Bright Segment (35 page)

“All the time, like so,” I said, and drank the rest of his, “And like so,” and drank mine down. “Steve!” Steve already had the refills on a tray and I knew it, which is why I yelled at him. “Now, about what you started to say—” and I broke off while Steve got to the table and put down the drinks and picked up the empties and went away again—“the story of your life. You sit there and tell me ‘Oh, nothing,’ and you say you work in a store, period. Now
I
am going to
tell
you
the story of your life. First of all, I’m going to tell you who you are. You’re Henry. Nobody else in God’s great gray-green Universe was ever this particular Henry. We start with that. No—”

Henry said, “But I—”

“No mountain,” I went on, “no supernova, no collapsing, alpha-spitting nucleus was ever more remarkable than the simple fact of you, Henry, just being Henry. Name me an earthquake, an oak tree, a racehorse or a Ph.D. thesis and I will, by God, name you one just like it that happened before. You,” I said, leaning forward and jamming my forefinger into his collarbone, “you, Henry, are unique and unprecedented on this planet in this galaxy.”

“No, I’m not,” he laughed, backing off from the finger, which did him no good once I had him pinned to the wall behind him.

“No supernova,” I said again, having just discovered that the phrase is a delightful way of sending the flavor of good bourbon through the nostrils. “That’s what we only begin with,” I went on. “Just being, you’re a miracle, aside from everything you’ve ever said or done or dreamed about.” I took away the finger and sat back to beam at him.

“Ah,” he said; I swear he blushed. “Ah, there’s plenty more like me.”

“Not a single one.” I tipped up my glass, found it was empty already, so I drank his because I had my mouth all set for it. “Steve!” I sat silently watching Henry aimlessly rubbing his collarbone while the drinks arrived and the empties left. “So we start with a miracle. Where do we go from there? How do you cap that?”

He made a sort of giggle. It meant, “I don’t know.”

“You never heard anybody talk like this about you before, did you?”

“No.”

“All right.” I put out the forefinger again, but did not touch him with it because he expected I would.

Over his shoulder, in the wall mirror, I could see that woman sitting alone in the back booth, crying. Always a great one for crying, she was.

“I’ll tell you why I talk like this, Henry,” I said. “It’s for your own
good, because you don’t know what you are. Here you walk around this place telling people ‘Oh, nothing’ when they ask for the story of your life, and you’re a walking miracle just to start with. Now what do we go on with?”

He shrugged.

“You feel better, now you know what you are?”

“I don’t … I never thought about it.” He looked up at me swiftly, as if to find out what I wanted him to say. “I guess I do.”

“All right then. That makes it better. That makes it easier on you, because I am now going to tell you what you are, Henry. Henry, what are you?”

“Well, you said—” he swallowed—“a miracle.”

I brought down my fist with a bang that made everybody jump, even her in the mirror, but especially Henry. “No! I’ll tell you what you are. You are a nowhere type, a
nudnick
type
nothing!
” I quickly bent forward. He shrank from the finger like a snail from salt. “And now you’re going to tell me that’s a paradox. You’re going to say I contradicted myself.”

“I’m not.” His mouth trembled and then he was smiling again.

“Well, all right, but it’s what you’re thinking. Drink up.” I raised my glass. “Here’s to the eyes, blue brown and brindle, and here’s to the fires that those eyes don’t kindle; I don’t mean the fires that burn down shanties, I mean the fires that pull down—”

“Gee, no, thanks,” he said.

I drank my drink. “But I mean,” I said aloud to myself, “really a nothing.” I took his drink and held it and glared at him. “You will, by God, stop stepping on my punchlines.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t even notice.” He pointed vaguely. “I didn’t know anyone could handle so much of that—that whiskey.”

“I got news for you, boy,” I said, and winked at him. “Here it is past quitting time and this whiskey is all I had for lunch, and it’s what I had for a snack—high tea, wot?—and it’s what I’m having for dinner, and well should you envy this mighty capacity. Among other things. Now I will show you why I have uttered no paradox in describing you as a miracle and a simultaneous, coexistent, concurrent nothing.

