Great Jones Street

25

In abundant sunlight a man carried paintings from a battered panel truck into the loft building across the street from me. He took canvas after canvas, about a dozen, gray every one with a white line down the middle. I turned back to Bohack, who occupied the center of the room, nodding into his Chinese beard, one foot up on a chair, the rest of him collapsing toward that point of support. He wasn't happy with me. His body showed it, swollen with exhaustion. He knew I was no longer content to remain in this room, leading his band of janissaries progressively inward, conceding motion to each hour that passed. His large open face seemed to beam his disappointment across the room. We were ten minutes into our second silence. Bohack took out a handkerchief and delivered mucoidal noises into it. He remained in his standing crouch, right foot set on the edge of the chair, elbow resting on right knee, his diffuse beard concealed by the handkerchief. He wasn't at all happy with me. I had betrayed our convergent destinies, reading the leer in the silvery eye of the first child to beckon.

"I wondered if you'd get here in time," I said. "I'm due to leave in a matter of hours. They're sending a car for me."

"If you knew I was coming over, why didn't you leave ahead of schedule? Why didn't Bucky Wunderlick get out when he had the chance?"

"Dumb question," I said.

"I guess it is. Heck, I'm stupid sometimes. You half want this confrontation. You half want to go to Essex Street with me."

"Who cut Azarian's throat? Did his people do that?"

"Longboy."

"What for?"

"Longboy's our throat man. When he was a medic in the Airborne he performed many a tracheotomy out in the field. Man with broken jaw, blocked air passage, choking to death in the drop zone. Longboy would trake him right there. He traked maybe ten people all told. He got to know the throat. He's developed a feel for it. So we sent Longboy after Azarian's throat. We had a lot of trouble locating Azarian. We knew he was after the product but we couldn't get him located right."

"He was just bidding," I said. "He never had his hands on it. There was no point in killing him."

"We killed him because we found him," Bohack said. "It was a heck of a job. We put a lot of time and effort into it. After all that time and effort, we obviously had to kill him. If we didn't kill him, it would have been a total waste, all that time and effort. We knew he was in California, in L.A., most likely in Watts. Finally we got street name and house number. That's when we sent out Longboy. He's our throat man."

"Dr. Pepper told you I was leaving. Is that right?"

"Right, Pepper told us. Pepper wanted me to arrange a get-together with Rex, Brandy, King, Bruno and the others. He knew about Happy Valley's interest in your retirement and he wanted to use the dog-boys to keep you permanently in this room. He was scared half to death of even approaching the dog-boys but he thought you'd cut him out of any chance at the product and this was his way of getting revenge. I was surprised, tell you the truth. I didn't think Pepper was that vindictive. He came on like a spiteful kid who wakes up one morning and finds he has two poison fangs and it's just a question of who gets the first nip. But I could tell he expected heap big trouble if he got anywhere near the dog-boys. Fear and trembling. It might have been halfway funny to see Pepper with those lunatics but I finally told him it wasn't necessary. I told him we didn't need the dog-boys. Don't you want to know why? You're just standing there without any look on your face. Isn't Bucky interested? Doesn't he care about these things?"

"He cares deeply."

"The dog-boys aren't an independent pack. I control them. I run them back and forth. They're not a separate faction. They're just a lunatic fringe that we use for our own purposes. They're completely subordinate. There's only one Happy Valley Farm Commune. The dog-boys are the lunatic fringe. We use them to sow fear and confusion. People think Happy Valley's weak and disorganized when it's just the opposite. A nice touch, what do you think? Broadcasting dissension, what do you think? Not bad, right? Sowing fear. Sowing confusion. What's your opinion?"

"I need time to think about it."

"I gave them the names," he said. "Bruno, Rex, Corky and so on. What do you think? Nice touch, don't you think? Sense of humor. You need that."

"How heavy are you?"

"I go two forty-five. Is that too heavy? I've got a big frame. With a big frame you need considerable poundage. My face is a round-type face but the rest of me is packed pretty solid."

"Are your parents big people?" I said.

"They're both normal size except my mother has the biggest thumbs I've ever seen in my Me."

"Any brothers or sisters?"

"Only child."

"Where do you buy your clothes?"

"Orchard Street."

