American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56
Page 74
He lay there on his back, breathing slowly, barely able to summon the strength to fill his lungs. He thought, Little man, what now?
It occurred to him then that, instead of fighting with the stones and the straw, he might simply have climbed into the giant’s slack cuff and been carried from the cellar in a moment.
The only indication of the self-fury he felt was a sudden bunching of skin around his closed eyes, a moist clicking sound as his lips pulled back suddenly from clenched teeth. Fool! Even the thought seemed to rise wearily.
His face relaxed again into a mask of sagging lines. Another question. Why hadn’t he tried to communicate with the giant? Oddly enough, that thought didn’t anger him. It was so alien it only surprised him. Was that because he was so small, because he felt that he was in another world and there could be no communication? Or was it that, as in all decisions now, he counted on only himself for any desired accomplishment?
Surely not that, he thought bitterly. He was as helpless and ineffectual as ever, maybe a little more blundering, that was all.
In the darkness he felt experimentally around his body. He ran a hand over the long, raw-fleshed scrape on his right forearm. He touched the torn flesh on the heel of his right hand, nudged an elbow against the swelling, purplish bruise on his right side. He ran a finger over the jagged laceration across his forehead. He prodded at his sore throat. He reared up a trifle and felt the shoot of pain in his back. Finally he let the separate aches sink back again into the general, coalescent pain. His eyes opened, the lids seeming to fall back of their own accord, and he stared sightlessly at the darkness. He remembered regaining consciousness in the sepulcher of rocks; remembered the horror that had almost driven him insane until he realized that there was air to breathe and he had to keep his mind if he wanted to get out.
But that first instant of realizing that he was sealed in a black crypt and still alive had been the lowest point.
He wondered why the phrase occurred to him. How did he know it was his lowest point? There might be others much worse waiting around the next corner—if he stayed alive.
But he couldn’t think of anything else. It was the lowest point, the nadir of his existence in the cellar.
It made him think of another lowest point, in the other life he had once led.
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When they got home from Marty’s, he stood at the livingroom window while Lou carried Beth to bed. He didn’t offer to help. He knew he couldn’t lift his daughter now.
When Lou came out of the bedroom he was still standing there.
“Aren’t you going to take off your hat and coat?” she asked.
She went into the kitchen before he could answer. He stood in his boy’s jacket and his Alpine hat with the red feather stuck in the band, hearing her open the refrigerator. He stared out at the dark street and heard the nerve-twisting crunch of ice cubes being freed in their tray, the muted pop of a bottle cap being pried off, the carbonated gurgle of soda being poured.
“Want some Coke?” she called to him.
He shook his head.
“Scott?”
“No,” he said. He felt a throbbing at his wrists.
She came in with the drink. “Aren’t you going to take off your things?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
She sat down on the couch and kicked off her shoes. “Another day,” she said. He didn’t reply. He felt as if she were trying to make him feel like a boy for getting dramatic over something inconsequential, while she patiently humored him. He wanted to burst out angrily at her, but there wasn’t any opening.
“Are you just going to stand there?” she asked.
“If I choose,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment, blank-faced. He saw the reflection of her face in the window. Then she shrugged. “Go ahead,” she said.
“No skin off your nose,” he said.
“What?” There was a sad, weary smile on her lips.
“Nothing, nothing.” Now he did feel like a boy.
Her drinking and swallowing sounded noisy to him. He grimaced irritably. Don’t slurp, his mind rasped. You sound like a pig.
“Oh, come on, Scott. Brooding won’t help.” She sounded faintly bored.
He closed his eyes and shuddered. It has come to this, he thought. The horror was gone; she was inured. He had expected it, but it was still a shock to find it happening.
He was her husband. He had been over six feet tall. Now he was smaller than her five-year-old daughter. He was standing in front of her, grotesque in his little boy’s clothes, and there was nothing but a faint boredom in her voice. It was a horror beyond horror.
His eyes were bleak as he stared out at the street, listening to the trees rustle in the night wind like a woman’s skirts descending an endless stairway.
He heard her drink again and he stiffened angrily.
“Scott,” she said. Falsely applied affection, he thought. “Sit down. Staring out the window won’t help Marty’s business.”
He spoke without turning. “You think that’s what I’m worried about?”
“Isn’t it? Isn’t it what we’re both—”
“It isn’t,” he cut her off coldly. Coldness in a little boy’s voice sounded bizarre—as if he were acting out a part in a grade-school play, unconvincing and laughable.
“What, then?” she asked.
“If you don’t know by now . . .”
“Oh, come on, darling.”
He picked on that. “Takes a little straining to call me darling now, doesn’t it?” he said, skin tight across his small face. “Takes a little—”
“Oh, stop it, Scott. Aren’t there enough troubles without your imagining more?”
“Imagining?” His voice grew shrill. “Sure! I’m imagining everything! Nothing has changed. Everything’s just the same. It’s all just my imagination!”
“You’ll wake Beth up.”
Too many enraged words filled his throat at once. They choked each other and he could only stand fuming impotently. He turned back to the window and stared out again.
