Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Now he felt light on his feet and very energetic. He could not fail. In a telephone booth he leafed through the directory, looking for the listing of the “Hacienda Restaurant.” Under “Restaurants” he located something called the “Yonge Hacienda.” Good. That would be it. It was only a few blocks away. As he approached it, on the far side of the street, he saw that there was a tall tenement building in that block; that would be it, the place where Shelley was living. Up there, behind one of those grimy windows, his daughter was waiting. Watching? The building was five stories high, decrepit and Victorian and still handsome in a terse, uniform way. But its ground floor, at least along the street, had been improved with a new façade. There was a drugstore with a front of white tile, and an open-air pizza place, all garish red wood. A clothing store with a black-and-white façade and a sign of a boy/girl dangling over its doorway, clinking little bells on a rope around the figure’s neck. The “Hacienda” was an ordinary restaurant with a bright orange sombrero for a sign.

  Jesse crossed the street. A few young people were sitting on the steps to a door that was ajar, so that Jesse could dimly see part of a stairway. One boy held out a plate with a few coins on it. Jesse approached the young people, sensing his height in their eyes. Though it was rather chilly, one of the boys was barechested, and his hair was twisted into a single thick strand that rose from the very top of his head, fixed with rubber bands. Everything in his face rose, straining upward. His eyebrows looked permanently arched. He was no more than twenty, but his eyes had that pouchy, blurred, childish look that Monk’s had had. He held the plate up to Jesse.

  These dying people!

  Beside the boy, slouched as if exhausted, sat a girl of about eighteen, in a faded green outfit, a sari perhaps, pulled up carelessly above her knees. Her dirty feet were held out straight, small and blunt and charming in sandals decorated with beads. Jesse was struck by the sleepy tinted cast of her face, her eyelids smeared with a greasy blue ointment. In the center of her forehead there was a blue spot. Her brown hair fell to her waist.

  The boy begged for something; Jesse could only catch the word “nutrition.” He took a bill out of his pocket and put it on the plate. He smiled formally at them. “I’m looking for someone you might know,” he said. They stared expressionlessly at him. He felt his heart enlarge with hope, with cunning. “A young man named Noel. I’m not bringing him bad news. Nothing bad.”

  The girl stared up at him without blinking.

  “Do you know anyone named Noel?” Jesse asked. “Does he live here?”

  Nervously they shook their heads, no, they didn’t know, didn’t know anything. Jesse had the idea that they were afraid of him. He wanted to comfort them; he stood staring down at them, puzzled, thoughtful, while another part of him urged him into motion.

  “Excuse me, will you let me by?” Jesse asked.

  They moved at once for him. The girl scrambled to her feet and the boy with the plate inched over to one side, on his haunches. Another boy—Jesse thought it was a boy—slid off the steps and squatted on the sidewalk, watching Jesse closely. There was no real alarm in their faces, only a momentary unsettling. They had the appearance of victims of war, photographed to illustrate the anonymity of war.

  Jesse entered the dark foyer. He was intensely, lightly happy. It was as if he were coming home. The steep dark stairs in front of him might have been trick stairs, a fake cardboard obstacle that would collapse beneath his powerful weight. But he would get to where he wanted to go. It was dark: good. He needed darkness in which to breathe deeply, privately. From the street behind him lights flickered, showing a large feeble shadow of Jesse on the stairs. The shadow moved quickly, rippled quickly upward.

  The tenement building was old, shabby, smelly. Unsurprising. Debris lay on the floor, a pile of garbage and papers. No light on the landing. The building was open, welcoming. Anyone could walk in. Anyone could run lightly up these stairs. It might have been the end of the world, with everything so open and dream-like and obliging! Jesse’s blood pounded with certainty. He was so powerful, his back so suddenly strong, certain.… He did not pause until he reached the third floor. There he went to a door that was partly opened; he heard a radio playing inside. Jesse rapped politely on the door. A girl in a short dress, or perhaps in a man’s shirt worn as a dress, poked her head out.

