“These sayings are hard,” Dr. Abernathy said, at last. He rose to his feet. “I’ll see you again on your return?”
“Perhaps,” said Tibor, activating his cart.
“The Christian God—” Dr. Abernathy hesitated, seeing how worn Tibor looked, worn by perplexity. “He is the God of unchange. ‘I am what I am,’ as God puts it to Moses, in the Bible. That is our God.”
Outside, all magic had fled from the noonday world, the sun had hidden its face behind a brief cloud, and Darlin’ Corey had eaten a bumblebee and was ill.
FIVE
He returned to the digs the following afternoon. The door grumbled when he inserted his finger, but it recognized the loops and whorls and slid halfway to the right. He sidled through and kicked it, and it closed behind him.
Adjusting his side-pack, which contained a new supply of herbicides, he paused for a moment to touch the lump which had grown between his left temple and forehead. It throbbed, it drove a shaft of pain through his head, as he knew it would. But he could not keep his hands away from it. The sore-tooth reaction, he decided.
He gulped another tablet from his new supply, knowing that it would have less than the desired effect.
Turning, then, he moved down the perpetually lit, perpetually poorly lit tunnel that led to the bunkers. Before he reached the one in which he was currently sleeping, his foot came down atop a small red truck and he was pitched forward to land upon his shoulder. As he fell, he shielded his aching head with an upflung arm. Activated by the push of his foot, the truck blew its horn and raced back up the tunnel.
After a moment, a short, heavyset figure raced past him, making sobbing noises.
“Tuck! Tuck!” it cried, pursuing the sound of the horn.
He raised himself to his knees, then to his feet. Staggering through the doorway, he noted that, as he had suspected, the room was now a shambles. Tomorrow I’ll move into the next one, he decided. It’s easier than cleaning the damned things out.
He dropped his pack upon the nearest table and collapsed onto the bed, pressing the back of his right wrist to his forehead.
A shadow across his eyelids told him that he was no longer alone. Without opening his eyes or changing his position, he snarled, “Alice, I told you to keep your toys out of the hall! I gave you a nice box for them! If you don’t start keeping them there, I’m going to take them all away from you.”
“No!” said the high-pitched voice. “Tuck …”
Then he heard the slap of her bare feet upon the floor, and the lid of the toy box creaked. It was too late to cry out, and knowing what was coming next, he gritted his teeth as she let it fall shut with a crash that bounced from all the walls of his sparse cell and converged upon his head.
The fact that she doesn’t know any better doesn’t alter the difficulty, he decided. Three weeks before, he had brought Alice home to the digs—an idiot girl whom the inhabitants of Stuttgart had expelled from their midst. Whether out of sympathy for her condition or the desire for companionship, he could not say. Probably something of both had entered into his choice. He could see now why they had done what they had done. She was impossible—maddening—to live with. As soon as he felt better, he would return her to the place where he had found her, crying beside the river with her dress caught in a thorn bush.
“Sorry,” he heard her say. “Sorry, Daddy.”
“I’m not your daddy,” he said. “Eat some chocolate and go to sleep—please….”
He felt like a glass of ice water. Crazy thought! The perspiration appeared like condensation now, while inside he was cold, cold, cold! He crossed his arms and began shaking. Finally, his fingers picked at the blanket, caught it, drew it over him.
He heard Alice singing to herself across the room, and for some reason this soothed him slightly.
Then, and the horrible part was that he knew he was not yet fully delirious, he was back in his office and his secretary had just rushed in with a sheaf of papers like a flower in her pinknailed hand and she was talking and talking and talking, excitedly, and he was answering and nodding, shaking his head and gesturing, pushing Hold buttons on his telephones, stroking his nose, tugging his earlobe, and talking and not hearing or understanding a word that either of them was saying, not even hearing the ringing of the telephones, under whose buttons the little lights kept winking on and off, and there was a sense of urgency and a strange feeling of separation, removal, futility, while Dolly Reiber—that was her name—talked until suddenly he noted, quite academically, that she had the head of a dog and was beginning to howl (this he was able to hear, though faintly), and he smiled and reached out to stroke her muzzle and she became Alice-at-his-bedside.
