It was into the second year now, and it was maddening.
Everything which had worked before failed this time, Each day he tried to break it, and it resisted his every effort.
He snarled at his students, drove recklessly, blooded his knuckles against many walls. Nights, he lay awake cursing.
But there was no one to whom he could turn for help. His problem would have been non-existent to a psychiatrist. who doubtless would have attempted to treat him for something else.
So he went 'away that summer, spent a month at a resort: nothing. He experimented with several hallucinogenic drugs; again, nothing. He tried free-associating into a tape recorder, but all he got when he played it back was a headache.
To whom does the holder of a blocked power turn, within a society of normal people?
... To another of his own kind, if he can locate one.
Milt Rand had known four other persons like himself: his cousin Gary, now deceased; Walker Jackson, a Negropreacher who had retired to somewhere down South; Tatya Stefanovich, a dancer, currently somewhere behind the Iron Curtain; and Curtis Legge, who, unfortunately, was suffering a schizoid reaction, paranoid type, in a state institution for the criminally insane. Others he had brushed against in the night, but had never met and could not locate now.
There had been blockages before, but Milt had always worked his way through them inside of a month. This time was different and special, though. Upsets, discomforts, disturbances, can dam up a talent, block a power. As event which seals it off completely for over a year, however, is more than a mere disturbance, discomfort or upset.
The divorce had beaten hell out of him.
It is bad enough to know that somewhere someone is hating you; but to have known the very form of that hatred and to have proven ineffectual against it, to have known it as the hater held it for you, to have lived with it growing around you, this is more than distasteful circumstance. Whether you are offender or offended, when you are hated and you live within the circle of that hate, it takes a thing from you: it tears a piece of spirit from your soul, or, if you prefer, a way of thinking from your mind; it cuts and does not cauterize.
Milt Rand dragged his bleeding psyche around the countly and returned home.
He would sit and watch the woods from his glassedin back porch, drink beer, watch the fireflies in the shadows, the rabbits, the dark birds, an occasional fox, sometimes a bat.
He had been fireflies once, and rabbits, birds, occasionally a fox, sometimes a bat.
The wildness was one of the reasons be had moved beyond suburbia, adding an extra half-hour to his commuting time.
Now there was a glassed-in back porch between him and these things he had once been part of. Now he was alone.
Walking the streets, addressing his classes at the institute, sitting in a restaurant, a theater, a bar, he was vacant where once he had been filled.
Fherc aie no books which tell a man how to bring back the power he has lost.He tries everything he can think of, while he is waiting. Walking the hot pavements of a summer noon, crossing against the lights because traffic is slow, watching kids in swimsuits play around a gurgling hydrant, filthy water sluicing the gutter about their feet, as mothers and older sisters in halters, wrinkled shirts, bermudas and sunburnt skins watch them, occasionally, while talking to one another in entranceways to buildings or the shade of a storefront awning. Milt moves across town, heading nowhere in particular, growing claustrophobic if he stops for long. his eyebrows full of perspiration, sunglasses streaked with it, shirt sticking to his sides and coming loose, sticking and coming loose as he walks.
Amid the afternoon, there comes a time when he has to rest the two fresh-baked bricks at the ends of his legs. He finds a tree-lawn bench flanked by high maples, eases himself down into it and sits there thinking of nothing in particular for perhaps twenty-five minutes.
Hello.
Something within him laughs or weeps.
Yes, hello, I am here! Don't go away! Stay! Please!
You are—like me... .
Yes, I am. You can see it in me because you are what you are. But you must read here and send here, too, I'm frozen. I—Hello? Where are you?
Once more, he is alone.
He tries to broadcast. He fills his mind with the thoughts and tries to push them outside his skull.
Please come back! I need you. You can help me. I am desperate. I hurt. Where are you?
Again, nothing.
He wants to scream. He wants to search every room in every building on the block.
Instead, he sits there.