  “I’m looking for a young man named Noel. He has blond hair.…”

  “Oh, them. They’re upstairs,” the girl said brightly.

  Jesse thanked her.

  On the next floor he came up to a door that had been crudely painted—a kind of rainbow—while the rest of the hall was a drab, dull green. The painting on the door was of a peacock’s tail. Had Shelley painted it? He was about to open the door without knocking, when something made him hesitate. Sweat had broken out on his body. It was no good to be too anxious, too nervous; in that way fatal mistakes might be made.… And there was something profound about this door. Once opened, it might never be closed. Once he opened it, he would have to go in.

  A light bulb burned in the hallway. No one was around. No one was watching.

  He turned the knob.

  Unlocked. He opened the door gently, stealthily. The room inside had been a kitchen, but for some reason the stove had been taken out. There were holes in the plaster where it had been detached. But the refrigerator remained, scuffed and dirty, its door decorated with a smaller version of the peacock’s tail. A childish blurred spectrum of bright colors. Jesse frowned at the stench of the room. He saw the roaches crawling freely in the sink and along the floorboards.

  “Is anyone here?” Jesse said.

  Someone jumped up and ran toward him from another room—appeared in the doorway gaping at Jesse. He was about Jesse’s height. His curly hair hung in damp ringlets about his face; it was silver-blond.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” the man asked.

  Jesse guessed he was about thirty. He was very thin. Emaciated chest, shoulder bones that seemed to lurch nervously forward, the bones of his face severe and ascetic.

  “I’m a friend.…” Jesse said, his face frozen into a small stiff smile. He held out his hands as if to show that he was carrying nothing, no weapons.

  “Are you from the peace clinic?” the man asked doubtfully.

  “Yes,” said Jesse.

  “Is this Friday night, then?” the man asked, staring in bewilderment at Jesse. “No, this isn’t Friday night. This isn’t Friday night.”

  His eye fell to Jesse’s trousers, and Jesse pulled his shirt down lower, still smiling. “How many of you live here?” he asked. He looked over the man’s shoulder. The next room was not much larger than the kitchen. Someone was sitting by a window, looking toward him. Someone else—two figures—were lying on a mattress on the floor. The room was crowded with boxes and junk, piles of clothing, towels. Jesse saw the entire room in that first instant, but then his vision seemed to shift out of focus and he stood there, staring helplessly.

  “What do you want?” the man with the silver-blond hair asked sternly.

  “Is your name Noel?”

  The man did not back away. Though his face was thin it was blunt and hard; he had a jaw like a man’s fist.

  “What …? Who …? My name is St. John,” he said with an ironic bow.

  “You are not St. John!” the person by the window cried, jumping up. “I am St. John!”

  “Noel is gone. Took off. Vanished. Noel is not in Toronto tonight,” the blond-haired man said, staring at Jesse. His thin, insolent lips shaped themselves into a nervous smile.

  The boy by the window ran over and tried to seize Jesse’s hand. “He isn’t St. John, I’m St. John. He’s been after me ever since I came here. He wants to take me over. I am St. John and no one else can claim to be St. John.…” This boy was younger than the other, but not very young; he was not really a boy at all; his pock-marked face gleamed with anguish. Jesse paid no attention to him and looked again at the couple on the mattress—two
boys—a boy with a dark untidy mustache and ragged hair, who was sitting up, and another, lying flat and senseless on his back, his arms folded across his stomach as if they had been laid there reverently.

  Jesse’s heart pounded. That he had come so far, only to fail.…

  “You’re not St. John!” the boy cried. “Why do you persecute me, Noel? Isn’t your own soul enough for you? Why do you want to possess us?”

  He clutched at Jesse’s arm and began to weep. “Noel wants to take me over. He wants to claim the authorship of the Revelations—my life-work—he wants to claim them for himself—”

  “Noel is not in town tonight,” the blond man said. “You won’t find him. He’s in Montreal on business.”

  “When do you expect him back?” Jesse asked.

  “Noel is evil. Noel does not exist. Noel has no soul of his own,” the boy cried angrily.

