by Fritz Leiber
How strange it was. What she had been doing in Goldie’s Casablanca was not exhibiting herself, but hiding; from them. Taking on protective coloration. To him alone, he was sure, had she been truly revealed. And it was this revelation that teased him. Taunted him, now.
The coat and blouse were off. Suddenly and almost innocently the slip dropped, the last curtain between them. This was the true Jane, all of Jane. The Jane tempting, delectable, rosy between her big-nippled, big-aureoled, tiny breasts, ivory in the shaven area above her triangle of Venus. He tasted this throbbing curving flesh with his hands, then his seeking lips. As desire soared hotly within him, it mounted responsively in her. She gave herself to him completely, part by smooth part (so very smooth, indeed), and yet not solely giving, but taking. Drawing on him as he drew on her. Fire slowly, sensuously. Then at increasing pace, until theirs was the swift, searing throb of climatic love, waxing to a poignant ecstasy beyond anything either had ever known—and waning, waning, as the crested wave breaks and wanes, only to renew itself and again rise surgingly to a new peak of bliss.
After they had slept together he found himself realizing that he had never felt so delightfully sober in his life, though granting that the picture might change a bit if he made a sudden movement. From where he lay he could see Jane in the mirror. She’d thrown on his dressing gown and was mixing drinks for them. A faucet gurgled briefly. Then she came back and he turned over and hitched himself up on an elbow.
“Here,” she said, handing him a glass.
He laughed. “I’m not sure what this will do to me. My mind’s in a delicate state.”
“Just a small one,” she said. “To us.”
“To us.” They clinked glasses. Following her example, he drained his. She sat down on the bed and looked at him.
“Hello, darling,” he said.
“Hello.”
“Feeling okay?”
“Wonderful.”
“Not worried about anything?”
“Of course not. What made you ask me that?”
“I don’t know. You look sort of sad.”
She smiled. “Isn’t it all right for love to make you sad?”
“I suppose so, in a way.”
“It makes you sad because when you’ve loved, you’re empty and your guard’s down. And you’re a little frightened because right there before you is the one you love, so tender and easily hurt, and his guard’s down, too.”
“But then joy ought to follow the sadness, before it’s even had a chance to get started.” And he touched her arm, tugged gently at the dressing gown, but she just stayed smiling at him, and after a while he took his hand away.
“You’re sure you’re not bothered about anything?” he queried.
“Oh, darling,” and it seemed to Carr that tears came into her eyes, making them bright, “this is the happiest night of my life. Whatever happens I want you to know that I love you utterly and completely.”
He sat up a little. “Nothing’s going to happen.”
“Of course not. But I wanted you to know.”
“Oh, sure.” He hitched himself around a bit as to face her. “But now that you’ve brought up the question of what’s going to happen to us, let’s talk about—”
He faltered. It seemed to him that a black haze had suddenly raced across the room. He rubbed his eyes. When he took his hand away, the room was swimming.
“I didn’t know I was that drunk,” he muttered. “I never thought that just one more drink—”
He looked quickly at Jane. She hadn’t moved. She still seemed to be smiling, very tenderly, almost pityingly. He turned his queerly heavy head toward the little table by the bed. With an effort he brought the brown blur into focus. The surface of the table was bare.
“The powders!” he said, and he had difficulty forming the words. “You put them in my drink.”
She didn’t answer.
“Damn you,” he said, pushing himself toward her smudged image, “you’ve got to—”
He felt her hands on his shoulders, pushing him back.
“You’ll be all right. You just need a little sleep.” Her voice seemed to come from the floor above. He tried to fight her, but he couldn’t lift his hands. The darkness was gaining fast.
“No I don’t,” he protested. “Ja…Plea…
“Just a little rest.”
“I won’t forget you…” he croaked miserably, “I won’…I wo…”
She was leaning over him. For a moment his vision cleared and he saw her face streaming with tears, and her white neck, the unloosened dressing gown, and her breasts. Then the darkness narrowed in around her and closed like the iris diaphragm of a camera.
Chapter Nine
The Blank Hours
CARR MACKAY RUBBED his face against the pillow, rolled over, slitted his eyes open and grimaced at the bright narrow oblong of light beneath the shade.
He waited impatiently for the alarm clock to stop ringing. When the last tinkle finally game, his mind eagerly dove back inside his body and lost itself in countless vague awareness of weight and tension, little pleasurable aches.
Then, just as it seemed certain that he must drive off to sleep again, he briskly got up, stuck his feet in slippers, went to the window, pulled up the shade, looked at the street, sniffed rheumily at the air, and went to the bathroom.
A large washrag, drenched in water hot as he could get it, wrung out, and held to his chin and cheeks, elicited from him the morning’s first smile. The lather felt good, too. He stroked it on thoughtfully, trying to get a uniformly thick coat, like a meringue pie.
When this job was completed to his satisfaction, he picked up his safety razor, squinted at it to make sure it was clean, screwed the handle until the blade had the proper tension, and looked at himself in the mirror. His nostrils twitched with friendly distaste.
