by Fritz Leiber
Jane had scampered down the stairs. Now Carr watched in growing amazement as she headed straight for the sedate waddlers, veered off at the very last moment, but in passing them reached out her hand and deliberately knocked off the nearest top hat. And the old fool wearing it marched on without even turning his head.
It hit Carr with all the instant impact of that crucial drink which opens the door to wonderland. It was as if his spirits had exploded like a fountain from his chest. There at his feet and Jane’s lay the city—a playground, a zoo, a nursery, a congregation of lock-stepping fools, afraid to show any reaction, even to outrage. Their eyes glued on advertisements, their hands clutched on pocketbooks, their thoughts shuffling stupidly as devil-dancers around a monolith of infantile inhibitions and frustrations. It was just as Jane had told him! You could do anything! No one could stop you! You were free!
With a whoop he raised his arms and ran lurchingly across the sidewalk at a wide angle that caught him up with Jane so that they raced around the corner hand in hand.
And now they were prince and princess no longer, but wizard’s children, sorcerer’s apprentices with stolen cloaks of invisibility, charter members of some modern and magical Hellfire Club. Under their winged feet the pavement sped. Neon signs caressed their cheeks with ruby, topaz and sapphire. Motors and horns struck up a dulcet, nerve-quickening music, suitable for acrobats preparing their star turn.
Across their path a theatre lobby spilled a gabbling, cigarette-puffing, taxi-hailing horde. Oh, the beautiful joy of rushing through them, of jostling powdered shoulders, of hopelessly tangling half-donned overcoats, of plucking at ties and shawls under the glare of yellow light-banks, of bobbing up and gibbering like apes into faces too staid or startled to dare let on they saw you. Then spinning into the clear like broken-field runners, crouched, seeing-eye blind man, to sprinkle him with a handful of pennies, to hurtle into a band of stragglers from a 1925-rococo movie palace—the same den of shadows he and Jane had deserted for chess two evenings ago—and to serve them just as you’d served their wealthier co-fools down the block.
Next, in an exhibition of hair-raising daring and split-second dexterity, to spring from the sidewalk and dark between speeding cab and green sedan, to jeer at the drivers, almost to slip and sprawl on gleaming tracks in from of a vast rhinoceros of a streetcar, to regain balance deftly and glide between moving chromium bumpers just beyond, finally to gain the opposite sidewalk, your ears ringing with a great shout such as might have greeted Blondin on his first tight-wire crossing of Niagara Falls—and to realize that you had uttered that shout yourself!
Oh, to hiss into the ear of a fat woman with smug suburban face, “The Supreme Court has just declared soap-operas unconstitutional,” to scream at a solemn man with eleven-dollar shirt, “The Democrats have set up a Guillotine in Grant Park!” to say to a mincing, dopey-eyed sweater girl, “I’m a talent scout. Follow me,” to a well-dressed individual with an aura of superiority, “Gallup Poll. Do you approve of Charlemagne’s polices toward the Saxons?” to a slinking clerk, “Burlesque is back,” to a hod-carrier, “Free beer behind the booths, ask for Clancy,” to a fish-faced bookie, “Here, hold my pocketbook,” to a slim intellectual with a briefcase, at court-stenographer speed, “Watch the sky. A wall of atomic catastrophe, ignited by injudicious Swedish experiments, is advancing across Labrador, great circle rout, at the rate of seventeen hundred and ninety-seven miles an hour.”
And finally, panting, sides needled by delicious breathlessness, to sink to the curb near a busy intersection and sit with back resting against metal trash box and laugh and laugh, gaspingly, in each other’s faces, doubling up after each new glimpse of the hustling crowd on the conveyor-belt called a sidewalk, every single face too proper or blasé-blind to look at you—and the equally wooden visages behind the wheels of the endless stop-starting string of cars that almost pinched your toes as they went grunting by.
Just then a police siren sounded and a large gray truck grumbled to a stop in front of them. Without hesitation, Carr scooped up Jane and sat her on the projecting backboard, then scrambled up beside her.
