Sparrow Nights (15 page)

“I thought you said you slipped.”

“The floor. The floor whacked me on the head. It came up like this and it banged my head.” I gave myself a glancing blow off the top of my head and, in doing so, cooked my own goose.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “In the interests of your welfare I recommend you stay here for an hour or two. Until things settle down.”

“Until what things settle down?”

“You could wait in the foyer. There’s reading material. Perhaps even yesterday’s newspaper.”

This, I supposed, was as close to a joke as he was going to get. Now it was my turn to look at him neutrally.

“Forget it.”

“Professor Halloway …”

“If you think I’m going to sit in your bloody waiting room with my noggin on fire and read the newspaper, you are as overworked as the newspapers say you are. There. How drunk could I be if I can manage a sentence like that without a stumble or a slur?”

“If you are still in discomfort tomorrow, you may return here and I’ll give you a prescription for something.”

When I got home I found the front door swinging on its hinges, dirt from the front garden hurled over the floor, a vase shattered. Someone had defecated in the kitchen sink.

Good God, I thought, reeling backwards, the smell making me gag, how did I get
here?
It struck me—for I suddenly saw myself as a man in the far corner of a photograph, irrelevant but fixed as such forever—that I was experiencing some kind of psychotic episode. I may even have said it out loud,
You are experiencing a psychotic episode
, but my heart was beating so fast I knew that very soon it wasn’t going to matter whether or not I understood what was happening to me.

“You’ve got to slow things down,” I said aloud, and to my surprise the sound of my own voice was quite reassuring. Even a hint of English exasperation, affectionate but firm. When I stopped speaking I noticed that everything began slowly to speed up again. My thoughts leapt forward. Little grey hounds, they were, dashing after the rabbit. But what exactly was the rabbit? Lord, what didn’t I think of next? What unimaginable clutter! Poetry, shards of poetry, Corbière, Musset, Hugo, nothing good, nothing great, just the trash of too much reading, too much teaching, too much listening to the sound of one’s own voice. And other things crowding around, standing too close, shouting “me too, me too, me too.” That stupid quitting of my summer job. But why remember it now? It was more than thirty years ago! (This between the kitchen and the foyer.) I swore to myself even back then, I solemnly declared a hundred times after that episode, that the next time I arrived
here
, got caught on board a train that shrieks down the tracks, I’d remember not to
do
anything about it. Feel what you like, dream what you like, scheme what you like, but don’t act on any of it. Leave it alone. Eventually it will just
go
, like dirty water running out of the bathtub.

And to be fair (here a wave of cheerfulness), for the most part it’s worked.
La plupart du temps
. All those tranquil years in between. What tranquil years? What fucking tranquil years? What are you talking about? When were you tranquil? Was it not like having a beast in the basement catching its breath?

But no (despair ran over me again), it hasn’t worked at all. I simply haven’t felt like this since … since when? Since last time. Since the dogs. Those poor sad dead dogs. She must have thought they were sleeping. Yes, all right now, don’t break my bloody arm, there were other incidents, if that’s what you want to call them. That business with the steak knife and my brother. But be honest, who hasn’t wanted to carve up his brother? What self-respecting younger brother hasn’t tried, at least once? And so half-heartedly too. My goodness. And Raissa, of course, yes, that was a slightly, how shall we say,
energised
period, stalking about the city, weeping over
Madame Bovary
in a public park. Oh, and the tall Jewish girl, goodness, she threw me for a loop, Lord, yes, that was madness too. I didn’t even
want
her. Ah yes, I know what you’re thinking, the addictive power of being loved, the third factor no one considers, you and me and it, just the three of us in such a small boat. But she left, you see, and, well, quite simply, I seem to be a chap who loves women who leave.
Quod est demonstratum
. It is their absolute, unmitigated, schizophrenic unavailability that makes them so precious. Indeed, who could be more desirable than an ex-lover crossing the street with a new man? Her coat swinging open, just a glimpse of all those treasures no longer within reach. Someone else’s now. Yes, indeed, someone else’s now.

And on it went, other episodes. How remarkable to have lasted so long, to have put up such a magnificent defence. A regular Maginot line. But why could I never—once the fit was upon me—see down the road to the point where none of this mattered, was the stuff of a port-and-cigars anecdote?
A bad patch, old chap, but I got through it
, and so on. Why the suc
cum
bing? It was as if my brain had turned against me, as if it had decided on its own to drive me mad. What does he need? Sleep? Then sleep shall be banished. Take it away. (A trifle grand, that, “to drive one mad.” A bit kingly. Something perhaps less chest-thumping. To undo one. Yes, better.)

So there, now we understand one another. You haven’t
gone
mad, you’ve always
been
mad. Small consolation, that. Hardly the prize at the end of the game show. Not exactly a new Chevrolet or a trip to Hawaii, this final persuasive knowledge that one has always been cracked, as they say in
Mad
magazine. Cracked. Hmm. Not exactly
le mot juste. Unhinged
seems closer to the point. Like a horse that won’t stop running. No,
unhinged
isn’t right either. What, precisely, is the word for a horse that won’t stop running?

But stop it now. You are having a psychotic episode. But even as I said the words
psychotic episode
I knew it was a useless strategy. A furnace had suddenly clicked on in my brain and I didn’t know how to turn it off. It would burn and burn and burn, it would agitate me for the rest of my life with its heat and speed and, worst of all, its
insistence
. Until it ran its course. Until I did something. Until I acted.

“Don’t do this,” I said out loud. “Don’t do this.” But it was such a weak voice, a tiny, ineffectual aunt whispering in the corner, “Wear your galoshes, dear. You’ll catch your death of …”

Feel what you like, dream what you like, scheme what you like. But for heaven’s sake, don’t act on it.

