Day Dark, Night Bright

by Fritz Leiber

  “But then how… Ernie, didn’t you once tell me the gauge doesn’t work?”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes. Look, there’s a station. Why don’t you buy gas now?”

  “No, I’ll wait for Wheaton—I know a place there I can get it cheaper,” he insisted, rather lamely, he feared.

  His sister looked at him steadily. He settled his head between his shoulders and concentrated on driving. His feeling of excitement was spoiled, but a few minutes of silence brought it back. He thought of the blur of green flashes inside the purring motor. If the passing drivers only knew!

  Uncle Fabius, retired perhaps a few years too early and opinionated, was a trial, but he did know something about the automobile industry. Ernie chose a moment when his sister was out of the room to ask if he’d ever heard of a white powder that would turn water into gasoline or some usable fuel.

  “Who’s been getting at you?” Uncle Fabius demanded sharply, to Ernie’s surprise and embarrassment. “That’s one of the oldest swindles. They always tell this story about how this man had a white powder or something and demonstrated it once with a pail of water and then disappeared. You’re supposed to believe that Detroit or the big oil companies got rid of him. It’s just another of those malicious legends, concocted—by Russia, I imagine—to weaken your faith in American Industry, like the everlasting battery or the razor blade that never gets dull. You’re looking pale, Ernie—don’t tell me you’ve already put money in this white powder? I suppose someone’s approached you with a proposition, though?”

  With considerable difficulty, Ernie convinced his uncle that he had “just heard the story from a friend.”

  “In that case,” Uncle Fabius opined, “you can be sure some fuel-powder swindler has been getting at him. When you see him—and be sure to make that soon—tell him from me that—” and Uncle Fabius began an impassioned ninety-minute defense of big business, small business, prosperity, America, money, know-how, and a number of other institutions that defended pretty easily, so that the situation was wholly normal when Ernie’s sister returned.

  As soon as the car pulled away from the curb on their way back to Chicago, she reminded him about the gas.

  “Oh, I’ve already done that,” he assured her. “Made a special trip so I wouldn’t forget. It was while you were out of the room. Didn’t you hear me?”

  “No,” she said, “I didn’t,” and she looked at him steadily, as she had that morning. He similarly retreated to driving.

  Stopping for a railroad crossing, he braked too hard and the car stalled. His sister grabbed his arm. “I knew that was going to happen,” she said. “I knew that for some reason you lied to me when—” The motor, starting readily again, cut short her remark and Ernie didn’t press his small triumph by asking her what she was about to say.

  To tell the truth, Ernie wasn’t feeling as elated about today’s fifty-mile drive as he’d imagined he would. Now he thought he could put his finger on the reason: It was the completely… well, arbitrary way in which the white powder had come into his possession.

  If he’d concocted it himself, or been given it by a shady promoter, or even seen the box fall out of the pocket of a suspicious-looking man in a trenchcoat, then he’d have felt more able to do something about it, whether in the general line of starting a fuel-powder company or of going to the F.B.I.

  But just having the stuff drop into his hands from the sky, so to speak, as if in a crazy dream, and for that same reason not feeling able to talk about it and assure himself he wasn’t going crazy… oh, it is rough when you can’t share things, really rough; not being able to share depressing news corrodes the spirit, but not being able to share exciting news can sometimes be even more corroding.

  Maybe, he told himself, he could figure out someone to tell. But who? And how? His mind shied away from the problem, rather decisively.

  When he checked the blue box that night, the original sodium bicarbonate lettering had returned with all its humdrum paragraphs. Not one word about exhaust velocities.

  From that moment, the fuel-powder became a trial to Ernie rather than a secret glory. He’d wake in the middle of the night doubting that he had ever really read the mind-dizzying lettering, ever really tested the stuff—perhaps he’d bring from sleep the chilling notion that in the dimness and excitement of Saturday morning he’d put the water in some other car’s gas tank, perhaps Mr. Jones’s. He could usually argue such ideas away, but they kept coming back. And yet he did no more bathroom testing.

