The Shrinking Man (2 page)

He twisted on the bed in restless agony. Why did he run from the spider? Why not let it catch him? The thing would be out of his hands then. It would be a hideous death, but it would be quick; despair would be ended. And yet he kept fleeing from it, and improvising and struggling and existing.

Why?

68″

When he told her, the first thing she did was laugh.

It was not a long laugh. Almost instantly it had been choked off and she stood mutely before him, staring. Because he wasn’t smiling, because his face was a taut blankness.

“Shrinking?”
The word was spoken in a trembling whisper.

“Yes.” It was all he could manage to say.

“But that’s—”

She’d been about to say that was impossible. But it wasn’t impossible, because now that the word had been spoken, it crystallized all the unspoken dread she’d felt since this had begun, a month before; since Scott’s first visit to Dr. Branson, when he’d been checked for possible bowing of the legs or dropping of the arches, and the doctor’s first diagnosis of loss of weight due to the trip and the new environment and his pushing aside of the possibility that Scott was losing height as well.

The dread had grown through the passing days of tense, frightened suspicion while Scott kept growing shorter; through the second visit to Branson and the third; through the X-rays and the blood tests; through the entire bone survey, the search for signs of bone-mass decrease, the search for a pituitary tumor; through the long days of more X-raying and the grim search for cancer. Through today and this moment.

“But that’s impossible.”

She had to say it. They were the only words her mind and lips would form.

He shook his head slowly, dazedly.

“It’s what he said,” he answered. “He said my height’s decreased more than half an inch in the last four days.” He swallowed. “But it’s not just my height I’m losing. Every part of me seems to be shrinking. Proportionately.”

“No
.” There was adamant refusal in her voice. It was the only reaction she could make to such an idea. “That’s
all?”
she asked, almost angrily. “That’s all he can
say?”

“Honey, it’s what’s
happening
,” he said. “He showed me X-rays—the ones he took four days ago and the ones he took today. It’s true. I’m shrinking.” He spoke as though he’d been kicked violently in the stomach, half dazed, half breathless with shock.

“No.” This time she sounded more frightened then resolute. “We’ll go to a specialist,” she said.

“He wants me to,” Scott said. “He said I should go to the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. But—”

“Then you will,” she said before he could go on.

“Honey, the
cost”
he said painfully. “We already owe—”

“What has that got to do with it? Do you think for one moment—”

A nervous tremor broke her words off. She stood trembling, arms crossed, her hands clutched at her loose-fleshed upper arms. It was the first time since it had started that she’d let him see how afraid she was.

“Lou.” He put his arms around her. “It’s all right, honey, it’s all right.”

“It isn’t. You have to go to that center. You
have
to.”

“All right, all right,” he murmured. “I will.”

“What did he say they’d do?” she asked, and he could hear the desperate need for hope in her voice.

“He…” He licked his lips, trying to remember. “Oh, he said they’d check my endocrine glands; my thyroid, pituitary—my sex glands. He said they’d give me a basal metabolism. Some other tests.”

Her lips pressed in.

“If he knows that,” she said, “why did he have to say what he did about—about shrinking? That’s not good doctoring. It’s thoughtless.”

“Honey, I asked him,” he said. “I established it when I started all the tests. I told him I didn’t want any secrets. What else could he—”

“All
right,”
she broke in. “But did he have to call it… what he did?”

“That’s what it
is
, Lou,” he said in anguish. “There’s evidence for it. Those X-rays…”

“He could be wrong, Scott,” she said. “He’s not infallible.”

He didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then quietly, he said, “Look at me.”

When it had begun, he was a six-footer. Now he looked straight across into his wife’s eyes; and his wife was five feet, eight inches tall.

Hopelessly he dropped the fork on his plate.

“How can we?” he asked. “The cost Lou, the
cost
. It’ll take at least a month’s hospitalization; Branson said so. A month away from work. Marty’s already upset as it is. How can I expect him to go on paying me my salary when I don’t even—”

“Honey, your health comes first,” she said in a nerve-flaring voice. “Marty knows that.
You
know it.”

