Infinite Dreams

  He had been after Pamela’s attentions (he used another word, which Chaucer would have recognized) for several months, and felt he was just about to succeed when I came along. I was an egotistical child, an alien and a cripple and, to his mind, I had stolen her away.

  The chief questioned him further and found that Beaumont had suffered a nervous breakdown over a year before and had been under treatment until he came to the University. He admitted to several other acts of violence and admitted knowing that he was still mentally ill but had not volunteered for further treatment because he felt that the illness was somehow allied with his genius, and he didn’t want to interfere with it. I felt that anything interfering with his brand of genius could only add to it, but I kept my own counsel.

  The infirmary treatment only took a few minutes. I arranged with the chief to come down the next morning to file a complaint and testify, then found a ’phone and called up Pamela.

  She was fascinated, but not surprised, with the revelations about Beaumont. I went over the whole thing in some detail, and then we talked about some more general matters, and finally I got down to the question of our relationship. She said, with some heat, that the affair with Beaumont didn’t change anything, that if I knew anything about women I wouldn’t even have asked, and that we could still be friends but that’s all: platonic, intellectual arrangement.

  While I’ve been writing this I’ve been thinking about what she said. I do know a little more about women than I knew a month ago. And a lot more about jealousy. And I’ve known about synergy for years.

  9 May.

  Today I started reading up on crystalline sculpture and piezoelectricity.

  Armaja Das

  I got a request from Kirby McCauley to write a story for an anthology called Frights (St. Martin’s Press, 1076). The theme would he “ancient horrors in modern guise.” The idea was intriguing. I’d only written one fantasy story in my life–snide critics might disagree–and it was a throwaway deal-with-the-devil joke. I said I’d send him an outline.

  The summer before, my wife and I had come down with acute attacks of dysentery in the rather dysenteric city of Tangier. Unlike her, I was able occasionally to get up and walk farther than the john, so it fell to me to venture out every few hours and haggle for bottled water and canned European food.

  Tangier redefined for me Raymond Chandler’s phrase “mean streets.” Our sleazy hotel fronted the main street that led to the waterfront; there was a tiny park outside the door, and that park was decorated by a dead man. Not violently dead, just some old fellow who’d tired of being a Moroccan. The first time I saw the corpse, I went back into the hotel and tried to explain the situation to the clerk in my all-but-nonexistent French. He just kept shrugging.* By nightfall, somebody had dragged the body away, to what fell purpose I leave to your imagination.

  Lying upstairs feeling dismal, it occurred to me that we might die there, and likely as not, no one would ever find out what had happened to us. Perhaps out of some obscure impulse to die with my boots on, I started making up a story about that, a pretty good Rod-Serlingish story called “To Die at Home.” I even made a few notes about it, after the fevered palsy had abated enough for me to write.

  So when Kirby asked for a fantasy story, I sent him an outline of “To Die at Home.” He wrote back saying that he liked it, but it wasn’t weird enough.

  I’ll write that story some day, if only to show Kirby how weird it is.

  I half-abandoned the project, figuring my talents really lay more in the direction of Analog than Weird Tales. Who wants to write about vampires anyhow, feh. But then I came across a fascinating article by Peter Maas, in New York magazine: “The Deadly Battle to Become King of the Gypsies.”

  He mentioned gypsy curses, and I was off and running. Running down to the library, where I spent a glorious afternoon in the stacks doing what I do best: goofing off. In this case, reading dusty old books and journals about gypsy lore.

  Loaded up with fresh information, it was child’s play to toss together gypsy curses, computer science, and minority assimilation into an “ancient horror in modern guise.”

  * It later occurred to me that my mort may have sounded like merd to him; his shrug may have meant that if I wanted to complain about shit, I was in the wrong country.

  The highrise, built in 1980, still had the smell and look of newness. And of money.

  The doorman bowed a few degrees and kept a straight face, opening the door for a bent old lady. She had a card of Veterans’ poppies clutched in one old claw. He didn’t care much for the security guard, and she would give him interesting trouble.

