by Peter Straub
When he got home, the baby bottle’s presence in his suitcase, wrapped in a coil of dirty shirts, startled him: it was as if the glass tube had followed him from Battle Greek to Manhattan by itself. Then he remembered wrapping it in the shirts on the night before his departure, a night when his father got drunk during dinner and said three times in succession, each time louder than the last, “I don’t think you’re ever going to amount to anything in this world, Bobby,” and his mother started crying, and his father got disgusted with them both and stomped outside to lurch around in the snow. His mother had gone upstairs to the bedroom, and Bunting had switched on the television and sat without feeling before depictions of other people’s Christmases. Eventually his father had come back inside and joined him in front of the television without speaking to him or even looking at him. At the airport the next morning, his father had scratched his face in a whiskery embrace and said that it had been good to see him again, and his mother looked brave and stricken. They were two old people, and working-class Michigan seemed unbearably ugly, with an ugliness he remembered.
He put the bottle away in a cupboard on a high shelf and forgot about it again.
Over the following years, Bunting saw the bottle only on the few occasions he had to reach for something on its shelf. He either ate most of his meals in inexpensive neighborhood restaurants or ordered them from Empire Szechuan, so he had little use for the pots and pans that stood there. During these years he found the job in the mail room of DataComCorp, invented Veronica for his parents’ pleasure and his own, reduced and then finally terminated his visits to Michigan, moved into his early thirties, and settled into what he imagined were the habits of his adult life.
He saved his money, having little to spend it on apart from his rent. Every autumn and every spring, he went to a good men’s clothing store and bought two suits, several new shirts, and three or four new neckties: these excursions were great adventures, and he prepared for them carefully, examining advertisements and comparing the merits of the goods displayed at Barneys, Paul Stuart, Polo, Armani, and two or three other shops he considered to be in their class. He read the same Westerns and mystery novels his father had once read. He ate his two meals a day in the fashion prescribed. His hair was cut once every two weeks by a Japanese barber around the corner who remarked on the smoothness of his collar as he tucked the protective sheet next to his neck. He washed his dishes only when they were all used up, and once a month or so he swept the floor and put things into piles. He set out roach killer and mousetraps and closed his eyes when he disposed of corpses. No one but himself ever entered his apartment, but at work he sometimes talked with Frank Herko, the man at the next word processor. Frank envied Bunting’s wardrobe, and swapped tales of his own sex life, conducted in bars and discos, for Bunting’s more sedate accounts of evenings with Veronica.
Bunting liked to read lying down, and liked to drink while he read. His little apartment was cold in the winter, and the only place to lie down in it was the bed, so for four months of every year, Bunting spent much of every weekend and most of his evenings wrapped up fully clothed in his blankets, a glass of cold vodka (without tonic, for this was after Labor Day) in one hand, a paperback book in the other. The only difficulty with this system, otherwise perfectly adapted to Bunting’s desires and needs, had been the occasional spillage. There had been technical problems concerning the uprightness of the glass during the turning of the pages. One solution was to prop the glass against the side of his body as he turned the page, but this method met with frequent failure, as did the technique of balancing the glass on his chest. Had he cleared all the books, wads of Kleenex used and unused, pill bottles, cotton balls, ear cleaners, jar of Vaseline, and the hand mirror from the chair beside his bed, he could have placed the glass on the seat between sips; but he did not want to have to reach for his drink. Bunting wanted his satisfactions prompt and ready to hand.
Depending on the time of the day, the drink Bunting might choose to go with New Gun in Town or Saddles and Sagebrush could be herbal tea, orange juice, warm milk, Tab or Pepsi-Cola, mineral water: should he not be enabled to’ take in such pleasurable and harmless liquids without removing his eye from the page? Every other area of life was filled with difficulty and compromise; this— bed and a book—should be pristine.
The solution came to him one November after a mysterious and terrifying experience that occurred as he was writing his monthly letter home.
