“Hi, Charlie,” cried the mailman, making his habitual derisive grin and, if precedent were to be followed, preparing one of his insulting wisecracks, e.g., “Still working on your first million?”
“So long, sucker,” said Charlie. He pulled the trigger of the toy weapon, which produced the expected clicking sound, like that made by the tongue against the roof of the mouth, and the mailman instantly disappeared, without even the proverbial puff of smoke!
Charlie was badly frightened, not because he believed for a moment that he had actually caused the postman to disintegrate into particles too small to be detected by the eye, but rather because he suspected that his mind had cracked, that he had suffered a hallucination. For he had always been a very literal man, with no imagination and with no respect for anybody who had one.
So now he was really worried about his sanity, and he even went so far as to make an emergency appointment with the psychiatrist who occupied one of the ground-floor offices in the apartment building. “Well, well, uh, Charlie, isn’t it?” said this practitioner, when the super was seated before his desk. “Before we get down to business, I’d like to point out that the lobby could use a good mopping.”
Charlie told this doctor, whose name was Hilfer, about the remarkable fantasy he had suffered.
Dr. Hilfer asked: “Has this mailman turned up since?”
“No, sir. But then he’s not due again till tomorrow morning.”
Hilfer narrowed his eyes. “You’re saying you murdered him, aren’t you, Charlie?” At the super’s gasping attempts to protest, the doctor raised a hand. “No, no. We’re not afraid to face the truth here. You did well in coming immediately to me. You’ll never spend a night in jail, I’ll promise you that.” He rose, finished with Charlie until the next appointment.
Charlie asked him to specify his fee. When Dr. Hilfer said that, because of the courtesy discount extended to employees of the building, it was only two hundred dollars per visit, Charlie pulled out the Space Disintegrator and made the psychiatrist vanish.
With this disappearance of another person at whom he had pointed the toy weapon, the super began to think that perhaps he was not imagining things, that maybe the Disintegrator was an efficacious means for getting rid of human beings without any attendant problems, not even the least destruction of property.
He tried it next on a boy of twelve, an exceptionally obnoxious youth in a building full of such, and the Doberman which the lad allowed, even encouraged, to disregard the law against soiling the sidewalks. Click-click, another problem was removed. But Charlie was not a cruel man: the kid had parents by whom he would have been missed. The super therefore considerately erased (as he had come to call it) Mr. and Mrs. Hochman as well.
And also, in a development not related to the foregoing, all persons who lived on the south corridor of the fourth floor were caused to disappear, for one or more of them persistently fouled the floor there with a dark, viscous liquid very like motor oil and also, sometimes, a very fine gravel. And soon to vanish was a wealthy man who lived in one of the penthouses and yet always tipped Charlie as though he resided in a studio apartment.
During the next few days Charlie also erased four flight attendants who shared an apartment: they were old offenders against the plumbing, no sink or washstand would long run free if that hairy quartet were allowed access to it. And he expunged a pair of handsome men who shared one-bedroom quarters and had never, in four years, been seen to admit a female person onto their premises: Charlie had never subscribed to the principle of live and let. And the following persons were never seen again after he had pointed the Disintegrator at them: his feckless assistant, who though twenty years younger always allowed Charlie to do the dirtier and heavier tasks; the morning doorman, who believed that his uniform made him socially superior to a super in dark-green denim; a passing stranger who spat upon the sidewalk; the heavy, sour man who had replaced the mail carrier who had been Charlie’s first prey; and a very fat woman who was so tasteless as to cram herself into designer jeans and a too-snug T-shirt.
At this point he ceased to keep a tally on his victims—if they could be so designated, though there was no evidence that they suffered a split-second of pain. The Disintegrator seemed simply to return them to the nothingness from which they had originally come as newborn infants. This would not seem to be murder. Charlie supposed that there probably wasn’t even a law against it, because it was unprecedented. But surely there would be one once it was known to be happening. Therefore only trouble could come from anybody’s learning about the Disintegrator.
Fortunately the plastic pistol would be neither difficult to conceal nor to justify having if it were detected. A super routinely collected lost toys or saw that the Sanitation Department took away the discarded ones. There could never be any reason why the Disintegrator would be identified for what it was. Only those who had been erased by it would be privy to its extraordinary power—and perhaps not even them, were they somehow brought back from the void. Most of the persons at whom Charlie had pointed it had not been looking his way at the time. Those who had been, like the first mailman, would have seen nothing but the red plastic muzzle, from which came no slug or noise or visible emanation before its target vanished utterly.
There had never been anything of this sort in the history of man, and Charlie was aware that he could have used the Disintegrator to rule the world! He might well have set out to do that had he been younger, but now his digestion was gone and his lower back sometimes ached so much he couldn’t get to sleep at night, and he really did not yearn for positive power. Just getting rid of people that annoyed him was a great advantage, and he asked for nothing more than peace in his declining years.
