The Hair of Harold Roux Read online

  Now, I am a man whose mere daydreams do not excite guilt. In my fiction I am constantly haunted by adultery, murder, cruelty and betrayal, but that is another world, and in it I will enter any darkness, leaving whatever loyalties I have back in the real world. So if I began to consider then, even in the most vivid detail, how I would take F.’s young wife to a motel on the highway to the city, ease her of all the sickness of her ugly marriage (in bed, she trembles as I gently touch her pink, childless nipple, etc., etc.), I felt no guilt. Thoughts are merely thoughts.

  And I was here to kill a deer. A knife at my belt, my accurate Marlin in the car, I was prepared only for that kind of reality.

  F. came in then. He stood in the open doorway looking at us, not speaking. Toward him Thelma turned the wasted look of apprehension.

  “My!” he began in a high falsetto. “Ain’t we all gussied up! What’s the occasion, as if I didn’t know.” He turned to me. “Ain’t she something, though? You kind of like her sweet little ass, don’t you, Professor.”

  He strode forward and hit her in the mouth. She nearly fell down but held on to the counter, one hand over the lower part of her face.

  “Hey!” I said.

  He turned to me, his hands held low in front of him, as though he expected, or welcomed, an attack. “You think Fm so bone-dumb I don’t know what’s going on? I knowed for a long time.”

  Without looking at her he hit her with the back of his hand, and her head hit the cabinet like a piece of wood. A canister set rattled on the counter. Quickly he took his rifle from the deer-hoof rack and levered a shell into the chamber. The rifle pointed at my belly, where I felt its ghostly power in the form of ice.

  “You want to stay and watch,” he said, “or you want to git the hell out of here?”

  I heard Thelma bawling as I left. At first I was going to call the police, and I drove fast down the gravel road in the cool light of dusk. But by the time I got back to town I had gone through in my imagination what that summons would entail in this world, where actions beget actions. I considered my wife, my family, but mostly my work, the symmetries and balances I pursue, and my dwindling reservoir of imagination and time.

  I don’t have to look for trouble in this world; it comes to me. For instance, there is a little man Fve seen three times over the last few years. I find him waiting for me in the hall in front of my office door. I don’t remember his name, but I remember him so well that after not seeing him for a year or more I am aware of the increasing gray in his brush-cut black hair. He is wiry, big-handed, a factory worker, as quick in his movements as a squirrel that finds itself a little too far from the nearest tree. As I come up to my office door I see him, and keep my eyes away from his as I unlock the door. After I’ve entered the office he stands peering at my name in the little card slot on the door, then at me with alert, avaricious eyes. He asks if I am Professor Benson, and during our subsequent interview makes absolutely no reference to ever having seen me before.

  Something is wrong, he says, with what’s going on in the White House, and he needs my advice.

  Should I agree that things are going wrong? Things are going wrong indeed, and I could go on intemperately for an hour, for two hours, for a marathon, a filibuster, a teach-in. The difference between his delusional system and mine is that mine is not encapsulated, and my despair at the vain and vicious actions of men can be documented at all levels. Something is going wrong in the White House, in the Kremlin, in Peking, in Cairo, in Athens, in Tel Aviv, in the Vatican, in your living room and mine. Something is going wrong and it always has the symptoms of the incurable psychosis he has brought to me with such excitement that I know he believes it to be a precious gift.

  He has a letter from the Office of the President, an answer to a letter he has previously sent. He has studied this answer very carefully, as you can imagine, and in its bland, perfectly trite, noncommittal platitudes he has found a code in the form of an anagram. If you take the first letter of the first word, the second letter of the second word, the third letter of the third word (at this point his smile is sure and hard, for even the most skeptical dolt would have to be convinced by now), you will see that these letters, slightly rearranged (according to an arithmetical formula he won’t go into now), spell DEATH u.s. The President is surrounded by Communists, but how to let the President know? And there is one other little problem—he wants to be rewarded for submitting this vital information to the President. He wants to be paid, and paid well.