"Do you pay your rent with cash, check or money order?"

"Right now we owe four months."

"What are your plans for me?"

"It's a nice day," he said. "Let's go up to the roof."

We strolled among chimneys of various shapes and materials, crumbling brickwork, heavy metal painted black, aluminum peanut-whistles. The tar was hard. To north and south, towers grew out of crooked rooftops in the foreground. Bohack rested against the ledge, eyes closed and face thrust upward, although the sun was at his back. It was one of those electrically blue days when every tall building set against the sky seems to drip silver. Bohack was looking at me now. His arms were folded. He wore crushed dented clothing that made him appear to ripple upward, a fountain of automobile parts and bland expressions.

"Your suicide should take place in a city like Tangier or Port-au-Prince or Auckland, New Zealand. Some semi-mysterious or remote place is probably best for your kind of suicide. That way the news is late, the news is garbled, the news is full of contradictions. A doubt always lingers that way. Even when they produce your body, there's a doubt or a shadow of a doubt. Maybe it's somebody else. Maybe it's a look-alike provided by the local police. The perfect suicide is when people know you're dead on one level but refuse to accept it on a deeper level. It's the final inward plunge, Bucky. It's what you owe us. It really is. We patterned our whole lives after your example. What happens? You decide to pull out. Just like that. You decide to step back into the legend. No good, Bucky. Not acceptable. Obviously it leaves us hanging. We're in the midst of an inward plunge and you suddenly just like that decide to sneak out into the open. Zero acceptability. Suicide's the best answer all around. I think you see that now."

"It's a good answer. But not the best."

"There's a definite second-best. But suicide's the best. How can I tempt you further? Can I say it's what everybody ultimately expects of you, right down to the littlest scribbler of fan mail? Should I say it's a life-affirming gesture for someone in your position? Do I put the whole thing in perspective by arguing that your life and work will draw off additional meaning from an act of this kind? How can I tempt you, Bucky? We're how high up – four stories? Not enough, is it? You want to be sure and I don't blame you one bit. Istanbul, that would be ideal. Better than Auckland, New Zealand, where chances are they do things in a neat tidy manner and we wouldn't have the proper mystery or doubt. Our building on Essex Street is five stories high. Add one for the roof. That's six, which is probably high enough."

"I admit I'm tempted."

"It's by far the best answer."

"Not by jumping though. That's no good at all."

"Let's discuss alternatives," he said.

"Many better methods."

"I'd be happy to discuss them with you. Anything you have to offer in the way of ideas is great with me. Gun's not bad. It's a right-there kind of thing. It's got a brutal purity other methods don't have."

"You're not being serious," I said. "If you were really bearing down on this, you wouldn't make dumb suggestions. It has to be more passive. But not drugs and not gas. An exotic poison maybe, A snake in a basket. Something that harks back to the great days when excess was the style. But I'll tell you the truth, Bo. We're just making noises up here. I have no real intentions. I'm not innocent enough for suicide."

"You have to teach by example, Bucky. Otherwise you're just a salesman."

"I've done things without understanding them fully. This would be one more such thing. Besides I'm not innocent. I've ass-licked around the edges of some mean conceits. You can't kill yourself when you're half-rotten with plague. Only the innocent are received. No suicide gets through unless he's free of attachment. It's murder I've been burning to commit. I'm way beyond suicide."

"Who you plan to kill?"

"I guess nobody anymore. Not even in the vague way I meant it. Four ounces on the meat scale. That's all I'm told I weigh. I was thinking about that while T waited for you to get here. Whether to bother at all with limousines and planes or just take what Bohack's got in store."

"Second-best," he said. "There's a definite second-best."

He put his hands flat against his belly and slid them into his pants up to the knuckles. Under his jacket, opened to the mild afternoon, he wore broad red suspenders. We passed a yawn between us. To the east a drilling crew was blasting rock apart at a construction site. I heard but could not see them. Each blast was preceded by the sound of whistles and followed by pigeons angling in panic to other abutments.

"You found Azarian," I said. "You found Pepper or he found you. You didn't find Watney. Did you find Hanes?"

"Hanes found us."

"That's what I thought."

