The rat - From 'The Romanian, a Memoir' - Excerpt

Literary Review, Wntr, 2003 by Bruce Benderson

From The Romanian, a memoir

The suburban bedroom in Syracuse, New York where I'm lying is boxy and low ceilinged, but the space around my codeine-fueled fantasies is tall and drafty. At the best of times, the drug undulates in and out of nerve cells as my body disintegrates into a low-resolution image, a phony hologram of murmuring dots, and my tipsy cells sacrifice binding power to new Technicolor pictures of Romulus, the Romanian whom I love.

The glowing silver shovel of Romulus's face leaps forth, but the pictures spring out of nothingness, like old-fashioned photographic instants when the flash powder goes off, to reveal me clasping that face, or stooping to suck the nipples of that pallid chest, until that image, too, is coated and devoured by a swarm of black flies. And then on to the next: his sullen rosebud mouth tightening. In a grainy, black-and-white twilight he and I huddled on the creaky bed of that tall, drafty room with cornices I always rented in Budapest.

We must be ever so careful not to make any noise, in order not to wake his two brothers who are staying with us. What if they see us while ...

This anxious thought sweeps away the drops of fantasy leaking from neurons and scrapes away the bright emulsion. The darkened bedroom in Syracuse pops back into hard focus. My very old mother is lying in the next boxy room. Our doors have been left ajar all night, as has been the practice during the last few years, because she is awoken countless times by her weak heart or bad bladder. With a twinge of guilt, I imagine her reaction to these fantasies I'm having, then feel guilty enough to rise unsteadily in my drugged state and tiptoe into her bedroom to check on her again, glimpsing her bundled form in the bed I've known since childhood, so still now and surrounded by foreboding; and then I come closer, bend with held breath until my face is nearly touching hers, to be sure she is still breathing.

It's hard to push these worries about her out of my mind by falling into another hypnotic daydream about Romulus. Doubtlessly, he is on that clanging train from the Communist period, which I later learned had never been headed east to Romania, as he'd promised when I sent him money for a ticket, but west to Vienna, where he thought he could sneak across the border. As the train pulls in, he probably would be crouching in a crawlspace over the ceiling of the toilet, and his half-bent knees, so long in that position, would just be starting to shoot pains as the Austrian border guards march through the cars checking passports and visas. Only the extra cash he's hidden in his shoe, which he got by lying to me about going back to Romania, gives him the endurance to stick it out. Now a wooden baton is banging on the slightly ajar partition in the toilet ceiling, and when it won't budge, the guard calls a colleague in to lean on while he climbs onto the toilet seat and, sensing the resistance as he pushes against the partition, which jams Romulus' head against an iron beam, he shouts in German, "Come out, you piece of vermin!" It's not the first time they've encountered an illegal immigrant using such a ploy. When a foot finally dangles from the crawlspace through the opened partition, they grab it and yank down roughly, so that Romulus lands on the small of his back on the toilet seat and slides to the floor. Here in Syracuse, my thoughts tarantella around that image, realizing that he was probably in an Austrian holding cell painted janitor green when I called his home on Christmas day, while I, it occurs to me, am lying here in this clean powder-blue room. Whereas my stomach is full, he has only an empty stomach and the overheated cell to rely upon. Suddenly it strikes me that this fearful yet excited thought of him is almost like a suburban's thought of a rat in the cellar. Overfed and feeling strangely confined, you toss and turn on suddenly intolerable permanent-pressed sheets; though everything is safely tucked away and the wall-to-wall freshly vacuumed, there is that rat down there. You heard it scurrying. With a strange kind of envy you think of that alien heart in that hungry pelt-covered body beating and beating beneath the warm, leathery skin, and those triangular, hair-pricked ears listening for the sound of your breathing. How can the two of you exist on the same planet? Maybe your skin deserves to be penetrated by those sharp, black-gummed teeth merely from the fact that they exist, it occurs to you as if in a half-dream; for what is the reason you yourself should exist? The difference between you and that vagrant in some inaccessible place gnaws at you like teeth that can't be located.

Is he thinking of me while he is in jail? Is he dreaming of me hovering in space like some abstracted cushion of comfort? Certainly he can't think of me where I am, on this absurd four-poster in suburbia. But maybe he pictures me in a New York gleaned from old movies, spider-black skyscrapers against a tarnished silver sky, gangsters and amber liquor ... While he crouches there in his cell, angry and depleted like a rat in a cage.