What Comes Next Page 10

  Two men, unknown to each other, confessed to Cripple Killings—this morning’s News. One of them, shown smiling in News photo, quoted as saying, “In all walks of life someone is always trying to take credit for what other people do. As God is my witness, I am the fiend the newspapers have been writing about.” There’s hardly anyone around worth killing.

  Had to wait thirty minutes for a train, a cop eyeing me as if he knew who I was. He came up, asked if I was for sale. I said no. He walked away, twirling his stick.

  Went home to get some more clothes, shirts mostly. Twenty dollars and forty-three cents from my mother’s pocketbook. A letter there from Rosemary, opened by them.

  DEAR CHRISTOPHER,

  I have a VW (gift from my father), which you are free to borrow if you have use for it. I mean it.

  I want to help. Forgive me.

  Where are you?

  YOURS,

  R.

  I looked into their room to see what they were doing. Nothing. Both asleep. The cover over her head, her hair twisted. He was on his back, rigid, like a stone god. His face gray.

  His eyes opened, stared madly at me. I ran.

  Someone new following me. His head shines like a cue ball.

  A woman walking a small dog. I asked her the time, my watch stopped. She asked if I wanted anything else or only the time. What did she have in mind? She said nothing, only a dog to walk, nothing in mind. Did I want to come home with her? I said I had a home. Started to follow her. At the corner a police car cut me off at the curb. The back door flying open. Three of them, uniformed cops, in back. They had it so I couldn’t move.

  “What did you say to her?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Do you speak English? Anglissez? You P.R., Spic?”

  “I asked her the time.”

  The three of them laughed like axes being sharpened.

  The one nearest me’s breath was like fish. To keep my balance, I had to lean back. My heels against the curb. I wasn’t sweating.

  “So you asked her the time. Uh huh.” He looked at his watch. “It’s five-twenty-five. How’s that? It’s kinda early to go around asking ladies the time.”

  “Do you molest women?” the fat one in the middle asked. “Expose yourself to them?”

  “What are you smiling for?” Fishbreath asked.

  I said it was a mouth formation. Whenever I was hungry, it looked like I was smiling.

  “Where were you at this time yesterday?”

  I made up an address—the first thing to come to mind.

  “Is that where you live? You know we intend to check out your whole story. We have two hundred and twelve unsolved crimes waiting for you.”

  I nodded. The pressure of the asphalt pushing up. My soles burning. The middle one, leaning forward: “Where are you comin’ from, if it isn’t too much to ask? Where did you get all that boodle?”

  I explain about my father’s house. “I used to live there, you can check. Ludwig Steiner. Professor Ludwig Steiner.” His name.

  “How would you like to come to headquarters? We’re sure to find something that suits you. Petty robbery, arson, drug abuse. Any number of things.”

  “I don’t like the looks of him. Let’s go.”

  “Back up,” he yells at me. “Jump.”

  The door slams shut as they pull away.

  NINE

  Who Was That Masked Man

  HER CLASS had ended early and she decided, provoked perhaps by Curt’s warning against it, to walk all the way home. The June night warm, half light—the moon like a slightly damaged eye. A woman in her class named Margo kept her company, as was her habit, to Park and Eighty-second, chattering about her problems (she suspected her husband of cheating on her and considered getting even) as if Rosemary could give her advice. It was a relief when Margo left. There were times, this one of them, when she preferred being alone. At Eighty-fifth, exhausted, tired of thinking about herself, she would have taken a bus, thought she would if one was coming, but there was none.

  At the entrance to the park, she was composing a poem in her head—What tears we hide behind our winter eyes/His Son, to get away from loving us, He died—the first two lines. A voice, not hers, behind her, interrupting, telling her to move to the right, something hard pressing against the base of her spine.

  “I have a knife,” the voice said.

  She did as she was told.

  He directed her to between two trees, sounds of life in the distance, of movement, a police siren somewhere. She thought to scream, dreamed of opening her mouth and no sound coming out. A bird cry climbing in her chest, dying.

  “Lie down,” he whispered, and though she was going to, he grabbed her around the neck and threw her to the ground. Her first impression was that he had no face. He fell on her, his hand over her breath. His weight soft. He warned her—his face a white rubber thing like a second skin—not to make a sound. She closed her eyes, said (heard herself saying), “Don’t.” His hand between her legs. “Don’t.” Her voice a tremor. She suffered bravely, touched by terror, anointed. Her body dying under his weight—her spirit an icy wind, a ghost. She felt in the presence of mystery, disembodied.

  Though she was no longer there, she felt his pulse inside her. Her body fleshless. Like water. It was as if he were a log floating in her dark river. Her name for no reason between them. “Rosemary.” Yes. Something danced in her, something. “Rosemary.” Again. In answer, she tore at the rubber skin. Again. Again. Again. Tearing at his face, stabbing him with her blunt fingers, until he was off. Her voice in her ears like a scream. Groaning, he stood over her, holding his pants up. She was sitting, feeling on the ground for a rock. His head like a balloon. He didn’t attack again, stumbled back, turned, ran. As if she were, rock in hand, coming after him. What was he afraid of? She watched him flee, her body shivering, aware, not wanting to know, that she knew who it was. Spitting dirt and grass from her mouth, pieces of herself, choking. How untouched she felt.

