Perforated Heart

by Eric Bogosian

  “Do you know who would?” The guy was a doorman. His job was to meet the needs of people coming through that front door. On the other hand, he was a modern man and resented his job. And so, in a perfect Sartrean exercise, he turned the tables whenever he could, to show people like me who was boss.

  Looking up, he seemed to be surprised to find me still standing before him. He said, “Excuse me?”

  “Do you know who would?” I repeated.

  “Would what?” His face betrayed nothing of the aggression he was aiming my way.

  “Have records of who might have once lived here.” I met his passive aggression with a potent combination of stubbornness and false sweetness.

  “No, sir.” Back to the journal.

  “Who’s the managing agent?” A degree of officiousness usually gets results. He replied by pointing his chin toward a bronze plaque attached to the wall. I recognized the name of one of the larger developers in the city. Stalemate.

  Finally, probably for no other reason than to send me on my way, the doorman offered a smidgen. “This building was completely gutted and the lofts were sold before renovation was finished. That was three years ago. When did your friend live here?”

  “The seventies. Thirty years ago, I guess.”

  “Are you kidding me? Those jokers are long gone. The contractor chased all of them out of here ten years ago before the C of O.”

  I couldn’t remember if John owned or rented his loft. People didn’t discuss real estate in those days. People who lived in lofts had a squatter mentality. Only frontiersmen lived in lofts. I did know that John was proud of having an unlisted phone number, so digging up old phone books would do no good.

  I returned to the subway, to the Upper West Side and my apartment. In my mail was an official-looking letter from a law firm informing me that Elizabeth would be proceeding with her lawsuit. I tossed the letter into the trash.

  I went online and browsed the name “John Davis.” Pretty useless. In New York state there are over a hundred John Davises. And who knew if he lived in New York state any longer? Or if he was alive at all? Who knew if John Davis was his legal name. I punched in Brigitte Davis. Nothing came up.

  The puzzle gave me a headache. My drinking buddy Jack introduced me to John. But I had not seen much of Jack since around the time he was hospitalized. I punched Jack’s name into the browser and got similar results to the John search.

  According to my journals, I met Jack through work at the video place. Jack had worked for another production house that my boss, Jonathan, had dealings with. Perhaps Jonathan could help, but where was Jonathan now? I quit working for Jonathan as soon as I started to sell my writing. No, I quit before I started to sell my writing. “The hungry years.” Jonathan had graciously “laid me off” so I could collect unemployment and write.

  In the eighties, Jonathan’s place had lurched onward like most of the old SoHo establishments. But eventually it succumbed to the inflated leases of the nineties. All the places from that time, Anthology Film Archives, Food, The Kitchen, even Castelli were long gone. Only Ken’s Broome Street Bar remained. So Jonathan, where had he moved to? Was he in the video business anymore? Was he alive? I Googled his name. Nothing. His company was also history.

  Can the past disappear?

  July 15, 1977

  An exciting few days. Two nights ago I was sitting in our living room, twenty-three stories up, writing. I was at a small table facing the broad vista of the Bronx and Yonkers. The city lay before me like a magical dark forest embedded with sparkling jewels. Haim was in the bedroom. Dagmara was out having dinner with her irritating workmates.

  I wanted to write, but instead I was daydreaming about Katie. I have slept with her one time. Was I obsessed? Did I love her? One minute I would be absolutely sure she was the one, then I would remember the bad night at the museum and then I’d start thinking and things would get confusing.

  While I was busy with all this thinking, my reading lamp pulsed and died. I reflexively looked up. Of course I assumed the bulb had burned out. My eyes naturally fell upon the view out before me. A chunk of the twinkly carpet went black before my eyes. Then another. I was witnessing the domino effect of a crashing electrical system but my brain couldn’t understand what was happening. Everything before me slipped into a velvet void. A distant billboard advertising Kent cigarettes was all that remained illuminated.

  From the bedroom, Haim bellowed. He charged into the room brandishing a flashlight. The light bounced off the plate glass and for a second I saw a reflection of the stunned look on my face. Haim shouted, “Do you see?”

