Chapter 1

I’ve forgotten the name of the French philosopher—or was it an Indian mystic?—who said that attention is the highest form of prayer. But I know what he meant. By paying attention to the little things we finally come to notice things that are deeper and more elusive, the things that are invisible to ordinary eyes. If you are interested in the study of what used to be called souls you have to watch carefully, for a long time, until finally you see under the surface—most people have never been trained to look and so. They see only the outsides of things. If you learn this kind of attention, you can look at the things, the objects, the people you have lived with for years and see things you never noticed before. For example, it was only recently that I discovered the furrow between my eyes. I was standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom and perhaps through some trick of the fluorescent light I happened to notice it, a small vertical crease in my forehead, like a narrow V sketched in with a pencil. Was I getting thoughtful in my old age, I wondered? That would be an irony. (I am convinced the universe is terribly ironical.) Anyhow, there I stood before the mirror with my feet sunk in the fuchsia carpet that had cost fourteen dollars and a half a yard, brooding over this shadow in my brow as though it were the mark of Cain. It was a strange thing for me to do, uncharacteristic, so to speak. What was I staring at myself for anyhow? What did I expect to find, stigmata? For that I would have to take off my shirt. Besides. I am not very religious.

All right, I thought, let’s take off the shirt. Let’s take off the pants too. What do we have here anyhow? Let’s get down to essentials. There he was, this strange beast the I, standing there in the mirror with the scars of old agonies faintly visible through his tan, the white shadow of his swimming trunks fitting him like a garment—on the face there’s another pale shadow of skin a little lighter than the rest, and a line like a fine seam starts on the forehead and follows down the cheek to the mouth. In short, a body which had been broken and then carefully put back together, with patience and skill, by hands which had left only a trace of their work. It seemed to me that of all the strange things in the world nothing was stranger to me than my own flesh. The wall beside me, the chromium fixture I touched with my hand, was hard and solid, but the rest was strange and I was unable to believe in it. In that moment it seemed that a stir of breeze could sweep it away. I thought, it is strange that it is only I who give a reality to this world, these objects that seem so solid: all that is inside me. And with a familiar chill, like the air that sinks down at evening from the hills behind the coast, came the question: who am I?

Because the secret is that I don’t know the answer to the question any more than you. Behind the scars, behind the swimmer’s tan, is something that even I myself have half forgotten: elusive, shadowy, the ghost of an old identity. There are times when for weeks on end I don’t think of it, when everything is familiar and reassuring and I imagine I have always been as I am now. But the shadows are still there, and then I ask myself—why not? Isn’t it possible to carry shadows inside you and still live, love, sleep, be happy or bored like ordinary people who are the same all the way through, like cheese?

Besides, who’s made out of cheese? I never did understand them, these cheese-people. Who doesn’t have a dark place somewhere inside him that comes out sometimes when he’s looking in a mirror? Dark and light, we are all made out of shadows like the shapes on a motion-picture screen. A lot of people think that the function of the projector is to throw light onto the screen, just as the function of the story-teller is to stop fooling around and simply tell what happened, but the dark places must be there too, because without the dark places there would be no image and the figure on the screen would not exist. Fine, let’s look at the dark places. To do this we have to roll the film back to a previous incarnation of myself: I am twenty-five years old, looking the same as I do now except a little thinner and more cocky, without the scars and the furrow between the eyes. In this somewhat faded photograph I am wearing a dirty cap with gold braid on it, the third engineer of a ship which through a piece of stupidity was sunk in the Solomon Islands in the fall of 1942. It was an event of no particular military or historical importance; a merchant ship had no business being in that part of the world in the first place and that was the year they were getting the gas ovens into high gear at Auschwitz. What possible significance can be attached to any individual fate, the things that happen to any single collection of bones, ligaments, reflexes, sensations in a time when six million people were exterminated according to the latest scientific methods? It was not an important agony, looked at objectively. What happened was simple, even banal: I became naked, died, lost parts of my flesh and most of my ego along with a few illusions such as a belief in the uniqueness of my personal scrap of consciousness and the cosmic importance thereof, and went on from there. All that was left was something inside that I don’t know what to call—a soul? Even the theologians don’t believe in that anymore. Maybe it’s better to believe in ghosts.

