Chapter Thirty-One: The Wild Man

Promethea had an audition before work. She and Felix stood on the street in front of a vacant lot. The weeds in the lot were broken and yellow. They stood on guard. There were dogs living in the building behind the lot. Even in the day one might come suddenly upon them.

“I’m all wrong for Desdemona,” she said. “But I might get Emilia.”

“Good luck,” Felix said.

The wind picked up. It was chilly and wet. A large military hovercraft moved slowly over the buildings across the avenue. The sun was a blur beneath the clouds. She touched his face. “Your skin is so, lush.” She kissed his lips lightly and drew away but he grasped her about the waist and hugged her. She smelled like cigarettes and leather; jasmine on her neck and the floral scents of her shampoo. He held his face against her hair. They kissed again and he felt her lips opening but he wouldn’t open his. Instead he inhaled deeply, searching for the smell of woman, beneath the perfume and soap. More like tanned hide. The beast. His eyes misted over.

“You’ve been good to me,” he said. “Thank you.”

They walked on to the PCP stop on Seventh Avenue and said goodbye at the foot of the listing, bent, metal steps.

Every day he walked for miles, sometimes in circles, sometimes not. He walked up to the library, to Central Park. The gated mansions of Fifth Avenue fascinated him, with their ancient wealthy families, inbred, hiding behind curtains, with armed guards, like the Venetian palaces in Henry James stories, evil and decayed. The park was dangerous but he walked the overgrown paths fearlessly. There was a hobo camp at the north end, near the great woods, where people washed, cooked and slept out in the open. No one ever paid him any mind. It was as if he didn’t exist.

It was true wherever he went. Street gangs and crime crews let him pass almost stunned by his lack of concern. The desire to kill, inflamed by any unknown person, was absent in his case. No one saw him approach but everyone knew his back as it vanished up the street or around a corner. Stray dogs stopped and whined. Police on horse back passed him by. He never challenged anyone but continued his grim stroll wherever it took him. Maybe they saw that killing him would be a favor. Whatever it was that secured his safety, he didn’t care or even think about it. For a while the young with a reputation to prove tried to take him out but something always went wrong. Potshots missed. He didn’t even flinch as bullets smacked into brick inches from his torso. Felix was a shadow man, the man who walked. A mystery began to attach itself to him. To one crew he was Black Flash, to another Fish. On the Upper West Side they called him Phoenix but in the hobo camp, people stopped doing whatever it was they were doing, boiling a kettle of water for beans and rancid bits of meat, washing out a pair of rotten socks in the pond, fucking like dogs in the open, to stare. In the hobo camps he was The Man Who Can’t Die.

He went east through the vast, empty, mirrored halls of luxury high rises. The sidewalks were narrow, dwarfed by ramps up to garages and when the automobiles drove by he felt like he was being squeezed flat. Here, in the world of glass and mirrors and cars and boutiques he was not even a shadow but a vapour trail, like a victim of a nuclear blast.

The shops were bizarre; tight, jagged spaces starting at street level and rising in shards and planes several floors up. The windows were full of mannequins in puce and scarlet or glowing gold and copper wraps, tropical fish and dolls dressed like rainforest birds. He never saw a naked human face here. The car windows were tinted so dark they appeared to be driven by themselves without passengers, like the world of machines predicted centuries ago.

He scrambled up an old composite service stair to the top of a concrete rampart and made his way to the levee overlooking the East River. He watched vortices form and break in the pewter water and the hovercraft cross and drift, the amphibatrain racing along. Uptown, in the seventies, he climbed down and crossed over towards the park. On Madison he bought a soft pretzel from a vendor and squeezed a squiggle of mustard on it. A little farther on he got an espresso and took these to some green composite benches just within the park, under a leafless oak tree with a huge trunk. Its roots had broken the stone retaining wall along Fifth and grown down under the cobblestones. It was like the park was bursting out of its sides. There was a playground nearby. Squirrels raced around the old, crumbling play structures. Trees had grown up around them. Buried beneath the bark and roots and dirt was the cast bronze figure of Alice seated on a mushroom, between the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, deeply patinated. It was never going to end, he thought. The only thing to do was die.

Well, there it was, he had reached his destination, the end of all his thoughts. Sometimes it took all day to reach the conclusion; sometimes it came to him before he had finished his shower. But everyday he resolved the problem in the same way. No one would care anyway. He could disappear without fear of disappointing anyone. No one depended on him for anything. No one’s life would be devastated or emptied of meaning without him. His words would echo in no minds. It would be a clean getaway without guilt. He was no one’s mental prisoner, he served no greater need or completed any feeling or thought. Felix was free. No one had ever been freer. His only enslavement was to nonexistence, to Veronica and things passed by, things he only dreamed about.

