No Birds Sing Here

CHAPTER 2

“Psychokinesis,” the used bookstore proprietor blurted out upon Beckman’s entry. “I spent most of the day looking. I knew I’d seen it somewhere.”

The old man shook his gray, fleshy jowls. The skin seemed to be running off him in great, highly viscous drops.

“Is it important, young man?”

“Very important.”

The old man smiled, and Beckman had to momentarily turn away to keep from looking into the primeval cave of his mouth.

“I thought it might be. Is there a number I can call if I find it?”

Beckman gave him the public library’s number. The old man snorted with joy.

“Don’t worry, son. I’ll find it if it’s the last thing I do.”

Beckman thanked him and moved to the back corner where Malany sat among her books, talking quietly with a tall, broad-shouldered man. Beckman leafed through a shelf of mysteries and watched the man with a cyclopoid eye. The two seemed previously acquainted. The man was considerably older than her and enveloped in an aura of wealth and power. Beckman could not understand the conversation, but he concentrated, leaving his mind open for stray thoughts. The man handed her a white envelope, bulging at the sides, then reached down and picked up one of the books. Beckman focused both eyes on the mystery titles in front of him. The man passed, trailing an atmosphere of sweet cigars.

“Big sale?” Beckman asked.

Malany grimaced, then in jolted transfiguration asked, “Have you got a place I can stay? I’m not from around here.” She asked Beckman with a tone of mild desperation.

Beckman, taken off his feet for a moment, felt his chin drop as his mind went temporarily blank. It took a few seconds for his mind to recycle. He rationally suspected that Malany’s sudden and impulsive request had something to do with the older man. The poetry books filled up only one whiskey box, and he was unexpectedly pleased to discover that Malany owned a car which, thankfully, she had parked close to the bookstore.

The car, a 1970 Oldsmobile, was pockmarked from inestimable collisions, each victim having left a smear of its own body paint at the point of impact, but that wasn’t what worried Beckman. Actually, Beckman wasn’t sure what the source was of his mushrooming fear. Malany sensed the tension immediately.

“I just want to stay low for a few days, and don’t think it’s because I want that wasted carcass you use for a body,” she said. “I haven’t had physical s*x in years, and I don’t anticipate having any in the foreseeable future.”

“I would not have thought that, judging from your poetry. Don’t you ever get lonely?” Beckman asked, feeling a bit ridiculous by the question.

“My poetry is the only satisfactory cycle of emotion I need.”

“What about the man I saw you talking to?”

“He’s just a man, that’s all. He’s nothing, really, and he’s in the ludicrous condition of not even knowing it.”

“Is that why you asked me if you could stay with me?”

“Look, whoever you are. I . . . ”

Beckman sensed that she, too, was projecting. He blanked his mind quickly, but not before he thought he saw a warning arc of electric energy pass through the darkness.

“All right. I won’t pry,” he interrupted. “You’re welcome to stay, but you’ll have to sleep on the floor.”

“I prefer it, actually.”

“But there are other things,” Beckman said.

“What other things?”

“I get up early to write before I go to work. It isn’t a pleasant job.”

“No job is,” she said. “Now, let’s get out of here.” She started throwing her stack of poetry books into the whiskey box. “I’m not going to sell any books here. Nobody comes in here. It’s a crypt. Everything’s old and crumbling and useless.”

She motioned for Beckman to pick up the box of books and follow her out. He did, although wondering all the while why he did it. Did she have some mystical power of authority? Did everyone obey her will? He gently placed the box in the trunk of her car and noticed that everything in her trunk was somehow broken or torn including her spare tire, which was flat. She handed him the keys.

“You drive,” she said.

“I haven’t driven a car in years. I don’t even have a license, and besides, the diner is within walking distance.”

“Can you carry my books that far?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” Beckman said.

“I’m not letting my books out of my sight,” she said, taking the keys away from Beckman.

It only took five or six minutes to reach the diner. Malany parked her car in the alleyway, which frightened the cats away from their domain. She shut the engine down and looked at him with a mild expression of disgust. They got out of Malany’s car and walked up the back stairway to Beckman’s apartment.

Once inside, Beckman went over to a stack of wooden crates in a corner of the room and unpacked a loaf of crumbly bread, four potatoes, an onion, and a can of corned beef. “I’m relieved to hear that you don’t rely on food to fuel your imagination.”

“What is your job here?” she asked.

Beckman hesitated then said, “I clean up, pretty much everything. What I mean to say is, it’s dirty and smelly.” At that moment he decided not to tell her about Herschel. Chances were, she would never meet him, and if she did, Herschel would probably run, screaming.