The light changed and they jounced across the intersection. The siren’s wail rose in volume and pitch as a paddy wagon turned into their street a block behind them. It swung far to the left, around a while string of cars, and careened into a pocket just behind them. They looked into the eyes of two red-jowled coppers. Jane thumbed her nose at them.
The paddy wagon braked to a stop at the curb and several policemen poured out of it and into a dingy hotel.
“Won’t find us there,” smirked Carr. “We’re high-class.” Jane squeezed his hand.
The truck passed under the dark steel canopy of the Elevated. Its motor growled as it labored up the approach to the bridge.
“I’ve a private barge on the river,” said Carr airily, “Unpretentious, but homey. And a most intellectual bargeman. Physical and mental giant. He’ll carry us to the ports of Hell and back and talk philosophy with us all the way.”
“Not tonight,” said Jane.
Carr pointed at the splintered end of the barrier. “Your friend did that on his way down,” he informed her amiably. “I wish he were along with us.” He looked at Jane. “No, I don’t,” he added.
“Neither do I,” she told him.
His face was close to hers, he started to put his arms around her, but a sudden rush of animal spirits caused him instead to plant his palms on the backboard and lift himself up, feet kicking.
He fell backward into the truck as Jane yanked at him. “You’re still quite breakable, you know,” she told him and kissed him and sat up quickly.
As he struggled up beside her, the truck hustled down the worn brick incline at the opposite end of the bridge and ground to a stop. A maroon and green awning stretched to the edge of the sidewalk. Above the awning, backed by ancient windows painted black, a bold, blinking, blue neon script proclaimed: Goldie’s Casablanca.
“That’s us,” said Carr. He hopped down and lifted Jane off as the truck started up again.
Inside the solid glass door beneath the awning, a tall, tuxedo-splitting individual with the vacant smile of a one-time sparring partner, was remonstrating quietly with an arm-swinging fat man whom he held pinned against the wall with one hand. Jane and Carr swept past them. Carr whipped out several dollar bills and held them clipped between bent finger and thumb. They descended a short flight of stairs, made a sharp turn, and found themselves in the noisiest and most crowded nightclub in the world.
The bar, which ran along the wall to their left, was jammed three deep. Behind it towered two horse-faced men in white coats. The one was reaching behind him for a bottle. The other was violently shaking a silver cylinder above his head, but the rattle was lost in the general din. He might, Carr thought, be performing a mysterious rite in honor of the Moorish maidens on the mural behind him. The willowy harem figures suggested El Greco, but someone—Goldie no doubt—had pasted cut-out, larger-than-life-size photographs of the faces of popular movie stars just above their bright yellow necks. The effect was arresting.
Packed tables, with no discernable aisles between extended from the foot of the stairs to the edge of a small and slightly raised dance floor, upon which, like some thick vegetable stew being stirred by laziest cook in creation, a solid mass of hunchedly embracing couples was slowly revolving.
The tinkly music for this elephantine exercise, almost as inaudible as the cocktail shaker, came from somewhere behind an inward-facing phalanx of alternately black and bare shoulders toward the far end of the wall to the right.
Everyone, even the dancers, seemed to be talking as fast as they could get the words out and as forcefully as the strength of tobacco-fogged lungs would permit.
Two couples marched straight at Carr. He swung aside, bumping a waiter who was coming around the end of the bar with a tray of cocktails. The waiter checked himself while the others passed, a crashing chord jetted up over the phalanx, appla
use vehement as carpet-beating began, and Carr substituted two of the bills for two of the cocktails just as the waiter continued forward and another couple came between them. Deftly holding the two cocktails in one hand and the rest of the bills in the other, Carr turned to Jane. But she had already left him and was edging through the press some tables away. Beyond her was a busy door marked “Setters,” close beside another labeled “Pointers.” Carr grimaced, leaned against the wall, closed his eyes, downed one of the cocktails, put the empty glass in his pocket and slowly sipped the other.
When he opened his eyes again, the dancers had all squeezed themselves into hitherto imperceptible nooks and crannies around the tables. The phalanx had dispersed to reveal a grossly fat man whose paunch abutted the keyboard of a tiny, cream-colored piano. A short apish individual who looked all dazzling white shirt-front—Goldie, surely at last—was standing on the edge of the empty dance floor and saying in a loud hoarse voice that in total lack of any honest enthusiasm would have been suitable for a carp: “And now let’s give the little chick a great big ovation!”