That was all that was left, but it was enough; a thread to connect the past with the present, death with life. Anyhow that was what I saw, that day when I had this epiphany or satori or whatever it was, looking in the mirror: under the scars, behind the wrinkle in the forehead, there were other ghosts, deeper and more elusive. Here was the mark where I murdered and fornicated, betrayed my friends and was betrayed by them; here I slept in strange rooms, the whore’s cubicle, the prison cell, the psychiatric ward. Is there anybody who would like to have written on his forehead a record of the places where he has slept? We are all innocent, in the end, and all guilty. We move blindly toward our sins, and the things we do and the things we suffer for don’t have much to do with each other. In the end there’s no justice: the universe is not an auditing firm. Would we like it better if it were? If we had to pay for everything, down to the last cruelty, the last fornication, the last harmless lie? Let’s leave the dark places where they are.

Not that we would want to do away with them, those dark places. There’s a faint odor of death everywhere, for example under the arm of the woman to whom we make love, that gives a dimension, a metaphysics, to her smile. I know this isn’t scientific; the chemists are working on deodorants. I wish them luck; they’re working in a good cause. But I know too that if we ever make a world without shadow, if the chemists and scientists and psychologists succeed in abolishing fear, pain, loneliness and death, some of us win find life so intolerable we will probably blow out our brains out of sheer boredom.

All right, fine, probably next I will want to revive the Inquisition and start burning people. Well, maybe so. Without shadows there is no metaphysics and without pain, no love. Don’t you think they felt their aliveness with a new intensity, made love well, savored the wine at the base of their tongues, after they had lit those fires? What do you take me for, a humanitarian? Well, no, I don’t want to burn people. I’ve been burned too: look at my hands.

Even from the beginning I never did belong to the cheese-people and for a long time I didn’t know what was the matter with me. It started in a little Utah town with the mountains all around it, where the wind came up in the morning and rustled in the poplar trees outside my bedroom window. The place I came from was good, and I understood from the start that I was the one who was wrong, for not fitting into it and being happy like the others. Maybe someday I will go back there, and stop and get gas and look around for Feigel’s drugstore and Mr. Poulsen’s pigeon-barn and the cafe where you catch the Greyhound bus, some time when I have a long white beard so nobody will recognize me. If you wait long enough, you don’t have to put on a false mustache: time provides the disguises. It would be interesting to see what it is like, to see if it is the same as I remember it. I don’t think it would have changed very much!

The people I came from were good Mormon stock, and what they lacked in knowledge of the world they made up in virtue. I respected their virtue then, as I do now. My parents conscientiously paid their tithe to the Church all through the Depression, they abstained from alcohol, coffee, and tea, and they believed with a quiet and firm conviction that people who smoked cigarettes were destined to pay for it in Hell. When I questioned any of these beliefs, like the one regarding the drinking of coffee, I was referred to the section in the Doctrine and Covenants known as the Word of Wisdom, which in our house was consulted in the way other people consult the encyclopedia. Some Mormons used to dispute whether the Word of Wisdom was divinely inspired or only a kind of compendium of hygiene assembled by Joseph Smith (it said tobacco was good for horse-poultices but bad for human beings) but my father was bishop of his ward and his opinion carried a certain authority. He believed it was divinely inspired. No tobacco or coffee was ever seen in our house. When I was a child a magazine like the Saturday Evening Post, which had pictures of people smoking and drinking coffee, had all the dark fascination of an oriental casbah and I would ponder over it wondering what these vices could be like. I imagined the pleasure of smoking as something dark, warm, and phallic, with a taste like the odor of incense. Chesterfields—they satisfy! intoned the radio around the time I was fourteen or fifteen and full of strange unsatisfied desires. When I heard these words, my heart would pound.

