I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

by Ellison, Harlan;

  One of the assassins had pulled a thin, desperately–sharp stiletto, and Paul had grappled with the man interminably, slashing at his flesh and the sensitive folds of skin between fingers, till the very essence, the very reality of death by knife became a gagging tremor in his sleeping body. It was as though the sense, the feel of death–in–progress was evoked. More than a dream, it had been a new threshold of anguish, a vital new terror which he would ever after have to support. It was something new to live with. Until finally he had locked the man’s hands about the hilt and driven the slim blade into his stomach, deep and with difficulty, feeling it puncture and gash through organs and resisting, rubbery organs. Then pulling it away from the mortally–wounded assassin and (did he, or did he suppose he had) used it again and again, till the other had fallen under the furniture. Another had been battered to his knees and dispatched finally, with a smooth, heavy piece of black statuary. Still another had gone screaming, pushed abruptly (Paul with teeth bared, fang–like, vicious animal) from a ledge, twisting and plunging heavily away. The passion with which he had watched that body fall, the desire in him to feel the weight of it going down, had been the disgusting detail of that particular segment. Still another had come at Paul with some now–forgotten weapon, and Paul had used a tire chain on him, first wrapping it tightly about the assassin’s neck and twisting till the links broke skin…then flaying the unconscious body till there was no life left in it.

  One after another. Thirteen of them, two already tonight, and now number fourteen, this pleasant–enough guy with the rah–rah demeanor, and the fireplace poker in his competent hands. The gang would never let him alone. He had run, had hidden, had tried to avoid killing them by putting himself out of reach, but they always found him. He went at the guy, wrested the poker from him, and jabbed sharply with the pike–tip of it. He was about to envision where he had thrust that blunt–sharp point, when the phone went off and the doorbell rang—simultaneously.

  For a screaming instant of absolute terror he lay there flat on his back, the other side of the bed creased only by a small furrow made by his spastic arm as it had flung itself away from him; the other side of the bed that she had inhabited, now untenanted, save for the wispy end–tips of the dream, streaking away as his arm had done.

  While the chime and the bell rang in discordant duo.

  Having saved him from seeing what damage he had done the collegiate guy’s face. Almost like melodious saviors. Rung in by a watchful God who allotted only certain amounts of fear and depravity to each sleeptime. Knowing he would pick up the thread of the dream precisely where he had left off, next time out. Hoping he could stave off sleep for a year, two years, so he would not have to find out how the rah–rah type had died. But knowing he would. Listening to the phone and the doorbell clanging at him. Having let them serve their purposes of wakening him, now fearing to answer them.

  He flipped onto his stomach and reached out a hand in the darkness that did not deter him. He grabbed the receiver off its rest and yowled, “Hold it a minute, please,” and in one movement flipped aside the clammy sheet, hit the floor and surely fumbled his way to the door. He opened it as the chime went off again, and in the light from the hallway saw only a shape, no person. He heard a voice, made no sense of it, and said impatiently, “C’min, c’min already for Chri’sake an’ shut the door.” He turned away and went back to the bed, picked up the receiver he had tossed onto the pillow, and cleared phlegm from his throat as he asked, “Yeah, okay now, who’s this?”

  “Paul. Has Claire gotten there, is she there yet?” He felt bits of rock–salt in the corners of his eyes, and fingered them tighter into the folds of flesh as he tried to place the voice. It was someone he knew, a friend, someone—

  “Harry? That’s you, Harry?”

  On the other end of the line, way out there in the night somehow, Harry Dockstader swore lightly, quickly. “Yeah, me, me already. Paul, is Claire there?”

  Paul Reed was suddenly assaulted by the overhead light going on, and he snapped his eyes shut against the blaze, opened them, closed them again, and then finally popped them open completely to see Claire Dockstader standing at the switch by the front door.

  “Yeah, Harry, she’s here,” then the weirdness of her being here came to him fully, and he demanded, “Harry, what the hell is going on, Claire’s over here, why isn’t she with you? Why’s she here?”

