An American Dream Read Free Page B

haven’t done your work.”
    “Yes,” said the moon, “you haven’t done your work, but you’ve lived your life, and you are dead with it.”
    “Let me be not all dead,” I cried to myself, and slipped back over the rail, and dropped into a chair. I was sick. I assure you I was sick in a way I had never been sick before. Deep in a fever, or bumping through the rapids of a bad nausea, one’s soul could always speak to one, “Look what this illness is doing to us, you coward,” that voice might say and one would shake or twist in the fever, but that at least was a nightmare. This illness now, huddling in the deck chair, was an extinction. I could feel what was good in me going away, going away perhaps forever, rising after all to the moon, my courage, my wit, ambition and hope. Nothing but sickness and dung remained in the sack of my torso. And the moon looked back, baleful in her radiance now. Will you understand me if I say that at that moment I felt the other illness come to me, that I knew then if it took twenty years or forty for my death, that if I died from a revolt of the cells, a growth against the design of my organs, that this was the moment it all began, this was the hour when the cells took their leap? Never have I known such a sickening—the retaliation of the moon was complete. What an utter suffocation of my faculties, as if I had disappointed a lady and now must eat the cold tapeworm of her displeasure. Nothing noble seemed to remain of me.
    Well, I got up from that deck chair and back to the living room which felt like an indoor pool. So steamy was the air on my stomach, just so ultra-violet seemed the light. I must have been in some far-gone state because there was an aureole about each electric light, each bulb stood out like a personage, and I remember thinking: of course, this is how they appeared to Van Gogh at the end.
    “You don’t look too well,” said the host.
    “Well, buddy, I feel worse than I look. Give me a drop of blood, will you?”
    The bourbon tasted like linseed oil and lit a low smoke in the liverish caverns of my belly. I could feel some effulgence of the moon glowing through the windows and dread came back like a hoot from a bully on the street outside.
    “It’s a great night for the race,” I said.
    “What race?” said my host. It was obvious he wished me to be gone.
    “The human race. Ho. Ho. Ho,” I said.
    “Steve!”
    “I’m on my way.”
    My hand offered him the glass as if it were the gift of a shiny apple, and then I strolled, closing my host’s door so carefully it failed to shut. I turned around to jam it once again and felt a force on me as palpable as a magnetic field. “Get out of here,” said a voice in my brain. The elevator took too long. I rang, and rang again, but there was not a sound from the cable or the cage. I broke into a galloping sweat. “If you’re not out of here in thirty seconds,” said the same voice, “your new disease takes another step. Metastases are made of moments like this, lover-man.” So I bolted down the stairs. It was ten flights taken in two banks each, twenty banks of concrete steps, cement-block walls painted guacamole-green, blood-iron railing made of pipe, and I flew down pursued by panic, because I had lost my sense of being alive and here on earth, it was more as if I had died and did not altogether know it, this might be the way it was for the first hour of death if you chose to die in bed—you could blunder through some endless repetition believing your life was still here.
    The door to the lobby was locked. Of course. I tired of beating on it with my hands—I was half certain I was really gone—and shifted to one foot, took off a shoe, began to whang away. The doorman opened in a pet. “What’s going on?” he asked. “I go upin the elevator and you ain’t there.” He was Italian, some stout dull lump of rejection from the Mafia—they had assigned him to this job about the time they decided he was