The Old Man and Mr. Smith Read online

  Only Chief Eckhardt remained behind, taking down the tedious deposition of Mr Xyliadis, who had already produced four different versions of what he had had in his pockets.

  * * *

  Once out in the open, Mr Smith moved with an energy and determination which were impossible when in the company of the portly Old Man, whose natural rhythm was moderate, not to say ponderous.

  He hailed a taxi, and found out from the driver that he could reach New York quicker by shuttle than by Greyhound bus, and also that there was a bureau de change at the airport. This solution was also better for the driver, as he himself pointed out, since the fare to the airport was higher than that to the bus terminal.

  ‘So everyone’s happy,’ he chortled as they drove off into the evening.

  Mr Xyliadis’ clothes hung from Mr Smith’s slender frame in folds. There had not been much choice. The only other person being X-rayed at that time of the afternoon had been a little girl of eight. Now Mr Smith looked as peculiar as an unpregnant woman wearing the clothes of her pregnancy. In fact, a large lady stopped him on his way to the ticket counter, asking him if he was undergoing the Westwood Wideworld Diet, and if so, in which week he was. Mr Smith replied that such a diet, ‘Unknown in Japan.’ The elephantine lady reacted as though it wasn’t particularly gracious for an oriental visitor to deny that he was undergoing a Californian diet when it was perfectly obvious that he was.

  The yen were changed without any difficulty, and the ticket on the shuttle purchased. Mr Smith flew without luggage, but left La Guardia airport in New York with a smart new grip which he stole without a second thought from a conveyor belt bearing luggage arriving from Cleveland. He then took a taxi to Oscar’s Wilde Life. The driver was a garrulous gentleman from Haiti, who asked Mr Smith if there were many gays in Japan.

  ‘Kindly keep eyes on road,’ was all that Smith would say. The reason for his unwillingness to talk was that he was, like a salamander in spring, shedding one disguise for another, and it required concentration.

  The Haitian’s driving became more and more erratic as he noticed changes in his client’s features in his driving mirror. In fact, he seemed absolutely petrified as the client emerged in 42nd Street, no longer oriental but now vaguely Anglo-Saxon, with flowing red locks and a mass of freckles on a face as disturbing as ever, the mask of centuries of unshared vices.

  ‘I haven’t overdone it, have I? With the freckles I mean?’ he asked the driver as he prepared to pay. On an impulse, the driver accelerated away without waiting to be paid.

  Mr Smith was delighted, realizing he had saved quite a sum in genuine dollars. He reflected that it was the first of his tricks which he had, in some way, commercialized.

  He walked over the street, which was still very much alive, despite, or rather because of the late hour. Electric signs stuttered out their unsubtle promise of titillation, if not of vice. Vice was left to the shadowy figures on the sidewalk, who all appeared to be waiting for something to happen, or, like spiders waiting for unsuspecting flies to become entangled in their invisible webs, remaining as still as possible.

  Near the entrance to Oscar’s Wilde Life, there stood a girl of noble proportions, her legs visible up to the hips, in wide-meshed stockings, torn in places. Her shoes had stiletto heels, which, when she moved a little, gave the impression that she was standing on stilts. She wore a mini-skirt which looked as though it had shrunk in the wash, and her breasts were like swimming dogs, eager to keep their nostrils above the waterline. Her face was young, but worn out. Their eyes met for a moment, and there was a flicker of some kind of recognition.

  ‘Coming with me, hun? … Show you a good time …’

  ‘Later perhaps …’ said Mr Smith, and brushed by her and her cloud of floral perfume.

  ‘There may be no later …’

  He ignored her and went into the brightly lit entrance to Oscar’s Wilde Life. Behind a curtain it became dark again. An effeminate brute dressed as Popeye the Sailorman stopped Mr Smith. He was joined by an elderly man with white hair brushed forward over his eyes, also dressed in a manner redolent of yacht clubs.

  ‘I’ll have to see in that bag, sweetheart,’ said the brute. ‘Security. We’ve had two bomb alerts already from Fascist heterosexual organizations.’

  Mr Smith opened up the bag. The contents were a make-up case, a silk camisole, silk panties, a bra, and a pair of salmon pink pyjamas.

  ‘Come on in,’ said the older of the two men. ‘I’m Oscar. Welcome to the club. Come, I’ll show you round. What’s your name?’

  ‘Smith.’

  ‘We’re all on a given name basis here.’

  ‘Smith is my given name.’

  ‘Right. Come this way, Smith dear.’