"The kid finally got around to using his God-given intellect. He offered to do anything we wanted if we'd give him a guarantee for his safety. He couldn't have called at a better time. There was one important service nobody else was in a position to render for us. Hanes was the right man at the right time. I look at your face and see nothing. Isn't Bucky Wunderlick curious about these things? Doesn't he care how the machinery functions? Maybe it's just that the sun's in his eyes. He seems to be blank but it's only the sun."

"I thought I had you measured step by step," I said. "I even awarded myself one extra step. But I have to admit I don't know what service Hanes might be in a position to render Happy Valley. The sun's in my eyes. Otherwise you'd see curiosity lighting up my face."

"We want your silence. You know that. But even if you took your own life right now, we wouldn't have what we want. Why? Because of the mountain tapes. Because the tapes are about to be released. New legends, new sounds, new confusions. In the last few days there have been rumors about the tapes being released. Then Pepper told us you were going on tour. It all fitted together. The only thing we didn't know was how to get at the tapes. Where they were. Who had them. Silence is silence, Bucky. There's no silence with the tapes on the market. It would hurt us. It would cause psychological pain. So Hanes was the right man. We gave him the guarantee he wanted. In return he went through the confidential files at Transparanoia. According to him, it was easy. He had the answer in no time."

"Pittsburgh."

"Cincinnati."

"Just testing," I said.

"Hanes seemed eager to give you maximum knifage. To put the blade in six inches, withdraw it two inches, stick it in three more inches. Seven inches. Maximum knifage among the primitive blood cults."

"I didn't help him when he was in the subways."

"He remembered."

"I see that."

"So Maje and two others are in a car right now on their way to the record plant in Cincinnati. They're carrying about twenty pounds of C-four. We have to play it safe. We don't know what stage of production the record's at. So we're blowing the whole plant. Silence has to be total if it's to be called silence. Am I right or not? In order to earn the name silence, the silence has to be total. I'd like to hear your views on that."

I took eight steps forward and hit him in the stomach, directing the blow at a point equidistant from his thumbs, which were still set against his belly, the only fingers outside his pants, about six inches apart, parallel to his belt line. I walked back to my spot at the brick chimney.

"What was that?" he said.

"Animal urge."

"What for?"

"I know what's ahead. Some dumb instinct made me hit you. No reason though. I walk step for step with you, Bo. It was an animal thing. I know what's ahead. I agree to it. But this animal urge made me hit you anyway."

"You get the faggot violence going. That's the only thing you accomplish with a move like that. The old faggot violence comes raging out of me. I turn bleary. I strike at anything that breathes. That's the meaningless inner faggotry everyone possesses. You roused my faggot-laden soul. Bad stuff, Bucky. No should do. Make nice-nice. No hit people. Heap big trouble."

"I agree to everything."

"It's a nice day," he said. "Let's go for a walk."

We went south on the Bowery without a word. Gray cats slept in the sun among men thawing against the sides of buildings, seated there for a parade of visored riot cops and their whores in snowshoes, or asleep as if in baskets, their bodies shaped against the revolt of bone. I had a yawning seizure then. It was fear, I knew, that caused it – the mechanism in the body that covers up fear in this whimsical way, yawn after yawn. The seizure lasted all the way to the Salvation Army Memorial Hotel, accompanied by popping sounds in my cheekbones. I was suddenly hungry. We stopped at a frankfurter cart on Chrystie Street and I ate three chili dogs and drank Coke and orange soda. I felt sick and tossed the empty Coke bottle over my shoulder, hearing it break politely in the gutter. Bohack never spoke or touched me. People seemed to know him here, although no words were exchanged. We went east into the market streets. I vomited on a parked car. Bohack waited at the distance deemed correct in the etiquette of vomiting. There were no metaphysical testimonies to be made in clarification of this episode. I was traveling a straight line to the end of an idea. It seemed simple arithmetic. For years I'd been heading this way, moment by moment, along a perfectly true line. We reached Essex Street and walked south past the basement companies that manufactured skullcaps. We entered a tenement and started to climb stairs. There were no lights in the hallway. I smelled babies and lush garbage. The tile steps were worn at the edges. Bohack climbed behind me, about three steps back, breathing evenly into the dimness. Great Jones Street, Bond Street, Chrystie Street, Essex Street. It was sixteenth-century London we'd been slouching through in our hands-in-pockets way. I reached the final landing. Puke. Vomit. Splat. Bohack slipped past me and unlocked one of the four metal doors on the top floor, using three keys in the process.

