Stories

by Susan Sontag

  Jekyll snatches the black cape off the hook and runs at Hyde, throws the cape over him, and seizes the bicycle chain lying on the floor. Hyde is struggling like a hen as Jekyll hits him once, twice, three times—trying, unsuccessfully as it turns out, to kill him—while, at the same moment, Utterson is picking up the phone with the long cord in his bedroom in Oyster Bay to dial the police.

  Utterson stands at the blackboard in the Study House. Jekyll sits on the edge of his cot in a dank cell. He’s already spent two months in solitary. Jekyll is in solitary, not because his crime, attempted murder, is so serious, but because one week after being put in jail he participated in a prisoners’ strike for better food; the strike turned into a riot, and two hostage guards had their throats cut. Jekyll, conceding that it was his duty to make common cause with the mostly black and Puerto Rican prisoners, so much less fortunate than he, finds himself punished more severely than anyone. He is maltreated by the guards and suspected by his fellow prisoners, who elected him their spokesman in the parleys with the negotiator from Albany, of having been too intransigent, thereby making it easier for the Governor to order the National Guard to storm the west wing; during the assault, thirteen prisoners had been shot down, including all the principal leaders of the riot except Jekyll.

  It’s very cold, the coldest January in years. Jekyll thinks it is still December. Anyway, December or January, no letup in the unremitting freezing spell is predicted. Technically, the prison can claim to be heated; regular deliveries of coal are made, and the coal shoveled into furnaces. But the heat doesn’t filter down to Jekyll or to any of the other cells on the floor where prisoners in solitary are lodged. He minds most that his nose is always cold. Also his feet. The prisoners are issued slippers when they arrive at the prison—real leather, Jekyll noted with surprise, though cracked, worn, and a size too big. But they aren’t allowed to wear socks. Jekyll, who was once a physical-fitness buff and now weighs one hundred and forty pounds, is extremely weak. If Utterson moves around too much on the platform, Jekyll will topple over.

  What Utterson is saying to a class of eager young disciples in the Study House is this: “Remember our lost brothers and sisters.” Jekyll, who thinks that today is December 14, remembers that last Sunday was his wife’s birthday.

  Richard Enfield, his wife’s cousin, is visiting Jekyll, who has now been moved from solitary to the east wing, where prisoners are housed in pairs. Jekyll, whose right foot is in a cast because of an accident he had yesterday jumping down from the upper bunk, has permission to receive visitors today in his cell, instead of in the long rectangular visitors’ room divided by a floor-to-ceiling grille. “That was a pretty dumb thing you tried to do there,” says Enfield, trying to be casual. At first, Jekyll thinks he is referring to the stupid way he wrenched his Achilles tendon and broke a bone in his heel, then realizes Enfield means the attempted murder of Hyde. But he isn’t offended. He has already had a loving visit, early this afternoon, from his wife, who brought him a box of chocolates and a roast chicken in aspic. He has had to share the chocolates with his cell mate, a heroin merchant who cut a guard’s throat during the riot, but luckily the man turned up his nose at the chicken and Jekyll got to devour it by himself. Jekyll has already put on a little weight (he is up to one hundred and fifty) and the cell is reasonably heated, but Enfield thinks he looks terrible.

  Jekyll imagines he is handcuffed and that a chain runs from his wrist to the doorknob of Utterson’s bedroom. If he jerked his hands, he could open Utterson’s door—being careful not to bang Poole, the sleeping fourteen-year-old acolyte, on the head as the door flies open—and actually see what obscene acts take place in that room in the middle of the night.

  “Anything I can bring you?” Enfield asks.

  “Sure,” says Jekyll. “You can bring me the news of someone’s death.”

  Enfield turns away in pity and disgust, and asks the guard to open the cell door. “Mind how you close the door,” Jekyll says. “There’s a draft.” His cell mate, now exiled to the upper bunk, presses his chocolate-stained mouth into his pillow and grunts unpleasantly. Utterson, taking his afternoon nap, rolls around in his large filthy bed, and shouts for Poole to bring him some fresh coffee. It is time for him to get up and rejoin his pupils in the Study House, to deliver another talk on inner discipline and the proper uses of selfishness. Jekyll watches the door slam shut.

  Finally, it is frail old Lanyon who brings Jekyll the news he is waiting for. Hyde has committed suicide: hanged himself in his cellar.