At 9:30 that evening they meet again, inside his mind.
Hello?
Stay! Stay, for God's sake! Don't go away this time! Pleue 'i/in't' Listen. 1 need you! You can help me.
How^ What is the master?
I'm like you. Or was, once. I could reach out with my m'nd ami be olhrr places, other thinv., other people. I can't do it now, though. I have a blockage. The power will not come. I know it is there. I can feel it. But I can't use .. . Hello?Yes, I am still here. I can feel myself going away, though. I will be back. I ...
Milt waits until midnight. She does not come back. It is a feminine mind which has touched his own. Vague, weak, but definitely feminine, and wearing the power She does not come back that night, though. He paces up and down the block, wondering which window, which door...
He eats at an all-night cafe, returns to his bench, waits, paces again, goes back to the cafe for cigarettes, begins chain-smoking, goes back to the bench.
Dawn occurs, day arrives, night is gone. He is alone, as birds explore the silence, traffic begins to swell, dogs wander the lawns.
Then, weakly, the contact:
/ am here. I can slay longer this time, I think. How can I help you? Tell me.
All right. Do this thing: Think of the feeling, the feeling of the out-go, out-reach, out-know that you have now. Fill your mind with thai feeling and send it to me as hard as you can.
It comes upon him then as once it was: the knowledge of the power. It is earth and water, fire and air to him. He stands upon it, he swims in it, he warms himself by it, he moves through it.
It is returning! Don't stop now!
Fm sorry. I must. I'm getting dizzy.. ..
Where are you?
Hospital ...
He looks up the street to the hospital on the corner, at the far end, to his left What ward? He frames the thought but knows she is already gone, even as he does it.
Doped-up or feverish, he decides, and probably out for a while now.
He takes a taxi back to where he had parked, drives home, showers and shaves, makes breakfast, cannot eat.
He drinks orange juice and coffee and stretches out on the bed.
Five hours iater he awakens, looks at his watch, curses.
All the way back into town, he tries to recall the power. It is there like a tree, rooted in his being, branching be-hind his eyes, all bud, blossom, sap and color, but no leaves, no fruit. He can feel it swaying within him, pulsing, breathing; from the tips of his toes to the roots of his hair he feels it. But it does not bend to his will, it does not branch within his consciousness, furl there it leaves, spread the aromas of life.
He parks in the hospital lot, enters the lobby, avoids the front desk, finds a chair beside a table filled with magazines.
Two hours later he meets her.
He is hiding behind a copy of Holiday and looking for her.
/ am here.
Again, then! Quickly! The power! Help me to rouse it!
She does this thing.
Within his mind, she conjures the power. There is a movement, a pause, a movement, a pause. Reflectively, as though suddenly remembering an intricate dance step, it stirs within him, the power.
As in a surfacing bathyscaphe, there is a rush of distortions, then a clear, moist view without. She is a child who has helped him. A mind-twisted, fevered child, dying ... He reads it all when he turns the powe
r upon her. Her name is Dorothy and she is delirious. The power came upon her at the height of her illness, perhaps because of it.
Has she helped a man come alive again, or dreamed that she helped him? she wonders.
She is thirteen years old and her parents sit beside her bed. In the mind of her mother a word rolls over and over, senselessly, blocking all other thoughts, though it cannot keep away the feelings: Methotrexate, methotrexate, metholrexate, meth ... In Dorothy's thirteen-year-old breastbone there are needles of pain. The fevers swirl within her, and she is all but gone to him.
She is dying of leukemia. The final stages are already arrived. He can taste the blood in her mouth. ^ Helpless within his power, he projects: ^ You have given me the end of your life and your final strength. I did not know this. I would not have asked it of you if I had.Thank you, she says, for the pictures inside you. Pictures?
Places, things I saw ...
There is not much inside me worth showing. You could have been elsewhere, seeing better. I am going again ... Wait!
