SOMETHING EVIL
I said, “Ikstein stands outside the door for a long time before he knocks. Did you suspect that? Did you suspect that he stands there listening to what we say before he knocks?” She said, “Did you know you’re crazy?” I said, “I’m not crazy. The expression on his face, when I open the door, is giddy and squirmy. As if he’d been doing something evil, like listening outside our door before he knocked.” She said, “That’s Ikstein’s expression. Why do you invite him here? Leave the door open. He won’t be able to listen to us. You won’t make yourself crazy imagining it.” I said, “Brilliant, but he isn’t due for an hour and I won’t sit here with the door open.” She said, “I hate to listen to you talk this way. I won’t be involved in your lunatic friendships.” She opened the door. Ikstein stood there, giddy and squirmy.
ANSWERS
I began two hundred hours of continuous reading in the twelve hours that remained before examinations. Melvin Bloom, my roommate, flipped the pages of his textbook in a sweet continuous trance. Reviewing the term’s work was his pleasure. He went to sleep early. While he slept I bent into the night, reading, eating Benzedrine, smoking cigarettes. Shrieking dwarfs charged across my notes. Crabs asked me questions. Melvin flipped a page, blinked, flipped another. He effected the same flipping and blinking, with no textbook, during examinations. For every question, answers marched down his optical nerve, neck, arm, and out onto his paper where they stopped in impeccable parade. I’d look at my paper, oily, scratched by ratlike misery, and I’d think of Melvin Bloom. I would think, Oh God, what is going to happen to me.
MACKEREL
She didn’t want to move in because there had been a rape on the third floor. I said, “The guy was a wounded veteran, under observation at Bellevue. We’ll live on the fifth floor.” It was a Victorian office building, converted to apartments. Seven stories, skinny, gray, filigreed face. No elevators. We climbed an iron stairway. “Wounded veteran,” I said. “Predictable.” My voice echoed in dingy halls. Linoleum cracked as we walked. Beneath the linoleum was older, drier linoleum. The apartments had wooden office doors with smoked-glass windows. The hall toilets were padlocked; through gaps we could see the bowl, overhead tank, bare bulb dangling. “That stairway is good for the heart and legs,” I said. She said, “Disgusting, dangerous building.” I said, “You do smell piss in the halls and there has been a rape. The janitor admitted it. But people live here, couples, singles, every sex and race. Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican families. Kids run up and down the stairway. A mackerel-crowded iron stream. Radios, TVs, whining day and night. Not only a piss smell, but pasta, peppers, incense, marijuana. The building is full of life. It’s life. Close to the subways, restaurants, movies.” She said, “Rapes.” I said, “One rape. A wounded man with a steel plate in his head, embittered, driven by undifferentiated needs. The rent is forty dollars a month. To find this place, you understand, I appealed to strangers. From aluminum phone booths, baby, I dialed with ice-blue fingers. It’s January in Manhattan. Howling winds come from the rivers.” “The rape,” she said. I said, “A special and extremely peculiar case. Be logical.” Before we finished unpacking, the janitor was stabbed in the head. I said, “A junkie did it. A natural force, a hurricane.” She said, “Something is wrong with you. I always felt it instinctively.” I said, “I believe I’m not perfect. What do you think is wrong with me?” She said, “It makes me miserable.” I said, “No matter how miserable it makes you, say it.” She said, “It embarrasses me.” I said, “Even if it embarrasses you, say it, be frank. This is America. I’ll write it down. Maybe we can sell it and move to a better place.” She said, “There’s too much.” I said, “I’ll make a list. Go ahead, leave out nothing. I have a pencil.” She said, “Then what?” I said, “Then I’ll go to a psychiatrist.” She said, “You’ll give a distorted account.” I said, “I’ll make an exact, complete list. See this pencil. It’s for making lists. Tell me what to write.” She said, “No use.” I said, “A junkie did it. Listen to me, bitch, a junkie did it.”
EATING OUT
Four men were at the table next to mine. Their collars were open, their ties loose, and their jackets hung on the wall. One man poured dressing on the salad, another tossed the leaves. Another filled the plates and served. One tore bread, another poured wine, another ladled soup. The table was small and square. The men were cramped, but efficient nonetheless, apparently practiced at eating here, this way, hunched over food, heads striking to suck at spoons, tear at forks, then pulling back into studious, invincible mastication. Their lower faces slid and chopped; they didn’t talk once. All their eyes, like birds on a wire, perched on a horizontal line above the action. Swallowing muscles flickered in jaws and necks. Had I touched a shoulder and asked for the time, there would have been snarling, a flash of teeth.
WHAT’S NEW
My mother said, “So? What’s new?” I said, “Something happened.” She said, “I knew it. I had a feeling. I could tell. Why did I ask? Sure, something happened. Why couldn’t I sit still? Did I have to ask? I had a feeling. I knew, I knew. What happened?”
THE BURGLAR
I dialed. The burglar answered and said Ikstein wasn’t home. I said tell him I called. The burglar laughed. I said, “What’s funny?” The burglar said, “This is a coincidence. When you called I was reading a passage in Ikstein’s diary which is about you.” I said, “Tell me what it says.” The burglar snorted: “Your request is compromising. Just hearing it is compromising.” I said, “I’m in the apartment below Ikstein’s. We can easily meet and have a little talk about my request. I’ll bring something to drink. Do you like marijuana? I know where Ikstein hides his marijuana. I have money with me, also a TV set and a Japanese camera. It’s no trouble for me to carry everything up there. One trip.” He said if I came upstairs he would kill me.
LIKE IRONY
He pried me open and disappeared inside, made me urinate, defecate, and screech, then slapped my dossier shut, stuck it in his cabinet, slammed drawer, swallowed key. “Well,” he said, “how have you been?” I said, “Actually, that’s what I’m here to find out.” He said,“People have feelings. They do their best. Some of us say things to people — such as you — in a way that is like irony, but it isn’t irony. It’s good breeding, manners, tact — we have delicate intentions.” I apologized. “So,” he said, “tell me your plans.” I said, “Now that I know?” “That’s right,” he said, “I’m delighted that you aren’t very stupid.”