Adam woke with a start. But
then he laid his head back down. "And then both mothers will bend over John and
cry. John's real father and the changeling will have run to the kitchen. The
father will take the gun from the twin. The changeling will cover John with his
jacket--Oh that's a good dramatic touch!--and the changeling will make a speech.
What?... What will he say?" Adam wondered. He sat up on the edge of his bed,
swooning with a high fever, but said aloud, "Something amazing. Maybe he'll say
something about his other life being dead now. Something about the man who led
his real life being dead... Oh god! He can call John his brother!"
Adam gazed across the room at his
word processor. He remembered thuddingly about the marble monolith and all its
metaphorical imperatives. Adam was terrified. Despite his good work while
asleep, the play had to be gotten onto paper. It had to walk and talk on a
stage. And according to the dramatics of his Michelangelo-grand delusions, what
he had to do next for the play/statue was to find the head of it in the stone
womb. He had to give birth to the head so the while thing could breathe and live
and not be stillborn and a gargoyle. The middle of the play, the keystone of the
arch of the doorway between consciousness and unconsciousness was also
comparable to that most wonderful and horrid part of humanity and art. It was
like a head. Like the brains. Like the face of the thing. A play is like a house
and people all at once. It requires craft and art, device and naturalness,
architecture and sculpture, cunning and magnanimity, purpose and beauty.
But Adam's metaphors and thoughts
and words were coming in jerks, billions of bacteria having hurled their bodies
into the seams of the hearty but of late seldom used systems that regulated his
creative mechanisms. But Adam heaved himself off of the bed. "I've got to do it.
I've got to write the second act," he thought. "But why now? You're too sick, I
think," said a non-sick region of his brain. "Because. I've got to pull myself
together and act like a man," said a whining, auto rhetoric-echoing part of his
brain.
So he sat at his keyboard
for two hours and went in and out of consciousness. In conscious states, he
wrote silly lines for his characters. They all had fevers along with their god.
It was an epidemic in the computer. In the transitional stages when he was
falling into the horrid blisses of fever, Adam would touch keys that would
obliterate the nonsense he had just written.
During this crazed two hour stay
at the keyboard, he had a perfectly lucid stretch of thought for eight minutes
that he used not for the play but to consider Yvonne. First he remembered her.
The way her skin was pink. The way her coat was beige. The way her voice was.
The way her laugh was. The way she walked. The way she had gotten into the car.
Then he thought what a monk he was to fall in love at a moment's encounter. But
then he thought how he could see thousands of women and not have any reaction.
He decided on the worth of a crude analogy: it only took one automobile and then
there was the potential for an automobile wreck. He concluded that he had to
write the play so he could see her. So he began to write silly fevered lines
again.
When Jamie arrived home
from work, Adam was in a transitional state, stomping on the little sparks of
fevered dialogue on the screen with a heated punching of keys preparatory to
lapsing into a waking nap. When Adam looked up, Jamie saw the face of a rococo
angel. Adam was glazed white marble with a Victorian child's pink tinted cheeks.
Jamie reached forth his hand instinctively and touched Adam's forehead. His hand
came away with a jerk as if he were in danger of being burned by the
smouldering. "My god!"
"The
play's not working," said Adam in slow motion. "It's no fucking good." And with
a snakelike quickness that bedazzled Jamie, the fevered writer reached out and
ripped up all the pages he had written, both copies.
Jamie yelled, "Stop! No!" and
struggled for the shreds but Adam shouldered him aside, which caused shudders of
tailbone pain that paralyzed the older man. Adam went to a window, threw it
open, and he dropped his play into the wind.
"So dramatic!" tsked
Jamie.
"Well drama's just the
thing for a play."
Adam was
spent. His face was bereft of the pink tinge. He was as white as snow. Jamie
went to Adam who was tottering by the open window and he led him down the hall
to his apartment and thermometer. When the accountant removed the thermometer
from the playwright's mouth, he noted how hard it was for Adam to even open his
jaws enough to let the glass rod out. The temperature was over 104°. "Jesus,"
Jamie said. "Let me see your throat." Jamie hadn't seen such a throat in a long
time, but its symbols were clear. It looked like a cave wallpapered with an
American flag. Red and white stripes; white stars of puss on a bluish field of
tonsils and environs. Scarlatina.
Jamie ran a cold bath in his tub and made Adam get in it before the water
covered the basin bottom even and before Adam could take off more than his
loafers. The accountant kept saying soothingly, "We've got to get the fever
down." He disappeared, and reappeared with three aspirin and a glass of water.
He watched the painful drama of the pill swallowing and then dumped pitchers of
water over Adam's head. As soon as the tub was full and he decided Adam wouldn't
drown, he disappeared again.
In
Adam's mind Jamie was gone for years. But Adam got used to traveling through a
bathroom-like universe alone in his white enamel space ship. By the time Jamie
came back with a dry change of Adam's clothes and a coat and knit cap for him,
Adam had landed cold, bitter and aching back on earth where the inhabitants had
temperatures under one hundred degrees. Jamie called a cab while Adam dressed.
They were waiting in the hall for
the elevator when Adam drifted away from Jamie and lurched to his apartment.
