Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  He remembered everything.

  He read a textbook once and it stayed with him. When the teacher asked a question based on the day's assignment, Tommy Niles' skinny arm was in the air long before the others had even really assimilated the question. After a while, his teacher made it clear to him that he could not answer every question, whether he had the answer first or not; there were twenty other pupils in the class. The other pupils in the class made that abundantly clear to him after school.

  He won the verse-learning contest in Sunday School. Barry Harman had studied for weeks in hopes of winning the catcher's mitt his father had promised him if he finished first—but when it was Tommy Niles' turn to recite, he began with In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,continued through Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them,headed on into Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made, and presumably would have continued clear through Genesis, Exodus, and on to Joshua if the dazed proctor hadn't shut him up and declared him the winner.

  Barry Harman didn't get his glove; Tommy Niles got a black eye instead.

  He began to realize he was different. It took time to make the discovery that other people were always forgetting things and that instead of admiring him for what he could do they hated him for it. It was difficult for a boy of eight, even Tommy Niles, to understand why they hated him, but eventually he did find it out, and then he started learning how to hide his gift.

  Through his ninth and tenth years he practiced being normal, and almost succeeded; the after-school beatings stopped, and he managed to get a few B's on his report cards at last, instead of straight rows of A. He was growing up; he was learning to pretend. Neighbors heaved sighs of relief now that that terrible Niles boy was no longer doing all those crazy things.

  But inwardly he was the same as ever. And he realized he'd have to leave Lowry Bridge soon.

  He knew everyone too well. He would catch them in lies ten times a week, even Mr. Lawrence, the minister, who once turned down an invitation to pay a social call to the Nileses one night, saying, "I really have to get down to work and write my sermon for Sunday," when only three days before Tommy had heard him say to Miss Emery, the church secretary, that he had had a sudden burst of inspiration and had written three sermons all at one sitting, and now he'd have some free time for the rest of the month.

  Even Mr. Lawrence lied, then. And he was the best of them. As for the others …

  Tommy waited until he was twelve; he was big for his age by then and figured he could take care of himself. He borrowed twenty dollars from the supposedly secret cashbox in the back of the kitchen cupboard (his mother had mentioned its existence five years before, in Tommy's hearing) and tiptoed out of the house at three in the morning. He caught the night freight for Chillicothe and was on his way.

  · · · · ·

  There were thirty people on the bus out of Los Angeles. Niles sat alone in the back, by the seat just over the rear wheel. He knew four of the people in the bus by name—but he was confident they had forgotten who he was by now, and so he kept to himself.

  It was an awkward business. If you said hello to someone who had forgotten you, they thought you were a troublemaker or a panhandler. And if you passed someone by, thinking he had forgotten you, and he hadn't—well, then you were a snob. Niles swung between both those poles five times a day. He'd see someone, such as that girl Bette Torrance, and get a cold unrecognizing stare; or he'd go by someone else, believing the other person did not remember him but walking rapidly just in case he did, and there would be the angry, "Well! Who the blazes do you think youare!" floating after him as he retreated.

  Now he sat alone bouncing up and down with each revolution of the wheel, with the one suitcase containing his property thumping constantly against the baggage rack over his head. That was one advantage of his talent: he could travel light. He didn't need to keep books once he had read them, and there wasn't much point in amassing belongings of any other sort either; they became overfamiliar too soon.

  He eyed the road signs. They were well into Nevada by now. The old, wearisome retreat was on.

  He could never stay in the same city too long. He had to move on to new territory, to some new place where he had no old memories, where no one knew him, where he knew no one. In the sixteen years since he had left home, he'd covered a lot of ground.

  He remembered the jobs he had held.

  He had once been a proofreader for a Chicago publishing firm. He did the jobs of two men. The way proofreading usually worked, one man read the copy from the manuscript, the other checked it against the galleys. Niles had a simpler method: he would scan the manuscript once, thereby memorizing it, and then merely check the galley for discrepancies. It brought him $50 a week for a while, before the time came to move along.

  He once held a job as a sideshow freak in a traveling carnie that made a regular Alabama-Mississippi-Georgia circuit. Niles had really been low on cash, then. He remembered how he had gotten the job: by buttonholing the carnie boss and demanding a tryout. "Read me anything—anything at all! I can remember it!" The boss had been skeptical and didn't see any use for such an act anyway but finally gave in when Niles practically fainted of malnutrition in his office. The boss read him an editorial from a Mississippi county weekly, and when he was through Niles recited it back word-perfect. He got the job, at $15 a week plus meals, and sat in a little booth under a sign that said: THE HUMAN TAPE RECORDER. People read or said things to him, and he repeated them. It was dull work; sometimes the things they said were filthy, and most of the time they couldn't even remember a minute later what they had said to him. He stayed with the show four weeks, and when he left no one missed him much.

  The bus rolled on into the fogbound night.

