I said, my voice distorted by my mask, “Nice disguise, Walker.”
“You’re not bad yourself, Doc.”
“How did you recognize me?” I asked.
“I saw you from across the street. I saw you put your mask on.”
I took my mask and gave it back to Peggy. I introduced her to Walker. He shook her hand and said to me, “God takes care of babes and fools. He sure took care of you.”
I struck him playfully on the side of the head.
Walker cried out and staggered back. Peggy, the vendor and I laughed. But there were tears in Walker’s eyes. The bandage had turned red where I had struck him. I said, “Is that ketchup or tomato sauce?”
Walker put a hand gingerly to the red spot on his bandaged face. He said, “You hurt me, Doc. That’s blood. Real blood. That’s no fake. You hurt just like the rest of ’em.”
I laughed and said with mock concern, “I’m sorry,” and pretended I was about to hit him again. He jumped back. He seemed afraid I might actually harm him. He was always a good actor.
“Oh no, you don’t, Doc. Once is enough.”
I laughed.
A taxi, flagged by Peggy, had come to a squealing stop at the curb next to us.
I said to Walker, “We’re going downtown. Need a ride?”
“Why not? Might as well.”
Two blocks into our ride I knew why he had so readily accepted my offer. He pointed to his bandaged head and said, “Want to hear about this?”
I didn’t. I wasn’t ready for another of his stories. But Peggy was. She said enthusiastically, “Yes. Please tell us.”
Walker told us how he was on a cross-town bus on his way to a memorial service in a synagogue when he saw a man with a camera taking pictures of him. He looked up at the man who was now aiming the camera everywhere on the bus except at Walker. Walker became suspicious.
He says, “A fat white guy with a beard and wearing sunglasses in a bus? You gotta be suspicious. Especially when he’s taking your picture and pretending he isn’t.”
Walker told us he took out his own sunglasses and put them on. He picked up the sports page from the empty seat next to him and pretended to read it. He fixed his eyes, behind his sunglasses, on the photographer. Before long, he saw the camera aimed at him. He saw it steady. He heard the click. He looked up. The man was aiming the camera here, there, and everywhere – except at him.
Walker got up from his aisle seat near the middle of the bus and walked towards the front where the man was standing, his back against a metal pole.
“Were you taking my picture?” he asked.
The man paid no attention. Walker asked again, “Did you just take my picture?”
This time the man looked at him. But he still didn’t answer.
Walker tells us, “The guy wasn’t deaf or dumb. He’d come on the bus with another man, a cripple with a yarmulke, and a huge bag on his shoulder. They were talking to each other. The cripple was walking as if he had no toes…” As soon as I hear Walker say that I know why his story sounds familiar. I think: Walker has finally become mad. He has become a character in a novel. I keep quiet. Walker isn’t my patient now.
He says, “I point to the guy’s Minox. I say, ‘You take my picture. I no give permission. Why you do so?’ The guy may be a tourist. Perhaps he doesn’t speak English. I don’t want to upset him. I only want to know why he’s taking my picture and pretends he’s not. But the guy is no tourist. He is as American as you and me, Doc. He says, ‘Don’t be a smartass. You know why.’ I tell him, ‘I don’t. And you better fucking well tell me.’ He shouts, ‘Because you’re a thief! A fucking pickpocket! That’s why.’”
Walker pauses. He has already strayed from the original story. I’m interested in his version. He begins to laugh. I know why. In the original, the pickpocket follows the photographer’s uncle into the lobby of his apartment building and tries to frighten the old man by showing him his penis. I wait. Next to me, Walker is almost beside himself with laughter. He says, “You know I’m circumcised. Right, Doc? I told you so.”
He had told me. But I wouldn’t know until I saw his penis. I could take his word alone for nothing.
He adds, “And I have a small dick. I never told you, because I was afraid you’d laugh at me. Everyone else who saw it did.”
