Shatterday

by Harlan Ellison

  Well, I offer you the words of the Polish poet Edward Yashinsky, who said, “Fear not your enemies, for they can only kill you; fear not your friends, for they can only betray you. Fear only the indifferent, who permit the killers and betrayers to walk safely on the earth.”

  When I was a kid there was a popular novel titled Leave Her to Heaven. Though the book has long since passed out of my memory, the title has stuck. I don’t believe there is such a thing as “divine retribution.” The universe is neither malign nor benign. It’s just there, and it’s too busy keeping itself together to balance the scales when some feep has jerked you around. I am a strong adherent of the philosophy that one must seek retribution oneself.

  And if the courts of the land cannot deliver up these people to justice then don’t form a lynch party, because that forces you to become what you have beheld, as vile as those who did you dirt. Instead, unleash primal forces against them. Force entry and take a trip through their lives in ways they will find most troublesome.

  Write a story and let the power of the massmind git’m!

  William Weisel pronounced his name why-zell. but many of the unfortunates for whom he had done remodeling and construction pronounced it weasel.

  He had designed and built a new guest bathroom for Fred Tolliver, a man in his early sixties who had retired from the active life of a studio musician with the foolish belief that his fifteen-thousand-dollar-per-year annuity would sustain him in comfort. Weisel had snubbed the original specs on the job, had substituted inferior materials for those required by the codes, had used cheap Japanese pipe instead of galvanized or stressed plastic, had eschewed lath and plaster for wallboard that left lumpy seams, had skirted union wages by ferrying in green card workers from Tijuana every morning by dawn light, had—in short—done a spectacularly crummy job on Fred Tolliver’s guest bathroom. That was the first mistake.

  And for all of this ghastly workmanship, Weisel had overcharged Fred Tolliver by nine thousand dollars. That was the second mistake.

  Fred Tolliver called William Weisel. His tone was soft and almost apologetic. Fred Tolliver was a gentle man, not given to fits of pique or demonstrations of anger. He politely asked Weisel to return and set matters to rights. William Weisel laughed at Fred Tolliver and told him that he had lived up to the letter of the original contract, that he would do nothing. That was the third mistake.

  Putatively, what Weisel said was true. Building inspectors had been greased and the job had been signed off: legal according to the building codes. Legally, William Weisel was in the clear; no suit could be brought. Ethically it was a different matter. But even threats of revocation of license could not touch him.

  Nonetheless, Fred Tolliver had a rotten guest bathroom, filled with leaks and seamed walls that were already cracking and bubbles in the vinyl flooring from what was certainly a break in the hot water line and pipes that clanked when the faucets were turned on, if they could be turned on.

  Fred Tolliver asked for repairs more than once.

  After a while, William Weisel’s wife, Belle, who often acted as his secretary, to save a few bucks when they didn’t want to hire a Kelly Girl, would not put through the calls.

  Fred Tolliver told her, softly and politely, “Please convey to Mr. Weisel—” and he pronounced it why-zell, “—my feelings of annoyance. Please advise him that I won’t stand for it. This is an awful thing he’s done to me. It’s not fair, it’s not right.”

  She was chewing gum. She examined her nails. She had heard this all before: married to Weisel for eleven years: all of this, many times. “Lissen, Mistuh Tollivuh, whaddaya want me to do about it. I can’t do nothing about it, y’know. lonly work here. I c’n tell ‘ill, that’s ail I c’n do, is tell ‘ill you called again.”

  “But you’re his wife! You can see how he’s robbed me!”

  “Lissen, Mistuh Tollivuh, I don’t haveta lissen to this!”

  It was the cavalier tone, the utterly uncaring tone: impertinent, rude, dismissing him as if he were a crank, a weirdo, as if he weren’t asking only for what was due him. It was like a goad to an already maddened bull.

  “This isn’t fair!”

  “I’ll tell ‘ill, I’ll tell ‘ill. Jeezus, I’m hanging up now.”

