Backteria and Other Improbable Tales

  “But you don’t believe a word I’ve said.”

  “David, use your head,” the therapist replied. “Did you really think I would?”

  Millman blew out tired breath.

  “I suppose not,” he conceded.

  He had never in his life felt so divided in his mind—so torn between desire and dread.

  On the one hand, he wanted the telephone to ring in his head so he could resolve this madness.

  On the other hand, he was terror-stricken by what might happen if he answered it.

  Easy enough for Palmer to repeat his conviction that it was his subconscious mind.

  What if he was wrong?

  Millman was thinking that for what might well have been the hundredth time when the telephone began to ring in his head.

  He drew in a long, slow, chest-expanding breath of air, then let it out until his lungs felt empty. All right, he told himself.

  The time had come.

  He saw the handset in his mind. Saw his left hand pick it up. Almost felt the earpiece press against his head. “Yes,” he said aloud.

  “This is your father,” the voice replied.

  Millman answered, “No.”

  “What did you say?” The image of his father’s face appeared in Millman’s mind: thin-lipped, critical.

  “You’re not my father,” he said.

  “Who am I then?”

  “I don’t know,” Millman answered desolately. “I just know you’re not my father.” Amazingly, he did know it now.

  “You’re right,” the man’s voice told him.

  Millman started. Was this the beginning of some new ploy? he wondered. “Who are you then?” he demanded.

  “This is a secret government project and I’m Agent 25409-J—” the man’s voice started.

  “Stop it,” Millman said through clenched teeth. “Don’t start that again. I won’t have it.”

  “I’m an inventor,” said the voice. “I’ve created a device that—”

  “Stop it,” Millman cut him off.

  “Right,” the man’s voice said. “This is your father.”

  “Stop it, damn it!” Millman cried.

  “Correct,” the man’s voice said. “I’m an earthbound spirit possessing you.”

  “God damn it, that’s enough!” Millman shouted. He felt his heartbeat pound.

  “Right,” the man’s voice said. “This is Krol. I’m speaking to you from the planet Mars.”

  “I’m hanging up,” Millman said.

  He imagined doing it.

  “You can’t hang up,” the voice informed him. “It’s too late for that.”

  Millman stiffened. “Yes, I can,” he said. He tried again to put the handset down.

  “I’m telling you,” the voice said coldly. “You can’t do it anymore.”

  Millman made a frightened sound and tried again.

  “You should be frightened,” said the voice.

  “I’m going to kill you now.”

  Millman’s body spasmed with a shudder. He slammed the handset down on its invisible cradle.

  “I’m going to kill you now,” the voice repeated.

  “Get away from me,” said Millman.

  “Not so.” The man’s voice was one of cruel amusement. “You’re mine now, little porker. Don’t you know who this really is?”

  “Get away from me,” Millman’s voice was trembling now.

  “All right, I’ll tell you who I am,” the man’s voice said. “I have many names. One of them is Prince of Liars. Isn’t that a gas?”

  Millman shook his head, teeth gritted hard. Again and again, he slammed down the unseen handset.

  “You’re wasting time, little porker,” said the man’s voice. “I’m in charge now. Want to hear some other names? Lord of Vermin. Prince of Sinners. Serpent. Goat. Old Nick. Old Davy! Isn’t that a gas?!”

  “Get away from me!” cried Millman. “I won’t listen to you anymore!”

  “Yes you will!” the voice cried back. “You’re mine now and I’m going to kill you!” The maniacal laughter began again.

  Millman reached for the vial of capsules.

  “That won’t do you any good,” the man’s voice told him gleefully. “You can’t escape me now.”

  Millman didn’t try to answer. Shaking uncontrollably, he picked the cap off, shaking two capsules onto his palm.

  “Two?” the man’s voice asked. “Not half enough, old man. You’ll never get away from me. You’re mine, I’m going to kill you dead.”

  The laughter started in again, booming in some cavern in his mind.

  Millman washed a pair of capsules down his throat, water spilling across his chin.

  “Not half enough!” the man’s voice cried, exultantly. He continued laughing with demented joy.

