Far Out

by Damon Knight

  “All right, let’s suppose he isn’t going to listen to reason—”

  “We might as well.”

  Len made an incoherent noise. “Okay. I still don’t see why we can’t write the last chapter ourselves—a few pages—”

  “Who can?”

  “Well, not me, but you’ve done a little writing—damned good, too. And if you’re so sure all the clues are there—Look, if you say you can’t do it, okay, we’ll hire somebody. A professional writer. It happens all the time. Thorne Smith’s last novel—”

  “Ugh.”

  “Well, it sold. What one writer starts, another can finish.”

  “Nobody ever finished The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

  “Oh, hell.”

  “Len, it’s impossible. It is. Let me finish. If you’re thinking we could have somebody rewrite the last part Leo did—”

  “Yeah, I just thought of that.”

  “Even that wouldn’t do any good, you’d have to go all the way back, almost to page one, it would be another story when you got through. Let’s go to bed.”

  “Moy, do you remember when we used to worry about the law of opposites?”

  “Mm?”

  “The law of opposites. When we used to be afraid the kid would turn out to be a pick-and-shovel man with a pointy head.”

  “Uh. Mm.”

  He turned. Moira was standing with one hand on her belly and the other behind her back. She looked as if she were about to start practising a low bow but doubted she could make it.

  “What’s the matter now?” he asked.

  “Pain in the small of my back.”

  “Bad one?”

  “No…”

  “Belly hurt, too?”

  She frowned. “Don’t be foolish. I’m feeling for the contraction. There it comes.”

  “The… but you just said the small of your back.”

  “Where do you think labour pains usually start?”

  The pains were coming at twenty-minute intervals, and the taxi had not arrived. Moira was packed and ready. Len was trying to set her a good example by remaining calm. He strolled over to the wall calendar, gazed at it in an offhand manner, and turned away.

  “Len, I know it’s only the fifteenth of July.”

  “Huh? I didn’t say that aloud.”

  “You said it seven times. Sit down; you’re making me nervous.”

  Len perched on the corner of the table, folded his arms, and immediately got up to look out the window. On the way back he circled the table in an aimless way, picked up a bottle of ink and shook it to see if the cap was on tight, stumbled over a wastebasket, carefully upended it and sat down with an air of J’y suis, j’y reste. “Nothing to worry about,” he said firmly. “Women do this all the time.”

  “True.”

  “What for?” he demanded violently.

  Moira grinned at him, then winced slightly and looked at the clock. “Eighteen minutes. This is a good one.”

  When she relaxed, Len put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it in only two tries. “How’s Leo taking it?”

  “Isn’t saying. He feels—” She concentrated. “Apprehensive. He’s feeling strange and he doesn’t like it… I don’t think he’s entirely awake. Funny.”

  “I’m glad this is happening now,” Len announced.

  “So am I, but…”

  “Look,” said Len, moving energetically to the arm of her chair, “we’ve always had it pretty good, haven’t we? Not that it hasn’t been tough at times, but—you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, that’s the way it’ll be again, once this is over. I don’t care how much of a superb rain he is, once he’s born—you know what I mean? The only reason he’s had the bulge on us all this time is he could get at us and we couldn’t get at him. He’s got the mind of an adult, he can learn to act like one. It’s that simple.”

  Moira hesitated. “You can’t take him out to the woodshed. He’s going to be a helpless baby, physically, like anybody else’s. He has to be taken care of. You can’t—”

  “No, all right, but there are plenty of other ways. If he behaves, he gets read to. Like that.”

  “That’s right, but—there’s one other thing I thought of. You remember when you said suppose he’s asleep and dreaming… and what happens if he wakes up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that reminded me of something else, or maybe it’s the same thing. Did you know that a fetus in the womb gets only about half the amount of oxygen in his blood that he’ll have when he starts to breathe?”

  Len looked thoughtful. “Forgot. Well, that’s just one more thing Leo does that babies aren’t supposed to do.”

  “Use as much energy as he does, you mean. All right, but what I’m getting at is, it can’t be because he’s getting more than the normal amount of oxygen, can it? I mean, he’s the prodigy, not me. He must be using it more efficiently… And if that’s it, what happens when he’s getting twice as much?”