  I am not a snake-poker. I am afraid of this man and of the multitudes he represents. The things I might tell him, however, rush through my mind like the horrible thoughts one can’t thrust away at four in the morning.

  I might close the door and turn toward him slowly, a grim smile on my face, and say, “So you know. It is very unfortunate for you, sir, that you have such an inquiring mind. But you haven’t gone quite far enough, and I can tell you this because you will never get out of this building alive: the President is in no danger, for he is one of us!”

  I think with awe of the perfect ecstasy these words would evoke in him. What glorious, heroic justification! How terrible it is of me to deprive him of this gift.

  But I don’t want to enter his system in such an active role; he has, of course, already enlisted me in the secret armies of his fantasy, and I want to resign my commission, please, thank you. I do not want to be caught again. So in order to get away I must lie with great subtlety, treat his madness with respect and even sympathy, yet beg to disagree with certain of his conclusions—when all the time my violent apprehension screams from below: Kill him, donH let him get out of this building alive.

  I look around me and observe how reality and our common paranoid tendencies reinforce each other. For instance, I believe that H., a radical student, was framed on a marijuana charge by the police in a nearby town. He is a militant who has a pure, messianic contempt for drugs, alcohol, or any other distraction that might lessen his usefulness to the cause he so fanatically serves. I have known him for three years, and at first we were quite close. Now, I no longer question to his face the elaborate system he has devised in order to find, over and over again, evidence that there is a deep, revolutionary alliance between his faction and great masses of the exploited workers of America. I wonder how much longer he will even speak to me.

  He may be mad, dangerously infected by one idea, but he did not keep marijuana in the bottle marked “Oregano” on the shelf above his stove. In their raid upon his apartment the police triumphantly confiscated his posters of Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung, and also informed the newspapers that “human excrement” was found on his floors. He and his wife had recently adopted an unhousebroken puppy.

  Where does delusion end and reality begin as our various delusions start to mesh? The connection is made, and madness, as always, seems dominant.

  And now another incident comes to mind, one that happened many years ago, when I was a young soldier. In Phenix City, Alabama, was a second-story beer joint frequented by paratroopers from nearby Fort Benning, Georgia. Perhaps Phenix City has changed, and the second-story place, along with all the other squalid clip joints, has disappeared, but in those days the town, with its air of small-time graft, was a study in degradation, in which the varied possibilities of humanity seemed to have been reduced to nothing but a vicious strut.

  The second-story bar was called Club Geronimo, after the fierce Apache chief whose name had been adopted by the Airborne as its battle cry. One entered the place by way of a wooden outside staircase. Inside the club were mismatched wooden and metal tables, chairs, a linoleum floor always damp with spilled beer and booze, and several young but used-looking waitresses who changed off during any evening because of accepted propositions or the results of slugging the dregs of too many drinks. On the musty papered walls were calendar pictures of streamlined blondes in shorts and halters. Hamburgers and other simple foods were served, but these were not highly recommended.

  If a paratroope
r left Club Geronimo with a girl it was proper for him to use the stairs, but otherwise he had to jump off the balcony—a descent of some twelve feet—onto the hard dirt alley below. Because of previous broken ankles, collarbones and wrists, this practice was frowned upon by the MP’s, and if they caught you at it you would receive “company punishment” for two weeks. But the punishment by the members of your own company for breaking tradition was rather harsh, too. So, while drinking in Club Geronimo, you always had ahead of you this scary little choice of exit. Somehow this awaiting test made the atmosphere of the club a little more edgy than it ordinarily would have been even among paratroopers, who had already, by volunteering for such duty, indicated their physical narcissism.