  ‘‘I’ll get even! I will! There has to be justice—”

  She dropped the receiver into its rest heavily, cracking her gum with annoyance, looking ceilingward like one massively put upon. She didn’t even bother to convey the message to her husband.

  And that was the biggest mistake of all.

  The electrons dance. The emotions sing. Four billion, resonating like insects. The hive mind of the masses. The emotional gestalt. The charge builds and builds, surging down the line seeking a focus. The weakest link through which to discharge itself. Why this focus and not that? Chance, proximity, the tiniest fracture for leakage. You, I, him, her. Everyman, Anyman; the crap shoot selection is whatever man or woman born of man and woman whose rage at that moment is that potent.

  Everyman: Fred Tolliver. Unknowing confluence.

  He pulled up at the pump that dispensed supreme, and let the Rolls idle for a moment before shutting it off. When the attendant leaned in at the window, Weisel smiled around his pipe and said, “Morning, Gene. Fill it up with extra.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Weisel,” Gene said, looking a little sad, “but I can’t sell you any gas.”

  “Why the hell not? You out?”

  “No, sir; just got our tanks topped off last night. Still can’t sell you any.”

  “Why the hell not? /”

  “Fred Tolliver doesn’t want me to.”

  Weisel stared for a long moment. He couldn’t have heard correctly. He’d been gassing up at this station for eleven years. He didn’t even know they knew that creep Tolliver. “Don’t be an asshole, Gene. Fill the damned tank!”

  “I’m sorry, sir. No gas for you.”

  “What the hell is Tolliver to you? A relative or something?”

  “No, sir. I never met him. Wouldn’t know him if he drove in right now.”

  “Then what… what the hell… I—I—”

  But nothing he could say would get Gene to pump one liter of gas into the Rolls.

  Nor would the attendants at the next six stations down the avenue. When the Rolls ran out, a mile from his office, Weisel almost had time to pull to the curb. Not quite. He ran dry in the middle of Ventura Boulevard and tried to turn toward the curb, but though traffic had been light around him just a moment before, somehow it was now packing itself bumper-to-bumper. He turned his head wildly this way and that, dumbfounded at how many cars had suddenly pulled onto the boulevard around him. He could not get out of the crunch. It wouldn’t have mattered. Improbably, for this non-business area, for the first time in his memory, there were no empty parking spaces at the curb.

  Cursing foully, he put it in neutral, rolled down the window so he could hold the steering wheel from outside, and got out of the silent Rolls. He slammed the door, cursing Fred Tolliver’s every breath, and stepped away from the car. He heard the hideous rending of irreplaceable fabric. His five hundred dollar cashmere suit jacket had been caught in the jamb.

  A large piece of lovely fabric, soft as a doe’s eye, wondrously ecru-closer-to-beige-than-fawn-colored, tailor-made for him in Paris, his most favorite jacket hung like slaughtered meat from the door. He whimpered; an involuntary sob of pain.

  Then: “What the hell is going on!” he snarled, loud enough for pedestrians to hear. It was not a question, it was an imprecation. There was no answer; none was required; but there was the sound of thunder far off across the San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles was in the grip of a two-year drought, but there was a menacing buildup of soot-gray clouds over the San Bernardinos.

  He reached in through the window, tried to turn the wheel toward the curb, but with the engine off the power steering prevented easy movement. But he strained and strained… and something went snap! in his groin. Incredible pain shot down
both legs and he bent double, clutching himself. Flashbulbs went off behind his eyes. He stumbled around in small circles, holding himself awkwardly. Many groans. Much anguish. He leaned against the Rolls, and the pain began to subside; but he had broken something down there. After a few minutes he was able to stand semierect. His shirt was drenched with sweat. His deodorant was wearing off. Cars were swerving around the Rolls, honking incessantly, drivers swearing at him. He had to get the Rolls out of the middle of the street.

  Still clutching his crotch with one hand, jacket hanging from him in tatters, beginning to smell very bad, William Weisel put his shoulder to the car, grabbed the steering wheel and strained once again; the wheel went around slowly. He readjusted himself, excruciating pain pulsing through his pelvis, put his shoulder against the window post and tried to push the behemoth. He thought of compacts and tiny sports cars. The Rolls moved a fraction of an inch, then slid back.

