Bedlam and Other Stories (15 page)

She'd reached out and taken hold of his chin. She'd thrust her face at him:
Look
at me, Grissom! Finally he'd had to rise from the sofa shouting you've got it backwards Syl, you're looking at the wrong side of the question. The whole reason I'm going through this is so people will respect my family, this is business Syl. And with an open-handed downward gesture at the waist, Grissom had started striding round the living room.

Perhaps that was Syl he glimpsed now, a dark cone-shaped figure back somewhere near the telephone.

“Starbaby!” the grip kept shouting. “Let's go be alone. Forget your mama, forget your daddy—”

“All
right
!” But that wasn't the blonde girl's voice. The blonde girl was pouting and had crossed both bulky arms of her jacket low on her body, covering her belly. Grissom looked elsewhere. He saw that the beautiful woman in the green suit had both narrow arms angled upwards sharply.

“All right,” the woman repeated. “They gave us a thirty spot, fifteen back on either side.”

The activity around Grissom picked up again. There was a general murmur that sounded, near as he could tell, happy. He heard also a lot of emphatic clicking.

Then the Oriental reporter was standing beside him. She'd changed her mirror somehow into a cylindrical silver appliance, about the size of a penlight, which she was pressing into Grissom's hand. It was heavier than he'd expected.

“Mr. Grissom, I'm sorry to be so rushed about all this.” She spoke to him in a different, much quieter voice. “And I do hope you understand about the people in the crew kidding each other. We have a girl today who's new, I mean she's just breaking into the business, and so I guess we kid around with her to, ah, in order to get her legs under her. You do see what I mean, Mr. Grissom?”

“I understand how she feels,” the man found himself saying. “I was young once myself.”

The reporter may have smiled. But he couldn't get a clear view; she'd turned away quickly and squatted over the grip's black box. All at once she was masculine as a baseball catcher.

“Yes thank you Mr. Grissom. Now you choose yourself: do you wish to stand or sit?”

At which the two bulbs inside the reflecting aluminum bowl exploded, and for several moments Grissom was suspended in a bright blindness through which the Oriental woman moved authoritatively, shouting in her other voice: “Yeah now, yeah now…all right so cut it…you can count it up or you can count it down but you better get it
on
either way….” Grissom smelled spearmint gum, then an oppressive lime breath freshener, then spearmint gum again. When his sight at last returned, the blonde girl was holding her compass-thing under his eyes, blurry against the bridge of his nose, and the grip was tucking a wire around his—Grissom's—lelt thigh.

“It
is
three,” the girl called, sounding firm again.

“When they're old like that,” someone else shouted, “the face just
goes
.”

“Mr. Grissom, please relax,” the reporter said when he jerked his leg away from the muscular grip. “Please, let us do our setup here, just stand still, you see what I mean.” She was out of sight, behind him possibly. “Time's running short, and besides, you should understand before we begin, Mr. Grissom, you should understand that we are on your side. We are, ah, think of us as a company or an agency that works for you. Yes you do know that, don't you. We work for you.”

“Give it some
back
light.” The Camera/Face loomed up once more. “There's no time to tweak the chromo-levels and I'm telling you, his face will just
go
.”

The sectioned jade suit came in view again. Before Grissom could find the woman's eyes, however, the grip was back on him, this time sprinkling Grissom's cheeks and forehead with a kind of powder. It felt gluey, clingy.

“And Mr. Grissom? Another thing, please. Our viewers would be interested in knowing if you're related to the astronaut, the American astronaut, you see who I mean.”

Already he was shaking his head. But could this be him, actually? Hey Grissom—the same person? Now that his eyes were shut the reflector lights had turned the inside of his lids a strange burnt orange, a color he couldn't recall ever seeing before. His face prickled under its new coating in a way that made him think of a match just dipped in sulphur. Worst of all, he was responding sensibly to something he knew was the fakest friendliness he'd heard in his life. Yet Grissom kept shaking his head. This question, he thought with the same heightened reasonableness he'd used earlier, is a question I have been asked many times before.

“The astronaut,” he said when the grip moved away, “was no relation. My father came from Greece.”