  But this is a story of madness in the context of madness, about the actions of Corporal E., who couldn’t seem to leave me alone. He came from Pennsylvania, where he had grown up on a farm. Though he was solidly built, I always thought of his broad muscles as lacking in tone, like an animal raised too quickly for slaughter, transformed at the end into its proper increments of protein and fat, something less than animal. He carried no extra fat, of course, but to me his strength seemed dumb, badly organized. He was always ordering me to do push-ups, and because he was cadre I had to do them. It seemed to perplex him that I did push-ups as easily as I did, and I could see in his eyes a deep yearning for some more satisfying way to utilize me. At the time, surrounded as I was by the army’s irrationality, I didn’t consider his constant need of me to indicate any namable psychosis, but now I think I can put a name to it, and the name is erotic delusion. He was always winking at me, and bumping into me, his expression indicating collusion between us. It was only after my usual cold or exasperated response that he would have me do the push-ups.

  This night, he’d been watching me for a while, and when I was coming back from the head he deliberately bumped me into a table. When I didn’t respond the way his delusion predicted, he pointed to the wet linoleum and told me to get down there and give him twenty. I examined the cruddy floor and my clean, creased chinos and told him to go fuck himself.

  I won’t reproduce the usual ceremonial posturings and banal insults that followed. Suffice to say that at a certain point he hit me on the left cheek hard enough to hurt like hell and cause me to taste blood. I won’t indulge here in the usual modest protestations of inadequacy, either. What happened next was that I hurt Corporal E. very badly—so badly, evidently, that he was reduced to a strange, childish panic. He managed to grab my left hand and clamp his teeth over my bent forefinger. Once his jaws were set, the rest of him turned passive and still. In considerable pain, I found myself standing there with the corporal more or less on the end of my left arm.

  A strange feeling. His eyes were open, and seemed to stare into mine. I requested that he let go. When he didn’t comply, I made the mistake of hitting him in the nose. The pain became unbearable, as if the blow had turned the bolt in a lock. He didn’t even blink, and blood from his nose mixed with blood from my finger. I had to get away from him. I felt that I was becoming my own finger, as though he had all of me in his jaws. I continued to argue with his unwavering gaze.

  “Let go or I’ll have to hit you with this bottle,” I said reasonably, pressing a beer bottle tentatively along his head above his ear. “Let go and I won’t hit you any more, okay?” Maybe he had won after all, I thought. I couldn’t believe, had never known before, how one small member of my body could generate so much pain. I became afraid of all wounds, as tender as a child. Even the twelve-foot jump from the balcony now loomed before me like an impossible cliff. The pain was so intense I couldn’t hit him with the bottle for fear of causing such pain in him.

  My friends had gathered around us. They argued with him, too, and offered me helpful suggestions I could barely hear through the vibrating, screenlike immediacy of my pain. They told me to hit him, to gouge out his eyes. One tried to pry open the jaws with a spoon, another by pressing the joints of the jawbone with his thumbs, another by strangulation. Nothing worked. I began to faint, and had to put my head down for a moment until the drab colors of the linoleum resumed their proper tones. I tapped his head with the bottle, a tender, tentative little blow that failed to register in his bright eyes. The others discussed where on his head would be the best spot to sap him. No one wanted to kill him, really, but all could see that the situation was intolerable. Corporal E.’s right canine, in particular, was half sunk into my finger, surely grating upon white bone.

  “Maybe they got a crowbar,” I heard someone say.

  The pain flowed up my forearm and scorched my elbow, played about with my upper arm, sometimes on the surface, then again like the thrust of a huge needle down into the clefts between the muscles themselves. My arm felt flayed, then drawn, as though it were being stripped, layer by gleaming layer. I had no idea what was going on in Club Geronimo then, I just spoke to the corporal’s steadfast madness. I had a steel table fork at his throat, the dull tines pressing into the complications of his neck. “I’ll kill you,” I told him. “I’ll have to. I’m going to shove this fork clean through your neck. I’ll twist it. Let go. Listen, do you hear me? I can’t stand this. I’ll have to kill you. Let go. Let go of my finger. Let go.”

  My earnestness had reduced me to plain language. I called him no names, accused him and his mother of no perversions. It was as though we were alone, made one by this terrible connection, bone to bone. When I touched the fork to his neck the pain thrust my own consciousness askew. It was just his head that had me, like the severed head of a snapping turtle clenched upon a stick, the stick you hold out, dreamlike, as a substitute for your hand.

