The Bell Tolls for No One

  “What is it, Adolph?”

  “It is . . . a little man . . . just as we planned . . . ”

  “As who planned? What the fuck you talking about?”

  “Oh, my friend, we must celebrate . . . dis is dere beginning!”

  “The beginning of what?”

  “Come. Come, we celebrate!”

  Adolph got off his knees and went into the other room. Harry toweled off while watching that goddamned thing floating there. Then he got into his skivvies and went into the other room where Adolph had uncorked some champagne he had gotten from somewhere.

  “My friend, this is one of the greatest moments of my life! Here’s mud in your eye!”

  Adolph lifted his drink in a toast. Henry lifted his. They clicked glasses.

  They drank them down.

  Then the bathroom door opened and the thing walked out. It looked like a sponge with tiny seaweed appendages. It walked across the floor and jumped into Adolph’s lap.

  Adolph cuddled whatever it was, then looked at Harry.

  “My friend . . . you have seen here . . . one of the greatest inventions . . . greater than the atom . . . the hydrogen bomb . . . you have seen something to even make God Himself tremble, ya?”

  “Hey, man, this thing came out of my ass! I can’t give birth! I’m no woman!”

  “Oh no, my friend, you are not a woman. But look . . . the blue eyes, the blond . . . Some baby, ya?”

  The thing sat on Adolph’s lap, looked steadily at Harry with those small blue eyes which seemed to loom just upon the edge of doom . . .

  The next day at work, badly hungover, Harry wondered about the thing. The other workers just worked away, talking about sports, bragging about imagined exploits; others were silent, immersed in their work, beaten-down.

  Harry had sat up most of the night drinking with Adolph as Adolph talked and raved about the creature.

  What was that thing? Was it real? How could such a thing occur? If it were real it would seem to be a dirty trick against God.

  Adolph had claimed that it was his “invention,” that he and others had been working on the matter for decades . . . But how could anything be created out of a fart? A fart was a poison gas, an expelling of something bad. How could anything be created out of that? Maybe Adolph had worked some trick on him? Some illusion? He was a strange old guy, Adolph’s eyes were mad, they glowed madly.

  Stevenson, the foreman, walked up to Harry.

  “Hey, Harry! You look like you’re daydreaming! You’re falling behind! Better pick it up! We got a basketful of phone numbers of guys who want your job! And maybe it’s not much of a job but for a guy like you it’s all there is! Now, get to it!”

  “Sure. I’ll pick up the pace. Don’t worry.”

  Stevenson strolled off to see who else he could jump. The son of a bitch was right. Harry was 46. The line between Harry and skid row was a thin one, indeed. In deed and in fact. He forced himself to set a faster pace. The other packers had heard him get chewed. They loved it. With Harry as the target it made their own sorry jobs all that more secure.

  But he couldn’t help thinking about that “thing.” What did Stevenson know? Had he seen that sponge thing with seaweed arms, blue eyes, blond hair? A greater invention than the atom bomb, Adolph had said . . . And now they had the hydrogen bomb and then all the nukes, nukes everywhere, stacked up and ready. Would the “thing” develop further? Harry had seen movies about “things” but this was the first one he’d ever seen in real life. And, it had come out of his goddamned ass!

  He stopped packing a moment, reached around, touched his behind. It was rather a nervous reaction . . . all the confusion of everything.

  Joe, the packer to his right, saw him.

  “Got the old hemorrhoids, Harry? Go on, reach up and give them a good scratch! I won’t tell anybody!”

  “Kiss my ass,” said Harry.

  “Bend over, let me see what you got?”

  “What you want, Joe, is hanging in front here! One big mouthful to rattle your tonsils!”

  Stevenson came swinging back. “All right, you guys, knock off the shit! If you worked your hands like you did your mouths we’d get some goddamned PRODUCTION around here!”

  I’ll get both these guys some day, Harry thought. They make each minute like an hour and each day like a week. I’ll get their balls in a paper sack and take them over to the punch press.

  Well, somehow the day went, it got done without too much further ugliness, just the standard grind ended as they went to their racks and got out their cards and rang out.

