A Touch of Infinity (13 page)

“That's all I tried.”

A slow, crafty grin spread over Dave's face as he reached into his pocket and took out a roll of bills. He peeled off a ten-dollar bill and pressed it flat on the table. “You know what this is, Harvey?”

Harvey stared at it without comment.

“How about it?”

“It could get us into a lot of trouble,” Harvey said thoughtfully.

“How?”

“Counterfeit.”

“Come off it, Harvey. What's counterfeit? Are you counterfeiting rolls? Danish?”

“Rolls are different. This is larceny, Dave.”

The two ladies listened and watched, their eyes wide, but said nothing. Morality had reared its ugly head, and suddenly what had been very simple was becoming most complicated.

“There never was an accountant who didn't have larceny in him. Come on, Harvey.”

Harvey shook his head.

“It's a gift,” Suzie explained. “It's spooky. I don't think you should talk Harvey into doing anything that he doesn't want to do. You don't want to do this, do you, Harvey?” she asked her husband. “I mean, unless you really want to.”

“Listen, Harvey, level with me,” Dave said. “Did you ever do anything like this before? Have you been working up to this?”

“How do you work up to it?”

“That's what I'm asking you. Because this is big—big, Harvey. If it's just a gift, you know, all of a sudden, then you got no obligations to anyone. You can take Danish out of the air. You can take a ten-dollar bill out of the air. What's the difference?”

“Counterfeit,” said Harvey.

“Balls. Are the rolls counterfeit, or are they the real thing?”

“It's still counterfeiting.”

“Harvey, you are out of your ever-loving mind. Look, you're sitting here in the bosom of your family—those closest to you, your own loved ones. You're protected. Suzie is your wife. I'm her brother. Ruthie is my wife. Flesh and blood. Who's going to turn you in? Myself—would I kill the goose that laid the golden egg? Ruthie—I'd break every bone in her body.”

“That's right, he would,” Ruthie said eagerly. “I can promise you that, Harvey. He would break every bone in my body.”

“Suzie? Suzie, would you turn Harvey in? Like hell you would. A wife can't testify against her husband. That's what I have been telling you, Harvey. Flesh and blood.”

“When you think about it,” Suzie said, “it's just like a parlor game, Harvey. I mean, suppose we were playing Monopoly or something like that. I mean, if you just did it for laughs. Dave says, take a ten-dollar bill out of the air. You do it. So what?”

“Maybe a dollar bill,” Harvey said, for the arguments were very convincing.

“Right on,” said Dave, taking a dollar bill out of his pocket. “I should have thought of that myself, Harv. Today a dollar is worth nothing, nothing. It's like a gag.” He spread the dollar on the table. “You know, when I was a kid, this could buy something. Not today. No, sir.”

Harvey nodded, took a deep breath, reached for a spot two feet in front of his nose, and plucked a dollar bill out of the air. Suzie squealed with pleasure and Ruthie clapped her hands in delight. Dave grinned and took the dollar bill from Harvey, laid it on the table next to the one he had produced from his pocket, and scrutinized it carefully. Then he shook his head.

“You missed, Harvey.”

“What do you mean, I missed?”

“Well, it's sort of a dollar bill. You got Washington's face all right, and it says ‘one dollar,' but the color's not exactly right, it's too green—”

“You left out the little print,” Ruthie exclaimed. “Here where it says that it's legal tender for all debts, public and private—you left that out.”

Harvey could see the difference. The curlicues were different, and the bright green stamp of the Department of the Treasury was the same color as the rest of it. The serial numbers had been left out, and as for the reverse side, it bore only a general resemblance to a real dollar bill.

“OK, OK—don't get nervous,” Dave told him. “You couldn't be expected to hit it the first time. What you have to do is to take a real good look at the genuine article and then try it again.”

“I'd rather not.”

“Come on, Harv—come on. Don't chicken out now. You want to try a ten?”

“No, I'll try the one again.”