  I said, “I think we blew a fuse.”

  Haim said, “No. Look out the window! It’s a blackout. We have them in Tel Aviv all the time! Get up! Get up! We have to go!”

  His eyes scanned the nothingness out past the plate glass, perhaps searching for enemy aircraft, who knows, then he turned, taking the light with him. I could hear Haim in the kitchen galley crashing through the pots and pans like a clumsy bear. Then the gush of water splashing into the bathtub.

  From the bathroom Haim shouted: “We have to collect as much as we can from the pipes above us. We only have fifteen minutes before all the water drains out of the building.” He burst into the kitchen again, found and lit two candles. In the candlelight his eyes danced with excitement. “And we will need food.”

  I found a beat-up portable radio and tuned to “1010.” The announcer sounded very grave. We were in the midst of an emergency! A massive electrical failure. And I had witnessed it with my own eyes! A thrill ran through me. The man on the radio was reporting that the entire city had blacked out! His voice faded to a murmur, then total inaudiblity. The batteries were old.

  The taps ran dry as Haim predicted they would. The apartment glowed with eerie waxen light. Sirens wailed twenty-three stories beneath us. I felt a lightness in the pit of my stomach, weakness in my knees. I thought, this is what fear feels like. Or life-threatening thrill. Maybe we were under attack! Haim grabbed a bottle of whiskey and a very sharp chef’s knife from a kitchen drawer. “Time to go.” He slugged the whiskey, slipped the knife under his belt and hustled me out of the apartment.

  No elevators, of course, we had to walk down all twenty-three flights of gloomy stairwells. As we descended, we were joined by confused neighbors who were making the same exodus. Most of the emergency lighting was nonfunctional and the flashlights barely cut into the murk. We stepped carefully, moving through total coal mine blackness for two or even three flights at a time. My neighbors were bodies without faces. Groping, muttering. Every so often, someone would call out a name. “Sidney?” “Fran? Where are you?” “Up here!” “Where?” “Here!”

  Emerging at ground level, we joined a parade of excited if shadowy souls thronging under the dead streetlamps as happy as clams, grinning and blabbing away as if they were off to see a county fair fireworks show or a Little League playoff, everyone moving forward with clear purpose, toward an indefinable something.

  Every few minutes an echo-y loud sound (A shot? An explosion? A cherry bomb?), from maybe blocks away, ruffled the gentle crowd. Everyone stopped and craned their necks, confused. A shouted sarcasm was followed by crazy laughter. The march resumed. Haim and I passed the bottle. He guzzled the booze bottoms up, like a sailor, caught up in the spirit of revolution or anarchy or whatever this was.

  We inspected the damage left by vandals preceding us. Security gates had been peeled off storefronts, trash cans overturned, the windows of cars punched out. We remained alert, especially with an eye for arson, but there was none of that, at least not in our neighborhood, only the distant police sirens.

  We did see Good Samaritans directing traffic and people drinking beer openly as if they needed an excuse and folks walking arm and arm. Others sat on stoops with their miniature poodles on their laps, candles beside them, eating from containers of leftovers, watching the passing procession. One guy was in the middle of the avenue grilling hot dogs on a
barbecue. The refrigerators are dead! Time to eat!

  In the dark, faces were unclear and the vagueness prevented any real engagement with anyone. Young women stuck close to one another or had men by their side. I didn’t see weapons, but I did see one guy carrying a nine-iron. As we made our way to the Village, Haim grew more and more discouraged. He wanted action and there was none to be had. I think he was hoping for some kind of spontaneous rioting to break out.

  Eventually we grew tired of walking, abandoned the search for adventure, and headed home. Climbing back up to the apartment was like ascending a small mountain. In the glimmers of flashlight I could see Haim’s perspiring brow. Entering our apartment had a weird anonymous feeling. Like this could be anyone’s apartment. A vacant, abandoned atmosphere. The drapes were open and now the hushed city was laid out at our feet, still and black. I thought, this is what it would be like if civilization ended. As we shut the door behind us I was thankful that Haim saved water. With a groan, my roommate flopped onto the couch like a massive narcotized golem.

