Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (16 page)

When the scratching at his mind did come again it was hours later, while
he was watching an old movie on The Late Show, when he had almost managed
to forget. He stiffened, feeling a surge of terror (and feeling something
else that he was unable to verbalize), even the half of his mind that had
wanted it to come screaming in horror of the unknown now that the
impossible had actually happened. He fought down terror, breathing
harshly. This couldn't be happening. Maybe he was crazy. A flicker of
abysmal fear. Sweat started on his forehead, armpits, crotch.

Again, the scratching: bright feelings sliding tentatively into his head,
failing to catch and slipping out, coming back again—like focusing a
split-image lens. He sat back in the easy chair; old springs groaned, the
cracked leather felt hot and sticky against his T-shirted back. He
squeezed the empty beer can, crumpling it. Automatically he put the empty
into the six-pack at the foot of the chair. He picked up another can and
sat with it unopened in his lap. The sliding in his head made him dizzy
and faintly nauseous—he squirmed uneasily, trying to find a position
that would lessen the vertigo. The cushion made a wet sucking noise as he
pulled free of it: the dent made by his back in the leather began to work
itself back to level, creaking and groaning, only to re-form when he let
his weight down again. Jarred by motion, the ashtray he'd been balancing
on his knee slipped and crashed face-down to the rug in an explosion of
ashes.

Mason leaned forward to pick it up, stopped, his attention suddenly caught
and fixed by the television again. He blinked at the grainy, flickering
black-and-white images; again he felt something that he didn't know how to
say, so strongly that the sliding in his head was momentarily ignored.

It was one of those movies they'd made in the late twenties or early
thirties, where everything was perfect. The hero was handsome, suave,
impeccably dressed; he had courage, he had style, he could fit in
anywhere, he could solve any problem—he never faltered, he never
stepped on his own dick. He was Quality. The heroine matched him: she was
sophisticated, refined, self possessed—a slender, aristocratic
sculpture in ice and moonlight. She was unspeakably lovely. They were both
class people, posh people: the ones who ran things, the ones who mattered.
They had been born into the right families on the right side of town, gone
to the right schools, known the right people—got the right jobs.
Unquestioned superiority showed in the way they moved, walked, planted
their feet, turned their heads. It was all cool, planned and poised, like
a dancer. They knew that they were the best people, knew it without having
to think about it or even knowing that they knew it. It was a thing
assumed at birth. It was a thing you couldn't fake, couldn't put on:
something would trip you up every time, and the other ones on top would
look through you and see what you really were and draw a circle that
excluded you (never actually saying anything, which would make it worse),
and you would be left standing there with your dick hanging out, flushed,
embarrassed, sweating—too coarse, doughy, unfinished—twisting
your hat nervously between knobby, clumsy hands. But that would never
happen to the man and woman on television.

Mason found himself trembling with rage, blind with it, shaking as if he
were going to tear himself to pieces, falling apart and not knowing why,
amazed and awed by his own fury, his guts knotting, his big horny hands
clenching and unclenching at the injustice, the monstrousness, the slime,
the millions of lives pissed away, turning his anger over and over,
churning it like a murky liquid, pounding it into froth.

They never paid any dues. They never sweated, or defecated. Their bodies
never smelled bad, never got dirty. They never had crud under their
fingernails, blisters on their palms, blood staining their arms to the
elbows. The man never had five o'clock shadow, the woman never wore her
hair in rollers like Emma, or had sour breath, or told her lover to take
out the garbage. They never farted. Or belched. They did not have sex—they
made love, and it was all transcendental pleasure: no indignity of
thrashing bodies, clumsily intertwining limbs, fumbling and straining,
incoherent words and coarse animal sounds; and afterward he would be
breathing easily, her hair would be in place, there would be no body
fluids, the sheets would not be rumpled or stained. And the world they
moved through all their lives reflected their own perfection: it was
beautiful, tidy, ordered. Mansions. Vast lawns. Neatly painted, tree-lined
streets. And style brought luck too. The gods smiled on them, a benign
fate rolled dice that always came up sevens, sevens, sevens. They skated
through life without having to move their feet, smiling, untouched,
gorgeous, like a parade float: towed by others. They broke the bank of
every game in town. Everything went their way. Coincidence became a
contortionist to finish in their favor.

