Nightmare Alley (27 page)

“I could kill you—”

“Lie back on the couch.”

“I could—Mother. Mother. Mother.”

He was on his knees, one hand beating at his eyes. He crawled to her and threw his head in her lap, burrowing in. Dr. Lilith Ritter, gazing down at the disheveled corn-colored hair, smiled slightly. She let one hand rest on his head, running her fingers gently over his hair, patting his head reassuringly as he sobbed and gasped, rooting in her lap with his lips. Then, with her other hand, she reached for the pad on the desk and wrote in shorthand: “Burleigh, Mississippi.”

In the spring darkness the obelisk stood black against the sky. There were no clouds and only a single star. No, a planet; Venus, winking as if signaling Earth in a cosmic code that the worlds used among themselves. He moved his head a fraction, until the cold, brilliant planet seemed to rest on the bronze tip of the stone shaft. The lights of a car, winding through the park, sprayed for a moment across the stone and the hieroglyphics leaped out in shadow. Car\??\touches with their names, the boasts of the dead, invocations to dead gods, prayers to the shining, fateful river which rose in mystery and found the sea through many mouths, flowing north through the ancient land. Was it mysterious when it still lived? he wondered. Before the Arabs took it over and the chumps started measuring the tunnel of the Great Pyramid in inches to see what would happen in the world.

The spring wind stirred her hair and trailed a loose wisp of it across his face. He pressed her cheek against his and with his other hand pointed to the planet, flashing at the stone needle’s point. She nodded, keeping silence; and he felt the helpless wonder sweep over him again, the impotence at touching her, the supplication. Twice she had given it to him. She had given it as she might give him a glass of brandy, watching his reactions. Beyond that elfin face, the steady eyes, there was something breathing, something that was fed blood from a tiny heart beating under pointed breasts. But it was cobweb under the fingers. Cobweb in the woods that touches the face and disappears under the fingers.

The hot taste of need rose in his mouth and turned sour with inner turmoil and the jar of forbidding recollection. Then he drew away from her and turned to look at her face. As the wind quickened he saw her perfectly molded nostrils quiver, scenting spring as an animal tastes the wind. Was she an animal? Was all the mystery nothing more than that? Was she merely a sleek, golden kitten that unsheathed its claws when it had played enough and wanted solitude? But the brain that was always at work, always clicking away behind the eyes—no animal had such an organ; or was it the mark of a superanimal, a new species, something to be seen on earth in a few more centuries? Had nature sent out a feeling tentacle from the past, groping blindly into the present with a single specimen of what mankind was to be a thousand years hence?

The brain held him; it dosed him with grains of wild joy, measured out in milligrams of words, the turn of her mouth corner, one single, lustful flash from the gray eyes before the scales of secrecy came over them again. The brain seemed always present, always hooked to his own by an invisible gold wire, thinner than spider’s silk. It sent its charges into his mind and punished him with a chilling wave of cold reproof. It would let him writhe in helpless misery and then, just before the breaking point, would send the warm current through to jerk him back to life and drag him, tumbling over and over through space, to the height of a snow mountain where he could see all the plains of the earth spread out before him, and all the power of the cities and the ways of men. All were his, could be his, would be his, unless the golden thread broke and sent him roaring into the dark chasm of fear again.

The wind had grown colder; they stood up. He lit cigarettes and gave her one and they passed on, circling the obelisk, walking slowly past the blank, unfinished wall of the Museum’s back, along the edge of the park where the busses trailed their lonely lights away uptown.

He took her hand in his and slid it into the pocket of his topcoat, and for a moment, as they walked, it was warm and a little moist, almost yielding, almost, to the mind’s tongue, sweet-salty, yielding, musky; then in an instant it changed, it chilled, it became the hand of a dead woman in his pocket, as cold as the hand he once molded of rubber and stretched on the end of his reaching rod, icy from a rubber sack of cracked ice in his pocket, straight into the face of a believer’s skeptical husband.

