The glow pulsed steadily, as Chatley's chest was being eaten away; and Pen could see inside him. It was like looking into a cauldron of soup being roiled by an invisible ladle. "What's happening to you?" Pen said urgently. He felt he should be doing something for Chatley, but this new strangeness was more frightening than anything that had yet happened. "Is there something I can do?"
The man made an attempt to smile. It was a thin rictus, the corners of his mouth twitching for just an instant. The sound coming from the glowing hole in his chest was faint, but if Pen leaned closer he could make out the unmistakable keening of mountain winds. Whatever was happening to Chatley, it had been intended that he would suffer. Pen asked again if there was some help he could offer: a hospital, moving the man's limbs to a more comfortable position, some kind of cover that would block the hole?
Chatley shook his head without much actual movement. "I took George S. Patton and Bert Lahr."
Pen said, "What? Say again, please: I couldn't make that out."
"Patton and Bert Lahr. And Huey Long and Groucho Marx. I took them."
"Took them? Took them where? Were you a cab driver? What?"
"I took them where the woodbine twineth. And Ansel Adams. I took him."
"Who are you, Mr. Chatley? What are you saying to me?"
Chatley looked up, and for a moment there were ages in his eyes. And enormous measures of pure pain. And the sense of things rushing away from the lens of his sight, while mountain winds howled. "I worked for the Dust Man. I collected for him. Got notices and did the actual work."
Pen had no idea what he meant.
That was not quite true.
He had an idea, but it lay so far beyond the membrane, on the shadowy side of other realities, that he could not countenance it.
Chatley said, "The Dust Man. The reaper. He laughs when he calls himself Boneyard Bill."
"He did this to you?"
"I did this to myself. He gave me a termination order for you. I didn't do it. So he had George fulfill the order on me."
Pen remembered the file card in the book. "Take by truck."
Chatley was speaking so softly now, Pen had to lean in almost to his mouth. The blue glow had spread, the hole was gigantic, nearly from armpit to armpit. "George isn't as adept as he should be. The truck threw me over the railing. I've been waiting for you. I'm glad you came." These words were spoken so haltingly, so filled with dying air, that it took him several minutes to release them.
"Why didn't you take me?" Pen asked.
Chatley would have shrugged, had he been able. As it was, he twitched terribly, saying, "If it hadn't been you, it would have been my next order. Should have been the woman before you. The order was an epileptic seizure, death all alone, in the evening, dressed to go out to dinner with her daughter." He closed his eyes against the pain, and said, "Her name was Emily Austin. In California. It should have been her, but I was still afraid. I'm still afraid; it hurts very much; Bill likes to hurt. But he may not be done with me. There was a taker once, a while ago, Ottmar, he got word back to some of us. . . the same way I got the papers into the book for you to find . . . he said it didn't stop after Bill had his way. Not for orders like you or Emily Austin, you're on the books. But for us, the takers. Bill likes to hurt. He doesn't get as much of a chance as he'd like."
"Can I help you in any way?"
Chatley opened his eyes. There was distance behind the color. He was on his way. The blue glow had eaten its way down through his stomach. "You know."
"I can't do that," Pen said, wishing he hadn't.
"Then why ask?"
"What would I have to do? I don't think I can do it, but what would that be . . . to help . . . ?"
Chatley told him. It was simple, but it was unpleasant. Then he said, "You can always tell one of us by the eyes." And he described the bad eyes Pen had seen watching him across a desk earlier that day. He lay silently for a long time, as the blue glow ate away the flesh and the bones and Pen could see the maelstrom swirling inside him. Then he said, "If you're going to do it, please now. It's very bad now. It's very bad."
And so Henry Chatley became the first for Pen Robinson.
