Ark

By Resil B. Mojares

There is a dead body in one of the rooms.

I could hear them whispering excitedly as they filed past my door. In my mind, I followed them down the narrow, dimly-lit door, down the sagging stairway, into the lobby.

Pinned in bed, I tried to shape the sounds, invading, into some compelling meaning. Failing, I relaxed into darkness.

Once, twice, that night, I straggled into involuntary awareness where, from the strangely wakeful house, the message was repeated: Someone is dead.

I did not rise, I knew I was not far from waking. I was conscious — within the sluggish pelagic sense of a vastly unexciting flood — of a body alive, mine. But I did not rise.

Over breakfast the following morning they talked about the dead. Meal was the unappetizing usual: fish, spineless, lard-wet eggs on greasy plates.

… The man’s been dead for two, three days, they were saying at the Parlor last night.

And to think, I’d been passing that door all the time…

No, no foul play. Must have been the heart…

I did not bother to look up from my plate as the talk went back and forth. To blunt any expectation of a reaction from me, I tackled my food with grim, exaggerated relish. A common table with strangers had never ceased to be an ordeal with me. There were many boarders in the house — permanents and transients — all steeped in a common stale smell, and I had never been able, through the years, to pin down a single name with a single face. Socializing to me was such a needless tax on the spirit, such a task.

… They said it was someone in the next room who finally got suspicious over the lights that never went out.

The poor man must have worked himself to death. He sold encyclopedias, I heard…

There were no relatives in the Parlor. Cruz said there was no one to notify…

I indolently watched a cockroach madly scurry across the table. I waited until it was gone. Noisily pushing my chair back from the table, I stood up and left.

It was near midnight when I returned. A group of borders had collected in the lobby.

They were curiously impassive as if they had been returned from frustratingly unimportant errands. Before this motley gathering someone was talking of the death.

I watched the man because he was different from all the rest. It was not only the enormous white polo that drowned his frame. He was clearly agitated, distractedly doing things as he talked: fingering buttons, smoothing creases in his shirt, cracking his knuckles. Though acutely clerk-faced — his face peaked and undernourished — he was pointedly immaculate.

Something should be done, I heard him saying. He was cracking his knuckles nervously. The sweat stood out on his upper lip.

Sipping at a paper cup of Coke I had brought in from a vending machine, I watched the man. It was a hot night and I was edgy and wakeful.

… We’re in this together, you see. And that man’s our responsibility.

His manner tight and breathless, he trembled slightly when he talked as though words in him did not simply issue from the mouth, they rolled in the blood, collected in the heart.

The others, slumped on the sofa or standing, lulled by the heat, appeared to be listening.

The man’s our responsibility, he repeated. This house killed him, you see. The rooms are so small, we’re packed so tight, there’s simply no air to breathe. The walls so grimy, we must have new paint to brighten them up. And, yes, more frequent cleaning… Everything is falling apart and no one bothers.

This house killed him, you see… He repeated the statement for what must have seemed, to him, the urgency of what he secretly felt.

The man seemed easily exhausted. His silences were long, and he cracked his knuckles. In the spell of midnight heat the others were silent. Sticky with sweat, I scoured my head for laughter. The man’s nervousness was beginning to irritate me.

Some of the ground floor rooms must be broken down, the man continued. For games, recreation. That’s necessary, you see, the owner must be told.

A fat cockroach flew whirring across the room. The men watched it pass.

Cruz is a lackey, the owner’s not here. Someone, sitting up on the lumpy sofa, was saying. I’ve been here years, I tell you I’ve never seen the man, not once.

The owner must be told, the nervous man persisted.

There was a near-fire once, the rheumy-eyed man on the sofa was saying. This house is a damned firetrap. But even that didn’t bring the owner down, wherever he was. He’s waiting to collect the insurance, that’s what they say.

There was a round of indifferent titters among those gathered but the nervous man did not seem to hear.

This is our house. And the man who died… he’s one of us, too.

Perhaps it was the burgeoning headache I had from the heat, the senseless drift of talk that made me snap.

You don’t like it here. Why, go… I found myself speaking. Go, I said, suddenly regretting my having allowed myself to be drawn into the pettiness of it all.

