What I did was to get away from that summer resort—and Judith. She was the sort to stick to a man, no matter what. I wanted to find out “what.”
She didn’t want me to go. She was definite about it. “Something’s happened to you, Woodie,” she said quietly as she systematically threw out all the clothes I put in my suitcase, just as systematically as I put them in. “I told you before I don’t like it. Isn’t that enough to make you stop it?”
“I’m not doing anything I can stop,” I said.
“I would stop,” she said illogically, “if you asked me to.”
“I told you, darling—I’m not doing anything. Things happen, that’s all.”
“Matter,” she said suddenly, planting herself in front of me, “can be neither created nor destroyed.”
I sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed. She immediately sat beside, on, and around me. “You been reading books,” I said.
“Well, what about it? You’re worried because things happen. You made a rock vanish. But you can’t destroy matter. It has to turn into energy or something. So you just couldn’t have done it.”
“But I did.”
“That doesn’t matter. It isn’t logic,” she said, in a quod erat demonstrandum tone.
“You’re overlooking one thing, irresistible creature,” I said, pushing her away from me, “and that is the fact that I don’t believe that precept about the indestructibility of matter, and never did. Therefore matter can be destroyed. Matter’s just a figment of my imagination, anyway.”
She opened and closed her lovely mouth twice and then said, “But in school—”
“Damn school!” I snapped. “Do I have to prove it to you?” I looked about the room for demonstration material, but couldn’t see anything offhand I could do without. I was travelling light. My eyes fell on her low-heeled pumps. “Look—you’ve lost your shoes someplace, I’ll wager.”
“I have not. I—eek!”
“—and your socks—”
“Woodie!”
“And that cute little blue beret—”
“Woodie, if you—”
“—what! No sunsuit?”
I suppose I went too far. As far as that was concerned, I should have realized that she didn’t need one. As for those—well, how was I supposed to know she didn’t use ’em?… I think that this was the only time I ever consciously did anything constructive with my creative imagination. Once somebody gave me a shapeless, hooded, scratchy burnoose from North Africa. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t comfortable, but it was the most all-fired enveloping garment ever devised by the mind of man. But she didn’t deserve this kind of treatment. When I thought “Cover up” I thought “Burnoose” automatically …
She clutched it around her. Now, get this. She didn’t say, “You’re a beast.” Or “heel.” Or “Schlemiel.” She said, “I think you’re wonderful, Woodie.” And she ran out, crying.
I sat there for a long time and then I finished my packing.
When I got back to the city and into my room I felt much better. The way I was now, I had to have things around me that I knew and was used to. They lent solidity to a quivering old universe. As long as they stood firm, the universe was safe.
My room was pretty nice. If you came to see me, we could drink coffee, if you didn’t mind getting up every time I reached for the sugar. Small. The carpet was on the wall and there was a Navajo rug on the floor. Couple of pastels and a nice charcoal of Judith. Indirect lighting, which meant a disk of black cardboard hanging by rubber bands from the otherwise unshaded bulb. Books. Bed. A radio that was going twenty-four hours a day.
Why should there be only twenty-four hours in a day?
I throttled the thought before it got anywhere.
I switched on both lights, the radio, and the hotplate under my coffee brewer. That humming noise was the meter turning like a phonograph playing the “Landlord’s Blues” (the utilities were included in the three fifty a week).
While I was hanging up my coat, Drip burst in, bellowing “Hiyah, Woodie? Hiyah, pal, back huh. What happened, huh?”
I closed the closet, spun around and gave him the old one-two on the mouth and chin, planted a foot in his stomach, and kicked him out in the hall. Opposite my door is what was first a crack, then a dent, now a hollow, where the Drip had continually hit it. I didn’t have anything against him, but I’d asked him, I’d asked him time and time again, to knock before he came in.
As soon as I had the door closed he bumped timidly upon it.
“Who is it?”
“Me?”
I opened up. “Oh. Hello, Drip.”
