“Point it how?” I whispered.
He shrugged. “Call the doll by a name. Hate it, maybe.”
“For God’s sake, Kelley, you’re crazy! Why, there can’t be anything like that!”
“You eat a steak,” Kelley said. “How’s your gut know what to take and what to pass? Do you know?”
“Some people know.”
“You don’t. But your gut does. So there’s lots of natural laws that are goin’ to work whether anyone understands ’em or not. Lots of sailors take a trick at the wheel without knowin’ how a steering engine works. Well, that’s me. I know where I’m goin’ and I know I’ll get there. What do I care how does it work, or who believes what?”
“Fine, so what are you going to do?”
“Get what got Hal.” His tone was just as lazy but his voice was very deep, and I knew when not to ask any more questions. Instead I said, with a certain amount of annoyance, “Why tell me?”
“Want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
“Don’t tell no one what I just said for a while. And keep something for me.”
“What? And for how long?”
“You’ll know.”
I’d have risen up and roared at him if he had not chosen just that second to get up and drift out of the bedroom. “What gets me,” he said quietly from the other room, “is I could have figured this out six months ago.”
I fell asleep straining to hear him go out. He moves quieter than any big man I ever saw.
It was afternoon when I awoke. The doll was sitting on the mantelpiece glaring at me. Ugliest thing ever happened.
I saw Kelley at Hal’s funeral. He and Milt and I had a somber drink afterward. We didn’t talk about dolls. Far as I know Kelley shipped out right afterward. You assume that seamen do, when they drop out of sight. Milton was as busy as a doctor, which is very. I left the doll where it was for a week or two, wondering when Kelley was going to get around to his project. He’d probably call for it when he was ready. Meanwhile I respected his request and told no one about it. One day when some people were coming over I shoved it in the top shelf of the closet, and somehow it just got left there.
About a month afterward I began to notice the smell. I couldn’t identify it right away; it was too faint; but whatever it was, I didn’t like it. I traced it to the closet, and then to the doll. I took it down and sniffed it. My breath exploded out. It was that same smell a lot of people wish they could forget—what Milton called necrotic flesh. I came within an inch of pitching the filthy thing down the incinerator, but a promise is a promise. I put it down on the table, where it slumped repulsively. One of the legs was broken above the knee. I mean, it seemed to have two knee joints. And it was somehow puffy, sick-looking.
I had an old bell-jar somewhere, that once had a clock in it. I found it and a piece of inlaid linoleum, and put the doll under the jar at least so I could live with it.
I worked and saw people—dinner with Milton, once—and the days went by the way they do, and then one night it occurred to me to look at the doll again.
It was in pretty sorry shape. I’d tried to keep it fairly cool, but it seemed to be melting and running all over. For a moment I worried about what Kelley might say, and then I heartily damned Kelley and put the whole mess down in the cellar.
And I guess it was altogether two months after Hal’s death that I wondered why I’d assumed Kelley would have to call for the little horror before he did what he had to do. He said he was going to get what got Hal, and he intimated that the doll was that something.
Well, that doll was being got, but good. I brought it up and put it under the light. It was still a figurine, but it was one unholy mess. “Attaboy, Kelley,” I gloated. “Go get ’em, kid.”
Milton called me up and asked me to meet him at Rudy’s. He sounded pretty bad. We had the shortest drink yet.
He was sitting in the back booth chewing on the insides of his cheeks. His lips were gray and he slopped his drink when he lifted it.
“What in time happened to you?” I gasped.
He gave me a ghastly smile. “I’m famous,” he said. I heard his glass chatter against his teeth. He said, “I called in so many consultants on Hal Kelley that I’m supposed to be an expert on that—on that … condition.” He forced his glass back to the table with both hands and held it down. He tried to smile and I wished he wouldn’t. He stopped trying and almost whispered, “I can’t nurse one of ’em like that again. I can’t.”
“You going to tell what happened?” I asked harshly. That works sometimes.
