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Part
Three:
Never may my
woes be relieved,
Since pity is fled;
And tears and sighs and groans my weary days
Of all joys have deprived.
Chapter 21:
"Alys!"
Jason Taverner called loudly. No answer. Is it the mescaline? he asked
himself. He made his way clumsily from the phonograph toward the door
through which Alys had gone. A long hallway, deep-pile wool carpet. At the
far end stairs with a black iron railing, leading up to the second floor.
He strode as
quickly as possible up the hall, to the stairs, and then, step by step, up
the stairs.
The second
floor. A foyer, with an antique Hepplewhite table off to one side, piled
high with Box magazines. That, weirdly, caught his attention; who, Felix
or Alys, or both, read a low-class mass-circulation pornographic magazine
like Box? He passed on then, still - because of the
mescaline, certainly - seeing small details. The bathroom; that was where
he would find her.
"Alys," he
said grimly; perspiration trickled from his forehead down his nose and
cheeks; his armpits had become steamy and damp with the emotions cascading
through his body. "God damn it," he said, speaking to her although he
could not see her. "There's no music on those records, no me. They're
fakes. Aren't they?" Or is it the mescaline? he asked himself. "I've got
to know!" he said. "Make them play if they're okay. Is the phonograph
broken, is that it? Needle point or stylus or whatever you call them
broken off?" It happens, he thought. Maybe it's riding on the tops of the
grooves.
A half-open
door; he pushed it wide. A bedroom, with the bed unmade. And on the floor
a mattress with a sleeping bag thrown onto it. A little pile of men's
supplies: shaving cream, deodorant, razor, aftershave, comb ... a guest,
he thought, here before but now gone.
"Is anybody
here?" he yelled.
Silence.
Ahead he saw
the bathroom; past the partially opened door he caught sight of an
amazingly old tub on painted lion's legs. An antique, he thought, even
down to their bathtub. He loped haltingly down the hall, past other doors,
to the bathroom; reaching it, he pushed the door aside.
And saw, on
the floor, a skeleton.
It wore
black shiny pants, leather shirt, chain belt with wrought-iron buckle. The
foot bones had cast aside the high-heeled shoes. A few tufts of hair clung
to the skull, but outside of that, there remained nothing: the eyes had
gone, all the flesh had gone. And the skeleton itself had become yellow.
"God," Jason
said, swaying; he felt his vision fail and his sense of gravity shift: his
middle ear fluctuated in its pressures so that the room caromed around
him, silently in perpetual ball motion. Like a pourout of Ferris wheel at
a child's circus.
He shut his
eyes, hung on to the wall, then, finally, looked again.
She has
died, he thought. But when? A hundred thousand years ago? A few minutes
ago?
Why has she
died? he asked himself.
Is it the
mescaline? That I took? Is this real?
It's real.
Bending, he
touched the leather fringed shirt. The leather felt soft and smooth; it
hadn't decayed. Time hadn't touched her clothing; that meant something but
he did not comprehend what. Just her, he thought. Everything else in this
house is the same as it was. So it can't be the mescaline affecting me.
But I can't be sure, he thought.
Downstairs.
Get out of here.
He loped
erratically back down the hall, still in the process of scrambling to his
feet, so that he ran bent over like an ape of some unusual kind. He seized
the black iron railing, descended two, three steps at once, stumbled and
fell, caught himself and hauled himself back up to a standing position. In
his chest his heart labored, and his lungs, overtaxed, inflated and
emptied like a bellows.
In an
instant he had sped across the living room to the front door - then, for
reasons obscure to him but somehow important, he snatched up the two
records from the phonograph, stuffed them into their jackets, carried them
with him through the front door of the house, out into the bright warm sun
of midday.
"Leaving,
sir?" the brown-uniformed private cop asked, noticing him standing there,
his chest heaving.
"I'm sick,"
Jason said.
"Sorry to
hear that, sir. Can I get you anything?"
"The keys to
the quibble."
"Miss
Buckman usually leaves the keys in the ignition," the cop said.
"I looked,"
Jason said, panting.
The cop
said, "I'll go ask Miss Buckman for you."
"No," Jason
said, and then thought, but if it's the mescaline it's okay. Isn't it?
