Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (15 page)

Mason always referred to the place as a meat-packing plant. (Henderson had
called it a slaughterhouse, but Henderson had quit.)

The package said fifteen minutes at 450, preheated. Maybe he shouldn't
tell Kaplan that he was getting laid, after all. Then everybody'd be
asking him questions tomorrow, wanting to know who the girl was, how she
was in the sack, where he'd picked her up, and he'd have to spend the rest
of the day making up imaginary details of the affair. And suppose they
found out somehow that he hadn't had a woman up here after all? Then
they'd think he was crazy, making up something like that. Lying. Maybe he
should just tell Kaplan that he was coming down with the flu. Or a bad
cold. He was tired tonight. Maybe he actually was getting the flu. From
overwork, or standing around in the rain too long, or something. Maybe
that was why he was so fucking tired—Christ, exhausted—why he
didn't feel like going bowling. Sure, that was it. And he didn't have to
be ashamed of being sick: he had a fine work record, only a couple of days
missed in six years. Everybody gets sick sometime, that's the way it is.
They'd understand.

Fuck them if they didn't.

Mason burned the pizza slightly. By the time he pulled it out with a
washcloth, singeing himself in the process, it had begun to turn black
around the edges, the crust and cheese charring. But not too bad.
Salvageable. He cut it into slices with a roller. As usual, he forgot to
eat it quickly enough, and the last pieces had cooled off when he got
around to them—tasting now like cardboard with unheated spaghetti
sauce on it. He ate them anyway. He had some beer with the pizza, and some
coffee later. After eating, he still felt vaguely unsatisfied, so he got a
package of Fig Newtons from the cupboard and ate them too. Then he sat at
the table and smoked a cigarette. No noise—nothing moved. Stasis.

The phone rang: Kaplan.

Mason jumped, then took a long, unsteady drag on his cigarette. He was
trembling. He stared at his hand, amazed. Nerves. Christ. He was working
too hard, worrying too much. Fuck Kaplan and all the rest of them. Don't
tell them anything. You don't have to. Let them stew. The phone screamed
again and again: three times, four times, six. Don't answer it, Mason told
himself, whipping up bravura indignation to cover the sudden inexplicable
panic, the fear, the horror. You don't have to account to them. Ring
(scream), ring (scream), ring (scream). The flesh crawled on his stomach,
short hair bristled along his back, his arms. Stop, dammit, stop, stop.
"Shut up!" he shouted, raggedly, half rising from the chair.

The phone stopped ringing.

The silence was incredibly evil.

Mason lit another cigarette, dropping the first match, lighting another,
finally getting it going. He concentrated on smoking, the taste of the
smoke and the feel of it in his lungs, puffing with staccato intensity
(Ithinklcanlthinklcanlthinklcanlthinklcan). Something was very wrong, but
he suppressed that thought, pushed it deeper. A tangible blackness: avoid
it. He was just tired, that's all. He'd had a really crummy, really rough
day, and he was tired, and it was making him jumpy. Work seemed to get
harder and harder as the weeks went by. Maybe he was getting old, losing
his endurance. He supposed it had to happen sooner or later. But shit, he
was only thirty-eight. He wouldn't have believed it, or even considered
it, before today.

"You're getting old," Mason said, aloud. The words echoed in the bare
room.

He laughed uneasily, nervously, pretending scorn. The laughter seemed to
be sucked into the walls. Silence blotted up the sound of his breathing.

He listened to the silence for a while, then called himself a stupid
asshole for thinking about all this asshole crap, and decided that he'd
better go to bed. He levered himself to his feet. Ordinarily he would
watch television for a couple of hours before turning in, but tonight he
was fucked up too exhausted and afraid. Afraid? What did he have to be
scared of? It was all asshole crap. Mason stacked the dirty dishes in the
sink and went into the bedroom, carefully switching off all the other
lights behind him. Darkness followed him to the bedroom door.

Mason undressed, put his clothes away, sat on the bed. There was a dingy
transient hotel on this side of the building, and its red neon sign
blinked directly into Mason's bedroom window, impossible to block out with
any thickness of curtain. Tonight he was too tired to be bothered by it.
It had been a bad day. He would not think about it, any of it. He only
wanted to sleep. Tomorrow would be different, tomorrow would be better. It
would have to be. He switched off the light and lay back on top of the
sheet. Neon shadows beat around the room, flooding it rhythmically with
dull red.