“I see,” the reporter said.

Grissom's eyes seemed slower adjusting, this second time around. The figures were no more than darker folds in a shattering orange sun.

“And oh yes, Mr. Grissom? That reminds me. Do you have any family you want with you now?”

“No.” His knees too, he noticed, were trembling badly.

“You wife perhaps, Mr. Grissom? Children or, ah, other?”

“No.”

“Your typical executive,” the grip said. He'd hardly bothered to lower his voice. “Like the song says, Starbaby: ‘It's just me, me, me, me.'“

“Now that song,” the blonde girl said, “
is a new
song.” She sounded as if she were smiling. She appeared to have moved over beside the grip.

“I see,” the reporter said, “I see.”

“Counting
two
sixties to fifteen in front!” the grip shouted.

Beyond the aluminum reflector, beyond the crew's sudden zombie stiffness, in the back of the house by the basement doors, Syl sat at the kitchen table talking on the telephone.

“Hello Susan?” she said. “Yes it's your sister again, your sister who married a caveman. He's going ahead with it. Louie is going on TV.”

“Now,” the reporter was saying to Grissom meantime, “there's one last thing, very important.” She stood beside him, speaking now at high speed, but she still had her face averted. It seemed she'd frozen, looking up at the ceiling. “Very important, Mr. Grissom. Don't be afraid to let your feelings show. In this business, Mr. Grissom, we work with what people can see. We have a saying, ‘You can show them what you can't tell them.'“

“Hey,” Syl said over the phone, “Susan, hey, it's like this. The whole world knows before his family knows. His own family has to find out on the TV. Hey, who does he think he
is
?”

“Mr. Grissom,” the reporter said quickly, “tonight for example we have only thirty seconds to get the job done. We have a thirty-second spot, plus a thirty-second shadow. Ah, fifteen seconds' leeway, that is, before and after. Anyway Mr. Grissom, the point is, you can be a superstar with whatever time you get, or you can put millions of viewers to sleep. The choice is yours.”

“I can't live with the man,” Syl told her sister. “Here Louie's always saying, ‘respect the family,' ‘protect the family.' And then he shoves me into the garbage! Hey, thirty years we've been married, is that nothing? I
loved
him, is that nothing?”

“So Mr. Grissom,” the reporter said, “we want you to show them somebody who's all one feeling, you see what I mean. We don't have time for any gray areas. And I think you want the same thing. You want to show them.” Grissom nodded, fast, with her. “Yes you're all business now. So then let's start working it up, Mr. Grissom. Watch yourself on the TV, yes watch yourself, I know it helps to jack those feelings
up
. And oh. Oh I nearly forgot. You will have to watch your language of course, Mr. Grissom. But otherwise go for it.
Go
.”

“Counting
one
sixty to fifteen in front!” the grip yelled.

“Oh Godgodgod,” Syl said, “there he goes.” With her free hand she touched the phone receiver. She ran her finger round and round in the tears on the plastic, as if fondling a rosary. “Susan, how can I forgive him? I can't.”

“Watch my language?” Grissom said.

He felt his tears gluey with the face powder. He heard his voice breaking. And in that moment of his question, finally, he got one good look at the reporter's face. She came up so close and unexpectedly that the businessman could see nothing but makeup. He saw pancake, the gloss that crusted over the cheekbones. Painted eyebrows, eye-shadow, eye-liner, the thick and artificial moisture of the mouth. Just one good look at her face and then he knew she had no face. He thought: Yes. Those cunts behind the mirror, those cock sucking buttfucking cunts of sharks behind the mirror—yes they showed me the truth.

“I can't live with the man,” Syl repeated, off by herself.

“Watch my
language
?” Grissom repeated. “All right, how's this. Don't you blankety-blank-
blanks
think it's time
to join the human race
?”

Not that we hadn't struggled time and again to escape, to leave behind the agony of having died nameless. Not that, faced with our deaths, we'd given up caring. No. From the beginning of our time here we'd turned our backs on the hurtful earth, as if it were a calendar scratched with the fingernails into the bricks of Death Row. Instead we'd dragged ourselves towards brighter possibilities. We dragged ourselves towards the stars. We knew even then that the stars were the others here, the ones unlike us: the men and women who'd died with names. Against the dark, their ghosts shone like gods.

