‘You seem to like ice cream a lot.’
‘I just rode around feeling of the silence. It’s a big bolt of the nicest, softest flannel ever made. Silence. A whole hour of it. I just sat in my car, smiling, feeling of that flannel with my ears. I felt drunk with Freedom!’
‘Go on.’
‘Then I got the idea of the portable diathermy machine. I rented one, took it on the bus going home that night. There sat all the tired commuters with their wrist radios, talking to their wives, saying, “Now I’m at Fortythird, now I’m at Forty-fourth, here I am at Forty-ninth, now turning at Sixty-first.” One husband cursing, “Well, get out of that bar, damn it, and get home and get dinner started, I’m at Seventieth!” And the transit-system radio playing “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” a canary singing words about a first-rate wheat cereal. Then—I switched on my diathermy! Static! Interference! All wives cut off from husbands grousing about a hard day at the office. All husbands cut off from wives who had just seen their children break a window! The “Vienna Woods” chopped down, the canary mangled. Silence! A terrible, unexpected silence. The bus inhabitants faced with having to converse with each other. Panic! Sheer, animal panic!’
‘The police seized you?’
‘The bus had to stop. After all, the music was being scrambled, husbands and wives were out of touch with reality. Pandemonium, riot, and chaos. Squirrels chattering in cages! A trouble unit arrived, triangulated on me instantly, had me reprimanded, fined, and home, minus my diathermy machine, in jig time.’
‘Mr Brock, may I suggest that so far your whole pattern here is not very—practical? If you didn’t like transit radios or office radios or car business radios, why didn’t you join a fraternity of radio haters, start petitions, get legal and constitutional rulings? After all, this is a democracy.’
‘And I,’ said Brock, ‘am that thing best called a minority. I did join fraternities, picket, pass petitions, take it to court. Year after year I protested. Everyone laughed. Everyone else loved bus radios and commercials. I was out of step.’
‘Then you should have taken it like a good soldier, don’t you think? The majority rules.’
‘But they went too far. If a little music and “keeping in touch” was charming, they figured a lot would be ten times as charming. I went wild! I got home to find my wife hysterical. Why? Because she had been completely out of touch with me for half a day. Remember, I did a dance on my wrist radio? Well, that night I laid plans to murder my house.’
‘Are you sure that’s how you want me to write it down?’
‘That’s semantically accurate. Kill it dead. It’s one of those talking, singing, humming, weather-reporting, poetry-reading, novel-reciting, jingle-jangling, rockaby-crooning-when-you-go-to-bed houses. A house that screams opera to you in the shower and teaches you Spanish in your sleep. One of those blathering caves where all kinds of electronic Oracles make you feel a trifle larger than a thimble, with stoves that say, “I’m apricot pie, and I’m done,” or “I’m prime roast beef, so baste me!” and other nursery gibberish like that. With beds that rock you to sleep and shake you awake. A house that barely tolerates humans, I tell you. A front door that barks: “You’ve mud on your feet, sir!” And an electronic vacuum hound that snuffles around after you from room to room, inhaling every fingernail or ash you drop. Jesus God, I say, Jesus God!’
‘Quietly,’ suggested the psychiatrist.
‘Remember that Gilbert and Sullivan song—“I’ve Got It on My List, It Never Will Be Missed”? All night I listed grievances. Next morning early I bought a pistol. I purposely muddied my feet. I stood at our front door. The front door shrilled. “Dirty feet, muddy feet! Wipe your feet! Please be neat!” I shot the damn thing in its keyhole! I ran to the kitchen, where the stove was just whining. “Turn me over!” In the middle of a mechanical omelet I did the stove to death. Oh, how it sizzled and screamed, “I’m shorted!” Then the telephone rang like a spoiled brat. I shoved it down the Insinkerator. I must state here and now I have nothing whatever against the Insinkerator; it was an innocent bystander. I feel sorry for it now, a practical device indeed, which never said a word, purred like a sleepy lion most of the time, and digested our leftovers, I’ll have it restored. Then I went in and shot the televisor, that insidious beast, that Medusa, which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little, but myself always going back, going back, hoping and waiting until—bang! Like a headless turkey, gobbling, my wife whooped out the front door. The police came. Here I am!’
