The Long Twilight (39 page)

"It's where it all started, and I do mean started. As the Senator pointed out, my life story begins here. Before this—nothing. No home, no past. Just a lot of unexamined preconceptions that are due for examination." I took a step toward the hall door and it burst open and the scruffy man came through it holding the biggest hogleg .44 I ever saw, aimed right between my eyes. The hole in the end looked wide enough to drive a small truck through, or maybe even a large one. No words were needed to tell me that the time for words wasn't now. I went sideways as the gun roared and exploded plaster from the wall behind the spot where I'd been standing. Red shouted something, and the girl cried out and I worked hard to get my feet under me and get turned around, but the floor seemed to be swinging up at me like the deck of a sinking liner. I held on and watched the ceiling swing past, then another wall; nothing spectacular, just a nice easy procession. Red sailed by, and the girl, moving faster now, sliding by. I heard her call: "Florin—come back!"

It took a long time for the words to push through the gray fog where my brains used to be.
Come back
, she'd said. It was a thought, at that. I'd had the ride before, but maybe I didn't have to go again— not if I fought back. The world was spinning like bathwater getting ready for that last long dive down the drain, and somehow suddenly I knew that if I went with it, this time it was for real.

There was nothing to hold onto, but I held on anyway.

I felt pressure against one side of me. That would do for a floor. I swung it around under me and built walls and a roof and held them in place by sheer willpower, and the roaring faded and the world slowed to a stop and I opened my eyes and was lying on my back in the middle of the world's biggest parking lot.

A dead flat sugar-white expanse of concrete marked off by blue lines into fifty-foot squares ran all the way to the horizon. That was all there was. No buildings, no trees, no people. The sky was a pale fluorescent azure, without clouds, without an identifiable source of light.

Voices came out of the sky.

". . . now! Follow emergency procedures, damn you!"
That in BigNose's bell-shaped tones.

"I'm trying . . . but—"
Lard Face speaking.

"This is no time to blunder, you cretin!"

"I can't . . . it won't . . ."

"Here—get out of my way!"

"I tell you—I threw in the wipe circuit! Nothing happened. It's . . . He's . . ."

"He what? Don't talk like a fool! He's got nothing to do with it! I control this experiment!"

Hysterical tittering. "Do you? Do you really? Are you sure? Are you sure we haven't been taken, had, gulled—"

"Damn you, kill the power! All the way back!"

"I did—or tried to. Nothing happened!"

"Close down, damn you!"
Big Nose's voice rose to a scream. At the same time the pain in my wrists and ankles and the ache in my chest rose to a crescendo, like bands of fire cutting me into pieces; and suddenly thunder rolled and the sky cracked and fell, showering me with sharp-edged fragments that turned to smoke and blew away and I was lying strapped down on my back looking up at the rectangular grid of a glare-ceiling, in a small green-walled room, and the man I had known as Big Nose was bending over me.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said. "He's alive after all."

A man with gray hair and a matching face, dressed in a white smock, and a scruffy man in a scruffy coverall came over and looked at me. Somebody finally got around to unstrapping me, unclamping something from my head. I sat up and felt dizzy and they handed me a cup of stuff that tasted terrible but seemed to be the right prescription. The dizziness went away, leaving me with nothing worse than a queasy stomach, a mouth that a family of moles had nested in, a dull headache, and an ache in my wrists and my ankles that wasn't so dull. The gray man—Dr. Eridani was his name, I remembered, the way you remember things you haven't thought about for a long time— smeared some salve over the raw spots. The rest of them were busy looking at the dials on a big console that filled up most of one wall, and muttering together.

"Where's the Senator?" I said. My thoughts seemed to be moving slowly, like heavy animals in deep mud.

Big Nose looked up from his work and frowned.

"He's just kidding," the scruffy man said. His name was Lenwell Trait, and he was a lab assistant. I didn't quite remember how I knew that, but I knew.

Big Nose—Van Wouk to his intimates—came over and looked at me without any visible affection.

"Look here, Bardell," he said, "I don't know what kind of ideas you're getting, but forget them. We have a legal agreement, signed and witnessed. You went into this with your eyes open, you'll get what's coming to you, not a penny more, and that's final!"

"
You're
giving him ideas," Eridani said quietly. Trait handed me a cup of coffee.

