I won't get old, he thought. Blind, half-dead, a piece of meat in a bed for others to haul around. I'll die decently. Pills, or gas, or maybe I'll jump off the bridge. The alcohol will do it for me. He saw himself in an alcoholic stupor, staggering along the road … getting hit by a car and dying instantly, no pain, no bedpans or tubes up his arms and in his ass and down his throat.
It was an old vision. Usually it waited till he was decently asleep. It was always night or early morning in the dream, and the car was always a red car. "Excuse me," he said to Helen. He ran downstairs. Let her think he had to piss. He twirled the dial of the combination lock on his locker, got it wrong, did it again, got it right, uncapped the bottle, and took a swallow. The bourbon eased down warmly—that was better. Sometimes he felt it was the only warm thing in the world. He screwed the cap on the bottle, locked it up, and sauntered up the stairs. They would know, of course. That Helen would smell it on him. What the hell, they wouldn't fire him unless he made a mistake. He wouldn't make a mistake.
Helen was waiting for him at the nursing station. "Let's hope he doesn't end up like Harold," he heard her say. Who the hell was Harold? The nurse at the desk was old and stringy, on her way to looking like that senile crock down the hall.
"Hi," he said, smiling. "I'm Mark Wald, the new night shift orderly."
Graveyard shift was a breeze. The old crocks wheezed and cried and slept. The aides took turns sleeping in the bed in the back room. Mark read paperbacks and sucked on his bottle of bourbon. The other night orderly was an old fag named Morton. He liked playing cards. Mark preferred to read. Morton sulked and played solitaire at the nursing station desk.
"Who was Harold?"
Morton looked up from putting a red queen on a black king. "Oh, it's you."
"Who the hell else would it be?"
"Harold was the dude before you. Black and built. Younger than you."
"He was a fag, too?"
"The word is faggot, sweetie. No. Straight as they come, if you'll excuse the phrase."
"What happened to him—he get tired of this dump?"
Morton looked up again. "No, sweetie. He ripped off dope from the narcotics box and OD'd on it. Morphine, I think."
Now why should that Helen even think he would be like some blood who needled himself to death? He hated drugs.
"Su-i-cide, they called it," said Morton.
"Huh."
"They come and go. I've been working here five years, you know that? Only Helen's been here longer than I have." His hands kept placing the cards. He had soft, pudgy hands.
"Helen said this place is a rich people's dump."
"It is. Look at the equipment we got! Monitors, crash carts. Those things are for hospitals. The nurses all have standing orders, so that if someone goes Code Red they can give the drugs without calling the doctor on the phone. Ever try to find a doctor at dinnertime? Forget it. All these old bags have money, and their sons and daughters have guilt complexes waiting for them to die."
"It's still a dump," Mark said. His knee brushed the table and all the cards slewed sideways off their piles. "Sorry."
Morton bent down. "Sure you are, sweetie," he said. "Sure you are."
Mark went down to his locker again. He sat with the bottle in his hand. The basement walls were dirty gray and nubby, like the stubble of old men's beards. He checked his watch. Near 4 A.M., time for somebody to die. It was true they often died at 4 A.M. They had had one respiratory failure that night already, the old lady in 209. Maybe she would die.
As if his thought had done it, a blinker over the basement door started flashing frantic red. Code Red, cardiac arrest. He stuck the bottle in the locker hastily and went up the stairs.
When he got to the room they were all in there. The EKG was jumping like a scalded mouse and the nurse was using the defibrillator. They all stood clear of the metal bedframe. The body on the bed jerked. Damn, Mark thought, in a nursing home they were supposed to let you die in peace.
"Call St. Francis's admitting," the RN said. "This one has to be in CCU."
Morton went to do that. Waste of time and money, Mark thought. Why can't they just let the bastards die?
