Nothing That Meets the Eye (32 page)

The carriers were coming in. Aaron nodded and grunted in reply to their “Morning, Aaron” or just “Morning.” Bobby came over to help him with the sorting. By then it was a quarter past nine. Bobby was quick. Aaron made himself work more quickly, not that he wanted to but because he wouldn't be outdone by the likes of Bobby MacAllister. Bobby was chubby and still had pimples like an adolescent. He'd be heavy to drag anywhere, Aaron realized.

But he began to plan the extinction of Bobby that afternoon. This so absorbed him, that for a few minutes that afternoon, he simply stood at the counter doing nothing, even though several people were waiting with packages to be weighed, and letters for which they had to buy stamps. Roger came up to Aaron and said:

“Snap out of it, Aaron. People're waiting in line!”

Aaron looked at him and thought, You're dead, Roger. You don't bother me. You're dead, and you don't even seem to know it. After that, Aaron smiled, and went to work quite cheerfully.

That evening, mostly in his diary because he thought better on paper, Aaron planned the murder of Bobby MacAllister. Midway in his plans, Bobby's father Mac seemed a more appropriate victim for his scheme, or rather his scheme more appropriate for Mac. It involved a knife. Mac was thinner than Bobby. It wouldn't take such a deep thrust. Aaron took his carving knife to work one morning and stabbed Mac just after five
P.M.
, when the two of them were the only ones in the post office. He stabbed Mac just as Mac was lifting an arm to get his jacket down from a hook. Mac had time only to turn around with a bewildered expression on his face, and then he slowly slumped to the floor. Aaron left him there, stepped over his body, and walked out.

He described this in detail in his diary. He filled a whole page with closely written words.

The next day, he did not speak to Roger or to Mac. They were both dead. Of course, he had to nod to them once or twice, not in greeting, but just by way of replying to something they said or asked him, but that wasn't the same as communicating with them, speaking to them. Ten days or so went by, and the strange looks that Mac and Roger and Bobby and even some of the carriers gave Aaron did not bother him at all. They couldn't do anything to a man for not speaking, could they? He wrote in his diary:

It is strange, the walking dead in the post office. It is strange to think I'll soon be the only one alive in it. I'll walk out one day and leave it empty and lock the door on it myself—after I turn off that Muzak. I'll be the sole survivor. Bobby is next and then the carriers, maybe Vincent first, because I am tired of the smell of his chewing gum and tired of his hand slapping me on the shoulder every morning if I'm near enough to him.

Aaron wrote some in his diary every evening, and he usually wrote at least half a page every noon when he came home for lunch. Once in a while, he made an entry that was not on the subject of the post office or of his own life, such as:

What is the matter with President Kennedy? How can he talk about disarmament and peace out of one side of his mouth and out of the other side talk about how many more billions of dollars we are going to need for armament, for nuclear missiles and so forth? Does this make any sense? Who is crazy?

Aaron was going to kill Bobby with a hammer. The first blow would knock him out, which was essential considering the size and strength of Bobby, and the blows after that would finish him. Aaron sawed off five inches of the wooden handle of his hammer, so that he could carry it unseen in the pocket of his overcoat. It was November tenth, a Friday, that he took the hammer to work with him. He was going to follow Bobby when Bobby left the post office, which Aaron knew would be slightly before five, as Bobby always had an early date with Helen on ­Fridays.

Bobby kept glancing at Aaron all that day. Bobby's heavy black brows looked puzzled. Every time Aaron noticed Bobby, he found Bobby looking at him, or his own glance attracted Bobby's eyes at once. Aaron decided that that day was not the day to do it. By five o'clock, Bobby had not yet left the post office, and Aaron got his coat to leave. To Aaron's great annoyance, Bobby got his own coat and came out with him.

“Say, Aaron—”

“I'm going this way,” Aaron interrupted. He lived in a different direction from Bobby and Mac.

“That's okay, I'll walk with you. Say, Aaron, what's the matter? What's the matter lately?” Bobby swung along beside him, though Aaron was walking quickly now.

“Lately?” Aaron said, with a nervous chuckle. “Nothing.”

“I don't mean it's any of my business, Aaron, I'm not trying to butt in, but if you've got some . . . kick against any of us, it's better to tell us about it, isn't it?”

The “us” annoyed Aaron, implying that the lot of them were ganged up against him. “I don't care to talk about it,” Aaron said.

“Oh.” Bobby looked more confused than he had all that day. “You mean, there is something, but you don't want to talk about it.”

“That's right,” Aaron said emphatically and with finality.

