Wonderland (74 page)

Jesse’s eyes jumped everywhere, looking for Shelley.

The stamp of marching feet. Chanting. Random shouts. Bright splashes of sound—pure voices, without words. Jesse’s heart ached to hear those voices, the girls’ voices, so pure and bodiless and angry. He was elbowed, shoved, pushed by people on the sidewalks, spectators who were getting impatient. A gang of Negro boys ran through the crowd, ducking and giggling. A girl with a picket sign was knocked down. She shrieked. A policeman on horseback started through the marchers, the horse’s tail swishing, aristocratic and unhurried; people strained to get out of the way, a few of the younger girls cried out in alarm.… Someone was being pressed up against a building.
Help! Stop!
The policeman continued without looking down. Jesse had been pushed along himself and could not see what had happened to the girls.

A surging, milling crowd, the stamping of feet, picket signs waving in the light—
END THE WAR IN
VIETNAM! END THE KILLING!
Jesse stared at the faces, knowing how necessary it was to see each face. His own face must have been brilliant with desire, like a beacon, because people occasionally glanced at him, struck by something they saw in him. He sensed in the young people who were marching a curious impersonal contempt for him, perhaps because of his clothes. Or his age. It was not personal, it was not bodily or physical or sensual, this contempt. It was an abstract, spiritual hatred of him, a dismissal that was frightening. A man like Dr. Vogel might die and it would not matter.

He felt their hatred, it made him lightheaded, fearful. He did not understand it. He thought of cancerous protoplasm: that fatal spreading
essence. He had seen it many times through a microscope. Eating away its own boundaries, no limits to it, an inflammation seeding everywhere—to the spinal fluid, to the brain. How they surged in the chill open air of Chicago, roused as if by godly chimes—the bells of sunken churches, pealing and pulsating in a rhythm that people like Jesse could feel only remotely, being too old. It was a rhythm that beat in the loins of the young and showed in their faces. Their eyes were glazed, filmed over by the cold wind—in a hurry, they were in a hurry! They were shouting with the need to hurry! They were so young, they could push everyone else off the edge of the continent, being in such a hurry!

Girls younger than his daughter were tramping around downtown in this mob, being pushed and shoved and pressed against, all elbows themselves, ducking under arms and squirming away, running, chanting, taunting the police and their own hecklers, their faces wind-blown and arrogant. Jesse was out of breath and could not keep up with them. He was behind the police line, safe with people his own age and older, not in the surging crowd that had taken over the street. He watched. No good to shout at them to wait. No good to shout at all. They would not hear, waving their signs in a communion of noise. They were children’s faces in the street, rising and blossoming and on the verge of detonation. Their faces strained to explode. Mouths and eyes out of shape, distorted, a lovely sleeping yearning to them as they pressed forward into the backs of other kids.…

Jesse hated this formlessness. He was seized with a sudden hatred for it, almost a nausea. He hated it, hated them. Hated the crowd and its joy in being trampled. Hated the noise. The communion. The sensuous rising heat of the faces, the shapes of the mouths … hated that merging, that mobbing.… Better to destroy them all, Jesse thought. Better to die than to descend into this frenzy, to be lost in this anonymous garbage. This strange mass consciousness revolted him. He hated it, hated all these people, even those watching from the sidewalks. So much garbage in the world! And most of it human! Heaving, pulsing, sighing, surging with blood, their common breaths congealing in the used-up air, forming a sooty, smoggy, warm breath that was human and guttery, the comfortable odor of sewage.… Jesse could not help but think that this crowd was about to part and reveal something,
a single figure, a truth. Wasn’t there a truth, a single truth, a single human being at the center of this mob? A single eye that would see everyone, everything, and pronounce judgment upon it?

But nothing. Only noise. Only bodies.

Jesse fought his way out of it. Back to where his car was parked, a mile away. Panting. Breathless. Stunned by the smell of them, this human flow, this avalanche, his head rocky with their chants, their feet. Yet his eyes still darted about hotly. He had to find her. He would find her. He had been tempted to lose himself in that crowd, yes, to pass into its frenzy as if his brain had burst, but he would not give in to it: he would return to the world in which he was a single human being, a single consciousness with a destiny he must fulfill.