I knew even then I was different from the others, my cheerful basketball-playing cousins with names like DeWayne and Lamar and Virl who went on missions for the Church to Norway and Holland and came back and married girls they met in Mutual and got jobs as Chevrolet salesmen, and were destined someday to be the bishops of their wards. How did they do it? For them it seemed as easy as breathing, but I was queer, freakish, something was wrong with me as though I lacked some essential organ, my vocation for normality was missing. I contemplated myself, on the outside a glum thoughtful boy, silent and rather abstracted, on the inside a misshapen freak. Certainly it could not be accounted for by my ancestry. Mormons are very genealogy-conscious and I knew mine by heart. My mother’s family, the Beales, were among the first settlers in the valley; there was a Beale Creek in the mountains and a town called Beale’s Mill a few miles east on the road to Heber. On my father’s side I was descended from the legendary Lorenzo Backus, the scholar-apostle who taught himself Persian and Hebrew, translated the Book of Mormon into Italian and carried eight hundred and fourteen books, including a complete set of Dante in calfskin bindings, from Missouri to Utah in a Conestoga wagon, killing several Indians on the way and fording three rivers without getting the books wet. The books were still preserved in the Pioneer Museum and there was a statue of my great-great-grandfather in Temple Square, in the heart of Salt Lake City. Once in a while when I came to town with my family, I would go to look at the statue. Brother Lorenzo, a craggy giant in a greatcoat which came below his knees, was staring into a large stone book with a frown of annoyance between his eyes, perhaps pondering how to translate “Melchizedek Priesthood” into Italian. His eyes were granite spheres, as opaque as those of Greek gods, and his bearing was severe and patriarchal. Sometimes I had an impulse to climb up between the arms of the statue and see what was written in the book. Probably it would say something like “Generation of pygmies! Whence sprang you from my loins?”

And I knew he would mean me, the gloomy silent boy who needed a haircut, all neurasthenic with the pale cast of thought. It never occurred to me that there was anything in common between Brother Lorenzo’s love of books and his urge to travel and my own strange restlessness—it was only years later that the thought struck me I was more like my great-great-grandfather than I thought, that he too had been a misfit when he ran away from a Tennessee farm to join the Mormons, that probably his relatives had said the same things about him that mine said about me—that he was queer as Dick’s hatband, that he had bats in the belfry, that he would never amount to a hill of beans. For example, I am probably the only other Backus after my great-great-grandfather to have read Dante. But in those days, I couldn’t see it that way. I didn’t want to be queer as Dick’s hatband. Nobody does at sixteen or seventeen. I wanted to be like the others.

Confronted with the creepy problems of adolescence, I grew queerer and queerer. I hid in Mr. Poulsen’s pigeon-barn next door when it was time to go to church, and I spent my lunch money on the clandestine girlie magazines which were sold under the counter in the local drugstore. The drugstore was run by the only Jewish merchant in Spanish Creek, a lonely bespectacled Brooklyner named Feigel. I knew next to nothing about Jews and I had the vague impression that somehow Mr. Feigel had invented voluptuousness, that it was a specialty of his race. Poor soft-eyed sad Mr. Feigel! I wonder if he read the magazines too. He was a widower who had lost his wife years before and he had no children. The magazines had names like Panty Antics and Nifty Pics, and they were full of pictures of healthy girls bouncing around playing badminton and other violent games without their bras on. Whoever published them was probably only trying to earn an honest dollar and I hope he never got caught; I have a soft spot in my memory for him. The magazines, and Mr. Feigel, were my first contact with non-Mormon culture.

Then around the time I was sixteen I made another discovery. Like eighty-five percent of all other adolescents, I heard about Krafft-Ebing and I went to the library to see if I could find Psychopathia Sexualis. But I imagined the author’s name started with C, and looking for it on the shelf I stumbled across Conrad instead. Heart of Darkness: the title leaped out at me from the row of books. I took it home and read it only half understanding, and then I went feverishly on through Nostromo, Lord Jim, The Nigger of the Narcissus, An Outcast of the Islands. I didn’t quite understand why Conrad fascinated me, but it was probably because he was the first human being I had encountered who was like myself: this Polish boy, born in a landlocked country, who had a strange call to become two things he was not, a sailor and an Englishman. I read everything I could find about Conrad and the sea. I pored over atlases until I knew Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, the Solomon Islands better than I knew the map of Utah. Somehow I had the premonition that the books were unholy, that they had led to transgression, darkness, oblivion, the opposite of everything that was familiar and secure—my family, the warm house, my room with its neatly folded bedspread. And yet I couldn’t stop. After I was supposed to be asleep, I read Victory under the blankets with a flashlight. I only half understood the books and I didn’t understand myself at all. Nobody else I knew read Conrad under the blankets; it was like a sickness. I didn’t tell anyone about it, and no one knew I read the books.

