by David Ely
“All right, Mr. Wilson. It’s only that this room is so confoundedly small, and when someone starts shouting, it’s sheer bedlam. If the company’d only give me an office of decent size—”
“My question,” Wilson said quickly, to forestall another review of administrative shortcomings, “is—what actually happens in what they call surgery?”
“Well, I’m no surgeon, Mr. Wilson. I’m not in attendance on those occasions, sir, as I’m sure you will realize—”
“You’re being evasive, Dr. Morris.”
“—and I can only advise you,” the minister continued, “to make your peace with yourself and your God, whether you happen to have one or not . . .”
Wilson nodded his head. He kept nodding it. The words of Dr. Morris seemed somehow to have become connected with those muscles of his neck which governed nodding, so that each word produced a corresponding little jerking movement of the head.
“ . . . ‘Our time is a very shadow that passeth away,’ ” Dr. Morris droned on, quoting with liberality from both Jewish and Christian sources, “ ‘and man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble . . .’ ”
As he spoke, the minister kept glancing furtively at his watch, and at the door, occasionally giving Wilson a reassuring smile, and then blinking in an abstracted way around the room, as though even while providing his visitor with divine consolation, he were still preoccupied with the lowly status of the religious department.
“ ‘I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were, um, dead, yet shall he live . . .’ ”
Dr. Morris began to speak more hastily, sometimes getting his quotations jumbled, or uttering those that were inappropriate to the occasion, and Wilson’s nodding, too, continued at a faster pace. He tried to hold his head still, but in vain. He finally seized his head with his hands, attempting both to stop its movements and to cover his ears. Dr. Morris was right; the office was too small, too terribly small. The walls seemed to lean against each other, separated only by a tiny cushion of air, and the air itself was being sucked away by the vacuum of the minister’s voice, so that soon the substance would be quite gone, and there would be nothing to prevent the walls from flopping down on them.
He shouted something at the walls. His eyes were closed, his ears blocked tightly by his hands, his body doubled up in the chair waiting for the room to fold him flat. The only thing to do was shout. Shout for help.
Then he felt something nip at his arm; a single tooth. He looked wildly around.
Dr. Morris had departed. The orderlies had returned, and one of them was holding an empty syringe. But the walls, at least, had not fallen.
“I want to see my contract,” Wilson said. “I’ve got a right to see my contract.” He glared at the orderlies, who remained impassive. “It’s bound to be in the contract, if it’s there—and it couldn’t be there because I read it myself.” He raised his hands imploringly. “At least, I think I read it.”
The orderlies gently raised him to his feet and moved him to the door.
“It wasn’t exactly a contract, come to think of it,” Wilson said. “It was in the form of a will, actually, but a man can’t legally will his living body for medical or commercial purposes—it simply can’t be done, gentlemen!” The orderlies grunted with the effort of propelling him along the corridor, but made no other response. “It’s against the common law! It’s against all moral standards! Of course, I realize that the will was made by a man who no longer exists,” Wilson added, attempting to anticipate what would undoubtedly be the company’s counterarguments, “and that in my present form I am, in a sense, actually a creation of the company, so that possibly there are certain proprietary rights involved . . . But only skin-deep, gentlemen! Only skin-deep! I mean, you can take back the pound of flesh, but the blood—that’s mine, isn’t it? . . . Isn’t it?” he echoed plaintively, as the orderlies carefully conveyed him into a small room and eased him down on an old-fashioned black leather sofa. He tried to rise, but his legs refused to push him up. He stared down at them in perplexity.
“Do you feel calmer, sir?” one of the orderlies inquired, not unkindly.
“Oh—well, yes,” said Wilson, truthfully. His arm ached a bit where the needle had gone in, but otherwise he was physically at ease. “It’s not a question of calmness, my young friends,” he added, “but of justice. Human justice.” He sought to describe the shape of justice with his hands, but they, too, declined to obey him, preferring to remain limply folded in his lap, and when he glanced up from them, he discovered that the orderlies had gone.
“Hello, Mr. Wilson.”
It was the company president, seated across the little room in a sagging wooden chair.
