Nightmare At 20,000 Feet

by Richard Matheson

  He shivered and, turning abruptly, went back into the bedroom.

  He slumped on the bed and stared at the delicately whirring electric clock on their bedside table.

  Past eleven, he saw. In less than an hour I have to hold class for a group of idiot freshmen. And, on the desk in the living room, is a mountain of mid-term examinations with essays that I must suffer through, feeling my stomach turn at their paucity of intelligence, their adolescent phraseology.

  And all that tripe, all those miles of hideous prose, had been wound into an eternal skein in his head. And there it sat unravelling into his own writing until he wondered if he could stand the thought of living anymore. I have digested the worst, he thought. Is it any wonder that I exude it piecemeal?

  Temper began again, a low banking fire in him, gradually fanned by further thinking. I've done no writing this morning. Like every morning after every other morning as time passes. I do less and less. I write nothing. Or I write worthless material. I could write better when I was twenty than I can now.

  I'll never write anything good!

  He jolted to his feet and his head snapped around as he looked for something to strike at, something to break, something to hate with such hate that it would wither in the blast.

  It seemed as though the room clouded. He felt a throbbing. His left leg banged against a corner of the bed.

  He gasped in fury. He wept. Tears of hate and repentance and self commiseration. I'm lost, he thought. Lost. There is nothing.

  He became very calm, icy calm. Drained of pity, of emotion. He put on his suit coat. He put on his hat and got his briefcase off the dresser.

  He stopped before the door to the room where she still fussed with her bag. So she will have something to occupy herself with now, he thought, so she won't have to look at me. He felt his heart thudding like a heavy drum beat.

  "Have a nice time at your mother's," he said dispassionately.

  She looked up and saw the expression on his face. She turned away and put a hand to her eyes. He felt a sudden need to run to her and beg her forgiveness. Make everything right again.

  Then he thought again of papers and years of writing undone. He turned away and walked across the living room. The small rug slipped a little and it helped to focus the strength of anger he needed. He kicked it aside and it fluttered against the wall in a rumpled heap.

  He slammed the door behind him.

  His mind gibbered. Now, soap opera like, she has thrown herself on the coverlet and is weeping tears of martyr-tinged sorrow. Now she is digging nails into the pillow and moaning my name and wishing she were dead.

  His shoes clicked rapidly on the sidewalk. God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who would create and find that we must lose our hearts for it because we cannot afford to spend our time at it.

  It was a beautiful day. His eyes saw that but his mind would not attest to it. The trees were thick with green and the air warm and fresh. Spring breezes flooded down the streets. He felt them brush over him as he walked down the block, crossed Main Street to the bus stop.

  He stood there on the corner looking back at the house.

  She is in there, his mind persisted in analysis. In there, the house in which we've lived for more than eight years. She is packing or crying or doing something. And soon she will call the Campus Cab Company. A cab will come driving out. The driver will honk the horn, Sally will put on her light spring coat and take her suitcase out on the porch. She will lock the door behind her for the last time.

  "No-"

  He couldn't keep the word from strangling in his throat. He kept staring at the house. His head ached. He saw everything weaving. I'm sick, he thought.

  "I'm sick!"

  He shouted it. There was no one around to hear. He stood gazing at the house. She is going away forever, said his mind.

  Very well then! I'll write, write, write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.

  A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth.

  He glanced aside as the green-striped bus topped the distant hill and approached. He put the briefcase under his arm and reached into his coat pocket for a token. There was a hole in the pocket. Sally had been meaning to sew it. Well, she would never sew it now. What did it matter anyway?

  I would rather have my soul intact than the suit of clothes I wear.

  Words, words, he thought, as the bus stopped before him. They flood through me now that she is leaving. Is that evidence that it is her presence that clogs the channels of thought?

  He dropped the token in the coin box and weaved down the length of the bus. He passed a professor he knew and nodded to him distractedly. He slumped down on the back seat and stared at the grimy, rubberized floor boards.

  This is a great life, his mind ranted. I am so pleased with this, my life and these, my great and noble accomplishments.

  He opened the briefcase a moment and looked in at the thick prospectus he had outlined with the aid of Dr. Ramsay.

  First week-1. Everyman. Discussion of. Reading of selections from Classic Readings For College Freshmen. 2. Beowulf. Reading of. Class discussion. Twenty minute quotation quiz.

  He shoved the sheaf of papers back into the briefcase. It sickens me, he thought. I hate these things. The classics have become anathema to me. I begin to loathe the very mention of them. Chaucer, the Elizabethan poets, Dryden, Pope, Shakespeare. What higher insult to a man than to grow to hate these names because he must share them by part with unappreciative clods? Because he must strain them thin and make them palatable for the dullards who should better be digging ditches.

  He got off the bus downtown and started down the long slope of Ninth Street.

  Walking, he felt as though he were a ship with its hawser cut, prey to a twisted network of currents. He felt apart from the city, the country, the world. If someone told me I were a ghost, he thought, I would be inclined to believe.

  What is she doing now?

