Death Kit

by Susan Sontag

  Diddy aches to hold the girl. He finishes the coffee, and has returned to his hotel. Another question to put to the helpful night clerk, who looks up from Introductory Sociology when Diddy leans over the desk. Is there an all-night florist in the vicinity? “At this hour? Gee, I doubt it, sir. It’s four o’clock. But there is one three blocks down the street. He opens early, I think, because there’s a big funeral parlor on the side street there. Around seven-thirty.”

  Diddy smiled, said good night. He appreciated the man’s courtesy, a welcome contrast with New York. Refused to discount it as behavior untypical of night clerks, which he might well have done since the young man—boy really—was obviously a college student, working in the hotel only part-time.

  At the elevator door, he called back, “Don’t forget to wake me at six-fifty.”

  “No, sir, I won’t.”

  Diddy let himself out of the self-service elevator at his floor. Down the quiet hall. Gaining his room, locked his door behind him; sat down heavily on the bed, (now) extremely messy, that he has claimed as his. Could he sleep? That seems unlikely. But the room is too small and underfurnished for him comfortably to wait out the balance of the night’s vigil anywhere except in bed. Though not expecting to sleep, undressed once more and crawled between the (now) familiar sheets. Once more, he tossed. Stretched out on his stomach and sank his head in the pillow. Lay on his side, knees bent, seized the pillow and hugged it to his chest. About dawn he may have dropped off. Asleep, he may have dreamed of a doll that he was given by his nurse when he was a small child.

  Raggedy Andy with a pink open face, topped by long, carrot red hair;

  button eyes, thick and smooth as raw lima beans;

  flat red triangle nose and black-and-red crescent mouth;

  a wide rigid neck and no shoulders;

  a pink cotton torso—Diddy had instantly undone the clothes to examine him—seamless, sexless;

  pink cotton hands sticking out of his blue-and-red print shirt;

  red striped legs hanging loosely from his royal blue trousers.

  For a long time Diddy couldn’t fall asleep without the doll. Nor would he, at first, consent to go to kindergarten without taking Andy with him. Andy sat propped up on Diddy’s lap at the dinner table, and was offered tribute from Diddy’s plate. Andy accompanied him to the toilet. Andy perched on the rim of the tub when Mary was bathing Diddy. Andy came along on the rather solemn occasions when his mother and father took the boys for an outing, and they on their best behavior, cautioned by Mary “not to be acting like silly kids and go on upsetting your folks, who want to enjoy themselves.” Not only had Diddy loved that doll more than any present he’d ever been given; Andy was dearer than anyone. Dearer to Diddy than his parents. But that was easy, he was afraid of them. Dearer than Paul. Dearer than Mary. Yet in the end the doll deteriorated into an almost unrecognizable state, virtually dismembered. A fistful of Andy’s bright wool hair had been torn out minutes after Diddy was punished for stealing five dollars from Mary’s purse to buy a birthday present for his father. Then there were Andy’s lima-bean eyes, which Diddy clawed off after he came home from school and found Paul, who was down with the measles, playing with Andy in his bed, making him tumble down onto his chest from the summit of his bent knees. There were, in fact, two kinds of provocations. Some were insults to Diddy, that he transmitted to or registered upon the docile stuffed body of his familiar. Others were insults to Andy himself, which included any infringement upon Diddy’s exclusive ownership of the doll; these were just as inexorably certified through a violence. For each provocation, Andy bore a scar or mutilation on his clothes or person. But it never occurred to Diddy that he was “ruining” the doll, as Mary and sometimes his mother remarked irritably. Diddy knew what he was doing. With each added injury, Andy became an even more precious historical totem, an album of Diddy’s hopeless sorrow. Sightless, bald, maimed, soiled, in tatters, his integument ripped in a dozen places, Andy grew in glory. It was precisely destroying the doll that made it precious to Diddy.

