4

Heretofore sweet Faith slumbered; then, past midnight, after two days’ tiring journey from Georgia to Chicago and a restless sleep in her train seat, Faith awoke to the wrenching of gears and a shrill whistle. Her car lurched backward, then was still, surrounded by the hissing of steam from engine valves. She rubbed her palms against her eyes, licked at a sour taste in her mouth, and smeared away moisture clouding her window. Outside, passengers with suitcases hurried through a semicircular terminal to a crowded exit. Brown men in dull black suits pushed carts piled higher than their heads with heavy luggage. The air rolled with steam. Faith pulled her bag from a gunmetal-gray rack overhead and hurried through the narrow aisle to the door. She stepped from the car, shivering in the midst of a fast-moving crowd that passed her on both sides, jostled her and, before she was in the clear, had brushed off her sign. She followed the other passengers down the broad strip to a bright waiting room. Men and women met, embraced, and left arm in arm. Others raced off alone, if no one met them, toward stairs at the rear of the room. Where was she to begin? Who in this room looked friendly enough to answer her questions? Their steps seemed to have a definite direction, their heels rang against the tiled floor with efficiency, with system and method. Faith stepped timidly in the shadow of a couple in matching trench coats and tams, following them at a safe distance up a slow escalator, down several narrow corridors plastered with political posters peeling with age, and into a hallway with parquet floors ending on the street level.

She felt panic when she reached the outside. The couple had already climbed into their car at the curb and driven off. Where, she had intended to ask, can I find a room? A meal? But they were gone. The street was silent save for the thudding of car tires on cobblestones and, from around the corner, the blast of horns. Standing still, her bag swinging at her side, she felt she’d entered a place desolate, despised by man, a canyon of jagged walls. The air was cold and heavy in her lungs. Her breath hovered before her face as blue wisps of steam. The sidewalk, too, was cold beneath her feet, its icy surface tearing at her soles as she hurried down the street to keep warm. A sign on the corner said Sixty-fourth. Which told her nothing. The storefronts were all covered with lengths of metal latticework. At the far end of the block she saw a man wearing sunglasses and a green army jacket leave a telephone booth at the bus stop. Faith approached him.

“Que es esto?” the man said, almost shouting. He backed away from her as if she held a summons. Cried, “Vayaaa!”

“I’m just trying to find a room,” she said, stepping closer. “I just now got off the train—”

He raised his glasses to his brow, squinted his black eyes at her, said, “No comprendo,” tersely, and backed away. He saw his bus turn the corner, and bolted into the street to meet it. From the rear window he frowned at her.

In the shiny glass of a Japanese curio shop she saw her reflection. You would have thought a witch had ridden her all night. (They do that, witches. The hags turn you over on your stomach when you’re sleeping, shove a bit into your mouth, and ride you on all fours for hours. All night long. And in the morning you feel real blue and ache from head to toe.) Her dress, though skimpy and a riot of wrinkles, was still somewhat, though only barely, intact. Her hair was drawn up and matted in dark clumps; her skin had turned ashy and gray from the cold. Her mouth and nose — dry. Her stomach grumbled. It pinched with a hunger bordering on nausea. Looking away, she saw the city lights grow brighter, more numerous on the far side of the bridge that began just across the street. Faith started across, but stopped midway when a particularly vicious cramp knotted in her right side. She was used to gales, to soothing sirocco summers. The cold began to slow her movements, to seep beneath her skin. To burn. Faith’s feet went numb, like weights cemented to her ankles. Her fingers stiffened. A small fire engine shot from around the corner, its bells ringing as it rumbled over the bridge and down a boulevard lined with bare leafless elms, and farther on, sirens blaring, to red flames twisting into the sky from a burning water tower. It was here, on this chilly South Side bridge, that Faith grew afraid, quailed and pined for home. She was alone, and in a strange city. Hadn’t the Swamp Woman said she was a Number One and, therefore, needed direction to avoid disaster? Neither Todd nor Lavidia had prepared her to be alone. She wasn’t equal to the occasion. But she couldn’t say Todd didn’t prepare her for fear.