Then, abruptly, he headed for the front door.
“Where are you going?” she asked, sounding alarmed.
“For a walk! Do you mind?”
“You mean down the street?”
He wanted to scream. “Yes,” he said, his voice shaking with repressed anger, “down the street.”
“You think you should?”
“Yes, I think I should!”
“Scott, I’m only thinking of you!” she burst out. “Can’t you see that?”
“Sure. Sure you are.” He jerked at the front door, but it stuck. Color sprouted in his cheeks and he jerked harder, a curse muffled on his lips.
“Scott, what have I done?” she asked. “Did I make you this way? Did I take that contract away from Marty?”
“Damn this goddam—” His voice shook. Then the door opened and banged against the wall.
“What if someone sees you?” she asked, starting up from the couch.
“Good-by,” he said, slamming the door behind him. And even that was ineffective because the jamb was too warped and the door wouldn’t slam, only crunch into its frame.
He didn’t look back. He started down the block with quick, agitated strides, heading for the lake.
He was about twenty yards from the house when the front door opened.
“Scott?”
He wasn’t going to answer at first. Then, grudgingly, he stopped and spoke over his shoulder.
“What?” he asked, and he could have wept at the thin, ineffectual sound of his voice.
She hesitated a moment, then asked, “Shall I come with you?”
“No,” he said. It was spoken in neither anger nor despair.
He stood there a moment longer looking back in spite of himself, wondering if she would insist on coming. But she only stood there, a motionless outline in the doorway.
“Be careful, darling,” she said.
This is the bottom, he thought, the very bottom. There is nothing lower than for a man to become an object of pity. A man could bear hate, abuse, anger and castigation; but pity, never. When a man became pitiable, he was lost. Pity was for helpless things.
Walking on the treadmill of the world, he tried to blank his mind. He stared at the sidewalk, walking quickly through the patches of street light and into darkness again, trying not to think.
His mind would not co-operate; it was typical of introspective minds. What he told it not to think about it dwelt on. What he demanded it to leave alone it clung to, doglike. It was the way.
Summer nights on the lake were sometimes chilly. He drew up the collar of his jacket and walked on, looking ahead at the dark, shifting waters. Since it was a week night, the cafés and taverns along the shore were not open. Approaching the dark lake, he began to hear the slapping of water on the pebbled beach.
The sidewalk ended. He moved out across rough ground, the leaves and twigs crackling under his tread like things alive. There was a cold wind blowing off the lake. It cut through his jacket, chilling him. He didn’t care.
About a hundred yards from the sidewalk, he came to an open area beside a dark, rustic building. It was a German café and tavern, next to it a few dozen tables and benches for outdoor eating and drinking. Scott threaded his way among them until he overlooked the lake. There he sank down on the rough, pocked surface of a bench.
He sat staring grimly at the lake. He tried to imagine sinking down in it forever. Was it so fantastic? The same thing was happening to him now. No, he would hit bottom and that would be the end of it.
He was drowning in another way.
They had moved to the lake six weeks before, because Scott had felt trapped in the apartment. If he went out, people stared at him. With the first week and a half of the Globe-Post series already in print and reprint, he had become a national celebrity. Requests still poured in for personal appearances. Reporters came endlessly to the door.
But mostly it was the ordinary people, the curious, staring people who wanted to look at the shrinking man and think, Thank God, I’m normal.
So they had moved to the lake, and somehow they had managed to get there without anyone’s finding out.
Life there, he discovered, was no improvement.
The dragging of it was what made it so bad. The way shrinking went on day by day, never noticeable, never ceasing, an inch a week like hideous clockwork. And all the humdrum functions of the day went on along with it in inexorable monotony.
Until anger, crouching in him like a cornered animal, would spring out wildly. The subject didn’t matter. It was the opening that counted.
Like the cat:
“I swear to God, if you don’t get rid of that goddam cat, I’ll kill it!”
Fury from a doll, his voice not manlike and authoritive, but frail and uncompelling.
“Scott, she’s not hurting you.”
He dragged up a sleeve. “What’s that? Imagination?” He pointed to a ragged scar.
“She was frightened when she did that.”
“Well, I’m frightened too! What does she have to do, rip open my throat before you get rid of her?”
And the two beds:
“What are you trying to do, humiliate me?”
“Scott, it was your idea.”
“Only because you couldn’t stand to touch me.”
“That’s not true!”
“Isn’t it?”
“No! I tried to do everything I could to—”
“I’m not a boy! You can’t treat my body like a little boy’s!”
And Beth:
“Scott, can’t you see she doesn’t understand?”
“I’m still her father, damn it!”
All his outbursts ended alike; him rushing to the cool cellar, standing down there, leaning on the refrigerator, breath a rasping sound in him, teeth gritted, hands clenched.
Days passed, one torture on another. Clothes were taken in for him, furniture got bigger, less manageable. Beth and Lou got bigger. Financial worries got bigger.
“Scott, I hate to say it, but I don’t see how we can go on much longer on fifty dollars a week. With all of us to feed and clothe and house . . .” Her voice trailed off; she shook her head in distress.
