The next trip would have to go better. At least we should chat about the weather, and how his cactus collection was coming along, whether the Old Man (Cephalocereus senilis)had blossomed yet, that kind of thing, like two real people with a relationship, which we’d never had.
I thought it would take me a week to check out each step and find out where I’d gone wrong. It took me more like three weeks, during which I accumulated a lot of tension and several splitting headaches, but didn’t dare take any pills because they’d slow down my thinking. I’d just have to manage until the job was done; I was determined to work it out.
Convinced finally that I had it figured, I went back wearing my no-skid, best-grip sandals to prevent slippage, just in case that was part of it.
We are cantering side by side, he on a bay gelding and me on a small chestnut mare. My shining black hair streams out behind me. He is wearing a hard derby. Up the languorous slope in slow motion, green hill against fiery blue sky. There at the top, the white fence bars to be jumped. Side by side we’ll sail over. I collect the mare between my knees, and glance over at him. He smiles. His eyes are grey and beautiful. He raises his riding crop to the brim of his hat with a nice little salute to me as I take the mare up on the snaffle.
Up she goes, like a bird, over the fence with her hind legs tucked up neat and nice. Only we keep going, straight out into the blue, sailing away on a perfect level.
Desperate, I crane my neck: behind me there is the fence on top of the hill, there are hedges and trees; there, far below me in a lovely meadow, he canters away on the bay horse.
What has happened this time? I want to know. I yank on the reins but she sails on out like a rocket through the purest of blue skies, the air is hitting my nose and making me dizzy, we’re so high up I can see the curve of the earth; hey, this is dangerous! I’m about to yell, when that mare puts her head down and bucks me off.
I sat up on the steel slats, sweating with rage and fright. No sound of the guard. How much time did I spend in that fruitless effort? My watch had stopped; that figured. Back to the library stacks.
As I passed the green plastex console, I resisted an impulse to kick in its panels. I couldn’t do that, because I intended to get some good out of it yet.
“You look thin, are you losing weight?” several people asked me during my next course of study. Well, what did that mean, that I was too fat, or that the weight loss emphasized certain boninesses, or that they saw a faraway look in my eyes? A long-ago look, perhaps? I was going to get that machine to take me back and just once it was going to go right, all the dialogues I’d prepared, what I say, what he says, what we say and do together.
The next time I encounter him his eyes are hazel and his hair just going white above the ears. We’re in the office of a highly esteemed scientific journal where he has brought in his manuscript. It’s abstruse as hell and full of symbols which are not on my typewriter, which means, since I have said, “I’d be delighted to type it for you,” I’ll have to put in the symbols by hand. It will take me a long time but I have only a short time and none at all to spare.
“After dinner?” I suggest.
“Why not?” he agrees.
We concur. We comply. We are sitting in a pinkly shaded booth over snail salad and sake martinis. We are eating rare steak garnished with mushrooms. We are holding hands and murmuring into each other’s echoing ears just as I always knew we would; palm to sweating palm down the avenue with everyone giving us envious glances, when the enormous facade of the hotel toward which we aim lights up from top to bottom in blazing green neon:
SHE HAS HER PERIOD
and I was lying crossways on the steel slats, tears in my eyes, biting my knuckles to stifle the sound of my sobs, for fear the guard would hear me. The guard had given up dance steps this week, or perhaps it was a different person this time; he was practicing a split whistle. I imagined that his whistles were boring little holes into the metal halls and naves of the building. It was no longer: what happened? It was not: where am I? anymore. It was beginning to be: why am I in such a fix? After the amount of work I had put in on this private project, I would see it through.
This time as I passed the console on the way out, I reached over and slapped one of its panels, though that didn’t provide me with much satisfaction. I felt these mishaps couldn’t go on much longer. All I wanted was one simple little episode which never happened but might have; it was not going to affect anything in the world, and I was taking full responsibility for my own part. Just once. Before I got too damned old to even care and as it was, I kept forgetting what color his eyes were.
His eyes are a light brown with amber flecks, beneath arched brows which are still dark though his hair, parted sharply to show pink scalp, is pure white. We are at table with his learned friends and my smile is cool as I murmur, “En brochette, of course,” which is my witty reply to a question I didn’t quite catch.
They all laugh heartily, give me approving glances. I can see him flush with pride in our friendship and I am so happy, he is so happy. There is a small hangnail on my right pinky which annoys the hell out of me but I pick at it under the table where no one can see.
The dinner is over, the brandies finished; flushed with pride and delight in each other, witty, beautiful, and best of all, together, we say good night to the gathered company and go off toward the grand staircase.
Above the first step there is a fantastic chandelier, white milk glass with baroque pink flowers and mint-green leaves; the light shines through milkily, dim, opalescent; an extraordinarily romantic chandelier and appropriate for the occasion. His hand presses mine reassuringly as we begin to mount the stairs. They are covered with a wine-colored carpet which has a curious kind of black and gold braid along the edges and each riser is edged with gold tacks which have curiously wrought heads.