During the riotous days of his wanderlust, Todd Cross had been a gambler and could take your money in a game of five-card stud faster than any man alive. This he did, and the others involved in that Saturday night game in the back room of the Bucket-o-Blood saloon reached for their pistols. Todd snatched the satchel of money off the wine-stained table, threw himself through the window, fell two flights, and landed on the sheriff’s horse. Unfortunately, the sheriff was on it; that is, until Todd came hurtling down. The sheriff called a posse, the posse called the vigilantes, and they called the National Guard. Todd rode like the wind. But his horse petered out near the mountains, whinnied, “To hell with this,” and Todd had to make it on foot, armed with but a single-shot derringer, his satchel, and a whole lot of heart. The hounds were at his heels the whole night long, vigilante bullets swarmed around his head like bees gone crazy. Todd kept stepping. He hid in a mountain cave. But they found him, children. His back pressed to the moist wall of the cave, he could hear the dogs outside, fighting one another to see who’d be first to chew the marrow from his bones. “Give up!” the vigilantes hooted. In a corner, just inches from his feet, Todd saw two gleaming eyes; he heard a grizzly growling. Above him was the bodacious beating of bat wings. Vampires. Todd fell to his knees, ankle-deep in a small stream that rippled through the cave. He prayed — he had to shout it, children, because those dogs and vigilantes and bats were loud! Todd fell on his side; he screamed when the bloodhounds came barreling in. Water touched his lips. He thrust out his tongue:

“Ahhh. ”

But Faith felt in no way reassured. This wasn’t home, this wasn’t the South. Lost, directionless, any step she took would probably be wrong. Fatal. Faith leaned back against the bridge, trembling. She felt something soft along her shoulders. Before she could turn a gloved hand with its cloth fingers worn away clamped over her mouth. Something snatched at her right arm, twisted it behind her back.

“Just be quiet,” an excited voice said into her ear. “I don’t want to hurt you. Just don’t scream.”

She should have bitten the salty-tasting fingers pressed against her teeth; she should have kicked back her heels toward his groin and screamed with all her strength. But the touch of his hand was electrifying — hard and rough. She was helpless, her eyes saw white, her knees dissolved.

“Just be silent,” the voice stammered. “I’m a poor man — a desperate man, or I wouldn’t be doing anything like this.” There was silence and horribly heavy breathing. The air carried the rush of traffic faraway. Then a rasping intake of air. “I was a professor at Princeton. Once — I was a scholar, you see? I’ve published, lectured, created courses unheard of before my coming. But my ideas cost me my job. No, you wouldn’t understand, of course, but what I wanted to teach was the truth not, not—” His voice trailed off in a whisper, then came back booming in her ear. “Pray that the poets were right — that someday, someday the rich will find themselves governed in a hell ruled by philosopher-kings. But until then, child. give me your bag!”

Herewith, the hands released her. Faith pivoted, nearly falling, and glimpsed a squat, red-eyed, wolfish man in a mauve-colored coat. He wrenched the bag from her hand, shoved her aside, and sprinted across the bridge, shouting, “Forgive me! The victim and victor are One!”

As he ran, rifling Faith’s laundry bag, the thief collided at the end of the bridge with a silhouetted figure. He recoiled and shouted, “Mercy!” She saw him fling the bag aside and, through a series of jerky feints, elude the figure. Who picked up her bag. He hurried up the bridge, its lights bringing into clarity his dark waistcoat, then a hat pulled over his eyes. He was sweating profusely. From his face there drifted steam.

“Your bag’s empty,” he said breathlessly. “There wasn’t money in it, was there?”

Faith collapsed against the bridge. She held her head. “Just a few dollars — call someone—” She looked up, startled by his silence. He was shaking his head. What struck her immediately was his glasses — silver wire-rims hooked over winglike ears and holding lenses so thick his eyes seemed to float behind them like dark blowfish. Between those lenses was a thin bridge dropping to a bulbous nose and wide nostrils. And below that — tight lips surrounded by a scraggly goatee. All over he had the hue of coffee colored with skim milk: a hesitant brown. His feet were tiny and delicate, poorly supporting his wide girth and watery, womanly hips. This was he who saved her. Also he who said, “I hate to sound like a pessimist, but there’s no point in calling the police. Your money’s gone. I can take you home if you like.” Again, he licked his thin lips. Faith found him frightening, not because he was intimidating or because he seemed aggressive, but because he appeared ready to fly apart — nervous, put together with phlegm, gristle, and paste. She looked away, shuddering, her teeth rattling as the wind stole like a lecher up her legs.

“Where can I take you?” he asked. He glanced over his shoulder (which he did often), then produced from his coat pocket a handkerchief so neatly folded it seemed the product of obsession. “Where are you staying?” He cocked his head. “What’s your name?” Finally, he raised his voice. “Can you speak?”

