CHAPTER 5
I was standing with the young medical student, Seven Coleman, under a drafty archway, the collar of his thin, threadbare coat turned up. I could hear his teeth chattering. Worried that he might catch a cold, I invited him to come up to my place, but he declined.
“Thank you, Mr. Bobuck,” he murmured, shivering, “but unfortunately I have to run some errands. Anyway, we’d be soaked to the skin after a couple of steps if we went out into the street. This downpour just won’t let up.”
Showers of water swept across the rooftops, streaming down the faces of the houses like floods of tears. If I turned my head a little I could see my window on the fourth floor across the street. With the rain trickling down, the panes looked as if the glass was soggy. A filthy yellow stream was coursing down the street, and the archway was filling up with people who had all decided to wait for the storm to pass.
I looked at the discolored houses squatting side by side in the rain like a row of morose animals. How eerie and run-down they all looked. Plopped down without thought, they looked like weeds that had shot up from the ground. There was a half house, crooked, with a receding forehead, and beside it was one that stuck out like a tusk. Beneath the dreary sky, they looked as if they were asleep, and you could feel none of the malevolent, hostile life that sometimes emanates from them when the fog fills the street on a chilly evening.
I have lived here for a generation and in that time I have formed the impression, which I cannot shake, that there are certain hours of the night, or in the first light of dawn, when these houses conspire against us. Sometimes a faint, quiver goes through their walls, noises scurry across the roof and drop into the gutter. Our dulled senses accept them, without looking for a cause.
When I consider all the strange people who live in them, phantom-like people of questionable species. People who seem to have been put together haphazardly out of odds and ends. I am more than ever inclined to believe that such dreams carry within them dark truths. I imagine all the people in these buildings fall lifeless the very second a tiny element is erased in their brains: perhaps the glimmer of an idea or a trivial ambition.
“Some of them are millionaires, you know?”
I stared at Seven.
It was as if Seven had guessed my thoughts. He pointed to the junk shop next door, where the water was washing off the rust from the old ironware into brownish-red puddles. “Frankie Wasser, for example. He’s unbelievably rich, owns a third of these slums.”
I was shocked. “Frankie Wasser? Frankie Wasser from the furniture store is rich?"
“Oh, I know him well,” Seven went on, determined to tell me the story. “I knew his son too, Dr. Wasser. Have you heard of him? Dr. Wasser, the eye-specialist? I caused the downfall of that asshole, Dr. Wasser, and even today no one knows it was me behind it.”
“Old Wasser has a son who was a doctor?” I asked.
He lowered his voice, like someone who has suddenly come to his senses. “Would you like to hear what I did?”
--
The story of Dr. Wasser
“Have you heard how they cure glaucoma? Glaucoma is a malignant disease of the eyeball that leads to blindness, and there is only one means of stopping its progress, an operation called an trabeculectomy in which a wedge-shaped flap of the iris is opened.
But there is one odd fact about the diagnosis of glaucoma: there are times, especially in the initial stages of the disease, when the symptoms, although they have previously been evident, seem to disappear. Completely. In such cases it is difficult for a doctor, to say for certain that a diagnosis might have been correct.
It was on this that Dr. Wasser based his fiendish plan. Time after time he diagnosed glaucoma just so that he could perform the operation, which was simple for him, but which brought in a lot of insurance money.
To lose one’s sight is terrible to consider. So, naturally the patients would insist that they have surgery as quickly as possible.
Operations on healthy eyes not only increased Wasser’s fame as an incomparable doctor, it also satisfied his lust for money and flattered his vanity. What could be more pleasing than to see those that he had robbed in reality look up to him as a good Samaritan, to hear them praise him as saving their vision?
But, like Wasser, I also grew up in this squalor, so I have my own fiendish side.
The young doctor, Savioli, is generally given the credit for unmasking him, but he merely presented the information I gave him. I piled up the evidence and supplied the proof, until the day came when the police showed up to question the doctor.
