Alone Against Tomorrow Part 15

I pulled what I had gotten from the till drawer from my pocket, and pointed it at him. "Now just settle back, Mr. Jim, and there won't be any trouble."

He raised his hands very melodramatically, and shuffled backward till his knee-backs caught the edge of the bed and he sat down with a plop.

"Oh, take down your hands," I said. "You look like a bad western movie." His hands came down self-consciously.

Denny looked at me. "What's he doin', Mr. Jim?"

"I don't know, Denny; I don't know," Jim said slowly, with thought. His eyes were trained on the barrel of the snub-nosed revolver I held. His eyes were frightened.

I found myself shaking. I tried to hold the revolver steady, but it wavered in my hand as though I was inside the eye of a tornado. "I'm nervous, fellow," I said, partly to let him note it, as if he hadn't already, and half to rea.s.sure myself that I was master of the situation. "Don't make me any worse than I am right now."

He sat very still, his lowered hands folded in his lap.

"For two weeks now, I've been close to going insane. My wife couldn't see or hear or feel me. No one in the street could. No one for two weeks. It's like I'm dead...and today I found you two. You're the only ones like me! Now I want to know what this is all about. What's happened to me?"

Denny looked at Mr. Jim, and then at me.

"Hey is he cuckoo, Mr. Jim? You want I should slug him, Mr. Jim?"

The old man would never have made it.

Jim saw that much, to his credit.

"No, Denny. Sit where you are. The man wants some information. I think it's only fair I give it to him." He looked at me. His face was soft, like a sponge.

"My name is Trempson, Mr.-ah-Mr. what-did-you-say-your-name-was...?"

"I didn't, but it's Winsocki. Albert Winsocki. Like in the song."

"Oh, yes, Mr. Winsocki. Well," his poise and sneering manner were returning as he saw he at least had the edge on me in information. "The reason for your current state of non-noticeability-you aren't really insubstantial, you know... that gun could kill me...a truck could run us down and we'd be dead-is very complex. I'm afraid I can't give you any scientific explanations, and I'm not even sure there are any. Let's put it this way..."

He crossed his legs, and I steadied the gun on him. He went on. "There are forces in the world today, Mr. Winsocki, that are invisibly working to make us all carbon copies of one another. Forces that crush us into molds of each other. You walk down the street and never see anyone's face, really. You sit faceless in a movie, or hidden from sight in a dreary living room watching television. When you pay bills, or car fares or talk to people, they see the job they're doing, but never you.

"With some of us, this is carried even further. We are so unnoticeable about it-wallflowers, you might say-all through our lives, that when these forces that crush us into one mold work enough to get us where they want us, we just-poof! disappear to all those around us. Do you understand?"

I stared at him.

I knew what he was talking about, of course. Who could fail to notice it in this great machined world we'd made for ourselves. So that was it. I had been made like everyone else, but had been so negative a personality to begin with, it had completely blanked me out to everyone. It was like a filter on a camera. Put a red filter on and everything red was there-but not there. That was the way with me. The cameras in everyone had been filtered against me. And Mr. Jim, and Denny, and "Are there more like us?"

Mr. Jim spread his hands. "Why, there are dozens, Winsocki. Dozens. Soon there will be hundreds, and then thousands. With things going the way they are...with people buying in supermarkets and eating in drive-ins and this new subliminal TV advertising...why, I'd say we could be expecting more company all the time.

"But not me," he added.

I looked at him, and then at Denny. Denny was blank, so I looked back at Trempson. "What do you mean?"

"Mr. Winsocki," he explained patiently, but condescendingly, "I was a college professor. Nothing really brilliant, mind you, in fact I suppose I was dull to my students. But I knew my subject. Phoenician Art, it was. But my students came in and went out and never saw me. The faculty never had cause to reprimand me, and so after a while I started to fade out. Then I was gone, like you.

"I wandered around, as you must still be doing, but soon I realized what a fine life it was. No responsibility, no taxes, no struggling for existence. Just live the way I wish, and take what I want. I even have Denny here-he was a handyman no one paid attention to-as my friend and manservant. I like this life, Mr. Winsocki. That was why I was not too anxious to make your acquaintance. I dislike seeing the status quo upset."

