After the workman had deposited him on the first floor of the building that was undergoing demolition, a cop hustled over and ushered Harry off to an area some distance away, where onlookers numbering in the thousands had gathered."
Now Harry was standing at the front of the crowd and wondering what the hell he was going to do without any money or shoes.
"Don't stay here," he heard. He looked about. Who had spoken? he wondered. A fat woman in a black hat stood to his left, but when he looked questioningly at her she didn't acknowledge him, and he realized that the voice he'd heard had been the voice of a man anyway. He looked at a well-dressed, older man standing to his right. "Excuse me," Harry said to him, "but did you just say something?"
"No," the man answered curtly, "I didn't," and it was clear from his tone that he didn't want to be bothered.
Harry turned a little to look at the people behind him. None of them looked back.
"Don't stay here," he heard, and realized, with a little shiver, that the voice seemed to be coming from within his own head. My God, he thought, I'm going crazy!
"No," said the voice, "you're not going crazy. We've got places to go, people to see, investigations to make. Remember Sydney?"
"But I must be crazy," Harry said aloud.
"Shh!" said the well-dressed man beside him, and he realized that the huge crowd, which had gathered to watch this building's demolition, was eerily quiet, as if they were waiting for a birth to happen or a violin concerto to begin.
"Damned loonies everywhere," muttered the fat woman standing to his left. "Not even wearing shoes."
"Shh!" said the well-dressed man.
"Don't you shush me!"
And the voice inside Harry's head chattered on, "I'm here, my friend, so listen to me./ There are lots better places for you to be."
Harry nodded. He was sure the voice was right.
"I don't know what your problem is," the voice continued. "Maybe when you made the leap you got looped, or plooped, don't ask me which, /but it's definitely some kind of cosmic glitch./Maybe you fooled someone in authority,/Someone in charge,/Someone large,/Or maybe when you arrive here,/You're alive here./But if you are alive,/It's probably not going to last,/So you'd better do your snooping fast."
"Not going to last?" Harry whispered. Of course he wasn't going to last. No one did. Everyone was mortal. His inner voice was making no sense at all, and speaking to him in rhyme besides. This was not a good sign.
He stepped forward, glanced right and left, and saw no way around the crowd except backward, through it, which didn't appeal to him.
He stepped back again. "What part of Manhattan is this?" he asked the fat woman.
Her chest heaved in annoyance. "Good heavens," she said, "it's Fifty-ninth Street and Sixth Avenue."
"And they're going to blow that building up?" It was a tall building, but not by New York City standards. It stood about twenty stories, he guessed. Much of the glass had been removed.
"No," said the fat woman sarcastically, "we're just here for our health."
"And what if I don't want to stick around?"
"Then that is your business," said the well-dressed man.
Harry could feel the crowd behind him. Its mass and weight and anticipation.
The voice in his head said, "This is sick. Thousands of people waiting around to see a building destroyed. People are anarchists at heart. Order doesn't really appeal to them. Just disorder."
"It's only human," Harry said, happy at any rate that the voice had stopped speaking to him in rhyme.
"What they're doing is watching the old give way to the new."
"And he talks to himself as well," muttered the fat woman.
"Remember Sydney?" repeated the voice inside Harry's head.
"Sydney?" Harry said. "In Australia?"
"Shhh!" said the fat woman.
"Sydney in Australia?" said the voice in Harry's head. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"It's the capital of Australia. Sydney," Harry answered.
"If you're going to talk to yourself," said the well-dressed man, "please do it at a whisper." A brief pause. "Though, on second thought, that might be more disconcerting. Crazy people talking to themselves in whispers would be very unnerving indeed. Heaven knows what they'd be plotting."
"I'm not crazy," Harry said to him.
"Actually, Canberra is the capital of Australia," said the fat woman.
"I'm talking about your rat puppy, dammit!" said the voice inside Harry's head.
"Rat puppy?" Harry said. "What in the hell is a rat puppy?"