“Oh.—Well, Dad and I were wondering if you'd like to pitch horseshoes with us tomorrow afternoon around two. We don't work tomorrow—tomorrow morning, you know. Veterans Day.”

“I know.” Did Bobby think he was crazy? Not knowing tomorrow was a holiday? “They haven't the nerve to call it Armistice Day anymore, have they? It's Veterans Day.”

Bobby forced a chuckle. He was slowing his pace. “Well, do we see you tomorrow? Vince is coming, too. The weather's supposed to be good, we'll have a couple of beers—”

Aaron stopped and stood up taller. “Sorry. No, thanks. I've got a few letters to write.” He saw Bobby's expression change to one of surprise and disbelief. Did Bobby think there were no people in his life to whom he had to write letters? “Thank you, anyway, Bobby. Good night.” Aaron walked away quickly before Bobby could say another word.

The evening was hellish for Aaron. He felt he had failed himself, that he had been unforgivably cowardly in not killing Bobby that day—or this evening, walking along the dark sidewalks with him. He could not face his diary, or face writing the disgraceful entry that he had achieved nothing after promising himself and the diary that he would achieve something. He was so angry with himself that he could not sleep. It was a wretched weekend.

On Monday, when Roger called him over to help with a lot of packages that were piling up on the counter, Aaron replied by saying very firmly and clearly, “You're dead.”

Roger's mouth opened.

Bobby stared at him.

A couple of people on the other side of the counter who had heard it looked blankly surprised. One of them smiled.

Aaron looked at Roger. That'll fix Roger, he thought, and in fact Roger looked quite scared.

“'S matter with him?” Roger asked Bobby.

Bobby went over to Aaron. “What's the matter, Aaron? You feeling okay?”

“I'm feeling fine, thank you,” Aaron said defiantly, though he knew his eyes were bloodshot from not sleeping.

They persuaded Aaron to go home. They told him he looked very tired. He started to defy them, then quickly gave in. Why not go home? What was pleasant about staying in this overheated musical hellhole? Aaron went home and recorded in his diary that he had informed Roger Hoolihan that he was dead, and that he had upset the entire post office by this fact. Take a few days off, Mac had said at the last. What an insult! A few days off. Were they giving him orders?

However, Aaron discovered that he did not at all mind a few days off, so he took them. On the third day, a letter arrived from Mac saying that he (Mac) and also Roger thought it would be a good idea for Aaron to see a doctor. They said they thought he had been working too hard, was under a strain, and that a doctor might prescribe just the right tonic, or a short vacation somewhere. It sounded exactly like Vera. Mac had even tried to make it funny, which Aaron did not appreciate. Mac said he would have called him, if he had had a telephone, and he would have come by to see him, but he did not want to intrude. The letter itself seemed to Aaron an intrusion, and in fact it was the last straw. He gave the two weeks' notice which his landlord had requested (Aaron paid his rent twice a month), and by December Aaron was in a town called Tippstone, Pennsylvania, seventy-five or eighty miles from Copperville, New Jersey. He found another furnished house with a fifty-dollar-a-month rent, more than ten dollars a month cheaper than his Copperville house had been. He intended to do nothing for two or three weeks except think and plan his next move, which he supposed would be to take a similar job in the local post office. Meanwhile, he had sufficient funds, and could afford not to work until after the New Year without going seriously into his savings or precluding a vacation for himself in the following summer.

Four days before Christmas, a bomb exploded in the Copperville post office, killing Mac, Roger, and three people who had been standing on the other side of the counter. Bobby, several feet behind them at the big desk, was wounded in the right arm and in his face. The package that had contained the bomb was hopelessly unidentifiable, as every shred of it went up in bits and pieces, and if Mac or Roger had noticed the return address, they were not alive to tell it. One of the Copperville citizens who had been killed was a teenager named Kenny Hall, who worked as errand boy for a local gift shop, and the newspaper said it was conceivable that someone had handed Kenny the package containing the bomb to mail. Kenny had been the first on the line and Mac had been weighing his packages when the bomb exploded, according to Bobby.

Aaron read the news with some pleasure. He was glad to know that Mac and Roger were no longer. He wished that he had thought of the same means of getting rid of them—even though he admitted to himself he would have been hard-pressed to acquire or create a bomb that would have gone off at just the right moment. Still, he dreamt about it, and they were dreams of glory and success that filled Aaron's mind. The bomber had set his bomb, it had gone off at the right time, and he had gotten away with it. Aaron burnt his diary. The bomb was better. He cut the newspaper stories out of the paper and put them into his billfold.

