The Collection

by Fredric Brown

  "Let's not. Not until you answer my questions, anyway."

  "All right. You'd go in anonymously, so there wouldn't be any stigma attached if the story wouldn't work out. If it does, you can tell the whole truth—including Dr. Randolph's collusion in getting you in and out again. The cat will be out of the bag, then.

  "You might get what you want in a few days-and you wouldn't stay on it more than a couple of weeks in any case."

  "How many at the asylum would know who I was and what I was there for, besides Randolph?"

  "No one." Candler leaned forward and held up four fingers of his left hand. He pointed to the first. "Four people would have to be in on it. You." He pointed to one finger. "Me." A second. "Dr. Randolph." The third finger. "And one other reporter from here."

  "Not that I'd object, but why the other reporter?"

  "Intermediary. In two ways. First, he'll go with you to some psychiatrist; Randolph will recommend one you can fool comparatively easily. He'll be your brother and request that you be examined and certified. You convince the psychiatrist you're nuts and he'll certify you. Of course it takes two doctors to put you away, but Randolph will be the second. Your alleged brother will want Randolph for the second one."

  "All this under an assumed name?"

  "If you prefer. Of course there's no real reason why it should be."

  "That's the way I feel about it. Keep it out of the papers, of course. Tell everybody around here-except my-hey, in that case we couldn't make up a brother. But Charlie Doerr, in Circulation, is my first cousin and my nearest living relative. He'd do, wouldn't he?"

  "Sure. And he'd have to be intermediary the rest of the way, then. Visit you at the asylum and bring back anything you have to send back."

  "And if, in a couple of weeks, I've found nothing, you'll spring me?"

  Candler nodded. "I'll pass the word to Randolph; he'll interview you and pronounce you cured, and you're out. You come back here, and you've been on vacation. That's all."

  "What kind of insanity should I pretend to have?"

  He thought Candler squirmed a little in his chair. Candler said, "Well-wouldn't this Nappy business be a natural? I mean, paranoia is a form of insanity which, Dr. Randolph told me, hasn't any physical symptoms. It's just a delusion supported by a systematic framework of rationalization. A paranoiac can be sane in every way except one."

  He watched Candler and there was a faint twisted grin on his lips. "You mean I should think I'm Napoleon?"

  Candler gestured slightly. "Choose your own delusion. But-isn't that one a natural? I mean, the boys around the office always kidding you and calling you Nappy. And-" He finished weakly, "-and everything."

  And then Candler looked at him squarely. "Want to do it?"

  He stood up. "I think so. I'll let you know for sure tomorrow morning after I've slept on it, but unofficially-yes. Is that good enough?"

  Candler nodded.

  He said, "I'm taking the rest of the afternoon off; I'm going to the library to read up on paranoia. Haven't anything else to do anyway. And I'll talk to Charlie Doerr this evening. Okay?"

  "Fine. Thanks."

  He grinned at Candler. He leaned across the desk. He said, "I'll let you in on a little secret, now that things have gone his far. Don't tell anyone. I am Napoleon!"

  It was a good exit line, so he went out.

  II

  He car his hat and coat and went outside, out of the air-conditioning and into the hot sunlight. Out of the quiet madhouse of a newspaper office after deadline, into the quieter madhouse of the streets on a sultry July afternoon.

  He tilted his panama back on his head and ran his hand-kerchief across his forehead. Where was he going? Not to the library to bone up on paranoia; that had been a gag to get off for the rest of the afternoon. He'd read everything the library had on paranoia-and on allied subjects-over two years ago. He was an expert on it. He could fool any psychiatrist in the country into thinking that he was sane-or that he wasn't.

  He walked north to the park and sat down on one of the benches in the shade. He put his hat on the bench beside him and mopped his forehead again.

  He stared out at the grass, bright green in the sunlight, at the pigeons with their silly- head-bobbing method of walking, at a red squirrel that came down one side of a tree, looked about him and scurried up the other side of the same tree.

