Front matter (continued 7)

Then I told him about my séance with his lambent, incorrigible girl friend.

He did listen.

I have to say that.

He listened like a man in the hands of the Gestapo trying to see if, perhaps, keeping quiet and not moving a muscle will help the pain.

When I wound it up, my compassion was coming back:

"I'm sick of it, Paul! Dave's sweating over you when he already has plenty to keep him busy. We've chased around for you the whole damned weekend—both of us with other things to do, and troubles of our own. Why? We think a lot of you. Because you're having the rough end of the rough time, we are, too. You were shot from worrying about the state of the world. A damned good-looking babe moved in on you and made it twice as rough. And you don't understand yourself. But the time has come to shut the book, Paul. The chapter's finished. There's no epilogue. It isn't one of my stories, boy. No happy ending. You couldn't get her back if you were the chief of police. You could get her back if you were Midas—and that way you wouldn't want her. She got a big throb out of you. She was as honest as she's able to be—for a time. Her mother instinct kept her going awhile. But she was soon laying the boys in the back room even though she was doing your cooking, nights. She offered me a deal—and if that doesn't cure you, son—" I racked the brain for a conclusion—"well, go on up and buy a hunk."

He didn't say anything.

I suppose he sat for five minutes.

His face was just—sweaty, like everybody's—and gray, and apparently relaxed.

When he walked over to the window, I thought I'd won, and my nerves gave an inch or two—so I could go on living a little while longer, myself.

But he leaned way down, lifted his long, slatty leg, stepped out on the terrace, and hopped up on the parapet. Sixteen stories of straight wall.

I went after the God-damned fool.

He turned around and sat there.

"Don't come any nearer," he said. His voice was like bad brakes.

So I leaned against the sill.

He saw, quicker than I, that his ankles were in range of a dive. He pulled them up, pivoted, and stretched out on the top of the wall. It was cement—about a foot wide. And baking hot. He rocked and wriggled for a minute, took off his coat, folded it, and stuffed it under himself. While doing that, he almost lost his balance. He caught a fingerhold on the inside edge of the concrete, which stuck out over the bricks a half or three-quarters of an inch.

"Paul," I said, "for God's sake, come in."

"I like it here."

"Okay."

"I want to think."

"Help yourself."

"You wouldn't understand."

I went back through the window and into my apartment. I was quivering like a broken spring and my mind wasn't tracking. I shoved into the bathroom and poured a glass of water. Equal parts of fright and fury—as intense as I'd ever felt—slopped the water. I drank what was left. Then I went back to the window.

"Listen," I said. "I can't stop you, if you want to knock yourself off. But this is my apartment. Jump from somewhere else, will you?"

"I haven't decided."

"Well, then, come on in and make up your mind. I'm high-shy. I don't like to stand on that terrace. And seeing a guy—even you—silhouetted against my skyline makes me sick at the stomach."

"It's the only thing I ever heard of that makes you sick! New experience for you. You like new experiences. Try to get a kick out of it."

"Okay," I said. "Jump, then, you yellow sissy."

He nearly did. He swung around so his legs dangled in the air—all those stories above the sidewalk. His fingers on the concrete rim turned white and his muscles vibrated.

"Paul!" I moaned at the fool.

He pulled back. "I'm not afraid," he said—as if to himself and in a surprised tone. "It's just that—I haven't quite decided."

"Please, cooky!" I put all the begging I have into it.

He shrugged. "Maybe—later."

He let go and fished in his pockets.

"Wait," I said.

I climbed out again with the cigarettes. Possibly—

"Toss 'em!"

I threw one—he reached—and it sailed out of sight, the sun catching it at the top of its arc. I tossed another. He got that one.

"Better go back inside," he said.

He lighted up and commenced to smoke.

I went in.

By then I was beginning to think a little. If I had a rope, I might get it over him. Only I didn't have a rope. And I might fail on the first try—in which case there probably would not be a second chance. If I could distract him for a bit, I still might grab him. Only, if there was any slip-up about that—he'd dive the sixteen floors. Well, then—what did you try to remind them of? How bright they were? How young? Or did you keep taunting them until they either went, or gave up? It looked as if that last wasn't right for Paul.

My phone rang.

"Mr. Wylie? This is Mr. Harrison—at the desk." He sounded upset. He's a nice guy—the assistant manager.

I said, "Yes."

His sigh seemed relieved. "Would you mind looking out your window? A woman has just come into the lobby who says there's a man in shirt sleeves sitting on the parapet."

"There is," I said. "It's my nephew, Paul Wilson."

Mr. Harrison laughed uneasily. "Pretty dangerous—"

I glanced at Paul. He was staring straight down again. "He's on the verge of jumping."

"Jumping!"

"And I can't get near enough to grab him. Whatever you do in a case like this—for God's sake start doing it quick! Only—if anybody tries to snatch him and he knows it—he'll probably go."

"Oh-my-God!"

"It's a mess. I'm sorry. And I need help. Intelligent help—quick."

"Do what I can."

I went back to the window.

"Who was that?" Paul asked. "Another whore?"

"The management," I said. "You're attracting attention."

He grinned acidly. "I know. Quite a few people already."

"Showing off?"

"Not giving a damn."

I sat down in a chair. I needed to sit down. Presently I called out to him, "If I get Marcia on the phone, will you talk to her?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Because things are past that." He looked up Madison Avenue toward nothing. "Way, way past that."

I smoked a couple of cigarettes.

Nothing happened. The sun went down a few more inches. I suppose the top of the parapet got cooler. Big, square shadows began to ride up the buildings across the street.

"Paul, come on in! Let's talk. You're in no condition to be doing what you imagine is thinking—and you know it! Anybody can put a period after his life, any time. What you need is a vacation. A decent one—with jack to spend—maybe at the seashore or up at Lake George. I'll give it to you. I'll persuade Brink you need the time off—"

He laughed—laughed like somebody masticating gravel. "All the dough in the world couldn't buy me off this perch."

"Nobody's trying to buy you. I'm trying to—"

"Oh, shut up. I want to think."

There was a light knock on my door, at that point. I opened it. A cop stood out there and a fireman behind him and Mr. Harrison behind them. The cop had a tough, smart face and he whispered. "Will he jump if we come in?"

"Search me."

"You okay?"

"More or less."

"Can you keep him talking? We're rigging a net in the apartment below there. We've got a couple of experts on the way, besides. Leave this door ajar—so they can get to your bedroom."

I nodded.

They slipped away.

Paul asked, when I came back, "Who was it?"

"The maid."

He accepted that.

"Cigarette?"

"Thanks."

I got outside and sat on my windowsill, about ten feet from him.

"I remember," I said, "the first time it happened to me."

"What happened?"

"The first time I was really in love. Her name was Ruth. She was a little gal. Light-brown hair and the kind of eyes that look up at you. Little breasts and shy, inquisitive hands. I—"

"Save it for the magazines."

"I was crazy about her. But I had to go to college and I couldn't afford to see her often. Couldn't afford to take her to the proms. A Christmas vacation came around and we threw a party at the house of a friend whose folks had gone south. We all got tight. I missed her when I was dancing—and started looking. I found her upstairs—in a bedroom—with a guy in my class. After that—"

"—you knew they were just like trolley cars."

"When I was working on the New Yorker—I fell again. A gal from Holyoke—"

"Horse manure to Holyoke."

