The Inner City
Page 11
“This one over here,” the bed opposite me said. She was younger than most of us, and she often had cheery people tromping in and out. “With the annoying voice. Get rid of that one.” I gloated over her spitefulness. Young and spiteful! Let her be the one.
“Don’t you think I know about my voice?” the accused woman said. “Isn’t that why I’m here? I will do anything, suffer anything to fix it, this curse of mine. I know how irritating my voice is, I hear about it over and over; I see how people turn away. I cringe when I speak,” she said, closing her eyes and bringing her hand up to her throat. “How I detest it. Imagine—hating it and unable to stop it. It is a terrible fate. Terrible, terrible.”
“The least you can do is stop talking about it so much,” her tormentor said. “Like some electronic screech, you should really start using a pen and a pad. Give us all some relief.”
“And you think I don’t suffer?” the horrible voice asked. “To see how people react, to hear how you insult me: do you think I am heartless, soulless, without feelings, cursed as I am with a voice that doesn’t suit me, doesn’t match me—”
“Oh, it matches you, all right. You are not a quiet person; try being a quiet person.”
“Oh? I’m the only one who should be silent? I suffer just to please everyone, I’m to be cut open from nose to throat, all to please you, and people like you, and never to speak?”
“That would be lovely.”
“Well, let me tell you—” she began, but the nurse with her cart handed her a raft of pills, and she began to swallow them.
In the bed to her left a businesslike man said, “And who judges which bed goes? And when will this take place? And where does the bed go? Will it be the sickest or the least sick? Or,” and here he shot a look at the woman with the awful voice, “the most annoying?”
“The doctors will decide,” the nurse said indifferently. “They have been trained for it, and as to where the bed goes—why, it goes on a truck and we never ask where. Once you leave, you know, you don’t exist for us. We are busy enough as it is, constantly reading your charts and discussing your medications and seeing who is doing well and who is not—”
“I want to do well,” the thin man said. “I concentrate every day on a healthy attitude—”
“Which I take to mean that it is your attitude that will cure you and not the medical profession?” the nurse asked darkly.
He realized his error and produced a sticky grin, saying, “Of course not—very much appreciated,” and flattened himself out against the sheets.
All the patients had their pills by now and they shifted, awaiting effects and peering glumly at the doorway. Evening rounds: surely there would be evening rounds? And would it be decided then?
“My brother-in-law knows the head of the hospital,” my neighbour whispered. “It won’t be me, I can tell you. I hate the man, but he has his uses.”
And I thought: I know no one. It felt electrical at first and then the stab of it broke off in a kind of dreadful flutter of the gut. I threw my eyes around the room, and I began to see their criteria in different terms: not the sickest or the healthiest, but the one most likely to leave no ripple behind, their disappearance unremarked, even satisfying, acknowledging an utter uselessness. There is one like that in every room, in every plot, in every family—the one who won’t be missed, who stands at the back in photographs, or perhaps only a hand is seen, thrust from the outside of the group, or who is turned away, always turned away, when everyone else is gazing forward.
I was torn from my reveries, hearing my own name called, and indeed it was the lead doctor, head of the ward, standing at the foot of my bed, radiating certitude. She smiled at me, assertive in her white coat, her white bright hands, the preparation of her words jostling toward her tongue.
“Enough!” I cried before she could speak my name again, and I sat up and then stood, panting until the room steadied and the multitude of faces settled back to the eleven others, and I saw the nurse departing, and the doctor watching me with a bored clinical eye. “It is enough!” I cried again and I took the cloth jacket neatly folded out of my bedside table, and the shoes from their plastic case. “Don’t speak my name,” I shouted to the doctor and I turned to the beds and said, “I know you think it should be me—I know in the back of your heads you said, of course it must be that one, and I’ll throw it back at you, then: Of course it’s me! But I shall walk away from you, not be rowed away to Lethe on a bed. Cowards! You force me to it because I can see how vile are your fears, your contempt, yet they only give me vigour! I’ll go, then, I’ll set you free, you worthless dregs, you broken toys!” And I began feebly to make my way to the corridor.
