What Comes Next

THREE

MY FATHER taking me by the hand to the drugstore. I am wearing short pants, an oversize kid. Scared of what was next. Thinking it was an injection of some kind — for rabies or for cancer — or something worse. The old man pushes me through the door. “Give the boy a dozen Trojans,” he says to the druggist, squeezing my arm — one side of the man’s face scar tissue — “and if any of them leak, Spenser, we know where they came from.” The druggist guffaws. “How’s your daughter?” my father asks him. “A beauty,” the druggist says. “Good as new. Works like a charm.” I don’t understand but my father seems pleased with the answer and leads me, his arm around my shoulder, to the back of the drugstore, where a girl dressed in white is lying on a couch, the wall behind her lined with Tampax boxes.

“Gee, I’m glad you’re back,” the girl says. I look around to see if she’s talking to my father or the druggist. No one else is there. “I saved you a dance,” she says, twitching her index finger at me like it was some kind of snake. I say I don’t like to dance. I know you’re supposed to but I just don’t enjoy it.

She has a black wedding band on her middle finger, which means (I remember reading somewhere) that her husband died before the marriage was consummated. I move my weight from one foot to the other. She is rubbing her hand along her leg, which makes me nervous.

“Have you seen my father?” I ask her. “I don’t want to lose him.”

“Oh, I thought you were the father,” she says. “You look to me, honey, like a father.”

I say no, I am the son.

She beckons to me. Embarrassed, I turn away, look for my father in the closet.

“Don’t be afraid,” she whispers. “Take your medicine like a man.”

I have the feeling, I can’t get over it, that the old man’s watching me from somewhere.

When I get to the couch, wanting my medicine, there is someone else with the girl, another man. “I’ll be through in a minute,” she says. “Don’t go anywhere.” Like slicing cheese, I cut his head off.

She is waiting for me, her arms out, leering — her face scourged like her father’s. I plunge my knife between her legs.

June 27

I slept last night with the lights on. It does no good. The dreams get worse.

Went with R. to the movies. About this war hero who goes out of his mind over a little girl. She was crying at the end, though pretended not. Turning her head so I wouldn’t see. I asked her if she liked it. She said it was fake. Which makes it true to life, I told her. Everything’s fake. Madman doesn’t kill little girl. Is killed by mistake. You read about things like that in the papers every day. I defended the movie until she backed down. It makes her feel superior to give in.

Later she said she wondered why I don’t touch her. I put my hand on her head and she jumped. I think she knows, though other times not. Is she playing with me? When I close my eyes I see Parks on top of her. A bird flies out from between them. It is my mirror image. The bird.

Some guy went berserk on Times Square at three in the afternoon. I missed seeing it by an hour. Wounding six people with a sawed-off shotgun before shooting himself in the mouth. It was on the radio; they didn’t even give his name. What did he think he was doing?

PHONE CALL ABUSE

SHOWS SHARP RISE

OFFENSIVE PHONE CALLS TO FAMILIES

OF THE DEATHS OF SOLDIERS

I started to follow a girl in the park; I only wanted to look at her, her breasts like the nose cones of missiles. A cop on horseback was eyeing me.

At dinner he said to my mother, “When is your son going to get himself a job? I won’t have him around the house like this. At his age I was supporting a mother, a sister, and two brothers.” Then he knocked over his chair and left the table. When my mother said, “Something’s bothering him,” I laughed until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Don’t laugh,” she said to me, laughing herself. “He worries about you. Don’t you know how much he worries about you?”

June 28

I dreamed him in the white mask coming at me with a knife. I ducked and he went out the window. The mask flying off, leaving him without a face. He hangs from the sill.

I’ve been reclassified 1-A.

I stayed in my room all day. He said he wanted to talk to me, banged on my door, but I didn’t come out.

June 30

Headline in the News:

HINT BREAK IN

CRIPPLE KILLINGS

SEX MANIAC CLAIMS THIRD WHILE

GIRL NINE WATCHES IN CLOSET

All three victims women with slight physical defects. The killer does some strange sexual thing to them — it never says what — then mutilates the body. (Why don’t they say what he does?)

