A crowd was starting to close in, some with extended hands, palms down, eager for a touch; other hands balled into fists. Beckman noticed the paraplegic gesturing wildly for them to come. He took Malany by the arm and led her across the street, pushing aside several red-faced, snorting men.
The paraplegic followed them in, turning to shout at the now dispersing crowd. “No blood today, you swine.” Then he slammed the door, jarring the glass throughout the store. “There, in there.” He pointed to an open doorway at the back of his store.
It was the room where he lived. The small bed was neatly made up, reproductions of Old Masters hung on the walls, prized volumes, vellum-bound, were dusted clean. A writing desk, antique table, chairs, and old photographs of the past were tastefully distributed about the room. The photographs immediately caught Beckman’s eye. A young man, resembling the paraplegic, stood with young friends on a tennis court; everyone bore rackets and smiles. Pictures of him standing with friends at the beach in swimming trunks or standing with pride next to his new 1950 Studebaker.
“I’ve closed the store for the day. Things like that upset me terribly. The police in this town . . . My God, they’re unbelievable.” He wheeled himself over to a small refrigerator and took out an unopened bottle of white Moselle.
“Here.” He held the bottle toward Beckman. “Would you open it?”
Beckman took the bottle.
“Corkscrew in the top drawer.”
Beckman obeyed.
“I saw everything from the store window. The minute I saw the police I knew what could happen, and I was just about to call an influential friend of mine at City Hall when you pulled that brilliant stunt.” He looked directly at Malany, his eyes rounded and moist. “It was truly wonderful seeing them devastated by a person of superior intelligence.” He laughed, holding three fingers over his mouth. “I pity the poor drunk who gets it tonight.”
“Poor drunk?”
“Oh, yes. It’s no surprise to see a squad car pull up to one of the holes down the street and see some poor wretch dragged out and gone over. The word’s probably already gone out about what happened this afternoon. The sober ones have moved out of range by now.”
Beckman had managed, after considerable tugging, to open the wine bottle. The paraplegic leaned over to a series of wooden shelves next to the refrigerator and picked out three wine glasses. Beckman poured.
“Aren’t you having any? It’s really very excellent,” the paraplegic said to Malany.
“She never indulges,” Beckman answered.
“Never?”
Malany shook her head slowly.
The paraplegic looked at her pleadingly. “Please, just this once. I don’t have many opportunities to celebrate a victory like yours today; and I must admit I shared in it—vicariously, of course—and I suppose, in a way, symbolically too. So, in view of our important event, would you please join us?”
Malany gazed at him for a long while. Beckman could feel her mental energy radiating through his skull. The paraplegic sensed it but, undaunted, he raced back to his refrigerator and withdrew a bottle of ginger ale. “Please?” he said, “please.”
Malany consented, and together they touched glasses.
“Victory!” the bookstore owner said tearfully and, with a trembling hand, swilled the wine in offertory. The wine seemed to have an immediate effect on him. He breathed easier and talked in continuum of the “important” people in town, centering on their lusts, greed, lies, hypocrisies, and punitive criminality. He spoke as though he had repeated the words many times.
Beckman wondered if the paraplegic made a practice of pulling strangers off the street to serve as dumb subjects for his vituperations. Or was it done, as Beckman suspected, as a solitary effort while staring down at his distorted image in a wine glass.
Malany, shifting with impatience, finally interrupted to ask his name. He refused to give it, claiming that it was no longer significant, then added, “When my money is used up, my bank account number will become meaningless also.”
Malany laughed at this. It was her kind of humor, and this pleased the paraplegic. Beckman sensed that everything about Malany pleased the paraplegic. He listened to Malany with an expression of religious ecstasy and, occasionally, it seemed, his eyes would move uncontrollably over her long form from neck to feet. The growing heat of his long dormant lust came to life as unexpectedly as a corpse, rising and pushing aside the dirt that covers it.