“Now hold on,” said the doctor. “I merely meant to compliment you on how well you’re doing. Quiet, uncomplaining—though we’ll have to make a note now, won’t we?” She turned to face the centre of the room as, with a sigh of relief mixed with disappointment, I removed my coat, my shoes, and inserted myself back into bed. The doctor went to stand at the foot of the bed of the thinnest man, the man who had to be watched to swallow his pills.
The doctor lowered her voice, though we all heard it still and it thrilled us. “You, Hanley, it is your bed that we have chosen.”
“Ah no!” he cried, pulling the sheets up to his chin, his eyes wide and unreflecting.
A cheerful buzz rose from the other patients. “I apologize,” I said, “it was the fever that did it to me, for I have loved you all as brothers, sisters, hating you sometimes, it’s true, but only as one hates within a family, intimately—all save Hanley, who doesn’t provoke me at all.”
“All save Hanley!” responded the other beds, as the orderlies came and pushed him away. He clutched the hem of his sheet, his lips quivering, his thin head with its pointed bones swivelling to gaze at each of us in turn. He may have said something—in fact, I’m sure he said something—but it was feeble and lost in the murmurs that rose up once his bed rounded the doorway and faded into the corridor.
“How odd,” said my neighbour to the left, “but I feel—suddenly—finer. I can think clearly, I’m sure of it.”
“That pounding in my chest is gone,” another declared.
“Do you know—I think I’m hungry.”
And we all had grins on our faces at the prospect of returning health. Was it coincidence that it had to do with Hanley’s removal? Was it an accident that once he left we all felt better?
Hanley was the cause of all our distress, and without him, we agreed, our lives were sure to be long and safe. “We will live,” we murmured to each other, “we are whole; it was Hanley all along!” And we blessed our doctors and our nurses and the orderlies who took Hanley from us, the creature who would blacken our hearts.
HOW LIGHTLY HE
STEPPED IN THE AIR
Sam himself was probably the last one to realize it.
“Have you noticed anything about Sam lately?” Dolores asked Don. They had adjoining desks. Sam had just passed by.
Don shrugged and his glasses slipped down his nose. “Nothing, no. What do you mean?”
Dolores turned to Betty on her other side. The desks were arranged in rows. “Have you noticed?”
“Too busy,” Betty said. “I never notice walks anyway.”
“Still,” Dolores said dreamily, “still, there’s something . . .”
Sam had not yet noted the change in his walk. He did, however, feel a certain pleasant lightness.
He had gotten as far as the designers’ offices when a surprised voice said, “How did you do that?”
Sam had not done anything. He had merely stepped over a wadded piece of paper on the carpeted floor. “Do what?”
“You stepped over the paper, but you didn’t—well—land right away. Is it a trick?” the woman, whose name Sam did not know, looked at him with admiration.
“No trick at all,” Sam said, smiling with his broken tooth showing. He walked on, with that new, light tread Dolores had mentioned, th
inking only that the woman was flirting. Sam, at the moment, felt above flirting. But the woman’s suggestion remained in the back of his mind.
For instance, it was only a day or so later that he reached for a particular book awkwardly placed a little too high on a shelf above his drafting table. He was surprised to find that he had left the ground. “Odd,” he remarked as he gently regained the floor. And then he laughed at himself. What a silly thought to have! He laughed again.
But Dolores, having happened to glance up from the row of desks where she worked across to the row of drafting tables where Sam worked, leaned over and nudged Don.
“I just saw him do it again.”
“I won’t believe it till I see it myself,” Don muttered in irritation. “You say you see it, but no one else does.”
“Well, then, watch,” she hissed back.
Don lifted his chin haughtily. “I’m busy. I’m working.”
