Complete Short Fiction, page 424
What, he wondered, frowning, did the waitress at Aunt Mary’s Breakfast Nook mean when she said that I knew Judith didn’t eat there anymore? It hadn’t struck him before that he didn’t know why. He felt himself on the edge of a discovery. Just before eleven, ignoring the frown of the younger Clayton, he took off a minute to call up Judith at the bookstore. Her father answered, and Marriott was amazed when his question was answered by a dead silence, and then, “Uh, is that you, Paul?”
“Yes, Mr. Garson. Funny thing is I’ve been worried about her all morning and—is she out?”
Silence; finally, “Look, Paul, how about you coming over to the bookstore? I’d like to have a talk with you.”
The older man’s voice sounded quite serious. Paul shrugged and said, “Why, sure, sir. I’ll drop by during my lunch hour.”
His mind was singularly blank the rest of the morning. He ate lunch without appetite, feeling unexpectedly exhausted. I must have worked harder this morning than I realized, he decided.
All afternoon the store swarmed with farmers. Marriott ate his dinner with a better appetite and went to a show to relax. It was not until he was climbing the steps of the house around ten o’clock that he remembered that he hadn’t gone to see Mr. Garson.
“I’ll have to make a point of seeing him tomorrow,” he told himself.
Inside, he turned on the hall light and casually glanced at the living-room door. Instantly his mind leaped to a memory of what he had seen the night before. Marriott shook himself angrily. It was really time he had a look in that room.
The living room was the same as it had been the previous night. For more than four years it had been as empty as the rest of the main part of the house. Now, it was completely furnished. A middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman sat motionless in chairs at opposite sides of the room. The woman was holding a book; the man simply sat. For the full minute that Marriott stood there glaring at them they did not move a finger or look at him. Finally, not knowing what else to do, Marriott closed the door and retreated into the kitchen.
He rekindled the fire, undressed, and crawled into bed. He told himself that he ought to call the police, but he had a curious sense of having seen the people in the room before. If he didn’t know better, he would have identified the woman as Judith as she would be at forty-five. As for the man—
Long after midnight, Marriott awakened with a start, realizing that he had fallen asleep in the middle of a thought, the thought that the man bore an astonishing resemblance to himself as he might be twenty years hence.
He climbed out of bed, turned on the lights, and went to the living room. He half expected to find the scene gone, but it was still there, unchanged, the man and woman occupying exactly the same positions that they had earlier. What was different was his own feeling. Very simply, without fear, he knew that he had to go in and look at the two people.
Unhesitatingly, he stepped across the threshold.
Marriott stirred in Ids chair and glanced at Judith. He had a curious memory of having come into the room that minute, but he knew that he had been sitting beside the window for nearly an hour. He started to dismiss the thought when the unusualness of it penetrated anew.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said aloud, explosively.
Judith looked up from her book. “What’s the matter, darling?”
Marriott hesitated. The remembrance in his mind was beginning to disturb him, and he thought of it suddenly as a private affair.
“Oh, nothing,” he mumbled. “I think I’ll go for a walk before bedtime—as far as the shop,” he added. “See if everything is all right.”
Judith seemed to accept the explanation and the purpose as normal, for she returned to her book. Marriott went out into the hall, put on his hat, and then paused before the mirror. The image that stared back at him was that of a dapper man of fifty. He found the sight more interesting than usual because he studied himself with an intentness that abruptly startled his mind.
What the hell, he thought, an old fellow like me looking for beauty.
Outside, he was amazed to realize he was perspiring. It was a warm night, so he wiped the wetness from his face with his handkerchief and shook his head wonderingly. Am I going to be sick? But he walked to the gate without any sense of nausea and more alive to his surroundings than he had been in many years. The old Marriott place was really deep inside the city now. On either side of the street, in both directions, shop windows glowed with a variety of the glittering atomic lighting. The street sparkled with colors, and two phalanxes of curved street lamps strode into the remote distance to the west, merging finally into a haze of light.
Marriott was pleased with the effect. It was nice living downtown, though there was a time, he recalled, when he had been ashamed of it. Judith’s idea for growing a high hedge of sturdy Carrigana had cut off the house from its environment, making of it a special retreat in the very heart of the business section. Standing there at the gate, Marriott experienced a warm rebirth of regard for Judith. She had refurnished the old Marriott place, rebuilt part of it, and landscaped the grounds. It was strange to think that he had once considered her not good enough to be the wife of a Marriott. He smiled and shook his head ever so slightly. People sometimes had queer ideas about their own importance.
He closed the gate softly and walked deeper into the downtown area. A great peace lay on his spirit, a sense of the goodness of life, the rightness of things as they were. His marriage to Judith had stilled the tumult of doubt about her in his mind long ago now, and the absolute success of the marriage gave him tonight a very special sense of physical and mental completion.
