by Dale Peck
He stood in his backyard looking at the things on the ground there; a bicycle with a flat tire lying on its side, a few planks of wood in a pile, some empty bottles, a bucket. He took the gun out of his pocket and felt its weight in his hand.
He shot at the bicycle without really aiming, just to hear the sound—it went bang, but the wind took most of it. The bicycle didn’t move. He stooped down and picked up a bottle and threw it in the air and shot at it, but he missed, and the bottle broke when it hit the ground.
So he walked around to the front of the house and he stood in the driveway, looking at the road. There was a sign about thirty yards away that said “35 MPH” on it and he looked at it for a few seconds, and then he shot at it, and he missed. So he aimed more carefully, resting the top half of his body against the car. He put a hole in the metal in the loop of the “P,” smiling at the sound it made. He put another hole right next to it. iii
iiithe populace. Traditional folk melodies have no authors.
Some people come back and stay for good; some people come back and stay for a while before leaving again; some people never come back. The distance between
points A and B is indicated by the time it takes to walk from one to the other. They
have many weapons but they lack spare parts, so many of them are unusable.
In all civilizations at all times it is common for people to expect the end of the world
Then he walked back around to the back of the house and, after hesitating for a second at the line where the clearing behind the house met the beginning of the fields, he headed out across the grass towards a line of trees in the far distance. He walked slowly. Every fifty yards or so he stopped and turned to look at the house, and each time it seemed to shrink into the space between the ground and the sky. After a while he stopped.
He looked up at the sky, and he looked over to where it lightened before being cut off by the ground, and then he looked back across the fields to his bedroom window on the second floor of the house. He turned in a slow circle, and then he sat down. The grass came up to his shoulders and the wind blew through it, but the ground underneath was hard and still, and he sat there for a couple of minutes. Eventually he twisted around, cramped his left leg underneath him and extended his right leg in front of him, one arm resting on his knee, the other holding the gun off at an odd angle. And he stared at the rounded toe of his right shoe, and wriggled his toes underneath, and then he pointed the gun at them, inhaled, and fired.
There was a bang and the gun moved, and his foot went numb and he was lying on his back, and the ground was spinning underneath the sky for miles around him, and he felt a sweet, warm convulsion in his stomach and his throat, and he turned over, pressed himself up with his hands and vomited on the ground.iv
ivin their lifetimes. A still-life of a wave of flowers hangs on the wall where there used to be a mirror. Existence is not a predicate.
Constraints on gastronomic habits have their origins in hygienic considerations.
The word “delirious” comes from a Latin word meaning “ridge” or “furrow.” The party out of power calls for the implementation of austerity measure. You owe everybody. It is possible to control
He remained propped up like that for a while, his upper body perched on his arms, his hips on the ground and his legs wrapped around each other behind him, and when his arms grew tired he spat and pushed himself up until he was on his knees. It was quiet. He could feel his foot throbbing, and by pivoting his shoulders around he could see the ripped toe of his shoe, and he watched it leak blood onto the ground, and watched as the hard ground failed to absorb it. He looked over the grass to the house, on the edge of the fields.
His head was spinning and he got to his feet, but the first step he took shifted his weight to the wounded foot and his leg collapsed and he fell and swore. He had the odd feeling that he was lost, and a brief, urgent desire to find out where he was, and then he remembered. He got up again and started to hop, making it about twenty yards before he had to stop. He could hear himself panting. An airplane hummed overhead. He wondered how bad the bleeding was, and he started towards the house again, stopping from time to time to try to curb his dizzyness. He was sweating a lot. Once, when he had fallen again, he paused to unlace his shoe and he delicately pried it off, wincing and saying Ah! as the pain cut its way through the numbness and the throbbing. He threw the shoe off into the grass as far as he could. The house sat on the edge of the fields, and he made his way towards it. v
vthe temperature of each room individually. The English language has no
future tense. In times of economic prosperity the role of women changes.
Messengers bring news of troop movements along the border.
