William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— Yes I… — You're goin to get paid for it and I ain't goin to get nothin. Jesse returned to admiring his chest.

Otto stood up and walked over to the bed. He scratched his arm, to give his hand something to do.

— Yeah, you're pretty, all right. Where'd you get hands like that? They aren't men's hands.

— They just grew, Otto started to reason, — like yours did.

— Like mine! Jesse made a fist, as Otto sat down again. — Yeah, you got to wise up to yourself, see? Jesse approached with the flat bottle in the palm of his hand, and stopped, swaying over him. He made the motion of smashing the bottle in Otto's face, then stood laughing.

— I have to, go to bed, Jesse.

— Yeah, you have to go to bed. Look, rabbit, I'm looking for a shack-job, see?

Otto sat still.

— Get me?

— I get you.

Jesse stood swaying for a moment. Then he said, — I got to go dump my bowels.

— Well, I'm going to bed, said Otto. He stood, stretched as though at ease, yawned a feigned yawn. Jocularly, man-to-man, he said, — Good night, Jesse. I don't want to seem to throw you out, but.

— Throw me out! Why rabbit you couldn't throw me. you just try, if you want me to kick you from one end of this room to the other. Throw me out, rabbit, that's a good one. said Jesse, out the door carrying the bottle, leaving the dirty glass.

The plantation outside was quiet, the jungle held at distance by thousands of pert green erections rearing on the stalks of the banana plants. There were no poisonous snakes, no poisoned darts. Few years before, within every discouraged native memory, they had managed in primitive content selling a consistently inferior grade of sisal, hands of green bananas, and occasional loads of hardwood to ships which came in leisurely to trade. Then an American fruit company arrived, tired of buying thousands of hands of bananas, set on hundreds of thousands of stems. The Company replaced the shaky wharf in the port with two firm piers, cleared and planted a tremendous plantation; and while waiting for their own trees to mature offered eight dollars a stem to local growers, since the Company ships were ready to call regularly. The natives gathered bananas in frenzied luxuriance, and planted thousands more. Then the Company's crop started to ripen. The price dropped to three dollars. The Company's bananas were cut and loaded, filling the Company ships to capacity. The Company ships were the only ones to call, since the Company owned the two new piers which the people had been so proud of at first. The local banana market disappeared. It simply ceased to exist. Ships passing the coast sailed through the smell of the fruit rotting on the trees miles out to sea. (It was now said that a plywood company in West Virginia was planning new and similar benefits for these fortunate people, so recently pushed to the vanguard of progress, their standard of living raised so marvelously high that none of them could reach it.)

The single bare bulb swung on its cord so slightly that shadows on the floor moved with the faint reciprocity of breathing, inhaling and exhaling, in swell and recession the bare boards over which Otto trod in silence picking up a shirt, then a necktie, seemed to breathe the silence of that sullen night before the rains.

The walls were white painted board. There was a metal bed with a discolored mattress on it, a metal chest of drawers with the mirror, table with two chairs, a long shelf and cuspidor. The room was high-ceilinged, with vents around the top to let what moving air there was circulate. It was through those vents that the strident crack. crack-crack of his typewriter had first roused his neighbors against him, and after his first interview with Jesse he had settled to write his play in longhand, and transcribe it on the typewriter in the Company office on days when he was not working.

The mirror had a frame which looked like brown wood, but it was metal painted to appear so. This was because of the termites, which work so industriously in the tropics. A fifty-year-old Funk & Wagnall's dictionary the size of a suitcase standing on a rickety table in the telegraph office down in the port was eaten through by them, hardly a whole word remained. But this mirror frame retained its patina. It might as well have been a picture frame, by now it had enclosed his image so often that it would seem it could not accommodate anyone else. He looked out the window, and saw on the ground only his own shadow. Jesse's light had gone out. He returned to the mirror.

He was now wearing a white linen suit which Brooks Brothers, who kept his measurements two thousand miles away, had sent him. He was wearing a Brooks Brothers shirt of off-white Egyptian cotton, and a gray silk hound's-tooth pattern (Brooks Brothers) tie. One thing more. With a casual over-the-shoulder glance into the mirror he turned and walked across the floor, took a Canadian cigarette from the table and lit it, his mirrored reflection intent upon him. He smiled at himself in the mirror. He raised an eyebrow. Better. He moistened his lips, and curled the upper one. Better still. The smile, which had shown his face obsequious, was gone. He must remember this arrangement: left eyebrow raised, eyelids slightly drawn, lips moistened, parted, down at corners. This was the expression for New York.

Having recovered himself, he flicked his cigarette into the darkness beyond the open window, and glanced again at the shreds on his upper lip which would be a mustache by the time he left the job. Then with a sursum corda on his lips in farewell to the image abandoned in the mirror, he undressed again and lay down on his sweated mattress. Before he was asleep, it had begun to rain.

The specially prepared matches lit easily, but cigarettes fell apart between the fingers. Weeks went by with mortal slowness, parade of heat, insects, water, paper work, stupidity aggressive and fearful, and the scribbling on the play. Weeds grew luxuriously. The only way that Otto was certain that time was passing was the frequency with which he had to pare his nails. His shoes, left under the bed, turned green.

Red flowers drooped at the end of long stalks, then dropped revealing the fruit in infant impotence. Week by week the fruit grew larger, pointed outward, then upward, and was cut in the full erectile vigor of youth.

Then it was over, early that year; and the minute the wet season was done it was forgotten. Near the horizon the haze appeared and the sun, part in and part out, rose warped out of shape like a drunken memory of sunrise. Black ashes hung over the plantation houses from a fire some distance away. Next door, from a radio, Enesco's Third Rumanian Rhapsody was being played on a harmonica. Otto counted his money.

The months of waiting were over, the months of non-entity. Saint Paul would have us redeem time; but if present and past are both present in time future, and that future contained in time past, there is no redemption but one. This one Otto now pressed with his wrist to be certain that it had not disappeared while he was dressing, leisurely, like a tired Colonial on the stage of a West End theater, for he had returned his wallet to his inside breast pocket. The man with the kewpie doll tattooed on the inside of his forearm (signed up for two years) said, — Two years isn't long, not if you say it real fast. For those nomads who sold the time of their lives, time was either money being made or money being spent, and life a cycle of living and unliving, as the sailor's life loses the beginning, middle, and end of the voyage from port to destination and becomes repetition of sea and ashore, of slumber and violence. The hours of work were hours of vacant existence, but the minutes were pennies, and in each dollar was held captive the hour gone for it: here time was held in thrall, to be spent at a man's wish. So as misers keep years bound up in mattresses and old tin boxes, wrapped in newspaper, sewn into linings (and ashore they sing — What shall we do with a drunken sailor?), he came forth with months in his pocket, and himself to dictate their expenditure.