The End of Me

THE END OF ME

A young man seated at his table

Holds in his hand a book you have never written

Staring at the secretions of the words as

They reveal themselves.

—WALLACE STEVENS, The Lack of Repose

1

I crawled out of the bush away from the window and I began to run. My only safety lay in flight. If I stopped I’d howl. I knew I must not stop. The thing was in my gut. In my parched in my constricted throat. Humped raw cringing wounded to death I’d howl into the night. Affrighting these houses. These well-kept lawns. These softly polished pianos. The dens would shiver. Rugs cringe. If I stopped. If ever I let it out of me. This wounded this stricken animal. And I didn’t. I didn’t howl. I ran. I still wore my tennis shoes. And I didn’t howl.

The club was closed. I drove home. The house was dark. I kept saying to myself: You’re finished. This is the end of you. I wanted to stand in some empty place and beat my hands together. I wanted to crawl. I wanted to burrow. Walking seemed unnatural. Perhaps if I went on all fours it would not hurt so much.

The house stared at me. I knew it was no longer my house. But the most dreadful thing was that it was not unexpected. I had watched it come. It had been coming. Padding toward me. Even if I could not see it clearly and even if I had not believed it I had known it was coming. I was getting old. Was it all simply because I was getting old? One is discarded. The door closes that had always been open. The phone is silent that had always rung. Others are selected where before one had been selected. On the floor through the window with the unheard music he reached under the soft sweater and he unhooked her brassiere. I had not howled. I had run. I was finished.

2

I packed. I put the ribbed socks, the expensive slacks, the shirts with the neat small monogram, the good shoes, the tweed sport jacket, the dark suit with the fine lining, into the suitcase. I put the album of pictures of myself into the suitcase. There were no books to pack. I did not want books. I could always buy books. Reading was painful anyway. I put the jockey shorts whose waist size had increased the last few years into the suitcase and a sleeveless sweater. I expected it to be cold in New York. It was January and it would be cold in New York. I was running away to New York. I could have gone elsewhere: I had money enough. I had this money from the good years. I was not going to let that bitch get her hands on what was left of the money. I put the silk kimono I had bought in the silk mill in Kyoto into the suitcase. I could have used the money I still had to go back to Japan. Japan was a good place to be nothing in. In Japan the Americans I had known had all been more or less finished. The sex in Japan had been like the booze used to be in the jungle or the islands. The sex went on with the obsessiveness that the drinking had in other places. But I did not want to go back to Japan and Paris, where I had lived, too, wasn’t a place to hide. Switzerland was peaceful but it wasn’t a peaceful life I wanted. I did not want to ski or buy watches or take long walks through the country past small vegetable gardens. I wanted to be lost. I wanted to be effaced. I wanted a place that could suck the pain out of me. I was going back to New York.

I did not destroy anything in the house although all the time I was packing there was a pulse, a throb in me to destroy things in the house. To cut up my wife’s clothes. To smash the paintings I had bought in the years when the money had been good. To open the faucets and to let them flood and to empty the ashes in the fireplace all over the rugs and to put a knife through the upholstery of the chaise longue and to set fire to the king-sized bed. I did not, after I had packed, do any of these things but what I did do was to go through the house and turn all the lights on. Every lamp, the concave, the convex, every ceiling light, the direct, the indirect, all over the house, the patio lights, the lights in the carport, all the lights there were. The house blazed. It was utterly illuminated. It drew on every circuit. Then I called the cab company for a cab and I waited in the blazing house and I left the house glaring there among all the dark or the quietly lit houses in the neighborhood. The taxi drove me to the airport and that light of my house, that fire I had set but not set, remained in my mind all during the time I waited in the terminal for the big jet to arrive and for my flight to be called. It was ten minutes after midnight when I boarded the plane for New York. I had a window seat. At twelve-thirty it took off. The blue ground lights blurred. As the plane lifted and became airborne, I thought the pain would diminish, but it did not diminish. Perhaps I had not gone far enough yet for it to diminish. I stared at the small square box of the Astrovision set above me. The late news ended. I reached up and turned off the narrow pencil beam of the reading light. I hoped to be enclosed in darkness. We were flying at 37,000 feet. Was that high enough? We were flying at 500 miles an hour. Was that fast enough? What would be fast enough, what would be high enough, what would be far enough, what would be dark enough for where I was going? Beneath me was the continent. The air bumped uncomfortably several times. Neat and girdled, the stewardess moved in the darkened cabin. Small triangular sandwiches appeared. Coffee in plastic cups. I ate mechanically. I drank mechanically. The in-flight movie would soon begin. I had seen it. I wanted to fall asleep. I prayed I’d fall asleep. Sleep and distance: that was what I needed. A profound sleep, an immeasurable distance. I sat in the inclined chair, sleepless, in the cabined darkness. They started the in-flight movie. I looked at the headphones plugged into the ears of the passengers. They resembled stethoscopes. The passengers were doctors called in on some severe illness. I was alone. I had abandoned everything. I had left it blazing in a token fire. The plane rocked. We were over Colorado. Colorado was not far enough. The plane settled and flew. I half wished it would not stop flying. Traversing continents. Oceans. Poles. I would sit like this, seat half-inclined, oxygen mask there, emergency exit there, the stewardess making her apparitional rounds, the crushed pillow so. They would occasionally flash a signal. I’d fasten my seat-belt. The signal would silently snap out. I’d unfasten my seat-belt. I’d obey the instructions as though the safety precautions mattered. I’d read what magazines there were as though they contained something to be read. Then the magazines would be exhausted. The triangular sandwiches, the olives on a toothpick, the spears of carrot, would give out. The fuel would give out. There would be alternations of light and dark. Below the land would become unrecognizable. Mountainous, snowy. There would be cloud formations of an unknown nature. I would go on to the end of it, with Astrovision. It was a way of dying.

