The Visible Man and Other Stories (22 page)

When he thought about it at all, he supposed that he must be having a breakdown. But that seemed much too harsh a word. “Breakdown,” “cracking-up,” “flying to pieces,” “losing your grip”—they were all such dramatic, violent words. None of them seemed appropriate to describe what was happening to him: a slackening, a loosening, a slow sliding away, an almost imperceptibly gradual relinquishment of the world. A very quiet thing. A fall into soot and silence.

Dawn was a dirty gray imminence behind drawn curtains.

Outside it was by now a cold and gritty early spring, but Paul never noticed. He never looked out any of the windows during all his months of seclusion, not even once, and he kept the curtains drawn at all times.

A needle-thin sliver of daylight came in through the crack in the curtains. Slow as a glacier, it lengthened out across the floor to touch the couch where Paul sat.

A toilet flushed on the floor above. After a moment or two, a water tap was turned on somewhere, and the water pipes knocked and rattled all the way down the length of the building. Footsteps going down the stairs outside Paul’s door. Voices calling back and forth in the stairwell. A child crying somewhere. The sound of a shower coming from the apartment down the hall. And then, on the floor below, the first radio of the day began to bellow.

One by one, then, over the next two hours, all the radios and televisions came on again, and there was the Gödelized babble of the previous night, although because people played their sets more loudly during the day, it now sounded like a thousand demon-possessed madmen shouting in tongues from deep inside metal rain barrels.

Still Paul did not move.

He sat motionless as marble on his couch while the living room curtains bled from gray-white to shadow-black again, and day once more dissolved into night. Twice during the day he had gotten up to go to the bathroom, and each time he had returned to the couch immediately afterward. He had eaten nothing, nor taken any drink. Except for the occasional motion of his eyes as he sat in the darkened room, he might have been a statue, or he might have been dead.

The night slowly decayed toward morning. Once there was a shot and a series of piercing screams somewhere outside in the street. Paul did not stir or turn his head. The sound of screaming police sirens came and went outside the building. Paul did not move.

The radios and televisions faded one by one. The last radio whispered on in Spanish far into the night, and then it, too, died.

Silence.

When dawn shone gray at the window once again, Paul got creakily to his feet. His eyes were strange. He had gone very far away from humanity in the last forty-eight hours. He no longer remembered his name. He was no longer sure where he was, what kind of a place he was in. It didn’t seem to matter—the apartment had become the world, the womb, the sum total of creation. The Continuum. It might as well have been Plato’s cave, where Paul sat watching shadows on the burlap walls. A biological pressure touched off the firing of a synapse somewhere inside Paul’s brain, and a deeply ingrained behavioral pattern took over. In response to that pattern, he shambled slowly toward the bathroom. His way led through the kitchen, which was still in deep darkness, as it was on the shadowed side of the building. Paul hesitated in the kitchen doorway, and a flicker of returning awareness and intelligence passed through him. He groped around for the light-switch, found it, and clicked it on. He squinted against the light.

Almost every surface in the kitchen was covered with cockroaches, thousands and thousands of them.

The sudden burst of light startled them and sent them into violent boiling motion. They came swarming up out of dirty cups and plates, up out of the sink, up out of overflowing garbage bags; they scuttled out across the kitchen table, across the floor, across the cabinet sideboard, across the stove. In an instant, the burlap walls were black and crawling with them as they scurried for their hidey-holes in the woodwork and the window moldings and the baseboards and the cabinets. Thousands of scuttling brownish-red insects, so many of them that their motion set up a slight chitinous whisper in the room.

Disgust struck Paul like a fist.

Shuddering, he sagged back weakly against the doorframe. Bile rose up in his throat, and he swallowed it. He reached out reflexively and shut off the light. The chitinous rustling continued in the darkness.