I went down into the basement and shuffled through a box containing the early drafts of my master’s thesis
(The Theme of Descent in Nineteenth-century Symbolists)
until I came across the clip from my former roommate’s gun. I squeezed a bullet into my palm. It was half the length of my baby finger, with a brass casing. I ran back up the stairs, taking them two at a time, but a wave of dizziness caught me at the top and I almost blacked out. I steadied myself in the doorway for a matter of moments. Good God, I groaned, how did I get
here?
Why, only a week ago I was happy; I got up in the morning, I read the paper, I patted the cat, I went to work. And now look. Look!

I clicked the clip into the heel of the gun and cocked it once to put a shell in the throat. I looked up the barrel to make sure the bullet was in place. I couldn’t see anything, but for a second there it looked like I was going to commit suicide.
Committing
suicide. Yes, it certainly was a commitment.

I pulled a bottle of Javex from the kitchen cupboard and poured it over the feces in the sink. I had to look away and plug my nose. I turned the taps on full steam, I swished the nozzle back and forth, and soon it was all gone. I poured in more Javex and ran the hot water until the kitchen window steamed over, my brain still shouting poetry,
où le sceau de Dieu blêmit les fenêtres. Le sang et le lait coulèrent…

Finally it was done. It was my sink again. Restored. One obstacle had been cleared. There was, it seemed, a checklist in my head and I didn’t dare think farther down than the line at which I found myself at present. Out of the corner of my eye I could see it stretching onto a second page.

I pushed an easy chair in front of the main door, went back into the kitchen, and locked and double-checked the back door. Locked the door to the cellar. Fished through the kitchen drawers for a paring knife. Settled back on the chesterfield but only after checking the street again, north and south. Saw the red-haired woman whose dogs I’d poisoned. She came out of her house and got into her car. I wondered if she still thought about them, if she still missed them. Probably not. Probably fussing about something else by now. It would pass. Like the shit in the sink, it would be gone without a trace. A little, private episode. Really, how much of one’s life is made up of these private incidents; how submerged one is. You know, for example, that you will recover from a broken heart, but somehow that piece of information, that
factoid
, never arrives at the soul or the brain or the nervous system, yes, the nervous system, where it might do some good. But if you know you’re going to be all right, why then do you suffer so?
To get there
. To get where you know you are going to get to anyway. How pathetic, then, to feel good about having arrived. I survived, you say. Yes, but what else would you do? No one dies from love. Come, come.

I felt a curious urge—and with it a sense of impunity—to go into the street and tap on the red-haired woman’s car window and say, It was me, I killed your dogs. My life back then seemed so … peaceful. What leisurely problems I’d had. A bark here, a bark there. Really, such a fuss
pour un rien
. Confessing, therefore, seemed rather an easy thing. It had been, on the face of things, rather a small crime when one came right down to it. The barking, not the killing.

But I didn’t go into the street. I was far too busy. And besides, once one starts confessing, where exactly does one stop?

I took a deep breath. My, I was tired. Indeed, very tired. But I had work to do. I sat on the chesterfield and put on my reading glasses and took the paring knife and cut a deep “X” in the soft lead at the tip of the bullet.

“There,
Donny,”
I said.

I went into the living room and knelt on the couch (where Emma had read
Anna Karenina)
and looked out the window like a child waiting for the rain to stop. By nightfall he still hadn’t come. I went upstairs, the gun in my dressing-gown belt; stopped at the head of the stairs and looked back down the stairwell. I could feel a breeze blowing in through the crack in the broken door. I hurried back down to the basement, pulled out an old green banker’s lamp, brought it upstairs, hooked it above the front door and plugged it into the foyer wall socket. Raced back up the stairs. Flicked on the hall light. Perfect, the lamp went on. Flick on, flick off. Perfect. Perfect. I could hear, clear as if an orchestra was playing on the front lawn, the opening, almost inquisitive notes of the
Concierto de Aranjuez
.

Darkness fell; the street lights had come on and I hadn’t noticed; the sky kept its blue from the day, almost an aquatic blue, even though blackness lay over the streets and houses and lawns below. A full moon that looked as if it had been dispensed from a child’s bedtime book hung in the sky. The red-haired woman came home. She walked up her front stairs, looking to the right and left, and there was something touching about her, these bird-like looks to each side, a fragility, a loneliness, as if she hoped at the last second to catch sight of someone on the street, a friend, even a neighbour, someone to chat to for a second before the house swallowed her up for another interminable, unfillable night. I wondered if she might be lonely without her dogs, and I felt a stab of regret. Such an odd, strange, sad, violent thing to have done, dead doggies on the grass, sleepy doggies …

Around two o’clock in the morning I heard a car door slam shut and I knew it was time. I hurried to the top of the stairs and lay on the floor. I listened. The car pulled away. Footsteps coming up the walk. The door creaked open.

“Professor?”

I turned on the banker’s lamp. In the green light I could see him, silhouetted in the doorway.

“Go away,” I said.

He shaded his eyes and looked up at me. “That you up there, Professor?”

I rested the butt of the gun on the floor and aimed it at his chest.

Then he started up the stairs.

“I have a gun,” I said.

“So do I, Professor …”

He turned his back to me; his shoulders went up as if he were reaching into the top of his pants. My behind contracted violently and I pulled the trigger. It was the loudest bang I’ve ever heard, like the end of the world, a flame shooting from the barrel. The impact spun him around. Catching the railing in his hand, he stepped down a few stairs, careful with his footing (so sad, that care), his knees buckled, he issued a loud groan and tumbled backwards, not flipping over but sort of sliding down the stairs headfirst, bang, bang, banging the back of his head until just his boots rested on the last stair and his heart, I guess it was his heart, sat on his chest. Right there, on his shirt, blown clean out of him.