Malany looked with pleasure, on the paraplegic’s disturbing condition. She even encouraged him with soft seductive tones, by touching his dead knee, by speaking certain words; words with O’s, so that her lips seemed swollen and sensuous. Beckman watched with horror as the paraplegic visibly shuddered.
“Will you be at the reading tonight?” emphasizing “tonight” and looking straight into the paraplegic’s sweat-glazed face.
“I would give anything to go but—” he sputtered.
She touched his other dead knee. The paraplegic shuddered and drew a quick breath.
“We’ll be happy to take you,” she said, ignoring Beckman’s signs of protest.
The paraplegic would have seen them if he had not been so intensely fixed on Malany. Psychokinesis wouldn’t work under these conditions. The paraplegic was out of reach, out of sight, sinking lower and lower into the abyss. He would be a lover who couldn’t love, a dancer on wooden legs. He would give all when there was nothing to give. The stupid bastard. Why does he think he can make it again, and with Malany of all people?
Malany wasn’t unaware of Beckman’s attempts to communicate, but she made no attempts to stop him. She had some inscrutable purpose for the paraplegic. Beckman left his mind open and receptive. He felt the sensitized points of his star antenna warming with reception, and although he couldn’t get the image to take a mental shape, he had the sensation of something real and present, some dark formless thing called forth against the will. Was it one of Malany’s monsters? Like all people who have monsters, she wasn’t completely to blame. She had as much of a toehold on reality as anyone. She could make change in a money transaction, read a newspaper, and determine time from a clock. That would be enough to keep her going in the real world of rules and objects.
The other, that perpetual vortex of imagination and emotion, the hyper-reality, unlimited by time or object was where she had chosen to live. The paraplegic would have to deal with his own hyper-reality. This was where the monsters resided, in the hyper-reality of the mind, and Beckman knew that Malany could handle them. But what about this crippled effigy of humanity? What powers did he have to be resurrected? Was it a dormant part of Malany’s self ?
Beckman pondered this as he sat in the back of the room during Malany’s poetry reading. The paraplegic sat in the front row, his head shaking slightly like a victim in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. He seemed to age visibly before Beckman’s eyes, gradually sinking in his seat, wilting like a dry plant.
It was a small group; ten, possibly fifteen. Beckman didn’t bother to count. None were young, and he knew this disappointed Malany. But she read from her book as though she were speaking to the multitudes. Only the paraplegic responded in the right way, shouting “Yes!” where audience participation was expected and remaining thoughtful and silent in moments of profundity. The others, unused to Malany’s style, maintained the reverent silences of the sermonized.
Even with such titles as “Bitches’ Lament” or “The Isle of Sappho,” hardly a muscle twitched until the intermission, when all but a few rushed for the door, congregating outside to vent their rage. They crowded around the stack of Malany’s books, almost forcing Beckman, who now fearfully scanned the semicircle of angry, distorted faces, against the wall. He really began to fear for his life.
The table tipped over and books scattered, with explosive force, into the crowd. One book, thrown out of the crowd, hit the wall a foot away from Beckman’s head. Then another and another until it seemed like a barrage of artillery
shells arching toward him. Beckman covered his head with his arms and dropped to the floor. The barrage slammed against the wall above him, and books fluttered down around him, sounding like flocks of wounded birds.
Beckman lay under the pile of Malany’s books. Despite the continuing clamor, it seemed very quiet. The noise appeared to recede behind a transparent wall. Beckman pushed himself up from the rubble, brushed the hair out of his eyes, and was met by a man, red-faced, lined with an endless network of connecting wrinkles, and topped with a mass of white curls.
He shrieked, “There’s no place for people like you and that other person in this town. We ought to take you both out and give you the beatings you deserve.”
The face was replaced by another, screaming, “Pervert! Pervert! Godless atheists!”
A general cacophony of voices broke through the lunar vacuum and seemed to go on endlessly until, abruptly, it was again quiet. Beckman, after looking around, pushed the remaining books off him and sat on the floor against the wall, picturing himself as a surviving soldier sitting among the debris of his battleground.