Still thinking about it, he paused at the atomic-energy plant and peered through its towering plexiglass windows. The atomic powerhouse was in a cavern below the level of the street, and he looked down on it. It was a cubic monster in its special concrete and lead cellar; except for its size, it lacked glamor. By far the most interesting adjuncts of the powerhouse were the turbines that radiated from the central cube of the machine in four separate lines of three turbines, each followed by a smaller series of dynamos. In that world of titanic engines human beings looked like small toy people.
Marriott walked on. When he came to Clayton’s Men’s Wear, now a two-story affair of curving glass and subtle lighting, he stopped short.
That’s odd, he thought. For a moment I had the distinct impression that I used to work there.
The night and the walk were like that. Memories of things half forgotten and fantasies that briefly seemed like memories until in amazement he rejected them as having no relation whatsoever to his life. He had married Judith in 1969, after his return from Vietnam, and they had lived an ideal married existence. In 1974 her father died, and immediately Judith’s ideas about the bookstore had been put into effect. It was now a large store that employed six clerks and grossed about ninety thousand dollars a year. Before Judith the store had been lucky to make twenty thousand dollars. Judith was a wonderful businesswoman, a wonderful wife, a wonderful woman.
He was in the yard now. He paused to close the gate behind him with trembling fingers and ran up the steps of the house to the door. Still shaking, he inserted the key in the lock He had a sense of urgency, the absolute conviction that he had to get inside as swiftly as possible. As the door shut gently behind him, he saw by the clock in the hallway that it was after midnight He had been out longer than he intended.
The living-room lights were still on, but Judith had gone to bed. Marriott glanced around the room, baffled by its familiarity. What he had expected to find as a result of his dash had never been clear, and it was even less clear now that he had arrived at his destination. Reluctantly, he switched off the lights and went upstairs. As he passed Judith’s room, which was at the head of the main staircase, she called out to him.
“You may come in and kiss me good night, dear. I’m still awake.”
Marriott hesitated. “What’s the matter with me?” he wondered in agony. “What am I supposed to do?”
That struck him. It was a new idea that he had a purpose on this night. That there was something . . . something at the back of his mind, he could feel But he couldn’t decide what it was.
He opened the door with the cautiousness of a man entering a woman’s bedroom for the first time. Judith had a habit of sleeping without a nightdress, and he didn’t want to surprise her.
A glance at the bed drained his anxiety before it came more than flashingly into his conscious mind. Judith was wearing a blue negligee. Marriott sighed his relief, but her first words made him uneasy.
“Lie down here beside me for a minute,” she said.
Marriott took off his shoes, an automatic action, and stretched out on the unoccupied side of the bed. There were fragments of thoughts in his mind: One of them was a question: What am I here for—in this future world? It was as sharp as that, but it was gone instantly into a hidden corridor of his memory. It remained wispily in the form of unhappiness. From the comers of his eyes, he studied Judith.
Her face showed her age, but she had retained in her body and in her figure a measure of her youth. Her skin was clear and tanned, what he could see of it; and it was a girl’s body that was silhouetted by the covering sheets. Absently, Marriott looked for the knife scar over her heart but the nightgown, though revealing, was of opaque material and hid the area of her heart.
Marriott was disappointed. He had wanted to see the scar, definitely and determinedly wanted to see it . . . With trembling fingers, he reached over, slipped the strap from her left shoulder, and pulled the nightgown away from the scar region.
There was no scar.
His brain throbbed with surmise. Intently, he bent over her, and she must have expected a kiss, for she raised herself expectantly. He drew back, climbed off the bed, and backed toward the door.
“I’m awfully tired,” he said, “I think I’ll go to bed.”
As he hurried out of her bedroom, he did not notice the rag just inside the doorway. He fell with a crash.
Paul Marriott, aged thirty-one, stirred and opened his eyes. He was lying face downward across the threshold of the bedroom at the head of the stairs. There was a bitter chill in the air, and it had penetrated his robe and pajamas. His body felt numb with cold.
As he sat up, he saw that it was broad daylight. Have I been here all night?
It was as he climbed to his feet and glanced into the bleak and unfurnished bedroom that he remembered his dream. He walked slowly down the stairs, frowning over the details. Why did I want to see if there was a scar over her heart? He was downstairs now, and he noticed, thrilled, that the living-room door was open.
He savored the utter emptiness of the room with relief until the icy cold air drove him to the kitchen where he hastily rekindled the fire in the stove and warmed himself at last. A glance out of the window brought another surprise. It had snowed during the night.
At Aunt Mary’s Breakfast Nook he considered the problem—of himself. In his dream about the two older people he had been aware of a purpose. The purpose must have been accomplished because the couple and their world of furniture was gone.
After eating, he walked through the slushy streets trying to remember what he had learned in his solitary psychology course at college that would be helpful now. It was a dim recollection. A few words floated up: neurosis, schizoid, dementia praecox—Hard to imagine anything like that applying to himself. He had been a fool, but not—he smiled deprecatingly—insane. As an example of the former was his surprise when he discovered that factories were being built on the land adjoining his house. He had believed he was leasing it for gardening for the low sum offered. It had turned out to be the sale price. Stupid? Not really. Inexperience.
