The World Asunder

by Ian Wallace

  It was my turn to close my eyes. “Esther says Kali. I say Burk Halloran, only smaller.”

  We both drank.

  Having tongue-dried my lips, I observed in delayed surprise, “That’s quite a thought-sequence—during approximately fifteen seconds between your reading of her note and your levitation of the rope!”

  He smiled wry. “That long? I guess I am too distraught to think quick.”

  “I think you are some kind of a nose-to-the^grindstone

  genius.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “I’ll make a confession. They think I have some unique kind of detective-logic, and that’s what pushed me up the promotion-line. In fact, I just have hunches. What the hell land of a genius is that?”

  I gazed. “A hunch is an intuition. An intuition is a subconscious patterning of evidence half-noticed. If you have it, God has blessed you: you’re a detective-inspector.”

  He stared at his nearly done drink. “Right or wrong, my intuition is telling me that I have to try to find Esther. This is a compulsion on me, Lil. I’m about to go, do you mind?”

  Some of these crises do open up like umbrellas! Putting down my drink on an end table, I inquired, “Where would you start looking?”

  He sipped conservatively on the ice-weak lees of his drink, then told me: “Once I’ve started driving my car, I’m sure I’ll know.”

  I chanced an admonition: “I will put it to you that this is no time for you to be driving. Let me take you to dinner, then come back here and sleep, or rest anyhow. Start in the morning.”

  Irritated, teeth-sheathed, he shook his head. "Late lunch, not hungry yet And I can not stay here. Lil—”

  “Yes, Dior

  “I shouldn’t be alone, I need pro company. Would you— take me to some motel way out of town?”

  Well: it was one of the two possibilities that I hadn’t been sure about, and it made me reach for my drink again. Having sipped, toying with it I asked it: “Please carry that idea a step or two further.”

  When I glanced up from my drink, he was grinning, but then he sobered. “Lilith, I am—well, God would I love that! But I am not going to cheat on Esther until I know the score. Not even if we have to share a room.”

  Now I was looking at him frankly. He was a type of man I hadn’t previously known in any way at all. He had won my liking and confidence, and without question he was one who could delight me; and if it had gone that way, now I knew that I would have been ready; but since it hadn’t gone that way, different values were introduced, and maybe, as between us two, they were better. I smiled broadly, and he answered my smile: the way his teeth broke through those lips was enchanting. I said, “I will cling to the belief that I could have won you if I had worked at it”

  “I endorse this belief. But I beg you, don’t work: I have this thing about Esther, you see—”

  “I am as pure as the driven snow, Inspector Horse. We could even share a bed without—”

  “No we couldn’t”

  I, wholly serious now: “All right, I agree that you need a pro companion. Two communicating rooms, then, or twin beds in a pinch.” Most earnest leaning forward: “Dio, that was maybe my torch-man in that fantasy with your Esther! Look, I’m between cases, I can have any calls switched to the office next door—I have to go with you!”

  He was practically in consternation. “Look, Lil! I’m not talking about just tonight and I don’t know where in hell I’ll be going! Good girl: drop me off at a country motel and take my car and go back to—”

  “No.” In retrospect it was at once the nicest and the most soul-dangerous “no” I have ever said.

  Slamming his drained glass down on a side table, he came to his feet and joined me on the sofa, pressing both my hands in his hard hands. “Lil Vogel, I do need you with me—specifically you. For looks, they’ll keep me on edge; for brains, we’ll need to pool them; for psychology because we’re both chasing a mutual fantasy—”

  Jumping away from me, he went into the bedroom to pack a minimum of male things. From there he called, “What about your things?” “No sweat,” I answered; “I’ll sleep in panties and bra tonight and buy a couple of changes and a toothbrush tomorrow.” His call: “Got the toothbrush—a new giveaway from an unopened package of toothpaste. Hey— would you accept Esther’s overnight case and night things? I swear I don’t have that kind of fetish—”

  I hate phony suspense, even in a memoir. Yes, he would get me, or I him, whichever; but I require you to accept the truth that neither of us then intended this.

  2.

  We took his car, a Ford four-door, but he made me drive: “I want to think,” he explained curt There was liquor in me, but I popped a restorative pill from my handbag and then it didn’t go badly. We got out of Manhattan (little tunnel traffic) , and he steered me south along the coast During the next hour I drove silently and he sat staring at the road; and there was little conversation, the exceptions mainly being that as we would approach an occasional route-junction, he would tell me where to turn. Once I complained, “I thought I was taking you somewhere, but it seems you are taking me.” Abstractedly he mumbled, “I keep having this draw, I know where to go—” By now I had practically abandoned psychology: this was a sane man who seemed truly under the stress of external compulsion, and all my systematic mind was directed to the problem of trying to fold logic in it. Maybe I wouldn’t find any: he had said that he was mainly intuitive. Me, I was mainly logical—and inwardly I chuckled at that reversal of sex-lore.

  I knew where I was, though, and so did he; and the smell of salt water began to savor the air. I remarked, “This area is lousy with motels, but they’ll all be full; any suggestions?” He, still abstracted: “I’ll know; keep driving.”

