Great Jones Street

5

The room's tensions were suitable to few enterprises besides my own, that of testing the depths of silence. Or one's willingness to be silent. Or one's fear of this willingness.

The snow turned brown on the window ledge. There was soup to eat when the old stove worked. Things functioned sporadically; other things functioned all the time but never to full effect. Through large parts of many nights I sat with Opel's coat around my shoulders. The little radio made its noises, fierce as a baby, never listening to itself. This was America's mechanical voice, its doll voice, coughing out slogans into the dawn, testing itself in the event of emergency, station after station fading away in the suffering breath of the national anthem. The firemen stayed in the firehouse.

I heard a noise in the hall and put my head out the door. He was there, sitting on the top step, Fenig again, peering down at me through the dimness.

"I couldn't write," he said. "I got started on a science-fiction thing but it bogged down in the early stages. I tried to walk it out. You know, pace it out. Sometimes it helps, a simple thing like walking up and down a room. When the inspiration peters out, I get off my duff and start pacing. I pace certain ways, depending on the situation. This time I was pacing five steps north, around, eight steps southeast, over to starting point, five steps north again. It sounds stupid but it works. Do something over and over and soon little irregularities show up in the routine. Unconscious, unbidden. This is when you know you're back in business. Come on up. I'll show you my place."

His room was sparsely furnished. It was dominated by an enormous trunk, balding with age, fitted out with huge rusty buckles and other types of metalwork. A rolled-up carpet lay against a wall. Fenig's typewriter was set on a small metal table with wheels. The shade on a nearby lamp had a cup-and-saucer motif.

"This is where I live and work," he said.

This was my first good look at Fenig. Because of the hood, his nose seemed larger perhaps than it really was, and since there is a sense of tragic destiny associated with people who have large noses, Fenig in his sweat shirt made me think of a gym teacher standing in a rainy playground while kids slash laughingly at his arms with improvised knives. We sat in old wooden chairs; on each one, several layers of paint were easily distinguishable in the manner of geological strata. Fenig himself appeared well kept, his clothes neat and recently laundered.

"Nobody knows me from shit," he said. "But I'm a two-time Laszlo Piatakoff Murder Mystery Award nominee. My one-acters get produced without exception at a very hip agricultural college in Arkansas. I'm in my middle years but I'm going stronger than ever. I've been anthologized in hard cover, paperback and goddamn vellum. I know the writer's market like few people know it. The market is a strange thing, almost a living organism. It changes, it palpitates, it grows, it excretes. It sucks things in and then spews them up. It's a living wheel that turns and crackles. The market accepts and rejects. It loves and kills."

Light entered mildly, the only wage a northern winter pays to moderation. A corner of the room began to shimmer, the sun raising dust in uncertain columns, and I realized I was still wearing Opel's coat. Fenig in his cotton-acrylic hood. Wunderlick tucked in at the waist, baring his bony wrists.

"There's a woman lives downstairs," he said. "First floor. Micklewhite. She's got a kid about twenty, deformed and retarded. He was born with something wrong with his skull. It's soft for some reason. His head is full of dents and funny little configurations. His family was ashamed and they never did anything. They just kept him in the room. Now the father's dead and the mother's nutty and the kid is still in the room with his pliable head. He can't talk or dress himself or anything. I don't know if he can even crawl. I've never seen him myself. She doesn't exhibit him around. But she told me everything. Micklewhite and her all-American boy. I've put him in four stories, sight unseen."

The radiator was similar to the one in the room below, a tall stooped object standing in a corner, wholly reconcilable with its surroundings or lack of them, nice to look at and even listen to, the kind of radiator that has a metal receptacle hooked to its back for the purpose of holding water and moistening the air. Our matching radiators. Something to water once in a while.

"Fame," he said. "It won't happen. But if it does happen. But it won't happen. But if it does. But it won't."

The building was pounded by shock waves from an explosion at a construction site nearby. I watched Fenig's jowls quiver a bit, all the loose skin on his face agitated by the tremor, a disquiet at the center of his neatness and calm. There was no sign of a radio, telephone or television set.

"I met Laszlo Piatakoff at a Baskerville Society dinner thing at the Hilton."

"Who is he?" I said.

"Laszlo Piatakoff is the Marjorie Pace Kimball of murder mystery. That's no exaggeration."

Down on the street someone was using a hammer. The sound was vibrant, accompanied by liquid echoes, and soon it was joined by the sound of another hammer, maybe a block away, a thick ripple to each granulating blow, probably Bond Street. The heavier of the two sounds was the more distant, and together they formed a slowly spreading wake, one of time, silence and reverberation, each of these flowing through the others, softening the petrified air, until finally one hammer was rested, and the other grew brutal.

"Everybody knows the thing about an infinite number of monkeys," Fenig said. "An infinite number of monkeys is put to work at an infinite number of typewriters and eventually one of them reproduces a great work of literature. In what language I don't know. But what about an infinite number of writers in an infinite number of cages? Would they make one monkey sound? One genuine chimp noise? Would they eventually swing by their toes from an infinite number of monkey bars? Would they shit monkey shit? It's academic, you say. You may be right. I don't know. One thing I do know. It's all a question of being in the right place at the right time. Knowing the market. Spotting its fluctuations. Measuring its temperament. I've written millions of words. Every one of them is in that trunk."

When I went downstairs I had to content myself with fashioning an impersonation of sleep, eyes closed, body lax, a studied evenness to my breathing. This, in the end, became tiring, and I ate some food and then sat by the window. The air carried a dismal stench, some kind of earth gas released by the detonations. I closed my eyes again. When I opened them it was well into evening. The room behind me was dark. I thought of opening the window and shouting:

"Fire! Hey, fire!"

The great doors of the firehouse would slowly come open. I'd get a glimpse of the big machine, fire-engine red, rigged with shiny appliances. Then tiny men in black booties would appear, edging out onto the sidewalk, lifting their beady eyes to my window.

"Fire!" I'd shout. "Hey, fire, fire!"

One small man would take several steps forward, moving into the light shed by a streetlamp. He'd tug at his booties for a second. Then he'd look back up at my window.

"Water," he would say, barely above a whisper.

A moment would pass and then his little comrades, standing all around him now, would commence whispering, as if by prearranged signal:

"Water, water, water, water, water."

Finally all the tiny men would return to the firehouse and the vaulted doors would slowly close behind them.