Cockpit (20 page)

“Are you ready?” the girl shouted.

“I am,” I shouted back. I closed my eyes. It was too late to run away, and I might never know if the man had intended to kill me, miss me or land the horseshoe on my shoulder pads. Because of a whim, my future lay in the hands of an old drunk. In the silence like the one in an air raid shelter before a bomb hits, I imagined the horseshoe gliding toward me, ready to strike me at any moment.

Suddenly, two iron hands gripped my shoulders with
such force that my whole body shook. Hesitantly, I reached up to touch them and felt cold metal. I opened my eyes and saw the horseshoe resting on the pads that were soaked with sweat. I tried to control my trembling and removed the horseshoe before the girl came over to assist me.

“So you’ve survived,” she said tonelessly.

“So far, yes. I am ready to collect my winnings.”

“As you wish,” she nodded.

We went back to the table. The man, who could barely walk by now, wanted to toast my courage with more whiskey. I told him that, instead of drinking, I wanted to take his daughter for a ride. He settled down with a full bottle, indifferent to what either of us did.

She accompanied me to the car without saying a word. We drove directly to my motel. On the way to my room, I ordered drinks to be brought up. After the waiter had left, she turned to me casually. “How do you plan to have me?” she asked. “Straight or kinky?”

She started to undress. When she was naked, she stood before me as cool and unconcerned as the first time I’d seen her on the nightclub stage. “Any particular place?” she asked.

I pulled back the blanket, and she climbed onto the bed, grabbing a pillow and propping herself against it.

“When?” she asked.

“Now,” I said.

I took hold of her shoulders. They felt too delicate to have withstood the weight of the horseshoe. “Lie down,” I ordered. She stretched out. “Anything else?” she asked. In the semidarkness of the room, I moved next to her, uncertain how to touch her. As she turned her head away to avoid my lips, her hands moved lightly behind my hips and her legs spread invitingly. I took it for a sign of desire, and my body responded.

I poised myself to ease inside her, but when I tried to enter her, she was closed tight. I moved her thighs farther apart, again attempting to push myself into her. She
groaned, but remained closed. I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her tight against me. Still she did not open herself to me. I played with her to get her aroused, sucking her nipples, burying my face in her. Finally, I tried to enter her by sheer strength. She was unyielding.

“Are you finished?” she asked, drawing up her knees and pulling away from me.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“It would take surgery to open me up,” she said. “I’ve never wanted to have the operation.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because of men like you,” she answered. She got up and began to dress.

I reached for her. “Don’t,” she commanded sternly. “You wanted what you won, but you’ll never win what you wanted.” She finished dressing and was gone.

I remember an old bicycle wheel that I used to roll in front of me when I was a boy, guiding it with a short stick. I believed the wheel was animated by a powerful spirit. I ran behind it barefoot, urging it on, the soles of my feet hard as its rim. Whenever the wheel began to totter, my stick would whip it back to life and the wheel would suddenly leap forward, as if daring me to pursue it. Sometimes, like a horse abruptly tearing the reins from a rider’s hands, the wheel would escape and surge far ahead of me, slowing down and speeding up at will.

Whenever I rested and the wheel lay still, I felt impatient and guilty. Its very shape demanded movement, and soon I would leap up and send it on its way again. In the early morning, I followed it across withered fields, toward the misty blur of the forest, through the gaunt skeletons of ancient birch trees. The life of my wheel was superior to the lives of men and beasts: a dog would chase it only to surrender to its indifference; a tattered-looking crow would swoop down to investigate the mystery of its speed and then flap off into the wilderness, croaking his defeat.

On the roads, we raced past mud-covered peasants, who
trudged alongside their overloaded carts and slow, bony horses. I guided the wheel with my stick, lashing at it when it slowed down, making it skim over the empty fields and ditches like a stone over water. The wind whipped my face and chilled my fingers, but I felt nothing. I was conscious only of vaulting through space.