  The skin on her face hung in deep creases, scored with a network of tiny wrinkles; her chin and nose protruded and dropped. A cataract made one eye opaque; the other eye was yellow and red surrounding deep black, unblinking. She had left her teeth in various things. She shuffled. She wore an old black dress faded slightly gray by repeated washing. If she had any hair, it was concealed by a pale blue bandanna. She was so stooped that her neck was almost parallel to the ground.

  “What can I do for you?” The security guard had a tired voice to match his tired shoulders and back. The job had seemed a little romantic the first couple of days, guarding all these rich people, sitting at an ultramodern console surrounded by video monitors, submachine gun at his knees. But the monitors were blank except for an hourly check, power shortage; and if he ever removed the gun from its cradle, he would have to fill out five forms and call the police station. And the doorman never turned anybody away.

  “Buy a flower for boys less fortunate than ye,” she said in a faint raspy baritone. From her age and accent, her own boys had fought in the Russian Revolution.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not allowed to … respond to charity while on duty.”

  She stared at him for a long time, nodding microscopically. “Then send me to someone with more heart.”

  He was trying to frame a reply when the front door slammed open. “Car on fire!” the doorman shouted.

  The security guard leaped out of his seat, grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprinted for the door. The old woman shuffled along behind him until both he and the doorman disappeared around the corner. Then she made for the elevator with surprising agility.

  She got out on the 17th floor, after pushing the button that would send the elevator back down to the lobby. She checked the name plate on 1738; Mr. Zold. She was illiterate but could recognize names.

  Not even bothering to try the lock, she walked on down the hall until she found a maid’s closet. She closed the door behind her and hid behind a rack of starchy white uniforms, leaning against the wall with her bag between her feet. The slight smell of gasoline didn’t bother her at all.

  John Zold pressed the intercom button. “Martha?” She answered. “Before you close up shop I’d like a redundancy check on stack 408. Against tape 408.” He switched the selector on his visual output screen so it would duplicate the output at Martha’s station. He stuffed tobacco in a pipe and lit it, watching.

  Green numbers filled the screen, a complicated matrix of ones and zeros. They faded for a second and were replaced with a field of pure zeros. The lines of zeros started to roll, like titles preceding a movie.

  The 746th line came up all ones. John thumbed the intercom again. “Had to be something like that. You have time to fix it up?” She did. “Thanks, Martha. See you tomorrow.”

  He slid back the part of his desk top that concealed a keypunch and typed rapidly: “523 784 00926/ / Good night, machine. Please lock this station.”

  GOOD NIGHT, JOHN. DON’T FORGET YOUR LUNCH DATE WITH MR. BROWNWOOD TOMORROW. DENTIST APPOINTMENT WEDNESDAY 0945. GENERAL SYSTEMS CHECK WEDNESDAY 1300. DEL O DEL BAXT. LOCKED.

  Del O Del baxt means “God give you luck” in the ancient tongue of the Romani. John Zold, born a Gypsy but hardly a Gypsy by any standard other than the strong one of blood, turned off his console and unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk. He took out a flat
automatic pistol in a holster with a belt clip and slipped it under his jacket, inside the waistband of his trousers. He had only been wearing the gun for two weeks, and it still made him uncomfortable. But there had been those letters.

  John was born in Chicago, some years after his parents had fled from Europe and Hitler. His father had been a fiercely proud man, and got involved in a bitter argument over the honor of his 12-year-old daughter; from which argument he had come home with knuckles raw and bleeding, and had given to his wife for disposal a large clasp knife crusty with dried blood.

  John was small for his five years, and his chin barely cleared the kitchen table, where the whole family sat and discussed their uncertain future while Mrs. Zold bound up her husband’s hands. John’s shortness saved his life when the kitchen window exploded and a low ceiling of shotgun pellets fanned out and chopped into the heads and chests of the only people in the world whom he could love and trust. The police found him huddled between the bodies of his father and mother, and at first thought he was also dead; covered with blood, completely still, eyes wide open and not crying.

