Death Kit (24 page)

“You mean yourself.”

“Me, too. Sure.” More words. Surely Hester knows what they're doing to him. She must want it to happen. Diddy dry-eyed (now). Dry withered grief.

“That's why you accuse yourself of crimes.”

If only it were so! Diddy sighed. Hester knew so much, yet she knew nothing.

“I'm sorry. I said it wouldn't be good for us to talk about that, and now I'm breaking the rule. Dalton, tell me something else. Tell me who you like or love.”

“I loved my wife. At least I thought I did. I guess I love my brother, too, in a way. But I don't see him often. I probably don't really love him; I'd just like to be him.… I think I don't really like anybody except you.”

The girl was silent.

“I wish I could embrace you right now.” Then realizing that, being only inches away from her, he could do exactly that; if he wanted. But it isn't a simple embrace Diddy wants, so he doesn't reach out at all. “I want to make love to you.”

Since they're not touching, Diddy has to look up. Discovers it's come back, no trick of memory: that same inexpressive face that he had seen yesterday. A face like a dead animal, or an internal organ never meant to be seen. Throbbing, opaque, not addressed to him or to anyone else. Disconnected. Suddenly Diddy feels horribly restless. Has to stand up and pace about the room. Glancing intermittently at Hester as he stalked, pivoted, and stalked. Her head was tilted downward.

(Now) Diddy mistrusts his feeling for the girl. A kind of vertigo, which he's walking off. Diddy alarmed. What's he been getting into? There's some kind of strong positive feeling for her, yes. But maybe it's mainly pity; what he'd felt once for a maimed stray cat he took in and nursed. Not love.

Looks at his watch. Only four-thirty. Diddy ends the silence, starts making excuses to leave. Still striding up and down, tearing apart. Though he senses how disappointed she is at his early departure, the need to leave is beyond his control.

“Don't go, Dalton. The visiting hour isn't over yet.”

But Diddy won't stay only because she wants him to. To be a shade kinder, he produces a lie. “I have a business meeting at five. You know, it was hard finding any time today to visit you.” Not the first lie he's told Hester.

Of course, Hester isn't fully acquainted with Diddy the Liar. Or maybe she does know he's lying, and decides anyway that the lie is to count as the truth. She'll accede to his need to be outside, to breathe. Ungraciously, resentfully even, she agrees to his going.

“But wait.” She pulls his arm as he stands by the bed to kiss her goodbye. “This will only take a moment. Please comb me. My aunt usually does it, but she pulls my hair. I want you to do it.”

“I'll be late.”

“It'll just take a minute. Please!”

“All right.”

Diddy, anxious, distracted, takes the comb from the night-table drawer and sits on the edge of Hester's bed. His coat already on, buttoned. With his right hand, he pushes the comb into the thick center of the girl's long silky blond hair; with his left hand he holds the upper portion of the hair he's combing downward so that if the comb has to plow its way through a tangle he can grip the hair at a higher place and prevent it from being strained at its roots in the scalp.

“I knew you could do it like that, without hurting. It's nice.”

Diddy, pleased that he can please her, instantly becomes one of the other Diddys again. He leans over for a moment to smell her hair and brush it with his lips.

“Don't you want to stay?” Hester has seized his hands.

Diddy's panic returns. His old panic, that of not understanding. His lips go dry; his head, the back of his neck, his armpits wet with sweat. Putting down the comb, his job unfinished.

“I have to go,” he says obstinately. “I'm sorry because it's the day before your operation.…”

“That's all right. Please stop.”

And Diddy flees.

*   *   *

Of course, he has nowhere to go (now). Since he's not due at the television studio until nine-fifteen. Best plan: hail a taxi and return to the Rushland. Once there, try to nap for a few hours.

But not yet. Not so quickly closed within another synthetic small space. Diddy wants to remain outdoors in the yellowish twilight. And, tired as he is, to stroll. Walking down routine streets, vaguely headed for the center of town. Diddy is probably going to walk all the way, though it's not necessary to decide that in advance.