I’m still waiting. Walker doesn’t seem able now to contain his laughter. He says, as much as it permits him to, “That man was a poet, a fucking genius with words. He made my small black mushroom of a prick a thing of beauty. A large tan-and-purple…”
“…uncircumcised thing,” I recite silently along with Walker, “a tube, a snake; metallic hairs…” But Walker is not quoting verbatim. “…a tube,” he says. “It hung over my great oval testicles; metallic hairs bristled at its thick base and the tip curled with the fleshly mobility of an elephant’s trunk.”
He stops. He has left out parts of the original passage which I had once made it my business to memorize. He has left out the iridescent skin, the disappointed expectation that the black skin should be thick or rough. But his version is good enough. Peggy, who has little time for novels, and has missed more than she knows, bursts out laughing. I see that the taxi-driver, protected from us by his bullet-proof glass, is enjoying himself, too. Walker is clapping his hands and bouncing up and down on the car seat. With his bandaged head, he looks like a mummy brought to life again. He says, “All my life I’ve dreamed of owning a prick like that!”
He decided, Walker says, to enjoy the wonderful instrument the photographer has given him and began to laugh along with the other passengers on the bus. Then he notices that the cripple is not laughing.
I listen to Walker more attentively now. This is all new. This is nothing I remember having read. This is now Walker’s story. He says, “I began to think. I asked myself why the cripple wasn’t laughing. Everyone else was. I thought it was because he was a cripple and was afraid that if he laughed at me, others could laugh at him. I imagined that everyone on the bus who was laughing knew how small my prick really was. And I became ashamed, as if they’d been ridiculing me all the time.”
He pauses. How good he is, I think. Typical Walker. Only he would think of identifying himself with that insulting and dangerous caricature, that criminal and buffoon, civilized – false-frontedly – only in his extraordinarily elegant appearance, who preyed on those least able to defend themselves – weak old men, their poor eyes watering with terror, mouths open with false teeth dropping from the upper gums – who were too foolish to understand that the abnormal thing he carried for a penis was not a gun. But the story is Walker’s now. I no longer can recite silently along with him. I can only listen.
He says, “That son of a bitch was holding the camera above his head like a priest before a fucking altar. He had called me uncircumcised. I don’t know whether he was circumcised or not. I couldn’t tell, anymore than I could tell if his listeners were. But he had boarded the bus with the cripple. I knew only that the cripple and I were circumcised and that everyone else on the bus, circumcised or not, was laughing at me.”
At that point, Walker says, he wanted only to get off the damn bus. He realized that he had gone past his stop and has missed the memorial service. The synagogue was several long blocks behind him. He felt like a fool, Walker says, who has been busy laughing only at himself. The photographer was still holding the camera above his head as if it was the Holy Eucharist. All Walker could think of was to take it away from him.
Walker, with us, is no longer laughing. He says, “I wanted to fuck his mother, his wife and his sister with that monstrous tool he had given me. I wanted to hold up his uncle with a fucking gun, not any goddamned prick. I wanted to protect myself somehow. But I was too ashamed to let those on the bus see how small my penis really was. I thought, take the Minox from him, take it from him and break it up. Then perhaps the people might forget what he told them about me. I thought I was going mad with embarrassment.”
Walker says h
e took off his sunglasses, and saw that the man’s eyes, behind his own sunglasses, were closed. Walker grabbed for the Minox. The photographer would not give it up. He and Walker began to fight for it.
The other passengers screamed. The driver stopped the bus. He opened the front doors and Walker and the photographer tumbled onto the street. Walker was holding the photographer by the neck against the front of the bus, and struggling to take the camera away from him. He heard an old male voice say something in a language he didn’t understand. He turned and saw an old man, elegantly dressed in an old-fashioned way. He turned back to the photographer. From the other side, he heard a younger, more vigorous voice speaking the same language. He was turning, still holding the photographer by the throat against the front of the bus, to see the owner of this new, soft-spoken voice when, Walker says, the world fell on the side of his face.
He laughs again now, a quieter laugh. He says, seated between Peggy and me, “It wasn’t the world at all. It was the goddamn baize bag that had hit me.”