  Of course the car still ran. He even fueled it once again with the garden hose, sniffing the nozzle to make sure it hadn’t somehow got connected to the basement furnace oil-tank. He picked three o’clock in the morning for the act, but nevertheless as he was returning indoors he heard a window in Mr. Jones’s house slam loudly. It unsettled him. Coming home the next day, he caught his sister and Mr. Jones consulting about something on the latter’s doorsteps, which unsettled him further.

  He couldn’t decide on a safe place to keep the box and took to carrying it around with him day and night. Bill spotted it once down at the office and by an unhappy coincidence needed some bicarb just then for a troubled stomach. Ernie explained on the spur of the moment that he was using the box to carry plaster of Paris, which involved him in further lies that he felt were quite unconvincing as well as making him appear decidedly eccentric, even butter-brained. Bill took to calling him “the sculptor”.

  Meanwhile, besides the problem of the white powder, Ernie was having other unsettling experiences, stemming (though of course he didn’t know that) from the other Gifts—and not just the Big Gift of Page-at-a-Glance Reading, though that still returned from time to time to shock his consciousness and send him hurrying for a few quick shots.

  Like many another car-owning commuter, Ernie found the traffic and parking problems a bit too much for comfort and so used the fast electric train to carry him five times a week to the heart of the city. During those brief, swift, crowded trips Ernie, generally looking steadily out the window at the brown buildings and black stanchions whipping past, enjoyed a kind of anonymity and privacy more refreshing to his spirit than he realized. But now all that had been suddenly changed. People had started to talk to him; total strangers struck up conversations almost every morning and afternoon.

  Ernie couldn’t figure out the reason and wasn’t at all sure he liked it—except for Vivian.

  She was the sort of girl Ernie dreamed about, improperly. Tall, blonde and knowing, excitedly curved but armored in a black suit, friendly and funny but given to making almost cruelly deflating remarks, as if the neatly furled short umbrella dangling from her wrist might better be a black dog whip.

  She worked in an office too, a fancier one than Ernie’s, as he found out from their morning conversations. He hadn’t got to the point of asking her to lunch, but he was prodding himself.

  Why such a girl should ever have asked him for a match in the first place and then put up with his clumsy babblings on subsequent mornings was a mystery to him. He finally asked her about it in what he hoped was a joking way, though she seemed to know a lot more about joking than he did.

  “Don’t you know?” she countered. “I mean what makes you attractive to people?”

  “Me attractive? No.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you then, Ernie, and I’ve got to admit it’s something quite out of the ordinary. I’ve never noticed it in anyone else. Ernie, I’m sure your knowledge of romantic novels is shamefully deficient, it’s clear from your manners, but in the earlier ones—not in style now—the hero is described as tall, manly, broad-shouldered, Anglo-Saxon features, etcetera, etcetera, but there’s one thing he always has, something that sounds like poetic over-enthusiasm if you stop to analyze it, a physical impossibility, but that I have to admit you, Ernie, actually have. Flashing eyes.”

  “Flashing eyes? Me?”

  She nodded solemnly. He thought her long straight lips trembled on the verge of a grin, but he c
ouldn’t be sure.

  “How do you mean, flashing eyes?” he protested. “How can eyes flash, except by reflecting light? In that case, I guess they’d seem to ‘flash’ more if a person opened them wide but kept blinking them a lot. Is that what I do?”

  “No, Ernie, though you’re doing it now,” she told him, shaking her head. “No, Ernie, your eyes just give a tiny flash of their own about every five seconds, like a lighthouse, but barely, barely bright enough for another person to notice. It makes you irresistible. Of course I’ve never seen you in the dark; maybe they wouldn’t flash in the dark.”

  “You’re joking.”

  Vivian frowned a little at that remark, as if she were puzzled herself.

  “Well, maybe I am and maybe I’m not,” she said. “In any case, don’t get conceited about your Flashing Eyes, because I’m sure you’ll never know how to take advantage of them.”

