Death Kit (2 page)

Perhaps reprieved from death, and if that's the case, reprieved either by his own vitality or by the merest accident, Diddy acknowledges that he remains the tenant of his life; and that the lease to which he holds title has some time yet to run. Something of a natural gentleman, he aims to keep the property in decent repair. If only he could feel less, live less inside himself. Isn't that feasible? From this point onward. A posthumous person has certain new resources, new strengths. Isn't the force of Diddy's aversions and horrors somewhat reduced? Drained away, because he did have the courage to attempt, with all seriousness, to destroy himself, and because he's survived the attempt.

In the three weeks following his return to work, everything does seem less sharp and less painful. On weekends he stays in and reads and listens to music. Hardly eating at all. Taking naps, rather than aiming at a full night's sleep either Friday or Saturday. Though on Sunday night, trying to get in bed at a reasonable hour. On weekdays Diddy gets up at eight o'clock as he always has. Alarm clocks make too brutal a sound; he's awakened by a clock radio turned to WOR/FM, eternally ascending and descending among the Top Forty. Then performs morning tasks, which rarely include breakfast. Walks the dog; when he comes back, cleans up a little. He's got the apartment under control; none of the objects present themselves as too slimy or too repulsively dry, nor the space as too big to move in or too small. Arrival at the office. His jellied porous boss, Michael C. Duva, advances across the floor with a file of correspondence between Watkins & Company and
The Review of Scientific Instruments
that needs Diddy's attention. Why does Duva tilt his head to the left when he speaks, why does he smile, and why does he allow those drops of saliva to collect at the corners of his mouth? Riding out the tide of nausea, Diddy fingers the scuffed aluminum of his desk and stares urgently at the water cooler. His cardboard secretary is at her post, surreptitiously adjusting her stockings. Diddy doesn't mind handling papers. But, immaculate always, he dislikes changing a typewriter ribbon. Is frustrated to the point of tears while making a sketch for a new layout, when a narrow line drawn with India ink arbitrarily thickens or swells into a stain. Once Diddy had prided himself on being fastidious, and found it easy to be neat. These days, he suspects all that to be sham. Despises himself for being squeamish and thin-skinned. “He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.” Diddy the Despicable. But he is, he is. Don't laugh.

And Diddy the Delicate, too. As a boy, Diddy had the normal amount of confidence in his body. At least, so he remembered. Paul, spending all his after-school hours at the piano, suffered more keenly than Diddy from the shameful anguish of early adolescence, envying his brother, only a year older, his precociously sinewy arms and stout chest. Paul never liked sports, while Diddy the Unmusical had gone out for athletics in high school, and made his mark. Because of his skills as an athlete, Diddy's manner of treating his younger brother was for a long time quite patronizing—despite his secret esteem for Paul's independence of character, which Diddy knew to be far more potent than physical strength. Still, Diddy was strong, too. And knew it. When had his physical confidence begun to wane? In the grim last years with Joan? But women liked him, always had. Their verdict counted for something. Yet Diddy didn't want to deceive. There was no reason for his body to go on being muscular and vigorous, while he only moves from taxis to the swivel chair in his office to chairs in restaurants to seats in theatres and concerts to the living-room couches to bed; his only exercise walking Xan. What's true should show. Since it's felt anyway. And whether or not anyone can see it, he does feel less substantial. The bony skull under the slightly graying hair, which he kept short, felt vulnerable. So did the slender fingers with fine nails, the highly arched feet.

Until finally Diddy's appearance did begin to testify to the physically inert, becalmed life he led. Then came that irresistible vertigo which climaxed in the ordeal of September, the decision of September 30th, the stay in the hospital, and the four frightened days afterwards he spent alone, without going out of his apartment. (Now) he really is too thin. While keys, wallet, cigarettes, coins, pocket knife, pencil flashlight, the Phi Beta Kappa key have put on weight. He's sleeping only a few hours each night and, when he does sleep, waking exhausted from his strenuous dreams. Also, hardly eating. Extra flesh, fat on the soul, is difficult to restore. A visit to his tailor is necessary, since Diddy notices (now) the space between his clothes and his moist skin. Diddy shouldn't be continually aware of the loosely defined but ample space existing there from neck to ankles, except where the contents of his pockets slam against his ribs and thighs, should he? But something is dilating, a wall is opening out.

