Men and Apparitions

by Lynne Tillman

  “What?” I think I said, What. I said, I think, “What? You’re kidding me.”

  No, he says, and I go blank, and he tells me how it started more than a year ago, they didn’t want to hurt me, it just happened.

  They they they …

  I stood, glared at him, about to strike his pretty face, because I wanted to kill him, I would murder him. I had no words, I had nothing. I ran down the stairs, we were on the top deck, hit the platform, and leaped off the bus. Blindly. Didn’t even know I was doing it. Had to get away from his sick words. Him. I’m not sure if the bus was moving. I fell down, anyway, sat there on the sidewalk, near the bus stop, stunned, all those ugly words on me, and I couldn’t move. Maybe I’d hurt myself, but I didn’t feel it. I felt nothing.

  I had to find Maggie, because she’d tell me he was lying, that it was all a sick joke.

  I should’ve seen it coming, the writing on the wall, recognized the patterns, right.

  Looking outside, I wasn’t looking inside, and I could avoid things right before my eyes, and not know it, like psychologists studying rats and believing they understand themselves. I was extrospective. Kidding. Clueless dumb asshole me.

  You’re not aware you’re in another narrative. Someone’s changed the story, right. You don’t know, because you’re playing your usual part, when nothing’s usual, your script doesn’t have the new lines.

  I got up off the street or sidewalk, don’t know how long I’d been there, dizzy, I felt like throwing up, I thought I’d been hit on the head, my head hurt, the bus must’ve passed by, Curtis didn’t jump off to help me, I would’ve killed him if he’d touched me, I swear I would have. I picked myself up, people stared, simultaneously staring, looking off, and ignoring me, the foreigner, that American, because it was embarrassing, and I hailed a taxi, I’m pretty sure, but my memory is scrambled, the shock of being sucker punched, and somehow I got back there, and when I walked into the apartment, Maggie was there, waiting—it had all been fucking planned—white as a ghost or a sheet, but Maggie wasn’t a clean sheet, she was dirty, filthy. I hated her for loving her. I couldn’t see her face, I couldn’t believe it was her face. She repeated what the Shithead told me, what what what, I shouted, or screamed inside my head, what what what, she wasn’t in love with me anymore, she said. Don’t say that, you have to love me, you have to, I said, and she was very sorry, she really was, I was great, she said, she said all the right things, and I

  hated her, “blah blah brilliant, handsome, wonderful,” and

  I wanted to strangle her. “Fuck you,” I said, and threw something. “It didn’t happen all at once,” she actually said shit like that. “It wasn’t Curtis … something was wrong, we didn’t talk, you at your computer … it just happened.” One day she knew she didn’t love me anymore. Words, no blame, no fault, dead words, believe me, you’ll see it will be …

  Slimy worms crawled from her mouth.

  NOTHING SCREAMING NOTHING.

  Hurt her, fuck her, get her back, make her mine, murder her. Even now I still don’t remember most of it. I moved into a hotel, or they did. I did. It had cable, I watched porn, jerked off until my dick bled, drank, cried, drank, cried, didn’t eat, thought I’d die, and prayed I would. Stuffed a wool scarf in my mouth to scream.

  Maggie worried about me; in the beginning she said she did. I didn’t believe any utterance from that treacherous mouth. She moved out, and so did the shithead, but she would call me, and I’d hang up. No, I was in a hotel, and they were still in the flat. She knocked on my door, and I wouldn’t let her in.

  I was a dead man walking. Rage balled me up. I didn’t know anything or that I was storming around London, around and around, riding the Tube from one end of the city, riding back, days and nights went by, I rode all the lines as far as they would go. Sometimes I jumped off at a station because its name struck me, and I wandered somewhere, wherever. I don’t remember. Foreign streets lay outside me.

  Out of their mouths, shit and vomit all over me, me mewling and sick. They wouldn’t stop, sensations, I couldn’t make my brain stop, I didn’t know what IT was, and I couldn’t. Treading in place. Dreading waking. Lost my heart. Lost everything. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I slept, wanted to sleep, wanted to wake up dead.