Dear Mom and Dad,
Everything is still going so well I sometimes think I must be dreaming. Veronica says she has never seen any employee anywhere come so far so fast. We went dancing at the Rainbow Room last night following dinner at Quaglino’s, a new restaurant all the critics are raving about. As I walked her back to Park Avenue through the well-dressed crowds on Fifth Avenue, she told me that she felt she would once again really need me by her side in Switzerland this Christmas, it’s hard for her to defend herself against her brother’s charges that she has sold out her native country, and the local aristocracy is all against her too.…
The mention of Christmas caused him to see, as if printed on a postcard, the image of the dingy white house in Battle Creek, with his parents standing before the front steps, his father scowling beneath the bill of a plaid cap and his mother blinking with apprehension. They faced forward, like the couple in American Gothic. He stopped writing and his mind spun past them up the steps, through the door, up the stairs into a terrifying void. For a moment he thought he was going to faint, or that he had fainted. Distant white lights wheeled above him, and he was falling through space. Some massive knowledge moved within him, thrusting powerfully upward from the darkness where it had been jailed, and he understood that his life depended on keeping this knowledge locked inside him, in a golden casket within a silver casket within a leaden casket. It was a wild beast with claws and teeth, a tiger, and this tiger had threatened to surge into his conscious mind and destroy him. Bunting was panting from both the force and the threat of the tiger locked within him, and he was looking at the white paper where his pen had made a little scratchy scrawl after the word too, aware that he had not fainted—but it was, just then and only for a second, as if his body had been hurled through some dark barrier.
Drained, he lay back against the headboard and tried to remember what had just happened. It was already blurred by distance. He had seen his parents and flown…? He remembered the expression on his mother’s face, the blinking, almost simian eyes and the deep parallel lines in her forehead, and felt his heart beating with the relief that he had escaped whatever it was that had surged up from within him. So thoroughly had he escaped it that he now wondered about the reality of his experience. A thick shield had slammed back into place, where it emphatically belonged.
And then came Bunting’s revelation.
He thought of the old baby bottle on its shelf and saw how he could use it. He set aside the letter and went across his room to take down the bottle from its high shelf. It came away from the shelf with a faint kissing sound.
The bottle was covered with fluffy gray dust, and a sticky brown substance from the shelf circled its base. Bunting squeezed dishwashing liquid into the bottle and held it under a stream of hot water. He scrubbed the bottom clean, unscrewed the plastic cap, and washed the grooves on the cap and the neck of the bottle. As he dried the warm bottle with his clean dish towel, he saw his mother bent over the sink in her dark little kitchen, her arms sunk into soapy water and steam rising past her head.
Bunting thrust this image away and regarded the bottle. It seemed surprisingly beautiful for so functional an object. The bottle was a perfect cylinder of clear glass, which sparkled as it dried. Oddly, its smooth, caressing weight felt as comfortable in his adult hand as it must have in his childish one. The plastic cap twirled gracefully down over the molded 0 of the bottle’s mouth. One tiny air bubble had been caught ascending from the thick rim at the bottom. The manufacturer’s name, Prentiss, was spelled out in thi
ck transparent letters circling the bottle’s shoulders.
He placed it on the cleanest section of the counter and squatted to admire his work. The bottle was an obelisk made of a miraculous transparent skin. The wall behind it turned to a swarmy, elastic blur. For a moment Bunting wished that his two windows, which looked out onto a row of decrepit brownstones on the west side of Manhattan, were of the same thick, distorting glass.
He went out onto Eighth Avenue to search for nipples, and found them in a drugstore, hanging slightly above eye level, wrapped in packages of three like condoms, and surrounded by a display of bottles. He snatched the first pack of nipples off the hook and carried it to the register. He practiced what he would say if the Puerto Rican girl asked him why he was buying baby bottle nipples—Darn kid goes through these things in a hurry—but she charged him ninety-six cents, pushed the package into a bag, took his dollar, and gave him change without a comment or even a curious glance.