The next week, a postcard came to him at the clinic postmarked Savannah, Georgia. Very faint scrawling, in pencil, which he could hardly read. It said something about a head, a “fast-moving head,” something about an operation, about brains. He turned the postcard over in his fingers: an ordinary street scene, a boulevard with palm trees, in Savannah. So she had gotten that far. Georgia.

He knew he would never find her.

In July he received a letter from Florida, a long letter on tablet paper, covered with Shelley’s slanted handwriting. And, in the envelope, part of a broken fingernail.

He read the letter several times.
The voice must say I love you. If it does not say I love you it is not an authentic voice
. Trembling, unable to control his trembling, he read about Noel, read about someone named Noel, his daughter’s lover.

He read the letter and yet he had the idea that she was dead: that the police were hiding information from him. Somewhere they had discovered her decomposing body, in a ditch somewhere, strangled and left by a man, a man named Noel.

He called the police. Went to the station and showed them the letter but would not surrender it to them, wouldn’t let them read it all the
way through. “She’s with a man. Someone named Noel. Named Noel,” Jesse said.

“If she writes you letters she’ll be coming back. Don’t worry,” he was told.

And Helene told him: “If she writes you that means she’ll come back. I know it. I’m certain of it.”

He tortured himself with certain passages from this letter:
Noel says, Noel rubs his forehead against mine, Noel weighs me down
.… He waited for another letter but nothing came until October: again postmarked Florida, a small city on the western side of the state.
I am “the Fetish.” Noel dressed me up … led me around the beach naked
.… Jesse read this letter and a flame passed over his brain, paralyzing him. She was teasing, taunting him. This couldn’t be true. He told Helene about the letter but would not let her read it. She did not insist. She kept saying gently, unconvincingly: “If she writes you, Jesse, she’ll come back. Why else would she write?”

The next month another long letter came, an almost unintelligible letter, and Jesse read it with a stiff angry smile, sitting at his desk at the clinic, where he spent most of his time though he no longer operated. He went to the clinic mainly on the chance that a letter from his daughter might arrive—she never sent any of the letters home. Ronald Myer had taken over much of his work. Jesse’s “work.” Jesse’s “patients.” He waited for the mail each morning and afternoon, waiting for Shelley to write, but when her letter did come he thought at first it must be a trick: he was sure that she was dead. Her murderer was writing these letters to drive him mad.

Then, in January of 1971, he got a letter from New York City, and he wondered if she might be on her way home. Coming north, coming back to him. He no longer bothered to call the police. No use to show them the letter. He kept it at the clinic, in the center drawer of his desk, where he could read it slowly through again and again.
You hypnotized me
, Shelley said. Or someone said, in Shelley’s voice and in her childish handwriting.

She was teasing him, taunting him. Like the girls in the street that day last April: their faces savage with the delight of teasing, taunting.

The next letter came only a few days later, also postmarked New York City.

“And that was your daughter? That girl your daughter, really?”

Monk was staring at Jesse and smiling vacuously.

“You mean you have a daughter, that was really your daughter? I thought it was a joke or something … I was a little mixed-up that night.… That little girl was really the daughter of Jesse Vogel?”

Jesse nodded stiffly.

“Well, Dr. Vogel, my friend, I would recognize you, yes, but it’s quite a surprise for me and an honor, truly an honor,” Monk was saying rapidly, “to open the door and see you standing there.… I’m a little confused, but eventually I make perfect sense. There is a code to my confusion. And so you’re looking for her, that little girl who was evidently your daughter, no joke about it …?”

“Yes. I thought you could help me.”

“Oh yes. Yes. I can help you. Indeed, yes,” Monk said with a smile.

Monk’s room was above a bar in the East Village. Jesse sat rigidly, in a kind of chair, while Monk sat on a ruined sofa with piles of candy wrappers on the cushions around him. The room stank.