  Millman pressed another capsule in his mouth, another, washed them down.

  “Not half enough!” the man’s voice yelled at him. “You’ve let me in too long!”

  Millman’s palsied hand shoved capsules in his mouth. He washed them down. The glass was empty now. He gulped down capsules dry, his face a mask of terror.

  “Secret government project!” howled the voice. “Inventor! Father! Earthbound spirit! Krol from Mars! The Devil! Take another capsule, David!”

  Millman lay on his right side on the bed, legs drawn up, twitching. God, please take me out of here! he kept begging, sobbing helplessly.

  “Your wish is my command,” the voice said finally.

  Inside his head, the telephone began to ring.

  He lay in his bed, hands clasped behind his head, grinning at the sound.

  Then he chuckled, picking up the handset in his mind. “Ye-es,” he said musically.

  “Please,” the man’s voice said.

  “Please?” he said as though he didn’t understand. “Please what?”

  “Please let me back.”

  “Oh, no,” he chided. “After all the trouble I went to? Keeping you so occupied you never dreamed what was coming? After all that work, you want me to let you back?”

  His face became a mask of feral animosity.

  “Never, asshole,” he said. “You are out of here for good.”

  “No!” the man’s voice cried.

  He snickered. “Gotta go now, babe,” he said.

  He put the handset down, giggling as he visualized the look of shock on Davie’s face. The little shit would try again of course, he knew.

  While he waited for the ringing to begin, he made his plans for tomorrow.

  First, a call to Elaine. Not another fucking nickel, bitch. And tell that pair of cretins you dropped not to bother me again.

  As for Fitch—his eyes lit up—what sheer delight it was going to be to smash that ugly bastard in the mouth and stalk out on that nowhere job.

  Then off to enjoy himself. Travel. Women. Fun. Women.

  He’d worry about money when he ran out of it.

  As for Palmer—he laughed aloud—the clever son of a bitch had it right all the time.

  Now let him try to collect his bill!

  He was cackling at the idea when the telephone began to ring in his head.

  With a hissing smirk, he reached into his mind and yanked out all the wires. The ringing stopped abruptly. There, he thought.

  He wouldn’t need that line any more.

  CU: Mannix

  While Mannix waited for the receiver to be lifted on the other end of the line, he gazed at the back of his right hand. It was a trim, powerful hand, the skin darkly tanned, the nails immaculately manicured. He spread the fingers and drew them hard into a fist. A good hand, strong and healthy-looking, not a sign of age.

  His legs twitched as the intermittent buzzing in the earpiece broke off with a click. “Good afternoon, Renken-Blasker,” said the girl’s voice.

  “Dale Mannix, dear,” he told her. “Burt in?”

  “Yes, Mr. Mannix—right away.” Her tone was properly reverential. Mannix smiled and drew in slowly on his stomach
muscles, glancing downward. His chest was spare and nut-brown. Hard, he thought. Who says I’m sixty-two? I’ll flatten him.

  “What can I do for you, Dale?” Burt Renken’s voice inquired.

  “Just got a new phone,” Mannix told him. “Called to give you the number.”

  “Shoot,” said Renken.

  Mannix looked at the receiver. “276-5090,” he read.

  “Got it,” Renken answered. “Old number out the window?”

  “No, no—just wanted a second one, exclusively for business.” He was briefly, pleasantly conscious of his voice—its warmth and variations.

  As he hung up, Mannix stared across the wide expanse of lawn toward the pool. Inger was rubbing tanning lotion over her nude, tawny form. Mannix shivered as she squirted oil drops across her breasts and rubbed them lingeringly into the skin. He thought of going out there in the sun with her. In his imagination, he could feel the soft, hot moistness of her skin.

  He made a grumbling sound and picked the script back up. Have to learn these bloody lines, he told himself. He propped the handtooled-leather binder on his lap and tried to concentrate. He’d never been too good at reading, though. Not that he didn’t have a memory he’d match against the best. No one—but no one—had a better grasp of dialogue than he did. It was the reading itself that bored him. All that damned descriptive garbage.