Inside he led me along a narrow hall to a large kitchen. A man and two young girls were painting the walls a gun-metal color, using pans and rollers. Bohack gave me a glass of water and told one of the girls to clean up the mess on the landing. I followed him through another room where two men with sledgehammers were knocking down a wall. They stood in sunny ruins, clothes and bodies chalked with plaster. The third and last room looked east. It was a small room, filled with plants, feverish in the heat of three floodlights. The lone window had no curtains or blinds. Steam came clouding out of an adjacent bathroom where hot water ran in the shower. Bohack placed me in an unpainted blocklike chair and then left the room.

Plants covered the floor around the perimeter of the room and were crowded together on shelves and grew in white plastic pots hung from the ceiling and in clay pots attached to the walls with metal clips. I noted many kinds, those huge and hooded and furled on long sticks, enclosing the springs of their own alertness, or drowsy and pouched, nocturnal orchids, vines and ivies, showering ferns, palms in their rectitude, or those murky and velvet, or redolent of the limpness of old summers, or pale as lizards. A small man entered the room. He said his name was Chess. He wore flannel trousers, glazed with age, and a matching vest over a striped shirt and tie. Vest lacked a button and the tie was not centered.

"Plants are scary things," he said.

He carried an old briefcase. His hair was blondish, combed sideways almost ear to ear. He closed the door behind him, wincing at the sound of the sledgehammers.

"It's like a prison here," he said. "I don't know why they stay. People leave and then come back. Some leave twice and come back twice. You watch, I say to myself. So-and-so will leave for good next time. But they're all right here. Just like I'm right here. I'm in this room same as you. I'll tell you something about Bohack. He's not smart and he's not stupid. He doesn't have any special magnetism. His ideas just miss being interesting ideas. For a long time I couldn't figure out what made him so indispensable. Why him? What's so special? I finally figured it out. It's because he's so big. He's the biggest one. People respond to his bigness."

"Where is he?" I said.

"He's making the four o'clock check. He checks the whole floor three times a day. Tells people what to do and how to do it. Somebody has to give orders and he's the biggest. Let me ask you something. That bridge out there. Is that the Brooklyn or the Williamsburg? I've never been able to muster enough courage to ask anyone. But I feel comfortable somehow with you. There's a chemistry with you. Let me rub away some of this steam on the window and you can get a better look."

"It's the Manhattan."

"Scary," he said. "I didn't know there was a bridge called the Manhattan Bridge. All this time not knowing. Oh that's so scary. What do you think of my plants? People are usually surprised by the plants. People forget we started out as an earth-family in a completely rural and rustic environment. Interdependence of man, plant and animal. That idea still has beauty for me. So what do you think of my plants? It's dry out today so I've got the hot shower going to get some humidity in here. Plants need that. Usually I just turn on the humidifier but Spot keeps peeing in it so I've had to put it away until Bohack gets him re-toilet-trained. That's the power of names. People act in response to their names. There's a tiny sector of the human brain where the naming mechanism is located. Spot pees in my humidifier and Rex plays with a little rubber Santa Claus that goes squeak-squeak a mile a minute. Dog behavior and dog play. But don't worry, this room is sacrosanct. We don't have to be concerned about anybody coming in here who isn't authorized to do so. The orchid is a cuntlike plant. Don't you think? Menacing in its beauty. Some plants just stand there. The orchid lures a person. It draws a person inward. This room is a good room for meditation and inward thinking. It's the most inward room we have. That's as good a reason as any as to why you're here."

The door opened and Longboy stood there, left hand in his back pocket, all his weight on one leg, the left, his body slack against the door frame. Chess raised his eyebrows and Longboy responded with a series of gestures too complex to unravel. Then he backed out of the room, pulling the door closed. Chess took some clippings out of his briefcase. The window was fogged to the point of total opaqueness. I felt a sickly light sweat all over my body.

"Where's Bohack?" I said. "Is the package with him? I know you've got the damn thing."

"Pepper told us you were going on tour. Hanes told us where the record plant is."