The staircase is very wide, and we mount it side by side, hand in hand, flushed with exertion and anticipation, the eighth stair, the tenth stair, the seventeenth stair. There is another chandelier over the landing, this one pale blue and lavender, bits of crystal hang down in drops and fringes all around, flashing light into our eyes. I feel his hand press encouragingly on the small of my back, one thumb tentatively strokes my hip, yes, we are climbing the magnificent stairway to our bed of love above but why is the staircase so long and neverending? There are far too many landings; there are little sideways stairways, like the tributaries of a river.
There are lights flashing on and off the console. In one motion, ungainly though it may have been, I leaped off the closed steel slats and smashed my fists against that console in despair. Still keeping my wits about me, though, and not raising my voice; just cursing in a whisper until the thing should have fused into slag. The lights on the console went out and it stood cool and silent.
For a little while, listening to the guard walk the hallways, I confronted this misery, wondering if it was a fake, if all the technical information I’d absorbed was some kind of a joke. The Sunday supplements had suggested that it augmented history in some indescribable way; the commercial programs variously described it as Time Machine, History Machine, Truth Factor, Truth Detector, Headless Marvel, and, in one case, the Whizz Bang, to which the physicists objected, saying it cheapened the concept of time travel.
I had studied every paper on the concepts and the hardware; I had set the dials correctly; I had experienced no discomfort in traveling. What happened when I got there, then? Everything seemed to be all right at this end. I’d give it one more try, before I settled down into sniveling about my aches and pains, and declined into imbecility over a sake on the rocks.
The guard was neither dancing nor singing, he sounded like yet another person, with a light but rather brittle step, as if he were an elderly man doing the rounds. Perhaps they had different shifts. I’d have to be more careful, for without having any such amusements as singing, dancing, and whistling, this guard might be far more alert.
I’d take a week to che
ck everything out, to double-check it. To rest my head and soak my body or perhaps the other way around, anything that might help. Anything, damn it. I would have one night of delight with him before it was too late, and that wasn’t much to ask. A night, a week, six months, a good relationship for a year, was that asking too much? It wasn’t as though I hadn’t been considerate the first time around, knowing he was preoccupied with professional matters, that he had serious attachments, and I wasn’t then any too sure of myself, any more than I was now sure of what color his eyes had been.
It is too dark to see what color his eyes are and anyhow they are closed, he is snoring, and has put his pajamas back on. I lie there in a bitter and resentful daze for a few minutes, then snap on the lamp. A forty-watt bulb, it doesn’t do much for the cracked walls and peeled paint of our hideout.
“Huh?” he says, putting one skinny forearm across his eyes to shield them, and he snores again, deeply. He sleeps with his mouth open. After a moment I raise my own forearm and regard the large pores and liver spots with the dismay of recognition.
Good God, how long have I been here?
I turn my head on the moldy pillow and look at his sparse white hair, the white stubble beginning to appear on his chin, the skeletal fingers of his hand limp against his own shoulder.
Good God, what if I don’t get back?
Back to my studies, to my one-mile jog very morning, well, it’s just half a mile these days; to the quiet simplicities I really enjoy. What if I live here now? It seems to me the time has passed alarmingly and this isn’t at all what I had started out to do or be, nor him, either, when his eyes were blue or hazel and he was becoming famous and for how long, I’d like to know, is he going to lie there and snore?
The vault door snores and rasps as the guard comes in. The room lights up as the blinking console lights flicker and go out. I’m lying on the tightly closed steel slats, clasping my aching head with both hands.
He comes over and takes me by the arm, pulling me to my feet. “What are you doing in here?” he asks, more surprised than angry. “It’s impossible for unauthorized personnel to get in here.”
“No it isn’t,” I say. “Not if you really put your mind to it.” I turn around, out of his grasp, and kick the console, but not hard enough to injure myself. As you get older, you have to be more crafty about these expressions of emotion.
“Now, now,” he says, “don’t do that. You’re not even allowed in here.”
“Yes, but—” I say, turning around to him.
And there he stands. His hair is white and his eyes are still blue.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, stunned by his presence. Did he pop up between the slats right behind me? I wonder.
“I’ve worked here for years,” he says, regarding me kindly but firmly. “Why do you ask that?”
“What about all those papers? The ones I offered to type for you? The lectures? The dinners with all your peerless friends?”
He smiles, and guides me toward the door with one skinny hand on the fat of my back. “Oh, that,” he says, smiling. “Yes, those days. I was promising, I certainly had ambitions, but it turned out I wasn’t good enough, after all. I do remember you, vaguely. Do you want some coffee? I have a thermos.”
“Well, thanks,” I say, sort of lingering to glance back at the vault room where I’d failed so badly. “Aren’t you going to arrest me?”
