Laughing Man (19 page)

"It could be Helen," Erthmun repeated. "Do you know her?"

"Who?"

"Helen."

"No, I don't know no Helen."

"Who does? Who does? She's like . . . a puff of . . . smoke, Marty. Smoke. She's like smoke. Do you know her?"

"No," Marty said again.

"Who knows her?" Erthmun said. "I don't."

"Sure," said Marty; he was getting nervous.

"She could be you, or me, or anyone," Erthmun said. "But she isn't. She isn't. She's . . . Helen. And she does what she does!"

"Sure," Marty repeated.

"She eats," Erthmun said. "We all eat."

"Sure we do. We eat," Marty said.

"I don't know," Erthmun said. "I met someone once. A long, long time ago, in another place. But she wasn't Helen. Only Helen is Helen. Helen isn't me, or you."

"Maybe you'd like your coffee warmed up?" Marty asked.

"But she could be you and you wouldn't know it," Erthmun said.

"You're shakin' real bad, mister," Marty said. "I can't understand what you're sayin'."

"You don't need to," Erthmun said. He set his cup down hard, so more coffee sloshed onto the counter. Marty did not step forward to clean it up.

"Jesus!" Erthmun shouted.

Marty lurched.

"It could be you, it could be you!" Erthmun shouted. "Why did I come in here?" The energy of his sudden anger was overcoming the fact that he was cold and shaking, and his words were easier to understand now. "Did you invite me in here?"

"You came in here all on your own," Marty said.

"Did I? Why would I do that?"

"I guess to get some coffee," Marty said.

"Are you human?" Erthmun shouted. "Are you human?"

"Sure I'm human."

"But do you know? Can you prove it? No. Who knows? Can you reach back and pull yourself out of your mother's womb and say,
This is me, and I'm human?
No. Who can? No one. Do you realize that there are dead women with chocolate stuffed in their mouths in this city right now as we speak? Think of it, think of it. Chocolate in their mouths! Naked, dead women with chocolate in their mouths, and no one knows why! Do
you
know why? No. No one knows! These are
previous
women!"

"Sure," said Marty. He was backing away as Erthmun ranted.

Erthmun said, "Women who are no more than soil, no more than the earth itself, women who are like plastic dolls, women who will never taste the chocolate that fills their mouths!"

"Sure," said Marty.

"And what do you know, Marty? Can you reach into your mother's womb, can you go back in time and reach into your mother's womb and say,
Yes, this is me, and this is my father, who fucked my mother one night, who fucked her sweetly and said he loved her when he was done, and put his seed into her, and it was
that
seed that made me?
And can you say,
And this is my mother, whose womb I'm in?
You can't say any of that. You can't say any of it!"

Erthmun stood suddenly. Marty lurched. There was a small handgun beneath the counter not far from him.

Erthmun said, "It is these women who are stalking me!"

"Sure," said Marty, bent over, and put his hand on the gun beneath the counter.

"What's that?" Erthmun said. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing," said Marty.

"Good," said Erthmun.

A
t that moment, Patricia was trying to telephone him from her cellular phone. She was in her car and the car was stuck in snow near the corner of Lexington and 37th Street. There were other cars stuck around her; most had been abandoned, but a few drivers were furiously trying to get their cars moving.

She let Erthmun's number ring a couple of dozen times.

T
he homeless man could see well enough now, and he thought that was wife was dead. He could see her eyes, and they were closed. He could see her mouth, and he thought that it was open a little. He didn't think that her chest was moving at all. She lay directly beneath him, in the cellar, and her legs and arms were splayed out.

He hoped that she wasn't dead. He thought that he actually loved her and that he didn't want to lose her like this.

He wondered if he could jump from here to the first floor. It was only a little farther, he guessed, than if he stood with his arm straight up. It wasn't twenty feet, as he had first thought. It was fifteen feet, tops—not a whole bunch more than the distance from a basketball hoop to the ground. He could jump it. He could do it, and when he had done it, it would be done, and he wouldn't have to think about it anymore. It would be behind him. He'd be on the first floor, and he'd be able to tell if his wife was dead. And if she wasn't . . . What then? What was he going to do then? Carry her somewhere? Carry her to a hospital? Go and call an ambulance? How would he pay for it, because for sure they'd want him to pay for it. He didn't even know the address here. A brownstone on West 161st Street—is that what he'd say? And how are you going to pay for this ambulance? they'd say. He'd have no answer.

He stared at his wife. He hoped to see that her chest was moving a little, that her lips were spluttering—though, if they were, he realized, he wouldn't be able to see it from here—or that her eyes would open.

He wanted her to live.

He wanted them both to live.

Christ, he was hungry!

Morning at the House on Four Mile Creek

S
unlight fell on some of the creatures huddled in a corner in that house. It was like a salve, a healing potion. They had watched it creep across the floor toward them as morning started. They had known what it was, and that its very touch brought wonderful pleasure and warmth. But they didn't move to greet it. No one got up from the naked heap and moved across the floor to greet it. This would have taken heat away from the others and would have brought cold and pain to the individual who did it. Better to wait for the sunlight together, as one.

The sunlight touched a few of them at the feet, though not all of them; and when this happened, all groaned in pleasure because all could feel the sunlight through the ones that it touched.

H
e was still bent over, still had his hand on the butt of the gun. He could see the other man's eyes on him, and he could read no threat or danger in them. But the man was so odd with his talk of naked women and chocolate and stalkers. The man was crazy, sure, and crazy people did crazy things, unless they were stopped.

