“Gee, Dad, look at that!”
He gaped at the teen-aged boy beside him. And who was he? Owen Crowley shook his head a little. He looked around him. Nice? In France again? What about the war?
The train plunged into blackness. “Oh, damn!” snapped Linda. On Owen’s other side she struck her match again, and in the flare he saw, reflected in the window, the features of another middle-aged stranger and it was himself. The present flooded over him. The war over and he and his family abroad: Linda, twenty-two, divorced, bitter, slightly alcoholic; George, fifteen, Chubby, flailing in the glandular limbo between women and erector sets; Carole, forty-six, newly risen from the sepulcher of menopause, pettish, somewhat bored; and he himself, forty-nine, successful, coldly handsome, still wondering if fife were made of years or seconds. All this passing through his mind before Riviera sunlight flooded into their compartment again.
Out on the terrace it was darker, cooler. Owen stood there, smoking, looking at the spray of diamond pinpoints in the sky. Inside, the murmuring of gamblers was like a distant insect hum.
“Hello, Mr. Crowley.”
She was in the shadows, palely gowned; a voice, a movement.
“You know my name?” he asked.
“But you’re famous,” was her answer.
Awareness fluttered in him. The straining flattery of club women had turned his stomach more than once. But then she’d glided from the darkness and he saw her face and all awareness died. Moonlight creamed her arms and shoulders; it was incandescent in her eyes.
“My name is Alison,” she said. “Are you glad to meet me?”
The polished cruiser swept a banking curve into the wind, its bow slashing at the waves, flinging up a rainbowed mist across them. “You little idiot!” he laughed. “You’ll drown us yet!” “You and I!” she shouted back. “Entwining under fathoms! I’d love that, wouldn’t you?”
He smiled at her and touched her thrill-flushed cheek. She kissed his palm and held him with her eyes. I love you. Soundless; a movement of her lips. He turned his head and looked across the sun-jeweled Mediterranean. Just keep going on, he thought. Never turn. Keep going till the ocean swallows us. I won’t go back.
Alison put the boat on automatic drive, then came up behind him, sliding warm arms around his waist, pressing her body to his. “You’re off again,” she murmured. “Where are you, darling?”
He looked at her. “How long have we known each other?” he asked.
“A moment, forever, it’s all the same,” she answered, teasing at his ear lobe with her lips.
“A moment or forever,” he murmured, “yes.”
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said, “just brooding on the tyranny of clocks.”
“Since time is so distressing to you, love,” she said, pushing open the cabin door, “let’s not waste another second of it.”
The cruiser hummed across the silent sea.
“What, hiking?” Carole said. “At your age?”
“Though it may disturb you,” Owen answered, tautly, “I, at least, am not yet prepared to surrender to the stodgy blandishments of old age.”
“So I’m senile now!” she cried.
“Please,” he said.
“She thinks you’re old?” said Alison. “Good God, how little that woman knows you!”
Hikes, skiing, boat rides, swimming, horseback riding, dancing till sun dispersed the night. Him telling Carole he was doing research for a novel; not knowing if she believed him; not caring much. Weeks and weeks of stalking the elusive dead.
He stood on the sun-drenched balcony outside Alison’s room. Inside, ivory-limbed, she slept like some game-worn child. Owen’s body was exhausted, each inadequate muscle pleading for surcease; but, for the moment, he was not thinking about that. He was wondering about something else; a clue that had occurred to him when he was lying with her.
In all his life, it seemed as if there never was a clear remembrance of physical love. Every detail of the moments leading to the act were vivid but the act itself was not. Equally so, all memory of his ever having cursed aloud was dimmed, uncertain.
And these were the very things that movies censored.
“Owen?” Inside, he heard the rustle of her body on the sheets. There was demand in her voice again; honeyed but authoritative. He turned. Then let me remember this, he thought. Let every second of it be with me; every detail of its fiery exaction, its flesh-born declarations, its drunken, sweet derangement. Anxiously, he stepped through the doorway.