“You’re a dumb character, Carr Mackay,” he said to himself in a kindly way, as he pulled the razor down his jaw. “Thirty nine…and an interviewer at an employment agency. That’s the measure of your ability in the workaday world!” He finished the cheek with quick little chops, held the blade under the hot faucet, and started on the other cheek. The first stroke was always the most fun, like shoveling snow. “Oh, but your job’s just a stepping stone? You’re going places from there? In a month, you say, you’ll be Mackay of Fisher and Mackay, editorial counselors? A little big shot?” Pulling his upper lip taut over his teeth, he tucked the razor under his nose and pulled it down carefully.
“Listen, Mackay, whom do you think you’re fooling? Why not admit you’re going to wriggle out of it at the first opportunity, even if you have promised Marcia? You know very well that you hate any and every new job, and that you doubly detest one in which you’re supposed to dazzle other people. And even if you have to take it to placate Marcia, it’s a foregone conclusion that you’ll end up as Mr. Fisher’s office boy. On top of all that the thing’s a pipe dream.” Reversing the razor, he mowed his lower lip. “Oh, but something very different is going to come along, is it? Some totally unexpected event that will burst through the dull round of life and open up a world of mystery and delight? Mackay, my friend, we have been listening to that quaint notion of yours for a long time and we’re getting very sick of it.” He attacked his chin fiercely; it was the crab grass in the lawn of his beard.
“Put it this way: without exactly intending to, you’ve reached an equilibrium in life. Rather hard to work your way farther up, and you don’t want to. And not too easy—ah! there’s the fear!—to slide down.” He started on his neck. Since he’d never quite decided which way the hair grew there, he shaved without confidence.
While reheated the washrag, he studied his shaved face. Odd, though he thought of Marcia, it didn’t bring quite the same feeling of frustrated hunger as it usually did in the early morning. He felt this morning as if he were a neat little machine that could be trusted to go ticking along indefinitely without getting into any trouble—or much of anything e
lse. Reassuring, but also depressing.
He buried his face in the steaming washrag.
Returning to the bedroom, he faced the question of whether to wear his blue or brown suit. A weighty decision—or were all those things decided for you in advance? He chose the brown. While slipping on the trousers, his glance fell on the empty surface of the table beside the bed. He felt a vague quirk of uneasiness. Should something be there? He decided not.
Standing in front of the dresser, he transferred to his pockets the objects neatly laid out on it, and brushed his hair with the military brushes. He glanced at Marcia’s picture, curious as to its effect on him. She looked very cool and well-photographed. Strange, he thought, how we’re tied to faces. He reminded himself that he and Marcia were due at the Pendleton’s tomorrow night—Friday. That would give him another day and a half to brood about the Fisher business.
After a quick patting of his pockets to check whether he had everything he should, and a final glance around the room, he went out the door, locked it behind him, and trotted down the stairs. A glance at the blank-faced Car in the mirror decided him that it was going to be a dull day.
On the street he bought a paper and swung aboard a bus that arrived on cue. He paid his fare and found a seat.
After the ride, he was faced with the morning’s second important question. Reflex or free will, he ordered orange juice, an egg, toast, and coffee. While waiting for them, he continued with the paper—sports and comic page. Again he had a sense of things having been speeded up.
Half a block from General Employment he met Tom Elvested. They exchanged comments on the weather. Something was nagging at Carr’s mind, though, as they entered the office. There was a question he’d been meaning to ask Tom, but now he’d forgotten what it was.
Miss Zabel looked up from the rose she was posing in a slim-necked glass vase. She smiled at him. He smiled back. Then he noticed that the calendar pad on her desk said “Friday.” He started to say something, then glanced surreptiously at the dateline of his paper. He felt mildly astounded. It was Friday. And he’d been thinking it was Thursday—or had he? This damn job gave you softening of the brain—couldn’t even remember the day of the week. Oh, well, so much better. Made it that nearer the week-end. And he’d see Marcia tonight. Was his tux in shape? Of course.
He’d no sooner settled himself at his desk and got his things arranged than his first applicant appeared, and thereafter they came in a steady stream. Business was very brisk for a Friday. He had something to occupy him every minute.
In spite of that, after the first hour he began to get some more of those flashes of uneasiness that had troubled him in the bus. Little flickers of apprehension that came without warning and departed with a guilty swiftness, as if they had no right to be in his mind. For no good reason, certain things bothered him. The glass panel. The clock. A stubby end of pencil on his desk. Tom Elvested’s back, which seemed so bulky. Miss Zabel’s teetering walk.
He rather expected lunch with Tom and the gang to shake him out of his mood. But it almost made Carr ache to listen to Tom Elvested mouthing stale cracks about the coming election, between businesslike forksful of Hungarian goulash. He knew very well that Tom was an intelligent, discerning chap, but to listen to him now you’d swear he’d swallowed a phonograph record with last month’s news commentary on it.
Ernie and Acosta were as bad, and the fact that he himself felt more or less like a nervous robot was no consolation at all. The waitress seemed to be forever bringing their checks.
