PART THREE

_Andante_

1

Reveille was the heat of burning gasoline, gears grating, rubber clattering on the sticky pavement and bits of shouts, floating around like confetti. I can remember when it used to be hoofbeats, quiet neighbor-talk, and sometimes, utter silence.

I lay glistening in a depression of the bed. At first, the big noise of the city, diminishing when the lights changed, and plunging up with new zeal a moment afterward, gave me only the pleasant sensation, the titillations and satisfactions, of being in New York. Then I remembered my circumstance. The frightened little animal that I am tore terribly around while I tried to catch it and to hold it and to remind it that the thin tissue on the front of its brain was capable of managing its panic. I spent some time at the job and sat up trickling.

All my life I have listened to a wearisome cell repeat an old saw: the coward dies a thousand times, the brave man once.

A person is afraid to be cowardly.

For many years, owing to this rather superficial sentence, I had to accept the inner humiliation of cowardice. A boy with my kind of imagination, my style of projecting, could not but help finding in his head the taste of the thousand deaths.

And I am often cowardly still. In those few morning minutes, I chased my coward a long distance.

But I do think the aphorism should be discarded. Certainly the coward dies a thousand times. So, too, however, does the man of imagination. It is the manner of the thousand deaths that is important. And bravery--our poor, human bravery--is not necessarily consonant with faulty imagination or none at all, as this dumbbell's apothegm implies.

I finally caught my animal--a real beast and not a dream.

I ordered coffee and stepped into the sitting room.

It was after nine.

The morning papers had been put at my door. There was mail.

A letter from Ricky.

I ripped it open and read it hungrily.

Dear:

Would you please, if you get a chance, go to the Lingerie Department at Saks and ask for Miss Drewson? Tell her I'd like to have three more slips like the blue satin ones I got last July when we were in town. I could order them by mail, but I want to be sure to get the same kind and she will know. Size twelve, which I guess I needn't tell you. We miss you--everything is just the same, which is dandy--and have fun. I love you very much.

Ricky

I had a second little beast to chase, then.

There was a bank statement.

There were four publicity releases from business concerns which keep sending me their bilge even though I took the pains, almost a year ago, to write them that I'd quit doing a newspaper column and had no way of airing their propaganda even if I felt the urge.

There were three letters from people who liked my books.

There was a letter from the assistant to the dean of a small college in Illinois:

Dear Wylie:

Just how does one go about getting so swellheaded and self-righteous that he thinks he can tell off everybody on earth? I would like to know, because it must be a wonderful sensation to balloon around so gassily. Look out for pins, though!

Please reply.

Sincerely, John F. Casselberry.

I put the letter between my big toe and the next one, held it out at body length, and reflected.

There is nothing unusual about this letter; I get a version of it every few days, sometimes running into thousands of derogatory words. And, of course, it is true.

Of course, of course, of course.

Authorship is the supreme act of ego.

Whether it is good or evil, as an act, depends, I suppose not so much on what's written, as how the writing is.

Most authors conceal the egoistic aspect of the business under the nom de plumes of their characters.

But exactly as every man is all that he thinks and does--and dreams, too--so is an author all he writes.

A mystery writer is a murderer in his head and he sets down his gory lore for an audience of murderers.

What does that make you, Wylie? You first-person author!

Did I use it to take the blame and the guilt--to take the responsibility--and to tear down the artifice of the third person? And was it true (as I felt) that, since my purpose was to turn the thoughts of better authors into a vernacular more popular than their own, my I was the mere agent--and not the excreted vanity which it so constantly deplored? Or was the whole affair a secret exercise in look-ma-I'm-dancing?

God knows, some part of it had to be.

I fancied myself as a teacher.

I was mostly a ham.

What I knew, what I had learned, sought, made sure of, found comfort and understanding in--all this--and the long years I'd spent endeavoring to give it a dignified texture--forever emerged as the overemphasis of a self-enamored tyro reciting Hamlet. The truths were somewhat there. But the voice was the voice of cheap aspirations in a cheap world.

Some people heard my mentors. Yes.

A few, reading my wretched books, saw beyond the antic actor, the attention-compeller, the infantile see-how-I-do, to Freud and Jung and the physicists, to the mathematicians, to the calling world and the crying night ahead, to the ingenuity and inconceivable courage of those whom I ballyhooed.

But others--oh, how rightly--saw me!

Yakkety-yak.

Wylie's next.

Shock you. Make you think. Inspire you. Scare the hell out of you. Set bristles standing on old Comstock's neck.

_Christ Jesus!_

I had thought a havoc in prose might be a substitute for havoc itself--sparing a man here and a woman there from the reality of acquainting them with the instinct.

O tin messiah.

Tawdry complex.

Bawling calfcake.

Jackass of your own worst describing.

Balloon.

It must be a wonderful sensation.

Not truth, so much as show-off.

Not love of you--infatuation with me.

Not--for what I did--but, like most of us, for what I might have done--and used instead to inflate the First Person Singular with the airs of my hot compartments.

The extravert posing as the introvert.

The hoofer philosopher.

Shame, shame, shame!

Shame ran off me.

And I shall die, in it and with it.

I went to my window to look at the city the messy cubes in the haze and somebody's radio performed an act of God.

Ja-da Ja-da Ja-da, ja-da, jing, jing, jing. Shimmy, I thought. Shimmy. Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s. You wear 'em in the winter and you wear 'em in the fall You wear 'em in the summer if you wear 'em at all. Shimmy. Shimmy! Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s. This is a message to and of the American people. The Dream. The Cross. Everybody Loves my body But my body Don't love nobody But me.

Dear Dean Casselberry:

I have read all the books in your library. I am a God-fearing, patriotic American. I believe in brother-love and liberty. In the folks, who made me what I am and from whom I cannot find myself different in any respect. Aside from that, you are right. I am sending you, under separate cover, my ear, which I have cut off for you. It is all I had to give and you may address it in the first person because it will then understand. Also, for the inflation of a balloon like mine, I send these directions: use equal parts of the outcries of the oppressed and laughter; for ballast--you will be there, and you should also carry a pail of tears.

Phil Wylie

Some give money some give work but if you give the person brother, you're a jerk. It didn't do me any good ... for ... If you try to tell the truth there's only you telling it.

2

It was a hell of a morning.

3

From nine-thirty until twelve-thirty I cut that serial. You wouldn't be interested. We'll go on, anyway. What the hell else can a man do?

4

Paul and Marcia, when they appeared for lunch, were expectably nervous.

The condition called strain is universal in this civilization, anyway. It begins in the cradle with the Freudian conditioning--the creation of each superego. Toilet training, the disciplines of the bawling id, meals according to schedule rather than appetite, the sting of parental palm on cheek, buttock, and wrist that follows erotic manipulation. All these, and countless other "punishments"--which change with changing social codes, change with changing fads amongst pediatricians, and differ from one home to another and one culture to another--set up such stresses that, by the age of two, there is hardly one civilized being in a thousand who is not loaded up with a lifetime of disparate indignities.

Add to this the regimentations of school--the musts and must nots of classroom and cloakroom. Impose upon it the innumerable stringencies of a religion. Require patriotism. Pepper the taut personality with familial prejudices and phobias. Jew-detestation, snake-dread. Now, in the passing years, fold in the Law--cop, truant officer, and prison bars--sidewalks not to be spit on, or park benches not to be initialed, or loud noises not to be made by individuals (but only corporations), and season with the regulations that rise around the older child, the adolescent, the adult.

Remove the person, then, from every natural source of his existence. Set him in a city where no useful plants grow and no animals graze--at the end of a steampipe that uses coal mined he knows not where, or oil sucked up ten thousand miles away. A city where no wood is chopped. Detach him, that is to say, from Nature--deprive him of its experiences and every direct sensation of the earth, upon which he depends. Bring even his water in far conduits, with chlorine added, so he will never know a spring's taste.

Set him to work at earning a living without acquaintance of how the whole of any living is made. On the contrary. Let his life's blood derive from some capillary of the flow. Let him take charge--not of house-building, or food-raising, or wood-gathering or fire-keeping, not of cookery or childbirthing or the weaving of fabrics--but of the twenty-eighth step in the manufacture of one size of ball bearings. Call this earning a living.

Give him a town to defend against all other towns and cities, a county to boast of, a state to regard as superior to forty-seven other states, and a nation which anyone can see is the greatest on earth. Teach him to hold such superiority as the supreme goal--to believe that no more can be asked of him or of his fellows than that they maintain the greatest nation--however low the rest may sink. Teach him never to inquire if his superlatives are adequate for the conditions of his age. Let him live to the full--by odious comparison. Let him say--I am better than you, wherefore you--not I--need all the improvement.

Now. Set a few wars in his time, with their alarms, rigors, restrictions, and dull regimentations. Load up his era with means for bacteriological attack and with atomic bombs. Invent great secrets, with attendant rumors. Frighten him all day long--and at night. Tell him he is nevertheless a free man and that, above all else, he must cherish and protect his liberty. Next, at every corner and edge of freedom, hack, harass, chip, clip, steal, stain, bribe, sabotage, and smudge each meaning and application of liberty, so that he no longer gathers its fundamental sense and comes to imagine liberty is consonant with security--which is all that remains for him to dwell upon, since he has been deprived of every secure thing and every secure experience in God's cosmos.

It makes you nervous, n'est-ce pas?

No one should be surprised that modern man shows signs of strain.

Nothing much in the world is sane.

Only the great instinct--the spaceless, timeless urge toward consciousness--continues its thrust of sanity. Because of it, even the maddest men are able to seize upon the illusion that they are sane by interpreting their own, spotty awareness as if it were the entirety of possible knowing. Because of instinct, however, all the mad men and all the mad societies will be brushed like bugs from the earth's crust and replaced by better, sensibler men or--if necessary--by silence. By silence while Evolution is retooled and instinct tries again with a new form--one which may not be so dazzled by its little consciousness or so greedy for the immediate fruits thereof as to attempt, with all the means and methods set down here, and ten million more, to deny instinct, repudiate Nature, and insist its petty Reason is the shape of truth entire.

So we three nervous wrecks sat down to lunch.

Marcia was a pretty girl, winsome, willowy, with eyes as blue as an upland lake and light-brown hair which, where the sun fell through undulant glass brick, turned opalescent, like duck feathers, and shone every color, as if it were composed of quintillions of submicroscopic prisms. She wore a light perfume--smelled like an April garden--and her voice was limpid.

Poor Paul.

Gloves on her hands--white little things, knit of string. She was nearly as tall as I am. A trembling came through the gloves. "So glad to meet you, Phil. Paul talks about you incessantly. It's practically a fixation."

Hot in the lobby, steamy; you could bake bread in the place. "Come in the Knight's Bar," I said, "and cool off."

She bewitched me with her lakelike eyes a moment longer--and deep in them I saw the shadow glide, the fear--the numb, dark carnivore that had to eat, that looked up at me with a guilty but imploring gaze.

You see, I knew her.

I held the door. She went first, walking confidently in the face of the strangers in the restaurant. Paul hesitated halfway through the cold doorway--hesitated, and eyed me with a sort of regret. Regret--and inquiry. I nodded my head to say she was lovely.

Jay saw her--gestured with a menu. We sat.

They ordered Manhattans and I a coke.

Music sprayed from its electrical hose--garbled a little, echoing slightly, like music from a lawn sprinkler. This wash of counterpoint in every public place is an attempt to assuage nerves that burn like beds of coals. We do everything we can dream of to relax--except relax. If we did that--we would lose the world that we own. And we are afraid to find our souls.

"It broke the record today," Paul said. Our best prop.

"Just over a hundred." Marcia moved her long hair across her right shoulder and kept gazing at me to see--not if I remembered her, for we had already acknowledged that--but what the effect was to be. "You ought to see Park Avenue! It's a parade--driving to the country!"

I tried to look like a man who had no memory--who regarded the earth as if it were a big flower. "Hot," I agreed. "But I'm one of those unbearable souls who likes it that way."

"Me, too," said Marcia. "Two winters ago, I went to Miami. I was crazy about it--"

It was a defiant thing to say. For that was where I'd seen her--with Dave Berne, one morning when I'd stopped at his hotel, early, to take him fishing.

"A young lady left over from last night," he said.

Miss Somebody-or-other, he had said. Marcia breakfasting in his bed. She exposed a nude shoulder to wave at me from the other room. Dave paid her and we went away.

He caught his first sailfish that day.

I supposed, now, that Marcia was offering me the opportunity to ask if I hadn't seen her in Miami; I supposed she had pointed out the hurt to let me, if I wished, open it up. Paul had crushed his napkin. He was sitting beside her and across from me--wondering, probably, how to turn the conversation away from the heat wave, the weather, to a less self-conscious, more profitable subject.

"Workin'?" he asked.

"Miami," I said to Marcia, "is quite a place." Then I said to Paul, "Yeah."

"He's cutting a serial," Paul told the girl. "When he gets through, they'll pay him about five years of my salary for it. A month's work, for him. A story about how some college football player married the Daisy Queen, I imagine. For that, he gets sixty bucks to my one. All I do, though, is make atom bombs. You can see the public would rather--"

"--have its ego blown up than its cities."

She laughed. "What is it really about?"

I gave them an outline of the story. "You see," I said, "it's just the way Shaw put it. If you're going to tell people the truth, you've got to make them laugh, or they'll kill you."

"Why will they?" Marcia asked.

"Because the truth doesn't seem amusing to them at all. However--they have a feeling life should be amusing. So--if you can make them laugh, and still occasionally set down a fact, they assume it's possible for somebody to know a few truths and still laugh. This permits them--in the long run--to ignore the truth you set down and go on laughing."

"Does the truth seem amusing to you, Phil?" she asked.

"Infinitely."

"It seems ghastly to me."

"Infinitely ghastly, too. You have to approach it in both moods at once--or else, and this is commoner--in first one and then the other."

"There is an unwritten law in this country," Paul reminded us dryly, "that everything is just dandy all the time--and anybody who says different is a communist!"

I nodded. "There is also a superstitious belief that the act of stating an unpalatable truth will increase its danger to the folks. What you don't know won't hurt you. Innocence is bliss. Boost, don't knock. If you haven't anything good to say, don't say it. This is the folklore of advertising. This is the theme song of radio. Everything has to be on the up-and-up. Criticism is regarded as un-American and un-Christian. The nation was founded by a rebellion of the early fathers against British tyranny. Christ was the most passionate critic man ever had. But it is considered the essence of patriotism and the chief tenet of the Master to be anticritic. So the whole meaning both of our nation and of its principal religion have been thrown overboard--and we are all riding on a roller-coaster where no track inspectors are allowed."

"Goodness!" Marcia said.

"Where," I went on, "nobody is even sure that the tracks were ever laid to the end: looking ahead realistically also is forbidden."

The drinks came.

Paul lifted his glass to the girl. She smiled at him warmly--with love, I suppose. What kind? It was a look of gratitude. A certain composition of her features. I compared that expression with the casual, collegiate, young-woman-of-the-world wave she had once given me from Dave Berne's double bed. A high-spirited, working-prostitute salute.

Some part of her conscience was grateful to Paul for taking her out of professional circulation. She was, I presumed, a girl with a good deal of courage--and one with taste. A sensitive girl who could--still--accommodate her mind to the objective risks of her trade. But the attitudes of many men toward her would not be acceptable. To face them, she would have to sell pieces of her inner person. Paul had rescued her from that and her eyes thanked him.

But, far more, Marcia's face expressed a maternal sentiment--warm and enveloping. He was, in a sense, her baby. Emotionally immature, romantic, and hence naïve, he had taken her for what she was not. She had played up to his assumption as an older woman to a child. In seducing him, she had seduced herself. She had adopted him as the symbol of the values she had discarded, the values that were now most precious to her because they were lost.

When I thought that over, I realized it was the point of extreme hazard in their relationship. Not social pressures, but the pressures of emotions--of instincts of which neither was conscious--would be the explosive condition of their two lives. The dangerous day would be the day when he matured sufficiently to dissociate the need to love from the need to be loved. In her case, the time would come then, too--when he demanded no more mothering in bowels or brain or heart. But it might come sooner--when she tired of that one function, or extended it, or spoiled its object, or devoured it, or cast it out for its own good.

For neither man nor woman can possess without being possessed, or consume without being consumed, and whether the process involves an object or another person, not to know the way of it and not to abide by the way is to be destroyed by it.

The lunch went along badly.

My habit of apostrophe and tirade, which usually fills such hollows as occur in talk--and forces its way, sometimes, beyond those decent opportunities--seemed inappropriate here. They had been depressed by what I had already said about the world. I guessed that, along with worries, they had hoped the visit would elicit an avuncular gaiety. They were young and in love, they thought, and should get from their elders the jocose disposition reserved for young love. I felt some of their expectancy, at any rate, and it only inhibited my rhetoric.

We talked of the news, of the airlift to Berlin which, by its very existence, constituted an immense Appeasement. We discussed the presidential candidates. We talked awhile of women's clothes, of the veterans' organization currently holding a convention in the city, and I described the house Ricky and I were building south of Miami, drawing a diagram on the tablecloth with a knife.

The effort to keep talk going--to find topics and to change them before attempt was disclosed--made me restive. Paul wasn't helping any. He'd eaten hungrily enough and then sat back--jerking and fidgeting about, making faces, pulling his nose, simpering, and smirking moonily.

She'd held up her end.

The trouble was, of course, that none of us was engaged in honest behavior.

Paul wanted to say: What do you think of her--and us?

Paul wanted me to say: She's lovely--and I'm sure you'll be happy.

I had become doubly certain--without yet entirely appreciating why--that it would never turn out. I had been generically sure, even before--just as Ricky had been sure: Paul wasn't constructed to marry a harlot and live happily ever after.

I wanted to say: For God's sake, cooky, send her back to her trade; she'll find some other guy, eventually; she's not for you.

