man at the ATM. There was something familiar about him. It wasn't his khaki field jacket or paper-shredded hair. Maybe it was his slouch. But Eric didn't care whether this was someone he'd once known. There were many people he'd once known. Some were dead, others in forced retirement, spending quiet time alone in their toilets or walking in the woods with their three-legged dogs.
He was thinking about automated teller machines. The term was aged and burdened by its own historical memory. It worked at cross-purposes, unable to escape the inference of fuddled human personnel and jerky moving parts. The term was part of the process that the device was meant to replace. It was anti-futuristic, so cumbrous and mechanical that even the acronym seemed dated.
Ingram folded the examining table back into the cabinet. He packed his satchel and went out the door, turning briefly to look at Eric. He was stationary, only a couple of feet away, but already lost in the crowd, forgotten even as he spoke, wide-eyed, with studied detachment in his voice.
'Your prostate is asymmetrical,' he said.
2
The Confessions of Benno Levin
NIGHT
He is dead, word for word. I turned him over and looked at him. His eyes were mercifully closed. But what does mercy have to do with it? There was a brief sound in his throat that I could spend weeks trying to describe. But how can you make words out of sounds? These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.
This resembles something he would say. I must be mouthing his words again. Because I'm sure he said it once, walking past my workstation to the person who was with him, in reference to such and such. Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.
Allow me to speak for myself. I had a job and a family. I struggled to love and provide. How many of you know the true and bitter force of that simple word provide? They always said I was erratic. He is erratic. He has problems of personality and hygiene. He walks, whatever, funny. I never heard a single one of these statements but knew they were being made the way you sense something in a person's look that does not have to be spoken.
I made a phone threat that I didn't believe. They took the threat to be credible, which I knew they had to do, considering my knowledge of the firm and the personnel. But I didn't know how to track him down. He moved about the city without pattern. He had armed escorts. The building where he lived was unapproachable in my current state of randomized attire. And I accepted this. Even at the firm, it was not easy to find his office. It changed all the time. Or he voided it to work elsewhere, or work wherever he happened to be, or work at home in the annex because he did not really separate live and work, or to travel and think, or to spend time reading in his rumored lake house in the mountains.
My obsessions are mind things, not geared to action.
Now I'm in a position where I can talk to his corpse. I can speak without interruptions or corrections. He can't tell me this or that is the case or I am shaming myself or fooling myself. Not thinking straight. This is the crime he placed in the hall of fame of horrors.
When I try to suppress my anger, I suffer spells of hwabyung (Korea). This is cultural panic mainly, which I caught on the Internet.
I was assistant professor of computer applications. Maybe I said this already, in a community college. Then I left to make my million.
The pencil I'm writing with is yellow, with the numeral 2. I want to note the tools I'm using, just for the record.
I was always aware of what they said in words or looks. It is what people think they see in another person that makes his reality. If they think he walks at a slant, then he walks at a slant, uncoordinated, because this is his role in the lives around him, and if they say his clothes don't fit, he will learn to be neglectful of his wardrobe as a means of scorning them and inflicting punishment on himself.
I make mind speeches all the time. So do you, only not always. I do it all the time, long speeches to someone I can never identify. But I'm beginning to think it's him.
I have my paper, legal size, white with blue lines. I want to write ten thousand pages. But already I see that I'm repeating myself. I'm repeating myself.
After I turned him over I went through his pockets and found nothing. One of his pockets was torn. He had a crusty purple wound on his head, not that I am interested in description. I am interested in money. I was looking for money. He had one half a haircut but not the other and wore shoes but no socks. The body smell was foul.
I steal electricity from a lamppost. I doubt if this occurred to him, for my living space.
I've suffered many reversals but I'm not one of those scanted men you see in the street, living and thinking in minutes. I live at the ends of the earth philosophically. I collect things, it is true, from local sidewalks. What people discard could make a nation. Sometimes I hear my voice when I am speaking. I am speaking to someone and hear the sound of my voice, third person, filling the air around my head.
The windows were sealed by the City when they condemned the building. But I pried one board loose to let in air. I don't live an unreal life. I live a practical life of starting over, with middle-class values intact. I'm knocking down walls because I don't want to live in a set of little quads where other people lived, doors and narrow hallways, whole families with their packed lives and so many steps to the bed and so many steps to the door. I want to live an open life of the mind where my Confessions can thrive.
But there are times when I want to rub myself against a door or wall, for the sympathetic contact.
I wanted his pocket money for its personal qualities, not its value so much. I wanted its intimacy and touch, his touch, the stain of his personal dirt. I wanted to rub the bills over my face to remind me why I shot him.
For a while I could not stop looking at the body. I looked inside his mouth for signs of rot. That's when I heard the sound in his throat. I thought in all expectancy he was going to talk to me. I wouldn't mind talking to him some more. After all we'd said in the long night I realize there's more for me to say. There are great themes running through my mind. The themes of loneliness and human discard. The theme of who do I hate when there's no one left.
The complex is the intelligence unit of the firm. This is who I called with my mostly empty threat. I knew they would interpret my comments as the specialized knowledge of a former employee and would gather rapid data on such. It was satisfying to me, telling them their own names, even somebody's mother's maiden name in a brilliant and telling thrust, and detailing the procedures and routines. I was in their heads, now, making contact. I didn't have to carry the burden alone.
I have my writing desk, which I dragged along the sidewalk, through the alley and up the stairs. This was an undertaking of days, with a system of wedges and ropes. This was two days I needed to do this.
I never felt a distinction over time between child and man, boy and man. I was never consciously a child as the term is usually applied. I feel like the same thing I always was.
I used to write him letters after they let me go but stopped because I knew it was pathetic. I also knew there was something in my life that needed to be pathetic but I forced myself to break off contact. The fact that he would never see the letters was not an issue. I would see them. The issue was writing them and seeing them myself. So think how surprised I was that I did not have to track him and stalk him, which I was unfitted to do and anyway haunted by opposing forces concerning does he die or not.
And whatever I said to them on the phone and however rapidly they gathered data, how could they trace me to where and how I live?
I don't own a watch or clock. I think of time in other totalities now. I think of my personal time-span set against the vast numerations, the time of the earth, the stars, the incoherent light-years, the age of the universe, etc.
World is supposed to mean something that's selfcontained. But nothing is self-contained. Everything enters something else. My small days spill into lightyears. This is why I can only pretend to be someone. And this is why I felt derived at first, working on these pages. I didn't know if it was me that was writing so much as someone I want to sound like.
