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They seized their frozen but sunburned hands back, to stare down and hold them against the panic in their breasts.
«Damn,» whispered Robert Webb. «Oh, damn!» He backed off and went to open the front door again and look at the snowing night where the footprints had almost vanished.
«No» he said. «No, no.»
Just then the yellow flash of headlights on the road braked in front of the house.
«Lotte!» cried Martha Webb. «It must be! Lotte!» The car lights went out. They ran to meet the running woman half up the front yard.
«Lotte!»
The woman, wild-eyed, hair windblown, threw herself at them.
«Martha, Bob! God, I thought I'd never find you! Lost! I'm being followed, let's get inside. Oh, I didn't mean to get you up in the middle of the night, it's good to see you! Jesus! Hide the car! Here are the keys!»
Robert Webb ran to drive the car behind the house. When he came back around he saw that the heavy snowfall was already covering the tracks.
Then the three of them were inside the house, talking, holding onto each other. Robert Webb kept glancing at the front door.
«I can't thank you,» cried Lotte, huddled in a chair. «You're at risk! I won't stay long, a few hours until it's safe. Then ..
«Stay as long as you want.»
«No. They'll follow! In the cities, the fires, the murders, everyone starving, I stole gas. Do you have more? Enough to get me to Phil Merdith's in Greenborough? I-«
«Lotte,» said Robert Webb.
«Yes?» Lotte stopped, breathless.
«Did you see anyone on your way up here? A woman? Running on the road?»
«What? I drove so fast! A woman? Yes! I almost hit her. Then she was gone! Why?»
''Well . .
«She's not dangerous?»
«No, no.»
«It is all right, my being here?»
«Yes, fine, fine. Sit back. We'll fix some coffee-«
«Wait! I'll check!» And before they could stop her, Lotte ran to the front door, opened it a crack, and peered out. They stood with her and saw distant headlights flourished over a low hill and gone into a valley. «They're coming,» whispered Lotte. «They might search here. God, where can I hide?»
Martha and Robert glanced at each other.
No, no, thought Robert Webb. God, no! Preposterous, unimaginable, fantastic, so damned coincidental the mind raves at it, crows, hoots, guffaws! No, none of this! Get oft' circumstance! Get away with your goings and comings on not neat, or too neat, schedules. Come back, Lotte, in ten years, five years, maybe a year, a month, a week, and ask to hide. Even tomorrow show up! But don't come with coincidence in each hand like idiot children and ask, only half an hour after one terror, one miracle, to test our disbelief! I'm not, after all, Charles Dickens, to blink and let this pass.
«What's wrong?» said Lotte.
«I-« said Robert.
«No place to hide me?»
«Yes,» he said. «We've a place.»
«Well?»
«Here.» He turned slowly away, stunned.
They walked down the hall to the half-open paneling.
«This?» Lotte said. «Secret? Did you-7»
«No' it's been here since the house was built long ago.» Lotte touched and moved the door on its hinges. «Does it work? Will they know where to look and find it?»
«No. It's beautifully made. Shut, you can't tell it's there.» Outside in the winter night, cars rushed, their beams flashing up the road, across the house windows.
Lotte peered into the Witch Door as one peers down a deep, lonely well.
A filtering of dust moved about her. The small rocking chair trembled.
Moving in silently, Lotte touched the half-burned candle.
«Why, it's still warm!»
Martha and Robert said nothing. They held to the Witch Door, smelling the odor of warm tallow.
Lotte stood rigidly in the little space, bowing her head beneath the beamed ceiling.
A horn blew in the snowing night. Lotte took a deep breath and said, «Shut the door.»
They shut the Witch Door. There was no way to tell that a door was there.
They blew out the lamp and stood in the cold, dark house, waiting.
The cars rushed down the road, their noise loud, and their yellow headlights bright in the falling snow. The wind stirred the footprints in the yard, one pair going out, another coming in, and the tracks of Lotte's car fast vanishing, and at last gone.
«Thank God,» whispered Martha.
The cars, honking, whipped around the last bend and down the hill and stopped, waiting, looking in at the dark house. Then, at last, they started up away into the snow and the hills.
Soon their lights were gone and their sound gone with them.
«We were lucky,» said Robert Webb.
«But she's not.»
«She?''
«That woman, whoever she was, ran out of here. They'll find here. Some body'll find her.»
«Christ, that's right.»
«And she has no I.D., no proof of herself. And she doesn't know what's happened to her. And when she tells them who she is and where she came from!»
«Yes, yes.»
«God help her.»
They looked into the snowing night but saw nothing. Everything was still. «You can't escape,» she said. «No matter what you do, no one can escape.»
They moved away from the window and down the hall to the Witch Door and touched it.
«Lotte,» they called.
The Witch Door did not tremble or move. «Lotte, you can come out now.» There was no answer; not a breath or a whisper. Robert tapped the door. «Hey in there.» «Lotte!»
He knocked at the paneling, his mouth agitated. «Lotte!»
«Open it!»
«I'm trying, damn it!»
«Lotte, we'll get you out, wait! Everything's all right!»
He beat with both fists, cursing. Then he said, «Watch
out!» took a step back, raised his leg, kicked once, twice, three times; vicious kicks at the paneling that crunched holes and crumbled wood into kindling. He reached in and yanked the entire paneling free. «Lotte!»
They leaned together into the small place under the stairs. The candle flickered on the small table. The Bible was
gone. The small rocking chair moved quietly back and forth, in little arcs, and then stood still.
«Lotte!»
They stared at the empty room. The candle flickered.
«Lotte,» they said.
«You don't believe .
«I don't know. Old houses are old… old..
«You think Lotte… she…?»
«I don't know, I don't know.»
«Then she's safe at least, safe! Thank God!»
«Safe? Where's she gone? You really think that? A woman in new clothes, red lipstick, high heels, short skirt, perfume, plucked brows, diamond rings, silk stockings, safe? Safe!» he said, staring deep into the open frame of the Witch Door.
«Yes, safe. Why not?»
He drew a deep breath.
«A woman of that description, lost in a town called Salem in the year 1680?»
He reached over and shut the Witch Door.
They sat waiting by it for the rest of the long, cold night.
The Ghost in the Machine
At the End of the Ninth Year
Bug
«Damn,» whispered Robert Webb. «Oh, damn!» He backed off and went to open the front door again and look at the snowing night where the footprints had almost vanished.
«No» he said. «No, no.»
Just then the yellow flash of headlights on the road braked in front of the house.
«Lotte!» cried Martha Webb. «It must be! Lotte!» The car lights went out. They ran to meet the running woman half up the front yard.
«Lotte!»
The woman, wild-eyed, hair windblown, threw herself at them.
«Martha, Bob! God, I thought I'd never find you! Lost! I'm being followed, let's get inside. Oh, I didn't mean to get you up in the middle of the night, it's good to see you! Jesus! Hide the car! Here are the keys!»
Robert Webb ran to drive the car behind the house. When he came back around he saw that the heavy snowfall was already covering the tracks.
Then the three of them were inside the house, talking, holding onto each other. Robert Webb kept glancing at the front door.
«I can't thank you,» cried Lotte, huddled in a chair. «You're at risk! I won't stay long, a few hours until it's safe. Then ..
«Stay as long as you want.»
«No. They'll follow! In the cities, the fires, the murders, everyone starving, I stole gas. Do you have more? Enough to get me to Phil Merdith's in Greenborough? I-«
«Lotte,» said Robert Webb.
«Yes?» Lotte stopped, breathless.
«Did you see anyone on your way up here? A woman? Running on the road?»
«What? I drove so fast! A woman? Yes! I almost hit her. Then she was gone! Why?»
''Well . .
«She's not dangerous?»
«No, no.»
«It is all right, my being here?»
«Yes, fine, fine. Sit back. We'll fix some coffee-«
«Wait! I'll check!» And before they could stop her, Lotte ran to the front door, opened it a crack, and peered out. They stood with her and saw distant headlights flourished over a low hill and gone into a valley. «They're coming,» whispered Lotte. «They might search here. God, where can I hide?»
Martha and Robert glanced at each other.
No, no, thought Robert Webb. God, no! Preposterous, unimaginable, fantastic, so damned coincidental the mind raves at it, crows, hoots, guffaws! No, none of this! Get oft' circumstance! Get away with your goings and comings on not neat, or too neat, schedules. Come back, Lotte, in ten years, five years, maybe a year, a month, a week, and ask to hide. Even tomorrow show up! But don't come with coincidence in each hand like idiot children and ask, only half an hour after one terror, one miracle, to test our disbelief! I'm not, after all, Charles Dickens, to blink and let this pass.
«What's wrong?» said Lotte.
«I-« said Robert.
«No place to hide me?»
«Yes,» he said. «We've a place.»
«Well?»
«Here.» He turned slowly away, stunned.
They walked down the hall to the half-open paneling.
«This?» Lotte said. «Secret? Did you-7»
«No' it's been here since the house was built long ago.» Lotte touched and moved the door on its hinges. «Does it work? Will they know where to look and find it?»
«No. It's beautifully made. Shut, you can't tell it's there.» Outside in the winter night, cars rushed, their beams flashing up the road, across the house windows.
Lotte peered into the Witch Door as one peers down a deep, lonely well.
A filtering of dust moved about her. The small rocking chair trembled.