"'No'?" the
cop said, and all at once his expression changed. "Stay where you are," he
said. "Don't head toward that quibble." Spinning, he dashed into the
house.
Jason
sprinted across the grass, to the asphalt square and the parked quibble.
The keys; were they in the ignition? No. Her purse. He seized it and
dumped everything out on the seats. A thousand objects, but no keys. And
then, crushing him, a hoarse scream.
At the front
gate of the house the cop appeared, his face distorted. He stood sideways,
reflexively, lifted his gun, held it with both hands, and fired at Jason.
But the gun wavered; the cop was trembling too badly.
Crawling out
of the far side of the quibble, Jason lurched across the thick moist lawn,
toward the nearby oak trees.
Again the
cop fired. Again he missed. Jason heard him curse; the cop started to run
toward him, trying to get closer to him; then all at once the cop spun and
sped back into the house.
Jason
reached the trees. He crashed through dry underbrush, limbs of bushes
snapping as he forced his way through . A high adobe wall ... and what had
Alys said? Broken bottles cemented on top? He crawled along the base of
the wall, fighting the thick underbrush, then abruptly found himself
facing a broken wooden door; it hung partially open, and beyond it he saw
other houses and a street.
It was not
the mescaline, he realized. The cop saw it, too. Her lying there. The
ancient skeleton. As if dead all these years.
On the far
side of the street a woman, with an armload of packages, was unlocking the
door of her flipflap.
Jason made
his way across the street, forcing his mind to work, forcing the dregs of
the mescaline away. "Miss," he said, gasping.
Startled,
the woman looked up. Young, heavy-set, but with beautiful auburn hair.
"Yes?" she said nervously, surveying him.
"I've been
given a toxic dose of some drug," Jason said, trying to keep his voice
steady. "Will you drive me to a hospital?"
Silence. She
continued to stare at him wide-eyed; he said nothing - he merely stood
panting, waiting. Yes or no; it had to be one or the other.
The
heavy-set girl with the auburn hair said, "I - I'm not a very good driver.
I just got my license last week."
"I'll
drive," Jason said.
"But I won't
come along." She backed away, clutching her armload of badly-wrapped
brown-paper parcels. Probably she had been on her way to the post office.
"Can I have
the keys?" he said; he extended his hand. Waited.
"But you
might pass out and then my flipflap -"
"Come with
me then," he said.
She handed
him the keys and crept into the rear seat of the flipflap. Jason, his
heart pulsing with relief, got in behind the wheel, stuck the key into the
ignition, turned the motor on, and, in a moment, sent the flipflap
flipflapping up into the sky, at its maximum speed of forty knots an hour.
It was, he noted for some odd reason, a very inexpensive model flipflap: a
Ford Greyhound. An economy flipflap. And not new.
"Are you in
great pain?" the girl asked anxiously; her face, in his rear-view mirror,
still showed nervousness, even panic. The situation was too much for her.
"No," he
said.
"What was
the drug?"
"They didn't
say." The mescaline had virtually worn off, now; thank God his six
physiology had the strength to combat it: he did not relish the idea of
piloting a slow-moving flipflap through the midday Los Angeles traffic
while on a hit of mescaline. And, he thought savagely, a big hit. Despite
what she said.
She. Alys.
Why are the records blank? he asked silently. The records - where
were they? He peered about, stricken. Oh. On the seat beside him;
automatically he had thrust them in as he himself got into the flipflap.
So they're okay. I can try to play them again on another phonograph.
"The nearest
hospital," the heavy-set girl said, "is St. Martin's at Thirty-fifth and
Webster. It's small, but I went there to have a wart removed from my hand,
and they seemed very conscientious and kind."
"We'll go
there," Jason said.
"Are you
feeling worse or better?"
"Better," he
said.
"Did you
come from the Buckman's house?"
"Yes." He
nodded.
The girl
said, "Is it true that they're brother and sister, Mr. and Mrs. Buckman? I
mean -"
"Twins," he
said.
"I
understand that," the girl said. "But you know, it's strange; when you see
them together it's as if they're husband and wife. They kiss and hold
hands, and he's very deferential to her and then sometimes they have
terrible fights." The girl remained silent a moment and then leaning
forward said, "My name is Mary Anne Dominic. What is your name?"
"Jason
Taverner," he informed her. Not that it meant anything. After all. After
what had seemed for a moment - but then the girl's voice broke into his
thoughts.
