Geoffrey Bartholomew - Manhattan Noir 2 - The Classics

The skinny girl was on her feet. She was not pretty. Her skin was the color of sour milk. She was jabbing her finger at me and shrieking. It had to do with Ahab and the birds.

Ahab said, “Kill, kill,” and turned to her with ferocious urgency.

I grabbed his collar and slammed him back. It is a pinch-collar, misnomered by many as a spike-collar. When the short sliding length of chain is pulled, the linked circle tightens. This causes blunt prongs to meet, pinching the neck. It is an effective, and with Ahab, a necessary collar. There is no question, however, that he would disregard the pain of pinched flesh if he thought that killing were really appropriate.

“Overprotective,” I said to the skinny not pretty girl who was the color of sour milk and had knees like flattened golf balls and who was shrieking and jabbing her finger at me. Shrieking, she did not hear me. “Fuck you,” I said. Jabbing her finger, she did not hear me. I don’t know if I said anything. If I did say overprotective and fuck you, then neither one of us heard anything and they were passionless sounds without significance, like fog, and they disappeared under the bright summer sun.

“Heel,” I said to Ahab.

He said nothing more. I believe he was thinking, with a growing sense of injustice or some such, of the seven fat pigeons and the way in which I had stopped him an instant before he lunged, an instant so close to the act that they shredded into one another. But I might very well be wrong.

We went home.

Ahab remained silent — that is, he did not say anything, in words, for more than a year. Most surely he carried on dialogues in the style assumed natural.

We were again at the park late one pleasant fall night, some fifteen months after our initial conversation. We had just entered and were walking down the ramp and I had not yet unsnapped the leash from his collar.

“Freedom now , freedom now ,” he chanted.

He had recently spent several afternoons playing with a bitch in the yard of a garden apartment down the street. Apartment and bitch were owned by a militant blueblack oboe player and his wife, both of whom wore their hair natural. “Freedom in a minute, there’s a squad car passing.”

“Baby, I’m not gonna wait no longer. You don’t like it, that’s your lookout.”

“What are you going to do if I keep the leash on?”

“Like the man says, violence is as American as cherry pie. Take it from there.”

“Shit on America, you’re violent by nature, that’s all.”

“True. What are you by nature?”

“You mean am I violent or not?”

“Don’t jive me, baby. You dig the question.”

“You know, if I do keep you on the leash, you won’t touch me. Matter of fact, if I clobbered the hell out of you, you wouldn’t touch me. That’s your nature too.”

“True, very true. You have the knowledge, man, but unfortunately not the wisdom.”

I unsnapped his leash. “Thanks,” he said, raced in wide circles, then went foraging into the darkness. He came back, fell in step with me and said, “Been thinkin’ on your nature?”

“No.”

“Well, wouldn’t help anyhow. You ain’t got none.”

“Seems the only reason you say anything is to needle me.”

“You people, man, you operate at three and three while the rest of it’s at fifty and fifty.”

“Rest of what?”

“Everything.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“No.”

“Well... listen, how come you talk? I thought about that a while back.”

“I’m an atavism.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It seems the thing to say.”

He swung in front of me and sat. He cocked his head to one side. “Hey, man. Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“I know. I love you.”

“Does it help, loving?”

“It helps. Sometimes, but it’s not nearly enough.”

He nodded.

We resumed walking. I said, “The thing is, there’s no significance. Nothing makes any difference. Nothing is more valuable than anything else. Which means there isn’t any such thing as value.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How do you endure it?”

“I don’t.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“You won’t survive then.”

“Is that really important?”

“No, it isn’t.”

Without Ahab I would have gone mad, if there is such a state. That is, in a negative sense. Which I don’t believe. I was sinking. Interminably. From nowhere, to nowhere. I am still sinking, all of us are, interminably. But now there is a vital difference — I have the key, the raison d’être ; better, the mode d’être . It is the answer, the only answer. Thank you, Ahab.

Sometimes I called him Ahab Flying Death Defier. I would throw one of his rubber toys and he would leap high, with grace, and close his powerful jaws about it in midflight, then land erect with light resilience. Now and then I would say, “It’s a dynamite stick! Catch it, boy, or we’re done for!” And he would snatch it from the air. I laughed. He wriggled pleasurably and came to get his ears scratched, his chest rubbed. We loved each other. For whatever that was worth.

I functioned well. The vicissitudes of my life went smoothly and successfully. Everything was, however, uniformly neutral. Everything still is, on that higher level. Or that lower level. Deterioration is not always symbolically manifest, nor even literally manifest. But that is what our dialogues had been about. Because deterioration is dominant, although deterioration is perhaps not the proper word: it implies values. And there is the crux of it all.

“Self-determination and a positive outlook,” Ahab said. “We must pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, so to speak.”

It was winter in the park. The sky was corrupt. The snow on the ground had been three days rotting. It was soot and sickly ice crystals. We had just come through a city election.

“It requires will, strong will. Immediate investment. A sacrifice on all our parts, which, I point out, will not be easy. But I tell you that a sacrifice made easily and without effort is no sacrifice at all and is therefore without consequence. Invest now and in a little time you will reap benefits one hundred, nay even one thousand — fold.”

“Where is this taking us?” I asked him.

“To our logical, our inescapable conclusion, my fellow countryman.”

Three boys in leather were approaching.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier there was one?”

“You weren’t desperate enough. Now is the time. The iron is hot.”

“Is it cusp?”

“It is cusp.”

“I suspected that, dimly. But it doesn’t make any difference.”

“True enough. That is why you must recognize its importance.” The boys in leather came scuffling closer. Ahab’s walk stiffened. “Discover your nature!”

“You said I didn’t have any.”

“You don’t.”

“Nothing does!”

“Nothing is!”

“Then how can—”

“Hey, Jack, you got any butts?”

“No, sorry.”

“Pull that mother back, or he’s dead!”

“He’s dead anyway. Come on, your wallet, Jack.”

They held thin steel in their hands, fine implements from the looks of them. I never knew much of cutlery. But they made good, solid metallic clacks when they sprang open. Discriminating buyers, I am told, look for that sound. I marked the absence of Ahab’s customary barks; this time there was only a low rumbling in his throat. He moved. The nearest one, the tallest, screamed. Ahab had opened his wrist. I could see a tendon. The knife fell. All three of them ran. Ahab loped after them, furrowed a calf, but broke off and returned when I called him.