I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

by Ellison, Harlan;

  “Listen,” he said smoothly (once again, a new tone, a lacquer–finished tone, chromed and slick), lightly, “I didn’t get a chance to shave before I picked you up, and I feel like a slob. You mind if we stop off for a minute at my place, and I’ll run a razor over my face?”

  She was not fooled. She had been married once, had been divorced, had been dating since she was fifteen, she knew exactly what he was saying. He was offering a private demonstration of his etchings. Her mind turned the offer slowly, examining it—in that breathless eternity of a moment in which all decisions are made—and studying each shimmering facet. She knew it was a bad idea, had no merit in any way, that she was a fool to think seriously of it, and that he would back off if she made the slightest sound of disapproval. True true, a bad idea, one to reject on the spot, and she rejected it. “All right,” she said.

  He turned sharply at the next corner.

  He looked down at her face, and abruptly saw her at the age of sixty–five. He knew with a crystal certainty what she would look like when she was old. Superimposed over the pale–and–pink firm immediacy of her face framed against the pillow, he saw a grey line–mask of the old woman she would one day become. The mouth with its stitchlines, tiny pickets running down into the lips; the dusty hollows lurking beneath the eyes; dark spaces in the character lines and in the planes of expression—as though whole sections had been sold off to retain life, even at the cost of losing appearance. The sooty patina covering the flesh, much like that left when a moth has been crushed, the powdery fine ash of its wings imprinting the surface on which the death had occurred. He stared down at her, seeing the double–image, the future lying inchoate across her now–face, turning the paramour beneath him into a relic of incognito spare parts and empty passions. A dim, drenched cobweb of probability, there in the eye–sockets, across the mouth he had kissed, radiating out from the nostrils and pulsing ever so faintly in the hollow of her throat.

  Then the vision melted off her young face, and he was looking at the creature of empty purposes he had just used. There was a mad, insane light flickering out of her eyes. “Tell me you love me, even if you don’t mean it,” she murmured huskily.

  There was a hungry urgency, a breathless demand in her voice, and a fist closed around his heart as she spoke, a chill ruined his aplomb, his grasp of the present, so recently returned to him. He wanted to pull out of her, away from her, as far as he could, and crouch down somewhere in the bedroom in a patient, foetal security.

  But the corner of the room he might have chosen was already occupied. Darkly occupied by bulk and a sinister presence. The breathing in that corner was coming laboredly, but much more regularly than before; it seemed to have become more steady, pulsing, as they had entered the apartment; and during the parry and counter and riposte of their encounter it had metronomically hurried itself to a level of even oftenness. Oh, it was taking form, form, form.

  Paul sensed it, but discounted the instinct.

  Deep breathing, stentorian, labored—but becoming more regular.

  “Tell me. Tell me you love me, nineteen times, very fast.”

  “I love you I love you I love you I love you,” he began rattling them off, propped on one elbow, counting them on the fingers of his left hand. “I love you I love you I luh—”

  “Why are you counting them?” she demanded, coquettishly, in a bizarre grotesque parody of naiveté.

  “I don’t want to lose track,” he answered, brutally. Then he slipped sidewise, falling onto his back, on Georgette’s side of the bed (feeling uncomfortable there, as though the ridges and whorls of her body were imprinted there, making it lumpy for him, but with the determination not to let this girl lie on that side). “Go to sleep,” he instructed her.

  “I don’t want to go to sleep.”

  “Then go bang your goddam head against the wall,” he snapped. Then he was forcing himself to sleep. Eyes closed, knowing how angry the girl beside him had become, he commanded sleep to come, and timorously, fawn–like in a deep foreboding forest, it came, and touched him. So that he began to dream again. That dream, again.