Walking through the city now, I am inspired by that same sense of vaulting. Whom shall I draw out of the anonymous crowd of faces surrounding me? I can enter their worlds unobserved and unchecked. Each person is a wheel to follow, and at any moment my manner, my language, my being, like the stick I used as a boy, will drive the wheel where I urge it to go.

As a result of the circumstances under which I left the Service, I cannot join any professional, social or political group. Yet, to live alone, depending on no one, and to keep up no lasting associations, is like living in a cell; and I have never lost my desire to be as free as I was as a child, almost flying, drawn on by my wheel.

Now, I have devised a new kind of wheel game, which provides the human associations my current lifestyle prohibits. Confronted with hundreds of anonymous faces, hundreds of human wheels, I choose one and let it take me where it will. I pick a life and enter it, unobserved: none of my pseudo-family members ever know how I gain access to their lives.

As soon as I arrived in the city after leaving the Service, I applied for part-time work in the few printing shops left in the city that still specialized in hand-engraved letterheads and invitations. Most of them had been in business so long that the founders had retired, leaving the firms to inexperienced or careless younger men. The plants were severely understaffed, and I was offered jobs at all the places to which I’d applied. I finally chose to work at the most respected of these establishments.

Since the plant was months behind in filling orders, my
offer to work overtime was eagerly accepted. Shortly after the shop closed each night, I was left alone. I would spend hours looking through files stuffed with letterhead samples for individual, business and government stationery. I selected the pieces I could use for each of my other identities and took them home with me. I also collected invitations to weddings, bar mitzvahs, parties and diplomatic receptions, as well as business announcements, certificates, calling cards and medical prescription blanks.

Some of the documents I needed had to be specially designed and printed. I decided that this would be easiest to do at the shop farthest behind in filling orders. I chose a place with a reputation for bad management and went to see its owner. I told him I had taken a day job but needed more cash to pay debts. I would be willing to work nights for less than the minimum wage. He hired me immediately.

I had been at the shop about two weeks when I became aware that I was being followed by a man who seemed to be working alone. At first, I considered leaving the city, but then decided to eliminate the threat instead.

One evening, I arrived at the shop with the distinct feeling that he was going to close in. I let myself into the store, locked the doors and headed for the room equipped with the powerful quartz lights that are used in photochemical treatment of large plates. As the briefest exposure to quartz light results in permanent blindness, it was imperative for the shops’ employees to wear special protective goggles and keep the door tightly sealed. I put on my goggles and sat in the darkened room near the light switch.

When I heard footsteps at the door, I faked a suppressed sneeze. I knew that everything depended on whether the man had noticed the danger sign posted outside the room.

The door opened. I turned on the switch and light tore through the room like an explosion. Protected by my goggles, I could see the man held a cocked gun. Then the light
must have pierced his eyes. He howled, dropped his gun and covered his face with his hands.

The man was a fool. His dependence on a mechanical weapon made him ignore, and destroy, his natural weapons, his eyes. I, on the other hand, cultivate those self-protective devices. I hook my feet around the legs of chairs to prevent their being pulled out from under me. Entering a building, I always check to see if anyone is following me. In a theater, I sit down only after everyone is already seated, and I prefer to ride an elevator alone.

I am always amazed by how many people never learn to protect themselves, especially those who have much contact with the public, for instance, salespeople. As I walk through stores, I see saleswomen with legs misshapen by decades of standing on their feet, and salesmen clutching their backs when they bend down to pick out merchandise from a lower drawer. I look at their faded faces. I study their tired eyes and the permanent squint caused by years of exposure to fluorescent lighting, as they complacently take out and put back merchandise for the ten-thousandth time. Theirs is the resignation of people who know only how to endure. They are servants who never expect any reward or help from the people they serve.

