III. A Final Manuscript

Better to end in horror than a horror without end.

—ADOLF HITLER

There comes to mind, on this first nacht of nights, Walpurgisnacht minus two, something someone once said about your own career, E.A.P. It was your sunshine enemy and midnight friend, Mr. James Russell Lowell, if memory serves, and it goes, “He squared off blocks enough to build an enduring pyramid, but left them lying … (something) … and unclaimed in many different quarries.” I like that, for the both of us. Though to make it better suit my own case: “Some of his blocks were of pumice, light as those great feathery stones carried by blacks atop their heads in Nepenthe. Others were of chalk, or sea-wracked shale, or petrified sponge. Still others of old adobe, of frozen peat, of pressed slag, even of fly ash reclaimed from blue-belching smoke stacks. S. Moro quarried where he could.” But there is still a pyramid there, somehow, wobble-sided, apex askew, struggling like Venice not to sink. I believe that. I do, and am only held back from watching it build fantastically anew in these last nightshade thoughts … by this thought. Concerning pyramids. When the slaves are all dead as dung from hauling hard, sun-baked, Egyptian ass up those manmade slopes, after the blocks have been inched up three spans of Nefretete’s thirteen-year-old instep every chiliad, and the engineers have the whole thing up, the square of the millennial hypotenuse equal to the sum of the squares of the two blood-drenched legs, every grain of granite in place, and the tippy-tip point right up there, Osiris, massively hard and desert-erect between the crocodile hairs, guess who they put inside?

The Mummy!

Rudy keeps wanting to make me more comfortable. He is in and out of here, nodding his crocodile head at the desk, or trying to get me over to the sofa by giving its corner leg a meaningful kick. A leg as bandied and swart and scarred as his own crocodile leg. Poor Rudy. I do my best to ignore him, but when he grows too distressed, I placate him by signaling for another pillow. And another. He has already stuffed four from the sofa into the coffin, three behind my back, one under my butt. They keep me fairly upright while I write this. On the lid. Set across here, lengthwise, it makes a passable lap desk. Lit by two floor-standing candles on either side of me. Each unwinking. Like a Pharaoh’s wall-eyed stare out of the Book of the Dead. I am cramped, stiff, aching, but peculiarly sensate. I am beginning to feel the part. My own inchoate rigor mortis.

These asterisks indicate noddings-off, I admit. They mark where an old man momentarily dozes, exactly where the true north of his anciently vein-mapped nose drops that last half inch and stars the page.

Snapping out of it, my skull seems full of stale lightning. From a repeated white blitz of sulphurous dream jolts, their last thunderclaps still in my ears, like static. That old radio program, Sturm und Drang. I stare, and yes, I can almost believe I am inside my tomb. But it is not the way you wrote, E.A.P. So brilliantly, but I am sorry, all wrong. There is no telltale smell of moldy earth, odor of stripped bone. There is only the most ordinary locale. Concerning sepulchers. If they are whited on the outside, they are far more elaborately painted on the inside, by clever and talented worms, to resemble our utterly flat surroundings. Ingenious topiaria. To fool us into living, even when we know we lie interred.

I am using all this. I am getting there. I may make it yet. Though I could use more time, a morbidly slow clock. In less than two days, I go on display. My bier opens free to the public. No admission, free bier. By then, what? By then, hopefully, I should be in the arrested grip of a last, gruesomely prepared death rattle, ready to meet them, face them down with exactly the right curdling … expression. One that will finally …finally freeze their goddamn blood. I plan to clear off this lid, but still leave it ajar, so it partly hides me, forcing them to peek round, look in to see for certain “Is that him?” Him, hell. These cerulean lips, fossilized teeth, this yellowed skin of dried mummy’s buttocks, one sunken, puckered-up ass-hole eye—“Is that it?” Even worse. That is not him. That is not it. That is simply, mortally that.

Lonely work, sitting my own death watch. I could do with some intelligent company, somebody to cue me occasionally. Yours, E.A.P. We understand each other. Your revenant, my rot. We understand each other only too well. The gist of it being a shared esthetic. The only true art—and it is lost—the only true art for either of us was to take fright, and give freely of it. To take great fright, and to give magnanimously of it. But for you it was so much easier. Your readers had not yet been granted—Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s one big mistake in the Atlantic Charter—freedom from fear. My audiences have. The same horrible things keep happening, of course, over and over and over, but they are accomplished now without any knowing horror. With—and hear, play with every syllable of this baleful word—-fear-less-ness. Allow me a brief declamation on your prose and poesy:—“You lived, sir, and wrote during an earlier, simpler moment of darkness when a drunken Fortunato had to be bricked into a wall by an individually skilled artisan. Now we immure whole neighborhoods in one day’s urban renewal. You must realize. The Fall of the House of Usher only cleared the way for another highrise. The Descent into the Maelstrom is the daily ride to work. The Pit is one of our two major political parties, the Pendulum the other. The Masque of the Red Death is held annually for combined inter-faith charities. The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether has been medically approved. Though we are more hesitant now about rushing the Tell-Tale Heart to transplant. The MS. is Found in a non-returnable bottle. The Purloined Letter is junk mail. The Bells are recorded. The Black Cat has been ‘fixed’ … Everywhere there is an odd blood, with no taste to it. None. It comes in a pop-top aluminum can, with a non-fattening lymph substitute, and an enriched plasma base, plus artificially added hemoglobin. It leaves a strange film on the tongue, and hardly fizzes …”

Where there is no spine, writes Mao Tshin-Bone, the people feel no tingle.

A need. A grousing need to explain why I have been menacing the nerves, and Late Evening News, of this paraplegic city. Why I have felt compelled to wander up and down, even at my age, barely galvanic of body, much naphthalated in mind, as the Imp of the Perverse. Yes, E.A.P., the imp himself, struggling to communicate some small pixie piece of the horror to this madding crowd. Through the blank newspapers, over deaf-and-dumb radio, blind TV, and now, live, from this oblong box … America! O beautiful for specious skies, for amber waves of pain! From every mountainside, let freakdom ring!

But to tell coherent tales. One tale, first, of the grotesque. Set this down for epigraph. You taught me language, and my profit on it is, I know how to curse! Said by Caliban, who never found his way to Central Park, who has reason enow to curse the day he came to Manhattan Isle and fell among Joseph Papp’s resident—and evil—company. A tale entitled “Livia.”

Livia!—thy lucent name lives on in far reaches of lasciviousness, thy lap and lithe limbs, but most of all, my Livia, in livid memory of thy elongated lacteal lugs. Like targes, they were. Great, leathery shields, crudely stretched, a giant boss at each protuberant centrum, yet fretted with the most delicately haired rosettes. I had never viewed such enormity companioned by such truculent promise. With each effulgent breath, in every luxuriant rise and fall, I sensed a subtle, limpid strength, a stout battle-readiness. They would—o breastless Amazons!—turn aside your spears.

She was to be, among the dramatis personae of our thespian joining, Miranda. She, my Livia, was to be Miranda because my Livia’s melancholic, half-crazed consort was the director. Papp’s dramaturge. He had grown his hair long, but long after it had grown gray. From every dormant follicle, renascent whorls of matted shag linked earlobe to nostril, pate to chin, until he was mangy as a mammoth, and equally tusked.

“Understand,” he addressed me that first time in the drear rehearsal hall. “It’s a very dirty play. It’s all about this dirty old cod Prospero. ‘I’ll break my staff.’ Shit he’ll break his staff. It split on him years ago. Why’s he got Ariel? To hype his sex fantasies. Wouldn’t he like to be bouncing our Mr. Caliban’s big rocks? That’s how I see Calibaby. He’s out to ball Miranda, sure, sure, but really for Old Prickless. Who can’t admit it. So you do your monster thing, great, but get a little senile lust in there too. It’s a mix. You’re your own horny bastard, but let’s see something else in you. Somebody. Daddynuts. Trying to throw a fuck at her through you.” His wink dripped a fell lubricity. “You’re right for it if you’re up to it, Gramps.”

My Livia’s lord, then, suffers from a malady of birth, satyriasis of the brain, and alas, it has touched her own lumined soul. Would that their flesh had never crossed! But the perils of any orgy are never what such as my limber Livia may do there, but whom she may meet there. “He wouldn’t get off me. There were other guys hanging in there with us, but they all shot and left. He stayed hard. I couldn’t bring him off. He just got harder. I was left there all alone with him.” He worked his deliberate wiles upon her. “Sometimes he can talk so dirty that, like, anything you really do feels clean?” They married. Or, as my Livia says, they have, are in possession of, maintain a marriage.

“We have a pretty good marriage,” she bespeaks herself.

“Where do you keep it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You have it. Where do you keep it?”

“Back at the apartment.”

“Could I possibly come see it sometime?”

“Look. It’s for the kid.”

“I see.”

“A kid when she’s young doesn’t care that much. But when she gets older, she wants you married. I’ve seen how it is with our friends’ kids when they’re not.”

“I see. Kids don’t help a marriage. Marriage helps kids.”

“Well … you don’t want it interfering.”

“With what?”

“Your adult life.”

“Of course not.”

“I mean, it stays in the apartment.”

My Livia, though she was not quite yet my Livia, lay atop my bed in the Warwick, while explaining these conjugal vows to me. Capriciously nude, though I had seen her often enough that way throughout the week. The storm, as her husband conceived the opening scene, tears every last button and stitch off both the courts of Milan and Naples. “It’s called The Tempest, right? It’s not called The Cloudburst.” But she was this way now, and here, here and now, all on her own. I had asked for my key at the desk and simply been told that it had already gone up. This was, Livia, a most unilateral assignation.

“Suppose I tell you,” I said, “that you’re married, you have a child, maybe I don’t want your adult company.”

She sighed, lissomely sighed. “They warned me you’d be blueballs.”

I did not ask who then, my Livia, and strove to elevate my thoughts above your sordid imprecation, but I had learned, long ago, never to let loose talk like that circulate backstage. So, with sad heart but soaring ballocks, I accepted your lustful challenge, allayed your every dire doubt, with nibble and nudge, bite and brawl. I turned you two times over, and three times round. You grew dizzy, then faint, but I was kind. I rendered you justice with mercy, while you wept at your folly and error.

“I got to tell him about you.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think?”

“None of that.”

“He’s got to know about you.”

“Why?”

“He won’t mind. Why should you?”

“I don’t like even friendly sexual rivalry.”

“He’s not that way.”

“We’re all that way.”

“Lionel and I aren’t.”

“Then I am.”

“He’ll want to be here himself next time.”

I dispatched detailed written orders to the desk, countermanding any such possibility. Let my Livia flop her fill in some other fishfry, but he must have raped the maid to get a key.

“Liv tells me you’re pretty good, Gramps.”

He had her fleshed across the arm of the divan, white buttocks spread on high, their snow covering his cruel rowl. But he pulled out in gentlemanly fashion, to turn and converse with me, still wet and wicked as an icicle.

“Take over for me.”

“Out.”

“Gramps …”

I searched for the proper phraseology. “I swing my own ass.”

He raised a sly, gray eyebrow, up and away into his matted forelocks. “You don’t like this kind of relaxation?”

“I don’t like your Don’t bang us, we’ll bang you.”

“But we’re working together.” How his satyr’s grin embraced us! Karma and Sutra and Pinch-Me-Tight. “Let’s get to know each other a little.”

There was a piteous stir from my Livia. “One or the other of you.” The couch arm quivered. “Shoot the bird, let’s shoot the bird …”

He callously ignored her. “I don’t want anybody along who’s not with us all the way.”

“What way?”

“I don’t think the cast has really settled down, Gramps.”

“I do. Very nicely.”

“We’ll have to wait and see.”

“Say what you mean.”

“It’s not two weeks yet, Gramps.”

“Nobody said two weeks to me.”

“Didn’t they?”

“And I don’t read for parts.”

“Don’t need to hear you read, Gramps. You’re a great read.” How spronged and empurpled and cloven-tipped he stood, this proud hard man … “But let’s just see how well you can relate to Miranda.”

“Shoot the bucking bird!”

I temporized. Yes, I begged off and left him to lift my Livia out of her immediate distress, turning to my own thoughts, while he slipped and slid down her deep and ferny ravine. But on familiar footing, I could tell that, even as I undressed. Inevitable. The husband always knows the best, the quickest way down.

“Now,” he asked, “what would you like to do?”

My thoughts had strayed, far afield, back into the Wienerwald, behind a dark pine where I had once had my way with a frog-legged maiden, while her own tongue hopped like a horned toad in the grotto of another. Perhaps, even here … “I would prefer to straight-fuck Livia,” I said at last, in the vernacular of the day, “while she eats your cock.”

To him, nothing that much out of the ordinary—a man of my years, he seemed to say, should boast more recondite kinks—but he would go along, out of politeness. Livia settled herself in splayed abandon, then ingested him all the way up his long, rigid shank, but with her soft, winsome gaze still on me. I told them to begin, proceed, I was certain I would be readied in a moment. That enlisted his sympathy. “Poor old dads,” he said, and my Livia gave me a silent thumbs-up.

I waited until they were more enmeshed, less observant, then went down on my hands and knees. “Go it, Gramps,” he encouraged these tired old bones, even reached out to help me up into her open mount. But I waved him aside and entered under my own power.

Half a minute later I had that nap-balled bastard.

“Livia!”

But you did not heed his cries, my loyal Livia. They did not reach your love-stopped ears as your jaw firmed, your teeth met in carnal ecstasy.

“Livvvia!”

You heard him not as he doggedly howled, sought in desperation to free himself, but only clenched the more, riding the last shuddering waves, my Livia, my fire-breasted Valkyrie, of a clitoral Götterdämmerung.

“Liv!”