Walker began to fall. He saw the cripple smiling and winding up to hit him again. The cripple struck. Walker fell to the ground. There was a terrible roar in his ears, as if the world was grinding to a stop and, above the roar, he heard faintly the voices of the old man and the mad man who had all but killed him, talking in their strange language to each other.
Walker stops. I almost jump out of my seat and shout, “Bravo!”
Peggy says, “How awful!”
I want to tell her that it is only a story, that Walker stole the incident from a novel. I want to say it’s only words but that Walker, foolishly, thinks he can become important by pretending that what the words describe actually happened to him. I want to say that it is his way of drawing attention to himself, to tell Peggy that she could not trust people like Walker. He was a fantasist, a fabulator, a mythomaniac. He did not deal with reality. Only in it. And I want to warn her not to waste her time or her sympathy on paranoiacs and hysterics, people who believed they were victims or heroes or martyrs, attention-craving people who did not themselves believe the lies they told. I want to say to Peggy that, in his own way, Walker was a photographer, too; a skilful exploiter of every background, a strategist and chameleon, a master of camouflage, a perpetual convert. He was my patient, I want to tell Peggy, but even I couldn’t say who Walker was.
I say none of this. Besides, Walker has not yet finished his story. His assailants, the photographer and the old man, had visited him in the hospital. They brought him flowers and an apology. They had made a mistake. He was not the man the photographer thought he was.
“I accepted the flowers and the apology,” he tells Peggy and me. “I couldn’t do anything else. I was stoned from all those painkillers. I shook their hands. Even the hands of the mad man who had almost killed me. He was an Israeli from Eastern Europe. He wanted to immigrate, to become American. I saw how big his arms and shoulders were and knew I was lucky to be still alive. I’m not angry. We all do what we have to do to get on.”
He pauses. He begins again to chuckle, then openly to laugh. He says, “But you know what? I’ll sue the sons of bitches.”
He looks with mock suspicion at me. He asks, “You’re sure you aren’t in the habit of riding that bus, Doc? Don’t you need a doctor’s touch to be a good pickpocket?”
I laugh. Like me, he really has forgotten nothing of that book. Peggy asks the driver to stop the taxi. We are near her friend’s house. She puts on her mask and her gloves. She does not want to risk being recognized. I put on my mask and my gloves, too. The three of us get out of the taxi. The driver says he almost doesn’t want to take the tip, he’s enjoyed himself so much! He takes it anyway. Peggy and I say goodbye to Walker and the two of us walk to the party, indistinguishable, beneath our costumes, from any other masked and costumed American.
“Poor Walker,” Peggy says, “It can’t be true, can it?”
I don’t answer. I remember Jonathan’s picture in the papers. I had been about to buy the paper when Walker interrupted me. I make a note to get a copy of Jonathan’s novel as soon as possible.
We climb up the stairs of the brownstone where Peggy’s friend lives. I knock on the door. It opens, and the sound of people enjoying themselves is loud. A masked and costumed person at the door motions us in. Without a word, so as not to give herself away, Peggy enters the house. I follow her.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
At first, everyone else at the party had tried to conceal his or her identity from the others. Everyone spoke in a disguised voice, used unself-revealing gestures and assumed postures they normally did not assume. Everyone was overjoyed when one uncovered another. An unselfconscious laugh, an exclamation in a carelessly familiar or no longer sufficiently disguised voice; an involuntary gesture, well known to friends, gave one away. Someone else named him or her excitedly, in a normal voice, and was, in turn, hilariously recognized. I had the pleasant impression that I was on stage among actors in a play. I was not myself an actor. I was neither of the discovered nor of the discoverers. I could not be recognized by anyone other than Peggy. I had no need, behind my mask, further to disguise myself. I spoke in my own voice, used my natural gestures, carried myself as I usually did. The party went on and people gradually forgot their posturings and began more and more to enjoy themselves. I could only pretend that I enjoyed the unwitting self-revelations as much as the others. And though, in the end, I too was discovered, it was only because everyone, having recognized everyone else but me, knew that I had to be Peggy’s friend. I took off the mask then.
