“Same thing.”
“And what the heck is that?”
“I’m still working at the Safe Harbor.”
A measure of confidence returned to Hamilton. Some things, at least, endured. There was still a Safe Harbor. Some small segment of reality carried over for him to hang his assurance on. “Let’s go there,” he said greedily.
“A couple of beers, before we go home.”
When they reached Belmont, Silky parked across the street from the bar. Critically, Hamilton sat inspecting it. At a distance, the bar wasn’t particularly changed. A trifle cleaner, perhaps. More spick and span. The nautical element was intensified; the allusions to alcohol seemed to have subtly diminished. In fact, he had trouble reading the Golden Glow sign. The bright red letters seemed to fuse together into a nondescript blur. If he didn’t already know what the sign read …
“Jack,” Silky said, in a soft, troubled voice, “I wish you could tell me what it is.”
“What what is?”
“I—can’t say.” She smiled hesitantly up at him. “I feel so sort of odd. I seem to have a lot of mixed-up memories running around loose in my head; nothing I can put my finger on, just a bunch of vague impressions.”
“About what?”
“About you and me.”
“Oh.” He nodded. “That. And McFeyffe?”
“Charley, too. And Billy Laws. It seems like it happened a long time ago. But it couldn’t, could it? Didn’t I just meet you?” She pressed her slender fingers achingly to her temples; idly, he noticed that she wore no nail polish. “It’s so darn confusing.”
“I wish I could help you.” And he meant it. “But I’ve been a little perplexed the last few days, myself.”
Is everything all right? I feel as if I’m just about to step through the pavement. You know … as if, when I put my foot down, it’ll sink on through.” She laughed nervously. “It must be time to find myself another analyst.”
“Another? You mean you’ve got one now?”
“Of course.” She turned anxiously toward him. “That’s what I mean. You say things like that and it makes me feel so uncertain. You shouldn’t ask me things like that, Jack; it isn’t right. It—hurts too much.”
“I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly. “It isn’t your fault; no point needling you.”
“My fault? About what?”
“Let it go.” Pushing the car door open, he stepped down onto the dark sidewalk. “Let’s get inside and have our beers.”
Safe Harbor had undergone an internal metamorphosis. Small square tables, draped with starched, white cotton cloths, were neatly spaced here and there. A candle burned and dripped on each table. On the walls hung a series of Currier and Ives prints. A few middle-aged couples sat quietly eating tossed green salad.
“It’s nicer in the back,” Silky said, leading the way among the tables. Soon they were sitting in the dark shadows of a rear booth, menus open in front of them.
The beer, when it came, was about the best beer he had ever tried. Examining the menu, he discovered that it was the real McCoy: genuine German bock beer, the kind he could seldom locate. For the first time since entering this world, he began to feel optimistic, even cheerful.
“Here’s a rat down your shirt,” he said to Silky, lifting his mug.
Smiling, Silky did the same. It’s good to be sitting here with you again,” she told him, sipping. “Sure is.”
Fussing with her drink, Silky asked, “Do you recommend any particular analyst? I’ve tried hundreds … I’m always going on to the next one in line. Trying to find the best. Everybody has one he recommends.” “Not me,” Hamilton said.
“Really? How eccentric.” She gazed past him at the Currier and Ives print on the wall behind the table; it showed a New England winter in 1845. “I guess I’ll go over to the MMHA and see their consultant. They usually can help.”
“What’s the MMHA?”
“The Mobilized Mental Hygiene Association. Aren’t you a member? Everybody’s a member.”
“I’m a marginal character.”
From her purse, Silky got out her membership card and showed it to him. “They handle all your mental health problems. It’s wonderful … an analysis any hour of the day or night.”
“Regular medicine, too?”
“You mean psychosomatics?”
“I suppose so.”
“They take care of that, too. And they have a twenty-four hour dietetics service.”
Hamilton groaned. “(Tetragrammaton) was better.” “(Tetragrammaton)?” Silky was suddenly floundering. “Do I know that name? What’s it mean? I have a land of vague impression that—” Sadly, she shook her head. “I just can’t fix it” “Tell me about dietetics.”