  It took six months for the kindly orphanage people to get a single word out of him: ratválo, which he said over and over; which they were never able to translate. Bloody, bleeding.

  But he had been raised mostly in English, with a few words of Romani and Hungarian thrown in for spice and accuracy. In another year their problem was not one of communicating with John; only of trying to shut him up.

  No one adopted the stunted Gypsy boy, which suited John. He’d had a family, and look what happened.

  In orphanage school he flunked penmanship and deportment, but did reasonably well in everything else. In arithmetic and, later, mathematics, he was nothing short of brilliant. When he left the orphanage at eighteen, he enrolled at the University of Illinois, supporting himself as a bookkeeper’s assistant and part-time male model. He had come out of an ugly adolescence with a striking resemblance to the young Clark Gable.

  Drafted out of college, he spent two years playing with computers at Fort Lewis; got out and went all the way to a Master’s degree under the G.I. Bill. His thesis “simulation of Continuous Physical Systems by Way of Universalization of the Trakhtenbrot Algorithms” was very well received, and the mathematics department gave him a research assistantship, to extend the thesis into a doctoral dissertation. But other people read the paper too, and after a few months Bellcom International hired him away from academia. He rose rapidly through the ranks. Not yet forty, he was now Senior Analyst at Bellcom’s Research and Development Group. He had his own private office, with a picture window overlooking Central Park, and a plush six-figure condominium only twenty minutes away by commuter train.

  As was his custom, John bought a tall can of beer on his way to the train, and opened it as soon as he sat down. It kept him from fidgeting during the fifteen or twenty-minute wait while the train filled up.

  He pulled a thick technical report out of his briefcase and stared at the summary on the cover sheet, not really seeing it but hoping that looking occupied would spare him the company of some anonymous fellow traveller.

  The train was an express, and whisked them out to Dobb’s Ferry in twelve minutes. John didn’t look up from his report until they were well out of New York City; the heavy mesh tunnel that protected the track from vandals induced spurious colors in your retina as it blurred by. Some people liked it, tripped on it, but to John the effect was at best annoying, at worst nauseating, depending on how tired he was. Tonight he was dead tired.

  He got off the train two stops up from Dobb’s Ferry. The highrise limousine was waiting for him and two other residents. It was a fine spring evening and John would normally have walked the half-mile, tired or not. But those unsigned letters.

  John Zold, you stop this preachment or you die soon. Armaja das, John Zold.

  All three letters said that: Armaja das, we put a curse on you. For preaching.

  He was less afraid of curses than of bullets. He undid the bottom button of his jacket as he stepped off the train, ready to quickdraw, roll for cover behind that trash can, just like in the movies; but there was no one suspicious-looking around. Just an assortment of suburban wives and the old cop who was on permanent station duty.

  Assassination in broad daylight wasn’t Romani style. Styles change, though. He got in the car and watched the side roads all the way home.

  There was another one of the shabby envelopes in his mailbox. He wouldn’t open it until he got upstairs. He stepped in the elevator with the others, and punched 17.

  They were angry because John Zold was stealing their children.

  Last March John’s tax accountant had suggested that he could contribute $4000 to any legitimate charity, and actually make a few hundred bucks in the process, by dropping into a lower tax bracket. Not one to do things the easy or obvious way, John made various inquiries and, after a certain amount of bureaucratic tedium, founded the Young Gypsy Assimilation Council—with matching funds from federal, state and city governments, and a continuing Ford Foundation scholarship grant.

  The YGAC was actually just a one-room office in a West Village brownstone, manned by volunteer help. It was filled with various pamphlets and broadsides, mostly written by John, explaining how young Gypsies could legitimately take advantage of American society. By becoming part of it, which was the part that old-line Gypsies didn’t care for. Jobs, scholarships, work-study programs, these things are for the gadjos. Poison to a Gypsy’s spirit.

