Science Fiction Discoveries

by Carol

“No use in that,” called Miss Gorfickel, interrupting a conversation about the state lottery that was causing a lot of merriment at the desk. “She's not in her own room. She's in Fun 'n' Rec.”

  Lydia sighed and turned John around. They went to a large, sunny room with a TV set in one comer. It showed a blurry, oddly-colored picture and tremendous sound volume, for the set was tuned to a channel not received in this city. Most of the old people were sitting in immeasurably dense invisible cases, built out of disassodation and individual mysteries. Some stared ahead of them, others beat aimlessly on chair arms, some banged on a long table.

  “Here comes that old woman's uncle,'' shouted a very old man. He was looking at John.

  “Hello, Granny,” said Lydia.

  Mrs. Stanch was small and odd, like a sea creature outside its own shell. She was in a wheelchair.

  “Do you know me?” shouted Lydia.

  Granny nodded impatiently. John, too, considered that a strange question.

  A woman sitting near Mrs. Stanch hobbled over. “Get rid of her,” she yelled, pointing to Mrs. Stanch and putting her face next to Lydia's. “She does everything stupid. She can't even button her dress.”

  A man with a natty striped blazer and faded cotton pajama pants came to whisper to John. “How about a game of croquet?” he asked, with serious good-fellowship.

  “How are you, Granny?” asked Lydia. “Everything all right?”

  “What time have you got?” asked Granny, looking at her bony, bare arm. “I lost my watch.”

  “She's not wearing the bracelet,” said Lydia in a 777

  low tone to John. "That’s because she’s a private patient. My parents have to pay for her, and it’s an awful lot of money. Most of them here are on Medicaid, because they swear they don’t have any money. But my parents both have jobs and so do I, so we have to pay for Granny.”

  "I’m supposed to be privileged,” said Granny suddenly. "I ought to get better food and better care, but I don’t. What time is it?”

  John felt like crying. He turned his back and faced a fat old lady who was singing a Gospel hymn. She peered at him. "The Lord gave me back my sight this morning,” she told him. "I was blind, blind, blind and then He gave me back my sight.”

  "I was at church this morning,” John began, but nobody was listening.

  A man was putting money into a pay telephone. He held the receiver and talked, but the receiver was simply clicking and buzzing.

  "I want my lunch,” said Mrs. Stanch.

  A nurse, fat and young, came by. "You know, you know, you had your lunch,” she called. She went over to join some other nurses at a round table in the corner where a poker game was in session.

  "I have to go to the toilet, I have to go to the toilet,” whimpered a woman in a chair with a tray in front. She beat on the tray. "Please. I have to go so badly.”

  John touched one of the nurses. "That lady has to go to the toilet,” he said.

  "Dealer’s choice,” said the nurse, and then turned around, laughing. "She don’t have to go to the toilet. She just wants some attention.”

  "I have to make attention,” said the woman in the chair. "Please. Somebody. Help me.”

  John swallowed. He had never seen anything like this. A nice-looking woman who might have been a telephone operator at the Sun Company smiled at him.

  “You look troubled,” she said, in a low, sweet voice. “Don’t feel troubled. There’s nothing you can do. They’re all so sad.”

  John brightened. “Are you living here?” he asked.

  The woman nodded. “Yes, in a way. Temporarily, that is, until my daughter and her husband return from abroad.”

  “Oh?” asked John, not sure what this meant, but glad that there was somebody in this dreadful, shrill room who didn’t seem either crazy or vicious.

  “Yes. They’ve gone to the court at St. Petersburg to get the papers. There is really nothing to be done until the papers are sent to Washington.”

  “What papers?” asked John. He saw Lydia shouting in her grandmother’s ear; Mrs. Stanch was shrugging and fiddling with the buttons on her dress.

  “The papers'* said the nice lady, with quiet amusement. ‘The papers that show who I am and when the proper time will be to return to the court.”

  “Court,” repeated John.

