Shatterday

by Harlan Ellison

  Alan made a sudden lurch toward the edge of the mist pool. The old paladin burned him out; there was a wisp of dark, thin smoke from the ash-filled sockets that had been Alan Pryor’s eyes; and the old paladin sighed once more before he began cataloging the parts of Alan Pryor’s body that could be recycled in expectation of the next child born with the power.

  In that lonely place where Alan Pryor gave his life, there were no observers. The attack came in an isolated, empty place where he was burned defending us. Now we lay his body to rest, with honor, swearing that he did not go unmourned. With honor, to your final rest, Alan Pryor. Humanity will not forget.

  G-64 in Bin 487.

  “There are no rules. Those who are in power make up the rules. So those out of favor are bound to break them.”

  JOSÉ BER GELBARD

  Shatterday

  Introduction

  Everything that is appropriate to say about this final entry of the current grimoire has been said in the general introduction, “Mortal Dreads,” with the possible exception of this:

  There is a curse over the door to my tomb. It says, Beware all ye who enter here—because herein lie the proofs of observation that we are all as one, living in the same skin, each of us condemned to handle the responsibility of our past, our memories, our destiny as elements in the great congeries of life. And if you find these dark dreams troubling, perhaps it is because they are your dreams.

  It’s been nice visiting with you.

  And when next the full moon rises, and the sounds from beyond the campfire are ominously semihuman, we will gather again and I’ll listen to your tales and then write them up in my way, and give them back to you.

  Until that time.

  i. Someday

  Not much later, but later nonetheless, he thought back on the sequence of what had happened, and knew he had missed nothing. How it had gone, was this:

  He had been abstracted, thinking about something else. It didn’t matter what. He had gone to the telephone in the restaurant, to call Jamie, to find out where the hell she was already, to find out why she’d kept him sitting in the bloody bar for thirty-five minutes. He had been thinking about something else, nothing deep, just woolgathering, and it wasn’t till the number was ringing that he realized he’d dialed his own apartment, He had done it other times, not often, but as many as anyone else, dialed a number by rote and not thought about it, and occasionally it was his own number, everyone does it (he thought later), everyone does it, it’s a simple mistake.

  He was about to hang up, get back his dime and dial Jamie, when the receiver was lifted at the other end.

  He answered.

  Himself.

  He recognized his own voice at once. But didn’t let it penetrate.

  He had no little machine to take messages after the bleep, he had had his answering service temporarily disconnected (unsatisfactory service, they weren’t catching his calls on the third ring as he’d insisted), there was no one guesting at his apartment, nothing. He was not at home, he was here, in the restaurant, calling his apartment, and he answered.

  “Hello?”

  He waited a moment. Then said, “Who’s this?”

  He answered, “Who’re you calling?”

  “Hold it,” he said. “Who is this?”

  His own voice, on the other end, getting annoyed, said, “Look, friend, what number do you want?”

  “This is BEacon 3-6189, right?”

  Warily: “Yeah… ?”

  “Peter Novins’s apartment?”

  There was silence for a moment, then: “That’s right.”

  He listened to the sounds from the restaurant’s kitchen. “If this is Novins’s apartment, who’re you?”

  On the other end, in his apartment, there was a deep breath. “This is Novins.”

  He stood in the phone booth, in the restaurant, in the night, the receiver to his ear, and listened to his own voice. He had dialed his own number by mistake, dialed an empty apartment… and he had answered.,

  Finally, he said, very tightly, “This is Novins.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at The High Tide, waiting for Jamie.”

  Across the line, with a terrible softness, he heard himself asking, “Is that you?”

  A surge of fear pulsed through him and he tried to get out of it with one last possibility. “If this is a gag… Freddy… is that you, man? Morrie? Art?”

  Silence. Then, slowly, “I’m Novins. Honest to God.”

  His mouth was dry. “I’m out here. You can’t be, I can’t be in the apartment.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, I am.”