“I do the same work you do, and get it done in the same amount of time, and yet I can still manage to keep in touch with the world around me.”
Don did not even condescend to sniff in response, but Betty, on Dolores’s other side, said, “You know, it’s funny, but I could almost swear . . .” She stopped uncertainly.
Sam sat thoughtfully in front of his draft board. He was no longer chuckling. That feeling of lightness he had—was it more than a feeling? He chewed thoughtfully on his moustache. Had he really learned a trick of some kind?
Once conscious of his new skill, Sam began to notice it more and more. He lived in a fourth-floor walk-up and it finally dawned on him, on the way home, how easy the stairs had become lately. In fact, once started, he drifted up effortlessly.
The next morning, coming downstairs began to be more of an effort. He had to grasp the handrail—gently, it’s true—to pull himself gradually down. Otherwise he moved very markedly forward, rather than down.
Sam began, tentatively, to test himself. Dolores was on the alert, and was able to nudge Don in time for him to see Sam as he took a gentle leap up to the top row of shelves and hovered there considering titles.
Don did not give in easily. “It’s a trick of some kind.”
“But what a trick!” Dolores breathed.
Sam exhaled and descended gently to the floor. Pencil in hand, he doodled rather than drafted at his board. If it was true, if it was really true . . . was it possible to put this to use somehow? His mind wandered.
Word spread along the rows of desks and drafting tables. Sam’s neighbours, hunched over their boards, had noticed nothing, but once alerted by Dolores, everyone kept an eye, or corner of an eye, watchfully on him.
Sam drifted by them, more obviously, day by day, floating.
There were various explanations.
“Maybe it’s glandular.”
Don was not to be appeased. “He’s just doing it to get attention.”
“Is he an air sign?”
“No, he’s a Pisces.”
“Well, fish float.”
Out of curiosity, people along the rows set traps for him. Suddenly there would be wastepaper baskets, cartons, or even chairs left temptingly in between the rows, directly in Sam’s path.
Sam was feeling lighter and lighter. He smiled as he stepped widely, gently, tenderly above cartons and chairs. The uninitiated would get a nod from those now familiar with Sam’s floating.
Everyone had some comment to make. Sam now spent little time on the ground.
“He’d make a great second-story man,” someone said speculatively.
But Sam had not figured out any use for floating, and it no longer mattered to him. He was happy to float. He began to do it in public—on street corners, in subways.
The urge would overcome him. He would smile, a small smile at first and then more expansive. He always had to step in order to rise; he couldn’t do it sitting down.
First the smile, then a lighthearted step and that wonderful lift into the air. He hung there—oh, what did the length of time matter, except that it increased subtly day by day?
People began to notice him on the street. If he jumped a curb, almost certainly someone would say, “Oh, look, that’s the same one we saw yesterday.” And maybe there would be the answer, “Oh, no, I think that one had a beard. Still, it might be the same.”
Sam’s smile, then, became almost beatific. Where he had loomed previously only a head above the crowd he now appeared head and shoulders.
The gradual settling down to Earth had a calming effect on him; it soothed him after the euphoria of his float.
Dolores once asked him—for she never questioned his ability, or thought it a trick—whether it was like certain dreams she’d had.
“It’s not at all like a flying dream,” he answered. “Unless you have flying dreams where you stand up? In that case it might be.” Sam had ceased to dream, anyway. He also couldn’t recall any of his old dreams. Apparently, he no longer needed them.
Sam’s reputation in the office was spreading. The rows where he worked were now very often cluttered with people who had no particular business being there, who “just stopped by” to say hello to an unnamed acquaintance.
This caused Don, who resented the attention paid to such an extraordinarily shallow form of amusement, a great deal of bitterness.
“He’s just doing it for effect,” he told Dolores and Betty more than once. “He thinks he’s special.”
“He is special,” Dolores repeated.
“Let’s just say ‘boo’ when he doesn’t expect it, and see what happens,” Betty whispered, raising her eyebrows.
