102
JASCHA KESSLER
unifonn: her crooked, gnarled, blueveined feet seemed mannoreal
against the bare wood floor; Riva, her roommate, slack-breasted,
yellow-skinned, lay comatose in a halfslip on her pallet-staring
blankly at the cracked ceiling-how Acker hated that greystriped
ticking and broken-springed cot. He waited; when Tilly looked up
at him he gestured at the noise of the hall, as if to say,
What's this?
and she glared back at him, her tired face falling easily into a grim–
ace of cynical disgust, and shrugged, as if to reply,
What
do you
think?
Acker went on.
He did not know how he ever managed to reach the end of
the corridor; to these people who had made it a gauntlet for hi5
undone sensibility, it was as if he were a transient, fluttering shadow
passing among them, a schlemiel who had somehow, somewhere,
lost his body. They jeered at him, bumped into him on purpose, and
gave him fierce, uninviting stares which said all too clearly,
Who
asked you?
or else, worse, ignored
him
altogether when he stopped
at a room and stared into it like a tourist wandering by mistake
through a gallery of lewd exhibitions. Lights went off and on dur–
ing his long progress, bottles were opened, ice cubes rattled into
glasses; four or five other radios played on different stations, and
people behaved as they would at the end of a party, rather, a dozen
parties. Acker was relieved to discover that he was in no worse
condition at the end of his journey than before. But wasn't
that,
he
heard his voice inside
him
imploring, a:bout as bad as one can
p0s–
sibly stand?
The end of the hall was dim, lit by an ochreous, fly-specked
bulb, perhaps an old ten watts. Acker put his hand out gingerly,
and stroked the rough boards nailed over what had been the win–
dows of a recessed moorish arch. Shaggy, splintery, the reality
of
this cursed wood, that he could touch at least, steadied him. The
last room there was dark as a tomb; he heard a girl's spluttering,
and then her giggles, and also a wann female laugh come from it.
Too strong a light flicked on. A male voice called, "Say, Mr.
Acker, is that yoU?" He turned himself around and went unwillingly
to the painful light. He was much too upset to put this movement
into words, but he knew obscurely and with no reason that here
was
the approach to the facts, truth, goal, call it what you want,
towards which he
had
been striving through
this
tumultuous
night.