"Paul. What are we supposed to think—to do—when we spend all the energy and time and dough to make a brilliant adult out of a promising kid? By 'we'—I mean at least a hundred men and women. The kid turns out to be super-good. Everybody chips in to make sure he has every possible opportunity. He is tops in his class. He gets an inside hot spot on the most important project in his nation. Every single person who ever knew him—loves him—and is button-popping proud of him. But one day he has his feelings hurt badly—and there's not one thing we can do for him. We try. But it's no dice. So he climbs out of a window and slams about a billion dollars' worth of brains and the time and energy, and hope of other people, to smithereens, on the curb. We bury what's left of him. And then we sit around asking each other what the use is. Our best wasn't good enough for him or for us. We keep asking ourselves what the hell he did expect of life—and of us—that he didn't get."

Paul at least listened—which was a clue: he'd listen to a piece about himself.

But he said coldly, "Your values are pretty sleazy, Phil. Only a day or two ago, you were telling me that we physicists had sinned. That we deserved to be punished. That all we'd done was evil. Now—because you're in a corner—physics is suddenly the most important thing in the nation. May I repeat—horse manure!"

"Sins of omission," I said. "You guys think of yourselves as honest—and you are, in one way. About science, you don't cheat or lie, ever. It's the solitary triumph of our age. And look at the results. Progress in objectivity accelerates by a factor of hundreds—thousands—in a couple of centuries. I'm for that. But that—alone—isn't enough. You birds look at your objective integrity as if it were all there is to virtue. It's not. Listen, Paulo. There are two functions of virtue: one is to find new truths; the other is to dispel old lies; the whole man practices both, equally."

"Grant that—but don't we educate people as fast as we can?"

I shook my head. "Look at you. The scientific description of your situation on this bloody shelf is known to tens of thousands. But not to you. You're the victim of old lies. You're about to toss yourself into the late afternoon because you were so busy learning new truths in physics that you never bothered to dispel the old lies in your psychology. You're a damned anachronism! A burnt offering to Woman. You're a puppet of a lot of myths and legends and poor child training. You might as well be a pagan male virgin—offered up to some fat, female goddess by your tribe. A man that isn't a man. A scientist from the neck up—and a howling heathen from the waist down. Unaware of the fact. A pretty picture!"

"I suppose," he said with the utmost bitterness, "that I would be sitting in your apartment chortling happily—if I had ideals like yours. The scientific integrity of a whore-master."

"My ideals," I said, "at least keep a mediocre author plugging to the end. Yours, apparently won't save one of the world's top mathematicians from one lousy pair of legs."

"That's all you feel about a woman!"

"That's all you feel! Fate took away your candy and now you won't play. It was public candy, anyhow—and only good for all the boys. You wouldn't face that. But if you want to love women realistically, that's just what you'll have to face, among a lot of other things. Love lies a long way beyond Marcia's behavior." I tried to grin at him. "I'm supposed to be a psychologist, myself. There should be a way by which I could persuade what's left of your senses to stop playing Prometheus and get off your rock."

"Outsmart me?"

"Shouldn't I be able? If my dope's any good?"

"It isn't any good, though. Just a flashy bunch of extrapolation and phony biology. You're no real philosopher, Phil."

"Maybe not. Still—it isn't my product. It's Jung's. He's something of a brain."

"Horse manure."

"There is plenty of it down there in the street," I said. "If you want to add yourself—by a method that will make you indistinguishable from the rest of it—"

He doubled up his fist and smacked the concrete. "Can't you see I'm tormented—?"

I shook my head a few times. "Yeah. Everybody can—for blocks."

He began to sob. I inched up from the sill and braced myself. All it would take was about one tear-blinded second—

He must have heard something on the floor below because he stopped gasping, suddenly, and leaned way out. Then he began hitching along the wall. He hitched right past me—his eyes on mine the whole way—and I have never seen any eyes exactly like that, before. They knew what was going on behind them—and didn't know. They weren't maniacal—but they were not sane, either.

When he was well beyond my reach, he looked down again and then hitched some more. He passed the corner of my apartment and came to the end of the parapet. A flat brick wall, rising for fifteen feet, made a backstop for him. He was in a corner. And there weren't any windows below him—because that was how the architect had designed the building. The net idea was out. And so, I thought, was the idea of some sort of expert jump at him from an unexpected angle. Unless the roof offered possibilities. I'd never been up there.

I walked down the terrace.

"That's near enough," Paul said.

I leaned on the hot parapet and looked down. About a thousand people had gathered in Madison Avenue—though it had been almost empty an hour before. In spite of the heat wave, in spite of the desertedness of the whole city, there they were—like bugs spilled out of a tin can. Cops among them—hollering and waving traffic through.

Every insect was white on top where the neck had craned the face up toward us.

I let myself absorb the vertical drop until I was weak.

Vertigo gets to me fast. My psychiatrist said he thought it was a symbol—in my case—for striving. I spent too much effort trying to get to some summit where skill, not effort, alone could take anybody. And the struggle was reflected as a physical horror of high places. There must have been something in it, because after assimilating the idea, I was at least able to live in high rooms without feeling queasy. But there may be even more in it—since I still get sick, hanging around the edge of sixteen-story walls.

Paul also was looking down at all the people and the people constantly arriving.

"I'm going in," I said.

He hardly paid any attention.

Such clothes as I had on were soaked clear through again. I was thinking about changing when the door knocked and the cop stood there with some other men—in and out of uniforms.

"He's moved."

"I know."

"We can't get at him good, there. A net won't be possible. We've got some guys looking over the picture on the roof. But it's risky. Twice, that squad has gotten a line around somebody—and had them get loose and go. One bird threw the rope off before they could pull it tight. And a woman cut it while she was hanging over the street. Can we come in?"

I opened the door. They looked at me. "My name's Black," one said. "Captain—your precinct." He introduced the rest the way an undertaker presents pallbearers to each other. They all went over near the windows and knelt and peeked furtively at Paul.

"Should I stay out there?" I asked.

The tough, bright-looking cop gave me the once-over. "High-shy?"

"Some."

"Do you think he's likely to go?"

"Christ knows! I'm not an expert in this sort of thing."

"Still—you do know him. Mr. Harrison, here, says he works on the atom bomb."

"That's right."

Black swore. "Make dandy headlines. Police allow suicide of scientist."

The younger cop said, "What sort of kid is he? Determined? Gutty? He looks that way."

"Yeah. And a little spoiled."

The cop whistled without making any sound. "Girl?"

I nodded.

"Where's she?"

"Hattie Blaine's," I replied, after thinking it over.

He looked out the window and shook his head. "Jesus!"

I sketched in a little. The men listened.

Black said, "I could send a cruise car up for her—and get her back here—"

I shook my head. "I suspect—he'd bail out for sure, then. His life plan was based on the idea that what she had been—would be rubbed out. Forgotten. If you understand. But she went back to work."

"The higher they are the harder they fall!" Black was grimly amused at the accuracy of the cliché.

And the younger cop said, "It isn't possible to be smart all ways at once, is it?"

"What do we do?" I asked.

He looked at me some more. "Take a shower and put on dry clothes, Mr. Wylie. We'll figure for a while. These things can last hours."

I did that.

They didn't figure much.

"The best we can do," Black informed me, "is to get set up there on the roof. The angle's bad—but we have two good men. If he shows signs of definitely going, we'll take a chance and try to rope him."

They'd been out on the narrow terrace, talking to him. The young cop was fascinated. "He told us that he was working out a personal problem against a background germane to the problem and equivalent to the other stresses of his life. Something like that. What the hell does 'germane' mean?"

"Appropriate," I said. It was near enough.

"When those double-domes go nuts—they still keep talking in their double-dome lingo."

"The nut," I said, "never realizes he's nutty. He thinks you are. That's why there're so many of them."