  And he thought back to the wall of amnesia of three years ago.

  The wall that hadn't been a wall at all. The phrase intrigued him: a wall at all. Pigeons on the grass, alas. A wall at all.

  It wasn't a wall at all; it was a shift, an abrupt change. A line had been drawn between two lives. Twenty-seven years of a life before the accident. Three years of a life since the accident.

  They were not the same life.

  But no one knew. Until this afternoon he had never even hinted the truth-if it was the truth-to anyone. He'd used it as an exit line in leaving Candler's office, knowing Candler would take it as a gag. Even so, one had to be careful; use a gagline like that often, and people begin to wonder.

  The fact that his extensive injuries from that accident had included a broken jaw was probably responsible for the fact that today he was free and not in an insane asylum. That broken jaw-it had been in a cast when he'd returned to consciousness forty-eight hours after his car had run head-on into a truck ten miles out of town-had prevented him from talking for three weeks.

  And by the end of three weeks, despite the pain and the confusion that had filled them, he'd had a chance to think things over. He'd invented the wall. The amnesia, the convenient amnesia that was so much more believable than the truth as he knew it.

  But was the truth as he knew it?

  That was the haunting ghost that had ridden him for three years now, since the very hour when he had awakened to whiteness in a white room and a stranger, strangely dressed, had been sitting beside a bed the like of which had been in no field hospital he'd ever heard of or seen. A bed with an overhead framework. And when he looked from the stranger's face down at his own body, he saw that one of his legs and both of his arms were in casts and that the cast of the leg stuck upward at the angle, a rope running over a pulley holding it so.

  He'd tried to open his mouth to ask where he was, what had happened to him, and that was when he had discovered the cast on his jaw.

  He'd stared at the stranger, hoping the latter would have sense enough to volunteer the information and the stranger had grinned at him and said, "Hi, George. Back with us, huh? You'll be all right."

  And there was something strange about the language until he placed what it was. English. Was he in the hands of the English? And it was a language, too, which he knew little of, yet he understood the stranger perfectly. And why did the stranger call him George?

  Maybe some of the doubt, some of the fierce bewilderment, showed in his eyes, for the stranger leaned closer to the bed. He said, "Maybe you're still confused, George. You were in a pretty bad smashup. You ran that coupe of yours head-on into a gravel truck. That was two days ago, and you're just coming out of it for the first time. You're all right, but you'll be in the hospital for a while, till all the bones you busted knit. Nothing seriously wrong with you."

  And then waves of pain had come and swept away the confusion, and he had closed his eyes.

  Another voice in the room said, "We're going to give you a hypo, Mr. Vine," but he hadn't dared open his eyes again. It was easier to fight the pain without seeing.

  There had been the prick of a needle in his upper arm. And pretty soon there'd been nothingness.

  ***

  When he came back again-twelve hours later, he learned afterwards-it had been to the same white room, the same strange bed, but this time there was a woman in the room, a woman in a strange white costume standing at the foot of the bed studying a paper that was fastened on a niece of board.

  She had smiled at him when she saw that his eyes were open. She said, "Good morning, Mr. Vine. Hope you're fe
eling better. I'll tell Dr. Holt that you're back with us."

  She went away and came back with a man who was also strangely dressed, in roughly the same fashion as had been the stranger who had called him George.

  The doctor looked at him and chuckled. "Got a patient, for once, who can't talk back to me. Or even write notes." Then his face sobered. "Are you in pain, though? Blink once if you're not, twice if you are."

  The pain wasn't really very bad this time, and he blinked once. The doctor nodded with satisfaction. "That cousin of yours," he said, "has kept calling up. He'll be glad to know you're going to be back in shape to-well, to listen if not to talk. Guess it won't hurt you to see him a while this evening."

  The nurse rearranged his bedclothing and then, mercifully, both she and the doctor had gone, leaving him alone to straighten out his chaotic thoughts.

