THE NUMBER YOU HAVE REACHED - THOMAS M. DISCH

Still in his twenties, Thomas M. Disch is successful enough as a free-lance writer that he can afford to travel and sightsee around the world, from Mexico to Marrakech to Dachau to Istanbul. This story of the obsession and guilt of the last man on Earth was written and published in England, but perhaps the sights of Dachau had their effect on it too.

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After the boredom had gone on long enough, the panic set in. This time it came midway through Volume 6 of Toynbee. Usually a long swim would have taken care of things, but now it was winter. He went out on the veranda in his tee-shirt and let the wind from the lake rasp at his exposed flesh.

He looked at the city buried in snow, and the great unblemished whiteness of the scene made his heart ache with the sense of his own loss and because it was so beautiful, too. He grasped the balcony rail, and the cold metal pricked the warm skin of his palms.

His muscles ached to be used. His flesh needed the touch of other flesh. His mind needed to come up against another mind. He had to talk.

He hadn't realized how hard he had been straining on the iron rail until he had torn it loose from the two pins that moored it to the cantilevered slab of the balcony. He let go of the railing and watched it drop the fourteen stories to the street into soft, powdery snow.

The next day was better. He was back under control. Of course he had had to put Toynbee away for the time being. He exercised, carrying up heavy boxes of books and canned food from the lobby. He took a mental count of the steps. From the lobby to the second floor there were eighteen steps, and fifteen between all the other floors.

One hundred and ninety-eight, all told. It upset him that the total figure stopped fust two short of two hundred. As soon as he had reached, panting, the last step, his mind would continue, independently; one hundred and ninety-nine, two hundred.

Once all the parcels had been put away, he began to clean up. As usual, he had let the apartment become very messy. He swept out all the rooms, taking the sweepings to the veranda and releasing them into the still fierce wind.

Then, in old, old clothes, down on his hands and knees, he scrubbed the wooden floors, bearing down with both hands on the stiff brush, counting the strokes. Then he waxed the floorboards till they gleamed. He dusted and waxed the furniture and tried to do the windows too, but the Windex froze on the cold glass.

When he was very tired, he tried to read again--a mystery, no more than that--but the only thing that interested him, the thing to which his eyes forever returned, was the number on the corner of each page. The book was 160 pages, from which he subtracted the number of the page he was on in order to arrive at the amount that there was still left for him to read.

At about one o'clock he laid the book down and listened to the lake wind slamming at the windows and, beneath that, the demure ticking of the eight-day clock. That night he dreamed that he was making love to his wife, who was dead.

He heard the phone ring, and for a while he only watched it, but a phone that is ringing looks just the same as a phone that is not ringing. At last he lifted the receiver and held it to his ear. "Hello!" he said, and then: "Heltor

"Hello," she replied, very matter-of-factly.

"I didn't think the phones were working," he said. It was a silly thing to say on such an occasion, but he had avoided a sanctimonious Thank heaven! or the bathos of Speak to me, say anything, but speak to me!

"It's the automation, I guess. Lots of things are still working, if you pay your bills/*

"I like your voice," he said. "I like the sound of it."

"It's a husky voice," she said.

"It reminds me of my wife."

"Was she beautiful?"

"Lidia was very beautiful. She was the Homecoming Queen at U.C.L.A."

"What were you?"

"I went to another school."

"That doesn't answer my question."

He blushed; she was so blunt. "I was the captain of the football team. What else?" He laughed deprecatingly. "If you'd like, I'll show you my picture in the yearbook."

"Over the telephone?'* This, in a very cool tone.

"Won't you come here?"

"Not yet."

"Why not?" Tears welled up into his eyes. His stomach knotted, suddenly, as though the illimitable loss of these last years were concentrated in that single reply.

"I don't know you well enough," she explained.

"How do you know me at all? How did you know to call me here? Do you know what I think? I don't even think you exist! I'm just imagining you."

"But you'll still talk to me, won't you?"

He made no reply.

"If you like," she said, "I'll talk to you. I've been watching you for a long time, actually. The day before yesterday I saw you out on your veranda. You stood there such a long time in just your tee-shirt that it made me feel cold. Your name is Justin Holt. I saw that on your mailbox, and, of course, then I realized who you were."

"What's your name?"

"You're that astronaut. I read all about you at the library/''

"Yeah, that's who I am, all right. I'll bet you haven't even bothered to think up a name for yourself. Or a background either."

"I'm not going to tell you my name. You wouldn't believe it. But I grew up in Winnetka, outside Chicago, just like your darling Lidia, and I went to college at Bennington, though I wasn't Homecoming Queen. I majored in Home Ec."

"You can't do that at Bennington. It's not that kind of college."

She giggled. "I'm making fun of you, Justin. Because I know Lidia studied Home Ec at U.C.L.A. It was in the wedding announcement in the Tribune. God, but a person must be dumb to do that. I can't stand dumb people. Can you, Justin?"

His hand tightened around the receiver. "How do you know--" But he broke off, realizing his dilemma: either she was real and could not have known these things about Lidia--or he was imagining her, in which case anything she said about Lidia, or himself, came from his own mind.