  In the eye, the right eye. The point of the poker entered, did its damage, came away foul. Paul flung himself violently from the sight, even as the crew–cut young man toppled suddenly past him, still alive somehow, crawling, dying by every bit of flesh through every rotting second. Starlight and darkness slipped by overhead as Paul whirled, spun, found himself in another place. A plaza, perhaps…

  A crowd, down the smart sleek shop–bordered street—a posh street (where?) in Beverly Hills, perhaps, glistening and elegant, and seeming almost dazzlingly clean with rhodium–finished permanence—growling, coming toward him.

  They were masked, caricatured, made up for some weird mardi gras, or costume party, or gathering of witches, where real faces would reveal real persons, and thus provide a grasp for their damnation. Strangers, boiling hurling sweeping down the street toward him in a chiaroscuro montage of chimerical madness. A vision out of Bosch; a bit of underdone potato or undigested Dali, hurled forth from a dream–image by Hogarth; a pantomime out of the innermost circle of Dante’s Inferno. Coming for him. For him.

  At last, after all these weeks, the dream had broken its pattern, and the massed terrors were now coming for him in a body. No longer one at a time, man–for–man in that never–ending succession of pleasant assassins. Now they had gathered together, grotesque creatures, masked and hungry.

  If I can figure out what this means, I’ll know, he thought suddenly. In the midst of the multi–colored haze of the dream, he knew abruptly, certainly, that if he could just make some sense from the events unreeling behind his eyes (and he knew it was a dream, right then), there would be a key to his problems, a solution that would work for him. So he concentrated. If I can just understand who they are, what they’re doing here, what they want from me, why they won’t let me escape, why they’re chasing me, what it takes to placate them, to get away from them, who I am who I am who I am…then I’ll be free, I’ll be whole again, this will be over, this will end, it’ll end…

  He ran down the street, the white clean street, and dodged in and among the cars that had suddenly appeared in lines, waiting for the light to change. He ran down the street to the intersection, and cut across among the slowly–moving vehicles, terror clogging his throat, his legs aching from the running, seeking an escape, an exit, any exit—a place of rest, of security where he could close the door and know they could not get in.

  “Here! We’ll help you,” a man shouted from a car, where he was packed in with his family, many children. Paul ran to the car, and the man opened his door, and Paul managed to crowd past him as he pulled the seat back, offering entrance to the back seat. Paul squeezed through, pushing the man up against the steering wheel. Then the seat was dropped back, Paul was in the rear with the children, and the car was piled with (what? fuzzy, indistinct) clothes, or soft possessions that the children sat on, and he was forced to lie down across the back deck, under the rear window

  (but how could that be?

  (he was a full–grown man, he couldn’t squeeze himself into that small a space, the way he had when he had been a child and gone on trips with his mother and father and laid down under the back window because the back seat was filled up, the way it had been when his father had died, and he had gone away with his mother from their home to the new home…

  (why did that memory suddenly come through so lucidly?

  (was he a grown man, or a small child?

  (please answer!) and he could see out the back window, and the crowd of terrifying masked figures, bright–eyed and haunting, were being left behind. Still, somehow, he did not feel safe! He was with the ones who could help, that man driving, he was strong and would drive fast through the traffic, and save Paul from the haunters, but why didn’t he feel safe…why?

  He woke, crying. The girl was gone.

  There was one who chewed gum while they did it. An adolescent with
oily thighs who had no idea of how to live in her body. The act was sodden and slow and entirely derelict in its duties. Afterward, he thought of her as a figment of his imagination, leaving only her laugh behind.

  She had a laugh that sounded like pea pods snapping open. He had met her at a party, and her attractiveness stemmed chiefly from too many vodkas and tonics.

  Another one was completely lovely, and yet, she was the sort of woman who gave the impression, upon entering a room, of having just left it.

  One was small and slight and shrieked for no reason save that she had read how passionate women screamed at the climax—in a bad book. Or more aptly, an undistinguished book, for she was an undistinguished woman.

  One after another they came to that one–and–a–half, casual adulteries without purpose or direction, and he indulged himself, again and again, finally realizing (by what was taking shape in the corner) what he was doing to himself, and his life that was no longer a life.

