“Now press your hands together and down.”
The incision widened slightly under the pressure, then abruptly the flesh gave and the entire skin of the face slipped off. The unexpected lack of resistance brought Wheeler’s hands to the bottom of the coffin and he found himself face to face, inches away, with the corpse.
Like the lungs and kidneys, the eyes—eye? —passed the median, very slightly reduced at the center. The pupil was oval, its long axis transverse. The skin was pale lavender with yellow vessels and in place of a nose was a thread-fringed hole. The mouth was circular, the teeth not quite radially placed; there was little chin.
Without moving, Wheeler closed his eyes, held them shut for one second, two, and then courageously opened them again. Karl whipped around the end of the coffin and got an arm around Wheeler’s chest. Wheeler leaned on it heavily for a moment, then stood up quickly and brushed the arm away.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did,” said Karl. “Would you want to be the only man in the world who’d gone through that—with nobody to tell it to?”
And after all, Wheeler could laugh. When he had finished he said, “Push that button.”
“Hand me that cover.”
Most obediently Cleveland Wheeler brought the coffin lid and they placed it.
Karl pushed the button and they watched the coffin slide into the square of flame. Then they left.
Joe Trilling had a funny way of making a living. It was a good living, but of course he didn’t make anything like the bundle he could have made in the city. On the other hand, he lived in the mountains a half-mile away from a picturesque village, in clean air and piney-birchy woods along with lots of mountain laurel and he was his own boss. There wasn’t much competition for what he did.
What he did was to make simulacra of medical specimens, mostly for the armed forces, although he had plenty of orders from medical schools, film producers and an occasional individual, no questions asked. He could make a model of anything inside, affixed to or penetrating a body or any part of it. He could make models to be looked at, models to be felt, smelled and palpated. He could give you gangrene that stunk or dewy thyroids with real dew on them. He could make one-of-a-kind or he could set up a production line. Dr. Joe Trilling was, to put it briefly, the best there was at what he did.
“The clincher,” Karl told him (in much more relaxed circumstances than their previous ones; daytime now, with beer), “the real clincher was the face bit. God, Joe, that was a beautiful piece of work.”
“Just nuts and bolts. The beautiful part was your idea—his hands on it.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’ve been thinking back to that,” Joe said. “I don’t think you yourself realize how brilliant a stroke that was. It’s all very well to set up a show for the guy, but to make him put his hands as well as his eyes and brains on it—that was the stroke of genius. It’s like—well, I can remember when I was a kid coming home from school and putting my hand on a fence rail and somebody had spat on it.” He displayed his hand, shook it. “All these years I can remember how that felt. All these years couldn’t wear it away, all those scrubbings couldn’t wash it away. It’s more than a cerebral or psychic thing, Karl—more than the memory of an episode. I think there’s a kind of memory mechanism in the cells themselves, especially on the hands, that can be invoked. What I’m getting to is that no matter how long he lives, Cleve Wheeler is going to feel that skin slip under his palms and that is going to bring him nose to nose with that face. No, you’re the genius, not me.”
“Na. You knew what you were doing. I didn’t.”
“Hell you didn’t.” Joe leaned far back in his lawn chaise—so far he could hold up his beer and look at the sun through it from the underside. Watching the receding bubbles defy perspective (because they swell as they rise), he murmured, “Karl?”
“Yuh.”
“Ever hear of Occam’s Razor?”
“Um. Long time back. Philosophical principle. Or logic or something. Let’s see. Given an effect and a choice of possible causes, the simplest cause is always the one most likely to be true. Is that it?”
“Not too close, but close enough,” said Joe Trilling lazily. “Hm. You’re the one who used to proclaim that logic is sufficient unto itself and need have nothing to do with truth.”
“I still proclaim it.”
“Okay. Now, you and I know that human greed and carelessness are quite enough all by themselves to wreck this planet. We didn’t think that was enough for the likes of Cleve Wheeler, who can really do something about it, so we constructed him a smog-breathing extra-terrestrial. I mean, he hadn’t done anything about saving the world for our reasons, so we gave him a whizzer of a reason of his own. Right out of our heads.”
