* * * *
Orbit 9
By Damon Knight
* * * *
Josephine Saxton HEADS AFRICA TAILS AMERICA
Leon E. Stover WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS TOO MUCH
Kris Neville DOMINANT SPECIES
Gene Wolfe THE TOY THEATER
Robert Thurston STOP ME BEFORE I TELL MORE
Joanna Russ GLEEPSITE
James Sallis BINARIES
Lee Hoffman and LOST IN THE MARIGOLDS
Robert E. Toomey, Jr.
Kit Reed ACROSS THE BAR
Vernor Vinge THE SCIENCE FAIR
W. Macfarlane THE LAST LEAF
R. A. Lafferty WHEN ALL THE LANDS POUR OUT AGAIN
James Sallis ONLY THE WORDS ARE DIFFERENT
Kate Wilhelm THE INFINITY BOX
* * * *
HEADS AFRICA
TAILS AMERICA
In Africa the clouds never cross the sun. Clouds countable changing, racing, dispersing and gathering fill the skies of Africa and yet they never veil the sun. That I read once and believe and the idea attracts me violently. Perpetual sun. Cosmic cosmetic glamorizing protective layer on my grayish hide, sunglasses and bright lipstick, beautiful at a glance. For what enhances the human frame more than color? Deeper than bronze I would bake, for even in England I have achieved miracles of transformation in two days on a withering lawn. And in seven days become bleached beneath the clouds that do most frequently obscure the sun. Yes.
Now when I was in a bar in Greenwich Village, sitting shivering in the heat of a New York August, this because I was wet to the skin with the waters of Washington Square fountains, the temptation to douse myself publicly and thoroughly having proved too great and sudden an onslaught on my sexual mores (and what else would have prompted a woman to wet herself to the skin whilst several hundred hippies in various states of degradation watched and whilst her male companion watched unmoved except for a faint startlement appearing in his otherwise controlled pale eyes), shivering all the more violently because not only was the bar too efficiently air-conditioned so that even the sweat of normal people in the bar dried before it had properly beaded beneath the arm but the man I was listening to spoke of Africa. He did not tell me that the sun never hides behind clouds, he did not mention the weather much at all, but mostly the beautiful scenery in East Africa, most particularly Kenya. I manifested as one born under blazing sun. In any other climate such people shiver. Some poor wretches arrive in England with the sun in their blood and never feel warm again. Though I have not touched the tropics in my feeble wanderings I felt that I had the sun in my blood. I thought: how could my blood congeal with benison continuous?
Outside my window now, in England, the skies are clear, the sun is yellow on the white garden rocks and birds and butterflies are active. Second flowerings occur. Almost November. Exquisite, excellent, and, in case the nights prove cool, the house is centrally heated. Yet my marrow is solid and my breath steams and icicles, crystallizes on the rim of a cup. I sweat rime, I do not bathe but crack open my shell and step out on the shattered fragments, clean, cold. I wept last night and Rhinestones woke me, embedded in my spine, my own tears taken shape, sharp. And my hair, oh that, it is like the winter lawn cutting—did you know that to cut the lawn with the hoar frost on it is good for the grass? Snap and tinkle goes my brush and little fragments that I must remember to look at under a microscope fall conspicuously onto my black-clad shoulders. And my teeth how they ache at contact with water, how the brush scratches and brazes down into the soft nerve with burning cold, how I could scream into the blue handbasin if only I did not fear I should strike the right note and crash it into splinters. And I am menstruating rubies and bloodstones and pink opals. At first I thought it was sacramental wine, it was so thin and clear and mean but it froze solid and lost its odor in the mineral world. So I have to take care of my fingernails and drum up a little warm breath now and again to soften them lest they break away. It is getting harder and harder to breathe warm, it is getting harder and harder to breathe at all.
Africa, you would thaw me out I know. And yet I fear to live in you, your men are far too tempting and I can always resist temptation nowadays, I have learned strength and the consistency of moral fiber and the value of faithfulness, but not without enormous pain. I am a great one for suffering. People have been known to despise me for it, and also, but less often, love me because of that capacity.
It was nice to hear David talk of East Africa.
“Farms of white set in trees, each more perfect than the one before, it was too much for me.”
“Was it David?” I said. And I further enquired how it could be that he lived in squalid New York when the best places in the world were obtainable to him. He had hitchhiked around the entire world, why not go again?
OH HE HAD TO LIVE IN NEW YORK TO KEEP HIS HEAD STRAIGHT
“I see.” And thought that Africa would straighten my head, that it would, and true. Not having at that moment thought about the frustration of seeing a thousand ideal lovers every time one went out to buy a bit of cheese. It would be too much, one’s head would not only grow askew, it would burst, ripe with substances more proper to other body-parts. Thoughts of Africa and of a rather dull party I attended in New York, perhaps the only dull hours I spent there. I am reminded of an African ballet we all went to see many years ago in the North of England. The dancers had blue-painted nipples and excited my senses more than anything had for months. Afterwards in the pub I fell to dreaming of fancy-dress parties in my studio, everyone wearing raffia and blue poster-paint, dancing wildly until Sunday dawn. Aloud I said:
“We’ll definitely have to have an African party.” The place was silenced until they comprehended.
“I thought you said ‘a fuckin’ party’ for a moment.” Perhaps I did, are not such floating fragments on the sea of the unconscious called Freudian ships?
“Oh David, tell me about it,” I said, shuddering so hard I could not hold my glass. “Did you go to the Mountains of the Moon?”
“Yes I did, of course I did, and the Great Rift Valley.” And he told me of the high craters set about with giant weeds and sitting numerous on the ground dappled panthers naked and slithery in the moonlight; plateaux unexplored and the metallic light that would not keep the head straight.
Oh Jesus Christ I could have wept into my beer.
“You are shivering,” said Tom who is an observant fellow, he being a professional writer.
“Yes, I was watching my limbs shaking, it is interesting, I cannot think why I shake quite so much, I am perfectly relaxed.”
He left the bar to go and purchase a secondhand chair which later proved too large to go into his apartment without removing the door which might in turn ruin the doorbell connection. I thought of him lonely and unvisited, sitting in his apartment in the chair, wondering if the chair had been a jinx on all his friendships. The fact of him having a telephone spoiled that joke, oh surely, they would call him on the phone? But if all one’s means of communication fail, do people come and tell you about it?
It is nice to arrive at a destination and discover that it is the one place on the planet that will KEEP THE HEAD STRAIGHT. I found that New York was that very destination to me once I had taken a few deep breaths and looked around. I loved it, and strangely, it loved me back. I felt blessed walking the streets, I felt warm and alive and I could find my tongue, it was like being reborn, I had an answer for everyone and I also had things to say from myself. Whoever that was.
There was a hippopotamus in a pond on a cold day, and we approached it eagerly and stood amazed as it explained to us about itself. Our children were entranced that a hippo could talk. Its voice was very deep and very slow and it opened its mouth with apparent difficulty, slowly and muddily enunciating its likes and dislikes, the name of its natural habitat (Africa) and a warning about its powerful jaws which were capable of breaking a man into two pieces, although it seldom did so. Oh, hippo from Africa, are you not cold to the bone in that English slime? Where is your mate? When do you mate? How often? Do you wallow in your cool distress and groan and grunt for a suitable mate, do you sublimate your sexual energies by eating salted peanuts thrown by the crowd, producing instead of orgasms enormous stinking farts? Do you long for the sun to bake a crust of mud onto you, do you wish you could jump into the fountains of Washington Square on a hot summer afternoon and get wet through whilst the Americans watched? A hippopotamus in the fountains, what a gas, natural gas, it smells suspiciously like sublimation, exhibitionism. No, no, it is just the hot weather, anyone with the sense would do it, I am now so cool in the breeze it is a delight to be alive. To add to our comforts, let’s have a beer in a bar.
“You are shivering,” said Tom who is observant.
“Y-y-yes,” I said and made no further rejoinder although I am observant too, I have swiveling eyes that stand up above the water. David was cold also, he had followed me into the fountains, but either he had not got so extremely soaking wet as I or Africa still warmed his blood. Both. Both.
The sun has gone, great banks of late October cloud obscure him, a wind whips up the rose petals and lawn trimmings, if I go outside I will get motes of dust in my eyes and that will spoil the shine of the ice. Refrigerated amber beads with dust on them, could anything be more sad?
Had I whole strings of such beads I would wear them around my neck and go and live in a corner of Washington Square, and watch the hippos splash. Or I would trade them with the tribes of East Africa, tell them of the magic properties of frozen human eyes, make with the eyes at the lovely inhabitants of my mind and bare my sparse bosom to the burning sun.
As winter approaches I think more and more of hibernation. I store salt peanuts under the rather hard mattress and I have cunningly replaced the stuffing of one of my pillows with little cubes of nourishing vitaminized fudge more normally used to take away the appetites of fat people. I stay in bed later every morning and go to bed earlier every night. I am Ursa the female bear, and I am not pregnant with cub either, I shall not have to wake in January to give birth or anything sordid like that. It is very pleasant to curl the paws around the ears and draw up the haunches, hear the prairie winds like a mistral fade into the distance with its popping of corks and murmur of friendly waiters and flap of white linen and oh such lively talk. Big Bear pulls on cowboy boots and crunches over New York snows, twenty below and a girl in every taxi. He never went to Africa, he went to Paris and caught dysentery, came to England huge and shivering and used our bathroom facilities about thirty-nine times although I was not counting, just marveling that anyone could be so brought down and yet have such verbal energy, and worrying also in case we should run out of toilet tissue before he departed depleted. Oh Ursus but I could have comforted you by snuggling into your massive back just where it aches and taking over the task of stroking your mustaches for a while, so that you could sweat in peace in that brightly colored nursery room where we put you to sleep, and put out the light in your eyes and I would have shared my store of peanuts with you, we could have stayed there all winter and slept all through our dormant sexuality, snuffling our way to the bathroom at increasingly infrequent intervals and I could have offered you a square of the vitamin fudge, growling:
THIS REMOVES THE APPETITE AND KEEPS THE HEAD STRAIGHT
Snuffle snuffle growl pad.
“Mummy there’s a bear in my bed.”
“Good heavens, dear, are you sure. Come with mummy and we shall frighten him away.”
Great Ursus, named Marc, left us a bottle of pink champagne. We had meant to drink it all together but what with the dysentery and his desire for icewater and what with Colin’s ulcer trouble I wasn’t going to drink it all myself was I? It lay in the fridge until Saturday when we opened it and gave some to the children who sneezed and giggled and went straight off into strange dreams and Colin swore it didn’t affect him at all and I felt instantly drunk.
MY HEAD WAS FAR FROM STRAIGHT
I wept into the bubbles and said some horrible things and went to bed by myself and curled up, first checking on the winter food supplies and that was when my temperature started to drop even lower. Hence the sharp pangs of Rhinestones and the banging about in the night when Colin came to bed.
“Someone’s been eating peanuts in bed.”
“Don’t be silly, I never touch them, you know nuts give me the wind.”
Well maybe we are going to go and live in Africa. Yes, we’ll definitely have to have an African safari.
“Bearer, have you got my portable bath, my portable handbasin and my portable toilet?”
“Yassuh mam.”
“Have you got my portable electric typewriter, my portable vacuum cleaner and my portable dining-room table?”
“Yassuh mam.”
“Have you got my portable Washington Square fountains, my portable food-blender and my portable central-heating system?”
“Yessuh mam.”
“Have you got my portable television set, my portable lawnmower and my portable double bed?”
“Yassuh mam.”
“Jesus Christ, you must be so tired. Put down the bed and get into it alongside me.”
“Mam, you know you got Rhinestones in your bed?”
“Yes, I’m saving them for the winter.”
“You should meet my cousin, he works down in Kimberley.”
Goodness gracious me, how loudly these tribesmen snore!
It will be cool this evening so I shall light a fire. But such a dangerous occupation for one so deeply frozen, what if part of me thaws, I shall drip onto the carpet and besides, I should not be so active with my low blood pressure, I might damage my brain cells and then:
MY HEAD WILL NOT BE STRAIGHT
At a party in New York there was a lady who had written a book on how to grow avocado pits. I have an avocado plant eight feet tall as it happens so I had no use for her book but I noticed how apt it was when some gallant commented on her appearance.
“Like a young Karen Blixen.”
“Oh she wrote so exquisitely about Africa,” said both David and Tom in the air-conditioned bar, and outside in the New York sun they spoke of her writings and I said I had admired her too but it had been many years before. I could visualize the coffee plantations in flower and knew that I wanted to travel to Africa and, God help me, write about it afterwards!
Well, I got the fire lighted, the coals caught up and reflections of hot light glimmer in my brass and copper, could anything be more English? We had trouble with the fire the night Marc stayed, he was very interested in the small flame I managed to induce from the bucketful of nutty slack, damn the coalman for delaying delivery. Marc knelt down and peered into the tiny fire as if he might see his future there, I recalled an uncle on a hearthrug long ago growling for me to ride on the bear.
“Again uncle bear, again, let’s do it again.”
“Not just now dear, I seem to have caught the dysentery.”
And like all well-trained good little girls I did not cry and howl selfishly, throw myself on the rug in a tantrum or bite his leg but went into the kitchen and chipped off some crystals of ice that had formed round my eyes, dropped them into a glass tumbler and decorated it with a slice of fresh lemon and returned with it to Marc who thought that he would never see a real glass of icewater in England. Oh but it is a country full of marvels that Americans would never expect.
The conversation just then was about Tarzan and the myth of the free wildman and all that crap. I said to Colin:
“Well why are you so damned keen on living in Africa and swinging in trees in municipal parks whenever you get the chance if you aren’t still sold on Tarzan?” I was sorry I’d said it the moment I realized I had said it, I had hurt his dream of Africa. But not half so much as he will hurt mine.
And my temperature is going down still, everything is getting slower and slightly distorted, time has less and less influence on me, only yesterday I had the dinner ready at four in the afternoon being under the misapprehension that it was well after six and time the children were fed.
“But mummy we’ve only just had lunch.”
“Have you dear, I didn’t notice, I was asleep in bed.”
Marc is asleep in bed when Tom rings him in the middle of the night. By a certain tone of voice Marc can tell that he is in for a long conversation. I wonder what kind of a problem it is that could keep Tom talking for an hour or more in the middle of the night? If I lived in New York would he call me up with his problems? It does not seem too likely, all the signs indicate that Tom and I will never have a really intimate friendship, the passkey to that requires something more than mere admiration of his work and a personal attraction, and whatever it is, I do not think I have it. One thing I do have of Tom’s is an old cap. But maybe the things he discusses with Marc are not so much personal problems. Maybe he wants advice on how to get a secondhand double bed into his apartment, he has been obliged to sleep downstairs in the vestibule these last two nights, it won’t even go into the lift. If someone rings him in the middle of the night he cannot hear the phone.
“Are you out of bed right now?” asks Marc sleepily.
“Yes, I was too hot to sleep tonight anyway so I stayed in my apartment with a lot of friends.”
“Have they any ideas on how to get the bed into the apartment?”
“I daren’t ask them, I’m not intimate enough with them to approach the question of beds in apartments.” Together they laugh at the joke. It is like when Tom and I saw two old negroes in the Bowery fighting desperately with their crutches. Tom just about broke up laughing, a strange, high, utterly delighted and slightly diabolical laugh. I felt very schmaltzy in my amusement by comparison. Which only goes to show that one must not compare oneself with writers like Tom, especially as one hardly knows who they are, you have to be careful whom you mix with, psychosis is more contagious than German measles and can also cause a woman to give birth to blind monsters. I know how easily caught are curses and psychoses, I can remove such things from people by begging an article of their clothing and wearing it in public. I have a cupboard full of old clothes and a closet full of succubi in alcohol and people tell me that I am uncommunicative these days. They ask me why I have had the phone taken out. To save expense and interruption, I reply. Interruption? Yes, I’m hibernating.
Who said Tom was psychotic, I didn’t, I only said he might be, anyone might be, these days you never know what you are talking to, do you? Just because he did not invite you to dinner, will not discuss things with you, does not exert himself to make your weird little existence more fabulous whenever he gets the opportunity? Don’t talk to me like that, the truth is, I’m jealous as hell of his magnificent tattoos and his capacity for riding a powerful motorbike. I can’t ride a motorbike, I have tried but I fall off. Too unstable you see. It’s going round bends that’s dangerous, and you also have to know your way back.
“Do you think you would like it in Africa?” asks David who is Tom’s friend from way back. No, he did not ask me that, nobody asked me that, they don’t care whether I would like it in Africa or not, it doesn’t affect them at all. But Marc had a dream of Mombasa once, and that seemed like a sparkling coincidence if ever there was one. As a student of Jung I am interested in synchronicity, being unable to explain certain series of coincidences. I turned to Jung as always, for he is The Philosopher for the Next Hundred Years, and I do not like to be left behind. It was a hell of a coincidence that Marc was visiting England and I lived there. It could be nothing but synchronicity at work that Marc was going to Paris and so was I. It could be nothing but a complete balls-up on Jung’s part that my trip was canceled and Marc went traipsing around the Bois de Something-or-other taking photographs of American exiles who used the slang of fifteen years ago.
It must be synchronicity that I live here and now, have just lighted a fire of coals in preparation for a cozy evening and am about to cook sausages and eggs and bacon for tea, it being Monday and no cold meat in the fridge. A friend came yesterday and stayed for dinner even though it was the middle of the afternoon—”Well if it really is only four you have time to stay,” I said and between us we ate all the roast lamb except for some scraps which Colin made into sandwiches. I hate making sandwiches, the fillings always elude the bread.
I CANNOT KEEP MY BREAD STRAIGHT
I lay in bed the night before last and I started to swell. I gradually expanded until I filled all the bed and Colin began to moan and snore in his sleep and I heaved to accommodate my newly enormous body, and he would have fallen onto the floor except the covers must have been well tucked in. My tongue got enormous, it grew at first at a greater rate than my mouth so I had to open my jaws, back and back they creaked and grew slowly big enough and squared-off at the front, my top lip and my nose became all one huge mound of flesh. I knew that if I sneezed I would blast the bedcovers right off. My great stumpy arms and legs rested heavily across my vast belly and my little fat ears twitched. My insides began to rumble like a distant volcano. I was almost too heavy to move and everything was incredibly awkward, but somehow I managed to get a hoof under the mattress and scoop out some salted peanuts. Most of them rolled onto the floor but I managed to throw a few into my gaping maw onto the domed tongue and slowly close my hps over them before they rolled into my throat. I chomped noisily, slurp slurp in the otherwise silent night. I thought of creeping downstairs and opening the bottle of champagne but I knew that champagne is meant to be shared amongst friends and I was the only hippopotamus for miles around, and besides it had all been drunk. I called Tom, long distance to New York at a cost of three pounds per minute.
“Tom?”
“Hullo, who’s that?”
“This is Josephine. Tom, can you help me, I have a problem.”
“A problem—you’ve got a problem?” He laughs delightedly, I am pleased to have made contact so easily, perhaps he is telepathic?
“Yes, listen. I can’t get through the door to the toilet and I think I have dysentery.” I listen to his wonderful trilling amusement until I reckon I have spent about twenty pounds sterling and ring off feeling better already. I make the whole room tremble with a wonderful bassoonlike stale-peanut-smelling fart which reaches an impossible vibrating nadir and then rises crescendo like a Swanee whistle and dies away on a series of staccato squeaks and a final flabby silent gust. I am small again, about a hundred and eight pounds, most of that ossified brain cell. I turn over in bed and Colin struggles for air dreaming of Africa. In his sleep he speaks. “Jesus Christ how these native women snore!”
Yes, it had to be synchronicity that made me small and active again by the time my little girl called out in the night.
“Mummy, mummy, the curtains are coming out at me!”
I stagger quickly into her room and growl at the curtains.
“Back, back you rose-patterned poltroons, back I tell you! How dare you frighten my little girl!” She is already asleep, secure in the knowledge that I can deal with anything supernatural. With curtains like ours how could I ever leave her behind, who else has the power to subdue them when they try to attack in the night? A child needs a nice stable mother in this crazy world, someone to reassure her and help
TO KEEP HER HEAD STRAIGHT
So I shan’t be setting off with a rucksack to the wilds of Greenwich Village alone just yet, and if we get to Africa it will be as a family, because in Africa there will not only be a plethora of curses and witches and bogies and so on, there will be snakes and spiders under the pillow, things I can’t deal with but Colin can—you should see him hunt with a slipper—and elephants on the road and crocodiles in the only decent swimming water for miles, I shall be needed to warn and nag and exorcise. We shall go on weekend trips to the Mountains of the Moon and see the shimmering leopards from the safety of our Land Rover, and see the Blixen-type coffee farms and see hippos in their habitat. If we went to America we should go to look at bears I expect. Family trips are like that. In Africa I shall get a magnificent tan and seek out African writers and ask them questions and with luck they might even ask me questions too. I might even write an African novel!
Excuse me, the telephone is ringing.
“Hello, who’s that?”
“This is Marc in New York.”
“Oh how lovely to hear from you, how are you, are you quite better?”
“Oh yes, lots and lots better thankyou Josephine, I’ve been eating avocados and they seem to have an—ah—curative property you know?”
“Oh yes indeed, I’m sure, I have one eight feet tall in my sitting room.”
“You do? I never noticed it! But listen Josephine, I ah—seem to have a problem.”
“You’ve got a problem?” I can hardly stop laughing, I know it is costing him about eight dollars a minute but my laughter is not to be contained by such a consideration. I can dimly make out what he is saying over my noisy mirth.
His bed is full of Rhinestones, he can’t understand it, he cleared them all up only the other night and took them out and gave them away to Chinese people on the street. But here, the bed is full of the damn things again, they are terribly sharp and they are ruining his hibernation.
“Send me your red scarf, I’ll hex them for you,” I say, but the distance between us seems to spoil our usual instant understanding. I cannot seem to communicate properly. And besides I am laughing so much. It is very amusing to be called like this in the middle of the night, especially as we haven’t got a phone.
* * * *
WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS TOO
MUCH COMMUNICATION
The jagged edge of construction showed against the sky. It was lunch time. Thousands of workmen were squatting in the narrow noontime shadow of the wall. Wagon tracks narrowed to infinity in all directions, bringing horse-drawn loads of stone and rice to this dry grassland barren of both. Men in this country can win no living without abandoning their crops and turning to animal breeding. So the First Emperor of China, Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, built the Great Wall at this divide between the steppe and the sown: to keep the sedentary cultivator in, captive to taxation, unfree to join the horsemen of the north.
On signal the men arose and swarmed back to work. As they toiled all along the line, filling the masonry sandwich with rubble, a vibrant shape formed on the distant horizon and instantly expanded in its headlong drive to the foreground: a great white flying charger, ridden by a fierce man in black, who scourged the backs of his trembling vassals as he passed over them. The Emperor at his magic work!
Then suddenly . . . inside a Japanese house . . . people kneeling on the floor . . . bowing to each other . . . kneeling on tatami mats and bowing to each other in a stiff display of lacquered punctilios. . . .
Mane blazing in the wind, the horse landed his imperial Chinese majesty smack in the middle of the departing guests where he dismounted and took up the place of the host standing at the door, hands on his knees, bowing frantically, bowing good-bye, and the film rush flipped to the end and the projection room bloomed bright white.
“Did you see that?”
“Yes, I saw.”
“Well, what do you make of it?”
“What about the others?”
Two reports from Dr. Mochizuki’s hands and a flickering of film again darkened the screen with chiaroscuro movement along the Great Wall. Here and there the image fell apart, revealing flashing vignettes of dainty ceremony: people dressed in kimono, bowing, pouring tea, passing things to each other at forehead level with both hands. The lights came on again at the end of the rush.
“All the recent takes are like that. Ito-san doesn’t keep his mind on his work. Quite literally not!”
“Could be the effect of his removal from the hospital to your laboratory,” ventured Dr. Iwahashi.
“It could be so. I suppose that is why an anthropologist like yourself has been asked to inspect this project.”
“The human element,” explained Iwahashi.
“I’ll show you some of the earlier, good stuff,” Mochizuki offered.
His secretary, ever sensitive to the punctuation of human events, brought in fresh tea and set the cups on the tea poy between the two armchairs.
The earlier film clips poured smoothly onto the screen from the glancing light beams and Mochizuki talked.
“As you can see,” he indicated Ch’in Shih Huang Ti’s enormous, gaudy palace buildings, “there is no limit to the scale we can achieve. That’s why we decided on redoing The Great Wall for a starter.”
The palace buildings stretched out with the infinitude of the wall itself, one for each day of the year, so that the Emperor might keep his enemies guessing his whereabouts.
“Anything Ito-san can imagine we can film. But we discovered another advantage as well,” Mochizuki continued at his nervous pitch. “The human eye selects for more detail in the focus of its attention, omitting structure and even color at the periphery. But the camera lens takes in everything impartially. Tricks of soft focusing or masking with a dynamic frame don’t even begin to approximate the different degrees of visual refinement experienced by the human retina—sharpest on the fovea, loss so on the surrounding macular area, and still less on the peripheral areas.
“Look at this.” Mochizuki wagged a skinny hand at the panorama on the screen. “Photographic realism when we want it. Spectacular enough. But when our dreamer dreams with his inner eye ...”
Mochizuki waited silently until one of the marvels appeared.
“Here now, the mountain scenery. See that? Even when panning. Why, it is like the painting of Gyokudo Kawai in motion!”
“So it is,” breathed Iwahashi respectfully.
There indeed was the style of Japan’s greatest modern painter come to life. As in Kawai’s nature studies, the center of interest glowed with full richness, the rest dropping off to skeletal sketches in black and white. The foveal, macular, and peripheral areas of the dreamer’s vision passed a stand of woods in review. Trees, trunks, and branches slipped in and out of detail and color with natural ease.
“The eyes of the audience are led where our dreamer chooses to lead them,” Mochizuki concluded. Iwahashi was reminded of the offstage benshi that used to explain silent films when he was a boy.
Mochizuki stood up. “Let us please now go to my laboratory.”
* * * *
“Well, there he is. That’s Ito-san,” said Dr. Mochizuki, chairman of Tokyo University’s new Department of Bionic Engineering.
Ito-san, a young catatonic lately released into Mochizuki’s custody from Tokyo Metropolitan Psychiatric Hospital after a year’s confinement, sat cross-legged in one corner of the laboratory, eating his breakfast. His personal nurse, a short dumpy creature, sat on the raised mat-covered platform with him, reading aloud from the day’s shooting script. From time to time she guided her patient’s sluggish chopsticks to his mouth.
A body servant to cook Ito-san’s rice, bathe him, change his clothes, and put him to bed at night was an added expense his family had saved by installing their housemaid in the hospital with him instead of hiring a tsukisoi there.
“They just sent her along when he went rigid,” Dr. Mochizuki said, continuing to brief his visitor. “And that’s the way my talent scouts found him. What do I care what’s wrong with him so long as he sticks to his dreaming?”
Dr. Iwahashi, professor of cultural anthropology, also of Tokyo University, stood admiring ancient Chinese armor and costumes fitted on startlingly lifelike mannequins which were ranged around the laboratory. He stopped revolving his head and cocked it at the tsukisoi.
“So she’s the only one who can get through to him?”
“Hai! The more she read to him the sicker he got.”
“Ah so,” murmured Iwahashi, slightly bowing his portly figure. “Interesting.”
“You are too kind. Sit here, please.”
Mochizuki indicated another pair of overstuffed armchairs. They clashed with the straight metallic lines of the bionic device which stood in the center of the laboratory.
“We’ve rigged up a slave screen to monitor the takes directly,” said Mochizuki.
The two professors sank into their cushions and waited for the televisor in front of them to light up.
The cameraman climbed his stool and focused the camera, the great drums of Fuji Color film arching over his head, on the bioescent screen hidden in the cool depths of the hooded machine. There, the mysterious images would soon flicker into life.
A student assistant brought Dr. Mochizuki a copy of the script attached to a clipboard.
“Today,” he leaned sidewise, “we are founding empire in China—the great battle of 222 B.C. between Ch’in and the last of the undefeated feudal states. Ch’in strikes down the Yangtze and finishes Ch’u—over a million men fielded on both sides.”
“About the time of the Second Punic Wars in the Roman world,” put in Iwahashi.
“I am instructed,” replied Mochizuki, nodding his body forward in his chair. But he added, “I’ve never had the chance to live outside Japan and study foreign things as you have done.” This concealed a barb of sanctimonious aggression flicked at a man set apart by his colleagues for his recent visiting professorship at Harvard.
“Anyway,” Mochizuki went on, “we are attempting to film that big scene. I suppose that’s why you are here.”
Iwahashi said nothing. His provincial-minded colleagues thought of him as a tainted expatriate simply because he had been out of the country for more than six months. But he had won favor with the Ministry of Education for that. And it was they who had sent him to check up on Mochizuki’s work.
Another student assistant extended a black hood that opened out and masked Ito’s face. For the while he saw darkness and rested.
Dr. Mochizuki pointed a finger and yet another student trotted over with the folio of drawings the tsukisoi had put down. She was now slowly massaging her patient’s back.
“Ito-san is very good at keeping track of all this technical detail,” said Mochizuki, flipping through pages of architectural, landscape, and military drawings. “The main actors are all here,” he waved a hand at the mannequins, “dressed in all their changes of costume. Or at least he used to keep everything straight. That’s the whole trouble.”
“Yes, I see,” said Iwahashi. He meant he would see if the. project were worth saving or not. Probably not.
Buddhalike, Ito-san sat on the matting with his face cupped in the hood. He saw a rectangle come out of the darkness in the ratio of 1:2.55. The tsukisoi stopped rubbing his back and nodded to the cameraman.
The slave screen before Iwahashi’s eyes lighted up.
He could see, from the torn edges of the uneven picture, that horses, chariots, rice bags, arms, and other military supplies were being loaded on river barges, ready for dispatch against the enemy down the Yangtze.
But the picture went to pieces almost as soon as it had started.
Dr. Mochizuki stood up and shouted. “Failure! A great failure!”
The cameraman crept out with little hunched-over motions. The tsukisoi came up and asked leave to go to the movies. Mochizuki nodded and sadly watched her go. And Ito-san got up on his knees and made noises sounding like, “So sorry.”
“That’s new,” said Mochizuki.
“Will he be all right?” asked Iwahashi.
“He lives here,” replied Mochizuki. “Let us please quit for the day.”
* * * *
Ito-san had the run of the whole twelfth floor of the new engineering building. He would trouble no one. Dr. Iwahashi knew that. He was famous for his comparative study of American and Japanese mental hospitals. He viewed the hospital ward as a small society, a kind of natural human community as suitable to anthropological fieldwork as any tribal home. In reporting his findings in the Japanese Journal of Psychiatry, before popularizing them in the newspapers, he could not resist delivering the following acid remarks:
We note with some irony that mental patients in America, that self-advertised homeland of democracy, are segregated into different classes as measured by the ruling ethic of social adjustment, which classes are meted out their custodial rewards in terms of placement in violent wards, general wards, or open wards. In Japan, still undemocratic in its feudal infrastructure—a condition our American critics never tire of exposing—mental patients enjoy unmitigated commonality. This equality under one class of confinement is enabled by the fact that we Japanese are so disciplined a race that even when we go mad, we go mad politely, with no disobedience to authority, no unguarded lapse of consideration for others, no unexpected breech of decorum, and no interruption of politesse.
Ito-san was simply installed in the laboratory where the experiment in bionic moviemaking was being conducted. The room contained a gas heater, a hot plate for cooking rice, and a four-mat platform: high-class quarters for a tsukisoi and her patient.
The times the tsukisoi had gone to the movies, which had become increasingly frequent, Ito paged idly through the script or strolled up and down the hallway in his clogs, whose sound of wooden kalumping gave Dr. Mochizuki an easy means of tracking him by ear.
* * * *
After the laboratory failure, the two professors, leading a double procession of loyal students, retired to a small coffee shop across the street from the university grounds. A plaster cast of a Picasso bronze, an owl, sat in the front window as an emblem of the democratic comforts of informal lounging to which the coffee shop invited its seekers, faculty and students alike. Numerous other works of Western art, paintings of English landscapes and statues of naked Greeks, crowded the walls and corners of the tiny room.
The place was filled with male art students, their long hair internationally styled, one to a table, paying for their majestic, foreign-style privacy with demitasse Columbian coffee at the steep price of seventy-five yen a cup. The manager waved away the student at the window table to make room for the herr doktor professors, while the anthropology and engineering majors descended on the rest of the tables and ordered soft drinks. Drs. Iwahashi and Mochizuki drank beer. They looked out on a miniature courtyard, a sentimental rural scene of moss, paddle wheels, and recycled dripping water, glassed-in like a museum diorama and artificially illuminated. From time to time, in orderly succession, according to their class standing, one or two students would migrate over and sit at the professorial table to listen and ask questions.
At one point a person unknown to either one of them sat down and asked Dr. Iwahashi about his newspaper articles on American and Japanese mental hospitals. Did teacher believe, then, that Westernism was a kind of disease that had to be kept out of the motherland in order to preserve Japanese sanity?
“Oh?” asked Dr. Iwahashi coolly, not even turning his head to the speaker. “Are you one of our students?”
The person quickly removed himself and his misplaced communication and returned to a remote table where he nursed with melancholy intensity a German translation of Mao Tse-tung’s poetry.
“Some of these modern students have no manners,” Iwahashi said to his colleague Mochizuki. “Just because I write for the mass media, I get mass man on my tail.”
Mochizuki reached for a peanut and munched it, cupping a hand before his mouth by way of concealing the unlovely sight of teeth and jaws at work.
“But you technical people,” Iwahashi went on, “are paid enough so you don’t have to chase after the mass media for your children’s tuition money.”
A bona fide student took his place as soon as the conversation drifted away from personal matters.
“I wanted to say,” offered Iwahashi in all friendliness, “that you really sounded like one of the old-time benshi back there awhile ago.”
“It couldn’t be helped,” said Mochizuki with a trace of overloudness. He checked this show of feeling, revealed in his defensive tone of voice. “I mean, we didn’t have a sound track.”
The current supplicant put forth his question:
“Benshi? What is a benshi?”
Both professors laughed at that, Iwahashi with easy, body moving mirth, Mochizuki with a stiff sniggle.
“Why, then, I’ll tell you,” boomed Dr. Iwahashi. He was a veritable Sam Johnson at explaining things during these typical extracurricular afternoons, unlike his formal classroom self.
“When movies came to Japan, they had a benshi standing out in the wings to explain the action. Talkies, which came in long before your time, naturally put the benshi out of business.”
“That is so,” said Dr. Mochizuki.
“Not only that,” added Dr. Iwahashi, “there was another man waiting at the top of a stepladder with a bucket of water, ready to dump it on the screen after each reel. Ha! What do you think of that? All that bright light beaming down out of the arc lamp, poured through a hot focus onto the paper screen down there—it might catch fire, you know. Hence, the little man with a bucket of water to cool it off, just in case.”
Mochizuki reached for another peanut and chewed it aggressively, without covering his mouth. He could abide no insult to technology, ancient or modern.
“Do you remember,” asked Dr. Iwahashi of the student, “when they first showed Rashomon in town? Kurosawa won first prize for that at Cannes in 1951, the first film Japan ever sent out to an international festival. Nobody back home understood it. So Daiei studios sent out benshi talkers to explain things.
“The trouble is,” Dr. Iwahashi went on, “that Hollywood products are too very much popular.”
“Hai!” said Mochizuki with an explosive sound of positive agreement.
“That’s why the Board of Scientific and Technological Development is interested in Dr. Mochizuki.”
“Hai!”
“The commercial development of his device will make Japanese movies more popular at home and help keep out so many foreign films. This will help our balance of payments, too.”
* * * *
The day the experiment in bionic moviemaking ended, Ito-san walked into Dr. Mochizuki’s office, stood there until noticed, then, straightening his winter wool kimono with courtly dignity, he kneeled to the floor, kowtowing, and distinctly said: “I cannot do it, teacher, I cannot do it.” And leaning forward, forehead on the floor, he cried great quaking, relieving sobs of tears.
* * * *
Displeased to learn that his marvel of bionic engineering must shut down for want of a stable telepath, Mochizuki sent for Iwahashi.
When the message arrived, Professor Iwahashi was in the midst of his Thursday afternoon class. He took the folded note from his tiptoeing office secretary, read it, and dismissed her. He decided matters could wait until he finished the lecture.
“This classroom, its furnishing, your clothing, personal belongings, all are of Western origin. Even the subject of my lectures is a branch of Western learning. Brought up and educated in these surroundings, few of you must find it easy to retain any culture which you can call your own.”
Dr. Iwahashi surveyed the high-collared Admiral Perry uniforms of his students.
“What, after all, can be claimed as absolutely native to this country?”
The students of comparative social behavior fingered their class pins, another foreign culture trait, in a state of high anxiety.
Dr. Iwahashi bore down on them.
“It is in the social conduct of your human relations that you are Japanese, if in nothing else. Be that! Remember the art of ki-ga-tsuku.”
Dr. Iwahashi tugged at the wings of his vest and tipped forward on the thin soles of his French patent leather shoes.
“Questions.” He asked for them with a statement and departed the classroom.
The academic secretary, who had been sitting there all the time, hung his head respectfully until the sound of hard heels turned from the hallway and into the professor’s office.
A student in the second row stood up and asked: “Pardon me, but I do not yet understand this business about ki-ga-tsuku. How is this so different from the behavior of foreigners? I do not understand what teacher is trying to tell us.”
Noises of agreement were made by the rest of the class.
Set off to one side of the lectern at a little rickety table, the teacher’s minion sat: a ruined, tubercular little pinch of a man dressed in a soiled suit. He put down his cigarette in slow motion, as if returning from a paradise of intellectual preoccupation to serve dolts, and blew out the last sick lungful of smoke.
It was he, the disciple, now that the master had left the room, who had to come right out in the open with this obscene talk about the private parts of social behavior.
He made cupping movements with his hands, scooping for that elusive balance between charitable clarity and selfish obfuscation required of a scholar as yet not sufficiently established to talk all in riddles.
“Unlike foreigners, Japanese do not like to say what they mean. If we say what we mean we are as naked persons, undressed in the world.”
The secretary sensed that he had gone too far with his conceit and lit a fresh cigarette. He did so nervously, however, and exposed the package to reveal the brand, Golden Bat, the inexpensive favorite of old-time farmer folk, at once dating his taste and discrediting his claim to win a faculty position in the department.
Another student rose up to ask what, after all, was so bad about the behavior of the foreigners?
“Take the Americans for example. They are direct and informal with each other. None of this body ritual we go through, such as bowing and hissing; none of this verbal ritual, such as saying yes when you mean no. Why shouldn’t we Japanese also adopt rational and efficient customs for ourselves?”
The secretary ignored the question. He held out with dogged silence until somebody else stood up. It was the first student.
“Yes, that is my question. What is it, as teacher tells us, that makes us truly Japanese inside?” With a twist of his class pin the student sat down.
The secretary talked to this point with professional ease.
“I refer you to chapter eight of teacher’s most famous work, Patterns of Japanese Interpersonal Behavior.”
The secretary thumbed through his copy of the textbook.
“That is the chapter entitled, ‘The Art of Ki-Ga-Tsuku What does teacher mean by ki-ga-tsuku! He has talked about this many times. I will repeat it for you.”
Dr. Iwahashi’s secretary flattened out the pages he would talk from. He ducked his cigarette pack under the table and drew out a fresh Golden Bat. It was loosely rolled and he had to twist the ends before lighting it. He spoke from memory, of course, because he had written the book, and many others like it, from his master’s lectures. Theoretically, the long years of feudal servitude on the part of the secretary would pay off with a professorship for himself. Then he, too, would be able to designate a promising young scholar to care for his own later years.
“Ki-ga-tsuku has this meaning: to find out what the other person intends to do. It is a game of perception. But it is different from the one played by Westerners. Foreigners want always to understand each other. Just as they come to Japan and try to understand the Japanese people.”
Appreciative laughter issued from the class at this, and the secretary reached out and touched the pages of the book possessively.
“We Japanese do not try to understand. We don’t want to know why, we want to know what. We don’t care about reasons, about motivations. Those are unclean matters. Concern for them is bad for the character.
“Our Japanese society is much more wholesome. Everybody’s role in our society is fixed and identified like a piece on the chessboard. When we encounter another Japanese we have only to guess what his next move will be. Who cares why he makes it? To guess why is to get involved in the sticky threads of another’s inner life. We in our formal society are free individuals undefiled by contact with the motivations of others.”
The classroom was quiet. The secretary, now that he had the class with him, smoked his Golden Bat with pride
“It is still the mission of the Japanese people to improve the character of the inferior races of the world. Allow me to quote the words of our late departed General Sadao Araki: ‘The spirit of the Japanese nation is, by its nature, a thing that must be propagated over the seven seas and extended over the five continents.’ “
* * * *
Dr. Iwahashi scuffed his way through the fallen leaves of the great ginkgo trees that dominated the Hongo campus. Neighborhood people were moving about, bent over, picking up the last of the ginkgo nuts for roasting.
Only one structure rose above the trees, the new engineering building, the first of the new constructions over eight stories put up by the university after the new earthquake regulations were put into effect.
The building was faced with glazed tiles; inside, it sported a pair of automatic stainless steel elevators. Iwahashi rode up to the twelfth floor and walked down halls of modern beauty and lighting. How unlike the halls of anthropology, with its cramped quarters, crammed with loose stacks of wooden drawers at the top of a walkup of unimproved cinderblock construction.
Inside the engineer’s office a dented aluminum pot boiled on a gas heater. Mochizuki extended the hospitality. He tipped the spout into a strainer packed with damp leaves of green tea and the bubbling hot water went steaming into the porcelain cup.
Iwahashi stepped across the snaky red gas tubing and received the cup in both hands in an act at once of polite formality and of self-seeking warmth.
After a long moment there in the grey twilight of a late afternoon in winter, Iwahashi said:
“I’ve arranged for Ito-san to be taken home. Come with me and I’ll treat you at your favorite seafood restaurant.”
The two of them jostled comfortably, not speaking, in the rush-hour crowds of the Marunouchi line and got off at Shinjuku station. They waited in line to enter Kikumasa, where tired businessmen took it easy on the way home with a little beer and raw fish. Finally, when their turn came, they sat facing each other at long stone benches, surrounded on high by great ornate platters that once had served the feasting tables of the Tokugawa barons. Surrounded by the clatter and delighted sounds of eating and enthusiastic talk on all sides of them, the two professors wiped faces and hands with the warm, wet towels set before them and prepared to order.
When the waiter had placed the food and poured out the beer, Iwahashi raised his glass, pronounced “kampai,” and the informal evening’s relationship formally got under way.
“Why can’t he finish The Great Wall?”
Iwahashi savored the tangled softness of raw jellyfish on his tongue. He might have taken this morsel as his text and said something to the effect that, while men can find satisfaction in eating raw food, they cannot abide one another in the raw, unclothed by ritual and protective custom. But he took instead the title of the film.
“Ito-san has built his own wall, one enclosing private space around himself, and he is cured.”
Mochizuki nodded convulsively, saying, “How true! How true!” thus indicating, without exposing, his need for explanation.
“Ito-san’s working with you on the film was its own therapy. He was in bondage to that woman, dreaming mind to mind with her. Evidently she got some kind of telepathic feedback from reading to him, some interior visualization from his mind of what she was reading. In time they evolved a symbiotic relationship: he trapped in it, she dependent on it. A disgusting, inhuman relationship of total involvement!”
Mochizuki shuddered. But he quickly came back to the question uppermost in his mind.
“What about the project, perhaps?”
Iwahashi poured his guest another glassful of Sapporo beer. “Ito-san is enjoying a vacation at home.”
“He is not coming back?”
“Yes.” One must always say “yes” even when the answer is “no” in order to avoid insincerity. Negation is offensively straightforward and rude. It is not sincere to hurt a personal relationship by sharp encounters with unpleasant facts. “Yes, he is not coming back.”
“But the machine . . .”
“You worked a miraculous cure,” replied Iwahashi with tactful but irrelevant praise.
Mochizuki rose slightly forward on his stool and gasped in a self-deprecating drag of air through his teeth: an imploded voiceless dental spirant.
“His secret fantasy was of normal social life, is it not so?”
“Hai!” It was a reflexive response in deference to authoritative opinion.
“It is so. In working with your machine, Ito-san found his chance to escape playing the insufflator to that mental succubus. Broadcasting his pictures through your machine, he robbed his tsukisoi of their reception.”
“She went off to the movies, then?”
“Yes.”
Now the yeses were hitting true, and Iwahashi continued with ease and under less pressure to guide and control the conversation.
“Once Ito-san learned to externalize his fantasy into your machine, he gradually reacquired the protective habits of formal human ties. His family has him back. Is this not good?”
“Hai!” affirmed Mochizuki, and he rose and bowed again. Iwahashi called for the check, thus signaling to Mochizuki, by doing the thing expected of the host, that he was to be held blameless for telling the truth.
They stepped out into the chill night air.
“The more communication, the less community,” muttered Iwahashi, offering his ultimate reflection on the matter.
Mochizuki did not understand that. Flags of the Rising Sun blazed in a long row in the powerful floodlights atop Keio department store to the front of them across the open square. Iwahashi looked up.
“The flags fly more these days, do they not?”
“Hai!”
Mochizuki understood that.
* * * *
DOMINANT SPECIES
Lobthar, the all-knowing, opened his eyes to the expected universe. The blue sun was at the horizon, and there were many colors in the sky. He watched the colors.
The air tasted of the scents the air should taste of.
This watching and tasting, as it always did, went on for an endless time. Lobthar found the universe good.
Then, roused by the awareness of food worms beyond the nest, Lobthar shook himself and stood up, preening his feathers. He turned his head from one horizon to the other and willed that later there would be rain from the storm clouds above. Already, in response to his will, he could feel the air change and bear the promise of moisture.
From the nest, in the shelter of his cave, Lobthar flew down to the forest, where there were feeding birds, as he wished there to be. He waited on the ground, trying to decide where the first food worm should be found. At length he approached the spot, heard the almost inaudible sound of earth movement below. Down went the beak. The worm was there.
At first there was moisture and subtle, spicy flavors. This combination gave way to the rich texture of the worm itself, with a sweet abiding ripeness that Lobthar could savor for an eternity. At length, Lobthar swallowed the worm.
After the time of morning feeding, which stretched almost beyond memory of the dawn, Lobthar rose once more into his air and settled back upon his water, where he floated, paddling, rocking himself on the gentle waves. Here was the recreated time of the egg, when the universe was constricted in warm comfort and his surroundings were composed of fluid slowly moving in convection currents.
Lobthar willed that there be a sound in the sky. There was a sound in the sky.
Lobthar looked up, toward the sound. A spot grew, and Lobthar willed that it grow larger and assume the form of a fire there in the sky. Lobthar brought this fire to the forest for his own amusement, and in the last minute, gave it the form of a cylinder.
Around the cylinder, invisible in the trees, there were now flames, as was only appropriate. Lobthar watched the flames, and gradually the flames went away to leave smoke. Lobthar found this good. Lobthar was continually amazed at the fertility of his own imagination. Now a new thing was introduced for his amusement into the universe. At another time, if he did not forget it, he would investigate this new thing in detail, but for now there was the comforting motion of the water beneath him and the comforting feeling of the air moving among the feathers.
* * * *
The following day, Lobthar, having forgotten the arrival of the cylinder, came upon it unexpectedly as he made a soaring flight over his forest. Seeing it below him, he recalled how he had willed its appearance before the rains of the previous day.