“Oh, oh yes. Well they brought in a … another one. At General. They called me in. Just like Hal. I mean exactly like Hal. Only I won’t have to nurse this one, no I won’t, I won’t have to. She died six hours after she arrived.”
“She?”
“You know what you’d have to do to someone to make them look like that?” he said shrilly. “You’d have to tie off parts so they mortified. You’d have to use a wood rasp, maybe; a club; filth to rub into the wounds. You’d have to break bones in a vise.”
“All right, all right, but nobody—”
“And you’d have to do that for about two months, every day, every night.” He rubbed his eyes. He drove his knuckles in so hard that I caught at his wrists. “I know nobody did it; did I say anyone did it?” he barked. “Nobody did anything to Hal, did they?”
“Drink up.”
He didn’t. He whispered, “She just said the same thing over and over every time anyone talked to her. They’d say, ‘What happened?’ or ‘Who did this to you?’ or ‘What’s your name?’ and she’d say, ‘He called me Dolly’ That’s all she’d say, just ‘He called me Dolly.’”
I got up. “Bye, Milt.”
He looked stricken. “Don’t go, will you, you just got—”
“I got to go,” I said. I didn’t look back. I had to get out and ask myself some questions. Think.
Who’s guilty of murder, I asked myself, the one who pulls the trigger, or the gun?
I thought of a poor damn pretty, empty little face with greedy hot brown eyes, and what Kelley said, “I don’t care about her one way or the other.”
I thought, when she was twisting and breaking and sticking, how did it look to the doll? Bet she never even wondered about that.
I thought, action: A girl throws a fan at a man. Reaction: The man throws the girl at the fan. Action: A wheel sticks on a shaft. Reaction: Knock the shaft out of the wheel. Situation: We can’t get inside. Resolution: Take the outside off it.
It’s a way of thinking.
How do you kill a person? Use a doll.
How do you kill a doll?
Who’s guilty, the one who pulls the trigger, or the gun?
“He called me Dolly.”
“He called me Dolly.”
“He called me Dolly.”
When I got home the phone was ringing. “Hi,” said Kelley.
I said, “It’s all gone. The doll’s all gone, Kelley.” I said, “stay away from me.”
“All right,” said Kelley.
THE MAN WHO LOST THE SEA
SAY YOU’RE A KID, and one dark night you’re running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast witchy-witchy-witchy. You pass the sick man and he wants you to shove off with that thing. Maybe he thinks you’re too old to play with toys. So you squat next to him in the sand and tell him it isn’t a toy, it’s a model. You tell him look here, here’s something most people don’t know about helicopters. You take a blade of the rotor in your fingers and show him how it can move in the hub, up and down a little, back and forth a little, and twist a little, to change pitch. You start to tell him how this flexibility does away with the gyroscopic effect, but he won’t listen. He doesn’t want to think about flying, about helicopters, or about you, and he most especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody. Not now. Now, he wants to think about the sea. So you go away.
The
sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. Built into his left sleeve is a combination timepiece and pressure gauge, the gauge with a luminous blue indicator which makes no sense, the clock hands luminous red. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft swift pulse of his pumps. One time long ago when he was swimming he went too deep and stayed down too long and came up too fast, and when he came to it was like this: they said, “Don’t move, boy. You’ve got the bends. Don’t even try to move.” He had tried anyway. It hurt. So now, this time, he lies in the sand without moving, without trying.
His head isn’t working right. But he knows clearly that it isn’t working right, which is a strange thing that happens to people in shock sometimes. Say you were that kid, you could say how it was, because once you woke up lying in the gym office in high school and asked what had happened. They explained how you tried something on the parallel bars and fell on your head. You understood exactly, though you couldn’t remember falling. Then a minute later you asked again what had happened and they told you. You understood it. And a minute later … forty-one times they told you, and you understood. It was just that no matter how many times they pushed it into your head, it wouldn’t stick there; but all the while you knew that your head would start working again in time. And in time it did. … Of course, if you were that kid, always explaining things to people and to yourself, you wouldn’t want to bother the sick man with it now.