We would sit at supper, my parents and I and my sister Veronica, and there was no sound but the ticking of the kitchen clock and the click of the forks against the plates. My father was preoccupied with his wholesale hardware store and the business of the bishopric. He had three hundred souls and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of doorknobs, bathroom fixtures, and square-cut shingle nails to think about and it didn’t leave him very much time to think about his family. But my mother noticed; she saw that I didn’t eat and that there were circles under my eyes. “Larry, your carrots. Larry, you haven’t eaten a thing. Larry, if you don’t eat, I’m going to see Dr. Nielssen.” She stoked me with cod-liver oil and tonics that made me faintly nauseated and left me as skinny as before. She was bewildered; in her world if you took your cod-liver oil, got plenty of exercise, and went to Mutual with other clean-minded youths you grew up strong and happy. Across the table my sister Veronica ate everything on her plate; her shoulders were strong and brown and she was as placid as a young heifer. What was the matter with me? A voice that seemed to come out of the walls, from under the table, from inside my chest, ordered me to go forth; I was cast out, unworthy of Zion. I was probably a little crazy; I really heard the voices and they were no metaphor. I knew that my heart was evil, wicked, rebellious.

There was no one who could help me, and no one I could explain it to. What would I tell them? That I read too much, that when I tried to go to sleep, I heard the surf in my ears beating on the beaches of Java? My complexion suffered from too much brooding indoors, and I think my father attributed it to self-abuse. As bishop of his ward, he was aware of adolescent vice. To my mother it was simply a problem in alimentation. “The poor thing can’t live on air,” I would overhear her saying plaintively to my father. “Last night he left half his broccoli.”

There was a night when, at eleven o’clock after I should have been asleep, I was reading The Secret Sharer under the covers. The beam of the flashlight turned yellow, then a brownish orange, and then there was only a tiny red glow in the center of the lens. I suffered from a lack of broccoli and the flashlight needed new batteries. I came out from under the covers and turned on the bedside lamp and went on reading. A half an hour later my father saw the bar of light under the door, and when I heard his footsteps coming down the hall, I knew it was too late to turn out the lamp. Instead I did a queer thing, out of an impulse I didn’t understand then and have never really understood since: I stuffed the Conrad under the covers and pulled from the nightstand one of the girlie magazines from Mr. Feigel’s drugstore. Perhaps it was because there was something secret and personal about my relation to Conrad that I wanted nobody to see; I preferred to be caught in a common vice rather than one that was unheard-of and incomprehensible even to me. At any rate, when my father took the magazine out of my hand, he found it open to a picture of a girl with breasts like ice cream cones, wearing a cowboy hat and a dazzling smile and pretending unconvincingly to lasso a calf. He was more baffled than indignant. “Where have we failed?” he asked me earnestly as if he really wanted to know the answer. “Where in the home we have provided for you did you get the notion of polluting your mind with such trash? Was it in Church that you got such ideas? Was it in Mutual? Is this what your teachers in school give you to read?” I didn’t answer. All I could think about was that I would never again be allowed to shut my bedroom door. I might have whispered hoarsely “Feigel’s drugstore”. If I kept silent it was not out of loyalty to that lonely little Jewish merchant who sat all day long behind his counter for a few nickels and dimes but simply out of a vast emptiness, an inability to say anything that would communicate the way I felt or explain why I behaved as I did.

My father stood by my bed for some time with his eyeglasses glinting, and then he closed Nifty Pics and looked at the cover. When he saw the price, he finally managed to work himself up to a convincing anger. “And this cost thirty-five cents!” he said, his voice shaking. It was the middle of the Depression and he was really shocked.

For an hour I lay in the darkness abandoning myself to the daydreams that most seventeen-year-olds indulge in under these circumstances: a rope thrown over a rafter, a ghastly form swinging at dawn, my parents’ remorse, etc. But I only succeeded in terrifying myself thoroughly, and instead of hanging myself in the garage with my sister’s jump-rope I ran away from Spanish Creek that night and never came back. I waited until everybody else was asleep and then I groped in the kitchen and found the grocery money in the jar in the cupboard, a little over thirty dollars in bills and small change. I went by the library and dropped the copy of The Secret Sharer and Other Stories in the night box (the statue of Andrew Carnegie contemplated me stonily in the moonlight) and then I caught the Greyhound bus that stopped at the cafe on the highway at one-thirty in the morning. I thought how many times I had heard that bus as I lay awake reading Conrad in bed: the bleating of brakes, a tired hiss of air, voices, then the door slamming and the rising growl of the exhaust in the night air as it pulled away down the highway again—now I was the outcast, the Secret Sharer, the traveler setting out into the heart of darkness! I wasn’t sleepy and I sat in the back of the bus, as wakeful and solemn as an owl. It was not odd that I ran away from home or even that I had briefly considered committing some form of suicide; I suppose everybody does at seventeen. The odd thing was that when I set foot on that bus I still believed in God (I still do, but I mean the old angry God of Moses and of my father who was bishop of his ward) and I believed that by my act I was damning myself, utterly and eternally. And yet I had to go; my demon gripped me. It was not that I had been caught by my father reading a magazine which as a matter of fact I hadn’t been reading. I understood even then that this was only an excuse. What then? I didn’t know. I bought a ticket and got on the bus. I was calm and almost happy.

