by Howard Fast
“You’re putting me on.”
“You have my word of honor, Harvey.”
“That shakes me.”
“So you see what it means to us, Harvey. You’re the last hope. Can you show cause?”
“Heavy—very heavy.”
“Maybe you want time to think about it?”
“You don’t want to think about it,” Harvey said. “If it’s there, it’s there.”
“Is it there?”
Harvey Titterson closed his eyes for a long moment, and then he looked up at Billy and said simply:
“We are what we are.”
“What?”
“We are what we are.”
“Just that?”
“Man, it’s your thing. Just think about it.”
“Exodus three, fourteen,” Billy said. “‘And God said unto Moses, I am what I am.’”
“Right on.”
Billy looked at his watch. It was three minutes before eleven o’clock. With hardly a thank you, he bolted out of the room and down the stairs and into the big black limousine.
“Turn on the radio!” he shouted at the chauffeur. “Eight eighty on the dial.”
The chauffeur fiddled nervously.
“Eight eighty—what’s holding you?”
“This is the Columbia Broadcasting Company,” the radio crackled, “CBS radio in New York City. At this time we have been leaving the air for a special announcement.” Then silence. Silence. Minute after minute went by, and still silence.
Then the voice of the announcer, “Apparently we are not to be interrupted today—”
On the fourth floor of the tenement, Harvey Titterson rolled a joint, had a toke, and then laid it aside.
“Crazy,” he said softly.
And then he composed himself to continue his meditation trip.
7
Not with a Bang
On the evening of the third of April, standing at the window of his pleasant three-bedroom, split-level house and admiring the sunset, Alfred Collins saw a hand rise above the horizon, spread thumb and forefinger, and snuff out the sun. It was the moment of soft twilight, and it ended as abruptly as if someone had flicked an electric switch.
Which is precisely what his wife did. She put on lights all over the house. “My goodness, Al,” she said, “it did get dark quickly, didn’t it?”
“That’s because someone snuffed out the sun.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” she asked. “And by the way, the Bensons are coming for dinner and bridge tonight, so you’d better get dressed.”
“All right. You weren’t watching the sunset, were you?”
“I have other things to do.”
“Yes. Well, what I mean is that if you were watching, you would have seen this hand come up behind the horizon, and then the thumb and the forefinger just spread out, and then they came together and snuffed out the sun.”
“Really. Now for heaven’s sake, Al, don’t redouble tonight. If you are doubled, have faith in your bad bidding. Do you promise me?”
“Funniest damn thing about the hand. It brought back all my childhood memories of anthropomorphism.”
“And just what does that mean?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. I’m going to take a shower.”
“Don’t be all evening about it.”
At dinner, Al Collins asked Steve Benson whether he had been watching the sunset that evening.
“No—no, I was showering.”
“And you, Sophie?” Collins asked of Benson’s wife.
“No way. I was changing a hem. What does women’s lib intend to do about hems? There’s the essence of the status of women, the nitty-gritty of our servitude.”
“It’s one of Al’s jokes,” Mrs. Collins explained. “He was standing at the window and he saw this hand come over the horizon and snuff out the sun.”
“Did you, Al?”
“Scout’s honor. The thumb and forefinger parted, then came together. Poof. Out went the sun.”
“That’s absolutely delicious,” Sophie said. “You have such delicious imagination.”
“Especially in his bidding,” his wife remarked.
“She’ll never forget that slam bid doubled and redoubled,” Sophie said. It was evident that she would never forget it either.
“Interesting but impractical,” said Steve Benson, who was an engineer at IBM. “You’re dealing with a body that is almost a million miles in diameter. The internal temperature is over ten million degrees centigrade, and at its core the hydrogen atoms are reduced to helium ash. So all you have is poetic symbolism. The sun will be here for a long time.”
After the second rubber, Sophie Benson remarked that either it was chilly in the Collins house or she was catching something.
“Al, turn up the thermostat,” said Mrs. Collins.
The Collins team won the third and fourth rubbers, and Mrs. Collins had all the calm superiority of a winner as she bid her guests good night. Al Collins went out to the car with them, thinking that, after all, suburban living was a strange process of isolation and alienation. In the city, a million people must have watched the thing happen; here, Steve Benson was taking a shower and his wife was changing a hem.
It was a very cold night for April. Puddles of water left over from a recent rain had frozen solid, and the star-drenched sky had the icy look of midwinter. Both of the Bensons had arrived without coats, and as they hurried into their car, Benson laughingly remarked that Al was probably right about the sun. Benson had difficulty starting the car, and Al Collins stood shivering until they had driven away. Then he looked at the outside thermometer. It was down to sixteen degrees.
“Well, we beat them loud and clear,” his wife observed when he came back to the house. He helped her clean up, and while they were at it, she asked him just what he meant by anthropomorphism or whatever it was.
“It’s a sort of primitive notion. You know, the Bible says that God made man in His own image.”
“Oh? You know, I absolutely believed it when I was a child. What are you doing?”
He was at the fireplace, and he said that he thought he’d build a fire.
“In April? You must be out of your mind. Anyway, I cleaned the hearth.”