Afternoon. He walked along the shore, staring at the mirror-flat blueness of the sea. It was true then. There was no distinct remembrance of it. From the second he’d gone through the doorway until now, all was a virtual blank. Yes, true! He knew it now. Interims were void; time was rushing him to his script-appointed end. He was a player, yes, as Artie said, but the play had been already written.
He sat in the dark, train compartment, staring out the window. Far below slept moon-washed Nice and Alison; across the aisle slept George and Linda, Carole grumbled in a restless sleep. How angry they had been at his announcement of their immediate departure for home.
And now, he thought, and now. He held his watch up and marked the posture of its luminous hands.Seventy-four minutes.
How much left?
* * * *
“You know, George,” he said, “when I was young - and not so young - I nursed a fine delusion. I thought my life was being run out like a motion picture. It was never certain, mind you, only nagging doubt but it dismayed me; oh indeed it did. Until, one day - a little while ago - it came to me that everyone has an uncontrollable aversion to the inroads of mortality. Especially old ones like myself, George. How we are inclined to think that time has, somehow, tricked us, making us look the other way a moment while, now unguarded, it rushes by us, bearing on its awful, tracking shoulders, our lives.”
“I can see that,” said George and lit his pipe again.
Owen Crowley chuckled. “George, George,” he said, “give full humor to your nutty sire. He’ll not be with you too much longer.”
“Now stop that talk,” said Carole, knitting by the fire, “stop that silly talk,”
“Carole?” he called. “My dear?” Wind from the Sound obscured his trembling voice. He looked around. “Here, you! Here!”
The nurse primped mechanically at his pillow. She chided, “Now, now, Mr. Crowley. You mustn’t tire yourself.”
“Where’s my wife? For pity’s sake go fetch her. I can’t—”
“Hush now, Mr. Crowley, don’t start in again.”
He stared at her; at this semi-mustached gaucherie in white who fussed and wheedled. “What?” he murmured.“What?” Then something drew away the veil and he knew. Linda was getting her fourth divorce, shuttling between her lawyer’s office and the cocktail lounges; George was a correspondent in Japan, a brace of critic-feted books to his name. And Carole, Carole?
Dead.
“No,” he said, quite calmly, “no, no, that’s not true. I tell you fetch her. Oh, there’s a pretty thing.” He reached out for the falling leaf and toppled from his chair.
The blackness parted; it filtered into unmarked grayness. Then his room appeared, a tiny fire on the grate, his doctor by the bed consulting with the nurse; at the foot of it, Linda standing like a sour wraith.
Now, thought Owen. Now was just about the time. His life, he thought, had been a brief engagement; a flow of scenes across what cosmic retina? He thought of John, of Linda Carson, of Artie, of Morton Zuckersmith, and Cora; of George and Linda and Alison; of Carole; of the legioned people who had passed him during his performance. They were all gone, almost faceless now.
“What... time?” he asked.
The doctor drew his watch. “Four-eight,” he said, “A.M.”‘
Of course. Owen smiled. He should have known it all along. A dryness in his throat thinned the laugh to a rasping whisper. They stood there, staring at him.
“Eight
y-five minutes,” he said. “A good length. Yes; a good length.”
Then, just before he closed his eyes, he saw them - letters floating in the air, imposed across their faces and the room. And they were words, but words seen in a mirror, white and still,
Or was it just imagination?
Fadeout.
<
* * * *
nightmare number four
robert bloch
(With apologies to the late Stephen Vincent Benét)
We thought it was a Joke
When we read it in the papers that afternoon—
About some nut inventor down in Georgia
With a device for printing matter on air.
No, it wasn’t skywriting again,
Or television. It printed matter on the air for you to read:
It was permanent
And wouldn’t blow away.
But there it was.
Just an item in the paper. It didn’t mean much.
Something to laugh about, or tell your wife,
“What will these guys think of next?”
And most people didn’t even see it, I suppose.
That’s why it came as such a shock
When the advertisers took it up.
I remember the morning
When I looked out of the window and saw the sign hanging there
(Just hanging there, you understand, in bold black letters)
Reading:
“HAVE YOU TAKEN A GOOD LAXATIVE LATELY, OLD TIMER?”
I know I blinked.
