Текст книги "The Manchurian Candidate "

Автор книги: Richard Thomas Condon

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Ten

JOHNNY HAD BECOME CHAIRMAN OF THE Committee on Federal Operations and chairman of its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, with a budget of two hundred thousand dollars a year and an inculcating staff of investigators. He grew sly, in the way he worked that staff. He would sidle up to a fellow senator or another member of the government placed as high and mention the name and habits of some young lady for whom the senator might be paying the necessities, or perhaps an abortion here, or a folly-of-youth police record there. It worked wonders. He had only to drop this kind of talk upon five or six of them and at once they became his missionaries to intimidate others who might seek to block his ways in government.

There were a few groups and individuals who were able to find the courage to assail him. One of the most astute political analysts of the national scene wrote: “Iselinism has developed a process for compounding a lie, then squaring it, which is a modern miracle of dishonesty far exceeding the claims of filter cigarettes. Iselin’s lies seem to have atomic motors within them, tiny reactors of such power and such complexity as to confound and baffle all with direct, and even slightly honest, turns of mind. He has bellowed out so many accusations about so many different people (and for all the public knows these names he brandishes may have been attached to people of entirely questionable existence) that no one can keep the records of these horrendous charges straight. Iselin is a man who shall forever stand guard at the door of the mind to protect the people of this great nation from facts.”

The American Association of Scientists asked that this statement be published: “Senator Iselin puts the finishing touches on his sabotage of the morale of American scientists to the enormous net gain of those who work against the interests of the United States.”

Johnny was doing great. From a semi-hangdog country governor, Raymond’s mother said, utterly unknown outside domestic politics on a state level in 1956, he had transformed himself into a global figure in 1957. He had a lot going for him beyond Raymond’s mother. His very looks: that meaty nose, the nearly total absence of forehead, the perpetual unshavenness, the piggish eyes, red from being dipped in bourbon, the sickeningly monotonous voice, whining and grating—all of it together made Johnny one of the greatest demagogues in American history, even if, as Raymond’s mother often said to friends, he was essentially a lighthearted and unserious one. Nonetheless, her Johnny had become the only American in the country’s history of political villains, studding folk song and story, to inspire concomitant fear and hatred in foreigners, resident in their native countries. He blew his nose in the Constitution, he thumbed his nose at the party system or any other version of governmental chain of command. He personally charted the zigs and zags of American foreign policy at a time when the American policy was a monstrously heavy weight upon world history. To the people of Iceland, Peru, France, and Pitcairn Island the label of Iselinism stood for anything and everything that was dirty, backward, ignorant, repressive, offensive, antiprogressive, or rotten, and all of those adjectives must ultimately be seen as sincere tributes to any demagogue of any country on any planet.

After Raymond’s mother had written the scriptures and set the tone of the sermons Johnny was to make along the line to glory, she left him bellowing and pointing his finger while she organized, for nearly fifteen months, the cells of the Iselin national organization she called the Loyal American Underground. This organization enrolled, during that first period of her work, two million three-hundred thousand members, all militantly for Johnny and what he stood for, and most deeply grateful for his wanting to “give our friends a place from which they may partake of a sense of history through adventure and real participation in the cause of fanatic good government, cleansed of the stain of communism.”

Raymond’s mother and her husband held their mighty political analysis and strategy-planning sessions at their place, which was out toward Georgetown. They would talk and drink bourbon and ginger ale and Johnny would fool around with his scrapbook. He always had it in his mind that cold winter nights would be the best time to paste up the bundles of clippings about his work into individual books, with the intent of someday providing the vast resources for a John Yerkes Iselin Memorial Library. The analyses of the day’s or the week’s battles were always informal and usually productive of really constructive action for the immediate future.

“Hon,” Raymond’s mother said, “aren’t there times when you’re up there at the committee table when you have to go to the john?”

“Of course. Whatta you think I’m made of—blotting paper or something?”

“Well, what do you do about it?”

“Do? I get up and I go.”