Erthmun said, "I don't have a gun. Did you believe that I had a gun?"

Marty said, "I want you just to leave, okay?"

"I'm cold," Erthmun told him.

Marty gripped the gun, straightened with it in his hand, but kept it pointed at the floor.

Erthmun said, "Would you shoot another human being?"

"I don't know if I ever would shoot anybody," Marty said.

"I'm another human being," Erthmun said. "I'm another human being," he repeated. "And I'm cold. I need to be here."

"I don't think you can stay in my delicatessen," Marty said; his words alone would have indicated uncertainty, but his tone was firm. "I have the gun and I don't know what I would do with it. I think that you should go to the hospital."

Erthmun pointed stiffly to indicate the street and the storm. He said, his voice quaking again, "Do you see that?"

"I see it," Marty said.

"If I leave here, that storm will kill me," Erthmun said.

Marty shook his head. "No. Not in this city. There are places for you to go. So I want you to leave and go to one of those places. Go to Penn Station. It's not far. It's warm. Go there."

Erthmun stared at the man for a long moment. These words went through Erthmun's head; What's happening to me? What do I know? Why am I here, in this city, in this restaurant? Why does that man have a gun in his hand? What does he want to do with it? What am I? What am I?

A
s quietly and as gracefully as a moth opening its wings, Helen had stepped out of the near-dark in the cellar of the brownstone on West 161st Street, and now she stood naked and incredible in the dim morning light, dark hair streaming down her back, her sky-blue eyes fixed on the homeless man above her, on the second floor, as if she were mentally weighing his worth to her. And he stared back in awe, because he knew that this was the incredible creature that had haunted him the previous evening.

Under other circumstances, the homeless man would have thought, "She's naked, she's a woman—she's vulnerable." But these were not such circumstances. This creature was no more vulnerable than the storm that still lashed the house. No more vulnerable than Death itself.

So he stared silently at her. His gaze did not move more than once from her eyes to her body, which was as exquisite as any female body he had seen.

And, still as if assessing his worth to her, she stared silently back. And after not too long, she bent quickly over the body of the homeless man's wife, ripped open the woman's gray wool jacket, tore at the blue sweater beneath, and the pink blouse beneath that, and shoved her hand far into the woman's stomach. Then she devoured what she pulled out of that stomach—the woman's small intestine, part of the woman's liver, a kidney—while the homeless man watched silently from above.

"Who the fuck moves that quickly?" Erthmun snarled. "Who?"

Marty's mouth was open and the nose of his own gun was stuck into it. Erthmun was holding the gun, and he had bent Marty backward over one of his stoves—which had not been lit. Erthmun was holding the neck of Marty's white shirt tightly in one hand.

A dollop of drool fell from Erthmun's mouth to Marty's neck, which caused Marty to make a little squeaking noise.

"What's that!" Erthmun demanded. "Did you say something to me?"

Marty shook his head a little. He did not want to annoy this man. Marty had seen him move at a speed at which no man should be able to move. He thought, upon awed reflection, that the man had even become invisible for a moment because he was moving so fast.

"Do you know this?" Erthmun snarled. "Do you know this?"

Again, Marty shook his head a little.

"Do you know this?" Erthmun repeated, and Marty got the fleeting impression that Erthmun had no idea that he was asking a question, that the words were simply an echo. Marty shook his head again. Another dollop of drool fell to his neck; he tried to ignore it.

Erthmun said, "I don't
want
to kill you. I don't
want
to kill you." Short pause. "But maybe
I
need
to!"

"You don't!" Marty whispered.

"Maybe I do! How do you know what I have to do? How do you know what I'm compelled to do? You don't know me. Who knows me? You don't!"

Marty said nothing.

Erthmun cocked the gun. "Maybe I
do
want to kill you! Maybe there's no maybe at all about anything I do. I do what I do because I feel good when I do it. And so I do what
I
do to feel good, because it's part of being alive. Feeling good is part of being alive. I feel good. You feel good. We do what we do and we feel good. That makes sense. Doesn't that make sense?"

Nothing.

"Answer me, goddamnit! Answer me!"

"Yes," Marty whispered.

"Do you know me? How can you know me? Who knows me?"

Marty shook his head in terrified confusion.

Erthmun took the gun from the man's mouth, pointed it at the ceiling, fired, fired again, again. Marty's body lurched with each shot.

Erthmun tossed the gun far across the deli. He held his hand up, fingers wide, for Marty to see. "I don't need that," he said. "I have these!"

H
elen had finished. She was drenched in the blood of the homeless woman, whose eyes had opened in the past few minutes; the woman's husband had dimly noted this from his perch above, and, as dimly, he had ascribed it to some errant reaction of nerves. It did not occur to him for long that his wife had been alive through her own devouring. The idea was monstrous; no one could continue living in the human community, or could go on believing in an ordered and sane universe, and accept that such a thing had happened to one who is loved.

Helen had finished, had consumed her last meal, had known her last great pleasure.

And now she was dying.

The homeless man did not know this. He saw her move off—with more clumsiness than the quiet grace with which she had made her appearance—into the near dark on the first floor of the brownstone. Her hip-length auburn hair was the last he saw of her. And as he stared at his disemboweled wife, the fleeting idea came to him—as a combination of abstraction and words—that surely he and his wife would never have children now, not only because she was dead, but because her ovaries and uterus had been ingested by the naked woman, and that was a fact that would never change.