The Essential Ellison Part 121

He gave up. He needed help. Help!

Standing in the street behind the car, clutching his groin, jacket flapping around him, smelling like something ready for disposal, he signaled wildly for a.s.sistance with his free hand. But no one would stop. Thunder rolled around the Valley, and Weisel saw what looked like a pitchfork of lightning off across the flats where Van Nuys, Panorama City and North Hollywood lay gasping for water.

Cars thundered down on him and swerved at the very last moment, like matadors performing a complicated veronica. Several cars seemed to speed up, in fact, as they approached him, and he had the crazy impression the drivers were hunched over the wheels, lips skinned back from clenched teeth, like rabid wild things intent on killing him. Several nearly sideswiped him. He barely managed to hobble out of the way. One Datsun came so close that its side-view mirror ripped a nasty, raw gash down the entire right side of the Rolls. He cursed and gesticulated and pleaded. No one would stop. In fact, one fat woman leaned out of her window as her husband zoomed past, and she yelled something nasty. He caught only the word " Tolliver!"

Finally, he just left it there, with the hood up like the mouth of a hungry bird.

He walked the mile to his office, thinking he would call the Automobile Club to come and tow it to a station where it could be filled. He didn' t have the time or the patience to walk to a gas station, get a can of fuel, and return to fill the tank. During the mile-long walk he even had time to wonder if he would be able to buy a can of gasoline.

Tolliver! G.o.d d.a.m.n that old man!

There was no one in the office.

It took him a while to discover that fact, because he couldn' t get an elevator in his building. He stood in front of one after another of the doors, waiting for a cage to come down, but they all seemed determined to stop at the second floor. Only when other pa.s.sengers waited did an elevator arrive, and then he was always in front of the wrong one. He would dash to the open door, just as the others entered, but before he could get his hand into the opening to stop the r.e.t.a.r.der bar from slamming against the frame, the door would seem to slide faster, as if it possessed a malevolent intelligence. It went on that way for ten minutes, till it became obvious to him that something was terribly, hideously, inexplicably wrong.

So he took the stairs.

(On the stairs he somehow slipped and skinned his right knee as one of the steps caught his heel and tore it off his right shoe.) Limping like a cripple, the tatters of his jacket flapping around him, clutching his groin, blood seeping through his pants to stain, he reached the eleventh floor and tried to open the door. It was, of course, for the first time in the thirty-five-year history of the building, locked.

He waited fifteen minutes and the door suddenly opened as a secretary, carrying some papers up one flight to the Xerox center, came boiling through. He barely managed to catch the door on its pneumatic closer. He stumbled frantically onto the eleventh floor and, like a man emerging gratefully from a vast desert to find an oasis, he fled down the corridor to the offices of the Weisel Construction Corporation.

There was no one in the office.

It was not locked. Was, in fact, wholly unattended and wide open to thieves, if such had chosen that office for plundering. The receptionist was not there, the estimators were not there, not even Belle, his wife, who served as secretary when he didn' t want to hire a Kelly Girl, was there.

However, she had left him a note: I' m leaving you. By the time you read this I will have already been to the bank and emptied the joint account. Don' t try to find me. Goodbye.

Weisel sat down. He had the beginnings of what he was certain was a migraine, though he had never had a migraine in his life. He didn' t know whether, in the vernacular of the United States Army, to s.h.i.t or go blind.

He was not a stupid man. He had been given more than sufficient evidence that something malevolent and purely anti-Weisel was floating across the land. It was out to get him... had, in fact, already gotten him... had, in fact, made a well-ordered and extremely comfortable life turn into a nasty, untidy, noisome pile of doggie-doo.

And it was named Tolliver.

Fred Tolliver...! How the h.e.l.l... ? Who does he know that could... ? How did he... ?

None of the questions reached a conclusion. He could not even formulate them. Clearly, this was insanity. No one he knew, not Gene at the gas station, not the people in the cars, not Belle, not his staff, not the car door or the building's elevators even knew who Tolliver was! Well, Belle knew, but what the h.e.l.l did she have to do with him?

Okay, so it wasn't going so good with Belle. So they hadn't really reconciled that innocent little thing he' d had with the lab technician at Mt. Sinai. So what? That was no reason for her to ditch a good thing. d.a.m.n that Tolliver!