“Well, they take care of your diet”
“So I gathered.”
“The correct food is very important. Right now I’m living on molasses and cottage cheese.”
“Give me sirloin steak,” Hamilton said feelingly.
Shocked, Silky gazed at him with horror. “Steak? Animal flesh?”
“You bet. And plenty of it. Smothered in onions, with baked potato, green peas, and hot black coffee.”
Horror turned to revulsion. “Oh, Jack!”
“What’s wrong?”
“You’re a—savage.”
Leaning across the table toward the girl, Hamilton said: “What do you say we get the heck out of here? Let’s go park on some back road and have sexual intercourse.”
The girl’s face showed only puzzled indifference. “I don’t understand.”
Hamilton sagged. “Forget it”
“But—”
“Forget it!” Moodily, he gulped down the remains of his beer. “Come on, let’s go home and have dinner. Marsha’s probably wondering what happened to us.”
X
Marsha greeted them with relief as they filed into the bright little living room. “Just in time,” she told Hamilton, standing on tiptoe to kiss him. In her apron and print dress she was a pretty, slender shape, warm and fragrant. “Go wash and sit down.”
“Can I help with anything?” Silky asked politely.
“Not a thing. Jack, take her coat.”
“That’s all right,” Silky said, “I’ll just toss it in the bedroom.” She trotted off, leaving them briefly alone.
“This is the damndest thing,” Hamilton said, following his wife into the kitchen.
“You mean her?”
“Yeah.”
“When did you meet her?”
“Last week. Friend of McFeyffe’s.”
“She’s cute.” Bending down, Marsha lifted a steaming casserole from the oven. “So sweet and fresh.”
“Darling, she’s a whore.”
“Oh.” Marsha blinked. “Really? She doesn’t look like a—what you said.”
“Of course she doesn’t. They don’t have them here.”
Marsha brightened. “Then she isn’t. She can’t be.”
Exasperated, Hamilton blocked her way, as she started into the living room with the casserole. “She is. In the real world she’s a barfly, a professional pick-up hanging around bars soliciting men and drinks.”
“Oh, really,” Marsha said, unconvinced. “I don’t believe it. We had a long talk over the phone. She’s a waitress or something. She’s a charming child.”
“Darling, when her apparatus was intact—” He broke off, as Silky reappeared, pert and wholesome-looking in her school girl’s outfit.
“I’m surprised at you,” Marsha said to her husband, as she skipped back into the kitchen. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Lamely, he shambled off. “The hell with it.” Picking up the evening Oakland Tribune, he threw himself down on the couch, opposite Silky, and began scanning the headlines.
Feinberg Announces New Discovery
Heralding Permanent Asthma Cure!
The article, on page one, showed a picture of a smiling, plump, balding, white-clad doctor, straight from a
mouthwash ad. The article told about his world-shaking discovery. Column one, page one.
Column two, page one, was a lengthy article on recent archeological discoveries in the Middle East. Pots, dishes, and vases had been unearthed; an entire Iron Age city had been located. Mankind watched with bated breath.
A kind of morbid curiosity overcame him. What had become of the Cold War with Russia? For that matter, what had become of Russia? Rapidly, he scanned the remaining pages. What he discovered made the hackles of his neck rise.
Russia, as a category, had been abolished. It was just too painfully unpleasant. Millions of men and women, millions of square miles of land—gone. What was there, instead? A barren plain? A misty emptiness? A vast pit?
In a sense, there was no front section to the newspaper … It began with section two: the women’s world. Fashions, social events, marriages and engagements, cultural activities, games. The comic section? Part of it was there—and part of it wasn’t. The fun-loving joke comics remained, the kiddies’ humor strips. But the detective, tough-guy, and girlie strips were absent. Not that it mattered, much. Except that the peculiar expanse of bare white newsprint seemed somehow unsatisfying.