The earnest carpet-beaters started to work again. Goldie, ducking down from the platform, rewarded them with a cold sneer. The fat man’s hands began to scuttle up and down the keyboard like two fat white rats. And a blonde in a small black dress stepped up on the platform. She held in one hand something that might have been a shabby muff.
But even as the applause swelled, most of the people at the tables started to jabber at each other again.
Carr shivered. Here you have it, he thought suddenly—the bare stage, the unlistening audience, the ritual of the machine. The bacchanal shrunk to a precalculated and profit-motivated booze-fest under the direction of a Pan who’d gone all to watery flesh and been hitting the dope for two thousand years. The dreadful rhythm of progress without purpose. Did these people see or hear at all? Did they taste or touch? Did they even thrill to their drunkenness? Oh, into what sterile corners the whip of beauty-hunger has driven the drugged, near-dead if not dead already, spirit of man!
The blonde raised her arm and the muff unfolded to show, capping her unseen hand, a small face of painted wood that was at once foolish, frightened and lecherous. Two diminutive hands flapped beside it. The blonde began to hum to the music.
Continuing to toy with the piano, the fat man glanced around briefly. In a rapid, piping voice on the verge of a titter he confided, “And now you shall hear the sad tale of that most unfortunate creature, Peter Puppet.”
Carr finished his second drink in a gulp, looked around for Jane, couldn’t see her.
“Peter was perfect puppet,” the fat man intoned leisurely, accompanying himself with suitable runs and chords. Carr leaned forward, frowning. It was hard to hear with the jabber going on. “Yes, Peter was the prize Pinocchio of them all. He was carved out of wood to resemble a human being in complete detail, oh the most complete detail. Peter had everything a man has…in wood!”
The puppet made eyes at the blonde. She ignored him and began to dance sketchily.
The fat man whirled on tables, beetling his brows, “But he had one fault!” he half-shrieked. “He wanted to be alive!” Then, going back to the lazy titter, “Yes, our Peter wanted to be a man. He wanted to do everything a man does. He even wanted to do those things that you’d never, never, never think could be done by a gentleman…with wooden parts!”
Some guffaws came through the general jabber. The fat man’s hands darted venomously along the keyboard, eliciting dream, pastoral tones.
“Then one lovely spring day while Peter was wandering through the meadows, wishing he were a man, he chanced to see a beautiful, a simply be-unbelievably be-yutiful be-londe. Peter was shaken to his wooden core. He felt a swelling in his little wooden…” The fat man smirked briefly at the audience “…heart.”
With all sorts of handclasps and hopeful gawkings, the puppet was laying siege to the blonde. She closed her eyes, smiled, shook her head, went on humming.
Carr noticed Jane picking her way through the tables. But she was moving away from him. He tried to catch her eye.
“…and so Peter decided to follow the blonde home.” The fat man made footsteps in an upper octave. “Pink-pink-pink…went his little wooden tootsies…pink-pink-ping.”
Jane reached the platform and to Carr’s astonishment, stepped up on it. Carr started forward, but the packed tables balked him.
Besides, contrary to his expectation, no one seemed inclined to bother Jane. Goldie was nowhere in sight, the noisy audience took no notice, and the fat man and the blonde apparently had decided to ignore her for the time being.
The blonde was making trotting motions with the puppet and the fat man was saying “Peter found that the blonde lived right next door to a furniture factory. Now Peter had no love of furniture factories because he’d once narrowly escaped becoming part of a Sheraton table leg. The screaming of the saws and the pounding of the hammers…” He did buzzy chromatic runs and anvil-chorusings “…terrified Peter. He felt that each nail was being driven right into his little wooden solar plexus, that the screaming saw was ruthlessly cutting off his precious wooden parts!”
Jane was standing near the blonde. Carr at last caught her eye. He thought he read there his own mixed feeling of pity and revulsion toward the noisy, mindless, beauty-blind horde.
He motioned her to come down, but she only smiled. Slowly she undid the gilt buttons of her coat and let it drop to the floor.