The cop nodded. "I'd say—the majority of people, sometimes." He shrugged. "I guess when you get into the atom-bomb class of brains, you get pretty chinchy everywhere else."

I shook my head. "The fact is otherwise. The brighter they are—the less likely they are to pull one like this. Only—they still do, occasionally."

Captain Black absently tossed his smoking cigar butt into the artificial fireplace and stepped over the windowsill. We could hear him, down the terrace, talking to Paul—but not the words.

"He got a family we could send for? Anything like that?" the young cop asked.

I shook my head. "His mother died—not by what's called suicide, but by the psychological means that amounted to the same thing. He's a case of a dame-starved kid growing up with too much emphasis on dames and too little knowledge about what they're really like."

The cop gazed at me with a different speculation. "Tough for you."

"I can stand it. I like him. It makes me angry. And it's—embarrassing."

"I'll say."

Time passed.

"They ought to have a gadget!" I talked to pass more time. "Something that they could shoot at a man on such a spot. A light, large net discharged by a Very pistol—maybe—that went too fast to duck and tangled you all up."

The cop wiggled his chin affirmatively. "The number of good, practical ideas buried in Headquarters runs to thousands."

Captain Black came in. "No dice."

Then Dave Berne arrived.

His eyes were the same faithful blue, but unnaturally vivid. He patted my back and shook hands with Black, whom he knew. He stood in the room a moment, peeling off a light-weight jacket and looking at the yellow roses. Then he went over and leaned out the window.

"Hi, Paul!"

"Et tu?" Paul called back.

Dave chuckled. "You've got quite a crowd down there. Had trouble pushing through!" He pulled his head back and said to us, "What gives?"

We told him such plans as existed.

Dave listened and smelled the flowers and moved his eyes to whoever was talking. Finally we'd finished and he grinned. "Well," he said, sighing a little, "let's go and get the damned fool in."

He went and I went after him and the others stayed, peering into the fading light.

Dave whispered to me to hang back a little and I did and he moved on along the parapet till he came to a point just out of range. Paul was watching him with a wary, scornful expression. Dave leaned over the parapet and looked down—and Paul took a look, too.

"Funny," Dave said. "All those yokels. I suppose most of 'em will go along home pretty soon. Suppertime. And soon be too dark to see the fun, anyhow. But some of 'em would hang around all night—even though the street is a God-damned stove-top. Waiting. Waiting and hoping. Hoping. Imagine it! Hoping to see a human being come sixteen stories in slow somersaults. Hoping to see him hit and spatter. Hoping his feet will burst and his shoes will fly off—the way they do, sometimes. Hoping they'll be a Christ-to-be-Jesus big puddle of blood to tell the family about—and blood spattered up to the second story. And a dent in the sidewalk. What the hell is wrong with a bunch of yahoos that'll stand around for hours on account of a hope like that?"

"Very graphic," Paul said.

Dave took a long look, then, at the surrounding roofs—the vertical rows of windows, some now electrically lighted, and some flared with the last copper rays of a sun that was going down in Jersey behind the Orange Mountains where I used to make field maps when I was a Boy Scout. He took still another look at the blue-powder sky, drew one deep breath, and hopped lightly up astride the parapet.

Paul was startled.

So was I.

And so were the cops. They yelled, "Hey!"

Dave made a "cease-fire" gesture behind his back. He inched along the parapet toward Paul, a ways. "You're going inside in a bit, son," he said quietly.

"I haven't decided. And don't rush me."

"But you will. Look, Paul. You know me—pretty well. And you know a good deal about me. From Phil. So listen. I'm a no-account yid bastard who never got—and will never get—a fair shot at using the ability he thinks he has. All I can do is outsmart other corporation lawyers—and get paid big dough for it."

Paul said sneeringly, "If you want to start a self-pity contest—"

"Nope. I was thinking about something else. Pride. Real pride. Things to be proud of. One's you. You weren't born behind any eight-ball. You've got ten times the brains of Phil, here, and me put together. You're in there fighting. And you're a guy—one of the guys who run about three in a hundred—who can look at a yid like me and not see that two thousand year old, imaginary eight-ball. I appreciate that. I'm proud some people can be like that."

"Don't be childish."

"I'm not. I'm just pointing out that—potentially—you're valuable. I have no value. You—and the guys like you—can probably figure out the stuff we need to go on fighting for freedom. You can probably lick the new tyranny, and maybe even without carving holes in the country and paying out the best young blood. And then we'll have a chance to go on with the liberty scrap. That's what you can do. It means a lot to guys like me—who never had a chance to draw one free-and-equal breath in his life. Not you as a person. You as ideas. So all right. That's that. Maybe you hate your job. Maybe it's a wrong thing. Maybe all the world has left, for now, is a choice among wrong ways. Personally—if that's so—I take our choice. America's. I'm no Stephen Decatur—but that's how my feelings go."

"If you don't mind," Paul said, "I'd just as soon be spared the patriotic harangue."

"Sure. I'm through. And you're coming in, soon, now." Dave let go of the ledge, pulled back his shirt sleeve, and peered at his wrist watch. "You're coming in—or I'm bailing out. In five minutes, Paul, my son, if you don't get off—I take off."

I was listening to Dave's voice and a terrible fear possessed me. But Paul heard only the shouting of agony within himself. "Wiseguy," he said.

Dave smiled a slow, gentle smile. "Wiseguy? Maybe so. But how long this wiseguy lives—is up to you, now."

"Do you think I believe you? Do you think I'm so stupid?"

"I mean it." Dave looked up from his watch and his eyes fixed on Paul. "I'm not kidding, son."

I could see the color change in Paul's cheeks. He'd been pale. He became ghostly. He locked eyes with Dave Berne.

The slightest stir moved the hot, early-evening air.

People sat at windows and on roofs; people stood in penthouse gardens with highballs and binoculars, enjoying the sensation, making a new ritual of it. A flashbulb blazed up and died in the instant, on a setback, across and down the street, where some news cameraman with a telephoto lens was getting a shot for his tabloid.

"I have," Dave said quietly, "about two hundred seconds left."

"What a cheap thing to do!" Paul spoke harshly.

Dave smiled even more and he nodded. "It's all I have—my life. Cheap—I said so."

Paul stood up.

It was horrifying. He'd been sitting that long while. His arms were cramped. His legs must have been asleep. He tottered to his feet, rocked on the near-motionless air, careened his arms, stamped, glanced down with a round and dreadful focus of his eyes, caught his balance, and looked triumphantly at Dave.

"You're kind of forcing my hand," he said.

Dave stood up, too, then—very quickly, and without tottering. Stood up—and looked at his watch. "I mean, too, of course, Paul, that if you go—I'll also go. I'll try for you—and standing, like this—we'll go together. You see—you have no choice but to go in, or take me along. And there's only about a minute left."

I went closer. "Dave, for the love of God!" My voice was a cackle. "If this thing has to be gone through with—I'm the guy. After all, Dave—I've only got a little bit left anyhow! Get down, for Christ's sake—and let me get up—"

Dave hardly glanced at me. "Be quiet, Phil. Stay where you are." He turned again to look at Paul.

And there they stood, swaying slightly, their eyes, their wills fastened together in conflict over the simple stake of life and of death. They defied each other—against the pale-blue heat of the evening sky. A murmur came up from the street, a muddled sob, as the watchers noted the change of position, the new precariousness, and sensed the imminence of climax. The sound boiled and grew and beat the bricks all the way up from the infested thoroughfare.

"Half a minute," Dave said, above the susurration.

I couldn't move.