“Who?” she said dizzily.

“I’m bit through.”

She touched him. “Who?”

“You bit hell out of me, you little bitch!”

“I never.”

“You did, Liv.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Look.”

Where now was its pluck and ambition and fine spicate form? Who now would recognize this poor, pulled, pink piece of taffy for the organ of tyranny it once had been?

“Honeybaby.”

He only moaned, took tender hold of himself.

“I would never.”

Then his appalled regard sought me out, where I still lay like a lambkin in my Livia’s lap.

“A folk secret of the Lower Danube,” I said, “but it takes the right kind of girl.”

Without one more word he gathered up his clothes, both their clothes, a motley, clanking pile of chain and leather, and hurried into the bedroom. She hesitated, my Livia, but then pushed me off and followed him, as a good wife must. I heard sounds of frustrate passion, as if he were trying to have a bit of a go at her, but found it all still too painful. When they came back out again, dressed and shackled, she was carrying his heavily studded belt for him over her arm. A poor, bent, graying man.

“I’ll see you,” he threatened through his agony, “at rehearsal.”

I looked longingly after her as she stayed her moment at my door, and our eyes embrously met, my Livia, though I failed to note in them the first secret luster, alas, of your lurid betrayal.

But all, astonishingly, went well, or so I ignorantly believed, that next hastening week. The rest of the catamite cast stayed far away from me. An unlooked-for boon. They too had been hovering, communal maenads and bacchantes, ready to fall upon my venerable, liver-spotted sex. I do not exaggerate the peril. They had a game they played of eve, lolling about backstage, grass-bent and yoga-sprung. Blindman’s buff. Eyes covered, both hands behind your back, no peeking or touching, can you tell who is blowing you? One guess only, and you have to guess before you come. Guess right, the man or woman caught blowing goes in the middle. Guess wrong, stay where you are, get blown again. Or eaten, as the case may be. My Livia confessed to have once tricked her own noble lord with a false Vandyke, but she no longer cared to play, and in fact, circulated word that I might do grave sexual harm, so that I too would be excused.

Merciful respite, time gained in which to arm and strengthen my Caliban against Lionel’s miscreate staging. He was militantly scabrous, sapping whole scenes for the most dragged-in titillation. Ferdinand and Miranda do not engage in a chaste game of chess. They engage in a fierce copulation, throwing tangled shadows on the thin scrim of her tent walls, and cry out, “Rook takes Queen!” He cut Ariel’s lines down to the rawest graffiti “Where the bee sucks there suck I,” sung in sibilant tremulo, as if written above a phone number on an Eighth Avenue steambath wall. My own battles were with Stephano and Trinculo, who climbed each other like two Airedales, tried floppily to climb me until I began wearing quills.

Yes, quills. And gutter slops and leprous cankers and a horsepiss, Liederkranz stench from across the street at the Sixth Avenue Deli. Whatever would keep me unpalatable, untouchable. That, of course, is the true way of the monster. His credibility. But here it was also a personal stand. I imagined my Caliban as that fearsome abort, a monster of principle. Grosser than thou, O regurgitating mankind. One of my better cosmetologies, my Livia, thy delicate touch helped open every sore. Also, essentially what I employed this evening for my arrival at Kennedy. The hope now is to dress it up in white tie, tails, evening cape for formal lying-in-state. If it works—and it must, it must—I shall be wished away, Monkey’s-Paw-fashion, by all and sundry while remaining utterly unapproachable.

What should have alerted me, if not my Livia’s strangeness, was her lord’s acquiescence. He appeared to drop his threat, approve apace my insurgent beastliness. “Terrific,” he bleated. “Repulsive but terrific. I want you to do something for me. Slur your words even more.” I was striving for a speech defect, a birth injury that had left my mooncalf Caliban hare-lipped. Pitiably nasal but banked with gut-chewing, tongue-tied fury. “And you’re right, Gramps. He has to stink. He likes to stink.” I fell down epileptic on stage in a squall of spittle one day, came in deliberately drunk the next, but no luck. I had hurt him once, but could not now manage to disgust him, even though Livia was my ally—false even then?—in every debauch.

“More monster, less man,” she warned me.

“Still?”

“Always.”

“How?”

“You got to get ahead of where he is.”

“Explain.”

“Know anything about living in this city?”

“You tell me.”

“It’s the Congo.”

“I see.”

“The Congo with elevators.”

“Go on.”

“You got to be what we go around thinking—”

“Fearing—”

“Maybe even hoping … will leap out at us.”

“On the elevator.”

“Stuck between floors.”

“You go too far.”

“Keep going. You’ll get there.”

I ruminated that, and yes, I let a little of the Dark Continent slip into my Caliban, let these eyes begin to drip an aboriginal rheum, let this sly old head turn fuzzy-wuzzy, a little bit Zulu. And you were there, my Livia, to heap on kinks and curls.

“Farther.”

“What?”

“You’re almost there.”

“Where?”

“Hundred and twenty-fifth and Amsterdam Avenue.”

“Too far.”

“You’re already past Ninety-sixth.”

“Far enough then.”

“No. They’ll catch you.”

“Who?”

“We will.”

“They don’t come near me.”

“Lionel will make them.”

“Stop it.”

“He told me.”

“He can’t.”

“They’re getting used to you. They’re not afraid. Lag one step behind, and they’ll all fall on you.”

“Ridiculous.”

“Fawn on you.”

“Impossible.”

“Love your demon dong,” she wailed nattily, “worse than I do.”

Did I actually realize then what I was doing, what was being done to me? All I can plead is that I still trusted my Livia, that I was determined to save my Caliban from their foul, liberated clutches, Lionel’s tumescent approach, that I went to a savage blackface to defend my honest monsterhood with reawakened rapacity.

That was toward the end of the week, my Livia’s own fingers assisting at the burnt cork. On Saturday, our last day in rehearsal hall before going up to the Park, Lionel announced, “I want to try something here. It may not work, but I want a look-see. Let Calibaby drink the whole bottle. The way you came in here last Wednesday, Gramps, that’s your own business, but I think we can use it here. And slur it up. You’re shitfaced, so let’s hear that cleft palate.” Livia touched my darkened visage. “Go far enough,” she whispered.

We ran through Act Two, scene two. Stephano and Trinculo, much as my Livia had predicted, set themselves to goosing each other, really trying to get a grab on me, while putting more edge on their sneers. “… this puppy-headed monster! A most scurvy monster! … The poor monster’s in drink. An abominable monster! … A most ridiculous monster … A howling monster! a drunken monster!” How they do add up, those stinging epithets, and all straight Shakespeare, but I gave back as good as I got. My Caliban wallowed in a belligerent drunkenness, with a nasty, threatening slobber, seething underneath. When I went to kiss Stephano’s foot, I bit it instead. Rabidly. And on my final out-cries—“Freedom, high-day! high-day, freedom! freedom, high-day freedom!”—I let them all know how rebelliously my black heart still beat. It was a brutish scene. Low comedy lowered to real bedlam, I must admit. Not since Ghoulgantua had I felt that old hellfire glow of roaring menace and inner misericordia.

I was, how woefully! even touched with pride. I rose to search for Lionel, spotted him back in the rear of the hall talking with some irate stranger. Whoever it was kept pointing at me, jabbing his finger stiffly, in sour anger, without ever once looking at me. He was clearly saying what damn well was going to be what from here on out, to Lionel, who was acting pleased!

My Livia crept to my side. “Guess who that is,” she murmured in an unfamiliar, nay, unhallowed voice.

“Who?”

“From the Mayor’s office.”

“Cultural Affairs?”

“Human Rights Commission.”

O my Livia!

“Lionel thought maybe we just better check everybody out.”

Right then, I plumbed the deepest bottom of treachery as she pulled forth the tiniest of pocket mirrors.

“Like a peek?”

It was cracked across, its silvering badly scaled, almost scrofulous, but in the random reflecting flakes I caught hideous sight of what deed had been done me, what wrong I had, yea, wittingly! done myself. A gaucherie of Negritude, a deformity of racial leer and cake-walking coonhood, a Stepin Fetchit in the guise of Othello. The bleakest blackamoor in this showboat city. I turned to you, my Livia, in dismay, and there fell from your harsh labia, in rude-tongued tones that I can scarce still credit, o my libeling Livia!—“You went far enough this time, niggerlips.”

Imitating again. Endlessly imitating. Stealing your style, E.A.P., nothing but the very best for me, of course, but as always, making off with only the most worthless amounts of substance. My chiefest crime has been petty mimicry. And why, why have I never been caught at it? Years ago, let’s say I stole a cheap Austrian accent from Franz Lehar’s overcoat hanging unwatched in some Heuriger, and to this day, somebody like that Esquire sneak-cock, bright enough otherwise, is willing to believe I am truly Viennese. And even if I were, there are no true Viennese. The Viennese, “we” Viennese are all veneer, smiling human stucco. Though perhaps that makes everybody truly Viennese. Only you, E.A.P., and the hallucinations you raised to elegy, to history—and we gigglingly pretend are apocrypha—remain solid, the very best. Let me say it. Let me confess how utterly I admire you, how hard I once tried to emulate you. When I first got into pictures in this country, when I finally returned from my Old High German fantasy life, came out from unter den Linden and tried to stop being a closet American, the first thing I did was … attempt to grow your moustache. I did. But couldn’t. Not enough facial hair. How I envied you that black, lush, Frenchified, almost pubic bush of a lip! And when I found out that you had once, in Philadelphia, in a fit of paranoia, asked to have it shaved off, to escape your killers … I believed in your killers. I still do. But they did not want your life, E.A.P. They sought your moustache, and have succeeded. I wish I could have carried it on for you. Immortally. But understand what has happened. Even if I had it now, if my arid lip had been brought to bristling blossom, it would only look now, and alas, only feel, like Ben Turpin’s greasy nose-tickler.

I did not wait around. I walked straight out into Forty-second Street just as I was, markedly putrid, and did a drunken, hambone stagger all the way back uptown to the Warwick. I created at least one incident I am aware of, maybe others, along my route, with some spade selling the Black Panther newspaper. “Walk proud, you mother-fucking minstrel!” he yelled at me. “Or we gonna cut yo’r banjo balls!” I answered him in hare-lip-ese. It made better copy than the official complaint against racial stereotypes lodged with the Mayor. “William Shakespeare’s respect for minority groups is already too well known through his moving, civic-minded portrait of Shylock the Jew to require further documentation from this department. We see no reason to open the public theatrical facilities of our park system to this distorted and unbalanced characterization, one that not only insults our black citizens but perverts Shakespeare’s own humanitarian treatment of what would now be recognized as a socially disadvantaged late-learner.” I heard first from the Times that I’d been fired. Had I been unaware all these years of the racial sensitivities of the people of this city? I thought of pleading a stubborn Germanic ignorance, if only to heighten the absurdity, but I finally said I only hoped an actor would be found who could deal with Caliban’s brutal ethos within the American traditions of fair play and broad liberal understanding. I suggested Henry Fonda.

Sullied. Euchered. Never trust a husband-and-wife team. Their dirty little secret always turns out to be they are really married. I was once almost myself. I thought very seriously of it. But I know now that marriage to her mother would have destroyed all that Hazel and I have since had together.

It would have been equally wrong to have married Hazel. Though for the sake of her poor, dear, destabilized mother—floating somewhere out there in the dark, like a grapeskin in a wine vat—I would like to see her settle down.

Marry then, Hazel. Beget children, and tell them how you once knew a circumspect old man who, throughout a long, long acquaintance, never—I think this is fair to say—never once, as close as he was to you, forced you to choose between father and lover.

I propose to set down here the entire text, which I believe I can give from memory, of what I said on the occasion this year of Edwin Booth’s Birthday, when Miss Julie Harris laid the annual wreath at the foot of his graven image in Gramercy Park. Press coverage was scandalously inaccurate, and editorial commentary benighted. But a word or two first about the Club, since its members have taken such umbrage at my remarks. Frankly I had not been there for years, fearing lice and communicable eld, had simply sent in my dues, my library fees, and ten dollars every Christmas for a bartender who never poured me a drink until that very day. A dodging, pudgy, noodle-nosed gin-sneak who had the nerve to say, “Welcome back, Mr. Moro,” and claim to remember I always drank sidecars.

“You never saw me before in your life.”

“You’re a tradition, Mr. Moro,” he shrugged.

“Right, boy. I used to come in here and write witticisms on F.P.A.’s napkin when he was drunk. Do you remember that imitation of a cockroach I did for Don Marquis? Or the night I whipped Mark Twain four straight games of Eight Ball and he damn near broke his damn cue over your idiot pate? That’s it, right there on the wall.”

The Club’s vice president had more tact.

“Oddly enough,” he snorted through the clear half of his cancer-eaten nose, “I don’t think we’ve ever formally met.”

“I never come here.”

“A shame.”

“I don’t like mausolea.”

“Then it’s kind of you to fill in for us today.”

“Who dropped dead?”

“Dennis had a small cerebral accident, affecting mainly his right side …”

“But why me?”

“To tell the truth, we’d been thinking of honoring you with a Night here. But after this Papp business …”

“Bad business.”

“Yes, I’m afraid.”

“So this will just have to do.”

“We still all admire those early films. Some of us, I’m sure you know, were in them.”

“Refresh my memory.”

He snorted again, the bad side this time. “As I said, we’ve never formally met, but you did smother me in The Moth.”

“Did I?”

“Yes. I was one of that group of young entomologists sent to capture you.”

“I remember now.”

“I expired, it must be said, after the briefest of agonies.”

“But you’ve been dead then for nearly thirty years.”

“Wouldn’t put it quite that way.” He struggled to put it another way. “We’re trying to become a younger club.”

