Weary, I carry the steaming cup into the living room, sit down in the easy chair with my back to the balcony. I try to balance the cup on my knee, but the damn thing is too hot; I finally rest it on the chair arm, leaving a moist ring on the fabric, but that hardly matters now. Can my will be weakening? Once I would have considered it sacrilege to sully fine furniture and would have gone to any length to avoid doing so. Now I am too wrapped in lassitude to get up and go into the kitchen for a coaster. Coffee seeps slowly into fabric, a widening brownish stain, like blood. I am almost too tired to lift the cup to my lips.
Degeneration starts very slowly, so deviously, so patiently that it almost seems to be a living thing; embodied, it would be a weasel-like animal armed with sly cunning and gnawing needle teeth. It never goes for your throat like a decent monster, so that you might have a chance of beating it down: it lurks in darkness, it gnaws furtively at the base of your spine, it burrows into your liver while you sleep. Like the succubi I try to guard against at night, it saps your strength, it sucks your breath in slumber, it etches away the marrow of your bones.
There is enough water in the tank for one more bath this week; I should wash, but I fear I’m too tired to manage it. Another example? It takes such a lot of effort to remain civilized. How tempting to say, “It no longer matters.” It does matter. I say it does. I will make it matter. I cannot afford the seductive surrender of my unfortunate brethren; I have a responsibility they don’t have. Perhaps I am luckier to have it in a way. It is an awesome responsibility, but carrying it summons up a corresponding strength, it gives me a reason for living, a goal outside myself. Perhaps my responsibility is what enables me to hang on, the knowledge of what is to come just enough to balance out the other pressures. The game has not yet been played to an end. Not while I still hold my special card.
Thinking of the secret, I look at the television set, but the atmospherics are wrong tonight for messages, and it’s probably too late for the haphazard programming they put out now. Some nights I leave the test pattern on, enjoying the flickering highlights it sends across the walls and ceilings, but tonight I think it will be more comfortable with just the pool of yellow glow cast by the lamp next to my chair, a barrier against the tangible darkness.
Looking at the television always reawakens my curiosity about the outside world. What is the state of society? The city I can see from my balcony seems to have degenerated into savagery, civilization seems to have been destroyed, but there are contradictions, there are ambiguities. Obviously the Building Committee must still be in existence somewhere. The electric lights and the plumbing still work in the Towers, a shipment of food supplies rattles up the pneumatic dumbwaiter into the kitchen cubicle twice a week, there are old movies and cartoons on television, running continuously with no commercials or live programming, never a hint of news. Who else could it be for but us? Who else could be responsible for it but the Building Committee? I’ve seen the city; it is dark, broken, inhabited by no one but a few human jackals who eke out a brute existence and hunt each other through the ruins. These facilities are certainly not operated for them—the other Towers are the only lighted buildings visible in the entire wide section of city visible from here.
No, it is the Building Committee. It must be. They are the only ones with the proper resources to hold a circle of order against a widening chaos. Those resources were vast. I know: we built them, we worked to make them flexible, we sweated to make them inexhaustible. We let their control pass out of our hands. One never finishes paying for past sins.
What a tremendous amount of trouble they’ve gone to, continuing to operate the Towers, even running a small television station somewhere to force-feed us the “entertainment” specified in the Charter. And never a word, never a glimpse of them, even for a second. Why? Why do they bother to keep up the pretense, the mocking hypocrisy of obeying the Charter? The real power is theirs now, why do they bother to continue the sham and lip service? Why don’t they just shut down the Towers and leave us to starve in our plush cells? Is it the product of some monstrous, sadistic sense of humor? Or is it the result of a methodical, fussily prim sense of order that refuses to deny a legal technicality even when the laws themselves have died? Do they laugh their young men’s laughter when they think of the once-formidable old beasts they have caged?
I feel a surge of anger. I put the half-emptied cup carefully down on the rug. My hand is trembling. The Time is coming. It will be soon now. Soon they will heap some further indignity on me and force my hand. I will not have them laughing at me, those little men with maggots for eyes. Not when I still have it in my power to change it all. Not while I still am who I am. But not just yet. Let them have their victory, their smug laughter. An old tiger’s fangs may be blunt and yellowing, but they can still bite. And even an old beast can still rise for one more kill.
I force myself to my feet. I have the inner strength, the discipline. They have nothing, they are the rabble, they are children trying out as men and parading in adult clothing. It was we who taught them the game, and we still know how to play it best. I force myself to wash, to fold the bed out from the wall, to lie still, fighting for calm. I run my eyes around the familiar dimensions of the apartment, cataloguing: pale blue walls, red draw curtains for the French windows, bookshelves next to the curtains, a black cushioned stool, the rug in patterns of orange and green against brown, a red shaggy chair and matching couch, the archways to the kitchen and bath cubicles. Nothing alien. Nothing hostile. I begin to relax. Thank God for familiarity. There is a certain pleasure in looking at well-known, well-loved things, a certain unshakable sense of reality. I often fall asleep counting my things.
(I hate this apartment. I hate everything in this apartment. I cannot stand to live here any longer. Someday I will chop everything to unrecognizable fragments and pile it in the middle of the floor and burn it, and I will laugh while it burns.)