Go? he said. Go where? he said, turning around hesitantly to face me.

When I saw his face, I was rather sorry for the man. He looked incongruously meek with some secret suffering, the sweat wet on his forehead it seemed like he was running a fever. But it appeared like the others, lethargic in the heat, did not notice.

There was something I found strangely obscene in his pain. I looked at him fully with what I felt was a fair distaste. I crushed the paper cup in my hand, tossed it carelessly to a corner, and went up to my room.

It was extraordinarily hot that night. I woke up, spat out of a dream’s diluvial darkness, to find my sheets soaking with sweat, my senses strangely sharp to my skin’s familiar stink. I sat up on my pallet, thirsty and dizzy.

Moments later, as I lumbered down the corridor on my way to the washroom, still drunk with sleep, I almost bumped into the man. It was dark. He was still dressed in his clownish shirt and he was smiling at me when I looked up. I hurried past him, shuddering involuntarily because, at that instant, the thought that the man was queer had crossed my head.

In front of the washroom, at the end of the corridor, I turned in time to see him reach the other end and turn, slowly walking back towards where I stood. I rushed into the toilet before he caught me looking. I did not want him to get idea I was interested in his business, whatever it was.

Although later, back in my room, I had to admit I was indeed struck by the strangeness of his walking the corridor so late in the night.

I could still hear him walking as I fell asleep.

The following morning, going through the dusty lobby, I saw some boarders huddled before the bulletin board, talking animatedly, breaking into occasional laughter.

Tacked to the board was a note written in an ornate, feminine hand. FIRST PETITION FOR THE AMELIORATION OF LIVING CONDITIONS, it read. TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.

And there followed, among others, the plans for improvement which the nervous man had outlined in the lobby the previous night. The sad little theatrics of the protest note amused me. Touched by the stranger’s death, the man’s obviously paving out his misplaced fears in a kind of game: I thought to myself.

I have never been able to successfully sympathize with the small, sad passions of men. They all tire me to death — activists with syphilis, small souls choking with claptrap and superstition. I have always thought of the matter as such a sorry waste. Men whose eyes stretch white with looking for the living points of their drowned earth excite in me nothing but pity, a feeling I have discovered hopelessly futile and messy.

I met him walking the corridor again when I returned late that night and I did not bother to smile when I passed him. And when I entered my room, I locked the door behind me.

I went to work on my journal that night. I am, you see, what you would call me a miscellaneous writer: I write term papers, speeches, releases, love letters, anything, all for a fee. It’s a killing business but I’m in my element, the feel of life’s invisible wilderness, the hard thin joy of stalking, skirmishes. An office in my head, I hang around in campuses, newspaper offices and printing shops, talking with the men; in beer parlors, looking at the waitresses. In short, I’m around a lot.

But nights I spend on my journal. People buy memorial park lots, I write my journal. I leave people to believe in history, I collect moments. I shan’t bet a tin crown on kingdoms, public destinations, the messiah’s a very dead horse. There’s nothing but moments the mind creates out of whipped air and sticks and on these the soul miraculously feeds it finally, slowly, chokes to death. And that’s why I don’t believe in poets and writers, either, straddled as they are on their wooden horses of presumptions. I’m talking now of the living ones, I reverence the dead.

I go whoring, yes, but never anything serious. Somewhere, I don’t know where, I have two children, perhaps three, but it’s nothing serious. Perhaps I shall soon be able to write after my name: H.C.E. But that’s an irrelevant private joke. The point, I always say, is to compose yourself for the grave. And that’s the secret of serenity.

Making love to a girl, I would say, after Baudelaire: I’m wooing my grave: And that would be enough to kill all silliness of the heart in me. Peace replaces the tiring smallness of love and friendship: there is then in me some universal, dying tenderness that encloses her and me, then finally only me, then finally nothing. The mind creaks to a stop. And that’s what I have long resigned myself to calling just. I take this journey forward in the mind and I end up with nothing but this indeterminacy of deed, this drowning in thought. The mental journey leaves me so tired I’m completely emptied of the desire and the strength for the physical repetition. And so I declare cease, I stop. The breathless girl is bewildered, hurt. How can I tell her of the root of my weariness? Tell her that I’m dewinded, empty, stopped.