“Women.”

“What about them?”

“You’ll have to admit them.”

“We admit them. We do indeed admit them. But whether that means, except on these very special occasions, they can be allowed simply to burst in here off the street … at noontime, particularly … Come meet Miss Harris.”

We got through drinks. We got through lunch. We even got across the street. Miss Julie leading her flock of wheezing old pigeons over to the park where I was to crumble up my slice of dried bread and throw them a few memorial crumbs. Nothing makes me feel older than a bunch of old actors trudging along in tragedy’s high-button shoes, comedy’s sagging socks.

Miss Harris stooped pertly to lay the wreath. Laurels on verdigris. Her haunch touched her Achilles’ heel, and a lock of loose red hair strayed from her, like a wisp of ruby smoke. Only Edwin Booth and I really saw.

Then I said:—“Fellow players, we are gathered here today, many of us in the seventh act of our own lives, to honor one who long ago made his own sad exit. We have spoken here before of how nobly he left this earthly stage, though still burdened with a deep personal sorrow. His grief over the death of Abraham Lincoln, for whose murder he felt he disgracefully bore some consanguineous guilt. We understand and respect this grief. Indeed, we hesitate to disturb that ennobling silence upon which he himself resolved, even at this distance of years. But do we, in the end, best serve his fond memory when we fail to give voice now to what we have come so painfully to know? Should we continue to bear this grief with him when our hearts can conceive, out of the terrible events of more recent years, some consolation?

“I will speak therefore today in the conviction that sorrow, even gone off into the wings, may yet be assuaged. And asking your forebearance, I will speak more of John than of Edwin. I will speak of John for the sake of our dear Edwin.

“John Wilkes Booth, whatever pall now falls upon his name, was also once our fellow actor. He is not so often thusly embraced, but before he ventured out into a darker drama than could be contained within our feeble footlights, he showed great talents. Perhaps far greater than those failing abilities we muster here today. He was horseman and swordsman and pistoleer. He was, above all else, a striking stage presence, with black hair and the blackest eyes. He had both daring and fancy. Even in his youth, we hear of him driving a sled up and down Maryland’s dirt roads in the middle of July, and shooting down any stray cat on sight. He had, during a meteoric career, the most excellent of notices. Boston attests to his Romeo, New York to his Antony. He knew fame. He knew women. A certain Miss Henrietta Tree is reported to have tried stabbing him in Madison, Indiana, only to turn the dirk upon herself. He may have even known madness. His father, Junius Brutus Booth, was in no wise free of it. He failed only to know himself.

“Though in that, he has not been alone. We have all, including his brother Edwin, failed equally to know him. That is the terrible tragedy. When he stepped into the Presidential box on April 14, 1865, and fired point blank at the President’s head, it is clear he ceased to be an actor. He had thrust himself most bloodily upon reality, and must have known as much. That far we may assume he understood his own destiny. But he did not know—nor did his brother Edwin know before he himself died here within sight of this lovely park—nor did the Nation itself know for another hundred years—that John Wilkes Booth had in fact founded what has become our most enduring political institution.

“In the fullness of time, we have grown wiser. We have at last understood, after the similar ventures of admittedly lesser men, of a Leon F. Czolgosz, of a Charles J. Guiteau, of a Lee Harvey Oswald, what it was that John truly achieved. And perhaps it is the ultimate tribute to his unique genius that his single deed, thought utterly mad at the time, not only profoundly altered the course of the Nation’s history, but has now become almost a commonplace of our political life.”

This is about where I began to get their real attention, though a lot of their silly sheep’s heads were actually nodding in agreement.

“So I would propose to say to our dear Edwin, across all these past bitter years, if I might be so bold as to prompt eternity: ‘Raise up your head. Your brother’s terrible deed can no longer be called an aberrant act. It has struck a kind of true norm, a bench mark by which your own great country now measures itself, its present direction and future hopes. He cannot be forgiven, but perhaps you have reason, at long last, to feel a touch of fraternal pride.’”

By this time, even the dimmest of them were on to me, so I worked abruptly into my peroration.

“But if these words sadly cannot reach our dear Edwin, there is still much we can do here, among ourselves. It is a fact that John Wilkes Booth did not escape. An even more chilling fact that few apparently ever do escape. The record of assassins caught, though marred by constant rumors of undiscovered co-conspirators, is still a long one. Here we might be of some usefulness. Could we not collect moneys among ourselves, in memory of Edwin, in honor of John, to provide for the future? Remember, the best and worthiest of the lot, our own fellow actor, was left alone at the last to shoot himself through the head in a burning barn. Could we not have helped him? Would we not have helped him? Is it beyond us now to turn over that annual Yuletide bar tip to the Edwin Booth Memorial Presidential Assassins’ Escape Fund to allow—”

I could have gone on a bit longer, but Miss Harris, to her credit—though I am well aware it is not at all her ordinary ladylike behavior—started a pretty good action, I guess you’d call it, by actually throwing her right shoe at me.

I am very, very tired, and one reason is that I have been masking my own moral fatigue. Like most people, I took America as a stimulant, when it is really a depressant.

I had, of course, during times between these grander contretemps, begun to cruise the subways. In full regalia.

The trick was to keep walking through, never stay too long in any one car, but pretend I was really looking for a seat. I would take along an old newspaper. When I spotted somebody, usually a midmorning shopper, since I had to avoid the rush hours, I would swerve over to the seat next to her and pat it with my leprous hand. That was usually enough to put her to serious flight, but if it wasn’t, if she froze, I’d pull apart the newspaper and start spreading the sheets carefully over the seat. The idea that I myself thought I was so foul that I didn’t want to soil anything was the real shocker.

Once or twice, however, I did meet with unexpected kindness.

“You’d better get yourself to a hospital.”

She was a good old soul, alone in the car, with a Blooming-dale’s shopping bag, a straw purse, and a net full of artichokes. I raked the air in front of her smiling face.

“I can recommend you a good hospital. My sister works up at Columbia Presbyterian.”

I shot out my green fingers to within an inch of her throat, quivering them, but didn’t dare do much more.

“This subway goes there.”

So I sat down.

“You got three more stops.”

“You’re afraid of me,” I hissed at her.

“My sister’ll see you get cleaned up.”

“You’re afraid of me.”

Then her jolly face did finally collapse. She stared away from me, out at the rushing darkness.

“Aren’t you?”

But the train slowed, and she got back her smile immediately, began pulling together her packages.

“I’m always scared I’m gonna miss my stop, but I never do.”

When she got up to get off, I made a menacing, just-short lunge at her.

“No. You want a Hundred and Sixty-eighth. Stay on two more.”

The other time I was followed by two Haitian-looking black kids on the Lexington Avenue. The whole length of the train and back. I thought they were trouble, and faced around on them when I reached an empty car up forward.

“Mister.”

I half crouched.

“You want chicken, mister?”

I growled, but he was a brave lad.

“We get you a chicken, my brother say you bite its head off.”

His brother pushed him in disgust. “Where we gonna get a fucking chicken?”

“We get it, he bite it for us.”

“Get his own fucking chicken!”

“You don’t want to see him bite no chicken?”

“He ain’t no voodoo man.”

“You say he was!”

“Up close he ain’t no voodoo man.”

“What the fuck you think he is?”

“He’s a fucking mummy.”

“He ain’t no fucking mummy! He ain’t wrapped!”

“He come unwrapped!”

“Mister.”

I let him move another step forward.

“You a fucking mummy, or a voodoo man?”

I bit the air viciously with long teeth, and he stepped back.

“You see that?”

“What I see?”

“He want chicken.”

“Shit he want chicken!”

“He eat chicken head!”

His brother pushed him again.

“Shit he eat chicken head!”

“We get you chicken, mister.”

His brother pushed him almost off his feet.

“We can’t get him nothin’ but fried chicken! He gotta have live chicken!”

And they turned around and ran.

Otherwise it was very much as reported. I spread terror on the IRT, panic on the Shuttle, but never really enough to bring down upon myself the full weight of Transport Authority justice. This was gesture, not assault. Their tactic of trying to force me off as a matter of public sanitation was adroitly conceived, but needed more proof. “If it looks like a syphilitic, walks like a syphilitic, talks like a syphilitic …” the health officer tried to argue.

“You still have to catch him spitting on the platform,” said the magistrate.

“He drools right in front of us,” I had the pleasure of hearing him admit in open court, “but it never drops.”

O my Manhattanos, I meet you in your streets, and you meet each other, and we all look askance, aside, away, and I am reminded of a young man I once knew in Berlin, a bitter isolate who collected snakes. He did not even like snakes. But he knew other people feared them, especially his dear mother, and so he found relative contentment among the twinings of his boa constrictor, the rippling scales of his adders and vipers. They slithered around his narrow room like exposed ganglia.

But ironically, they began to force a kind of society upon him. Other herpetologists. Such seem to meet together even more often than other fanatics, deep in the cold bowels of natural history institutes, and I admitted one day that I was pleased for him, thought it fortunate that he had found their company.

“Why?” he said.

“Now you have other people to talk to.”

“We never talk.”

“At least you share something in common.”

“Do we?”

“You come together and sit together and—”

“Everybody sits two seats away from each other.”

“You don’t, in some way, commune?”

He sighed. “When I have to meet anybody at these affairs, face to face, I can think only one thought.”

“What’s that?”

“I know why I collect snakes, but why does he collect snakes?”

The odd part is that I really had forgotten about that finger. I’d stuffed it into the purse Mike T. gave me, no idea really what I thought I was going to do with it, then packed the purse to take along with me here to New York. One day I was looking around for something to put a lot of candy in, for the prostitutes along Broadway, like the Marquis de Sade with his poison bon-bons. I thought of the purse, hauled it out of the bottom of my suitcase, opened the hasp, and caught a whiff. I had to turn it upside down to shake the damn thing out of there.

I got it into some formaldehyde, in an old jelly jar, in just about the nick of time. Hate to think how long I’d had it around by then. Still don’t have the faintest notion why I wanted to hang on to it. Just interested.

Actually, a couple of fascinating things I discovered about that finger when I held the jar up to the light and really studied it, joint by joint. I must’ve counted at least nine different and distinct old scars, plus other blemishes. His jackknife slipped, he slammed a car door on it, he cut it clipping his hedge, he put his fist through a window, he fell down in the bathroom while changing razor blades, one guess is as good an another, I suppose. In any case, that finger was marked for severance, bound to go sometime. He’d also chewed the nail almost down to nothing but a speck of shellac. The nervous type, as well as accident-prone. Most fascinating of all, there was still the trace of an indentation running all the way around the flesh above the first joint. Very tight, like a banding. So what was a ham-fisted clunk like him doing with a pinkie ring?

It gave the damn thing a personality. Been through the wars, come out with scuffed knuckles, but still a bit of a dandy, even a sybarite. I started thinking of it as Pinkie.

Another tale. Several. In fact, all the tales of the arabesque I told them at the day-care center, down in that church cellar near St. Mark’s Place. Some parts of the City remained desirous of my services longer than others. My free services. This was the Library Reading-Out-Loud Program. The thought I presume was that I would do a Boris, read the kiddies fairy tales to prove I wasn’t the Big Bad Werewolf at heart. Columbia Records was interested, sent along a representative, Miss Flopsy-Mopsy, who I hope got her Cottontail full.

But without Martha, I don’t think I could have gone as far as I did. Into the Secret Memoirs of the Little Match Girl, and other such Grimmnesses. Martha Williamson. A beautiful brute of a woman, built slowly, like a reef, into a blissful maternal isle. Part Jamaican, some Irish. A lovely tropical brogue and a strange streak of Caribbean blarney. She was being rehabilitated into a children’s nurse, under threat of sterilization, after a career on welfare as Chelsea’s leading Soviet Mother.

“Won’t let me have my own,” she told me, “but they still keep bringing me more.” They tumbled about her, shoeless and filthy, and she smacked them down like monkeys into a flea-picking circle at my feet. “Storyman’s here. Settle ass. He’s gonna tell it like it ’twas.”

“What would they like to hear, Martha?”

“Ask ’em.”

“What would you like to hear, boys and girls?”

“‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’!” was first.

“But you’ve already heard that one.”

“Sure.”

“Hundreds of times.”

“Sure.”

“How the Little Bear comes in and sees Goldilocks and says, ‘Somebody’s been sleeping in my bed, and …’”

“And she’s still in it!” said a baby mandrill.

“That’s right. But do you know what else the Little Bear said?”

“Tell us!”

“He said, ‘Goldilocks, you can’t sleep in that bed. That’s the only bed we got, and there’s three got to sleep in it already. Mama Bear when she get home from work and she is dog-tired, and Papa Bear if he do come home, and hope he ain’t too drunk because, if he is, he take up most of the room, and me, Little Bear. We can’t put four in that bed, Goldilocks. I get crowded out enough. And if Papa Bear come home after Mama Bear asleep and he spot you, you ain’t gonna like it, Goldilocks, and I ain’t gonna can help you none. So haul out of here, Goldilocks, I got enough trouble. And was it you or the damn cockroaches ate my porridge?’”

A hushed chittering.

“Wow. That how it happened?”

“More than likely.”

“I thought they giving us the wrong story.”

Some heads nipped around to look at Martha, but she was just fine. A big calypso smile.

A little girl chimpanzee stood up and whispered, “‘The Little Match Girl’ … can she be next?”

“You know what happened to her,” I said.

“Yeah. She lit her last match.”

“And then …?”

“Don’t know.”

“You don’t?”

“Nobody told us yet.”

“Well, then … a really big man stepped out of the alley and said, ‘You dumb cunt!’”

They laughed, but I wasn’t sure until I saw Martha laugh too. Deep, with no ripples, like a lagoon.

