by Martin Amis
“ ‘Tod Friendly’? What the fuck kind of name is that?”
“There,” said the kid. “Clean.”
We had to keep going away and coming back again. The basement stall got harder and harder to find our way out of. We tried to eat. We fished stuff out of the trash cans in Washington Square Park, a sandwich, an apple intact but for the missing bite, then to the Superette for nickels and dimes. Time passed. Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are. Until this final exchange.
“Well then,” we said, with perhaps inappropriate bitterness, as the kid handed over our new papers, plus a whole ton of money. “I’m at your mercy.”
“Double,” he said.
“You tell me.”
“I hope he told you how it goes on this same-day shit. At a weekend.”
“Good.”
“Yeah. From the Reverend.”
“You’re expecting me. My name is John Young.”
And that was it. My name is John Young.
The longest day, it really was the longest day ever. Already the train ride seemed years distant, like Wellport, like old age. But John Young couldn’t sleep. With its sounds of many cars and few birds, dawn faded. And John Young lay there, wanting fear to be over. Over … I thought of the chess players in the park, where we sat for so many hours, the chess players, more various by far than the pieces they wielded (the players not erect, not regulated, but mumbling, shambling, rhomboid). Each game, it’s true, begins in disarray and goes through episodes of contortion and cross-purpose. But things work out. All that scowl and elbow and tenseness of posture, all that agony—it works out. One final tug on the white pawn, and perfect order is restored; and the players at last look up, smiling and rubbing their hands. Time will tell, and I put my trust in time, absolutely. As do the chess players, of course, every move legitimated by the slapped clock.
Thank God. He’s out. Like a baby. Though naturally I’m still here: even in the darkness I keep a watch upon the world. Sometimes—now, for instance—I look down on Tod, on John, as a mother might (mother night), and try to find hope in the innocence or neutrality of his sleep.
So now we wake up a new man. John Young. Johnny Young. Or how about Jack Young? I kind of like it. Ho hum. Feeling no pain suddenly. Reach out here (whoops) for a cleansing few gulps of … Jesus. Wild Turkey.
Our clothes came at us from all over the room. A shoe like a heavy old bullet thrown out of the shadows, and skillfully caught, off-balance and one-handed; windmilling trousers trapped by the foot and then kicked up onto the leg; that serpent necktie. I got a very bad feeling as we pitched into the bathroom and fumbled for the mouthwash. Then we knelt before the altar of the can—and pulled the handle. The bowl filled with its terrible surprises. Oh, man. We’ve done this once or twice before, as I vividly recall. It seems to me about the most you can ask of the human body. Now we solaced our brow on the porcelain, and emitted a few sour gasps of disgust. And got down to it. The premise for alcohol abuse, one gathers, is that consciousness, or selfhood, or corporeality, is intolerable. But it is intolerable. Certainly when you’re chockful of gangrene. Here it comes again, consciousness, weary, multiform, intolerable.
We went out into New York City and staggered here and there through the Village and drooled it all out in bar after bar. They wouldn’t serve us at the first few joints we tried, which wasn’t surprising, because we came through the door yelling our head off, or trying to, in this faulty new voice of ours. There was, I remember, quite a restful interlude up some alley or other, during which we reclined panting on a heap of cardboard boxes; then two young men jovially gathered us up and escorted us back into the action. Next we went to see what the hell was going on in a couple of places farther down the block. I can understand why John was overexcited by New York, where, at night, life and all its color and reflection is folded out onto the street, and not shut in and huddled, behind the glow of windows. In any event by six o’clock he was in okay shape. Outside the last bar the cab was waiting remorselessly, the driver with his face averted, waiting to take me somewhere I didn’t want to go.
Like the driver I knew where we were going without being told. The fireman’s ladder of Seventh Avenue, climbed on the rungs of the cross streets, uptown, then the swinging rope of Broadway. This must be Nicholas Kreditor, our weatherman, and the Imperial Hotel.
