Jason said, “I’m going about it the way any celebrity who no one has ever heard of would go about it.”
For a moment she stared at him and then she laughed. “I see. Well, that’s cool; that’s really cool. I’ll have to remember that.” She turned her attention back to the documents she was forging. “In this business,” she said, absorbed in what she was doing, “I don’t want to get to know people I’m making cards for. But”—she glanced up—“I’d sort of like to know you. You’re strange. I’ve seen a lot of types— hundreds, maybe—but none like you. Do you know what I think?”
“You think I’m insane,” Jason said.
“Yes.” Kathy nodded. “Clinically, legally, whatever. You’re psychotic; you have a split personality. Mr. No One and Mr. Everyone. How have you survived up until now?”
He said nothing. It could not be explained.
“Okay,” Kathy said. One by one, expertly and efficiently, she forged the necessary documents.
Eddy, the hotel clerk, lurked in the background, smoking a fake Havana cigar; he had nothing to say or do, but for some obscure reason he hung around. I wish he’d fuck off, Jason thought to himself. I’d like to talk to her more…
“Come with me,” Kathy said, suddenly; she slid from her work stool and beckoned him toward a wooden door at the right of her bench. “I want your signature five times, each a little different from the others so they can’t be superimposed. That’s where so many documenters”—she smiled as she opened the door—“that’s what we call ourselves—that’s where so many of us fuck it up. They take one signature and transfer it to all the documents. See?”
“Yes,” he said, entering the musty little closetlike room after her.
Kathy shut the door, paused a moment, then said, “Eddy is a police fink.”
Staring at her he said, “Why?”
“‘Why?’ Why what? Why is he a police fink? For money. For the same reason I am.”
Jason said, “God damn you.” He grabbed her by the right wrist, tugged her toward him; she grimaced as his fingers tightened. “And he’s already—”
“Eddy hasn’t done anything yet,” she grated, trying to free her wrist. “That hurts. Look; calm down and I’ll show you. Okay?”
Reluctantly, his heart hammering in fear, he let her go. Kathy turned on a bright, small light, laid three forged documents in the circle of its glare. “A purple dot on the margin of each,” she said, indicating the almost invisible circle of color. “A microtransmitter, so you’ll emit a bleep every five seconds as you move around. They’re after conspiracies; they want the people you’re with.”
Jason said harshly, “I’m not with anyone.”
“But they don’t know that.” She massaged her wrist, frowning in a girlish, sullen way. “You TV celebrities no one’s ever heard of sure have quick reactions,” she murmured.
“Why did you tell me?” Jason asked. “After doing all the forging, all the—”
“I want you to get away,” she said, simply.
“Why?” He still did not understand.
“Because hell, you’ve got some sort of magnetic quality about you; I noticed it as soon as you came into the room. You’re”—she groped for the word—“sexy. Even at your age.”
“My presence,” he said.
“Yes.” Kathy nodded. “I’ve seen it before in public people, from a distance, but never up close like this. I can see why you imagine you’re a TV personality; you really seem like you are.”
He said, “How do I get away? Are you going to tell me that? Or does that cost a little more?”
“God, you’re so cynical.”
He laughed, and again took hold of her by the wrist.
“I guess I don’t blame you,” Kathy said, shaking her head and making a masklike face. “Well, first of all, you can buy Eddy off. Another five hundred should do it. Me you don’t have to buy off—if, and only if, and I mean it, if you stay with me awhile. You have…allure, like a good perfume. I respond to you and I just never do that with men.”
“With women, then?” he said tartly.
It passed her without registering. “Will you?” she said.
“Hell,” he said, “I’ll just leave.” Reaching, he opened the door behind her, shoved past her and out into her workroom. She followed, rapidly.
Among the dim, empty shadows of the abandoned restaurant she caught up with him; she confronted him in the gloom. Panting, she said, “You’ve already got a transmitter planted on you.”
