The Throat (89 page)

Despite my
fatigue, my work went leaping ahead of me like some animal, tiger or
gazelle, that I was trying to capture. I was scarcely conscious of
writing—the experience was more like
being
written
. I saw everything,
smelled everything, touched everything. During those hours, I ceased to
exist. Like a medium, I just wrote it down. By the time I began to
awaken to my various aches, it was seven or eight in the morning. I
tottered to my bed, lay down, and rested while my mind kept pursuing
the leaping tiger. After fifteen minutes of exhausted nonsleep, I got
up and went back to the machine.

Sometimes I
noticed that I had spent an entire night writing
Fee Bandolier
instead
of
Charlie Carpenter.

All of this
should have been joyous, and most of the time it was. But even when I
was most absorbed in my work, during those periods when I had no
personal existence, some dormant part of me flailed about in an
emotional extremity. After I stopped typing, my fingers trembled—even
the fingers trapped in the cast were quivering. I had entered the
childhood of Fielding Bandolier, and dread and terror were his
familiars. But not all of the trouble came from what I was writing.

During my
two-hour naps, I dreamed of being back on the body squad and plunging
my hands into dead and dismembered bodies. I encountered the skinny
young VC on Striker Tiger and froze, blank and mindless, while he
raised his ancient rifle and sent a bullet into my brain. I stepped on
a mine and turned into red mist, like Bobby Swett. I walked across a
clearing so crowded with dead men that I had to step over their bodies,
looked down to see purple-and-silver entrails spilling out of my gut,
and fell down in acknowledgment of my own death. Paul Fontaine sat up
on his gurney with his gun in his hand and said,
Bell
, and blew my
chest apart with a bullet.

For twenty
years, the afternoons had been the hours when I did the bulk of my
work. After I forgot how to sleep at night, after I began walking into
hell every time I took a nap, those hours turned to stone. What I wrote
came out forced and spiritless. I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't write.
So I tucked my notebook into my pocket and went out on long walks.

I trudged
through Soho. I passed unseeing through Washington Square. I hovered
distracted in the Three Lives bookstore and came back to myself in
Books & Co., miles away. Now and then, some grudging little
incident found its way into the notebook, but most of the time I was in
Millhaven. People I had never seen before turned into John Ransom and
Tom Pasmore. The lightless eyes and rusty face of Ross McCandless
slanted toward me from the window of a passing bus. Block after block,
I walked along Livermore Avenue, finally saw the sign outside the White
Horse Tavern, and realized that I was on Hudson Street.

Around seven
o'clock on what turned out to be the last of these miserable journeys,
I walked past a liquor store, stopped moving, and went back and bought
a bottle of vodka. If what I needed was unconsciousness, I knew how to
get it. I carried the bottle home in the white plastic carrier bag, set
it on the kitchen shelf and stared at it. Sweating, I paced around the
loft for a long time. Then I went back into the kitchen, twisted the
cap off the bottle, and poured the vodka into the sink.

As soon as
the last of it disappeared into the drain, I went downstairs for dinner
and told everybody I was feeling much better today, thank you, just a
little trouble sleeping. I forced myself to eat at least half of the
food on my plate, and drank three bottles of mineral water. Maggie Lah
came out of the kitchen, took a long look at me, and sat down across
the table. "You're in trouble," she said. "What's going on?"

I said I
wasn't too sure.

"Sometimes I
hear you walking around in the middle of the night. You can't sleep?"

"That's about
it."

"You could
try going to one of those veterans' meetings. They might help you."

"Veterans of
Millhaven don't have meetings," I said, and told her not to worry about
me.

She said
something about therapy, stood up, kissed the top of my head, and left
me alone again.

When I got
back into my loft, I double-checked my locks, something I'd been doing
four and five times a night since my return, took a shower, put on
clean clothes, and went to my desk and turned on the computer. When I
saw that my hands were still shaking, Maggie's words came back to me.
They sounded no more acceptable now than they had the first time. Years
before, I'd gone twice to a veterans' group, but the people there had
been in another war altogether. As for therapy, I'd rather go directly
to the padded rooms and the electroshock table. I tried to get back
into the world of my work and found that I could not even remember the
last words I'd written. I called up the chapter, pushed
HOME
HOME
and the button with the arrow that pointed down, which
instantly delivered me to the point where I had stopped work that
morning. Then the nightly miracle took place once again, and I fell
down into the throat of my novel.