  It was an inane conversation, totally devoid of sense, but his synapses were not yet in focus. “Harry?” he repeated.

  The voice on the other end snarled, gutturally.

  Then Claire was coming across the room at him, wrathful and impatient, ferocious in demanding, “Give me that phone!” Each word sharply enunciated, much too fine for this hour of the morning, each syllable clear and harsh and very thin–lipped, only a woman’s way. “Give me that phone, Paul. Let me talk to him…hello, Harry? You sonofabitch, go straight to fucking hell, die you bastard! Ooo, you bas–tard!”

  And she literally flung the receiver onto the rest.

  Paul sat on the edge of the bed, feeling himself naked from the waist up, feeling the rug under his bare feet, feeling that no woman should use language like that at this hour. “Claire…what the hell is going on?”

  She stood trembling for a moment, valkyric in her fury, then stalked, half–stumbled, fell across the room into the easy chair. Upon touching the seat she burst into tears. “Ooo, the bas–tard,” she repeated, not to Paul, not to the silent phone, to the air perhaps. “That lousy chaser, that skunk and his chippies, those bums he brings up to the house, Oh God Why’d I Ever Marry That Skunk!”

  It was, of course, all laid out for Paul in that sentence, even without the particulars, even at that hour, and the ring of his own recent past was so clear he winced. The word chaser did it. His own sister had called him that when she’d heard he and Georgette were divorcing. That damned word: chaser. He could still hear it. It had hurt.

  Paul rose from bed. The one–and–a–half in which he managed to live (now) alone suddenly seemed close and muggy with a woman in it. “Claire, want some coffee?”

  She nodded, still running through her thoughts like prayer beads, eyes turned inward. He moved past her into the tiny kitchenette. The electric coffeepot was on the sideboard, and he hefted it, shoot it to see if there was enough left from the last brewing. A heavy sloshing reassured him, and he plugged in the cord.

  As he returned to the living room, her eyes followed him. He dropped onto the bed and slid upward, bracing the pillow behind him. “Okay,” Paul said, reaching for the cigarettes beside the phone, “lay it on me. Who was it this time, and how far along were they when you caught him?”

  Claire Dockstader pursed her lips so tightly, dimples appeared in her cheeks. “Only a philanderer like you, as bad as Harry, just as big a Skunk, could put it that way!”

  Paul shrugged. He was a long, lean man with a thatch of straw–colored hair; he raked the hair off his forehead and applied himself to lighting the cigarette. He didn’t want to look at her. A thing in his living room, soon after Georgette, too soon, even a friend’s wife. He pulled at the cigarette, and at his thoughts: neither satisfied. He seemed too long for the bed, ungainly, hardly of interest to a woman, yet apparently it was not so, for she stared at him differently now. A subtle shifting of mood in the room, as though she had suddenly realized she had not only broken into his living room, but into his bedroom as well, a room in which other things than just living were done. They were very close, but held apart by a circumstance that both realized might at any moment melt. Uncomfortable, suddenly, both of them. He pulled up the sheet to his waist; she looked away.

  Coffee perking, popping, distracting, thank God.

  “Christ, what time is it?” Paul asked (himself, in self–defense, more than her). He pulled the travalarm from the nightstand and stared into its face, its idiot face, as though the numbers meant something. “Jeezus, Jeezus, three ayem, Jeezus; don’t you people ever sleep?” He
was a pot, calling a kettle black. He never slept, never really went to bed, so who was he fooling with this line out of suburban rote?

  She shifted in the easy chair, rearranging her skirt that had ridden up over her knees, and Paul once more marveled at the joys of the current hemlines, if one was a leg man, which he had decided with the advent of the current hemlines, he was. She caught his stare and toyed with it for a moment, then allowed it to vaporize in her own eyes, not just yet returning his proposition.

