The Lost Weekend (24 page)

Had that done it? But not any number of doors, of course, not a thousand sound-proof vaults, would shut the whispering out. He might as well give up, he might as well listen. His imagination was beginning to generate to the point of delirium, and he might
as well give himself up to it. He was beginning to hear and see what normally he would merely think. He lay back and clasped his hands under his head and gave himself up to the whisperers, whose sibilant rustling words were almost soothing, now, to his nerves. He was tired. Perhaps if he resisted no longer and heard them out, they would tire, too, and go away.…

What are we going to do about Don?

We can’t go on like this any longer
.

He can’t
.

None of us can
.

He’ll kill himself
.

He’s killing us, if he only knew it
.

He knows it
.

Something’s got to be done
.

He’s got to be stopped
.

For his own good
.

For everybody’s
.

He can’t keep this up much more
.

Something terrible will happen
.

It’s already happening
.

What are we going to do about Don? …

The full daylight finally drove them away. He did not hear them go. The whispering merely became faint and fainter and died out. “Delirium is a disease of the night.” As the light filled the room, the whispering vanished. He would not need to listen any more. He could close his eyes in quiet, now, and sleep.

But sleep was out of the question. His nerves and muscles, the tendons in his legs and arms, were taut as if he had been stretched, and were now so stretched, on a rack. He could not release them. He turned over again and again and assumed positions of lassitude, hoping the sleep would come, or at least rest. But in a moment he was aware that his toes were pointed upward toward his knees, straining, or pointed down, as if stretching to reach the very bottom of the bed. The calves of his legs ached with the
strain. He could not relax his feet and toes, allow them to lie natural and quiet in whatever position they fell into. In the next second they were active by themselves, pushing, straining, reaching, as if possessed with some uncontrollable reflex, the way the leg of a killed animal will persist with its own movement after death.

He lay on his back and arched his spine for as long a time as possible and then slumped back on the bed again. The effort would start the flow of the stagnant circulation, and the relaxing would quiet him and perhaps induce sleep. But it did not. Every bone in his body throbbed as if he had been subjected the day before to the most violent and unusual exercise, every muscle ached with its own pain. He was in fear of cramps; and to stave them off, he tried again and again, in vain, to lie loosely flung out, or curled up, or limply flat on his back, in all the positions he could think of for sleep.

He recalled the time he had suffered that cramp, that seizure, that constriction of the leg muscles, in the small hotel at Antibes. He had been lying in the wide bed on just such a bright sunshiny morning as this, wondering how soon one of his beach friends would stop by and thus be able to get him a drink. The calves of his legs throbbed and beat with a life of their own, the tendons constantly pulled the toes up as if he were standing on his heels or drew them down in the
points
of the ballet-dancer. He lay on his back and listened desperately for the tiny rickety cage of the
ascenseur
to rattle up and stop on his floor. The ceiling above the bed quivered with little leaf-like patches of sunlight, reflected from the bright sea outside. Time and again throughout the morning (as through all that dreadful night) the stillness was shattered by a raw deafening two-noted screech that could be nothing less than the rusty gates of Hell grinding open on Judgment Day. The grating blast came from somewhere outdoors. It was earsplitting. It sounded as if some violent giant were pumping at an old-fashioned monster pump. Every time it happened he almost sprang from the bed, but his legs went on working feverishly at their own contractions and
refused to obey. Suddenly one of them drew up by itself and he felt a stabbing pain in the side of the calf. He flung off the light quilt and leaned forward, grabbing at the bare leg with his hands. A welt, a lump had arisen. Even as he looked, the lump tightened and twisted, the muscles wound themselves into a turning knot under his very eyes, half as big as his fist. In panic he pinched at it with his fingers and thumb, pounded it, thumped on it, and shot his leg into the air. The knot of flesh untwisted, the hot pain died away, and he fell back, exhausted.

Remembering this, dreading now a recurrence of that painful and frightening constriction, he got out of bed. Walking is what he needed; standing. But he was too weak to stand. Sitting, then. He made his way into the living room and collapsed into the big chair by the window. As he did so, he thought of that nightmare noise at Antibes, and recalled how foolish he had felt when he learned it was a donkey braying in the next garden, the first he had ever heard.