Moving in silently, Lotte touched the half-burned candle.
«Why, it's still warm!»
Martha and Robert said nothing. They held to the Witch Door, smelling the odor of warm tallow.
Lotte stood rigidly in the little space, bowing her head beneath the beamed ceiling.
A horn blew in the snowing night. Lotte took a deep breath and said, «Shut the door.»
They shut the Witch Door. There was no way to tell that a door was there.
They blew out the lamp and stood in the cold, dark house, waiting.
The cars rushed down the road, their noise loud, and their yellow headlights bright in the falling snow. The wind stirred the footprints in the yard, one pair going out, another coming in, and the tracks of Lotte's car fast vanishing, and at last gone.
«Thank God,» whispered Martha.
The cars, honking, whipped around the last bend and down the hill and stopped, waiting, looking in at the dark house. Then, at last, they started up away into the snow and the hills.
Soon their lights were gone and their sound gone with them.
«We were lucky,» said Robert Webb.
«But she's not.»
«She?''
«That woman, whoever she was, ran out of here. They'll find here. Some body'll find her.»
«Christ, that's right.»
«And she has no I.D., no proof of herself. And she doesn't know what's happened to her. And when she tells them who she is and where she came from!»
«Yes, yes.»
«God help her.»
They looked into the snowing night but saw nothing. Everything was still. «You can't escape,» she said. «No matter what you do, no one can escape.»
They moved away from the window and down the hall to the Witch Door and touched it.
«Lotte,» they called.
The Witch Door did not tremble or move. «Lotte, you can come out now.» There was no answer; not a breath or a whisper. Robert tapped the door. «Hey in there.» «Lotte!»
He knocked at the paneling, his mouth agitated. «Lotte!»
«Open it!»
«I'm trying, damn it!»
«Lotte, we'll get you out, wait! Everything's all right!»
He beat with both fists, cursing. Then he said, «Watch
out!» took a step back, raised his leg, kicked once, twice, three times; vicious kicks at the paneling that crunched holes and crumbled wood into kindling. He reached in and yanked the entire paneling free. «Lotte!»
They leaned together into the small place under the stairs. The candle flickered on the small table. The Bible was
gone. The small rocking chair moved quietly back and forth, in little arcs, and then stood still.
«Lotte!»
They stared at the empty room. The candle flickered.
«Lotte,» they said.
«You don't believe .
«I don't know. Old houses are old… old..
«You think Lotte… she…?»
«I don't know, I don't know.»
«Then she's safe at least, safe! Thank God!»
«Safe? Where's she gone? You really think that? A woman in new clothes, red lipstick, high heels, short skirt, perfume, plucked brows, diamond rings, silk stockings, safe? Safe!» he said, staring deep into the open frame of the Witch Door.
«Yes, safe. Why not?»
He drew a deep breath.
«A woman of that description, lost in a town called Salem in the year 1680?»
He reached over and shut the Witch Door.
They sat waiting by it for the rest of the long, cold night.
The Ghost in the Machine
1996 год
The talk in the village in the year 1853 was, of course, about the madman above, in his sod-and-brick hut, with an untended garden and a wife who had fled, silent about his madness, never to return.
The people of the village had never drunk enough courage to go see what the special madness was or why the wife had vanished, tear-stained, leaving a vacuum into which atmospheres had rushed to thunder-clap.
And yet…
On a sweltering hot day with no cloud to offer shadow comfort and no threat of rain to cool man or beast, the Searcher arrived. Which is to say, Dr. Mortimer Goff, a man of many parts, most of them curious and self-serving, but also traveling the world for some baroque event, or miraculous revelation.
The good doctor came tramping up the hill, stumbling over cobbles that were more stone than paving, having abandoned his coach-and-horses, fearful of crippling them with such a climb.
Dr. Goff it turned out, had come from London, inhaling fogs, bombarded by storms, and now, stunned by too much light and heat, this good if curious physician stopped, exhausted, to lean against a fence, sight further up the hill, and ask:
«Is this the way to the lunatic?»
A farmer who was more scarecrow than human raised his eyebrows and snorted, «That would be Elijah Wetherby.»
''If lunatics have names, yes.»
«We call him crazed or mad, but lunatic will do. It sounds like book learning. Are you one of those?»
«I own books, yes, and chemical retorts and a skeleton that was once a man, and a permanent pass to the London Historical and Scientific Museum-«
«All well and good,» the farmer interrupted, «but of no use for failed crops and a dead wife. Follow your nose. And when you find the fool or whatever you name him, take him with you. We're tired of his shouts and commotions late nights in his iron foundry and anvil menagerie. Rumor says he will soon finish some monster that will run to kill us all.»
«Is that true?» asked Dr. Goff.
«No, it lies easy on my tongue. Good day, Doctor, and God deliver you from the lightning bolts that wait for you above.»
With this the farmer spaded the earth to bury the conversation.
So the curious doctor, threatened, climbed on, under a dark cloud which did not stop the sun.
And at last arrived at a hut that seemed more tomb than home, surrounded by land more graveyard than garden.
Outside the ramshackle sod-and-brick dwelling a shadow stepped forth, as if waiting, and became an old, very old, man.
«Well, there you are at last!» it cried.
Dr. Goff reared back at this. «You sound, sir, as if you expected me!»
«I did,» said the old man, «some years ago! What took you so long?»
«You are not exactly cheek by jowl with London, sir.»
«I am not,» the old man agreed and added, «The name is Wetherby. The Inventor»
«Mr. Wetherby, the Inventor. I am Dr. Goff, the so-called Searcher, for I move in behalf of our good Queen, turning rocks, digging truffles, curious for stuffs that might delight her Majesty or fill her museums, shops, and streets in the greatest city in the world. Have I reached the right place?»
«And just in time, for I am now in my eightieth year and of inconsequential vigor. If you had arrived next year, you might have found me in the churchyard. Do come in!»
At this moment, Dr. Goff heard a gathering of people behind him, all with a most unpleasant muttering, so at Mr. Wetherby's beckoning, he was glad to enter, sit, and watch an almost rare whiskey being poured without invitation. When he had quaffed the glass, Dr. Goff swiveled his gaze about the room.
«Well, where is it?»
«Where is what, sir?»
«The lunatic device, the insane machine that goes nowhere but in going might run down a child, a lamb, a priest, a nun, or an old blind dog, where?»
«So I am that famous, am I?» The old man let a few crumbs of laughter fall from his toothless mouth. «Well, sir. I keep it locked in the goats' shed behind: the outhouse of machines. Finish that to strengthen your sanity when you at last behold the delight and grievance of my long inventive life. So!»
The doctor drank, was replenished and soon out the door, across a small, smooth circle of turf, and to a shed whose door was triple-kept with numerous padlocks and keys. Old Wetherby entered, lit many candles, and beckoned the good doctor in.
He pointed as to a manger. The medical Searcher looked, expecting a mother, crib, and holy babe by the way Wetherby gestured and cried:
«There she be!»
«Is it female, then?»
«Come to think, she is!»
And there in the candlelight was Wetherby's mechanical pride.
Dr. Goff coughed, to hide his chagrin.
«That, sir, is but a metal frame!»
«But what a frame to hold velocities! Ha!»
And the old man, young with fevers, rushed to seize a largish wheel which he transported to fit to the front part of the frame. Then he fetched yet another circular object to fit into the frame's rear.
«Well?» he cried.
«I see two wheels, half a cart, and no horse!»
«We will shoot all horses!» exclaimed Wetherby. «My invention, by the tens of thousands, will shy off all horses and banish manures. Do you know, each day in London a thousand tons of horse clods must be cleared, fertilizer wasted, not spread on neighbor fields but dumped as sludge down-Thames. God, how I talk!»
«But, sir, continue. Those look to be spinning wheels, borrowed from nearby farms?»
«They are, but spliced and strengthened with metal to sustain» — Wetherby touched himself — «one hundred twenty pounds. And here's the saddle for that weight.» Whereupon he fitted a saddle mid-frame. «And here the stirrups and ribbon to run the back wheel.» So saying, he affixed a longish leather ribbon to one stirrup's rotary and tightened it on a spool at the rear.
«Do you begin to perceive, Doctor?»
«I am stranded in ignorance, sir.
«Well, then, be alert, for I now enthrone myself.»
And the old man, light as a chimpanzee, slung himself in place on a leather seat mid-frame between the silent spinning wheels.
«I still see no horse, sir.»
«I am the horse, Doctor. I am the horse a-gallop!»
And the old man thrust his feet in the stirrups to chum them up, around, and down; up, around, and down; as the rear wheels, provoked, did likewise, up, down, around, with a lovely hum, fastened in place on the platform planks.
«Aha.» The doctor's face brightened. «This is a device to manufacture electrical power? Something from Benjamin Franklin's storm-lightning notebooks?!»
«Gods, no. It could make lightnings, yes! But this, sir, not seeming one, is a horse, and I its night rider! So!»
And Wetherby pumped and wheezed, wheezed and pumped, and the rear wheels, locked in place, spun faster, faster, with a siren whine.
«All very well,» snorted the good doctor, «but the horse, if it is, and the rider, if you are, seem to be going nowhere! What will you call your machine?»