  In moon-relieved rural darkness, I pulled up at a stop-sign crossroad; all around were scrub woods, and the salt-smell was enhanced by surf-sound. The sensual combination reminded me that it was nine at night and I was ravenous. “Turn?” I queried. “Straight ahead,” he ordered. I crossed the intersection, drove into darkness, and abruptly braked at a dead end with nothing but woods in front of us.

  Me: “Now what?”

  He: “Cut the engine.”

  I turned the switch: silence. No, not silence; an outside hissing—and the left side of the car slowly settled. I uttered, “I have the sense of a flat tire.”

  Not at all disturbed, he opened the glove compartment, got a flashlight, exited, and peered the tires around. At my window he reported, “You’re half right. Two flat tires. Both on the same side.”

  Positively I asserted, “Can’t happen.”

  “That,” he responded, “is to me the interesting part of it, in view of the evening we’re having. And look: there’s a motel complex, I think.” He pointed to my left: through the trees, several white buildings were moon-illuminated; the nearest wasn’t a hundred yards away....

  A tow truck clanked to a stop behind us, and a rangy middle-aged driver-mechanic climbed out already explaining that business was bad and they were cruising. I got out of the car while Dio was flash-pointing to the flat tires. The driver said, “Open your trunk, I’ll put the spare on the front wheel and tow her in, I’m a mile away.” I followed Dio while he went around rear and I handed him the keys, and he put one into the trunk lock.

  The trunk lid opened, all right Also there was a whining noise, and the whole body rose up about three feet on some kind of spring extensors.

  Having jumped back when the unexpected action started, I was studying the open trunk when I became aware that Dio and the driver were beside the car looking under it. I came around behind them and followed their eyes.

  A broad steel tray sat on the chassis, exposed by the elevated auto-body. On the tray lay naked and erotically supine, arms alluringly extended and legs arousingly open, a dark woman whose deep eyes and lush parted lips called for all three of us....

  We stared.

  The driver said dead, “Don’t go away, I'll have to report this.” />
  The woman vanished and was replaced by an open cubical tin box maybe twenty centimeters on a side, packed with weed. Dio said dead, “You mean because of that marijuana?”

  The driver, having coughed, shaky-responded, “I must be nuts, I swear I saw a woman there, but she just—dissolved into a box of pot, like in the movies—”

  Straightening, Dio gazed at the driver. “While you decide what you’re going to report, why don’t you change the front wheel?"

  The car-body redescended onto the chassis, concealing the tray and the box; the trunk remained open.

  Muttering, the driver shrugged big and went for the trunk. Dio grabbed the two small bags out of the rear seat and steered me into the woods toward the motel. We walked mostly in silence; but at one point he muttered, “That was Esther”; and it came into me that his Esther did look rather like me, only maybe softer and more appealing; and then it came into me that Dio and I had shared another illusion, and that this time a third party had shared it.

  This motel was called Fishermen’s Cove, and it was really a picturesque inn with a big parking lot hidden by shrubs and trees, and it sat ripple-slappingly on one quay of an actual fishermen’s cove with good-sized fish-worn cabin-boats tied up: we could see all that in moonlight over ten o’clock dinner by bringing our faces close to the glass to screen off the dim interior lighting. Mostly, though, we attended to shoving in food: for both of us, rare prime ribs and Chateauneuf du Pape. Faute de mieux, we’d accepted the best accommodations offered by the inn, although we hadn’t seen them yet: communicating chambers, yes, but the large vaulted lower chamber containing the upper chamber, which was a penthouse-platform swinging overhead. Who would sleep where we’d decide when we got there.

  Still pretty tense, we found that the only possible topics for conversation were our illusions and our past love-lives, both of us understanding that the latter must have bearing on the former. We disposed of the love-questions with rather neat dispatch: each of us dropped a few facts, leaving the other to infer a lot.

  His Esther had been young-passionate in 1945; and although Dio deposed that he was a long way from being either physically or psychically deficient in that area, he did have this thing about his careers (first army, then police) with their irregular hours and wearying demands, and during the past year Esther had been relatively aloof and had strayed a lot. How long had they been married? Five years, just over, but they’d cohabited during two prior years. “I’d guess,” remarked Dio, “that even before this Kali, she’d found a lover or two. I haven’t been jealous, but I’ve worried, and the uncertainty has been worrisome.” He left it there for then, and so did I.

  He was looking at me with expectation of reciprocity, and I felt obliged to give about my torch-man; but I kept it concise, not spilling a lot Burk Halloran in 1948 had been a patient in the plush rest-home where I had worked for a couple of years as a staff psychologist. He was a handsomely, impishly graceful Irish-American in his early thirties, with a sense of humor that was bizarre and devious—“quite capable,” I inserted, “of concocting every cockeyed illusion that we’ve seen tonight, if he’d had the power, just for the sport of it.” Burk amazingly blended activeness and profoundly penetrating intellectuality. I had fallen in love with him and had rather intimately helped him through a major crisis; and then I had flown the coop, which might have been dangerous for Halloran except that I had tipped off his psychiatrist before departing. After initial depression, Burk had made steady progress and was discharged half a year later. “Cured?” I had stupidly demanded on the phone. “Vogel, Vogel,” the doctor had clucked, “we never say that.” Whereafter I had rested relatively easy on a working assumption that Burk had risen to the kind of temperate instability which makes for success and even for genius. And some while ago, I had kissed off the crazy romantic hope that he might come hunting for me....

