“Go away,” I gritted. “Talk sense, or go away. Preferably—go away.”
The head shook from side to side, and its expression was gentle. “Give up,” it said. “Call it quits. Remember what was good, and fade out.”
“You’re no good to me,” ’ I muttered, and waded over to the book case. I got out a dictionary, glowering at the head, which now was registering a mixture of pity and amusement
Abruptly, the tapioca disappeared.
I leafed through the book. Sizable, sizar, size, sizzle—“Try S-Y,” prompted the head.
I glared at it and went over to the S-Y’s. Systemize, systole—
“Here it is,” I said, triumphantly. “The last word in the S section.” I read from the book. “ ‘Syzygy—either of the points at which the moon is most nearly in line with the earth and the sun, as when it is new or full.’ What are you trying to tell me—that I’m caught in the middle of some astrological mumbo-jumbo?”
“Certainly not,” it snapped. “I will tell you, however, that if that’s all your dictionary says, it’s not a very good one.” It vanished.
“But—” I said vaguely. I went back to the dictionary. That’s all it had to say about syzygy. Shaking, I replaced it.
Something cat-sized and furry hurtled through the air, clawed at my shoulder. I startled, backed into my record cabinet and landed with a crash on the middle of my back in the doorway. The thing leaped from me to the couch and sat up, curling a long wide tail against its back and regarding me with its jewelled eyes. A squirrel.
“Well, hello!” I said, getting to my knees and then to my feet. “Where on earth did you come from?”
The squirrel, with the instantaneous motion of its kind, dived to the edge of the couch and froze with its four legs wide apart, head up, tail describing exactly its recent trajectory, and ready to take off instantly in any direction including up. I looked at it with some puzzlement. “I’ll go see if I have any walnuts,” I told it. I moved toward the archway, and as I did so the squirrel leaped at me. I threw up a hand to protect my face. The squirrel struck my shoulder again and leaped from it—
And as far as I know it leaped into the fourth dimension or somewhere. For I searched under and into every bed, chair, closet, cupboard, and shelf in the house, and could find no sign of anything that even looked like a squirrel. It was gone as completely as the masses of tapioca.…
Tapioca! What had the head said about the tapioca? “She’s thinking about it now.” She—Gloria, of course. This whole insane business was tied up with Gloria in some way.
Gloria not only disliked tapioca—she was afraid of it.
I chewed on that for a while, and then looked at the clock. Gloria had had time enough to get to the hotel. I ran to the phone, dialed.
“Hotel San Dragon,” said a chewing-gum voice.
“748, please,” I said urgently.
A couple of clicks. Then, “Hello?”
“Gloria,” I said. “Listen; I—”
“Oh, you. Listen—can you call me back later? I’m very busy.”
“I can and I will, but tell me something quickly: Are you afraid of squirrels?”
Don’t tell me a shudder can’t be transmitted over a telephone wire. One was that time, “I hate them. Call me back in about—”
“Why do you hate them?”
With exaggerated patience, she said carefully, “When I was a little girl, I was feeding some pigeons and a squirrel jumped right up on my shoulder and scared me half to death. Now, please—”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll speak to you later.” I hung up. She shouldn’t talk to me that way. She had no right—
What was she doing in that hotel room, anyway?
I pushed the ugly thought down out of sight, and went and poured myself a beer. Gloria is afraid of tapioca, I thought, and tapioca shows up here. She is afraid of the sound of small animals’ feet, and I hear them here. She is afraid of squirrels that jump on people, and I get a squirrel that jumps on people.
That must all make some sense. Of course, I could take the easy way out, and admit that I was crazy. But somehow, I was no longer so ready to admit anything like that. Down deep inside, I made an agreement with myself not to admit that until I had exhausted every other possibility.
A very foolish piece of business. See to it that you don’t do likewise. It’s probably much smarter not to try to figure things out.
There was only one person who could straighten this whole crazy mess out—since the head wouldn’t—and that was Gloria, I thought suddenly. I realized, then, why I had not called all bets before now. I had been afraid to jeopardize the thing that Gloria and I shared. Well, let’s face it. We didn’t share it any longer. That admission helped.
I strode to the telephone, and dialed the hotel.
“Hotel San Dragon.”
“748, please.”
A moment’s silence. Then, “I’m sorry, sir. The party does not wish to be disturbed.”
I stood there looking blankly at the phone, while pain swirled and spiralled up inside me. I think that up to this moment I had treated the whole thing as part sickness, part dream; this, somehow, brought it to a sharp and agonizing focus. Nothing that she could have done could have been so calculated and so cruel.
I cradled the receiver and headed for the door. Before I could reach it, gray mists closed about me. For a moment I seemed to be on some sort of a treadmill; I was walking, but I could not reach anything. Swiftly, then, everything was normal.
“I must be in a pretty bad way,” I muttered. I shook my head. It was incredible. I felt all right, though a little dizzy. I went to the door and out.