“My name is Faith Cross and I don’t have a place to stay.” The region around her mouth felt brittle, her chattering teeth clipped at the edge of her tongue. “I don’t have a place to go—”

He started to speak, but held his breath, picking his teeth with his tongue. At the bridge’s end two officers appeared with clubs swinging like pendulums at their sides. He grabbed Faith’s arm and tugged at her slightly. “There’s a nice spot just around the corner,” he said. His voice was as thin as his lips. “You look like you could use a drink.”

Tugging Faith along the bridge, he directed her into the close foyer of an all-night tavern, then through a glass door to a semidark room. He found a booth at the rear, and sat poker-faced toward the door. In the dim light cast by the glowing blue screen of a television set above the bar, Faith could see soft kernels of sleep in the corners of his bloodshot eyes, could smell, when he leaned close to her across the table, his milk-sour breath.

“What do you drink?” he asked.

“Drink?” She hesitated, feeling crowded in the closeness of the booth, congested both in her throat and in her thoughts with the unfamiliar sounds and sensations in the room: those in the room around her were either looking for or trying to forget something, though she knew not what; but a portion of it was lost in the blue strata of cigarette smoke screening her vision of the peaked and anxious faces of drinkers at the bar who, as they tipped their glasses, regained it, only for others to have it lost again when a woman’s shrill cackling rose above their threshold of insularity. It was happiness they sought, or so Faith imagined; and it was sorrow they sought to escape. In and out, from those seated along the wood-paneled wall to those at the bar, something both light and dark moved, brightening a face here, causing a mouth to droop there, but continually moved silently from one nightlifer to another. Despite her original dread, Faith no longer felt afraid. Her host seemed to move through the smoke and pulse beat of this crowd easily. He had returned her bag, he seemed genuinely interested in her. Perhaps he could be, if given the chance, not a friend in utility (for these are flighty), or a friend in common traits and interests (far too superficial), but a friend, truly, in faith.

“You look like a Bloody Mary to me,” he said, smiling.

Faith’s left hand touched her face. “I do?”

He grinned, left her, and slipped through the noisy crowd to the bar. During the interval of his absence she again felt unprotected. It reminded her of the way she felt when she stood on the platform at the train station in town watching Alpha Omega Jones leave home. It had been a terrible day. By chance she had encountered Alpha’s mother at the feed store in town and learned that Alpha, in just an hour, would be leaving Hatten County to look for work up North. She had not seen him for months, he working and all. After delivering the box of dry goods to Lavidia, she raced back to town. And missed him. She could see his sad profile in the train window — sad because of the necessity of his flight. She shouted his name, but the train whistle smothered her cry. The train pulled off, bathing her in white steam as she ran behind it, tossing pebbles at his window. She had been there; it was important that he know that, that he should carry her memory with him always. Probably, he never knew. She remembered her feeling of isolation as being unbearable. He, like all those in the bar, had been only inches from her in physical distance, but beyond touch. It lay heavy on Faith’s chest. She started talking the instant her host returned to slide a frosty glass toward her.

“You haven’t told me your name—”

He pursed his lips, and pulled at the tip of his nose. “Arnold T. Tippis.”

“Well, Mr. Tippis,” she said, “I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve—”

“Forget it.” He yanked his nose again, then adjusted his glasses. “You don’t owe me anything yet.” For a second he looked embarrassed, perhaps by his eyes, which wandered in sweeping motions across her face, stopping momentarily to study the asymmetry of her eyes, then her mouth, and moved on to her shoulders and suggestion of breasts. Men judging livestock, or women inspecting fresh eggs at the fair have such eyes. “You’re nice-looking,” he said flatly, “. cute.”

It was a purely objective statement; nothing, she convinced herself, lurked behind such a simple statement of fact. This she told herself at least twice, believing it until Tippis, after clearing his throat, reached across the table and folded his hand over her own.

“I’m looking for something!” Faith blurted.

With his free hand Tippis alternately chain-smoked, blowing smoke from the side of his mouth, rather than in her face, and nibbled at rye saltines from a bowl. “That’s bad,” he muttered.

Her feelings were drained into the immediacy of the warmth between his hand and her own. She looked away from him again, but left her hand still, aware that her palm was growing moist and her fingers trembling. Not in erotic response; it was more like fear. This was not, in any circumstance, a safe man to be with, not because of what he might do to her but because of some strange thing he’d done to himself. Suddenly, her hand went dry, and she was all thought, pure intellect, and concentrating on the way his lips curled back like proud flesh around a half-healed wound.

“I’m looking for the really Good Thing.” She sipped at her drink, discovered she had never tasted tomato juice prepared in quite this way, and accepted, when the barmaid noticed her empty glass, a second drink. To be truthful, it made her a bit braver.