«I have had many nights and years to think.» Wetherby pumped and wheezed. «The Velocitor, perhaps.» Pumpwheeze. «Or the Precipitor, but no, that sounds as if I might be thrown from my 'horse.' The Galvanizer, yes? Or why not-« Wheeze-pump. «The Landstride or Diminisher, for-« Wheeze-pump. «It does diminish time and distance. Doctor, you know Latin, eh? So, feet to wheel, wheel run by feet name it!''
«The Elijah, your given name, sir, the Elijah.»
«But he saw a wheel way in the middle of the air and it was a wheel in a wheel, is that not so?»
«When last I was in church, yes. And you are grounded, that is plain to see. Why not Velocipede, then? Having to do with speed and the applied toe and ankle?»
«Close-on, Dr. Goff, close-on. Why do you stare so fixedly?»
«It comes to mind that great times call forth great inventions. The inventor is child to his year and day. This is not a great time for such as you and yours. Did this century call you forth as its mightiest of all men of genius?»
Old Wetherby let his machine coast for a moment and smiled.
«No, I and my Tilda here, I call her Tilda, will instead be the gravity that calls forth the century. We will influence the year, the decade, and the millennium!»
«It is hard for me to believe,» said the medical gentleman, «that you will build a road from your sill to the city on which to glide your not-inconsiderable dream.»
«Nay, Doctor, the reverse is true. The city, and the world when they know me1 and this will run a concourse here to deliver me to fame.»
«Your head knocks heaven, Mr. Wetherby,» said the doctor dryly. «But your roots ache for sustenance, water, minerals, air. You stroke and pump wildly, but go nowhere. Once off that rack, will you not fall on your side, destroyed?»
«Nay, nay.» Wetherby, in gusts, pumped again. «For I have discovered some physics, as yet nameless. The faster you propel this bodily device, the less tendency to fall left or right but continue straight, if no obstacles prevent!»
«With only two wheels beneath? Prove it. Release your invention, set it free in flight, let us see you sustain your forward motion without breaking your bum!»
«Oh, God, shut up!» cried Wetherby as his kindling legs thrashed the pedals, racketing round as he leaned into a phantom wind, eyes clenched against an invisible storm, and churned the wheels to a frenzy. «Don't you hear? Listen. That whine, that cry, that whisper. The ghost in the machine, which promises things most new, unseen, unrealized, only a dream now but tomorrow — Great God, don't you see?! If I were on a real path this would be swifter than gazelles, a panic of deer! All pedestrians vanquished. All coach-and-horses in dust! Not twenty miles a day, but thirty, forty miles in a single glorious hour! Stand off, Time. Beware, meadow-beasts! Here glides, in full plummet, Wetherby with nothing to stop him!»
«Aye,» said the Searcher dryly, «you pump up a storm on that stand. But, set free, how would you balance on only two wheels!?»
«Like this!» cried Wetherby, and with a thrust of his hands and an uplift of frame, seized the Traveler, the Motion Machine, the Pathfinder, up free of its stand and in an instant plunged through the room and out the door, with Dr. Goff, in full pursuit, yelling:
«Stop! You'll kill yourself!»
«No, exhilarate my heart, oxygenate my blood!» cried Wetherby, and there he was in a chicken-yard he had trampled flat, paths some sixty feet around on which he now flailed his metal machine with scythings of ankle, toe, heel, and leg, sucking air, gusting out great laughs. «See? I do not fall! Two legs, two wheels, and: presto!»
«My God!» cried Dr. Goff, eyes thrust forth like hardboiled eggs. «God's truth! How so?!»
«I fly forward faster than I fall downward, an unguessed law of physics. But lo! I almost fly. Fly! Good-bye horses, doomed and dead!»
And with «dead» he was overcome with such a delirium of pant and pump, perspiration raining off him in showers, that with a great cry, he wobbled and was flung, a meteor of flesh, over and down on a coop where the chickens, in dumb feather-duster alarms, exploded in shrieks as Wetherby slid in one direction while his vehicle, self-motivated, wheels a-spin, mounted Dr. Goff, who jumped aside, fearful of being spliced.
Wetherby, helped to his feet, protested his trajectory:
«Ignore that! Do you at last understand?»
«Fractures, wounds, broken skulls, yes!»
«No, a future brave with motion, 'tween my legs. You have come a long way, Doctor. Will you adopt and further my machine?»
«Well,» said the doctor, already out of the yard, into the house, and to the front door, his face confused, his wits a patch of nettles. «Ah,» he said.
«Say you will, Doctor. Or my device dies, and I with it!»
«But.. .» said the doctor and opened the outer door, only to draw back, alarmed. «What have I done!» he cried.
Peering over his shoulder, Wetherby expressed further alarm. «Your presence is known, Doctor; the word has spread. A lunatic has come to visit a lunatic.»
And it was true. On the road and in the front garden yard were some twelve or twenty farmers and villagers, some with rocks, some with clubs, and with looks of malice or outright hostility caught in their eyes and mouths.
«There they are!» someone cried.
«Have you come to take him away?» someone else shouted.
«Yah» echoed the struggling crowd, moving forward.
Thinking quickly, Dr. Goff replied, «Yes. I will take him away!» And turned back to the old man.
«Take me where, Doctor?» whispered Wetherby, clutching his elbow.
«One moment!» cried the doctor to the crowd, which then subsided in murmurs. «Let me think.»
Standing back, cudgeling his bald spot, and then massaging his brow for rampant inspiration, Dr. Goff at last exhaled in triumph.
«I have it, by George. A genius of an idea, which will please both villagers, to be rid of you, and you, to be rid of them.»
«What, what, Doctor?»
«Why, sir, you are to come down to London under cover of night and I will let you through the side door of my museum with your blasphemous toy of Satan .
«To what purpose?»
«Purpose? Why, sir, I have found the path, the smooth surface, the road you spoke of at some future time!»
«The road, the path, the surface?»
«The museum floors, marble, smooth, lovely, wondrous, ohmigod, for all your needs!»
«Needs?»
«Don't be thick. Each night, as many nights as you wish, to your heart's content, you can ride that wheeled demon round and round, past the Rembrandts and Turners and Fra Angelicos, through the Grecian statues and Roman busts, careful of porcelains, minding the crystals, but pumping away like Lucifer all night till dawn!»
«Oh, dear God,» murmured Wetherby, «why didn't I think?»
«If you had you would've been too shy to ask!»
«The only place in the world with roads like future roads, paths like tomorrow's paths, boulevards without cobbles, pure as Aphrodite's cheeks! Smooth as Apollo's rump!»
And here Wetherby unlocked his eyes to let fall tears, pent up for months and long hilltop years.
«Don't cry,» said Dr. Goff.
«I must, with joy, or burst. Do you mean it?»
«My good man, here's my hand!»
They shook and the shaking let free at least one drop of rain from the good doctor's cheek, also.
«The excitement will kill me,» said Wetherby, wiping the backs of his fists across his eyes.
«No better way to die! Tomorrow night?»
«But what will people say as I lead my machine through the streets to your museum?»
«If anyone sees, say you're a gypsy who's stolen treasure from a distant year. Well, well, Elijah Wetherby, I'm off.»
«Be careful downhill.»
«Careful.»
Half out the door, Dr. Goff tripped on a cobble and almost fell as a farmer said:
«Did you see the lunatic?»
«I did.»
«Will you take him to a madhouse?»
«Yes. Asylum.» Dr. Goff adjusted his cuffs. «Crazed. Worthless. You will see him no more!»
«Good!» said all as he passed.
«Grand,» said Goff and picked his way down the stone path, listening.
And uphill was there not a final, joyful, wheel-circling cry from that distant yard?
Dr. Goff snorted.
«Think on it,» he said, half aloud, «no more horses, no
more manure! Think!»
And, thinking, fell on the cobbles, lurching toward London and the future.
The talk in the village in the year 1853 was, of course, about the madman above, in his sod-and-brick hut, with an untended garden and a wife who had fled, silent about his madness, never to return.
The people of the village had never drunk enough courage to go see what the special madness was or why the wife had vanished, tear-stained, leaving a vacuum into which atmospheres had rushed to thunder-clap.
And yet…
On a sweltering hot day with no cloud to offer shadow comfort and no threat of rain to cool man or beast, the Searcher arrived. Which is to say, Dr. Mortimer Goff, a man of many parts, most of them curious and self-serving, but also traveling the world for some baroque event, or miraculous revelation.
The good doctor came tramping up the hill, stumbling over cobbles that were more stone than paving, having abandoned his coach-and-horses, fearful of crippling them with such a climb.
Dr. Goff it turned out, had come from London, inhaling fogs, bombarded by storms, and now, stunned by too much light and heat, this good if curious physician stopped, exhausted, to lean against a fence, sight further up the hill, and ask:
«Is this the way to the lunatic?»
A farmer who was more scarecrow than human raised his eyebrows and snorted, «That would be Elijah Wetherby.»
''If lunatics have names, yes.»
«We call him crazed or mad, but lunatic will do. It sounds like book learning. Are you one of those?»
«I own books, yes, and chemical retorts and a skeleton that was once a man, and a permanent pass to the London Historical and Scientific Museum-«
«All well and good,» the farmer interrupted, «but of no use for failed crops and a dead wife. Follow your nose. And when you find the fool or whatever you name him, take him with you. We're tired of his shouts and commotions late nights in his iron foundry and anvil menagerie. Rumor says he will soon finish some monster that will run to kill us all.»