On December 27, Aaron presented himself at the Copperville police station and admitted having sent the bomb to the Copperville post office. The two rugged policemen to whom he spoke, both blond and young, seemed slightly doubtful.

“Can I see Bobby MacAllister?” Aaron asked.

“He's still in the hospital,” said one of the police officers.

But Aaron persuaded them to take him there. Bobby's arm was in a heavy bandage. He had some dark red cuts above his right eyebrow. Aaron told his story to Bobby, about making the bomb at home, setting the time device, coming to Copperville and sending the packaged bomb via Kenny to the post office. When he had finished his confession, he stood erect, justified, not ashamed of what he had done, but quite willing to take any punishment the law chose to mete out to him.

Bobby's dark, empty eyes looked frightened.

“Well, Bobby?” one of the policemen asked. “You know this man, you said. He worked in the post office—three years?”

“About three years. You remember him in the post office, don't you?”

The policemen acknowledged that they did remember Aaron in the post office.

“I'm sure he's telling the truth,” Bobby said. “He used to go around saying, ‘You're dead,' to Roger and even to Dad, if he—” Bobby choked up.

Aaron watched him patiently.

“I'm sure he's telling the truth,” Bobby said. “He's cracked, that's all.”

So the police took Aaron away. It was one more case solved on their books. Aaron was not (and neither were the victims) of such importance that a psychiatrist would examine him to make sure he was telling the truth. Aaron was put into the state prison, where he chose to work in the laundry. The prison had one psychiatrist, who held a group therapy session once a week, and Aaron was made to attend it, but Aaron was not inclined to talk. His existence was boring, he admitted to himself, but he felt he had achieved something few men can or do achieve, the annihilation of people they despise. He was therefore a good prisoner.

MAN'S BEST FRIEND

E
very morning at seven-thirty, Dr. Edmund Fenton left his apartment in the east sixties and headed for Central Park with his German shepherd, Baldur. After a brisk walk of half an hour or so, they went home to breakfast—Baldur on the warm milk and dry toast prescribed in the dog book, and Dr. Fenton on orange juice, dry toast, and coffee. At nine o'clock, Dr. Fenton arrived at his office on Lexington Avenue with Baldur, who lay all morning in the well under Dr. Fenton's desk, patiently awaiting the break at one o'clock for the walk home and lunch.

At six and again before bedtime, Dr. Fenton took Baldur for walks either in Central Park or down Madison Avenue. He followed to the letter the instructions for rearing in his dog book, and under the fine care, Baldur grew strong and handsome. He had a rich black stripe down his back, blending through brown to a pale buff on belly and legs. His manners were perfect. He never barked and never tugged at his leash. He did his teething on the leather toy that Dr. Fenton provided for the purpose. In elevators, if he was standing at the rear, Baldur always waited until everybody else was off before he moved. He behaved, indeed, in a more civilized fashion than most people. Once, when Dr. Fenton had given a party and some of the guests had stayed until the small hours, delaying Baldur's nightly outing as well as preventing his sleeping, Baldur accompanied the guests to the door finally with a more genuine friendliness than had Dr. Fenton, whose hospitality was wearing thin by that time. One of the guests, Bill Kirstein, even said something about it.

“Awright, Ed, we're leaving,” he had said. “You don't have to throw us out. Why don't you learn some manners from that dog of yours?”

The remark had hurt Dr. Fenton, falling as it did on a part of him already wounded—his pride. It had hit all the more directly because, in the previous week or so, the same idea had crossed Dr. Fenton's mind: that Baldur's general comportment put his own to shame. Baldur could wait in a butcher's shop, for instance, with better grace than Dr. Fenton could, especially if there were a couple of garrulous housewives ahead of him. Dr. Fenton had once tried to sneak his order in out of turn, a woman had said something to him about it, and he had slunk from the butcher's shop feeling like a criminal.

Looking back on it, Dr. Fenton felt that his unhappiness dated from the time of Bill Kirstein's remark. From then on, he took no pleasure in Baldur and no real pleasure in anything. He began to feel inferior to the dog. He tried to improve his own manners, made himself also wait at elevators, and removed his hat more often, but he never felt that his courtesy matched Baldur's, which was apparently inborn, since Dr. Fenton had devoted no time at all to training Baldur in etiquette. Baldur's face, too, had a dignity and intelligence that made him look as if he regarded the man in the street—and even his master—with a profound and uncompromising judgment from behind a cordial exterior. Dr. Fenton began to feel the dog knew why he had been given him and knew Dr. Fenton's particular faiblesse, a sense of failure. After all, the dog had been a present from a woman who had rejected Dr. Fenton's proposal of marriage six months ago.