Lobthar perched in a tree. At length, he willed an opening to appear in the cylinder and a creature to come out of the opening. There were no wings on it, but rather wingless extremities. Lobthar was at a loss to know what to cause the creature to do. Fall to the earth and dig worms? Ascend into the air?
Lobthar approached, swirling down, causing the creature to draw away from the fearsome sight of Lobthar. Lobthar settled to the ground at the foot of the creature and looked up. It made a noise, as Lobthar willed it should. There was much unexpected color to it, and Lobthar willed that it give off a bad odor. This it did.
Lobthar wondered what to make it do now. Make it approach cautiously and deferentially? This it did. Now what?
An extremity extended cautiously, as was appropriate, and touched the feathers of Lobthar. Lobthar moved forward a step to facilitate further touching, which occurred. Lobthar was then lifted up. This was exactly as Lobthar had intended.
The creature turned toward the cylinder, carrying Lobthar with it. Lobthar thought it would be very interesting indeed to know what was inside the cylinder, and in response to the wish, the creature entered it.
Inside there was an unexpected fertility of imagination. Lobthar was placed on a vantage point along the wall. Desiring to learn more of the imagination of Lobthar, he settled himself to further conjecture.
At last, after an endless day of unusually bright fantasies, Lobthar went to sleep.
* * * *
Upon awakening, Lobthar perceived yesterday’s universe unchanged. Mesmerized by it, Lobthar returned to the egg, and the warmth and comfort there: when he dwelt in great fluid silence. At length, he reexperienced the constriction of that tiny universe and the need to burst forth into some greater projection of the mind’s devising. To do so required exertion reexperienced. In time the restraining barriers fell away, and lo! there was revealed the world of Lobthar, bright and shiny, rare and wonderful, filled with sensations previously unknown. Indeed, such stirrings always gave him the greatest pleasure in memory, and he responded with an enthusiasm that transcends description. Let there be light! Let there be sound! Let there be air to fly in! Let there be motion to excite the imagination! And also let there be food worms stirring in the appropriate places in the soil, the taste of which came forward in anticipation of the need.
At this point, Lobthar felt a desire for food worms, but the surface beneath him was unsuited to them. It was clearly and evidently not the time for him to will food worms, in spite of the inward desire. For there is a time for all things, and now was the time for glittering surroundings.
At length he willed sound, and there was sound. At length he willed the return of the creature, and it was so. He imagined that there was the smell of food worms upon the creature, and this was so. Lo! There were the food worms, and the creature brought the food worms to Lobthar, and Lobthar ate the food worms. They were as before, since they need never be otherwise for full enjoyment.
At length the creature was willed to depart and this too it did, and Lobthar was left once again with this new world. It might be, Lobthar realized, that he would find it more pleasant to remain here than outside among the trees and the water.
The memory of the water brought doubt, as did the memory of the air, and of the smells beyond this enclosure, and of the joy one had in the colors in the sky as one dictated one’s requirements. Still, it would be well to consider carefully before a change of position.
At length, Lobthar willed the return of the creature. The creature, as was appropriate, removed Lobthar from the cage and carried him along a corridor, exposing Lobthar to greater miracles of his imagination than even he would have thought possible.
Lobthar surrendered himself to still another creature, and this creature carried Lobthar to a small table and held him against it. Lobthar could feel the smoothness and the coolness of the new surface, and Lobthar’s nostrils were assailed by strange and wonderful odors not previously experienced.
This new creature drew back Lobthar’s wings to inspect them and to marvel at them, and Lobthar wished that the creature would hold him more tightly, and this it did, until the tension became almost a pain to Lobthar, and Lobthar moved to cause the tension to depart, and then realized that he did not wish it to depart; rather, he wished to relax and enjoy it.
Now Lobthar willed that the creature cover his head with a cloth from which arose a very pungent odor, and Lobthar drifted with the odor, back into time, as he called up imagination of the world beyond the cylinder and his first creation of land and water and light and darkness, and by degrees, Lobthar became aware that he was willing himself to sleep, and that the sleep would be long and deep like the sleep of the egg, which he could remember but dimly now, and the odors around him of his own willing were sweet and soft and sleepy and sleepy and very sleepy and Lobthar was willing himself deeper and deeper to sleep, more deeply than ever before.
The creature drew forth a dissecting knife, but Lobthar had his eyes closed and had not willed it, so the knife did not yet exist. He drifted deeper and deeper to sleep: at last indifferently aware of a strange new and penetrating device in his universe.
* * * *
THE TOY THEATER
Eight hours before we were due to land on Sarg they dropped a pamphlet into the receiving tray of the two-by-four plastic closet that was my “stateroom” for the trip. The pamphlet said landing on Sarg would be like stepping into a new world. I threw it away.
Landing on Sarg was like stepping into a new world. You expect a different kind of sunlight and a fresh smell to the air, and usually you don’t get them. Sarg had them. The light ran to sienna and umber and ocher, so that everything looked older than it was and made you think of waxed oak and tarnished gold. The air was clear and clean. Sarg wasn’t an industrial world, and since it was one of the lucky ones with no life of its own to preserve, it had received a flora en masse from Earth. I saw Colorado spruce, and a lot of the old, hardy, half-wild roses like Sarah Van Fleet and Amelie Gravereaux.
Stromboli, the man I was coming to see, had sent a buggy and a driver for me (if you don’t want industry there are things you can’t have, lots of them) and I got a good view of the firs on the mountains and the roses spilling down the rocks as we rattled along. I suppose I dropped some remark about the colors, because my driver asked, “You are an artist?”
“Oh, no. A marionettist. But I carve and paint my own dolls—that’s an art, if you like. We try to make it one.”
“That is what I meant. It is mostly such artists who come here to see him, and the big box which I loaded for you was suggestive. That is your control you carry?”
“Yes.” I took it out of its leather case to show him.
He peered at the tiny dials and levers. “The signer has such a one. Not, you understand, identical; but similar. Perhaps you could...?” He glanced back to where Charity reposed in her box. “It might help to pass the time.”
I made her throw open her lid and climb up to sit on the seat with us, where she sang to the driver in her clear voice. Charity is a head taller than I am, blond, long-legged and narrow-waisted; a subtle exaggeration, or so I like to think, of a really pretty showgirl. After I had made her kiss him, dance ahead of the horse for a while, then climb back into her home and slam the lid, the driver said, “That was very good. You are an artist indeed.”
“I forgot to mention that I call her Charity because that’s what I have to ask of my audiences.”
“No, sir; you are very skilled. The skipping down the road—anyone can make them to skip for a few steps, but to do so for so long, over the uneven ground and so rapidly, I know how difficult it is. It deserves applause.”
I wanted to see how far he would go, so I asked, “As good as the signor?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Not as good as Signor Stromboli. But I have seen many, sir. Many come here and you are far better than most. Signor Stromboli will be pleased to talk to you.”
* * * *
The house was smaller than I had expected, of the Italian Alpine style. There was a large, informal garden, however, and a carriage house in the rear. The driver assured me that he would see to my baggage, and Madame Stromboli, who I assume had been following our progress up the road from a window, met me at the gate. She was white-haired now, but the woman she had once been, olive-skinned and beautiful with magnificent dark eyes, still showed plainly in her face. “Welcome,” she said. “We are so glad that you could come.”
I told her that it was a great honor to be there.
“It is a great expense for you; we know that. To travel between the suns. Once when we were much younger my husband went, to make money for us. I could not go, it cost too much. Only him, and the dolls. For years I waited, but he returned to me.”
I said, “It must have been lonely.”
“It was, very lonely. Now we are here where very few can come and see us. It is beautiful, no? But lonely. But my husband and I, we are lonely together. That is better. You will wish to wash, and perhaps change your clothing. Then I will take you to see him.”
I thanked her.
“He will be kind to you. He likes young men who follow the old art. But be content with what he shows you. Do not say: How do you do this? Or Do that! Let him show you what he wishes and he will show you a great deal.”
* * * *
He did. I will not pretend to condense all the interviews I had with Stromboli into a single scene, but he was generous with his time—although the mornings, all morning, every day, were reserved for his practice, alone, in a room lined with mirrors. In time I saw nearly everything of his that I had heard described, except the famous comic butler Zanni. He showed me how to keep five figures in motion at a time, differentiating their motions so cleverly that it was easy to imagine that the dancing, shouting people around us had five different operators, provided that you could remember, even while you watched Stromboli, that they had an operator at all.
“They were little people once, you know,” he said. “You have read the history? Never higher than your shoulder—those were the biggest—and they moved with wires. In those days the most any man could do well was four, did you know that? Now they are as big as you and me, they are free, and I can do five. Perhaps before you die you will make it six. It is not impossible. As they pile the flowers onto your casket they will be saying, He could do six.”
I told him I would be happy just to handle three well.
“You will learn. You have already learned more difficult things. But you will not learn traveling with just one. If you wish to learn three, you must have three with you always, so that you can practice. But already you do the voice of a woman speaking and singing. That was the most difficult for me to learn.” He threw out his big chest and thumped it. “I am an old man now and my voice is not so deep as it was, but when I was young as you it was very deep, and I could not do the voices of women, not with all the help from the control and the speakers in the dolls pitched high. But now listen.”
He made Julia, Lucinda, and Columbine, three of his girls, step forward. For a moment they simply giggled; then, after a whispered but audible conference, they burst into Rosine’s song from The Barber of Seville—Julia singing coloratura soprano, Columbine mezzo-soprano, and Lucinda contralto.
“Don’t record,” Stromboli admonished me. “It is easy to record and cheat; but a good audience will always know, the amateurs will want you to show them, and you can’t look at yourself and smile. You can already do one girl’s voice very good. Don’t ever record. You know how I learned to do them?”
I expressed interest.
“When I was starting—not yet married—I did only male voices. And the false female speaking singsong, the falsetto. Then I married and little Maria, I mean Signora Stromboli my wife, began to help. In those days I did not work always alone. She did the simpler movements and the female voices.”
I nodded to show I understood.
“So how was I to learn? If I said, ‘Little Maria, you sit in the audience tonight,’ she would say, ‘Stromboli, it is not good. It is better when I do them.’ So what did I do? I made the long tour outworld. The cost was very high but the pay was very high too, and I left little Maria at home. When I came back we could do this.”
Columbine, Lucinda, and Julia bowed.
* * * *
The signor and I said our good-byes on the day before I was to leave Sarg. My ship would blast off at noon, and the morning practice sessions were sacred, but we held a party the night before with wine in the happy, undrunken Italian way and singing—just Stromboli and his wife and I. In the morning I packed hurriedly, and discovered that my second best pair of shoes were missing. I said to hell with them, gave my last suitcase to Stromboli’s man of all work, said good-bye again to Maria Stromboli, and went out to the front gate to wait for the man of all work to bring the buggy around.
Five minutes passed, then ten. I still had plenty of time, a couple of hours if he drove fast, but I began to wonder what was keeping him. Then I heard the rattle of harness. The buggy came around a curve in the road, but its driver was a dark-haired woman in pink I had never seen before. She pulled up in front of me, indicated my luggage, which was neatly stowed on the back of the buggy, with a wave of her hand, and said, “Climb up. Antonio is indisposed, so I told the Strombolis I would drive you. I am Lili. Have you heard of me?”
I got into the seat beside her and told her I had not.
“You came here to see Stromboli, and you have not heard of me? Ah, such is fame! Once we were notorious, and I think perhaps that it was because of me that he retired. He lives with his wife now and wishes the world to think that he is a good husband, you understand; but my little house is not far away.”
I said something to the effect that I had been unaware of any other houses in the neighborhood.
“A few steps would have brought you in sight of it.” She cracked her whip expertly over the horse’s back, and he broke into a trot. “Little Maria does not like it, but I am only a few steps away for her husband too. But he is old. Do you think I am getting old also?”
She leaned back, turning her head to show me her profile—a tip-tilted nose, generous lips salved carmine. “My bust is still good. I am perhaps a little thicker at the waist, but my thighs are heavier too, and that is good.”
“You’re very beautiful,” I said, and she was, though the delicately tinted cheeks beneath the cosmetics showed craquelure.
“Very beautiful but older than you.”
“A few years, maybe.”
“Much more. But you find me attractive?”
“Most men would find you attractive.”
“I am not, you understand, a tart. Many times with Signor Stromboli, yes. But only a few with other man. And I have never been sold—no, not once for any price.” She was driving very fast, the buggy rattling down the turns.
After a few moments of silence she said, “There is a place, not far from here. The ground is flat and you may drive off the road to where a stream comes down from the mountain. There is grass there, and flowers, and the sound of the water.”
“I have to catch my ship.”
“You have two hours. We would spend perhaps one. For the other you can sit in a chair down there, yawning and thinking nice thoughts about Sarg and me.”
I shook my head.
“You say that Signor Stromboli has taught you much. He has taught me much too. I will teach it to you. Now. In an hour.” Her leg pressed hard against mine.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but there’s somebody else.” It wasn’t true, but it seemed the best way of getting free of an embarrassing situation. I added, “Someone I can’t betray, if I’m going to live with myself.”
Lili let me off at the entrance to the spaceport, where I could pile my bags directly on the conveyor. As soon as the last of them were gone she touched the horse’s rump with the lash of her whip, and she, with the horse and the rattling buggy, disappeared in rising dust. A coin-operated machine inside the port vacuumed most of it out of my clothes.
As she had said, I had almost two hours to kill. I spent them alternately reading magazines and staring at the mountains I would be leaving.
“For the Sol system and Vega. Gate five. You have fifteen minutes before departure
I picked myself up in a leisurely way and headed toward Gate five, then stopped. Coming toward me was a preposterous figure, familiar from a thousand pictures.
“Sir!” (Actually it sounded more like “SeeraughHa!” given a rising intonation all the way—the kind of sound that might have come from a chummy, intoxicated, dangerous elephant.)
“Sir!” The great swag belly was wrapped in a waistcoat with blue and white stripes as broad as my hand. The great shapeless nose shone with an officious cunning. “Sir, your shoes. I have your shoes!”
It was Zanni the Butler, Stromboli’s greatest creation. He held out my second-best shoes, well brushed. In his flipper of a hand they looked as absurd as I felt. People were staring at us, and already beginning to argue about whether or not Zanni was real.
“The master,” Zanni was saying, “insisted that I restore them to you. You will little credit it, sir, but I have run all the way.”
I took my shoes and mumbled, “Thank you,” looking through the crowd for Stromboli, who had to be somewhere nearby.
“The master has heard,” Zanni continued in a stage whisper that must have been audible out in the blast pits, “of your little talk with Madame Lili. He asks—well, sir, we sometimes call our little world the Planet of Roses, sir. He asks that you consider a part of what you have learned here—at least a part, sir—as under the rose.”
I nodded. I had found Stromboli at last, standing in a corner. His face was perfectly impassive while his fingers flew over the levers of Zanni’s controller. I said, “Joruri.”
“Joruri, sir?”
“The Japanese puppet theater. The operators stand in full view of the audience, but the audience pretends not to see them.”
“That is the master’s field, sir, and not mine; but perhaps that is the best way.”
“Perhaps. But now I’ve got to catch my ship.”
“So you said to Madame Lili earlier, sir. The master begs leave to remind you that he was once a young man very like yourself, sir. He expresses the hope that you know with whom you are keeping faith. He further expresses the hope that he himself does not know.”
I thought of the fine cracks I had seen, under the cosmetics, in Lili’s cheeks; and of Charity’s cheeks, as blooming as peaches.
Then I took my second-best pair of shoes, and went out to the ship, and climbed into my own little box.
* * * *
STOP ME BEFORE I TELL MORE
—There was this traveling salesman, see—
* * * *
COLD-SKINNED. Anyone who touched him remarked on it. Skin as cold as the Beadsman on St. Agnes’s Eve. As cold as the hymen of a virgin witch.
Not ugly, not handsome. Not much to speak of. Between tall and short, slim and fat, lined and smooth. Eyebrows, thick, were noticeable; eyes were not.
You couldn’t have called him a Willy Loman type because Willy Loman hadn’t been invented yet. You wouldn’t anyway since he was shy, promoted the product with reluctance, and had been shunted off to an unlucrative sales route by a compassionate district manager. He hated the road. All roads. Dirt, asphalt, concrete, patches of blobbed tar. He feared the miles ahead and drove with his eyes staring steadily down at a point just a few feet in front of the car.
* * * *
—and one dark night—
* * * *
All light switched off above, below, and to the side. Weak headlights that needed adjustment picked out a triangular section of monotonous gravel. Cold seeped in through the cracked rear window and entered his cold body at the neck. His eyes ached from staring at the road. He wanted to stop and rest but knew he would freeze in place if he did. What vengeful God had made the Great Plains so vulnerable? There must be a place near but in pitch blackness it was impossible to make out any outlines. He was well-read enough to ponder the meaninglessness of a death practically on the doorstep of an unseen farmhouse.
* * * *
—his car breaks down on this lonely road, see—
* * * *
Without even a wheeze or a decent dying gasp. Just rolled to a graceless stop. Wearily he leaned his head against the steering wheel, right up against the horn which blew or choked with a long echo that seemed to travel far without encountering a human ear. He sat up. The draft caught him a particularly frosty blast on the back of the neck. He listened for some sound, then began to pound the horn like crazy for comfort.
Finally he decided that freezing in motion was probably better than freezing still, and he left the car to hunt for shelter.
* * * *
—comes finally to this farmhouse—
* * * *
Hardly aware he had been going uphill, he came near the crest and saw the single light shining in the distance. Unshaped and too far away to tell whether it was a fire, another headlight (perhaps with another salesman cursing another dead car), or a window. Over the crest and downhill to the glittering beacon he ran. The shuffle of his shoes against the gravel sounded like rapid asthmatic breathing.
* * * *
—runs all the way to the farmhouse and knocks—
* * * *
Where? The light from the window was so weak it didn’t illumine the shape of the house or any detail beyond the windowsill. The light source was a lamp in the window, and even with head pressed against glass, he could see very little of the room. A patch of wall seemed faded and grease-stained.
Then should he knock on the window? Or holler? Such actions were too aggressive. But he just couldn’t stand there and die.
Hand over hand, palms pressed against wall siding, he began to make his way along the house. He caught one sliver in the side of a palm, another more painful one in the web between thumb and forefinger. He stepped into a rosebush, thorns punctured his calf. He couldn’t refrain from cursing. A sound came from inside the house, something like a shin banging against a chair.
He reached the corner of the house and felt his way to the door. He knocked once. The door opened. A fat man blocked some of the glaring light that flowed out at him.
* * * *
—farmer comes to the door and asks—
* * * *
“Who’s out there?”
The voice seemed gruff, billy-goatish, angry. He retreated three paces, almost wishing he could run back to his car and freeze in peace.
“Speak up, boy. I got a gun sittin’ here by the door powerful enough to blast you to double-smithereens before you get outta the light.”
“No don’t!”
He stood still, trying to look as niceguy as possible.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Leonard Brack and my car broke down just up the road.”
“We got no phone but you can . . .”
* * * *
—farmer took him in and—
* * * *
“. . . spend the night here and I’ll drive you up to the gay-rage in the mornin’. Come in and get warm, boy.”
Once in the house and seated by a flaming gas heater, Leonard enjoyed the rediscovery of warmth. The farmer, Cyrus McConnell, fed him coffee and dull conversation.
* * * *
—well, this farmer had two beautiful—
* * * *
“What is it, papa?” came a soft voice from somewhere above.
“Come on down and see for yourself.”
Hopping footsteps followed skipping footsteps down a stairway to the hall. Two shapely forms came through the doorway.
“This here’s my two daughters:
“Jeanie—”
Who was tall and blond with the kind of pretty farm-girl face found on tractor calendars and in almanac illustrations.
“—and Joanie.”
Who looked exactly like Jeanie except for her raven-black hair.
“They’re twins.”
Which didn’t really have to be pointed out.
* * * *
—each o’ these babies was built like a—
* * * *
“Brick shi—” Leonard stopped suddenly, realizing he was thinking aloud.
“What’s that, son?”
“Ah—brickshi. That’s a traditional Ukrainian greeting.”
* * * *
—salesman ogled the twins up and—
* * * *
“You’re breathin’ heavy, mister,” said Jeanie.
“Like a thirsty heifer,” said Joanie.
“Don’t spook the gentleman, girls,” said the farmer. “Of course he’s breathin’ heavy. He’s tired out from trottin’ over the whole durn countryside.”
Leonard, in nine years on the road, had never before encountered such breathtaking beauty. Packed well, too, including ribbons.
“You’re pale, mister,” said Joanie.
“Like a harvest moon,” said Jeanie.
* * * *
—then the farmer said the salesman could sleep in the guest room provided—
* * * *
“...that you let me lock you in there till dawn.”
The words acted like an emetic on Leonard, as disappointment dissipated his desire. Still, he comforted himself with the thought that the brief sight of these twin delectations would, for a change, give him something more exciting than invoices to think about as he drifted off to sleep. Sneaking one more look at the girls, he cursed fate for always springing on him Surprise without Resolution.
“You look sad, mister,” Jeanie said.
“Like a hound dog that’s just flushed a feather hat,” said Joanie.
* * * *
—locked him in and he went to bed, but sure enough in a minute—
* * * *
Ready to sleep, kept awake only by the dilemma of whether to dream about blond Jeanie or brunette Joanie. Or was it brunette Jeanie and blond Joanie?
Then a warm hand touched his face.
“You got cold skin, mister.”
He sat up straight.
“How did you get in here?”
“That’s my secret.”
“It’s too dark in here. Which one are you?”
“That’s also my secret. Move over.”
* * * *
—so they, you know, made out, all the rest of the night, and it was—
* * * *
An hour and a half of incredible warmth. A journey on apparently familiar roads which turned out to be untraveled. A trip to the moon on gossamer wings. An ecstasy like nothing else he’d ever experienced in his plodding, one step in front of the other life.
She was an energetic delight, some part always in motion until she left him just before dawn. Several times he tried to detect which of the daughters he grappled with, but it was impossible to tell. When she’d departed as mysteriously as she’d arrived, he regretted not knowing which one to thank in the morning.
* * * *
—so next morning he looked for, you know, signs to tell which one it was but—
* * * *
When Jeanie blew in his ear while serving a plate of hash, he thought the issue was no longer in question. Then Joanie blew him a secret kiss.
“You look all perplexed, mister,” said Joanie. “Like a sow with silk purses hangin’ offa its head,” said Jeanie.
* * * *
—so he went away, frustrated by the mystery—
* * * *
Back to the daily monotony. Adventures came few and far between these days. Far between? Between this and what? Well, back to shoving unsuitable material into the greased fingers of sleepy storeowners.
He drove his revived car by the house for one final look. He thought he saw two girls in two windows waving at him.
* * * *
—bugged all the next year by the memory, you know—
* * * *
Waking him suddenly at nights. Making him conscious of plaster cracks forming crooked involved rivers along dingy hotel walls. Causing sweat to appear on his forehead at unusual times.
* * * *
—so one day at twilight he found himself on a familiar road and sure enough there was the same farmhouse—
* * * *
Run, Leonard, run. See (in your mind’s eye) the girls. See Jeanie or Joanie at the window. Stop. That’s not the way. Be cool and calm. They must believe this is just a coincidence, that today you found yourself on a familiar road and sure enough you spotted the house of last year’s kindnesses.
“You’re trembling, mister,” said Jeanie at the door. “Like a apple tree bein’ shook by a nervous boy,” said Joanie in the hallway.
* * * *
—so he was invited to spend the night again and the farmer locked him in again and he waited until—
* * * *
“I startle you again? Mister, your skin’s solid ice.”
His reflexes keener from a year’s planning, he reached for the lamp beside the bed. It clicked sharply but gave forth no illumination.
“I pulled the plug. It’s you, me, and the pitch dark, mister. Move over.”
“Who are you?”
“I’ll never tell.”
* * * *
—and they had, you know, one more hot night of it—
* * * *
Better than last year, as if sharpened by three hundred and sixty-four days of training. Metaphysically, an almost-felt electrical current surging through all outlets and connections. Psychologically, ego-building after so many sleepless frustrated nights but also nerve-racking due to the silly confusion of identity. Philosophically, a hasty reshuffling of old values to accommodate new situational contexts.
* * * *
—and he tried to find out which twin had his tony—
* * * *
“Hey Jeanie!”
“You can’t trick me into telling.”
“Why not?”
“That’s my secret.”
“Why is it so important?”
“Secret.”
“But a guy’s got to know who he’s doing it with.”
“No he don’t. It is merely a natural act between two consenting individuals, and identity has nothing to do with it. Identity is superfluous, incongruous, inadequate.”
“Damn it, that’s what knocks me out. You talk different here than both of you do downstairs.”
“A woman’s mantle varies from parlor to bedroom.”
“Well, give me a clue at least.”
“Clue implies a mystery to be solved, a corner puzzle piece to begin interlockment. Therefore, there cannot be clues here, since I do not wish you to arrive at a solution. Quit jawin’.”
* * * *
—again, just before dawn, she disappeared—
* * * *
But where to? Nobody just disappears. Not without a long drum roll and a puff of smoke, anyway. The ritual was same as last year: a quick ascension to a kneeling position, a warm kiss upon his chest, the residual bounce of the bed as she left it, a couple of footsteps.
The absence of further sound upset him. No click of key in lock, no raising of secret trapdoor, no sliding of secret panel, no pushing open of window.
Her departure method was only the penultimate mystery. The question of her identity furnished more mental tension. In daylight there was not sufficient contrast between Joanie and Jeanie’s behavior to provide any indication of who warmed his bed these annual nights.
At breakfast both girls looked a bit puffy-eyed, as if they both had been awake all night. Two pairs of eyes studied him knowingly.
* * * *
—had insomnia all the next year worrying about it—
* * * *
Maybe Jeanie because blondes have more fun. Maybe Joanie since brunettes relish mystery.
And how could he be sure it was the same girl both years? Maybe Joanie one year, then Jeanie’s turn the next. Or vice versa. But the second said the same things as the first. Well, that’s possible. They’re sisters and the first could have told the second all the details of the first’s experience so the second could sneak in the room and pose as the first. Or not really the second posing as the first but the second being the second and, since she was a twin, acting very like the first. The consequences of such possibilities terrified him because then it was not just a problem of which one came to his room, but which one at which time? It had the effect of cubing the mystery.
He developed nervous tics. Chewing on a pillow, then retreating in disgust from the saliva puddles. Mind blanking off in the middle of a sure sale. Stopping at any old farmhouse, but finding the occupants had no daughters or married daughters or homely daughters (who, though they eyed him knowingly, left him alone at night) or pretty daughters (who laughed at his advances).
* * * *
—so he went back to the farmhouse and the farmer and the farmer’s daughters—
* * * *
With his new spectacles he could see the house better than before. It was a genuinely ugly structure. Gray paint peeled off the siding at a thousand places. Windowsills sagged. A corner of porch was held up by old lumber.
Joanie opened the front door and greeted him indifferently, like an old friend. So did Jeanie.
Cyrus came into the hallway, greeted Leonard with a hearty brickshi, and held out his left hand to shake. The right one was missing, lost when he’d tripped and reached up to a thresher for help.
* * * *
—and this time, what do you think—
* * * *
Surprise, Leonard! Here comes Jeanie with a three-month-old kid in her arms. Don’t choke.
“Is he yours?” he said to Jeanie.
“Might be,” she answered.
“Might be mine, too,” Joanie interjected, taking the baby from the arms of Jeanie, who gave him up willingly.
He studied the baby carefully for a clue. A few strands of medium brown hair, about as many as Leonard had on his own head, and the same shade of brown. No other indications.
“Your girls do like to fun me,” he said to Cyrus. “But I’ll bet you’ll tell me whose it is.”
“Can’t, Leonard. Wish I knew. I was in the hospital for five months recovering from this. Came home and found the little tyke nestled in a crib. They won’t tell me neither.”
Leonard’s face revealed his disappointment.
“You look despairin’, mister,” said Joanie.
“Like a young ‘un when they take down the Christmas tree,” said Jeanie.
“Can’t understand how she done it,” Cyrus said, “whichever one it was. Lock ‘em both in every night.”
* * * *
—so he went to bed that night more mixed up than usual and sure enough—
* * * *
“Move over.”
Acting quickly, he whipped out the flashlight he’d concealed under the covers and shone it on her navel. She grabbed it out of his hands, flicked off the switch, and flung it across the room.
“Now move over.”
* * * *
—so he had another night of, you know, fun—
* * * *
“But I’ve got to know now.”
“I don’t see why it’s so damned important.”
“Because of the kid.”
“Why because of the kid? It’s just a baby like all others.”
“Because it’s mine, that’s why.”
“Who said it’s yours?”
“Isn’t it?”
“That’s a secret.”
“How can you be so callous about your own child?”
“Who said it’s my child?”
“Isn’t it?”
“Secret.”
“I would think, for the kid’s sake, that he ought to know which of you is his mother.”
“Who said either of us was his mother?”
* * * *
—and so another night went by without him being any the wiser—
* * * *
“The trouble with you, mister, is that you think your one-nighter per year is the only thing that happens around here. As if my father, my sister, and I go into suspended animation, lifeless until you saunter in again. Frankly, I nearly forget you from one year to the next.”
“Then—it really isn’t my baby?”
“I never said that.”
* * * *
—and he left the next day as confused as ever—
* * * *
“Here—I saved a can of peach preserve for you,” Joanie said after breakfast.
“And some tomato puree from me,” Jeanie said.
Leonard divided an expression of fury between them.
* * * *
—another year—
* * * *
He developed several plans, as follows:
PLAN A: Scratch her someplace. Draw blood. Next morning see which girl is scratched.
PLAN B: Bring two flashlights.
PLAN C: Set off a tear gas bomb and quickly don gasmask. In ensuing confusion, plug in lamp and turn it on.
PLAN D: Whip out a set of handcuffs and chain her to me so she can’t leave before dawn.
* * * *
—and another return to the farmhouse—
* * * *
The girls, bustling around, paid little attention to him except to show how well little Timmie could walk all by himself. Cyrus sulked in a kitchen, so despondent he even had the girls lock Leonard in his room.
* * * *
—and another night—
* * * *
All plans failed, as follows:
PLAN A: The next morning both girls wore bandages on the spot he’d scratched (the back of the neck).
PLAN B: The second flashlight got lost in the covers when she descended upon him.
PLAN C: He left the bomb in the trunk of his car.
PLAN D: The handcuffs, purchased in a novelty store, were too big for her wrists and she slipped out of them.
* * * *
—and still confusion—
* * * *
“I’m more than just confused. I think I’m on the verge of insanity.”
“Don’t dramatize. You’ve just got a simple ego hangup, that’s all.”
“When I’m in an asylum, you’ll laugh out of the other side of your mouth.”
“If you’re so determined, try catatonia. It might do you some good to shut up for a while.”
“Please tell me.”
“And the truth shall make you free? No deal.”
* * * *
—and, well, he came back again—
* * * *
Puffiness around Jeanie’s eyes, Joanie’s black hair graying. Cyrus, bedridden, just nodded his head hello, never said a word. Timmie bugged him unmercifully, saying look at me do this and look at me do that. The kid was homely enough to be his.
Nobody locked the door. That bothered him.
This year, poised, he asked few questions and she seemed bored.
* * * *
—and again—
* * * *
She came through the door, unslinking, unmysterious. She went through the bed motions like a high priestess at her thousandth sacrifice.
“I’ve had ten women besides you this year,” he said.
“So?”
“I just wanted you to know that I’m compensating, that’s all.”
* * * *
—and again—
* * * *
“Move over.”
“Not tonight. I’m bushed.”
“New strategy?”
“No strategy. I’m just tired.”
“Okay.”
* * * *
—and again—
* * * *
Three years in the army as a middle-aged private and corporal had depleted the curve of his belly. He almost felt jaunty as he approached the farmhouse. With some delight he noted that the house had been painted a dull yellow in the intervening years, as if it too had been rejuvenated by the war.
The kid—how old was he now, six, seven?—played on a swing. His homeliness was not enhanced by the mean expression of his face.
“You again?” Joanie said, looking up briefly from a bowl of string beans she was stripping. Gray locks now balancing the black in her hair, she had also put on weight. What the hell, though, it was still a good build.
“In the war, huh?” Jeanie said, coming out on the porch. It was not an especially perceptive observation, since he still wore his uniform.
The years had ravaged both twins about equally. The sheen of Jeanie’s hair had faded, she was pudgy but also, like Joanie, in fairly attractive places.
Yet there was a difference. Some of the liveliness had gone out of Jeanie’s eyes. No longer as pretty as Joanie, she also seemed more careless in appearance.
“I’d like to say hello to your dad,” he said.
“Cemetery’s four miles down the road,” Jeanie said.
“Oh—I’m sorry.”
“Sure.”
The girls worked at chores until suppertime. They served him a fine meal, but responded indifferently to his compliments. They would not even tell him which one had prepared the dressing for the roast pork.
The door to his room was not only not locked, it was left open. Light plunged in from the hallway. He settled into the bed, noting the lack of resiliency in the springs. Around midnight she came to him. She entered the room in a businesslike sweep, unmindful of the light which outlined her. He could not recognize her; her face and hair were too much in shadow.
“Move over.”
As he shifted quickly to the wall side of the bed, he realized how much he’d been longing for her; how much the memory of her had nagged at his brain while on troop ships, in foxholes, standing around the stage door of the canteen; how much he’d been disappointed by liberated whores whose too-clear faces had mocked him or remained indifferent with vacant looks in their wasted eyes.
Happily they enacted the ritual of returning warrior and girl left behind, their lovemaking more intense than at any time since the first years. Afterward they lay silent, with nothing to say and no questions that required asking, each comfortable in the repetition of myth.
“It’s been a long time,” she finally said.
“I love you, Jeanie or Joanie as the case may be.”
“That’s nice.”
“And you still won’t tell me who you are.”
“I’d like to, but I won’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s just decreed, that’s all.”
“But that’s silly.”
“Is it? Tell me, after tonight will you stay here?”
“I’d like to, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Well—uh—I’ve got to get back to the road. To my job.”
“Is that the real reason?”
“Of course.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“How do you know it isn’t?”
“I just know.”
“How?”
“That’s my secret.”
In the morning they both kissed him good-bye. Each kiss was polite, but with an extra touch—or slight push—of buried affection. He could not tell from the kiss which pair of lips belonged to his yearly bedmate. He tried to pat Timmie’s head, but the kid squirmed away and ran to the sink where he played listlessly with a sponge.
Jeanie and Joanie had tears in their eyes as he left. He assumed that, if he could weigh their tears, the scale would be evenly balanced. Damn them anyway. Damn both of them, the one he loved and the one who posed as lover.
* * * *
—and, you know, years went by—
* * * *
The house tilting to the east. Yellow paint peeling, replaced by new yellow coat, which fades to off-white. A new porch with uneven latticework, bits of which break off from time to time as the porch ages and cracks under the strain. Furniture comes and goes, and gradually the newest furniture is indiscernible from the oldest.
Timmie growing up with little strain, cultivating indifference to everyone: Going off at sixteen to join some mythical military service, polishing off a few Myrmidons and settling down in a southern port with a chubby girl whose face in photographs has little resolution.
Jeanie and Joanie adding weight and puffiness by degrees. Joanie’s hair becoming gray starkly, Jeanie’s fading to gray subtly. A gradual advance of eyelids downward, so the visible portion of each eye decreases until the two women look out at the world through narrow slits. Which causes them to tilt their heads backward when making an important look-them-in-the-eye statement.
Leonard losing weight, but becoming emaciated rather than slim. Piling up further nervous tics, an ulcer, and a recurring case of athlete’s foot. Skin hardening, stretched like artist’s canvas from bone to bone. In his face deep lines which gradually link, through tributaries, into an intricate network.
* * * *
—and finally, now get this—
* * * *
A fluffed-out pillow shelling peas. a bent and dented pipe cleaner watching the painfully slow movements of the pillow’s shelling.
* * * *
—uh, he comes up to her and says—
* * * *
“Where’s your sister?”
She took the bowl out of her lap and placed it beside her on the stair. She tilted her head backward. He felt uncomfortable under the stare of eyes he could not see.
“She died. Months ago. Been a long time since your last visit.”
It took awhile for him to understand her words.
“Dead?” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Sure.”
She held position, rigid, a trace of breathing in her amplified bosom.
* * * *
—uh, he looks her right in the eye and says—
* * * *
“Which one of you is dead?”
She might have laughed. Or the sudden sound that echoed around him might have been a cackle of disdain. “That’s my secret, old man.”
He very much wanted to sit down, but she sprawled over most of the steps and the ground was too far away.
* * * *
—-uh, then he, then he, uh, goddamn it!—
* * * *
“Of course you won’t tell me who you are,” he said.
“Can’t you tell?”
He looked for a clue, searched his memory for some feature that had differentiated the two. A difference in the depth of shadow beneath the eyes, a contrast in the shade of gray that had invaded the girls’ hair.
* * * *
—uh, this is stupid, I can’t think, damn it—
* * * *
“Are you coming to my room tonight?”
“Yes.”
He felt relieved. At least she was still alive, it was the other one who’d died. He might not know whether or not she was Jeanie or Joanie, but by this time how important was the name anyhow? He anticipated the night with some pleasure.
* * * *
—uh, this is really stupid but I can’t—
* * * *
“Move over.”
His heart began to beat fast. She hadn’t even waited for night to fall, had entered the room in broad daylight just as he was edging into his nap. In broad daylight without subterfuge. And what the hell kind of subterfuge could she use now anyway? The complete rejection of the Ritual excited him.
Moving her body as if it were weightless, she made love like a young girl. He responded energetically and the effort almost killed him. But, gasping for breath and hurting in all the usual places, he nevertheless felt abnormally happy.
“I don’t need to know who you are,” he said.
“Really? For what reason?”
The concern in her voice surprised him. Had he, after all these years, finally won the game by giving up? Defeated her because the mystery she’d created so carefully was now irrelevant?
“I don’t need to know for—well, I guess for sentimental reasons. You’ve given me so much, memories of love and affection, and this night every year that’s given a meaning to my life. I love you for that and for everything.”
“Well, that’s sentimental all right.”
* * * *
—God damn it, I can’t remember the punchline—
* * * *
He gazed at her tenderly, pleased that for once he could lie with her and actually see her beside him. She had an odd smile on her face. Then her cheeks began to puff out spasmodically and he realized that she was suppressing a giggle. She lost the battle. The giggle exploded, without transition, into full-scale laughter.
“What are you laughing at?” he asked. But she couldn’t stop laughing long enough to tell him. It was all so infectious he began to laugh himself.
* * * *
—it was something about, no that’s another joke—
* * * *
“It’s just that—” she started to say, but instead capitulated to another fit of laughter.
“This is silly,” he said and buried his face in her ample bosom. The pitch of his laughter deepened to what sounded to him like a resonant bass. At the same time he heard the wheezing part of her laugh reverberating in her chest.
* * * *
—sorry, I know you think I’m a real idiot, but—
* * * *
“Now—what’s funny?” he said for the umpteenth time, as her laughter ebbed back to giggle proportions.
“It’s not—it’s not that funny. It’s just that you look so silly and so confident.”
“Shouldn’t I be?”
“All that stuff about love—”
“I’m sorry you think it’s stuff. But really, I don’t care if you don’t return my love.”
“I never said that.”
“But I no longer care what you said or never said. None of that is important any more. It’s the total experience that’s important. The years of loving you are more important than knowing whether you’re Joanie or Jeanie. Pardon the stuff, but I love you now and have loved you since the first night years ago when you so attractively materialized inside this room.”
“Who said it was me that materialized in your room? Who said that I’m the one you’ve been diddling with all the time or half the time or any of the time over the last few decades?”
* * * *
—punchline just slipped my mind and it’s a real zinger, too—
* * * *
“Are you the one who’s made love to me all these times?”
“That’s a secret.”
“Please—I’ve got to know now.”
“Why now? I thought you didn’t care anymore.”
“I didn’t, but I do now. I still don’t have to know your name, I just have to know if you’re the one.”
“I get it. Although knowledge of specific identity is unimportant, what does matter is whether I, whose identity you don’t know, am your lover, whose identity you don’t know, because if I’m not, then the one who died, whose identity you don’t know, is—so that you, whose identity you don’t know, will feel secure in the knowledge that your real and truly genuine affection will be asserted in the right direction, toward the woman in your bed or at the grave of the deceased. Right?”
“Of course. Isn’t it important?”
“Is it?”
“Isn’t it?”
“It might be, but I am now at this moment in your arms and ready for more, and I want the affection directed at me, whether or not I am the one who deserves it.”
“Then you’re not. Not the one who deserves it, I mean.”
“I never said that.”
“Why can’t you tell me?”
“I just can’t. Can’t you understand that? I can’t.”
* * * *
—but, never mind, a joke’s a joke, and I got another one that’ll just send you into hysterics—
* * * *
GLEEPSITE
I try to make my sales at night during the night shift in office buildings; it works better that way. Resistance is gone at night. The lobbies are deserted, the air filters on half power; here and there a woman stays up late amid piles of paper; things blow down the halls just out of the range of vision of the watch-ladies who turn their keys in the doors of unused rooms, who insert the keys hanging from chains around their necks in the apertures of empty clocks, or polish with their polishing rags the surfaces of desks, the bare tops of tables. You make some astonishing sales that way.
I came up my thirty floors and found on the thirty-first Kira and Lira, the only night staff: two fiftyish identical twins in the same gray cardigan sweaters, the same pink dresses, the same blue rinse on their gray sausage-curls. But Kira wore on her blouse (over the name tag) the emblem of the senior secretary, the Tree of Life pin with the cultured pearl, while Lira went without, so I addressed myself to the (minutes-) younger sister.
“We’re closed,” they said.
Nevertheless, knowing that they worked at night, knowing that they worked for a travel agency whose hints of imaginary faraway places (Honolulu, Hawaii—they don’t exist) must eventually exacerbate the longings of even the most passive sister, I addressed myself to them again, standing in front of the semicircular partition over which they peered (alarmed but bland), keeping my gaze on the sans-serif script over the desk—or is it roses! —and avoiding very carefully any glance at the polarized vitryl panels beyond which rages hell’s own stew of hot winds and sulfuric acid, it gets worse and worse. I don’t like false marble floors, so I changed it.
Ladies.
“We’re closed!” cried Miss Lira.
Here I usually make some little illusion so they will know who I am; I stopped Miss Kira from pressing the safety button, which always hangs on the wall, and made appear beyond the nearest vitryl panel a bat’s face as big as a man’s: protruding muzzle, pointed fangs, cocked ears, and rats’ shiny eyes, here and gone. I snapped my fingers and the wind tore it off.
No, no, no, no! cried the sisters.
May I call you Flora and Dora? I said. Flora and Dora in memory of that glorious time centuries past when ladies like yourselves danced on tables to the applause of admiring gentlemen, when ladies wore, like yourselves, scarlet petticoats, ruby stomachers, chokers and bibs of red velvet, pearls and maroon high-heeled boots, though they did not always keep their petticoats decorously about their ankles.
What you have just seen, ladies, is a small demonstration of the power of electrical brain stimulation—mine, in this case—and the field which transmitted it to you was generated by the booster I wear about my neck, metallic in this case, though they come in other colors, and tuned to the frequency of the apparatus which I wear in this ring. You will notice that it is inconspicuous and well designed. I am allowed to wear the booster only at work. In the year blank blank, when the great neurosurgical genius, Blank, working with Blank and Blank, discovered in the human forebrain what has been so poetically termed the Circle of Illusion, it occurred to another great innovator, Blank, whom you know, to combine these two great discoveries, resulting in a Device that has proved to be of inestimable benefit to the human race. (We just call it the Device.) Why not, thought Blank, employ the common, everyday power of electricity for the stimulation, the energization, the concretization of the Center of Illusion or (to put it bluntly) an aide-memoire, crutch, companion and record-keeping book for that universal human talent, daydreaming? Do you daydream, ladies? Then you know that daydreaming is harmless. Daydreaming is voluntary. Daydreaming is not night dreaming. Daydreaming is normal. It is not hallucination or delusion or deception but creation. It is an accepted form of mild escape. No more than in a daydream or reverie is it possible to confuse the real and the ideal; try it and see. The Device simply supplements the power of your own human brain. If Miss Kira—
“No, no!” cried Miss Lira, but Miss Kira had already taken my sample ring, the setting scrambled to erase the last customer’s residual charge.
You have the choice of ten scenes. No two persons will see the same thing, of course, but the parameters remain fairly constant. Further choices on request. Sound, smell, taste, touch, and kinesthesia optional. We are strictly prohibited from employing illegal settings or the use of variable condensers with fluctuating parameters. Tampering with the machinery is punishable by law.
“But it’s so hard!” said Miss Kira in surprise. “And it’s not real at all!” That always reassures them. At first
It takes considerable effort to operate the Circle of Illusion even with mechanical aid. Voltage beyond that required for threshold stimulation is banned by law; even when employed, it does not diminish the necessity for effort, but in fact increases it proportionately. No more than in life, ladies, can you get something for nothing.
Practice makes perfect.
Miss Kira, as I knew she would, had chosen a flowery meadow with a suggestion of honeymoon; Miss Lira chose a waterfall in a glade. Neither had put in a Man, although an idealized figure of a Man is standard equipment for our pastoral choices (misty, idealized, in the distance, some even see him with wings) and I don’t imagine either sister would ever get much closer.
Miss Lira said they actually had a niece who was actually married to a man.
Miss Kira said a half-niece.
Miss Lira said they had a cousin who worked in the children’s nursery with real children and they had holidays coming and if I use a variable condenser, what’s it to you?
Behind me, though I cannot imagine why, is a full-length mirror, and in this piece of inconstancy I see myself as I was when I left home tonight, or perhaps not, I don’t remember: beautiful, chocolate-colored, naked, gold braided into my white hair. Behind me, bats’ wings.
A mirror, ladies, produces a virtual image, and so does the Device.
Bats’ faces.
Hermaphroditic.
It is no more addicting than thought.
Little snakes waving up from the counter, a forest of them. Unable to stand the sisters’ eyes swimming behind their glasses, myopic Flora and Dora, I changed the office for them, gave them a rug, hung behind them on the wall original Rembrandts, made them younger, erased them, let the whole room slide, and provided for Dora a bedroom beyond the travel office, a bordello in white and gold baroque, embroidered canopy, goldfish pool, chihuahuas on the marble and bats in the belfry.
I have two heads.
Flora’s quite a whore.
The younger sister, not quite willing to touch the ring again, said they’d think about it and Kira, in a quarrel that must have gone back years, began in a low, vapid whisper—
Why, they’re not bats at all, I said, over at the nearest vitryl panel; I was mistaken, and Lira, Don’t open that! We’ll suffocate!
No one who is sane, of course, opens anything any more into that hell outside, but this old, old, old place had real locks on the vitryl and real seams between, and a narrow balcony where someone had gone out perhaps fifty years ago (in a diving suit) to admire the updrafts between the dead canyons where papers danced on the driving murk and shapes fluttered between the raw lights; one could see several streets over to other spires, other shafts, the hurricane tearing through the poisoned air. Nighttime makes a kind of inferno out of this and every once in a while someone decides on a gaudy exit: the lungs eaten away, the room reeking of hydrosulfurous acid, torn paper settling on the discolored rug.