Marriott came to where he had seen the power plant in the dream. The memory was so vivid that he stopped and stared at the dozen or so dowdy frame houses that now occupied the area—each house with its half acre of land. It was easy to imagine these semi-shacks being torn down and the dazzling, transparent atomic complex rising up where they had been. He visualized the scene as he had observed it: the turbines and dynamos, coming out like begemmed spokes of a wheel from the gigantic cube of lead and concrete that was the visible portion of the “pile.” The consequent structure did seem a little out of place; his vague impression was that all atomic stuff was kept far from villages small or large. In the dream, locational problems had either been solved or ignored.
A glance at his watch drew him out of his reverie. Three minutes to nine. He’d better hurry if he was going to get the store swept out before young Pete arrived.
He was a dozen feet farther along the street when he thought: If he was going to—what? Like a sick man he slowed his pace and dragged on, stunned. The awful memory unfolded before his mind of Paul Marriott sweeping out the Clayton store for four years. But why? Why? What happened?
Marriott faltered to a stop and stood leaning against a light post. The memory, such as it was, that was in his mind was pitiless. In late 1969 Paul Marriott, the last human thread of the once-thriving and important Marriott family, had suddenly lost his forward impetus, had staggered spiritually and fallen into an abyss the nature and depth of which was still blurred in mist. In a frenzy of self-abnegation he had allowed himself to be swindled out of the valuable Marriott land and had humiliated his name and person by becoming the sweeper and the clerk at Clayton’s Men’s Wear.
But what happened to Judith? Marriott shook his head with a numb sense of imminent revelation. He recalled that Judith and he had been engaged. Then—
His brain was registering unevenly as if the thought on the edge of his consciousness was too big for it. He remembered the question Judith’s father had asked the day before. “. . . What started you thinking about her, Paul?”
That hypnotist! Marriott made the positive identification. The man had put him under as a part of his show and had stirred up his subconscious . . . I’ve got to see him . . .
The search was like a dream, his mind darting always faster than his feet and snatching him rudely from half-finished conversations. He had memories of expressmen, bus drivers, theater managers, and hotel clerks gazing after him with offended eyes and frowning faces. He was a man who could not pause for the amenities, but the memory of his madness was mercifully vague, and so it mattered not. At two in the afternoon, when the dulling sky was brighter than it had been in the earlier part of the day, he walked into one more hotel, asked the question—and had his man.
Offstage, Blandar the Magnificent was not quite as Marriott remembered him. He looked smaller and, in his conventional blue suit, unimposing. Under other circumstances Marriott might have guessed him to be a salesman.
“You would like to buy me a drink?” he said.
The intention had not occurred to Marriott, but he made it his own. As they walked into the bar, he found himself explaining the difficult time he had had. “I’ve easily traveled a hundred miles since I left Hampden.”
He saw that Blandar was not going to apologize for his elusiveness. He waited impatiently as the drinks were set up. Blandar drained his with a gulp. “Another,” he said to the bartender. He sipped that one more slowly, but Marriott, who was beginning to guess Blandar’s own difficulty, discreetly left the change from his ten-dollar bill on the counter.
“I seem to remember you now,” Blandar said when Marriott had explained his problem. “You were reluctant to come up, but the young men were determined. I caught an undertone of—” He cocked his head and hesitated—“of unconscious desire to humiliate you.”
He added, “I used to be a practicing psychologist until I discovered I could make more money as a traveling hypnotist—so I didn’t play up to their neuroticism.”
Marriott nodded. He had come to the conclusion that the desire to humiliate him was unconscious. “Everybody,” he said, “has been outwardly kind to me. I suppose people always like to see someone they’ve envied taken down a peg. But what I don’t understand is why did I acquiesce in the degradation?”
“Guilt.”
Marriott could feel himself changing color. “What do you mean?”
He seemed to be in a well of darkness staring up into the light at the other man. The hypnotist’s eyes were unwinking. “This girl, Judith,” he said, “when did you last see her?”
“Why—I don’t remember.” He was swaying. Funny, I feel as if Tm going to faint.
“The nature of your hallucination,” Blandar said, “opens up one more potentiality of hypnotism. Personally, I have yet to find the end of its many possibilities. Most people escape into amnesia or into the past when they meet a situation they cannot face. Your first move was amnesia, but when you started to come out of that, you were confronted by a problem. In your case the past was a very special one. Those were the days when your family was important. Couldn’t solve your guilt there. So you looked for your answer in the future.” Blandar frowned. “Tell me that part again. It sounded . . . unlifelike . . . to me. But I can’t quite put my finger on it.”
It was like drawing aside a curtain to a secret room, as if his mind had an awful suspicion that it was going to be penetrated to the uttermost. Blandar sipped two drinks while he listened and another drink while he thought it over.
“I have a habit,” he said at last, “of telling a deep trance subject that the next time he gives me permission to hypnotize him he’ll go under when I snap my fingers and say, ‘Sleep!’ I don’t recall doing that to you, but I must have. May I hypnotize you?”
