But I couldn’t stop. I went to that door because I had to. The mental telegraph was still working at what I felt was glee—a terrible, insane glee—and triumph. My hand trembled toward the door. It was coated with green fire.
I opened the door and saw what was there.
It was the girl, my girl. Dead. Her eyes stared vacantly into that October vault, into my own eyes. She smelled of stolen kisses. She was naked and she had been ripped open from throat to crotch, her whole body turned into a womb. And something lived in there. The rats. I could not see them but I could hear them, rustling inside her. I knew that in a moment her dry mouth would open and she would ask me if I loved. I backed away, my whole body numb, my brain floating on a dark cloud.
I turned to Nona. She was laughing, holding her arms out to me. And with a sudden blaze of understanding I knew, I knew, I knew. The last test. The last final. I had passed it and I was free!
I turned back to the doorway and of course it was nothing but an empty stone closet with dead leaves on the floor.
I went to Nona. I went to my life.
Her arms reached around my neck and I pulled her against me. That was when she began to change, to ripple and run like wax. The great dark eyes became small and beady. The hair coarsened, went brown. The nose shortened, the nostrils dilated. Her body lumped and hunched against me.
I was being embraced by a rat.
“Do you love?” it squealed. “Do you love, do you love?” Her lipless mouth stretched upward for mine.
I didn’t scream. There were no screams left. I doubt if I will ever scream again.
It’s so hot in here.
I don’t mind the heat, not really. I like to sweat if I can shower. I’ve always thought of sweat as a good thing, a masculine thing, but sometimes, in the heat, there are bugs that bite—spiders, for instance. Did you know that the female spiders sting and eat their mates? They do, right after copulation.
Also, I’ve heard scurryings in the walls. I don’t like that.
I’ve given myself writer’s cramp, and the felt tip of the pen is all soft and mushy. But I’m done now. And things look different. It doesn’t seem the same anymore at all.
Do you realize that for a while they almost had me believ-ing that I did all those horrible things myself? Those men from the truck stop, the guy from the power truck who got away.
They said I was alone. I was alone when they found me, almost frozen to death in that graveyard by the stones that mark my father, my mother, my brother Drake. But that only means she left, you can see that. Any fool could. But I’m glad she got away. Truly I am. But you must realize she was with me all the time, every step of the way.
I’m going to kill myself now. It will be much better. I’m tired of all the guilt and agony and bad dreams, and also I don’t like the noises in the walls. Anybody could be in there. Or anything.
I’m not crazy. I know that and trust that you do, too. If you say you aren’t crazy that’s supposed to mean you are, but I am beyond all those little games. She was with me, she was real.
I love her. True love will never die. That’s how I signed all my letters to Betsy, the ones I tore up.
But Nona was the only one I ever really loved.
It’s so hot in here. And I don’t like the sounds in the walls.
Do you love?
Yes, I love.
And true love will never die.
For Owen
Walking to school you ask me what other schools have grades.
I get as far as Fruit Street and your eyes go away.
As we walk under these yellow trees you have your army lunch box under one arm and your short legs, dressed in combat fatigues, make your shadow into a scissors that cuts nothing on the sidewalk.
You tell me suddenly that all the students there are fruits.
Everyone picks on the blueberries because they are so small.
The bananas, you say, are patrol boys.
In your eyes I see homerooms of oranges, assemblies of apples.
All, you say, have arms and legs and the watermelons are often tardy.
They waddle, and they are fat.
“Like me,” you say.
* * *
I could tell you things but better not.
That watermelon children cannot tie their own shoes; the plums do it for them.
Or how I steal your face—steal it, steal it, and wear it for my own.
It wears out fast on my face.
It’s the stretching that does it.
I could tell you that dying’s an art and I am learning fast.
In that school I think you have already picked up your own pencil and begun to write your name.
Between now and then I suppose we could someday play you truant and drive over to Fruit Street and I could park in a rain of these October leaves and we could watch a banana escort the last tardy watermelon through those tall doors.
Survivor Type
Sooner or later the question comes up in every medical student’s career. How much shock-trauma can the patient stand? Different instructors answer the question, in different ways, but cut to its base level, the answer is always another question: How badly does the patient want to survive?
January 26 Two days since the storm washed me up. I paced the island off just this morning.
Some island! It is 190 paces wide at its thickest point, and 267 paces long from tip to tip So far as I can tell, there is nothing on it to eat.
My name is Richard Pine. This is my diary. If I’m found (when), I can destroy this easily enough. There is no shortage of matches. Matches and heroin. Plenty of both.
Neither of them worth doodlysquat here, ha-ha. So I will write. It will pass the time, anyway.
If I’m to tell the whole truth-and why not? I sure have the time!—I’ll have to start by saying I was born Richard Pinzetti, in New York’s Little Italy. My father was an Old World guinea. I wanted to be a surgeon. My father would laugh, call me crazy, and tell me to get him another glass of wine. He died of cancer when he was forty-six. I was glad.
I played football in high school. I was the best damn football player my school ever produced. Quarterback. I made All-City my last two years. I hated football. But if you’re a poor wop from the projects and you want to go to college, sports are your only ticket. So I played, and I got my athletic scholarship.
In college I only played ball until my grades were good enough to get a full academic scholarship. Pre-med. My father died six weeks before graduation. Good deal.
Do you think I wanted to walk across that stage and get my diploma and look down and see that fat greaseball sitting there? Does a hen want a flag? I got into a fraternity, too. It wasn’t one of the good ones, not with a name like Pinzetti, but a fraternity all the same.
Why am I writing this? It’s almost funny. No, I take that back. It is funny. The great Pine, sitting on a rock in his pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, sitting on an island almost small enough to spit across, writing his life story. Am I hungry! Never mind, I’ll write my goddam life story if I want to. At least it keeps my mind off my stomach. Sort of.
I changed my name to Pine before I started reed school. My mother said I was breaking her heart. What heart? The day after my old man was in the ground, she was out hustling that Jew grocer down at the end of the block. For someone who loved the name so much, she was in one hell of a hurry to change her copy of it to Steinbrunner.
Surgery was all I ever wanted. Ever since high school. Even then I was wrapping my hands before every game and soaking them afterward. If you want to be a surgeon, you have to take care of your hands. Some of the kids used to rag me about it, call me chickenshit. I never fought them. Playing football was risk enough. But there were ways.
The one that got on my case the most was Howie Plotsky, a big dumb bohunk with zits all over his face. I had a paper route, and I was selling the numbers along with the papers.