When you have traveled in the tubes as much as I have, when you have seen the playground in Antarctica time after time, when your features have melted enough between black and brown and white, man and woman, as plastic as the lazy twist of a thought, you get notions. You get ideas. I saw once in a much more elegant office building a piece of polished wood, so large, so lovely, a curve fully six feet long and so beautiful that if you could have made out of that wood an idea and out of that idea a bed, you could have slept on that bed. When you put your hand on the vitryl panels at night, the heat makes your hand sweat onto the surface; my hand’s melted through many times, like oil on water. I stood before the window, twisting shapes for fun, seeing myself stand on the narrow balcony, bored with Kira and Lira, poor Kira, poor Lira, poor as-I-once-was, discussing whether they can afford it.
“... an outlet for creativity . . .”
“. . . she said it’s only ...”
What effort it takes, and what an athlete of illusion you become! able to descend to the bottom of the sea (where we might as well be, come to think of it), to the manless moon, to the Southern Hemisphere where the men stay, dreaming about us; but no, they did away with themselves years ago, they were inefficient, the famous Blank and Blank (both men) saw that men were inefficient and did themselves in (I mean all the men except themselves) in blank-blank. Only three percent of the population male, my word!
“. . . legal . . .”
“. . . never . . .”
“Don’t!” cried Miss Kira.
They know what I’m going to do. Ever since I found out those weren’t bats’ faces. As Miss Kira and Miss Lira sign the contract (thumbsy-up, thumbsy-down) I wrench the lock off the vitryl and squeeze through, what a foul, screaming wind! shoving desperately at the panels, and stumble off the narrow, railless balcony, feeling as I go my legs contract, my fingers grow, my sternum arch like the prow of a boat, little bat-man-woman with sketchy turned-out legs and grasping toes, and hollow bones and fingers down to my ankles, a thumb-and-forefinger grasper at the end of each wing, and that massive wraparound of the huge, hollow chest, all covered with blond fur; in the middle of it all, sunk between the shoulders, is the human face. Miss Kira would faint. I would come up to Miss Lira’s waist. Falling down the nasty night air until I shrug up hard, hard, hard, into a steep upward glide and ride down the currents of hell past the man-made cliff where Kira and Lira, weeping with pain, push the vitryl panel back into place. The walls inside are blackening, the fake marble floor is singed. It is comfy-cold, it is comfy-nice, I’m going to mate in midair, I’m going to give shuddering birth on the ledge of a cliff, I’m going to scream at the windows when I like. They found no corpse, no body.
Kira and Lira, mouths like O’s, stare out as I climb past. They do a little dance.
She was a Floradora baby
With a chance to meet the best,
But she had to go and marry Abie,
The drummer with the fancy vest!
Tampering with the machinery is punishable by law, says Kira.
Oh my dear, we’ll tinker a bit, says Lira.
And so they will.
* * * *
BINARIES
critical mass
It’s happened again, I’m in bed with a stranger. Don’t know her name. If I want to remember the curve of the bottom of her breasts, the way they rest on her ribs or rise to her shoulder, I’ll have to reach out and touch them. Do I know her? She has a name, an address (which she refuses to give me), three telephone numbers at which I might reach her. Along with the last she has given me a chart showing the time of day I’m most likely to find her at each number. She has long hair. She is wearing a tight violet dress. Her eyes are violet. She is overweight but that’s something you always forget until you look at her again.
Also: I am being pursued. I saw the frost of his breath on the glass just a moment ago. Her lover, husband, father, a mutual friend? How am I to know? even that there is a connection? Each time I try and confront him, he flees. Last week in the press of crowds at 14th Street he took the only way open to him and was crushed to death in the doors of one of the uptown trains. His last words were I kept my promise, Tell them. My suit is still stained with his blood. And for a moment I envied the dead man: he kept his promise, I have to live up to mine. The next morning there was a certain wariness to his movements.
She has small breasts. When she lies down they hardly exist. Her hips are wide and solid, her thighs large, full, the whole lower half of her body out of proportion to the upper—the breasts, the slender torso, the fragile arms. Her legs are short. Her feet small, delicate. She is nude in the photograph, I can’t remember what clothes she wore.
Someone has written a collection of short stories and published them under my name; they have even put my photograph on the back cover. I received a copy in the morning post. Anonymous, no return address, postmarked Grnd Cntrl Stn. The stories reveal my deepest secrets. The most intense and intimate movements, relations of my life. Only one person could have written them. Or had reason to. My attorney is investigating the possibility of a lawsuit against the publisher but, as the work was copyrighted in my own name, there seems little we can do. The publisher expressed to my attorney his desire to meet the author, his admiration for the book. He relayed an invitation to a party at his home last night. Which is how I met this girl.
He follows me everywhere. Perhaps I am looking for associations where there are none. Perhaps he is nothing more than a hired assassin. Plotting my rotation around the events of the day. The occasions of the moment. Then, certain, he will strike. Perhaps he has nothing to do with what I am doing.
She was standing in a group and she said You’re here, You finally came, and took my arm. She was in the park by the fountain and we watched the pigeons dive for pennies then silently, without words, walked away together. We were afraid of words. It was a clear blue day. The water was silver. It would never rain again. She was in the library. We had requested the same book and sat side by side at one of the long tables in the Special Collections room reading it. She was working at a restaurant, to show me the way to the table where I never arrived. I ate, instead, on the bed in my single room. With her beside me. In the Village. She was sitting beside me on the plane from London and we never got off. She was sitting on the fire escape, crying softly, and I opened the window.
They are moving the city again and I am occasionally lost somewhere between her house and mine. It was at one of these times, coming up out of the subway into what I thought to be midtown Manhattan, and finding myself in the open space of Queens, that I first approached my pursuer. He turned and threw himself onto the back of a truck which was just then pulling away, carrying off the skating rink from Rockefeller Plaza.
Her face is fine and precise as an etching. No part of it could ever be changed. It was drawn with a crow-quill pen and always grins. Her eyes are astonished. Her hair is a different length and colour each time I see her. Her neck is a perfect curve, the wing of a sparrow. Her shoulders are narrow. Her hands are soft. And strong. Her eyes are astonished. They move slowly, as though sliding through oil. When they touch you, you smile.
Ice is crashing off the roof and onto the ground outside. There are pigeons frozen alive inside it. She is gone. He has taken away the photograph. He has gone away himself. And I am sitting here saying-------------. Her name. And it all makes sense.
It does, it does.
* * * *
momentum
I am waiting for a train. To take me a little farther away. Here at Paddington Station. Out of the taxi with my single bag. Ducking. Halfcrown tip, smile, Ta. Now I’m larger. On the pavement walking away from the cab. Before that was a coach from Brighton, whatever I was doing in Brighton and an 82 bus. Now I’m smaller. Inside the station. Waiting for a train etc. I’d like a ticket please. Certainly your destination sir. Anywhere. Ailleurs. Just a little farther away. I see and would that be return fare. No. God no never. I see sir that there is a departure from Gate D at eight o five that would be a halfhour from now sir the train arrives I forget where he said at ten twelve if that would be satisfactory sir. Yes. That would be two pounds eight sir. Stamp rubber ink. Thank you have a pleasant journey sir I hope you enjoy wherever he said. Politeness, that much politeness. A weapon. Now down through Gate D and onto a coach and tea and to look out at the backs of all these houses. And to take me a little farther away. To wonder how much further can I go. To check do I have my passport. To realise the train is going to Paris. To be more careful what I say from now on.
I am French. I was born in a large house off the rue de Tournon, in the 6th arrondissement. Of a Polish mother who died before she saw what I was. Of a father born in Paris, 32 and he’d spent a total of three of them there. Of a father who belonged too much to France to stay there. He read to me, peering over the slats of my petit berceau, Cendrars’ Prose du transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France and Les Pâques à New York, and when I was 6 it was to New York that, bundled up, with my French abécédaires and my grammaires anglaises, I was sent pour faire de l’éducation. To that place that could never exist. That was something created in Cendrars’ poems. That about to acquire a History possessed already its ruins. From which I would never return. Or wish to.
Are you still sitting on the beach with your book and the tiny glass of green tea. You’ll never finish the book you know. With the old people all around you. The people from Hove who come to stare at the sea and wait to die. That strange beach without sand. Rocks. Where I told you one day Your ears are like shells and you turned back to me in the sun and your copper sweater and you smiled. And looked in the water. And it took your face away, to Greece and Istanbul. Where we watched a weary father lift an arm and point to the water and say to his two little girls France is just over there. Both of us smiling at that, we could no more believe him than could the children. To an American France can never be just over there. France is thousands of miles away. A hundred years away. Ten hours by plane. We find it hard enough to believe France exists at all. Do you still believe, you said it once, that I’m “always returning.” And each morning do you still set a place for me and make the tea very strong because I might come. With my eyes blurred, I’ve worked all night. With my hands trembling. Do you still keep cigarettes in the flat for me. And do you go down to the London trains each weekend, still. Because. I might come.
None of you could ever understand, perhaps even believe, my impotence while writing. You always ... go away. You said. I didn’t want to hurt you. But you always had to come too close. And incredible, the unerring instinct by which you’d know whenever I set to work. Get randy and turn up at my flat. Compete, demand attention, you probably wanted to tear up the pages. Crawl under the desk and fondle me as I wrote. And to say again and again I have only so much energy. Not enough for it all. Not enough—even as it drained into you on the studio bed and stained the coverings. And that little shout of yours to tell me I was empty again.
I am English. Turning over my passport. At the Embassy. Impossible to say is this an American or Briton smiling at me now, I trust you’ve given this matter serious consideration young man it is of grave import, I cannot stress strongly enough the profound significance and implications of your action I can only hope that you are yourself fully aware of it. And. And of what you are doing. Yes sir I’m quite aware thank you. And you wish to carry on. Most assuredly. I see. Well I should think yes everything seems to be in order. The girl is. French. O yes of course French. And both. Yes both of us. Quite, well then as I say everything is in order, You should be receiving the new passport within the fortnight. Through the other Embassy of course. They should I suppose be requiring new photographs. Yes sir I’m off to that now the little shop just up the way on Oxford. That would be the one across from Heals. Yes. Splendid. Best of luck young man. And to go down the steps now. Cold.
He won’t be coming round anymore. You can take your Joan Baez records out of the cupboard and put them back on the shelf with the others. You can stop putting new paper in the typewriter every day. You can put away the notebooks for your novel. You can get rid of the French books on Fourth Avenue or in Soho and you don’t have to dust off Heidegger any longer, you can just let it sit there on the table till it turns to dust. And. And you can tear down those wretched Cézanne reproductions. He hated them too.
I am in hospital. In Poland. Dying. They have scraped out the inside of my chest like a curetage till there’s nothing more they can scrape out but moi-meme. Which for some reason they’re reluctant to do. I have donated the organs of my body to others. Whatever they can salvage. Three times a day doctors gather at the foot of my bed and talk quietly among themselves, glancing up towards me from time to time. I lie here smoking and reading Bergson. Duration. I have the general impression that they are bargaining for the various pumps vehicles containers of my body. Wypuśc mu flaki. I am 24. Led to slaughter. I almost survived. That when it comes, not much longer now, I will hear far away in the corridors, the corridors where they would all be waiting, friends, attorneys, publishers, a few young writers, perhaps even a family, the quiet firm sound of applause.
Bump bump bump. Down the stairs. Bag slapping on your bare leg. Snow on the bottom now, I mean it this time. You always mean it. And a cab waiting. Black. And the snow. And two cups of tea on the table inside.
“I’m an American. It’s a complex fate, to be an American, Henry James. And it doesn’t matter. Any train, plane, coach, cab, that’s where I’ll always arrive. This is New York say hello. To New York. Again. No. No I don’t remember whose picture that is on the passport with me. It should say, page 9 I think. America say hello to one of your own. You’ll never lose him and he can’t get rid of you. America knows how to welcome a failure. It should. Les statues meurent aussi. And the French lady is crying into the sea. Si lourde. Sourde. Rain in the City. Noise. Smoke. Wheels. The low sob of a million machines and machinations. A thousand new plots. I am as far away as I can get now, from you. From everything. And it’s not even snowing. And there’s no beach.
Here.
* * * *
centre
The car died again today.
Each morning the grocer leaves a pound of coffee and a carton of cigarettes outside the door for me. Mail is delivered with the morning papers. Today none were there.
There is nothing on the radio. Even static.
Or maybe last night. In the dark and cold. Dying in snow. In the bright sun I gently pried open its hood, cleaned the plugs and checked they were firmly in place. Dried out the carburetor and blew into the fuel pump, opened the feed a bit wider. Scraped the battery terminals and choked it manually. It wouldn’t come around.
I can get nothing on the phone but recordings. I’ve listened to Let It Bleed four times now.
K came. As always, punctually, at ten. With breakfast in a paper bag. She is 45, close to that, old enough to be my mother but when I think of her it’s only her body I remember, her legs in tight jeans, the perfect curve of her bottom like an inverted heart, her short colourless hair and the smallness of her. Her smile and the eyes too light and soft to be blue. So much energy, so calm I think she’s never been unhappy before this. She leaves herself behind in rooms from Kensington to Mayfair. The sense of her presence so strong you hardly realise she’s gone. When she is. But she’s stopped all that. Now, she comes only to this room. Only here. And sits on the grey unmade bed. And smiles whenever I look up at her. Why. Why do you keep coming here. I ask her. A whale’s penis even in repose is taller than I am.
Next week I am being sent to another country, to learn the language. After which I am to return and teach others. I have no idea why. Nor do I seem to have much choice.
I have moved away from the window. K is painting them black and she’s turned on the radio, to listen as she works. Black. Like a bat, penis libre, tail. Jumper stretching tight to show the bra, strap and buckle, the pinch of her waist and an inch of bare skin. I think we once had a discussion of something or another.
A call from D/K. Quite upset. They were unable to pay the bill. Hospital policy, no discharge of patients until such time as the bill is met. D standing at the desk. On the white floor. In his corduroy jacket. And a bargain struck. The hospital allowed K to leave but insists upon keeping the baby. They are permitted to visit it. From 2 to 4 in the afternoon. From 6 to 8 at night. K spoke to me. I could hear D crying softly in the background.
They have taken the car. Dragging it away across the fields of broken cornstalks and through the snow. It left a thin trail of oil behind.
One of her breasts is set lower on her chest than the other. Lower and slightly off to the side, towards her arm. The nipple of that one is inverted, the other 3/4 of an inch long. The obvious facts, of her jumper. Both breasts are small. And solid under your hand. Her husband would have strong fingers.
I am burning the book. It is snowing into the sea. The radio is on. I drop the last match and look up at her. Why do you keep coming back here. They are talking about the weather again.
* * * *
rotation
The pills. A white one, a green one, a red one. They are lined up as always on the bedside table. Each night beside me. And the light. In the room, si légère.
She is wearing grey slacks tonight. When she comes. Of a thick material that follows the taper of her legs down, to fit close about the ankle. Where there are white socks. The tops turned down, and loafers. Brown. Her legs are crossed at the knee. Feet at rest sur le coussin. A band of skin on the left one showing which reminds him what he once said to her, cuisine à cuisse à toi. She is always smoking. Her breasts move in the light cashmere as she inhales. Rise, then sink. With his eyes. You smoke too much.
Some instants a man knows, even as they occur, at the very moment of occurrence, he will never forget. He will carry this with him through the rest of his life. It will always be beside him. A second shadow. And the life will seem longer, or shorter, because of it. He will never be able to make it go away. Or himself from it. And he knew, now, even before the words, when he looked up and saw her there. This was one of those times.
Cher, Je lutte avec les anges de ta lettre, Jacob.
Kind of you to notice. No, Hell, I meant that. Who really cares how much someone smokes, who gives a damn, really. You do. I meant it.
Living together off and on. For twenty years now, and she hasn’t changed. Nothing about her has changed. She looks the same as that first time, twenty years ago. At the party they left together. And three days later thought to ask one another’s name. While his own age rattles inside him. Like a turtle’s blunt head. Butting dumbly, again and again, the glass slabs. That contain him.
Tu, Bientôt une réponse. Tant bien que mal. Et dès maintenant, jamais, garderais l’oiseau.
Other times she would dress in black and move about the house, moving the furniture around inside the rooms, and he couldn’t see her. Just the sound of her breath in the dark. The rasp of legs that don’t want to be changed. And once. Late, lying in bed, her plan to have a peacock tail tattooed on her bottom, in full colour. When she felt he was losing interest in her. Or she would turn up some day, maybe she’d been gone for months, with her pubic hair shaved down till just two initials remained. And maybe they would be his and maybe they wouldn’t. But he was pretending sleep. Just the sound of her breath in the dark.
Réponse. Judas was a moral man. He did what he had to do. A vous.
I don’t like, no, the States. We all know now it’s a failure and we’re ashamed. That’s what the French, the Polish, reading, that’s what it all means. I feel I’m spiritually European. Or want to be. Then why do you stay here. Why did you come back. Because I belong here.
Artaud. Giving his reading. In Paris, he’d been locked away in mental asylums for nine years, all the Paris élite came. And every few minutes he’d stop and look out at the audience, out at Gide and Breton and Jean Paulhan and Camus and Pichette and his friend Adamov and all the others. In despair. And he would try to explain, When you come round you simply cannot find yourself again. Life itself has been permanently debased, and a portion of original goodness and joy lost forever. He would say, I have agreed once and for all to give in to my own inferiority. He would stop and look around at all the faces and surrender. Give up in the middle of a poem, Putting myself in your place I can see how completely uninteresting everything that I am saying must seem. What can I do to be completely sincere? And then to go back and read L’Inconditionné. She is sitting up in bed. As he tells her this, again. Naked. Her breasts are larger than you think, perhaps in contrast to the smallness of her body in the tall window now. The motel sign red on the glass. Or the weight she’s lost. She has seen a story of his in a magazine. Though he has been careful never to show them to her. And asks about the title. That Buddhism sees the Self, Etre, Being as a bubble. Nothing inside. Nothing at the centre. And Sartre’s Cartesian phenomenology too but go ahead and call it existentialism if you want to. Sartre doesn’t care. And I don’t. And so there are just gestures, that’s all we have. And the bubbles are all the time going higher and higher, getting larger. Like lies. Which essentially they are of course. And soon to burst. She hated it when he talked like that.
Do I. Belong here. Yes. Quel sens. Then to ask another name. To watch her. To turn her face away.
She would come back with her body bruised and torn. No explanation, I am doing what I have to do. And nothing else would have changed. Or had the power to change. Effects. And that pale residue of sadness inside. Somewhere.
A quote for you. Like many young men in the South, he became overly subtle and had trouble ruling out the possible. C’est moi.
Living now in this house in Pennsylvania. And she comes round. All the questions unanswered. Or unasked. Peirce’s old house down the road with a little plaque out front to tell everyone who he was. And Peirce who once wrote, Actuality is something brute. There is no reason for it. For instance putting your shoulder against a door and trying to force it open against an unseen, silent, and unknown resistance.
So let me tell you how it will be. The end. One night you will be lying alone in bed. You will hear sounds downstairs. You will hear feet coming slowly up the stairs. You will hear them pause at the door. You will hear the doorknob turning. You will hear the door open. You will hear the footsteps again. On the rug now. You will be lying alone in bed. You will never see his face. You will never know his name.
* * * *
Lee Hoffman and Robert E. Toomey, Jr.
LOST IN THE MARIGOLDS
“Don’t be myzled by the cultural imperative,” the image on the vidphone said as the colors flowed and the face turned into polychromatic knotty pine.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Murdock asked. He felt desperate. His head ached. He massaged his temples and leaned against the desk. “I just want to know if the deal’s gone through,” he said. “Now, please. Have we got the bulkhead rights or not?”
“Hard-boiled haddock is up two points,” his partner said with a thin green grin. The image split; two faces grinned at him.
And the line went dead for the third time that afternoon.
Murdock considered smashing the phone with his fist, then thought better of it. The damn things were expensive as hell.
He looked down from the blank screen. His monogrammed marble egg lay atilt in the white bone china eggcup on the dark blue desk blotter. The egg was rose-colored, veined with gray and black. The very sight of it comforted him.
He brushed his fingertips across it, closed his hand around it, rubbed his thumb against the cool smooth surface. He held it and gazed at the ornate initials.
His.
His marble egg, his mahogany-topped desk, his lushly carpeted office paneled in polished brown silitex, his aquarium, his deluxe model 5472 vidphone.
Scowling at the phone, he punched 0 for operator.
A girl’s face appeared on the screen. She was young, red-haired, efficient. “Your call, sir?” she said briskly.
“I’ve been disconnected.” He worried the monogrammed marble egg as he answered.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“This is the third time this’s happened in the last two hours. I’m paying plenty for service and I expect—”
“Did you dial directly, sir?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What is your number, please?”
“MOrris 54692.”
“And what number are you trying to reach, please?”
“I haven’t been trying to reach him. I’ve been reaching him and getting disconnected.”
“His number, sir?”
“DEsmond 69969, Punta Gorda, Florida. That’s on the West Coast. Area B813.”
“Thank you, sir. One moment, please.”
Murdock clutched the marble egg. He stared at the ONE MOMENT, PLEASE sign on the screen and tried to ease back into the depths of his chair. His back was beginning to ache. His eyes watered. The operator appeared on the screen again, slightly blurred.
“Sir, service has been temporarily disrupted in Area B813. Shall I call you when we regain contact?”
“Disrupted? By what?”
“Hyperactive sunspots, sir.”
“Let me speak to your superior,” Murdock said. “This call is of the utmost importance to me.”
“Certainly, sir. One moment and I’ll connect you.”
This time, instead of the ONE MOMENT, PLEASE sign, a beautiful girl with a dazzling smile came on the screen.
“I am a recording,” she announced happily. Then her tone became sterner. “You have dialed a wrong number. Please disconnect and dial again.” She smiled the dazzling smile. “I am a recording,” she repeated. Then, with a trace of disappointment, “You have dialed a wrong number. Please disconnect and dial again.”
She smiled dazzlingly and Murdock hung up.
The operator he reached this time was a brunette. When he’d finished his story, she connected him with a motherly middle-aged supervisor who heard it through again. Her superior was an owlish woman who listened with an intent expression of disinterest.
The marble egg warmed to the heat of his grip. His fist felt clammy. He waited as the supervisor made connections with her immediate superior. The screen blinked twice, dimmed, then revealed a dour-faced executive with a black carnation pinned to his lapel.
Murdock fixed his attention on the flower as he launched adroitly into his story. He’d reduced the telling time to ninety-four seconds, including dramatic pauses.
“I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do, sir,” the man said.
“I can’t stress the importance of this call too highly,” Murdock said.
“I appreciate your plight, sir. However, sunspot activity is beyond the control of The Phone Company. I sincerely regret any inconvenience this interference may have caused you, but you must understand that we can take no responsibility for the interruption of service due to natural causes.” The man inserted a dramatic pause of his own. “I’m certain you understand.”
“Yes, but do you understand that I’ll be ruined if I can’t get in touch with my partner?”
The man gave him a long look of sympathetic skepticism. “We will endeavor to connect you as soon as possible, sir,” he said with a wilting smile. “However, if you will refer to your contract with our organization you will find that The Phone Company cannot take any responsibility for, or be adjudged liable for—”
“Paragraph seven,” the executive said.
Murdock gave up. “How soon can you put me through to him?” he asked.
“As soon as possible, sir. Sunspot activity, as you are no doubt aware yourself, cannot be controlled. However, if you will give me the name and number of the party you are trying to reach . . .”
“His name?”
The egg slid from Murdock’s grip. He snatched at it. Still juggling, he faced the vidphone again.
The executive said, “As soon as we regain service, sir. If you’ll give me the name of the party you are trying to reach and his contract number . . .”
Murdock scowled. He couldn’t remember his partner’s name. All the years they’d been together, and now he couldn’t remember. ... He dropped the egg.
“Sir?” the phone asked with concern. “Is there something wrong?”
“I’ll call back,” Murdock mumbled as he reached for the disconnect button.
Blood rushed to his head as he bent to pick up the monogrammed marble egg.
* * * *
Frowning at his reflection in the dark face of the phone, Murdock considered the situation.
He’d been away from home only once, twelve years ago. He remembered that trip vividly—starkly. A strange place—a strange bed—strange people. None of the warm, familiar comforts of home.
He looked around the office he’d built into his lovely multilevel house. All the fine particular things. The plush red sofa vibrant against the pea-green patterns of the rug. The mellow glow of the armadillo lamp—Irving had been such a good pet; too good to give up just because he’d died. Tammy had been a good pet, too. He smiled at the stuffed tabby standing on the mantle of the electronic fireplace. So had Wallace, the parakeet that perched in eternal silence on the edge of the aquarium, one glass eye alert to his every move, the other fixed on the three Siamese fighting fish who, at the moment, seemed to be engaged in a mutual nonaggression.
Home.
And he had to leave them again. Leave Savannah and go to Punta Gorda himself. Get this mess straightened out with—hell, he still couldn’t remember his partner’s name. Well, it’d come to him.
Had to see the man, find out what was wrong. Those goddamn bulkhead rights had to be cleared before his option on that stretch of Charlotte Harbor ran out. Already the dredges and draglines were contracted to start filling.
Penalty clauses.
Forfeiture.
Every cent he had tied up in the project.
Dammit. Move fast, his partner had said. Act quickly or somebody else would grab the ball and run with it. Half the Harbor was already filled. Not much left to be developed. Get everything ready to move the instant the bulkhead rights were approved. Sure. He’d done it: put up all his capital, signed papers, made commitments. And now the option was about to expire. The deadline was less than forty-eight hours away.
There was no way out of it, around it, over it or under it. He’d have to go to Punta Gorda himself. And he’d have to fly. He shuddered at the thought.
Still clutching the marble egg, he got to his feet. He stood there.
“Jean!” he called.
“What?” His wife’s voice came thin from the distance, softened by the acoustic ceiling.
“Where are you?”
“In here, dear.” She sounded very far away.
He walked to the door. “In where?”
“The living room. I’m polishing the bronzed baby shoes.”
Stepping into the hall, he closed the office door behind him. The house was very quiet. He walked down the hall and into the
. . . kitchen.
“Jean?”
“Yes, dear?”
“Where are you?”
“In the living room, Shelly.” This time she sounded closer.
He walked through the door and across the hall to the
. . . downstairs bathroom.
“Jean!”
“What is it, dear?”
He started to say that he couldn’t find the living room, but that was ridiculous. He was upset. He’d taken a wrong turn. He’d been living in this house for fifteen years.
He opened the medicine chest and took out a bottle of blue pills. Vitamin C. Good for the nerves. He swallowed three, then remembered it was calcium that was good for the nerves. He added three bonemeal tablets to the C he’d swallowed.
“Shelly?” his wife called.
“I’ll be right there.”
“All right.”
He walked down the hall and turned left. That felt wrong. He kept turning in a one-hundred-eighty-degree arc, then he turned right. It felt right. The living room was there, just where it always had been.
Upset, he told himself. Damn whatsisname. Needed to increase his calcium intake. Maybe take more lecithin, too.
“Jean,” he said.
She set the bronzed baby shoes down on the pre-Colombian coffee table and turned to him with a pale lavender cloth in her hand.
“Yes, dear, what is it?”
“I’ve got to go out of town.”
She stared at him.
“To Punta Gorda. Trouble over the bulkhead rights in Charlotte Harbor. It has to be settled today and every time I get—get—” He still couldn’t remember. He sighed, then said, “Every time I get whatsisname on the phone he just gabbles jabberwocky at me.”
“Who?”
“You know. My partner.”
“Oh.” She nodded.
“That damn phone company.” He sighed again. “I can’t get a clear channel to Punta Gorda. Sunspots, they say.”
“Oh, the children are outside playing. Those sunspots are very bad for them, aren’t they? Shouldn’t I call them in?”
“I don’t think the sunspots will hurt them,” Murdock mumbled. “But you’d better call them in anyway. I have to leave immediately.”
“You mean right now? This minute?”
“Just about. On the next available flight to Fort Myers. I want to say good-bye to the kids. I’ve never left them . . . alone . . . before this.” He squared his sagging shoulders and added, “Call the airport, will you, while I pack. Assuming you can get through.”
She rose. The sight of her standing there, still as slim and lithe as she’d been the day he married her, filled him with a sudden sense of pride.
She was long-legged and small-breasted. Tousled blond hair cut fashionably short framed a face that was a little too emphatic to be called quite beautiful. She wore a loose ultramarine and green print housecoat and rope-soled shoes with no stockings. As she came toward him, she stuffed the pale lavender cloth into her pocket.
She looked up at him. “How long will you be gone, dear?”
“I don’t know. Not long, I hope. There’s something strange going on and I don’t like it. My option will expire tomorrow midnight if I don’t have the go-ahead from the land planning commission signed and in my banker’s hands. If this deal falls through for any reason, we’ve had it. I’ve got to go.”
She kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Everything will be all right.”
He looked deep into her wide dark brown eyes. “Would you tell me something, dear?”
“Of course.”
“And not think I’m joking?”
“Yes.”
“What’s my partner’s name?”
“Shelly!”
“No, that’s my name. What’s his name?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Jean?”
“I’m thinking,” she said. “You know, I can’t seem to remember. It’s right here on the tip of my tongue. See?” She stuck her tongue out at him.
“I don’t see it,” he said.
She pulled in the tongue and tasted it, then frowned. “It was there.” Shrugging, she shook her head. “I’ll call the airport.”
He kissed her again and went to pack.
* * * *
“Ten forty-five,” Jean said as Murdock came into the living room. “You’ve got almost an hour to get there.”
“Seats?” he asked as he set down his overnight bag.
“There were some cancellations. You have a reservation.”
“Good.”
He looked toward the children. Leslie was five now. His sister, Tracy, was four. Good, dutiful, obedient children, but more concerned at the moment with something Leslie held hidden in cupped hands than with their father’s impending departure. For an instant Murdock felt disappointment. He told himself they were both too young to understand.
Doctor Kirk’s Bluebook on Successful Child-Rearing in Our Modern Society said that a father must never let his own troubles interfere with his appreciation and attention to the concerns of his children.
Murdock grinned at his son and said, “Whatcha got there, champ?”
The boy eyed his father.
Tracy returned the grin. “It’s magic.”
“Let’s see.”
Peeling his thumbs apart, Leslie spread his hands open. The object nestled into his palm was small and shiny. A faceted shape made of some bright silvery metal.
As Murdock started to take it, he realized there was already something in his hand. His monogrammed marble egg. He put it down on the pre-Colombian coffee table, carefully so it wouldn’t roll off, then reached for the silvery object.
His fingers touched a surface as soothingly smooth as the polished stone they’d just relinquished. They closed tight on it. “What is it?” he repeated.
“Has it got germs on it?” Jean asked.
“It’s a pentadodecahedron,” Leslie said.
Dutifully, Tracy added, “It’s magic.”
Murdock stroked one facet of the curious object. “A what?”
“Pentadodecahedron,” Leslie repeated.
Tracy said, “We found it in the marigolds. The Easter Bunny laid it.”
Jean nodded as if her worst suspicions had been substantiated. “It has germs on it.”
“It’s got pictures on it,” Tracy said.
Murdock opened his hand and looked. She was right. Each of its five-sided facets showed a small figure of some kind.
“There’s a lion and a goat,” his daughter told him. “And some fishes and some children and—and all kinds of stuff.”
He nodded agreement. The side he was looking at showed a pair of children facing each other. The figures seemed vaguely familiar. He couldn’t place them.
“Shake it,” Leslie said.
Murdock shook it. He heard a series of small but distinct musical notes like the clear tones of fine crystal struck lightly with something made of steel. Soothing.
“That’s nice,” Jean said. “What is it, dear?”
“Be damned if I know.”
“A pentadodecahedron,” Leslie offered patiently.
Jean looked at her offspring. “Where did you get it?”
Tracy repeated, “We found it in the marigolds.”
“Looking for Mister Moto,” Leslie said.
Mister Moto was the snow-white, blue-eyed, stone-deaf tomcat that had been adopted into the Murdock household a few months ago, after Irving died.
“Did you find him?” Murdock asked, hefting the object. It was very light. Too light for the size of it. It chimed in his hand.
“We called and called, but he never came,” Tracy said.
Leslie shot his sister a scowl of disgust. “Nope. Can I have my pentadodecahedron back now?”
“It has germs on it,” Jean told him. “You don’t know where it’s been.”
“Yes, we do,” Tracy said.
“Where?”
“In the marigolds,” she sighed.
“Does this mean I can’t have it back?” Leslie said.
“We can look for more,” Tracy suggested. “Maybe the Easter Bunny laid a lot of them.”
“Listen, children,” Murdock said. “I’ve got to go on a short trip. I want you two to behave yourselves while I’m gone.”
“Can we go, too?” Tracy asked.
Leslie just glowered at his father.
The pentadodecahedron chimed again as Murdock turned his arm to look at his watch. “We better get moving.”
Jean instantly looked harried. “I’ve got to fix my face.”
“I’ll get the car out. Come on, kids.”
He picked up the suitcase. It had his initials on it in gold leaf that was still as bright as the day it was bought. The matched luggage had been a wedding gift. For an instant he wondered who’d given it to them. And why. The thought passed.
Tracy mumbled, “I wanna hunt Easter Bunnies.”
* * * *
Jean backed the car out of the driveway, swung it in a wide arc and stepped on the gas. It jolted forward. Murdock tested his seat belt for the third time since he’d strapped in. It felt secure. He checked the kids, saw that they were all right, then stared at the road ahead.
“Jean,” he said suddenly, “our car was blue. Wasn’t it?”
“Isn’t it?” she said. She gripped the steering wheel hard with both hands and set their course by sighting down the hood ornament, a chromed scorpion with unfurled wings.
“No, it’s green,” he told her. “Look at it.”
“You’re right.” She pondered the problem and came up with an answer that satisfied her. “It must be the sunspots.”
“How in God’s name could sunspots change the color of a car?”
“Sunspots do all sorts of things, don’t they?”
He wasn’t sure. “Maybe. Watch out!” he shouted as Jean ran a red light with practiced ease.
“I wish you wouldn’t scream in my ear like that,” she said, more hurt than indignant. “It’s very distracting. Don’t you want to make your flight?”
Murdock didn’t reply. Jean slammed on the brakes.
Murdock lurched forward. The safety belt cut painfully into his bulging middle. It held. As he rocked back, he saw that the light over this intersection was green.
“What the hell?”
“Look, Mommy!” Leslie called from the back. “A parade!”
“Yes, dear,” Jean said.
“I want some ice cream!” Tracy wailed.
Murdock stared up the cross street. A pair of perfectly matched piebald horses proceeded at a stately pace, towing a gilded float behind them. On the float a huge papier-mâché boll weevil basked in a blanket of pink and white camellias. It rolled slowly past, followed by men on horseback and men pedaling high-wheeled velocipedes and ten-speed English racing bikes with red, white and blue streamers whipping in the wind.
Small girls in filmy lawn intertwined complicated dance steps among the riders, strewing flower petals and cotton bolls. Dogs in ruffled clown collars and tasseled nightcaps staggered along on their hind legs, yipping and snapping at the petals and bolls as they blew past their noses.
The sound of a brass band preceded its actual appearance. The oompahs converged on the spot and overwhelmed completely the tiny string ensemble that paced along behind with an air of indefinable sadness and regret. Short-skirted girls with bright red boots and rouged batons high-stepped by to the cheers of the people lining the street.
“I want some ice cream!” Tracy wailed.
“There’s the ice cream man!” shouted Leslie.
“The children would like some ice cream, dear,” Jean said.
Murdock said nothing.
Leslie leaned excitedly over the back of the seat and pointed. “There he is! See? See him? Right there!”
A man in white pushing a small cart with tinkling bells suspended on strings.
“I’m afraid that’s not really ice cream,” Jean said.
Murdock scowled at the large red letters across the side of the cart: FRENCH FRIED POTATOES.
“I want some ice cream!” Tracy wailed.
The parade line gapped. The vender shoved his pushcart across the street. Leslie mumbled a word his mother didn’t approve of. Murdock heard it and nodded.
The next section of the parade arrived.
Two identical men in identical blue uniforms with gold shoulder-braid were supporting between them the ends of a gigantic billowing banner that read
THE GREAT SAVANNAH TO ATLANTA
CROSS-COUNTRY LOVE-PAGEANT AND
COTTON FESTIVAL EXTRAVAGANZA
in onyx open lettering.
Behind them came a small tidy man with a large sign saying
STAMP OUT THE DEWEY
in publicity Gothic.
Behind him a girl of about ten with mauve ribbons in her long dark hair carried another sign of the same size and lettering style.
DECIMAL IN GEORGIA
She was followed by a grim buxom matron whose sign said
LIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS
From the distance came a curious wail quite unlike a fire engine or an air raid warning siren. Black smoke hovered over an approaching segment of the parade. Brilliant white puffs of steam rose to engage the dark cloud in combat.
Another brass band strode past, each man cradling his instrument in silent respect to the heartbeat measures throbbing from the big bass drum. None of them were in step.
“We’re going to miss my plane!” Murdock said.
Jean patted him on the arm. “Don’t worry, dear. We’ll make it all right.”
“Ice cream!” Tracy howled.
“Me too!” Leslie added with small hope of success.
In unison: “ICE CREAM!”
“Shut up!” Murdock snarled.
Immediately he felt guilty. He reached into his pocket for the monogrammed marble egg. It wasn’t there. His fingers twitched.
“Calm down, Shelly,” Jean said. “You’re just a bundle of nerves.”
“I am not!”
She gave him a significant look.
“Ummm,” he said and slumped in the seat as far as the safety belt would let him, which wasn’t very.
“There’s calcium in the glove compartment,” Jean said.
He stretched out an arm and snapped open the compartment door. A flashlight rolled out and fell between his feet with a clunk. Ignoring it, he fished for the emergency bottle of calcium.
“Did you remember to pack your kelp tablets?” Jean asked.
“Ummm,” he said.
He found the bottle and took three pills.
The eerie wailing resolved itself into an approximation of a melody. The clouds of smoke loomed closer. They spewed from the chimney of a brass-plated boiler. Ranks of gleaming gilt tubes tootled the puffs of steam.
At the keyboard of the calliope, a burly man in a clown suit pounded out a ponderous waltz. The calliope rolled past, drawn by two white horses in red harness.
The following float was pulled by a pink-and-white candy-striped jeep driven by a pretty young girl in a skimpy bikini. There was nothing to the float itself but a flatbed on bogie wheels, decorated with black crepe. It bore like a wearisome burden the weight of a small gray whale with sawdust leaking out of a vent in its side.
The whale was not alone. A pair of stalwart men in yellow nor’westers kept it company. Both wore jet-black beards, lush and untrimmed. One brandished a harpoon toward Murdock as the float came even with the car, and shouted, “You oughta seen the one that got away!”
His companion gave Murdock the peace sign.
Nothing followed the float for a good five hundred feet.
A cop appeared in the opening. He gestured at Jean with one International Day-glo Orange-gloved hand.
She stepped on the gas.
Murdock checked his seat belt.
“Ice cream?” Tracy said.
* * * *
Murdock realized he’d been holding his breath. He sighed. They were on the edge of a vast expanse of grass, dotted with gray aged buildings of an undefined nature and scarred with sharp straight strips of rotting concrete. Then he saw the terminal building, topped with its green fishbowl, posing proudly at the head of one blacktop strip.
Chatham Field at last, Murdock thought.
“Here we are, dear,” Jean said. “And in plenty of time, too.”
He didn’t answer her.
Was it Chatham Field, he wondered, or was it Travis Field? They’d changed the name some time ago, after it had ceased to be a military base. Which had it been; what was it now? Had they changed the name again? He’d heard a rumor that it was now McGee Field. He wished he’d looked at the sign by the gate as they drove in. Well, it didn’t matter, did it?
Jean surveyed the herringbone patterned parking places, chose one between two other cars, and swung the steering wheel sharply. The car whipped around. Its front bumper slammed against the rear chrome of a large black limousine. Satisfied, she backed and filled, deftly jockeying the car into its slot by ear.
It wasn’t until the whine of the electric engine had died away that Murdock opened his eyes and unfastened the safety belt.
He said his good-byes before he got out. Clutching his overnight bag, he walked around the car. He paused to lean in the open window and give Jean a peck on the lips. Then he pulled his head out and stepped back. He looked at the car.
“Green?” he said.
“Sunspots,” she replied.
* * * *
As he entered the terminal building, he sighted the sign above the National counter.
NATIONAL
in blue letters against a backlighted white background. The light was a fluorescent flicker. He strode toward it.
Two people were in line ahead of him. A middle-aged man with a shining bald spot, wearing a black leather jacket, and a young sailor with three slanted parallel blue stripes on his white jumper.
“Why can’t I go to Boston?” the middle-aged man was asking.
“Because there are no flights scheduled to make that run,” the girl at the counter said, her voice a study in patience.
“Why? There’s always been flights to Boston from here before. I make this trip twice a month for business reasons. I know there’s a regular Wednesday flight to Boston.”
Murdock didn’t want to hear it, but the voices were loud and rising. He couldn’t shut them out.
“All air traffic to Boston has been curtailed,” the girl said. “However, you may fly to Los Angeles if you wish.”
“Why the hell would I want to fly to Los Angeles?” The man’s bald spot was beginning to flush.
“It’s very nice there this time of the year,” the girl said. “Or so they claim.”
The sailor turned to face Murdock. “You know what the Marine Corps symbol looks like?” he said.
“I’m familiar with it,” Murdock admitted.
“It’s a sea gull on an eightball with an anchor up its ass screaming ‘Go, Navy.’ I just spent five months on an LST with those mothers. All they did was sit around and fondle their guns.”
“Rifles,” Murdock muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. I was in the Army myself.”
“The Army.”
“National Guard, actually.”
The sailor looked disgusted. He turned away.
“. . . goddamn airline!” the middle-aged man said. He strobed off, his bald spot flickering under the sign light.
The sailor stepped up, leaned over the counter and kissed the girl soundly. She looked surprised but not at all displeased.
“Worth waiting in line for,” the Seabee said. He glanced at Murdock and his lips twisted. He moved on down the line to the mob at the TWA counter.
The girl in the National uniform gave Murdock a long unfocused look, then her warm smile became a professional one.
“Yes, sir?”
“My name is Murdock,” Murdock said, checking his watch. “I have a reservation on the next flight to Fort Myers.”
“The ten forty-five. That’s Flight 666 to Jacksonville, Tampa, Fort Myers and Miami,” the girl said. She picked up a clipboard and scanned the top sheet on it. “Murdock?”
“That’s right.”
“Would you spell that, please?”
He spelled it.
“Em as in ‘mildew’?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m sorry, your name isn’t here, Mr. Murdock.”
“Let me see the list.”
She held the clipboard to her chest and he stopped reaching.
“Our passenger lists are confidential,” she said.
“But my name has to be there. My wife called less than an hour ago. There were cancellations. She made a reservation for me. In the name of Murdock.”
The girl took a step back and looked at the list again. She shook her head. “It’s really not here, sir. There isn’t a single cancellation on Flight 666. Every one of the seats is booked as far as Jacksonville. However, if you’d like to pick up the flight there . . .”
“How can I get there?”
She consulted another list, shook her head again. “I’m afraid Flight 666 is the only one that could get you there in time.”
“Another airline?”
“Unfortunately no one else has a flight out of here in time.”
A line was queueing up behind him. He could feel their aura of impatience. He reached into his pocket for the monogrammed marble egg. It still wasn’t there. Searching aimlessly, he found a handkerchief and settled for dabbing at his forehead with that.
“When’s the next scheduled flight to Fort Myers after Flight 666?” he asked.
“Flight 666 tomorrow at ten forty-five.” She gave him a bright relieved smile. “Shall I reserve a seat for you?”
“I’ve got to get there today.”
The girl looked terribly sincere. “I’m really sorry, sir, but there’s been some difficulty between here and Florida.”
“Hyperactive sunspots?”
“Peripheral crosswinds. So there just aren’t any other flights besides 666 right now. Not from here, anyway.”
His hand started for the empty pocket again. He stopped it as he remembered, passed it the handkerchief to keep it occupied.
Sighing, he said, “I’ll wait. Maybe someone will cancel before the plane takes off.”
“It’s goddamned unlikely anyone’ll cancel after the plane takes off,” said a weary voice behind him.
He ignored it. “This is of tremendous importance to me, miss,” he said. “You have to understand that.”
“I do, sir.”
“Do you?”
“Oh, yes, sir.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said the voice behind him.
“I have your name, Mr. Mandrake,” the girl said. “If somebody cancels or fails to show, I’ll have you paged.”
“Murdock,” he mumbled.
His shoulders sagged. He walked slowly away from the counter.
* * * *
The vending machine dribbled out birch beers that were flat and iceless and it refused to give him his change. He gave it a few halfhearted kicks and it contritely fell over. It lay on its back disgorging shaved ice and gurgling to itself.
A man wearing gray gabardine coveralls with
VENDO
stenciled over his left breast and
HI! I’M JACKIE!
over the right rushed up. He looked mad.
“You know anything about this, buddy?” he asked Murdock.
“No, sir.” Murdock wished the incriminating cup he was holding were elsewhere. He wished he were elsewhere. Home.
“You didn’t see it happen?”
“No, sir.”
“I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” the serviceman said grimly. “Five times in one week is too often to be coincidence.” He gave Murdock a flinty stare. “I have the power to make a citizen’s arrest, you know.”
Murdock didn’t know. But he nodded. He began to edge away, concealing the cup with his body.
“The criminal always returns,” the man pronounced. “When he does, I’ll be here. Waiting!” Murdock nodded again.
A sharp sound cut the air, jabbing at his nervous system. The public address speaker rattled something resembling his name in conjunction with Flight hiss-sizzle-hiss. He made it to the plane door just as it was closing. More than half the seats were empty. The hostess flashed an enameled smile at him and told him to sit wherever he wanted. He slid into the nearest seat and discovered he was over the wing. He couldn’t see the ground. Suddenly he wanted very badly to see the ground.
He got up and took another seat aft of the wing. He gazed at battered cracking whitetop, thinking of the marble egg he’d put down on the coffee table and never picked up again. It was the fault of that damned pentadodecahedron. It had distracted him from more important things. He wondered vaguely what it was. Not that it mattered. He fastened his seat belt.
It seemed forever before the plane finally came to life and taxied across the field.
It reached the end of the runway, made a full turn and sat there, shuddering and grunting and not getting anywhere. The engines whined. The pitch rose. The intensity rose. The shuddering increased. The plane trembled and lurched. Then it began to roll. It picked up speed. Too fast, he thought. The ramp was too short. They’d crash into those blank gray buildings at the end of it.
He shut his eyes.
When he opened them again, he discovered the ground was far below. Too far. Getting farther away every moment. The plane lifted at a quick sharp angle.
He struggled to pull himself together. His angle of vision widened as the plane lifted. He could see the city, the muddy red river along its edge, the grassy expanse of Hutchinson Island lying across from it. The red river became a ribbon winding through the flat gray-green of the marshes and the brighter green of the pine-covered islands. Small streams threaded through the green to join it. They twisted and writhed, cutting the land into small sharp-edged shards.
Fascinating.
It looked just like a map; just like that Coast and Geodetic Survey map he’d had when he was a kid. Where was it now?
At home.
Ahead, he could see the vast gray sea, discolored where the red river dumped its burden of mud. He realized that the long thin strip of land splitting the river near its mouth was Cockspur Island. The five-sided structure on the prow of the island must be Fort Pulaski. It was a National Monument of some kind. Something to do with Robert E. Lee, he thought. He should take the kids out there to see it sometime. He really should. Doctor Kirk’s book advised taking youngsters on educational and culturally inspiring field trips at frequent intervals.
