Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

At night, lying in the bunkhouse, I listened to owls. I’d never before heard that sound, the sound of darkness, blooming, opening inside you like a mouth.

BASKETBALL PLAYER

I was the most dedicated basketball player. I don’t say the best. In my mind I was terrifically good. In fact I was simply the most dedicated basketball player in the world. I say this because I played continuously, from the time I discovered the meaning of the game at the age of ten, until my mid-twenties. I played outdoors on cement, indoors on wood. I played in heat, wind, and rain. I played in chilly gymnasiums. Walking home I played some more. I played during dinner, in my sleep, in movies, in automobiles and buses, and at stool. I played for over a decade, taking every conceivable shot, with either hand, from every direction. Masses cheered my performance. No intermission, no food, no other human concern, year after year they cheered me on. In living rooms, subways, movies, and schoolyards I heard them. During actual basketball games I also played basketball. I played games within games. When I lost my virginity I eluded my opponent and sank a running hook. Masses saw it happen. I lost my virginity and my girl lost hers. The game had been won. I pulled up my trousers. She snapped her garter belt. I took a jump shot from the corner and another game was under way. I scored in a blind drive from the foul line. We kissed good night. The effect was epileptic. Masses thrashed in their seats, loud holes in their faces. I acknowledged with an automatic nod and hurried down the street, dribbling. A fall-away jumper from the top of the key. It hung in the air. Then, as if sucked down suddenly, it zipped through the hoop. Despite the speed and angle of my shots, I never missed.

PLEASURE

My mother was taking me to the movies. We were walking fast. I didn’t know what movie it would be. Neither did my mother. She couldn’t read. We were defenseless people. I was ten years old. My mother was five foot nothing. We walked with fast little steps, hands in our pockets, faces down. The school week had ended. I was five days closer to the M.D. My reward for good grades was a movie — black, brilliant pleasure. Encouragement to persist. We walked in a filthy, freezing, blazing wind for half a mile. The pleasure I’ll never forget. A girl is struck by a speeding car.A beautiful girl who speaks first-class English — but she is struck down. Blinded, broken, paralyzed. The driver of the car is a handsome doctor. My mother whispers, “ Na, ” the Polish word that stimulates free-associational capacities in children. Mind-spring, this to that. The doctor operates on the girl in a theater of lights, masks, and knives. She has no choice in this matter. Blind and broken. Paralyzed. Lucky for her, she recovers. Her feeling of recovery is thrilling love for the doctor. He has this feeling, too. It spreads from them to everywhere, like the hot, vibrant, glowing moo of a tremendous cow, liquefying distinctions. The world is feeling. Feeling is the deadly car, the broken girl and blinding doctor, the masks, knives, and kisses. Finally there is a sunset. It returns me with smeared and glistening cheeks to the blazing wind. I glance at my mother. She whispers, “ Na? ” Intelligence springs through my mind like a monkey, seizing the bars, shaking them. We walk fast, with little steps, our hands in our pockets; but my face is lifted to the wind. It shrieks, “Emmmmmdeee.” My call.

SOMETHING EVIL

I said, “Ikstein stands outside the door for a long time before he knocks. Did you suspect that? Did you suspect that he stands there listening to what we say before he knocks?” She said, “Did you know you’re crazy?” I said, “I’m not crazy. The expression on his face, when I open the door, is giddy and squirmy. As if he’d been doing something evil, like listening outside our door before he knocked.” She said, “That’s Ikstein’s expression. Why do you invite him here? Leave the door open. He won’t be able to listen to us. You won’t make yourself crazy imagining it.” I said, “Brilliant, but he isn’t due for an hour and I won’t sit here with the door open.” She said, “I hate to listen to you talk this way. I won’t be involved in your lunatic friendships.” She opened the door. Ikstein stood there, giddy and squirmy.

ANSWERS

I began two hundred hours of continuous reading in the twelve hours that remained before examinations. Melvin Bloom, my roommate, flipped the pages of his textbook in a sweet continuous trance. Reviewing the term’s work was his pleasure. He went to sleep early. While he slept I bent into the night, reading, eating Benzedrine, smoking cigarettes. Shrieking dwarfs charged across my notes. Crabs asked me questions. Melvin flipped a page, blinked, flipped another. He effected the same flipping and blinking, with no textbook, during examinations. For every question, answers marched down his optical nerve, neck, arm, and out onto his paper where they stopped in impeccable parade. I’d look at my paper, oily, scratched by ratlike misery, and I’d think of Melvin Bloom. I would think, Oh God, what is going to happen to me.

MACKEREL

She didn’t want to move in because there had been a rape on the third floor. I said, “The guy was a wounded veteran, under observation at Bellevue. We’ll live on the fifth floor.” It was a Victorian office building, converted to apartments. Seven stories, skinny, gray, filigreed face. No elevators. We climbed an iron stairway. “Wounded veteran,” I said. “Predictable.” My voice echoed in dingy halls. Linoleum cracked as we walked. Beneath the linoleum was older, drier linoleum. The apartments had wooden office doors with smoked-glass windows. The hall toilets were padlocked; through gaps we could see the bowl, overhead tank, bare bulb dangling. “That stairway is good for the heart and legs,” I said. She said, “Disgusting, dangerous building.” I said, “You do smell piss in the halls and there has been a rape. The janitor admitted it. But people live here, couples, singles, every sex and race. Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican families. Kids run up and down the stairway. A mackerel-crowded iron stream. Radios, TVs, whining day and night. Not only a piss smell, but pasta, peppers, incense, marijuana. The building is full of life. It’s life. Close to the subways, restaurants, movies.” She said, “Rapes.” I said, “One rape. A wounded man with a steel plate in his head, embittered, driven by undifferentiated needs. The rent is forty dollars a month. To find this place, you understand, I appealed to strangers. From aluminum phone booths, baby, I dialed with ice-blue fingers. It’s January in Manhattan. Howling winds come from the rivers.” “The rape,” she said. I said, “A special and extremely peculiar case. Be logical.” Before we finished unpacking, the janitor was stabbed in the head. I said, “A junkie did it. A natural force, a hurricane.” She said, “Something is wrong with you. I always felt it instinctively.” I said, “I believe I’m not perfect. What do you think is wrong with me?” She said, “It makes me miserable.” I said, “No matter how miserable it makes you, say it.” She said, “It embarrasses me.” I said, “Even if it embarrasses you, say it, be frank. This is America. I’ll write it down. Maybe we can sell it and move to a better place.” She said, “There’s too much.” I said, “I’ll make a list. Go ahead, leave out nothing. I have a pencil.” She said, “Then what?” I said, “Then I’ll go to a psychiatrist.” She said, “You’ll give a distorted account.” I said, “I’ll make an exact, complete list. See this pencil. It’s for making lists. Tell me what to write.” She said, “No use.” I said, “A junkie did it. Listen to me, bitch, a junkie did it.”