“The second time was when I almost brained you with the stone ashtray out there in the living room.
You suddenly turned round and caught me holding it back over my shoulder and I had to do a ridiculous pirouette to pass it off as a jape. You know why I checked myself that time, Vivian? It was solely because I had thought : ‘I don't want her all bloodied up, I don't want even the back of her skull crushed, I'll do it a better way.'
“Once I'd thought of that I had no choice. It was just a matter of moving efficiently with a minimum waste of time, of stealing the cyanide from the photoengraving department and refilling the two Nembutal capsules, of getting a duplicate set of keys to this apartment the noon you let me come here from the office to fetch the homework you'd forgotten, of waiting for the time in your mood-cycle when you'd make the big complaint about not being able to sleep and, when it came this morning, taking you aside and offering you my two yellow capsules with much insistence that you take them both tonight and with repeated warnings that you tell no one—because, I said, most people these days are so irrationally critical of sleeping pills and especially of anyone not a doctor handing them out.
“I was afraid afterwards that I'd overdone it. You know, Vivian, I've often wondered during this last month of preparation whether you hadn't caught on, at least in some nebulous way, to what I was up to. I've been behaving in such a flighty, abstracted way, or at least it's seemed so to me. I'm no actor, you know. I never could play it cool. My repressions don't make me restrained, only tongue-tied and jumpy. So I've often wondered whether you hadn't caught on as to what I had in mind and were letting me go ahead with it because you yourself wanted it that way. Oh, not that you've asked me to kill you in so many words, but you've liked talking about suicide and you thought the Mexican candy skull I bought you was charming and you've told me how you keep coming back to the line in Keats’ ‘Nightingale’ about being ‘half in love with easeful death’ and after all you are my Blue Girl, my Dancing Skeleton, my Sleeping Beauty, my Snow White, my Little Sister of Death ...
“Yes, I really thought you knew the cyanide or some swift death was in the capsules when you took them from me. But if you did know that, Vivian, I wonder now if you really had to take them. If you were so much in love with death, I might have been able to love you alive. I'm actually beginning to think I could. My God, Vivian, if that was the way you felt, why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you open my eyes blinded by my mania-habits and my fears? Vivian, why—”
For a third time I thought that Vivian moved! Only this time it was I who shuddered. What if she should get up now, I asked myself, and come at me grinding her teeth and tear off the sleeping mask, and open her eyes to show just the whites and throw her arms around my neck stranglingly? I've never believed in the supernatural, though I've had an aesthetic taste for the weird, but now in that blue-litten room the whole impossible universe of vampires and zombies and werewolves suddenly came alive for me. What if the dead did come back ... in the body?
No, no, I told myself, it was clearly an illusion born of my nervousness and self-dramatizing. And even if Vivian's body actually had twitched a little, there were natural causes. I mustn't forget rigor mortis— my uncle told me the usual horrendous stories and I had done enough reading on the subject.
Besides, in all my rather absurd oratory I had lost sight temporarily of my chief purpose in coming here tonight. Thinking of that, I almost laughed. I moved toward the bed. Once again I caught the sweet foul odor of corruption—upsetting but reassuring too. Once again I sprayed the lilac cologne.
And then—you know, it's hard to believe this, but it's true—I discovered that I had lost my desire, or rather the hot, male intensity of it. Either my somewhat ridiculous spouting and melodramatic self justification had sublimated it, or that moment of supernatural dread had chilled it. At any rate, there was Vivian lying there, more beautiful than I've ever seen her, infinitely desirable, all ready for me, and here I was worse than a eunuch. It was a scene for the gods to snicker at as they watched our painful antics from their lecherous couches on Olympus.
But I wasn't going to be cheated that way, no, I told myself, I'd murdered to get Vivian and I was going to have her. So I rang up the red curtain that had been closed ever since I met Vivian, and my girls came out of the wings and began to put on their thousandth performance, or something like that, of Lesbian Gang, Miss Satan's School, Sisters of the Whip, Hell's Sorority House, and the other little dramas I have concocted over the years. I don't know why it's so exciting to imagine girls torturing girls, but it is for me and I gather from pornographic books and photographs that my taste is not unique.