And then there was nothing under the plane but sea.
No ground at all. Nothing visible through the window but the wing and the water and the white ice-crystal clouds glimmering in a stark blue sky. No ground at all. At that realization, he felt the pit of his stomach flinch. He wanted the ground. He wanted his home.
He discovered a tugging. His hand was digging under the seat belt and into his pocket, looking for . . .
His fingers touched a smooth, cool, comforting surface. Elated, they closed on it. He hadn’t left the egg after all. He’d simply overlooked it when he’d hunted before. That only proved how bad his nerves were getting. More calcium tablets. That was what he needed.
The shape of the surface was wrong. Frowning, he brought the object out of his pocket. It chimed at him. He held it up and stared at the shining silvery facets of the thing.
The figures of two children seemed to stare back.
* * * *
Landing in Jacksonville made his stomach queasy. Landing in Tampa was just as bad. But at least it was the last stop before Fort Myers. The plane lifted off again on the last leg of his trip.
He worried about the pentadodecahedron as he watched land skim by below. They weren’t traveling as fast now as before, and they were lower. He could see a lot of detail in the landscape. Neatly trimmed lawns, precisely planted groves of fruit trees. Swimming pools shaped like oblongs, like ovals, like kidneys, like half moons and quarter moons and full moons. A pool in every backyard. And most of the backyards butted against canals.
Money, he thought. Loads of money down there. Fortunes had been made already. And lost. Dammit, what had happened to . . . to . . . Jesus, he still couldn’t remember the bastard’s name.
Beyond the vast fields of houses in bloom, he could see the rolling green of the Gulf. Thin spindly oil rigs latticed out of it a short distance offshore. A lean white yacht cut across it, catching his eye with its trim speed. It threaded between markers and anchored fishing boats, heading for a small bay.
He recognized the curious shape of the bay and the twin rivers feeding into it. Charlotte Harbor, almost exactly the way it was on the maps back in his office. The town on its edge must be Punta Gorda.
Why the hell didn’t the planes land here? It was absurd that he should have to go on to Fort Myers and then backtrack.
Absurd.
Something was going on in the Harbor. Barges like huge houseboats were anchored along the shallows between Pine Island and the mainland. Lengths of huge tubing on floats trailed across the water like surfaced eels. Plumes of pale mud gushed from their mouths, laying layers of sand along the shore. Dredges building dry land at the edge of the sea. Not far from the water draglines were cutting deep gashes into the earth. Ditches that were embryonic canals. A land project in its early stages. Pushing back the sea.
His land project.
It was his project; he was certain of it. He’d studied the maps too often. He knew the lines and contours of them too well. He couldn’t be mistaken. That was the land and water-right he’d optioned. That was the land he was going to build as soon as the bulkhead rights were cleared.
But someone was at work there already.
He squinted to read the huge letters painted across the side of one of the dredges.
EMERGENCE DEVELOPMENT, INC.
It was even the company he’d contracted to do his work. But it was too soon. The bulkhead rights weren’t cleared yet. As far as he knew.
What the hell had his partner been up to? What was going on? Had somebody jumped his claim, gotten away his option? Was that why whosis had gabbled about hard-boiled haddock? Afraid to face him and own up to it?
He gripped the chiming pentadodecahedron, his thumb rubbing frantically at one facet. Wait until he got hold of . . .
Whatshisname.
Unless he was leaping to conclusions.
The seat belt sign flashed on. The plane circled on. The field at Fort Myers was smaller than the one at Savannah, but then it had never served as a military base. It lay at the edge of town, alongside a broad straight stretch of highway. The plane circled wide. It cut back and swung in low and fast. Much too fast. Murdock gripped the arms of the seat. The plane touched down smoothly and taxied toward the small terminal building. Stopped.
Passengers scrambled to their feet. They filled the aisles. Murdock found himself jammed in between two of them, a tall blond girl with one blue eye and one green eye, and a chubby Roman Catholic priest with a broken arm in a black clerical sling.
They moved along past the hostess who handed each an orange, out the door and down the escaladder into the hot bright Florida sunshine. That day the opening market value on the sunshine had been 20.69 and rising.
The air smelled of half-burnt jet fuel, scorched paving and salt marshes. Murdock crossed the concrete to the terminal building. Inside, the scent was the cool canned slightly musty odor of recycling air. He felt the thin film of sweat on his forehead chill as he walked past a blower. He rubbed at his face and wiped the hand off on a trouser leg as he hurried over to the long bank of vidphones.
The red lights were burning; they were all in use.
He stood there staring at the pleasingly patterned Translucetic booths and wished somebody would get the hell off the phone and give him a chance at it.
An unshaven old man with a patch over one eye and grappa on his breath stopped in front of him and asked Murdock if he could for the love of God spare a quarter for a cup of coffee.
“I gave at the office,” Murdock muttered.
“Please,” the old man whined.
“Here. Take this.” Murdock shoved the orange into the man’s open hand. “I need all my change for the phone.”
“An orange! I’m overwhelmed,” the old man said. He walked away grumbling to himself.
Finally one of the red booth lights blinked green and a door opened. A white-haired woman in a lavender and cerise sarong waddled out. Her mirror-lensed sunglasses turned toward Murdock. He saw himself reflected in them, tiny twin images bulging in their fishbowl convexities.
She stood firm, blocking the door. With an anxious grunt he shoved past her bosom and into the booth. He jerked the door shut behind him. A dim light and a noisy fan cut on.
Facing the blank screen, he thumbed a coin into the slot and punched 0.
She was the first genuinely ugly vidphone operator he’d ever seen. For a moment he just stared at her in astonishment.
“Your call, sir?” she said.
At least her voice was pleasant. It reassured him.
“Punta Gorda,” he told her. “Area Code B813, person-to-person to . . . make that station-to-station to DEsmond 69969, collect from Mr. Murdock.”
“I’m sorry, sir. Area Code B813 is temporarily out of service.”
She smiled. Strong teeth.
Like a mule, he thought. He almost asked her if she knew when service would be resumed. But, of course, she wouldn’t. He felt certain of that.
Instead, he said, “All right. I’d like to put through a person-to-person call to Savannah, Georgia. Area Code J912, to Mrs. . .” He hesitated. It was right there. It was . . . “to Jean Murdock. Collect.”
“I’m sorry, sir. Only calls originating within Area Code D813, Fort Myers, can be serviced at this time.”
“Sunspots?”
“I don’t know the reason, sir.”
“And I suppose you don’t know when service will be restored either, do you?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re most welcome, sir.”
She flashed her teeth at him again. The screen went blank. In her case it was a mercy.
He bounced the chiming pentadodecahedron in his hand.
Someone started banging on the Translucetic side of the booth.
“Hey, you through in there already or what?”
Bang! Bang! Bang bang bang bang!
He opened the door. It was the priest with the broken arm.
“Bless you, my son,” the priest said. He shouldered Murdock roughly out of the way as he went in and slammed the door behind him.
* * * *
A fold-down screen closed the Hertz-Avis booth. A sign tacked to it said
OUT
Underneath it was a smaller sign:
WE LOVE YOU, PLEASE WAIT
WILL BE BACK AT
There was a clock dial under the sign. The hands of the clock were missing and someone had drawn a leering face on it in heavy red Magic Marker ink.
Murdock looked around, then walked over to the airline ticket counter. A young man with long hair sat on a high stool behind it. He wore a blue blazer and a bored expression. He was looking off into the distance as Murdock approached.
“Excuse me,” Murdock said.
No response.
“I said, ‘excuse me.’“
The young man’s eyes focused on him. “Yes? May I help you?”
“Would you happen to know when the car rental people will be getting back?”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“I have to get to Punta Gorda,” Murdock said. “I have to get there today.”
“So what would you like me to do?”
“Tell me how.”
The young man’s eyes unfocused again. He absently stroked the winged insignia on his breast pocket.
“I’ve never been to Punta Gorda. We don’t fly there, you know.”
“I don’t care. I’ve got to get there.”
“It’s north of here,” the young man offered.
“Is there a bus? A train? An intercity taxi service? Dog sled?”
‘Taxi.” The young man sounded hopeful. “There’s an air taxi service. The Gatorland Flying Service. It’s that hangar over yonder. The one with the orange windsock on it.”
“Thanks.”
“Be sure to tell them Jerry Fisk sent you.”
“I will.”
“Promise?”
“Jesus!” Murdock said.
“Jerry. Jerry Fisk.”
* * * *
“Jerry Fisk sent me,” Murdock said. The corrugated metal walls of the hangar caught his voice, held it in thin dusty reverberations. “I want to charter a plane to Punta Gorda.”
The woman facing him looked like somebody’s idea of a composite mother-image. In spite of the heat, a pale gray sweater was draped shawllike over her shoulders. Her skirt was calf-length. Her shoes were Red Cross. She peered over the rims of her glasses at him and smiled. She took his arm.
“Come into the office,” she said.
He followed her into a cobwebbed cubicle jammed with two desks, three filing cabinets, an indeterminate number of straight-backed chairs. Papers and charts littered the desks. Some were yellowed with age, curling at the edges. One wall was taken up by a huge framed etching of the Titanic going down.
She pushed him gently into a chair and seated herself on a corner of the nearest desk.
“You’re in luck,” she said, striking a wooden match on the sole of her shoe. She used it to relight a half-smoked cigarillo. “One of our best pilots is free at this very moment.”
“I’d like to leave immediately,” Murdock said.
She clenched the cigarillo in her teeth and brushed papers off the desk as she hunted through them. “It’s here somewhere. Ah, here we go.”
She shoved a printed form at Murdock. He took it. It was printed upside down. No, he was holding it upside down. Upset, he told himself. Too nervous. He turned the form over.
“Would you sign it, please?” she asked.
“What is it?”
“Just a standard waiver-of-liability form. It releases our firm from responsibility for any injuries incurred as a direct result of our unsolicited services to you.”
“Injuries?” He looked up. Behind her head, the rearmost section of the Titanic was under water. Smoke billowed from its upper decks.
“It’s a standard form. Standard form #699. See.” She poked her fingertip at a small line of type at the bottom of the sheet. It read
STANDARD FORM PRINTING, INC.
Handing him a cryptostylus, she told him, “You sign right there, beside the X.”
Murdock stared at the paper. He raised his head and glanced around the office. One panel of a partition was broken. Through it he could see the dimness of the hangar. Chains swung from an overhead hoist. A wing section that looked like balsa wood and canvas was stowed in the rafters.
He frowned. There was something terribly familiar about it all. It should have been in black and white. It was right out of an old Jimmy Cagney movie from the Late Show Antiques Festival. Or was it Cary Grant? Richard Arlen? He wasn’t sure.
The woman tapped her fingertip on the form to get his attention. “Would you?”
He signed. His hand trembled.
“If you’ll just wait one little moment, I’ll call the pilot.” She smiled sweetly. “He’s my son, you know.”
“I want to see the plane,” Murdock said.
“You will, sir,” she assured him. “You will. Hey, Dallas, you lazy shiftless no-count, get your ass in here, we gotta customer!”
* * * *
The pilot looked like Cary Grant in full flying togs. A battered horsehide jacket, field boots and riding breeches. No leather helmet and goggles, though. No white silk scarf either. For a moment Murdock questioned the man’s competence. How could he fly without a white silk scarf?
“Name’s Dallas,” Cary Grant said. His smile was almost as deep as the cleft in his chin. He offered his hand. Murdock shook it. The grip was firm, dry and confident. Murdock felt better.
“Ready to go?” Dallas asked. He gestured toward a plane in the hangar’s shadow.
At least it wasn’t one of those Ford Tri-motors from the movies, Murdock thought. In fact, it wasn’t any kind of plane he recognized. He said, “What model plane is that anyway?”
“Ain’t a model.” Dallas paused to chuckle at his own joke. “It’s a real ‘un.”
When Murdock failed to join him in his hilarity, he added, “It’s a Piper Yamacraw. Them plane-makers run out’n Indian nations to name ‘em after ‘bout five, six years ago. Now they callin’ the new models after little tribes an’ things. Yamacraws was parta the Creek Nation. None of ‘em left nomore.”
“Killed off by settlers?” Murdock asked.
“Naw. Same thing happened to them as happened to the Hawaiians. They kept intermarryin’ till there wasn’t any fullbloods left. Wiped themselves out the painless way.” Dallas scowled at Murdock ominously. “Same as is gonna happen to us all one of these days. Watch your step gettin’ in.”
The cabin of the small, twin-engined plane was remarkably like the interior of an automobile. The controls looked much the same. That seemed wrong to Murdock. He felt there should have been a lot more dials and meters and things. Panels of them in front of the pilot and above his head. To every side of him. Or maybe nothing but a joystick. He wasn’t sure how it should be set up, but this wasn’t the way.
He settled himself deep into the copilot’s seat and reached automatically around for the ends of the seat belt. He found them and fastened it, pulling it as tight as he could. The buckle snapped into lock.
“You ready?” Dallas asked, climbing in on the other side.
“Yes,” Murdock gasped thinly.
“Wait!” It was the woman from the office. She came running out to the plane waving something. “Idiot,” she hollered fondly. “You’re always forgetting.” She flung the thing around Dallas’s neck. It was a white silk scarf.
Suddenly Murdock felt a lot better. He gave a relieved sigh. The seat belt snapped.
He felt a lot worse.
“Thanks, Mom,” Dallas said.
“And for Christ’s sake,” she told him. “You watch out for them goddamn peripheral crosswinds.”
“Don’t you worry none, Mom.” He gave her a small peck of a kiss in the middle of her tired careworn forehead. She backed away. Dallas turned to Murdock. “You just set back an’ take it easy. We’ll be there in two shakes of a gator’s tail.”
“My seat belt broke,” Murdock said.
The pilot nodded. “That’ll be five dollars extra.”
* * * *
Murdock mumbled half-remembered prayers all the way to Punta Gorda. He kept himself braced against the control panel and the floorboards, not relaxing until Dallas said, “We’re down.”
They were rolling toward a candy-striped red and white hangar. Rolling too fast, Murdock thought. They’d never be able to stop in time!
But they did.
Dallas jumped out, walked around and opened Murdock’s door. The afternoon sun reflected off the tasseled white silk scarf, giving the pilot’s handsome face a radiant ethereal glow.
“Okay, Mr. Murdock?” he asked.
“Okay,” Murdock echoed, stumbling to the ground.
The ground. He realized it was okay. He was here. Safe, sound, and in one piece. He felt a rush of fondness for the smiling, competent pilot who’d managed this miracle.
“Punta Gorda,” the pilot said. “Ain’t changed a bit since I was here last.”
“I’ve got to take care of some business,” Murdock said. “Can you wait for me?”
“Depends. How long you gonna be?”
“Only an hour or two, I hope.”
“I reckon I can hang around that long. Till five maybe. Gotta head back then. Mom hates it when I’m late for supper.”
“If I can’t get back by then, how can I get in touch with you?”
“You just call the airport at Fort Myers, Mr. Murdock. We’ll be havin’ supper right there in our own little hangar. You’d be downright amazed what Mom can cook up on that hot plate. If you need me, I’ll fly back down here after we eat.”
“Wait,” Murdock said. “I’ll be here.”
* * * *
A sign with the wreathed-dragon symbol of TPC hung from a post in front of the candy-striped hangar. Inside, Murdock found that the office was a lot like the one he’d just left back in Fort Myers. Except that this one wasn’t cobwebby. In fact, it looked like it had just been uncrated and set to cool. The public phone booth beside the door was empty.
“It ain’t workin’,” a twanging nasal whine informed him.
A redheaded kid with no eyebrows and a huge adam’s apple. He leaned against the frame of the office door.
“I’m not surprised,” Murdock said with a sigh. “I need a taxi.”
The kid shook his head. “They don’t come out this way.”
“How are people supposed to get to town from here?”
The kid shrugged. “We hardly ever see anybody. Me, I ride a bi-sickle. Gonna get a motor-sickle next year, though.” He twisted his hand in the air in front of him. “Vroom, vroom, vroom.”
“How far are we from the Loshun Mall?” Murdock asked.
“ ‘Bout two miles or so. More or less. Vroom. Maybe.”
“And I can’t get a taxi?”
“Looks like.”
“I can’t walk it.”
The kid stared at Murdock’s legs. His eyes narrowed. “Wanna rent my bike?”
Murdock considered it. The idea wasn’t very appealing. But it would be better than walking. It had been a long time since he had ridden one, though. Well, they said once you’d learned to swim or ride a bike you never completely lost the ability.
“How much?” he asked.
The unbrowed eyes narrowed further. The lips pursed. “How long?”
“Till five.”
“Ten bucks,” the kid said.
“I’ll walk.”
“Five bucks. I ain’t gonna go no lower. Take it or leave it.”
It would have been worth five. There was a lot more than that at stake. But a principle was at stake, too.
Murdock said, “Two fifty, and you’re robbing me blind at that.”
The kid held out his hand. “In advance, mister. I gotta have a deposit, too. Gotta be sure you’ll come back.”
Murdock stared at the hand. It was filthy. “You should try washing that once in a while,” he said.
“Hell, spit and crud’s the only things holding it together.”
Murdock doled out the two fifty.
“And twenty-five dollars deposit.”
“Come on.”
“Take it or leave it,” the kid said, stuffing the two fifty into his pocket.
Murdock peeled out two tens and a five. “I want a receipt for that.”
The kid shrugged again. “Watch third gear. Slips on hills.”
“A receipt,” Murdock insisted, not sure whether he should feel silly about it or not. But sure that he wanted the receipt. Business was business. He waited while the kid scrawled something illegible on a dirty scrap of paper with a burnt match.
The bicycle had a low narrow seat and high handlebars. A three-speed shift and a handbrake. He leaned it away from the wall of the hangar, got gingerly aboard, and pedaled off, wobbling badly.
The afternoon was getting warmer.
* * * *
Loshun Mall sprawled in the midst of a vast parking lot. It was a squat white concrete block structure with one single glass and plastic office tower rising upward from it like an obscenity finger. The tower was the pride of Punta Gorda. Originally it had been twenty-eight stories high. Then it had blown over. They built it up again, this time five stories less. It blew over again. Three rebuildings later, it was twelve stories high and hopeful. It rose directly from the center of the Mall building.
There were rows of racks for bicycles outside the Mall entrance. They were all full. Murdock leaned his bike against a wall and joined the teeming throng of shoppers that flowed through the open doorways.
It was like walking through a waterfall. A curtain of cold air boxing in a solid block of artificial atmosphere. The Mall was a frigid tropical paradise. Its high acoustic ceiling was speckled with colored lights. Plush plastic birds of every hue sang recorded songs as they hung suspended from almost invisible wires or perched in the Styraflex palms that lined the walks. Planters carved from mahogany-stained coquina were filled to overflowing with large-leafed machine-made foliage. Cast concrete benches nestled among them, lit by incandescent cressets, lined with exhausted shoppers.
The stores fronting into the Mall beckoned with open doors and brilliant window displays. Swords, sterling silver, lava lamps, patent medicines, shoes, puppies and boa constrictors, suits and dresses and garden implements, toys, guns, religious statuary.
An insurance company display showed a beautifully ornate casket with a sign above it saying:
YOU’RE GOING TO DIE SOMEDAY!
DON’T MAKE IT HARD ON YOUR LOVED ONES!
PASS AWAY HAPPILY—CHAT
A WHILE WITH OUR FRIENDLY
HELPFUL STAFF.
Murdock finally found the directory. Loshun Tower wasn’t listed. Evidently it couldn’t be reached from this particular passageway. He backtracked to the outside and tried a different entrance. It, too, failed to get him to the Tower.
Outside again, he surveyed the parking lot and wondered just how one got from here to the office building. A boy of about ten bounced by on a pogo stick. A poodle in sunglasses led a woman in sunglasses past on the end of a leash. The dog stopped and watered a plastic palm. A policeman ambled slowly along, swinging his stunstick. Murdock walked toward him.
“Excuse me, officer.”
The cop halted and turned on him. “Don’t come too close, mister.”
“I just want directions.”
“Stand back a little there. Okay, what’s the problem?”
“I’m looking for the entrance to Loshun Tower.”
“That way,” the cop said, pointing with the stunstick. “Back off now.”
Murdock backed, restraining the impulse to cut and run.
In the cool that leaked through the air curtain, a man in a long white robe with a deep cowl marched back and forth, his sandals slapping softly on the maroon indoor-outdoor carpeting. He shouldered a sign that said:
LISTEN, CHILDREN!
He confronted Murdock.
Murdock tried to edge past him.
The man’s impossibly thick black beard bristled out from the shadow that half-hid his face. As he sidestepped to block Murdock’s way, he said, “The spawning rivers are running dry! Prepare yourself, for the days of wrath are at hand!”
Murdock tried to go around. The man moved with him, holding out a folded slip of pink paper. Murdock took it. The robed figure didn’t move.
“Get out of my way or I’ll call a cop,” Murdock said.
“I am a cop,” Blackbeard intoned. “I only do this during my off-duty time.” He jutted his beard at Murdock again and added, “Prepare yourself, for the days of wrath are at hand! The spawning rivers are running dry!”
“Do you mind?” Murdock said.
“You got any ID?” Blackbeard asked.
“What?”
“Identification. You got any or not?”
“I’m really in a hurry,” Murdock said.
The man waggled his sign. “You see what this is?”
Murdock looked. The sign was heavy-duty posterboard. The pole that held it up was an extra-long riot stunstick. He reached into his pocket and took out his wallet.
“Citizen card?” the cop said.
Murdock handed it over. The cop examined it carefully, comparing the picture on it with the actuality.
“It’s not really a very good likeness,” Murdock apologized.
“What are you doing this far from Savannah?”
“I have a business here. My office is in Loshun Tower. I’m in land development.”
The cop handed the citizen card back.
“Keep your nose clean,” he said. “We’ll be watching you. We don’t like trouble here. Punta Gorda is a nice peaceful little town and we aim to keep it that way, mister. No nuts or freaks allowed. Step out of line and you’ve had it.” He raised his voice again. “The spawning rivers are running dry! Prepare yourself, for the day of wrath is at hand.”
Murdock put his wallet away and went into the chill of the Mall. This time he managed to locate a bank of elevators and beside them, the Tower directory. The sight of his company’s name there in simple white block letters against a velvety background cheered him.
An elevator opened its doors.
He went in and it sighed, sealed and hummed. He reached out to push the tenth-floor button and noticed that he was still holding the folded pink slip the cop had given him. He opened it as the elevator rose, and looked at it. Bold black type, slightly out of alignment, explained:
Beyond all doubt, the evidence points to 1914 as the year when the kingdom of God went into operation, and that event is causing things to happen here on Earth.
That was it except for a small union label in the corner of the sheet. He let the paper flutter to the floor and the elevator stopped.
The doors opened and he stepped out into a corridor filled with beautiful, tanned girls in short skirts. They were all tall and blond and wore flat-heeled shoes. He paused to appreciate the dazzling array of flexing calves, then struck out for Suite 1066. Two left turns and an acre of sunkissed flesh later he found it. The door was lettered in Greco Adornado Bold:
AMALGAMATED BEACHFRONT, INC.
DON’T JUST STAND THERE
COME ON IN!
He went on in.
The office was cool. White walls. A pale blue carpet. Matching furniture. The receptionist was a tall, leggy blond in a brief sky-blue bikini and flat-heeled shoes. She sat in front of a glass-topped desk. There was nothing on it but an empty ashtray and a morocco-bound copy of the Koran. To her left was a full-length vidscreen.
She flashed Murdock a smile of intense relief.
“Oh, Shelly, you’re here! We were beginning to think you weren’t going to make it. The papers arrived over an hour ago.”
“You know me?”
He’d never seen her before.
She tilted her pretty head. “Know you? Shel-lee!”
The last half of her greeting penetrated. “Papers?”
“The ones you were waiting for, hon. Clearing the bulkhead rights. Have you been smoking, love?” Her face showed sudden concern. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Fine,” he mumbled. “Ummmm. Wh—where’s my partner? He here?”
“Who?”
“That was my next question.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” She rose to come around the desk and face him, looking up. Gently she pressed a cool palm against his warm forehead. “Let me smell your breath.”
Backstepping, he took out his bottle of C and gulped down a couple. He held the bottle toward her. “Would you like some vitamins?”
“Not during business hours, hon.” Her brow furrowed. “Mr. Hardy’s been calling here every ten minutes. He’s absolutely frantic.”
“Hardy? My partner?”
“Your attorney.” She studied him with a faint trace of interest.
“My attorney,” he repeated, wondering if he shouldn’t have taken calcium instead of C. Or possibly he should take it now to complement the C.
She said, “He says those papers have to be signed and at the bank before three. We’ve got a messenger girl standing by on roller skates.”
He sighed.
She gave him a sympathetic smile. “It’s the pressure, isn’t it, hon? You’ve been working too hard. You just come along and sign those papers and I’ll take care of everything else.”
Her cool gentle hand slipped into his and tugged at him. She led. He followed numbly. Across the waiting room, past a coffee table littered with colorful Chamber of Commerce brochures, to a door of frosted glass. She pushed the door open and led him into the office.
It was as big as the waiting room, and even more deeply carpeted. He felt like he was walking on whipped cream.
The Translucetic desk was vast and kidney-shaped. It was the color of chlorinated water. The walls were textured, done in four attractive pastel shades: pink, blue, beige and oyster white. A number of tastefully framed Primachrome architect’s renderings of Amalgamated Beachfront property developments were hung in various places.
She guided him around the desk and into the welcoming upholstery of the Patent Comfy-Chair.
“Sit down and relax,” she said. “Would you like a drink?”
“No.”
“Of water?”
“No.”
He looked at the papers on the desk in front of him. He didn’t know what was going on, but he knew what had to be done.
“Where’s a pen?” he asked.
She put a cryptostylus into his hand.
The computer-pen made small scratchy sounds as he scrawled his signature across the paper. He lifted the corner of the sheet, signed the first carbon, then the second, third, fourth, fifth. He kept signing and lost count.
When he reached bottom, the girl took the pen from his cramped hand. She gathered up the sheaf of papers and said, “I’ll give these to Noel. She’ll rush them right over to Mr. Hardy.”
“Fine,” Murdock said with a nod.
“Shall I call Mr. Hardy for you?”
“Please.”
She started toward the door, then turned and said over her beautiful tanned shoulder, “Take it easy, Shelly. You only live once.”
* * * *
Murdock’s hands felt empty. They were empty. His fingers twitched for something to do. He fished the pentadodecahedron out of his pocket. It chimed as he fondled it.
He leaned back in the chair and looked around. On his desk—his desk?—was a large green blotter. On the blotter was a small Kalliroscope on a walnut stand equipped with a one-watt heating source. Inside the sealed glass and metal box a smoky living liquid swirled and danced, sensitive to the slightest thermal gradient. He stared at it for a moment, then lifted his eyes.
A big wall-mounted vidphone blanked back at him from across the room. To one side of it was a dark cork board framed with diffraction foil. A dart board. He remembered how fond he’d been of darts when he was a kid. Hadn’t thought about that for a long time.
It was an odd dart board. Divided into twelve segments, with no bull’s eye or numbers for scoring. Nothing but a silhouette figure in each of the segments. The figures were strangely familiar. He puzzled as to where he might have seen them before and what they were. Fish, crab, bull, a woman holding a balance. Very familiar.
He saw the darts lying half-hidden under some Chamber of Commerce brochures to the left of the Kalliroscope on the desk. They were old-fashioned wooden-bodied darts fletched with real feathers. He hefted one, appreciating its weight and balance. He threw it.
The dart thanged into a picture of two figures standing back to back. Children, from the look of them. Yes. He remembered where he’d seen them before.
He picked the pentadodecahedron up off the desk and turned it in his hands. The fish, the crab, the bull. They were the same all right. Some small differences in detail, but not enough to disguise them. All the figures were the same except for the children, if that was what they actually were. There was only one child on the pentadodecahedron. He thought there’d been two.
Or had there been? He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure about much anymore. Less and less every moment.
But at least the bulkhead papers were signed and on their way. The business was proceeding properly again. The pressure was off. He wasn’t staring financial ruin in the face anymore. He could stop and think. His nerves would unstring themselves and hopefully he could get back to life as usual.
The pentadodecahedron was just some toy his children had found among the marigolds. There were more important matters to be considered. He leaned back in the chair to consider them and the intercom buzzed.
“What?” he said.
“Mr. Hardy on channel two, sir.”
Not hon anymore. Sir.
He said, “Thanks.”
The intercom clicked at him. He punched 2 and as the screen across the room lit up he told himself that at last he’d get some answers to his questions. Then he could get himself home again where he belonged.
The man who appeared on the screen was so pale that Murdock wondered if the chromatint was out of adjustment. Nobody in Florida could really be that washed-out looking. The Chamber of Commerce would never allow it.
“For Christ’s sake, Murdock,” the man said. “Where in hell have you been? If you hadn’t got here when you did, the whole deal would have been blown. I own a piece of this project, too, remember!”
Murdock decided that whoever this Hardy was, he wasn’t going to be pushed around by him like that.
“I got here, didn’t I? What’s going on out in the harbor? Somebody’s already begun filling. Is somebody trying to grab our deal? We’ve got the rights. We’ve got the option. Or have we?”
“What are you raving about?” Hardy snapped. He was wearing a vested suit. A bright red handkerchief poked out of the breast pocket. He fiddled with a corner of it as he spoke. “You’re the one who set up this early-bird deal. It was your idea to order the work started as soon as we were certain the bulkhead rights would be cleared.”
“I did? Who handled it? My partner?”
“ Who partner? What partner? What the hell good am I to you as a lawyer if you don’t let me in on these things?” He frowned suddenly. “Who drew up the partnership agreement? What is this, Murdock, the axe? You trying to shove me out the door?”
He pulled out the red handkerchief and swabbed at his pale face with it.
This is ridiculous, Murdock thought. Calcium was called for. He found the small bottle of pills and flipped up the cap with his thumb. Not many left. He took three.
“What’s that?” Hardy asked him suspiciously.
“Calcium.”
The lawyer looked dubious. “Murdock, if you’re trying to screw me . . .”
“Wait a minute,” Murdock said. “Just wait a minute.”
Hardy paused and took a deep breath.
Murdock clutched the chiming pentadodecahedron. Its surface was so smooth, so like that of the monogrammed marble egg that he’d left at home. He wondered if he could have the pentadodecahedron monogrammed, too. His fingers played along its shining surfaces.
“Wait a minute,” he said again. “Let’s both calm down and talk this thing over reasonably. We’ve gotten our wires crossed somewhere.”
“Have we?” Hardy said, still dubious. “Okay, go ahead. Explain.”
“No, you explain. Wait. We can take turns asking each other questions. You go first.” He stared at his toy. He could have sworn there’d been two children on it.
“What’s this about your partner?” Hardy said.
“That’s what I was going to ask you.”
“I don’t know what kind of a stupid game you’re . . .”
The screen went dead.
Murdock looked at it without surprise. He activated the intercom.
“The phone just went dead,” he said. “Will you call TPC and . . . hello? Are you there? Is this thing working?”
No answer.
He went to the door and opened it. The outer office was empty. He crossed the room and jerked open the hall door. A flash of blue. Long tanned legs. It was his secretary. He thought it was her, but they all looked so damned much alike. She was getting into an elevator. He waved at her and ran down the corridor.
“Hey!” he yelled, wishing he knew what her name was. “Hey, wait!”
She waved back. “Hey, hon!”
And the elevator doors closed.
He pushed the button for the other elevator. It arrived quickly, full of Xeroxed blond, leggy, tanned young girls talking and giggling among themselves. He squeezed in and pressed L. The cab went up. Slowly, stopping at every floor.
At last it was empty. No more girls. His feelings on that were mixed; he wasn’t sure whether he should be happy or not. He jabbed at the L again and noticed below it a switch labeled
MANUAL OVERRIDE
He threw the switch and the elevator began to descend.
It went nonstop to the lobby and he let go of the switch. The doors slid back and showed him the plastic jungle of the Mall. He stepped out and glanced around, looking for his secretary. He saw people, legs, sunburnt arms, blondes (have more fun because there are more blondes than anybody else), a teleview camera crew, a bronzed man wearing nothing but a loincloth and a grim expression while a small monkey chittered on his muscular shoulder, and where was his secretary? She was the one in the blue bikini, but he couldn’t see her. He rushed across the lobby toward the Mall entrance. Maybe he could catch up with her in the parking lot.
He dashed through the air-curtain and collided with the blackbearded white-robed cop.
LISTEN, CHILDREN!
Big black letters swooping wildly overhead as the two of them tottered together . . . then they went over in a confused heap. There was a sound of snapping elastic . . . the black beard of the prophet was torn away ... it flopped onto the concrete like a small limp animal. Murdock hazily expected it to scurry off to its burrow or whatever.
“You’re under arrest!” the cop shouted, writhing under Murdock’s weight. “Now get the hell off me before I charge you with attempted rape!”
* * * *
Murdock finally managed to convince the police that he was a respectable businessman who sought nothing more from his life than to bring increased happiness and prosperity to beautiful peaceful Punta Gorda. Once they came to accept this, they began to listen more sympathetically to his story. His status changed subtly from that of a suspect to that of a citizen. By the time he’d told it all, they were shaking their heads in sympathy.
Two things were now obvious to them. Murdock meant only good toward their city and he’d lost someone. His partner or his secretary; possibly both. The sergeant had no doubts as to what had happened to those two. It happened all the time in romantic, sun-drenched, moon-washed Florida. There was a simple, realistic and officially approved solution: pass it along to another department.
He sent Murdock upstairs to the Bureau of Missing Persons.
The office of the BMP was a whitewashed cinder-block cubicle filled with papers. File cabinets overflowed with them. Wire baskets spilled them onto the floor. A gigantic desk threatened to crumble under their weight. There were boxes and piles and shelves of them. Papers. If there was an order to them, Murdock couldn’t see it.
In the midst of the stacks sat a small harassed clerkish-looking man with a black, pencil-thin mustache on his upper lip. It wiggled like a starved caterpillar when he spoke.
“Yeah?”
“I was sent up here by the desk sergeant,” Murdock said. “He told me you could help me.”
“I can’t. Who’s missing?”
“My partner.”
“No shit? Yours too? It’s an epidemic. Bristol—that’s my partner—he’s gone. We’ve been trying to locate him for a week and a half now. The clerk stood up and made a sweeping gesture at the desk. A small pile of papers and photographs were swept to the floor. “You see this mess? Just look at it! Day after day thousands of missing person reports come into Florida. They’re filed from every state in the Union. Even this one. It seems like people are always running away, dropping out of sight. Have you noticed that?”
“Yes,” Murdock started. “I . . .”
“And you know where they end up?”
“No,” Murdock said. “I . . .”
“Half the time, they don’t. I have all these photographs and all these damn forms, descriptive forms, mind you, and they’re all catalogued and numbered and lettered and stamped and you know what’s wrong with them?”
Murdock shook his head.
“They don’t say which goes with what! I don’t know. You know who knows?”
“Who?”
“Bristol. He has a system. But the only person in the whole world who understands the Bristol System is Bristol and he hasn’t been in to work for a week and a half. We’ve been looking for him everywhere.” He stared at Murdock. “Now. Do you have a decent recent photograph of yourself? Full-face is best. Profile will do.”
“What?”
“For our files.”
“But I’m not missing.”
“Not now you’re not. But what about next week? Or even tomorrow? Or an hour from now?”
Murdock found the thought chilling. He put it out of his mind.
“Well, do you?” the clerk asked.
“Do I what?”
“Have a decent recent photograph of yourself? I haven’t got all day to fool around with you, mister.”
“I don’t. Its my partner I’m trying to find. Not me.”
“Stand over there. That’s right. Over against that blank wall.”
Murdock gave up and backed over to the barren stretch of cinder blocks.
The clerk opened a desk drawer. Papers tumbled in heaps to the floor. He opened another drawer and found what he was hunting for. It was a Swiftshutter camera with an automatic ellipse attachment, held together by a ragged piece of twine. Fondling it, he faced Murdock.
“Smile.”
Murdock tried one last time. “I just want. . .”
“Smile, goddammit!”
Murdock smiled.
The clerk pressed a stud. The camera clicked, growled, farted and clicked again. Flipping open the slide, the clerk pulled out a print. It smelled faintly of urine.
“Not bad,” he said. “Would you like copies made?”
“Sure, sure,” Murdock mumbled.
“Sixty-nine cents each. Here’s a form. Just enter the information in the spaces provided. Any lies will leave you open for a charge of perjury. That’s a very serious offense in this state. You have fifteen minutes to complete it, starting when I say go. Sit there.” He pointed to a school desk with a chair attached.
Murdock sat.
“Do you have a cryptostylus?” the clerk asked.
“No.”
“Here.” He held out the computer pen. “That’ll be one dollar.”
Murdock gave him the goddamn dollar.
The clerk unpocketed a turnip that looked like an old-fashioned railroad timepiece with a long thin golden chain. But it had too many studs. The clerk pressed one of the studs and the turnip began to tick. He put it to his ear, shook it and pressed another stud. It stopped ticking. Satisfied, he turned to Murdock.
“All right. Ready? Go!”
Murdock worked steadily but carefully, filling out the form to the loud tick-tick of the turnip.
“Time!” the clerk called out. “Are you finished?”
“I’ve been finished for five minutes.”
“Okay, wise guy, we’ll be checking this against. . .” The clerk looked at the form, his lips moving as he scanned it. His mustache did the prone “. . . the Georgia State Police records. You’ll be hearing from us.”
“Now will you help me find my partner?” Murdock said.
“Jesus Christ, mister,” the clerk said. “Have a heart, willya? I can’t even find my partner. I explained all that to you earlier. What’s his name?”
“Bristol?”
“Hey, that’s my partner’s name too!”
“I meant your partner,” Murdock said with a sigh.
“You’ve seen him?” the clerk asked eagerly.
“No.”
“Neither have I. And just look at this mess he left me with, the thoughtless bastard. Some people have no consideration.”
Murdock backed away. As he sidled toward the doorway, the clerk said, “You can expect those copies in two to three weeks.”
Murdock nodded and left.
“C.O.D!” the clerk yelled after him.
* * * *
It wasn’t any use, Murdock thought. He felt infinitely weary. Nothing was of any use. He stepped into a public vidphone booth, slamming the door viciously behind him, and broke a nail punching 0 with his forefinger.
“Yes, sir?” the operator sneered at him.
“I want to put through a call to ...” He hesitated. It was right on the edge of his mind. Home. Yes. “. . . to Savannah, Georgia.”
“Your bug number, please?”
“What?”
“Your number. What number are you calling, please?” She gave him a faint smile and started to unbutton her blouse.
“MOrris 54692. Person-to-person to . . . to . . .” Hell, now he couldn’t even remember his wife’s first name. “To Mrs. S. Murdock.”
“One moment please,” the operator said. As she faded out of sight, he glimpsed a flash of blue. She was wearing a blue bikini top under the white blouse.
A One Moment Please sign appeared, slightly purple around the edges.
He waited.
The operator’s voice returned. The rest of her didn’t. The sign wavered, shimmering as the voice informed him, “We are ringing your party.”
The screen went dead.
He didn’t even bother trying again.
He wasn’t sure what was happening, but he knew one thing. He had to get home. Back to the familiar things he knew and loved. Back to whatever-her-name-was and the kids, whosis and whatsis. Back as quickly as he could. Fly back. If that pilot was still waiting for him at the airfield he could fly directly back instead of waiting for the morning flight tomorrow in Fort Myers.
If the pilot was waiting.
Murdock wasn’t counting on it.
His fingers worked frantically at the pentadodecahedron as he hurried to Loshun Mall. The bicycle was leaning against the wall where he’d left it. A parking ticket fluttered from the high handlebars.
He stared at the little white card, then ripped it off and tore it into quarters. He tore the quarters into dimes and dropped the change into a litter basket, then climbed onto the bike and pedaled like hell back to the airfield.
The Piper Yamacraw sat beside the candy-striped hangar, a large patient bird squatting on a barren nest. No one was in sight.
Murdock pedaled anxiously around the hangar. He found Dallas in back, playing quoits with the kid.
He swung off the bicycle and let it fall. His fingers strove into his pocket and fisted around the pentadodecahedron.
The pilot grinned amiably at him. “Back to Fort Myers now, Mr. Murdock?”
“Savannah!” he answered. “Can you fly me to Savannah?”
“Sure . . .”
“All right, then, let’s go.”
The kid shouted after them, “Look out for the peripheral crosswinds, suckers!”
* * * *
Murdock merely muttered, grunted and mumbled in response to the pieces of travelogue the pilot gave him. He gazed out the window at the gray mush of cloud cover that hid the Okefenokee. He nodded abstractedly as he was told that they’d follow the coast up from Brunswick. He didn’t bother to ask which when Dallas told him one of those islands below was St. Simon’s and another Sapelo. He just didn’t give a damn.
But when Dallas said, “That’s Skidaway, and there’s Tybee up ahead,” he squinted to pick them out. Tybee marked the mouth of the Savannah River.
Almost home.
There was the island, and there was the river spilling itself into the sea. Upriver, the long thin strip of Cockspur Island sat stolidly, with Fort Pulaski standing vigil at one end. Then the pine islands and the grassy marshes cut by twisting ribbons of creeks and rivers. And there the high bluff where Oglethorpe had established his colony in 1733—the site that had become the city of Savannah.
There. The bluff.
There.
Murdock stared at the vast grassy space atop the bluff. It stretched out for miles, open and empty, sloping into the marshlands, fading into piney woods. Empty. Nothing.
“Savannah,” Murdock said softly.
“Huh?” Dallas said.
“Savannah. It’s . . . gone?”
The only reply Murdock got was a slight shrug.
“It can’t be gone,” he said. He stared at the ground. “Can you land here?”
“Sure can.”
The plane dipped one wing. Banking, it began to circle. Murdock saw nothing but grassy vastness.
“Maybe we . . . took a wrong turn somewhere?” he suggested.
“Nope,” Dallas said. “Savannah, Georgia. This is it.”
Murdock kept staring at the red river, the bluff, the bottoms, the wide flat of Hutchinson Island and the marshes that decades ago had been rice paddies. There was the point where the Talmadge Bridge should have stood. There was the narrow lip at the foot of the bluff that should have been River Street. There, outlying from the townsite were the swamplands that had been drained and filled for the ever-expanding suburbs. But there weren’t any suburbs. No suburbs, no city. Nothing.
Grass bowing gently in the breeze.
It must be a mirage, he told himself. He wasn’t convinced.
The wheels of the Yamacraw touched the grass, moved away, touched again and began to roll across the bumpy ground.
“It’s gone,” Murdock said dully. “It’s really gone. My home, my wife, my poor children. My home. For God’s sake, Dallas,” he pleaded, “what’s happening here?”
The plane jolted to a stop.
“Perspective causes parallel lines to converge,” the pilot said.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Murdock snarled in sudden fury. He turned to glare at the man. And failed.
The pilot was gone.
Murdock sat for a moment, feeling the anger drain out and numbness seep in.
Then he slowly opened the door of the plane, put a careful foot on the step and lowered himself to the ground.
The grass was thick with weeds and the wind was picking up, blowing across the river. It carried the salty scent of marshes. There was no one in sight. No one to question. No one to blame.
Murdock pinched his nose and turned in a full circle.
Nothing. The plane had disappeared while his back was turned.
There had to be an explanation. There had to be a rational explanation. Had to be.
Nothing. Nothing except Murdock. Nothing except himself.
He turned his back to the bluff, turned to face the wind. He began walking.
Before he’d gone far, he sat down and removed his shoes. The grass was soft. He stood up and started to run. After a short distance, he’d winded himself, but he kept on going.
The sun went down and it got dark and cool. Dew formed. His socks were sopping wet. He stripped them off and stuffed them into his shoes, then threw the shoes over his shoulder and kept on going.
Toward. Not away.
* * * *
ACROSS THE BAR
In her youth Maud Constable had talked longingly about the days when she would be a venerable widow with beautiful white hair; she would live like a small gem in an exquisitely furnished setting well away from spilled cereal and greasy fingerprints, and in solitude she would perfect her poetry. She secretly knew she would never really be any better than she was but she used this fiction to prepare herself for the eventual loss of her children to adult life and for the unbearable prospect of outliving her husband.
At seventy-five she was in fact a venerable widow with beautiful white hair, she had an exquisitely furnished apartment in which the walls were white and everything else was rococo and, while she would not admit it, her poetry had in fact grown richer, but the days tasted flat in her mouth and she opened her doors to everybody who came, welcoming dirty feet and fingerprints and fifteen-year-old runaways and assorted deadbeats sleeping curled up in corners, secretly hoping that eventually, one of these mornings, somebody might even spill a bowl of cereal, so that it would be more or less like old times.
When the telegram came, she thought at first that it must be for Anderson, who lived in the dinette, and she went in and cleared her throat to wake him, saying: “Greetings . . But when he extended a hand from under the walnut table and took the wire and read it, he scrambled out in a hurry, saying, “Read it again, honey, it’s for you.”
Her hands were trembling so that she couldn’t make out any of the print but she already had the wire by heart:
GET AFFAIRS IN ORDER.
NEED YOU FOR SPACE PROBE.
And in the next minute the man from NASA was at the door to explain. Errol and Stanley took Maud into the bedroom to dress for the interview, while Anderson cleared Billy and the cats off the couch so the man from NASA would have a place to sit down. In a minute or two Errol and Stanley opened the bedroom door and Maud sailed out in black, she had put on something that could pass for a cassock, and her white hair made an aureole under the Spanish veil. She looked a little tremulous but her chin was firm, and as she sat down with the man from NASA she gave the others such a look that they cleared the room so she and the man from NASA could be alone.
“Of course,” Darrel said at the party Anderson gave to celebrate. “It’s the most logical thing in the world.”
Mary del Val stopped doing her nails. “But NASA.”
“They’ve been talking about it for years,” Darrel said, “but there wasn’t a poet alive who could pass the physical.”
Mary said, “But Maud.”
Darrel overrode him. “The only person who ever said anything decent in space was Yuri what’s-his-name, you know, ‘I am iggle.’ It’s her patriotic duty as a poet.”
“Maud’s a hundred and twelve if she’s a day.”
“I happen to be seventy-five,” Maud said, giving Mary a stuffed grape leaf. “Besides, that’s just the point.”
Mary sniffed. “Sweetie, you’ll disintegrate.”
“Oh, but I’ll keep on sending, right up to the end. ‘Deathsong in the Stars.’ “
“Heroic.”
“Beautiful.”
“I didn’t think it was bad,” Maud said. “Not half bad at all.”
Mary put an arm around her. “Well all right, but we’re going to miss you.”
“Somebody will put up a statue.”
Darrel said, “They might even put you on a stamp.”
Mary sighed grudgingly. “Well, I suppose there are worse ways to go.”
When all the guests had left, Anderson and Billy and Errol and everybody seemed to disappear at the same time; Anderson mumbled something about taking back the deposit bottles and vanished into the night; Billy was already asleep on the couch, and Errol curled tightly in his corner and snored heavily when Maud asked him to take out the garbage, so that she ended, as she always did, by cleaning up after the party all by herself.