  Sweat trickled into his eyes, making them sting. He huffed and lunged and applied as much pressure as the pain would permit. The car would not move.

  He gave up. He needed help. Help!

  Standing in the street behind the car, clutching his groin, jacket flapping around him, smelling like something ready for disposal, he signaled wildly for assistance with his free hand. But no one would stop. Thunder rolled around the Valley, and Weisel saw what looked like a pitchfork of lightning off across the flats where Van Nuys, Panorama City and North Hollywood lay gasping for water.

  Cars thundered down on him and swerved at the very last moment, like matadors performing a complicated veronica. Several cars seemed to speed up, in fact, as they approached him, and he had the crazy impression the drivers were hunched over the wheels, lips skinned back from clenched teeth, like rabid wild things intent on killing him. Several nearly sideswiped him. He barely managed to hobble out of the way. One Datsun came so close that its side-view mirror ripped a nasty, raw gash down the entire right side of the Rolls. He cursed and gesticulated and pleaded. No one would stop. In fact, one fat woman leaned out of her window as her husband zoomed past, and she yelled something nasty. He caught only the word “Tolliver!”

  Finally, he just left it there, with the hood up like the mouth of a hungry bird.

  He walked the mile to his office, thinking he would call the Automobile Club to come and tow it to a station where it could be filled. He didn’t have the time or the patience to walk to a gas station, get a can of fuel, and return to fill the tank. During the mile-long walk he even had time to wonder if he would be able to buy a can of gasoline.

  Tolliver! God damn that old man!

  There was no one in the office.

  It took him a while to discover that fact, because he couldn’t get an elevator in his building. He stood in front of one after another of the doors, waiting for a cage to come down, but they all seemed determined to stop at the second floor. Only when other passengers waited did an elevator arrive, and then he was always in front of the wrong one. He would dash to the open door, just as the others entered, but before he could get his hand into the opening to stop the retarder bar from slamming against the frame, the door would seem to slide faster, as if it possessed a malevolent intelligence. It went on that way for ten minutes, till it became obvious to him that something was terribly, hideously, inexplicably wrong.

  So he took the stairs.

  (On the stairs he somehow slipped and skinned his right knee as one of the steps caught his heel and tore it off his right shoe.)

  Limping like a cripple, the tatters of his jacket flapping around him, clutching his groin, blood seeping through his pants to stain, he reached the eleventh floor and tried to open the door. It was, of course, for the first time in the thirty-five-year history of the building, locked.

  He waited fifteen minutes and the door suddenly opened as a secretary, carrying some papers up one flight to the Xerox center, came boiling through. He barely managed to catch the door on its pneumatic closer. He stumbled frantically onto the eleventh floor and, like a man emerging gratefully from a vast desert to find an oasis, he fled down the corridor to the offices of the Weisel Construction Corporation.

  There was no one in the office.

  It was not locked. Was, in fact, wholly unattended and wide open to thieves, if such had chosen that office for plundering. The receptionist was not there, the estimators were not there, not even Belle, his wife, who served as secretary when he didn’t want to hire a Kelly Girl, was there.

  However, she had left him a note:

  I’m leaving you. By the time you read this I will have already been to the bank and emptied the joint account. Don’t try to find me. Goodbye.

  Weisel sat down. He had the beginnings of what he was certain was a migraine, though he had never had a migraine in his life. He didn’t know whether, in the vernacular of the United States Army, to shit or go blind.

  He was not a stupid man. He had been given more than sufficient evidence that something malevolent and purely anti-Weisel was floating across the land. It was out to get him… had, in fact, already gotten him… had, in fact, made a well-ordered and extremely comfortable life turn into a nasty, untidy, noisome pile of doggie-doo.

  And it was named Tolliver.

  Fred Tolliver…! How the hell… ? Who does he know that could… ? How did he… ?