Familiarity breeds contempt. Alcoholism is a disease. As the measurement of time grew more accurate the 9-to-5 work day was introduced and standardized, resulting in an increased psychological division between work and leisure.
It took him a long time to reach the clearing behind the house, and when he had he stopped to look again at the things on the ground there; they seemed transformed. He was trembling, and his good leg was tired from carrying his weight, and he was afraid it would give way before he could reach the back door. He had been dragging his shot foot on the ground, and it was dirty. The wind blew across his face and chest. He was confused, and squinted at the house for a minute, and nearly lost his balance and tipped over. With a final effort he threw himself towards the back door of the house, opened it, and propelled himself through the doorframe with his hands, paused and looked around, and dropped into a chair by the kitchen table.
His coffee cup was still on the table. Nothing had moved. His sock was dark with clotted blood and soil, and he could see dark red streaks on the floor in a path from the door to his chair. He had tears in his eyes. He had a hard time thinking.
After a minute he pushed himself up from the chair and hopped over to the sink and turned on the water. Propping himself up on his good leg and grabbing onto a paper towel roll in a holder above the sink, he reached down with his right hand and pulled his other leg up and put it in the sink, leaning over backwards a bit to maintain his balance. Gingerly he pulled his sock off, rolling it down his ankle and then stretching it as much as he could. He felt it pull a bit as it separated from the wound, and it hurt. vi
viEvery major city has a housing shortage. Immigrants from another country are placed in internment camps for the duration of a war with that country. The telephone rings a dozen times before someone answers.
Sunlight streams through the windows. E. Coli makes many
medical discoveries possible. Self-immolation is a tradition.
During an argument someone loses their temper and some objects are broken. Afterwards
He couldn’t tell exactly what the gun had done; the individual toes seemed to be twisted and crushed, there were a few small charred patches, and there was a lot of blood. It looked like a bit of pinkish bone was sticking out. He felt better because he could see it, and he touched one bit of protruding flesh lightly with the tip of his finger, and that made him feel better as well. Blood ran down the side of the sink, and the water from the tap diluted it and washed it in a circle down the drain. He maneuvered the foot with his hand, guiding it into the running water.
The pain was excruciating and he screamed, flinching backwards and losing his balance. He clutched at the paper towel roll but it came easily out of its holder and he fell backwards, his shoulders crashing into the table behind him and his lower back landing on a chair. The chair splintered beneath him and the table jerked backwards a foot or two. He heard the sound of his coffee cup rolling towards the edge of the table and he twisted and lunged at it to grab it before it fell. The table came down under his weight and he watched helplessly as the cup hit the floor and broke into dozens of pieces, and some of them disappeared beneath the refr
igerator. After that it was quiet, and he could hear the water running in the sink, and he noticed for the first time that he had left the back door open. Bill, he said to himself out loud, Shit, and he laughed, half buried beneath the broken furniture.vii
viisome time is spent wondering whether the damage is irrepairable. The development of a night-time economy is a result of the invention of the electric light, and an increase in the work force, and changes in moral beliefs. If X equals
Y and Y equals Z then X equals Z. Garbage in, garbage out.
The human body is the best picture of the human soul. By bouncing
lasers off of reflectors on the moon scientists can detect minute shifts in the earth’s crust.
He still held the paper towel roll in one hand; a broken chair leg was sticking into the small of his back, and he pulled it out with the other hand.
He sat up as best he could, and he started wrapping paper towels around his foot, the first few layers soaked up blood and were stained red. Eventually they formed big white clumps around his foot. He pulled himself to his feet and fought back the urge to vomit again. The pain had ceased and the throbbing had begun again, and he hopped back to the sink and took a bottle of aspirin from the shelf above it, emptying five of them into his hand and washing them down with water that he slurped from the faucet. He made his way into the front hall, and then hopped through the living room and into the room with the TV in it, and he fell on the couch, where he sat for a moment, breathing heavily and staring at the telephone. The wind made a slight, soft whistling noise as it blew through a crack in the window-frame.viii
viiiThe birth of the idea of a guilty conscience was as important as the birth
of the idea of private property. The plane has been delayed because of
bad weather. Incarceration is more sophisticated than exile.