Jamie had to run back and forth in Adam's foyer, alternately sticking his head
into the hall to tell Fred to hold the elevator and sticking his head into
Adam's livingroom to watch him destroy the computer's memorization of the play.
Adam considered his own actions as maniacal as the attack on the Pieta in the
Vatican some years before. But a tantrum is a tantrum, and picking up the
remains of a tantrum is a tantrum. He couldn't stop himself. When he was done,
when the play was erased, he placidly let Jamie lead him to the elevator, to the
cab, to the all night clinic.
Sitting on the examination table, Adam rolled up the wrong sleeve when the young
doctor approached thermometer in one hand, blood pressure cuff in the other.
"Oh, sorry," said Adam, and he covered the bandaged wrist and rolled up the
other sleeve. Jamie stood by suffering for Adam and noticed that the young jaded
doctor didn't raise an eyebrow at the sight of the gauze and tape bracelet.
"It's a tacky world," thought Jamie. Adam's pressure was slightly elevated, his
temperature was over one hundred and two. "Tacky world," though Jamie in
response to the statistics. The doctor felt the glands at the neck, looked at
the throat.
"Oy! Strep!" he said.
"That's what I thought," said
Jamie. "Are you going to take a culture?"
"I will if you like," said the
doctor.
"For god's sake shut up!"
Jamie was told by Adam, who had an exaggerated gag reflex in the best of times.
"What are you?" the doctor asked
Jamie, suddenly interested in the two men. "You his...ah...friend?"
"Very tacky world,"
thought Jamie. Aloud he answered, "I'm his father."
Adam and the doctor both gazed at
the old queen. "That infected, too?" asked the doctor, pointing to Adam's bad
wrist. He rolled up Adam's sleeve, snipped off the bandage and peered among
Jamie's meticulous collection of butterflies. "This is beautiful," he admired.
"You've been a busy boy," he said to Adam, who sneered.
"It was an accident," said Jamie,
but instantly sorry for saying it. "Tacky me, too," he thought.
"If they live, that's what they
all say. Why wasn't this stitched?"
"It was a kitchen job," said
Jamie.
Adam's head whirled. He
could see a bathroom with three bathtubs. Kiki crucified in one. Robert
crucified in another. And Adam was in the middle one, shallowly cut, drowning in
waste toxins of bacteria, trying to sculpt the head of Moses in the soap bubbles
with his right hand, trying to write a play on the water with blood drops from
his left. He rolled his eyes to Jamie. "Why has thou forsaken me?" was what Adam
thought to ask. But Jamie translated the ocular plea as, "Get me the hell out of
here!"
"So you going to give him
some antibiotics or what?" asked Jamie expeditiously.
"Yeah," said the doctor, daubing
Adam's wrist, butterflies and all, with a topical antibiotic. "This is a very
good job. Did you do it?"
"Yeah."
"You're not a nurse...?"
"No. I studied medicine a long
time. A long time ago." "Tacky," he thought. He hadn't mentioned it in decades.
He met Adam's stunned gaze with a small, sober shrug that said it was true.
"So keep these butterflies on and
bring him back in a week. And take this prescription and give him a tablet every
six hours. But you know, suicide..."
"Give him an injection, too,"
ordered Jamie.
The young doctor
blinked, but shuffled to a cabinet and fixed a shot. "In the ass," he told Adam.
Jamie helped Adam get down on one elbow. Adam didn't flinch with the stab, but
Jamie did which sent waves of secondary pain through the area of the broken
bone. While Adam's pants were still down, the doctor said, "Your treatment for
the wound itself is fine, but he really ought to have some...ah...help."
"'He don't need analyzin'...He's
not sick he's just in love!'" Jamie sang.
"What?" said the doctor.
"He's okay. He's a writer. He's
not sick. Other than his throat. And his mind. He's an artist."
"God damn it, Jamie. Let's go,"
Adam croaked.
"See?" said Jamie.
"He's just a very sensitive type."
"Yes. But next time he might do
it for real."
"Yes," Jamie
conceded, pushing Adam out the door ahead of himself. "But you could say that
about any of us. About anything."
"Jamie," cried Adam in the cab going home after a job at the pharmacy to fill
the prescription, "the play's gone." His voice was a bubbling whisper.
"For god's sake, Adam. You're not
dying. You've got strep, scarlatina. You'll live."
"The play!"
"Oh, hell. I made a copy while
you were in the tub. Pull yourself together. Listen, I've had it up to here with
this tip-toeing around. Your talent's not all that fragile. I'm tired of you
trying to make like a shadow. I'll give you back the play when you're well. And
you'll finish it, and it'll be great. Pull yourself together. This bullshit has
got to stop. Aren't you bored? You've had such fun working on the play. And
you've got to write the play for the social life. Aren't you tired of only
meeting fags?"
They rode in
silence for several blocks, the kinescopic effect of various kinds of electric
lighting alternating with dark night enhanced by Adam's fever amusing the
playwright as he savored the news of his play's survival.
"Listen, Adam. I'm tired of this
wimpy whimpering; this self-pity. It's unproductive. The nature of the world is
that you have to produce something. It's time to pull yourself together. Act
like a man, Adam. Be a man. Some men write plays. It's your duty."
Adam nodded faintly, happily. He
was thinking about Yvonne Yvette. He was wondering how it would feel to have her
hands cool on his face.