Then I wanted to go up sixteen floors to my apartment with my troubles, my work, no women, no nephew.

What did the girl want to say?

I looked at her again--at her opalescent hair and her blue eyes.

And she looked back.

For a moment, the shadow stood still--stood still, and dissipated.

A wanton expression, brief and Lilith-like, reshaped the sharp, carmine edges of her mouth. She saw me not as the uncle of her now-beloved, but as the detached person--another man--and in this seeing me, she involuntarily recalled her long affair with lust. I have heard a woman say that, by merely quivering her underlip in a certain fashion, she had been able to change the tone, attention, and interest of nine men in ten with whom she'd ever talked--and there was nothing in her history to make me doubt the statement. And I have heard another woman say that all there was to Rudolph Valentino was the dilation of his nostrils. Watching Marcia's mouth, I could understand the sense of such matters.

So I was sure of still another thing.

Hattie Blaine had been dubious of her. Hattie had made the suggestion--the to me profoundly immoral suggestion--of tempting this girl.

Hattie had done it out of an unconscious notion that Marcia had some point in her nature which could not be lent to the kind of marriage Paul would need.

It wasn't money.

It was mood.

Marcia caught me making this observation. She blushed a little, glanced at the table, and then raised her eyes--but whether anxiously or in a repetition of the look, I could not tell.

Passionate women are seldom ashamed of their passion.

What she felt was not bold; it was not arch; it was not mercenary; it was--simply--an essence of her own responses. A belonging, like the curved shape of her eyebrows or the narrowness of her red nails--which she accepted as no more and no less than that, and revealed as naturally.

I wanted to go, even more.

One can pick patterns in one's life--rhythms, cadences, aggregates, cross sections, events that occur in pairs and threes--and the phenomenon is undoubtedly the result of chance. But one notices, one superimposes the pattern subjectively--and decides it is not chance but some obscure order, because one likes to feel that obscure orders occur in life. It is difficult to keep the ego perpetually lined up with statistical reality.

In twenty-four hours I'd looked at, talked to, explored, and somewhat learned three different, very handsome young women. Mrs. Yvonne Prentiss. Gwen Taylor--at Hattie's. And Marcia.

They come in threes, I thought. I thought it had been a long time since I'd met even one girl so pretty as all these. I reminded myself not to be an ass--to keep the view that grouping and variation in no way warp mathematical principle. The obsessive quality of all such ideas weighed on me. I hardly heard her account of their junket, on the preceding Saturday, to Jones' Beach.

I began to invent an excuse for present departure--to think ahead about apologizing--my work--the check, please--

Then the busboy dropped the tray.

He had tripped, it proved, on a napkin.

There were heavy stacks of plates and side dishes on the tray--glasses of water--metal domes.

The boy staggered--and the wild gesticulation of his free arm was caught by my peripheral vision. So I saw the tray slant--saw its burden slide and crash onto the heads of a pair of buttressed dowagers, a few tables away. The noise seemed to continue for a long time and a scream permeated it as the boy lost hold entirely on his tray, fell against a chair-back, and dish after soiled dish cascaded onto flower hats, bright blouses, fat shoulders, and freckled necks.

A rush of waiters masked the scene. Guests stood to see better.

A bull-voiced beldame roared, "Send the manager!"

Her less hefty companion burst through the waiters, daubing at the stained area of her bosom and throwing bits of lettuce with every swipe. She made a beeline for the ladies' room--followed by her smeared, stentorian colleague, whose hat was full of dill and parsley.

This commotion had hardly died down--Jay had no more than managed to clear the carpet, dispatch the wreckage on the table, send out the chairs for purging, and bite back the last traces of his mirth--when another oddity got under way.

"I want," said a man seated beside Paul, "a baked apple."

"But there are no baked apples." Fred, the waiter, said this.

"Go and tell the chef I want a baked apple."

"I did, sir. There are none."

"Explain to him that I always have a baked apple, here."

"There is applesauce--sir."

Fred is Viennese. His sorrowful, wise eyes meandered over to meet mine. They were expressionless. But the fact that they had moved toward me was, in itself, communication.

"I do not like applesauce. Slippery pudding! Go and tell the chef I want my usual baked apple."

The churl who spoke was familiar to me by sight. An Englishman--a VIP during the war--who had often stayed at the Astolat. A medium-sized man of sixty with a red face and eyes like gray gas. A brittle British voice, snotty in every particular. An iron-gray Kaiser Wilhelm mustache and a way of smacking his lips underneath it, when he was in a temper, that shook its points.

He was always accompanied by his wife. As a rule, they ate quietly--talking together now and then, and more often just swilling in food. She was a lank, vapid woman with a toadstool's complexion, a chin like a fist, and hair tormented into little knobs--as if she absent-mindedly had cooked it, rather than coiffed it--and burned it in the process. Lumpy, burned hair, a disgusting dish of it--and a voice like claws, to match her master's.

She stared, now, at her empty plate, and said nothing. She did not seem to be ashamed, or embarrassed, or to be waiting for a storm to subside. She was a woman born without the knack for yielding or apology. She merely looked at her plate because she would be God-damned if she cared to look at anything or anybody else.

Fred came back. He put on a sympathetic expression. "The chef says he is very sorry. He says that this is not the time of year for baked apples."

"The stands are loaded with apples," the Englishman snorted. "Seen 'em myself!"

"I know. But they're eating apples. Not baking apples. They come later in the fall."

The Englishman doubled his fist and lightly thumped the table. "I said I wanted a baked apple! All I wanted was a baked apple."

"I have explained."

"With cream. A baked apple with cream."

I have seen Englishmen by the dozen go through this sort of routine. With the exception of certain Germans, some of them are, I believe, the rudest people on the earth. Badly brought-up babies--these empire builders.

This one was insulting the waiter and his wife, in the bargain--but I have rarely seen an Englishman who minded insulting his wife by making scenes. When crossed in matters like baked apples they seldom consider wives, children, strangers, decorum, or the reputation of Britannia. They merely behave like twirps.

Fred had said nothing.

"I suppose," the Englishman at last went on, shivering his mustache, "you mean to tell me I am not to have a baked apple--?"

"Perhaps for dinner--one of the eating kind could be baked--"

The Englishman suddenly hurled his napkin on his plate. He stood. "No baked apple," he said. "Well!"

He intended to stalk from the room.

However, Paul--who had at first been chortling over the slow-spilled tray and later watching the Englishman with intent, even exaggerated, care--now interposed, to my great surprise.

He sat next to the Britisher--on the same banquette. Thus when the infuriated man surged upright he stood alongside Paul and between our two tables.

Paul stretched out his foot, rested his shoe on the corner of the Englishman's table, and untied the lace.

The man, barred by the long leg, said, "Good Gad!"

Paul retied the lace. He looked dimly at the Englishman--who, I honestly believe, had not so much as noticed or recalled a single person in the room but himself all during the baked apple affair. It is a kind of concentration peculiar to the British.

"Put down your foot, man!"

"Quintod!" Paul said, as if using rare syllables of opprobrium: "Quidhetch! Vassenoy!" He moved his foot this way and that, eying it. Even the Englishwoman was staring at it now, in some shock. After all, it was on her table, twenty inches from her picklelike nose, and not a victual.

Paul turned again to the standing man and hissed, "Kittenpitches!"

"Waiter!"

Fred was still standing there--still fairly impassive. He had the wit to say, "Yes, sir?"

"This person is drunk!"

Paul came to his feet then--and towered over the Englishman. He bent close. "Pomadiant nocrot," he said harshly. "Cantapunce. Cabulate geepross. Dreek!"

The Englishman opened his mouth and emitted a thin, high, frightened squeak.

Paul scowled. "Nikerpole," he said, sadly now. "Oose."

Quite suddenly, Paul sat down. He spoke to Marcia in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone--but a tone loud enough to carry around the respectfully quieted room. "Never did understand why people came here without first learning the language. _And_ the manners. I dare say my Japanese surprised him! Probably an admiral in civies, spying out the next war. Got a camera in his mustache, I presume, clever devils!"

The Englishman then left the room, shaking from head to foot.

His wife, however, remained staring at her plate. By and by Fred brought her a stewed fish with which she began to fill her baleful gizzard.

I would have thought--I would have bet--that this was the end of such things. The tray, alone, would have done as the month's quota for this proper restaurant.

I was wrong.

Hardly had the Englishman departed--hardly had his wife commenced to make slushing sounds with the cream sauce on her fish--hardly had I dried my tears--when the corner of the eye opposite the one that had caught sight of the teetering tray drew my attention in its new direction.

This was toward the bar.

Here Mrs. Doffin was sitting at her regular table.

She had been sitting there, lunch and dinner, when I had first entered the Knight's Bar in 1937. A tall, narrow woman with dyed red hair, who was given to wearing witches' hats--such hats as women wore in Merlin's day--round and pointed. A stovepipe of a woman with a face on which a bleached fuzz grew, and eyes that resembled spoon-backs.

Year in, year out, the four seasons through, Mrs. Doffin had five Martinis for lunch, five for dinner, five in the evening after dinner, and refreshments in her room, between-times. Some ten million dollars lay to her account in various banks, I understood, but, since the death of her husband in 1932, she had devoted herself entirely to one form of enjoyment, if the pointed hats be excepted.

Never soused, noisy, or shot--she was never remotely sober. Sometimes, late at night, if you came into the bar, you would see her lips move as she communed voicelessly with whatever shades or hallucinations accompanied the thirteenth or fourteenth Martini. Occasionally, in a moment of clarity, she would recognize this person or that--a waiter, the manager, Ricky, myself. She would nod regally then, wish you good morning, afternoon, or evening--approximately according to the time--and flick her fingers flirtatiously.

She never bothered anybody.

She was not bothering anybody now.

She was sitting at her regular table, wearing a bright, vacant smile, and stuffing matches into her nose.

She had placed twenty or thirty when I spotted her.

She picked up another and delicately inserted it, pressing it up until its pink tip came even with the rest.

"Curious," I said.

Marcia and Paul craned their necks. They watched awhile.

"I wonder how many it will hold," Paul said.

"Another half dozen, I should think. She has a bit more room on the right side."

"Does she light them when she gets a snoot full? Make quite a firework."

"It's new," I answered. "First variation in ages."

"Somebody should stop her!" Marcia said urgently.

Paul's head shook. "On what grounds?"

"Good heavens, Paul--!"

Mrs. Doffin reached the point where neither nostril would contain another match. She tamped them pensively and nodded to herself. They protruded, I would say, the best part of an inch--all neat and even.

Mrs. Doffin then removed her hat. It was the first time I had seen the full billow of her hair. It looked like excelsior on which paprika had been sprinkled. She set the hat on the seat at her side and glanced with a bright smile and opaque eyes at the whole earth. I suppose the waiters had failed to notice her new gambit owing to the fact that she, and her soundless palaver, were fixtures in the place, like the intruding girders and the gaudy horsemen on the walls. All the waiters ever saw was her glass, when she emptied it. She could have breathed fire, or come in tattooed, and they would have observed no change.

From her hat, Mrs. Doffin withdrew a hatpin, long and as black as any of her garments or their accessories.

This, with the utmost aplomb, she thrust through both her cheeks, hesitating only momentarily at the midpoint, evidently in order to get her tongue beneath the line of direction. One does not--her pleased look seemed to say--absurdly and clumsily impale one's tongue, in these little maneuvers.

"Fred," I called at this point. "Mrs. Doffin needs you."

He looked. His eyes bulged and his brows shot high. He hurried toward her.

She flirted her fingers at him.

He signalled to Jay.

Together they escorted Mrs. Doffin from the room.

Nobody ever saw her again.

There are homes for the rich to do such things in.

5

"The heat is getting people," Paul said, as he and Marcia bade me good-bye in the lobby.

Marcia gave me one last look. She knew she hadn't passed.

She ascribed the wrong cause to the fact.

She thought that, since I'd seen her sensual impulse was not confined to one person, I'd written her off as a slut.

Whose sensual impulses have ever been confined to one person?

Were they so limited, human breeding would be the rarest of activities and marriage almost unheard of.

I didn't mind Marcia's libido.

All I objected to was its orientation.

I rode up to my room and began dilatorily to strip once again.

6

I am told the female of ruff is reeve.

I am told the energy of one of the early atomic bombs is about equal to the energy that falls on a mile and a half square of the earth in a single day.

I am told that a bishop in Philadelphia ordered two motion-picture houses to close down their shows.

I am told that common goldfish will survive under winter ice while the fancy sorts will not.

I am told the kurbash is a whip.

I am told that Soviet fighter planes are buzzing our airlift.

I am told that Paris is unchanged this summer.

I am told that a committee is being formed to censor as un-American all books which, in its opinion, are sacrilegious or immoral.

I am told that no creature can travel faster than a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, or thereabouts.

I am told that Truman reads Keats.

These are things I had not known before.

I subtract myself from them and find life going on as usual--the land I love deteriorating, the world I adore growing ever more miserable.

I throw the papers and magazines on my coffee table and go to work.

7

Once, I laughed.

Not at the slapstick landslide of dirty dishes on the dowagers.

Not at the weird vanishing of Mrs. Doffin.

But at the matter of a baked apple.

O England--culture uncultivated!

Brave boors.

8

Toward half past five I got my nose bloodied.

It happened this way:

I went down to the newsstand for a typewriter ribbon; the energy of my sentiments had worn holes in the incumbent tape.

While I was waiting for a red light on Madison Avenue I heard band music and saw people scurrying toward Fifth. I went over to see the parade.

It was a listless marching--veterans on gummy asphalt all along the limp trees by the Park. The older men from the older war rode in mimic locomotives that bucked their front wheels, hooted sirens, clanked bells. Some current soldiers marched--carrying rifles with hot metal parts, and behind them came a show of mechanized equipment, with bands interspersed. I listened to the bands and thought of Shakespeare's reference to men who couldn't contain their urine when they heard the bagpipes play. Brass bands, as much as anything, had undone the loose hold of the Germans on sense. Songs about rolling caissons and lifting anchors were flaring the eyes and dropping the chins of the street-lining crowds here, too. I studied these people, remembering all philosophers and the scientists and their faith in reason. Man's monumental Thought--his pride--was silly in these surroundings. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, James, and a hundred more--compartments of order in a chaos of shining orbs and panting tongues. Pretty compositions, real in themselves, and true enough--but floating in a flood their owners did not observe or--if they saw it--ruled irrelevant, nor realized they rode it, too. What old classic premise could stand the test of a brass band? None.

I watched the bright horns and the dull guns.

I stood at attention when the flags went by--feeling, as I always do, the aspiration in those white stars and those red stripes.

We would continue to aspire--some of us--while breath stayed in us.

But this stirring--this patriotic thrill--did not debilitate my sphincters. Tightened them, rather, against the multimillion goons who would as soon sell all of liberty down any creek as their own two-bit integrity. What patriots remain these days must battle harder against their countrymen for truth, for dignity, for honesty and love than ever against an outside foe.

It proved a misfortune to be moved to lofty sentience, at that time.

The tiresome military iron clanked by as it has clanked through every city on the earth for thousands of years.

More men of the newer war came, canoe-shaped hats worn cock-eyed, bellies lean still, faces blank in the scalding sunshine.

I noticed, now, that many paraders were moving among the spectators--marchers who had been dismissed some distance up the Avenue. These men, from other states, ticketed like parcel post, badge-thick and boozy, shoved among the ordinary citizens, cawing and singing, carrying pails, and shooting water pistols. Occasional cops watched them with the fixed, tolerating smiles taught in the department--proper address toward large political groups. The men, in what they thought of as boisterous glee, peed out their pistol streams at any pretty girl, blotting blouses, stippling skirts with dark dribbles, and evoking, as often as not, coaxing screams.

I wandered through a block or two of this nickering infantilism, this petty and symbolic repayment for a thousand lacks and ten thousand wretched frustrations. Men will be boys, I thought. Boys, I knew, will hardly ever be men.

I came to a lamppost where a dozen pistoleers were singing, "I want a girl just like the girl who married dear old dad." Their mouths yearned it and the sun sparkled on the gold fillings in their teeth. This song, so far as I recall, is the only legitimate outlet for the Oedipus complex permitted in twentieth-century U.S.A. So I watched gents from Oklahoma and Idaho and Nebraska sing their incest, get their backs in it, and I wondered how much effort it would take to elicit from even one of them an acknowledgment of that emotion which, hidden deep inside him, gave him his particular inflection and look while he sang that particular song. I have wondered before while viewing luncheon clubs as they yearned for a girl like mother. To a face, every here and there, the anthem does memorable things. I supposed they would all rather be dead than have to admit the possibility of the truth. I supposed that the recognition of the baby alive in us all would require the hurdling of yet more dead bodies--billions, at least--to bring them to a happy acceptance of such affairs.

American babies are not allowed to be Freudian.

Not till they grow up, anyhow.

I pushed along.

There was a clearing in the crowd ahead. Out of it came such blats of laughter, animal calls, and whistlings as mark the approach to a feeding zoo--the same sound that is emitted by the amused radio audience.

I reached the edge.

Here the canoe-hats had formed an open oblong between the curb and an apartment front. It was necessary for anyone who went by to cross this area. On its rim stood a man with a stick, and heavy batteries. He wore a sergeant's chevrons and his breast was a blaze of heroism. Men crossed the vacated cement untouched--and middle-aged women, also. But whenever a young girl made her way through the hem of the crowd and came unexpectedly into the hollow oblong, the sergeant sneaked forward with his stick, got behind her, lifted the rear of her skirt, poked, and applied the juice.

The girls, shocked electrically, without warning, in this delicate and private part of their anatomies reacted frantically. Most of them screamed. All of them leaped--thrusting their hips forward convulsively. Some then ran--and dove into the crowd on the other side. One, a girl with long, dark hair, slipped after she leaped, fell, and tore a hole in her stocking. Another jumped, turned, and cursed. One tried to hit the sergeant with her pocketbook. Most endeavored to recover some shred of composure--to laugh--or to slip away without showing what they felt. Some wept instantly.

