by Jerry
“Mr. Hagendorn will of course be disappointed,” he said. “He told me how much he looked forward to meeting you both. But at least I am bringing the young lady.”
He was dressed in the same loose-fitting white pants, like some ancient man of medicine—they even had a drawstring, Philip noticed—but he’d added, over his white shirt, a warm alpine jacket, and his bald head was covered by an old-fashioned homburg. Far from being unfit for a protracted uphill walk, he looked younger and more powerful than he had by the fireside last night. It was clear he belonged on the mountain.
Margaret carried her bathing suit wrapped in a towel. A camera dangled from a strap around her neck. “I’ll bet the view’s wonderful from up there,” she said, kissing Philip goodbye. She blew him a second goodbye kiss as she and her companion started gaily up the trail.
The air had grown chillier as they climbed, but their exertions kept them warm. The walk was proving more arduous than Margaret had expected. “How in the world did your boss ever manage to build a house up here?” she had asked half an hour ago, as they’d pushed their way up a steep section of path near the foot of the mountain.
“There’s a narrow road that winds around the other side,” Laszlo had said, pausing to tilt back his hat and wipe the sweat from his bald head. “We’re going up the back way. You’ll find, however, that it’s faster.”
He had sounded friendly enough, but since then they’d exchanged barely a word. As the day had grown colder, so had his mood; he’d become silent, preoccupied, as if listening for voices from the mountain, and when she’d asked him how much farther it was, he’d simply nodded toward the north and said, “Soon.”
They had been on the trail for nearly an hour, following a zigzag course up the densely wooded slope. It was plain that Laszlo had misled her—or perhaps he had misled himself as well: though he continued, even now, to walk steadily and purposefully, with no sign of hesitation, she was beginning to wonder if he really knew the way as well as he’d claimed.
By the time the trail grew level, the trees had begun to thin out, and when she turned to look behind her she could see, in the spaces between them, the distance they had come. Below them spread the undulating green of the valley, though the inn and its grounds were lost from sight around the other side of the mountain. They were midway up the slope now, following a circular route toward the northern face. Ahead of her Laszlo paused, staring uphill past a faraway outcropping of rocks, and said, “We’re nearly there. It’s just past that curve of land.”
Shielding her eyes, she searched the horizon for a glimpse of rooftops. Suddenly she squinted. “Who’s that?”
“Where?”
“Up among those rocks.” She pointed, then felt foolish; for a second she’d thought she’d seen a small black figure merge with the shadow of a boulder as it fell upon the uneven ground. But now, as she looked more closely, she could see that the ground lay covered in ragged clumps of undergrowth, and that it was this, tossed by the wind, that had moved.
“Come,” said Laszlo, “the house is just ahead, and we will want to be back down before dark.”
Philip sat impatiently on the back porch, leafing through one of the previous winter’s ski magazines while waiting for the phone inside to ring. The potted geraniums blew softly in the breeze from off the mountain. He found it absurdly unnecessary to keep assuring himself that Margaret would be all right with Laszlo, but he continued to assure himself of that just the same.
He looked up to find himself no longer alone. The elderly woman from last night had seated herself in a chair nearby and had taken out some knitting. She nodded to him. “First time here?”
“Yes,” he said, automatically raising his voice on the assumption that she might be hard of hearing. “Just a weekend vacation.”
“I’ve been coming here for more than fifty years,” she said. “My husband and I first came here in the summer of 1935. He passed on in ‘64, but I keep coming back. I’ve seen this inn change hands seven times.” She gave a little cackle. “Seven times!”
Philip laid aside the magazine. “And does the place look different now?” he asked politely.
“The inn, no. The area is different. There’ve been a lot of new people coming in, and a lot of the old ones gone.” She looked as if she were about to enumerate them, but at that moment the screen door opened and Mrs. Hartley emerged, an account book in her hand. She saw Philip and smiled.
“Still waiting for your call?”
“Yes,” he said. “I don’t know what’s keeping that kid. I’ll hear the phone out here, won’t I?”