"I'm a
potter," she said shyly. "These are pots I'm taking to the post office to
mail to stores in northern California , especially to Gump's in San
Francisco and Frazer's in Berkeley."
"Do you do
good work?" he asked; almost all of his mind, his faculties, remained
fixed in time, fixed at the instant he had opened the bathroom door and
seen her-it-on the floor. He barely heard Miss Dominic's voice.
"I try to.
But you never know. Anyhow, they sell."
"You have
strong hands," he said, for want of anything better to say; his words
still emerged semireflexively, as if he were uttering them with only a
fragment of his mind.
"Thank you,"
Mary Anne Dominic said.
Silence.
"You passed
the hospital," Mary Anne Dominic said. "It's back a little way and to the
left." Her original anxiety had now crawled back into her voice. "Are you
really going there or is this some -"
"Don't be
scared," he said, and this time he paid attention to what he said; he used
all his ability to make his tone kind and reassuring. "I'm not an escaped
student. Nor am I an escapee from a forced-labor camp." He turned his head
and looked directly into her face. "But I am in trouble."
"Then you
didn't take a toxic drug." Her voice wavered. It was as if that which she
had most feared throughout her whole life had finally overtaken her.
"I'll land
us," he said. "To make you feel safer. This is far enough for me. Please
don't freak; I won't hurt you." But the girl sat rigid and stricken,
waiting for - well, neither of them knew.
At an
intersection, a busy one, he landed at the curb, quickly opened the door.
But then, on impulse, he remained within the flipflap for a moment, turned
still in the girl's direction.
"Please get
out," she quavered. "I don't mean to be impolite, but I'm really scared.
You hear about hunger-crazed students who somehow get through the
barricades around the campuses -"
"Listen to
me," he said sharply, breaking into her flow of speech.
"Okay." She
composed herself, hands on her lapful of packages, dutifully - and
fearfully - waiting.
Jason said,
"You shouldn't be frightened so easily. Or life is going to be too much
for you."
"I see." She
nodded humbly, listening, paying attention as if she were at a college
classroom lecture.
"Are you
always afraid of strangers?" he asked her.
"I guess
so." Again she nodded; this time she hung her head as if he had admonished
her. And in a fashion he had.
"Fear,"
Jason said, "can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you're
afraid you don't commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you
always, always hold something back."
"I think I
know what you mean," Mary Anne Dominic said. "One day about a year ago
there was this dreadful pounding on my door, and I ran into the bathroom
and locked myself in and pretended I wasn't there, because I thought
somebody was trying to break in ... and then later I found out that the
woman upstairs had got her hand caught in the drain of her sink - she has
one of those Disposall things - and a knife had gotten down into it and
she reached her hand down to get it and got caught. And it was her little
boy at the door -"
"So you do
understand what I mean," Jason interrupted.
"Yes. I wish
I wasn't that way. I really do. But I still am."
Jason said,
"How old are you?"
"Thirty-two."
That
surprised him; she seemed much younger. Evidently she had not ever really
grown up. He felt sympathy for her; how hard it must have been for her to
let him take over her flipflap. And her fears had been correct in one
respect: he had not been asking for help for the reason he claimed.
He said to
her, "You're a very nice person."
"Thank you,"
she said dutifully. Humbly.
"See that
coffee shop over there?" he said, pointing to a modern, well-patronized
cafe. "Let's go over there. I want to talk to you." I have to talk to
someone, anyone, he thought, or six or not I am going to lose my mind.
"But," she
protested anxiously, "I have to get my packages into the post office
before two so they'll get the midafternoon pickup for the Bay Area."
"We'll do
that first, then," he said. Reaching for the ignition switch, he pulled
out the key, handed it back to Mary Anne Dominic. "You drive. As slowly as
you want."
"Mr.
Taverner," she said. "I just want to be let alone."
"No," he
said. "You shouldn't be alone. It's killing you; it's undermining you. All
the time, every day, you should be somewhere with people."
Silence. And
then Mary Anne said, "The post office is at Forty-ninth and Fulton. Could
you drive? I'm sort of nervous."
It seemed to
him a great moral victory; he felt pleased.
He took back
the key, and shortly, they were on their way to Forty-ninth and Fulton.
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