But the response of the delighted--the ecstatic onlookers, was always the same: a jarring salvo of catcalls, guffaws, finger whistles, ribald yells, mirth's paroxysms.

I watched this business for quite a while--the bands going by behind me--the flags--the guns--and the sweating people standing all along the curb for miles of Fifth Avenue.

Finally, a fair-haired girl of about sixteen came innocently into the open place, looked about to find the reason for it, saw none, and began to cross. The sergeant slipped swiftly behind her. Quickly, with his stick, he lifted the little pink cotton of her skirt, bent as he walked, with ogling pool-room pantomine, took aim, and thrust. This girl did not leap but stood transfixed on the point of the electric stick. A great grin broke on the sergeant's face and he thrust, now--again and again. Her head turned in slow horror. Whatever fantasy had seized her brain was shattered by the sight of the lewd man jabbing at her. The crowd roared like all the pottery on earth falling over a precipice. A look of the most pitiful terror came over her. At last, she found the nerves and muscles for running and escaped into the yapping multitude.

The sergeant straightened up. When he straightened, I stepped out and hit him on the mouth as hard as I could.

The approving roar stopped as if a noose had tightened on its throat.

The sergeant stared at me with addled menace. Blood trickled from between his lips, where I had felt his teeth loosen.

Then one of his buddies hit me from the side.

My nose blazed with pain.

The hollow lost its shape. Different--yet not much different yells were raised.

Someone cracked the back of my head.

I saw a place between two fat men, lunged at it, looked back. The sergeant was slowly sitting down, fumbling for his handkerchief.

Blows fell on me. A man in a navy uniform grabbed my arm. I hit him and he let go. The crowd closed around me.

When, after long minutes of pushing and weaving, I emerged on a side street, my nose was bleeding.

I wiped it and went, somewhat shakily, to the hotel.

The nosebleed stopped in a few minutes.

I turned on my radio and found a cello solo amongst the predinner music.

Ave Maria, as a matter of fact.

9

Tom Alden--Tom-the-doctor--had been thinking about me, off and on, for more than thirty hours, now.

He is the kind of person whose thoughts give birth more to inquiry than opinion.

We went to a Longchamps for dinner--the gold and vermilion decorations made bearable by air conditioning. Traffic was light; only a few people were about--people going tiredly in the heat-choked night. After dinner, we rode back in a cab to the Astolat and strolled over to the Park where we sat together on the Mall, listening to the concert. Thousands of people had spread out newspapers in the lamplit dusk and lay upon them, asleep, talking, making love. The police had suspended the bans that one night. Tenements and penthouses were ovens; their refugees gasped on the grass. Kids played in the fountains and no one interfered. The city itself had an evacuated feeling; all who were able had fled the heat wave and the rest were in parks, in cool restaurants, or in the movie theaters. Stars shone hazily above the trees and the stagy skyscrapers. Music, coming down the Mall, was distorted by invisible eddies that still rose from the sun-baked cement; it soared and fell and wobbled through the furnace atmosphere.

Tom, as I said, is given to inquiry. This is not surprising in a man who practices several sciences. If we were old friends, we were also dedicated, in different ways, to the examination of all that surrounded ourselves and each other. Our sensibilities were tuned to the fact; they lacked the common diffidences of most such attachments.

"How's it going?" That was his first question, when he arrived at my hotel rooms.

"Okay."

He put down the black bag that lies within easy reach of his whole life.

"Jittery?"

"Not that I know of."

"Tell Ricky?"

"No."

"How is she?"

"All cured--we hope."

His pale eyes fixed on me. "Let me have another look at the throat."

He had another look--rearranging lights.

"I did a little reading on it, Phil. I can't say for sure what it is."

"I'm going on the assumption that it is--what-for."

"Yes. You would. Most people would take the opposite attitude--until the last possible fraction of the last possible second."

"Why?"

He shrugged and put his tools away. "Wishful thinking."

"More fun to know than wish--look than dream."

"Not many agree with that."

"They don't know enough--look far enough. If you're going to get yourself free--you've got a lot of illusion to hack through first."

"Do you feel really free?"

I shook my head. "Not free at all. But I do feel I know what freedom is--what it means--what it's for. Maybe that's as near as you can get--these days."

He went to the toilet and washed--in an absent-minded, habitual manner. "Hot night."

"Hot."

"You've been told your number was up before now. I've been considering that. You know what it's like."

"Sure."

"What's it like?" He asked it eagerly, and yet academically, as if there were a formula for the reply.

"Changes from minute to minute."

"I suppose so." He seemed disappointed.

That was when we started for Longchamps.

He took the bag along. He always does....

He ordered one Tom Collins. The tall glass was sweating even before the waiter could bring it from the bar.

"How are you--fixed?"

I told him that.

He peered at the room, the other diners, the gaudy colors. "Funny. I remember back in high school in Montclair when you were the class poet. Everybody thought you'd be a writer, sure. The last will and testament of our class left your pen to the juniors. Remember that?"

I remembered.

"But I don't suppose anybody--including yourself--ever thought you'd rip out magazine serials like logs going through a circular saw. Get to be a popular writer. And then set people on their ears by writing about psychology. We all thought you were destined for the garret--a lot of reputation, maybe--but not Florida houses and--fifty thousand dollars' worth of insurance--"

"No."

"Did you?"

"Yeah."

"You did!"

"No harm in daydreaming, was there? Back then?"

Tom meditated on those distant high school years. "You realized the daydream."

"A person like me has a good many daydreams. When one comes true--he automatically starts on the next."

"Do you consider yourself happy?"

"Enormously, Tom."

"So do I. _Why?_ How come? When you spend about ninety per cent of your time considering the unhappiness of the world?"

"Somebody has to collect the garbage or we'd all die of plague. And a born garbage collector loves his job."

"There's more to it than that."

"Yeah. It's not garbage. It's what we discard, ignore, repress. The green fertilizer of the next crop. The yin to the coming yang. My contemplation of what you call the unhappy aspects of life is really the substance of what I find to be hope."

"Jung changed you a lot, Phil."

"I dunno. I got thinking--some years back--of a poem I wrote when I was twenty-one. Threw it away--lost it--haven't any idea what happened to it. But in that poem was the fundamental Jungian idea--the idea that instinct directs human affairs--and that it's a force in action which always has equal and opposite reactions--"

"Still--Archie--"

I thought of Archie--the psychiatrist to whom Tom had sent me for analysis. "Archie taught me psychology--Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian--and let me work out my own problems, aloud. He was a great teacher."

"He died of cancer," Tom mused.

"'--too'?"

He looked at me and grinned gently. "Masochism takes funny forms in you."

"In us all." I went back a little way in the discussion. "When I was a young guy, I formed the habit of listening to, and looking at, everything that happened in my mind. Ruling out nothing. Trying to relate everything to everything else. That's a good habit. That's the natural mind. There are too God-damned many prohibitions and taboos in the life of a Presbyterian minister's son to keep track of. So I started--as a game--ignoring all of them, in my head. Plenty of people do. I arrived--in that poem--at a pretty complete formulation of instinct and the laws of instinct--as Jung sees it working. As Toynbee sees it working collectively, on civilizations. As Northrop glimpses it. As Jesus tried to define it. As Aristotle didn't even guess it."

"So you think you really never underwent a philosophical change?"

"No. I lost sight of what I'd felt--when I was a dizzy, drunk Hollywood writer. But when Archie taught me Freud and Jung--I got back the insight--in contemporary terms and scientific formulations. That's all. And it isn't very much."

"Are you ever frightened?"

"I'm protoplasm, for God's sake!"

He chuckled. "That's a relief! I've wondered what are you scared of. Sometimes--you seem haunted. Most of the time, I could swear you were afraid of nothing."

"The shadow of the ego--the black streak behind it that it never looks around to see."

"And what does that mean?"

"What I'm scared of. Inhumanity. Cruelty. To man--to me, also, I guess.''

"People get more humane."

"Like hell!"

"If you lived a thousand years ago--or ten thousand you'd believe it. The trouble is, you're supersensitive."

I took a long breath.

"What do you read?" I asked. "What do you want to hear? A list of German concentration camps? An account of the cremation of some six million innocent people by Germany? A survey of conditions in Russian slave labor camps? A discussion of physical torture as it is used by modern police in America? Or by military men? Or as a political instrument in Europe? Or as a diplomatic measure, by, let us say, the English, in their colonies? Do you want to hear a discourse on the behavior of Jap troops in war? On our own troops? Would you like to have me run over the treatment of people in American lunatic asylums? Shall I touch on lynching details--and other minor unpleasant experiences of the American Negro? Would you like me to talk about how we Americans disposed of the Indian problem? Would you be interested in some studies of corporeal punishment as it is administered in American slum homes and on American farms? Shall I recite the prison methods and jail practices common amongst our agents of law enforcement? Or would a review of the various effects of intense radiation on the human body, as well as its genes, coupled with the fact that about every other American is sitting around these days asking why in hell we don't atom-bomb Russia, tend to persuade you that we are not, essentially, humane people? Shall I discuss brutality in sports? Are you interested in considering our annual million smashed in automobiles as evidence of a certain basic scarcity of the humanitarian impulse? There are various business practices I could go into, in documenting the matter. Not the ruination of widows and orphans. Not the adulteration and poisoning of products. Just the little results of the basic premise of business which is that making money is the whole object, without reference to kindness or love. Or would you like to review the various sorts of crimes committed by the people in our fair land? Would you like to contemplate the interesting and vicious psychology of many of the _victims_ of these crimes? Shall we look at the degree of obliviousness, smugness, or rejection which Americans held toward the atrocities before the recent war--or hold now toward massacre and famine in India--famine in China--ruthless dictatorship in a dozen nations--Spain, for instance--Argentina--a lot more? Or shall we, on the other hand, investigate a whole field of cruelty as large as the one just hinted at: the _psychological_ cruelties of modern men? It would double the scope of the survey. The teachers--devising torments to sweat off their frustrations on their pupils. The common office techniques of the average man-of-affairs. The torments of the soul written into the class structures of society. The awful havoc wreaked on man whenever a minister preaches hell-fire and damnation. No fooling! We are not humane. We are--per capita--the cruelest people who ever lived, because, unlike the poor thieves on the two other crosses--we do know what we do!"

Tom took off his fogged spectacles and wiped them. I pushed the advantage. "Cruelty among doctors. An interesting little sidetrack. I recall, for example--"

"Skip it." He looked sorrowfully at me. "You win that one."

"All I want," I said, "is for people to _be_ truly humane. _Truly_ loving. But, to gain that, we'd be obliged to give up a great deal we now cherish dearly."

We had lemon ice.

Later, we walked into the Park and sat down....

The people on the newspapers on the grass, the silo smell of trees at night in heat waves, lamplight and music--as I have said....

"Cruelty in doctors," Tom repeated musingly, after we found a bench on the Mall, where we could feel the breeze if one came.

"Last night," I responded, when he didn't go on, "I was reading a book that suggested the whole philosophy of medicine was cruel. Saving babies--increasing the life span--only so people will go hungry by millions."

"Vogt? Osborne? I read them. What's true humanity? I don't know--except sometimes, in individual cases. What about old people, for instance?"

"What about them?"

He looked back over his shoulder as if he could see through the night, the trees of Central Park, and the blocks of buildings, to the East River. "Out on the Island--I take care of a ward filled with them. Chronics. Sixty years old. Seventy. Eighty. Ninety. Some been in bed for twenty years. No cure. No hope. No chance--in a high percentage--of doing a thing, ever. An organ's shot--ruined beyond repair. Half of them touched with senile dementia; a quarter, sunk in it. Mess their beds. You feed 'em with spoons. And yet they go on--year after year after year."

"I've seen the ward."

"America has millions of such people. Only a fraction of 'em in hospitals. Moms and pops, grandmas and grandpas, hanging on to the last, sick gristle of existence. Spoiling the lives of other millions of people. Taking their time and their energy. Absorbing funds that young kids desperately need. All for nothing. Wheedling and whining and complaining if everything isn't soft and easy for them. Reminding sons and daughters and grandchildren of their 'duty.' The duty to be enslaved by meaningless, useless senility. The food and the clothes, the beds and the service, the tax money, the energy, the topsoil, if you go for Vogt--and the metal--pours down their gullets and is worn out by their worn-out bodies--and not one single, solitary useful thing is accomplished."

"You're stealing my act," I said.

Tom laughed ruefully. "It's an easy act for a doctor to crib! Tell me, why in hell do people look forward so much to old age? Nine times out of ten, it's a mess. Even proud, independent people, when they get old, usually lose their pride and their independence--and go down begging for handouts."

"The best reason I can think of," I said, "is that they're disappointed in life as they've lived it up to middle age."

"The whole country grows older," Tom went on, after nodding to himself. "The American landscape will soon be cluttered with human antiques. Pension-seeking, vengeful, dogmatic, persecuting, bloc-voting, parasitic millions. An ocean of wasteful protoplasm--Old Men of the Sea--and old Women--riding on the backs of everybody. Is a thing like that humane?"

"It is richly sentimental."

"In the labs, thousands of my colleagues are sweating to bring it about. Studying the degenerative diseases. Trying to lick cancer and heart trouble and hypertension. Trying to lick aging itself--to keep the old, old indefinitely! Geriatrics--a whole science for the maintenance of second childhood! Sometimes, Phil, I actually think the world is as crazy as you say it is. Sometimes--when I run into a bright kid whose parents can't afford to have its legs straightened--and then when I visit my ward--I'd like to sweep the place clean with a Thompson gun and move in the kids who need it."

"There is the Townsend Plan," I offered. "Two hundred dollars a month for everybody who's old, if they spend it right away--and millions are too stupid to see the catch. In fifty years--Pensioned Old Age may be the great goal that progress and prosperity are today. Of course, there isn't enough stuff to go around, and there will never be, so two hundred bucks, if you gave it to the gaffers to spend, soon wouldn't buy a good-sized roast. But they may try for it."

Tom laughed somberly. "They are trying. You should see the pension literature in my ward. The letters they write. The voting they do. Should I shoot them? What the hell do you really believe about it?"

"There is the death wish," I said.

"They don't want to die! Not one in a dozen! Even if they're blind, vomiting on the hour, spoon-fed, and in pain--they want to go on living--and are proud of it."

"It's Jung," I answered, "who keeps talking about the law of opposites. The death wish is subjective. But we translate it into its opposite form--in this case, the objective. We want other people to die--to suffer--to bear our load--to take our responsibility. We hate. What did you say about your old folks? Vengeful and persecuting and parasitic? That's the death wish turned wrong-side-out. Or--take this pair of opposites. We have applied reason to extending life. So we have automatically obliged ourselves to apply reason to death. That is a psychological consequence of administering life--stretching it, maintaining it--of baby-saving and so on. Only--being egoists--blind to the basic laws of instinct--we won't kill anybody. Millions of Russians, maybe, but not one American. It's even against the law for a person to kill himself, for whatever merciful and laudable a reason. So what? We insist on our right to save and maintain every life. We also insist on dodging the resultant duty at the other end of the natural spectrum: death. The living have no recourse left but to extravert their death wish. To hate others because of the hatefulness of the trap they're in."

"How do you work it out?"

"In the better world," I said, "a person who had enjoyed the long conscious control of his life would feel somewhat responsible for controlling his death. When he got useless, he would give up. He would regard it as rational--and as part of that 'greater love' that almost no man, these days, hath a sign of."

"Voluntary euthanasia?"

"Why not? And if you came a header and couldn't do it for yourself--the state would do it."

"Do you think," Tom said with asperity, "that the people would permit anything like that? Or think of it as _idealism_? Why--it's a sin--!"

"Sure. Sin. It's one of the sins that keep the churches full and the heads and hearts of the folks empty. Vested interest."

"How many people would do it?"

I shrugged. "Couldn't say. You've seen cases. You'll likely witness another--my own--before long--"

"Good God! I'm sorry--Phil--!"

I laughed and he relaxed--visibly.

"The mass of humanity," he went on after a time, "hasn't that kind of insight, education, nerve--"

"No. Maybe not. Hasn't--as I'd put it--even that much access to its own instincts. Doesn't know even that clearly the relationship of ideals to acts. Of material gains to inner responsibilities. That's the trouble with the mass of humanity. It decides to use atom bombs--the work of a few geniuses who, left to themselves, might not."

"Appalling," Tom said.

"Sure. But the moldboard plow is just as deadly as the bomb in the hands of the common mass. And the implications of plows are much easier for the common jerk to understand than the implications of nucleonics. But he doesn't. So why worry about atomic bombs? Merely another aspect of the same, deep, and ubiquitous nonsense."

We sat awhile.

"What," Tom finally said, "will the better world be like?"

"Woodsy," I answered.

I could hear his grin in his voice. "To restore and shore up the topsoil?"

"Yep. To maintain the ecology that maintains man. And besides, woods are pleasant."

"The rivers would be clear. The factories would dump their wastes in the desert. And the sewage would go through processing plants and then be put back on the land."

"Not many factories, anyhow," I said.

"No? Why?"

"Not nearly so many people, for one thing. People would--people did--cherish each other more when they were scarcer. That's a psychological aspect of overpopulation thus far hardly observed. There are so many of us getting in each other's way and making life tough by merely being that we tend to hate each other just from congestion. Then--the people in the better world wouldn't be so crazed over junk. A tenth of the factories we've got now would probably furnish all the junk they'd want."

"Cities, do you think?"

"Maybe a few small ones--where people put in a few years before going back to the open country."

"Villages? Small towns?"

"Sure. Lots of schools and colleges. Everybody would be pretty bright--and pretty anxious to learn. Everybody would be artistic. Everybody would want to do a certain amount of work with his hands."

