The Price of the Ticket Read online

  In other words, Mark Paulos was becoming virile with the rosy potential of retribution. And this was a sublime if lesser sentiment offered him by the dream, of lesser sublimity than its artful recapitulation of the facts of his father’s death.

  The severity of the beatings merely served to seed the boy’s hope. His suffering became a form of nourishment. His whimpers became sighs, his screams diminished to groans, his begging ceased altogether. To elicit the smallest particle of obvious distress his father had increasingly to summon a concentration increasingly beyond his focus, a strength beyond his scope.

  Having underestimated the effect of his own rage upon himself, as well as that of the two glasses of whiskey he’d consumed en route to the weekly ritual, not to mention the progressive enervation engendered by twelve years, on and off, at the galvanizing plant, Paulos senior finished the latter beatings winded and half-delirious; and his labored breathing almost inevitably figured as an outrider of the dream’s climax. Much as it betrayed, at the time, to the winded old man as he stared down into the expressionless eyes of his son, their animating force retreated to infinity long since, that some day he was going to have to kill this boy before the boy killed him.

  Laboring, sweating profusely in his sleeveless undershirt, the old-before-his-time man thrust the child aside and took up his glass from the counter. With two swallows he finished it, contemplating the silently weeping boy in the doorway as he drank, breathing heavily into the mouth of the glass as it enveloped his own, the buckle of the dangling strop clinking on the crazed tile at his feet. With each application of swill to his salivating throat the back of his balding head brushed the electric cord. It was an old cord. The twisted pair of cloth-covered strands glowed in the backlight cast by their bulb. Filaments stood off the insulation like hair off the segmented tail of a scorpion. With each contact of the glistening pate the socket buzzed in its luminous cloak of steam above the mirror.

  Chapter Two

  HEY, KID? NEVER MIND THE RAZOR, BUT DON’T SPARE THE strop! Ah, hargh, heough, cheoughghgh…,” was what Pauley remembered when he was awake. But in the dream he heard only the laugh, never the old man’s voice. Nor the brush whip the lather in the cup, nor saw it applied to the rubicund face. Not in the dream. But at odd times in waking life he heard certain of these sounds–often, in fact. The flap of a pigeon’s wings, as it dropped off a building ledge and fell toward the pavement, just before it managed to reverse the plummet and veer up on the afternoon westerly, for example, might not sound exactly like a horsehair shaving brush spinning a lather off a cake of perfumed soap in the bottom of an old coffee cup. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that the sound, catching Pauley unaware, didn’t always take him back to that bathroom, but it was always capable of it. Some cortical mechanism–possibly his imagination, possibly something much more ruined–took care of the rest.

  “Ah, hargh, heough, cheoughghgh.…” The convulsion had caused the old man to grip the edge of the counter until he caught enough breath to spit into the sink. Cigarettes, whiskey, and the fumes off the galvanizing tank had added up over the years to emphysema, but it wasn’t killing him fast enough to suit anybody, least of all but one himself. He gulped the rising steam as if it were but a poor substitute for the kicky vapors of his occupation, capable of rusting the tissue of a lung the moment they kissed it, and took the last swallow of whiskey. Then the glass was empty.

  “Up to the Mark,” he’d always said. But in the dream Pauley never heard it. He saw the old man’s hand, holding out the empty water glass to his son, the man not looking at his son but at his own reflection in the steaming mirror, gauging the incremental plummet of the decrepitude sampled there, adding, “Hargh, heough, cheoughghgh.…”