«Is that true?» asked Dr. Goff.
«No, it lies easy on my tongue. Good day, Doctor, and God deliver you from the lightning bolts that wait for you above.»
With this the farmer spaded the earth to bury the conversation.
So the curious doctor, threatened, climbed on, under a dark cloud which did not stop the sun.
And at last arrived at a hut that seemed more tomb than home, surrounded by land more graveyard than garden.
Outside the ramshackle sod-and-brick dwelling a shadow stepped forth, as if waiting, and became an old, very old, man.
«Well, there you are at last!» it cried.
Dr. Goff reared back at this. «You sound, sir, as if you expected me!»
«I did,» said the old man, «some years ago! What took you so long?»
«You are not exactly cheek by jowl with London, sir.»
«I am not,» the old man agreed and added, «The name is Wetherby. The Inventor»
«Mr. Wetherby, the Inventor. I am Dr. Goff, the so-called Searcher, for I move in behalf of our good Queen, turning rocks, digging truffles, curious for stuffs that might delight her Majesty or fill her museums, shops, and streets in the greatest city in the world. Have I reached the right place?»
«And just in time, for I am now in my eightieth year and of inconsequential vigor. If you had arrived next year, you might have found me in the churchyard. Do come in!»
At this moment, Dr. Goff heard a gathering of people behind him, all with a most unpleasant muttering, so at Mr. Wetherby's beckoning, he was glad to enter, sit, and watch an almost rare whiskey being poured without invitation. When he had quaffed the glass, Dr. Goff swiveled his gaze about the room.
«Well, where is it?»
«Where is what, sir?»
«The lunatic device, the insane machine that goes nowhere but in going might run down a child, a lamb, a priest, a nun, or an old blind dog, where?»
«So I am that famous, am I?» The old man let a few crumbs of laughter fall from his toothless mouth. «Well, sir. I keep it locked in the goats' shed behind: the outhouse of machines. Finish that to strengthen your sanity when you at last behold the delight and grievance of my long inventive life. So!»
The doctor drank, was replenished and soon out the door, across a small, smooth circle of turf, and to a shed whose door was triple-kept with numerous padlocks and keys. Old Wetherby entered, lit many candles, and beckoned the good doctor in.
He pointed as to a manger. The medical Searcher looked, expecting a mother, crib, and holy babe by the way Wetherby gestured and cried:
«There she be!»
«Is it female, then?»
«Come to think, she is!»
And there in the candlelight was Wetherby's mechanical pride.
Dr. Goff coughed, to hide his chagrin.
«That, sir, is but a metal frame!»
«But what a frame to hold velocities! Ha!»
And the old man, young with fevers, rushed to seize a largish wheel which he transported to fit to the front part of the frame. Then he fetched yet another circular object to fit into the frame's rear.
«Well?» he cried.
«I see two wheels, half a cart, and no horse!»
«We will shoot all horses!» exclaimed Wetherby. «My invention, by the tens of thousands, will shy off all horses and banish manures. Do you know, each day in London a thousand tons of horse clods must be cleared, fertilizer wasted, not spread on neighbor fields but dumped as sludge down-Thames. God, how I talk!»
«But, sir, continue. Those look to be spinning wheels, borrowed from nearby farms?»
«They are, but spliced and strengthened with metal to sustain» — Wetherby touched himself — «one hundred twenty pounds. And here's the saddle for that weight.» Whereupon he fitted a saddle mid-frame. «And here the stirrups and ribbon to run the back wheel.» So saying, he affixed a longish leather ribbon to one stirrup's rotary and tightened it on a spool at the rear.
«Do you begin to perceive, Doctor?»
«I am stranded in ignorance, sir.
«Well, then, be alert, for I now enthrone myself.»
And the old man, light as a chimpanzee, slung himself in place on a leather seat mid-frame between the silent spinning wheels.
«I still see no horse, sir.»
«I am the horse, Doctor. I am the horse a-gallop!»
And the old man thrust his feet in the stirrups to chum them up, around, and down; up, around, and down; as the rear wheels, provoked, did likewise, up, down, around, with a lovely hum, fastened in place on the platform planks.
«Aha.» The doctor's face brightened. «This is a device to manufacture electrical power? Something from Benjamin Franklin's storm-lightning notebooks?!»
«Gods, no. It could make lightnings, yes! But this, sir, not seeming one, is a horse, and I its night rider! So!»
And Wetherby pumped and wheezed, wheezed and pumped, and the rear wheels, locked in place, spun faster, faster, with a siren whine.
«All very well,» snorted the good doctor, «but the horse, if it is, and the rider, if you are, seem to be going nowhere! What will you call your machine?»
«I have had many nights and years to think.» Wetherby pumped and wheezed. «The Velocitor, perhaps.» Pumpwheeze. «Or the Precipitor, but no, that sounds as if I might be thrown from my 'horse.' The Galvanizer, yes? Or why not-« Wheeze-pump. «The Landstride or Diminisher, for-« Wheeze-pump. «It does diminish time and distance. Doctor, you know Latin, eh? So, feet to wheel, wheel run by feet name it!''
«The Elijah, your given name, sir, the Elijah.»
«But he saw a wheel way in the middle of the air and it was a wheel in a wheel, is that not so?»
«When last I was in church, yes. And you are grounded, that is plain to see. Why not Velocipede, then? Having to do with speed and the applied toe and ankle?»
«Close-on, Dr. Goff, close-on. Why do you stare so fixedly?»
«It comes to mind that great times call forth great inventions. The inventor is child to his year and day. This is not a great time for such as you and yours. Did this century call you forth as its mightiest of all men of genius?»
Old Wetherby let his machine coast for a moment and smiled.
«No, I and my Tilda here, I call her Tilda, will instead be the gravity that calls forth the century. We will influence the year, the decade, and the millennium!»
«It is hard for me to believe,» said the medical gentleman, «that you will build a road from your sill to the city on which to glide your not-inconsiderable dream.»
«Nay, Doctor, the reverse is true. The city, and the world when they know me1 and this will run a concourse here to deliver me to fame.»
«Your head knocks heaven, Mr. Wetherby,» said the doctor dryly. «But your roots ache for sustenance, water, minerals, air. You stroke and pump wildly, but go nowhere. Once off that rack, will you not fall on your side, destroyed?»
«Nay, nay.» Wetherby, in gusts, pumped again. «For I have discovered some physics, as yet nameless. The faster you propel this bodily device, the less tendency to fall left or right but continue straight, if no obstacles prevent!»
«With only two wheels beneath? Prove it. Release your invention, set it free in flight, let us see you sustain your forward motion without breaking your bum!»
«Oh, God, shut up!» cried Wetherby as his kindling legs thrashed the pedals, racketing round as he leaned into a phantom wind, eyes clenched against an invisible storm, and churned the wheels to a frenzy. «Don't you hear? Listen. That whine, that cry, that whisper. The ghost in the machine, which promises things most new, unseen, unrealized, only a dream now but tomorrow — Great God, don't you see?! If I were on a real path this would be swifter than gazelles, a panic of deer! All pedestrians vanquished. All coach-and-horses in dust! Not twenty miles a day, but thirty, forty miles in a single glorious hour! Stand off, Time. Beware, meadow-beasts! Here glides, in full plummet, Wetherby with nothing to stop him!»
«Aye,» said the Searcher dryly, «you pump up a storm on that stand. But, set free, how would you balance on only two wheels!?»
«Like this!» cried Wetherby, and with a thrust of his hands and an uplift of frame, seized the Traveler, the Motion Machine, the Pathfinder, up free of its stand and in an instant plunged through the room and out the door, with Dr. Goff, in full pursuit, yelling:
«Stop! You'll kill yourself!»
«No, exhilarate my heart, oxygenate my blood!» cried Wetherby, and there he was in a chicken-yard he had trampled flat, paths some sixty feet around on which he now flailed his metal machine with scythings of ankle, toe, heel, and leg, sucking air, gusting out great laughs. «See? I do not fall! Two legs, two wheels, and: presto!»
«My God!» cried Dr. Goff, eyes thrust forth like hardboiled eggs. «God's truth! How so?!»
«I fly forward faster than I fall downward, an unguessed law of physics. But lo! I almost fly. Fly! Good-bye horses, doomed and dead!»
And with «dead» he was overcome with such a delirium of pant and pump, perspiration raining off him in showers, that with a great cry, he wobbled and was flung, a meteor of flesh, over and down on a coop where the chickens, in dumb feather-duster alarms, exploded in shrieks as Wetherby slid in one direction while his vehicle, self-motivated, wheels a-spin, mounted Dr. Goff, who jumped aside, fearful of being spliced.
Wetherby, helped to his feet, protested his trajectory:
«Ignore that! Do you at last understand?»
«Fractures, wounds, broken skulls, yes!»
«No, a future brave with motion, 'tween my legs. You have come a long way, Doctor. Will you adopt and further my machine?»
«Well,» said the doctor, already out of the yard, into the house, and to the front door, his face confused, his wits a patch of nettles. «Ah,» he said.
«Say you will, Doctor. Or my device dies, and I with it!»
«But.. .» said the doctor and opened the outer door, only to draw back, alarmed. «What have I done!» he cried.