However, a strange state of affairs had come into being. Now that Charlie could erase those who bothered him, there were more of them all the time. Whereas when he had been helpless against them, relatively few persons had seriously bothered him on any given day, now, when he had the means to rub out anyone who offended him, such individuals appeared in great numbers wherever he went. At the delicatessen, for example, while waiting in line for a brisket on rye, mustard only, the super was jostled savagely, and at least one other customer unfairly jumped his proper place in line, and when Charlie finally reached the counterman he was insulted by him for being too slow in giving the order (being momentarily speechless with indignation). Really the only way to deal with this situation was to erase everybody in the deli—a job which, amazingly, took only a few pulls of the trigger: the Disintegrator could handle any number of persons who were in line with its muzzle. Charlie was soon to test its efficacy on a line before the ticket window at the ballpark, taking out twenty-three persons with one squeeze. Apparently it was like x-ray, going straight through living tissue, but having no effect on nonorganic matter.
Before many days had passed, the effects of Charlie’s erasures began to be evident. Fewer and fewer people were to be seen in the building, and the survivors began to wonder audibly what had happened to the missing tenants. Sometimes they unwittingly asked the only man who could have explained: “Hey, Charlie, this place is beginning to look deserted, don’t you think?” Or, “What’s become of everybody, Charlie?”
At first the super would cast doubt on their powers of observation. “Take it from me, there’s more people around here every day. You just missed a big crowd.” Next, when the reduction in population had become too drastic to ignore, Charlie would say something like: “Oh, everybody gets out of here on weekends nowadays.” And if the response was: “But, Charlie, today’s Wednesday,” he might answer: “They stretch it to the breaking point, don’t they?” and shake his head over the decadence of the typical contemporary jobholder. Finally when nothing he could dream up would satisfy the inquirer, Charlie would shrug and reach for the Disintegrator, and so went, one by one, or sometimes little group by group, the remaining tenants, and soon the entire building was devoid of humanity except for Charlie himself.
&nbs
p; Now, certainly, the people who had lived there had relatives and friends who missed them, and many individuals came to the building in search of the whereabouts of the former tenants, including representatives of the large real-estate firm that owned the apartment house. Charlie erased all these investigators, and then went downtown to the main office of the firm, his employers, and caused everyone there to disappear.
Charlie continued in this fashion for several months, always finding new uses for the Disintegrator. For example, he was aware that even with all his power he was still not desirable to the kind of women, namely young and pretty ones, who now had begun to attract him. He might spot some knockout accompanied by a man and erase the latter, but the girl even so would see no reason why she should take Charlie as replacement for her vanished companion. But one day the super got the idea of replacing all the other males in the city who were younger and/or better-looking than he, and he set about making wholesale erasures with his Disintegrator. This took a few weeks, despite the effectiveness of his device, for there were hundreds of thousands of persons he had to get rid of, but finally it was done, and Charlie was obviously, by default, the best date a woman could find in a city of the aged, the physically disabled, and the harmless mental defectives, and he could take his pick, with the exception of the contrary ones who said that if he was all that was offered they could survive without male friendship—naturally, he erased this sort immediately on hearing that argument.
But at about this time life for Charlie began to be dissatisfying even though everything was going his way, for in the absence of all able-bodied and sane men a good many of the practical affairs of the city were in a mess. When there was trouble at a power plant it could not be corrected for months, owing to the small number of female electrical technicians, and Charlie soon found his own building without lights, air conditioning, TV, or any of the other conveniences afforded by electricity. Most restaurants were closed for the same reason, added to which was the utter absence of garbage-removal workers. The few woman bus- and taxi-drivers were so overworked that most of them quit their jobs, and with the disappearance of gas-truck drivers, station personnel and mechanics, the vehicles could not run long anyway, and of course the same was true of private cars.
Some of the deprivations did not matter that much: most of the police were gone, but so were almost all of the criminals, except for a few tough girls whom Charlie found it simple to erase when he encountered them.
Up to the time of the erasure of the men, television, radio, and the press had given daily attention to the disappearance of so much of the city’s population, and there were all sorts of theories as to what and why it was happening, but after the power failures this stopped owing to the inability of the information media to continue to function. However, the girls dated by Charlie talked of no other subject, except the inevitable matter of the latest problem such as lack of refrigeration, so no food could be had but the canned and dehydrated stuff.
“Charlie,” they would say, “have you heard this theory? That all the guys, every one, turned homosexual and went to some community in the desert where they won’t have to listen to reproaches?”
“Hell with that,” Charlie would growl. “Don’t bother me about that!” For with all those lonely women at his disposal, he didn’t have to worry about being rude.
And the fact was that he was getting pretty bored with women in general, now that he had them all to himself, and he was getting really tired of living without electricity, especially now that there weren’t many places to go, and he would have liked at least to watch television, and whenever he had a date now he asked the girl why she hadn’t gone in for a career in technology.