  “Did you want to leave a message for Noel? Or did you bring him something?” the blond man asked.

  Jesse was trembling. Did they notice? But the boy was so upset, whimpering, he kept dancing around and trying to tug at Jesse’s arm … and the man with the silver-blond hair, his hands on his hips, appearing so stern, really had a raw, edgy, wild look to his eyes, as if he too were hiding his terror.

  “No, no message. Nothing,” said Jesse.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “You didn’t bring us anything?” the boy sitting up on the mattress cried. Though his voice showed disappointment, he got to his feet with a bouncy spring and came over to shake hands. “My name is Wolcott. I’m from Peoria. I know you’re an American, I know your accent—Chicago? I want some news from home, authentic news, not what you read in the newspaper. I want some citrus fruit. What I need is nutrition, good sound nutrition, and I need somebody to take me seriously,” he said, rubbing at his mustache, “not like this clown Noel, Noel is just a joke … oh, Noel is evil, but evil can be laughed at too … I laugh at evil … I laugh at death itself. Mister, what are you running up here? What are you peddling?”

  “Does anyone else live here with you?” Jesse asked.

  “Oh, nobody, nobody! People come and go and we can’t account for them. That’s my little brother over there. We’re all tented up here, we help one another, it’s like the Boy Scouts back home.… There are deaths in the Boy Scouts too, but they are kept secret. Tents collapse, boys die in campfires and drown on canoe trips. Those deaths are kept secret, but ours are shouted from steeples.…”

  “Shut your mouth,” the blond man said.

  Wolcott darted away behind Jesse, giggling.

  “You’re Noel, then?” Jesse asked the blond man.

  The man shrugged his shoulders.

  The boy on the mattress stirred as if this noise annoyed him. He drew the back of his hand across his forehead the way Jesse often did. That weariness, that reluctance.… Jesse could see, in spite of the dim light in the room, that the boy’s skin was yellow.

  “Is he sick?” Jesse said.

  “No. Oh, maybe the flu. Nothing much,” Noel muttered.

  “What flu?” said Jesse.

  “The flu. Any flu. He’s okay.”

  “Angel will be all right as soon as the nutrition man arrives,” Wolcott said cheerfully. “That will clean out our systems nicely. Noel can’t do it anymore. Noel is wearing out, eh, Noel? Lost his contacts. In fact, he’s hiding. He’d like to be in Montreal, eh, but how can he get there without appearing on the street …?”

  Jesse went over to the boy on the mattress. He stared down—his heart pounding in that slow, heavy, clutching way—and saw that this was not a boy at all, but a girl—her hair cut off close to the skull, jaggedly, her face wasted, yellow, the lips caked with a stale dried substance.

  “Shelley—?” he said.

  “She needs something to clean out her system,” Wolcott said anxiously.

  She stared up at Jesse. Slowly, laboriously, she sat up and stared.

  “Who are you?” she asked blankly.

  Was this Shelley?

  She muttered something and crawled away, across the mattress. She was wearing jeans and a boy’s undershirt that hung loose on her. It was incredible how thin her body was—she looked like a child of nine or ten.

  Jesse reached for her. “Shelley—”

  “No! No!” she cried.

  She scrambled to her feet and ran to the window. “Don’t you come near me or I’ll jump out! I know who you are! I heard your voice! I know who you are, you want to kill me—”

  She shook her head slowly, to clear it. Her voice was thick and hoarse, each word she spoke seemed deliberately chosen. Jesse looked around, dazed. This man with the silvery-blond hair—Noel—the Noel of all the letters, now wild-eyed and anxious himself—he stood ready to run, the ringlets of his hair damp and frizzy. The stubble on his face was like part of a mask.