"Your Sydney Greenstreet, for Christ's sake! He's killing people, or had that slipped your mind? You'd better start remembering, Harry, or you'll really fall behind."
"Sydney Greenstreet iskilling people?" Harry asked. "He's only an actor. And, besides that, he's dead."
"So are you!"
"So am I what?"
"Dead, Fred. As dead as a snail who leaves no trail."
"Dead?" Harry was astonished. "That's the second time you've said that. I'm not dead!"
"As dead as last month's chicken cacciatore. Don't you recall,/The ocean, the fall ... oh, shit!"
"Oh, shit? What's wrong?"
"I'm being plooped again."
"Plooped? What in the hell does 'plooped' mean?"
"You want to come with me, buddy?"
Harry hadn't noticed the cop standing in front of him.
"Sorry, my friend, you're on your own—"
"You listening to me, Mack?"
"Mack?" Harry focused on the cop. He was big, scowling and immovable. He took Harry by the arm and led him away.
Speaking to the Dead
Chapter Twenty-nine
Conrad was clearly happy to have people seated at his table. He decanted some Chablis, served it lovingly to everyone, explained that he had cheese and crackers besides and, if that wasn't enough, he could whip up a quick lunch of Fettucini Alfredo. But, inexplicably, no one was hungry anymore and only Morgan tried the wine, which he declared to be of an excellent vintage.
Conrad told them, "All that you see here—this house, the other buildings—is not the first… space that I've inhabited."
"Space?" Freely asked.
Conrad nodded. His rheumy gray eyes were friendly and intelligent. "It's the only word that really applies. I've been here. . . let me rephrase that, I've been dead, in the generally accepted meaning of the word, for ten years. At least, that's what I believe. As you might imagine, it is very difficult indeed to measure the passage of time in this place we have all inherited. There is no sun, as you know. And any `days' and 'nights' we might have are, I would suspect, purely of our own creation. They may, in fact, well be subconscious creations, as is so much of what exists here, for us and because of us. We create . . . beings to populate our particular spaces, but these beings begin to act in ways we never anticipated. I believe it is because they are creations of our whole psyches. They aren't just creations of our conscious selves, our conscious wishes and desires, but of our subconscious selves too. And as we all know, our subconscious selves are strangers to us."
He gestured to indicate the room. "I have my clocks, of course"—there were a dozen clocks in the room: two stately grandfather clocks, several mantel clocks, a cuckoo clock, a camelback clock and even three windup Big Bens in brass; all of them read 4:30 and all of them were ticking—"and my calendars, which you will see around the house. But still, days are almost impossible to keep track of. You look at the clock and it says . . . whatever it says, and you forget it. Then, when you look at the clock again and it says something else, you wonder how long it's been since you last looked at it. Sometimes you remember, sometimes you don't. Sometimes you think, Ah, that's the same time it was the last time I looked at it. And you decide that it has been twenty-four hours since you last looked at it, so you assume that a day has passed and you mark it on the calendar. But, of course, it might be only twelve hours that have passed. Half a day
. But even this very rough approximation, this coincidence of clock watching, happens rarely. So it's extremely difficult to keep track of time. But with all of that said, I would estimate that I have been dead for ten years." He smiled, as if an idea had just occurred to him. "Goodness, you can help me with that." He focused on Amelia. "What is the last date you remember? Month, day and year."
"Christmas Eve," she told him at once, and gave him the year.
His smile faded. "My God?' He looked confusedly from face to face. "My God," he repeated, "if that's true, then I've been here for less than three years. It seems like so very much longer."
"You're talking about earth years," Morgan reminded him.
"There are no others," Conrad said.
Amelia said, "You're assuming that I haven't been here as long as you have. It's possible that I've been here longer."
Conrad thought about this and nodded. "Who knows? Maybe all my efforts at keeping track of time are stupid and futile. When we . . . passed over, didn't we leave all of that hogwash behind?"
