I See a Man Sitting on a Chair, and the Chair Is Biting His Leg

by Harlan Ellison

  He carefully avoided the embroglio. It looked like fun, but he wasn’t going to aid and abet the goo in taking him over.

  He hailed a taxi and stared at the scenery. The Temple of Strangers was served by the virgin daughters of the town’s leading citizens; executions for impiety were held publicly in the Court of the Sun; Christianity was in disrepute: it wasn’t any fun.

  The old Nevadan custom of gambling was still observed, but had been elaborated, ramified and extended. In East pyrites, the saying, “You bet your life,” had real and sinister meanings.

  Many of the practices in East pyrites were un-Constitutional; others were implausible; and some were downright inconceivable.

  Pareti loved it at once.

  He selected the Round-The-World Combination Hotel, close to the Hall of Perversions, just across the street from the verdant expanse of Torture Garden. In his room, he showered, changed, and tried to decide what to do first. Dinner in the Slaughterhouse, of course; then perhaps a little mild exercise in the cool darkness of the Mudbath Club. After that—

  He suddenly became aware that he was not alone. Someone or something was in the room with him.

  He looked around. There was apparently nothing wrong, except that he could have sworn he had put his jacket on a chair. Now it was on the bed, near him.

  After a moment’s hesitation he reached for the jacket. The garment slid away from him. “Try to catch me!” it said, in a coy, insipid voice. Pareti grabbed for it, but the jacket danced away from him.

  Pareti stared at it. Wires? Magnets? A joke of the management of the Hotel? He knew instinctively that he would find no rational way in which the coat had moved and talked. He gritted his teeth and stalked it.

  The jacket moved away, laughing, dipping like a bat. Pareti cornered it behind the room’s massage unit, and managed to grab a sleeve. I’ve got to have this goddam thing sent out to be cleaned and burned, he thought insanely.

  It lay limp for a moment. Then it curled around and tickled the palm of his hand.

  Pareti giggled involuntarily, then flung the garment away from him and hurried out of the room.

  Descending by dropshaft to the street, he knew that had been the true onset of the Disease. It had altered the relationship between him and an article of clothing. An inanimate object. The goo was getting bolder.

  What would it do next? He was in a soft place called The Soft Place. It was a gambling hall whose innovation was an elaborate game called Stick It. The game was played by seating oneself before a long counter with a round polyethylene-lined hole in the facing panel, and inserting a certain portion of the anatomy therein. It was strictly a man’s game, of course.

  One placed one’s bets on the flickering light-panels that covered the counter-top. These lights were changed in a random pattern by a computer programmer, and through the intricacies of the betting and odds, various things happened behind the facing panels, to whomever happened to be inserted in the playing-hole. Some of the things were very nice indeed. Some were not.

  Ten seats down to his right, Pareti heard a man scream, high and shrill, like a woman. An attendant in white came with a sheet and a pneumatic stretcher, and took the bettor away. The man to Pareti’s left was sitting forward, up tight against the panel, moaning with pleasure. His amber WINNER light was flashing.

  A tall, elegant woman with inky hair came up beside Pareti’s chair. “Honey, you shouldn’t be wasting anything as nice as you here. Why don’t we go downshaft to my brig and squam a little…”

  Pareti panicked. He knew the goo was at work again. He withdrew from the panel just as the flickering lights went up LOSER in front of him, and the distinct sound of whirring razor blades came out of the playing-hole. He saw his bets sucked into the board, and he turned without looking at the woman, knowing she would be the most gorgeous creature he had ever seen. And he didn’t need that aggravation on top of everything else.

  He ran out of The Soft Place. The goo, and Ashton’s Disease, were ruining his good time of hell-for-leather. But he was not, repeat, not going to let it get the better of him. Behind him, the woman was crying.

  He was hurrying, but he didn’t know where he was going. Fear encased him like a second self. The thing he ran from was within him, pulsing and growing within him, running with him, perhaps moving out ahead of him. But the empty ritual of flight calmed him, left him better able to think.

