“There is a…”
“Oh, all right. You don’t have to shout. Go get Robert’s rubber knife and stab him.”
“Angie,” Robert said, in that tone as though we speak foreign languages to each other, “When I come home from work I’m tired. Why can’t you at least arrange things so I can—”
“You are not tired,” I said. “You didn’t used to be tired.” I burst into tears.
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Bob snarled. “I’ll go talk to Robert. What’s he doing? Pouring ink all over my white shirts?”
Broodily, I dialed a cold luncheon meat sandwich.
Bob reappeared in the kitchen almost immediately with an odd look on his face. “There’s an old tramp in Robert’s room,” he whispered as though he wanted to keep things quiet until he called the police.
“It’s all right,” I said, knowing I’d never really get the idea across. “He’s not an old tramp. His name’s Smitty and he’s an ex-con.”
“An ex-con! That makes it all right?”
“You needn’t raise your voice. He’s reformed now and he’s of good character. He’s a Voluntary Readjustment.”
“How do you know he’s of good character?”
“I just know.”
“Angie,” Bob said, still in that foreign language, “you don’t just know anything. Come on. We can’t leave Robert alone with that criminal.”
But Bob was so fascinated at the sight through the oneway walls of Robert’s room that we both stood and watched.
There were two cats, and Tina Louise was spitting at her double.
“That’s right,” Smitty was saying. “Leave that old real cat alone. What an ex-con wants to do, see, is stay out of trouble. Your old lady catches you clipping the fur off her cat, she’ll have your hide. This way, see, you do what you want and she can’t say a thing.”
“Dat right?” Robert said, his eyes shining.
“Right. Now go ahead.”
Robert clipped to his heart’s content. He clipped until the pseudocat disappeared completely.
Tina Louise stomped out, her eyes glassy. She hasn’t been the same since.
“What would you like for dinner, Smitty?” I asked.
“Spinach,” he said. “Hamburger steak and baked potato. A glass of milk.”
“Me too,” Robert cried.
There was a howl from the kitchen. “Who the hell is this cold luncheon meat sandwich for?”
“I dialed it for you,” I said, “because you were so nasty about the soufflé.”
“I wasn’t nasty—”
“Now, Miss,” Smitty said reprovingly, “that’s no dinner to give your old man when he’s just come home from a hard day’s work.”
“Why does everybody think he works so hard? He doesn’t work hard.” I was beginning to feel a little hysterical.
A long-toothed monster with two heads and green prickles came lumbering in. I grabbed Robert’s rubber knife and slashed it to pieces.
“You ruined my monster!” Robert wailed.
“You oughtn’t ruin his monster,” Smitty told me reprovingly.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” I screamed. I burst into tears and threw myself on the sofa. “To hell with all of you.”
“Now, now,” Smitty said soothingly. “This is no time to give up. We’re doing fine with Robert and you’re just the kind of woman your husband needs. It’s just that…”
“That what?”
“You’d only get mad if I told you.”
Smitty went out, and came back shortly with a couple of glasses of what looked like liquid lipstick. “It’s a Bloody Paradise,” he said in answer to my look.
“What’s in them?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t enjoy it if I told you. It’s something I learned about before my Readjustment. I got special knowledge, see, and there are times when it comes in handy.”
Even one sip of a Bloody Paradise is nice, and half of one gives the general effect of living under water. Under water, Bob began to look positively human. The look in his eyes was not in a foreign language.
I opened my mouth to say, “Now why don’t you look at me that way all the time?” But my vocal cords were frozen. I couldn’t say a word.
Smitty came out of the kitchen and grinned at me. “That one thing wrong with you,” he recalled. “You talk too much.”
I heard the door to the Family Room slide down softly behind Smitty.
It was an entirely successful evening.
There really aren’t any words that beat a little human contact.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES
A THOUGHT struck me.
I swerved off the road, heard a truck roar by screaming with its angry horn, and held on to the steering wheel until I stopped shaking.
I have been struck by thoughts before.
But the others were my own.
I realized almost immediately that it had not been really a thought. It had been a printed sentence that appeared suddenly before my eyes. I had been driving all day and by this time I was hypnotized into a numb world of endless strips of highway and the hoarse mutterings of motors. The road moved on and on, the countryside looming up dimly at the sides, forever running back from me, like a motion picture.
Then suddenly there was the still, as when the camera breaks down and you feel deceived and cheated.
And the sentence.
I began to laugh at myself.
Once I woke up from a nightmare sweating and scared so stiff I couldn’t bring myself to reach out from the blanket to turn on the light. Then I recalled the nightmare. I’d dreamed my cat was trying to hang herself with my best necktie.
So I laughed, recalling the alien thought that stopped the road in its tracks.
YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD, the sentence had said.
The night traffic went by me. Salesmen going home. A low thunder, the flick of a scream, the long disappearing sound of cars going by in the night. The idiot sounds of sane civilization all around me.
I started up the car again. I felt as though I’d dropped into some odd pocket of the universe. I looked into the brilliant, mindless eyes of a speeding car, waited my turn, and nosed back into the mainstream.
