All the Sounds
of Fear
by Harlan Ellison
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"Give me some light!"
Cry: tormented, half-moan half-chant, cast out against a
whispering darkness; a man wound in white, arms upflung
to roistering shadows, sooty sockets where eyes had
been, pleading, demanding, anger and hopelessness,
anguish from the soul into the world. He stumbled, a
step, two, faltering, weak, the man returned to the
child, trying to find some exit from the washing sea of
darkness in which he trembled.
"Give me some light!"
Around him a Greek chorus of sussurating voices;
plucking at his garments, he staggered toward an
intimation of sound, a resting place, a goal. The man in
pain, the figure of all pain, all desperation,
and nowhere in that circle of painful light was there
release from this torment. Sandaled feet stepping, each
one above an abyss, no hope and no safety; what can it
mean to be so eternally blind?
Again, "Give me some light!"
The last tortured ripping of the words from a throat raw
with the hopelessness of salvation. Then the man sank to
the shadows that moved in on him. The face half-hidden
in chiaroscuro, sharp black, blanched white, down and
down into the grayness about his feet, the circle of
blazing white light pinpointing him, a creature impaled
on a pin of brilliance, till closing, closing, closing
it swallowed him, all gone to black, darkness within and
without, black even deeper, nothing, finis, end,
silence.
Richard Becker, Oedipus, had played his first role.
Twenty-four years later, he would play it again, as his
last. But before that final performance's curtain could
be rung, twenty-four years of greatness would have to
strut across stages of life and theatre and emotion.
Time, passing.
· · · · ·
When they had decided to cast the paranoid beggar in
Sweet Miracles, Richard Becker had gone to the
Salvation Army retail store, and bought a set of rags
that even the sanctimonious saleswomen staffing the shop
had tried to throw out as unsalable and foul. He bought
a pair of cracked and soleless shoes that were a size
too large. He bought a hat that had seen so many autumns
of rain its brim had bowed and withered under the
onslaught. He bought a no-color vest from a suit long
since destroyed, and a pair of pants whose seat sagged
baggily, and a shirt with three buttons gone, and a
jacket that seemed to symbolize every derelict who had
ever cadged an hour's sleep in an alley.
He bought these things over the protests of the kindly,
white-haired women who were doing their bit for
charity, and he asked if he might step into the
toilet for a few moments to try them on; and when he
emerged, his good tweed jacket and dark slacks over his
arm, he was another man entirely. As though magically,
the coarse stubble (that may have been there when he
came into the store, but he seemed too nice-looking a
young man to go around unshaved) had sprouted on his
sagging jowls. The hair had grown limp and off-gray
under the squashed hat. The face was lined and planed
with the depravities and deprivations of a lifetime
lived in gutters and saloons. The hands were caked with
filth, the eyes lusterless and devoid of personality,
the body grotesquely slumped with the burden of mere
existence. This old man, this skid from the Bowery, how
had he gotten into the toilet, and where was the nice
young man who had gone in wearing that jacket and those
slacks? Had this creature somehow overpowered him
(what foul weapon had this feeble old man used to subdue
a vital, strong youth like that)? The white-haired Good
Women of Charity were frozen with distress as they
imagined the strong-faced, attractive youth, lying in
the bathroom, his skull crushed by a length of pipe.
The old bum extended the jacket, the pants, and the rest
of the clothing the young man had been wearing, and in a
voice that was thirty years younger than the body from
which it spoke, he explained, "I won't be needing these,
ladies. Sell them to someone who can make good use of
them." The voice of the young man, from this husk.
And he paid for the rags he wore. They watched him as he
limped and rolled through the front door, into the
filthy streets; another tramp gone to join the tide of
lost souls that would inevitably become a stream and a
river and an ocean of wastrels, washing finally into a
drunk tank, or a doorway, or onto a park bench.
Richard Becker spent six weeks living on the Bowery; in
fleabags, abandoned warehouses, cellars, gutters and on
tenement rooftops, he shared and wallowed in the nature
and filth and degradation of the empty men of his times.
For six weeks he was a tramp, a thoroughly
washed-out hopeless rumdum, with rheumy eyes and palsied
hands and a weak bladder.
One by one the weeks mounted to six, and on the first
day of casting for Sweet Miracles, the Monday of
the seventh week, Richard Becker arrived at the Martin
Theatre, where he auditioned for the part in the clothes
he had worn for the past six weeks.
The play ran for five hundred and eighteen performances,
and Richard Becker won the Drama Critics' Circle Award
as the finest male performer of the year. He also won
the Circle Award as the most promising newcomer of the
year.
He was twenty-two years at the time.
The following season, after Sweet Miracles had
gone on the road, Richard Becker was apprised, through
the pages of Variety, that John Foresman & T. H.
