Magnetic Field(s) Read online

  RON LOEWINSOHN

  MAGNETIC FIELD(S)

  a novel

  Bantam Books

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND

  This is a work of fiction. All of its characters and all of its incidents are imaginary, made only of words. If any of them resemble characters or incidents in what we call the real world, that resemblance is purely accidental.

  MAGNETIC FIELD(S)

  A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Alfred A. Knopf edition published June 1983

  Windstone and accompanying logo of a stylized W are trademarks of Bantam Books, Inc.

  Bantam Windstone Trade edition / December 1984

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1983 by Ron Loewinsohn.

  Cover artwork copyright © 1984 by David Schleinkofer.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, N. Y 10022.

  ISBN 0-553-34117-0

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  CW 0987654321

  Bantam Windstone Books

  Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed

  THE BELL JAR by Sylvia Plath

  BODILY HARM by Margaret Atwood

  CANCER WARD by Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn

  THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER by William Styron

  THE CRYING OF LOT 49 by Thomas Pynchon

  DELTA OF VENUS Erotica by Anaïs Nin

  THE DIVINERS by Margaret Laurence

  THE END OF THE ROAD by John Barth

  THE FIRST CIRCLE by Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn

  FISHER’S HORNPIPE by Todd McEwen

  THE FLOATING OPERA by John Barth

  THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK by Doris Lessing

  GOODBYE, COLUMBUS by Philip Roth

  GRAVITY’S RAINBOW by Thomas Pynchon

  THE HEADMASTER’S PAPERS by Richard A. Hawley

  HOUSEKEEPING by Marilynne Robinson

  HUNGER OF MEMORY by Richard Rodriguez

  THE IVORY SWING by Janette Turner Hospital

  JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN by Dalton Trumbo

  THE KILLING GROUND by Mary Lee Settle

  LITTLE BIRDS by Anaïs Nin

  THE LONG MARCH by William Styron

  MAGNETIC FIELD(S) by Ron Loewinsohn

  A MEASURE OF TIME by Rosa Guy

  THE MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR by Doris Lessing

  ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH by Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn

  THE RIVER WHY by David James Duncan

  SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE by William Styron

  THE SNOW LEOPARD by Peter Matthiessen

  SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION by Ken Kesey

  THE SOT-WEED FACTOR by John Barth

  A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE by Anaïs Nin

  STATE OF GRACE by Joseph Pintauro

  THE STONE ANGEL by Margaret Laurence

  AN UNKNOWN WOMAN by Alice Koller

  V. by Thomas Pynchon

  For Stephen, Will, and Joe, and for Kitty, who brought me cups of coffee all that dark autumn in Reykjavik

  PART ONE Albert

  PART TWO Kindertotenlieder

  PART THREE Daniel

  MAGNETIC FIELD(S)

  1 / ALBERT

  Killing the animals was the hard part. “All you’ve got to do,” Jerome had told him, “is keep your cool. There isn’t anybody else’s cool you’ve got to keep, and there isn’t anybody else who will keep yours.” The first time it happened—he had already gone with Jerome five or six times—they were in this backyard when this little black dog (a Scottie?) started yapping up at them and he froze in the first moment and in the next felt his body want to move back over the fence, the way they’d come. But Jerome had simply reached down to pick up a brick that formed part of a kind of border around some flowers—it was all one smooth motion—and bashed in the dog’s head with one good one, and then gave it one more to make sure, the second one making an awful sound as it went into what was left of the dog’s head. There were just these four little legs attached to this furry black body, and where the head had been was just this turmoil of hair and blood and meat and one piece of jagged bone and one eye where it shouldn’t have been, not even not looking at anything, just there; and he looking down at it till Jerome touched him on the chest and then motioned toward the window with one jerk of his thumb.

  The first time he’d had to do it himself, they had just stepped into this backyard at the end of the driveway and suddenly there was this big setter—just as surprised as they were. He started to feel himself wanting to turn back out of there, hearing the blood rushing in his ears and thinking he did not want to do this as he reached back, his hand closing around the cold shaft of the tire iron in his back pocket. Behind him Jerome had stopped. He reached out his left hand, offering “something” to the dog, which leaned forward to check it out at the same time that it began to pull its lips back away from its teeth. He brought the tire iron out and down in one sweeping arc into the animal’s head. It actually made a dent in the head and felt something, at first, like hitting a rolled-up rug, except that now there was this dog lying there with its different legs crumpled under it or sticking out in a way that nothing that was alive would lie that way. He just stood there a long moment, looking down at that furry body, hearing himself breathing and hearing the dog not.

  Killing the animals was the hard part because they tended to get under his skin; they reminded him of him. Their bodies were complicatedly thick, so that hitting this skull was nothing at all like hitting a rolled-up rug, or a log, things that were solid, the same all the way through. They were made of all those layers of skin and bone and organs, all of which he thought of as easily bruised, especially the organs. They moved like him, they wanted things, they wanted, and they were scared and furious.

