You're All Alone (illustrated) (12 page)

“After we’d walked for a while that first day, I saw two of my girl-friends ahead. He said, “I’ll leave you now,’ and went off. I was glad, for I wouldn’t have known how to introduce him.

“That first walk set a pattern, almost as if we’d learned a list of magic rules. We must always meet as if by accident and part without warning. We must never go any special place. We must never tell our names. We must never talk of tomorrow or plan anything, just yield to a fatalistic enchantment. Of course I never mentioned my friend to a soul. Away from the park I’d say, ‘You dreamed him, Jane,’ almost believing it. But the next afternoon I’d go back and he’d appear and I’d walk with him and have the feeling of a friend seeing into my mind. It went on that way for quite a while.” She emptied her cup.

“And then things changed?” Carr asked as he poured her more.

“In a way.”

“Did he start to make love to you?”

“No. Perhaps that was what was wrong. Perhaps if he’d made love to me, everything would have been all right. But he never did any more than take my arm. He was like a man who walks with a gun at his back. I sensed a terrible, mute tension inside him, born of timidity or twisted pride, a seething flood of frustrated energy. Eventually it began to seep over into me. For no good reason my heart would start to pound, I could hardly breathe, and little spasms would race up and down me. And all the while he’d be talking calmly. It was awful. I think I would have done something to break that tension between us, except for the magic rules and the feeling that everything would be spoiled if we once disobeyed them. So I did nothing. And then things began to get much worse.”

“How do you mean?” Carr asked.

Jane looked up at him. Now that she was lost in her story, she looked younger than ever.

“We were stuck, that’s what it amounted to, and we began to rot. All that knowledge he had of my queer thoughts began to terrify me. Because, you see, I’d always believed that they were just quirks of my mind, and that by sharing them I’d get rid of them. I kept waiting for him to tell me how silly they were. But he never did. Instead, I began to see from the way he talked that my queer thoughts weren’t illusions at all, but the truth. Nothing did mean anything. Snores actually were a kind of engine-puffing, and printed words had no more real meaning than wind-tracings in sand. Other people weren’t alive, really alive, like you were. You were all alone.”

A bell clanged. They both started.

Jane relaxed. “Closing time,” she explained.

Carr shrugged. That they were in the stacks of the library had become inconsequential to him. “Go on,” he said.

“Now the walks did begin to effect the rest of my life. All day long I’d be plunged in gloom. My father and mother seemed a million miles away, my classes at the music academy the stupidest things in the world. And yet I didn’t show anything outwardly. No one noticed any change, except Gigolo my cat, who sometime acted afraid and spat at me, yet sometimes came purring to me in a most affectionate way—and sometimes watched at the windows and doors for hours, as if he were on guard. I was lost and not one soul tried to save me, not even my man in the park.”

SHE TOOK a drink and leaned back. “And then one autumn day when the clouds were low and the fallen leaves crackled under our feet, and we’d walked farther together than ever before, in fact a little way out of the park, I happened to look across the street and I noticed a spruce young man looking at us. I called my friend’s attention to him. He peered around through his thick glasses.

“The next instant he had grabbed me tight above the elbow and was marching me ahead. He didn’t speak until we got around the corner. Then he said, in a voice I’d never heard him use before, ‘They have seen us. Get home.’

“I started to ask questions, but he only said, ‘Don’t talk. Don’t look back.’ I was frightened and obeyed him.

“In the hours afterwards my fear grew. I pictured ‘them’ in a hundred horrible ways. I went to sleep praying never to see the small dark man again and just be allowed to live my old stupid life.

“Some time after midnight I awoke with my heart jumping, and there was Gigolo standing on the bedclothes spitting at the window. I made myself get up and tiptoe to it. Two dark things rose above the outside sill. They were the top of a ladder resting against it. I looked down. Light from the alley showed me the smiling face of the young man I’d seen across the street that afternoon. You know him, Carr. The one they call Dris—Driscoll Ames. He had two hands then. He reached them up to open the window.

“I ran to my father’s and mother’s room. I called to them to wake up. I shook them. And then came the most terrible shock of my life. They wouldn’t wake, no matter what I did. Except that they breathed, they might have been dead. I remember pounding my father’s chest and digging my nails into his arms.

“I think that even without Gigolo’s warning snarl and the sound of footsteps coming swiftly through the bathroom, I would have rushed out of the apartment, rather than stay a moment longer with those two living corpses who had brought me into the world.”

Her voice was getting high. Carr looked uneasily down the empty, book-lined aisles.

“I darted down the front stairs and there, peering at our mailbox, I saw an older man. You know him too, Carr. Wilson. He looked at me through the glass panel of the inner door and then he looked at my nightdress, and then he smiled like the young man on the ladder.

“With steps pounding down the stairs there was only one way for me to go. I ran down through the basement, past the stone wash tubs and the padlocked storage rooms, and out into the dirty cement area-way. And there, standing in the alley, in the light of one high naked bulb, I saw my fairy godmother.”

CARR BLINKED. She smiled thinly and said, “Oh yes, my fairy godmother, just like Cinderella’s, come to rescue me. A tall beautiful golden-haired woman in a golden evening dress. There was a black band around her wrist, like the strap of a handbag.

“Then I saw that the black band was a leash, and at the other end of the leash was a huge hound that stood high as her waist and was dirty gray like the fence behind them. It was snuffing at the rubbish.

“Then Hackman—for of course it was she—saw me crouching under the back porches and her lips formed in a smile, but it was different from the men’s smiles, because it was at the thought that the hound would get me before the men.

