Laughing Man

by Wright, T. M.

  He wished that he had kept a photo album. He thought that it would have thousands of photographs in it, and they would show not only him, but all the people in his life, from the moment of his birth. They would show his sisters, his mother, and his dead father. They would show all the women he had slept with, and all the murder victims whose eyes or wounds or lives he had looked into—the woman in Central Park who'd had her throat slashed and her red wig stolen, the woman in Harlem whose husband had shot her first with a handgun, then with a shotgun, and, finally, had put an arrow through her heart, all in an effort, he said, "to destroy the evil that settled in her" when she joined a weight-loss club. The man on 42nd Street who had simply been beaten to death for his wallet. The family in Queens who had been variously shot, drowned, and stabbed, and then incinerated by a perpetrator who had never been caught. And a thousand other victims, some unique, most mundane, culminating in the women who'd had cheap chocolate stuffed in their mouths and their faces cleansed.

  And all the photographs in his personal photo album would be in black and white because that was the way he saw scenes from his past—in black and white.

  Except for his birth.

  Which was a world of color, pain, and pleasure. His phone rang.

  He let it ring until it stopped.

  "Damnit!" Patricia David whispered. Where the hell was he? She'd dropped him at his apartment only an hour and a half earlier, and he had seemed to want only to go to bed and get warm. She tried his number again, let it ring nearly two dozen times, hung up. She wished he had a goddamned answering machine, like everyone else.

  She decided that she'd have to go back to his apartment. He was probably asleep, and it wasn't hard to imagine that in his condition he could sleep through a ringing telephone.

  She looked at McBride, who was standing at a file cabinet nearby and was obviously waiting for her to acknowledge him. "I'm going to Erthmun's apartment," she said.

  "You can't," McBride told her. "The lieutenant says he needs us both on this, like now!"

  "It's too bad," Patricia said as she stood and shrugged into her coat.

  "Is that what I tell the lieutenant?"

  "Sure. Tell him it's too bad. Use those words exactly." And she walked briskly past McBride and out of the squad room.

  Erthmun saw his face in his memory. It was in shades of black and white, too. Round and jowly, dark-eyed, thick-lipped, heavy-lidded, and prematurely aged. He thought that age had become a reality when the person on the outside mirrored the person on the inside. He hoped that it wasn't the face that other people saw. He hoped it was a kind of quirky Dorian Gray portrait that only he could see.

  It occurred to him all at once that he had done a lot of sitting at this window, had watched a lot of people passing by. Thousands, maybe. Thousands of victims, and thousands of passersby.

  He became aware that something strange was happening inside him. As if some anonymous thing deep within his biology were bursting or blossoming slowly. This frightened him. He thought it foretold his death, and he did not want to die. He thought again about his Uncle Jack and his last words. "Oh, shit!"—such lazy and damnable resignation in the face of death. He—Jack Erthmun—wasn't going to die that way. He would fight Death, he would spit it in the eye and blind it so it wouldn't recognize him. No one was going to shovel him into a rectangle of earth without a lot of kicking and screaming!

  So what, he wondered, was he doing at this open window, wrapped up in his cocoon of blankets, waiting for that anonymous thing inside him to burst? It was almost as if he were offering himself to it.

  In his mind's eye, he saw himself throwing the blankets off, slamming the window shut, and giving Death a real fight, if only with action and movement and noise.

  But it was a fantasy. He did not move from his cocoon of blankets, the cold breeze pushed hard against his face, and he felt the thing inside him blossoming, as if it were about to slowly consume his internal organs from the inside and leave him nothing but a shell of skin and hair, jowls and heavy eyelids.

  And suddenly he found that this was a gratifying and pleasant thing he was doing. It spoke of some great inevitability that he had long denied, and, with that denial, he pushed back—as if he had lived his entire life tottering on one leg, afraid to fall. What right did he have to spit into the eyes of eternity?