"Hanes also turned over the product. You wouldn't have guaranteed his safety without that."

"Hanes turned over the product and Pepper agreed to test it for a straight fee. Hell probably never get paid but I doubt if he cares. He was overjoyed at this late date merely to find out what's been in that package these many weeks that's reduced us all to such deviant behavior. That begonia needs cutting back. Funny I hadn't noticed earlier."

I picked up the plant he'd indicated and threw it against the wall, using a windmill motion. Chess looked briefly at the cracked clay, leaves still embedded in lumps of earth. Then he leaned over in his chair and spread the newspaper clippings on the floor between his feet.

"Everybody's searching, you know. Everybody's trying to make the journey. But they're going about it wrong. They're seeking the wrong kind of privacy, the old privacy, never again to be found. Now here's an item about a seventy-year-old man who's sailing from Cape Hatteras to England in a skiff that's only nine feet long. It says he plans to practice yoga at sea. This one is about a Bloom-ington housewife who's flying from Minnesota to Australia in a balloon. Evidently she has relatives in Australia. That's the ostensible reason for the journey. We both know the real reason. A group of Methodists from Pittsburgh are setting out next month for the Sinai Desert where they intend to pray and fast for forty days and nights. It says they're being urged by their bishop to take along some kind of rations besides water but it says the group thus far has resisted the idea. Woman, sixty-two, circles world in single-engine plane. Now here's a Norwegian man who sat for two hundred and two hours in a window box on his terrace, breaking the world record by thirty-some-odd hours. We both know he wasn't interested in records. A man in Missouri spent a hundred and sixty-one days in a deep cavern. Missouri abounds in caverns. He ate canned food, he drank water, he burned over nine hundred candles. He said it's the first time in his life he wasn't bored. Sensory overload. People are withdrawing from sensory overload. Technology. Whenever there's too much technology, people return to primitive feats. But we both know that true privacy is an inner state. A limited environment is important. Yes, yes. But you can't fly off in a balloon and expect to find the answer.

The will has to urge itself to this task. The mind has to level itself across a plane of solitude. We're painting this whole floor of the building a dark gray. Not the plant room. No, no. The plant room stays white. Everything else gets painted gray."

"I just had a thought."

"The concept of a captive lunatic fringe within an organization is mine alone, my concept alone, despite what you may have heard to the contrary. Irrationality can be managed to great effect. There's power and intimidation behind every event the dog-boys are made to stage."

"Are you Dr. Pepper?" I said. "You're not, are you?"

"I'm Chess and these are my plants. Pepper is at least four inches taller than I am. You know that. Voice aside. Color of eyes aside. The man is four inches taller than I am. Pepper's feats in the realm of disguise are well known and well documented but the man can't hide four inches of muscle, bone and tissue. I'm Fred Chess, ordinary American. I used to be a theatrical producer. I went into photo offset work after that Nothing seemed to be panning out. Look, if I were Pepper, it would mean I knew all along what kind of drug was in the package. Any long-standing intimate connection between Pepper and Happy Valley would mean that I, as Pepper, had knowledge of the drug from the very beginning. You'd have to revise everything that's happened. It would mean that I managed not only Bohack but also Hanes and Watney. If I'm Pepper, it means everything's been a lie up to now. I managed the whole thing, it means. I guided the product from hand to hand. It was my circle, point by point, the product originating at Happy Valley and ending there. It would mean that you've been the victim of the paranoid man's ultimate fear. Everything that takes place is taking place solely to mislead you. Your reality is managed by others. Logic is inside out. Events are delusions. If I were Pepper, it would mean I knew the nature of the product, I had it delivered to you, I planned and followed its course, I fabricated a Toronto meeting between Hanes and Watney, I assigned the informer to Azarian, I planted Hanes in the subway, I had Watney leave the bubble gum cards, I had Bohack bring you over here – the straight line intersecting the circle. It would mean I managed Opel."

"But there's the difference in height," I said.

"Of course there is," he said. "There's no feasible way a man can subtract four inches, is there? Not to mention eye color, voice, skin pigmentation, size of genitals and so forth. I'm Fred Chess is who I am. Fact is I have no particular respect for Dr. Pepper. The man's always been a cunt-hair away from outright quackery."