But when Chatley was gone, perhaps having been saved from the Dust Man's special attentions on that other plain beyond the membrane, Pen realized he had not asked what the Chinese epigraphs meant, nor why he had written a check for cash in the amount of one hundred and fifty dollars, nor how he — using Ottmar's method — had been able to get the papers into that old book, nor what had turned him against the Dust Man, nor what had finally broadened his courage to defy Bill, nor what the takers posing as FBI men had sought to find out from Pen (but perhaps it had only been a matter of needing to be convinced Pen was an unsuspecting bystander), nor the answers to the other questions that now would never go into the solving of the puzzle, the passage through the membrane.
And one morning very soon, the truck would pick up a black plastic bag filled with remaining parts.
Pen gave over the running of the shop to the clerks.
He wandered the city, looking into people's faces.
He found the taker who had fulfilled the orders on P. T. Barnum and Babe Ruth and Adlai Stevenson, among others. Those were the names she remembered best, the ones she would tell him about. He found her eating dinner alone at the Russian Tea Room, and he followed her home, and did what he would never have thought himself capable of doing. He forced his way into her building, then into her apartment. He tied her to a chair and asked her more than a hundred questions. Chatley had died before he could answer those questions, more than a hundred Pen had been too distracted to ask. She possessed the bad eyes Henry Chatley had described, so Pen was able to do what he had to do. But she knew only a few things, despite her age. She did as she was told. Had been doing it for a very long time; and Pen learned that it was because of the gift of a very long time that many takers hired on.
It seemed to Pen a poor reason for working at such an unpleasant job. And when she told him, with resignation, that now he would have to put her out of Bill's reach, because of finding her and talking to her and interfering with her anonymity and making her suspect in Bill's eyeless sockets, he said he couldn't do that, and she began to cry, which Pen thought was shameless of her, and she told him some of what it would be like, but he already knew that because he had crouched beside Chatley, and she said if he had even a spark of human kindness, a vestige of human decency, he would do what had to be done, and he thought that was even crueler of her to say, because where did human kindness and human decency enter into her job description? Had she said anything to Babe Ruth when she took him? Had Adlai Stevenson given her unassailable reasons for demonstrating human decency and kindness?
"You mustn't leave me for Bill!"
"It would serve you right."
"Please! Show some compassion!"
"My god, this is an obscenity!"
But in the end, he did it. Because thinking about all the reasons why he couldn't do it, which were all the reasons she had ignored and did do it, made him so desolately angry that he couldn't stop himself. And so with the second one he became the avenger of Death.
He found the taker who had gotten Ernie Pyle, and he killed him. He found the taker who had arranged for John Lennon and Fiorello La Guardia and Brendan Behan, and killed him. He found the taker who had gotten Mackenzie King and Marilyn Monroe and Frank Herbert, and he killed her. He found the taker who had gotten Sergei Rachmaninoff and Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Keller, and he killed him. He sat behind the one who had taken Emiliano Zapata and Leon Trotsky and Amelia Earhart and Aleister Crowley as she stolidly watched an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. She was a very old, blue-haired woman, and she studied the film as if preparing for a final exam. And Pen waited for a car crash, reached into her lap, pulled out a knitting needle; and he killed her. He saw the taker who had been his inquisitor, and he followed him into a restaurant, and when he went to the men's toilet followed him again, and di
dn't even ask whom he had gotten, because he knew the list would be long and filled with people whose names he would not know, and which the taker would not remember, and he simply killed him. But not once did he ask the question that transcended, in simplicity and importance, all the hundreds of questions he did get answered.
Not once did he ask a taker why the Dust Man was not making any effort to stop him from decimating the ranks of his chosen agents, why he was allowing Pen Robinson to course through the city being the avenger of Death.
On the first day of winter, in Central Park, near the statue of Alice, he saw a taker about to put his hands on a child climbing a rock. Pen moved in, feeling his years in his aching bones, and he was about to use the icepick on the man whose hand stretched toward the little girl, when he felt a chill that was not part of the season, and a hand dropped onto his shoulder. The voice behind him said, "No, I think not, Pen. That will be enough. It's certainly enough for me."
In the moment before the cold hand turned him away, Pen saw the taker reach to the child, and touch her on the ankle, and the child fell. It lay on the crackling icy grass, and the taker moved off, casting only a momentary glance at Pen and his companion. The taker was frightened.
