Shadows 4

by Charles L. Grant (Ed. )

  She was plump in Waylon's, and there were dark hollows under her eyes. There were coffee stains on her polyester pantsuit. Her companion wore jeans, a T-shirt, and a red baseball cap with a red-and-white Peterbilt patch. Coretti risked losing them when he spent a frantic minute in "Pointers," blinking in confusion at a hand-lettered cardboard sign that said, We aim to please — You aim too, please.

  Third Avenue lost itself near the waterfront in a petrified snarl of brickwork. In the last block, bright vomit marked the pavement at intervals, and old men dozed in front of black-and-white TVs, sealed forever behind the fogged plate-glass of faded hotels.

  The bar they found there had no name. An ace of diamonds was gradually flaking away on the unwashed window, and the bartender had a face like a closed fist. An FM transistor in ivory plastic keened easy-listening rock to the uneven ranks of deserted tables. They drank beer and shots. They were old now, two ciphers who drank and smoked in the light of bare bulbs, coughing over a pack of crumpled Camels she produced from the pocket of a dirty tan raincoat.

  At 2:25 they were in the rooftop lounge of the new hotel complex that rose above the waterfront. She wore an evening dress and he wore a dark suit. They drank cognac and pretended to admire the city lights. They each had three cognacs while Coretti watched them over two ounces of Wild Turkey in a Waterford crystal highball glass.

  They drank until last call. Coretti followed them into the elevator. They smiled politely but otherwise ignored him. There were two cabs in front of the hotel; they took one, Coretti the other.

  "Follow that cab," said Coretti huskily, thrusting his last twenty at the aging hippie driver.

  "Sure, man, sure . . ." The driver dogged the other cab for six blocks, to another, more modest hotel. They got out and went in. Coretti slowly climbed out of his cab, breathing hard.

  He ached with jealousy: for the personification of conformity, this woman who was not a woman, this human wallpaper. Coretti gazed at the hotel—and lost his nerve. He turned away.

  He walked home. Sixteen blocks. At some point he realized that he wasn't drunk. Not drunk at all.

  In the morning he phoned in to cancel his early class. But his hangover never quite came. His mouth wasn't desiccated, and staring at himself in the bathroom mirror he saw that his eyes weren't bloodshot.

  In the afternoon he slept, and dreamed of sheep-faced people reflected in mirrors behind rows of bottles.

  That night he went out to dinner, alone—and ate nothing. The food looked back at him, somehow. He stirred it about to make it look as if he'd eaten a little, paid, and went to a bar. And another. And another bar, looking for her. He was using his credit card now, though he was already badly in the hole under VISA. If he saw her, he didn't recognize her.

  Sometimes he watched the hotel he'd seen her go into. He looked carefully at each of the couples who came and went. Not that he'd be able to spot her from her looks alone—but there should be a feeling, some kind of intuitive recognition. He watched the couples and he was never sure.

  In the following weeks he systematically visited every boozy watering hole in the city. Armed at first with a city map and five torn Yellow Pages, he gradually progressed to the more obscure establishments, places with unlisted numbers. Some had no phone at all. He joined dubious private clubs, discovered unlicensed after-hours retreats where you brought your own, and sat nervously in dark rooms devoted to areas of fringe sexuality he had not known existed.

  But he continued on what became his nightly circuit. He always began at The Backdoor. She was never there, or in the next place, or the next. The bartenders knew him and they liked to see him come in, because he bought drinks continuously, and never seemed to get drunk. So he stared at the other customers a bit—so what?

  Coretti lost his job.

  He'd missed classes too many times. He'd taken to watching the hotel when he could, even in the daytime. He'd been seen in too many bars. He never seemed to change his clothes. He refused night classes. He would let a lecture trail off in the middle as he turned to gaze vacantly out the window.

  He was secretly pleased at being fired. They had looked at him oddly at faculty lunches when he couldn't eat his food. And now he had more time for the search.