It had happened like this: for five years, Dr. Fenton had been mutely in love with the wife of his friend Alex Wilkes. Theodora Wilkes was a tall, good-looking woman of about thirty-five, with sleek black hair drawn into a roll at the back of her neck, and long beautiful hands which, though they did nothing, looked as if they could cope with any situation. Theodora liked people around her, and it was seldom that Dr. Fenton had been able to speak with her alone, except in the corner of a room at a cocktail party. When he was in a corner with her and free to utter a few shy banalities, he felt in the presence of a goddess of love, happiness, and savoir vivre—in short, a goddess of all that Dr. Fenton was not. Dr. Fenton had never been married. A son of poor parents, he had worked his way through dental school, and being modest and unaggressive, he had not capitalized on his abilities as he might have done, so that even with an office at a good address, he was earning no more than twelve thousand a year at the end of his first ten years of practice, and much of this had to go for overhead. And after five years, his abject love of Theodora had made no progress, either. But his dreams had grown bolder and bolder. If he could marry her, he dreamt, his income would quadruple, his skill would increase, and even his voice would change for the better.

Then something happened that Dr. Fenton had never dared dream: Alex Wilkes died suddenly of a heart attack. Tactfully, Dr. Fenton had begun his courtship of Theodora. After three months, he had asked her to marry him. The moment when Theodora had looked at him tenderly, and said she must take some time to consider, had been the happiest of Dr. Fenton's life. Then, at their next meeting, she had told him she could not marry him. No, it did not mean that she would never marry, she said, and the inference was clear: she would never marry him. Dr. Fenton had dragged through several weeks on the brink of suicide from depression. Then one day Theodora had called him and they made an appointment to see each other. Dr. Fenton, who had hoped for a change of heart in Theodora, had gone home after the interview with nothing but a four-month-old German shepherd puppy, Baldur von Hohenfeld-Neuheim. She had wanted to give him something alive, she said. The puppy would be a companion to him and would get him out-of-doors more often.

Dr. Fenton did not want to see Theodora again, even the memory of her long hands was painful to him, yet he had been inspired to take especially good care of Baldur, because he had been a present from her. And being a man of some mental discipline, he had managed to combine his nurture of the puppy with an exclusion of brooding, negative thoughts about Theodora. Still, she had rejected him, and the wound remained.

A knowledge of this was what Dr. Fenton felt he could see in Baldur's brown eyes as the dog lay watching him sometimes, particularly at dinner, which Dr. Fenton ate at the end of a white enamel table in his kitchen. He felt the dog was saying as he stared down his long nose: “You failure, you poor excuse for a man! Now I see you in your proper setting, eating your miserable dinner in shirtsleeves at the end of a kitchen table.” There would swim before Dr. Fenton's eyes Baldur von Hohenfeld-Neuheim's pedigree, with all the Grosseltern and Urgrosseltern, all the Odins and Waldos and Ulks von this and that and their respective prizes. Dr. Fenton had finally rolled his sleeves down and put on his jacket, and then set up the bridge table in the living room to eat on. Now he set the bridge table every evening with a tablecloth. Baldur moved into the living room and lay nearby on the rug, regarding him calmly, not ever begging, not commenting in any way except with those eloquent and majestic eyes, which for all Dr. Fenton's efforts still seemed to scorn and condemn without pity. When Dr. Fenton offered him the bone from his steak or chop, Baldur accepted it with the formal, distant air of royalty accepting a purely symbolic tithe.

Yet Dr. Fenton could not have said that the dog was not loyal, reasonably affectionate, and all that a good dog should have been. On Thursdays, when Dr. Fenton worked at a clinic and could not take him along, Baldur greeted him at the door at six o'clock and seemed to shrug off Dr. Fenton's apologies for not having been able to take him out since morning. But Dr. Fenton saw in the dog's unfailing courtesy, which he felt cloaked an inner contempt, the same attitude he had seen or imagined so often in Theodora. For instance, Theodora had often pressed him to stay on when the hour was late, which he knew now she had done for politeness' sake and not because she wanted his company. Dr. Fenton was no longer at ease in his own house, for the same reason he would not have been at ease had Theodora been living in the apartment with him on some incredible platonic basis.