To top it, Tom had to lag behind with him on the way out and start talking about that intellectual girl-friend of Midge’s and how they must have a date sometime together. It was all he could do to keep from being rude.
When he got back to the office his mood was worse than ever. He gritted his teeth. It was turning into one of those frightful fays when every nod and smile takes an effort and you have to purse your lips or clench your fists under the desk in order to understand what people are saying.
One of those days when it’s hard to keep track of what you’re doing. He found he’d picked up the phone and dialed Marcia’s number without any memory of the thoughts leading up to the action.
“Could we have dinner before the party tonight?” he asked her. “I’d like to talk to you.”
“Sorry, but I can’t make it. But if you call for me about eight, we might stop somewhere for a drink.”
“Swell.” He felt there was something he wanted to say to her, now, but he couldn’t think what it was before she hung up.
Just then he heard the scrape of boots and saw a dumpy man in blue jeans approaching his desk—and felt patches of gooseflesh break out on his back.
Oh, he remembered the little man well enough from the day before yesterday. The trouble was that the figure stood out too vividly in his memory, like something in a nightmare.
He could remember with a feverish distinctiveness almost every word the man had spoken, the exact intonations, each gesture he had made.
He could picture precisely how the man smoked a cigarette.
But there were the most frightening gaps in his memory. He couldn’t recall a word he himself had said to the man, or how he’d reacted to him, or how he’d handled the man’s application. It was as if the dumpy man floated alone in space, a small blue god.
It was only with the greatest difficulty that he could recall his name—Jimmie Kozacs; and his occupation—magnetic inspector.
And now facing him across the desk, the man had the same quality of excessive reality as Carr’s memory of him. As if he were sitting in the front row of a movie house and the little magnetic inspector, magnified many times, were towering over him on the screen.
Then, as if from a defective speaker at the back of such a movie house, he heard the man say, “Hello, I come about that Norcott job. It wasn’t like they made it out to be.”
Carr was conscious of asking him to sit down, of fumbling for his application blank and record card, of making some sort of conversation. HE was conscious too, as the interview progressed, of Mr. Kozacs’ genially outraged complaints about what they expected a magnetic inspector to do out at Northcott.
But all the while he was hypnotized by Mr. Kozacs’ excessive reality.
To look at that wholesome, reddish face with his upturned nose, and at the stocky, blue-jeaned body, and to be waiting, as it were, for them to get so solid that they’d break through the floor.
To rack your brain as to what conceivable connection there could be between such an innocuous face and formless dread that kept surging through you until you almost wanted to retch.
And all the while to be talking t that face and scribbling memos for it, and finally to bid it goodbye and wish it better luck.
Just then Carr noticed a silly error in Mr. Kozacs’ application blank.
It was the date. It showed their first interview as having occurred on Tuesday, when of course it had been only the day before yesterday—Wednesday.
The dumpy man was just stepping past the next application approaching Carr’s desk. Carr started to call him back and point out the discrepancy.
But before he could speak, his mind returned from the journey it had taken without waiting for his explicit bidding—a quick round-trip to last Sunday and back.
It brought numbing news.
Parts of Tuesday afternoon, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, and all of Thursday, were blanks.
Maybe today isn’t Friday. Maybe they’re all wrong. Maybe half of Chicago has made a mistake.
No, Mackay! That’s the way to shake your mind loose. That’s the super-highway to the insane asylum. You’ve got to face it.
But what were you doing, then, during those blank spells? What were you doing?
Steady! That’s a question that will have to be left unanswered for the present.
But what are you going to do now?
Go to a psychiatrist? Tell him about your “spells of amnesia”? Have him ask about y
our childhood, pull down the shade, shine lights in your eyes, work on your nerves—
No! You couldn’t stand that and you know it. That would shake your mind loose for sure.
But there is something you can do. Something that’ll at least keep the road open to sanity and safety. It isn’t spectacular, though it’ll take a sort of courage. You can simply keep doing what you’re supposed to be doing. Go through all the motions of your daily routine without varying them an iota. There’s safety in routine, Mackay. It keeps men going when nothing else will. You know, soldiers in battle, and all that. By following routine, you have the best chance of holding onto your mind.
You can start right now. Stand up—and did it ever occur to you, Mackay, that standing up is an interesting mechanical problem? Your bones are levers, your muscles are motors—you can feel the cables of sinew tighten smoothly. Smile—it gives you a crinkly feeling in your cheek, doesn’t it? Shake hands with the next applicant. Note the moisture. Also the quality of the grip. Vigorous but jerky—that’s a clue to character. Study his face—the smile, the gold fillings in his back teeth, the worried brown eyes yellow-flecked, the ripples of tension in the dusky skin around them, the alert nose, the eczema scars under the powder. That’s a face for you, Mackay, a face to remember.
Rejoice, Mackay! Here’s a new applicant—a whole new world for you to lose yourself in. I know it’s had, Mackay but in an hour and thirty-seven minutes it’ll be five o’clock. If you can hold on until then and do what’s expected of you, you can walk out of here with your mind intact and no one will have the faintest suspicion of what’s happened to you. You’ll be free, Mackay, free!