He carried the bag back to his building rejoicing, as if he had narrowly escaped some great danger. The ice had not broken beneath his feet: he was in command of his life.
At home, he drew the package of nipples from the bag and noticed first that they were stacked vertically, like the levels of a pagoda, secondly that they were Evenflo nipples, “designed especially for juice.” That was all right, he was going to use them to get juiced.
Dear Parent, read the back of the package, All babies are unique. Bunting cheered the wise patriarchs of the Evenflo Products Company. The Evenflo system let you adjust the flow rate to ensure that Baby always got a smooth, even flow. Baby swallows less air, too. Sure-Seal nipples had twin air valves. They were called the Pacers, as if they were members of a swift, confident family.
Bunting was warned not to put the nipples into microwave ovens, and cautioned that every nipple wore out. There was an 800 number to call, if you had questions.
He took his quart of Popov from the freezer and carefully decanted vodka into the sparking bottle. The clear liquid sprang to the top and formed a trembling meniscus above the glass mouth. Bunting used his pocketknife to cut the nipples from the pack, taking care to preserve the instructions for their use, and removed the topmost level of the pagoda. The nipple felt surprisingly firm and resilient between his fingers. Impatiently, he fitted the nipple into the cap ring and screwed the ring down onto the bottle. Then he tilted it to his mouth and sucked.
The nipple met his teeth and tongue, which instantly accepted it, for what suits a mouth better than a nice new nipple? But a frustratingly thin stream of vodka came through the crosscut opening. Bunting sucked harder, working the nipple between his teeth like gum, but the vodka continued to stream through the opening at the same even, deliberate rate.
Now Bunting took his little silver knife, actually Frank Herko’s from his pocket. Bunting had seen it lying on Herko’s desk for several days before borrowing it. He intended to give it back someday, but no one could dispute that the elegant knife suited someone like Bunting far more than Frank Herko—in fact, Herko had probably found it on a sidewalk, or beneath a table in a restaurant (for Frank Herko really did go to restaurants, the names of which Bunting appropriated for his tales of Veronica), and therefore it was as much Bunting’s as his. Very cautiously, Bunting inserted the delicate blade into one of the smooth crosscut incisions. He lengthened the cut in the rubber by perhaps an eighth of an inch, then did the same to the other half of the crosscut. He replaced the nipple in the cap ring, tightened the ring onto the bottle, and tested his improvement. A mouthful of vodka slipped through the enlarged opening and chilled his teeth.
Bunting had taken his wonderful new invention directly to bed, shedding his tie and his jacket as he went. He picked up his Luke Short novel and sucked vodka through the nipple. When he turned the page, he clamped the nipple between his teeth and let the bottle dangle, jutting downward past his lower lip like a monstrous cigar. A feeling of discontinuity, unfinished business, troubled him. He was riding down onto a grassy plateau atop a dun horse named Shorty. He gazed out across a herd of grazing buffalo. The bottle dangled again as the bottom half of the letter to his parents slipped down his legs into the herd of buffalo. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yes.”
The baby bottle, inspired by the event which had befallen him as he wrote the letter, had replaced it. All Bunting wanted to do was luxuriate in his bed, rolling atop old Shorty, clutching his trusty bottle in pursuit of buffalo hides, but more than a sense of duty compelled him to fold down the corner of the page and close the book on Shorty and the browsing herd. Bunting’s heart had lightened. He picked up the pad on which he had been writing to faraway Battle Creek, found his pen in the folds of the blanket, and resumed writing.
So I’ll have to go with her again, he wrote, then dropped down the page to begin a paragraph dictated from the center of his new satisfaction.
