The Box Man (13 page)

On the old white door the layers of paint cannot conceal the surface scratches. Staring at the door, you think of many things. What is that sound that catches your attention now? Is it only your fancy? Yes, you hear it … there … that’s it … from a different direction. You look around at the window. A movable house of cardboard precisely modeled on the one worn by the box man on the bed next to the wall. Has the real box man at last taken it into his head to come? No, the interval between footfalls is too short. It is not a dog either. Perhaps it is that chicken. It is that weird hen that sometime learned to walk about at night. Every night she wanders around here, searching for food. Is a night prowling chicken an extremely strange phenomenon or not? Since it can monopolize all the night insects that crawl out unafraid, there is plenty of food and it should be well fed, but it is thin and sickly. If one finds oneself with exceptional talents one has to pay unexpected compensation (you seem to be taking a lesson from the chicken now).

You try lifting to your lips the half drunk glass of beer. You decide to stop with just wetting the tip of your tongue a little. The beer is completely flat and undrinkable. More than four hours have already passed since you sat down here. Although it will soon be the end of September, the weather is depressing. You stop the sweat that flows from the hairline at your forehead with some cotton soaked in alcohol and moisten your sticky lips with saliva, but you cannot very well turn on the fan or the air conditioner. You must not miss hearing whatever footfalls there may be. You have become terribly suspicious.

A thick slab of glass lies on the desk. On it the half written affidavit. The affidavit concerning the incident that has not yet taken place and that we are sure will. Pushing it aside, you open a notebook. Quarto size, lined with orange colored horizontal lines … This is surprising; I did not know that you had even prepared notes exactly like mine. You absently turn the cover. The first page begins with the following sentence:

“This is the record of a box man. I am at this time beginning to write this record in my box. I am in a cardboard box that its over my head and covers me completely to the hips.

“That is, at this point, the box man is my very self.”

You flip over more than ten pages and open to a clean one. Grasping your ballpoint pen, you assume a posture for writing, but changing your mind, you look at your watch. Still nine minutes until midnight. The last Saturday in September is just coming to a close. You rise from your seat, pen and notebook in hand. You walk to the bed. You tilt the box over diagonally and crawl in, bringing it down over your head from the back. You present a figure seated on the edge of the bed with the box over your head. Apparently you have become rather used to getting in and out of the box. You adjust it so that the observation window is directed at the lamp on the desk. But there is not enough light to take notes. You switch on the flashlight suspended over the observation window. Making the plastic board you have provided into a table, you begin taking your notes on that.

“The following is a summary of the incident: The place is the city of T, the last Monday in September …”

You evidently fancy to begin recording the past events of the day after tomorrow when nothing has yet occurred. What is the hurry? Or is it that you are backed up by your considerable self confidence? Since you are trying to establish a chronology of actions that you describe in the past tense, evidently those actions had already been going on when I began reading these notes. You already were aware of the results of those actions, though I was not, for you could make an educated guess. But I should like to read right on in your notes. I cannot believe that there was any other clear purpose for the action than to bring death.

You begin to write.

“On the outskirts of a little frequented seaside park, an unidentified body was washed up. The body was wearing over its head a box made of packing cardboard, secured by a cord tied around its waist. Undoubtedly it was a box man who had been wandering about the city lately and who, by mistake, had fallen into a canal; the body was swept by the tides onto the beach. Other than the box, he had no possessions. The result of the autopsy made it possible to set the supposed time of death about thirty hours previously.”

Thirty hours previously … you were very decisive about that. Let us suppose for the moment that the time of the autopsy was early in the morning of Monday. Going back thirty hours from then puts us at precisely the present moment. At the latest it will be within several hours from now. You too have evidently made up your mind to face death. When you hastily close your notes, you slip off the bed and kneel on the floor, You shove the box, which has dipped forward, off toward the back. The things inside the box knock against each other and set up a din. Confused, you hug the box to you, looking over your shoulder. You look up, straining your ears to catch any noise beyond the walls, beyond the ceiling. Fear paints a streak of varnish down your face. The varnish is evidently quick drying, and the surface of your face is covered with crepe like wrinkles. You are much too nervous.

Why can’t you be more practical? You can only do what you can no matter how you try.

You straighten up and face the door. You begin to walk. You hold your elbows close to your sides; and your fingers, all together, slightly bend inward. You take three steps and your strength leaves you. You change directions and go in front of the desk. Seating yourself, you hold your head in your arms. The notes that you have placed between your elbow and your side slip noiselessly onto the desk. And then time indolently goes by as you think.

You are now staring at the edge of the thick glass plate on top of the desk. A pure blue that doesn’t belong anywhere, that has no feeling of distance between its two surfaces. An infinite greenish blue. A dangerous color, filled with the blue temptations of flight. You drown in the blue. When your body sinks out of sight in it, you look as if you will go on swimming forever. You recall the many times you have had this temptation. The blue of the wake welling up from a steamship propeller . . the stagnant water of an abandoned sulphur mine … blue pellets of rat poison that resemble jelly candy … the violet dawn that one sees, waiting for the first train with no place to go… it is the colored glass of the spectacles of love distributed by the Suicide Aid Society, or if you wish, the Spiritual Euthanasia Club. The glass is tinted with the thin membrane of a wan winter sun that a skilled technician strips away with great care. Only those who wear these glasses can see the terminus from which the one way train sets out.

I wonder if perhaps you are not too engrossed with the box. Perhaps you are poisoned by the box, which is merely a means. I hear that the box is indeed a dangerous source of blue.