Dr. Fenton never sat around his apartment in shirtsleeves now, much less in pajamas, even on Sundays. He almost never saw any friends, but he talked sometimes with Baldur. He would ask Baldur if he were ready to go out—Baldur would signal with a wag or droop of his tail—and asked him what he preferred for his dinner. Baldur knew the names of several kinds of meat, liked liver once a week, and signaled for hamburger most of the time. Truthfully, Dr. Fenton would have loved to be free of him, but the dog's keen intelligence, which Dr. Fenton believed amounted almost to clairvoyance, kept him from even thinking of this. His depression deepened, and he brooded on suicide.

He was brooding on it very late one night as he walked the Queensboro Bridge with Baldur. He released the dog with a command to run ahead of him. With a leap, Dr. Fenton cleared the iron balustrade. Another step or two and he was at the edge of the girders that hung above the river. Then he felt himself yanked backward and he fell, grasping instinctively at the girders under his hands. Baldur was standing over him, looking at him bewilderedly but with wagging tail. Dr. Fenton's mood had passed, and he proceeded on his way home.

The following weekend, he read in the Sunday Times of the marriage of Mrs. Theodora Wilkes to Robert Frazier II of Pennsylvania. Dr. Fenton had never heard of him, but his very name evoked a picture of a handsome, cultured Main Liner, a man of leisure and means. He imagined Theodora and her new spouse on a long honeymoon, perhaps a 'round-the-world cruise, their friends the cream of society. He took Baldur out for a long walk to try to change his thoughts. A man stopped him in Central Park, said he was a dog dealer, and asked if Dr. Fenton possibly wanted to sell Baldur. Dr. Fenton flinched at the words. If he didn't want to sell, then he certainly wanted to enter him in a few shows, didn't he? The man told Dr. Fenton of a dog show in New Jersey in three weeks, in which Baldur could take first prize in the German shepherd class hands down.

“Of course. It really wouldn't be fair to the others to enter him,” Dr. Fenton murmured nervously, and walked on.

His practice was declining. He made two bad blunders—in both cases forgetting to remove some medicated cotton in the bottom of a cavity before filling it—and he slept wretchedly, expecting at any hour the ringing of the telephone and the voice of some agonized client. His drooping posture reflected his spirits and contrasted with Baldur's fine bearing. When they walked on the street together, Dr. Fenton felt he could read in the eyes of passersby what they thought of the two of them. He no longer had the pride to care. His one objective was to care for the dog to the best of his ability. On Baldur's first birthday, he gave him a new chain collar and leash and Baldur had a steak at a fine restaurant. Then they went to an open-air concert of Viennese music.

Dr. Fenton had come to dread his weekends, because he could never escape the dog's disapproving eyes. And with delayed reaction, he had begun to brood over Theodora and to imagine her life with Robert Frazier II. On long Sunday afternoons, his imagination expanded in wild arabesques. He saw Theodora wrapped in clouds of happiness and tobacco smoke, covered with jewelry he would never have been able to buy her, smiling contemptuously down on him. He had the form of a small skunk or a vermin-ridden rat, cringing at her feet, while Baldur cavorted mockingly around him, nipping him and laughing.

It was on a dismal Sunday afternoon that Dr. Fenton made his second suicide attempt. He sealed his kitchen window with adhesive tape, then persuaded Baldur into the bedroom and closed the door. He sealed the door of the kitchen, and turned on all the gas jets of the stove. Then he sat down in front of the oven with his head resting on the open oven door and inhaled deep, delicious drafts of the sweet, dizzy-making gas. For the first time in many months, he felt happy.

Dr. Fenton awakened slowly and found himself surrounded by blurry human forms. His head felt as if it were being crushed in a vise.

“You'll be all right,” one figure said. “We heard your dog barking. He nearly broke the door down. Good dog . . .”

Dr. Fenton saw Baldur's handsome face peering down at him, and realized he was back in the old world again.

Later, he learned that Baldur had opened the bedroom door, which had no key for its lock, then had yanked the kitchen door open, despite its adhesive tape sealing, dragged him into the air, then barked and barked until some neighbors had called the superintendent and gotten in. Baldur was photographed by every newspaper in New York, and Dr. Fenton was interviewed thoroughly about him, his personality, what he ate, what tricks he could do, and so on. No one asked Dr. Fenton a single question about himself. The next day, Baldur's face smiled out from the front pages of two tabloids, while inside there was a reenactment of the rescue in six consecutive pictures, which Baldur must have obliged with while Dr. Fenton had been shunted off to bed by the doctors. Even the more conservative papers gave two columns to the story with a photograph of Baldur. “A Man's Best Friend,” they called the dog. Dr. Fenton was called “Dr. Benton” in one newspaper, “Mr. Fenton” in another, and “an obstetrician” in another.