The Man Who Melted

by Jack Dann

  “I think it will be better without…strangers.” Then she waved good-bye, linked arms with the two men, and they were off.

  “How do you feel?” Mantle asked Joan, trying to press through the awkwardness of the moment.

  “How do you feel?” she asked—and then, as if she were looking through him, she said, “Christ, I'm sorry, Ray. I don't know why I tried to…would want to kill you. Jesus, I know why. Oh God, it's all me.”

  “Stop it,” Roberta said. “We've been over that and—”

  Faon shushed her and said to Joan, “Now, you know it wasn't your fault; it wasn't anyone's fault. Is it your fault if you have a dream?”

  “But it was real. It wasn't a dream and can't be undone.”

  “Even if it was real, it was like a dream. You couldn't help that.”

  “Yes I could, I tried to kill him,” Joan said.

  “But you also saved him,” Faon said. “You broke out of your coma, out of the dark spaces, to rescue him—”

  “From myself,” Joan said to Mantle. But something passed between them, an understanding, a shared grief, a sad, sweet laughter. Then, as if oblivious to Faon, Roberta, and the preternaturally bright afternoon, she asked, “Are you afraid of me…now?”

  “No,” Mantle said hollowly, even as he remembered the cold, dead being that had tried to kill him.

  FOURTEEN

  Midafternoon, and as promised, it was hot.

  Joan and Mantle lay on a faded, flower-patterned blanket and looked out at the quiet turquoise sea which was limned with pearl. The sky was clear. Everything seemed to shimmer in the windless heat. To their left, curving away from the small, private beach, were the scraps of red porphyry—they looked like rough-cut shields of Viking giants. Behind them was a wall of the same rock; this place was seemingly inaccessible, unless you knew the path which led out of the pine forest to the hidden perron cut into the rock where the slope was more gentle. The beach was gray shingle, the only drabness in this sunlit place. The blue water swirled gently around the stones, and cicadas kept up their daylong melody.

  Mantle's sedative had worn off, or so he thought. He was nervous now, but in control, as if he had put the dark spaces behind him.

  “Do you know we've never been naked together, except in bed?” Joan said, turning from her stomach to her side, nervously looking at Mantle and resting her head on a tight little fist. They had been silent since they had undressed; both the silence and being undressed were awkward.

  “Well, that's the usual place for people to be naked, don't you think?” Mantle said.

  “You're a Puritan.”

  “I most certainly am not.” Mantle brushed a black fly away from his face; there was a swarm of them. He grinned, but it was awkward. The whole world seemed to be at a standstill, hanging on each word and gesture, ready to crash. Mantle and Joan were afraid, each afraid of breaking the other with a word or gesture.

  “Christ, this is worse than being together for the first time, isn't it?” Joan said.

  “I don't know where to start. It's as if we've known each other too well; I've done too many things to you, hurt you too many times.”

  “No, it's me who—”

  “Let's not start that game of whose fault everything is and who's more to blame than the other.”

  “Then you want to break everything up before I can even—”

  “Stop it, Joan,” Mantle said, sitting up. He knew he should put his arms around her, but he felt emotionally paralyzed: a vision of Joan pulling him into the pool passed through his mind. “I'm not breaking anything up, but Christ, look what we're doing to each other.”

  “That's my fault, not yours.”

  “You don't believe that, so stop it—”

  “I tried to kill you, I know that. I saw you when I was hooked-in with Pfeiffer at the casino, but you thought I was Josiane; and when you saw it was me, you left. I hated you and needed you, I wanted you to be dead so you couldn't hurt me again….” She motioned with her hands as she talked, which was out of character for her; but she wasn't really talking to him. She was talking to someone, or something, only she could hear. “I love you and I wanted to kill you—”

  “Stop it,” Mantle said; and then in a whisper, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry….”

  “Yes, I did, it was all my fault.” She began to shake as if she were wrestling with her self, or selves. She whispered angrily, “Stop it, you unworthy cunt, let him go.”

