I pulled the door wide in time to see Tinsley running down the hall, his clothing drenched and soaked, his body wet from head to foot. He turned when he saw me, and cried out. “Stay away from me, oh, God, Steve, don’t touch me, or it’ll happen to you, too! I was wrong! I was wrong, yes, but near the truth, too, so very near!”
Before I could prevent him, he had descended the stairs and slammed the door below. Susan suddenly stood beside me. “He’s gone mad for certain this time, Steve, we’ve got to stop him.”
A noise from the bathroom drew my attention. Peering in, I turned off the shower which was steaming hot, drumming insistently, scaldingly, on the yellow tiles.
Bill’s car thundered into life, a jerking of gears, and the car careened down the road at an insane speed.
“We’ve got to follow him,” insisted Susan. “He’ll kill himself! He’s trying to run away from something. Where’s your car?”
We ran to my car through a cold wind, under very cold stars, climbed in, warmed the motor, and were off, bewildered and breathless. “Which way?” I shouted.
“He went east, I’m certain.”
“East it is, then.” I poked up the speed and muttered, “Oh, Bill, you idiot, you fool. Slow down. Come back. Wait for me, you nut.” I felt Susan’s arm creep through my elbow and hold tight. She whispered, “Faster!” and I said, “We’re going sixty now, and there are some bad turns coming!”
The night had gotten into us; the talk of insects, the wind, the roaring of the tires over hard concrete, the beating of our frightened hearts. “There!” Susan pointed. I saw a gash of light cutting through the hills a mile away. “More speed, Steve!”
More speed. Aching foot pressing out the miles, motor thundering, stars wheeling crazily overhead, lights cutting the dark away into dismembered sections. And in my mind I saw Tinsley again, in the hall, drenched to the skin. He had been standing under the hot, scalding shower! Why? Why?
“Bill, stop, you idiot! Stop driving! Where are you going, what are you running away from, Bill?”
We were catching up with him now. We drew closer, yard by yard, bit by bit, around curves where gravity yanked at us and tried to smash us against huge granite bulwarks of earth, over hills and down into night-filled valleys, over streams and bridges, around curves again.
“He’s only about six hundred yards ahead, now,” said Susan.
“We’ll get him,” I twisted the wheel. “So help me God, we’ll get to him!”
Then, quite unexpectedly, it happened.
Tinsley’s car slowed down. It slowed and crept along the road. We were on a straight length of concrete that continued for a mile in a firm line, no curves or hills. His car slowed to a crawling, puttering pace. By the time we pulled up in back of him, Tinsley’s roadster was going three miles an hour, just poking along at a pace like a man walking, its lights glaring.
“Steve—” Susan’s fingernails cut my wrist, tight, hard. “Something’s—wrong.”
I knew it. I honked the horn. Silence. I honked again and it was a lonely, blatant sound in the darkness and the emptiness. I parked the car. Tinsley’s car moved on like a metal snail ahead of us, its exhaust whispering to the night. I opened the door and slid out. “Stay here,” I warned Susan. In the reflected glare her face was like snow and her lips were trembling.
I ran to the car, calling: “Bill, Bill—!”
Tinsley didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
He just lay there behind the wheel, quietly, and the car moved ahead, slowly, so very slowly.
I got sick to my stomach. I reached in and braked the car and cut the ignition, not looking at him, my mind working in a slow kind of new and frightened horror.
I looked once more at Bill where he slumped with his head back.
It didn’t do any good to kill flies, kill moths, kill termites, kill mosquitoes. The Evil ones were too clever for that.
Kill all the insects you find, destroy the dogs and the cats and the birds, the weasels and the chipmunks, and the termites, and all animals and insects in the world, it can be done, eventually by man, killing, killing, killing, and after you are finished, after that job is done you still have—microbes.
Bacteria. Microbes. Yes. Unicellular and bi-cellular and multi-cellular microscopic life!
