Image of the Beast / Blown
Page 4
shine in quiet green glades and wisdom like milk from
full flowing breasts. Certainly not green milk. White
creamy milk of tenderness and good sense.
Childe smiled. The Great Romanticist. He not only
looked like Lord Byron, he thought like him. Reincarna-
tion come. George Gordon, Lord Byron, reborn as a
private eye and without a club foot. One thing about a
club mind, it didn't show. Not at first. But the limp
became evident to others who had to walk with him day
after day.
The Private Eyes of the novels. They were simple
straightforward men with their minds made up—all black
and white—vengeance is mine, saith Lord Hammer—
true heroes with whom the majority of readers had no
trouble identifying.
This was strange, because the antiheroes of the existen-
tial novels were supposed to be representative of the
modern mind, and they certainly were uncertain. The
antithero got far more publicity, far more critical trumpet-
ing, than the simple, stable, undoubting private eye, the
hero of the masses.
Childe told himself to cut, as if his thoughts were a
strip of film. He was exaggerating and also simplifying.
Inwardly, he might be an existential antihero, but out-
wardly he was a man of action, a Shadow, a Doc Savage,
a Sam Spade. He smiled again. Truth to tell, he was
Herald Sigurd Childe, red-eyed, watery-eyed, drippy-
nosed, sickened, wanting to run home to Mother. Or to
that image named Sybil.
Mother, unfortunately, became angry if he did not
phone her to ask if he could come over. Mother wanted
privacy and independence, and if she did not get it, she
expressed herself unpleasantly and exiled him for an
indeterminate time.
He parked the car outside his apartment, ran up the
steps, hearing someone cough behind a door as he passed,
and unlocked his door. The apartment was a living room,
a kitchenette, and a bedroom. Normally, it was bright
with white walls and ceilings and creamy woodwork and
lightly colored, lightly built furniture. Today, it was
gloomy; even the unshadowed places had a greenish
tinge.
Sybil answered the phone before the second ring had
started.
"You must have been expecting me," he said gaily.
"I was expecting," she said. Her voice was not, how-
ever, unfriendly.
He did not make the obvious reply. "I'd like to come
over," he finally said.
"Why? Because you're hard up?"
"For your company."
"You haven't got anything to do. You have to find
some way to spend the time."
"I have a case I'm working on," he said. He hesitated
and then, knowing that he was baiting the hook and
hating himself for it, said, "It's about Colben. You read
the papers?"
"I thought that was what you'd be working on. Isn't
it horrible?"
He did not ask her why she was home today. She
was the secretary of an advertising agency executive.
Neither she nor her boss would have a driving priority.
"I'll be right over," he said. He paused and then said,
"Will I be able to stay a while or will I have to get out
after a while? Don't get mad! I just want to know; I'd
like to be able to relax."
"You can stay for a couple of hours or more, if you
like. I'm not going anyplace, and nobody is coming—
that I know of."
He took the phone from his ear but her voice was
laud enough for him to hear, and he returned it to his ear.
"Herald? I really do want you to come!"
He said, "Good!" and then, "Hell! I've just been think-
ing of myself! Is there anything I can get you from the
store?"
"No, you know there's a supermarket only three
blocks from here. I walked."
"OK. I just thought you might not have gone out yet
or you forgot something you might want me to pick up
for you."
They were both silent for a few seconds. He was
thinking about his irritations when they had been married,
about how many times he had had to run out to get
things that she had forgotten during her shopping. She
must be thinking about his recriminations, too; she was
always thinking about them when they got together.
"I'll be right over," he said hurriedly. "So long."
He hung up and left the apartment. The man was
still coughing behind the door. A stereo suddenly blared
Strauss' Thus Spake Zarathustra downstairs. Somebody
protested feebly; the music continued to play loudly. The
protests became louder, and there was a pounding on a
wall. The music did not soften.
Herald considered walking the four blocks to Sybil's
and then decided against it. He might need to take off
suddenly, although there did not seem much chance of it.
His answering service was not operating; it had no prior-
ity. He did not intend to leave Sybil's number with the
police operator or Sergeant Bruin while he was with her.
She would get unreasonably angry about this. She did not
like to be interrupted by calls while she was with him, at
least, not by business calls. That had been one of the
things bugging her when they were man and wife. Theo-
retically, she should not be bothered by such matters
now. In practice, which operates more on emotion than
logic, she was as enraged as ever. He well knew how
enraged. The last time he had been at her apartment, the
exchange had interrupted them at a crucial moment, and
she had run him out. Since then, he had called several
times but had been cooled off. The last time he'd phoned
had been two weeks ago.