At Salt Lake City at three o’clock in the morning I had to change buses, and in the depot, I sealed my fate completely by buying two packs of cigarettes. Having set one foot in Hell I knew there was no reason not to go on. I had heard it explained often enough: after cigarettes came apostasy, blasphemy, fornication, murder, and finally the electric chair. I opened the first pack and lit one with hands that trembled, burning half the end off it in my ignorance of how the thing was done. A crisp sensual aroma, with a tang as of houris and half-naked odalisques, rose into my mouth. Sitting there in the bus I experimented cautiously, sending the smoke in twin plumes from my nose. Nobody paid any attention to me. As the bus boomed through Grantsville, Utah, I crushed out the first cigarette and lit another one.

On the trip to Oakland, which took a little less than twenty-four hours, I smoked all forty of them, one by one. By the time we crossed the Sierras my mouth tasted yellow and there were spots before my eyes, but I went on, dizzy and half sick but feeling a magnificent Byronic contempt for the abyss that yawned under my feet. Lonely and cold, half nauseated by the cigarettes and the stench of perspiration in the bus, I was oddly happy. At last, somewhere in the Sacramento Valley, I went to sleep. When I woke up the bus had stopped. We were standing in a depot and all the other seats were empty.

“Okay, stovepipe, end of the line,” the driver told me.

It was after midnight. I walked out of the depot into Oakland. Everything was alien and unreal. Even the air was different; the city smelled of stagnant water and fog. I walked for perhaps an hour through the streets, staring through red neon signs into beer joints and waterfront cafes. My eyes burned with sleeplessness. Old men who smelled of whiskey lurched around me as though I were invisible. Stifled laughter, cheap music, the smell of fried food came at me out of doorways. I hadn’t eaten for almost thirty hours, but I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t know what I wanted. I was sleepy but I didn’t want to go to bed. I went on walking.

Finally, I left the lights behind and I was somewhere near the waterfront. I couldn’t see the bay but I sensed that it was near from the smell of salt and rotten weeds. I was on a street lined with vacant lots, decayed wooden buildings, empty shops with broken windows. At the end of the street there were docks, and over the roofs the slanted funnel of a ship dimly outlined in the floodlights. I walked toward a ruby clot of neon signs, and there, where the hungry cats coiled along the gutters, I found a Mexican girl, fat and gaudy, standing in the light from an all-night cafe. From a block away she was only an indistinct plump figure in a purple dress, silhouetted in the pink light from the window. Her skirt was too short and she stood on tiny spike heels that seemed too frail to support her weight. Three sailors from the naval air station were coming up the street toward her, and now they were almost abreast of her. In their tight-fitting summer whites they were exactly alike, like a musical comedy team, except that they all wore their hats at different angles. They stared around at the Mexican girl as they passed, then they made a small circle on the sidewalk and came back toward her. I could hear their voices coming thinly up the deserted street.

“Lissen honey, I’m not kidding, your type appeals to me.”

“Okay buddy, you’re second in line, right after Long John. I seen her first.”

“You saw her?”

“I seen her.”

She went on looking down the street as though they weren’t there.

“Oh, go peddle your papers,” she told them after a while in a bored voice.

There was a sotto voce comment I couldn’t catch, then a burst of laughter.

“You think you’re funny but you’re not very funny,” said the fat girl.

“Whaddya standin’ around waitin’ for then, the Prince of Wales?”

“Come on, I told you, there’s nothing doing here.”

“Wait now, lissen—”

“You heard her, no sailors or dogs.”

“She didn’t say nothin’ about dogs.”

“Arf, arf,” one of them began yelping hopefully, bounding around the street on stiff legs.

The fat girl sighed and looked scornfully the other way, down the street.

