4

My mother washed her hair in the kitchen sink. “Did you eat somewhere?” she asked, squinting through the soap.

“I had a hamburger with Angela.”

She rinsed her hair. I sat at the kitchen table for a few minutes, reading the labels on the spices on the lazy Susan. The spice containers were sticky from being handled by buttery fingers. The salt container had a decal of a red and yellow rooster on it. The decal was beginning to flake off. I sniffed the pepper through the holes in the shaker, wanting the smell of something sharp and real.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Just a little tired.”

“Go away. I’m washing my hair.”

Actually, she was finished. She was drying her hair, her face pale and washed-out without any makeup. I deliberately opened the newspaper to the television schedule and stared at it without reading just to give myself some time to score points, then I sighed and folded the paper and stood.

I froze on the stairs. The half-darkness stopped me, and the solitude that waited for me in my bedroom held me back like a straight-arm. I held the banister, then forced my feet to climb one step, then another.

My books were on the bed, inert, dumb objects that did not know or care anything; just lying around exactly where a person left them. I opened the Latin book and stared at it. I fanned the pages of Modern Geometry. I leafed the pages of my binder until I found the assignment for the next day and stared at my handwriting, amazed in a stupid way that I had written those casual words just a few hours before.

Even the amazement had a certain dull feel to it. What surprised me was how calm I was, and how little details like the lint at the end of my ballpoint still had their idle interest. Life goes on no matter what, I thought. Things remain the same. The pajamas hang on their hook with the same weight and the same folds, making the same shape on the closet door, no matter what happens to me or anyone else.

I thought like this for a while, shivering a little from time to time, a spasm seizing my hands or my feet like I was senile all of a sudden, and had no more future than a comfy wheelchair in a nice, quiet rest home, among dozens of droolers just like me, relics too palsied even to masturbate. When I tried to move my arms in a coordinated gesture, to turn a page, or shift a book, they creaked nearly audibly and faltered. I was an android badly in need of servicing. I was not supple, I told myself. “Supple” is a word that appeals to me.

It was five minutes after midnight, and I was nonfunctional. My mother had watched a show on TV, had turned it off, flushed the toilet, and gone to bed. I stared into my geometry book as if I were, for the first time in my life, transfixed by Euclid. The book had been used by several years of students before me, and on one page someone had drawn a picture of a penis. Dots came forth from the penis, sperm or pee, it was hard to tell, or even hard to be interested; it was a very desultory sketch. The artist himself probably had taken little interest in it, although I was curious as to why he had chosen a penis as his subject. But I examined this sketch and thought that whatever happened, this little drawing would remain in my memory.

I piled my books in my desk and pulled the desk drawer all the way out. My mother never enters the room, but you never know. I took out the cracker box and sorted through it looking for something to let me sleep, but I didn’t have anything respectable in the way of pills, only Valium and the little yellow and aqua five milligram Librium that wouldn’t put a two-year-old to sleep, much less a muscular, active person such as myself. I also had a half-pint of Cutty Sark which I had been saving for a special evening. I like to do that—save something for a day in the future; it makes you feel you have a control over the future, which, of course, you don’t.

I swallowed a few Librium and drank half of the Cutty Sark, just wanting a little slowdown, a little less clarity. The Librium strolled into my nervous system like a blind detective, bumbling, missing the point, and having no effect. The scotch didn’t even make me yawn, and the taste of it didn’t please me either, although I usually like it. The flavor of all that burned peat smacked, that night, of too much bacon. I stumbled into the doorjamb of the bathroom and lifted the toilet lid. I vomited the smallest amount a person can vomit, perhaps half a teaspoon worth of something that looked like a mixture of scotch and pus; it was a disagreeable thing to have to look at there in the toilet bowl, but nothing more respectable erupted so I went back to my room and undressed.

I lay down and what I did then was like sleep, but it was more like having to read something long and unending, a telephone book that for some reason simply had to be read, and no skimming. Every name, every address, every phone number had to be read, and cheating would simply make something horrible happen, although there was no way of guessing what.

I woke suddenly and sat up. Something terrible had happened and I could not remember what it was. Then I remembered. I lay back down, wilted, but immediately jumped from the bed, exhilarated. I didn’t have a plan; I didn’t need a plan. Everything would be fine; I could tell by the way the pajama top unsnapped as I pulled it open and it took its place on the hook.

But I kept trembling, big holes of feeling opening in me.

Mead’s father would die if he knew about Mead. And suddenly I wanted more than anything to save Mead’s father. I wanted him to live.

I wanted the world to continue and to have no more harm happen to anyone. I wanted everything to be all right.

And there was only one way for that to happen.