He sat back happily and lit a cigarette.
‘And did you realize, in committing these crimes, that the wrist radio, the broadcasting transmitter, the phone, the bus radio, the office intercoms, all were rented or were someone else’s property?’
‘I would do it all over again, so help me God.’
The psychiatrist sat there in the sunshine of that beatific smile.
‘You don’t want any further help from the Office of Mental Health? You’re ready to take the consequences?’
‘This is only the beginning,’ said Mr Brock. ‘I’m the vanguard of the small public which is tired of noise and being taken advantage of and pushed around and yelled at, every moment music, every moment in touch with some voice somewhere, do this, do that, quick, quick, now here, now there. You’ll see. The revolt begins. My name will go down in history!’
‘Mmm.’ The psychiatrist seemed to be thinking.
‘It’ll take time, of course. It was all so enchanting at first. The very idea of these things, the practical uses, was wonderful. They were almost toys, to be played with, but the people got too involved, went too far, and got wrapped up in a pattern of social behavior and couldn’t get out, couldn’t admit they were in, even. So they rationalized their nerves as something else. “Our modern age,” they said. “Conditions,” they said. “High-strung,” they said. But mark my words, the seed has been sown. I got world-wide coverage on TV, radio, films; there’s an irony for you. That was five days ago. A billion people know about me. Check your financial columns. Any day now. Maybe today. Watch for a sudden spurt, a rise in sales for French chocolate ice cream!’
‘I see,’ said the psychiatrist.
‘Can I go back to my nice private cell now, where I can be alone and quiet for six months?’
‘Yes,’ said the psychiatrist quietly.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Mr Brock, rising. ‘I’m just going to sit around for a long time stuffing that nice soft bolt of quiet material in both ears.’
‘Mmm,’ said the psychiatrist, going to the door.
‘Cheers,’ said Mr Brock.
‘Yes,’ said the psychiatrist.
He pressed a code signal on a hidden button, the door opened, he stepped out, the door shut and locked. Alone, he moved in the offices and corridors. The first twenty yards of his walk were accompanied by ‘Tambourine Chinois.’ Then it was ‘Tzigane,’ Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in something Minor, ‘Tiger Rag,’ ‘Love Is Like a Cigarette.’ He took his broken wrist radio from his pocket like a dead praying mantis. He turned in at his office. A bell sounded; a voice came out of the ceiling, ‘Doctor?’
‘Just finished with Brock,’ said the psychiatrist.
‘Diagnosis?’
‘Seems completely disoriented, but convivial. Refuses to accept the simplest realities of his environment and work with them.’
‘Prognosis?’
‘Indefinite. Left him enjoying a piece of invisible material.’
Three phones rang. A duplicate wrist radio in his desk drawer buzzed like a wounded grasshopper. The intercom flashed a pink light and clickclicked. Three phones rang. The drawer buzzed. Music blew in through the open door. The psychiatrist, humming quietly, fitted the new wrist radio to his wrist, flipped the intercom, talked a moment, picked up one telephone, talked, picked up another telephone, talked, picked up the third telephone, talked, tou
ched the wrist-radio button, talked calmly and quietly, his face cool and serene, in the middle of the music and the lights flashing, the phones ringing again, and his hands moving, and his wrist radio buzzing, and the intercoms talking, and voices speaking from the ceiling. And he went on quietly this way through the remainder of a cool, air-conditioned, and long afternoon; telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio…
The April Witch
Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew. She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in blossoms, showering away in petals when the breeze blew. She perched in a lime-green frog, cool as mint by a shining pool. She trotted in a brambly dog and barked to hear echoes from the sides of distant barns. She lived in new April grasses, in sweet clear liquids rising from the musky earth.
It’s spring, thought Cecy. I’ll be in every living thing in the world tonight.
Now she inhabited neat crickets on the tar-pool roads, now prickled in dew on an iron gate. Hers was an adaptably quick mind flowing unseen upon Illinois winds on this one evening of her life when she was just seventeen.