The trip to the hotel was the worst kind of a nightmare. I could only conclude that there was something strange and serious wrong with me, completely aside from my fury and my hurt at Gloria. I kept running into these blind spells, when everything about me took on an unreal aspect. The light didn’t seem right. I passed people on the street who weren’t there when I turned to look at them. I heard voices where there were no people, and I saw people talking but couldn’t hear them. I overcame a powerful impulse to go back home. I couldn’t go back; I knew it; I knew I had to face whatever crazy thing was happening, and that Gloria had something to do with it.
I caught a cab at last, though I’ll swear one of them disappeared just as I was about to step into it. Must have been another of those blind spells. After that it was easier. I slouched quivering in a corner of the seat with my eyes closed.
I paid off the driver at the hotel and stumbled in through the revolving doors. The hotel seemed much more solid than anything else since this horrible business had started to happen to me. I started over to the desk, determined to give some mad life-and-death message to the clerk to break that torturing “do not disturb” order. I glanced into the coffee room as I passed it and stopped dead.
She was in there, in a booth, with—with someone else. I couldn’t see anything of the man but a glossy black head of hair and a thick, ruddy neck. She was smiling at him, the smile that I thought had been born and raised for me.
I stalked over to them, trembling. As I reached them, he half-rose, leaned across the table, and kissed her.
“Arthur …” she breathed.
“That,” I said firmly, “will do.”
They did not move.
“Stop it!” I screamed. They did not move. Nothing moved, anywhere. It was a tableau, a picture, a hellish frozen thing put there to tear me apart.
“That’s all,” said a now-familiar voice, gently. “That kiss did it, son. You’re through.” It was the head, but now he was a whole man. An ordinary-looking, middle-sized creature he was, with a scrawny frame to match his unimpressive middle-aged face. He perched on the edge of the table, mercifully between me and that torturing kiss.
I ran to him, grasped his thin shoulders. “Tell me what it is,” I begged him. “Tell me, if you know—and I think you know. Tell me!” I roared, sinking my fingers int
o his flesh.
He put his hands up and laid them gently on my wrists, holding them there until I quieted down a little. I let him go. “I am sorry, son,” he said. “I hoped you would figure it all out by yourself.”
“I tried,” I said. I looked around me. The grayness was closing in again, and through it I could see the still figures of the people in the coffee shop, all stopped in mid-action. It was one three-dimensional frame of some unthinkable movie-film. I felt cold sweat all but squirt from the pores of my face. “Where am I?” I shrieked.
“Please,” he soothed. “Take it easy, and I’ll tell you. Come over here and sit down and relax. Close your eyes and don’t try to think. Just listen.”
I did as he asked, and gradually I stopped shaking. He waited until he felt that I was calm, and then began talking.
“There is a world of psychic things—call them living thought, call them dreams if you like. Now, you know that of all animals, only human beings can reach these psychic things. It was a biological accident. There is something about humans which is tangent to this psychic world. Humans have the power to open a gate between the two worlds. They can seldom control the power; often they’re not aware of it. But when that gate is opened, something materializes in the world of the humans. Imagination itself is enough to do it. If you are hungry, down deep inside, for a certain kind of woman, and if you picture her to yourself vividly enough, such a gate might open, and there she’ll be. You can see her and touch her; she’ll be little different from a real one.”
“But—there is a difference?”
“Yes, there is. She is not a separate thing from you. She is a part of you. She is your product. That’s what I was driving at when I mentioned parthenogenesis. It works like that.”
“Parthenogenesis—let’s see. That’s the process of reproducing without fertilization, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. This ‘materialization’ of yours is a perfect parallel to that. As I told you before, however, it is not a process with high survival value. For one thing, it affords no chance to cross strains. Unless a living creature can bring into itself other characteristics, it must die out.”
“Then why don’t all parthenogenetic creatures die out?”
“There is a process used by which the very simple, one-celled forms of life take care of that. Mind you,” he broke off suddenly, “I’m just using all of this biological talk as symbolism. There are basic laws that work in both worlds, that work equally on the high forms of life and the low. Do you see?”
“I see. These are just examples. But go on about this process that the parthenogenetic creatures use to mix their strains.”
“It’s very simple. Two of these organisms let their nuclei flow together for a time. Then they separate and go their ways again. It isn’t a reproductive process at all. It’s merely a way in which each may gain a part of the other. It’s called—syzygy.”
“Oh,” I said. “That. But I still don’t—let me see. You mentioned it first when that—that—”
“When Gloria met Arthur,” the man finished smoothly. “I said that if it were syzygy, you’d be all right. Well, it wasn’t, as you saw for yourself. The outside strain, even though it didn’t suit her as well as you did, was too strong. You got hurt. Well, in the workings of really basic laws, something always gets hurt.”
“What about you? Who are you?”
“I am somebody who has been through it, that’s all. You must understand that my world is different from the one you remember. Time itself is different. Though I started from a time perhaps thirty years away, I was able to open a gate near you. Just a little one, of course. I did it so that I could try to make you think this thing out in time. I believe that if you could, you would have been spared all this. You might even have been able to keep Gloria.”
“What’s it to you?”
“You don’t know, do you? You really don’t know?”
I opened my eyes and looked at him, and shook my head. “No, I don’t. I—like you, old man.”
He chuckled. “That’s odd, you know. I don’t like me.”
