What Comes Next

by Jonathan Baumbach

  She moved her hands along the outline of her hips, her long fingernails a shade darker than her capris.

  Clinging desperately to the buoyancy of his mood, Curt invited the woman to his apartment for a drink.

  She let him wait for her answer, staring at his neck, her mouth fixed in what seemed like a leer; it made Curt nervous.

  Fluorescent message on billboard … 2:05 A.M.… JULY 29 … 81 DEGREES … SEASONABLY HOT TONIGHT AND TOMORROW … 40% CHANCE OF …

  “That’s a lot of prickly you got on your chin.”

  … In the heat of battle brave men do not feel their wounds. … Sometimes it is better not …

  “I said, that’s a lot of prickly.”

  He felt for his beard, his fingers like babes in their first woods. … 2:06 A.M. … (Better not what?) “Do you like it?”

  She shrugged, looked away in amusement, as if it were impossible to take such a question seriously. Curt forced a laugh, unamused. “Well, Professor Big Hands,” she said, taking his arm, “let’s go where we’re going.”

  “I have a few errands to run,” he said, improvising. “Could you meet me in about an hour?” He wrote an address, the same one he had given his wife, on the back of a movie stub and, winking, pressed it into her hand.

  “A man like you goes on an errand,” she said, “he may never come back.”

  In the middle of the next block she stopped him, pulling on his arm like a weight. A taxi, she said. She wanted a taxi. “You know if the lady is tired, Professor, that extra-special something is missing, huh?” She rubbed her hand along his arm. “I make it worth your while,” she whispered, something in her voice mocking itself.

  “I can’t afford a cab,” he told her, unnerved by the thought of that extra-special something, wanting by this time only to get away.

  “How much do you have?”

  “Not enough,” he said evasively, surprised at the question.

  “Let me see.” She frisked him, feeling all his pockets—other places—with a facility that betrayed a certain amount of practice, a certain natural gift. “I want to see what you have.”

  Curt held her arms out away from him, holding her by the wrists as if he were holding a pair of poisonous snakes.

  “How strong you are,” she said, smirking.

  “What do you want?” Looking behind him. “What is it?”

  “What do I want?” She laughed, the sound like jagged glass, painful to listen to, threatening.

  He dropped her hands, backed up, thought of running away but knew his father would disapprove. Beat a woman, kill her if necessary, but for God’s sake don’t run away.

  “Who was it,” she asked, “you or me put his big spender’s hand on my ass?” She shook her head, made a noise of disbelief. “Professor, I think maybe you got something missing upstairs. What do you think?”

  He thought about it, missing the something that was missing. “Look,” he said, looking around him like a man in a room without doors, “if money’s what you’re after, you’ve made a mistake.”

  She repossessed his arm. “You’re not so bad as I thought.”

  They walked another block, her arm enclasped in his, Curt by turns desperate and elated, dreaming. The street in a fog of light.

  Another block. What demon had made him pat her ass? What mad whim? His sense of himself, out of shape, melted under the pressure of some enormous heat.

  “Oh, my aching ass,” she said, letting go of his arm a moment at the corner to stretch, to dance her weariness before him—his head in the cosmic eye of their game already on a platter. And which head was it? It was all the heads he had.

  “Hey, look at that,” he said. “Jesus! Hey. Over there. It’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen.”

  Her head turned, her eyes trying to make forms out of mist, Curt slipped behind her and ran.

  He had run two blocks, his chest burning from the effort, before he stopped to look back. The woman, whoever she was, was out of sight. Taking a deep breath, he stepped into the gutter to get a better view of the direction he had come from. There was no sign of the woman; he kept looking, refusing to believe that she wasn’t there.

  He wandered into a phone booth on the corner of the next street and, without thinking about the time, without thinking about anything, dialed Christopher’s number.

  His mother answered on the second ring. She said Christopher wasn’t home.

  “I just want to say good-bye,” Curt said. “I’m going away.”

  “I don’t know when Christopher will be back. Are you some friend of his?”

