“You’ve got a point, mister,” I agreed. “I’m sorry for your trouble. Are you okay?”
He looked alarmed and glanced quickly down at himself. “Why? Am I on fire somewhere else?”
“No, no,” Tommy Janssen said hastily. “But that was real hot coffee I tossed on you: Jake serves it just short of hot enough to burn.”
“And the back of a neck is a lot easier to burn than a tongue,” Doc Webster said in that gentle bellow of his. “You’ve got some hard bark on you, mister.”
The newcomer shook his head ruefully. “I wish I did. I’ve got so many scars and colloid patches I look like Frankenstein’s first attempt. See?” He held out his right hand, and sure enough it was crisscrossed with scars, old and new.
The Doc came through the crowd like a whale passing through a school of fish, and examined the appendage. “That one there must have hurt,” he remarked, pointing to a large ugly one.
The newcomer laughed. It was a shocking sound. “If only it had,” he said, and laughed some more. People began to murmur.
The Doc was staring at him. “Wait a minute now. Are you saying…? I believe I read something about this—”
Across the room, Solace somehow managed to cut through the murmuring without overloading her speakers. “Riley-Day Syndrome,” she said.
The newcomer stopped laughing. He located the source of the voice and blinked. The visual display was the one Solace usually used unless she felt need for complex facial expressions: a greatly enlarged version of the classic Smiling Mac startup icon. Except at the moment it wasn’t smiling as broadly as usual.
“Is that somebody on the Internet?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I answered briefly. Well, I wasn’t exactly lying: Solace was somebody, in my book, and she lived on the Internet—was, in fact, despite all rumors to the contrary, the only being who actually did literally live on the Internet. And we had been skittish about revealing Solace’s true nature to our rare newcomers, always letting her make the first move. Some people, you tell them about a sentient computer network, and the first thing they think of is Demon Seed or “■ Press Enter,” or at best, War Games. You know: “Anything I don’t understand must be malevolent.”
“What is she, a pathologist?”
“Y-e-s,” I said carefully. I didn’t think Solace had ever taken med school exams, but didn’t doubt that she could ace them if she chose—I hadn’t claimed she was a licensed pathologist.
“Well, she’s a good one. She nailed it, from a single clue. I am an atypical sufferer of an extremely rare hereditary condition called Riley-Day Syndrome.”
“Do tell,” I said. “What are the symptoms?”
“Doctor?” he said to Solace.
“Riley-Day Syndrome, or familial disautonomia, first identified in 1949, occurs nearly exclusively in Ashkenazi Jews. There are approximately 300 known cases in America. Its symptoms include unstable blood pressure and hypertension, unstable temperature, vomiting spasms, profuse sweating, impairment of vestibular function, a marked tendency to develop erythematous skin rashes, lacrimation deficit…and, most striking, an impaired ability—often total inability—to perceive pain.”
“That’s it, by God!” Doc Webster said. “I always wanted to meet an example of your syndrome, sir.”
Zoey said, “Friend, by any chance could I interest you in having this baby for me?”
“My God,” said Slippery Joe Maser, who has been dealing with chronic lower back pain—and two wives!—for almost a decade now, “You’re a lucky young feller! I’d take all that other stuff to get that last part. Hell, I got the blood pressure, the sweating and the rashes already.”
The newcomer gave another of those startling barks of laughter. “I’d trade you in a hot minute, Pop. If they ever get to the point where they can do a nice simple everyday brain transplant, I’ll be happy to swap bodies with you.”
Slippery Joe looked startled. “Well, I wish you could. I’d take a deal like that, by damn.” he said.
“Not if you were smart, Joe,” Solace said. “Twenty-five percent of Riley-Day babies are dead by age ten, and fully half by age twenty.”
“Look at those scars on his hand, Slip,” Doc Webster said. “He’s lucky to have lived this long.”
That brought a rumble from the crowd.
Just think how badly you could injure yourself with no pain system. Why, you could bleed yourself unconscious before you noticed you were injured. Being impervious to pain might well be even more of a nuisance than being saddled with a couple of million dollars.