He crumpled up the wrapper and shoved it into his jacket pocket. Despite the piles of rubbish and trash he could not bring himself to litter. He walked down off the path into the thicket surrounding Alice. The ground was soggy. There was a dense layer of leaves and branches. It smelled like wet bark. Smell was important. If he smelled cats or dogs or humans he had to be careful. Once a vicious cat had leapt down onto his head, near the reservoir. Feral cats had taken over an acre or so of territory but he had ignored the smell. He was blundering along senselessly when he felt a piercing pain on his head, as if a titanium grappling hook had dropped down from a spaceship and seized him. Then a muffling of fur and panic blinded him till he realized what was going on and was able to grab hold of the cat and fling it away. That was merely annoying. A pack of wild dogs was another story completely. Now he unconsciously searched for signs of animal or human spoors. Each had a distinct smell.

Felix didn’t carry a gun. The others did and had tried to persuade him to buy one but he didn’t want it. Anything he couldn‘t fight didn’t matter. He was half hoping someone would put an end to him, saving himself the trouble. None of the methods of self-dispatch appealed to him. He considered death by drowning. But he always swam to the surface. A bullet to the head was efficient but he lacked the will to pull the trigger. Hanging made him crazy. He hated heights more than life. The swan dive into crushed rock was not for him.

He stepped over the bracken and leaned against the cold metal sculpture. Saplings crowded in between the larger trees. Roots had grown up over the characters. Alice was like an abandoned goddess, with her big grotesque head, and this was her temple, lost to the jungle. He looked up into the high branches. Crows stood on the bare crowns, cawed and flapped off in pairs. Even the king must die.

A squirrel rooted in the leaf mold. Fundamentally it was the violence he shrank from. He was too weak to bring it off. And if he had the strength he would no longer want to die. Another paralyzing paradox. He was like an injured animal staggering from trap to trap. But at least the trapped animal has the will to gnaw its leg off rather than die doing nothing.

He climbed the hat of the Mad Hatter and stood stretching out his hands. He gave a yell, a loud, throaty yell, and jumped back down. Who cares? He walked back up to the path and deeper into the park. Rain pitter-pattered the branches and the ground. It was a soft rain, filtered by the denuded canopy, somehow less grimy and depressing than the incessant winter downpour he was used to, with its metallic taste. Well, it was the rain or the storms or the heat and with the heat came the clouds of gnats, flying cockroaches, toads and bats. These were the alternatives.

He came upon a big rock and climbed a hill. He paused on a stone bridge crossing the old transverse, now a winding canal, to watch the water. People used to come just to see the beautiful canals built through the park. He had read about it in books. The water was black. A yellow leaf floated along. Branches blocking a bend collected these yellow leaves and released them. The water was only a foot or so from the top. It had a briny, industrial smell but it was still peaceful to watch it pulse along. Perhaps a gun was the way to go. It would only take a second to pull the trigger. There would be no lengthy preparation, no slow transition into death, no moments of terror and pain at the approaching sidewalk or struggle with amorphous water. Just the will to pull the trigger and then nothing, not even black. It would be like before he existed. Between the two eternities. Horseman, pass by!

On the other side the path climbed steeply. But there was something wrong. He smelled alcohol. A man emerged out of nowhere, on the path ahead. He looked like an animal. His hair was long and tangled with leaves and twigs. It stood off his head and stuck out in all directions. His beard stuck out all over the place too and grew almost up to his eyes, which were dazed and unfocused. Dirt encrusted the skin on his forehead and arms. As Felix approached he just stood there, naked to the waist, in torn jeans, bare feet imbedded in the ground like claws. In one hand was a bottle with an inch of yellow liquid. He smelled of animal fat. His nails were long and cracked and black. As was his habit Felix smiled briefly, nodded his head and kept going. But a sort of electrical current crept through his limbs as he walked by the man. Two minutes later he felt a deep chill. He was coming. It was coming. Felix didn’t turn around. He was like the rain. Let it come down. He pulled together and awaited the blow. He became aware of everything around him. A chipmunk hopping, sparrows chattering. The leafmold’s sweet smell and the earth and stones soaked with rain. Veronica. There was a boat with three stripers lying on the bottom, gills pulsing, soft lips opening and closing. It had been a good day. He and his father had started at dawn, with a turning tide. Felix piloted the boat out onto the river and headed north.

It came. The man had Felix by the throat. He started to cough and gag. He had no power, no strength. The man’s arms were like the roots of trees, rough and sour smelling. He felt himself going down. He felt the stinking breath of his assailant on his ear, saliva soaked into his hair, burning like acid. At last, he thought. I’m going to die here. He was going to succumb. There was no fight left in him. The blood vessels in his eyes popped. He watched his body slowly decompose. First the dogs fed on his entrails. Then birds came down to peck at his eyes and flesh. Flies laid their eggs. Maggots, ants and beetles picked the bones clean. Dead leaves settled over the bones and turned to earth.

