The Largesse of the Sea Maiden Read online

  By now the drug we’d swallowed should have been doing its work, but I felt no effect. When I asked the others about it, Dundun shook his head, but BD stared at me with eyes like two shiny mirrors and said, “All I know is this: Janet Charleson will pleasure any man alive.”

  “Does she pleasure animals too?”—Dundun wanted to know.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it.”

  “You mean Janet Charleson will do it with a goat? She’ll let a billy goat hump her?”

  “Like I say, I wouldn’t doubt it.” But BD frowned and withdrew into himself for a minute, and I bet he was wondering if inside this insatiable woman, Janet Charleson, he’d mixed his powers with those of a goat.

  Dundun started climbing on the bars of the nearest cell. He’d slipped off his shoes and socks and now clung to the metal fretwork by his toes. BD said, “Is this shit hitting you like it’s hitting me?” and Dundun said, “No, man, I’m just exercising.”

  Dundun’s mental space, customarily empty, had been invaded by an animal spirit. He gripped the bars with his left hand and foot, simultaneously stretching his right arm and leg straight out into the air, exactly in the style of a zoo monkey.

  “Are you sure you’re not feeling anything?” I asked him.

  “I’m feeling all the way back to my roots. To the caves. To the apes.” He turned his head and looked at us. His face was dark, but his eyeballs gave out sparks. He seemed to be positioned at the portal, bathed in prehistoric memories. He was summoning the ancient trees—their foliage was growing out of the walls of our prison, writhing and shrugging, hemming us in.

  A voice laughed—“Hah!”—coming from my cellmate, Strangler Bob, who sat nearby on the catwalk’s floor with his arms folded across his chest. Like all of us here, Strangler Bob knew how to sleep—from lights-out at ten until breakfast at seven, and a nap after breakfast, and a nap before supper—but this Christmas Eve he stayed up late and observed us with his dead soulless gaze.

  BD, meanwhile, said, “I’ve never seen snow catching so many colors.”

  The potion wasn’t evenly distributed on the page. BD had gotten most if not all of it, which was fair, but sad. The only effect I felt seemed to coalesce around the presence of Strangler Bob, who laughed again—“Hah!”—and when he had our attention said:

  “It was nice, you know, it being just the two of us, me and the missus. We charcoaled a couple T-bone steaks and drank a bottle of imported Beaujolais red wine, and then I sort of killed her a little bit.”

  To demonstrate, he wrapped his fingers around his own neck while we musketeers studied him like something we’d come on in a magic forest.

  Dundun clapped his hand on his forehead with a sound like a gunshot and said to the murderer, “You’re the man who ate his wife!”

  Strangler Bob said, “That was a false exaggeration. I did not eat my wife. What happened was, she kept a few chickens, and I ate one of those. I wrung my wife’s neck, then I wrung a chicken’s neck for my dinner, and then I boiled and ate the chicken.”

  “Wait a minute, Mr. Bob,” BD said. “Can I get you to explain this to me? Do you mean to say you gobbled up a T-bone steak and red imported wine and all, and then you—you know, executed your wife—and then you had chicken? Like immediately after the crime, you were hungry again?”

  “You sound like the prosecutor. He tried to make it an aggravating circumstance. It was just a chicken, a goddamn chicken.” Strangler Bob’s body had disappeared, his bald head floating—not just floating, but zooming through space. He said, “I have a message for you from God. Sooner or later, you’ll all three end up doing murder.” His finger materialized in front of him, pointing at each of us in turn—“Murderer. Murderer. Murderer”—pointing last at Dundun’s nose. “You’ll be the first.”

  “I don’t care,” Dundun said, and you could see it was true. He didn’t care.

  BD shivered wildly, and actually such a strong shudder ran through him that his curly hair flew around his head. “Can you really talk to God?”

  At this I snorted like a pig. The idea of God disgusted me. I didn’t believe. Everybody yacked and blabbered about cosmic spirituality and Hindu yogic chakras and Zen koans. Meanwhile, Asian babies fried in napalm. Right now I wished there was some way we could start this whole night over, leaving Strangler Bob out of it.

  Immediately my wish came true when Dundun—excited, I guess, by this conversation with a murderer and by the prediction that he himself would murder someone—tendered a bizarre suggestion: “Let’s bang the button.”

  While I stood in my tracks trying to decode these words, BD took them at their plain meaning and got himself in front of the button.

  BD was tall, as I’ve said, and looked immovable. Dundun, however, swung hand over hand from the prehistoric vines and branches he’d summoned, and hung from the jungle’s ceiling and pushed the red button with the heel of one bare foot. We heard a delicate sound—like an old-fashioned alarm clock in a 1930s movie tinkling distantly in the building’s sleep. When a deputy arrived and called through the door—“What’s going on in there?” BD said, “Nothing,” but the deputy was only asking to pass the time while he got the key in the lock, and then three of them came in with batons and set about beating on the heads and bodies of anybody within reach. Murderer Bob went down in a ball on the floor the same as the Three Musketeers, and the deputies, when their arms were tired and they judged their duty properly exercised, said, “Don’t touch that button no more tonight,” and said, “That’s right, Gentlemen,” and also, “Or somebody’s gonna get crippled.”

