Until in pure resentment you longed to wallow in some filth; until it became a mark of bravado not to wash your hands.
For the statutes were quite clear—illness was a criminal offense and it was a misdemeanor to fail to carry out even the most minor precaution aimed at keeping healthy.
It started with the cradle and it extended to the grave and there was a joke, never spoken loudly (a most pathetic joke), that the only thing now left to kill a person was a compelling sense of boredom. In school the children had stars put against their names for the brushing of the teeth, for the washing of the hands, for regular toilet habits, for many other tasks. On the playground there was no longer anything so purposeless and foolish (and even criminal) as haphazard play, but instead meticulously worked out programs of calisthenics aimed at the building of the body. There were sports programs on every level, on the elementary and secondary school levels, on the college level, neighborhood and community levels, young folks, young marrieds, middle-aged and old folks levels—every kind of sports, for every taste and season. They were not spectator sports. If one knew what was good for him, he would not for a moment become anything so useless and so suspect as a sports spectator.
Tobacco was forbidden, as were all intoxicants (tobacco and intoxicants now being little more than names enacted in the laws), and only wholesome foods were allowed upon the market. There were no such things now as candy or soda pop or chewing gum. These, along with liquor and tobacco, finally were no more than words out of a distant past, something told about in bated breath by a garrulous oldster who had heard about them when he was very young, who might have experienced or heard about the last feeble struggle of defiance by the small fry mobs which had marked their final stamping out.
No longer were there candy-runners or pop bootleggers or the furtive sale in some dark alley of a pack of chewing gum.
Today the people were healthy and there was no disease—or almost no disease. Today a man at seventy was entering middle age and could look forward with some confidence to another forty years of full activity in his business or profession. Today you did not die at eighty, but barring accident, could expect to reach a century and a half.
And this was all to the good, of course, but the price you paid was high.
“Donald Parker,” said Alden.
“Yes,” said the voice from the darkness.
“I was wondering if you were still here.”
“I was about to leave. I thought you were asleep.”
“You got in,” said Alden. “All by yourself, I mean. The medics didn’t bring you.”
“All by myself,” said Parker.
“Then you know the way. Another man could follow.”
“You mean someone else could come in.”
“No. I mean someone could get out. They could backtrack you.”
“No one here,” said Parker. “I was in the peak of physical condition and I made it only by the smallest margin. Another five miles to go and I’d never made it.”
“But if one man…”
“One man in good health. There is no one here could make it. Not even myself.”
“If you could tell me the way.”
“It would be insane,” said Parker. “Shut up and go to sleep.”
Alden listened to the other moving, heading for the unseen door.
“I’ll make it,” Alden said, not talking to Parker, nor even to himself, but talking to the dark and the world the dark enveloped.
For he had to make it. He must get back to Willow Bend. There was something waiting for him there and he must get back.
Parker was gone and there was no one else.
The world was quiet and dark and dank. The quietness was so deep that the silence sang inside one’s head.
Alden pulled his arms up along his sides and raised himself slowly on his elbows. The blanket fell off his chest and he sat there on the bed and felt the chill that went with the darkness and the dankness reach out and take hold of him.
He shivered, sitting there.
He lifted one hand, cautiously, and reached for the blanket, intending to pull it up around himself. But with his fingers clutching its harsh fabric, he did not pull it up. For this, he told himself, was not the way to do it. He could not cower in bed, hiding underneath a blanket.
Instead of pulling it up, he thrust the blanket from him and his hand went down to feel his legs. They were encased in cloth—his trousers still were on him, and his shirt as well, but his feet were bare. Maybe his shoes were beside the bed, with the socks tucked inside of them. He reached out a hand and felt, groping in the dark—and he was not in bed. He was on a pallet of some sort, laid upon the floor, and the floor was earth. He could feel the coldness and the dampness of its packed surface as he brushed it with his palm.
There were no shoes. He groped for them in a wide semi-circle, leaning far out to reach and sweep the ground.
Someone had put them someplace else, he thought. Or, perhaps, someone had stolen them. In Limbo, more than likely, a pair of shoes would be quite a treasure. Or perhaps he’d never had them. You might not be allowed to take your shoes with you into Limbo—that might be part of Limbo.
No shoes, no toothbrushes, no mouth washes, no proper food, no medicines or medics. But there was a doctor here—a human doctor who had broken in, a man who had committed himself to Limbo of his own free will.
What kind of man would you have to be, he wondered, to do a thing like that? What motive would you have to have to drive you? What kind of idealism, or what sort of bitterness, to sustain you along the way? What sort of love or hate, to stay?
He sat back on the pallet, giving up his hunt for shoes, shaking his head in silent wonderment at the things a man could do. The human race, he thought, was a funny thing. It paid lip service to reason and to logic, and yet more often it was emotion and illogic that served to shape its ends.
