Crompton Divided

by Robert Sheckley

  He boarded a cruising ornithopter and gave its driver Loomis’s home address. He was not interested in the alien sights on all sides of him, sights which Playboy magazine had voted ‘Most Far-out in the Galaxy’ for three consecutive years. The ornithopter flapped to a graceful landing on the front lawn of aluminium-sided ranch house with car-port, jalousies, a Florida room, a swimming pool, and a hibiscus tree. Crompton paid the driver (a freckled CCNY student on a working vacation). Trying to maintain his composure, he went up to the front door and rang the chimes.

  The door opened. A girl of about five in a soiled T-shirt looked up at him. ‘Whaddaya want?’

  ‘Ah – is Mr. Loomis in?’

  ‘What do you want him for?’

  ‘That is a personal matter,’ Crompton said.

  ‘I don’t like you,’ the child said.

  ‘Gwendkwifer,’ a woman’s voice called from behind the child. ‘Come here, please.’

  The little girl went away. A dark and boldly attractive young woman looked out at Crompton. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Crompton. I am here to see Mr. Loomis on a matter of considerable importance to both of us.’

  ‘If you’re a bill collector, forget it, he’s broke.’

  ‘It is nothing like that,’ Crompton said.

  A man’s voice from within the house said, ‘Get out of the way, Gilliam. I can handle this.’

  The door opened. Mr. Loomis looked out at Mr. Crompton.’

  Tableau!

  Parts of the same personality recognize each other instantly, and through any disguise. The moment is always the same, almost sickening in its intensity, a moment so paradoxically and simultaneously attractive and repulsive that response is momentarily arrested while one tries to think of something to say. For what do you say after the initial shock has worn off? Should you take an informal line? (‘Hello, missing personality-segment, always glad to see a part of myself, come in and take your shoes off. …’) Or is it a time for caution? (‘Oh, you’ve popped up again. I do hope you’ll watch your manners this time. …’)

  So it was that these two fragments of a single personality gazed upon each other without speaking. Crompton saw the signs of a decaying Durier body. He observed Loomis’s neat, handsome features, somewhat blurry now, characterologically gone to fat. He noticed the smooth, thinning brown hair artfully cut, and the brilliant eyes around which was a trace of cosmetics. And you could depend on Crompton not to overlook the self-indulgent twist to Loomis’s mouth and the complacent slouch of his body.

  Here was the stereotype of the Sensualist, the man who lives only for pleasure and slothful ease. Here was the embodiment of the Sanguine Humor of Fire, caused by too much hot blood, tending to make a man unduly mirthful and overfond of fleshy gratifications. In Loomis resided all of Crompton’s potentialities for pleasure, untimely ripped from him and set up as an entity in itself – Loomis, the pure pleasure principle, vitally necessary to the Crompton mind body.

  This pleasure principle, which Crompton had always imagined as existing in vacuo, seemed to be endowed with a personality of its own, to say nothing of the unexpected complication of a wife and child.

  ‘Well well well,’ Loomis said, grinning and rocking on his heels. ‘I always figured you’d look me up one of these days.’

  ‘Who is this creep?’ Gilliam asked. (The actual word she used was nmezpelth, a bit of Trastanian slang she had picked up from her far-traveling tap-dancing father. Nmezpelth means ‘diseased slime-mold’ and carries the connotation of ‘dismal repetition of undesirable actions.’)

  ‘He is my only living relative,’ Loomis said.

  Gilliam peered suspiciously at Crompton. ‘Is he a second cousin or something?’

  ‘Afraid not,’ Loomis said. ‘Biologically he is a sort of combination brother and father to me. I don’t believe there’s a word to describe the relationship.’

  ‘You told me you were an orphan!’

  Loomis shrugged. ‘Well, you told me you were a virgin.’

  ‘You bastard! What is this all about?’

  Loomis said, ‘Oh well, these things always come out in the end, don’t they? Gilliam, I have a confession to make. The fact is, I’m not actually a person at all. I am no more than a portion of this person’s personality.’