Something
astounding, no other word will do, happened to me the next day. Its
cause was an ordinary moment, banal in every outward way; but what it
called up was another moment, not at all ordinary, from the archaic
story ringed with warnings about looking back I had imagined concealed
behind Orpheus and Lot's wife, and this glimpse did turn me into
something like a pillar of salt, at least for a while.

My own cries
had jerked me up out of the usual daymares, napmares mingling Vietnam
and Millhaven. My shirt was stuck to my skin, and the cushion I used as
a pillow was slick with sweat. I ripped off the shirt and groaned my
way into the bathroom to splash cold water over my face. In a fresh
shirt, I went up to my desk, sat down before the computer and searched
for that capacity for surrender which gave me access to my book. I
hated the whole idea of going outside again. As it had on every other
afternoon for the past two weeks, the door into the book refused to
open. I gave up, left the machine, and paced around my loft in a state
suspended between life and death. My loft seemed like a cage built for
some other prisoner altogether. It came to me that my strange afternoon
treks around Manhattan might be an essential part of the night's
work—that they might be what allowed my imagination to fill itself up
again. It also came to me that this was magical thinking. But worthless
as it was, it was the best idea I had, and I let myself out of the cage
and went out onto Grand Street.

Warm summer
light shone on the windows of art galleries and clothing stores, and
women from New Jersey and Connecticut strolled like travelers from a
more affluent planet among the locals. Today, most of the locals seemed
to be young men in pressed jeans and rugby shirts. They were Wall
Street trainees, embryo versions of Dick Mueller, who had taken over
artists' lofts when the rents in Soho had pushed the artists into
Hoboken and Brooklyn. I tried to picture Dick Mueller hovering over the
arugula at Dean & DeLuca, but failed. Neither could I see Dick
bragging to his friends about the Cindy Sherman photograph he had
picked up for a good price at Metro Gallery. My mood began to improve.

I stopped in
front of my local video shop, thinking about renting
Babette's Feast
for the twentieth time. I could catch up on all the Pedro Almodovar
films I hadn't seen, or have a private Joan Crawford retrospective,
beginning with
Strait-Jacket
.
Along with all the usual Mel Gibson and
Tom Cruise posters in the window was one for a line of film noir
released on video for the first time. Now we're talking, I thought, and
moved up to inspect the poster. Alongside a reproduction of the box for
Pickup on South
Street
was that for
From
Dangerous Depths,
the movie
that Tom said had been playing in our neighborhood at the time of the
Blue Rose murders. I peered at the picture on the box, looking for
details.
From Dangerous Depths
starred Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino and
had been directed by Robert Siodmak. I told myself that I would rent it
someday and moved on.

At the Spring
Street Bookstore, I bought John Ashbery's
Flow Chart
and took a quick,
unforeseen spin into desperation while I signed the credit slip. I saw
myself pouring the vodka into the drain the previous night. I wanted it
back, I wanted a big cold glass of liquid narcotic in my hand. As soon
as I got out of the bookstore, I went into a cafe and took a table at
the opposite end of the room from the bar to order whatever kind of
mineral water they had. The waiter brought me an eight-ounce bottle of
Pellegrino, and I made myself drink it slowly while I opened the
Ashbery book and read the first few pages. The desperation began to
recede. I finished the water and devoured another hundred lines of
Flow
Chart
. Then I left some bills on the table and walked back out
into the
sunlight.