  He sat down on a park bench beneath an obscenely-shaped purple lamp post. The neon designs were gagging and suggestive. It was quiet here—except for the Muzak—he was in the world-famous Hangover Square. He could hear nothing—except the Muzak—and the stifled moans of a tourist expiring in the bushes.

  What could he do? He could resist, he could close out the effects of Ashton’s Disease by concentration…

  A newspaper fluttered across the street and plastered itself around his foot. Pareti tried to kick it away. It clung to his foot, and he heard it whisper, “Please, oh please do not spurn me.”

  “Get away from me!” Pareti screamed. He was suddenly terrified; he could see the newspaper crinkle as it tried to unsnap his shoe-buttons.

  “I want to kiss your feet,” the newspaper pleaded. “Is that so terrible? Is it wrong? Am I so ugly?”

  “Let go!” Pareti shouted, tugging at the paper, which had formed into a pair of giant white lips.

  A man walked past him, stopped, stared, and said, “Jim, that’s the damnedest bit I ever saw. You do that as a lounge act or just for kicks?”

  “Voyeur!” the newspaper hissed, and fluttered away down the street.

  “How do you control it?” the man asked. “Special controls in your pocket or something?”

  Pareti shook his head numbly. He was so tired suddenly. He said, “You actually saw it kiss my foot?”

  “I mean to tell you I saw it,” the man said.

  “I hoped that maybe I was only hallucinating,” Pareti said. He got up from the bench and walked unsteadily away. He didn’t hurry.

  He was in no rush to meet the next manifestation of Ashton’s Disease.

  In a dim bar he drank six souses and had to be carried to the public Dry-Out on the corner. He cursed the attendants for reviving him. At least when he was bagged, he didn’t have to compete with the world around him for possession of his sanity.

  In the Taj Mahal he played girls, purposely aiming badly when he threw the dirks and the kris at the rapidly spinning bawds on the giant wheel. He clipped the ear off a blonde, planted one ineffectually between the legs of a brunette, and missed entirely with his other shots. It cost him seven hundred dollars. He yelled cheat and was bounced.

  A head-changer approached him on Leopold Way, and offered the unspeakable delights of an illegal head-changing operation by a doctor who was “clean and very decent.” He yelled for a cop, and the little ratfink scuttled away in the crowd.

  A taxi driver suggested the Vale of Tears and though it sounded lousy, he gave the guy the go-ahead. When he entered the place—which was on the eighty-first level, a slum section of foul odors and wan street lights—he recognized it at once for what it was. A necro-joint. The smell of freshly-stacked corpses rose up to gag him.

  He only stayed an hour.

  There were nautch joints, and blind pigs, and hallucinogen bars, and a great many hands touching him, touching him.

  Finally, after a long time, he found himself back in the park, where the newspaper had come after him. He didn’t know how he’d gotten there, but he had a tattoo of a naked seventy-year-old female dwarf on his chest.

  He walked through the park, but found that he had picked an unpromising route. Dogwood barked at him and caressed his shoulders; Spanish Moss sang a fandango; an infatuated willow drenched him in tears. He broke into a run, trying to get away from the importunities of cherry trees, the artless Western prattle of sagebrush, the languors of poplar. Through him, his disease was acting on the environment. He was infecting the world he passed through; no, he wasn’t contagious
to humans, hell no, it was worse than that: he was a Typhoid Mary for the inanimate world! And the altered universe loved him, tried to win him. Godlike, an Unmoved Mover, unable to deal with his involuntary creations, he fought down panic and tried to escape from the passions of a suddenly writhing world.

  He passed a roving gang of juvies, who offered to beat the crap out of him, for a price, but he turned them down and stumbled on.

  He came out onto De Sade Boulevard, but even here there was no relief. He could hear the little paving stones whispering about him:

  “Say, he’s cute.”

  “Forget it, he’d never look at you.

  “You vicious bitch!”

  “I tell you he’ll never look at you.”

  “Sure he will. Hey, Joe—”

  “What did I tell you? He didn’t even look at you!”

