Edgar Pangborn - A Mirror for Observers

“Kind of rough on Gimbel’s Basement. Abe, the Black Death of the fourteenth century probably knocked over only about half of Europe, and that was in a time when everybody and his brother had fleas, to make things easy for Bacillus pestis. The flu of 1918 killed more than the First World War, but statistically it hardly made a dent in the human race.”

He rolled his forehead on his arms. “Yes, they might find it necessary to use a few hydrogen bombs to help things along. That’ll do it, that and a rising water level.”

“Abe, I really do believe there’s time for coffee before the end of the world.”

He sighed sharply and stood up, smiling faintly, perhaps making up his mind, or yielding to my insistence only because he no longer cared much about anything. “All right. Let me get it. I won’t run away.”

“You mean you won’t ever run away from anything again?”

He glanced back at me from the doorway, stooping to push his shoes on. “Why, I wouldn’t even predict, and I quote, whether the baby will have a harelip. You like it strong and black?”

“Strong enough to grow short hair on a billiard ball.”

We were still lingering over breakfast in the kitchen — a good breakfast at that, and Abraham didn’t refuse to enjoy it — when Sharon came.

I write that baldly, because I don’t know any words that tell what it is that happens when someone enters a room. The air changes. The whole orientation is something that never happened before. If the person is Sharon, the changed air has spice and sparkle, the orientation is toward warmth, toward what we call hope: merely another name for a desire to go on living. A lot of talk, maybe, for the process of hearing the doorbell, telling Abraham to sit still, walking through to the door, seeing a bright bit of human stuff in a wrapping of bunny fur — and of course, being Sharon, no hat.

“I’m coming in anyway, so may I? How can anyone be so early? How do I know it’s early? Because you’ve still got egg on your chin.” She kicked the door shut behind her. “Nup, on this side.” She rubbed the place with a peewee handkerchief and pulled me down to kiss it. “Just to make it well, poor egg.” She flung the coat somewhere or other. She was wearing leaf-brown trousers — they don’t call ’em slacks any more — and a crisp yellow blouse that made music with ocean-blue eyes. It’s always trousers nowadays except for evening dress-up, unfortunate for fat girls but fine for Sharon. “Smoke me a light, Will — I mean light me — I mean I couldn’t stay away. You won.”

“Things happened when you couldn’t sleep?”

She watched me with a rather helpless smile above the match flame. “Do you telepath or something? Not that I’d mind awfully…. Oh, I began remembering more and more, couldn’t stop — please, Will, without prejudice to my right of being nine years older, huh? But — take me to him.”

“Sure?”

“Why, you sevenfold so-and-so, I can’t rest till I see him. Once anyway. And you knew I couldn’t. Green Tower, you said — I sort of wouldn’t care to go alone. Well, look—” She unfastened a button of my shirt, puffed a lungful of smoke through the opening, and stood back to study the effect. “Like that, you — you character. Make people start smoldering with silly ideas, you’ve got to take the consequences.”

I slipped an arm around her and walked her into the kitchen. I felt the shock in her like an electric charge, and took my arm away.

Abraham was standing on the other side of the cluttered table. I saw his small brown hands spread out, finger tips supporting him, and heard him say raggedly: “Don’t look now, Will, but you’re still smoking.”

I ignored that, as Sharon did. I don’t know how long they stood quietly, staring at each other. Long enough for a universe to spin a while. I remember picking up a spoon and setting it down with great care lest I hurt the silence. Neither had spoken when Sharon walked around the table. She raised her hands to his forehead and moved them down slowly, over his eyes and cheeks and mouth, until they were resting on his shoulders. He said nothing, but she spoke as if answering something, with gravity and a little surprise: “Why, did you think you could love any woman but me?”

I said: “For your information, Abraham, the world won’t blow up.” He might have heard it; I don’t know. I stepped into the living room and shrugged on my overcoat. At the door I glanced down and muttered: “Nah, Elmis, not slippers.” My shoes were by the armchair where I had kicked them off, so I studiously shoved my old four-toed feet into them. I didn’t hear any conversation from the kitchen. I went out to the elevator and rode down and walked a mile or so into the city’s morning. The wind was chilly but very fresh and sweet.

After a time I was aware that someone was following me. I put on an act of window-shopping in one or two places, but couldn’t get a fair look at him. A small man in nondescript gray-brown, busily peering into windows himself, his face averted. I tried a few aimless turnings, enough to make certain that I was his quarry: there was no doubt of it; he clung. I climbed to Second Avenue Upper Level, and walked a few blocks before pausing at a bus stop to look back. He was no longer with me. That I found strange — if a bus came now he’d lose me — unless he had turned over the task to some other shadow. I strolled away from the bus stop and entered a drugstore on the Upper Level, finding a seat at the soda counter from which I could study the sidewalk over my coffee. No one else came in while I lounged there. No one even looked in, except a harmless-seeming woman who halted to glance at the menu in the window and moved on.

I couldn’t detect anyone tailing me as I gradually retraced my course to the apartment house. I had used up about an hour and a half. It was past ten o’clock and the sky had grown dingy, preparing a spring storm.

Someone with a familiar back was hurrying for the self-service elevator when I came into the lobby. Bright platinum hair, a fine hip-swing. Not good. I grabbed the elevator door as she was about to close it. “Oh, hel lo, Will! But how lucky! I was on my way to see you.”

“Fine.” I searched a bumbling and semiparalyzed brain for something that might work. “Things are kind of upset — can’t I take you out somewhere? Had breakfast? Coffee anyhow—”

“Oh my, no!” She batted cute eyelashes at me. “Too much trouble, and anyway I had breakfast.” She poked the button and the cage started up. I could have asked how she happened to know my floor. I didn’t. “I don’t mind a bit, Will — I’ve seen how you helpless men keep house, everything just everywhere—”

“But—”

“Now, that’s all right, don’t give it a thought!” She captured my arm and hugged it to her side. “Simply had to talk to you about something, awfully important, that is to me—” Miriam Dane chattered on, managing to say actually nothing at all, until we were in front of my door.

I tried again. “Got a friend staying with me, he’s been ill and — well, sleeping late. Small apartment. Really be better if we—”

“Now you stop fretting. I’ll be so quiet, and it’s only for a minute.” She wasn’t exactly the woman I had met at Max’s. In some subtle fashion she looked older. I had not sensed any steel of determination in her then. She had it now, and there was coldness in the steel. She quit smiling and chattering, because I had quit being Santa Claus. She watched me as if she intended to hypnotize the key ring out of my pocket. It wouldn’t do. I stared back at her, not wanting to get rough or disagreeable, not reaching for my keys either. The smile was all gone. A tiny shoe with a rhinestone buckle began to tap on the floor. She said without any pretense, evenly and clearly: “It’s necessary that I see Abe Brown.”