  “I was his teacher.”

  “I’ll tell him you called, Mr. … Is it about school that you want to see him? Has it something to do with Christopher’s schoolwork?”

  “Parks. Curtis Parks.”

  “I’ll give him the message.”

  “No message. I’m leaving. Just wanted to say good-bye.”

  “I’ll tell him to be sure to call you back. Don’t worry. I’ll get the message to him, Mr. Parks. Don’t worry about it.”

  The phone was dead. He was looking at the receiver in his hand as if trying to remember how it had got there.

  He stood in the phone booth a few minutes more, private, at home in the limits of its isolation, as though he were expecting a call. Alas, no one had his number, no one.

  When he left the rectangular box he was in—his lungs surprised by the sudden rush of air—it was with some idea of where he was going. His eyes fixed on the ground in front of him, he walked down Forty-fifth Street from the Avenue of the Americas to Ninth Avenue.

  A fight was going on in front of a bar, two men shoving each other in the chest, taking turns. Curt was knocked into as he went by, surprised, shaken into anger. Outraged, victimized at every turn, he thrust the man who had bumped him back in the direction he had come. Off balance—not looking to go the way he wasn’t going—the man (a lard-bellied drunk) stumbled and collapsed on his face. “There goes the surly shit,” someone yelled. “Boom.”

  “Who’s a shit, ya fuckhead. I’d like to hear you say that to his face.”

  Curt edged away; the man on the sidewalk, he noticed, the one he had shoved in self-defense, lying like a sack.

  “Congratulations,” an inebriated woman yelled from the doorway of the bar to Curt. “No one’s ever put the bastard O’Sullivan down before.”

  “He bumped into me,” Curt said. “What else could I do?”

  “You could have minded your own business,” a voice assaulted him. “Who the hell asked you to butt in, Champ? I’d like to know who asked you.”

  Two men approached, burly types, and Curt backed up into a parking meter at the curb, turning abruptly, a man threatened on all sides.

  “Look,” Curt said, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, dimly aware that he was in danger, “it was an accident. I was walking by and the guy banged into me.”

  “He doesn’t look so tough,” the one on the right said to his companion.

  “He looks tough to me,” the other said, smiling at Curt in a friendly though peculiarly insinuating way, a man who understood, respected, on the whole, the malice of others. “How tough are you, Champ?”

  Curt didn’t answer, tested the range of his freedom by taking a casual step to the side, the taste of panic in his throat. The men looked at each other; neither moved. Curt saw himself, conceived it as in a dream, thrown to the ground, beaten, pummeled by kicks. For no cause, to no purpose. (PACIFIST PUMMELED IN BAR-FRONT BRAWL.) Yet it seemed somehow fitting—the perfect end to his day—that he should be beaten for something he had done without intent, an act, if violent, of innocence.

  “Excuse me,” Curt said. “I have to go.”

  The men parted, made room between them—the space they offered barely large enough for him to get through.

  “Thank you,” Curt said, a man who appreciated favors, holding on to his pose of unconcern. A matter of time, of moments. His move. In a moment he would make it, anesthetized, bey
ond fear. In a moment.

  Now.

  He went between the two men, resigned to whatever awaited him, turning sideways to avoid unnecessary contact. He waited for the blow to fall, the first blow, with resignation, almost—he had waited so long for it—with a martyr’s pleasure. A hand patted him on the back and he brushed it off with a shrug. Kept going, mean and tense (like a Western movie hero). “Hey, bucko, don’t get into any more trouble,” one of them yelled after him.

  He walked neither quickly nor slowly, aware of being observed, his pace determined by the tension of appearing unconcerned. It was still possible that the two men were following him, that someone was, and that when he reached a properly remote spot, he would get the beating that was coming to him. And worse perhaps, trying to conceive what might be worse. He was walking toward the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

  The lights burned. The ticket windows like a gargantuan network of nerve cells with the skin (as in a biology diagram) stripped away. The rawness of the place, the needle glow of the lights as if the outer skin of the bulb had been removed, suited Curt. The needs of his mood. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to, conceive of a place more congenial to the way he was feeling. He basked in the raw lights like a convalescent on a Florida beach.