It was full daylight now. It looked like midmorning, but the small traveling clock on the bookshelf at his elbow said only 8:10. What was he going to do about liquor, what was he going to do now? He had to have it, if never before in his life. His senses would certainly leave him if he did not have a drink now. He had to have something to carry him through the weakness of that day and the terror. Three drinks would do it, only three. Two, he’d even take two, yes two, truly no more, he’d swear to stop at two, if only it were given to him to get it. Just this once, and one only.…

There was, of course, not a drink in the house. He almost doubted he’d be able to walk as far as the kitchen, even if there were a bottle there. Oh, but not seriously. He’d get it! He’d get there! His mind went back to the money again. Whatever had become of it? Had some demon in him caused him to lose it, some demon of the perverse who saw to it that he threw it away? Had he really spent it all? But even if it should turn up, now, he had
not the strength to make use of it. He could never have made the stairs, much less get cleaned up first to go out. He had reached the day he had dreaded from the beginning, the day of despair and utter debilitation when he was physically unable, finally, to get himself out of the jam. There was only this one thing to face, this one thing, and the problem would be solved:
Today was the day you could simply not drink
.

But how could you become reconciled to watching yourself lose your mind, how could you stand by and let it happen, how could you face that? How could you sit there and wait for the breakdown when you knew that a drink, one drink, would avert it? Would you not instead find someway to destroy yourself first, yes even in this helpless condition, rather than suffer what could not be borne?

Like a released spring he was suddenly up in the chair, crouched against the back, as a line of fire ran across the rug toward his feet. He stared in fright, and it was gone. Was this an hallucination too? No, not in this daylight. Delirium is a disease of the night. It was an illusion, a prank of the eye, the result of his over-strung nerves. You often saw flashes out of the corner of your eye, dancing lights that vanished when you turned in their direction. Such a thing was this, nothing more, he was sure of it. He glanced toward the fireplace, and again the streak of fire raced across the rug. It was as if a path of gasoline had been poured along the carpet and then touched with a match. It was so bright, so like flame, that it seemed to be the only color in the room, like the orange-red fire in the Aetna advertisements. Tentatively he lowered his feet and sat watching, then; watching the whole length and expanse of the rug. So long as he kept his eye on it—

Physically he knew he was in dangerous shape. His pounding heart seemed continually about to stop. It thumped and missed, but did not go all the way to oblivion. It pounded with such frantic insistence that he was unable to get in any position, sitting, lying, leaning, where he could not hear it. He felt it strike against
the wall of his chest in irregular alarming tattoo, but what was more intolerable still is that he heard it, heard it as plainly as if his own ear were pressed against his breast: a disorderly thumping, sometimes loud, sometimes soft, sometimes even missing whole beats—and quiet for so long that he would sit up in sudden panic and listen wildly for it to go on.

“He died a thousand deaths”—aaah! Worse by far than a thousand, it was
one
death drawn out in endless torture, a death that didn’t die. You kept on dying, and dying; you died all day and all night; and still there was dying yet to do, and more dying ahead—it simply did not end and would never end. It was more than the human heart could bear, or the brain: it was conscious insanity—any moment now his brain would burst with terror and he would go mad. But it didn’t burst, he didn’t go blessedly mad, he crouched there raw and alive, his eyes staring to see if the familiar room would go blank in breakdown, his ears straining to hear the first crack or rattle of total collapse. The telephone rang.

The noise stabbed his bladder and bathed his thighs with hot urine, but he was unable to move or care. The telephone rang from the bedroom, and rang out, and rang out. It sounded red; orange-yellow; like the nerve-shattering bell that rings in the subway when a train is about to pull out; like the screaming alarm of the prison-break. It was not bad. It could be borne. He knew what it was and that it would be no worse. Present fears were less than horrible imaginings. This was something he could take, perhaps even pin his mind on.

He did not think who it might be. He merely listened. The still rooms rang with the metallic summons but he had no intention of answering. Certainly he had not the strength. Finally it ceased. At once the silence became as clamorous as the lately-jangling ’phone. He undid his belt and his fly, unbuttoned his shorts, and slid both pants down his legs to his feet. For the time being, this was as much of an effort as he could make. He sat back in a trance of exhaustion.

