“What about this robbery? You must be out of your mind …”
“Yeah, that. Listen, Anne baby, I swear to you I don’t know a thing about it. Laughton must have been telling you the straight goods on that. You know we agreed that the rest of this week you just have a good time, remember? That comes over too, baby. When you have a good time and relax, thirty-seven million people are enjoying life and relaxing. That’s good. They can’t be stimulated all the time. They like the variety …” Wordlessly John held out a glass, Scotch and water. Herb took it without looking.
Anne was watching him coldly. Suddenly she laughed. It was a cynical, bitter sound. “You’re not a damn fool, Herb. Don’t try to act like one.” She sipped her drink again, continuing to stare at him over the rim of the glass. “I am warning you, if anyone shows here to rob me, I’m going to treat him like a real burglar. I bought a gun after today’s broadcast, and I learned how to shoot when I was only nine or ten. I still know how. I’ll kill him, Herb, whoever it is.”
“Baby,” Herb started, but she cut him short.
“And this is my last week. As of Saturday, I’m through.”
“You can’t do that, Anne,” Herb said. John watched him closely, searching for a sign of weakness, anything; he saw nothing. Herb exuded confidence. “Look around, Anne, at this room, your clothes, everything … You are the richest woman in the world, having the time of your life, able to go anywhere, do anything …”
“While the whole world watches …”
“So what? It doesn’t stop you, does it?” Herb started to pace, his steps jerky and quick. “You knew that when you signed the contract. You’re a rare girl, Anne, beautiful, emotional, intelligent. Think of all those women who’ve got nothing but you. If you quit them, what do they do? Die? They might, you know. For the first time in their lives they are able to feel like they’re living. You’re giving them what no one ever did before, what was only hinted at in books and films in the old days. Suddenly they know what it feels like to face excitement, to experience love, to feel contented and peaceful. Think of them, Anne, empty, with nothing in their lives but you, what you’re able to give them. Thirty-seven million drabs, Anne, who never felt anything but boredom and frustration until you gave them life. What do they have? Work, kids, bills. You’ve given them the world, baby! Without you they wouldn’t even want to live any more.”
She wasn’t listening. Almost dreamily she said, “I talked to my lawyers, Herb, and the contract is meaningless. You’ve already broken it countless times by insisting on adding to the original agreement. I agreed to learn a lot of new things, so they could feel them with me. I did. My God! I’ve climbed mountains, hunted lions, learned to ski and water ski, but now you want me to die a little bit each week … that airplane crash, not bad, just enough to terrify me. Then the sharks. I really do think it was having sharks brought in when I was skiing that did it, Herb. You see, you will kill me. It will happen, and you won’t be able to top it, Herb. Not ever.”
There was a hard, waiting silence following her words. “No!” John shouted, soundlessly, the words not leaving his mouth. He was looking at Herb. He had stopped pacing when she started to talk. Something flicked across his face, surprise, fear, something not readily identifiable. Then his face went completely blank and he raised his glass and finished the Scotch and water, replacing the glass on the bar. When he turned again, he was smiling with disbelief.
“What’s really bugging you, Anne? There have been plants before. You knew about them. Those lions didn’t just happen by, you know. And the avalanche needed a nudge from someone. You know that. What else is bugging you?”
“I’m in love, Herb. I want out now before you manage to kill me.” Herb waved that aside impatiently.
“Have you ever watched your own show, Anne?” She shook her head. “I thought not. So you wouldn’t know about the expansion that took place last month, after we planted that new transmitter in your head. Johnny boy here’s been busy, Anne. You know these scientist types, never satisfied, always improving, changing. Where’s the camera, Anne? Do you ever know where it is any more? Have you even seen a camera in the past couple of weeks, or a recorder of any sort? You have not, and you won’t again. You’re on now, honey.” His voice was quite low, amused almost. “In fact the only time you aren’t on is when you’re sleeping. I know you’re in love; I know who he is; I know how he makes you feel; I even know how much money he makes per week. I should know, Anne baby. I pay him.” He had come closer to her with each word, finishing with his face only inches from hers. He didn’t have a chance to duck the flashing slap that jerked his head around, and before either of them realized it, he had hit her back. Anne fell back to the chair, too stunned to speak for a moment.
The silence grew, became something ugly and heavy, as if words were being born and dying without utterance because they were too brutal for the human spirit to bear. There was a spot of blood on Herb’s mouth where her diamond ring had cut him. He touched it and looked at his finger. “It’s all being taped now, honey, even this,” he said. He returned to the bar, turning his back on her.
There was a large red print on her cheek. Her gray eyes had turned black with rage; she didn’t take her gaze from him.