We knew we may have been nothing compared to them, these people who could face the night so brightly sure of who they were. But we measured ourselves against them. From the beginning of our time here, we saw them and wanted better for ourselves. We wanted our names back.

So our betrayed lump of souls, spastic as an infant and bawling injustice, went crawling from star to star asking for help. Imagine a faint whorl of galactic dust, drifting across a cloudless, moonless night. That dust was our unmarked grave. That groaning you heard — that night you noticed us at last — was the cost of every step of our journey through the black. We made a powdery cluster of thousands of thousands. And worst of all, time and again the bulges of our group would have to shift as new nameless rose from the world to join us. The fresh-spawned ghosts were hauled into place by the specific gravity of the tortured and overlooked, and the interruption would jostle every exposed bone in our entire punchdrunk mob. Awful stop-and-go. Though it was a batch of these newcomers, to be fair, who eventually helped us discover what the stars were made of.

Eventually. For untold ages till then, however, all we could do was beat on through the dark. We paid little attention, also, to the astral wanderers from the plane of the living, the psychics and mediums and so forth. We brushed them off like instellar flies. Really, all we had eyes for was the next tackhead in the black, the next fixed spot in the night sky. Whenever at last we reached another, our begging was shameless. Again, again, again:
Tell us our names
.

Nothing. Not even the smallest murmur of sympathy. Each star went on glistering in silence, as grim a spectacle to us as each new glacier must have seemed to a million nameless stone-age tribes.

Why did we go on? Everyone loses something, in the shuttle from one life to the next. Everyone has to start all over, as a ghost. And though in our case some scrabbled along with throats slashed by the guards' machetes, though others in our musty group had elbows broken backwards by their torturers or hair burned away where the electrodes had been placed — nonetheless these wounds no longer hurt. If a brother-ghost tripped over the ropy length of an intestine, spilled from the hole in his gut, he felt about as much pain as if he'd had an earlobe tugged. Then why go on begging for this scrap of personality left behind? And we did have our dropouts, giving up the chase, floating off to blackness lonesomely. But always the vast majority strove on. Or at least we did in these early days, before we began to learn what the stars were made of. We stumbled from shiny spot to shiny spot like a lost two-year-old pulling on the pants leg of any adult he can find. We would risk any humiliation, in order to escape the one from which we'd come.

It's not that we've forgotten our names. It's that our names were taken away. We were some bug in the grotesque machinery of the State, and the State hadn't merely crushed us, but also had scraped whatever stain we'd left off the iron altogether. They'd caught us and they'd rubbed us out. Then whenever someone came looking for us, some blue-ribbon panel of diplomatic investigators come combing the prison register for us, the warden would sit fatly grinning.
No such person here
. No such name on the books. And all the time the guards would be down in our cells slapping the dreams from our heads so they could then hammer us back to unconsciousness once more.

Cell without a number, prisoner without a name! Our families were told we'd “disappeared.” Our friends were let know, with a glance blunt as a rifle butt, they shouldn't ask any questions. Our enemies smiled. Meanwhile nameless as dust, we died.

We remembered nothing, or what we remembered was no help. Someone might pass along a recollection of machetes raised overhead, their blades nickelized by the swollen moon. Or as we travelled we might brood on a freezing night spent curled in the blackness of a metal box too large to keep a person warm. But where these memories came from, we couldn't say. We didn't know even just whose memories they were. What we recalled of earth seemed to spring up from all of us at once.

No wonder we ignored the visitors from physical existence, the psychics and astral journeymen. Because these people could hear us groan and ponder our memories as we slogged along, and because the lights sprinkled round us seared the night in silence, the psychics and so forth would come pester us with their questions about “the future.” But the future here seemed so much more than these limited nags could imagine. The world of the dead, understand, is not the world in which we'd died. Here it's nothing like a prison, a compound lined with electrified wire, a bamboo cage in which you can neither stand nor sit. Instead — for everyone except us, except us — the afterlife looked like a perfection that went on forever.