“I’ll clean it up tomorrow.”
“Well, I’m going to bed. I think you’re crazy to start a fire at this time of the night, but I’m not going to argue with you. This is the first time you did not overbid, and thank heavens for small favors.”
The wood was dry, and the fire was warm and pleasant to watch. Collins had never lost his pleasure at watching the flames of a fire, and he mixed himself a long scotch and water, and sat in front of the flames, sipping the drink and recalling his own small scientific knowledge. The green plants would die within a week, and after that the oxygen would go. How long? he wondered. Two days—ten days—he couldn’t remember and he had no inclination to go to the encyclopedia and find out. It would get very cold, terribly cold. It surprised him that instead of being afraid, he was only mildly curious.
He looked at the thermometer again before he went to bed. It was down to zero now. In the bedroom, his wife was already asleep, and he undressed quietly and put an extra comforter on the bed before he crawled in next to her. She moved toward him, and feeling her warm body next to him, he fell asleep.
8
A Talent of Harvey
Harvey Kepplemen never knew that he had a talent for anything, until one Sunday morning at breakfast he plucked a crisp water roll right out of the air.
It balanced the universe; it steadied the order of things. Man is man, and particularly in this age of equality, when uniformity has become both a passion and a religion, it would be unconscionable that a decent human being of forty years should have no talent at all. Yet Harvey Kepplemen was so obviously and forthrightly an untalented man—until this morning—that the label was pinned on him descriptively. As one says, He is short, She is fat, He is handsome, so they would say of
Harvey: Nothing there. No talent. No verve. Pale. Colorless. No bent. No aptitude. He was a quiet, soft-spoken person of middle height, with middling looks and brown eyes and brown hair that was thinning in a moderately even manner, and he had passable teeth with good fillings and clean fingernails, and he was an accountant with an income of eighteen thousand dollars a year.
Just that. He was not given to anger, moods, or depression, and if any observer had cared to observe him, he would have said that Harvey was a cheerful enough person; except that one never noticed whether he was cheerful or not. Suzie was his wife. Suzie’s mother once put the question to her. “Is Harvey always so cheerful?” Suzie’s mother wanted to know.
“Cheerful? I never think of Harvey as being cheerful.”
Neither did anyone else, but that was because no one ever gave any serious thought to Harvey. Perhaps if there had been children, they might have had opinions concerning their father; but it was a childless marriage. Not an unhappy one, not a very happy one. Simply childless.
Nevertheless, Suzie was quite content. Small, dark, reasonably attractive, she accepted Harvey. Neither of them was rebellious. Life was just the way it was. Sunday morning was just the way it was. They slept late but not too late. They had brunch at precisely eleven o’clock. Suzie prepared toast, two eggs for each of them, three slices of crisp bacon for each of them, orange juice to begin and coffee to finish. She also set out two jars of jam, imported marmalade, which Harvey liked, and grape jelly, which she liked.
On this Sunday morning, Harvey thought that he would have liked a crisp roll.
“Really?” Suzie said. “I never knew that you liked rolls particularly. You do like toast.”
“Oh, yes,” Harvey agreed. “I do like toast.”
“I mean, we always have toast.”
“I have toast for lunch, too, “Harvey agreed.
“I could have bought rolls.”
“I don’t think so, because I guess I was thinking about the kind of rolls we had when I was a kid. They were very light and crisp, and they were two for a nickel. Can you imagine paying only a nickel for two rolls?”
“No. Really, I can’t.”
“Well, no more light, crisp water rolls, two for a nickel.” Harvey sighed. “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just reach up like this and pluck one out of the air?”
And then Harvey reached up and plucked a crisp, brown water roll right out of the air, and sat there, arm frozen into position, mouth open, staring at the water roll; then he lowered his arm slowly and placed the roll on the table in front of him and continued to stare at it.
“That’s very clever, Harvey,” Suzie said. “Is it a surprise for me? I think you did it perfectly.”
“Did what?”
“You plucked that roll right out of the air.” Suzie picked up the roll. “It’s warm—really, you are clever, Harvey.” She broke it open and tasted it. “So good! Where did you buy it, Harvey?”
“What?”
“The roll. I hope you bought another one.”
“What roll?”
“This one.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Harvey, you just plucked it right out of the air. Do you remember the magician who entertained at Lucy Gordon’s party? He did it with white doves. But I think you did it just as nicely with the roll, and it’s such a surprise, because I can imagine how much you practiced.”
“I didn’t practice.”
“Harvey!”
“Did I really take that roll out of the air?”
“You did, Mr. Magician,” Suzie said proudly. She had a delicious feeling of pride, a very new feeling. While she had never been ashamed of Harvey before, she had certainly never been proud of him.
“I don’t know how I did it.”
“Oh, Harvey, stop putting me on. I am terribly impressed. Really, I am.”
Harvey reached out, broke off a piece of the roll, and tasted it. It was quite good, fresh, straightforward, honest bread, precisely like the two-for-a-nickel rolls he had eaten as a child.
“Put some butter on it,” Suzie suggested.
Harvey buttered his piece and then topped it with marmalade. He licked his lips with appreciation. Suzie poured him another cup of coffee.
