Sophie's Choice - William Styron [331]
By then it was one o’clock in the afternoon. I barely realized it but I was in a deep crisis. I actually had ached so intensely over this wicked, this monstrous disappointment—this betrayal!—that a kind of quivering St. Vitus’ dance had begun to possess my limbs. In addition, the carnal, raw-nerved discomfort of my hangover had become a crucifixion, my thirst was unquenchable, and by the time the bus nosed its way through the clotted traffic of Arlington, I was suffering from an anxiety attack which each one of my psychic monitors had begun to regard gravely, flashing alerts all through my flesh. Much of this had to do with that whiskey Sophie had sluiced down my throat. Never in my life had I seen my fingers tremble so uncontrollably, nor could I remember ever having trouble lighting a cigarette. There was also an extravagant nightmarishness about the passing moonscape which aggravated my depression and fear. The dreary suburbs, the high-rise penitentiaries, the broad Potomac viscid with sewage. When I was a child, not so long ago, the southern outskirts of the District had drowsed in dusty charm, a chain of bucolic crossroads. My God, look at it now. I had forgotten the illness which my native state had so rapidly undergone; bloated by war profits, the obscenely fecund urban squalor of Fairfax County swept across my vision like an hallucinated recapitulation of Fort Lee, New Jersey, and the sprawling concrete blight which only the day before I thought I was leaving behind forever. Was all this not merely Yankee carcinoma, spreading its growth into my beloved Old Dominion? Surely things would get better further south; nonetheless I felt compelled to lay my tender skull back against the seat, writhing as I did so with a combined fear and exhaustion such as I had never in my life known before.
The driver called out, “Alexandria.” And here I knew I had to flee the bus. What, I wondered, would some intern at the local hospital think at the sight of this skinny distraught apparition in rumpled seersucker requesting to be put into a strait jacket? (And was it then that I knew with certainty that I would never again live in the South? I think so, but to this day I cannot be sure.)
Yet I managed at last to put myself under reasonable control, fighting off the goblins of neurasthenia. By a series of interurban conveyances (including a taxi, which left me nearly broke) I got back to Union Station in time to catch the three o’clock train to New York. Until I seated myself in the stuffy coach I had not been able to permit myself images, memories of Sophie. Merciful God, my adored Polack, plunging deathward! I realized, in a stunning rush of clarity, that I had banished her from my thoughts during that aborted foray into Virginia for the simple reason that my subconscious had forbidden me to foresee or to accept what my mind in its all too excruciating awareness now insisted upon: that something terrible was going to happen to her, and to Nathan, and that my desperate journey to Brooklyn could in no way alter the fate they had embraced. I understood this not because I was prescient but because I had been willfully blind or dim-witted, or both. Hadn’t her last note spelled it out, so plainly that an innocent six-year-old could have divined its meaning, and hadn’t I been negligent, feloniously so, in failing to hurry after her immediately rather than taking that brainless bus ride across the Potomac? I was swept by anguish. To the guilt which was murdering her just as surely as her children were murdered must there now be added my own guilt for committing the sin of blind omission that might help seal her doom as certainly as Nathan’s own hands? I said to myself: Good Christ, where is a telephone? I’ve got to warn Morris Fink or Larry before it’s all over. But even as I thought this the train began to shudder forward, and I knew there could be no more communication until...
And so I went