It is a sophism to imagine that there is any strict dividing line between the waking world and the world of dreams. Prospero's Cell, by Lawrence Durrell, Luisa thought. Today she was feeling strong, almost strong enough to tongue the respirator tube out of her throat. They would never let her do that. She had been to Greece, though not to Durrell's Corcyra. Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins. That was the book's first line. She tried to remember the blue and white, all the colors, the scent of lemon trees … "Hi, baby. They told us at report you had a bad night! What'd you want to stop breathing for, huh? You know they won't let you do that around here." Helen was moving closer to the bed. "It was busy here last night. That Friedman in 211, he arrested last night. They took him to St. Francis."
Yes, Luisa thought, oh yes?
Helen's voice was gentle as a kiss. "They called this morning to say he passed, baby." She went on. "Your son's coming in to see you today, baby; won't that be nice? He called to say he be in after lunch."
Johnny—she recalled a little boy named Johnny, who did not at all go with the man-sized voice that sometimes came and talked over her. Be nice, Johnny. She had often had to tell him that, a cranky little boy who liked to fuss … What could she tell him today? That they fed her through a tube and that she could no longer breathe through her own power? That food has no taste when it goes through a tube? That the sea around Greece is blue? How had she borne such an unimaginative child! He had sent her a postcard from Europe, where he had dutifully gone to honeymoon: a picture of the Paris Metro, a giant pneumatic tube. Tubes. Could she tell him she was sick of tubes?
Helen was talking to her. "Baby? Louise? Oh, damn." She half-felt hands on her. I can hear you perfectly, Luisa wanted to say. But Helen was muttering off to the nursing station. Luisa was walking the line between wakefulness and dreams, that was all. She imagined it as a thin line cut in concrete, like the lines in the sidewalks she had skipped over as a child, chanting. "Step on a crack, break your mother's back." If only they would stop pulling her back into life. Even Helen, who understood, who always told her when one of them had gone, even Helen held her to life. One day through the tubes they would feed her arsenic, and then it would all be over.
Fantasy. She built against the dark of her closed eyes the trembling blues of Corfu.
At six o'clock Mark made his final rounds. The fluorescent lights were watery in the dawn. Out of the beds the old people stared, sleepy, flat-eyed, blind-eyed. He was alone. Morton was in the hospital, St. Francis, cut up by a mugger, rolled on his way to work, left to bleed to death in an alley. What had he gone into an alley for? Su-i-cide; he could hear Morton saying it in that fag drawl.
Someone was moaning. He walked into 209. The old lady was shifting and turning her head. The tape that held the respirator tube was loose. She was supposed to be comatose, or semicomatose. He watched her for a while. The movement looked purposeful. He reached out and patted the tape down again. She moaned. Her eyes were cloudy, and he remembered that she was blind. How did it feel to have hands come out of the night at you like that? Like the hands with the knife that had cut Morton. "Listen, sweetie," he said, "you want me to take that tape off? That tube out? If I do that you'll die, you know, poof, out like a damned light. You know that?" Her body was still, frozen, stiff as a board. He put his hand on the tape again to tease her. Comatose, semicomatose, what did doctors know? he thought. She'd heard him. I'd be scared; Christ, I'd be petrified. "I won't do it," he told her. "I could lose my job."
He drowsed through the report that ritualized the shift change and then went downstairs to collect his book and his bottle. He leaned against the dirty gray wall and took a long drink. Warmer than any woman. One for the road. And one for Morton. He wondered how bad Morton was. He capped the bottle and tucked it, brownbagged, decently
clad, under his arm. He wondered what Morton had left uncollected in his locker. A pack of cards?
The wind was bitter. He held tightly to the bottle, glad that his was only a short walk home. It came to him suddenly that he was drinking himself to death. The thought was mildly entertaining. It could be worse. On the ice patches he staggered, and it became a game to see if this one or the next one would trip him. He beat them all. He decided to shortcut through the tunnel under the freeway. There would be few cars through it on a Sunday morning, 7 A.M. on an icy day. The tunnel walls were gray and smooth. He found himself thinking back to 209. He had almost done it to the old lady. Christ. That would have been a mistake.