  Coretti found her at 2:15 on a Wednesday morning, in a gay bar called The Barn. Paneled in rough wood and hung with halters and rusting farm equipment, the place was shrill with perfume and laughter and beer. She was everyone's giggling sister, in a blue-sequined dress, a green feather in her coiffed brown hair. Through a sweeping sense of almost cellular relief, Coretti was aware of a kind of admiration, a strange pride he now felt in her—and her kind. Here, too, she belonged. She was a representative type, a fag-hag who posed no threat to the queens or their butchboys. Her companion had become an ageless man with carefully silvered temples, an angora sweater and a trenchcoat.

  They drank and drank, and went laughing—laughing just the right sort of laughter—out into the rain. A cab was waiting, its wipers duplicating the beat of Coretti's heart.

  Jockeying clumsily across the wet sidewalk, Coretti scurried into the cab, dreading their reaction.

  Coretti was in the back seat, beside her.

  The man with silver temples spoke to the driver. The driver muttered into his hand mike, changed gears, and they flowed away into the rain and the darkened streets. The cityscape made no impression on Coretti who, looking inwardly, was seeing the cab stop, the gray man and the laughing woman pushing him out and pointing, smiling, to the gate of a mental hospital. Or: the cab stopping, the couple turning, sadly shaking their heads. And a dozen times he seemed to see the cab stopping in an empty sidestreet where they methodically throttled him. Coretti left dead in the rain. Because he was an outsider.

  But they arrived at Coretti's hotel.

  In the dim glow of the cab's dome light he watched closely as the man reached into his coat for the fare. Coretti could see the coat's lining clearly and it was one piece with the angora sweater. No wallet bulged there, and no pocket. But a kind of slit widened. It opened as the man's fingers poised over it, and it disgorged money. Three bills, folded, were extruded smoothly from the slit. The money was slightly damp. It dried, as the man unfolded it, like the wings of a moth just emerging from the chrysalis.

  "Keep the change," said the belonging man, climbing out of the cab. Antoinette slid out and Coretti followed, his mind seeing only the slit. The slit wet, edged with red, like a gill.

  The lobby was deserted and the desk clerk bent over a crossword. The couple drifted silently across the lobby and into the elevator, Coretti close behind. Once he tried to catch her eye, but she ignored him. And once, as the elevator rose seven floors above Coretti's own, she bent over and sniffed at the chrome wall ashtray, like a dog snuffling at the ground.

  Hotels, late at night, are never still. The corridors are never entirely silent. There are countless barely audible sighs, the rustling of sheets, and muffled voices speaking fragments out of sleep. But in the ninth-floor corridor, Coretti seemed to move through a perfect vacuum, soundless, his shoes making no sound at all on the colorless carpet and even the beating of his outsider's heart sucked away into the vague pattern that decorated the wallpaper.

  He tried to count the small plastic ovals screwed on the doors, each with its own three figures, but the corridor seemed to go on forever. At last the man halted before a door, a door veneered like all the rest with imitation rosewood, and put his hand over the lock, his palm flat against the metal. Something scraped softly and then the mechanism clicked and the door swung open. As the man withdrew his hand, Coretti saw a grayish-pink, key-shaped sliver of bone retract wetly into the pale flesh.

  No light burned in that room, but the city's dim neon aura filtered in through venetian blinds and allowed him to see the faces of the dozen or more people who sat perched on the bed and the couch and the armchairs and the stools in the kitchenette. At first he thought that their eyes were open, but then he realized that the dull
pupils were sealed beneath nictitating membranes, third eyelids that reflected the faint shades of neon from the window. They wore whatever the last bar had called for; shapeless Salvation Army overcoats sat beside bright suburban leisurewear, evening gowns beside dusty factory clothes, biker's leather by brushed Harris tweed. With sleep, all spurious humanity had vanished.

  They were roosting.

  His couple seated themselves on the edge of the formica countertop in the kitchenette, and Coretti hesitated in the middle of the empty carpet. Light-years of that carpet seemed to separate him from the others, but something called to him across the distance, promising rest and peace and belonging. And still he hesitated, shaking with an indecision that seemed to rise from the genetic core of his body's every cell.

