Vertigo

by Bob Shaw

  “It’s no trouble — specially after the way you guys looked after me in England.”

  Hasson made another attempt to recall their first meeting, the drinking session which Werry appeared to cherish in his memory, but no images were forthcoming and he felt an obscure guilt. “I met up with your friend Morlacher this afternoon, by the way.”

  “Is that a fact?” Werry looked unconcerned. “He said the man who got killed today was some kind of a VIP.”

  “Bull! He was a buyer for a department store down in Great Falls. He didn’t deserve to get killed, of course, but he was just an ordinary joe up here on an ordinary business trip. Another statistic.”

  “Then why did…?”

  “Buck always talks that way,” Werry said, losing some of his composure. “He’s got it into his head that the Civil Aviation Authority can be talked into extending the north-south air corridor up past Calgary to Edmonton, maybe even as far as Athabasca itself. He goes on TV, gets up petitions, brings bigwigs here our of his own pocket… Doesn’t seem to realise there Just isn’t enough urgent freight traffic to justify the expense.”

  Hasson nodded, visualising the cost of installing a chain of automatic radar posts, energy fences and manned patrol stations to bring a three-hundred-kilometre strip up to the safety standards demanded by the various pilots” guilds. “What’s it to him, anyway?”

  “The Chinook. The big lolly. The inn on a pin.” Werry paused to look affronted. “Buck thinks he can still get some of his old man’s money back out of it. He sees it as a luxury airport hotel, convention centre, billion dollar brothel, Olympic games stadium, the United Nations building, Disney planet, last filling station before Mars… You name it — Buck thinks he’s got it.”

  Hasson gave a sympathetic smile, recognising the kind of bitter rhetoric used by men suffering from the age-old complaint of a thorn in the side. “He was worked up about it this afternoon.”

  “What does he expect me to do?”

  “From what I can gather, he’s coming over to tell you what he expects. I told him I’d pass the word on.”

  “Thanks.” Werry furrowed the carpet with the toe of a glossy boot. “Sometimes I wish I’d …” He glanced at Hasson from under lowered brows and suddenly smiled, resuming the guise of the insouciant revolutionary colonel. His fingers traced the pencil line of his moustache as though making sure it was still in place.

  “Listen, Rob, we’ve got better things to talk about,” he said. “You came here to forget about police work and I’m going to make sure you do. I want you to report downstairs in thirty minutes, spruced up for a party and thirsty as hell. Got it? Got it?”

  “I probably could use a drink,” Hasson said. Too much had happened to him in one day and he knew from experience that it would take at least a quarter-litre of whisky to guarantee an easy descent into sleep and no dreams of flying.

  “That’s more like my boy.” Werry slapped him on the shoulder and left the room in a flurry of air currents which were scented with a peculiar mixture of talc, leather and machine oil.

  Hasson glanced regretfully at the bed and the comfortably glowing television set, then began to do some belated unpacking. Dreadful though the prospect of a party was, it offered him more leeway than an evening cooped up with Al Werry and the three other members of his household. It should be possible for him to get into a corner near the booze supply and sit tight until he could decently retire for the night. That way he would have won through to the next day, when he could think about regrouping his forces to withstand fresh onslaughts.

  He gathered up his toiletries, opened the bedroom door a fraction and listened to make sure there was no chance of encountering May or Ginny Carpenter, then set out with stealthy tread towards the bathroom. Part way along the landing he reached another door which was slightly ajar, and was intrigued to see that the room beyond was being alternately lit up and plunged into total darkness every few seconds. Hasson hurried on by, went into the bathroom and spent fifteen minutes an having a shower and generally making himself presentable. He renewed an earlier finding that it is always a stranger who looks back at one from a strange minor. The only explanation he could think of was that people who are familiar with the positioning of their mirrors unconsciously pose, straining towards a desired image of themselves, before turning towards their reflections. In this case, Hasson was taken unawares by the sight of a dark-haired, unobtrusively muscular man whose face was marred by an apprehensive tautness around the mouth and eyes. He stood at the mirror consciously composing his features, trying to eliminate the traces of swain and self-pity he saw there, then left the bathroom and went back along the landing. The intermediate door was still ajar and the light was still flashing on and off behind it. Hasson passed by, but immediately was troubled by fears of some bizarre electrical fault which could ignite the dry timber of the house. He went back, eased the door open a little further and looked into the room. Theo Werry was sitting cross- legged on the bed, holding a table lamp directly in front of his eyes and steadily operating the switch. Hasson backed away as silently as possible and returned to his room, filled with the shameful realisation that there were worse injuries than ruptured spinal discs and broken bones.