"I can read between the lines," she said, as though sensing his doubt. "I've seen a lot of Lidias."

"And a lot of my sort, too?"

"Oh no, Justin. You're unique. You're famous. And you're handsome. Did you know that women think you're very handsome? And you're a genius, of course. You have an I.Q. of 198." Her laughter had a cruel animal resonance.

"Why'd you say that?" he asked, sure that the phantasm had betrayed itself for what it was.

"Why not? One number's as good as another."

"Then dial another number," he said, and hung up. Abruptly, he had ceased believing in her. He had always feared that it would end like this, in madness. His exercises in stoicism, his restraint, all his efforts to conserve himself had come at last to nothing.

He drank, sitting cross-legged on the splendid polar bear rug in the middle of the living room. He drank Chivas Regal from the bottle and ate English water biscuits from a tin.

When he woke the phone was ringing again. There were two mice in the biscuit tin, eating crumbs. They paid no attention to the ringing of the phone, but when he got up, they scuttered away. He picked up the phone. It wasn't morning yet. Perhaps it had only just turned dark.

"Hello," she said. "This is Justine."

He laughed, and a stabbing pain tore through his head.

"I told you you wouldn't believe me, but what did you want me to do--lie? It wouldn't have been hard to invent some more probable name. Like Mary. What do you think of Mary? Or Lidia? That sounds about as common as dishwater."

"Why do you have to pick on her?"

"Maybe I'm jealous."

"Well, you don't have to be."

"You didn't really love her, did you? You married her just the way you joined the Army, just the way you got yourself picked to go to Mars. That's all you cared for--to get to Mars. And you married Lidia because her father would help you get there."

"Listen, Justine" he said, "this is getting tiresome. I don't need you to call and be my guilty conscience. If you're a real person, prove it. But, right now, I don't know a thing about you."

"That's not all you don't know about. What about the millions--"

"The millions?" he interrupted her.

"--of dead," she said. "All of them dead. Everyone dead. Because of you and the others like you. The football captains and the soldiers and all the other heroes."

"I didn't do it. I wasn't even here when it happened. You can't blame me."

"Well, I am blaming you, baby. Because if you'd been ordered to, you would have done it. You'd do it now--when there's just the two of us left. Because somewhere deep in your atrophied soul you want to."

"You'd know that territory better than me. You grew up there."

"You think I don't exist? Maybe you think the others didn't exist either? Lidia--and all the millions of others."

"It's funny you should say that."

She was ominously quiet.

He went on, intrigued by the novelty of the idea. "That's how it feels in space. It's more beautiful than anything else there is. You're alone in the ship, and even if you're not alone you can't see the others. You can see the dials and the millions of stars on the screen in front of you and you can hear the voices through the earphones, but that's as far as it goes. You begin to think that the others don't exist."

"You know what you should do?" she said.

^What?"

"Go jump in the lake."

"That isn't funny."

There was no reply. The dial tone buzzed in his ear. She had hung up on him this time. He went to look out the windows at the city, buried under the tons of snow that would not be removed, but the window panes were beaded with the frozen droplets of Windex.

He picked them off with his fingernails, one by one, counting them. When he got to one hundred and ninety-eight, the rage boiled up into one vicious gesture and he slammed his fist into the pane.

The cold air rushed in on him, and he made a sound deep in his throat, beyond the sound of simple pain; it was the sound of an animal at bay.

The furnace in the building was automatic. The telephone was automatic, as long as he paid his bills, and the bank that paid his bills was automatic as long as it received his paychecks, and his paychecks came automatically through the mails from the Federal Government.

The entire city was run by automatons, which, one by one, ran down as the fuel or the instructions or the repairs failed them. Even the bombs had been automatic. And the spaceship that had taken him and his companions to Mars and then taken him back, they had been automatic too.

Sometimes he felt automatic, though as an astronaut he was uniquely equipped to endure his isolation, and he had up to this point kept from panicking too badly.

Even in that first week, driving up from the Cape, he had not betrayed the protective mask of smooth inex-pressiveness (which he had first consciously assumed in boot camp, but which, unconsciously, temperamentally, he might almost have been born with).

Of course, it had helped that the automatic street cleaners had cleared away the dead bodies, and that on highways the stalled cars had been removed.

At the time he had reflected that it was strange, it was really quite remarkable that he had been a soldier, an officer in the United States Army, for twelve years and he had never seen a dead body.

Naturally, he did eventually find some that hadn't been disposed of. Lidia, for instance, seemed to have been sleeping when the bombs came. She had been in bed, in any case. The body hadn't decayed, for the bombs had been thorough in eliminating life. The vermin had only begun to reappear recently, and God knew where they had come from. The body had just sort of fallen apart.

She kept trying to telephone him, but when he answered the only thing she would say was that he should kill himself since he had killed everyone else. He pointed out that he hadn't killed her, Justine. "Oh, but I don't exist!" It did no good to be reasonable with her, so at last he stopped answering the phone.

He would sit in the living room on the sofa with a book in his lap and count the rings.