  They had soaped and shaved and disinfected her, along with other indignities, and now she could see herself in the reflector of the big delivery-table light—the image clear and bright, like everything else, but very haloed and swimmy, and looking like a statue of Sita. She had no idea how long she had been here—that was the scopolamine, probably—but she was getting pretty tired.

  “Bear down,” said the staff doctor kindly, and before she could answer, the pain came up like violins and she had to gulp at the tingly coldness of laughing gas. When the mask lifted she said, “I am bearing down,” but the doctor had gone back to the other end of her and wasn’t listening.

  Anyhow, she had Leo. How are you feeling?

  His answer was muddled—because of the anaesthetic?—but she didn’t really need it; her perception of him was clear: darkness and pressure, impatience, a slow Satanic anger… and something else. Uncertainty? Apprehension?

  “Two or three more ought to do it. Bear down.”

  Fear. Unmistakable now. And a desperate determination.

  “Doctor, he doesn’t want to be born!”

  “Seems that way sometimes, doesn’t it? Now bear down good and hard.”

  Tell him stop blurrrrrr too dangerrrrrrr stop I feel wowrrrr stop I tellrrrr stop.

  “What, Leo, what?”

  “Bear down.”

  Faintly, like a voice far under water: Hurry I hate you tell him sealed incubator… tenth oxygen, nine tenths inert gases Hurry.

  The pressure abruptly relaxed.

  Leo was born.

  The doctor was holding him up by the heels, red, bloody, wrinkled, trailing a lumpy soft snake. The voice was still there, very small, very far away: Too late. The same as death. Then a hint of the old cold arrogance: Now you’ll never know… who killed Cyrus.

  The doctor slapped him smartly on the minuscule buttocks. The wizened, malevolent face writhed open; but it was only the angry squall of an ordinary infant that came out. Leo was gone, like a light turned off under the measureless ocean.

  Moira raised her head weakly. “Give him one for me,” she said.

  YOU’RE ANOTHER

  It was a warm spring Saturday, and Johnny Bornish spent the morning in Central Park. He drew sailors lying on the grass with their girls; he drew old men in straw hats, and Good Humour men pushing their carts. He got two quick studies of children at the toy-boat pond, and would have had another, a beauty, except that somebody’s damned big Dalmatian, romping, blundered into him and made him sit down hard in the water.

  A bright-eyed old gentleman solemnly helped him arise. Johnny thought it over, then wrung out his wet pants in the man’s rest room, put them back on and spread himself like a starfish in the sun. He dried before his sketchbook did, so he took the bus back downtown, got off at Fourteenth Street and went into Mayer’s.

  The only clerk in sight was showing an intricate folding easel to a tweedy woman who didn’t seem to know which end was which. Johnny picked up the sketchbook he wanted from a
pile on the table and pottered around looking at lay figures, paper palettes and other traps for the amateur. He glimpsed some interesting textured papers displayed in the other aisle and tried to cross over to them, but misjudged his knobby-kneed turning circle, as usual, and brought down a cascade of little paint cans. Dancing for balance, somehow he managed to put one heel down at an unheard-of angle, buckle the lid of one of the cans and splash red enamel all over hell.

  He paid for the paint, speechless, and got out. He had dropped the sketchbook somewhere, he discovered. Evidently God did not care for him to do any sketching today.

  Also, he was leaving little red heel prints across the pavement. He wiped off his shoe as well as he could with some newspaper from the trash basket at the corner, and walked down to the Automat for coffee.

  The cashier scooped in his dollar and spread two rows of magical dimes on the marble counter, all rattling at once like angry metal insects. They were alive in Johnny’s palm; one of them got away, but he lunged for it and caught it before it hit the floor.

  Flushed with victory, he worked his way through the crowd to the coffee dispenser, put a china cup under the spigot and dropped his dime in the slot. Coffee streamed out, filled his cup and went on flowing.

  Johnny watched it for a minute. Coffee went on pouring over the lip and handle of the cup, too hot to touch, splashing through the grilled metal and gurgling away somewhere below.

  A white-haired man shouldered him aside, took a cup from the rack and calmly filled it at the spigot. Somebody else followed his example, and in a moment there was a crowd.

