Americana

11

Men like to be told of another man's defeat, failure, collapse, perdition; it makes them stronger. Women need such news of vanquished souls because it gives them hope of someone large and woeful wanting to be mothered. Sympathy resides in the glands; the breast is magic. Of course this doesn't even begin to explain what happened after Sullivan finished the bedtime story.

I turned on the light and slowly removed the sheet from her body. Once again I stood above her for a moment and she watched me. I kneeled on the bed and looked down at her. I took her hand and put it to my face and I bit and licked her fingers, which tasted of flavorless soap. I put both our right hands to her right breast. My hand guided hers to her own lips and down along her body and to the inside of my thigh and up to my chest and mouth. She was an artist and I wondered if she thought my body, which she had never truly seen until this night, to be beautiful. I placed her hand between her legs, which were together like lewd art. I lay prone across the bed and bit and licked her fingers, which tasted now of bath and light sweat. I looked into the opening.

I played with the soft flesh and spi

I smelled the cookies baking. It lasted only seconds. Then I sank into the bed again and it was like a field on which a certain number of troops have pretended to be dead, trading their odors with the smell of the earth and feeling a delicious-ness not known since the games of childhood. I went back to sleep then. When I came out of it, I was not even amazed at the ease with which I could put aside the previous night. It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams. I showered and shaved. With my curved scissor I clipped some hair from my nostrils. I looked not bad, things considered, the film-segment done and torn out of me (all blood and eyes), the black wish fulfilled (with all the accompanying panics of such a moment), very little money in my pocket and nowhere in particular to go.

1) New York was not waiting for me with microphones and fleets of ribboned limousines, sweet old Babylonian movie-whore of a city yawning like Mae West.

2) The network had by this time disposed of my corporate remains in some file cabinet marked pending return of soul from limbo.

3) To stay in Fort Curtis was out of the question; the town was now simply the sum of its unfilmed monotonies.

4) The camper itself seemed off-limits. What could Sullivan and I say to each other? (What had we ever said?)

But in the mirror, these things considered, I looked not bad. Indeed I remained David Bell. I brushed my teeth, dressed, and went to the armchair to pare my fingernails. Perhaps I could go to Montana and fall in love with a waitress in a white diner. Canada might be nice, the western part, for it was one of the very last of the non-guilty regions in the world. I could smoke hashish for a year squatting outside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. A woman came in then, wearing an open robe over a pair of dungarees and a sweater. I had never seen her before. She changed the sheets, punching the bed repeatedly and then striking the pillow with the edge of her hand in karate fashion. She looked at me briefly in that analytical ma

"There's some cigarettes under here and a book of matches. You want them or not?"

"No," I said.

She sucked them in. I had no idea what time it was. My fingernails in the machine. The hair of my belly and balls curled in the sheets in the hallway. She attached a small brush to the pipe and cleaned the blinds.

"That's a Vaculux, isn't it? My father used to handle that account. That was years ago. He's growing a beard now. Just the thought of it makes me uncomfortable."

"I just do my job," she said.

She left quietly then, one more irrelevant thing that would not go unremembered. My feet were still up on the chair. Inaction is the begi

"Come to view the body?" I said.

"May I sit down?"

"Please."

She sat at the head of the bed, on the pillow, imitating the characteristics of my own posture, knees high and tight, hands folded over them. Above her on the wall-a gap between the printed words-was a lithograph of an Indian paddling a canoe on a mountain lake. I have said much earlier that in describing Sullivan I would try to avoid analogy but at that moment she seemed herself an Indian, an avenging squaw who would descend the hill after battle to tear out the tongues of dead troopers so they would not be able to enjoy the buffalo meat of the spirit world. Daughter of Black Knife she seemed, a workmanlike piece of murder.