Paul couldn't tear away his eyes from Dave: each instant stood alone and almost still.

"Ten seconds," Dave said. And he turned around—facing nothing—to jump.

A great cry escaped Paul.

He toppled on the terrace—and passed out.

Dave about-faced and stepped down lightly.

11

It was twenty-one o'clock, which is to say, nine that evening.

Dave had eaten dinner with me and gone off to another meeting of his maestros. To look, he said, for the silver lining of the silver screen.

Not even mentioning Paul.

Not seeming to be affected....

Paul was in a hospital.

A private hospital. The cops had wanted to send him to Bellevue for observation. But Dave had persuaded them and arranged to have my nephew taken on a stretcher down the service elevator and transported by ambulance to a safe place.

I'd called Ricky and told her about it. Told her again that I'd be back in Buffalo by the following evening, in all likelihood.

And I'd called Karen, my daughter, and warned her of what she would see and read when the morning papers reached her country doorstep in Connecticut.

Nine o'clock.

The next day would be Monday.

I waited.

Dr. Adams was late. The charred cigarettes piled up.

At last, he phoned from the lobby.

Come up.

One of those psychiatrists about whom interviewers write:

... nothing of the abnormal about him; he would be mistaken anywhere for a successful businessman....

Because Dr. Adams took considerable pains to look exactly like a successful American businessman who would be mistaken anywhere.

dark, chalk-striped suit, polished brown brogues, foulard tie, fifty-one years old, seventy-one inches high, a hundred and seventy-one pounds, heavy horn-rims in his breast pocket with the Parker 51, smoothly brushed iron-gray hair, smoothly brushed iron-gray eyebrows, smoothly unbrushed iron-gray eyes, the outdoor complexion that is imperative for indoor men of distinction, and the prize already awarded for filling in the last line of the limerick:

Healthy, wealthy and wise.

You couldn't help liking him if you tried, and believe me, I tried. I tried because Adams (Hargrave H.P.) was the head of the private hospital where Dave had sent Paul and I wouldn't have one of those top-notch third-rate psychiatrists fooling with my nephew.

He said he'd always wanted to meet me and I said I'd never heard of him and he laughed because he was amused, not because he laughed when he didn't know what else to do, like an American businessman.

He sat down in one of my chairs and refused a drink and said, "Tell me all you think I ought to know about Paul."

Three hours and several hundred questions later he left.

Paul was going to be all right.

Not soon—but someday when he'd learned the masochisms, sadisms, castration complexes, repressed homosexual feelings, mistaken anima identification, archetypal possessions, and other data not shown by the meters in his laboratory.

Hargrave H.P. Adams had plenty of what it would take. I wouldn't have minded asking him some of my own questions. He had come up with a few suggestions and formulations unknown to me....

That brought the evening up past midnight.

I felt wretched.

You are apt to, when you think they're going to stand you against the stone wall the next morning.

There were, of course, Tom's pills.

I rolled them out in my hand and just looking at them gave me a fuzzy taste in my mouth so I rolled them back.

It was one to think yourself out of.

I went into the living room and climbed through the window and peered down into the glittering slot of Madison Avenue until, all of a sudden, I began to shake. I almost threw up before I could scramble back into the apartment.

I sat down and stared at the sky.

You could still see a few stars in the haze. The night was as close as a pressure cooker.

My nausea left slowly; my shakes subsided.

In states of this sort I usually try, if possible, to make a list of Things to Do.

Things to Do on Sunday Night in the Big City, after the witching hour.

One can walk the streets. Go to the Park. Read. Eat. (But not sleep.) One can take a sightseeing bus to Chinatown. The taxi dance halls are open. The all-night movies. Any of numerous friends— or my brother— would sit up and talk till morning. I could by simply lifting the telephone and dialing a number fill my apartment with assorted pretty girls. Or just Gwen. Why not? The image appeared the woman-lines, the dry-martini taste of a woman's libido Gwen's cuprous hair; and it was not Gwen at all but an image in myself. Who she was, I had no idea. But I knew I'd had enough of the Gwens in this world to last until my next reincarnation or, possibly, the second coming of Christ in Anno Double-Domini. (Tomorrow, I thought, begins another reincarnation) It was enough of a list.

I had now collected sufficient Things to Do so as to go on sitting in my chair, which was all I desired to do: I had somewhat collected myself.

The sky belched light.

I leaned forward, looked, and half of the hazy stars were erased, gone, done for, hidden behind an invisible tumble of nimbus.

My nerves let themselves down another degree.

I went around the room, emptying an ashtray the night maid had overlooked, fixing myself a glass of hot, powdered coffee.

And back to my chair.

Now, across the parapet, across the well-learned silhouette of buildings opposite, the undersides of clouds were heated up. Their contours showed in brief, stammering flashes of lavender, as if they were gigantic lamps which some celestial electrician was trying to connect with a frayed cord.

At my side, the exhausted curtain came to momentary life—then perished again in the swelter of the room.

Gwen was an image. Whoever she was, I saw what I saw, looking from within to what lay within. Another item for Forbisher-Laroche: Why visit the fille de joie? Because she is more I than She.

Yvonne, then?

I gave the matter my consideration—and half an eye to the approaching weather.

"Blow, blow, thou bitter wind Thou art not so unkind In this man's latitude." Hark ye, Sir Bughouse: You don't know anything.

All you know about Yvonne is what you read in the newspaper advertisements.

She is a collection of costly, streamlined surfaces.

An accumulation from high-class department store counters.

And a statistic from a book that has not yet been published owing, doubtless, to pressures from the Neo-Christian-Centrist-Totalitarian Renaissance.

Did you think she was a woman?

She was a dream.

An arrangement of electrons, a mess of mesons, in your cranium, Sir Spatterwit.

There must be blah-diddie-blah-blah (statistics, pal) happy homosexual hours for housewives and houris

ergo we, Wylie, have witnessed Onesuch. What a premise! What a casual conclusion. O Lydian ease! O languorous Lesbos! (O legislators! You left out the ladies!

And our legally innocent Yvonne has homed to Pasadena's passes, also

Healthy, wealthy and wise.)

Must it not be assumed that blah people are happy and blah people are given to such excursions, wherefore blah per centum of the excursionists are happy?

Certainly. But Yvonne? What is she?

Sir Psychologist, Lord Hack, Keeper of the Happy Ending, can you not also hypothesize a hundred different valid denouements?

Certainly.

When the poor, unknown child returns, what Weltschmerz may not seize hold upon her? What nostalgia? What fantasy or recollections? What esoteric envies? What odd curiosities? What cooling after the confidences? What illogical new distastes? What unexpected spousely piques? What dither? What clandestine or common experiment with all what unsweet ensuite?

Never congratulate the Fates, emir;

it makes them self-conscious ... undependable.

A point to remember should you ever set down a hundred hours of pseudo-autobiography:

Lessons in Light Lycanthropy: seven essays by Philip Gordon Prismaggot.

Now came thunder, like sounds in the intestines of distant elephant herds; now, my curtain rose as eerily as a medium's table and flopped back to lank alignment with the wall.

I saw the point:

In the quest for the woman-in-skirts, some of us fail to notice that the woman-within may be partly and helplessly a perverse wench, attesting by default to all the oversights of her masculine lord: us.

It was a remarkable discovery and explained occasional tendencies of numbers of my gentlemen companions.

Given another five years, caliph, and you could resolve this situation—this exotic act of the inner She who rules whatever crannies her master shuns in conscious male conceit.

If you happen to be the kind of person who, out of mere idleness, or from scientific motive, or in our poor common cause, is willing to trephine his own soul for a better look, you will find such dances going on there, such images and integers of the complicated flesh.