I smelled his drink and lowered it. “You started out being everything I described—unique, unprecedented. If you thought about it at all, which I doubt, you thought of yourself as having been born naked and defenseless, and having gained constantly since—the power of speech, the ability to read, an education of sorts (you can see by my calling it that I’m in a generous mood) and, lately, some sort of a job in some sort of a store, the right to vote, and that … well, unusual suit you’re wearing. No matter how modest you are about these achievements—are you are, you really are—they seem to add up to more than you started with.

“Well, they don’t. Since the day you were born, you’ve lost. What the hell is it that you keep looking at?”

“That girl. She’s crying. But I’m listening to what you’re saying.”

“You better listen. I’m doing this for you, for your own good. Just let her cry. If she cries long enough, she’ll find out crying doesn’t help. Then she’ll quit.”

“You know why she’s crying?”

Did I! “Yes, and it’s a pretty useless procedure. Where was I?”

“I’ve been losing since I was born,” Henry obediently reminded me.

“Yeah, yeah. What you’ve lost is potential, Henry. You started out with the capability of doing almost anything and you’ve come to a point where you can do almost nothing. On the other hand, I started out being able to do practically nothing and now I can do almost anything.”

“That’s wonderful!” he said warmly.

“You just don’t know,” I told him. “Now, mind you, we’re still talking about you. You’ll see the connection. I just want to illustrate a point … These days, everybody specializes or doesn’t make it, one or the other. If you’re lucky enough to have a talent and find work where you use it, you go far. If your work is outside your talent, you can still make out. If you have no talent, hard work in one single line makes for a pretty fair substitute. But in each case, how good you are depends on how closely you specialize and how hard you
work inside a specialty. Me, now, I’m different.
Steve!
”

“None for me,” Henry insisted plaintively.

“Do it again, Steve. Henry, stop interrupting me when I’m doing you a favor. What
I
am, I’m what you might call a specializing non-specialist. We’re few and far between, Henry—guys like me, I mean. Far as work’s concerned, I got a big bright red light in here—” I tapped my forehead—“that lights up if I accidentally stay in one line too long. Any time that happens, I quick wind up what I’m doing and go do something else instead. And far as talents are concerned, talents I got, I guess. Only I don’t use ’em. I avoid ’em. They’re the only thing that could ever trap me into specializing and I just won’t be trapped, not by anybody or anything. Not me!”

“You have a real talent for writing,” Henry said diffidently.

“Well, thanks, Henry, but you’re wrong. Writing isn’t a talent. It’s a skill. Certain kinds of thinking, ways of thinking—you might call them based on talent; but writing’s just a verbalization, a knack of putting into an accepted code what’s already there in your head. Learning to write is like learning to type, a transformation of a sort of energy into a symbol. It’s what you write that counts, not how you do it. What’s the matter, did I lose you?”

He was looking out into the room over my shoulder and smiling. “She’s still crying.”

“Forget it. Every day, women lose their husbands. They get over it.”

“Lose—Her husband’s dead?”

“Altogether.”

He looked again and I watched his wide mouth, the show of strong, uneven teeth. I couldn’t blame him. She’s a very unusual-looking girl and here the coast was clear. I wondered next what you’d ever say to Henry so he wouldn’t smile.

Then he was looking at me again. “You were talking about your writing,” he said.

“Oh. Now suppose, Henry, you had the assignment to write a piece every week and you wrote every single piece so the man who reads it believes it. And suppose one piece says: ‘The world will end.’
And another one says: ‘The world will not end.’ One says: ‘No man is good. He can only struggle against his natural evil.’ And another says, ‘No amount of evil can alter the basic goodness of human beings.’ See what I mean? Yet every single word of every piece comes out like a revelation. The whole series just stinks of truth. Would you say that you, the writer of all of this crud, believes or does not believe in what he writes?”

“Well, I guess … I don’t know. I mean I—” He looked into my eyes swiftly, trying again to discover what I wanted him to say. “Well,” he said clumsily, when I just sat and wouldn’t help, “if you, I mean I, writing that way, if I said white was white and then it was blue … well, I guess I couldn’t believe ’em both?” His voice put the question mark shyly at the end and he pretended to duck.

