Quicker Than the Eye (10 page)

Yessss.

Yes 
what?

And then it added:

Soooo...

"How long . . . how long," I murmured, "has it . . . has 
he 
been 
here?"

"No one knows. When Victoria was Queen? When Booth emptied his makeup kit to load his pistol? When Napoleon yellow-stained the Moscow snows? Forever's not bad .

What else?"

I swallowed hard. "Is . . . is he?"

"Dorian? Dorian of the attic? He of the Portrait? And somewhere along the line found portraits not enough? Oil, canvas, no depth. The world needed something that could soak in, sponge the midnight rains, breakfast and lunch on loss, depravity's guilt. Something to truly take in, drink, digest; a pustule, imperial intestine. A rheum oesophagus for sin. A laboratory plate to take bacterial snows. Dorian."

The long archipelago of membranous skin flushed some buried tubes and valves, and a semblance of laughter was throttled and drowned in the aqueous gels.

A slit widened to emit gas and again the single word:

Yessss .

"He's 
welcoming 
you!" My host smiled.

"I know, I know," I said impatiently. "But why? I don't even 
want 
to be here. I'm ill. Why can't we go?"

"Because"-my host laughed-"you were 
selected.

"Selected?"

"We've had our 
eye 
on you."

"You mean you've watched, followed, spied on me? Christ, who gave you 
permission?"

"Temper, temper. Not everyone is picked."

"Who said I 
wanted 
to be picked!?"

"If you could 
see 
yourself as 
we 
see you, you'd know why."

I turned to stare at the vast mound of priapic gelatin in which faint creeks gleamed as the creature wept its lids wide in holes to let it stare. Then all its apertures sealed: the saber-cut mouth, the slitted nostrils, the cold eyes gummed shut so that its skin was faceless. The sibilance pumped with gaseous suctions.

Yessss, 
it whispered.

Lisssst, it murmured.

"And list it 
is!" 
My host pulled forth a small computer pad which he tapped to screen my name, address, and phone.

He glanced from the pad to reel off such items as wilted me.

"Single," he said.

"Married and 
divorced."

"Now 
single! No women in your life?"

"I'm walking wounded."

He tapped his pad. "Visiting strange bars."

"I hadn't noticed."

"Creative blindness. Getting to bed late. Sleeping all day. Drinking heavily three nights a week."

"Twice!"

"Going to the gym, look, 
every day. 
Workouts excessive. Prolonged steam baths, overlong massages. Sudden interest in sports. Endless basketball, soccer, tennis matches 
every 
night, and half the noons. 
That's 
hyperventilation!"

''My 
business!"

"And 
ours! 
You're balanced giddily on the rim. Shove all these facts in that one-armed bandit in your head, yank, and watch the lemons and ripe cherries spin. Yank!"

Jesus God. Yes! Bars. Drinks. Late nights. Gyms. Saunas. Masseurs. Basketball. Tennis. Soccer. Yank. Pull. 
Spin!

"Well?" My host searched my face, amused. "Three jackpot cherries in a row?"

I shuddered.

"Circumstance. No court would convict me."

"This 
court 
elects 
you. We tell palms to read ravenous groins. 
Yes?"

Gas steamed up from one shriveled aperture in the restless mound. 
Yessss.

They say that men in the grip of passion, blind to their own darkness, make love and run mad. Stunned by guilt, they find themselves beasts, having done the very thing they were warned 
not 
to do by church, town, parents, life. In explosive outrage they turn to the sinful lure. Seeing her as unholy provocateur, they kill. Women, in similar rages and guilts, overdose. Eve lies self-slain in the Garden. Adam hangs himself with the Snake as noose.

But here was no passionate crime, no woman, no provocateur, only the great mound of siphoning breath and my blond host. And only words which riddled me with fusillades of arrows. Like an Oriental hedgehog, bristled with shafts, my body exploded with No, No, No. 
Echoed 
and then real:

"No!"

Yessss, 
whispered the vapor from the mounded tissue, the skeleton buried in ancient soups.

    
Yessss.

I gasped to see my games, steams, midnight bars, late-dawn beds: a maniac sum.

