Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  And Jeffty, who had the same problem all of us kids had had in the Forties with programming that pitted equal favorites against one another on different stations, having paid his respects to Hop Harrigan and Tank Tinker, spun the dial and went back to ABC, where I heard the stroke of a gong, the wild cacophony of nonsense Chinese chatter, and the announcer yelled, “T-e-e-e-rry and the Pirates!”

  I sat there on the top step and listened to Terry and Connie and Flip Corkin and, so help me God, Agnes Moorehead as The Dragon Lady, all of them in a new adventure that took place in a Red China that had not existed in the days of Milton Caniff’s 1937 version of the Orient, with river pirates and Chiang Kai-shek and warlords and the naive Imperialism of American gunboat diplomacy.

  Sat, and listened to the whole show, and sat even longer to hear Superman and part of Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy and part of Captain Midnight, and John Kinzer came home and neither he nor Leona came upstairs to find out what had happened to me, or where Jeffty was, and sat longer, and found I had started crying, and could not stop, just sat there with tears running down my face, into the corners of my mouth, sitting and crying until Jeffty heard me and opened his door and saw me and came out and looked at me in childish confusion as I heard the station break for the Mutual Network and they began the theme music of Tom Mix, “When It’s Round-up Time in Texas and the Bloom Is on the Sage,” and Jeffty touched my shoulder and smiled at me, with his mouth and his big brown eyes, and said, “Hi, Donny. Wanna come in an’ listen to the radio with me?”

  * * * *

  Hume denied the existence of an absolute space, in which each thing has its place; Borges denies the existence of one single time, in which all events are linked.

  Jeffty received radio programs from a place that could not, in logic, in the natural scheme of the space-time universe as conceived by Einstein, exist. But that wasn’t all he received. He got mail-order premiums that no one was manufacturing. He read comic books that had been defunct for three decades. He saw movies with actors who had been dead for twenty years. He was the receiving terminal for endless joys and pleasures of the past that the world had dropped along the way. On its headlong suicidal flight toward New Tomorrows, the world had razed its treasurehouse of simple happinesses, had poured concrete over its playgrounds, had abandoned its elfin stragglers, and all of it was being impossibly, miraculously shunted back into the present through Jeffty. Revivified, updated, the traditions maintained but contemporaneous. Jeffty was the unbidding Aladdin whose very nature formed the magic lampness of his reality.

  And he took me into his world with him.

  Because he trusted me.

  We had breakfast of Quaker Puffed Wheat Sparkies and warm Ovaltine we drank out of this year’s Little Orphan Annie Shake-Up Mugs. We went to the movies and while everyone else was seeing a comedy starring Goldie Hawn and Ryan O’Neal, Jeffty and I were enjoying Humphrey Bogart as the professional thief Parker in John Huston’s brilliant adaptation of the Donald Westlake novel Slayground. The second feature was Spencer Tracy, Carole Lombard and Laird Cregar in the Val Lewton-produced film of Leiningen Versus the Ants.

  Twice a month we went down to the newsstand and bought the current pulp issues of The Shadow, Doc Savage and Startling Stories. Jeffty and I sat together and I read to him from the magazines. He particularly liked the new short novel by Henry Kuttner, “The Dreams of Achilles,” and the new Stanley G. Weinbaum series of short stories set in the subatomic particle universe of Redurna. In September we enjoyed the first installment of the new Robert E. Howard Conan novel, Isle of the Black Ones, in Weird Tales; and in August we were only mildly disappointed by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fourth novella in the Jupiter series featuring John Carter of Barsoom—“Corsairs of Jupiter.” But the editor of Argosy All-Story Weekly promised there would be two more stories in the series, and it was such an unexpected revelation for Jeffty and me that it dimmed our disappointment at the lessened quality of the current story.