What happened
next might have been the culmination of all these events. It might have
been the result of getting only two hours of sleep every day or of the
wretched dreams that jumped out at me during those hours. But I don't
think it was any of those things. I think it happened because it had
been waiting to happen. A long gray Mercedes pulled into a parking
space across the street, and a huge bearded blond man got out and
locked bis door. He looked like Thor dressed in artist uniform, black
shirt and black trousers. His hair fell in one long wave to just above
his collar, and his beard foamed and bristled. Although I'd never met
him, I recognized him as a painter named Allen Stone who had become
famous in the period between Andy Warhol and Julian Schnabel. He'd just
had a retrospective, negatively reviewed almost everywhere, at the
Whitney. Allen Stone turned away from his car and glanced at me with
cold, pale blue eyes.

I saw. That
was all that happened, but it was enough. I saw. On a mental screen
that obliterated the street before me, Heinz Stenmitz's great blond
head loomed over me. He was grinning like a wolf, pressing one hand
against the back of my neck as I knelt in semidarkness, crowded between
his vast legs, my arm across his lap, my fingers held tight around the
great veiny red thing straining up at me out of his trousers. This, the
center and foreground of the scene, pulsed in my hand. "Put it in your
mouth, Timmy," he said, almost pleading, and urged my head toward the
other head, my mouth toward the other little mouth. I shuddered,
recoiled, and the vision blew apart. Allen Stone had turned away from
whatever he saw in my face and was moving past the front of his car
toward a set of double black doors set into an ornate building at the
level of the sidewalk.

Heat blazed
in my face. My scalp tried to peel itself away from my skull. My
stomach flipped inside-out, and I stepped forward and deposited a pink
mixture of Italian water and partially digested Vietnamese food into
the gutter. Too shocked to be embarrassed, I stood looking down at the
mess. When my insides contracted again, I drooled out another heap of
the pink lava. I wobbled back on the sidewalk and saw two of the
well-dressed suburban women, their faces stiff with disgust, standing
stock-still about six feet away from me. They jerked their eyes away
and hurried across the street.

I wiped my
mouth and moved toward the corner, separating myself from the spatter
in the gutter. My legs seemed disconnected and much too long.
Fee
Bandolier
, I said to myself.

When I got
back to Grand Street, I fell into a chair and began to cry, as if I had
needed the safety of my own surroundings to experience the enormity of
whatever I felt—shock and grief. Anger, too. A glance on the street had
just unlocked a moment, a series of moments, I had stuffed into a chest
forty years ago. I had wrapped chain after chain around the chest. Then
I had dropped the chest down into a psychic well. It had been bubbling
and simmering ever since. Among all the feelings that rushed up from
within was astonishment—this had happened to me, to
me
, and I had
deliberately, destructively forgotten all about it.

Memory after
memory came flooding back. Partial, fragmentary, patchy as clouds, they
brought my own life back to me— they were the missing sections of the
puzzle that allowed everything else to find its proper place. I had met
Stenmitz in the theater. Slowly, patiently, saying certain things and
not saying others, playing on my fear and his adult authority, he had
forced me to do what he wanted. I did not know how many days I had met
him to kneel down before him and take him in my mouth, but it had gone
on for a time that the child-me had experienced as a wretched
eternity—four times? Five times? Each occasion had been a separate
death.

Around ten, I
reeled out to a restaurant where I wouldn't see anyone I knew, reeled
through some kind of dinner, then reeled back to my loft. I realized
that I had done exactly what I wished: instead of therapy, I had gone
straight to electric shocks. At midnight, I took the usual second
shower—not, this time, to get ready for work, but to make myself feel
clean. About an hour later, I went to bed and almost immediately
dropped into the first good eight-hour sleep in two weeks. When I came
awake the next morning, I understood what Paul Fontaine had been trying
to tell me on Bob Bandolier's front lawn.

I spent most
of the next day at my desk, feeling as though I were shifting a pile of
gravel with a pair of tweezers—real sentences, not instruction-manual
sentences, came out, but no more of them than filled two pages. Around
four, I turned off the machine and walked away, figuring that it would
take me at least a few weeks to adjust to what I had just learned about
myself. Too restless to read a book or sit through a movie, I met the
old urge to get on my feet and walk somewhere, but two weeks of
wandering in an aimless daze were enough. I needed somewhere to go.