  Ring out, thought Harry, ring out the old and the fucked and the weary again.

  On the way back Harry stopped at a chain restaurant for dinner. He found a table alone. The waitress arrived. She was indifferent yet false, a bit fat and a bit unhappy. The fat and the unhappy fought each other for supremacy. She had no chance either way.

  She took his order and walked off.

  Then Harry began thinking about the thing again. It was surely alive. It moved. Blinked its eyes. And the teeth worked, he knew that.

  He hoped Adolph knew how to housebreak the thing. What would it eat? Dog food? He hoped it wasn’t cannibalistic.

  Harry looked around at the people. They all looked ugly and tired. They were ugly and tired. They were losers. Where were the winners? Where were the beautiful people? All these around him: it seemed to be a crime to be alive. And he was one of them.

  Harry sighed and looked down at his work-beaten hands. Hell, he was tired but it wasn’t a good tiredness. It was like he had been gypped. Well, he had plenty of company: a world-full.

  The waitress brought his plate. She slammed it down, smiled a horrible false smile, said “ENJOY!” with a rasping voice, began to walk off.

  “Waitress,” Harry said, “please don’t forget the coffee.”

  She stopped, turned. “Oh yeah . . . Cream and sugar?”

  “Straight,” Harry answered.

  “Like an arrow?” she forced a smile, thinking of her tip.

  Harry answered, “Like an arrow.”

  The food was greasy and sad. The plate had a crack which ran in from the edge and looked like a long hair. The coffee was bitter and doomed. Well, there was nothing to do but consume the mess. You couldn’t live on air. Not that air out there. Harry worked away. All about him the people consumed their food in a dark surrender.

  The waitress arrived to refill his coffee cup.

  “Everything all right, sir?”

  “Yeah,” said Harry . . .

  Then he was in the tub again, the water steaming hot, the beer cold. For Harry, that was as close as he could get to a peaceful mood. Stevenson was far away. These moments were his, entirely. Not that he really did anything with his moments. But at least somebody else wasn’t using them. He took a great gulp of beer. Now we was equal to anybody, a president, a king, a movie star, a TV comedian.

  Harry relaxed, noticed the cracks in the ceiling. He’d never noticed them before. The cracks formed a pattern. He could make it out. Quite strange and beautiful. Or maybe only nice: a great bull charging.

  Then Harry felt like farting. He let it go. It was a good one. It boiled up out of the water. The bubbles almost rang.

  As long as man could fart he stood a chance.

  It really stank.

  Harry reached around for a beer to celebrate. He got it, took a good hit.

  Then he noticed the brown pool on the water. Then . . . the brown turned a brown-grey. Then . . . the area began to rise . . . slowly. It poked upwards . . . and began to take form.

  A small head formed. Then arms. Little spindly arms. Then legs.

  The hair was long and dark, the eyes green. The mouth formed a tiny smile and it began to swim around the tub.

  Harry noticed the small breasts. It was a little woman, a woman-thing with the same sponge-like body and seaweed arms. It swam about the tub.

  “ADOLPH!” Harry yelled.

  “What is it??
??

  “Come in here!”

  The door opened and Adolph was there.

  “Look,” said Harry, “look what happened to my fart! It happened again! Why? What the hell’s going on here? I can’t even fart without this stupid thing happening!”

  “Ah, my God in heaven, WE HAVE DONE IT!”

  “Done what? Get that goddamned thing out of the tub!”

  Adolph reached out his arms. “Come, my darling!”

  The little bitch leaped out of the water and onto one of Adolph’s arms and up that arm and then jumped up onto his shoulder.

  “Listen, Adolph, what’s going on here?”

  “It’s just a little bit of something I put in your beer.”

  “Listen, man, I want you to stop fucking with my beer!”

  “Oh, no more now! These two are all we need now . . . ”

  He smiled at the little woman on his shoulder. “Come, my darling, I want you to meet a friend . . . ”

  And he walked away with the little woman . . .