“Dictated by all available factors. Yes. What are you getting at, Joe?”
“Oh—just that our complicated hoax is simple, really, in the sense that it brought everything down to a single cause. Occam’s Razor slices things down to simplest causes. Single causes have a fair chance of being right.”
Karl put down his beer with a bump. “I never thought of that. I’ve been too busy to think of that. Suppose we were right?”
They looked at each other, shaken.
At last Karl said, “What do we look for now, Joe—space ships?”
Dazed
I
I work for a stockbroker on the twenty-first floor. Things have not been good for stockbrokers recently, what with tight money and hysterical reaction to the news and all that. When business gets really bad for a brokerage it often doesn’t fail—it merges. This has something to do with the public image. The company I work for is going through the agony. For the lower echelons—me—that means detail you wouldn’t believe, with a reduced staff. In other words, night work. Last night I worked without looking up until my whole body was the shape of the chair and there was a blue haze around the edges of everything I could see. I finished a stack and peered at the row of stacks still to be done and tried to get up. It took three tries before my hips and knees would straighten enough to let me totter into the hall and down to the men’s room. It never occurred to me to close the office door and I guess the confusion, all the strange faces coming and going for the past few days, extending to the security man downstairs. However it happened, there was a dazed man in my office when I came back a moment later.
He was well dressed—I guess that, too, helped him pass the guards—in a brown sharkskin suit with funny lapels, what you might call up-to-the-minute camp. He wore an orange knitted tie the like of which you only see in a new boutique or an old movie. I’d say he was in his twenties—not yet twenty-five. And dazed.
When I walked in and stopped dead he gave me a lost look and said, “This is my office.”
I said the only thing I could think of. “Oh?”
He pivoted slowly all the way around, looking at the desk, the shelves, the files.
When he came around to face me again he said, “This isn’t my office.”
He had to be with the big five-name brokerage house that was gobbling up my company in its time of need. I asked him.
“No,” he said, “I work for Fortune.”
“Look,” I said, “you’re not only in the wrong office, you’re in the wrong building. Time-Life is on Sixth Avenue—been there since nineteen fifty-two.”
“Fifty-two—” He looked around the room again. “But I—but it’s—”
He sat down on the settle. I had the idea he’d have collapsed on the floor if the settle hadn’t been there. He asked me what day it was. I think I misunderstood.
“Thursday,” I said. I looked at my watch. “Well, it’s now Friday.”
“I mean, what’s the date?”
I pointed to the desk calendar right beside him. He looked at it twice, each one a long careful look. I never saw a man turn the color he turned. He covered his eyes. Even his lips went white.
“Oh my God.”
“You all right?” I asked—a very stupid question.
“Tell me something,” he said after a while. “Has there been a war?”
“You have to be kidding.”
He took his hand down and looked at me, so lost, so frightened. Not frightened. There has to be a word. Anguished. He needed answers—needed them. Not questions, not now.
I said, “It’s been going on a long time.”
“A lot of young guys killed?”
“Upwards of fifty thousand.” Something made me add: “Americans. The other side, five, six times that.”
“Oh, my God,” he said again. Then: “It’s my fault.”
Now I have to tell you up front that it never occurred to me for one second that this guy was on any kind of a drug trip. Not that I’m an expert, but there are times when you just know. Whatever was bothering him was genuine—at least genuine to him. Besides, there was something about him I had to like. Not the clothes, not the face, just the guy, the kind of guy he was.
I said, “Hey, you look like hell and I’m sick and tired of what I’m doing. Let’s take a break and go to the Automat for coffee.”
He gave me that lost look again. “Is the lid off on sex? I mean, young kids—”
“Like rabbits,” I said. “Also your friendly neighborhood movie—I don’t know what they’re going to do for an encore.” I had to ask him, “Where’ve you been?”