Now the loneliness grew inside him, like a cancer, like a worm of a thousand branches, running down his nerves, creeping under his scalp, tying two arms together and squeezing his brain in a noose, pushing into his loins and twisting them until they ached with need and not-having, with wanting and not-daring, with thrust into air, with hand-gripping futility—orgasm and swift-flooding shame, hostile in its own right, ashamed of shame.

They stopped walking and he moved toward a backless bench under the trees which were putting out the first shoots of green in the street lamp’s glow, delicate, heartbreakingly new, the old spring which would bring the green softly, gently, like a young girl, into the earth’s air long after they and the fatal, coursing city, were gone. They would be gone forever, he thought, looking down into her face which was now as empty as a ball of crystal reflecting only the window light.

The rush, the rocketing plunge of the years to death, seized hold of him and he gripped her, pressing her to him in a fierce clutch after life. She let him hold her and he heard himself moaning a little under his breath as he rubbed his cheek against the smooth hair. Then she broke away, reached up and brushed his lips with hers and began to walk again. He fell in behind her for a few steps, then came abreast of her and took her hand once more. This time it was firm, muscular, determined. It closed on his own fingers for a single reassuring instant, then broke away and she thrust her hands into the pockets of her coat and strode on, the smoke of her cigarette whirling back over her shoulder like a sweet-smelling scarf in the wind.

When she walked she placed her feet parallel, as if she were walking a crack in the sidewalk. In spite of high heels the ankles above them never wavered. She wore gunmetal stockings, and her shoes had buckles of cut steel.

Two ragged little boys, gleeful at being out after midnight, came bounding toward them, chasing each other back and forth across the walk by the wall where the trees leaned over. One of them pushed the other, screaming dirty words, and the one pushed caromed toward Lilith. Turning like a cat released in mid-air, she spun out of his path and the boy sprawled to the cinders, his hands slipping along, grinding cinders into the palms. He sat up and as Stan turned to watch, he suddenly sprang at his companion with his fists. Kids always play alike. Rough-house around until one gets hurt and then the fight starts. A couple of socks and they quit and the next minute are friends again. Oh, Christ, why do you have to grow up into a life like this one? Why do you ever have to want women, want power, make money, make love, keep up a front, sell the act, suck around some booking agent, get gypped on the check—?

It was late and the lights were fewer. Around them the town’s roar had softened to a hum. And spring was coming with poplar trees standing slim and innocent around a glade with the grass hummocks under one’s hands—can’t I ever forget it? His eyes blurred and he felt his mouth tighten.

The next moment Lilith’s hand was through his arm, pressing it, turning him across the avenue to the apartment house where she lived, where she worked her own special brand of magic, where she had her locked files full of stuff. Where she told people what they had to do during the next day when they wanted a drink, when they wanted to break something, when they wanted to kill themselves with sleeping tablets, when they wanted to bugger the parlor maid or whatever they wanted to do that they had become so afraid of doing that they would pay her twenty-five dollars an hour to tell them either why it was all right to do it or go on doing it or think about doing it or how they could stop doing it or stop wanting to do it or stop thinking about doing it or do something else that was almost as good or something which was bad but would make you feel better or just something to do to be able to do something.

At her door they stopped and she turned to him, smiling serenely, telling him in that smile that he wasn’t coming in tonight, that she didn’t need him, didn’t want him tonight, didn’t want his mouth on her, didn’t want him to kneel beside her, kissing her, didn’t want anything of him except the knowledge that when she wanted him in the night and wanted his mouth on her and wanted him kneeling beside her, kissing her, she would have him doing all those things to her as she wanted them done and just when she wanted them done and just how she wanted them done to her because she had only what she wanted from anybody and she had let him do those things to her because she had wanted them done to her not because he could do them better than anyone else although he didn’t know if there was anybody else and didn’t want to know and it didn’t matter and she could have him any time she wanted those things done to her because that was the way she was and she was to be obeyed in all things because she held in her hand the golden thread which carried the current of life into him and she held behind her eyes the rheostat that fixed the current and she could starve him and dry him up and kill him by freezing if she wanted to and this was where he had gotten himself only it didn’t matter because as long as one end of the golden wire was embedded in his brain he could breathe and live and move and become as great as she wanted since she sent the current along the wire for him to become great with and live with and even make love to Molly with when Molly begged him to tell her if he didn’t want her any more so she might get some man before she looked like an old hay-burner and her insides were too tight for her ever to have a kid.