“Stop looking,” Tippis said. He arched his eyebrows sleepily. “Everybody’s looking for what’s Good and True and Beautiful. It’s damned foolish, really. Be content. Self-analysis will put you at peace with your problems — really.”

After the third drink Faith’s stomach felt even emptier than before, like a warm pit, or the inside of an old, old cave unvisited by beast or fowl for centuries. Her head felt the same way. As a muffled muttering, his words came to her:

“Me,” he said, “I can live with my problems. They make me unique, so they’re okay. You don’t mind listening to this, do you? I mean, you girls have to hear a lot of this sort of thing, right?”

Dizzy, Faith said, “Right,” her brain besotted. She bugged her eyes at him. It was getting hard to see. She looked away briefly and was shocked by her condition, knowing that the swelling and detachment of her thoughts, like subdividing amoebas, had changed the room in a peculiar way: the bar looked glutted with bodies — fat ones squeezed into loud pastel shirts, lean and tall ones rising from the floor like reeds; and their outlines formed an odd unity similar to geometric shapes, flowing together, implicating each other in a terribly necessary way, jelling into a colorless whole. This was not rhythm, only chaos. She felt outside them, or locked within herself with all of them beyond her. Overhead, a star-shaped chandelier cast the entire room in inundating bolts of ocean blue. Watching it made her nauseous. She attended to Tippis, who lowered his eyes to the table and scratched his forefinger at cracker crumbs on the checkered cloth.

“My analyst told me to scream when I get frustrated, but that’s not really as crazy as it sounds, not at all, because all my life there’ve been things I’ve wanted to scream at, to strike out of my path, or trample under my heel. But I kept silent. I tried to be cunning, thinking that — like the young sapling that bends in the wind — I could eventually conquer the world through endurance. Things started to churn and bubble inside me until I thought I’d explode. Passivity wasn’t working. It was like there was a grenade in my guts. That make any sense?”

Faith concluded hastily, unclearly, that her host was possessed. It happened all the time. Someone was, perhaps, working evil mojo on him. Leechcraft was what he needed, or a talisman, but she had neither, or anything to protect herself, or even anything to keep her heavy head from nodding like an old drunken hedonist gorged with grapes. Faith jerked herself upright. Her teeth felt soft and her bones rubbery; and every few minutes she felt herself sliding down her seat, prevented from going under the table only by Tippis’s hand gripping her wrist.

“So I went to an analyst downtown when things started going wrong on my job. I practiced dentistry on the West Side — made good money, too, and had a good name. But one day my nerves started going, hands started to shake, and I kept getting headaches and hearing voices, y’know?”

She nodded. Yes, she knew. The living dead, when bored, often communicated with their relatives, their friends. The point was to listen to them.

“So I started seeing a psychiatrist. He said I should have come to him maybe ten years ago. He said it was fifty percent in my head and fifty percent in the world. Everybody’s got an ego that arises from the id when they have to satisfy their instinctual needs—” As he talked Tippis’s face twisted as though he tasted bile; he reared back his shoulders, squared them, and squeezed Faith’s dry hand. It didn’t matter. Her hand felt numb. She accepted another drink and nibbled ravenously with her free hand at the stale crackers.

Tippis continued, a muscle beating in his jaw as he looked at but did not quite see her, “He convinced me to do my own research into the psyche.” What he told her made Faith giggle — that is, until she realized he was serious about infantile sexuality, and all those other things neither he nor she could see. Lavidia, she remembered, had derided Todd for believing in things he couldn’t see. But that was different: Lavidia simply hadn’t looked hard and long enough. Tippis said, “It’s so damned obvious! Everything you want is an object for the satisfaction of drives developed in childhood, and you, in society, are an object for others, hardly ever for yourself. But society, through the family and peer group, suppresses these drives so civilization doesn’t evaporate in a collective lust involving billions. Tell me,” he said, pulling at the tip of his dark goatee, “what is it you want most from life?”

It shot from her lips: “The Good Thing.”

Tippis stared, then chuckled, lighting a fresh cigarette, his tenth. “There is no such object. Surely you mean some specific thing that makes you feel good — like scratching, sneezing, or the pleasurable feeling when the valve to your full bladder opens—”

“No, I mean—” She stopped, her eyes wide with incredulity. She stared past him to the wall. What did she mean?