  She walked away, straightening her skirt, as if nothing had happened. Had anything? Her horror was not that he had done what he had done, but that she had felt something, had, against herself, wanted him.

  Curt was dozing when, as in a dream—his students cheering a speech against the war he had made—he heard the phone ring. Carolyn coming into the bedroom to answer it.

  “It’s for you,” she said.

  He said hello into the phone.

  Silence.

  “Hello.”

  The voice was barely audible. “I don’t want to see you again,” it said.

  What? A sense of danger like a car coming at him. “Why not?”

  “I just don’t want to see you again. That’s all.”

  He thought if he could keep the voice from leaving, he was safe. “Rosemary, what’s the matter? Has something happened?”

  “I just don’t want to….” And then, Curt waiting for the end of her sentence, she was gone.

  “Who was it?” she asked, staring at him in the dark.

  “Rosemary,” he said, not yet awake, the phone call still part of his dream.

  “Is she your girl?”

  He nodded, lost. Without the energy to lie.

  She laughed in her throat. “It wasn’t very nice of her to call you at home, was it? What did she want?”

  “Nothing,” he moaned.

  “How is that supposed to make me feel?”

  He couldn’t answer. She left the room.

  Carolyn was on the couch in the living room, a coat over her feet, as he went by on his way out. “I need some air,” he said, not looking at her. She was silent, and he waited, his head bent, to be assaulted by her wit. There was nothing for him.

  The phone booth on the corner out of order, he had to walk three blocks to find another.

  On the fourth ring Imogen answered, said she didn’t think Rosemary was home, though she wasn’t sure, had been sleeping. He hung on while she checked. “No, she’s not here, Professor. Wait, I th
ink I hear someone in the hall. Hold on.”

  He held.

  “No, next door.”

  Not able to explain why, he said he was worried, but the aunt insisted there was nothing to worry about. She would be back any minute.

  Frantic, he walked up and down the block, counting seconds, a sense of menace touching him like a hand from behind. Though all alone, he felt his student’s eyes on him. Only five minutes had passed, but he called again. This time he waited six rings (had he waked the damn aunt again?) but then Rosemary answered.

  “Why did you call like that?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. I meant what I said, Curt.”

  He asked her to explain; why, what had he done?

  “I want you to promise not to try to see me.”

  He groaned. “Rosemary, I love you.”

  “No.” She was crying. “Curt, please accept my decision. I can’t go on this way, not anymore. Will you please, please do as I ask?”

  “How can I?”

  She sobbed, unable to talk, sobbed, sobbed, her grief exploding into the phone. Her sobs riding over him like waves.

  He cried, listening to her. “Rosemary.”

  “Your time is up,” a voice interrupted. “Five cents for the next five minutes.”

  “Will you promise?” she begged.

  He promised, hating himself. And that was it.

  What kind of monster am I? he asked a world of silent victims—his wife upstairs, crying. He was whistling softly to himself as he went up the steps of his house.

  TEN

  July 23

  I’LL BE TAKEN by the Army in ten days. I have two weeks at most. Practice marching, salute myself in the mirror. (Nothing else to do here but sleep.) It makes me tired. I take off like an astronaut in my sleep. Listen to my heartbeat, write myself fan letters.

  Call Parks. No one answers.

  An old war movie on television. I like it when the hero holds off the whole enemy army himself, machine-gunning them as they come over the hill. His sidekick feeding him the ammunition and telling jokes. “The Marines’ Hymn” on the sound track.

  I feel trapped in this place, cut off from what I have to do. Five strange rooms to myself. An oversize double bed. Too much comfort. Other reflections (not mine) in the mirror. In the walls. Like wearing someone else’s clothes. (My mother once made me wear the suit of a cousin who died. She said it was a shame to let a perfectly good, almost new garment go to waste.) I pace around, touch everything—padded chairs, porcelain figurines, the fiber of the rug. My fingers numb. I don’t go out. Too much violence in the street. Except sometimes to find out what’s happening. I’m growing a mustache, a whole new face.

  CITY WARNED

  ON RAT DANGER

  A city health official has warned of a “potentially explosive condition” if the city’s estimated 8-million rats are exposed to bubonic plague and typhus from returning servicemen.

  WOMAN EATS OWN CHILD

  U.S. WILL REDUCE

  MISSILE ARSENAL

  BY DROPPING TITAN

  TWO SISTERS FOUND

  STRANGLED IN PARK

  The butchered bodies of two missing little sisters who “never stayed out after dark” were found today partly nude and apparently strangled and sexually molested in Central Park on the periphery of the Sheep Meadow.

  GI’S FLUSH ENEMY FORCE

  IN FIRST BATTLE OF BIG DRIVE

  NEGRO Gl SMOTHERS MINE WITH OWN BODY;

  WILL RECEIVE COUNTRY’S HIGHEST AWARD

  HONOR STUDENT

  SLAIN IN B’KLYN

  SLAIN STUDENT “A PERFECT GUY”

  “I wouldn’t have minded if it were in the war,” his mother said in a radio interview, “but to have

  it in the street this way seems such a waste.”