He slammed his hand onto the desk, missed slightly, caught the edge and drove a thick splinter of wood into the fat of his palm, at the same time scattering the small stack of telegrams across his lap and the floor.

Wincing with pain, he sucked at the splinter till it came out. He used one of the telegram envelopes to blot the blood from his hand.

Telegrams?

He opened the first one. The Bank of America, Beverly Hills branch 213, was pleased to advise him they were calling due his loans. All five of them. He opened the second one. His broker, Shearson Hayden Stone Inc., was overjoyed to let him know that all sixteen of the stocks in which he had speculated heavily, on margin, of course, had virtually plummeted off the big board and he had to come up with seventy-seven thousand dollars by noon today or his portfolio was wiped out. It was a quarter to eleven by the wall clock. (Or had it, inexplicably, stopped?) He opened the third one. He had failed his est cla.s.s and Werner Erhard himself had sent the telegram, adding in what Weisel took to be an unnecessarily gloating tone, that Weisel had " no human potential worth expanding." He opened the fourth one. His Wa.s.sermann had come back from Mt. Sinai. It was positive. He opened the fifth one. The Internal Revenue Service was ecstatic at being able to let him know they were planning to audit his returns for the past five years, and were seeking a loophole in the tax laws that permitted them to go back further, possibly to the start of the Bronze Age.

There were others, five or six more. He didn' t bother opening them. He didn' t want to learn who had died, or that the state of Israel had discovered Weisel was, in actuality, Bruno " The Butcher" Krutzmeier, a former prison guard at Mauthausen, personally responsible for the deaths of three thousand Gypsies, Trade Unionists, Jews, Bolsheviks and Weimar democrats, or that the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Department was gleefully taking this opportunity to advise him that the precise spot over which he sat was expected to collapse into the magma at the center of the Earth and by the way we' ve canceled your life insurance.

He let them lie.

The clock on the wall had, to be sure, stopped dead.

In fact, the electricity had been turned off.

The phone did not ring. He picked it up. Of course. It- like its friend the clock- was stone dead.

Tolliver! Tolliver! How was he doing all this?

Such things simply do not happen in an ordered universe of draglines and scoop-shovels and reinforced concrete.

He sat and thought dark, murderous thoughts about that old sonofab.i.t.c.h, Fred Tolliver.

A 747 boomed sonically overhead and the big heavy-plate window of his eleventh floor office cracked, splintered, and fell in around his feet.

Unknowing confluence of resonating emotions, Fred Tolliver sat in his house, head in hands, miserable beyond belief, aware only of pain and anger. His cello lay on its back on the floor beside him. He had tried playing a little today, but all he could think of was that terrible man Weisel, and the terrible bathroom that was filling with water, and the terrible stomach pains his feelings of hatred were giving him.

Electrons resonate. So do emotions. S peak of " d.a.m.ned places" and one speaks of locations where powerful emotional forces have been penned up. One cannot doubt, if one has ever been inside a prison where the ma.s.sed feelings of hatred, deprivation, claustrophobia and brutalization have seeped into the very stones. One can feel it. Emotions resonate: at a political rally, a football game, an encounter group, a rock concert, a lynching.

There are four billion people in the world. A world that has grown so complex and uncaring with systems and brutalization, of individuals because of the inertia produced by those systems' perpetuation of self, that merely to live is to be a.s.saulted daily by circ.u.mstances. Electrons dance. The emotions sing. Four billion, resonating like insects. The charge is built up; the surface tension is reached; the limit of elasticity is pa.s.sed; the charge seeks release; the focus is sought: the weakest link, the fault line, the most tremblingly frangible element, AnyTolliver, EveryTolliver.

Like the discharge of a lightning bolt, the greater the charge on the Tolliver, the greater its tendency to escape. The force of the four billion driving the electrons in their mad dance away from the region of highest excess toward the region of greatest deficiency. Pain as electromotive force. Frustration as electric potential. The electrons jump the insulating gap of love and friendship and kindness and humane behavior and the power is unleashed.

Like the discharge of the lightning bolt, the power seeks and finds its focus, leaps the gap, and the bolt of energy is unleashed.

Does the lightning rod know it is draining off the dangerous electrical charge? Is there sentience in a Leyden jar? Does not the voltaic pile continue to sleep while current is drawn off? Does the focus know it has unleashed the anger and frustration of the four billion?