I realized I was listening to a madman.

Mr. Jim Trempson had been a poor teacher, and had suffered my fate. But where I had been turned-as I now realized-from a Milquetoasted hum-drummer to a man cunning enough to find a revolver, and adventurous enough to use it, he had been turned into a monomaniac.

This was his kingdom.

But there were others.

Finally, I saw there was no point talking to him. The forces that had cupped us and crushed us till we were so small the rest of the world could not see us, had done their work all too well on him. He was lost. He was satisfied with being unseen, unheard, unknown.

So was Denny. They were complacent. More than that... they were overjoyed. And during this past year I have found many like them. All the same. But I am not like that. I want out of here. I want you to see me again.

I'm trying desperately, the only way I know how.

It may sound stupid, but when people are day-dreaming, or unfocused on life, so to speak, they may catch sight of me. I'm working on that. I keep whistling and humming. Have you ever heard me? The song is "Buckle Down Winsocki."

Have you ever caught sight of me, just out of the corner of your eye, and thought it was a trick of your imagination?

Have you ever thought you heard a radio or TV playing that song, and there was no radio or TV?

Please! I'm begging you! Listen for me. I'm right here, and I'm humming in your ear so you'll hear me and help me.

"Buckle Down Winsocki," that's the tune. Can you hear it?

Are you listening?

Try a Dull Knife

IT WAS parchanga night at The Cave. Three spik bands all going at once, each with a fat momma shaking her meat and screaming Vaya! The sound was something visible, an a.s.sault in silver lame and screamhorn.

Sound hung dense as a smog-cloud, redolent as skunk-scent from a thousand roaches of the best s.h.i.t, no stems or seeds. Darkness shot through with the quicksilver flashes of mouths open to show gold bridgework and dirty words. Eddie Burma staggered in, leaned against a wall and felt the sickness as thick as cotton wool in his throat.

The deep scar-burn of pain was bleeding slowly down his right side. The blood had started coagulating, his shirt stuck to his flesh, but he dug it: it wasn't pumping anymore. But he was in trouble, that was the righteous truth. n.o.body can get cut the way Eddie Burma'd been cut and not be in deep trouble.

And somewhere back out there, in the night, they were moving toward him, coming for him. He had to get through to-who? Somebody. Somebody who could help him; because only now, after fifteen years of what had been happening to him, did Eddie Burma finally know what it was he had been through, what had been done to him...what was being done to him...what they would certainly do to him.

He stumbled down the short flight of steps into The Cave and was instantly lost in the smoke and smell and twisting shadows. Ethnic smoke, Puerto Rican smells, lush shadows from another land. He dug it; even with his strength ebbing, he dug it.

That was Eddie Burma's problem. He was an empath. He felt. Deep inside himself, on a level most people never even know exists he felt for the world. Involvement was what motivated him. Even here, in this slum nightclub where intensity of enjoyment subst.i.tuted for the shallow glamour and gaucherie of the uptown boites, here where no one knew him and therefore could not harm him, he felt the pulse of the world's life surging through him. And the blood started pumping again.

He pressed his way back through the crowd, looking for a phone booth, looking for a toilet, looking for an empty booth where he could hide, looking for the person or persons unknown who could save him from the dark night of the soul slipping toward him inexorably.

He caromed off a waiter, Pancho Villa mustache, dirty white ap.r.o.n, tray of draft beers. "Hey, where's the gabinetto?" he slurred the request. His words were slipping in their own blood.

The Puerto Rican waiter stared at him. Uncomprehending. "Perdon?"

"The toilet, the p.i.s.soire, the can, the head, the c.r.a.pper. I'm bleeding to death, where's the potty?"

"Ohhh!" meaning dawned on the waiter, "Excusado... atavio!" He pointed. Eddie Burma patted him on the arm and slumped past, almost falling into a booth where a man and two women were groping one another darkly.

He found the door to the toilet and pushed it open. A reject from a Cuban Superman film was slicking back his long, oiled hair in an elaborate pompadour before the foggy mirror. He gave Eddie Burma a pa.s.sing glance and went back to the topography of his coiffure. Burma moved past him in the tiny room and slipped into the first stall.