Abruptly, I could not breathe. My lungs labored. There did not seem to be any air in the plane. The plane was silent. The in-flight movie had ended. The reading beams had been extinguished. I could not swallow. My mouth gaped. I was really going to die. In panic I pushed at the emergency button.

The stewardess materialized.

She bent over me.

Pressure clotted my ears.

I can’t breathe.

Would you like an oxygen mask?

She loosened my collar.

I labored.

All the sustaining air seemed sucked out of the plane. The cabin became a hollow tube. Airless I was hurtling through the transfixed dark.

She reached up and twisted the nozzle of the air valve. A hiss. Night air, blowy, cold. From the great dark outside.

Breathe, she said. Slowly. Deeply.

I did.

She was all there was in the world. None of the passengers stirred. The magazines lay discarded on the sleeping and indifferent laps.

The pressure unclotted. The laboring diminished. I was able to swallow. The panic ended. It was anxiety. I wasn’t going to die. Not yet. The stewardess went away. Then something paled outside the window and it was morning.

3

At first I could not leave the hotel. I was on the eighth floor. I looked out of the window. I could see the dark wet rocks of Central Park and the stripped trees. The sky was the color of rain. The radiator hissed and then rattled and then hissed. The room was warm enough. I could not leave it. Not yet. It was a sort of well-furnished cave I had crawled into. To die: or to give birth. That’s what caves were for. Mine was opposite Central Park.

In the street a chauffeur polished a Cadillac that was parked at the opposite curb. A man passed. He was reading a tabloid. Then a woman, thin-legged, with a brown leather pocketbook. Then a man in a white raincoat. Rain was expected. I had no expectations. A young man went by, smoking. The chauffeur was still polishing his car. He was polishing the trunk of the Cadillac. He evidently started with the trunk. He did not expect rain or he had orders to polish the Cadillac no matter what the weather. A bald-headed man went by with an Afghan dog. He held the leash loosely and the dog squatted in the gutter. I was tired. I had not slept in the plane. I was afraid to go to sleep after the hallucination of not breathing. I thought I would go to sleep after a while. The chauffeur was now polishing the top of the Cadillac. A girl carrying a paper bag and muffled in a fur coat went by. A girl in high boots. Then three salesmen stopped at the curb. They had three attaché cases and each carried an umbrella. They all expected rain. I had been standing at the window with my topcoat on. Now I took it off. I took my tie off. I went into the bedroom. The bellhop had put my suitcase on a folding metal rack. I unpacked. After I unpacked I went back into the sitting room and I looked out of the window again. The chauffeur was polishing the door handles of the Cadillac. I sat down in one of the two green upholstered chairs in the sitting room. The suite was too expensive. But I was too tired to care about that. I would change later to something less expensive. From the chair only the sky was visible and the broken-toothed line of roofs. I should try to sleep. I stood up and looked out of the window. The chauffeur was inside the Cadillac and he was polishing the steering wheel and the dashboard.

4

It was dark when I awoke. I turned on all the lights in the sitting room. I would have dinner in the room, I thought.

There was an engraving on the hotel wall. Behind the TV antenna. It was an English hunting scene. I unhooked it from the picture hanger and took it down to examine it more closely.

Tom Moody, the caption said: The Whipper-In.

What was a whipper-in? Something to do with a fox-hunt. Old Tom, the Whipper-In, was dead. I read the verses:

Six crafty earth-stoppers in

hunter’s green dressed

Supported poor Tom to his last

place of rest.

I identified the six crafty earth-stoppers. They were the pall-bearers. On their shoulders was old dead Tom’s coffin.

His horse which he styled his

old soul next appeared

On whose forehead the brush

of his last fox upreared.

Brush, was it? Upreared, did it? I looked at the white horse. His old soul. I looked at the sylvan English scene. What woman wept, a child in her engraved arms, before the thatched cottage? She looked young. Old Tom’s what? Had he ever crouched at a window smoked from the burning turf and seen