He came in and started his greetings and salutations all over again. Poor old Drip. He’d been pushed around by half the population from Eastport to Sandy Hook, and if he minded it, it never showed. He had a voice which was squeaky without being high, a curving stance that was apprehensive rather than round-shouldered, a complexion which was more pink than healthy, shoulders which were much broader than they were strong, and an untruthful aggressive chin. The guy was whacked but harmless.
He once asked me what I thought of him and I said, “You’re the Creator’s transition between a hypothesis and a theory.” He’s still trying to figure it out … if he’s where he can figure anything.
Drip was useful, though. I don’t care who you are, if you are with the Drip, you feel superior. So he was useful. The fact that he felt correspondingly inferior was his hard luck. It was no one’s fault that he pushed an eight-ball ahead of him through life. Certainly not his.
He talked like this:
“Gee? Woodie? It’s good to see you again? What are you going to do. Go back to work. Without? Finishing your vacation. Gee? Something must have. Did you fight. With Judith? Gosh … everything happens to you?”
“Do you want some coffee and stop crossquestioning me,” I said.
“I’m sorry.” The phrase was a reflex with him.
“What’ve you been doing with yourself, Drip?”
“Nothing? Nothing? Why are you. Back, Woodie?”
“Well, I’ll tell you.” I scratched my head. “Oh, hell. Never mind. Drip, I’m going to grab an oil can.”
“Sh-ship out. On a tanker again? Oh, Woodie, you can’t. Do that? I thought you’d quit going to sea.”
“I can do anything,” I said with conviction. “I’m—jittery around here, thassall.”
He looked at the Arabian prayer-rug on the wall and the way it was reflected in the big mirror across the room. “If you go, could I have your room,” he whispered as if he were asking me to die for him.
“No, boy. I want you to come with me.”
“What?” he screamed. “Me. On a ship. Oh? No! Nonono!”
Looking at Drip, putting sugar in his coffee, I felt suddenly sorry for him. I wanted to help him. I wanted him to share the exultance I had known in the days before I met Judith and had dropped the anchor.
“Sure. Why not, Drip? I hit my first ship when I was sixteen, and I got treated all right.”
“Oh, yes,” he said without sarcasm, “you can do all sorts of things. Not me? I could never do the things you’ve done?”
“Nuts,” I said. Being with Drip always did one of two things: made me think how wonderful I was, or how pathetic he was. This was the latter case. In trying to help him out a little, I completely forgot my new potentialities. That’s where I made my mistake. “Look,” I said, “why is it that you’re afraid of the ghost of your own shadow? I think it’s because you refuse to make the effort to overcome your fear. If you’re afraid of the dark, turn the light out. If you’re afraid of falling, jump off a roof—just a little garage roof some place. If you’re afraid of women, stick around them. And if you’re afraid to ship out, for gosh sakes come along with me. I’ll get a quartermaster’s job and you can be ordinary seaman on my watch. I’ll show you the ropes. But on any account, face your fear.”
“That’s the way you do things, isn’t it?” he said almost adoringly.
“Well, sure. And you could if you tried. Come on, Drip. Make an effort.”
His forehead wrinkled up and he said, “You don’t know the kind of things I’m afraid of.”
“Name ’em!”
“You’d laugh.”
“No!”
“Well, like now, there’s a—a— right outside the door. Oh, it’s horrible!”
I got up and opened the door. “There’s nothing there but some dirt that should have been swept up three days ago.”
“You see?” he said. “You want me to see things your way and you can’t begin to see the things I see.” And he began to cry.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Drip. Cut it out. I can see everything you can. I can—” Why—of course I could! Drip was a part of—of everything. His ideas, his way of thought were a part of everything. Why not see what he saw? “Drip, I’ll see things the way you do. I will! I’ll see everything with your eyes. I’ll show you!”