  Mannix crossed his muscular legs and cleared his throat, his eyes on the poolside chaise again. Inger was on her stomach now. She stretched out, resting her head on her arms. What was she thinking of? he wondered. Who was she thinking of?

  Flexion in his neck again. Trapezius, he thought. He clenched his teeth, visualizing tension spasms in the damaged muscle. He stared out at her naked form. To look inside that golden head, he thought—to see, to know.

  He glanced at the telephone suddenly, the idea sprung to full bloom in his mind. Smiling, he picked up the receiver and dialed their old number. Fortunately, Maria was out shopping. He started as he heard the jangling of the telephone in the entry hall. To be on both ends of the line at once was an odd sensation. He couldn’t hear the poolside telephone.

  He smiled as Inger reached out lazily for the receiver. It made him feel godlike to realize that he knew everything and she knew nothing about that ringing telephone beside her.

  She lifted the receiver. “Hello?” she said.

  That voice—he shivered at the sound of it. Casually, he reached across the table by his leather chair, removed a tissue from its dispenser, folded it in quarters, and held it over the mouthpiece. “Hello,” he replied.

  “Who’s this?” asked Inger.

  “Don’t you know?” he asked. His famous blue-grey eyes were crinkling at the corners. He could see them as he had so many times – in close-up, on wide-screen, in Technicolor.

  “No,” she said. Interest or impatience? Mannix lost his smile. He couldn’t tell.

  “Let’s just say a fond admirer.”

  Inger murmured. “Oh?”

  Ice water running up the backs of his legs. It wasn’t impatience. “Come on, you know,” he said.

  “I don’t,” she protested—mildly.

  Mannix turned his head, releasing shaky breath. She knew, he told himself. She was putting him on, that’s all. “Sure you do,” he insisted. He felt that internationally famous knot of vein at his right temple starting to pulse. “Take a guess.”

  “How can I?” she asked.

  Mannix fumbled on the chairside table, feeling for his eyeglasses. “Try,” he said impulsively. “We’ve met, you know.” He realized abruptly that his voice was that of Gresham, the sly Chicago lawyer in Point of Order, Universal, 1958. His agent had told him he was crazy to do that one, that it would hurt his image.

  “Met where?” she was asking.

  “One of those parties,” he answered.

  He had the glasses now. He slid them hastily across his ears and nose bridge. Inger sprang into focus. “What do you look like?” she asked him.

  You’d better know it’s me, he thought. The planes of his face were hardened now—that look of threatening anger movie audiences knew the world over: woe betide his enemies now. He looked out coldly at her, his neck beginning to stiffen. “If I told you what I look like,” he said, “you’d know who I am and the game would be over.”

  He covered the mouthpiece, sucked in breath. Hell, let it go, a voice suggested. No, he answered. He’d suspected this for some time now. Let it come out.

  “All right,” she said, “let’s see.”

  He waited.

  “You’re—fifty. No, no—sixty,” she said.

  Mannix grinned. You knew all along, you Kostlich kraut, he thought, delighted. He closed his eyes abruptly, trying not to recognize the surge of gratified relief that filled him. “That old,” he heard himself say.

  “I’m only teasing,” she said.

  Mannix opened his eyes.

  “You’re under forty, I imagine,” Inger said.

  “That’s right,” Mannix felt his heartbeat, slow and heavy. “Thirty- eight to be exact.” He stared out through the window. Inger had her left arm pressed beneath her breasts, nudging them upward. “That’s not old at all,” she said.

  She didn’t know. Mannix felt ill. “No, it isn’t old,” he said with Gresham’s voice. “I’m still completely capable of—” (beat): he saw it written on a script page “—quite a bit.”

  He felt his flesh grow cold as Inger’s soft laugh drifted from the earpiece. “I’ll bet you are,” she said.

  Mannix blinked. His head felt light. “I am,” he told her. “Interested?”

  He shuddered as she slid her feet back on the chaise, pushing up her knees. Her legs remained together for an instant, they slumped sideways and apart. “Why should I be interested in you?” she asked.