  “But he’s got to! Joe, Joe, it’s me, over here—”

  Pareti whirled and yelled, “As far as I’m concerned, one paving stone looks exactly like another paving stone. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all.”

  That shut them up, by God! But what was this?

  High overhead, the neon sign above cut-rate Sex City was beginning to flash furiously. The letters twisted and formed a new message:

  I AM A NEON SIGN

  AND I ADORE JOE PARETI!

  A crowd had gathered to observe the phenomenon. “What the hell is a Joe Pareti?” one woman asked.

  “A casualty of love,” Pareti told her. “Speak the name softly, the next corpse you see may be your own.”

  “You’re a twisto,” the woman said.

  “I fear not,” Pareti said politely, a little madly. “Madness is my ambition, true. But I dare not hope to achieve it.”

  She stared at him as he opened the door and went into Sex City. But she didn’t believe her eyes when the doorknob gave him a playful little pat on the ass.

  “The way it works is this,” the salesman said. “Fulfillment is no problem; the tough thing is desire, don’t you dig? Desires die of fulfillment and gotta be replaced by new, different desires. A lotta people desire to have weirdo desires, but they can’t make it onaccounta having lived a lifetime on the straights. But us here at the Impulse Implantation Center can condition you to like anything you’d like to like.”

  He had hold of Pareti’s sleeve with a tourisnag, a rubber-lined clamp on the end of a telescoping rod; it was used to snag tourists passing through the Odd Services Arcade, to drag them closer to specific facilities.

  “Thanks, I’ll think it over,” Pareti said, trying without much success to get the tourisnag off his sleeve.

  “Wait, hey, Jim, dig! We got a special bargain rate, a real cheapo, it’s only on for the next hour! Suppose we fix you up with pedophilia, a really high-class desire which has not as yet been over-exploited? Or take bestiality… or take both for the special giveaway price—”

  Pareti managed to pull the snag from his sleeve, and hurried on down the Arcade without looking back. He knew that one should never get Impulse Implanation from boiler-shop operators. A friend of his had made that mistake while on leave from a TexasTower, had been stuck with a passion for gravel, and had died after three admittedly enjoyable hours.

  The Arcade was teeming, the screams and laughter of weekend freakoffs and smutters rising up toward the central dome of ever-changing light patterns, crapout kliegs, and grass-jets emitting their pleasant, ceaseless streams of thin blue marijuana smoke. He needed quiet; he needed aloneness.

  He slid into a Spook Booth. Intercourse with ghosts was outlawed in some states, but most doctors agreed that it was not harmful if one made certain to wash off the ectoplasmic residue afterward with a thirty percent alcohol solution. Of course, it was more risky for women (he saw a Douche Bidet Rest Stop just across the Arcade concourse, and marveled momentarily at the thoroughness of the East pyrites Better Business Bureau; they took care of every exigency).

  He leaned back in the darkness, heard the beginning of a thin, eerie wail…

  Then the Booth door was opened. A uniformed attendant asked, “Mr. Joseph Pareti?”

  Pareti nodded. “What is it?”

  “Sorry to disturb you, sir. A call for you.” She handed him a telephone, caressed his thigh, and left, closing the door. Pareti held the phone and it buzzed. He put it to his ear. “Hello?”

  “Hi there.”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is your telephone, stupid. Who did you think it was?”

  “I can’t take all this! Stop talking!”

  “It’s not talking that’s difficult,” the telephone said. “The tough thing is finding something to say.”

  “Well, what do you want to say?”

  “Nothing much. I just wanted you to know that somewhere, somehow, Bird lives.”

  “Bird? Bird who? What in hell are you talking about?” There was no answer. The telephone had hung up.

  He put the telephone down on the comfort ledge and sank back, hoping to God he could make it in peace and quiet. The phone buzzed again, almost immediately. He did not pick it up, and it went from buzz to ring. He put it to his ear again.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi there,” a silky voice said.

  “Who is this?”

  “This is your telephone, Joe baby. I called before. I thought you might like this voice better.”

  “Why don’t you leave me alone?” Joe almost sobbed.