Searle were about to begin casting for House of
Infidels, the new script by Odets, his first in many
years. Through friends in the Foresman & Searle offices,
he obtained a copy of the script, and selected a part he
considered massive in its potentialities.
The role of an introspective and tormented artist,
depressed by the level of commercialism to which his
work had sunk, resolved to regain an innocence of
childhood or nature he had lost, by working with his
hands in a foundry.
When the first night critics called Richard Becker's
conception of Tresk, the artist, "a pinnacle of thespic
intuition" and noted, "His authority in the part led
members of the audience to ask one another how such a
sensitive actor could grasp the rough unsubtle life of a
foundry-worker," they had no idea that Richard Becker
had worked for nearly two months in a steel stamping
plant and foundry in Pittsburgh. But the makeup man on
House of Infidels suspected Richard Becker had
once been in a terrible fire, for his hands were marked
by the ravages of great heat.
After two successes, two conquests of Broadway, two
characterizations that were immediately ranked with the
most brilliant Shubert Alley had ever witnessed, Richard
Becker's reputation began to build a legend.
"The Man Who is The "'Method,'" they called him, in
perceptive articles and interviews. Lee Strasberg of the
Actors Studio, when questioned, remarked that Becker had
never been a student, but had the occasion arisen, he
might well have paid him to attend. In any event,
Richard Becker's command of the Stanislavski theory of
total immersion in a part became a working example of
the validity of the concept. No mere scratcher and
stammerer, on a stage Richard Becker was the man
he pretended to be.
Of his private life little was written; he let it be
known that if he was to be totally convincing in a
characterization, he wanted no intrusive shadow of
himself to stand between the audience and the image he
offered.
Hollywood's offers of stardom were refused, for as
Theatre Arts commented in a brief feature on Richard
Becker:
· · · · ·
"The gestalt that Becker projects across a row of
footlights would be dimmed and turned
two-dimensional on the Hollywood screen. Becker's
art is an ultimate distillation of truth and
metamorphosis that requires the reality of stage
production to retain its purity. It might even be
noted that Richard Becker acts in four dimensions,
as opposed to the merely craftsmanlike three of his
contemporaries. Surely no one could truly argue with
the fact that watching a Becker performance is
almost a religious experience. We can only
congratulate Richard Becker on his perceptiveness in
turning down studio bids."
· · · · ·
The years of building a backlog of definitive parts
(effectively ruining them for other actors who were
condemned to play them after Becker had said all there
was to say) passed, as Richard Becker became, in turn, a
Hamlet that cast new lights on the Freudian implications
of Shakespeare … a fiery Southern segregationist whose
wife reveals her octoroon background … a fast-talking
salesman come to grips with futility and cowardice … a
many-faceted Marco Polo … a dissolute and totally amoral
pimp, driven by a loathing for women, to sell his own
sister into evil … a ruthless politician, dying of
cancer and senility …
And the most challenging part he had ever undertaken,
the re-creation, in the play by Tennessee Williams, of
the deranged religious zealot, trapped by his own
warring emotions, into the hammer-murder of an innocent
girl.
When they found him, in the model's apartment off
Gramercy Place, they were unable to get a coherent story
of why he had done the disgusting act, for he had lapsed
into a stentorian tone of Biblical fervor, pontificating
about the blood of the lamb and the curse of Jezebel and
the eternal fires of Perdition. The men from Homicide
East numbered among their ranks a rookie, fresh to the
squad, who became desperately ill at the sight of the
fouled walls and the crumpled form wedged into the tiny
kitchenette; he became violently ill, and was taken from
the apartment a few minutes before Richard Becker was
led away.
The trial was a manifest sadness to all who had seen him
onstage, and the jury did not even have to be sent out
to agree on a verdict of insanity.
After all, whoever the fanatic was that the defense put
on the stands, he was not sane, and he was certainly no
longer Richard Becker, the actor.
· · · · ·
For Dr. Charles Tedrow, the patient in restraining room
16 was a constant involvement. He was unable to divorce
himself from the memory of a night three years before,
when he had sat in an orchestra seat at the Henry Miller
Theatre and seen Richard Becker, light and adroit, as
the comical Tosspot in that season's hit comedy,
Never a Rascal.
He was unable to separate his thoughts from the shape
and form of the actor who had so immersed himself in The
Method that for a time, in three acts, he was a
blundering, maundering, larcenous alcoholic with a
penchant for pomegranates and (as Becker had mouthed it
onstage) "barratry on the low seas!" Separate them from
this weird and many-faceted creature that lived its many
lives in the padded cell numbered 16? Impossible.
At first, there had been reporters, who had come to
interview the Good Doctor in charge of Becker's case;
and to the last of these (for Dr. Tedrow had instituted
restrictions on this sort of publicity) he had said, "To
a man like Richard Becker, the world was very important.
