The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (50 page)

Mr. Pivner came out upon the street, to see a crowd gathering at the far corner. He turned his coat collar up again and pulled his hat down. When he reached the crowd, he looked where they were looking, up: at a man poised on a ledge eight stories above. Lights shone on him. Figures leaned from nearby windows. The crowd shifted impatiently. —Don’t he know it’s raining? I wish he’d get it done, if he’s going to do it, a man said to Mr. Pivner. Mr. Pivner
only stared. As he did, the rhythm of the crowd’s voice took shape. They chanted, —Jump . . . jump . . . jump . . . and the figure above drew back. —J
UMP
 . . . J
UMP
 . . . J
UMP
 . . . they chanted. A priest appeared at the window nearest him.—JUMP. . . JUMP . . . JUMP. . . The figure drew back, further, toward the priest. A young man leaning from the door of a car with a
Press
card in the windshield said to his companion, —The son of a bitch isn’t going to jump . . .

Two blocks further on, Mr. Pivner stopped to buy a newspaper. There a man was arguing with the news-vendor, hatless, weaving slightly. He had started to leave, but turned saying, —Now don’t start to get obnoxious . . .

—Hello, Jerry, Mr. Pivner said, taking a paper. Jerry said, —Wet enough for you? Mr. Pivner said, —What’s the matter with that fellow?

—Him? Aw, drunks get lonely sometimes. You know, he don’t care what he says, he oney wants to talk to somebody.

—You’re quite a philosopher Jerry, said Mr. Pivner, and went on, stopping in anxious habit at curbs, turning corners, glancing at passing shoe-tops, stockinged legs and trouser legs. Then with the city’s suddenness someone was walking beside him. Their steps matched in a precise off-beat, ordained syncopation of doom on the wet pavement. Mr. Pivner walked faster, from fear was it? or revulsion? and still the man came on, beside and just behind him. Could he stop to light a cigarette? or for an untied shoelace? But the rain beat down around him and he walked on, again quickening his footsteps as they were echoed close upon him. When he turned down his street he looked back. The other continued straight, hat pulled down against the rain.

That street was quiet. There were no leaves dead and blowing in the gutters, because there were no trees within hope of the most boisterous wind. But there were forlorn bits of paper, candy wrappers, newspaper, paper bags, as satisfactorily dead and un-mercied as winter’s brown leaves in any village side street.

Like the others, Mr. Pivner spent little time at ground level. He was usually moving rapidly beneath it, or taking his spurious ease some ells above. Up he rose in the elevator, out into the passage, and he opened his door with one of a number of keys he carried, a satisfaction no one can know who does not keep a secret and private self locked away from eight million others. He stood for a moment in his open doorway, as he always did, lighting the rooms with the button at his hand and looking through the rooms in that instant of anxiety which waited always to be expanded into full terror at finding the place burgled, finding under the hand
of the careless burglar the intimate slaughter of his secret self. But everything was in order, silently waiting to affirm him, holding there the sense of the half-known waiting for eventual discovery in a final recognition of himself. He took off his hat and shook it (having hurried home as though his own coronation were waiting), and moved now with the slow deliberation of lonely people who have time for every meager requirement of their lives. He took off his coat, shook it, and looked at the spots he had made on the wallpaper.

The small apartment was as inoffensive as himself. Like the defiantly patternless botch of colors he wore upon his necktie, signal of his individuality to the neckties that he met screaming the same claim of independence from the innominate morass of their wearers, the apartment’s claims to distinction were mass-produced flower-and hunting-prints, filling a need they had manufactured themselves, heavy furniture with neither the seductive ugliness of functional pieces nor the isolate dumb beauty of something chosen for itself: in matching, they fulfilled their first requirement, as did the hopeless style of his brown pleated trousers which matched his brown coat, double-breasted over a chest resigned to be forever hidden like a thing of shame, whitening to yellowness with the years so that to show it now would be indeed offensive. It was a part of the body which he had never learned to use, never having been so poor that he was forced to feel the strain and growth of its muscles in the expansion of labor; nor rich enough to feel it liberated in those games (requiring courts, eighteen-hole courses, bridle-paths) which rich people played. Totally unconscious of itself except when something went wrong, that body served only to keep his identity intact, and was kept covered, like this room, to offend no one.