  He wondered about it as the buildings floated past him. What is she thinking as I stand here and the town of Fort drifts by me like vaporous stage flats? What are her hands holding? What expression has she on her lovely face?

  She is alone in the house, our house. What might have been our home. Now it is only a shell, a hollow box with sticks of wood and metal for furnishings. Nothing but inanimate dead matter.

  No matter what John Morton said.

  Him with his gold leaves parting and his test tubes and his God of the microscope. For all his erudite talk and his papers of slideruled figures; despite all that-it was simple witchcraft he professed. It was idiocy. The idiocy that prompted that ass Charles Fort to burden the world with his nebulous fancies. The idiocy that made that fool of a millionaire endow this place and from the arid soil erect these huge stone structures and house within a zoo of wild-eyed scientists always searching for some fashion of elixir while the rest of the clowns blew the world out from under them.

  No, there is nothing right with the world, he thought as he plodded under the arch and onto the wide, green campus.

  He looked across at the huge Physical Sciences Centre, its granite face beaming in the late morning sun.

  Now she is calling the cab. He consulted his watch. No. She is in the cab already. Riding through the silent streets. Past the houses and down into the shopping district. Past the red brick buildings spewing out yokels and students. Through the town that was a potpourri of the sophisticated and the rustic.

  Now the cab was turning left on Tenth Street. Now it was pulling up the hill, topping it. Gliding down toward the railroad station. Now…

  "Chris!"

  His head snapped around and his body twitched in surprise. He looked toward the wide-doored entrance to the Mental Sciences Building. Dr. Morton was coming out.

  We attended school
together eighteen years ago, he thought. But I took only a small interest in science. I preferred wasting my time on the culture of the centuries. That's why I'm an associate and he's a doctor and the head of his department.

  All this fled like racing winds through his mind as Dr. Morton approached, smiling. He clapped Chris on the shoulder.

  "Hello there," he said. "How are things?"

  "How are they ever?"

  Dr. Morton's smile faded.

  "What is it, Chris?" he asked.

  I won't tell you about Sally, Chris thought. Not if I die first. You'll never know it from me.

  "The usual," he said.

  "Still on the outs with Ramsay?"

  Chris shrugged. Morton looked over at the large clock on the face of the Mental Sciences Building.

  "Say, look," he said. "Why are we standing here? Your class isn't for a half hour yet, is it?"

  Chris didn't answer. He's going to invite me for coffee, he thought. He's going to regale me with more of his inane theories. He's going to use me as whipping boy for his mental merry-go-round.

  "Let's get some coffee," Morton said, taking Chris's arm. They walked along in silence for a few steps.

  "How's Sally?" Morton asked then.

  "She's fine," he answered in an even voice.

  "Good. Oh, incidentally. I'll probably drop by tomorrow or the next day for that book I left there last Thursday night."

  "All right."

  "What were you saying about Ramsay now?"

  "I wasn't."

  Morton skipped that. "Been thinking anymore about what I told you?" he asked.

  "If you're referring to your fairy tale about my house-no. I haven't been giving it any more thought than it deserves- which is none."

  They turned the corner of the building and walked toward Ninth Street.

  "Chris, that's an indefensible attitude," Morton said. "You have no right to doubt when you don't know."

  Chris felt like pulling his arm away, turning and leaving Morton standing there. He was sick of words and words and words. He wanted to be alone. He almost felt as if he could put a pistol to his head now, get it over with. Yes, I could-he thought. If someone handed it to me now it would be done in a moment.

  They went up the stone steps to the sidewalk and crossed over to the Campus Cafe. Morton opened the door and ushered Chris in. Chris went in back and slid into a wooden booth.

  Morton brought two coffees and sat across from him.

  "Now listen," he said, stirring in sugar, "I'm your best friend. At least I regard myself as such. And I'm damned if I'll sit by like a mute and watch you kill yourself."

  Chris felt his heart jump. He swallowed. He got rid of the thoughts as though they were visible to Morton.

  "Forget it," he said. "I don't care what proofs you have. I don't believe any of it."

  "What'll it take to convince you, damn it?" Morton said. "Do you have to lose your life first?"

  "Look," Chris said pettishly. "I don't believe it. That's it. Forget it now, let it go."

  "Listen, Chris, I can show you…"

  "You can show me nothing!" Chris cut in.

  Morton was patient. "It's a recognized phenomenon," he said.

  Chris looked at him in disgust and shook his head.

  "What dreams you white frocked kiddies have in the sanctified cloister of your laboratories. You can make yourself believe anything after a while. As long as you can make up a measurement for it."

  "Will you listen to me, Chris? How many times have you complained to me about splinters, about closet doors flying open, about rugs slipping? How many times?"

  "Oh, for God's sake, don't start that again. I'll get up and walk out of here. I'm in no mood for your lectures. Save them for those poor idiots who pay tuition to hear them."

  Morton looked at him with a shake of his head.

  "I wish I could get to you," he said.

  "Forget it."

  "Forget it?" Morton squirmed. "Can't you see that you're in danger because of your temper?"

