The button.
He pressed it, grabbed up the record albums, stood in front of the gate as it incredibly slowly creaked its noisy protesting way open.
A brown-uniformed man carrying a gun appeared. Jason said, “I had to go back to the quibble for something.”
“Perfectly all right, sir,” the man in the brown uniform said. “I saw you leave and I knew you’d be back.”
“Is she insane?” Jason asked him.
“I’m not in a position to know, sir,” the man in the brown uniform said, and he backed away, touching his visored cap.
The front door of the house hung open as he had left it. He scrambled through, descended brick steps, found himself once more in the radically irregular living room with its million-mile-high ceiling. “Alys!” he said. Was she in the room? He carefully looked in all directions; as he had done when searching for the button he phased his way through every visible inch of the room. The bar at the far end with the handsome walnut drug cabinet…couch, chairs. Pictures on the walls. A face in one of the pictures jeered at him but he did not care; it could not leave the wall. The quad phonograph…
His records. Play them.
He lifted at the lid of the phonograph but it wouldn’t open. Why? he asked. Locked? No, it slid out. He slid it out, with a terrible noise, as if he had destroyed it. Tone arm. Spindle. He got one of his records out of its sleeve and placed in on the spindle. I can work these things, he said, and turned on the amplifiers, setting the mode to phono. Switch that activated the changer. He twisted it. The tone arm lifted; the turntable began to spin, agonizingly slowly. What was the matter with it? Wrong speed? No; he checked. Thirty-three and a third. The mechanism of the spindle heaved and the record dropped.
Loud noise of the needle hitting the lead-in groove. Crackles of dust, clicks. Typical of old quad records. Easily misused and damaged; all you had to do was breathe on them.
Background hiss. More crackles.
No music.
Lifting the tone arm, he set it farther in. Great roaring crash as the stylus struck the surface; he winced, sought the volume control to turn it down. Still no music. No sound of himself singing.
The strength the mescaline had over him began now to waver; he felt coldly, keenly sober. The other record. Swiftly he got it from its jacket and sleeve, placed it on the spindle, rejected the first record.
Sound of the needle touching plastic surface. Background hiss and the inevitable crackles and clicks. Still no music.
The records were blank.
PART THREE
Never may my woes be relieved,
Since pity is fled;
And tears and sighs and groans my weary days
Of all joys have deprived.
21
“Alys!” Jason Taverner called loudly. No answer. Is it the mescaline? he asked himself. He made his way clumsily from the phonograph toward the door through which Alys had gone. A long hallway, deep-pile wool carpet. At the far end stairs with a black iron railing, leading up to the second floor.
He strode as quickly as possible up the hall, to the stairs, and then, step by step, up the stairs.
The second floor. A foyer, with an antique Hepplewhite table off to one side, piled high with Box magazines. That, weirdly, caught his attention; who, Felix or Alys, or both, read a low-class mass-circulation pornographic magazine like Box? He passed on then, still—because of the mescaline, certainly—seeing small details. The bathroom; that was where he would find her.
“Alys,” he said grimly; perspiration trickled from his forehead down his nose and cheeks; his armpits had become steamy and damp with the emotions cascading through his body. “God damn it,” he said, speaking to her although he could not see her. “There’s no music on those records, no me. They’re fakes. Aren’t they?” Or is it the mescaline? he asked himself. “I’ve got to know!” he said. “Make them play if they’re okay. Is the phonograph broken, is that it? Needle point or stylus or whatever you call them broken off?” It happens, he thought. Maybe it’s riding on the tops of the grooves.
A half-open door; he pushed it wide. A bedroom, with the bed unmade. And on the floor a mattress with a sleeping bag thrown onto it. A little pile of men’s supplies: shaving cream, deodorant, razor, aftershave, comb…a guest, he thought, here before but now gone.
“Is anybody here?” he yelled.
Silence.
Ahead he saw the bathroom; past the partially opened door he caught sight of an amazingly old tub on painted lion’s legs. An antique, he thought, even down to their bathtub. He loped haltingly down the hall, past other doors, to the bathroom; reaching it, he pushed the door aside.
And saw, on the floor, a skeleton.
It wore black shiny pants, leather shirt, chain belt with wrought-iron buckle. The foot bones had cast aside the high-heeled shoes. A few tufts of hair clung to the skull, but outside of that, there remained nothing: the eyes had gone, all the flesh had gone. And the skeleton itself had become yellow.
“God,” Jason said, swaying; he felt his vision fail and his sense of gravity shift: his middle ear fluctuated in its pressures so that the room caromed around him, silently in perpetual ball motion. Like a pourout of Ferris wheel at a child’s circus.
He shut his eyes, hung on to the wall, then, finally, looked again.
She has died, he thought. But when? A hundred thousand years ago? A few minutes ago?
Why has she died? he asked himself.
Is it the mescaline? That I took? Is this real?
It’s real.
Bending, he touched the leather fringed shirt. The leather felt soft and smooth; it hadn’t decayed. Time hadn’t touched her clothing; that meant something but he did not comprehend what. Just her, he thought. Everything else in this house is the same as it was. So it can’t be the mescaline affecting me. But I can’t be sure, he thought.