Millions of them, billions of them on every pore, on every inch of flesh of your body. On your lips when you speak, inside your ears when you listen, on your skin when you feel, on your tongue when you taste, in your eyes when you see! You can’t wash them off, you can’t destroy all of them in the world! It would be an impossible task, impossible! You discovered that, didn’t you, Bill. I stared at him. We almost convinced you, didn’t we, Bill, that insects were not guilty, were not Watchers. We were right about that part of it. We convinced you and you got to thinking tonight, and you hit upon the real crux of the situation. Bacteria. That’s why the shower was running at home just now! But you can’t kill bacteria fast enough. They multiply and multiply, instantly!
I looked at Bill, slumped there. “The flyswatter, you thought the flyswatter was enough. That’s a—laugh.”
Bill, is that you lying there with your body changed by leprosy and gangrene and tuberculosis and malaria and bubonic all at once? Where is the skin of your face, Bill, and the flesh of your bones, your fingers lying clenched to the steering wheel. Oh, God, Tinsley, the color and the smell of you—the rotting fetid combination of disease you are!
Microbes. Messengers. Millions of them. Billions of them.
God can’t be everywhere at once. Maybe He invented flies, insects to watch his peoples.
But the Evil Ones were brilliant, too. They invented bacteria!
Bill, you look so different . . .
You’ll not tell your secret to the world now. I returned to Susan, looked in at her, not able to speak. I could only point for her to go home, without me. I had a job to do, to drive Bill’s car into the ditch and set fire to him and it. Susan drove away, not looking back.
And now, tonight, a week later, I am typing this out for what it is worth, here and now, in the summer evening, with flies buzzing about my room. Now I realize why Bill Tinsley lived so long. While his efforts were directed against insects, ants, birds, animals, who were representatives of the Good Forces, the Evil Forces let him go ahead. Tinsley, unaware, was working for the Evil Ones. But when he comprehended that bacteria were the real enemy, and were more numerous and invisibly insidious, then the Evil Ones demolished him.
In my mind, I still remember the picture of the Elder Tinsley’s death when he was shot as a result of the quail flying against his gun. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem to fit into the picture. Why would the quail, representative of Good, kill the Elder Tinsley? The answer to this comes clear now. Quail, too, have disease, and disease disrupts their neutral set-up, and disease, on that day long ago, caused the birds to strike down Tinsley’s weapon, killing him, and thus, subtly, animals and insects.
And another thought in my mind is the picture of the Elder Tinsley as he lay covered with ants in a red, quivering blanket. And I wonder if perhaps they were not giving solace to him in his dying and decay, talking in some silent mandibled tongue none of us can hear until we die. Or perhaps they are all.
The game of chess continues. Good against Evil, I hope. And I am losing.
Tonight I sit here writing and waiting, and my skin itches and softens, and Susan is on the other side of town, unaware, safe from this knowledge which I must set on paper even if it kills me. I listen to the flies, as if to detect some good message in their uneven whirring, but I hear nothing.
Even as I write, the skin of my fingers loosens and changes color and my face feels partially dry and flaking, partially wet, slippery and released from its anchorage of softening bone, my eyes water with a kind of leprosy and my skin darkens with something akin to bubonic, my stomach gripes me with sickening gastric wrenches, my tongue tastes bitter and acid, my teeth loosen in my mouth, my ears ring, and in a few m
inutes the structure of my fingers, the muscles, the small thin, fine bones will be enmeshed, entangled, so much fallen gelatin spread over and down between the black lettered keys of this typewriter, the flesh of me will slide like a decayed, diseased cloak from my skeleton, but I must write on and on and on until etaoin shrdlucmfwyp . . . cmfwaaaaa dddddddddddddddddddd . . .
2004–05: THE NAMING OF NAMES
THEY CAME TO THE STRANGE BLUE LANDS and put their names upon the lands. Here was Hinkston Creek and Lustig Corners and Black River and Driscoll Forest and Peregrine Mountain and Wilder Town, all the names of people and the things that the people did. Here was the place where Martians killed the first Earth Men, and it was Red Town and had to do with blood. And here where the second expedition was destroyed, and it was named Second Try, and each of the other places where the rocket men had set down their fiery caldrons to burn the land, the names were left like cinders, and of course there was a Spender Hill and a Nathaniel York Town. . . .
