I reached down again and picked it off and it burst between my fingers. My
own blood ran across my palm and inner wrist in a warm flood. I began to cry. Still
crying, I walked back to my clothes and put them or. I wanted to stop crying, but I
just didn’t seem able to turn off the waterworks. Then the shakes set in, making it
worse. Vern ran up to me, still naked. ‘They off, Gordie? They off me? They off me?’
He twirled in front of me like an insane dancer on carnival stage. They off? Huh? Huh?
They off me, Gordie?’
His eyes kept going past me, as wide and white as the eyes of a plaster horse
on a merry-go-round.
I nodded that they were and just kept on crying. It seemed that crying was
going to be my new career. I tucked my shirt in and then buttoned it all the way to the neck. I put on my socks and my sneakers. Little by little the tears began to slow down.
Finally there was nothing left but a few hitches and moans, and then they stopped, too.
Chris walked over to me, wiping his mouth with a handful of elm leaves. His eyes
were wide and mute and apologetic.
When we were all dressed we just stood there looking at each other for a
moment, and then we began to climb the railroad embankment. I looked back once at
the burst leech lying on top of the tramped-down bushes where we had danced and
screamed and groaned them off. It looked deflated… but still ominous.
Fourteen years later I sold my first novel and made my first trip to New York.
‘It’s going to be a three-day celebration,’ my new editor told me over the phone.
‘People slinging bullshit will be summarily shot’ But of course it was three days of
unmitigated bullshit. I went away thinking the publishing house believed me to be the
reincarnation of Thomas Wolfe; they saw me off with perhaps other things in mind–
paperback sales in the millions, for instance.
While I was there I wanted to do all the standard out-of-towner things–see a
stage show at Radio City Music Hall, go to the top of the Empire State Building (fuck
the World Trade Center; the building King Kong climbed in 1933 is always gonna be
the tallest one in the world for me), visit Times Square by night. Keith, my editor,
seemed more than pleased to show his city off. The last touristy thing we did was to
take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, and while leaning on the rail I happened to look down and see scores of used condoms floating on the mild swells. And I had a
moment of almost total recall–or perhaps it was an actual incidence of time-travel.
Either way, for one second I was Literally in the past, pausing halfway up that
embankment and looking back at the burst leech: dead, deflated… but still ominous.
Keith must have seen something in my face because he said: ‘Not very pretty,
are they?’
I only shook my head, wanting to tell him not to apologize, wanting to tell him
that you didn’t have to come to the Apple and ride the ferry to see used rubbers,
wanting to say: The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the
past and get ready for some future mortality; that’s why all the verbs in stories have ed endings, Keith my good man, even the ones that sell millions of paperbacks. The only
two useful artforms are religion and stories.
I was pretty drunk that night, as you may have guessed.
What I did tell him was: ‘I was thinking of something else, that’s all.’ The most
important things are the hardest things to say.
22
We walked further down the tracks–I don’t know just how far–and I was starting to
think: Well, okay, I’m going to be able to handle it, it’s all over anyway, just a bunch of leeches, what the fuck; I was still thinking it when waves of whiteness suddenly
began to come over my sight and I fell down.