“You can call me Rat,” he said.
“How’d you get a name like that?”
“Don’t remember. Happened a long time ago. It bugged me at first, but not anymore. A guy can get used to anything.”
See, I always think of that play when I’m drinking alone. As if I’ll reach a moment when something will click in my head and all my problems will disappear. But it never works that way. Nothing ever clicks.
Here’s a joke I heard in an old movie about the Great Depression: “Every time I pass the Empire State Building, I open my umbrella. I mean, it’s raining people there.”
“I thought you weren’t coming,” she said, sounding a bit relieved.
“I don’t stand people up. I just had something to do before I left.”
It set me to thinking. Like, why build something so enormous? Of course, all graves mean something. Everyone dies, and so on.
I do tell lies on occasion. The last time was a year ago.
“I thought I loved him. For a moment, anyway.” She paused. “Have you ever been in love?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can you remember what she looked like?”
I tried to call to mind the faces of the three girls I had slept with, but, strange to say, I couldn’t form a clear picture of a single one.
“No,” I said.
“Weird, huh? Why is it like this?”
“Probably because it makes it easier.”
“I’d love to go back to China in a few years’ time, though. Not that I’ve ever been there, of course. Crosses my mind every time I go down to the harbor and see the ships.”
“My uncle died in China.”
“I see. All kinds of people died there. Still, we’re all brothers.”
Hartfield detested so many things: post offices, high schools, publishing houses, carrots, women, dogs—the list is endless. There were only three things that he liked, namely, guns, cats, and his mother’s cookies. Apart from Paramount Pictures and the FBI testing center, he seems to have owned the most extensive gun collection in the United States. The only firearms he didn’t collect were anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons. His most prized piece was a .38 revolver with a pearl-studded handle. He kept just a single bullet in its chamber, and liked to boast, “I’ll use this baby to revolve myself someday.”
Yet when his mother died in 1938, he traveled all the way to New York to jump off the Empire State Building, flattening himself like a frog on the pavement below.
Following his wishes, this quote from Nietzsche was carved on his gravestone:
How can those who live in the light of day possibly comprehend the depths of night?
MAY 1979