  After all, it was his dime. Johnny got another cup and waited his turn. An angry man in a white jacket disappeared violently into the crowd, and Johnny heard him shouting something. A moment later the crowd began to disperse.

  The jet had stopped. The man in the white jacket picked up Johnny’s original cup, emptied it, set it down on a busboy’s cart, and went away.

  Evidently God did not care for him to drink any coffee, either. Johnny whistled a few reflective bars of “Dixie” and left, keeping a wary eye out for trouble.

  At the kerb a big pushcart was standing in the sunshine, flaming with banana yellows, apple reds. Johnny stopped himself. “Oh, no,” he said, and turned himself sternly around, and started carefully down the avenue, hands in pockets, elbows at his sides. On a day like what this one was shaping up to be, he shuddered to think what he could do with a pushcart full of fruit.

  How about a painting of that? Semi-abstract—“Still Life in Motion”. Flying tangerines, green bananas, dusty Concord grapes, stopped by the fast shutter of the artist’s eye. By Cézanne, out of Stuart Davis. By heaven, it wasn’t bad.

  He could see it, bit and vulgar, about a 36 by 30 (stretchers: he’d have to stop at Mayer’s again, or on second thoughts somewhere else, for stretchers), the colours greyed on a violet ground, but screaming at each other all the same like a gaggle of parakeets. Black outlines here and there, weaving a kind of cockeyed carpet pattern through it. No depth, no light-and-dark—flat Easter-egg colours, glowing as enigmatically as a Parrish cut up into jigsaw pieces. Frame it in oyster-white moulding—wham! The Museum of Modern Art!

  The bananas, he thought, would have to go around this way, distorted, curved like boomerangs up in the foreground. Make the old ladies from Oshkosh duck. That saturated buttery yellow, transmuted to a poisonous green… He put out a forefinger absently to stroke one of the nearest, feeling how the chalky smoothness curved up and around into the dry hard stem.

  “How many, Mac?”

  For an instant Johnny thought he had circled the block, back to the same pushcart; then he saw that this one had only bananas on it. He was at the corner of Eleventh Street; he had walked three blocks, blind and deaf.

  “No bananas,” he said hurriedly, backing away. There was a shriek in his ear. He turned; it was a glitter-eyed tweedy woman, brandishing an enormous handbag.

  “Can’t you watch where you’re—”

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said, desperately trying to keep his balance. He toppled off the kerb, grabbing at the pushcart. Something slithery went out from under his foot. He was falling, sliding like a bowling ball, feet first toward the one upright shaft that supported the end of the pushcart…

  The first thing that he noticed, as he sat there up to his chest in bananas, with the swearing huckster holding the cart by main force, was that an alert, white-haired old gentleman was in the front rank of the crowd, looking at him.

  The same one who—?

  And come to think of it, that tweedy woman—

  Ridiculous.

  All the same, something began to twitch in his memory.

  Ten confused minutes later he was kneeling asthmatically on the floor in front of his closet, hauling out stacks of unframed paintings, shoeboxes full of letters and squeezed paint tubes, a Scout axe (for kindling), old sweaters and mildewed magazines, until he found a battered suitcase.

  In the suitcase, under untidy piles of sketches and water colours, was a small cardboard portfolio. In the portfolio were two newspaper clippings.

  One was from the Post, dated three years back: it showed Johnny, poised on one heel in a violent adagio pose, being whirled around by the stream of water from a hydrant some Third Avenue urchins had just opened. The other was two years older, from the Journal: in this one Johnny seemed to be walking dreamily up a wall—actually, he had just slipped on an icy street in the upper Forties.

  He blinked incredulously. In the background of the first picture there were half a dozen figures, mostly kids.

  Among them was the tweedy woman.

  In the background of the second, there was only one. It was the white-haired old man.

  Thinking it over, Johnny discovered that he was scared. He had never actually enjoyed being the kind of buffoon who gets his shirttail caught in zippers, is trapped by elevators and revolving doors, and trips on pebbles; he had accepted it humbly as his portion, and in between catastrophes he’d had a lot of fun.

  But suppose somebody was doing it to him?

