The Visible Man and Other Stories (19 page)

He opened his eyes. Reality came back: in a babble, in a rush, mildly nauseating. He ignored it, dazed and incandescent with the promise of the night ahead. The world steadied. He stepped back into the shower stream to wash the soap from his body. He had an enormous erection. Clumsily, he tried to hide it with a towel.

Mason takes a taxi home from work. The first time.

That night he is transformed, ripped out of himself, turned inside out. It is pleasure so intense that, like pain, it cannot be remembered clearly afterward—only recollected as a severe shock: sensation translated into a burst of fierce white light. It is pleasure completely beyond his conception—his most extreme fantasy not only fulfilled but intensified. And yet for all the intensity of feeling, it is a gentle thing, a knowing, a complete sharing of emotion, a transcendental empathy. And afterward there is only peace: a silence deeper than death, but not alone.
I love you
, he tells her, really believing it for the first time with anyone, realizing that words have no meaning, but knowing that she will understand,
I love you
.

When he woke up in the morning, he knew that this would be the day.

Today she would come. The certainty pulsed through him, he breathed it like air, it beat in his blood. The knowledge of it oozed in through every pore, only to meet the same knowledge seeping out. It was something felt on a cellular level, a biological assurance. Today they would be together.

He looked at the ceiling. It was pocked with water stains; a deep crack zigzagged across flaking plaster. It was beautiful. He watched it for a half hour without moving, without being aware of the passage of time; without being aware that what he was watching was a “ceiling.” Then, sluggishly, something came together in his head, and he recognized it. Today he didn’t begrudge it, as he had Wednesday morning. It was a transient condition. It was of no more intrinsic importance than the wall of a butterfly’s cocoon after metamorphosis.

Mason rolled to his feet. Fatigue and age had vanished. He was filled with bristly, crackling vitality, every organ, every cell, seeming to work at maximum efficiency: so healthy that “healthy” became an inadequate word. This was a newer, higher state.

Mason accepted it calmly, without question. His movements were leisurely and deliberate, almost slow motion, as if he were swimming through syrup. He knew where he was going, that they would find each other today—that was predestined. He was in no hurry. The same inevitability colored his thoughts. There was no need to do much thinking now, it was all arranged. His mind was nearly blank, only deep currents running. Her nearness dazzled him. Walking, he dreamed of her, of time past, of time to come.

He drifted to the window, lazily admiring the prism sprays sunlight made around the edges of the glass. The streets outside were empty, hushed as a cathedral. Not even birds to break the holy silence. Papers dervished down the center of the road. The sun was just floating clear of the brick horizon: a bloated red ball, still hazed with nearness to the earth.

He stared at the sun.

Mason became aware of his surroundings again while he was dressing. Dimly, he realized that he was buckling his belt, slipping his feet into shoes, tying knots in the shoelaces. His attention was caught by a crisscross pattern of light and shadow on the kitchen wall.

He was standing in front of the slaughterhouse. Mason blinked at the building’s filigreed iron gates. Somewhere in there, he must have caught the bus and ridden it to work. He couldn’t remember. He didn’t care.

Walking down a corridor. A machine booms far away.

He was in an elevator. People. Going down.

Time clock.

A door. The dressing room, deep in the plant. Mason hesitated. Should he go to work today? With Lilith so close? It didn’t matter—when she came, Lilith would find him no matter where he was. It was easier meanwhile not to fight his body’s trained responses; much easier to just go along with them, let them carry him where they would, do what they wanted him to do.

Buttoning his work uniform. He didn’t remember opening the door, or the locker. He told himself that he’d have to watch that.

A montage of surprised faces, bobbing like balloons, very far away. Mason brushed by without looking at them. Their lips moved as he passed, but he could not hear their words.

Don’t look back. They can turn you to salt, all the hollow men.

The hammer was solid and heavy in his hand. Its familiar weight helped to clear his head, to anchor him to the world. Mason moved forward more quickly. A surviving fragment of his former personality was eager to get to work, to demonstrate his regained strength and vigor for the other men. He felt the emotion through an ocean of glass, like ghost pain in an amputated limb. He tolerated it, humored it; after today, it wouldn’t matter.

