That was undoubtedly the method. Once he had a definite application for the method, his imagination could go ahead of him, leading him safely to love or death. .
He was on the # 24 bus on his way to Bob and Esther's for dinner, the Christmas trees already out and lit on the second level of Heal & Son, a baby roaring with unknown anguish, shrilling like an alarm — that irritated him; everything made him tense, in fact: — the red traffic lights that glowed like measles, the start-and-stop of the bus over the pavement whose texture he thought he could feel even through wheels, shocks, floor and seat (the baby cried on); he bore with the nausea as they turned another roundabout like the same old samsara; a blonde with a punk haircut got on just then, and the Op Art herringbone pattern on her sidebag almost made him upchuck; slowly they approached smolder-orange-windowed housing towers ghastly in the drizzly sky and the baby wept NO! NO! and they passed SOLICITORS and CARPETLAND, the streets more crowded with shops now, which soothed him; maybe there'd be something he could buy… — You gotta shu' up! the baby's mother kept saying. He looked out at the people skating soundlessly over the bright tiles of the Underground station. .
Better not to try anything than to be wicked! — That's how most people acted, and they were probably right, dying their lumpish lives without collecting more than their share of the general blame; but he'd do whatever he was called to do. .
He hadn't drunk enough whiskey at Bob and Esther's. His throat still hurt. The pub down the street was out of onion crisps. And the BBC was going to move him out of his hotel room (this small square grave with diamond-patterned carpet, an adjoining marble tomb of a bathroom on whose black floor he slipped and nearly brained himself every time; the double bed took up most of the room; he lay in it enjoying surcease from his fever and fiddled with the cigarette hole that the white girl had made in the coverlet) because they'd made a mistake putting him there in the first place; it was too good for him or not good enough or something — most likely too good for him; once they moved him out, the white girl wouldn't be able to find him; so he called even though she said she'd probably be out, and he got her mother, who wanted to know who he was, what number he was calling from, how he'd met her daughter, what they'd done together; he told her to have the girl call in the morning. At eleven in the morning he had to go to work and she hadn't called, so when they let him out for lunch at 1:00 he went back to his half made-up room but there was no message from her and he wondered if maybe the desk flunkeys hadn't brought it up yet but he didn't feel like going to see; maybe she didn't want to call him; he tried to call her, but the hotel had closed the line and it was too much effort to make them open it. So he ducked into the pub across the street and had a half pint of Sam Smith's, not the stout but the pale apple-flavored kind. The fat barman reached across every minute to munch peanuts. Muzak played grandiosely; a serious drinker leaned on a crutch; the husband was going to be late to the studio and he felt so sad and rejected that the white girl hadn't called him that he didn't care.
Munching on some cheese crisps (TRADITIONAL FLAVOVR), he wandered into the canteen where the producer was supposed to meet him, but the producer wasn't there, so he went down the long hot fire-doored hallways to the studio where the producer was frowning over the script, and he said to the producer: I thought you were going to meet me in the canteen.
I was there, said the producer. But then I had to work. Some people have to work.
The producer's friend started to introduce herself, but the producer interrupted and said to him: You mustn't eat crisps. No, I'm serious. They'll dry your voice out.
There are only a few crumbs left, the husband said. He finished the crisps and went into the other room, which was nicely soundproofed, the producer and technicians now secured in an aquarium where they could frown and gesture and grimace in happy silence behind their window, leaving him free to listen to the second hand going round.
The green light came on. - OK, the producer said. Stand by for Seal Hunt III.
The next morning he had a fever and a sore throat and remembered how the white girl had coughed once or twice; it was 5:00 when he woke up lonely and got up to drink some water but could barely swallow. He lay there until 7:30. Furry bedclothes gnawed at him throughout that long night of sickness. When it started getting light he put on an eyeshade but it seemed to press against his eyes and he could not stop seeing ferocious white dots against the blackness, so he removed the eyeshade, and slowly the albino ants decayed into static. The flicker of his eyelashes, irritatingly magnified, merged with his headache like wet and rusty ferns woven into an unending basketwork of decay. At eight he thought about calling the white girl, but decided to have breakfast first. Maybe the hot tea would help him.
In the Brasserie (why they had to call it that he didn't know) he untwisted his urine-sample-sized jar of breakfast marmalade (NO ADDED COLOUR) and munched his toast, listening to the waitress's shoes squeaking on the parquet floor. The marmalade was good. At long last one other guest came in, a man in a red tie and corduroy suit. Without seeming to see the husband, the man saw him and sat on the other side of the room.
It was 8:20. He got Reception to give him an outside line; then, dreading the thought that he might reach her mother, he called the white girl. The phone rang four times. Hello? said the white girl's mother very anxiously. - Is Samantha there? he said. - No, said the mother, not angrily, not even wearily, only sadly, with such calm and final sadness as to constitute implacability. The mother understood that he and the daughter had done or were doing something that was being kept from her. The mother was never going to pass on his messages or let him see her.
Georgette Heyer in uniform green jackets, multiple copies of Cortâzar (grey), Céline (black) and some unknown faraway writer whose jackets were metallic white like the wrappers of those Belgian chocolates with the horse picture; these almost subsumed him, but he kept believing there must be some other category he longed for but couldn't think of, some special kind of book that was entirely unfamiliar but very very good… — Yeah, here's fiction, a lady said. The sound of the escalator was maddening. A wave of fever drenched him. He swayed and did not open Mayersberg.
Speak Malay! the green book shouted. A saleslady led him to an English-Eskimo Eskimo-English dictionary; he looked on his own for something Khmer but couldn't find anything closer than Speak Indonesian! He stared dull-eyed, open-mouthed, at Spoken Thai, a Gilbertese-English dictionary, Da Kine Talk. .
Climbing up insecticide-smelling stairs, looking through a window into another window set among sooty bricks, he saw other windows with books behind them. Books walled themselves off from him like the Alaskan cemetery fenced with whalebones. Whether they were books or something else didn't even matter anymore. He remembered the Polish market in Omaha with its glass coffin filled with sausage, dried smoked sausage on top, pickled sausage all around bulkheaded by bags of beef jerky; one of those sausages and only one was the right choice, but he hadn't made it. Maybe the English-Eskimo Eskimo-English dictionary was the right choice. He was starting not to think so, but it would definitely have been the wrong choice not to buy it. That's how it would have been with the white girl, too; if he hadn't made love with her he never would have known that she wasn't going to pull off her white mask to be his wife. He was sweating like a mountain-climber. He thought: I suppose this will be how it is when I get AIDS. -Then he thought: Maybe I do have AIDS.