Cain’s Book (24 page)

I press the tabulator, to sluice away my uncertainty, and begin to type:

–
Cain’s Book
: that was the title I chose years ago in Paris for my work in progress, in regress, my little voyage in the art of digression. It’s a
dead cert the frontal attack is obsolete.

And it’s not the first time I’ve felt like making an inventory. (A little Lucifer constantly discovering himself after his eviction.) I have tried more than once. Everything I have
written is a kind of inventorizing. I don’t expect ever to be able to do much more, and the inventories will always be unfinished. The most I can do is to die like Malone with a last dot of
lead pinched between forefinger and thumb, writing perhaps:
Mais tout de même on se justifie mal, tout de même on fait mal quand on se justifie.
³⁹

From time to time I think up epilogues for
Cain’s Book
. God knows if I’ll ever be able to put a stop to this habit. I would need an eye in the back of my head and a hand to
propel me by the scruff of my own neck. Wanting them, and with the creeping behind, the sudden onsets of panic, the epilogues are easily explained. To fall on myself from above, like the owl on the
wee grey mouse.

Outside, on the canal, a tug hoots. I get up and go outside on the catwalk, the narrow strip of deck between the door of the cabin and the stern of the barge. The small green
tug moves swiftly past me and continues on its way down the canal towards the East River. The deck under me rises and falls gently with the swell.

The unloading crane has temporarily stopped work. The operator is on the dock, talking to one of the dock hands. A light blue Ford, its large tail lights blinking red, is going through the gate
of the yard onto the street.

The canal water is smooth again in the wake of the tug, a muddy grey-green colour, its dull mirror surface bearing a scum of oil, dust, paper, and an occasional plank of wood. There are two
yellow sand scows at the yard at the other side of the canal. The scow which is nearly light looms over the loaded scow like a pier over a low-lying jetty. On the light scow which will be pulled
out with the tide is a Portuguese Negro and his woman and his dog. The cabin of the other scow is locked up.

Earlier in the afternoon I sat outside on the catwalk and watched the Negro who stood watching his scow being unloaded. The crane over there has a distinctive putter. Even across the short
breadth of the canal it seems to come from a great distance, like the sound of a tractor in a field far away, and that sound mingled with the sound of all the other cranes working on the canal, and
they swung about, the grabs rising and falling, hawsers straining, and they were like big steel birds with no wings and no plumage, nodding and pecking all the afternoon. The man was smoking a
pipe. His woman came out of the cabin from time to time with a bucket of slops or to hang up wet clothes. I couldn’t make out her features clearly, but she was wearing a drab, almost
colourless smock, and she was blonde. I got the impression she was big, with heavy buttocks and strong thighs.

Scow women are not often beautiful. The exceptions are the transients. I never spoke to a woman who looked forward with equanimity to dying on the scows. Women more than men have a need for
roots and the shifting barge life with its hard, primitive conditions breaks down a woman’s resistance. And it doesn’t happen often, a woman’s dying on a scow. When it does, it is
like when Geo was lying at Newburgh and the old wino woman fell in and got drowned, at night, and they dragged her out with a boathook in the early morning, her clothes sodden and her face
purplish-grey. The police visited all the scows lying there at the time to try to find out whom she had been with. No one claimed her. As Geo said, she might have been pushed in, and anyway, who
was going to admit to a woman like that? He was just taking his morning fix, Geo said, when this loud knocking came on his door. A beetle in a child’s tin can. He thought they had come for
him, that someone had tipped them off about the heroin. By the way they knocked he knew it was the fuzz, Authority – there were three of them, one was in plain clothes, an old guy of about
sixty. It was he who spoke: “Where’s your woman, son?” It had taken a moment for that to register. Geo’s mind was anchored to the shit and works he’d stashed quickly
away in the table drawer. “Where’s your woman, son? She not come back last night?” Geo is always having narrow shaves.

The only sign of life aboard now is the faint trickle of smoke from the stack above the shanty-like cabin. They’re probably cooking something. It’s too warm for a fire.

The operator is turning again towards the crane whose grab lies like an armoured fist on my load of gravel. I return to the cabin.

There are moments when I despair of others, give them up, let them stray out of the circle of light and definition, and they are free to come and go, bringing panic, or chaos,
or joy, depending on my own mood, my state of readiness. Readiness – as every Boy Scout knows – there is the virtue of the citadel.