Mason walked to the far end of the long white room. Lilith seemed very close now—her nearness made his head buzz intolerably. He stumbled ahead, walking jerkily, as if he were forcing his way against waves of pressure. She would arrive any second. He could not imagine how she would come, or from where. He could not imagine what would happen to him, to them. He tried to visualize her arrival, but his mind, having only Disney, sci-fi and religion to work with, could only picture an ethereally beautiful woman made of stained glass descending from the sky in a column of golden light while organ music roared: the light shining all around her and from her, spraying into unknown colors as it passed through her clear body. He wasn’t sure if she would have wings.

Raw daylight through the open end of the room. The nervous lowing of cattle. Smell of dung and sweat, undertang of old, lingering blood. The other men, looking curiously at him. They had masks for faces, viper eyes. Viper eyes followed him through the room. Hooves scuffed gravel outside.

Heavy-lidded, trembling, he took his place.

They herded in the first cow of the day, straight up to Mason. He lifted the hammer.

The cow approached calmly. Tranquilly she walked before the prods, her head high. She stared intently at Mason. Her eyes were wide and deep—serene, beautiful, and trusting.

Lilith, he named her, and then the hammer crashed home between her eyes.

The Man Who Waved Hello

THE WORLD SOLIDIFIED.

He was Harry Bradley, Caucasian, thirty-seven years of age, of certifiably good character. A junior executive—grade GS 8, $10,000 a year, Readjusted Scale—who had been a junior executive since he was thirty and would be a junior executive until he died in harness or was forcibly retired to a Senior Citizen’s Haven (you can get in but you can’t get out). His apartment measured thirty feet by thirty feet by twelve feet, and was decorated in the pseudocolonial that was popular that year, everything made out of plastic and scaled down. He had plush red artificial fabric drapes across a picture window that looked out at nothing except acres of other picture windows looking back. The window measured exactly sixteen inches by twenty-four inches, no more or no less than any other picture window owned by any other executive of his grade and seniority. That was only fair; that was democracy. He had a solar-powered kitchenette that could cook him almost anything in five minutes, but he was very seldom hungry. He had paneled walls made out of artificial wood. He had a fireplace with a simulated fire that was actually a (safe; economical) electric coil; you could turn it on and off with a switch and plug it into the wall socket. He had a “colonial” chandelier (scaled-down) that was made of a plastic that you almostcouldn’ttellfromrealglass, and that would sway and tinkle convincingly if you turned the air conditioner up high. He had (although he didn’t know it this precisely) the 152,673rd copy of a Cezanne print to be run off the presses that year, and the 98,435th copy of a Van Gogh—both pictures were hung magnetically so that the uniform creme luster of the walls would not have to be marred by a nail. He wasn’t allowed to mar the walls anyway, and if he did he would have to explain it in writing, in triplicate, in exasperating detail. There was also a large Rembrandt (copy number into the high millions) that he didn’t like but which was government issue and had come with the apartment, and which his contract didn’t allow him to get rid of. He had a silent electric clock with a built-in optional tick. He had a combination viewphone/color hologram (but he didn’t want to think about that now: later) that enabled him to either talk to people (other executives) or watch commercial (government) programming. He had a table shaped like an old sailing-ship wheel that you could put cocktails on and spin around. He had a simulated antique colonial lantern for a conversation piece. He had an automatic stereo with a selection of twenty-three classical symphonies and six uninterrupted hours of interpreted popular music that he never listened to. If he wanted, he could use his viewphone to talk to people on the moon via the communications satellite linkups. There was nobody on the moon he wanted to talk to. Nobody on the moon wanted to talk to him either.

He was Harry Bradley. There was no way to avoid it.

He lay perfectly still in the middle of the floor.

He was naked.

Sweat dried on his body, and his breath came in rasps.

Bradley struggled weakly, flopped over onto his stomach. The tile was unbelievably cold against his wet skin, and hard as rock; his flesh crawled in revulsion at the contact. He managed to raise himself up on one elbow before his head began to swim. He paused, head bowed, panting, involuntarily studying the dirt in the cracks between the tiles. For a moment there he had been two people, living two different existences in two separate environments, and that’d been rough. He was still having trouble separating realities—conflicting memories chittered at him, emotions surged in opposition, lingering afterimages merged nauseously with vision: one universe still superimposed over another like a double-exposed negative. But one universe was fading. The universe he preferred, the universe where he wasn’t doomed to be Harry Bradley, junior executive, grade GS 8, $10,000 a year. Even as he struggled to hold onto it, to
something
, it slipped away irrevocably. His dream universe melted and flowed back into the well behind his eyes, to be replaced by the gray, familiar scenes of reality that boiled up like landscapes in bubbles.