“You’re in serious trouble if you have a drive for which there’s no object. That’s what the world is really all about — subject-object antagonism. Objectifying a thing, making it no more than an object so it can be grasped, manipulated, and ruled is, obviously, dehumanizing, even cruel, I suppose, if done to another person. But too many of your drives can only be satisfied, and only then temporarily, in this way. There is no other way unless you kill off your feelings like a musty old monk or Indian bodhisattva. So find an object. The world provides several, and they’re useful and approved besides. Set an accepted goal for yourself — comfortable living, that’s a good one, or fashion, collecting antique bottles or comic books from World War II. Sublimate, child.” He looked at her over the rims of his glasses and smiled. “Do you like cuisine?”

“I don’t know,” Faith said. “Isn’t that what they clean in the army?”

“That’s latrine,” Tippis snorted. He waved his hand dramatically, then lowered it, stroking her wrist. “You can’t escape history, or the needs and neuroses you’ve picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth (Pardon me, I couldn’t resist that, dentistry and all).” He laughed deeply, “Mhah ha ha ha,” amusing himself. “Your every past action and thought have made you what you are. Am I right or wrong?”

His words troubled Faith. The past, remote and distorted by the mercy of waning memories, had the terrible power to be present at all times in its effects: this was true. It was some kind of law. Didn’t sorcerers control their victims by possessing an old truss they’d worn, old cigarette butts that once touched their lips? And Dr. Lynch — wasn’t what he meant — that what was, was only the form of what had been, even if what was past had been accidental? In their corner of the bar, Faith tried to make her peace with the problems of change, permanence, and the free-will-destroying tyranny of history. Everything, including the Good Thing, seemed to hinge on it. But you couldn’t have it both ways — change and no change, freedom and the comfort of the past. Either you were brand-new at each instant, innocent and undetermined and, therefore, free, or you were a bent-back drudge hauling all of world history on your shoulders across the landscape of your life, limited in all your possibilities, enclosed within the small cage of what had passed before. Each event would weigh you down, alter you, send you through endless changes. You were in bondage. And the other way? — could you be brand-new each instant, remade by the power of either your own hand or magical thoughts? She turned it over and over: the Good Thing, if it could be at all, if it was indeed the truly unique good thing, had to be in the second way, above and beyond the wastepaper basket of the past; but didn’t that imply that it, being so aloft, so absolute, was not really in the world — that the slim line between perfection and impossibility was no distinction at all? It was all so confusing. Her thoughts became sluggish and lost their connections. Tippis’s voice drifted back again, breaking the mood.

“. am I right or wrong?”

“That’s so grim. ” she wanted to say, but her tongue, heavy as lead, would not move.

“It’s the same for everybody,” Tippis sighed through his teeth. “Civilized life is based on suffering, on the enslavement of the instincts and the self-alienation implicit in never being an object for your own needs. Look at this.” He released her hand and unfolded a paper napkin upon which he made a hasty sketch:

“That’s what should happen,” Tippis said. “The instinctual drive is directed from the pleasure to the reality principles by a secondary process that points it head-on at the world. But it meets an anticathexis, and gets displaced this way:

“. so the libidinal energy of the instinct itself feeds the neurosis.” Tippis stared at his sketch and groaned. “That’s me, Arnold Tyler Tippis! All I ever wanted was to be a musician, but that little arrow there got bent all to hell!”

“Tha’s. turrble,” Faith said. “You wanted to be a moosician?”

Pain sprang across Tippis’s face. His eyes seemed to swell like blowfish behind his lenses, and he shook his head violently. “I’m over that now. It doesn’t bother me anymore. I can even laugh about it. ”

Faith did not hear him laugh.

“My parents were killed in a highway accident when I was a child, so I grew up in a little Midwestern town with my aunt and uncle. I called him Uncle Bud, and he played a banjo like nobody’s business — he taught me chords and transitions, the whole works. Naturally, I wanted to be a traveling musician, he being my ego-ideal and all. But my aunt wouldn’t hear of it.” Tippis’s eyes moistened with remembrance. “She used to beat my fingers with a poker whenever she caught me playing Uncle Bud’s banjo after he died.” Tippis placed his cigarette in the ashtray to his left. Faith realized that his right index and forefinger remained outstretched and rigid though his hand was empty. Tippis held his right hand up, staring at his fingers with ill-suppressed horror:

“She broke those two once. They never did come back exactly right. But she had my best interests at heart — I know that now. So,” he sighed, “I couldn’t fret Uncle Bud’s banjo anymore. About the only thing I could do after that was read. I graduated from college when I was nineteen. ”

“And the fingers didn’t heal?” Faith asked.

“Nope.” Tippis glanced over his shoulder, then shoved his right hand into his pocket. “Like I said, it used to bother me. I couldn’t date girls or anything like that for a long time. I felt too self-conscious.” He peeked at her over his lenses again. “You do understand, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry,” Faith said.

