Dark Carnival (4 page)

    'Let go of me!' he cried. 'Let go of me! You've caught me, you've captured me! My lungs, you've got them in a vice! Release them!'

    He experienced violent gasps as if his ribs were pressing in, choking the breath from him.

    'My brain; stop
squeezing
it!'

    And terrible hot headaches caught his brain like a bivalve in the compressed clamp of skull-bones.

    'My vitals! All my organs, let them be, for God's sake! Stay away from my heart!' His heart seemed to cringe from the fanning nearness of his ribs. Ribs like pale spiders crouched and fiddling with their prey.

    Drenched with sweat, he lay upon the bed one night while Clarisse was out attending a Red Cross meeting. He tried to gather his wits again, and always the conflict of his disorderly exterior and this cool calciumed thing inside him with all its exact symmetry.

    His complexion: wasn't it oily and lined with worry?

   
Observe the flawless, snow-white perfection of the skull
.

    His nose: wasn't it too large?

   
Then observe the small tiny bones of the skull's nose before that monstrous nasal cartilage begins forming Harris's lopsided proboscis
.

    His body: wasn't it a bit plump?

   
Well, then, consider the skeleton; so slender, so svelte, so economical of line and contour. Like exquisitely carved oriental ivory it is, perfected and thin as a reed
.

    His eyes: weren't they protuberant and ordinary and numb-looking?

   
Be so kind as to note the eye-sockets of the skeleton's skull; so deep and rounded, sombre, quiet, dark pools, all knowing, eternal. Gaze deeply into skull sockets and you never touch the bottom of their dark understanding with any plumb line. All irony, all sadism, all life, all everything is there in the cupped darkness
.

    Compare. Compare. Compare.

    He raged for hours, glib and explosive. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solemn philosopher, quietly hung inside of Harris, saying not a word, quietly suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.

    Then it came to Harris.

    'Wait a minute. Hold on a minute,' he exclaimed. 'You're helpless, too. I've got you, too. I can make you do anything I want you to! And you can't prevent it! I say put up your carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges and — sswtt — up they go, as I wave to someone!' He giggled.

    'I order the fibula and femur to locomote and
Hunn
two three four,
Hunn
two three four — we walk around the block. There.'

    Harris grinned.

    'It's a fifty-fifty fight. Even steven. And we'll fight it out, we two, we shall. After all, I'm the part that
thinks!
' That was good, it was a triumph, he'd remember that. 'Yes, by God, yes. I'm the part that thinks. If I didn't have you, even then I could still think!'

    Instantly, he felt a pain strike his head. His cranium, crowding in slowly, began giving him some of his own treatment back.

    At the end of the week he had postponed the Phoenix trip because of his health. Weighing himself on a penny scales he saw the slow glide of the red arrow as it pointed to: 164.

    He groaned. 'Why, I've weighed 175 for ten years. I can't have lost ten pounds.' He examined his cheeks in the fly-dotted mirror. Cold primitive fear rushed over him in odd little shivers. 'Hold on! I know what you're about,
you
.'

    He shook his finger at his bony face, particularly addressing his remarks to his superior maxillary, his inferior maxillary, to his cranium and to his cervical vertebrae.

    'You rum thing, you. Think you can starve me off, make me lose weight, eh? A victory for you, is that it? Peel the flesh off, leave nothing but skin on bone. Trying to ditch me, so you can be supreme, ah? No, no!'

    He fled into a cafeteria.

    Ordering turkey, dressing, creamed potatoes, four vegetables, three desserts, he soon found he could not eat it, he was sick to his stomach. He forced himself. His teeth began to ache. 'Bad teeth, is it?' he wanted to know, angrily. 'I'll eat in spite of every tooth clanging and banging and rattling so they fall in my gravy.'

    His head ached, his breathing came hard from a constricted chest, his teeth pulsed with pain, but he had one small victory. He was about to drink milk when he stopped and poured it into a vase of nasturtiums. 'No calcium for you, my boy, no more calcium for you. Never again shall I eat foods with calcium or other bone-fortifying minerals. I'll eat for one of us, not both, my lad.'

    'One hundred and fifty pounds,' he said, the following week to his wife. 'Do you see how I've changed?'

    'For the better,' said Clarisse. 'You were always a little plump for your height, darling.' She stroked his chin. 'I like your face, it's so much nicer, the lines of it are so firm and strong now.'