GIS FLUSH ENEMY FORCE

Went with Rosemary to the zoo. She called and asked if I wanted to go. More and more she’s like Phyllis. The way Phyllis was. Staring at the animals as if she were looking in the mirror. The male elephant trying to mount the female, who kept moving her ass away. Though I said I wanted to go, I couldn’t get her to move away. I stood with my back to the cage. The elephant’s piston like a giant rolling pin. Is that what she wants?

We sat on a large rock in the park. On a hill over a playground. Kids on swings pushed by fat Negresses. The place crawling with police. I flinched when one came close. She saw. Seeing my sweat, she trembles.

She tells me her father and mother divorced. The father in Cleveland, a tax lawyer. Says she feels like an orphan, glancing at me when she says it. Lives with her aunt (which I knew), her father’s sister, who works during the day. When I said why don’t we go up there, she said no.

No mention of Curtis Parks.

I told her I was an adopted child. Both parents died when I was born. She nods to herself. Even when I lie, it comes out true.

If she didn’t suspect, she would tell me about the attack in the park, would invite me up.

I have to find out if Parks is seeing her.

July 2

I dreamed I was pissing out the window. The stuff burning holes in whatever it touched. People scattering, falling. There was more, but it was gone in the morning, my mother shaking me awake.

Police say they have a lead on the Cripple Killer. Some children reported to have seen him well enough to make identification. No description given.

I followed Parks most of the day. Nothing interesting. He didn’t meet Rosemary.

He asked me at dinner what kind of grades I expected. I said I didn’t know. He shook his head. “Tell him,” he said to my mother, “if he wastes his life, he wastes mine.”

“He’s not wasting his life,” she said. “You think anything that’s not your life is a waste.”

“You’re lucky you have a mother,” he said in his sarcastic voice. “She’d defend you if you went around slaughtering people in the street.”

“I would,” she said. “Whatever he does, I love him.”

After they went to sleep I took ten dollars from her pocketbook.

July 5

With Rosemary in Washington Square Park. (She said she wanted to watch me play chess. Two moves from mate, I let the old man take my queen. No one noticed — Rosemary looking away, daydreaming.) Then on the way to the subway, Parks is coming toward us. He looks like he wants to run but since I’ve seen him, keeps coming. We shake hands. His smile stuffed into his face. We are all pretending something. (Was he following us?) He invites us to have a drink with him. Rosemary says that she has to get somewhere. “What about you, Chris?” I say no. We stand around, Parks asking how she is, how I am. We are all well. He stares at Rosemary, who won’t look at him. When he leaves, my stomach hurts.

In her aunt’s apartment on Central Park West she tells me that she and Parks were (I listen as if I didn’t know) close. She talks about it. Says she no longer sees him. Starts to cry. My pants bulge. Her confession.

All ears and nose, I listen. I’m sorry, I say, hands in pockets. She kisses me on the forehead. I am stiff. Nothing happens. The aunt, a spidery bird of a woman, breaks in.

When I get home my mother tells me someone named Curtis Parks called, left a number for me to call him back.

I call Rosemary after dinner. The aunt says she’s out for the evening. When she asks who’s calling, I tell her Curtis Parks. “Oh, how are you, Professor?” she says.

In my room at night, I mount Rosemary, watching myself, my rolling pin between her legs. She is screaming.

Running from the station, something fierce in him, unappeasable. Something mad in him.

I sit on a bench across the street, smoke a cigarette. Wait for her to come home. He sits on my back, offering advice. “I bear the burden for both of you,” he says. I get up and throw him off. He clings. In a phone booth, I dial Parks. His wife says hellohello. Is he sleeping? Hellohellohello. “I’m sorry,” I say. A police car goes by. With my last dime I call home. My mother says who is it. I bang the receiver down. Choking her. I want him. With my scout knife I saw at the wire. Stab and saw. It is hard, a plastic spiral covering it. When there is blood on the blade I stop.