  At the factory the next day it was about the same. Harry felt like an experimental rat running on a treadmill. No matter how you kept going you go nowhere. All you could do, finally, was die. Meanwhile, you kept going, uselessly. Christ, didn’t the others ever think about it? He looked over at Joe to his right. Joe was packing away. He had a cap on his head with the bill turned to the back. He was chewing gum.

  Harry looked at the assembly line. All girls. And not a looker on the line. The girls moved deftly and with agility, keeping up with the line. They were good at that. And they showed no pain. The made little jokes. Sometimes they swore, other times they laughed. They went on, minute after minute, day after day. Food, shelter, and clothing. Transportation. Subsistence.

  Stevenson came by. “How’s it going, Harry?”

  “Smooth, Mr. Stevenson, real smooth.”

  “O.K., keep it that way.”

  Stevenson walked on off . . .

  Harry decided not to eat that night. He stopped at a bar near the apartment. It was a dreary place, full of dull and lonely people. The bartender’s face was full of warts and there was a faint smell to him, an unkindly smell, something like the smell of piss.

  “Yeh?” he asked Harry.

  “Draft beer,” Harry answered.

  The bartender put the glass under the spigot, pulled the handle, and the beer came out, only it was mostly foam, a yellow curling foam, demented. As the foam spilled over the top of the glass the barkeeper took two fingers of his left hand and cut the excess off. He plopped the glass on the bar and the foam rand down the sides wetting the bar—highlighting the grains whereupon somebody had crudely carved in the word “SHIT.”

  “Nice night,” the barkeeper said.

  “Yeh,” said Harry.

  Harry worked at the beer, somehow got it down. Meanwhile, the conversations he heard about him were hardly endearing. It seemed almost as if people pretended to be stupid. So then, just to prove the fuckers couldn’t run him out, Harry ordered another beer. It had more foam than the other. He worked at it. What an existence. You got fucked over at work and then when you came out to spend your money you got fucked over again. Everything possible was done to screw you up. No wonder the jails and the madhouses were overcrowded, no wonder skid row was packed.

  Harry finished his beer. Nothing to do but go back to the apartment.

  When Harry got there he had a long hot shower. To hell with that bathtub. He toweled off, got into some fresh clothes, and joined Adolph in the other room. Adolph was reading the Wall Street Journal. Harry sat down, picked up the daily paper from the coffee table. Same crap. Little wars everywhere. They were afraid to have the big one. Maybe some day it would come anyhow. All it took was one finger on one man to start it. Seemed like it was impossible not to happen. What a thing to think about after busting your ass in a factory all day and then drinking bad beer. He put the paper down.

  “Hey, Adolph!”

  “Yes, my friend . . . ”

  “Where are those two things?”

  “In the bedroom.”

  “What are they doing there?”

  “My friend, they are not sleeping . . . ”

  “Don’t they need sleep?”

  Adolph put the Wall Street Journal down. “These creatures . . . they don’t need sleep. Or food. Or water.”

  “How do they get their energy?”

  “Oh, that! That’s a secret. I will tell you, though part of it is from the sun. Other sources, I cannot tell you . . . ”

  “Do they have to go to the bathroom?”

  “No, they are not like us.”

  “Are they like us in any way?”

  “They are like most of us in two ways, at least.”

  “Like?”

  “They reproduce and they take orders. They reproduce and they obey.”

  “Listen, Adolph, I don’t want those things running around the apartment.”

  Adolph picked up the Wall Street Journal and began reading again.

  “Put that paper down, Adolph, I haven’t finished talking to you!”

  Adolph put the paper down and smiled. “Hard day at the office, Harry?”

  “I don’t want those two things running around the apartment!”

  “Ah, I am so sorry, Harry, but there will be more than two. You see, these creatures reproduce in from 2 to 8 hours.”

  “What the fuck you telling me, Adolph?”

  “That this is the greatest miracle yet, Harry, don’t you REALIZE that? It’s the greatest miracle since man walked the earth! Just allow yourself to THINK about it! A NEW LIFE FORM! And, you, yourself, helped evolve it! Can’t you fathom the immensity of all this?”