  ‘‘I’ll have to call you back.” Peter Novins hung up.

  He went back to the bar and ordered a double Scotch, no ice, straight up, and threw it back in two swallows, letting it burn. He sat and stared at his hands, turning them over and over, studying them to make sure they were his own, not alien meat grafted onto his wrists when he was not looking.

  Then he went back to the phone booth, closed the door and sat down, and dialed his own number. Very carefully.

  It rang six times before he picked it up.

  He knew why the voice on the other end had let it ring six times; he didn’t want to pick up the snake and hear his own voice coming at him.

  “Hello?” His voice on the other end was barely controlled.

  “It’s me,” he said, closing his eyes.

  “Jesus God,” he murmured.

  They sat there, in their separate places, without speaking. Then Novins said, “I’ll call you Jay.”

  “That’s okay,” he answered from the other end. It was his middle name. He never used it, but it appeared on his insurance policy, his driver’s license and his social security card. Jay said, “Did Jamie get there?”

  “No, she’s late again.”

  Jay took a deep breath and said, “We’d better talk about this, man.”

  “I suppose,” Novins answered. “Not that I really want to. You’re scaring the shit out of me.”

  “How do you think I feel about it?”

  “Probably the same way I feel about it.”

  They thought about that for a long moment. Then Jay said, “Will we be feeling exactly the same way about things?”

  Novins considered it, then said, “If you’re really me then I suppose so. We ought to try and test that.”

  “You’re taking this a lot calmer than I am, it seems to me,” Jay said.

  Novins was startled. “You really think so? I was just about to say I thought you were really terrific the way you’re handling all this. I think you’re much more together about it than I am. I’m really startled, I’ve got to tell you.”

  “So how’ll we test it?” Jay asked.

  Novins considered the problem, then said, “Why don’t we compare likes and dislikes. That’s a start. That sound okay to you?”

  “It’s as good a place as any, I suppose. Who goes first?”

  “It’s my dime,” Novins said, and for the first time he smiled. “I like, uh, well-done prime rib, end cut if I can get it, Yorkshire pudding, smoking a pipe, Max Emst’s paintings, Robert Altman films, William Goldman’s books, getting mail but not answering it, uh…”

  He stopped. He had been selecting random items from memory, the ones that came to mind first. But as he had been speaking, he heard what he was saying, and it seemed stupid. “This isn’t going to work,” Novins said. “What the hell does it matter? Was there anything in that list you didn’t like?”

  Jay sighed. “No, they’re all favorites. You’re right. If I like it, you’ll like it. This isn’t going to answer any questions.”

  Novins said, “I don’t even know what the questions are!”

  “That’s easy enough,” Jay said. “There’s only one question: which of us is me, and how does me get rid of him?”

  A chill spread out from Novins’s shoulder blades and wrapped around his arms like a mantilla. “What’s that supposed to mean? Get rid of
him? What the hell’s that?”

  “Face it,” Jay said—and Novins heard a tone in the voice he recognized, the tone he used when he was about to become a tough negotiator—”we can’t both be Novins. One of us is going to get screwed.”

  “Hold it, friend,” Novins said, adopting the tone. “That’s pretty muddy logic. First of all, who’s to say you’re not going to vanish back where you came from as soon as I hang up…”

  “Bullshit,” Jay answered.

  “Yeah, well, maybe; but even if you’re here to stay, and I don’t concede that craziness for a second, even if you are real—”

  “Believe it, baby, I’m real,” Jay said, with a soft chuckle. Novins was starting to hate him.

  “—even if you are real,” Novins continued, “there’s no saying we can’t both exist, and both lead happy, separate lives.”

  “You know something, Novins,” Jay said, “you’re really full of horse puckey. You can’t lead a happy life by yourself, man, how the hell are you going to do it knowing I’m over here living your life, too?”

