Martian Time-Slip (18 page)

He nodded.

“I saw that in my brother,” Doreen said. “Schizophrenic panic, and once you see it break out in a person, you can never forget it. The collapse of their reality around them…the collapse of their perceptions of time and space, cause and effect…and isn't that what's happening to you? You're talking as if this meeting with Arnie can't be altered by anything you do—and that's a deep regression on your part from adult responsibility and maturity; that's not like you at all.” Breathing deeply, her chest rising and falling painfully, she went on, “I'll call Arnie and tell him you're pulling out, and he'll have to get someone else to finish with Manfred. And I'll tell him that you've made no progress, that it's pointless for you and for him to continue with this. I've seen Arnie get these whims before; he keeps them percolating for a few days or weeks, and then he forgets them. He can forget this.”

Jack said, “He won't forget this one.”

“Try,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I have to go there tonight and give him my progress report. I said I would; I owe it to him.”

“You're a damn fool,” Doreen said.

“I know it,” Jack said. “But not for the reason you think. I'm a fool because I took on a job without looking ahead to its consequences. I—” He broke off. “Maybe it is what you said. I'm not competent to work with Manfred. That's it, period.”

“But you're still going ahead. What do you have to show Arnie tonight? Show it to me, right now.”

Getting out a manila envelope, Jack reached into it and drew out the picture of the buildings which Manfred had drawn. For a long time Doreen studied it. And then she handed it back to him.

“That's an evil and sick drawing,” she said in a voice almost inaudible. “I know what it is. It's the Tomb World, isn't it? That's what he's drawn. The world after death. And that's what he sees, and through him, that's what you're beginning to see. You want to take that to Arnie? You have lost your grip on reality; do you think Arnie wants to see an abomination like that? Burn it.”

“It's not that bad,” he said, deeply perturbed by her reaction.

“Yes, it is,” Doreen said. “And it's a dreadful sign that it doesn't strike you that way. Did it at first?”

He had to nod yes.

“Then you know I'm right,” she said.

“I have to go on,” he said. “I'll see you at his place tonight.” Going over to the window, he tapped Manfred on the shoulder. “We have to go, now. We'll see this lady tonight, and Mr. Kott, too.”

“Goodbye, Jack,” Doreen said, accompanying him to the door. Her large dark eyes were heavy with despair. “There's nothing I can say to stop you; I can see that. You've changed. You're so less—alive—now than you were just a day or so ago…do you know that?”

“No,” he said. “I didn't realize that.” But he was not surprised to hear it; he could feel it, hanging heavy over his limbs, choking his heart. Leaning toward her, he kissed her on her full, good-tasting lips. “I'll see you tonight.”

She stood at the doorway, silently watching him and the boy go.

In the time remaining before evening, Jack Bohlen decided to drop by the Public School and pick up his son. There, in that place which he dreaded before any other, he would find out if Doreen were right; he would learn if his morale and ability to distinguish reality from the projections of his own unconscious had been impaired or not. For him, the Public School was the crucial location. And, as he directed his Yee Company ’copter toward it, he felt deep within himself that he would be capable of handling a second visit there.

He was violently curious, too, to see Manfred's reaction to the place, and to its simulacra, the teaching machines. For some time now he had had an abiding hunch that Manfred, confronted by the School's Teachers, would show a significant response, perhaps similar to his own, perhaps totally opposite. In any case the reaction would be there; he was positive of that.

But then he thought resignedly, Isn't it too late? Isn't the job over, hasn't Arnie cancelled it because it doesn't matter?

Haven't I already been to his place tonight? What time is it?

He thought in fright, I've lost all sense of time.

“We're going to the Public School,” he murmured to Manfred. “Do you like that idea? See the school where David goes.”

The boy's eyes gleamed with anticipation. Yes, he seemed to be saying. I'd like that. Let's go.

“O.K.,” Jack said, only with great difficulty managing to operate the controls of the ’copter; he felt as if he were at the bottom of a great stagnant sea, struggling merely to breathe, almost unable to move. But why?

He did not know. He went on, as best he could.