Peering over his shoulder, Wetherby expressed further alarm. «Your presence is known, Doctor; the word has spread. A lunatic has come to visit a lunatic.»
And it was true. On the road and in the front garden yard were some twelve or twenty farmers and villagers, some with rocks, some with clubs, and with looks of malice or outright hostility caught in their eyes and mouths.
«There they are!» someone cried.
«Have you come to take him away?» someone else shouted.
«Yah» echoed the struggling crowd, moving forward.
Thinking quickly, Dr. Goff replied, «Yes. I will take him away!» And turned back to the old man.
«Take me where, Doctor?» whispered Wetherby, clutching his elbow.
«One moment!» cried the doctor to the crowd, which then subsided in murmurs. «Let me think.»
Standing back, cudgeling his bald spot, and then massaging his brow for rampant inspiration, Dr. Goff at last exhaled in triumph.
«I have it, by George. A genius of an idea, which will please both villagers, to be rid of you, and you, to be rid of them.»
«What, what, Doctor?»
«Why, sir, you are to come down to London under cover of night and I will let you through the side door of my museum with your blasphemous toy of Satan .
«To what purpose?»
«Purpose? Why, sir, I have found the path, the smooth surface, the road you spoke of at some future time!»
«The road, the path, the surface?»
«The museum floors, marble, smooth, lovely, wondrous, ohmigod, for all your needs!»
«Needs?»
«Don't be thick. Each night, as many nights as you wish, to your heart's content, you can ride that wheeled demon round and round, past the Rembrandts and Turners and Fra Angelicos, through the Grecian statues and Roman busts, careful of porcelains, minding the crystals, but pumping away like Lucifer all night till dawn!»
«Oh, dear God,» murmured Wetherby, «why didn't I think?»
«If you had you would've been too shy to ask!»
«The only place in the world with roads like future roads, paths like tomorrow's paths, boulevards without cobbles, pure as Aphrodite's cheeks! Smooth as Apollo's rump!»
And here Wetherby unlocked his eyes to let fall tears, pent up for months and long hilltop years.
«Don't cry,» said Dr. Goff.
«I must, with joy, or burst. Do you mean it?»
«My good man, here's my hand!»
They shook and the shaking let free at least one drop of rain from the good doctor's cheek, also.
«The excitement will kill me,» said Wetherby, wiping the backs of his fists across his eyes.
«No better way to die! Tomorrow night?»
«But what will people say as I lead my machine through the streets to your museum?»
«If anyone sees, say you're a gypsy who's stolen treasure from a distant year. Well, well, Elijah Wetherby, I'm off.»
«Be careful downhill.»
«Careful.»
Half out the door, Dr. Goff tripped on a cobble and almost fell as a farmer said:
«Did you see the lunatic?»
«I did.»
«Will you take him to a madhouse?»
«Yes. Asylum.» Dr. Goff adjusted his cuffs. «Crazed. Worthless. You will see him no more!»
«Good!» said all as he passed.
«Grand,» said Goff and picked his way down the stone path, listening.
And uphill was there not a final, joyful, wheel-circling cry from that distant yard?
Dr. Goff snorted.
«Think on it,» he said, half aloud, «no more horses, no
more manure! Think!»
And, thinking, fell on the cobbles, lurching toward London and the future.
At the End of the Ninth Year
1995 year
«Well,» said Sheila, chewing on her breakfast toast and examining her complexion, distorted in the side of the coffee urn, «here it is the last day of the last month of the ninth year.»
Her husband, Thomas, glanced over the rampart of The Wall Street Journal saw nothing to fasten his regard, and sank back in place. «What?»
«I said,» said Sheila, «the ninth year's finished and you have a completely new wife. Or, to put it properly, the old wife's gone. So I don't think we're married anymore.»
Thomas floored the Journal on his as-yet-untouched scrambled eggs, tilted his head this way and that, and said:
«Not married?»
«No, that was another time, another body, another me.» She buttered more toast and munched on it philosophically.
«Hold on!» He took a stiff jolt of coffee. «Explain.»
«Well, dear Thomas, don't you remember reading as children and later, that every nine years, I think it was nine, the body, churning like a gene-chromosome factory, did your entire person over, fingernails, spleen, ankles to elbows, belly, bum, and earlobes, molecule by molecule-«
«Oh, get to it,» he grumbled. «The point, wife, the point!»
«The point, dear Tom,» she replied, finishing her toast, «is that with this breakfast I have replenished my soul and psyche, completed the reworking of my entire flesh, blood, and bones. This person seated across from you is not the woman you married-«
«I have often said that!»
«Be serious.»
«Are you?» he said.
«Let me finish. If the medical research is true, then at the end of nine years there is not an eyebrow, eyelash, pore, dimple, or skin follicle in this creature here at this celebratory breakfast that in any way is related to that old Sheila Tompkins married at eleven a.m. of a Saturday nine years ago this very hour. Two different women. One in bondage to a nice male creature whose jaw jumps out like a cash register when he scans the Journal. The other, now that it is one minute after the deadline hour, Born Free. So!»
She rose swiftly and prepared to flee.
«Wait!» He gave himself another jolt of coffee. «Where are you going?»
Hallway to the door, she said, «Out. Perhaps away. And who knows: forever!»
«Born free? Hogwash. Come here! Sit down!»
She hesitated as he assumed his lion-tamer's voice. «Dammit. You owe me an explanation. Sit!»
She turned slowly. «For only as long as it takes to draw a picture.»
«Draw it, then. Sit!»
She came to stare at her plate. «I seem to have eaten everything in sight.»
He jumped up, ran over to the side table, rummaged more omelet, and banged it in front of her.
«There.! Speak with your mouth full.»
She forked in the eggs. «You do see what I'm driving at, don't you, Tomasino?»
«Damnation! I thought you were happy!»
«Yes, but not incredibly happy.»
«That's for maniacs on their honeymoons!»
«Yes, wasn't it?» she remembered.
«That was then, this is now. Well?»
«I could feel it happening all year. Lying in bed, I felt my skin prickle, my pores open like ten thousand tiny mouths, my perspiration run like faucets, my heart race, my pulse sound in the oddest places, under my chin, my wrists, the backs of my knees, my ankles. I felt like a huge wax statue, melting. After midnight I was afraid to turn on the bathroom light and find a stranger gone mad in the mirror.»
«All right, all right!» He stirred four sugars in his coffee and drank the slops from the saucer. «Sum it up!»
«Every hour of every night and then all day, I could feel it as if I were out in a storm being struck by hot August rain that washed away the old to find a brand-new me. Every drop of serum, every red and white corpuscle, every hot flash of nerve ending, rewired and restrung, new marrow, new hair for combing, new fingerprints even. Don't look at me that way. Perhaps no new fingerprints. But all the rest. See? Am I not a fresh-sculpted, fresh-painted work of God's creation?»
He searched her up and down with a razor glare.
«I hear Mad Carlotta maundering,» he said. «I see a woman hyperventilated by a midlife frenzy. Why don't you just say it? Do you want a divorce?»
«Not necessarily.»
«Not necessarily?» he shouted.
«I'll just simply . . . go away.»
«Where will you go?»
«There must be some place,» she said vaguely, stirring her omelet to make paths.
«Is there another man?» he said at last, holding his utensils with fists.
«Not quite yet.
«Thank God for small favors.» He let a great breath gust out. «Now go to your room.»
«Beg pardon?» She blinked.
«You'll not be allowed out for the rest of this week. Go to your room. No phone calls. No TV. No-«
She was on her feet. «You sound like my father in high school!»
«I'll be damned.» He laughed quietly. «Yes! Upstairs now! No lunch for you, my girl. I'll put a plate by your door at suppertime. When you behave I'll give you your car keys. Meanwhile, march! Pull out your telephone plugs and hand over your CD player!»
«This is outrageous,» she cried. «I'm a grown woman.»
«Ingrown. No progress. Re-gress. If that damn theory's true, you didn't add on, just sank back nine years! Out you go! Up!»
She ran, pale-faced, to the entry stairs, wiping tears from her eyes.
As she was hallway up, he, putting his foot on the first step, pulled the napkin from his shirt and called quietly, «Wait …»
She froze in place but did not look back down at him, waiting.
«Sheila,» he said at last, tears running down his cheeks now.
«Yes,» she whispered.
«I love you,» he said.
«I know,» she said. «But it doesn't help.»
«Yes, it does. Listen.»
She waited, hallway up to her room.
He rubbed his hand over his face as if trying to massage some truth out of it. His hand was almost frantic, searching for something hidden around his mouth or near his eyes.
Then it almost burst from him. «Sheila!»
«I'm supposed to go to my room,» she said.
«Don't!»
«What, then?»
His face began to relax, his eyes to fix on a solution, as his hand rested on the banister leading up to where she stood with her back turned.
«If what you say is true-«
«It is,» she murmured. «Every cell, every pore, every eyelash. Nine years-«
«Yes, yes, I know, yes. But listen.»
He swallowed hard and that helped him digest the solution which he now spoke very weakly, then quietly, and then with a kind of growing certainty.
«If what you say happened-«
«It did,» she murmured, head down.
«Well, then,» he said slowly, and then, «It happened to me, too.»
«What?» Her head lifted a trifle.