“You must have been surprised to discover that I am famous, after all that nonsense at Ann Arbor,” Monk said. He was thick and clammy, stripped to the waist, perspiring in spite of the chilly room. His chest was mottled, many colors, even bruised in great yellow and orangish and violet welts, and his chest hair was stubbly—it had evidently been shaved off some time ago and allowed to grow back in. His head was
completely bald. The gleaming scalp was rotund and boastful. Even when Monk was not speaking, his mouth moved in silent, moist, circular movements, as if he were chewing gum though he did not seem to be chewing gum.

“Yes, I was surprised to hear about you. I was surprised,” Jesse admitted.

“Well, this is a time of magic. Anything can happen today,” Monk said. “My first book was published under the name T. W. Monk, not Trick Monk. I rejected Trick because it was undignified. Did you read my book?”

“I’m afraid not,” Jesse said.

“I knew you wouldn’t, and I don’t hold it against you,” Monk said with a swift, sweet smile, moving his mouth. “The title was
Poems Without People
. Do you remember that title?”

Jesse frowned. No, he did not remember.

“Ah, you don’t remember.… Poems are written to people like you, who don’t remember any of them,” Monk said wistfully. He had a garish, lined face; he appeared middle-aged. His face sagged. The skin of his scalp differed noticeably from the skin on his face, which was ruddy and pale in spots, caked over with something bright and muddy—it must have been make-up—that caught the light cruelly in this room.

“Anyway, it’s good to meet an old friend after so many years,” Monk said, reaching out to shake Jesse’s hand again. It was the third time he had shaken Jesse’s hand. “I feel that I am about to synthesize great areas of American thought, I feel that I am on the brink of revelation—and then you appear! Jesse Vogel appears knocking at my door! Did you happen to read that review of my second book last year in—what was it—the
Saturday Review?
The reviewer took on twenty-five books of poetry, an avalanche, but such an avalanche is correct in our time because it reflects the avalanche that is to come. I don’t mind being considered in a mountain of other human beings. I feel, Dr. Vogel,” he said with a snicker, “that in a mountain of bodies my own will fare well enough—eh? An arm sticking out here, a leg there, a vital organ exhibited to public view, eh? There is a cult down here, you know, strongly behind President Nixon. I had a vision of him descending to us from the sky. I think he is the Second Coming in person. It was that conviction I tried to express in my book … it was not an easy vision to
express.…” Monk got to his feet with a grunt. He began to pace back and forth in the cramped space in front of Jesse. “The reviewer for the
Saturday Review
misunderstood my poem, but with charity. There is no evil, Dr. Vogel, my dear Jesse, my friend Jesse.…” He turned to Jesse with a sudden warm, loose smile. Jesse tried not to draw back. “Oh, how I loved you! Seeing you at those morning lectures of Cady’s, sitting in the front row, sleepy and angelic and so attentive, so very attentive, as if your soul’s salvation depended upon your hearing everything, learning everything. Your strength and your brains, your lovely brains—There is no love without the struggle of the brains, sexual chess, no, nothing at all—but you had a kind of Protestant soul then, an unimaginative dreary Protestant soul, and there was no chance of your being converted … and … and so decades have passed.… Now, now what was I saying …?”

“You were going to tell me about my daughter,” Jesse said nervously.

“Your daughter. Yes. It’s strange, that you are a father.” Monk went to sit on the edge of a tub. Evidently, the tub was not used for baths but was piled with books and magazines and papers and clothes. Behind Monk’s head a banging had begun on the other side of the wall, but he did not seem to notice it. “Did you follow her footsteps to me, or what? I mean, is it still snowing?”

“What?”

Monk got up with another grunt and went to peer out of the window.

“They must have shoveled it up. Who sent you here?”

“Someone clerking in a bookstore. I asked about you and he told me where you live.”

“But, look … the girl never came up here, did she?” Monk said, frowning. “She never came up to this room. I’m sure of that. So how did you follow her here?”