  “How can I, Joe?” the telephone asked. “I love you! Oh Joe, Joe, I’ve tried so hard to please you. But you’re so moody, baby, I just don’t understand. I was a really pretty dogwood, and you barely glanced at me! I became a newspaper, and you didn’t even read what I wrote about you, you ungrateful thing!”

  “You’re my disease,” Pareti said unsteadily. “Leave me alone!”

  “Me? A disease?” the telephone asked, a hurt note in the silken voice. “Oh, Joe, darling, how can you call me that? How can you pretend indifference after all we’ve been to each other?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pareti said.

  “You do too know! You came to me every day, Joe, out on the warm sea. I was sort of young and silly then, I didn’t understand, I tried to hide from you. But you lifted me up out of the water, you brought me close to you; you were patient and kind, and little by little I grew up. Sometimes I’d even try to wriggle up the pole handle to kiss your fingers…”

  “Stop it!” Pareti felt his senses reeling, this was insanity, everything was becoming something else, the world and, the Spook Booth were whirling around. “You’ve got it all wrong—”

  “I have not!” the telephone said indignantly. “You called me pet names, I was your screwin’ goo! I’ll admit, I had tried other men before you, Joe. But then, you’d been with women before we met, so we mustn’t throw the past up to one another. But even with the other five I tried, I was never able to become what I wanted to be. Can you understand how frustrating that was for me, Joe? Can you? I had my whole life before me and I didn’t know what to do with it. One’s shape is one’s career, you know, and I was confused, until I met you…Excuse me if I babble, darling, but this is the first chance we’ve had for a real talk.”

  Through the gibbering madness of it all, Pareti saw it now, and understood it. They had underestimated the goo. It had been a young organism, mute but not unintelligent, shaped by the powerful desires it possessed like every other living creature. To have form. It was evolving—

  Into what?

  “Joe, what do you think? What would you like me to become?”

  “Could you turn into a girl?” Pareti asked, timorously.

  “I’m afraid not,” the telephone said. “I tried that a few times; and I tried being a nice collie, too, and a horse. But I guess I did a pretty sloppy job, and anyhow, it felt all wrong. I mean, it’s just not me. But name anything else!”

  “No!” Pareti bellowed. For a moment, he had been going along with it. The lunacy was catching.
/>   “I could become a rug under your feet, or if you wouldn’t think it was too daring, I could become your underwear—”

  “Goddam it, I don’t love you!” Pareti shrieked. “You’re nothing but gray ugly goo! I hate your guts! You’re a disease…why don’t you go love something like yourself?”

  “There’s nothing like me except me,” the telephone sobbed. “And besides, it’s you I love.”

  “Well, I don’t give a damn for you!”

  “You’re cruel!”

  “You stink, you’re ugly, I don’t love you, I’ve never loved you!”

  “Don’t say that, Joe,” the telephone warned.

  “I’m saying it! I never loved you, I only used you! I don’t want your love, your love nauseates me, do you understand?”

  He waited for an answer, but there was suddenly only an ominous, surly silence on the telephone. Then he heard the dial tone. The telephone had hung up.

  Now. Pareti has returned to his hotel. He sits in his embroidered room, which has been cunningly constructed for the mechanical equivalents of love. Doubtless he is lovable; but he feels no love. That is obvious to the chair, to the bed, and to the flighty overhead lamp. Even the bureau, not normally observant, realizes that Pareti is loveless.

  It is more than sad; it is annoying. It goes beyond mere annoyance; it is maddening. To love is a mandate, to be unloved is insupportable. Can it be true? Yes, it can; Joe Pareti does not love his loveless lover.

  Joe Pareti is a man. He is the sixth man to spurn the loving lover’s lovely love. Man does not love: can one argue the syllogism? Can frustrated passion be expected to defer judgment any longer?

  Pareti looks up and sees the gilded mirror on the facing wall. He remembers that a mirror led Alice to Looking-Glass Land, and Orpheus to Perdition; that Cocteau called mirrors the gateways to hell.

  He asks himself what a mirror is. He answers himself that a mirror is an eye waiting to be looked through.