No Birds Sing Here

“Quiet!” Beckman projected through the cloudy, dirt-streaked window glass to the cats in the alley below. Almost every day now for the past month they had met at the same time, at the same spot, to square off and defend their strand of dented, slime-lined garbage cans. At first, he had watched the cats, fascinated with their determination, their pure jungle ferocity. They didn’t waste time yowling in those days. It was a quick warning scream, almost inaudible, then the thumping of tightly muscled flesh on the ground, the rattling of old newspapers, and garbage can clanging against garbage can. Two grown men could not have made as much noise tearing one another’s throats out. But now, after many battles, after they had shredded each other’s ears and streaked their faces with Frankenstein scars, the cats had settled down to a wary truce, content to face each other on diplomatic haunches and scream defiance, yet realizing that further struggle was useless. Beckman thought that this would be an excellent metaphor for his first novel, just the thing he had been looking for. Often during that month, the screaming cats got to him. The very first notes would send him raging to the window to fling it open and shout down, “Quiet!” The cats hardly glanced up. It was apparent that they were somewhere outside of his control. He could have used violence, but the thought sickened him. At times he had wished for some unseen demon to take charge of his body, only for a few minutes, so that he could send down a deterring ball of water. Nothing like that happened. No demons, or angels for that matter, came and he grew tired and bored with shouting the same ineffectual plea every morning. By channeling the energy of his rage into thought projection, Beckman believed he could develop his mind this way, and possibly take the next step in human evolution. Ignoring time and trying to ignore the pain in his legs, he continued standing at the window, mentally projecting Quiet! until the cats gradually ambled away. Beckman was pleased, even happy. He was sure that those thumping knots of cells and tissue in the center of their skulls had been made slightly feverish by his effort. The cats did seem a little disoriented as they left. He went back to his old, portable Remington typewriter that he had bought for $40 at a thrift store. He could not afford one of those new home computers put out by IBM, and he would need a printer, which he also could not afford. Nevertheless, he fully intended to start his first novel if he had to do it by hand. He had what he believed to be his best idea yet, but it had been interrupted yesterday by his co-worker, Herschel. It had taken Beckman weeks to teach Herschel that dishes must be cleaned in more than one spot, or that the entire floor must be cleaned and not just where he stood. It wasn’t until Beckman honestly thought that Herschel could be trusted to do his work alone, that he caught him urinating on the dishwashing sink. Beckman lost control and inadvertently contributed to Herschel’s vocabulary. Herschel even repeated the words for an hour afterward: “Stupid bassard, ton b***h, imacel.” The next morning, Beckman caught Herschel standing in the middle of the small kitchen, spraying a circle of urine around the room. Beckman backed away, staying out of sight. There was something ceremonial about the way he was doing it; a solitary ritual, as though some primitive declaration moved without restraint in his mind. Beckman peeked through the cracked door. Herschel was doing a strange dance on his toes, arms raised above his head. When the ritual was complete, he walked to his stool in the corner where he waited between chores. Beckman thought it was time. He entered the kitchen sonorously and with some exaggeration, appeared shocked at the ring of urine on the floor, which was now starting to run in converging streams toward the floor drain. He pretended anger, but Herschel, with omnificent impenetrability, looked as insular as a priest who had just performed Mass. Beckman decided to use cold water to keep down the smell. He attached the rubber hose to a wall faucet, then pointed out every act of the cleansing process to Herschel. He warned him, in what he knew to be wasted effort, not to do it again. “It’s a no-no,” he said, adding a mock demonstration of urinating. “A no-no!” Herschel shook his head vigorously and gazed at Beckman, dull-eyed, flashing inscrutable grins that exposed his rotting and missing teeth. Later, after closing, when the boss and customers had gone, Beckman, finishing his work, looked up into the soft, waxy face of Herschel, then down at the twisted, underdeveloped p***s Herschel held lovingly in his hand. He continued to stare incredulously at the stream of hot liquid spurting forth with all the force of religious zeal, dashing against his leg, bathing and baptizing. Beckman leapt back in horror. The liquid soaking through his pants seemed to scald the raw and repelled flesh of his leg. He ran from Herschel and up the stairs to his room, slammed the door, locked it, and continued running, tears streaming down his cheeks, to the closet-like bathroom near his writing desk. He peeled off his pants, thrust them into the shower, turned the water on full blast, and leapt in after them. He thought of throwing the pants away, but that would leave him with only two pair, one of which he saved for those few times when he could afford a movie. He stomped on the pants like a sumo wrestler until he had pounded them flat against the contours of the shower floor. He picked them up with his fingers, letting the shower spray bludgeon them into melting shapes. He wrung them until the fabric paled, ground them between his hands, dropped them back down on the shower floor, stomped them again, yelled, cursed, and wished with all his heart that Herschel would find a high voltage electric socket to urinate in. Beckman turned the shower off when the water started to get cold. He had stomped and brutalized his pants until they lay at his feet as grotesque as a mutilated accident victim. He realized then that he had forgotten to take the rest of his clothes off, and his shirt, clinging and dripping, was beginning to cool with the rapidity of a switched-on deep freezer. He pulled off his sodden woolen socks along with the rest of his clothes and