The letters were black as ink, but solid to the touch:
They hung there and they didn’t go away.
Well, this was how it started - and on the streets, going to work,
There were more signs to read.
“EAT REEKIES - THEY’RE GOOD FOR YOU!”
“HAVE YOU HAD YOUR WINTER FUR RELINED?”
and
“GET YOUR CRANKCASE DRAINED.”
Passengers puzzled on the bus, but we weren’t sore, then.
The signs were small at first;
Just two feet high, black and white - “POOPSI-COLA HITS THE SPOT.”
After while we noticed the men with spray guns
Like insect exterminators, spraying the letters out.
Little crowds used to watch them do it.
And the TV comedians made gags,
And the columnists filled their columns,
And somebody wrote a song about it.
But nobody wrote indignant letters to the newspapers
Yet
Then they began spraying signs over the lawns
And over driveways
And above houses
And the streets were choked with signs, signs, signs.
Black specks of printed matter, wherever your eyes turned.
Advertising firms were sued by property owners,
But the air was free. Wasn’t it?
The courts thought so.
Motorists complained the signs blocked visibility.
There were accidents.
Men were killed, but the ads went on.
To sell more bread.
To sell more tonics to help digest the bread.
To sell more laxatives to get rid of the bread
Once it was digested.
And then, of course - they advertised more bread again.
That’s how it was, and we might have gotten used to it, in time
If only the signs hadn’t started getting BIGGER
And THICKER.
Two feet tall in the air.
Then five feet.
Then ten.
And the letters a foot thick.
The air was black. Foul.
There was some secret ink they used, and when you breathed it,
It made you retch.
But that was all right, too.
One of the signs said “USE FLETCH’S PILLS AND STOP RETCHING.”
There was a cure
But not for blindness, not for insanity,
Not for the perpetual sight of signs
Floating over Broadway and Park Avenue.
Twisting between clotheslines in the slums,
Weaving across the swimming pools on palatial estates.
Blocking the boulevards
Shadowing the sun in a black blot over the city—
The signs, reading, “TENDER SKIN LIKES VELVY-DOWN TISSUE,”
“EAT MORE KOHLRABI WEEK,”
“GET RID OF YOUR UGLY PIMPLES!” and “THROW AWAY YOUR TRUSS!”
And then they made the signs in color to light up the night,
And blindness and insanity began to pile up vital statistics.
Regular advertising died
Because this was cheaper and more profitable.
What if the signs did tangle up in streaming criss-crosses?
What if you looked out of the window and saw nothing but reams of it,
Illegibly imprinted on air?
They got the insects to work, then.
Inoculated them, I suppose. Trained them, perhaps
To void out the signs.
No more sprayers.
Insect thoraxes spewed out the signs in patterns.
They must have bred the bugs on Madison Avenue.
Some genius thought it up—
The Man in the Gray Flannel Overalls.
Of course we tried to pass some laws.
We always do, when it’s too late,
And it was too late now.
There were insects everywhere. Insects in clouds,
Insects in black swarms, spurting from distended bellies;
Each forming his little letter - its dot, his dash, her period.
And that, of course, was the beginning
Of the end.
Too many insects.
Too many to train, too many to control. So they bred.
Bred, and flew, and devoured.
They made nests in crates of VELVY-DOWN. They nibbled at the trusses.
They bored through boxes of FLETCH’S PILLS.
It didn’t do any good to reline your winter furs.
They ate them, too,
And bred again.
The skies were really black now. Black with flying forms.
It was too late.
The plague came, and then the famine.
They called out the Marines.
But how are you going to bayonet an insect?
And pretty soon,
What with plague and famine and all,
There weren’t any Marines any more.
There weren’t any consumer goods left to consume,
Nor any consumers.
And - belated blessing! - there weren’t any advertisers either.
Just the insects
Flying aimlessly through ink-spattered air, droning by the signs
Made meaningless through lack of eyes to read them. And insect retinas
Flickered down on an empty world where there was nothing left
But words.
Lucky for me
I saved a few to write this down....
<
* * * *
Kornbluth, Mary (Ed) Page 24