  It was happening, just this easily. A pact of guilt and opportunity was being solidified, without the decency of either admitting its necessity. Paul had been separated not nearly long enough to attempt morality of a high order, and Claire was still burning with outrage. Neither would say the name of the game, but both would play, and both knew it would happen.

  And as soon as Paul Reed admitted his loneliness, his guilt and his desires were compounding to produce (why fool around, name it!) adultery, an act of love performed without the catalyst of love, something unpleasant began to happen in the empty, dark, far corner of the room.

  He was unaware of its beginnings.

  “Why did you pick me for your flight?” he asked flippantly.

  “You were the only one I could think of who’d be awake this late…and I wasn’t thinking too clearly…I was too furious to think straight.” She stopped talking; she had said much more than what she had said. Of all the places she might have gone, of all the seedy bars where she might have been picked up and laid in retaliation, of all the married friends she and Harry had accrued, of all the cheap hotels where an innocent night of sleep might be purchased for five dollars, she had picked Paul and his living room that was a bedroom that was a hole in the world where guilt could be born out of frustration and pain.

  “Is that, uh, coffee ready?” she asked.

  He slid out of bed, nakedly aware of her eyes on his body, and went into the kitchenette. He ached in places he did not want to ache, and knew what was going to happen, for all the wrong reasons, and knew he would despise not only her and himself when it had been done, when they had killed something between them, but that he would barely think of it again. He was wrong.

  When he handed her the coffee cup, their hands touched, and their eyes locked for the first time in this new way, and the cyclic movement began for the millionth time that night. And once begun, the cycle could not be impeded.

  While slowly, steadily, in the dark corner, what had begun to happen, nasty as it was, went unnoticed. Their insensate passion a midwife at that strange birth.

  Simply the mechanics of divorce were gristmill enough to powder him into the finest ash. Simply the little pains of walking through the apartment where they had bumped into one another constantly, the lawyer talks, the serving of the papers, the phone calls that lacked any slightest tinge of communication, the recriminations, and worst of all, the steadily deteriorating knowledge that somehow what had gone wrong was not real, but a matter of thoughts, attitudes, dreams, ghosts, vapors. All insubstantial, but so omnipresent, so real, they had broken up his marriage with Georgette. As if they were substantial, rock–hard, real, physically tearing her from his arms and his thoughts and his life. Phantom raiders from both of their minds, whose sole purpose in life was to shrivel and shred and shatter their union. But the thoughts and vapors and grey images persisted, and he existed alone in the one–and–a–half where they had set up their gestalt, while she cast the runes and murmured the incantations and boiled up the mystic brews, all set down so precisely in the grimoire of divorce. And as the pattern of separation progressed, a boulder racing mindlessly downhill, needing only the most impossible strength imaginable to halt its crushing rush, his life set itself up in a new sequence, apart from her, yet totally motivated by her existence, and the reality of her absence.

  Earlier that day he had received a phone call from her. One of those backbiting, bitter, flame–colored conversations that ended in him telling her to go to hell, she wasn’t getting any more money out of him till the settlement, and he didn’t give a damn how badly she needed it.

  “The Court said sixty–five a month separate maintenance, and that’s all you’re getting. Stop buying clothes and you’ll have enough to live on.”

  Chittering reply from the other end.

  “Sixty–five baby, that’s it! You’re the one who moved out, not me; don’t expect me to support your nutty behavior gratis. We’re through, Georgette, get that through your platinum head, we’re all done. I’ve had it with you! I’m fed up with all the dirty dishes in the sink, and your subway phobia, and not being able to touch your goddam hair after you’ve been to the beauty parlor and—oh, crap, why bother with all this…the answer is…”

  Chittering interruption, vitriol electrically transmitted, hatred telephonically magnified, poured directly into his mind through his ear.

  “…yeah? Well, the same to you, you stupid simple–ass broad, the same double to you. Go to hell! You’re not getting any more money out of me till the settlement, and I don’t give a damn how badly you need it!”