«It doesn't just happen to one person, right? It happens to all people, everyone in the world. And if that's true, well, my body has been changing along with yours during all the last nine years. Every follicle, every fingernail, all the dermis and epidermis or whatever. I never noticed. But it must have.»
Her head was up now and her back was not slumped. He hurried on.
«And if that's true, good Lord, then I'm new, too. The old Tom, Thomas, Tommy, Tomasino is left behind back there with the shed snakeskin.»
Her eyes opened and she listened and he finished. «So we're both brand-new. You're the new, beautiful woman I've been thinking about finding and loving in the last year. And I'm that man you were heading out to search for. Isn't that right? Isn't that true?»
There was the merest hesitation and then she gave the smallest, almost imperceptible nod.
«Mercy,» he called gently.
«That's not my name,» she said.
«It is now. New woman, new body, new name. So I picked one for you. Mercy?»
After a moment she said, «What does that make you?»
«Let me think.» He chewed his lip and smiled. «How about Frank? Frankly, my dear, I do give a damn.»
«Frank,» she murmured. «Frank and Mercy. Mercy and Frank.»
«It doesn't exactly ring, but it'll do. Mercy?»
«Yes?»
«Will you marry me?»
«What?''
«I said, will you marry me. Today. An hour from now. Noon?»
She turned at last to look down at him with a face all freshly tanned and washed.
«Oh, yes,» she said.
«And we'll run away and be maniacs again, for a little while
«No,» she said, «here is fine. Here is wonderful.»
«Come down, then,» he said, holding his hand up to her. «We have another nine years before another change. Come down and finish your wedding breakfast. Mercy?»
She came down the steps and took his hand and smiled.
«Where's the champagne?» she said.
«Well,» said Sheila, chewing on her breakfast toast and examining her complexion, distorted in the side of the coffee urn, «here it is the last day of the last month of the ninth year.»
Her husband, Thomas, glanced over the rampart of The Wall Street Journal saw nothing to fasten his regard, and sank back in place. «What?»
«I said,» said Sheila, «the ninth year's finished and you have a completely new wife. Or, to put it properly, the old wife's gone. So I don't think we're married anymore.»
Thomas floored the Journal on his as-yet-untouched scrambled eggs, tilted his head this way and that, and said:
«Not married?»
«No, that was another time, another body, another me.» She buttered more toast and munched on it philosophically.
«Hold on!» He took a stiff jolt of coffee. «Explain.»
«Well, dear Thomas, don't you remember reading as children and later, that every nine years, I think it was nine, the body, churning like a gene-chromosome factory, did your entire person over, fingernails, spleen, ankles to elbows, belly, bum, and earlobes, molecule by molecule-«
«Oh, get to it,» he grumbled. «The point, wife, the point!»
«The point, dear Tom,» she replied, finishing her toast, «is that with this breakfast I have replenished my soul and psyche, completed the reworking of my entire flesh, blood, and bones. This person seated across from you is not the woman you married-«
«I have often said that!»
«Be serious.»
«Are you?» he said.
«Let me finish. If the medical research is true, then at the end of nine years there is not an eyebrow, eyelash, pore, dimple, or skin follicle in this creature here at this celebratory breakfast that in any way is related to that old Sheila Tompkins married at eleven a.m. of a Saturday nine years ago this very hour. Two different women. One in bondage to a nice male creature whose jaw jumps out like a cash register when he scans the Journal. The other, now that it is one minute after the deadline hour, Born Free. So!»
She rose swiftly and prepared to flee.
«Wait!» He gave himself another jolt of coffee. «Where are you going?»
Hallway to the door, she said, «Out. Perhaps away. And who knows: forever!»
«Born free? Hogwash. Come here! Sit down!»
She hesitated as he assumed his lion-tamer's voice. «Dammit. You owe me an explanation. Sit!»
She turned slowly. «For only as long as it takes to draw a picture.»
«Draw it, then. Sit!»
She came to stare at her plate. «I seem to have eaten everything in sight.»
He jumped up, ran over to the side table, rummaged more omelet, and banged it in front of her.
«There.! Speak with your mouth full.»
She forked in the eggs. «You do see what I'm driving at, don't you, Tomasino?»
«Damnation! I thought you were happy!»
«Yes, but not incredibly happy.»
«That's for maniacs on their honeymoons!»
«Yes, wasn't it?» she remembered.
«That was then, this is now. Well?»
«I could feel it happening all year. Lying in bed, I felt my skin prickle, my pores open like ten thousand tiny mouths, my perspiration run like faucets, my heart race, my pulse sound in the oddest places, under my chin, my wrists, the backs of my knees, my ankles. I felt like a huge wax statue, melting. After midnight I was afraid to turn on the bathroom light and find a stranger gone mad in the mirror.»
«All right, all right!» He stirred four sugars in his coffee and drank the slops from the saucer. «Sum it up!»
«Every hour of every night and then all day, I could feel it as if I were out in a storm being struck by hot August rain that washed away the old to find a brand-new me. Every drop of serum, every red and white corpuscle, every hot flash of nerve ending, rewired and restrung, new marrow, new hair for combing, new fingerprints even. Don't look at me that way. Perhaps no new fingerprints. But all the rest. See? Am I not a fresh-sculpted, fresh-painted work of God's creation?»
He searched her up and down with a razor glare.
«I hear Mad Carlotta maundering,» he said. «I see a woman hyperventilated by a midlife frenzy. Why don't you just say it? Do you want a divorce?»
«Not necessarily.»
«Not necessarily?» he shouted.
«I'll just simply . . . go away.»
«Where will you go?»
«There must be some place,» she said vaguely, stirring her omelet to make paths.
«Is there another man?» he said at last, holding his utensils with fists.
«Not quite yet.
«Thank God for small favors.» He let a great breath gust out. «Now go to your room.»
«Beg pardon?» She blinked.
«You'll not be allowed out for the rest of this week. Go to your room. No phone calls. No TV. No-«
She was on her feet. «You sound like my father in high school!»
«I'll be damned.» He laughed quietly. «Yes! Upstairs now! No lunch for you, my girl. I'll put a plate by your door at suppertime. When you behave I'll give you your car keys. Meanwhile, march! Pull out your telephone plugs and hand over your CD player!»
«This is outrageous,» she cried. «I'm a grown woman.»
«Ingrown. No progress. Re-gress. If that damn theory's true, you didn't add on, just sank back nine years! Out you go! Up!»
She ran, pale-faced, to the entry stairs, wiping tears from her eyes.
As she was hallway up, he, putting his foot on the first step, pulled the napkin from his shirt and called quietly, «Wait …»
She froze in place but did not look back down at him, waiting.
«Sheila,» he said at last, tears running down his cheeks now.
«Yes,» she whispered.
«I love you,» he said.
«I know,» she said. «But it doesn't help.»
«Yes, it does. Listen.»
She waited, hallway up to her room.
He rubbed his hand over his face as if trying to massage some truth out of it. His hand was almost frantic, searching for something hidden around his mouth or near his eyes.
Then it almost burst from him. «Sheila!»
«I'm supposed to go to my room,» she said.
«Don't!»
«What, then?»
His face began to relax, his eyes to fix on a solution, as his hand rested on the banister leading up to where she stood with her back turned.
«If what you say is true-«
«It is,» she murmured. «Every cell, every pore, every eyelash. Nine years-«
«Yes, yes, I know, yes. But listen.»
He swallowed hard and that helped him digest the solution which he now spoke very weakly, then quietly, and then with a kind of growing certainty.
«If what you say happened-«
«It did,» she murmured, head down.
«Well, then,» he said slowly, and then, «It happened to me, too.»
«What?» Her head lifted a trifle.
«It doesn't just happen to one person, right? It happens to all people, everyone in the world. And if that's true, well, my body has been changing along with yours during all the last nine years. Every follicle, every fingernail, all the dermis and epidermis or whatever. I never noticed. But it must have.»
Her head was up now and her back was not slumped. He hurried on.
«And if that's true, good Lord, then I'm new, too. The old Tom, Thomas, Tommy, Tomasino is left behind back there with the shed snakeskin.»
Her eyes opened and she listened and he finished. «So we're both brand-new. You're the new, beautiful woman I've been thinking about finding and loving in the last year. And I'm that man you were heading out to search for. Isn't that right? Isn't that true?»
There was the merest hesitation and then she gave the smallest, almost imperceptible nod.
«Mercy,» he called gently.
«That's not my name,» she said.
«It is now. New woman, new body, new name. So I picked one for you. Mercy?»
After a moment she said, «What does that make you?»
«Let me think.» He chewed his lip and smiled. «How about Frank? Frankly, my dear, I do give a damn.»
«Frank,» she murmured. «Frank and Mercy. Mercy and Frank.»
«It doesn't exactly ring, but it'll do. Mercy?»
«Yes?»
«Will you marry me?»
«What?''
«I said, will you marry me. Today. An hour from now. Noon?»
She turned at last to look down at him with a face all freshly tanned and washed.
«Oh, yes,» she said.
«And we'll run away and be maniacs again, for a little while
«No,» she said, «here is fine. Here is wonderful.»
«Come down, then,» he said, holding his hand up to her. «We have another nine years before another change. Come down and finish your wedding breakfast. Mercy?»
She came down the steps and took his hand and smiled.