Once inside, he bolted the door, and sat down heavily on the lidless toilet. He pulled his shirt up out of his pants, and unb.u.t.toned it. It stuck to his skin. He pulled, gently, and it came away with the sound of mud squished underfoot. The knife wound ran from just below the right nipple to the middle of his waist.

It was deep. He was in trouble.

He stood up, hanging the shirt on the hook behind the door, and pulled hanks of toilet paper from the gray, crackly roll. He dipped the paper in a wad, into the toilet bowl, and swabbed at the wound. Oh, G.o.d, really deep.

Then nausea washed over him, and he sat down again. Strange thoughts came to him, and he let them work him over: This morning, when I stepped out the front door, there were yellow roses growing on the bushes. It surprised me; I'd neglected to cut them back last fall, and I was certain the gnurled, blighted k.n.o.bs at the ends of the branches-still there, silently dead in reproach of my negligence-would stunt any further beauty.

But when I stepped out to pick up the newspaper, there they were. Full and light yellow, barely a canary- yellow. Breathing moistly, softly. It made me smile, and I went down the steps to the first landing, to get the paper. The parking lot had filled with leaves from the Eucalyptus again, but somehow, particularly this morning, it gave the private little area surrounding and below my secluded house in the hills a more lived- in, festive look. For the second time, for no sensible reason, I found myself smiling. It was going to be a good day, and I had the feeling that all the problems I'd taken on-all the social cases I took unto myself- Alice and Burt and Linda down the hill-all the emotional cripples who came to me for succor-would shape up, and we'd all be smiling by end of day. And if not today, then certainly by Monday. Friday, the latest.

I picked up the paper and snapped the rubber band off it. I dropped the rubber band into the big metal trash basket at the foot of the stairs, and started climbing back up to the house, smelling the orange blossoms and the fine, chill morning air. I opened the paper as I climbed, and with all the suddenness of a freeway collision, the morning calm vanished from around me. I was stopped in midstep, one leg raised for the next riser, and my eyes felt suddenly grainy, as though I hadn't had enough sleep the night before. But I had.

The headline read: EDWARD BURMA FOUND MURDERED But...I was Eddie Burma.

He came back from memories of yellow roses and twisted metal on freeways to find himself slumped against the side of the toilet stall, his head pressed to the wooden wall, his arms hanging down, the blood running into his pants top. His head throbbed, and the pain in his side was beating, hammering, pounding with a regularity that made him shiver with fear. He could not sit there, and wait.

Wait to die, or wait for them to find him.

He knew they would find him. He knew it.

The phone. He could call...

He didn't know whom he could call. But there had to be someone. Someone out there who would understand, who would come quickly and save him. Someone who wouldn't take what was left of him, the way the others would.

They didn't need knives.

How strange that that one, the little blonde with the Raggedy-Ann s...o...b..u.t.ton eyes, had not known that. Or perhaps she had. But perhaps the hungered frenzy of the moment had overcome her, and she could not simply feed leisurely as the others did. She had cut him. Had done what they all did, but directly, without subtlety.

Her blade had been sharp. The others used much more devious weapons, subtler weapons. He wanted to say to her, "Try a dull knife." But she was too needing, too eager. She would not have heard him.

He struggled to his feet, and put on his shirt. It hurt to do it. The shirt was stained the color of teak with his blood. He could barely stand now.

Pulling foot after foot, he left the toilet, and wandered out into The Cave. The sound of "Mamacita Lisa" beat at him like gloved hands on a plate gla.s.s window. He leaned against the wall, and saw only shapes moving moving moving in the darkness. Were they out there? No, not yet; they would never look here first. He wasn't known here. And his essence was weaker now, weaker as he died, so no one in the crowd would come to him with a quivering need. No one would feel it possible to drink from this weak man, lying up against a wall.

He saw a pay phone, near the entrance to the kitchen, and he struggled toward it. A girl with long dark hair and haunted eyes stared at him as he pa.s.sed, started to say something, then he summoned up strength to hurry past her before she could tell him she was pregnant and didn't know who the father was, or she was in pain from emphysema and didn't have doctor money, or she missed her mother who was still in San Juan. He could handle no more pains, could absorb no more anguish, could let no others drink from him. He didn't have that much left for his own survival.

