by D. M. Fraser
New York Ted
New York Ted
Bum got no money but he’s okay in bed
Sure miss the sweet-talkin’ things he said
New York Ted
Well, it’s not Gladys Gorman, and it could stand a touch of soulful blues harp crying in there; but for this occasion it’s better than nothing. (“Funny thing,” you might remember saying, “you get used to compensating for the impossible; second best becomes second nature.” Someone across a table chuckled appreciatively. Someone else changed the subject.) This, then, is Marge, who’s worked every all-nighter inside a ten-mile radius—all two of them—for longer than you’d guess if you saw her at a distance, especially through a grimy café window, a glass, uh, darkly. And it would be pleasing to announce that the then-face-to-face part comes next, that this chapter, at least, rates a happy ending on some rancid mattress, with a bit of good honest nooky to take that slut sorrow out of our several voices, but it can’t be arranged. Have to bear in mind where we are …
New York Ted
New York Ted
Can’t get this melody
Out of my head
Pass on, while you can. Who do you think you are, with your heart full of trumped-up “compassion,” your dime-a-dozen down-home memories, who are you to linger on this shabby familiar corner, feeling pity? But wait, it’s not necessarily that—it’s … oh shit … it’s that thing there. Something else. There. And gone now, as soon gone as the smoke from your cigarette, a faint bluing of the immediate air, a scarcely visible thickening of particles, and at once a dissolution. Now I know in part, then I shall know even as I am known. Is that It, precisely?
New York Ted
New York Ted
When a woman gets hungry she gotta be fed
I’ll find me a miner or a logger instead
of New York Ted
Some Dream-Vision, eh? Marge puts down the mop, pours herself a coffee, lights a smoke. A slow night, tonight … “Yeah, it’s true I split on her, walked out, couldn’t stomach livin’ on her wages. Not that she made fuck all. Not that she spread it around, y’know. And the goddamn flat was gettin’ me down, too. No heat half the time, and I wouldn’t’ve been surprised there was rats. That’s a low thing, rats. I can hack most anything but that, hearin’ them nibblin’ away there all night long, nibblenibblenibble, and you know damn well the next thing they’ll be nibblin’ on is you … But she wasn’t a bad woman, in her way. I’ve been with lots worse …”
Is this to be the Good Companion after all, this shambling fellow with the slow voice, lumberjack shirt, jukebox eyes? Don’t count on it. Another day, perhaps, it might more easily happen—there remains that chance—another day, another terminus at the still foreseeable end of the bus ride you won’t forget to take (comin’ up soon): at the conclusion of this or some other story, one of these spectres may indeed consolidate into sentient flesh, into voice, into the firm fact that’s love, kindness, an accessible warmth. Something else. You’ve neglected so much, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still with you. A scrap of music, an old joke, the glint of unexpected light on a face—any of these can bring it all back, hold it just long enough, just long enough. The faith, if there’s such a thing, is that it may happen. Just long enough.
And the apparition is already fading, having served its rhetorical purpose, receding down the pavement keeping time to the song (commissioned especially for this eventuality), as if all our arrivals and departures could be played to this counterpoint. Sing on, Marge, girl of no one’s (present) dreams:
New York Ted
New York Ted
Hope you enjoy your Procrustean bed
I’ll come and see you when I’ve got the bread
New York Ted
Indulge yourself, at this point, in a deep breath. You’ll need it.
X. Flashing Blue
Got them old Suspicious Character Blues again.
“And where might you be goin’ … sir?”
“Frawk.”
“Eh? Speak up.”
“For—a—walk … sir.”
“Got someplace to sleep? Sleep it off, I mean.”
“Sure.”
“Well, maybe you better go there.”
“Now?”
“That’s the idea, son.”
Strongly resist authoritarianism in all its guises.
XI. Sunday
There are two popular theories about Sunday: (1) that it is the last day of the week, and (2) that it is the first day of the week. In either case, it is not a notably interesting day.
