by Fritz Leiber
“It’s funny,” he said, “I’ve gone past this alley a hundred times and never noticed this place.”
“Cities are like that,” she said. “You think you know them when all you know are routes through them.” We’re even beginning to talk about life, Carr thought.
One of the beer-drinkers put two nickels in the jukebox. Low strains eddied out.
Carr looked toward the bar. “Maybe they don’t serve at the tables now,” he said.
“Who cares?” she said. “Let’s dance.”
“I don’t imagine it’s allowed,” he said. “They’d have to have another license.”
“I told you you were scared of life,” she said gayly. “Come on.” There wasn’t much space, but enough. With what struck Carr as-a grave and laudable politeness, the beer-drinkers paid no attention to them at all, though one beat time softly with the bottom of his glass against his palm.
Jane danced badly, but after a while she got better. Somewhat solemnly they revolved in a modest circle. She said nothing until almost the end of the first number. Then, in a choked voice—
“It’s been so long since I’ve danced with anyone.”
“Not with your man with glasses?” Carr asked.
She shook her head. “He’s too scared of life all the time. He can’t relax—not even pretend.”
The second record started. Her expression cleared. She rested her cheek against his shoulder. “I’ve got a theory about life,” she said dreamily. “I think life has a rhythm. It keeps changing with the time of day and year, but it’s always there. People feel it without knowing it and it governs their lives.”
“Like the music of the spheres?” Carr suggested.
“Yes, only that makes it sound too nice.”
“What do you mean, Jane?”
“Nothing.”
Another couple came in, took one of the front booths. The bartender wiped his hands on his apron, pushed up a wicket in the bar, and walked over to them.
The music stopped. Carr dug in his pocket for more nickels, but she shook her head. They slid back into their booth.
“I hope I didn’t embarrass you,” she said.
“Of course not.”
A TELEPHONE rang. The fat bartender carefully put down the tray of drinks he had mixed for the other couple and went to answer it.
“Sure you don’t want to dance some more?” Carr asked.
“No. let’s just let things happen to us.”
“A good idea,” Carr agreed, “provided you don’t push it too far. For instance, we did come here to get a drink, didn’t we?”
“Yes, we did,” Jane agreed. The impish expression returned to her eyes. She glanced at the two drinks standing on the bar. “Those look good,” she said, “Let’s have those.”
He looked at her. “Seriously?”
“Why not? We were here first. Are you scared of life?”
He grinned at her and got up suddenly. She didn’t stop him, rather to his surprise. Much more so, there was no squawk when he boldly clutched the glasses and returned with them. Jane applauded soundlessly. He bowed and set down the drinks with a flourish. They sipped.
She smiled. “That’s another of my theories. You can get away with anything if you aren’t scared. Other people can’t stop you, because they’re more scared than you are.”
Carr smiled at her.
“What’s that for?” she asked.
“Do you know the first name I gave you?” he asked.
“No.”
“The frightened girl. Incidentally, what did startle you so when you sat down at my desk this afternoon. You seemed to sense something in me that terrified you. What was it?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. You’re getting serious again,” she warned him.
He grinned. “I guess I am.”
More people had begun to drift in. By the time they finished their drinks, all the other booths were filled. Jane was getting uneasy.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said abruptly, standing up.
Carr started to reply, but she had slipped around a couple approaching their booth and was striding toward the door. A fear took hold of him that she would get away like this afternoon and he would never see her again. He jerked a dollar bill from his pocket-book and dropped it on the table. With nettling rudeness the newcomers shoved past him and sat down. But there was no time to be sarcastic. Jane was already mounting the stairs. He ran after her.
She was waiting outside. He took her arm.
“Do people get on your nerves?” he asked, “so you can’t stand being with too many of these for too long?”
She did not answer, but in the darkness her hand reached over and touched his.
CHAPTER VI
Don’t let on you know the secret, even to yourself. Pretend you don’t know that the people around you are dead, or as good as dead. That’s what you’ll do, brother, if you play it safe . . .
