Moon Palace (7 page)

I rattled on like that for several more minutes, but all the talk had worn me down, and I could feel my inspiration beginning to flag. Midway through my last speech (on Jules Verne and the
Baltimore Gun Club), it abandoned me entirely. My head shrank, then grew enormously large; I saw peculiar lights and comets darting behind my eyes; my stomach began to rumble, to bulge with dagger-thrusts of pain, and suddenly I felt I was going to be sick. Without a word of warning, I broke off from my lecture, stood up from the table, and announced that I had to leave. “Thank you for your kindness,” I said, “but urgent business calls me away. You are dear, good people, and I promise to remember you all in my will.” It was a deranged performance, a madman’s jig. I staggered out of the kitchen, knocking over a coffee cup in the process, and groped my way to the door. By the time I got there, Kitty was standing next to me. To this day, I still don’t understand how she managed to get there before I did.

“You’re a very strange brother,” she said. “You look like a man, but then you turn yourself into a wolf. After that, the wolf becomes a talking machine. It’s all mouths for you, isn’t it? First the food, then the words—into the mouth and out of it. But you’re forgetting the best thing mouths are made for. I’m your sister, after all, and I’m not going to let you leave without kissing me good-bye.”

I started to apologize, but then, before I had a chance to say anything, Kitty stood on her toes, put her hand on the back of my neck, and kissed me—very tenderly, I felt, almost with compassion. I didn’t know what to make of it. Was I supposed to treat it as a genuine kiss, or was it just one more part of the game? Before I could decide, I accidentally leaned my back against the door, and the door opened. It felt like a message to me, a secret cue that things had come to an end, and so, without another word, I continued backing out the door, turned as my feet crossed the sill, and left.

A
fter that, there were no more free meals. When the second eviction notice arrived on August thirteenth, I was down to my last thirty-seven dollars. As it turned out, that was the same day
the astronauts came to New York for their ticker-tape parade. The sanitation department later reported that three hundred tons of trash were thrown to the streets during the festivities. It was an all-time record, they said, the largest parade in the history of the world. I kept my distance from such things. Not knowing where to turn anymore, I left my apartment as seldom as possible, trying to conserve whatever strength I still had. A quick jaunt down to the corner for supplies and then back again, nothing more than that. My ass became raw from wiping myself with the brown paper bags I carried home from the market, but it was the heat I suffered from most. The air in the apartment was intolerable, a sweatbox stillness that bore down on me night and day, and no matter how wide I opened the windows, I could not coax a breeze to enter the room. My pores gushed constantly. Even sitting in one place put me in a sweat, and when I moved in any way at all, it provoked a flood. I drank as much water as possible. I took cold baths, doused my head under the tap, pressed wet towels against my face and neck and wrists. This offered scant comfort, but at least I was able to keep myself clean. The soap in the bathroom had shrunk to a small white sliver by then, and I had to keep it in reserve for shaving. Because my stock of razor blades was also running low, I limited myself to two shaves a week, carefully scheduling them to fall on the days when I went out to do my shopping. Although it probably didn’t matter, it consoled me to think that I was managing to keep up appearances.

The essential thing was to plot my next move. But that was precisely what gave me the most trouble, the thing I could no longer do. I had lost the ability to think ahead, and no matter how hard I tried to imagine the future, I could not see it, I could not see anything at all. The only future that had ever belonged to me was the present I was living in now, and the struggle to remain in that present had gradually overwhelmed the rest. I had no ideas anymore. The moments unfurled one after the other, and at each moment the future stood before me as a blank, a white page of uncertainty. If life was a story, as Uncle Victor had often told me,
and each man was the author of his own story, then I was making it up as I went along. I was working without a plot, writing each sentence as it came to me and refusing to think about the next. All well and good, perhaps, but the question was no longer whether I could write the story off the top of my head. I had already done that. The question was what I was supposed to do when the pen ran out of ink.