  We read comics together, and Jeffty and I both decided—separately, before we came together to discuss it—that our favorite characters were Doll Man, Airboy and The Heap. We also adored the George Carlson strips in Jingle Jangle Comics, particularly the Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg stories, which we read together and laughed over, even though I had to explain some of the esoteric puns to Jeffty, who was too young to have that kind of subtle wit.

  How to explain it? I can’t. I had enough physics in college to make some offhand guesses, but I’m more likely wrong than right. The laws of the conservation of energy occasionally break. These are laws that physicists call “weakly violated.” Perhaps Jeffty was a catalyst for the weak violation of conservation laws we’re only now beginning to realize exist. I tried doing some reading in the area—muon decay of the “forbidden” kind: gamma decay that doesn’t include the muon neutrino among its products—but nothing I encountered, not even the latest readings from the Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research near Zurich gave me an insight. I was thrown back on a vague acceptance of the philosophy that the real name for “science” is magic.

  No explanations, but enormous good times.

  The happiest time of my life.

  I had the “real” world, the world of my store and my friends and my family, the world of profit&loss, of taxes and evenings with young women who talked about going shopping, or the United Nations, or the rising cost of coffee and microwave ovens. And I had Jeffty’s world, in which I existed only when I was with him. The things of the past he knew as fresh and new, I could experience only when in his company. And the membrane between the two worlds grew ever thinner, more luminous and transparent. I had the best of both worlds. And knew, somehow, that I could carry nothing from one to the other.

  Forgetting that, for just a moment, betraying Jeffty by forgetting, brought an end to it all.

  Enjoying myself so much, I grew careless and failed to consider how fragile the relationship between Jeffty’s world and my world really was. There is a reason why the Present begrudges the existence of the Past. I never really understood. Nowhere in the beast books, where survival is shown in battles between claw and fang, tentacle and poison sac, is there recognition of the ferocity the Present always brings to bear on the Past. Nowhere is there a detailed statement of how the Present lies in wait for What-Was, waiting for it to become Now-This-Moment so it can shred it with its merciless jaws.

  Who could know such a thing…at any age…and certainly not at my age…who could understand such a thing?

  I’m trying to exculpate myself. I can’t. It was my fault.

  * * * *

  It was another Saturday afternoon.

  “What’s playing today?” I asked him, in the car, on the way downtown.

  He looked up at me from the other side of the front seat and smiled one of his best smiles. “Ken Maynard in Bullwhip Justice an’ The Demolished Man.” He kept smiling, as if he’d really put one over on me. I looked at him with disbelief.

  “You’re kidding!” I said, delighted. “Bester’s The Demolished Man?” He nodded his head, delighted at my being delighted. He knew it was one of my favorite books. “Oh, that’s super!”

  “Super duper,” he said.

  “Who’s in it?”

  “Franchot Tone, Evelyn Keyes, Lionel Barrymore and Elisha Cook, Jr.” He was much more knowledgeable about movie actors than I’d ever been. He could name the character actors in any movie he’d ever seen. Even the crowd scenes.

  “And cartoons?” I asked.

  “Three of ’em: a Little Lulu, a Donald Duck and a Bugs Bunny. An’ a Pete Smith Specialty an’ a Lew Lehr Monkeys is da C-r-r-r-aziest Peoples.”

  “Oh boy!” I said. I was grinning from ear to ear. And then I looked down and saw the pad of purchase order forms on the seat. I’d forgotten to drop it off at the store.

  “Gotta stop by the Center,” I said. “Gotta drop off something. It’ll only take a minute.”

  “Okay,” Jeffty said. “But
we won’t be late, will we?”

  “Not on your tintype, kiddo,” I said.

  * * * *

  When I pulled into the parking lot behind the Center, he decided to come in with me and we’d walk over to the theater. It’s not a large town. There are only two movie houses, the Utopia and the Lyric. We were going to the Utopia and it was only three blocks from the Center.