“Sure, but somebody’s on it now, and it looks like they may take a while. I’ll try to hurry ‘em up.”
Philip frowned. “How about the phone in the office?”
“Well, my husband’s using it right now. He’s going over the orders with our supplier down in Concord. But don’t worry, it won’t take long.”
“The problem is,” said Philip, with growing impatience, “my son may be trying to reach me at this very moment. Couldn’t you transfer his call to a phone upstairs? I could wait in one of the vacant rooms.”
She shook her head. “There aren’t any phones up there. The two down here are the only ones we’ve got.”
“But that’s impossible,” said Philip. He could feel his heart beginning to beat faster.
“Impossible! That big fellow, Laszlo, has a phone in his room. I heard him just last night, and the night before. He was talking with someone named Hagendorn. I heard him.” Yet even as the words rushed from his lips, he knew that what he’d said was false; that it was not impossible at all; that the only voice he’d heard had been Laszlo’s. For all he knew, the man might have been speaking to the walls, the air, the empty room.
They had a word for people like that, people who talked to themselves. Psychos.
“That’s where I know him from!” the old woman was saying. “He was Hagendorn’s man. I knew I recognized him.” She turned to Philip. “The person you were talking to last night, he used to be a kind of—oh, I don’t know what you’d call him. A kind of valet. He worked for some dreadful man who lived up on the mountain. Bringing women up there for him, and I don’t know what else. There were all kinds of stories.”
“That’s right,” said Philip, eagerly grasping at any confirmation of the facts, however unsavory. “This guy Hagendorn. He’s apparently got some sort of opulent villa up there.”
The woman’s eyes widened. “But that house burned down in 1939. I remember it—some kind of terrible explosion. Something to do with an oil tank. That man Hagendorn was burned to death, I remember distinctly, and everyone said it was just as well.” She shook her head. “There’s nothing up there now. There hasn’t been a house there for years.”
“Honestly, Laszlo,” called Margaret, “are you sure we haven’t come too far? This can’t be the way.”
They had passed the outcropping of rocks and had wandered out onto a narrow tableland overgrown by scrub pine and weeds. Ahead of them, curving against the mountain’s face, stood what looked like a low broken-down stone wall half concealed by vegetation. Beyond it the pines appeared to be anchored in nothing but blue sky, for at their base the land dropped away into a haphazard tumble of boulders a thousand feet below, as if giant hands had sheared away part of the mountain.
Laszlo was well in front of her, his pace here grown more eager, while she, fearful of the drop, walked slowly now, eyes wary. With an impatient wave of his hand he motioned for her to join him.
“Laszlo,” she said breathlessly, as she caught up with him, “where are we? Where is Mr. Hagendorn’s house?”
“What’s that? The house?” He pursed his lips and looked blank for a moment. Absently he gazed around him, like one seeing this place for the first time. Suddenly his gaze grew fixed; she noticed that he was staring past her feet. “Why, here’s the house,” he said in a small voice, as if explaining to a child. “It’s right here.”
She follow
ed his gaze. He was pointing directly into the gorge.
She stepped back in confusion. He’s only joking, she told herself, but her stomach refused to believe her. She felt his hand fall lightly on her shoulder.
“I suppose,” he said, “that first you’ll want to see the pool.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, trying vainly to twist away. “Yes, show me the pool, Laszlo.”
For a moment his arm dropped from her shoulder and she was free; but already he had seized her hand and was dragging her implacably forward.
“Come,” he said. “There’s so much to see.” Smiling, he gestured at what lay before them, a vast cavity in the rock, deep as a pit, cut sharply as the lip of a monstrous pitcher into the precipice’s edge. Laszlo tugged her closer. With a gasp she realized that its three stony sides were squared off, as regular as the walls of some enormous dungeon, but cracked and weathered now, patch-worked with lichen and moss—ancient. The bottom was a mass of weed-grown rubble opening onto the sky.
“And here,” he said, “we have the pool.”
