Thunder and Roses

by Theodore Sturgeon

  I was the horror that frightened them so!

  The sound gradually lessened. It was not that it lessened in overall intensity. It was just there were fewer and fewer creatures running away. It diminished rapidly, and in about ninety seconds it had reduced to an occasional single scampering. One invisible creature ran around and around me, as if all the unseen holes in the walls had been stopped up and it was frantically looking for one. It found one, too, and was gone.

  I laughed then and went back to my work. I remember that I thought quite clearly after that, for a while. I remember writing in a glissando passage that was a stroke of genius—something to drive the doghouse slapper crazy but guaranteed to drive the customers even crazier if it could be done at all. I remember zoom-zooming it off under my breath, and feeling mightily pleased with myself over it.

  And then the reaction struck me.

  Those little claws—

  What was happening to me?

  I thought instantly of Gloria. There’s some deadly law of compensation working here, I thought. For every yellow light, a purple shadow. For every peal of laughter, a cry of anguish somewhere. For the bliss of Gloria, a touch of horror to even things up.

  I licked my lips, for they were wet and my tongue was dry.

  What was happening to me?

  I thought again of Gloria, and the colors and sounds of Gloria, and most of all, the reality, the solid normalcy of Gloria, for all her exquisite sense of fantasy.

  I couldn’t go crazy. I couldn’t! Not now! I’d be—unfit.

  Unfit! As terrifying to me, then, as the old cry of “Unclean” was in the Middle Ages.

  “Gloria, darling,” I’d have to say, “Honey, we’ll just have to call it quits. You see, I’m off my trolley. Oh, I’m quite serious. Yes indeedy. The men in the white coats will come around and back up their little wagon to the door and take me away to the laughing academy. And we won’t see each other any more. A pity. A great pity. Just give me a hearty little old handshake, now, and go find yourself another fellow.”

  “Gloria!” I yelled. Gloria was all those colors, and the lovely sounds, and the fragrance that clung to my cheek and came to me when I moved and held my head just so.

  “Oh, I dunno,” I moaned. “I just don’t know what to do! What is it? What is it?”

  “Syzygy.”

  “Huh?” I came bolt upright, staring around wildly. Twenty inches over the couch hovered the seamed face of my jovial phantom of the street outside Murphy’s. “You! Now I know I’m off my—hey! What is syzygy?”

  “What’s happening to you.”

  “Well, what is happening to me?”

  “Syzygy.” The head grinned engagingly. I put my head in my hands. There is an emotional pitch—an unemotional pitch, really—at which nothing is surprising, and I’d reached it. “Please explain,” I said dully. “Tell me who you are, and what you mean by this sizz-sizz whatever-it-is.”

  “I’m not anybody,” said the head, “and syzygy is a concomitant of parthenogenetic and certain other low types. I think what’s happening is syzygy. If it isn’t—” The head disappeared, a hand with spatulate fingers appeared and snapped its fingers explosively; the hand disappeared, the head reappeared and smiled, “—you’re a gone goose.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said miserably.

  “Don’t do what?”

  “That—that piecemeal business. Why do you do it?”

  “Oh—that. Conservation of energy. It works here too, you know.”

  “Where is ‘here’?”

  “That’s a little difficult to explain until you get the knack of it. It’s the place where reverse ratios exist. I mean, if something stacks up in a three to five ratio there, it’s a five to three ratio here. Forces must balance.”

  I almost had it. What he said almost made sense. I opened my mouth to question him but he was gone.

  After that I just sat there. Perhaps I wept.

  And Gloria came the next day, too. That was bad. I did two wrong things. First, I kept information from her, which was inexcusable. If you are going to share at all, you must share the bad things too. The other thing I did was to question her like a jealous adolescent.

  But what else could be expected? Everything was changed. Everything was different. I opened the door to her and she brushed past me with a smile, and not a very warm one at that, leaving me at the door all outstretched arms and large clumsy feet.

  She shrugged out of her coat and curled up on the couch.