I must say my girls never seemed such cheap and sleazy creatures as they did tonight, even Miss Satan herself and poor frightened Lovey-Dovey. Or maybe they put on a brilliant performance and it was just me that felt cheap, having to use them that way.
At any rate, they eventually had the desired effect on me. They always do. I turned once more to the bed.
And then—oh, I didn't lose my ardor, quite the contrary, but Vivian looked so very beautiful and lovely and loving, as if she were somehow making an effort to make herself nice for me in death, that I wished her alive with that understanding of me and I felt lonely and sad to my core, though still loving, and I knelt down beside the bed at her feet to kiss, not her icy hand, but the sleeve of her white silk kimono, begging for forgiveness, yearning for her pardon.
As I did so, I noticed that the white bedclothes were wet at that point, so wet that droplets were forming at the hanging edge of the white coverlet and dripping noiselessly onto the thick carpet. The liquid was absolutely colorless and odorless too—I touched my nose to it. And it was very cold.
It had to be ice water—as if a rubber sheet full of ice water under the bedclothes were leaking.
I didn't move. I didn't breathe.
Then I got the odor of corruption, stronger than ever, but clearly not from the ice water. I stooped lower then on my knees, still holding the hem of Vivian's kimono to my lips, and looked under the bed.
Not two feet away from me was a dishpan full of garbage. A purple-gray hunk of meat was the main part of it, flanked by crescents of mold-spotted cantaloupe rind, and scattered over with gardenia blossoms. Beyond it was a little, gray, grill-faced microphone lying on its back with thin wires going from it toward the head of the bed.
Still holding the hem of her kimono and kneeling and bending so that my face almost touched the carpet, I followed the inconspicuous wires with my eyes. They traveled around the foot of the baseboard and disappeared under the bathroom door.
I instantly realized exactly what had happened—there was no reasoning to it, no deduction; one moment ten thousand facts and ideas weren't in my head, the next moment they were.
Just as I'd guessed, Vivian had suspected me all along. She'd gone to the police—maybe not for the first time—as soon as I gave her the capsules—during lunch hour, of course. The powder in the capsules had been easily identified as cyanide, but because they only had Vivian's word that I'd given her the capsules and because in any case they wanted to nail me—and because policemen have as hot nasty tastes as other men—they'd laid this little trap for me with Vivian's cooperation. Maybe the blue lights had helped give them the idea, though if the lights hadn't been blue they'd have simply turned them off.
Yes, it must have been the police who had planted this microphone, and maybe the police who had hit on the point about the blue lights, but it must have been Vivian who had thought of concealing her eyes, which no one can keep from blinking, with the black sleeping mask. As for her breathing, she'd have kept it shallow and I hadn't even looked at her five consecutive seconds.
And I was somehow certain that it was Vivian who had thought of the rubber sheet full of ice cubes and the dishpan full of garbage. I could imagine the police chuckling enthusiastically as she suggested those items. The police are our guardians, but they like their pornography as much as the n
ext chap.
Yes, I was curiously sure they'd enjoyed my little performance, even been thrilled by it, both Vivian and the police—and I rather wished I'd gotten the bit about Miss Satan's School on the tape, and Lovey-Dovey's last torments.
Yes, Archie, I told myself, Vivian will have nightmares about it, or maybe pleasant dreams, all the rest of her life. And those crooked-brained, blue-coated voyeurs will keep the tape in their secret black museum and play it for kicks for the next fifty years. But after all, you did put the cyanide in those capsules, Archie old boy, and for killing the thing you love there's no pardon to the end of time, or at least until the end of you.
I knew exactly what was going to happen next, but just the same I stood up and quietly started for the door to the living room.
Before I was halfway there it began to open. I stopped where I was.
Vivian sat up in bed with a jerk. Jill-in-the-box. The mask stared at me.