    'They're not
my
lines, they're his, damn him! You mean to say you like him better than you like me?' he demanded indignantly.

    'Him? Who's ‘
him
'?'

    In the parlour mirror, beyond Clarisse, his skull smiled back at him behind his fleshy grimace of hatred and despair.

    Fuming, he popped malt tablets into his mouth. This was one way of gaining weight when you couldn't keep other foods down. Clarisse noticed the malt pellets. 'But, darling, really, you don't have to regain the weight for me,' she said.

    'Oh, shut up!' he felt like saying.

    She came to him and sat down and made him lie so his head was in her lap. 'Darling,' she said. 'I've watched you lately. You're so — badly off. You don't say anything, but you look — hunted. You toss in bed at night. Maybe you should go to a psychiatrist. But I think I can tell you everything he would say. I've put it all together, from hints you've let escape you. I can tell you that you and your skeleton are one and the same, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. United you stand, divided you fall. If you two fellows can't get along like an old married couple in the future, go back and see Dr. Burleigh. But
first
, relax. You're in a vicious circle, the more you worry, the more your bones stick out, the more your bones stick out, the more you worry. After all, now, who picked this fight — you or that anonymous entity you claim is lurking around behind your alimentary canal?'

    He closed his eyes. '
I
did. I guess I did. Oh, my darling, I love you so.'

    'You rest now,' she said softly. 'Rest and forget.'

    Mr. Harris felt buoyed up for half a day, then he began to sag again. It was all very well to say everything was imagination, but this particular skeleton, by God, was fighting back.

    Harris set out for M. Munigant's office late in the day. Walking for half an hour until he found the address, he caught sight of the name Mr. Munigant initialled in ancient, flaking gold on a glass plate outside the building. Then, his bones seemed to explode from their moorings, blasted and erupted with pain. He could hardly see in his wet, pain-filled eyes. So violent were the pains that he staggered away. When he opened his eyes again he had rounded a corner. M. Munigant's office was out of sight.

    The pains ceased.

    M. Munigant was the man to help him. He
must
be! If the sight of his gilt-lettered name could cause so titanic a reaction in the deepness of Harris's body, why, of course M. Munigant
must
be just the man.

    But, not today. Each time he tried to return to that office, the terrible pains laid him low. Perspiring, he had to give up, and stagger into a cocktail bar for respite.

    Moving across the dim room of the cocktail lounge, he wondered briefly if a lot of blame couldn't be put on M. Munigant's shoulders; after all, it was Munigant who'd first drawn such specific attention to his skeleton, and brought home the entire psychological impact of it! Could M. Munigant be using him for some nefarious purpose? But what purpose? Silly to even suspect him. Just a little doctor. Trying to be helpful. Munigant and his jar of breadsticks. Ridiculous. M. Munigant was okay, okay.

    There was a sight within the cocktail lounge to give him hope. A large fat man, round as a butterball, stood drinking consecutive beers at the bar. Now
there
was a successful man. Harris repressed a desire to go up, clap the fat man's shoulder, and inquire as to how he'd gone about impounding his bones. Yes, the fat man's skeleton was luxuriously closeted. There were pillows of fat here, resilient bulges of it there, with several round chandeliers of fat under his chin. The poor skeleton was lost, it could never fight clear of
that
blubber; it may have tried once — but now, overwhelmed, not a bony echo of the fat man's supporter remained.

    Not without envy, Harris approached the fat man as one might cut across the bow of an ocean liner. Harris ordered a drink, drank it, and then dared to address the fat man:

    'Glands?'

    'You talking to me?' asked the fat man.

    'Or is there a special diet?' wondered Harris. 'I beg your pardon, but, as you see, I'm down. Can't seem to put on any weight. I'd like a stomach like that one of yours. Did you grow it because you were afraid of something?'

    'You,' announced the fat man, 'are drunk. But — I like drunkards.' He ordered more drinks. 'Listen close. I'll tell you —  

    'Layer by layer,' said the fat man, 'twenty years, man and boy, I built this.' He held his vast stomach like a globe of the world, teaching his audience its gastronomical geography. 'It was no overnight circus. The tent was not raised before dawn on the wonders installed within. I have cultivated my inner organs as if they were thoroughbred dogs, cats and other animals. My stomach is a fat pink Persian tom slumbering, rousing at intervals to purr, mew, growl, and cry for chocolate titbits. I feed it well, it will almost sit up for me. And, my dear fellow, my intestines are the rarest pure-bred Indian anacondas you ever viewed in the sleekest, coiled, fine and ruddy health. Keep ‘em in prime, I do, all my pets. For fear of something? Perhaps.'