He lowered his head, teeth clenched behind drawn lips. Every bill was a chain that weighed him down. He could almost feel the heavy links forged around his limbs.

“And what do we—” he began, stopping as he noticed Beth staring at him, her supper forgotten.

“Eat your food,” Lou told her. Beth started a little, then dug her fork into a mound of gravy-topped potatoes.

“How do we pay for it?” Scott asked. “There’s no medical insurance. I owe Marty five hundred dollars for the tests I’ve already taken.” He exhaled heavily. “And the GI loan may not even go through.”

“You’re going,” she said.

“Easily said,” he answered.

“All right, what would you rather do?” she snapped with the temper of fear in her voice. “Forget it? Accept what the doctor said? Just sit back and—” A sob swallowed her words.

The hand he put over hers was not a comforting one. It was as cold and almost as shaky as hers.

“All right,” he murmured. “All right, Lou.”

Later, while she was putting Beth to bed, he stood in the darkened living room watching the cars drive by on the street below. Except for the murmuring voices in the back bedroom, there was no sound in the apartment. The cars swished and hummed past the building, their headlights probing ahead at the dark pavement.

He was thinking about his application for life insurance. It had been part of the plan in coming East. First working for his brother, then applying for a GI loan with the idea of becoming a partner in Marty’s business. Acquiring life and medical insurance, a bank account,
a decent car, clothes, eventually a house. Building a structure of security around himself and his family.

Now this, disrupting the plan. Threatening to destroy it altogether.

He didn’t know at what precise second the question came to him. But suddenly it was terribly there and he was staring fixedly at his upheld, spread-fingered hands, his heart throbbing and swollen in an icy trap.

How long could he go on shrinking?

Finding water to drink was not a problem for him. The tank near the electric pump had a minute leak on its bottom surface. Beneath its dripping he placed a thimble he had carried once from a sewing box in a cardboard carton underneath the fuel-oil tank. The thimble was always overflowing with crystal well water.

It was food that was the problem now. The quarter loaf of stale bread he’d been eating for the past five weeks was gone now. He’d finished the last crunchy scraps of it for his evening meal, washed it down with water. Bread and cold water had been his diet since he’d been imprisoned in the cellar.

He walked slowly across the darkening floor, moving toward the white, cobwebbed tower that stood near the steps leading up to the closed cellar doors. The last of the daylight filtered through the grime-streaked windows—the one that overlooked the sand hills of the spider’s territory, the one over the fuel tank, and the one over the log pile. The pale illumination fell in wide gray bars across the concrete floor, forming a patchwork of light and darkness through which he walked. In a little while the cellar would be a cold pit of night.

He had mused for many hours on the possibility of somehow managing to reach the string that dangled over the floor and pulling down on it so the dust-specked bulb would light, driving away the terror of blackness. But there was no way of reaching the string. It hung, for him, a hundred feet above his head, completely unattainable.

Scott Carey walked around the dull white vastness of the refrigerator. It had been stored there since they’d first moved to the house—was it only months before? It seemed a century.

It was the old-fashioned type of refrigerator, one whose coils were
encased in a cylindrical enclosure on its top. There was an open box of crackers beside that cylinder. As far as he knew, it was the only food remaining in the entire cellar.

He’d known the cracker box was on the refrigerator even before he’d become trapped down there. He’d left it there for himself one afternoon long before. No, not so long before, as time went. But, somehow, days seemed longer now. It was as if hours were designed for normal people. For anyone smaller, the hours were proportionately magnified.

It was an illusion, of course, but, in his tininess, he was plagued by manifold illusions; the illusion that he was not shrinking, but the world enlarging; the illusion that objects were what they were thought to be only when the person who thought of them was of normal size.