  None of the questions reached a conclusion. He could not even formulate them. Clearly, this was insanity. No one he knew, not Gene at the gas station, not the people in the cars, not Belle, not his staff, not the car door or the building’s elevators even knew who Tolliver was! Well, Belle knew, but what the hell did she have to do with him?

  Okay, so it wasn’t going so good with Belle. So they hadn’t really reconciled that innocent little thing he’d had with the lab technician at Mt. Sinai. So what? That was no reason for her to ditch a good thing. Damn that Tolliver!

  He slammed his hand onto the desk, missed slightly, caught the edge and drove a thick splinter of wood into the fat of his palm, at the same time scattering the small stack of telegrams across his lap and the floor.

  Wincing with pain, he sucked at the splinter till it came out. He used one of the telegram envelopes to blot the blood from his hand.

  Telegrams?

  He opened the first one. The Bank of America, Beverly Hills branch 213, was pleased to advise him they were calling due his loans. All five of them. He opened the second one. His broker, Shearson Hayden Stone Inc., was overjoyed to let him know that all sixteen of the stocks in which he had speculated heavily, on margin, of course, had virtually plummeted off the big board and he had to come up with seventy-seven thousand dollars by noon today or his portfolio was wiped out. It was a quarter to eleven by the wall clock. (Or had it, inexplicably, stopped?) He opened the third one. He had failed his est class and Werner Erhard himself had sent the telegram, adding in what Weisel took to be an unnecessarily gloating tone, that Weisel had “no human potential worth expanding.” He opened the fourth one. His Wassermann had come back from Mt. Sinai. It was positive. He opened the fifth one. The Internal Revenue Service was ecstatic at being able to let him know they were planning to audit his returns for the past five years, and were seeking a loophole in the tax laws that permitted them to go back further, possibly to the start of the Bronze Age.

  There were others, five or six more. He didn’t bother opening them. He didn’t want to learn who had died, or that the state of Israel had discovered Weisel was, in actuality, Bruno “The Butcher” Krutzmeier, a former prison guard at Mauthausen, personally responsible for the deaths of three thousand Gypsies, Trade Unionists, Jews, Bolsheviks and Weimar democrats, or that the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Department was gleefully taking this opportunity to advise him that the precise spot over which he sat was expected to collapse into the magma at the center of the Earth and by the way we’ve canceled your life insurance.

  He let them lie.

  The clock on the wall had, to be sure, stopped dead.

  In fac
t, the electricity had been turned off.

  The phone did not ring. He picked it up. Of course. It—like its friend the clock—was stone dead.

  Tolliver! Tolliver! How was he doing all this?

  Such things simply do not happen in an ordered universe of draglines and scoop-shovels and reinforced concrete.

  He sat and thought dark, murderous thoughts about that old sonofabitch, Fred Tolliver.

  A 747 boomed sonically overhead and the big heavy-plate window of his eleventh floor office cracked, splintered, and fell in around his feet.

  Unknowing confluence of resonating emotions, Fred Tolliver sat in his house, head in hands, miserable beyond belief, aware only of pain and anger. His cello lay on its back on the floor beside him. He had tried playing a little today, but all he could think of was that terrible man Weisel, and the terrible bathroom that was filling with water, and the terrible stomach pains his feelings of hatred were giving him.

  Electrons resonate. So do emotions. S

  peak of “damned places” and one speaks of locations where powerful emotional forces have been penned up. One cannot doubt, if one has ever been inside a prison where the massed feelings of hatred, deprivation, claustrophobia and brutalization have seeped into the very stones. One can feel it. Emotions resonate: at a political rally, a football game, an encounter group, a rock concert, a lynching.

  There are four billion people in the world. A world that has grown so complex and uncaring with systems and brutalization, of individuals because of the inertia produced by those systems’ perpetuation of self, that merely to live is to be assaulted daily by circumstances. Electrons dance. The emotions sing. Four billion, resonating like insects. The charge is built up; the surface tension is reached; the limit of elasticity is passed; the charge seeks release; the focus is sought: the weakest link, the fault line, the most tremblingly frangible element, AnyTolliver, EveryTolliver.