  Moving slowly and thoughtfully, he dressed in comfortable slacks and a soft maroon shirt, and by the time he had finished guests had begun to arrive for the party. Their voices came up through the floor in irregular waves. They were loud, relaxed and cheerful, as befitted members of the exclusive club for those who felt at home in Al Werry’s house — a club to which Hasson did not belong. He opened the bedroom door three times and turned back three times before mustering enough resolve to go downstairs.

  The first person he saw on entering the front room was May Carpenter, now dressed in a few scraps of white diaphanous material, held together by fine gold chains. She turned towards him, smiling, almost swamping him with a composite projection of every screen sex goddess he could bring to mind. He blinked, trying to absorb the visual impact, then became aware of other women in similarly exotic attire and men in colourful braided jackets. It dawned on him that, contrary to the impression he had received from Werry, the occasion was one for dressing up. Everybody, a silent voice reprimanded, is looking at you. He hesitated in the doorway, wondering if there was any way in which he could withdraw.

  “There he is,” Al Werry shouted. “Come in and meet the gang, Rob.” Werry came to him, glass in hand, incongruously dressed in his reeve’s uniform minus only the tunic and cap. He gripped Hasson’s elbow and led him towards the others.

  Lost for something to say, Hasson glanced down at Werry’s uniform. “Are you on call tonight?”

  Werry looked surprised. “Of course not”

  “I just thought. . “Say hello to Frank and Carol,” Werry put in and then went on to perform a bewildering series of introductions from which Hasson failed to salvage even one name. Numbed by the succession of smiles, handshakes and amiable greetings, Hasson arrived like a piece of flotsam at a table of drinks presided over by Ginny Carpenter, who was wearing the same coppertex suit he had seen her in earlier. She gazed at him without moving, implacable as a suit of armour.

  “Give the man a drink.” Werry said, chuckling. “That’s Rob’s special brand -the Lockhart’s. Give him a good belt,”

  Ginny picked up the bottle, examined its label critically and poured out a small measure. “Anything with it?”

  “Soda water, thanks.” Hasson accepted the glass and, under Werry’s benign scrutiny, swallowed most of its contents. He was unable to prevent himself flinching as he discovered the whisky had been diluted with tonic water.

  “All right, is it?” Werry said. “It took me days to track down that bottle.”

  Hasson nodded. “It’s just that I never tried it with tonic water before.”

  Expressions of incredulity and delight appeared on Werry’s face. “Don’t tell me Ginny gave you the wrong mixer! What a woman!”

  “He oughta to
be drinking good rye and ginger ale, same as everybody else,” Ginny said unrepentantly, and Hasson knew she had ruined his drink on purpose. Baffled and depressed by her hostility, he turned away and stood without speaking until Werry had furnished him with a fresh glass, which this time was brimming with almost neat whisky. He moved into a quiet corner and began working on his drink, methodically and joylessly, hoping to anaesthetise himself down to a level at which the nearness of strangers would be unimportant.

