Hunger and Thirst Read online

  He looked at the room.

  Everything was the same. The coat, the hat, the money, the dresser and closet, everything.

  His gaze ran over the floor. The rug was dirty and spotty brown. There was a piece of blackened gum scuffed into it.

  He’d never noticed it before. It must have been put there by a former occupant of this room. He looked at the piece of gum and imagined the man or woman stepping on it and then lifting their foot gingerly with a muffled curse and looking at the threads of gum their soles were pulling from the rug.

  He wished that person was here now to help him.

  It seemed very telling that a person had stood right on that spot and stepped on a piece of gum. An actual, living person had stood there. But now he was alone here and that person did not know of him and couldn’t help him. In his sleepy, half-conscious daze, it seemed strangely important and valuable to him. He kept thinking of it as he stared at the rug and the gum. He saw that the rug was made up of three irregularly sized pieces that were sewed together with thick brown twine. He had never seen that before either. Odd, how many things you notice when you have the time, he thought.

  There was a magazine lying at the foot of the table that stood by the window. He looked at it.

  MOVIES read the cover, 10.

  He saw Ava Gardner sitting in a creamy blue nightgown looking up at him. Her eyes were sleepy and sultry. Her moist red lips were parted a little. There was a lock of dark hair dangling over her creamy forehead. The bodice of her nightgown was cut very low. He could see the healthy brownish-white flesh, the entrance to the valley that ran between her upright breasts. He could feel the softness of her flesh with his eyes. Her shoulders were back and she had her right hand pressed against her hip. Through the silken transparency of the flaring sleeve, he could see her smooth, lightly-haired arm.

  His mind asked Ava Gardner—What are you doing down there, how did you fall on the floor?

  Ava Gardner looked at him and, to his question, gave no answer. He looked back at her.

  In the dreary, waking drone of a city morning they were immobile and gazing at each other.

  He looked over her torso and saw her firm, rising breasts and his organ was erect and stiff. But he didn’t feel a thing. He might have been in church so pure and unsullied by libidinous thoughts was he. He looked at her breasts and his eyes observed how lovely they were, how soft and curved and…

  He lifted his eyes to the ceiling without caring anymore.

  His eyes fastened on the ceiling, the brownish white tint of the ceiling plaster. It was almost the same shade as her flesh. How different the source. Yet the same too. Both the result of thirty odd years of wear and maturation. His eyes saw that, deep-set, lack-lustre eyes. He looked at the plaster falling off. How can a room be so dirty, he wondered, how can it possibly be so dirty and ugly?

  The ceiling wavered. His brain slid off its perch and for a split second, he wondered where he was again. Then his eyes, as if to answer the question of his mind, dropped their gaze and he was looking at the money again. And he remembered.

  There were five twenty-dollar bills, six, no, seven of them. He could see them by squinting. He tried to remember where his glasses were. He couldn’t remember. He wished he had them though. He felt that if he could see the world more clearly he would be more a part of it and able to return to it the sooner. But the way it was, his myopia caused the world to be blurred. It was not sharp and pin-pointed in detail. It separated him. He was in another bourne. He was apart, just a little bit yes, but still apart, some distance from the maximum point of being alive in the world.

  Since he could not see his way back completely, there was only one thing to do.

  He must sit up and wash his face.

  He had to get out of there. He couldn’t wait. He’d rested. Now he had to get up. The shock must have worn off, he told his system. “All right,” he said. And said it calmly as he could as if by cajoling his body, he could soothe it into motion.

  “Now,” he said.

  Very calmly, and with a thin assured smile on his face, he tried to sit up.

  Muscles pulled in their slack. They tightened. The levers of his skeleton and covering cables began to pull. They jerked once like a mulish derrick, trying to lift him up.

  The pain in his back began to throb. He felt as if he were being held against a great spinning carborundum wheel.

  And his body stayed. And the smile stayed, frozen hard as his flesh tightened. Rocklike, struggling to sit up, he looked like a pop-eyed, grinning idiot.

