” some woman says. “Those kids don’t get enough to do at school.” There is a police drawing, a composite sketch. Citizens are requested to phone the police immediately if they see anyone behaving suspiciously answering to above description. The old man on my left—it is his paper we are looking at—stares at me. I smile back like a lamb.

  My mother, coming into my room,
tells me that Joel Minitz, who was the son of a friend of hers, was killed in the war. “I don’t want you to go. Promise me you’ll do everything you can to stay out.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “It would be such a waste, Chrissy. When you were four—friends of mine still talk about it—you used to add three two-figure numbers in your head. Do you remember?”

  “When you tell me I remember.”

  “Don’t have a chip on your shoulder like Dad. He has other good qualities but that’s not one of them. You used to smile all the time when you were younger. You never gave anyone any trouble. All my friends used to say what a beautiful child you were.”

  He calls her, wanting something. Complaining without words to me, she hurries out. Her eyes vengeful, frightened. Her movement a shriek. I cover my ears with my hands.

  In the night a man comes wearing my mask. It doesn’t come off, he says. “I want you to help me get it off.” I push him out the door but he comes in again. He tells me that since wearing the mask he has killed six people—f our women, two children. The children his brothers, one perhaps himself. I offer to cut the mask off for him. He says no, then yes. There is no other way. When the mask is half off I dig the knife into his throat. The point sticks, comes out his ear (like a hearing aid). Nowhere to put him, I carry him into the street. Run with him over my shoulder. A girl sees us, yells for me to stop. Bending over, I catapult the body at her. Another takes its place. I throw it off but the weight remains. At the end of the road I see my face in the mirror. I am wearing the mask—one side of it cut away, the skin scourged, bubbling.

  When I wake up I hear my father storming through the house, unable to sleep. “Damn sirens,” he is saying.

  The News has another drawing of the killer. He is more dark than light, the police say. (Three witnesses say dark, one says light to medium.) “The man we want is an amateur,” an unidentified source tells a News reporter in an interview. “In each case there are more wounds than necessary. And the stabbings themselves are imprecise. This is a violent man who kills to satisfy something missing in his life. We are close to nailing him. We will nail him. I can’t say any more without endangering routine security.” A Puerto Rican, picked up as a suspect, has been let go; says he was not beaten by the police.