Her wrist ached as he urged her to its brink. The ground seemed to shift beneath her as an edge of cloud swept past the sun. She took an unsteady step backward.
“No,” he said in a chiding voice, “you can’t leave now. You’ll have to stay the night.”
Drawn forward, she peered into the shadowy depths. Within them, as the light changed, something stirred, black as soot, like a stick of charred wood.
“The tiles are imported,” he was saying. “No expense was spared.”
She felt his free hand close tightly on her shoulder. The ground was spinning beneath her feet, the shadows rising to claim her.
“And now,” he said, “it is time to meet Mr. Hagendorn.”
Neither of the Hartleys had been of any help, beyond locating, in one of their local guidebooks, a map of the hiking trails that crisscrossed the mountain; but the old lady, lips quivering with concentration, had been able to make an educated guess where the villa had stood, just above a jagged grey line identified on the map as Romney Gorge. Judging by the map, it seemed, despite Laszlo’s claim, the climb of at least an hour; but Philip made it in half that—in time to see a burly figure in hospital whites struggling with a young woman at the top of the trail, by the edge of a cleft cut deep into the rock and opening onto the sky.
He raced toward them with what little strength remained, knowing that, days later and far away, he’d be able to tell his son the story of how one of the pair was snatched back from the abyss, while the other went to meet his master alone.
MANNEQUINS
Charles Oberndorf
Ivy left work early the day the thing, the robot, I escaped. After six hours of typing insurance claims into a VDT, with two ten-minute breaks and a I half-hour lunch break, her eyes had begun to hurt her, as they sometimes did. She felt that sluggish, don‘t-want-to-do-anything feeling she had sometimes felt after watching the soaps all afternoon those times she had been laid off. It was only a few times a month when her eyes hurt. It used to be that her eyes always felt strained when she had gotten out of secretarial school and started doing temp work (there had been a shortage of jobs back then, too). It seemed like every year or two she had had to go out and buy new, thicker glasses. But now her eyes didn’t hurt so frequently, and the bosses let her go home early whenever her eyes got really bad. The union was fighting for even better glare-prevention devices on the screen, and the bosses responded that they were following the standards—adjustable screens, no monitoring bells, frequent rest breaks—that the union itself had set up umpety-ump years ago. Ivy didn’t pay much attention anymore to the fighting.
So she took the Metro home early that day. The street and all its little block houses seemed empty. The kids were in school, the husbands and wives (if they still lived together) out working or looking for work. There were a few wives at home: cleaning, reading, or watching talk shows while preparing dinner; sometimes, looking for work could be more tiring than living with one small salary. And there were women who said it was wrong to work, at least while there were kids. They sometimes made Ivy feel real guilty; she had had to put Claire in a child-care center. But Ivy had never had the money for a good one, even with the tax credits. She had been working temp back then, and they weren’t paying benefits to temps in those days.
Ivy’s stream of thought, the daydreaming that sometimes got her in trouble at work, was interrupted by a human figure moving toward her. It was walking awkwardly, almost as if it were limping. It looked like something out of a movie. The lone figure—a gunfighter or a soldier coming home—walking down an empty street, everything much too still beneath the late afternoon sun. Then Ivy realized that the figure was female, a woman wearing blue-gray slacks and tunic that looked too thin for the cool April day. As she continued approaching, Ivy became aware of how dirty and tom the clothes were, then how plasticky and unhuman her skin was. It must be one of those robots that they had in fancy restaurants, the kind people went to just so they could say a robot had served them. Ivy wasn’t quite sure how she felt; it was sort of like being a rabbit or some other animal that stands in the road, mesmerized by the bright headlights of an oncoming car. One part of her, the overcautious part, told her to run. Instead, she said, “Hello,” her voice sounding tiny in the empty street. And now she stepped forward. The thing stopped and stepped back, almost stumbling. It seemed to react as if it were scared.
“Who are you?” Ivy said, not knowing how to keep the suspicion and the tremor out of her voice.
The thing didn’t respond. Ivy couldn’t remember if the robot waiters could talk; the computers on TV did. The thing took another step back.