  Genesis refers to sin that coucheth at the door, or croucheth at the door, and so this was no new thing, but old, so very old, as old as the senseless acts that had given it birth, and the madness that was causing it to mature, and the guilty sorrow—the lonelyache—that would inevitably cause it to devour itself and all within its sight.

  On the night that he actually paid for love, the night he physically reached into his wallet and took out two ten dollar bills and gave them to the girl, the creature took full and final shape.

  This girl: when “good girls” talk about “tramps” they mean this girl and her sisters. But there are no such things as “tramps” and even the criminal never thinks of himself in those terms. Working–girl, entrepreneur, renderer of services, smarty, someone just getting along…these are the ways of her thoughts. She has a family, and she has a past, and she has a face, as well as a place of sex.

  But commercialism is the last sinkhole of love, and when it is reached, by paths of desperation and paths of cruel, misused emotions—all hope is gone. There is no return save by miracles, and there are no more miracles for the common among common men.

  As he handed her the money, wondering why in God’s name, why! the beast in the corner by the linen closet took its final shape, and substantiality, reality was its future. It had been called up by a series of contemporary incantations, conjured by the sounds of passion and the stink of despair. The girl snapped her bra, covered herself with dacron and decorum, and left Paul sitting stunned, inarticulate with terror in the presence of his new roommate.

  It stared at him, and though he tried to avert his eyes (screams were useless), he stared back.

  “Georgette,” he said huskily into the mouthpiece, “listen…lis, listen to me, willya, for Christ’s sake…st, stop blabbering for a second, willya, just, just SHUT UP FOR ONE GODDAM SECOND! will ya…” she finally subsided, and his words, no longer forced to slip themselves piecemeal between hers, left standing naked and alone with nothing but silence confronting them, ducked back within him, shy and trembly.

  “Well, go on,” he said, reflexively.

  She said she had nothing further to say; what was he calling her for, she had to get ready to go out.

  “Georgette, I’ve got, well, I’ve got this uh this problem, and I had to talk to someone, you were the one I figured would understand, y’see, I’ve uh—”

  She said she didn’t know an abortionist, and if he had knocked up one of his bummy–girls, he could use a goddam coat–hanger, a rusty coat–hanger, for all she cared.

  “No! No, you stupid ass, that isn’t anything like what I’m scared about. That isn’t it, and who the hell do you care who I date, you tramp…you’re out on the turf enough for both of us…” and he stopped. This was how all their arguments had started. From subject to subject, like mountain goats from rock to rock, forgetting the original discussion, veering off to rip and tear with their teeth at each other’s trivialities.

  “Georgette, please! Listen to me. There’s a, there’s a thing, some kind of thing living here in the apartment.”

  She thought he was crazy, what did he mean?

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what it is.”

  Was it like a spider, or a cat, or what?

  “It’s like a bear, Georgette, only it’s something else, I don’t know what. It doesn’t say anything, just stares at me—”

  What was he, cracking up or something? Bears don’t talk, except the ones on TV, and what was he, trying to pull off a nut stunt so he wouldn’t have to pony up the payments the court set? And why was he calling her in the first place, closing with: I think you’re flipping, Paul. I always said you were a whack, and now you’re proving it.

  Then the phone clicked, and he was alone.

  Together.

  He looked at it from the corner of his eye as he lit a cigarette. Hunkered down in the far corner of the room, near the linen closet, the huge soft–brown furry thing that had come to watch him, sat silently, paws folded across its massive chest. Like some great Kodiak bear, yet totally unlike it in shape, the truncated triangle of its bloated form could not be avoided—by glance or thought. The wild, mad golden discs of its eyes never turned, never flickered, while it watched him.

  (This description. Forget it. The creature was nothing like that. Not a thing like that at all.)

  And he could sense the reproach, even when he had locked himself in the bathroom. He sat on the edge of the tub and ran the hot water till steam had obscured the cabinet mirror over the sink and he could no longer see his own face, the insane light in his eyes so familiar, so similar to the blind stares of the creature in the other room. His thoughts flowed, ran, lava–like, then congealed.