I rounded dark corridors to confront a stranger so pockmarked, creased, and oiled by passion, so cobwebbed and smashed by drink, that I tried to avert my gaze. The terror gaped his mouth and reached for my hand. Stupidly, I reached to shake his and-rapped glass! A mirror. I stared deep into my own life. I had seen myself in shop windows, dim undersea men running in creeks. Mornings, shaving, I saw my mirrored health. But 
this! 
This troglodyte trapped in amber. Myself, snapshotted like ten dozen sexual acrobats! And who jammed this mirror at me? My beautiful host, and that corrupt flatulence beyond.

"You are selected," 
they whispered.

"I refuse!" 
I shrieked.

And whether I shrieked aloud or merely thought, a great furnace gaped. The oceanic mound erupted thunders of gaseous streams. My beautiful host fell back, stunned that their search beneath my skin, behind my mask, had brought revulsion. Always when Dorian cried, "Friend," raw gymnast teams had mobbed to catapult that armless, legless, featureless Sargasso Sea. Before they had smothered to drown in his miasma, to arise, embrace, and wrestle in the dark gymnasium, then run forth young to assault a world.

And I? What had I dared to do, that quaked that membranous sac into regurgitated whistling and broken winds?

"Idiot!" cried my host, all teeth and fists. "Out! Out!"

"Out," I cried, spun to obey, and tripped.

I do not clearly know what happened as I fell. And if it was a swift reaction to the holocaust erupted like vile spit and vomit from that putrescent mound, I cannot say. I knew no lightning shock of murder, yet knew perhaps some summer heat flash of revenge. For
what? 
I thought. What are you to Dorian or he to you that frees the hydra behind your face, or causes the slightest twitch of leg, arm, hand, or fingernail, as the last fetid air from Dorian burned my hair and stuffed my nostrils.

It was over in a second.

Something shoved me. Did my secret self, insulted, give that push? I was flung as if on wires, knocked to sprawl at Dorian.

He gave two terrible cries, one of warning, one of despair.

I was recovered so in landing, I did not sink my hands deep in that poisonous yeast, into that multiflorid Man of War jelly. I swear that I touched, raked, scarified him with only one thing: the smallest fingernail of my right hand.

My fingernail!

And so this Dorian was shot and foundered. And so the mammoth with screams collapsed. And so the nauseous balloon sank, fold on midnight fold, upon its own boneless sell, fissuring volcanic sulfurs, immense rectal airs, outgassed whistles, and whimpers of self-pitying despair.

"Christ! What have you 
done!? 
Murderer! Damn you!" cried my host, riven to stare at Dorian's exhaustions unto death.

He whirled to strike, but ran to reach the door and cry, "Lock this! 
Lock! 
Whatever happens, for God's sake, don't 
open! 
Now!" The door slammed. I ran to lock it and turn.

Quietly, Dorian was falling away.

He sank down and down, out of sight. Like a great membranous tent with its poles removed, he vanished into the floor, down flues and vents on all sides of his great platform nest. Vents obviously created for such a massive disease-sac melting into viral fluid and sewer gas. Even as I watched, the last of the noxious clot was sucked into the vents, and I stood abandoned in a room where but a few minutes before an unspeakable strata of discards and half-born fetuses had lain sucking at sins, spoiled bones, and souls to send forth beasts in semblance of beauty. That perverse royalty, that lunatic monarch, gone, all gone. A last choke and throttle from the sewer vent underlined its death.

My God, I thought, even now, that, all that, that terrible miasma, that stuff is on its way to the sea to wash in with bland tides to lie on clean shores where bathers come at dawn ...

Even now ...

I stood, eyes shut, waiting.

For what? There had to be a next thing, yes? It came.

There was a trembling, shivering, and then a quaking of the wall, but especially the golden door behind me.

I spun to see as well as hear.

I saw the door shaken, and then bombarded from the other side. Fists pummeled, struck, hammered. Voices cried out and screamed and then shrieked.

I felt a great mass ram the door to shiver, to slam it on its hinges.

I stared, fearful that the door might explode and let in the flood tide of nightmare-ravening, terrified beasts, the kennel of dying things. For now their shrieks as they mauled and rattled to escape, to beg for mercy, were so terrible that I clamped my fists to my ears.

Dorian was gone, but they remained. Shrieks. Screams. Screams. Shrieks. An avalanche of limbs beyond the door struck and fell, yammering.

What must they look like now? I thought. All those bouquets. All those beauties.