“That’s what it was,” Noah Gonzalez said suddenly. “I knew there was something…I saw your eyes when you come in, mister, and I thought maybe you were in the same line of work as me. I spent twenty years on the county bomb squad. You looked the way I always do when I walk into a strange room: looking around for bombs.”
The stranger nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, maybe you know a little about what it’s like. I’ve always figured I was about twice as scared as anybody else, and more of the time. But you may have me beat. My name is Acayib. Acayib Pinsky.” He pronounced it, “A kay yib;” I found out how it was spelled later. It means “wonderful and strange,” which I would have to say is appropriate.
“I’m Noah Gonzalez, and the fellow that put out your hair is Tommy, and that’s Doc Webster, and that over there is Jake Stonebender—he runs the joint. That’s enough introductions for now: you’ll meet everybody eventually, if you’re smart. If you stay around long enough, that is. This is Mary’s Place, by the way.”
“Pleased to meet you all,” Acayib said, and offered his scarred right hand. Noah shook it without flinching. “Who’s the other doctor, on the Mac over there?”
“My name is Solace,” she said.
“Well, I sure could use some,” he said.
“Then you’ve come to the right place,” I told him. And I gave him a quick capsule explanation of our toasting custom, and the business about one-dollar bills being the only denomination I accept.
It made Acayib smile for the first time. “Maybe I have come to the right place.” He took three singles from his pants pocket, came over to the bar, and set them down. “Beer, please.”
I gave him one of our house brand, Mary’s Milk. It’s not Rickard’s Red, but it’s pretty good. As he took it, he noticed the closed guitar case nearby on the bartop. “You have live music in here?”
I was caught without an answer. Fast Eddie, living up to his name, saved me. “Yeah,” he said from his piano stool, “but I’m it. De picker’s like you: dis is his foist time here.”
Acayib nodded. He glanced at the handful of paper airplanes around the case, and clearly recognized them as currency. Perhaps he couldn’t make out the denomination, or more likely he just assumed they were gag money; he dismissed them from his attention and walked over to the chalk line I’d pointed out. I reached over the bar and tugged at Buck’s shirtsleeve. “Psst!”
“Yes, Jake?” he whispered back.
“I know we was havin’ fun here, but would you mind if we were to put your airplane-party on hold for a few minutes? I’d sure like to see if that fella feels like talking about his situation, and a million dollars goin’ by might just be too much distraction for him.”
He looked pained. “I’d like to hear his story just as much as you would, believe me. But there’s still a lot of money left in that case, and I won’t feel easy in my mind until it’s all nice harmless air pollution. Still—” He glanced up at the clock behind me—blinked as he realized for the first time that it was a CounterClock, with retrograde motion and numbers from 21 to 1—frowned, visibly refused to even try and interpret it, and glanced down at his own watch. “Oh hell,” he murmured, “it’s not even midnight yet. And if we run short of time, I guess there’s no law says they have to be airplanes. We could just make spitballs out of ’em; it’d go a lot faster that way. Yes, let’s get Acayib talking if we can. He seems to need to.”
I was liking
Buck more by the minute.
Acayib had made four long sips of his beer, and taken three of them already there at the chalk line. When he saw he had my attention, he lifted his glass in salute to us, drained it in one long noisy gulp, said, “To pain,” and hurled the glass at the hearth.
It burst on the back wall, showering shards.
“To pain,” several people—most of us—chorused, and followed his example. Enough glasses hit the hearth at once to send little fluffy clumps of ash—thousands’ of dollars worth of it, probably—puffing out in all directions. (That fireplace is parabolically shaped so that it’s almost impossible to make broken glass spray out of it, but lighter-than-air objects with the wind behind them stand a fair chance of escape.) Without anyone asking them to, the nearest couple of patrons used the brooms standing nearby to sweep the fluff carefully back into the fireplace.