From the bundle of papers which have withstood my periodic prunings I select a couple of sheets and read:

Whenever I glance back through the notes accumulated over the years I am struck by their haunting sense of dispossession. The image of the hanged man recurs frequently. (I even
went so far not long ago as to fashion a doll out of an old sack and some rope, its face greenish-grey with streaks of red and black paint, and to suspend it in a hangman’s noose from the
yard of the mast. It is a common practice among scowmen to fix some emblem or other to the mast. But mine was unusual. It caused too much comment, and with junk aboard I felt it prudent to remove
it.) It is as though I have been writing hesitantly, against the tide, with the growing suspicion that what I have written is in some criminal sense against history, that in the end it can lead me
only to the hangman.

–
Notes towards the making of the monster...
That was one title I considered. At those bad moments when the dykes crumble there is a certain relief in inventing titles. On one
scrap of paper I find the following notation:
In its lust after extinction the human soul has learnt promiscuous ways.
I can’t remember when I wrote it nor to what precisely it
referred. The notes are not consecutive; they go on and on, like tapeworm; Cain’s testament, the product of those moments when I feel impelled to outflank my deep desire to be silent, to say
nothing, expose nothing.

When I write I have trouble with my tenses. Where I
was
tomorrow
is
where I
am
today, where I
would be
yesterday. I have a horror of committing fraud. It is
all very difficult, the past even more than the future, for the latter is at least probable, calculable, while the former is beyond the range of experiment. The past is always a lie, clung to by an
odour of ancestors. It is important from the beginning to treat such things lightly. As the ghosts rise upwards over the grave wall, I recoffin them neatly, and bury them.

It is, I suppose, my last will and testament, although in so far as I have choice in the matter I shall not be dying for a long time. (One can only cultivate oneself as one awaits the
issue.)

If eternity were available beyond death, if I could be as certain of it as I at this moment am sure of the fix I have only to move my hand to obtain, I should in effect have achieved it already,
for I should be already beyond the pitiless onslaught of time, beyond the constant disintegration of the present, beyond all the problematic struts and viaducts with which prudence seeks to bridge
the chasm of anxiety, with the ability to say, avoiding unseemly haste: “I’ll die tomorrow,” without bothering to intend it, or not to intend it, as bravely as the fabled
gladiators of ancient Rome. It is because it is not so available (– I beg of you, Abel, refrain from flaunting your faith at me) that I have to suffer the infinite degenerations of objective
time... a past that was never past, was, is always present; a present past and a past present both distinct from the present prospect of the past degenerating already into a future prospect which
will never be... suffer that, be prey to anxiety, nostalgia, hope...

The problem has always been to fuse the fragments of eternity, more precisely, to attain from time to time the absolute serenity of timelessness; not easy in the era of pushing, aggressive
democracies when all revolt not subsumed under the symbol of the juvenile delinquent tends to be regarded as either criminal or insane or both. (Revolt, my child, revolt is a quick axe cleaving
dead wood in the forest, by night. The woodsman of the day is the executioner.)

A
FEW WEEKS AGO
I tied up next to Bill’s scow. There was no sign of Jake about whom I had been thinking a great deal
since the night at the stake boat. I asked him where she was and he said he didn’t know, that she had gone to visit her mother in North Dakota but that he hadn’t heard from her for two
months. I went for a drink with Bill and I had vague thoughts about splitting from New York and going after her. I didn’t suppose I would. Bill’s talk about her, his saying how mixed up
she was... all that depressed me.

Tired of the scows and of New York, my New York, the limits that make my going there from where I am tied up in Flushing at the Mac Asphalt and Construction Corporation uninteresting... I think,
Why go? Why go anywhere?... A familiar sound. Like the end is the beginning and vice versa. Though nothing is ending in spite of the bust which Fay comes all the way from Manhattan to tell me
about:

From Tom Tear’s loft you can look down on the Bowery. It is on the top floor, three flights up, of a building that appears derelict from a distance. On the ground floor, a wholesaler of
cheap felts; on the first, a name painted in black on two musty frosted-glass panes of two dingy doors, one at either end of the landing, O. Olsen Inc., Exterminators; on the second, a glass door
boarded unevenly up, marked “Store”, and this absent sculptor, Flick, who shares a WC with Tom. The WC has no door to it, but it is set slightly back from the stairs so that someone
going up- or downstairs won’t necessarily see the occupant.

Fay saw the police go up, heard the shouts, and watched them all come down, three cops, she said, first, in uniform, called off the beat probably, and then a plainclothesman holding on to
Jody’s arm and talking into her ear, and then Tom with another plainclothesman, and wearing his cap... no doubt he’d made them wait while he put it on... and then the rest, Og, who
looked like something the cat brought in, and Beryl – you must meet her, Joe – whom Fay had brought with her, and Geo, and Mona crying, he almost carried her, Fay said, and a cop
bringing up the rear. There were three cars and one paddy wagon outside on Bond Street.