“‘You ain’t burned down nothing. You scratched off your last match, girl, and this whole block is still standing! Now you get out there and hustle me some fire. I show you what to do with it. They’s still Woolworth’s. They’s still the A and the P. And you better hustle hard, girl, cause, goddamn if you look to me like you even worth a damn match!’”

Over their happy screaming, Miss Flopsy-Mopsy cried out, “You mustn’t do this!”

I turned Weimar on her. “I believe your Mr. James Thurber has already said about Miss Red Riding Hood that little girls aren’t so easy to fool any more.”

“You’re unspeakable!”

“Shall I stop, children?”

There were loud protests, and a call for “The Emperor’s Nightingale.”

I was surprised. “You know that one too?”

“Martha told us.”

“Well, if she already told you …”

“You tell ’em, storyman,” Martha chuckled. “It wasn’t no jewels and gold, was it?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Tell ’em.”

“It was plastic. Fourteen ninety-five, as advertised on television, and when the emperor got it home, the warble busted. The second time he played with it. He took it back to the store, and they told him it only needed new batteries, and wouldn’t give him a refund. That’s why he went looking for a real nightingale.”

“Man,” said a lemur down in front of me, “they hard to find.”

“He’s still looking.”

“Listen.” He really had something he wanted to ask me. “Listen … what really happened to the wolf?”

“Which wolf?”

“The one that was after the pigs.”

That one was too easy.

“The pigs got him.”

“Yeah. They did, didn’t they?”

“Once they got him down the chimney inside that little brick house, he never got out.”

“Boiled him. That right?”

“That’s right.”

“But I mean, what did they finally do with him?”

“Really want to know?”

“Yeah.”

“Ate him.”

“He’d of done the same to them.” Martha didn’t ever seem to stop laughing. “Done the same to them.”

“Martha’s right. Do you know about Hansel and Gretel?”

“Yeah, sure. They cooked the witch.”

“Baked her.”

“But that’s not all they did,” I insisted. “When they found out how much fun it was to cook a witch, they went and got another one. They cooked her, and then they caught two more. Baked them both together in a casserole. But after that, they had trouble.”

“Ran out of wood for the stove,” said a baboon.

“No. Lots of wood. But ran out of witches. Weren’t any more around. So Gretel said, ‘Let’s get somebody and pretend she’s a witch.’ Hansel didn’t like that much, but he went along. They caught a fairy next, and put a peaked hat on her, and broiled her quick without looking too close. Then they cooked more fairies, and elves, and nymphs, anybody and everybody.”

“How many?”

“Millions.”

“How many millions?”

“Oh maybe six.”

“Go away, storyman,” Martha joshed. “Two kids couldn’t cook that many folks.”

“They had help.” I smiled around the circle. “You’d’ve helped, wouldn’t you?”

Uproarious assent.

“Did Martha ever tell you about the City Mouse and the Country Mouse?”

She had, but this time some of them didn’t want to hear it again.

“No?”

“Don’t want to hear about no stupid mice!”

“But I tell it about rats.”

Sudden awe.

“They listening, storyman.”

“Once upon a time, the City Rat went to visit the Country Rat, and—”

“He take the subway?”

“No, he took the sewer.”

“Long as he got there.”

“He did, and it was a drag. So he brought the Country Rat back uptown with him, to show him some excitement. The Country Rat was going to go right up the front stoop, but the City Rat took him around back and up through the wall. ‘You gotta cozy it around here,’ he told the Country Rat. ‘We wait for dark.’ And when dark came, the City Rat crawled out with the Country Rat hanging onto his tail, and there, in an empty frozen-orange-juice box, was a little baby.”

Miss Flopsy-Mopsy got up with an appalled look and left.

“She thinks she knows the story,” Martha said, “but too bad she don’t.”

“Then the City Rat said to the Country Rat, ‘Go on.’ ‘Go on what?’ said the Country Rat. ‘Bite the baby,’ said the City Rat. ‘You crazy?’ said the Country Rat. ‘That’s what we come for,’ said the City Rat, ‘I’m not biting no baby,’ said the Country Rat. ‘You no fun at all,’ said the City Rat, and he climbed up on the edge of that juice box and leaned down toward the little baby’s cheek and …” They were hanging on my every word. “—and clicked his big rat teeth once, twice and then—”

But even I couldn’t do it.

“—and then the light suddenly snapped on—”

“There ain’t no light.” Martha laughed.

“—and the City Rat was knocked right smack dead with a work shoe—”

“You lie.”

“—and the Country Rat ran all the way back to the country, and found an old feed pail to chew on, and said, ‘I don’t want no part of any city.’”

“Amen to that,” said Martha. “But you shitting us, storyman. You ain’t—”

“Let’s play a game.”

Gibbering assent drowned her out, and so she had to go back to laughing. Still no ripples. Calm over the whole dark sea.

“Girls first,” I said. “The boys can watch this time. Does everybody know Drop-the-handkerchief?”

“If you got one.”

There was room enough. I got the females into a circle with Martha’s help, then pulled out my handkerchief, twirling it taut and untaut. “Now we’re all going to close our eyes, and I’m going to go around and around in back of you, and drop this hanky behind one of you, and—”

“She chases you!”

“That’s right, but nobody’s to open her eyes until—”

“—You say you dropped it! We know, we know!”

I started off with just a wee bit of a skip. “A tisket, a tasket—” I figured I still needed some small incident to go with the tales they would take home, spread abroad. “—a green and yellow basket—” I picked out the most jutted behind and, a little more than softly, snapped my taut handkerchief at its high cheek. The girl giggled. “I took a present to my love—” So I picked out another, and snapped harder. More giggling. “—took a present to my love—” I wanted something besides a giggle. On my next circle round, I saw some trembling here and there, girlish nerves, especially in one tiny, dirty derrière, bare as a baboon’s under her dusty skirt. I whipped it one but good. A real yelp. “—and on my way I dropped—”

But I never got to drop it. It was yanked out of my hand.

“Get his butt!”

Martha was waving them all into the fray with my handkerchief. “Boys too! Get that butt-pincher!” I started to back away, but quickly thought how silly, and stood my ground. They were serving my own purposes. Some of them really tried to pinch hard, but their fingers were just too small. Nibbles. Guppies attacking flab. Still, I squealed, rubbed a few of their heads sweetly, pretended excruciating ecstasy, and it was all a great laugh, especially to Martha.

“We on to you, storyman!” she chortled.

“You won’t report me?” I pleaded, quaking in my dirty old man’s shoes.

“That’s how come you know so much about children.”

That caught me off guard a little.

“We gonna report this ol’ butt-pincher?” she said to the apes.

“Please,” I made moan.

“Tell you what. If we reports him …”

“It’s something I can’t help!” I laid on.

“Then we ain’t never gonna get him back again.”

The monkeys howled.

“Keep him! Keep him!”

“Now just a damn minute,” I blurted.

But she was gleeful. “I got your hanky, storyman. I’m the one that’s chasing you now.”

And she was, in a manner of speaking, did, right back to her barrow on Eighteenth Street after the other mothers came for their own. But a goodly number of them still went with us.

“All yours?” I asked.

“All mine. None of ’em his.”

They loudly booed whoever, or how many, he might be, in happy unison.

“I been telling ’em those stories. But I been telling it like—who was she?—that Singing Lady—remember her?”

“I do indeed. Your Miss Irene Wicker.”

“Man, you got her beat.”

“But you see how I am,” I tried to insist.

“I seen.” She looked at me very wisely across her tremendous bosom, that outermost reef. “You a rare man. You understand children. Turn your back on ’em, they kill you with a coconut, but they only doing it for love. And if you don’t show ’em how cruel they is, they just gets crueler. We ain’t got time in this world to pretend nothing to nobody. If you love a child, you better let him know what’s hateful in him. And love that part of him just as much as the rest. You don’t, he’s gonna take it away from you, and hisself right along with it.” Waves could beat against her, but they only set her another hand-slapping rhythm. “And I ain’t lost none of my own yet.”

“Martha, you’ve got to report me.”

“Who says?”

“I shouldn’t be allowed near children.”

She roared. “You big on getting reported, ain’t you?”

“Martha, it’s your duty.”

“Tell you what, storyman. I maybe do my duty, if you do me a little duty here.”

This involved locking all the children in the kitchen with a giant jar of peanut butter and a spoon each, then helping her roll out the daybed on its sprung and rusty crutches. She shucked her dress and lay down heavily, turning herself over so that all that island majesty rose up into new boulderous heights.

“Let’s see what kind of a buttman you really is.”

It outweighed her bosom manyfold. I approached it with some trepidation, feeling very old indeed. But she reached back between her legs and pulled me strongly into her. A plunge down a swift race between those two giant boulders, and higher than I aimed to enter.

“Wait,” I said.

“You just stay where I put you.”

“We can come to that, Martha.”

“I got my reasons.”

The boulders began to move, sweetly crushing me.

“If we gets bedchecked, they can see I ain’t running them no risks.”

Dwelling upon moody death tonight, E.A.P., I think of your own sad end. Five days you were missing before they found you in that Baltimore tavern, beyond drunkenness. A shivering mind covered with only the barest threads of consciousness. And that day—when Dr. Snodgrass rescued you for four more days of what passed for life, most of it a suicidal delirium that I well recognize—was Election Day. That is the touch that appalls me, that you may have been kept those five blank days in some foul “repeaters” coop, drugged and made mummy-ready to be taken to the polls. Over and over again. To vote until either you or the municipality corrupted, whichever first.

My God. Concerning the vote. It is the addiction of this country. We cannot kick the habit. We will vote until all our treasure is spent, the national will exhausted. Yet after a big vote, such as this hallucinating nationwide high we get on every four years, what withdrawal symptoms! The stark, cold, rucking truth that seizes us, the chills that wrack us when we realize whom we have actually sent to the White Halfway House. We should quit cold turkey, but no, here we are, about to do it again. I was serious before. The choice is, in fact, exactly as you described it, E.A.P. One man who has become a deep and knived pit into which the walls are slowly forcing us—in order to escape the other man who swings back and forth above us, from coast to coast, scything the air, who has been lowering toward us for years, clanking, razoredged, whetted and ready, if he can only reach us in time, to cut us right in two:

They have names, you know them.

When that Esquire snoop got after me about politics, digging into my supposed pinko past, I finally told him that in my ultimate view, there is only God and man.

“That’s religion,” he said.

“I’m very religious about answering all political questions.”

“All right, Simon. What about God and man?”

“As far as politics goes?”

“Whatever.”

“Well, I’ll say this much. I am perfectly willing to see God made elective so long as he is subject to term limits. It might even help somewhat. But I am opposed to all these modern changes in the terms of office for man.”

“I don’t follow.”

“If you’ll recall, his appearance on the voting rolls was originally supposed to be an appointment that extended beyond the grave.”

Among my other depredations, I tried to do what I could, my small share at least, to stop the vote. As somebody who finally managed to quit voting, I thought I might be able to help others to help themselves by becoming a poll watcher.

I was naturally refused by the Board of Elections, but did talk to some interested press about the matter.

“What was your purpose in seeking to become a poll watcher, Mr. Moro?”

“Admonitory.”

“How so?”

“My thought was to challenge everybody.”

“Indiscriminately?”

“Yes. Some, of course, would still have to be allowed to cast their votes. But by and large, only the most hopeless cases. Those who’ve been voting a straight ticket for twenty years, that type. There’s really no point in trying to rehabilitate these lost souls. But the so-called independent voters, for instance, those who still feel they are making some real choice, they could be turned away. And should be. This sense of exercising choice is the most dangerous thing about voting. Most voters become hooked before they realize it is a delusion.”

“Anybody else?”

“The young. Those who will be voting for the first time, unless stopped. They’re very important. My feeling is that if they can be warned off, voting might very soon die out altogether. In other words, I don’t think the situation, though desperate, is irreversible. It is largely a matter of educating people, and particularly our young people, to recognize the inevitable self-abuse, the tax on their own intelligence that voting demands.”

“You ever voted yourself, Mr. Moro?”

“Of course. Often for Miss Rheingold. Always before the Academy Awards. You can’t be moralistic about a thing like this, especially when it’s so deeply woven into our society. I approach the problem strictly as an ex-voter who understands the attractions that voting has for certain dissatisfied people.”

“Who’d you ever vote for?”

“I’d rather not say. And in taking that position I realize I am contributing to the secrecy already connected with the ballot, a secrecy that I also know to be a large factor in the rapid rise of the vote. I realize that, and I am opposed to that secrecy. But as long as the secret ballot is the law of this land, I will respect it, however unwillingly, even in my own case. This is a highly complicated problem. Voting, of course, can’t be outlawed. You already in this country tried Prohibition. But private individuals certainly have the right to abstain from this vice, if you will allow me to call it a vice. And above all, we can certainly insist that it be made an open and aboveboard affair. To put it another way, I am for fully, not just partially, legalizing the franchise. I would think that, as a first step, we might begin by removing all those silly, opium-den curtains from the polling booths—”

“Mr. Moro, I don’t think you understand our democratic system.”

I grew wroth. “That excuse has been offered time and again. You’re as well aware as I am that voting has crept perniciously step by step into the system by which this country first Constitutionally arranged to govern itself. Voting, as we have it now, is an abuse of that system, and your Mr. George Washington would agree with me.”

And so on, & So Forth.

I’d have to admit that this adjunctive campaign did not catch on quite as well as my subway junkets or my revised fairy tales. The City still thinks of me primarily as a child molester, not a political maniac. It only goes to prove that people, even in the nature of the evil men do them, don’t really want change.