“See? That’s exactly what I mean. Now tomorrow when you have to go I want you to try it my way and see what happens. Will you?”

He grinned horribly. “Right up there in front of all those TV cameras?”

“Never mind. Tomorrow when you have to go I want you to throw yourself into a rage—making sure you are on camera—wait for a tight shot if you can—and bang on the desk and scream for the chairman and yell ‘Point of order! Point of order!’ Then stand up and say you will not put up with this farce and that you will not dignify it with your presence for one moment longer.”

“Why do I do that?”

“You have to start making the right kind of exits for yourself, Johnny, so that the American people will know that you have left so they can sit nervously and wait for you to come back.”

“Gee, hon. That’s a hell of an idea. Oh, say, I like that idea!”

She threw him a kiss. “What an innocent you are,” she said, smiling at him dotingly. “Sometimes I don’t think you give a damn what you’re talking about or who you’re talking about.”

“Well, why the hell should I?”

“You’re right. Of course.”

“You’re damn right, I’m right. What the hell, hon, this is a business with me. Suppose we were lawyers, I often say to myself. I mean actual practicing lawyers. I’d be the trial lawyer working out in front, rigging the juries and feeding the stuff to the newspaper boys, and you’d be the brief man back in the law library who has the research job of writing up the case.” He finished the highball in his hand and gave the empty glass to his wife. She got up to make him another drink and said, “Oh, I agree with that, honey, but just the same I wish you would try a little bit more to feel the sacredness of your own mission.”

“The hell with that. What’s with you tonight, baby? I’m like a doctor, in a way. Am I supposed to die with every patient I lose? Life’s too short.” He accepted the highball. “Thank you, honey.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart.”

“What is this stuff? Applejack?”

“Applejack? It’s twelve-year-old bourbon.”

“That’s funny. It tastes like applejack.”

“Maybe it’s the ginger ale.”

“The ginger ale? I always drink my bourbon with ginger ale. How could it taste like applejack because of the ginger ale? It never tasted like applejack before.”

“I can’t understand it,” she said.

“Ah, what’s the difference? I happen to like applejack.”

“You’re so sweet it isn’t even funny.”

“Not so sweet as you.”

“Johnny, have you noticed that some of the newspaper idiots are getting a little nasty with their typewriters?”

“Don’t pay any attention.” He waved a careless hand. “It’s a business with them just like our business. You start getting sensitive and you just confuse everybody. The boys who are assigned to cover me may call themselves the Goon Squad but I don’t notice that any of them have ever asked to be transferred. It’s a game with them. They spend their time trying to catch me in lies, then printing that I said a lie. They like me. They try to knife me but they like me. I try to knife them but we drink together and we’re friends. What the hell, hon. All we’re all trying to do is to get a day’s work done. Take it from me, never get sensitive.”

“Johnny, baby?”

“Yes, hon?”

“Do me a favor and tomorrow at the lunch break please make it a point to go into that Senate barbershop for a shave. You can stand two shaves a day. I swear to God sometimes I think you can grow a beard in twenty minutes. You look like a badger in a Disney cartoon on that TV screen.”

“Don’t worry about it, hon. I have my own ways and I look my own way, but I’m very goddam American and they all know it out there.”

“Just the same, hon, will you promise to get a shave tomorrow at the lunch break?”

“Certainly. Why not? Gimme another drink. I got a big day coming up tomorrow.”

John Yerkes Iselin was re-elected to his second six-year term on November 4, 1958, by the biggest plurality in the history of elections in his state. Two hundred and thirty-six fist fights went unreported the following evening in the pubs, cafés, bodegas, cantinas, trattorias, and sundry brasseries of western Europe between the glum American residents and the outraged, consternated natives of the larger cities.

Early one Monday morning in his office at The Daily Press (for he had taken to arriving at work at seven-thirty rather than at ten o’clock now that he was the department head, just as had Mr. Gaines before him) Raymond looked up and saw, with no little irritation at the interruption, the figure of Chunjin standing in the doorway. Raymond did not remember ever having seen him before. The man was slight and dark with alert, liquid eyes and a most intelligent expression; he stared, with wistful hopefulness mixed with ascending regard, but these subtleties did not transport Raymond to remembering the man.