Malany appeared in the doorway. “What happened? It’s time to start.”
“They’ve all gone. What you see here represents how they felt about your poetry.”
Malany slammed the door. Beckman got to his feet and started stacking the books back into the whiskey box that he had brought them in. He had really expected and believed that his plan for success would work here, if anywhere. The explosive hostility of these gentle Southern people had shocked him.
Hatred like theirs was indelible and more destructive than the multiple fists that had been aimed at him in the fight at the Dirty Sam. He would find a way to recover. He still believed in the plan. He wanted to make Malany happy, but for the present, and that was most important, an event in their lives, along with its decisions, had been taken out of his hands. He felt in no way answerable. Perhaps it was the way a person felt standing before a firing squad; something deeper than simple resignation and, more purely, a sense that he was no longer responsible for anything, not even himself.
Beckman finished packing the books, making sure all the ones stamped with footprints were on the top. He folded the card table and returned it to the closet where he had found it, swept up all the papers and cigarette butts even though he wasn’t expected to. When he went back into the poetry room, Malany was reading the second part of her selections to a room empty except for the paraplegic. She was reading as though the room was full of people. Beckman wondered for a moment if the shock had been too great, and if she had completely lost contact. He watched her for a while. There were tears in her eyes, and he knew that she was not insane.
He spoke. “It’s pointless, Malany, even ridiculous. I’m surprised at you, making such a romantic gesture. These people are ready to run us out of town, and they probably will unless we get moving.”
The paraplegic turned to him and shouted across the room of empty chairs, “Let her read, you fool. Let her read.”
Malany, tears running down her cheeks, said, “Yes. Let me read. I came here to read. Let me read.”
Beckman waited. The paraplegic glared at him, panting hatred. Beckman—and he felt terrible about it afterwards—walked back and forth across the back of the room, showing his body and his precious legs to the trembling, foaming, white-hot paraplegic.
“I’ll be waiting in the car when you’ve finished,” Beckman said, stopping at the door and looking back to see Malany turned away, sobbing. He picked up the box of books and bore them in both arms with considerable effort out of the building to the car.
He had imagined that someone, unsatisfied with the thought that he had been left alive, might be waiting outside. But, to his relief, the parking lot was clear. Malany’s was the only car visible and fortunately well illuminated under a streetlight. He loaded the books into the trunk and, knowing Malany would not be in condition to drive, got in on the driver’s side, locked the doors and, because it was a warm night, rolled the windows down halfway.
He did not want to believe that there would be more violence, but he knew how deeply Malany had wounded them. Maybe the white-haired gentleman’s mind would snap while he tried calming down with a drink of brandy in his library, and he might return as Mr. Hyde, bent on murder.
Beckman laughed. If he were back in Baltimore or Philadelphia, he would seriously consider that possibility. Then, too, he had been wrong about the local reaction to Malany’s poetry, a consideration that he had given second place, tragically forgetting the only communication he’d had with his boss at the diner. “Son,” said his imagined boss. “Words is power. Ask any lawyer.” Beckman realized that he had mixed the wrong words with the wrong culture and ignited the explosion.
No, he couldn’t blame them for being angry at someone who farted in their perfumed air. He had been naive and foolish and felt a little guilty for not remaining with that other cripple until Malany had had her great hour upon the stage. Shakespeare had thought of it all, so what was the use? At least a Shakespearean scholar at his old college believed so, and was so convinced of it that he had spent his last years in the artificial world of drug addicts, shouting obscenities from apartment windows.
There was a gentle tapping at the car window. Beckman roused himself from dreaming and opened the door.
“Can you hold him?” Malany asked, pointing to the paraplegic who was unconscious in his wheelchair.
“What happened?” Beckman asked, getting out of the car.
“I think he’s in a trance. He just slumped over when I finished.”
“Did you check to see if he was dead?”
“God, no. You don’t suppose . . . ”
Beckman slowly raised the paraplegic’s head. “By God, he looks dead.”