"Why?"

"That's the instinct of the critter, isn't it?"

"How come they'd all be bright?"

"Because the biggest fun we're going to have--when we get that wise, if we ever do--is breeding bright people. Living for the sake of future generations--and having some happiness doing it. Happiness with sex, amongst other things, when it ceases to scare us to pieces."

"Maybe," Tom's tone objected, "you might finally convince the folks that knocking themselves off when they got useless was evidence of a great love--an assimilated employment of the death wish. I can even see certain remedial effects in the idea--if that were the common philosophy: people would want to make a bigger effort while they did live, for example. But you can't get dumb babies to knock themselves off."

"You could start--though--at the other end. Clamping down on the people who overproduce and are least qualified to do so."

"Birth control for the morons? The Jukes and Kallikaks?"

"Yeah."

"Too difficult. They fornicate when drunk."

"Then set your lab wizards to find an easy, lasting system. They ought to work toward stopping the output of predefeated babies--of society-defeating hordes of nitwits--as a compensatory duty for working on longevity and the diseases of old age. Fill the drugstores with something you take a sip of that'll sterilize you for five years straight. Chocolate flavor. And back it with national advertising."

"Try to sell that idea! Every church would say it would mean the suicide of the race."

"Suicide of church members, maybe! Kidding aside, the more intelligent specimens of mankind, who do use birth control, still do have offspring--on purpose. It's just that they're outnumbered--and the net result is genetic decline."

"What else--in the better world?"

"No mummery about sex. No mysteries. The young allowed to develop according to their impulses--without shame or restraint so long as they aren't hurtful. The sex manners and aesthetics of the mature built upon that background of unashamed, free experience."

"And what would those manners be?"

"Don't ask me! I'm a shame-produced human gimmick, myself."

"You're welching!"

"Not exactly. I suspect--in the better world--sex would be such a different set of ideas and acts and experiences and feelings that we can't even imagine them."

"Nobody would dare bring up kids that way."

"People already have dared. A school in England does it. A school for difficult kids--not the socially elite specimens. And they turn out fine. Normal; and nice people. Which is something you definitely cannot say of the kids turned out by our own reform schools."

"It's hard to believe," Tom said.

"Isn't it! That's the trouble with truth--these days."

We went on talking for a long while about the better world.

As we designed it, that hot night, I kept thinking how much of our envisioned heaven-on-earth was constituted of what are now considered to be mortal sins.

By and by, Tom said, "Half the doctors in the Utopia would be psychiatrists--right?"

"No."

"Doesn't it follow--in your idea of the state of things? Half the people who go to doctors, you say, have psychological causes for their physical symptoms. And I'd just about agree. Half the hospital beds are occupied by nuts."

"The better world, though, is designed to keep people from getting neuroses and psychoses--individually. And to stop the massive neuroses and psychoses of nations and races."

"So it is!" He chuckled. "That's your everlasting premise, isn't it? If all the people understood themselves, they'd live according to their understanding, and be well, wise and happy, if not particularly wealthy."

"Doctors, like factories, would be scarcer in the better world."

"But what in hell would people _do_?"

"Oh--they'd do unto others as they'd be done by. And they'd add a step even to the Golden Rule. They'd do unto the unborn generations as they would wish their ancestors had done unto them. The existing Golden Rule--which nobody practices anyhow--is objective. Its subjective counterpart refers to the people to come, not the people around at the moment. That's the Golden Rule of instinct--what instinct is all about. Evolution. The increase of consciousness down the aeons. Obvious, isn't it--that the history of evolution steadily spells increasing consciousness? Logical, therefore, that such is the inevitable bent of the future of life--as life is conveyed in man, or as it might someday be conveyed in another form, if man doesn't catch on, consciously, to the scheme behind his consciousness."

"Biological immortality," Tom said.

"Psychobiological immortality. Only--modern man, being so pompous about what goes on in his cortex and repressing so much of what goes on in the rest of his brain, has construed the 'immortal' aspect of instinct as a property of his ego. The natural urge to live through his species, through kids--to love, that is--to be man's father--is drained off into the asinine notion that his personal ego will live in a slap-happy eternity."

"Man," said Tom, "has a pretty damned powerful feeling about that personal immortality. Hard to shake."

"Why not? It's fashioned out of his most powerful instinct. The one that supports life itself, reproduction, and that at least accompanies evolution. Man takes that billion-year-old galaxy of instincts, filters it through his cortex, and comes up with the idea of Heaven. It's a childish mistake. But even a child, when it's mistaken about the actual nature of an instinct, still has as powerful a compulsion in his error as he would have if he were correct. Say he's frightened by something that isn't really frightful: he's still just as much afraid. And we--most of us--are in that state about pretty much all of our inner selves."

"And have been, you think, for a long while?"

"Sure. Since thousands of years before Christ. You guys in medicine ought to quit studying tissue per se--and study its functioning some more. Contemporary man--as a rule--never gets even a glimmering of how his personality is split and how the conscious part can bamboozle the unconscious part--and believe it has got away with it. You know the fact--you ignore the implications. For instance, Tom, we actually see upside-down, right?"

"Sure."

"In our first few weeks--as babies, we react according to the fact of our vision. We want to grab the top of something--but we reach for the bottom--because human vision is inverted."

"It is."

"We learn--by experience--that we see upside-down. As we age--month by month--we develop a 'mind' that makes the correction for us. By the time we're some months old, everything 'looks' rightside-up. And only once in a while, under peculiar conditions, does anybody's mind ever glimpse the world the way his eyes see it--inverted."

"So what?"

"So--that is an example of useful autohypnosis. An immensely potent example. It shows how the 'mind' can establish a set of facts directly opposite to those observed by the eyes. A mind that can go through life looking at an inverted world but 'seeing' it the way it is--manifestly is capable of accepting almost any degree of suggestion from its other parts, and its various senses--of accepting true suggestion or false suggestion. Manifestly, it isn't necessarily 'right' or 'wrong' about anything not proven."

"An argument for empiricism."

"Sure. But for psychological empiricism. That is--an argument for refusing to take for granted any human descriptions of the nature of mind, personality, spirit, psyche, soul--call it what you will--until the descriptions have been pragmatically checked. Take my proposition that all ideas of personal survival after death are misconstructions of an instinct designed to apply to the psychological and biological future of men on earth. Then look over some people who, as a group, reject the idea of Heaven. The communists, I mean.

"I've pointed out--and brighter men have pointed out before me--that when the materialist dialectic was applied on a mass of people, it became a religion. Reason and logic departed. Dogma, orthodoxy, emotion, creed, saints, apostles, holy orders, a Bible with gospels--the whole, compulsive paraphernalia of religion burst into being. What was intended as an abstract, atheistic, scientific, materialistic pattern for living turned into the most fanatical evangelism, the most bigoted crusade, the least logical movement the earth has seen for ages. Lately, where the facts of the science of genetics have proven contrary to communist dogma, the Soviet has abolished science. The Roman Catholic Church never did anything more religious, in the worst sense of that word--more superstitious--more compulsive--or more absurd."

"What are you driving at?"

"Just this. What happened, psychologically, in Russia is one more great proof of instinct. Until and unless you find out pragmatically what instinct is, and what its laws are, no theory of government or system for living will be anything but a set of compulsive simulations of instinct. A religion. Communism was dialectical materialism so long as men just talked about it; when they tried to put it in effect, it became another faith, with the complete trappings of a faith. Dialectical materialism not merely denies that men are instinctual--it ignores the very possibility; as a result, its application drives instinct entirely into the unconscious mind. You can see the proof of that by reading in the daily papers what's happening in Russia or by noting the Russian technique of debate. Pure theology. Pure nonsense."

"I wish you'd written more along those lines," Tom said.

"I'd planned to. I'd even started the first chapters. The calm, collected, documented description of what instinct is and how it works. It was going to be a scientific contribution. Jung explained to the Freudians. Wylie explained to the Jungians."

Tom sat stiff for a minute or so. "Essays?"

"Peaceful ones. Scholarly. No brass and no balloons."

"Golly."

"Why 'golly'?"

"We need that tome."

"Not really. Too soon. Jung wrote me, once, that he thought it would take about five hundred years before people began to understand generally the ideas he elicited."

"More books might help shorten the interval."

I nodded my head affirmatively. "Might. Time doesn't matter, though. Not so much. When I first began to see what caused the immense and self-evident discrepancy between what some men would like to be and what most men actually are I burned up with the idea of noising the news around. I learned the hard way that the idea was one for just a few people--too few to be more than leaven in the coming centuries. I finally realized that my burn was, mostly, the desire to be the missionary myself. To get a by-line. Ego in a low form. And I also slowly realized that the truth would be there, always--and since it was there, steps could be taken by anybody, anytime, toward finding it again."

"You just write off your whole civilization--like that."

"It's what we're here for. To write ourselves off."

"Usefully."

"Well--our civilization has learned enough useful technical tricks to last for millenniums. We served a purpose."

Tom looked at his watch--and sighed. "Gotta go."

"I thought we were to have a long evening together."

"So did I. But I have to go back to Medical Center. They called before supper. There's a peculiar pneumonia up there--and something that isn't leukemia but acts like it."

We stood up and went across the grass, blinking in the gloom and stepping around prone figures.

"You seem all right," he said.

"I'm all right."

"I still think we could use that book--and I hope that we'll get it."

"Thanks."

"Need anything?"

He meant medicine. I said I didn't.

We both waved and a cab stopped.

He thanked me rather formally for dinner.

"So long, boy," he said, then. "And don't give up hope."

"I've got plenty of hope--it just isn't immediate, like the fiscal prospects of department stores."

"I mean for yourself."

"Hope isn't for yourself," I said.

"Night!"

His voice was gentle, affectionate. The door thwacked.

The cab went away into the torrid murk, its two little top lights blinking out when the driver threw the flag.

I stood on the corner, on cobblestones, shaded from nothing by the suffocating trees above me and thinking, I guess, about the book I wasn't going to write. All of a sudden my eyes filled with tears. I felt so lost, so lonely, so ashamed of my body and so scared that I wanted to have someone put comforting arms around me.

A couple necking on a flat bench beside the Park wall diddled a battery radio and it began to sing through its nose.

"Alllll--thuh worrrrld--is waiting for the sunnnnrise--alll--"

All that was coming up was the stone moon.

Diagonally down Fifth Avenue, I noticed the spot where the canoe-hat had poked the girl who looked like my daughter.

I went over there. On the cement sidewalk--a broad, pale path that sparkled in the street light--I saw the stains of that bastard's blood.

I wanted to spit in them.

I had an impulse to look around for a tooth--something to have mounted for a watch charm.

I supposed he'd put them in his pocket to give to his dentist.

I didn't feel so lonely after that.

10

It was about half past nine when I came back to my apartment.

I stripped off my clothes and put in two hours of work.

Then the phone rang.

I was sure it would be Ricky.

Some men's wives, calling that late, would be checking up.

Ricky would just be missing me.

I jumped over to the phone.

It wasn't that clear Hello Darling, like a star in clouds, a landfall in unknown, tedious seas.

"Hello. Phil Wylie?" A pleasant voice. Yvonne, perhaps.

"Yeah-me." I wasn't very civil since it wasn't Ricky.

"This is Gwen. Can you talk?"

"Gwen?"

"We met last night. If you've forgotten so soon, it's not my fault."

The redheaded girl at Hattie's--the one who looked studious and unaffected--the one who had made me think of the handsome wife of some fortunate professor. An interesting one.

"Oh," I said. "Sure."

"I'm not--interrupting--anything? Hattie said you were being a bachelor--and you sat up late. I just asked her."

"I was working."

"And I was hoping you were lonesome."

"Well, I am, as a matter of fact."

"Goody! I'll take a cab."

I was going to tell her to do no such thing. I sat down on the sofa to explain my intention of working until the words ran together and all I could manage was a dozen steps to bed sometime, probably, before dawn. But I leaned back and, in doing that, I looked into the other room. I saw myself sitting there, trying to read myself to sleep, eating some of Tom's barbiturate to help--and solitude eating me.

I said, "All right."

"You sound terribly nonchalant."

"It's the telephone," I said. "You can't see over it."

She chuckled and drew in her breath just enough so I heard it and said, "Twenty minutes."

I fixed up the manuscript and set the bridge table aside. Then I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. "Why?" I said to myself.

This inquiry may seem to have a connotation of guilt. Such is not the case. It represented introspection, which I continued as I removed, in the now-tepid water that emerged from the tap marked "cold," all track and trickle of the night's labors.

My friend Dave Berne--whom I'd come upon with Marcia in _dolce far niente_--once quoted Forbisher-Laroche to the effect that there are fifteen hundred and six discrete reasons for associating with prostitutes and only nine even potentially commensurate objections. Dave and I, with an hour or so to spare at the time, were able to list three hundred and twenty of the fifteen hundred and six and felt, upon discontinuing the game, that we had every good prospect of recapitulating the lot from our own joint knowledge.

A degree of doubt was cast upon the Forbisher-Laroche figures in my subsequent association with Dave, owing to the fact that he quoted the same authority on so many other matters--the breeding rate of hamsters, for example, the relative climbing efficiencies of various kite designs, and the esoteric causes of giddiness. It occurred to me that "Forbisher-Laroche" might serve my lawyer friend in lieu of the name of an authority or researcher which he could not call to mind--or even in lieu of better authority than his own. This, however, was remarkably good; so the table, even if specious, may be regarded as sound from the order-of-magnitude standpoint.

Among the nine objections to association with prostitutes were at least two (Dave said) which could be regarded as obsolete: the dangers of disease and of pregnancy. Of the remaining seven, only two more (he claimed) could be regarded as rational by the man of ethical detachment--one aesthetic; the other, the practical matter of costs. The rest were mere excursions into "morals"--a contradiction in itself since, were we to apply any genuine morality to sex and sexual conduct, we should have to begin by contemplating the field with simple honesty--a process in which the "Moralistical" objections would dissolve instanter, so he stated.

Of the two objections worth considering, then, one was the expense--a matter to be pondered in all deals and negotiations. The other was that old chestnut which appears in the endless series of candid books of advice to boys, books advertised as providing "complete sex enlightenment," books which, in sum, horribly frighten their readers and leave them, as a rule, incapable of any real enlightenment for the rest of their lives. "Would you," such books fiercely inquire, "walk into a cheap hotel, find that the stranger before you had left the tub filled with his dirty bath water, and immerse yourself in it?" This, in short, is the _aesthetic_ objection.

It contains certain fallacies. One is the implied idea that sex relations are equivalent to ablution--that they are designed to transfer from each individual to the other such foreign matter as may have accumulated on his or her person. There is the further implication that such individuals are thereafter unable to cleanse themselves of the alleged spotting and staining supposedly got in such a fashion. Carried to its logical conclusion, this thought would force hotels, as just one example, to discard a bathtub with the checking out of each guest. Industry could not keep up with such tub-scrapping.

In other words, the question is unfairly put. If cleaning one's self is to be admitted as a pertinent analogue for love-making, the question should read, "Would you use the _bathtub_ in a cheap hotel?" And why necessarily cheap?

"Would you," the interrogator should ask in all equity, "dawdle voluptuously in the shining, sunken, marble tub of the most gaudy hostelry on Park Avenue?"

Again, modern chemistry being what it is, and business being ingenious, it is a safe inference that the tub in the palatial hotel and the tub in its humble competitor would be made ready by the identical advertised product--one having the same statistical effect upon the muck and microbes of the rich as upon the grime and germs of the impecunious. And, even if such were not the case, the Park Avenue situation per se cannot be ruled out.

But I fear the bathtub analogue is hardly intended to be examined for what it is. There is no integrity of thought behind it. Its author does not pause to consider that millions already do plunge daily into common tubs--swimming pools, which are, presumably, well chlorinated. Nor does he go on to inquire as to whether his reader uses the dishes in restaurants and drugstores and whether, before using them, he inspects the dishwashing facilities and practices. There is a lack of fairness in the man. He himself--for reasons he would never dare to inspect--regards prostitutes as he regards the standing pool of some rank stranger's bath; and he deems it as his mission in life to promulgate this obscene and entirely unrealistic simile in the hope (and the good expectation) that all his young readers will, for the rest of their lives, upon encountering the flossiest of doxies, think instanter of stale tub water.

The fact of the matter is that the bright and capable girl who engages in prostitution will be found, on any count, cleaner and shinier, better soaped, scrubbed, polished and perfumed than the average for all wives in the land. Statistically, she may be slightly more venereal than her married sisters, but only slightly--and, since we have given her brightness and capability, it is equally certain (statistically) that she will be more likely to be under treatment and so incapable of communicating afflictions which, as noted above, have themselves somewhat lost their menacing aspect. In short, were a woman to be chosen by lot from (_a_) the general married group or (_b_) the group of alert tarts, and were the criterion to be bodily aesthetic desirability, there would be no doubt as to which group one should draw from. Tubs are tubs.

It is at best a trifling matter.

The positive first item on the Forbisher-Laroche list (if you're interested) and the first which Dave and I set down on our own impromptu schedule, was "fun." The idea that sexual congress, erotic play, coition--call it what you will--is _fun_ has very nearly vanished from Western society. To all persons who approach prostitution with the standing-tub-water philosophy, even the most faithful and the most sanctified relations between man and wife will hardly be even appetizing--since, by their acknowledged images, such people will find themselves condemned to a single tub of water in which they will be obliged to bathe all their lives. This, of course, is the inevitable penalty paid by every denigrator of sex activities: his own, under his best auspices, will still forever seem vile. Also this is the outlook of churches. It explains why the churchly so rarely have any fun and why, if they do, they make sure someone pays for it later--preferably a heretic, and, if possible, in blood.