  “Leo, play some music.”

  I felt like hell and I know I looked it. Did she notice? Did she even care? Didn’t it make any difference at all how I felt, what I was going through?

  I went and stood in front of her. “Gloria,” I said sternly, “where have you been?”

  She looked up at me and released a small, retrospective sigh that turned me bright green and sent horns sprouting out of my scalp. It was such a happy, satisfied little sound. I stood there glowering at her. She waited a moment more and then got up, switched on the amplifier and turntable, dug out the “Dance of the Hours,” turned the volume up, added too much bass, and switched in the volume expander, which is quite the wrong thing to use on that record. I strode across the room and turned the volume down.

  “Please, Leo,” she said in a hurt tone. “I like it that way.”

  Viciously I turned it back up and sat down with my elbows on my knees and my lower lip stuck out. I was wild. This was all wrong.

  I know what I should do, I thought sullenly. I ought to yank the plug on the rig and stand up and tell her off.

  How right I was! But I didn’t do it. How could I do it? This was Gloria! Even when I looked up at her and saw her staring at me, saw the slight curl to her lip, I didn’t do it. Well, it was too late then. She was watching me, comparing me with—

  Yes, that was it. She was comparing me with somebody. Somebody who was different from her, someone who rode roughshod over everything delicate and subtle about her, everything about her that I liked and shared with her. And she, of course, ate it up.

  I took refuge in the tactic of letting her make the first move. I think, then, that she despised me. And rightly.

  A bit of cockney dialogue I had once heard danced through my mind:

  “D’ye love us, Alf?”

  “Yus.”

  “Well, knock us abaht a bit.”

  You see? I knew the right things to do, but—

  But this was Gloria. I couldn’t.

  The record finished, and she let the automatic shut off the turntable. I think she expected me to turn it over. I didn’t. She said, “All right, Leo. What is it?” tiredly.

  I said to myself, “I’ll start with the worst possible thing that could happen. She’ll deny that, and then at least I’ll feel better.” So I said to her, “You’ve changed. There’s somebody else.”

  She looked up at the picture molding and smiled sleepily. “Yes,” she said. “There certainly is.”

  “Uff!” I said, because that caught me right in the solar plexus. I sat down abruptly.

  “His name’s Arthur,” she said dreamily. “He’s a real man, Leo.”

  “Oh,” I said bitterly. “I can see it. Five o’clock shadow and a head full of white matter. A toupée on his chest and a vernacular like a boatswain. Too much shoulders, too little hips, and, to quote Thorne Smith, a voice as low as his intentions. A man who never learned the distinction between eating and dining, whose idea of a hot time consists of—”

  “Stop it,” she said. She said it quite casually and very quietly. Because my voice was raised, it contrasted enough to have a positively deafening effect. I stood there with my jaw swinging like the lower gate of a steam-shovel as she went on, “Don’t be catty, Leo.”

  It was a studied insult for her to use such a woman-to-woman phrase, and we both knew it. I was suddenly filled with what the French call esprit d’escalier—the wit of the staircase; in other words, the belated knowledge of the thing you sho
uld have said if you’d only thought of it in time, which you mumble frustratedly to yourself as you go down the stairs on your way out. I should have caught her to me as she tried to brush past me when she arrived, smothered her with—what was that corny line? “kisses—hard tooth-raking kisses, that broke his lips and hers in exquisite, salty pain.” Then I should have threatened her with pinking scissors—

  And then I thought of the glittering, balanced structure of self-denial I had built with her, and I could have cried.…

  “Why come here and parade it in front of me?” I shouted. “Why don’t you take your human bulldozer and cross a couple of horizons with him? Why come here and rub my nose in it?”

