Nightmares and Dreamscapes Page 32

  The bathroom's outer door banged briskly open. Tell almost screamed. Someone hummed his way over to the urinals, and as water began to splash out there, an explanation occurred to Tell and he relaxed. It was so simple it was absurd . . . and undoubtedly correct. He glanced at his watch and saw it was 1:47.

  A regular man is a happy man, his father used to say. Tell's dad had been a taciturn fellow, and that saying (along with Clean your hands before you clean your plate) had been one of his few aphorisms. If regularity really did mean happiness, then Tell supposed he was a happy man. His need to visit the bathroom came on at about the same time every day, and he supposed the same must be true of his pal Sneakers, who favored Stall #1 just as Tell himself favored Stall #3.

  If you needed to pass the stalls to get to the urinals, you would have seen that stall empty lots of times, or with different shoes under it. After all, what are the chances a body could stay undiscovered in a men's-room toilet-stall for . . .

  He worked out in his mind the time he'd last been there.

  . . . four months, give or take?

  No chance at all was the answer to that one. He could believe the janitors weren't too fussy about cleaning the stalls--all those dead flies--but they would have to check on the toilet-paper supply every day or two, right? And even if you left those things out, dead people started to smell after awhile, right? God knew this wasn't the sweetest-smelling place on earth--and following a visit from the fat guy who worked down the hall at Janus Music it was almost uninhabitable--but surely the stink of a dead body would be a lot louder. A lot gaudier.

  Gaudy? Gaudy? Jesus, what a word. And how would you know? You never smelled a decomposing body in your life.

  True, but he was pretty sure he'd know what he was smelling if he did. Logic was logic and regularity was regularity and that was the end of it. The guy was probably a pencil-pusher from Janus or a writer for Snappy Kards, on the other side of the floor. For all John Tell knew, the guy was in there composing greeting-card verse right now:

  Roses are red and violets are blue,

  You thought I was dead but that wasn't true;

  I just deliver my mail at the same time as you!

  That sucks, Tell thought, and uttered a wild little laugh. The fellow who had banged the door open, almost startling him into a scream, had progressed to the wash-basins. Now the splashing-lathering sound of him washing his hands stopped briefly. Tell could imagine the newcomer listening, wondering who was laughing behind one of the closed stall doors, wondering if it was a joke, a dirty picture, or if the man was just crazy. There were, after all, lots of crazy people in New York. You saw them all the time, talking to themselves and laughing for no appreciable reason . . . the way Tell had just now.

  Tell tried to imagine Sneakers also listening and couldn't.

  Suddenly he didn't feel like laughing anymore.

  Suddenly he just felt like getting out of there.

  He didn't want the man at the basin to see him, though. The man would look at him. Just for a moment, but that would be enough to know what he was thinking. People who laughed behind closed toilet-stall doors were not to be trusted.

  Click-clack of shoes on the old white hexagonal bathroom tiles, whooze of the door being opened, hisshh of it settling slowly back into place. You could bang it open but the pneumatic elbow-joint kept it from banging shut. That might upset the third-floor receptionist as he sat smoking Camels and reading the latest issue of Krrang!

  God, it's so silent in here! Why doesn't the guy move? At least a little?

  But there was just the silence, thick and smooth and total, the sort of silence the dead would hear in their coffins if they could still hear, and Tell again became convinced that Sneakers was dead, fuck logic, he was dead and had been dead for who knew how long, he was sitting in there and if you opened the door you would see some slumped mossy thing with its hands dangling between its thighs, you would see--

  For a moment he was on the verge of calling, Hey Sneaks! You all right?

  But what if Sneakers answered, not in a questioning or irritated voice but in a froggy grinding croak? Wasn't there something about waking the dead? About--

  Suddenly Tell was up, up fast, flushing the toilet and buttoning his pants, out of the stall, zipping his fly as he headed for the door, aware that in a few seconds he was going to feel silly but not caring. Yet he could not forbear one glance under the first stall as he passed. Dirty white mislaced sneakers. And dead flies. Quite a few of them.

  Weren't any dead flies in my stall. And just how is it that all this time has gone by and he still hasn't noticed that he missed one of the eyelets? Or does he wear em that way all the time, as some kind of artistic statement?