  Mr Smith followed Oscar through a mass of exotic plants, which suddenly gave way to what appeared to be a clearing in the jungle. There, miraculously, was a swimming pool made of marble, with neo-Roman motifs, and some heavy-handed visual eroticism worthy of Pompeii. The water pouring into the pool flowed out of a gilt male organ, as shoddy in its brilliance as a piece of costume jewellery. The two appendages, also in a blinding gold finish, produced waves and treacherous currents at will. The water, of an evil green, was full of naked men, shrieking, and manifesting their gift for over-statement. By the side of the pool stood two nude blacks, their ears studded with rhinestones. One had ropes of Majorcan pearls round his neck.

  ‘These are my native porters,’ giggled Oscar. ‘Fellows, welcome Smith.’

  ‘Jambo, jambo, bwana,’ cried the two men in a complicated rhythmic patter, ending with a highly synchronized dance and hand-slap.

  The men in the swimming pool roared their approval.

  ‘Boys and girls,’ called Oscar, with a suggestive roll of his eyes. Applause. ‘This is Smith.’ Hoots of derision. Oscar clapped his hands in reprimand. Cajolingly he went on, when silence had been re-established, ‘Smith is all right. Oscar’s seen inside his suitcase.’ All in an alluring cantabile. ‘Now go and get rid of those dreadful clothes in our baroque un-dressing rooms, and show yourself in your true glory!’

  An outbreak of enthusiasm. While Oscar led Smith away, one swimmer called out, ‘I’m just crazy for freckles,’ to be playfully bitten by his lover, who hadn’t a freckle to his face.

  ‘I’ll leave you alone here. But not for long. Dig that hair!’

  Mr Smith looked round in this red plush and bone-white changing room, with its statues of Roman youths in inane poses. He pulled aside the curtains to the alcoves where the clothes were hung, and his eyes fell on a pair of jeans, hand painted with peacocks and birds of paradise. He felt the stirrings of a deep enthusiasm which he had not experienced for years. He tried them on. They fitted. Nothing else left there by the bathers went terribly well with the trousers, but he slipped into a loose, tarnished T-shirt of a tender violet hue with the words ‘Call Me Madame’ printed on the front. He looked at himself in a mirror. He was amused by what he saw.

  Seizing his suitcase after he had hung Mr Xyliadis’ formal suiting on the hangers from which he had stolen his new clothes, he rushed past Oscar, pushing him aside, as well as the muscular Popeye at the entrance, and gained the street. The prostitute was still where he had first seen her. Seizing her hand, Mr Smith hissed, ‘Quick! Where do we go?’

  She ran with him on her stiletto heels, sounding like a colt.

  ‘A hundred bucks, I don’t take no less!’ she panted.

  ‘All right, all right!’

  She pulled him into a dark doorway. A man sat there, busy not looking up.

  ‘It’s me, Dolores,’ she said.

  ‘116,’ said the man, giving her a key attached to a label.

  She took the key, and climbed a narrow staircase to the first floor. When she had found the door, she opened it, turned on the light, and ushered Mr Smith in to share the spartan misery of this alcove dedicated to vice for a few precious moments.

  She closed the door after Mr Smith, and locked it. She then invited him to sit on the bed, which he did. Then she turned a switch near the door, and the blinding white light was replaced by an ugly red. She lit a cigarette, and offered one to Mr Smith, which he refused.

  ‘Dolores,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That’s a pretty name.’

  She wasn’t here to waste time. ‘What are you into?’ she enquired.

  ‘Into? I don’t understand the question.’

  ‘You’re not here for straight sex, are you? That’s not the way you look.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She puffed on her cigarette in irritation. ‘OK, so I’ll give you the tariff,’ she said. ‘The prices may seem steep to you, but I’m very experienced in every variant from straight to kinky. Basic is a hundred bucks, like I said. Then straight is twenty bucks every ten minutes after.’

  ‘Straight?’ asked Mr Smith, his face gnarled.

  ‘Sure. Straight intercourse, without none of the trappings. Then if you want to be spanked like a schoolboy, that’s fifty bucks every ten minutes over and above the basic hundred bucks basic. If that’s the way you want to go, I go upstairs to the wardrobe, see, and dress up like a schoolmarm, or else if you want to be a slave, that’s seventy-five every fifteen minutes, and I dress up as a mistress or as a goddess, whichever takes your fancy. If you want to whip me, that’s going to cost upward of a hundred bucks every fifteen minutes, and I don’t take no hard strokes. I got French maid outfits, and school-girls, studded leather handcuffs, collars, wooden ankle restraints, and nipple clamps, or vibrators and dildos. What’s it to be?’