“Yes?” he drawled in his calculatedly horrid way.

“I am Chunjin, Mr. Shaw, sir. I was interpreter attached to Cholly Company, Fifty-second Regiment—”

Raymond pointed his outstretched finger right at Chunjin’s nose. “You were interpreter for the patrol,” he said.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw.”

Other men might have allowed their camaraderie to foam over in the warming glow of the good old days, but Raymond said, “What do you want?” Chunjin blinked.

“I mean to say, what are you doing here?” Raymond said, not backing away from his bluntness but attempting to cope with this apparent stupidity through clearer syntax.

“Your father did not say to you?”

“My father?”

“Senator Iselin? I write to—”

“Senator Iselin is not my father. Repeat. He is not my father. If you learn nothing else on your visit to this country memorize that fact.”

“I write to Senator Iselin. I tell him how I interpret your outfit. I tell him I want to come to America. He get me visa. Now I need job.”

“A job?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw.”

“My dear fellow, we don’t use interpreters here. We all speak the same language.”

“I am tailor and mender. I am cook. I am driver of car. I am cleaner and scrubber. I fix anything. I take message. I sleep at house of my cousin and not eat much food. I ask for job with you because you are great man who save my life. I need for pay only ten dollars a week.”

“Ten dollars? For all that?”

“Yes sir, Mr. Shaw.”

“Well, look here, Chunjin. I couldn’t pay you only ten dollars a week.”

“Yes, sir. Only ten dollars a week.”

“I can use a valet. I would like having a cook, I think. A good cook, I mean. And I dislike washing dishes. I had been thinking about getting a car, but the parking thing sort of has me stopped. I go to Washington twice a week and there is no reason why I shouldn’t have the money the airlines are getting from this newspaper for those trips and I’d rather not fly that crowded corridor anyway. I would prefer it if you didn’t sleep in, as a matter of fact, but I’m sorry, ten dollars a week just isn’t enough money.” Raymond said that flatly, as though it were he who had applied for the job and was turning it down for good and sufficient reasons.

“I work for fifteen, sir.”

“How can you live on fifteen dollars a week in New York?”

“I live with the cousins, sir.”

“How much do the cousins earn?”

“I do not know, sir.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Chunjin, but it is out of the question.” Raymond, who had still not greeted his old wartime buddy, turned away to return to his work. From his expression he had dismissed the conversation, and he was anxious to return to the bureau reports and to some very helpful information his mother had managed to send along to him.

“Is not good for you to pay less, Mr. Shaw?”

Raymond turned slowly, forcing his attention back to the Korean and realizing impatiently that he had not made it clear that the meeting was over. “Perhaps I should have clarified my position in the matter, as follows,” Raymond said frostily. “It strikes me that there is something basically dishonest about an arrangement by which a man insists upon working for less money than he can possibly live on.”

“You think I steal, Mr. Shaw?”

Raymond flushed. “I had not considered any specific category of such theoretical dishonesty.”

“I live on two dollars a week in Mokpo. I think ten dollars many times better.”

“How long have you been here?”

Chunjin looked at his watch. “Two hours.”

“I mean, in New York.”

“Two hours.”

“All right. I will instruct the bank to pay you a salary of twenty-five dollars a week.”

“Thank you, Mr. Shaw, sir.”

“I will supply the uniforms.”

“Yes sir.”

Raymond leaned over the desk and wrote the bank’s address on a slip of paper, adding Mr. Rothenberg’s name. “Go to this address. My bank. Ask for this man. I’ll call him. He’ll give you the key to my place and some instructions for stocking food. He’ll tell you where to buy it. We don’t use money. Please have dinner ready to serve at seven-fifteen next Monday. I’ll be in Washington for the weekend, where I may be reached at the Willard Hotel. I am thinking in terms of roast veal—a boned rump of veal—with green beans, no potato—please, Chunjin, never serve me a potato—”

“No, sir, Mr. Shaw.”