I wrote this down on my journal.

Feeling prelatic, I closed my notebook. I went to bed. A plump roach whirred across the room and was gone. As I descended into darkness, the only sound remaining in the house was his walking.

The following morning, I saw Second Petition tacked to the board in the lobby. I did not bother to read it.

Coming home late that night I met him walking in the corridor. I nodded vaguely when he greeted e with a wide smile. I went directly to my room and closed the door behind me.

I wanted to get back from my writing but nothing came. I was feeling dull, impatient. I dallied with the thought of constructing a brightness machine to squeeze out, at the pull of a lever, the juice of genius in me but I simply could not concentrate.

An ache curled livid in my head and compounding it, I was bothered by the sound of his walking outside my room.

For such a small man he had such a heavy tread. I went to the door with the mind to yell at him but when I let myself out, all wrought up, he was so close by me — I was looking into his eyes — that it was all I could do to stare at him harshly, pointing heavily down at his heavy shoes.

For a moment, he just stood there smiling at me stupidly. And then finally looking down at his shoes, he must have realized what I wanted for he hurriedly mumbled his apologies, his mouth breaking into an even wider, sillier smile. There was something feverish about the way his thin hands fluttered as he bent to untie his laces, something comic about the passion with which he unshod himself right then and there at my feet. When he straightened up I almost expected him to execute a bow. But he just smiled and turned away. I watched him, disappear down the corridor, his shoes now dangling on their laces from his hands. And I withdrew to my room.

The silent encounter momentarily unnerved me. I went to my window and faced the blank concrete wall of the next building. Furiously dragging on my cigarette, I held down my irritation at the almost theatrical stupidity of the man.

Later, my calm returned. And when I finally heard him shuffling past my door in what now sounded like soft slippers, I had to smile to myself.

I went to sleep that night with the sound of his walking, memory of childhood rain impinging on the brain.

The third Petition was on the board when I went out the next morning. A few boarders were gathered at the lobby. It was the morning of the funeral. I did not linger to listen to inquire.

That night when I met him in the corridor I was feeling sufficiently high I gave him a jaunty salute when he greeted me.

But my exhilaration slowly died down when I was inside the room. The stale smell of things stirred in an almost liquid heat. The lightness I felt was floating, sourceless. It readily perished.

The rats were busy at work. I heard them gnawing on wood and paper under the pallet. When I moved about they paused; when I stood stockstill they began again. I repeated the motions, taunting, testing the little creatures. I finally tired of the game and composed myself to write.

There were so many things in my head, each rushing forward into darkness whenever I strained to grasp them, momently flaring, leaving behind bright cracks, dying. To sleep in that astral quiet…

Life is a mad, bright congenital sickness inducing delusions hyperesthesia. Between life and non-life, the essential conflict, is not one breath, one simple gasp of fitful air, but a vast mental wilderness of diseased tissues and nerves. In this rotting forest there are no swift magical transformations: Io, a cow, Cygnus a swan, the daughters of Minyas bats, Dostoevky’s sufferer does not become the mouse in the hole. Harry Haller does not become the wolf of the steppes. Yes, Samsa became the vermin in the mind’s grim that was no magic. It was K, seeing things, stretched out on his own greasy, creaky rack.

The field of tension is this persistent, loveless desire to coagulate the creature, soulbound, heliotropic, helical. The field stinks with malodorous sweat. We have become such passionate reasoners, such passionate sufferers…

I was tired. I saw myself getting in and out of boxes, clean square boxes that got smaller and smaller. It is this obsessive desire for prediction, uroboric, self-eating. My mind played with the thought; and expanding, filled out with irrelevancies.

To purge the organism of bright fatal helios. Is futile. S + P = CONCEPT. The futile urge to purge. Is real. S + P = C. The real futile urge. Is sick. The real sick futile urge…

I was growing lightheaded; a deep strange was squirming to life within me. As I paused in thought two sounds returned to me with unusual clarity: the rats gnawing on wood, and him waling the corridor. I shunted the sounds from mu mind, I was thinking.