“Oh, Jesus!”
Beckman felt the man’s pulse, then the chest area over the heart. “But he’s alive. Just fainted. Help me.”
Malany and Beckman lifted the limp body out of the wheelchair and slid him onto the back seat, folding his arms and legs into a fetal position so that he would fit. Beckman folded up the wheelchair after some trouble finding the right release points, and put it in the back so that it rested against the seat without touching the stricken man.
They rode in silence back to the motel and, without turning, Beckman could see her eyes in passing flashes of light. They were like the entrances of two wide, dark tunnels. Sensing her anguish and checked by guilt, Beckman begged her forgiveness in a torrent of words, blubbering forth in what seemed like the secret tongues of a Pentecostal. The paraplegic, by then awake and laughing maniacally, erupted into a fit of coughing.
Malany was unmoved, silent as a marble goddess. She never believed anyone suffered with quite the same acuity as she did. When they stopped in front of the cabin, Beckman reached over to shut off the engine but was stopped by Malany’s hand. He had opened his mind and so wasn’t too surprised as he had been receiving unclear impressions during the ride from the library. When Malany said she would not be going in, Beckman got out of the car.
“Where will you go?” he asked as Malany slid over into the driver’s seat. She glanced back at the now sleeping half man.
“With him,” she said.
“We could try another place. Somewhere out west maybe?” Beckman asked.
She shook her head.
“Malany, I’m a cripple too. It isn’t as obvious as his, but I know it’s there. Everybody in the straight world treats me like one, like I can’t stand erect, or like I’m going to rape their daughters. You know. You must be aware.”
Malany didn’t acknowledge. She only looked ahead at the distant lights.
“All right!” Beckman tried to sound angry but couldn’t. He stepped out of the car and turned to look at her through the open window. “I haven’t got a dime. Could you spare something? I’ll probably never be able to pay it back.”
Malany held a $20 bill out of the window. He took the bill and looked at it, surpris
ed at the suddenness and the finality. He wanted to speak. Something must be said. She was driving away and in doing so, jerked something out of him, took away something vital. He felt internally flaccid. He was dying.
He screamed, “Wait!”
But she was really gone, and gone to live with a paraplegic whose useful time had ended the day he was crippled. What had she chosen? Yes, it was Malany who made the choices. It was her money, her power that had created his illusions and made them seem real. Now that she had withdrawn them, and without explanation (did she think explanations were not necessary or important to him?), he realized the falsity of purpose, the stupidity of a “meaningful life”. He felt, finally, at the end of something. He looked at the motel cabins, outlined by a single naked light over the office; the last stopping place for the rejected, the defeated, the separation station for an army of human derelicts.
Beckman waited, stunned for a moment by the night silence, then started toward his cabin. There was a sound; threatening, primeval. Instinctively he froze, the gift of millions of years of fear. Bushes rustled near his cabin. He heard animal sounds of grunting and effort. Beckman moved forward on tiptoes, feeling like exposed prey. He was close to the bushes. He crouched. A strange excitement had replaced his fear. His senses were alert to the slightest change; his mind tuned to wide reception. In the dim yellow light, Beckman saw a head emerge from the bush under his windows. The segmented image of the person’s body became more visible through the bush. The hair was long, to the waist. It was the motel desk clerk looking in his window.
Beckman’s first impulse, his wonderful instinctive self, was to stop her; but he had the advantage, and he was curious. The woman’s head moved to one side. She cupped her hands over her eyes and seemed to press her face against the windowpane. It was very quiet, not even the sound of traffic on the highway. She looked around quickly, then jumped down from whatever she was standing on. Beckman remained crouched and watched. There were sounds of rattling leaves and twigs snapping. Then a muted cry, sounds of physical struggle. Beckman ran over to the wriggling bush and found the desk clerk on her knees, tearing at the bush with wild hands. Her hair had become entangled. When she saw him, she yelped and started kicking at him.
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