The Lost Weekend (23 page)

The building caved in. There seemed to have been a deafening explosion. Had their pent-up massed emotion burst the walls apart, blown them down? Where was the alien speaker, where were the women now? There was a heap of flat ruin, and the crowd was on the campus, in the open air. They stood hesitant, dazed. But only for a second. Once outdoors, in the full sunlight, the obscurantism of the dream vanished, and all was suddenly clear as if they followed a planned design.

The fraternity house was located at the far north-east corner of the campus—they all knew that. That’s where Birnam was! That’s where they would get him! No words were exchanged, no one took leadership. With a herd understanding, they all moved off at a trot. Without a cry now, without so much as a mutter, they started across the campus; and he ran with them.

The ground shook as from continuous nearby blasting. He
knew that while he ran with the crowd, stayed with them, was one of them, his presence would go undiscovered. But what of that moment when they should reach the fraternity house and fail to find him? Would they not then turn about and discover him there in their very midst? What could save him from their anger then?—their double anger for having cheated them of finding him where they had sought him first. He did not think that far ahead, he merely ran on.

Was this the end at last?—the pattern completed? Or was some unfathomable providence saving him for a still juster destruction? It was like all the unreal times he had come so near it—seeking it, as he had always been seeking it, unrealizingly—and been always unrealizingly spared.… Like the time when he came- to on the hard iron catwalk high over the railroad tracks at Basle (awoke in the blue steaming night and saw the murky yards beneath flecked with tiny piercing lights of ruby and emerald and topaz shining through the steam, and the trains sliding in from all over Europe or panting there below as they bided the hour that marked the time-change between Switzerland and France); that time he had climbed to the wet slippery vibrating rail of the
Conte di Savoia
plunging westward in the middle of the night and dared his Norwegian Anna to prevent his leap to the boiling wake of the ship (she had walked away, amused, and he had been left standing there, doing what he would have been unable to do sober and by daylight, till the gale—which might have done otherwise—filled his camel’s-hair coat and threw him ignominously to the rolling deck again); or the nightmare-time at five in the morning, with a tireless barfly Irish friend—the two of them all that remained after a gala night at the Suvretta, they and a drowsy fixed-smiling barmaid who awaited their further pleasure—the way, then, he had exploded a gas-filled balloon with his cigarette and ignited the twisted crêpe-paper streamers strung from floor to ceiling: touched off the whole room with a sudden hellish roar till the place was all one instant flame—
which immediately, miraculously, went out (sparing not only him, that time, but the several hundred sleepers as well who slept in the rooms above).…

Was this, then, the end, this lynching now (for so the dream pointed from the start)? No, it was only the beginning, the first of all those freakish nightmare-times, the foundation of the pattern, laid in dream as in fact, to be repeated endlessly till the one ultimate just end or new beginning.…

He was not scared for himself (he had never been, ever). He was only frightened because a dreadful thing was about to happen to them all, of which he, the victim, would be the least to suffer. It was horrible that it had to happen but there was no help for it, no other way out for any of them. He ran on blindly, his heart thumping with an intolerable pity. His one fear was that he might stumble and fall and be trampled underfoot, finding his death in a way that he knew was not right, in a way that was against the will of the crowd, a death accidental and anonymous, contrary to the whole intention of the dream as it had shown itself from the beginning. But if the other were intended and inevitable, why fear falling? He would not fall, and he didn’t. He ran on, propelled along at a deadly jog-trot by the single purpose of the mob.

The great buildings of the campus were lost in the clouds of dust that went up from the thousands of running feet. The Liberal Arts and Fine Arts colleges, the Hall of Languages, the Library—dimly he was aware that the crowd flowed past them somewhere in the dust-yellow gloom. They became more and more obscured and were left behind. Above the dull thunder of trampling, he heard the bell in the chapel ringing, the alarum-bell.

Then, a little ahead—still a hundred feet off, perhaps—he began to notice there was some small island that the crowd flowed around. The stream separated at that point and closed again beyond it, and ran again on. A tree, a post? But it was an object moving. Something or someone fought there, going against the crowd, cutting through it—toward him? Over the bent backs
and bobbing heads, through the spiraling dust, passing maddeningly in and out of view as the crowd wove around it, he saw the young agonized face, the battling arms, the threshing shoulders, the grinding clenched white-shining teeth of his younger brother.

He might have known. Oh he might have known from the start that Wick would turn up, Wick would appear somehow in just this way, Wick of all people in the world would not let it happen.

He thought he would never reach that point where Wick fought, for the further he ran on, the further Wick seemed to be carried off by the onrushing tide. He might even go down, and be lost to him forever, as he himself was about to be lost to Wick. But the distance between them diminished and soon they were in shouting distance, able to exchange excited violent glances, signals that they had seen each other.

They did not shout. Don took silence from Wick who fought silently on, unwilling to draw the attention of the mob to the fact that his search was ended—and theirs too, did they but know it. The throng swept along oblivious of the one as they were of the other, unaware of the straw that was Wick, struggling in the flood.

