The Light at The End of The Universe -, page 20
And the announcer’s voice: “There’s nothing like family life to make a man of you, is there? Another meditation scene for Americans, presented by the Ancient and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ, Pragmatist.”
After that third one Harrison burst panting into Luck-man’s office, pounding the OFF button on the nerve-shot adman’s desk secretary to shut up its officious protests at his intrusion, and shouting at Luckman, “Are you crazy? Are you crazy? What’s the matter with you? I ask you to do me a nice religious series, wholesome stuff in the public ’ interest, and what do I get? Smut, filth and violence, that’s what I get. Bloody dorks right on camera, Christ you’re supposed to be an artist, couldn’t you just suggest that without putting it right up there for everybody in the country to see? And there were kids screwing right out in the open in that one, too; you think you’re doing spots for the educational networks? I won’t even tell you what I think of that thing with the guy shtupping his own daughter. That’s filth, Luckman, and worse than that, it’s bush! Strictly Anchorage local. You got a daughter? Nah, you don’t; if you did you’d know that fathers don’t screw then-own daughters. I got three daughters, Luckman; you think I ever snuck into one of them? Hell no. Nice little asses, too, don’t think they aren’t, but I never did nothing and you know why? Because I’m their father for Chrissake; they could have babies with gills or something. And I’ll tell you, my wife wasn’t too overjoyed with that thing about childbirth, either. You can imagine.”
Luckman sat through all of this numbly, the creative intensity of the past few weeks having drained him of all emotion. He hardly knew what his bald-topped little boss was talking about; as far as he was concerned those scenes he’d shot were as true to life as they came. He wondered momentarily what the odds would be on his making Harrison see that the ads were in the reputable long line of ashcan art, gritty realism, stark depictions of reality without everything prettied up. He could say, “Look, a real artist can’t get into how his public will react,” but he figured Harrison might argue about that too. He could point to his awards, but he had little confidence in their convincing power, since he wasn’t impressed with how much they said himself. He decided to hear the little man out in hopes that eventually they could reach a meeting of minds.
But Harrison said, “I’ll tell you what I’m doing, Luck-man, I’ve already ordered those ads off the air from this moment on, and I’ve had the tapes locked up in the vault as evidence, and my lawyers are drawing up a suit against you right this minute. I don’t know how you’re going to pay the damages, Luckman, especially since I’m firing you as of this instant, but I don’t care either. You get your stuff out of this office by tonight, and turn in your key to the executives’ washroom too. Right now, Luckman; hand it over.” Red-faced and sweating, Harrison held out his hand, and Luckman, after staring uncomprehendingly for a few seconds, slowly drew out his key chain and extracted the one to the top-level urinal banks.
“I want you out of here tonight,” Harrison said as he strode with big steps to the door. “I won’t have a filth-merchant one more day in my office.”
After he’d gone Luckman sat for a long time at his desk, thinking vaguely that he ought to get mad or break something or at the very least throw some good swearing after the narrow-minded old company president, but he was too exhausted to manage anything more than a querulous “Peepee-doodoo.”
Luckman hung around the office all afternoon, slowly wandering the Monsantoclover halls, pointedly ignored by writers, technicians and receptionists alike. He tried to make it through the day without having to pee, reluctant to wind up his stay with the company by taking a leak in the common bathrooms, but toward four o’clock his bladder let him know that it had gone the distance for him so he made his shamefaced way to the outer hall lavatory, where as he fumbled with his codpiece he was attacked by a gang of young thugs from the mailroom.
Shouting “filthy old fart” and “establishment propagandist” they began to pummel him with heavy package-carrying fists, jabbing and kicking and pounding him like a bunch of Roman mailmen beating up Julius Caesar. “That’s an unfair picture of kids today,” said one of them as he kneed Luckman in the uncodded groin, and Luckman, groaning as he fell, gasped, “It was art, you can’t beat up a man just because you don’t go for ashcan art,” but this didn’t stop them and he took a lot of pavement-worn shoeleather in the face. He felt his nose break like a firecracker going off, and the hard white tiles of the lavatory floor tilted off toward infinity. He fell into a silent void, but the mailroom louts managed to find him .for several more shots in the ribs as he went.
At the hospital, near death in an oxygen bed, Luckman vaguely heard his aging nurse tell him, as she roughly rolled him over in order to make his bed, that the older members of the staff had pulled strings to get him into a maximum-security ward where the young interns could be kept away from him. There was a guard at the door, she told him, who was guaranteed no younger than sixty, and his doctor was just two weeks away from enforced retirement, so he could count on all the protection the hospital could dish up.
“Confidentially,” she said, “I’d like to know where you got those shots in the delivery room. Was that a Caesarian?”
“Ashcan art,” Luckman managed to say between puffed and bandaged lips. His liver-spotted old nurse squared off a comer of the sheet and said, “Listen, do you think I could make it as a character actress if you got me a break? I’d like to get out of nursing, too many people die on me.”