In Lonesome Town, on Sunday, everything was closed. The sun shone reluctantly. Some people went into substantial brick buildings, curiously decorated, where they sang depressing songs and asked Jesus to take them to his bosom. Other people stayed home and stared at the football game.
Jamie slept through the morning. In the afternoon, he went to the park, observed the grass and trees, spoke briefly and unproductively to an errant duck, fell into a fit of lust, sighed in vain, and wandered back to the hotel. His head felt like ice-cream abandoned in the rain.
He read a few chapters of Eat Your Way to Mental Health, which advised him that the mind’s well-being depended upon the consumption of brown, glutinous, and distasteful foods, in unappetizing combinations. As an experiment, he went down to the lobby and bought a chocolate bar, which seemed to qualify. Midway through it, he decided to give up on the experiment.
In the evening, he made his way to the waterfront, to watch the small boats sailing off into the sunset. “One of our most appealing attractions,” the literature had advised. The air was crisp with pathos and salt spray. Jamie leaned on a spiky railing and, because it was Sunday, croaked a few bars of a favourite hymn:
Time like an ever-rolling stream
Bears all her sons away.
They fly forgotten as the dream
Dies at the opening day.
That made him feel considerably better. The hymn should have begun and ended there, he thought. The small boats bobbed away over the horizon; presently, the sun followed them.
In front of the hotel, a street evangelist was urging repentance, denouncing foreign immigration, promising the remission of sins, urging immediate use of a nuclear deterrent against our godless foes, collecting nickels and dimes. A wickedly beautiful virgin thumped a tambourine; there were random cries of “Hallelujah” and “Yea Lordy.” Across the street, a very old man played “Mack the Knife,” not quite accurately but with remarkable passion, on an accordion.
In the TV lounge, Jamie sat through a late movie about the Korean War. A small, shaggy person with distraught eyes watched him fixedly, saying nothing, as he did so. The predictable people won the last battle, and the movie ended. “See you,” the shaggy person said.
The one light had burned out in Jamie’s room. He lit a match, scorched his fingers, and contrived to find the mickey he’d bought, foresightedly, the day before. After drinking most of it, he was wide-awake and restless.
A clock, somewhere outside, chimed midnight with great solemnity. Jamie went to bed and failed to fall asleep.
That was Sunday, in Lonesome Town.
XII. An Upright Man
Of course (he knows), he won’t be able to hide out forever; so far he’s been able to avoid the real reckoning, the one he supposes he came here for, but it will find him anyway. That’s part of the program, perhaps the largest part. He won’t be able to stay here forever. Lonesome Town is only a crossroads, a truck stop; its population is mostly transient. Jamie can’t be an exception. No doubt—now, with a somewhat less than rosy-fingered dawn sneaking, necessarily sideways, through the airshaft window—he’d like to stay, if only because, in the circumstances, staying is easier than going. He suspects that reason is not admissible. It’s in the nature of vacations, even this one, to end. Aside from a skeleton staff, the local colour, everyone here is in Jamie’s predicament. What else is this but a town of hotels, seedy rooms (like the one he’s in) beh
ind ornate, elderly façades?—a town of people who would be entirely content to haunt these rooms, and the corridors connecting them, until the last brick crumbled from the last false front. If it were possible. Not possible. The traffic through Lonesome Town has its own momentum; the rules it obeys are long-established and inflexible. The rules require a rolling onward of wheels, endlessly turning, day and night. Even in sleep, the sound is audible.
Jamie, sleepless, goes down to the lobby, there to find the resident insomniac, as always, staring into the television—just now, into the test pattern. The insomniac’s name, this morning, is Harry Agglyntine. In 1567, Harry Agglyntine was named as an Upright Man, which is the highest species of vagrant scoundrel, in a pamphlet entitled (in part) A Caveat for Common Cursitors, by one Thomas Harman, seeking to instruct the English public in the styles and operations of criminal vagabonds. This may or may not be the same Harry Agglyntine; he appears old enough, however well preserved, and there is a certain streak of roguery manifest in him … It would be politic, anyway, not to enquire too closely. He looks at Jamie with the yellow, unwinking eyes of a very sage cat. “You’re up early,” he observes.
