Broken Necks/The Bomb Thrower

Men and women swathed in streets and buildings; factories, avenues, houses and traffic winding them mummy fashion. He stood pressed against the wall of a skyscraper. Hatless, unshaven, thin-lipped and with the eyes of a frightened girl, he stood watching the people in the streets.

Their movement on the sidewalk in front of him was like the play of shadows. He might lose himself in these shadows. His legs inside their soggy trousers quivered pleasantly.

He raised his eyes toward the window-pitted altitudes. A patch of sky lay neatly balanced between the roof lines of the street. The curious smile of a man saying "yes" without knowing what it means loosened his lips.

He must look at people. Men were moving about in the city hunting him. They would come soon and take him away. In the meantime, he must fill his eyes with the sight of people, of stone pavements, of doorways and plate glass windows lettered with gold and porcelain. These things constituted freedom.

Curves of people, blur and drip of people; why did they seem different now? They were slaves and master—murderous, blood-sucking rich and sweating, back-broken poor. There was this tableau in the crowd; a strong lined terrible cartoon was in the crowd. But his eyes or his mind would not clear. He stared in vain.

The people were like rain on the sidewalk. He watched them vanish in gusts before him. He felt frightened at their vagueness. Round and round them was the smoke of chimneys, the noise of traffic and swirl of buildings. They were wound deep. Legs moved under the swathing. Faces wrapped in tons of stone, in miles of steel, drifted blindly. Life seemed lost within an effigy.

He removed a cigarette from his trouser pocket and lighted it, staring at the little pyramid of flame that danced at the end of his nose. Eventually the men who were hunting him would come to this corner. They would see him against the skyscraper—hatless, unshaved, smoking a cigarette. He told himself these things, taking pride in their lucidity. Then his lips loosened in the smile again.

No one was hunting the people on the sidewalk. And yet they hurried, running this way and that, darting under bars, in and out of doorways, while he who was being hunted stood motionless. Men were worming their way through the layers of the city like bewildered maggots wandering over a mum- my case, hunting him. When they found him they would become suddenly large. They would take him by the wrists, twisting them sharply, and hold him among them at the curbing while a crowd gathered and a wagon, clanging vividly, came charging out of the traffic.

He came back to himself. He must deny himself the simplicity of fear. If he stepped into the crowd he would begin to run. He would run, knocking people over, jumping in and out among cars and wagons. His legs quivered pleasantly at the thought and the cigarette dried to his lips. It might be better than standing as he was, with unfocused thoughts nauseating his brain. Yet he held himself from running, his unwashed hands flattened against the cool stone of the skyscraper and his fear like the soul of a stranger scurried about in his body.

His thought became a dream that twisted itself before his eyes, addressing him with sudden intimate voices. He felt the city like a great dice box shaking about him. Men and women rolled and rattled out of it into the streets. Standing near the skyscraper he could observe the combinations—the changing hieroglyphs of dots. Now the city shook out combinations of yellow, blue and lavender hats; luscious curves of women and doubled fists of men swinging against the black angles of legs; faces that seemed like a soiled, unraveling bandage, and arrangements of wood and steel that were continually turning corners. And now it shook out the sound of laughter and the shriek of horns.

The intimate voices said to him there was no mean- ing to life. He had once been mistaken or perhaps insane. Now he was a man recovered from a delirium of mania and finding himself weak and calm in a sunny place. The things that had peopled his mania became a distant part of the dream before his eyes, an impossible and persisting yesterday. He watched them. There was the high hammering pur- pose of ideals that had been in his brain. There was the clear lust that had animated him. He had been moving all his life in the light of this lust. It had played like a searchlight before him, a searchlight on a tableau. Masters and slaves—exploiting, intolerable tyrants with red faces and definitely-shaped hearts; and humanity crucified in factories and slums. These things had been plain yesterday. Now they were far away and outside of him in a dream.

As he filled his eyes with the sight of people the impossible and persistent yesterday drifted continually before him as if it no longer belonged to the world. The light of faith that had supported this yesterday had drained itself out of him. He saw himself stealing about through streets with a thing under his coat, entering a crowded building and casually hiding the thing under a long stone bench on which people were sitting. A few moments later amazing things were happening. Windows fell into the street. Walls flew through the air. The crowded building into which he had carried the thing became a confusion of stone and bricks.

He watched the yesterday again and saw himself standing on a corner with the noise of explosion still in his ears. It had remained in his ears as he walked away. He sought now to recapture it. But a silence remained. The explosion had been a noise heard by someone else. The yesterday in which it had oc- curred had been a yesterday inhabitated by someone else.

From his position, pressed against the wall of the skyscraper, he, the man who had carried the thing under his coat, looked upon a world in which he had never lived before. The tableau and the patterns of yesterday were shuffled together and vanished. The philosophy by which he had read into its heart was vanished. Thought had become a fantastic shuffle of words, a flood of ink and a flood of sound that broke against the movement of crowds and vanished.