  Anyway, it was of this doll, long since discarded into a Halloween bonfire when Diddy was eleven, that the man Diddy dreamed; if indeed Diddy did sleep. In the dream, he had Andy back, considerably less battered than he remembered the doll having been in the final stages of its career. Of course, the lima-bean eyes were still missing. But that didn’t matter, because (now) Andy could talk. Talk through the printed slit of a mouth that hardly moved. And said something that started with “For—”; it was either “Forgive” or “Forget.” Either way Diddy heard it, he wasn’t too far submerged in his dream to fail to appreciate that he was also watching a movie, perhaps projected in a theatre, perhaps miniaturized and coarsened on TV. This was a movie about Andy, a documentary record; priceless because Andy no longer existed, had long ago been consigned to the Halloween flames by Diddy’s shameful wish to ingratiate himself with the other boys, to be one with the prankish neighborhood kids with whom he played softball but never talked. Who could hardly imagine that their surly able shortstop played in secret with a doll.

  He had to invent Diddy the Mischievous. In order to make plausible the bringing of the sacrifice out of his own house to the bonfire, Diddy had told the boys that this was the favorite doll of a cousin who was staying with them. An imaginary cousin, of course—Diddy had neither sister nor girl cousins—but complete with name, physical traits, and a whiny helpless all-girl character quite her own. The boys seemed to admire the brutality of the prank, to relish the thought of his imaginary cousin’s sorrow upon discovering that her favorite doll had been burnt. They told stories about what Ann would say, improvised a fantasy about the stream of tears she would shed. The tears were endless. Cousin Ann would be lying in bed late at night, sleepless with grief. Tears would pour out of her head, drenching the front of her cotton nightgown, down onto the sheets, thoroughly soaking them, and you know what the grownups would make of that in the morning. Still flowing, gathering, the tears would tumble off her bed; a pool of tears would slither across the floor of the guest room where she was supposed to be staying. Then out the door, along the corridor and, with a thunderous rush, down the staircase, a waterfall of irresistible force, a torrent of tears that would force open the front door, surge down the walk and pour into the street, filling Drachman Street, sweeping along the rubbish that lay in the gutters so that the drains became clogged, and when Drachman reached Main, thundering down Main Street, turning right on Sixth Street, flooding the junior high, the church, the library, the drugstore. Via Speedway on out of town, inundating the farmers’ fall crops, bulldozing the neat cones of hay already placed about the fields, and ruining the unharvested hay by making it wet. Hurtling on and on, a Niagara of tears, toppling silos, drowning cows, overturning Greyhound buses and cars speeding along country roads, washing away the stucco motels on the highway, felling telegraph poles and power stations, making bridges buckle and trains tip over into ravines. Until, finally, the liquid avalanche plunged into the raw formless sea.

  Diddy elated by this vision of stanchless grief conjured up by the other boys. He saw in it only the beauties of enthusiasm, nothing that was cruel. Nor did he see himself as the accomplice of even an imaginary cruelty. Birdlike, he soared over the saline tidal wave as it lacerated and engulfed town, land, and people. As in a dream, he stepped forward; crept nearer and nearer the fire. It had begun to scorch his cheeks but he didn’t mind. At a distance, the other boys watched. Diddy flung the doll into the flames, which hardly flared up at all on receiving their new fuel. Then the boys began to laugh and jump up and down. Chant “Diddy burnt Andy! Diddy burnt Andy!” Diddy felt his horrified heart turn into an iron safe. Understanding (now). They’d known all along he still secretly cherished a doll from his early childhood; Paul must have told on him. Wait! Stop! Andy’s blackened corpse clearly visible, his limbs flung about awkwardly, aslant one of the burning boards. But it was too late. The doll was irretrievable. “Forgive,” whispered Diddy, his eyes smart
ing only from smoke. Though he ached for the relief of tears. And “Forget,” too, he must have muttered to himself as he stumbled back to his house, without yelling a word of insult or reproach at his friends. The offense of their callousness and Paul’s treachery was too great to be requited. Diddy could conceive of neither revenge nor reparation.

  Anyway, it was of this Andy—uselessly sacrificed familiar, diminished double—that Diddy (now) dreamed, Sunday night, in the hotel room. If he did dream. Certainly, this memory of the doll and its immolation was accurate enough to be no dream at all. Just the amplified and extra-vivid remembering that flourishes in the transit between being asleep and being awake.

  One piece of evidence for it being a dream was that his memories seemed to be a movie. And Diddy in some solitary projection room to which he had sentenced himself to watch over and over again his gullible child-self perform, all unknowing, the dreadful, unnecessary deed. Watch it and try to cull some lessons for future behavior from this awful error.