  She patted his hand. “Of course, you’re too young to know about it, but I’m sure that someone older could tell you all about it. I am the Princess Anastasia. My parents were the Czar and Czarina of Russia. It’s been written up extensively.”

  John was glad to hear there was someone who knew what she was doing. A woman with wild, blue-streaked hair called from the end of the long table, “Come here, you.” John walked over to her.

  “Can I help you?5’ he said.

  The woman’s eyes filled with tears. She wiped them with both hands. “Help me get out,” she whispered. “My mother is waiting for me at home. She used to depend on me to help with dinner. Yesterday she came and brought me my doll, but it was the wrong doll. But I must get home in time for dinner.”

  John nodded. This seemed entirely clear. He went over to the table where the nurses were playing cards. “Is it all right,” he asked one of them, who was gathering in a pile of colored discs, “if I take Mrs. This-Lady for a walk?” The nurse, counting her chips, nodded carelessly.

  John started to help his friend out of the room. Immediately three more people joined them. “I want to go for a little walk to the comer,” said an old man. “I have a friend there who’ll tell me how the printing plant operates.”

  “My son is waiting for me in the car,” said an old lady.

  Lydia had taken her grandmother off to the bathroom. John took four patients with him to the bank of elevators. As they waited for the car going down the patients quarreled and made hostile passes at each other. Then they hustled somehow into the elevator.

  At the main floor the short woman with the tall hair was talking on the reception-desk phone. She glanced up at John and went on with her conversation.

  For a moment, at the front door, John hesitated.

  “How would you like to be locked up, way up there?” snapped an old lady, successfully reading his mind.

  “I wouldn’t,” said John, and let them all out into the street.

  Several hours later, after Lydia and John had returned to the Sun Company, the tired, middleaged woman who was in charge of the twentieth-floor desk returned from a trip to a funeral home. She made many such trips during her work week. She looked around the room. “Where are—?” she asked, naming names.

  Nobody knew at the moment. Eventually the tired woman called the police. She was the only one at the Clara Barton Residence for Dignified Primogenitors who cared anything at all about the patients, but naturally she was discharged for incompetence after the runaways were corraled and shipped back in one prowl car.

  “That's a terrible place," said John to Lydia, as they were leaving for the day. “Does your granny really have to stay there?"

  “Well, sure," said Lydia. “Where else? All those places are the same. It s okay for the ones on Medicaid, but it's hard on people like us. My parents had put away some money for a trip to Europe, but forget it. The doctor there says Granny's strong as an ox. She's good for another six, seven years. So? What do we do?"

  “Would I ever be ... there?" John spoke very low. He didn't really want Lydia to hear him.

  She wasn't listening. “Oh, well," she said. “Everybody's got something, right? Except you, Mr. Sim. You're the exception that proves the rule."

  John looked a little happier. That probably meant he didn't ever have to live in a place like that where no one tuned in the TV right or could remember if he had been given lunch.

  And yet he was saddened all that evening, watching a western at home, because there was something he felt he understood about those people. He could tell what most of them had been thinking, which was certainly odd. They were all so very old, and he was so v
ery young.

  Mrs. Wanger's parties were never given for pleasure. They were based largely on Mr. Wanger's idea of getting people drunk enough so he could have something to blackmail them about at the shop, and on Mrs. Wanger's dying daydreams of being a famous hostess, like those people in Washington who wrote their autobiographies and knew newspaper columnists. The Wangers knew very few people connected with the world of communications, much less the arts, but it was easy for Mrs. Wanger to get them to attend her parties. She subscribed to a service that supplied her with unlisted telephone numbers.

  “Hello, Mrs. Onassis,” she would say, “this is Helena Wanger. IVe heard so much about you from Truman Capote. He’s dying to see you, and we’ll be together at a tiny dinner party here on the fourteenth. He’ll never speak to me again if you don’t come.”