Then there is this business of handing out candy to the whores, my own affaire des bonbons. None of them seemed to have much of a sweet tooth, though great talents for invective. I took abuse that would have shriveled Priapus. Finally, outside the Americana, a tough little puss-puss, about five foot two in her poofed henna wig and punishment heels, yelled so loud she brought a cop.

“Okay, dads,” he grabbed me. “Let’s give back the purse.”

“That’s his purse!” she yowled.

I got all his Irish eye. “His, is it?”

“He’s freaking me, him and his purse!”

“You always carry a handbag, dads?”

“No harm,” I said.

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“It’s full of lemon drops!” she screeched.

“Is it now?”

“For my fair ones,” I wheezed. “Sweets to the sweet.”

“And who might they be?”

“No harm if I want to give treats to my little girls.”

“This one of your little girls?”

“I got nothing to do with this candy freak!”

“No harm.” I opened the purse. “Have one.”

He poked the purse right back at me with his nightstick. “Let’s see you eat one first.”

Of course I hesitated.

“Go on,” he nodded. “Treat yourself.”

I kept my jaw tensely set, and the whore muttered, “Tol’ you, tol’ you.”

“Plenty there, dads.”

“They’re for my sweet little ones,” I crowed nervously.

“Something in them,” she snarled.

“What’s the name, dads?” He had out his notebook.

I clammed up again.

“Come on. You got a name.”

“Sade.”

“The full name.”

“Mark D. Sade.”

“Live in the city?”

“No.”

“Where you staying?”

“The Bastille.”

He didn’t seem to know that hotel.

“Got any identification?”

I put the purse behind my back.

“Come on, Mark. Let’s have a driver’s license or something.”

“No harm.”

“Otherwise we take a little walk.”

I started suddenly shaking, pulled the purse around in front of me again, tore it open. Then, with a very good crazy snicker, I fisted up a big handful of lemon drops and jammed them into my mouth, wrappers and all. They were damn hard to swallow. I almost gagged on the cellophane twists, but the choking added conviction.

“No harm,” I laughed hysterically. “No harm.”

He knocked the next handful out of my hand and blew his whistle. The whore ran. I staggered, dumping lemon drops all over Eighth Avenue, tried to pick them up and cram more into my mouth. He tackled me and was struggling to put his finger down my throat when the squad car roared up.

I took it as far as they wanted to go, even let them stomach-pump me. To assure my effect, but also because I didn’t really fancy trying to digest all that crinkly cellophane. I then spent a restful night at St. Luke’s under close observation, found myself very big in the newspapers again next morning. The nice part about the Daily News story was that it connected me with “a long series of previous incidents involving Moro that have increasingly annoyed New Yorkers.” I was beginning to establish myself.

Though exactly as what kind of a poor flimflam—yes, still!—I didn’t find out until that cop stopped by at St. Luke’s, to decide if there was any way he could press charges. I thought he gave up pretty easily.

“They were nothing but lemon drops,” he said, “as if you didn’t know.”

“No harm.”

“Right. You really don’t mean anybody any harm.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

“We’re sure.”

“The papers aren’t.”

“You’re the kind of nut, if we catch you making an obscene phone call, it’s always to your wife.”

“I’m not married.”

“I’m talking about the way you’re trying to scare this city.”

“Out of its wits.”

“People are that way already. Everybody’s scared, but nobody knows what he’s really scared of.”

“The blacks, crime in the streets, their apartments being robbed, police brutality—”

“Too much to be scared of. That’s the trouble.”

“Add me.”

“I am. But everybody’s really better off being scared of you.”

“What?”

“You’re a safe way to be scared.”

I was outraged. “I intend to strike terror, absolute terror into every heart!”

He smiled. “We’d be happy to cooperate.”

That’s when I knew I was going to have to use Pinkie. Somehow. Maybe this was even why I’d kept that finger back so long. Always in readiness, but never publicly committed. Once or twice I’d taken it along with me in my pocket, on the sly, to push elevator buttons with, or stir a cup of coffee. But it didn’t work on those square-lit panel buttons. They operate on body heat. The finger has to be live. And I couldn’t drink the coffee, too much formaldehyde. Besides, I knew these were furtive horrors, wasted on my dull-witted fellow passengers or a few drifters in Nedick’s. There had to be a right time, a moment when I could, with maximum exposure, stick that finger right in everybody’s eye.

Grisly of me, yes. But necessary. Concerning all this. People are much more frightened by pieces of people than they are by actual people. The foot still in the dead soldier’s boot, the head on a pike, the lopped limbs in the Grand Central baggage locker, the testicles stuffed in the mouth, the string of ears, et cetera. It is once again the part for the whole. We blanch and shiver more at what is missing than what is there. We remember the dismembered. Ghoulgantua. I had it all together back then, as they say. That once. Every bit and piece of me was really somebody. The problem here was how to create that same fear of rampant carnage out of not even so much as a man’s hand. Easy enough to drop the thing in somebody’s Caesar salad, but how to make a little finger go a lot longer way, the whole way?

Luckily Terry was beginning to take a panicky interest, started calling me from the coast.

“What are you doing to us?”

“How are you involved?”

“The trades got you in Bellevue.”

“St. Luke’s.”

“Molesting prostitutes?”

“And kids.”

“Kids?”

“And old ladies on subways.”

“Simon!”

“Life goes on.”

“Listen careful.”

“Speak.”

“We’ve got you on the Tonight Show.”

“Excellent.”

“But you’d better behave.”

“Watch me.”

“I will, and I want to see Mr. Nice Ghoul.”

“I’ll tell them fairy tales.”

“Don’t shit me, Simon. We’re already hearing some of those out here.”

“Then I’ll tell them how I made the picture.”

“How who made the picture?”

“A family picture about family people with family problems.”

“Well … in a way … it is.”

“I quite agree.”

“How come you agree?”

“I’m family myself. The black sheep of the Family of Man maybe, but still Family.”

“I warn you, Simon. Any more trouble, and I’m coming east.”

So the right time had come, and for the occasion, since I would be wearing my Ravenswear, I decided to put Pinkie in costume too.

“A ring for my lady’s finger,” I sang at the salesgirl behind the Woolworth jewelry counter.

“What kind of ring? Engagement? Birthday? Anniversary?”

“Anything that will get us into a motel.”

“You want a wedding band, then. And you probably want it adjustable.”

“No. We can try it on here.”

“She’s with you?”

“She couldn’t come, but I brought this along.”

We tried three before we found one that really fit that old groove. That is, I slipped them on and off the finger as she handed them to me, standing very far back of the counter. Then she said she needed to call her supervisor if she was going to make change for my dollar. Altogether it made a nice little preliminary stir.

So then, the night Mine Host, whoever he may be, met Pinkie.

I’ve always hated these talk shows. Hated them. Rhetorical fellatio: You’ve been around a long time, haven’t you?—Yes, a long time.—Do monsters ever grow old?—I think they try to age gracefully, like most of us.—How old would Ghoulgantua be now?—A lot of him would be practically senile, but some parts of him would still be fairly young.—That right?—Yes. His left ear could hear a pin drop, but he’d probably need trifocals for his right eye.—This is some conversation we’re having, isn’t it?—Yes it is. It is indeed.—Do you enjoy playing monsters? I mean, do you really feel monstrous yourself?—I think most of us feel pretty monstrous most of the time.—You think so?—Oh yes. I’ve been wandering around New York a lot lately, just on my own—You certainly have, haven’t you?—Yes, and I notice there’s a lot of mayhem, in people’s faces.—How do you mean?—It’s the way they look at you. The same way I used to look at Fay Wray. Or Hazel Rio in our new picture.—Fay Wray. Whatever happened to her?—I don’t know.—Married King Kong and had six little princess apes.—Maybe.—Hey, we’re having Hazel Rio on the show next week, you know that?—I heard that.—We’ll have to ask her just how do you look at her. But you’ve been getting lots of looks yourself lately, haven’t you?—Quite a lot.—What kind of looks?—Oh … nasty, mean, bitter, angry, desirous.—Desirous?—Rapacious, really.—But tell me this, despite all that, I mean, despite everything, haven’t some people been kind?—A few.—How have they been kind?—They’ve tried to get me to a hospital, or asked a policeman to help. The ones that haven’t run away.—A lot of people run away from you?—Quite a few.—Why do you think they run away?—I think it has a great deal to do with themselves.—They’re not just afraid?—They’re afraid, but afraid of themselves, really. Like I just said a minute ago, what I see in them is myself, and what I think they see in me is themselves. At least that’s what I want them to see—But you’re such a nice guy, or are you?—Well, you know what they say about nice guys.—Finishing last, you mean.—Yes.—They do say that, don’t they?—They do, but it may not be the whole story.—How do you mean?—Let’s say it’s all finished, whatever it happens to be, and there’s this one last guy, all alone.—Yes.—Why shouldn’t he think he’s a nice guy? Who’s around to tell him any different? He could be a very bad guy, the worst guy who ever lived.—You think there are a lot of really bad guys who think they’re nice guys?—That’s one definition of a monster.—Who’s around now that’s that kind of a monster?—Well, there’s Richard Nixon, he’s been last a few times, and Chiang Kai-shek, and Hubert Humphrey, and—I’m not sure I like how this conversation is going, do you?—And maybe you could include yourself. How are your ratings lately?—Hey now, I thought you were supposed to be the monster around here.—Yes, but I’m a monster by intent.—That’s better?—Much.—All right. What makes me a monster?—You’re a monster through circumstances.—I can’t wait to hear this.—You can’t help being a monster when millions of people give up what used to be their own quiet times together, all their small talk, maybe a good two hours of sleep each night to watch you mouth—What’s that you’re wearing, Simon?—This, you mean.—What do you call that outfit?—Ravenswear.—I want to ask you about that, just as soon as we hear this word from …

Hate them. Oral onanism: Simon Moro’s been telling us here how he turns into a Raven. What are those back there, wings?—My dark pinions.—What happens when you moult? That’s a bird-brained question, isn’t it? Let me ask you something else about the picture. Who directed it?—I did.—You did?—Largely.—Why does it say Terry Cowan here on the card?—Terry worked as my assistant. A very bright lad too.—He’s coming along?—He’s coming along. I predict quite a future for him. But he’s got one problem.—What’s that?—He’s squeamish.—Squeamish?—Sight of blood sickens him.—Doesn’t that make it a little hard for him to do a horror picture?—Yes, and it shows in his work. Somewhat.—Kind of like being Busby Berkeley with two left feet, isn’t it?—Almost.—He’s not going to mind our saying that, is he?—Busby might.—Let’s see here, the script is by?—Myself.—You wrote the script?—I collaborated.—With?—Your Mr. Edgar Allan Poe.—Who else? I guess I just tear up this card, don’t I?—Hasn’t been right so far.—This is pretty much your picture then?—I think you could say that.—I know you’ve done some great pictures, Zeppelin and The Moth, you have, and those lizard ones—who was he again?—Gila Man.—Right, I knew that. Classics they’ve become. But it’s been a long time.—Yes. Eight years since The Shoplifter.—I saw that one. It was great. But eight years, you say?—Eight years.—So how does it feel to be back in this one? You happy with it?—I was when I left Hollywood. But we’ve lost some good things in the editing.—You know, you hear that all the time, but does it ever really happen?—It can easily. You play a great, long, torrid love scene, and it ends up a last-minute handshake.—Did you play any love scenes for this picture?—Oh yes. Several. Ravens are terrific lovers.—Who do you make love to?—Lenore.—Hazel Rio?—That’s right. Hazel.—Tell me, how does a raven make love?—You better see the picture.—Anyhow, it’s a horror picture, not a love picture. Isn’t it?—Both, really.—But will it scare people?—Petrify them.—Really and truly?—Yes. Particularly the love scenes.—Did I hear him right, audience?—They’re some of the best horror.—I guess I did. So it’s a horror love picture. Have I got it straight?—Yes, if you realize that all horror is erotic.—I didn’t know that. Did the audience know that?—Very erotic.—Now that I know, I’m not sure I want to know. Should I take my wife to this picture?—Yes.—I should? What do you think’s wrong with my wife?—Take everybody. It’s good, clean family eroticism.—Whoops!—They don’t always turn out that well!—It can get worse?—Some horror films go off in very strange directions these days.—Do we want to get into that? I guess not. How do we get out of it? Let’s talk about Quincy Adams.—That’s not going to get us out of it.—It’s not, is it? But isn’t he in the picture with you?—Briefly.—He was on our show once. Briefly. I don’t mean that. He stayed a long time. What’s he do in your picture?—Equivocates.—He does what?—Equivocates.—That sound as bad to you out there as it does to me up here?—He’s very good at it.—But do we dare ask him back on the show again? I don’t mean that either. Is he going to mind our talking about him like this?—I don’t think so, really. He equivocates pretty openly.—In the picture too?—Throughout.—You actually show him equivocating?—In extreme close-up.—Wow. Listen. You were going to tell us something that happened on set, weren’t you?—If you’ll allow me a few liberties here, I’m even going to demonstrate how it happened.—What sort of liberties? You’re not going to equivocate, are you?—Not in the least.—What is it you want me to let you do?—Take off my shoes.—Go ahead. While Simon Moro is liberating his feet here, we’ll return you to your local stations. Don’t go away, folks, we’ll be right back….