    This called for another drink for everybody.

    'Gain weight?' The fat man savoured the words on his tongue. 'Here's what you do; get yourself a quarrelling bird of a wife, a baker's dozen of relatives who can flush a covey of troubles out from behind the veriest molehill. Add to these a sprinkling of business associates whose prime motivation is snatching your last lonely quid, and you are well on your way to getting fat. How so? In no time you'll begin subconsciously building fat betwixt yourself and them. A buffer epidermal state, a cellular wall. You'll soon find that eating is the only fun on earth. But one needs to be bothered by outside sources. Too many people in this world haven't enough to worry about, then they begin picking on
themselves
, and they lose weight. Meet all of the vile, terrible people you can possibly meet, and pretty soon you'll be adding the good old fat!'

    And with that advice, the fat man launched himself out into the dark tide of night, swaying mightily and wheezing.

    'That's exactly what Dr. Burleigh told me, slightly changed,' said Harris thoughtfully. 'Perhaps that trip to Phoenix, now, at this time — '

    The trip from Los Angeles to Phoenix was a sweltering one, crossing, as it did, the Mojave desert on a broiling yellow day. Traffic was thin and inconstant, and for long stretches there would not be a car on the road for miles ahead or behind. Harris twitched his fingers on the steering-wheel. Whether or not Creldon, in Phoenix, lent him the money he needed to start his business, it was still a good thing to get away, to put distance behind.

    The car moved in the hot sluice of desert wind. The one Mr. H. sat inside the other Mr. H. Perhaps both perspired. Perhaps both were miserable.

    On a curve, the inside Mr. H. suddenly constricted the outer flesh, causing him to jerk forward on the hot steering wheel.

    The car plunged off the road into deepest sand. It turned half over.

    Night came on, a wind rose, the road was lonely and silent with little traffic. Those few cars that passed went swiftly on their way, their view obstructed. Mr. Harris lay unconscious until very late he heard a wind rising out of the desert, felt the sting of little sand needles on his cheeks, and opened his eyes.

    Morning found him gritty-eyed and wandering in thoughtless, senseless circles, having, in his delirium, gotten away from the road. At noon he sprawled in the poor shade of a bush. The sun struck into him with a keen sword edge, cutting through to his — bones. A vulture circled.

    Harris's parched lips cracked open, weakly. 'So that's it?' he whimpered, red-eyed, bristle-cheeked. 'One way or another you'll wreck me, walk me, starve me, thirst me, kill me.' He swallowed dry burrs of dust. 'Sun cook off my flesh so you can peek forth. Vultures lunch and breakfast from me, and then there you'll lie, grinning. Grinning with victory. Like a bleached xylophone strewn and played by vultures with an ear for odd music. You'd like that. Freedom.'

    He walked on through a landscape that shivered and bubbled in the direct pour of sunlight; stumbling, falling flat, lying to feed himself little mouths of flame. The air was blue alcohol flame, and vultures roasted and steamed and glittered as they flew in glides and circles. Phoenix. The road. Car. Water. Safety.

    'Hey!'

    Somebody called from way off in the blue alcohol flame.

    Mr. Harris propped himself up.

    'Hey!'

    The call was repeated. A crunching of footsteps, quick.

    With a cry of unbelievable relief, Harris rose, only to collapse again into the arms of someone in a uniform with a badge. . .

    The car tediously hauled, repaired, Phoenix reached, Harris found himself in such an unholy state of mind that the business transaction was more a numb pantomime than anything else. Even when he got the loan and held the money in his hand it meant nothing. This Thing within him like a hard white sword in a scabbard tainted his business, his eating, coloured his love for Clarisse, made it unsafe to trust an automobile; all in all this Thing had to be put in its place before he could have love for business or anything. That desert incident had brushed too closely. Too near the bone, one might say with an ironic twist of one's mouth. Harris heard himself thanking Mr. Creldon, dimly, for the money. Then he turned his car and motored back across the long miles, this time cutting across to San Diego, so that he would miss that desert stretch between El Centro and Beaumont. He drove north along the coast. He didn't trust that desert. But — careful! Salt waves boomed, hissing on the beach outside Laguna. Sand, fish and crustacéa would cleanse his bones as swiftly as vultures. Slow down on the curves over the surf.