I was seated in a clean, high-tech restaurant very different from Saigon, the Vietnamese restaurant two floors beneath my loft on Grand Street. (Two friends, Maggie Lah and Michael Poole, live in the loft between my place and the restaurant.) Bare white walls instead of painted palm fronds, pink linen tablecloths with laundry creases. The waiter handed me a long stiff folded white menu printed with the restaurant's name, L'Imprime. I opened me menu and saw Human Hand listed among Les Viandes. Human hand, I thought, that'll be interesting, and when the waiter returned, I ordered it. It came almost immediately, two large, red, neatly severed hands covered with what looked more like the rind of a ham than skin. Nothing else was on the white disc of the plate. I cut a section from the base of the left hand's thumb and put it in my mouth. It seemed a little undercooked. Then the sickening realization that I was chewing a piece of a hand struck me, and I gagged and spat it out into my pink napkin. I shoved the plate across the table and hoped that the waiter would not notice that I did not have the stomach for this meal. At that moment I woke up shuddering and jumped out of bed.
From the light that gathered and burned around the edge of the curtain, I knew that the day would be hot. We were going to have one of those unbearable New York summers when the dog shit steams like dumplings on the sidewalks. By August the entire city would be wrapped in a hot wet towel. I lay back down on the bed and tried to stop shaking. Outside, in the sunny space between buildings, I heard the cooing of a bird and thought it was a white dove. The dove made a morning sound, and my mind stalled for a moment on the question of whether the bird was a morning or a mourning dove. It had a soft, questioning cry, and when the sound came again, I heard what the cry was. Oh, it drew in its breath, who? Oh (indrawn breath), who, who? Oh, who? It seemed a question I had been hearing all my life.
I got up and took a shower. In the way that some people sing, I said, Oh, who? After I dried myself I remembered the two red hands on the white plate, and wrote this memory down in a notebook. The dream was a message, and even if I was never able to decode it, I might be able to use it in a book. Then I wrote down what the dove had said, thinking that the question must be related to the dream.
My work went slowly, as it had for four or five mornings in row. I had reached an impasse in my book—I had to solve a problem my story had given me. I wrote a few delaying sentences, made a few notes, and decided to take a long walk. Walking gives the mind a clean white page. I got up, put a pen in my shirt pocket and my notebook in the back pocket of my trousers, and let myself out of the loft.
When I walk I cover great distances, both distracted and lulled by what happens on the street. In theory, the buckets go down into the well and bring up messages for my notebook while my attention is elsewhere. I don't get in my own way; I think about other things. The blocks go by, and words and sentences begin to fill the clean white page. But the page stayed empty through Soho, and by the time I was halfway across Washington Square, I still had not taken my notebook out of my pocket. I watched a teenage boy twirl a skateboard past the drug dealers with their knapsacks and briefcases and saw a motorboat clipping over blue water. One of my characters was steering it. He was squinting into the sun, and now and then he raised his hand to shield his eyes. It was very early morning, just past sunrise, and he was speeding across a lake. He was wearing a gray suit. I knew where he was going, and took out my notebook and wrote: Charlie—speedboat—suit—sunrise—docks at Lily's house— hides boat in reeds. I saw fine drops of mist on the lapels of Charlie's nice gray suit.
So that was what Charlie Carpenter was up to.
I began walking up Fifth Avenue, looking at all the people going to work, and saw Charlie concealing his motorboat behind the tall reeds at the edge of Lily Sheehan's property. He jumped out onto damp ground, letting the boat drift back out into the lake. He moved through the reeds and wiped his face and hands with his handkerchief. Then he dabbed at the damp places on his suit. He stopped a moment to comb his hair and straighten his necktie. No lights showed in Lily's windows. He moved quickly across the long lawn toward her porch.
At Fourteenth Street I stopped for a cup of coffee. At Twenty-fourth Street Lily came out of her kitchen and found Charlie Carpenter standing inside her front door.Decided to stop off on your way to work, Charlie? She was wearing a long white cotton robe printed with little blue flowers, and her hair was shapeless. I saw that Lily had recently applied eggplant-colored polish to her toenails. You're full of surprises.
Then it stopped moving, at least until it would start again. At Fifty-second Street, I went into the big B. Dalton to look for some books. In the religion section downstairs I bought Gnosticism, by Benjamin Walker, The Nag Hammadi Library, and The Gospel According to Thomas. I took the books outside and decided to walk to Central Park.
When I got past the zoo I sat on a bench, took out my notebook, and looked for Charlie Carpenter and Lily Sheehan. They had not moved. Lily was still saying You're full of surprises, and Charlie Carpenter was still standing inside her front door with his hands in his pockets, smiling at her like a little boy. They both looked very fine, but I was not thinking about them now. I was thinking about the body squad and Captain Havens. I remembered the strange, disordered men with whom I had spent that time and saw them before me, in our shed. I remembered my first body, and Ratman's story about Bobby Swett, who had disappeared into a red mist. Mostly, I could see Ratman as he was telling the story, his eyes angry and sparkling, his finger jabbing, his whole being coming to life as he talked about the noise the earth made by itself. Ratman seemed astonishingly young now—skinny, with a boy's unfinished skinniness.
Then, without wanting to, I remembered some of what happened later, as I occasionally do when a nightmare wakes me up. I had to get up off the bench, and I shoved my notebook in my pocket and started walking aimlessly through the park. I knew from experience that it would be hours before I could work or even speak normally to anyone. I felt as though I were walking over graves—as though a lot of people like Ratman and di Maestro, both of whom had only been boys too young to vote or drink, lay a few feet beneath the grass. I tensed up when I heard someone coming up behind me. It was time to go home. I turned around and went toward what I hoped was Fifth Avenue. A pigeon beat its wings and jumped into the air, and a circle of grass beneath it flattened out in the pattern made by an ascending helicopter.
It is as though some old part of yourself wakes up in you, terrified, useless in the life you have, its skills and habits destructive but intact, and what is left of the present you, the person you have become, wilts and shrivels in sadness or despair: the person you have become is only a thin shell over this other, more electric and endangered self. The strongest, the least digested parts of your experience can rise up and put you back where you were when they occurred; all the rest of you stands back and weeps.
I saw the face of the man I had killed on a Chinese man carrying his daughter on his shoulders. He jumped up on an almost invisible trail. His face looked frozen—it was almost funny, all that amazement. I watched the Chinese man carry his daughter toward a Sabrett's hot dog cart. The girl's round face filled like a glass with serious, gleeful concentration. Her father held a folded dollar in his hand. He was carrying a ridiculous old rifle that was probably less accurate than a BB gun. He got a hot dog wrapped in white tissue and handed it up to his daughter. No ketchup, no mustard, no sauerkraut. Just your basic hot dog experience. I raised my M-16 and I shot him in the throat and he fell straight down. It looked like a trick.