  "I'm telling you, John…"

  "Where do you think that temper of yours goes? Do you think it disappears? No. It doesn't. It goes into your rooms and into your furniture and into the air. It goes into Sally. It makes everything sick; including you. It crowds you out. It welds a link between animate and inanimate. Psychobolie. Oh, don't look so petulant; like a child who can't stand to hear the word spinach. Sit down, for God's sake. You're an adult; listen like one."

  Chris lit a cigarette. He let Morton's voice drift into a non-intelligent hum. He glanced at the wall clock. Quarter to twelve. In two minutes, if the schedule was adhered to, she would be going. The train would move and the town of Fort would pass away from her.

  "I've told you any number of times," Morton was saying. "No one knows what matter is made of. Atoms, electrons, pure energy-all words. Who knows where it will end? We guess, we theorize, we make up means of measurement. But we don't know.

  "And that's for matter. Think of the human brain and its still unknown capacities. It's an uncharted continent, Chris. It may stay that way for a long time. And all that time the suspected powers will still be affecting us and, maybe, affecting matter, even if we can't measure it on a gauge.

  "And I say you're poisoning your house. I say your temper has become ingrained in the structure, in every article you touch. All of them influenced by you and your ungovernable rages. And I think too that if it weren't for Sally's presence acting as an abortive factor, well… you might actually be attacked by…"

  Chris heard the last few sentences.

  "Oh, stop this gibberish!" he snapped angrily. "You're talking like a juvenile after his first Tom Swift novel."

  Morton sighed. He ran his fingers over the cup edge and shook his head sadly.

  "Well," he said, "all I can do is hope that nothing breaks down. It's obvious to me that you're not going to listen."

  "Congratulations on one statement I can agree with," said Chris. He looked at his watch. "And now if you'll excuse me I'll go and listen to saddle-shoed cretins stumble over passages they haven't the slightest ability to assimilate."

  They got up.

  "I'll take it," said Morton but Chris slapped a coin on the counter and walked out. Morton followed, putting his change into his pocket slowly.

  In the street he patted Chris on the shoulder.

  "Try to take it easy," he said. "Look, why don't you and Sally come out to the house tonight? We could have a few rounds of bridge."

  "That's impossible," Chris said.

  The students were reading a selection from King Lear. Their heads were bent over the books. He stared at them without seeing them.

  I've got to resign myself to it, he told himself. I've got to forget her, that's all. She's gone. I'm not going to bewail the fact. I'm not going to hope against hope that she'll return. I don't want her back. I'm better off without her. Free and unfettered now.

  His thoughts drained off. He felt empty and helpless. He felt as though he could never write another word for the rest of his life. Maybe, he thought, sullenly displeased with the idea, maybe it was only the upset of her leaving that enabled my brain to find words. For, after all, the words I thought of, the ideas that nourished, though briefly, were all to do with her-her going and my wretchedness because of it.

  He caught himself short. No!-he cried in silent battle. I will not let it be that way. I'm strong. This feeling is only temporary, I'll very soon have learned to do without her. And then I'll do work. Such work as I have only dreamed of doing. After all, haven't I lived eighteen years more? Haven't those years filled me to overflowing with sights and sounds, ideals, impressions, interpretations?

  He trembled with excitement.

  Someone was waving a hand in his face. He focused his eyes and looked coldly at the girl.

  "Well?" he said.

  "Could you tell us when you're going to give back our midterm papers, Professor Neal?" she asked.

  He stared at her
, his right cheek twitching. He felt about to hurl every invective at his command into her face. His fists closed.

  "You'll get them back when they're marked," he said tensely.

  "Yes, but…"

  "You heard me," he said.

  His voice rose at the end of the sentence. The girl sat down.

  As he lowered his head he noticed that she looked at the boy next to her and shrugged her shoulders, a look of disgust on her face.

  "Miss…"

  He fumbled with his record book and found her name.

  "Miss Forbes!"

  She looked up, her features drained of colour, her red lips standing out sharply against her white skin. Painted alabaster idiot. The words clawed at him.

  "You may get out of this room," he ordered sharply.

  Confusion filled her face.

  "Why?" she asked in a thin, plaintive voice.

  "Perhaps you didn't hear me," he said, the fury rising. "I said get out of this room!"

  "But…"

  "Do you hear me!" he shouted.

  Hurriedly she collected her books, her hands shaking, her face burning with embarrassment. She kept her eyes on the floor and her throat moved convulsively as she edged along the aisle and went out the doorway.

  The door closed behind her. He sank back. He felt a terrible sickness in himself. Now, he thought, they will all turn against me in defence of an addle-witted little girl. Dr. Ramsay would have more fuel for his simple little fire.

  And they were right.

  He couldn't keep his mind from it. They were right. He knew it. In that far recess of mind which he could not cow with thoughtless passion, he knew he was a stupid fool. I have no right to teach others. I cannot even teach myself to be a human being. He wanted to cry out the words and weep confessions and throw himself from one of the open windows.

  "The whispering will stop!" he demanded fiercely.