Crompton Divided (21 page)

‘That’s a little difficult to explain,’ Crompton said.

‘But what’s this all about?’

‘It’s a special therapy we’re doing. It’s going to make us into a single whole person.’

‘Walking down a pitch-black tunnel is your idea of therapy?’

‘No, no, this is just a preliminary.’

‘To what?’

‘I don’t know. They said it was best we didn’t know.’

‘Why did they say that?’

‘I’m not sure, I think it’s part of the treatment.’

Loomis throught about that for a while. Then he said, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well, I don’t either,’ Crompton said. ‘But that’s what they told me.’

‘I see,’ Loomis said. ‘Well, isn’t that just great? This is really a nice situation you’ve gotten us into. You think you’re so intelligent, don’t you? Let me tell you something, Al, you’re not smart, you’re stupid.’

‘Try to be calm,’ Crompton said. ‘We are at a very famous and successful place. They know what they’re doing.’

‘It just doesn’t look kosher to me,’ Loomis said. ‘Can’t we just check out of this place and try to sort things out on our own?’

‘I think it’s a little too late for that,’ Crompton said. ‘And anyhow –’

Light, coming from no apparent source, suddenly flooded the corridor. Just ahead, the passageway widened into a large room.

Crompton entered, and saw that he was in a surgical theater. There were tiers of seats, shadowed in gloom. In the center of the room was an elaborate operating table. There were several men standing around the table wearing white coats, rubber gloves, and gauze masks. There was a man lying on the table, his face hidden under a washcloth. In the background, a radio was playing one of last year’s top Terran ten, ‘Tushy Sounds,’ by Spike Dactyl and the Rump Parliament.

This looks like it could get unplesasant,’ Loomis remarked. ‘I think I’ll simply follow my nature and cop out of the action at this point by taking refuge in a meditation on my genitals, a spiritual practice I have been following since childhood.’

Stack woke up and said, ‘What’s going on?’

Crompton said, ‘Quite a lot, but this is hardly the moment for a recapitulation.’

‘I can fill you in,’ Loomis said.

‘Please do it very quietly,’ Crompton said. ‘I’ve got to cope with this situation.’ He turned to the doctors. ‘What is going on here?’

The eldest of the doctors had a long, forked gray beard and an authoritarian manner which he wore with argyle socks, perhaps as an oxymoron of ambiguous intent. He said, ‘You’re late. I trust you are ready to begin now?’

‘Begin what?’ Crompton said. ‘I am not a doctor. I don’t know what to do.’

‘It is precisely because you are not a doctor that you have been chosen!’ said a short, red-haired doctor from the rear of the group. ‘We are relying, you see, on your spontaneity and élan.’

‘Do have a go,’ another doctor said.

Despite Crompton’s protests they dressed him in a surgical gown, slipped rubber gloves over his hands, and tied a gauze mask over his face. Crompton was beginning to feel dizzy and dreamlike. Strange thoughts passed through his mind: Quondam substitutions? Perelmanesque gambit inapropos just now. The intricacy of forgetfulness! And then the peanut butter.

Someone slapped a scalpel into his hand. Crompton said, ‘If I were to react to this on a reality level, it would be frightening.’ He unmasked the patient, and beheld a fat-faced man with a mole on his left cheek.

‘Gaze well upon him,’ the fork-bearded doctor said. ‘Gloat upon your handiwork. Because you and you alone brought him to this as sure as God made little green apples.’

Crompton was about to remonstrate, but stopped because just then a pretty red-haired girl clad only in a violet dirndl came into the operating theater and asked, ‘Is Doctor Groper ready for me yet?’

‘No,’ one of the doctors hissed. He was nondescript except for his voice, which was soft and viscid and hinted at greasy iniquities.

The girl nodded and turned to Crompton. ‘Wanna see something?’

Crompton was too dumbfounded to respond. But Loomis, who always kept a weather eye open for opportunities like this, broke off explaining the situation to Stack and took over and said, ‘By all means, my dear, show me something.’