The police will come, I thought, soon. But .

No matter what ...

I would not unlock that door.

It was a day of holocausts, cataclysms, tornadoes, earth-quakes, blackouts, mass murders, eruptions, and miscellaneous dooms, at the peak of which the sun swallowed the earth and the stars vanished.

But to put it simply, the most respected member of the Bentley family up and died.

Dog was his name, and dog he was.

The Bentleys, arising late Saturday morning, found Dog stretched on the kitchen floor, his head toward Mecca, his paws neatly folded, his tail not a-thump but silent for the first time in twenty years.

Twenty years! My God, everyone thought, could it really have been that long? And now, without permission, Dog was cold and gone.

Susan, the younger daughter, woke everyone yelling:

"Something's wrong with Dog. Quick!"

Without bothering to don his bathrobe, Roger Bentley, in his underwear, hurried out to look at that quiet beast on the

kitchen tiles. His wife, Ruth, followed, and then their son Skip, twelve. The rest of the family, married and flown, Rodney and Sal, would arrive later. Each in turn would say the same thing:

"No! Dog was 
forever."

Dog said nothing, but lay there like World War II, freshly finished, and a devastation.

Tears poured down Susan's cheeks, then down Ruth Bentley's, followed in good order by tears from Father and, at last, when it had sunk in, Skip.

Instinctively, they made a ring around Dog, kneeling to the floor to touch him, as if this might suddenly make him sit up, smile as he always did at his food, bark, and beat them to the door. But their touching did nothing but increase their tears.

But at last they rose, hugged each other, and went blindly in search of breakfast, in the midst of which Ruth Bentley said, stunned, "We can't just leave him 
there."

Roger Bentley picked Dog up, gently, and moved him out on the patio, in the shade, by the pool.

"What do we do next?"

"I don't know," said Roger Bentley. "This is the first death in the family in years and-" He stopped, snorted, and shook his head. "I mean-"

"You meant exactly what you said," said Ruth Bentley. "If Dog wasn't family, he was nothing. God, I loved him."

A fresh burst of tears ensued, during which Roger Bentley brought a blanket to put over Dog, but Susan stopped him.

"No, no.1 want to see him. I won't be able to see him ever again. He's so beautiful. He's 
so - old."

They all carried their breakfasts out on the patio to sit around Dog, somehow feeling they couldn't ignore him by eating inside.

Roger Bentley telephoned his other children, whose response, after the first tears, was the same: they'd be right over. Wait.

When the other children arrived, first Rodney, twenty-one, and then the older daughter, Sal, twenty-four, a fresh storm of grief shook everyone and then they sat silently for a moment, watching Dog for a miracle.

"What are your plans?" asked Rodney at last.

"I know this is silly," said Roger Bentley after an embarrassed pause. "After all, he's only a dog-"

"Only!?" 
cried everyone instantly.

Roger had to back off. "Look, he deserves the Taj Mahal. What he'll get is the Orion Pet Cemetery over in Burbank."

"Pet Cemetery!?" cried everyone, but each in a different way.

"My God," said Rodney, "that's silly!"

"What's so 
silly 
about it?" Skip's face reddened and his lip trembled. "Dog, why, Dog was a pearl of. . . rare 
price.

"Yeah!" added Susan.

"Well, pardon me." Roger Bentley turned away to look at the pool, the bushes, the sky. "I suppose I could call those trash people who pick up dead bodies-"

"Trash people?" exclaimed Ruth Bentley.

"Dead bodies?" said Susan. "Dog isn't a 
dead body!"

"What 
is 
he, then?" asked Skip bleakly.

They all stared at Dog lying quietly there by the pool. "He's," blurted Susan at last, "he's . . . he's my 
love!" 
Before the crying could start again, Roger Bentley picked up the patio telephone, dialed the Pet Cemetery, talked, and put the phone down.

"Two hundred dollars," he informed everyone. "Not bad."

"For 
Dog?" 
said Skip. "Not enough!"

"Are you really serious about this?" asked Ruth Bentley.

"Yeah," said Roger. "I've made fun of those places all my life. But, now, seeing as how we'll never be able to visit Dog again-" He let a moment pass. "They'll come take Dog at noon. Services tomorrow."