  We crawled off to our cells in a state of terror and bewilderment—though not Dundun, who seemed unaffected by the nightmare he himself had caused to explode in our faces, and strolled around the catwalk humming and scatting and fluttering his fingers along the bars. He didn’t possess a complete brain.

  I dragged my physical being, one big throbbing pulse, into an upper bunk I hoped was mine. During the festival of horrors my cellmate, Strangler Bob, had evaporated. Now here he was, reconstituted full-length in his bed. I stepped on his knee climbing into my bunk, and he didn’t say anything. I expected some obscenities or at least a bitter “Merry Christmas,” but not a peep. I studied him surreptitiously over the edge of the bunk, and soon I could see alien features forming on the face below me, Martian mouth, Andromedan eyes, staring back at me with evil curiosity. It made me feel weightless and dizzy when the mouth spoke to me with the voice of my grandmother: “Right now,” Strangler Bob said, “you don’t get it. You’re too young.” My grandmother’s voice, the same aggrieved tone, the same sorrow and resignation.

  I’ll never go back to jail. I’ll hang myself first.

  BD must have felt the same about incarceration. About fifteen years after all this, in the early 1980s, he hanged himself in a holding cell in Florida. Looking at it one way, BD thereby committed a murder, so Strangler Bob’s prediction for him came true. May he rest in peace.

  …We saw Viola Percy one night.

  The county jail and courthouse lay at the bottom of a hill on Court Street, and near the top of the hill, where Dubuque Street intersected, sometimes the relatives or friends—girlfriends, mostly, drunken girlfriends—of inmates came and stood, and waved and hooted, because we could get a pitiful glimpse of that particular spot from the cellblock’s southeast corner, through the very last window. It was the night of New Year’s Eve, and when a prisoner called us to the window, we all took turns looking at Viola, “my soul-mate and my heartbreak,” BD called her, staged in the light of the streetlamp as at the far end of a long tunnel, dressed in a sort of go-go outfit or mini-raincoat made of plastic, with a white yachting cap and white boots halfway up her calves. A small, glittering rain would have perfected the picture, which was, all the same, as silent and remote and unattainable and sad as you could want. And very vague as to its meaning. Allowing him the sight of her in that lonely moment—what it signaled was left to BD to interpret. During my brief stay there
, Viola never came to visit him.

  While I was kept there I wondered if this place was some kind of intersection for souls. I don’t know what to make of the fact that I’ve seen those same men many times throughout my life, repeatedly in dreams and sometimes in actuality—turning a corner on the street, gazing out the window of a passing train, or leaving a café just at the moment I glance up and recognize them, then disappearing out the door—and it makes me feel each person’s universe is really very small, no bigger than a county jail, a collection of cells in which he encounters the same fellow prisoners over and over. BD and Dundun, in particular, turned up in my youth many times after this. I think they may have been not human beings, but wayward angels. I won’t go into all the events they figured in, but I’ll report this much about Dundun: A couple of years after we met in jail, he partnered up with the blond sociopathic giant Jocko, and together they robbed a notorious drug lord in Kansas City. During the robbery Donald Dundun killed a bodyguard—giving truth to Strangler Bob’s prediction.

  You might go farther and say Strangler Bob’s second sight proved out one hundred percent. The day after the Kansas City robbery, Dundun showed up at my door three hundred miles east of the scene of the crime, amazed at what he’d done and looking for a place to hide. We consumed a lot of his stolen heroin while he outwaited his pursuers in my little apartment, and when he felt safe and went away, he left me with a large quantity of the stuff, all mine, and over the course of the following month I became thoroughly addicted to heroin. I’d been addicted before, and I would be again, but this was the turning point. My fate was sabotaged. Thereafter, I was constantly drunk, treated myself as a garbage can for pharmaceuticals, and within a few years lost everything and became a wino on the street, drifting from city to city, sleeping in missions, eating at giveaway programs…Very often I sold my blood to buy wine. Because I’d shared dirty needles with low companions, my blood was diseased. I can’t estimate how many people must have died from it. When I die myself, BD and Dundun, the angels of the God I sneered at, will come to tally up my victims and tell me how many people I killed with my blood.