If you announce the results, however, you are liable to go to Hecate. Hecate County, I mean.

Unless you do so, that is, in plain wrapper and with a Ph.D. Cf.:

"The inner natures of all men and women partake of the natures of the opposite sex—a psychological phenomenon in some forms openly expressed by modern society (O moms, O Mummers!), but in other forms suppressed with the full force of public opinion. What public opinion suppresses, the individual endeavors to conceal both from himself and from society. Nevertheless, were the individual not equipped with the psychological elements of the opposite sex, comprehension and sympathy between the two would be impossible. And this 'feminine' quality of a man—for example—may even project on real women, in inverted form, those universal, adolescent feelings toward his own sex which the conscious adult man repudiates. Hence, as Cadwallader, Pratt and Razzle say, in their lucid monograph—"

But if you express the results in terms of palpable feelings and acts—rather than in this lack-life lingo of pedagogy—the very gents and gals who share the same sensations will rise as one (owing to the general habit of suppression) and breathe down your neck with a blowtorch.

When you see them coming you will know what troubles them that they do not know.

It is, always, their responses to your perceptions.

Themselves—not you.

Yvonne, to put it in the terse form, like Gwen,

was also in a sense a shimmering fragment of a dislocated inner me.

If you are distressed by her,

the time has come to bore a hole in the thick skull of your own soul and see the remarkable tittup going on there.

Lightning struck a graph on the sky.

I sat learning about myself.

If, indeed, the Final Report was due, I might as well review my material. At God's Great Judgment Seat, witnesses who did not bother to notice what was really happening inside themselves—and, of course, prejudiced or dishonest witnesses—will undoubtedly go to the Hotter Hecate.

I thought about Paul for a while and decided it was time for Paul to think about himself.

I thought of Socker Melton and perceived there was no reason, any more, for a single soul to go to any church, save instinct—

which the churches denied thrice whenever they opened their sanctimonious mouths three times.

I thought lovingly of my country

and lovingly of the whole world.

I sent greetings to the Chinese and the Hindus and the Africans.

I wished that I might live to see if the bombs fell

and what the people did afterward.

Then I appreciated that, following any resolution of such affairs—

of bombs or none, airborne plagues or none—

I would wish in this same fashion to live to see

what they did

when a billion starved

when four or five billions, produced in the uncontrolled birthorgies of the devout and the innocent, over-horded this little globe

what they did when the metals ran thin—in a century or so

when idiotic breeding decayed the human line to a rabble incapable of sustaining liberty or order or technology

when the last water under the earth dried up

when the sea thickened

when the moon approached.

Indeed, there is no limit to wishing one might assist at meeting challenges old Toynbee may never have thought of—

inevitabilities that only man can avoid and that, as yet, he does not even consider as Necessary Works. They are denied by Time magazine.

Aortas of lightning and branched arteries of electric fire now diagrammed the clouds. Across the roofs, thunder ricocheted; it rolled like tumbrils in the avenues.

A steady press of air flapped the curtains and I moved my chair a little to escape their nervous abrasion.

This fetid wind depressed me.

My thoughts settled in a muddy ooze and lived beneath the riffled surface enviously, for that it seemed alive.

And in this separation I saw more views.

The intellectual, I deplore—scholar, economist, sociologist, big literary man. The sorry lot have spent half the twentieth century admiring the engines of their minds and not bothering to feed knowledge into them or raw materials; now, with the gauges falling, they have nothing to say excepting only to repeat their proud, intellectual admission of obsolescence.

The critic, I deplore; he sits upon his flagpole with his radio, his sandwiches and his displayed latrine, handing down opinions of what is happening under the earth, from which he sees an occasional man emerge whom he invariably deduces to be a Troglodyte or a Morlock.

The philosopher of modern times is my favorite joke; he stands at the head of the Faculty—without faculties of his own; he sums up the wisdom of the mind without appreciating he no longer understands what his own mind is. Were he even as honest as the psychiatrist he disdains, he would get his psyche analyzed before he undertook to forward the discussion of awareness. But what philosopher ever consented to an effort at learning something of himself before pontificating upon the All of everybody else? That still, small science of psychology, which he elbows behind his panoply of classic names, has turned him into a quack—an astrologer among astronomers and the barker for a medicine show at a convention of true physicians.

The preacher—dressed in the anonymous odds and ends of all the instincts of the animal kingdom and holding this shoddy surplice to be a white and spotless raiment—the one, true robe for Ascension—is my jester, for being mad and comical and also for speaking so much wisdom and for his good heart, when he has one.

This is what I believe about them—

and they are what I am:

Intellectual, critic, philosopher, and preacher.

Hoist by my own plutonium petard.

For all my data have, still, an inadequate access to my heart. It laughs and weeps too often without consulting the encyclopedia in my head or the new Book of Rules I have commenced there.

I saw Excalibur and could not wrench it from the sea,

Touched the Grail—and could not swallow,

Wandered the far mountains, came upon a new Decalogue, and could not lift the tablets to bring them down.

Prophet, maybe. Pilgrim, perhaps. But only in the intellectual, critical, philosophical, evangelical senses.... Happy? The ego was often happy—his big ego. At Peace?

He had tranquillity where other men did not and joy where they were only confused; but, in their simple pleasures, it was he who felt confusion, he who too frequently was but a spectator, he who failed with his blood to pursue the truth his brain so lucidly, so uselessly delineated.

Human nature, he decreed, need not be dishonest or dishonorable; let us throw off this old-church myth, this pew-filler, that men are by their very substance evil and undependable. Having said his say he daily marched into the humanities and acted with a good deal less than integrity complete. Like a very ass.

Still he believed it. The truth shall make ye free. Still he cried out that men are born for freedom. And he died, a prophet without particular honor in the home town of himself. He shouted: Forever learn the new Down with everything as is Seek God beyond his Holy Names Behold yourself (Intellectual, critic, philosopher, preacher) The while, he beheld but morsels of himself, and—like other men—admired them as if they were the fabric of reality and not the gingerly scissored swatches of one awareness. Well, go away now, Wylie. It is the time, as you so intellectually predicted, for an improved you or a better somebody to take over the problem. Good night, sweet hypocrite. Dauntless disappointment. Oaf. Of course, I argued with myself against self-condemnation. I am a contemporary man, I insisted.

Too conditioned by father and mother, school, church, America, the common law, and this and that, and you, and you, to expect in a single lifetime (not too long, either) that I could, by whatever authenticity of effort, penetrate thousands, thousands, thousands of years of the unpenetrated stuff in my superego and discover the true whole of me beyond: the conveniently overlooked, the misrepresented, the tabooed, the forgotten, the unfrocked, the submerged structure of humanity itself.

And I argued: Even if I did this, it would be nothing. What I said was reason, they would say was sacrilege. What I said was love, they would call obscene. What I said was truth, they would call nonsense. My hope would bring them but despair. My laughter would wring their panicky tears. My God would also be their Devil. And some of my ideals would seem un-American. They would call my route to understanding a blind labyrinth. Their scientists would find me emotional. Their priests—cold, analytical, and heartless.

Every instinct of my society would belabor me whenever I pointed out its valid opposite. And when I said, These are but local, temporal contradictions—seen together, they can be transcended, understood, contained by a man who rises above them to look down upon them, or by a man who shoulders them, why!!! All who live by the exploitation of one side of any paradox, all the mighty engineers and all the honored men of God, would jump at me.

And they would finally corner me somewhere, breaking my own rules.