He turned the radio on, and adjusted his hearing, so that he heard only a comforting confusion of sound. An electric reading lamp, capable at a turn of a finger of three degrees of intensity, stood (just out of reach) beside a large chair. Behind was a veneered secretary of anonymous century and unavowed design, holding protected behind glass an assortment of books published by the hundred-thousand, treatises on the cultivation of the individual
self
, prescriptions of superficial alterations in vulgarity read with excruciating eagerness by men alone in big chairs, the three-way lamp turned to its wildest brilliance as they fingered those desperate blazons of individuality tied in mean knots at their throats, fastened monogrammed tie-clasps the more firmly, swung keys on gold-plated monogram-bearing (“Individualized”) key-chains, tightened their arms against wallets in inside pockets which held the papers proving
their identity beyond doubt to others and in moments of Doubt to themselves, papers in such variety that the bearer himself became their appurtenance, each one contemplating over words in a book (which had sold four million copies: How to Speak Effectively; Conquer Fear; Increase Your Income; Develop Self-Confidence; “Sell” Yourself and Your Ideas; Improve Your Memory; Increase Your Ability to Handle People; Win More Friends; Improve Your Personality; Prepare for Leadership) the Self which had ceased to exist the day they stopped seeking it alone.

——I knew it couldn’t work out. I knew he was too good. I should have known . . . said a girl’s voice on the radio, ——O God, what have I
du-un
 . . .

On the end-table stood a ship model, a square-rigged man-o’-war set with so much sail (it was all metal) that it would have tumbled stern-over-prow in the idlest wind, furnished with so many guns that one of its own broadsides would have sent it heeling over to the bottom. The telephone was here too, and it was here that Mr. Pivner suddenly appeared from the bathroom, to pick up the receiver. —Hello? Hello? There was nothing. He dialed. —What number were you calling, ple-as? —I thought I heard the telephone ring, operator. Did you ring my telephone? —Excuse it, ple-as. —Hello? Hello?

——then and only then do you decide. The decision, my friends, rests with
you
. First come, first served. Don’t wait, don’t delay, don’t hesitate. And remember, you are under absolutely no obligation . . . said the radio.

Mr. Pivner returned from the bathroom with a bottle and a hypodermic needle, which he put down beside a photograph album. No one had opened the album for months. Shut in it were mean-sized prints, snapshots taken on vacations, of himself and other refugees. Some enclosed views of water, shreds of mountains, corners of sky, taken to remind him at moments like this of an outdoors whose wonders he was permitted to see some fifteen days in four hundred. But he had forgotten, not that sunsets did occur, but what a sunset was; or the flight of a bird; the movement of water against a shore; the freshness of air consciously breathed; distances seen over land; the sound of wind in a green tree; or the silent, incredible progress of a snail.

And his camera photographs, having cast these phenomena into static patternless configurations of gray, recalled nothing. They served, waiting locked up in undimensional darkness here, as witnesses: that he had had more hair twelve years ago; that he had started to wear (rimless) glasses nine years before; that his brown suit was seven, not five, years old.

—Ladies, now is the time to save and save. Women are flocking to . . .

He sat down, and before filling the needle took a letter from his pocket which he put on the chair arm and did not read. He had read this brief letter enough times, at his desk and in the office lavatory, over coffee and over meals. He would read it again after supper, study his own name in counterfeit signature at the bottom. Otto wrote to say that he would call to arrange a meeting place; but gave no number where he might be reached. Therefore there was nothing to do but wait. Some months before there had been a call, a drunken boy’s voice shouting for Otto, asking him who the hell
he
was anyhow. Mr. Pivner took up the bottle and read the directions. Diabetes is a serious disease. No one can afford to take chances; there is no reason to take them, when the marvels of medical science are worked out to the most minute point, making the notion of hazard contemptible, if only one follows the directions on the bottle. True, he had had four attacks in these past seven years, suddenly rendered helpless in public, going down with the reeling fall of a drunkard: but those had been moments of excitement. One had only to be careful, keep hold of one’s self. That poor woman in the subway tonight, for instance . . . (he had for the moment forgot the man on the ledge). One had only one’s self to blame for catastrophe, with Science concentrating its huge forces on bettering the human lot. (Had he not read, only the week before in a newspaper, of a new medicine which would prolong human life? Men might live to be two hundred years old, unclothed perhaps and unfed since there would be so many, but Science took care of details when they arose (had he not read only this week that very palatable foods were being made from seaweed, coal, and cotton? and clothing: the same article said that very durable cloth could be made from soy beans, meat extracts, and vegetable products). Two hundred years old! and, as he understood it, alive.)