But Luckman went into a coma and couldn’t continue the conversation. When he came out of it, a dark time later, his wife Cora was at his bedside, her hair dyed in red, white and blue streaks and tiny gold stars on her teeth; she said, “Don’t get your hopes up, Sam. I just came by to let you know I’m divorcing you on grounds of insanity. I figured it was the least I could do to tell you myself, I mean in honor of all we used to mean to each other.”
His son was there too, wearing a see-through codpiece with at least two dozen notches marked down the side. “I’m changing my name,” he muttered. “No more of that Sergei crap. “I’m changing my last name too, so people won’t think I’m related to you.”
“We came to pay our last respects,” Cora said. “The doctors say you’ve about had it. You don’t mind my telling you that, do you?” Luckman tried to protest that he’d be up and around in a couple of days, with plenty of years left in him for trailblazing aluminum-siding commercials, but his face seemed to be tied down.
“Shall I have you cremated?” Cora asked. “A real funeral would be a financial burden on me as your widow, you know. Anyway you don’t look too handsome right now, with those tubes in you and all. You were a real looker when you were young, remember? Before you got fat and your putz shrank.”
“I’m bored here,” said Sergei, and he started fooling around with his mother’s tightened little rump. Cora got to breathing hard so the kid tossed her skirt up and muscled Luckman to one side of the bed so he could climb into Cora right there. Cora giggled and thoughtfully held Luck-man’s hand as she spread her legs, then the sullen wiry kid was pumping into her like a jackhammer and Luckman, horrified, whispered, “In and out, in and out, it’s all God, isn’t it” But Sergei said, “I’m God. I’m the Son.” Luckman wondered at what point he’d passed into a delirium. He sank back into the bedding as darkness closed in, receded, surrounded him again. At last he fell into dark flames, murmuring, “Oh shit.”
As I explained earlier, sometimes I carry story ideas in my head for years before I begin to write them. “Stanley Toothbrush” is another example; I got the original idea for this in 1959, during an evening of barhopping in North Beach with Gordy Dickson, Poul Anderson and some other people. At one point Gordy was talking at length about whittling—I think he was having a Serious Intellectual Discussion with someone about whether or not whittling fulfilled the same artistic function as sculpting.
Well, Gordy said the word “whittling” so often that it ceased to have any meaning to me—all I heard was a pair of preposterous-sounding syllables: “whitt-ling, whitt-ling.” I turned to Poul and said, “I don’t believe in the word ‘whittling.’” And I launched into a description of a story that I’d just then decided to write some day, about this fellow who has strange psi powers and one day he gets to thinking about the word “shelf’ and decides that he doesn’t believe in it. “And at that moment,” I said, “there’s a godawful crashing all over the house as all the shelves disappear and things come tumbling down. And the story goes on from there, with more and more things ceasing to exist as he stops believing in their names.”
Poul nodded and said he knew what I meant about how words can lose their meanings if you hear them too often. He said “gasoline” was the least believable word he’d ever heard: “Think of those ridiculous sounds…gass-oh-leen. And backwards it’s ’enilosag.’ Sounds like a patent medicine from Indiana.”
A thought struck me when he said that. “Did you come here in your car?” I asked. Poul said yes. “Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to walk home,” I said, “because all the gasoline in your car just disappeared.”
But Poul shook his head. “No no,” he said; “we have a Morris Minor, which uses petrol. I believe in petrol.”
It was, as you can see, just an idle, rather silly conversation in a bar, at a time when I hadn’t yet managed to write any stories good enough to sell professionally. But when I did begin to sell stories a couple of years later, I remembered that conversation and wrote “Stanley Toothbrush.”
(The character “Stanley Toothbrush” was based on a real person, by the way, though I never met him. Friends of mine had told me many wild stories of the doings of Stanley Toothbrush, whom they called that because they didn’t know his last name but he always carried a toothbrush in his pocket. Some of the least likely things in fantasy stories are quite real.)
STANLEY TOOTHBRUSH
The trouble was, Herbert decided as he stared baggily into the mirror, that Joanie just didn’t understand about mornings. It was very important in this workaday world to understand mornings: Each day of the week had a different character, and you had to bear that in mind. Monday, of course, was just awful—it was hopeless morning, when you had five days of work stretching like parallel lines out to eternity or infinity or Friday when they would at last meet Tuesday was a foggy morning, when the lines were blurred and you didn’t want to think about it By Wednesday you were caught up in the office environment and it seemed somehow, unthinkingly, reasonable that you should spend most of your life doing something you didn’t want to do, but Thursday was anxious morning, when it began to dawn on you anew that salvation Friday was coming. And Friday morning was the worst; that was the day when you could no longer resist measuring your sentence in hours.
Today was Friday, and to make it worse Joanie had kept him up till two that morning. A movie, a few drinks afterward at her apartment, and then she’d insisted on just walking around for over an hour, talking. Herbert lathered up his face and painfully began to scratch off the night’s accumulation of beard.
He was in a quandary. If he put his foot down and told Joanie right out that he had to get more sleep on week-nights, she’d just get mad and refuse to see him at all, most likely. But if he continued to take her out every night, missing sleep and stumbling around the office the next day like a badly engineered windup toy, it wouldn’t be long before he was dismissed. Either way, he’d soon be on the shelf…shelved by Joanie or shelved by Mr. Blackburn.