  Until they opened their eyes, all of them simultaneously, the membranes sliding sideways to reveal the alien calm of dwellers in the ocean's darkest trench.

  Coretti screamed, and ran away, and fled along corridors and down echoing concrete stairwells to cool rain and the nearly empty streets.

  Coretti never returned to his room on the third floor of that hotel. A bored house detective collected the linguistics texts, the single suitcase of clothing, and they were eventually sold at auction. Coretti took a room in a boardinghouse run by a grim Baptist teetotaler who led her roomers in prayer at the start of every overcooked evening meal. She didn't mind that Coretti never joined them for those meals; he explained that he was given free meals at work. He lied freely and skillfully. He never drank at the boardinghouse, and he never came home drunk. Mr. Coretti was a little odd, but always paid his rent on time. And he was very quiet.

  Coretti stopped looking for her. He stopped going to bars. He drank out of a paper bag while going to and from his job at a publisher's warehouse, in an area whose industrial zoning permitted few bars.

  He worked nights.

  Sometimes, at dawn, perched on the edge of his unmade bed, drifting into sleep—he never slept lying down, now—he thought about her. Antoinette. And them. The belonging kind. Sometimes he speculated dreamily . . . Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures.

  A kind of animal that lives only on alcoholic beverages. With peculiar metabolisms they convert the alcohol and the various proteins from mixed drinks and wine and beers into everything they need. And they can change outwardly, like a chameleon or a rockfish, for protection. So they can live among us. And maybe, Coretti thought, they grow in stages. In the early stages seeming like humans, eating the food humans eat, sensing their difference only in a vague disquiet of being an outsider.

  A kind of animal with its own cunning, its own special set of urban instincts. And the ability to know its own kind when they're near. Maybe.

  And maybe not.

  Coretti drifted into sleep.

  On a Wednesday three weeks into his new job, his landlady opened his door—she never knocked—and told him that he was wanted on the phone. Her voice was tight with habitual suspicion, and Coretti followed her along the dark hallway to the second-floor sitting room and the telephone.

  Lifting the old-fashioned black instrument to his ear, he heard only music at first, and then a wall of sound resolving into a fragmented amalgam of conversations. Laughter. No one spoke to him over the sound of the bar, but the song in the background was "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly."

  And then the dial tone, when the caller hung up.

  Later, alone in his room, listening to the landlady's firm tread in the room below, Coretti realized that there was no need to remain where he was. The summons had come. But the landlady demanded three weeks' notice if anyone wanted to leave. That meant that Coretti owed her money. Instinct told him to leave it for her.

  A Christian workingman in the next room coughed in his sleep as Coretti got up and went down the hall to the telephone. Coretti told the evening shift foreman that he was quitting his job. He hung up and went back to his room, locked the door behind him, and slowly removed his clothing until he stood naked before the garish framed lithograph of Jesus above the brown steel bureau.

  And then he counted out nine tens. He placed them carefully beside the praying-hands plaque decorating the bureau top.

  It was nice-looking money. It was perfectly good money. He made it himself.

  This time, he didn't feel like making small talk. She'd been drinking a margarita, and he ordered the same. She paid, producing the money with a deft movement of her hand between the breasts bobbling in her low-cut dress. He glimpsed the gill closing there. An excitement rose in him—but somehow, this time, it didn't center in an erection.

  After the third margarita their hips were touching, and something was spreading through him in slow orgasmic waves. It was sticky where they were touching; an area the size of the heel of his thumb where the cloth had parted. He was two men: the one inside fusing with her in total cellular communion, and the shell who sat casually on a stool at the bar, elbows on either side of his drink, fingers toying with a swizzle stick. Smiling benignly into space. Calm in the cool dimness.

  And once, but only once, some distant worrisome part of him made Coretti glance down to where soft-ruby tubes pulsed, tendrils tipped with sharp lips worked in the shadows between them. Like the joining tentacles of two strange anemones.

  They were mating, and no one knew.

  And the bartender, when he brought the next drink, offered his tired smile and said, "Rainin' out now, innit? Just won't let up."

  "Been like that all goddamn week," Coretti answered. "Rainin' to beat the band."