Knife in hand, I move toward him. “Do you have change of a quarter?” He fiddles in his pocket, his eyes on my face. (What does he see?) No change. We pass. I sense him turning, following me. I don’t look back. Someone is coming from behind, goes by. A man in a flowered shirt, dark. He goes under the turnstile. A train coming on the other side. Afraid to commit himself to the wrong direction, he scrambles back and forth, looking for a way to the other side. For a moment, arms in front of him, he thinks of going across the tracks, of jumping the gap. There are policemen coming from both sides of the platform, two from one side, one from the other. In panic, he sits down on the floor. Rolls himself into a ball and moves, fuse in mouth, toward the pair of cops. The train comes and I get on. The cops are shouting at the human bomb. The lone one has his gun drawn and is saying something in a sweet voice. The other two go into the men’s room to hide. The train pulls out. My finger in my pocket bleeds a stain.

July 7

All morning I expect something to happen. In a dream the police pick me up as the Cripple Killer. My mother not home when they arrive. My father in his study yells at them through the door, doesn’t come out. A child on a pony identifies me. Also Parks and Rosemary, who have collected evidence against me, they say. Everything fits. I am unable to explain where I’ve been. And then, awake, I can’t shake the feeling that it is so. That they will come for me. It is a matter of time. I stay in bed till noon in a sweat. No one home. I have a half glass of my father’s Courvoisier for breakfast. And a Coke. I dress, clean my room. Call Rosemary. Have to tell her, get it over with. “Come over,” she says. “Please come over, Chris.”

I delay. I call Parks, who is out. His wife, who has this cultured voice, says from what she’s heard she’d like to meet me. Has been looking forward to it. (What has she heard?) I say I am also looking forward to it. When I hang up I’m in a sweat again. My nerve gone. Regret everything. My skin like a sheet over a corpse. I give her the business in my room, the door closed, confess to her my crimes as she writhes under me. I am best alone.

When I get there she isn’t home. I wait five minutes then leave, free of my promise to myself.

Headline in Post:

MAN IN WOMAN’S

GARB, PERVERSE

KILLER’S FOURTH

MISTAKEN FOR A WOMAN,

TRANSVESTITE IS KILLED IN HALLWAY,

THOUGH NOT MOLESTED, POLICE SAY

Someone taps my shoulder. I drop the paper. When I turn she looks frightened, her arms in front of her face. “Don’t be angry with me, Christopher.” She has been running after me. Was asleep when I rang the bell.

In her apartment, I look out the window twelve flights down. Expect to see myself waiting on the bench across the street. Only a park. A flight of cars between. She is wearing a pink-and-white dress. Like a candy cane. I can’t look at her. She is too close. Sweat burns my neck.

Nothing is said. I think of telling her — it pushes against the top of my head. The longer I wait, the heavier it is. Prick or conscience? Between my legs there is more eye than sight.

I am sitting next to her. She pretends trust. Her head against my face. I want to smash the room. It is not the time. I tell her that I am in love with her. She looks frightened and shakes her head. Then, her face in her hands, she cries.

She tells me that she doesn’t feel love for me. It is the reason she cries (she says). Wants to but doesn’t. It is the way it is. “Oh, Chris, I’m sorry.” Kissing my face.

I hold her down on the couch, force my weight on her. (What more can I confess?) She whispers in my ear, sobs. Without resistance, there is nothing. I let her up.

“Will you please go?” she whispers. We face each other. Her eyes dream my destruction. When I go to the door she calls me back. “Will you come over tomorrow?”

I shake my head.

“I want to see you again, Christopher.”

“All right.” I want to get out, away from her, before the aunt comes.

“Do you still love me?”

I bury my face in her breasts. “I’ll be over in the afternoon.” (Leave hating her, feeling untouched.) I have the sense on the subway, riding home, that if I stop watching myself I won’t be there.