‘I want to be in love,’ she said.
She had said it at supper. And her parents had widened their eyes and stiffened back in their chairs. ‘Patience,’ had been their advice. ‘Remember, you’re remarkable. Our whole Family is odd and remarkable. We can’t mix or marry with ordinary folk. We’d lose our magical powers if we did. You wouldn’t want to lose your ability to “travel” by magic, would you? Then be careful. Be careful!’
But in her high bedroom, Cecy had touched perfume to her throat and stretched out, trembling and apprehensive, on her four-poster, as a moon the color of milk rose over Illinois country, turning rivers to cream and roads to platinum.
‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘I’m one of an odd family. We sleep days and fly nights like black kites on the wind. If we want, we can sleep in moles through the winter, in the warm earth. I can live in anything at all—a pebble, a crocus, or a praying mantis. I can leave my plain, bony body behind and send my mind far out for adventure. Now!’
The wind whipped her away over fields and meadows.
She saw the warm spring lights of cottages and farms glowing with twilight colors.
If I can’t be in love, myself, because I’m plain and odd, then I’ll be in love through someone else, she thought.
Outside a farmhouse in the spring night a dark-haired girl, no more than nineteen, drew up water from a deep stone well. She was singing.
Cecy fell—a green leaf—into the well. She lay in the tender moss of the well, gazing up through dark coolness. Now she quickened in a fluttering invisible amoeba. Now in a water droplet! At last, within a cold cup, she felt herself lifted to the girl’s warm lips. There was a soft night sound of drinking.
Cecy looked out from the girl’s eyes.
She entered into the dark head and gazed from the shining eyes at the hands pulling the rough rope. She listened through the shell ears to this girl’s world. She smelled a particular universe through these delicate nostrils, felt this special heart beating, beating. Felt this strange tongue move with singing.
Does she know I’m here? thought Cecy.
The girl gasped. She stared into the night meadows.
‘Who’s there?’
No answer.
‘Only the wind,’ whispered Cecy.
‘Only the wind.’ The girl laughed at herself, but shivered.
It was a good body, this girl’s body. It held bones of finest slender ivory hidden and roundly fleshed. This brain was like a pink tea rose, hung in darkness, and there was cider-wine in this mouth. The lips lay firm on the white, white teeth and the brows arched neatly at the world, and the hair blew soft and fine on her milky neck. The pores knit small and close. The nose tilted at the moon and the cheeks glowed like small fires. The body drifted with feather-balances from one motion to another and seemed always singing to itself. Being in this body, this head, was like basking in a hearth fire, living in the purr of a sleeping cat, stirring in warm creek waters that flowed by night to the sea.
I’ll like it here, thought Cecy.
‘What?’ asked the girl, as if she’d heard a voice.
‘What’s your name?’ asked Cecy carefully.
‘Ann Leary.’ The girl twitched. ‘Now why should I say that out loud?’
‘Ann, Ann,’ whispered Cecy. ‘Ann, you’re going to be in love.’
As if to answer this, a great roar sprang from the road, a clatter and a ring of wheels on gravel. A tall man drove up in a rig, holding the reins high with his monstrous arms, his smile glowing across the yard.
‘Ann!’
‘Is that you, Tom?’
‘Who else?’ Leaping from the rig, he tied the reins to the fence.
‘I’m not speaking to you!’ Ann whirled, the bucket in her hands slopping.
‘No!’ cried Cecy.
Ann froze. She looked at the hills and the first spring stars. She stared at the man named Tom. Cecy made her drop the bucket.
‘Look what you’ve done!’
Tom ran up.
‘Look what you made me do!’
He wiped her shoes with a kerchief, laughing.
‘Get away!’ She kicked at his hands, but he laughed again, and gazing down on him from miles away, Cecy saw the turn of his head, the size of his skull, the flare of his nose, the shine of his eye, the girth of his shoulder, and the hard strength of his hands doing this delicate thing with the handkerchief. Peering down from the secret attic of this lovely head, Cecy yanked a hidden copper ventriloquist’s wire and the pretty mouth popped wide: ‘Thank you!’