Emptying ashtrays and putting lemon wax on all the drink rings, Maud gave considerable thought to what she would wear on the trip. She supposed comfort was an important factor, but after all, this was her triumphal final appearance and she owed posterity something. She thought of herself as dead, sailing in perpetual orbit, and she knew she would have to look her best. Besides they had asked her to make a little speech from the gantry for the benefit of all those who would come down to watch the launching and all those billions who would be watching on their screens at home. She thought at first they would expect a white coverall or a lame jumpsuit with the national emblem stitched across the back, but she had never been at her best in pants. Instead she would wear what she always wore for readings and state occasions—the wine-colored velvet with the lace fichu and the matching mitts. As a concession to the patriotic character of the proceedings she would wear a red-white-and-blue ribbon on a proud diagonal across her breast.
She collected the last of the dirty glasses and, in consideration for her sleeping deadbeats, left the vacuum in its closet and used a handbrush to get up the crumbs. The windows were showing gray daylight when she finished, and she turned off the last of the lamps and sat in the morning shadows, trying hard to think.
There was something wrong with the arrangement, Maud knew it, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Why, for instance, had the man from NASA tactfully suggested that she might want to write at least part of her “Deathsong” before she blasted off? Why had he been so indifferent to the idea of physical examinations, or flight training, why had he turned away certain of her questions with a knowing, sympathetic smile?
She would not be back, she already knew that, and it didn’t bother her; it was little enough to give in exchange for the chance to write about the stars. She would sing her last song and then blaze into death, grander than any queen on a pyre. She would welcome death, she had wished for it often, she was old and ready to be released from her body; she would join her husband, wherever he was.
Still, all was not what it appeared to be. There were certain things unexplained; she was to be the poet, but she would not be alone on the trip. Who else was going, and why? The man from NASA had smiled and would not say. Wouldn’t it take the NASA people a long time to prepare her and the others, whoever they were? Shouldn’t they all be having tests and whirling around in the centrifuge? Apparently not; takeoff would be in just three days, so that she didn’t have much time to worry, or to think. Why didn’t they want her to have more time to think? Because she might chicken out.
“I won’t chicken out,” she said firmly. Then she dropped an afghan over the sleeping Billy and went on in to bed.
Emerson woke her at ten to say good-bye. Emerson was her eldest, the vice-president of a bank. He had his secretary get her on the line.
“Mother,” he said, “are you out of your mind?”
“Oh,” she said. “You’ve heard.”
“The Poet Laureate of Outer Space indeed.”
“Why Emerson, that’s rather nice. Did you make it up?”
“Of course not, Mother. It’s in all the papers.”
“Well, yes. I thought that was a little imaginative for you.”
She could hear Emerson shuffling and rustling at the other end of the phone. She wondered if he had written a speech. He cleared his throat.
“Now Mother, Sam and Andrew and I have been talking, and we want you to reconsider. You only have one life you know, and this . . . this is undignified.”
Maud sighed. “I suppose you have something better to propose?”
“Well, we decided maybe you weren’t getting out enough, and we want to give you a trip to the Bahamas. Three months, if you’d like, expenses paid. And after that—”
“Yes, Emerson?”
“Well, you could spend a month with Sam and one with Andrew and then maybe you could come to Madge and me for Christmas, and after that—”
“Christmas.”
“Well you know we’d love to have you for longer, but . . .”
“I don’t think so, thank you, Emerson. Thank Sam and Andrew for me, and tell them both good-bye ...”
“Have it your way,” he said at last, in his it’s-your-funeral voice, “but don’t expect us at the launching.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Maud said. When she hung up, she felt released.
The morning of the launching everybody got up at four so they could go down to the space installation with her. Darrel and Errol had decorated a delivery truck with bunting and wired in a tape recorder and two loudspeakers with the Triumphal March from Aida playing full blast on a continuous loop. Everybody had on his best, which meant tails for Darrel and Errol and a formal for Mary and a poncho for Billy, Guatemalan, hand-woven, and Anderson had shaved for the first time since Maud had known him and was wearing a shiny blue gabardine suit. Someone else had on some kind of uniform, unspecified, but with plenty of gold braid and epaulets, and a couple of the girls from the neighborhood had found jumpsuits somewhere and altered them to fit like wallpaper, with intriguing cutouts over the cleavage and at the waist.
It was an ungodly hour, but everybody was in a wonderful mood. Anderson had taken every whiskey and liqueur in Maud’s cabinet and made a punch, and Darrel and Mary had spent the whole preceding day baking a cake in the shape of a launching pad with a spun sugar rocket with the name Maud on it taking off in a cloud of cotton candy with candles placed strategically around the blastoff area.
Maud rode in front with Anderson, who was driving, while everybody laughed and sang and popped balloons and rolled around together in the back.
Anderson said, “I’ll take care of the plants while you’re gone. What do you want me to do with the cats?”
“If you can’t find good homes for them, I suppose you’d better have them put away.”
“Maud, you’re going to want them when you get back.”
“You know I won’t be back.” When he wouldn’t look at her, she began rummaging in her beaded bag. She found a wad of papers and pressed it on him. “Look, I’ve written part of the ‘Deathsong,’ I want you to hang on to it.”
“But you’ll be transmitting it from space.”
“This is only the first canto,” Maud said. “I want something to live after me In Case.”
He didn’t want to take it, but she made him. He wouldn’t voice any doubts about the trip, if he gave in to his doubts he would have to turn the truck around and take them all back home. Instead he said, “Maud, we’re all very proud of you.”
When they got to the launching area they discovered several things all at once. There were ten other people, all about Maud’s age, along with their families, all jostling outside the portal; when they went through the portal, all their friends and relations would have to stay outside, they would have to watch the launching on a monitor. So they learned Maud would not be alone on the flight, and they learned that the project had a name: it was to be called Operation Hope. When some twenty more old people had gathered and everybody was milling in suspense, a second lieutenant came out and gave an embarrassed little speech.
They were all welcome, they were pioneers in a new project; one of the nation’s scientists had discovered that under certain conditions, zero gravity could retard the aging process, and so this first valiant handful might stay young forever in free fall; they would pave the way for billions to new and extended lives. Maud was the poet laureate and chronicler; Maud would give her valedictory at the gantry just before they loaded the ship and propelled the aging, valiant crew into their greatest adventure. It was Maud who would write their names in the stars and trail their message into the reaches of space.
When Maud said good-bye at the portal, Darrel and Errol fell on each other’s necks and cried. Mary was trying to be brave, but she had long since retreated behind sunglasses and wouldn’t speak for fear of losing control.
Anderson said, “Why won’t they tell us more? Why can’t we come in to watch?”
“You’ll see me,” Maud said. “I’ll light up the sky.”
“Oh, Maudie, I don’t think we ought to let you go.”
“Good-bye dear,” she said, and kissed him quickly on the cheek.
Looking over his shoulder, she wondered why nobody else seemed suspicious, why none of the valedictory relatives had asked for any more details, and she understood that nobody cared. Her shipmates were going through the gate quickly, carried along by their families. Sons and daughters and nephews and nieces and grandchildren and a few great-grands were propelling all the old men and women toward the gate, moving inexorably even as they showered farewell hugs and kisses and repeated demands to write. She saw that the old people went uncertainly, their expressions a mixture of apprehension and hope, and she detached herself from her own group quickly, kissing each in turn, and then drew a deep breath at the portal and went inside.
An old man tottered next to her, carrying a cardboard suitcase. “We’re going to be young again,” he said. “They promised.”
A twisted little woman no older than Maud turned to him with an expression of profound bitterness. “Don’t be so sure.”
Somebody else said, “It doesn’t matter. Anything’s better than what we have.”
Maud said gently, “We’re going to see the stars.”
“Stars, hell.” Maud recognized a man whose children had pushed him forward and fled before he even reached the gate. “All I wanted was out of there.”
Someone was crying. “Oh, oh, there are too many of us.”
Looking ahead, Maud saw that their group was not alone. There must have been thousands of people in their seventies and eighties all coming from different portals, all converging on the ship; they came with satchels and handbags and canvas duffel bags and ancient, wheezing dogs and bird cages with scraggly parakeets, with balls of string and old clippings and pipes and syringes, all the paraphernalia of old age; they came in panama hats and antiquated lace dresses and one or two wore World War I uniforms, shuffling along with leg-bindings flapping and once-sleek coats hanging on their inadequate frames; they came out of despair and apprehension, with their eyes glazed and their lips slightly parted in hope.
There were almost too many of them for the ship; it loomed, some ten blocks high, and if they did all fit, they would never make it off the ground. She looked at the ship and then looked about her at the field of aging folk and she faltered, because she understood.
A strong hand closed on her elbow. “We want you to give a farewell speech from the gantry.” It was the lieutenant. “We’re very honored to have you aboard, Mrs. Constable.” He took a hasty look around. “And we’re counting on you to make this the kind of occasion it ought to be.”
“Yes,” Maud said. “You mean I am the Judas goat.”
“We have to get them on the ship somehow,” he said and then covered his mouth.
She knew perfectly well what would happen; it was a disposal operation, she could tell from the naked look on the captain’s face, the cynical expressions of the crew who bustled around in white coveralls, collecting the old people like cowboys making a cattle drive. She would get to give her speech from the gantry and then they would all load; there might be a Trumpet Voluntary or a chorus of the “Stars and Stripes Forever” before blastoff and then the rocket would explode on the gantry with all hands aboard and the nation would say, How sad, and heave a sigh of relief.
She knew what she could do: she could rise to the platform and cry out Beware, or Help; she could alert the whole nation, they would come to save her and all the others from an ignominious death. She thought of Emerson: would he come? Would they? She realized she had known, she had known from the beginning that she would never get off the ground, and so had some of the rest of them; the outside world may have known it too, perhaps they had known it all along. Considering, she looked at the others rustling about her and she became aware of all their fatigue, their infirmities, the miseries of age and all their accumulated pain, and she hesitated only a second before she looked the lieutenant in the eye and said, “Very well.”
Standing between two major generals on a platform draped with bunting, Maud gave a beautiful little speech for Darrel and Errol and Anderson and Mary and all the others who were watching, and especially for all the old people clustered about her feet. For everybody’s sake she had to make a graceful exit: her speech would be read into the Congressional Record, and in homes all over the nation the great television audience found itself dabbing at its eyes. About her, the old people surged toward the loading platform; now their eyes were bright with hope and they would board the ship with pride.
When Maud had finished she made a small bow: a prayer? and stepped inside.
She could hear all the others behind her, chittering and sighing, but she had no time to speak to them; she had work to do. Instead she withdrew inside herself, sitting docilely where the crewmen put her, obediently setting her arms into the clamps so they could strap her down. She would be dead within the hour, they would all be dead, but she was after all a poet and she would give her remaining minutes to composing the second, the final canto of her never-to-be-published deathsong, a longer narrative poem which she had tentatively titled “Across the Bar.”
* * * *
My offices are under the tidal-wave breaker wall. I know, that’s an unsavory and unsafe part of Newton. I was trapped there once for three tides after a really large earthquake smashed the wall and laid several tons of rubble over the walkdown to my rooms. On the other hand, having my offices there gives prospective clients the deliciously naughty feeling that they are dealing with the underworld. Then, when they see how solidly luxurious my offices are, they think that besides being a sinister figure, I am also a successful one.
When the girl knocked on my door, I was deep asleep on the pallet behind my desk—considering how much money I spend on those rooms, I can’t afford to sleep anywhere else. I staggered up and walked to the door, swearing at myself for having let my receptionist go three tides earlier: for obvious reasons, there isn’t much market for industrial spies during the Science Fair.
Even the city police corporation relaxes during the Fair, so I couldn’t guess who my visitor might be. I opened the door.
Vision of visions! Large, soft eyes looked at me over a pertly turned nose and full moist lips. Her satiny skin glowed a deep, even infra, marking out firm, ripe curves. There was a lot to see, since her only clothing was a brief pair of rear leggings.
She was young and nervous. “You are Leandru Ngiarxis bvo-Ngiarxis?”
I smiled. “To the wide world, yes—but you may call me Ndruska.”
She stepped inside. “Why do you keep it so dark in here?”
I wasn’t about to tell her that she’d caught the master industrial spy asleep. So I lowered my head and ogled up at her. “The maiden glow of your skin is more than sufficient light for me.”
She blushed bright infra from her shoulders up and tried to sound tough when she said, “See here, Ngiarxis, it’s unpleasant enough to do business with someone of your sort. Please don’t make it any worse by, by starting immoral advances.”
“Just as you say, milady.” I turned on the lights and crossed to the other side of the desk.
“Now, how may I . . . serve you?”
She lowered herself delicately onto a visitor’s pallet.
“My name is Yelén Dragnor bvo-Science-Fair-Committee.” She produced the appropriate identification badge.
“Hmm. Are you any relation to the chief scientist of the House of Graun?”
She nodded. “Beoling Dragnor bvo-Graun is my father.”
“Indeed, I am honored. I understand he is to give the popular lecture at the Fair, next-tide. You must be very proud.”
She came to her knees, her brittle mask of sophistication cracking. “I am proud—very. But s-scared, too. We—the Science Fair Committee, that is—know the princes of Graun will m-murder father rather than let him speak at the Fair.”
I tried not to seem incredulous. I have never heard of any polity willing to risk its own dissolution merely to eliminate one scientist. “What does your father know that could be so distressing to the House of Graun?”
“I don’t know. I—I don’t know. Father won’t tell the Committee. Of course, that’s only proper, since his research is Graun property until the Fair actually begins. But he won’t give us even a hint. The princes have tried to kill him once already, and we just have to find someone to protect him.”
“And so you came to me.”
“Y-yes. The Fair Committee knows your reputation. They’re willing to pay you well—up to two hundred fifty-six acres of prime farmland. All, all you have to do is guard father till next-tide. The Committee can protect him after that, when he gives his talk. .. . Will you do that?”
The Fair Committee must have known a lot about my reputation, considering the nubile creature they had sent with their proposition. I reached across the table and gently brushed the tears from her neck. “Don’t worry, Lenska, I’ll do what I can. It’s really not terribly difficult to outsmart the princes of Graun.” Besides, I still didn’t believe they’d try something so stupid as assassinating a scientist on the eve of the Science Fair.
She perked up considerably at this and provided me with the particular information I would need to do the job. By the time she left she was almost cheerful. She had met the big, bad spy and found that while he was big, he wasn’t so awfully bad.
At the top of the ramp she turned and looked down at me, her face a pale infra smudge against the sky. I promised to be at her father’s apartment in less than half an hour.
She wagged her rear and was gone.
* * * *
I’ve lived in more than a few cities, but Newton-by-the-Sea will always be my favorite. I know, Benobles and Is-Hafn have their points: they’re old, they’re rich, and the ground underlying them is so stable that their buildings rise six, seven, even eight stories. But the snow in Benobles is more than three stories deep. It’s so cold there that the city would be pitch dark without its street lamps. And Is-Hafn may have some great gamboling houses, but it’s a two-hour steam sledge ride from the present ice harbor to the old city. Personally I’d rather live where I can keep my hooves warm.
That’s easy to do in Newton. Just north of the city, Mt. Hefty pours a sixty-four-foot wide stream of incandescent red lava into the sea. At high tide, the water meets the molten rock just beyond the north sea wall, and a veil of steam rises far up over the city, casting an infra glow down upon it. Along the coast, south of the lava flow, the water is delightfully warm, and the beaches are smooth and sandy.
At the moment I couldn’t see any of this. It was low tide and the lava met the sea several miles out. The steam generated was a faint gleam over my left shoulder, too far away to light my surroundings. If it hadn’t been for the streetlamps, the only light would have been the bright splinters of red from half-shuttered windows, and the deep infra glow of occasional passersby. From my hiding place behind an ornamental deeproot tree, I inspected my surroundings. This was a luxurious section of town, not far from the Fairgrounds. The electric street lamps cast long shadows up the sides of the apartment buildings that faced both sides of the street. Some of those buildings were three and even four stories tall, constructed pyramid fashion so that the top floor had only a quarter the area of the first. Silk-petal vines gleamed dark and glossy against their carven walls, the pollen making the air heavy and sweet.
Except for the faraway hiss of lava changing water into steam, all was quiet. The party in the building across the street had ended more than an hour ago, and by now the revelers were departed. No one had come down the street past my hiding place for nearly eight minutes. That’s another nice thing about Newton: its citizens are generally asleep during the low tides, when things are darkest out. That makes things a lot easier for people like me.
I rose up off my rear and tried to get the cramps out of my legs. Even here in Newton, stakeouts are an uncomfortable bore. After about four hours on a job like this, even my hand torch and automatic pistol begin to feel awfully heavy. As usual I was wearing a body mask that covered everything but my eyes and nose. The mask is heavy and hot, but my skin glow is virtually invisible when I have it on.
For the umpteenth time I scanned up and down the street: no activity. And that fourth-floor window, the window to Beoling Dragnor’s apartment, was still dark. This whole job was just a false alarm, I complained to myself. The Science Fair Committee had let itself be taken in by the paranoid ravings of a senile scientist. I had been employed against the princes of Graun before, and I knew they were brutal, but their brutality was not irrational or self-destructive. There was only one Science Fair in each generation. In the time between Fairs, a Graun researcher was practically Graun property, and his research results were as secret as Graun counterespionage could keep them. What prince would risk such a cozy situation just to prevent one scientist from talking at the Fair?
Just then the streetlamps went dim, slowly cooled to the point of invisibility.
So much for my theories.
Even the few lights left in the apartments went out. The bvo-Graun must have struck a power substation at least.
We have a simile in Newton: “Dark as the sky at low tide.” Believe me, there are few things darker. And now, without streetlamps, the sky’s darkness was everywhere. I couldn’t see the pistol I held in my hand.
I stood very still and strained my ears. If this job were properly orchestrated, the bvo-Graun should be moving in now. I did hear something, a faint creaking. It seemed to come from the direction of Dragnor’s apartment. I couldn’t be sure, though. Even at low tide, the hiss of boiling sea water is loud enough to blur sharp hearing.
I looked into the sky. Nothing. What in Ge’s name was going on? The only thing that could hover in the air so quietly was a balloon. But a balloon’s air heater would have been too bright to look at. Even if they managed to shield the heater, there’s no way they could stop the gas bag from glowing without making the whole contraption too heavy to fly. And I couldn’t see even a shimmer.
I reached over my back and slid my hand torch out of its pocket. Using it would be a last resort, since it would make me a much better target than anyone else.
Several minutes passed. The creaking was unmistakable now, and I could hear body movements too. If the bvo-Graun were trying to involve Dragnor in a simulated accident, they would have to act fast, and I’d have to be faster to stop them. Ge, I was going to have to use my torch after all.
Then, as it has so often in the past, the Ngiarxis family luck came through for me. The skies parted momentarily and the stars shone down on Newton! If you’re from Benobles, maybe this doesn’t seem so unusual. But here on the coast we’re lucky if the sky clears once in a borning.
There must have been sixty-fours of stars: harsh, uncompromising points of light that burned in infra, red, and orange. Even at high tide, the sky above Newton is rarely so bright as it was during those few seconds.
The assassins were using a balloon. Its starlit hulk floated two hundred fifty-six feet above the street. Three men hung on slings beneath it. They were less than sixty-four feet up now and were closing in on Dragnor’s window. They must have had guts to try something like that.
Aiming through a clear spot in the branches above me, I fired at the balloon. But I fired wide. I guess I’m just naturally big-hearted. Sixty-four feet is a long way to fall.
I shouldn’t have bothered. The bvo-Graun recovered from their star-struck surprise and rained fire down on me and my little tree. Splinters of wood flew in all directions as their rockets exploded. They had the high ground with a vengeance.
So much for charity. My second shot was aimed for the balloon. The target was just too high up, though. My rocket missed it by at least eight feet. But he who flies hydrogen-filled balloons must be prepared to pay the price: the bottom of the gas bag exploded as my rocket passed under it, and in seconds the entire aircraft was engulfed by fire and thunder.
The ropes to two of the assassins were severed instantly and they fell to the street. Splash. The third fellow rappelled madly downward. He almost made it, being only sixteen feet above the street when his ropes burned through.
As I ran out from what was left of my concealment, flaming debris was still falling out of the sky. I stopped briefly by the corpse of the one who had fallen from sixteen feet. The man was a bvo-Graun all right. His body mask had all insignia removed, but the cut of the cloth was familiar.
What did this Dragnor have on the House of Graun, anyway?
* * * *
The Fairgrounds are near the western edge of Newton, on a gently sloping terrace facing the sea. For fifteen out of sixteen bornings, the grounds are unused except for theaters which contract with the city for the use of the land. But once in every generation, tents cover the grounds and even sprawl into adjacent properties. A bonfire is set on the crestline west of the grounds, and by its glow the tents reflect every color you can imagine, no matter what the time of tide. And so the Science Fair is begun. In one tent you can see the most recent improvements in steam turbines, while in the next the latest techniques in podiatry are demonstrated, or a lecture in antibody reactions is in progress. The variety is nigh endless.
The crowd trying to squeeze into the main lecture tent was unbelievably large, and it took all my powers of infiltration to get to the tent’s entrance. There the Fair Official badge I had been given was put to good use. I was searched and then admitted.
They were virtually sitting on each others’ backs inside. I knew the Fair’s popular lecture usually lives up to its name, but this was incredible. Even the name Beoling Dragnor wouldn’t ordinarily draw like this. Apparently the people of Newton knew the scientist would report on something spectacular. What could it be? Telegraphy without wires? Perhaps a method of predicting earthquakes? Dragnor had never been pinned down to a single field so it was hard to guess. Doubly so for those who knew that Graun had tried to silence him.
I used my badge to reach the reserved pallets set right before the stage. Yelén Dragnor had already arrived. I squeezed in beside her, slipped my arm across her shoulders.
“Surprise, dear Lenska! Despite immense and perilous difficulties I have delivered your father safe and sound to the Speakers Subcommittee.”
She wiggled delightedly, then remembered that she was the daughter of a researcher and I was a poor freeman. She said, “We are most grateful, sir Leandru.” Her eyes said much more.
I glanced down the row of pallets. The pavilion was brightly lit and the costumes of the various personages in our special section gleamed and glittered in eight colors. At the end of the row sat the three official representatives of the House of Graun. They were dressed in ruffled pants and overcapes checkered bright orange and medium infra—the Graun colors. The one in the middle was Thorc Graun bvo-Graun, reputed to be the master of the House of Graun. At the moment, that individual had the look of a frustrated creditor. His pale eyes swept back and forth across the stage, occasionally rested on me. It was notice I could do without.
The stage was empty except for a small console set to one side. This increased the mystery, since what is science without gadgetry? I didn’t have a chance to wonder on the question further, for just then attention sounded and the speaker walked on the stage.
Beoling Dragnor was an old man. He had lost much of his hair and his splotchily colored skin revealed poor circulation. He reached center stage, turned, and looked down upon us. For a long moment, the loudest sound was the sea three miles away.
“Good tide.” The voice was cracked and squeaking but not weak, not timorous. “My name is now Beoling Dragnor bvo-Science-Fair-Committee. Before this Fair I served the House of Graun in Benobles.” He nodded stiffly to the princes of Graun in the first row below him. “In at least one respect, Benobles is a superior city: the skies are clear there more often than any other city of my acquaintance. On the average, the stars are visible more than one hour in every sixty-four. I have observed and studied them for more than a generation.”
A ripple of disappointment spread through the audience. Except for the discovery of the moon and its connection with the tides, astronomy had always seemed a singularly useless field.
But Dragnor continued his slow discourse. “We know very little about the stars. Many generations ago, Xlomenes Onasiu proposed that they are worlds similar to our own but much hotter—so hot that their surfaces are covered with glowing magma. Even now this is the best theory we have, though modern physics still can’t justify all the details.
“Over the generations, a number of people have studied the stars from Benobles. I have used their observations to arrange the lamps which light this lecture pavilion. If you are sitting near the center of the pavilion, the relative positions and luminosities of these lamps will appear very much as did the sixteen brightest stars in the sky’s fifth octant, sixty-four generations ago.”
Dragnor nodded to a technician who sat by the console at the side of the stage. “The stars are probably the most stable features in our universe. In this case, a simple change of one rheostat will demonstrate how the stars appeared thirty-two generations ago.”
The technician fiddled and one of the lamps shone several times brighter. I squinted over my shoulder at the light. All the other “stars” were ordinary heat lamps, but this variable one was actually an electric arc stopped down to low power.
“And finally the sky as it appears at present.” The same star became yet brighter, till it was the brightest of all the stars in the display. The effect was not lost on the audience. An unhappy murmuring rose behind us.
Old Dragnor seemed unperturbed. After all, he presumably knew what was coming. “You have noticed that one particular star has waxed. In a technical lecture, to be given later, I will offer evidence that this increased brightness is not intrinsic but is due entirely to the motion of the star.” He paused, let the audience guess where the talk was going.
When he spoke again it was with seeming irrelevance. “The city of Benobles is connected to the rest of the world by its steam sledge traffic. When it is not too cold I enjoy going to one of the outer sledge terminals to watch the express approach town. At first, all you can see of the sledge is its tiny headlight glowing in the far away. The light grows brighter and brighter, but it does not move left or right, up or down. At the last moment, when the light is brightest, it slides to one side as the express whips past the siding and goes on into the center of town.
“Until fifteen bornings ago, the Waxing Star represented above had no measurable proper motion. Then, shortly after the last Science Fair, I succeeded in measuring its motion. The drift is small: less than a minute of arc during all the time I have observed it, but more than large enough for me to predict the future position of the Star.”
The murmuring around us was louder, more anxious. Thorc Graun clenched and unclenched his hands, all the while glaring at Dragnor.
The scientist continued, “I’ll reserve the details of my calculations for a technical lecture. At this time, I will content myself with showing you our sky as it will appear only a few generations from now.”
The Science Fair technician must have turned that arc light up to full. I shut my eyes but the glare seemed to go right through the eyelids. Every inch of exposed skin felt as though it were being flayed. Old Dragnor’s calm voice went on. “The Waxing Star’s closest approach to Ge will occur just eight generations from now. At that time, the Star will be many times brighter than the representation hung above us here. For two hundred fifty-six tides it will glow so brightly and then slowly fade, as it passes on by us.”
The arc lamp was turned down, till it was merely a very bright light. I opened my eyes and looked around. Lenska Dragnor sagged against my side, her face hidden behind her hands. The audience seemed wilted, almost hypnotized.
At the far end of our row, Thorc Graun looked as though he were gathering himself up to pounce onto the stage.
“My lords, do you know what this close passage will do to our world? I do not. Our ignorance is immense. Our instruments are crude. Within the range of error of my estimates, the Waxing Star might burn away our oceans. Failing that, it could easily melt the glaciers and drown us all.
“Our only hope for certain survival is the development of a science and a technology to meet the challenge. To achieve this, we must abolish all proprietary rights to inventions and discoveries. This Science Fair must be declared permanent!”
The crowd’s dazed silence lasted only a moment. Then there was pandemonium. Half the noblemen and corporate chairmen in the pavilion were on their hooves, shouting. It was hard to blame them. They sank much of their resources into research, and now someone was suggesting that they give away the fruits of those endeavors. For that matter, where did Dragnor’s suggestion put me? If all research were public knowledge, what use would there be for an industrial spy?
I had to pull Lenska back down onto her pallet as Thorc Graun bvo-Graun scrambled onstage and pushed Dragnor to one side. If the old man were not safe with his secret told, he would never be. The prince of Graun raced back and forth along the edge of the platform, shouting at the top of his lungs. I couldn’t hear a word.
Behind us the city folk and the scientists pushed and jostled one another as various factions tried to approach the stage. For them, Dragnor’s revelation far outshone the question of extending the Fair, and their shouted questions and speculations drowned out everything else.
Still, I doubt if a single one of them guessed that the Waxing Star was not nearly so important as what was near it.
* * * *
When the Altengaden lifted, there was a prompt investigation. Magniac was brought before the Count, who said, “Your wives despise you and your children hate you. We have lived for half a century on Neuland and you remain an apostle for lost Earth. You are a renegade, you preach sedition, and you are now responsible for the deaths of six young men and six young women.”
“They will return.”
“If they do return, they will not find you in Castle Gyepu or the City Gyepu. As an anachronism in our society—”
“You and I were young together at the court of the Emperor—” Magniac began, and stopped, sullenly ashamed of himself.
“And so I am foolishly clement. Magniac, you are banished. You may have a wain of goods, oxen and domestic animals. Do not return. You have made your life a matter of indifference to me.”
The architect of the exodus from Earth left Gyepu with dogs barking and children dancing, his ponderous wagon loaded with previously discarded books and clothing and laboratory equipment. All of his proper tools were aboard the Altengaden. He followed the river north and turned west to the low hills. He built a shelter in a small valley. He transplanted seedlings to establish a coppice of pines. He worked a ledge of native sandstone and built a tower. He planted vines and made wine. As carbon becomes diamond with heat and pressure and time, Magniac’s loathing of this new world crystallized to an adamant hatred that enabled him to endure his solitary life for five lonely years.
He had seduced twelve young men and women to his purposes, removed the machinery from Castle Gyepu by guile and bribery, and built a second spaceship. He had spent his last resources of influence and credit to equip the Altengaden, but he had not expected to remain behind to answer for his actions. The young people had responded to his exhortations, believed his promises of bountiful Earth, submitted to his tyranny during the construction, and left without him. He could only ascribe the nonreturn of the spaceship to the perfidy of the crew. Seduced once, they would be seducible again. The thought of the twelve, disporting themselves among the teeming millions of old Earth, made Magniac grind his white teeth in rage.
He was standing on the roof of his tower the day the Altengaden returned. The mote in the sky distracted him from the thousandth weary consideration of a third spaceship. The englobement machinery, the great Orffyreus wheels and the entrainment tubes, these were possible. The Steyr steam engines could be replaced with great labor but the harmonic amplifiers could not, even with the resources of this world at his disposal. There must be electricity for the carbon arc lights that kept the forage alive in the deep void, but to achieve space at all, the harmonics were fundamental. He turned his white impassive face from Gyepu and took comfort in the dark solace of the little pines.
He turned again and there was the Altengaden, dropping through the heavens. At a distance of six kilometers he saw it whole, half earth and half sky, a perfectly spherical spaceship with the hunting lodge in the center. It sank below the hills and into the lake its departure had left. A sheet of water rose and spread over the valley floor, draining to the river, gullying the river road. Horsemen from Castle Gyepu picked their way toward it through the mud.
The only outward sign of Magniac’s burning impatience during the next two days was the habit he fell into of buttoning up the tails of his coat. He missed the familiar swish of cloth against the backs of his knees and unbuttoned them. He cleaned and loaded the Parabellum Luger with the special cartridges whose bullets he had cast himself. He carried the awkward pistol under his shirt in a special holster. He buttoned his coattails and unbuttoned them again.
The committee was a group of his peers who had left old Earth with him. They rode three horses and led a fourth. “It is the Count’s wish you inspect the machinery,” said de Juilly in French.
Weissech said in Polish, “The ban is not lifted, Magniac.”
“Flumdiddle,” grumbled Welby. “Come now, don’t lollygag about as if our time’s not worth a scrope. We may be metagrobilized, but bring you out of Coventry to carry a lanthorn? Rum show, a rummy show altogether.”
Magniac swung to the saddle without a word. There was one good thing about Neuland, after all: the younger generation had adopted German as a common language. It was very well to be polyglot on old Earth, but to do Welby the courtesy of learning schoolboy English was tedium and a bore.
They approached the lodge from the uphill side. The horses struggled through the mud and displaced soil. A gate had been cut in the peripheral fence and de Juilly dropped his hat when he bent out of the saddle to open it. Magniac was the only one wearing proper clothing. To see his former associates in homespun made him slightly ill. The felted hat de Juilly dropped would better have been left where it lay, to make a nest for some uncritical hen.
Magniac threw back his cape. The sun was warm and the fodder in the fields was almost old-Earth green. It had survived the journey through space very well. The grazing cattle were strange red and white beasts, blocky and close to the ground. There was a woven-wire pen full of enormous bronze turkeys. So the journey had been successful from many aspects. Magniac sniffed the air with his beaky nose. There was animal effluvium, a faint taste of petroleum, and the blossoms of the forage crop. There was no trace of the crew and no scent of any human breeding stock.
As soon as he entered the great hall of the lodge, Magniac knew that men had died there. The hundreds of stag horns, each mounted on a mahogany shield with a silver plate, were dusty but not disarranged. The parquetry floor was burnished and smelled faintly of beeswax. A bouquet of unfamiliar red roses was only now beginning to drop petals onto an inlaid tabletop.
“What happened?” asked Magniac.
“They funked it,” blurted Welby. “They killed theirselves in their diggin’s.”
“My dear sir,” said de Juilly, severely, “six men and six women of the highest cultural attainment do not brave the starry empyrean and ‘funk it.’ Why should they return home to blow their brains out?”
“Don’t bullyrag me. My son was one of them.” Welby honked his nose loudly. “Pax.”
“The blood had not yet congealed,” said de Juilly. “Such a mass suicide is inexplicable, beyond comprehension.”
They mounted the stairs to the gallery and walked the hall to a spiral iron staircase. The sun burned through the lace curtains drawn across the windows of the control tower. The Circassian walnut instrument panel was as Magniac had seen it last. The tall bronze levers were polished and set at full stop. The gravitic entrainment wheels were locked at rest. From a cursory inspection, the lodge and its kilometer-diameter englobement could again become the Altengaden and lift through space when steam was up.
There was a message on a sheet of watermarked paper tin-tacked to the gimbaled steering wheel, now in its neutral horizontal position. It was signed by all twelve of the crew, men and women alike. “Demons inhabit space,” was all it said.
“Agreed,” said the Count as he entered the room. The years had not changed him. His eyes were luminous and his movements epitomized masculine grace. Magniac had always considered his taste for intelligent women to be dubious at best and he demonstrated an almost feminine patience as Magniac went through the multitudinous details of the mechanical inspection. Magniac asked for steam and was refused; still it took the better part of two hours to check the instrumentation.
The control room of the Altengaden was an emotionally neutral place to Magniac, nothing at all like the high open tower of Castle Gyepu where he had controlled the fearful voyage through the stars so many years before.
In the engine room his heart was clutched by an unfamiliar emotion—nostalgia? There were the grey Steyr engines built to his order in Vienna sixty years before, still bright with bronze and shining brass. There was the heavy generator, the rows of petroleum essence tanks, and the giant Orffyreus wheels built of seasoned fruitwood and sealed with purified fish oil, the pendulums and the weights, the shafts and pistons still gleaming after this long time.
He crawled along the gravitic entrainment tubes and checked the resonating chambers of the harmonic amplifiers with a tuning fork. Intent upon his work, he had taken the instrument from a small cupboard lagged to the stone, and it was only when he was done with it that recollection washed over him as water washed over the meadows when the Altengaden settled home. This was one of John Shore’s tuning forks made in England, given him as a boy by the Landgrave at Hesse-Cassel. He had pitched their lives against its truth in the hurried construction of these chambers under the desperate pressures to leave Earth.
The Second Balkan War had been concluded by the treaty of Bucharest on August tenth, but the diplomatic experts gathered at Castle Gyepu (it was curious how many of the gifted of whatever country gravitated to the Foreign Service) anticipated war between Serbia and Albania and further difficulties with Greece. The Irredentist agitation was developing in Transylvania, but both Franz Josef and the Tsar made surreptitious common cause during this breathing space to continue the systematic harassment of the people.
The world had become suddenly smaller. Distance, great wealth, and position could no longer protect them. The call had gone out in March and the people foregathered by early September. The invasion of Albania by the Serbs on September twenty-third forced the decision to leave old Earth.
The peasants had been sent away days before—that was the fated error, in Magniac’s opinion—and only the gifted were in the village and the castle when the ten-kilometer englobement rose from Earth. Snow had been falling, and the last snow fell in full sunshine as they left the shadow of Earth for a new home among the stars.
A clear note sounded from the tuning fork as it struck the cupboard door. “Well, Magniac?” said the Count.
“Everything—is operational.”
“On the first of October, nineteen thirteen,” said the Count softly, “with the precious few of our blood gathered from the farthest corners of the globe, these meadows and orchards, the plain and the livestock—the very earth and sky itself—and you threw the master control, did you not, Magniac?”
“I should have stayed.”
“To be hunted and harried and caught and pinned with a holly stake? There is a madness in herd-humans, the price perhaps of genius in herd-humans.” The Count dusted his hands delicately. “If memory serves me, there were a few bottles from the vineyards near Tarczal here in the hidden cellar. Did you find them when you appropriated my hunting lodge? No? Then we may again toast Franz Josef in his own Imperial Tokay.”
The Count had ordered a small buffet set on the Italian table with the drooping red roses and Magniac found himself responding to food he had not tasted for years. The wine was beyond its prime but still excellent, ghostly reminiscent of a lost time and place. Magniac absently turned his glass and was again overwhelmed by memory.
Magniac’s taste had run to science. He had been intimate with H. L. F. von Helmholtz, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, and both Curies. He knew Max Planck, and Rutherford and Soddy. The most remarkable man of his acquaintance was Tilah J.B. Bose, an Indian of lowly origin, whose shattering brilliance and intuitive understanding of space-time relationships made possible both the englobement and gravitic entrainment, when combined with Magniac’s unique understanding of the Orffyreus principle and his extrapolation of some unpublished speculations of Helmholtz. Bose gulped this very Tokay and later died a drunkard’s death and was forgotten, except by Magniac here on Neuland, light-years and years from abundant Earth.
The stem of the glass snapped in his hand.
The Count ignored the puddled wine through which Diana and her inlaid hounds were hunting on the tabletop. “Gabriel Cilli became leader of your Young Turks,” he said easily, “a name that has never failed to evoke a tiresome cross-language pun in my mind. There were no technical inadvertencies. Your backtrack photography served admirably for astrogation.” He politely inclined his head to Magniac.
“There is a log of the voyage?”
For answer the Count glanced at the heaped black ashes in the Carrara fireplace. A groan escaped Magniac. The Count continued, “My lodge was landed in a comparatively inaccessible valley near Belgrade. Our young people established a cordial relationship with the villagers over a period of a month. By judicious use of the gold with which you supplied them, they secured the animals you may have noticed, as well as a variety of new plants and seeds. This rose, for example, comes originally from America and is named the Chrysler Imperial. Of what empire, I have no notion.” He delicately sniffed the fragrance.
“When may we return?”
“Abandon hope,” said the Count. “Science and circumstance have made old Earth uninhabitable for us.”
Magniac kicked his chair back and stood taut with fury.
The Count sipped his wine. “The crew was subject to a series of increasingly violent respiratory ailments from which they never fully recovered. Compounding their afflictions was the presence of a stowaway, a spy of the Muscovites, who accompanied them on their journey home.”
“A human! Alive?” Magniac’s eyeteeth glistened.
“Until—let me see—four days ago. He must have been a brave and foolhardy man. His name was not mentioned in the log, but it may well have been Mithridates. He had ingested the subtle poisons of Earth in many countries—new wonders of chemistry—nothing so simple and healthy as arsenic—”
Magniac sucked air through his teeth.
“—and in the mental and physical perturbation of the crew,” the Count continued languidly, “in their justifiable fear of my reaction, the old truth became resurgent. They drank his blood. Knowledge may be power, Magniac, but a revelation of the truth to the philosophically indigent can kill. Our emotional muddleheads were morally overthrown by their action. They became desperately ill as well, from the virulent poisons carried in his bloodstream. In what I must regard as a deplorable excess of idiocy, they agreed to a suicide pact and killed themselves upon landing.”
“Good riddance!”
“Agreed,” said the Count soberly.
“As for the rest of your fantasy,” snarled Magniac, fumbling with the buttons of his ruffled shirt, “you have burned the evidence and truth has never been—”
There was a dreadful crashing noise from the vaults. “The resonating chambers,” murmured the Count. “No one will leave Neuland now.” He stood and said, “Your banishment is still in force. Depart, you atavistic madman.” De Juilly, Weissech, and Welby stood in the doorway, wrecking bars in their hands. A rose petal fell to the tabletop.
Magniac slumped, hope destroyed, revenge forgotten. He walked out of the lodge with dragging feet. He plodded across the fields, a figure from another age in his tall silk hat, long frock coat, and red silk-lined black cape.
The sun set and he welcomed the dark. At his tower he lifted the trapdoor, descended into the crypt, lay in his coffin bed and put a silver bullet through his old heart with the Parabellum Luger.
* * * *
WHEN ALL THE LANDS POUR OUT AGAIN
Anybody want to get away from it all? To make a total change? You had better want to do it: you will do it anyhow. Now is the time. Today is the day.
Three learned men were in the academic center of a learned metropolis, talking about a thing that hadn’t happened for thousands of years, which perhaps had never happened. You will already know of these men, by reputation at least, if there is anything academic about you at all.
“It wasn’t understood the first time it happened, or any of the other times,” Professor George Ruil offered. “In spite of a few studies, it has been understood even less since those times. The accounts of the happenings have been rationalized, falsified, belittled, and that makes it all wrong: it was never rational, it was never false, and it certainly was not little.”
“It is interesting, George, in the way that so many secondary footprints in the clay of time are interesting,” Dr. Ralph Amerce told his friend, “but it is of no more present importance than are bear burrows or gravels of the third ice age. And it can’t come back.”
“I’m not sure that George here won’t be able to connect it with bear burrows and gravels of the third ice age,” Nobelist Professor Wilburton Romer jibed. (These were three very learned men: would we tune in on them otherwise?) “But you can’t find any real traces of it, George, only traces of traces. It hasn’t any form we can grasp, it hasn’t any handle we can take hold of, it hasn’t any name we can call it by.”
“Oh, I’ll call it Jubilee,” George Ruil said.
“A thing named Jubilee back when the world was young, when men were not quite men yet?” Romer questioned.
“The world was older then,” Ruil offered. “It grows younger all the time, as any geologist can tell you; it sluffs off its old incrustations. And men were always men.”
“Let us not get into your prejudices on that, George,” Ralph Amerce begged. “But you really don’t give us anything to look at or handle. What was Jubilee?”
“It was as strong an urge as that to propagate, as strong as that to survive,” Ruil offered. “It was and is a cyclic necessity. Can we be true people without it?”
“We were animals when we had it, if we had it,” Amerce said. “Yes, we can be, and we are now, true people without it. It’s only one of your odd little theories, George. If such things once happened, why then they happened. But they had no real purpose.”
“Only to renew the world and everything that moves upon it,” George Ruil maintained, “only to provide impregnation and contrast and culture and moment. How will we be renewed now? What will provide these things for the world today?”
“We do quite well now, George,” Romer said, “better, I believe, than when we lived in trees and swamps and caves. I wouldn’t change anything of it now, George, even if I could.”
“I’d change a lot of things of it now, if I could,” Amerce smiled. “But it was no more than a curious cyclic thing, George, and it is finished forever.”
“A man would be foolish to say that about the years, Ralph, especially to say in the twelfth month of the year that the cycle of the years was finished forever. I believe that this cycle also begins to come around now.”
“What’s the worry, George?” Romer asked. “It will be the matter of some thousands of years. If we do see the signs of it, we will not be here to see the thing itself.”
“No, it is not the matter of some thousands of years,” Ruil contradicted. “The effects and the readjustments may take several thousand years, but the Jubilee itself is one day. One day only, friends. The nervousness before it may be of some hundred or two hundred years, the early skirmishing may be of a month or so, but the Jubilee itself is in one day. Today (I have just learned it myself) is the day.”
“Have you anything at all to go on, George?” Wilburton Romer asked him.
“Only a timetable of my own construction, contradictory in many places, full of gaps everywhere. An old prophecy That no creature on earth will sleep tonight where he slept last night.’ The fact of a certain uneasiness in the world for the last two hundred years. Has anyone else noticed that? And a hunch; a hunch, men, almost as strong, I believe, as the thing itself was, will be.”
“And what will you do with your little hunch, George?” Ralph Amerce asked him out of that pleasantly ironic face.
“I guess I should take it to the president. He should be advised of a thing like this.”
—Three learned men in the academic center of a learned metropolis, talking about a thing that hadn’t happened in the last three thousand years, maybe not in the last thirty thousand years, that perhaps had never happened at all, that had left none but very dim and confused footprints if it did happen.
And one of them was going to the president to tell him that the thing was urgent.
* * * *
And there had been some early skirmishing, though of less than a month.
It had been time for the bears of Crater Valley to find themselves burrows and hibernate. They didn’t do it, though. Instead, they gathered together, the three hundred of them from the three thousand square miles of the valley; they climbed the south ridge of the valley, they went over it and continued to the south. Nobody had ever seen three hundred bears traveling together like that. But now a forest ranger saw them come out of the valley, and another ranger saw them a hundred miles further south, still going rapidly and happily. So the event was reported.
* * * *
Red squirrels of the northern part of the country moved down into the territory of the gray squirrels of the south. It was no great thing, only three or four million squirrels. The larger gray squirrels did not oppose the red squirrels, they began to pack their own belongings to move out of their way. They were very slightly grumpy about it as if to say, “We’re going, we’re going, but aren’t you just a little bit early with it?”
Radio astronomers had reported that there had been, only last night, a break in the pervading sky harmony (which the radio astronomers do not refer to as the Music of the Spheres), that there had been a very intense high-pitched signal (“Like a whistle in the break in the music, the everybody-change-partners whistle in a country dance, the everybody-change-chairs whistle in Musical Chairs,” one of the astronomical assistants said), and that now there was pause with the sky harmony greatly muted.
And another bit of early skirmishing, less than a month a-going, twenty-seven days in fact: Charles Malaga was sweating as fry-cook in a little café in Aloalo on a mid-Pacific island, and his friend Johnny Ofutino was eating fish of his fry.
“Somebody has to go first,” Johnny Ofutino said. “The ray-fish went this morning, the turtles are going to start this evening. What’s the matter with people?”
“I don’t know, Johnny, what’s the matter with us?” Charley Malaga asked.
“Somebody has to go first,” Johnny Ofutino still insisted. “Let’s us go first, and then some of the rest will follow along.”
“All right, wait’ll I turn the fires off,” Charley Malaga said.
“No, turn them way up,” Johnny Ofutino told him. “Throw stuff on the fires. Burn the café down.”
“Oh all right.”
They burned the café down and went out and launched a fishing boat that had paddles and a half-sail. The sea was running right for them, as they knew it would be. They went all that day and that night. In the morning a small engine-ship came by with half a dozen such small boats in tow. Men threw them a line from the ship, and Charley and Johnny also went into easy tow.
About eight hundred other such assemblages were afloat by the second day. It wasn’t a very long voyage: they had taken voyages twice as long in their earlier days. It didn’t take them much time, even under such small engines: twenty-seven days. So they came to a pleasant land and landed.
The Polynesians had finally discovered America. But their arrival caused only a small flurry of interest. Several dozen of these same Polynesians had been to America before; but if you consider that as an obstacle, then you do not understand the meaning of discovery.
* * * *
Pacific ocean fish and cetaceans were crowded up at the Pacific end of the canal. Some of them seemed to be in a chomping hurry. Most of these had been able to get through the canal for several days, but now many more had crowded up at the Pacific end. And very many more were going around the Horn. There was no good reason for it. The Atlantic was not that much better an ocean than the Pacific. But there comes a time when it seems as if you have lived in one place long enough. It was just that the fish and cetaceans and shelleys and sea-stars felt that it was time to make a change.
* * * *
“Did you get to make an appointment with the president, George?” Wilburton Romer asked as George Ruil returned to them.
