by John Haskell
The only way Petrushka can escape his situation is to die. So he thought. He knew the Ballerina would never love him and the Charlatan would never free him, and that’s fine. I’ve been a puppet all my life. I can’t just suddenly change who I am or leave who I am, it doesn’t happen like that. I don’t want to die, but if dying is the only way to escape my fate, or my future, or whatever it is, I’ll do it. What do I have that’s so precious to lose? My life as a puppet? A pathetic puppet incapable of love, although that’s not right. I have known love. But at some point you have to say, well, that was nice, that life I knew, but it’s over. And the music for the ballet is by Igor Stravinsky, but I wasn’t hearing the music because I was in the cab, and the cab’s radio was tuned to a station that was talking about traffic. I was riding in the cab to the house of a Chinese person. I was partly excited and partly I was numb. I had a gun in my pocket which was exciting, but what I was going to do with the gun, that was the numb part, the puppet part, as if what I did wasn’t done by me. It was done by a man holding a greasy bag of meat, half-cooked, holding it in his open palm so the bag, if it broke, wouldn’t stain his clothes. I’d never wanted to play the role of this man but now I’d been given the role and that’s what you do, you come out of the womb and it starts like that, being told what you are, what you can be, and maybe you like it and maybe you don’t but either way you stop thinking about the role because not thinking makes it easier. And when we got to a corner at the base of a hill I told the driver to stop. I gave him some money, watched him drive off, and from the corner I began walking up the deserted street. I did it quietly, avoiding the circles of light cast by the streetlights. And the walk, which wasn’t long, reminded me of a walk I’d taken with my aunt, a hike, a Sierra Club hike up a hill. I was young so I got to the top of the hill before the older ladies, imagining myself an explorer, the first human soul to ever stand under this particular pine tree, on these particular needles, and it was a different location now but the soundlessness was the same. It was a soundlessness in which I felt my heart beat, and sometimes I chewed gum to keep calm, and I didn’t have any gum but I had a cigar in my pocket. The coat I was wearing was Cosmo’s coat, an old one he’d given me, and the cigar in the pocket was Cosmo’s cigar. I held it between my lips, not lighting it because the ember would call attention to the man walking up to the tall wooden gate, and on the other side of the gate he heard the dogs. And they heard him. And I pulled the meat, half wrapped in wax paper, from the brown bag, and maybe I should have kept the buns. It would have been easier, or cleaner, because now I reached into the bag, grabbed the half-cooked hamburger and dropped it over the gate. Through a slit between the gate and the fence I counted two dogs, and I could see the meat hit the cement and the dogs attacking it. First they sniffed it, then attacked it, and they didn’t care if the meat was cooked or not. Dobermans tend to be tailless, or stub tailed, because people cut the tails off, and when the meat was gone, and the violence of the growling was gone, I pulled the metal wire that released the gate, pushed it slowly open, said calming things to the dogs, nice dog, good doggy, things like that, and the dogs sniffed me but I wasn’t meat, or not the kind of meat they liked. They seemed sated, their jaws resting on the cement near a stainless steel water bowl, and they let me squeeze past them. I walked along the side of a stucco house, into an open area that led to an unpaved road, a private road, and I walked up that until, about a hundred feet ahead of me I saw the A-frame house. Then I tossed the cigar. I’d been told there would be bodyguards, and I saw them, three or four figures moving back and forth in front of a large triangular window. The window overlooked the road which had turned into a path, and as I walked below the A-frame house I was acting the part of someone who knows where he’s going. If they stopped me I’d say I’m … I’d make something up. People tend to let you keep walking if you walk with purpose and that’s how I walked up the path, hearing the voices of the henchmen coming from the window. The language they spoke, I assumed, was Chinese, and I could feel the weight of the key against my thigh, the key I’d been given, and I walked up some paving-stone stairs to another level and there was a house here, a bigger house. I passed an open doorway, and because I was trying to walk with purpose I hardly turned my head but inside the door I saw a group of people in a room, a family, kids and women in yellow light, and I kept walking, around the house to the back stairs. From the top of the stairs, hearing the voices of the family below me, the kids laughing and the adults laughing too, it sounded like a family that probably knew love. But I couldn’t afford to think about that. I had to think about what I was doing, and the act of killing, although I didn’t think about that, must have meant something to me because I had to block from my mind the happiness of the family. I pulled out the key to the door and when the key opened the door I stepped inside. It was dark in the room when I closed the door but I noticed a light down one hallway, and voices. I followed the sound of the voices to a half-open door that led to what looked like a bathroom but bigger, like a steam room. It was a tiled room with a large tiled tub and sitting in the tub, his back toward me, was a thin, gray-haired man. Next to him, facing him, a small young girl with long dark hair was laughing. They were both laughing, flirting with each other by splashing each other, and from what I could see she wasn’t wearing a top. The man was distracted, enjoying her attention, and this would be the perfect moment, I thought, the back of his head a perfect target. Would be the perfect moment, if what I was going to do was kill him. But I wasn’t sure I was. I didn’t think I was. Or mainly I wasn’t thinking. The gun was still in the pocket of my coat, and now, with the perfect moment directly in front of me, I left it there, waiting until I knew what I was doing. Or until a more perfect, perfect moment came along, and as is often the case, by waiting for a better moment the moment that was perfectly fine slipped away. Which would have been perfect for me. I could’ve gone back to the Commodore and told him … I didn’t know what, and I was thinking about what it might be when the girl slipped out from under the old man’s arms. She stepped