  Mantle suddenly became frightened: not for himself, but for her. Joan was not just having an episode. She might lose herself—not in the dark spaces but in the crushing mechanisms of her own frightened mind. Mantle could feel her anxiety; it was palpable, cloying, suffocating. Forcing himself against her thoughts, he embraced her, caught her, and she responded as if he had pulled her back into the world, back to an imperative, immediate reality.

  And once again he felt caught in her mind.

  They rolled off the blanket onto the hot shingle, which was uncomfortable against Mantle's back and legs. Joan was on top of him, kissing and biting him, as if by taking his essence she could blot out what had happened earlier. Mantle felt anxious, as if this were all wrong, but slowly he became excited by her, by her thoughts, her intense need. His own thoughts were a distant voice telling him that Joan was his way out, his chance to stay out of the dark. If she was strong, she would help him. He became aggressive, lost himself in the sweaty, gritty rutting.

  It was ironic, but they were both more comfortable with their clothes on. Mantle had stepped back into his boxer-style swimsuit, and Joan wore a flesh-colored bikini. As long as they lay naked, they couldn't talk or expose their thoughts, and Mantle was more comfortable with this Joan whom he knew intimately. Even their telepathic flashing during lovemaking didn't frighten him now, as he lay beside her. But the woman he had just coupled with was someone else, someone who was crawling with exposed instincts and drives—not the controlled, giving woman whom he thought of as wife (although she wasn't) and confidante.

  He felt spent and languorous in the sun, which seemed to beat down upon him in waves. When he opened his eyes, tiny, shimmering motes appeared on the edges of his vision as if they were the very atoms of the world and could only be seen now, when Mantle felt no fear and need of the world. But each second comprised a thousand events: the flap and noise of gulls; the background rushing shushing of the city (which could be heard if one put an ear to the ground, for the nearby undercities growled with teeming life); the insects, the bees, midges, and hornets; the lapping of water; the crack of a shuttle above; the short bleat of a skimmer on the water. Yet, everything was still suspended, eternal, ageless, as if every sight and sound were composed, as if time and event were art rather than hazard. Joan was lying beside Mantle, but she kept a comfortable distance, as if she were able to gauge exactly his psychological space.

  “You know, it's almost silly…” Joan said, sitting up and blinking in the light. A long, white ship crawled across the smooth sea in the distance: a toy on a piece of cellophane.

  “What's almost silly?”

  “This.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That fucking made it all right, at least for the moment. It's as if all that we do reduces to that, that all we can ever do—”

  “I do love you,” Mantle said simply, and he meant it, although that surprised him. “I'll try to make it different this time. I'm ashamed that it almost took losing you for me to realize how much I do need you. And not the way it used to be, not just as a friend, but physically.”

  “You didn't just then.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You fucked me because I needed you.”

  “At first—”

  “Yes,” Joan said, picking at the pebbles and then tracing the design of the blanket with her finger, “I felt the change, and I love you for that.”

  “But…?”

  “What about Josiane? Did you find her when you hooked-into the Crier?” Joan made cab
bage folds with the edge of the blanket.

  “No, I didn't find her,” Mantle replied. Then, after a pause, he said, “Yes, I glimpsed something, but Faon had to smack my face before I remembered it.” Joan's expression changed; she looked at him intently, as if she could not breathe until he told her. It was like being hooked-into Pfeiffer: she could glimpse a stray thought, but could not penetrate him directly. “I saw, her…under water, as if drowned in a shallow pool.”

  “Oh God,” Joan moaned.

  “I wasn't going to tell you. So much for resolve.”

  “Weren't going to tell me? Jesus Christ—”

  “It could have just been a dream, rather than a sending. I don't know. But Josiane's taken my life, my memory. I want them back. Yet after the episode…the passage—if that's what you want to call it—everything feels different. It's as if my compulsion to know, to find Josiane, has lifted. As if I could start again with you, unencumbered.”