  Tell hit the door pretty hard coming out. The receptionist just up the hall glanced at him with the cool curiosity he saved for beings merely mortal (as opposed to such deities in human form as Roger Daltrey).

  Tell hurried down the hall to Tabori Studios.

  *

  "Paul?"

  "What?" Jannings answered without looking up from the board. Georgie Ronkler was standing off to one side, watching Jannings closely and nibbling a cuticle--cuticles were all he had left to nibble; his fingernails simply did not exist above the point where they parted company with live flesh and hot nerve-endings. He was close to the door. If Jannings began to rant, Georgie would slip through it.

  "I think there might be something wrong in--"

  Jannings groaned. "Something else?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "This drum track is what I mean. It's badly botched, and I don't know what we can do about it." He flicked a toggle, and drums crashed into the studio. "You hear it?"

  "The snare, you mean?"

  "Of course I mean the snare! It stands out a mile from the rest of the percussion, but it's married to it!"

  "Yes, but--"

  "Yes but Jesus bloody fuck, I hate shit like this! Forty tracks I got here, forty goddam tracks to record a simple bop tune and some IDIOT technician--"

  From the tail of his eye Tell saw Georgie disappear like a cool breeze.

  "But look, Paul, if you lower the equalization--"

  "The eq's got nothing to do with--"

  "Shut up and listen a minute," Tell said soothingly--something he could have said to no one else on the face of the earth--and slid a switch. Jannings stopped ranting and started listening. He asked a question. Tell answered it. Then he asked one Tell couldn't answer, but Jannings was able to answer it himself, and all of a sudden they were looking at a whole new spectrum of possibilities for a song called "Answer to You, Answer to Me."

  After awhile, sensing that the storm had passed, Georgie Ronkler crept back in.

  And Tell forgot all about the sneakers.

  *

  They returned to his mind the following evening. He was at home, sitting on the toilet in his own bathroom, reading Wise Blood while Vivaldi played mildly from the bedroom speakers (although Tell now mixed rock and roll for a living, he owned only four rock records, two by Bruce Springsteen and two by John Fogerty).

  He looked up from his book, somewhat startled. A question of cosmic ludicrousness had suddenly occurred to him: How long has it been since you took a crap in the evening, John?

  He didn't know, but he thought he might be taking them then quite a bit more frequently in the future. At least one of his habits might change, it seemed.

  Sitting in the living room fifteen minutes later, his book forgotten in his lap, something else occurred to him: he hadn't used the third-floor rest room once that day. They had gone across the street for coffee at ten, and he had taken a whiz in the men's room of Donut Buddy while Paul and Georgie sat at the counter, drinking coffee and talking about overdubs. Then, on his lunch hour, he had made a quick pit-stop at the Brew 'n Burger . . . and another on the first floor late that afternoon when he had gone down to drop off a bunch of mail that he could have just as easily stuffed into the mail-slot by the elevators.
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br />   Avoiding the third-floor men's? Was that what he'd been doing today without even realizing it? You bet your Reeboks it was. Avoiding it like a scared kid who goes a block out of his way coming home from school so he won't have to go past the local haunted house. Avoiding it like the plague.

  "Well, so what?" he said out loud.

  He couldn't exactly articulate the so-what, but he knew there was one; there was something just a little too existential, even for New York, about getting spooked out of a public bathroom by a pair of dirty sneakers.

  Aloud, very clearly, Tell said: "This has got to stop."

  *

  But that was Thursday night and something happened on Friday night that changed everything. That was when the door closed between him and Paul Jannings.

  Tell was a shy man and didn't make friends easily. In the rural Pennsylvania town where he had gone to high school, a quirk of fate had put Tell up on stage with a guitar in his hands--the last place he'd ever expected to be. The bassist of a group called The Satin Saturns fell ill with salmonella the day before a well-paying gig. The lead guitarist, who was also in the school band, knew John Tell could play both bass and rhythm. This lead guitarist was big and potentially violent. John Tell was small, humble, and breakable. The guitarist offered him a choice between playing the ill bassist's instrument and having it rammed up his ass to the fifth fret. This choice had gone a long way toward clarifying his feelings about playing in front of a large audience.

