Hunger and Thirst

by Richard Matheson

  Finally he jerked them off his feet and dropped them.

  “Lie down,” Lynn said, “Take a nap, the party will be over soon.”

  “Oh. Okay. Th-thanks … Lynn.”

  “Go to sleep,” Lynn said and closed the bedroom door behind him.

  Erick lay down in the darkness, smelling the coat beside him on the bed.

  Then he sat up and dropped his legs over the edge of the bed. He reached out and felt the warm fur. He stroked it absently. Then his fingers twitched away from the itchy hair and he stood up suddenly and walked to the window. He looked down over the street, watching cars pass, watching the lights of the city flashing on. He saw the red light on top of the Empire State building. He wondered again what a fur coat was doing there in August, it was so hot. The street was airless. Heat seemed to simmer in the air. He felt it now, like hot damp hands caressing him, clutching, rubbing at him lethargically.

  He turned back. He was dreadfully thirsty. He wondered if the bathroom were empty. He tiptoed to the door and listened leaning his forehead against the door. He heard the laughter and the gabbing. He opened the door a little and the noise pried its way through the crack.

  The bathroom door was still shut. He closed the door and suddenly realized that he hadn’t eaten since the night before when he got home from the walk. He remembered the fountain in the park and wished he were there in the darkness leaning over it and letting the cold water gush down his throat. If that little boy were in the way he would kill him.

  And if he were by the lake he would walk into it without hesitation. It wasn’t the erratic, half crazy impulses anymore. It was a complete, non-argumentative desire to end his life. He was certain of it.

  So certain that he walked to the window and put one foot up on the sill.

  If there hadn’t been a screen there which he couldn’t open he would have stepped up and over. But it would have been ridiculously petty to fumble with a screen catch at such a moment. And, by that time, the reaction had come anyway and he was shivering, visualizing himself on the street bloody and crushed, he felt the crushing pain of himself on the street bloody and crushed, he felt the crushing pain of himself hitting the pavement.

  Another reaction. He wanted himself to be dead and punished for what he had done. Suddenly, he clenched his right fist and drove it brutally against his chest. He struck himself again and lurched back, losing balance. He fell on the floor with a thump and felt a sharp pain in his back and hips. He sat there fearfully, heart beating rapidly, afraid they had heard and would come in en masse to laugh at him sprawled on the floor.

  He pushed himself up with a grunt and sank on the bed. He lay on his side and stared at the window. He saw the lights of the apartment across the street and saw some people moving around like robots. It was a woman, a man. They seemed to be rearranging things. All they did was move from room to room.

  He found the looking more and more painful until he realized that he was squinting his eyes, bunching together the flesh around them. He relaxed his eyes and closed them.

  The darkness oppressed him.

  He opened his eyes. He had the feeling that he was trapped. That he was never going to be free again. He knew he could get up and leave the apartment. He could leave the street, the city, the country if he wanted.

  But he was trapped.

  A sense of utter imprisonment covered him. And he knew it would never end. He was sure that, always, in the night or the day, he would walk with the sense of being confined, of having caught himself in some invisible and terrible mesh that could not be severed or released.

  He lay there, as if bound, staring at the window. Then he jumped up as if to prove himself that he could move. He paced like a prisoner in his cell. He looked around anxiously as if he half expected the walls to begin moving in silently, driven by some dreadful machinery until the room was a cell, then a closet and, finally, no space at all but all the walls and ceiling and floor touching together and, in between, the jelly of him all crushed and compressed like pulpy fruit in a grinder.

  He whimpered in fear. He needed someone to run to. He needed someone to bury his face in their lap, someone to stroke his head and say—it is all right now, child. He was afraid of being alone. He had thought for years that he wanted to be alone. Now he knew that it was the most terrible thing in the world. And, suddenly, he had the urge to hitchhike to Connecticut and find the grave of John Foley and sit there quietly with his old friend, feeling his companionship. He wanted to relive the past, knowing the things he once knew. He wanted to be kind to John and loving to Sally and marry her and keep his mother alive and happy and …

  He sat there on the bed, staring blankly at the floor.