«Where's the champagne?» she said.
Bug
1996 year
Looking back now, I can't remember a time when Bug wasn't dancing. Bug is short for jitterbug and, of course, those were the days in the late thirties, our final days in high school and our first days out in the vast world looking for work that didn't exist when jitterbugging was all the rage. And I can remember Bug (his real name was Bert Bagley, which shortens to Bug nicely), during a jazz-band blast at our final aud-call for our high school senior class, suddenly leaping up to dance with an invisible partner in the middle of the front aisle of the auditorium. That brought the house down. You never heard such a roar or such applause. The bandleader, stricken with Bug's oblivious joy, gave an encore and Bug did the same and we all exploded. After that the band played «Thanks for the Memory» and we all sang it, with tears pouring down our cheeks. Nobody in all the years after could forget: Bug dancing in the aisle, eyes shut, hands out to grasp his invisible girlfriend, his legs not connected to his body, just his heart, all over the place. When it was over, nobody, not even the band, wanted to leave. We just stood there in the world Bug had made, hating to go out into that other world that was waiting for us.
It was about a year later when Bug saw me on the street and stopped his roadster and said come on along to my place for a hot dog and a Coke, and I jumped in and we drove over with the top down and the wind really hitting us and Bug talking and talking at the top of his lungs, about life and the times and what he wanted to show me in his front parlor-front parlor, hell, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom.
What was it he wanted me to see?
Trophies. Big ones, little ones, solid gold and silver and brass trophies with his name on them. Dance trophies. I mean they were everywhere, on the floor by his bed, on the kitchen sink, in the bathroom, but in the parlor, especially, they had settled like a locust plague. There were so many of them on the mantel, and in bookcases instead of books, and on the floor, you had to wade through, kicking some over as you went. They totaled, he said, tilting his head back and counting inside his eyelids, to about three hundred and twenty prizes, which means grabbing onto a trophy almost every night in the past year.
«All this,» I gasped, «just since we left high school?»
«Ain't I the cat's pajamas?» Bug cried.
«You're the whole darned department store! Who was your partner, all those nights?»
«Not partner, partners,» Bug corrected. «Three hundred, give or take a dozen, different women on three hundred different nights.»
«Where do you find three hundred women, all talented, all good enough, to win prizes?»
«They weren't talented or all good,» said Bug, glancing around at his collection. «They were just ordinary, good, every-night dancers. I won the prizes. I made them good. And when we got Out there dancing, we cleared the floor.
Everyone else stopped, to watch us there out in the middle of nowhere, and we never stopped.»
He paused, blushed, and shook his head. «Sorry about that. Didn't mean to brag.»
But he wasn't bragging. I could see. He was just telling the truth.
«You want to know how this all started?» said Bug, handing over a hot dog and a Coke.
«Don't tell me,» I said. «I know.»
«How could you?» said Bug, looking me over.
«The last aud-call at L.A. High, I think they played 'Thanks for the Memory,' but just before that-«
» 'Roll Out the Barrel'-«
»-'the Barrel,' yes, and there you were in front of God and everyone, jumping.»
«I never stopped,» said Bug, eyes shut, back in those
years. «Never,» he said, «stopped.»
«You got your life all made,» I said.
«Unless,» said Bug, «something happens.»
What happened was, of course, the war.
Looking back, I remember that in that last year in school, sap that I was, I made up a list of my one hundred and sixty-five best friends. Can you imagine that? One hundred and sixty-five, count 'em, best friends! It's a good thing I never showed that list to anyone. I would have been hooted out of school.
Anyway, the war came and went and took with it a couple dozen of those listed friends and the rest just disappeared into holes in the ground or went east or wound up in Malibu or Fort Lauderdale. Bug was on that list, but I didn't figure out I didn't really know him until half a lifetime later. By that time I was down to half a dozen pals or women I might turn to if I needed, and it was then, walking down Hollywood Boulevard one Saturday afternoon, I heard someone call:
«How about a hot dog and a Coke?»
Bug, I thought without turning. And that's who it was, standing on the Walk of Stars with his feet planted on Mary Pickford and Ricardo Cortez just behind and Jimmy Stewart just ahead. Bug had taken off some hair and put on some weight, but it was Bug and I was overjoyed, perhaps too much, and showed it, for he seemed embarrassed at my enthusiasm. I saw then that his suit was not half new enough and his shirt frayed, but his tie was neatly tied and he shook my hand off and we popped into a place where we stood and had that hot dog and that Coke.
«Still going to be the world's greatest writer?» said Bug.
«Working at it,» I said.
«You'll get there,» said Bug and smiled, meaning it. «You were always good.»
«So were you,» I said.
That seemed to pain him slightly, for he stopped chewing for a moment and took a swig of Coke. «Yes, sir,» he said. «I surely was.»
«God,» I said, «I can still remember the day I saw all those trophies for the first time. What a family! Whatever-?»
Before I could finish asking, he gave the answer.
«Put 'em in storage, some. Some wound up with my first wife. Goodwill got the rest.»
«I'm sorry,» I said, and truly was.
Bug looked at me steadily. «How come you're sorry?»
«Hell, I dunno,» I said. «It's just, they seemed such a part of you. I haven't thought of you often the last few years or so, to be honest, but when I do, there you are knee-deep in all those cups and mugs in your front room, out in the kitchen, hell, in your garage!»
«I'll be damned,» said Bug. «What a memory you got.»
We finished our Cokes and it was almost time to go. I couldn't help myself, even seeing that Bug had fleshed himself out over the years.
«When-« I started to say, and stopped.
«When what?» said Bug.
«When,» I said with difficulty, «when was the last time you danced?»
«Years,» said Bug.
«But how long ago?»
«Ten years. Fifteen. Maybe twenty. Yeah, twenty. I don't dance anymore.»
«I don't believe that. Bug not dance? Nuts.»
«Truth. Gave my fancy night-out shoes to the Goodwill, too. Can't dance in your socks.»
«Can, and barefoot, too!»
Bug had to laugh at that. «You're really something. Well, it's been nice.» He started edging toward the door. «Take care, genius-«
«Not so fast.» I walked him out into the light and he was looking both ways as if there were heavy traffic. «You know one thing I never saw and wanted to see? You bragged about it, said you took three hundred ordinary girls out on the dance floor and turned them into Ginger Rogers inside three minutes. But I only saw you once at that aud-call in '38, so I don't believe you.»
«What?» said Bug. «You saw the trophies!»
«You could have had those made up,» I pursued, looking at his wrinkled suit and frayed shirt cuffs. «Anyone can go in a trophy shop and buy a cup and have his name put on it!»
«You think I did that?» cried Bug.
«I think that, yes!»
Bug glanced out in the street and back at me and back in the street and back to me, trying to decide which way to run or push or shout.
«What's got into you?» said Bug. «Why're you talking like that?»
«God, I don't know,» I admitted. «It's just, we might not meet again and I'll never have the chance, or you to prove it. I'd like, after all this time, to see what you talked about. I'd love to see you dance again, Bug.»
«Naw,» said Bug. «I've forgotten how.»
«Don't hand me that. You may have forgotten, but the rest of you knows how. Bet you could go down to the Ambassador Hotel this afternoon, they still have tea dances there, and clear the floor, just like you said. After you're out there nobody else dances, they all stop and look at you and her just like thirty years ago.»
«No,» said Bug, backing away but coming back. «No, no.»
«Pick a stranger, any girl, any woman, out of the crowd, lead her out, hold her in your arms and just skim her around as if you were on ice and dream her to Paradise.»
«If you write like that, you'll never sell,» said Bug.
«Bet you, Bug.»
«I don't bet.»
«All right, then. Bet you you can't. Bet you, By God, that you've lost your stuff!»
«Now, hold on,» said Bug.
«I mean it. Lost your stuff forever, for good. Bet you. Wanna bet?»
Bug's eyes took on a peculiar shine and his face was flushed. «How much?»
«Fifty bucks!»
«I don't have-«
«Thirty bucks, then. Twenty! You can afford to lose that, can't you?»
«Who says I'd lose, dammit?»
«I say. Twenty. Is it a deal?»
«You're throwing your money away.»
«No, I'm a sure winner, because you can't dance worth shoats and shinola!»
«Where's your money?» cried Bug, incensed now.
«Here!»
«Where's your car!?»
«I don't own a car. Never learned to drive. Where's yours?»
«Sold it! Jesus, no cars. How do we get to the tea dance!?» We got. We grabbed a cab and I paid and, before Bug could relent, dragged him through the hotel lobby and into the ballroom. It was a nice summer afternoon, so nice that the room was filled with mostly middle-aged men and their wives, a few younger ones with their girlfriends, and some kids out of college who looked out of place, embarrassed by the mostly old-folks music out of another time. We got the last table and when Bug opened his mouth for one last protest, I put a straw in it and helped him nurse a marguerita.
«Why are you doing this?» he protested again.
«Because you were just one of one hundred sixty-five close friends!» I said.
«We were never friends,» said Bug.
«Well, today, anyway. There's 'Moonlight Serenade.' Always liked that, never danced myself, clumsy fool. On your feet, Bug!»
He was on his feet, swaying.
«Who do you pick?» I said. «You cut in on a couple? Or there's a few wallflowers over there, a tableful of women. I dare you to pick the least likely and give her lessons, yes?»