The storm was upon the city, now. The oncoming cold front had won the battle of the isobars. Lightning hissed and hit some nearby edifice, accompanied by a blast of thunder. The hammer of Thor, the flashbulbs of Zeus flooded the metropolis with pale, stroboscopic light. Buildings quivered under the cannonade. Inside them the millions cowered and crossed themselves or stood admiring at their windows, each, according to his nature, responding to the grandeur of liberation.

The first drops splashed upon my parapet. My curtain stretched like a flag. Papers blew. I shut the window and ran about in the pleasant excitement of the arriving storm, making fast my small interior. The world beyond churned in ecstasies of rain, din, and colored light that showed no more than light's existence. My lamps glowed for a moment a sinister red, and came up again.

I sat there after finishing my little errands, preoccupied with the loud allegory in the street.

The psyche has its climate.

Every burning drought serves by its precise degree to lift the waters of the earth for rains—and floods, too. Every deluge brings fertile substance to the spirit's plains and exposes the rich minerals on its crags. In the cold, the plants rest; in summer, they make ready the ice-resistant seeds. The trick is not—as men believe—to become but a willful rain-maker—endeavoring by rites, fasts, dances, or sleets of solid carbon dioxide to alter the immutable for some hour's advantage. This is failure; whatever such methods steal here must be repaid elsewhere. The great accomplishment of man is to understand the relationships of climate, appreciate them all, adapt his soul to every temporal vicissitude—in the knowledge that whoever is free from pride in this one good or prejudice against that special evil cannot be engulfed, or eroded, or burned alive, or frozen into the sparse tundra of intellect, of asceticism.

He—and he alone—conveys the mutations of consciousness who tends his green valley undismayed by knowing it is the valley of winter shadow. And could he own all the reasoning power of man—could his soul present within him all that women know but cannot say—he would be as God.

After a time the storm somewhat diminished. The city hissed like the embers of a great fire that resists hose and bucket.

Now, I was invaded by that projection of self-pity which Catholics think is love and Protestants believe is duty. I saw Ricky and Karen and my family, all my fond, patient friends—in sorrow. Great tears glistened inside me and their tiny counterparts ran on my cheeks.

No, I cried. Spare me not for myself—I am reconciled; but for them.

I investigated such intricate delicacies in Ricky as I have not attempted to describe here and I saw how sorrow would run through them all; I watched the infinite loyalty of a daughter turned by the slab of a tomb; I saw my family lifting up the load of their one more bereavement and my friends kicking stones, not selfishly, but for the world they hoped I might someday somehow bring my jot of meaning to.

I paced the muggy flat and cursed.

And more.

I shall not tell you for you already know the sentiments whereby love, and duty, too, are transferred. Only at long, long last I realized how much I, who own nothing but my inner self, had imagined I owned them.

It was an injury I'd done them.

And so one more illusion set aside its mask, at least for that while, that now.

How many there were!

How often I saw them on other countenances; how rarely I lifted them from my own.

Finally, I fell asleep.

An old, old man—sitting in a chair.

PART FIVE

Coda

Rain teemed in the stone-gray morning.

My little Big Day.

A tepid stew was strained from the colander of heaven and dripped in lachrymose gray juice that steamed on every brick and tile and slate and on the asphalt acreage of the street.

I sent for my drab breakfast. You are familiar with its one element. A cup and a cup and a cup.

I set myself to my last installment. For a while, the inked deletions wavered and ran off the track. I went to the window and watched the rain smoke on my parapet—looked up at the insipid sky—found no one there—and finally turned to the roses which drooped a little in the corner of the room—drooped but glowed—and perfumed every glaucous shadow of the morning with fond recollection. The lines came straighter, after that.

By and by I called Hugo about my ticket.

"Closed in," he said. "They're landing a few planes still—but they've delayed departures. Later, it's supposed to clear—and it'll be cooler. This is the front of a high coming in from Canada."

Closed in.

"Shall I try the evening flight?"

"Sure," I said.

I gave the number of the sanitarium.

"Oh, yes, Mr. Wylie, Mr. Wilson had a comfortable night. He's talking to Dr. Adams, now. I couldn't interrupt. He seems quite cheerful—said if you phoned to tell you he'd call back when he finished his consultation."

I turned over the last page—read, cut one more paragraph, marked the lines on my long tally sheet, counted them, and felt, suddenly, the negative pressure of completion—the vacuum's strain, the sense of deprivation. Work can be addictive—one more self-enchantment of the cortex—another of the infinite autohypnoses. And when the addict's done with it, what comfort is there for his unemployment?

I stacked the many pages, scribbled a note to Harold, and phoned to his office that the manuscript would be ready for his messenger at the desk. A few merry hours and a little excitement for the profligate, dun days of my fellow citizens, God bless and pity them—a vicarious trip beyond the confines of mass production—a description of the flavor of a few of the trees they had cut down.

Bill came for it and carried it to the lobby.

Now, my clothes.

My costume.

Everything was finished

with the possible exception of me.

Rain fell all around the marquee—in a wet, funereal fringe.

The doorman stood in the street beneath his great umbrella, whistling. Two old ladies waited impatiently, jostling each other and batting annoyedly at their pocketbooks. They seemed to expect the whistle to conjure up a yellow taxi from the fourth dimension and because it took Al five minutes to hail an empty, the elder of the two put back her dime in her purse and snapped it with the righteous authoritative sound of a Norn's shears.

"Let's go to Gimbel's first," she said.

But the other wanted to start in Lord and Taylor's.

They whisked away debating this.

And I went soon—through the leaden atmosphere, on the black and slippery pavement.

The people were there in the office ahead of me.

Mr. So-and-so. Mrs. So-and-so. Miss So-and-so.

The nurse was there, too.

It was where we had come in. Where we all do. Where we leave.

I sat, batting the drops from my trouser cuffs, smelling the damp feathers of the anxious poultry.

I found my magazine.

At last

"Mr. Wylie."

It was still a different doctor—a plump little man wearing glasses which took the radiance of his floor lamps as a shield so I could not see his eyes. His neutral hair was cut as short and even as fur.

"I'm glad to make your acquaintance," he said. "Have a cigarette. I've read your books."

I took his cigarette. Inauspicious token.

The condemned man smoked a hearty breakfast.

"Not all of us physicians deserve such a keel-hauling." He laughed at the way I'd rubbed the nose of his trade in its sins and pomposities. This was to show me his nose was immaculate.

"Sure."

He lighted his own and smoked the way doctors often do—like schoolkids with Cubebs.

"Personally, I think it's a shame a man with ability like yours for putting words together should get mixed up in this Jungian stuff."

The place had been done by a decorator—a decorator who saw a surgeon's waiting room as something soothing in ivories and sepia and faint gold. And putting words together is just a trick, too; it doesn't involve knowledge or sense—just lucky knack.

I cut a smile in my face for him. "Talk it over, sometime," I said.

He smirked interest in himself. "I'm a sort of cross between a Freudian and a semanticist, Wylie. What do you think of semantics?"

"The poets understood it before Korzybski."

"Very good! Very! Still—"

"—a means. A useful insight." I felt a bead of sweat roll from my armpit down my corrugated ribs. "The basic assumption is mistaken, though. It omits instinct. No cortical rearrangement will accomplish much, even with semantics, until it admits instinct—"

"I always wondered whether you understood the subject. Guess you do. But I still don't see Jung's slant."

How cleverly the thumb and finger de-wing the caught fly! And how the fly beats its legs in satisfactory protest! If I had injured his composure in some book or other, some essay, he would avenge it now. I stared at the flaring spectacles of this penny-ante sadist and swore to myself that he could sweat me—and all his full waiting room—till Gabriel put his brass horn to his lips before I'd twitch my foot. And in this outlandish, familiar crisis of our everyday relations, I brought forth with the energies of wrath another formulation.