One hears sound effects instead of sounds.
The Angel
by Patrick McGrath
You know the Bowery, I presume? It was on the Bowery that I first caught a glimpse of Harry Talboys. I was a writer in those days, and I lived in a five-story walk-up by the men’s shelter. I didn’t realize at the time that Harry Talboys lived in the same building, though of course I was familiar with the powerful smell of incense that contaminated the lower floors. It was high summer when I met him, high summer in Manhattan, when liquid heat settles on the body of the city like an incubus, and one’s whole activity devolves to a languid commerce of flesh and fluids, the ingestion and excretion of the one by the other, and all sane organisms quite simply estivate. I was certainly estivating; I rose late in the day, and after certain minimal ritualistic gestures of the writerly kind made my way to the liquor store. It was on one of these errands, on a garbage-strewn and urine-pungent sidewalk, beneath a blazing sun, and slimed in my own sweat, that I first encountered Harry Talboys.
He was making stately progress down the Bowery with a cane. Let me describe him: a tall, thin figure in a seersucker suit the grubbiness of which, the fraying cuffs, the cigarette burns and faded reddish wine stain on the crotch could not altogether disguise the quality of the fabric and the elegance of the cut. Very erect, very tall, very slow, on his head a Panama hat; and his face a veritable atlas of human experience, the nose a great hooked bone of a thing projecting like the prow of a ship, and the mouth—well, the mouth had foundered somewhat, but the old man animated it with lipstick! He must have been at least eighty. His shirt collar was not clean, and he wore a silk tie of some pastel shade—pale lilac or mauve, I seem to remember; and in his buttonhole a fresh white lily. (I never saw Harry Talboys without a fresh flower in his buttonhole.) And as I say, he was making his way down the Bowery, and the men from the men’s shelter drinking at the corner of Third Street greeted him warmly. “Hey, Harry!” they called; “Yo, Harry!” and he moved through them with all the graceful condescension of royalty, briefly lifting his Panama to reveal a liver-spotted skull devoid of all but a last few wisps of snow-white hair. Watching this performance I was much taken with the dignity of the old fellow, and with his lipstick. Was there, I asked myself, a story here?
Our friendship began well: he asked me into his apartment for a drink. Such a hot day, he said, hanging up his Panama in the hallway and leaning his stick in the corner; productive activity, he said, was quite out of the question. His accent, to my surprise, was old Boston. (I’m from the North End myself.) The odor of incense was strong, and so was the perfume he wore. He was very liberally scented and smelled, in fact, like an old lady, but there was, I detected it even then, something unpleasant about it, a nuance, a suggestion of overripeness in the bouquet.
Are you familiar with the apartments of the Lower East Side? Designed essentially as holding tanks for wage laborers, they do not err on the side of expansiveness. We entered Harry’s living room. Crowded bookshelves, a pair of deep seedy armchairs that faced windows with a clear prospect north to the Chrysler Building, and between the windows, on a rounded, slender-stemmed table of varnished black wood, a vase full of lilies. Directly above the lilies, and between the windows, hung a large crucifix, the body of the Saviour pinned to a cross of white ivory with nailheads of mother-of-pearl. Hanging from the ceiling in the far corner of the room, on a length of copper chain, was the censer whence the fumes emanated. No air conditioner, no fan. There was, however, ice in the kitchen, and Harry made us each a large gin-and-tonic. Then he lowered himself stiffly toward an armchair, the final stage of this operation being a sort of abandoned plunge followed by a long sigh. “Cigarettes,” he murmured, rummaging through the pockets of his jacket.
“You have no cats,” I said.
“Dreadful creatures,” he said. “Can’t abide them. Your very good health, Bernard Finnegan!”