The later edition of the Post: POLICE SAY NEW CLUES TO CRIPPLE KILLER’S IDENTITY. According to witnesses, killer is dark blond, medium height, between eighteen and twenty-five. “Looks like some ordinary college kid,” some woman says. “Those kids don’t get enough to do at school.” There is a police drawing, a composite sketch. Citizens are requested to phone the police immediately if they see anyone behaving suspiciously answering to above description. The old man on my left — it is his paper we are looking at — stares at me. I smile back like a lamb.

My mother, coming into my room, tells me that Joel Minitz, who was the son of a friend of hers, was killed in the war. “I don’t want you to go. Promise me you’ll do everything you can to stay out.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“It would be such a waste, Chrissy. When you were four — friends of mine still talk about it — you used to add three two-figure numbers in your head. Do you remember?”

“When you tell me I remember.”

“Don’t have a chip on your shoulder like Dad. He has other good qualities but that’s not one of them. You used to smile all the time when you were younger. You never gave anyone any trouble. All my friends used to say what a beautiful child you were.”

He calls her, wanting something. Complaining without words to me, she hurries out. Her eyes vengeful, frightened. Her movement a shriek. I cover my ears with my hands.

In the night a man comes wearing my mask. It doesn’t come off, he says. “I want you to help me get it off.” I push him out the door but he comes in again. He tells me that since wearing the mask he has killed six people — f our women, two children. The children his brothers, one perhaps himself. I offer to cut the mask off for him. He says no, then yes. There is no other way. When the mask is half off I dig the knife into his throat. The point sticks, comes out his ear (like a hearing aid). Nowhere to put him, I carry him into the street. Run with him over my shoulder. A girl sees us, yells for me to stop. Bending over, I catapult the body at her. Another takes its place. I throw it off but the weight remains. At the end of the road I see my face in the mirror. I am wearing the mask — one side of it cut away, the skin scourged, bubbling.

When I wake up I hear my father storming through the house, unable to sleep. “Damn sirens,” he is saying.

The News has another drawing of the killer. He is more dark than light, the police say. (Three witnesses say dark, one says light to medium.) “The man we want is an amateur,” an unidentified source tells a News reporter in an interview. “In each case there are more wounds than necessary. And the stabbings themselves are imprecise. This is a violent man who kills to satisfy something missing in his life. We are close to nailing him. We will nail him. I can’t say any more without endangering routine security.” A Puerto Rican, picked up as a suspect, has been let go; says he was not beaten by the police.

I call the Selective Service Board. The woman there says she gives no information over the phone, that it is against the law.

“Whose law? God’s?”

She says she just does what she’s told.

I hear him through the door: “He wants to put me in my grave, Mary. That’s what he wants. I’ll see him in hell first, the bastard.”

“Don’t yell,” she says. “Please. He wants nothing more than to please you.”

“You know what he can do that would please me?”

“Shh. Behave yourself.”

Something happened on the subway. Some man bumped into me from behind, trying to get a seat. I pushed back, my elbow catching him in the neck. His head against the metal of the door, bleeding. His glasses cracked. An old guy. Holding a dirty handkerchief to his forehead. I said I was sorry. The guy crying. An accident, I told him. A woman kept saying she was going to get the police. I got off at the next stop and, without looking back, got away.

He brought her a white rose he had taken from someone’s garden. She kissed him timidly, held him away, then fell against him, holding on as if she were drowning. “How lovely,” she said. He was watching himself, distrustful of the man he was watching, jealous. While Rosemary seemed without a sense of danger. They embraced violently on the couch, contesting their affection, Christopher worried about the aunt walking in — other fears like shadows behind cellar doors, Rosemary assuring him that her aunt wouldn’t be back until late and even so, even if she walked in, she wouldn’t mind.

So that’s how it had been with Parks — it was a revelation to him. Despite her assurances, he listened for footsteps in the hall. It was possible that he had been followed or that Parks himself would, out of habit, appear.