“Come on, I tell you we’re wastin’ our time.”

The other two pulled the dog-impersonator away and they came up the street toward me, casting back several mocking fluty farewells. They passed by me so close I could hear the starched rustle of their whites and smell the acrid scent of male sweat and alcohol. The fat girl turned around, arranged a lock of hair in the reflection from the cafe window, made a grimace into the glass to press out her lipstick, and then turned back on her tiny heels toward the street again. The sailors were a half a block away. One of them flung a falsetto birdlike greeting at a band of girls on the other side of the street and was rewarded by a stifled peal of laughter. Then they were gone. I went slowly down the sidewalk and looked into the cafe as though I were uncertain whether to enter. I was alone on the street with the fat girl. She glanced at me and then shrugged, a tacit comment on the scene that had just taken place.

“Sailors!” she said contemptuously.

Her manner was amiable, placid, but indifferent. After the first glance she hardly bothered to look at me. Her plump feet overflowed out of the tiny spike-heeled shoes, and her face was made up clumsily like a picture drawn by a child: round cupid-bow mouth, mascara lashes, mauve eyelids as bright as humming-bird wings. I saw now that she was probably not much older than I was.

“They’re just looking for a little fun,” I suggested, groping for something to say.

She accepted both my presence and the remark. “They’ve got more jokes than money,” she commented without rancor. “Sailors, the town is full of them. Far as I’m concerned, they’re trash.”

“I guess they’re a nuisance,” I conceded, feeling that the subject was rapidly becoming exhausted.

“They’ve got more jokes than money,” she said. This epigram seemed to please her, since she repeated it for the second time.

She raised her hand mechanically to lift the hair at the back of her head, yawned, and let it fall.

“How about you? Do you know any jokes?”

I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and finally she burst out laughing. “Well then, maybe you’ve got some money.”

Her room was large and musty, with an odor of damp wood and a faint and not unpleasant scent of cheap perfume. The two windows were hung with imitation-velvet drapes. There was a sagging bed, a dresser, and a table with a faded chintz flounce tacked around it like a skirt. The table was littered with various objects: a flaxen-haired doll, piles of underclothing, a portable phonograph. On the dresser was a miniature shrine with a gimcrack plaster saint who held up his forefinger rather stiffly, as though he were pointing at something on the ceiling. A yellow palm branch was tacked over the bed.

She moved around the room mechanically, patting a satin pillow, throwing a stray blouse out of sight behind the furniture, switching on a lamp by the bed. Then, yawning, she sat down on the bed and lazily peeled off her stockings, shaking each one and ‘hanging it carefully over the back of the chair.

“You didn’t even tell me your name,” she complained perfunctorily as though she were reciting a part.

“Larry.”

“Larry what?”

“Backus.”

At this she made a small stifled titter, a kind of hiccup of amusement.

“Okay,” I countered half-annoyed, “what’s your name?”

“Connie.”

“Connie what?” It was an insane litany, but at least it was better than talking about the sailors.

“People like me don’t have last names,” she said vaguely. After a while she asked me, “How old are you, anyhow?”

“Twenty.”

This produced a small skeptical shrug; her lips stretched a little and she raised one eyebrow.

“I bet you don’t even like me after I asked you up to my room,” she remarked as though she was thinking about something else.

“I like you fine,” I said loyally.

I felt more at ease now; these efforts to entertain me, perfunctory as they were, made me realize the purely economic nature of what was happening. Earlier, in the street, she had seemed like a figure of mysterious evil, a kind of Stygian sorceress, painted and enigmatic. Now I saw that she simply wanted to provide me with a service for a price, and that what I had taken for contempt was perhaps only uneasiness over whether what she had to offer would be worth the money. For the first time I began to see her as she really was: an inexpertly painted fat girl, not very pretty, that nobody in her hometown had wanted to marry.

“My feet hurt,” she complained, rubbing the line across her soft arch. “Those shoes, I told them they were too small.” She stood up stolidly with her bare feet apart and began pulling off the rest of her clothes. The purple dress went over her head, large expanses of peach-colored underwear appeared, then flesh: pale, convex, and pendulant. Ludicrously she left her brassiere on. I stared with fascination at these details that looked more like medical illustrations than like the pictures in Mr. Feigel’s magazines. The gaudy mask of her face, with its painted eyes and cupid-bow mouth, seemed incongruous joined to the massive pale innocence of this body.