The city stared down at him with its geometrical cloud of windows. The streets wound themselves around him and the zigzag tumble of its dice played about his feet. Men were prowling through the city hunting him, peering into alleyways, ringing door bells, searching rooms, questioning scores who had merely known his name.. They would find him flattened against the wall of the skyscraper, smoking a cigarette.

He thought idly of the things he had planned to say with his capture. But they were things of another world— masters and slaves, dignity of murder, blasting a hole in the fat and purblind consciousness of the public through which it might see the vision of wrongs and crucifixions. The words of the thoughts he had prepared in the world that no longer existed lost themselves in the dream before his eyes.

He stared about him. There was something other hunting him than the police. A vision hunted him, demanding of him new words to give it life. But he could think only with his eyes. With his eyes he stared at the vision that had no meaning in his thought — women swaying under colored dresses, hips jerking as they moved; men with faces lowered, arms swinging as they moved; women whose faces were like lavender corpses—vividly dead things, painted, smeared with layers of powder; women with stiffened faces whose cheeks were hardened into tinsel; faces with sores showing blue and pink through a broken enamel; faces cherubically curved with lips that smiled and large, iridescent eyes that gleamed with impudence; faces like brooding gestures; old faces—men without teeth and women whose jaws quivered and whose eyes shed water; faces twisted out of human guise; faces like little whiskered dogs, cunning, sodden, deformed into vicious grimaces and stamped with enigmatic despairs and enigmatic elations; faces of youth—dull, empty, clear-eyed like little freshets of water. The vision of faces swept by him like the babble of a strange language. Over them were colors of hair, oily and rusted colors, blooming with purple, black, red, green and yellow hats. They bobbed by him—faces, hair and hats making queer lithographic masks running before his eyes.

He watched them with an intensity that made him dizzy. Hats of men like a stretch of crazily-slanted, tiny roofs fled before him and remained always present. Lean-handled buildings, swelling like great clubs at the top, cars clanging and crawling, and the flutter of windows, like a swarm of transfixed locusts, passed into his eyes and left his thought blank. There was no meaning to be read in them.

They were a vision for eyes alone. Life hunted the people in the street, pursuing them through the windings of pavements and corridors; an insensate life, like the bay of a galloping hound. Men and women in a churn, men and women rolling and rattling out of a dice box. There was no other pattern or tableau.

With the shortened cigarette warming his lips, he remained against the wall of the skyscraper. His shoulders had become hunched like those of a man stricken with cold. He seemed to have withered in- side of his clothes so that the movements of his body, visible at his collarless neck and wrists, were like the rattle of a dead nut inside its shell. His coat and trousers hung from him like garments heavy with rain, giving him a soggy, voluminous exterior. The corkscrew bone of his neck slanted punily like a soft candle out of the grimy socket of his collar. His head had fallen forward as if he were dozing.

It was twilight and the signs over the sidewalks popped into vision with freshly-kindled lights. Names and slogans spelled themselves against the thin darkness. Commodities, luxuries, trades, food, drink, novelties and schemes of finance jutted their illuminated scrawls over the pavements, stretching in fantastic unrelation down the sides of the street. Under them the faces danced. Raising his eyes he looked again at the window-pitted altitudes now shot with discs of yellow. The patch of sky that had lain neatly balanced above them had withdrawn, leaving behind a devouring dark.

He would not be able to talk to the police as he had planned. The men who were hunting him would come soon and drag him away from the wall of the skyscraper. His cigarette was long finished. He searched idly for another. He began to mumble to himself. Where was everybody going? Everywhere in the world they were moving like this. He alone wasn’t moving. He was not in the hunt. He had been mistaken or perhaps insane. There was no tableau but a hunt, a running of faces and hats; a running of legs and bodies and jerking hips.

A hand plucked at his elbow. His body became silent. A thought hurried from him like a frightened little dog. The street revolved into a blur of hats and windows. His legs inside their trousers rattled about. Moments later he recalled having heard a voice speaking sharply to him to move on. He re- membered having been jerked by the elbow into the midst of the throng on the sidewalk. Moveon! Then they were still hunting him. No one had found him. People shot by. The pleasant quivering of his legs attracted his attention. They were moving as if springs were shooting them upward. They were mounting something. And his arms were floating happily. He was running.

Down the street he ran, a hatless, unshaven figure in flapping trousers. His body jumped up and down and his legs moved as if they were being blown along. In and out, in and out, past yawning yellows of theaters and restaurants, past faces that vanished like unfinished words. His mind was at peace. The nausea was drained out of it. He was flying. Over cars and under wagons, down curbs and up little hills of bodies. Men were hunting him, streaming after him with the gallop and bay of hounds. He opened his mouth and let out the wildness of his heart.