“Of course. I’ve already sent in the word. I still don’t understand how you got in there like that.”
Sipping his coffee, I say, “They used to call me Lightfoot.”
“Did they? Nicknames are funny things. They used to call my wife Fickle, but it was because she had freckles. She says it started with her school friends calling her Freckles, but gradually—” and he launches into an interminable account of his wife’s past, and goes on and on until they come to take me away, a whole squadron of slim men in squeaky shoes whose eyes are any color I don’t remember. Everything considered, they handle me gently.
Their sergeant says: “You’re charged with breaking and entering. Understand your rights?”
Rights, yes. But breaking and entering what? I wonder. Reentering somewhere? Breaking in or breaking out?
They put me away in a cell where I dozed for the rest of the night. In the morning they released me, my lawyer insisting I had not broken any law. If he only knew how right he was, though if I’d been able to follow my intentions, some laws would have lain in shards. They rarely sentence you for your intentions, though; perhaps they figure you can do that for yourself.
So there I was, free to go home to my filmscreen and warmed sake, and I found that’s what I wanted. Though I wouldn’t have said so, years ago when I knew whether his eyes were brown or grey.
<
* * * *
C. L. Grant
EVERYBODY A WINNER, THE BARKER CRIED
PERHAPS the sound had only been a trick of the wind, but the girl on the beach turned slowly, searching for the gull she might have heard cry. There was no hope in her face, and though her eyes squinted against the glare, she saw nothing but colors bleached and colors charred. And the only thing that moved with her was the wind, in early spring.
She wore slacks and a heavy green sweater hastily snatched from a fallen mannikin; there was a darkly stained kerchief and her shoes she held in one hand. Attractive once, now she was thin and there were coarse lines that deadened her face. She was tired, and as she walked slowly south, she tripped over nothings in the sand.
There was a pier, charred and splintered, where the ocean’s roar was magnified and hurled itself back at her with the odor of salt and dead fish and the rotting slime that covered the pilings. She hesitated as if bracing to run, then bit at her lips and forced herself to walk—out of the white sun into the gray where the cool wind became cold. With one hand at her throat and breathing deeply, she looked straight ahead toward the sand on the other side. Then she stumbled. As she put out a hand to steady herself, the wind shifted a piece of blackened cardboard. There was a man underneath and she screamed when she saw the crabs.
“Oh God!” was not a prayer, but a cry for release as she ran into the open, seeing nothing and hearing only the sea until the pier was lost behind her, and ahead, the wheel.
She slowed until relief forced her to her knees while she stared at the boardwalk lined by rusting metal benches, and beyond them, facing blindly toward the water, the empty stands dwarfed by the once-domed building in their midst.
The wheel. The please-don’t-leave-me-on-top ferris wheel rose through the shambles. It looked as if it were being devoured. But it was a memory.
The wind died. The girl slumped forward to her hands, and cried.
And when the time for weeping has passed, she brushed her hands against her legs and rose to her feet. In spite of the sun the sand was cold and the benches somehow looked warm. She took one step toward them and saw him. He was sitting almost directly above her, head down, his arms folded across his chest, still enough for death. But when he grunted and shifted, she cried out without thinking and he looked up. For a moment they stared unbelievingly at each other, and before he could speak, she turned and fled.
“Hey!” he shouted, jumping to his feet and vaulting to the ground. “Hey, wait a minute! Wait, please!”
His voice covered the waves, his feet crunching in the sand thundered in her ears as she ran. Suddenly she slipped, tumbling over a sharp incline just as a wave broke beneath her. The icy water slammed her against the low wall of sand, knocking the air from her lungs and rushing unchecked into her mouth. She was lifted and the sun rushed at her, then thrown, dragged and lifted again; and through it all she felt nothing.
When she next opened her eyes, she was lying between a tattered seaman’s coat and a thin bed of rags spread on a bench. She tried to sit up but dizziness forced her down again, and with one hand she felt dried blood on her cheek.
“How are you feeling?” The voice was low and pat
iently quiet. She started, then pulled herself up, trying to see and understand what she saw at the same time. The effort made her want to gag.
The man was kneeling in front of her, a glass of dark, steaming liquid cupped in his hands. He held it out, urging her to take it.
“Here,” he said, smiling. “Drink this stuff. It will make you feel better.”
She hesitated, glancing from side to side as if deciding which way to run. But the man was insistent, and the obviously warm glass changed her mind. She drank without pausing for a breath, smiling in spite of herself at the taste, holding her elbows close to her side to keep the warmth within her. Then she rolled the still-hot container between her hands and looked at him.
He seemed as short as she, perhaps shorter. He was wearing faded jeans, a blazer ripped at the collar and a dark blue yachting cap with the plastic brim torn off. He was thin, but the folds around his neck were signs he had once carried much more weight. It was impossible to tell how old he was.
Orbit 13 - [Anthology] Page 18