“Honey, relax,” Herb said after a moment, his voice soft and easy again. “It won’t make any difference to you in what you do, or anything like that. You know we can’t use most of the stuff, but it gives the editors a bigger variety to pick from. It was getting to the point where most of the interesting stuff was going on after you were off. Like buying the gun. That’s great stuff there, baby. You weren’t blanketing a single thing, and it’ll all come through like pure gold.” He finished mixing his drink, tasted it, and then swallowed most of it. “How many women have to go out and buy a gun to protect themselves? Think of them all, feeling that gun, feeling the things you felt when you picked it up, looked at it …”
“How long have you been tuning in all the time?” she asked. John felt a stirring along his spine, a tingle of excitement. He knew what was going out over the miniature transmitter, the rising crests of emotion she was feeling. Only a trace of them showed on her smooth face, but the raging interior torment was being recorded faithfully. Her quiet voice and quiet body were lies; only the tapes never lied.
Herb felt it too, a storm behind her quietude. He put his glass down and went to her, kneeling by the chair, taking her hand in both of his. “Anne, please, don’t be that angry with me. I was desperate for new material. When Johnny got this last wrinkle out, and we knew we could record around the clock, we had to try it, and it wouldn’t have been any good if you had known. That’s no way to test anything. You knew we were planting the transmitter …”
“How long?”
“Not quite a month.”
“And Stuart? He’s one of your men? He is transmitting also? You hired him to … to make love to me? Is that right?”
Herb nodded. She pulled her hand free and averted her face, not willing to see him any longer. He got up then and went to the window. “But what difference does it make?” he shouted. “If I introduced the two of you at a party, you wouldn’t think anything of it. What difference if I did it this way? I knew you’d like each other. He’s bright, like you, likes the same sort of things you do. Comes from a poor family, like yours … Everything said you’d get along …”
“Oh, yes,” she said almost absently. “We get along.” She was feeling in her hair, her fingers searching for the scars.
“It’s all healed by now,” John said. She looked at him as if she had forgotten he was there.
“I’ll find a surgeon,” she said, standing up, her fingers white on her glass. “A brain surgeon …”
“It’s a new process,” John said slowly. “It would be dangerous to go in after them …”
She looked at him for a long time. “Dangerous?”
He nodded.
“You could take it back out …”
He remember
ed the beginning, how he had quieted her fear of the electrodes and the wires. Her fear was that of a child for the unknown and the unknowable. Time and again he had proven to her that she could trust him, that he wouldn’t lie to her. He hadn’t lied to her, then. There was the same trust in her eyes, the same unshakable faith. She would believe him. She would accept without question whatever he said. Herb had called him an icicle, but that was wrong. An icicle would have melted in her fires. More like a stalactite, shaped by centuries of civilization, layer by layer he had been formed until he had forgotten how to bend, forgotten how to find release for the stirrings he felt somewhere in the hollow, rigid core of himself. She had tried and, frustrated, she had turned from him, hurt, but unable not to trust one she had loved. Now she waited. He could free her, and lose her again, this time irrevocably. Or he could hold her as long as she lived.
Her lovely gray eyes were shadowed with fear and the trust that he had given to her. Slowly he shook his head.
“I can’t,” he said. “No one can.”
“I see,” she murmured, the black filling her eyes. “I’d die, wouldn’t I? Then you’d have a lovely sequence, wouldn’t you, Herb?” She swung around, away from John. “You’d have to fake the story line, of course, but you are so good at that. An accident, emergency brain surgery needed, everything I feel going out to the poor little drabs who never will have brain surgery done. It’s very good,” she said admiringly. Her eyes were very black. “In fact, anything I do from now on, you’ll use, won’t you? If I kill you, that will simply be material for your editors to pick over. Trial, prison, very dramatic … On the other hand, if I kill myself …”
John felt chilled; a cold, hard weight seemed to be filling him. Herb laughed. “The story line will be something like this,” he said. “Anne has fallen in love with a stranger, deeply, sincerely in love with him. Everyone knows how deep that love is; they’ve all felt it, too, you know. She finds him raping a child, a lovely little girl in her early teens. Stuart tells her they’re through. He loves the little nymph. In a passion she kills herself. You are broadcasting a real storm of passion, right now, aren’t you, honey? Never mind, when I run through this scene, I’ll find out.” She hurled her glass at him, ice cubes and orange sections leaving a trail across the room. Herb ducked, grinning.
“That’s awfully good, baby. Corny, but after all, they can’t get too much corn, can they? They’ll love it, after they get over the shock of losing you. And they will get over it, you know. They always do. Wonder if it’s true about what happens to someone experiencing a violent death?” Anne’s teeth bit down on her lip, and slowly she sat down again, her eyes closed tight. Herb watched her for a moment, then said, even more cheerfully, “We’ve got the kid already. If you give them a death, you’ve got to give them a new life. Finish one with a bang. Start one with a bang. We’ll name the kid Cindy, a real Cinderella story after that. They’ll love her, too.”
Anne opened her eyes, black dulled now; she was so tight with tension that John felt his own muscles contract and become taut. He wondered if he would be able to stand the tape she was transmitting. A wave of excitement swept him and he knew he would play it all, feel it all, the incredibly contained rage, fear, the horror of giving a death to them to gloat over, and finally, anguish. He would know them all. Watching Anne, he wished she would break then, with him there. She didn’t. She stood up stiffly, her back rigid, a muscle hard and ridged in her jaw. Her voice was flat when she said, “Stuart is due in half an hour. I have to dress.” She left them without looking back.