  They were also absolutely different. That’s how he could hate them this swiftly, this coolly. They were part of this place. They defended it dumbly, the way a door would just stand there keeping people out till somebody kicked it in or bashed it in with his shoulder or an axe. They lived in this place like the kid’s bike that Jerome was now stepping over on his way to the back steps. They belonged to something and they never even thought about it, not even when they fought or even died to protect it as if it were their life. Getting inside the house itself was easy.

  Jerome first of all reached up to the lintel above the screen door, running his fingers along the length of it. Then he dropped down to a squat and lifted the doormat. There it was.

  As soon as he stepped inside, feeling his head and shoulders move past the doorjamb into the different light and different smell of the inside of the house, he felt it again, something that was both anger and pleasure skittering around on the skin of his shoulders and his upper arms. It always made him think of the first time he’d felt it.

  He and Lewis had seen these Arabs leave from the apartment where they lived behind their grocery store. They always left a window high up in the side wall open.

  But why was he so preoccupied with the notion of the first time—the first time an animal was killed, the first time he killed an animal, the first time he’d gone into a house? The first time was what made the difference. It looked forward, and after that all th
e other times looked back and remembered it. When you went into something, you didn’t know what it was going to be like, and the first time filled you up with what it was like. After that it was just like putting a little more air in the same balloon. It made a difference in what the rest of the world looked like, too. Things looked different after the first time you did something, but after the other times you knew how they were going to be.

  The window high up in the side wall was open the way it always was, and they had seen the whole family leave, piling endlessly into their car, all of them talking at once, the fat woman he took to be the mother pushing and pulling the kids, yelling at them in between talking to the others. Now they were gone and the dark grocery was empty, and so was the apartment behind it, even though they had left some lights on and a radio playing. People are fucking dumb.

  With one boost from Lewis he was holding on to the windowsill, and a second or two later he was crouching inside the frame of the window, looking down into the dark inside of the store for a way to climb down, waiting for his eyes to get used to the dark, to pick out the precise spot to put his foot that would take his weight and yet not knock anything off the shelf. Climbing down the shelves silently was awkward but not hard, staring at boxes of cornstarch and bluing (what did people use bluing for?) while his toe reached for and then found the next shelf in the darkness below him, but when he got both his feet on the floor he realized he’d been holding his breath. All his muscles felt good and tight as he started to move along the aisle, his head and shoulders leaning forward slightly into the next step, into the next second, till he glimpsed in the half-lighted volume of air above the shelves and a little in front of him somebody moving furtively.

  For an instant he stopped breathing, wanting to run forward and backward at the same time, wanting to fight and deny everything at the same time, before he realized that it was himself he had seen moving in the big round anti-shoplifting mirror, himself moving among these shadows. That was when he first realized that he’d been feeling it all along, the feeling of difference, ever since he’d gotten his body completely inside the window. The mirror only showed him the half-dark inside of the store from an angle that was almost exactly the same as when he had crouched there inside the window frame waiting for his eyes to get used to the dark. It was an old empty cube of a room whose interior volume was charged with darkness like a velvety dust and with silence like a pressure in his ears. It was the same store he’d been coming to for years to buy chocolate milk and those small packaged berry turnovers, and to try to steal packs of gum or a candy bar from the racks in front of the counter while the Arabs were distracted by one of the other guys back by the Coke cooler, but at the moment, crouching above the top shelf and looking down into that dark geometry of shelves and counters, plate-glass windows ribbed with Venetian blinds, some dusty light filtering through them from the street-lamp outside, boxes and bottles ranged along the shelves, he could not have imagined a space as strange as that. And there, barely defined in the strangeness, the foreignness of that dark aisle, he saw himself looking up into the mirror with his mouth open, being there in a place that stubbornly continued to be empty in spite of his being in it. These were the dark aisles that the Arabs walked through, casually, at night, after closing, if they needed something, a can of corn, a stick of margarine, frozen pizza. They walked around in here then without even thinking about it.

  He moved quickly to the counter and slid behind it. They had not even bothered to lock the cash register. He pressed the NO SALE button while leaning his stomach against the drawer, hugging the machine with his other hand, trying to smother the ringing of its bell. He took all the bills, making a small pile of them in his left hand and neatly folding them in half and sliding the wad deep into his pants pocket. From the shelf beside the register he took a half-pint bottle of Southern Comfort and put it in his back pocket. Then he moved to the back, to the door that led to the people’s apartment.