“I’m sorry—I guess I didn’t notice you, sir,” said Wilson.
“Not at all,” the old man said, with a deprecatory gesture. “I’m not the noticeable type, my boy.” He sighed and fumbled with his vest, from which two buttons were missing. “I’m sorry about all of this, Mr. Wilson,” he finally said. “I really hoped you’d make it. I hoped you’d find your dream come true.”
“I never had a dream.”
“Maybe that was it,” the old man said. “Yes, that may very well have been it.” He nodded his head in a forlorn way, as if Wilson had provided him with a distressing but inevitable insight.
“I seem to be nothing but trouble for you,” Wilson said, humbly. “Coming—and going.”
“Ah, well,” the old man muttered, scratching his seamed forehead and then inspecting his fingernails. “You’re not the only one, my boy.”
“You mean all the others in the dayroom?”
“Those, and others. There are other dayrooms, Mr. Wilson. We keep having to add them on, and it’s taking up space required for administrative and operating divisions, I’m afraid, but there’s not much we can do about it. No sir, the proportion of failures—if you’ll forgive the word—is so high, my boy, that I’d be ashamed to mention it to you. But possibly it makes you feel a little better to know that you’re not in a minority?”
“Not really.”
“No, I suppose not.” The president sighed again. His chair creaked sympathetically. “No, it’s not a minority, I fear,” he repeated, and then, mumbling slightly, he added: “Oh, when I began the business—and that was a long time ago, son, an awfully long time—I was a young man myself . . .” He paused and blew his nose. “Um, what was I saying?”
“You were telling me about when you started the business.”
“Yes. Well, I was a young man, as I said. A young man with an idea.” He chuckled mournfully. “Believe me, Mr. Wilson, there’s nothing in the world so frightening and pathetic as a young man with an idea! And an altruistic idea, to boot. That’s the worst. No sir, I wasn’t aiming to make a lot of money. It had to be a self-supporting commercial operation, true enough, but that was just the necessary foundation to give expression to this idea of mine. You know: helping others. Helping others to a little happiness . . . and not just the wealthy—although at first, of course, I realized that I’d have to start with those who could afford high fees—but ultimately everybody. A mass market, Mr. Wilson.” He drew out his pipe and rubbed it carefully against his cheek, then began to fill it from an old leather tobacco pouch.
“Yes?”
“Oh. Well, then the failures began. I didn’t pay much attention at first, you see, being preoccupied with the administrative end of things. I thought to myself: get the business established on a firm footing, and then there’d be time to iron out the bugs. And all the time, you understand, I took comfort in the thought that in my small way I was waging a battle against human misery. I was, too, except . . .” He stopped to light his pipe.
“Except what, sir?”
“Eh? Oh, except that the failures kept on coming, more and more, and I finally had to admit that I might possibly have based my enterprise on a fallacy. I’ve always tried to be honest with myself, son. That’s the only way to live h
onorably.” He waved his pipe, which promptly went out, and he was forced to light it again. “As for that fallacy, it was simply this: that my business seemed to attract the wrong kind of clients. In fact, I often wondered whether it didn’t attract only the wrong kind of clients.”
“I don’t quite—”
“It’s simple, my boy. My clients were men who were ready to abandon their original identities . . . and why? Because, for one reason or another, they had made a botch of things (apart from material success, of course), and I can’t imagine what possessed me to think that these gentlemen would be likely to do much better just because I gave them a new face and a new name.”
“But if you realized this, then why didn’t you stop? I don’t mean to be critical,” said Wilson, “but wasn’t it just a little bit dishonest to keep on?”
The old man looked even sadder than before. “Ah, well, you’re right, Wilson. But it wasn’t all that easy. By the time I came to this conclusion, you see, I had built up a big organization. I had a staff running into the hundreds. I had a tremendous investment in facilities and equipment and the like, which couldn’t just be turned off overnight, you know. And then, too,” he added ruefully, “I was no longer the only voice in authority, because we’re a modern concern, Wilson, with profit-sharing and a board of directors and all . . .” He put his pipe away again. “And I couldn’t very well take sole responsibility for throwing all these people out of work, could I? As it is, Wilson, we’re having some financial difficulties. You’ve got no idea what the expenses are like in this sort of business,” he remarked, gloomily. “We keep needing to get more clients to help support the cost of processing those we’re working on, and we have to cut all sorts of corners . . . and then, too, we’ve got to keep a close check on the reborns outside, because with the high incidence of failure, we never can tell when one of them might try to make trouble by, for instance, deciding to sue us in court. You can see why we couldn’t let that happen, Wilson.”