"Services!" Snorting, Rodney stalked to the rim of the pool and waved his arms. "You won't get me to 
that!"

Everyone stared. Rodney turned at last and let his shoulders slump. "Hell, I'll be there."

"Dog would never forgive you if you didn't." Susan snuffed and wiped her nose.

But Roger Bentley had heard none of this. Staring at Dog, then his family, and up to the sky, he shut his eyes and exhaled a great whisper:

"Oh, my God!" he said, eyes shut. "Do you realize that this is the first terrible thing that's happened to our family? Have we ever been sick, gone to the hospital? Been in an accident?"

He waited.

"No," said everyone.

"Gosh," said Skip.

"Gosh, indeed! You sure as hell notice accidents, sickness, hospitals."

"Maybe," said Susan, and had to stop and wait because her voice broke. "Maybe Dog died just to 
make 
us notice how lucky we are."

"Lucky?!" Roger Bentley opened his eyes and turned. "Yes! You know what we 
are-”

"The science fiction generation," offered Rodney, lighting a cigarette casually.

"What?"

"You rave on about that, your school lectures, or during dinner. Can openers? Science fiction. Automobiles. Radio, TV, films. Everything! So science fiction!"

"Well, dammit, they are!" cried Roger Bentley and went to stare at Dog, as if the answers were there amongst the last departing fleas. "Hell, not so long ago there were no cars, can openers, TV. Someone had to dream them. Start of lecture. Someone had to build them. Mid-lecture. So science fiction dreams became finished science fact. Lecture 
finis!”

"I bet!" 
Rodney applauded politely.

Roger Bentley could only sink under the weight of his son’s irony to stroke the dear dead beast.

"Sorry. Dog bit me. Can't help myself. Thousands of years, all we did is die. Now, that time's over. In sum: science fiction."

"Bull." Rodney laughed. "Stop reading that junk, Dad."

"Junk?" Roger touched Dog's muzzle. "Sure. But how about Lister, Pasteur, Salk? Hated death. Jumped to stop it. That's all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different. Junk?!"

"Ancient history, Pop."

"Ancient?" Roger Bentley fixed his son with a terrible eye. "Christ. When I was born in 1920, if you wanted to visit your family on Sundays you-"

"Went to the 
graveyard?" 
said Rodney.

"Yes. My brother and sister died when I was seven. Half of my family gone! Tell me, dear children, how many of 
your 
friends died while you were growing up. In grammar school? High school?"

He included the family in his gaze, and waited.

"None," said Rodney at last.

"None! You hear that? None! Christ. Six of my best friends died by the time I was ten! Wait! I just remembered!"

Roger Bentley hurried to rummage in a hall closet and brought out an old 78-rpm record into the sunlight, blowing off the dust. He squinted at the label:

"No News, Or What Killed The Dog?"

Everyone came to look at the ancient disc.

"Hey, how old 
is 
that?"

"Heard it a hundred times when I was a kid in the twenties," said Roger.

"No News, Or What Killed The Dog?" Sal glanced at her father's face.

"This gets played at Dog's funeral," he said.

"You're not 
serious?" 
said Ruth Bentley.

Just then the doorbell rang.

"That can't be the Pet Cemetery people come to take Dog-?"

"No!" cried Susan. "Not so 
soon!"

Instinctively, the family formed a wall between Dog and the doorbell sound, holding off eternity.

Then they cried, one more time.

The strange and wonderful thing about the funeral was how many people came.

"I didn't know Dog had so many friends," Susan blubbered.

"He freeloaded all around town," said Rodney.

"Speak kindly of the dead."

"Well, he did, dammit., Otherwise why is Bill Johnson here, or Gert Skall, or Jim across the street?"

"Dog," said Roger Bentley, "I sure wish you could see this."

"He 
does." 
Susan's eyes welled over. "Wherever he is."

"Good old Sue," whispered Rodney, "who cries at telephone books-"

"Shut up!" cried Susan.

"Hush, both of you."

And Roger Bentley moved, eyes down, toward the front of the small funeral parlor where Dog was laid out, head on paws, in a box that was neither too rich nor too simple but just right.

Roger Bentley placed a steel needle down on the black record which turned on top of a flake-painted portable phonograph. The needle scratched and hissed. All the neighbors leaned forward.