The old Martian names were names of water and air and hills. They were the names of snows that emptied south in stone canals to fill the empty seas. And the names of sealed and buried sorcerers and towers and obelisks. And the rockets struck at the names like hammers, breaking away the marble into shale, shattering the crockery milestones that named the old towns, in the rubble of which great pylons were plunged with new names: IRON TOWN, STEEL, TOWN, ALUMINUM, CITY, ELECTRIC VILLAGE, CORN TOWN, GRAIN VILLA, DETROIT II, all the mechanical names and the metal names from Earth.
And after the towns were built and named, the graveyards were built and named, too: Green Hill, Moss Town, Boot Hill, Bide ’a Wee; and the first dead went into their graves. . . .
But after everything was pinned down and neat and in its place, when everything was safe and certain, when the towns were well enough fixed and the loneliness was at a minimum, then the sophisticates came in from Earth. They came on parties and vacations, on little shopping trips for trinkets and photographs and the “atmosphere”; they came to study and apply sociological laws; they came with stars and badges and rules and regulations, bringing some of the red tape that had crawled across Earth like an alien weed, and letting it grow on Mars wherever it could take root. They began to plan people’s lives and libraries; they began to instruct and push about the very people who had come to Mars to get away from being instructed and ruled and pushed about.
And it was inevitable that some of these people pushed back. . . .
HOPSCOTCH
VINIA WOKE TO THE SOUND of a rabbit running down and across an endless moonlit field; but it was only the soft, quick beating of her heart. She lay on the bed for a moment, getting her breath. Now the sound of the running faded and was gone at a great distance. At last she sat up and looked down from her second-story bedroom window and there below, on the long sidewalk, in the faint moonlight before dawn, was the hopscotch.
Late yesterday, some child had chalked it out, immense and endlessly augmented, square upon square, line after line, numeral following numeral. You could not see the end of it. Down the street it built its crazy pattern, 3, 4, 5, on up to 10, then 30, 50, 90, on away to turn far corners. Never in all the children’s world a hopscotch like this! You could jump forever toward the horizon.
Now in the very early, very quiet morning, her eyes traveled and jumped, paused and hopped, along that presumptuous ladder of chalk-scratches and she heard herself whisper:
“Sixteen.”
But she did not run on from there.
The next square waited, she knew, with the scribbled blue-chalk 17, but her mind flung out its arms and balanced, teetering, poised with her numb foot planted across the 1 and the 6, and could go no farther.
Trembling, she lay back down.
The room was like the bottom of a cool well all night and she lay in it like a white stone in a well, enjoying it, floating in the dark yet clear element of half dreams and half wakening. She felt the breath move in small jets from her nostrils and she felt the immense sweep of her eyelids shutting and opening again and again. And at last she felt the fever brought into her room by the presence of the sun beyond the hills.
Morning, she thought. It might be a special day. After all, it’s my birthday. Anything might happen. And I hope it does.
The air moved the white curtains like a summer breath.
“Vinia . . . ?”
A voice was calling. But it couldn’t be a voice. Yet—Vinia raised herself—there it was again.
“Vinia . . . ?”
She slipped from bed and ran to the window of her high second-story window.
There on the fresh lawn below, calling up to her in the early hour, stood James Conway, no older than she, seventeen, very seriously smiling, waving his hand now as her head appeared.
“Jim, what’re you doing here?” she said, and thought, Does he know what day this is?
“I’ve been up an hour already,” he replied. “I’m going for a walk, starting early, all day. Want to come along?”
“Oh, but I couldn’t . . . my folks won’t be back till late tonight, I’m alone, I’m supposed to stay . . .”
She saw the green hills beyond the town and the roads leading out into summer, leading out into August and rivers and places beyond this town and this house and this room and this particular moment.
“I can’t go . . .” she said faintly.