The car came diving into the neck of the tunnel, a bullet-shaped red toy. Mark watched as it slipped on the street ice. The driver took the skids, slid, and then pulled out, nonchalant as if it were a game for kids. Smooth, he thought.
The car grew suddenly very large and very red.
The dream, he thought, it's the car of the dream. The tunnel wall was flat and cold at his back. He was pressed down and there was nowhere he could go. The bright fender grazed him, and like a bull, the car was gone. The driver honked back at him. Bastard, you missed me, he thought, you missed me! Torn between rage and joy, he threw the bottle into the air. It went up like a rocket. His feet slipped out from under him. "Hey!" He was falling. You bastard, he thought in wonderment as the bottle shattered all around him, you bastard.
"Morning, baby. You doing any better today? It's raining. Gray outside. I almost didn't want to come to work this morning, it's so ugly. But then I thought, what would Louise think if I weren't there? She'd worry. Honey, you remember that night orderly Mark?" Helen's voice dropped. "You know, they found him under the freeway this morning with his neck broke, and all cut up and covered with whiskey. An accident. Isn't that something? He was young, too. But Morton, you remember Morton, he's okay and coming back to work tonight, so there'll be someone on duty to look after you. Imagine, he just slipped on the ice! Cruel way to die."
Luisa dreamed. Cruel. That was cruel. April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead earth … Lord, must these bones live? The tube in her chest pumped. Her mouth hurt, her back hurt. Mark, she thought, remembering his voice and the thick alcoholic breath of him and the feel of his hand on her cheek. It was cruel of him to tease me. Out like a light, he had said. Out, out, brief candle. The light in Greece stains the air like yellow wine. Why would they not let her go? Arsenic through the tube would be easy. That would be murder; they would never do that. She lay and dreamed of all the ways there were to die. Arsenic, gas, ropes and cliffs, the white cliffs of Dover, steely razor blades with blue edges, blue water to drown in, and cars, bright red lethal cars. So many ways to die, she thought, but not here, and her heart clenched in a sudden fury. Again, she urged it, again, again. They do it for each other, but not for us, the bastards, never for us.
The End
© 1979 by Elizabeth A. Lynn. First published in Shadows 2 edited by Charles L. Grant.
Transformer
Chad Oliver
Our town is turned off now, all gray and lazy, so this seems like a good time to begin.
Let's not kid ourselves about it, Clyde—I know what you're thinking. I don't blame you. You're thinking there's nothing from one wall to the other that's as completely and thoroughly boring as some motherly old dame gushing about the One Hundred and One fugitives from Paradise which are to be found in Her Home Town. A real insomnia killer, that's what you're thinking. A one-bell monologue.
Suppose we get things straight, right from the start.
I may look like one of those sweet little old ladies who spend all their time in the kitchen slipping apple preserves to bleary-eyed children, but I can't help what I look like, and neither can you. I never set foot in a kitchen in my life, and of course there aren't any kids in our town—not physically, anyway. I don't say I'm the most interesting gal you ever met, Clyde, but I'll tell you for sure you never yakked with anyone like me before.
Now, you take our town. If you want it straight, it's the damnedest place you ever heard of. It stinks, but we can't get out. ELM POINT is the name on the station, that's what we have to call it, but it's as crazy as the rest of the place. There's no point in ELM POINT, and the only trees I ever saw are made out of sponge rubber.
You might stick around for a minute and listen, you see—things might get interesting.
One more thing we might as well clear up while we're at it. I can hear you thinking, with that sophisticated mind of yours: "Who's she supposed to be telling the story to? That's the trouble with all these first-person narratives." Well, Clyde, that's a dumb question, if you ask me. Do you worry about where the music comes from when Pinza sings in a lifeboat? I feel sorry for you, I really do. I'll tell you the secret: the music comes from a studio orchestra that's hidden in the worm can just to the left of the Nazi spy. You follow me? The plain, unvarnished truth is that I get restless when the town's turned off for a long time. I can't sleep. I'm talking to myself. I'm bored stiff, and so would you be if you had to live here for your whole life. But I know you're there, Clyde, or this wouldn't be getting through to you. Don't worry about it, though.