  I walked into the store with the pad of forms, and it was bedlam. David and Jan were handling two customers each, and there were people standing around waiting to be helped. Jan turned a look on me and her face was a horror-mask of pleading. David was running from the stockroom to the showroom and all he could murmur as he whipped past was “Help!” and then he was gone.

  “Jeffty,” I said, crouching down, “listen, give me a few minutes. Jan and David are in trouble with all these people. We won’t be late, I promise. Just let me get rid of a couple of these customers.” He looked nervous, but nodded okay.

  I motioned to a chair and said, “Just sit down for a while and I’ll be right with you.”

  He went to the chair, good as you please, though he knew what was happening, and he sat down.

  I started taking care of people who wanted color television sets. This was the first really substantial batch of units we’d gotten in—color television was only now becoming reasonably priced and this was Sony’s first promotion—and it was bonanza time for me. I could see paying off the loan and being out in front for the first time with the Center. It was business.

  In my world, good business comes first.

  Jeffty sat there and stared at the wall. Let me tell you about the wall.

  Stanchion and bracket designs had been rigged from floor to within two feet of the ceiling. Television sets had been stacked artfully on the wall. Thirty-three television sets. All playing at the same time. Black and white, color, little ones, big ones, all going at the same time.

  Jeffty sat and watched thirty-three television sets, on a Saturday afternoon. We can pick up a total of thirteen channels, including the UHF educational stations. Golf was on one channel; baseball was on a second; celebrity bowling was on a third; the fourth channel was a religious seminar; a teenage dance show was on the fifth; the sixth was a rerun of a situation comedy; the seventh was a rerun of a police show; eighth was a nature program showing a man flycasting endlessly; ninth was news and conversation; tenth was a stock car race; eleventh was a man doing logarithms on a blackboard; twelfth was a woman in a leotard doing setting-up exercises; and on the thirteenth channel was a badly animated cartoon show in Spanish. All but six of the shows were repeated on three sets. Jeffty sat and watched that wall of television on a Saturday afternoon while I sold as fast and as hard as I could, to pay back my Aunt Patricia and stay in touch with my world. It was business.

  I should have known better. I should have understood about the present and the way it kills the past. But I was selling with both hands. And when I finally glanced over at Jeffty, half an hour later, he looked like another child.

  He was sweating. That terrible fever sweat when you have stomach flu. He was pale, as pasty and pale as a worm, and his little hands were gripping the arms of the chair so tightly I could see his knuckles in bold relief. I dashed over to him, excusing myself from the middle-aged couple looking at the new 21” Mediterranean model.

  “Jeffty!”

  He looked at me, but his eyes didn’t track. He was in absolute terror. I pulled him out of the chair and started toward the front door with him, but the customers I’d deserted yelled at me, “Hey!” The middle-aged man said, “You wanna sell me this thing or don’t you?”

  I looked from him to Jeffty and back again. Jeffty was like a zombie. He had come where I’d pulled him. His legs were rubbery and his feet dragged. The past, being eaten by the present, the sound of something in pain.

  I clawed some money out of my pants pocket and jammed it into Jeffty’s hand. “Kiddo…listen to me…get out of here right now!” He still couldn’t focus properly. “Jeffty,” I said as tightly as I could, “listen to me!” The middle-aged customer and his wife were walking toward us. “Listen, kiddo, get out of here right this minute. Walk over to the Utopia and buy the tickets. I’ll be right behind you.” The middle-aged man and his wife were almost on us. I shoved Jeffty through the door and watched him stumble away in the wrong direction, then stop as if gathering his wits, turn and go back past the front of the Center and in the direction of the Utopia. “Yes sir,” I said, straightening up and facing them, “yes, ma’am, that is one terrific set with some sensational features! If you’ll just step back here with me…”

  There was a terrible sound of something hurting, but I couldn’t tell from which channel, or from which set, it was coming.

  * * * *

  Most of it I learned later, from the girl in the ticket booth, and from some people I knew who came to me to tell me what had happened. By the time I got to the Utopia, nearly twenty minutes later, Jeffty was already beaten to a pulp and had been taken to the Manager’s office.