The ’phone rang again. It was like a sting. It stung him to alertness as before. He listened, raw with suspense, to the long ringing beat and the long pause, the long beat and the long pause, over and over in the nerve-wracking monotony of the automatic dialing system. To regain control, he tried to concentrate on listening to the silent spaces between. Were they longer than the rings? He tried to measure them by counting. During each pause (and each time he was more hopeful), there was a moment of breathless anxiety when he began to hope the pause might extend itself another second, and another, and still another, or one more, till the stillness erased the ringing altogether and took over the house once more. The ring came again.

Telephones didn’t ring like that at home, not in his mother’s house when he was a boy. They were short, or long, or anyway irregular, depending on the operator; and sometimes you even knew which operator was on duty by the way the ’phone rang. Madge always gave three short rings, Doris a couple of long ones.…

It was good thinking of home. He thought of it deliberately now—thought of home with passion.… He saw himself sitting in the front-pew of the chancel, on the men’s and boys’ side, wearing his clean-smelling choir-vestments: the long black cassock and the white linen stiffly-starched cotta—he felt the pinch and chafe of the Buster Brown collar as he turned to watch the minister preparing the communion. From across the red-carpeted aisle, on the women’s side, he heard his mother’s voice among all the others, the warm alto voice that reached the farthest corner of the nave as surely as the most piercing soprano. He looked at her where she sat among the other women and girls. She smiled back at him, her perfect teeth gleaming, and gave him the smallest wink. He had heard it said that Mr. Harrison often declared, yes even to his wife, that he only came to church on Sundays to look at Mrs. Birnam in the choir; and he wondered if it were true.… The church was filled with sunlight, it was a wonderful summer
Sunday morning. The sun streamed in through the yellowish-green stained-glass windows and bathed the congregation in a soft sub-marine light, as if the whole place were under water. Beyond the communion rail, his little brother Wick knelt at the altar, his hands at his side, not leaning against anything, and Don could see that the hem of his white cotta trembled ever so slightly. Wick was waiting to help Mr. Brittain with the service, and Don was waiting to tell Wick after church (and so too, probably, was their mother) that his sloppy plaid socks showed beneath the skirt of his cassock. Behind the wall in back of the men’s side he could hear the muffled thump and pound of the wooden pump that sustained the breath of the organ.… The minister was ready to serve the choir. His mother rose with the other women and went to the altar rail, where they knelt in a row on the red-carpeted step. All the heads were bowed, now, except hers. She looked straight before her, her elbows on the rail, her hands clasped under her chin. She seemed lost in thought, and so was he, as he gazed at his beautiful mother, lovely with the clear profile, the straight nose, the soft cheeks—the soft, pink, rose-like cheeks.…

The telephone was ringing again. He had no way of knowing how long his little excursion into the past, his deliberate revery, had lasted. It had not been refreshing or helpful; or if it had, the ringing of the ’phone wiped it at once all away, woke his aching nerves, his rioting heart, his fears of what was going to happen to him now. The telephone rang on. Was there possibly one small infinitesimal sip in the bottom of the sticky bottle standing there on the table? If there were, he was unable to reach it; and he knew only too well that the sip or drop, had there been one, would in his present need prove a greater aggravation than none at all.

Now it came to him suddenly that he had not eaten. He had eaten not a single bite of food since before Wick left—how many days ago? He was never able to eat when he was drinking; it was the last thing he ever thought of and the last thing he wanted; and the thought of food now—even knowing that food, if he had it,
might help him out of his weakness and so enable him to go out and get drink somewhere—made him retch. Was it possible to go without food so long and still be upright? He knew it was, it had happened many times. He thought of the sandwich he had started to buy a day or so ago (when was it?) and wondered what had prevented him. No food in all that time. But he couldn’t think of it or wonder about it, because now a new thought possessed him: Interminable and agonizing though the long day would be, it was bound to end, sometime, somehow, and darkness would finally fall. What did that not mean? Delirium was a disease of the night, yes; but also—oh, worse!—delirium never came while you were drinking. Only after you had stopped. That was the terrible thought. He had stopped. And there was no way of starting again. Unable to go out and get liquor, trapped here the whole day without it, what would tonight be like? It was a prospect so terrifying that at once he tried to busy himself, occupy his mind, with something to do.