  But by the end of the third song, he was no longer frightened. By the end of the first set he knew he was home. Years after that first gig, Tell heard a story about Bill Wyman, bassist of The Rolling Stones. According to the story, Wyman actually nodded off during a performance--not in some tiny club, mind you, but in a huge hall--and fell from the stage, breaking his collarbone. Tell supposed lots of people thought the story was apocryphal, but he himself had an idea it was true . . . and he was, after all, in a unique position to understand how something like that could happen. Bassists were the invisible men of the rock world. There were exceptions--Paul McCartney, for one--but they only proved the rule.

  Perhaps because of the job's very lack of glamor, there was a chronic shortage of bass players. When The Satin Saturns broke up a month later (the lead guitarist and the drummer got into a fist-fight over a girl), Tell joined a band formed by the Saturns' rhythm man, and his life's course was chosen, as simply and quietly as that.

  Tell liked playing in the band. You were up front, looking down on everyone else, not just at the party but making the party happen; you were simultaneously almost invisible and absolutely essential. Every now and then you had to sing a little backup, but nobody expected you to make a speech or anything.

  He had lived that life--part-time student and full-time band gypsy--for ten years. He was good, but not ambitious--there was no fire in his belly. Eventually he drifted into session work in New York, began fooling with the boards, and discovered he liked life even better on the far side of the glass window. During all that time he had made one good friend: Paul Jannings. That had happened fast, and Tell supposed the unique pressures that went with the job had had something to do with it. . . but not everything. Mostly, he suspected, it had been a combination of two factors: his own essential loneliness and Jannings's personality, which was so powerful it was almost overwhelming. And it wasn't so different for Georgie, Tell came to realize following what happened on that Friday night.

  He and Paul were having a drink at one of the back tables in McManus's Pub, talking about the mix, the biz, the Mets, whatever, when all of a sudden Jannings's right hand was under the table and gently squeezing Tell's crotch.

  Tell moved away so violently that the candle in the center of the table fell over and Jannings's glass of wine spilled. A waiter came over and righted the candle before it could scorch the tablecloth, then left. Tell stared at Jannings, his eyes wide and shocked.

  "I'm sorry," Jannings said, and he did look sorry . . . but he also looked unperturbed.

  "Jesus Christ, Paul!" It was all he could think of to say, and it sounded hopelessly inadequate.

  "I thought you were ready, that's all," Jannings said. "I suppose I should have been a little more subtle."

  "Ready?" Tell repeated. "What do you mean? Ready for what?"

  "To come out. To give yourself permission to come out."

  "I'm not that way," Tell said, but his heart was pounding very hard and fast. Part of it was outrage, part was fear of the implacable certainty he saw in Jannings's eyes, most of it was dismay. What Jannings had done had shut him out.

  "Let's let it go, shall we? We'll just order and make up our minds that it never happened." Until you want it to, those implacable eyes added.

  Oh, it happened, all right, Tell wanted to say, but didn't. The voice of reason and practicality would not allow it. . . would not allow him to risk lighting Paul Jannings's notoriously short fuse. This was, after all, a good job . . . and the job per se wasn't all. He could use Roger Daltrey's tape in his portfolio even more than he could use two more weeks' salary. He would do well to be diplomatic and save the outraged-young-man act for another time. Besides, did he really have anything to feel outraged about? It wasn't as if Jannings had raped him, after all.

  And that was really just the tip of the iceberg. The rest was this: his mouth closed because that was what his mouth had always done. It did more than close--it snapped shut like a bear-trap, with all his heart below those interlocked teeth and all his head above.

  "All right," was all he said, "it never happened."

  *

  Tell slept badly that night, and what sleep he did get was haunted by bad dreams: one of Jannings groping him in McManus's was followed by one of the sneakers under the stall door, only in this one Tell opened the door and saw Paul Jannings sitting there. He had died naked, and in a state of sexual excitement that somehow continued even in death, even after all this time. Paul's mouth dropped open with an audible creak. "That's right; I knew you were ready," the corpse said on a puff of greenly rotten air, and Tell woke himself up by tumbling onto the floor in a tangle of coverlet. It was four in the morning. The first touches of light were just creeping through the chinks between the buildings outside his window. He dressed and sat smoking one cigarette after another until it was time to go to work.