Because they had class. Because they were on top.

Mason sat up, gasping. He had left the ashtray on the floor. Numbly, he
set the beer can down beside it. His hand was trembling. He felt like he
had been kicked in the stomach. They had quality. He had nothing. He could
see everything now: everything he'd been running from all his life. He was
shit. No way to deny it. He lived in a shithouse, he worked in a
shithouse. His whole world was a vast shithouse: dirty black liquid
bubbling prehistorically; rich feisty odors of decay. He was surrounded by
shit, he wallowed in it. He was shit. Already, he realized, it made no
difference that he had ever lived. You're nothing, he told himself, you're
shit. You ain't never been anything but shit. You ain't never going to be
anything but shit. Your whole life's been nothing but shit.

No.

He shook his head blindly.

No.

There was only one thing in his life that was out of the ordinary, and he
snatched at it with the desperation of a drowning man.

The sliding, the scratching in his head that was even now becoming more
insistent, that became almost overwhelming as he shifted his attention
back to it. That was strange, wasn't it? That was unusual. And it had come
to him, hadn't it? There were millions and millions of other people in the
world, but it had picked him—it had come to him. And it was real, it
wasn't a dream. He wasn't crazy, and if it was just a dream he'd have to
be. So it was real, and the girl was real. He had somebody else inside his
head. And if that was real, then that was something that had never
happened to anybody else in the world before—something he'd never
even heard about before other than some dumb sci-fi movies on TV. It was
something that even they had never done, something that made him different
from every man in the world, from every man who had ever lived. It was his
own personal miracle.

Trembling, he leaned back in the chair. Leather creaked. This was his
miracle, he told himself, it was good, it wouldn't harm him. The bright
feelings themselves were good: somehow they reminded him of childhood, of
quiet gardens, of dust motes spinning in sunlight, of the sea. He
struggled for calm. Blood pounded at his throat, throbbed in his wrists.
He felt (the memory flooding, incredibly vivid—ebbing) the way he
had the first time Sally Rogers had let him spread her meaty, fragrant
thighs behind the hill during noon class in the seventh grade:
light-headed, scared, shaking with tension, madly impatient. He swallowed,
hesitating, gathering courage. The television babbled unnoticed in the
background. He closed his eyes and let go.

Colors swallowed him in a rush.

She waited for him there, a there that became here as his knowledge of his
physical environment faded, as his body ceased to exist, the soothing
blackness broken only by random afterimages and pastel colors scurrying in
abstract, friendly patterns.

She was here—simultaneously here and very far away. Like him, she
both filled all of here and took up no space at all—both statements
were equally absurd. Her presence was nothing but that: no pictures, no
images, nothing to see, hear, touch, or smell. That had all been left in
the world of duration. Yet somehow she radiated an ultimate and catholic
femininity, an archetypal essence, a quicksilver mixture of demanding fire
and an ancient racial purpose as unshakable and patient as ice—and
he knew it was the (girl? woman? angel?) of his previous "dream," and no
other.

There were no words here, but they were no longer needed. He understood
her by empathy, by the clear perception of emotion that lies behind all
language. There was fear in her mind—a rasp like hot iron—and
a feeling of hurtling endlessly and forlornly through vast, empty
desolation, surrounded by cold and by echoing, roaring darkness. She
seemed closer tonight, though still unimaginably far away. He felt that
she was still moving slowly toward him, even as they met and mingled here,
that her body was careening toward him down the path blazed by her mind.

She was zeroing in on him: this was the theory his mind immediately
formed, instantly and gratefully accepted. He had thought of her from the
beginning as an angel—now he conceived of her as a lost angel
wandering alone through Night for ages, suddenly touched by his presence,
drawn like an iron filing to a magnet, pulled from exile into the realms
of light and life.