Still crap, but bringing me closer, very close: Simon Moro’s got his shoes off here, but you can’t see his feet because … what do you call that skirt thing?—A caftan.—Okay. His caftan, as you can see, he’s practically tripping over it. Let’s move along here.—Well, we had this quite wonderful live raven on set named Rupert.—You’re going to be Rupert the Raven?—I’m the raven, that’s correct.—He mind you stealing his part?—We’re still good friends.—Go ahead. I’m interrupting.—We went through a terrible morning, Monday, the first week of shooting. A lot of fracas. Rupert’s stand-in was injured, and the scene wasn’t working. Everything a disaster.—Like every night on this show.—Anyhow, one of the grips lost something fairly valuable to him in all the confusion.—What was it?—I’ll get to it. In fact, I brought it along with me tonight.—Good.—Nobody could find the thing, everybody hunting high and low. But Rupert spotted it.—Where?—Way up in some spider webbing.—A real spider web?—No. Fake. No spider. Part of the set.—I see.—And when Rupert saw how high up it was, realized he was the only one who could reach it, he took off.—You were telling me they’ve got very keen minds, ravens do. Am I right?—Yes. He flew up, picked it right out of the web with his beak, and brought it back to me.—Why you? Why not the guy who lost it?—He knew me better.—Or he knew you were going to be on tonight’s show. Smart bird there, Rupert. Okay. You’re going to do it for us, that whole bit. When? Right now?—I’m ready whenever you are.—Then here we go. Ladies and gentlemen, Simon Moro as the Raven, in a moment of … what’s it say here? … a Moment of Recaptured and Reiterated Horror? You got me….

Finally, after all that horse prattle, I switched raucously into ravenese. I waited for the trumpeter to quit, then fluttered out of my chair in a jabber. I pulled Pinkie out of my pocket, but too high over my head for focus.

—What’s that? Looks like a sausage.

I tossed it away quickly, out past the cameras into their cables, call that the web, so they couldn’t get a shot of it yet. They stayed on me instead, as I leapt into a flight pattern.

—He’ll never get off the ground, that raven.

Then I was out there in the cables, on top of the finger, covering it with the skirts of my caftan. I did some blinking and burbling, until I had Pinkie between the big and second toes of my right foot. The cameras caught up with me again. I lifted the caftan and slowly brought talon to beak, feeling the tendons in my leg tighten with age, but still yield, stretch all the way to my mouth.

—Isn’t that some trick?

There was a spattering of applause around me. Like tossed bird seed, I remember thinking.

—Some of our viewers probably remember Simon doing that in one of his earliest movies. I do, I’m here to tell you. Boy. Fed himself soup with a spoon, and never spilled.

I turned, very much on the wing, and swooped in a gyre twice around both cameras, twisting them into each other’s lenses.

—All right, Rupert, let’s see what you’ve got there. Hey, how do you call a raven?

I screeched through my teeth, past the stench and sponginess. He screeched back at me in proudly silly imitation.

—Too much parakeet?

I plummeted down on him.

—Do I take it from you, or … Christ no I don’t!

But the cameras had already moved in tight, and for one slight, bright, shining moment, I think I actually unified this country.

Though possibly I exaggerate. Here, as perhaps in much else I have claimed for myself so far. Not all parts of the country got to see it. Some local stations balked, cut to their “Please Stand By” opticals. And only the studio audience it all as I’ve described it. The tape was trimmed, keeping attention during those last few seconds on Pinkie, not Mine Host. The network wanted its man absolved. Its attitude toward me was one of rough justice. “Since you’re never going to appear on television again, Moro, we’re willing to show why.” I suppose, by its own lights, that was magnanimous, even daring of TV.

But am I wrong, or did there arise at that moment, as parceled out across the land as that moment had to be, a wave of universal revulsion? At long last? I think so, and will not pretend modesty. I have not been unaware of my evolving fad, nor ignorant of the reach it could give me, despite its shallowness. But please, my only real conceit has been the chance it offered me to make some such meaningful gesture. And frankly, I believe I brought it off.

I feel that wave still. It supports me. It makes it possible to lie down in this coffin and press forward with Terry’s ridiculous scheme, though, as you will ultimately see, very much in my own fashion. For I am not going to let that wave subside. In fact, I have resolved upon a dire stratagem that will bring it to tidal proportions.

Concerning this revulsion. If I were to analyze it, I would say that it extends outward from the crooking of that tiny finger, if only subconsciously, to all the great bestiality we have undertaken as a nation. I certainly hope so, in any case. Much can be attached to that finger. I will not bother to list the horrors we have known lately, and indeed done. What I have really tried to do is show, by vivid and palpable example, how they must, must be taken between our teeth.

But I have to prepare now for the day’s doings. Rudy will be in here soon to dress me, jury up my starched shirt with chicken wire to hide breathing, whiten my visage with a bloodless face powder, and so forth. People are coming to see what has revolted them, and they must continue to be revolted. Otherwise, all this self-torment, to what end?

Sunlight strikes the facets of your vials, E.A.P., their vibes thrum the viol, the violet, and the vine. I approach the first dawn of my popular death. Its rattle shakes my pen, and my words, for the nonce, expire.

If there is a God, by god I hope he is a professional …

Walpurgisnacht minus one. After what I must admit has been a very defeating day. Pennies and garlic. The riches and breath of this city. The good folks came first in rivulets, then in washes to cleanse my body with their tears. Not really. Not at all. Only to stare. To stare and stare, with no commensurate reaction. And another worry. I’ve always said I never lost a staring contest. But did I today? I did not stare back. As the unseeing dead, I suppose you could say I was hardly required to. Excuse enough to keep my lids lowered, or turn aside my eyes, upward into my head. To disengage. But I’m not satisfied with my performance. Not satisfied. I’ve played this whole first reel with my back to camera. Tour de force, yes, eternally, and old tricks from Zeppelin, but how do we know if I’m really any good? I must find some way tomorrow to dare stare. Open my eyes. Play dead straight.

I wish to note here the visit of only one mourner. My dearest Hazel.

“I know you can’t talk now, Simon honey, but there’s a few things I have to tell you. I found out about Terrykins. He does it to windows! I caught him at Schrafft’s. When he was outside, I was inside. So I don’t think I can do much with him, baby, I’m not glass. But I’ve been to the German consulate, and they checked. They say sure they’re willing to release your film, but they don’t have it any more. They could be just saying that. But I did one of them, and he says it’s very embarrassing, but some Israelis stole it. To make a documentary about the prison camps for American tourists. I’m sorry. They used your work, but they lost most of you. It’s not fair, is it? My German says they think it’s even more unfair to them because the Israelis took what you made up and pretended it was real. Anyhow, it’s all gone. I wish I’d at least seen it. Also, mama may be coming through the line today. I know there’s not much you can do, but think about her. She always said she wanted to see you dead. So you don’t really have to go much out of your way to give her a little treat.”

So much for Terry’s integrity. It is like my Hazel’s chastity. Not quite. I doubt if his ever required even initial violation.

As for her mother, she’d already been through. Assaultingly weeping and tunelessly wailing. I tasted one of her tears on my lip. Gin.

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy, Rudy. You are such a strange device upon this scarlet field of human endeavor.

I remember when I taught you how to make the sign of the cross. Touch forehead, touch heart, touch shoulder, touch shoulder. So simple. Another signal you could make with your hand. This one will let you in the church.

But your eyes kept asking me, what does it mean? What am I saying? And why does everybody else make the same sign? Head, heart, shoulder and shoulder?

It is an admission, Rudy, that if God is really present, we must all be deaf and dumb. If He is speaking, we do not hear. If He is listening, we cannot speak. We can only gesture with our hands, like you, and look for His. In everything, they say. But I do not see it myself.

Your trouble is that you were born a stump with an abstract turn of mind. But try, please try not to philosophize. I am being concrete. When I butt my hands together and close them palm to palm, I do not mean prayer. I mean my notebook. And when I make cursive motions in the air with a tightened fist, it is not the revolution. I am only asking for another ballpoint pen. Bring me one.

I am going to write about My Trip to the Country. The account will contain essential information. Perhaps a little stale. Some of it, in fact, fifty years old. But I have kept it all buried too long. These things also must rise and walk in the open sight of men.

When I cover my eyes with my hand, Rudy, it does not mean I am thinking. It means I can hardly bear to look.

Last Friday night, then, I rode wildly down the Jersey Turnpike in a Hertz Mustang on a complicated mission. First through the thick, chemical fogs and marshy luminescence of the Elizabeth refineries. On all sides of me, oil ominously cracked, and hydrogen sulfide burned off at the wick of a tall, laddered taper, like an ignis fatuus. Once I saw the tail of a lurking tiger curl around a storage tank. Billy Blake Enters Heaven.

But soon I had left all that, and the city’s stinking moat, far behind me. I swung down the ramp at Exit 8 and roared off into the desolate countryside. The roads were still vaguely cement, but more and more broken, soon scabrous with tar, then tar altogether, then tar mixed with sand. I passed lonely outposts. The Citizens Rifle and Revolver Club, and the snip-snap sound of small arms emptying their chambers in the dark. Gert’s Meats and Groceries, shut for the winter, open next famine. An abandoned pick-up truck, its front end buried in red clay, emblazoned “We’ll Haul It For You!” The Au Fait Decor Design Center, advertising a special on Venetian blinds, along with “Plastic Flowers—Reduced.” They were all somehow familiar, or if not exactly these hulks of enterprise, certainly the sandy, piney miles and miles between them. I only worried about the frequent and flaky signs—“For Sale, Eckmann Realty”—that my headlights picked up along the roadside, in stubbled fields and eroded front lawns, on falling fruit stands.

I came to Mabel’s, though I had never known any Mabel ready to offer me Fried Clams, Chicken-in-the-Basket, Music, Dancing Sat. Eve., Liquor, Seven-Up Time, Rooms for Rent, Pottery, Snacks, Live Bait, Souvenirs, Free TV. I pulled up to her single unmarked gas pump and honked. I waited several minutes, listening to her sign hiss and tick. It was a long-stemmed 1940 cocktail glass, slightly tipsy, in pink-elephant neon. Somebody who was not Mabel, at least by sex, came out to say they were all closed up, and he didn’t have the key to the pump.

“Can you tell me if I’m anywhere near Vienna?” I asked.

“Where?”

“Vienna.”

“Never heard of it.”

Was I that far off the track? Then I realized. After all these years, I’d absent-mindedly slipped up on the local pronunciation.

“Sorry,” I said, and then enunciated, “Vienna.”

“Oh. You want old Vi Town.”

We were agreed.

“Half mile straight ahead, first left.”

He hurried back inside Mabel’s and turned off her pink gin fizz.

Five minutes later I was at the sign the Volunteer Fire Department had put up at town’s edge in 1911.

WELCOME TO VIENNA

And then the rhyme line below it.

Why-enna where else?

I was back.

I drove straight through, not stopping, only checking on one or two places. We still seemed to have the only decent house in town, three down on the left from the fire house, still right opposite the General Store. Our whitewashed wishing well still stood next to the storm cellar doors. How many wishes I’d thrown down that hole, I remembered, but quickly looked to the right, for Eckmann Realty, next to the General Store. Double empty, and maybe it was only the night, but I could hardly make out Eckmann’s peeling name on the old signboard over the transom.

But there was a much newer placard in the window. “Sold by C. Moro.”

Ah so. To himself, most likely. He’d turned realtor, then, too. There always had been a certain skulking prosperity in the town. All you had to do was keep jumping it coming around every corner.

But I was already outside Vienna, going toward the Jersey shore. The beaches were a good ten miles distant, but the real sand began here. A windy swirl of it churned up in the road ahead of me, and spattered the car windows like hard rain. When it cleared, I was at the brick gates of the Austro-Hungarian Picnic Grounds. The old chain was dropped down so low and rusty that I drove right over it.

I stopped and got out at the first fireplace. There seemed to be more fireplaces than I remembered, as many as sixty, but then we were always building more fireplaces. Every summer, another barbecue pit for the new folks in town, though the architecture never changed. And hadn’t, from what I could see. Still the same low-hearthed, double-grilled, wood-burning, soot-blackened family units. All summer long, the pitchy smoke of charred hamburger and scorched chicken legs, or sometimes a flank steak, hung in the burnt air. The bricks never cooled, and my father played stubborn, beery piano hour after hour over the popping grease.

I wandered over to the music shed. Its roof must have been replaced sometime during all those years, but it was still corrugated tin. I remembered its resonance, whomping out his thumby chords in schmaltz booms. The piano here now was still an old one, its keyboard locked up for the season, but a new one, of course, to me. It had been a Player Pianola in my father’s day. He’d mastered the instrument by running the rolls over and over, following along the keys with his hammy hands, memorizing their plunks and dips downward. He could have played those slaughterhouse Strauss waltzes of his blind as well as deaf and dumb.

Something of all this, however distortedly, had gone into my work, and I had come here first to be alone, to dredge up those long-ago summertime fancies. My mother’s mad Tyrolean dances. Eckmann and the alphorn he built out of stove pipe. The frenzied, clog-footed cotillions that everybody flung themselves into, linking steins and rear ends. Comical, chimerical, but some noisome stench of the future here. Odors of the Anschluss. Ah so, that weird, almost Ruritanian evening when my brother followed the toast to the Emperor Franz Josef by rising to propose they also drink to the Kaiser. Strange to think of him rebelling that way, yet still staying on, a crypto-Prussian, to become a town father. Stranger still to think of that opera bouffe gesture as any kind of a rebellion. He must have been all of fifteen then, barely old enough to drink schnapps.

I walked back to the car with perplexing geopolitical thoughts. Why had my parents come to this country if all they wanted to do was refound that same farcical principality all over again? Gaiety travels no better than wine. I had been raised as a miserable sprite in the New Jersey Vienna Woods, had tried to escape all the way across the sea to the real Transylvania. It occurred to me that I probably couldn’t have gone a longer way around to never leave home.

As I drove back out over the chain, I noticed a new structure across the road, and back in a ways. A drive-in theater, in fact, the top of its screen curving just over the pine trees. The marquee, built of brick in that same fireplace style, had last July’s feature still listed in hanging letters.