Through both doors the cops came into the bedroom. One of them switched on the big yellow ceiling light. Under it, Vivian's skin was pinkly flushed.
The cops came toward me, but I stood there aloof, looking at Vivian. Now I could see her eyes through the mask.
She jerked the sheet up to her neck, but kept staring at me.
A hand grabbed my shoulder and jerked me one way, but almost immediately another hand jerked me the other. My coat tore. It was comic. I pretended not to notice, and really I hardly did.
Vivian's face was contorted with fury, but whether at me—and why—or at the cops—and why—I couldn't tell. Maybe if she'd taken the mask off, baring all her expression, I'd have been able to. For instance, was the flush merely anger?
It was an interesting problem. I still ponder it when the bare globe turns out in the concrete ceiling overhead and I wait for sleep.
MR. BAUER AND THE ATOMS
Dr. Jacobson beamed at him through the thick glasses. “I'm happy to tell you there is no sign whatever of cancer."
Mr. Bauer nodded thoughtfully. “Then I won't need any of those radium treatments?"
“Absolutely not.” Dr. Jacobson removed his glasses, wiped them with a bit of rice paper, then mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. Mr. Bauer lingered.
He looked at the X-ray machine bolted down by the window. It still looked as solid and mysterious as when he had first glimpsed a corner of it from Myna's bedroom. He hadn't gotten any farther.
Dr. Jacobson replaced his glasses.
“It's funny, you know, but I've been thinking...” Mr. Bauer plunged.
“Yes?"
“I guess all this atomic stuff got me started, but I've been thinking about all the energy that's in the atoms of my body. When you start to figure it out on paper—well, two hundred million electron volts, they say, from just splitting one atom, and that's only a tiny part of it.” He grinned.
“Enough energy in my body, I guess, to blow up, maybe ... the world."
Dr. Jacobson nodded. “Almost. But all safely locked up."
Mr. Bauer nodded. “They're finding out how to unlock it."
Dr. Jacobson smiled. “Only in the case of two rare radioactive elements."
Mr. Bauer agreed, then gathered all his courage. “I've been wondering about that too,” he said. “Whether a person could somehow make himself ... I mean, become ... radioactive?"
Dr. Jacobson chuckled in the friendliest way. “See that box at your elbow?” He reached out and turned something on it. The box ticked. Mr. Bauer jerked.
“That's a Geiger-Muller counter,” Dr. Jacobson explained. “Notice how the ticks come every second or so? Each tick indicates a high-frequency wave. If you were radioactive, it would tick a lot oftener."
Mr. Bauer laughed. “Interesting.” He got up. “Well, thanks about the cancer."
Dr. Jacobson watched him fumble for his panama hat and duck out. So that was it. He'd sensed all along something peculiar about Bauer. He'd even felt it while looking over the X-ray and lab reports— something intangibly wrong. Though he hadn't thought until now of paranoia, or, for that matter, any other mental ailment, beyond the almost normal cancer-fear of a man in his fifties.
Frank Bauer hesitated at the corridor leading to Myna's apartment, then went on. His heart hammered enragedly. There he'd gone chicken again, when he knew very well that if he could ever bring himself to state his fear coldly and completely—that crazy fear that a man's thoughts could do to the atoms of his body what the scientists had managed to do with uranium 235 and that other element—why, he'd be rid of the fear in a minute.
But a man just didn't go around admitting childish things like that. A human bomb exploded by thought! It was too much like his wife Grace and her mysticism.
Going crazy wouldn't be so bad, he thought, if only it weren't so humiliating.
* * * *
Frank Bauer lived in a world where everything had been exploded. He scented confidence games, hoaxes, faddish self-deception, and especially (for it was his province) advertising copy exaggerations behind every faintly unusual event and every intimation of the unknown. He had the American's nose for leg-pulling, the German's contempt for the non-factual. Mention of such topics as telepathy, hypnotism, or the occult—and his wife managed to mention them fairly often—sent him into a scoffing rage. The way he looked at it, a real man had three legitimate interests—business, bars and blondes. Everything else was for cranks, artists, and women.