“You mean to say that kind of writer doesn’t believe anything he writes. Well, I knew you were going to say that, and you’re one hundred and three per cent
wrong
.” And I leaned forward and glared at him.

He looked into his lap. “I’m sorry.” Then, “He believes some of it?”

“No!”

“Oh,” Henry said. Miserably, he moved his glass an inch to the left. I took it away from him.

I said, “A writer like that learns to believe
everything
he writes about. Sure, white is white. But look: go down as far as you can into the microscopic, and still down, and what do you find? Measurements that can only be approximated; particles that aren’t particles at all, but only places where there is the greatest probability of an electric charge … in other words, an area where nothing is fact, where nothing behaves according to the rules we set up for the proper behavior of facts.

“Now go up in the other direction, out into space, farther than our biggest telescopes can reach, and what do you find? Same thing! The incommensurable, the area of possibility and probability, where the theoretical computation (that’s scientese for ‘wild guess’) is acceptable mathematics. So okay: all these years, we’ve been living as if white was white and a neat
a
plus
b
equals a respectable
c
.

“There might be an excuse for that before we knew that in the microcosm and in the macrocosm all the micrometers are made of rubber and the tape-measures are printed on wet macaroni. But we do know that now; so by what right do we assume that everything’s vague up there and muzzy down yonder, but everything
here
is all neat as a pin and dusted every day? I maintain that nothing is altogether anything; that nothing proves anything, nothing follows from anything; nothing is really real, and that the idea we live in a tidy filling of a mixed-up sandwich is a delusion.

“But you can’t go around not believing in reality and at the same time do your work and get your pay. So the only alternative is to believe
everything
you run into, everything you hear, and especially everything you think.”

Henry said, “But I—”

“Shut up. Now, belief—faith, if you like—is a peculiar thing. Knowledge helps it along, but at the same time it can only exist in the presence of ignorance. I hold as an axiom that complete—
really
complete—information on any given subject would destroy belief in it. It’s only the gaps between the steppingstones of logic that leave room for the kind of ignorance called intuition, without which the mind can’t move. So back we come to where we started: by not specializing in anything. I am guarding my ignorance, and as long as I keep that ignorance at a certain critical level, I can say anything or hear anything and believe it. So living is a lot of fun and I have more fun than anybody.”

Henry smiled broadly and shook his head in deep admiration. “I’m glad if it’s so, I mean, you’re happy.”

“What do you mean,
if?
I get what I want, Henry; I always get what I want. If that isn’t being happy, what is?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Henry closed his eyes a moment and then said again, “I wouldn’t know … Let me out, would you?”

“You going some place? I’m not through with you, Henry, me boy. I don’t
begin
to be through with you.”

He looked wistfully at the door and, without moving, seemed to sigh. Then he smiled again. “I just want to, uh, you know.”

“Oh, that. The used beer department is down those steps over there.” I got up and let him by. There was no way out of Molson’s except past me; he wouldn’t get away.

Why shouldn’t he get away?

Because he made me feel good, that’s why. There was something about Henry, a sort of hair-trigger dazzle effect, that was pretty engaging. Recite the alphabet to him and I swear he’d look dazzled. Not that the line I’d been slinging wouldn’t dazzle anyone.

It was just then I decided to tell him about the murderer.

The room tilted suddenly and I hung on to the edges of the table and stopped it. I recognized the symptom. Better get something to eat before soaking up any more of that sour-mash. I didn’t want to get offensive.

Just then I felt, rather than heard, a sort of commotion. I looked up. Henry, that damn fool, was leaning with his palms of the table where what’s-her-name sat, the one who cried all the time. I saw her glance up and then her face went all twisted. She sprang up and fetched him one across the chops that half spun him around. Next thing you know, she was through the door, with Henry staring after her and grinning and slowly rubbing his face.

“Henry!”

Turning my way, Henry looked again at the door, then came shambling over.

“Henry, you ol’ wolf, you’ve been holding out on me,” I said. “Since when have you been chasing tomatoes?”

He just sat down heavily and fondled his cheek. “Gosh!”