He was very much a man of his times; he had no real
personality of his own, with the exception of that one
overwhelming faculty and need to reflect the world
around him. He was an actor in the purest sense of the
word. The world gave him his personality, his attitudes,
his façade and his reason for existence. Take those away
from him, clap him up in a padded cell—as we were forced
to do—and he begins to lose touch with reality."
"I understand," the reporter had inquired carefully,
"that Becker is re-living his roles, one after another.
Is that true, Dr. Tedrow?"
Charles Tedrow was, above all else, a compassionate man,
and his fury at this remark, revealing as it did a leak
in the sanitarium's security, was unlike him. "Richard
Becker is undergoing what might be called, in
psychiatric terms, 'induced hallucinatory regression.'
In his search for some reality, there in that room, he
has fastened onto the method of assuming characters'
moods he had played onstage. From what I've been able to
piece together from reviews of his shows, he is going
back: from the most recent to the next and the next and
so on."
The reporter had asked more questions, had made more
superficial and phantasmagoric assumptions, until Dr.
Charles Tedrow had concluded the interview forcibly.
But even now, as he sat across from Richard Becker in
the quiet office, he knew that almost nothing the
reporter had conceived could rival what Becker had done
to himself.
"Tell me, Doctor," the florid, bombastic traveling
salesman who was Richard Becker asked, "what the hell's
new down the line?"
"It's really very quiet, these days, Ted," the physician
replied. Becker had been this way for two months now:
submerged in the part of Ted Rogat, the loudmouth
philandering protagonist of Chayefsky's The Wanderer.
For six months before that he had been Marco Polo, and
before that the nervous, slack-jawed and incestuous son
of The Glass of Sadness.
"Hell, I remember one little chippie in, where was it,
oh yeah, hell yes! It was K.C., good old K.C. Man, she
was a goodie! You ever been to K.C., Doc? I was a
drummer in nylons when I worked K.C. Jeezus, lemme tell
ya—"
It was difficult to believe the man who sat on the other
side of the table was an actor. He looked the part, he
spoke the part, he was Ted Rogat, and Dr. Tedrow
would catch himself from time to time contemplating the
release of this total stranger who had wandered into
Richard Becker's cell.
He sat and listened to the story of the flame-hipped
harlot in Kansas City whom Ted Rogat had picked up in an
Armenian restaurant, and seduced with promises of
nylons. He listened to it, and knew that whatever else
was true of Richard Becker, this creature of many faces
and many lives, he was no saner than the day he had
killed that girl. After eighteen months in the
sanitarium, he was going back, back, back through his
acting career, and re-playing the roles; but never once
coming to grips with reality.
In the plight and the flight of Richard Becker, Dr.
Charles Tedrow saw a bit of himself, of all men, of his
times and the thousand illnesses to which mortal flesh
was heir.
He returned Richard Becker, as well as Ted Rogat, to the
security and tiny world of room 16.
Two months later he brought him back and spent a highly
interesting three hours discussing group therapy with
Herr Doktor Ernst Loebisch, credentials from the Munich
Academy of Medicine and the Vienna Psychiatric Clinic.
Four months after that, Dr. Tedrow got to know the surly
and insipid Jackie Bishoff, juvenile delinquent and hero
of Streets of Night.
And almost a year later—to the day—Dr. Tedrow sat in his
office with a bum, a derelict, a rheumy-eyed and
dissipated vagabond who could only be the skid from
Sweet Miracles, Richard Becker's first triumph,
twenty-four years before.
What Richard Becker might look like, without camouflage,
in his own body, Tedrow had no idea. He was, now, to the
most agonizing scrutiny, the seedy old tramp with the
dirt caked into the sagged folds of his face.
"Mr. Becker, I want to talk to you."
Hopelessness shined out of the old bum's eyes. There was
no answer.
"Listen to me, Becker. Please listen to me, if you're in
there somewhere, if you can hear me. I want you to
understand what I'm about to say; it's very important."
A croak, cracked and forced, came from the bum's lips,
and he mumbled, "I need'a drink, yuh go' uh drink fuh
me, huh …"
Tedrow leaned across, his hand shaking as he took the
old bum's chin in his palm, and held it fixed, staring
into this stranger's eyes. "Now listen to me, Becker.
You've got to hear me. I've gone through the files, and
as far as I can tell, this was the first part you ever
played. I don't know what will happen! I don't know what
form this syndrome will take after you've used up all
your other lives. But if you can hear me, you've got to
understand that you may be approaching a crisis point in
your—in your life."
The old bum licked cracked lips.
"Listen! I'm here, I want to help you, I want to
do something for you, Becker. If you'll come out
for an instant, just a second, we can establish contact.
It's got to be now or—"
He left it hanging. He had no way of knowing if-what.