He soothed her. He would wait for her, he would be a beacon—he would
not leave her alone in the dark, he would love her and pull her to the
light. She quieted, and they moved together, through each other, became
one.

He sank deeper into Night.

He floated in himself: a Mobius band.

In the morning, he woke in the chair. A test pattern hummed on the
television. The inside of his pants was sticky with semen.

Habit drives him to work. Automatically he gets up, takes a shower, puts
on fresh clothes. He eats no breakfast; he isn't hungry—he wonders,
idly, if he will ever be hungry again. He lets his feet take him to the
bus stop, and waits without fretting about whether or not he'd remembered
to lock the door. He waits without thinking about anything. The sun is
out; birds are humming in the concrete eaves of the housing project. Mason
hums too, quite unconsciously. He boards the bus for work, lets the driver
punch his trip ticket, and docilely allows the incoming crowd to push and
jostle him to an uncomfortable seat in the back, over the wheel. There,
sitting with his knees doubled up in the tiny seat and peering around with
an unusual curiosity, the other passengers give him the first bad feeling
of the day. They sit in orderly rows, not talking, not moving, not even
looking out the window. They look like department store dummies on their
way to a new display. They are not there at all.

Mason decided to call her Lilith—provisionally at least, until the
day, soon now, when he could learn her real name from her own lips. The
name drifted up from his subconscious, from the residue of long, forgotten
years of Sunday school—not so much because of the associations of
primeval love carried by the name (although those rang on a deeper level),
but because as a restless child suffering through afternoons of
watered-down theology he'd always imagined Lilith to be rather pretty and
sympathetic, the kind who might wink conspiratorially at him behind the
back of the pious, pompous instructor: a girl with a hint of illicit humor
and style, unlike the dumpy, clay-faced ladies in the Bible illustrations.
So she became Lilith. He wondered if he would be able to explain the name
to her when they met, make her laugh with it.

He fussed with these and other details throughout the day, turning it over
in his mind—he wasn't crazy, the dream was real, Lilith was real,
she was his—the same thoughts cycling constantly. He was happy in
his preoccupation, self-sufficient, only partly aware of the external
reality through which he moved. He contributed only monosyllabic grunts to
the usual locker-room conversations about sports and politics and pussy,
he answered questions with careless shrugs or nods, he completely ignored
the daily gauntlet of hellos, good-byes, how're they hangings and other
ritual sounds. During lunch he ate very little and let Russo finish his
sandwich without any of the traditional exclamations of amazement about
the wop's insatiable appetite—which made Russo so uneasy that he was
unable to finish it after all. Kaplan came in and told Russo and Mason in
hushed, delighted tones that old Hamilton had finally caught the clap from
that hooker he'd been running around with down at Saluzzio's. Russo
exploded into the expected laughter, said no shit? in a shrill voice,
pounded the table, grinned in jovial disgust at the thought of that old
bastard Hamilton with VD. Mason grunted.

Kaplan and Russo exchanged a look over his head—their eyes were
filled with the beginnings of a reasonless, instinctive fear: the kind of
unease that pistons in a car's engine might feel when one of the cylinders
begins to misfire. Mason ignored them; they did not exist; they never had.
He sat at the stone table and chain-smoked with detached ferocity, smoking
barely half of each cigarette before using it to light another and dumping
the butt into his untouched coffee to sizzle and drown. The Dixie cup was
filled with floating, jostling cigarette butts, growing fat and
mud-colored as they sucked up coffee: a nicotine logjam. Kaplan and Russo
mumbled excuses and moved away to find another table; today Mason made
them feel uneasy and insignificant.

Mason did not notice that they had gone. He sat and smoked until the
whistle blew, and then got up and walked calmly in to work. He worked
mechanically, raising the hammer and bringing it down, his hands knowing
their job and doing it without any need of volition, the big muscles in
his arms and shoulders straining, his legs braced wide apart, sweat
gleaming—an automaton, a clockwork golem. His face was puckered and
preoccupied, as if he were constipated. He did not see the blood; his
brain danced with thoughts of Lilith.