“I doubt it,” he answered.
“It’s true. Eddy planted it on you.”
“Bullshit,” he said, and moved away from her toward the light of the restaurant’s sagging, broken front door.
Pursuing him like a deft-footed herbivore, Kathy gasped, “But suppose it’s true. It could be.” At the half-available doorway she interposed herself between him and freedom; standing there, her hands lifted as if to ward off a physical blow, she said swiftly, “Stay with me one night. Go to bed with me. Okay? That’s enough. I promise. Will you do it, for just one night?”
He thought, Something of my abilities, my alleged and well-known properties, have come with me, to this strange place I now live in. This place where I do not exist except on forged cards manufactured by a pol fink. Eerie, he thought, and he shuddered. Cards with microtransmitters built into them, to betray me and everyone with me to the pols. I haven’t done very well here. Except that, as she says, I’ve got allure. Jesus, he thought. And that’s all that stands between me and a forced-labor camp.
“Okay,” he said, then. It seemed the wiser choice—by far.
“Go pay Eddy,” she said. “Get that over with and him out of here.”
“I wondered why he’s still hanging around,” Jason said. “Did he scent more money?”
“I guess so,” Kathy said.
“You do this all the time,” Jason said as he got out his money. SOP: standard operating procedure. And he had tumbled for it.
Kathy said blithely, “Eddy is psionic.”
4
Two city blocks away, upstairs in an unpainted but once white wooden building, Kathy had a single room with a hot-compart in which to fix one-person meals.
He looked around him. A girl’s room: the cotlike bed had a handmade spread covering it, tiny green balls of textile fibers in row after row. Like a graveyard for soldiers, he thought morbidly as he moved about, feeling compressed by the smallness of the room.
On a wicker table a copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.
“How far’d you get into it?” he asked her.
“To Within a Budding Grove.” Kathy double-locked the door after them and set into operation some kind of electronic gadget; he did not recognize it.
“That’s not very far,” Jason said.
Taking off her plastic coat, Kathy asked, “How far did you get into it?” She hung her coat in a tiny closet, taking his, too.
“I never read it,” Jason said. “But on my program we did a dramatic rendering of a scene…I don’t know which. We got a lot of good mail about it, but we never tried it again. Those out things, you have to be careful and not dole out too much. If you do it kills it dead for everybody, all networks, for the rest of the year.” He prowled, crampedly, about the room, examining a book here, a cassette tape, a micromag. She even had a talking toy. Like a kid, he thought; she’s not really an adult.
With curiosity, he turned on the talking toy.
“Hi!” it declared. “I’m Cheerful Charley and I’m definitely tuned in on your wavelength.”
“Nobody named Cheerful Charley is tuned in on my wave-length,” Jason said. He started to shut it off, but it protested. “Sorry,” Jason told it, “but I’m tuning you out, you creepy little bugger.”
“But I love you!” Cheerful Charley complained tinnily.
He paused, thumb on off button. “Prove it,” he said. On his show he had done commercials for junk like this. He hated it and them. Equally. “Give me so
me money,” he told it.
“I know how you can get back your name, fame, and game,” Cheerful Charley informed him. “Will that do for openers?”
“Sure,” he said.
Cheerful Charley bleated, “Go look up your girl friend.”
“Who do you mean?” he said guardedly.
“Heather Hart,” Cheerful Charley bleeped.
“Hard by,” Jason said, pressing his tongue against his upper incisors. He nodded. “Any more advice?”
“I’ve heard of Heather Hart,” Kathy said as she brought a bottle of orange juice out of the cold-cupboard of the room’s wall. The bottle had already become three-fourths empty; she shook it up, poured foamy instant ersatz orange juice into two jelly glasses. “She’s beautiful. She has all that long red hair. Is she really your girl friend? Is Charley right?”
“Everybody knows,” he said, “that Cheerful Charley is always right.”