“No need for an appointment now,” Ruil said. “They seem pretty informal there today and I got the president himself on the phone while he was having breakfast. I’m not sure that I got my message over to him, but something is moving with them there and I don’t believe it matters whether he understood me exactly. I don’t understand it exactly myself. ‘I believe you are absolutely right,’ the president told me. ‘I believe that everyone is absolutely right. And we are going to do something. I believe that we are all going to get in a plane. They are making a big plane ready now. It will hold nine hundred persons. I will get in it with the congresses and we will go somewhere. We aren’t decided yet whether we should blow up all the buildings here when we leave. There are dissidents who say that we should not.’ ‘Where will you go in the plane, Mr. President?’ I asked him. ‘I am not sure about that,’ he said. ‘Is it important which way a plane goes? There are several dissidents who see no reason to get on a plane and go somewhere today. There are always dissidents in government. They say that nothing has happened. I tell them that if all of us get on a plane and go somewhere that that will be something happening. It is possible that the pilot will know where the plane is going. If he does not know then perhaps someone will instruct him.’ That is what the president said. He didn’t seem to be his usual incisive self this morning.”
“Curious,” said Ralph Amerce. “I don’t seem to be my usual incisive self this morning either. You really believe, George, that there is a catastrophe brewing?”
“No, man, no! Does Jubilee sound like catastrophe to you? How could anyone misunderstand it so? It is the adjustment of the whole world. Oh, there will be what in other circumstances would be called destruction, but we will not call it that. Certain mountains will decide that they have been in one place long enough, and they will get up and walk. Why should the mountains be denied this pleasure? Is there not in scripture the passage about the hills gamboling like lambs? The ice, perhaps, will decide that it has been in bondage for too long a time and it will explode gloriously over great areas. Possibly the magnetism of the earth will be reversed; we know that that has happened before. How would you feel if you had been named North for a million years? And assuredly the fountains of the deep will be broken open. Some millions of persons will die, I’m sure: I am even more sure that they will die joyously. Get into the spirit of it, men.”
“To me the spirit of it is a lazy and peaceful one, George,” Wilburton Romer yawned. “Though the rational part of me says that nothing at all has happened, nevertheless I now accept that the renovation is about to happen. Will we keep our sane names, do you think?”
“Oh no, I’m sure we will not,” Amerce declared, himself getting into the spirit of it. “Why should we keep our same names? Why, there have been echoes of this all through plain historical times, George, and we all too deaf to hear them. The sober accounts of Velikovsky and Wesley Patten and Father O’Connell have been treated as if they were subject to doubt. Even the Fortean documentaries have been laughed away as if they were—well—Fortean. But I see pieces of it everywhere now. The folk-wanderings themselves were only aftermath to such a Jubilee. The simultaneous conflagrations all through the archaic civilized world were part of the thing itself. ‘Trees walking like men’ were only a small bright portion of it. What could have been more irrational than the Rhinoceros coming to Africa during one of the Jubilees, then the Camel appearing (of all places) in Asia during another? What could have been more outlandish than Madagascar sinking (all except the top of its head) into the Ocean, and the Island Africa rising to become a continent? We can look back on all these previous Jubilees with new eyes now. Well, but there should be portents bursting all over the place.”
“There are, Ralph, there are,” Wilburton smiled. “I’ve just been catching the morning radio news with my west ear. Flying jackrabbits have been seen all over the country. A few were seen back in the year 1945, you know, but they were considered a hoax. A herd of unicorns had been sighted in Nebraska, and they were supposed to be extinct. More than a hundred saucers have landed this morning. The small creatures from them say that they are people too: and they do look like small people. They say that they have been living in the Little Sky, not in the Big Sky, and that now the Little Sky is falling down. Besides, they were tired of living in one place and were ready for a change. They had been nervous about things for some years, they say; they’d have come down before but they feared that the earth was not really solid and they’d sink into it. But anyone who wants a change can go into the Little Sky as soon as it’s stabilized again, they say.
“And the covers have been taken off of diverse lands, Scandinavia and Arabia among others; and many millions of people are pouring out of them. These are two of the secret Wells of the World that have always populated the world. A thousand valleys of Scandinavia have had the delusional cover pulled off of them, and the sleeping millions in these valleys have awakened. And the old Arabian kingdoms have awakened today. What had appeared to be sand was only a false cover pulled over them. ‘We thought the sky had been hanging a little low these last several thousand years,’ one of the millennia-old Arabian kings is reported to have said.”
“All that on the morning news?” George Ruil asked from somewhere under his arched brows, “How rum. And how confirming. And what has the news to say at this moment?”
“The announcers are complaining of troubles in their own studios, George. They’re having trouble getting their buildings to burn. But high explosives are being brought in, and many of the persons will evacuate the buildings as they are fused off. They’re having a lot of fun at it too. Ah, that station has just gone off the air. That’s the third one to go off in five minutes.”
“Your goldfish, George, they’re climbing right out of the bowls,” Ralph Amerce gasped out in some wonder. “And they’re making a pretty purposive way across the floor.”
“I’ll open the front door for them,” George Ruil said as he rose to do it. “They want to be out and traveling too. Come along, goldies, come along, flop right over the threshold. That’s it. Hey there, watch it, don’t step on the goldfish!”
“We’re sorry, we’re sorry,” said strangers at the door, “but you can’t renew a world without breaking a few goldfish. It’s all right, we just stepped on one, the rest will be able to make it to the curb, and everything’s flowing gutter-full there; someone’s turned on all the fire hydrants. Are you gentlemen ready to leave?”
“Oh, I suppose we could get ready pretty quickly, strangers. Where are you from?”
“From the west, I believe, or some such direction. We’ve been driving all night. We got here and we said: This is just the sort of place we want, as soon as it’s burned down.”
“We’ll make it as quick as we can, men,” George Ruil said. “Come along, Ralph and Wilburton. Let’s gather such irrational things as we might want to take with us. A fine day for it, friends.”
“A fine day for it, friends,” said the strangers at the door.
* * * *
“Not like a thief in the night,” Ralph Amerce murmured mystically. “Like a bright-faced boy in the bright morning.”
* * * *
Various things were happening in the world. Great numbers of American Indians came out of nine separate holes in the ground. They had just gone down for a little nap, they said, and somebody had put them under a trick and caused them to sleep for a thousand years. It would not greatly matter, they said: likely they hadn’t missed anything important.
A happy woman was leading her brood of children along a smoking road. “What happened to the twins?” she asked. “The big dogs got them, mama,” one of the brood answered, “the big dogs are acting funny.” “Oh darn,” the woman said, “I wanted them to see all the nice things that are happening today.”
Dazed and smiling multitudes were moving out of Greater Armenia and Turkestan. Chinamen were setting out in thousands of junks to discover the South Sea islands. Housecats gathered in moving mobs everywhere, and the rumor ran through their mobs that the King of the Cats himself would appear in his majesty. Snakes gathered by the ten thousands at Portpatrick in Scotland and vowed they would swim the Channel to Ireland or die in the attempt. But the land rose before them and they passed over dryshod. (What? Are snakes shod with shoon? On Jubilee day, perhaps.)
And still nothing had happened.
Then it began to happen a little. The gentle quaking. The beautiful fire in the air and in the ground. Euphoria pouring out of every crevice. The rumbling like old forgotten music. The continents were winding up their anchor chains.
* * * *
And at, well, pretty much the same time, three other men were met with about a dozen disciples. These three men were, in the current view, the three most powerful men in the world. Their names were—if you are any kind of revolutionary at all you will know them—: Saul Trumait the red lion of England, Pedro Cachiporro the red tiger of Mexico, Arpad Koster the red wolf of Moravia, and they were met in reddish New York. These men controlled the complexes inside the complexes.
“Nothing has happened,” said Trumait. “We have not planned anything to happen just now, so it will not be possible for anything to happen. How could anything happen if it were not of our instigation?”
“But there is rumor of things happening,” one of the disciples said, “and there are fires and bombings everywhere. And people are wandering about.”
“There should not be any fires or bombings unless we have ordered them,” Cachiporro muttered. “Fires and bombings are an art and we are the directing artists. There cannot be too many of them, that is true, but they must always be done for proper effect. We alone understand the proper effects. And the people have no right to wander about unless we have incited them to it.”
“There are the beginnings of earthquakes,” another of the disciples said.
“Then we will put an end to the earthquakes,” Koster rasped. “There will be earthquakes only when we command them. It is time that the earth learned that it has masters.”
“The dogs have all gone wild and developed the running sickness,” a third of the disciples said. “The birds have all gathered in huge flocks and started to migrate, and not at all in their usual directions. Some of the fruit trees are blooming again and it isn’t the season for it. Some of them have begun to fruit a second time this year, and that isn’t the strangest part of it. I myself have seen, this very morning, walnuts growing on an apple tree, and there weren’t any signs of them there yesterday.”
“Well, we will immediately put a stop to all that,” Trumait declared. “We have the powers, we are the powers, we have all the power of the red-devil earth and we will use that power. We aren’t given rule over the elementals for nothing.”
“There are rumors of tidal waves,” said another disciple.
“This we will not tolerate for a moment!” Cachiporro swore, “neither the waves nor the rumors. There is sky-business involved in this somewhere and we will not permit it. If the waves are running, let them stand still!”
Would you believe it? The waves everywhere in the world stood still. They were taken by surprise, perhaps, but they had always obeyed the voice of Authority wherever given.
“Let the rumors run no more,” Koster spoke like fire. “Let all such talk cease right now. Let the rumor-men’s minds be befuddled and their tongues be like rocks in their mouths.”
It happened just like that. Rumor everywhere was frozen in midspeed, and the tongues of all the mongers were like rocks in their mouths. These things can be stopped.
“The migrating birds will halt in midair!” Saul Trumait commanded. “Not one wing will beat till we say it may beat again.”
And all the migrating birds were frozen motionless in midair.
“Look, look!” one of the more excitable disciples cried out. “It’s like lava flow bursting up through the pavements outside, up through the sidewalks, up under this very floor, it seems like.”
“Oh, that is us,” Saul Trumait said easily. “Where do you think we draw our power from? We also have our fathers.”
“Let the people stop their wandering,” Cachiporro ordered. “Should there be a revolution that is not ours? Let all vehicles stand still at once. Let the wandering people not set another foot down.”
And quite a few persons of the world were paralyzed with one foot in midstride. These three men were really very powerful.
“Let the fires and bombings stop if they are not our own fires and bombings,” Koster commanded. And all except the privileged bombings and fires ceased.
“Is there anything else of the divergent unlawful—that is not of the true unlawful going on?” Trumait asked, breathing a little heavily from the power that had been flowing through him. “What do our special monitors show? Is there anything going on that is not ours?”
“There are still earthquakes; there are still people laughing; and there are other lava flows which do not seem to be yours,” said one of the disciples who was fiddling with the instruments.
“Let the false lava stop!” Cachiporro commanded. “There must be no lava that does not come from our own fire fathers.”
“Let the people’s laughter cease,” Koster roared. “Let it scorch their throats.”
“May the quaking leave off right now,” Trumait ruled. “We are the only earth-movers.”
“Stop, you fool things, stop!” Pedro Cachiporro ordered. “We are the only authority and we order you.”
“Halt!” Koster barked. “We are the power.”
“Let none of it move,” Trumait commanded.
And it all stopped.
The red lion and the red tiger and the red wolf looked at each other with thunderous triumph; and the disciples adored. The three men themselves were Revolution, they themselves were the Moving Powers of the world and nothing could move without their instigation.
* * * *
“Ah, something is beginning again,” said the disciple who was fiddling with the instruments. It had been a short but momentous pause. “It’s like a new kind of earthquake now, a new sort of lava flow, a different shape of world waves. Hear it? You don’t need instruments. Hear it?”
It all broke loose. It broke wide open. What world-noise was that? Laughter, world-laughter. The three unpowered leaders diminished and their faces cracked like clay pots. It was the whole world laughing at them, in new mountains that had not been mountains a moment before, in craters that were fire-new craters, in pinnacles and persons that had just been renewed. The whole world was laughing at the three creatures that shrank and shattered and turned into unnameable minuscules.
This was Revolution, and the revolutionaries had never stood tall enough to touch the least hairs on its toes.
* * * *
The continents began to detach each from each and to drift. Whether they would move much or little during the Jubilee depended on their own proclivities and states of mind, but they were free to move. And it was not a thing of a million years or a thousand. It was the thing of an hour.
There were world disturbances, of course; there were three-mile-high waves here and there, and such; but there were no more disturbances than could be expected from such causes.
* * * *
“There is land below that isn’t charted,” said the navigator of the plane that was carrying the president and the congresses.
“Chart it then if it will make you happy,” the pilot told him. “That is Hy-Brasil, an old land come back. I bet it felt that it had been submerged long enough.”
“And you’re coming down too soon, coming down to no possible land,” the navigator said an hour later. “You’ll hit open ocean.”
“Oh no. We’ll hit risen land,” the pilot insisted. “See it there now. Is it not fresh and shiny with the sea-water still rushing off its risen flanks and the spray of it rising a mile high?”
The plane came down to Lyonesse which had been the mother of assemblies a long time ago, which had sunk into the ocean a long time ago. It was a good town and a good land, and it seemed glad to be back.
Other planes and various craft were also arriving at Lyonesse. They were homing in on it from everywhere. The crafts carried the governing bodies of more than two hundred commonwealths, and all those parliamentary and official types were beaming and bright and happy. What town they would form there now would be a curious one, but there are advantages in having all governing bodies gathered together in one place where they will not bother the peoples of the world.
* * * *
And in another place there were three wise men walking in that first noontime of the Jubilee. Perhaps these three men had once had the names of Ruil and Amerce and Romer, but they did not have those names now.
They were walking in a direction that had not yet been renamed. They would not sleep that night where they had slept the night before, nor would any other person in the world. They had sandals on their feet; they were wrapped in cloaks and euphoria; they had staffs in their hands; and they carried (from some old symbolism or from some new joy) lighted lanterns in the daytime. Three wise men.
* * * *
ONLY THE WORDS ARE DIFFERENT
1.
Pulse
I just looked up and a man fell by my window with his arms waving. (Earlier, my thumb was engaged in moving across the paper like a chicken drumstick. Scratching, scratching.) He seems to have been in a great hurry, and possibly there was something he wanted to tell me. This may, I realise, have something to do with the scaffolding which grew outside my window during the night; it’s out there now, as I write a wood and steel doily of piping, ladders, planks and pantlegs;
the sky shows through
in squares of blue.
I go to the window and there is a crowd below me, a red truck with two white attendants. The man is lying strangely on the pavement; perhaps he is very tired. Pigeons tiptoe down his legs and arms. Snails would be better, but snails (les escargots) are not in season—only strawberries. His mouth is full of strawberries. The red juice dribbles out of his mouth and streams along the pavement.
I wonder what it was that he wanted to tell me? Probably that he loved me.
* * * *
2.
Schlupp-thunkk. Schlupp-thunkk. The wipers mimic a heart. Beating.
Postmortems of parties dead and cold now, passing home in a bouncing car. You here beside me, warm with drinking, soft with sleep in your pumpkin dress that skis off one shoulder and slides along your leg. The child in your lap. Shapeless in her bundle of flannel.
—like it’ll snow forever. And our Fiat crunches through the crust of that snow. The motor, in third, hums and whirrs. Thinking of our Ford gathering snow on the salvage yard. In the backseat now there are the remains of two pheasants and a bottle of brandy. The brandy rolls and clatters against the oven pan, rolls in its nest of birds’ bones and greasy dressing. Snow stipples the flat grey air, slurs the streets. I smoke the last cigarette and watch for ice. Guilt in small actions, always. The heater growls.
Who was that girl?
I pass the cigarette to you, you drag once and hand it back. The tip is wet now. Of course.
The sexy one. You consider her, try to remember other qualities she may have had. Long hair, boots. The one who kept drinking the brandy.
I shrug. Undergrad, I think. Light from an oncoming car catches in my eyes, trapped under the ridges, supraorbital—as you say, like pueblo cliffs, a moderately effete baboon. (And you . . . you have sat on those ledges and watched a world, the world in front, the world behind them . . . lived on the edge, looking.)
Painter?
That’s the guy she was with. Workshop, I think. Supposed to be very good. She has a novel coming out next year, from Harper.
In your class?
Too obvious, Jane. The brandy, or real annoyance? I shift into second to take a curve. The wipers are tossing away time. To buy our way home.
No. Not many of the writers are interested in Pope, they mostly go for modern lit. I’ve told you all that before.
The baby has crapped in its sleep and the smell fills the car. You reach for the cigarette, draw, encounter filter and throw it out, leaving the window a little open. You twist and rummage through your pockets; skirt, sweater, coat. I thought I had a pack of Salems somewhere...
We smoked them.
So: that sideways glance. A measured apprehension. A truck comes toward us, puffing chimney, cab outlined in small red lights. A huge interstate rig. We’re out of the city, coming onto open road. I shift to fourth and see your face in the truck’s lights. How many times, these five years, this same moment? The Fiat takes the curve and starts, up a hill, dropping speed. Touching the shift, I almost touch your knee but you pull away. The road drops steadily into the darkness, the vacuum, behind us. The lights spread out in front of us, a dull flash-lightning inside the fog, that goes on and on.
Look! but we’ve passed it, whatever it was.
What . . .
A styrofoam snowman. Someone has a goddamn styrofoam snowman in their yard—
O shit! A styrofoam snowman.
If another truck, even a car came by, I might see you crying. But nothing else passes, we’re alone on the road. I can only hear the sound of your breath in the dark. Finally you lean forward and shut off the heater.
How much further?
A few miles.
* * * *
3.
Have you ever noticed how books accumulate around you? Like clouds. You don’t remember putting them there, or buying them (and if you had bought them, you’d have put them on the coffee table, or a shelf, or perhaps beside the bed). And they couldn’t have come through the mail slot; it’s too small. The post office doesn’t deliver. You never enter it: the Draft Board is just upstairs. But they go on accumulating, even now that you know, like clouds.
Then one day there appears on your desk—a surprise beside your morning coffee—this memo advocating the extinction of poems (though a few would be maintained in cages, well-fed and cared for, by way of Justice, for the children to see; to which they might toss an occasional leftover letter, partly eaten, or melted to a shapeless mess in their warm hands; perhaps an occasional colon or dash; an adjective, apostrophe). You quickly add your name —recalling it, letter by letter, as you write—to the already formidable list. This, it occurs to you now, is a petition. You pick it up and the first page comes apart in your hands like a newspaper. It begins to unfold, a very long list indeed. You follow the names through the study, library, den, kitchen, living room, dining room, up three flights of stairs to the bedroom. You jump out the window and run, as though you are (in October) flying a kite, and still the petition comes open, unfolds, like panels of toilet paper folded front to back, back to front, front to back. Each is stamped in blue Property of the British Government and you realise now that this was stolen from the Tate, more precisely from one of the toilet booths on the bottom floor by the cafeteria, behind the Trova and the would-be Michelangelo virgin.
You run, you run, you’re out of breath. Finally, in New Jersey, you reach the end of the list. It began with the names of several well-known artists (painters, sculptors, ceramists, filmmakers, mixed mediasts) and ends with the signature of the local cub reporter. The only names missing are those of the poets themselves—though a few of them, too, have signed. Under pressure, one presumes. Of their wives, publishers, bankers, typewriters, cigarettes, “humor.” All the way back across mitred New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, you search for your name but are unable to find it, even in Philadelphia. But you have considered removing it and this, like the poetry itself, is a noble gesture; you are sure of that, at least. . .
Over dinner I explain all this to you, my wife, and your new friend Harrison. It apparently means little to you, but Harrison feigns interest quite well. And I like him. I feel myself attracted to this strange, quiet man. But let me warn you, darling: his name was not on that list!
* * * *
4.
Story
They are in love. They go to the beach at Brighton and she is disappointed, there are only rocks, where is the sand. The Camden Town Zoo. Shopping together at Heal’s. The East and West for curry. Westbourne Grove (Notting Hill). Baby elephant. Theatre closed—seats outside for sale, want them, can’t find anyone to ask. They return to Portobello Road and, stomachs rumbling from the Madras (this, like the sound of wind in the pastiche-Corbusier elephant house), make love. She wants “your child.” Sadly watching him roll the rubber down over his penis, thinks of discarded peacock feathers lying on ground at zoo; they climax (him 3, her 2). Nothing is ever said. He returns with her to America (on the boat, his birthday, she has him lean his arms against the upper bunk and masturbates him, slowly). They take a flat just outside New York. Strain of isolation, his disorientation, intimations of an affair apart from her. Their love, always silent, is now proclaimed in words. The words distort, fictionalise, lead them each into “false” emotions; they are farther apart with each day, each word (she still wants his child). He finally leaves in the middle of the night, after a (rationalised) argument—the words—over sex. Three days later she receives a small package. No name, no return address, postmark Grand Central Station. She opens the package, which is beautifully gift-wrapped, and takes out what is inside. Holds it up to the light of the kitchen window: precise visual description. A rubber, the nipple filled with semen, a knot tied just above it. Title: Love Letter.
* * * *
5.
Molly keeps a cockroach. It lives in a cage made of Japanese matchsticks, the size of a child’s shoebox, floor covered with a jiggerful of sawdust. It lives on charcoal which it extracts from cigarette filters dropped into its cage by Molly and her lovers, rolling the residue of paper into tiny neat balls to store in one corner of the cage. When Molly mates, it climbs up the side, crawls upsidedown halfway out across the top, then drops down into the litter and starts up the side again—faster and faster, again and again. Finally it drops down onto its back and lies there in the sawdust, exhausted, moving its legs slowly, like eyelashes.
Afterward Molly stands there by the cage telling us, The roach is a dead end, it hasn’t changed in a handful of thousands of years.
Later the roach will ascend to the light fixture and cry there for the crumbling dry bodies of flies. When Molly climbs on a chair to bring it down, it will stare at her with its one cold black eye, it will wave one leg frantically in her face. J’accuse, J’accuse.
* * * *
The Mayor has declared war on the roaches, believing common cause will bring us together; restore esprit, order. The contraceptives have been burned in bonfires on Town Hall Square, people queue outside the compulsory strip shows, the city’s water supply is pumped full of aphrodisiacs—and still, it’s not enough. No one cares. No one, frankly, gives a damn. Anomie and entropy. The birthrate still declines, the city collapses into itself. Stronger measures are required, the Mayor declares from the top of the Town Hall steps (the sun on his skull, the smell of burnt rubber, burning plastic), We must act now!
Badges came last night, press-gang firemen, to bear Molly’s roach away to its execution. She locked the door and shoved things against it—bureaus, bookshelves, the stove—and when they finally broke through, attacked them with shishkebob skewers. She blinded three, ruined another’s hand, neatly burst the balloonlike testicles of the last. Holding her, kicking, screaming, against the wall (halls filled with inquisitive Citizens), they took the cage cover off and discovered that she had (predictably, perhaps) killed the roach herself—with a gold stickpin left behind by one of her lovers—to keep them from getting it.
Molly, “The stars and the rivers
and waves call you back.”
* * * *
And the citizens, when they return to their flats from gaping and gasping in the hall—what is it that they do? There, in that abject privacy. Contained by those colorful walls.
* * * *
THE INFINITY BOX
It was a bad day from beginning to end. Late in the afternoon, just when I was ready to light the fuse to blow up the lab, with Lenny in it, Janet called from the hospital.
“Honey, it’s the little Bronson boy. We can’t do anything with him, and he has his mother and father in a panic. He’s sure that we’re trying to electrocute him, and they half believe it. They’re demanding that we take the cast off and remove the suit.”
Lenny sat watching my face. He began to move things out of reach: the glass of pencils, coffee mugs, ashtray…
“Can’t Groppi do anything?” He was the staff psychologist.
“Not this time. He doesn’t really understand the suit either. I think he’s afraid of it. Can you come over here and talk to them?”
“Sure. Sure. We just blew up about five thousand dollars’ worth of equipment with a faulty transformer. Lenny’s quitting again. Some son of a bitch mislaid our order for wafer resisters… I’ll be over in half an hour.”
“What?” Lenny asked. He looked like a dope, thick build, the biggest pair of hands you’d ever see outside a football field, shoulders that didn’t need padding to look padded. Probably he was one of the best electronics men in the world. He was forty-six, and had brought up three sons alone. He never mentioned their mother and I didn’t know if she was dead, or just gone. He was my partner in the firm of Laslow and Leonard Electronics.
“The Bronson kid’s scared to death of the suit we put on him yesterday. First time they turned it on, he panicked. I’ll run over and see. Where’s that sleeve?” I rummaged futilely and Lenny moved stolidly toward a cabinet and pulled out the muslin sleeve and small control box. Once in a while he’d smile, but that was the only emotion that I’d ever seen on his face, a quiet smile, usually when something worked against the odds, or when his sons did something exceptionally nice—like get a full paid scholarship to MIT, or Harvard, as the third one had done that fall.
“Go on home after you see the kid,” Lenny said. “I’ll clean up in here and try to run down the wafers.”
“Okay. See you tomorrow.”
Children’s Hospital was fifteen miles away, traffic was light at that time of day, and I made it under the half hour I’d promised. Janet met me in the downstairs foyer.
“Eddie, did you bring the sleeve? I thought maybe if you let Mr. Bronson feel it…”
I held it up and she grinned. Janet, suntanned, with red, sun-streaked hair, freckles, and lean to the point of thinness, was my idea of a beautiful woman. We had been married for twelve years.
“Where are the parents?”
“In Dr. Reisman’s office. They were just upsetting Mike more than he was already.”
“Okay, first Mike. Come on.”
Mike Bronson was eight. Three months ago, the first day of school vacation, he had been run over and killed by a diesel truck. He had been listed DOA; someone had detected an echo of life, but they said he couldn’t survive the night. They operated, and gave him a week, then a month, and six weeks ago they had done more surgery and said probably he’d make it. Crushed spine, crushed pelvis, multiple fractures in both legs. One of the problems was that the boy was eight, and growing. His hormonal system didn’t seem to get the message that he was critically injured, and that things should stop for a year or so, and that meant that his body cast had to be changed frequently and it meant that while his bones grew together again, and lengthened, his muscles would slowly atrophy, and when he was removed from the cast finally, there’d be a bundle of bones held together by pale skin and not much else.
At Mike’s door I motioned for Janet to stay outside. One more white uniform, I thought, he didn’t need right now. They had him in a private room, temporarily, I assumed, because of his reaction to the suit. He couldn’t move his head, but he heard me come in, and when I got near enough so he could see me, his eyes were wide with fear. He was a good-looking boy with big brown eyes that knew too much of pain and fear.
“You a cub scout?” I asked.
He could talk some, a throaty whisper, when he wanted to. He didn’t seem to want to then. I waited a second or two, then said, “You know what a ham radio set is, I suppose. If you could learn the Morse code, I could fix a wire so that you could use the key.” I was looking around his bed, as if to see if it could be done, talking to myself. “Put a screen with the code up there, where you could see it. Sort of a learning machine. Work the wire with your tongue at first, until they uncover your hands anyway. Course not everybody wants to talk to Australia or Russia or Brazil or ships at sea. All done with wires, some people are afraid of wires and things like that.”
He was watching me intently now, his eyes following my gaze as I studied the space above his head. He was ready to deal in five minutes. “You stop bitching about the suit, and I start on the ham set. Right?” His eyes sparkled at that kind of language and he whispered, “Right.”
“Now the parents,” I told Janet in the hall. “He’s okay.”
Bronson was apelike, with great muscular, hairy forearms. I never did say who I was, or why I was there, anything at all. “Hold out your arm,” I ordered. He looked from me to Dr. Reisman, who was in a sweat by then. The doctor nodded. I put the sleeve on his arm, then put an inflatable splint on it, inflating it slightly more than was necessary, but I was mad. “Move your fingers,” I ordered. He tried. I attached the jack to the sleeve wire and plugged it in, and then I played his arm and hand muscles like a piano. He gaped. “That’s what we’re doing to your son. If we don’t do it, when he comes out of that cast he’ll be like a stick doll. His muscles will waste away to nothing. He’ll weigh twenty-five pounds, maybe.” That was a guess, but it made the point. “Every time they change the cast, we change the program, so that every muscle in his body will be stimulated under computer control, slightly at first, then stronger and stronger as he gets better.” I started to undo the splint. The air came out with a teakettle hiss. “You wouldn’t dream of telling Dr. Thorne how to operate on your boy. Don’t tell me my business, unless you know it better than I do.”
“But… Did it hurt?” Mrs. Bronson asked.
“No,” Bronson said, flexing his fingers. “It just tingled a little bit. Felt sort of good.”
I removed the sleeve and folded it carefully, and at the door I heard Mrs. Bronson’s whisper, “Who is he?” and Janet’s haughty answer, “That’s Edward Laslow, the inventor of the Laslow Suit.”
Enrico Groppi met me in the corridor. “I just came from Mike’s room. Thanks. Want a drink?” Groppi was an eclectic—he took from here, there, anything that worked he was willing to incorporate into his system.
“That’s an idea.” I followed him to his office, left word for Janet to meet me there, and tried not to think about the possibility that the suit wouldn’t work, that I’d built up false hopes, that Mike would come to hate me and everything I symbolized…
I drove Janet home, leaving her car in the hospital lot overnight. That meant that I’d have to drive her to work in the morning, but it seemed too silly to play follow the leader back the county roads. To get home we took the interstate highway first, then a four-lane state road, then a two-lane county road, then a right turn off onto a dirt road, and that was ours. Sweet Brier Lane. Five one-acre lots, with woods all around, and a hill behind us, and a brook. If any of us prayed at all, it was only that the county engineers wouldn’t discover the existence of Sweet Brier Lane and come in with their bulldozers and road-building equipment and turn us into a real development.
Our house was the third one on the narrow road. First on the left was Bill Glaser, a contractor, nice fellow if you didn’t have to do more than wave and say hi from time to time. Then on the right came the Donlevy house that had been empty for almost three years while Peter Donlevy was engaged in an exchange program with teachers from England. He was at Cambridge, and from the Christmas cards that we got from them, they might never return. Then, again on the right, our house, set far back behind oak trees that made grass-growing almost impossible. Farther down and across the lane was Earl Klinger’s house. He was with the math department of the university. And finally the lane dead-ended at the driveway of Lucas Malek and his wife. He was in his sixties, retired from the insurance business, and to be avoided if possible. An immigrant from East Europe, Hungary or some place like that, he was bored and talked endlessly if encouraged. We were on polite, speaking terms with everyone on the lane, but the Donlevys had been our friends; with them gone, we had drawn inward, and had very little to do with the neighbors. We could have borrowed sugar from any of them, or got a lift to town, or counted on them to call the fire department if our house started to burn down, but there was no close camaraderie there.
It was our fault. If we had wanted friends we certainly could have found them in that small group of talented and intelligent people. But we were busy. Janet with her work at the hospital where she was a physical therapist, and I at my laboratory that was just now after fourteen years starting to show a bit of profit. It could have got out of the red earlier, but Lenny and I both believed in updating the equipment whenever possible, so it had taken time.
It was a warm day, early in September, without a hint yet that summer had had it. I had the windows open, making talk impossible. Janet and I could talk or not. There were still times when we stayed up until morning, just talking, and then again weeks went by with nothing more than the sort of thing that has to take place between husband and wife. No strain either way, nothing but ease lay between us. We had a good thing, and we knew it.
We were both startled, and a little upset, when we saw a moving van and a dilapidated station wagon in the driveway of the Donlevy house.
“They wouldn’t come back without letting us know,” Janet said.
“Not a chance. Maybe they sold it.”
“But without a sign, or any real-estate people coming around?”
“They could have been here day after day without our knowing.”
“But not without Ruth Klinger knowing about it. She would have told us.”
I drove past the house slowly, craning to see something that would give a hint. Only the station wagon, with a Connecticut plate. It was an eight-year-old model, in need of a paint job. It didn’t look too hopeful.
Every afternoon a woman from a nearby subdivision came to stay with the children and to straighten up generally until we got home. Mrs. Durrell was as mystified as we about the van and the newcomer.
“Haven’t seen a sign of anyone poking about over there. Rusty says that they’re just moving boxes in, heavy boxes.” Rusty, eleven, probably knew exactly how many boxes, and their approximate weight. “The kids are down at the brook watching them unload,” Mrs. Durrell went on. “They’re hoping for more kids, I guess. Rusty keeps coming up to report, and so far, only one woman, and a lot of boxes.” She talked herself out of the kitchen, across the terrace, and down the drive to her car, her voice fading out gradually.
Neither Pete Donlevy nor I had any inclination for gardening, and our yards, separated by the brook, were heavily wooded, so that his house was not visible from ours, but down at the brook there was a clear view between the trees. While Janet changed into shorts and sandals, I wandered down to have a look along with Rusty and Laura. They were both Janet’s kids. Redheads, with freckles, and vivid blue-green eyes, skinny arms and legs; sometimes I found myself studying one or the other of them intently for a hint of my genes there, without success. Laura was eight. I spotted her first, sitting on the bridge made of two fallen trees. We had lopped the branches off and the root mass and just left them there. Pete Donlevy and I had worked three weekends on those trees, cutting up the branches for our fireplaces, rolling the two trunks close together to make a footbridge. We had consumed approximately ten gallons of beer during those weekends.
“Hi, Dad,” Rusty called from above me. I located him high on the right-angled branch of an oak tree. “We have a new neighbor.”
I nodded and sat down next to Laura. “Any kids?”
“No. Just a lady so far.”
“Young? Old? Fat?”
“Tiny. I don’t know if young or old, can’t tell. She runs around like young.”
“With lots of books,” Rusty said from his better vantage point.
“No furniture?”
“Nope. Just suitcases and a trunk full of clothes, and boxes of books. And cameras, and tripods.”
“And a black-and-white dog,” Laura added.
I tossed bits of bark into the brook and watched them bob and whirl their way downstream. Presently we went back to the house, and later we grilled hamburgers on the terrace, and had watermelon for dessert. I didn’t get a glimpse of the tiny lady.
Sometime during the night I was brought straight up in bed by a wail that was animal-like, thin, high-pitched, inhuman. “Laura!”
Janet was already out of bed; in the pale light from the hall, she was a flash of white gown darting out the doorway. The wail was repeated, and by then I was on my way to Laura’s room too.
She was standing in the middle of the floor, her short pajamas white, her eyes wide open, showing mostly white also. Her hands were partially extended before her, fingers widespread, stiff.
“Laura!” Janet said. It was a command, low-voiced, but imperative. The child didn’t move. I put my arm about her shoulders, not wanting to frighten her more than she was by the nightmare. She was rigid and unmoving, as stiff as a catatonic.
“Pull back the sheet,” I told Janet. “I’ll carry her back to bed.” It was like lifting a wooden dummy. No response, no flexibility, no life. My skin crawled, and fear made a sour taste in my mouth. Back in her bed, Laura suddenly sighed, and her eyelids fluttered once or twice, then closed and she was in a normal sleep. I lifted her hand, her wrist was limp, her fingers dangled loosely.
Janet stayed with her for a few minutes, but she didn’t wake up, and finally Janet joined me in the kitchen, where I had poured a glass of milk and was sipping it.
“I never saw anything like that,” Janet said. She was pale, and shaking.
“A nightmare, honey. Too much watermelon, or something. More than likely she won’t remember anything about it. Just as well.”
We didn’t discuss it. There wasn’t anything to say. Who knows anything about nightmares? But I had trouble getting back to sleep again, and when I did, I dreamed off and on the rest of the night, waking up time after time with the memory of a dream real enough to distort my thinking so that I couldn’t know if I was sleeping in bed, or floating somewhere else and dreaming of the bed.
Laura didn’t remember any of the dream, but she was fascinated, and wanted to talk about it: what had she been doing when we found her? how had she sounded when she shrieked? and so on. After about five minutes it got to be a bore and I refused to say another word. Mornings were always bad anyway; usually I was the last to leave the house, but that morning I had to drive Janet to work, so we all left at the same time, the kids to catch the schoolbus at the end of the lane, Janet to go to the hospital, and me to go to the lab eventually. At the end of the lane when I stopped to let the kids hop out, we saw our new neighbor. She was walking a Dalmatian, and she smiled and nodded. But Laura surprised us all by calling out to her, greeting her like a real friend. When I drove away I could see them standing there, the dog sniffing the kids interestedly, the woman and Laura talking.
“Well,” was all I could think to say. Laura usually was the shy one, the last to make friends with people, the last to speak to company, the first to break away from a group of strangers.
“She seems all right,” Janet said.
“Let’s introduce ourselves tonight. Maybe she’s someone from around here, someone from school.” And I wondered where else Laura could have met her without our meeting her also.
We didn’t meet her that day.
I got tied up, and it was after eight when I got home, tired and disgusted by a series of mishaps again at the lab. Janet didn’t help by saying that maybe we had too many things going at once for just the two of us to keep track of. Knowing she was right didn’t make the comment any easier to take. Lenny and I were jealous of our shop and lab. We didn’t want to bring in an outsider, and secretly I knew that I didn’t want to be bothered with the kind of bookkeeping that would be involved.
“You can’t have it both ways,” Janet said. Sometimes she didn’t know when to drop it. “Either you remain at the level you were at a couple of years ago, patenting little things every so often, and leave the big jobs to the companies that have the manpower, or else you let your staff grow along with your ideas.”
I ate warmed-over roast beef without tasting it, and drank two gin-and-tonics. The television sound was bad and that annoyed me, even though it was three rooms away with the doors between closed.
“Did you get started on Mike’s ham set yet?” Janet asked, clearing the table.
“Christ!” I had forgotten. I took my coffee and headed for the basement. “I’ll get at it. I’ve got what I need. Don’t wait up. If I don’t do it tonight, I won’t get to it for days.” I had suits being tested at three different hospitals, Mike’s, one at a geriatric clinic where an eighty-year-old man was recovering from a broken hip, and one in a veterans’ hospital where a young man in a coma was guinea pig. I was certain the suit would be more effective than the daily massage that such patients usually received, when there was sufficient help to administer such massage to begin with. The suits were experimental and needed constant checking, the programs needed constant supervision for this first application. And it was my baby. So I worked that night on the slides for Mike Bronson, and it was nearly two when I returned to the kitchen, keyed up and tense from too much coffee and too many cigarettes.
I wandered outside and walked for several minutes back through the woods, ending up at the bridge, staring at the Donlevy house where there was a light on in Pete Donlevy’s study. I wondered again about the little woman who had moved in, wondered if others had joined her, or if they would join her. It didn’t seem practical for one woman to rent such a big house. I was leaning against the same tree that Rusty had perched in watching the unloading of boxes. I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, images were flitting through my mind, snaps, scraps of talk, bits and pieces of unfinished projects, disconnected words. I must have closed my eyes. It was dark under the giant oak and there was nothing to see anyway, except the light in Pete’s study, and that was only a small oblong of yellow.
The meandering thoughts kept passing by my mind’s eye, but very clearly there was also Pete’s study. I was there, looking over the bookshelves, wishing I dared remove his books in order to put my own away neatly. Thinking of Laura and her nightmare. Wondering where Caesar was, had I left the basement light on, going to the door to whistle, imagining Janet asleep with her arm up over her head, if I slept like that my hands would go to sleep, whistling again for Caesar. Aware of the dog, although he was across the yard staring intently up a tree bole where a possum clung motionlessly. Everything a jumble, the bookshelves, the basement workshop, Janet, Caesar, driving down from Connecticut, pawing through drawers in the lab shop, looking for the sleeve controls, dots and dashes on slides…
I whistled once more and stepped down the first of the three steps to the yard, and fell…
Falling forever, ice cold, tumbling over and over, with the knowledge that the fall would never end, would never change, stretching out for something, anything to grasp, to stop the tumbling. Nothing. Then a scream, and opening my eyes, or finding my eyes open. The light was no longer on.
Who screamed?
Everything was quiet, the gentle sound of the water on rocks, a rustling of a small creature in the grasses at the edge of the brook, an owl far back on the hill. There was a September chill in the air suddenly and I was shivering as I hurried back to my house.
I knew that I hadn’t fallen asleep. Even if I had dozed momentarily, I couldn’t have been so deeply asleep that I could have had a nightmare. Like Laura’s, I thought, and froze. Is that what she had dreamed? Falling forever? There had been no time. During the fall I knew that I had been doing it for an eternity, that I would continue to fall for all the time to come.
Janet’s body was warm as she snuggled up to me, and I clung to her almost like a child, grateful for this long-limbed, practical woman.
We met our new neighbor on Saturday. Janet made a point of going over to introduce herself and give her an invitation for a drink, or coffee. “She’s so small,” Janet said. “About thirty, or a little under. And handsome in a strange way. In spite of herself almost. You can see that she hasn’t bothered to do anything much about her appearance, I mean she has gorgeous hair, or could have, but she keeps it cut about shoulder length and lets it go at that. I bet she hasn’t set it in years. Same for her clothes. It’s as if she never glanced in a mirror, or a fashion magazine, or store window. Anyway, you’ll see for yourself. She’ll be over at about four.”
There was always work that needed doing immediately in the yard, and on the house or the car, and generally I tried to keep Saturday open to get some of it done. That day I had already torn up the television, looking for the source of the fuzzy sound, and I had replaced a tube and a speaker condenser, but it still wasn’t the greatest. Rusty wanted us to be hooked up to the cable, and I was resisting. From stubbornness, I knew. I resented having to pay seventy-five dollars in order to bring in a picture that only three years ago had been clear and sharp. A new runway at the airport had changed all that. Their radar and the flight paths of rerouted planes distorted our reception. But I kept trying to fix it myself.
Janet was painting window shades for Laura’s room. She had copied the design from some material that she was using for a bedspread and drapes. She had baked two pies, and a cake, and a loaf of whole-wheat bread. The house was clean and smelled good and we were busy. And happy. It always sounds hokey to say that you’re a happy man. Why aren’t you tearing out your hair over the foreign mess, or the tax problem, or some damn thing? But I was a happy man. We had a good thing, and knew it. Janet always baked on Saturday, froze the stuff and got it out during the week, so the kids hardly even knew that she was a working mother. They were happy kids.
Then Christine came along. That’s the only way to put it. That afternoon she came up through the woods, dressed in brown jeans, with a sloppy plaid shirt that came down below her hips and was not terribly clean. Laura ran down to meet her, and she was almost as big as Christine.
“Hi,” Janet said, coming out to the terrace. “Mrs. Rudeman, this is Eddie. And Rusty.”
“Please, call me Christine,” she said, and held out her hand.
But I knew her. It was like seeing your first lover again after years, the same shock low in the belly, the same tightening up of muscles, the fear that what’s left of the affair will show, and there is always something left over. Hate, love, lust. Something. Virtually instantaneous with the shock of recognition came the denial. I had never seen her before in my life, except that one morning on the way to work, and certainly I hadn’t felt any familiarity then. It would have been impossible to have known her without remembering, if only because of her size. You remember those who aren’t in the range of normality. She was possibly five feet tall, and couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. It was impossible to tell what kind of a figure she had, but what was visible seemed perfectly normal, just scaled down, except her eyes, and they looked extraordinarily large in so tiny a face. Her eyes were very dark, black or so close to it as to make no difference, and her hair, as Janet had said, was beautiful, or could have been with just a little attention. It was glossy, lustrous black, thick and to her shoulders. But she shouldn’t have worn it tied back with a ribbon as she had it then. Her face was too round, her eyebrows too straight. It gave her a childlike appearance.
All of that and more passed through my mind as she crossed the terrace smiling, with her hand outstretched. And I didn’t want to touch her hand. I knew that Janet was speaking, but I didn’t hear what she said. In the same distant way I knew that Laura and Rusty were there, Laura waiting impatiently for the introductions to be over so she could say something or other. I braced myself for the touch, and when our fingers met, I knew there had been no way I could have prepared myself for the electricity of that quick bringing together of flesh to flesh. For God’s sake, I wanted to say, turn around and say something to Rusty, don’t just stand there staring at me. Act normal. You’ve never seen me before in your life and you know it.
She turned quickly, withdrawing her hand abruptly, but I couldn’t tell if she had felt anything, or suspected my agitation. Janet was oblivious of any currents.
“But you and Rusty and Laura have all met,” she said. “I keep forgetting how great kids are at insinuating themselves into any scene.”
“Where’s Caesar?” Laura finally got to ask.
I had another shock with the name. My nightmare, my waking nightmare. Or had I heard her calling to the dog?
“I never take him with me unless he’s been invited,” Christine said. “You never know where you’ll run into a dog-hater, or a pet cat, or another dog that’s a bit jealous.”
They talked about the dog we had had until late in the spring, a red setter that had been born all heart and no brain. He had been killed out on the county road. Again I was distantly aware of what they were saying, almost as if I were half asleep in a different room, with voices droning on and on beyond the walls. I was simply waiting for a chance to leave without being too rude.
The kids wandered away after a little while, and Janet and Christine talked easily. I began to listen when she mentioned Pete’s name.
“Pete and Grace had been my husband’s friends for a long time. Pete studied under him, and Grace and I were in classes together. So they invited me to stay in their house this year. Karl suggested Pete for the exchange program three years ago. He didn’t believe there was a coherent American school of philosophy, and he thought that it would be good for Pete to study under the Cambridge system of Logical Positivism.” She shrugged. “I take it that Pete didn’t write to you and warn you that I’d be moving in. He said he would, but I guess I didn’t really think he’d get around to it.”
Karl Rudeman. Karl Rudeman. It was one of those vaguely familiar names that you feel you must know and can’t associate with anything.
Janet had made a pitcher of gin and bitter lemon, and I refilled our glasses while I tried to find a tag to go with the name. Christine murmured thanks, then said, “It isn’t fair that I should know so much about you both—from Pete—and that you know nothing about me. Karl was a psychologist at Harvard. He worked with Leary for several years, then they separated, violently, over the drugs. He died last May.”
I felt like a fool then, and from the look on her face, I assumed that Janet did too. Karl Rudeman had won the Nobel for his work in physiological psychology, in the field of visual perception. There was something else nagging me about the name, some elusive memory that went with it, but it refused to come.
Christine stayed for another half hour, refused Janet’s invitation to have dinner with us, and then went back home. Back through the woods, the way she had come.
“She’s nice,” Janet said. “I like her.”
“You warn her about Glaser?”
“She’s not interested. And it does take two. Anyway she said that Pete gave her the rundown on everyone on the lane. You heard her.”
“Yeah,” I lied. I hadn’t heard much of anything anyone had said. “He must have been thirty years older than she is.”
“I suppose. I always wonder how it is with a couple like that. I mean, was he losing interest? Or just one time a month? Did it bother her?” Since Janet and I always wondered about everyone’s sex life, that wasn’t a strange line for our talk to have taken, but I felt uncomfortable about it, felt as if this time we were peeking in bedroom-door keyholes.
“Well, since you seem so sure she wouldn’t be interested in Bill Glaser, maybe she’s as asexual as she looked in that outfit.”
“Hah!” That’s all, just one Hah! And I agreed. We let it drop then.
We had planned a movie for that night. “Get some hamburgers out for the kids and I’ll take you around to Cunningham’s for dinner,” I said to Janet as she started in with the tray. She looked pleased.
We always had stuffed crab at Cunningham’s, and Asti Spumante. It’s a way of life. Our first date cost me almost a week’s pay, and that’s what we did, so I don’t suggest it too often, just a couple of times a year when things have suddenly clicked, or when we’ve had a fight and made up to find everything a little better than it used to be. I don’t know why I suggested it that night, but she liked the idea, and she got dressed up in her new green dress that she had been saving for a party.