  There had been other jobs: good jobs, bad jobs. None of them had lasted very long. There had been some girls, too, but none of them had lasted too long. They had all, even those he tried to conceal it from, found out about his special ability, and soon afterward they had left. No one could stay with a man who never forgot, who could always dredge yesterday's foibles out of the reservoir that was his mind and hurl them unanswerably into the open. And the man with the perfect memory could never live long among imperfect human beings.

  To forgive is to forget, he thought. The memory of old insults and quarrels fades, and a relationship starts anew. But for him there could be no forgetting, and hence little forgiving.

  He closed his eyes after a while and leaned back against the hard leather cushion of his seat. The steady rhythm of the bus lulled him to sleep. In sleep, his mind could rest; he found cease from memory. He never dreamed.

  · · · · ·

  In Salt Lake City he paid his fare, left the bus, suitcase in hand, and set out in the first direction he faced. He had not wanted to go any farther east on that bus. His cash reserve was only $63, now, and he had to make it last.

  He found a job as a dishwasher in a downtown restaurant, held it long enough to accumulate a hundred dollars, and moved on again, this time hitchhiking to Cheyenne. He stayed there a month and took a night bus to Denver, and when he left Denver it was to go to Wichita.

  Wichita to Des Moines, Des Moines to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to Milwaukee, then down through Illinois, carefully avoiding Chicago, and on to Indianapolis. It was an old story for him, this traveling. Gloomily he celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday alone in an Indianapolis rooming house on a drizzly October day and for the purpose of brightening the occasion summoned up his old memories of his fourth birthday party, in 1933 … one of the few unalloyedly happy days of his life.

  They were all there, all his playmates, and his parents, and his brother, Hank, looking gravely important at the age of eight, and his sister, Marian, and there were candles and favors and punch and cake. Mrs. Heinsohn from next door stopped in and said, "He looks like a regular little man," and his parents beamed at him, and everyone sang and had a good time.
And afterward, when the last game had been played, the last present opened, when the boys and girls had waved good-bye and disappeared up the street, the grownups sat around and talked of the new president and the many strange things that were happening in the country, and little Tommy sat in the middle of the floor, listening and recording everything and glowing warmly, because somehow during the whole afternoon no one had said or done anything cruel to him. He was happy that day, and he went to bed still happy.

  Niles ran through the party twice, like an old movie he loved well; the print never grew frayed, the registration always remained as clear and sharp as ever. He could taste the sweet tang of the punch, he could relive the warmth of that day when through some accident the others had allowed him a little happiness.

  Finally he let the brightness of the party fade, and once again he was in Indianapolis on a gray bleak afternoon, alone in an $8-a-week furnished room.

  Happy birthday to me, he thought bitterly. Happy birthday.

  He stared at the blotchy green wall with the cheap Corot print hung slightly askew. I could have been something special, he brooded, one of the wonders of the world. Instead I'm a skulking freak who lives in dingy third-floor back rooms, and I don't dare let the world know what I can do.

  He scooped into his memory and came up with the Toscanini performance of Beethoven's Ninth he had heard in Carnegie Hall once while he was in New York. It was infinitely better than the later performance Toscanini had approved for recording, yet no microphones had taken it down; the blazing performance was as far beyond recapture as a flame five minutes snuffed, except in one man's mind, Niles had it all: the majestic downcrash of the timpani, the resonant perspiring basso bringing forth the great melody of the finale, even the french-horn bobble that must have enraged the maestro so, the infuriating cough from the dress circle at the gentlest moment of the adagio, the sharp pinching of Niles' shoes as he leaned forward in his seat …

  He had it all, in highest fidelity. There arecompensations, he thought. But oh, the price I pay for my Beethoven!

  · · · · ·

  He arrived in the small town on a moonless night three months later, a cold, crisp January evening when the wintry wind swept in from the north, cutting through his thin clothing and making the suitcase an almost impossible burden for his numb, gloveless hand. He had not meant to come to this place, but he had run short of cash in Kentucky, and there had been no helping it. He was on his way to New York, where he could live in anonymity for months unbothered, and where he knew his rudeness would go unnoticed if he happened to snub someone on the street, or if he greeted someone who had forgotten him.

  But New York was still hundreds of miles away, and it might have been millions on this January night. He saw a sign: BAR. He forced himself forward toward the sputtering neon; he wasn't ordinarily a drinker, but he needed the warmth of alcohol inside him now, and perhaps the barkeep would need a man to help out or could at least rent him a room for what little he had in his pockets.

  There were five men in the bar when he reached it. They looked like truckdrivers. Niles dropped his valise to the left of the door, rubbed his stiff hands together, exhaled a white cloud. The bartender grinned jovially at him.

  "Cold enough for you out there?"

  Niles managed a grin. "I wasn't sweating much. Let me have something warming. Double shot of bourbon, maybe."

  That would be 90¢. He had $7.34.