And that, he thought, might be the reason that all the medics now were robots. For medicine was a science that only could be served by reason and by logic and there was in the robots nothing that could correspond to the human weakness of emotion.
Carefully he swung his feet off the pallet and put them on the floor, then slowly stood erect. He stood in dark loneliness and the dampness of the floor soaked into his soles.
Symbolic, he thought—unintentional, perhaps, but a perfect symbolic introduction to the emptiness of this place called Limbo.
He reached out his hands, groping for some point of reference as he slowly shuffled forward.
He found a wall, made of upright boards, rough sawn with the tough texture of the saw blade unremoved by any planing, and with uneven cracks where they had been joined together.
Slowly he felt his way along them and came at last to the place they ended. Groping, he made out that he had found a doorway, but there was no door.
He thrust a foot over the sill, seeking for the ground outside, and found it, almost even with the sill.
Quickly, as if he might be escaping, he swung his body through the door and now, for the first time, there was a break in darkness. The lighter sky etched the outline of mighty trees and at some level which stood below the point he occupied he could make out a ghostly whiteness that he guessed was ground fog, more than likely hanging low above a lake or stream.
He stood stiff and straight and took stock of himself. A little weak and giddy, and a coldness in his belly and a shiver in his bones, but otherwise all right.
He put up a hand and rubbed it along his jaw and the whiskers grated. A week or more, he thought, since he had shaved—it must have been that long, at least. He tried to drive his mind back to find when he’d last shaved, but time ran together like an oily fluid and he could make nothing of it.
He had run out of food and had gone downtown, the first time in many days—not wanting to go even then, but driven by his
hunger. There wasn’t time to go, there was time for nothing, but there came a time when a man must eat. How long had it really been, he wondered, that he’d gone without a bite to eat, glued to the task that he was doing, that important task which he’d now forgotten, only knowing that he had been doing it and that it was unfinished and that he must get back to it.
Why had he forgotten? Because he had been ill? Was it possible that an illness would make a man forget?
Let’s start, he thought, at the first beginning. Let’s take it slow and simple. One step at a time, carefully and easily; not all in a rush.
His name was Alden Street and he lived in a great, high, lonely house that his parents had built almost eighty years ago, in all its pride and arrogance, on the mound above the village. And for this building on the mound above the village, for the pride and arrogance, his parents had been hated, but for all the hate had been accepted since his father was a man of learning and of great business acumen and in his years amassed a small-sized fortune dealing in farm mortgages and other properties in Mataloosa county.
With his parents dead, the hate transferred to him, but not the acceptance that had gone hand-in-hand with hate, for although he had a learning gathered from several colleges, he put it to no use—at least to no use which had made it visible to the village. He did not deal in mortgages nor in properties. He lived alone in the great, high house that now had gone to ruin, using up, bit by bit, the money his father had laid by and left him. He had no friends and he sought no friends. There were times when he did not appear on the village streets for weeks on end, although it was known that he was at home. For watching villagers could see the lights burning in the high and lonesome house, come nights.
At one time the house had been a fine place, but now neglect and years had begun to take their toll. There were shutters that hung crooked and a great wind years before had blown loosened bricks from the chimney top and some of the fallen bricks still lay upon the roof. The paint had peeled and powdered off and the front stoop had sunk, its foundation undermined by a busily burrowing gopher and the rains that followed. Once the lawn had been neatly kept, but now the grass grew rank and the shrubs no longer knew the shears and the trees were monstrous growths that almost screened the house from view. The flower beds, cherished by his mother, now were gone, long since choked out by weeds and creeping grass.
It was a shame, he thought, standing in the night. I should have kept the place the way my mother and my father kept it, but there were so many other things.
The people in the village despised him for his shiftlessness and his thoughtlessness which allowed the pride and arrogance to fall into ruin and decay. For hate as they might the arrogance, they still were proud of it. They said he was no good. They said that he was lazy and that he didn’t care.
But I did care, he thought. I cared so very deeply, not for the house, not for the village, not even for myself. But for the job—the job that he had not selected, but rather that had been thrust upon him.
Or was it a job, he wondered, so much as a dream?
Let’s start at the first beginning, he had told himself, and that was what he had meant to do, but he had not started at the first beginning; he had started near the end. He had started a long way from the first beginning.
He stood in the darkness, with the treetops outlined by the lighter sky and the white ghost fog that lay close above the water, and tried to swim against the tide of time back to that first beginning, back to where it all had started. It was far away, he knew, much farther than he’d thought, and it had to do, it seemed, with a late September butterfly and the shining gold of falling walnut leaves.