I blew smoke at the fat little hamster. "You can put it this way. Jung sees the source of the superego as unconscious, too—just as Freud sees the id. To Jung—both are continuums of instinct. That's all. Any culture—even the culture of you physical scientists, which is mostly yet to come—rises from instinct, not from the frontal lobes. If you think of superego as subconscious in source and merely the opposite of id, you can understand Toynbee—and Toynbee's error about a churchly salvation for this day and age. You might actually understand Jesus—and what Christianity was intended to be to people. You can understand a great deal that even most psychologists don't know about."

"Interesting," he said, and he gave up. There were papers on his desk. "Like to mull it over with you someday." He discarded two or three sheets. "I've got a report on you here somewhere." He found it, finally. "Negative." He glanced at me and chuckled. "Cobb, my associate, was fooled. Told me he was all but sure of carcinoma. The thing—" he read to himself—"is a rather rare lymphatic growth. But two or three mild doses of X-ray will obliterate it. You'll never be able to see the site. Cobb will give you the first treatment straight off. Only take a few minutes. Just hold your mouth open—and shed your troubles." He chuckled again. "Mighty glad to meet you, Wylie. Maybe, someday, you'd come up to Westchester and talk to a little group I'm a member of—"

I said I would, breaking my rule. And that was that.

It happens to millions. The frightful diagnosis, the aching interlude, the laboratory check, reprieve. Till next time. It is one of the you-knows.

Half an hour later I went down to the level of the street. The lobby of this particular medical building was a poorly lighted, sparsely furnished marble sepulcher and along it lay a track of corrugated rubber matting upon which were the coming and going footprints of us all. I sat on a stone bench.

Weakness was for a while my only sensation.

My thoughts ran feebly.

They had given it back to me.

I was getting used to the process.

I should exult—

deliver myself of some noble message, immediately.

I have nothing to offer you but the Four Biles: blood and sweat and tears and W.C.

A doorman appeared from behind a fern that had been handed down from Pharaoh.

"Something funny, Mac?"

"Not very. It's just that I've lost my mind."

"People have lost everything else in this damned hall!"

He went away.

Out in back, I suppose he had a boat to ferry people across the Styx.

Soon I stumbled to the skirling thoroughfare and waved at cabs until one stopped.

Or maybe it was a hearse.

Or maybe it was a singsong boat plying in the rain alongside the doorman's draped dinghy.

Certainly it was occupied by a multitude of people, many of them dead and many of them trollops.

Want Immortal Life?

Want me?

My reaction would come—next week—next month—never.

I'd already had it.

Since Thursday, I had been consumed by my reaction.

This was robust information.

My heart resumed its job.

The infinite, posterior brain relaxed.

The small, frontal analogue took sensible direction.

Our house in Florida would go on building now—for us. The flower-filled patio and the white roof with bunting vines abloom—the cypress bedroom up among the branches of live oaks, melaleucas, orchid trees, and sweet frangipanis—the workroom with books all around, a raised fireplace and a rail to put my feet on while someday, perhaps, I marked the typed pages of the long-projected Explanation. I could write it. I could devote all my time to it: twenty-four thousand dollars were going—not into my estate—but my account.

I spun the Astolat's revolving door.

Ricky stood there—bright omen and good harbinger! Prayer answered and that best conduct I am capable of, rewarded. She wore a violet suit to match the strangest tint of her bejeweled gaze. She wore a hat with a violet feather to joust adversity and make the place for joy. Raindust glittered in her dark curls and the silver in her curls. She was smiling as she signed the register. How much she smiles!

She saw me.

"Darling!"

We kissed casually. We always do. Perhaps we are a little self-conscious in public and this may be because we are not, when we are alone with each other.

I thought she was there in response to the mute messages of the weekend. To go back with me if I wanted to go back—to stay if I wanted to stay. Possibly to shop for a day. But suddenly I could sense the wrongness of that.

"I decided I better fly down to see the doctor," Ricky said. "You won't mind waiting over another day?"

"What's the matter?"

You would have to know Ricky to know all that made up her expression, then. In her eyes was the way she felt about herself, about me; her mouth spoke of courage. "I'm afraid the undulant fever's back."

"No. Please God, no!"

"I think I ought to be checked. The past few days, I've been running a temperature. And the old megrims have begun."

She smiled again.

It was one of her masterpieces.

We were together.

We had our lives....

I patted her. The wings of my spirit began to beat against her pitiable prospect—the racking weeks ahead, the shots and blood tests, clinical examinations, probings and slides and stains, reports, hospitalizations while the doctors observed, sweats, chills, toxic horrors, frets, pains, and bravery summoned every morning from the deep well of her to last another day.

The elevator rose.

"Hell," I said, the best I could say, "we'll get you on the vaccine today. You phone Dr. Frank immediately. And then lie down. I'll unpack you. In a few weeks, you'll be right as rain."

I fumbled my key into the lock and automatically took from the doorclip my accumulation of morning mail and messages. She asked about Paul and I told her the tale.

Afterwards, she went to the phone, dialed, and watched me with loving, apologetic eyes—as if it were her fault she was infected.

While she described to the specialist the symptoms of this new malevolence I went through the mail, stopped at a letter from my lawyer, ripped it open.

Enclosed in it was a note from my accountant. The Bureau of Internal Revenue, he wrote, wanted, on the following Thursday, to go over with me the records pertaining to my income tax declarations for 1945 and 1946. Records in filing cabinets in storage in Miami Beach. Records on high closet shelves in Rushford. Records stored here in the cellar of the Astolat. In suitcases, boxes, portfolios and old trunks. Records they would not be able to check over next Thursday—because it would take a week and cost hundreds of dollars to get them together. They'd be willing to wait the week and they did not care about the cost to me; their interest would be to see if perhaps, after interminable scrutiny of the dollars and cents of forgotten years, they could find any reason to add a few more hundreds, or a thousand, to the taxes already paid.

Were I a businessman, enamored of columns of figures, such a prospect might scarcely have scarred the surface of my attention. I am not. The order was another garnishee of tranquillity—from then until I had assembled the records, held the conferences, and paid up, if any misjudgment were claimed or any disagreement ensued. I felt chained to a tormented system I could forever deplore but never alter. The wasteful exigency closed around me like a jail.

Ricky hung up. I put the letter into my pocket. She would be harassed by it—because I was. Let it wait till some happier time.

"Dr. Frank wants me to come right down," she said.

"Before lunch?"

"I'm not hungry, anyway, dear."

"I'll go with you."

"You stay here and eat!"

"You need somebody along—"

"Nonsense! I'm used to it. I won't hear of your going!"

And so we argued a little and she had her way. She went out alone in the rain with her misery.

There was a message saying that Harold had called.

I phoned back.

His usually calm voice was raised with emotion. "I got word the serial was done and Bob Durfree called before I sent for it. I've got some bad news for you, Phil. They've been dissatisfied with Durfree's editorial policy for quite a while. Over the weekend, the Board met and they've hired a new editor. Serials are out, from now on. I reminded the new editor that the characters in your story belong to them—and you can't sell it anywhere else. He said he was sorry; said he wanted short stories about Cynthia, as usual. But no serials. You know, they never consider a request as a commitment. I'm as sore as I can be! I realize you were counting on the money for your new house. But—can't you change the characters and do it over and let me try it on somebody else? It's a mighty good story!"

