Death Wish

“She’s just not responding?”

“The doctor’s starting to talk about shock treatments. Insulin shock, not electric.”

He was tired, suddenly; his swollen eyes took longer to blink. Coming on top of the rest it was just too much to expect a man to bear.

Jack was saying, “… form of amnesiac catatonia. She looks at things and evidently she sees them, she recognizes you when you walk into the room, but it’s as if there’s no emotional reaction. As if she observes everything without any associations. You can turn her around and give her a push and she’ll walk across the room as obediently as a wind-up toy. She eats by herself if you put the food in front of her, but she doesn’t seem to care what it is. She ate a whole plate full of calves’ liver last night and you know how she detests the stuff. She didn’t even seem to notice. It’s as if there’s some kind of short-circuit somewhere between the taste-buds and the brain, or between the eyes and the brain. When I go in to see her she knows who I am, but she doesn’t recognize me—not in the sense of relating me to herself.”

He listened to Jack’s words and feeling almost burst his throat.

After he hung up, Dundee came into the office. Took one look at his face and said in alarm, “Paul?”

“There’s nothing to talk about, Bill. Not right now.”

He left the building and walked through Grand Central to the subway steps, moving with a heavy deliberation in his tread. Walked down to the platform and waited for the crosstown Shuttle. The tu

The trains were ru

For some indeterminate reason the Broadway Express was less crowded; usually it was packed more thickly than the Shuttle. But he found a seat and sat with his legs close together and his elbows tight against his abdomen, squeezed between two women. One of them had a sickening load of garlic on her breath; he averted his face and breathed as shallowly as he could. The train lurched and swayed on its worn-out rails. Motes of filth hung visibly in the air. Some of the ceiling lights had blown out; half the car was in gloom. He found he was looking from face to face along the rows of crowded passengers, resentfully sca

Ishould have been a Nazi. A shrieking scrape of brake shoes; the train bucked to a halt. He dived out of the car onto the Seventy-second Street platform and followed the crowd to the narrow stairs. The fu

He batted his way through to the turnstile, using his elbows with indiscriminate discourtesy; rushed outside onto the concrete island and stood there getting his breath while the light changed.

He cried at the corny sad dramas on television; he knew every commercial by heart. At half-past nine in the middle of a program an a

After, he thought, not “following.” Where the hell did those imbeciles go to school? It’s after station identification.

I am strung out. Need something. A woman?

No whores. With a whore it would be a mockery. Maybe a woman: a compatible stranger. In the city they were supposed to be easy to find, although he had never tried.

A bar, he thought. Wasn’t that where lonely people were supposed to go? But he never went to bars alone. He had never been able to understand people who did.

Still it was better than rotting in this caged isolation. He knotted his tie and shouldered into his jacket and went out.

10

He sat on the bar stool with his heels hooked on its chrome ring, holding his knees together stiffly to avoid touching the man next to him. “God damn right I’m a bigot,” the man was saying. “I’m a better man than any nigger I ever met.”

He was big without much black hair left on top of his skull; a man who worked with his hands and probably with his back. Grease-smeared gray trousers, a fla

There had been a black couple in the place: well-dressed in flaunt-it-baby outfits, the leather and the bright colors and the Afro hair. When they had left the bar the big man had turned without preamble and started talking to Paul: “Fucking spades come in here like they own the place. You work for a living, right? I work for a living, my kids go to crummy schools, they don’t get to no summer camps—the fucking politicians ain’t worried about my kids, all they worry about is the fucking spades get the summer camps and the schools. You know how many million niggers we got on welfare you and me are supporting with our taxes? Here I read in the paper this morning some fat welfare niggers put on a demonstration march down at City Hall, you read about that?”

“No.…”

“Demanding—not asking, demanding a fucking allowance for Christmas presents for their fucking bastard kids. Anybody ever send you a Christmas allowance for your kids? Christ, I work for a living and I don’t get no fancy presents for my kids, I can’t afford it, they’re lucky they get a couple toy cars and a new outfit of clothes to go to school in. And everybody always bleeding about the fucking spades, Jesus H. Christ if I hear that three-hundred-years-slavery number one more time I’m go