“Up late.” They will converse like this, haphazardly, for some time; the test pattern will yield to the Early Bird News, from which they’ll glean the intelligence that an electronics factory (subcontractor to a major defence installation) in Jamie’s city has just been blown to ancient memory. Someone’s poaching, Jamie thinks automatically. But it might have been Isobel, trying to recapture the glow. “Nothing’s sacred these days,” says Harry Agglyntine. “Bad thing, dynamite. Gives people notions.” The newscaster has a round, enthusiastic face and a barely detectable stammer; he seems personally injured by the news he has to read. There are pictures of the ruins, which resemble all ruins in the world, except that these are still active, still steaming. Jamie is remembering his first blast, the peculiar pleasure of being able to say, as the on-the-spot photos flashed on the screen: I did that. Was it an ignoble sensation? He isn’t sure; somewhere along the line the confidence, the absolute knowing, went out of it. “What I lack,” he says, is “staying power. Perdurance.” Harry wags his head, in evident approval. “Perdurance,” he agrees. “That’s a nice word, ain’t it? I haven’t heard tell of perdurance for a long time. My Mort had it, but she’s long gone into the darkmans.” On occasion, when he forgets some things and recalls others, he falls into this lingo, the common speech of an upright man.
A young man in vulgar underwear crosses the lobby, waves a potential Good Morning, exits into a washroom. “No respect,” says Harry. “The young persons these days are an offence unto heaven.” When there’s no answer, he persists: “Ain’t they? Ain’t they?” On the television, a middle-aged woman is discussing Scandinavian cuisine with another middle-aged woman; they both smile vivaciously, and frequently, as they talk. “No,” Jamie says. The desk clerk leaves his post, and shuffles toward a door marked No Admission. “Well, now,” he exudes in passing, “what’s come down the tube today?” He’s disappeared before anyone can reply.
Jamie yawns. He’s thinking that his sojourn in Lonesome Town has very nearly run its course. The reckoning … There’s a smell in the lobby that he’s smelled before; the last time was when, in a seizure of regret, he’d gone back to visit a house he’d just vacated. He’d spent an afternoon pacing through the hollow rooms, noticing anew the grunginess of the wallpaper, the way the floor slanted, the smoke-smudges above the fireplace, the warps in the window glass. Living there, among furniture and appliances, the apparatus of settled life, he’d forgotten all this: the naked decrepitude our homes always slide tiredly into, when we leave them. Returning, he’d caught it off-guard. The smell was there then: an odour of disuse, of a vacancy longer, a neglect more insidious, than the facts of the matter allowed for. (A house can die in three days, he’d thought, shivering.) He’d felt a need, as implacable as it was absurd, to keep vigil there—as if, in some upstairs room perhaps, something eternally horrible (and true, above all else) were waiting for him, in solitary patience … But he’d been trespassing, that day; in the Heartbreak Hotel, in Lonesome Town, he’s still a paying guest. Abruptly, insomniac Harry glares at him. “Don’t stay. Whatever you do, don’t linger. Take a warning well intended. There’s poison here, poison to shrivel the heart, blind the brain, bring low the upright man. Haven’t I breathed it myself in this air? Haven’t I choked on it? You have no cause to do the same …” Jamie gets up, gets away; he can’t listen to this. “Have a nice day,” he says, leaving. At some distance he hears, a mumble almost below his ear’s threshold, a cant: There was a proud patrico and a nosegent. He took his jockam in his famble, and a wapping he went; he docked the dell; he prig prance; he binged a waste into the darkmans; he filched the cove without any filchman.
Crazies, Jamie thinks as he climbs the stairs, I’m surrounded by goddamned crazies.