But (to go to the opposite pole for reference--a course which is implicit in all considerations of the well-educated man) even amongst the heretics--amongst sophisticated, intellectual, emancipated citizens--the concept of fun in relation to sexual activity is absent, or nearly so. These people--husbands, wives, bachelors, spinsters, teen-agers and precocious children--readers of popular slick magazines and the newsprint digests, subscribers to book clubs, members of frank discussion groups--rely for their sex facts upon certain nationally advertised texts which are dispatched through the mails in plain wrappers. All such volumes are offered as authoritative manuals of the art of love--no holds barred; rather the contrary.

I have read perhaps a dozen of these treatises with close attention and I am prepared to agree that their claims are not exaggerated. They do present, in considerable detail and with never a minced word, what might be termed the classic figures of love-making. And yet their readers--persons who are presumed to be doing skull-practice for an imminent marital event--will not find in any of these works a suggestion that the subject in hand involves what I have called fun.

The verbal diagrams suggest, instead, that an extremely intricate and arduous business is being considered--one to be approached in precisely the same fashion as an inquiry into the manly art of self-defense made by a nervous weakling who is about to be exposed, more or less against his will, to an environment swarming with tough, aggressive stevedores and millhands.

In all these treatises, emphasis is put upon the likelihood of early failure--the mere hope of subsequent success--and the stratagems which, if meticulously pursued, may ultimately bring about success. The directions read like those for boxing, savate, or judo. An encounter of the most dire solemnity is envisaged. Painful knockdowns and other traumatizing incidents are constantly described. Yet it is pointed out repeatedly that a genuine knock_out_ will result inevitably in Unhappiness, Infidelity, Divorce, Frigidity, Impotence, Neurosis, Neurasthenia, Psychosis, Premature Senility, Suicide, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Thus the "sophisticated" individual comes to the practice of the art of love without room in his mind for the thought that it might be fun, pleasure, joy, glee, and a source of high laughter. He (or she) is, instead, nerved up for a clash, the outcome of which is most uncertain and potentially of extreme hazard, and the technique for which involves a repertoire like that of a concert organist, along with the timing, muscular co-ordination, and steady nerve of a trapeze performer.

It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader at this point that the manuals in question here are the works of accredited physicians, which is to say, of scientists. Their observations are astute, accurate and complete, from the objective standpoint--and, of course, highly _reasonable_. All they have omitted is the subjective, or instinctual, aspect of the matter--and here is as good an example of that phenomenal but widespread oversight as any.

Some of them even refer to the subject as the "science"--not the art--of love. Technique is a still commoner term. One can reflect sympathetically upon the plight of their mates. And, of course, one can also reflect that, at least in a few instances, these amatory scientists should be given the benefit of a solid doubt: were they to describe love-making as fun, and address themselves to the means of eliciting pleasure therefrom, rather than to the training-table and Olympiad aspects of the procedure, they would be denied the use of the mails even in plain wrappers and even if they had fifty university degrees. The United States Post Office is willing (in a gingerly way) to disseminate anatomical discourse on sex for the married or near-married; but it draws an absolute line at any suggestion that sexual relations are, or could be, consonant with a good time.

Thus we see that the churches, on the one hand, and the cognoscenti, on the other, rule fun out of sex and are supported in the matter by the government.

The first good reason for associating with a prostitute is, however, unmistakably--pleasure.

The pleasure is reciprocal--self-evident for the gentleman, and frequently for the lady also. In cases where the gentleman is something less than that, the lady still has the pleasure of pecuniary profit. This is not a matter to be taken lightly in an era in which the United States is regarded as the last stronghold of capitalism--and the "money-incentive" is recognized as one of our chief Ideals.

There are, it is true, certain nigglers who claim that, since the prostitute lends her person to an act from which she may receive no particular direct pleasure (owing to surfeit or to disinterest) the profession itself is immoral--a violation of that American Ideal which regards sexual relations as permissible only for the Consummation of Romantic Love. Let all such note, then, that fully half the wives in the land report that they seldom or never enjoy consummation, and rarely even intense pleasure, in their relations with their husbands. Must we say all these wives are therefore prostituting themselves?

A similar question may be asked of those who are finicky about the straight cash aspect of professional cohabitation. Our magazine fiction, radio, motion pictures, and other media are engaged in a uniform campaign to indoctrinate Miss America with the theory that her best possible operation in life is to marry a man with millions, or with wealth in his background, with a good income, or--minimally--good prospects. Hardly one heroine of these legends in a thousand marries an oaf manifestly doomed to poverty. Money is an American Ideal--and the plain inference to be drawn from our legends is that sexual desirability occurs for the acquisition of money.

The nation is elaborately stratified according to the amount of money obtained by each young woman upon marriage, or by other means. Of the girl who gets a rich husband we say (even though he has the manners of a gopher and the countenance of a quince), "Oh, well, she can own a convertible and sleep on percale." Advertising, of course, is wholly directed to this association of ideas: one never sees a homely girl displaying a fur coat or a roadster or even pop. With such massive duress visited upon her from every direction--with women marrying and divorcing wealthy men one after the other and remaining the while on elective lists of America's Leading Ladies--a girl cannot conceivably be criticized, on grounds logical or grounds emotional--for slightly short-cutting the standard technique and employing her fresh, gay, sex appeal to obtain the money directly, by a somewhat greater volume of relations at a lower net charge per unit. This is, after all, no more than the translation of another American Ideal--mass production--to a different field.

One associates with these young ladies, then, for one's money's worth of fun, as I have said. But, lest the reader doubt Forbisher-Laroche (as I do in a sense, myself) I set below, at random, a few of the putative 1,505 other reasons:

_Company._ A man often finds himself alone--as I did that evening.

_Need._ It has been pointed out that the so-called sexual drive of young men, at least, is on the order of five times as great as that of young ladies of equal age. This is a circumstance which, for some generations, our imbecile sires have endeavored to deny or conceal. Obviously, their absurd activities in that direction lie at the very heart of the insane condition of the modern mind. Since men have five times the passion of women in their youth, our sex mores must be revised, and soon, five hundred per centum, or we shall all go wacky. It may have happened to us already, in fact.

It has been pointed out that, with the increase of age, this enormous sex discrepancy tends to diminish. The woman of thirty-five will have undergone an augmentation of desire--her mate a decrease. In an unpublished work, I tentatively suggested that--this being the biological fact--a new sex convention might be devised whereby relations between all women of more than, say, thirty-five--whether married or single--and all unmarried males of less than, say, twenty-one, would be publicly regarded as rising out of "innocent necessity" and not counted as in any way unchaste, or unfaithful, or otherwise compromising. The notion seemed inspirational to me. It would at once provide a remedy for a truly desperate situation now existing unrecognized among both sexes at certain diverse ages--and it would give useful and socially beneficial occupation to a slew of wives and single women in America who at present have nothing to do at all. It would provide boys and young men with experienced tutors--women who knew what was in the books but were able to enjoy themselves, to boot--and it might, indeed, revive the now-drooping flower of love in the whole land. My friends, however, after reading my feuilleton, advised me not to publish it, on the fantastic grounds that it would be regarded as frivolous!

But to go on with the random reasons:

_Variety._ It is a point upon which I feel no comment whatever should be needed.

_Obedience._ This term has its limitations for the intended meaning. The word "command" might serve, but it also has connotations not here intended.

In a marriage ceremony, it is true, the wife agrees, as a rule, to "obey" her husband--and he, her. However, in perhaps half of American marriages, obedience drops out of the relationship the moment the preacher closes his prayer book. In perhaps a quarter, the husband becomes the serf of the wife--who has customs galore and the weight of American advertising to back her in her commands of what he must do, earn, obtain, provide, and so on.

Yet the sexual deed itself is one which, if there be command or obedience, requires that the command come from the male, the obedience from the female. (Male aggression, female passivity, the scientists insanely term it.) This circumstance, however loathsome to feminists, is--again--a simple fact of nature: a man is physiologically incapable of being commanded to make love. He cannot simulate. In acts so fundamental to his heart, mind, spirit, and soul as those related to sex, it is therefore not only psychologically evident, but physically plain, that a certain degree of obedience, or receptivity to command, or, if you prefer, co-operation, is necessary on the part of the woman. Without it, love-making, when possible at all, is at best a mere reflex.

Such is the condition of millions of women today, however--and not surprising, either, in view of the times and the customs--that they are inclined to refuse male address, and to whine, scold, heckle, disobey, begrudge, demean, belittle, routinize, particularize, censor, evade, scorn, shame, humiliate, et cetera, before or during or after sexual relations. This leaves the male relentlessly insatiate. Geared by Nature for cohabitation with a willing--nay, an enthusiastic--partner, he finds himself bedded with a cold and prissy marmot of a woman. It drenches his self-esteem, decays his manliness, and either reduces him to the shy, stammering estate of millions of our Milquetoasts or else sets him in a permanent rage against life so that he is ready to turn communist, or Ku-Kluxer, to take to drink, or to beat his children.

Prostitutes provide the only dependable respite from this dilemma, which man currently even somewhat allows himself. Inasmuch as they are sexually in the employ of the man, they will, if worthy of their hire, not critically submit to, but genially participate in his caprices. By this method, millions of otherwise lost men keep alive somewhere within themselves at least a flicker of honest, male self-respect. Now and then--if only a night a year--and only for a price--they are obeyed by a woman.

_Whim._ This is related to the above. As I pointed out to Yvonne, the norm for the human approach to sex relations is the mammalian. Yet all forms save one specific approach are today prohibited. State dungeons await even husbands reported by their children as abed off the parallel and with angular deviations of more than a very few degrees. This is called "bestiality"--a term devised by no animal lover.

Being animals, we hunger to be harmlessly animals. Being forbidden by parents, schools, church and state, millions are confined in the domestic arts of love to that one simple stratagem which propels locomotives. But amongst ladies of easier, nobler virtue, the parched mammal may discover some surcease.

_Beauty._ This, too, is self-explanatory.

_Relaxation._ Ditto.

_Peace._ Also.

_Health._ Also.

_Kindliness._ Many lack it at home.

_Warmth._ Another occasionally marked domestic deficit.

_Mirth._ See above.

_Femininity._ Look over the wives and look over the trollops.

_Youth._ Who does not age?

_Favor._ Some say all women are masochistic and many wives surely are; for these, a slight indiscretion may be a pleasanter thing to suffer than the painless boredom of impeccable fidelity. Whoring as a favor to the frau may be a rare form--but it must not be overlooked.

_Information._ Whole books could be written on this topic alone.

_Practice._ Here, again.

_Courtesy._ Helping worthy girls through college, and the like.

_Testing._ The litmus of another woman.

_Tradition._ No comment.

_Courage._ In these days, it takes a lot.

_Conversation._ A degree of candor is found among filles de joie that is elsewhere rare.

And so the list goes--to the alleged length of fifteen hundred and six excellent reasons for associating with hired damsels. They hardly furnish a good brief for the sexual slum and erotic underground of harlotry today; but they surely show the sores and shortcomings of the pure, the purulent, in heart.

Hence, when, at the beginning of this dissertation, I asked myself "Why?" I was speculating upon which of the multitude of possible motives governed my assent to Gwen's proposition.

Beauty, to be sure; she was a handsome wench; Loneliness and Fun; Relaxation; Information and Conversation, perhaps; and perhaps, also (a reason Forbisher-Laroche himself had never thought of) the Imminence of Death. It is said that the imminence of death on any large scale historically produced mass orgy--that, for instance, the Roman streets were littered with connected couples whenever the plague closed in upon the city during medieval times. This urge--sired doubtless by Nature's command to beget in every eleventh hour--may have had its dark and archetypal image within me somewhere.

11

These ratiocinations occupied me while I dressed, picked up the premises, and ordered from the Knight's Bar a supply of ice in a thermos jug, some whisky, Coca-Cola, glasses, and carbonated water. The waiter had brought them--a waiter wet and odoriferous from a day's running through the high temperatures, but cheerful withal--and held the card for my signature, and departed, before she called from the lobby.

I gave her the number and went out to the elevator.

She had piled up the sleek filaments of her red-brown hair to keep cool a graceful neck. She wore a suit of thin cotton--green--and interesting shoes of a darker green. She came to my quarters laughing amiably. "I'm very pleased with myself!"

"You should be."

She undid the catch of her jacket and took it off. The green blouse beneath was little more than a broad brassière--a sensible and summery thing that left bare a midsection of smooth, sunburned abdomen and rib. "It was my idea to call you up," she said.

"Which pleases me with you."

She sat down near the window, hopeful a breeze might come through it. Her eyes rested on mine with gay attentiveness. "It's terribly slow at Hat's," she said. "It has been--all month."

"Everybody," I said, "is out of town."

"Leaving nobody home to go out of the world with. Desolating!"

"I've got some Scotch--soda--"

"Weak," she said, "and lots of ice."

I mixed the drink. While I was doing it, she saw the manuscript in work and went over to the bridge table. She read a few lines. "It sounds amusing," she said.

"It did to me--the first time through. And the second time--when I corrected it. Right now, I'm cutting it, and my own jokes are a little less than fresh." I handed her the tall glass. "Too bad we don't have airconditioning here at the Astolat."

"I like heat waves. Besides--I spent the afternoon in an air-conditioned apartment. I'm all cooled off for the weekend."

"If you change your mind--we'll find a chilled spot later."

"Then I'll change it--" she looked across the glass-rim--"later. I was over at the apartment of a girl named Charmaine. Used to work for Hattie--and then became the friend of a lad who died and left her millions."

"Nice gal?"

Gwen said, with a quick, small indrawn breath, "Darling!" Then she glanced at me again--and flushed.

"Hattie told me all about Charmaine," I said.

"It--it--only makes me want a man--!" She was afraid I'd be indignant, or perhaps disgusted. "That's true! In fact--that's what Charmaine tries--to do. She likes to make people all hot and bothered. She--!"

The girl was embarrassed--and yet _remembering_, at the same time. The glass tilted a little in her hand. I went over to her and touched her. "Didn't they tell you about me?"

She laughed, then, and sat down. "I was fussed, I guess. Some men--"

I said it for her. "Some men are so narrow-minded you can't put a dime between what they don't know and what they'll never learn."

The feeling that she might have made a faux pas--might have prejudiced me hopelessly against her--had gone from her eyes. She walked over to the windowsill where the radio was. She switched it on and turned the dial back to the minimal volume. While the tubes warmed, she leaned forward on the sill and looked out--across the brick terrace and the parapet, some half dozen feet away. My floor is on a slight setback. When she found she couldn't see straight down, she pulled her head inside again, found a station playing dance music, tuned it in sharply, turned it very low, and smiled at me.

"Sex isn't logical," she said.

"Not from the standpoint we call logic."

"Take me."

"An idea."

She nodded her head affirmatively and went on smiling. "What attracts me--sexually--to people--isn't their sex. Not whether they're men or women--or even little kids, for that matter. It's something about them that I never know what it may be. The way they move--or the way they talk--or their expressions--or their looks. It can be any little thing. Sometimes I think it isn't _them_ at all--but how _I_ feel at the time. And even then my feelings aren't ever the same. According to what it is that attracts me, I'm different. Sometimes I see a man I'd like to have make love to me. Sometimes I see some college boy I'd just like to neck. Sometimes I see a woman I wish would have a crush on me and rush me--like college girls--and get herself terribly upset about wanting me around so much--and not knowing what to do. And sometimes I feel the way Charmaine seems to, about everybody she likes. I just try to see how excited I can make them be--and then let them be. Like that. Let them go away. Does it bore you?"

"No."

"There are some feelings I can't react to. Homosexuality in men. I don't mean it revolts me, or anything. I just can't see why they bother--even with all I _can_ see. And the most peculiar part is noticing that the men who hate pansies the most are nearest to it. You find that out, in my kind of life. They'll visit you and act strictly like Marine sergeants--and get very tight--and finally, perhaps, ask--probably pretending to kid--if there are only girls around the place. When anything like that happens--I feel perfectly blank. Yet that doesn't seem--normal--under the circumstances."

Gwen's theory of normal libido required the possibility of erotic reaction to just about any object, it appeared.

I wondered how close that was to the actual nature of us all. The Freudians would have shrugged it off as adolescent. A carrying-into-maturity of the unsorted, unspecialized yearnings of the infant and the child. I felt that--if a person could choose--he, or she, would be far better off with Gwen's libido than the tormented fragment that the majority cherished. Cherished as the platform for all that they called love and integrity.

She was telling the truth. But presently I wondered if she had not told it a great many times, to men like myself, and to women--some women. Told it as a psychological tapestry against which to pose herself; as an advertisement, an inducement. It wouldn't be the first time I'd heard a prostitute do that. Tell the truth readily enough--too readily. Personal history--anecdotes--subclinical material. Intellectual people would fall for it. They would be seduced by it. For they have been deprived not just of the erotic play their childhood naturally yearned for but, in most cases, of the opportunity for mere discussion of the subject, which they'd have enjoyed.

Suppose eating, not sex, were the taboo of our century? Suppose it was illegal for more than two people to eat together and suppose even they had to get a license for it and eat in secret, while children were fed alone in dark closets? Suppose our billboards and newspaper ads, movies and books and art, devoted themselves to pictures of food--but never to one glimpse of anybody eating? (That's what we'd done about sex--or tried our best to do.) Wouldn't it result in secret, general passions to try esoteric foods? And wouldn't people like to get together, law or none, and talk about the tabooed object?

I thought about Bali, where people actually were a little ashamed of eating meals in public. An animal indecency to be ritualistically concealed.

I felt the familiar stab of indignation. How long would it take my fellow men to realize what they had done to themselves, and _why_ they had done it?

To hide the real creature. To dress up the pretense that we are not instinctual.