  Helen didn't know how long she had, and it didn't matter. A week. A month. An hour. She would be what she was until she came apart, then the flies and the burying beetles could have her. She had made food of the living. Soon she would be food for the living, and that irony wasn't something she easily understood. She was breasts, hair, gut, teeth, palate, heart, legs, and hunger.

  She was hungry now.

  And so she would eat.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The young homeless couple was peering in a shop window at TV sets. They were both thinking that it would be nice if they had even just one room to live in and that room had a TV set in it. They wouldn't even need a remote control. The TV set could have an old fashioned rotary dial; they wouldn't mind at all getting up from the bed or their chairs to change channels. And it didn't need to be a color set, either, and it didn't need to be hooked up to cable. Three channels would be fine. Two channels would be fine.

  They were on West 161st Street and they had been on their way out of the city, on their way to the George Washington Bridge, then to New Jersey, then Delaware—on their way to South Carolina, eventually—and they had begged enough money to enjoy a breakfast of fried eggs, toast, and coffee, which had been the best eggs, toast, and coffee they'd ever eaten. They had stopped to look in the shop window because, since childhood, they had been addicted to television.

  The young man said, "See, I told you. Reruns of Let's Make a Deal. Look at that. Jesus, Monty Hall's giving away a twenty-five-year-old Dodge."

  His wife said, "It wasn't twenty-five years old, then. It was new."

  "Yeah," he said. "I guess."

  This conversation had been designed to give them each a little comfort because it was one they had had in their pre-homeless days. But now it only punctuated their desperation, and so they quickly moved on.

  It had been a couple of hours since breakfast, and both of them were starting to grow hungry again. After a few days of homelessness, they had tried to ignore hunger pangs, but with little success.

  "It's not such a bad face, is it?" Erthmun whispered to Patricia David, who was bending over him and was looking very concerned.

  "It's a beautiful face, Jack," she said.

  "It doesn't look like the face of a toad?"

  "It's a beautiful face," Patricia repeated. "Jack, can you get up?" She glanced at the open window. "I'm going to close that," she said.

  "No, don't!" Erthmun protested.

  She hesitated only a moment, then stepped over to the window and slammed it shut. Erthmun looked confusedly at it, as if uncertain why he had opened it in the first place.

  Patricia put her hands under his arms. "C'mon, Jack, we've got to get you out of here and to a hospital. You may be suffering from hypothermia."

  "I've got . . . a joke," Jack whispered.

  "A joke? Sure. Tell it to me on the way to the hospital."

  "No. Let me tell it to you now."

  She still had her hands under his arms. She thought he felt very cold beneath his heavy jacket. She let go of his arms, straightened, looked down at him. She could see only the back of his head. "If I let you tell me the joke," she asked, "will you let me take you to a hospital?"

  "To a hospital? Yes," he whispered.

  "Okay. Tell me the joke."

  "It's another word joke, another pun," he whispered, and turned his head a little so he could see her out of the corner of his eye.

  "Yes. Good," she said. "A pun. Tell it to me."

  He turned his head back, fell silent a moment, said, "I don't remember it. It had to do with classical music."

  "Classical music?"

  "Yes."
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  "But you don't remember it?"

  "Don't remember it? Yes. I don't remember it."

  "Does that mean you'll cooperate with me now?"

  He nodded. "Yes."

  "Good." She put her hands under his arms again to help him up.

  He shook his head. "No. I remember the joke."

  "Jack, for Christ's sake, this really is not the time for jokes."

  "It is," he whispered. "Of course it is." He turned his head and looked pleadingly at her. "Who tells jokes, Patricia?"

  "Huh?"

  "People tell jokes. People tell jokes! Let me tell you mine. Then I'll go wherever you want me to go."

  Before their homelessness, the young couple had read both the New York Times and the Post religiously. It had seemed to be a necessary part of living in society. They had both kept up with politics and social issues, and they had read the comics and sports pages, too. He had liked baseball and football. She had liked tennis and auto racing.