He went into the bathroom and turned off the shower, saying ow twice, apparently because the tap was hot. Then he opened the door and stepped into the hall. Soon the pounding stopped. Chess came back inside, followed by Bohack, Longboy and three others, men at the beck of the strongest hand, two wearing lumber jackets like mine. Beyond these six, others were gathering in the hall, male and female, standing at rest, pardonably devoid of any sign of gloom. At the edge of every disaster, people collect in affable groups to whisper away the newsless moments and wait for a messenger from the front. A small wet belch, like a child's, rippled from my lips. The window began to clear, gradually, in long vertical patches.

"It's a mind drug," Chess said. "Mind drugs affect different people different ways. They're notorious for that. Highly unpredictable. Dr. Pepper thought this stuff was atropine at first. Atropine diminishes the killer impulse. No market for that. No street market anyway. But by the time he was finished he knew it was something else. It's a drug that affects one or more areas of the left sector of the brain. Language sector. Still no market for this product. Street or otherwise. It damages the cells in one or more areas of the left sector of the human brain. Loss of speech in other words."

"I know all this. This is boring."

"Pepper was nice enough to dissolve the chemical powder with a sterile something-or-other and prepare an ampule for us. But you know what's hard to figure? Why U.S. Guv was fooling around with this stuff in the first place. Maybe they have a language warfare department. Maybe they think the best way to silence troublemakers is literally. That would be funny as hell if that were true. Glub, glub, glub. Or maybe Pepper was right the first time. Atropine. A tranquilizer for the killing site. But I doubt it. The man knows his dope. I give him that. Dope's his home away from home. I'm sure he was right with his second analysis."

"He'd fucking well better be right."

"Note this," Chess said. "You'll be perfectly healthy. You won't be able to make words, that's all. They just won't come into your mind the way they normally do and the way we all take for granted they will. Sounds yes. Sounds galore. But no words. No songs. You watch, I said to myself. We'll get him here and then hell refuse to cooperate. But so far you've cooperated beautifully. It took us a great deal of time and trouble to get the drug back into our possession. Therefore we're compelled to use it. We have the drug so we're forced to administer it. Anything to say? Last words? Oh yes, we hope you'll continue to stay on Great Jones Street. We like having you nearby, yes, absolutely. Any last words?"

"Pee-pee-maw-maw," I said.

Chess eked out laughter – a petty tremble of his lips that slowly grew into a radical whining body-sound, all parts surrendering themselves to glee. Soon we were all laughing, every one of us, those in the plant room and those in the hallway, all but Bohack who stood quietly amid the vegetation, one plant touching his shoulder at the crest of its ascent. His eyes were focused and perfectly clear but it was hard to tell what he was looking at. His presence was such that only stillness could fully accommodate the cavernous power his body engendered. The room seemed to contract about him, our laughter soaking dolefully into his skin, all becoming quiet now. A phone rang in one of the other rooms. Cincinnati, I thought. All gone my mountain songs. Something in Bohack shivered invisibly at the sound of the phone and I began to realize his captivity was stricter even than mine. The news of tapes in flames brought him no joy. As the phone was answered he chose in fact not even to remain for the final stifling, in motion suddenly toward the door, crashing past two men, the lumber jacket wearers, one of them doing a little roundelay at the end of Bohack's lunge. All watched in unconnected manner this destruction of the placid air around us. He began wading through people in the hallway and soon was gone, metal door closing hard behind him as (in my mind) he stepped daintily over the vomit stain in the outer hall. Quiet returned then, a hurried calm accumulating in a kind of regional pattern, far hallway first, moving inward toward the center of the plant room. They were young, all those people gathered beyond the doorway, but haggard and slow to move, handymen, woodworkers, seamstresses, possessed of a rueful nostalgia, perhaps for the prairie womb common to them all, that land too bleak for song to live. Chess examined Longboy's fingernails for dirt and then counseled him on the proper angle of insertion, according to Dr. Pepper, forty-five to sixty degrees. Manhattan, soberest of bridges, was restored to the window in dwindling mist, never less plain, arm and broadsword of the sky. Longboy opened his medic's kit and lifted a hypodermic syringe to the pale light.