Look what you’ve done already, making him send you away with that angry shrug of the mind (which, with the eyes, are the only things that will move just now). The motionless effort costs him a wave of nausea. He has felt seasick before but he has never been seasick, and the formula for that is to keep your eyes on the horizon and stay busy. Now! Then he’d better get busy—now; for there’s one place especially not to be seasick in, and that’s locked up in a pressure suit. Now!
So he busies himself as best he can, with the seascape, landscape, sky. He lies on high ground, his head propped on a vertical wall of black rock. There is another such outcrop before him, whip-topped with white sand and with smooth flat sand. Beyond and down is valley, salt-free, estuary; he cannot yet be sure. He is sure of the line of footprints, which begin behind him, pass to his left, disappear in the outcrop shadows, and reappear beyond to vanish at last into the shadows of the valley.
Stretched across the sky is old mourning-cloth, with starlight burning holes in it, and between the holes the black is absolute—wintertime, mountaintop sky-black.
(Far off on the horizon within himself, he sees the swell and crest of approaching-nausea; he counters with an undertow of weakness, which meets and rounds and settles the wave before it can break. Get busier. Now.)
Burst in on him, then, with the X-15 model. That’ll get him. Hey, how about this for a gimmick? Get too high for the thin air to give you any control, you have these little jets in the wingtips, see? and on the sides of the empennage: bank, roll, yaw, whatever, with squirts of compressed air.
But the sick man curls his sick lip: oh, git, kid, git, will you?—that has nothing to do with the sea. So you git.
Out and out the sick man forces his view, etching all he sees with a meticulous intensity, as if it might be his charge, one day, to duplicate all this. To his left is only starlit sea, windless. In front of him across the valley, rounded hills with dim white epaulettes of light. To his right, the jutting corner of the black wall against which his helmet rests. (He thinks the distant moundings of nausea becalmed, but he will not look yet.) So he scans the sky, black and bright, calling Sirius, calling Pleiades, Polaris, Ursa Minor, calling that … that … Why, it moves. Watch it: yes, it moves! It is a fleck of light, seeming to be wrinkled, fissured, rather like a chip of boiled cauliflower in the sky. (Of course, he knows better than to trust his own eyes just now.) But that movement …
As a child he had stood on cold sand in a frosty Cape Cod evening, watching Sputnik’s steady spark rise out of the haze (madly, dawning a little north of west); and after that he had sleeplessly wound special coils for his receiver, risked his life restringing high antennas, all for the brief capture of an unreadable tweetle-eep-tweetle in his earphones from Vanguard. Explorer, Lunik, Discoverer, Mercury. He knew them all (well, some people collect match-covers, stamps) and he knew especially that unmistakable steady sliding in the sky.
This moving fleck was a satellite, and in a moment, motionless, uninstrumented but for his chronometer and his part-brain, he will know which one. (He is grateful beyond expression—without that sliding chip of light, there were only those footprints, those wandering footprints, to tell a man he was not alone in the world.)
Say you were a kid, eager and challengeable and more than a little bright, you might in a day or so work out a way to measure the period of a satellite with nothing but a timepiece and a brain; you might eventually see that the shadow in the rocks ahead had been there from the first only because of the light from the rising satellite. Now if you check the time exactly at the moment when the shadow on the sand is equal to the height of the outcrop, and time it again when the light is at the zenith and the shadow gone, you will multiply this number of minutes by 8—think why, now; horizon to zenith is one-fourth of the orbit, give or take a little, and halfway up the sky is half that quarter—and you will then know this satellite’s period. You know all the periods—ninety minutes, two, two-and-a-half hours; with that and the appearance of this bird, you’ll find out which one it is.
But if you were that kid, eager or resourceful or whatever, you wouldn’t jabber about it to the sick man, for not only does he not want to be bothered with you, he’s thought of all that long since and is even now watching the shadows for that triangular split second of measurement. Now! His eyes drop to the face of his chronometer: 0400, near as makes no never mind.