“—some canned, not fresh, spinach; pan gravy, I think some stewed fruit, and two cups of hot black coffee.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw. Just like in United States Army.”

“Jesus, I hope not,” Raymond said.

Eleven

ON APRIL 15, 1959, THE VERY SAME DAY ON which Chunjin got his job with Raymond on transfer from the Soviet Army, another military transfer occurred. Major Marco was placed on indefinite sick leave and detached from duty.

Marco had undergone two series of psychiatric treatments at Army hospitals. As the recurring nightmare had grown more vivid, the pathological fatigue had gotten more severe. No therapy had been successful. Marco had weighed two hundred and eight pounds when he had come into New York from Korea. At the time he went on indefinite sick leave he weighed in at one hundred and sixty-three and he looked a little nuts. Every nerve end in his body had grown a small ticklish mustache, and they sidled along under his skin like eager touts, screaming on tiptoe. He had the illusion that he could see and hear everything at once and had lost all of his ability to edit either sight or sound. Sound particularly detonated his reflexes. He tried desperately not to listen when people talked because an open A sound repeated several times within a sentence could make him weep uncontrollably. He didn’t know why, so he concentrated on remembering the cause, when he could, so that he would not listen so attentively, but it didn’t work. It was an A sound that must have been somewhat like a sound he had heard many, many years before, in utter peace and safety, which through its loss or through his indifference to it over the years could now cause him to weep bitterly. If he heard the sound occur once, he quickly hummed “La Seine,” to push the A sound off to the side. His hand tremors were pronounced when his arm was extended unsupported. Sometimes his teeth would chatter as though he had entered a chill. Once in a while, after four or five unrelieved nights of nightmare, he developed a bad facial tic, and it wasn’t pretty. Marco was being rubbed into sand by the grinding stones of two fealties. He was being slowly rubbed away by two faiths he lived by, far beyond his control; the first was his degree of holy reverence for the Medal of Honor, one of the most positive prejudices of his life because his life, principally, was the Army; and the second was the abnormal degree of his friendship for Raymond Shaw, which had been placed upon his mind, as coffee will leave a stain upon a fresh, snowy tablecloth, by the deepest psychological conditioning.

When Marco completed, for the want of any other word, the second course of treatment and was ordered to rest, they knew he was through and he knew they knew it. He headed for New York to talk to Raymond. He had never been able to tell the doctors the part of the dream where Raymond killed Mavole and Lembeck, on a continuous-performance basis, and he had not allowed himself to mention every phase of the four variations on the drill that had been used to win Raymond the Medal of Honor. He had written to Al Melvin and, between them, he and Melvin had spent over three hundred dollars talking to each other on the long-distance telephone, and it had brought considerable relief to each to know that the other was suffering as deeply from the same malady, but it did not stop the nightmares. Marco knew that he must talk to Raymond. He must, absolutely must. He knew that if he did not talk to Raymond about most of the details in his dreams he would die from them. Ironically, as Marco was riding one train to New York, Raymond was riding another to Washington.

Marco sat like a stone in the train chair, riding sideways in the club car. The car was about half filled. Almost all of the seats were occupied at one end, Marco’s end, by businessmen, or what seemed to be businessmen but were actually an abortionist, an orchestra leader, a low-church clergyman, an astrologer, a Boy Scout executive, a horticulturist, and a cinematographer, because, no matter how much they would like the world to think so, the planet is not populated entirely by businessmen no matter how banal the quality of conversation everywhere has become. Some women were present; their dresses gave the car the only embarrassing touch of color, excepting the garish decorations on the upper left side of Marco’s blouse.