Fred Tolliver sat in misery, the cello forgotten, the pain of having been cheated, of being impotent against the injustice, eating at his stomach. His silent scream: at that moment the most dominant in the entire universe. Chance. It could have been anyone; or perhaps, as Chesterton said, " Coincidences are a spiritual sort of puns."

His phone rang. He did not move to pick up the receiver. It rang again. He did not move. His stomach burned and roiled. There was a scorched-earth desperation in him. Nine thousand dollars overcharge. Thirty-seven hundred dollars by the original contract. Twelve thousand seven hundred dollars. He had had to take a second mortgage on the house. Five more months than the estimated two Weisel had said it would take to complete the job. Seven months of filth and plaster dust and inept workmen tramping through his little house with mud and dirt and dropping cigarette b.u.t.ts on his floor.

I' m sixty-two years old, he thought, frantically. My G.o.d, I' m an old man. A moment ago I was just middle-aged, and now I' m an old man... I never felt old before. It's good Betsy never lived to see me like this; she would cry. But this thing with the bathroom is a terrible thing, an awful thing, it's made me an old man, poor, in financial straits; and I don't know how to save myself. He's ruined my life... he's killed me... I' II never be able to get even, to put away a little... if the thing with the knees gets any worse, there could be big doctor bills, specialists maybe... the Blue Cross would never cover it... what am I going to do, please G.o.d help me... what am I going to do?

He was an old man, retired and very tired, who had thought he could make it through. He had figured it out so he could just barely slide through. But the pains in the back of his knees had begun three years before, and though they had not flared up in sixteen months, he remembered how he would simply fall down, suddenly, ludicrously, fall down: the legs p.r.i.c.kling with pins and needles as though he had sat cross-legged for a long time. He was afraid to think about the pains too much. They might come back if he thought about them too much.

But he didn' t really believe that thinking about things could make them happen. Thinking didn' t make things change in the real world. Fred Tolliver did not know about the dance of the emotions, the resonance of the electrons. He did not know about a sixty-two-year-old lightning rod that leaked off the terror and frustration of four billion people, all crying out silently just as Fred Tolliver cried out. For help that never came.

The phone continued to ring. He did not think about the pains he had felt in the back of his knees, as recently as sixteen months ago. He did not think about it, because he did not want it to return. It was only a low-level throbbing now, and he wanted it to stay that way. He didn' t want to feel pins and needles. He wanted his money back. He wanted the sound of gurgling under the floor of the guest bathroom to stop. He wanted William Weisel to make good.

He answered the phone. It rang once too often for him to ignore it.

"h.e.l.lo?"

" Mr. Tolliver? Is that you?"

"Yes, this is Fred Tolliver. Who's calling?"

" Evelyn Hand. I haven' t heard from you about my violin, and I' m going to need it late next week..."

He had forgotten. In all the anguish with Weisel, he had forgotten Evelyn Hand, and her damaged violin. And she had paid him already.

" Oh, my gosh, Miss Hand, I' m awfully sorry! I' ve just had the most awful business going on these last months, a man built me a guest bathroom, and he overcharged me nine thousand dollars, and it's all broken and..."

He stopped. This was unbecoming. He coughed with embarra.s.sment, giving himself a moment to gather his composure. " I' m just as terribly sorry and ashamed as I can be, Miss Hand. I haven' t had a chance to get to the repairs. But I know you need it a week from today..."

" A week from yesterday, Mr. Tolliver. Thursday, not Friday."

" Oh. Yes, of course. Thursday." She was a nice woman, really. Very slim, delicate fingers and a gentle, warm voice. He had thought perhaps they might go to the Smorgasbord for a meal, and they might get to know each other. He wanted companionship. It was so necessary; now, particularly, it was so necessary. But the memory of Betsy was always there, singing softly within him; and he had said nothing to Evelyn Hand.

" Are you there, Mr. Tolliver?"

" Uh, yes. Yes, of course. Please forgive me. I' m so wrought up these days. I' ll get to it right away. Please don' t you worry about it."

" Well, I am rather concerned." She hesitated, as though reluctant to speak. She drew a deep breath and plunged on:.. I did pay you in advance for the repairs, because you said you needed the money for bills, and..."

He didn' t take offense. He understood perfectly. She had said something that otherwise she would have considered deplace. but she was distraught and wanted to make the point as firmly as she could without being overly offensive.

" I' ll get to it today, Miss Hand; I promise."