After the injection, he picked up his newspaper. The Sunday edition, still in the rack beside him, required fifty acres of timber for its magic transformation of nature into progress, benefits of modern strides in transportation, communication, and freedom of the press: public information. (True, as he got into the paper, the average page was made up of a half-column of news, and four-and-one-half columns of advertising.) A train wreck in India, 27 killed, he read; a bus gone down a ravine in Chile, 1 American and 11 natives; avalanche in Switzerland, death toll mounts . . . This evening edition required only a few acres of natural grandeur to accomplish its mission (for it carried less advertising). Mr. Pivner
read carefully. Kills father with meat-ax. Sentenced for slaying of three. Christ died of asphyxiation, doctor believes. Woman dead two days, invalid daughter unable to summon help. Nothing escaped Mr. Pivner’s eye, nor penetrated to his mind; nothing evaded his attention, as nothing reached his heart. The headless corpse. Love kills penguin. Pig got rheumatism. Nagged Bible reader slays wife. Man makes own death chair, 25,000 volts. “Ashamed of world,” kills self. Fearful of missing anything, he read on, filled with this anticipation which was half terror, of coming upon something which would touch him, not simply touch him but lift him and carry him away.

Every instant of this sense of waiting which he had known all of his life, this waiting for something to
happen
(uncertain quite what, and the Second Advent intruded) he brought to his newspaper reading, spellbound and ravenous. Man fights lion in zoo, barefisted. Cow kills woman. Rooster kills woman. Dogs eat Eskimo. As he turned the pages, folding them smartly back over the bulk of the newspaper, he relaxed a little at his comparative safety away from the news, drew comfort from the train wreck (he was not in it), the bus accident in Chile (nor in that), the meat-ax slaying (he had not done it), the headless corpse (not his), and so the newspaper served him, externalizing in the agony of others the terrors and temptations inadmissible in himself. Even though the evening paper repeated the news of the morning paper, he read attentively again, reworded, of the hunt for the unknown person who was releasing birds from an uptown zoo, of the discovery of two priceless art treasures, original paintings of Dierick Bouts, in a pawnshop in Hell’s Kitchen, of the murder trial in Mouth, Mississippi, where just that morning the husband’s heart had been exhibited in court. All of these civilized wonders were brought together, he was made to feel, expressly for him, by the newspaper. True, they kept him in such a state that he often bought late editions of the same newspaper, seeing different headlines than those tucked under his arm, only to read the story from column six suddenly elevated to a banner across columns one to four. True, often the only way he could know whether he had read a newspaper was to turn to the comic strips, where life flowed in continuum; and recognizing them, he knew that he must have read everything else closely and avidly, that nothing had evaded his eye, nor penetrated to his heart round which he had built that wall called objectivity without which he might have gone mad. As the tales of violence seemed daily to increase it hardly occurred to him that he was living in such unnatural density of population that it daily supported disasters sufficient for a continent. Added to this
came the blood of the world, piped in on wires, and wireless, teletype, undersea cables, and splashed without a drop lost in transit upon Mr. Pivner, who sat, hard, patient, unbending, wiped it from his eyes, and waited for more.

Mr. Pivner elevated himself slightly upon one narrow ham and broke wind, a soft interrogative sound which went unanswered. Then he sagged and stared at the newspaper, untroubled by the notion that this might have been a demon leaving its residence inside him. Not only would he, albeit embarrassed, scoff at this medieval reality; but he could, in all reason, believe that even had he lived then, he would have scoffed. Incubae and succubae, the shriek of the mandrake root pulled from the ground which drove a man mad if he heard it, chloroform a decoy of Satan, smallpox a visitation of God: all those, and many more, he could believe that he would not have believed, but would have stood forth, as he was submerged now, in Reason. It was true, there were things he did not understand, realms where Science advanced upon the provinces of God, where he felt rather uncomfortable, looking forward, secretly, to the day when Science would explain all, and vindicate the Doubt which he kept hidden in case it should not.