To trace the passage of an old story: the temptress on a raft, I see her in a cave in the mountains; watch her seduce the monk child, the stone child, to man replete with eyes and skin and sin. Speak, speak: she whispers with mouth imparting warmth, with hands kneading warm. The crops are withered now; carcasses litter the dry, hard fields. She traces the veins of rock to veins of tensile pain; she wraps him in the odor of her nearness, diuretic and sheer. Now I see her bearing him in the bridal bed now smelling thickly of his seed. That night, the rains fell and, as myth foretold, life began again.

The tale throbbed in my head for the ritual was senseless to me.

The room was oppressively warm. I was tired, subdued. And thirsty, I made for the door. On my way back from the washroom, I met the man.

Go and sleep, I said.

No, he simply stated. He made to go but I held him by the shoulder, surprised at once by his frailness.

Sleep, I said.

I must keep watch, he said.

For what? I almost laughed in his face. My nerves were frayed in the lateness of the hour and I was tired.

I must watch while you sleep, he said. And then he looked at me, leaned towards me. He tensed to speak but no word came. And then, finally, stuttering, he said:

The man who died… no one was there. Don’t you see… if someone cries out in his sleep then someone shall hear.

I should not have laughed but I did. And then man should not have smiled. It was then that the lurking thought rose sharply in my head. The man was mad. I withdrew my hand from his shoulder. I saw then how his eyes glittered with fever, felt that the skin I had brushed was hot.

I could not exactly recall what happened next. I found myself back in the room, the door locked behind me.

I had a fitful, dreamwracked sleep that night. Lying in darkness there filtered down to me the sound of someone carelessly walking over my grave.

The morning after the funeral, I found the lobby deserted. The board was empty except for the usual List of Letters I never bothered to read.

Returning late that night I did not meet him in the corridor. Thinking he must have been somewhere in the lower floor when I came up, I waited for the sound of his walking. But it did not come.

The suddenly unnatural silence of the house bothered me. But I quickly banished it from my thoughts as I composed myself to write. I stared at the bleak concrete wall fronting the window, listened to the sounds of the night outside, below, astride my senses, like a dull flood, indeterminate, mechanic.

I could not explain it but I was suddenly gripped by a deep irrational fear — the house carried away in dark waters, the sounding death.

I cursed my weakness. I returned to the table, seated, I began to order my thoughts.

The struggle between the mineral and the spiritual in us is such an unexciting contest. It takes place in a murk. What intoxicated Kurtz was the smell of death, heady and thick. And he, being the passionate, spiritual man, tensed himself tautly against it even as it ate slowly at his brain. And that is why tensing his senses metal-bright, corroded, he was almost unrecognized in death. To give up the ghost is not so easy, the damned thing so inextricably sticky, it is not so easily released, does not easily levitate into nothingness as free configured smoke such as that we see in medieval picture book.

I paused. As my mind went blank, the dull mechanic flood coursed in my ears like water over a crumbling spillway. It seemed always like the multiple, disorganized sounds of rolling, splintering, falling were damned only by my thinking. I brought my mind to attention once more, but even as I waited no comets laid bright tracks on blackness.

In the room the trapped heat had a sourish human taste. I went out for a drink from the washroom tap. It was when I returned to the room that I realized I must have half-expected to meet the man for I could not explain there, the vague disappointment, loneliness, I felt.

Without thought, weariness in the body was liquid, liberated. Casting for a center, I pinned my tiredness on a cockroach stain on the smeary wall.

I went to sleep that night heavy with many things: a dull humming mesh of sleeping bodies; strange, silent, almost animal souls rubbing their hides against walls; the clamorous gray and unsubsiding flood.

Once, a rat scuttled across my genitals and I bolted up in horror. The house was silent. My mouth was dry. Alive to the stench of my own sweat, I cocked my ear for a familiar sound but there was nothing.

I forgot all about the man the next morning. I was in haste to collect from a guy whom I had written a paper.

I returned late at night, frustrated in my business. I found the corridor empty. I went straight to the room. I was feeling faint and sick.