I craned around and looked over at Gloria and her man, still frozen in that strange kiss. “Will those dream people stay like that forever?”
“Dream people?”
“I suppose that’s what they are. You know, I’m a little proud of Gloria. How I managed to dream up anything so—so lovely, I’ll never know. I—hey—what’s the matter?”
“Didn’t you understand what I was telling you? Gloria is real. Gloria goes on living. What you see over there is the thing that happened when you were no longer a part of her. Leo: she dreamed you!”
I rose to my feet and put my fists on the table between us. “That’s a lie,” I choked. “I’m—I’m me, damn you!”
“You’re a detailed dream, Leo, and a splendid job. You’re a piece of sentient psyche from another world injection-molded into an ideal that Gloria dreamed. Don’t try to be anything else. There aren’t many real humans, Leo. Most of the world is populated by the dreams of a few of them; didn’t you know, Leo? Why do you suppose that so few people you met knew anything about the world as a whole? Why do you suppose that humans keep their interests confined and their environments small? Most of them aren’t humans at all, Leo!”
“I’m me,” I said stubbornly. “Gloria couldn’t have thought of all of me! Gloria can’t run a power shovel! Gloria can’t play a guitar! Gloria doesn’t know anything about the circus foreman who sang, or the Finn dynamite boss who was killed!”
“Of course not. Gloria only dreamed a kind of man who was the product of those things, or things like them. Have you run a shovel since you met her? You’d find that you couldn’t, if you really tried. You’ve played guitar for no one but her since you met her. You’ve spent all your time arranging music that no one will ever see or play!”
“I’m not anybody’s dream!” I shouted. “I’m not. If I was an ideal of hers, we would have stayed together. I failed with her, old man; don’t you know that? She wanted me to be aggressive, and I wasn’t.”
He looked at me so sadly that I thought he was going to cry. “She wanted you to take. You were a part of her, no human can take from himself.”
“She was deathly afraid of some things that didn’t bother me at all. What about that?”
“The squirrels, and the sound of all the little feet? No, Leo; they were baseless phobias, and she had the power to overcome any of them. She never tried, but it was not difficult to create you without them.”
I stared at him. “Do you mean to—Old man, are there more like me, really?”
“Many, many,” he sighed. “But few who cling to their nonexistent, ghostly egos as you are doing.”
“Do the real people know what they are doing?”
“Very few of them. Very few. The world is full of people who feel incomplete, people who have everything they can possibly want and yet are unhappy, people who feel alone in a crowd. The world is mostly peopled by ghosts.”
“But—the war! Roman history! The new car models! What about them?”
He shook his head again. “Some of it’s real, some not. It depends on what the real humans want from moment to moment.”
I thought a minute, bitterly. Then I asked him, “What was that you said about coming back in world-time, and looking through a little gateway at things that had happened?”
He sighed. “If you must hang on to the ego she gave you,” he said wearily, “you’ll stay the way you are now. But you’ll age. It will take you the equivalent of thirty or so years to find your way around in that strange psychic world, for you will have to move and think like a human. Why do you want to do that?”
I said, with determination, “I am going back, then, if it takes me a century. I’m going to find me right after I met Gloria, and I’m going to warn me in such a way that I’ll figure out a way to be with Gloria for the rest of her life.”
He put his hands on my shoulders, and now there really were tea
rs in his eyes. “Oh, you poor kid,” he said.
I stared at him. Then, “What’s—your name, old man?”
“My name is Leo.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
The Blue Letter
THEY SAT A dance out, finally, because her hair was sending dark tendrils over the nape of her neck. They sat together in a wing chair under the balcony, a chair just too big for one; and she pulled pins out of her hair.
“Lovely,” he said. He touched it. “Lovely. I didn’t know it was so long.”
She smiled, arching her body to see into the wall mirror around the tall wing of the chair, and combed deftly.
“I have always—I’ve never—” he faltered. “I mean, women shouldn’t be allowed to cut their hair.”
“Didn’t you say your wife has long hair?”
“Yes, she has, but not like that. She hasn’t cut it since I married her, but it isn’t like that.”
The comb stopped, its teeth streaming little wakes like stones in a painted waterfall. He looked into the mirror and saw her face there, watching him gravely. She said, “Are you happy?”
He hesitated. None of his friends who had ever seen him with his wife had ever asked that. It would be silly to ask that.
Before he could speak, the comb finished its stroke and she half-whispered, “You said you were happy, while we were dancing.”
“Yes, I did. I was. I never danced with anyone like you. I never danced as well.”
She bent her head, making a part, looking at the mirror upward through her brows. “Your wife must be very good, judging by the way you dance.”
He almost shook his head. “She’s—She doesn’t enjoy it very much.”
She turned to him suddenly, with her eyes wide. They were green, and ever so slightly slanted. The planes of her ivory face were subtly distinct from one another. She spoke urgently, “She’ll be back soon, won’t she? And then you and I will—Well, I’ll drop out, that’s all. She’s two thousand miles away from here, because you had to come back and make a new start alone. Well, you’ve made your new start, and it’s not right for you to be alone. Why can’t you—why can’t we take what we want until she comes back?”
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