"Bardell's not getting any ideas," he said, and grinned a sly grin at me. "He knows better than that."

"Bardell's an actor," I said. My voice sounded weak and old.

"You're a stumblebum we picked out of a gutter and gave an opportunity to," Van Wouk growled. "Like all your kind, you now imagine you're in a position to exert pressure. Well, it won't work. Your health hasn't suffered, so don't start whining."

"Don't kid me, Doc," I said, firing from the hip. "What about the wipe circuits? How about Eta Level? Everything jake all down the line?"

That shut them up for a couple seconds.

"Where did you pick up those terms?" Lard Face asked me.

"A little lizard told me," I said, and suddenly felt too tired to bother with games. "Forget it; I was just ribbing you. You wouldn't have a drink handy?"

Trait went off and came back in a minute with a flask of rye. I took a couple ounces from the neck and things started to seem a little brighter.

"Something was said about payment," I said.

"One hundred dollars," Big Nose snapped. "Not bad for an hour or two of a rummy's time."

"I had a feeling it was longer," I said. "No damage, eh? How about amnesia?"

"Uh-uh," Trait said lazily. "You know better, Bardell."

"Get him out of here," Van Wouk said. "I'm sick of the sight of him. Here." He grabbed at his pocket and brought out a wallet and extracted some worn currency and pushed it at me. I counted the spots.

"A hundred is right," I said. "But that was the straight dope about the amnesia. I'm a little confused, gents. I remember you boys. . . ." I looked at them, remembering. "But I kind of don't remember our deal—"

"Get him out!" Van Wouk yelled.

"I'm going," I told Trait. He had hold of my arm, twisting it, moving me toward the door. "You don't have to get tough."

He walked me out into the corridor, green tile like the room, along it to steps that went up with light at the top.

"Just between pals," I said, "what happened to me in there?"

"Nothing, chum. A little scientific experiment, that's all."

"Then how come I don't remember it? Hell, I don't even know where I live. What town is this?"

"Chicago, chum. And you don't live no place. You just kind of get by."

Double doors that opened out onto concrete steps. There were lawn and trees that looked familiar in the dark.

"The Senator's Summer Retreat," I said. "Only no searchlights."

"You can't count on them politicos," Trait said. "Take my advice and don't squeeze it, Bardell. You got your century, even if maybe your marbles is scrambled a little, but hell, they wasn't in too good shape when you come in. I'd watch that off-brand Muscatel if I was you, chum."

"The Lastrian Concord," I said. "Diss. Miss Regis. None of that happened, huh?"

"You had like a nightmare. You damn near blew all the tubes in old Pickle-puss' pet Frankenstein. Go tank up and sleep it off and you'll be good as new."

We were down the steps now, and he turned me and pointed me toward the gate.

"By the way, what color do you call those tiles?" I said.

"Nile green. Why?"

"Just curious," I said, and did a half-turn and rammed the old stiff-finger jab to the breastbone and doubled him over like peeling a banana. I held him up and pried my hundred out of his left hand that I'd felt making the touch, and then checked his hip and got thirty more, just for carfare.

"So long, Red," I said. "I never cottoned to you much anyway." I left him there and beat it by a back route out the side gate.

It was cold in town that winter. I headed for the waterfront with the idea of making an early start on my bender. With a hundred and thirty to blow at $2.79 per fifth, that was a lot of Muscatel. I tried to work out just how much, and got to about fifteen gallons and happened to catch sight of myself in a window I was passing.

At least I guessed it was me. I hardly knew me. My eyes stared back from the dark glass like a pair of prisoners doing life in solitary. My face looked left out in the weather, worn out, caved in. There was gray stubble a quarter of an inch long on my jaw, wild grayish locks on my head. My Adam's apple bobbed like a yo-yo when I swallowed. I stuck my tongue out; it didn't look good either.

"You're in bad shape, old man," I told the stranger in the glass. "Maybe fifteen gallons of rotgut isn't what you need."

I stood there and stared at the reflection staring at me and waited for the little voice to pipe up and remind me how good the old heartwarmer was, how it slid down so nice and tongue-filling and hit bottom and burned its way out, taking the ache out of bones and the strain out of joints, bringing comfort to the body and ease to the mind.