  Since it is two weeks later, Jekyll should have been able to receive Lanyon in the visitors’ room; but this morning he tripped on his crutches while hobbling from his bunk to the slop pail and cleanly fractured a bone in his left ankle. The prison doctor has just left; the new cast, a pinkish color, is still damp.

  “Speaking as your lawyer, I don’t know whether this affects your chances for parole or not.”

  My feet, thinks Jekyll. No, not my feet.

  Lanyon is still talking. “Attempted murder is still attempted murder, even if the intended victim dies for whatever reason shortly after.”

  “Did he leave me a note?” Jekyll demands in a husky voice.

  Lanyon hands Jekyll a small envelope that Jekyll tears open. Inside is a sheet of ruled paper from a school notebook, on which is the imprint in lipstick of a large mouth. Lanyon tries to look over Jekyll’s shoulder, but Jekyll crumples the paper before the lawyer can see, stuffing it into the top of his right cast.

  “What does he say? It could be useful in the file I’m submitting to the parole board.”

  Jekyll shakes his head. “Did he leave any other messages?” he says coldly.

  “For Utterson.”

  “What did it say?”

  “He admits it was he who tried to burn down the Institute on October sixteenth.”

  “Poor pretentious bastard,” says Jekyll, hiding his disappointment.

  “Shut up! I’m trying to sleep!” grumbles the murderer in the upper bunk.

  During a moment’s silence, Jekyll looks down at his handsome, bony hands. “And what did Utterson say to that?”

  “You know Utterson.” Lanyon laughs, with his discordant, old man’s laugh. “He says it would have been fine with him if Hyde had succeeded. He says that everybody is free to do as he or she likes.”

  “Oh, freedom …” Jekyll munches on some vanilla fudge his wife brought him that morning. Leaning back comfortably in his bunk, he settles his legs, encased to mid-calf in plaster, one dry and the other still damp, on the extra pillow he’s been given, and smiles. “Don’t speak to me about freedom.”

  … Frail long hair, brown with reddish lights in it, artificial-looking hair, actressy hair, the hair she had at twenty-three when I met her (I was nineteen), hair too youthful to need tinting then, but too old now to have exactly the same color; a weary, dainty body with wide wrists, shy chest, broad-bladed shoulders, pelvic bones like gulls’ wings; an absent body one might be reluctant to imagine undressed, which may explain why her clothes are never less than affected and are often regal; one husband in dark phallocratic mustache; unexpectedly successful East Side restaurant owner with dim Mafia patronage, separated from and then divorced in fussy stages; two flaxen-haired children, who look as if they have two other parents, safely evacuated to grassy boarding schools. “For the fresh air,” she says.

  Autumn in Central Park, several years ago. Lounging under a sycamore, our bicycles paired on their sides—Julia’s was hers (she had once bicycled regularly), mine was rented—she admitted to finding less time lately for doing: going to an aikido class, cooking a meal, phoning the children, maintaining love affairs. But for wondering there seemed all the time in the world—hours, whole days.

  Wondering?

  “About …” she said, looking at the ground. “Oh, I might start wondering about the relation of that leaf”—pointing to one—“to that one”—pointing to a neighbor leaf, also yellowing, its frayed tip almost pe
rpendicular to the first one’s spine. “Why are they lying there just like that? Why not some other way?”

  “I’ll play. ’Cause that’s how they fell down from the tree.”

  “But there’s a relation, a connection …”

  Julia, sister, poor moneyed waif, you’re crazy. (A crazy question: one that shouldn’t be asked.) But I didn’t say that. I said: “You shouldn’t ask yourself questions you can’t answer.” No reply. “Even if you could answer a question like that, you wouldn’t know you had.”

  Look, Julia. Listen, Peter Pan. Instead of leaves—that’s crazy—take people. Undoubtedly, between two and five this afternoon, eighty-four embittered Viet veterans are standing on line for welfare checks in a windowless downtown office while seventeen women sit in mauve leatherette chairs in a Park Avenue surgeon’s lair waiting to be examined for breast cancer. But there’s no point in trying to connect these two events.

  Or is there?

  Julia didn’t ask me what I wonder about. Such as:

  What Is Wrong

  A thick brownish-yellow substance has settled in everyone’s lungs—it comes from too much smoking, and from history. A constriction around the chest, nausea that follows each meal.

