Moon Palace (10 page)

I encountered dangers in there as well, but nothing truly calamitous, nothing I did not manage to run away from in the end. One morning, an old man sat down beside me on a bench, stuck out his hand, and introduced himself as Frank. “You can call me Bob if you want to,” he said, “I’m not fussy. Just as long as you don’t call me Bill, we’ll get along fine.” Then, with barely a pause, he launched into a complicated story about gambling, going on at great length about a thousand-dollar bet he had made in 1936 which involved a horse named Cigarillo, a gangster named Duke, and a jockey named Tex. I lost him after the third sentence, but there was something enjoyable about listening to his scattered, half-cocked tale, and since he seemed perfectly harmless, I didn’t bother to walk away. About ten minutes into his monologue, however, he suddenly jumped up from the bench and grabbed the
clarinet case that I was holding on my lap. He ran down the macadam footpath like some invalid jogger, moving with pathetic little shuffling steps, arms and legs shooting crazily in all directions. It wasn’t hard for me to catch up to him. Once I did, I snagged his arm brusquely from behind, spun him around, and wrenched the clarinet case from his hands. He seemed surprised that I had bothered to go after him. “That’s no way to treat an old man,” he said, showing not the slightest remorse over what he had done. I felt a powerful urge to punch him in the face, but he was already trembling so hard with fear that I held myself back. Just as I was about to turn away, he gave me a fcopyened, contemptuous look, and then sent a large gob of spit flying in my direction. About half of it dribbled down his chin, but the rest of it landed on my shirt about chest high. I averted my eyes from him for a moment to inspect the damage, and in that split-second he scrambled away again, glancing back over his shoulder to see if I was coming after him. I thought that would be the end of it, but once he had put a safe distance between us, he stopped in his tracks, turned around, and started shaking his fist at me, jabbing the air with indignation. “Fucking commie!” he shouted. “Fucking commie agitator! You should go back to Russia where you belong!” He was taunting me to come after him, obviously hoping to keep our adventure alive, but I didn’t fall into the trap. Without saying another word, I turned around and left him where he was.

It was a trivial episode, of course, but others had a more menacing air to them. One night, a gang of kids chased me across Sheep’s Meadow, and the only thing that saved me was that one of them fell and twisted his ankle. Another time, a belligerent drunk threatened me with a broken beer bottle. Those were close calls, but the most terrifying moment came on a cloudy night toward the end, when I accidentally stumbled into a bush where three people were making love—two men and a woman. It was difficult to see much, but my impression was that they were all naked, and from the tone of their voices after they discovered I was there, I gathered they were also drunk. A branch snapped
under my left foot, and then I heard the woman’s voice, followed by a sudden thrashing of leaves and twigs. “Jack,” she said, “there’s some creep over there.” Two voices answered instead of one, both of them grunting with hostility, charged with a violence I had rarely heard before. Then a shadowy figure rose up and pointed what looked like a gun in my direction. “One word, asshole,” he said, “and I’ll give it back to you six times.” I assumed he was talking about the bullets in the gun. If fear has not distorted what happened, I believe I heard a click at that point, the sound of the hammer being cocked into place. Before I understood how scared I was, I took off. I just turned on my heels and ran. If my lungs hadn’t finally given out on me, I probably would have run until morning.

It’s impossible to know how long I could have taken it. Assuming that no one had killed me, I think I might have lasted until the start of the cold weather. Aside from a few unexpected incidents, things seemed fairly well under control. I spent my money with excruciating care, never more than a dollar or a dollar and a half a day, and that alone would have deferred the moment of reckoning for some time. Even when my funds dipped perilously close to the bottom, something always seemed to turn up at the last minute: I would find money on the ground or some stranger would step forth and produce one of those miracles I have already discussed. I did not eat well, but I don’t think I ever went an entire day without getting at least a morsel or two into my stomach. It’s true that I was alarmingly thin by the end, just 112 pounds, but most of the weight loss occurred during the final days I spent in the park. That was because I came down with something—a flu, a virus, God knows what—and from then on I didn’t eat anything at all. I was too weak, and every time I managed to put something into my mouth, it came copy back up again. If my two friends hadn’t found me when they did, I don’t think there’s any question that I would have died. I had run out of reserves, and there was nothing left for me to fight with.

