Hunger and Thirst Read Online Free PDF Page A

but he knew it wasn’t. Its work was undiminished, its scope unlimited by this paralysis. It could go on clicking until he rotted. But the words came anyway.
    It is true. I am awake. I am paralyzed. I am in my room on Third Avenue and I cannot move myself.
    He turned his gaze and looked dizzily at the dying rose.
    It was pallid and curling up. His eyes moved. He saw the other two objects. His head must have moved, he thought in surprise.
    One of the objects he still didn’t remember. But suddenly he recalled that the other one, the higher one, was a bar of candy.
    I’m hungry, said his brain as if cued in.
    For a moment it enraged him how predictable the body was. He saw a candy bar and his stomach bespoke the need for food. And he saw the water and immediately his body called for water.
    For a long moment, he felt superior to the childish expectable dictates of his body.
    Then he forgot it, then he didn’t care. He could not follow any train of thought fully. His brain slipped and slid over thought like a poor, bundled-up traveler walking over slick winter ice. He looked at the candy bar again. I’m hungry, said his stomach.
    He was.
    His stomach felt empty. The more he thought about it the emptier it seemed. The walls seemed to be sucking themselves in just to be annoying, to make him hungrier. He tried to raise a hand to push against his stomach, forgetting. Only his right hand stirred slightly under his leg. He closed his eyes. I’m hungry, he said to force out the other thoughts. I’m hungry, I’m hungry, I’m hungry…
    Until he was hungry.
    Now his organ was subsiding. He watched as the small hill in his pants began to sink, quivering as it fell. My bladder
is
distended, he thought, my God I have to go.
    For a moment the spasm of burning and pain gripped him tightly. Then it passed, leaving him cold and shaky.
    And wondering, in rising terror, what was going to happen to him because he was hungry and thirsty and had a terrible need to empty his body of its piling wastes.
    But he couldn’t move.

5
    He was back in the army.
    He was in bed and it was Sunday morning so he didn’t have to get up. He was exhausted. They had just come back from a twenty mile hike. He felt exhaustion in every muscle of his body.
    He had his eyes open and was looking at the ceiling. There was a bar of sunlight falling across the floor and bending up and over the foot of his bed. Through the sheet he felt the warmth, like the caressing of a hand. The heat traveled up his legs and into his body.
    He was thinking about sex.
    His hands were under the blanket feeling and pressing. The heat made him feel soft and pliable and he was breathing heavily, pressing insistent fingers into his groin.
    Leonora came down the long barracks aisle.
    He knew she was coming, he didn’t even have to look. He felt her slippers on the floor. He heard their soft blueness and smelled their clicking. The other men in bed all whistled softly but they knew she was his.
    And she came to him and the cot springs squeaked as she sat down beside him, wearing a blue silk nightgown and smiling down at him, stoking his tousled hair.
    “Hello Ava,” he said and when he said it, her mouth turned down and her face grew very stern.
    “Why did you call me Ava?” she asked.
    “Oh, I’m just kidding you,” he said, “Because I saw a magazine on the rug in my room and the rug has a piece of gum scuffed into it and it was a picture, a
photograph
of Ava Gardner on the cover and she had on a blue silk nightgown like the one you have on so I thought it would be pretty funny to call you Ava.”
    She smiled. She said, “Oh,” and she smiled again. She bent over to kiss him and the bodice of her gown fell away from her small firm breasts.
    He felt her hair fall over both his cheeks and he was in a house of warm hair and her lips were warm and she was tickling his mouth with the tip of her tongue. And while she was kissing him he said, “Say John,” to the boy sleeping in