  ‘Where is the passion?’ cried Mr Smith in a voice like a chord on an organ.

  ‘The what?’ asked the frightened Dolores.

  ‘The passion,’ spat M
r Smith. ‘There can be no vice without passion, a precipitate voyage to the very extremes of human possibility, a delirium as close to death as can be, a kaleidoscope of the senses, something which defies description. Passion. It has no price.’

  ‘Then get outa here,’ cried Dolores, emboldened by her terror. ‘I got nothing to give without a price.’

  ‘Here’s a thousand dollars,’ said Mr Smith, suddenly reasonable. ‘Do what you think I deserve.’

  ‘A thousand dollars!’ Dolores was staggered. ‘You want to tie me up?’

  ‘I don’t want to make any effort. I am extremely tired.’

  ‘How do you want me to dress up?’

  ‘I paid for a body, not for clothes.’

  ‘Get your clothes off then.’

  ‘That’s asking for effort again.’

  Dolores was lost momentarily. ‘Care for Greek?’

  ‘Greek?’

  ‘Body, body?’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

  ‘Brother, where you been all these centuries?’

  ‘Well may you ask …’

  Dolores found some rock music on the aged little bedside radio, and began swaying to the music, which was a kind of return to sanity for her. Moving her hips in what she took to be a sensual way, she responded to the monotonous beat of the music, and to the incomprehensible lyrics, which consisted of a single phrase in no particular language, repeated over and over again.

  Mr Smith watched her through half-closed eyes. While she began a routine which was to her the gateway to sex in all its rhythmic insistence, it seemed to Mr Smith that he had wandered in on a journey to the very depths of boredom.

  Bouncing away, she undid the fasteners on her miniskirt, and it slid obediently to the ground. She tried to dislodge it from her feet by stepping out of it while maintaining the rhythm, but it caught on one of her heels, and she nearly fell over. A split second of amusement threatened to break Mr Smith’s surrender to tedium, but Dolores recovered, and Mr Smith was once again enveloped in his torpor. Dolores undid her brassière to music, and liberated her breasts, which tumbled to their natural position, wobbling to the beat as though they had a life of their own.

  Mr Smith noticed the traces of sharp lines where the garment had bitten into the flesh. After the net stockings had been rolled down, the panties followed, causing the body to pass through a diversity of graceless poses, and once again, as Dolores became visible for the first time in all her arrogant nudity, Mr Smith’s last impression before being overtaken by oblivion was of the marks of elastic, cutting like the traces of a centipede’s progress around the waist and diagonally across the buttocks.

  When Mr Smith awakened, the radio had been reduced to an unpleasant crackle. He looked around, and realized that a naked woman had achieved what centuries of existence had been unable to: she had put him to sleep. He felt into his pocket. His money had gone. In a fury, he rushed to the door, and downstairs. The unseeing man was no longer there. The light over the desk was out.

  Mr Smith emerged into the street. It was beginning to be light, and the street was relatively empty. He ran back along the pavement to the entrance of Oscar’s Wilde Life. There was no trace of Dolores. Instead, the Old Man stood where Dolores had been, his white hair and beard cascading over his robes as before. Beside him were two small suitcases.

  ‘How did you know?’ stammered Mr Smith.

  ‘You gave me the address, remember?’ replied the Old Man. ‘I’ve booked us into a transients’ hotel round the corner. It’s called the Mulberry Tower. Not the best perhaps, but we are not on Earth to experience the best.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ mused Mr Smith resentfully, and he added, ‘Did you ask for me in Oscar’s Wilde Life?’

  ‘No. I thought it wiser not to.’

  ‘You really are amazing.’

  ‘Not really. I just feel I know you, that’s all.’

  ‘What are you doing with two suitcases?’

  ‘One is for you. I thought you might have lost yours by now.’

  Mr Smith burst into tears suddenly, and quite embarrassingly.

  ‘What is the matter now?’ sighed the Old Man.

  ‘It’s not all I’ve lost,’ sobbed Mr Smith. ‘All my money’s gone! Stolen! Stolen!’

  The Old Man sighed deeply. He dug into his pockets, and produced a few hundred yen.

  ‘Oh no, not again!’ pleaded Mr Smith tearfully. ‘I can’t bear being Japanese. I’m so bad at it.’