His brain seemed fuzzy, and he found himself thinking irrationally about how silly that expression was. “On the shelf*…a ridiculous metaphor. In the first place the word “shelf’ was ridiculous all by itself. He ran the word through his brainclouds several times—shelf, shelf, shelf. It didn’t make sense; it was just a random collection of sounds. Did human animals really go around all the time trying to communicate with such pointless sounds? Shelf, shelf.
There was a terrible crashing and banging all through his apartment, and Herbert nearly took off his left nostril with the razor.
He ran out of the bathroom to find out what had happened, heedless of the soapsuds dripping on his living-room rug. The noise had come mostly from the kitchen, and he went there first He found his dishes (the ones that had been washed and put away) all over the floor in pieces; cans of soup and chili and jars of instant coffee and salad dressing were scattered at his feet. The cupboard doors stood open, one of them still swinging on its hinges.
There was obviously no one else in the apartment, so it must have been an earthquake or something, he decided. He hadn’t felt it but then in his condition this morning that wasn’t surprising. He stood staring at the mess and decided that he had a headache too.
Well, there was nothing to do but clear it up. He stooped and began loading cans in his arms, thinking about how much it would cost him to replace the broken dishes, and when he went to put the cans back in the cupboard he found that there were no shelves left.
They weren’t anywhere on the floor either; they had disappeared. No shelves? But that was silly. He opened the refrigerator and a head of lettuce rolled out onto the floor and a can of beer fell on his foot. The shelves in the refrigerator had vanished, too.
Herbert didn’t like this at all. He put the cans of soup down, kicked some dishes into a corner, and checked the closets. The shelves were gone there too. The bookcase by the door had collapsed, emptying onto the floor two dozen mysteries, short-story collections by Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner, and numerous books on sex in history, secret societies, and the like. When he went back into the bathroom he found that the shelves in the medicine cabinet had gone too, and half his supply of hair tonic was dripping into the sink.
He stood and pondered for a minute. Now let’s see…he had been shaving and thinking about Joanie, and then he had decided that the word “shelf’ was…unbelievable. And all the shelves had disappeared, just like that. It was a perfectly clear chain of circumstances.
He decided this was a hell of a way to start a Friday morning.
There wasn’t much he could do right now; he was already late at the office. He hurriedly finished shaving, left his razor in the sink, put on a tie, and went to work.
When he entered the office, Marcia frowned at him from behind the switchboard, so he knew Mr. Blackburn was mad. He hung up his coat (noticing that the shelves hadn’t disappeared from the closets here) and hurried to his desk.
In a moment the phone rang. “Mr. Blackburn would like you to step into his office,” Marcia said.
Herbert went in, carrying with him the list of Los Angeles newspapers he had contacted for the Paperap ads. He didn’t suppose he could change the subject, but he might as well try.
“Here’s the list you wanted,” he said briskly. “I’m not sure about the advisability of this Pasadena thing, but—”
“I wanted that list yesterday,” Mr. Blackburn said calmly. “Put it down there. Why were you late this morning?”
“I’m sorry, sir; I had a little trouble at home.”
“What kind of trouble?”
All my shelves blinked out of existence, Herbert said in his mind, trying it on for size. No, that wouldn’t do at all.
“I cut myself shaving. Couldn’t stop the bleeding for almost an hour—must have hit a vein or something. A wonder I didn’t bleed to death, sir, ha ha, then I would have been really late getting in.”
Mr. Blackburn stared coldly at him. “See that it doesn’t happen again,” he said. “We don’t want our employees cutting their throats every morning. Now go away.”
Herbert went away. He sat at his desk for ten minutes thinking that he would really have to be sure to come in on time for the next several days. No more nonsense like this morning. And then he sat back in his chair and wondered how one went about seeing that his shelves didn’t disappear.
Well, it had happened because he’d decided that “shelf” was a nonsensical word. Presumably it could happen again if he got to thinking about some other words. That newspaper list he’d given to Mr. Blackburn, for instance—what if that had disappeared? After all—noos-pay-per-list was pretty silly too. But he’d better not think about that
His phone rang. “Mr. Blackburn would like you to step into his office,” Marcia said.
“Yes, I know,” said Herbert, knowing. He went in.
“Where’s that list you just gave me?” said Mr. Black-bum.
“I’ll look for it again,” he said and walked slowly back to his desk. He sorted through various sheets of paper on his desktop and in his drawers and within half an hour was able to make up a duplicate, which he gave to Mr. Black-bum.
Then he sat at his desk and frowned. He didn’t like this one bit. He’d read a little about wild talents, of course—people who could tell what cards were before they were turned over, people who could control the roll of dice, who could read minds or see into the future. They were usually erratic, undependable, and often useless—like the lady in Pennsylvania who could, tell where every frog within ten miles was at any given time, or the man out in Idaho who could hear the radiation from stars. It was undoubtedly something to do with the unused four fifths of the brain—at least, that was as close as Herbert could come to a rational explanation of it. Something probably caused it.