“Yes, I guess that’s true.” Kathy poured bad gin (Mount-batten’s Privy Seal Finest) into the orange juice. “Screw-drivers,” she said, proudly.
“No, thanks,” he said. “Not at this hour of the day.” Not even B & L scotch bottled in Scotland, he thought. This damn little room…isn’t she making anything out of pol-finking and card-forging, whichever it is she does? Is she really a police informer, as she says? he wondered. Strange. Maybe she’s both. Maybe neither.
“Ask me!” Cheerful Charley piped. “I can see you have something on your mind, mister. You good-looking bastard, you.”
He let that pass. “This girl,” he began, but instantly Kathy grabbed Cheerful Charley away from him, stood holding it, her nostrils flaring, her eyes filled with indignation.
“The hell you’re going to ask my Cheerful Charley about me,” she said, one eyebrow raised. Like a wild bird, he thought, going through elaborate motions to protect her nest. He laughed. “What’s funny?” Kathy demanded.
“These talking toys,” he said, “are more nuisance than utilitarian. They ought to be abolished.” He walked away from her, then to a clutter of mail on a TV-stand table. Aimlessly, he sorted among the envelopes, noticing vaguely that none of the bills had been opened.
“Those are mine,” Kathy said defensively, watching him.
“You get a lot of bills,” he said, “for a girl living in a one-room schmalch. You buy your clothes—or what else?—at Metter’s? Interesting.”
“I—take an odd size.”
He said, “And Sax and Crombie shoes.”
“In my work—” she began, but he cut her off with a convulsive swipe of his hand.
“Don’t give me that,” he grated.
“Look in my closet. You won’t see much there. Nothing out of the ordinary, except that what I do have is good. I’d rather have a little amount of something good…” Her words trailed off. “You know,” she said vaguely, “than a lot of junk.”
Jason said, “You have another apartment.”
It registered; her eyes flickered as she looked into herself for an answer. That, for him, constituted plenty.
“Let’s go there,” he said. He had seen enough of this cramped little room.
“I can’t take you there,” Kathy said, “because I share it with two other girls and the way we’ve divided up the use, this time is—”
“Evidently you weren’t trying to impress me.” It amused him. But also it irritated him; he felt downgraded, nebulously.
“I would have taken you there if today were my day,” Kathy said. “That’s why I have to keep this little place going; I’ve got to have someplace to go when it’s not my day. My day, my next one, is Friday. From noon on.” Her tone had become earnest. As if she wished very much to convince him. Probably, he mused, it was true. But the whole thing irked him. Her and her whole life. He felt, now, as if he had been snared by something dragging him down into depths he had never known about before, even in the early, bad days. And he did not like it.
He yearned all at once to be out of here. The animal at bay was himself.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Kathy said, sipping her screwdriver.
To himself, but aloud, he said, “You have bumped the door of life open with your big, dense head. And now it can’t be closed.”
“What’s that from?” Kathy asked.
“From my life.”
“But it’s like poetry.”
“If you watched my show,” he said, “you’d know I come up with sparklers like that every so often.”
Appraising him calmly, Kathy said, “I’m going to look in the TV log and see if you’re listed.” She set down her screwdriver, fished among discarded newspapers piled at the base of the wicker table.
“I wasn’t even born,” he said. “I checked on that.”
“And your show isn’t listed,” Kathy said, folding the newsprint page back and studying the log.
“That’s right,” he said. “So now you have all the answers about me.” He tapped his vest pocket of forged ID cards. “Including these. With their microtransmitters, if that much is true.”
“Give them back to me,” Kathy said, “and I’ll erad the microtransmitters. It’ll only take a second.” She held out her hand.
He returned them to her.
“Don’t you care if I take them off?” Kathy inquired.
Candidly, he answered, “No, I really don’t. I’ve lost the ability to tell what’s good or bad, true or not true, anymore. If you want to take the dots off, do it. If it pleases you.”