"No funeral oration," said Roger quickly. "Just 
this . . 
And a voice spoke on a day long ago and told a story about a man who returned from vacation to ask friends what had happened while he was gone.

It seemed that nothing whatsoever had happened. Oh, just one thing. Everyone wondered what had killed the dog.

The dog? asked the vacationer. My 
dog 
died? Yes, and maybe it was the burned horseflesh did it. Burned 
horseflesh!? 
cried the vacationer. Well, said his informant, when the barn burned, the horseflesh caught fire, so the dog ate the burned horseflesh, died.

The barn!? cried the vacationer. How did it catch fire? Well, sparks from the house blew over, torched the barn, burned the horseflesh, dog ate them, died.

Sparks from the 
house!? 
shouted the vacationer. How-?

It was the curtains in the house, caught fire.

Curtains? Burned!?

From the candles around the coffin.

Coffin!?

Your aunt's funeral coffin, candles there caught the curtains, house burned, sparks from the house flew over, burned down the barn, dog ate the burned horseflesh-In sum: no news, or what killed the dog!

The record hissed and stopped.

In the silence, there was a little quiet laughter, even though the record had been about dogs and people dying.

"Now, 
do we get the lecture?" said Rodney.

"No, a sermon."

Roger Bentley put his hands on the pulpit to stare for long moments at notes he hadn't made.

"I don't know if we're here for Dog or ourselves. Both, I suppose. We're the nothing-ever-happened-to-us people. Today is a first. Not that I want a rush of doom or disease. God forbid. Death, come slowly, please."

He turned the phonograph record round and round in his hands, trying to read the words under the grooves.

"No news. Except the aunt's funeral candles catch the curtains, sparks fly, and the dog goes west. In 
our 
lives, just the opposite. No news for years. Good livers, healthy hearts, good times. So-what's it all 
about?"

Roger Bentley glanced at Rodney, who was checking his wristwatch.

"Someday we must die, also." Roger Bentley hurried on. "Hard to believe. We're spoiled. But Susan was right. Dog died to tell us this, gently, and we 
must 
believe. And at the same time celebrate. What? The fact that we're the start of an amazing, dumbfounding history of survival that will only get better as the centuries pass. You may argue that the next war will take us all. Maybe.

"I can only say I think you will grow to be old, 
very 
old people. Ninety years from now, most people will have cured hearts, stopped cancers, and jumped life cycles. A lot of sadness will have gone out of the world, thank God. Will this be easy to do? No. Will we do it? Yes. Not in all countries, right off. But, finally, in most.

"As I said yesterday, fifty years ago, if you wanted to

visit your aunts, uncles, grandparents, brothers, sisters, the graveyard was it. Death was 
all 
the talk. You 
had 
to talk it. Time's up, Rodney?"

Rodney signaled his father he had one last minute.

Roger Bentley wound it down:

"Sure, kids still die. But not millions. Old folks? Wind up in Sun City instead of marble Orchard."

The father surveyed his family, bright-eyed, in the pews.

"God, look at you! Then look back. A thousand centuries of absolute terror, absolute grief. How parents stayed sane to raise their kids when half of them died, damned if I know. Yet with broken hearts, they did. While millions died of flu or the Plague.

"So here we are in a new time that we can't see because we stand in the eye of the hurricane, where everything's calm.

"I'll shut up now, with a last word for Dog. Because we loved him, we've done this almost silly thing, this service, but now suddenly we're not ashamed or sorry we bought him a plot or had me speak. We may never come visit him, who can say? But he has a place. Dog, old boy, bless you. Now, everyone, blow your nose."

Everyone blew his nose.

"Dad," said Rodney suddenly, "could-we hear the record again?"

Everyone looked at Rodney, surprised.

"Just," said Roger Bentley, "what I was going to suggest."

He put the needle on the record. It hissed.

About a minute in, when the sparks from the house flew over to burn the barn and torch the horseflesh and kill the dog, there was a sound at the back doorway to the small parlor.

Everyone turned.

A strange man stood in the door holding a small wicker basket from which came familiar, small yapping sounds.

And even as the flames from the candles around the coffin caught the curtains and the last sparks blew on the wind

The whole family, drawn out into the sunlight, gathered around the stranger with the wicker basket, waiting for Father to arrive to throw back the coverlet on the small carrier so they could all dip their hands in.