But now an explosion had occurred which made all other explosions, even of the greatest fakeries, seem like a snap of the fingers.
By the time he reached the street, he thought he was beginning to feel a bit better. After all, he had told the doctor practically everything, and the doctor had disposed of his fears with that little box. That was that.
He swabbed his neck and thought about a drink, but decided to go back to the office. Criminal to lose a minute these days, when everybody was fighting tooth and nail to get the jump. He'd be wanting money pretty soon, the bigger the better. All the things that Grace would be nagging for now, and something special for Myna—and then there was a chance he and Myna could get away together for a vacation, when he'd got those campaigns lined out.
The office was cool and dusky and pleasantly suggestive of a non-atomic solidity. Every bit of stalwart ugliness, every worn spot in the dark varnish, made him feel better. He even managed to get off a joke to ease Miss Minter's boredom. Then he went inside.
An hour later he rushed out. This time he had no joke for Miss Minter. As she looked after him, there was something in her expression that had been in Dr. Jacobson's.
It hadn't been so bad at first when he'd got out paper and black pencil. After all, any advertising copy had to make Atomic Age its keynote these days. But when you sat there, and thought and thought, and whatever you thought, you always found afterwards that you'd written:
INSIDE YOU ... TRILLIONS OF VOLTS!
You wouldn't think to look at them, that there was much resemblance between John Jones and the atom bomb...
UNLOCKED!
THE WORLD IN YOUR HANDS JUST A THOUGHT—
Frank Bauer looked around at the grimy street, the windows dusty or dazzingly golden where the low sun struck, the people wilted a little by the baking pavement—and he saw walls turned to gray powder, their steel skeletons vaporized, the people became fumes, or, if they were far enough away, mere great single blisters. But they'd have to be very far away.
He was going crazy—and it was horribly humiliating. He hurried into the bar.
After his second bourbon and water he began to think about the scientists. They should have suppressed the thing, like that one fellow who wanted to. They shouldn't ever have told people. So long as people didn't know, maybe it would have been all right ... But once you'd been told...
Thought was the most powerful force in the world. It had discovered the atom bomb. And yet nobody knew what thought was, how it worked inside your nerves, what it couldn't manage.
And you couldn't
stop thinking. Whatever your thoughts decided to do, you couldn't stop them.
It was insanity, of course.
It had better be insanity!
The man beside him said, “He saw a lot of those Jap suicide flyers. CRAZY as loons. Human bombs."
Human bombs! Firecrackers. He put down his drink.
As he hurried through the thinning crowd, retracing the course he had taken early in the afternoon, he wondered why there should be so much deadly force locked up in such innocent-seeming, inert things. The whole universe was a booby trap. There must be a reason. Who had planned it that way, with the planets far enough apart so they wouldn't hurt each other when they popped?
He thought he began to feel sharp pains shooting through his nerves, as the radioactivity began, and after he had rushed up the steps the pain became so strong that he hesitated at the intersection of the corridors before he went on to Myna's.
He closed the door and leaned back against it, sweating. Myna was drinking and she had her hair down. There was a pint of bourbon on the table, and some ice. She jumped up, pulling at her dressing gown.
“What's wrong? Grace?"
He shook his head, kept staring at her, at her long curling hair, at her breasts, as if in that small hillocky, yellow entwined patch of reality lay his sole hope of salvation, his last refuge.
“But my God, what is it!"
He felt the pains mercifully begin to fade, the dangerous thoughts break ranks and retreat. He began to say to himself, “It must have hit a lot of people the same way it hit me. It's just so staggering. That must be it. That must be it."
Myna was tugging at him. “It's nothing,” he told her. “I don't know. Maybe my heart. No, I don't need a doctor."
She wandered into the bedroom and came back with a large waffle-creased metal egg which she held out to him, as if it were a toy to cajole an ailing child.
The Black Gondolier and Other Stories Page 11