In the upstairs lounge, he isn’t really surprised to hear a familiar voice, Agnes’ voice, saying, “I figured I’d see you again.” She looks inexplicably like a housewife in a commercial for breakfast cereal. “Just passing through.” Aw shucks. Scuffling his feet, head down, throat hoarse, who’s he trying to convince? Old sentimentalist, old bullshitter …
Agnes says, “Don’t you even want to say goodbye?” And before he answers, she says, “Oh, I know. It’s not your fault, it never was. Isobel must have told you that. You can’t help it. None of us can help it. Poor Jamie, poor baby, I know.” Over and over, on and on. Yes, Isobel had told him. Poor Jamie … Yup. It’s comin’ on time to leave Lonesome Town.
But he says, “Maybe we should finish what we started.” Oops, hadn’t meant to put it that way. Shouldn’t rush these things.
Can we give them, now, a moment’s decent privacy? To say in whatever language they speak, whatever survives to be said. To kiss in the custom of old sweethearts, comic-book lovers, slowly, bending forward and back, breathless at the end of it. To explore what has been there, all the time, ripe for exploration. Let it go by, this unimportant passage, neither more nor less wonderful than any other. Who’ll miss it, if we skip it? After all, we know the end of the story and they, poor kids, don’t. We can spare them our snooping, turn our prurient hearts elsewhere, for an hour.
And an hour later, in his room, door closed, Jamie discovers the bed and collapses at once into the sleep of the damned.
XIII. The Departure From Lonesome
The sky warned of rain, the day he left, but no rain came down. The wind was sullen. Traffic moved randomly below the windows of the Heartbreak Hotel; in one of the cars, a radio was playing the Verdi “Requiem,” at full volume. It penetrated briefly into Jamie’s sleep, dislodging a dream in which a grateful populace was about to reward him for a lifetime of public service and minimal corruption. Cheap ironies, he thought: all my life I’ve been hounded by cheap ironies. The chords resound out of a darkness … The dream abandoned him; the music moved on toward the next stoplight. It was hard to haul himself out of the mattress, into the world. The floor was cold. “It’s not too late, is it?” Jamie said to the mirror. “Unlimited opportunities wait for the industrious, don’t they?” The mirror said nothing, but it looked dubious. “I’m worried about my growth potential,” Jamie continued. “I want to participate in meaningful awareness-expansion. I can’t find my centre, and I’m not sure I even have one. My head hurts, too.” He puked magnificently into the sink.
Agnes wasn’t there. Isobel wasn’t there. To commemorate them, to pass the time before leaving Lonesome Town, Jamie masturbated into a towel. He kept his eyes open. What he saw, at climax, was precisely the ceiling light, a plain 60-watt bulb, unshaded. It wasn’t intelligible. Someone’s voice seemed to echo through the plumbing: “The world is intelligible only to those who make no effort to live in it.” Cheap ironies … “Thanks a lot,” Jamie said. Seeing the light bulb had reminded him of something; he got up, flicked the switch; nothing happened. Have to speak to the management about that
. He’d never been very efficient at dealing with the petty business of life.
After he’d dressed, he composed the first lines of a letter to Isobel, the one she’d mark Addressee Unknown if she found it in her mailbox. “My dear,” he wrote, “please don’t think I’ve been neglecting our mutual interests. The economy is collapsing. Runaway inflation is running away with the country. Are you at peace with yourself? Every word I write means exactly what you think it means. Will you still love me tomorrow?”
No good. Jamie struck a match, and watched with interest as the paper burned: the combustion of cellulose was never the same twice. He observed the bottle of whisky, on the floor beside the bed; it wasn’t as empty as he’d expected. Ahhhhh … The little dogs on the label looked at him alertly. “Woofwoof,” he said. “Wowwow. Will you still love me tomorrow?”
“McIvor? You in there?”
“Arrrgh.”
“Telephone.”
“I wanted to tell you,” Isobel said, “that I won’t be here any more. There are other things to do. I’ve found … someone. Someone nice. He’s got a regular job, and he bathes every day. He has a deep appreciation of investment capital and the ramifications thereof. And he keeps himself in shape; he jogs a mile every morning. It’s a refreshing change … I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, it’s you,” Jamie said. “I should have known you’d call. I was just writing to you, but I burned the letter. I’m leaving Lonesome Town today.”