  “You don't believe that!” Joan said. “You were always honest with me, at least about those things that directly concerned me. I knew what you were, what you are. Perhaps that's why I let myself become involved with you: you were safe; nothing could come of it, or so I thought.” She laughed. “But you are not being honest now, neither with me nor yourself.”

  “If I had any real strength—”

  She touched him lightly on the leg, and that stopped him in midsentence, another signal they both understood. Just now, as he stared out into the lambent water, sparkling because of a breeze breaking its surface, he understood that his relationship with Joan was something apart from both of them, an autonomous entity, a thing-in-itself that came into being because of them. It could not be broken now; it would live on in spite of Mantle. He felt that somehow the relationship was the world; and if he chose, he could hide inside it, secure. He knew its parameters. Everything would be all right—except for Josiane.

  ‘Leave her, bury her, forget her,’ Joan thought, and Mantle heard it as if she had spoken to him in a soft whisper.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I didn't say anything,” Joan said, blushing.

  “But I felt the connection.” Mantle felt her pain and it became his own. He tried to embrace her, console her with himself, strengthen her, but she stiffened and drew away from him.

  “You're going to have to find out about Josiane, one way or another,” Joan said flatly, her face still burning. “I never thought otherwise. I would not want you like this forever, but if it's to be, I'll take that.”

  “But, Jesus, it's like taking leavings. You're better than that.”

  She laughed, this time bitterly. “You've got a talent for being ‘the loved.’ Someone has to be it.”

  “Just as Josiane was for me,” Mantle said. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Was she?”

  “So I've been told.”

  “Anyway,” Joan said, “at least I'm becoming aggressive.” A smile reflected the irony in her voice. “That, you see, is a function of the lover.”

  If I end it here, I hurt her again, he thought, and hated himself. This much he understood: he would not be able to leave her unless the relationship threatened to destroy her sanity or he found Josiane. He would not, could not, end it until the last shallow gasp.

  Again, Mantle was looking out to sea. It still frightened him, especially now, when everything was clear, pellucid; the ocean was a proper blue, meeting the sky at the horizon, but such a great expanse—no one could feel claustrophobic on such a day. Yet that was it: the security of space, the sunlight that could never give way to darkness—it was too beautiful, and hence two-dimensional. He could, by just taking a wrong direction of thought, fall right through this world; and the ocean, that beautiful blue swelling, was illusion. Its reality was depth and darkness. It was the sea he had been plunged into when he was hooked-in.

  “Let's talk about what happened in the pool, and our connection,” Joan said.

  “No, it's too early for that. Let's settle back together for a while, I still don't have my bearings. Jesus, I don't even know if I'm out of the woods yet. I might have another passage. I don't know when I might go crazy again, and that episode by the pool…thinking about that, now is a sure way to—”

  “I don't think you have to worry now,” Joan said. She caressed his leg, twisted the dark hairs as if to make tangles out of tangles. “It feels over.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Just a sense I get from you, a feeling. It's no great mystical thing, you know. Most anyone who knows you as well as I do could sense the difference.”

  And Mantle remembered how once, long ago, when he was having an anxiety attack, Pfeiffer actually ran out of the room. He left Mantle with Caroline, who talked him back.

  “I'm not going to try to convince you that you weren't sick for a part of your episode,” Joan said. “You probably were, I mean in a psychotic sense.”

  “It's better for you if I stop it dead right here, isn't it?” Mantle asked. “Break all the connections except the natural ones.”

  Joan laughed softly, then said, “No, it's better for me if you leave yourself open to me. It's better for me if you find her and remember your past. At least until then, I'll stay with you. What happened at the pool will never happen again. But what I did…. Christ, you're right, there's nothing more to say, nothing I can say. I love you and I'm sorry. Maybe it won't separate us, maybe it will. Yet, some good could come of this….”