  The pain increased. It never reached a plateau where I might confront it, know it, and negotiate some kind of treaty with it. But it was the sight of his teeth deep in my flesh, and the fear of amputation, that finally made me act. I took the bottle again and began to tap above his ear. With each small blow my whole left side was seared by fire. I felt like a man having to amputate his own limb. Still operating, I think, was a deep rule against murder, but this was true desperation and I began to tap his head harder, faster, the soft ring of the bottle on his skull growing harder until the tympanic hollows below his bones answered, and finally his black pupils widened. With a slow, even, peaceful elevation of his gaze the pigmented parts of his eyes moved up into his forehead. His jaws slowly opened upon a gush of my blood and I was free, singular; it was like being born again.

  A human bite is considered dangerous, and my crushed and torn finger was treated by the medics in radical fashion. After the Novocaine, the cleaning, the stitches, the tetanus and penicillin shots, I felt as I know Corporal E. did the next morning—that something much more climactic than a saloon fight had occurred. Within a week he had arranged to have himself transferred out of the regiment.

  Soon I will have to go to my office to have the conference with G. about his frightening novel, and I find myself in anxiety, yearning again for that sudden clear freedom, the clamped homunculus gone from my flesh forever.

  Did I say that one of the fictional objects G. has set up for vengeance is a college professor whose open, rather shy demeanor hides the most calculating, malicious intent, and whose initials are the same as mine? This character in G.’s novel is called Albert Bamberger, and in the end, when Bamberger is found out, degraded and subjected to public contumely, G.’s lack of narrative and descriptive talent is transcended by a kind of gleeful energy. At the most dramatic point, Albert Bamberger, attempting to escape, is brought down by a knife thrown by the hero.

  Am I right in believing that Albert Bamberger, who gets the “Arkansas toothpick” between his shoulder blades, is me, or am I just another madly alert animal in a world of imagined conspiracy? G. will no doubt watch me slyly as we discuss his novel, because I won’t bring this matter of identification into the open. That is what he will be waiting for, but I won’t do it. I know he wants me to admit it, to have to feel that fictional blade, that ghostly steel
, in my back.

  We use each other, the materials of reality, our experiences, everything at all in our “encapsulated delusional systems.” Even in my apprehension I sense my kinship with G., and cannot wholly condemn his mad attempt to make his own satisfying order out of chaos. I, too, am driven by a similar horror vacui. Though I would call my work by another name, I will use G. and all the rest for my own purposes, use them coldly and without mercy, more coldly than their own warm needful selves could ever understand.