  He nursed the drink when it came, sipped it slowly, let it roll down his gullet. He thought of the summer he had been stranded for a week in Washington, a solid week of 97° temperature and 97 humidity, and the vivid memory helped to ease away some of the psychological effects of the coldness.

  He relaxed; he warmed. Behind him came the penetrating sound of argument.

  "… I tell you Joe Louis beat Schmeling to a pulp the second time! KO'd him in the first round!"

  "You're nuts! Louis just barely got him down in a fifteen-round decision, the second bout."

  "Seems to me—"

  "I'll put money on it. Ten bucks says it was a decision in fifteen, Mac."

  Sound of confident chuckles. "I wouldn't want to take your money so easy, pal. Everyone knows it was a knockout in one."

  "Ten bucks, I said."

  Niles turned to see what was happening. Two of the truckdrivers, burly men in dark pea jackets, stood nose-to-nose. Automatically the thought came: Louis knocked Max Schmeling out in the first round at Yankee Stadium, New York, June 22, 1938. Niles had never been much of a sports fan, and particularly disliked boxing- but he had once glanced at an almanac page cataloguing Joe Louis' title fights.

  He watched detachedly as the bigger of the two truckdrivers angrily slapped a ten-dollar bill down on the bar; the other matched it. Then the first glanced up at the barkeep and said. "Okay, Bud. You're a shrewd guy. Who's right about the second Louis-Schmeling fight?"

  The barkeep was a blank-faced cipher of a man, middle-aged, balding, with mild empty eyes. He chewed at his lip a moment, shrugged, fidgeted, finally said, "Kinda hard for me to remember. That musta been twenty-five years ago."

  Twenty, Niles thought.

  "Lessee now," the bartender went on. "Seems to me I remember … yeah, sure. It went the full fifteen and the judges gave it to Louis. I seem to remember a big stink being made over it; the papers said Joe should've killed him a lot faster'n that."

  A triumphant grin appeared on the bigger driver's face. He deftly pocketed both bills.

  The other man grimaced and howled, "Hey! You two fixed this thing up beforehand! I know damn well that Louis KO'd the German in one."

  "You heard what the man said. The money's mine."

  "No," Niles said suddenly, in a quiet voice that seemed to carry halfway across the bar. Keep your mouth shut, he told himself frantically. This is none of your business. Stay out of it!

  But it was too late.

  "What you say?" asked the one who'd dropped the ten-spot.

  "I say you're being rooked. Louis won the fight in one round, like you say. June 22, 1938 , Yankee Stadium. The barkeep's thinking of the Arturo Godoy fight. That went the full fifteen in 1940."

  "There—told you! Gimme back my money!"

  But the other driver ignored the cry and turned to face Niles. He was a cold-faced, heavy-set man, and his fists were starting to clench. "Smart man, eh? Boxing expert?"

  "I just didn't want to see anybody get cheated," Niles said stubbornly. He knew what was coming now. The truckdriver was weaving drunkenly toward him; the barkeep was yelling, the other patrons backing away.

  The first punch caught Niles in the ribs; he grunted and staggered back, only to be grabbed by the throat and slapped three times. Dimly he heard a voice saying, "Hey, leggo the guy! He didn't mean anything! You want to kill him?"

  A volley of blows doubled him up; a knuckle swelled his right eyelid, a fist crashed stunningly into his left shoulder. He spun, wobbled uncertainly, knowing that his mind would permanently record every moment of this agony.

  Through half-closed eyes he saw them pulling the enraged driver off him; the man writhed in the grip of three others, aimed a last desperate kick at Niles' stomach and grazed a rib, and finally was subdued.

  Niles stood alone in the middle of the floor, forcing himself to stay upright, trying to shake off the sudden pain that drilled through him in a dozen places.

  "You all right?" a solicitous voice asked. "Hell, those guys play rough. You oughtn't mix up with them."

  "I'm all right," Niles said hollowly. "Just … let me … catch my breath."

  "Here. Sit down. Have a drink. It'll fix you up."

  "No," Niles said. I can't stay here. I have to get moving. "I'll be all right," he muttered unconvincingly. He picked up his suitcase, wrapped his coat tight about him, and left the bar, step by step by step.

  He got fifteen feet before the pain became unbearable. He crumpled suddenly and fell forward on his face in the dark, feeling the iron-hard frozen turf against hi
s cheek, and struggled unsuccessfully to get up. He lay there, remembering all the various pains of his life, the beatings, the cruelty, and when the weight of memory became too much to bear, he blanked out.

  · · · · ·

  The bed was warm, the sheets clean and fresh and soft. Niles woke slowly, feeling a temporary sensation of disorientation, and then his infallible memory supplied the data on his blackout in the snow and he realized he was in a hospital.

  He tried to open his eyes; one was swollen shut, but he managed to get the other's lids apart. He was in a small hospital room—no shining metropolitan hospital pavilion, but a small county clinic with gingerbread molding on the walls and homey lace curtains, through which afternoon sunlight was entering.