out of the tub, walked to a lacquered liquor cabinet, mixed herself a drink, and instead of walking back to the old man she walked into what looked like a bathroom. And then the old man, naked, his skin hanging off his bones like the skin of an old hound, stood. He didn’t see me watching him step out of the tub and walk across the tiled floor, and when he got to a door he stopped. I didn’t know where the door might lead but this, I thought, must be the perfect moment. He was dizzy, or he was thinking, either way he was defenseless, his rib cage visible, his scapula sticking out, and I was close enough to hit the back of his head if I shot him. And that’s when the thought of shooting him, a thought I’d been able to avoid until then, hit me. Along with the abstract concept of killing, there was the concrete image of the contents of his skull splattering across the white door in front of him. And I wasn’t ready for that. I wasn’t ready for him to never again splash water on his girlfriend. Or even if she was a prostitute I wasn’t ready, and I had no intention of being ready, and I would’ve turned and walked down the hall and out the door and back to my puppet self, but my puppet self was already here. The man, if he’d been a Tai Chi master, would have heard my breathing or sensed my heat, and if he’d been having a heart attack, that would’ve made it easy but then he opened the door. He reached out, turned the handle, and without looking back he stepped into another room and closed the door behind him.
Nijinsky, when he danced the role of Petrushka, accentuated the character’s madness, which was his madness. No one noticed because madness gave his dancing power, made him a genius, le dieu de la danse, and it wasn’t until he stopped dancing, or started dancing less, that his mind, which was subjugated to his body, began to spin out of control. In his diary he made no distinction between God’s voice and his own voice because he saw no distinction. And when he danced Petrushka he let his madness speak, unafraid of what it said or why he said it, and people loved the dancing but the madness was frightening.
It was frightening because the chances he took weren’t the chances they wanted to take. But they wanted him to take them. They wanted him to open his eyes and see the connections they were unwilling to see, but had to see, and I could have opened my own eyes, seen what I was doing or about to do but again, a moment in which I don’t act came, and then it was gone. I was still in the one room and the old man had entered the other room, and I didn’t know what he was doing in that room, possibly preparing to ambush me, and the girl was probably taking a shower, and all I had to do was remember my job. I waited a few seconds, and then I quietly turned the handle of the door, and when I very cautiously stepped inside I saw in the room a large pool, a swimming pool, and I saw the old man stepping down into the shallow end of the pool. The light was blue, sparkling in the water, and this was the moment I pulled out the pistol. The water in the hot tub had been hot water and this was cool water and the man took off his glasses, set them on the edge of the pool, dipped his head under the water, pushed off and glided, not like a fish but not like an old man either. I stepped to the pool’s edge, and he was graceful under the water, holding his breath, his skinny legs propelling him forward, and the whole pool must have been shallow because when he stood up at the deep end he was still only crotch deep, and standing there he wiped the water out of his face. And once he did he saw me, facing him, holding a gun. I was standing on the beige tile, expecting him to call out to his bodyguards but instead he said something to me, matter-of-factly, staring at me as if I ought to understand but he spoke Chinese. You’re making a big mistake, or You don’t have to do this to me, or more like, So this is the day I am going to die. I couldn’t think about what he was saying because if I started thinking I wouldn’t cock the gun. I wouldn’t hear the click when I pulled back the slide, and when I extended my arm with the gun in my hand, both of his arms were hanging at his sides. He continued staring, either at me, or it looked as if he was staring at something in front of me, something between us, something passing from him to me or me to him, and in a movie my character would talk to him, say something to him that would give him a chance to prepare for death but this wasn’t a movie. I’d come this far so now my finger pulled the trigger. That was the next step, and I say my finger because my finger seemed to make the decision, not me, and it was just the one shot. I’d been looking at the dark spots of his two eyes so I didn’t know where I’d hit him but one shot seemed to be enough. He fell back into the water and the water parted for him. And gradually, as the waves of his splash died down his body rose up, floating on the water, his feet pulling him down but his lungs were still filled with air. His blood was staining the water, spreading out, and his thin hair was spread across on the surface of the water, and that’s when I heard the girl. I turned, and she was older than a girl, and she was standing at the open door, and when she turned and ran off, that’s when I heard the footsteps on the stairs. Although I hadn’t noticed it, the sound of the shot had probably been loud, and by the time the henchmen, two of them, rushed into the room I’d followed the girlfriend back into the hot-tub room, and then down the hall, and there was light from the open door but mostly the room was dark, and I listened. I heard splashing as the bodyguards pulled their boss’s body back to shore, and no one else seemed to be running into the room so I walked out the door. From the top of the stairs I saw people running below me, some with dogs on leashes, and voices were calling to other voices, and in the confusion of barking voices I ran down the stairs, past the room where the family had been, down the path past the A-frame house, and it would have been a perfectly clean getaway except about halfway to the gate I noticed a sensation in my side, below my ribs. But I kept running. I got to the gate, opened it, ran down the street to another street, ran down that to a busy street with stores and lights and on the corner a bus had stopped to pick up passengers. I got on the bus, walked to a seat in the back and sat, looking straight ahead. I was looking straight ahead, my face more or less expressionless, but in my body I was glowing with a physical sense of exultation, of floating, and it took a while before I looked down to see that I was bleeding.
