Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  What else? How in heck am I going to fill up an entire tape with this? So after I came to New York, cabbed it, put some money aside—lived in Jersey City for the first four years. I got this other job driving a truck for Nabisco, paid the rent and got into the city as much as possible. Usually took the PATH to the Village and just wandered around. I felt pretty good, and safe, too, just walking around alone but surrounded by all these people. It was so different than the place I used to live, where you know just about everybody and they know everything about you. In Manhattan, just blocks full of people of all types wandering around. I guess you could say I became a people watcher. It was great; also I started reading, too. I got hold of a place in Hell’s Kitchen—luckily my rent’s stayed low. And then landed with a more legitimate outfit, cabbing. A guy I knew who was some opera singer—he hung out in the Polish place I used to eat at— was quitting driving because he had gotten on at some company for the season, and he sort of got me in through the backdoor with his friends, and that’s it. A bona fide New York driver. I tended to meet a lot of hookers as a driver, and I actually dated one of them and tried to change her evil ways but to no avail. Nice time trying, though. You live in New York long enough, you realize no one in the world is normal anymore, at least it doesn’t seem that way, and nobody ever really changes. Not really. They just become more of themselves.

  The waking dreams, they started a couple of days ago—at least the really vivid ones, I mean, it’s not like I never had nightmares or nothing. I’ve had this strange sleep pattern for some time now, but I’m not sure how long. Maybe since I’ve been driving. Maybe earlier. My memory of the last ten years or so is sort of skewered, because my days and nights have been all fouled up for awhile. The waking dreams don’t really scare me much. I guess it’s like what a drug addict might call an acid flashback, except I didn’t ever drop any acid in my time, although I used to smoke dope and take Black Beauties sometimes and I know they find out stuff about that everyday. Usually it feels like I just step off the end of the world and land in another one, although I notice if I’m driving and have one of these dreams, my body takes over and pulls the cab to the curb so I never end up killing myself—although a few passengers have jumped ship at that point. It’s like there’s some kind of thin skin draped over the world, or in front of my eyes and I can see the dream, and I can see through the dream to the rest of the world. Beating up the guy at Thirty-third and Third was something else— I thought it was in the dream I was doing that. Usually, like I said, my physical body does its usual shtick. But in this waking dream I’m fighting a monster, although...um...can’t remember what this monster looks like, and the next thing I know I’m clobbering this old guy out in front of a market. I felt bad, which is why it was me who called the cops and the ambulance. Enough said. I’m happy he dropped the charges. Thanks, Paula for that. Saved my neck. Sleep hits me differently than the dreams, I just conk out. It’s like anesthesia, though, because I conk out and then come to and I don’t feel like there’s been a passage of more than maybe two seconds, like I blinked. I worried for a while that maybe I’ve got a tumor, but I think I know the reason.

  Because in one of the waking dreams, Paula, it came to me, it came for me, it called out to me.

  It...

  Subject switched off tape recorder at this point.

  7

  Dream notes/subject: Urquart/October.

  10-22

  7 AM/Subject dreamed while walking down Park Avenue/dream: being chased by dogs into an open grave, lying in grave, dogs above foaming and gnashing teeth, subject saw his mother throwing a Tupperware party, and dogs were invited and bought plastic howls and played games, subject’s mother eaten by dogs, then dogs pretend to be subject’s mother/duration: over in ten minutes or so.

  6:30 PM/Subject dreamed while at traffic light on Hudson/world was ocean, cabs were crabs, mermaids singing from rocks, moray eels grabbing fish. Mention of something seen that subject can’t describe, white space, a blind spot/duration: approx. three minutes.

  10 PM/Subject says sky becomes curtain, draping down, then circus tent, and a magician is on stage at circus and calls subject up to be assistant. Magician smells like urine. Magician has hypnotized woman on stage, woman begins floating. Subject watches as audience claps. Magician begins to wave wand over audience, audience begins screaming, metamorphosing into animals, squealing, barking, mewling, running wild. Magician has cages at all exits. Subject’s arms become wings, and to escape, subject flies upward but is caught in circus tent, and down below him the floating woman is not floating but is being lowered into a grave (a very long grave) and subject is standing above ground, holding his mother’s hand, only it’s not his mother, but again, the blind spot/duration: twenty minutes or more.

  10-25

  Between 2-3 AM/subject watched woman give birth at street corner, baby that came out was piglet, squealing, man came by—butcher—with butcher knife to cut umbilical cord, but butchered squealing pig in front of onlookers, sky yellow, ground tippled like earthquake/duration:?

  10 AM/subject surrounded by gang in alley, each gang member had wings (like birds? angels?), razors in hand, approaching, then strong wind blows them away, and dropped razors become serpents slashing each other, smells of orange blossoms, smells of gasoline. Ants crawling across “trees” made out of body parts— hands, feet, noses, and yes, even penises. One tree with a large hole in center, and some animal living in hole although subject doesn’t explain further. Again, perhaps blind spot/duration: 2 minutes.