The firm has convened a week-long conference at the main plant, upstate. Rising competition from abroad had the New York office worried. An old established firm was not to be allowed to rest on its laurels. Seeking new ideas from the departments of research and development, production, advertising, and sales. Diddy, assistant director of advertising, was asked to go up for the entire week. Duva might or might not come up by Wednesday.

A flattering assignment, Diddy supposes. And something of a vacation. After packing his bag before he went to bed Saturday night, October 26th, Diddy's sleep, sounder than usual, was traversed by a dream. Paul and he are hiding in a forest, gathering logs, stacking them; when he stumbles or is pushed into a hole. What next? A foolish agony. Paul yells, “I can't help you.” Goddamn it, I'm so fragile a hard wind can topple me, Diddy thinks as he falls. Paul is leaning over, looking down, screaming “Diddy! Diddy!” Frightened, crying. Diddy can't reassure Paul, or save himself. Joan is waiting at the bottom of the hole. Has she come back? But that part of the dream gets dark.

Diddy slept late. Brought his reluctant dog down to the basement and handed the super ten dollars to board him for a week. Xan was behaving the way he did when Diddy brought him to the vet. Whining, dragging his nails along the green linoleum that covers the entire floor of the super's tiny apartment, as Diddy, coaxing and threatening, led him into the kitchen. The super's small children want to start playing with Xan immediately. “It's all right, Mr. Torres,” said Diddy to their father, who looked as if he already regretted the transaction. “He'll calm down as soon as I go.” Would that Diddy were as confident as he sounded. The animal's whine nauseated him.

Then he caught a cab to the station, and boarded the third car from the end of the Sunday afternoon Privateer. Special new luxury express train, each car divided, European style, into compartments accommodating six people. One improves on the new by returning to the old.

*   *   *

On time. We left the city heading northwest. Diddy in a window seat, finding what comfort he could for his narrow haunches on the prickly upholstery, occupied himself for the first hour with the heavy
Times
he'd bought in the station. No obligation to look. Besides, he'd taken this trip often, was familiar with the strip of sights available from the window as we bolted through the outskirts of the city. If each factory has a smokestack, if all the housing projects are unadorned boxes built of brick, if a power station is a power station, and a prison always confines—what point is there in looking? To fabricate differences, discern nuances, is the job of those seeing for the first time. On other trips, Diddy's highly compromised desire for confrontation had permitted more looking at the houses seen through train windows—houses he could accept and refuse, as in a daydream, without ever inhabiting them. This time, Diddy refused the organized looking offered by the window.

What else? All the ideas he ought to be thinking, typed out on legal-size yellow paper and clipped together, were stored in his briefcase on the rack over his head. The rest were unthinkable. Diddy settled behind the newspaper, grateful to be able to wall himself off from his traveling companions. A compartment is public space, open to anybody. Yet it has a certain intimacy, too. A maximum of six persons are shut up together, temporarily sealed off from everyone else. A little cell of travel. Forced neighboring, which increases the reign of order.

Diddy bored (now). He's finished the newspaper. Hungry, which always happens on trains. Restless. A conductor comes to collect everyone's ticket. Whose tickets? Our tickets. In an express train which is rapidly passing many stations without stopping, each station identical with the last, Diddy is cooped up among interchangeable people. But being a fellow traveler of life, incorrigibly hopeful though sharply disillusioned, he will make the effort to tell one from the other. He casts a moderate, diffused look at the others in the compartment: to stare wouldn't be polite.

Occupying the window seat opposite, a woman in a faded woolen suit, with untidy gray hair and small sharp eyes, mistress of two bulging shopping bags at her feet. Perhaps the bags contain food. But the journey wasn't that long. Gifts for rowdy indifferent grandchildren? Whatever the contents of the bags, Diddy guessed, this was a woman who tried too hard and habitually gave what was not wanted.