Harold is not just my literary representative. He is my friend. I didn't want him to guess how I really felt.

I told him I'd decide later whether to write the serial over or to chuck it. I hung up. Went to the desk. The carbon copy of my summer's work was sitting there, mute and blurry in its box. I took it out and fingered it and wondered how long it would be before I'd get to that sober book which would try to tell what certain men had learned of human instinct and how different it was from what most of the rest of mankind believed.

Quite a while, I thought.

There were other things to do first. A wife to heal, a kid to send to school, a house to finish, taxes to pay, trips to make, furniture to buy.

Maybe a war to fight at some frustrated desk.

But then

the future didn't belong to me, anyway.

It doesn't belong to you.

It belongs to our children and their children; to God—whom I call instinct—whom you may never call or call upon—or whom you may prayerfully confuse with your own good opinion of yourself.

Look and see.

I went down to the Knight's Bar alone.

I was hungry.

(This is one of the marvels of Nature.)

Jay brought a menu.

"Terrible, about your nephew," he said.

"It's all right, now. He'll pull out of it."

"That kind of thinking, I guess, is more than men can stand."

"It's the thinking they don't do that they can't stand."

Jay smiled a little. "Then they aren't any different from the rest of us."

"They aren't. Only—they don't know it." Jay glanced down at the menu. "Sole," I said, "and parsley potatoes Tartar sauce and a baked apple."

My mind flared and guttered over the anticlimaxes of the day. Soon, it commenced to take its ribald revenge.

I sent a message to the neurologists:

Gentlemen:

Yours of the twentieth century received and lack of contents noted. Item. You have cut out hunks of the anterior brains of monkeys and found, after the surgery, they were able to live in the jungle just as well as before. Item. You have hacked out hunks of the posterior cerebral tissue of cats with the result that they lost their instincts: they no longer tended to their kittens, fed them, or defended them. Item. Your colleagues in medicine are getting similar results with human prefrontal lobotomies. And yet—you still deny that man and his works repeat the great pattern of his instincts! You deny that his reason, his image of himself which he alone deems reasonable, is but another reflection of this same pattern in another dimension. In closing, nuts.

I sent a message of truth to the theologists:

Dear Fellow Compulsives:

To insist you know God when you do not know logic or science is hideous. Those who say they know God and yet reject truth, however selectively, are playing at being God. And those men who play they are God, perforce use men as toys. When will you end this dreadful game? Sincerely.

A time will come, I thought, when man's chief passion will be to observe and to learn dispassionately—his passions.

But you won't be there, Mac.

For this reason, I sent a telepathic message to the School for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, where—at long last—the professors are assembled to try to find out something to teach:

Persons:

Cease trying to rectify the Bhagavad-Gita by means of the Uncertainty Principle. Try algebra—since you are so much simpler than you think. Query: When will you exchange truths evenly with the Believers? So long.

As I say, I nonwired this missive. I got no answer.

The oscilloscope of my mind rippled sadly. Its little line ran straight, then finally shot up with further inquiry:

Who sees that day is the augury of coming night? And who—looking at the darkened sky—sees it to be the daylight of a trillion suns? Who further sees the great initial in the stars themselves—the F for Freedom that I dreamed of in a dream? Whose brain will abide it all? Who will continue our Quest?

And next, I felt my solitude.

If any man is more alone than I in this society I would know it, for I would have met him in the spaces I inhabit.

True, I've seen a few in my distances. And Ricky goes there with me sometimes—as she must.

In another sense, indeed, the whole company of my contemporaries is with me and I am alone only in knowing it.

For the dignity and purpose we dreamed of in the youth of this century has gone. We do our work. We mind our manners. But our young hope has been dimmed by the predictabilities. Hence we all know how temporary we are, how brief our routines, how probably it is futile to quarry or to breed, to build or to wish, to sell or to instruct, to make these civilized exertions.

Camus' plague is on us; it has been here a long while. We call it materialism.

Progress that excludes Man.

We have no peace of mind.

And here is the question of it that the theologists and the scientists have not yet hit upon:

So long as one man suffers unjustly from his fellows, be he yellow or black or white, there shall be no peace of mind for anybody.

And here is the demonstration:

Whatever Man does that he should not, and knows he should not, and whatever man does not, that he knows he should, becomes the substance of the fear of every man, lest it happen to him in his turn.

Integrity of man to man is not a paltering "ideal"; it is man's most essential ingredient, for it measures his potential for continuum in the sufficient space and patient time of God.

Whoever thinks to have peace of mind, these days, is therefore the figment of his own imagination; whoever wants it for himself without thought to others is a criminal.

Only the man-concerned ever knows that fragmented trifle of tranquillity permitted by our noxious times and customs. The rest are dead already in their souls—of science, of religion, of egoistic lust, of a deliberate return to childishness, of every fatal evidence of our plague.

Now a man—the Englishman—opened a newspaper noisily at his table across from me.

This is what I read:

Soon, fifteen million Americans would be organized (voluntarily, they call it) for Civil Defense.

A tenth of us regimented—willingly—for Civil Defense.

(Yet everyone who knows, proclaims there is no defense!)

The men without imagination have spoken.

We shall be ready to police and put out fires, to evacuate and rope off radioactive areas, to deal with gas, bacterial clouds, falling fungi and shots caromed off the moon.

In the name of courage, fifteen million of us will be, if possible, meticulously imbued with the latter-day alarms.

Who says now that we are even a little sane?

For a moment, my mind was blacked out by despair.

But again and still its show went on.

We, who did not have knowledge enough of ourselves to fight, when the time came, for liberty at its source—for freedom of knowledge itself—are day by day losing the rest of our freedom.

It is a working of the great law.

And in what noble names the old tyrant takes us over!

Perhaps, I thought, we may understand in time, or be lucky, and get back a brighter version of the lost principle of freedom. And if not, the quicker we are slaves the better—for the necessity of freedom shall become plain that much the sooner.

I could see the exultant marching of the fifteen million defenders of the indefensible. The burial squads of the Atomic Age are forming. Soon it will be fashionable for women to knit Geiger counters. Two-minute speakers, hastily instructed at the Y.M.C.A. will explain the need for volunteers and tell us what must be done when it is too late to do anything. Boy Scouts will learn to decontaminate the same, old, innocent surfaces. And the prizes at ladies' bridge will have the shape of guided missiles.

A great age to be alive in

while it lasts.

And that is how I began to laugh again.

For God is in His Heaven and all is well with Him.

Now the sun thrust a raffish beam through the clouds and gave to the room a curious, amber glow. All of us sitting there shared this discrete cube of light as fish share the water in an aquarium. And all of us, or nearly all, failed like the fish to penetrate the dimensions of our environs. Whichever way we looked we saw, not the great world outside, but only the image of ourselves. It was the nature of the place, we said; we never noticed that it was our failure to look anywhere save at our side of the glass walls.

This extra light also disclosed a fresh secret of the Knight's Bar. I had thought that the mural horsemen were on their way to Elaine's tower in Astolat. It seems not. Over the weekend the artist had fixed to the wall his final composition, a painting of the Grail, silk-muffled and centered in a rosy halo. It occupied a circular place directly over the bar.

How apt!

The very effort of questing leads most but to a deeper unconsciousness.

This is the moral of Faith—so far.

And the moral of Research—so far.

Why is that so?

Because they go in conceited search of salvation for themselves, or in search of knowledge for what is pompously called its own sake.

Now the Musak took up a suitable accompaniment for my mirth.

Ja-da Ja-da Ja-da, ja-da, jing, jing, jing! Segue into silence, fade-out, and fast iron curtain.

The End