“Gee, Charlie,” the young woman would say, “I could have sworn you would have found that unfeminine. Don’t you prefer me as the high-fashion model I am, or anyway was until this current crisis hit the city?”
“I’d rather have my refrigerator turning out ice cubes,” said Charlie. “I’d rather not have to go around my apartment carrying a candle.” And in his annoyance with a situation that he had certainly brought on himself he would erase this person. He had no patience whatever with anybody. He erased the rest of the men, the lame, and the halt, and so on, for aesthetic reasons, and he got rid of more and more females because he was exasperated by their uselessness.
Finally without being full aware of what he had done, Charlie got rid of the last person in town, a tall redhead with green eyes and large teeth, who had made too many jokes for his taste, and then he was all alone in the vast city. A sense of his uniqueness came to him after a day or so, and having taken one of the empty cars that had been abandoned at every curb and driven from one end of town to the other without hearing or seeing anyone, Charlie reflected on his lack of foresight in using the Disintegrator so lavishly, and he understood that such a fool as he should never have had his wish granted. He then turned the muzzle of the Disintegrator on himself and pulled the trigger.
It wasn’t long before people came from other places and repopulated the city and became so involved in their own affairs that the strange disappearance of the original citizenry, never explained, was forgotten except by those periodicals perennially concerned with alien abductions and the Bermuda Triangle.
Some kid found the Disintegrator where it had fallen on Charlie’s disappearance, and he pointed it at his friends, a stray dog, and so on, and pressed the trigger, but aside from the clicking noise, nothing happened. He was still too young to have any really passionate wishes.
A Biography of Thomas Berger
Thomas Louis Berger (b. 1924) is an American novelist best known for his picaresque classic, Little Big Man (1964). His other works include Arthur Rex (1978), Neighbors (1980), and The Feud (1983), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Berger was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Thomas Charles, a public school business manager, and Mildred (née Bubbe) Berger. Berger grew up in the town of Lockland, Ohio, and one of his first jobs was working at a branch of the public library while in high school. After a brief period in college, Berger enlisted in the army in 1943 and served in Europe during World War II. His experiences with a medical unit in the American occupation zone of postwar Berlin inspired his first novel, Crazy in Berlin (1958). This novel introduced protagonist Carlo Reinhart, who would appear in several more novels.
In 1946, Berger reentered college at the University of Cincinnati, earning a bachelor’s degree two years later. In 1948, he moved to New York City and was hired as librarian of the Rand School of Social Science. While enrolled in a writer's workshop at the nearby New School for Social Research, Berger met artist Jeanne Redpath; they married in 1950. He subsequently entered Columbia University as a graduate student in English literature, but left the program after a year and a half without taking a degree. He next worked at the New York Times Index; at Popular Science Monthly as an associate editor; and, for a decade, as a freelance copy editor for book publishers.
Following the success of Rinehart in Love (1962), Berger was named a Dial Fellow. In 1965, he received the Western Heritage Award and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for Little Big Man (1964), the success of which allowed him to write full time. In 1970, Little Big Man was made into an acclaimed film, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway.
Following his job as Esquire’s film critic from 1972 to 1973, Berger became a writer in residence at the University of Kansas in 1974. One year later, he became a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, and went on to lecture at Yale University and the University of California, Davis.
Berger’s work continued to appear on the big screen. His novel Neighbors (1980) was adapted for a 1981 film starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. In 1984, his novel The Feud (1983) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; in 1988, it too was made into a movie. His thriller Meeting Evil (1992) was adapted as a 2012 film starring Samuel L. Jackson and Luke Wilso
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In 1999, Berger published The Return of Little Big Man, a sequel to his literary classic. His most recent novel, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, was published in 2004.
Berger lives ten feet from the Hudson River in Rockland County, New York.
In 1966, two years after he wrote Little Big Man, Berger stands at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, the site of Custer’s last stand in 1876. This was Berger’s first visit to the famous battlefield.
This black-and-white image became the readers’ vision of Berger: dark and esoteric. (Photo courtesy of Gerry Bauer.)
A snapshot of Berger with his friend Zulkifar Ghose, taken in midtown Manhattan in the summer of 1974. (Photo courtesy of Betty Sue Flowers.)
This marked-up manuscript page comes from a story called “Gibberish,” from Berger’s original short story collection Abnormal Occurrences.
In this 1984 letter to his agent, Don Congdon, Berger tells Congdon that he was mentioned on The David Susskind Show, a television talk show.
In this 1997 letter, Berger writes to Roger Donald, his editor at Little, Brown, about characters, props, and plot points in The Return of Little Big Man.
In 1997, Berger wrote to Congdon about communications from Michael Korda, editor in chief of the publisher Simon & Schuster, and Donald.
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Abnormal Occurrences: Short Stories Page 16