  The party went on all about him, forming and dissolving different centres of activity, gradually growing louder in proportion to the amount of alcohol consumed. Al Werry, apparently feeling he had discharged all his obligations to Hasson, circulated continuously among his friends, never staying more than a few seconds with any one group, looking healthy, spruce and competent — and totally out of place — in his chocolate-brown uniform. May Carpenter spent most of the time surrounded by at least three men, seeming to be fully absorbed in responding to their attention and yet always managing to intercept his gaze when he looked in her direction. It came to him that Werry and May had one thing in common in that their characters were completely impenetrable as far as he was concerned. In each case the physical presence was so overwhelming as to obscure the inner being. May, for example, was behaving exactly as if she found Hasson interesting, in spite of the fact that he had virtually ceased to exist as far as women were concerned. Perhaps she had a strong maternal instinct: perhaps she met all men on the same terms — Hasson had no way to tell. He toyed with the problem at odd moments between bouts of conversation with men and women who took it in turns to relieve his solitude. The noise level in the room continued to increase. Hasson persevered with his drinking until he had finished the half-bottle of scotch and was obliged to try the rye, which he found bland but reasonably acceptable.

  At one stage in the evening, when the lights had been turned down and a number of people were dancing, he made the discovery that the chubby, apple-cheeked young man talking to him was not a farmer, as his appearance suggested, but was actually a physician called Drew Collins. A memory which Hasson had suppressed — that of Theo Werry sitting alone in his room with the table lamp held close to his eyes — sprang to the forefront of his consciousness.

  “I’d like to ask you something,” he said, uncertain about the ethics involved. “I know it’s the wrong time and all that…”

  “Don’t worry about all that crap,” Drew said comfortably. “I’d write you a prescription on a beer mat.”

  “It isn’t about myself- I was wondering if you were Theo’s doctor.”

  “Yeah, I look after young Theo.”

  “Well…” Hasson swirled his drink, creating a conical depression in its surface. “Is it true that he’ll get his sight back in two years?”

  “Perfectly true. Slightly less than two years, in fact.”

  “Why does the operation have to wait so long?”

  “It isn’t an operation as such,” Drew explained, apparently happy to talk shop. “It’s the culmination of a three-year course of treatment. The condition Theo suffers from is known as complicated cataract, which doesn’t mean the cataract itself is complicated — just that there were other factors involved in his getting it so young. Until about twenty years ago there was only one possible treatment — removal of the opaque lenses — which would have left him with highly abnormal vision for life, but now we can restore the transparency of the lens capsule. It involves putting drops in the eyes every day for three years, but at the end of that time the simple injection of a tailored enzyme into the lenses will make them like new. It’s a genuine medical advance.”

  “It certainly sounds that way,” Hasson said. “Except…”

  “Except what?”

  “Three years is a long time to be left in the dark.”

  Unexpectedly, Drew moved closer to Hasson and lowered his voice. “Did Sybil rope you in, as well?”

  Hasson stared at him in silence for a moment, tying to hide his confusion. “Sybil? No, she didn’t rope me in.”

  “I thought she might have done,” Drew said in confidential tones. “She contacted some of Al’s relations and got them to lean on him, but Al’s the only one who is legally responsible for the boy, and it had to be his own private, personal decision.”

  Hasson searched his memory and dredged up a vague recollection of Werry mentioning that his former wife’s name was Sybil. A glimmer of partial understanding appeared in his mind.

  “Well,” he said guardedly, “there are things for and against this new treatment.”

  Drew shook his head. “The only thing against it is the three- year delay, but — especially for a youngster — that’s a small price to pay for perfect vision.

  “Is it?”

  “Of course it is. AJ made the decision, anyway, and Sybil should have stuck with him over it and backed him up, if only for Theo’s sake. Personally, taking everything into consideration, I think he made the right decision.”

  “I suppose …” Hasson, recognising dangerous conversational waters ahead, cast around for a change of subject and for no reason he could explain his mind fastened on the man he had encountered in the downtown health food shop. “Do you get much competition from alternative medicine around here?”

  “Practically none.” Drew glanced sideways and raised his eyebrows as he was joined by Ginny Carpenter. “Albertan law is pretty strict about that son of thing, Why do you ask?”