  “But what good are these things?”

  “What good, indeed? These ‘things’ as you call them . . . they need no food, no water. They are loyal and obedient.”

  “They sound like slaves.”

  “Slaves, ha!” Suddenly Adolph’s eyes blazed furiously. “THINK WHAT AN ARMY THEY’D MAKE!”

  “Army?”

  “Yes, and they could survive a nuclear attack for they have no needs. Isn’t life finally strange?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean because of the nuclear arms race most of us have felt that the world is doomed, or almost doomed, that there could be no alternative but total or near-total destruction. And now we have created these durable and self-sufficient creatures. There’s hope now.”

  “But these aren’t human. What about the humans?”

  “There should be a few humans left to ally themselves with these new creatures. There will be hope and a rebuilding and a surviving nation.”

  “Which one?”

  “That too, my friend, is a secret.”

  “Sounds like crap to me that those fucking sponges could do anything.”

  “Ah, my friend, if you could only know how carefully we have planned over all these decades.”

  “‘We’? Who’s ‘we’?”

  Adolph’s eyes narrowed. For a moment he looked very dangerous. Then, he smiled. “Ah, Harry! I’ve just been JOKING with you! You see, I am just going to raise a few of these and then sell them to a circus. A freak show, you know. The Walking Sponges. The crowd will love them.”

  Adolph picked up the Wall Street Journal, glanced at Harry over the top of the page, then began reading again.

  Harry got up and went to the refrigerator for a beer. When he came back Adolph was gone. Harry sat down with his beer and flipped on the Johnny Carson show . . .

  He watched TV for some hours, drinking many beers. Between the factory and Adolph, life had become a little bit too much for him. After some time he passed out only to be aroused by something. The room was dark. He could make out the form of Adolph and then Adolph said, “NOW!” and five or six sponges rushed upon him. He knocked one off into space, catching it with a good right. It bounced right up and rushed him again. And the others were upon him. The things were powerful. He felt himself b
eing lifted and he was being carried. He struggled but it was useless. The apartment door opened and he was carried down the hall. It was as if he were being flung along by a tornado.

  Then they were outside. They were by his car. How did they know? He felt a seaweed hand go into his pants pocket for his keys. The thing had a sort of built-in prescience.

  They unlocked the car doors, flung him into the front seat next to the driver. The driver started the car. The sponge knew how to drive.

  Harry was driven down a street of night by sponges.

  “God,” he thought, “I am being taken for a ride! Just like a gangster movie.”

  “Hey, look,” Harry said, “you’re not going to get away with this! You’re going to stop at a traffic light and somebody is going to see a sponge driving and all those other sponges sitting around. You’ll be exposed!”

  “Let us worry about that,” said the driver.

  “Hey, you guys can talk! Why haven’t you spoken before this?”

  “Speech is the last factor to develop in our make-up.”

  “But what do you know? You don’t know anything!”

  “We’re programmed. Try us.”

  “Who sewed the 13 stars on the American flag?”

  “Betsy Ross.”

  “Name a great American actress.”

  “Bette Davis.”

  “Name me a one-eyed black Jew.”

  “Sammy Davis Jr.”

  Harry leaned back. They were going to take him to some secluded spot and kill him, then return to Adolph and continue the master plan. History was riding along with him in his 8-year-old car.

  Then they stopped at a traffic light. Another car pulled up along beside them.

  “Make a sound,” said one of the sponges, “and you’re dead now.”

  Harry looked over at the other car. It was Stevenson, for Christ’s sake! He was drunk and he was sitting in his car with a drunken floozie. Stevenson was smoking a cigar. Then Harry saw the floozie dive down to Stevenson’s middle. Stevenson stared straight ahead. The floozie was giving him a blowjob right there at the traffic light.

  The light changed and the sponge at the wheel dug out leaving Stevenson back there getting his. Harry knew he didn’t have much time left. He had to think, and fast.

  “Now look,” he said to the sponges, “I am the FATHER of two of you and grandfather to the rest. Do you realize that? Do you want to kill your father?”