Downstairs. Get out of here.
He loped erratically back down the hall, still in the process of scrambling to his feet, so that he ran bent over like an ape of some unusual kind. He seized the black iron railing, descended two, three steps at once, stumbled and fell, caught himself and hauled himself back up to a standing position. In his chest his heart labored, and his lungs, overtaxed, inflated and emptied like a bellows.
In an instant he had sped across the living room to the front door—then, for reasons obscure to him but somehow important, he snatched up the two records from the phonograph, stuffed them into their jackets, carried them with him through the front door of the house, out into the bright warm sun of midday.
“Leaving, sir?” the brown-uniformed private cop asked, noticing him standing there, his chest heaving.
“I’m sick,” Jason said.
“Sorry to hear that, sir. Can I get you anything?”
“The keys to the quibble.”
“Miss Buckman usually leaves the keys in the ignition,” the cop said.
“I looked,” Jason said, panting.
The cop said, “I’ll go ask Miss Buckman for you.”
“No,” Jason said, and then thought, But if it’s the mescaline it’s okay. Isn’t it?
“‘No’?” the cop said, and all at once his expression changed. “Stay where you are,” he said. “Don’t head toward that quibble.” Spinning, he dashed into the house.
Jason sprinted across the grass, to the asphalt square and the parked quibble. The keys; were they in the ignition? No. Her purse. He seized it and dumped everything out on the seats. A thousand objects, but no keys. And then, crushing him, a hoarse scream.
At the front gate of the house the cop appeared, his face distorted. He stood sideways, reflexively, lifted his gun, held it with both hands, and fired at Jason. But the gun wavered; the cop was trembling too badly.
Crawling out of the far side of the quibble, Jason lurched across the thick moist lawn, toward the nearby oak trees.
Again the cop fired. Again he missed. Jason heard him curse; the cop started to run toward hi
m, trying to get closer to him; then all at once the cop spun and sped back into the house.
Jason reached the trees. He crashed through dry underbrush, limbs of bushes snapping as he forced his way through. A high adobe wall…and what had Alys said? Broken bottles cemented on top? He crawled along the base of the wall, fighting the thick underbrush, then abruptly found himself facing a broken wooden door; it hung partially open, and beyond it he saw other houses and a street.
It was not the mescaline, he realized. The cop saw it, too. Her lying there. The ancient skeleton. As if dead all these years.
On the far side of the street a woman, with an armload of packages, was unlocking the door of her flipflap.
Jason made his way across the street, forcing his mind to work, forcing the dregs of the mescaline away. “Miss,” he said, gasping.
Startled, the woman looked up. Young, heavy-set, but with beautiful auburn hair. “Yes?” she said nervously, surveying him.
“I’ve been given a toxic dose of some drug,” Jason said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Will you drive me to a hospital?”
Silence. She continued to stare at him wide-eyed; he said nothing—he merely stood panting, waiting. Yes or no; it had to be one or the other.
The heavy-set girl with the auburn hair said, “I—I’m not a very good driver. I just got my license last week.”
“I’ll drive,” Jason said.
“But I won’t come along.” She backed away, clutching her armload of badly-wrapped brown-paper parcels. Probably she had been on her way to the post office.
“Can I have the keys?” he said; he extended his hand. Waited.
“But you might pass out and then my flipflap—”
“Come with me then,” he said.
She handed him the keys and crept into the rear seat of the flipflap. Jason, his heart pulsing with relief, got in behind the wheel, stuck the key into the ignition, turned the motor on, and, in a moment, sent the flipflap flipflapping up into the sky, at its maximum speed of forty knots an hour. It was, he noted for some odd reason, a very inexpensive model flipflap: a Ford Greyhound. An economy flipflap. And not new.
“Are you in great pain?” the girl asked anxiously; her face, in his rear-view mirror, still showed nervousness, even panic. The situation was too much for her.
“No,” he said.
“What was the drug?”
“They didn’t say.” The mescaline had virtually worn off, now; thank God his six physiology had the strength to combat it: he did not relish the idea of piloting a slow-moving flipflap through the midday Los Angeles traffic while on a hit of mescaline. And, he thought savagely, a big hit. Despite what she said.
She. Alys. Why are the records blank? he asked silently. The records—where were they? He peered about, stricken. Oh. On the seat beside him; automatically he had thrust them in as he himself got into the flipflap. So they’re okay. I can try to play them again on another phonograph.
“The nearest hospital,” the heavy-set girl said, “is St. Martin’s at Thirty-fifth and Webster. It’s small, but I went there to have a wart removed from my hand, and they seemed very conscientious and kind.”
“We’ll go there,” Jason said.
“Are you feeling worse or better?”
“Better,” he said.
“Did you come from the Buckman’s house?”
“Yes.” He nodded.
The girl said, “Is it true that they’re brother and sister, Mr. and Mrs. Buckman? I mean—”
“Twins,” he said.
“I understand that,” the girl said. “But you know, it’s strange; when you see them together it’s as if they’re husband and wife. They kiss and hold hands, and he’s very deferential to her and then sometimes they have terrible fights.” The girl remained silent a moment and then leaning forward said, “My name is Mary Anne Dominic. What is your name?”