The man, the Reverend, was big, handsome, sad, and powerful. He had the snouty, screen-filling face of a politician. Not that he’d ever get anywhere with it, in the U.S., not these days anyway. The coloring was wrong, the tango-tutor’s mustache was wrong. I thought instantly that there was something pathetic and obscene about his thick burgundy suit, which made you wonder what other kinds of outfit or uniform he’d like to dress up in. His black necktie was steadied by a gold pin the shape of a crucifix. There were other religious accessories around the place and, on the walls, idealized renderings of New Testament scenes. We sat facing him from the customer’s end of a leather-topped desk. Sinisterly, there were two beds in this inner room, twin beds, with identical coverlets and cushion arrangements.
For a while he talked details, addresses, some familiar, some not. Then he said,
“I just want to make clear that I pay you every correctitude for what you were involved in over there.”
John said gratefully, “All I ever wanted to do was help people.”
“You’ll be able to continue with your fine work. I guarantee it.”
He guaranteed it. With his limp shrug. The Imperial was full of old people. It was an old-people hotel. We had seen and sensed them on our way up, their tentative postures, their unanimity of hesitation. Judging by his office suite, and his strictly localized charisma, I assumed that the old people were partly in Kreditor’s care. I guarantee it.… You could imagine him guaranteeing a lot of things, or at least saying he guaranteed things a lot.
John said, “I do want to go on helping people.”
“Make a clean break and resume elsewhere. It’s another plus you have no family.”
“That’s necessary?”
“Better yet,” he said, “just leave New York. Thus far in it’s all at state level. We’re not talking San Cristóbal. We’re talking New Jersey. We’re not even talking Canada.”
“That I don’t need.”
“Our backup could take the form of a defense fund and legal help.”
“What do you advise?”
“The Immigration and Naturalization Service. To revoke your citizenship.”
“Explain.”
“Worst case: the Justice Department makes an application to the INS.”
The Reverend paused. “God forbid,” he said, and touched his cruciform tiepin with a buxom fingertip. For a moment, again, he looked sad and powerful. The sadness, perhaps, of the intercessor or shaman who, though in close and constant touch with the spirit world of angels and demons, is often oppressed by the thought of his own talentlessness—when set against their virtues and glamours, their hoodoos, their evil eyes.
“The only present danger,” Kreditor resumed, “is if the press pick up on it like they did with that poor, poor lady in Queens.”
John waited. He was staring at the twin beds. Then, both quickly and suddenly, he turned to the Reverend—who was now holding before him a photograph, of which he allowed us only the briefest glimpse. Thank Christ. This photograph, this swipe of grain, so briefly glimpsed: I could tell it contained extraordinary information. It was black and white. It was about power. Twelve men were depicted there, in unmistakable configuration. Twelve men, but two distinct human types, equally represented, six of one type, half a dozen of the other. The first type had power, and safety in numbers. The second type had no power—had numbers, but no safety: numbers conferred only grief and weakness. The first type was silently saying something to the second type. Six men were saying to the other six: Whatever else divides us, whatever else is between us, only one thing matters. We belong to the living, you to the dead. We are
the living and you are the dead. The dead.
“So. All they have is this, which is thirty years old, and two so-called witnesses.”
“Nothing,” said John.
“What, nothing?”
“I had no criminal record.”
“The usual catch: did you lie about your criminal record?”
“Ah.”
“It’s taking the form of inquiries about your U.S. naturalization.”
“Go on.”
“There’s some heat,” said Kreditor.
And I wondered if he meant the heat that was all over John’s body. Now John looked away shyly and said, “My mother …”
Kreditor seemed interested. “That’s a plus for us.”
“My first language.”
“Hey, that’s right, I remember. You’re the one with no accent.”
The two men stood up and shook hands. John said,
“I’m going to tell you the truth. Yesterday was better.”
“Sir, how are you today?”
“Reverend.”
“Doctor.”
John and I returned to our new home, but it was difficult, at first, to take any pleasure in the place (the vast skylight, for example), John’s state being what it was. It would have been nice to be able to keep out of his way. A woman, someone like Irene, I know, would have found him horrible to be near. So you can imagine what he was like to be inside.