  “It’s nothing much. I bumped into an interesting character today — an Asian who runs a health food shop. He said his name was Oliver.”

  “Oliver?” Drew looked blank.

  “That’s Oily Fan,” Ginny put in, cackling like a Disney witch. “You wanna stay away from him, boy. You wanna stay away from all those Chinks. They can live where white folks would die off “cause all they ever think about is how to make money.” She swayed for a moment, glass in hand, her triangular face flushed with alcohol. “Do you wanna know how those sons make money in their corner stores when there’s no customers in?”

  “What I want is another drink,” Drew replied, moving off.

  Ginny caught his arm. “I’ll tell you what they do. They can’t bear to let a minute pass without making money, so they just stand there at the cigar counter opening match boxes and taking one match out of each. I’ve looked in and seen them at it — just standing there! One match out of each box! Nobody would ever miss one, but when they’ve done it fifty times they’ve got an extra box to sell. White folks wouldn’t go to all that trouble, but the Chinks just stand there. . . One match out of each box!”

  Hasson considered the story briefly, classified it under the heading of “Racist Apocryphal” and simultaneously picked our a flaw in its internal logic. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  Ginny mulled over his words and seemed to note their ambivalence. “Do you think I made all that up?”

  “I didn’t mean to imply …” Hasson smiled apologetically, dreading a confrontation with the flinty little woman. “I think I need another drink, too.”

  Ginny waved expansively in the direction of the table. “Go ahead and soak it up, friend.”

  Hasson thought of a number of retorts ranging from the coldly sarcastic to the crudely obscene, but again in his mind there was a verbal log-jam complicated by undercurrents of embarrassment, exhaustion and fear. He found himself mumbling thanks to Ginny and backing away from her like a courtier excusing himself from a royal presence. He topped up his glass, aware that he was drinking too much, and decided to adopt Werry’s technique of continually moving from one locus to another until he could decently withdraw to the fortress of his room. In a short time the excess of strong drink combined with his tiredness to produce in him a trance-like state in which the room became an encompassing screen upon which human forms were flat and meaningless projections, like the patterns radiated by a guttering fire.

  At one stage Hasson was dumbfounded to realise he had been drawn into some kind of i
nebriated game whose rules were never made clear to him, but which engendered a great deal of stumbling in darkness, whispering, laughing, and slamming of unseen doors. It came to him that his chance of escape had arrived, that with any luck at all he could be safe in bed before his absence was even noticed. He tried to take his bearings in the darkness and set out for the door which opened into the hall, but his progress was impeded by others who seemed to possess a magical ability to know exactly what they were doing and exactly where they were going in the absence of light. A door opened in front of him, revealing a dimly lit room, and several hands pushed Hasson forward. He heard the door slam behind him and in the same moment became aware that he was alone in the kitchen with May Carpenter. His heart began an unsteady pounding.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” she said in a low voice, coming towards him. “What sign have you got?”

  “Sign?” Hasson stared at her in bewilderment. In the low- centred mellow light her flimsy party clothing appeared hardly to exist at all, turning her into a feverish erotic vision.

  “Yes. I’ve got Libra.” She held up a card with a drawing of a pair of scales. “What have you got?”

  Hasson spread the fingers of his right hand and looked down at it. He was holding a card which also bore the sign of Libra.

  “The same,” May said. “That’s lucky for both of us.” With no trace of hesitation she put her arms around his neck, drawing his face down to meet hers. In the instant before the kiss Hasson saw her open mouth grow large with its nearness, large as any screen goddess’s mouth in photographic close-up, as simplified and idealised as any sex symbol’s mouth on a movie poster, all flawless mathematical curvatures and billowing crimson and stepped white planes, filling his eyes. During the kiss he experienced a sense of unreality, but at the same time his hands and body were receiving other messages, reminding him that the business of life was life and that it had not done with him yet. The revelation unnerved him with its forcefulness and simplicity, driving him to separate himself from May so that he could look at her again.