  Dead.

  Was she really dead? How could he believe it. Just the night before they had quarreled. She was very much alive then. He had told her that he wasn’t going to get some enervating job and quit writing. Well, the, she said, get yourself a night job and write in the day, no one is asking you to give up your writing. I know, you say that, he said, but you’d just love it if I got some job in an engineering plant and drove myself crazy.

  She had turned her face away and sighed and shaken her head over and over and he had shouted—You would, wouldn’t you! And she hadn’t answered. And a few minutes after she had suffered a small attack and he had seen her cheeks twitch with pain. And he had to get medicine and was a long time in getting it because he was sick of her attacks and wished to hell she’d stop pretending to be sick just to hold him.

  He lay down again, resting on his side. He listened to himself breathing, remembering the morning in Germany when he had lain under his muddied shelter half and listened to himself breathing as if trying to remember exactly how it went so he wouldn’t forget if he were wounded.

  There was something lacking. Something terribly needed. He couldn’t rest. He rolled over with a moan, restless and pounded his fist into the bedspread.

  “No,” he moaned. He yawned then and saw the picture of himself yawning widely as if he were sleepy and nothing else was the matter.

  Then he stared hollow eyed at the wall and watched a pattern of light that shone on the dresser mirror.

  Then he felt it in his hands, the fur coat. He drew it to himself. And, suddenly, pressed his face into it. Wrapped his arms around it and sobbed into its silky softness like a little boy crying his heart out on the warm coat of his dog. When the girl finally went home Lynn had to pry the coat from his arms.

  * * * *

  He lay on the bed in Lynn’s pajamas. The apartment was empty except for the two of them. Lynn was sitting in his underwear, a half demolished drink propped on his knee.

  “When did she die?” he asked.

  “This afternoon,” Erick said, “I went walking, as I said. She had a stroke while I was gone. When I went home she wasn’t there, she was in the hospital. I went to see her and they told me she was …”

  Lynn nodded. He took a sip from his drink.

  “Where are you going to stay?” he asked.

  “I … I have to get a room,” Erick said “I can’t stay with my sister.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh.” He turned away and took the glass off the bedside table and took a long drink from it. “It’s not my sister so much. It’s her husband. I might kill him.”

  “You can stay here until you find a place.” Lynn said.

  Erick swallowed. “Thanks.”

  They had another drink. They talked about college days and people they had known. They avoided talking about his mother or Sally. Erick pretended he didn’t know his mother was dead. He let himself get drunk. He let the room lose shape and the fires bank in his body.

  “I think I’ll take a shower,” Lynn said, “I reek.”

  “Okay,” Erick said.

  Lynn stood up and walked into the bathroom. He didn’t close the door. Erick heard the shower go on. He lay there staring at the creamy white ceiling. He felt the drink filling him with fuzzy warmth. For some
reason he found himself listening to the sound of Lynn’s taking a shower. He touched himself. He found that his heart was beating quickly.

  He snapped up his head from a doze and saw Lynn standing over the bed naked and dripping wet. He was weaving and looking down at Erick. Erick felt something stirring in his body. He felt his stomach muscles tighten. He looked over Lynn’s body. He made no motion as Lynn reached down and opened the pajamas.

  “It’s time, baby,” Lynn said, breathing hard, “Turn out the light.” His face was a sensual mask, his eyes half shut …

  Erick hesitated. Then something broke.

  “All right!” he said, almost angry, almost as if arguing with someone.

  He reached out with a vicious gesture and turned out the lamp.

  “All right!” he snarled, reaching out and grabbing.

  * * * *

  He couldn’t sleep. He lay there tossing, still naked, no longer drunk. He looked over at Lynn who was snoring. Lynn’s hand was still on Erick’s leg. Erick pulled away. His stomach hurt. He stood up on the floor. There was a cool breeze coming through the window.