Harvey finished the roll—Suzie refusing any more than a taste—and then he shook his head thoughtfully. “Damned funny,” he said. “I just reached up and took it out of the air.”
“Oh, Harvey.”
“That’s what I did. That’s exactly what I did.”
“Your eggs are getting cold,” Suzie reminded him.
He shook his head. “No—it couldn’t have happened that way. Then where did it come from?”
“Do you want me to put them back in the pan?”
“Listen, Suzie. Now just listen to me. I got to thinking about those rolls I ate when I was a kid, and I said to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to have one right now, and wouldn’t it be nice just to reach up and pick it out of the air—like this.” And suiting his action to the thought, he plucked another roll out of the air and dropped it on the table like a hot coal.
“See what I mean?”
Suzie clapped her hands. “Wonderful! Beautiful! I was staring right at you and I never saw you do it.”
Harvey picked up the second roll. “I didn’t do it,” he said bleaky. “I haven’t been practicing sleight of hand. You know me, Suzie. I can’t do the simplest card trick.”
“That’s what makes it so wonderful—because you had all these hidden qualities and you brought them out.”
“No—no. Remember how it is when we play poker, Suzie, and it’s my deal, and it’s a great big yak because I can’t shuffle the cards, and it’s the big laugh of the evening when I try it and the cards are all over the table. You don’t unlearn something like that.”
Suzie’s eyes widened, and for the first time she realized that her husband was sitting at the table in a T-shirt, with no sleeves and no equipment other than two cold eggs and three strips of bacon.
“Harvey, you mean—”
“I mean,” he said. “Yes.”
“But from where? Gettleson’s Bakery is four blocks away.”
“They don’t make water rolls at Gettleson’s Bakery.”
They sat in silence then and stared at each other.
“Maybe it’s something you have a talent for,” Suzie said finally.
More silence.
“Do you suppose it’s only rolls?” Suzie said. “I mean just rolls? Suppose you tried a Danish?”
“I don’t like Danish,” Harvey answered miserably.
“You like the kind with the prune filling. I mean, when they’re crisp and have a lot of prune filling and they’re not all that limp, squishy kind of dough.”
“You don’t get them like that anymore.”
“Well, you remember when we drove down to Washington, and we stopped at that motel outside of Baltimore, and you remember how they told us they had their own chef who worked in one of the big hotels in Germany, only he wasn’t a Nazi or anything like that, and he made the Danish himself and you remember how much you liked it. So you could just think about that kind of Danish, full of prune filling.”
Harvey thought about it. His hand was shaking as he reached out to a spot midway between himself and Suzie, and there it was between his thumb and his forefinger, a piece of Danish so impossibly full of sweet prune filling that it almost came to pieces in Harvey’s fingers. He let it plop down on the cold eggs.
“Oh—you’ve spoiled the eggs,” Suzie said.
“Well, they were cold anyway.”
“Yes, I suppose so. I can make you some fresh eggs.”
Harvey put a finger into the prune filling and then licked it thoughtfully. He broke off a corner of the Danish, ignoring the cold egg yellow that adhered, and munched it.
“There’s no use making fresh eggs,” Suzie observed, “because now that sweet stuff will ruin your appetite. Is it good?”
“Deliciou
s.”
Then, in a squeak that was almost a scream, Suzie demanded to know where the Danish came from.
“You saw it. You told me to get a Danish.”
“Oh, my God, Harvey!”
“That’s the way I feel about it. It’s damn funny, isn’t it?”
“You took that Danish right out of the air.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“It wasn’t a trick,” said Suzie. “I think I am going to be sick, Harvey. I think I am going to throw up.”
She rose and went to the bathroom, and Harvey listened unhappily to the sound of the toilet being flushed. Then she brushed her teeth. They were both of them very clean and neat people. When she returned to the breakfast table, she had gotten a grip on herself, and she told Harvey matter-of-factly that she had read an article in the magazine section of The New York Times to the effect that all so-called miracles and religious phenomena of the past were simply glossed-over scientific facts, totally comprehensible in the light of present-day knowledge.
“Would you repeat that please, darling?” Harvey asked her.
“I mean that the Danish must have come from somewhere.”
“Baltimore,” Harvey agreed.
“Do you want to try something else?” she asked tentatively.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Then I think we ought to call my brother, Dave.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Suzie said, “and I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Harvey, but simply because Dave knows what to do.”
“About what?”
“I know you don’t like Dave—”
Dave was heavy, overbearing, arrogant, insensitive, and contemptuous of Harvey.
“I don’t like him very much,” Harvey admitted. Harvey disliked feelings of hostility toward anyone. “I can get along with him,” he added. “I mean, Suzie, you cannot imagine how much I try to like Dave because he is your brother, but whenever I approach him—”
“Harvey,” she interrupted, “I know.” Then she telephoned Dave.
Dave always had three eggs for breakfast. Harvey sat at the table and watched gloomily as Dave stuffed himself and Dave’s wife, Ruthie, explained about Dave’s digestion. Dave had never taken a laxative. “Dave has a motto,” Ruthie explained. “You are what you eat.”