  7 PM/subject sees groups of witches, naked, old hags, dancing around a man with an enormous penis between his legs and horns on his head, and the man is pouring juice (why juice? Subject says he doesn’t know why, but just knows it was juice) on all the hags “anointing” them, and then in the midst of all this, here comes that trusty old blind spot. What is it he’s not telling? Does he really not remember what it is, what moves in the center of these visions?/duration:?

  10-26

  Noon/subject watches beautiful woman about to jump off third floor of building, flying in midair, lover down below ready to catch her, sees she is flying, turns back on her, woman’s arms catches fire, spreads down and across her body until she is completely burning, still her lover doesn’t turn, she is screaming, burning in midair/subject watches until woman turns to ashes and the ashes float down around him like snow, and the ashes build up into heaps and drifts and cars wreck in black snowdrifts, while teenagers (all boys) chase after something down the road which becomes an empty hole/duration: perhaps half an hour(!)

  7 PM/subject sees a man walking his dog, dog has same face as man, then looks back to man’s face, and it is dog’s face, and it is a dog (a Shar-Pei?) walking a man on a leash, subject doesn’t see humor at all/duration: less than a minute.

  11:30 PM/subject in bar drinking, sees skeletons “through the skins” of all the patrons, skeletons moving, skulls decayed, again crawling ants (red ants) all over skeletons, ants coming out of drinks, pouring from bottles. Then skeletons completely taken over (eaten?) by ants and ants make up “bridges” around skeletons. A man with hands for feet comes in from outside and says, “We have found you,” and subjects sees that he too is made up completely of ants/duration: four minutes.

  10-27

  No dreams, no black out “rests.” Subject irritable, restless.

  Dream notes becoming useless—subject is tired of telling them. Becoming very guarded in his words. Pressure must be lessened.

  Cool it, Paula, let him come to you with this stuff, don’t always be pumping for information.

  8

  Paula Quinn/Notes on Charles Geoffrey Urquart, III.

  Tonight I’m going over to Hell’s Kitchen to see Charlie.

  I’ve been trying to finagle an invitation for weeks, but that’s the one part of his life he’s been keeping pretty private. I don’t blame him, but I still think it would help to see how he organizes his world. I think I’m going to do somethin
g completely against myself, although he’s been coming on to me since the sessions began so I know he won’t be unhappy. I actually think he’s falling in love with me. Ackerman would roast my ass if he found out, but I think I can handle this so there’s no unpleasantness, I wouldn’t want to hurt Charlie, either. Maybe I won’t go through with it. Maybe I’ll chicken out, or he won’t even be interested. If I could only figure out a way of getting to him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Charlie’s Living Room

  1

  “Paula,” Charlie said, opening the door to his apartment, “I didn’t think you’d drop by.”

  She stood there, feeling as if she were shivering in the rain. She hadn’t expected to feel dread at the threshold of his apartment. “Sorry. I tried calling you, but your line’s been busy. May I...come in?”

  “It’s a wreck,” he said, shrugging. “But it’s my own wreck.

  The apartment was a one-room studio, and it was a wreck: dirty laundry in clumps around the floor, dishes piled high in the sink, the kitchen itself a disaster area with the shower stall across from the sink and an actual water closet next to the shower. “Combination kitchen/bathroom, no real aesthetic sense, but each floor of this building used to be one long continuous apartment, so when they were all divided, rat holes like this one became dispensable.”

  But the living area, with his small single bed pushed up into the window alcove, newspapers tossed on the floor as if by a wind, and books stacked one atop the other (she noticed that most of them were library books that had never been returned), empty bottles along the windowsill, some stacked between books on a low shelf—none of this was as bizarre as what was on the walls.

  “Did you do all this?” she asked, and before he could answer, she added, “It’s beautiful.”

  But she was thinking: No wonder he is so plagued by waking dreams. Who could sleep in this prison?

  Charlie had papered the walls with posters and magazine cutouts, a collage of human beings, all staring at him. Rock stars, models, the President of the United States, the Queen of England, naked women from the pages of Playboy and Penthouse, naked couples from even more lurid pornographic magazines, men and women from L. L. Bean catalogs, from Neiman-Marcus catalogs, covers from hardcover novels, a poster of Caravaggio’s Eros, a print of Botticelli’s Primavera, several prints of Madonnas and babies—all intertwined on the wall, looking over each other’s shoulders, watching Charlie, and now watching her, too.

  Her first impulse was to run out of the room, down the five flights of narrow staircase, back to the street, and scream for a cab. But Paula Quinn rarely acted on impulse.

  2

  They ended up in bed.

  Paula Quinn had no way of justifying this to anyone, let alone herself, except that it might further her research, as well as allow Charlie to trust her. She genuinely liked him, as a person, in spite of the oddities, but then, any man she’d ever gone out with in Manhattan had come with a disproportionate share of weirdness. She thought Charlie was attractive in a rather ordinary way; she was lonely, and he was certainly alone. The ramifications of sleeping with him scared her, aside from the ethical impurity it represented. Charlie was, in some way, insane, and as Megan Richmond had been telling her for the past three weeks, she was playing with fire if she thought she could handle Charlie Urquart. She was out of her league on this case.