The girl reached into a tiny purse which she wore pinned to the waist of her dirndl and took out a pair of silver scissors.

‘I never go anywhere without them,’ she said.

‘Never at all? How fascinating,’ Loomis said. ‘Why don’t we take a walk and you can tell me all about it. I wonder if one can get a drink in this place?’

‘Now you must excuse me,’ the girl said. ‘I’ve got to put my toidy to bed.’ She exited.

‘Charming,’ Loomis murmured, and would have followed her if Crompton had not wrestled back control.

‘May we get back to business?’ Crompton said icily. He turned to the doctors. ‘I assume that all of this serves some sort of therapeutic purpose? I
am
the patient around here, am I not?’

‘Well, that calls for a bit of explanation,’ the fork-bearded doctor said, reaching under his mask to scratch what became visible as a harelip.

‘I thought you weren’t allowed to explain things,’ Crompton said.

‘You misunderstood. We are permitted to explain anything, as long as we don’t tell the truth.’

‘But don’t think that simplifies anything for you,’ said the resident in psychosurgery, who had just come into the room at that moment with his clipboard. ‘Even our lies contain valuable hints for you to figure out.’

‘Sometimes a lie and the truth are the same thing,’ the fork-bearded doctor said. ‘Anyhow, it’s all part of the insight game.’

‘Do get on with the operating,’ the resident said, ‘so we can get away for some lunch.’

Crompton looked down at the man on the operating table. He had never seen him before. Various thoughts entered his mind. His left knee had been bothering him lately, and he was irked by the vague sense of having forgotten something trivial but amusing. He could hear Loomis and Stack whispering together. It was maddening: that they should make noise in
his
mind just when he had to operate! He looked at the scalpel in his hand. A wave of doubt came over him. He tried to remember where he had attended medical school. Instantly he had a picture of the New Jersey Turnpike at the Cheesquake Bay exit. How strange the mind was!

He studied a patch of shiny skin between the patient’s eyebrows. Almost absentmindedly he raised the scalpel and cut deeply.

Instantly he heard the deep whine of a symbol transformer in the basement, and the scalpel in his hand changed into a long-stemmed rose.

Crompton suffered then a momentary syncope. When he had recovered, the patient, doctors, operating theater, indeed, the whole construct, had faded.

Now he was standing in a formal garden on a high cliff that overlooked a wrinkled blue sky.

41

Once it must have been a beautiful garden, with its formal walks and meanders. But now it was sadly overgrown. The purple verbena was still doing nicely, and the notch-eared kalanchoes looked eminently prosperous; but dandelions were now blooming everywhere, and a barrel cactus had taken up residence near the gazebo. The grounds were covered with dog turds, tin cans, newspapers, and rusted camping equipment.

Crompton noticed that he was holding a long-handled rake in one hand, a shovel in the other. He knew what he had to do. Humming to himself, he raked debris into neat piles, picked up funk and crap, and even found time to prune a few rosebushes. He felt good doing this.

But then he noticed that a black and evil-smelling blight had sprung up behind him. There were patches of rot wherever he had stopped.

The sky darkened, a bitter wind whipped through the garden, and black clouds scudded by overhead. A heavy rain commenced to fall, transforming the garden into an instant bog. And, as if that weren’t enough, deafening thunderclaps shook the garden, and forked bolts of lightning lit up the livid sky.

A holocaust of black flies swept in, followed by a procession of long-snouted Peruvian weevils with their tiny tan parasites. These in turn were followed by vultures and iguanas, and the ground beneath Crompton’s feet commenced to tremble, to crack, to heave in vast sluggish ripples.

A fissure opened in the ground, and in its depths Crompton could see the sulfurous glow of hellfires.

‘Now really,’ Crompton said, ‘what is this all about?’

There was a moment of uncanny silence. Then a great voice that seemed to come simultaneously from all parts of the sky called out. ‘
Daniel Stack! This is the hour of your reckoning!
’

‘But wait a minute,’ Crompton said, ‘I’m not Stack, I’m Crompton.’