The rococo opulence of the other place was gone: supplanted by a plastic sterility that was worse than poverty.

He shook his head ponderously, wincing at the rasp of pain. Even memory had gone now. All he could recall of the other place was a vague impression of abstract beauty and richness, and that there he had been important, an integral part of totality. That it was a better place than here.

The electric clock in the kitchen ticked noisily, each tick a nail pinning him more tightly to the world.

A furnace started with a roar on a lower level.

His throat was clogged with sandpaper.

He had taken the egomorphic drug two hours ago: ten thousand years of subjective existence.

He began to shake, trembling uncontrollably. The cold of the apartment was getting through now, piercing like knives. His teeth chattered painfully together. His lips were turning blue.

With an effort, he sat up. The floor tilted queasily, first one way and then the other, like a seesaw. He put his head between his knees for awhile. The room steadied. He heard the elevator swarm by outside his walls: a snide ratcheting sound.

Don’t think. Just don’t think at all.

Slowly, he got to his knees, and then crawled to his feet. It was easier than he’d thought it would be, if he stopped at every stage to rest. It only took him about five minutes.

He was finally able to stand. The shift in perspective was amazing, and frightening. Suddenly, he felt like he was balancing on a tightrope above an abyss, like he was a taffy-man that’d been stretched out to miles in length and was now in danger of toppling over because he was too thin for his height. His knees kept giving way, and he kept trying to lock them. The taffy-man swayed precariously, as if in a high wind.

Incongruously, he still had an erection. It slapped awkwardly and painfully against his thighs as he moved. He touched it cautiously: the pallid head. Nausea surged through him.

Bradley stumbled toward the bathroom, teeth clenched to keep back the vomit that had suddenly geysered up from the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t feel his feet, although he could see his toes stubbing clumsily against pieces of furniture, and knew that it must hurt. He floated—or slid—down the slowly tilting floor toward the bathroom, using his head as a gyroscope. One foot in front of the other, only momentum to keep you from toppling into the abyss.

The bathroom door irised aside to let him through. He crashed to his knees before the voider, not feeling the jolt. He leaned into the voider and vomited violently, bringing up only an oily, greenish bile. Triggered by his presence, the bathroom began to play soothing Muzak—woodwinds and strings—and to fill the cubicle with subtly perfumed incense: sandalwood. It was all very modern.

Bradley worked his way through the dry heaves and shuddered into stillness. He retched one final, wrenching time and then knelt quietly, his head resting on the lip of the voider. It chuckled cheerfully and energetically to itself, busy digesting his vomit. His stomach spasmed retroactively; muscles fluttered in sympathy along his bowed back. Sweat had drawn itself primly into precise beads on his upper lip.

Throwing up had cleared his head, and made him aware of his body again, but otherwise had not helped much. He still felt horrible.

Don’t think why, don’t get on that at all. Just keep moving, get the blood going a little. Or die, damn you. Die and rot in hell forever.

Christ.

He went back out into the hall, cursing feebly at the bathroom door as it dilated open and closed behind him. Retching him out. The apartment was warmer—the thermostat reacting in obedience to his own body temperature, shutting down as his temperature dropped in the stasis induced by the egodrex, revving up again as he returned reluctantly to life. Very clever, these clockwork things. They always functioned, no matter what. Automatically he picked up the clothes he had scattered around when the drug had started to depress the higher-reasoning centers of his brain, translating his undermind directly into experience. He threw the clothes into the hamper that led to the building’s reconstituting systems. They’d be pulped and treated and made usable again. So would his vomit. Now that it was almost too late, the government was very big on ecology. Good to the last drop.

There was a full-length mirror (convertible to one way so he could peek into the corridor outside) near the hamper. He studied his nakedness with distaste: fish-belly white, flabby, bristly-haired as a dog. His erection had finally gone down, but now it looked like some obscene, wrinkled slug crawling from a nest of dirty, matted hair. He felt a touch of returning nausea. New clothes. Get dressed. The fresh cloth feeling even more stifling against his dirty skin, but never mind. Cover it all up. Before it begins to decompose.