All these things he saw in the full lower lip, the sharp cheekbones and chin, the enormous eyes of gray that looked like ink now in the dark of the vestibule. He was about to ask her something else and he wet his lips with his tongue. She caught his thought, nodded, and he stood there, three steps below her with his hand holding his hat, looking up at her and needing and then she gave him what he was begging for, her lips for a full, warm, soft, sweet, moist moment and her little tongue between his like the words, “Good night” formed of soft moisture. Then she had gone and there he was for another day, another week, another month, willing to do anything she said, as long as she would not break the golden wire and now he had her permission, which she had pulled out of his mind, and he hurried off to take advantage of it before she changed her mind and sent him refusal, chilling along the invisible wire embedded in his brain, that would stop his hand six inches from his lips.

Three doors down was a little cocktail bar with a glass sign over it that was illumined some way from inside and said “BAR.” Stan hurried in. The murals jagged crazily this way and that up the three-toned wall and a radio was playing softly where the bar man nodded on a stool at one end of the bar. Stan laid a dollar on the polished wood.

“Hennessy, Three Star.”

“ ‘Inside, above the din and fray, We heard the loud musicians play The “Treues Liebes Herz” of Strauss—’ ”

“What’s that?”

“It’s from
The Harlot’s House
. Shall we go in?”

They were walking down a side street in the early summer twilight; ahead of them Lexington Avenue was gaudy with neon. In the basement of an old brownstone was a window painted in primary blues and reds; above it a sign, “Double Eagle Kretchma.” Gypsy music was filtering out on the heated air.

“It looks like a joint to me.”

“I like joints—when I’m in the mood for dirt. Let’s go in.”

It was dark with a few couples sliding around on the little dance floor. A sad fat man with blue jowls, wearing a Russian blouse of dark green silk, greasy at the cuffs, came toward them and took them to a booth. “You wish drinks, good Manhattan? Good Martini?”

“Do you have any real vodka?” Lilith was tapping a cigarette.

“Good vodka. You, sir?”

Stan said, “Hennessy, Three Star, and plain water.”

When the drinks came he offered the waiter a bill but it was waved away. “Later. Later. Have good time first. Then comes the payment—the bad news, huh? Have good time—always have to pay for everything in the end.” He leaned across the table, whispering, “This vodka—it’s not worth what you pay for it. Why you want to come here anyhow? You want card reading?”

Lilith looked at Stan and laughed. “Let’s.”

From the shadows in the back of the room a woman stepped out and waddled toward them, her bright red skirt swishing as her hips rolled. She had a green scarf around her head, a curved nose, loose thin lips and a deep, greasy crease between her breasts which seemed ready to burst from her soiled white blouse at any moment. When she wedged herself into the booth beside Stan her round hip was hot and burning against his thigh.

“You cut the cards, lady; we see what you cut, please. Ah, see! Good sign! This card called The Star. You see this girl—she got one foot on land, one foot on water; she pour wine out on land and water. That is good sign, lucky in love, lady. I see man with light hair going to ask you to marry him. Some trouble at first but it come out all right.”

She turned up a card. “This one here—Hermit card. Old man with star in lantern. You search for something, no? Something you lose, no? Ring? Paper with writing on it?”

Against Lilith’s blank, cold face the gypsy’s questions bounded back. She turned another card. “Here is Wheel of Life. You going to live long time with not much sickness. Maybe some stomach trouble later on and some trouble with nervous sickness but everything pass off all right.”