He shook his head and said candidly, “I don’t know where it was. Are people leaving their jobs—and school—going off to live on the land?”
“Some,” I said. “Come on.”
I switched off the overhead light, leaving my desk lamp lit. He got to his feet as if he were wired to the switch, but then just stood looking at the calendar.
“Are there bombings?”
“Three yesterday, in Newark. Come on.”
“Oh, my God,” he said and came. I locked the door and we went down the corridor to the elevators. Air wheezed in the shaft as the elevator rose. “It always whistles like that late at night,” he said. I had never noticed that but knew he was right as soon as he said it. He also said weakly, “You don’t feel like walking down?”
“Twenty-one flights?”
The doors slid open. The guy didn’t want to get in. But I mean, he really didn’t. I stood on the crack while he screwed up his courage. It didn’t take long but I could see it was a mighty battle. He won it and came in, turned around and leaned against the back wall. I pushed the button and we started down. He looked pretty bad. I said something to him but he put up a hand, waved my words away before they were out. He didn’t move again until the doors opened and then he looked into the lobby as if he didn’t know what to expect. But it was just the lobby, with the oval information desk we called the fishbowl and the shiny floor and the portable wooden desk, like a lectern, where you signed in and out after hours and where the guard was supposed to be. We breezed by it and out into Rockefeller Center. He took a deep breath and immediately coughed.
“What’s that smell?”
I’d been about to say something trivial about the one good thing about working late—you could breathe the air, but I didn’t say it.
“The smog, I guess.”
“Smog. Oh yes, smoke and fog. I remember.” Then he seemed to remember something else, something that brought his predicament, whatever it was, back with a hammer blow. “Well of course,” he said as if to himself. “Has to be.”
On Sixth Avenue (New Yorkers still won’t call it Avenue of the Americas) we passed two laughing couples. One of the girls was wearing a see-through top made of plastic chain mail. The other had on a very maxi coat swinging open over hot pants. My companion was appreciative but not astonished. I think what he said was, “That too—” nodding his head. He watched every automobile that passed and his eyes flicked over the places where they used to sell books and back-date periodicals, every single one of them now given over to peepshows and beaver magazines. He had the same nod of his head for this.
We reached the Automat and it occurred to me that an uncharacteristic touch of genius had made me suggest it. I had first seen the Automat when I had ridden in on my mother’s hip more years ago than I’ll mention—and many times since—and very little has changed—except, of course, the numbers on the little off-white cards that tell you how many nickels you have to put in the slot to claim your food. After a few years’ absence one tends to yelp at the sight of them. I always do and the strange young man with me did, too. Aside from that, there is a timeless quality about the place, especially in the small hours of the morning. The over-age, over-painted woman furtively eating catsup is there as she, or someone just like her, has been for fifty years; and the young couple, homely to you but beautiful to each other, full of sleepiness and discovery; and the working stiff in the case-hardened slideway of his life, grabbing a bite on the way from bed to work and not yet awake—no need to be—and his counterpart headed in the other direction; no need for him to be awake either. And all around: the same marble change counter with the deep worn pits in it from countless millions of coins dropped and scooped; behind it the same weary automaton; and around you the same nickel (not chrome) framing for the hundreds of little glass-fronted doors through which the food always looks so much better than it is. All in all, it’s a fine place for the reorientation of time-travelers.
“Are you a time-traveler?” I asked, following my own whimsy and hoping to make him smile.
He didn’t smile. “No,” he said. “Yes, I—well—” flickering panic showed in his eyes “—I don’t really know.”
We bought our coffee straight out of the lion’s mouth and carried it to a corner table. I think that when we were settled there he really looked at me for the first time.
He said, “You’ve been very kind.”
“Well,” I said, “I was glad of the break.”
“Look, I’m going to tell you what happened. I guess I don’t expect you to believe me. I wouldn’t in your place.”
“Try me,” I offered. “And anyway—what difference does it make whether I believe you?”