Herb winked at John and motioned toward the door. “Want to take me to the plane, kid?” In the cab he said, “Stick close to her for a couple of days, Johnny. There might be an even bigger reaction later when she really understands just how hooked she is.” He chuckled again. “By God! It’s a good thing she trusts you, Johnny, boy!”
As they waited in the chrome-and-marble terminal for the liner to unload its passengers, John said, “Do you think she’ll be any good after this?”
“She can’t help herself. She’s too life oriented to deliberately choose to die. She’s like a jungle inside, raw, wild, untouched by that smooth layer of civilization she shows on the outside. It’s a thin layer, kid, real thin. She’ll fight to stay alive. She’ll become more wary, more alert to danger, more excited and exciting … She’ll really go to pieces when he touches her tonight. She’s primed real good. Might even have to do some editing, tone it down a little.” His voice was very happy. “He touches her where she lives, and she reacts. A real wild one. She’s one; the new kid’s one; Stuart … They’re few and far apart, Johnny. It’s up to us to find them. God knows we’re going to need all of them we can get.” His face became thoughtful and withdrawn. “You know, that really wasn’t such a bad idea of mine about rape and the kid. Who ever dreamed we’d get that kind of a reaction from her? With the right sort of buildup …” He had to run to catch his plane.
John hurried back to the hotel, to be near Anne if she needed him. He hoped she would leave him alone. His fingers shook as he turned on his screen; suddenly he had a clear memory of the child who had wept, and he hoped Stuart would hurt Anne just a little. The tremor in his fingers increased; Stuart was on from six until twelve, and he already had missed almost an hour of the show. He adjusted the helmet and sank back into a deep chair. He left the audio off, letting his own words form, letting his own thoughts fill in the spaces.
Anne was leaning toward him, sparkling champagne raised to her lips, her eyes large and soft. She was speaking, talking to him, John, calling him by name. He felt a tingle start somewhere deep inside him, and his glance was lowered to rest on her tanned hand in his, sending electricity through him. Her hand trembled when he ran his fingers up her palm, to her wrist where a blue vein throbbed. The slight throb became a pounding that grew, and when he looked again into her eyes, they were dark and very deep. They danced and he felt her body against his, yielding, pleading. The room darkened and she was an outline against the window, her gown floating down about her. The darkness grew denser, or he closed his eyes, and this time when her body pressed against his, there was nothing between them, and the pounding was everywhere.
In the deep chair, with the helmet on his head, John’s hands clenched, opened, clenched, again and again.
<
* * * *
Here is one more of the handful of unpublished stories Richard McKenna left behind when he died in 1964. Like his “The Secret Place in a way, it is about the longing that most of us have felt for Somewhere Else—some other world, better, simpler and more private than this one.
Many writers have dealt with the theme since H.G. Wells wrote “The Door in the Wall” before the turn of the century; but rarely has it been developed with such persuasiveness and power as McKenna gives it here.
If indeed there is another place beyond this too-solid reality—call it Avalon, Cockaigne, Fiddler’s Green—then eight desperate men, dying of thirst in an open boat, might find a way to enter it: for “God is spread pretty thin at 18 south 82 east”
* * * *
FIDDLER’S GREEN
By Richard McKenna
On the morning of the fifth day Kinross woke knowing that before the sun went down one of them would be eaten. He wondered what it would be like.
All yesterday the eight dungaree- and khaki-clad seamen had wrangled about it in thirst-cracked voices. Eight chance-spared survivors adrift without food or water in a disabled launch, riding the Indian Ocean swells to a sea anchor. The S.S. Ixion, 6,000-ton tramp sneaking contraband explosives to the Reds in Sumatra, had blown up and sunk in ten minutes the night of December 23, 1959. Fat John Kruger, the radioman, had not gotten off a distress signal. Four days under the vertical sun of Capricorn, off the steamer lanes and a thousand miles from land, no rain and little hope of any, reason enough and time, for dark thinking.
Kinross, lean and wiry in the faded dungarees of an engineer, looked at the othe
rs and wondered how it would go. They were in the same general positions as yesterday, still sleeping or pretending to sleep. He looked at the stubbled faces, cracked lips and sunken eyes and he knew how they felt. Skin tight and wooden, tongue stuck to teeth and palate, the dry throat a horror of whistling breath and every cell in the body, clamoring.
Thirst was worse than pain, he thought. Weber’s law for pain. Pain increased as the logarithm of what caused it; a man could keep pace. But thirst was exponential. It went up and up and never stopped. Yesterday they had turned the corner and today something had to give.
Little Fay, of the rat face and bulging forehead, had begun it yesterday. Human flesh boiled in seawater, he had said, took up most of the salt and left a nourishing broth fresh enough to drink. Kinross remembered that false bit of sea lore being whispered among the apprentices on his first cruise long years ago, but now it was no tidbit for the morbid curiosity of youth. It shouldered into the boat like a ninth passenger sitting between him and all the others.
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