The clarinet was still there, sitting in its case by my bed. I am ashamed to admit it now, but I nearly buckled under and sold it. Worse than that, I even went so far as to take it to a music store one day to find out how much it was worth. When I saw that it wouldn’t bring in enough to cover a month’s rent, I abandoned the idea. But that was the only thing that spared me the indignity of going through with it. As time went on, I realized how close I had come to committing an unpardonable sin. The clarinet was my last link to Uncle Victor, and because it was the last, because there were no other traces of him, it carried the entire force of his soul within it. Whenever I looked at it, I was able to feel that force within myself. It was something to cling to, a piece of wreckage to keep me afloat.

Several days after my visit to the music store, a minor disaster nearly drowned me. The two eggs I was about to place in a pot of water and boil up for my daily meal slipped through my fingers and broke on the floor. Those were the last two eggs of my current supply, and I could not help feeling that this was the cruelest, most terrible thing that had ever happened to me. The eggs landed with an ugly splat. I remember standing there in horror as they oozed out over the floor. The sunny, translucent innards sank into the cracks, and suddenly there was muck everywhere, a bobbing slush of slime and shell. One yolk had miraculously survived the fall, but when I bent down to scoop it up, it slid out from under the spoon and broke apart. I felt as though a star were exploding, as though a great sun had just died. The yellow spread over the white and then began to swirl, turning into a vast nebula, a
debris of interstellar gases. It was all too much for me—the last, imponderable straw. When this happened, I actually sat down and cried.

Struggling to get a grip on my emotions, I went out and splurged on a meal at the Moon Palace. It didn’t help. Self-pity had given way to extravagance, and I loathed myself for surrendering to the impulse. To carry my disgust even further, I started off with egg drop soup, unable to resist the perversity of the pun. I followed it with fried dumplings, a plate of spicy shrimp, and a bottle of Chinese beer. The good this nourishment might have done me, however, was negated by the poison of my thoughts. I nearly gagged on the rice. This was no dinner, I told myself, it was a last meal, the food they serve up to a condemned man before they drag him off to the gallows. Forcing myself to chew it, to get it down my throat, I remembered a phrase from Raleigh’s last letter to his wife, written on the eve of his execution:
My brains are broken.
Nothing could have been more apt than those words. I thought of Raleigh’s chopped-off head, preserved by his wife in a glass box. I thought of Cyrano’s head, crushed by the stone that fell on it. Then I imagined my head cracking open, splattering like the eggs that had fallen to the floor of my room. I felt my brains dribbling out of me. I saw myself in pieces.

I left an exorbitant tip for the waiter, then walked back to my building. When I entered the lobby, I made a routine stop by my mailbox and discovered there was something in it. Other than eviction notices, it was the first mail that had come for me that month. For a brief moment I fancied that some unknown benefactor had sent me a check, but then I examined the letter and saw that it was merely a notice of another kind. I was to report for my army physical on September sixteenth. Considering my condition at that moment, I took the news rather calmly. But by then it hardly seemed to matter where the stone fell. New York or Indochina, I said to myself, in the end they came to the same thing. If Columbus could confuse America with Cathay, who was I to
quibble over geography? I entered my apartment and slipped the letter into Uncle Victor’s clarinet case. Within a matter of minutes, I had managed to forget all about it.

I heard someone knocking at the door, but I decided it was not worth the effort to see who it was. I was thinking, and I did not want to be disturbed. Several hours later, I heard someone knock again. This second knocking was rather different from the first, and I did not think it could have been made by the same person. It was a coarse and brutal pounding, an angry fist that rattled the door on its hinges, whereas the other had been discreet, almost tentative: the work of a single knuckle, tapping its faint, intimate message on the wood. I turned these differences over in my mind for several hours, pondering the wealth of human information that was buried in such simple sounds. If the two knocks had been made by the same person, I thought, then the contrast would seem to indicate a terrible frustration, and I was hard-pressed to think of anyone who was that desperate to see me. This meant that my original interpretation was correct. There had been two people. One had come in friendship, the other had not. One was probably a woman, the other was not. I continued thinking about this until nightfall. As soon as I was aware of the darkness, I lit a candle, then went on thinking about it until I fell alseep. In all that time, however, it did not occur to me to ask who those people might have been. Even more to the point, I did not make any effort to understand why I did not want to know.