“Just at that moment Gigolo shot past my legs with a squalling cry and hurtled off down the alley. With a great bound the hound was after him, dragging my fairy godmother after him stumbling and slipping, ignoring her curses and frantic commands, dirtying her lovely golden gown. And I was racing off in the opposite direction, the hound’s baying filling my ears.

“I ran for blocks, turning corners, cutting across lawns, before I stopped—and then only because I couldn’t run any farther. But it was enough. I seemed to have got away.

“But what was I to do? I was cold. The windows peered. The street lights whispered. The shadows pawed. There was always someone crossing a corner two blocks away. I thought of a girlfriend who was at least a little closer to me than the others, a girl named Midge who was studying at the music academy.

“She lived in a duplex, just a few blocks away. Keeping out of the light as much as I could, I hurried over to it. Her bedroom window was open a little. I threw some pebbles at it, but nothing happened. I didn’t like to ring. Finally I managed to step from the porch to her window and crawl inside. She was asleep, breathing easily.

“By this time I was telling myself that my father and mother had been drugged as part of a plan to kidnap me. But not for long.

“For, you see, I was no more able to rouse Midge than my parents.

“I dressed in some of her clothes and climbed out the window and walked the streets until morning. Then I tried to go home, but I went cautiously, spying out the way, and that was lucky, for in a parked automobile across from our apartment sat Wilson. I went to the academy and saw Hackman standing at the head of the steps. I went to the park and there, where my small dark man used to wait for me, was Dris.

“And then I knew for sure.”

“Knew what?” Carr asked after a pause.

She looked at him. “You know,” she said. “You told me yourself in front of the Art Institute.”

“What?” Carr repeated uneasily.

Her face seemed incredibly tiny as she sat hunched on her stool, her brown suit shading into the background. The stacks were silent, the mutter of the city was inaudible, a scampering mouse at the other end of the building might have been heard. In all directions the narrowing aisles stretched off. All around them was the pressure of the hundreds of thousands of books. But always the tunneling gaps, the peepholes, the gaps between the books.

And then, one by one, moving in on them, the lights in the stacks began to wink out.

“Just that everything’s dead,” Jane whispered. “Just that people are corpses. You don’t have to have the psychologists tell you that consciousness is unnecessary. You don’t have to listen to the scientists who say that everything’s atoms. All you have to do is read the schoolbooks, the school-books written by dead minds the same way a newspaper is printed by dead metal. They all tell you the same thing—that the universe is just a big machine.”

If you can’t get back to your place in the machine, your chances are slim, brother. By being smart and never making a mistake, you may be able to stay alive. But it’s lonely work, even if you’ve got a buddy . . .

“NO,” CARR breathed.

All the lights had gone out except the one above their heads, which seemed to glow like some limpid eye.

Jane smiled at him crookedly. “But you told me that yourself,” she repeated, “not knowing half of what you know now. Just a big machine, that’s all it is. Except every now and then a mind awakens, or is awakened by another mind. One in a million. If the wakened mind keeps to its place in the machine, it may be safe. But if it leaves its place, God help it!”

“Why?” Carr asked unwillingly. “Because the pattern won’t change for it—and the minds that have wakened first will hunt it down and destroy it. Or else they’ll corrupt it.”

“Why should that be?” Carr demanded. “Why wouldn’t the wakened minds want to waken other minds, more and more of them, until the whole machine’s awake?”

Jane’s lips shaped themselves in a sneer. “Because that isn’t the way wakened minds operate—and besides, they can’t waken other minds, except in a few lucky cases by a tremendous and uncontrollable effort of will. But they don’t want to waken other minds, except to torture them. They’re selfish and frightened and mad with desire. They glory in being able to do whatever they want, no matter how cruel or obscene, in a dead world that can’t stop them.” (There sprang into Carr’s mind the memory of the four men with black hats and the dead-alive mannequin.) “They’re deathly afraid of rivals stealing their privileged position—and every wakened mind is a rival, to be corrupted and joined with them in their selfishness, or else destroyed. All they can see is the prey and the loot.”

“No,” Carr breathed, “I can’t believe it.”

“Can’t believe it!” Again Jane smiled crookedly. “If you’d seen and known what I’ve seen and known this past year—”

“Year?” Carr said incredulously.

“Yes, it’s that long since I ran away from my fairy godmother. Give me another drink. No, more. And take some yourself. Yes, a whole year.”

She drank greedily and looked at him for a while. “Do you know Chicago, Carr? I do. I know it like a big museum, with all sorts of interesting dead things in the showcases and the animated exhibits. At times it’s almost restful. And at times it’s almost beautiful, like an elaborate automaton set before a European king. Only every once in a great while you see someone else in the museum, perhaps at the end of a long corridor. You might call them the museum guards, for they don’t want you to be there. And you can’t go home from the museum, you have to live there forever. Is there anything left in the bottle?”

“A little,” he said. “No, enough for two.”

“I’ve lived a year in the museum,” she continued, receiving the paper cup from him. “I’ve slept in parks, in empty furnished flats, in department store display rooms, in that boarded-up old Beddoes mansion, on leather couches in clubs and waiting rooms that are closed at night, on stolen campbeds in offices and warehouses—but not in empty hotel rooms, for you can’t tell when they’ll be occupied. I’ve stolen food from delicatessens, snatched it from the plates of people who couldn’t see me or anything, gone straight into the kitchens of the most expensive restaurants—and hooked candy bars from drugstore stands. Shall I tell you about the blind crowds I’ve threaded through, the unseeing trucks I’ve dodged, the time I got blood-poisoning and cured it myself behind a prescription counter, the theaters I’ve haunted, the churches I’ve crept into, the els I’ve ridden back and forth for hours, the books I’ve read down here—and all of it alone?”