Cities of the Red Night

graffiti in the toilet cubicle, running his hands over phallic drawings with the impersonal interest of an antiquarian. He is a plant, an intrusion. He has never seen the other boys, a whiff of steaming pink flesh, snapping towels, purple bruises. He leans against the wall of the toilet as silver spots boil slowly in front of his eyes.

Christmas Eve, 1923: You see the old YMCA building. Someone he carried with: Hi/ ...

'Hi. It's me, Toby.'

His father points to a few boys still staying there ... the shower's silence. Other boys have gone away. Part time in this improvised room. Building has to be vacated by the folding time machine where the gas ring is hot occasionally. Toby pulled out of the mission, stage set, other Christmases. His part is six years old in the epidemic. Toilet cubicle, his old face, remote parents. Sleepy animal whiff of naked flesh Christmas geese in the sky. Silent night for someone died waiting for the graffiti in 1918. If you ask for something solid as shirt and pants walks ... long sight you read The Monkey's Paw? Years over phallic drawings snapping towels and purple bruises....

Toby dresses and walks back into the 'living room,' as they call it. A man sitting at the table. He is thin and white-haired with blue eyes. His pants and shirt are red-and-white-striped like peppermint. A long patched coat is folded on the chair beside him. Wisps of fog drift from the lapels.

'Well, Toby, and what would like for Christmas?'

'Well, sir, I guess people ask for a lot of silly things, so I'd like to ask your advice before making up my mind.'

'Yes, Toby, people do ask for silly things. They want to live forever, forgetting or not knowing that forever is a time word and time is that which ends. They want power and money without submitting to the conditions under which power and money are granted. Now I'm not allowed to give advice but sometimes I think out loud. If you ask for something solid like power or money or a long life, you are taking a sight-unseen proposition.... Now, if you ask for an ability ...'

'I want to learn how to travel in time.'

'Well, you could do a lot worse. Makes you rich just incidentally. But it can be dangerous....'

'It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live.'

Toby experienced a feeling of ether vertigo as he was pulled into a whirling black funnel. Far away, as if through a telescope, he could see someone sitting at a table, a slim youth of about twenty with yellow hair and brown eyes.

A fluid plop and he was inside the youth, looking out. He was sitting in a restaurant somewhere, taste of paper-thin cutlet, cold spaghetti, and sour red wine in his mouth. The waiters looked ill-tempered and tired. Now he became aware of someone sitting at an adjacent table, so obviously looking at him that they seem for a moment to be alone in the restaurant. It was a woman of about twenty-six, neither well nor poorly dressed, with an older man and woman, probably her parents. She had, Toby thought, one of the most unpleasantly intrusive faces he had ever seen, set in an oily smile or rather a knowing smirking cringe with a suffocating familiarity that pressed on his being like a predatory enveloping mollusk.

Toby began to feel quite faint. Suddenly he spoke without moving his lips: 'You'll never get into a nice gentile country club with a look like that hanging out of your Jew face.... We like nice Jews with atom bombs and Jew jokes....'

Dead silence, wild-eyed faces looking for the source of this outrage.

'Ach Gott!' A Jewish waiter slumped to the floor in a faint.

Toby shifted his attention to a table of blacks. Yes and the right kind of darky too, singing sweet and low out under the mimosa, not feeding his black face in teh same restaurant with a white man and getting his strength up to rape our grandmothers.'

Next a table of Latin American diplomats.