The pounding started again the next morning. By the time I was sufficiently awake to know I was not dreaming it, I heard a jangle of keys out in the hall—a loud, percussive thunder that exploded in my head. I opened my eyes, and at that moment a key entered the lock. The latch turned, the door swung open, and into the room stepped Simon Fernandez, the building superintendent. Sporting his customary two-day beard, he was dressed in the same khaki pants and white T-shirt that he had been wearing since the beginning of summer—a dingy outfit by now, smudged
with grayish soot and the drippings of several dozen lunches. He looked directly into my eyes and pretended not to see me. Ever since Christmas, when I had failed to give him his annual tip (another expense struck from the books), Fernandez had turned hostile. No more hellos, no more talk about the weather, no more stories about his cousin from Ponce who almost made it as a short-stop with the Cleveland Indians. Fernandez had taken his revenge by acting as though I did not exist, and we had not exchanged a word in months. On this morning of mornings, however, there was an unexpected reversal of strategy. He sauntered around the room for several moments, tapping the walls as though inspecting them for damage, and then, passing by the bed for the second or third time, he stopped, turned, and did an exaggerated double-take as he noticed me at last. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Are you still here?”

“Still here,” I said. “In a manner of speaking.”

“You gotta be out today,” Fernandez said. “Apartment’s rented for the first of the month, you know, and Willie’s coming with the painters tomorrow morning. You don’t want no cops dragging you out of here, do you?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be out in plenty of time.”

Fernandez looked around the room with a proprietary air, then shook his head in disgust. “You’ve got some place here, my friend. If you don’t mind me saying so, it reminds me of a coffin. One of those pine boxes they bury bums in.”

“My decorator has been on vacation,” I said. “We were planning to do the walls in robin’s egg blue, but then we weren’t sure if it would match the tile in the kitchen. We agreed to give it a little more thought before taking the plunge.”

“Smart college boy like you. You got some kinda problem or what?”

“No problem. A few financial setbacks, that’s all. The market has been down lately.”

“You need money, you gotta work for it. The way I see it,
you just sit around on your ass all day. Like some chimp in the zoo, you know what I mean? You can’t pay the rent if you don’t have no job.”

“But I do have a job. I get up in the morning just like everyone else, and then I see if I can live through another day. That’s full-time work. No coffee breaks, no weekends, no benefits or vacations. I’m not complaining, mind you, but the salary is pretty low.”

“You sound like a fuck-up to me. A smart college boy fuck-up.”

“You shouldn’t overestimate college. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

“If I was you, I’d go see a doctor,” said Fernandez, suddenly showing some sympathy. “I mean, just look at you. It’s pretty sad, man. There ain’t nothing there no more. Just a lot of bones.”

“I’ve been on a diet. It’s hard to look your best on two soft-boiled eggs a day.”

“I don’t know,” said Fernandez, drifting off into his own thoughts. “Sometimes it’s like everybody’s gone crazy. If you wanna know what I think, it’s those things they’re shooting into space. All that weird shit, those satellites and rockets. You send people to the moon, something’s gotta give. You know what I mean? It makes people do strange things. You can’t fuck with the sky and expect nothing to happen.”

He unfurled the copy of the
Daily News
he was carrying in his left hand and showed me the front page. This was the proof, the final piece of evidence. At first I couldn’t make it out, but then I saw that it was an aerial photograph of a crowd. There were tens of thousands of people in the picture, a gigantic agglomeration of bodies, more bodies than I had ever seen in one place before. Woodstock. It had so little to do with what was happening to me just then, I didn’t know what to think. Those people were my age, but for all the connection I felt with them, they might have been standing on another planet.

Fernandez left. I stayed where I was for several minutes, then climbed out of bed and put on my clothes. It did not take me long to get ready. I filled a knapsack with a few odds and ends, tucked the clarinet case under my arm, and walked out the door. It was late August, 1969. As I remember it, the sun was shining bcopyly that morning, and a small breeze was blowing off the river. I turned south, paused for a moment, and then took a step. Then I took another step, and in that way I began to move down the street. I did not look back once.