The color of rain that gives beggars colds … The color of the hour when the store shutters of the underground passages are drawn … the color of the graduation watch forfeited to the pawnbroker … the color of jealousy broken on the stainless steel sink of the kitchen … the color of the first morning of unemployment … the color of the ink of a useless I.D. card … the color of the last movie ticket the candidate for suicide purchases .. the color of the hole that has been eaten away by hours of such strong alkalinity as anonymity, hibernation, euthanasia.

But by shifting my gaze only a few inches, you are already outside the hole. No matter how serious you pretend to be you are after all a fake box man. You can’t stop yourself from being what you are. You are now looking at a calendar from a pharmaceutical company, that you have laid under the plate glass on the desk. Monthly slogans are printed on it: to the left, “The Season for Vitamins and Cortisone Products”; and to the right, “September and the Lack of Harmony of the Autonomous Nerves,” between which is inserted the trademark representing a cream colored Hippocrates surrounded by some Latin aphorism. The red letter in the left corner attracts your glance. The last Sunday in September. The day immediately before when the drowned man in a box is scheduled to be cast up on the outskirts of the seaside park . . the next day… no, it’s already today by a few minutes. No matter how you pretend not to see them, the already printed letters do not disappear. It’s the same as your chronology written in the past tense. You place your two spread hands separated by shoulder width on the edge of the desk. Yes, that’s fine. By shifting your weight forward and supporting yourself on your elbows, you are able to rise easily. Once things are started you cannot stop.

Nevertheless, it’s that unfinished affidavit that annoys me. I beg you to destroy it and throw it away before you leave your seat. If things go as planned, such an affidavit will be a useless white elephant, and if they don’t, the situation will be a lot worse than the one you describe in it.

AFFIDAVIT
Continued

Now, concerning the incident of the corpse you ask about, I can tell you with certainty that the body is that of the doctor captain whose names I borrowed in order to practice medicine. The reason why I call him doctor captain is not because of his old rank but because I used the title for so many years half jokingly and it became a habit with me. Permit me to call him in this way. There was the danger of suicide from sometime past with the doctor, and I am deeply sorry that I was remiss and unable to stop him before anything happened. I regret that very much. I beg you to give me the opportunity of explaining the situation.

The year before the end of the war I was assigned as an orderly to the army doctor in a certain field hospital. Since at the time the doctor was absorbed in his research on producing sugar from wood, I had to take over a good half of the examinations and treatment of patients. Fortunately my memory was good and my hand more than averagely dexterous, and under the guidance of the doctor I was able to perform quite complicated operations. Let me say a word about his research: during the war there was a great shortage of sugar, and sweets were very precious. If he were able to extract sugar from wood, that would be a discovery of worldwide import. The doctor noticed goats eating paper, the raw product of which consisted of wood, and thinking that there must be some active enzyme in the goats’ intestines that broke up the cellulose into starch, he devoted himself night and day to separating and extracting it.

One time, I don’t know whether it was because he was infected by the goats’ intestinal bacteria or whether he was poisoned by tasting the processed wood, the doctor had the misfortune to fall ill. It was a strange sickness: he ran a high fever for three successive days, and after that in three day cycles he experienced severe muscular cramps accompanied by spasms and nervous disorders. The doctor himself was unable to diagnose his case, and his colleagues gave up on it too. Since then, every time I have the opportunity I watch for literature on the subject, but as yet I have no indication even as to the name of the sickness. As I had long felt kindly disposed toward the doctor, I did my best to care for him. The condition of the sick man seesawed, and there was no satisfactory progress. I still regret to this day that unable to stand the sight of his suffering and in view of his persistent pleading I began to administer drugs to him daily. By the time the war ended, he had already developed symptoms of addiction. However, I did not leave him, and we were demobilized together.

Even after demobilization, I worked along with the doctor to open a clinic and participated as his assistant in both management and practice. Of course, his illness took no turn for the better, and outside of giving me instructions by means of medical charts the fact was that he was personally incapable of giving examinations or treatment.

Since you ask, I should like to tell you without covering anything up why I dared to continue to per form illegal medical activities, knowing they were illegal.

First of all there was the necessity of replenishing the doctor’s drugs. At this point there was no question of higher or lower rank between us, nor was I at all coerced by him. It was something I did out of a feeling of friendship, spontaneously, and I think that I should hold myself totally responsible. To your question of whether one should not pay special attention to the treatment of drug addicts, I should like to answer in the following way. The treatment of the doctor’s drug addiction-he was different from the usual patient-was extremely difficult, and further the actual rate of recovery from addiction is pretty close to zero. While I realize that giving drugs is euthanasia over a period of time, I did not have the courage to abandon him.

Second, I cannot deny the fact that my livelihood was guaranteed under the cloak of the doctor’s qualifications. But I did not take advantage of his weak point, his drug habit. The accounting was all in the hands of the doctor’s wife, Nana. Only later did Nana and I become intimate, but even so the doctor was afraid that I would abandon him, and he constantly resorted to strong pressure on Nana to establish a relationship with me as a device for keeping me from leaving. This type of persecution complex tends to be frequently observable in the later stages of drug addiction. Third, my realization that daily my reputation was increasing and that my skill was beginning to be recognized was one of the reasons why I dared to continue my practice. Of course, there is no objective measurement by which one can precisely appraise the techniques of a practicing physician. Indeed, I continued, I suppose, because I did not have a strong sense of the crime of charlatanry. What’s more, my interest in medicine was gradually growing, and I diligently and ceaselessly absorbed the latest information in medical books and specialized reviews. I considered that twelve years’ experience and a conscientious and inquiring mind gave me a confidence in myself that went beyond having or not having a license. In point of fact, I was frequently amazed, when I examined patients that came to me from other hospitals, at the irresponsible and mistaken diagnoses of those doctors who had graduated from the university but who had been poor students there. However, I don’t mean to excuse my own offense by that. Whatever my reasons, it is not permissible to infringe the law.