  When he parted from her downtown, pausing a moment to watch her walk away with feline majesty, he muttered “Flashing Eyes!” with a shrug of the shoulders and a skeptical growl. Just the same, he ducked his head as he moved off and he pulled the brim of his hat down sharply.

  Afternoons, hurtling home in the five o’clock rush, it was not Vivian but Verna who frequently occupied the seat beside him, taking up rather more space in it than the Panther Princess. Verna was another of his newly acquired and not altogether welcome conversation-pals, along with Jacob the barber, Mr. Willis the druggist and Herman the health-food manufacturer, inventor of Soybean Mush—conquests of his Flashing Eyes or whatever it was.

  Verna was stocky, pasty-faced, voluble (with him), coy, and had bad breath—he could see the tiny triangles of pale food between her incisors and canine whenever her conversations became particularly vehement and confidential, which was often. She always had a stack of books hugged to her stomach. She worked in a fur-storage vault, she said, and could snatch quite a bit of time for reading—rather heavy reading, it seemed.

  It wasn’t very long before Verna was head-over-heels (fearful picture!) infatuated with him. Somehow his friendliness had touched a hidden spring in this ugly, friendless, clumsy girl and for once she had lost her fear of the world’s ridicule and opened her hulking heart to another human being. It was touching but rather overpowering, especially since she always opened her mouth too. He learned a great deal about herself, her invalid father, Elizabethan and Restoration poetry, paleontology, an organization known as the Working Girls’ Front, Mr. Abrusian, and a brassy Miss Minkin who sounded like a fiendish caricature of Vivian.

  He felt that deliberately avoiding Verna would be a dirtier trick than he liked to think himself capable of. Nevertheless there were times when he seriously wished he’d never acquired whatever power it was—except for Vivian, of course. What the devil, he asked himself for the nth time, could that power be?

  That night, in the bathroom, the question came back to him and he impulsively switched off the light and looked into the mirror. He gasped and seemed on the point of shrieking out something, but he only grasped the washbowl more tightly and stared into the mirror more intently.

  After about a minute, he tugged on the light again. He was pale. He had convinced himself of the actual existence of the phenomenon that was in reality the third of the Little Gifts: Flashing Eyes.

  He couldn’t notice anything in the light, but in the dark his eyes gave off a faint blue flash about every five seconds, just as Vivian had said, lighting up his cheeks and eyebrows like some comic-book vampire!

  It might be attractive by day, when it just registered as an impalpable hint, but it was damn sinister in the dark! It wasn’t much, but it was there—unless the flashes were inside his head and he was projecting them… blue… something called the Purkinje effect?… but then Vivian had actually seen… oh, damn!

  Suddenly he wildly looked around, a little like a trapped animal. Why did it always have to happen in the bathroom, he asked himself—the bicarb, the flame, the blade (if that counted), and now this? Could there be something wrong about the bathroom, something either in the room itself or in his childhood associations?

  But neither the bathroom walls nor his minutely searched memory returned an answer.

  It was dark in the hall outside and he almost bumped into his sister. He recoiled, stared at her a moment, then threw his hand over his eyes, darted into his bedroom and shut the door.

  “Is there something wrong, Ernie?” she called after him.

  “Wrong?”

  The door muffled his voice. “How do you mean?”

  “I mean about your eyes.”

  “My eyes?” It was almost a scream. “What about my eyes?”

  “Don’t shout, Ernie. I mean are they painful?”

  “Painful? Why should they be painful?”

  “I really don’t know, Ernie.” She was being very patient and calm.

  “I mean did you notice anything about them?” He was trying to be the same without much success.

  “Just that you put your hand up to them as if they hurt.”

  “Oh.” Great relief. “Yes, they do smart a little. I guess I’ve been using them too much. I’m putting some eye-drops in them now.”

  “Can I help you, Ernie? And shouldn’t you see an opto… ocu… optha… I mean an eye doctor?”