Freely shrugged. "You grow accustomed to keeping track of things. Appointments, TV shows, gray hairs. Time. It's only human."
"And what are any of us if not 'only human,' eh?" Conrad asked.
Amelia changed the subject. "What is this place you've created for yourself here, Conrad?"
He frowned. "Mostly, what it is," he said. "What it has become for me is an enigma. It has grown and changed since I created it. The beings I created have grown and changed as well, despite my best efforts to keep them precisely the way they were in the beginning."
"And how did you create them in the beginning?" Amelia asked.
"I suppose you could say that I created them to be… benevolent fiends," Conrad answered, with a twisted little smile.
Amelia shook her head. "I don't understand that."
His smile faded. He focused on the table, as if unwilling to look Amelia in the eye, and answered, "They were game pieces. No more, no less. That's the way I designed them and that's the way they acted. At first."
"You mean, like in chess?" Morgan asked. "They were like pawns and rooks and knights?"
"In a way, yes," Conrad answered. "They looked like human beings. Actually, I designed them to look like French partisans, from the Second World War. Eleven men, five women. Beautiful women, of course. I modeled them after a computer game I played while I was alive—"
"Really?" Morgan cut in. "What kind of computer did you have? A 386? A 486?"
"It was a 486, 33 megahertz, with 32 meg of ram and a CD-ROM drive."
"I don't know what in the hell you're talking about," Amelia said. She glanced toward the door. She wished Jack would come inside. It made her unaccountably nervous to have him out there all by himself. Her maternal feelings surprised her.
Morgan was astonished. "Amelia, how can you live in the last decade of the twentieth century and not know a thing about computers?"
"Don't use my computer illiteracy to make a value judgment," Amelia replied testily. "As far as I'm concerned, the only thing that computers are good for is speeding up the pace of civilization, which is something it certainly doesn't need."
"Oh, c'mon," Morgan countered. "Computers have allowed for all kinds of improvements ... in medicine, armament, weather forecasting—"
"What we have," Amelia interrupted, "is a basic disagreement about what the direction of civilization should be—"
"Should have been," Conrad broke in. "Try to remember that we are all part of a very different sort of civilization now. And it's a civilization that may be far more anarchic than we realize."
"Anarchic?" Freely asked.
He nodded. "I think that once we left our physical selves behind, we entered a world of enormous and unpredictable possibility and potential. In the real world—in the world we left behind, I should say—our physical selves needed to work in harmony with the physical world in order to maintain our survival."
"Pardon me," Morgan said, "but I feel as physical as I ever did."
Conrad nodded. "There's an old saying that the most erogenous zone in the body is between our ears. I'm sure we all understand that. Our brains interpret and create our feelings and reactions, and our brains—our souls, really: I think that brains and souls are really one and the same thing—are telling us all now that we're as solid as we ever were. Hit the table"—he did it and got a loud thud for his effort—"and we expect a noise, and a little pain too, because that's something we grew accustomed to expect in our time on earth. So we expect it here, and our brains—our souls—happily oblige."
Freely said, "And what does all this have to do with your… benignly fiendish Frenchmen?" She smiled, pleased with her turn of phrase.
Conrad shrugged. "Nothing, probably. And maybe everything." He looked from face to face, then said to Amelia, "Tell me what you think this place is—heaven or hell?"
The question took her aback. She had never given it a thought. "I don't know." She shook her head. "It never occurred to me that it was either. I never really believed that there was actually a heaven or a hell."
This seemed to disappoint Conrad. He turned to Morgan. "And how about you? Heaven or hell?"
"Heaven. Of course." He paused. "At least, that's what I supposed at first. I'm not so sure now."
"We were always trained to believe in either a heaven or a hell, weren't we?" Freely asked.
"It's the old good or evil thing," Morgan said. "Either something is good or it's evil. No gray area. This place we've all become a part of may be a very, very large gray area."