Would we ever see? Learn? Break down the conceited barricade we'd lifted up since beyond the Stone Age--the wall between the old brain and the new cortex? Or would we, too, decay? Enter our Toynbean time of troubles, turn military, tyrannical, lucubricious and guilty--instead of loving and free, and so in the end fall prey to the outlying barbarian horde--the rest of the world, that outnumbered us sixteen to one? Was a Presbyterian, a Catholic, a collegiate agnostic, a Unitarian, a socialist nearer to insight than an old Roman?

I juggled the breathless doubt in my mind.

"The misery and aggression of the world, the hate and warlike sentiment," a great psychiatrist had said the other day, "are due to two causes: physical hunger in the Orient; in the Occident, the fantastic sex repressions derived from Christianity, so called, and obtaining still in the materialist societies."

There it was--in the words of a psychological scientist.

Not a single statesman that I knew of had picked up the thought.

"A penny," Gwen said.

I apologized. "It's too intricate. It's a summing up of various truths rejected or denied. We're out of the habit of seeing them. So it might take me a couple of years to explain."

Gwen laughed. "Swell! I'll come by, an hour a day--and lie on your couch--and you can explain."

"Maybe," I said, "if they'd listened to you just now--and compared what you said with what they honestly feel--but they won't!"

"They will if you get them in the mood--and alone."

"Many?"

"Darned near all--that I ever see. You'd be astonished."

"Still--that doesn't matter. Because when they act they act as a mob. And as a mob--they never admit what they really think and feel and dream and wish and long for. They just fight."

An expression came into her eyes that was part speculative and part cautious. "Some like that, too. Like to be hurt."

"Sure. The guilt again. The old quid pro quo."

She watched me. "They get a kick out of it."

"Pain's their license for any fun. Not in Nature--just in people. And what--incidentally--is your feeling about that?"

"Being hurt? I'd hate it."

"Me, too. Hurting, then?"

Her wary eyes decided. She raised a shoulder and let it fall. "What would you do if a guy who loved it asked you to beat him? If you knew it was the only kick he could get out of life? If he brought you a switch--"

"--just like the kind his mother used--"

"--and begged you?"

I said, "Scram."

"Suppose _a girl_ did?" She looked at me intently.

It was an idea that had never crossed my mind. I thought it over. "Scram," I repeated. "There's pain enough in life--even in loving--without asking for more."

Gwen's eyebrows went up. "It's another thing I can't feel, either." She gestured with her hand, pushing the idea away from herself.

She'd finished her highball long since. She made another, now--a stronger one. I didn't want any more Coca-Cola at the moment--any more anything. Any more her, even.

And that shocked me.

What had the sensation come from?

From her most recent confession?

No. It was familiar--undistressing in that connotation--a known, acknowledged, assimilated phenomenon, like any other biological datum of birds, bees, flowers, our earth. Nothing surprising at all.

It went back to the question "Why?": To Loneliness, Beauty and Fun and all that.

The truth was, I had been unwilling, once again, to face the night unsleepy and alone. I didn't want a girl; this one, or any one, except Ricky.

But the not-wanting of solitude was the greater negative.

She'd turned to another radio station and found a slow rumba. She drank deeply--standing--and moving her hips in tempo.

"Come on," she said.

Unwillingly, and unwilling to protest the heat of the night, I began to dance with her. She was, as Hattie had promised, very good.

I thought that presently I would stop this and send her home. It would be awkward.

And then, as the music quickened and we made a spot turn in the center of the room, I saw through the doors to the doors beyond--the doors that led to Yvonne's room. Mine was no longer flatly parallel with the wall.

I raised my voice. "Come on in, Yvonne!"

I had never relocked the door on my side.

She came in.

Gwen looked at her, at me, at Yvonne again--not troubling to hide the fact that she was astonished. But not irritated.

I would have expected Yvonne to be embarrassed--who would not?

She wasn't. Her gray eyes met mine steadily.

"I hoped you'd call me today," she said. "When you didn't--I had dinner with dad. I got back after the theater--and I heard your radio go on. I finally decided to knock on your door. But when I unlocked the one on my side--I found yours open. I was just about to say boo! and ask for a drink. I'll be good and go quietly afterward."

She said it steadily, rapidly, so that I knew, and Gwen knew, she had prepared it.

"Mrs. Prentiss," I said, "Yvonne Prentiss--Miss Gwen Talyor."

Yvonne turned and held out her hand.

She was wearing a black dinner dress; black was certainly for her.

Gwen took her hand and kept it and said to me, "Does a beautiful brunette live on the other side?"

I laughed. "And a platinum blonde across the hall. Just below me lives--"

"I know," Gwen answered. "Don't tell us."

I carried my glass to the bathroom, rinsed it, and made a highball.

"We met yesterday," I said to Gwen. "She comes from Pasadena." I handed the drink to Yvonne. "Miss Taylor--is an old friend of an old friend of mine."

Gwen said, "She knows. She's been listening."

Yvonne wouldn't look at me, then. But she said, "I told her. Do you mind terribly much? It's your own fault--for unlocking the door."

I ignored that. "Lemme see, then. Just where the hell were we?"

"You were dancing. And I wish you'd go on."

"Not the heat--" I began--"but--"

Gwen came over to my chair. "Come on."

So we danced a little--not very well.

"I wish," Yvonne said, "I could do that step."

I took a good look at her. And I looked back, in my mind, at her stylized past.

Her gray eyes were wide open and very bright. Otherwise she was composed. She didn't seem to realize how unprecedented it was for her not to mind that she had been caught eavesdropping on a man she'd known for a day who was alone with a girl she did not know at all. She should have been shocked--shocked as much as if she had suddenly found she had gone up on the stage and begun ad-libbing a part in a play. But she wasn't even concerned; she behaved as if she had always been in the cast.

Maybe she had.

When she said she wished she could do the off-beat step, I stopped dancing.

"Show her," I said to Gwen.

Gwen looked straight into my eyes--her back to Yvonne. One curved brow went up, inquiringly. I nodded the least bit.

Gwen let go of me as if I had disappeared. She turned and smiled and held out her arms.

Yvonne set her drink down carefully and got up and walked to Gwen. They began dancing--not trying the step--but just dancing. In a moment--in the same moment--without either of them saying a word--they switched; Yvonne led Gwen.

I sprawled back on the divan.

They danced for a long time and as they danced it seemed to me Yvonne relaxed a millimeter at a time--until she moved like a nebula--all gold and white and black. Gwen just smiled--looking at nothing for a long time, and finally looking down--an inch or so--into Yvonne's eyes.

When they stopped, Yvonne said softly, "That was wonderful!"

"Like it?"

"I never felt I was doing a rumba before. Even"--she laughed lightly toward me--"with the eminent professor Wylie."

"He's good," Gwen said. "But you have to be experienced."

"I used to think I was."

"You will be, lamb," Gwen said.

An announcer lengthily discussed various food products. Gwen turned him down to an indecipherable mutter. When strains of music returned thinly, Yvonne asked, "Can you tango?"

Gwen nodded.

So they danced again and, by and by, as they passed me, Yvonne said, "Mind if I borrow your girl friend for a brief chitchat?"

I shook my head.

Yvonne danced Gwen through the other room and through the doors.

They closed quietly.

Moments before, I had been embarrassed by Gwen's presence--by the realization that I had wanted companionship rather than passion. Now my feelings changed, showing how incomplete my awareness of them had been. I was alone and I did not want to be. Yvonne had deprived me of my casual date. I was not precisely jealous of one woman over another, but I was distressed. And this sentiment was not relieved by the plain fact that I was responsible, through a series of negative acts, for my situation.

I could have sent Yvonne packing. I could, by not nodding my head, have kept Gwen with me. On the evening before, I could have accepted Yvonne's invitation for a nightcap, or accepted the later invitation in her note to me. I'd been somewhat Olympian on both occasions--a little more detached than there was detachment in the sum of the parts of my nervous system.

But what should one do?

What would others do?

This is a question which I sometimes test by projecting myself into others, not to examine their circumstances, but to imagine what they would do in mine.

I switched off my radio.

I stretched out on my divan, lighted a cigarette and cogitated.

A great many of the men I know would refuse to believe or weigh the facts as they existed. Their knowledge of homo sapiens is so superficial, so repressed, or so compartmented, that they could not even assume an Yvonne would want to take a Gwen into her boudoir, let alone that one had done so.

And the majority of my male friends would label any narrative of my past two days as a boast. They would doubt that I'd encountered two such extremely attractive girls in so short a space of time. Two? Three, by the reckoning of these men--for they would include the scalding stare of Marcia as a sexual coup. They would assume I'd somewhat mistaken my own libido for any description I gave of the three girls, in the bargain.

They would forget how disturbed Yvonne was; hence they would fail to see that the interest she had shown in me was motivated not by myself, or any possible charm of mine, but by her wish for escape, or for anodyne, or for revenge--and perhaps, also, for mere experiment with her insatieties. These men would also overlook the fact that Gwen was a prostitute. Such liking as she felt for me was merely a fortunate vicissitude of business. She would have called me up even if she had disliked me: trade was slow and I had the price. Such men--and I knew many--would even overlook Marcia's attachment to Paul, on the opposite grounds that she _was_, after all, a prostitute. They would imagine every woman's hot-eyed glance as evidence of their irresistibility. In my place, they would conclude that three women, young and handsome, had given them a tumble because of what they were.

Three handsome young women had certainly invited me; but not one for myself.

There is also, among some of my friends, an inverted form of chivalry which causes them to feel they are obliged to respond to every feminine beckon with assent. But they take no responsibility for the results--the tangible and psychological results--of whatever behavior follows such assent. These imagine themselves great lovers and great understanders of women; they actually hold toward women about the same attitude they hold toward roast beef.

To all these last men, the fact that I had failed to wait upon Yvonne the night before, and dispatched Gwen with a nod, and responded to Marcia's luncheon leer with nothing more than analysis, would seem a great waste of opportunity, a failure to meet obligation, and even a kind of hypocrisy. For they would be men who knew that I held no brief for absolute fidelity in marriage. Knowing that, they would conclude _any_ refusal of mine to commit adultery was Pharisaic. Such men are black-white viewers; they go through life blind to the color spectrum.

I knew still other men--a few, at least--who would regard my association with prostitutes and loose women (which is what they would call Yvonne) as proof that I was a bum. To these, all that I did, thought and expressed would be discredited by the antics of some of my companions. "Wylie," they would say, "hangs out with scum." _Ergo_ Wylie's discernment, his art, his intellectual ability is manifestly nil.

This is the common attitude of "Christians"--though how they explain their own Christ's various companions is beyond my guessing.

Two or three more of my friends would take what might be called the anthropological view of my situation. They would argue that, being away from my wife and needing sexual refreshment, having the opportunity, but not taking it, I was acting weakly. These would overlook not merely the motives of the ladies, and my feelings about my wife, but also the fact that my share of everyman's borrowed time was apparently running out--a circumstance which in itself alters the libido.

To some of my friends, then, I would have to excuse myself for what I had already done; to others, I would have to make excuses for what I had failed to do. To myself, I had nothing much to say.

In a minute, an hour, or on the morrow, my reasons, moods and motives would change once more and my behavior might be different. Hence this empathetic review had merely shown again how men behave according to sets of compulsions--patterns of conscious virtue, conscious sin, or conscious animalism--which stem in every case from arbitrary mores. And neither amongst the overtly virtuous nor the subtly sinful is the pattern valuable; it makes hypocrites of the former and deprives the latter of joy. The animalists, too, have no solution: they fornicate as through a wall, knowing a person exists on the other side but not what a person is.

So any instinct, when unseen, compels men to abide by some formulation of itself. They accept a Faith and are then obliged to play they are the God who rules that Faith. So, too, a man like myself, who quests beyond these compulsive faiths (and is therefore called faithless by Believers of every stamp) foolishly plays God whenever he does not quite know himself.

I sat there, sneering at the pompous fashion in which I had behaved and wondering how to make peace with my solitude, my recovered mortality. Even I had wanted more than I had found for myself. Not redheads and ash blondes abed in the night of that heat-glazed city, but their company, their tempting presence. It would be a matter worth thinking about in the future--if my future was to be long enough for that kind of thought.

I came close, again, to calling Ricky, at that point.

Telling her. Summoning her.

And I thought that most of the men I knew would do precisely that. They like to ride downhill alone; but when the burden grows heavy and the grade steep, their wives become wheels on the wagon of their difficulties. So American marriage is too often both trouble-sharing and a private sport. "If you love her," they would say, "and if she loves you, it is your duty to let her know and she would be hurt if you did not." These, I think, are little boys married to their mothers. If I had known the truth of my condition, Ricky would have been the next to know. But I was not certain--quite. Let her sleep the night through, then. Live two more contented days. She is my wife. She nurtures me and I her and if I told her when I did not need to tell her, that would be a true weakness in my lexicon.

Even while thinking that, I looked at the phone again and touched it. But I am not quite such a schoolboy.

I may be the only male in America who feels as I do but my feeling is definite: from the age of about six, I did not want a girl who was necessarily just like the girl that married dear old dad.

It may be that there are no real men left in America.

America may be as barren of actual masculinity as Sodom of holy folk.

Some of us, however, still take an occasional crack at keeping alive the memory of what men once were--or fanning the hope of what they may be.

Once, for instance, men behaved with compassion toward women; they were even interested in how women feel; what women did was actually important to men--once. It may again be so.

But the likelihood is that nobody ever escaped Sodom alive. Lot's wife looked back for a last squint at the new streamlined dish washers--and turned to a pillar of salt. Lot, a moment later, tried to save a charred copy of the financial page--and turned into a pillar of bicarbonate of soda.

I got to about that point in my estimates when the doors opened again. Yvonne appeared--flushed and tousled--a drink in one hand and some books in the other.

"Lonesome?" she asked.

"Far from it," I said. "I was working with the Lord."

She laughed. "Join us?"

I shook my head.

"I thought not. Here! _Amusez-vous!_" She threw the books on my bed and shut the door again.

I looked at the books. Three mystery stories in the conventional getup of gaud and grue and one volume without a jacket: Huxley's _Ape and Essence_, which Yvonne had denuded to camouflage another treatise. I passed up the mysteries--the immunizing doses of mayhem, the habit-forming homicide--with which so many of the better people try to allay their critical sensations in this civilization. I took the Huxley back to my living room and read in it here and there.

It was unfortunate, I thought, that the bright Aldous had seen fit to show the world that he, too, could write a screenplay. Did he need a studio job, I wondered?

But it was only funny that the public and the critics had misjudged the tale. For Huxley's portrait of post-atomic California was not, as most persons assumed, the flight of a delirious brain. It was, by every relevant index, the most likely prediction that an intelligent man could make, these days. It was just what good actuaries and capable business forecasters should anticipate. Six hundred years ago, I reflected, the Great Plague had reduced Western Europe to a similar condition: religion had become corrupt, rogues had seized the government, the expiring feudal system had been finally shattered, and the people had roamed amidst half-empty towns and cities, living by robbery, raping, burning witches, and indulging every horrid superstition, while knowledge vanished and science stood still. This condition had lasted for more than a century.

The intervening twenty generations had not been enough to change man a particle. He was the same specious brainist and therefore the same potential dupe of his unaltered instincts. His opposite possibilities were perhaps even stronger--since he had exploited vanity for six more centuries. Atomic bombs, likely, would be worse than Plague and have long-lasting, ancillary effects of the very sort described by Huxley. And there would be new plagues---military diseases.

Yet it had not occurred seriously to anybody, so far as I knew, that the mordant scenery of _Ape and Essence_ was a logical extension of current events. Wild fantasy, the critics thought--having insufficient imagination to evaluate past or present and no education in the sciences whatever, as a rule.

Well, I thought, when and if we reach the state of cannibalism, I shall try to eat a critic. There should be good crackling around fat heads.

And next I thought that even Huxley made too little of the fact that, after our earth was literally Hell for a hundred years, man produced the Renaissance.

I also thought how no one apparently had realized that the Californian cult of Belial was an inversion of the Roman Catholic parades, liturgies, chants and other idolatrous measures. And I thought how the Huxleyan method disclosed, with considerable vim and penetration, that Christian worship--Catholic or Protestant--is all but completely a paean for Satan today. The Godly serve the Devil through hatred, hypocrisy, materialism, conceit and big death wishes. They need only a change of names and symbols to align what they actually do with their pretension. Belial already reigns over the Church--not God.

Someday, after the atomic wars--I thought--a practitioner of the corrupted religion of his time, a science-hater (for what he deemed science had done to man), a legless character with three arms and two navels (owing to the general damage done the genes of all living things), a cannibal (but one who could still read a little), might discover this volume in the silence of a wrecked library and hail Huxley as a great prophet--a man with valuable new ideas for worship and fresh notions about sex relations in public places. Thus Huxley might contribute (contrary to his intent but in the same fashion as many other prophets) to the majestic rites of human degradation.

No critic, however, could possibly contemplate such a matter as anything but a joke.

I wondered how the great-grandchildren of critics would view it.

Thus wondering, I went to bed.

It was late, of course.

I put out my light and listened to the seismic nocturne of the city.

From the next room came a bold, cajoling giggle.

Then quiet.

The building quivered.

The planet turned.

Exhaustion lowered me into sleep on a jerky rope that did not loosen me for a long time.

12

Contrary to expectation, the end of civilization came about through a series of events connected in no way with war or atomic bombardment. Of these events the earliest, so far as careful inquiry could determine at the time, was initially observed by Malcolm Calk of 2531 North Munley Street, Urbana, Illinois. Mr. Calk had just become engaged to Dorothea Lurp of the same address--the boarding establishment of Sarah L. Rev, or Reev--and they were celebrating the happy occasion by spending a weekend at the Chicago home of Miss Lurp's parents. The day being warm--it was the 9th of August, in the hot summer of 1953--the young couple determined to repair to the beach.