  They no longer read newspapers. It didn't seem necessary because they didn't feel that they were a part of society anymore. They felt that society had rejected them, had spit them out.

  If they had continued reading newspapers, they would have seen news about the second massive storm in less than a week that was heading through New York State, driven by fierce arctic winds. So, when the temperature dropped precipitously, and the winds picked up, and the snow started, and when the young man's trick knee began to ache, it was their first hint that they were in trouble, that their plan to make it to the George Washington Bridge today would have to be postponed. That they'd have to find some kind of shelter quickly.

  They were on West 161st Street. The Hudson River was not far to the west. To the east, a row of sad brownstones stood empty. This, they decided, was their salvation.

  "Here's the joke," Erthmun declared. He had begun to shiver. It wasn't continuous—it came and went—and Patricia didn't know if this was a good sign or a bad sign.

  "Yes, the joke," Patricia coaxed. "Go ahead." She was still standing behind him. Snow was pelting the window with a random tap-tap-tap.

  Erthmun sighed, shivered. "Classical music," he said.

  "Do you know about classical music?" He was slurring his words now, and Patricia thought this was a bad sign.

  "Yes, I do," she said, though it was a lie. She wanted to get him moving.

  "Yes," he said, repeated, "Classical music," and added quickly, "What did the . . ." He stopped.

  "What did the . . . what?" Patricia coaxed.

  "What did the . . . shape-shifting classical composer . . ." He stopped. He was slurring his words badly now. Patricia could hardly understand him.

  "What did the shape-shifting classical composer . . . what?" she coaxed.

  "What did the shape-shifting classical composer say?"

  "I don't know."

  "He said this: He said, 'I'm . . ." Erthmun shivered, shook. "He said, 'I'm Haydn now, but I'll be Bach later.'"

  Patricia laughed quickly.

  "I'm Haydn now, but I'll be Bach later," Erthmun repeated.

  Patricia said, "It's funny, Jack. Can we go now?"

  "Funny?" Jack pleaded. "Is it?"

  She said, "Jack, I can't understand you. You're slurring your words."

  "Is it funny?" he repeated, emphasizing each word.

  She understood him. She said, "It is, Jack. It's funny. Didn't I laugh?"

  He shivered again.

  "Didn't I laugh?" Patricia repeated.

  "Yes," Erthmun said.

  "So we can go now?"

  "Go now? Yes," Jack managed.

  Breaking into one of the abandoned brownstones hadn't been as easy as the homeless couple had imagined. They had chosen one whose door still was planked shut because the others, they decided, were probably filled with druggies and other homeless people. But getting the plank off the door was no easy matter. The young man had thought he could simply pull it loose by hand, but it had been nailed into the oak door frame with huge nails, and though he and his wife both tried, they soon realized that pulling the plank loose without some kind of lever would be impossible.

  He told her to wait on the steps of the brownstone while he went looking for something with which to pry the plank loose. The snow, by then, had begun curling around them like a cloud, and the wind was painfully cold, so she agreed to wait for him in a little sheltered area to the right of the front door.

  He looked in the storm for quite a while; at last, he found an abandoned car whose trunk wasn't latched securely. He located a tire iron in the trunk—this was a providential find, he decided—made his way through the storm back to the brownstone, and pried the plank loose from the front door. It was a chore that made his hands ache from exposure to the cold wind and his arms ache from the effort, so when he was done, he cursed into the storm and threw the tire iron away in anger.

  The inside of the brownstone was a place of devastation. A stairway that had once led to the second floor was gone. A homemade wooden ladder stood in its place. Much of the first floor was missing, revealing a basement full of litter and yellow dust. Above, snow was making its way through what could only have been a hole in the roof, down a short hallway, and then over the landing.

  The young woman said, "This is an awful place." Her husband agreed.

  They decided that as soon as possible, they would leave. But for now, it was their only shelter.