When I made love to her late that night, she burst into tears, and I stroked her hair until she fell asleep. I remembered the first time she had done that, how frightened I’d been, and her convulsive clutching when I had tried to get up to bring her a drink of water or something. She hadn’t been able to talk, she just sobbed and held me, and slowly I had come to realize that I had a very sexy wife whose response was so total that it overwhelmed her, and me. She sighed when I eased my numb arm out from under her. Pins-and-needles circulation began again and I rubbed my wrist trying to hurry it along.
Christine Warnecke Rudeman, I thought suddenly. Christine Warnecke. Of course. The photographer. There had been a display of her pictures at the library a year or two ago. She had an uncanny way of looking at things, as if she were at some point that you couldn’t imagine, getting an angle that no one ever had seen before. I couldn’t remember the details of the show, or any of the individual pieces, only the general impression of great art, or even greater fakery. I could almost visualize the item I had read about the death of her husband, but it kept sliding out of focus. Something about his death, though. Something never explained.
Tuesday I went home for lunch. I often did, the lab was less than a mile from the house. Sometimes I took Lenny with me, but that day he was too busy with a printed circuit that he had to finish by six and he nodded without speaking when I asked if he wanted a sandwich. The air felt crisp and cool after the hot smell of solder as I walked home.
I was thinking of the computer cutting tool that we were finishing up, wondering if Mike had mastered the Morse code yet, anticipating the look on his face when I installed the ham set. I was not thinking of Christine, had, in fact, forgotten about her, until I got even with the house and suddenly there she was, carrying a tripod out toward a small toolhouse at the rear of the lot.
I turned in the Donlevy drive. If it had been Ruth Klinger, or Grace Donlevy, or any of the other women who lived there, I would have offered a hand. But as soon as I got near her, I knew I’d made a mistake. It hit me again, not so violently, but still enough to shake me up. I know this woman, came the thought.
“Hi, Eddie.” She put the tripod down and looked hot and slightly out of breath. “I always forget how heavy it can get. I had it made heavy purposely, so it could stay in place for months at a time, and then I forget.”
I picked it up and it was heavy, but worse, awkward. The legs didn’t lock closed, and no matter how I shifted it, one of them kept opening. “Where to?” I asked.
“Inside the toolshed. I left the door open…”
I positioned it for her and she was as fussy as Lenny got over his circuits, or as I got over wiring one of the suits. It pleased me that she was that fussy about its position at an open window. I watched her mount a camera on the tripod and again she made adjustments that were too fine for me to see that anything was changed. Finally she was satisfied. All there was in front of the lens was a maple tree. “Want to take a look?” she asked.
The tree, framed by sky. I must have looked blank.
“I have a timer,” she said. “A time-lapse study of the tree from now until spring, I hope. If nothing goes wrong.”
“Oh.” My disappointment must have shown.
“I won’t show them side by side,” she said, almost too quickly. “Sort of superimposed, so that you’ll see the tree through time…” She looked away suddenly and wiped her hands on her jeans. “Well, thanks again.”
“What in hell do you mean, through time?”
“Oh… Sometime when you and Janet are free I’ll show you some of the sort of thing I mean.” She looked up, apologetically, and shrugged as she had that first time I met her. It was a strange gesture from one so small. It seemed that almost everything was too much for her, that when she felt cornered she might always simply shrug off everything with that abrupt movement.
“Well, I have to get,” I said then, and turned toward the drive. “Do you have anything else to lug out here, before I leave?”
“No. The timer and film. But that’s nothing. Thanks again.” She took a step away, stopped and said, with that same shy apologetic tone, “I wish I could explain what I want to do, in words. But I can’t.”
I hurried away from her, to my own house, but I didn’t want anything to eat after all. I paced the living room, into the kitchen, where the coffee I had poured was now cold, back to the living room, out to the terrace. I told myself asinine things like: I love Janet. We have a good life, good sex, good kids. I have a good business that I am completely involved in. I’m too young for the male climacteric. She isn’t even pretty.
And I kept pacing until I was an hour later than I’d planned on. I still hadn’t eaten, and couldn’t, and I forgot to make the sandwich for Lenny and take it back to him.
I avoided Christine. I put in long hours at the lab, and stayed in the basement workshop almost every evening, and turned down invitations to join the girls for coffee, or talk. They were together a lot. Janet was charmed by her, and a strong friendship grew between them rapidly. Janet commented on it thoughtfully one night. “I’ve never had many woman friends at all. I can’t stand most women after a few minutes. Talking about kids sends me right up the wall, and you know how I am about PTA and clubs and that sort of thing. But she’s different. She’s a person first, then a woman, and as a person she’s one of the most interesting I’ve ever run into. And she has so much empathy and understanding. She’s very shy, too. You never have to worry about her camping on your doorstep or anything like that.”
She’d been there almost two months when Pete’s letter finally arrived telling us about her. Janet read it aloud to me while I shaved.
“ She’s a good kid and probably will need a friend or two by the time she gets out of that madhouse in Connecticut. Rudeman was a genius, but not quite human. Cold, calculating, never did a thing by accident in his life. He wound her up every morning and gave her instructions for the day. God knows why she married him, why they stayed together, but they did. In his own way I think Rudeman was very much in love with her. He said once that if he could understand this one woman he’d understand the entire universe. May he rest in peace, he never made it. So be good to her.
“Grace sends love. She’s been redoing our apartment…”
I stopped listening. The letter went on for three pages of single-spaced typing. The letter had left as many questions as it had answered. More in fact, since we already had found out the basic information he had supplied. I decided to go to the library and look up Rudeman and his death and get rid of that nagging feeling that had never gone away.
“Eddie, for heaven’s sake!” Janet was staring at me, flushed, and angry.
“What? Sorry, honey. My mind was wandering.”
“I noticed. What in the world is bothering you? You hear me maybe half the time, though I doubt it.”
“I said I’m sorry, Janet. God damn it!” I blotted a nick and turned to look at her, but she was gone.
She snapped at Rusty and Laura, and ignored me when I asked if there was any more mail. Rusty looked at me with a What’s-eating-her? expression.
I tried to bring up the subject again that night, and got nowhere. “Nothing,” she said. “Just forget it.”
“Sure. That suits me fine.” I didn’t know what I was supposed to forget. I tried to remember if it was time for her period, but I never knew until it hit, so I just left her in the kitchen and went downstairs to the workroom and messed around for an hour. When I went back up, she was in bed, pretending to be asleep. Usually I’d keep at it until we had it out in the open, whatever it was, and we’d both explain our sides, maybe not convincing each other, but at least demonstrating that each thought he had a position to maintain. That time I simply left the bedroom and wandered about in the living room, picked up a book to read, put it down again. I found Pete’s letter and saw that we’d been invited to visit them over Christmas. I seemed to remember that Janet had gone on about that, but I couldn’t recall her words. Finally I pulled on a jacket and walked out to the terrace. I looked toward the Donlevy house, Christine’s house now. Enough leaves had fallen by then so I could see the lights.
It’s your fault, I thought at her. Why don’t you beat it? Go somewhere else. Go home. Anywhere else. Just get out.
I was falling. Suddenly there was nothing beneath my feet, nothing at all, and I was falling straight down in a featureless grey vacuum. I groped wildly for something to hold on to, and I remembered the last time it had happened, and that it had happened to Laura. Falling straight down, now starting to tumble, my stomach lurching, nausea welling up inside me. Everything was gone, the house, terrace, the lights… I thought hard of the lights that had been the last thing I had seen. Eyes open or closed, the field of vision didn’t change, nothing was there. “Janet!” I tried to call, and had no way of knowing if I had been able to make the sound or not. I couldn’t hear myself. A second sweep of nausea rose in me, and this time I tasted the bitterness. I knew that I would start crying. I couldn’t help it; nausea, fear, the uncontrollable tumbling, unable to call anyone. Fury then displaced the helplessness that had overcome me, and I yelled, again without being able to hear anything, “You did this, didn’t you, you bitch!”
Donlevy’s study was warm, the colors were dull gold, russet, deep, dark green. There was a fire in the fireplace. The room was out of focus somehow, not exactly as I remembered it, the furniture too large and awkward-looking, the shelves built to the ceiling were too high, the titles on the topmost shelf a blur because of the strange angle from which I saw them. Before me was Donlevy’s desk, cleaner than I’d ever seen it, bare with gleaming wood, a stand with pens, and several sheets of paper. No stacks of reports, journals, overflowing ashtrays… I looked at the papers curiously, a letter, in a neat legible handwriting. Two pages were turned face down, and the third was barely begun: “… nothing to do with you in any way. When I have finished going through the papers, then I’ll box up those that you have a right to and mail them to you. It will take many weeks, however, so unti…” The last word ended with a streak of ink that slashed downward and across the page, and ran off onto the desktop.
Where was she, Christine? How had I got… I realized that I wasn’t actually there. Even as the thought formed, I knew precisely where I was, on my own terrace, leaning against a post, staring at the lights through the bare trees.
I looked at the letter, and slowly raised my hand and stared at it, both on the terrace and in the study. And the one in the study was tiny, tanned, with oval nails, and a wide wedding band…
“Eddie?”
Janet’s voice jolted me, and for a moment the study dimmed, but I concentrated on it, and held it. “Yes.”
“Are you all right?”
“Sure. I thought you were sleeping.”
In the study… who the devil was in the study? Where was she? Then suddenly she screamed, and it was both inside my head and outside filling the night.
“My God!” Janet cried. “It’s Christine! Someone must have…”
I started to run toward her house, the Donlevy house, and Janet was close behind me in her robe and slippers. In the split second before that scream had exploded into the night, I had been overcome by a wave of terror such as I had never known before. I fully expected to find Christine dead, with her throat cut, or a bullet in her brain, or something. Caesar met us and loped with us to the house, yelping excitedly. Why hadn’t he barked at a stranger? I wanted to kick the beast. The back door was unlocked. We rushed in, and while Janet hesitated, I dashed toward the study.
Christine was on the floor near the desk, but she wasn’t dead, or even injured as far as I could tell from a hurried examination. Janet had dropped to her knees also, and was feeling the pulse in Christine’s wrist, and I saw again the small tanned hand that I had seen only a few minutes ago, even the wedding band. The terror that had flooded through me minutes ago surged again. How could I have dreamed of seeing that hand move as if it were my own hand? I looked about the study frantically, but it was back to normal, nothing distorted now. I had been dreaming, I thought, dreaming. I had dreamed of being this woman, of seeing through her eyes, feeling through her. A dream, no more complicated than any other dream, just strange to me. Maybe people dreamed of being other people all the time, and simply never mentioned it. Maybe everyone walked around terrified most of the time because of inexplicable dreams. Christine’s eyelids fluttered, and I knew that I couldn’t look at her yet, couldn’t let her look at me. Not yet. I stood up abruptly. “I’ll have a look around. Something scared her.”
I whistled for Caesar to come with me, and we made a tour of the house, all quiet, with no signs of an intruder. The dog sniffed doors, and the floor, but in a disinterested manner, as if going through the motions because that was expected of him. The same was true of the yard about the house; he just couldn’t find anything to get excited about. I cursed him for being a stupid brute, and returned to the study. Christine was seated on one of the dark green chairs, and Janet on one facing her. I moved casually toward the desk, enough to see the letter, to see the top lines, the long streak where the pen had gone out of control.
Janet said, “Something must have happened, but she can’t remember a thing.”
“Fall asleep? A nightmare?” I suggested, trying not to look at her.
“No. I’m sure not. I was writing a letter, in fact. Then suddenly there was something else in the room with me. I know it. It’s happened before, the same kind of feeling, and I thought it was the farmhouse, the associations there. But maybe I am going crazy. Maybe Victor’s right, I need care and treatment.” She was very pale, her eyes so large that she looked almost doll-like, an idealized doll-like face.
“Who is Victor?” Janet asked.
“Eugenia’s husband. She’s… she was my husband’s daughter.” Christine sighed and stood up, a bit unsteadily. “If it starts again… I thought if I just got away from them all, and the house… But if it starts again here…”
“Eddie, we can’t leave her like this,” Janet said in a low voice. “And we can’t leave the kids alone. Let’s take her home for the night.”
Christine objected, but in the end came along through the woods with Janet and me. At our house Janet went to get some clothes on. Her gown and robe had been soaked with dew. While Janet was dressing, I poked up a fire in the fireplace, and then made some hot toddies. Christine didn’t speak until Janet came back.
“I’m sorry this happened,” she said then. “I mean involving you two in something as… as messy as this is.”
Janet looked at me, waiting, and I said, “Christine, we heard from Pete and he seemed to think you might need friends. He seemed to think we might do. Is any of this something that you could talk to Pete about?”
She nodded. “Yes. I could tell Pete.”
“Okay, then let us be the friends that he would be if he was here.”
Again she nodded. “Lord knows I have to talk to someone, or I’ll go as batty as Victor wants to believe I am.”
“Why do you keep referring to him?” Janet asked. Then she shook her head firmly. “No. No questions. You just tell us what you want to for now.”
“I met Karl when I was a student at Northwestern. He had a class in physiological psychology and I was one of his students and experimental subjects. He was doing his basic research then on perception. Three afternoons a week we would meet in his lab for tests that he had devised, visual-perception tests. He narrowed his subjects down to two others and me, and we are the ones he based much of his theory on. Anyway, as I got to know him and admire him more and more, he seemed to take a greater interest in me. He was a widower, with a child, Eugenia. She was twelve then.” Her voice had grown fainter, and now stopped, and she looked at the drink in her hand that she had hardly touched. She took a sip, and another. We waited.
“The reason he was interested in me, particularly, at least in the beginning,” she said haltingly, “was that I had been in and out of institutions for years.” She didn’t look up and her words were almost too low to catch. “He had developed the theory that the same mechanism that produces sight also produces images that are entirely mental constructs, and that the end results are the same. In fact, he believed and worked out the theory that all vision, whether or not there is an external object, is a construct. Vision doesn’t copy anything in the real world, but instead involves the construction of a schematic, and so does visual imagination, or hallucination.”
I refilled our glasses and added a log to the fire, and she talked on and on. Rudeman didn’t believe in a psychological cause to explain schizophrenia, but believed it was a chemical imbalance with an organic cause that produced aberrated perception. This before the current wave of research that seemed to indicate that he had been right. His interest in Christine had started because she could furnish information on image projection, and because in some areas she had an eidetic memory, and this, too, was a theory that he was intensely interested in. Eidetikers had been discounted for almost a century in the serious literature, and he had reestablished the authenticity of the phenomena.
“During the year,” she said, “he found out that there were certain anomalies in my vision that made my value to him questionable. Gradually he had to phase me out, but he became so fascinated in those other areas that he couldn’t stand not starting another line of research immediately, using me extensively. That was to be his last year at Northwestern. He had an offer from Harvard, and he was eager to go there. Anyway, late in April that year I… I guess I flipped out. And he picked up the pieces and wouldn’t let me go to a psychiatrist, but insisted on caring for me himself. Three months later we were married.”
Janet’s hand found mine, and we listened to Christine like that, hand in hand.
“He was very kind to me,” Christine said slowly sometime during that long night. “I don’t know if he loved me, but I think I would have died without him. I think—or thought—that he cured me. I was well and happy, and busy. I wanted to take up photography and he encouraged it and made it possible. All those years he pursued a line of research that he never explained to me, that he hadn’t published up to the time of his death. I’m going through his work now, trying to decode it, separating personal material from the professional data.”
She was leaving out most of it, I believed. Everything interesting, or pertinent, or less than nattering to her she was skipping over. Janet’s hand squeezed mine; take it easy, she seemed to be saying. Christine was obviously exhausted, her enormous eyes were shadowed, and she was very pale. But, damn it, I argued with myself, why had she screamed and fainted? How had her husband died?
“Okay,” Janet said then, cheerfully, and too briskly. “Time’s up for now. We’ll talk again tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever you’re ready to, Christine. Let me show you your room.” She was right, of course. We were all dead tired, and it was nearly three, but I resented stopping it then. How had her husband died?
She and Janet left and I kicked at the feeble fire and finished my last drink, gathered up glasses and emptied ashtrays. It was half an hour before Janet came back. She looked at the clock and groaned.
“Anything else?”
She went past me toward the bedroom, not speaking until we were behind the closed door. “It must have been gruesome,” she said then, starting to undress. “Victor and Eugenia moved in with her. Karl’s daughter and son-in-law. And Karl’s parents live there, too. And right away Victor began to press for Karl’s papers. They worked together at the university. Then he began to make passes, and that was too much. She packed up and left.”
I had finished undressing first, and sat on the side of the bed watching her. The scattering of freckles across her shoulders was fading now, her deep red tan was turning softly golden. I especially loved the way her hip bones showed when she moved, and the taut skin over her ribs when she raised her arms to pull her jersey over her head. She caught my look and glanced at her watch pointedly. I sighed. “What happened to her tonight?”
“She said that before she finally had to leave the farm up in Connecticut, the last night there, Victor came into her third-floor room and began to make advances—her word, by the way. She backed away from him, across the room and out onto a balcony. She has acrophobia, and never usually goes out on that balcony. But she kept backing up, thinking of the scandal if she screamed. Her stepdaughter’s husband, after all. In the house were Karl’s mother and father, Eugenia… Victor knew she would avoid a scene if possible. Then suddenly she was against the rail and he forced her backward, leaning out over it, and when she twisted away from him, she looked straight down, and then fainted. She said that tonight she somehow got that same feeling, she thinks that that memory flooded back in and that she lived that scene over again, although she can’t remember anything except the feeling of looking down and falling. She screamed and fainted, just like that other night.” Janet slipped into bed. “I think I reassured her a little bit anyway. If that’s what happened, it certainly doesn’t mean she’s heading for another break. That’s the sort of thing that can happen to anyone at any time, especially where one of those very strong phobias is concerned.”
I turned off the light, and we lay together, her cheek on my shoulder, her left arm across my chest, her left leg over my leg. And I thought of Christine in the other room under the same roof. And I knew that I was afraid of her.
The next morning was worse than usual. Thank God it’s Friday, we both said a number of times. I had no desire to see Christine that morning, and was relieved that she seemed to be sleeping late. I told Janet I’d leave a note and ask her to go out by the side door, which would latch after her. But when the kids left to catch their bus, she came out.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d told them that I was here. I thought it would complicate things to put in an appearance before they were gone,” she said apologetically. “I’ll go home now. Thanks for last night. More than I can say.”
“Coffee?”
She shook her head, but I was pouring it already and she sat down at the kitchen table and waited. “I must look like hell,” she said. She hadn’t brought her purse with her, her long hair was tangled, she had no makeup on, and her eyes were deeply shadowed with violet. I realized that she was prettier than I had thought at first. It was the appeal of a little girl, however, not the attraction of a grown woman.
She sipped the coffee and then put the cup down and said again, “I’ll go home now. Thanks again.”
“Want a lift to your house? I have to leave too.”
“Oh, no. That would be silly. I’ll just go back through the woods.”
I watched her as far as I could make out the small figure, and then I turned off lights and unplugged the coffee pot and left. But I kept seeing that slight unkempt figure walking from me, toward the woods, tangled black hair, a knit shirt that was too big, jeans that clung to her buttocks like skin. Her buttocks were rounded, and moved ever so slightly when she walked, almost like a boy, but not quite; there was a telltale sway. And suddenly I wondered how she would be. Eager, actively seeking the contact, the thrust? Passive? I swerved the car, and tried to put the image out of mind, but by the time I had parked and greeted Lenny, I was in a foul mood.
Lenny always left the mail to me, including anything addressed to him that came in through the lab. In his name I had dictated three refusals of offers to join three separate very good firms. That morning there was the usual assortment of junk, several queries on prices and information, and an invitation to display our computer cutting tool and anything else of interest in the Chicago Exposition of Building Trades. Lenny smiled. We talked for an hour about what to show, how best to display it, and so on, and finally came down to the question we’d both been avoiding. Who would go? Neither of us wanted to. We finally flipped a coin and I lost.
I called Janet at the hospital and told her, and she suggested that we have some literature printed up, ready to hand out, or to leave stacked for prospective buyers to pick up.
“We should have literature,” I called to Lenny, who nodded. “We can have a sketch of the machine, I guess,” I said to Janet.
“Don’t be silly. Let Christine take some pictures for you.”
“Our neighbor, Christine Warnecke, would probably take pictures for us,” I told Lenny. He nodded a bit more enthusiastically.
We scheduled the next two weeks as tightly as possible, planning for eighteen-hour days, trying to keep in mind the commitments we already had. We had to get a machine ready to take to Chicago, get it polished for photographs, get an assortment of programs for the computer, keep the running check on the wired suits in the hospital cases, finish installing a closed-circuit TV in a private school, and so on.
I was late for dinner, and when I got there Janet simply smiled when I muttered, “Sorry.”
“I know,” she said, putting a platter of fried chicken down. “I know exactly what it will be like for the next few weeks. I’ll see you again for Thanksgiving, or thereabouts.”
I kissed her. While I was eating, the telephone rang. Christine, wondering if we’d like to see some of the work she’d done in the past few years. I remembered her offer to show us, but I shook my head at Janet. “Can’t. I’ve got to write up the fact sheet tonight and be ready for the printers. They can take it Thursday. Did you mention the picture to her?” I motioned to the phone.
Janet shook her head. “I will.”
“Hi, Christine. Sorry, but I’ve got things that I have to do tonight. Maybe Janet can. Listen, would you be willing to take a picture of a machine for us, Lenny and me? He’s my partner.” She said of course, and I told her that Janet would fill in the details and hung up. I shooed Janet out, and went downstairs. Hours later I heard her come back, heard the basement door open slightly as she listened to see if I was still there. I clicked my pen on my beer glass, and the door closed. For a couple of seconds I considered my wife, decided she was a good sort, and then forgot her as I made another stab at the information sheet.
By twelve thirty I had a workable draft. It would need some polish, and possibly some further condensation, but it seemed to be adequate. I went upstairs for a drink before going to bed. I didn’t turn on the living-room lights, but sat in the darkened room and went over and over the plans we had made. Tomorrow I’d get Christine over to take the pictures…
I suddenly saw her buttocks as she moved away from me, and her enormous eyes as she sat at the table and sipped coffee, and the very small hand with its wide band of gold. I closed my eyes. And saw the hand again, this time it opened and closed before my face, turning over and over as I examined it. I saw the other hand, and it was as if it were my own hand. I could raise and lower it. I could touch the right one to the left one, lift one to… my face. I stared at the room, the guest room in the Donlevy house. I had slept there before. Janet and I had stayed there years ago while paint dried in our house. I knew I was seated in the darkened living room, with a rum collins in my hand, knew Janet was sleeping just down the hall, but still I was also in that other room, seeing with eyes that weren’t my eyes.
I started to feel dizzy, but this time I rejected the thought of falling. No! The feeling passed. I lifted the hands again, and got up. I had been in a deep chair, with a book on my lap. It slipped off to the floor. I tried to look down, but my eyes were riveted, fixed in a straight-ahead stare. I ordered the head to move, and with a combination of orders and just doing it, I forced movement. I forced her-me to make a complete turn, so that I could examine the whole room. Outside, I ordered, and walked down the hall to the living room, to the study. There were other thoughts, and fear. The fear was like a distant surf, rising and falling, but not close enough to feel, or to hear actually. It grew stronger as the walk continued. Dizziness returned, and nausea. I rejected it also.
The nausea had to do with the way my eyes were focusing. Nothing looked normal, or familiar, if my gaze lingered on it. And there was movement where I expected none. I made her stop and looked at the study from the doorway. The desk was not the straight lines and straight edges that I had come to know, but rather a blur that suggested desk, that I knew meant desk, and that did mean desk if I closed my eyes, or turned from it. But while I looked at it, it was strange. It was as if I could look through the desk to another image, the same piece of furniture, but without the polish, without casters, the same desk at an earlier stage. And beyond that, a rough suggestion of the same desk. And further, wood not yet assembled. Logs. A tree on a forest floor. A tree in full leaf. As I looked at the tree, it dwindled and went through changes: leaves turned color and fell and grew again, but fewer; branches shortened and vanished and the tree shrank and vanished…
I jerked away, and in the living room my heart was pounding and I couldn’t catch my breath. I waited for the next few minutes, wondering if I were having a heart attack, if I had fallen asleep, wondering if I were going mad. When I could trust my hands to move without jerking, I lifted the drink and swallowed most of it before I put it down again. Then I paced the living room for several minutes. Nothing had happened, I knew. Overtired, imaginative, half asleep, with vivid near-dreams. I refused to believe it was anything more than that. And I was afraid to try it again to prove to myself that that was all there was to it. I finished the drink, brushed my teeth, and went to bed.
Christine turned up at the shop at four the next afternoon. She shook Lenny’s hand, businesslike and brisk, and thoroughly professional. He could have eaten her for breakfast without making a bulge. Her greeting to me was friendly and open. She looked very tired, as if she wasn’t sleeping well.
“If you don’t mind, Eddie, maybe Mr. Leonard can help me with the machine. I find that I work better with strangers than with people I know.”
That suited me fine and I left them alone in the far end of the lab. Now and again I could hear Lenny’s rumbling voice protesting something or other, and her very quiet answers. I couldn’t make out her words, but from his I knew that she insisted on positioning the machine on a black velvet hanging for a series of shots. I groaned. Glamour yet.
“It’s the contrast that I was after,” she said when she was through. “The cold and beautifully functional machine, all shiny metal and angles and copper and plastic, all so pragmatic and wholesome, and open. Contrasted by the mystery of black velvet. Like a sky away from the city lights. Or the bowels of a cave with the lights turned off. Or the deepest reaches of the mind where the machine was really born.”
Right until the last I was ready to veto the velvet for background without even seeing it, but she got to me. It had been born in such a black bottomless void, by God. “Let’s wait for proofs and then decide,” I said. I wondered, had she looked at the machine, through it to the components; through them back to the idea as it emerged from the black? I tightened my hand on my mug and took a deep drink of the hot murky coffee. We probably had the world’s worst coffee in the lab because Lenny insisted on making it and he never measured anything, or washed the pot. On the other hand, he seemed to think the stuff he turned out was good.
“I’ll develop them later today and have proofs ready to show you tonight, if you want,” Christine said to us.
“You want to pick them up and bring them in with you in the morning?” Lenny asked. I said sure, and Christine left. I didn’t watch her walk away this time.
After dinner Janet and I both went over to her house to see the proofs. While I studied the pictures, Christine and Janet went to the kitchen to talk and make coffee. I finished and leaned back in my chair waiting for their return. Without any perceptible difference in my thoughts, my position, anything, I was seeing Janet through Christine’s eyes. Janet looked shocked and unbelieving.
I stared at her and began to see other faces there, too. Younger, clearer eyes, and smoother-skinned, emptier-looking. I turned my head abruptly as something else started to emerge. I knew that if I had tried, I would have seen all the personality traits, including the ugliness, the pettiness, everything there was that went into her.
“What is it?” Janet asked, alarm in her voice.
I shook my head, her head. She tried to speak and I wouldn’t let her. Without any warning I had crossed the threshold of belief. I knew I could enter her, could use her, could examine whatever was in her mind without her being able to do anything about it. I knew in that same flash that she didn’t realize what was happening, that she felt haunted, or crazy, but that she had no idea that another personality was inside her. I pulled away so suddenly that I almost let her fall down.
From the other room I heard Janet’s cry, followed by the sound of breaking glass. I hurried to the kitchen to find her standing over Christine, who was sitting on a stool looking dazed and bewildered and very frightened.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Janet shook her head. “I dropped a glass,” she said, daring me not to believe.
I wondered why she lied to me, but leaving them alone again, I knew why. I had always been the rationalist in the family. I refused to grant the existence of ghosts, souls, spirits, unseen influences, astrology, palmistry, ESP, anything that couldn’t be controlled and explained. I marveled at my absolute acceptance of what had happened. It was like seeing a puzzle suddenly take form and have meaning, like a child’s puzzle where animals are hidden in line drawings; once you locate them, you can’t lose them again. You know. I knew now. It happens once, you don’t believe it; twice, you still don’t believe. Three times, it’s something you’ve known all your life. I knew. My hands were shaking when I lighted a cigarette, but inwardly I felt calmer than I had felt before as I considered Christine. I wasn’t afraid of her any longer, for one thing. It was something I was doing, not something being done to me. I could control it. And she didn’t know.
I stubbed out the cigarette and sat down abruptly. Rudeman? Had he lived in her mind throughout their marriage? Is that what drew him to her, made him marry a girl twenty-five years younger than he’d been. Had he managed to keep her by this ―control? I couldn’t use the word possession then. I wasn’t thinking of it as possession. It was more like having someone else’s mind open for inspection, a tour for the curious, nothing more.
If I talked to her now, made her see what had happened, quite inadvertently, she could probably get help, learn how to control it so that future intrusion would be impossible. If Rudeman had cared for her at all, hadn’t wanted to use her, he would have cured her, or had it done somehow. Maybe he had known, maybe that’s what those boxes of books were about, the years of experimentation. A little human guinaa pig, I thought. Large-eyed, frightened, trusting. Completely ignorant of what was being done to it. And over the image of the frightened woman came the image of her slight figure as she walked away from me toward the woods, with her little fanny swinging gracefully, the rest of her body a mystery under concealing clothes.
The way she saw things, there wouldn’t be any mystery about anything. Into and through and out the other side. No wonder Rudeman had been fascinated. How did she manage to live with so many conflicting images? Did that explain her schizophrenia? Just a name they applied to a condition that was abnormal, without knowing anything about what it was actually? The questions were coming faster and faster, and the thought of her, sitting out there in the kitchen, with answers locked up under that skull, was too much. I began to pace. Not again. Not now especially, with Janet there. She’d begin to suspect me of being responsible, just as I had suspected her of being responsible long before I had an inkling of what was happening. I thought of Christine as her, with special emphasis on it, separating her from all other hers in the world, but not able or willing to think of her by name.
I wondered what they were doing in the kitchen. What was she telling Janet? I started through the hall toward the kitchen, then stopped, and hurriedly returned to the living room. I couldn’t look at her yet. I had to think, to try to understand. I needed time to accept all the way through what had happened between us. And I suddenly wondered what she saw when she looked at me, through me to all the things that I had always believed were invisible.
I couldn’t stand being in that house any longer. I grabbed the proofs and stuffed them back into the envelope. In the hallway I yelled out to Janet, “I’m going back through the woods. I’ll leave the car for you. Take your time.”
She stuck her head out from the kitchen. I thought she looked at me with suspicion and coldness, but her words were innocuous, and I decided that I had imagined the expression. “I won’t be much longer, honey. Be careful.”
It was dark under the oak trees, with the tenacious leaves still clinging to the twigs, rustling in the wind. The ground was spongy and water came through my shoes quickly, ice cold, squishing with each step. A fine film of ice covered the two logs. I cursed as I slipped and slid across, thinking of the black frigid water below. At our side of the brook I paused and looked back at the glowing windows, and for just an instant I entered her. No transition now, just the sudden awareness of what she was seeing, what she was hearing, feeling, thinking. She moaned and fear throbbed in her temples. She shut her eyes hard. I got out as fast as I had entered, as shaken as she had been. I hadn’t meant to do it. The thought and the act, if it could be called that, had been simultaneous. I rushed home, stumbling through the familiar woods, bumping into obstacles that seemed ominous: a log where yesterday the path had been clear, a hole covered with leaves, a trap to break an ankle in, a low branch that was meant to blind me, but only cut my cheek, a root that snaked out to lasso my foot, throwing me down face first into the ice-glazed leaves and dirt. I lay quietly for a minute. Finally I stood up and went on, making no attempt to brush off the muck. Muck and filth. It seemed fitting.
I still had a couple of hours of work to do that night. The following day Mike’s body cast was being changed, and I had to be on hand. He had his ham operator’s license, and Janet had said that the only problem now was that he didn’t want to stop to sleep or eat or anything else. He was doing remarkably well in every way. She had kissed me with tears in her eyes when she reported. In the morning I had to drop the pictures off for Lenny, scoot over to the hospital, return for the pictures, take them back to her… I changed my mind. I’d let Lenny deliver the proofs. In fact, I wouldn’t see her at all again. Ever.
I got in the tub and soaked for fifteen minutes, then put on pajamas and robe and went down to the basement to check out the program for Mike’s computer. I didn’t hear Janet come in, but when I went up at twelve thirty, she was in the living room waiting for me.
“I’m really concerned for her,” she said. “I don’t think she ought to be alone. And I don’t think she’s crazy, either.”
“Okay. Tell.” I headed for the kitchen and she followed. Janet had made coffee and it smelled good. I poured a cup and sat down. “I don’t know if I can or not,” she said. “Christine has a gift of vision that I’m sure no one ever had before. She can see, or sense, the process of growth and change in things.” I knew that I was supposed to register skepticism at that point, and I looked up at her with what I hoped was a prove-it expression. She became defensive. “Well, she can. She’s trying to duplicate it with the camera, but she’s very frustrated and disappointed in the results she’s been able to get so far. She’s got a new technique for developing time-lapse photographs. Whether or not it’s what she is after, it’s really remarkable. She prints a picture on a transparency, and shoots her next one through it, I think. When she prints that on another transparency, it gives the effect of being in layers, with each layer discernible, if you look hard enough. But she claims that for it to be successful, you should be able to see each stage, with all the others a blur, each one coming into focus with the change in attention you give to it. And that’s how she sees.”
I finished the coffee and got up to pour a second cup, without commenting. Standing at the stove, with my back to her, I said, “I’m willing to believe that she’s some kind of a genius. But, this other thing, the fainting, screams, whatever happened tonight. She needs a doctor.”
“Yes. I know. I talked her into seeing Dr. Lessing. Lessing will be good to her.” She made a short laughing sound, a snort of quickly killed mirth. “And he’ll tell her to pick up a man somewhere and take him to bed. He thinks that widows and widowers shouldn’t try to break the sex habit cold turkey.” Again the tone of her voice suggested amusement when she added, “Knowing that she’s coming to him through us, he’ll probably recommend that she cultivate Lenny’s company, two birds with one stone.”
My hand was painfully tight on the cup handle. I remembered one night with Janet, saying, “Jesus, I wish I could be you just for once, just to see what happens to you when you cry like that, when you pass out, why that little smile finally comes through…”
I knew my voice was too harsh then. I couldn’t help it. I said, “I think she’s a spook. I don’t like being around her. I get the same feeling that I got when I was a kid around a great-uncle who had gone off the deep end. I was scared shitless of him, and I get the same feeling in the pit of my stomach when I’m near her.”
“Eddie!” Janet moved toward me, but didn’t make it all the way. She returned to her chair instead and sat down, and when she spoke again, her voice was resigned. Way back in Year One, we’d had an understanding that if ever either of us disliked someone, his feelings were to be respected without argument. It needed no rationalization: people liked or disliked other people without reason sometimes. And by throwing in a non-existent uncle I had made doubly sure that she wouldn’t argue with me. Finis. “Well,” Janet said, “she certainly isn’t pushy. If you don’t want to be around her, you won’t find her in your path.”
“Yeah. And maybe later, after I get out from under all this other stuff, maybe I’ll feel different. Maybe I’m just afraid right now of entanglement, because I’m too pressed for time as it is.”
“Sure,” Janet said. I liked her a lot right then, for the way she was willing to let me drop Christine, whom she had grown very fond of, and was intrigued by. She was disappointed that she had been cut off at the water, that she wouldn’t be able now to talk about Christine, speculate about her. God knows, I didn’t want to think about her any more than I had to from then on.
The next few days blurred together. I knew that things got done, simply because they didn’t need doing later, but the memory of seeing to them, of getting them done, was gone. The geriatric patient came out of his cast on Saturday practically as good as new. He was walking again the same day they removed it, with crutches, but for balance, and to give him reassurance. His leg and hip muscles were fine. Lenny and I laughed and pounded each other over the back, and hugged each other, and split a bottle of Scotch, starting at one in the morning and staying with it until it was gone. He had to walk me home because neither of us could find a car key. Lenny spent the night, what was left of it. On Sunday I slept off a hangover and Lenny, Janet, the kids, and Christine all went for a long ride in the country and came back with baskets of apples, cider, black walnuts, and butternuts. And Janet said that Christine had invited all of us over for a celebration supper later on.
“I didn’t say we’d come,” Janet said. “I can call and say you still are hungover. I sort of hinted that you might be.”
“Honey, forget it. How’s Lenny? You should have seen him last night. He laughed!”
“And today he smiled a couple of times,” she said, grinning. “He’s over at Christine’s house now, helping with firewood, or something.”
“Tell her that we’ll be over,” I said.
The kids grumbled a little, but we got Mrs. Durrell in to sit and we went over to Christine’s. Lenny was in the living room mixing something red and steaming in a large bowl. “Oh, God,” I prayed aloud, “please, not one of his concoctions.” But it was, and it was very good. Hot cider, applejack, brandy, and a dry red wine. With cinnamon sticks in individual cups.
Steaks, salad, baked potatoes, spicy hot apple pie. “If I knew you was coming,” Christine had murmured, serving us, but she hadn’t belabored the point, and it was a happy party. She proposed a toast after pouring brandy for us. “To the good men of the earth. Eddie and Lenny, and others like them wherever they are.”
I knew that I flushed, and Lenny looked embarrassed and frowned, but Janet said, “Hear, hear,” and the girls touched the glasses to their lips. In a few moments we were back to the gaiety that was interrupted by the toast that lingered in my head for the rest of the evening.
Lenny was more talkative than I’d seen him in years. He even mentioned that he had been a physicist, something that not more than a dozen people knew. The girls were both looking pretty after a day in the cold air; their cheeks were flushed, and they looked happy. Janet’s bright blue-green eyes sparkled and she laughed easily and often. Christine laughed too, more quietly, and never at anything she said herself. She still was shy, but at ease with us. And it seemed that her shyness and Lenny’s introspective quiet were well matched, as if there had been a meeting of the selves there that few others ever got to know. I caught Lenny’s contemplative gaze on her once, and when she noticed also, she seemed to consider his question gravely, then she turned away, and the flush on her cheeks was a bit deeper. The air had changed somehow, had become more charged, and Janet’s touch on my hand to ask for a cigarette was a caress. I looked at her, acknowledging the invitation. Our hands lingered over the cigarette in the non-verbal communication that made living with her so nice.
I was very glad we had that evening together. Janet and I left at about twelve. Lenny was sitting in a deep chair before the fire when we said goodnight, and he made no motion to get up and leave then too. In our car Janet sighed and put her head on my shoulder.
Images flashed before my eyes: Christine’s buttocks as she moved away from me; the tight skin across Janet’s ribs when she raised her arms over her head; Christine’s tiny, tiny waist, dressed as she had been that night, in a tailored shirt and black skirt, tightly belted with a wide leather belt; the pink nipples that puckered and stiffened at a touch; and darker nipples that I had never seen, but knew had to be like that, dark and large. And how black would her pubic hair be, and how hungry would she be after so long a time? Her head back, listening to a record, her eyes narrowed in concentration, her mouth open slightly. And the thought kept coming back: What would it be like to be her? What did Janet feel? What would she feel when Lenny entered her body? How different was it for a woman who was sexually responsive? She wouldn’t even know, if I waited until she was thoroughly aroused. Sex had been in the air in the living room, we’d all felt it. After such a long period of deprivation, she’d crumble at Lenny’s first touch. She’d never know, I repeated to myself.
When we got out of the car I said to Janet, “Get rid of Mrs. Durrell as fast as you can. Okay?” She pressed her body against mine and laughed a low, throaty laugh.
I was in a fever of anxiety then, trying to keep from going out into her too soon. Not yet. Not yet. Not until I had Janet in bed, not until I thought that she and Lenny had had time to be at ease with each other again after being left alone. Maybe even in bed. My excitement was contagious. Janet was in bed as soon as she could decently get rid of the sitter, and when my hand roamed down her body, she shivered. Very deliberately I played with her and when I was certain that she wouldn’t notice a shift in my attention, I went out to the other one, and found her alone. My disappointment was so great that momentarily I forgot about Janet, until her sudden scream made me realize that I had hurt her. She muffled her face against my chest and gasped, and whether from pleasure or pain I couldn’t tell, she didn’t pull away.
She was fighting eroticism as hard as she could. Drawing up thoughts of plans, of work not yet finished, of the notebooks that were so much harder to decipher than she had suspected they would be, the time-lapse photos that were coming along. Trying to push out of her mind the ache that kept coming back deep in her belly, the awful awareness of her stimulation from too much wine, the nearness of Lenny and his maleness. She was hardly aware of the intrusion this time, and when I directed her thoughts toward the sensual and sexual, there was no way she could resist. I cursed her for allowing Lenny to leave, I threatened her, I forced her to unfold when she doubled up like a foetus, hugging herself into a tight ball. For an hour, more than an hour, I made love to Janet and tormented that other girl, and forced her to do those things that I had to experience for myself. And when Janet moaned and cried out, I knew the cause, and knew when to stop and when to continue, and when she finally went limp, I knew the total, final surrender that she knew. And I stared at the mirror image of the girl: large dark nipples, beautifully formed breasts, erect and rounded, deep navel, black shiny hair. And mad eyes, haunted, panic-stricken eyes in a face as white as milk, with two red spots on her cheeks. Her breath was coming in quick gasps. My control was too tight. Nothing that she thought was coming through to me, only what she felt with her body that had become so sensitive that when she lay back on the bed, she shuddered at the touch of the sheet on her back. I relaxed control without leaving and there was a chaotic blur of memories, of nights in Karl’s arms, of giving up totally to him, being the complete houri that he demanded of her.
“Bitch!” I thought at her. “Slut.” I went on and on, calling her names, despising her for letting me do it to her, for being so manipulable, for letting me do this to myself. And I brought her to orgasm again, this time not letting her stop, or ease up, but on and on, until suddenly she arched her back and screamed, and I knew. I don’t know if she screamed alone, or if I screamed with her. She blacked out, and I was falling, spinning around and around, plummeting downward. I yanked away from her. Janet stirred lazily against me, not awake, hardly even aware of me. I didn’t move, but stared at the ceiling and waited for the blood to stop pounding in my head, and for my heart to stop the wild fibrillation that her final convulsion had started.
Janet was bright-eyed and pink the next morning, but when she saw the full ashtrays in the living room and kitchen, she looked at me closely. “You couldn’t sleep?”
“Too much to think of,” I said, cursing the coffee pot for its slowness. “And just four days to do it.”
“Oh, honey.” She was always regretful when I was awake while she slept. She felt it was selfish of her.
I could hardly bring myself to look at Lenny, but he took my moods in stride, and he made himself inconspicuous. The machine was gleaming and beautiful, ready to crate up and put in the station wagon. We wouldn’t trust it to anyone but one of us, and I would drive to Chicago on Friday, install it myself Saturday morning, hours before the doors of the exposition opened at four in the afternoon. Lenny, like Janet, took my jittery state to be nerves from the coming show. It was like having a show at the Metropolitan, or a recital at Carnegie Hall, or a Broadway opening. And I wasn’t even able to concentrate on it for a period of two consecutive minutes. I went round and round with the problem I had forced on myself by not leaving Christine Warnecke Rudeman strictly alone, and I couldn’t find a solution. I couldn’t speak out now, not after last night. I couldn’t advise her to seek help, or in any way suggest that I knew anything about her that she hadn’t told us. And although the thoughts of the night before were a torture, I couldn’t stop going over it all again and again, and feeling again the echo of the unbearable excitement and pleasures I had known. When Lenny left for lunch, I didn’t even look up. And when he returned, I was still at the bench, pretending to be going over the installation plan we had agreed on for our space at the exposition. Lenny didn’t go back to his own desk, or his work in progress on the bench. He dragged a stool across from me and sat down.
“Why don’t you like Chris?” he asked bluntly.
“I like her fine,” I said.
He shook his head. “No. You won’t look at her, and you don’t want her to look directly at you. I noticed last night. You find a place to sit where you’re not in her line of sight. When she turns to speak to you, or in your direction, you get busy lighting a cigarette, or shift your position. Not consciously, Eddie. I’m not saying you do anything like that on purpose, but I was noticing.” He leaned forward with both great hands flat on the bench. “Why, Eddie?”
I shrugged and caught myself reaching for my pack of cigarettes. “I don’t know. I didn’t realize I was doing any of those things. I haven’t tried to put anything into words. I’m just not comfortable with her. Why? Are you interested?”
“Yes,” he said. “She thinks she’s going crazy. She is certain that you sense it and that’s why you’re uncomfortable around her. Your actions reinforce her feelings, giving you cause to be even more uncomfortable, and it goes on from there.”
“I can keep the hell away from her. Is that what you’re driving at?”
“I think so.”
“Lenny,” I said when he remained quiet, and seemed lost in his speculations, “is she? Going crazy again? You know she was once?”
“No. I doubt it. She is different, and difference is treated like mental illness. That’s what I know. No more. From demonic possession to witchcraft to mental illness. We do make progress.” His hands, that had been flat and unmoving on the benchtop, bunched up into fists.
“Okay, Lenny,” I said. “I believe you. And I won’t see her any more for the next couple of weeks, whatever happens. And, Lenny, if I’d known—I mean, I didn’t realize that anything of my attitude was coming through. I didn’t really think about it one way or the other. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her… or you.”
He looked at me gravely and nodded. “I know that,” he said. He stood up and his face softened a bit. “It’s always people like you, the rationalists, that are most afraid of any kind of mental disorders, even benign ones. It shows.”
I shook my head. “A contradiction in terms, isn’t that? Mental disorders and benign?”
“Not necessarily.” Then he moved his stool back down the bench and went back to work. And I stared at the sketches before me for a long time before they came back into focus. The rest of the afternoon I fought against going back to her and punishing her for complaining about me. I thought of the ways I could inflict punishment on her, and knew that the real ace that I would keep for an emergency was her fear of heights. I visualized strolling along the lip of the Grand Canyon with her, or taking her up the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, or forcing her up the face of a cliff. And I kept a rigid control of my own thoughts so that I didn’t go out to her at all. I didn’t give in all week, but I had her nightmares.
On Wednesday Janet suggested that I should let Lenny go to Chicago and I snapped at her and called her a fool. On Thursday Lenny made the same suggestion, and I stalked from the lab and drove off in a white fury. When Janet came home I accused them of getting together and talking about me.
“Eddie, you know better than that. But look at you. You aren’t sleeping well, and you’ve been as nervous as a cat. What’s the matter with you?”
“Just leave me alone, okay? Tired, that’s all. Just plain tired. And tired of cross-examinations and dark hints and suspicions.”
They were getting together, the three of them, all the time. I knew that Lenny was spending his evenings with Christine, and that Janet was with them much of the time when I was busy down in the basement workshop or out at the hospital. They said, Janet and Lenny, that they were trying to decipher the code that Karl Rudeman had used in making his notes. I didn’t believe them.
They were talking about me, speculating on whether or not I was the one driving her crazy. I imagined the same conversation over and over, with Lenny insisting that I could have done that to her, and Janet, white-faced and frantic with indecision, denying it. Not while I had been with her, she would think. Not at a time like that.
Then I would snap awake, and either curse myself for being a fool, or become frightened by the paranoid drift of my thoughts. And I would know that none of it was true. Of course Janet wouldn’t discuss what went on over there; I had practically forbidden her to do so. And Lenny wouldn’t talk about it under the happiest circumstances, much less now.
Friday, driving to Chicago I began to relax, and after three hours on the road I was whistling and could almost forget the mess, could almost convince myself that I’d been having delusions, which was easier to take than the truth.