  We had gas, we had water, we had a few bits of food that would begin to rot by tomorrow afternoon. Down on the street, the word was that the problem would take days if not weeks to fix. No one knew the cause. Everyone was fairly certain the Russians had nothing to do with it. I had no idea what was coming next for the first time in my life.

  The ringing phone broke the silence. It was Dagmara, hysterical, saying she had been calling for hours. Without electricity our answering machine was dead and hadn’t picked up her call. I don’t know what she thought could have happened to us, but she finally calmed down when she realized that we were safe. She was okay also and said she was going to stay overnight with her girlfriends from work.

  I phoned my father. He also had no electricity but he seemed unworried. He told me a long-winded story about the blackout in 1965.

  Haim began to snore. In the candlelight, he looked so harmless. I realized I love this guy so much. The snoring built to a small roar.

  I hadn’t drunk as much as Haim and I wasn’t tired. I tried finding Katie but her answering machine didn’t pick up either. I decided to walk to Brooklyn, to John’s. I found my way downtown, over the Brooklyn Bridge and eventually to John’s neighborhood.

  When I got there, John and a small crowd were assembled around the loading dock at the front of his building. I could smell the weed from a block away. John hailed me like a long-lost brother and handed me a warm beer, then ’Gitte emerged from the building with a bowl of hot soup (the gas was still working). John began to sing “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad.” ’Gitte perched on the dock and I lay down on my back beside her, my belly full of her delicious soup. I gazed up at ’Gitte, who was laughing at John’s antics. I let myself dive deeply into her shimmering beauty. The stars were out, my belly was full, I was in love. Everything inside me released and I felt weightless. I was home.

  June 9, 2006

  Am I wrong to assume my generation will be the last to possess a complete sense of literature and history? Is it that far-fetched to say that we, the literati of the contemporary world, are in fact the last of the true literates? Soon there will be no great minds. And there will be no going back. There will be no Samuel Johnson or Voltaire or Pound or Joyce with enough knowledge to make the ultimate structural connections. And so, no new connections, no new universal networks will be possible or created. We will become medieval, fragmented. All ideas will be equal: comic books, classical theater, advertising, nineteenth-century novels, movies, gum wrappers, the Bible.

  A very thin topsoil of information (the Internet) will cover everything. A strong wind (a war, a blackout, a computer virus) will blow it all away. Chaos will enter. A new Dark Age will prevail, arriving in the breakdown lane of the “information superhighway.”

  As an individual, as an author, an artist and a man, I stand at the brink of this moment in history. I know what I don’t know. Those who come after me, won’t even know that.

  And I only have so much time on this earth, so I am on the veritable peak of the peak. It’s all downhill from here. All downhill. Gradually and inevitably I can only lose my abilities—hearing, taste, sensation (especially in the tip of my penis, the surfaces of my tongue and eardrums). I will become weaker and weaker, creep along more and more slowly, wake every morning a little groggier, breathe ever more shallow breaths.

  Slowly but surely, my body will separate into its constituent parts as each organ struggles: eyes, ears, kidneys, joints, heart, even my brain. I will spin into smaller and smaller pieces, a process that will persevere even after I’m dead as I decay into a biological soup of elemental molecules. When I was a pup, I had no notion of my parts or my vulnerabilities. I thought nothing could hurt me. I bullied my way through life energized by the theme of my self-ness, my desire. But that is all past.

  I’ve been nothing but undistinguished on every front. No friends. No family. Not even any lovers, now. Only a gallery of memory. But isn’t that enough? What more can you have? So I have that. Consciousness. Soon gone.

  June 10, 2006

  I’ve spent all day burrowing through a stack of newspaper tear sheets and printouts of the better-known Internet blogs which Leon’s publicity director has been kind enough to forward in a large gray envelope. Delivered by messenger, of course. Normally I don’t bother reading this crap, but the wounding release of this book has metastasized into a gaping, bleeding gash. I can’t help myself, I can’t turn my eyes away from the torn flesh, the seeping blood, the broken sutures. I am drawn to this mess. I must probe it, mesmerized by the maggots wriggling through the rotten meat.