She is whispering with congested urgency to an extremely pretty girl on her right. The girl seemed to be listening, but it was as if something, perhaps the large sunglasses she wore, exempted her from having to reply. The lenses were greenish-black; so dark the girl's eyes couldn't be seen, and Diddy wondered how well she could see through them. There's a wall for you!

Next to the girl, on the outside seat opposite Diddy, was a paunchy cleric whose plump face had been lowered toward his breviary since the train started; his underlip trembled systematically as he read. A breviary can't be used up like a newspaper; it's to read and reread forever. What a system! Could Diddy the Good ever have been a priest, with something worthwhile and always the same to read? Not the right sort of goodness, maybe. Too much Done-Done.

Sharing Diddy's seat, on his left, was a ruddy, heavily built, ostentatiously clean-shaven man in a tweed suit, smelling of cheap after-shave lotion or eau-de-cologne. About Diddy's age. Who had spread a large magazine on his knees at the start of the journey, but instead of taking it up, plucked a handkerchief from his pocket, spat quietly at it; then remained quite still, looking into the handkerchief. The magazine didn't slip off his lap even when the train tilted, swooped round a curve.

The gray-haired woman was the first to speak, asking if anyone minded her opening the window. Not a bad day. Rather warm. Diddy the Good did it for her, dirtying the tips of his fingers. “Do not lean out of the window.” We exchanged comments about the improved service on this line since the new trains had been installed, and about the refinement of traveling, six together, in a compartment, rather than being lined up and paired off in an open coach. The man in the tweed suit said he'd heard that the railroad, long rumored to be virtually bankrupt, was pulling itself out of the red. Diddy felt his mind getting gluey, his palate becoming furred. Conversation is always a trap for those who love the truth, isn't it? Yet common sense said Don't fret, Don't waste your integrity on a situation that isn't serious. A hard rule. Who cares about the condition of the railroad, its innovations, its finances? Does anyone here really care? Oh, but have pity upon people, poor soft-tongued creatures who should be kissing flowers but find, instead, that toads are leaping out of their mouths. Though irritated by the man's nervous way of speaking, Diddy has pity. Here's a toad, too. (Now) that the trains were punctual, Diddy remarked, they-ought-to-be-washed-down-more-often. He grimaced at the streaked windowpane, the dusty ledge, the trampled cigarette butts on the floor. The gray-haired woman found Diddy a paper napkin in one of her bags—a food bag, then—that he could use to clean his hands. Diddy thought the woman looked unwashed. Probably not dirty at all, but soiled by age.

The man in the tweed suit stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket, cleared his throat, picked up his magazine. We could read the cover (now).
Philately Annual.

“A collector, I assume.” We hadn't seen the priest look up. The suave voice issued from a mouth that moved without rendering any more expressive the face surrounding it. A face such as psychoanalysts acquire early in their training. Veiled, nerveless, relatively immobile.

“Yes, I am. And a dealer, too.” The man in the tweed suit seemed to need to cough or to spit again.

“Have you seen this issue?” said the priest. “Very rare, I believe.” From his vest pocket, the priest produced a pair of tweezers; then from another black pocket on the inside of his jacket, withdrew a walletlike case, opened it, lifted up a flap with his thumb and forefinger, and cautiously extracted a block of blue stamps with the tweezers.

So the priest and the man in the tweed suit both turn out to be collectors of stamps, valuable paper miniatures of a country, a king, a building, a tree, a face; both took out and compared their latest acquisitions. At tweezers-length, the joys of common interests. Diddy, if he wanted to talk, was left to the gray-haired woman and, he hoped, to the pretty girl with whom she was traveling, silent so far. The woman needed little encouragement. She explained that she was accompanying the girl, her niece, who was going to have an eye operation at the renowned medical center upstate. Is the girl totally blind? Diddy wondered. Seemed rude to ask. The woman launched into a description of her niece's prospective surgery, how much it will cost, its hazards, its chances of success. She insisted on using, but kept mispronouncing, words like “corneal” and “ophthalmic” and “choroid.” Diddy annoyed. He became restless when people spoke imprecisely, or didn't get things right.

“Hester, isn't that so? Isn't that what the doctor said?”