Then the Reverend called, with his news about the weather turning stormy, and I thought he was the last person we needed to hear from. But after that, well, it was all sea breezes. The afternoon passed in happy loneliness, TV, newspaper, the inspection of various little perplexities: waste disposer, toenail, shirt button, light bulb. Consciousness isn’t intolerable. It is beautiful: the eternal creation and dissolution of mental forms. Peace … As noon approached John adopted a behavior pattern that I knew well: stretching, scratching, complacently sighing. It meant that he was about to go to work.
I could only watch as he changed. The short-sleeved bib, the white smock. I looked for the black boots. No. Just the white clogs. What hope from them? John was purged now, and fully awake to the world.
As he walked the five blocks no one tried to stop him. The heavens didn’t weep above his head, nor did the fat-cheeked clouds assume sneers of calamity. Likewise the ground, the concrete, which did not cleave to devour or entomb him. And the wind ditto, smoothing past in sweet-zephyr form, no devil-breath, no hurricano. I could adduce only the hopeless weeping of a child, the terrified stare of a black bum on Thirteenth and Seventh, and the way all the walkers, city-users, the tragedians of the street—the way they all seemed to be fleeing, and the uniformed ones (those that are responsible) saying, Don’t mind us. We just wreck buildings or We just start fires or We just scar highways or We just spread trash. Here is the building, with doormen, porters, receptionists, wheeling caterers, hurrying stretcher-bearers, who know who we are. Dr. Young. For we, we, we!—we demolish the human body.
At such times, I conclude, the soul can only hang in the dark, like a white bat, and let darkness have the day. Beneath, the body does what it does, in mechanical exertions of will and sinew, while the soul waits. It must be safe to assume—surely to God—that this is it. This is the gravamen of the dreams of Tod Friendly, of John Young, where the half-dead stand in line and a white-coated figure sweats with power, cruelty, and beauty, with all that is entirely unmanageable. But the dreams lied. I thought (I was sure) that our transgression would be some kind of departure. I thought it would be extraterritorial, out of society, forming its own new universe. I certainly never figured Tod/John for a life of crime. And yet it turns out to be the same old stuff only worse, more, again, further. I mean, where is the limit? Show me the ultimate intensifiers of sin. What can you categorically not do to someone else’s body? I won’t claim ignorance. Pretty much the same sort of shit was coming down at AMS, if we’d gone looking for it, and of course it was happening all over town at well-known locations: St. Mary’s, St. Andrew’s, St. Anne’s. It is general. It is general hospital. Nobody can pretend for a minute that they don’t know what’s going on. The ambulance is out there screaming for all to hear, its lights looping, lassoing: watch us hog-tie all the horrors of the night. Behind the fringe of orange crime-scene tape, on the street, the chalked outline of a human body. Here we are in our fatigues, delivering our damage. Stand back! People—don’t interfere. Let us do what we need to do.
The air of the hospital is lukewarm, and it hums, and tastes of human organs obscurely neutralized or mistakenly preserved. We the doctors move between ceiling and floor, between striplight and the croak of linoleum. In these passages there is a feeling of necessary novocaine; morally we are like the refrigerated tongue on the dentist’s chair, mouth open as wide as it ever goes to the instruments of pain, but speechless. In the operating room you can only see my eyes. Here the men cover their hair with paper caps, the women with scarves. On my feet are wooden clogs. Clogs. Why clogs? I wear my surgical gown, my skintight rubber gloves. I wear an outlaw’s mask. My headlight band is connected to a transformer on the floor, half-submerged in blood. The cord goes down my back, under my surgical gown, and wiggles around behind me, like tail of monkey, tail of fiend. With our eyes we see only the eyes of the others there. The victim is invisible, fully shrouded: except for the bit we’re working on. When it’s over, we wash our hands like trained neurotics. The printed sign on the mirror enjoins: Each Finger Nail Should Be Stroked Fifty Times. Finger Tips Should Be Kept Higher Than Elbows. Each Stroke Requires Two Motions. Each Finger Has Four Sides. Then the fluorescence of the locker room, its cord carpet and steel shelves, the laundry barrels and the fattest trash cans you ever saw, from which we fish our presmeared tackle. Out in Casualty it’s always Saturday night. Everything is possible.