  Love isn’t a science, relationships don’t yield repeatable results.

  Why did she stop loving me?

  Sometimes I could visualize scenes between us, little acts of kindness, lust, I reheard conversations. Incomplete, always.

  Is that when she stopped loving me? That moment, and what was that look in her eyes, on her face? How her mouth pursed then … I didn’t say anything then, I let that moment go, I was stupid. Was that when …

  I practiced invisibility, right, when it suited me, like with her, when I needed to. I told Maggie, after I super-reluctantly agreed to meet her in person because I didn’t know what I was capable of doing, I told her she was an evil bitch. I could see right into her, that she had no heart, no love. She had killed my heart and hope.

  Maggie, get your fucking divorce, I told her I wouldn’t fight it, and she said she didn’t want anything, didn’t need anything, she wished … Fuck you, I said. Get your fucking divorce, I hope you both die. I warned her that shithead should stay away from me, I wasn’t kidding, and fuck you both, I said.

  Then I made myself invisible and walked out of the café.

  I left the café and kept walking, grabbed my bag from the hotel, and fled, took flight. I jumped on a train to Paris, checked into a hotel, walked around, stopped in cafés, saw nothing, watched without seeing, slept without sleeping, lived without living, then on an impulse, I had many, jumped a train to Amsterdam, walked around and around, the canals, had a prostitute in the district, they sit in the windows, like fleshy mannequins, like men go shopping, I was a creep creeping along, buying sex, how low could I go, did we do it, I mean, did I stick my dick in her, or did she suck me off, I can’t even remember, so fast, and kept walking, feeling sick of myself, everything. Then, sometime, to Centraal Station, and hopped a train to Bruges, then Maastricht. I suppose I ate, but don’t remember food. I didn’t want food, everything coming into me was poison.

  If I had thoughts, if I was thinking, it was only that I didn’t believe anything, I believed only I could never feel again, or be the same, because I’d been touched by the loveless hand of dead love, no love anymore, I was unloved.

  What is a day, a night, to the half-dead? Half dark, half light.

  Dull, duller, I was the puniest of dopes in the pathetic blah blah blah. Or, I was one of the saints, and no one else would ever touch me. I moved through, passing by vacantly, naked, clothed, on the streets, inviolable.

  I took another train, into Germany, and jumped off at Freiburg. Heidegger’s city. Free city. This is one of those strange things that happen to people on the loose and ready to do anything. Life took a turn I couldn’t expect, but when you break ties with reality, or anyway the reality you had lived in, events occur; on my own, things, people, came to me. I was suspended in time, and slow, and could be caught and caught up in others.

  I was hanging around. I was a stranger among strangers, and I didn’t know what I was doing.

  A painter took me into his home, because he liked Americans, that’s how I recollect it, and told me I’d been around Freiburg’s museum for contemporary art, maybe for two days, I can’t remember where I slept, and he noticed, a curious man, a kind teacher, he noticed me, so he talked to me, and invited me for a pilsner. I must have told him stuff, maybe about how I was going to study men like me, and more stuff, and he heard me, and made an offer. He took me in, because he saw a guy, me, on the loose, not a dangerous character except to himself—I was my only enemy, he said, but he was wrong; I had enemies. He offered me a room, his empty attic. I could stay there, if I wanted. It wasn’t good to sleep in parks, he said.

  The painter was a true gentleman, old school, seventy-five years old, and he didn’t expect anything fro
m me. He’d been born in 1930, a youth decimated by terror, no control of anything. He had an ex-wife and a girlfriend. He drove me to his house, on the outskirts of the city, and showed me the attic, where there was a bed and a chest of drawers, he gave me towels, and showed me where my bathroom was, it was small, but mine only, and left me alone. I lay down on the bed, the comforter overwhelmed me with its soft, warm embrace, and I slept and slept. I don’t know how long I slept.

  One day I woke up and walked into town. Then I walked into town every day, and sat in cafés, strolled around the old city, where Stars of David were embedded in cobblestone streets, names of dead Jews carved into stone. This was, I saw, guilt lying in the streets, glittering. Maybe I thought of my father’s Jewish great-grandfather.