“But that’s okay, just as long as clever girls like you can stay on the streets the object I need is provided. You ready to go?”

Though she knew not where and could hardly stand, Faith said, “Yes,” feeling inside and out all toasted, tight-chested, and trusting. He, this somehow sad and pitiable man dirty with the dust of his memories, supported her on his right arm, led her back onto the cold, empty street, and hailed a taxi. At Stony Island he took her to an old building bearing a sign out front — HOTEL SINCLAIR — a place so small its cockroaches had to walk single-file through the hallways. A stocky woman at the desk startled awake when they entered and studied Faith apprehensively before shoving Tippis the ledger and asking, “How old is she?” Tippis grunted, “Twenty-six,” and the woman handed him the key, grumbling, “No drinking — I run a decent place here, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor,” the last part of that being malevolent and as dry as witches’ ashes on a Puritan’s pyre. “Mrs. Taylor?” Faith said. Tippis ignored that and led her up a narrow, creaking flight of stairs to a dingy room at the end of the fourth floor. He closed the door and, in the darkness, dropped Faith across a mattress moist at its center. He stepped farther back into the shadows.

Lying there on the bed she could hear no sound but the rush of Tippis’s birdlike breathing. Her eyes could not adjust to the darkness of the stuffy room — it was like fog, or the oval heart of a hippogriff, laced through and through with an inky material that absorbed any light from under the door. A feeling of vertigo crawled from her stomach to her throat. Fingers caught at her wrists.

To the darkness Faith said, “Arnold—?”

He gave no sign. But upon her fell his entire weight, driving her back along the bedspread on which she felt the raised pattern of flowers. She guessed — peonies. And gasped. A long, agonized breath smelling of tobacco and sour cream blew against her face, slipping down her throat as she struggled to take in air. She wanted to scream.

Tippis did things to her there in the lightless room at the end of the hall that should, if possible, be exorcised from memory. She lay perfectly rigid, tight-lipped like a corpse with rusty pennies on its eyes — praying. No one, apparently, heard. For Tippis continued, his lips humming, and in his mouth was a gurgling sound. Faith twisted her head and vomited over the side of the bed, no longer praying now, but thinking, “To me. not to me is this happening.” Not to that well-protected portion of herself that came spinning forth whenever she said, “I. me. myself,” not to her, but to some part other than herself, some weak and vulnerable part that could so easily be made an object, that was incapable of escaping circumstance and chance. To herself she whispered, “This is bad, Faith. Bad. Faith.” The darkness helped. She couldn’t see him, or what he was doing, and it was easy to dam her ears to his breathing by shouting deep within her mind again and again:

“I am Faith Cross.

“I am Faith.

“I am.

“I.?”

Outside, through the thin walls, she heard from afar the racing of an automobile engine, rubber squeal against pavement and the sound fade away, then — in her ears, louder now — Tippis’s short breaths hungrily sucked in through his nostrils, and a whistle hiss through his teeth. He showered her with sweat and raked at her with his nails. She was his. There was pain and the salty smell of blood, but, oddly enough, no longer was there terror. For this was not happening to her, only to another, to a shadow of herself. To a thing apart, out there, like the odd-shaped bottles and brooms in Lavidia’s kitchen, like the people in the bar.

After what seemed like hours Tippis was done. He clicked on the ceiling light, and Faith saw the wretchedness of her room: a water-ringed door, big yellow flowers on gray wallpaper, cracked sink sticking from the garishly papered wall like a goiter; a broken writing table beside the sagging bed, sticky, damp corners behind an enormous radiator, and bare, warped floors. And on the spring-mattress bed — enough blood to account for a knifing, and whiter stains where Tippis, somehow thinking of her at the last instant, had withdrawn. After dressing he placed a twenty-dollar bill on the bed. His face was pained, it lacked all pleasure. He looked like one possessed, though momentarily freed, but only briefly, only for a heartbeat. At the door, he tried to smile, and broke into song:

“Here’s to fucking that makes a man a fool;

Opens up his pores, wears away his tool—

He gets on a woman but hasn’t long to stay,

His head’s fulla nonsense, his ass’s fulla play;

He gets on like a lion, and slips off like a lamb,

Tries to look passionate, but he isn’t worth a damn.”

Tippis left.