He suggested that they go into her room, feeling numb, a man about to parachute out of a plane for the first time. Wanting to stay where he was. Not to fall.

Rosemary hesitated, her head cocked, as though reading his intentions. “I’d rather stay here,” she said in a tremulous voice. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

He persisted, distrustful of her affection, in pursuit (fleeing her claim on him) of knowledge. He had only to mention Parks to break her down, drag the corpse of his name between them. Her silence pleaded with him. To be kind. To be brutal and kind.

Rosemary started to speak, her lips moving, tasting the possibility of words, without words. A tension of wills between them.

And when he had lost her, even temporarily, he would pursue her again — his need determined by the pains of failure — nagged by his own secrets, suspicious of hers.

And so it went, accumulating commitments and vengeances.

He felt reprieved at first and then, wanting her, sick with regret. She was leaning away from him, self-absorbed, silent. He wanted to have her — it seemed necessary — to break her down. She looked as remote and cool as the first time he saw her. He was not asking for anything, wouldn’t ask, his need apart from what he wanted.

Then, without explanation, she got up and was gone. Lonely, he paced the living room, drawn to the window to see if anyone was there he knew. For a moment, he thought he saw Parks, but it was someone else. That there were no policemen within view worried him. It was better to know where they were, safer. Two boys were fighting, one holding a knife behind his back. He thought to warn the other, to yell from the window, then Rosemary returned, distracting him.

“We can go into my room now if you want to,” she said, her face half turned away as if in hiding.

He said it was late, he had to go. In his imagination he dashed out and, getting nowhere he wanted to be — wanting to be where he wasn’t — came back.

“I hate you,” she said in a hoarse, fierce whisper, and flung the flower, the white rose, in his face. It burned like a slap.

She felt released, unburdened. He turned away.

He turned back older, or feeling older, ruined, defeated, hated. His boyhood gone, smashed. He closed his eyes to recall the time that had passed, to bring himself back to where, feeling himself immortal — that sanctuary of his fear — he had been. And he discovered, the present revising his vision of the past, that he had never been invulnerable, that he had never, outside of thinking himself so, outside of self-delusion, been safe. There was no place to turn back to. There never had been a place or a time. He was born a dying man.

When she tried to comfort him he pushed her away. Later, grabbing her by the hair, he kissed her forcibly, holding her face against his. “I want to see your room,” he muttered.

She smiled as if she had known in advance what was going to happen.

Once in the room, the door closed, he hardly had a chance to look around. Proudly, as if unveiling a statue, Rosemary lifted her dress over her head and stood before him, naked, her hands on her hips, like a model or a dancer. One thing surprised him; she was wearing a crucifix on a chain, the cross like a snake between her breasts.

He tumbled her to the bed, still in his clothes, expecting to be pushed away. She kissed his face until, unable to bear it, he cried. Choked with shame, wave after wave rising and falling, he couldn’t stop. Buried his face in her breasts, the crucifix pressing against his eye. She stroked his hair, said not to worry about anything, not to worry. Planning his rage, hating her, he pretended to be comforted.

They were in bed lying together like children when the aunt came home. She called Rosemary’s name a few times while under one thin blanket Christopher sweated his fear. “We’re in my room,” Rosemary called to her, getting out of bed, latching the door from the inside. “Chris is here with me.

“Hello, Christopher,” the aunt called — she had met him once. “How are you?”

“OK,” he mumbled, amused, his rage like smoke. In some way its unreality made it easier for him, made it finally possible.

In the act of love, Rosemary stiffened suddenly, froze, her nails digging into his back. “I know who you are,” she said. “I’ve known.”

Hanging from a ledge, he let go. (Everything.) His life went out, went out, went out. Went out.

July 10

When I came home my mother said some man, who wouldn’t leave his name, had been looking for me. Said he would be back without fail tomorrow. A man in a gray suit with a hat. About thirty, she thought, maybe forty.

I set my alarm for five o’clock.