The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth

by Roger Zelazny

  He glanced at the clock and realized that its hands were moving backwards.

  The clock told him that it was 10:33, going on 10:32 in the P.M.

  Then came the thing like despair, for he knew there was not a thing he could do about it. He was trapped, moving in reverse through the sequence of actions past. Somehow, he had missed the warning.

  Usually, there was a prism-effect, a flash of pink static, a drowsiness, then a moment of heightened perception…

  He turned the pages, from left to right, his eyes retracing their path back along the lines.

  “?emphasis an such bears grief whose he is What”

  Helpless, there behind his eyes, he watched his body perform.

  The cigarette had reached its full length. He clicked on the lighter, which sucked away its glowing point, and then he shook the cigarette back into the pack.

  He yawned in reverse: first an exhalation, then an inhalation.

  It wasn’t real—the doctor had told him. It was grief and epilepsy, meeting to form an unusual syndrome.

  He’d already had the seizure. The dialantin wasn’t helping. This was a post-traumatic locomotor hallucination, elicited by anxiety, precipitated by the attack.

  But he did not believe it, could not believe it—not after twenty minutes had gone by, in the other direction—not after he had placed the book upon the reading stand, stood, walked backward across the room to his closet, hung tip his robe, redressed himself in the same shirt and slacks he had worn all day, backed over to the bar and regurgitated a Martini, sip by cooling sip, until the glass was filled to the brim and not a drop spilled.

  There was an impending taste of olive, and then everything was changed again.

  The second-hand was sweeping around his wristwatch in the proper direction.

  The time was 10:07.

  He felt free to move as he wished.

  He redrank his Martini.

  Now, if he would be true to the pattern, he would change into his robe and try to read. Instead, he mixed another drink.

  Now the sequence would not occur.

  Now the things would not happen as he thought they had happened, and un-happened.

  Now everything was different.

  All of which went to prove it had been an hallucination.

  Even the notion that it had taken twenty-six minutes each way was an attempted rationalization.

  Nothing had happened.

  … Shouldn’t be drinking, he decided. It might bring on a seizure. He laughed.

  Crazy, though, the whole thing… Remembering, he drank.

  In the morning he skipped breakfast, as usual, noted that it would soon stop being morning, took two aspirins, a lukewarm shower, a cup of coffee, and a walk.

  The park, the fountain, the children with their boats, the grass, the pond, he hated them; and the morning, and the sunlight, and the blue moats around the towering clouds.

  Hating, he sat there. And remembering.

  If he was on the verge of a crackup, he decided, then the thing he wanted most was to plunge ahead into it, not to totter halfway out, halfway in.

  He remembered why.

  But it was clear, so clear, the morning, and everything crisp and distinct and burning with the green fires of spring, there in the sign of the Ram, April.

  He watched the winds pile up the remains of winter against the far gray fence, and he saw them push the boats across the pond, to come to rest in shallow mud the children tracked.

  The fountain jetted its cold umbrella above the green-tinged copper dolphins. The sun ignited it whenever he moved his head. The wind rumpled it.

  Clustered on the concrete, birds pecked at part of a candy bar stuck to a red wrapper.

  Kites swayed on their tails, nosed downward, rose again, as youngsters tugged at invisible strings. Telephone lines were tangled with wooden frames and torn paper, like broken G clefs and smeared glissandos.

  He hated the telephone lines, the kites, the children, the birds.

  Most of all, though, he hated himself.

  How does a man undo that which has been done? He doesn’t. There is no way under the sun. He may suffer, remember, repent, curse, or forget. Nothing else. The past, in this sense, is inevitable.

  A woman walked past. He did not look up in time to see her face, but the dusky blonde fall of her hair to her collar and the swell of her sure, sheer-netted legs below the black hem of her coat and above the matching click of her heels heigh-ho, stopped his breath behind his stomach and snared his eyes in the wizard-weft of her walking and her posture and some more, like a rhyme to the last of his thoughts.

  He half-rose from the bench when the pink static struck his eyeballs, and the fountain became a volcano spouting rainbows.

  The world was frozen and served up to him under glass.

  … The woman passed back before him and he looked down too soon to see her face.

  The hell was beginning once more, he realized, as the backward-flying birds passed before.

  He gave himself to it. Let it keep him until he broke, until he was all used up and there was nothing left.

  He waited, there on the bench, watching the slithey toves be brillig, as the fountain sucked its waters back within itself, drawing them up in a great arc above the unmoving dolphins, and the boats raced backward across the pond, and the fence divested itself of stray scraps of paper, as the birds replaced the candy bar within the red wrapper, bit by crunchy bit.

  His thoughts only were inviolate, his body belonged to the retreating tide.

  Eventually, he rose and strolled backwards out of the park.

  On the street a boy backed past him, unwhistling snatches of a popular song.

  He backed up the stairs to his apartment, his hangover growing worse again, undrank his coffee, unshowered, unswallowed his aspirins, and got into bed, feeling awful.

  Let this be it, he decided.