Marco had a rye old-fashioned placed on the round, metal stand in front of him, but he hadn’t tasted it. He kept wishing he had ordered beer not to taste and he was careful not to look at anybody, because he had stopped doing that several weeks before. He sweated continuously. His face had very little color. His palms drenched his trousers at the tops of his knees. He was battling to make a decision as to whether he wanted to smoke a cigar or not. His eyes burned. He felt an agony of weariness. His stomach hurt. He concentrated for an instant on not clenching his teeth but he could not retain the thought. His jaws were tired and some doctor had told him that he would grind the dentine off his molars if he didn’t concentrate on not clenching his jaws. He turned his body slightly, but not his head, toward the person sitting beside him, a woman.

“Do you mind cigar smoke,” he mumbled.

“Not at all,” she murmured. He turned away from her but made no move to find a cigar.

“Go ahead,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I wish you’d smoke two cigars at the same time.”

“You must really like cigar smoke.”

“Not especially, but I think two cigars going at the same time would look awfully amusing.”

He turned his body again toward the woman sitting beside him. He lifted his eyes slowly, hesitantly, beyond the long, scarlet-tipped fingers at repose in her lap, past a shining silver belt buckle shaped as Quetzalcoatl, an urbane feathered serpent; past uptilted, high-setting, pronounced breasts that stared back at him eyelessly through dark blue wool; past the high neckline and the discreet seed pearls around a long throat of white Carrara marble, to a mouth whose shape he had yearned to see in living flesh since he had seen its counterpart within a photograph he had found in a German magazine twenty-three years before, rolled up in his father’s effects in the trunk of a command car. In abstract, it was a sexual object. It was a witty mouth. It looked insatiable. It told him about lust which had been lost far back in mythology, lust which could endow its tasters with eternal serenity, and it was the mouth of many varieties of varying kinds of woman. He regretted having to leave off his concentration on the sight of it; with difficulty he moved his eyes upward to the questing horn of a most passionate nose; a large, formed, aquiline, and Semitic nose, the nose of a seeker and a finder of glories, and it made him remember that every Moslem who attains heaven is allotted seventy-two women who must look exactly like this between the eyes and the mouth, and he thought across the vast, vast distance of the huanacauri rock of Incan puberty to the words of the black, black, black song that keened: “If she on earth no more I see, my life will quickly fade away.” Then at last his eyes came to the level of the eyes of a Tuareg woman and he rushed past a random questioning as to whether the Berlitz Schools taught Temajegh, and he thought of the god of love who was called bodiless by the Hindus because he was consumed by the fire of Siva’s eyes, then he closed his own eyes and tried to help himself, to stop himself, to—SWEET GOD IN HEAVEN! he could not. He began to weep. He stumbled to his feet. The passengers across the aisle stared at him hostilely. He knocked his drink over, and the metal stand over. He turned blindly and noisily to the left, unable to stop weeping, and made it, from behind the wet opaqueness, to the train door and the vestibule. He stood alone in the vestibule and put his head against the window and waited for time to pass, feeling confident that it would pass, when his motor would run down and this sobbing would slowly subside. Trying to analyze what had happened, as though to fill his mind, he was forced into the conclusion that the woman must have looked the way that open A sounded to him: an open, effortless, problemless, safe, and blessed look. What color had her hair been? he wondered as he wept. He concentrated upon the words by which angels had been known: yaztas, fravashi, and Amesha Spentas; seraphim and cherubim; hayyot, ofanim, arelim, and Harut and Marut who had said: “We are only a temptation. Be not then an unbeliever.” He decided that the woman could only be one of the fravashi, that army of angels that has existed in heaven before the birth of man, that protects him during his life, and is united to his soul at death. He sobbed while he conjectured about the color of her hair. At last, he was permitted to stop weeping. He leaned against the train wall in exhaustion, riding backward. He took a handkerchief slowly from his trousers pocket and, with an effort of strength which he could not replenish with sleep, slowly dried his face, then blew his nose. He thought, only fleetingly, that he could not go back into that club car again, but that there would be plenty of other seats in the other direction, toward the rear of the train. When he got to New York, he decided, he would pull on a pair of gray slacks and a red woolen shirt and he’d sit all day on the rim of the map of the United States behind Raymond’s big window, looking out at the Hudson River and that state, whatever its name was, on the other shore and think about the states beyond that state and drink beer.