My fingertips (he thought, moving) are covered with the scars of people I've touched. The flesh remembers those touches. Sometimes I feel as though I am wearing heavy woolen gloves, so thick are the memories of all those touches. It seems to insulate me, to separate me from mankind. Not mankind from me, G.o.d knows, for they get through without pause or difficulty-but me, from mankind. I very often refrain from washing my hands for days and days, just to preserve whatever layers of touches might be washed away by the soap.

Faces and voices and smells of people I've known have pa.s.sed away, but still my hands carry the memories on them. Layer after layer of the laying-on of hands. Is that altogether sane? I don't know. I'll have to think about it for a very long time, when I have the time.

If I ever have the time.

He reached the pay phone; after a very long minute he was able to bring a coin up out of his pocket. It was a quarter. All he needed was a dime. He could not go back down there, he might not make it back again. He used the quarter, and dialed the number of a man he could trust, a man who could help him.

He remembered the man now, knew the man was his only salvation. He remembered seeing him in Georgia, at a revival meeting, a rural stump religion circus of screaming and Hallelujahs that sounded like !H!A!L!L!E!L!U!J!A!H! with dark black faces or red necks all straining toward the seat of G.o.d on the platform. He remembered the man in his white shirtsleeves, exhorting the crowd, and he heard again the man's spirit message.

"Get right with the Lord, before he gets right with you! Suffer your silent sins no longer! Take out your truth, carry it in your hands, give it to me, all the ugliness and cesspool filth of your souls! I'll wash you clean in the blood of the Iamb, in the blood of the Lord, in the blood of the truth of the word! There's no other way, there's no great day coming without purging yourself, without cleansing your spirit! I can handle all the pain you've got boiling around down in the black lightless pit of your souls! Hear me, dear G.o.d hear me...I am your mouth, your tongue, your throat, the horn that will proclaim your deliverance to the Heavens above! Evil and good and worry and sorrow, all of it is mine, I can carry it, I can handle it. I can lift it from out of your mind and your soul and your body! The place is here, the place is me, give me your woe! Christ knew it, G.o.d knows it, I know it, and now you have to know it! Mortar and trowel and brick and cement make the wall of your need! Let me tear down that wall, let me hear all of it, let me into your mind and let me take your burdens! I'm the strength, I'm the watering place...come drink from my strength!"

And the people had rushed to him. Allover him, like ants feeding on a dead beast. And then the memory dissolved. The image of the tent revival meeting dissolved into images of wild animals tearing at meat, of hordes of carrion birds descending on fallen meat, of small fish leaping with sharp teeth at helpless meat, of hands and more hands, and teeth that sank into meat.

The number was busy.

It was busy again.

He had been dialing the same number for nearly an hour, and the number was always busy.

Dancers with sweating faces had wanted to use the phone, but Eddie Burma had snarled at them that it was a matter of life and death that he reach the number he was calling, and the dancers had gone back to their partners with curses for him. But the line was still busy. Then he looked at the number on the pay phone, and knew he had been dialing himself all that time. That the line would always always be busy, and his furious hatred of the man on the other end who would not answer was hatred for the man who was calling.

He was calling himself, and in that instant he remembered who the man had been at the revival meeting. He remembered leaping up out of the audience and taking the platform to beg all the stricken suffering ones to end their pain by drinking of his essence. He remembered, and the fear was greater than he could believe.

He fled back to the toilet, to wait for them to find him.

Eddie Burma, hiding in the refuse room of a sightless dark spot in the netherworld of a universe that had singled him out for reality. Eddie Burma was an individual. He had substance. He had corporeality.

In a world of walking shadows, of zombie breath and staring eyes like the cold dead flesh of the moon, Eddie Burma was a real person. He had been born with the ability to belong to his times; with the electricity of nature that some called charisma and others called warmth. He felt deeply; he moved through the world and touched; and was touched.