  Julia, naturally lean, has managed lately to lose more weight. She told me last week that only bread and coffee don’t make her ill. “Oh, no!” I groaned—we were talking on the phone. That evening I went over to inspect her smelly bare refrigerator. I wanted to throw out the plastic envelope of pale hamburger at the back; she wouldn’t let me. “Even chicken isn’t cheap any more,” she murmured.

  She brewed some Nescafé and we sat cross-legged on the living-room tatami; after tales of her current lover, that brute, we passed to debating Lévi-Strauss on the closing off of history. I, pious to the end, defended history. Although she still wears sumptuous caftans and treats her lungs to Balkan Sobranies, the other reason she is not eating is that she’s too stingy.

  One thickness of pain at a time. Julia may not want to go out “at all,” but many people no longer feel like leaving their apartments “often.”

  This city is neither a jungle nor the moon nor the Grand Hotel. In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints. Only some of its citizens have the right to be amplified and become audible.

  A black woman in her mid-fifties, wearing a brown cloth coat darker than the brown shopping bag she is carrying, gets into a cab, sighing. “143rd and St. Nicholas.” Pause. “Okay?” After the wordless, hairy young driver turns on the meter, she settles the shopping bag between her fat knees and starts crying. On the other side of the scarred plastic partition, Esau can hear her.

  With more people, there are more voices to tune out.

  It is certainly possible that the black woman is Doris, Julia’s maid (every Monday morning), who, a decade ago, while down on St. Nicholas Avenue buying a six-pack and some macaroni salad, lost both of her small children in a fire that partly destroyed their two-room apartment. But if it is Doris, she does not ask herself why they burned up just that much and no more, why the two bodies lay next to each other in front of the TV at exactly that angle. And if it is Doris, it is certainly not Monday, Miz Julia’s day, because the brown paper bag holds cast-off clothing from the woman whose seven-room apartment she’s just cleaned, and Julia never throws out or gives away any of her clothes.

  It’s not easy to clothe oneself. Since the Easter bombing in Bloomingdale’s third-floor boutique section, shoppers in large department stores are body-searched as they enter. Veined city!

  If it is not Doris, Julia’s Doris, then perhaps it is Doris II, whose daughter (B.A., Hunter College, 1965), having been bewitched, now lives with a woman the same age as her mother, only fatter, muscularly fat, and rich: Roberta Jorrell, the Queen of the Black Arts; internationally known monologist, poet, set designer, filmmaker, voice coach, originator of the Jorrell System of body awareness, movement, and functional coordination; and initiated voodoo priestess third-class. Doris II, also a maid, has not heard from her daughter for seven years, a captivity of biblical length that the girl has been serving as assistant stage manager of the Roberta Jorrell Total Black Theatre Institute; bookkeeper for Jorrell real-estate holdings in Dakar, Cap-Haïtien, and Philadelphia; decipherer and typist of the two-volume correspondence between R.J. and Bertrand Russell; and on-call body servant to the woman whom no one, not even her husband, dares address as anything other than Miss Jorrell.

  After taking Doris, if she is Doris, to 143rd and St. Nicholas, the taxi driver, stopping for a red light on 131st Street, has a knife set against his throat by three brown boys—two are eleven, one is twelve—and surrenders his money. Off-duty sign blazing, he quickly returns to his garage on West Fifty-fifth Street and unwinds in a corner, on the far side of the Coke machine, with a joint.

  However, if it is not Doris but Doris II whom he has dropped at 143rd and St. Nicholas, the driver is not robbed but immediately gets a fare to 173rd and Vyse Avenue. He accepts. But he is afraid of getting lost, of never finding his way back. Writhing, uncontrollable city! In the years since the city stopped offering garbage collection to Morrisania and Hunts Point, the dogs that roam the streets have been subtly turning into coyotes.

  Julia doesn’t bathe enough. Suffering smells.

  Several days later, a middle-aged black woman carrying a brown shopping bag climbs out of a subway in Greenwich Village and accosts the first middle-aged white woman who’s passing by. “Excuse me, ma’am, but can you tell me the way to the Ladies’ House of Detention?” This is Doris III, whose only daughter, age twenty-two, is well into her third ninety-day sentence for being a, etcetera.