  Holding up his pants with one hand the boy followed the glass held by the other, like a small acolyte gripping alb and chalice. Through the sitting/lying/drinking/rumpus/sleeping/copulating/blaspheming/eating room and into the kitchenette, where he paused to gingerly rebuckle his pants over his welted thighs and hips, casting the while a rueful glance at the coverless Jack London omnibus on a chair by the door. Though he was nine he had to stand on the chair, omnibus set reverently aside, and use both hands to pour the whiskey out of the squat long-necked gallon flask with the uninspired label, winged molting grouse or blasted castle, that landed recharged every three or four days like a mortar shell in their domestic foxhole. Though he’d commonly see a half-ounce of the bright fluid run along the old man’s cheek and into his ear, the boy had been slapped silly for spilling a single drop. Latterly and often as he poured whiskey for the old man too stupefied to get it for himself the boy would wonder, if the tree fell on the trapper for beating the sled dog in the Jack London story, why didn’t some recompense of equal force precipitate upon the head of his father? A lamppost would do. Surely there’d been plenty of cause for some discernible swing of the pendulum, if only since he’d taught himself to read? Otherwise he’d soon lose faith in that particular creed. Had nature become so unbalanced, later in the century?

  He retraced his steps with the half glass of whiskey. He’d learned not to fill it to the brim, because his father liked to cover the back of his throat with a quantity of whiskey without rinsing his face with it.

  At the bathroom door the acolyte with lowered eyes proffered timidly the chalice to be snatched and drained by the ordained voracity. But the glass was not taken from his hands.

  For a long time nothing happened.

  Halfway through that lapse of time, the dream took up its narrative again.

  On the wet floor before him, Mark Paulos could see his father’s naked feet. There were black hairs in the valleys between the fine bones of the man’s bulbous toes, crabbed from years of gripping the scaling diamond plate of the catwalk. As he watched them the light wavered and dimmed through yellow to brown and back. Somewhere above, water ran into the sink. He became gradually aware of another sound, distinct from but harmonious with the running water. Years later, when big-house procedure routed him to his first dentist, Pauley discovered a cognate sound, as whimsically capable as the pigeon’s wing-flap of sending him the fifteen twenty-five thirty-five years in an instant, gas or no gas: the intermittent gurgle of the little tube the hygienist used to vacuum saliva and tooth chips from beneath a tongue. It sounded like an aquarium aerator, too. But at the time he heard his father’s throat emitting it, dentists and captive fish were foreign to his experience.

  Still the glass of whiskey was not taken. With great care, slowly, the boy allowed his glance to climb the leg of his father’s pants. Two ornate pot-metal pulls on the vanity cabinet’s skew doors appeared, then the tiled edge of the counter; followed by beltless pant-loops, the skinny undershirted potbelly belying the vertical suspender, the strop on the wall beyond. Steam. An armpit gushing hair. The grizzled underside of his father’s twisted, incompletely lathered face, the left arm cantilevered left away from it, high over Mark’s upturned gaze, the right arm angled toward the opposite wall, above the strop.

  And the strange guttering sound, like the aerator on a tank in which hovered a pair of carp, a Siamese beta, guppies, some kind of angelfish, as if the aerator itself were the motor of their suspension.

  The father had pulled taut the lathered skin of his left jowl to scrape beneath it, and he should have been squinting into his reflection beyond the steam to guide the delicate pass over the jugular. But the father wasn’t shaving. Nor was he moving purposefully at all. He was shivering, as if cold. Yet he sweated. Like an arrow shot straight up some time ago that’s just now returned to bury its point in a stump, his father stood at a quivering, trembling halt.

  And he wasn’t boozily squinting, either. He was staring at himself, straight into the mirror, eyes wide, eyebrows high. The razor’s beautifully honed blade hovered below his gaze, bright at his cheek, a light in his hand, his forefinger laid along its vector, the metal incongruous against the lathered flesh like the tin band that encircles the ankles of a supe
rmarket chicken.

  Mark Paulos had never really seen or conceived of his father as unmoving. The senior Paulos was a restless, dissembling, wracked, exhausted, permanently annoyed creature, kept thin by his nerves, who always had a cigarette going, a drink, a complaint, a spasmodic curse or gesture, a blow for the unaware, and two for those who expected but one. Yet here he stood in the dream, as but once before, not quite silent, not quite unmoving; in memory he vibrated audibly like the tine of a tuning fork amid the gurgle of the sink drain, the whine of the running spigot; and the mild bubbling–which young Mark at last discerned was coming from his father’s mouth, with occasional bubbles of spittle, like the spout of a pump that’s lost its prime.