  Then, of course: “Hello, Mr. Capote ..and the same speech, with the blanks filled in slightly differently, would be delivered. The method worked so often that it surprised Mrs. Wanger. Had she been her fifteen-years-before-self, she would have said, “Oh, people are the same everywhere. There are lots of nice folks in the world.” Now she simply approached her profession as a roulette player (or a condemned butterfly) approaches the wheel.

  The Wangers lived on Long Island in a house that had been designed by two architects who didn’t speak to each other. One of them had given up the job when she said she wanted a mud room. “What the hell is a mud room?” he asked viciously. She tried to tell him, but he interrupted. “Go roll in the mud, you silly old sow.” He was still writing abusive letters about the money owed him. The other architect had said yes to everything Mrs. Wanger had suggested and then went ahead with a Victorian overlay on Scandinavian Modem. The house had been photographed everywhere and Mrs. Wanger had achieved some fame as a woman who knew what she wanted and went ahead and got it in spite of Philistine opposition.

  On the evening after the stockholders’ meeting at the Sun Company, Mrs. Wanger gave a big one. There were about a hundred people, from as far away as Bombay, India or Sioux City. She had read somewhere that a careful hostess never has a casual buffet, always a sit-down dinner, so a special table was moved into the interior of the house (in which the first architect had removed all walls) that seated more than a hundred people. John Sim was of course at Mrs. Wanger’s right.

  Before they sat down to dinner, at nine-thirty, he had taken a little nap in one of the bedrooms, or at least a room that had a wooden slab and a throw cushion in it; he’d been so tired, after arriving at half-past seven and having to listen to so many people talking so loud, while he held his glass of tomato juice. Once he spilled part of it on his white linen jacket (this is the year of Gatsby, his valet had assured him), but he didn’t cry. He accepted the ice cube held out to him by a lady in a red satin fringed dress.

  “This will take it right out,” she told him. “Go ahead.” The ice cube seemed to help. She took a handkerchief out of her red purse to mop up the stain. “See this purse?” she asked. John nodded. “Well,” she said, “it’s the one out of sixty-two that came in handy. Know what I mean? Get the picture? One out of sixty-two?”

  John began humming to himself.

  “One out of sixty-two premiums. Gifts from banks! Every time they used to give away things I’d put some money in all of them and get a gift. Got a whole set of power tools ...” John had put his head to one side and looked puzzled.

  “Power tools!” she shouted. “Electric drill, all that mess. I’m not married any more, so I don’t use them, but I got them. And a blender, and a badminton set— with birdie—and tennis rackets and juice squeezers and a camera and an electric scissors and a thermal blanket and an ice bucket and God knows what else. Sixty-two. This purse is the only one I use.”

  “Why?” said John.

  She pushed him with gigantic archness. “You!” she said.

  Two tall, blond girls, looking very much alike, their hair hanging straight down, their faces carefully made up to look as if they were not made up at all, were talking about a popular humorist, a man who made his own physical and emotional inadequacies the subject of his one-line jokes. They tried to draw John in on their conversation.

  “It isn’t right to make fun of yourself if you are ashamed of yourself,” John said slowly. “It’s different if you make fun of yourself because you make mistakes, but not because you really hate everything about you. Then it is sad, not funny.”

  The girls stared at him for a moment, then one said to the other in her harsh, nasal voice, “I just resent the time that meathead husband of mine spends with that tramp he sees in Brooklyn, that’s my time he’s wasting, don’t forget that!” John thought how sad it was that somebody so pretty sounded so mean-spirited; he’d noticed that about many people.

  A man who had been standing near them, a man wearing big round glasses and some kind of makeup all over his face, nudged John, who was getting tired of having people touch him.

  “She’s so goddam self-oriented,” said the man. “She hasn’t learned to release herself, to be herself. She hasn’t learned the real truth ... everybody is his own best friend.”

  “That would be lonesome,” said John in his slow, careful voice.

  The man wasn’t paying attention and went on talking for a while. A girl joined them. She was not as young as her hair and her costume indicated: her hair was like a child’s, loose and straggly, and she wore a tucked, white Sunday School dress that came to the floor in back and just below her pelvis in front.