  And that was different too. The fact that the lights were on and the radio was playing made it seem even more strange, like another world or time, some other life. Other people lived their life here, something that absolutely excluded him. They had a calendar on the wall that he could not read; in the sink and on the drainboard next to it were dishes with the remains of stuff in them that he could not recognize as food. He knew he was wasting time, that they didn’t keep valuables in the kitchen, but he almost couldn’t help himself, it felt so good on his skin and around his head, being in this place where people lived, where they took for granted all these things that were so strange to him, so foreign—the color of this table, the way these chairs were spaced around it, the radio that was playing now that was addressing itself to them, to the Arabs, the way a radio playing in another apartment or even the next room doesn’t sound like it’s talking to you, except that now he was in the other apartment and it still didn’t sound like it was talking to him.

  As far as this house was concerned he didn’t even exist, he thought as he unplugged the TV set, winding its cord around the handle and putting it next to the front door. In a corner of the living room a small table was covered with papers and envelopes, business stuff, and he went through them quickly, without really expecting to find anything. There wasn’t any money, but he took a small box of blank checks.

  Going down the hall (he was moving faster now), he just pushed open doors and poked his head into the rooms. He didn’t bother with the kids’ rooms, but in one of the others he found a drawer with piles of what he took to be jewelry. He did not know how to carry this stuff away; it would never fit in the pockets of his blue jeans. He yanked a pillow off the bed and pulled off the pillowcase. He got the earrings and necklaces, and some cufflinks and a ring out of another drawer. He also took a small radio out of one of the rooms in back (somehow he felt that he should not take the one that was playing), and a camera. He didn’t find any more money, but in the dark bottom of one of the drawers, underneath some clothes, he scooped up a bunch of little foil-wrapped packages that his hand recognized as rubbers. He heard himself snort a kind of Humph! as he dropped them into the pillowcase even as he was already moving back toward the hall.

  He could smell his own sweat now like a zone around and surrounding him as he moved through the rooms of that apartment, through the various smells that belonged to this place, so different from his own. He realized that he had never once stopped moving—except for the moment when he’d seen himself in the mirror—the whole time he’d been in here. The back of his throat was dry and he was having trouble swallowing, but he knew he was moving back toward the kitchen now by the sound of the radio that had told him all the while he’d been here which direction he’d been moving in, even though it wasn’t “talking” to him, even though there was nobody home.

  Now as he passed the kitchen he wanted to stop and get a drink of water. Or even better, a beer. To get a beer out of the fridge. To open the door of the fridge casually, the way the people who lived here did, without any haste at all, not even really “hearing” the loud clunk of the door handle as his hand pulled it down and held it open while he bent down, finally dropping to a squat to check if there was any beer. But he knew he must not. A glass, a beer bottle, the door handle of the fridge: they would take his fingerprints.

  He was also unaccountably tired, his arms and legs feeling heavy, his throat and chest constricted, so that he was having trouble breathing: the pressure of the darkness he’d felt when he first looked down into the grocery store from the windowsill was now a pressure that filled the apartment itself, making it hard to breathe. He had no idea how long he’d been in here. It seemed so long that he could barely imagine a time when he hadn’t been here or when he would be outside again, not hearing this radio.

  Back in the living room he stopped for a moment and forced himself to stand up straight (had he been stooping all this time?), forced himself to stand still. He could control his legs, even though they felt as if they would begin tre
mbling any moment now. What was it that he wanted to do now? To sit down on this couch and smoke a cigarette. He realized he regretted now that he’d unplugged the TV, because he actually wanted to sit here and smoke a cigarette while watching something on TV and flicking his ashes into this ashtray with incomprehensible writing all over it. The way the people who lived here did. But he could not force himself to do it. He really didn’t have any idea how long he’d been here or when they would come back. At any minute he might hear their car pull up outside.

  He fumbled for a cigarette, right where he was standing, and put it in his mouth. But he could not hold his hand still long enough to get it lit. Finally he waved the match out and dropped it into the ashtray. Then in a fit of exasperation he picked up the ashtray, hefted it for a moment, then dumped the butts and ashes onto the couch and stuffed it into the pouch in the front of his sweat shirt. He could feel it against the muscles of his stomach as he leaned down to pick up the TV and the pillowcase, and he could hear the people asking themselves with a kind of outraged incomprehension, “But why would he take an ashtray? It’s not even worth anything!” That would mystify them and infuriate them even more than the money or the TV: the absence of the ashtray would insist on his invisible presence in the room, in the house. Like a ghost, he would haunt the place where they had their lives.

  It was two days later (they had not been able to resist talking about it) that Jerome took him aside and told him, “You are a fool.”

  “I am not a fool.”

  “Yes. Both you and Lewis are fools, but you are the biggest fool.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “About six or seven different kinds of fool.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I figure it like this: you went inside and he stayed outside and looked out, right? Right there you are both fools. If you were caught, you would be charged with burglary and he would get off as an accessory, if he even waited around to get arrested with you. I really don’t think he’s that much of a fool. But look at how much of a fool he is: he still doesn’t know how much you really got out of there. He has to trust you that you have given him a complete accounting, and I really don’t think that you are that much of a fool—to take ninety-nine percent of the risk and give him fifty percent of the profit.”