She was right in one guess. He was hard up. But he
did not expect to be any less so after seeing her. He
intended to talk, to talk only, to soothe some troublings
and to scare away the loneliness that had come more
strongly after seeing the film of Colben.
It was strange, or, if not so strange, indicative. He had
lived twenty of his thirty-five years in Los Angeles
County. Yet he knew only one woman to whom he could
really unburden himself and feel relaxed and certain of
complete understanding. No. He was wrong. There was
not even one woman, because Sybil did not completely
understand him, that is, sympathize with him. If she did,
she would not now be his ex-wife.
But Sybil had said the same thing about men in
general and about him in particular. It was the human
situation—whatever that phrase meant.
He parked the car in front of her apartment—no
trouble finding parking space now—and went into the lit-
tle lobby. He rang her bell; she buzzed; he went up the
steps through the inner door and down the hall to the
end. Her door was on the right. He knocked; the door
swung open. Sybil was dressed in a floor-length morning
robe with large red and black diamond shapes. The black
/> diamonds contained white ankhs, the looped cross of the
ancient Egyptians. Her feet were bare.
Sybil was thirty-four and five feet five inches tall. She
had long black hair, sharp black eyebrows, large green-
ish eyes, a slender straight nose perhaps a little bit too
long, a full mouth, a pale skin. She was pretty, and the
body under the kimono was well built, although she may
have been just a little too hippy for some tastes.
Her apartment was light, like his, with much white
on the walls and ceilings, and creamy woodwork and
light and airy furniture. But a tall gloomy El Greco re-
production hung incongruously on the wall; it hovered
over everything said and done in the one room. Childe
always felt as if the elongated man on the cross was de-
livering judgment upon him as well as upon the city on
the plain.
The painting was not as visible as usual. There was al-
most always a blue haze of tobacco—which accounted
for the walls and ceiling not being as white as those of
his apartment—and today the blue had become gray-
green. Sybil coughed as she lit another cigarette, and
then she went into a spasm of coughing and her face
became blue. He was not upset by this, no more than
usual, anyway. She had incipient emphysema and had
been advised by her doctor to chop off the smoking two
years ago. Certainly, the smog was accelerating her dis-
ease, but he could do nothing about it. Still, it was one
more cause for quarreling.
She finally went into the kitchen for water and came
out several minutes later. Her expression was challenging,
but he kept his face smooth. He waited until she sat
down on the sofa across the room from his easy chair.
She ground the freshly lit cigarette out on an ash tray
and said, "Oh God! I can't breathe!"
By which she meant that she could not smoke.
"Tell me about Colben," she said, and then, "first,
could I get you ... ?"
Her voice decayed. She was always forgetting that he
had quit drinking four years ago.
"I need to relax," he said. "I'm all out of pot and no
chance to get any. You ... ?"
"I'll get some," she said eagerly. She rose and went
into the kitchen. A panel creaked as it slid back; a min-
ute passed; she came back with two cigarettes of white
paper twisted at both ends. She handed him one. He
said, "Thanks," and sniffed it. The odor always brought
visions of flat-topped pyramids, of Aztec priests with
sharp obsidian knives, naked brown men and women
working in red clay fields under a sun fiercer than an
eagle's glare, of Arab feluccas scudding along in the
Indian ocean. Why, he did not know.
He lit up and sucked in the heavy smoke and held it
in his lungs as long as he could. He tried at the same
time to empty his mind and body of the horror of
this morning and the irritations he had felt since calling
Sybil. There was no use smoking if he retained the
bad feelings. He had to pour them out, and he could do
it—sometimes. The discipline of meditation that a friend
had taught him—or tried to teach him—had sometimes
been effective. But he was a detective, and the prosecu-
tion of human beings, the tracking down, the immer-
sion in hate and misery, negated the ability to meditate.
Nevertheless, stubborn, he had persisted in trying,
and he could sometimes empty himself. Or seem to. His
friend said that he was not truly meditating; he was us-
ing a trick, a technique without essence.
Sybil, knowing what he was doing, said nothing. A
clock ticked. A horn sounded faintly; a siren wailed.
Sirens were always wailing nowadays. Then he breathed
out and sucked in again and held his breath, and pres-
ently the crystallization came. There was a definite shift-
ing of invisible lines, as if the currents of force that
thread every centimeter of the universe had rearranged
themselves into another, straighter configuration.
