All at once he felt it welling up in him, a sense of exhilaration, of love as pure as Himalayan snow, of brotherhood and communal joy akin to what Gandhi must have felt among the unwashed hordes of Delhi or Lahore. He’d been a hermit too long (it was almost two weeks now), too long out of contact with the energy of the people and the élan vital of the age. Besides, he hadn’t been within two feet of a girl since September, when Amy Clutterbuck had let him hold her hand in a darkened movie house in Ithaca. And now he was surrounded by them.
Here a blonde, there a blonde, everywhere a blonde, blonde, he clucked to himself as he made his way to the bleachers and mounted the levels with big, pumping, awkward strides. God, this was great! The smells alone! Perfume, incense, pot, tobacco, Sen-Sen! He was nearly dizzy with excitement as he appropriated a seat midway up the near bleacher, flung himself onto the cold hard plank and coincidentally thrust his knees into the back of the girl in front of him. But it wasn’t merely a thrust — the long shanks of his legs may as well have been spring-coiled, the fierce whittled bones of his kneecaps could have been knives — no, it was a savage piercing stab to the victim’s kidneys that made her jerk upright in shock and swing around on him like a Harpy.
He saw a small white face devoured by hair, eyes like violets under glass, a crease of rage between a pair of perfect unplucked eyebrows. “What the fuck’s the idea?” she spat, the force of the fricative stirring the very roots of his beard.
“I–I—I—” he began, as if he were about to sneeze. But then he got hold of himself and launched into an apology so profound, so heartfelt, fawning and all-reaching that it might have mollified Ho Chi Minh himself. He concluded by offering a stick of gum. Which she accepted.
“Long legs, huh?” she said, showing her teeth in a rich little smile.
He nodded, the sharp Crane beak stabbing at the air and the ratty braid of his hair flapping at his collar. Was he from around here? she. wanted to know. No, he was from Peterskill, just quit school at Cornell — it was a real drag, did she know what he meant? — and had his own place now, really cool, out in the woods.
“Peterskill?” she yelped. “No kidding?” She was from Van Wartville herself. Yup, born and raised. Went to private school. She was at Bard now. Did he have a car?
He did.
She wouldn’t mind going home for the weekend, maybe blowing off her Monday classes and getting her father to drive her back up. Would that be okay with him — a ride maybe?
He nodded till his neck began to ache, grinned so hard the corners of his mouth went numb. Sure, of course, no problem, any time. “I’m Tom Crane,” he said, holding out his hand.
She shook, and her hand was as cold as one of the innumerable, dumb-staring perch he’d cut open in Bio lab. “I’m Mardi,” she said.
He was about to say something inane, just to keep the conversation going, something like “I’m a Libra,” but just then the lights went down and the emcee announced the band. That was when things began to get peculiar. Because instead of the band, with their ragged hair and sneers, suddenly there was another character at the microphone — a dean or something, in suit and tie-announcing in a voice that was almost a yelp that there’d been an accident and asking for the crowd’s cooperation. People began to look around them. A murmur went up. It seemed that someone — a gatecrasher — had attempted to slip in through one of the great long windows that ran the length of each wall and stood about twenty feet above the floor. The gatecrasher had climbed in, hung for a moment from the ledge and then dropped down into the crowd. Or so the dean explained.
The murmur became louder. Was he — a representative of the warmongering elite — asking them, the audience, the people, to turn in one of their own? To fink, rat, betray? Tom was thunderstruck. He studied the crown of Mardi’s head, the part of her hair, the slope of her shoulders, in growing outrage. But no. That wasn’t it at all. The gatecrasher had been hurt. His ring had hung up on the window catch when he dropped to the floor: the ring, along with the finger it had encircled, had been torn from his hand. Would the audience take a minute to search for the finger so that it might be saved?
The murmur rose to a shout. They were on their feet now, and a great sound of shuffling and groaning pervaded the place, as of a vast herd in migratory movement; panic was writ on their faces. Somewhere out there, in a lap or handbag or ground beneath somebody’s heel, was a bleeding finger, still-living flesh: it was enough to make you get down on all fours and bay like a hound. Tom felt sick, all the joy and exhilaration gone out of him like wind from a balloon. There was a general moaning and gnashing of teeth. “There’s no cause for panic!” the dean was shouting through the microphone, but no one seemed to hear him.
Mardi had stood fixedly through all of this, one step down from the saint of the forest, her eyes scanning the crowd. Now she turned to him, fanning out her hair with a reflexive jerk of her neck, and there it was, the finger. It fell, like a pale grub, from the snarled web of her hair and dropped to the seat beside her. “There!” Tom shouted, pointing at the seat in horror and fascination. “There it is!” She glanced down. And up at him. The expression on her face — she wasn’t appalled, disgusted, panicked, didn’t scream or dance on her toes — was like nothing Tom had ever seen. Or no: it was feral. She was a cat and this bit of flesh was something she’d prized from a nest or a hole in a tree. A smile began to make its slow way across her lips, until amidst the confusion, the howls and the uneasy fits and starts of laughter with which the place reverberated like some chamber of doom, she was beaming at him. “We cannot start the concert,” the dean was shouting, but Mardi paid no attention. Still beaming, still holding Tom’s eyes, she bent ever so slightly from the waist and flicked the finger into the shadowy maw of the bleacher.
Patrimony
It was as if Walter had awakened from a long sleep, as if the past twenty-odd years were the illusion, and this — the dreams and visions, history and its pertinacity — the reality. He couldn’t be sure of anything any more. All the empirical underpinnings of the world — Boyle’s Law, Newtonian physics, doctrines of evolution and genetic inheritence, TV, gravity, the social contract, merde — had suddenly become suspect. His grandmother had been right all along. His grandmother — the fisherman’s wife, with the stockings fallen down around her ankles and her faintly mustachioed upper lip rising and falling in ceaseless incantation — had perceived the world more keenly than philosophers and presidents, pharmacists and ad men. She’d seen through the veil of Maya — seen the world for what it was — a haunted place, where anything could happen and nothing was as it seemed, where shadows had fangs and doom festered in the blood. Walter felt he might float off into space, explode like a sweet potato left too long in the oven, grow hair on his palms or turn to grape jelly. Why not? If there were apparitions, shadows on dark roadways, voices speaking in the rootless night, why not imps and goblins, God, St. Nick, UFOs and pukwidjinnies too?