And immediately the room began to shake itself; things wavered uncomfortably; then I realized that Drip was astigmatic. I also realized with a powerful shock that I had been nearly colorblind, compared with the vividness with which he saw things. Whew!
Then I became conscious of the terrors—the million unidentifiable fears with which the poor dope had been living, day and night.
The ceiling was going to crush me. The floor was going to rise up and strike me. There was something in the closet, and it would jump out at me any second. I was going to swell inside my clothes and choke to death—I was going to go blind any day now—I was going to be run over if I went outside, suffocate if I stayed in. My appendix was going to burst some night when I was alone and I would die in agony. I was going to catch some terrible disease. People hated me. And laughed … I was alone. I was on the outside looking in. I was on the inside looking on. I hated myself.
Gradually the impact of the thing faded while the horror grew. I glanced at Drip; he was still crying into his coffee, but at least he was not trembling. I was trembling … poor, scared, morbid, dismal Drip was, in that moment, a tower of strength.
I must have stood there for quite a while, pulling out of it. I had to do something! I couldn’t shrink against Drip! I had my self-respect to think of. I—
“Wh-what was that you said about … outside the door?”
He started, looked up at me, pointed wordlessly at the door. I reached out and opened it.
It was out there, crunched in a corner in the dimness, waiting for someone to come along. I slammed the door and leaned against it, mopping my forehead with my sleeve.
“Is it out there?” whispered Drip.
I nodded. “It’s … covered with mouths,” I gasped. “It’s all wet!”
He got up and peeked out. Then he laughed. “Oh, that’s just the little one. He won’t hurt you. Wait till you see the others. Gee? Woodie. You’re the first one who ever saw them, besides me. Come on? I’ll show you more.”
He got up and went out, waiting just outside for me. I realized now why he had always refused to precede me through a door. When he went out he trod on a writhing thing and killed it so it would not creep up my legs. I realized that I must have done it for him many times in the past without realizing it.
We came to the top of the stairs. They wound away from under my feet. They looked fragile. They looked dangerous. But it seemed all right as long as he led the way. He had a certain control over the thousands of creeping, crawling, fluttering things around us. He passed the little landing and something tentacular melted into the wall. Little slimy things slid out from under his feet and reappeared just behind mine. I pressed very close to him, crushed by the power of hate which oozed from them.
When we reached his room, which was just above mine, he put his hand on the doorknob and turned to me. “We have to burst in,” he whispered, “there’s a big one that hides here. We can frighten him away if we come suddenly. Otherwise he might not know we were inside. And if he found us in there he would. Eat us?”
Drip turned the knob silently and hurled the door open. A livid mass of blood and blackness that filled the whole room shrank into itself, melting down like ice in a furnace. When it was in midair, and about the size of a plum, it dropped squashily to the floor and rolled under the bed. “You see,” said Drip with conviction. “If we went in quietly we would shrink down. With it?”
“My God!” I said hoarsely. “Let’s get out of here!”
“Oh, it’s all right,” he said almost casually. “As long as we know exactly what time it is, he can’t come back until we go.” I understood now why Drip had his wall covered with clocks.
I was going to sink down on a chair because I felt a little weak, but I noticed that the seat of the straight-back he had—it was red plush—was quivering. I pointed to it.
“What? Oh, don’t mind that,” said Drip. “I think it’s stuffed with spiders. They haven’t bitten anyone yet, but soon they will. Burst the seat. And swarm all over the room?”
I looked at him. “This is hor—Drip! What are you grinning about?”
“Grinning. I’m sorry? You see, I never saw anyone frightened before by my things?”
“Your things?”
“Certainly. I made them up.”
I have never been so furious. That he should terrify me—me—with figments of his phobiacal imagination; make me envy him for knowing his way about his terrifying world; put me in an inferior position—it was unthinkable! It was—impossible!
“Why did you make them up?” I asked him with frozen intensity.