11

Inside Mr. Kott's skin were dead bones, shiny and wet. Mr. Kott was a sack of bones, dirty and yet shiny-wet. His head was a skull that took in greens and bit them; inside him the greens became rotten things as something ate them to make them dead. Jack Bohlen, too, was a dead sack, teeming with gubbish. The outside that fooled almost everyone, it was painted pretty and smelled good, bent down over Miss Anderton, and he saw that; he saw it wanting her in a filthy fashion. It poured its wet, sticky self nearer and nearer to her, and the dead bug words popped from its mouth and fell on her. The dead bug words scampered off into the folds of her clothing, and some squeezed into her skin and entered her body.

“I love Mozart,” Mr. Kott said. “I'll put this tape on.”

Her clothing itched her, it was full of hair and dust and the droppings of the bug words. She scratched at it and the clothing tore in strips. Digging her teeth into the strips, she chewed them away.

Fiddling with the knobs of the amplifier, Mr. Kott said, “Bruno Walter conducting. A great rarity from the golden age of recordings.”

A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from somewhere in the room, and after a time she realized that it was her; she was convulsed from within, all the corpse-things in her were heaving and crawling, struggling out into the light of the room. God, how could she stop them? They emerged from her pores and scuttled off, dropping from strands of gummy web to the floor, to disappear into the cracks between the boards.

“Sorry,” Arnie Kott muttered.

“What a shock,” she said. “You should spare us, Arnie.” Getting up from the couch she pushed away the dark, bad-smelling object that clung to her. “Your sense of humor—” she said.

He turned and saw her as she stripped herself of the last of her clothing. He had put down the reel of tape, and now he came toward her, reaching out.

“Do it,” she said, and then they were both on the floor, together; he used his feet to remove his own clothing, hooking his toes into the fabric and tearing until it was away. Arms locked around each other, they rolled into the darkness beneath the stove and lay there, sweating and thumping, gulping in the dust and the heat and the damp of their own bodies. “Do it more,” she said, digging her knees into his sides to hurt him.

“An accident,” he said, squashing her against the floor, breathing into her face.

Eyes appeared beyond the edge of the stove; something peeped in at them as they lay together in the darkness—something watched. It had put away its paste and scissors and magazines, dropped all that to watch this and gloat and savor each thump they made.

“Go away,” she gasped at it. But it did not go away. “More,” she said, then, and it laughed at her. It laughed and laughed, as she and the weight squashing her kept on. They could not stop.

Gubble me more, she said. Gubble gubble gubble me, put your gubbish into me, into my gubbish, you Gubbler. Gubble gubble, I like gubble! Don't stop. Gubble, gubble gubble gubble,
gubble!

As Jack Bohlen lowered the Yee Company ’copter toward the landing field of the Public School directly below, he glanced at Manfred and wondered what the boy was thinking. Wrapped up in his thoughts, Manfred Steiner stared sightlessly out, his features twisted into a grimace that repelled Jack and made him instantly look away.

Why did he have anything to do with this boy? Jack wondered. Doreen was right; he was in over his head, and the unstable, schizophrenic aspects of his own personality were being stirred into life by the presence beside him. And yet he did not know how to get out; somehow it was too late, as if time had collapsed and left him here, for eternity, caught in a symbiosis with this unfortunate, mute creature who did nothing but rake over and inspect his own private world, again and again.

He had imbibed, on some level, Manfred's world-view, and it was obviously bringing about the stealthy disintegration of his own.

Tonight, he thought. I have to keep going until tonight: somehow I must hold out until I can see Arnie Kott. Then I can jettison all this and return to my own space, my own world; I will never have to look at Manfred Steiner again.

Arnie, for Christ's sake, save me, he thought.

“We're here,” he said as the ’copter bumped to a halt on the roof field. He switched off the motor.

At once Manfred moved to the door, eager to get out.

So you want to see this place, Jack thought. I wonder why. He got to his feet and went to unlock the door of the ’copter; at once Manfred hopped out onto the roof and scampered toward the descent ramp, almost as if he knew the way by heart.