He calls upon the power that lives within him now, fused with his will and his sense, his thoughts, memories, feelings. In one great blaze of life, he shows her Milt Rand.
Here is everything I have, all I have ever been that might please. Here is swarming through a foggy night, blinking on and off. Here is lying beneath a bush as the rains of summer fall about you, drip from the leaves upon your fox-soft fur. Here is the moon-dance of the deer, the dream drift of the trout beneath the dark swell, blood cold as the waters about you.
Here is Tatya dancing and Walker preaching; here is my cousin Gary, as he whittles, contriving a ball within a box, all out of one piece of wood. This is my New York and my Paris. This, my favorite meal, drink, cigar, restaurant, park, road to drive on late at night; this is where I dug tunnels, built a lean-to, went swimming; this, my first kiss; these are the tears of loss; this is exile and alone, and recovery, awe, joy; these, my grandmother's daffodils: this her coffin, daffodils about it; these are the colors of the music I love, and this is my dog who lived long and was good. See all the things that heat the spirit, cool within the mind, are encased in memory and one's self. I give them to you, who have no time to know them.
He sees himself standing on the far hills of her mind. She laughs aloud then, and in her room somewhere high away a hand is laid upon her and her wrist is taken between fingers and thumb as she rushes toward him suddenly grown large. His great black wings sweep forward to fold her wordless spasm of life, then are empty.
Milt Rand stiffens within his power, puts aside a copy of Holiday and stands, to leave the hospital, full and empty, empty, full, like himself, now, behind.
Such is the power of the power.
AUTO-DA-FE
Returning home late one night, I was almost hit by a speeding car which crashed a red light three blocks from my apartment in Baltimore. By the time I reached home, I had this entire story in mind and I finished writing it before I turned out the lights. I sold it to Harlan Ellison for Dangerous Visions. I'm very fond of it.
Still do I remember the hot sun upon the sands of the Plaza de Autos, the cries of the soft-drink hawkers, the tiers of humanity stacked across from me on the sunny side of the arena, sunglasses like cavities in their gleaming faces.
Still do I remember the smells and the colors: the reds and the blues and the yellows, the ever present tang of petroleum fumes upon the air.
Still do I remember that day, that day with its sun in the middle of the sky and the sign of Aries, burning in the blooming of the year. I recall-the mincing steps of the pumpers, heads thrown back, arms waving, the white dazzles of their teeth framed with smiling lips, cloths like colorful tails protruding from the rear pockets of their coveralls; and the homs—I remember the blare of a thousand horns over the loudspeakers, on and off, off and on, over and over, and again, and then one shimmering, final note, sustained, to break the ear and the heart with its infinite power, its pathos. Then there was silence, I see it now as I did on that day so long ago... . He entered the arena, and the cry that went up shook blue heaven upon its pillars of white marble. "Viva! El mechador! Viva! El mechador!" I remember his face, dark and sad and wise. Long of jaw and nose was he, and his laughter was as the roaring of the wind, and his movements were as the music of the theramin and the drum. His coveralls were blue and silk and tight and stitched with thread of gold and broidered all about with black braid. His jacket wasbeaded and there were flashing scales upon his breast, his shoulders, his back, His lips curled into the smile of a man who has known much glory and has hold upon the power that will bring him into more.
He moved, turning in a circle, not shielding bis eyes against the sun.
He was above the sun. He was Manolo Stillete DOS Muertos, the mightiest mechador the world has ever seen, black boots upon bis feet, pistons in his thighs, fingers with the discretion of micrometers, halo of dark locks about his head and the angel of death in his right arm, there, in the center of the grease-stained circle of truth. He waved, and a cry went up once more. "Manolo! Manolo! DOS Muertos! DOS Muertos!" After two years' absence from the ring, he had chosen this, the anniversary of his death and retirement to return—for there was gasoline and methyl in his blood and his heart was a burnished pump ringed 'bout with desire and courage. He had died twice within the ring, and twice had the medics restored him. After his second death, he had retired, and some said that it was because he had known fear. This could not be true.