lay them all next to the pants. He patted his body with a damp, sour towel and walked, half dazed, to his cot. He sat on the edge, shivering for a long time, steeped in wordless disgust at his present condition in life, and especially with his own body. He looked at his own p***s and wondered how such a thing could have become the symbolic representation of half the world’s obsessions; and now Herschel, stumbling around in the murky world of the mentally defective, had discovered his own symbolic, as well as ritual use for it. Beckman wrapped himself in the covers of his cot. Waves of uncontrollable shuddering passed through his body like electrical currents. He had really never thought about leaving Baltimore, or of leaving the restaurant since he got the job a month before. In fact, he had come to regard it as a kind of sanctuary. He did his work uncomplainingly, even, at times, happily scraping the residue left in plates, on floors, commodes, everything left or abandoned at the end of its usefulness. He did this work joyfully, feeling that it was the most necessary practical work to be done, underrated and undervalued. At moments, when feelings of revulsion swept over him, he deliberately, with eyes open, reached into the nearest full garbage can and squeezed between his fingers the raw materials of his livelihood. But now there was Herschel, completely mystifying, possessing some other worldly power beyond his touch, and approaching, irresistibly, the sacristy of his room. He remained at the typewriter until past noon without typing a single word. The idea of the cats fighting over worthless territory seemed tired and stale. He put the idea aside. There would be time later. He was hungry after breakfasting on the last of his bread, and coffee made from yesterday’s grounds. It was Monday, his only day off in the week. A trip to the grocery store was necessary, and he would stop by the used bookstore to see what he could find on psychokinesis. The bookstore was wedged inconspicuously between a small grocery store and an expensive-looking dress shop advertising a special sale on zebra-striped nightwear. Beckman had a nodding acquaintance with the proprietor of the bookstore, an acrid smelling septuagenarian dressed like a caricature of James Joyce. The proprietor watched him suspiciously, following him with his old, hysterical eyes. Beckman, as usual, felt like a street thug and was tempted, this time, to stuff one of the ragged and stained used paperbacks under his own shirt but decided against it. The old man did have periods, in the year that Beckman had known him, where he seemed to have a past with remembered hopes and regrets; and for this, Beckman felt sorry for him and would not add to his cumulative torments. There was a new addition to the used bookstore, and Beckman stared at her before he realized that she was truly a woman, covered as if she were in nun’s black. But she wasn’t a nun. Nuns wore street clothes now, and if they did wear their medieval habits, they would wear sneakers with them. The woman was reading from a thin black volume, selected, presumably, from the two-foot high stack of identical copies in front of her. Above her, a sign tacked to the bookshelves announced an autograph sale of poems by “Malany”. Beckman picked up one of the volumes. “Free verse, experimental stuff, of course,” Beckman said. The poetess seemed puzzled. “Will you be here later tomorrow? I don’t have the money now.” “How late?” she asked. “After seven.” “No,” she said, taking the volume out of his hands. Beckman wasn’t the slightest bit offended—the depersonalizing aspect of recent poverty and dissociation. “I’m a writer also.” “Oh?” Her nose wrinkled from the sudden whiff of onions and old grease drifting across the three feet of space between them. “Bullshit,” she said. “I love it.” “What, bullshit?” “Uninhibitedness. Writers should be uninhibited. We are the only free people left. The last endangered species not on the endangered list, but that’s where they want us, isn’t it?” “More bullshit,” she said. “Yeah, but . . . ” Beckman sensed something terrible and turned to face the proprietor. He momentarily retched from the old man’s hot dog-breath. “I’m looking for a book on psychokinesis.” The old man backed away, repeating in what sounded like Gregorian chant, “Psychokinesis, Psychokinesis.” “When you find it, save it for me.” And Beckman left. He was more than disappointed when the cats didn’t show up the next morning, but he had to expand. At some point he had to branch out, tackle new and more difficult problems. Herschel would be his next project, the practical application of psychokinesis: no more experimentation, no more abstraction. Beckman waited until he thought it was time, then slightly opened the kitchen door, forming a door-length slit with Herschel in the center. There Herschel was, forming a circle of urine on the kitchen floor, obedient as a hypnosis victim to whatever biological urges that raced freely in his mind. Beckman thought of projecting a whole sentence, a command like he had done with the cats, but a single, emphatic, easy to understand word might have more effect. So, he projected the word Stop! over and over again until his pulse throbbed and beads of sweat oozed from his forehead. The boss came in, slamming the front door, and the noise startled him. The boss didn’t own the place. He simply managed it for an absentee owner. He was a man well over six feet tall who walked with a slight stoop like a wrestler ready to lunge at his opponent. He had thick legs, a distended midsection, a thick neck, and a roll of fat around the base of his skull. Beckman knew that any further projections would be fruitless. He eased the door closed and waited for the next opportunity. It came, as before, with Herschel, walking up to him while smiling sweetly, twisted p***s in hand. Beckman had all the force and energy of his panic to help him now. It took every drop of discipline he could muster to keep from crying out, to remain steadfast. He looked straight into Herschel’s depthless eyes and, with undiluted adrenaline filling his body and with the harnessed power of a fusion bomb, projected, Stop, stop, stop straight at Herschel’s forehead. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop until he felt the warm organic solution lovingly dash against his leg.