"I think," Amelia offered, "that if these . . . creations of ours—your benevolent French fiends, Conrad and my Silver Lake weirdos—are what you say they are—combinations of both our conscious and unconscious selves—then we can learn a hell of a lot from them. About ourselves, I mean." She smiled. "Shit, maybe God created all of us so he could get in touch with his real self."
Conrad smiled back. "That whole idea may be part of the entire scheme of things here—"
Suddenly a shot rang out. Conrad jumped to his feet, shouting, "Good Lord, your friend is still in the car," and ran from the room. On the way, he scooped up what looked like a .45 automatic from a side-table drawer.
Amelia ran after him. Morgan and Freely followed.
Harry decided that he shouldn't tell these people about the voice he was hearing. Rat puppies, anarchists, Sydney Greenstreet, death. It had all the glaring earmarks of insanity.
But these people weren't paying him a lot of attention. They were eating donuts, drinking coffee, smoking. Most of them seemed to be attending to other matters, and the few that were concentrating on him—one of them a beefy detective wearing a soiled white shirt and what looked like a perpetual scowl—seemed to simply be trying to decide what to do with him. He heard the name "Bellevue" being bandied about, and he heard someone else say, "Oh, shit, let him go, he's not hurting anyone. So what if he's not wearing shoes?" And someone else grudgingly agreed.
Then a woman came over from another desk. She was tall, stocky, middle-aged, and had a no-nonsense look about her. She introduced herself as Mrs. Cantor and said she represented the Mental Health Crisis Intervention Committee, an arm of the New York County Social Services Department. "Mr. Briggs," she said—Harry didn't remember telling anyone his name, but supposed that he must have, otherwise she wouldn't know it—"would you say that you talk to people who aren't there often?"
Harry grinned at her. He was still wearing his brown trench coat and double-breasted gray suit, but his gun was missing—though not his shoulder holster. He didn't remember wearing a hat. "If you're asking whether I talk to myself a lot, the answer is no. I never talk to myself. I only talk aloud if other people are talking to me."
"Yes, quite," said Mrs. Cantor. "Perhaps my question was ill phrased. Let me try again."
"I wish you wouldn't," Harry said. "I understood it. And no, I don't talk to myself."
She nodded. "Mr. Briggs, who is the president
of the United States?"
He told her.
She nodded again. "And what year is it?"
He told her the last year he remembered.
She smiled. "That is correct."
Harry cocked his head. "Of course it is."
"And how old are you, Mr. Briggs?"
"Forty-eight."
"And could you tell me why you're not wearing shoes?"
He leaned forward in the chair and looked at his bare feet. "I don't know," he answered. "I woke up in that building and my feet were bare—"
"You don't know what you were doing in that building, Mr. Briggs?"
"No."
"What do you remember?"
He sighed. "I remember my constitutional rights. And my constitutional rights say—"
"Forget it, Mack," said the beefy cop. "As far as we're concerned, you're just another crazy fucker. And crazy fuckers don't have no goddamned constitutional rights."
Mrs. Cantor glared at him. "Detective, if you don't mind, I am conducting this inquiry!"
"Am I being charged with something?" Harry asked.
"Not at this time," said Mrs. Cantor.
"I'll answer that," said the cop. He looked at Harry. "Whether you're being charged with something or not just ain't the point. We found you walking around barefoot in the snow, and talking to yourself, so we have to assume that you ain't got both oars in the water—"
"Oars in the water?" Harry interrupted. The phrase seemed to have some meaning for him, but he couldn't get hold of it.
"It's a slang term for mental or emotional distress," said Mrs. Cantor.
"I know what it means," Harry snapped.
"I'm back," he heard.
"Huh?" he said.
"Who are you talking to, Mr. Briggs?"
"I got plooped again,/It's really getting old,/I was back in sixth-grade English—"
"Plooped?" Harry interrupted.
"Mr. Briggs, who are you talking to?"
"I told you, sister, he's nuts. He's got toys in his attic."
Sleepeasy Page 13