Looking back now, I can't remember a time when Bug wasn't dancing. Bug is short for jitterbug and, of course, those were the days in the late thirties, our final days in high school and our first days out in the vast world looking for work that didn't exist when jitterbugging was all the rage. And I can remember Bug (his real name was Bert Bagley, which shortens to Bug nicely), during a jazz-band blast at our final aud-call for our high school senior class, suddenly leaping up to dance with an invisible partner in the middle of the front aisle of the auditorium. That brought the house down. You never heard such a roar or such applause. The bandleader, stricken with Bug's oblivious joy, gave an encore and Bug did the same and we all exploded. After that the band played «Thanks for the Memory» and we all sang it, with tears pouring down our cheeks. Nobody in all the years after could forget: Bug dancing in the aisle, eyes shut, hands out to grasp his invisible girlfriend, his legs not connected to his body, just his heart, all over the place. When it was over, nobody, not even the band, wanted to leave. We just stood there in the world Bug had made, hating to go out into that other world that was waiting for us.
It was about a year later when Bug saw me on the street and stopped his roadster and said come on along to my place for a hot dog and a Coke, and I jumped in and we drove over with the top down and the wind really hitting us and Bug talking and talking at the top of his lungs, about life and the times and what he wanted to show me in his front parlor-front parlor, hell, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom.
What was it he wanted me to see?
Trophies. Big ones, little ones, solid gold and silver and brass trophies with his name on them. Dance trophies. I mean they were everywhere, on the floor by his bed, on the kitchen sink, in the bathroom, but in the parlor, especially, they had settled like a locust plague. There were so many of them on the mantel, and in bookcases instead of books, and on the floor, you had to wade through, kicking some over as you went. They totaled, he said, tilting his head back and counting inside his eyelids, to about three hundred and twenty prizes, which means grabbing onto a trophy almost every night in the past year.
«All this,» I gasped, «just since we left high school?»
«Ain't I the cat's pajamas?» Bug cried.
«You're the whole darned department store! Who was your partner, all those nights?»
«Not partner, partners,» Bug corrected. «Three hundred, give or take a dozen, different women on three hundred different nights.»
«Where do you find three hundred women, all talented, all good enough, to win prizes?»
«They weren't talented or all good,» said Bug, glancing around at his collection. «They were just ordinary, good, every-night dancers. I won the prizes. I made them good. And when we got Out there dancing, we cleared the floor.
Everyone else stopped, to watch us there out in the middle of nowhere, and we never stopped.»
He paused, blushed, and shook his head. «Sorry about that. Didn't mean to brag.»
But he wasn't bragging. I could see. He was just telling the truth.
«You want to know how this all started?» said Bug, handing over a hot dog and a Coke.
«Don't tell me,» I said. «I know.»
«How could you?» said Bug, looking me over.
«The last aud-call at L.A. High, I think they played 'Thanks for the Memory,' but just before that-«
» 'Roll Out the Barrel'-«
»-'the Barrel,' yes, and there you were in front of God and everyone, jumping.»
«I never stopped,» said Bug, eyes shut, back in those
years. «Never,» he said, «stopped.»
«You got your life all made,» I said.
«Unless,» said Bug, «something happens.»
What happened was, of course, the war.
Looking back, I remember that in that last year in school, sap that I was, I made up a list of my one hundred and sixty-five best friends. Can you imagine that? One hundred and sixty-five, count 'em, best friends! It's a good thing I never showed that list to anyone. I would have been hooted out of school.
Anyway, the war came and went and took with it a couple dozen of those listed friends and the rest just disappeared into holes in the ground or went east or wound up in Malibu or Fort Lauderdale. Bug was on that list, but I didn't figure out I didn't really know him until half a lifetime later. By that time I was down to half a dozen pals or women I might turn to if I needed, and it was then, walking down Hollywood Boulevard one Saturday afternoon, I heard someone call:
«How about a hot dog and a Coke?»
Bug, I thought without turning. And that's who it was, standing on the Walk of Stars with his feet planted on Mary Pickford and Ricardo Cortez just behind and Jimmy Stewart just ahead. Bug had taken off some hair and put on some weight, but it was Bug and I was overjoyed, perhaps too much, and showed it, for he seemed embarrassed at my enthusiasm. I saw then that his suit was not half new enough and his shirt frayed, but his tie was neatly tied and he shook my hand off and we popped into a place where we stood and had that hot dog and that Coke.
«Still going to be the world's greatest writer?» said Bug.
«Working at it,» I said.
«You'll get there,» said Bug and smiled, meaning it. «You were always good.»
«So were you,» I said.
That seemed to pain him slightly, for he stopped chewing for a moment and took a swig of Coke. «Yes, sir,» he said. «I surely was.»
«God,» I said, «I can still remember the day I saw all those trophies for the first time. What a family! Whatever-?»
Before I could finish asking, he gave the answer.
«Put 'em in storage, some. Some wound up with my first wife. Goodwill got the rest.»
«I'm sorry,» I said, and truly was.
Bug looked at me steadily. «How come you're sorry?»
«Hell, I dunno,» I said. «It's just, they seemed such a part of you. I haven't thought of you often the last few years or so, to be honest, but when I do, there you are knee-deep in all those cups and mugs in your front room, out in the kitchen, hell, in your garage!»
«I'll be damned,» said Bug. «What a memory you got.»
We finished our Cokes and it was almost time to go. I couldn't help myself, even seeing that Bug had fleshed himself out over the years.
«When-« I started to say, and stopped.
«When what?» said Bug.
«When,» I said with difficulty, «when was the last time you danced?»
«Years,» said Bug.
«But how long ago?»
«Ten years. Fifteen. Maybe twenty. Yeah, twenty. I don't dance anymore.»
«I don't believe that. Bug not dance? Nuts.»
«Truth. Gave my fancy night-out shoes to the Goodwill, too. Can't dance in your socks.»
«Can, and barefoot, too!»
Bug had to laugh at that. «You're really something. Well, it's been nice.» He started edging toward the door. «Take care, genius-«
«Not so fast.» I walked him out into the light and he was looking both ways as if there were heavy traffic. «You know one thing I never saw and wanted to see? You bragged about it, said you took three hundred ordinary girls out on the dance floor and turned them into Ginger Rogers inside three minutes. But I only saw you once at that aud-call in '38, so I don't believe you.»
«What?» said Bug. «You saw the trophies!»
«You could have had those made up,» I pursued, looking at his wrinkled suit and frayed shirt cuffs. «Anyone can go in a trophy shop and buy a cup and have his name put on it!»
«You think I did that?» cried Bug.
«I think that, yes!»
Bug glanced out in the street and back at me and back in the street and back to me, trying to decide which way to run or push or shout.
«What's got into you?» said Bug. «Why're you talking like that?»
«God, I don't know,» I admitted. «It's just, we might not meet again and I'll never have the chance, or you to prove it. I'd like, after all this time, to see what you talked about. I'd love to see you dance again, Bug.»
«Naw,» said Bug. «I've forgotten how.»
«Don't hand me that. You may have forgotten, but the rest of you knows how. Bet you could go down to the Ambassador Hotel this afternoon, they still have tea dances there, and clear the floor, just like you said. After you're out there nobody else dances, they all stop and look at you and her just like thirty years ago.»
«No,» said Bug, backing away but coming back. «No, no.»
«Pick a stranger, any girl, any woman, out of the crowd, lead her out, hold her in your arms and just skim her around as if you were on ice and dream her to Paradise.»
«If you write like that, you'll never sell,» said Bug.
«Bet you, Bug.»
«I don't bet.»
«All right, then. Bet you you can't. Bet you, By God, that you've lost your stuff!»
«Now, hold on,» said Bug.
«I mean it. Lost your stuff forever, for good. Bet you. Wanna bet?»
Bug's eyes took on a peculiar shine and his face was flushed. «How much?»
«Fifty bucks!»
«I don't have-«
«Thirty bucks, then. Twenty! You can afford to lose that, can't you?»
«Who says I'd lose, dammit?»
«I say. Twenty. Is it a deal?»
«You're throwing your money away.»
«No, I'm a sure winner, because you can't dance worth shoats and shinola!»
«Where's your money?» cried Bug, incensed now.
«Here!»
«Where's your car!?»
«I don't own a car. Never learned to drive. Where's yours?»
«Sold it! Jesus, no cars. How do we get to the tea dance!?» We got. We grabbed a cab and I paid and, before Bug could relent, dragged him through the hotel lobby and into the ballroom. It was a nice summer afternoon, so nice that the room was filled with mostly middle-aged men and their wives, a few younger ones with their girlfriends, and some kids out of college who looked out of place, embarrassed by the mostly old-folks music out of another time. We got the last table and when Bug opened his mouth for one last protest, I put a straw in it and helped him nurse a marguerita.
«Why are you doing this?» he protested again.
«Because you were just one of one hundred sixty-five close friends!» I said.
«We were never friends,» said Bug.
«Well, today, anyway. There's 'Moonlight Serenade.' Always liked that, never danced myself, clumsy fool. On your feet, Bug!»
He was on his feet, swaying.
«Who do you pick?» I said. «You cut in on a couple? Or there's a few wallflowers over there, a tableful of women. I dare you to pick the least likely and give her lessons, yes?»