The heavy emotions are what animate him (now). Which is why it's some help to keep moving his legs. As soon as he'd left the hospital building, his panic was replaced by shame. Diddy feels ashamed of himself. A heavy vitreous emotion, two-thirds of the way from water to something dense and viscous. Shame floods his body with phlegm. And in the yellowish twilight, sullen violet thoughts. Diddy has at his disposal only the shadows of energy with which to struggle up, hauling himself hand over hand, into a clear light. But he's trying manfully. Crawling when necessary. Scraping his palms and knees. Unwilling to admit defeat, or the presence of an insurmountable wall.

What's the matter with him? You'd think Diddy was trapped back there in the hospital in the same fashion that he was trapped, or thought he was, in the darkened train compartment Sunday afternoon. No one had him in a corner (now). A beautiful woman who was offering him love had aroused in him an unprecedented tenderness and longing. What could be more different from a trap? A liberation, rather. A blessing. A miracle.

Diddy is heading toward the center of town. As he walks, his bony nervous arms within the tweed jacket and the Chesterfield coat punching at the air below his waist. Diddy is enraged at himself for having fled his good. For having pained his new love. Ordinarily, Diddy was not indecisive. Rarely shy with women. If he'd behaved so erratically and self-indulgently with Hester, it must be connected with other matters that have become unclear. According to an old rule of psychic contagion: that absence of clarity or outright confusion in one, just one specific, local matter will end by infecting the whole of one's judgment.

Diddy, like any animal, has two eyes. Let's suppose that one eye is diseased, or has been traumatized. That stands for Incardona's death, and its attendant enigmas. The other eye is a perfectly healthy organ. That one stands for his tie with Hester, and their deepening connection with each other. With this condition, how could he have been such a fool? Foolish enough to expect one's clear-sighted eye can remain uncontaminated by the diseased one. Man, a creature of binocular vision, uses both eyes to see; with both eyes moving conjointly, can perceive depth. But it is well known that if one eye has a severe inflammation or a serious infection, or even so grave a flaw as a detached retina, which comes about through a physical injury to that eye alone, the same condition eventually tends to appear in the other eye, the perfectly healthy one. A sympathetic reaction.

That sympathy for the damaged part of him was what was blurring his relations with Hester. If he doesn't take care, he will ruin everything. As he's always known: the two, Hester and Incardona, go together. In him their destinies are linked. Good eye and bad eye, beautiful vision and recurrent nightmare. To feel properly about one he must decide, once and for all, how he feels about both.

About the workman's death. Does Diddy feel guilty or doesn't he? Since he called on Myra Incardona last night—was it only last night? it seems ages behind him—he feels less. Less guilty. That's as it should be. Those people are really animals. One shouldn't waste emotion on their fate. It's people like the Incardonas who make life a nightmare. Diddy won't feel guilty. He can't. No room in his life for guilt. For if Diddy so much as admits guilt through the door, front door or back door, of his house, be it the most spacious of dwellings, the puffing swelling monster will end by dispossessing him entirely.

About the girl. What does he feel toward this delicate, troubled creature? Who's strong, perhaps, where he is weak, but surely weak in some ways in which he's strong. Here, his feelings are clearer. The stupidity of running away! (Now) Diddy believes he really loves her. And he longs for Hester to know of his love, if it will give her pleasure. To know before she's wheeled into the operating room tomorrow morning.

Footsore Diddy, his heart beating faster than usual, is nearing the downtown section of the city. (Now) is the time to acknowledge that he doesn't want a taxi. Noticing that the clock on a bank façade says it's already a quarter to six, he goes into a drugstore and asks the soda jerk if there's a post office nearby. Yes. Arriving at five minutes to six, stands at the sloping counter carpeted with tan blotting paper to write out his telegram.

Sharing the counter, to his left: an elderly Negro woman, wearing the clothes of the self-respecting poor, has crumpled up one yellow form with a sigh and started another. Probably a request for money. Or the announcement of a relative's death.

Diddy's telegram should be delivered to the Warren Institute in less than an hour. Who will read it to Hester? Hopefully, Mrs. Nayburn won't have returned yet. Then it would be the disagreeable Gertrude who brings the telegram to Hester's room. But if it should be the crass meddling aunt who recites his declaration, so what? Diddy has nothing to hide.

