Is he? he thought.
Is Edward Voegler really me, and am I really him? And if I am, what the hell do I do now? Should I call that number, let them take me back to that horrible place, what horrible place, how do I know of its horror if I’m not indeed Edward Voegler, the escaped lunatic, what had the headline called him, a schizo, yes, schizo escapes l.i. asylum. There was a poetry in the words. L.I. Asylum. He thought back to a headline he had seen in the Daily News, oh, long ago — why was it he could remember all the stupid trivial paraphernalia of his life, the inconsequential trimmings, and not any of the really important things, like whether or not he happened to be Edward Voegler, escaped lunatic, or madman, or schizo, or whatever he was? The headline had appeared when the men down at Canaveral had sent up a rocket containing white mice. The rocket was supposed to send radio signals back to earth before the eventual return of the mice, but those brilliant spacemen had gloriously fouled up the experiment, and the rocket was not sending back any radio messages, and it looked as though those red-eyed little rodents would go spinning through space eternally. The headline on the Daily News that day — What made him think he didn’t like that newspaper? That headline had cheered up his entire day! — had read simply:
God, that was a great headline! The man who wrote that headline should have been given a medal and a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue in an open car with Mayor Wagner taking off his hat and holding it up to the crowd like a panhandler!
I must be crazy, he thought. I’m sitting here with a cold cup of coffee, light with a little sugar — I take it black, isn’t that what Gloria said? Sam takes it black — remembering a headline I saw years ago, when the headline on the newspaper right in front of me is telling me I’m a nut who stole some director’s nice blue suit (and undoubtedly his gold cuff links and tie tack) and ran off with a case of paranoid schizophrenia and a severe persecution complex with delusions of grandeur. Where the hell is Doris? Isn’t she ever coming out?
She suddenly seemed like his only salvation. Doris in the building across the street, with her long bird legs and her flowing black crest, old Doris would know all the answers. He would wait for her to come out, and then he would simply say, “Hi, Doris, remember me? It’s nutty old Ed Voegler; we used to know each other before I got committed. Remember? I used to tell you about all the hatchet murders I was planning. Come on, you remember, don’t you?”
And Doris would look at him and say, “Why, you silly boy, you. You’re not Ed Voegler at all, whoever he is. You’re Myron Goldfarb, who used to take me cycling in the Bronx, don’t you remember?”
Oh, yes, he thought, oh yes, I remember those sun-stained days, yes, yes, I remember, but hasn’t Edward Voegler got a memory, too, and isn’t his as confused and as terrified as my own, this paranoid schizophrenic who took his evening meal and then ran for freedom? Didn’t I run for freedom this morning, up Central Park South with the birds singing their sweet and piercing song in my ears? Didn’t I run for freedom?
“There’s more of them guys on the outside than on the inside,” the voice beside him said.
He wheeled on his stool. The boy standing next to him was no more than sixteen years old. He was wearing a black leather jacket with silver studs in the collar. His sideburns were long, and his eyes were wide and blue in a guileless open face seeking conversation.
“Are you talking to me?” Buddwing asked.
“Yeah, sure,” the boy said.
“What did you say?”
“I said there’s plenty of them nuts walking the streets.”
Buddwing smiled. “Yes,” he said, “I’ll bet there are.”
“How’d he get out?” the boy asked.
“He just left.”
“Don’t they have fences around them places?”
“I guess they do.”
“So what kind of fences do they have where some nut can just march out like that?” The boy shook his head.
“Maybe he cut a hole in the fence. Or dug under it,” Buddwing said, and then wondered if that was what Voegler had done, what he had done.
Two other boys seemed to materialize out of nowhere. They were sporting sideburns, too. One of them was wearing a gray sweat shirt with a black line drawing of Beethoven stamped onto the front. The other was wearing a blue sports shirt over which was an open red vest. They took up positions slightly behind the boy in the black leather jacket, and joined the conversation easily and naturally.
“I wonder if he really only escaped last night,” the one with the Beethoven sweat shirt said.
“What do you mean?” the one with the red vest asked.
“Well,” Beethoven explained with patient logic, “that’s only what they’re telling us. Suppose he really escaped last week, or maybe even last month? Maybe they’ve been looking for this creep all the time, and they couldn’t find him ’cause he’s hiding out in the bushes someplace, you know, so they figure that now maybe they better warn the people, you dig?”
“That sounds crazy,” Red Vest said, but Buddwing did indeed dig what Beethoven was saying because it suddenly opened a new line of thought for him, and the thought was overwhelming. Suppose, he thought, suppose I am not Edward Voegler but simply a very nice ordinary man, a garbage man perhaps, who doesn’t happen to remember who he is? But more than that, suppose I haven’t really known who I am for a week, maybe, or even maybe a month, just as Beethoven said? Suppose I have been waking up every morning for the past month without having the slightest idea who I am?
“You may be right,” he said to Beethoven, looking at the face above the sweater for the first time. The boy had long brown hair and gray eyes, and really a remarkably handsome face, with a short pug nose and full lips, like one of the carved angels on the roof of Il Duomo in Milan; Italy again, hot, the roller in the typewriter had melted because the typewriter had been near the window with the sun beating in on it and the temperature had been a hundred and two in the shade, the roof of the cathedral with its gingerbread icing, the way her hair had been framed by a sky of molten brass, brass against brass, her hair, Milan.
“Sure,” Beethoven said. “You think they’re gonna tell us anything? And get theirselves in hot water? It’s only ’cause they can’t find that kook is why they’re telling us about it now.”
“Well, maybe so,” Red Vest said. “What do you think?”
He addressed this to Leather Jacket, who was obviously the leader of the trio. L.J., the boss, shrugged as if such speculation were beneath his lofty consideration. “Who cares?” he said. Red Vest, who looked somewhat like an Indian, with a swarthy complexion and black crew-cut hair with incongruously long sideburns, shrugged too. Whatever was all right with L.J. was all right with him, it seemed, and besides, who cared?
“Did they finally get that stickball game going?” L.J. asked Beethoven.
“Yes, they did,” Buddwing answered.
“Takes them an hour to get a game started,” L.J. said, accepting Buddwing into the conversation casually and easily. “You ever see a bunch of guys take so long to get something going?”
“No,” Buddwing said. “It’s Saturday, though, so I guess there’s no rush.” He picked up his cup and sipped at the coffee, pulling a face.