He has minutes to wait now—ten? … thirty? … twenty-three?—while this baby moon eats up its slice of shadowpie; and that’s too bad, the waiting, for though the inner sea is calm there are currents below, shadows that shift and swim. Be busy. Be busy. He must not swim near the great invisible amoeba, whatever happens: its first cold pseudopod is even now reaching for the vitals.
Being a knowledgeable young fellow, not quite a kid any more, wanting to help the sick man too, you want to tell him everything you know about that cold-in-the-gut, that reaching invisible surrounding implacable amoeba. You know all about it—listen, you want to yell at him, don’t let that touch of cold bother you. Just know what it is, that’s all. Know what it is that is touching your gut. You want to tell him, listen:
Listen, this is how you met the monster and dissected it. Listen, you were skin-diving in the Grenadines, a hundred tropical shoal-water islands; you had a new blue snorkel mask, the kind with face-plate and breathing-tube all in one, and new blue flippers on your feet, and a new blue spear-gun—all this new because you’d only begun, you see; you were a beginner, aghast with pleasure at your easy intrusion into this underwater otherworld. You’d been out in a boat, you were coming back, you’d just reached the mouth of the little bay, you’d taken the notion to swim the rest of the way. You’d said as much to the boys and slipped into the warm silky water. You brought your gun.
Not far to go at all, but then beginners find wet distances deceiving. For the first five minutes or so it was only delightful, the sun hot on your back and the water so warm it seemed not to have any temperature at all and you were flying. With your face under the water, your mask was not so much attached as part of you, your wide blue flippers trod away yards, your gun rode all but weightless in your hand, the taut rubber sling making an occasional hum as your passage plucked it in the sunlit green. In your ears crooned the breathy monotone of the snorkel tube, and through the invisible disk of plate glass you saw wonders. The bay was shallow—ten, twelve feet or so—and sandy, with great growths of brain-, bone-, and fire-coral, intricate waving sea-fans, and fish—such fis
h! Scarlet and green and aching azure, gold and rose and slate-color studded with sparks of enamel-blue, pink and peace and silver. And that thing got into you, that … monster.
There were enemies in this otherworld: the sand-colored spotted sea-snake with his big ugly head and turned-down mouth, who would not retreat but lay watching the intruder pass; and the mottled moray with jaws like bolt-cutters; and somewhere around, certainly, the barracuda with his undershot face and teeth turned inward so that he must take away whatever he might strike. There were urchins—the plump white sea-egg with its thick fur of sharp quills and the black ones with the long slender spines that would break off in unwary flesh and fester there for weeks; and file-fish and stone-fish with their poisoned barbs and lethal meat; and the stingaree who could drive his spike through a leg bone. Yet these were not monsters, and could not matter to you, the invader churning along above them all. For you were above them in so many ways—armed, rational, comforted by the close shore (ahead the beach, the rocks on each side) and by the presence of the boat not too far behind. Yet you were … attacked.
At first it was uneasiness, not pressing, but pervasive, a contact quite as intimate as that of the sea; you were sheathed in it. And also there was the touch—the cold inward contact. Aware of it at last, you laughed: for Pete’s sake, what’s there to be scared of?
The monster, the amoeba.
You raised your head and looked back in air. The boat had edged in to the cliff at the right; someone was giving a last poke around for lobster. You waved at the boat; it was your gun you waved, and emerging from the water it gained its latent ounces so that you sank a bit, and as if you had no snorkel on, you tipped your head back to get a breath. But tipping your head back plunged the end of the tube under water; the valve closed; you drew in a hard lungful of nothing at all. You dropped your face under; up came the tube; you got your air, and along with it a bullet of seawater which struck you somewhere inside the throat. You coughed it out and floundered, sobbing as you sucked in air, inflating your chest until it hurt, and the air you got seemed no good, no good at all, a worthless devitalized inert gas.
Selected Stories Page 47