On the bed, breathing in the heavy blood-and-semen smell filling the room, Faith lay spread-eagled, her eyelids closing and her limbs as motionless as those of a wind-up doll now run down and lying like dirt, or defecation, or yesterday’s newspaper, wet and blurred, in the middle of the road. Through the wall behind her she heard radio music playing in the next room, but this she grew unaware of, for her mind — clear and as smooth as a sea stone beaten by waves and elements for a millennium — registered no sensation, held, in its broken glass frame, no reflections. It was, momentarily, dead. No thoughts came to her, not for a while; then, gradually, her breathing grew as rhythmic as the music next door, rising, falling. Falling. She thought, but did not stir. She started to inch slowly, her eyes shut tight and fists clenched, along the interior of her memories — some immediate, some older, some perhaps written into her blood, or cells, or synapses before she was born — timidly feeling the impressions etched there, like ancient friezes or the faded images of brown bison in moist mountain caves. From cavern to cavern she moved, like a child lost in the anfractuous corridors of an art museum with high walls, until she saw, for reasons obscure to her, the first time her father had taken her into town, on a Saturday morning, and for the purpose of buying meal. The summer sun had baked the road to hot, dry dust, had heated the inside of his old Edsel so its torn cushions burned her skin at the touch; the air itself was thick with steam, hot in her lungs, and raised water from the pores on her chest and arms. Todd stopped at a one-pump filling station two miles outside of town, put in a dollar’s worth of ethyl, and Faith — quite young then and naïve to the ways of the world — had asked to use the washroom. She was refused. The man responsible was really a boy, an ugly one at that, with ash-white hair tumbling into his eyes. He had bony arms knotty at his elbows, and his smooth belly pushed through an opening in his plaid shirt, overrode his cowboy belt. He was snaggle-toothed, and bent forward slightly when he took Todd’s dollar, careful not to let Todd’s darker hand touch his own. Todd raged — no. No. It had not happened that way. Not at all. Clearly now she saw her father grinning sheepishly, lowering his eyes to the boy’s muddy boots, and asking in a slow, clumsy voice where — if it was permissible and would not upset the delicate, divinely established order of things, of spiders and sinners and martyred saints whose hierarchy led to a too, too remote Deity — Faith could relieve herself. “In the bushes,” the boy said, “behind the station.” And Todd, taking her by her hand, and trembling across his six feet — though now he looked less than five — led her past the open door of the clean women’s room and set her down in the bushes. He said nothing the remainder of the hot ride into town, nothing as he shopped, and nothing on the way back home. Nothing. And this, she knew, was how he reacted always: never defiant, never confident save when he was alone, or walking behind his farmhouse, or seated late at night like a peaceful wizard before his own fireplace; never indignant or righteous until that spring day three hitchhikers from the next county stopped him on the road, first asking directions, then asking if — through accident or design — he had ever had a white woman, and finally demanding that he remove his trousers to satisfy their curiosity. It was all so clear: the way he stepped quickly aside, or into the street, regardless of mud or traffic, when men smaller than he, perhaps in soul as well as body, came abreast; the begrudging yet servile and obsequious way he used the rear entrances of stores in town, bought clothes without first trying them on, without letting them touch his flesh as the management demanded — the look of futility in his eyes at the end of each summer when he released, without a word of objection, half the produce from their sharecropper’s yield. And especially the way he acted when men, roaring by in cars on weekends, would hoot and jeer at Lavidia while she worked in the fields: Todd turned his head. So Lavidia hated him, perhaps because she knew that pitiable side of Todd that lay within the confines of history, or perhaps because she knew his subservience was necessary to put food on their table, that he ceased to be human simply. to be, to taste, to hear and smell and see the infinity of worldly sensations, even though he enjoyed them through the odd, invisible bars of his imprisonment. So it came to this: his world of pots and pans with proper names was not created by an act of freedom, but by necessity — an escape it was. A valve. On the day of his death alone had he been forced too far; they ignored his forced, jocular, and polite replies to their pointed questions concerning his promiscuity. He had laughed even when they demanded of him what he could not do; and then he turned on them, screaming as though his mind had snapped when they forced it upon him. And so Todd died. But the situation was worse than she’d imagined. She saw, plummeting deeper, that the past was final, irreversible. Each act added to her ongoing essence, was whipped in like batter, or dissolved like sugar in water — invisible, but there nonetheless. Worse, not only your acts but those of others, those who made you an object, were mixed in as well. And these you could not control. What to do, what to do? Tippis had taken her, and paid for his taking; she was placed, placed, and burned deep into her was the label: whore. It was true. A part of