“Finally, conquering his terror, Peter raced past the furniture factory and darted up the walk to the blonde’s home…pink-pink-pink-pink!”
Jane had coolly begun to unbutton her white blouse.
Blushing, Carr tried to push forward, motioning urgently. She took no notice. He started to shout at her, but just then he realized something and the realization left him speechless.
The crowd wasn’t reacting. It was chattering as noisily as ever.
They were blind. They were mindless. They couldn’t contact anything that was outside of their mechanistic rhythm.
But that was ridiculous.
But that Jane should in reality be a strip-tease dancer at Goldie’s Casablanca—that was ridiculous too. Or that she should be so drunk…
“Peter followed the blonde up the stairs…trip-trip-trip…and into her bedroom. He felt the sap running madly up his legs and into his little wooden…tummy.”
Jane dropped her blouse, was in her slip and skirt.
Carr stood with his knee pushed forward against a table, swaying slightly, his hand still upraised like a drunken traffic cop ordering the world to stop.
“Then, his throat dry as sawdust with excitement, Peter jumped into bed with the blonde!” The fat hands tore up and down the keyboard. “And the blonde looked at Peter and said, ‘Little wooden man, what now?’”
Jane looked at Carr and dropped the shoulder straps and let her slip fall away. Carr swallowed. Tears stung his eyes. Her breasts seemed far more beautiful than flesh ought to be.
And then there was, not a reaction on the part of the crowd, but the ghost of one.
Sudden silences at parties are a common experience. One moment everyone is talking. The next, all conversations halt at once. You look about foolishly. You vaguely think, according to your turn of mind, of the mathematics of coincidence, of an invisible spirit passing, or of some chemical or physical stimulus, such as a faint odor or an odd half-heard sound, affecting everyone, but too tenuous to register clearly on anyone’s consciousness. Then someone laughs and you’re all talking again.
Such a momentary silence fell on Goldie’s Casablanca. Even the fat man’s glib phrases seemed to slacken and fade, like a phonograph record running down. His pudgy hands slowed, hung between cords. While the frozen gestures and expression of the people at the tables all hinted at words halted on the brink of utterance. And it seemed to Carr, as he started at Jane, that heads and eyes turned toward the platform, but only sluggishly and with difficulty, as if all these people were
dreaming and only half-wakened from their dreams, or as if, dead, they felt a faint, almost painful, ripple of life. They seemed to see and yet not to see Jane’s naked breasts, to being to forget at the same moment they become aware.
And although he knew it was ridiculous and that his mind was hazy with liquor, Carr felt that Jane was showing herself to him alone, and the stupefied audience were no more than cattle who turn to look toward a sound, experience some brief sluggish glow of consciousness, and go back to their cud-chewing an their dark wordless inner life.
Then, all at once, the crowd was jabbering again, the fat man was smirking and tittering, the blonde was fighting off a madly amorous puppet, and Jane was hurrying among the tables, her arms pressed to her sides to hold up her slip, with snatched-up coat and blouse trailing from one hand. As she approached, it seemed to Carr that everything else was melting into her, blurring off, becoming unimportant.
When she’d squeezed past the long table, he grabbed her hand. They didn’t say anything. Their eyes took care of that. He helped her into her coat. As they hurried up the stairs and out the glass door, they heard the fat man’s recitation die away like the chugging of a black greasy engine: “And what do you think little Alice found when she went up to the nursery?—her puppet Peter and her French doll Goldielocks in a most compromising position, oh, yes, a most…”
It was five blocks to Carr’s room. The streets were empty. A stiff breeze from the lake had blown the smoke from the sky, and the stars glittered down into the trenches between the buildings. The darkness that clung to the brick walls and besieged the street lamps seemed to Carr to be compounded of excitement and terror and desire in a mixture beyond analysis. He and Jane hurried on, holding hands.
The hall was dark. He let himself in quietly and they tiptoed up the stairs. Inside his room, he pulled down the shades, switched on the light. A blurred Jane was standing by the door, taking off her coat. For a moment Carr was afraid that he might have drunk too much. He moved toward her quickly. Then she smiled and her image cleared and he knew he wasn’t too drunk. He almost cried as he clapped his arms around her.