You want to know what I do? All right. Some guy comes in with a bandage around his head. We don’t mess about. We’ll soon have that off. He’s got a hole in his head. So what do we do? We stick a nail in it. Get the nail—a good rusty one—from the trash or wherever. And lead him out to the Waiting Room where he’s allowed to linger and holler for a while before we ferry him back to the night. Already we’re busy with this bag lady we’ve got, welding sock and shoe plastic onto the soles of her evil feet.… When we’re done with the bad ones, we can’t wait to get them out of here. Gangway. It doesn’t matter. There’s always more.
I keep thinking I know them. This happens ten times a day. I keep thinking I know them, these that are wheeled on trolleys or borne on stretchers. Wait. Wasn’t that Cynthia, who worked in the deli? Was that woman maybe Gaynor, whom I knew with the act of love? But surely this is Harry, the doorman at the Met. It all happens so fast. I can’t hear, with the screams and the ribcrack. Whose child is that? Wasn’t he the kid who used to dash across the road, back in Wellport? So many years. Slow. Children.
But then again our world is suddenly very full, humanly, full of faces and voices. Everybody knows me. I am not referring to the victims, of course, who don’t know me and who, for all practical purposes, aren’t human but come in sections of interest, so that even their smiles and yawns and frowns come in sections. (This habit I have of thinking I know them—as humans—is mistaken, and inappropriate. I don’t know them.) I know everybody else. For the first time in my life I have friends, and interests, shared interests, like baseball and opera and partying, and I gleam and bobble with privilege. All these strangers know me. From the outset the whole team here at the hospital was instinctively pally and collegial. Esprit de corps is first rate, even idealistic. The thing called society—it’s behind us. We mediate between man and nature. We are soldiers of a sacred biology. Because I am a healer, everything I do heals, somehow. The thing called society is, I believe, insane. In the locker room the steel grills are pasted with letters that say, Thanks for your kindness for making a tough time much easier to bear, and If it wasn’t for all of you there at the hospital I don’t know how we would have
survived. The doctors read these thank-you notes with tears in their eyes, especially when gratitude is expressed in a childish hand. Not Johnny Young, though. Perhaps he knows, as I do, that the letters are propitiatory. The children (“7 yrs”) haven’t been here yet. They won’t be so grateful when we’re through.
We have many hobbies (life has filled up and fanned out), but our main extracurricular interest, naturally, is women’s bodies. Women’s bodies, which Johnny finds so much more interesting, by so many magnitudes, than everything else put together. He isn’t after women’s bodies for only one thing, not Johnny. He is after women’s bodies for all the other things too: love, spiritual communion, loss of self, exaltation. Women’s bodies bring out all his finer feelings. The fact that a woman’s body has a head on top of it isn’t much more than a detail. Don’t get me wrong: he needs the head, because the head wears the face, and supplies the hair. He needs the mouth; he badly needs the mouth. As for what the head contains, well, yes, Johnny needs some of the things that live in there: will, desire, perversity. To the extent that sex is in the head, then Johnny needs the head.
Originally I was going to adopt a distant and defeated tone. Something like: As for John’s sexual life during our years here in the city, suffice it to say that he dated a lot of nurses. But it doesn’t suffice. Saying something like that never does suffice. It’s true about nurses, by the way. Or it’s true about the nurses John dates, and they seem to be a pretty typical crowd. The work looks like hell to me, it looks like loin-death from where I’m sitting, but hospitals are erotic—that’s what they all say. They’re always ribbing one another about it. Blood and bodies and death and power. I suppose you can see the connection. They are reconciling themselves to their own mortality. They are doing what we all have to do down here on earth: they are getting ready to die. Thus, for Dr. Young, the fatal, the mortal, the life-deciding interest in women’s bodies. What can it be about women’s bodies, apart from their being so incredibly interesting?