Then Pen was turned, without seeming effort, and he looked at the face of the Dust Man. He had not seen that face in forty-one years.
Tears came to his eyes, and he reached out to touch the chest of the reaper, the reiver, the slayer of nations; and he said, "You went away and I never got to say goodbye."
Pen Robinson's father, who had died in a mill accident when Pen had been fourteen, smiled down at his boy and said, "I'm sorry, Pen. But I've spent a long time getting back to you, and I've missed you."
Now Pen could see clearly through the membrane; and he understood why Henry Chatley had been permitted to contact him; and why he had found it so effortless, after a quiet, empty, essentially lonely life of shelf dust and cold meals prepared after work, to do the things he had done.
And he walked with the Dust Man, whose name was Bill, as had been his father's name, through the membrane and straight into a long lifetime position in the family business.
Is he who opens a door and he who closes it the same being?
GASTON BACHELARD (1884–1962)
French philosopher of science, Sorbonne
OVER CAPPUCCINO and key lime pie he told her that even though it wouldn't seem as if he was going away, he was, in fact, going away. Farther than she could imagine.
"I'll go with you. Take me with you." She started to cry. "Nothing's holding me here. I can go with you."
So he told her that though he could not take her, that he could take nothing and no one with him, she needn't worry about his being gone, because he would be here. With her.
She thought he was speaking in metaphor, invoking that occasional spirituality in his nature that was a large part of his attraction. "I don't want the memory of you . . . I want you!" she said urgently.
"It'll be me. I'll be here, except that it won't be this me. It'll be the next one over."
She got hysterical at that and he quickly came around the teak dinner table that she had polished so assiduously with lemon oil in joyous expectation of having dinner with him; and he held her tightly, his unhappiness made somehow supportable by the mingled odors of her recently washed hair and the lemon oil. "I love you," she sobbed. He told her he knew that; and he said he loved her, too; and he told her not to cry, because it was going to be all right. All of which was true. Then he told her that she might not even realize it wasn't him but some other him, which was also true. But it made her more hysterical.
Then he said the truest thing about their relationship. He said, "We didn't really fall in love. What we did was collide at the intersection of your life and mine."
She had no idea what that really meant, but she took it to mean he had fallen out of love with her; and he was abandoning her; and she ran away from him, locked herself in the bathroom; and he left, not wanting to cause her any more anguish. Because, in truth, he had loved her more than any woman he had ever known in this life. In this life.
But he had only resided in this life for eleven months.
He left her then: gathering up his jacket and muffler, and the little Steuben glass panda he had found gift-wrapped on his place at the dinner table. The chances of carrying the figurine through were not good, but he wanted to try.
Wanted to try not only because it would have been cruelty for her to come out of the bathroom, find him gone, and see the frivolous, dear gift left behind. Wanted to try because he felt he should try to remember her.
Forgetting her, as he had forgotten so many others from so many lives past, was inevitable. But like a child who saves a special seashell, a memorable rock, a useless lanyard from summer camp, in order that the memories will not fade too quickly, he always tried to carry some memento through.
He was alone in the creaking, ancient elevator when he felt himself going. Like the onset of the flu. He had felt it coming as they had sat eating dinner. The dryness in the nasal passages, the unpleasant feeling at the back of his throat that he had never been able to describe, save by comparing it to the gasping discomfort that accompanies the too-rapid consumption of too much ice cream; the burning in the eyes, the arthritic pains in hip and finger joints.
He was relieved that he had felt the onset of the slippage and had gotten away before he vanished. Otherwise, how could she have reconciled the appearance of the other him when he was gone?
He leaned against the wall of the elevator, hoping no one had pressed the button on a lower floor, hoping he would go quietly before the elevator reached the lobby; and he drew in long, deep, shuddering breaths.
And in a moment he had slipped through.
The elevator was empty. A faint scintillance in the air, and a not unpleasant odor: the smell of sunshine on dusky Concord grapes bursting on their vines.