His answer, of all things in the fluid universe, was the most rational. I have thought of it since. He said:
“I made them up because I was afraid of things. Ever since I could remember. So I didn’t know what it was I was afraid of, and I had to make up something to fear. If I didn’t do that I would go crazy …”
I backed away from him, mouthing curses, and the lines of the room straightened out as I regained my own point of view. The colors dulled to my old familiar tones, and Drip, that improbable person, that hypothesis, faded out, lingering a moment like a double exposure, and then vanished.
I went downstairs. Drip was better off nonexistent, I thought as I tuned out a jam session. He was a subversive influence in this—my universe. He was as horrible a figment of imagination as was that thing in the hall of his. And just as unbelievable … I got me Tchaikovsky’s B minor concerto on the radio because that’s the way I felt, and I lay down on the bed. Jive would have driven me morbid, because Drip had been a hep-cat, and I didn’t want to think of him somehow.
Footsteps came soft-shoeing up the corridor and stopped outside my door. “Woodie—”
“Oh, damn,” I said. “Come in, Judith.”
She passed the knob from one hand to the other as she entered, looking at me.
“I must be quite a guy to have such a lovely shadow.”
“Every man in the world seems to be after me,” she said, “and I’m stupid enough to follow you. I came back to say goodbye.”
“Where are you going?”
“No place.”
“Where am I going?”
“You’ve already gone.”
“I … Where?”
“Here. From the camp. You forgot to kiss me before you left. You can’t get away with that.”
“Oh.” I got up and kissed her. “Now why did you follow me?” “I was afraid.”
“What; that I’d jump a ship?”
She nodded. “That and … I dunno. I was afraid, thassall.”
“I promised you I’d stay ashore, didn’t I?”
“You’re such an awful liar,” she reminded me without malice.
“Heh!” I said. “Always?”
“As long as I’ve known you—”
“I love you.”
“—except when you say that. Woodie, that’s one thing I have to be sure of.”
“I know how it is, insect.” I let her go and reached for my hat.
“Let’s eat.”
I remember that meal. It was the last meal I ate on earth. Minestrone, chicken cacciatore and black coffee at a little Italian kitchen. And over the coffee I explained it to her again, the thing that had happened to me.
“Woodie, you’re impossible!”
“Could be. Could be. I’ve found a lot of things impossible in the last couple of days. They don’t exist any more. Drip, for instance.”
“Drip? What happened?”
I told her. She began putting on her hat.
“Wait,” I said. “I haven’t finished my coffee.”
“Do you realize what you’re telling me? Woodie, if you’re wrong about all this, you don’t know it—you believe it—and you’re insane. If you’re right—you murdered that boy!”
“I did nothing of the kind. I did nothing of any kind. Damn it, darling, I know this is a little hard to take. But the universe is my dream, and that’s … all. Drip couldn’t have existed—you told me that yourself when you first met him.”
“That was strictly a gag,” she said, and stood up.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.” She sounded tired. “Anywhere … away from you, Woodie. Let me know when you’ve got all this out of your head. I’ve never heard anything so … Oh, well. And anyway, there’s a natural explanation for everything that’s happened.”
“Sure. I’ve given you one and you won’t believe it.”
She threw up her hands in what I saw was very real disgust. I caught her hand as she turned away. “Judith!” She stood there not looking at me, not trying to get away, simply not caring. “You don’t mean this, Judy kid. You can’t. You’re the only thing I can believe in now.”
“When you ‘dreamed’ me up, Woodie, you let me have too much discernment to stay in love with a … a lunatic,” she said quietly. She slipped her hand out of mine and went away from there.
I sat still for a long time watching tomato sauce seep into a piece of Italian bread. “When it gets to that pore in the bread,” I told myself, “she’ll come back.” A little later, “When it gets to the crust—” It took quite a while, and she still didn’t come back. I tried to laugh it off, but laughing hurt my face. I paid my way out and drifted down the street. I found me a ginmill and I got good … and … plastered.
The Ultimate Egoist Page 32