  I was dead, walking on the dead. I played out an internal drama, a single character drama, invisible, the way I wanted it.

  In cafés I observed people and imagined that: either they were watching me or they weren’t. I noticed that, when I believed one or the other, I felt my way of observing them changed. If people were noticing me, also, they might be doing it malevolently or benevolently. I kept my notebook on the table. Every action or behavior had another behind it, every attitude another behind it, and then I could sometimes feel the weight of existence and interpretations, as physical, these many layers, and then I realized that any notion I had of seeing through people’s behavior, comprehending it, or of its having some transparency, was absurd. Heavy lay the layers, I ostentatiously wrote in my notes.

  If the layers added up, as beneficence, I could drink a beer, quiet, calm. If the layers, one resting on the other, complex human “being” fusing together, seemed threatening, I left the café. Some afternoons brought peace, others chaos.

  At the house I contributed money to food, and the painter mostly left me alone, his home my sanctuary. Maggie didn’t know where I was. No one did. I told the painter my name was Henry Adams. Adams, he repeated in his German accent, and nodded. He accepted me.

  I watched him paint, sitting on a chair, I was quiet like Little Sister. He’d placed white skulls on black blankets, on his studio floor, and he would look at them, eyes steady on the inert objects, and maybe he saw them move, or he could move them. I kept very still and practiced invisibility because if I moved, the skulls might pierce my own. I didn’t feel my skin protected me, a raw blob.

  It was spring, the growing time, and I watched plants growing in his garden. I watched bees suckle from blossoms, birds talk in trees. I waited for Mr. Petey, he never showed up. Bamboo trees brushed against the house, whoosh whoosh whoosh, the wind breezed by, whoosh whoosh whoosh. I took walks with him, maybe we walked a few miles, side by side, or he walked in front of me. I followed him, my guide. He was, then.

  I hold these memory-truths to be possible: I saw strangeness, a girl and her dog disappeared suddenly, as if kidnapped, I still don’t understand that. Shooting stars were common, and faces in clouds talked to me. Sometimes, Mother.

  I loped along and occasionally took pictures. Or made notes. Young men and women didn’t interest me. Also, I didn’t know German, and realized that people interested me when they spoke, and I could understand them. So, my being an ethnographer was a total joke. I didn’t watch people as if they were in a zoo, though, that felt too weird. Somehow I decided it was comforting, realizing that talking in a language I knew made people interesting. It made me believe I might be human. People stared, I stared back, and one raised his fist, I think he did, but I couldn’t know if that was real, a threat or a greeting; or these events, these people, if they were real. I embraced all of it, as normal and as true to what I was, who I was. Who I was saw what he saw and heard.

  The painter had a passion for eggplant, not cooked, just the shape of it and its gleaming purple skin. He dedicated days to studying one and making drawings of it. I didn’t get it. I tried to look at it, but each time I did, I got bored fast. It was just an eggplant.

  One night, at dusk, in the distance, near the trees, eight children ran around, probably playing, shouting, running back and forth. It didn’t look like play. I knew I should see it that way. Young animals, wolves, lion cubs, play with their brothers and sisters, but they’re actually learning how to hunt, to kill, eventually. I couldn’t see anything but these children, young animals, learning the same skills as other young animals. I turned away, walked home, into the house. I knew I would never look at children the same way again. It seemed inconceivable to turn back.

  The painter had a sauna, and every day he took one and came out bright red. That alarmed me, and I told him it might not be good for his heart. He patted his heart, then me, on my back, and opened a bottle of red wine.

  At night, the painter wore a monk’s robe, listened to Bach or watched the news on TV. The phone rang once in a while, the children he rarely mentioned, but seemed to love, his dealer, an old friend, a former student. He was glad to hear from them but didn’t seem to depend upon it, or them. It was his life, he had his life, and lived it with a consistency, a constancy that he liked. He didn’t seem bored by the sameness of things. Actually, he was turned on by it, and painted it.

  I understood that, later, when I watched things, and went my own way too, in my head.