  He looks up into the vacuum left by his stilled voice. Helga is there in the shadows; he hadn’t seen her return. There are, after a moment, murmurs of approbation. Laughter has occurred in the right places. He has revealed something of himself and his work, and he feels the shivery apprehension and then the acceptance of responsibility. The water is not so bad once you get your whole body wet, but you are still swimming toward a shore that may or may not be receding. Linda Einsperger wants to know how autobiographical the story is, and he answers that it is too autobiographical, that it makes him self-conscious, and who wants to write about or read about a professor who is a writer who is writing about writing. It is all incestuous and even narcissistic. Yes, for instance, the corporal, who was really a private and somewhat smaller, did bite his finger. Here are the scars, and much of the sense of touch is gone from the pad of that finger. And Thelma, poor Thelma. That is a longer story altogether, in which he was guilty of more than daydreams, but he doesn’t tell them this. John Periault asks, If the story isn’t finished, what is he going to do to finish it? He replies, now safely into a familiar, literate, honest glibness, that the beauty shop section seems to him to outweigh the other parts. Something is wrong with the balance of memory, with the story’s symmetry. What the hell does it have to be symmetrical for? Frank Hawkes asks. Having found his issue, he will now defend the story against this sterile academician. No, that is overstated in this instance, but it is true of Frank’s positions on most matters. Aaron goes on, perversely, he thinks, in order to gain the initiative, to say that the story is told by a rather pompous, rather rhetoric-conscious person. Witness all those balanced, somber, periodic sentences. The narrator is being characterized by his tones, and there is in his narration the further defining necessity for what he (the narrator) might call meteness, and in his case this must be reflected in symmetry. That dude is sick, man, he just as sick as anybody in there, Bradford Wilkins observes, to which Aaron answers, Yes, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Some agree, some do not. Gladys, the sixty-year-old, leans forward into the light, her gray hair pulled back from her face in almost painful tension as though she strains against a tether. She moves her arms and hands tentatively, with the dimming grace (it seems to Aaron) of a woman who has once been extraordinarily beautiful. In the way she holds herliead and shoulders she displays some gallantry in the losing battle against gravity and age. She says that the story, as Professor Benham said before, is about writing fiction, isn’t it? Linda Einsperger grows excited, her pale eyes flash; the A student has begun to perceive the answer. Yes! Yes! she says, but does not elaborate. She knows, almost. If she could write it down, she would know. Now she looks at Aaron with the excited admiration of one who discerns beneath an interesting surface a puzzle to solve—a puzzle with a legitimate solution one can grasp as a neat reward for thought. But they all have a horror of vacuums, Gladys says. I know the feeling. Frank Hawkes says that it isn’t necessary to be paranoid these days. Everybody breaks the law. Like he’s got a joint in his pocket, so what? The law’s after everybody’s ass. You ought to really know that, Bradford Wilkins says, implying that the white boy can’t really know, which causes Frank Hawkes to part his electric hair at the top of his head and offer to show Bradford Wilkins a view of some scars. George decides that the conversation is getting away from the story and asks if it’s possible that all the various characters are at least somewhat justified in their varieties of clinical paranoia. Both Bradford Wilkins and Frank Hawkes give him disgusted but essentially tolerant glances; George has to do his professor thing. Well, John Periault says, F. is right in a way because Allard Benson does consider balling his wife, even if he’s too chicken to try it. Frank Hawkes suggests that maybe it’s those who can, do, and those who can’t, write about it. Aaron thinks this is interesting, but can you really write about something if you couldn’t possibly do it, and be at all true. Imagine it, man, Bradford Wilkins says. Are any of the other people in the story real? Gladys asks. Aaron says they’re all somewhat real, but changed for the purposes of the story. Not changed deliberately, but as they come on they change the meaning of the story, and it changes them, as the story changes meaning in the writer’s mind—as he begins to find out what it’s really about. Linda Einsperger says that it’s really about people making order out of chaos and that’s what fiction does, so maybe by comparing fiction to paranoia the writer learns something about fiction. Yes, Gladys says. But what has he learned about fiction? That it doesn’t always work, Aaron says, earning a few doubtful looks for his facetiousness. No, I’m still not sure what I wanted to find out. One girl who hasn’t yet spoken suggests that the writer is colder than the paranoiacs because he manipulates them deliberately, while they actually believe in and fear their fantasies. Aaron notices that this formerly silent girl is admired by the talkers for her theory. Yes, they nod, well put. George says that the difference is that the writer produces, at his best, art, which is good, while the paranoiacs cause danger and even, possibly, murder. Oswald, Sirhan, Beckwith, Ray, for instance. Who’s Beckwith? Frank Hawkes asks, and is informed by Bradford Wilkins that Beckwith is the white mother now walking around free that shot Medgar Evers in the back. Well, Linda Einsperger says, does the end justify the means—with a writer, that is. Only in art, maybe, George says. Frank Hawkes says belligerently that he likes the goddam story anyway, no matter what anybody thinks about it. So what’s wrong with thinking once in a while, Linda Einsperger inquires, an edge in her voice that reminds Aaron that she and Frank used to live together. You can sit around and stink and think all you want, Frank says, meaning that some people are out on the barricades where they ought to be. Well, Linda replies, I haven’t had a populist prefrontal lobotomy like some people I know. George does his professor thing again.