He reached into the air and returned with another dollar bill between his fingers. They all examined it eagerly.

“Good, good,” Dave said. “Not perfect, Harvey—you missed on the seal, and the paper's not right. But it's better. I'll bet I could pass this one.”

“No!” Harvey grabbed both spurious bills and stuffed them into his pocket.

“All right, all right—don't blow your cool, Harv. We try it again now.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“No. I'm tired. Anyway, I got to think about this. I'm half out of my mind the way it is. Suppose this happened to you?”

“Man oh man, I'd buy General Motors before the week was out.”

“Well, I'm not sure that I want to buy General Motors or anything else. I got to think about this.”

“Harvey's right,” Suzie put in. “You always come on too strong, Dave. Harvey's got a right to think about this.”

“And while he thinks, the gift goes.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, it came on sudden. Suppose it goes the same way?”

“I don't care if it does,” Suzie said loyally. “Harvey's got a right to think about it.”

“OK. I'm not going to be unreasonable. Only one thing—when he thinks his way out of this, I want you to call me. I'm going to get some twenties and some fifties. I don't think we should go in for anything bigger than that right now.”

“I'll call you.”

“OK. Just remember that.”

When Dave and Ruthie had departed, Harvey asked his wife why she had agreed to call. “I don't need Dave,” he said. “You and Dave treat me like an imbecile.”

“I just agreed to get rid of him.”

“I'd just like to think once that you were on my side and not on his.”

“That's not fair. I'm always on your side. You know that.”

“I don't know it.”

“All right, make a big federal case out of it. They're gone, so if you want to think about it, why don't you think about it?” And she stalked into the bedroom, slammed the door, and turned on the television.

Harvey sat in the living room and brooded. He took out the dollar bills, studied them for a while, and then tore them up and made a trip to the bathroom to flush them down the drain. Then he returned to the couch and brooded again. It had been late afternoon by the time Dave and Ruthie left, and now it was early in the evening and darkening, and he was beginning to be hungry. He went into the kitchen and found beer and bread and ham, but his inner yearning was for a hamburger sandwich, not the way Suzie made hamburgers, dry, tasteless, leathery, but tender and juicy and pink in the middle. Reflecting on the fact that he was married to a rotten cook, he took a hamburger sandwich out of the air. It was perfect. Suzie entered as he took his first bite.

“Don't think about me,” she said. “I could starve to death while you sit here stuffing yourself.”

“Since when do I let you starve to death?”

“Where did you get the hamburger?”

He took one out of the air and put it in front of her.

“It's full of onions,” Suzie said. “You know how I hate onions.”

Harvey rose and dropped the hamburger into the garbage pail.

“Harvey, what are you doing?”

“You don't like onions.”

“Well, you can't just throw it away.”

“Why not?” Harvey felt himself changing, and the change was encompassed in those two simple words—why not? Why not? He plucked a hamburger without onions out of the air, dry and hard, the way his wife cooked them.

“Be my guest,” he said coolly.

She took a bite of the hamburger and then informed him through a mouth filled with food that he was acting very funny.

“What do you mean, funny?”

“You're just acting funny, Harvey. You got to admit that you are acting funny.”

“All right, it's a different situation.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I can take things out of the air,” said Harvey. “That's pretty different. I mean, it's not something that you go around doing. For example, you want some chocolate cake?” He reached out and retrieved a piece of chocolate layer cake and placed it in front of Suzie. “How does it taste? Try it.”

“Harvey, I'm still eating the hamburger, and don't think I don't realize that it's very unusual what you can do.”

“It's not like I'm just a kid,” Harvey said. “I'm a forty-one-year-old loser.”

“You're not a loser, Harvey.”

“Don't you kid yourself. I am a loser. What have we got? Five thousand dollars in the bank, a four-room apartment, no kids, nothing, absolutely nothing, a great big fat zero, and I am still forty-one years old.”

“I don't like to hear you talk like that, Harvey.”