  “I’m going to tell you something,” she yelled into John’s ear. He looked alarmed. She grabbed his arm and fanned her hand in front of his face.

  “Don’t worry. It’s no knock, it’s a boost. I got this outfit at your store! What do you think of that? Every broad here wearing something cost three, four hundred dollars. Know how much I paid for this at Sun? Forty-five bucks! That makes me the cheapest baby here. Cheapest baby here.”

  “You bought that at my store,” repeated John.

  “You bet. I don’t see the sense in spending three, four hundred for something all your friends know you got it and when you wear it again they say oh she’s wearing that again and there goes that bread for a bummer that you could have spent in a chin-lift or dermabrasion. So I always buy evening clothes at the Sun. I’m your best customer. How about that?”

  Her drink was spilling down her chin and one eye had a black aura underneath, a lost half-moon of damp mascara.

  “Forty-five dollars is too much money,” said John. “Don’t waste your money. You ought to wear a pretty dress that looks nice.”

  The girl burst into wild laughter. “Man, you really lay it on. That is the funniest thing I ever heard in all my life. You are something.” She planted a wet nasty kiss on John’s beautiful mouth. He looked at her for a moment (later, during her usual next-morning remorse period, she had a distinct impression of disgust and horror) and then took out his handkerchief. He wiped off his lips and then ran his tongue over them.

  The editor of a literary journal had been watching this with what he thought of as amused detachment, a state he rarely achieved because of his inner and sensible conviction that he, as editor or person, was not worth bothering about.

  The book editor had been answering people’s questions about what makes a best seller. He said nobody knew the reasons, in a hushed liturgical voice, any more than anyone knew what made literary reputations or whether—his eyes shifted because he was going to tell a joke—the moon was made of green cheese.

  “What makes a book sell is because somebody likes it, but you don’t know what people are going to like the next week,” said John.

  Two publishers began making notes.

  The editor decided he would pay John a compliment. During his own period of next-morning penitence he would realize that he was in love with John, but now he felt completely in tune with everybody and pretty damn intellectual-special.

  “Prince Mishkin,” he said. ‘That’s you.”

&nb
sp; John smiled a little. He was beginning to feel very tired indeed.

  “The idiot,” chuckled the literary editor. “You say ’em as you sees ’em.”

  “Your wig is crooked,” said John.

  “See what I mean? You’re a genius. listen whydon’t you think about writing a book. You take the best sellers of the last ten years, you got all this crap, yours could be a combination seller and realie. You could do a realie. I’d personally see to it that you got good review space. Have you ever thought about it?”

  “About what?” asked John.

  “Well, not the usual. You’re not Jewish, but that’s pretty well used up anyway, and you don’t have physical problems—so I’d have to think about it. Most of the stuff we’ve been doing is really by the same guy, but he uses different names—”

  “I know,” said John, thinking vaguely about what he’d been told about current books, plays, films, music and art.

  The editor gasped. He had meant to say that many of the reviews in his influential journal were written by his brother-in-law. It had not occurred to him that a probing mind would have seen through all the pseudonyms and deliberate shifts of opinion.

  He backed away from John, into a tall, thin youngish woman who looked like a tall, skinny boy with frizzy curls. “Hi!” said the woman. “Who’s worth talking to?” The editor shuddered and looked helplessly at John, who felt sorry for the funny man.

  “Robins are more careful than authors,” said John. The editor turned up his acne-scarred face reverentially as John said, “A robin builds a nest and lines it with something nice and soft and then sits on the eggs whether its raining or not and is very careful but when the baby birds are hatched she begins to change, and though she feeds them and brings them worms she is very sure that they get out of the nest on time even though the nest was very beautiful and very right for them.”

  Why am I always outclassed, sobbed the editor to himself, who was not his own best friend; why is there always some handsome sonofabitch who makes me sound the way I feel . . . ? He stumbled to the door and walked to the railway station where he boarded the wrong train.