drove a special car and had a special permit from the police department that allowed him to park anywhere. He was a handicapped person. He had an animal's sex drive and went to whorehouses.) Sometimes I tell him I was a national intercollegiate weightlifting champion at Duke University who was once engaged to her. Sometimes I tell him I am somebody else. He is easy to lure into conversation. (I have the feeling that when I am not talking to him, no one else is. He has grown garrulous with the years. He has been grotesquely fitted all his life for work in the Personal Injury Department and will remain in that opening until his wheelchair stops rolling or until the police department takes away his special parking permit. Then he will have to park himself elsewhere. Without permission to park, you are not allowed to park.) Len Lewis left a long time ago after a serious case of influenza from which he never bounced back.
'He never really bounced back.'
I knew he was dead before he told me. I can add: Len Lewis was fifty-five when I was there and that was thirty years ago.
'Then his wife passed away about a month after he did. It's odd, really odd, the way people remember and keep calling up after so many years. I'm sorry I don't remember you, but you say you only worked here a very short time, didn't you?'
Len Lewis never left his wife. He didn't really want to. Virginia didn't want him to. He was too old. She was too young. Then she was dead. And I was alive in a phone booth. I called Len Lewis once shortly after I was married when I was feeling terribly lonely and despondent (and didn't know why. Oh, that abominable
'Won't you come up and say hello?' he invited in his reticent, soft-spoken way. 'There are still a few of us left.'
'I want to get in touch with Virginia,' I said. 'I think I'd like to keep in touch with Virginia Markowitz if I can.'
'She did it with gas.»
'How terrible.'
'. in the kitchen of her mother's home. I was very fond of her. She was always very fond of you.'
(A woman's place is in the kitchen. A man's is in the garage. If I catch my wife and leave her, it won't be out of jealousy. It will be out of spite. If she leaves me, it would be shattering. I will turn into someone nervous. I might never be able to meet anyone's eyes. I would lack confidence and lose my job.)
I called Ben Zack a month ago late one afternoon when I felt I could not make myself go home one more time to my wife and children on my country acre in Connecticut if my very existence depended on it. I do indeed know what morbid compulsion feels like. Fungus, erosion, disease. The taste of flannel in your mouth. The smell of asbestos in your brain. A rock. A sinking heart, silence, taut limbs, a festering invasion from within, seeping subversion, and a dull pressure on the brow, and in the back regions of the skull. It starts like a fleeting whim, an airy, frivolous notion, but it doesn't go; it stays; it sticks; it enlarges in space and force like a somber, inhuman form from whatever lightless pit inside you it abides in; it fills you up, spreading steadily throughout you like lava or a persistent cosmic shroud, an obscure, untouchable, implacable, domineering, vile presence disguising itself treacherously in your own identity, a double agent — it is debilitating and sickening. It foreshadows no joy — and takes charge, and you might just as well hang your head and drop your eyes and give right in. You might just as well surrender at the start and steal that money, strike that match, (masturbate), eat that whole quart of ice cream, grovel, dial that number, or search that forbidden drawer or closet once again to handle the things you're not supposed to know are there. You might just as well go right off in whatever direction your madness lies and do that unwise, unpleasant, immoral thing you don't want to that you know beforehand will leave you dejected and demoralized afterward. Go along glumly like an exhausted prisoner of war and get the melancholy deed over with. I have spells in spare time when it turns physically impossible for me to remain standing erect one second longer or to sit without slumping. They pass. I used to steal coins from my sister and my mother — I couldn't stop. I didn't even want the money. I think I just wanted to take something from them. I was mesmerized. I was haunted. I wanted to scream for help. I had only to consider for an instant the possibility of taking a penny or a nickel again from a satin purse in a pocketbook belonging to my mother or sister and it was all over: I would have to do it. I was possessed by the need to do it. I would plod home through snow a mile if necessary in order to get it then. I had to have it then. I took dimes and quarters too. I didn't enjoy it, before or afterward. I felt lousy. I didn't even enjoy the things I bought or did. I gambled much of it away on pinball machines at the corner candy store (and felt a bit easier in my mind after it was lost). I didn't feel good about a single part of it, except getting it over with — it was an ordeal — and recovering. After a while the seizures ended and I stopped. (The same thing happened with masturbation, and I gave that up also after fifteen or twenty years.)
I called Ben Zack again yesterday.
She was still not there.
'I asked for number four.
She said she wanted more.'
'Although I remember her very well, of course, of course. Then you don't know what happened to her, do you?'
I told Ben Zack my name was Horace White. He didn't think he remembered me.
'I asked for number five.'
I asked for Mrs. Yerger and was so glad when he said he didn't think he remembered her either.
'I felt it come alive.'
'She was that very big, broad woman who was put in charge of the file room from someplace else and said she was going to fire all of us if we didn't shape up soon.'
'Perhaps she didn't stay long, Horace,' Ben Zack apologized. 'It was all so long ago. Somebody else called up a few weeks ago to ask about Virginia Markowitz also. Isn't it odd? Isn't it odd that there are still people who call up for her after so many years?'
I asked for Tom.
'Tom who?'
'Thumb.'
'Thumb?'
'Johnson. He worked in the file room too when Virginia and Mr. Lewis and you were there. He left to go into the army.'
'He isn't here now. There's hardly anybody here now.'
Tom Terrific, of course, who had given me the handwriting I use and who was able to stick it to Marie Jencks whenever she wanted him to in a way I wished I could and knew I could not. I couldn't even do it to Virginia, and I wasn't really afraid of her.
I asked for me.
I was not there either. (I had never done that before.)
It made me mad to hear that.
'But I'm pretty sure I remember who you mean, Horace,' he said. 'He was that nice-looking, polite boy with a good sense of humor, wasn't he? No, I don't know what ever became of him.'
Neither do I. (I don't feel even distantly connected to him.)
It would have made me glad to hear I was still working there in the file room as a nice-looking, polite, seventeen-year-old boy with a good sense of humor (at least I'd know where that part of me was while I scrounge around looking for the others), cracking jokes as I carried my incident folders back and forth past Virginia's desk, humming 'Take it in your hand, Mrs. Murphy,' or whistling:
'Johnny, come tickle me.
You know just where.
Under my petticoat,
You'll find a bush of hair.
If you don't tickle me.
In the right place,
I'll lift up my petticoat.