Acayib apparently took notice of that detail. When he got back to the bar, he said, “Jake, I’ve never been in a tavern where the customers helped clean up. I take back what I said before; you folks seem responsible enough to play with fire. If you want to go back to your game with the funny-money paper airplanes, go right ahead.”
“We will if you insist,” Buck said, “but we’d much rather shoot the shit with you.”
Acayib looked him over.
Buck sighed. “Look, Acayib…I only found this place myself about half an hour before you did—but one of the things I’ve learned already is their policy on privacy. I’m told that anybody who asks a snoopy question here is subject to be coldcocked…and I think they’re serious about it. But in your case, sir, I’m willing to risk it. I would imagine there’s probably no topic in your life as boring to you by now as Riley-Day Syndrome…but I’d be grateful if you’d be willing to talk about it some with us.” He flicked a glance at Fast Eddie. Eddie had not left his stool—but he was poised, a cat about to pounce, and one hand had drifted to his back pocket. Acayib saw it too, and turned to me.
“If you don’t feel like talking,” I said, “just say, ‘No, but I don’t mind your asking.’ But do it fast—or Buck there will wake up in the parking lot with a headache. We take privacy pretty seriously around here.”
“I don’t mind your asking,” he said at once, and Fast Eddie relaxed slightly. “Aw hell, I don’t mind talking about it. Ask anything you want, any of you. One more time, why not? If anybody comes up with a question I’ve never heard before, I’ll buy Buck a drink. Here, let me start you off: ‘Can you detect heat and cold?’ Answer: ‘Yes, but just barely—and I often have trouble telling them apart.’ That’s why I thought that the coffee Tommy poured on me was beer. ‘What’s the worst you’ve injured yourself without noticing?’ Answer: ‘Well, I once walked a couple of miles on a broken leg.’ And there’s a bullet in my right thigh, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell you how or when it happened; my doctor found it during a semiannual checkup. But neither injury is responsible for the way I walk: that’s the ‘vestibular impairment’ part of the syndrome. Let me see, now. Women often ask, ‘Did you ever cry when you were a baby?’—or sometimes, ‘Do you ever cry now?’ And the answer is, ‘Of course—you don’t have to feel pain to feel sad.’ Only I can’t even do that right: I can cry, but no tears ever come out. That’s that ‘lacrimation deficit’ Dr. Solace mentioned. Okay, now one of you ask me something.”
“What’s the question you’ve been asked least?” Margie Shorter asked.
He blinked. “Uh…that one. Buck, I owe you a beer. But aside from that one…well, two different guys have asked if I’d ever been tempted to get tattooed—since it’d be only tedious. The answer is ‘No.’ I was always afraid if I got started, I wouldn’t stop until I looked like the Illustrated Man.”
Tanya Latimer spoke up. “What’s it like—living without pain? Do you ever miss it?”
“What’s it like, living without a penis?” he responded.
“Huh? Oh, I get you…how can I know, with nothing to compare it to? Sorry—I guess it was a dumb question. It’s just…well, black people in America have had more than our share of pain for so long, and done so many magnificent, unprecedented things with it, that I’ve sometimes wondered if we wouldn’t miss it, at least a little bit, if racism ever did magically disappear. It isn’t just fear that keeps us from feeling totally comfortable hanging around white people; it’s also that—present company excepted—so many of them seem to us so vapid and dull and directionless. I don’t know if I’d enjoy being like that for long. Maybe pain has gotten good to us. I’d be overjoyed to make the experiment, mind—but I do wonder sometimes. Don’t you?”
Dave Goldblum-Matthias nodded vigorously—then remembered that Tanya is blind. “Yes, yes—it’s like I’ve been thinking for a few years now: one day, if God is good, there will exist a generation of Jews in Israel who do not have a single living ancestor who can tell them of his own experience what it is like to be landless, homeless, stateless. Jews like ordinary humans—will this be a wholly good thing? Will they still be proud? After all these weary millennia on the road, will we really be happy with roots—even in the Promised Land?”