Sometimes she would let it go on interminably and he would leave the house and find a bench that faced the frozen marina.

He had decided to brush up on his math. He had forgotten almost everything he had learned in college. The necessity of ignoring the cold made it easier, in a way, to concentrate. When he was really involved with his studies, nothing else mattered.

Or, when the wind off the lake was too strong, he might walk down the snowbound streets, past the numbered buildings, exercising his memory, for this was, after all, the city he had grown up in. He found that he could not remember many of the particulars of his boyhood days.

Memories that he had thought secure had, through neglect, diminished almost to vanishing. So that, sometimes, trudging through the snow, he would just count his footsteps. It seemed that he might, if he kept counting long enough, come up with just the right number, and it would count for something.

But, while he waited for that number to turn up, he knew enough about math to be entertained and even instructed. Consider the number 90. 90 was the sum of two squares: the square of 9 and the square of 3.

It was also the product of 9 and 10, whereas the product of 9 and 11 was 99. And twice 99 was 198! The numbers on either side of 198 were both primes: 197 and 199. The possibilities latent in numbers were infinite--literally, infinite.

But behind this growing passion for numbers there was an unresolved anguish, a moral restlessness, a sense of betrayal--though a betrayal of whom he could not have said. One would not exactly have called it guilt.

It was something that Justine had aroused in him. Perhaps there was a sort of justice in her demand that he should die. There was at least no reason for him to survive. He had done nothing to deserve to be thus singled out.

He had been bundled into an automated rocket with two other men and been shipped, like so much cargo, to another planet where he had stayed only long enough to witness the accidental deaths of his companions, and then he had been shunted back to his starting point.

It had been the merest coincidence that in the interval the buttons had been pushed that set into motion the automated engines of destruction that in their own way possessed the secret of life and death: the neutron bombs.

Sunset especially terrified him. He was not afraid of the dark, but at sunset he had to be indoors. He would go into the kitchen, where there were no windows, and close the door behind him. After sunset, he could go anywhere in the apartment.

The counting had become a compulsion for him. From the very first day he had had a sense of what it might become. He counted the books on his shelves. He counted his own pulse. He counted off seconds by his watch. He tried'to Veep track of the ticking of the eight-day clock in the living room.

He lay awake in bed for hours before he could sleep, counting.

One night he heard a voice in his dreams singing the nursery song about the clock:

Hickory-dickory-dock, The mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one. The mouse did run. Hickory-dickory-dock. The phone rang. Before he was quite awake he answered it. "Please," she said, "listen to me.

I'm sorry for what I said. I didn't really mean it. Don't you know that? It's been my fault from the very first. You won't do that--you won't do what I said? God, I was so afraid you wouldn't answer."

She rattled on incoherently. He felt as though he were at a great remove from the voice at the other end of the wire, as though he were eavesdropping or as though she had dialed his number by mistake.

"Can I come over there now? I should have done that right at the beginning, but I was afraid. I didn't know you. Can I come there now?"

He didn't know what to answer. What could he say to someone who didn't exist? The bedroom, he noticed, was drenched in moonlight. It streamed in through the thin muslin curtains and lay on the bed, as tangible as buttermilk.

"What?" he said, abstractly.

"But perhaps I should decide it by myself alone. Is that what you think? You're right. I will come. I'll be there in ... in an hour. Or, at the very most, an hour and a half." She hung up.

He looked at the clock. I have ninety minutes, he thought. Five thousand four hundred seconds. He began to count them.

It was hard to do a number a second once you were past one hundred, so when the knock came at the door, he was only at two thousand six hundred and seventy. He tried to ignore her knocking, as he had ignored the ringing of the phone for so many days.

"Please, Justin. Please let me in."

"No," he explained carefully. "If I let you in now, I can't turn back. I'll have admitted that you're real."

"I am real, Justin. You can feel me, you can look at me. Oh please, Justin!"

"That's just what I'm afraid of. I'll never know whether I haven't gone completely mad at last."

"Justin, I love you."

"You do understand, don't you? You can see why it's impossible?"

"I won't leave this door. I'll stay here and when you come out--"

"I won't come out, Justine. If you had only come to me at the beginning--instead of phoning. Now it's too late. How can I believe in you now? It would be despicable to relent now, a weakness. Unforgivable. I couldn't stand that, and you could never respect me."

There was no reply from behind the door,

"Go away," he said.

He knew that she was waiting there, baiting her trap with silence. He went out on the veranda and looked at the snow-laden city. It seemed almost brighter in moonlight than under the full glare of the sun.

I'll jump when I've counted ten, he told himself. He counted to ten, but he didn't jump. If he went back to the door, he knew she'd be there--or, at least, that he would think she was there. He had no choice. And wasn't this what she had asked of him? Wasn't this, almost, justice?

He counted to twenty, to fifty, to one hundred. The numbers had a calming eflFect. They made sense. Each number was just one more than the number that had preceded it, and the next number was one more than that.

He counted as far as one hundred and ninety-eight. Suddenly, the knocking at the door was renewed, louder than ever. He let himself go and his body dropped the fourteen stories to the street into soft, powdery snow.