He walked pretty fast now, breathing with his mouth wide open as if he hoped (or were actually doing it) to soothe and quiet his stomach with the damp and dark and the cold.
Now he could see the Market — a broad, low, brilliant, wallless cavern filled with ranked vegetables as bright and impervious in appearance as artificial flowers, among which men in sweaters and women in men’s sweaters and hats too sometimes, with Latin faces still swollen with sleep and vapoured faintly about the mouth and nostrils by breathing still warm from slumber, paused and looked at the man in shirt sleeves and loosened collar, with a face looking more than ever like that of a corpse roused and outraged out of what should have been the irrevocable and final sleep.
He went on towards the coffee-stall; he felt fine now. “Yair, I’m all right now,” he thought, because almost at once he had quit trembling and shaking, and when at last the cup of hot pale liquid was set before him he told himself again that he felt fine; indeed, the very fact of his insistence to himself should have been intimation enough that things were not all right.
And then he sat perfectly motionless, looking down at the cup in that rapt concern with which one listens to his own insides. “Jesus,” he thought. “Maybe I tried it too quick. Maybe I should have walked around a while longer.”
But he was here, the coffee waited before him; already the counterman was watching him coldly. “And Jesus, I’m right; after a man has had his coffee it’s to-morrow: it has to be!” he cried, with no sound, with that cunning, self-deluding logic of a child. “And to-morrow it’s just a hang over; you ain’t still drunk to-morrow; to-morrow you can’t feel this bad.”
So he raised the cup as he had the final glass before he left home; he felt the hot liquid channelling down his chin too and striking through his shirt against his flesh. With his throat surging and trying to gag and his gaze holding desperately to the low cornice above the coffee-urn he thought of the cup exploding from his mouth, shooting upward and without trajectory like a champagne cork.
He put the cup down, already moving, though not quite running, out of the stall and between the bright tables, passing from one to another by his hands like a monkey runs until he brought up against a table of strawberry boxes, holding to it without knowing why he had stopped nor when, while a woman in a black shawl behind the table repeated:
“How many, mister?” After awhile he heard his mouth saying something, trying to.
“Qu’est-ce qu’il voulait?” a man’s voice said from the end of the table.
“D’ journal d’ matin,” the woman said.
“Donne-t-il,” the man said. The woman stopped and reappeared with a paper, folded back upon an inner sheet, and handed it to the reporter.
“Yair,” he said. “That’s it.” But when he tried to take it he missed it; it floated down between his and the woman’s hands, opening on to the first page. She folded it right now and he took it, swaying, holding to the table with the other hand, reading from the page in a loud declamatory voice: “Bankers strike! Farmers yacht! Quintuplets acreage! Reduction gains! — No; wait.”
He swayed, staring at the shawled woman with gaunt concentration. He fumbled in his pocket; the coins rang on the floor with the same sound which the key made, but now as he began to stoop the cold floor struck him a shocking blow on the face and then hands were holding him again while he struggled to rise.
Now he was plunging toward the entrance; he caromed from the last table without even feeling it, the hot corrupted coffee gathering inside him like a big heavy bird beginning to fly as he plunged out the door and struck a lamp-post and clinging to it surrendered, as life, sense, all, seemed to burst out of his mouth as though his entire body were trying in one fierce orgasm to turn itself wrong side out.
Now it was dawn. It had come unremarked; he merely realized suddenly that he could now discern faintly the words on the paper and that he now stood in a grey palpable substance without weight or light, leaning against the wall which he had not yet tried to leave.
“Because I don’t know whether I can make it yet or not,” he thought, with peaceful and curious interest as if he were engaged in a polite parlour game for no stakes. When he did move at last he seemed to blow leaf light along the greying wall to which he did not exactly cling but rather moved in some form of light slow attrition, like the leaf without quite enough wind to keep it in motion.
The light grew steadily, without seeming to come from any one source or direction; now he could read the words, the print, quite well, though they still had a tendency to shift and flow in smooth elusion of sense, meaning while he read them aloud: “Quintuplets bank… No; there ain’t any pylon…. Wait. Wait….
Yair, it was a pylon only it was pointed down and buried at the time and they were not quintuplets yet when they banked around it…. Farmers bank. Yair. Farmer’s boy, two farmers’ boys, at least one from Ohio anyway she told me. And the ground they plough from Iowa; yair, two farmers’ boys down banked; yair, two buried pylons in the one Iowa drowsing woman drowsing pylon drowsing….No; wait.”
He had reached the alley now and he would have to cross it since his doorway was in the opposite wall: so that now the paper was in the hand on the side which now clung creeping to the wall and he held the page up into the grey dawn as though for one last effort, concentrating sight, the vision without mind or thought, on the symmetrical line of box heads:
FARMERS REFUSE — BANKERS DENY — STRIKERS
DEMAND PRESIDENT’S YACHT ACREAGE REDUCTION QUINTUPLETS GAIN EX-SENATOR RENAUD CELEBRATES TENTH ANNIVERSARY AS RESTAURATEUR
. .. the fragile web of ink and paper, assertive, proclamative; profound and irrevocable if only in the sense of being profoundly and irrevocably unimportant… the dead instant’s fruit of forty tons of machinery and an entire nation’s antic delusion. The eye, the organ without thought, speculation, or amaze, ran off the last word and then, ceasing again, vision went on ahead and gained the door beneath the balcony and clung and completely ceased. “Yair,” the reporter thought. “I’m almost there but still I don’t know if I am going to make it or not.”
To-Morrow
IT WAS A foot in his back prodding him that waked Jiggs. He rolled over to face the room and the daylight and saw Shumann standing over him, dressed save for his shirt, and the parachute jumper awake too, lying on his side on the couch with the Indian blanket drawn to his chin and across his feet the rug which last night had been on the floor beside the cot. “It’s half-past eight,” Shumann said. “Where’s what’s his name?”
“Where’s who?” Jiggs said. Then he sat up, bounced up into sitting, his feet in the sock legs projecting before him as he looked about the room in surprised recollection. “Jesus, where is he?” he said. “I left him and Jack… Jesus, his boss came down here about three o’clock and said for him to be somewhere at work at ten o’clock.” He looked at the parachute jumper, who might have been asleep save for his open eyes. “What became of him?” he said.
“How should I know?” the jumper said. “I left him lying there on the floor, about where you are standing,” he said to Shumann. Shumann looked at the jumper too.
“Were you picking on him again?” he said.
“Yair, he was,” Jiggs said. “So that’s what you were staying awake until I went to sleep for.” The jumper did not answer. They watched him throw the blanket and the rug back and rise, dressed as he had been the night before — coat, vest and tie — save for his shoes; they watched him put the shoes on and stand erect again and contemplate his now wrinkled trousers in bleak and savage immobility for a moment, then turn towards the faded theatre curtain.
“Going to wash,” he said. Shumann watched Jiggs, seated now, delve into the canvas sack and take out the tennis shoes and the boot legs which he had worn yesterday and put his feet into the shoes. The new boots sat neatly, just the least bit wrinkled about the ankles, against the wall where Jiggs’ head had been. Shumann looked at the boots and then at the worn tennis shoes which Jiggs was lacing, but he said nothing: he just said:
“What happened last night? Did Jack—”
“Nah,” Jiggs said. “They were all right. Just drinking. Now and then Jack would try to ride him a little, but I told him to let him alone. And Jesus, his boss said for him to be at work at ten o’clock. Have you looked downstairs? Did you look under the bed in there? Maybe he —— —”
“Yair,” Shumann