It wasn’t exultation, it was adrenaline, the drug, the chemical compound manufactured by the body, and it was affecting my body more than my mind because my mind, I was going to say my mind was numb but my whole puppet self was numb. I was sitting on the bright orange bus seat, holding a shiny steel pole that connected to the seat in front of me, and there’s a scene in the Godard movie Pierrot le Fou in which the hero, a Petrushka character, travels with the woman he loves to the south of France. And when she abandons him he decides to blow himself up, literally. He crawls into a trash can, covers himself with sticks of dynamite, lights a fuse, and as the fuses start burning he thinks, wait a minute, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to die, and he tries to snuff out the burning fuses but the fuses don’t snuff and we see him explode, or at least we see an explosion, and when I looked down at my right side rib, the floating rib, below the rib my blood was seeping into my shirt. I realized, putting two and two together as they say, that one, I’d been shot, and two, the bullet seemed to have passed through my body. I couldn’t remember what organ was down there, didn’t know my intestine was puctured but the body can heal itself, I knew that, or thought I did, and I would be fine as long as I didn’t bleed to death. And I wasn’t bleeding much. And a certain bleeding is good, I thought, because bleeding would force me to focus, on the famous here and now, and mostly I was, looking down at the blood on my shirt, but also the world was out there. I looked out to the wet streets outside the bus window, a taxicab idling by a gas station phone booth. And when the bus pulled up to a bus stop I got off the bus, and it wasn’t raining, and hadn’t been raining, and why were the streets wet? They always seemed to be wet. And when I walked across the wet sidewalk and opened the taxi door, the painful part was sliding into the seat. I told the driver, I’m going to a movie and he said, which movie? I didn’t know. Sometimes I just want to see images of people moving in front of me, that’s what I said and he said he saw that every night, meaning through his windshield, and I had my right hand holding my wound. Although the painful part was my lower back, I found myself cradling my belly, the edge of it where the blood was, cupping my hand on the place where the bullet had torn me, trying to keep the wetness inside myself from leaking out. When the car hit a pothole the bump, transmitted to my body, exaggerated the pain, but I could stand the pain, and then the cabbie pulled up to the curb. It was lit by a theater marquee. This is perfect, I told him, and when I put a bill in his hand and left his cab I pretended to walk toward the theater. In case the cabbie was watching me. I pretended to read the poster for the movie, and actually I did read it, but I have no memory of what the movie was. Not Singin’ in the Rain. Gene Kelly wasn’t singin’ or dancin’ or falling in love in the fake rain of a movie set. And I wasn’t falling in love either. But I felt a similar endorphin flowing in me, and I knew from my studies that pain, which originates in the body, is felt in the mind, like rain falling in Los Angeles, and how we feel about that rain is up to us, and pain is the same, it’s just pain, and if I could feel it without fighting it, it could just be there, with me, no big thing. Not that I wanted it. Or wanted having it. But that’s the role I’d been given, a lousy role, but the fact that I didn’t want the role made no difference to the powers that be, the powers that are, the powers that cast me, against type, as a person who kills people. A few days ago, or hours even, although he might have dreamed about killing the Moor, Petrushka wouldn’t have been able to do it. And he didn’t intend to do it. He just wanted someone to look at him and pay attention, to see he wasn’t a buffoon, and now here I was, and I didn’t hail another cab, but when a cab pulled up to the curb I got in, and although I was wearing my same old costume I wasn’t quite feeling like me anymore.