  “How do you mean?” Mantle asked.

  “We're still connected, as if we have a room all our own locked up inside us, a place of safety, a hiding place, but you have to be willing to make the shift. You don't ever have to, of course….”

  Mantle nodded, remembering Joan rising dead and naked out of the lake.

  “Or you can see it as a curse, that we could glimpse each other, hurt each other—that's what you think, isn't it?”

  “No, it's just….”

  “Such a nakedness. You don't have to be naked, you can wall yourself in—I couldn't see. And what happened at the pool—”

  “I'm just afraid,” he admitted.

  “I know you're going back to New York, I saw that.”

  “What?”

  “Josiane. You've got to find out, isn't that right? In the dark spaces you saw her…there.”

  “Yes, I did,” Mantle said, relieved. She knew, and he didn't have to fake it for himself. He felt as if they were part of this sunlit world again, together. And with that thought came bone-aching fatigue, but not the slippery fatigue of anxiety; rather, the sense of having come through the fire. He had felt it when he was taken out of combat, and when he had learned that his mother would survive a particularly virulent form of cancer (one of the new varieties)—he had been at home when he had heard the news, and had fallen asleep with the video on, even before the doctor could finish his explanation.

  But Mantle wouldn't be able to sleep now; he needed to talk and savor the bright world.

  “Well, are you going to take a walk with me or not?” he asked.

  When he returned to his room, he found a thick, well-thumbed book on the neatly made bed. Faon had left it for him. Embossed on the imitation cloth cover in rough boldface was only the title Le Symbole de Crieur.

  He picked it up, then dropped it back on the bed. He paced back and forth across the room, from the door to the window. He couldn't sleep. He didn't want to read. He wanted Joan, but she wanted to be alone to “sort things out,” as she said; and he was to do the same. That was unlike Joan, though. Perhaps she was having second thoughts, also. She could certainly do without him; maybe she had finally come to terms with it. After all, she would have Faon and Roberta and this house and her religion to bolster her. He felt shaky again, his thoughts were feverish, and he followed them as if he derived some bitter enjoyment out of giving form to his fears.

  It was dusk, always a bad time for him. He lay down on the bed, propped himself into a comfortable position, and
dipped into the book, skimming, stopping to reread a passage here and there, alternately turning from the thick serif print of the first quarter of the book to the footnote-size print that followed. Mantle was not really interested in the scriptures, which were oddly incongruous intercessory prayers, all derivative. The bulk of the book was annotation. Some of the annotated material was very perceptive, but there was too much of that annoying “divine irradiation from other worlds” business. The annotations were a hodge podge of different styles, a botch of the common and the sublime. They were not written in any scientific spirit, but were rather anecdotal, after the fashion of most nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing on psi phenomena and the occult.

  But it did seem that his experience with Joan was not uncommon. The book told of circuits fantomes and circuits autonomes, connections that could exist outside of and after the dyadic hook-in.

  Without retaining a word, he automatically read the next few paragraphs on Raudive voices, the recordings of the dead—a controversy that was not resolved until the invention of the psyconductor.

  Once again he remembered Joan rising out of the water, grabbing him.

  Jesus, if something like that could happen again….

  It was their intimacy that would tear the relationship apart. The irony was not lost on Mantle, who tossed the book onto the floor. It must have hit just right, for it began to speak. A touchtape had been activated.

  “I believe in the wave that is One curling toward the shore of Unity.

  “I believe in the crystal and the seed that turn the many into the One.

  “I believe…”

  Later, he dreamed that he heard Josiane's voice calling him.

  “Come in,” Mantle said. His room was dark. The book glowed on the floor; it was the color of the water in the Blue Grotto in Capri.

  “It's getting late; they're holding up dinner for you.” Joan sat down on the edge of the bed; Mantle changed position to give her room. She reached over to the console beside the bed and turned on the lights. “Sometimes I wonder if you paint in the dark.”