‘Oh, so you have manners?’ The smell of leather on his hands, the smell of the horse rose from his clothes into the tender nostrils, and Cecy, far, far away over night meadows and flowered fields, stirred as with some dream in her bed.
‘Not for you, no!’ said Ann.
‘Hush, speak gently,’ said Cecy. She moved Ann’s fingers out toward Tom’s head. Ann snatched them back.
‘I’ve gone mad!’
‘You have.’ He nodded, smiling but bewildered. ‘Were you going to touch me then?’
‘I don’t know. Oh, go away!’ Her cheeks glowed with pink charcoals.
‘Why don’t you run? I’m not stopping you.’ Tom got up. ‘Have you changed your mind? Will you go to the dance with me tonight? It’s special. Tell you why later.’
‘No,’ said Ann.
‘Yes!’ cried Cecy. ‘I’ve never danced. I want to dance. I’ve never worn a long gown, all rustly. I want that. I want to dance all night. I’ve never known what it’s like to be in a woman, dancing: Father and Mother would never permit it. Dogs, cats, locusts, leaves, everything else in the world at one time or another I’ve known, but never a woman in the spring, never on a night like this, Oh, please—we must go to that dance!’
She spread her thought like the fingers of a hand within a new glove.
‘Yes,’ said Ann Leary, ‘I’ll go. I don’t know why, but I’ll go to the dance with you tonight, Tom.’
‘Now inside, quick!’ cried Cecy. ‘You must wash, tell your folks, get your gown ready, out with the iron, into your room!’
‘Mother,’ said Ann, ‘I’ve changed my mind!’
The rig was galloping off down the pike, the rooms of the farmhouse jumped to life, water was boiling for a bath, the coal stove was heating an iron to press the gown, the mother was rushing about with a fringe of hairpins in her mouth. ‘What’s come over you, Ann? You don’t like Tom!’
‘That’s true.’ Ann stopped amidst the great fever.
But it’s spring! thought Cecy.
‘It’s spring,’ said Ann.
And it’s a f
ine night for dancing, thought Cecy.
‘…for dancing,’ murmured Ann Leary.
Then she was in the tub and the soap creaming on her white seal shoulders, small nests of soap beneath her arms, and the flesh of her warm breasts moving in her hands and Cecy moving the mouth, making the smile, keeping the actions going. There must be no pause, no hesitation, or the entire pantomime might fall in ruins! Ann Leary must be kept moving, doing, acting, wash here, soap there, now out! Rub with a towel! Now perfume and powder!
‘You!’ Ann caught herself in the mirror, all whiteness and pinkness like lilies and carnations. ‘Who are you tonight?’
‘I’m a girl seventeen.’ Cecy gazed from her violet eyes. ‘You can’t see me. Do you know I’m here?’
Ann Leary shook her head. ‘I’ve rented my body to an April witch, for sure.’
‘Close, very close!’ laughed Cecy. ‘Now, on with your dressing.’
The luxury of feeling good clothes move over an ample body! And then the halloo outside.
‘Ann, Tom’s back!’
‘Tell him to wait.’ Ann sat down suddenly. ‘Tell him I’m not going to that dance.’
‘What?’ said her mother, in the door.
Cecy snapped back into attention. It had been a fatal relaxing, a fatal moment of leaving Ann’s body for only an instant. She had heard the distant sound of horses’ hoofs and the rig rambling through moonlit spring country. For a second she thought, I’ll go find Tom and sit in his head and see what it’s like to be in a man of twenty-two on a night like this. And so she had started quickly across a heather field, but now, like a bird to a cage, flew back and rustled and beat about in Ann Leary’s head.
‘Ann!’
‘Tell him to go away!’
‘Ann!’ Cecy settled down and spread her thoughts.
But Ann had the bit in her mouth now. ‘No, no, I hate him!’
I shouldn’t have left—even for a moment. Cecy poured her mind into the hands of the young girl, into the heart, into the head, softly, softly. Stand up, she thought.