  He stumbled into the dark hallway and into the bathroom. He stood tensely in the darkness wondering if he should turn on the light. He ran his hands over the cool shape of the sink. Then he ran himself a drink of water. He sat down on the toilet and drank the water and stared at the dark wall.

  Something began.

  Slowly, like someone pouring hot water into him, little by little. It dripped on him and in him endlessly, building up until it became a sloshing pool in him, inundating his organs. He sat there shivering and staring at the wall. He was trying to think, trying to use his mind. But it was as if every time he tried to think, raw emotion would shove the thought aside.

  He heard a sound in the kitchen and was covered with a sudden chill. For a moment he actually believed that his mother was coming to haunt him. He jumped up and stood in the doorway, staring into the living room, almost expecting to see her come fluttering out of the kitchen, white and vengeful. His heart beat in huge rapid beats. He stepped back and sat down heavily. He writhed in fearful agony. His stomach began to burn. He heard Lynn snoring contendedly in the bedroom.

  Suddenly he had the vision of Sally standing over him and Lynn before, watching in silent terror. And the idea that Lynn had finally won his victory after all those years made him twitch violently. Breaths poured from his lungs, his heart best faster and faster. He felt some sort of climax approaching. It couldn’t go on like that. Something had to give.

  “Mother,” he moaned, “Mom.”

  His fingers twitched and the glass shattered on the floor.

  YES!

  He slid wildly off the bowl and dropped with a convulsive sob to his knees. He felt his right knee gouged by a piece of glass. He gasped at the pain but slapped around crazily until he found a dagger of glass.

  Without hesitation he threw up his hand and jerked the sharp glass edge over his throat. He felt a thin line of pain across the flesh and a sudden dripping of blood, on his chest. He sliced impotently at his wrists. He sawed at them with a feverish anger and hysteria. He hacked at them and felt blood running and pain of severed capillaries. Then he dropped the glass and crouched there shivering, his chest heaving with breaths and throbbing with wild heart beats.

  “Oh!”

  He was afraid. Suddenly he was afraid. He pushed up, slipped, fell on his knees. He pushed up again, the pain burning in his wrists. Something gave and he heard a spurt of blood hit the floor like water from a spilled glass.

  He staggered into the hallway, into the bedroom feeling his blood spatter on the floor, grabbing one wrist with shaking fingers, trying to stop the flow and feeling the hot blood running over his fingers, escaping.

  “Lynn!” he screamed, “Lynn!”

  He heard Lynn grunt and sit up suddenly. He heard the blood running, it seemed, faster and faster. Weakness was beginning to cover him.

  “Lynn, I’m bleeding to death!”

  “What!”

  Lynn jolted up and the lamplight flung itself out on Erick. Lynn stood there staring at him, mouth wide, one hand pressed to his cheek in horror.

  “Lynn, I’m …” Erick sank to his knees.

  “God help me,” he moaned sadly, “I’m going to die now.”

  * * * *

  All was lost in a blur of motion and lights.

  It seemed as if that hour were raced like a film run at top speed. It was a cloud of events made up of tightening belts around his wrists and wrapping a towel around his throat. Hurrying down the elevator and into Lynn’s car, driving at top speed to the nearest hospital. Then, of white halls and white-garbed nurses and doctors. And him numbed going through it all like a dizzy, half interested spectator.

  And thinking of only one thing; muttering it over and over.

  “Lynn, I broke your glass. I’m sorry. I’ll reimburse you. I assure you of that. I broke your glass. Lynn, I … “

  And they kept telling him to be quiet. Then finally he fainted and sank into hot blackness. And drifted around in a slow lazy tide of pain, just on the surface like a hollow pea pod.

  10

  All afternoon he stared at the ceiling.

  Not an inch of him moved. He didn’t see anything but the visions in his mind. He didn’t hear anything but the voices of lost people. He didn’t feel anything but a tickling in his throat and the sensation of something bumping endlessly in his chest. He thought it was two people walking about in his chest and, meeting, unable to get past each other because they kept stepping the same way as the other one. He didn’t smell anything but the dead, putrefying mucous in his throat and mouth. He didn’t taste anything. The buds were as hard as wood.