  ‘That’s really funny,’ Gilliam said, laughing unpleasantly. ‘You’re always bragging about how big a man you are, and now I find out you’re not even a man at all.’

  Loomis smiled. ‘My dear, you couldn’t even satisfy a Durian android; God help us both if I’d been a man!’

  ‘Now that,’ Gilliam said, her voice rising to a scream, ‘is just too damn much! Baby, I’m splitting because you are not where it’s at.’

  ‘Go back to the job where I found you. What was it – graveyard-shift waitress at the Last Chance Simulacrum Café? Doubtless that is more your speed.’

  ‘I’m going!’ Gilliam shouted. ‘I’ll send for my clothes! You’ll hear from my lawyer!’

  She scooped up Gwendkwifer, who screamed, ‘I don’t want to go! I want to see what happens next to Daddy!’

  ‘Precocious little thing,’ Loomis remarked to Crompton. ‘Good-bye, my dears,’ he said, as Gilliam and Gwendkwifer exited.

  12

  ‘Well, alone at last,’ Loomis said, bolting the door. He looked Crompton up and down and didn’t seem too pleased with what he saw. ‘Did you have a pleasant trip here, Alistair? And do you expect to stay long?’

  ‘That depends,’ Crompton said.

  ‘Well, come into my parlor and let’s have a gab.’

  Loomis’s parlor was a wonder and a revelation. Crompton almost stumbled as his feet sank into the deep-piled Oriental rug. The lighting in the room was dim and golden, and a succession of faint and disturbing shadows writhed and twisted across the walls, coiling and closing, transmuting into animals and the blotchy forms of children’s nightmares, and disappearing into the mosaic ceiling. Crompton had heard of shadow songs, but had never before seen one.

  Loomis said, ‘It’s playing a rather fragile little piece called “Descent to Xanadu.” How do you like it?’

  Crompton shrugged. ‘It must have been very expensive.’

  Loomis shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. It was a gift. Won’t you sit down?’

  Crompton settled into a deep armchair that conformed to his contours and began, very gently, to massage his back.

  ‘Something to drink?’ Loomis asked.

  ‘Depolymerized sarsaparilla, if you have it,’ Crompton said.

  Loomis went to get drinks. Crompton heard a melody that seemed to originate in his own head. The tune was slow and sensuous, and unbearably poignant. It seemed to Crompton that he had heard it before, in another time and place.

  ‘It’s called “Terminal Freedom,”’ Loomis said, returning. ‘Direct aural transmission. Pleasant little thing, isn’t it?’

  Crompton knew that Loomis was trying to impress him. And he was impressed. As Loomis poured drinks, Crompton looked around the room at the sculptures, drapes, furniture, gadgets; his clerky mind made some estimates. The goods in this room had cost a great deal of money.

  Crompton sipped his drink. It was an Aaian concoction; a feeling of well-being began to pervade him. He said reluctantly, ‘Pretty good.’

  He didn’t expect Loomis to possess such a measure of composure; or, as they say in the crosswords, sang-froid. It disturbed him. Loomis’s obvious competence, ease, and command of the situation argued the disturbing idea that perhaps Loomis was not as inadequate a personality as represented. If that were so, where did it leave Crompton? Middle or low man on the personality dominance totem pole? But that simply could not be. To have come all this way to have a mere sensualist dominate him? No!

  ‘I have come here,’ Crompton said, ‘for the purpose of effecting Reintegration, which, as I’m sure you know, is our legal and moral prerogative.’

  ‘Come to dissolve me back into your personality, eh, Alistair?’ Loo
mis said merrily.

  ‘The goal,’ Crompton pointed out, ‘is a state of fusion in which our various factors combine to form a new person, one which will partake of each of our memories equally, and so equally be each of us.’

  ‘That’s what is supposed to happen,’ Loomis said. ‘Personally, I have my doubts. And why should I run the risk of finding out? I’m perfectly happy just the way I am.’

  ‘Happiness is impossible for an inadequate and truncated personality such as yourself,’ Crompton said.