Fretfully, he began to fall asleep in the hot room, in the dark.

Almost to sleep, he heard a woman weeping in his mind. The weeping
scratched at the inside of his head, sliding randomly in and out of his
brain. Not really the sound of weeping, not actually an audible sound at
all, but rather a feeling, an essence of weeping, of unalterable sadness.
Without waking, he groped for the elusive feelings, swimming down deeper
and deeper into his mind—like diving below a storm-lashed ocean at
night, swimming down to where it is always calm and no light goes, down
where the deep currents run. He was only partially conscious, on the
borderline of dream, where anything seems rational and miracles are
commonplace. It seemed only reasonable, only fair, that, in his
desolation, he should find a woman in his head. He did not question this,
he did not find it peculiar. He moved toward her, propelled and guided
only by the urge to be with her, an ivory feather drifting and twisting
through vast empty darkness, floating on the wind, carried by the currents
that wind through the regions under the earth, the tides that march in
Night. He found her, wrapped in the underbelly of himself like a pearl: a
tiny exquisite irritant. Encased in amber, he could not see, but he knew
somehow that she was lovely, as perfect and delicate as the bud of a
flower opening to the sun, as a baby's hand. He comforted her as he had
comforted Emma on nights when she'd wake up crying: reaching through
darkness toward sadness, wrapping it in warmth, leaching the fear away
with presence, spreading the pain around between them to thin it down. She
seemed startled to find that she was not alone at the heart of nothing,
but she accepted him gratefully, and blended him into herself, blended
them together, one stream into another, a mingling of secret waters in the
dark places in the middle of the world, in Night, where shadows live. She
was the thing itself, and not its wrapping, as Emma had been. She was
ultimate grace—moving like silk around him, moving like warm rain
within him. He merged with her forever.

And found himself staring at the ceiling.

Gritty light poured in through the window. The hotel sign had been turned
off. It was morning.

He grinned at the ceiling, a harsh grin with no mirth in it: skin pulling
back and back from the teeth, stretching to death's-head tautness.

It had been a dream.

He grinned his corpse grin at the morning.

Hello, morning. Hello, you goddamned son of a bitch.

He got up. He ached. He was lightheaded with fatigue: his head buzzed, his
eyelids were lead. It felt like he had not slept at all.

He went to work.

It is still raining. Dawn is hidden behind bloated spider clouds. Here, in
the factory town, miles of steel mills, coke refineries, leather-tanning
plants, chemical scum running in the gutters, it will rain most of the
year: airborne dirt forming the nucleus for moisture, an irritant to
induce condensation, producing a listless rain that fizzles down
endlessly, a deity pissing. The bus creeps through the mists and drizzle
like a slug, parking lights haloed by dampness. Raindrops inch down the
windowpane, shimmering and flattening when the window buzzes, leaving long
wet tracks behind them. Inside, the glass has been fogged by breath and
body heat, making it hard to see anything clearly. The world outside has
merged into an infinity of lumpy gray shapes, dinosaur shadows, here and
there lights winking and diffusing wetly—it is a moving collage done
in charcoal and watery neon. The men riding the bus do not notice it—already
they seem tired. It is seven
A.M.
They
sit and stare dully at the tips of their shoes, or the back of the seat in
front of them. A few read newspapers. One or two talk. Some sleep. A
younger man laughs—he stops almost immediately. If the windows were
clear, the rain collage of light and shadow would be replaced by row after
row of drab, crumbling buildings, gas stations decked with tiny plastic
flags, used car lots with floodlights, hamburger stands, empty schoolyards
with dead trees poking up through the pavement, cyclone-fenced recreation
areas that children never use. No one ever bothers to look at that either.
They know what it looks like.

