Stanley can’t tell if that was intended as an answer to his question. A long curl of sour smoke rises from Alex’s cigarette; he draws on it just enough to keep it lit, tips the ash into the mayonnaise lid. The passage of time inside the room seems keyed somehow to that cigarette: like Alex has smoked the clock down to a crawl. Stanley fidgets on his crate. He’s forgotten how much he hates junkies.
As concerns method, Alex says, we simply took to the streets. With no intended destination, no expectation of what we might find. Accident and chance were our means of clearing the slate. We sought out signals and traces with the unerring antennae of our desires. If this sounds effortless I promise that it was not. It required dedication and tremendous fortitude, because the enemy was always present within us. Desire is treacherous, it wants only to be satisfied, and thus it is always ready to accept ruinous compromises. We hoarded our dreams like pirate treasure, and like all proper treasures, they generated maps. In those days we spoke often of a city—imaginary, but still realizable—that would be built with no objective beyond the facilitation of play. The chief obstacle, of course, was architecture. Desire is fleeting; architecture is not. So desire learns to accommodate itself to architecture. Play becomes professionalized. Pleasure becomes rote. We had no solution for this. We believed that in the city of our dreams, every man would inhabit his own cathedral. But through the years the best I’ve ever been able to manage—
Alex puts the cigarette in his mouth, lifts the needle and the eyedropper from the table, shifts them into his left hand, and plucks the cigarette from his lips again.
—is a fortress, he says. A citadel. You see, the best thing about having a habit is that you always know what your desire is, and that it is your own. It’s not like wanting a new Oldsmobile. It seals those other lesser desires in amber, so you can look upon them with a cool eye. I have not forgotten the city that we sought. I once walked its streets, and I believe that one day I will do so again. I must confess that I have very high hopes for Las Vegas. They are certain to be disappointed.
Lyn sighs, leans forward, opens the pack of Luckies on the low table, lights one. She rolls her head as she exhales her first puff, like a gangster’s moll in a movie. Then she picks up a book from the floor—Listen, Little Man! it says on the spine—and returns to the bedroom, untying her silk belt as she goes. As she turns the corner, the kimono slips from her shoulders to the floor. Alex doesn’t look at her, or at anything else. He puts the cigarette to his lips, and its tip glows. It’s not yet a third gone.
Say, Alex? Stanley says. I don’t suppose I could borrow your john for a minute?
The lightsocket hung over the commode is empty. Stanley finds a box of matches and a votive candle on the toilet tank, then shuts the door. Almost before he’s dropped his pants the typing has resumed: a quick initial burst, followed by sporadic chatter, and the occasional hiss of the carriage return. Long silences creep in. Soon Stanley can count the letters of each word so easily that he’s tempted to guess what they are. He thinks of Welles, picturing the fat man seated at his own desk. The triangle formed by his eyes, his fingers, the shuttling page. Stanley closes his eyes, stretches out his arched fingers over an imagined keyboard.
When he’s done he flushes, removes his jacket and his shirts, and washes his face and neck and arms and chest in the bathroom sink. The mirror on the medicine-cabinet is streaked; he’s about to wipe it with a towel when he sees that the streaks are letters, written in grease-pencil, now almost erased. He lifts the candle, looks closer. The hasty serrated writing is distinctive, familiar: a match with the slogans he read last night on the coffeehouse walls. THIS IS THE FACE OF GOD YOU SEE, it says.
Stanley dries himself and dresses, then waits till the typewriter is going at a good clip again before blowing out the candle and opening the door. In the rectangle of light that leads to the bedroom he can see Lyn’s pale feet, their toes angled down at the edge of the mattress. The right foot is still; the left rises and falls, like the pumpjacks by the canals. Alex doesn’t look up at Stanley, not even when he stops typing. The forgotten Lucky Strike droops between his lips, burnt gray to its filter. Before the ash falls, Stanley shows himself out.
42
On his way back to Horizon Court Stanley passes a small department store as it opens for the day: the manager props the door, then walks to the back and steps into the stockroom to retrieve merchandise. The woman at the register flips through a catalogue. Stanley crouches between racks and tables; no one sees him come in or go out. He leaves with a new pair of bluejeans, a new shirt, some brown gabardine slacks that caught his eye. Two doors down he steals a bottle of rubbing alcohol from a druggist who’s on the phone with his bookie. Why does anybody ever pay for anything? Stanley wonders.