  All self-reflexive work annoys them. They want their big dish of ice cream. They want the obvious. They want a pacifier, because they, the critics, are in the employ of the reigning academy and the academy must protect the status quo. This is all so obvious. If the status quo could see itself, it might change. No one wants that.

  Also, it would never occur to the oblivious Critic that the writer is writing because he must. The true writer does not write out of choice but of necessity. Because the act of writing is an act of courage. And because the Critic himself is an employee, he assumes everyone wielding a pen is an employee.

  July 23, 1977

  “My Lucky Day” has been published. I ran to the Village and bought ten copies of the magazine. No one has called me. But I reread the piece and fuck it, it is good. It is there on the page in black and white and no one can take that from me. It exists and therefore I exist. It will be the first of a collection of dozens of stories. Of hundreds.

  Haim opened a cheap bottle of champagne in congratulations. Dagmara brought a cake home and we had a small celebration. I guess they’re the only family I’ve got now. Later when Haim, high from the booze, started making his usual embarrassing erotic overtures to Dagmara, I lied and told them I had to go see my boss about something.

  I called Zim. He sounded depressed. Insisted I come over. But I knew that I couldn’t talk about the story with him. All we’d do is drink and snort drugs and complain about life. Instead, I grabbed a train to Brooklyn.

  I was surprised to find John and ’Gitte home alone, reading, as sober as Ozzie and Harriet. I felt like I was intruding. It never occurred to me that they would have a private home life. John’s loft is like a public place, like the library or a bar.

  Finally, John rolled a joint and for the second time that night I felt like I was part of a family. What’s that about? I decided not to tell John about my story being published. John doesn’t care about the real world, doesn’t care about ambition. Also he would never admit he was jealous.

  ’Gitte disappeared into the kitchen to make lemonade and John told me stories about bullfighting. I relaxed while he described Mexico and the stadiums and how the matadors aim their stabs so that they cut into the bull’s shoulder muscles and force the bull to lower his head. They do this because then the matador can thrust straight down between the shoulder and the neck so perfectly t
hat the blade of the sword cuts into the aorta and the bull dies instantly!

  After the bullfight, if the matador has been skillful, he is given the bull’s ear, if he has been very skillful, he is given both ears, and if he’s been superb, he is given the ears and the tail. Then the bull’s carcass gets hacked up and the meat is sold right then and there in the stadium as people are walking out. Fresh bull meat. Thousands of bulls are slaughtered this way every year. Tens of thousands.

  John said that El Cid, the famous Spanish medieval military leader, is reputed to be the first person to lance a bull from horseback. I don’t know how he knows this, but he says it like he knows. He added that the greatest bullfighter of all time was some guy named Mano-something who died in the ring when he was fatally gored. He had actually retired but another bullfighter dared him to come out to fight because he wanted to impress Ava Gardner.

  Ava Gardner was the actress who ruined Frank Sinatra’s marriage. She was also married to Mickey Rooney (!), but that had to be a long time ago. Sounds like she had a good time wherever she went. Anyway, Franco (who was the fascist dictator of Spain at the time) declared three days of mourning when this Mano guy got gored by the bull. Sex and death and fate. That’s all there is, I guess.

  July 27, 1977

  I shouldn’t be drinking. I wake up every day with a pain in my side. Two nights ago I got a call from that Tim guy from the bookstore. He was hanging out in the Village at the Cookery listening to Marian Mc-Partland, the jazz pianist. Wanted me to join him because he was with a friend who’s a big deal editor. It was pretty clear when I got there that both of these guys were very drunk. The editor guy kept smiling at me and laughing and telling me how beautiful I was. What great eyes I have, blah-blah-blah. Asking me all about myself, when did I arrive in New York blah-blah-blah. I’m thinking, “Go with the flow.”