The Wild (7 page)

Cindy put a period to the conversation by announcing that the news had started. They told about a terrible series of murders in Calaveras County, California. Pictures of the concrete blockhouse where the crimes were committed were shown. Bob felt fascinated loathing at the sight of the thing. He wondered what had gone on inside.

Later he went into Kevin's room and talked to him about Kafka. Then he read the
Metamorphosis
and grew slightly sick. People assumed that the story of a man turning into an insect was metaphorical, but what if Kafka had taken it from life? What if it was a real experience?

Of course it wasn't real. How could he even think that, and so debase the literature of the piece?

Later he drank three Stolys and listened to Steve Reich's
Desert Music.
He ate some cold shrimp that were in the fridge and wished he was at Pascal Manoule's in New Orleans. Barbecued shrimp and a Dixie beer. God love it, perhaps the best meal in America.

This night passed without dreams.

When he woke up, there was thin, gray light coming in the window. He went through the ceremonies of the morning, the shave, the brushing of the hair, the dressing in the gray suit, the kissing of the schoolbound boy, the march out into the sun-drenched traffic, the subway, the jammed crowds of Thirty-fourth Street, the elevator, the office of Duke Data Consultants on the sixth floor of the Empire State Building. At the moment he could not afford a secretary, and his outer office contained nothing but a desk, an archaic Mac, and a telephone.

He took in the mail, which consisted of the usual pound or so of computer magazines, trade journals, and bills. There were no letters of inquiry, and none of his outstanding accounts had sent checks. The bills he piled up to take to Cindy.

He had not yet sat down when the phone began ringing. "This is Joe Tragliano, I want—"

Bob put down the phone in horror. Tragliano? Somebody from the landlord's office—but which landlord, home or this place?

He didn't want to call Cindy about it. The mere fact that landlords were beginning to phone would terrify her. Why didn't things ever come out right? The world is not made to come out right, the world is made to burn. And yet flowers, spring, glistening lakes, snowflakes, laughing children.

And yet—the phone ringing again. Bob jerked back and forth. God, God, it could be a client. Or—he answered.

"Tragliano. Look, we got a hot check here. We can't deposit it again, you gotta send us a new check. You understand that?"

"Yes."

"Okay, there's gonna be an eviction notice in your mailbox tomorrow. It's no big deal, don't get worried, just get the money to us, okay?"

"Okay." Oh, God. The apartment, sixteen hundred and fifty dollars a month. It hadn't seemed like much a year ago but now, God.

There was a pink envelope on the floor he hadn't seen before. Pushed under the outer door while he was on the phone. He opened it. A pink copy of his April office rent bill, a yellow copy of the May bill, a blue copy of the June bill, a white copy of the current bill.

They had been waiting for him to come in. Eyes had watched his entrance, feet had moved. Was somebody now hanging back in the hall, waiting to buttonhole him when he came out?

Please somebody—if there is a God—help me, help me get out of this mess.

He would go down to the coffee shop in the basement and coffee himself and read the latest issue of
MacWorld.
Maybe there'd be some useful tidbit in the computer-industry gossip columns, something he could make a few cold calls about. "Hi, Willard, I just heard a rumor that Compaq's coming out with an AT clone that's—"

What? Who cares. His "clients" didn't need him, they subscribed to computer magazines, too. Soon he heard the coffee bell in the hall. Never mind the shop in the basement. He shouldn't risk leaving his office, anyway. What if they changed the locks on him? But they were nice people here. He was nearly half a year behind and they hadn't even given him an eviction notice. Just these bills, and the feeling that he was being watched.

He went out and bought a cup of hot tea. When he returned to his desk, he noticed that there were tears streaming down his face. He worried that he was in imminent danger of becoming the first person to commit suicide by jumping out of a lower floor of the Empire State Building. He called Monica. She took the call personally, bless her soul.

"Bob?"

He had planned a big speech, but the sound of her voice washed it all out of his mind. "I need a little help." He hated the shaking tone, the whine behind it. "Monica, give me an appointment as soon as you can."

"Where are you, Bob?"