Usually Mason prefers the aisle seat, but this morning, prompted by some
obscure instinct, he sits by the window. He is trying to understand his
compulsion to watch the blurred landscape, trying to verbalize what it
makes him think of, how it makes him feel. He cannot. Sad—that's the
closest he can come. Why should it make him sad? Sad, and there is
something else, something he gropes for but it keeps slipping away. An
echo of reawakening fear, in reaction to his groping. It felt like, it was
kind of like— Uneasily, he presses his palm to the window, attempts
to rub away some of the moisture obscuring the glass. (This makes him feel
funny too. Why? He flounders, grasping at nothing—it is gone.) A
patch of relatively clear glass appears as he rubs, a swath of sharper
focus surrounded by the oozing myopia of the collage. Mason stares out at
the world, through his patch of glass. Again he tries to grasp something—again
he fails. It all looks wrong somehow. It makes him vaguely, murkily angry.
Buildings crawl by outside. He shivers, touched by a septic breath of
entropy. Maybe it's— If it was like— He cannot. Why is it
wrong? What's wrong with it? That's the way it's always looked, hasn't it?
Nothing's changed. What could you change it to? What the fuck is it
supposed to be like? No words.

Raindrops pile up on the window again and wash away the world.

At work, the dream continued to bother Mason throughout the day. He found
that he couldn't put it out of his mind for long—somehow his
thoughts always came back to it, circling constantly like the flies that
buzzed around the pools of blood on the concrete floor.

Mason became annoyed, and slightly uneasy. It wasn't healthy to be so
wrapped up in a fucking dream. It was sick, and you had to be sick in the
head to fool around with it. It was sick—it made him angry to think
about the slime and sickness of it, and faintly nauseous. He didn't have
that slime in his head. No, the dream had bothered him because Emma was
gone. It was rough on a guy to be alone again after living with somebody
for so long. He should go out and actually pick up some broad instead of
just thinking about it—should've had one last night so he
wouldn't've had to worry about what to tell Kaplan. Sweep the cobwebs out
of his brain. Sitting around that damn house night after night, never
doing anything—no wonder he felt funny, had crazy dreams.

At lunch—sitting at the concrete, formica-topped table, next to the
finger-smudged plastic faces of the coffee machine, the soft-drink
machine, the sandwich machine, the ice-cream machine (
OUT OF ORDER
) and the candy-bar machine—he
toyed with the idea of telling Russo about the dream, playing it lightly,
maybe getting a few laughs out of it. He found the idea amazingly
unpleasant. He was reluctant to tell anybody anything about the dream. To
his amazement, he found himself getting angry at the thought. Russo was a
son of a bitch anyway. They were all son of a bitches. He snapped at Russo
when the Italian tried to draw him into a discussion he and Kaplan were
having about cars. Russo looked hurt.

Mason mumbled something about a hangover in apology and gulped half of his
steaming coffee without feeling it. His tuna-salad sandwich tasted like
sawdust, went down like lead. A desolate, inexplicable sense of loss had
been growing in him throughout the morning as he became more preoccupied
with the dream. He couldn't have been this affected by a dream, that was
crazy—there had to be more to it than that, it had to be more than
just a dream, and he wasn't crazy. So it couldn't have been a dream
completely, somehow. He missed the girl in the dream. How could he miss
someone who didn't exist? That was crazy. But he did miss her. So maybe
the girl wasn't completely a dream somehow, or he wouldn't miss her like
that, would he? That was crazy too. He turned his face away and played
distractedly with crumbs on the formica tabletop. No more of this: it was
slimy, and it made his head hurt to think about it. He wouldn't think
about it anymore.

That afternoon he took to listening while he worked. He caught himself at
it several times. He was listening intently, for nothing. No, not for
nothing. He was listening for her.

On the bus, going home, Mason is restless, as if he were being carried
into some strange danger, some foreign battlefield. His eyes gleam
slightly in the dark. The glare of oncoming car headlights sweeps over him
in oscillating waves. Straps swing back and forth like scythes. All around
him, the other passengers sit silently, not moving, careful not to touch
or jostle the man next to them. Each in his own space: semivisible lumps
of flesh and shadow. Their heads bob slightly with the motion of the bus,
like dashboard ornaments.

When Mason got home, he had frozen pizza for supper again, though he'd
been intending to have an omelet. He also ate some more Fig Newtons. It
was as though he were half-consciously trying to reproduce the previous
night, superstitiously repeating all the details of the evening in hopes
of producing the same result. So he ate pizza, shaking his head at his own
stupidity and swearing bitterly under his breath. He ate it nevertheless.
And as he ate, he listened for the scratching—hating himself for
listening, but listening—only partially believing that such a thing
as the scratching even existed, or ever had, but listening. Half of him
was afraid that it would not come; half was afraid that it would. But
nothing happened.