  *

  Around eleven o'clock on that Saturday--they were working six-day weeks to make Daltrey's deadline--Tell went into the third-floor men's room to urinate. He stood just inside the door, rubbing his temples, and then looked around at the stalls.

  He couldn't see. The angle was wrong.

  Then never mind! Fuck it! Take your piss and get out of here!

  He walked slowly over to one of the urinals and unzipped. It took a long time to get going.

  On his way out he paused again, head cocked like Nipper the Dog's on the old RCA Victor record labels, and then turned around. He walked slowly back around the corner, stopping as soon as he could see under the door of the first stall. The dirty white sneakers were still there. The building which used to be known as Music City was almost completely empty, Saturday-morning-empty, but the sneakers were still there.

  Tell's eyes fixed upon a fly just outside the stall. He watched with an empty sort of avidity as it crawled beneath the stall door and onto the dirty toe of one of the sneakers. There it stopped and simply fell dead. It tumbled into the growing pile of insect corpses around the sneakers. Tell saw with no surprise at all (none he felt, anyway) that among the flies were two small spiders and one large cockroach, lying on its back like an upended turtle.

  Tell left the men's room in large painless strides, and his progress back to the studios seemed most peculiar; it was as if, instead of him walking, the building was flowing past him, around him, like river-rapids around a rock.

  When I get back I'll tell Paul I don't feel well and take the rest of the day off, he thought, but he wouldn't. Paul had been in an erratic, unpleasant mood all mornin
g, and Tell knew he was part (or maybe all) of the reason why. Might Paul fire him out of spite? A week ago he would have laughed at such an idea. But a week ago he had still believed what he had come to believe in his growing-up: friends were real and ghosts were make-believe. Now he was starting to wonder if maybe he hadn't gotten those two postulates turned around somehow.

  "The prodigal returns," Jannings said without looking around as Tell opened the second of the studio's two doors--the one that was called the "dead air" door. "I thought you died in there, Johnny."

  "No," Tell said. "Not me."

  *

  It was a ghost, and Tell found out whose a day before the Daltrey mix--and his association with Paul Jannings--ended, but before that happened a great many other things did. Except they were all the same thing, just little mile-markers, like the ones on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, announcing John Tell's steady progress toward a nervous breakdown. He knew this was happening but could not keep it from happening. It seemed he was not driving this particular road but being chauffeured.

  At first his course of action had seemed clear-cut and simple: avoid that particular men's room, and avoid all thoughts and questions about the sneakers. Simply turn that subject off. Make it dark.

  Except he couldn't. The image of the sneakers crept up on him at odd moments and pounced like an old grief. He would be sitting home, watching CNN or some stupid chat-show on the tube, and all at once he'd find himself thinking about the flies, or about what the janitor who replaced the toilet paper was obviously not seeing, and then he would look at the clock and see an hour had passed. Sometimes more.

  For awhile he was almost convinced it was some sort of malevolent joke. Paul was in on it, of course, and probably the fat guy from Janus Music--Tell had seen them talking together quite frequently, and hadn't they looked at him once and laughed? The receptionist was also a good bet, him with his Camels and his dead, skeptical eyes. Not Georgie, Georgie couldn't have kept the secret even if Paul had hectored him into going along, but anyone else was possible. For a day or two Tell even speculated on the possibility that Roger Daltrey himself might have taken a turn wearing the mislaced white sneakers.

  Although he recognized these thoughts as paranoid fantasies, recognition did not lead to dispersion. He would tell them to go away, would insist there was no Jannings-led cabal out to get him, and his mind would say Yeah, okay, makes sense to me, and five hours later--or maybe only twenty minutes--he would imagine a bunch of them sitting around Desmond's Steak House two blocks downtown: Paul, the chain-smoking receptionist with the taste for heavy-metal, heavy-leather groups, maybe even the skinny guy from Snappy Kards, all of them eating shrimp cocktails and drinking. And laughing, of course. Laughing at him, while the dirty white sneakers they took turns wearing sat under the table in a crumpled brown bag.