“Naturally.”
“And some do make a go of it, my boy.” The old man’s face brightened. “Not many, but some. That makes it better, doesn’t it? And we are working constantly to find ways of improving on that proportion,” he added, wistfully. “I may not see it in my lifetime, but the younger executives like Joliffe may, and in fact I believe they will. Oh, you can call it wishful thinking, son, but it all began with a wish, didn’t it? And our life is built on wishes. We’ve got to keep plugging away,” the old man declared severely, admonishing Wilson with one bony finger. “We can’t just give up. We’ve got to push on, we’ve got to stay solvent and reduce costs wherever we can,” he said, referring again to his financial troubles. “Why, do you know that up until last year our Cadaver Procurement Section was running thirty and forty percent over budget, sir?”
Wilson stirred uneasily on the sofa. “But you’ve managed to take care of that problem now,” he muttered.
“Yes, yes. We—” The president stopped himself. “Sorry, Wilson. I’m afraid that example was not too aptly chosen, considering your position.”
Wilson merely shrugged, or rather, tried to shrug. He seemed to be even more divorced from his body than before, as if it were gradually, by means of the injection, acquiring an independent existence. If it got up and walked away, he wondered, would he remain in the little room . . . and if he did, what would he consist of?
“Could you do it now—right now?” he asked, although he did not particularly care.
“Do what? Oh—well, no, Wilson. That’s impossible. We have to wait until a client appears who answers your general measurements.”
“But what about cold storage?”
“I’m afraid that’s full-up, my boy. Anyway, we’ve found that we get the best results on the alternative basis. Cheaper, too. Less surgical conditioning.”
“I see,” Wilson said, or thought he said. He was not sure that his lips had moved, nor was he positive that he had heard his words, for the disembodied sensation was growing stronger, and it seemed that the power of speech and hearing was in a process of erosion. Sight, too, was becoming somewhat uncertain. The old man across the room was nothing more than a thin little shadow now, and his reedy voice was subject to irregular fluctuations, as if it were governed by a spluttering radio tube about to expire absolutely. Only phrases here and there came through with clarity.
“ . . . look at it this way, my boy . . . Opportunity for someone else . . . make amends for your failure . . .”
The dim overhead light now seemed to be slowly splitting into fragments, tiny points of light which danced in the air, then gradually became fixed in space.
Still the old man’s voice continued, fitfully:
“It’s your immortality, in a way, my boy . . . When most men die, they just die, that’s all, without a purpose . . .”
Now the points of light were being extinguished, one by one. There was only darkness behind them.
“ . . . but for you, there’d be a purpose. Giving someone else a chance. Isn’t that better than . . . ? Isn’t that the point of life, my boy . . . ?”
Only a few of the lights remained.
“Love,” whispered the unsteady old voice. “It’s love, son, the only kind of love that counts . . . Unselfish love . . .”
Now there were but two lights, and these so shrunken and uncertain that their existence seemed in doubt. He thought he might as well make one last effort to speak before they, too, faded into darkness together with the old man, the room, the building, city, everything; and so, swiftly but carefully choosing his words, he delivered a final response.
“It really doesn’t matter,” he said.
About the Author
DAVID ELY was born in Chicago and was educated at the University of North Carolina, Harvard, and Oxford. He is a former newspaperman and the author of seven novels and two collections of short stories. His novel Seconds was the basis for the 1966 Rock Hudson film of the same title. He and his wife live on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A print edition of Seconds was originally published in August 1964 by Signet, a division of Random House, Inc.
SECONDS. Copyright © 1963 by David Ely. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition JANUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780062264923
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062264930
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