Long day. Too much driving. Not enough sales. Dearth of a salesman. I laughed nervously. I’d have to have either my eyes or my head examined.
Eyes, I concluded. It would be much cheaper.
“g,w,f,y,” I said. I think I can even see the little ones in the bottom line: “a,” I squinted hard, “m…”
“Never mind,” the doctor said, blinding me with a flashlight. “Look to your left. All the way. Now to the right. Hmm.”
I kept wishing he’d regard my eyes as more like windows of the soul and less like a television set.
He made me look at those deceptive little pictures with the colors. “Odd,” he said. “Doesn’t mean anything.”
He pulled one lid up and had a good look inside.
“What did you say your symptoms were?”
I hadn’t told him and I wasn’t about to. “Er… things seem to get out of… er… focus sometimes. I’ll be looking down at something like the… er… floor and suddenly… there it is!”
“Caught it!” he said triumphantly. “Fine! Fine aberration,” as though he had invented it himself.
“Did you see it, too?” I was intent on looking around the floor now, because I had seen it very plainly.
“Yes, indeed. A rare type of spasmodic strabismus, I should say.”
I sighed but it was more a shudder. I was cold inside. Maybe he saw a spasmodic strabismus. I saw a sign that said, YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD.
“Nothing I can do for you,” the doctor said jovially, “short of operating. I don’t think it’s serious enough to warrant a corrective operation. Nothing to worry about. Just ignore it and check back with me in six months.”
Nothing to worry about. That was easy to say.
Maybe I ought to see a psychiatrist. But the thing was so real. Were vi
sions that real to other crazy people?
Other crazy people!
I dropped into a telephone booth and began to flip through the yellow pages of a telephone book. How do you find a psychiatrist? They just list them all as physicians.
Do you call a doctor and ask him to give you a good, cheap psychiatrist?
I couldn’t afford a psychiatrist. Fifteen or twenty dollars an hour or whatever it is. I had eighty dollars a month payments on the car and I was about to sink a heavy down payment on a hi-fi set. No two ways about it.
I dropped the telephone book and stooped absently to pick it up.
YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD, the cover flashed at me.
I got out fast.
Eventually, of course, I ended up in a headshrinker’s office. A man can take only so much. I got so I was afraid to drive.
The psychiatrist, to my surprise, sported neither a goatee nor an accent. Nor did he have a couch, unless the armchair was a folding couch. I stood staring at him and the antique, polished table he apparently used for a desk.
“Have a seat,” he offered, but I was too tensed up to sit down. Hell, I was embarrassed. How was I going to tell him about my delusion without having him think I was crazy?
Finally I said, “You’re going to think I’m crazy, doctor.”
That was a bad beginning. He just looked at me.
“Well, this thing keeps… well, here I was on the road one night, driving along, when suddenly I see this… Great Gods of Olympus, doctor, how old is that desk?”
Even his bespectacled calm was disturbed, but that was the least of my concerns. For his desk had flashed a message at me. And the message was, WITH LUCK AND PLUCK YOU WILL RISE TO GREATNESS.
The doctor cleared his throat and arranged his thoughts “Around 1880, I should say. Er… any special reason for asking?”
“You’ve just cured me, doctor!” I shouted, and scooted out of the office throwing a large bill at the receptionist.
Actually, of course, I didn’t have any problems solved, but this was my first break. This was the first message I got that didn’t say, YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD.
I don’t know, really, why one delusion made me feel insane and two delusions restored my sanity. Except that I was never convinced that the first was a delusion. And there is a logic deep in the human mind that makes a probable reality out of two possible realities.
My lack of scientific training stood me in good stead.
I felt as though I had something to work on. It was an antique desk. That must be significant. Of what? I had glimmerings of an idea, but I didn’t know where it would lead.
My next stop was an antique shop. But after I stared at an expressionless foot stool for an hour the proprietor came up and folded his arms at me.
“You counting the stitches in the petits points?” he asked threateningly.
I did my best to look like an insulted millionaire and left.
So I went to the museum. There, at least, I could stare. Even if I looked suspicious I could always say I was an art student.
I didn’t know what to pick. Something below my eye level, since that’s where my messages had been appearing. That left out paintings and hangings.
I decided to start back at the beginning. In the quiet chill of the deserted museum, in the midst of the Egyptian collection, the incongruity of the whole thing struck me again. The messages were so silly: YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD. WITH LUCK AND PLUCK YOU WILL RISE TO GREATNESS. The one thing that had not occurred to me was that the messages might be supernatural. That was because they were silly. The supernatural might be many things. But not silly.
Still, there is an aura of old, old magic about Egyptian things. I looked at the strange, square-carved bodies and enigmatic faces of Egyptian art. I settled on an ancient sarcophagus, so full of time it should have fallen to dust centuries ago. I watched, almost hoping it would yield no message.
It did. The message was in hieroglyphics. Much too fast for me to copy the curious little pictures.
I shifted to the Greek collection, because I know a few Greek letters and I might be able to keep the letters in mind long enough to write them down.
That night I called the boss and told him I wouldn’t be able to go out on the road for a week. It’s a slack season, anyway, so he said all I had to lose was my commission.