  “So you’re—you’re the father, huh?” Noel said. “Dr. Vogel, huh?” But then, as if recovering himself, he laughed and waved Jesse away. “Oh hell, you don’t expect us to believe that! That’s a hot one! You just come in here off the street and … and you expect us to believe you, like God himself has to be believed—Our little Angel has nothing to do with you, she is our girl, our baby. We take care of her. She is our little sister and our wife and our little madonna, just wait a few days and we’ll sweat the yellow out of her. She’ll be magnificent again. And who are you, mister, you,” he said wildly, his teeth chattering, “to barge in here and try to wreck our family? You came under false pretenses! I thought you had something to deal me! All this talk about Noel, how do you dare mention his name, Noel is beyond all your C.I.A. plots and spying and betrayals.…”

  “Noel don’t—don’t let him come near me—” Shelley whispered. She was staring at Jesse through her fingers. Her lips moved thickly. “If he comes to touch me I will have to die—”

  “She already jumped out a window once,” Noel said to Jesse angrily, as if this were Jesse’s fault, “and this time it’s the third floor! You better leave us all in peace, get the hell out of here and leave us all in peace!”

  “Shelley, please,” Jesse said. He could not believe this: her wasted body, her thin, puckered, pinched little face.… He took a few steps forward and she pressed herself against the window, her arms outspread. Someone had snipped her hair close against the skull; it was growing in unevenly, in patches of dark, greasy red. Was this Shelley? Was that her face? He would not have recognized her on the street. She had a boy’s face now, a sexless face, the cheeks thin and the eyes sunk back into her head, darkly shadowed as if bruised. Her skin was a sharp sickly hue of yellow.

  “I don’t know who you are. I didn’t mean for you to come here. I didn’t know what it meant,” Shelley babbled. “I live here and this is my family here. Everything comes from them. Noel is my husband here—not you—never you—when I have a baby it will be for all of them here, and not you—Why did you come after me? I can’t go back. I’m all dried out. I’m dried out. Look—” And she lifted the undershirt to show her chest—her shriveled little breasts, her ribs, the shock of her yellow skin. “I’m all shut off, there is a curse on me to shut me off, my body, I don’t know what happened—there is no blood and no baby either—the police have a radar machine that dries us all up—”

  “You’re making her very excited,” Noel said. “You’d better leave.”

  “Get away from me,” Jesse said.

  He approached his daughter. She flattened herself back against the window and gaped at him. Jesse calculated the distance between them—he would be able to grab her if she tried to throw herself out the window—

  “I am not here. There’s nobody here,” Shelley whispered.

  “Shelley, please—” Jesse said.

  “No. Nobody is here. You can’t get me. I don’t exist and you can’t get me.”

  “Shelley, you’re not well. You know that. You’ve got to let me help you,” Jesse said carefully.

  “I’m dried out and n
othing works,” Shelley said, staring at him. “I don’t hate you for that. I don’t hate Noel. Inside me everything is dried up. You were looking for Shelley, with that face Shelley had back home; well, Shelley is dead and there isn’t anybody in her place. I don’t have a passport. We wanted to go to Cuba for the sugar harvest. Noel was going to take us all. I don’t have a birth certificate either. I wrote to you from California to destroy all the evidence. You can have another baby to take my place—you can adopt a baby—”

  Only Noel and Jesse remained now; the other boys had fled. Noel drew his forefinger across his nose, sniffing in a kind of panic. He was barefoot, his toes long, angular, very dirty. He wore ordinary work trousers and a soiled white undershirt. “Hey look,” he said gently to Jesse, “she started crashing last night. She was high for seven, eight days. Now you got her scared to death. You smell it? How afraid she is? She thinks you’re going to kill her.”

  “I’m not going to leave her here.”

  “She isn’t well,” Noel said angrily, miserably, “she needs her head cleaned out! She doesn’t need you!”

  “Noel can take care of me,” Shelley insisted. “I don’t need anybody else. I’m sorry I wrote to you. Noel made me pure, like a madonna, like an angel.… He brought so many men to me to make me pure again, to make me into nothing. He made me free, you don’t understand, he made my body float free of everything.… But you, you,” she said, confused, “you’re standing right there so that I have to look at you, and you know my name and … you understand that I am the wife of all of them here and not of you.…”