‘So where’s Stack?’ the voice bellowed.

‘He’s here, but this is
my
therapy, not his!’

‘I don’t know nothing about that,’ the vast voice retorted. ‘I got an order to deliver an hour of reckoning to Daniel Stack. Do you want to accept it for him?’

‘No, no,’ Crompton said. ‘I’ve got my own problems. Just a moment, I’ll get him.’

Crompton turned his gaze inward. ‘Dan?’

‘Leave me alone,’ Stack said.‘I’m practicing introspection.’

‘There’s someone here wants to speak to you.’

‘Tell them to go away,’ Stack said.

‘Tell them yourself,’ Crompton said, and dived down into his own unconscious for a brief and well-deserved nap.

Stack reluctantly took over the body and its various sensoria. ‘Yeah, what is it?’

‘Daniel Stack!’ the great voice from the sky bellowed. ‘This is the time of your reckoning. I am the spokesman for the men you have murdered. Do you remember them, Dan? There was Argyll, Lanigan, Lange, Tishler, and Wey. They have been waiting a long time for this moment, Dan, and now –’

‘What was that last name?’ Stack asked.

‘Wey. Charles Xavier Wey.’

‘I never killed anybody by that name,’ Stack stated. ‘The others, yes. Wey, no.’

‘Could you have forgotten?’ the voice enquired.

‘Are you kidding? Do you think I’m blasé or something, not to remember who I’ve killed. Who is this Wey and why is he trying to hang a bum rap on me?’

There was a brief silence broken only by the hiss of rain falling into the fiery fissure. Then the voice said, ‘The case of Mr. Wey will be looked into later. But now, Dan Stack, here are your dead come to greet you!’

Again there was silence. Then an irritable voice from somewhere could be heard to say, ‘All right, black out the garden set. Christ, isn’t anyone on the ball around here?’

Then there came darkness of a density like unto infinite layers of marmoset fur.

42

Alarmed by the proceedings, Crompton took over control of the body again from Stack. Crompton saw that he was standing in a large, high-ceilinged room painted buff and brown, with tall thin windows and a subtle aroma of legality. A placard at the rear read: superior court of karmic instrumentality, section viii, justice o. t. grudge presiding. It looked like any American small-town courtroom: rows of wooden benches for spectators and interested parties; tables and chairs for lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses. The judge’s bench was raised to dominating height, and to its right was the witness stand.

The bailiff called out, ‘All rise.’

Justice Obadiah Grudge came in briskly, a small, mid-dleaged man, mostly bald, with rosy cheeks and glinty blue eyes. ‘Sit down, if you please,’ he said. ‘We are today considering the case of Daniel Stack, a sentient being whose loose ends are presently to be tied up, if I may be permitted the colloquialism, in a manner appropriate and peculiar to the Law of Causality as it is commonly understood in this corner of the galaxy. Come forward, Mr. Stack.’

Crompton said, ‘I am appearing for him, your honor. He is an aspect of my personality, my ward, as you people would understand if you looked over the details of the case. As such he cannot be considered a discrete individual in his own right. Stack is not in fact a proper person or personage as defined by common usage in the school of hard knocks, if I may be permitted the analogy. He is a mere aspect of a greater personality; of myself, with all modesty, from whom he became detached due to circumstances beyond our control. Hence it is our contention that ‘Daniel Stack’ cannot be tried as an individual since his individualism so-called is merely a facet of myself, to whom he stands in the relationship of shadow to object, if I may coin a phrase.’

The judge asked, ‘Are you putting yourself forward, Mr. Crompton, to stand for Stack’s alleged crimes?’

‘In no way, your honor! I, Alistair Crompton, have committed no such crimes, therefore I could not be tried for them even if I so wished. But I maintain that Stack cannot be tried either, for the reasons of nonindividuality previously stipulated, and because he has no body peculiar to himself upon which punishment could be visited.’