The woman on his left is still struggling to print the letters. That make up the words. That make up the news, probably bad; or the plea for assistance. Diddy, who always got A's in Penmanship, has his own reasons for printing on his telegram form almost as slowly as she. For bearing down as hard as he can on the fatigued ballpoint pen, one of two attached by slender chains to the frame of the writing counter. Diddy digs the blunt point into the paper, as if he thought it was this piece of paper that would be delivered to Hester. And wanted to make something Braille-like that she could decipher herself, by moving her fingertips along the indentations. Of course, he knows perfectly well that this isn't so. Telegrams come typed. And must be read aloud to the blind. Perhaps Diddy is writing in this heavy fashion because he wants to engrave the words on himself.

I LOVE YOU. I AM WITH YOU TOMORROW MORNING. DALTON
.

*   *   *

Diddy hasn't returned to the Rushland. Leaving the post office, he continued on foot toward the center of town. After sending the telegram, easier to walk. Except for being hungry, feels he could walk forever. Stopped off at a small Chinese restaurant and ordered a cup of wonton soup and a plate of barbecued spareribs, but the soup was water and the ribs burnt meatless. Diddy plays with the inedible food a few moments, then pays up and leaves. Still hungry. Better not to be so fastidious. Second stop: a pizzeria, where he downs without complain a doughy triangle smeared with tasteless cheese and tomato sauce, then another, then a third, then a fourth.

Since eight o'clock he's been wandering up and down a brightly lit street about fifteen blocks from the Rushland.

Diddy is looking. “Science has proved that 90% of all knowledge is acquired visually.” What about the other ten percent? Do those who have to make do on that small fraction discover the ninety percent to be a distraction? Seeing an adulteration of genuine knowledge?

Or is seeing necessary? Is it like “Ninety percent of the eye is water”? The viscous medium needed to support and shelter the miniature organs, the bland sea needed to float the precious intricate devices of sight?

Diddy looking. Is that necessary?

On a brightly lit street on which are congregated a burlesque house, a movie theatre showing skin flicks, two penny arcades jammed with leather-jacketed motorcyclists and girls in miniskirts, and stores selling party records, scatological ashtrays, back-number magazines, devices for practical jokers, and sex books.

Diddy is looking.

Comparing the sizes of breasts in the stills displayed outside the Casino Burlesque with those outside the Victory Theatre. Browsing in old issues of
National Geographic
and
Silver Screen
in one bookstore; the latest issues of
The Justice Weekly, The Spanker's Monthly,
and
The Ladder
in another. Diddy the Voyeur. What does he feel? Amused? Disgusted? Curious? Something, but not very much, of all three. Yet Diddy is trying to feel. Feels more in one of the novelty stores, examining rubber monster masks. When he tries on a limp cool mask of Frankenstein's monster; and sees his rectangular, stitched, pathetic Boris Karloff face in the mirror. The harsh, sad joke of Diddy the Monster. Dreamed by Diddy the Good.… All the looking has made him vaguely restless in a sexual way. As he's leaving the novelty store, Diddy stops before another mirror. Admired his de-Frankensteined profile. Turns to the mirror full-face, tenses his biceps, then approvingly feels the muscle he's made in his left arm with his right hand.

Diddy touring one of the arcades. (Now) dispensing quarters for the shooting gallery at the back. He's already weighed himself: eighteen pounds underweight. And read the fortune which the machine ejected. “You are about to take an important trip.” Diddy laughs and sticks the white card into his wallet. Has already tested the strength of his handgrip. “Above average,” if the machine is to be believed. Which is not bad for a man who's pale as the inmate of a maximum-security penitentiary, and lean as a mandrake root. He has also played six games on a pinball machine. And on another machine, tested his skill as a driver. “Good Insurance Risk.” (Now) Diddy has been sufficiently expert with the breech-lock rifle, scoring with every one of the last ten ducks that bobbed across the target area, to have won a prize. “The panda bear, the cigarette lighter, or the set of six wine glasses, mister?” Diddy chooses the stuffed panda, a foot-tall thick creature with big round ears and festoons of red ribbon about its neck; carries his prize onto the street. Into a taxi, and gives the driver the address of the television studio.