So what I started that day was apparently a series of impulses which qualified for my interest if I could detect no point in them at all. I got a job sewing giant tents, learned to box, moved in with a woman who's a sometime amateur actress.
My training in science was not wasted: I can smell plans where there are none and so avoid them. In any good lab you look down about a two-year tunnel of programmed proving every rare day that you could possibly be said to begin anything, and even the chance that you will not prove what you hope to prove is planned for, accommodatable by an existing plan for happy accidents. And my training supplies me this: I sit every morning now recording these planless times, taking these notes with a near-Ph.D.'s mechanical care. I have a last blue-gridded notebook and I sit at a wire-mesh patio table and try to effect some shape, some contour, from these raw data of the wasty wonderful days since I quit. I quit the tent sewing and the boxing. I started the actress-living-with. I quit my room-gave away everything in it. I started these notes.
Before I got to this major starting and quitting I did some warm-up starting and quitting. I started going to revivals and quit, I started to seduce the Orphan and quit, I talked for the very last time to the Veteran, during which time I decided to quit making fun of him. I did all this the night after quitting Friedeman, and some of it is not inexplicable. The data point of the spontaneous taking in of a tent revival, for example, has to do with getting home and breathing the waxy air of my field hospital and wondering about Friedeman's preaching, and seeing my cute deco dimestore-framed portrait of Miss Dr. Eminence in Love with Polanski looking sexier and smarter and righter than ever, and needing something to do other than make a third phone call. Before I could get going to the revival, the Veteran started yelling at his dead nigger.
He was stomping around hard in his steel-soled jungle boots, presumably trying to shake the dead nigger out of hiding. This was customary. As was not customary, I went over to have a look. I usually waited until he came to my room (next to his) to ask me if I'd seen the dead nigger.
Before I could knock, he jerked open his door.
"What!" he said.
"I'm here to help you catch him."
"You've been in my house?"
"No, man. No way, man. I've been listening? This was a somewhat standard exchange for us, a kind of password ritual.
"Catch who, then?" (This was also: my answer would help corroborate the existence of the prowling dead nigger.)
"The dead nigger."
"Dead nigger is right," he shouted, turning and marching into his room, gesturing wildly, his arms swinging with violence and surrender at once. "Every time I leave, dead fucking nigger pisses all over the place."
Under his open window was a puddle. It was water, rainwater, but it would not do to tell the Veteran this.
"The sonofabitch," I said, pulling a long face at the puddle. I overdid it-a hair too much sympathy tended to alienate him from its source. He became suspicious. There was nothing to do for it now.
"Does the radio bother you?" His clock radio was on, low.
"No."
"I'll turn it fucking off, then." He landed on his bed on his knees and violently twisted the radio off. I'd been in a few of these minuets with him before and had discovered it a mistake to change course. To tell him now that it had been noisy as hell and to thank him would deepen the suspicion and send him on a new, uncharted rant. Once he asked me how I liked his mother.
"The radio was fine," I said.
"If it bothers you, just speak up! Say something!"
"O.K."
"O.K., fucking-A."
We both pondered the puddle.
Standing there, having quit over at school, for the first time I was willing to try to understand this madman, to find out what had happened. Before, I had I been willing only to play with him in the interest of an amateur knowledge of what I presumed was paranoia. It is funny how a little uncertainty, a little petty love-and-life dislocation like mine, can give you pause, tune you quickly to the genuine losses around you.
I knew enough not to ask anything remotely like what happened. All I could do was stand there and regard the puddle with him. He was calming down. I noticed I had not come with my hunting knife, which I always did-fully drawn and kept between the Veteran and myself to not the least distress on the part of the Veteran. I was talking to the Veteran unarmed.
I wondered how I'd look with something like a little true mileage on me. I noticed for the first time what the Veteran really looked like; he was handsome. You couldn't tell how many times his odometer might already have been around. He was not quite a bright, careful boy.
There was finally a bit of powerful logic in this dead-fucking-nigger thing, too. The rooms-all of them-did smell like piss, and the smell did seem to strengthen when you were away, and the Veteran's puddle was perpetual, whereas my window, always open, never seemed to take in rain. And the Veteran had absolutely nothing in his room to steal except his cheap clock radio, which is the perfect inspiration for a petty thief to foul things. Standing there with him, I thought finally that his truest touch was in believing his tormentor dead: I half thought there might be something to it all whenever he said dead.
The only sense this makes is to see the scene and its effect on me as what we call an energy of activation in the long series of planless, purposeless goings-on that followed. I have been occupied since all the quitting began with people who are anything but custodians of their chances in life.
I am determined to draw a curve through these plotless days which will make order of them, to force a spline accurately down along the roller coaster of nonsense I started riding when I left the lab. A giant component of the reaction series I can hazard now (living with Mary, and having so splendid a time I wonder where I was but here all my life) has to do with women, with what my real relation to them is and is to be. For surely Miss Dr. Eminence in Love with Polanski was right. I was wrong for her, I was wrong to her, I was wrong with her. And I have a few suspicions that the wrongness is something not simply personal between me and her. I have some reservations about-I shall hazard a very early hypothesis, as only a false scientist would-young women in general, about this whole teasing setup. Which setup I needn't attempt to describe yet. What happened next falls precisely upon the curve of this function I would describe.
I quit the Veteran and his room. In the hall I ran into the Nurse, as I called her then. I call her the Orphan now, for what was about to go down. The Veteran was yelling something at the dead nigger.
"Y'all find him?" she asked.
"He's tricky, I bet."
Ordinarily I would have complied with some eye rolling and offered to tell her some Veteran stories, but having gone and got righteous, having gone in there unarmed, half looking for the dead nigger myself, I failed to respond. This was timing: for months I had stumbled around in this hall trying to locate a natural opener with this woman, whose full head of red hair suggested to me electric sex. We had passed, nodded, paused, resumed, slipped into respective rat ranges across the hall from one another a hundred times. Now we were talking, and I was not going to talk. She rested a load of books on her hip and said, "You want a beer?"