They were contentedly ensconced at the lakeside when Mr. Calk's eyes wandered from the person of his fiancée, who was in wading, to the clouds overhead. These were of a cumulus nature, for the most part widely spaced, and drifting southward on a wind reported later by the Weather Bureau as of twelve miles per hour at mean cloud altitude. Calk's mind was, as may readily be imagined, turned toward those fancies which are commonly described as "building castles in the air." He reports, indeed, that the phrase passed through his thoughts as he looked at the vaporous structures overhead.

Within them he observed a certain slight turbulence or agitation to which he at first paid scant heed. Clouds revolve and turn themselves inside out in a manner that bespeaks air currents and their own diaphanous consistency--a manner that sometimes suggests they have a life of their own in a weird fourth dimension of the blue up yonder. But the young Calk gave the phenomenon only a cursory, occasional glance; his head was already "in the clouds"--another phrase upon which he recalls musing at the time. He was apparently a person of whimsey--a patternmaker employed by the Racine Forge and Tool Company of Urbana.

Presently, however, his focus was drawn with insistence toward the slow-tumbling clouds and, as people will, he gave free play to his imagination, seeing in the changing shapes now a dragon, now a cat's face, and now the chuck of a turret lathe. These gossamer figures wove themselves, vanished, and eddied into yet different forms until, ultimately he found himself viewing a large letter N. About this he saw nothing remarkable--at first. A letter of the alphabet is probably shaped by the clouds as often as any boar's head or serpent.

The "N," however, took on contour and texture until it seemed a deliberate thing--resembling, as Calk put it later, "Sky-writing done backwards in a newsreel so that the frayed-out smoke pulled together again to make a real clean-cut N."

At the moment, however (so uncritical was his brain and so unrelated was the celestial phenomenon to his thoughts), he came to a different conclusion. When the N established itself as a clear and sharply defined capital letter, some two miles in length and many thousands of feet above Lake Michigan, Calk informed himself that it was, actually, the work of a sky-writer. This is a kind of rationalization which any psychologist will recognize. Because what he saw did not quite conform to his past experience, Calk discounted his sensory impression and interpreted an external fact in terms of orderly recollections rather than of observable reality. Donner, Bates, Breesteen, Cavanaugh, Cohen and Wilstein, among other authorities, have noted the similiarity of this process to that by which prejudices are often established.

"Look, honey," Mr. Calk called to his fiancée. "Sky-writer."

Miss Lurp looked and nodded in agreement. "Yeah. Bet it's cold up there! Lucky fellow--the pilot."

No one else in the vicinity appeared to be aware of the process overhead. Miss Lurp continued to wade--Mr. Calk to watch her and to cast an occasional glance at the sky. A letter U was slowly formed alongside the perfect N.

Miss Lurp at this point stepped on a clamshell, or possibly a broken bottle, which hurt her foot although it did not break the skin. Exaggerating the injury, she hopped ashore to solicit comfort, which Mr. Calk readily supplied. Thereafter, sitting side by side, they gazed up at the NU, near which yet other clouds were shifting and shaping themselves.

"Why," said Miss Lurp, "that's not sky-writing at all! It's just the clouds coming together accidental-like." To another couple, sitting on the sand nearby, she called, "Look, people! The clouds are having a spelling bee!"

One upturned countenance, or even two, may not serve to divert a throng from its preoccupations, whether sordid or sublime. But four faces intently elevated will permeate any mass of people and constrain nearly all of the individuals in it to join. This contagion of curiosity now spread over the beach. Soon, persons everywhere--on the sand and the walk behind and in the water--bathers, loafers, nurses with perambulators on the Drive, and policemen who were supposed to patrol it but who were more attentive to the nurses--looked up to see, in a vast blue area above, three letters:

NUT

Sedately the word moved toward the city area. People began to speculate about the product thus being advertised. Two or three of the quicker-thinking formed hat-pools for dimes and quarters--best guess to take all. At the same time, a considerable discussion arose over the fact that these letters were not being formed by a plane--a glinting speck at the head of a comet of smoke--but were the result of a composing of clouds which had thitherto appeared to be in the random distribution familiar to all. A vague alarm became observable in the voices and the postures of the beholders although it was suggested by the calm among them that the sky-writer had lost the first part of his message--a PEA, for example, or a GRAPE. At the same time, the discomforting fact remained that no performer, and no aerial equipment of any nature, could be descried.

The growing strain--and strain came easily amongst persons who had lived through eight years of the Atomic Age--rather suddenly diminished. Clouds boiled, rotated and stretched out to make what people began to recognize (in the order of individual percipience) as a pluralizing S and an exclamation point. The great letters on the sky said:

NUTS!

This, clearly, was a joke. Someone who possessed a slightly malicious sense of humor, some technician with a novel trick, had seen fit to write above Lake Michigan a laconic comment: NUTS! People laughed and went back to their activities--and their deliberate eschewals of all activity. Other clouds appeared and offered no further entertainment. A few cars on the Lake Shore Drive ground to a stop. Their operators and passengers looked up to see what still intrigued the residual gazers--chuckled--and drove on.

Perhaps only Calk, of all those myriads, had a real premonition of evil. He referred it, not unnaturally, to the fact that this was the occasion of his engagement. Looking at the long, shiny limbs of Miss Lurp, the nodes on them, at her rather dangly breasts and her somewhat overteased brown hair (that now smelled of a plastic bathing cap into which had been "built" a perfume that did not quite eradicate the cap's original odor of phenol) he could not help wondering if it was auspicious to behold, upon their first venture as affianced persons, a great NUTS! floating overhead. Following the word with his eye, as it drifted toward the metropolis, he also observed, with distaste, that it maintained its continuity better than any sky-writing he had ever seen.

Other citizens, not having witnessed the formation of the word, took it for granted that some prankster had done the deed and, since Chicago is a city where a burp will bring down the house, hugely enjoyed it. The _Sun_ had a box about it. The _News_ had a cartoon about it--bad municipal government shuddering as the word in the sky threatened. The _Tribune_ carried a long editorial attributing the whole affair to communists.

The next day was rainy.

The day after, however, was immaculately clear and from the azure reaches above the lake there floated to and over Chicago a second giant syllable:

CRAP!

The formation, this time, was witnessed by the officers and crew of the _Matthew T. Handless_, a freighter. Her skipper, acting as spokesman for the group, seemed less awed by the reporters and news cameramen than by his memory. "It was an absolutely cloudless morning out there," he said. "Dry weather. Barometer at 30.46. Nothing in sight. Then clouds just seemed to appear of their own accord in the sky. Not a wave below--flat calm. They worked themselves into this here, now, word--and they started drifting for Chicago on a high-altitude breeze. I watched pretty much the whole thing with my glasses--and they're good glasses. I just had 'em checked at Davis's Optometrical, and there was no plane of any sort."

The news spread across an amused United States.

WRITING IN SKY PANICS CHI

"Disgruntled Chicagoan" was the universal solution. Disgruntled Chicagoan with a new process for sky-writing. Somebody sore about the housing shortage, the garbage disposal, the taxes, the materials scarcities, the innumerable blanks to be made out for local, state and federal governments, the new bonus, the rising menace of prohibition, the thousand things at which people were indignant in 1953. "Chicago per se," the New York _Times_ rather uncouthly suggested.

It was not until the 14th of August, however--a day much like the 9th--that the matter took on different proportions. For, by then, the marshaled resources of science were as ready as set rattraps. When the clouds began to churn significantly, no less than one hundred and eighteen planes, not counting the planes of photographers and mere sightseers, climbed to the region from fields all around the Windy City, which, of course, as on the ninth, was enjoying a mild zephyr.

A huge S took shape. Traffic stopped. Customers and employees poured out of stores like lava, offices regurgitated their hordes, housewives left bacon burning and babies sodden; all were witness to an impromptu air circus. It had three phases, or acts. First, police planes and military aircraft drove off unofficial spectators--light planes and helicopters belonging to the curious and two or three commercial pilots who carried their fares off the flyways for a closer look. Second, science went to work.

The letter S was photographed. Samples of it were taken. The air currents in and around it were measured by instruments operated through ports in airplanes readied just for the task. Various tagged atoms were then dusted into the letter and their courses were pursued by scientists in helicopters, armed with counters. From the ground, spectroscopes were trained upon the initial and diffraction gratings laid bare its spectrum. Everything was done that had been planned at the University of Chicago--and elsewhere in the city--and by a variety of physical scientists who phoned and wrote in their suggestions. Meantime, an H formed next to the S and subdued titter filled the watching streets.

The third plane followed when an ineluctable I was added to the throbbing sky-scene. As if this was carrying cosmic anagrams too far, military aircraft undertook to break up the phenomenon--also according to plan.

Four-letter words, so called, are one of the great American taboos. In this connotation, nuts and crap are not considered precisely forbidden, though each has a special reference which is impermissible. All people know all the four-letter words, of course, since they are scribbled everywhere and commonly used by lower caste persons when under duress. And substitute words are employed, by the most devout, for every profane or obscene term. So the taboo is of a magical nature (speaking anthropologically). Primitive people, such as the Americans, generally employ medicine men, witch doctors, or priests against magical threats. In this case, however, physical rather than spiritual results were expected from the efforts of the airmen.

First, formations of jets flew through the cloud-spelling--along its own paths and then in series of crisscrosses. Nothing much happened; the streaming jets blew wisps and curls of mist out of alignment but it swiftly filled itself in again. Heavy bombers followed, but the washes of their props were equally ineffectual. During the bomber maneuvers, furthermore, one Paul Kully, a student flier, eluded the police and ventured close to the now-completed T. The pilot of the leading bomber, a B-36, took evasive action too late, and Mr. Kully's light plane, shorn of a wing and set on fire, came spiraling to earth--a sight enormously exciting to the already enthralled Chicagoans.

This ended the main spectacle. Most of the planes descended to earth. The word--awful, unprintable, unacknowledgable, obscene and illegal--which, as has been noted, many use in private and in public, and everybody sees constantly chalked on fences and carved into cement by rude boys--and which is pronounced "shucks" by the super-superstitious--now rode in the Chicago heavens. The breeze dropped. Surrounding cumulus clouds retreated as if to frame the sign; air movement died aloft; the four corrupt letters and their following exclamation point came to rest directly over the Loop. This was widely regarded as the supreme practical joke--until the extras began to appear. These were in a way disappointing: photographers had spiraled vainly in the high blue, for not one newspaper made bold to print a picture of what all could see if they bent their necks.

But the published statement concerning the scientific investigation had a tendency to diminish the widespread mirth. Dr. A.B. Cummings, acting for a General Committee, wrote the report. It said, in part: "... a gross examination showed a special arrangement of clouds which cannot be accounted for by the laws of chance. Emphasis should be made of the fact that absolutely no clue to human agency, domestic, enemy, or other--either in the air or on the ground--was found. There was no evidence of interference from the stratosphere above. No abnormal radiation was detected. No use of sonic devices may be presumed in view of the study. After the mass became stationary, it was found that currents of air were moving as they should (according to all known laws and principles of meteorology) above, below, and on both sides of the phenomenon.

" ... that last fact, taken by itself, is perhaps the most disturbing, although it is possibly equaled by one other. Viz--the mass is not subject to the known laws of dissipation. The slipstream of jets and the wash of huge propellers ought to have caused it to disintegrate in a few minutes. They made only a moderate and local effect which, again in violation of understandable principles, was offset by the reassemblage of the mass along its original contours. It has been proposed that if there is a repetition of this totally unprecedented and inexplicable effect, antiaircraft artillery with ordinary fused shells be used in an attempt to break it up. In such a case, citizens will have to be sheltered from falling fragments during the bombardment. This will probably be tried--although the tendency of the mass to hold its shape, resembling as it does a similar tendency in plastics of special molecular structures, at least suggests that even artillery may not be effective....

" ... the demand made by a committee of quite understandably outraged churchmen, led by Msgr. Loyola O'Tootle, of St. Plimsol's Roman Catholic Cathedral, that an atomic bomb be used to disperse the sacrilege is, of course, impractical, as such a bomb, in the caliber now being stored by our government, would destroy not only the cloud mass in question (presumably) but (predictably) the entire city of Chicago for a radius of four miles. Any smaller atomic bomb is no more to be thought of in connection with the riddance of this bizarre pest, as not only demolitional but genetic effects....

"To sum up, the mass seems to consist merely of cloud material, somewhat more densely packed than usual. Its formational aspects cannot be traced to any conceivable person or device. Its violation of certain simple physical laws is the great scientific puzzle of it. But it is definitely not poisonous or harmful. The only 'danger' to be expected from it, so far as the most elaborate examination and the most learned extrapolation can discern, is psychological. Until science explains the phenomenon, the layman should regard it without dismay--or other emotion, if possible. Doubtless when the formed-mass principle is unraveled the explanation will not only be quite simple, but of some currently unguessable great value to engineering, to industry, to the military, and hence to the whole people."

Dr. Cummings's job was detached, thorough--and satisfied nobody.

For it was a statement of absolute mystification.

Auburn-haired little Jeanne Sheets, aged seven, of Mallow Road Apartments, running into her yard that afternoon, cried, "Mummy, there's a dirty word in the sky!"

"Yes, dear."

"Who put it there?"

"Mummy doesn't know, dear."

"Can I say it? It's in the sky--real big."

"No, dear."

"Maybe God put it there?"

"You mustn't think things like that, you naughty child!"

Jeanne Sheets knew as much about it as Cummings, or any other physicist or any meteorologist, or anybody.

The next day, through unimpeachable sources in Sofia, a world that had been amused--and somewhat agog--learned that, over the city of Moscow had appeared:

МАЈІАРХЍ

The smile on the world's face faltered.

Why?

Here the subtleties of the human spirit are evinced. People were stunned for the obvious reason that the appearance of an expletive over the Soviet capital tended to indicate _human_ enmity was not involved in the phenomenon. There was a deeper reason. The Moscow affliction gave universality to what had been, thitherto, an ailment of the skies over the guilty-feeling democracies. The profanation of the Soviets, in other words, eliminated all subconscious hope of escape into the Opposite, that natural area which the aware mind detests, or at least resists, but upon which the instincts depend. Laughter ceased and the world made up its mind that steps had to be taken instantly to solve, resolve, and dissolve the indecent chimera.

Then, on the morning of August 27th, in the city of New York, between the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, a great B took shape against a cloudless zenith. No Gorgon's head could have paralyzed the city more effectively. All traffic stopped and most persons who were physically able descended to the hot streets. Amateurs' telescopes on Long Island and slot-machine viewers as far away as Eagle Rock Park in New Jersey were turned upon the pale sky in which Manhattan's buildings had for so long fastened their lean teeth.

New York's streets solidified. Even ambulances ceased to attempt to move--their drivers either helping patients out for a look or resigning themselves to the delivery of D.O.A.'s. Ministers of churches, priests, and rabbis now made some attempt at excoriation. A band of volunteer hymn singers fought against the steadily forming BAS at Trinity Church; censors swung and holy water splashed about St. Pat's. Useless. The TARDS! filled itself out with no regard for fear or fury, lewd ripostes or prayers. And all could see that this new comment was less general than its precursors. Here the sky had not simply engraved an expletive upon itself but called the most numerous people of any city a vile name.

At the same time, moreover (9:12 in the morning when the first wraith of cloud was observed), strange events were occurring elsewhere on earth. An underling at the near-deserted offices of the AUP, watching the clatter of a ticker, yelled to his superior some seconds after 9:30, "Hey, chief! They got it in Paris."

"What does it say?"

The youth perplexedly spelled it out. His chief, better educated and possessed of a greater imagination, envisioned the jam-packed Champs-Élysées and the azure vault above the Arc de Triomphe inscribed

MERDE, ALORS!

New York was the first city to stampede.

Before the S in BASTARDS! was completed, a loft caught fire in Seventh Avenue. The engines were unable to reach it, the fire spread, a wall fell into the crowd, and horrified survivors pressed both north and south in the thoroughfare, screaming. Their hysteria went ahead of them and, since the neck-craning throngs could not know the cause of it, they interpreted the oncoming roar in the wildest fashions. They, also, turned to run. Central Park furnished a place in which one-half of this tumultuous and trampling herd was able to spread out and regain some composure, though it had left the streets behind dotted with the maimed and slain. There was no sizable park to the south, however, and those who took that direction (save for a few thousands who sought shelter in the Pennsylvania Station) built up an avalanche of humanity which pelted and thundered clear to the Battery, itself its own Juggernaut.

The infection spread to side streets and to other avenues, inevitably. Within an hour, a great part of middle and lower Manhattan became such an abattoir as history has no record of. The show-windows along Fifth Avenue were burst in by the push of people who were then sliced and guillotined by the cascading glass. Wooden buildings were knocked askew in places.

Nobody could cope with such a situation but the mayor did his resourceful best. He ordered airplanes equipped with loud-speakers of great power to fly over the self-beleaguered city and explain what the source of the great stampede had been. Every morgue and hospital in the city and in its environs was mobilized. All bridges and tunnels were instantly cleared for the transport of the injured, as Manhattan's hospitals could not handle five per cent of the casualties. Police, using pistols with little ceremony, brought to a partial halt the epidemic of looting that occurred in the early afternoon. People were commanded to take the equivalent of air-raid shelter and to stay there.

The military, acting with their usual belated but firm ineffectuality, again essayed the problem of the Word itself. Unveiling a new weapon--a rocket adapted for air-to-air combat, with a warhead of a secret explosive--the Army launched squadrons of fighters and bombers to the attack. A great cannonade over the city began near five o'clock. It was futile: the blasts disrupted edges and fringes of the letters in the sky but they mended themselves as fast as they were tattered. Army Ordinance then tried its supersecret, twenty-four-inch rockets. Careless fusing caused one of these to explode at a low level, destroying the upper stories of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building--but subsequent accurate salvos of the tremendous weapon merely caused the letters to undulate.