  Mark stood there, still holding the glass of whiskey. Nothing happened. After a while, he gently pressed the whiskey glass against his father’s hip. The gurgling raised pitch, and young Mark quickly pulled the glass away. The gurgling resumed its lower pitch. His father did not otherwise react. Steeling himself, Mark touched the glass against his father’s hip and pressed again. Again the guttering raised its pitch, nearly to a hiss. He pulled the glass away. The guttering again. Once more he pressed the glass against the hip. Once again the hiss. Now he modulated the touching with a crude rhythm. The guttering raised to the hiss, fell away again, increased in pitch, lowered in pitch, raised and lowered, raised and lowered.…

  A musty sharp odor interrupted his game, and young Paulos’ bare toes warmed as his father’s urine welled over the tiles beneath them. Looking down, he saw the last of the evacuation gently cascade over his father’s ankle below the soaking cuff. He stepped aside and watched, fascinated, as the stream slid eighteen inches over the floor to the doorway and disappeared beneath the threshold. This took a minute. He tried to remember whether he knew anybody who frequented the establishment downstairs. Then, as the thickness of the urine diminished and ceased to flow, before he was really conscious of what he was doing, Mark chased its remnants over the tiles with the whiskey. A turn of the glass and a sweep of his hands and it was done. A barroom reek lifted from the floor.

  This was more whiskey than he’d ever spilled in his life. The boy reflexively cringed out of his reverie, anticipating the reprisal in the flat of his father’s hand. But none came. Only sound moved through the little room: the intermittent spitting from the light socket, the hiss of water, the whining spigot, the gulping drain, the guttering from his father’s throat. It was as if he alone were tentatively alive in an inanimate tableau advertising eminently replaceable bathroom fixtures.

  Now he saw the cause of his father’s immobility, though he didn’t understand it at the time. It was the wire that draped down from the high ceiling and back up to the light over the mirror. This brought current to his father, who’d caught a section of the wire in the crook of his elbow as with customary flamboyance he’d reached up and over to the opposite side of his face, to draw taut his flaccid cheek for the razor’s work. The rounded bend of a small copper pipe jutted out of the grout in the corner between the floor and the wall, in which his father had lodged his foot to steady himself. On the other side of the wall this half-inch pipe supplied fresh water to the toilet tank. The stub and little soldered copper elbow nestled beneath the naked arch of his father’s instep with the patient eternity of a millipede beneath a rock, providing a perfect ground for the 120 volts and fifteen or twenty amperes now coursing from the transformer atop the pole in the street in front of the apartment house to the weather head at its eastern gable, down four stories to its basement service box, through the Indian-head nickel placed beneath the blown fuse in its socket, up through stout tube-and-post ten-gauge copper wire to the octal box in a sagging plaster ceiling and thence down through the twisted filaments to the inside of Mark’s father’s convulsed elbow, where it evenly divided its attentions between the porcelain light socket and the direct route to earth, through Pauley’s father’s musculature. Theirs was probably the only cheap apartment in the city with a dedicated circuit for the bathroom light, some landlordly infrastructures are positively creamed in benevolence, some bathrooms as it were customized by Destiny.

