Bright Segment (46 page)

I hoped he hadn’t noticed my turning away like that. Then I found I could see his reflection in the polished gray-green marble of the wall by the elevator. He was looking at me; I could see his face tilt as he glanced down at the hat I was twisting in my hands. Then it tipped up and back a little as he studied the tops of the doors, the way a man does when he wants to look as if he’s absorbed in his own thoughts. So he’s seen that hat, at ten in the morning, and that meant I was going out, and he knew all about me and Twink and the accident, and was being considerate.

Old Frozen Face was being considerate, too. Old Frozen Face always did the correctly considerate thing. Like hiring Bernie, who was a cripple.

I hated myself for thinking that.

It made me hate Bernie. I glared at his reflection. Just then, one of the elevator doors across the corridor rolled open and I jumped and spun.

“Up!” said the operator.

Bernie stumped into it without looking at me. The door closed. I wished I had a rock to throw at it.

I tried hard to get hold of myself. I knew what was happening.
Scare a man badly enough, and then make the thing he fears diffuse and unreachable, and he’ll lash out indiscriminately at everything and everyone. Well, lash away, boy, I told myself, and get it out of your stinking small-minded system before you get home.

“Down?” the operator asked.

Shouldering into the car, I felt I had a right to be sore at the operator for taking so long. The elevator was full of intruders and the descent took forever, and for a moment I got so mad, I swear I could have hunched my shoulders and sprayed them all with adrenalin. Then the doors opened again and there was the lobby like a part of all outdoors, and the offices upstairs no longer contained or confined me, and their people no longer intruded.

I scurried down the steps and along the concourse to the interurban station, trusting my feet and letting the rest of me fly along with the eager aimlessness of a peace-dove released at a school pageant.

How can there be any unreality in your cosmos? I asked myself. The day Twink goes to the hospital—that’s
today;
it’s here. It’s been a real thing all this time, for all it was in the future; it was more real than most other things in the world. And now it’s come and you’re walking underwater, seeing through murk.

But the whole world’s helping, too. Nothing is so unreal to the commuter as a commuter’s station at ten in the morning. The trains, lying in these echoing acres, look like great eviscerated larvae. The funereal train crew, gossiping as if work were done, as if it weren’t their job to get me home before the sawbones went to work on my little girl.

I went to them. “Baytown?”

They looked at me, a conductor, a motorman, a platform man. They were different sizes and shapes, but their faces were all the same gray, and contained the same damnable sense of the fitness of things. They were in a place that belonged to them, doing the right thing at the right time in it. They were steady and sober and absolutely at the service of commuters-by-the-ton, but a man outbound at ten in the morning, though tolerable, could hardly be served. He wasn’t what they were there for.

I went into the train and sat down and looked at my watch. Four
minutes. They were going to make me wait four minutes.

I sat in an empty car and looked at the glare of yellow woven plastic pretending to be rattan, steel panels pretending to be wood, and the advertising signs. There were three kinds of signs: the imperatives, which said Buy and Drink and Use; the comparatives, which said Better, Richer, Finer (and never stated what they were better and richer and finer than); and the nominatives, which stupidly and without explanation proclaimed a name.

I snorted at them all and reached for a paper someone had left on a nearby seat. If its previous owner had been there, I think I’d have punched him right in the mouth. I’ve always respected books and I’ve always felt a paper is a sort of book. This character had put the middle section in upside down, folded some sheets back on themselves and away from the centerline, so that page covers skewed and flopped all around, and he had generally churned up and mutilated the dead white body before discarding it.

Growling, I began to put it back together again.

Angrily, I hurled the paper away from me. It came to pieces in midair and fluttered to the floor, to lie there accusingly and stare at me. I swore and got up and gathered it together and crammed it out of sight on the seat ahead of mine.