I slept deeply Friday night, and Saturday I was busy, getting our exhibit set up and getting acquainted with others who were also showing tools and machinery. From four until the doors closed at eleven, the hall got fuller and fuller, the noise level became excruciating, the smoke-laden air unbreathable. Our cutting tool drew a good, interested response, and I was busy. And too tired for the late dinner I had agreed to with two other exhibitors. We settled for hamburgers and beer in the hotel dining room, and soon afterward I tumbled into bed and again slept like a child. The crowds were just as thick on Sunday, but by Monday the idle curiosity-seekers were back at their jobs, and the ones who came through were businesslike and fewer in number. I had hired a business student to spell me, and I left him in charge from four until seven, the slack hours, so I could have an early dinner and get some rest. But I found myself wandering the streets instead, and finally I stopped in front of a library.
Karl Rudeman, I thought. How did he die? And I went in and looked up the clippings about him, and read the last three with absorption. When I went to dinner afterward, I was still trying to puzzle it out. He had had dinner with his family: his wife, parents, daughter, and son-in-law. After dinner they had played bridge for an hour or two. Sometime after that, after everyone else had gone to bed, he had left the house to roam through the fields that stretched out for a quarter of a mile, down to the river. He had collapsed and died of a heart attack at the edge of a field. Christine, awakening later and finding him gone, had first searched the house, then, when she realized that Karl was in his pajamas and barefooted, she had awakened her stepson-in-law and started a search of the grounds. Karl wasn’t found until daylight, and then the tenant farmer had been the one to spot the figure in orange-and-black striped pajamas. There was no sign of violence, and it was assumed that he had been walking in his sleep when the fatal attack occurred.
Back to the exhibit, and the flow of evening viewers. Invitations, given and accepted, for drinks later, and a beaver flick. Lunch with a couple of other men the following day. A long talk with a manufacturer who was interested in procuring the order for the cutting tool, should there be enough interest to warrant it.
The obscene movie had been a mistake, I knew as soon as the girl jerked off her slip and opened her legs. Suddenly I was seeing her, open-legged on the edge of the bed before a mirror.
I pushed my way through a cluster of men at the back of the theater to get out into the cold November air again. I walked back to the hotel. A freezing mist was hanging head high, not falling, but just hanging there, and I gulped it in, thankful for the pain of the cold air in my throat. A prowl car slowed down as it passed me, it picked up speed again and moved on down the street. I had bought a stack of magazines and some paperbacks to read, but nothing in the room looked interesting when I took off my damp clothes and tried to persuade myself that I could fall asleep now.
I had room service send up a bottle of bourbon and ice, and tried to read a Nero Wolfe mystery. My attention kept wandering, and finally I lay back on the bed, balancing my drink on my stomach, and thought about her.
It was so easy, and gentle even. She didn’t suspect this time, not at all. She was saying, “… because they’re abstractions, you see. Emotions like fear, love, anger. First the physiological change in the brain, the electrochemical changes that take place stimulating those abstractions, and then the experience of the emotion.”
“You mean to say he really believed that the feeling of anger comes after the chemical changes that take place?”
“Of course. That’s how it is with a physiological psychologist. And you can see it operate; tranquilizers permit you to know intellectually but they don’t let you react, so you don’t experience the anger or fear, or whatever.”
Lenny was sitting back in the green chair in the study, and she was behind the desk that was spread with snapshots and proofs.
“Okay. What triggers those changes in the first place?”
“Well, his specialty was sight, or vision, as he preferred to call it. Light entering the eye brings about a change in the chromophore in the first thousandth of a second, and after that the rest of the changes are automatic, a causal chain that results in the experiencing of a vision of some sort.”
“I know,” Lenny said gently. “But what about the vision that doesn’t have an object in real space? The imaginary image? No light there to start the chain of events.”
“A change brought about by electrochemical energy? The leakage of energy from cellular functioning? The first step is on a molecular level, not much energy is involved, after all. Lenny, it’s happening…”
I got a jolt of fear then, along with the words spoken softly. Her hands clenched and a proof under her right hand buckled up and cracked. Before Lenny could respond, I pulled out and away.
I didn’t know how she had found out, what I had done to give my presence away. But her knowledge had been as certain as mine, and the fear was named now, not the fear of insanity. It was a directed fear and hatred that I had felt, directed at me, not the aimless, directionless, more-powerful fear that my presence had stimulated before. She knew that something from outside had entered her. I sat up and finished my drink, then turned off the light. And I wondered what they had been finding in those notes… Half a bottle and hours later I fell asleep.
I dreamed that I was being chased, that I kept calling back over my shoulder, “Stop, it’s me! Look at me! It’s me!” But it didn’t stop, and steadily it gained ground, until I knew that I was going to be caught, and the thought paralyzed me. All I could do then was wait in rigid, motionless, soundless terror for it to reach out and get me.
The nightmare woke me up, and it was minutes before I could move. It was nearly daylight; I didn’t try to sleep any more. I was too afraid of having her dreams again. At seven thirty I called Janet.
“Hey,” she said happily. “I thought we’d never hear from you.”
“I sent some cards.”
“But you’ll be here before they will. How’s it going?”
“Fine. Boring after the first day. I went to a dirty movie last night.”
“I hope you had bad dreams. Serve you right.” Her voice was teasing and cheerful and happy, and I could see her smile and the light in her eyes.
“How’s everything there?” I couldn’t ask about Lenny and Christine. If they had found out anything, they hadn’t told her. I’d know, if they had. We chatted for several minutes, then she had to run, and I kissed her over the wire and we both hung up at the same time, the way we always did. I was being stupid. Naturally they wouldn’t tell her. Hey, did you know that your husband’s been torturing this woman psychologically, that he raped her repeatedly, that he’s contemplating killing her? I jerked from the bed, shaking.
I had a dull pain behind my right eye when I went down to breakfast. A wind was driving sleet through the streets like sheer white curtains, and I stopped at the doorway, shivering, and went back inside to the hotel dining room. I couldn’t think, and I knew that I had to think now.
If Lenny deciphered the notebooks, and if Karl had known that she could be possessed—there, I thought with some satisfaction, I used the word. If he had known and put that in his notebooks, then Lenny was bright enough to know that the recurrence of her schizophrenia was more than likely due to a new invasion. I groaned. He wouldn’t believe that. I couldn’t even believe it. No one in his right mind would, unless he had done it and could prove it to himself… I gripped my cup so hard that coffee splashed out and I had to use both hands to return the cup to the saucer. Had Lenny gone into her too?
The pain behind my eye was a knife blade now. Lenny! Of course. I tried to lift the coffee and couldn’t. I flung down my napkin and got up and hurried back to my room, as fast as I could get out of there. I paced, but no matter how I came to it, I ended up thinking that the only way Lenny could have accepted the thing was through experience. First Rudeman, then me, and now Lenny.
He couldn’t have her. She was mine now. And I would never give her up.
The pain was unbearable and I collapsed, sprawled across the bed, clutching my head. I hadn’t had a migraine in years. It was not knowing. Not knowing how much they had found out, not knowing what they were doing, what they were planning, not knowing if there was a way they could learn about me.
I went to her abruptly, roughly. She dropped a pan of developer and moaned, and caught the sink in a dark room. “No!” she cried. “Please. No!”
I tried to make her remember everything Lenny had said to her, tried to bring back his voice, but there was too much, it came too fast. She was too frightened, and intermixed were the revived thoughts of insanity, of Karl’s voice, Lenny’s words. Too much. She had to relax. I took her to the couch and made her lie down and stop thinking. I felt her fear, and hatred, and abhorrence, like a pulse beating erratically, with each beat the pressure increased, and then ebbed. She tried to break away, and we struggled, and I hurt her. I didn’t know what I had done, how I had managed it, but she groaned and wept and fell down again, and now my pain was also her pain. “Karl,” she whispered soundlessly, “please go. Please leave me alone. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Please.”
I stayed with her for more than an hour, and then I tried to force her to forget. To know nothing about my presence. She struggled again, and this time she screamed piercingly, and for a moment the feeling of a plunge straight down was almost overwhelming, but everything stopped, and I could find nothing there to communicate with, nothing to probe. It was like being swallowed by a sea of feathers that stretched out in all directions, shifting when I touched them, but settling again immediately. She had fainted.
I fell asleep almost immediately and when I awakened it was nearly two, and my headache was gone. I went to the exposition.
That afternoon a man returned who had been at the stall for almost an hour on Saturday. He had a companion this time. “Hi, Mr. Laslow. Hendrickson, remember? Like you to meet Norbert Weill.”
Of course, I knew who Norbert Weill was. If you had a home workshop, you had something of his in it. If you had a small commercial shop, you probably had something of his. If you had a hundred-man operation, you’d have something of his. He was about sixty, small and square, with muscles like a boxer’s. He grunted at the introduction, his handshake was a no-nonsense test of strength. “Hendrickson says it’ll cut through plastic, glass, aluminum, steel. Without changing nothing but the program. That right?”
“Yes. Would you like a demonstration?”
“Not here. In my shop. How much?”
“I can’t discuss that without my partner, Mr. Weill.”
“Get him, then. When can he make it?”
So it went. In the end I agreed to call Lenny, then get in touch with Weill again at his Chicago office. Lenny didn’t sound very enthusiastic. “Let him have the machine in his own shop for a couple of weeks after you close down there. Then let him make an offer.”
“I think he’ll make the offer without all that, if we’re both on hand to discuss it. Outright sale of this machine, an advance against royalties. Could come to quite a bundle.”
“Christ! I just don’t… Eddie, can you get away from that place for a couple of hours? I’ve got to have a talk with you. Not about this goddam machine, something else.”
“Sure. Look, plan to fly up on Friday. It’ll take an hour, no more. A couple of hours for the talk with Weill. A couple more with me, then fly back. Six hours is all. Or less maybe. You can afford to take one lousy day off.”
“Okay. I’ll call your hotel and let you know what time I’ll get in.” He sounded relieved.
“Hey, wait a minute. What the hell is going on? Is it one of the suits? The closed-circuit TV giving trouble? What?”
“Oh. Sorry, Eddie. I thought I said personal. Nothing at the shop. Everything’s fine. It’s… it’s something with Chris. Anyway, see you Friday.”
I didn’t go back to the booth, but instead found a small coffee shop in the exposition building and sat there smoking and thinking about Lenny and Christine, and Janet and me, and Mr. Weill, and God knows what else. This was it, I thought, the break we’d been waiting for. I didn’t doubt that. Money, enough for once to do the things we’d been wanting to do. A bigger shop, more equipment, maybe some help, even a secretary to run herd on books. And neither Lenny nor I cared. Neither of us gave a damn.
Sitting there, with coffee in front of me, a cigarette in my fingers, I probed Christine to see what was happening. She was talking in a low voice. Her eyes were closed. Going into her was like putting on distortion lenses, putting scrambling devices in my ears. Nothing was in clear focus, no thoughts were coherent all the way through. She was on something, I realized. Something that had toned down everything, taken off all the edges, all the sharpness.
“I used to walk on that same path, after… I saw the fields sown, the tractors like spiders, back and forth, back and forth, stringing a web of seeds. And the green shoots—they really do shoot out, like being released, a rubber band that is suddenly let go, but they do it in slow motion. It was a wheatfield. Pale green, then as high as my shoulders so that I was a head floating over the field, only a head. Magician’s best trick. Float a head. Then the harvesters came and the snow fell. And it was the same walk. You see? And I couldn’t tell which was the real one. They were all real. Are real. All of them are. The tranquilizers. He said I shouldn’t take them. Have to learn how to find which one is now and concentrate on it. No tranquilizers.”
She sighed, and the images blurred, fused, separated again. She turned off a tape recorder, but continued to lie still, with her eyes closed. Her thoughts were a chaotic jumble. If she suspected that I was there, she gave no indication. She was afraid to open her eyes. Trying to remember why she had walked along that path so many times after Karl died out there. In the beginning, the hours of training, hours and hours of testing. Then the experiments. Afraid of him. Terribly afraid. He had cleared the world for her, but he might scramble it again. So afraid of him. If she took the capsules and went to bed, it didn’t matter, but now. Afraid to open her eyes. Lenny? Isn’t it time yet? It’s been so long—days, weeks. Snow has fallen, and the summer heat has come and gone. I know the couch is under me, and the room around me, and my finger on the switch to the recorder. I know that. I have to repeat it sometimes, but then I know it. Mustn’t open my eyes now. Not yet. Not until Lenny comes back.
I smelled burning filter and put out the cigarette and drank coffee. What would she see if she opened her eyes now? Was that her madness? A visual distortion, a constant hallucination, a mixture of reality and fantasy that she couldn’t tell apart? She turned her head, faced the back of the couch.
Very slowly I forced her to sit up, and then to open her eyes. It was much harder than making her respond had been before. She kept slipping away from me. It was as if there were so many other impulses that mine was just one of a number, no more powerful than any of the illusory ones that kept holding up images for her to scan and accept, or reject. Finally she opened her eyes, and the room began to move. There was no sequence, no before and after, or cause and effect. Everything was. Winter, with a fire in the fireplace, summer with fans in the windows, company talking gaily, the room empty, children playing with puzzles, a couple copulating on the couch, a man pacing talking angrily… They were all real. I knew we—I had to get out of there, and there was no place to go. I was afraid of the outside world even more than the inside one. I was afraid to move. The couch vanished from behind me. The room was moving again. And I knew it would vanish, and that I would fall, like I had fallen a thousand times, a million times.
“Help me!” I cried to the pacing man, and he continued to pace although the room was certainly fading. And the children played. And the couple made love. And the fans whirred. And the fire burned. And I fell and fell and fell and fell…
I sat in the coffee shop and shook. I was in a sweat, and I couldn’t stop the shaking in my hands. I didn’t dare try to walk out yet. No more! No more. I shook my head and swore, no more. I’d kill her. She had learned what to do, what not to do, and through my stupidity and blundering, I’d kill her.
“Sir? Is anything wrong? Are you all right?”
The waitress. She touched my arm warily, ready to jump back.
“Sir?”
“I… I’m sorry, Miss. Sleeping with my eyes open, I guess. I’m sorry.” She didn’t believe me. Behind her I saw another woman watching. She must have sent the waitress over. I picked up the check, but I was afraid to try to stand up. I waited until the girl turned and walked away, and then I held the top of the table until I knew my legs would hold me.
I had the boy I’d hired relieve me for the rest of the day, and I walked back to my hotel, slowly, feeling like an old man. I started the hour-long walk making myself promises. I would never touch her again, I’d help Lenny find out the truth about her and do whatever could be done to cure her, and to get her and Lenny together. They needed each other, and I had Janet and the children, and the shop. Everything I had driven for was either mine, or within sight by now. Everything. She was a danger to me, nothing else. By the time I got to the hotel I knew the promises were lies. That as long as I could get inside that woman’s head, I would keep right on doing it. And now the thought had hit me that I wanted to be with her physically, just her and me, when I did it next time. It was a relief finally to admit to myself that I wanted to seize her body and mind. And I knew that I wanted everyone else out of her life altogether. Especially Lenny. Everyone who might be a threat, everyone who suspected that there was a mystery to be unraveled. The notebooks would have to be destroyed. If Karl had known, the knowledge must be destroyed. All of it. No one to know but me.
I looked on her then as a gift from God or the Devil, but my gift. From the instant of our first meeting, when the shock of seeing her had rattled me, right through that moment, everything had been driving me toward this realization. I hadn’t wanted to see it before. I had ducked and avoided it. Pretending that she was abhorrent to me, making Janet and Lenny shield me from her, shield her from me. I walked faster and with more purpose. I had too much to do now to waste time. I had to learn exactly how to enter her without the panic she always felt as soon as she knew. And I had to find a way to make her rid herself of Lenny.
I bought a bottle of bourbon, and some cheese and crackers. I had to stay in to plan my campaign, make certain of all the details this time before I touched her. I knew I would have to be more careful than I had been in the past. I didn’t want to destroy her, or to damage her in any way. I might have to hurt her at first, just to show her that she had to obey. That’s what always hurt her, having to fight with her. And no more tranquilizers. Karl had been right. She shouldn’t have drugs, not she. What else had he learned about her? How deep had his control been? The line from Pete’s letter came back to me: “He wound her up each morning…”
The bastard, I thought with hatred. Goddamned bastard.
It was almost five when I got to my room. There was a message from Lenny, to call him at her number. I crumpled up the note and flung it across the room. How much of the notebooks had he been able to get through? How much had he told her about what he had found there? I poured a generous drink and tried to think about Lenny and Karl, and all the time I kept seeing her, a tiny, perfectly formed figure, amazingly large dark eyes, doll-like hands…
She would have called Lenny after my… visit. I cursed myself for clumsiness. I’d have her in an institution if I wasn’t more careful. Had she been able to get back to present after I ran out this time? I realized that that’s how I had always left her, in a panic, or in a faint. What if she, in desperation, jumped out a window, or took an overdose of something? I took a long drink and then placed the call. I was shaking again, this time with fear that she was hurt, really hurt.
Lenny answered. “Oh, Eddie. Can you get Weill tonight? I can get in by ten fifteen in the morning. Can you find out if he can see us then?”
I swallowed hard before I could answer. “Sure. He said to call anytime. Someone will be there. Is that all? I mean when I got the message to call you at… her house, I was afraid something had happened.”
“No. It’s all right. Chris has decided to feed me, that’s all.” There was a false note in his voice. Probably she was nearby, listening. I fought the impulse to go out to her to find out.
“Okay. If I don’t call back, assume that it’s set up.”
“What’s wrong with you? You sound hoarse.”
“Out in the rain. A bug. I’m catching that mysterious ‘it’ that’s always going around. See you tomorrow.”
“Yeah. Take care of yourself. Get a bottle and go to bed.”
“Sure, Lenny.”
I stared at the phone after hanging up. He was suspicious. I could tell from his voice, from the way he hedged when I asked a direct question. Maybe not simply suspicious. Maybe they actually knew by now. Not that he could prove anything. To whom? Janet? A jury? I laughed and poured another drink, this time mixing it with water. “This man, ladies and gentlemen, entered the mind of this woman at will…”
At breakfast the next morning I realized that I hadn’t eaten anything for a couple of days, and still didn’t want to then. I had coffee and toast, and left most of the soggy bread on the dish. Lenny met me at the hotel.
“God, Eddie, you’d better get home and go to bed. We can close up the display. You look like hell.”
“A bug. I’ll be all right. Maybe you could stay if I do decide to take off?”
“Let’s close the whole thing. It’s just three more days.”
“I’ll stay,” I said. What an ideal set-up that would have been. Him here, me back home, Janet working.
I let Lenny do the talking at Weill’s office, and we got a good offer, not as much as we had hoped, but probably more than Weill had planned to make. We ended up saying that our lawyer would go over the contract and be in touch.
“Let’s go to your room where we can talk without interruption,” Lenny said then, and neither of us mentioned Weill again. A few months ago, B.C., Before Christine, we’d have been arrested for disturbing the peace if we’d had this offer from someone like Weill, and now, we didn’t even mention it again.
I lay down on my bed and let Lenny have the only chair in the room. My head was ringing and aching mildly, and my back and legs were stiff and sore. I didn’t give a damn about Lenny’s problems then.
Lenny paced. “God, I don’t even know where or how to begin this,” he said finally. “Back at the beginning of Christine and Karl. She was such a good subject for his experiments that he based much of his research on her alone, using the other two for controls mostly. Then he found out that she was too good, that what she could do was so abnormal that he couldn’t base any conclusions on his findings on her. For instance, he trained her to see objects so small that they were too small to fall on the cones and rods in the retina. And he trained her to spot a deviation in a straight line so minute that it needs special equipment to measure. Same with a circle. She can tell the exact place that a circle deviates from sphericity, and again it needs sophisticated instruments to measure it. Stereo acuity. We lose it if the peripheral vision is flattened out, if we don’t have the cues. She doesn’t lose it. She can see things where there isn’t enough light to see them. She can see things that are too far away to see. Same with her color perception. You need a spectrometer and a spectrophotometer to make the same differentiation she can do with a glance.”
He stopped and threw himself down in the chair and lighted a cigarette before he continued. “I’m getting pretty well into the notebooks. It’s tough going, very technical, in a field I know nothing about. And he knew nothing about physics, and used layman’s language, and a sort of shade-tree mechanic’s approach with some of the equipment he had to learn to use. Anyway, after a few years, he switched to a second code. He was paranoid about his secrets. A developing psychosis is written down there plain enough even for me to see. He was afraid of her.” Lenny put out the cigarette and looked at me. I was watching him, and now I shook my head.
“What do you mean afraid? Her schizophrenia? Was she showing signs of it again?”
“Will you forget that! She’s not a schizo! Pretend you look at this room and you see it as it’s been all through its history, with everyone who was ever here still here. Suppose you can’t stop yourself from straying in time, just the way you stray in space. If you were lost in a hotel like this one and had to knock on doors, or ask people the way to your room, that’s being lost in space. Lost in time is worse because no one answers until you find your own time. But those who are in your time see the search, hear your end of it, and wham, you’re in a hospital.”
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat up, but the room was unsteady. I had to support my head on my hands, propped up on my knees. “So why isn’t she locked up?”
“Because she learned how to control it most of the time. Maybe a lot of people are born able to see through time and learn as infants to control it, how to tell this present from all the other images that they see. Maybe only a few do it, and most of them never learn control. God knows something drives some children into autism that they never leave. She learned. But in periods of high stress she backslid. If she became overtired, or sick, or under a strain, she couldn’t hold the present in sharp enough focus. So they had her in and out of hospitals. And Rudeman became fascinated by her, and began to do his own line of research, using her, and he realized that she was seeing layers of time. Can’t you just see it? Him the famous physiological psychologist denying mind from the start, being forced finally to concede that there’s something there besides the brain. He struggled. It’s all there. He couldn’t accept, then he looked for a reasonable cause for her aberrations, finally he knew that she was somehow existing partly in another dimension that opened time just as space is opened to the rest of us.” Lenny’s sudden laugh was bitter and harsh. “He preferred to think he was going mad, that she was mad. But the scientist in him wouldn’t let it rest there. He devised one experiment after another to disprove her abilities, and only got in deeper and deeper. First understanding, then control. He taught her how to look at now. He forced her into photography as part of her therapy, a continuing practice in seeing what is now.”
He couldn’t see my face. If he had found out that much, he must have learned the rest, I kept thinking. I couldn’t tell if he suspected me or not, but if he knew that someone was driving her back into that condition, he would go down the list of names, and sooner or later he would get to me. I knew he would stop there. Too many signs. Too much evidence of my guilt. He’d know. Janet would know. I remembered the toast that she had made that night in her house: to the good men. I wanted to laugh, or cry.
“Christ, Eddie, I’m sorry. Here you are as sick as a dog, and I’m going on like a hysterical grandmother.”
“I’m not that sick,” I said and raised my head to prove it. “It just seemed like as good a way as any to listen. It’s a pretty incredible story, you have to admit.”
“Yeah, but you ain’t heard nothing yet. Chris thinks that Rudeman is haunting her. And why not? If you know you can see the past, where do you draw the line at what is or isn’t possible? She’s certain that he found a way to come back and enter her mind, and she’s having a harder and harder time holding on to the present. She thinks he’s having revenge. He always threatened her with a relapse if she didn’t cooperate wholly with him in his research.”
Lenny’s big face registered despair and hopelessness. He spread his hands and said, “After you swallow half a dozen unbelievable details, why stop at one more? But, damn it, I can’t take that, and I know something has driven her back to the wall.”
I stood up then and looked through the drawer where I had put the bourbon. Then I remembered that it was in the bathroom. When I came back with it, Lenny took the bottle and said, “When did you eat last?”
“I don’t remember. Yesterday maybe.”
“Yeah, I thought so. I’ll have something sent up, then a drink, or you’ll pass out.”
While we waited I said, “Look at it this way. She sees things that no one else sees. Most people would call that hallucinating. A psychiatrist would call it hallucinating. She thinks her dead husband is haunting her somehow. What in hell are you proposing to do, old buddy?”
Lenny nodded. “I know all that. Did you know that Eric is color blind?” I shook my head. Eric was his middle son. “I didn’t know it either until he was tested for it at school. A very sophisticated test that’s been devised in the past twenty-five years. Without that test no one would have suspected it ever. You see? I always assumed that he saw things pretty much the way I did. I assume that you see what I see. And there’s no way on this earth to demonstrate one way or the other that you do or don’t. The mental image you construct and call sight might duplicate mine, or it might not, and it doesn’t matter as long as we agree that that thing you’re sitting on is a bed. But do you see that as the same bed that I see? I don’t know. Let me show you a couple of the easy tests that Karl Rudeman used.” He held up a card and flashed it at me. “What color was it?”
I grinned. I had expected to be asked which one it was. “Red,” I said. “Red Queen of Hearts.”
He turned the card over and I looked at it and nodded, then looked at him. He simply pointed again to the card. It was black. A black Queen of Hearts. I picked it up and studied it. “I see what you mean,” I said. I had “seen” it as red.
“Another one,” he said. “How many windows are in your house?”
I thought a moment, then said, “Twenty-one.”
“How do you know?”
“I just counted them.” I was grinning at him and his simple-minded games. But then I started to think, how had I known, how had I counted them? I had visualized room after room, had counted the windows on the walls that I had drawn up before that inner eye. The bellboy rang and came in with a cart. I tipped him and we sat down to eat sandwiches and drink coffee. “So?” I asked, with my mouth full. “So I visualized the windows. So what does that mean?”
“It means that that’s how you remember things. If you had an eidetic memory, you would have seen the walls exactly as they were when you memorized them, and you could have counted the books in your line of vision, read off the titles even. The question is: are you looking into the past? No answer yet. That’s what Chris can do. And that’s how she sees the past. That clearly. And she sees the anomalies. You see what you expect—a red Queen of Hearts. She sees what is. But, as you say, no psychiatrist would believe it. Rudeman didn’t for years, not until he did a lot of checking.”
I was wolfing down the sandwiches, while he was still working on the first one. I felt jubilant. He didn’t know. She didn’t know. Karl haunting her! That was as good a thing for her to think as anything else.
“Okay,” I said, pouring more coffee. “I see that she’d have a problem with a psychiatrist. But what’s the alternative, if she’s as— sick—or bothered as she seems to be?”
“The answer’s in the notebooks,” Lenny said. “She knows it. She tried to find it at the farmhouse, but it was impossible to work there. And now she’s afraid of Rudeman all over again. She believes that somehow she caused his death. Now she has to pay.”
The strong waves of guilt I had got from her. But why had he wandered out in the fields barefoot and in pajamas?
“What scares me,” Lenny said, “is the slowness of getting through those notes. Bad enough while he was sane, but immeasurably harder as his psychosis developed, for the last seven or eight years. It’s like trying to swim in a tar pit. By the end it was bad enough that he was certifiable, I guess. He knew the contents of those notebooks would invalidate all the work he had done in the past. Chris doesn’t want to talk about it, and all I know for sure is what I’ve been able to dig out of that code he used.”
“Psychotic how?”
“Oh, God! I don’t know what name they’d put on it. In the beginning he thought she was a puppet that he could manipulate as he chose. Then gradually he became afraid of her, Chris. Insanely jealous, mad with fear that she’d leave him, terrified that someone would find out about her capabilities and begin to suspect that there was more. Just batty.”
“So what do you intend to do?”
“That’s what I came up here to talk to you about. I’m going to marry her.” I jerked my head around to stare at him in disbelief. He smiled fleetingly. “Yeah, it’s like that. Not until next year sometime. But I’m taking her on a long, long trip, starting as soon as we can get the books we’ll need ready. That’s why I want to wrap up a deal with Weill as fast as we can. I’ll need my share. We can handle the shop however you want—keep my bench waiting, or buy me out. Whatever.”
I kept on staring at him, feeling very stupid. “What books?” I asked finally, not wanting to know, but to keep him talking long enough for me to try to understand what it would mean to me.
“Rudeman used his library shelves as keys throughout. Things like one — eleven — two ninety-eight — three — six. Top row, eleventh book, page two ninety-eight, line three, word six. First three letters correspond to ABC and so on. He’d use that for a while, then switch to another book. Chris memorized those shelves, so she can find the key books. Stumbled onto it a couple of years ago. That’s why she dragged all of his books with her when she ducked out of that house. She just didn’t have time to go through the notebooks to sort out the ones he had used.”
“Lenny, are you sure? Isn’t it just the sick-bird syndrome? I mean, my God, maybe she really is crazy! A lot of beautiful, charming, talented people are.”
“No. She isn’t. Rudeman would have known after all those years. He wanted her to be, but he couldn’t convince himself in the slightest that she was.” He stood up. “I didn’t expect you to believe me. I would have been disappointed in you if you had. But I had to get it out, get some of this stuff said. Let you know you’ll have the shop to yourself for a year or so.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Go home. Move in the Donlevy house. She’s on tranquilizers, and they make it awfully hard to hold on to the present. She keeps wandering back and forth. It’ll take a week to get things ready to leave.” He mock-cuffed me and said, “Don’t look so worried. I know what I’m doing.”
When he was gone I wished that he had a real inkling of what he was doing, and I knew that he would never know. I thought about that line that everyone has that he can’t cross, no matter what the evidence, unless there is an inner revelatory experience. Rudeman couldn’t believe she looked into the past, until he experienced it through her. Then he drew the line at possession, until it was proven again, and with its proof he had come to doubt his own sanity. Lenny could accept the research that proved she could see the past, but no farther. Whatever Rudeman had said about possession he had written off as insanity. And I had blundered in and swallowed the whole thing without reservation, through experience, firsthand experience. I tried to think in what ways I was like Rudeman, making it possible for me to do what he had done, wondering why Lenny couldn’t do it, why others hadn’t. My gift. Like my fingerprints were mine alone. I gave Lenny ten minutes to make sure that he really was gone, then I looked in on her. I said it to myself that way, Think I’ll look in on her now.
Met by a wave of hatred stronger than anything I’d ever experienced. Resistance. Determination not to be taken again. Thoughts: not going crazy. You’re real and evil. Die! Damn you, die! I killed you once! How many times! Die!
I drew back, but not all the way. She thought she was winning. She conjured a vision of a man in pajamas, orange and black stripes, walking, a pain in the chest, harder and harder, gasping for air… I clutched the arms of the chair and said, “No! Stop thinking. No more!” The pain returned, and this time I was falling, falling… I had to get out. Get away from her. The witch, bitch, which witch bitch. Falling. Pain. I couldn’t get loose. Falling. Out the window, over the rail, backward, seeing the ground… She screamed and let go.
I lay back in the chair, trying to catch my breath, trying to forget the pain in my chest, my shoulder, my left arm. I didn’t have a heart condition. Perfectly all right. Medical exam just last year. Perfectly all right. I flexed the fingers in my hand, and slowly raised the arm, afraid the pain would return with movement.
Bitch, I thought. The goddam bitch. She hadn’t taken the tranquilizer, she had been waiting, steeled against me, ready to attack. Treacherous bitch. I pushed myself from the chair and stood up, and saw myself in the mirror. Grey. Aged. Terrified. I closed my eyes and said again, “Bitch!”
Was she panting also, like a fighter between rounds? If I went again now, would she be able to attack again so soon? I knew I wouldn’t try. The pain had been too real.
I looked at my watch then and nearly fell down again. An hour and a half? I held it to my ear, and shook it hard. An hour and a half! Shakily I called Weill’s office and told Hendrickson that he could have the machine tool picked up any time. I was going home.
There wasn’t much else there, nothing that I couldn’t get to the car alone. And by five I was on the highway. An hour and a half, I kept thinking. Where? Doing what?
She would kill me, I thought over and over. Just like she killed her husband. The notebooks, I had to get them myself. I couldn’t let Lenny take them away. Rudeman must have discovered too late that she had power too. But he must have suspected before the end. His psychosis. The new code, afraid she had learned the old one. He must have learned about this. He had kept her ten years before she killed him. It would be in the notebooks. I drove too fast, and got home in six hours. And not until the car squealed to a stop in the driveway did I even think about what I would tell Lenny or Janet. But I didn’t have to tell her anything. She took one look at my face and cried, “Oh, my God!” And she pulled me from the car and got me inside and into bed somehow, without any help from me, but without hindrance either. And I fell asleep.
I woke up when Janet did to get the kids off to school. “Are you better? I called Dr. Lessing last night, and he said to bring you in this morning.”
“I’m better,” I said wearily. I felt like I was coming out of a long drugged sleep, with memories hazy and incomplete. “I need to sleep and have orange juice, and that’s about it. No need for you to stay home.” She said she’d see about that, and she went out to get Rusty up, and to find Laura’s red scarf. I hadn’t seen them for almost a week, hadn’t even thought of them. They would expect presents. They always expected presents. When Janet came back in fifteen minutes, I convinced her that I really was all right, and finally she agreed to go on to work. She’d call at noon.
I had breakfast. I showered and dressed. And smoked three cigarettes. And convinced myself that I wasn’t sick at all. And then I walked over to Christine’s house.
Lenny met me at the door. “What the hell are you doing up and out? Janet said you came in sick as a dog last night.” He gave me more coffee. At the kitchen table.
“I kept thinking about what you were saying about her.” I indicated the rest of the house. “And I was sick, feverish, and decided I couldn’t do anything else in Chicago. So I came home. Anything I can do to help?”
Lenny looked like he wanted to hug me, but he said merely, “Yeah, I can use some help.”
“Tell me what to do.”
“Just stick around until Chris wakes up. I gave her a sleeping pill last night. Should be wearing off soon. What I’ve been doing is going down the notebooks line by line and every time he used another book for his key, Chris visualizes the shelf and finds it there. Then we find that book in the boxes. And I go on to the next one. While she rests, or is busy with her work, I find the key words in the books and decode a line or two to make sure. Rather not lug that whole library with us if I can avoid it.”
I was watching him as if he were a stranger. I was thinking of him as a stranger. I had no definite plan worked out, just a direction. She had to get rid of him. Before he learned any more from the notebooks.
And her. What did she know? I knew I had to find out without any more delay. I tried to reach her and found a cottony foggy world. The sleeping pill. I tried to jar her awake, and got glimpses of a nightmare world of grey concrete expanses. A hall, the grey of the floor exactly matched the grey of the walls and ceiling. The joints lost their squareness ahead of me, and the hallway became a tube that grew narrower and narrower and finally was only a point. I was running toward the point at a breakneck speed.
You’re not Karl! Who are you? I pulled out. What if she brought the pain again? The pseudo heart attack? I was shaking.
“Jesus, Eddie, you should be in bed.” Lenny put his hand on my forehead. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”
I shook my head. “I’m okay. Just get a chill now and then. How about the couch here? At least I’ll be handy when she gets up.”
He installed me in the study on the deep green couch, with an Indian throw over me. I drifted pleasantly for a while. Then, Get out! Who are you?—I’ll never get out again. Karl knew, didn’t he? I’ll finish what he started. You can’t hurt me the way you hurt him. I’m too strong for you. We’ll go away, you and me. I laughed, and laughing pulled away. At the same instant I heard her scream.
I sat up and waited. Lenny brought her down in a few minutes. I didn’t join them in the kitchen. I watched and listened through her, and she was so agitated now that she wasn’t even aware of my presence. I was getting that good at it.
“Listen, Lenny, and then leave me alone. I thought it was Karl, but it isn’t. I don’t know who it is. He can get inside my mind. I don’t know how. I know he’s there, and he makes me do things, crazy things. He’ll use me, just like Karl did all those years. I can’t help myself. And night after night, day after day, whatever he wants me to do, wherever he wants me to go…” She was weeping and her talk was beginning to break up into incoherent snatches of half-formed thoughts.
“Chris! Stop that! Your husband was crazy! He thought he could possess you. That’s insane! And he half convinced you that he could do it. But God damn it, he’s dead! No one else can touch you. I won’t let anyone near you.”
“He doesn’t have to be near me. All these weeks… He’s been in and out, watching, listening to us go over the notebooks. He knows what’s in them now. I… He won’t stop now. And if he says I have to go with him, I’ll have to.”
Her voice went curiously flat and lifeless. She was seeing again that tube that ended in a point, and suddenly she longed to be on it, heading toward that point. “I’d rather die now,” she said.
Lenny’s big face twisted with pain. “Chris, please, trust me. I won’t let anyone near you. I promise. Let me help you, Chris. Please. Don’t force me out now.”
“It won’t make any difference. You don’t understand. If he makes me go with him, I can’t fight it.”
But she could. I didn’t know if my thoughts reminded her of the heart attack, or if she would have thought of it herself. Karl sitting in her room, watching her with a smile on his face. “You will turn them down, of course, my dear. You can’t travel to Africa alone.”
“No, I won’t turn them down! I want to take this assignment…” Slipping, blurring images, fear of being alone, of not being able to keep the world in focus. Fear of falling through the universe, to a time where there was nothing, falling forever… Staring at the rejection of the offer in her own handwriting. Karl’s face, sad, but determined.
“You really don’t want to travel without me, my dear. It wouldn’t be safe for you, you know.”
And later, waking up from dreamless sleep. Knowing she had to get up, to go down the hall to his room, where he was waiting for her. No! It’s over! Leave me alone. Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, standing up, NO! I HATE YOU! Your soft fat hands! You make me feel dirty! Why don’t you die! Have a heart attack and die.
Fighting it to the door, dragging herself unwillingly to the door, fighting against the impulse, despising him and even more herself. He was forcing her up flights of stairs, without rails, straight down for miles and miles, and he was at her side, forcing each step. She pushed him, and he screamed. Then he was there again, and she pushed again. And again. Then he was running, and she, clinging to the doorknob in her bedroom, she was running too, pushing him off the steps as fast as he managed to climb back on, and he stumbled and fell and now she knew he would fall forever, even as she fell sometimes. Swirling into darkness with pain and terror for company. She slipped to the floor, and awakened there much later knowing only that something was gone from her life. That she felt curiously free and empty and unafraid.
I lay back down and stared at the ceiling. I could hear her footsteps recede up the stairs, across the hall to her room. Lenny’s heavy tread returned and there was the sound of measured pacing. Soon, I thought. Soon it would end. And after today, after she recovered from the next few hours… She would have to remain nearby, here in this house as long as possible. Above me she was starting to dress. I was there. She didn’t doubt a presence haunting her. Nor did she question that he could force her to go away with him if he chose.
“Who?” she whispered, standing still with her eyes closed. She imagined the suppressed fury on Lenny’s big face, the pulse in his temple that beat like a primitive drum summoning him from this time back to a time when he would have killed without a thought anyone who threatened his woman. I laughed and forced his face to dissolve and run like a painting on fire.
Suddenly I was jerked from my concentration by the sound of Janet’s voice. “Where is he? How is he?”
“He’s sleeping in the study. Feverish, but not bad.” Lenny’s reassuring voice.
Janet came into the study and sat on the couch and felt my face. “Honey, I was scared to death. I called and called and no answer. I was afraid you’d passed out or something. Let me take you over to Dr. Lessing.”
“Get out,” I said without opening my eyes. “Just get out and leave me alone.” I tried to find her, and couldn’t. I was afraid to give it too much attention with Janet right there.
“I can’t just leave you like this. I’ve never seen you like this before. You need a doctor.”
“Get out of here! When I need you or want you I’ll be in touch. Just get the hell away from me now.”
“Eddie!”
“For God’s sake, Janet, can’t you leave me alone? I’ve got a virus, a bug. I feel rotten, but not sick, not sick enough for a doctor. I just want to be left alone.”
“No. It’s more serious than that. Don’t you think I know you better than that? It’s been coming on for weeks. Little things, then bigger things, now this. You have to see a doctor, Eddie. Please.”
Wearily I sat up and stared at her and wondered how I’d ever found her attractive or desirable. Freckled, thin, sharp features, razorlike bones… I turned away and said, “Get lost, Janet. Beat it. Yeah, it started a long time ago, but it takes a club over the head, doesn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what you think I mean. I’m sick. I’m tired. I want to be alone. For a long time. Tonight. Tomorrow night. Next week. Next month. Just get out of here and leave me alone. I’ll pick up some things later on after you’ve gone to work.”
“I’m going to call Dr. Lessing.”
I looked at her and hoped I wouldn’t have to hit her. I didn’t want to hurt her, too. Her freckles stood out in relief against the dead white of her skin. I closed my eyes. “I won’t see him. Or anyone else. Not now. Maybe tomorrow. Just leave me alone for now. I have to sleep.”
She stood up and backed away. She had seen. She knew that I’d hit her if she didn’t get out. At the door she stopped, and the helplessness in her voice made me want to throw something at her. “Eddie? Will you stay here for the next hour?”
So she could bring in her men in white. I laughed and sat up. “I had planned to, but I guess I’d better plan again. I’ll be in touch.”
She left then. I could hear her voice and Lenny’s from the kitchen, but I didn’t try to make out their words. A clock chimed twelve. I wanted to go out there and throw Janet out. I didn’t want her around for the next half hour or so. I heard the back door, then the sound of a motor, and I sighed in relief.
I went to the kitchen and got coffee and stood at the window watching snow fall.
Lenny joined me. “Janet says you had a fight.”
“Yeah. I was rough on her. Sickness brings out her mother-hen instincts, and I can’t stand being fussed at. What was wrong with Christine?”
“A dream.” He stared at the snow. “Supposed to get a couple of inches by night, I think. Won’t stick long. Ground isn’t cold enough yet.”
“Lenny, for God’s sake quit kidding yourself. She’s sick. She needs professional help.”
“She thinks—she’s certain that he learned enough about her to put an end to this so-called illness. She’s desperately afraid of a relapse. Hospitalization, shock therapy…”
“What if you are causing her present condition? Isn’t it suggestive? Her husband, now you. It’s a sexual fantasy. By making her reach a decision about you, you might push her off the deep end irreversibly.”
He looked shocked. “That’s crazy.”
“Exactly. Lenny, these things are too dangerous for a well-meaning but non-professional man to toy with. You might destroy her…”
“If she was crazy you’d be making good points,” Lenny said distinctly. “She isn’t.”
I finished my coffee. A doctor. Shots, pills, all yesterday and last years and decades ago. Questions. Lost forever and forever falling. Through all the yesterdays. Lenny wants to get a doctor for you. A psychiatrist. You have to get him out of here now. Immediately. Even if it kills him.
She resisted the idea. She kept trying to visualize his face, and I wouldn’t let it take shape. Instead I drew out of her memories of the institutions she’d been in.
Lenny’s voice startled me, and I left her.
“I don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to be here when she comes down. She knows you think she’s psycho.”
I put down my cup. “Whatever you say.”
She came into the kitchen then. She was deathly pale. She had a gun in her hand. I stared at it. “Where… ?”
She looked at it too, looked at it in a puzzled manner. “I had it in my car when I came here,” she said. “I found it when I was unpacking and I put it upstairs in my room. I just remembered.”
“Give it to me,” Lenny said. He held out his hand and she put the small automatic in it.
I sighed my relief. That was the last thing I wanted her to do. She’d be locked up the rest of her life. Now if I could make her drive him out, maybe he’d use it himself.
Lenny kept his hand in his pocket, over the gun. “Why were you thinking of guns right now? Where was this?”
“In my train case. I told you…” She glanced at me and I turned my back to stare at the snow again. I was watching my own back then, and seeing Lenny’s face and the kitchen that I was keeping in focus only through great effort. “I told you,” she said again. “If he makes me go back with him, I’ll have no choice.” I made her add, “The only way I escaped from Karl was through his death.” She shuddered, and an image of Karl’s face swam before her eyes. It was contorted with pain and fear. It was replaced by another face, Lenny’s, also contorted by pain and fear. And the image of a hospital ward, and a doctor. And I watched his face change and become my own face. The image dimmed and blurred as I tried to force it away, and she fought to retain it. The concrete corridor was there. She forced the image of a man backward through the corridor, grey walls and ceiling and floor all one, no up and no down, just the cylinder that was growing smaller and smaller. I tried to pull away, and again there was a duel as she fought to keep the imagery. Cliffs, I thought. Crumbling edges, falling… Hospital, shots, electroshock…
“Chris, what is it?” Lenny’s voice, as if from another world, faint, almost unrecognizable.
“I don’t know. Just hold me. Please.”
Cliffs… Exploding pain in my chest suddenly. Burning pain in my shoulder, my arm. Darkness. Losing her, finding her again. Losing…
“You!” Her voice coarse, harsh with disbelief. I turned from the window clutching my chest. The room was spinning and there was nothing to hold on to. Let go. They’ll lock you up. Pain.
“Eddie!”
“You!” she said again, incredulously.
Get the gun back! Lenny. No more pretense now. My hand found something to hold, and the room steadied. Feeling of falling, but knowledge of standing perfectly still, fighting against the nausea, the pain. Get the gun. Reach in his pocket and take it out. We, she and I, were in that other place where the grey corridor stretched endlessly. We had time because there was no time. She backed a step away from Lenny, and I forced her to move closer again, seeing the beads of sweat on her forehead, the trembling in her hands. From somewhere else I could hear Lenny’s voice, but I couldn’t hear the words now. GET THE GUN!
“Lenny, get out! Leave. Go away fast. He’ll kill you!” Her voice came from that other place, but the words were echoed up and down the corridor.
You and I. I’ll take care of you. I won’t let anyone hurt you.
Lenny’s hands on me, trying to force me to a chair. Seeing myself sprawled across the table unconscious. “No!” I tried to make her fall down an elevator shaft, and saw even clearer my own figure across the table. I tried to remember how it felt to fall in an uncontollable plunge, and nothing came. She had to faint. Something could be salvaged even now, if only she would faint, or have hysterics, or something, I couldn’t break out, pull away. She was holding the back of a chair with both hands, holding so hard her muscles hurt. I saw her grasp tighten and felt the pain erupt again, this time blacking out everything momentarily. Lenny… I couldn’t make her move. I slipped my hand into his pocket then and my fingers felt the metal, warm from the close pocket. I pulled it out and aimed it at Lenny. I was seeing his face from a strange angle, her angle. A cross-section of his face. A Dali painting of fear and shock. She was beating on me and I closed my other hand over her wrist, a child’s wrist. Laura’s wrist. Back in that timeless corridor. Why didn’t you look into the future too? Why just the past?
He said I did. I repressed it. Too frightening. The image of the man sprawled across the table, clearer, detailed. Real.
Absolute terror then. Hers. Everything shifting, spinning away, resolving into strange shapes, displaced items of furniture, strange people moving about. Intolerable pain as she lashed out in desperation to find her way through the maze of time. And I was outside again.
I tried to go into her and couldn’t. I could see her, wide-eyed, catatonic, and couldn’t reach her at all. It was as if the wall that had been breached had been mended now, and once again kept me and all others outside. I didn’t know how I had gone through it before. I didn’t even know if I had.
I heard the gun hit the floor before I realized that I had dropped it. I felt the table under my cheek before I realized that I had collapsed and was lying across it. I heard their voices, and I knew that she had found her way back, but I couldn’t see them. For the moment I was free of the pain. Almost uninterested in the figure slumped across the table.
“You’d better get an ambulance,” she said. I marveled at the calm self-assurance in her voice. What had she seen while she had stood unmoving, rigid? She touched my forehead with fingers that were cool and steady.
“Was it real?” I whispered. “Any of it?”
“You’ll never know, will you?” I didn’t know if she said the words aloud or not. I listened to their voices drifting in and out of consciousness while we waited for the ambulance. Was it real? I kept coming back to that. Was what real?
Anything.
* * * *