  ‘Well, just between us, I know what you mean. A life devoted exclusively to pleasure with no regard for higher values is a dog’s life. It’s a fact. Desires fade, Alistair, yet I continue the same weary round of repetitions. No, pleasure is not the fun it’s cracked up to be.’

  ‘Well then –’

  ‘But pleasure is the only game in town. Basically, I’m a party person, Al, not a deep thinker. Sure, pleasure isn’t all fun, but who am I to complain about it? It’s a living, isn’t it? A man must do his work, even if his work happens to be the pursuit of pleasures he no longer cares about. That’s what being a man means.’

  ‘I don’t think that definition would stand up to any real examination,’ Crompton said.

  ‘Precisely why I will not give it one,’ Loomis said. ‘My motto is: Be courageous, follow your impulses, and ignore the obvious!’

  ‘Have you always lived by that motto?’ Crompton asked.

  ‘I guess I always have. I always knew I was different from others. But it didn’t bother me much as a kid. I was always popular in school. Not much on education, of course; or not on the education they thought they were teaching me. But I picked up a lot on my own. What treasures of sensuality existed for me in those days! Early adolescence is a beautiful time. But you know how children are – a lot of fooling around, but not much of the real thing. The real thing began for me with Miss Tristana de Cunha, my history teacher. She was a tall woman in her late twenties. Beneath her shapeless school-marm clothing she had the body of a nymph! She was an inexhaustible treasure of sensuality. And after her there was Clovis, then Jennifer. …’

  ‘How long did you continue your formal education?’ Crompton asked.

  ‘I dropped out at the age of sixteen. Or rather, I was invited to leave. I was accused of corrupting minors (though only a minor myself!). They said that I was staging ‘unspeakable orgies.’ A gross exaggeration, I can assure you. In any event, formal education held no charm for me. I was young, attractive, energetic, enthusiastic, and I knew even then what I wanted to be in life.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I wanted to be a lifeguard at the Aaia Country Club. I’ve always envied and admired lifeguards. They get all the action. It’s such a beautiful job. There you are, all alone above the crowd, wearing nothing but trunks, sandals, and a white pith helmet. And of course you’ve got a shiny brass whistle around your neck! Naturally you get a fantastic tan. And the action? A lifeguard is a seminaked authority figure as well as a symbol of summer sensuality. I attained that job in my seventeenth year, after working as busboy and waiter. It was really fantastic.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘One of those things. One day, after I held the job for two years, there was an emergency. Somebody was in trouble out beyond the marker buoys. I got in my boat and rowed out. It was a very fat woman from Earth. I tried to get her into the boat, but she panicked and capsized me. I struggled with her, trying to tow her to the overturned boat, begging her to keep still while I got us back to shore. But she was out of her head crazy with hysteria and she had a stranglehold around my neck. I realized that the only thing I could do was clip her one on the jaw and tow her in like a stranded whale. Before I could do that, however, she clipped me – a roundhouse right with her three hundred-odd pounds of berserk strength behind it. I went out like a light. Luckily, people had noticed my difficulties and sent out another boat. It was just one of those things that could happen to anybody.’

  ‘But the management didn’t see it that way?’

  ‘They accused me of not knowing how to swim! If you can believe that! Me, who had been their lifeguard for two years!’

  ‘Surely you could prove to them your competence in that department?’

  ‘Frankly, I wouldn’t lower myself to it. If that was what they thought of me, to hell with them. I resigned my position.’

  ‘What did you do then?’ Crompton asked.

  ‘I considered my situation.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘About a year.’

  ‘How did you live during that time?’

  ‘Fortunately I had a sponsor – Miss Suzy Gretsch. That was the woman who had cost me my job. She was grateful to me for having saved her life –’

  ‘But you hadn’t saved her life!’

  ‘In her opinion, I had. She was a generous woman, with a certain flair for sexuality belied by her ungainly body. She was the first person to find artistic talent in me, and to wish to develop it.’

  ‘What artistic talent did she find?’

  ‘I’ve always had a facility for sketching quick caricatures. She made me see that I had serious talent there, one worthy of development. Under her sponsorship I enrolled in art school.’