I often single out an older salesperson who seems particularly in need of an anonymous benefactor. Once I entered the luggage department of a large store and described a certain kind of suitcase to a middle-aged saleswoman. She accompanied me from shelf to shelf, showing me every item. I finally settled on one of the largest and most expensive pieces, but decided that another color would be more attractive. The woman was not certain that they carried it, but asked me to wait while she went to the stockroom to check. She returned with the suitcase, commenting on my good fortune, because it was the only piece of its kind remaining. I examined it and told her it wasn’t quite what I’d pictured.

I suddenly pretended to change my mind; instead of a suitcase, I said, I would consider a large attaché case. She patiently pushed aside all the suitcases I’d been looking at and escorted me to the attaché cases. I showed initial interest in two or three, but ended by complaining that none of them had the type of lock I was looking for. Once again, she went to the stockroom and brought back several cases, each with a different type of lock. I found a flaw in all of them.

Losing interest once more, I moved toward the shaving kits. They came in an even greater variety than the luggage, but she did not seem to mind my looking over as many of them as I wanted. After inspecting at least a dozen, I could not make up my mind if I really needed one. I reflected for a moment, then said I wanted to think it over before buying anything. Disappointed and obviously tired, she must have assumed I would never come back, but still she remained courteous and friendly.

A week later, I returned to the luggage department and went over to her. She remembered me and asked if I could wait a moment until she finished with the customers she was helping. I said I would, resisting the advances of several other salespeople. When she was ready to assist me, I asked to see, one more time, everything I’d liked. I again appeared unable to decide and pretended to be on the verge of leaving.

I started across the floor, paused and went back to her. I said I had decided to buy the suitcase she had brought from the stockroom, as well as the attaché case with two combination locks. I told her I trusted her judgment, and that, if she claimed they were the best available, I would believe her. I paid in cash, and while my luggage was being wrapped I thanked her for her gracious service and asked for her name so I could recommend her to my friends. She was beaming as I said goodbye to her.

On the following day, using letterhead stationery from
one of the country’s better-known industrial conglomerates, I wrote to the president of the store where the woman was employed. I complimented his organization on its unusually courteous and efficient service, and cited the saleswoman as an outstanding example of the store’s high caliber. In closing, I again praised the store and the saleswoman, saying that, if some of my executives were as good an advertisement for my company as she was for his store, I would be more than happy.

Many times I’ve worked my way into other lives through real estate firms, insurance or employment agencies, collection services, marketing research firms, publishing houses, newspaper or magazine offices. I pretend to be suffering from a nervous disorder that has gravely impaired my speech and left my limbs unsteady. I force on the manager a crudely typed card stating I am illiterate and impoverished, and am willing to clean offices at lunch time for a third of the standard rate. With a badly shaking hand, I point out a sentence which states that I do not mind being locked in the office when the staff is out to lunch or even overnight. The manager agrees to try me out. I do an excellent cleaning job, while perusing all the correspondence, memos and miscellaneous papers in the office.

Not long ago, I was cleaning a real estate office when I came across a letter of complaint from a tenant. The woman, who lived alone, demanded assistance in protecting herself from an alcoholic neighbor. She claimed that every night he pounded on her door yelling that her poodle’s barking disturbed his sleep; actually he was trying to force her out of her apartment so a friend of his could move in.

The woman was so afraid of her neighbor that, whenever she had to walk the dog or take her garbage to the incinerator, she called a woman friend in the building to stand guard while she ran across the hall or to the elevator. Every morning, she sneaked out to go to the beauty shop where she worked only after making sure that her neighbor
had left his apartment. Terrified that he would attack her in the corridor, she began leaving work early to get home before he did, and went out only late at night to walk her dog. She closed by saying that her neighbor was ruining her life.

I called the woman, introducing myself as a former acquaintance of the bully next door. I told her I had run into him at a bar, and, when he was drunk, he had mentioned her by name, swearing he would put an end to her poodle’s whining by killing the animal. I said I knew that her neighbor appeared to be capable of violence and urged her to keep out of his way.