“I may have to come in sometimes in a hurry and take a shower.” Beckman continued.

She looked out of the dirty window, bored and disinterested. “What time?” She asked.

“Usually around seven. Will you go out at all?” Beckman asked.

“Probably not. I have some things I want to write, and I don’t like to eat.”

She appeared not to have heard a word. Beckman had only meant it as a harmless touch of conventional humor, something banal and standardized.

“But conventionality is meaningless and irrelevant,” she said. She immediately left the window where she had been standing, gazing down at the ally, and went over to his books, which he had stacked against the wall next to the window.

“Paperbacks from the used bookstore, a few college textbooks, nothing very highbrow,” he said.

But she was looking at the titles intently, weighing and sifting each for meaning, even the mysteries. Beckman left her for his two-burner hot plate to boil two potatoes and warm half the can of meat. He was beginning to realize, already, the shadowy complexities of two people sharing the same things. It was understandable that food and space had to be drawn in half, but there were other problems, considerations, or demons as he instantly labeled them.

“You strike me as a privileged little rich kid running away from Mama,” Malany said.

“Almost correct,” Beckman said. “Well-to-do rather than rich, and I’m running away from my father. He’s a partner in a Washington law firm. He wants me to go to law school and join his firm.”

“And you want to show him that you don’t need him?” Malany said.

“I want to be a successful writer. I believe I have something to say.” Beckman offered her his sleeping bag. She accepted, immediately laying it beside his books. The act unexpectedly challenged Beckman’s sense of territory. He felt in some primeval way dispossessed in one important corner of his room.

She consumed her portion of the food with bewildering indifference. After eating, they read for several hours, sharing the lamp. Beckman was hardly able to concentrate, before she stood up and began to undress. She ignored his stare, and Beckman thought the disrobing was a simple, deliberate declaration of freedom; getting down to the basic fact of nudity, the human body in its natural state with nothing left to the torments of curiosity. Nevertheless, he couldn’t stop admiring her long, silken dark hair and the way it flowed around her neck and shoulders.

“Do you have a clean towel?” she asked.

Beckman pointed to the heavy cardboard box at the head of his cot where he kept all his clothes and linen. He watched her as she walked over and stooped beside the box. She was Eve stooping next to one of Eden’s cool, lush streams. Beckman began to feel the tingling fingers of lust, that hated animal, which raised its spiny head, independent of his will. Malany found her towel and noticed his annoyance.

“You remember what I said about s*x?”

Beckman nodded.

“It’s a power I developed so that I could devote myself to poetry.”

“I know, I know.” Beckman said with a note of frustration in his voice.

“I won’t object to m**********g you, if you want.”

The suggestion completely evaporated his desire, not that he was against m**********n when intercourse was ruled out, but Malany had an unfair advantage.

“It sounds like perverted, orthodox Freudianism,” Beckman said.

“Label it what you will, but it works.”

“Pragmatism diluted?”

“How much have you written lately?” Malany asked.

“I confess not much, but it hasn’t been because of my overactive s*x life, which isn’t active at all.”

“Yes, but subconsciously, it takes its toll,” Malany said.

“You may have a point, but suppose I don’t want to cease to be a s****l being.”

“Then you must be prepared to accept the fate of the common man, the common denominator of existence, enslavement by all of the servile, ego-generating forces which drive people into such symbolic acts of self-destruction as s*x. Why do you think that the Renaissance poets referred to s*x as dying?”

“Probably because no one had derived the word orgasm,” Beckman said, thinking it might stimulate a humorous response.

“This dialogue is no longer valid,” Malany declared.

She turned for the shower stall, her long, thin body bending like a delicate sprig. The sound of the water in the shower made him overwhelmingly drowsy. He couldn’t resist stretching out on his uncovered mattress.

He slept until the next morning, well past the time he usually arose. Malany was coiled up in the sleeping bag in a fetal position, and seemed to be sucking one thumb, wrapped neatly in a thin membrane of white sheet.

Beckman dressed quickly and decided on coffee and doughnuts in the restaurant. Before leaving, however, his body seemed to jerk convulsively toward the window. Only one of the cats had returned and lay triumphantly atop Malany’s car, surveying his Swiftian Empire with all the assurance of an oriental despot. Beckman did not have the energy to try psychokinesis, and he wondered briefly if it would be more beneficial to invert the situation and leave his mind open to receive whatever involuntary, non-directed message the cat might send out.