  When he went into the waiting room to sit down, suddenly exhausted from the weight of the day, he had a ticket in his pocket for Tucson, Arizona. Since the bus for Tucson wasn’t leaving for another four and a half hours, he had time to think over what he hadn’t yet decided to do. The waiting room was mostly empty. Six people, seven including Curt, were scattered about—no two together—as if they had been blown into the rows of hard wooden seats by an arbitrary wind. Curt looked around, comforted by the isolated presence of others, yawned. He let his eyes shut for a moment, recognizing the darkness as a landscape he had spent a good part of his life in. He didn’t mean to go to sleep, resisting the urge, the need, but to no avail.

  Saw himself at the White House, knighted by the President, an enormous silver medal placed around his neck, then he was standing up before the cameras to denounce the war, all wars, war itself. A gallery of his students, Christopher among them, cheering, clapping, throwing things—paper airplanes, firecrackers, tomatoes, small animals, the corpses of children.

  He awoke with a sense of urgency fifteen minutes before the departure time of his bus. Disoriented, he rushed—made frantic by exhaustion—to the center of the terminal, trying to recall as he ran where he was supposed to go. A series of numbers flashed through his mind, some relevant to his life, some not. A phone number haunted him, stayed with him indelibly—his father’s number (his own), the house they moved from after his mother died twenty-one years ago.

  He went from platform to platform, too rushed to ask directions. (Where was he supposed to be?) The signs intrigued him, the places that people were going. Texas, New Mexico, Wyoming, California, North and South Dakota—exotic places to a man who was born in Connecticut and had spent most of his adult life in New York City. A bus, not his, scheduled for Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Toledo, Chicago, Des Moines, and Denver was boarding as he went past. For the hell of it, he got at the end of the line, five people ahead of him. Denver. He had visions of mountain lakes, of lying on his back in a canoe, of bathing nude under a waterfall. There would be no talk of war, no television films of corpses in Denver. Unfortunately, the ticket he had in his pocket was for Tucson, another place altogether. Watching the woman ahead of him—the tension sharpening him like a pencil—he planned his move.

  “Say, when do we get to Denver, Mac?” he asked the driver, who punched a hole in his ticket—the hand faster than the eye—and returned it, mumbling the information without looking up. Curt thanked the driver and went, overflowing with secret pleasure, his face determinedly blank, to the back of the bus, where he found a window seat, the last one available.

  He let the seat tilt back as far as it would go and, painfully tired, closed his eyes. The fear of discovery, the needles of sweat on his neck, kept him alert. It was only when the bus began to move that he relaxed and let his tiredness overtake him. He slept, the bus rocking him, and in his dreams he was a child again.

  It was light—a DRINK MILK ad on a billboard the first thing he saw—when he awoke. Telephone poles limped by, impassive exiles. He had the sense, watching the landscape recede as if it were in motion, that he was getting away with something, had already perhaps gotten away with it. Whatever it was.

  He demanded of his mouth a smile, a benign charismatic figure, turning to the woman next to him, who had a sleeping child of two or three on her lap. He was a man free of the importunities of the past. The woman nodded to Curt, then looked away. He held onto his smile, saw it reflected back at him, mockingly, it seemed, in the glaze of the window. Who do you think you are to get away? the eyes said. He wondered dimly what Christopher and Rosemary were saying about him, what they would think of his disappearance. The baby next to him began to cry. Wherever it was he was going, it would take a while. Through the dust of his reflection, Curt saw something amazing with antlers—ah! a lovely thing—then a field of cows, telephone poles, some geese or ducks, a red farmhouse, receding into the distance, feeling the loss of things he had never known as they passed from sight.