  “All right!”

  His voice became shaky and alarmed again. He lost calm detachment. He lost his assurance and his cloak of forced confidence. He struggled. He pushed and clutched and strained every muscle, his body aching and burning. Breaths blew great bubbles of saliva through the spaces between his clamped teeth. They popped from his lips and broke, running down over his chin. His right hand twitched under him, his body shook like a piece of metal caught and spun by a buzzing drill bit.

  He heard the bed springs squeaking, outside the busses roaring and hissing and the cars running along and the trains grinding on their tracks while he, like a shuddering statue, tried to sit up.

  “No!”

  He could not stifle the cry as his muscles lost grip and strength slid from him. And, although he had not risen at all, it seemed as if he fell back, slumping heavily on the mattress, gasping with open mouth, his body swelling and throbbing with great waves of pain.

  One brown-trousered leg was thrown over the edge of the bed. His hands were motionless, five pronged lumps of dry, dirty flesh. He looked like a marionette taken from its box and tossed there carelessly, unable to move or compose its floppy limbs.

  Oh, my God, it’s true.

  The inner chamber of his mind spoke as if alarmed but he knew it wasn’t. Its work was undiminished, its scope unlimited by this paralysis. It could go on clicking until he rotted. But the words came anyway.

  It is true. I am awake. I am paralyzed. I am in my room on Third Avenue and I cannot move myself.

  He turned his gaze and looked dizzily at the dying rose.

  It was pallid and curling up. His eyes moved. He saw the other two objects. His head must have moved, he thought in surprise.

  One of the objects he still didn’t remember. But suddenly he recalled that the other one, the higher one, was a bar of candy.

  I’m hungry, said his brain as if cued in.

  For a moment it enraged him how predictable the body was. He saw a candy bar and his stomach bespoke the need for food. And he saw the water and immediately his body called for water.

  For a long moment, he felt superior to the childish expectable dictates of his body.

  Then he forgot it, then he didn’t care. He could not follow any train of thought fully. His brain slipped and slid over thought like a poor, bundled-up traveler walking over slick winter ice. He looked at the candy bar again. I’m hungry, said his stomach.

  He was.

  His stomach felt empty. The more he thought about it the emptier it seemed. The walls seemed to be sucking themselves in just to be annoying, to make him hungrier. He tried to raise a hand to push against his stomach, forgetting. Only his right hand stirred slightly under his leg. He closed his eyes. I’m hungry, he said to force out the other thoughts. I’m hungry, I’m hungry, I’m hungry…

  Until he was hungry.

  Now his organ was subsiding. He watched as the small hill in his pants began to sink, quivering as it fell. My bladder is distended, he thought, my God I have to go.

  For a moment the spasm of burning and pain gripped him tightly. Then it passed, leaving him cold and shaky.

  And wondering, in rising terror, what was going to happen to him because he was hungry and thirsty and had a terrible need to empty his body of its piling wastes.

  But he couldn’t move.

  5

  He was back in the army.

  He was in bed and it was Sunday mor
ning so he didn’t have to get up. He was exhausted. They had just come back from a twenty mile hike. He felt exhaustion in every muscle of his body.

  He had his eyes open and was looking at the ceiling. There was a bar of sunlight falling across the floor and bending up and over the foot of his bed. Through the sheet he felt the warmth, like the caressing of a hand. The heat traveled up his legs and into his body.

  He was thinking about sex.

  His hands were under the blanket feeling and pressing. The heat made him feel soft and pliable and he was breathing heavily, pressing insistent fingers into his groin.

  Leonora came down the long barracks aisle.

  He knew she was coming, he didn’t even have to look. He felt her slippers on the floor. He heard their soft blueness and smelled their clicking. The other men in bed all whistled softly but they knew she was his.

  And she came to him and the cot springs squeaked as she sat down beside him, wearing a blue silk nightgown and smiling down at him, stoking his tousled hair.