“I told you to go to sleep!” he said.
“Sorry, Daddy,” she told him.
“It’s all right! Go to sleep, like I told you.”
The figure withdrew, and he found the strength to unsnap his ammo belts and tear off his clothing, for he no longer felt like a glass of ice water, and he pushed these items over the edge of the bed.
He lay there panting, and his head throbbed with each beat of his heart.
The rats! The rats … They were all around him, moving closer…. He reached for the napalm. But, Deliver us, deliver us from Your Wrath, said the rats, and he chuckled and ate their offerings. “For a time,” he told them, and then the sky burst and there were slow-swimming, shapeless forms all about him, mainly red, though some were colorless, and he existed indifferently as they flowed by him, and then—or before or after, he could not be certain, and he knew that it did not matter—he heard and felt, rather than saw, a light within his head, pulsing, and it was a pleasant thing and he let it soak deep into him for a time, for a time that could have been hours or seconds (it did not matter), and while he felt, suddenly, that his lips had been moving, he had heard no words, there where he was, until a voice said, “What’s a D-III, Daddy?”
“Sleep, damn you! Sleep!” his mouth finally communicated to his ear, and there came the sound of fleeing footsteps. Rats … Deliver us … D-III … Light … Light. Light!
He was glowing like a neon tube, pulsing like one, too. Brighter and brighter. Red, orange, yellow. White! White and blinding! He reeled in the pure white light. Reveled in it for a moment. A moment only.
It descended slowly, and he saw it coming. He saw it hovering. He cowered, cringed, abased himself before it, but it began its eternally slow descent nevertheless. “God!” came the strangled cry from his entire being, but it drew nearer, nearer, was upon him.
A crown of iron came down, settled upon his brow, drew tighter, fit him. It tightened and felt like a circlet of dry ice about his head. Arms? Did he have arms? If so, he used them to try to drag it away, but to no avail. It clung there and throbbed, and he was back in his bunker in the digs, feeling it.
“Alice!” he cried out. “Alice! Please … !”
“What, Daddy? What?” as she came to him again.
“A mirror! I need a mirror! Get the little one on top of the john and bring it to me! Hurry!”
“Mirror?”
“Looking-glass! Spiegel! Reflector! The thing you see yourself in!”
“Okay.” And she ran off.
“And a knife! I’ll need a knife, I think!” he called out, not knowing whether he had been heard.
After an aching time, she returned. “I have the mirror,” she said.
He snatched it from her and held it up. He turned his head and looked into it with his left eye.
It was there. A black line had appeared in the center of the lump.
“Listen, Alice,” he said, and stopped then to draw a deep breath. “Listen … In the kitchen … You know the drawer where we keep the knives and forks and spoons?”
“I think … Maybe …”
“Go get it. Pull the whole drawer out—very carefully. Don’t drop it. Then bring the whole thing here to me. Okay?”
“Kitten. Things drawer. Kitten. Things drawer. Things drawer …”
“Yes. Hurry, but be careful not to drop it.”
She ran off, and a moment later he heard the crash and the rattling. Then he heard her whimpers.
He threw his feet over the edge of the bed and collapsed upon the floor. Slowly, he began to crawl.
He reached the kitchen and left moist handprints upon the tile. Alice cowered in the corner, repeating, “Don’t hit, Daddy. Sorry, Daddy. Don’t hit, Daddy …”
“It’s all right,” he said. “You can have another piece of chocolate.” And he picked up two sharp knives of different sizes, turned, and began the long crawl back.
Ten minutes perhaps, and his hands were steady enough to raise the mirror in the left and the small knife in the right. He bit his lip. The first cut will have to be a quick one, he decided, and he positioned the knife beneath the black line.