“I am just making the point that I got to think this through. I got to get used to the fact that I can take things out of the air. It's an unusual talent. I got to convince myself.”

“Why? Don't you believe it, Harvey?”

“I do and I don't. That's why I have to think about it.”

Suzie nodded. “I understand.” She ate the chocolate cake and then went into the bedroom and turned on the television again.

Harvey followed her into the bedroom. “Why do you say you understand? Why do you always tell me that you understand?” She was trying to concentrate on the television screen, and she shook her head. “Will you turn off that damn box!” Harvey shouted.

“Don't shout at me, Harvey.”

“Then listen to me. You watch me take things out of the air and tell me you understand. I take a piece of chocolate cake out of the air, and you tell me that you understand. I don't understand, but you tell me that you understand.”

“That's the way it is, Harvey. They send people up to the moon, and I don't know any more about it than you do, but that's the way science is. I think it's very nice that you can take things out of the air. I think that if one of those computer places put it on a computer, they would be able to tell you just how it works.”

“Then why do you keep saying that you understand?”

“I understand that you want to think about it. Why don't you sit down inside and think about it.”

Harvey closed the door of the bedroom and went back into the living room and thought about it. It was actually the first moment he had really thought about it, and suddenly his head was exploding with ideas and notions. Some were what his friends in the advertising agencies would have called very creative notions, and some were not. Some were simply the crystallization of his own dissatisfactions. If someone had suggested to him the day before that he was a seething mass of dissatisfactions, he would have denied the accusation hotly. Now he could face them as facts. He was dissatisfied with his life, his job, his home, his past, his future, and his wife. He had never set out to be an accountant; it had simply happened to him. He had always dreamed of living in a large, spacious country home, and here he was in a miserable apartment with paper-thin walls in an enormous jerry-built building on Third Avenue in New York City. As far as his past was concerned, it was colorless and flat, and his future promised nothing that was much better. His wife—?

He thought about his wife. It was not that he disliked Suzie; he had nothing against her, nor could he think of very much that he had going for her. She was short, dark, and pretty, but he couldn't remember why or exactly how he had come to marry her. The plain fact of the matter was that he adored oversized blondes, large, tall, buxom, beautiful blondes. He dreamed about such women; he turned to watch them on the street; he fell asleep thinking about them and he awakened thinking about them.

He thought about one of them now. And then he began to grin; an idea had clamped onto him and it wouldn't let go. He sat up in his chair and stared at the bedroom door. He straightened his spine. The television blared from behind the door.

“To hell with it!” he said. It was a new Harvey Kepplemen. He stood up, his spine erect. “Tall, blond, beautiful—” he whispered, and then hesitated over the notion of intelligence. “To hell with intelligence!”

He reached out into the air in front of him with both hands now, and suddenly there she was, but he couldn't hold her and she fell with an enormous thud and lay sprawled on the floor, a blond, naked woman, very beautiful, very large, magnificently full-breasted, blue eyes wide open and very motionless and apparently lifeless.

Harvey stood staring at her.

The bedroom door opened, and there was Suzie, who also stood and stared at her.

“What is that?” Suzie cried out.

The answer was self-evident. Harvey swallowed, closed his mouth, and bent over the beautiful blonde.

“Don't touch her!”

“Maybe she's dead,” Harvey said hopelessly. “I got to touch her to find out.”

“Who is she? Where did she come from?”

Harvey turned to meet Suzie's eyes.

“No.”

Harvey nodded.

“No. I don't believe it. That?” Now Suzie walked over to the large blonde. “She's seven feet long if she's an inch. Harvey, what kind of a creep are you?”

Harvey touched her, discreetly, on the chest just below the enormous breasts. She was as cold as a dead mackerel.

“Well?”

“She's as cold as a dead mackerel,” Harvey replied bleakly.

“Try her pulse.”

“She's dead. Look at her eyes.” He tried the pulse. “She has no pulse.”