  They climbed the homemade ladder to the second floor.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Erthmun dreamed of running. He dreamed that the tall, golden grasses moving past him, as he ran, coalesced into one monolithic golden form because he was running so fast. He dreamed that the sun raced him through the day, and that he outran the noises of insects and birds, and he saw other insects, and other birds, in a blur, trying in vain to flutter out of his way. But he was Death, and he was Life, and nothing could get out of his way, and nothing could stop him.

  It was a wonderful dream, and he did not wake from it at once.

  Patricia David said, "He's smiling."

  The doctor standing with her at Erthmun's bedside said, "A dream."

  "I know," said Patricia David. "I assume that's a good sign."

  The doctor shook her head a little. "It's a dream, that's all."

  In the empty brownstone on West 161st Street, the young homeless couple had busied themselves with talk of architecture because they were trying to ignore their hunger pangs, their desperation, and the storm that had worked into an urban fury beyond the tall windows. Most of these windows were cracked, though none on the second floor were broken, and some had been covered with plywood that, oddly, still smelled of glue and formaldehyde, and still bore a fresh, orange cast.

  The young man had said, "They don't make houses like this anymore."

  The young woman had agreed, and then announced that it was a Federal-style house, to which the young man chortled and said that of course it wasn't a Federal-style house, it was a Late Victorian house.

  There were four rooms on the second floor. They were of a uniform size—large enough for a double bed and a couple of dressers, though the rooms were empty now—and each had a small closet with a closed door. The young couple had not looked into any of the closets because their curiosity was not at peak today, and because they did not imagine there was anything in these closets that they wanted to see, or that would be useful to them.

  There was also a bathroom, sans fixtures, except for a water-stained oak medicine cabinet with a cracked mirror. All the walls had been done in a bold, blue-flower print wallpaper that was remarkably well preserved, though water-stained, too, and the floors were hardwood, covered with a fine gray dust, which was undisturbed; the young couple had accepted that this was a good sign.

  They were huddled together in a room that was protected from the direct onslaught of the wind and so was a few degrees warmer than the other rooms. The young man said, "It usually doesn't get this cold in New York."
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br />   "But it gets real hot in the summer," the young woman said.

  "I wish it was summer now," said the young man.

  They fell silent after that, and they maintained silence for quite a while. They did not want to believe that the storm was intensifying, although it was obvious from the whining noise the storm made against the window glass. They didn't want to admit, either, that the day was ending, that the pale light in the house was beginning to fade. Cold, darkness, and hunger in such a place as this was not what they had planned for themselves a year earlier. They had planned babies, mortgages, car payments, barbecues on balconies that overlooked Central Park.

  Erthmun's dream of running ended and became a dream of disease. He saw the earth beneath his feet rise up in great globular pustules that ran with putrefaction and partly coagulated blood. This blood clogged the mouths of living things around him—insects, animals, birds, people at play—and made them gasp for air and fall dead. Then they became globular pustules that ran with putrefaction and coagulates that clogged open mouths; these open mouths appeared from the earth around him, from within mounds of fallen leaves and punctured mushrooms and flower petals. These open mouths became open eyes that were sky-blue, and they quickly became clouded with coagulates. Then there were faces in the earth, open rosebud mouths and open sky-blue eyes, and noses clogged with coagulates and clumps of earth.

  Then the earth was alive with dark creatures that ran naked through golden grass and mounted one another and laughed and ate and ate and ate, and mounted one another, and mounted one another and watched the air change and the living things sleep, and dream, and die, and then they died, too.

  And the earth was a place of disease and cold and death. Erthmun himself was running naked in this place. His bare feet plunged into hip-deep snow, and he leaped as if he were weightless through it. Then the snow caught him, held him, clogged his mouth, his nose, clouded his eyes, became warm, became clumps of wet, warm earth, became great globular pustules that spouted partially coagulated blood and putrefaction, and then there were mouths in the putrefaction, mouths spitting out the coagulates, mouths screaming, mouths crying. "I am human! I am human!"