  In November a volunteer had opened the office in the morning to find a crude fire bomb, using a candle as a delayed-action fuse for five gallons of gasoline. The candle was guttering a fraction of an inch away from the line of powder that would have ignited the gas. In January it had been buckets of chicken entrails, poured into filing cabinets and flung over the walls. So John found a tough young man who would sleep on the cot in the office at night; sleep like a cat with a shotgun beside him. There was no more trouble of that sort. Only old men and women who would file in silently staring, to take handfuls of pamphlets which they would drop in the hall and scuff into uselessness, or defile in a more basic way. But paper was cheap.

  John threw the bolt on his door and hung his coat in the closet. He put the gun in a drawer in his writing desk and sat down to open the mail.

  The shortest one yet: “Tonight, John Zold. Armaja das.” Lots of luck, he thought. Won’t even be home tonight; heavy date. Stay at her place, Gramercy Park. Lay a curse on me there? At the show or Sardi’s?

  He opened two more letters, bills, and there was a knock at the door.

  Not announced from downstairs. Maybe a neighbor. Guy next door was always borrowing something. Still. Feeling a little foolish, he put the gun back in his waistband. Put his coat back on in case it was just a neighbor.

  The peephole didn’t show anything, bad. He drew the pistol and held it just out of sight, by the doorjamb, threw the bolt and eased open the door. It bumped into the Gypsy woman, too short to have been visible through the peephole. She backed away and said “John Zold.” He stared at her. “What do you want, púridaia? He could only remember a hundred or so words of Romani, but “grandmother” was one of them. What was the word for witch?

  “I have a gift for you.” From her bag she took a dark green booklet, bent and with frayed edges, and gave it to him. It was a much-used Canadian passport, belonging to a William Belini. But the picture inside the front cover was one of John Zold.

  Inside, there was an airline ticket in a Qantas envelope. John didn’t open it. He snapped the passport shut and handed it back. The old lady wouldn’t accept it.

  “An impressive job. It’s flattering that someone thinks I’m so important.”

  “Take it and leave forever, John Zold. Or I will have to do the second thing.”

  He slipped the ticket envelope out of the booklet. “This, I will take. I can get your refund on it. The money will buy lots of posters and pamphlets.” He tried to to
ss the passport into her bag, but missed. “What is your second thing?”

  She toed the passport back to him. “Pick that up.” She was trying to sound imperious, but it came out a thin, petulant quaver.

  “Sorry, I don’t have any use for it. What is—”

  “The second thing is your death, John Zold.” She reached into her bag.

  He produced the pistol and aimed it down at her forehead. “No, I don’t think so.”

  She ignored the gun, pulling out a handful of white chicken feathers. She threw the feathers over his threshold. “Armaja das,” she said, and then droned on in Romani, scattering feathers at regular intervals. John recognized joovi and kari, the words for woman and penis, and several other words he might have picked up if she’d pronounced them more clearly.

  He put the gun back into its holster and waited until she was through. “Do you really think—”

  “Armaja das” she said again, and started a new litany. He recognized a word in the middle as meaning corruption or infection, and the last word was quite clear: death. Méripen.

  “This nonsense isn’t going to …” But he was talking to the back of her head. He forced a laugh and watched her walk past the elevator and turn the corner that led to the staircase.

  He could call the guard. Make sure she didn’t get out the back way. Illegal entry. He suspected that she knew he wouldn’t want to go to the trouble, and it annoyed him slightly. He walked halfway to the phone, checked his watch and went back to the door. Scooped up the feathers and dropped them in the disposal. Just enough time. Fresh shave, shower, best clothes. Limousine to the station, train to the city, cab from Grand Central to her apartment.

  The show was pure delight, a sexy revival of Lysistrata: Sardi’s was as ego-bracing as ever; she was a soft-hard woman with style and sparkle, who all but dragged him back to her apartment, where he was for the first time in his life impotent.