  FIFTEEN

  ON THE SUBWAY, hanging from a strap like a piece of meat on a hook, floating. Being pressed against, owned, used against himself. His other hand on someone’s leg, flesh for flesh. The train starting, stopping. The lights out, on. The fan over his head whirring, cutting hands from wrists. A sour-lipped woman shaking her head at him. Made in God’s image. We are all, each one (God help us!), made in God’s image.

  He opened the collar of the blue knit shirt that had belonged to Parks, his neck heavy with sweat. Would she recognize the shirt as his, as Parks’? He worried that she would confuse the two of them, but saw that in the long run it didn’t matter.

  Rosemary wearing a blue bathrobe, her hair like a jungle, when she opened the door. She let him in without asking who it was, without looking to see.

  She held her finger to her lips, latched the door silently behind him.

  “Get dressed,” he whispered, his throat thick.

  She was back in a few minutes—he had no sense of her being gone—in a blouse and shorts. “I have a razor, Chris, if you want to shave.”

  “Pack it in a bag and take some clothes to change into.” He felt his stubble with his fingers, surprised at its thickness. Everything, even the hair under his skin, was out of control.

  Her eyes impassive, heavy, she went into her room to pack. He sat by the window, looking out. Felt lonely.

  Watched a little girl squatting in the grass, holding a headless rubber doll in her arms, rocking it. A police car went by. He forced himself to look, framed in the window—a matter of will—until the police were gone.

  Come on, come on. Let’s go.

  “Rosemary,” Aunt Imogen called from her room, “is someone there?”

  Rosemary, carrying a tote bag, emerged from her room, wearing a denim skirt over her shorts. Led him, no questions asked, to her car, a skin-colored Volkswagen, holding the key out to him on her finger.

  He took the wheel though he had no license, but after a few blocks he pulled over to the side and changed places with her. “Do you know how to get to the Washington Bridge?” he said. “I can’t keep my eyes open.”

  “You’ll have to give me directions, Chris.”

  He closed his eyes—a car swerving toward them, a madwoman sitting on the hood, winking at him.

  “Be careful,” he warned her, his eyes splitting open as if they were being born, clamping shut.

  The car tended to lurch when she shifted, her relation to the clutch hit and miss. They slowed, stopped; a car in front somewhere broken down at the entrance to the bridge. Something wrong. Lights flashing ahead.

  He leaned over her and honked the horn. Which set off a chorus of honks from behind. A few in front. Behind. Nothing moving bu
t the noise.

  “Have patience,” she said.

  The fumes in the air were choking him.

  They were moving again—slowly—three lanes filtering into one. The car lurching each time she shifted from first to second. Slamming on the brakes, stalling.

  They switched places again, Christopher at the wheel. Half a dozen horns groaning at them like guns being shot. “If I had a machine gun, I’d kill them all,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t.” She turned on the radio, moved from station to station, nothing quite what she wanted.

  The car had a gamy smell and he had the notion, which was consoling, that it was made from human skin specially treated to have the consistency of metal.

  It was hard to keep his eyes off the river. He drove in the outside lane, glancing at the water as if it might suddenly reveal something to him. Getting over the bridge—the Volks buffeted by the wind as they crossed—exhilarated him. They were, if nothing else, if nowhere, out of the city.

  They stopped for gas on the other side. He paid for a full tank, which left him with eight dollars in his wallet.

  “How much money do you have?”

  She gave him a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Do you have any more?”

  She shook her head. “A few dollars and some change.”

  It was as if they were chained invisibly to the city. Their car like a dog let free on an enormous leash. When they reached a certain distance, the end of their rope, they would be jerked back to where they had been.

  He slowed down—there seemed less hurry now—the view the same: trees, grass, sky, wherever you looked. The same trees, the same grass. The sky a pale blue, the clouds like threads of smoke. He gave up all hope of getting away.

  Looking over, he noticed that Rosemary had on sunglasses—had she had them on before?—large ones that masked her expression. He couldn’t remember the color of her eyes, dreamed them brown. Dark brown, the color of her glasses. Dove into them as if they were a muddy river.