  After basic small talk, a couple of drinks straight from a bottle of bourbon, and the usual walking around the issue, they were in each other’s arms and it had all begun. Perhaps it had been the two martinis she’d had before she arrived—to work her courage up. Perhaps it was a feeling of needing this. Perhaps it was just something she had trouble admitting to herself:

  She was falling for one of her subjects.

  Paula Quinn was attracted to Charlie Urquart despite his strangeness, his total lack of charm, his messy apartment, and perhaps most importantly to her, the feeling of dread she got when she was close to him. She both wanted him and wanted to run from him. Instead, she got in bed with him, and it began.

  3

  Sex was enjoyable if mechanical, but she didn’t expect to enjoy it—all those pictures on the wall watching her as she disrobed clumsily seemed to whisper that this was a public event, not a private one. She felt that at any moment one of the people in the photos would start whistling and clapping. Charlie seemed pretty eager to get her clothes off, and then sighed as he looked at her naked.

  “I’m naked but you’re not,” she said. “That doesn’t seem terribly fair.”

  “I’m a little self-conscious,” he chuckled.

  “You could turn the lights down.”

  “No, I like having them on.” He grinned like a little boy, and then kissed her left breast. “You know I’ve got scars.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “The major one’s on my left leg, above the knee. I got bit once.” He undid his pants, stepping out of them. She probably wouldn’t have noticed the marks on his thigh if he hadn’t told her, or she would’ve thought nothing of them. Skin had been grafted just above the knee. “What bit you?”

  “Mad dog.”

  “That must’ve hurt.”

  “It’s hard to remember pain. Sometimes I try, but it doesn’t seem as bad as, say, the last time I came down with the flu.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to another scar, just below his knee—it was less a scar than an indentation.

  “Oh, I always forget that one, it was so long ago, it’s practically a birthmark. I was about twelve. Maybe eleven. I was playing around my father’s workshop and he got mad and wanted to teach me how dangerous his power tools were. He was a smart man. He taught me all right. I learned all about power tools that day.”

  “You used one the wrong way and cut yourself?”

  “No, nothing like that. To teach me the lesson, my father put his chainsaw against my leg and just turned it on for a second. Funny, huh? He had an entire routine. See, I’d do something, wrong, in this case, fool around with his work tools. The first time he’d say, ‘That’s one,’ and the second time, ‘That’s two’ and finally, you know, ‘That’s three,’ and that’s when he’d get down to business. So he took this chainsaw and put it on my leg, switched it on—for just a second—made this cut, I screamed, and he told me, you know, ‘See what you get for messing with things you don’t know about,’ and ‘I gave you two chances before this.’ Good old Pop.”

  She didn’t mention the small round scars on his chest and arms, but he saw her looking at them as he took his shirt off.

  Sometimes I think I hear him whenever I screw up, saying, ‘That’s one.’”

  He kissed each of her breasts.

  4

  “They bother me.” She said this after the great act itself was over, and they both lay there, looking at anything but each other.

  “The...scars?”

  “No. The walls.”

  He glanced around his room. “Oh.”

  “Don’t you think it’s even slightly creepy?”

  “I guess so. Nothing drives me crazier, though, than a blank wall.”

  “Do you think there’s a correlation between your waking dreams and the pictures?”

  “I think,” he said, leaning back on his elbows, scanning the faces on the wall, “the pictures keep her away.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who took away my sleep.”

  “Is she real?”

  “You mean is she in my dreams or did I know her? Both. And she’s not my mother.”

  “I’m not trying to psychoanalyze you, Charlie. Just curious. Just want to know what you’re thinking about.”

  “What do you think of during sex?”

  Paula blinked. “I don’t know. I guess I don’t think a lot during sex.”

  “I think about her. No matter who I do it with, I’m always doing it with her.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I can’t help it I don’t try to think o
f her, it just turns out that way.”

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s someone I was...involved with. That, as they say, accounts for my troubled youth. I tried to kill her.”

  “You tried! Did you?”

  “Kill her? No. That would’ve been too easy. You look relieved.”

  “Well, I mean, the thought of sleeping with a murderer isn’t high on my list of things to do.”

  Charlie smiled. “I guess not. I guess I should call a cab for you, ho-ho.”

  “I can’t spend the night?”

  “You want to?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re crazier than I am. You some kind of masochist? Wait—I know, you don’t believe me, do you?”

  “I believe you, Charlie, I’m just tired and I like you.”

  “I like you, too, Paula.”

  “If I fall asleep, will you lie here with me and pretend to sleep?”

  “You bet,” he whispered, nuzzling against her.

  Looking up at the Madonna and child on the ceiling, she said, “And protect me from them, too, will you?”