Everything blurred. He began to feel warm and he headed out on the boat with his father, into the sun. They started out on the canal, rocking slowly along, down to the river. Slivers of gold and grey scaled the water and then the boat entered the sky. His father lay on the bottom of the boat, wrapped in canvas. Sea gulls cried. He looked down through the trees at the park below. Veronica was on a bench, weeping. Felix! she screamed. He felt a jerk, as if the boat had reached the end of its rope and was yanked out of the sky. He was falling into her voice. The woods circled around and he felt a pulse of violent, focused rage go through him. His mind shut down, the narrative that had plagued him for years, for his whole life even, ceased. His mouth opened, his foot rose up and he loosed a fearsome guttural roar and kicked at the man violently. He stood and stamped down on the man’s foot so hard it crushed all of the bones and the man loosened his hold. Felix whirled around, acid surging into his mouth. His teeth felt long and sharp, like sabers. He hissed and grabbed the man by the hair and the man swung at Felix’s exposed chest, knocking him to the ground. Howling and hopping on one foot, the man pulled out a knife and fell down onto Felix but Felix got to his feet, seized the man’s arm and broke it in two across his knee like a stick. Then, in a slow, calculated fury, he kicked and punched him to the ground till he was bloody and inert. Felix stood panting over him a moment, pried his fingers off the knife and ran out to Seventy Second Street and down Fifth Avenue, stopping only when he was sure he wasn’t being followed. He looked up and down the avenue through a dark canopy of interlocking branches. Uptown, a block away, a horse and buggy trotted along. The hoofs clopped on the cobblestones. Beneath the tattered awning of a sandstone building across the street stood a family, dressed in black. There were two children heavily swathed in dark cloth, covered entirely except for the eyes. The parents stood together behind them, the father in a tailored overcoat with sable lapels, and the woman in a sable fur with a high collar and a red cloche. A uniformed guard with a multibarreled, robotic assault rifle resting on his hip, stood stiffly off to the side.

Felix looked at his hands. They were bruised and bloody. His throat and neck burned. It was hard to breathe, he felt like he had swallowed rocks and his eyes ached and burned, stabbed from within by needles. The blood throbbed in his head. He wanted to scream but no sound escaped his throat. He started to cry and threw the knife over the broken stonewall into the park and walked home.

He could barely speak. It felt like someone had shoved toothpicks into his neck and throat. Peter was pacing tight circles in front of the bathroom, gripping his hair with one hand and pointing with the other. “Are you going to get a gun now?”

Moises, pouring gin into a glass and handing it to Felix, said, “Why do you walk there anyway? Do you want to die?”

Promethea stared at her feet and blew smoke at her toes.

“I like to walk in the woods,” he croaked, taking the gin.

“A wild man!” Moises said. He turned on the t.v.

Peter stared at Felix. He couldn’t tell if Peter was mad or worried. He didn’t want to piss him off, and he didn’t want to worry him. It was a burden either way. “Can I at least look at your neck? If you need to go to a hospital I’ll take you.”

Felix waved him off. “I just need to sleep.”

Peter nodded and yawned. “They’re just wiping me out at Les Jardeen. I can’t talk about sports anymore. God, Felix, I miss Mr. Clay.”

But Felix had no idea who he was talking about. He watched the news blurrily. Bulldozers and hovercraft lay waste to towns in Iroquoia. Then live sex from Fallopia. Controversy. He laid out his mattress and they watched t.v. over his recumbent form. When the t.v. went off and they were all asleep he got up and took out the bottle of Paregane from his duffel bag. He couldn’t go back to that depression anymore. He wanted to feel good. Booze, marijuana, THE WILD MAN mushrooms, stimulants, and narcotics: he had tried them all; whatever Moises did, he did. Nothing worked. They all fell flat. Paregane at least worked. And if it killed him, so much the better. That was how he would go, like Veronica, like all those people on the news. It was painful, but he managed to swallow the pill.

The first thing he did when he reached the garden was to go in search of Sammael. He went to the fountain in the ruined courtyard but there was no one there, just a few gold fish gliding in circles. The stones were wet with recent rain. The sun was coming out and the water was starting to evaporate. His throat felt whole again. He strolled through the pinewoods listening to his feet press down the bed of copper needles and drank the icy water of a stream, which he followed down to the lake. There he sat on the warm volcanic sand and watched the sun flame out across the waves in glints of red and yellow. Kingfishers shot out and back over the water like arrows fired from the boughs. Eventually he dove into the purple water. It absorbed him and gave him back. He breathed the sweet air deep into his lungs and felt it diffuse through his limbs all the way to his toes and fingertips.