—He is wakened by a shaft of sunlight that falls through the uncurtained French windows. He groans, stirs, draws one foot up, heel against buttock, knee toward the ceiling. His hand clenches in the bedclothes. The sound of birds reaches him through the insulating glass. For a moment, waking, he thinks that he is elsewhere, another place, another time. He mutters a woman’s name and his hand goes out to grope across the untouched, empty space beside him in the double bed. His hand encounters only the cool of sheets, no answering warmth of flesh. He grimaces, his bent leg snaps out to full length again, his suddenly desperate hand rips the sheet free of the mattress, finding nothing. He wrenches to his feet, neck corded, staggering. By the time his eyes slide open he has begun to scream—
-OW IT. Do you hear me, bastards? I will not allow it. I will not stand for it. You’ve gone too far, I warn you, too far, I’ll kill you. D’you hear? Niggers and thieves. The past is all I have. I will not have you touching it, I will not have you sliming and defiling it with your shitty hands. You leave her out of it, you leave her alone. What kind of men are you using her against me? What kind of men are you? Rabble not worth breath. Defiling everything you touch, everything better than you finer than you. I will not allow it.
It is time. It is Time.
The decision brings a measure of calm. I am committed now. They have finally driven me too far. It is time for me to play the final card. I will not let them remain unpunished for this another second, another breath. I will call for It, and It will come. I must keep control, there must be no mistakes. This is retribution. This is the moment I have waited for all these agonizing months. I must keep control, there must be no mistakes. It must be executed with dispatch, with precision. I breathe deeply to calm myself. There will be no mistakes, no hesitations.
Three steps take me to the television. I flick it on, waiting for it to warm. Impatience drums within me, tightly reined as a rearing Arabian stallion. So long, so long.
A picture appears on the screen: another imbecilic movie. I think of the Building Committee, unaware, living in the illusion of victo
ry. Expertly, I remove the back of the television, my skilled fingers probing deep into the maze of wires and tubes. I work with the familiarity of long practice. How many hours did I crouch like this, experimenting, before I found the proper frequency of the Others by trial and error? Patience was never a trait of the rabble; it is a talent reserved for the aristocracy. They didn’t count on my patience. Mayflies themselves, they cannot understand dedication of purpose. They didn’t count on my scientific knowledge, on my technical training at Annapolis. They didn’t count on the resources and ingenuity of a superior man.
I tap two wires together, creating sparks, sending messages into ether. I am sending on the frequency of the Others, a prearranged signal in code: the Time is now. Let It come. Sweat in my eyes, fingers cramping, but I continue to broadcast. The Time is now. Let It come. At last a response, the Others acknowledging that they’ve received my order.
It is over.
Now It will come.
Now they will pay for their sins.
I sit back on my heels, drained. I have done my part. I have launched It on Its way, given birth to retribution, sowed the world with dragon’s teeth. And they laughed. Now It is irreversible. Nothing can stop It. An end to all thieves and niggers, to all little men, to all the rabble that grow over the framework like weeds and ruin the order of the world. I stagger to the French windows, throw them open. Glass shatters in one frame, bright fragments against the weave of the rug. Onto the balcony where buildings press in at me unaware of Ragnarok. I collapse against the mesh, fingers spread, letting it take my weight. No motion in the world, but soon there will be enough. Far north, away from the sight of the city, the spaceships of the Others are busy according to plan, planting the thermal charges that will melt the icecap, shattering the earth-old ice, liberating the ancient waters, forming a Wave to thunder south and drown the world. I think of the Building Committee, of the vermin in the ruins of the city, even of my fellows in the other Towers. I am not sorry for them. I am no longer young, but I will take them with me into darkness. There will be no other eyes to watch a sun I can no longer see. I have no regrets. I’ve always hated them. I hate them all.
(I hate them all.)
—He hates them all—
A moaning in the earth, a trembling, a drumming as of a billion billion hooves. The Tower sways queasily. A swelling, ragged shriek of sound.
The Wave comes.
Over the horizon, climbing, growing larger, stretching higher, filling up the sky, cutting off the sunlight, water in a green wall like glass hundreds of feet high, topped with fangs of foam, the Wave beginning to topple in like the closing fist of God. Its shadow over everything, night at noon as it sweeps in, closes down. The Towers etched like thin lines against its bulk. It is curling overhead in the sky now there is no sky now but the underbelly of the Wave coming down. I have time to see the Towers snapped like matchsticks broken stumps of fangs before it hits with the scream of grating steel and blackness clogs my throat to
(I have destroyed the world.)
—The shadow of the mesh on his face—
Sometimes you can see other people in the other Tower apartments, looking out from their own balconies. I wonder how they destroy the world?