He slashed and screamed, almost simultaneously.
She ran to his side, sobbing, but he was sobbing too, and unable to answer.
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” she cried.
“Give me my shirt!” he cried.
She pulled it from the pile of his clothing and dropped it on him.
He touched it gingerly to his brow, wiped the tears from his eyes on its sleeve. He bit his lip again, and from the wet trickle realized that it, too, needed wiping. Then, “Listen, Alice,” he said. “You’ve been a good girl, and I’m not mad at you.”
“Not mad?” she asked.
“Not mad,” he said. “You’ve been good. Very good. But you’ve got to go away tonight and sleep in another room. This is because I’m going to be hurting and making noises, and there is going to be lots of blood—and I don’t want you to see all this, and I don’t think you’d like it either.”
“Not mad?”
“No. But please go to the old room. Just for tonight.”
“I don’t like it there.”
“Just for tonight.”
“Okay, Daddy,” she said. “Kiss me?”
“Sure.”
And she leaned forward, and he managed to turn his head so that she did not hurt him. Then she withdrew, without—thank god!—undue noise.
She was, he estimated, around twenty-four years old, and, despite her wide shoulders and her fat-girded waist, was possessed of a face not unlike one of Rubens’s cherubs.
After she had gone, he rested awhile, then raised the mirror once again. The blood was still coming, so he blotted it—several times—as he studied the wound. Good! he decided. The first cut had gone deep. Now, if he’d the guts …
He took up the knife and positioned it above the black line. Something inside him—down at that animal level where most fears are born—cried out, but he managed to ignore it for the single instant necessary to make the second cut.
Then both mirror and knife fell upon the bed and he grasped the shirt to his face. He blacked out then. No lights. No crown. Nothing.
How long it took him to come around, he did not know. But he pulled the shirt from his face, winced, licked his lips.
Finally, he raised the mirror and regarded himself.
Yes, he had succeeded in parenthesizing the thing. The first step had been completed. Now he would have to do some digging.
And he did. Each time the blade struck against the protruding piece of metal, his head felt like the inside of a cathedral bell, and it was minutes before he could proceed again. He kept mopping the blood and tears and sweat from his face.
Then it was there.
He had finally exposed a sufficient edge so that his fingernails might gain purchase. Biting his tongue now, as he had bitten his lower lip clean through, he took hold very gently, tightened his grip carefully, and pulled with all his strength.
When he awakened and was able to raise the mirror once again, it stood out a quarter of an inch from his head.
He moistened the shirt with his saliva in order to clean his face.
Again, the slow approach and the spasmodic tug. Again, the blackness.
After the fifth time, he lay there with a two-inch thorn of metal fallen from his right hand upon the bed, and his face was a sweating, bleeding, crying mask with a hole in the left side of it, and he slept a sleep without dreams—in fact, beneath that ruddy surface there seemed a certain layer of peace, though it could have been a trick of the lights through the mess.
She tiptoed in with the exaggerated care of a child, and raised both hands to her mouth and bit the knuckles because she knew that she was not supposed to bother him and she felt that if she cried she would.
But, it was like Halloween—like a mask, that he was wearing. She saw the shirt fallen to the floor. He was so wet …
“Daddy …” she whispered, and laid it across his face, pressing lightly, lightly, with fingertips like spiders’ legs, until it absorbed all, all, all of that which covered him like mud or swarming insects.
Later, she pulled it away, because she had been cut, many times, and she knew that such things dry and stick and hurt to pull away.
He looked cleaner then, though still somewhat altered, and she clutched it to her and took it back with her, back to the old room, because it was his, because he had given her toys and chocolate and because she wanted something of his which he would not want anymore—not when it was that dirty.