  A faintly-remembered nightmare ran in reverse through his mind, giving it an undeserved happy ending.

  It was dark when he awakened.

  He was very drunk.

  He backed over to the bar and began spitting out his drinks, one by one into the same glass he had used the night before, and pouring them from the glass back into the bottles again. Separating the gin and vermouth was no trick at all. The proper liquids leapt into the air as he held the uncorked bottles above the bar.

  And he grew less and less drunk as this went on.

  Then he stood before an early Martini and it was 10:07 the P.M. There, within the hallucination, he wondered about another hallucination. Would time loop-the-loop, forward and then backward again, through his previous seizure?

  No.

  It was as though it had not happened, had never been.

  He continued on back through the evening, undoing things.

  He raised the telephone, said “good-bye”, untold Murray that he would not be coming to work again tomorrow, listened a moment, recradled the phone and looked at it as it rang.

  The sun came up in the west and people were backing their cars to work.

  He read the weather report and the headlines, folded the evening paper and placed it out in the hall.

  It was the longest seizure he had ever had, but he did not really care. He settled himself down within it and watched as the day unwound itself back to morning.

  His hangover returned as the day grew smaller, and it was terrible when he got into bed again.

  When he awakened the previous evening the drunkenness was high upon him. Two of the bottles he refilled, recorked, resealed. He knew he would take them to the liquor store soon and get his money back.

  As he sat there that day, his mouth uncursing and undrinking and his eyes unreading, he knew that new cars were being shipped back to Detroit and disassembled, that corpses were awakening into their death-throes, and that priests the world over were saying black mass, unknowing.

  He wanted to chuckle, but he could not tell his mouth to do it.

&nb
sp; He unsmoked two and a half packs of cigarettes.

  Then came another hangover and he went to bed. Later, the sun set in the east.

  Time’s winged chariot fled before him as he opened the door and said “good-bye” to his comforters and they came in and sat down and told him not to grieve overmuch.

  And he wept without tears as he realized what was to come.

  Despite his madness, he hurt.

  … Hurt, as the days rolled backward.

  … Backward, inexorably.

  … Inexorably, until he knew the time was near at hand.

  He gnashed the teeth of his mind.

  Great was his grief and his hate and his love.

  He was wearing his black suit and undrinking drink after drink, while somewhere the men were scraping the clay back onto the shovels which would be used to undig the grave.

  He backed his car to the funeral parlor, parked it, and climbed into the limousine.

  They backed all the way to the graveyard.

  He stood among his friends and listened to the preacher.

  “.dust to dust; ashes to Ashes,” the man said, which is pretty much the same whichever way you say it.

  The casket was taken back to the hearse and returned to the funeral parlor.

  He sat through the service and went home and unshaved and unbrushed his teeth and went to bed.

  He awakened and dressed again in black and returned to the parlor.

  The flowers were all back in place.

  Solemn-faced friends unsigned the Sympathy Book and unshook his hand. Then they went inside to sit awhile and stare at the closed casket. Then they left, until he was alone with the funeral director.

  Then he was alone with himself.

  The tears ran up his cheeks.

  His suit and shirt were crisp and unwrinkled again.

  He backed home, undressed, uncombed his hair. The day collapsed around him into morning, and he returned to bed to unsleep another night.

  The previous evening, when he awakened, he realized where he was headed.

  Twice, he exerted all of his will power in an attempt to interrupt the sequence of events. He failed.

  He wanted to die. If he had killed himself that day, he would not be headed back toward it now.

  There were tears within his mind as he realized the past which lay less than twenty-four hours before him.

  The past stalked him that day as he unnegotiated the purchase of the casket, the vault, the accessories.

  Then he headed home into the biggest hangover of all and slept until he was awakened to undrink drink after drink and then return to the morgue and come back in time to hang up the telephone on that call, that call which had come to break…

  … The silence of his anger with its ringing.

  She was dead.

  She was lying somewhere in the fragments of her car on Interstate 90 now.

  As he paced, unsmoking, he knew she was lying there bleeding.

  … Then dying, after that crash at 80 miles an hour.

  … Then alive?

  Then re-formed, along with the car, and alive again, arisen? Even now backing home at a terrible speed, to re-slam the door on their final argument? To unscream at him and to be unscreamed at?

  He cried out within his mind. He wrung the hands of his spirit.

  It couldn’t stop at this point. No. Not now.

  All his grief and his love and his self-hate had brought him back this far, this near to the moment…

  It couldn’t end now.

  After a time, he moved to the living room, his legs pacing, his lips cursing, himself waiting.

  The door slammed open.

  She stared in at him, her mascara smeared, tears upon her cheeks.

  “!hell to go Then,” he said.

  “!going I’m,” she said.

  She stepped back inside, closed the door.

  She hung her coat hurriedly in the hall closet.

  “.it about feel you way the that’s If,” he said, shrugging.

  “!yourself but anybody about care don’t You,” she said.

  “!child a like behaving You’re,” he said.