S. MORO

in

HITLER’S CAMPS

I wondered if I might have become a local war hero.

Back in Vienna again, I stopped first at the General Store. Frankly, to see if anybody who might be up that late would notice me. The deep, buckling swells in the floor hadn’t changed. I remembered my father once joking that this was the farthest inland the Jersey surf had ever reached. A huge roller, still carrying the candy counter at its crest.

There was only one lone codger tending the store. It took me a moment to realize it was Eckmann. Eighty if he was a day. When I asked him if I could buy an American flag sticker for my car, he didn’t seem to recognize me.

“Have them in again Monday maybe,” he said.

“You’re out?”

“Been a run on them.”

“Town must be livening up.”

He didn’t say anything. I sensed he was lying.

“This your store?” I asked him.

“I mind it.”

“Who for?”

“Man across the way.”

“With the wishing well?”

“That’s the war memorial.”

“It’s the what?”

“He give it to the town.”

Eckmann’s eyes had gone bad on him. He was hand-fumbling his way down the counter toward me.

“Important man around here. Owns most of us when we’re dead too.”

“How so?”

“The cemetery’s his. Made his mark in life out of that cemetery.”

He’d almost reached me, would once he got around the hore-hound candy jar.

“Had a business myself. Next door. But got to be too much for me. So we kind of traded real estate.”

“Watch you don’t bump that jar.”

“Traded even. My holdings for one of his plots. And I get to hang around here until I need it.”

I was about to say Eckmann, you always were a damn fool, go blow your horn, when somebody came in the door. It looked like somebody too small to be up at this hour. Before I had that idea out of my head, he was hugging me around the knees, like a small bear.

Rudy in tears. Rudy trying to say everything with his hands, but needing them to wipe away his tears. So I wiped them away, and tried to catch up with all his fingers had to say. How good it was to see me, how long it had been, how old we were getting! Did I think he’d grown? Did I? Did I know he could still lift over twice his weight easily? Did I know he could drive the hearse now, if somebody was with him? Did I want to hear him play the piano? Could we go right out to the picnic grounds and he’d play and I’d dance, the way our folks always did?

I tinkled piano keys in the air, then twisted a key in a lock, and then shrugged.

He understood. He’d run and get the key.

I hauled him back before he escaped and shook my head.

He understood. But why not?

I pointed across the street, walked my fingers, indicated both of us, and drew a face as long as I could remember my brother’s being. I meant we must.

He understood. He kicked me.

But I understood, and hugged him hard, rubbing my cheek on the balding flat of his head.

“Look out for that little runt,” Eckmann said. “He’s got mean toes.”

I realized Eckmann still didn’t know who I was.

We didn’t go to the front door, but around to the storm cellar doors, which Rudy flipped back like shutters. Harsh light and a chill rose up out of the cellar, still as whitewashed as the wishing well.

Cosmo was working over a corpse, and wearing a green eye-shade. It was my father’s eyeshade, or one exactly like it. I’d forgotten how much our parent had tried to pamper his one best remaining sense.

When Cosmo saw me, he yanked it off in acute embarrassment. Hadn’t seen me in nearly fifty years, and here I’d caught him wearing it. I’m sure Rudy meant that to happen.

He didn’t say anything for quite a long time. Then he said, “We’ll talk in the morning.”

“Where do I sleep?”

“Rudy will show you.”

“All right.”

He pulled up a strand of the corpse’s stringy gray hair. “She’s got to be ready for church by eight.”

“I said, all right.”

“All right then.”

“One thing though.”

“Talk to Rudy. You were always good at talking to him.”

“When we go out, don’t put it back on.”

He ground his snaggly teeth.

We went out into the cemetery together the following day, just before noon. To check on the grave Rudy had dug for the old gal, who’d owned a beauty parlor over near Point Pleasant. Which was why she had to look extra nice, Cosmo said. But also to talk things over, and for him to point out to me one headstone in particular. It was already somewhat weathered, lichened, with the Imperial Death’s Head and the slogan, GOTT MIT UNS FÜR KÖNIG UND VATERLAND, but incompletely inscribed.

SIMON MORO

1900–

“This was where I was going to put you,” he said, “if you’d come back to us with any honor.”

“It wasn’t my war. It was your war. Why didn’t you go?”

“I had all this to worry about.”

He stretched his knobby hand out over the far-reaching graves. We were standing in the original family plot, a good distance out back, but still the dead nearest the house. He’d fenced it off, but where were the sheep, and my mother with her scythe? The sheep had long ago become mutton, and my mother …

Her grave was next to our father’s, right behind my own premature memorial. I’d remembered them as being very much alone out here, but now they were all but lost in a great, green-rolling, anonymous crowd. I guessed the place must draw from at least three counties.

“I served, Cosmo.”

“But you didn’t win.”

“Nobody did, really. It was a bloody circus, and they killed all the clowns.”

“You just set it up for that friend of yours.”

“What friend?”

“Hitler.”

“I hated Hitler.”

He smirked at me slyly. “Didn’t look that way in your last picture.”

I tried to keep my patience. “You wouldn’t understand, but I had to run from Hitler.”

“Just like you to.”

“You don’t know.”

“I know when the family name’s been disgraced on the field of valor.”

“I didn’t even use our name. I used Eckmann’s, if you must know.”

“You went as a Moro.”

“I went illegally, remember? American citizens weren’t supposed to be fighting for the Kaiser. I fought and I deserted—”

“Deserted?”

“Both bravely, Cosmo. As somebody called Rudi Eckmann.”

“Rudy? You think he’d be proud of what you done?”

“Yes, if he could ever know.”

“It’s worse than I thought.”

“You don’t know.”

“I know what you did to our good name. Couldn’t defend it yourself, so you let a bunch of monsters do it for you!”

I tried to change the subject.

“When did you force out Eckmann?”

He squirmed a little. “He was a charge on the public rolls. I got him off last year.”

“And left him with nothing.”

“I left up his signs.”

“His land?”

“It ain’t much, but I’m holding on to it.”

“What for?”

“I got my reasons.”

“We’re old men, Cosmo. You, me, even Rudy. And none of us has any family. What good is your damn greed?”

“You don’t have any family?”

“None I’m tied to.”

“Legally?”

“That’s not the real point, but it’s the case.”

He was pleased by this, felt freer to talk.

“The land’s for more of the same.” He waved again out over the stones already raised, and the profitable grave sites beyond. I could see now what he’d turned into. A quickbuck land developer on death duty. “Nothing here for you,” he went on, “except maybe this.” He patted the skull on my headstone. “If I even let you have that. So now, how come you’re back?”

“I need your brotherly help.”

He snorted. “I disowned you after Versailles.”

I got angry. “I had a lot to say about Versailles myself. And I said it. Out loud, publicly.”

“Where?”

“In the real Vienna.”

“Didn’t reach us.”

“How would it? You just do not know. I’ve spent years, trying to shock people out of making mistakes like that. And worse ones. Every way I could.”

“That what you think you’ve been doing?”

“That’s what I know I’ve been doing. I’m still doing it.”

“With your spook tricks.”

“With my life. What have you been doing with yours?”

“Don’t get high and mighty with me. Remember I seen your last picture. You didn’t even stick up for your Nazi friends!”

Useless. I was trying to reach him across too many piled-up decades. It gave me pause. I realized I still clung to my old Marxist habit of trying to get aboard the train of history. But to Cosmo, to most people, history is only a ghost train. They hear its wail far down the tracks sometimes, but never see it go by, don’t even want to ride the rails.

“All right, Cosmo, all right. Suppose I say that I need your professional help.”

“Who for?”

“Myself.”

“Yourself?”

“Yes.”

He grinned. “Now that might be arranged.”

I explained at length what was going on, what I needed from him. It seemed to appeal to his streak of connivance.

“Pretty complicated.”

“That’s why I want you and Rudy along.”

“You really going back to Germany?”

“That’s the plan, but I don’t trust the plan yet. I don’t think I can really depend upon anybody involved in this. Except my family.”

“Your family.”

“Especially if I have to change plans.”

He squirmed at this too, but seemed to take my point.

“Well, I got a new hearse.”

“No, I don’t want that one. Rudy showed me the old one this morning, back of the firehouse.”

“That’s the town ambulance now.”

“I don’t care. I want it.”

“And two cheap coffins you want.”

“Just as cheap as Father used to make them. Thin. Out of old scrap wood, if you’ve got any.”

“I got some pretty thin pine, some old poplar.”

“Then pine for the sides, poplar for the lids.”

“I could do things a lot fancier, if I had time to order.”

“Don’t have time to order, and I don’t want fancy.”

“You don’t.” He sharpened up his sharpest look. “You really in trouble up there in the big city?”

“Enough people think I am.”

“Why?”

“I want them to think I am.”

“You always did go looking for trouble. That time you played Satan in the church play?”

“King Herod.”

“Herod, was it? Looked like Satan to me.”

“I played it that way.”

“Chopped every damn doll in town right in two.”

“But then Eckmann stopped stropping his daughter, and our father quit going after Mother, and …” But it was too complicated, or just too long ago.

“You were a hellion, all right. Whole town glad to see the hind end of you.” He considered. “And I guess what all this boils down to is us seeing it again, don’t it?”

“For the last time.”

“Never thought you’d come back. After the Armistice maybe, but not after that.”

“With your help, I won’t need to again. One way or another.”

“Guess I got to be for that, don’t I?”

We started walking back toward the house, but wide around through some of the older graves. I passed one pitched-over stone with a big chip out of its side that I recognized as my mother’s work. It gave me a momentary pang.

Cosmo was full of himself, pride in his calling, how big he’d gotten, how much the buried population had expanded since our father’s sparsely settled days, but something else was still puzzling him.

“What kind of trouble you get yourself into up there in the big city?”

“Don’t you have television?”

He smiled hard money at me. “When we get to wanting it, we ride up to Mabel’s.”

He put on his overalls after lunch, worked hard most of the afternoon, down in the storm cellar, sawing and hammering. I sat outside a while on the edge of the wishing well, mulling him, Rudy, the town, other things over. The well had been converted into the war memorial by simply chipping out of its uneven stones a badly spaced tribute that ran all the way around and caught up with itself.

BATTLE TO OUR HONORED DEAD IN

When he came up once for a little fresh air, I asked him about this unwonted public-spiritedness.

“Sure I give it,” he said. “But I didn’t tell them which war.” He poked the lettering with the claw of his hammer.

“And I didn’t tell them which side neither.”

Later on, I decided to go in search of Rudy. “Out back,” Cosmo yelled up to me from the storm cellar, “digging another grave.”

I found him already three feet down in the tough, red clay, in front of my own headstone.

I stood there at its wintry marge, and Rudy looked up at me with a miserable, thoroughly astonished expression after each shovelful, but kept on digging. It was back-breaking labor, the clay unyielding when he spaded into it, wet when he lifted it. This must be what has kept him so strong all these years, I ruminated.

When he stopped to rest, I squared off a long box with my hands, then lay my head on my open palm with my eyes peacefully closed, and then did a quick, very cheerful skeleton dance, smiling broadly.

Rudy still didn’t understand, but saw at least that I didn’t object.

I went back to Cosmo to find out just what he had in mind. He scooped up a handful of loose sawdust, let it sift out of the bottom of his fist. It made a small pile on a pine knot, like sand in the bottom of an hourglass.

“I’m sticking by my word.”

“What word?”

“To the town.”

“In what way have you oathed yourself to this town?”

“I promised them I’d only let you back here to be buried.”

“How much you must have missed me.”

“Somebody might recognize you.”

“Not so far.”

“If they do, I’m at least covered.”

I took a walk through Vienna around five, once again to see who indeed might know me. Along our sandy, little, gutterless Ringstrasse.

No face was particularly familiar, though some of them I knew I’d kissed, and one or two I might have struck in a schoolyard fight. But none of them seemed to know I’d ever been anywhere near any of them before. Even the several ancients stooled up over their cups of coffee at the Rexall drugstore. Our Café Mozart.

I also looked in at the Seahorse Dinette. Our Demel’s, where my mother had once, to save us all, slung hash for six months. The present waitress, reading the Asbury Park Evening News, told me she’d be right with me, or I could get a plate and help myself. I asked her if I could bring her anything.

“I eat at home,” she said, leaning nearer the newsprint.

I said I would do the same, and left, unnoticed.

Changes everywhere. The old gaslights were gone, of course. There had been three, their nightly tendance one of my father’s bounden duties. The church was still the same denomination, but locked up and gray, instead of Easter-white with its doors forbiddingly open. Our own St. Stephen’s. The school was now the post office, and the post office was now the B.P.O.E. I couldn’t even find the one-room Public Library. One summer I read it all. By the middle of August. That got me in trouble too. I was too quick for my own good, and there were better things for a growing boy to do than sit around all day and read, and if you take them out again, you’ll wear out the bindings before others have had a chance to borrow them …

But learning, I guessed, had been moved regionally out of town. You reached it now by school bus. Though I didn’t see anybody school age either. It looked sadly like a place where there wasn’t even any Halloween any more.

When I stopped to pet the Dalmatian lying in front of the fire house, our Belvedere Palace, the dog was abruptly called to come back inside. By a man standing with one foot horsed on the fire engine fender, who I was sure used to deliver eggs to us when he was a boy.

“You tell old man Cosmo at least that dog’s life is still his own.”

I dropped by the General Store again. Eckmann’s face seemed to light up the least little feeble bit.

“I ain’t forgot. You’re after a flag sticker.”

So I went back down the Ringstrasse to Cosmo again, who was just setting aside work for the day, one coffin half nailed together, the boards for the other sawn and laid out, like pants pieces.

“There seems to be a stranger in town,” I said.