When he turned to find another seat in another car, she was standing there. Her hair was the color of birch bark, prematurely white, and he stared at her as though her thyroid were showing its excessive activity and her hypereroticism. She stood smoking a new cigarette, leaning back, riding forward, and looking out of the window.

“Maryland is a beautiful state,” she said.

“This is Delaware.”

“I know. I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid track on this stretch, but nonetheless Maryland is a beautiful state. So is Ohio, for that matter.”

“I guess so. Columbus is a tremendous football town. You in the railroad business?” He felt dizzy. He wanted to keep talking.

“Not any more,” she told him. “However, if you will permit me to point it out, when you ask someone that, you really should say: ‘Are you in the railroad line?’ Where is your home?”

“I’ve been in the Army all my life,” Marco said. “We keep moving. I was born in New Hampshire.”

“I went to a girls’ camp once on Lake Francis.”

“Well. That’s away north. What’s your name?”

“Eugénie.”

“Pardon?”

“No kidding. I really mean it. And with that crazy French pronunciation.”

“It’s pretty.”

“Thank you.”

“Your friends call you Jenny?”

“Not yet they haven’t.”

“I think it’s a nice name.”

“You may call me Jenny.”

“But what do your friends call you?”

“Rosie.”

“Why?”

“My full name—the first name—is Eugénie Rose. I always favored Rosie, of the two names, because it smells like brown soap and beer. It’s the kind of a name that is always worn by the barmaid who always gets whacked across the behind by draymen. My father used to say it was a portly kind of a name, and with me being five feet nine he always figured I had a better chance of turning out portly than fragile, which is really and truly the way a girl using the name Eugénie would have to be.”

“Still, when I asked you your name, you said Eugénie.”

“It is quite possible that I was feeling more or less fragile at that instant.”

“I never could figure out what more or less meant.”

“Nobody can.”

“Are you Arabic?”

“No.”

He held out his hand to be taken in formal greeting. “My name is Ben. It’s really Bennet. I was named after Arnold Bennet.”

“The writer?”

“No. A lieutenant colonel. He was my father’s commanding officer at the time.”

“What’s your last name?”

“Marco.”

“Major Marco. Are you Arabic?”

“No, but no kidding, I was sure you were Arabic. I would have placed your daddy’s tents within twelve miles of the Hoggar range in the central Sahara. There’s a town called Janet in there and a tiny little place with a very rude name that I couldn’t possibly repeat even if you had a doctorate in geography. When the sun goes down and the rocks, which have been heated so tremendously all day, are chilled suddenly by the night, which comes across the desert like flung, cold, black stout, it makes a salvo like a hundred rifles going off in rapid fire. The wind is called the khamseen, and after a flood throws a lot of power down a mountainside the desert is reborn and millions and millions of white and yellow flowers come to bloom all across the empty desolation. The trees, when there are trees, have roots a hundred feet long. There are catfish in the waterholes. Think of that. Did you know that? Sure. Some of them run ten, twelve inches. Everywhere else in the Arab world the woman is a beast of burden. Among the Tuareg, the woman is queen, and the Hoggar are the purest of the Tuareg. They have a ceremony called ahal, a sort of court of love where the woman reigns with her beauty, her wit, or the quality of her blood. They have enormous chivalry, the Tuareg. If a man wants to say ‘I love!’ he will say ‘I am dying of love.’ I have dreamed many times of a woman I have never seen and will never see because she died in 1395, and to this day the Tuareg recall her in their poetry, in their ahals, telling of her beauty, intelligence, and her wit. Her name was Dassine oult Yemma, and her great life was deeply punctuated by widely known love affairs with the great warriors of her time. I thought you were she. For just an instant, back there in that car a little while ago, I thought you were she.”