  Outside the casual Saturday traffic grumbled in the streets.

  Half-day workers were gone from the buildings. Only a few remained in the restaurants and drug and cigar stores and the four men in the four newsstands under the elevated steps. Trains ran infrequently. Everything was slowed down.

  It was a grey cloudy day. There were long continents of storm clouds hanging around the edges of the sky. All day it looked like rain. But it never rained. It was gloomy all afternoon. It got dark early.

  All evening he lay there on the bed, a dead weight, eyes wide and staring, his body, corpselike, except for the shallow almost imperceptible movement of his chest.

  SUNDAY

  1

  A door shut loudly.

  His mind fluttered. It was dead silent in the street.

  The house was a listening box. He lay there dry and stiffening, his wide, frozen eyes staring up at the ceiling, at the sky, at the universe, at eternity.

  “Money first or no pussy!” came the simpering voice of a whore.

  “Come on bitch, take it off!” said the drunk, drunk.

  Erick Linstrom, 27, lay dying in the night.

  “Oh no!”

  Flat mirthless laughter. “Money first or no pussy!”

  “God damn whore!”

  A lurching sound, a creak of wood, a body falling on the bed. A muffled curse, a phlegmy cough.

  “You ain’t gettin’ none free from me!” she snapped in her tinny voice, “I sell it!”

  She laughed drunkenly and there was silence while a shattered man thumbed at his grease-lined wallet.

  Erick Linstrom, six foot and a quarter inch, heard his mind praying to someone he did not even understand. Dry flaking lips twitching an Our Father which art in Heaven…

  “That’s better!”

  Nasty and hard and calculating. Sound of handbag clicking open, crumpled bills deposited in a powdery grave suffocated in thick perfumey oven of leather. Handbag dropped on the floor. Rustle of skirt.

  “Here ya are, ya bastard! Take it!”

  Clothes being pulled off ruthlessly. Watery slurping kisses. Hot, dirty hands, feeling, squeezing, pushing, holding. “Strip me, baby, strip me!”

  Thy will be done on earth

  Eyes that would weep
but cannot. Erick Linstrom, 135 pounds, sinking into the black pattern of forever.

  “Why don’t ya shave, ya shaggy bastard!”

  Blatent prostitute cry. Grunts, slurps, tongues licking, hot flesh pressed together. “Give it to me, give it to me!”

  The night defiled by grunts and gasps of animal possession. The darkness vile with panted dialogue of lust. Bed springs shrieking out abuse, excess. Ugly white limbs entwined, hairy stomachs sucking wetly together, air spinning, bubbling with the reek of unclean cavities.

  And forgive us our trespassers as we forgive those who…

  Hands like twisted claws. Legs like worm-eaten logs. Torso like a hollow rotten barrel. Erick Linstrom, male, breathing in night and death.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming!”

  Lord, I am coming.

  Heaving, twisting, burning legs and arms, beer soaked breaths mingling. Stomachs pressing. Male animal and female animal copulating. Passage of sperm.

  Erick Linstrom, writer and lover and student and robber and paralytic and staring death’s head thinking out a final prayer without mind. For thine is the kingdom and power and

  The drunk rolled off the whore, coughing.

  He scratched his testicles and grunted. He coughed and spit on the floor. “Ya pig!” said the whore, scratching her white belly with one hand.

  They both fell asleep and snored. Then they woke up and did it again and the handbag clicked open again. Then they snored again. And the third time was on the house.

  While Erick Linstrom, cold and dying, looked up and saw nothing but gathering night in the morning.

  * * * *

  It was upon him.

  Breath rattled and clicked in his throat.

  His body was stiffening, stiffening.

  His right hand closed into a fist. His mouth pulled open, splitting membranes. Blood and pus dripped into his mouth. His eyes were like rock.

  Jesus, Jesus!

  He hung naked on the cross and felt the burning pain in his palms where the nails had been driven through flesh. He felt the wooden crossbars under his arms and under his trunk. He shook with an agony of cramps. Oh my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!