Still shivering, Paul went back into the living room. Here the dawn had imposed a kind of gray twilight, and there were only five or six cockroaches to be seen, scurrying across the floor with amazing rapidity. Paul shuddered again. His skin itched as though bugs were crawling over him, and he brushed his hands repeatedly down along his arms. He was reacting way out of proportion to this—he was reacting symbolically, archetypically. He had been sickened and disgusted by this on some deep, elemental level, and now there was something reverberating through him again and again like the tolling of a great soundless bell. He could sense that thoughts were rippling just under the conscious surface of his mind, like swift-darting fish, like a computer equation running—to what end he did not know. Without conscious motivation, he reached out and suddenly tapped the spacebar of his typewriter. More cockroaches boiled out of the typewriter mechanism, scuttling out from under the machine, crawling up from between the keys on the keyboard, crawling up from beneath the roller.

Paul shuddered convulsively from head to foot.

That’s it
, he thought irrationally,
that’s all
.

You’re finished
, he thought.

Suddenly he was unbelievably, unbearably, overwhelmingly tired. He staggered to his bed and fell down upon it. That great soundless bell was tolling again, beating through blood and bone and meat. His vision blurred until he was unable to clearly see the dawn-ghost of the ceiling. The bed seemed to be spinning in slow, slow circles. A cockroach scurried over his hand. He was too beaten-out physically to do anything other than twitch, but another enormous wave of disgust and loathing and rage and self-hate rolled through him and flooded every cell of his being. His eyes filled with weak tears. He grimaced at the ceiling like an animal in pain. His head lolled.

Sleep was like a long hard fall into very deep water.

As with every sentient creature, there was a part of Paul that never slept and that knew everything. Racial subconscious, organic computer, overmind, genetic memory, superconsciousness, immortal soul, call it what you will—it not only knew everything that had happened to Paul and to all the race of man, it also knew everything that
might
have happened: the web of possibilities in its entirety. Since there is really no such thing as time, it also knew everything that
will
and
might
happen to Paul and to everyone else, and what
will
and
might
happen to everyone who ever will (or might) be born in what we fatuously call “the future.” It is hopeless, of course, to try to talk about these matters in any kind of detail—our corporeal, conscious minds cannot even begin to grasp the concepts involved, and the language is too inadequate to allow us to discuss them even if they could be understood. Suffice it to say that in Paul the superconsciousness-organic computer et cetera had always been much more accessible to him than is usually the case. And now that he had been partially freed from the bonds of ego by deprivation, exhaustion, starvation, fever, madness and hate, Paul’s dreaming mind was finally able to reach the superconsciousness and operate it to his own ends.

He ran the “memory” of the superconsciousness back until it had reached one of the key junctions and turning-points of his life, and then had it sort through the billions of possible consequences arising out of that junction until it found the one possibility that would best facilitate the peculiar sentence of oblivion that Paul had mercilessly handed down upon himself in the High Court of his own soul. The one that Paul finally decided upon was probably the least likely and most bizarre of all the myriad possibilities stemming from that particular junction of his life—a number which
is
finite, but which is also enormous far beyond our range of conscious comprehension. It was a corner that had never been turned.

He went back. He turned that corner.

The boy woke to night and silences. He lay quietly on his back and stared at the shadowy ceiling, half-relieved, half-disappointed. It had been only another storm, after all.
Just like Ma said
, he thought. It must have passed and spent itself while he was sleeping.
And tomorrow I’m going to Ohio
.

But even as he was thinking this, the wind puffed up out of nowhere and slammed against the windows, rattling the glass in their frames. The boy could hear the wind scoop up the big metal garbage cans out front and send them rolling and clattering and clanging far down the street like giant dice. Suddenly there was a torrent of water slamming and rattling the window along with the wind, as if a high-pressure hose had been turned against the glass. The house groaned and shook.

The boy lay trembling with fear and delight. The storm hadn’t passed, after all! Maybe he had awakened during a lull, or maybe he hadn’t slept as long as he had thought and the storm was just beginning. The boy sat up eagerly in the bed.