A moment later she returned the cards, smiling her sixteen-year-old hazy smile.
Observing her youth, her automatic radiance, he said, “‘I feel as old as yonder elm.’”
“From Finnegans Wake,” Kathy said happily. “When the old washerwomen at dusk are merging into trees and rocks.”
“You’ve read Finnegans Wake?” he asked, surprised.
“I saw the film. Four times. I like Hazeltine; I think he’s the best director alive.”
“I had him on my show,” Jason said. “Do you want to know what he’s like in real life?”
“No,” Kathy said.
“Maybe you ought to know.”
“No,” she repeated, shaking her head; her voice had risen. “And don’t try to tell me—okay? I’ll believe what I want to believe, and you believe what you believe. All right?”
“Sure,” he said. He felt sympathetic. The truth, he had often reflected, was overrated as a virtue. In most cases a sympathetic lie did better and more mercifully. Especially between men and women; in fact, whenever a woman was involved.
This, of course, was not, properly speaking, a woman, but a girl. And therefore, he decided the kind lie was even more of a necessity.
“He’s a scholar and an artist,” he said.
“Really?” She regarded him hopefully.
“Yes.”
At that she sighed in relief.
“Then you believe,” he said, pouncing, “that I have met Michael Hazeltine, the finest living film director, as you said yourself. So you do believe that I am a six—” He broke off; that had not been what he intended to say.
“‘A six,’” Kathy echoed, her brow furrowing, as if she were trying to remember. “I read about them in Time. Aren’t they all dead now? Didn’t the government have them all rounded up and shot, after that one, their leader—what was his name?—Teagarden; yes, that’s his name. Willard Tea-garden. He tried to—how do you say it?—pull off a coup against the federal nats? He tried to get them disbanded as an illegal parimutuel—”
“Paramilitary,” Jason said.
“You don’t give a damn about what I’m saying.”
Sincerely, he said, “I sure do.” He waited. The girl did not continue. “Christ,” he spat out. “Finish what you were saying!”
“I think,” Kathy said at last, “that the sevens made the coup not come off.”
He thought. Sevens. Never in his life had he heard of sevens. Nothing could have shocked him more. Good, he thought, that I l
et out that lapsus linguae. I have genuinely learned something, now. At last. In this maze of confusion and the half real.
A small section of wall creaked meagerly open and a cat, black and white and very young, entered the room. At once Kathy gathered him up, her face shining.
“Dinman’s philosophy,” Jason said. “The mandatory cat.” He was familiar with the viewpoint; he had in fact introduced Dinman to the TV audience on one of his fall specials.
“No, I just love him,” Kathy said, eyes bright as she carried the cat over to him for his inspection.
“But you do believe,” he said, as he patted the cat’s little head, “that owning an animal increases a person’s empathic—”
“Screw that,” Kathy said, clutching the cat to her throat as if she were a five-year-old with its first animal. Its school project: the communal guinea pig. “This is Domenico,” she said.
“Named after Domenico Scarlatti?” he asked.
“No, after Domenico’s Market, down the street; we passed it on our way here. When I’m at the Minor Apartment—this room—I shop there. Is Domenico Scarlatti a musician? I think I’ve heard of him.”
Jason said, “Abraham Lincoln’s high school English teacher.”
“Oh.” She nodded absently, now rocking the cat back and forth.
“I’m kidding you,” he said, “and it’s mean. I’m sorry.”
Kathy gazed up at him earnestly as she clutched her small cat. “I never know the difference,” she murmured.
“That’s why it’s mean,” Jason said.
“Why?” she asked. “If I don’t even know. I mean, that means I’m just dumb. Doesn’t it?”
“You’re not dumb,” Jason said. “Just inexperienced.” He calculated, roughly, their age difference. “I’ve lived over twice as long as you,” he pointed out. “And I’ve been in the position, in the last ten years, to rub elbows with some of the most famous people on earth. And—”