But it didn't. Or if it did I didn't hear it. I was feeling my heart thump with a dull, sick thump, working too hard just to keep going. I listened to the wheeze and grunt of my lungs trying to suck in enough air, felt the tremors that wobbled my knees like base viol strings, the sour, drained feel of unhealthy muscles, the sag of dying skin, the sick weight of neglected organs.

"What's happened to me?" I asked the old man in the glass. He didn't answer, just touched his withered lips with a gray tongue.

"You look as scared as I feel, Pop," I said. "By the way, do I know your name?"

Big Nose called you Bardell
.

"Yeah. Bardell. I . . . used to be an actor." I tried the idea on for size. It fit like a second-hand coffin.

"They hauled me in off the street,"
I told myself.
"The white-coat boys, Van Wouk and the rest. They needed a guinea pig. I volunteered."

"So they said. And before that—what?"

"I don't remember so good. Must be the Muscatel, old man. It's rotted your brain. My brain. Our brain."

"So—what are we going to do about it?"

I thought of booze and felt a stir of seasickness.
"No more booze,"
I said.
"Definitely no more booze. Maybe a doctor. But not like Eridani. Food, maybe. Sleep. How long since you slept in a bed, old man?"

I couldn't remember that, either. I was good and scared now. It's a lonely feeling not to know who you are, where you are. I looked along the street. If I'd ever seen it before, I didn't know when. But I knew, without knowing how I knew, that the waterfront was
that
way; and a block of old frame houses with
Room to Let—Day, Week, Year
signs in the windows was
that
way.

"That's it," I said. My voice was as cracked and worn as a thrown-away work shoe. "A clean bed, a night's sleep. Tomorrow you'll feel better. You'll remember, then."

"Sure. Everything will be jake
—mañana."

"Thanks, pal; you've been a big help." I waved to the old man in the glass and he waved back as I turned and started off, not toward the waterfront.

The old woman didn't like my looks, for which I didn't blame her, but she liked my ten-dollar bills. She puffed her way up two flights and to the back, threw open the door of a bare, ugly high-ceilinged little room with a black floor showing around a bald rug, a brass single bed, a chiffonier with washstand. It was the kind of room that would be an icebox in winter and a steam bath in summer. Rusty springs squeaked with an ill-tempered sound as I sat down on the threadbare chenille. I said, "I'll take it."

"Bathtub at the end of the hall," my new landlady said. "You got to bathe off 'fore you go to laying in my beds."

For an extra buck she supplied a yellowish-white towel and a washcloth with a thin spot in the middle, as stiff as a currycomb, and an only slightly used bar of coral-colored soap that smelled like formaldehyde. The feel of eleven dollars in cash must have gone to her head, because she went along and started pipes clanking and spurting brownish water into the tub. She even wished me a good night, and handed me an old safety razor before she went away.

I soaked for a while, which felt good in spite of the rusty patch right where my
glutei maximi
rested. Afterward I raked at my whiskers and went on to trim a few of the drake's tails curling around my neck.

"Nice work, old timer," I told the face in the mirror. "You'll make a good-looking corpse yet."

Back in the room, I slid in between the sheets which felt like starched burlap and smelled like chlorine, curled myself around a couple of broken springs that were poking up through the cotton padding, and sailed off someplace where age and sickness and human frailty don't exist, where the skies are pink all day, and the soft voices of those we love tell us what great guys we are, forever and ever, amen.

I felt better in the morning, but not good. When I started to get dressed I noticed the goaty smell coming from my clothes. There were heavy feet in the hall just then, and I stuck my head out and entrusted my landlady with another ten-spot and the commission of buying me some new BVDs and socks. What she brought back weren't new, but they were clean and there was nine dollars change.

I turned down her offer of breakfast (seventy-five cents) and bought an apple at a fruit stand. There were plenty of sartorial emporia in the neighborhood specializing in mismatched pinstripes and shirts with darned elbows, all with the same dusty look, as if the owners had died and been buried in them. I selected a snazzy pinkish-tan double-breasted coat and a pair of greenish-black slacks which were thick and solid if not stylish, a couple of shirts, formerly white, a pair of cracked high-top shoes made for somebody's grandpa, and a snappy red and green tie that probably belonged to a regiment of Swiss Marines. The ensemble wasn't what anyone would call tasteful, but it was clean and warm, and mothballs smell better than goats any day.