The Sinful Ones (16 page)

Steady! That’s a question that will have to be left unanswered for the present.

But what are you going to do now?

Go to a psychiatrist? Tell him about your “spells of amnesia”? Have him ask about your childhood, pull down the shade, shine lights in your eyes, work on your nerves—

No! You couldn’t stand that and you know it. That would shake your mind loose for sure.

But there
is
something you can do. Something that’ll at least keep the road open to sanity and safety. It isn’t spectacular, though it’ll take a sort of courage. You can simply keep doing what you’re supposed to be doing. Go through all the motions of your daily routine without varying them an iota. There’s safety in routine, Mackay. It keeps men going when nothing else will. You know, soldiers in battle, and all that. By following routine, you have the best chance of holding onto your mind.

You can start right now. Stand up—and did it ever occur to you, Mackay, that standing up is an interesting mechanical problem? Your bones are levers, your muscles are motors—you can feel the cables of sinew tighten smoothly. Smile—it gives you a crinkly feeling in your cheek, doesn’t it? Shake hands with the next applicant. Note the moisture. Also the quality of the grip. Vigorous but jerky—that’s a clue to character. Study his face—the smile, the gold fillings in his back teeth, the worried brown eyes yellow-flecked, the ripples of tension in the dusky skin around them, the alert nose, the eczema scars under the powder. That’s a face for you, Mackay, a face to remember.

Rejoice, Mackay! Here’s a new applicant—a whole new world for you to lose yourself in. I know it’s had, Mackay but in an hour and thirty-seven minutes it’ll be five o’clock. If you can hold on until then and do what’s expected of you, you can walk out of here with your mind intact and no one will have the faintest suspicion of what’s happened to you. You’ll be free, Mackay, free!

CARR NUDGED HIS glass forward across the chromium surface.

The bartender reached for it. Carr turned toward Marcia. “Another?” he asked. “I’m one up on you.”

She smiled but kept hold of the stem of her glass. The bartender flicked up Carr’s and turned away.

“You want to have just the right amount of edge on you when you meet Keaton,” she said. “He goes a lot by first impressions.”

Carr nodded dutifully. Marcia looked very handsome tonight. Above the black dress her bare shoulders and neck were startling youthful. And on her face was that expression which Carr always found both exciting and disturbing—a look that incited daring, but threatened waspishness if the daring were not of just the right quality; a look that indicated she was intensely interested in you, but only in certain things about you.

Not, for instance, in your troubles. No matter how black.

“What’s the matter, Carr? You’re so silent.”

“Nothing.”

“One would almost think you weren’t looking forward to meeting Keaton.”

Carr finished his Manhattan. He touched his black tie. There was another uncomfortable silence. To break it, he started to talk at random.

“You remember Tom Elvested? He’s been pestering me to go out with some mysterious girl he insists is just my type.”

“Why don’t you?” Marcia said quickly. “It might be very amusing.”

Carr laughed. “I just mentioned it as an example of Tom’s bull-headedness. Once he gets an idea—”

“But why not?” Marcia pressed. “She might be young. That would be interesting for you.”

“Nonsense,” said Carr uncomfortably. “I gather she’s a wet blanket. Some sort of timid intellectual. I mentioned it as an example…”

His voice trailed off. He looked at his empty glass. Marcia looked at him.

“Time we were going,” she said.

In the taxicab she quickly turned and kissed him. Before he could respond she had moved away an was telling him the latest gossip of the publishing business. A few blocks and they were pulling up at the Pendletons’.

From the street, the bright lighted windows of the huge third floor apartment looked like the amusement deck of a medium-size ocean liner ploughing through the night. There were even the strains of music echoing down.

There was a flurry of movement in the street. Another taxicab drew behind theirs. A messenger boy with a cellophane box appeared from the opposite direction and ran up the walk. A large black dog, held on leash by a woman in furs, came snuffing toward Carr and he felt an abnormal twinge of fear.  He and Marcia hurried up the walk. He held the door for her and for the couple which had emerged from the second taxi. The man thanked him with a slight bow. The girl, who had a delicately flushed British complexion, touched Marcia’s hand and they chatted.

As Carr followed their nicely filled stockings up the gray-carpeted stairs, he tried to think of something to say to the other man. But instead he found himself wondering what would happen if he had another attack of amnesia. That possibility hadn’t occurred strongly to him before, but now it obsessed his mind.