The weather had been with me from the start, so much so
that I had stopped thinking of it as a problem. Almost every day was a repetition of the day before: beautiful late-summer skies, hot suns parching the ground, and the air then drifting into the coolness of cricket-filled nights. During the first two weeks, it hardly rained at all, and when there was rain, it never amounted to more than a sprinkle. I began pushing my luck, sleeping more or less out in the open, by now conditioned to believe that I would be safe wherever I was. One night, as I lay dreaming on a patch of grass, utterly exposed to the heavens, I finally got caught in a downpour. It was one of those cataclysmic rains: the sky suddenly splitting in two, buckets of water descending, a prodigious fury of sound. I was drenched by the time I woke up, my whole body pummeled, the drops bouncing off me like buckshot. I started running through the darkness, frantically searching for a place to hide, but it took several minutes before I managed to find shelter under a ledge of granite rocks, and by then it hardly mattered where I was. I was as wet as someone who had swum across the ocean.

The rain continued until dawn, at times slackening to a drizzle, at times exploding with monumental bursts—screeching battalions of cats and dogs, pure wrath tumbling from the clouds. These eruptions were unpredictable, and I did not want to run the risk of getting caught in one. I clung to my tiny spot, dumbly standing there in my waterlogged boots, my clammy blue jeans, my glistening leather jacket. My knapsack had been subjected to the same soaking as everything else, and that left me with nothing dry to change into. I had no choice but to wait it out, shivering in the darkness like a stray mutt. For the first hour or two I did my best not to feel sorry for myself, but then I gave up the effort and let forth in a spree of shouting and cursing, putting all my energies into the most vile imprecations I could think of—putrid strings of invective, nasty and circuitous insults, bombastic exhortations against God and country. After a while, I had worked myself up to such a pitch that I was sobbing through my words, literally
ranting and hiccuping at the same time, and yet through it all managing to summon up such artful and long-winded phrases that even a Turkish cutthroat would have been impressed. This continued for perhaps half an hour. Afterward, I was so spent that I fell asleep copy where I was, still standing up. I dozed for several minutes, then was roused by another onslaught of rain. I wanted to renew my attack, but I was too tired and hoarse to scream anymore. For the rest of the night I just stood there in a trance of self-pity, waiting for the morning to come.

At six o’clock I walked into a hash house on West Forty-eighth Street and ordered a bowl of soup. Vegetable soup, I think it was, with greasy chunks of celery and carrots bobbing in a yellowish broth. It warmed me to a certain extent, but with my wet clothes still plastered to my skin, the dampness was penetrating too deeply for the soup to have any permanent effect. I went downstairs to the men’s room and dried off my head under the nozzle of an electric sani-blower. To my horror, the gusts of hot wind puffed up my hair into a ridiculous tangle, and I wound up looking like a gargoyle, a crazed figure jutting from the bell tower of some Gothic cathedral. Desperate to undo the mess, I impulsively loaded my razor with a fresh blade, the last one in my knapsack, and started hacking off my wild serpent locks. By the time I was finished, my hair was so short that I scarcely recognized myself anymore. It accentuated my thinness to an almost appalling degree. My ears stuck out, my Adam’s apple bulged, my head seemed no bigger than a child’s. I’m starting to shrink, I said to myself, and suddenly I heard myself talking out loud to the face in the mirror. “Don’t be afraid,” my voice said. “No one is allowed to die more than once. The comedy will be over soon, and you’ll never have to go through it again.”

Later that morning, I spent a couple of hours in the reading room of the public library, counting on the stuffiness of the place to help dry out my clothes. Unfortunately, once the clothes began to dry in earnest, they also began to smell. It was as if all the folds
and crevices of my garments had suddenly decided to tell their secrets to the world. This had never happened before, and it shocked me to realize that such a noxious odor could be coming from my person. The mixture of old sweat and rainwater must have produced some bizarre chemical reaction, and as my clothes grew progressively drier, the smell became uglier and more overpowering. Eventually, it got so bad that I could even smell my feet—a horrific stench that came copy through the leather of my boots, invading my nostrils like a cloud of poison gas. It didn’t seem possible that this was happening to me. I continued thumbing through the pages of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, hoping that no one would notice the smell, but these prayers soon came to naught. An old man sitting across the table from me looked up from his newspaper and started to sniff, then looked disgustedly in my direction. For a moment I was tempted to jump to my feet and scold him for his rudeness, but I realized that I didn’t have the energy for it. Before he had a chance to say anything, I stood up from my chair and left.