  “What do you mean I can’t lead a happy life? What do you know about it?” And he stopped; of course Jay knew about it. ALL about it.

  “You’d better start facing reality, Novins. You’ll be coming to it late in life, but you’d better learn how to do it. Maybe it’ll make the end come easier.”

  Novins wanted to slam the receiver into its rack. He was at once furiously angry and frightened. He knew what the other Novins was saying was true; he had to know, without argument; it was, after all, himself saying it. “Only one of us is going to make it,” he said, tightly. “And it’s going to be me, old friend.”

  “How do you propose to do it, Novins? You’re out there, locked out. I’m in here, in my home, safe where I’m supposed to be.”

  “How about we look at it this way,” Novins said quickly, “you’re trapped in there, locked away from the world in three-and-a-half rooms. I’ve got everywhere else to move in. You’re limited. I’m free.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  Then Jay said, “We’ve reached a bit of an impasse, haven’t we? There’s something to be said for being loose, and there’s something to be said for being safe inside. The amazing thing is that we both have accepted this thing so quickly.”

  Novins didn’t answer. He accepted it because he had no other choice; if he could accept that he was speaking to himself, then anything that followed had to be part of that acceptance. Now that Jay had said it bluntly, that only one of them could continue to exist, all that remained was finding a way to make sure it was he, Novins, who continued past this point.

  “I’ve got to think about this,” Novins said. “I’ve got to try to work some of this out better. You just stay celled in there, friend; I’m going to a hotel for the night. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  He started to hang up when Jay’s voice stopped him. “What do I say if Jamie gets there and you’re gone and she calls me?”

  Novins laughed. “That’s your problem, motherfucker.”

  He racked the receiver with nasty satisfaction.

  ii. Moanday

  He took special precautions. First the bank, to clean out the checking account. He thanked God he’d had his checkbook with him when he’d gone out to meet Jamie the night before. But the savings account passbook was in the apartment. That meant Jay had access to almost ten thousand dollars. The checking account was down to fifteen hundred, even with all outstanding bills paid, and the Banks for Cooperatives note came due in about thirty days and that meant… he used the back of a deposit slip to figure the interest… he’d be getting ten thousand four hundred and sixty-five dollars and seven cents deposited to his account. His new account, which he opened at another branch of the same bank, signing the identification cards with a variation of his signature sufficiently different to prevent Jay’s trying to draw on the account. He was at least solvent. For the time being.

  But all his work was in the apartment. All the public relations accounts he handled. Every bit of data and all the plans and phone numbers and charts, they were all there in the little apartment office. So he was quite effectively cut off from his career.

  Yet in a way, that was a blessing. Jay would have to keep up with the work in his absence, would have to follow through on the important campaigns for Topper and McKenzie, would have to take all the moronic calls from Lippman and his insulting son, would have to answer all the mail, would have to keep popping Titralac all day just to stay ahead of the heartburn. He felt gloriously free and almost satanically happy that he was rid of the aggravation for a while, and that Jay was going to find out being Peter Jay Novins wasn’t all fun and Jamies.

  Back in his hotel room at the Americana he made a list of things he had to do. To survive. It was a new way of thinking, setting down one by one the everyday routine actions from which he was now cut off. He was all alone now, entirely and totally, for the first time in his life, cut off from everything. He could not depend on friends or associates or the authorities. It would be suicide to go to the police and say, “Listen, I hate to bother you, but I’ve split and one of me has assumed squatter’s rights in my apartment; please go up there and arrest him.” No, he was on his own, and he had to exorcise Jay from the world strictly by his own wits and cunning.

  Bearing in mind, of course, that Jay had the same degree of wit and cunning.