He looked at Sybil and now he loved her very much,
as he had loved her when they were first married. The
snarls and knots were yanked loose; they were in a
beautiful web which vibrated love and harmony through
them with every movement they made. Never mind the
inevitable spider.
4
He had hesitated to stop her when she kissed him all over
his belly, although he knew what was coming. He con-
tinued to restrain himself when she took his penis and
bent down to place her mouth around the head. He felt
the tongue flicking it, shuddered, pushed her head away,
though gently, and said, "No!"
She looked up at him and said, "Why?"
"I never got around to telling you the fine details of
the film," he said.
"You're getting soft!"
She sat up in the bed and looked down at him. She
was frowning.
"Have you got a disease?"
"For God's sake!" he said, and he sat up, too. "Do
you think I'd go to bed with you if I knew I had the
syph or the clap? What kind of a question—what kind
of a person do you think I am?"
"I'm sorry," she said. "My God! What's wrong?
What did I do?"
"Nothing. Nothing under most circumstances. But I
felt as if my cock was frozen when you … Never mind.
Let me explain why I couldn't let you go down on me."
"I wish you wouldn't use words like that!"
"OK, my thing, then! Let me tell you."
She listened with wide eyes. She was leaning on one
arm near him. He could see the swollen nipple, which
did not seem to dwindle a bit as she listened. It might
have increased. Certainly, her eyes were bright, and,
despite her expressed horror, she smiled now and then.
"I really think you'd like to do that to me!" he said.
"You're always saying something stupid like that," she
said. "Even now. Do you hate me so much you can't
even get a hard-on."
"You mean erection, don't you?" he said. "If you
can't understand why my penis wanted to crawl into
my belly for safety, then you can't understand anything
about men."
"I won't bite," she said, and she grabbed his penis and
lunged for it with her mouth wide open and smiling to
show all her teeth.
He jerked himself away, saying, "Don't!"
"Forget about it, I was just kidding you," she said,
and she crawled onto him and began kissing him. She
thrust her tongue along his tongue and down his throat
so far that he choked. "For God's sake!" he said, turning
his head away. "What the hell are you trying to do? I
can't breathe!"
She sat up and almost hissed at him. "You can't
breathe! How do you think I breathe when you're shov-
ing that big thing down my throat? What is the matter?"
"I don't know," he said. He sat up. "Let's have a few
more drags. Maybe things'll straighten out."
"Do
you have to depend upon that to be able to love
me?"
He tried to take her hand in his but she snatched it
away.
"You didn't see it," he said. "Those iron teeth. The
blood! Spitting out that bloody flesh! God!"
"I feel sorry for Colben," she said, "but I don't see
what he has to do with us. You never liked him; you were
going to get rid of him. And he gave me the creeps.
Anyway … oh, I don't know."
She rolled off the bed, went to the closet, and put on
the kimono. She lit a cigarette and at once began
coughing. It sounded as if her lungs were full of snot.
He felt angry, and opened his mouth to say some-
thing—what, he did not know, just so it was something
that would hurt. But the taste of cunt made him pause.
She had a beautiful cunt, the hair was thick and almost
blue-black and so soft it felt almost like a seal pelt.
She lubricated freely, perhaps too much, but the oil was
sweet and clean. And she could squeeze down on his cock
as if she had a hand inside it. And then he remembered
the thing bulging out the pad over the woman's cunt in
the film, and the blood that had been pouring into his
penis became slushy and slowly thawed out and drained
back into his body.
Sybil, who had seen the dawning erection, said,
"What's wrong now?"
"Sybil, there's nothing wrong with you. It's me. I'm
too upset."
She sucked in some more smoke and managed to
check a cough.
"You always did bring your work home. No wonder
our life became such a hell."
He knew that that was not true. They had rubbed
each other raw for other reasons, the causes of most of
which they did not understand. There was, however, no
use arguing. He had had enough of that.
He sat up and swung his legs over the bed and stood
up and walked to the chair on which he had piled his
clothes.
"What are you doing?"
"Some of the smog gotten in your brain?" he said.
"It's obvious I'm going to dress, and it's fairly predic-
table that I'm getting out of here."
He checked the impulse to say, "Forever!" It sounded
so childish. But it could be true.
She said nothing. She swayed back and forth with her
eyes closed for a minute, then, after opening them,
spun around and walked into the living room. A minute