This is strictly for kicks.
Okay, so let's have some details. I live in a town that's part of the background for a model railroad. Maybe you think that's funny, but did you ever live in a subway? I want to be absolutely clear about this—you're a little dense sometimes, Clyde. I don't mean that ELM POINT is a town that's located on a big railroad that's operated in an exemplary, model manner. No. I mean I live on a model railroad, a half-baked contraption that's set up in a kid's attic. The kid's name is Willy Roberts, he's thirteen years old, and we don't think he's a god that created our world. In fact, if you want my opinion, Willy is a low-grade moron, and a sadist to boot.
So my world is on a big plywood table in an attic. My town is background atmosphere for a lousy electric train. I don't know what I'm supposed to be. A motherly old soul glimpsed through a house window, I guess. An intimate detail. It gives me a pain.
If you think it's fun to live in a town on a model railroad, you've got rocks in your head.
Look at it from our point of view. In the first place, ELM POINT isn't a town at all—it's a collection of weird buildings that Willy Roberts and his old man took a fancy to and could afford. It isn't even sharp for a model railroad town; the whole thing is disgustingly middle class.
Try to visualize it: there's a well in the middle of the table, a hole for Willy Roberts to get into when he works the transformer and the electric switches. The whole southern end of the table is covered with a sagging mountain made of chicken wire and wet paper towels. The western side has got a bunch of these sponge rubber trees I was telling you about, and just beyond them is an empty area called Texas. There are some real dumb cows there and two objectionable citizens who come to our town every Saturday night and try to shoot up the place. The Ohio River starts in the northwestern corner of the table and flows into the southeast, where I guess it makes a big drop to the floor. (No one has ever gone over to look.) Our town and a mountain take up the northern end of the table and part of the eastern side. That's where I live, as a matter of fact—on the eastern side, between the Ohio River and the water tower.
Now catch this building inventory, Clyde—it'll kill you. We've got a police station and a firehouse in North Flats, at the edge of the mountain where the tunnel comes out. There's a big tin railroad station with a red roof. There's a quaint old frame hotel that was left over from the Chicago Fire, and right behind it there's this diner that was supposed to look like an old streetcar. There's one gas station with three pumps, but no cars. There's a big double spotlight on a tin tower right across from my house; I have to wear dark glasses all the time. There's seven lower-class frame houses with dirty white curtains in the windows; Humphery and I live in one of them. Humphery—that's my husband, or would be if Willy Roberts ha
d thought to put a preacher in this hole-works in the tin switchman's house up the tracks. Whenever one of those damned trains comes by he has to goose-step out and wave his stupid red lantern. Clyde, he hates it. Then there's a cattle pen on a siding, with no wind to blow the smell away, if you get what I mean.
That's about it—a real Paradise.
Willy's got two trains on the table now. One is a flashy passenger job stashed full of stuck-up aristocrats—you know, the kind who are always reading the Times when they go through your town. The other is a freight train that doesn't carry anything; it just grinds around the track like a demented robot, and its only job, as far as I can tell, is to shuttle itself onto a siding and look respectful when the passenger train full of city slickers hisses by. As if all this racket weren't enough, Willy's got him a switch engine, too, and he keeps it in our front yard. It's got a bell.
There's more, too, but we'll get to that.
How do you like our town, Clyde? Interesting? I want to tell you something else: our town is planning to commit a murder.
Guess who.
You just stick around awhile.
You know, our town is all gray and lazy when the current isn't on, just like I said. Nobody's got much energy; I must be just about the only one awake in ELM POINT at night. It gets pretty lonesome.
But the door to the attic is opening now, and here comes Willy the Kid. Hang on, Clyde—all hell will pop loose in a minute. You'll have to excuse me for a minute; I have to wake Humphery up and get him down to his tin house. It's terrible—you almost have to dent Humphery to wake him up like this. And for what? Every time he wakes up, he has to go to the damnfool switchman's house and make with the red lantern.
Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 Page 35