  We know more than we can use. Look at all this stuff I’ve got in my head: rockets and Venetian churches, David Bowie and Diderot, nuoc mam and Big Macs, sunglasses and orgasms. How many newspapers and magazines do you read? For me, they’re what candy or Quaaludes or scream therapy are for my neighbors. I get my daily ration from the bilious Lincoln Brigade veteran who runs a tobacco shop on 110th Street, not from the blind news agent in the wooden pillbox on Broadway, who’s nearer my apartment.

  And we don’t know nearly enough.

  What People Are Trying to Do

  All around us, as far as I can see, people are striving to be ordinary. This takes a great deal of effort. Ordinariness, generally considered to be safer, has gotten much rarer than it used to be.

  Julia called yesterday to report that, an hour before, she had gone downstairs to take in her laundry. I congratulated her.

  People try to be interested in the surface. Men without guns are wearing mascara, glittering, prancing. Everyone’s in some kind of moral drag.

  People are trying not to mind, not to mind too much. Not to be afraid.

  The daughter of Doris II has actually witnessed Roberta Jorrell—stately, unflinching—dip both hands up to the wrists in boiling oil, extract some shreds of cornmeal that she kneaded into a small pancake, and then briefly reimmerse pancake and hands. No pain, no scars. She had herself prepared by twenty hours of nonstop drumming and chanting, curtseying and asyncopated hand clapping; brackish holy water was passed around in a tin cup and sipped; and her limbs were smeared with goat’s blood. After the ceremony, Doris II’s daughter and four other followers, including Henry, the husband of Roberta Jorrell, escorted her back to the hotel suite in Pétionville. Henry was not allowed to stay on the same floor this trip. Miss Jorrell gave instructions that she would sleep for twenty hours and was not to be awakened for any reason. Doris II’s daughter washed out Miss J’s bloody robes and stationed herself on a wicker stool outside the bedroom door, waiting.

  I try to get Julia to come out and play with me (fifteen years have gone by since we met): see the city. On different days and nights I’ve offered the roller derby in Brooklyn, a dog show, F.A.O. Schwarz, the Tibetan Museum on Stat
en Island, a women’s march, a new singles’ bar, midnight-to-dawn movies at the Elgin, Sunday’s La Marqueta on upper Park Avenue, a poetry reading, anything. She invariably refuses. Once, I got her to a performance of Pelléas et Mélisande at the old Met, but we had to leave at the intermission; Julia was trembling—with boredom, she claimed. Moments after the curtain rose on the Scene 1 set, a clearing in a dark forest, I knew it was a mistake. “Ne me touchez pas! Ne me touchez pas!” moans the heroine, leaning dangerously into a deep well. Her first words. The well-meaning stranger and would-be rescuer—equally lost—backs off, gazing lasciviously at the heroine’s long hair; Julia shudders. Lesson: don’t take Mélisande to see Pelléas et Mélisande.

  After getting out of jail, Doris III’s daughter is trying to quit the life. But she can’t afford to: everything’s gotten so expensive. From chicken, even wings and gizzards, to the Coromandel screen, once owned by a leading couturier of the 1930s, for which Lyle’s mother bids $18,000 at a Parke-Bernet auction.

  People are economizing. Those who like to eat—a category that includes most people, and excludes Julia—no longer do the week’s marketing in an hour at one supermarket, but must give over most of a day, exploring ten stores to assemble a shopping cart’s worth of food. They, too, are wandering about the city.

  The affluent, having invested in their pocket calculators, are now seeking uses for them.

  Unless already in a state of thralldom, like the daughter of Doris II, people are answering ads that magicians and healers place in newspapers. “You don’t have to wait for pie in the sky by-and-by when you die. If you want your pie now with ice cream on top, then see and hear Rev. Ike on TV and in person.” Rev. Ike’s church is not, repeat not, located in Harlem. New churches without buildings are migrating from West to East: people are worshiping the devil. On Fifty-third Street west of the Museum of Modern Art, a blond boy with a shag cut who resembles Lyle tries to interest me in the Process Church of the Final Judgment. “Have you ever heard of the Process?” When I say yes, he goes on as if I’d said no. I’ll never get into the 5:30 screening if I stop to talk to him, but I hand over a buck fifty for his magazine; and he keeps up with me, telling me about free breakfast programs the Process runs for poor children, until I spin into the museum’s revolving door. Breakfast programs, indeed! I thought they ate little children.