“Cheerful Tony,” I muttered. Some convolution of the face muscles, some accident of the dental arch, a trick of the light and the fortuitous presence of a news photographer as lucky as the guy who
got the flag-raising at Iwo—put ’em all together and you’ve got a national hero. What good did it do to anyone to read about Cheerful Tony or to write about it? What good did it do Tony?

For an ugly moment, I wished I could trade places with Tony’s father. All he had to worry about was cancer—nice, certain cancer—and once it was finished, that would be the end of it.

But I didn’t envy him the publicity, and for the hundred thousandth time, I thanked the Powers that so few people knew about Twink.

The doors slid shut and the train started. I let go a sigh of relief and hunched back in my seat, wondering how to make the time go faster. Not the time; the train. I pushed my feet uselessly against the legs of the next seat, made a calm and childish calculation of what I was doing (forty pounds foot-pressure forward, forty pounds shoulder-pressure backward—equals zero) and sat up feeling like a fool. I began to look at the ads again.

Imperative, comparative, nominative.

Maybe my technique had been wrong all along. Maybe I should have used nothing but advertising tactics on Twink the whole time. After all, those were tested methods, with more than a century of proof behind them

“Relax with oxygen,” I should have told her. “Live,” I should have told her, twelve times a minute, in the best imperative mood. “Live … live.” And, “Don’t struggle. Let the doctor work. It will be easier.” (Than what?) And, of course, the pervasive, institutional nominative: “Twink. Everybody knows Twink. Everybody loves Twink.” Until she believes it all.…

The anger, which had changed to hysteria, converted itself now into crawling depression. It descended on me like the shadow of some great reptile, something that moved slowly and implacably and without human understanding. I felt utterly alone. I was different. Apart. More apart than Bernie, who had left half a leg in Formosa. More than Sue Gaskell, who was the only Negro in the copy department—by God, another “kindness” of old Frozen Face.

Why couldn’t someone (besides Twink) share this with me? Even
Doris couldn’t. Doris loved me; she ate with me, slept with me, worried and hoped with me, but this thing with Twink was something she couldn’t share. She just wasn’t equipped for it. Sometimes I wondered how she held still for that. This might go on for years … if Twink lived at all … Twink and I sharing a thing that Doris could never know, even being Twink’s mother.

Suddenly I found someone else to be mad at and the depression lifted enough to let it in. You guys, I thought, you helpful people who put welded track on these roadbeds, who designed pneumatic dampers and cushioned wheels for the trains—did it ever occur to you that a man might want something to listen to in a train in 1973? Twenty years ago, I could have listened to the wheels and I could have made up a song to go along with them;
blippety-clak, blippety-clak
.

Blippety-clink, poor little Twink, don’t let her die—

All right, fellows—on second thought, you can have your welded rails.

“Baytown,” said the annunciator in a cultured voice, and deceleration helped me up out of the seat.

I went to the door and was through it before it had slid all the way open, shot down the platform while fumbling for my commuter’s plate, missed the scanner slot with it and skinned my knuckles, dropped the plate, picked it up, got it into the slot, waited forever—well, three seconds—while it scanned, punched and slid out my receipt.

I was just about to blow a fuse because there was no taxi, but there was. I couldn’t bark my address because the driver knew it, and I couldn’t wave bribes at him because he was paid by the development, and anyway his turbines had a governor to keep him from speeding as fast as I wanted. All I could do was huddle on the cushion and bite the ball of my thumb.

The house was very quiet. For some reason, I had expected to find them in the nursery, but there wasn’t a sound from there. I found Doris stretched out on the settee in the den, looking drowsy.

“Doris!”

“Shh. ’Lo. Twink’s asleep.”

I ran to her. “Is she … do you … are you …”

She rumpled my hair. “Shhh,” she said again. “My goodness, it’s going to be all right.”

I leaned very close and whispered, “Scared. I’m scared.”

“I’m scared, too,” she said reasonably, “but I’m not going to go all to pieces.”

