David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘The hands being especially close to your idea of your identity of who you are, adding to the horror. Exceeded only by the face in terms of closeness, maybe.’

‘There was no dog shit on my face. I held my arms out straight in front of me in order to like hold my hands as far out away from me as was humanly possible.’

‘That only added to the monster-aspect. Monsters almost always hold their arms out straight in front of them as they chase you. I would have run like hell.’

‘They did. I remember on one hand I was both screaming in horror just like they were and on the other I was roaring with monstrousness as I’d chase first one and then sort of peel off to chase somebody else. There were cicadas in the trees and they were all screaming in rhythm and somebody’s radio was on through an open window. I remember the smell coming off my hands and how they didn’t look like my hands anymore at all and feeling like how was I going to open the door without getting shit on it or even if I rang the bell. There’d be shit on my parents’ doorbell.’

‘What’d you do?’

‘Jesus, what’d your mom do? Did she scream? Did you stand outside moaning and kicking the door and trying to ring the bell with your elbow?’

‘Our house had a knocker. I would have been screwed.’

‘I bet some of the other kids were in their houses cracking the curtains to look out the front window at you like staggering around moaning from house to house with your hands out straight like Frankenstein.’

‘It’s not like a shoe which you can just take off.’

‘I’ve got a story about shit, but it’s not pretty.’

‘I don’t remember. The memory ends with the shit and my hands and trying to chase everybody, which is odd, because up to then the memory is extraordinarily clear. Then it just stops and I don’t know what happened.’

‘I’m assuming I haven’t talked before about running around with this odd gang of guys at Bradley and the strange thing we got into junior year of breaking into people’s dorm rooms and holding them down while Fat Marcus the Moneylender sat on their face.’

‘I think I would have remembered.’

‘This was at Bradley; you know the weird shit you get into. There were five or six of us and this senseless thing got started where it was a tradition to cruise the freshman dorms at about four in the morning and find an unlocked door and all burst in and we’d all hold the guy in bed down and Fat Marcus the Moneylender would take his pants down and sit on his face.’

‘…’

‘There was no reason to it. We just thought it was a gas.’

‘Fat Marcus the Moneylender?’

‘An enormous guy from the Chicago suburbs. Morbidly enormous. Always had cash and lent it out and kept his accounts in a small special ledger. Very careful bookkeeper, could compound daily without a calculator. Never even just Fat Marcus, it was always “the Moneylender.” He was a Jew but I don’t think that had anything to do with it. It was how he put himself through school after his parents had cut him off — this wasn’t his first school but I don’t remember his background too good.’

‘Why the sitting on people’s face?’

‘The weirdness of it was the charm. That’s all I can tell you. It was just something we started doing. I get a strange feeling even just thinking about how to describe it.’

‘What did the guy in bed do?’

‘The guy in the bed was not a happy camper, I can tell you that much. It would all happen real fast where we’d all just burst in and be on the guy before he was even awake. We’d each grasp an extremity and quick as shit Fat Marcus the Moneylender’d have his pants down and sit on the guy’s face and stay there just long enough where the kid in the bed didn’t smother. Then we’d be out of there just as fast as we came in. That was part of the whole point, so the guy in the bed probably didn’t even know if it was real or a nightmare or what the hell it was.’

They weren’t far off the Sticky; the fog was a storm coming in off the river. The very air was at attention. Two ledge-chested older women were peering in the window of the coin shop.

They all had unconscious habits of which maybe only Hurd, as the new one, was fully aware. Agent Lumm’s habit on surveillance was in a blank absent way to use his front teeth to peel a tiny fragment of dead skin from his lip and put it on the tip of his tongue and gently blow it out his mouth to land somewhere invisible. He was wholly unaware that he did this, Hurd could tell. Gaines blinked slowly in a stony mindless way that reminded Hurd of a lizard whose rock wasn’t hot enough. Todd Miller wore a corduroy coat with a sheepskin collar and bunched and unbunched his left sleeve; Bondurant stared at a point between his shoes on the van’s rug as if it were a chasm. It seemed staggering to Hurd that no one smoked. He himself was an endless catalogue of tics and fidgets.

One probationary agent whose sunglasses hung from his collar wore twelve-hole Doc Martens whose holes Hurd had counted several times.

‘How does Marcus the Moneylender pull his pants back up while you all are running out?’

A long silence ensued while Bondurant gave Gaines a prison-yard stare. Gaines said, ‘You ever try to get dressed while you’re running? Can’t be done.’

‘The guy thinking it might have been a dream until that is he gets up to shave and sees his nose squished flat and a big ass-imprint on his face.’

‘Did he scream?’

‘In a muffled way they all screamed. Of course they screamed. But the thing that was making them scream was also the thing that muffled the scream.’

‘Some fat man’s ass coming down and covering their face.’

‘Speed and quiet were the essence of the operation, and this was important because this was breaking in and assault of a sort, and Fat Marcus had already been expelled from at least one place, and none of us were what you might call on the Dean’s List, and let’s don’t forget this was 1971 and the draft board was just about standing at the front gate waiting for you if you got kicked out.’

‘This is why Bondurant was in the war. In The Nam.’

‘I was a G-2 bookkeeper in Saigon, dickhead. That’s not The Nam.’

‘But you’re saying this is what got you drafted? Assaulting freshmen with a big Jew’s ass?’

‘I’m saying it was just something that started happening and that we pulled off numerous operations all up and down the underclass dorms with a hundred percent operational success until the day the door we found open belongs to this kid, Diablo, that everybody called Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist, this Puerto Rican mural-painter scholarship from Indianapolis that was crazy, that for example lost his student-aid job in the faculty dining hall because one day he came in on what we’re pretty sure was acid and set all the place settings at everybody’s place with all knives, and saw visions and painted these spiky fluorescent Catholic murals on walls on warehouses down by the river, and was crazy — Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist.’

‘Didn’t anybody at your school ever have names like Joe or Bill?’

‘That for the most part nobody ever messed with because he was crazy as a fucking mudbug, this little hundred-pound spic kid from some Indianapolis barrio, but by this time the operation was a finely honed mechanism built for speed, that plus nobody even placed who it was until we’d all bursted in and deployed around the bed. I had the left ankle I remember, and Fat Marcus was up on the bed undoing his belt and getting his feet distributed on either side of what was usually the guy’s pillow except this kid didn’t use a pillow or even sheets; it was just the bare dorm mattress with those stripes on them.’