That was probably what northern Asia looked like, now. A kind of titanic strip of blank newsprint, where once millions of lives had been lived, for better or worse. Worse—as far as an overweight, middle-aged woman named Edith Pritchet was concerned. Russia bothered her; like a buzzing gnat, it made her life unpleasant.
Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen any flies or gnats. Or spiders. Or pests of any kind. By the time Mrs. Pritchet was done, this was going to be a mighty pleasant world to live in … if anything remained.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” he said suddenly to Silky. “That there isn’t any Russia?”
“Any what?” Silky asked, looking up from her magazine.
“Forget it.” Throwing down his newspaper, he plodded moodily out of the living room and into the kitchen. “That’s the part I can’t stand,” he said to his wife.
“What’s that, darling?”
“They don’t care!”
Gently, Marsha pointed out, “There never was any Russia. So how can they care?”
“But they should care. If Mrs. Pritchet abolished writing, they wouldn’t care. They wouldn’t miss it—they wouldn’t notice it was gone.”
“If they didn’t notice it,” Marsha said thoughtfully, “then what does it matter?”
He hadn’t thought about that. While the two women set the dinner table he did so. “It’s worse,” he told Marsha. “That’s the worst part of it. Edith Pritchet tampers with their world—she remakes their lives and they don’t even notice. It’s terrible.”
“Why?” Marsha flared up. “Maybe it’s not so terrible.” Lowering her voice, she nodded toward Silky. “Is that terrible? Was she so much better before?”
“That’s not the point. The point is—” He followed angrily after her. “Now it’s not Silky. It’s somebody else. A wax dummy Mrs. Pritchet made up to take Silky’s place.”
“It looks like Silky to me.”
“You never saw her before.”
“Thank God,” Marsha said fervently.
A slow, dreadful suspicion began to creep over him. “You like this,” he said softly. “You actually prefer this.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Marsha said evasively.
“You do! You like these—these improvements.”
At the kitchen door, Marsha halted, her hands full of spoons and forks. “I’ve been thinking about it today. In many ways everything is much cleaner and neater. Not so messy. Things are—well, so much simpler. More orderly.”
“Well, there aren’t so many things.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Maybe we’ll turn out to be objectionable elements. Have you thought about that?” Gesturing, he continued: “It’s not safe. Look at us—we’ve been remolded already. We’re sexless—do you like that?” There was no immediate answer. “You do” Hamilton said, aghast. “You prefer it.” “Well talk about it later,” Marsha said, going off with the silverware.
Grabbing hold of her arm, Hamilton roughly pulled her back. “Answer me! You like it her way, don’t you? You like the idea of a great, fat, fussy old lady cleaning sex and nastiness out of the world.”
“Well,” Marsha said thoughtfully, “I think the world could use some cleaning up, yes. And if you men haven’t been able to, or don’t want to do it—”
“I’m going to let you in on something,” Hamilton told her fiercely. “As fast as Edith Pritchet abolishes categories, I’m going to restore them. The first category I’m going to restore is sex. As of tonight, I’m going to reintroduce sex into this world.”
“Yes, you would, wouldn’t you? That’s something you want; that’s something you’ve been mulling about constantly.”
“That girl in there.” Hamilton jerked his head toward the living room; Silky was happily arranging napkins around the dinner table. “I’m going to haul her downstairs and go to bed with her.”
“Darling,” Marsha said practically, “you can’t”
“Why not?”
“She’s—” Marsha gestured. “She’s not equipped.”
“Don’t you care a damn bit?”
“But it’s absurd. It’s like talking about purple ostriches. There just isn’t any such thing.”
Striding into the living room, Hamilton took firm hold of Silky’s hand. “Come along,” he ordered her. “We’re going down to the audiophile room and listen to Beethoven quartets.”
Astonished, Silky came stumbling involuntarily after him. “But what about dinner?”
“The hell with dinner,” he answered, pulling open the door to the stairs. “Let’s get down there before she abolishes music.”