Acayib frowned. “Buck,” he said, setting money on the bar, “I owe you three drinks so far. Another beer for me too, please, Jake, while I think about them.” I served up Mary’s Milks for him and Buck, ignoring his money. “I think what you’re both asking me,” he said finally, “is whether I’m really so sure I’d trade places with a normal. Well, my immediate impulse is to say yes. Every single normal I’ve ever discussed this with has been absolutely certain I was nuts to wish I could trade—and I’ve always felt that anything everybody agrees on has just naturally got to be wrong. But now you’ve both got me wondering—”
“It’s differences from ‘normal’ that make a person special,” Tanya said. “Look at us: I’m a blind spade and David’s a queer Jew, and we’re two of the happiest people I know. Everybody here is at least a little bit bent, one way and another, and the devil himself ain’t as happy as we are here most nights.”
“Balance,” Acayib said thoughtfully, and took a long slow sip of beer.
“Salt in the cookies,” Dave said.
“Beg pardon?”
“You put salt in cookies to make them sweeter,” he explained. “Gives the sugar something to work against.”
“Huh.”
“Are you scared all the time?” Noah asked.
“Just when I’m in some environment I can’t control,” he said. “At home in my easy chair, I’m a laid-back kind of guy. I guess you could say that at all times, I know whether it’s safe to relax or not.”
“It’s safe here, Mister,” Shorty Steinitz said earnestly. “We’ll all keep an eye on you. Won’t we?”
There was a ragged but enthusiastic chorus of agreement. “You got it, Acayib!” “Take it off your mind, Nazz—it’s covered.” “You’re off duty for the night, partner.” “We look out for each other, here.”
He blinked around at us owlishly, his mouth slack.
“Believe us, son,” Doc Webster said. “Pain has its uses—but it is not worth the grief that comes with it.”
“But most of the time I’m like a ship in a war zone with no radar and one overworked lookout,” he said.
“Better that than a thousand lookouts with shrill voices,” the Doc said. “I’ve been a doctor, man and boy, for almost forty-five years now—and I believe to my boots that the human pain system was one of God’s very worst designs, even worse than the scrotum. A child could do better. What good is an alarm system with no off switch and no volume knob? For two million years of evolution, the overwhelming majority of our most poignant pains were urgent warnings of situations we could do nothing about. For all but the last century of that two million years, the agony attendant on an inflamed appendix served no useful purpose whatsoever, probably lowered the victim’s resistance even farther. It’s taken our minds two million years to adapt to our stupid bodies and invent medicine. Until we developed dentistry
, what use was a toothache? Were we supposed to bash ourselves in the mouth with a rock? Why should passing a gallstone hurt so much—or at all? Even now, with so many medical tools at my disposal, most of the pains my patients suffer are superfluous, redundant information, pointless misery. Some of it is false information, referred pain. Yet we still have no really satisfactory way to switch off the alarm, and all the ways we know to mute it have undesirable side effects. I sometimes wonder if God felt He needed to flay us into developing intelligence.” He coughed and looked embarrassed. “Anyway, I suspect it might be better to have the alarm system permanently disconnected than to be unable to turn it off—or at least turn it down for periods of time without penalty.”
“If God had agreed with you, maybe we’d never have become intelligent,” Acayib pointed out. “If we have.”
“Maybe not,” the Doc agreed, “and maybe we’d have become alert, instead, and who’s to say that wouldn’t be an improvement? Have you ever spent much time in the company of someone with real deep, chronic intractable pain?”
“No,” he admitted. “My parents went together in a common disaster.”
“Let me take you down to Smithtown General some night, and spend a little time in the Intractable Pain Clinic with me. I think I can convince you that you’re a lucky man.”
“Dammit,” Acayib said stubbornly, “I refuse to be grateful. I will not concede that Riley-Day Syndrome isn’t a fucking curse. It’s not a blessing, it’s a sentence.”
“Do you know who Neils Bohr is?” Solace asked him.
“Genius. One of the founders of quantum mechanics.”
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