I knelt there, soaking up a kind of strength, a kind of peace from her. “Sorry, darling. I’ve been—” I shuddered. “On the train, I was reading about Cheerful Tony. I was thinking how they’d do the same thing with us, if they knew.”

“Only more.” She half-laughed. “All that mail, all those reporters, newsreel men. All that glory. All that—noise.”

We listened together to the morning silence. It was the first time since she’d phoned me that I’d noticed how lovely the day was.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“For what?”

“For not telling them. For being—well, for just being; I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. And for Twink.”

“For
Twink
?”

“Of course. She’s my little girl. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have known her.”

“I think the way motherhood makes people crazy is one of the nicest things around,” I said.

She answered, but with her eyes. Then she said, “We have to be there at noon.”

I looked at my watch, leaped wildly to my feet, turned left, turned right.

Doris openly laughed at me. “How long does it take to get to the hospital?” she asked.

“Well, ten minutes, but we have to … don’t we have to, uh?”

“No, we don’t. We have more than an hour. Sit down and help me be quiet. Want something to eat before we go?”

“No. God, no. Shall I fix—”

“Not for me.”

“Oh,” Slowly I sat down again.

She giggled. “You’re funny.”

“Yeah.”

“Have any trouble getting away?” She was making talk, I knew, but I went right along with it.

“Matter of fact, no,” I said. “Old Frozen Face took one look at me after you called, and chased me out.”

“He’s so wonderful.… Honey! Don’t call him that!”

I growled something wordless. “He makes me mad.”

“After all he’s done?”

“Yes, after all he’s done,” I said irritably.

Because
of all he’s done, I think. All my life, I’m a misfit for one reason or another; then, in college, they found out this thing about me and I worked my way through being a laboratory curiosity. I got into the papers. Not too much—just enough to keep me from getting any decent job after I graduated. Except with Frozen Face, of course. I didn’t apply; he wrote me. He hired all his people that way. People with half a leg. Blind people in Personnel. Ex-cons who couldn’t get started.

At first, it looked as if his people had escaped the things that hung over them—thanks to him. Then, after a while, you began to realize that you wouldn’t be working there if you didn’t have something wrong with you. It was like starving all your life until you found you could be well fed and taken care of till the day you died—in a leprosarium.

But I said, “Sorry, Doris. Just naturally ungrateful, I guess … Twink’s waking up.”

“Oh, dear! I thought she might sleep until—”

“Shh.”

Ever since the accident (I’d turned the car over; they say you can’t do that with any car later than 1970, but I’m the guy), Twink had terrified me every time she woke up. She’d come out of the normal sleep of a normal baby and enter a frightening stillness, a cessation of everything but life itself. It was, I suppose, coma; but I’d lived with seven weeks of it once, and even now the momentary passage through it, from sleep to waking, was so loaded with terror and guilt for me that it was all I could take. And when you add to that the
fact that I had to hide it, that above all else I had to be strength to her, and comfort, as she awoke—

Then it was over; she was awake, confused, dimly happy.

“Hi, baby. How’s my Twink?”

Doris, tense on the couch, not breathing, waiting—

“It’s all right. Twink’s all right,” I said.

“Well, of course!”

I shot Doris a look. There wasn’t a hairline crack in that enamel of hers, but it suddenly occurred to me that it was past time for me to stop using her as the pillar of strength around here. I bent and kissed her and said (making it sound like a joke, because I knew she’d prefer it that way), “Okay, honey; from here on, you can scream curses.”

“I’ll just do that,” she said gratefully.

Did the accident have anything directly to do with it or was it just me? Champlain (yes,
the
Champlain, who took up where Rhine left off) had a number of theories about it. The most likely one was that when my peculiar equipment got stirred up enough in the crash and for that awful hour afterward, I sent such a surge of empathy at Twink that I created a response. You can call it telepathy if you like—Champlain did—but I don’t like the sound of that. Of course, I’m biased. You can take your extrasensoria, all of them, and—well, just take ’em and leave me be.