That was when he committed suicide. Word went round the city that he had died from a stroke. But it was nitrate. When it is inhaled, nitrate can create the appearance of a stroke. It was not long, however, before the truth came out.”
--
Seven stared into space, lost in thought, as if immersed in some deep problem; then he shrugged a shoulder in the direction of Frankie Wasser’s junk shop. “Now he’s alone,” he muttered, “all alone with his greed and that wax doll.”
I remembered that Dr. Savioli was the name that Zac, my puppeteer friend, had told me as the guy who had rented the apartment next to mine.
I wondered about what Seven had said, "Wasser’s wax doll."
--
That evening I had my friends, Joshua and Zac over for margaritas. Margaritas had become a ritual we established to make certain we got together regularly. I had opened the window to get rid of the stuffiness of my tiny room. The cold night wind blew in and set the coats hanging on the door gently dancing.
“Rokop’s hat is trying to fly away,” said Zac, pointing to the musician’s huge floppy hat, the broad brim of which was beginning to flap like a pair of black wings. Joshua Rokop laughed and beat time to the music that drifted across the roofs on the thin winter air. Then he picked up my old, battered guitar that was leaning against the wall, pretended to pluck its broken strings and sang a strange song in a squawking falsetto.
Joshua stopped and suggested we go to the i-Bar after we finish the margaritas. They had been trying to get me to go with them for some time but I don’t like crowded places.
“Yes, you should come along with us,” said Zac, as he closed the window, “it really is worth seeing.”
After a moment Joshua said, “I was just thinking about the way those coats were flapping in the wind, isn’t it strange the way the wind makes inanimate objects move? Doesn’t it look odd when things which usually just lie there lifeless suddenly start fluttering. I remember once looking out onto an empty lot, watching huge scraps of paper whirling angrily round and round, chasing one another. There was just one thick newspaper that couldn’t keep up with the rest. It lay there on the ground, full of spite and flapping spasmodically, as if it were out of breath and gasping for air. As I watched, I wondered. What if we living beings were nothing more than such scraps of paper? Maybe there is a similar unseeable, unfathomable wind blowing us from place to place determining our actions, while we are mistakenly certain we are acting by our own free will? What if the life within us were nothing other than some mysterious whirlwind?”
“Joshua, you’re sounding like Bobuck. What’s wrong with you?” joked Zac, giving the musician a suspicious look.
“It’s the story about that Ibbur book that Bobuck told before you arrived, that and the margaritas,” Joshua explained.
“Ibbur?” Zac quizzed.
“Actually, about an odd man who brought the book. Bobuck doesn’t know his name or where he lives, and although he says his appearance was very striking, he can’t describe the guy.”
Immediately Zac became interested. “That’s curious,” he said after a pause. “Did he happen to be smooth-faced and have black eyes?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Do you know him?”
The puppeteer shook his head. “No, it’s sounded like the TAR.”
“TAR? That’s a stretch, isn’t it?”
Zac replied, “The TAR tale always starts with a man who can’t be described delivering a book. That seems to be exactly what you are saying.”
“The TAR doesn’t exist. It is a fairy-tale.”
"Well, true, but the idea was that a alchemist made a man out of tar for some evil corporation."
Joshua looked to Zac and asked, “You think his TAR had a dick? If he is tar he really wouldn’t need one.”
Zac thought for a moment, “If I was an alchemist making a TAR he would have a huge dick. That would be the scariest part of him.”
We laughed.
Seeing Zac laugh, his head propped in his hand, the light emphasizing the strange contrast between the youthful redness of his cheeks and the whiteness of his hair, I could not help comparing his features with the mask-like faces of his puppets which he had shown me so often. It was not surprising that they looked so much like Zac. The same profile, the same expression.
As I contemplated Zac’s simple life, it suddenly seemed uncanny that someone like him, even though he was well educated, had returned to the shabby puppet booths and fairgrounds of his father, putting the same puppets through the same clumsy movements and acting out the same threadbare plots. I realized that he was unable to abandon them. They were part of his life almost like his children. When he was far away from them, he worried about them until he returned home. That is why he looked after them so lovingly and proudly dressed them up in their tawdry finery. I wondered if his puppets had dicks.