  “Did you see a very little boy, about five years old, with big brown eyes and straight brown hair…he was waiting for me?”

  “Oh, I think that’s the little boy those kids beat up?”

  “What!?! Where is he?”

  “They took him to the Manager’s office. No one knew who he was or where to find his parents—”

  A young girl wearing an usher’s uniform was kneeling down beside the couch, placing a wet paper towel on his face.

  I took the towel away from her and ordered her out of the office.

  She looked insulted and she snorted something rude; but she left. I sat on the edge of the couch and tried to swab away the blood from the lacerations without opening the wounds where the blood had caked. Both his eyes were swollen shut. His mouth was ripped badly. His hair was matted with dried blood.

  He had been standing in line behind two kids in their teens. They started selling tickets at 12:30 and the show started at 1:00. The doors weren’t opened till 12:45. He had been waiting, and the kids in front of him had had a portable radio. They were listening to the ball game. Jeffty had wanted to hear some program, God knows what it might have been, Grand Central Station, Let’s Pretend, The Land of the Lost, God only knows which one it might have been.

  He had asked if he could borrow their radio to hear the program for a minute, and it had been a commercial break or something, and the kids had given him the radio, probably out of some malicious kind of courtesy that would permit them to take offense and rag the little boy. He had changed the station…and they’d been unable to get it to go back to the ball game. It was locked into the past, on a station that was broadcasting a program that didn’t exist for anyone but Jeffty.

  They had beaten him badly…as everyone watched.

  And then they had run away.

  I had left him alone, left him to fight off the present without sufficient weaponry. I had betrayed him for the sale of a 21” Mediterranean console television, and now his face was pulped meat. He moaned something inaudible and sobbed softly.

  “Shhh, it’s okay, kiddo, it’s Donny. I’m here. I’ll get you home, it’ll be okay.”

  I should have taken him straight to the hospital. I don’t know why I didn’t. I should have. I should have done that.

  * * * *

  When I carried him through the door, John and Leona Kinzer just stared at me. They didn’t move to take him from my arms. One of his hands was hanging down. He was conscious, but just barely. They stared, there in the semi-darkness of a Saturday afternoon in the present. I looked at them. “A couple of kids beat him up at the theater.” I raised him a few inches in my arms and extended him. They stared at me, at both of us, with nothing in their eyes, without movement. “Jesus Christ,” I shouted, “he’s been beaten! He’s your son! Don’t you even want to touch him? What the hell kind of people are you?!”

  Then Leona moved toward me very slowly. She stood in front of us for a few
seconds, and there was a leaden stoicism in her face that was terrible to see. It said, I have been in this place before, many times, and I cannot bear to be in it again; but I am here now.

  So I gave him to her. God help me, I gave him over to her.

  And she took him upstairs to bathe away his blood and his pain.

  John Kinzer and I stood in our separate places in the dim living room of their home, and we stared at each other. He had nothing to say to me.

  I shoved past him and fell into a chair. I was shaking.

  I heard the bath water running upstairs.

  After what seemed a very long time Leona came downstairs, wiping her hands on her apron. She sat down on the sofa and after a moment John sat down beside her. I heard the sound of rock music from upstairs.

  “Would you like a piece of nice pound cake?” Leona said.

  I didn’t answer. I was listening to the sound of the music. Rock music. On the radio. There was a table lamp on the end table beside the sofa. It cast a dim and futile light in the shadowed living room. Rock music from the present, on a radio upstairs? I started to say something, and then knew…Oh, God…no!”

  I jumped up just as the sound of hideous crackling blotted out the music, and the table lamp dimmed and dimmed and flickered. I screamed something, I don’t know what it was, and ran for the stairs.

  Jeffty’s parents did not move. They sat there with their hands folded, in that place they had been for so many years.

  I fell twice rushing up the stairs.