The Greek collection yielded a message the next day. Twice. I couldn’t read it, of course, but I got it down.
The Classics professor at the University was delighted for the opportunity.
“The only thing people ever bring me to read any more is Roman numerals. When the journals start using Arabic numbers I’ll be obsolete.”
“Nice for the Arabs, though,” I remarked, not knowing quite what to say.
But I didn’t fed as flippant as I sounded. Standing there in the cramped office, full of the dusty, chalky smell of learning, I was filled with excitement and, deep inside, shot through with cold needles. Now that there was a third message, I expected it to explain everything.
The professor read the message and frowned. “Shaky looking sigmas,” he said, “but I can make it out. Where did you get this, anyway?”
“Er… my girl friend wrote it to me,” I said. “In a letter. You know.”
“Not the girl for you,” he said. “The sentence reads: I RULE BECAUSE I AM STRONG.”
The room seemed to fold in on me, a little, dark room staring at me with the one bright eye of the window. I sat down. I must have been pale.
“Perhaps it’s a joke,” the professor offered, seeing something was wrong.
“Is it a quotation?” I asked, grasping at straws in an unknown sea.
“Not exactly,” the professor said. “But it’s fifth century Greek and you’ll find something very like it in Thucydides, book III and book V. The philosophy was a pitfall that Athens fell into. She abandoned democracy for rule by force. Athens murdered the entire population of the island of Melos and they said, ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’ Not very pretty.”
Not pretty. Mass murder. Why was I getting the message? Was it a message or was that just my first reaction that I hadn’t thought to abandon? What was it all about?
In any case, it didn’t seem likely that it was a personal message for me.
I went back to the museum. The next thing I got a message out of was a Louis XV bed. It was in French, so I copied it down dutifully and brought it to the French Embassy.
I got thrown out.
I brought it to the University.
I got thrown out.
I got out a book on eighteenth century French mores and a French lexicon. I burned the message carefully. It’s a wonder it didn’t burn up by itself.
Contrite, I began concentrating on a Puritan Hornbook. Sure enough, your soul is doomed to hell.
Gloomily I wandered over to an early cotton gin. MOVE TO THE CITY, the message said.
That was odd.
MOVE TO THE CITY. That’s what everybody would be doing soon after the invention of the cotton gin. The Industrial Revolution.
A command?
Why?
There was some pattern, some meaning. But my mind kept backing away from every pattern I made. I needed to forget it and come back to it later.
I left the museum in the early evening and dropped into a movie. It was an inconsequential western. I don’t even remember what it was about. I do remember coming out of the movie with an overwhelming urge to eat an ice cream cone. I figured seeing a cowboy movie had triggered a childhood desire.
To my surprise, I found an ice cream stand set up in the lobby of the theatre. People were flocking around it, al-thought it was a chilly night and the popcorn looked warm and comfortable. I waited until they were all gone.
“You know,” I told the girl, “it’s a funny thing, you having this ice cream stand here, I was dying for an ice cream cone and I come out and here’s an ice cream stand.”
The girl popped her gum and turned w
orn blue eyes on me. “It ain’t my ice cream stand, it ain’t my idea and it ain’t funny. You been took, mister.”
“What do you mean?” If she were an alien from another planet about to explain my messages, I wouldn’t have been surprised. “What do you know about it.”
“Subgliminel,” she said darkly. “Something like that. They flash these pictures of ice cream during the movie. So fast you don’t know how you seen them. Then you want to buy the ice cream. You don’t know why, you just want to. Me, I don’t like it.”
I didn’t know whether she didn’t like the ice cream or the subliminal suggestion. But she’d given me an idea. A darn good idea.
Subliminal suggestion.
I was back to my eye doctor bright and early the next day.
“How many people,” I asked him, “have this spastic strabismus, or whatever I have?”
“Some chromatic aberration,” he said reprovingly, “and a rare kind of intermittent spastic strabismus. Very few people have it.” He shook his head as though it were, indeed, a sad situation. “We get to see it so seldom.”
It almost made me feel inadequate.
But I understand now why I was seeing things other people weren’t seeing. If I wasn’t having delusions.
I wondered what would happen if I put an ad in the paper asking people with my kind of eye trouble to get in touch with me.
Suppose I got an answer. And suppose the other guy didn’t see messages. How would I ask him without giving myself away? And suppose he did? Would he know any more than me? More than likely anybody with my experience would be in the booby hatch. If I hadn’t caught that message on the psychiatrist’s antique desk I would be, too. Maybe that’s where I’d end up anyway.
I went by the library and got out a stack of books. Then I came home and made myself a big pot of coffee. There was an inviting-looking bottle of bourbon on the shelf, but I shook off the temptation. I could at least try to solve my problem.
The thing to do was pretend it was someone else’s problem. Something I read in a book. Not something that made me turn cold all over. Because an unnatural occurrence, no matter how silly it is, is the most frightening thing in the world. If the ghost of Hamlet’s father had wiggled its ears, Hamlet would not have laughed. And when time stops in its tracks to say, YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD, it’s not funny.
A Handful of Time Page 5