For him—he couldn’t help it—the oil burner had virtually lost its role of heating apparatus. It was, almost actually, a giant tower in whose bowels there roared a magic flame. And the hose was, almost actually, a quiescent viper, sleeping in giant, scarlet coils. The three-quarter wall beside the burner
was
a cliff face, the sands a terrible desert across whose hills crawled not a spider the size of a man’s thumbnail, but a venomous monster almost as tall as he was.

Reality was relative. He was more forcefully aware of it with every passing day. In six days reality would be blotted out for him—not by death, but a hideously simple act of disappearance.

For what reality could there be at zero inches?

Yet he went on. Here he was scanning the sheer face of the refrigerator, wondering how he might get up there and reach the crackers.

A sudden roar made him jump and spin around, his heart thudding.

It was only the oil burner leaping into life again, the rumble of its mechanism making the floor beneath him tremble, sending numbing vibrations up his legs. He swallowed with effort. It was a jungle life he led, each sound a warning of potential death.

It was getting too dark. The cellar was a frightening place when it was dark. He hurried across the chilled expanse of it, shivering under the tentlike robe he had made by poking a head hole in a piece of cloth, then ripping the edges into dangling strips and tying them into knots. The clothes he had been wearing when he had first tumbled into the cellar now lay in dirty heaps beside the water heater. He had worn them as long as he could, rolling up sleeves and cuffs, tightening the
waistband, keeping them on until their sagging volume hampered movement. Then he had made the robe. He was always cold now except when he was under the water heater.

He broke into a nervous, hopping walk, suddenly anxious to be off the darkening floor. His gaze flew for a moment to the cliff edge high above and he twitched again, thinking he saw the spider clambering over. He’d started to run before he saw that it was only a shadow. His run slowed again to the erratic, jerky walk. Adjust? he thought. Who could adjust to this?

When he was back under the heater, he dragged a box top over his bed and lay down to rest underneath its shelter.

He was still shivering. He could smell the dry, acrid odor of the cardboard close to his face, and it seemed as if he were being smothered. It was another illusion he suffered nightly.

He struggled to attain sleep. He’d worry about the crackers tomorrow, when it was light. Or maybe he would not worry about them at all. Maybe he’d just lie there and let hunger and thirst finish what he could not finish, despite all dismays.

Nonsense! he thought furiously. If he hadn’t done it before this, it wasn’t likely that he could do it now.

64″

Louise guided the blue Ford around the wide, graded arc that led from Queens Boulevard to the Cross Island Parkway. There was no sound but the valve-knocking rumble of the motor. Idle conversation had faded off a quarter-mile after they’d emerged from the Midtown Tunnel. Scott had even jabbed in the shiny radio button and cut off the quiet music. Now he sat staring glumly through the windshield, vision glazed to all but thought.

The tension had begun long before Louise came to the Center to get him.

He’d been building himself up to it ever since he’d told the doctors that he was leaving. For that matter, the blocks of anger had been piling up from the moment he’d entered the Center. Dread of the financial burden had constructed the first one, a block whose core was the dragging weight of further insecurity. Each nerve-spent, fruitless day at the Center had added more blocks.

Then to have Louise not only angrily upset at his decision, but unable to hide her shock at seeing him four inches shorter than herself—it had been too much. He’d scarcely spoken from the moment she’d entered his room, and what he had said had been quiet, withdrawn, each sentence shackled by reserve.

Now they were driving past the understated richness of the Jamaica estates. Scott hardly noticed them. He was thinking about the impossible future.

“What?” he asked, starting a little.

“I said, did you have breakfast?”

“Oh. Yes. About eight, I guess.”

“Are you hungry? Shall I stop?”

“No.”

He glanced at her, at the tense indecision apparent on her face.

“Well,
say
it,” he said. “Say it, for God’s sake, and get it off your chest.”

He saw the smooth flesh on her throat contract in a swallow.

“What is there to say?” she asked.

“That’s right.” He nodded in short, jerky movements. “That’s right, make it sound like my fault. I’m an idiot who doesn’t want to know what’s wrong with himself. I’m—”