“I can’t hear you!” he protested mildly, smiling up at her under a shielding hand.
“Why did you ask me to walk with you, and not someone else?”
He considered this for a moment. “I don’t know,” he admitted. He thought it over again, and gave her his most pleasant and agreeable look. “Because, that’s all, just because.”
“I’ll be down,” she said.
“Hey!” he said.
But the window was empty.
They stood in the center of the perfect, jeweled lawn, over which one set of prints, hers, had run, leaving marks, and another, his, had walked in great slow strides to meet them. The town was silent as a stopped clock. All the shades were still down.
“My gosh,” said Vinia, “it’s early. It’s crazy-early. I’ve never been up this early and out this early in years. Listen to everyone sleeping.”
They listened to the trees and the whiteness of the houses in this early whispering hour, the hour when mice went back to sleep and flowers began untightening their bright fists.
“Which way do we go?”
“Pick a direction.”
Vinia closed her eyes, whirled, and pointed blindly.
“Which way am I pointing?”
“North.”
She opened her eyes. “Let’s go north out of town, then. I don’t suppose we should.”
“Why?”
And they walked out of town as the sun rose above the hills and the grass burned greener on the lawns.
There was a smell of hot chalk highway, of dust and sky and waters flowing in a creek the color of grapes. The sun was a new lemon. The forest lay ahead with shadows stirring like a million birds under each tree, each bird a leaf-darkness, trembling. At noon, Vinia and James Conway had crossed vast meadows that sounded brisk and starched underfoot. The day had grown warm, as an iced glass of tea grows warm, the frost burning off, left in the sun.
They picked a handful of grapes from a wild barbed-wire vine. Holding them up to the sun, you could see the clear grape thoughts suspended in the dark amber fluid, the little hot seeds of contemplation stored from many afternoons of solitude and plant philosophy. The grapes tasted of fresh, clear water and something that they had saved from the morning dews and the evening rains. They were the warmed-over flesh of April ready now, in August, to pass on their simple gain to any passing stranger. And the lesson was this; sit in the sun, head down, within a prickly vine, in flickery light or open light, and the world will come to you. The sky will come in its time, bringing rain, and the earth will rise through you, from beneath, and make you rich and make you full.
/> “Have a grape,” said James Conway. “Have two.”
They munched their wet, full mouths.
They sat on the edge of a brook and took off their shoes and let the water cut their feet off to the ankles with an exquisite cold razor.
My feet are gone! thought Vinia. But when she looked, there they were, underwater, living comfortably apart from her, completely acclimated to an amphibious existence.
They ate egg sandwiches Jim had brought with him in a paper sack.
“Vinia,” said Jim, looking at his sandwich before he bit it. “Would you mind if I kissed you?”
“I don’t know,” she said, after a moment. “I hadn’t thought.”
“Will you think it over?” he asked.
“Did we come on this picnic just so you could kiss me?” she asked suddenly.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong! It’s been a swell day! I don’t want to spoil it. But if you should decide, later, that it’s all right for me to kiss you, would you tell me?”
“I’ll tell you,” she said, starting on her second sandwich, “if I ever decide.”
The rain came as a cool surprise.
It smelled of soda water and limes and oranges and the cleanest, freshest river in the world, made of snow-water, falling from the high, parched sky.
First there had been a motion, as of veils, in the sky. The clouds had enveloped each other softly. A faint breeze had lifted Vinia’s hair, sighing and evaporating the moisture from her upper lip, and then, as she and Jim began to run, the raindrops fell down all about without touching them and then at last began to touch them, coolly, as they leaped green-moss logs and darted among vast trees into the deepest, muskiest cavern of the forest. The forest sprang up in wet murmurs overhead, every leaf ringing and painted fresh with water.
“This way!” cried Jim.
And they reached a hollow tree so vast that they could squeeze in and be warmly cozy from the rain. They stood together, arms about each other, the first coldness from the rain making them shiver, raindrops on their noses and cheeks, laughing. “Hey!” He gave her brow a lick. “Drinking water!”