He was gone from that life. His name had been Alan Justes. And he was gone.
At precisely the instant that Alan Justes scintillated out of existence in an elevator traveling between the fifteenth and fourteenth floors of an apartment building on East 63rd Street in New York City, a man who looked exactly like Alan Justes emerged from the doorway of Steinway & Sons, the famous piano makers on East 57th Street, who had closed for the evening three hours earlier; and he hurried toward Fifth Avenue on his way to 63rd Street. He was dressed quite differently from Alan Justes, which would cause momentary confusion when, eighteen minutes hence, he would ring the doorbell of that certain apartment on the twentieth floor of the building on East 63rd. A moment of pain and confusion that would be compounded when the door was opened and he would say to the attractive brunette whose eyes were swollen from crying, "Hi. Katherine? I'm Allen." Because he would say it and not spell it, she would not realize till weeks later that he was no longer A-l-a-n, but someone named A-1-l-e-n. There were other, minor differences, as well: a mole on the left shoulder no longer existed; the lyrics to a number of popular songs were absent from his available repertoire for singing in the shower; he now liked brussels sprouts; the buffalo-head nickel he carried as a lucky piece would soon be spent with the rest of the change in his pocket, because for Allen it had no special significance.
But later than night, in bed, Katherine would perceive a subtle, salutary difference between the man who had walked out of her apartment and the man who had returned less than half an hour later.
It is an ill wind that blows no one some good.
Alan breathed deeply as he passed through the membrane. It might not have been a membrane. But it felt very much like pressing one's face against a balloon, pushing steadily and without discomfort into a resilient surface. And in a timeless moment he was through. His right hand, which had been in his jacket pocket, holding the glass panda, was now empty. Goodbye, Kathy, he thought; and put her out of his mind as the memory faded, faded.
"You can't sleep here, buddy," said a voice. "Move it alon
g."
He looked up. By moonlight he saw the not-unkind face of a cop, staring down at him. There were broken veins in his round cheeks and on the fleshy bulb of his nose. He drinks, Alan thought. But then, if I had to spend my nights waiting for teenage creeps to rob convenience marts, Yd drink, too.
"I'm not sleeping, Officer," Alan said, getting to his feet. "I'm sitting, thinking, contemplating the moon and the steady passage of the hours." He was eloquent in this new life; he liked that.
It was a doorway in which he stood. Now he stepped out onto the sidewalk. A section of residential buildings, well-tended townhouses, neat entranceways. Traffic was light. The first car he noticed had no wheels. It shussshed past on what appeared to be an air-cushion mechanism. There was no unpleasant exhaust smell.
The cop examined him, stepping back to give him room in case a gun or knife might materialize in a hand. The cop's manner altered instantly as he perceived the cut of suit was expensive, the shoes so highly polished they reflected both streetlight and moonlight, the face shaved, the hair combed. The faint scent of lime aftershave. "Sorry to startle you like that, sir. Thought you might be an old skid catching forty winks."
"No harm done, Officer," Alan said. "The cement was cool and I was stalling the return home."
"Why . . . it's Mr. Justman, isn't it?" Alan's face was full in the light now. He smiled at the cop. They stood staring at each other for another second; then the cop said, "Well, say hello to your mother for me, Mr. Justman." And he touched the shiny black visor of his cap with his stubby left hand, in a gesture as old as the deference paid by city employees to those known as gentry. And he walked away, leaving Alan Justman to contemplate the necessity of going home.
He stood in the channel of street and the sound of a spiky, scream-horn saxophone cut through the empty moment. He looked up at the few bright windows but could not find the source of the music. I have to go home, he thought. And the thought reinterpreted itself visually in his mind as a dark, ominous rush of water slithering into the distance. Smooth, slick, oily shapes, barely breaking the surface of the freshet, frightening shapes cruising along, were caught in the moonlight of his mind. I have to go home. Mother will be worried.
Angry Candy Page 25