They touched hands. In another instant they were together, face to face. The din and fury roared around them but they were met, and suddenly Wick showed none of the buffeting he had taken against the mob. He stood before Don, his clear youthful face heart-breaking to see. His hair was combed smooth and cleanly parted, he had on a white clean freshly-ironed shirt open at the throat, he wore grey flannels as well and a sleeveless sweater of soft pale-yellow cashmere, he smiled—and in that moment the dream was over.

It took Don minutes, minutes, to dream all that took place in that last second before the end—all that took place in him, and in Wick, and between them together. It was truly the longest part of the dream, spinning itself out in timeless suffering while the
action sped to its crashing climax so fast he had no time to realize it was ended. But in that second, that tick, he lived whole lives. Till then, he had scarcely been touched by the events of the dream at all, he had never even protested its meaning. Now he suffered what could not be borne.

Wick pressed something into his palm. His fingers closed on a tiny tin box and somehow he knew instantly what it was. His way out—Wick had got it to him in time. In time. But they had no time to speak of it, no time for anything but the handclasp which passed the box from one to the other. There was only time for the radiant smile—and Don read in that smile all Wick’s joy, all his passionate relief, to have found and reached him in time.

Nor was there time for Wick to sense the full meaning or consequence of what he was doing, there was time only for his first reflex of joy. Later would come the realization—but he would be from thence. Don’s heart burst with pity, then, as he knew that a moment from now Wick’s suffering would begin—while he, his own suffering ended, would not be there to comfort him. Far from comforting him (O hell-kite!), he was the cause. Unable to bear the sight of Wick’s relief, so soon to break into grief as passionate as his joy, he wrenched free the hand that held the box, snatched with his nails at the tin lid, slammed the pills into his mouth, and awoke in a pool of wet on the floor beside the couch.

How he must have wept. The rug was dark with it. He was weeping still, and could not stop. Worse, there was no release from pain even now, in the stunning realization that it had, indeed, been only a dream and the dream was ended. He knew the dream was a good dream, it told him where help lay and would always lie, but that too was no comfort. He staggered to his feet and fell across the couch, the couch he had fallen from at some point in the dream. He wanted now to die, he would never be able to shake the stifling depression the dream had left with him, it would hang darkly over him as long as he remained alive. He got up and went to the bookshelf for the bottle and drank the
hot stuff as fast as it would go down, drank it all. Choking and gagging, with tears streaming from his eyes, he groped his way to the bedroom. He opened the door and fell upon the bed. At once he went off again into a dead sleep, a sleep that lasted, then, till the terrible day began, the day of terror.…

Just before dawn he was awakened by the sound of the street-door slamming three flights below. True, it was no more than a muffled and distant thump, but he wondered how he could have heard it at all, much less been awakened by it.

He lay listening. Footsteps came up the stairs. He heard them on each stairway and landing, and along the hall on each floor. He could not be sure, but there seemed to be two people coming. Yes, he was sure of it now. He heard them ascend the last flight and stop just outside the apartment door.

He lay motionless on his back, his eyes closed, to hear the better. There was nothing more for some minutes. Then the conversation began.

“What are we going to do about Don?”

“Such a pity.”

“Something’s got to be done.”

“We can’t go on like this much longer.”

“He can’t either.”

“What are we going to do?”

“What’s going to be done?”

“What do you think?”

“What do you?”

“What are we going to do about Don?”

The terrifying thing was that the conversation was carried on in whispers, loud stage-whispers, breathful and sibilant, but whispers all the same. The words carried through the closed door, across the little foyer, and into his bedroom as clearly as if they were being whispered at his very pillow.

He knew it was an hallucination. The beginning of breakdown? Delirium is a disease of the night, he remembered. He was hearing things. His ears were made the fools of the other senses. When he opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling, the whispering stopped at once. The moment he closed them again, there was the whispering:
What are we going to do about Don?

The thing to do was keep your eyes wide open and look at something, concentrate on some object, look hard at it. He raised himself on his pillow and leaned toward the desk and stared fixedly at the small plaster bust of Shakespeare that he had carried about with him for many years in all the places he’d been and always been able to hang onto and never lose or forget and leave behind or have to pawn or sell, and the whispering stopped. Maybe he could regain control by trying to recall the other desks and dressers, the bureaus and bookcases and cabinets, the mantels and armoires and nightstands and tables and shelves the little bust had dominated in its time. It was a complacent smug little face and probably looked no more like Shakespeare than he did or indeed not as much, but he was fond of it. He closed his eyes and lay back on the pillow to test how it was now. The whisperers said:
What are we going to do about Don, he can’t go on like this forever, something’s got to be done.…

He got off the bed and stood up; and as he did so, suddenly he realized that he was loudly clearing his throat, as if to warn the whisperers that he was moving about in his room. Nothing could have made him feel more foolish, he could almost smile about it, for he knew, there wasn’t even the faintest question, no, not even in his overwrought state, that no one was there. Standing up, he learned for the first time how weak he was. He was barely able to reach the bedroom door and shut it and get back to the bed again.