  Ernie answered “No” to both those questions, but of course it took a lot more lying and improvising and general smoothing out before his sister would even pretend to be satisfied and stop her general nagging for the evening. She was getting uncomfortably cagey and curious lately, addicted to asking such questions out of a blue sky as:

  “Ernie, when we were visiting Uncle Fabius, did you actually believe that you went out and bought gas?”

  That one momentarily brought Ernie’s stammer back, something which hadn’t troubled him for years.

  And when she wasn’t asking questions, her quiet studying of him for long minutes was even more upsetting.

  Next morning, on the way to the electric train, Ernie made a purchase at the drugstore. When he sat down beside Vivian, she took one look at him and gave a very deliberate-sounding hollow laugh.

  “Blackglasses!” she said. “I tell him he’s attractive because he has Flashing Eyes and within two days he’s wearing black glasses. I suppose I should have guessed it.”

  “But my eyes hurt,” Ernie protested. “Sensitive to sunlight, I think.” He wished he could explain to her that he’d bought the glasses not only in case he got caught out at night, but also to convince his sister he hadn’t been lying about sore eyes. He hadn’t intended to wear them by day and hardly knew why he’d put them on before joining Vivian.

  “Spare me your rationalizations,” she said. “Your motives are clear to me, Ernie, and they happen to be very commonplace.”

  She leaned toward him and her voice, little more than a whisper, took on an unexpectedly gloomy, chilling, hopeless tone.

  “See these people all around us, Ernie? They’re suicides, every one of them. Day by day, in every way, they’re killing themselves. People love them, admire them, and it only makes them uneasy. They have abilities and charms by the bushel—yes, they do, even that man with the wen on his neck—and they only try to hide them. The spotlight turns their way and they goof. They think they’re running away from failure, but actually they’re running away from success.”

  Ernie looked at them, he couldn’t help it, her voice made him, and the ability of Page-at-a-Glance Reading chose that moment to come back to him, only applied to faces instead of letters, and there seemed to be another ability along with it, unclear as yet but frightening. He felt like a very old detective scanning the lineup for the thousandth time.

  The black glasses didn’t interfere a bit—the dozens of faces in this speeding electric car were suddenly as familiar as the court cards in a deck—and he had the feeling that, like a bunch of pink pastelboards, they were about to be hurled in his face.

  My God, he asked himself, flinching, how could
you go on living with so many faces so close to you, so completely known?—each street you turned into, each store you entered, each gathering you joined, another deluge of unique features. Ugly, pretty, strong, weak—those words didn’t mean anything any more in this drenching of individuality he was getting, and that showed no signs of stopping.

  So he hardly heard Vivian saying, “And it’s true of you, Ernie—in spades, for your black glasses,” and he hardly remembered parting from her, and when he found himself alone, he did something unprecedented for him at that time of day—he went to a bar and drank two double whiskies.

  The drinks brought the downtown landscape back to normal and stopped the faces printing themselves on his mind, but they left him very disturbed, and the suspiciousness with which he was treated at the office didn’t improve that, and Ernie began to wish for ordinariness and commonplaceness in himself more than anything in the whole world. If only, he silently implored, there were some way of junking everything that had happened to him in the past few weeks—except maybe Vivian.

  Verna on the train home positively terrified him. She was unusually talkative and engulfing this evening and he thought that if the faces-forever feeling came to him just as she was baring her food-triangles and all, he wouldn’t be able to stand it. Somehow, it didn’t. Yet the very intensity of his distaste frightened him. Not for the first time, the word “insanity” appeared in his mind, pulsing in pale yellowish-green.

  Half a block from home, passing his parked car (with an unconscious little veer of avoidance), he spotted three figures in close conference in front of his house: his sister, a man in dark blue—yes, Mr. Jones, and… a man in a white coat.

  Almost before he knew it, he was in his car and driving away. He truly didn’t know what he was going to do, only that he was going to do it, and found a trivial interest in trying to guess what it was going to be. Whatever it was, it was going to dim that yellowish-green world, decrease its type-size, make him a little more able to face the crisis waiting him at home… or somewhere.