His throat was constricting. The dreadful memories, the sheer terror of what he had experienced in Atlanta now flooded in on him. "My office." His voice was a whisper. He jammed his teeth together to capture the sob that was about to follow the words.

"If you can get here by ten-thirty, I'll give you half an hour. We can meet again after five."

The even tone was like a handclasp right through the phone. As soon as he hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was American Express. "Mr. Duke, we must have a fifteen-hundred-dollar payment at one of our offices by the close of business today, or we'll be forced—"

He put the phone down, a fussy, frightened gesture. Fear made him feel so careful that he thought he must look prissy. Did pilots in crashing planes become fascinated by bug splotches on the windshield as the ground rushed up?

He tried to swallow his tea and leave, but the tea seared his throat and he gagged, spitting it all over the pile of bills and computer magazines. Oh, so what? His lips, his tongue burning, he stalked out into the silent hallway.

He no longer cared if the Empire State Building was watching him. Better to be outside than in here with all these miserable creditors and the spilled tea. Who knew, maybe something good would happen. He might find a dime on the sidewalk, for example, or be run over by a bus.

As he moved through the streets of the city he experienced a radical change of mood. His spirits lifted. Hard, white sunlight was flooding the world. He went up Fifth Avenue past the corpse of Altman's and still-moving Lord and Taylor's. The people who passed him were shining with what he told himself was the light of the soul. For a moment, reveling in the secret understanding that there was something beautiful here, he loved the faded plastic sushi in the window of a Japanese restaurant, the roaring buses, the sweating Con Ed workers at the corner of Fortieth and Fifth, the new Republic National Bank building, the library with its bright lions and its grand facade.

He was in essence a family man, he decided, and trudged on to the Olympic Tower, where Monica's office overlooked all of mid and lower Manhattan. The waiting room was full of teak and zebrawood furniture, rich dark paneling, and floor-to-ceiling windows. An elderly, beautifully dressed woman sat behind the reception desk and a man of perhaps thirty in one of the chairs. Far below, St. Patrick's Cathedral spread like a stone beast.

"You can go right in, Mr. Duke," the woman at the desk said. Monica was so successful, so rich;

Look at all this. Somehow it enabled him to regain his composure. "Look at all this," he said as he went in. "It's a long way from a psychiatric residency at Bellevue." Bob remembered her as she had been then, a laughing girl so blond she might have been an angel.

He sat down gratefully in the heavy chair she indicated with a gesture. She came beside him and sat in a higher, stiffer chair.

"Go ahead," she said, touching his hand.

"I was in Atlanta at a conference. Business. I went to sleep—no, it begins before. It started on Saturday. We were at the zoo. The wolf stared at me. Later I had a strange dream, that the wolf had eaten me, and I sort of filled its body. I animated it, like. That must have been Saturday night. Sunday I went to the conference, and I had another dream. Far worse."

"During the conference?"

"Well, at night. I was in my room. It was like I didn't even fall asleep, when suddenly I was not a human being anymore. I was this animal again."

"The wolf from the zoo?"

"An animal. Whatever animal. Probably a wolf, maybe a dog. I dreamed I went out of the room and got chased by a guard and ended up, for God's sake, in the hotel restaurant. I crashed through a door and made it back to my room. I became myself again in the elevator and I had to stand there with my face to the wall because I was totally naked. I have never felt so naked." He dropped to silence. That had not been as hard as he had thought it would be. The next part, though, he wondered if he could utter.

"Yes?" She touched his hand again. She had done that ever since he had known her. Surely she understood how provocative it was. He wished for perhaps the hundred-thousandth time that he had made her that night in the Catskills.

"Monica, I think some part of this dream was real. The next morning I got up and everybody at the conference was talking about how this giant dog had gotten into the restaurant and broken down the glass doors, and escaped into an elevator."

She did not do what he had thought she would, which was to cry out in amazed disbelief. "So you integrated this into your previous night's dreaming."

"Integrated—Monica, you don't understand. It
was
my dream. My dream was true. I became something else, something wild. I remember how it was to be that creature. Exactly how it was."

"Yes?"