THEY EMERGED from the alley into a street where the air had an intoxicating glow, as if the lamps puffed out clouds of luminous dust which rose for three or four stories into the dark.
They passed a music store. Jane’s walk slowed to an indecisive drift. Through the open door Carr glimpsed a mahogany expanse of uprights, spinets, baby grands. Jane suddenly walked in. The sound of their footsteps died as they stepped onto the thick carpet.
Whoever else was in the store was out of sight somewhere in the back. Jane sat down at one of the pianos. Her fingers quested for a while over the keys. Then her back stiffened, her head lifted, and there came the frantically rippling arpeggios of the third movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
She didn’t play it any too well, yet she did manage to extract from it a feeling of wild, desperate wonder. Surely if the composer had ever meant this to be moonlight, it was moonlight illumining a white-pinnacled ocean storm or, through rifts in ragged clouds, the Brocken on Walpurgis Nacht.
Suddenly it was over. In the echoing quiet Carr asked, “Is that more like it? The rhythm of life, I mean?” She made a little grimace as she got up. “Still too nice,” she said, “but there’s a hint.”
They started out. Carr looked back over his shoulder, but the store was still empty. He felt a twinge of returning fear.
“Do you realize that we haven’t spoken with anybody but each other tonight?” he asked.
She smiled woefully. “I think of pretty dull things to do, don’t I?” she said, and when he started to protest, “No, I’m afraid you’d have had a lot more fun tonight with some other girl.”
“Listen,” he said, “I did have a date with another girl and . . . oh, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Her voice was odd, almost close to tears. “You’d even have had more fun with Midge’s girl-friend.”
“Say, you do have a memory,” he began. Then, turning on her, “Aren’t you really Jane Gregg? Don’t you know Tom Elvested and Midge?”
She shook her head reprovingly and looked up with an uneven smile. “But since you haven’t got a date with anybody but me, Mr. Serious, you’ll have to make the best of my antisocial habits. Let’s see, I could let you look at some other girls undressing on North Clark or West Madison, or we could go to the symphony, or . . .”
They were passing the painfully bright lobby of a movie house, luridly placarded with yellow and purple swirls which seemed to have caught up in their whirlwind folds an unending rout of golden blondes, grim-eyed heroes, money bags, and grasping hands. Jane stopped.
“Or I could take you in here,” she said.
He obediently veered toward the box office, but she kept hold of his arm and walked him past it into the outer lobby.
“You mustn’t be scared of life,” she told him, half gayly, half desperately, he thought. “You must learn to take risks. You really can get away with anything.”
Carr shrugged and held his breath for the inevitable.
They walked straight past the ticket-taker and through the center-ai
sle door.
Carr puffed out his breath and grinned. He thought, maybe she knows someone here. Or else—who knows?—maybe you could get away with almost anything if you did it with enough assurance and picked the right moments.
THE THEATER was only half full.
They sidled through the blinking darkness into one of the empty rows at the back. Soon the gyrations of the gray shadows on the screen took on a little sense.
There were a man and woman getting married, or else remarried after a divorce, it was hard to tell which. Then she left him because she thought that he was interested only in business. Then she came back, but he left her because he thought she was interested only in social affairs. Then he came back, but then they both left each other again, simultaneously.
From all around came the soft breathing and somnolent gum-chewing of drugged humanity.
Then the man and woman both raced to the bedside of their dying little boy, who had been tucked away in a military academy. But the boy recovered, and then the woman left both of them, for their own good, and a little while afterwards the man did the same thing. Then the boy left them.
“Do you play chess?” Jane asked suddenly.
Carr nodded gratefully.
“Come on,” she said. “I know a place.”