Then it was morning. He dressed before the others were up, showered quickly and went out for croissants and bread. There were enough pills for a month. Maybe that would do it. If not, he’d have to buy Paregane on the street. Gametria had closed its doors to all but Paregane users. It was not a place he liked; the one time he had gone there he had felt totally alienated. It was Moises’s idea, he knew a bouncer who would let them in and they all dutifully dressed in their most stylish clothes. That meant for Felix that he had to assemble a hat, jacket, pants and gloves from Peter, Edsel and Moises.

From the street it was an ordinary building, seven stories high, with a brick facade, gargoyles and scrollwork at the corners. The transition zone was the stairs, after the bouncers allowed you into the steel doors. They passed through a mist, which, like a drug, altered their perception.

Inside was an environment of light and music. There were no walls, ceilings or floors. People were like butterflies and dragonflies gathering over the glittering pile of lucre in the Cave of Mammon. He had entered a liminal zone where humans passed like bright scarves of silk dropped through the night. The music and lights drifted. They drank a strange cocktail. There was a weird sexual vibration that seized them but no one touched. When he focused on faces he saw nothing at all but gaunt, severe features. There was no conversation. One walked on glass stairs, through gates of falling water that neither ascended nor descended. The walls breathed music and light. There was an odor of electricity. He felt awful for days.

Now the rich clientele were tired of hallucinations. They wanted reality. They wanted Paregane. Everyone got a little younger. They lined up in black and pink cotton tunics, shirts trimmed in green and sapphire, hats with red feathers.

He passed them. They were a herd. How much did it cost? In thirty days there’d be no more.

He had money. Even after rent and food he could go a long time without working. But Paregane was expensive. Street people didn’t use it. There had been no outbreak of peace in midtown. The industrial suburbs were untouched. Most places the same inane violence ground on without cease.

If he spent his money on Paregane he would never leave for Alaska. Wasn’t that his plan once? To do something with his life? In Alaska he would at least be honoring Veronica’s wishes. But Veronica’s wishes, who cared? It didn’t matter what she wanted, she was gone. He could go where he wanted. Or not go anywhere. He could look for her in the garden, maybe stay there with her. That was what they were chasing after, lining up on the street in front of the building called Gametria.

He felt inside of himself a new kind of power. He felt like a great cat, a lion, had become his familiar. It was in his arms, his jaws and loins. He had lion’s teeth and lion’s eyes. He could see fear. His hunger had a searching quality. He had no will to fight and yet there, in the park, when he both wanted to die and could have, this self- shattering will had seized hold of him. He had become ferocious, a predator. Whether the man lived or died meant nothing to him. He suffered no remorse or fear. A calm confidence suffused his limbs.

He walked by Gametria again. Enormous black bags of garbage were piled two-and-a-half metres up on the curb. A wave of rats had arrived and they were gnawing their way into the bags. Sometimes they squealed. Sometimes a late arrival ran across the feet of the people on line. They looked at him and smiled and said good morning. There were maybe ten of them, men and women. He paused to breathe in their odor and decided to join the line.

Back at the apartment, Moises, Peter and Promethea awoke. Edsel arrived for his morning coffee and Peter took a shower. Since Felix’s arrival it had been rare for Moises, Promethea and Edsel to be alone together.

“This is it, before he gets out of the shower,” Moises said. He grabbed Felix’s duffel bag and went through it.

“Moises!” said Promethea.

“Moises!” repeated Edsel.

“You’d better stop.”

“It’s his bag.”

Moises bared his teeth. “I don’t give a damn! He lives with us.”

“What are you doing?” Promethea asked.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know,” Moises said. “We’ve talked about it often enough. Christ, it’s all we talk about now.” He pulled out the bottle. “Here.” He shook three pills out. “He’ll never know. You’ve heard him. He’s afraid of dying. Why he keeps it I don’t know. It’s like those creepy ashes.”

“He might have counted them,” Edsel said. He and Promethea, despite their protests, had huddled around Moises and were gazing down at the three green pills in his palm.

Moises made a face and said, “As if I care.”

“Even if Felix doesn’t notice, Peter will kill us,” Promethea said.

“Come on. Aren’t you just dying to know?”

Promethea stared at the bathroom door and the bag. She bit her lip. Edsel grew quiet. The three were in an orbit around the pills. Then Promethea and Edsel held out their hands. The shower stopped running. The toilet flushed. Peter brushed his teeth. Moises gave them each a pill and replaced the bottle in the bag.

“If we like it we can always buy more at Gametria and replace what we took.”

The bathroom door clicked. Hastily they hid the pills and Moises said, “Tonight.”