  “Hello Ava,” he said and when he said it, her mouth turned down and her face grew very stern.

  “Why did you call me Ava?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’m just kidding you,” he said, “Because I saw a magazine on the rug in my room and the rug has a piece of gum scuffed into it and it was a picture, a photograph of Ava Gardner on the cover and she had on a blue silk nightgown like the one you have on so I thought it would be pretty funny to call you Ava.”

  She smiled. She said, “Oh,” and she smiled again. She bent over to kiss him and the bodice of her gown fell away from her small firm breasts.

  He felt her hair fall over both his cheeks and he was in a house of warm hair and her lips were warm and she was tickling his mouth with the tip of her tongue. And while she was kissing him he said, “Say John,” to the boy sleeping in the next cot, “You don’t mind if I lay her, do you?”

  “Golly, it’s all right with me Erick,” John Foley said in his sleep, hugging his rifle.

  He felt all right then. And he opened his mouth and she pulled the sheet off his body and everybody was laughing and whistling but he didn’t care. “Do you care?” he asked Leonora and she said, “I don’t care.”

  He kissed her neck and pulled the gown over her shoulders and pulled it down until it slid out and over the hills of her breasts and slipped off her rigid nipples and dropped whispering to her waist. He kissed her hot flesh.

  Everything sped and ran. She was lying under him and moaning Oh darling, oh darling, keep it up, keep it up but all of a sudden he had to stop. I’m sorry Leo honey he said I have to go to the No you don’t she said and she was angry and hot. But I have to Leo don’t you understand I’ll only be a minute. No! she said angrily or I’ll scream and wake up your mother. I have to Leo and he ran naked down the long splintery barracks aisle and jumped down the stairs to the latrine and stood leaning his head against the damp wall over the urinal and watching himself and John was next to him in the Central Park toilet and he said to John—Say, John is this the pause that refreshes or is this the pause that…

  He woke up with a shudder.

  His organ was erect again and urine was pouring out of it. He felt it running and splashing down his stomach and crotch, dribbling over his thighs. It was hot. He saw the enlarging spot of wetness in his pants, saw a tiny spurt of yellow fluid come out between the buttons on his pants. It soaked him.

  He didn’t care.

  He was smiling and his eyes closed again and he shivered and relished the feeling of hot urine pouring over him. He felt excited and happy, breathing in deeply through gritted teeth as the urine flooded over him endlessly, soaking down under him, blotted up by the bed clothes. He didn’t feel his bladder working. He just felt the hot wetness and it seemed as if someone were pouring it over his lower extremities.

  When it finally stopped he sighed in sleepy satisfaction, still half in the dream. I don’t care Leo, he either said or thought. I’ll do it again. I love it, it’s wonderful, I love it, I love it, I love it.

  The room began to drift and melt away. Blackness, warm and comforting dropped over him and shut his eyes with gentle fingers. He slept, his long body warm and moist and comfortable. Slept without dreams.

  Like in a warm place, very nice. A warm, wet, dark place.

  6

  It was almost nine.

  People hurried to work. They jumped down from bus steps. They came from the earth, a disgorged flow of pumping legs and arms and bobbing heads. They came thumping down the steps from the elevated platform, a swelling line of them, hurrying to work under the grey blue April sky.

  The sun was up but not yet visible in the sky. It lay hidden behind a thin layer of grey. The sky was filled with an endless column of puffy continents drifting along slowly.

  No one in the street looked up at them.

  Everyone’s eyes looked down at the dirty sidewalk or straight ahead toward their destination; the office or the shop or the factory. Some of the people stopped for brief moments to gaze in brief coveting at the window displays. Some of them gazed dumbly and passed on, unsold. Others made mental notes to return when pay day came. Others simply looked with neither the intent to buy nor interest in the product, drawn in by a sign, a picture, a certain twist of display.