  BRIDE KILLED ON WEDDING BED

  BOY KILLS FATHER

  AND FATHER’S FIANCEE

  GRANDMOTHER IS ALSO SHOT

  CHEMIST KILLS DAUGHTER, SELF

  A Columbia Heights chemist apparently killed himself last night after strangling his daughter to death and pouring nitric acid on her boyfriend during an argument over the youngsters’ romance.

  NEW BLOWS SEEK

  TO SHORTEN WAR

  BORDER VILLAGE LEVELED

  IN PRECISION RAID

  AIR EMERGENCY CALLED

  POLLUTION BURIES CITY

  People with weak hearts or lung trouble were cautioned by the Mayor not to leave their homes except for an emergency during the current crisis. Deaths attributed to the poisonous air are at nine.

  A-TEST IN BIG CAVE

  MAY HIDE EFFECTS

  BROOKLYN POLICE

  PRESS KILLER HUNT

  GO ON 12-HOUR SHIFTS AFTER

  FIFTH WOMAN IS SLAIN

  The police went on 12-hour shifts in an intensive manhunt for a sadistic killer blamed for five rape-stabbings of cripples in the Brooklyn area during the last three months.

  The latest victim, Miss Rose Pimpsel, 79 years old, was found last night in her home near the downtown area, extremities grotesquely mutilated.

  I saw Curtis Parks or some guy who looked like him going into a church basement. Called his name. He didn’t turn around. Ran after him. Someone running behind me, the sound of his steps in my head. Followed him into a dark room.

  “No smoking,” some guy at the door whispered. “Not even straight cigarettes. Whose friend are you?”

  “Professor Parks’.”

  “Whose?”

  I got a seat in the last row. The projector just behind me, to my right. The inside of a garbage can on the screen, a maggot crawling across a piece of meat. Eating its way into the meat. The cover of the can blacks out the scene, THE END.

  The lights went on. Clapping. A girl with long hair sitting next to me, yawning. I stood up to look for Parks, didn’t see him. In the first row, one of the men who had been following me. The lights out.

  “Quiet,” she said. “It’s beginning.”

  The heat of the projector on my neck, it begins.

  AIR, BREASTS, WATER

  A shot of a breast. The nipple of a breast. A mouth. The breast again, a hand covering it. (A nipple peeking between two fingers.) A boy of about ten diving into the waves (at Coney Island). A shot of a crowded beach. A couple sunbathing, the boy’s head on the girl’s stomach. The figures together make a cross. A shot of a cross on a church. A shot of a cross on a chain around a girl’s neck, the cross between her breasts. A shot of the girl’s mouth, open, closed, open. She sticks out her tongue. A shot of a cow’s tongue in a butcher’s window. A shot of the boy diving into the waves, a breaker washes over him. A shot of a middle-aged woman, her head in her hands, sobbing. A shot of a sign: NO PARKING ANYTIME. Another sign: NO SMOKING. A hand-written sign: NO PETTING. Another: NO FUCKING ANYTIME. A shot of an old man on a bench, asleep. He wakes up with a start, looks around. A shot of the front of Israel Zion Hospital. (Someone laughs.) A shot of a billboard: YOU’RE IN THE PEPSI GENERATION. The ocean. A shot of waves breaking, of a boy jumping up and down in the waves. The same boy doing a dead man’s float. The couple on the blanket, arms and legs entwined, kissing. A sign: NO BALL PLAYING ALLOWED. Waves breaking against the rocks. A shot of a stormy sky. Droplets of rain falling on the surface of the water. Rain. People on the beach running for shelter. A shot of what looks like a tidal wave. A hand sticking out of the water. A hunter with a gun shooting at something in the sky. A clip from a war movie: the explosion of a bomb in the ocean. A lion (like the MGM lion) roaring silently. A shot of an elegant double bed with a canopy over it. A shot of a couch—the couple we had seen on the beach lying back to back on it. A shot of a well-curved leg, a stocking being taken off. Very slowly. The action reverses itself—the stocking is on again. Then again very slowly, even, it seems, more slowly than before, a pair of hands take the stocking off. Before it is completely off, the stocking is on again. A shot of a penis. Then an eye. A close-up of a kiss. The man, sleeping on t
he bench, lurches in his sleep, seems about to fall off. A soundless scream. A mouth. A clip of a gunfight from another movie. One man is hit, falls, shoots as he goes down. The other falls. A shot of something that turns out to be the nipple of a breast. A close-up of a breast. A light seems to be coming from it. Flame. In the flame it says: NOT THE END.

  There is applause, six or seven people clapping. A few hisses. We sit in the dark. A voice in front of me saying something about breasts. The lights go on. The one who was Parks is gone.

  Mrs. Parks calling me. “When are you coming back?” she wanted to know. I said I had to prove myself first, but that I would return. Not to worry. As soon as the fucking war is over. “It’s indelicate,” she said, “to talk of war in mixed company. Have you no shame?”