  Straighten them out? That had been three years ago, and he hadn't been able to straighten them out yet:

  The startling fact that they'd spoken English and that he'd understood that barbaric tongue perfectly, despite his slight previous knowledge of it. How could an accident have made him suddenly fluent in a language which he had known but slightly?

  The startling fact that they'd called him by a different name. "George" had been the name used by the man who'd been beside his bed last night. "Mr. Vine," the nurse had called him. George Vine, an English name, surely.

  But there was one thing a thousand times more startling than either of those: It was what last night's stranger (Could he be the "cousin" of whom the doctor had spoken?) had told him about the accident. "You ran that coupe of yours head-on into a gravel truck."

  The amazing thing, the contradictory thing, was that he knew what a coupe was and what a truck was. Not that he had any recollection of having driven either, of the accident itself, or of anything beyond that moment when he'd been sitting in the tent after Lodi-but-but how could a picture of a coupe, something driven by a gasoline engine, arise to his mind when such a concept had never been in his mind before.

  There was that mad mingling of two worlds-the one sharp and clear and definite. The world he'd lived his twenty-seven years of life in, in the world into which he'd been born twenty-seven years ago, on August 15th, 1769, in Corsica. The world in which he'd gone to sleep-it seemed like last night-in his tent at Lodi, as General of the Army in Italy, after his first important victory in the field.

  And then there was this disturbing world into which he had awakened, this white world in which people spoke an English-now that he thought of it-which was different from the English he had heard spoken at Brienne, in Valence, at Toulon, and yet which he understood perfectly, which he knew instinctively that he could speak if his jaw were not in a cast. This world in which people called him George Vine, and in which, strangest of all, people used words that he did not know, could not conceivably know, and yet which brought pictures to his mind.

  Coupe, truck. They were both forms of-the word came to his mind unbidden-automobiles. He concentrated on what an automobile was and how it worked, and the information was there. The cylinder block, the pistons driven by explosions of gasoline vapor, ignited by a spark of electricity from a generator.

  Electricity. He opened his eyes and looked upward at the shaded light in the ceiling, and he knew, somehow, that it was an electric light, and in a general way he knew what electricity was.

  The Italian Galvani-yes, he'd read of some experiments of Galvani, but they hadn't encompassed anything practical such as a light like that. And staring at the shaded light, he visualized behind it water power running dynamos, miles of wire, motors running generators. He caught his breath at the concept that came to him out of his own mind, or part of his own mind.

  The faint, fumbling experiments of Galvani with their weak currents and kicking frogs' legs had scarcely fore-shadowed the unmysterious mystery of that light up in the ceiling; and that was the strangest thing yet; part of his mind found it mysterious and another part took it for granted and understood in a general sort of way how it all worked.

  Let's see, he thought, the electric light was invented by Thomas Alva Edison somewhere around-Ridiculous; he'd been going to say around 1900, and it was now only 1796!

  And then the really horrible thing came to him and he tried-painfully, in vain-to sit up in bed. It had been 1900, his memory told him, and Edison had died in 1931. And a man named Napoleon Bonaparte had died a hundred and ten years before that, in 1821.

  He'd nearly gone insane then.

  And, sane or insane, only the fact that he could not speak had kept him out of a madhouse; it gave him time to think things out, time to realize that his only chance lay in pretending amnesia, in pretending that he remembered nothing of life prior to the accident. They don't put you in a madhouse for amnesia. They tell you who you are, let you go back to what they tell you your former life was. They let you pick up the threads and weave them, while you try to remember.

  Three years ago he'd done that. Now, tomorrow, he was going to a psychiatrist and say that he was-Napoleon!

  III

  The slant of the sun was greater. Overhead a big bird of a plane droned by and he looked up at it and began laughing, quietly to himself-not the laughter of madness. True laughter because it sprang from the conception of Napoleon Bonaparte riding in a plane like that and from the overwhelming incongruity of that idea.

  It came to him then that he'd never ridden in a plane, that he remembered. Maybe George Vine had; at some time in the twenty-seven years of life George Vine had spent, he must have. But did that mean that he had ridden in one? That was a question that was part of the big question.