“ ‘Belief or nonbelief has no power over objective truth.’ ” I could tell by his voice he was quoting somebody. The smile I had been looking for almost came and he said, “You’re right. I’ll tell you what happened because—well, because I want to. Have to.”
I said fine and told him to shoot. He shot.
I work in Circulation Promotion [he began]. Or maybe I should say I worked—I guess I should. You’ll have to pardon me, I’m a little confused. There’s so much—
Maybe I should start over. It didn’t begin in Rockefeller Center. It started, oh, I don’t know how long ago, with me wondering about things. Not that I’m anything special—I’m not saying I am—but it seems nobody else wonders about the same things I do. I mean people are so close to what happens that they don’t seem to know what’s going on.
Wait, I don’t want to confuse you, too. One of us is enough. Let me give you an example.
World War II was starting up when I was a kid and one day a bunch of us sat around, trying to figure out who would be fighting who. Us and the British and French on one side, sure—the Germans and Austrians and Italians on the other—that was clear enough. And the Japanese. But beyond that?
It’s all history and hindsight now and there’s no special reason to think about it, but at the time it was totally impossible for anyone to predict the lineup that actually came about. Go back in the files of newspaper editorials—Harper’s or Reader’s Digest or any other—and you’ll see what I mean. Nobody predicted that up to the very end of the war our best and strongest friends would be at peace with our worst and deadliest enemy. I mean, if you put it on personal terms—if you and I are friends and there’s somebody out to kill me and I find out that you and he are buddies—could we even so much as speak to each other again? Yet here was the Soviet Union, fighting shoulder to shoulder with us against the Nazis, while for nearly
five years they were at peace with Japan!
And about Japan: there were hundreds of thousands of Chinese who had been fighting a life-and-death war against the Japanese for ten years—ten years, man! —and along with them, Koreans. So we spent billions getting ourselves together to mount air strikes against Japan from thousands of miles away—New Guinea, the Solomons, Saipan, Tinian. Do you know how far it is from the Chinese mainland to Tokyo, across the Sea of Japan? Six hundred miles. Do you know how far it is from Pusan, Korea to Hiroshima? A hundred and thirty!
I’m sorry. I get excited like that to this day when I think of it. But damn it—why didn’t we negotiate to move in and set up airstrips on the mainland and Korea? Do you think the natives would have turned us down? Or is it that we just don’t like chop suey? Oh, sure—there are a lot of arguments like backing up Chiang against the Communists and I even read somewhere that it was not our policy to interfere in Southeast Asia. (Did I say something funny?) But you know Chiang and the Communists had a truce—and kept it too—to fight the common enemy.
Well—all right. All that seems a long way from what happened to me, I suppose, but it’s the kind of thing I’ve spent my life wondering about. It’s not just wars that bring out the thing I’m talking about, though God knows they make it plainer to see. Italy and Germany sharpening their newest weapons and strategies in the Spanish civil war, for example, or Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia—hell, the more sophisticated people got the less they could see what was in front of them. Any kid in a kindergarten knows a bully when he sees one and has sense enough at least to be afraid. Any sixth-grader knows how to organize a pressure group against a bad guy. Wars, you see, are really life-and-death situations, where what’s possible, practical—logical—has a right to emerge. When it doesn’t—you have to wonder. French peasants taxed till they bled to build the Maginot Line all through the thirties, carefully preparing against the kind of war they fought in 1914.
But let’s look some place else. Gonorrhea could be absolutely stamped out in six months, syphilis maybe in a year. I picked up a pamphlet last month—hey, I have to watch that “last month,” “nowadays,” things like that—anyway, the pamphlet drew a correlation between smoking cigarettes and a rising curve of lung cancer, said scientific tests prove that something in cigarettes can cause cancer in mice. Now I bet if the government came out with an official statement about that, people would read it and get scared—and go on smoking cigarettes. You’re smiling again. That’s funny?
Slow Sculpture Page 28