  A lot of it was not funny, look at it any way you like. There was the time the bus driver had closed the door on Johnny’s foot and dragged him for three yards, bouncing on the pavement. He had got up with nothing worse than bruises—but what if that passenger hadn’t seen him in time?

  He looked at the clippings again. There they were, the same faces—the same clothing, even, except that the old man was wearing an overcoat. Even in the faded half-tones, there was a predatory sparkle from his rimless eyeglasses; and the tweedy woman’s sharp beak was as threatening as a hawk’s.

  Johnny felt a stifling sense of panic. He felt like a man waiting helplessly for the punchline of a long bad joke; or like a mouse being played with by a cat.

  Something bad was going to happen next.

  The door opened; somebody walked in. Johnny stared, but it was only the Duke, brawny in a paint-smeared undershirt, with a limp cigarette in the comer of his mouth. The Duke had a rakish Errol Flynn moustache, blending furrily now into his day-old beard, and a pair of black, who-are-you-varlet brows. He was treacherous, clever, plausible, quarrelsome, ingenious, a great brawler and seducer of women… in short, exactly like Cellini, except he had no talent.

  “Hiding?” said Duke, showing his big teeth.

  Johnny became aware that, crouched in front of the closet that way, he looked a little as if he were about to dive into it and pull overcoats over his head. He got up stiffly, tried to put his hands in his pockets, and discovered he still had the clippings. Then it was too late. Duke took them gently, inspected them. with a judicial eye, and stared gravely at Johnny. “Not flattering,” he said. “Is that blood on your forehead?”

  Johnny investigated; his fingers came away a little red, not much. “I fell down,” he said uncomfortably.

  “My boy,” Duke told him, “you are troubled. Confide in your old uncle.”

  “I’m just—Look, Duke, I’m busy. D
id you want something?”

  “Only to be your faithful counsellor and guide,” said Duke, pressing Johnny firmly into a chair. “Just lean back, loosen the sphincters and say the first thing that comes into your mind.” He looked expectant.

  “Ugh,” said Johnny.

  Duke nodded sagely. “A visceral reaction. Existentialist. You wish to rid yourself of yourself—get away from it all. Tell me, when you walk down the street, do you feel the buildings are about to close in on you? Are you being persecuted by little green men who come out of the woodwork? Do you feel an overpowering urge to leave town?”

  “Yes,” said Johnny truthfully.

  Duke looked mildly surprised. “Well?” he asked, spreading his hands.

  “Where would I go?”

  “I recommend sunny New Jersey. All the towns have different names—fascinating. Millions of them. Pick one at random. Hackensack, Perth Amboy, Passaic, Teaneck, Newark? No? You’re quite right—too suggestive. Let me see. Something farther north? Provincetown. Martha’s Vineyard—lovely this time of the year. Or Florida—yes, I can really see you, Johnny, sitting on a rotten wharf in the sunshine, fishing with a bent pin for pompano. Peaceful, relaxed, carefree…”

  Johnny’s fingers stirred the change in his pocket. He didn’t know what was in his wallet—he never did—but he was sure it wasn’t enough. “Duke, have you seen Ted Edwards this week?” he asked hopefully.

  “No. Why?”

  “Oh. He owes me a little money, is all. He said he’d pay me today or tomorrow.”

  “If it’s a question of money…” said the Duke after a moment.

  Johnny looked at him incredulously.

  Duke was pulling a greasy wallet out of his hip pocket. He paused with his thumb in it. “Do you really want to get out of town, Johnny?”

  “Well, sure, but…”

  “Johnny, what are friends for? Really, I’m wounded. Will fifty help?”

  He counted out the money and stuffed it into Johnny’s paralysed palm. “Don’t say a word. Let me remember you just as you are.” He made a frame of his hands and squinted through it. He sighed, then picked up the battered suitcase and went to work with great energy throwing thin$s out of the dresser into it. “Shirts, socks, underwear. Necktie, Clean handkerchief. There you are.” He closed the lid. He pumped Johnny’s hand, pulling him toward the door. “Don’t think it hasn’t been great, because it hasn’t. So on the ocean of life we pass and speak to each other. Only a look and a voice; then darkness and silence.”