Moving bearlike on her fat feet, she went to the portable phonograph and twisted the crank, picking up a record and examining the label. “Maybe we could play some music,” she suggested hopefully.

I shook my head.

“Would you like a drink?”

I nodded.

She turned her back and bent over to open the bottom drawer of the dresser, while I stared at two pale hills with a shadowy cleft between them that widened as she bent. When she turned around again she was carrying two not very clean tumblers, one half full of an amber fluid and the other containing only a few drops. The half-full glass she handed to me.

I took the glass and drained it in two strangling swallows, while she sipped hers slowly. Then I set the glass down. Somnambulistically, as though my fingers were little machines that moved without my really paying attention to them, I undid buttons and my shirt came off.

She had pulled back the covers and slipped half into bed. Now she undid the brassiere, and I saw why she had not taken it off before. Two pink masses sprang out and rolled heavily to the sides: shapeless, pendulant, so huge that at first I took them for some sort of a deformation, with two brown bumps in the middle that quivered for a moment and then came to rest. Clearly it would have been impossible for her to stand up with these objects unconfined. She smiled at me a little uncertainly, the round cupid-bow curving upward.

I felt no sense that anything important was taking place. The first irrevocable step had been taken when I stole the money from the grocery jar, and after that it had all followed inexorably. I stood up and turned out the light. Then, with my eyes closed, I sank into that vast expanse of flesh that smelled of cheap silk and dime-store perfume. Connie performed her duties with the usual perfunctory mechanicalness of the underpaid. Then, unexpectedly, there was a spasm and a series of staccato wrenches. For the first time I felt some emotion; I thought something was broken inside me, that the blood was gushing out and I was dying. But this terror lasted only a second. My heart pounded for a while and then slowed, and there was calm dominated by the odor of perspiration. I extricated myself like an accident victim from the wreckage.

She was saying something, and I understood that she was asking me if I wanted to stay with her all night. I shook my head mutely.

She looked at me as though for the first time. “I’ll bet you’re not even twenty,” she said with a childish spite, as though to get back at me for my silence and my refusal to stay. But the tone was not convincing; it was enough for me to glance at the drooping pink bags for the corners of her mouth to drop. Turning away, she slipped out of bed with her back to me and reached for her clothes.

She pulled a cheap nightgown over her head and shook it down over her soft enormous hips. It was an elephantine gesture, vulgar and yet reassuringly domestic, and with it the last vestige of evil and mystery melted away from her. She didn’t meet my glance and I saw that I had won. In spite of my innocence and clumsiness, in spite of the unconvincing lie about my age, it was she who had prostituted herself and not me. After that neither of us spoke. I dressed quickly and left, leaving in her damp plump hand five dollars of the money my mother had put aside in the jar for corn flakes, sugar, broccoli, but not for coffee, which was forbidden by the Word of Wisdom.

Below in the street it was almost daylight. A fog had begun to gather, drifting over the yellow pools in the gutters. I began walking down the short block to the waterfront. From somewhere out in the bay came the hoarse bass of a ship’s whistle, echoing off the hills behind the city. Then silence: I heard my own footsteps on the gritty pavement, the scratching of a paper blown along the street. A cat the color of fog crossed my path, then crouched and watched me as I passed.

I had no place to go and I was sleepy now. I had a vague idea of finding an empty store or a warehouse to sleep in. As far as I could see in the thin fog the streets were deserted. It seemed to me strange that all the millions of people in the city around me had a place to sleep, that for each one of them there was a room and a bed, a place where he belonged. I had always accepted this as natural, and yet now it seemed to me that to have a bed, a room that belonged to you, was a kind of miracle, an accident of the most improbably good fortune. How could it be that I too had once had a place to go, a room where I could shut the door and be alone with the things that were mine, books, clothes, the faded souvenirs and trophies of my childhood? And then, with an unexpected clarity, I saw the room seven hundred miles away where I had slept for the last time, the bed empty now, the spread folded carefully over the pillow, the shoes lined in a neat row under the dresser. In the room across the hall my mother and father lay stiffly side by side in the big bed, their arms crossed on their breasts. The clock ticked, my sister breathed gently with her face buried in the pillow, as the dawn came up, the desert wind rustled in the poplars outside the window. There was a tightness in my throat: what was this stupidity? My face was wet with tears. Angrily I rubbed my eyes and shook away the hot drops from my hand. Then I took a breath and felt the cool fog in my throat, and after a while I was calm again.