Was an amnesia attack like fainting, or like sleep? Would it hold off as long as you kept thinking about it? Presumably anything might set it off. Really he must see a psychiatrist in spite of everything.

A shrill laugh of greeting cam skirling down the stairs. He looked up and saw Katy Pendleton hanging over the landing like a fat doll with a face covered by tiny cracks. A fantastic green flower dripped from her hand.

“Look what Hugo sent,” she cried to them. “He can’t come. Detained at the consulate.” She waggled the orchid at Marcia and the British girl. “My dears, you look lovely. Come with me.” She handed the cellophane box to the messenger boy. “No reply.” Then quickly, to Carr and the other man, with a jolly grimace, “Mona will show you,” and sweeping back through the door she revealed a sharp-faced Negro maid she’d been eclipsing.

As Carr stepped inside he saw that the Pendletons’ apartment did have something of the layout of an ocean liner. Rooms opening to either side of two parallel central hallways. The big shadowy sun porch, its dark doors visible beyond dancing couples, might be the bridge. Next, the huge living room—main salon. Then a small stuffy-looking study hung with large, dark portraits—captain’s cabin. Then a library—second salon. Finally the luxurious staterooms. Dining salon and galley presumably at the stern.

The West Indian stewardess—Negro maid, rather—showed Carr a bed heaped with coats and hats, to which he added his own. Returning into the hall he saw Marcia talking earnestly to a small man who wore a soft white shirt under his tuxedo. Carr stopped short, feeling an uncomfortable coldness mounting inside him.

The small man slumped, his arms a-dangle, his thin features slack with tiredness. But this appearance was deceptive. He had a tic. Whenever it convulsed the muscles of his cheek, his dark-circled eyes flashed a penetrating, critical glance, and his fingers curled. It was as if he lurked behind a curtain which small puffs of wind kept twitching aside.

Marcia raised eyebrows at Carr. Carr went resignedly, knowing this must be Keaton Fisher.

But the introduction was hardly over, the dark-circled eyes had only begun to quick-freeze Carr, the limp fingers had not quite finished a pulse-taking handshake—which the tie suddenly converted into a spasmodic grip—when Katy Pendleton, who had been pinning the green orchid to a half-protesting redhead, interrupted.

“Oh, Mr. Fisher, I’ve promised to introduce you to the Wenzels. You’ll excuse us, I know.”

Marcia touched Carr’s arm. “Later.” She hurried off.

Momentarily relieved, Carr found himself a cocktail and drifted into the library, where a number of lively discussions were going on.

Carr recognized several people. But he hesitated at deciding which group to join and the conversation went so fast that his clever remarks were constantly getting outdated. He felt rather like an awkward girl nerving herself for the right moment to start jumping rope.

His uneasiness was fast reaching a peak where he might blurt out any sort of remark just so as to be noticed, when Marcia came along and said she wanted to dance.

As soon as Carr had his arms around her, he realized that here was the only person he wanted to talk to.

His other impulses had been merest camouflage. Why in this world, when something fantastically strange and terrifying had happened to him, should he waste thought or time on this noisy herd? It suddenly struck him that of course he must tell Marcia about his mysterious amnesia attacks. Whatever had made him think otherwise? What was love if you didn’t share? As they circled past the beaming brown faces of the musicians, he got set to tell her.

“Just as well Katy butted in,” Marcia whispered softly and swiftly. “That wasn’t the right time for your talk with Keaton. I’ve spoken to him and arranged things.”

He nodded. “Marcia,” he began with difficulty.

“Now listen carefully, Carr,” she said. “In about ten minutes Keaton will drift away from the library and go into the study. I’ll see to it that he’s alone. You watch for him and make sure not to get tied up with anyone. A few moments later, drift along after him.”

“All right,” he said, “but first, Marcia, there’s something—”

The music ended with a flourish. Marcia gave him a little push. “Now run along and watch Keaton,” she said. “Oh, hello, Guy,” and the next moment her back was turned and she was talking with a lanky, graying Mr. Pendleton.

Miserably, Carr returned to the library, picking up a cocktail on his way. The discussions were still going full tilt. Keaton Fisher was now dominating one of them, timing his points to his tic.