  She stood up, pale, and lovelier than I had thought a human being could be—so beautiful that I had to close my eyes. “I came because I had to have something to compare him with,” she said steadily. “You are everything I have ever dreamed about, Leo, and my dreams are … very detailed.…” At last she faltered, and her eyes were bright. “Arthur is—is—” She shook her head. Her voice left her; she had to whisper. “I know everything about you, Leo. I know how you think, and what you will say, and what you like, and it’s wonderful, wonderful … but Leo, Arthur is something outside of me. Don’t you see? Can’t you see? I don’t always like what Arthur does. But I can’t tell what he’s going to do! You—you share everything, Leo, Leo darling, but you don’t—take anything!”

  “Oh,” I said hoarsely. My scalp was tight. I got up and started across the room toward her. My jaws hurt.

  “Stop, Leo,” she gasped. “Stop it, now. You can do it, but you’ll be acting. You’ve never acted before. It would be wrong. Don’t spoil what’s left. No, Leo—no … no …”

  She was right. She was so right. She was always right about me; she knew me so well. This kind of melodrama was away out of character for me. I reached her. I took her arm and she closed her eyes. It hurt when my fingers closed on her arm. She trembled but she did not try to pull away. I got her wrist and lifted it. I turned her hand over and put a kiss on the palm, closing her fingers on it. “Keep that,” I said. “You might like to have it some time.” Then I let her go.

  “Oh Leo, darling,” she said. “Darling,” she said, with a curl to her lip …

  She turned to go. And then—

  “Arhgh!” She uttered a piercing scream and turned back to me, all but bowling me over in her haste to get away from Abernathy. I stood there holding her tight while she pressed, crouched, squeezed against me, and I burst into laughter. Maybe it was reaction—I don’t know. But I roared.

  Abernathy is my mouse.

  Our acquaintance began shortly after I took the apartment. I knew the little son-of-a-gun was there because I found evidences of his depredations under the sink where I stored my potatoes and vegetables. So I went out and got a trap. In those days the kind of trap I wanted was hard to find; it took me four days and a young fortune in carfare to run one of them down. You see, I can’t abide the kind of trap that hurls a wire bar down on whatever part of the mouse happens to be available, so that the poor shrieking thing dies in agony. I wanted—and by heaven I got—one of those wirebasket effects made so that a touch on the bait trips a spring which slams a door on the occupant.

  I caught Abernathy in the contraption the very first night. He was a small gray mouse with very round ears. They were like the finest tissue, and covered with the softest fuzz in the world. They were translucent, and if you looked very closely you could see the most meticulous arrangement of hairline blood vessels in them. I shall always maintain that Abernathy owed his success in life to the beauty of his ears. No one with pretensions to a soul could destroy such divine tracery.

  Well, I let him alone until he got over being frightened and frantic, until he got hungry and ate all the bait, and a few hours over. When I thought he was good and ready to listen to reason, I put the trap on my desk and gave him a really good talking-to.

  I explained very carefully (in simple language, of course) that for him to gnaw and befoul in his haphazard fashion was downright antisocial. I explained to him that when I was a child I was trained to finish whatever I started to eat, and that I did it to this day, and I was a human being and much bigger and stronger and smarter than he was. And whatever was good enough for me was at least good enough for him to take a crack at. I really laid down the law to that mouse. I let him mull over it for a while and then I pushed cheese through the bars until his tummy was round like a ping-pong ball. Then I let him go.

  There was no sign of Abernathy for a couple of days after that. Then I caught him again; but since he had stolen nothing I let him off with a word of warning—very friendly this time; I had been quite stern at first, of course—and some more cheese. Inside of a week I was catching him every other night, and the only trouble I ever had with him was one time when I baited the trap and left it closed. He couldn’t get in to the cheese and he just raised Cain until I woke up and let him in. After that I knew good relations had been established and I did without the trap and just left cheese out for him. At first he wouldn’t take the cheese unless it was in the trap, but he got so he trusted me and would take it lying out on the floor. I had long since warned him about the poisoned food that the neighbors might leave out for him, and I think he was properly scared. Anyhow, we got along famously.

  So here was Gloria, absolutely petrified, and in the middle of the floor in the front room was Abernathy, twinkling his nose and rubbing his hands together. In the middle of my bellow of laughter, I had a severe qualm of conscience. Abernathy had had no cheese since the day before yesterday! Sic semper amoris. I had been fretting so much over Gloria that I had overlooked my responsibilities.