They hurried out of the bustling theater district into an empty region of silent gray office buildings—for the Loop is a strange place, where loneliness jostles too much companionship. Looking up at the dark and dingy heights, Carr felt his uneasiness begin to return. There was somethihg exceedingly horrible in the thought of miles on miles of darkened offices, empty but for the endless desks, typewriters, filing cabinets, water coolers. What would a stranger from Mars deduce from them? Surely not human beings.
With a great roar a cavalcade of newspaper trucks careened across the next corner, plunging as frantically as if the fate of nations were at stake. Carr took a backward step, his heart pounding.
Jane smiled at him. “We’re safe tonight,” she said and led him to a massive office building of the last century. Pushing through a side door next to the locked revolving one, she drew him into a dingy lobby floored with tiny white tiles and surrounded by the iron latticework of ancient elevator shafts. A jerkily revolving hand showed that one cage was still in operation, but Jane headed for the shadow-stifled stairs.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “It’s thirteen stories, but I can’t stand elevators.”
Remembering the one at Marcia’s apartment, Carr was glad.
They emerged panting in a hall where the one frosted door that wasn’t dark read CAISSA CHESS CLUB.
Behind the door was a long room. A drab austerity, untidy rows of small tables, and a grimy floor littered with trodden cigarettes, all proclaimed the place to be the headquarters of a somber monomania.
Some oldsters were playing near the door, utterly absorbed in the game. One with a dirty white beard was silently kibitzing, occasionally shaking his head, or pointing out with palsied fingers the move that would have won if it had been made.
Carr and Jane walked quietly beyond them, found a box of men as battered by long use as the half obliterated board, and started to play.
Soon the maddening, years-forgotten excitement gripped Carr tight. He was back in that dreadful little universe where the significance of things is narrowed down to the strategems whereby turreted rooks establish intangible walls of force, bishops slip craftily through bristling barricades, and knights spring out in sudden sidewise attacks, as if from crooked medieval passageways.
They played three slow, merciless games. She won the first two. He finally drew the third, his king just managing to nip off her last runaway pawn. It felt very late, getting on toward morning.
She leaned back massaging her face.
“Nothing like chess,” she mumbled, “to take your mind off things.” Then she dropped her hands.
TWO MEN were still sitting at the first table in their overcoats, napping over the board. They tiptoed past them and out into the hall and went down the stairs. An old woman was wearily scrubbing her way across the lobby, her head bent as if forever.
In the street they paused uncertainly. It had grown quite chilly.
“Where do you live?” Carr asked.
“I’d rather you didn’t—” Jane began and stopped. After a moment she said, “All right, you can take me home. But it’s a long walk and you must still follow the leader.”
The Loop was deserted except for the darkness and the hungry wind. They crossed the black Chicago River on Michigan Boulevard, where the skyscrapers are thickest. It looked like the Styx. They walked rapidly. They didn’t say anything. Carr’s arm was tightly linked around hers. He felt sad and tired and yet very much at peace. He knew he was leaving this girl forever and going back to his own world. Any vague notion he’d had of making her a real friend had died in the cold ebb of night.
Yet at the same time he knew that she had helped him. All his worries and fears, including the big one, were gone. The events of the afternoon and early evening seemed merely bizarre, a mixture of hoaxes and trivial illusions. Tomorrow he must begin all over again, with his job and his pleasures. Marcia, he told himself, had only been playing a fantastic prank—he’d patch things up with her.
As if sensing his thoughts, Jane shrank close to his side.
Past the turn-off to his apartment, past the old white water tower, they kept on down the boulevard. It seemed tremendously wide without cars streaming through it.
They turned down a street where big houses hid behind black space and trees.
Jane stopped in front of a tall iron gate. High on one of the stone pillars supporting it, too high for Jane to see, Carr idly noted a yellow chalk-mark in the shape of a cross with dots between the arms. Wondering if it were a tramps’ sign commenting on the stinginess or generosity of the people inside, Carr suddenly got the picture his mind had been fumbling for all night. It fitted Jane, her untidy expensive clothes, her shy yet arrogant manner. She must be a rich man’s daughter, overprotected, neurotic, futilely rebellious, tyrannized over by relatives and servants. Everything in her life mixed up, futilely and irremediably, in the way only money can manage.
