My mother was still a beautiful woman. There was either a great new absence or a great new presence in my mother. Her physique was perfectly fine, but now I looked at her knowing she was not eternal, was considering the possibility of her own death. Something slid out from under me.
“You pick out a rich girl, now,” said the old man the last day. “It’s all the same in the dark.”
I left Dream of Pines by the old greasy highway, seeing the new motel courts and a few pale boys on the diving board of their swimming pools. It was mid-September, and almost cold. They were having a good time. But everything and everybody was ghostly to me now. They were ghosts, they knew they were near death and they were having fun anywhere they could take it. Their old man had taken a job in a place that was still warmish in September and they were living here until they found a house. They stayed underwater as long as they could to get away from the stinking air of the paper mills. Their old man was back in the room using the motel ballpoint to figure up on the motel stationery how long they could last before the paycheck. I thought all this under the influence of my old man, who had told me how Dream of Pines was booming. “Booming!” I saw the swimmers in my dreams later. They were skeletons, shivering, smiling hugely with their gums, the last flesh left to them. Death was everywhere in Dream of Pines, since the old man first mentioned it. I didn’t even trust my own youth. My youth was an old sick pirate; there was a boy back there lying on the reefs, bleeding. The lad’s throat had been cut. I had cut it. “Push off, push off!” came an odd voice in my ear. I had no hometown, and Hedermansever was not my home. There was no real bed for me, not in thfe bunk at college, not in the gray stone house, not in Fleece’s house.
I knew Fleece would not be back at school and I was wondering who they would stick me with in the room. But there he was waiting for me, healthy as a berry. He’d put on some weight, in truth. I had an impression, however, that he was only simulating health. He was a mite frantic to cut a healthy figure, like a man skating casually while trying to balance a cantaloupe on his neck. He agreed with everything I said, everything I wanted to do. “Hell yes, Monroe!” Want to play some poker? Want to bet on the Colts? Want to play some snooker? He didn’t know how to do any of those things. “You bet, Monroe.”
Then his mouth became restless.
“Do you understand when I say that by the time it counts I’m afraid I won’t have enough energy to get my genius across? There are two people, professors on this campus, who once were geniuses, you can tell it in their faces, walking around with their wives and families, these men altogether sapped of power, with their caved-in smiles.” He was out late frequently with Bet. He acted as if he had just run along way.
“One thinks he can play with his own energy forever. Then she comes along, giving you every indication she means to be only your hobby, just wants to trail along as long as you let her. Always the flirting. And before you know it, you’re pouring your brains down her cunt. She isn’t smiling any more, nor flirting. She’s serious as death. She ought to be. Half your self lies in a pool at the backend of mons pubis.”
This went on the whole fall. Then in 1962, he wouldn’t get out of the rack for classes and slept like a rattlesnake hibernating in winter. One night the last of January he got out of bed, put his shoes on contrariwise, shut his eyes, and walked right into all his stacked-up material — the books, the cigar boxes, the metal stork, everything, it all tumbled over. I cannot define for sure what state he was in. He plunged sightless through the debris, kicking at it. He mounted a pile of books and stood there on top in blind idiocy. The books would not support him. He crashed on the end of my bed.
“I’m a dirty boy. Hit me.”
I tapped him. His eyes were still shut.
“Hit me hard, Ruben. You know how fed up with me you are.”
I punched him. He slunk away and crawled back to his bed over the foot-high rubble. He put his hand in the plate I’d brought him from the cafeteria.
“I’m a dirty boy, dirty, dirty, dirty boy. Get me a preacher.”
I closed my book. “All right, I will.”
I went down two floors and got that Baptist from South Carolina that I used to room with. He was already asleep, nine o’clock at night, and came to the door in a brown robe. He couldn’t make me out. I went in the room to help him find his quadrafocals. A Chinese boy was sitting up sleepily on the other bunk. This was Don Thing, the poet from Hong Kong. He wrote a sort of timid new English set to poetry in the dart, the campus literary magazine. His poems were printed on the slant, with lines wide apart, so as to de-emphasize what utter banal coonshit they were.
“Don and I have taught each other a lot,” said Thomas, my old roommate, going up the stairs in his cloth skids. His tiny black eyes were so lost in his glasses, he seemed imprismed, and you thought he probably couldn’t hear you, either.
“I’ve brought Thomas,” I said to Fleece, who lay stiff on the bed, like an open-eyed corpse. He hadn’t eaten in two days and had seldom smoked. I was the one who had to explain to his professor in the lab. I backed to the door and told Thomas Fleece was ready for him. Thomas made his way over the collapsed library and knelt by the bed, being unable to find a seat. I shut the door as if I’d left, easing at the same time into the plaster cave of the closet. Thomas never even looked back.
“Monroe said you needed me.”
“Pastor, when you get as much as I have and you can’t quit getting it, but you know you’re robbing your mind—”
“Is this about a girl?”
“I won’t say her name.”
“Have you made her pregnant?”
“No. I want you to read the letters that led me down this sorry road. Pick up one of them. Look around the room for letters written in brown ink.”
Thomas bent around the room like some huge exiled rat with goggles. He waddled over a cigar box which was tumping out the letters we hadn’t burned. Then he picked up a wad and sat down to read. This took ten minutes. There was only the study lamp on, upended.
“This paper smells like a restroom. Is that the joke, that now I have smelly hands?”
“What he has done, Pastor, I think, is make an intellectual preoccupation out of sex. You see how much good grammar he spends on it. Sex wasn’t made for thought, was it? It’s only instinct and touch. As intellectual matter it is a swamp from which no man comes back whole. You go into the swamp with your mind — there seems to be so much to contemplate. And you come back, if you get back, with a few pubic hairs in your hand and a shriveled-up backbone.”
“Why do you need me here? You aren’t going crazy like Monroe said.”
“Yes I am! I’ve been theorizing on sex every minute since I found out it was possible that a lady might smile when she spread her legs. I get flashes of sexual visions as fast as you can open and close your hand. I read books and see flickering pictures, not a movie, but still-life photographs that … I know that when the mind plays variations on the same theme, you have lost part of it somewhere—”
“Well, you do have a lot of theories for everything you say, don’t you?” says Thomas. “Wait. Now you say you are getting it regular?”