So they danced, as though ridden with the conscience of the Tarahumara Indian, whose only sin can be not having danced enough.
Feasley said, — Come on, let's get out of here, not stopping as he passed the table. — Chrahst, I found her, the girl in the purple dress. Standing right beside me at the next urinal. .
— I hate women, a voice said. It paused. Then, — I hate men too.
And so, as the Lord prophesied through the Greek Clement: / am come to destroy the work of the woman, that is, concupiscence, whose works are generation and death.
It broke up and spread itself, in couples and threes and figures of stumbling loneliness, into the streets, into doorways, they all went into the dark repeating themselves and preparing to meet one another, to reassemble, rehearse their interchangeable disasters; and the place looked like a kingdom stricken by papal anathema, as when Philippe Auguste, cunning pitiless monarch of France, was excommunicated for marrying Agnes while his wife Ingeborg still lived, and in his kingdom under the interdict there was neither baptism, marriage, nor burial, and corpses rotted on the high road.
— Wasn't it fun, said Agnes Deigh leaning against a garbage can. Herschel, scratching the sotted front of an evening shirt beside her, agreed, with the sound of a thing drowning. He excused himself, and when he had thrown up in an empty doorway returned singing. No doubt about it: tonight he was going to manage it. — Your strip-tease danse was shocking, Rudy, he said. — Where's Tertullian? I can't lose him, Rudy said, and slipped a white hairless arm through Herschel's, pulled the evening cape tighter and with almost masculine ex?speration thrust the long blond hair out over the fur. — Call a cab, baby, for God's sake. I feel awful. I feel like I was going to have a miscarriage.
Agnes Deigh returned a moment later, from between two parked cars. She was talking. But there was no one to talk to. There was no one there at all. The sound of thunder approached from the street's corner, a Department of Sanitation truck stopping every ten or twelve yards to open the huge maw at its back and masticate the immense portions left out to appease it with gnashings of reckless proportions, glass smashed and wood splintered between its bloodless gums. Agnes, leaning alone there, was suddenly frightened less than ten bites away. She was, as much as her haze of consciousness would allow her, terrified, and set off up the street in the opposite direction, loping in frantic steps as though dodging among trees, an injured doe in a landscape of Piero di Cosimo fleeing the patient hunter. She reached a lighted doorway, struggled into the vast and empty interior, and collapsed into a pew.
Ed Feasley and Otto were moving at seventy-three miles an hour. But neither of them wanted to go to Connecticut, and when they realized that they were taking that direction the car swung about with a scream, and was saved from what might have been a fatal skid by hitting its sliding rear against a lamppost. It headed south. — I want to see how fast I can make that ramp around Grand Central, Ed said, full of spirit. As long as he was conscious, he liked to have a good time. He had been having one, continuous, for years, and never a moment of craven doubt in any of it. He was not afraid: not a grain of that fear which is granted in any definition of sanity. In college, he had entertained himself and others, quiet evenings in his rooms when his allowance was cut off, by beating the back of his fist with a stiff-bristled hairbrush, then swinging his hand in circles until the pressure of descending blood broke small capillaries and spotted the rug and ceiling with spots turned brown by morning; or standing before a mirror with thumb and forefinger pressed against his carotid arteries until his lace lost all color and he was caught by consciousness as he fell; or dropping lighted cigarettes into the trouser turn-ups of a friend's two-hundred-dollar suit; or setting fire to his hand dipped in lighter fluid; or setting fire to the extended newspapers of people in subways just before the doors closed, leaving him on the platform overcome with laughter at the fugitive conflagration. He liked a Good Time.
The car stopped so suddenly it might have hit a wall. Otto straightened up from the dashboard holding his head. They were in front of a hospital. — What is it? he asked, brushing at a spot on his sleeve until he realized that it was a band of light from the streetlamp above.
— I've always wanted to pat a stiff on the head. They shave them, Ed Feasley said. A minute later they were in a basement corridor of the hospital, talking to the watchman. He was lonely. They just wanted to know how to get to Connecticut. They were told. The watchman left on his round.
In a large refrigerated room, Ed Feasley raised a sheet and stroked a smooth pate. He groaned with pleasure. Otto opened drawers, and closed them. Then he turned with his prize. It was a leg, small enough to be a woman's, quite old, slightly blackened around some of the toes and its detached end neatly bound with tape. But Ed's felicitous imagination had been busy too: with some effort, he had brought together two lonely corpses of opposite sex, erected now in the act of life. But even that mortal pleasure failed to change their expressions, leveled into disconsolate similitude by their shaven heads.
Otto was having trouble keeping the leg wrapped. — You ought to get rid of that sling, Ed Feasley said. — It's just a gag anyway, isn't it? Here, give me the leg, and he left with it partially wrapped in the bit of blue cloth under his arm.
The car roared south in the dawn's early light. — We have to do something with it, said Feasley, nodding back at the fragmentary passenger in the back seat. — We ought to give it to somebody. Somebody who needs it.
— There's a girl I'd like to give it to, Otto said. — I'd like to give it to Edna Mims, God damn it, in a box, a nice long white flower box from Max Schling.
— That's it! said the driver. — She's the girl you used to go around with in college? She's a good lay. We've got to get the box now.
The sudden light of Madison Square showed day approaching rapidly, though the sky was not yet colored with dawn; but with this clearing sky above, and the knock he had got on the head, sobriety and trepidation descended upon Otto. — We'd better not, he said.
— No, come on, it's a fat idea.
They thundered into Washington Square. Otto tried desperately to think of an alternative, something safer, someone defenseless. Then he said, — Stanley.
— Stanley?
— We'll tell him it's a relic. He's a Catholic, and he must want a relic. We'll give him the Pope's left leg.
— He won't believe it.
— He'll believe it.
— I wouldn't believe it, even if I was Catholic.
— He's a Catholic. He'll believe it. How does he know what the Pope's leg looks like?
— How does anybody know, except the Pope?
— Except the Pope. There's more than one pope.
— The rest are dead.
— All right, they're dead. This is from a dead one.
— Well then he can't have been dead very long.
— Look, we don't have to tell him it's a pope's leg. Stanley lives in a basement apartment. All we have to do is break the lock on the grating, we can do that some way, and slip it into bed with him. He'll wake up and think it's the Pope.
— The Pope in bed with him?
— But then he'll find that there's no one attached to it. Then he'll know.
— What'll he know?
— Why then he'll know that the Pope is dead.
The car turned toward Sixth Avenue.
At four in the morning, the nurse told Stanley that his mother was sleeping well, that he had better go home and get some rest, they would get in touch with him immediately if anything happened. Mother lay in one of those bed machines which can be cranked and warped in any direction, to accommodate whatever vagary of accident or human ill. But even now, though the black beads lay quiet in her fingers, she was not asleep. Not at all. After a reassuring look at her teeth in the glass she had closed her eyes and pretended sleep, so that they would go away, mortally tired she was of all of their quietened voices in hope that she would live, their faces drawn in dolefulness trusting that she would not die when that, in unequivocal reason, was all she wanted.