Later, much later, when she looked at it, fully unrolled, spread out upon her bed, she was delighted to see that it bore a perfect likeness of his face, traced in the juices of his own body, lying there flat, dark now, conforming in every detail to his countenance.…
Save for the eyes—which, strangely, seemed horizontal—just slots—as though they viewed straight across the surface of the world, as if the world were flat and his gaze traveled on without end, forever.
She did not like the way it showed his eyes, so she folded it up and took it back and hid it away at the bottom of her toy box, forgetting it forever after.
This time, for some reason, she remembered not to drop the lid, but closed it carefully.
SIX
Here! The scrabbling man on hands and knees in the drainage ditch. Dark eyes seeking an opening. An X of canvas belts upon his back. Above him the lightnings, upon him the rain. And about the next bending of his way, he watches/they watch/it watches, for he/they/it—it—knows that he is coming with a pain in his head. And it glances into the place where the storm meets the earth and the mud is born, wipes splashes from its coat, sniffs the air, sees the man’s head and shoulders pass the turning point, withdraws.
The man finds the opened sewer and crawls within.
After twenty feet he flicked on his hand torch and shone it upon the ceiling. He stood then on the walkway beside the slop and leaned his back against the wall. Mopping his brow on his khaki sleeve, he shook droplets from his hair and dried his hands on his trousers.
For a moment, he grimaced. Then, dipping into a shoulder-pack, he withdrew a tube of tablets, gulped one. The thunders echoed about him in that place and he cursed, clutching his temples. But it came again and again, and he fell to his knees, sobbing.
The level of the slop in the center ditch began to rise. Observing it in the light of his torch, he rose to his feet and staggered further inward until he came to something resembling a platform. The smell of refuse was more powerful here, but there was space to sit down with his back to the wall, so he did. He switched off the torch.
After a time, the pill began to take effect and he sighed.
See how feeble it is that has come among me.
He unsnapped his holster and thumbed down the safety catch on his revolver.
It has heard me and knows fear.
Then, between the rumbles of thunder there was only silence. He sat there for perhaps an hour, then drifted into a light sleep.
That which awakened him might have been sound. If so, it had been too soft to have registered consciously.
It is awake. How is it that it can hear me? Tell me. How is it that it can hear me?
“I can hear you,” he said
, “and I’m armed,” his mind automatically falling to the weapon at his side and his finger finding its trigger.
(Image of a pistol and feeling of derision as eight men fall before it clicks upon an empty chamber.)
With his left hand he turned on the torch once more. As he swept it about, several opallike sparkles occurred in a corner.
Food! he thought. Ill need something before I make it back to the bunker! They’ll do.
You will not eat me.
“Who are you?” he asked.
You think of me as rats. You think of a thing known as The Air Force Survival Handbook, where it explains that if you cut off one of my heads—which is where the poison is—you must then slit open the ventral side and continue the cuts to extend the length of each leg. Subsequent to this, the skin can be peeled off, the belly opened and emptied, the backbone split and both halves roasted on sharpened sticks over a small fire.
“That is essentially correct,” he said, then. “You say that you are ‘rats’? I do not understand. The plural—that’s what I don’t understand.”
I am all of us.
He continued to stare at the eyes located about twenty-five feet from him.
I know now how you hear me. There is pain, pain in you. This, somehow, lets you hear.
“There are pieces of metal in my head,” he said, “from when my office exploded. I do not understand this thing either, but I can see how it may be involved.”
Yes. In fact, I see that one of the pieces nearer the surface will soon work its way free. Then you must break your skin with your claws and withdraw it.
“I don’t have claws—oh, my fingernails. Then that must be what’s causing these headaches. Another piece is moving around. Fortunately, I can use my knife. That time I had to claw one out was pretty bad.”
What is a knife?
(Steel, sharp, gleaming, with a handle.)
Where does one get a knife?
“One has one, finds one, buys one, steals one, or makes one.”
I do not have one, but I have found yours. I do not know how to buy or steal or make one. So I will take yours.