Outside, the weather was gloomy: a raw and sullen kind of day, all mist and hopelessness. I could feel myself gradually running out of ideas. A strange weakness had crept into my bones, and it was all I could do to keep from stumbling. I bought a sandwich at a deli not far from the Colisseum, but then had trouble maintaining interest in it. After several bites, I wrapped it up again and stored it in my knapsack for later. My throat was hurting, and I had broken out in a sweat. Crossing the street at Columbus Circle, I went back into the park and started looking for a place to lie down. I had never slept during the day before, and all my old hiding places suddenly seemed precarious, exposed, useless without the protection of night. I kept walking north, hoping I would find something before I collapsed. The fever was mounting inside me, and a stuporous exhaustion seemed to be eating up portions of my brain. There was almost no one in the park. Just as I was about to ask myself why, it started to drizzle. If my throat
hadn’t been hurting so much, I probably would have laughed. Then, very abruptly and violently, I began to throw up. Bits of vegetable soup and sandwich came bursting out of my mouth, splattering on the ground before me. I gripped my knees and stared down at the grass, waiting for the spasm to end. This is human loneliness, I said to myself. This is what it means to have no one. I was not angry anymore, however, and I thought those words with a kind of brutal candor, an absolute objectivity. Within two or three minutes, the whole episode felt like something that had taken place months before. I kept on walking, not willing to give up my search. If someone had appeared just then, I probably would have asked him to take me to a hospital. But no one appeared. I don’t know how long it took me to get there, but at a certain point I found a cluster of large rocks surrounded by over-grown foliage and trees. The rocks formed a natural cave, and without stopping to consider the matter any further, I crawled into this shallow indentation, pulled some loose branches in with me to block up the opening, and promptly fell asleep.

I don’t know how much time I spent in there. Two or three days, I would think, but it hardly matters now. When Zimmer and Kitty asked me about it, I told them three, but that was only because three is a literary number, the same number of days that Jonah spent in the belly of the whale. Most of the time I was barely conscious and even when I seemed to be awake, I was so bound up in the tribulations of my body that I lost all sense of where I was. I remember long bouts of vomiting, frenzied moments when my body wouldn’t stop shaking, periods when the only sound I heard was the chattering of my teeth. The fever must have been quite high, and it brought ferocious dreams with it—endless, mutating visions that seemed to grow directly out of my burning skin. Nothing could hold its shape in me. Once, I remember, I saw the Moon Palace sign in front of me, more vivid than it had ever been in life. The pink and blue neon letters were so large that the whole sky was filled with their bcopyness. Then, suddenly, the letters
disappeared, and only the two
os
from the word
Moon
were left. I saw myself dangling from one of them, struggling to hang on like an acrobat who had botched a dangerous stunt. Then I was slithering around it like a tiny worm, and then I wasn’t there anymore. The two
os
had turned into eyes, gigantic human eyes that were looking down at me with scorn and impatience. They kept on staring at me, and after a while I became convinced that they were the eyes of God.

The sun appeared on the last day. I don’t remember doing it, but at some point I must have crawled from the cave and stretched myself out on the grass. My mind was in such a muddle that I imagined the warmth of the sun could evaporate my fever, literally suck the illness out of my bones. I remember pronouncing the words
Indian summer
over and over to myself, saying them so many times that they eventually lost their meaning. The sky above me was immense, a dazzling clarity that had no end to it. If I went on staring at it, I felt, I would dissolve in the light. Then, without any sense of falling asleep, I suddenly began to dream of Indians. It was 350 years ago, and I saw myself following a group of half-naked men through the forests of Manhattan. It was a strangely vibrant dream, relentless and exact, filled with bodies darting among the light-dappled leaves and branches. A soft wind poured through the foliage, muffling the footsteps of the men, and I went on following them in silence, moving as nimbly as they did, with each step feeling that I was closer to understanding the spirit of the forest. I remember these images so well, perhaps, because it was precisely then that Zimmer and Kitty found me: lying there on the grass with that odd and pleasant dream circulating in my head. Kitty was the one I saw first, but I didn’t recognize her, even though I sensed that she was familiar to me. She was wearing her Navaho headband, and my initial response was to take her for an afterimage, a shadow-woman incubated in the darkness of my dream. Later on, she told me that I smiled at her, and when she bent down to look at me more closely, I called her Pocahontas. I remember that I had trouble seeing her because of the sunlight,
but I have a distinct recollection that there were tears in her eyes when she bent down, although she would never admit that afterward. A moment later, Zimmer entered the picture as well, and then I heard his voice. “You dumb bastard,” he said. There was a brief pause, and then, not wanting to confuse me with too long a speech, he said the same thing again: “You dumb bastard. You poor dumb bastard.”