We drank. He asked me about my writing. I began to explain, but he quickly lost interest. His gaze shifted to the window, to the glittering blade that the Chrysler Building becomes in the shimmering blue heat of certain summer days. His books impressed me. A good many classical authors—Petronius was represented, Apuleius and Lactantius, and certain of the early Christian writers, Bede and Augustine among others. When I rose to leave, he asked me for my telephone number. Would I, he wondered, have a drink with him again? Yes, I said, with pleasure.
“Gin?”
The censer was, as before, smoldering gently on its chain. It reminded me of my childhood, of chapels and churches in which I had fidgeted through innumerable interminable Masses. Harry’s perfume, slightly rotten though it was, one grew accustomed to; not the incense. The stink of it was apparent as soon as one entered the building. I asked him why he burned it.
“Does it disturb you?” he said. He was slicing a lemon on the kitchen counter, very slowly. I was in the other room. The Chrysler Building was glowing in the dusk, and there were red streaks to the west, over the Hudson.
“It makes me feel like a schoolboy.”
He looked at me carefully then, those watery blue eyes of his fixing me like a pair of headlights. “Are you a Catholic?” he said.
“Lapsed.”
“I too.”
He sighed. He became preoccupied. He appeared to be pondering our common connection to the Roman faith. “When I was a young man,” he said, when we were settled in our armchairs, “I called myself a Catholic but I lived like a pagan. Oh, I could drink in those days, Bernard! I could drink till dawn. Today, as you see, after one gin I become”—here he smiled with gentle irony—“desperately befuddled. But then! I was happy with my gods, like the ancients. Do you know what we thought the body was, Bernard, back in the Twenties? A temple in which there was nothing unclean. A shrine, to be adorned for the ritual of love! We lived for the moment, Bernard—the purpose of life was to express yourself, and if you were unhappy that was because you were maladjusted, and if you were maladjusted it was because you were repressed. We were excitable, you see, and if there was one thing we would not tolera
te”—he turned toward me in his armchair—“it was boredom! Dullness! Anathema!” He gazed off into the night. There was a silence.
“Go on,” I said.
“It didn’t last. I remember coming back to New York in 1929 . . . My friends all seemed to be dead, or married, or alcoholic . . .” Another pause. “I don’t suppose you know the Rhapsody in Blue?” He hummed the opening bars, and there was suddenly a tone, in the thickening and aromatic dusk, of intense melancholy, rendered all the more poignant by the slow, faltering cadence of the old man’s melody. He said little more that evening, and when I rose to leave he was distant and abstracted. He did apologize, though, for being “such a wretched host.”
The summer progressed. In a gin-blurred heat haze we slipped into August. I spent two or three hours a day at my table and told myself I was working. In fact I made several verbal sketches of Harry Talboys; to what use I would put them I had no clear idea at the time.
The thunderstorms began—brief showers of intense rain, with lightning and thunder, which did nothing to disturb the pall of stale heat that clung to the stinking city. They ended as suddenly as they began, and left the streets still steaming and fetid. It occurred to me that I should more actively prompt Harry to reminisce. I wondered if, between us, we might not produce a memoir of the Twenties? We would call it An Old Man Remembers the Jazz Age, or something of the sort; lavishly illustrated with photographs from the period, it would stand as an expressive personal document of modern America in the innocent exuberance of its golden youth. The more I thought about it, the surer I felt that such a book was needed. I mentioned the idea to Harry when next I saw him. “I knew an angel once,” he murmured. “That was in the Twenties.”
It was, they said, the hottest summer in thirty years, and there was a distinct possibility that the garbage men would go on strike. A rather grisly murder occurred in an abandoned building over on Avenue C; the body was mutilated and drained of all its blood. The New York Post suggested that a vampire was on the loose. My own habits became increasingly nocturnal, and my productivity declined still further. I did manage to spend one afternoon in the public library looking at material from the Twenties, and made up a list of questions to put to Harry, questions which I hoped would release a rich flow of anecdotes. I felt like a prospector: if only, I thought, I could sink my probe with enough precision, up would gush the stuff to make us both some real money. The times were right, I became more certain than ever, for An Old Man Remembers the Jazz Age.