Dressed, he walked aimlessly into the kitchen, past the sailing-ship wheel. The big electric combination clock blinked relentlessly at him from the wall: hour, day, month, year. Calibrated to a tenth of a second. Never let you forget. Why did anybody need to know the time that closely? Why did anybody need time? Despite himself, he read the clock dials, scanning left to right in reflex. Christ, only five P.M.? Work tomorrow. Back to the office, the tapes, the papers, the meaningless files of numbers, punch cards to be sorted. Routing. And Martino promoted over him, in spite of seniority. The second time. Time. All the hours left in this day, all the days left ahead. Unrequited time hung over him like a rock, threatening to fall.

This was going to be bad. This was going to be very bad.

Suddenly, Bradley was having trouble with his breathing. He tried not to think of the seconds turning into minutes into hours into days into weeks into months into years, all ahead of him, all of which he’d have to somehow get through. He thought of them anyway, ticking them off one by one inside his skull. This was going to be too bad to stand. He’d have to. He couldn’t possibly get any more egodrex until Friday. That’d been his regular fix for three years. And he couldn’t afford it anyway—it already took every cent of the small credit margin he was allowed for accessories, illegally transferred, to buy his weekly dose of the egomorphic. But this was bad. He felt another, familiar pressure building up, forcing him toward the other thing. No, not this time. Don’t think about the other thing. Don’t think.

He took stock of his body, to distract himself. He found, to his disgust, that he was hungry. His body was hungry. He wasn’t actually in need of nutrient, and his mind gagged at the thought of eating, but the food he lived on—like most of the government’s products—was mildly addictive (habit-forming was the official term, not addictive) and his body wanted to eat. Chew and swallow: a pacifier. Resignedly, he punched out a combination on the kitchenette at random, not caring what he got. The kitchenette mumbled, the solar oven buzzed briefly, and a tray slid out of a slot, sealed in tinfoil. He peeled away the tinfoil and ate. The food was divided into tiny geometrical sections on the tray, a glob of that here, a spatter of this there. It all tasted basically the same: like plastic. Bradley ate it without noticing it, trying to involve himself to distract his mind from the other thing, failing.

It wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough.

He put down his fork. Hands cupping the eyes, squeezing. Keep it in.

Maybe you’re finished this time. You’re going to do it again, aren’t you? No. Yes, you will, you know it. (He shook his head, arguing with himself.) Maybe they’ll catch you this time. Maybe they’ll just put you away. Rot in the darkness, no light. Maybe they’ll just put you the hell away. Huh? Degradation. Disgrace. You’ve been lucky all these years, in a way. Nobody’s ever found out about the egomorphic drug—only psychologically addictive, no needle-marks, no lasting metabolic effects: the thinking man’s junk. But someday they’ll catch you. Maybe this time. Today.

Bradley got up and walked stiff-legged around the apartment, circling around and around his furniture, looking but carefully not touching anything. His furniture.
His
things. He said. They weren’t really. The apartment and everything in it belonged to the government. The exchange was automatic. He never saw any money, there wasn’t really any such thing as money anyway. The bank computers balanced the credit tally he earned against the credit debit he owed to rent the good things in life a GS 8 was entitled to. Nothing more or less. Food, clothing, antique lanterns—the government allowed him to rent these things from them as reward and compensation for his services. There was no place else you could get any of them. There was only one game in town. If he rose to a higher grade, he would be allowed to rent more good things from the government, of correspondingly finer quality. And when he died, the government would continue to rent the same facilities to someone just up from GS 7, including the same reprocessed food and clothing—although in practice there was an inevitable attrition rate, a little always lost from the system, something else added.

My things. God save me from my things.

He looked out the window: Washington faded into Baltimore into New York into Boston.

There was no place to go. Outside the door, along the corridor, down the elevators and escalators, past the concrete arcades and recycled fountains, past the glass-and-steel hives of the other GS residences, past the drabber cinderblock sections for the rank-and-file, past the cadet nurseries and creches, the tank and algae farms, the oxygen reinforcement systems, the industrial quarter, the rec areas, the outer maintenance rim, then the edge of the megalopolis. And beyond that: only anarchy and death. And the armed patrols, walls, minefields and barbed wire that guarded the City from chaos. No way out that way, not at all.

And no one else there. In all the four hundred miles of the City, in all the raped lands beyond, no one else there. No one here but him.

He sobbed, gasping air. Isolation filled his lungs like syrup.

He would do it now, it was too late to stop. Suicide? He thought briefly of suicide, of hurtling himself down from his window and falling forever until the ground caught him. No, he was too scared. Too afraid to be alone. He would do the other thing instead, as he always did.