  “Darling, I’ll take care of him,” I said reassuringly to Gloria. I led her to an easy-chair and went after Abernathy. I have a noise I make by pressing my tongue against my front teeth—a sort of a squishy-squeaky noise, which I always made when I gave cheese to Abernathy. He ran right over toward me, saw Gloria, hesitated, gave a “the hell with it” flirt with his tail, turned to me and ran up my pants-leg.

  The outside, fortunately.

  Then he hugged himself tight into my palm while I rummaged in the icebox with my other hand for his cheese. He didn’t snatch at it, either, until he let me look at his ears again. You never saw such beautiful ears in your life. I gave him the cheese, and broke off another piece for his dessert, and set him in the corner by the sink. Then I went back to Gloria, who had been watching me, big-eyed and trembling.

  “Leo—how can you touch it?”

  “Makes nice touching. Didn’t you ever touch a mouse?”

  She shuddered, looking at me as if I were Horatio just back from the bridge. “I can’t stand them.”

  “Mice? Don’t tell me that you, of all people, really and truly have the traditional Victorian mouse phobia!”

  “Don’t laugh at me,” she said weakly. “It isn’t only mice. It’s any little animal—frogs and lizards and even kittens and puppies. I like big dogs and cats and horses. But somehow—” She trembled again. “If I hear anything like little claws running across the floor, or see small things scuttling around the walls, it drives me crazy.”

  I goggled. “If you hear—hey; it’s a good thing you didn’t stay another hour last night, then.”

  “Last night?” Then, “Last night …” she said, in a totally different voice, with her eyes looking inward and happy. She chuckled. “I was telling—Arthur about that little phobia of mine last night.”

  If I had thought my masterful handling of the mouse was going to do any good, apparently I was mistaken. “You better shove off,” I said bitterly. “Arthur might be waiting.”

  “Yes,” she said, without any particular annoyance, “he might. Goodbye, Leo.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Nobody said anything for a time.

  “Well,” she said, “goodbye.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ll call you.”

  “Do that,” sh
e said, and went out.

  I sat still on the couch for a long time, trying to get used to it. Wishful thinking was no good; I knew that. Something had happened between us. Mostly, its name was Arthur. The thing I couldn’t understand was how he ever got a show, the way things were between Gloria and me. In all my life, in all my reading, I had never heard of such a complete fusion of individuals. We both felt it when we met; it had had no chance to get old. Arthur was up against some phenomenal competition; for one thing that was certain was that Gloria reciprocated my feelings perfectly, and one of my feelings was faith. I could understand—if I tried hard—how another man might overcome this hold, or that hold, which I had on her. There are smarter men than I, better-looking ones, stronger ones. Any of several of those items could go by the board, and leave us untouched.

  But not faith! Not that! It was too big; nothing else we had was important enough to compensate for a loss of faith.

  I got up to turn on the light, and slipped. The floor was wet. Not only was it wet; it was soft. I floundered to the seven-way lamp and cranked both switches all the way around.

  The room was covered with tapioca. Ankle-deep on the floor, inches deep on the chairs and the couch.

  “She’s thinking about it now,” said the head. Only it wasn’t a head this time. It was a flaccid mass of folded tissue. In it I could see pulsing blood vessels. My stomach squirmed.

  “Sorry. I’m out of focus.” The disgusting thing—a sectioned brain, apparently—moved closer to me and became a face.

  I lifted a foot out of the gummy mass, shook it, and put it back in again. “I’m glad she’s gone,” I said hoarsely.

  “Are you afraid of the stuff?”

  “No!” I said. “Of course not!”

  “It will go away,” said the head. “Listen; I’m sorry to tell you; it isn’t syzygy. You’re done, son.”

  “What isn’t syzygy?” I demanded. “And what is syzygy?”

  “Arthur. The whole business with Arthur.”