It would take time. It was a good instrument, a fine, old Gagliano. He knew he could finish the repairs in time if he kept at it without distraction.

Her tone softened. " Thank you, Mr. Tolliver. I' m sorry to have bothered you, but... you understand."

"Of course. Don't give it a thought. I'll call as soon as it's ready. I'll give it special attention, I promise."

" You' re very kind."

They said their goodbyes and he stopped himself from suggesting dinner when the violin was ready. There was always time for that later, when appropriate. When the business with the bathroom was settled.

And that brought him back to the state of helpless fury and pain. That terrible man, Weisel!

Unknowing confluence of four billion resonating emotions, Fred Tolliver sat with head in hands; as the electrons danced.

Eight days later, in a filthy alley behind a boarded-up supermarket that had begun as a sumptuous gilt-and-brocade movie house in 1924, William Weisel sat in filth, trying to eat the b.u.t.t of a stale loaf of pumpernickel he had stolen from a garbage can. He weighed ninety-seven pounds, had not shaved in seven days, his clothes were stained and torn rags, his shoes had been stolen while he slept, four days earlier, in the doorway outside the Midnight Mission, his eyes were rheumy and he had developed a terrible, wracking cough. The angry crimson weal on his left forearm where the bolt of lightning had just grazed him seemed to be infected. He gagged on the bread, realizing he had missed one of the maggots, and threw the granitelike b.u.t.t across the alley.

He was incapable of crying. He had cried himself out. He knew, at last, that there was no way to save himself. On the third day, he had tried to get to Tolliver, to beg him to stop; to tell him he would repair the bathroom; to tell him he would build him a new house, a mansion, a palace, anything! Just stop this terror! Please!

But he had been stopped. He could not get to Tolliver. The first time he had set his mind to seeing the old man, he had been arrested by a California Highway Patrol officer who had him on his hot sheet for having left the Roll& in the middle of Ventura Boulevard. Weisel had managed to escape on foot, somehow, miraculously.

The second time he had been attacked by a pit bull while skulking through back yards. He had lost his left pant leg below the knee.

The third time he had actually gotten as far as the street on which Tolliver's house sat, but a seven-car pileup had almost crushed him beneath tons of thundering metal, and he had fled, fearing an aircraft carrier might drop from the sky to bury him.

He knew now that he could not even make amends, that it was inertial, and that he was doomed.

He lay back, waiting for the finish. But it was not to be that easy. The song of the four billion is an unending symphony of incredible complexity. As he lay there, a derelict stumbled into the alley, saw him, and pulled the straight razor from his jacket pocket. He was almost upon him when William Weisel opened his eyes. He saw the rusty blade coming for his throat, had a moment of absolute mind-numbing horror wash over him, spasmed into shock, and did not hear the sound of the cop's service revolver as the derelict- who had serviced over a dozen other such b.u.ms as Weisel in this same manner- was blown in half.

He woke in the drunk tank, looked around, saw the company to which he had been condemned, knew that if he lived it would be through years of horror, and began tearing off strips of rags from what remained of his clothing.

When the attendant came to turn the men out into the exercise area, he found William Weisel hanging from the bars of the door, eyes bulging, tongue protruding like a charred leaf from his mouth. What he could not reconcile was that no one in the cell had even shouted, nor raised a hand to stop Weisel. That, and the look of voiceless anguish on the dead man's face, as though he had glimpsed, just at the instant of death, a view of an eternity of voiceless anguish.

The focus could direct the beam, but it could not heal itself. At the very moment that Weisel died, Fred Tolliver- still unaware of what he had done- sat in his home, realizing finally that the contractor had done him in. He could never repay the note, would perhaps have to get work again in some studio, and probably would be unable to do it with sufficient regularity to save the house. His twilight years would be spent in some dingy apartment. The modest final hope of his life had been denied him: he would not be able to just simply get by in peace. It was a terrible lonely thing to contemplate.

The phone rang.

He picked it up wearily. " Yes?"

There was a moment of silence, then the voice of Miss Evelyn Hand came across the line, icily. " Mr. Tolliver, this is Evelyn Hand. I waited all day yesterday. I was unable to partic.i.p.ate in the recital. Please have my violin waiting for me, repaired or not."

He was too stunned, too depressed, even to be polite. " Okay."