—He turns away, dimly remembering a business appointment. Outside the lazy hooting of rush-hour traffic. There is a cartoon carnival on Channel Five—
The Last Day of July
HE CAN FEEL them in the air around him, swimming through the walls, the ceiling, the floor, always just out of sight. What they are he doesn’t know, but they are there. Sometimes he can almost see them out of the corner of his eye—a motion, a flickering, a presence: a glow behind him, as if someone had just turned up an oil lantern. And yet there is no light. When he turns to look, nothing is there, everything is still—but with that subliminal sense of stirred air, as if something has just passed, as if something has flowed aside into the wall an instant faster than he can turn his head. He tries to catch them, spinning violently, rounding on his heel. But always finds the room empty, the same peering windows, the same hunched shapes of furniture. And the tension will grow, redoubled, at his back: the air watchful, watching, an imminence never quite defined—until he whirls again. Nothing. Empty. The table, the piles of papers and books, the chairs, the tall china cabinet. And then he will feel eyes re-form behind him.
When John comes into the house with the second suitcase, daylight has already begun to die. All at once, everything is flatter, duller—not darker, but just less vivid, as though a gray film of oil has been pulled between the sun and the earth. The house, the surrounding forest, all suddenly seem two-dimensional: the house a stage set, the forest wall a backdrop. There are no sharp edges, no highlights, no reticulations. The large rain puddle in the elbow of the encircling dirt road is a solid gunmetal oval—no reflections, no ripples; it seems that you could pry it up in one piece and stack it against a wall. The air itself is heavy, somehow sodden without being wet, without the slightest trace of moisture. The branches of the trees hang close to the ground, as though pregnant with rain: they are dry to the touch, sterile, almost like stone. There are no birds.
The man from the agency honks, backs the car, and turns it around so that it points back toward the access road to the highway. John pauses on the threshold of the back porch, sets down the suitcase, and nods in thanks for the ride from the train station. Already he has forgotten the ride, except as a confusion of sensation: noise, movement, alternating explosions of light and shadow, unfocused objects flowing by the windshield, pirouetting, tumbling, expanding and contracting in obedience to an unknown rhythm. He does not know where he is, does not know where the house is in relation to anything else in the vicinity, does not know what county he is in, is not even sure of the state. He has been informed of these things, but he has forgotten. He never really listened.
The agency man puts his car in gear; the back wheels spin in mud, then bite gravel. The car accelerates, swerves by the house onto the access road that leads to the blacktop secondary road that merges at last into the state highway. It disappears, taillights bobbing. In the perspectiveless, colorless perception imposed by that dusk, it does not seem to dwindle normally into distance. Rather, it vanishes, abruptly, as if it has been absorbed tracelessly by some universal solvent, as if it has passed into another reality. John listens for the sound of a retreating engine. There is none. Balancing the suitcase against his foot, he watches the last light drain from behind a stand of silver birches: a visual dopplering; mushroom shadows sprout up and lengthen across to form a hedge of darkness in which the birches gleam faintly—bones. Then he goes inside.
The enclosed porch opens onto the kitchen. He can make out a sink and stove to his right, a dining table to the left, shelves and counters facing. The living room beyond is lost in shadow. The deep gray half-light makes him strain his eyes; objects seem to hang suspended in light as in a fluid, kept recognizable only by an intense, squinting focus—they threaten to slip out of resolution into formlessness, a primitive amorphism in which they are not bound by human preconceptions as to their shape and nature. Faced with this rebellion, he gropes for a wall switch, finds it, flips it up.
New shadows snap across the room, click into their accustomed places under chairs, along the edges of the tables, the counters, the shelves, in the angle of the sink and stove. Positive and negative space define order, etching each other’s borders; between them they shape the room, sculpting it out of light and shadow, overt and implied. Pinning it down. He begins to breathe more easily. John sets the suitcase down beside its mate and moves into the center of the room. A mirror over the shelves gives him his reflection: pale, high forehead, drawn. He ignores it, uneasily avoiding the reflection’s eyes. His friend’s things are still here: he can see soiled plates stacked in the sink basin, frying pans and pots on the drainboard, a waffle iron, a cigarette-rolling machine. Reassured, he moves forward into the living room, turning on lights as he goes.
&nb
sp; The living room is a large, L-shaped chamber, taking up most of the ground floor. The shorter end of the L has been used as a writing room. It contains two mahogany tables, still paper stacked; a massive, dust-covered typewriter; bound files lined up on the window ledge, flanked by ceramic pots containing withered ivy; a tall china cabinet that faces in toward the long bar of the L. The two sections are divided by a high, open archway. The long section of the L contains a couch, a settee, an end table, an overstuffed chair. The stairway leading to the second floor is at the far end. Set in the facing wall—between two glassed-in doors leading to the veranda—is a stone fireplace, filled with charred wood scraps and ashes. Books glint on the mantelpiece over the fireplace: heavy, leatherbound, oiled volumes. He steps forward into the room, unconsciously wary, turning his head from side to side. He stops, sniffing the dead air. The air is musty and tomb-dry, as if it has not been breathed for a hundred years. He takes another step, and dust puffs from the living-room carpet under his feet. The dust swirls avidly up to meet him, dancing fiercely and joyously in the middle of the air. The backlighting throws his long, spindly shadow ahead, across the carpet, the andirons, the ashes, up the wall of the fireplace to the mantel, into the dust and silence of the empty house.
The Visible Man and Other Stories Page 9