“That’ll just encourage him,” Don sniffed. He shuffled the papers on his desk in disapproval.
Sam began to have difficulty getting back down to the ground. He was perplexed by this. When he took an elevator he continued to rise after the doors opened. People sometimes had to pull him down, like the pulling, they told him, of a large helium-filled balloon.
Although he could relax sitting down, he did not necessarily rest on the chair. He began to suspect that he was actually beginning to float in any position—but not at all times, perhaps only when his mind wandered and he thought about his mysterious gift.
He told Dolores he’d been to a fortune-teller. She had discussed only his present and past and vigorously shook her head when asked about his future.
Sam fingered his moustache sadly and settled only a few inches above the ground. “It’s the not having a future that seems surprising.”
“A man who can fly,” Dolores said. “How can there be a predictable future? Wind currents alone . . .”
Sam stopped her with a gesture. “It hasn’t gotten that bad yet.”
“Ah, but, as you said, she couldn’t see the future.”
Sam gradually settled a few inches higher. That very morning he had woken with his nose smack against the ceiling.
In fact, Sam was afraid he was losing all control over his gift. Crowds collected around him almost constantly now, since he rose so consistently and conspicuously at every opportunity. It was all right now, in the summer, to hover giddily in the air until it was time to come down to Earth—but in winter? In winter it could be unpleasant, at the rate he was going, to be stranded outside a third-story office window waiting for whatever it was that took him down again.
And it might not even wait till winter. At the rate he was going, by the time the leaves fell off the trees he would be evaporating into the stratosphere. How high, indeed, would he go? Was there a limit to his powers—or none at all?
His work was suffering, he had to admit. It was difficult enough trying to stay in some sort of relative proximity to his table, but his mind wandered so often (and as his mind wandered, so did his body) that he spent whole hours in idle trains of thought. The designs he handed in were incomplete, or they had certain erratic elements incorporated into them that caused consternation in the upper ranks.
The floor manager had spoken to him already a few times—at first tentative
ly, because he liked Sam. But he had been getting words, stronger and stronger, from those above. His heart thudded every time he saw Sam sitting in the air above his table, abstractedly staring into the distance. Sam was becoming a continuing disturbance, and disturbances did not help productivity.
The manager, Peter, overheard parts of the many conversations about Sam. He knew, for example, how irritated Don was with Sam’s unprofessional stance. And Don was the kind of person capable of making his complaints known straight up and down the hierarchy—even over Peter’s head. Peter also knew about the minor betting that was going on about the time and height of Sam’s best levitation each day—had even participated, much earlier on, with his own crumpled dollar.
But the encouragement—the egging on—that now continually interrupted the workday was beyond his tolerance and even beyond his specific orders.
Still, he could hear Don vexedly saying, “Oh, don’t ask him to do that, we’ll never hear the end of it,” and knew that his staff had come up with yet another test or trial for Sam to perform.
Dolores’s voice answered back, “Oh, but we have to see just what he can do. He doesn’t know it himself. In the interests of science!” She laughed gaily; she had begun to feel that Sam was her property, her discovery. Peter shuddered and turned away. Perhaps the situation could be covered by a memo. He rapidly composed it as he hurried down the corridor. “To all staff members: In the interests of professionalism, only those authorized to be in the Design Department will be admitted during their normal shifts. We would also like to point out that betting pools of any kind are strictly prohibited, and this prohibition will be enforced. In addition, business hours do not include the performance of any tricks or attention-gathering activities that distract from a working environment.” Yes, he thought, something along those lines would be appropriate.
Sam found that putting weights in his shoes did not work. He contrived to belt himself into the chair at work, but that began to drift with him as well. He requested metal bolts to keep his chair connected to the floor and Peter agreed to it. Sam rigged up all manner of devices to make it possible to stay strapped into his chair and still reach the materials he needed to work with.