As he did, the room filled with blinding blue-white light, so dazzling that it almost seemed to sear the retinas. A split-second later there was a buffeting, ear-splitting explosion. Then another blast of light, then another monstrous thunderclap, and so on in such fast and furious alternation that the boy couldn’t catch his breath for the shock of it. It was as if a heavy howitzer were firing salvos right outside his bedroom window. Another moment or two of this, the lightning certainly striking right outside the house, and then there came a silence that could only upon reflection be recognized as identical with the highest previous level of noise.

Joy! the boy thought. He was leaning dazedly back against the headboard, eyes wide. He hoped that he hadn’t made in his pants.

More thunder, not quite so overwhelmingly right-on-top-of-him any more. While it was still booming and rumbling, the bedroom door opened and his mother came in. She didn’t turn on his light, but she stood in the doorway where she herself was illuminated by the bulb in the hall. “Are you all right, baby?” she asked. Her voice sounded funny somehow.

“I’m okay, Mom.”

“Don’t let it scare you, Paulie,” she said. “It’s only a hurricane; it’ll be over soon.”

There
was
something funny about her voice. It had a strained, wild note to it. Tension under restraint.

“I’m not scared, Ma, I’m okay.”

“Try to get some sleep, then,” she said. And her face changed alarmingly, expressions melting and shifting across it faster than the boy could catch them. When she spoke again, her voice had gone gravelly and dropped in register, as though she was straining to keep it under control. “But if—” She started again. “But if you can’t sleep, then come downstairs and be with me for a while.” She stopped abruptly, whirled around and left. He could hear her footsteps clicking away down the hallway, fast and agitated.

The same funny thing had been in her face as well as her voice. Dimly, almost instinctually, the boy recognized what it was: it was fear.

She
was the one who was afraid, in spite of her reassurances to him.
His mother
was afraid.

Why?

It was completely out of accord with her mood earlier that evening. Then she had been somewhat distracted, the way she always was lately—but that was somehow all tied up with him not having a father any more. She had been tense and snappish—but that was because she’d been packing all day. She hadn’t been afraid then. She’d been a little bit nervous about the approaching storm, but not afraid—mostly irritated by the thought of all the bother and nuisance it was going to cause her, maybe they wouldn’t be able to leave tomorrow if the weather was still bad. Why was she afraid now?

The boy got out of bed and padded across to the door. He opened it and slipped out into the upstairs hallway. A few feet down the hallway he stopped, head up, “sniffing the air.”

Something was very wrong.

He didn’t know what it was, he couldn’t identify it or put a name to it, but somehow everything was wrong. Everything was the same, but it was somehow also completely different. He could smell it, the way he’d been able to smell the storm when it was behind the horizon. It was in the air itself, his mother, the house around him—the most subtle and nearly imperceptible of differences. But the air, the house, his mother,
they were not the same ones he’d had before
.

It was as if he’d gone to sleep in one world and awakened in another. A world exactly the same except for being completely different.

The thought was too big for his mind, too complex for him to begin to appraise it. The whole concept slipped sideways in his head and then right on out of it, leaving him not even quite sure what it was he’d been struggling to comprehend a moment before. But it also left behind a legacy of oily panic. For the first time he began to become really afraid.

He crept stealthily to the head of the stairs and listened at the stairwell. He could hear his mother’s voice talking downstairs, and Mrs. Spinnato’s voice, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. With utmost caution, he went down four treads and crouched next to the railing. They had the radio or the television on down there, but between the wind and the thunder outside and the crackling frying-egg static on the set itself, it was almost impossible to hear what it was saying, either. The boy strained his ears. “. . . fall . . .” it said and the rest was swallowed by the wind. The boy went down another tread. “. . . falling . . .” it repeated.

The rest was garble and static-hiss, wind, more eggs frying, a thunderclap, and then it said “. . . roche . . .”

After another moment, his mother and Mrs. Spinnato came by the foot of the stairs, heading toward the kitchen. He froze, but neither woman looked up as she passed. Their voices came to him in snatches through the sound of the wind.