BECAUSE HE SPENT HIS PAY on heroin, he was always short on rent. The landlady was on his back for rent every night when he left. He would often try elaborate ruses to get into his hotel room without the landlady catching sight of him. They had changed the lock on the front door. He would crawl up the back fire escape and into his back window.
He lost weight. All his clothes seemed a little bit baggy. If he didn’t put on suspenders, his pants would probably fall right down to his ankles. As if he were standing in a puddle.
He once spent three minutes attempting to climb into his jacket, which kept trying to run away from him. The minute he put one arm in, the other one seemed to slip out. He seemed suddenly aware of the mathematics and geometry of mundane actions, and once aware, he could no longer take them for granted. But he found it wonderful. Putting on a jacket was as perplexing as folding an origami swan.
Then one night he crawled up the back fire escape to find that they had also bolted the window.
Pierrot was tormented by his addiction. The wings were wrapped around him like a straitjacket. He spent the money on heroin and kissed his room at the Cupid Hotel good-bye. Not a month after leaving Irving’s house, he lay down on a piece of cardboard in the park to sleep.
The leaves fell down on top of him. He kept his eyes closed, but the ground grew up around him. The roots of the trees reached up like the great arms of wrestlers, and they rolled around his limbs like boa constrictors. The beetles and other insects crawled into his nose and ears. They devoured his brain. And then it was hollow, like an Easter egg that children had already blown the yolk out of.
If anyone was to come along and tap him, his shell would shatter.
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HE LEARNED HOW TO SHOOT UP, so he could get more for his money. The heroin would probably kill him within five years. Knowing that somehow took the pressure off everything. What did anything matter if you weren’t going to get old? He could live the rest of his life as a child. What a blessing.
A child’s main job was to be happy. If Pierrot was happy, he was doing his job. He sat on the trolley with his eyes closed, as big a grin as was anatomically possible spread across his face.
He walked down the aisle of the trolley. He was holding out a flower. He held it out for everybody to smell. They all backed away from it as if it were going to squirt water in their faces.
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HE STOPPED AT A PLAYGROUND one day when he was high. He didn’t feel that he was in any way superior to the children playing there. They were his people! The children looked so hungry that their eyes stuck out like oversize stones on silver rings.
Children were always amused by Pierrot. They could see right away that he was a lot of fun, that he always got in trouble, that he knew how to clown around, that he didn’t fit in with the other adults.
He hated being stuck in a body so much bigger than theirs. He couldn’t fit his ass into the swings. The slide was much too narrow for him to whiz down it comfortably. Pierrot sat on one slide and discovered that his feet were already at the ground. What did that mean? If he were an intelligent type of scientist, like Newton or Galileo, he would be able to deduce some fantastic rule of physics from it.
A father chased him out of the park. He thought it was inappropriate for Pierrot to be talking to children in the playground, for him to be there at all. He was now twenty years old, after all.
When the evening came, a black bat flew by, like the charred remains of a burned will.
22
THE TEN PLAGUES
McMahon got Rose a room in the Darling Hotel at Sherbrooke and Mountain Streets. It was a fancy neighborhood. The buildings were all stately. There were iron awnings at the front of the buildings, with lights underneath. The very rich inhabited their own universes, lived under their own skies. Limousines would drive up under the awnings. The drivers would hurry out and go around the side to allow extraordinary men and their wives to step out.
There were doormen with gold-buttoned uniforms in the lobby. A woman strutted by with a great yellow stole wrapped around her fat shoulders, like caramel poured on top of ice cream.
“Clean up my room, please,” she said, mistaking Rose for a maid.
Rose had never lived in such a room. It had its own bathroom and a kitchenette. She supposed that she ought to get down on her knees and kiss McMahon’s feet. But she didn’t feel she owed him anything for this. She closed her eyes. She wondered why she had not been allowed to take her suitcase this time. Every young woman should travel around with her own suitcase. She imagined her body cut into pieces and piled into her suitcase with rocks and tossed into the Saint Lawrence River.
All she had was the plan she’d made with Pierrot, which she kept in her pocket. Her toes sank into the beige carpet as if into sand at the edge of the beach.
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