“They’ll remember you someday.”

“When?”

“After you’re gone.”

“But not fondly.”

“That time you drove all our sheep into church.”

“The Lambs of God, Cosmo. I was showing, how each living creature is—”

“They’ll remember that.”

“I see they’ve locked the doors.”

“Come on. We got to go help Rudy.”

“He’s doing fine on his own.”

“Not toward the end. He gets six feet down, he can’t pull himself out.”

On Sunday, while Cosmo finished work on the coffins, Rudy and I test-drove the old hearse down to the shore, with Rudy at the wheel. Between us, me shouting, him shifting, we made it.

Once there, I tried to give him a treat. I took him on the indoor merry-go-round with me, two on a horse, gave him some change to waste on the prize machines, bought him a candied apple that he tried to put in his pocket, half-eaten. Then we went for a long stroll down the almost empty boardwalk. He insisted on walking right next to the row of closed concessions, his shoulder hugging their boarded-up fronts, his eyes turned away from the sea. Finally I pulled him over to the railing and made him look. He was trembling.

From his hands, though he always kept one or the other tight to the rail, I got the idea he didn’t know how something like the ocean could exist. Too big. Where did it all go?

I tried to show him by making a boat with my hands, then an airplane, then even swimming strokes that it could be crossed, that it did have another side. That I’d been there myself, might go again.

But he couldn’t follow, and we were both soon way over our heads in a discussion that lacked all finger dexterity. To end it, I cupped my right hand, reached, way far out with a giant scooping-motion, and brought the whole sea carefully back up over the railing for him in my palm.

That reassured him. He clearly thought it was marvelous that I could do a thing like that. He wanted me to take it back to the car, and all the way home to Vienna, but since I’d decided to do the driving on the trip back, I let it all dribble out between my fingers.

By the time we returned to town, the coffins were done, and there was a fresh corpse in the storm cellar. Eckmann’s.

“Heart attack. But he can just wait a couple days,” Cosmo said. “I’m too interested in your good riddance.”

Rudy had the old hearse drawn-up to the storm cellar doors, and was loading the coffins in back for the next day’s journey. Cosmo and I went across the street to close up the General Store. There were still a few horehound drops that hadn’t been picked up out of the troughs of the undulate floor. Eckmann had been struck down still just short of rounding that candy jar.

Later that evening, a lot of the town gathered in front of the General Store and stood staring across at us while we were inside eating our dinner.

Cosmo told me there was a rumor around that Eckmann had met with foul play at the hands of the stranger, whom some of them were beginning to think they recognized as somebody they knew something about from somewhere.

He waited until we’d finished dessert, then went outside and spoke to them from the porch. He didn’t explain who I was. He just told them I’d been at the shore all day, and Rudy could verify that.

“You’d best stay inside the house until we’re right ready to leave,” he smirked. He whiled away the rest of the evening, writing me out a death certificate.

We left the next morning as soon after breakfast as I could get my make-up on. But it was an elaborate job, took some time, so a lot of the town was out watching again, even more suspiciously, when I climbed into the back of the hearse. As quickly as possible. The waitress from the Seahorse Dinette still let out a very slow scream.

But mostly they seemed to be down on Cosmo, dressed in his damn mourning like a hick Fred Astaire.

“Who’s your house guest?”

“Some stiff you short-changed come back to get you?”

“That thing don’t belong in this town, Cosmo.”

“Scared old Eck right out of his ticker.”

“Just couldn’t wait for your one and only friend’s natural end, could you?”

“If you didn’t have Rudy, we’d take both you and it.”

“We may yet.”

“Don’t bring that thing around here again, Cosmo.”

“No sir.”

“And you know we don’t ever forget a face.”

Rudy backed us out of the driveway, then wrenched us brutally, yawingly into ratchety forward motion. As we rolled down the tarred ruts, Cosmo grinned back at me through the cab window.

“You get everybody into trouble!” he yelled.

“Could have told them who I was!” I yelled back.

“Who are you?”

“The only one of you who ever did enough wrong to make good!”

He pointed at me, gleefully. “Can look at you and see that ain’t so!”

“I’m known for looking this way!”

“Nobody we know is.”

I felt absurdly disconsolate. Behind me, in the seat of my often harrowing childhood, ah angry populace and my own open grave. As we chugged out of town, we passed the back of that sign.

YOU ARE LEAVING VIENNA

And then the other rhyme line. A civic challenge.

Try-enna where else!

I had them in here earlier tonight, both of them, not just Rudy, together for a conference. A story conference, to settle how we’re going to handle tomorrow, and I seem to have matters very much back in hand. Cosmo has been a lot more pliable since I got him to the big city. A lot more, especially after what he has been seeing today. My crowds frightened him. I thought Rudy was the one I’d have to watch, who might shatter, maybe very badly, but I guess Rudy figures if I can pick up a whole ocean in one hand, I can hold off whatever scares him about New York with the other. It’s Cosmo who turns out to be the coward under all that small-town meanness. Soon as things start to get a little urban he panics. Yelled we were going to blow right off the Goethals Bridge, and damn near jumped himself. Probably did the same thing at the Verrazano, though I was under my coffin lid by then, and couldn’t see. If I’d known Rudy was going to be that stalwart. I’d have had them go through Lincoln Tunnel instead. Very, very slowly, to give Cosmo a real claustrophobic taste of just where he puts people.

But I don’t want him to lose all his starch. I brought him in here tonight, snarled at him, right in front of Rudy, a piece of policy, and told him, “I want you to start acting more like family.”

“That so?”

“I want you to start treating me the same way Father used to make us treat him. Never mind why. I have reasons. From now on, I’m the master.”

“That so?”

“Yes, that’s so. Tonight the master sees nobody. Not even Terry. Rudy will bring the master any messages. The master doesn’t want any messages Rudy can’t bring. And you’re on guard for the master.”

“Yes, Master,” he sniggered, trying to make a joke of it, but the joke was too thin. He was too distraught. It makes him look meaner, but I can tell his real meanness is losing substance. I was really trying to shore it up some.

“Say that again.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Father was deaf. All he could do was watch your mealy lips move. He couldn’t hear your real churlishness. But I can. Try again.”

His lip curled.

“And get it right.”

His lip hid its curl.

“Yes, Master.”

“Much better.”

Then I went over what he was to tell Terry, and carefully explained how all that fit into my own plans for tomorrow night. Which are, indeed, quite, quite settled, now that Hazel has done her intelligence work so well. It is another sure sign of Cosmo’s weakening meanness that my plans actually shock him.

“I thought they’d suit you,” I smiled.

“When did you decide this?”

“I’ve had it in the back of my mind right along.”

“Terrible.”

“Why?”

“You could’ve told me.”

“Do I have to tell you everything?”

“I’m involved.”

“Are you?”

“I’m your brother.”

I laughed, and then noticed Rudy’s flat head was going back and forth between us, wondering what we were laughing at.

I froze. “Whatever you do, don’t tell Rudy. Don’t even look at him right now.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Only tell him after he can’t do a thing about it.”

“All right.”

“‘All right, Master.’”

“Whatever you say, Master.”

The forced servility was galling him, and therefore bucking him up considerably. I was glad I’d thought of it.

“Now get out of here. I want to talk to Rudy.”

“Immediately, Master.”

I made Rudy a big parade with my hands, then spun a steering wheel to show him how he was going to be driving in it, and then laughed again to prove how much fun Cosmo and I thought it was going to be.

Rudy frowned doubtfully, but dutifully took me at my word.

Concerning lies. It is extremely hard to tell them with only your hands.

Rudy has since been in here with one message. From Terry. He delivered it by putting his thumb in his mouth, sucking very hard on it, then pointing to me. When I looked puzzled, he repeated it. Then we both shrugged at each other. I suspect that somewhere along the line—from what Terry said to Cosmo, to what Cosmo signaled to Rudy, to what Rudy tried to pass on to me—something has been lost. Though I doubt if it is important enough to be regretted.

In fact, tonight, incomprehension comes to me as a distinct pleasure. Almost a giddiness. There is so much now I have no need to know. Perhaps never have had. It even strikes me that a way to pare this world of its meaninglessness is to resort to simple dumb-show. Kisses and blows, wild gestures and timorous twiddlings, & so forth. Doesn’t everybody agree that the movies lost something when sound came in? Exactly. And tomorrow I return myself bodily to those former, happier days. To epic-making silence.

But of course it is already tomorrow, and I’m not going to, cannot go on with these scribblings. I’m far too tired. A big performance ahead of me. Tomorrow. Tonight.

Yet I still worry about a critical point that has often been attacked in your own work, E.A.P. How close the horror sometimes borders on the ludicrous. Cosmo and Rudy and Simon. Will we turn out to be as diabolical as The Unholy Three, or as comical as Chico and Harpo and Groucho? The Moro Brothers …

So I wonder about tomorrow. Tonight. It’s settled, but no prices are good until paid, said the cheat, no promises are good until kept, said the infidel, no deeds are good until done, said the undoer. At this point, and at my age too, my whole career is—wunderbar, precisely!—at stake.

Walpurgisnacht. It is here. Very little to say about today’s events. Like yesterday’s, just more of the same. I did try one eye open. Then the other. It only seemed to bring a worse class of people. Maniacs, Moroites, mummers, marrow-eaters, multitudes. If I’d open both, Cosmo and Rudy couldn’t have handled the crowds. They are out picking up the hearse now, so a few random notes before departure.

Only one note, really. A philosophical memory, away from all this clamor. About a coach lamp. Its mantle used to burn all night long at the side of our house in Vienna, over those storm cellar doors. It wasn’t there when I went back this time. I only remember it now. Or did I, telling baroque stories to that Esquire scribbler? Anyhow, gone. My suspicion is that Cosmo sold it for some outrageous, antique-inflated price to buy more embalming fluid.

It was black, with little, round, golden knobs, each threaded to hold a long pin in place for six delicately bevelled glass panes. Old glass. Gorgeous and clear, like that first winter skim of pond ice. It gave off a scarifying light, but that’s what attracted the bugs all summer long. Clouds of them. Moths, mayflies, earwigs, mosquitoes, even those big June beetles. I never did understand how quite so many worked their way inside the lamp. There were holes, of course, to let out the heat from the gas flame, but they were so few and so small that the lamp was like its own closed world. A dusk-to-dawn nova. It was like gaining entrance to a star. But they crawled in there, and died in a fiery instant, and piled up until I could see the rising white level of their dead even from down on the ground.

Then it was my job to climb up a ladder and clean them out of the lamp. I’d have to take it apart very cautiously. The mantle was even more fragile than the glass. So were the dead. And there they would be. The brittle beetle carcasses, the moths burnt to brown dust, one or two charred crickets, the immolated gnats. And I could see everything. Thousands of little legs, furry faces, torn wings, turned-up bellies, severed antennae. A mass grave. Yet they lay so lightly upon one another that I could pick them up one at a time if I wanted. A mosquito by its shriveled, tiger-striped body, or a mayfly by its stiff, iridescent web.

And often I did, by way of delay, because I knew what I would eventually find underneath. As I pulled away the corpses, pinched slowly down through that insectal pyre, I gradually—and it was always a gruesome sensation—came to the living. Tiny, squiggling things. Vital mites and feisty larvae, snuggled away under all that pall and quietus. It was terrifying to see a snapping, twisting shape suddenly pull itself up over a tangle of dead limbs, across a disintegrating sphinx wing, and thrive. Inside that lamp, where bright death reigned perpetually, and dropped myriad cadavers down into the pit below, life still went on.

But that’s how it is. Just how it is.

Quickly now. I am writing this still from my coffin, but the coffin is now in the back of the hearse. Rudy is up front at the wheel. Alas, Rudy, I wave good-bye to you here, handlessly. Cosmo, in an error that is unlike him, has had to go back for the hammer.

Though his meanness is muchly recovered. Consider the following last request he has just made of me, smiling his fell desires around his three rotten teeth.

“You’re going through with it?”

“No question.”

“None?”

“None.”

“Then I got an idea.”

“Make it quick.”

“I want to bury the other one. Back home.”

I gawked at him in sheerest admiration. “So you can keep your word to the town.”

“As soon as Rudy and me get back to Vienna. It’s got the skeleton. Everything. Your grave’s dug. We just pop it in the hole.”

“Baroque.”

“That so?”

“What about … you don’t care what’s going to happen here?”

“None of that’ll ever reach us.”

“Probably not.”

“If it does, they’re wrong, we’re right.”

“Of course.”

“This way,” he smirked, and it was a grin as good as my Ghoulgantua’s, “we’re rid of you, in a way, but we also got you back home.”

“In a way.”

“All right, Master?”

“I’d be honored.”

I told him he could even have a little fun with Terry. Badger him with farewell blandishments, and then skeedaddle. Yes, Terry, even our double-cross-purposes have finally crossed. But I told Cosmo he was all on his own there.

I’m on my own here. Or almost. Closing up now. Cosmo is coming up the alley with the hammer.

We simply switch lids.

Nothing could be simpler. Or rather Cosmo will switch lids. Take this labeled one—and farewell, o faithful lap desk—over to the empty, and bring that one over here. And I will watch from inside as he lowers that one down over me.

I am now taking Terry’s pills, one by one. Only because I do not want to scream out and bring an unwarranted halt to the proceedings before they are done. In truth, I would like to see the whole thing as it happens from inside here, but I do not trust myself to hold my tongue. For similar reasons, Terry, as per your request, I have also emptied my bladder.

This notebook will be found under my staked corpse. I hope not too blotted by …

I have no farewell words. Hands are better than words.

I have only a last question.

After you bore witness to this climactic and totally egregious little horror of mine, my beloved voyeurs, did anybody bother to stay for the movie?