Have I ever really told you about Veronica, Mom and Dad? I mean, really told you about her? Do you know how beautiful she is, and how intelligent, and how successful? I bet not a day goes by that some photographer doesn’t ask her to pose for him, or an editor doesn’t stop her on the street to say that she has to be on the cover of his magazine. She has dark hair and high, wide cheekbones, and sometimes I think she looks like a great cat getting ready to spring. She has a MBA, and she reads a novel in one day. She does all the crossword puzzles in ink. And fashion sense! It’s no wonder she looks like a model! You look at those top models in the newspaper ads, the ones with long dark hair and full lips, and you’ll see her, you’ll see how graceful Veronica . is. The way she bends, the way she moves, the way she holds her glasses in one hand, and how cute she looks when she looks out through them, just like a beautiful kitten. And she loves this country, Dad, you should hear her talk about the benefits America gives its people—honestly, there’s never been a girl like this before, and I thank my stars I found her and won her love.
With this letter Bunting had come into his own. Despite all the lies he had told about her, lies that had become woven into his life so deeply that a beautiful shadow had seemed to accompany him on the bus back and forth to work, Veronica had never been so present to him, so visible. She had come out of the shadows.
He continued:
In fact, my relationship with Veronica is getting better and better. She gives me what I need, that comfort and stability you need when you come home from the business world, close your door behind you, and want to be free from the troubles and pressures of the day. Did I tell you about the way she’ll pout at me in ^middle of some big meeting with a DataComCorp client, just a little tiny movement that no one but me would possibly notice? It gives me the shivers, Mom and Dad. And she has shown me so much of the life and excitement of this town, the ins and outs of having fun in the Big Apple—/ really think this is going to last, and one fine day V11 probably pop the question! She’d say yes in a minute, I know, because she really does love me as much as I love her—
TWO
Bunting woke up with a hangover on the Monday after his birthday and immediately decided that it would not be necessary to go to work.
His room offered evidence of a disorderly night. The Popov bottle, nearly empty, stood on the counter beside the refrigerator, and one of his lamps had been on all night, shedding a yellow circle of light upon a mass of folds and wrinkles that resolved into his gray worsted suit from Paul Stuart. Evidently he had tossed aside the jacket, undone his belt, and stepped out of his trousers as he moved toward the bed. His shoes lay widely separated, as if he had torn them off his feet and tossed them away. Closer to the bed were his tie, yesterday’s white shirt, and his underwear, all of which formed points on a line leading toward his poisoned body. Beside him lay the empty Prentiss baby bottle and a paperback copy of The Buffalo Hunter, splayed open on the sheet. Evidently he had tried to read after finally getting out of his clothes and making it to bed: his body had followed its habits although his mind had stopped working.
He moved his legs off the
bed, and sudden nausea made him fear that he was going to vomit before he could get to the toilet. The clarity he had experienced on first waking vanished into headache and other physical miseries. Some other, more decayed body had replaced the one he knew. The nausea ebbed away, and Bunting pushed himself off the bed. He looked down at long white skinny legs. These were certainly not his. The legs took him to the bathroom, where he sat on the toilet. He heard himself moaning. Eventually he was able to get into the shower, where the hot water sizzled down on the stranger’s body. The stranger’s wrinkled hands pushed soap across his white skin and rubbed shampoo into his lifeless hair.
Slowly, he dressed himself in a dark suit, a clean white shirt, and a navy blue necktie with white stripes, the clothes he would have worn to a funeral. His head seemed to float farther from the ground than he remembered, and his arms and legs were spindly and breakable. Bunting experienced a phantasmal happiness, a ghastly good cheer released by the disappearance of so much of his everyday self.
The mirror showed him a white, aged Bunting with sparkling eyes. He was still a little drunk, he realized, but did not remember why he’d had so much of the vodka—he wondered if there had been a reason and decided that he had simply celebrated his birthday too vigorously. “Thirty-five,” he said to the white specter in the mirror. “Thirty-five and one day.” Bunting was not accustomed to giving much attention to any birthdays or anniversaries, even his own, and only the call from Battle Creek had reminded him that anyone else knew that the day was anything but ordinary. He had not even given himself a present.