Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

“You look like a Bloody Mary to me,” he said, smiling.

Faith’s left hand touched her face. “I do?”

He grinned, left her, and slipped through the noisy crowd to the bar. During the interval of his absence she again felt unprotected. It reminded her of the way she felt when she stood on the platform at the train station in town watching Alpha Omega Jones leave home. It had been a terrible day. By chance she had encountered Alpha’s mother at the feed store in town and learned that Alpha, in just an hour, would be leaving Hatten County to look for work up North. She had not seen him for months, he working and all. After delivering the box of dry goods to Lavidia, she raced back to town. And missed him. She could see his sad profile in the train window — sad because of the necessity of his flight. She shouted his name, but the train whistle smothered her cry. The train pulled off, bathing her in white steam as she ran behind it, tossing pebbles at his window. She had been there; it was important that he know that, that he should carry her memory with him always. Probably, he never knew. She remembered her feeling of isolation as being unbearable. He, like all those in the bar, had been only inches from her in physical distance, but beyond touch. It lay heavy on Faith’s chest. She started talking the instant her host returned to slide a frosty glass toward her.

“You haven’t told me your name—”

He pursed his lips, and pulled at the tip of his nose. “Arnold T. Tippis.”

“Well, Mr. Tippis,” she said, “I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve—”

“Forget it.” He yanked his nose again, then adjusted his glasses. “You don’t owe me anything yet.” For a second he looked embarrassed, perhaps by his eyes, which wandered in sweeping motions across her face, stopping momentarily to study the asymmetry of her eyes, then her mouth, and moved on to her shoulders and suggestion of breasts. Men judging livestock, or women inspecting fresh eggs at the fair have such eyes. “You’re nice-looking,” he said flatly, “. cute.”

It was a purely objective statement; nothing, she convinced herself, lurked behind such a simple statement of fact. This she told herself at least twice, believing it until Tippis, after clearing his throat, reached across the table and folded his hand over her own.

“I’m looking for something!” Faith blurted.

With his free hand Tippis alternately chain-smoked, blowing smoke from the side of his mouth, rather than in her face, and nibbled at rye saltines from a bowl. “That’s bad,” he muttered.

Her feelings were drained into the immediacy of the warmth between his hand and her own. She looked away from him again, but left her hand still, aware that her palm was growing moist and her fingers trembling. Not in erotic response; it was more like fear. This was not, in any circumstance, a safe man to be with, not because of what he might do to her but because of some strange thing he’d done to himself. Suddenly, her hand went dry, and she was all thought, pure intellect, and concentrating on the way his lips curled back like proud flesh around a half-healed wound.

“I’m looking for the really Good Thing.” She sipped at her drink, discovered she had never tasted tomato juice prepared in quite this way, and accepted, when the barmaid noticed her empty glass, a second drink. To be truthful, it made her a bit braver.

“Stop looking,” Tippis said. He arched his eyebrows sleepily. “Everybody’s looking for what’s Good and True and Beautiful. It’s damned foolish, really. Be content. Self-analysis will put you at peace with your problems — really.”

After the third drink Faith’s stomach felt even emptier than before, like a warm pit, or the inside of an old, old cave unvisited by beast or fowl for centuries. Her head felt the same way. As a muffled muttering, his words came to her:

“Me,” he said, “I can live with my problems. They make me unique, so they’re okay. You don’t mind listening to this, do you? I mean, you girls have to hear a lot of this sort of thing, right?”

Dizzy, Faith said, “Right,” her brain besotted. She bugged her eyes at him. It was getting hard to see. She looked away briefly and was shocked by her condition, knowing that the swelling and detachment of her thoughts, like subdividing amoebas, had changed the room in a peculiar way: the bar looked glutted with bodies — fat ones squeezed into loud pastel shirts, lean and tall ones rising from the floor like reeds; and their outlines formed an odd unity similar to geometric shapes, flowing together, implicating each other in a terribly necessary way, jelling into a colorless whole. This was not rhythm, only chaos. She felt outside them, or locked within herself with all of them beyond her. Overhead, a star-shaped chandelier cast the entire room in inundating bolts of ocean blue. Watching it made her nauseous. She attended to Tippis, who lowered his eyes to the table and scratched his forefinger at cracker crumbs on the checkered cloth.

“My analyst told me to scream when I get frustrated, but that’s not really as crazy as it sounds, not at all, because all my life there’ve been things I’ve wanted to scream at, to strike out of my path, or trample under my heel. But I kept silent. I tried to be cunning, thinking that — like the young sapling that bends in the wind — I could eventually conquer the world through endurance. Things started to churn and bubble inside me until I thought I’d explode. Passivity wasn’t working. It was like there was a grenade in my guts. That make any sense?”

Faith concluded hastily, unclearly, that her host was possessed. It happened all the time. Someone was, perhaps, working evil mojo on him. Leechcraft was what he needed, or a talisman, but she had neither, or anything to protect herself, or even anything to keep her heavy head from nodding like an old drunken hedonist gorged with grapes. Faith jerked herself upright. Her teeth felt soft and her bones rubbery; and every few minutes she felt herself sliding down her seat, prevented from going under the table only by Tippis’s hand gripping her wrist.

“So I went to an analyst downtown when things started going wrong on my job. I practiced dentistry on the West Side — made good money, too, and had a good name. But one day my nerves started going, hands started to shake, and I kept getting headaches and hearing voices, y’know?”

She nodded. Yes, she knew. The living dead, when bored, often communicated with their relatives, their friends. The point was to listen to them.

“So I started seeing a psychiatrist. He said I should have come to him maybe ten years ago. He said it was fifty percent in my head and fifty percent in the world. Everybody’s got an ego that arises from the id when they have to satisfy their instinctual needs—” As he talked Tippis’s face twisted as though he tasted bile; he reared back his shoulders, squared them, and squeezed Faith’s dry hand. It didn’t matter. Her hand felt numb. She accepted another drink and nibbled ravenously with her free hand at the stale crackers.

Tippis continued, a muscle beating in his jaw as he looked at but did not quite see her, “He convinced me to do my own research into the psyche.” What he told her made Faith giggle — that is, until she realized he was serious about infantile sexuality, and all those other things neither he nor she could see. Lavidia, she remembered, had derided Todd for believing in things he couldn’t see. But that was different: Lavidia simply hadn’t looked hard and long enough. Tippis said, “It’s so damned obvious! Everything you want is an object for the satisfaction of drives developed in childhood, and you, in society, are an object for others, hardly ever for yourself. But society, through the family and peer group, suppresses these drives so civilization doesn’t evaporate in a collective lust involving billions. Tell me,” he said, pulling at the tip of his dark goatee, “what is it you want most from life?”