“It’s been so nice,” Jane said in a choked voice, not looking at him, “so nice to pretend.”
She fumbled in her pocket, but whether for a handkerchief or a key Carr could not tell. Something small and white slipped from her hand and fluttered through the fence. She pushed open the gate enough to get through.
“Please don’t come in with me,” she whispered. “And please don’t stay and watch.”
Carr thought he knew why. She didn’t want him to watch the lights wink agitatedly on, perhaps hear the beginning of an anxious tirade. It was her last crumb of freedom—to leave him with the illusion she was free.
He took her in his arms. He felt in the darkness the tears on her cold cheek wetting his. Then she had broken away. There were footsteps running up a gravel drive. He turned and walked swiftly away.
In the sky, between the pale streets, was the first paleness of dawn.
CHAPTER VII
Keep looking straight ahead, brother. It doesn’t do to get too nosy. You may see things going on in the big engine that’ll make you wish you’d never come alive . . .
THROUGH SLITTED, sleep-heavy eyes Carr saw the clock holding up both hands in horror. The room was drenched in sunshine.
But he did not hurl himself out of bed, tear into his clothes, and rush downtown, just because it was half past eleven.
Instead he yawned and closed his eyes, savoring the feeling of self-confidence that filled him. He had a profound sense of being back on the right track.
Odd that a queer neurotic girl could give you so much. But nice.
Grinning, he got up and leisurely bathed and shaved.
He’d have breakfast downtown, he decided. Something a little special. Then amble over to the office about the time his regular lunch hour ended.
He even thought of permitting himself the luxury of taking a cab to the Loop. But as soon as he got outside he changed his mind. The sun and the air, and the blue of lake and sky, and the general feeling of muscle-stretching spring, when even old people crawl out of their holes, were too enticing. He felt fresh. Plenty of time. He’d walk.
The city showed him her best profile. As if he were a god briefly sojourning on earth, he found pleasure in inspecting the shifting scene and’ the passing people.
They seemed to feel as good as he did. Even the ones hurrying fastest somehow gave the impression of strolling. Carr enjoyed sliding past them like a stick drifting in a slow, whimsical current.
If life has a rhythm, he thought, it has sunk to a lazy summer murmur from the strings.
His mind played idly with last night’s events. He wondered if he could find Jane’s imposing home again. He decided he probably could, but felt no curiosity. Already she was beginning to seem like a girl in a dream. They’d met, helped each other, parted. A proper episode.
He came to the bridge. Down on the sparkling river deckhands were washing an excursion steamer. The skyscrapers rose up clean and gray, Cities, he thought, could be lovely places at time, so huge and yet so bright and sane and filled with crowds of people among whom you were indistinguishable and therefore secure. Undoubtedly this was the pleasantest half-hour he’d had in months. To crown it, he decided he’d drop into one of the big department stores and make some totally unnecessary purchase. Necktie perhaps. Say a new blue.
Inside the store the crowd was thicker. Pausing to spy out the proper counter, Carr had the faintest feeling of oppressiveness. For a moment he felt the impulse to hurry outside. But he smiled at it. He located the neckties—they were across the huge room—and started toward them. But before he’d got halfway he stopped again, this time to enjoy a sight as humorously bizarre as a cartoon in The New Yorker.
Down the center aisle, their eyes fixed stonily ahead, avoiding the shoppers with a casual adroitness, marched four youngish men carrying a window-display mannequin. The four men were wearing identical light-weight black overcoats and black snap-brim hats which looked as if they’d just been purchased this morning. The two in front each held an ankle, the two in back a shoulder. The mannequin was dressed in an ultra-stylish olive green suit, the face and hands were finished in some realistic nude felt, and her arms were rigidly fixed to hold a teacup or an open purse.