  He crossed half a dozen items off the list. There was no need to call Jamie and find out what had happened to her the night before. Their relationship wasn’t that binding in any case. Let Jay make the excuses. No need to cancel the credit cards, he had them with him. Let Jay pay the bills from the savings account. No need to contact any of his friends and warn them. He couldn’t warn them, and if he did, what would he warn them against? Himself? But he did need clothes, fresh socks and underwear, a light jacket instead of his topcoat, a pair of gloves in case the weather turned. And he had to cancel out the delivery services to the apartment in a way that would prevent Jay from reinstating them: groceries, milk, dry cleaning, newspapers. He had to make it as difficult for him in there as possible. And so he called each tradesman and insulted him so grossly they would never serve him again. Unfortunately, the building provided heat and electricity and gas and he had to leave the phone connected.

  The phone was his tie-line to victory, to routing Jay out of there.

  When he had it all attended to, by three o’clock in the afternoon, he returned to the hotel room, took off his shoes, propped the pillows up on the bed, lay down and dialed a 9 for the outside line, then dialed his own number.

  As it rang, he stared out the forty-fifth floor window of the hotel room, at the soulless pylons of the RCA and Grants Buildings, the other dark-glass filing cabinets for people. It was a wonder anyone managed to stay sane, stay whole in such surroundings! Living in cubicles, boxed and trapped and throttled, was it any surprise that people began to fall apart… even as he seemed to be falling apart? The wonder was that it all managed to hold together as well as it did. But the fractures were beginning to appear, culturally and now—as with Peter Novins, he mused—personally. The phone continued to ring. Clouds blocked out all light and the city was swamped by shadows. At three o’clock in the afternoon, the ominous threat of another night settled over Novins’s hotel room.

  The receiver was lifted at the other end. But Jay said nothing.

  “It’s me,” Novins said. “How’d you enjoy your first day in my skin?”

  “How did you enjoy your first day out of it?” he replied.

  “Listen, I’ve got your act covered, friend, and your hours are numbered. The checking account is gone, don’t try to find it; you’re going to go out to get food and when you do I’ll be waiting—”

  “Terrific,” Jay replied. “But just so you don’t waste your time, I had the locks changed today. Your keys don’t work. And I bought groceries. Remember the fifty bucks I put away in the jewelry box?”

  Novins
cursed himself silently. He hadn’t thought of that.

  “And I’ve been doing some figuring, Novins. Remember that old Jack London novel, The Star Rover? Remember how he used astral projection to get out of his body? I think that’s what happened to me. I sent you out when I wasn’t aware of it. So I’ve decided I’m me, and you’re just a little piece that’s wandered off. And I can get along just peachy-keen without that piece, so why don’t you just go—”

  “Hold it,” Novins interrupted, “that’s a sensational theory, but it’s stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins, if you’ll pardon my being so forward as to disagree with a smartass voice that’s probably disembodied and doesn’t have enough ectoplasm to take a healthy shit. Remember the weekend I went over to the lab with Kenny and he took that Kirlian photograph of my aura? Well, my theory is that something happened and the aura produced another me, or something…”

  He slid down into silence. Neither theory was worth thinking about. He had no idea, really, what had happened. They hung there in silence for a long moment, then Jay said, “Mother called this morning.”

  Novins felt a hand squeeze his chest. “What did she say?”

  “She said she knew you lied when you were down in Florida. She said she loved you and she forgave you and all she wants is for you to share your life with her.”

  Novins closed his eyes. He didn’t want to think about it. His mother was in her eighties, very sick, and just recovering from her second serious heart attack in three years. The end was near and, combining a business trip in Miami with a visit to her, he had gone to Florida the month before. He had never had much in common with his mother, had been on his own since his early teens, and though he supported her in her declining years, he refused to allow her to impose on his existence. He seldom wrote letters, save to send the check, and during the two days he had spent in her apartment in Miami Beach he had thought he would go insane. He had wanted to bolt, and finally had lied to her that he was returning to New York a day earlier than his plans required. He had packed up and left her, checking into a hotel, and had spent the final day involved in business and that night had gone out with a secretary he dated occasionally when. in Florida.