Now, the party was over and Peggy and I were on the streets again. She said she didn’t want to take a taxi. She wanted to walk, at least for part of the way. The early morning air was cool on my face. The unfamiliar taste of bourbon lingered pleasantly on my tongue. The goblins, imps and other magical creatures had disappeared from the streets. The nearly empty pavement did not seem menacing. The few people we passed – couples, costumed and unmasked like us; a small group of costumed revellers, unmasked, too; a solitary drunk now and then – seemed too ordinary to be dangerous. On the street, the cars and trucks and buses, following their headlights, seemed to be apart, in a world of their own. But at a corner newsstand, near which we were waiting for the light to change, the headlines screamed at me that another foolhardy white had been killed in the ghetto.
I suggested the taxi again to Peggy. She had not seen the headlines. She said she wanted to walk. I suggested that we pay Paul a visit and give him the news about her book. When she said yes, I suggested the taxi again. I did not think she could possible want to walk the several blocks to Paul’s home near the Cultural Center. But she did. I put myself in her hands. I was in a good mood. I had laughed a lot at the party. I was tipsy. I was having a good time.
We reached the Cultural Center and took a short cut through it to Paul’s apartment building. The large concrete plaza, which I usually saw full of visitors during the day, or lit up and full of concert or theatregoers at night, was dimly lit and empty now. Its water-fountain was quiet. Our footsteps on the pavement were loud. I felt safe and comfortable. I put an arm about Peggy’s shoulders. We neared the centre of the plaza. The hum of the cars and trucks, cut off partly by the buildings, and gradually diminishing, seemed very far away. Above the distant hum, we began to hear the sounds of skates on concrete. These became louder and louder as we approached the concert hall, and we saw three figures skating ahead of us under one of the far-spaced electric lampposts.
They were masked, and dressed like clowns. One had a jester’s cap on. Another was a harlequin. The third wore a costume like mine and his mask was exactly like the one I had left behind at the party. I became uneasy. But the skaters paid no attention to us. The one wearing the jester’s cap had skates on his hands as well as on his feet. He skated on his feet. He skated on his hands, his feet in the air. He brought his feet down again and skated, his back to the sky, on hands and feet, on feet and one hand, and on hands and one fo
ot. He skated again on all fours, then raised his upper body upright and, without a pause and skating all the time, bent slowly over backwards until he was skating on his hands and feet again, leading now with his feet, his belly curved and facing up to the sky.
He stopped, was perfectly still for a second, then began to skate in the opposite direction. He completed a circle around the lamppost, then slowly began to bring his upper body up until he was erect again and skating backwards.
It was a spectacular display. I began to applaud wildly. I pulled Peggy closer to the edge of the circle of light in which the skaters were performing and we watched them. They seemed engrossed in their performance and unaware of us. But when, after a while, we began to move away, they followed.
Peggy said, “Isn’t that nice?”
“They’re serenading us,” I said.
Perhaps because he had seen my costume beneath my open overcoat, the skater who was dressed like me broke away from the group and began to circle about us. Peggy and I clapped our hands and smiled to encourage him. He circled us slowly two or three times, then stretched out a gloved hand, palm up, as if for me to hit it. I hit it eagerly. I wanted to express my appreciation for his performance. I felt a slight electric shock and pulled my hand quickly out of his, laughing at the prank. He threw his head backwards, uttered no sound, But I imagined that, behind his mask, he was laughing, too.
He offered me his hand again. I took it, prepared to be shocked. I felt nothing. I laughed. He circled a few times, then offered his hand. I took it, uncertain whether I would be shocked or not. After he had done this three or four times, I began to enjoy playing with him. I found the game pleasantly confusing.
His companions were skating ahead of us. Every now and then they fanned out and disappeared into the dimly lit night, like scouts reconnoitring or like babies testing how far they could move away from their parents before returning to them. From time to time, they fell back and joined their friend in skating around us. It was, indeed, as if they were, with their performance, serenading Peggy and me.
Prisnms Page 11