  He got up and started to walk again. It was almost five o'clock; pretty soon Charlie Doerr would he leaving the paper and going home for dinner. Maybe he'd better phone Charlie and he sure he'd be home this evening.

  He headed for the nearest bar and phoned; he got Charlie just in time. He said, "This is George. Going to be home this evening?"

  "Sure, George. I was going to a poker game, but I called it off when I learned you'd be around."

  "When you learned-Oh, Candler talked to you?"

  "Yeah. Say, I didn't know you'd phone me or I'd have called Marge, but how about coming out for dinner? It'll be all right with her; I'll call her now if you can."

  He said, "Thanks, no, Charlie. Got a dinner date. And say, about that card game; you can go. I can get there about seven and we won't have to talk all evening; an hour'll be enough. You wouldn't be leaving before eight anyway."

  Charlie said, "Don't worry about it; I don't much want to go anyway, and you haven't been out for a while. So I'll see you at seven, then."

  From the phone booth, he walked over to the bar and ordered a beer. He wondered why he'd turned down the invitation to dinner; probably because, subconsciously, he wanted another couple of hours by himself before he talked to anyone, even Charlie and Marge.

  He sipped his beer slowly, because he wanted to make it last; he had to stay sober tonight, plenty sober. There was still time to change his mind; he'd left himself a loophole, however small. He could still go to Candler in the morning and say he'd decided not to do it.

  Over the rim of his glass he stared at himself in the back-bar mirror. Small, sandy-haired, with freckles on his nose, stocky. The small and stocky part fitted all right; but the rest of it! Not the remotest resemblance.

  He drank another beer slowly, and that made it half past five.

  He wandered out again and walked, this time toward town. He walked past the Blade and looked up to the third floor and at the window he'd been working out of when Candler had sent for him. He wondered if he'd ever sit by that window again and look out across a sunlit afternoon.

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  He thought about Clare. Did he want to see her tonight?

  Well, no, to be honest about it, he didn't. But if he disappeared for two weeks or so without having even said good-bye to her, then he'd have to write her off his books; sh
e wouldn't like that.

  He'd better.

  He stopped in at a drug store and called her home. He said, "This is George, Clare. Listen, I'm being sent out of town tomorrow on an assignment; don't know how long I'll be gone. One of those things that might be a few days or a few weeks. But could I see you late this evening, to say so-long?"

  "Why sure, George. What time?"

  "It might be after nine, but not much after. That be okay? I'm seeing Charlie first, on business; may not be able to get away before nine."

  "Of course, George. Any time."

  ***

  He stopped in at a hamburger stand, although he wasn't hungry, and managed to eat a sandwich and a piece of pie. That made it a quarter after six and, if he walked, he'd get to Charlie's at just about the right time. So he walked.

  Charlie met him at the door. With finger on his lips, he jerked his head backward toward the kitchen where Marge was wiping dishes. He whispered, "I didn't tell Marge, George. It'd worry her."

  He wanted to ask Charlie why it would, or should, worry Marge, but he didn't. Maybe he was a little afraid of the answer. It would have to mean that Marge was worrying about him already, and that was a bad sign. He thought he'd been carrying everything off pretty well for three years now.

  Anyway, he couldn't ask because Charlie was leading him into the living room and the kitchen was within easy earshot, and Charlie was saying, "Glad you decided you'd like a game of chess, George. Marge is going out tonight; movie she wants to sec down at the neighborhood show. I was going to that card game out of self-defense, but I didn't want to."

  He got the chessboard and men out of the closet and started to set up a game on the coffee table.

  Marge came in with a try bearing tall cold glasses of beer and put it down beside the chessboard. She said, "Hi, George. Hear you're going away a couple of weeks."

  He nodded. "But I don't know where. Candler-the managing editor-asked me if I'd be free for an out of town assignment and I said sure, and he said he'd tell me about it tomorrow."