“I suppose you expect me to go back to the paper.”
“I didn’t say that. I merely said—”
“I know what you said.”
“Well, if it offends you, I’m sorry. Fifty dollars a week isn’t enough. What about when winter comes? What about winter clothes, and oil?”
He shook his head as if he were trying to shake away the need to think of it.
“Do you think Marty would—”
“I can’t ask Marty for more money,” he said curtly.
“Well . . .” She said no more. She didn’t have to.
And if she forgot and undressed without turning out the light, perhaps thinking he was asleep, he would lie in bed staring at her naked body, listening to the liquid rustle of her nightgown as it undulated down over her large breasts and stomach and hips and legs. He’d never realized it before, but it was the most maddening sound in the world. And he’d look at her as if he were a man dying of thirst looking at unreachable waters.
Then, the last week in July, Marty’s check didn’t come.
First they thought it was an oversight. But two more weeks went by and the check still didn’t come.
“We can’t wait much longer, Scott,” she said.
“What about the savings account?”
“There isn’t more than seventy dollars in it.”
“Oh. Well . . . we’ll wait one more day,” he said.
He spent that day in the living room, staring at the same page of the book he was supposedly reading.
He kept telling himself he should go back to the Globe-Post, let them continue their series. Or accept one of the many offers for personal appearances. Or let those lurid magazines write his story. Or allow a ghost writer to grind out a book about his case. Then there would be enough money, then the insecurity that Lou feared so desperately would be ended.
But telling himself about it wasn’t enough. His revulsion against placing himself before the blatant curiosity of people was too strong.
He comforted himself. The check will come tomorrow, he kept repeating, it’ll come tomorrow.
But it didn’t. And that night they’d driven over to Marty’s and Marty had told him that he’d lost his contract with Fairchild and had to cut down operations to almost nothing. The checks would have to stop. He gave Scott a hundred dollars, but that was the end.
Cold wind blew across him. Across the lake a dog barked. He looked down and watched his shoes swinging above the ground like pendulum tips. And now no money coming in. Seventy dollars in the bank, a hundred in his wallet. When that was gone, what?
He imagined himself at the paper again, Berg taking pictures, ogling Lou, Hammer asking endless questions. Headlines fluttered across his mind like banners. smaller than two-year-old! eats in high chair! wears baby clothes! lives in shoebox! sex desire still same!
His eyes shut quickly. Why wasn’t it really acromicria? At least then his sex desire would be almost gone. As it was, it got worse and worse. It seemed twice as bad as when he had been normal, but that was doubtless because there was no outlet at all. He couldn’t approach Louise any more. The drive went on burning in him, banking higher and higher each day, adding its own uniquely hideous pressure to everything else he was suffering.
And he couldn’t talk to Louise about it. The night she’d made that obvious offer, he’d felt almost offended. He knew it was over.
“Laughin’ at the blues!
Laughin’ till I’m crazee!”
He twitched up on the bench, his head snapping around. Squinting into
the darkness, he saw three shadowy figures strolling a short distance away, their youthful voices thin as they sang.
“My life is nothin’ but a stumblin’ in the dark. I lost my way when I was born.”
Boys, he thought, singing, growing up and taking it for granted. He watched them with a biting envy.
“Hey, there’s a kid down there,” one of them said.
At first Scott didn’t realize they were talking about him. Then he did and his mouth tightened.
“Wonder what he’s doin’ there.”
“Prob’ly—”
Scott didn’t hear the rest of it, but from the burst of coarse laughter he could guess what had been whispered. With a tensing of muscles, he slid off the bench and started walking back toward the sidewalk.
“Hey, he’s goin’,” one of the boys said.
“Let’s have some fun,” said another.
Scott felt a jolt of panic, but pride would not allow him to run. He kept steadily on toward the sidewalk.
Now the footsteps of the three boys grew faster.
“Hey, where ya goin’, kid?” he heard one of the boys call to him.
“Yeah, kid, where ya goin’?” said another.
“Where’s the fire, kid?”
There was a general snicker. Scott couldn’t help it; he walked faster. The boys walked faster.
“I don’t think Kiddo likes us,” said one of them.
“That ain’t nice,” said another.
It was a race. Scott knew it with a hanging tautness in his stomach. But he wouldn’t run. Not from three boys. He’d never be small enough to run from three boys. He glanced aside as he started up the slope toward the sidewalk. They were gaining on him. He saw the glowing tips of their cigarettes moving toward him like hopping fireflies.
They caught up to him before he reached the sidewalk. One of them grabbed his arm and held him back.
“Let go of me,” he said.
“Hey, kid, where ya goin’?” asked the boy who held him. His voice was insolent with pretended friendliness.
“I’m going home,” he said.
The boy looked about fifteen, sixteen maybe. He had a baseball cap on. His fingers dug into Scott’s arm. Scott didn’t have to see his face; he could almost imagine it—thin, mean, the jawline and brow peppered with pimples, the cigarette drooping from one corner of a lean, almost lipless mouth.