her was no longer her own, not for her now, but for another. Had it not always been so? Deeper, farther down the descent, she saw the extent of her own otherness. How much there was in her makeup that was beyond her control, her freedom and reason and magical thinking could only be guessed at, for she could not have witnessed all history. She could not have seen every human deed done, kneaded, whipped into her essential self, her factualness. But she saw its broad curves, its crucial contours. She saw them coming, leaving the great amphitheater of hills at Havana Harbor in a three-hundred-ton slave ship called The Trinity, a sleek ship with an arrowy hull cutting through the storms of the Atlantic, coming with bearded freebooters and buccaneers, coming with cotton bales hollowed at their center, watered-down kegs of Irish whisky and kegs of gunpowder stacked in rows in the hold. Coming for trade along the Gold Coast. Armed with firelocks and cutlasses, they lower their skiff against the water and move to the slave factory at Bangaland, miles from the interior where, the month before, Mandingoes and Fussah were herded in leg irons, whipped, brought to heel — all of them, the debtors, the thieves, the dark prisoners of war and religious heretics. They pick, these restless seamen, no women over twenty-five, or sickly youths, or the ones with tribal incisions and spiraling tattoos on their faces. But they pick the young princess, the chieftain’s favorite daughter: they pick Faith. She is easily worth two bars, a musket, and a case of gin; the others — the men — they, too, are picked, but only for a lifetime of labor on Alabama plantations and Argentina estancias. Faith they pick as the captain’s concubine: it has always been so. In her eyes is defeat and — yes, even submission (though the legend-makers will lie of this to save face), for she has seen the gutting of her village with flame and sword, seen the smashing of her centuries-old temples and, thus, the death of her gods. She struggles with her leg iron and is brought by the action of the boatswain’s whip to her knees. Her head is shaved, her ornaments, anklets, and skin kilts decorated with bright brass beads are stripped away, her body is bathed in oil, and her buttocks branded with a bent wire dipped in fire. Around her, in the difficult Soosoo dialect, her own tribesmen shout for mercy. But their gods are dead. They are separated, husband from wife, father from son, and tossed into the belly of The Trinity with tribesmen of a different tongue. Faith crosses the Atlantic in darkness, sitting chained on another’s lap, or lying, not on her left side where the pressure will be against her heart, but on her right for the entire voyage, surrounded by the sick, the dying: dropsy, pleurisy, flux, malaria, and scurvy — the worst cases are jettisoned overboard, but not at a loss, for in Liverpool, Boston, and Madrid, The Trinity’s shareholders expect only sixty slaves, the ship’s capacity. On this voyage, as on all others, The Trinity holds one hundred. Naked, weakened, and frightened, she arrives, is taken to the auction block after a bath and hasty meal, and sold. Twenty dollars. But that is not the beginning, not at all. Beneath her thoughts are more impressions, older ones of an ancient, colithic world — a continent in the lush, tropical zone now sunken into the Indian Ocean, but upon which a highly developed race of bearded anthropoid apes traveled in bands through the trees. Some drop to the ground. It is she among them, a woman-thing with pointed ears and razor-sharp teeth; yet she is as strong as all the others, perhaps stronger, because within her loins is the mystery of being. And there, on the not yet firm soil rolling with monstrous vegetation, covered with white volcanic ash and crawling with fierce, many-fanged accidents of nature, she — an accident, too — discovered that her forearms, once used for clasping limbs and scaling trees, were free when she took to the ground. They were free to snatch fruit and stones, spears and clubs. And in that habit of clasping, the hands themselves changed; the bones grew differently over the ages, altered to perform more delicate operations such as seizing red, raw meat from fires sprung by lightning, such as planting seeds and planning harvests from observation of the moon and stars and seasons, while the brain itself and larynx and her body as a whole rushed to pace the development of the hand — to create man, society, and history; to build swift clippers and slave ships and manacles to make men, and especially women, the objects of desire; to weave the thick rope that stretched the strong neck of Todd Cross that hot spring day.

All right.

Rising to a sitting position slowly, as if someone had replaced her spine with a two-by-four or ridden her on all fours, Faith saw the twenty-dollar bill on the bed. She reached for it, then drew back her hand, aware of a sharp ache all through her body, particularly her legs, thighs, and sore abdomen. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and hobbled to the sink, where she washed herself, then smoothed down her dress. She rested against the sink, her head bent into its bowl. With the twenty dollars she could attempt to return home. What awaited her there? — an empty farmhouse, the self-satisfied smirk of Reverend Brown?

No.

She raised her head and peered into the cracked glass of the mirror above the sink. “Nice-looking,” she whispered to her reflection, “. cute.” She had twenty dollars. She knew, without further thought, how to get more.

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