  He had slammed the receiver back on the stand, and continued getting dressed for his date. When he had picked up the girl, a brunette he had met in his insurance agent’s office, a secretary there, it was as though he was collecting unemployment, getting something to which he was entitled, but that nonetheless smacked faintly of being on relief.

  Picking up this girl for the first time was precisely like collecting unemployment. Enough to keep him going, but not nearly enough to sustain him in a supportable life. A dole. A pittance, but desperately necessary. A casual girl, with a life of her own, whose path would cross his this once, and then they would stumble past, down their own roads forever, light–footed, unlighted, interminably.

  “I’m afraid I won’t be very charming company tonight,” he told her as she slid into the car. “A woman who looks very much like you gave me considerable heartache today.”

  “Oh?” she inquired guardedly. It was their first date. “Who would that be?”

  “My ex–wife,” he said, telling her the first lie. He had not looked at her, save when he reached across to open the door. Now he stared dead–straight ahead as he pulled the unpolished Ford away from the curb and swung it into traffic.

  She sat looking at him speculatively, wondering if accepting a dinner date with an office client was such a good idea after all, no matter how engaging a sense of humor he had. His face was not at all the youthful cleverness he had presented to her on those three occasions when he had come to the insurance office. It was a harder substance, somehow, as though whatever light, frothy matter had been its basic component previously, had congealed, like week–old gravy. He was unhappy and disturbed, of course, there was that in abundance; but something else skittered on the edge of his expression, a somnolence, and she was strangely frightened by it—though she was certain it meant harm not for her, but on the contrary, very much for him.

  “Why do you let her give you heartache?” she asked.

  “Because I still love her, I suppose,” he answered, a bit too quickly, as though he had rehearsed it.

  “Does she love you?”

  “Yeah, I guess she does.” He paused, then added in a contemplative monotone, “Yeah. I’m quite certain she does. Otherwise we wouldn’t try to kill each other so hard. It’s making us both very sick, her loving me.”

  She straightened her skirt and tried to find another passage through the conversation, but all she could think was, I should have told him I was busy tonight.

  “Do I look very much like her?”

  He stared straight ahead, handling the wheel casually, as though very certain, very sure of it, as though he derived a deep inner satisfaction from driving, from propelling all this weight and metal precisely as he wished. It was as though he was with her, yet very far away, locked in an embrace with his vehicle.

  “Oh, not really, I suppose. She’s blonde, you’re brunette. Just around the temples, m
aybe, and your hair, the way you wear it pulled back on the side that way, and the skin around your eyes crinkled the same way. That, and the tone of your skin. Something like that; more reminds me of her than any actual look–alike.”

  “Is that why you asked me out?”

  He thought about it a moment, pressing his full lips together, then replied, “No. That wasn’t it. In fact, when I realized that you reminded me of her, I wanted to call the office and break the date.” I wish you had, she thought severely, I wish I weren’t here. With you.

  “We don’t have to go, you know.”

  He turned his head, then, seemingly startled. “What? Oh, say, hell I didn’t mean to depress you. This thing has been going on for months, and it’s just one of those miserable problems that has to work itself out. Don’t think I was trying to wriggle out of buying you a meal.”

  “I didn’t think that,” she replied coolly. “I merely thought you might want to be alone this evening.”

  He smiled, a strained little smile that was half frown and part sneer, and moved his head slightly. “Christ! Anything but that. Not alone. Not tonight.”

  She settled back against the vinyl seat cover, determined suddenly to make him uncomfortable, in defense.

  What seemed to each of them like elastic hours stretched past, and then he said, in an altogether new tone of voice, a forced light tone each knew was false, “Where would you like to go? Chinese? Italian? I know a nice little Armenian restaurant…?”

  She was silent, purposefully, and it served its purpose; he was uncomfortable, unhappier than before, and in the next instant it passed and he felt hateful, outright nasty, wanting to either get her into bed at once, or dump her, but not have to suffer this way through an entire evening. And so she defeated herself, as the rock wall slid up to cover the gentleness he would have demonstrated later that night. Deviousness replaced gentleness, sadness.