* * * * *
The basement was cold and damp. Hamilton turned on the electric heater and pulled down the window blinds. As the room warmed to cheery friendliness, he opened the doors of the record cabinet and began dragging out armloads of LPs.
“What do you want to hear?” he demanded belligerently.
Frightened, Silky lingered by the door. “I want to eat. And Marsha fixed such a lovely dinner—”
“Only animals eat,” Hamilton muttered. “It’s unpleasant Not nice. I’ve abolished it.”
“I don’t understand,” Silky protested mournfully.
Clicking on his amplifier, Hamilton adjusted the elaborate network of controls. “What do you think of my rig?” he inquired.
“Very—attractive.”
“Push-pull parallel output. Flat up to thirty thousand cps. Four fifteen-inch woofers. Eight theater horns: tweeters. Cross-over network at four hundred cps. Transformers wound by hand. Diamond styli and gold liquid-torque cartridge.” As he placed an LP on the turntable, he added, “Motor able to spin a weight of ten tons without slowing below thirty-three and a third. Not bad, eh?”
“W-wonderful.”
The music was Daphnis and Chloe. A good half of his LP collection was mysteriously absent; mostly modern atonal and experimental percussive works. Mrs. Pritchet preferred the good standard classics; Beethoven and Schumann, the heavy orchestral stuff familiar to the bourgeois concert-goer. Somehow the loss of his precious Bartok collection drove him into more of a frenzy than anything else so far. It had an intimate quality, a meddling with the deepest layers of his personality. There was no living in Mrs. Pritchet’s world; she was even worse than (Tetragrammaton).
“How’s that?” he asked automatically, as he turned down the lamp almost to nil. “Not in your eyes, now, eh?”
“It never was, Jack,” Silky said, troubled. A dim fragment of recollection seeped into her purified mind. “Golly, I can hardly see my way around … I’m afraid I’ll fall.”
“Not very far,” Hamilton retorted sardonically. “What do you want to drink? It just so happens that I have a fifth of Scotch somewhere around here.”
Whipping open the liquor
cabinet, he groped expertly inside. His fingers closed around the neck of a bottle; rapidly drawing it forth, he bent to locate glasses. Oddly, the bottle didn’t feel right. A closer examination confirmed it; he wasn’t holding a fifth of Scotch, after all.
“Let’s make it creme de menthe,” he corrected, resigned. In some ways, it was better. “Okay?”
Daphnis and Chloe swelled out luxuriantly into the darkened room as Hamilton conveyed Silky to the couch and sat her down. Obediently, she accepted her drink and dutifully sipped, a blank and humble expression on her face. Prowling intently around, Hamilton made the various fine adjustments of the connoisseur, straightening a wall print here, turning up the amplifier a trifle, lowering the lamp still more, fluffing up a pillow on the couch, assuring himself that the door to the stairs was closed and locked. Upstairs, he could hear Marsha stirring around. Well, she had asked for it.
“Just close your eyes and relax,” he ordered wrathfully.
“I’m relaxed.” Silky was still afraid. “Isn’t this enough?”
“Sure,” he muttered morbidly. “That’s great. Here’s an idea—try taking off your shoes and putting your feet up on the couch. You get a different impression of Ravel when you do that”
Silky obediently kicked off her white loafers and lifted her bare feet up and under her. “That’s nice,” she said wanly.
“A lot better, isn’t it?”
“Much.”
All at once a vast, overwhelming sorrow overcame
Hamilton. “It’s no use,” he said, defeated. “It can’t be done.”
“What can’t be done, Jack?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
For a time the two of them were silent. Then, slowly, quietly, Silky reached out and touched his hand. I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
“It’s my fault, isn’t it?”
“Sort of. In a way. A very diffuse and abstract way.”
After a hesitant pause, Silky asked, “Can—I ask you something?”
“Sure. Anything.”
“Would—” Her voice was so faint that he could hardly hear it She was gazing up at him, eyes large and dark in the dim light of the room. “Jack, would you kiss me? Just once?”
Eye in the Sky Page 13