  “!sorry you’re say least at could You”

  Her eyes flashed like emeralds through the pink static, and she was lovely and alive again. In his mind he was dancing.

  The change came.

  “You could at least say you’re sorry!”

  “I am,” he said, taking her hand in a grip that she could not break. “How much, you’ll never know.”

  “Come here,” and she did.

  CORRIDA

  He awoke to an ultrasonic wailing. It was a thing that tortured his eardrums while remaining just beyond the threshhold of the audible.

  He scrambled to his feet in the darkness.

  He bumped against the walls several times. Dully, he realized that his arms were sore, as though many needles had entered there.

  The sound maddened him…

  Escape! He had to get away!

  A tiny patch of light occurred to his left.

  He turned and raced toward it and it grew into a doorway.

  He dashed through and stood blinking in the glare that assailed his eyes.

  He was naked, he was sweating. His mind was full of fog and the rag-ends of dreams.

  He heard a roar, as of a crowd, and he blinked against the brightness.

  Towering, a dark figure stood before him in the distance. Overcome by rage, he raced toward it, not quite certain why.

  His bare feet trod hot sand, but he ignored the pain as he ran to attack.

  Some portion of his mind framed the question “Why?” but he ignored it.

  Then he stopped.

  A nude woman stood before him, beckoning, inviting, and there came a sudden surge of fire within his loins.

  He turned slightly to his left and headed toward her.

  She danced away.

  He increased his speed. But as he was about to embrace her, there came a surge of fire in his right shoulder and she was gone.

  He looked at his shoulder and an aluminum rod protruded from it, and the blood ran down along his arm. There arose another roar.

  … And she appeared again.

  He pursued her once more and his left shoulder burned with sudden fires. She was gone and he stood shaking and sweating, blinking against the glare.

  “It’s a trick,” he decided. “Don’t play the game!”

  She appeared again and he stood stock still, ignoring her.

  He was assailed by fires, but he refused to move, striving to clear his head.

  The dark figure appeared once more, about seven feet tall and possessing two pairs of arms.

  It held something in one of its hands. If only the lighting weren’t so crazy, perhaps he…

  But he hated that dark figure and he charged it.

  Pain lashed his side.

  Wait a minute! Wait a minute!

  Crazy! It’s all crazy! he told himself, recalling his identity. This is a bullring and I’m a man, and that dark thing isn’t. Something’s wrong!

  He dropped to his hands and knees, buying time. He scooped up a double fistful of sand while he was down.

  There came proddings, electric and painful. He ignored them for as long as he could, then stood.

  The dark figure waved something at him and he felt himself hating it.

  He ran toward it and stopped before it. He knew it was a game now. His name was Michael Cassidy. He was an attorney. New York. Of Johnson, Weems, Daugherty and Cassidy. A man had stopped him, asking for a light. On a street corner. Late at night. That he remembered.

  He threw the sand at the creature’s head.

  It swayed momentarily, and its arms were raised toward what might have been its face.

  Gritting his teeth, he tore the aluminum rod from his shoulder and drove its sharpened end into the creature’s middle.

  Something touched the back of his neck, and there was darkness and he lay still for
a long time.

  When he could move again, he saw the dark figure and he tried to tackle it.

  He missed, and there was pain across his back and something wet.

  When he stood once again, he bellowed, “You can’t do this to me! I’m a man! Not a bull!”

  There came a sound of applause.

  He raced toward the dark thing six times, trying to grapple with it, hold it, hurt it. Each time, he hurt himself.

  Then he stood, panting and gasping, and his shoulders ached and his back ached, and his mind cleared a moment and he said, “You’re God, aren’t you? And this is the way You play the game… “

  The creature did not answer him and he lunged.

  He stopped short, then dropped to one knee and dove against its legs.

  He felt a terrible fiery pain within his side as he brought the dark one to earth. He struck at it twice with his fists, then the pain entered his breast and he felt himself grow numb.

  “Or are you?” he asked, thick-lipped. “No, you’re not… Where am I?”

  His last memory was of something cutting away at his ears.

  LOVE IS AN IMAGINARY NUMBER

  They should have known that they could not keep me bound forever. Probably they did, which is why there was always Stella.

  I lay there staring over at her, arm outstretched above her head, masses of messed blond hair framing her sleeping face. She was more than wife to me: she was warden. How blind of me not to have realized it sooner!

  But then, what else had they done to me?

  They had made me to forget what I was.

  Because I was like them but not of them they had bound me to this time and this place.

  They had made me to forget. They had nailed me with love.

  I stood up and the last chains fell away.

  A single bar of moonlight lay upon the floor of the bedchamber. I passed through it to where my clothing was hung.

  There was a faint music playing in the distance. That was what had done it. It had been so long since I had heard that music…

  How had they trapped me?

  That little kingdom, ages ago, some Other, where I had introduced gunpowder—Yes! That was the place! They had trapped me there with my Other-made monk’s hood and my classical Latin.

  Then brainsmash and binding to this Otherwhen.