He had been sitting in a garden and he had been a child. It was a blue and wine-like autumn day and the air was fresh and the sun was warm, as anything only can be fresh and warm when one is very young.
The leaves were falling from the tree above in a golden rain and he put out his hands to catch one of the falling leaves, not trying to catch any single one of them, but holding out his hands and knowing that one of them would drift into a palm—holding out his hands with an utter childish faith, using up in that single instant the only bit of unquestioning faith that any man can know.
He closed his eyes and tried to capture it again, tried to become in this place of distant time the little boy he had been on that day the gold had rained down.
He was there, but it was hazy and it was not bright and the clearness would not come—for there was something happening, there was a half-sensed shadow out there in the dark and the squish of wet shoes walking on the earth.
His eyes snapped open and the autumn day was gone and someone was moving toward him through the night, as if a piece of the darkness had detached itself and had assumed a form and was moving forward.
He heard the gasp of breath and the squish of shoes and then the movement stopped.
“You there,” said a sudden, husky voice. “You standing there, who are you?”
“I am new here. My name is Alden Street.”
“Oh, yes,” the voice said. “The new one. I was coming up to see you.”
“That was good of you,” said Alden.
“We take care of one another here,” the voice said. “We care for one another. We are the only ones there are. We really have to care.”
“But you…”
“I am Kitty,” said the voice. “I’m the one who fed you soup.
She struck the match and held it cupped within her hands as if she sought to protect the tiny flame against the darkness.
Just the three of us, thought Alden—the three of us arraigned against the dark. For the blaze was one of them, it had become one with them, holding life and movement, and it strove against the dark.
He saw that her fingers were thin and sensitive, delicate as some old vase fashioned out of porcelain.
She bent with the flame still cupped within her hand and touched it to a candle stub thrust into a bottle that, from the height of it, stood upon a table, although one could not see the table.
“We don’t often have a light,” said Kitty. “It is a luxury we seldom can afford. Our matches are so few and the candles are so short. We have so little here.”
“There is no need,” said Alden.
“But there is,” said Kitty. “You are a new one here. We cannot let you go stumbling in the dark. For the first little while we make a light for you.”
The candle caught and guttered, sending flickering shadows fleeing wildly. Then it steadied and its feeble glow cut a circle in the dark.
“It will soon be morning,” Kitty told him, “and then the day will come and the light of day is worse than the darkness of the night. For in the day you see and know. In the dark, at least, you can think that it is not too bad. But this is best of all—a little pool of light to make a house inside the darkness.”
She was not young, he saw. Her hair hung in dank strings about her face and her face was pinched and thin and there were lines upon it. But there was, he thought, back of the stringiness and the thinness and the lines, a sense of some sort of eternal youthfulness and vitality that nothing yet had conquered.
The pool of light had spread a little as the flame had settled down and now he could see the place in which they stood.
It was small, no more than a hut. There was the pallet on the floor and the blanket where he’d tossed it from him. There was a crazy-legged table upon which the candle stood and two sawed blocks of wood to serve as chairs. There were two plates and two white cups standing on the table.
Cracks gaped between the upright boards that formed the walls of the hut and in other places knots had dried and fallen out, leaving peepholes to the world outside.
“This was your place,” he said. “I would not have inconvenienced you.”
“Not my place,” she said. “Harry’s place, but it’s all right with Harry.”
“You can’t,” she said. “He’s dead. It is your place now.”
“I won’t need a place for long,” said Alden. “I won’t be staying here. I’ll be going back.”
She shook her head.
“Is there anyone who’s tried?”
“Yes. They’ve all come back. You can’t beat the swamp.”
“Doc got in.”
“Doc was big and strong and well. And there was something driving him.”
“There’s something driving me as well.”
She put up a hand and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “No one can talk you out of this? You mean what you are saying?”
“I can’t stay,” he said.
“In the morning,” she told him, “I’ll take you to see Eric.”
The candle flame was yellow as it flickered in the room and again the golden leaves were raining down. The garden had been quiet and he’d held out his hands, palms upward, so the leaves would fall in them. Just one leaf, he thought—one leaf is all I want, one leaf out of all the millions that are falling.
He watched intently and the leaves went past, falling all about him, but never a one to fall into his hands. Then, suddenly, there was something that was not a leaf—a butterfly that came fluttering like a leaf from nowhere, blue as the haze upon the distant hills, blue as the smoky air of autumn.
For an instant the butterfly poised above his outstretched palms and then mounted swiftly upward, flying strongly against the downward rain of leaves, a mote of blue winging in the goldenness.
He watched it as it flew, until it was lost in the branches of the tree, and then glanced back at his hands and there was something lying in his palm, but it was not a leaf.
The Ghost of a Model T: And Other Stories Page 7