  A Dio-hand came across the table to take my hand. His hand and his voice were warm and gentle: “Excuse the egotistical interruption, but I’ve about decided that Esther wants me to come hunting for her. Do you think?”

  My other hand went on top of his, and I told him positively, “I am sure of it, and it isn’t just a hunch: I saw evidence.”

  Our hands were together an instant longer, and then he pulled back his hand, and sheathed teeth. “You mean that glaring loophole in her note—she gives me carte blanche to get a divorce but signs no renunciation of property rights or alimony? Just in case you’re wondering, Esther is bright enough to know about that—but maybe she left in a hurry, she didn’t think—”

  “She was thinking clearly enough to leave the note on top of a rope that looked exactly like the one her phantom abductor used in the rope-trick.”

  His fist began rhythmically and noiselessly pounding the table-top. His hands were small and wiry with long fingers; he used his hands a lot when he was talking. He squeezed out: “You are giving credence to the illusion that some redhead really stole her up out of the apartment into the sky.”

  I frowned, shaking my head. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that. Tell me one thing: are you obsessively afraid of fire?”

  “My mother was burned to death when our shack caught fire. I was thirteen. She was a widow, or something.”

  What do you say to a thing like that? Well, it depends on the guy and the situation; this was Dio, and it was right here, and I decided on a few seconds of thoughtful silence, after which I moved on. “Look, this is mere spinning, but it’s the best I can do for starters. Esther ran away from you, leaving a note—and I am certain she was hinting that she wanted you to follow if you would. We’ll accept her statement that she was leaving with some man named Kali. When you and I neared your apartment just ahead of four o’clock, you had a—now I have to bring ESP into it—you had a telepathic sense of this disaster, and it objectified itself as this illusion.”

  “I get it The flames were how my fire-haunted subconscious projected the feeling of disaster.”

  “Right.”

  “Why the rope-trick in the illusion?”

  Me, glib: “Your intuition of the rope that was under her note.”

  “Then why was there a rope under her note?”

  I studied the Hennessey that I was finishing off with.

  He added, “And why did you see it all too?”

  I looked up, almost smiling. ‘That I have figured. I think you’re one of those guys who broadcast your psychic crises real loud, and I picked it up telepathically. Which may mean electroencephalographically, for all I know—”

  “And why did her abductor turn out to be your redhead, whom I’d never met or heard about? And why does his name seem to be, not Halloran, but Kali?”

  I swallowed air, sipped and swallowed cognac, tried to save it: “When I picked up your illusion, I put my redhead into it, and you—picked it up from me?”

  He was totally somber. “I won’t dignify that with a comment. I will instead introduce the triple-objective evidence of my misbehaving car and a phantom of my Esther, who instantly was transformed into a box of pot. And I will tell' you what I am almost ready to believe, after rejecting all the material common-sense possibilities that I can think of. I am about to think that some guy somewhere, with enormous transpsychic power and a twisted sense of humor, is playing games with us by projecting illusions into both of us and in one case three of us. What do you think of that?”

  What I was thinking was ultimately dismal; but with difficulty I forced a twisted smile—he had to be the one to say it. “You are an obviously sane detective-inspector, and I have to listen with respect. Go ahead.”

  He did, instantly. “I suggest that this guy Kali really resembles your redhead; and in view of your psychic description of Burk Halloran, including his exotic sense of humor, Kali may be Halloran.”

  I bit: “Then he shrank!”

  Dio countered: “We saw merely his projected hallucination of himself, and I may have projected my own shortness into the hallucination, and you picke
d up that ingredient from me. . . . Okay, that’s far-fetched; no matter, I’ll go on.

  I am suggesting that Kali seduced and stole my Esther, but first he and she plotted out the method together, which accounts for the coincidence of the rope-trick illusion and the rope under the note; and if Kali is in fact your Halloran, that would account for you being brought in on the illusion-ing.

  “No, wait, there’s more. If she wants me to follow her, for some wild reason so does he, or he wouldn’t have let me see him and he wouldn’t have jacked me up just now with the car-acrobatics. And he also wants you to follow him, which is why he let you see him. Now, here’s the next thing: sit tight, Lilith. He wants us here tonight: he made sure we’d stop here by flattening not one but two of my tires, unilaterally.”

  After meditation, I decided that a sip of cognac was in order; I picked up the glass, but my hand was trembling so horribly that I put it down.

  Dio gestured for the check, and both of his hands took both of mine. “We’ll forget it,” he told me, “unless he reminds us again tonight. I had a bottle of Black Label sent up to our room—”