A film of dust covered the table, the pile of books. It was strange that I should notice distinctly the feel of fine, grainy dust as I passed my hand over things. I judged I was running a fever because I was edgy and sweating, my senses honed to a vague, debilitating excitement.

I laid myself on bed, itchy with dust and heat. I spent time staring at a gaping hole in the ceiling, the peeling paint. I listened to the dark whirring, the tiny scampering feet. Unable to collect, must get up early, walk tomorrow; I must rest now, conserve my strength — a jumble of petty thoughts crowded my head as I listened patiently to my shallow breathing.

But I was soon up. Lightning my cigarette, my last, I walked about the room, putting books, things, into place. I was caught up in a slow indefinite burning and I was trying to organize. But the aimless excitement was eating me.

Finally, opening the door, I looked out into the corridor and there, near the head of the stairway where the bulb was dead, I saw him standing. I thought he smiled, but he did not move. An excitement so thick it felt like sickness surged through me, I looked again, feeling all the while a sudden rush of shame, relief. But he was not there.

I pressed a cold hand over my face because my eyeballs were sticky and warm. And I looked again. He was not there. The corridor was empty. Withdrawing sick, I closed the door and locked it. I found myself leaning heavily against it, sweating cold. And turning back towards the bed, I was struck by the stupidity of my blindness, my shame, that, throwing my head up, I laughed.

I fell laughing on the bed.

And the house came sharply alive at my laughter. There was an answering rattle of sticks and bottles and walls from the many rooms of the house, and I shrieked louder. The rattle grew louder in answer. I stopped so suddenly I choked on my laughter.

In the sudden silence that followed I said to myself: They are listening, mistrustful, afraid, choking on the faint sad odor of their own semen on the grimy walls; soon they will return to sleep and drown in their own bad dreams. A wave of oppressive darkness swept over me. Breathing thickly, I began once more to collect my thoughts.

It’s simply this fever, a sheer trick of heat. He was not there. Watch that simple fact. I must get up, spend myself on something. Organize.

I pushed myself from the bed and headed for the table. Seated, I started methodic, to think. I closed my eyes but before me there was only black swimming space. I caught my head in a vise to keep the throbbing down, the swimming still. In that interior blackness I thought I caught the reflected sheen of vague angelic bodies but then it was only the dim pained white of my eyelids pressing.

No, he was not there. It’s just that I haven’t eaten my seeing him a pure trick of hunger. A simple fact. Now to have water. To steady the head … But wait! Suppose he had gone down the stairway to the lower floor when I had that second look. And he’s coming up now the other end. I’ll catch him if I go, open the door, now. He’s barefoot; he has cast off his slippers, yes. And that’s why I can’t hear him. And he’s there now, yes, walking past the door.

I stifled a laugh. My eyes were smarting with the heat. I must get hold of myself, I said. Organize, I said. To effect balance when the ground is moving, I said.

But soon I was at the door. I thought I heard steps down the stairs. But when I rushed out, the corridor was empty. I went down the defective dark of the stairway, listening for a sound. I walked the deserted lower corridor and when I finally turned up the other sagging staircase, there was no one. For very long time I went up and down, walking the corridors. I was feeling so faint and sick I thought my knees would give way if I stopped, that they would hold if I just kept on walking. And I walked.

It was a long time. My brain in wires, a sour feathery feel, rising tickled my throat as I walked. I rushed towards the washroom. I bent over the rank smelling bowl but nothing came. I doused my head in water. In the bodied odor of the toilet I was all ghostly, atmospheric head. Light, like the singing air was rising through a hole in my head, I returned to the room.

Organize, I said. Need for ballast in a rising murk, I said. Hold still, I said.

Inside the room I fixed my mind on the cockroach stain. My body burned with attention until, lifted up in a strange lightness, my mind cleared.

In the middle of my sleep that night I dreamed I clambered up the heights of fever, and he came, bending over me, whispering away the storm, passing over my face his hand, lonely memory, the feel of the gentle heaviness of my father’s hand.

The following day I saw them carry his body down the dingy stairway.

They found him in his room. He must have died in his sleep, someone said.

I did not go out that day. I stayed in the room. I waited for the darkness to come because I felt there were many things I had to do, and I wanted to begin.