His voice had gotten more and more rapid and his eyes were feverish. She had held his hand tightly in both of hers as he had spoken, ever since he had introduced himself. They stared at each other.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You became one of my best and bravest thoughts,” he told her. “I thank you.” The taut, taut band around his head had loosened. “Are you married?”

“No. You?”

“No. What’s your last name?”

“Cheyney. I am a production assistant for a man named Justin who had two hits last season. I live on Fifty-fourth Street, a few doors from the Museum of Modern Art, of which I am a tea-privileges member, no cream. I live at Fifty-three West Fifty-fourth Street, Three B. Can you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Eldorado nine, two six three two. Can you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“You look so tired. Apartment Three B. Are you stationed in New York? Is stationed the right word? Fifty-three West Fifty-fourth Street.”

“I’m not exactly stationed in New York. I have been stationed in Washington but I got sick and I have a long leave now and I’m going to spend it in New York.”

“Eldorado nine, two-six-three-two.”

“I stay with a friend of mine, a newspaperman. We were in Korea together.” Marco ran a wet hand over his face and began to hum “La Seine.” He had found the source of the sound of the open A. It was far inside this girl and it was in the sound of the name Dassine oult Yemma. He couldn’t get the back of his hand away from his mouth. He had had to shut his eyes. He was so tired. He was so tired. She took his hand gently away from his mouth. “Let’s sit down,” she said. “I want you to put your head on my shoulder.” The train lurched and he almost fell, but she caught and held him, then she led the way into the other car where there were plenty of seats.

Raymond’s apartment was on the extreme west coast of the island where firemen had heavy bags under their eyes from piling out four and five times a night to push sirens to brownstone houses where nobody had any time to do anything about too many bone-weary Puerto Ricans living in one room. It was a strip of city too dishonest to admit it was a slum, or rather, in all of the vastness of the five boroughs of metropolis there was a strip of city, very tiny, which was not a slum, and this was the thin strip that was photographed and its pictures sent out across the world until all the world and the minuscule few who lived in that sliver of city thought that was New York, and neither knew or cared about the remainder of the six hundred square miles of flesh and brick. Here was the ripe slum of the West Side where the city had turned so bad that at last thirteen square blocks of it had had to be torn down before the rats carried off the babies. New York, New York! It’s a wonderful town! The west side of the island was rich in façades not unlike the possibilities of a fairy princess with syphilis. Central Park West was all front and faced a glorious park betrayed only now and then by bands of chattering faggots auctioning bodies and by an excessive population of emotion-caparisoned people in the somewhat temporary-looking sanitariums on so many of its side streets. Columbus and Amsterdam avenues were the streets of the drunks, where the murders were done in the darkest morning hours, where there were an excessive number of saloons and hardware stores. They were connected by trains of brownstone houses whose fronts were riotously colored morning and evening and all day on Sunday by bursts and bouquets of Puerto Ricans, and beyond Amsterdam was Broadway, the bawling, flash street, the fleshy, pig-eyed part of the city that wore lesions of neon and incandescent scabs, pustules of lights and color in suggestively luetic lycopods, illuminating littered streets, filth-clogged streets that could never be cleansed because when one thousand hands cleaned, one million hands threw dirt upon the streets again. Broadway was patrolled by strange-looking pedestrians, people who had grabbed the wrong face in the dark when someone had shouted “Fire!” and were now out roaming the streets, desperate to find their own. For city block after city block on Broadway it seemed that only food was sold. Beyond that was West End Avenue, a misplaced street bitter on its own memories, lost and bewildered, seeking some Shaker Heights, desperately genteel behind an apron of shabby bricks. Here was the limbo of the lower middle class where God the Father, in the form of sunlight, never showed His face. Raymond lived beyond that, on Riverside Drive, another front street of large, grand apartments that had become cabbage-sour furnished rooms which faced the river and an excessive amount of squalor on the Jersey shore. All together, the avenues and streets proved by their decay that the time of the city was long past, if it had ever existed, and the tall buildings, end upon end upon end, were so many extended fingers beckoning the Bomb.