  His girlfriend spent most days away, working as a teacher for disturbed children, and hung out on weekends, mostly. She painted also. I don’t know what she thought of me and my living in his house. She seemed cool. I liked that she wore Yohji Yamamoto only. I liked her dedication to one designer. She kept quiet, and sometimes told the painter his breath stank. The painter would go, Oh no, and pop some mints into his mouth. He appreciated her telling him. He loved raw onions. I thought that was probably very German.

  One morning, the sky looked ominous, and kept me inside; the next day, I awoke to a blue, cloudless sky, and walked into the garden. The noise in my head had dulled to a lowish stutter, no banging, no loud ticking time bomb, time is not the bomb. Ha.

  More flowers were coming along, sprouting blooming, more colors and natural brilliance, and the buzzing in the air—sounds of life—sounded harmless, so I decided to leave. I wanted to. It was an impulse. The painter wasn’t sure it was wise, and his round face turned solemn.

  We took a long walk, later, when the sun was going down, the days were longer heading toward summer. We didn’t speak much. He saw that I wasn’t the way I’d been, though I didn’t know what I’d been.

  That night I packed what I had, not much, and the next day he drove me to the train station. He was calm, I was resolute, also nervous. I mean, whoever I was, I had to leave. He watched me buy a ticket to Paris, and then stood on the platform with me. The train pulled in, right on time, crazily on time, and then he watched me board the train, and before I left the platform, and walked to my seat, he called out, “Henry,” and I stopped at the top of the stairs, and looked at him. He looked small from the train platform. He handed me a flat package that I knew must be a small painting or a drawing, and wished me great luck. Then he said, gravely, “I love you like a son.” My father never said he loved me, and he was actually my father, actually I was his son, his second.

  I can picture the painter and the scene now. It’s very reassuring.

  I traveled through Germany, Holland, Belgium, jumped off in Paris, and then bought a ticket for the train to London. I couldn’t return home, return was impossible, I wasn’t wanted, and couldn’t be there, there was nothing to return to, and no home without her. I had failed at what I wanted most, Maggie, though she didn’t believe in it, failure.

  association, dissociation

  I found a generic hotel room in London, in the East End, and walked around during the day. At night, within my limits, I caroused at a pub. I hung with a loose group, two artists, female, male, a financial writer, computer software nerd-genius, art critic and historian, a multi-faceted posse like London’s new face, though it was also two-faced, everything was, and one face hid the other, the way the sun hides the moon.

/>   We collided in a pub. Just ordinary, my temporary local.

  I mean, it resembled ordinary life, with some order: I shifted from my hotel bed to my local and back, and sometimes I caught a big American movie in central London, where crowds of tourists wandered, and, like me, looked up and down. I visited galleries and museums, I didn’t focus, couldn’t see anything. The contacts I’d made before, I didn’t want to connect with; I knew them through that fucking shithead creep.

  They call it a fugue state, what happened to me. It’s not at all musical (kidding). I was escaping reality, in flight, suffering dissociation and a dissociative amnesia, a kind of selective amnesia like Little Sister’s selective mutism, so the memories were still there, unlike regular amnesia when they’re gone forever. Mine were buried very deep and most will return, the docs say. I don’t know about that.

  I didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to know.

  I transformed, to myself, into an incomplete, imperfect stranger. Rage would come, I’d feel something, not blank, but nothing subdued my mind’s febrile activity. I wished hard I were home, a boy protected, again, but no protection existed for me, I was an adult, and madness was my only sensation, and pain. I crushed my homely thoughts to powder. Which I snorted. My memory is holes and spots, and turned who I was or became into daily guesswork.

  Every night, the end of day, had a destination, and I talked to these people, one or two would be hanging out, Guinness or wine in hand, a whiskey—looking back now, I believe pub life could be the virtual world’s flesh-oasis. I listened to them. They used words I knew, did things I did, or had done, or hadn’t done, but I followed along.

  An artist took me to a club where a conceptual poet stood on his head and lectured, I can’t remember what he said, he spoke from memory and very fast, but by the way he stood on his head, or that he was standing on his head and speaking at the same time, I knew he and I could be friends, and that he understood the world the way I did.