The room was silent while Joshua poured more drinks.
“Less boring subject," said Joshua, “I saw Rosina downstairs when I came in, the redheaded girl, she seems like a dangerous one to be living in the same building with.” He rolled his eye up to me with a questioning look.
I explained that I had watched her grow up and that having sex with her seemed like incest. I did notice, and appreciate, how she had matured.
Softly, very softly, music could be heard through the window; sometimes it would fade away and then return, depending on whether the wind dropped it on the way or carried it up to us.
After a while Joshua lifted his drink and ask me whether I wasn’t at least going to say, “cheers,” but I gave no answer. I had so completely lost the willpower to make my limbs move, that it did not even occur to me to open my mouth. I thought I was asleep, so stone-like was the calm that had taken possession of me.
Joshua said quite loud, “He’s fallen asleep.” Meaning me, but I wasn’t asleep. They went on talking in subdued voices, and I realized they were talking about me. Someone said something about “therapy,” and I listened more intently.
“You need to watch what you say when Bobuck's around,” said Joshua reproachfully. “He is very susceptible to suggestion and before you know it, he would be in the middle of a full TAR attack.”
Zac nodded. “You’re quite right. I forget what he has been through. Poor guy.”
“Did Bobuck spend a long time in that place? It’s a pity about him, he can’t even be thirty.”
“I don’t know his past in detail. He looks like he could be French. My old friend, Dr. Hill, who was one of Charlie's doctors when he was in.... in that place, asked me to take him under my wing and find him a room nearby so he could keep an eye on him. Charlie is such a sweet man, but far too sensitive for this neighborhood.”
Again Zac gave me a concerned look while I feigned sleep. “Since then he's lived here repairing antique jewelry, and managed to make a decent living out of it. The fortunate thing is that he seems to have forgotten everything that put him in trouble to begin with.”
Zac’s words smacked me and squeezed my heart with rough, cruel hands. There had always been a vague torment gnawing at my soul, a feeling as if something had been taken from me. I felt as if I had passed through long periods of my life like a sleepwalker going along the edge of a precipice. I had never been able to find the cause but now the secret was out, and it hurt.
Now I had a terrible explanation for the strange dream that kept returning of being part of a weird music group, a band of sorts. I dreamed of stages and dressing rooms, each more frightening than the last. I had been institutionalized and hypnosis had been used to block my memories. I was rendered homeless in my own head.
I realized I was a cutting that had been grafted onto another stem, a branch sprouting from an unknown root. Even if I were to succeed in forcing my way into my past, it would mean that I would again suffer at the hands of the same memories that had been successfully locked out.
I heard a strange sound and opened my eyes a bit to see that Zac was carving a puppet-head. The noise was the rasp of a knife against the wood. I felt angry at him for keeping information from me, but he did it out of friendship. The sound of the knife on the wood was irritating. The way the head moved to and fro in the puppeteers hand made it look as if it were alive and peering into every corner of the room. Then the eyes stayed fixed on me for a long time, like they had finally found me. I could not turn my eyes away and stared at the wooden face. The knife seemed to hesitate, unsure of itself, then Zac cut a firm, decisive chunk and the wooden features took on a frightening life of their own.
I recognized the face of the man who brought me the book.
I became the puppet head and was lying in Zac’s lap. His hands moved my head allowing me to see different parts of the room. I saw myself sleeping across the table.
I snapped back awake.
“You were so sound asleep that you didn’t even notice we finished the margaritas, there’s not even a glass left for you.”
I remembered the things I had overheard, and I wanted to yell at them, but my thoughts could not find words and were drowned in the general bustle as my guests prepared to leave.
Zac put my coat over my shoulders, insisting, “Come along to the i-Bar with us, Bobuck, it’s fantastic ebf.”
Eyeball fucking was Joshua's favorite sport.
Unresistant, I let Zac lead me down the stairs. The smell of the fog, which penetrated the house from the street, grew stronger and stronger.