“I won’t hurt you,” Ivy said, and that’s when the thing’s movements, her own words, all of it made it seem sort of funny. But not funny enough to laugh.
“They killed my family,” the thing said. The squeaky, artificial voice was such a surprise that Ivy didn’t quite understand what it had said. “I left the factory; they probably want me back.”
“What? Who in heaven’s name are you talking about?”
“The people who built us and put us in cars. They killed my family. That is what it is called, is it not?”
Ivy could never figure out exactly why she took it (no, her) in, but she felt like she’d had no choice. She found herself chatting incessantly to it, as if the robot were Rosa Martinez or old Mrs. Buloski stopping in for a visit. Ivy knew that she talked on forever only when she was nervous or didn’t really know what to say. She left the thing behind in the cramped living room, looking back every now and then to make sure it didn’t move, and went through her bedroom dresser until she found one of her new flower-print shirts. She turned her back, because she really didn’t want to see, when the thing took off its tom, grimy shirt and put on Ivy’s. Ivy then asked it (no, her) to sit on the sofa. Ivy sat in a nearby chair, and the robot began to tell her all about what had happened: the Testing Center, the accident, the escape. And the thing started calling Ivy by her name.
I do not know the manner in which to write this account. After two weeks of living with Ivy and Claire, I still do not know how my perception of the environment and actions is similar to or different from theirs. After two weeks of reading their books, I still do not know how to choose words accurately.
I can write “I feel.” When my skin touches something, the nerve endings send electrical impulses that are registered and recorded in my memory. I can feel the smoothness of the table-top; I can feel the rough fabric of the couch. Certain small sensations are too light to be sensed by my nerves; I have never felt the breeze that Ivy says she likes to feel brush lightly across her face.
I can write “I feel sad,” but I do not comprehend that kind of feel. My insides do not respond with any sort of sensation to a gentle touch, as do the insides of the women in Ivy’s books. My hand does not lightly rub my belly, the way Claire’s will rub her belly in what she says is her instinctive way of comforting
the child within.
Claire says to Ivy that I have no feelings, that I am a machine, the way a dishwasher is a machine, just more complex. Ivy tells her she is wrong. Ivy says that I do have feelings. If I did not have feelings, I would not have fled, and I would not have hidden from their search.
If I could not feel, I would not write out this account of why I fled and why I will return. And I will most probably be terminated without ever knowing what it means to feel. I will never be able to write: “I feel sad.”
Or: “I feel happy.”
Or: “I feel proud.”
It was strange to hear it—the thing, the robot—call her Ivy. The only people who called her Ivy were the girls at the office. Her bosses usually called her Ms. Hart. Most of her relatives had called her Curls—a childhood name—rather than Ivy, but most of them didn’t live in Detroit anymore. Her husband. Jerry—who had been killed several years ago when an automated factory’s computer system crashed and set everything crazy—rarely had called her by name. And Jerry hadn’t been the type for pet names. Sometimes Ivy had wished he’d say her name more often. There were times he’d say it, and it would set off little, sparkling waterfalls within her, making her feel warm and tingly in a way that his touch, after the years and monotony, no longer could. Her daughter, Claire, of course, called her Mother. Claire used to call her Mom, but somewhere along in junior high Claire had become so serious and begun to call her parents Mother and Father, Only after her father’s death had Claire begun to call her Mom again, and then only when protesting something in a whiny adolescent voice or when Ivy had done something nice to surprise her.
And so it was spooky to hear this squeaky, artificial voice call her Ivy. And then there was the way it looked. It sort of reminded Ivy of those dummies you used to see modeling clothes in store windows (now you just saw people modeling in the windows because everybody needed jobs), or like those dummies they used to put in cars to see what would happen when one car crashed into another or if one car ran full speed into a brick wall. They used to show movies of that when Ivy was learning how to drive. She knew it was silly, but Ivy used to feel sorry for the dummies, especially when their heads flew off and their eyes looked so empty .