  And he said it right. Like a real human being.

  * * *

  Barry Malzberg tells me that Arthur L. Samuels has sold the first two things he's written and doesn't want to write anymore. Neither of us is betting on it, especially since the Malzberg form and the Samuels touch have produced . . .

  * * *

  CALLING COLLECT by Barry N. Malzberg and Arthur L. Samuels

  I

  "I'll do it," Irma Green said after a long pause. She pushed a strand of hair distractedly back over her ear. "I mean," she said, "I have no choice."

  Her visitor shrugged and said, "That is your decision."

  "I mean I do have a choice," she said, "but then—"

  "Vanity of vanities," her visitor said calmly. "All is vanity." His eyes glowed.

  "Ain't that the truth," Irma said reluctantly.

  II

  Martin Green staggered from the rear patio toward the shrilling phone, looking remarkably like an angry Doberman. Even there, he could not escape the sound of the telephone which sounded peculiarly, malevolently fixated on him. That was ridiculous, of course; the call, as always, would be for Irma. No peace, he thought. No peace. "Hello?" he said.

  "This is Jack Jacobs," an unctuous voice said. "Jack Jacobs, you know? We met you at the pool last week—my wife and I, we met you and your wife at the swim club." The voice paused, wavered. "This is Martin Green, isn't it?"

  "She's not home," Martin said. "She's out. She's at a club meeting."

  "Oh," Jack Jacobs said. He paused again. "When will she be back?"

  "Later. Listen, Jacobs, what do you want? Why are you calling my wife?"

  "We—my wife and I, that is—wanted to invite you over some evening. Generally I do the calling." Jack Jacobs coughed into Martin's ear and said, "I know that isn't conventional—in the suburbs it's usually the wife who does the social things like that, I know, but we have kind of a liberated marriage, share and share alike, so I thought I'd put through the invitation—"

  "Jacobs," Martin said flatly, "I don't think I want to see you. I don't even remember you and I don't want to renew acquaintances. You understand?"

  There was a long silence at the other end and Jack Jacobs said, "Oh yes, I understand."

  "Don't call my wife anymore, Jacobs," Martin said and put the phone down so abruptly that it bounced off the pedestal. He caught it on the fly. "Don'
t do it," he screamed and slammed it down again and went back to the patio. But his mood was ruined. He could not do bicycle repair. Strange men were calling his wife now on what was already an instrument of destruction. I can't take it anymore, he thought, but he knew that this was only a pose. Of course he could continue to take it.

  What was the alternative?

  Irma Green was obsessed with the telephone. Martin could sit and read for hours, work on household equipment; Irma talked. When she didn't talk, she went out. In between times, when feasible, she prepared dinner, slept, engaged in sex. When she was home she was on the telephone.

  The calls came in and went out. Irma scurried off on her activities, wooed new acquaintances from her own bed until after midnight. I don't have a wife, I have a switchboard, Martin thought. Once he had even said it to her. She did not take to it kindly. Fifteen years of marriage counted for something, she said. Like autonomy and trust. Trust was vital to any marriage. Beaten, Martin had dropped the issue. But now she was getting calls from a man. Who was Jack Jacobs? What did he want? What was going on?

  Martin pondered the issue into the evening, long after Irma had come home, dropped her coat and car keys, returned five telephone calls. She had laughed when told about Jacobs. He had almost drowned in the pool trying to show off last week, she had said. Didn't Martin remember? No, he did not remember. Well, it did not matter; certainly she was far too busy to want to deal socially with people like him or his fat liberated wife. "You look angry, Martin," she said at eleven, the phone mercifully still. "Are you jealous? Do you think I'm having an affair?"

  "You're never off that phone," Martin said pointlessly. "You're always calling someone or they're calling you. There's no peace."

  "It keeps me young," Irma said.

  This was probably true, Martin thought. At forty-five she looked thirty; throughout their marriage she had softened and deepened, while he had merely wrinkled and spread. "It's not keeping me young," he said. "If I haven't got Jacobs for a correspondent, I have the telephone."