Carr shuffled from the edge of one group to another, smiling and nodding approvingly at some of the remarks, but apparently just enough to get himself accepted without really being noticed. Everyone seemed to have concluded that he was just a vacuous sort of chap who wanted to wander around nursing a drink. He was conscious of a growing wall between him and all the others. A glass wall, perhaps, since it seemed to him that he could no longer hear so well what was being said—there was a humming in his ears.

Just then he noticed Keaton Fisher disappearing into the hallway. As if by magic his anxiety vanished and self-possession returned. Just as earlier he had been filled with relief to get away from Keaton Fisher, now he felt overjoyed at the prospect of getting back to him—anything, so long as it gave him something definite to do.

He veered for a moment toward the table of cocktails, then checked himself and walked straight to the study, pausing outside the door.

Keaton Fisher was inside and along. He had picked up a magazine and was studying the table of contents. He was facing away from Carr. He was motionless—except for the tic.

A childish play on words occurred to Carr, Keaton Fisher had a tic. Therefore Keaton Fisher was ticking. Like a clock.

Dark portraits of bearded men in last century’s clothes looked down on Keaton—masked men like himself who shrewdly eyed profits through the eyeholes in their faces. Carr felt a rush of anxiety and apprehension.

Staring motionless at the same page of the magazine, Keaton Fisher continued to tick.

Motionless—yet all at once he seemed to Carr to double in height, to become a terrifying figure in which was concentrated the quintessence of all the brasher and more predatory qualities of the noisy world around them—the world of out-thinking and out-smarting, come-ons and killings, ads and headlines, slaps and grabs, the world of the super-intelligent business-robots, of the hyper-efficient modern machine-men.

Keaton Fisher went on ticking.

For the moment everything was wiped from Carr’s mind except the question of whether or not to enter this room. He knew that he was faced with a decision that would effect his whole future life. He knew that, as happens much too often with such decisions, he was not making it, it was being made for him by forces stronger than any which consciousness could summon, but it was being made nevertheless.

Keaton Fisher still ticked.

With a little gulping sigh that was almost a whimper of fear, Car ducked back, darted to the cocktail table, drank one, picked up one, then another—he could pretend he was taking it to some woman—walked rapidly into the living room, edged along the wall past the dancers, opened the door to the dark sun porch, saw it was empty, sat down and began to drink in greedy little gulps.

When he put down the second glass beside his chair, reaction struck him a blow that made him writhe. He stared frantically at the dark windows with their reflected gleams of color from the dance floor. What he had done had shut him away from Marcia forever. This had been a last chance, a last test. It would be kidding himself to think differently.

He had scorned a splendid chance to make a real success in the world, a chance to push his head above the level of the nonentities, to clamber up to a level where you had some say about what happened to you.

He had doomed himself to lose his present job, to sneak away from his present environment, to go downhill for God knows how long, until the urges inside him gathered themselves for another try, if they still had the strength for that. Shame and vanity, he knew, would permit no other course.

But most of all, he had lost Marcia.

Perhaps it still wasn’t too late. Perhaps—

He jumped up, hurried back to the living room, sidled past the dancers, entered the study.

It was empty.

He looked in the library. He saw Keaton Fisher talking with some other people. Marcia looked happy, Keaton Fisher also seemed in expansive spirits. As Carr watched, he laughed at something and patted Marcia’s arm—just as his tic came.

Carr jerked back, hurried to the cocktail table, repeated his maneuver with the three drinks, and returned to the sun porch.

But now, as he drank in the darkness with the orchestra moaning behind him, there was a difference. Now that he had taken the irreversible step, or been pushed into it, he hated everything about the surroundings in which the step had been taken. Those idiots! What right had they to create a society in which brashness and machine-efficiency alone counted, in which the unambitious and fleshly-soft were tortured? Blind as bats to the truly important things in life. Jigging and hip-wagging like cogs and pistons while the world went God knows where. Sneering and jibing while time stole days from everyone and wouldn’t give them back. Fighting for crumbs of prestige, while unknown dangers, like black sea monsters, silently circled mankind’s vessel. For a moment Carr felt as if the Pendletons’ apartment were truly a ship, with only one poor drunken fool crouched futilely on the dark and empty bridge. He braced himself against the crash of the rocks.