Shortly after six o'clock the Navy, carrying out a suggestion of Cardinal Bleatbier, tried a new tactic--the interposition of a smoke screen between the abomination and the desolated city. The idea was greeted by officers with enthusiasm. The effect of it was not. For, after some fifty Navy planes had laid a great, brown carpet underneath the Word and above the buildings, there came new and hitherto unobserved eddyings of the air and the Navy smoke was drawn into the writing on the heavens--not only fortifying and clarifying what it had been intended to obscure but also giving the letters a phosphorescent glow which became visible as soon as twilight descended.

That night, as electricity began to fail in the city, the surviving people undertook to leave en masse. They had no stomach for another day such as they had passed through. An additional factor urged them on. During the years of the Atomic Age they had been living--like people of every city--with keen, increasing queasiness. It is not conducive to urban content to know that any of a dozen foreign governments can, or potentially can, blot out you and yours in an eye-twinkling. Indeed, for many years, people had been trickling away from cities everywhere--either openly giving their reason or offering some excuse.

Finally, from the very onslaught of B Day, there had poured forth a succession of orders setting up various official hierocracies for the emergency--deputy police, wardens, and so on, along with the rationing of gasoline, restrictions on subway use, abrogation of power supply, and other such matters. Americans are not a patient people and of all Americans, New Yorkers are the most impatient. Unlike Britains, Russians, and Europeans, they had never accepted the brash contempt of the public exhibited continually both by government and industry after World War II. Nor had they become reconciled to bureaucratic rule. They had resented the multiplication of authorized agents and official personnel. Hence, not being schooled to such vicissitudes at the time of B Day, they lost their tempers. They left town. By midnight, the tunnels, bridges, and ferries could no longer be held open for the evacuation of casualties. By three in the morning, every bridge and every tunnel and every boat was swarming with one-way, antlike movement as New Yorkers abandoned New York. All the next day the human tide welled into metropolitan environs.

The contagion spread to other cities as words began to form above them and in some instances even before their skies developed a C or a J or a P or an A or the like. Terror begat terror. Various metropolises were soon without electricity, water, food, gasoline, and so on. Fires began to rage in them. In no time, Cleveland, Detroit, Birmingham, Boston, Los Angeles, and other centers were in a condition like that of cities over which a powerful enemy has gained absolute control of the air.

There is, of course, no general record of the total effect of this exodus. Towns, villages, hamlets, and lone farms were unprepared to house or to feed the scores of millions who descended upon them--rich refugees in limousines piled high with canned foods and guns--slum masses in rags and on foot, with nothing but fear and hunger to drive them ahead. Here and there some man of feudal abilities organized bands of the fugitives and these forcibly evacuated whole communities, taking possession of them--only to be driven out by bands better armed and more ruthless. Theft and violence became the national way of life; and murder--murder that took the lives of millions--the means to obtain a meal or a woman or a bauble in some as yet unsmashed village store window. City people had become the sworn enemies of country people--and vice versa. The Hindus and Mussulmans of India on the days after its liberation were more kindly disposed to one another than these--and dealt more mercifully.

So it went--fire, blood and turmoil, death, epidemic and ruin.

Only Russia maintained, for a little while, the mask of order. No obscenity in its skies was able to break the disciplined ranks of the proletariat. But this calm--this grimly enforced maintenance of socialІ decorum--was ultimately shattered. On the 3rd of September, while the Kremlin exulted over the downfall of each and every empire and democracy, there appeared, almost experimentally, over the city of Kiev the phrase:

јІЕНИН ДИСИВД

No mere exposure of lewd words could faze the Soviets; but the hideous violation of the proprieties represented by the simple statement that "Lenin deceived" sent consternation whistling from the Baltic to theҪИ Black Sea. The next day, the sky of Moscow reported that Stalin had lied methodically; and the day after that, the people of Ordzhonikidze were informed that the Kremlin feasted, the party guzzled, the people starved. Russia rose against its government and Politburo heads were carried from city to city on stakes. Exodus followed. From the hot wheatfields of the Ukraine to the cool timberlands of Siberia, the panoply of death began.

Last to enjoy the fruits of organized society, perhaps, were the atomic scientists and their families at Los Alamos. These persons, impounded by a series of fences and protected by guards trained not only to mistrust rumor, but to bear silently all knowledge of however weird a nature, and to shoot without asking questions, were protected through the precedents and methodologies of what is called security. The town and its laboratories were stocked with food and water against possible air attack and resultant isolation by radiation. Hence the planetary debacle, while it became known to the scientists, did not greatly affect the local status quo. The guards were ordered to destroy such bands of wandering refugees as made their way across the deserts to the vicinity. This was done.

Meantime, the scientists took measures to study and if possible to arrest the universal disintegration of humanity.

It is the custom of journalists (and it is the habit in fiction) to depict scientists as impractical, dreamy men, absent-minded, innocent, and not competent to deal with simple situations--men forever in need, like infants, of overseers. Nothing could possibly be further from the truth. Indeed, it may fairly be said that, had the people of the world understood this fallacy about scientists, they might themselves have been more scientific--which is to say aware--and so prevented their catastrophe. Actually, it was known--known statistically--even before World War II, that scientists as a group were possessed of an all-round superiority over their fellows. They were not merely precocious, but like the precocious everywhere, they had on the average larger physiques, more strength and endurance, quicker reflexes, greater athletic ability, and better looks than common Homo sapiens. However, although this fact had been published a thousand times and proved in a hundred ways, the people preferred to cling to the myth that scientists were inept in all but their métier--naïve, absent-minded, and rather foolish.

That but affords another index of the general foolishness.

New York's tragedy convinced the farsighted physicists, chemists, biologists, and others at Los Alamos that the nation and possibly the world would be swept with unprecedented panic. The steps anent local guards which have been already described were immediately taken. Under Xerxes Cohn, the scientists organized research parties; in fifteen planes, they took off to study the situation at first hand. Within forty-eight hours they had assembled a full report of events in a dozen urban areas and of the gory melee in progress everywhere in the countryside. (They had, naturally, all the information available on the Words from Calk's first account in the Chicago papers, through Cummings's initial survey, to the latest military data--as well as reports of many great savants made before their own flights from various cities of the earth.)

These data were now screened, and evaluated. Charts were prepared. A discussion meeting was held in the hall for top-secret conferences. Various papers were read, including the following:

_Tead's Hypothesis_ that energy, in whatever form, has a sort of subnuclear consciousness and will power and that the watery masses which made up clouds, revolted by the wretched spectacle of humanity, had taken up word-spelling as a form of rebuke, i.e., as Nature talking to human nature.

_Schilch's Theory_ that there were no words and that the whole grisly phenomenon was the result of mass autohypnosis. This proposition (which might valuably have been given further investigation) was discarded by the scientists for empirical reasons: they, themselves, they felt, could not be hypnotized and certainly their instruments could not be. (It will be noted that there was no discussion of the possibility that the scientists could be so hypnotized as uniformly to misread their instruments.)

_Boden's Proposal_ that the human unconscious mind actually formed the Words by telekinesis. To defend this (another idea worthy of deeper scrutiny) he cited J.B. Rhine--and was laughed off the rostrum.

_Jetefti's_ remarkably erudite _Demonstration_--following studies of cosmic radiation around various Words--studies of ionization, of stratospheric air currents, of polarization, of the uninterruptibility of streams of neutrons, gamma rays, alpha particles, electrons, photons, and other forms of radiation with which the Words had been surrounded, of the Heaviside Layer, etc., etc.--that no external (i.e., interplanetary) agency or intelligence had _projected_ the Words on city skies.

_Poglief's Discussion_ of God which concluded, "Religious Fundamentalism has been the recourse of millions, as might be expected. These persons hold either that God has permitted the Devil thus to rebuke humanity, which may be a sound moral observation but which is not good physics; or else that the Words represent the imminence of the Day of Judgment and the approach of the Opening of the Gates of Paradise. This latter theory, gentlemen, is not, I feel, borne out by the specific nature of the abundant tokens."

Hearty laughter greeted this conclusion. And again--the opportunity to consider the nature of God, a third valuable occasion, was missed.

Ultimately, it was decided that

(_a_) No direct harm whatever had come from the Words

(_b_) Thus the disaster was of psychological occasion, up to the present time

(_c_) Wherefore Los Alamos should immure itself as a fort against all threat from the ravening masses, until

(1) they calmed down (unlikely for years)

(2) they all perished (not probable)

(3) a manageable remnant remained (most likely)

(_d_) In which last case Los Alamos could be the nucleus of a new and spreading social culture, factual and scientific in nature, which would gradually recapture and restrain humanity with a view

(_z_) to establish a true freedom

(_y_) to abolish racialism

(_x_) to end wars

(_w_) to limit birth to numbers the planet's resources could maintain indefinitely

(_v_) by the use of genetics and eugenics to raise constantly all levels of health and intelligence

(_u_) and thus to bring about the halcyon world which had been within the very grasp of the stupid species when they had all but destroyed themselves.

So propitious was this program that a banquet to celebrate its inauguration was called for that night. The entire community, dressed in its best, assembled in a mood of new hope to dine from trestle tables in an airplane hangar.

It was during this festival, while postprandial brandies were being served, that Xerxes Cohn stepped outdoors to take a breath of the thin, poignant night air of New Mexico and, perhaps, to turn a covertly exultant face upon the raw landscape; after all, through persons like himself, man would triumph despite man's folly and its cost. He stepped into the gloom, then, and because he was an astrophysicist as well as a nuclear expert, he turned his eyes to the familiar constellations. His stocky body grew stiff. There, in the region of Ursa Minor, glowed a hitherto unknown star--a nova of approximately the third magnitude. At once he called into the laughter-filled area behind him, "Oh, Tead! Schilch! Boden! Come on out! We've got a sign, too--a nova."

People--including those summoned--began to join the great man and murmur with a sort of primitive awe. As they looked, the light from yet another new star--reaching the planet earth after years of journeying at its absolute speed--burst before their gaze. The sign was doubled in the heavens--and, soon enough, trebled. It was Jetefti--the Italian-Czech--whose keen imagination caused him first to whisper, "I say, Xerx, it couldn't be--?"

Silence fell everywhere. More novae flashed into being. And there could no longer remain a doubt amongst even the most skeptical of this enlightened residue of the race. The stars had set forth an unimaginably vast initial of their own, an

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13

The phone split my sleep. I was unready for the sound, or any sound, ripping open my peaceful bivouac--bayoneting dreams and my poor respite.

I grabbed in the dark. "Yeahhhh?"

"Can I come up?"

"For God's sakes, Paul, what time is it?"

"She's gone!"

"Okay, okay. Where--?"

"Downstairs!"

I found the light. Four-fifteen. Went to the door and propped it open with a chair. Turned on the shower and stepped into it--letting the multiple streams rattle against my sleepy skull and sweep away the salty acids on my body.

The door slammed. Paul stuck his head around the curtain. "I can't find her!"

"For God's sakes, it's not that hot! She won't melt! Go get yourself some whisky. Or would you rather have coffee?"

"Christ. What do I care?" His brow was fissured. Sweat had soaked his unshaved face--which he had wiped with hands increasingly grimed by junketing about the city all night. He looked like a hung-over mechanic.

"You need a bath, yourself," I said, stepping out.

"You don't understand! I've got to find her! Before she does anything desperate."

"Look, Paul. If she's going to pull one, on the spur--it's pulled. If it's not done now--she won't hurry about it." I daubed myself with a towel; perspiration came immediately where the water had just been. It was muggier than Miami before a hurricane. "Don't get the idea that because it's your first, it's her primary emotional crisis, either! Marcia's been through a lot!" I opened the hot-water tap, let it run, and filled a tumbler. I went into the living room, took a jar of powdered coffee from the desk pigeonhole where I kept it, dumped in a couple of spoonfuls, went back, and stirred with my toothbrush handle. Then I took a couple of lumps of sugar from a horde I'd been accumulating at the Astolat's expense, plunked them in, and stirred more. I drank about half of the hot coffee and lit a cigarette.

Paul had followed every step of this gambit. I felt a little less like a roused-up mummy with the coffee inside me, so I said, "I'm sorry as all hell, cooky. Tell me about it."

"You did it!" His eyes despised me for a moment. Then tears came. "I guess I should have known enough not to bring her around to see you."

"What did I do?"

"Made her self-conscious. Made her think it wasn't ever going to work out for us. She said that when you looked at her it made her feel like a tart."

It had gone the other way around: when she'd looked at me, she'd felt--not like a tart, necessarily--but not like a faithful wife, either. And I was being blamed for that. I skipped the point. "You two kids retired in good order."

"That's what I thought. We got about a block away before she blew up."

"I'm sorry."

He tossed himself into a chair. He slipped down his tie and stared at me. "What in hell _did_ you do?"

"Nothing."

"It wasn't--a pleasant--lunch. If all those idiotic things hadn't got us laughing--then paralyzed--"

"Go on. She blew up?"

"Sure. She said about a thousand crazy things--things like never being able to go around with me where people knew--because she realized she'd always see them knowing--and thinking. I had to get back to the lab. We've got the pile set at--we've got stuff cooking. I managed to calm her down enough so she promised to go home and get dinner. But when I got there--" He held out a note:

Paul, dear--For people like us, it should always be quick, clean, permanent, and no hard feelings. I love you--that's why. M.

"Sounds like--going away. Nothing more drastic."

"Drastic enough! And she can't get away with that! I won't let her! We'd have made it."

"What did you do? Bloodhound around the city?"

"Went to her old apartment, first. Then--to the people who'd been her friends. Routing them out. Bribing doormen to let me knock and wake them up. Finally--when I ran out of ideas--I went to Hattie Blaine's. Good God--what a hideous place!"

I skipped that one, too. It was no time to argue that Hat's, while it had a few dim facets of one sort or another, was in my opinion (or had been, anyhow)--rather enchanting. A kindlier spot than many a hearth or any city street.

"What did Hat say?"

"Ye gods! She talked. She talked the grimmest bunch of obscene sophistries I ever heard in my life! She tried to get me drunk! She even tried to get one of the girls to--entertain me!"

"It never passed through your cold, reasoning, scientific cranium that perhaps she was trying to be decent to you?"

"_Decent!_"

"Did she know where Marcia was?"

"If she did--she wasn't saying. She said she had no idea on earth. Hadn't heard from her for months. Or seen her--naturally. I begged her--beseeched her--to give me any useful address. Any name. Any scrap of a suggestion--"

I picked up the phone. After ringing me, the Astolat switchboard operator had fallen back to sleep and I listened to the buzz for a long while before she plugged in--irritably. The number I gave wasn't in the book. But Hattie wouldn't be asleep--yet. Not unless she'd changed.

Viola answered and Hattie came on in a moment. "Hello, Phil. What's cooking? You and Gwen quarrel?"

Since waking, I hadn't thought about Gwen--or Yvonne. The question startled me. "Nope," I said. "Gwen, incidentally, has--has gone out for a bit with a friend of mine. Nice gal, Gwen. It's about my nephew, Paul."

"Oh. Is he there?"

"Yeah."

"Phil, that lad's in very bad shape."

"Yeah."

"I'm serious. I know men. He's apt to do--anything!"

"Yeah. Maybe so. Look. You don't have any ideas about Marcia--that you'd give me, but not him?"

"Too many!"

"I don't understand."

"I couldn't very well give Paul the names and addresses of all the boys who have liked her, could I? In the shape he's in--he'd rout out God Almighty, or run a one-man posse through hell."

"Yeah."

"Phil. He shouldn't see her now--even if I knew where she was--and I haven't a single good idea about that. Just--lots of possibilities. I don't know what she'd do--I doubt if she'd do anything violent--but she has a right to be wherever she wants, hasn't she?"

"Of course. I just thought--if you did have any hunches--he's sitting here chewing the rug--"

Hattie sighed. "Old enough to do better! Maybe he's a great physicist--but, believe me, he's in kindergarten on women! I tried to tell him so--gently. But he just sat there looking wilder than a priest trapped in the ladies' can! If I hear anything tomorrow, Phil, I'll give you a ring. If I were you--I'd slip Paul a Mickey Finn, or something, to cool him down."

I thanked her.

She told me she was glad I liked Gwen and I said again that I thought Gwen was a good deal of damsel and I hung up.

"Nothing?" Paul had been on his chair-edge.

I shook my head. "Hattie's calm about it--and she really knows the girl."

"Really knows Marcia? That bat-faced old strumpet? The hell she does!"

"Okay," I said. "Okay."

"Who's Gwen?"

"One of her girls. She was down here earlier. She's gone."

He jumped up and came over to the sofa where I sat with the phone. "Fine thing! I thought you said you were here working--not cheating!"

"A slight relapse, say. What of it?"

"Relapse!" His voice was thin and high. His fists were doubled. His face streamed as if he were shoveling in a boiler room. "Sweet guy, you are! Oh--you've got a good brain! Even talent! But all you do is whore around with your brains and your god-damned talent! And yourself! You look at a woman--you just _look_ at her--and you make her feel like a slut! You've got a wife that's too good for a good guy--and a thousand times too good for you! So what? A weekend off--and you louse the place up with a chippy--! Somebody tries to dig a decent, lovely girl out of a bad spot--and you come along and roll your dirty eyes on her--!"

I said, "Look, Paul. If you're going to rage around at people for keeping tarts in their homes, start with your own, will you?"

He swung but he didn't follow hard and I ducked it.

So he began to sob, then--back in his chair.

I went to the bathroom, broke out a clean tumbler, dumped in the contents of three of the sodium amytal capsules Tom had prescribed for me, added water, swished it around, slogged back to the sitting room, poured in three fingers of whisky, and handed it to him. He took a deep, lunging breath and drank the whole business.

He sobbed a while longer.

Then, in a low, self-pitying voice, he began a rhapsody, or maybe threnody, on Marcia. The drink hit him, and the pills; he grew detailed and intimate; finally he said he'd lie down for an hour before going on with the search.

It was getting light by that time.