  More evidence: the fitful presence of something or someone else, that couldn’t be part of his memory. While the Andy-bonfire repeated itself. While the Andy-bonfire, distanced by being seen on film, was being rerun. Over many showings of the ellipitically edited film, a new character gradually emerged, as if a supplementary reel soaking in the emulsion in the photographer’s darkroom was being developed piecemeal and then awkwardly spliced in. At first, the cast consisted only of Diddy and the other boys. The way it really had been. Then Diddy could perceive another figure, somewhat out of focus, a stranger, but—he guessed—the one who truly presided over the scene. An adult, indeed an elderly woman with untidy gray hair and sharp features, in burlap tunic and hood, munching a brown pear with her pointy teeth. A terrible old woman. A witch for Halloween. In the dream, Diddy tried not to look at her. And found this possible to do. Though always hovering at Diddy’s eye level somewhere near the tumultuous fire, she never fully alighted on the ground. But whenever Diddy managed to shut the witch out of his vision, by staring past her at the noisy flames or down at his own feet, some clarity was lost. Everything in his mind wobbled and bent; the way Billy and Ira and Chris and Mark did, viewed through the fiercely heated air surrounding the fire.

  What he (now) suspected couldn’t be so. Would make everything come out wrong. Yet he couldn’t banish the insidious thought, presenting itself as a realization, that Andy wasn’t his doll after all, never had been. That, envious of his young cousin’s treasure, he’d only been pretending to be Andy’s rightful owner. So it was true that poor Ann had a miserable time awaiting her. Would sob pitifully to discover Diddy the Treacherous has murdered her beloved, helpless Andy. Not Niagaras and Red Seas inundating the world. But still, copious salty tears; too strong for her eyes to bear. When she discovered Diddy’s theft and learned that Andy had been cremated, she would weep herself blind.

  What to do about this confusion? Diddy paralyzed before his dream, if it was a dream. He’d already told the boys what might be, what he prayed would still turn out to be, what must be—a lie. The lie about the doll’s ownership. So he couldn’t ask them (now) to tell him whether his lie was true. Could he? Neither could he ask the witch, drifting all too near him, throbbing in the scorched air, Who please, who, himself or his cousin, owned Andy. She was ugly, and he was afraid of her. Only a fool would expect such a loathsome creature to be generous. Why should a witch be kind enough to unravel a riddle, to grant him the surcease of truth? Diddy must decide for himself to whom Andy belonged. To assist him, he had the advice offered by Andy, an Andy miraculously resurrected, to Diddy’s unspeakable joy, and (now) cradled in Diddy’s arms; an Andy who could speak, with printed mouth, almost distinctly. Forgive. Forget. Diddy unaware of any contradiction in the course of events. He lets Andy’s sibylline advice, blurred, overlapping, brusque, tentative, fill his mind.

  Or maybe Diddy didn’t dream about the doll. Maybe only remembered it. For it did happen: the discarding of Andy into a Halloween bonfire when Diddy was eleven. An act of senseless bravado which Diddy had recently come to regard as his first suicide attempt.

  At ten minutes to seven, he was prized from somewhere inside himself by the phone. Inexact to call it awakening. Diddy got up; as he rapidly showered, shaved, and dressed, listened to the TV. A few minutes of Mickey Mouse; then the seven o’clock news came on, still lacking an item about the death of a railroad workman yesterday afternoon. Only the same war, floods in Italy, famine in India, exposure of high-school narcotics ring, local et cetera. Diddy deciding to give the media one more chance. Went down to the lobby; picked a copy of the fresh edition of the Courier-Gazette off the top of the stack of newspapers on the desk. The courteous student night clerk had been replaced by a stout bespectacled woman in her forties, wearing an orange cable-stitch cardigan and knitting something green. Paper in hand, Diddy scanned the apparently vacant lobby, hoping not to see anyone from the firm emerge from behind a pillar, or discover a colleague dozing in a deep chair on the far side of one of the potted plants. But seven-fifteen must be too early for anyone to be down yet. Except for himself and a porter steering a carpet sweeper around, and the desk clerk, the lobby was empty. Diddy sank into an upholstered lounge chair against the right wall, under an ornately framed seascape in oils, lit a cigarette. Laid the paper on his knees and avidly began to read it through, starting with page 1. Is Diddy’s talent for thoroughness being wasted? “Late Final” seemed identical with “City,” the edition he’d pored over upstairs in the middle of the night. Two identical editions? Was this a bad joke or an affectation? A provincial newspaper aping the scale of big city enterprises, insinuating urgency, claiming that there’s more news than there actually is or than it’s able to provide. Diddy enraged. Scornfully turning page after page. Wait! Diddy is wrong. On page 16, second column, the following headline:

  WORKER HIT BY EXPRESS TRAIN

  RAILROAD INVESTIGATING

  and a four-paragraph story under it. Amazing how calm Diddy feels as he begins to read:

  A trackman employed by the New York, Boston & Standard Railroad for thirteen years was killed yesterday afternoon. Angelo Incardona, age 37, of 1863 Maplewood Boulevard, who was engaged in minor repairs of the track running through the Hudson Hills Tunnel 430 miles south of here, was apparently struck by the Privateer, the new ultra-modern express train making its daily run from New York to Buffalo. The body was discovered by the engineer of the Summerton local, the next train to pass through the tunnel.

  The Privateer left New York City from Grand Central Station at 3:10 p.m., as scheduled, railroad officials report. The trip was without incident, and the train arrived here at 9:15, and reached Buffalo at 10:05 on time. When questioned, the Privateer’s chief engineer, Martin Pelty, of Albany, said that neither he nor any member of his crew saw Mr. Incardona as they passed through the Hudson Hills Tunnel, and at the Privateer’s speed they could not have felt any impact had the train struck someone. Railroad officials have emphasized that laborers working on the track are briefed on train schedules. Officials cannot explain why Mr. Incardona did not get out of the way of the Privateer. Like all tunnels on this route, the Hudson Hills Tunnel is equipped with an electronic warning system. Approaching trains trigger a loud siren in the tunnel that gives ample time for anyone on the track to move off it and stand safely in one of the numerous shelters, seven feet high, five feet deep, and seven feet wide, in both walls of the tunnel. Railroad safety rules require that workmen stand well within these shelters while trains are passing through.

  One railroad official, who asked to remain anonymous, said that the circumstances of Mr. Incardona’s death did not rule out the possibility of suicide. Local police are discounting the suicide theory but declare they have no intention of closing the case immediately. The newly reorganized Accident Investigation Squad, headed by Capt. Arthur G. Mallory, has opened a file on the case and expects to determine whether any responsibility belongs to the railroad. “I’m not saying there are, but the
re just might be some loophole in the precautions laid down by the railroad for the safety of men working on the tracks,” Capt. Mallory said last night when reached at his home by the Courier-Gazette. Capt. Mallory said he plans to inspect the lighting available in the tunnel, the system of shelters and storage areas, and the functioning of the electronic warning system. Representatives of the New York, Boston & Standard have already pointed out that their safety regulations are far stricter than the minimums established by federal and state law. But they have assured the police of their continued and full cooperation with every phase of the investigation.

  Hasn’t the anonymous author of the story been carried away by the faint prospect of a larger story, an investigation leading to a negligence suit that might put the state’s second wealthiest railroad on trial? Forgetting his original subject, mere Angelo Incardona. But eventually the zealous reporter had to descend to the commonplaces of an obituary; summarizing a life that had only the most schematic existence as far as public records show. Perhaps his rewrite man had to cut away a good deal more pyramiding of supposition about the railroad, to bring the reader smack up against Incardona, as he existed before his abruptly accomplished removal from this world. A few facts, anyway. Not much to tell in this fourth, and last, paragraph.

  Mr. Incardona was born in Utica but moved to this city at the age of fourteen. He graduated from William McKinley High School, where he was a star quarterback in his senior year. After graduation, he enlisted in the army and served in Korea during the Korean War. He was a member of American Legion Post #701 and the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way, AFL-CIO. He is survived by his wife, Myra, and a son, Thomas Francis, 11. Services will be held tomorrow at 2:00 at the Floral Gardens Funeral Home, 303 Schuyler Avenue.