  The Old Man began to lose patience. He concentrated briefly and ferociously. Then he produced a fistful of notes. ‘These any better?’

  Mr Smith took them. ‘Swiss francs. You are a sport. How can you ever forgive me?’ The tears were back.

  ‘I don’t know, but I’ll find a way. All I refuse to do any more is to carry your luggage. Kindly pick it up and follow me.’

  « 5 »

  The Mulberry Tower was not the kind of hotel that insisted on unrelated people of any sex having separate rooms. Mr Smith and the Old Man consequently shared a pretty abominable little box in which the feeble lighting was amplified by the bright and neurotic neons from outside, to say nothing of the shadow of the metal fire escape which was cast on the damp walls in a variety of geometrical patterns. The fact that an unhealthy-looking dawn was breaking only added to the disharmony.

  ‘Please try to compose yourself,’ said the Old Man to Mr Smith, who had taken to blubbing again, at times like a punished child, at times with a towering anger and disgust.

  ‘Remember, we who do not need sleep have to put up with the nights so that men and women may recuperate from the ardours of the day. It is a tribulation for us, this nightly passage from light to darkness, and then back to light again. But we must accept it. It was part of the original blueprint, and there’s nothing we can do without affecting the ecological balance. We must be patient.’

  ‘Oh God,’ grumbled Mr Smith, ‘you talk like one of your own bishops, platitude upon platitude, generality upon generality. You think the night is respected by all those pederasts, splashing the dark hours away in Oscar’s Wilde Life? They tuck each other up during the day, take the phones off the hooks, and snatch what rest they can, with eyeshades and earplugs in place, and electronic devices imitating the noise of a waterfall. There are no rules governing human behaviour as there were in the Middle Ages, when candles were the only alternative to daylight, and curtains the only alternative to night. People can sin round the clock now, whenever and wherever their stress allows them to. I’ve seen them plugging electrical devices into wall-sockets to make them function. They do the same with parts of their body, plug them into one another for moments of snatched ecstasy, and the burping, farting satisfaction afterwards, with a few words, a bottle of fizzy elixir, and a mentholated cigarette weak in tar.’

  ‘There are those who treat the act of procreation with the piety it deserves,’ admonished the Old Man.

  ‘There are those, there are those, there are always those,’ cried Mr Smith. ‘But there are others, the outnumbering multitude. Why, you still speak as though examining the blueprint, the grand design. Reality is what the blueprint has become. They know how it works. They no longer have to read the instructions on the lid of the box. They’ve thrown the box away! That’s why we came back, isn’t it? On a fact-finding tour? Didn’t you wish to remind yourself of how mankind has adapted itself to survival on this planet? Wasn’t that the idea? A renewal of acquaintance? For better or for worse?’

  The Old Man smiled. ‘Of course. Your question is merely rhetorical. You don’t really expect me to answer.’ The Old Man knitted his brows. ‘Bear with me for a moment. Try to be frugal with repartee and with undue facility. They come too easily to you, but there are times when one must forego the temptation to be entertained, since amusement too easily deflects us from the course of an investigation.’ The Old Man left a pause. Then he went on, slowly and deliberately.

  ‘You see, to exist as a pervasive atmosphere, a formless spirit, lending a landscape its sudden stabs of sunlight or sheets of mournful rain, stage-managing natural disasters with as fine a touch of macabre magic as the centuries have taught me, is all very well, but I found that I had to return to the limitations of a human shape if I wished to help my memory in its task of reconstructing life as we had once imagined it. I needed a feel of those mortal restrictions, inability to fly without an aeroplane, to cover distance without an automobile, to change altitude rapidly without a lift, to speak to the ends of the Earth without a telephone. These are all things man has invented to give himself the illusion of being a god. And they are brilliant inventions, considering the fact that I left no clues how they should be done. The last time I saw man, he was still trying to fly by launching himself from high places and flapping his arms about. No amount of broken bodies would dissuade him from his efforts. For centuries he slaved away trying to find a less capricious substitute for a horse, and gradually he bent metals and mineral oils to his will, until today he is able to emulate us in many of our powers, by sheer stubbornness and that private and personal elysium called the intelligence; the ability to join even abstractions together to form a pattern, held in place by the cunning logic of existence. I admire what the infant I first saw reaching for blurred objects in his line of vision has achieved. He can talk in seconds from one end of the Earth to the other. If what he says has not much improved from the time he could only be heard as far as his voice would carry – well, let’s not be too readily disappointed. Wisdom is far slower to mature than scientific knowledge.’