He waved his hand and his name rolled back upon him.
The homs sounded once more: three long blasts. Then again there was silence, and a pumper wearing red and yellow brought him the cape, removed his jacket.
The tinfoil backing of the cape flashed in the sun as DOS Muertos swirled it. Then there came the final, beeping notes. The big door rolled upward and back into the walL He draped his cape over his arm and faced the gateway.
The light above was red and from within the darkness there came the sound of an engine.
The light turned yellow, then green, and there was the sound of cautiously engaged gears.
The car moved slowly into the ring, paused, crept forward, paused again.
It was a red Pontiac, its hood stripped away, its engine like a nest of snakes, coiling and engendering behind the circular shimmer of its invisible fan. The wingsof its aerial spun round and round, then fixed upon Manolo and his cape.
He had chosen a heavy one for his first, slow on turning, to give him a chance to limber up.
The drums of its brain, which had never before recorded a man, were spinning.
Then the consciousness of its kind swept over it and it moved forward.
Manolo swirled his cape and kicked its fender as it roared past.
The door of the great garage closed.
When it reached the opposite side of the ring the car stopped, parked.
Cries of disgust, booing and hissing arose from the crowd.
Still the Pontiac remained parked.
Two pumpers, bearing buckets, emerged from behind me fence and threw mud upon its windshield.
It roared then and pursued the nearest, banging into the fence. Then it turned suddenly, sighted DOS Muertos and charged.
His veronica transformed him into a statue with a skirt of silver. The enthusiasm of the crowd was mighty.
It turned and charged once Jnore, and I wondered at Maoolo's skill, for it would seem that his buttons had scraped cherry paint from the side panels.
Then it paused, spun its wheels, ran in a circle about the ring.
The crowd roared as it moved past him and recircled.
Then it stopped again, perhaps fifty feet away.
Manolo turned his back upon it and waved to the crowd.
—Again, the cheering and the calling of his name.
He gestured to someone behind me fence.
A pumper emerged and bore to him, upon a velvet cushion, his chrome-plated monkey wrench.
He turned then ag
ain to the Pontiac and strode toward it It stood there shivering and he knocked off its radiator cap. A ]'et of steaming water shot into the air and the crowd bellowed. Then he struck the front of the radiator and banged upon each fender.
He turned his back upon it again and stood there.
When he heard the engagement of the gears he turned once more, and with one clean pass it was by him, but not before he had banged twice upon the trunk with his wrench, It moved to the other end of the ring and parked. Manolo raised his hand to the pumper behind the fence.
The man with the cushion emerged and bore to him the long-handled screwdriver and the short cape. He took the monkey wrench away with him, as well as the long cape.
Another silence came over the Plaza del Autos. The Pontiac, as if sensing all this, turned once more and blew its horn twice. Then it charged. There were dark spots upon the sand from where its radiator had leaked water. Its exhaust arose like a ghost behind it. It bore down upon him at a terrible speed.
DOS Muertos raised the cape before him and rested me blade of the screwdriver upon his left forearm.
When it seemed he would surely be run down, bis hand shot forward, so fast the eye could barely follow it, and he stepped to the side as the engine began to cough.
Still the Pontiac continued on with a deadly momentum, turned sharply without braking, rolled over, slid into the fence, and began to bum. Its engine coughed and died.
The Plaza shook with the cheering. They awarded DOS Muertos both headlights and the tailpipe. He held them high and moved in slow promenade about the perimeter of the ring. The horns sounded. A lady threw him a plastic flower and he sent for a pumper to bear her the tailpipe and ask her to dine with him. The crowd cheered more loudly, for he was known to be a great layer of women, and it was not such an unusual thing in the days of my youth as it is now.
The Last Defender Of Camelot Page 13