  At which point he realized he had never seen the faces of any of the women who had been in the apartment. Not one of them. Faceless, all of them. Not even Georgette’s face came to him. None of them. They were all without expression or recall. He had been to seed with so many angular corpses. The sickness welled up in him, and he knew he had to get out of there, out of the apartment, away from the creature in the corner.

  He bolted from the bathroom, gained the front door without breaking stride, caroming off the walls, and was lying back against the closed slab of hardwood, dragging in painful gouts of air before he realized that he could not get away that easily. It would be waiting for him when he got back, whenever he got back.

  But he went. There was a bar where they played nothing but Sinatra records, and he absorbed as much maudlin sorrow and self–pity as he could, finally tumbling from the place when the strings and the voice oozed forth:

  How I wish I could forget

  Those happy yesteryears,

  That have left

  A rosary of tears.

  There was another place, a beach perhaps, where he stood on the sand, silent within himself, as the gulls wheeled and gibbered across the black sky, kree kree kree, driving him a little more mad, and he dug his naked hands into the sand, hurling great clots of the grainy darkness over his head, trying to kill those rotten, screaming harridans!

  And another place, where there were lights that said things, all manner of unintelligible things, neon things, dirty remarks, and he could not read any of them. (In one place he was certain he saw the masked revelers from his dream, and frothing, he fled, quickly.)

  When he returned, finally, to the apartment, the girl with him swore she wasn’t a telescope, but yeah, sure, she’d look at what he had to show her, and she’d tell him what it was. So, trusting her, because she’d said it, he turned the key in the door, and opened it. He reached around the jamb and turned on the light. Yeah, yeah, there he was, there he was, that thing there he was, all right. Uh–huh, there he is, the thing with the staring eyes, there he is.

  “Well?” he asked her, almost proudly, pointing.

  “Well what?” she replied.

  “Well what about him?”

  “Who?”

  “Him, him, you stupid bitch! Him right there! HIM!”

  “Y
’know, I think you’re outta your mind, Sid.”

  “M’name’s not Sid, and don’t tell me you don’t see him, you lying sonofabitch!”

  “Say lissen, you said you was Sid, and Sid you’re gonna be, and I don’t see no goddam nobody there, and if you wanna get laid allright, and if you don’t, just say so and we’ll have another drink an’ that’ll be that!”

  He screamed at her, clawing at her face, thrusting her out the door. “Get out, get outta here, g’wan, get out!” And she was gone, and he was alone again with the creature, who was unperturbed by it all, who sat implacably, softly, waiting for the last tick of time to detach itself and fly free from the fabric of sanity.

  They trembled there together in a nervous symbiosis, each deriving something from the other. He was covered with a thin film of horror and despair, a terrible lonelyache that twisted like smoke, thick and black within him. The creature giving love, and he reaping heartache, loneliness.

  He was alone in that room, the two of them: himself and that soft–brown, staring menace, the manifestation of his misery.

  And he knew, suddenly, what the dream meant. He knew, and kept it to himself, for the meaning of dreams is for the men who dream them, never to be shared, never to be known. He knew who the men in the dreams were, and he knew now why none of them had ever simply been killed by a gun. He knew, diving into the clothes closet, finding the duffle bag full of old Army clothes, finding the chunk of steel that lay at the bottom of that bag. He knew who he was, he knew, he knew, gloriously, jubilantly, and he knew it all, who the creature was, and who Georgette was, and the faces of all the women in the damned world, and all the men in the damned dreams, and he had it all, right there, right in his hands, ready to be understood.

  He went into the bathroom. He was not going to let that bastard in the corner see him succeed. He was going to savor it himself. In the mirror he now saw himself again. He saw the face and it was a good face and a very composed face, and he stared back at himself smiling, saying very softly, “Why did you have to go away?”