  The street was turgid with yellow-topped busses, bulky, thick-wheeled garbage trucks, their bodies a pale white, their tires black and spiked. And streams of private cars and taxicabs. The heavy rumble of their forward movement shook the house. It made the dirty walls tremble, sent tiny clouds of plaster dust into the air, formed motes of dust in the air. It stirred the bubbly water in the glass. It made the wilting rose jiggle in its place.

  He was still asleep, cold and shivering, dreaming of snow and winter.

  The room was chilly and the soggy underwear and pants clung to his flesh like cold wet paper. He stirred restlessly, his right hand jerking a little. Then it pulled out completely from beneath his leg as a wintry blast struck the him that dreamed.

  He shuddered and moaned and his eyes fluttered open.

  He looked dully at the ceiling.

  His eyes felt caked over with a hard dry crust. It still stabbed at the corners of his eyes. It annoyed him and he wanted to wipe it away.

  His throat was dry. His tongue shifted sluggishly as he licked his lips.

  There he was. Still there. Whatever hope that it had been a dream was now gone for good. It was as real as anything was real. He tried to sit up. But there was no point in it. He couldn’t sit up. He just lay there without moving, staring up at the ceiling.

  His back and right shoulder were still cold.

  Now his crotch and thighs and upper legs were cold too. The rest of his body was more or less comfortable. It was getting warmer outside. Sunlight was beginning to pierce through to the ground. It was easing out the knotted muscles of the city and himself. Everything was running smoother.

  The traffic sped and parted and throbbed and rumbled, never ending. And lives come and go, he thought, and eyes open on the mystery of life and eyes close on the mystery of death and still the traffic moves on, the elevated trains fleeing from station to station and back again. And back again. And again.

  Or do they?

  He drew in a shuddering breath.

  There was an odor to the room. He was beginning to get it. An odor of the old, the drying and the decaying. All mingled with the pungent, musky odor of his urine-soaked trousers. It was the smell of dying things.

  He asked the question of no one.

  “What am I to do?”

  And when he asked to know, his eyes flickered like pictures on a haunted screen and no one could tell what things were in his eyes.

  Again, he looked at the rose, still drying, still shriveling, the outside petals pulling away from the center folds.

  It was like some rare fruit being peeled by the atmosphere. The petals would pull away, one by one through the coming hours and drop onto the white dusty towel whi
ch was supposed to be a table cloth.

  And suddenly a feeling of intense might dropped on him and he closed his eyes, his heart beating quickly.

  What does it mean to lie paralyzed? To lie paralyzed and look at a dying rose? It had to mean something. The complete thing, the affair in its entirety.

  How many times had he been walking or standing or sitting, no matter where, and, suddenly, looked up and said or thought in the profoundest wonder—how long has this been going on?

  But this portion of it; lying paralyzed in a room on Third Avenue in New York in April.

  What did it signify?

  It had to mean something. It simply had to have some intimation of purpose. What was it in the wide world, in the vast universe that he should be here in this ugly, rotting room, unable to get up? What did it mean that his overcoat was a jumbled, caverned lump of wool on the dirty, spotted rug, that bills of large denomination made a pattern of scroll-worked green on the light brown rug?

  And that he, a human being, an amalgam of nerves and tendons and muscles and flesh and skin and a brain and vague hopes for a soul—was shot? Shot in the back by a wizened, miserly old man.

  Was there a meaning? Certainly there were facts. The facts were clear. He was in room 27 of this particular house on Third Avenue and the walls were green and thickly, clumsily plastered and cracked. And there was one wall board showing over there where the plaster had fallen off. That was by the other table on which his typewriter rested, silent and aloof. The wardrobe closet door was slightly ajar and so were all the drawers in the dresser but the bottom one and the mirror on top had a thin layer of dust hanging on its surface and the rose was dying.

  Was there a pattern for all that?

  He felt dizzy, trying to discover it. As he had always grown dizzy when he sought a meaning to everything, a template that fitted over all the parts.

  And, in the dizziness, the edges of the room clouded again and he blinked his eyes.