  Right now I’m eating bacon and eggs in a large restaurant in San Francisco. It’s sunny, noisy, crowded—actually every table’s occupied, and so I’m sitting at the bar that runs the room’s entire length, and I’m facing the long wall-mirror, so that the restaurant behind me lies spread out before me, and I’m free to stare at everyone with impunity, from behind my back, so to speak, while little yelps and laughs from their chopped-up conversations rain down around me. I notice a woman behind me—as I face her reflection—sharing breakfast at a table with her friends, and there’s something very familiar about her…Okay, I’ve realized, after staring at her a bit, quite without her knowledge, that her face looks very much like the face of a friend of mine who lives in Boston—Nan, Robert’s wife. I don’t mean it’s Nan. Nan in Boston is a natural redhead, whereas this one’s a brunette, and somewhat younger, but there’s so much of Nan in the way this woman moves her mouth, and something about her fingers—her manner of gesturing with them as she speaks, as if she’s ridding them of dust, precisely as Nan does—that I wonder if the two might be sisters, or cousins, and the idea isn’t far-fetched, because I know Nan in Boston actually comes from San Francisco, and she has family here.

  An impulse: I think I’ll call Nan and Robert. They’re in my phone (odd expression). I’m gonna call…

  Okay. I just called Robert’s number. Immediately someone answered and Nan’s voice cried, “Randy!” “No, I’m not Randy”—and I tell her it’s me. “I have to get off the phone,” Nan says, “there’s a family emergency. It’s awful, it’s awful, because Robert…” As in a film, she breaks down sobbing after the name. I know what that means in a film. “Is Robert all right?” “No! No! He’s—” and more sobbing. “Nan, what happened? Tell me what happened.” “He had a heart attack this morning. His heart just stopped. They couldn’t save him. He’s dead!” I can’t accept this statement. I ask her why she would say such a thing. She tells me again: Robert’s dead. “I can’t talk now,” she says. “I’ve got a lot of people to call. I have to call my sister, all my family in San Francisco, because they loved him so dearly. I have to get off the line,” and she did.

  I put away my phone and managed to write down that much of the conversation in this journal, on this very page, before my hand started shaking so badly I had to stop. I imagined Nan’s fingers shaking too, touching the face of her own cellphone, calling her loved ones with the unbelievable news of a sudden death. I rotated my barstool, turned away from my half-eaten meal, and stared out over the crowd.

  There’s the brown-haired woman who so resembles redheaded Nan. She stops eating, sets down her fork, rummages in her purse—takes out her cellphone. She places it against her ear and says hello…

  —I left my breakfast unfinished and went back to the nearby hospital, where I’d dropped a friend of mine for some tests. We called him Link, shortened from Linkewits. For many weeks now I’d been living with Link in his home, acting as his chauffeur and appointments clerk and often as his nurse. Link was dying, but he didn’t like to admit it. Weak and sick, down to skin and bones, he spent whole days describing to me his plans for the renovation of his house, which was falling apart and full of trash. He couldn’t manage much more than to get up once or twice a day to use the bathroom or heat some milk and instant oatmeal in his microwave, could hardly turn the pages of a book, lay unconscious as many as twenty hours at a stretch, but he was charting a long future. Other days he embraced the truth, made decisions about his property, instructed me as to his funeral, recalled his escapades, spoke of long-departed friends, considered his regrets, pondered his odds—wondered whether experience continues, somehow, after the heart stops. These days Link left his house only to be driven to medical appointments in San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Petaluma—that’s where I came in. Now, while I sat in a waiting room and the technicians in Radiology put him under scrutiny, making sure of what they already knew, I took out a pen and my notebook and finished jotting a quick account of my recent trip to the restaurant and my sighting of the woman I believed to be Nan’s sister. I’ve reproduced it verbatim in the first few paragraphs above.

  Writing. It’s easy work. The equipment isn’t expensive, and you can pursue this occupation anywhere. You make your own hours, mess around the house in your pajamas, listening to jazz recordings and sipping coffee while another day makes its escape. You don’t have to be high-functioning or even, for the most part, functioning at all. If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the time, I’d certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time, and production wouldn’t suffer. Bouts of poverty come along, anxiety, shocking debt, but nothing lasts forever. I’ve gone from rags to riches and back again, and more than once. Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie—although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.

  Some of my peers believe I’m famous. Most of my peers have never heard of me. But it’s nice to think you have a skill, you can produce an effect. I once entertained some children with a ghost story, and one of them fainted.

  I’ll write a story for you right now. We’ll call this story “The Examination of my Right Knee.” It happened a long time ago, when I was twenty or twenty-one. Since shortly after my fifteenth birthday, my right knee had been tricky—locking into place sometimes when I bent my leg, and staying that way until I found just the combination of position and movement that would set the joint free again. For years I’d tried ignoring the problem, but it had only gotten worse, and so, during my junior year as an undergraduate, I reported it to the experts at the university hospital. An X-ray indicated torn cartilage. The head of Orthopedics himsel
f was going to take a closer look, and I waited in a hallway outside his door in a green robe and paper slippers.

  Almost nothing went on in this hallway. Now and then a medical person in green or white padded by. After a while, about fifty feet along the corridor, a middle-aged man in a dark business suit started talking into a wall-mounted payphone. For most of the conversation his back was turned to me, but at one point he pivoted with a certain frustrated energy, and a few of his words reached my ears: “I was never an animal lover.”

  At that moment the door I was waiting for opened, and an orderly in white asked me to come in.