  But Mark didn’t at the time wonder over the mechanics of affliction-saving devices. An old con with a contractor’s license doing twenty-five to life for electrocuting his partner would later explain to him the principle of grounding. What the child was wondering at the time was whether he might be able to pack the tattered Jack London omnibus–a tome big enough to double as a wheel chock for a dump truck–and get the hell out of his father’s life forever while the getting was looking possible. He would need money. Money, it being payday, was only as and if ever in his father’s pocket. And if he knew little enough about the mysterious force that had immobilized his father, Mark was intuitively afraid of touching him with his bare hands, even to the extent of going through the pockets of the man who stood impotent, humming like the faring on an irrigation pump. A bit of smoke rose off the connection, too, where the frayed wire was folded in the crook of the elbow, and, very faintly, a distant sizzle came, with the smell of burning meat. To touch his father at all under any circumstances was a matter of revulsion. Now it was even more out of the question, like trying to pick up a convulsing snake. Mark could see that the wire was probably at the root of the mystery, that the connection was delicate at best, that to go through his father’s pockets might disturb a rather tenuous equilibrium, and thus he determined finally to savor, for as long as it cared to last, the delicious suspension of the family drama.

  Escape offered little hope. Like most abused children Mark had no reason to expect that life away from the paternal hammer might be any different than the regime he’d been taught to endure, under which he’d learned a thousand little tricks to make his life more tolerable. With a few exceptions, like the weekly beating, he’d learned how to cushion, soften, de-emphasize or sublimate the worst of his father’s rages, if not to avoid them altogether. School, for example, had begun to take up an increasing amount of time. His father hadn’t seemed to notice the diversion, so long as it was free, and the old man enjoyed having the apartment to himself. Often Mark would manage to arrive home long after drink had eroded his father’s capacity for anything but randomly effective violence, or after he’d given up waiting to dole it out to his son and gone out to the taverns looking to exchange a few blows with his mates. At such times whatever tawdry apartment they lived in would become Mark’s own. This is when he learned to cast his mind deep into fantasy, with a little help from a kindly author–Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Alexander Dumas. He learned to keep his own counsel. Left to his own devices, he might have made something of himself.

  And these thoughts were leading him gradually to the conclusion that, in spite of everything, life had somehow assumed a manageable if excruciating modality over the past couple of years–more than one-fifth his earthly tenure. All things considered, why should a kid venture out into the world? If his father’s experiences were anything to go by, the most he could look forward to was a more protracted beating, in the form of some kind of stinking job.

  But now came the twist of fate that plummeted the boy into his orphanage years, juvenile hall, jail, and prison, the years that engendered a character, and a criminal.

  His father began to cut his own throat.

  As young Pauley mulled his fate in the doorway, his father’s razor hand began to move with an eerie fluttering motion, like a bird caught in a bird-spider’s web–a bird with a sharp stainless steel tail, unlikely to be trapped for long. Quivering as if caught in a field of unpredictable magnetic power, the blade began to flutter and saw, back and forth, across Paulos senior’s cheek: flutter and saw, saw and flutter, utterly mechanistic, each short arc as if guided by some unseen pendulum within the hand, disassociated from the otherwise strangely unmoving forearm and wrist. The net effect was as if the razor were making the deliberate hackings necessary to chop cocaine (an audio cue that would join the pige
on, the fish tank, the dental hygienist’s vacuum pump, and anyone spitting through a crack between their teeth, which sounded almost exactly like the loose connection in the porcelain light fixture, as ping-pong balls among Pauley’s associative mousetraps)–a chopping often performed on some hard nonporous reflective surface, like a mirror. Except that there was no cocaine. There was shaving soap, and though reflected in a mirror, the actual chopping surface was a man’s actual cheek. Each skew of the razor sliced into flesh, the hand descending the while, so that a series of smiling slits appeared in the foam on Mark’s father’s cheek, each a little lower and a little longer than the one flooding above it.

  The guttering sound from his father’s throat modulated strangely, as if broadcast from some small, hapless machine attempting to recite a final bit of enigmatic code as it sank into a dark sea. In the mirror his eyes bulged, fascinated, as they helplessly watched the red bloom in the ivory foam along the fissure of each cut, following in every case with a measurable delay the direction in which the cut had unfolded behind the blade, like insidious vermilion contrails following lethal military devices through the cumulus of a final winter.