Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

Have I ever described Kathy’s hands? They were peasant hands, with short, wide, thick palms, stubby fingers. They were soft and beautifully kept, but the care she gave them could not disguise the basic earthy shape of them. The very long, curved nails helped a little, but if you noticed them particularly, you saw that they were not pretty hands. Her feet were short and wide, with rather puffy insteps.

I do not know what was going on in Kathy’s mind that morning. But there was hate in the car. You could feel the hate. And so there was sickness. So there was a sickness in her mind, and she infected me with it. She passed on to me a part of what the world had done to her.

I was driving. My hands were locked on the wheel at ten after ten. And suddenly that small, thick hand came crawling over my right thigh on its stubby fingers, a large soft pale insect...

I have stopped this account. I needed time to think about myself. It is a tired irony, I suppose, that I should be removed from this life before I have had any chance to understand it. Yes, I’ve been to college. In an objective way I’ve learned the various schools of thought — man’s efforts to understand himself. At one end of the scale are those who say we are a long-range result of a chemical accident, and what we call thought is an ultimate refinement of instinct. At the other end, man is in the image of God, and is divine. The individual is the result of heredity, environment — and something else. An X factor?

Yes, I had thought of such things — talked weightily in bull sessions. But until these past few weeks it has never been subjective. What is this thing I — in some process of simplification — call Me? It has a name. Kirby Palmer Stassen. (Say this enough times and it becomes meaningless — a mouthing of nonsense syllables.) The name is an inefficient tagging, a kind of identification. I have existed. I have moved through time and place, without thought. The world has happened to me, not me to it. My hungers and emotions have been primitive.

During this final year of my life I have done things society condemns. And even though they were acts committed by me, they are more like things that have happened to me. I see them on a small stage, brightly lighted — little painted figures moving on awkward strings, making empty sounds. The thing called Me is on that stage in every scene, in every act. I am the lead in a pointless drama.

While I thought, they brought the midday meal. They have just taken the tray away. I was hungry. I ate. In that sense Me is an organism, converting foodstuffs to energy through a process of gobbling, mastication, chemistry. Another Me has slept, renewing itself. Another Me has made love, and spoken with great confidence of eternity. A million million things have gone into my head, and memory is one of those toy cranes which can dig at random and never come up with as much as ten per cent of what must be there, buried under round candies.

Most men give up seeking an answer to the riddle of their own existence. It makes their heads hurt. They give up and go play manly games, dig hard for the buck, get slopped at the country club and chase all available tail, and if forced to think about themselves, they say introspection is unhealthy — a suitable diversion for eggheads.

They aren’t giving me enough time to wrestle with the big riddles, but I can amaze myself with the little ones. After my — excuse the expression — Wolf Pack career, it seems entirely strange that I should feel a revulsion about writing down what Kathy Keats did to me, a temptation to skip it. Since they are going to strap me down and put me to death by electricity, what difference would it make if I covered all this paper with obscenities?

But I cannot be explicit. I am in many ways a prude. Murderous, but a prude.

She trained me the way you train an animal, and with less respect than you show a decent animal. When I felt the touch of her hand I reached down automatically and clasped it. She snatched her hand away. Lesson one — the hand must not be touched. Lesson two — do not look at her, even for an instant. Her mouth was level, the Dietrich face expressionless, the eyes invisible behind the darkness of her sunglasses. Lesson three — do not permit the driving to become erratic.

I remember that I looked far ahead to where the road shimmered into mirage, and I tried to divorce my mind from my body. I knew the actions that would stop her, but I was powerless to use them, trapped by my own queasy fascination. I told myself it was a tawdry, silly, childish thing she did. But she was turned so as to stare directly back into the face of her sleeping husband. And I was frightened. I felt too young. I felt like a child being bathed by an evil nursemaid. I felt that some unspeakable thing was coiling and vomiting in her mind. I had fallen among strangers I could never understand, and when next we stopped I would leave them and they would never see me again. God knows I wish my resolve had not weakened.

At a dreamlike seventy the car fell forward into the endless, overexposed Kodachrome landscape. And far behind the car a ball of orchid facial tissue spun along the rocky shoulder amid the spin-devils of our swift passage and came to rest under the brass of an Aztec sun. Kathy curled away into the far corner of the front seat and went to sleep with her head on a small crimson cushion. John Pinelli awakened and coughed and asked where we were. Kathy’s trained animal answered him in servile tones.

The new motels of Mexico enable the U. S. tourist to leave his country with the assurance he will not have to adapt himself to alien ways. He can be comforted by the same bold and banal architecture, the same wide asphalt parking areas, the innersprings and mixer faucets and spring locks and wall-to-wall carpeting. If he can avoid staring at the world outside his motel he will not be upset by the look of burned mountains, overladen burros and the brown and barefoot gente.

Our up-to-date highway guide reported a new motel as being the last one for sixty miles. A desk clerk beamed and bowed at me and said he was full, he could not accommodate us. I went back to the car and told them. Kathy got out quickly, and I followed her into the office. She walked to the desk in her green shorts and her green-and-white blouse and her very dark glasses with the green frames and her golden sandals.

She took her bill clip from her purse, placed a twenty-dollar bill on the counter and said icily, “I have gone far enough today.” She placed a second twenty on top of it and said, “I am tired and we will stay here.” She added a third bill and said, “We will require a twin-bed double and a single, not connecting, and ice immediately.”

“Yes, señorita!” the man said, bowing, beaming. “Yes, of course.” He hissed like an adder and a small boy came and helped me with the bags.

As we walked to the car, I said, “If you want me to handle it that way...”

“You couldn’t possibly,” she said. “You wouldn’t know what to look for. You wouldn’t know how much. I watched his eyes.”

And that was the last I said to her on that first day in Mexico. After I was alone in my room I thought about her. I decided I hated her. Perhaps in the same way Pavlov’s dogs hated him. I felt dirtied, because she had known how to force my acceptance, how to deny me the male role, how to turn me into her creature. She had spoiled my own picture of myself — the clever, boyish, slightly sinister aggressor — a charming young man who had gone off on this mad adventure on the optimistic off-chance of putting horns on the husband-director, puffy, pink-and-white John Pinelli.

The motel had a bar. I got drunk. I told outrageous lies to two girls from the University of Texas on spring vacation. I managed to split them up and get the larger of the two, and a bottle, back to my room. Underneath all the alcohol I told myself she was the obvious cure for what had happened to me with Kathy. The girl was large, alert, muscular and elfin. She would permit only the most meager and innocent intimacies. And then she would begin writhing and laughing like a madwoman, all hard brown outdoor knees and elbows. After I gave up with her, I felt as though I had fallen down several flights of stairs.