  ‘You were living with her at the time?’

  ‘Of course. She was so lonely, poor thing. It was the least I could do for her. And it was really quite pleasant. I gave that woman the best time she ever had in her life. The small sums that I required for my clothing and odds and ends were nothing to her. We were quite devoted to each other. She even wanted to marry me.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Poor Suzy! She became pathologically, irrationally jealous.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She had the silly suspicion that I was playing around with the models at art class.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘Well, of course. But I was doing it all so cleverly that she could never find out a thing. And since she had no real evidence, her jealousy was irrational. All might still have been well if she hadn’t hired that detective. He couldn’t find anything really incriminating, either; but to save his reputation, he framed me. He bribed three models to swear that they had had relationships with me, singly, ensemble, and with others. The damnable thing was that it was true, but he hadn’t caught me at it. Still, the technical fact of it having actually happened prevented me from showing Suzy that I had been framed. … It resulted in quite a nasty scene, as you can imagine. I gave her back her ankle bracelet and left her apartment.’

  Things were never quite so good for Loomis after the lifeguard job. He did manage to get hired as a substitute bartender at one of the popular nightclubs. It was a good situation: bartenders have first crack at the female customers, also an inside track with the waitresses. He really wanted to hold on to this one. And he did well at it. But –

  ‘I got fired,’ he admitted candidly. ‘It was because Leela made a scene and the owner decided that I was trouble. I’d been living with Leela for about a month at that time. Leela wasn’t her real name. She’d picked that up from some book. She started these scenes because Myra, whom I had recently met, was always hanging around. As if I could stop her from coming into the bar!’

  ‘Why was she always hanging around?’

  ‘Well, she’d become dependent on me. Foolishly enough, I had agreed to help her out. She was learning to be an exotic dancer, and she needed someone with sure hands to hold her while she practiced splits and backbends. Leela put the worst possible interpretation on this, of course.’

  ‘Did she have cause?’ Crompton asked.

  Loomis shook his head impatiently. ‘She never caught me doing anything out of line with Myra. So why should she be so certain? What right did she have to make a big public mess, and to accuse me – with no evidence at all – of sleeping with Myra and Bunny? Any court anywhere in the galaxy would exonerate me –’

  ‘Wait a minute. Who was Bunny?’

  �
�Bunny was Myra’s sister. About sixteen, a charming little thing with great blue eyes and a cute, immature little figure.’

  ‘And what were you doing with her?’

  ‘Only what I had to do.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You see, they lived together in a one-room efficiency. Bunny began to get ideas. And Myra didn’t care. That Myra!’

  ‘So Leela made a scene and that was the end of your job?’

  ‘That’s right. My life became a succession of temporary jobs and temporary women. One of those women was Gilliam. And that brings us up to date.’

  ‘What made you decide to marry Gilliam?’

  ‘Well, she insisted. She was the only one who ever really insisted. That’s love, isn’t it? And she was pretty good-looking, and rich. I figured, how far wrong can I go? It just goes to show you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Is Gilliam rich? I thought you said she worked as a waitress.’

  ‘She was just doing it for a goof. For a while I thought we could be happy together – just her and me and her money. But it was not to be. We’ve had our problems.’

  ‘Other women?’

  ‘What else? I seem to be cursed with this powerful interest in women.’

  ‘In their sexuality, you mean,’ Crompton stated.

  ‘Well, of course. That’s what women want men to be interested in them for, Alistair. Women are their sexual natures. Very few men are aware of this.’

  ‘That surely isn’t true,’ Crompton said. ‘From what I’ve seen, nearly all men are interested in sex.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing,’ Loomis said. ‘Being interested in sex is simply being interested in one’s own sensations. But few men are interested in women’s sexual nature. It frightens them. You’re a virgin, Al, aren’t you?’

  ‘We are discussing you, not me. If I understand correctly, you live off the earnings of women.’

  ‘And we all know what that is,’ Loomis said. ‘Don’t be so high and mighty, Alistair! Men and women do live off each other – all except the freaks like you.’