And as he lapsed into silence, as he released the bum's
chin, a strange alteration of facial muscles began, and
the derelict's countenance shifted, subtly ran like
mercury, and for a second he saw a face he recognized.
From the eyes that were no longer red-rimmed and
bloodshot, Dr. Charles Tedrow saw intelligence peering
out.
"It sounds like fear, Doctor," he said.
And, "Goodbye, once more."
Then the light died, the face shifted once again, and
the physician was staring once more at the empty face of
a gutter-bred derelict.
He sent the old man back to room 16. Later that day, he
had one of his male nurses take in an 89-cent bottle of
muscatel.
· · · · ·
"Speak up, man! What in the name of God is going on out
there?"
"I—I can't explain it, Dr. Tedrow, but you'd
better—you'd better get out here right away. It's—it's,
oh, Jee-zus!"
"What is it? Stop crying, Wilson, and tell me
what the hell is wrong!"
"It's, it's number 16 … it's …"
"I'll be there in twenty minutes. Keep everyone away
from that room. Do you understand? Wilson? Do you
understand me?"
"Yessir, yessir. I'll—oh Christ-hurry up, Doc …"
He could feel his pajama pants bunched around his knees,
under his slacks, as he floored the pedal of the ranch
wagon. The midnight roads were jerky in the windshield
and the murk that he raced through was almost too
grotesque to be a fact of nature.
When he slewed the car into the drive, the gatekeeper
threw the iron barrier back almost spastically. The
ranch wagon chewed gravel, sending debris back in a wide
fan, as Tedrow plunged ahead. When he screeched to a
halt before the sanitarium, the doors burst open and the
senior attendant, Wilson, raced down the steps.
"This way, th-this way, Doctor Te—"
"Get out of my way, you idiot, I know which direction!"
He shoved Wilson aside, and strode up the steps and into
the building.
"It started about an hour ago … didn't know what was
happ—"
"And you didn't call me immediately? Ass!"
"We just thought, we just thought it was another one of
his stages, you know how he is …"
Tedrow snorted in disgust and threw off his topcoat as
he made his way rapidly down the corridor to the section
of the sanitarium that housed the restraining rooms.
As they came into the annex, through the heavy glass-portaled
door, he heard the scream for the first time.
In that scream, in that tormented, pleading, demanding
and hopelessly lost tremor there were all the sounds of
fear he had ever heard. In that voice he heard even his
own voice, his own soul, crying out for something.
For an unnamable something, as the scream came again.
"Give me some light!"
Another world, another voice, another life. Some evil
empty beseeching from a corner of a dust-strewn
universe. Hanging there timelessly, vibrant in colorless
agony. A million tired and blind stolen voices all
wrapped into that one howl, all the eternal sadnesses
and losses and pains ever known to man. It was all
there, as the good in the world was sliced open and left
to bleed its golden fluid away in the dirt. It was a
lone animal being eaten by a bird of prey. It was a
hundred children crushed beneath iron treads. It was one
good man with his entrails in his blood-soaked hands. It
was the soul and the pain and the very vital fiber of
life, draining away, without light, without hope,
without succor.
"Give me some light!"
Tedrow flung himself at the door and threw back the bolt
on the observation window. He stared for a long and
silent moment as the scream trembled once more on the
air, weightlessly, transparently, tingling off into
emptiness. He stared, and felt the impact of a massive
horror stifle his own cry of disbelief and terror.
Then he spun away from the window and hung there,
sweat-drenched back flat to the wall, with the last
sight of Richard Becker he would ever hope to see,
burned forever behind his eyes.
The sound of his sobs in the corridor held the others
back. They stared silently, still hearing that
never-spoken echo reverberating down and down and down
the corridors of their minds:
Give me some light!
Fumbling beside him, Tedrow slammed the observation
window shut, and then his arm sank back to his side.
Inside room 16, lying up against the far wall, his back
against the soft passive padding, Richard Becker looked
out at the door, at the corridor, at the world, forever.
Looked out as he had in his first moment of life: purely
and simply.
Without a face. From his hairline to his chin, a blank,
empty, featureless expanse. Empty. Silent. Devoid of
sight or smell or sound. Blank and faceless, a creature
God had never deigned to bless with a mirror to the
world. His Method now was gone.
Richard Becker, actor, had played his last part, and had
gone away, taking with him Richard Becker, a man who had
known all the sights, all the sounds, all the life of
fear.
The End |
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Copyright © 1962 by Harlan Ellison.
Revised, copyright © 1977 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed,1990, 2005
by Harlan Ellison. Reprinted by arrangement with, and permission
of, the Author and the Author's Agent, Richard Curtis
Associates, Inc., New York. All rights reserved. Harlan Ellison
is a registered trademark of The Kilimanjaro Corporation. |
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