As Jack stepped from the ship the boy disappeared from sight. On his own he had hurried down the ramp and plunged into the school.

Doreen Anderton and Arnie Kott, Jack said to himself. The two people who mean the most to me, the friends with whom my contacts, my intimacy with life itself, is the strongest. And yet it's right there that the boy has managed to infiltrate; he has unfastened me from my relationships where they are the strongest.

What's left? he asked himself. Once I have been isolated there, the rest—my son, my wife, my father, Mr. Yee—all follow almost automatically, without a fight.

I can see what lies ahead for me if I continue to lose, step by step, to this completely psychotic boy. Now I can see what psychosis is: the utter alienation of perception from the objects of the outside world, especially the objects which matter: the warmhearted people there. And what takes their place? A dreadful preoccupation with—the endless ebb and flow of one's own self. The changes emanating from within which affect only the inside world. It is a splitting apart of the two worlds, inner and outer, so that neither registers on the other. Both still exist, but each goes its own way.

It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again.

And, he realized, I stand on the threshold of that. Perhaps I always did; it was implicit in me from the start. But this boy has led me a long way. Or, rather, because of him I have gone a long way.

A coagulated self, fixed and immense, which effaces everything else and occupies the entire field. Then the most minute change is examined with the greatest attention. That is Manfred's state now; has been, from the beginning. The ultimate stage of the schizophrenic process.

“Manfred, wait,” he called, and followed slowly after the boy, down the ramp and into the Public School building.

Seated in June Henessy's kitchen, sipping coffee, Silvia Bohlen discoursed on her problems of late.

“What's so awful about them,” she said, meaning Erna Steiner and the Steiner children, “is that, let's face it, they're vulgar. We're not supposed to talk in terms like that, but I've been forced to see so much of them that I can't ignore it; my face has been rubbed in it every day.”

June Henessy, wearing white shorts and a skimpy halter, padded barefoot here and there in the house, watering from a glass pitcher her various indoor plants. “That's really a weird boy. He's the worst of all, isn't he?”

Shuddering, Silvia said, “And he's over all day long. Jack is working with him, you know, trying to make him part of the human race. I think myself they ought to just wipe out freaks and sports like that; it's terribly destructive in the long run to let them live; it's a false mercy to them and to us. That boy will have to be cared for for the rest of his life; he'll never be out of an institution.”

Returning to the kitchen with the empty pitcher, June said, “I want to tell you what Tony did the other day.” Tony was her current lover; she had been having an affair with him for six months now, and she kept the other ladies, especially Silvia, up to date. “We had lunch together over at Geneva II, at a French restaurant he knows; we had escargots—you know, snails. They serve them to you in the shells and you get them out with a horrible-looking fork that has tines a foot long. Of course, that's all black-market food; did you know that? That there're restaurants serving exclusively black-market delicacies? I didn't until Tony took me there. I can't tell you the name of it, of course.”

“Snails,” Silvia said with aversion, thinking of all the wonderful dishes she herself would have ordered, if she had a lover and he had taken her out.

How would it be to have an affair? Difficult, but surely worth it, if she could keep it from her husband. The problem, of course, was David. And now Jack worked a good deal of the time at home, and her father-in-law was visiting as well. And she could never have him, her lover, at the house, because of Erna Steiner next door; the big baggy hausfrau would see, comprehend, and probably at once, out of a Prussian sense of duty, inform Jack. But then, wasn't the risk part of it? Didn't it help add that—flavor?

“What would your husband do if he found out?” she asked June. “Cut you to bits? Jack would.”

June said, “Mike has had several affairs of his own since we've been married. He'd be sore and possibly he'd give me a black eye and go off for a week or so with one of his girl friends, leaving me stuck with the kids, of course. But he'd get over it.”

To herself, Silvia wondered if Jack had ever had an affair. It did not seem probable. She wondered how she would feel if he had and she found out—would it end the marriage? Yes, she thought. I'd get a lawyer right away. Or would I? There's no way to tell in advance….

“How are you and your father-in-law getting along?” June asked.