Could he talk about it? It was almost as if the part of him which contained those memories had not the best grasp of the English language. Or was that true? Maybe he could do as she asked, maybe he had language enough. He had planned to talk about what he did, and how it was all real, not a dream, but some baroque effect of a deteriorating mind—the emergence of the wild. But how it
felt—
well, how had it felt?

"I was lying on my bed in the room. I was naked."

"Lying how, on your back?"

"On my back. I was aroused."

"Meaning?"

"I had desire. Intense desire and there was nobody there. I don't fool around on Cindy, but right then I wanted to. I was in a state of intense excitement, and I was alone."

"Did you do anything at all about it?"

"I rarely do that—you're referring to—"

"Bob, try to relax. If you can't talk comfortably with me, I can certainly recommend somebody else."

"No, Monica, I love you—" How in the world had he come to say that? This wasn't going to come out right. "You to help me."

"Bob, I'm a mother figure for you, as much as you may think you desire me sexually."

"I never had much of a relationship with my mother. When I got in her lap, she used to say I was too bony and put me out. Or she'd say she didn't like to be touched when it was hot, her skin was clammy. It was always hot, and her skin was always clammy. When I say that, I feel a hideous, upsetting sexual stirring. I remember when I used to get punished, my sister would watch. It was horrible."

"How were you punished?"

"The old-fashioned way. I was spanked. Viciously, at times. It happened constantly, but I only remember one or two specific occasions."

"Do you think that this is where your masochism started?"

"Masochism?"

"You tell me."

"I want to tell you about my experience. What brought me in here. I have to, it's terribly important. I think that I may be the victim of a rare psychophysical effect. My mind and my body are working together in some mysterious manner— oh, God, Monica, I've got to get this through to you: I
was
that animal. I turned into something that everybody else in the hotel, the maid who first saw me, the security guards, the people in the restaurant, they all thought it was a big dog or a wolf. And Monica, I felt like a wolf. I did not feel like a human being."

"Did you want to eat them?"

"No no no, that's totally off the point. You're not understanding me. My whole frame of reference changed. Sense of smell, hearing. For God's sake, I could hear people breathing at the far end of a long hall. I could smell all the components of their sweat, their perfume as seven or eight different odors, even the difference between the smell of their hands and the smell of their faces. And I saw it all in vague, muted colors. The point is, what I did in the dream is what people in the hotel saw this big animal do. And I dreamed I was that animal."

"Bob, I want you to listen to me for a moment. Our half hour is up and I'm going to run late with all my patients until lunchtime. I'm going to write you a prescription for something that will calm you down. You'll feel much better. I want you to take it and have a good lunch and then do something you enjoy. Go to a movie. Afterward come back here. I'm finished at five-thirty and I can spend a couple of hours with you. Does that sound like a good plan?"

He nodded and she wrote something on a prescription form. He didn't read it and didn't intend to. He was so grateful that she had instructions for him to follow that he would have followed them into a fire, had that been demanded of him. On the way out of the office he had quite a surprise.

"Mr. Duke, that's a hundred and fifty dollars," the receptionist said with a smile.

"Excuse me?"

"Your bill. We prefer payment by visit. The fee is three hundred dollars an hour. The doctor said you should pay for this visit now, and be sure and bring another check tonight."

For a moment Bob felt anger, then disappointment. Then it occurred to him that she was doing the professionally correct thing. The relationship was being established for what it was, being separated by the check from the friendship. As he wrote he felt a little sick, thinking of the astounding dwindling of the money. Another hot check. How would she take it, when she discovered that he was a deadbeat?

It hit him that he could spend the next few hours productively by writing an ad for the Consultants Market of the Tuesday Science Section of the
Times.
That made sense. He could run it for a month and maybe something would happen that would spare him the hopelessness of letters and the indignity of calls. Or he could go over to the library and look through the Standard Rate and Data Catalog of Mailing Lists. A new SRDC was out; maybe this month's edition would show some relevant mailing lists he hadn't tried. Or better, he could get some lists of people in computer-intensive industries like accounting, and send them letters. Lists of known computer users weren't worth a damn. Consultants had a bad rep with those people. Too many fast-buck operators in the business who turned out to know less than their clients.