  Mannix felt the pulsing at his temple quicken. Her tone, her posture. She was willing.

  He twitched as Inger sat up, turned around, and looked back toward the study window. She did know! Mannix felt his heartbeat jolt. He waited for her smile, her wave, some sign of recognition. He deserved her mockery for this. He’d take it gracefully and—

  Mannix felt himself go numb as Inger turned back and reclined once more. “Well?” she asked.

  “Well, what?” She had to recognize his voice now—he wasn’t even trying. But he had to try! Abruptly, he was back inside the other man. “Why should you be interested in me? Because I’m good in bed. Damn good.” Please, he thought. Please tell me that you know it’s me.

  “Are you really?” Inger said.

  Mannix shivered violently. “If I was there I’d show you.”

  That laugh again. He’d fought the realization for a long time, but he knew it now: it was an obscene laugh. Inger was obscene. “If you were here,” she said, “you’d have to show me because I’m lying in the sun without a stitch on.”

  He stared out through the window at her. Now her legs were far apart, her left hand was back behind her head. She’s ready for you, Mister, Mannix thought.

  The swimming pool reflected like a mirror in the moonlight. Mannix stared at it. Bel Air was soundless at this time of night. He heard a bird chirp somewhere in the darkness.

  He turned and looked at Inger.

  Her body was stretched out on the bed like some sleek, well fed animal. She is an animal, he thought. Less than half an hour before she’d straddled him with panting fierceness. “Kostlich! Kostlich!” (Delicious! Delicious!) Who had she really straddled in the darkness though? (She had turned the lamp off, not he.) That man who phoned her this afternoon? He hadn’t seen her so excited in a year.

  Mannix walked across the carpeting and stood beside the bed, gazed down at the golden flood of hair across the pillow, at her browned, voluptuous figure.

  All through dinner he had waited for the laughter. They’d gone over to The Swiss House—she doted on Viennese cooking. They’d gotten one of the tables in back and, as they’d eaten, he’d kept waiting for the laughte
r to begin—for her to tell him how ridiculous he was. At one point, when he’d seen her smiling to herself, he’d asked her what was funny — felt his hands begin to shake with final hopeful readiness.

  “Nothing,” she had said. He’d stared at her and known that everything he’d feared for all these years was true: he was that most despised and ludicrous of men—the cuckold.

  Mannix leaned over tremblingly and pulled out the drawer of his bedside table. Reaching in, he drew out his pistol and pointed it at Inger.

  No. He shook his head. Ruin his career for her? He smiled contemptuously at her slack Germanic features. Thirty-seven years he’d been a star. He’d be insane to end that for a moment’s dubious revenge. He put the pistol back into the drawer.

  He took off his robe and lay down on the bed beside her. Now that he’d made up his mind to divorce her, he was amused at himself for having thought, even for a moment, that she was clever enough to have fooled him.

  He clucked. Too bad, he thought. Marriage number four gone down the tube. Amusing that, for the first time, it was not because of his unfaithfulness. The public would never believe it, of course. Not that they should—the other enhanced his image better. Mr. Romance. He winced. What idiot columnist had made that up?

  It was good all morning. Makeup at six, shooting at seven. The scenes were long and his. There were a lot of takes without excessive waits for setups. With what spare time there was, he entertained the cast with anecdotes about the Golden Years —memories laced with humor, charm, and wit. He did it beautifully. To lure and hold with words—to be “on” before a rapt, attentive audience—there was nothing like it. It was almost sensual.

  Then it was over and he was in his dressing room. Lunch was called. He wasn’t hungry. He sat inside the lavish trailer, staring at the telephone. How long had she been cheating on him? In the almost three years of their marriage, how many times?

  Mannix jerked the telephone receiver off its cradle and dialed his home number. As if it were someone else’s hand, he watched it draw the neatly pressed and folded handkerchief from the pocket of his grey slacks and press it down across the mouthpiece. Now what? asked his mind. You’re dumping her. Isn’t that enough?

  It’s not, he thought.