“Oh, not badly. He and Jack and the Steiner boy are off somewhere today, taking a business trip. I don't see much of Leo, actually; he came mainly on business—June, how many affairs have you had?”

“Six,” June Henessy said.

“Gee,” Silvia said. “And I haven't had any.”

“Some women aren't built for it.”

That sounded to Silvia like a rather personal, if not outright anatomical, insult. “What do you mean?”

“Aren't constituted psychologically,” June explained glibly. “It takes a certain type of woman who can create and sustain a complex fiction, day after day. I enjoy it, what I make up to tell Mike. You're different. You have a simple, direct sort of mind; deception isn't your cup of tea. Anyhow, you have a nice husband.” She emphasized the authority of her judgment by a lifting of her eyebrows.

“Jack used to be gone all week long,” Silvia said. “I should have had one then. Now it would be so much harder.” She wished, fervently, that she had something creative or useful or exciting to do that would fill up the long empty afternoons; she was bored to death with sitting in some other woman's kitchen drinking coffee hour after hour. No wonder so many women had affairs. It was that or madness.

“If you're limited to your husband for emotional experience,” June Henessy said, “you have no basis of judgment; you're more or less stuck with what he has to offer, but if you've gone to bed with other men you can tell better what your husband's deficiencies are, and it's much more possible for you to be objective about him. And what needs to be changed in him, you can insist that he change. And for your own part, you can see where you've been ineffective and with these other men you can learn how to improve yourself, so that you give your husband more satisfaction. I fail to see who loses by that.”

Put that way, it certainly sounded like a good healthy idea for all concerned. Even the husband benefited.

While she sat sipping her coffee and meditating about that, Silvia looked out the window and saw to her surprise a ’copter landing. “Who's that?” she asked June.

“Heaven's sake, I don't know,” June said, glancing out.

The ’copter rolled to a halt near the house; the door opened and a dark-haired, good-looking man wearing a bright nylon shirt and necktie, slacks, and stylish European loafers stepped out. Behind him came a Bleekman who lugged two heavy suitcases.

Inside her, Silvia Bohlen felt her heart quiver as she watched the dark-haired man stroll toward the house, the Bleekman following with the suitcases. This was the way she imagined June's Tony to look.

“Gosh,” June said. “I wonder who he is. A salesman?” A rap sounded at the front door and she went to open it. Silvia set down her cup and followed along. At the door June halted. “I feel sort of—undressed.” She put her hand nervously to her shorts. “You talk to him while I run into the bedroom and change. I wasn't expecting anybody strange to drop by; you know, we have to be careful, we're so isolated and our husbands are away—” She darted off to the bedroom, her hair flying.

Silvia opened the door.

“Good day,” the good-looking man said, with a smile revealing perfect white Mediterranean teeth. He had a faint accent. “Are you the lady of the house?”

“I guess so,” Silvia said, feeling timid and ill at ease; she glanced down at her own self, wondering if she were dressed modestly enough to be standing out here talking to this man.

“I wish to introduce a very fine line of health foods which you may be familiar with,” the man said. He kept his eyes on her face, and yet Silvia had the distinct impression that somehow he managed at the same time to examine the rest of her detail by detail. Her self-consciousness grew, but she did not feel resentful; the man had a charming manner, simultaneously shy and yet oddly forthright.

“Health food,” she murmured. “Well, I—”

The man gave a nod, and his Bleekman stepped up, laid down one of the suitcases, and opened it. Baskets, bottles, packages…she was very much interested.

“Unhomogenized peanut butter,” the man declared. “Also dietetic sweets without calories, to keep your lovely slimness. Wheat germ. Yeast. Vitamin E; that is the vitamin of
vitality
…but of course for a young woman like yourself, not yet appropriate.” His voice purred along as he indicated one item after another; she found herself bending down beside him, so close to him that their shoulders touched. Quickly she drew away, startled into apprehension.

At the door, June put in a momentary appearance, now wearing a skirt and a wool sweater; she hung about for a moment and then drew back inside and shut the door. The man failed to notice her.