His was a doomed existence, because he was not only an extrovert and gregarious, but he was truly clever, vastly inventive, suffused with humor, and endowed with the power to listen. For these reasons he had pa.s.sed through the stages of exhibitionism and praise-seeking to a state where his reality was a.s.sured. Was very much his own. When he came into a room, people knew it. He had a face. Not an image, or a subst.i.tute life that he could slip on when dealing with people, but a genuine reality. He was Eddie Burma, only Eddie Burma, and could not be confused with anyone else. He went his way, and he was identified as Eddie Burma in the eyes of anyone who ever met him. He was one of those memorable people. The kind other people who have no lives of their own talk about. He cropped up in conversations: "Do you know what Eddie said...?" or "Guess what happened to Eddie?" And there was never any confusion as to who was the subject under discussion.

Eddie Burma was a figure no larger than life, for life itself was large enough, in a world where most of those he met had no individuality, no personality, no reality, no existence of their own.

But the price he paid was the price of doom. For those who had nothing came to him and like creatures of darkness, amorally fed off him. They drank from him. They were the succubi, draining his psychic energies. And Eddie Burma always had more to give. Seemingly a bottomless well, the bottom had been reached. Finally. All the people whose woes he handled. all the losers whose lives he tried to organize, all the preying crawlers who slinked in through the ashes of their non-existence to sup at his board, to slake the thirsts of their emptiness...all of them had taken their toll.

Now Eddie Burma stumbled through the last moments of his reality, with the wellsprings of himself almost totally drained. Waiting for them, for all his social cases, all his problem children. to come and finish him off.

I live in a hungry world, Eddie Burma now realized.

"Hey, man! C'mon outta th' c.r.a.pper!" The booming voice and the pounding on the stall door came as one.

Eddie trembled to his feet and unbolted the door, expecting it to be one of them. But it was only a dancer from The Cave, wanting to rid himself of cheap wine and cheap beer. Eddie stumbled out of the stall, almost falling into the man's arms. When the beefy Puerto Rican saw the blood, saw the dead pale look of flesh and eyes, his manner softened.

"Hey...you okay, man?"

Eddie smiled at him, thanked him softly, and left the toilet. The nightclub was still high, still screaming, and Eddie suddenly knew he could not let them find this good place, where all these good people were plugged into life and living. Because for them it would be a G.o.dsend, and they would drain The Cave as they had drained him.

He found a rear exit, and emerged into the moonless city night, as alien as a cavern five miles down or the weird curvature of another dimension. This alley, this city, this night, could as easily have been Transylvania or the dark side of the moon or the bottom of the thrashing sea. He stumbled down the alley, thinking...

They have no lives of their own. Oh, this poisoned world I now see so clearly. They have only the shadowy images of other lives, and not even real other lives-the lives of movie stars, fictional heroes, cultural cliches. So they borrow from me, and never intend to pay back. They borrow, at the highest rate of interest. My life. They lap at me, and break of] pieces of me. I'm the mushroom that Alice found with the words EAT ME in blood-red on my id. They're succubi, draining at me, draining my soul. Sometimes I feel I should go to some mystical well and get poured full of personality again. I'm tired. So tired.

There are people walking around this city who are running on Eddie Burma's drained energies, Eddie Burma's life-force. They're putt-putting around with smiles just like mine, with thoughts I've second- handed like old clothes pa.s.sed on to poor relatives, with hand-movements and expressions and little cute sayings that were mine, Scotch-taped over their own. I'm a jigsaw puzzle and they keep stealing little pieces. Now I make no scene at all, I'm incomplete, I'm unable to keep the picture coherent, they've taken so much already.

They had come to his party, all of the ones he knew. The ones he called his friends, and the ones who were merely acquaintances, and the ones who were using him as their wizard, as their guru, their psychiatrist, their wailing wall, their father confessor, their repository of personal ills and woes and inadequacies. Alice, who was afraid of men and found in Eddie Burma a last vestige of belief that males were not all beasts. Burt, the box-boy from the supermarket, who stuttered when he spoke, and felt rejected even before the rejection. Linda, from down the hill, who had seen in Eddie Burma an intellectual, one to whom she could relate all her theories of the universe. Sid, who was a failure, at fifty-three. Nancy, whose husband cheated on her. John, who wanted to be a lawyer, but would never make it because he thought too much about his clubfoot. And all the others. And the new ones they always seemed to bring with them.