“Jason Taverner,” he informed her. Not that it meant anything. After all. After what had seemed for a moment—but then the girl’s voice broke into his thoughts.
“I’m a potter,” she said shyly. “These are pots I’m taking to the post office to mail to stores in northern California, especially to Gump’s in San Francisco and Frazer’s in Berkeley.”
“Do you do good work?” he asked; almost all of his mind, his faculties, remained fixed in time, fixed at the instant he had opened the bathroom door and seen her—it—on the floor. He barely heard Miss Dominic’s voice.
“I try to. But you never know. Anyhow, they sell.”
“You have strong hands,” he said, for want of anything better to say; his words still emerged semireflexively, as if he were uttering them with only a fragment of his mind.
“Thank you,” Mary Anne Dominic said.
Silence.
“You passed the hospital,” Mary Anne Dominic said. “It’s back a little way and to the left.” Her original anxiety had now crawled back into her voice. “Are you really going there or is this some—”
“Don’t be scared,” he said, and this time he paid attention to what he said; he used all his ability to make his tone kind and reassuring. “I’m not an escaped student. Nor am I an escapee from a forced-labor camp.” He turned his head and looked directly into her face. “But I am in trouble.”
“Then you didn’t take a toxic drug.” Her voice wavered. It was as if that which she had most feared throughout her whole life had finally overtaken her.
“I’ll land us,” he said. “To make you feel safer. This is far enough for me. Please don’t freak; I won’t hurt you.” But the girl sat rigid and stricken, waiting for—well, neither of them knew.
At an intersection, a busy one, he landed at the curb, quickly opened the door. But then, on impulse, he remained within the flipflap for a moment, turned still in the girl’s direction.
“Please get out,” she quavered. “I don’t mean to be impolite, but I’m really scared. You hear about hunger-crazed students who somehow get through the barricades around the campuses—”
“Listen to me,” he said sharply, breaking into her flow of speech.
“Okay.” She composed herself, hands on her lapful of packages, dutifully—and fearfully—waiting.
Jason said, “You shouldn’t be frightened so easily. Or life is going to be too much for you.”
“I see.” She nodded humbly, listening, paying attention as if she were at a college classroom lecture.
“Are you always afraid of strangers?” he asked her.
“I guess so.” Again she nodded; this time she hung her head as if he had admonished her. And in a fashion he had.
“Fear,” Jason said, “can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Mary Anne Dominic said. “One day about a year ago there was this dreadful pounding on my door, and I ran into the bathroom and locked myself in and pretended I wasn’t there, because I thought somebody was trying to break in…and then later I found out that the woman upstairs had got her hand caught in the drain of her sink—she has one of those Disposall things—and a knife had gotten down into it and she reached her hand down to get it and got caught. And it was her little boy at the door—”
“So you do understand what I mean,” Jason interrupted.
“Yes. I wish I wasn’t that way. I really do. But I still am.”
Jason said, “How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
That surprised him; she seemed much younger. Evidently she had not ever really grown up. He felt sympathy for her; how hard it must have been for her to let him take over her flipflap. And her fears had been correct in one respect: he had not been asking for help for the reason he claimed.
He said to her, “You’re a very nice person.”
“Thank you,” she said dutifully. Humbly.
“See that coffee shop over there?” he said, pointing to a
modern, well-patronized cafe. “Let’s go over there. I want to talk to you.” I have to talk to someone, anyone, he thought, or six or not I am going to lose my mind.
“But,” she protested anxiously, “I have to get my packages into the post office before two so they’ll get the midafternoon pickup for the Bay Area.”
“We’ll do that first, then,” he said. Reaching for the ignition switch, he pulled out the key, handed it back to Mary Anne Dominic. “You drive. As slowly as you want.”
“Mr.—Taverner,” she said. “I just want to be let alone.”
“No,” he said. “You shouldn’t be alone. It’s killing you; it’s undermining you. All the time, every day, you should be somewhere with people.”
Silence. And then Mary Anne said, “The post office is at Forty-ninth and Fulton. Could you drive? I’m sort of nervous.”
It seemed to him a great moral victory; he felt pleased.
He took back the key, and shortly, they were on their way to Forty-ninth and Fulton.
22
Later, they sat in a booth at a coffee shop, a clean and attractive place with young waitresses and a reasonably loose patronage. The jukebox drummed out Louis Panda’s “Memory of Your Nose.” Jason ordered coffee only; Miss Dominic had a fruit salad and iced tea.
“What are those two records you’re carrying?” she asked.
He handed them to her.
“Why, they’re by you. If you’re Jason Taverner. Are you?”
“Yes.” He was certain of that, at least.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you sing,” Mary Anne Dominic said. “I’d love to, but I don’t usually like pop music; I like those great old-time folk singers out of the past, like Buffy St. Marie. There’s nobody now who could sing like Buffy.”
“I agree,” he said somberly, his mind still returning to the house, the bathroom, the escape from the frantic brown-uniformed private cop. It wasn’t the mescaline, he told himself once again. Because the cop saw it, too.