What was I, a child? First I wept tears, then I was angry with myself, and then I saw everything coldly and dispassionately. What had happened? The victory had been too easy. I had the sensation of a prisoner who rises up in a sudden desperation and lunges at his chains and finds they are only paper; they fall away and he is free. In the room I had just left fat Connie was already sleeping, probably, with the same placid innocence as my sister. Was this all? Was this the unspeakable sin without forgiveness they had thundered fire and damnation about? Standing in that Oakland street in the fog I made a remarkable discovery: the people I had grown up among had not known very much about sin and so they had overrated it. And then the idea struck me that perhaps Hell was overrated too; it was hard to imagine anyone being punished for what I had just done. And Heaven? Suppose you did as they said, lived virtuously, paid your tithing, went to church every Sunday, and later the ecstasy they promised you turned out to be like going with the Mexican girl: insipid, sweaty, a little boring?

I felt an odd sensation of vertigo. There seemed to be too much empty space around me, my limbs were light and unreal from lack of sleep, the slightest noise I made seemed to be magnified until it filled the street and echoed from the buildings. I went on walking toward the docks. On the waterfront all the warehouses were locked; there was nothing but a wall of corrugated-iron fronts. A half a block farther on, the warehouses ended, and a big high-sided barge was tied to a dock with a dredge rig on it. The dredge had an old steam plant at one end, and at the other end a bucket-conveyer sticking up at an odd angle into the sky. A makeshift gangplank led out onto the barge from the dock. I broke into a run, scrambled across the plank and onto the rusty steel deck. When I got to the other side of the barge there was nothing beyond but the bay. Out on the water I heard the cry of gulls, the hoarse sound of whistles. Something was building up inside me as though some substance under terrific pressure was leaking into my chest. “Hey!” I shouted.

I felt silence all around me, the terrific vastness of space. An urge came to me to inflict violence on something. In a rage of rebellion against everything, my own emptiness, the indifference of the fog, I began picking up everything I could lay my hands on and throwing it: bolts, tin cans, broken boards. I felt that the silence of the fog was a physical enemy and I wanted to fling things into it, to inflict pain on it for its indifference. Paint pots, a rusted wrench, scraps of lumber rose up and vanished soundlessly in the gray air. The fog absorbed it all. By this time, I was panting and I began scrabbling around on the littered deck for something else to throw. I kicked a winch but it was intractable, solid cast-iron.

“You! You!” I shouted. “Pay attention, God damn it, now listen to me!”

Probably I was still a little drunk from the whiskey. I threw a crowbar, a heavy one; it soared end-over-end and vanished softly and invisibly like a bird.

“Listen! This is serious!” I yelled.

It wasn’t that there was nothing there. It was that the silence was there, a physical presence, and wouldn’t answer. I wouldn’t have minded if there had been no God, then the universe would be empty and all things would be possible. But that He should exist—that He should hover up there looking at me like the fog and be indifferent— was intolerable. In a paroxysm of rage, I scrambled up the long beam of the bucket-conveyer. It was too long to lower on deck and they had left it hanging out over the dock, festooned with cables. The beam swayed and the cables rattled. Then I let go and stood up, tottering and flailing for balance. I was walking high up in the air, my hands outstretched like an acrobat.

“Hey! Hey!” I went on yelling, my voice cracking. “I’m defying you, goddam it, make me fall!”

I was rather hoping He would. If He had it would have been a lesson to me, and after that I would have known where He and I stood. But five seconds went by and I decided that He just didn’t give a damn.

“You! You! Listen now!”

At that moment, I lost my balance and fell twenty feet onto the concrete dock. For a while I groped in the air, my arms outstretched. Then I turned sideways and smacked. Everything was knocked out of me, childhood, tears, fears, and the last of Spanish Creek. Physically I didn’t break anything at all. It was just as I thought, He couldn’t do it, or if He could He wasn’t interested.

All this happened on Pier 18 in the inner harbor, Port of Oakland, exactly four months after my seventeenth birthday. l did wrench my wrist a little, and the next day I bought some Sloan’s Liniment to rub on it. My yelling when I was up in the air had woken up the watchman, and he came out of his little hut and chased me off the dock.

“Listen, young fella, you can fall off one of them dredges and hurt yourself,” he told me.