" I want you to know you have caused me great pain, Mr. Tolliver. You are a very unreliable and evil man. I want you to know I' m going to take steps to rectify this matter. You have taken money from me under false pretenses, you have ruined a great opportunity I had, and you have caused me unnecessary anguish. You will have to pay for your irresponsibility; there must be justice. I will make certain you pay for what you' ve done!"

" Yes. Yes, of course," he said, dimly, faintly.

He hung up the receiver and sat there.

The emotions sang, the electrons danced, the focus shifted, and the symphony of frustration went on.

Fred Tolliver's cello lay unattended at his feet. He would never get through, just barely slide through. He felt the excruciating pain of pins and needles in his legs.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

S. J. LEC.

SYNCHRONICITY: This photograph arrived unheralded in the mail as the author was working on this essay about anger and revenge. It is the only extant photograph from his childhood. It is a picture of his 6th grade cla.s.s at Lathrop School in Painesville, Ohio. The date was 1946; the author was twelve years old. Notice that all but two of the children stand with their arms at their sides or in their pockets, att.i.tudes of peaceful composure. The little girl in the first row, third from the right, is the one who sent the author the photo. She was the first girl the author ever dated. Her name was Jean Gittner. The author can be seen at the far left, first row. He does not stand in a relaxed posture. He looks pugnacious. Smaller than the smallest girl in this photo, the author seems at age twelve already the sort of person who would, 36 years later, write a study on belligerent behavior. Note the Band-Aid on his right cheek, no doubt covering the aftermath of an early schoolyard encounter of anger and/or revenge. Note the 1946 Captain Midnight Secret Squadron Decoder Badge the author wears. Directly above the author, in the top row, is a boy named Jack Wheeldon. The author reports that Mr. Wheeldon was the bully who took enormous pleasure in beating up the author every day at Lathrop. Of the 28 children in this photo, only two are now deceased. One of them is Jack Wheeldon. When the author was asked if that fact had anything to do with the statement in this essay that there are some people one should never mess with, the author smiled pugnaciously and said nothing.

Driving In The Spikes An Essay on Anger and Revenge By a Master of the Form About the little boy, in a moment. But, first, consider this: each of us is rooted in the present. We are sunk to the knees in the quicksand of today. But imbedded in our heads is a time machine. When we activate that mechanism, we are time travelers. The mechanism is called memory, and it spins us back and back to whatever year we wish to visit. Here we are, clinging to the end of that fine silken cord trailing behind us, vanishing into yesterday. Memory secures us to our experiences and we are the end-result of what we felt and saw and did as we slid along the silken cord.

Come back down the cord with me, to the little boy.

A random summer in the 1940s. As it has been with most of the little boy' s summers, he has been sent away to camp. In Ohio, in the 1940s, when the parents could bear it no longer, the summer brought surcease with the annual shunting-off of the kids to camp. Six weeks of relative quiet and replenishment of the vital forces that allowed adults to continue living with the kids without thoughts of dismemberment.

The little boy hated camp. He was taken out of his home, out of his neighborhood, out of the playground; away from his friends and most of all away from his dog. The little boy found it hard to make friends, but his dog was always there.

Now he returns from camp and his father picks him up at the bus station, and the little boy wants only one thing: to rush home and fall to his knees and hug his dog. His father seems too quiet and even troubled. The little boy senses something is wrong, but he is a little boy and little boys don' t ask Dad what' s wrong. That' s grown-up stuff.

But when they get home, and the little boy dashes out of the car before his father can complete the sentence- " Wait a minute, I want to tell you..." - there is no dog out on the lawn, no friend from whom he has been separated for six weeks, leaping and pawing and waiting to put his tongue all over the little boy' s face. There is an absence here. And the little boy quickly grows frightened.

Until the father sits him down and explains, with hesitance and dismay, that the dog is dead. The little boy cannot contain the knowledge. He has never experienced death or the holes it leaves in the world. And when, later, he learns how the dog died, the little boy mutates and becomes something he has never been before, in a process that can never be reversed.

He learns that the old woman who lives up the street, who has lived here all the years the little boy and his dog and his family have lived on that street, found the pup in her yard and called the dog catcher, and before the father knew about it, the dog had been ga.s.sed. The little boy is told the animal was " put to sleep," but he knows his friend was ga.s.sed, was killed.

He cannot understand why the old woman would do such a thing. " He never hurt anybody," he says through his tears. " He was little; he couldn' t hurt anything."