Harlan Ellison - Deathbird Stories

The first message he had from her was in the lightflesh of the Newsweek sign on the other side of 46th Street. He was sweeping out the front of the bookstore when he looked up and saw ROGER! UP HERE! ROGER! spelled out in the rapidly changing lights. It spasmed and changed and became an advertisement for timely news. He blinked and shook his head. Then he saw the crimson spiral shining through his shirt, flickering on and off. There was a soft cotton candy feeling in his stomach. He swept the cigarette butts and dustballs furiously…out onto the sidewalk and across the sidewalk and into the gutter. He walked back to the bookstore, looking up and over his shoulder only as he stepped through the doorway. The sign was as he had always seen it before. Nothing strange there.

At his dinner break, he walked to the papaya stand near the corner of 42nd and Broadway and stood at the counter chatting with Caruso (which was not his name, but because he wanted to become an opera singer and went into the basement of the juice stand and sang arias from Il Trovatore and I Pagliacci, that was the name by which he was known).

“How do you feel?” Caruso asked him.

“Oh, I’m okay. I’m a little tired.”

“You been to the doctor?”

“No. They said I didn’t need to come around unless I hurt or something seemed wrong.”

“You got to take care of yourself. You can’t fool around with your health, yeah?” He was genuinely concerned.

“How’re you?” Roger Charna asked. Caruso wrapped the semitransparent square of serrated-edged paper around the hot dog and handed the bunned frank to him. Charna reached for the plastic squeeze-bottle of mustard.

“Couldn’t be better,” Caruso said. He drew off a large papaya juice and slid it across the counter. “I’m into Gilbert & Sullivan. Pirates of Penzance. I hear there’s a big Gilbert & Sullivan revival coming on.”

Roger Charna ate without making a reply. He felt very sorry for Caruso. When he had first met him, the boy was not quite twenty, working at the stand, high hopes for a singing career. Now he was going to fat, his hair was thinning prematurely, and the dreams were only warm-bed whispers to impress the girls Caruso hustled off Times Square. It would come to nothing. Ten years from now, should Roger come back, he knew Caruso would still be there, singing in the basement, pulling 35¢ slices of pizza (that would probably cost $1.25) from the big Grimaldi oven, filling the sugar jars, carrying cases of Coke syrup downstairs to be stored, the dreams losing their color, gravity pulling it all down.

Then he realized he might still be on Times Square, ten years from now. The pity backed up in its channel and washed over him.

The 7-Up sign winked once and began pulsing. His chest spiral picked up the beat. Pain hit him. Roger looked up and the sign was flickering on and off. His chest spiral had changed color, now pulsed deep blue in sync with the 7-Up sign, right through his shirt. The girl on the sign moved smoothly and directly to stare down at him. Her mouth began moving. Roger Charna could not read lips.

“Caruso.” The counterman turned from reloading the hot dog broiler and smiled. “Huh?” Roger pointed across the street, up at the 7-Up sign. “Take a look over there and tell me what you see.” Caruso moved to the end of the counter and stared up. “What?” Roger pointed to the sign. “The sign, the 7-Up sign.” Caruso looked again. “What am I supposed to see?” Roger sighed and finished his hot dog. “I think I’ll go see the doctor tomorrow morning.”

“You got to take care of yourself. You been a very sick guy, yeah?”

Roger nodded and laid out the coins in payment for the dog and papaya. Caruso pushed them back with the heel of his hand. “Iss onna house.” Roger found himself still nodding.

The coins back in his pants pocket, he walked up Broadway to the bookstore, wishing the New York Times still had its neon newsservice on the island at 42nd Street.

It might all come clear if whoever was trying to reach him had free access to unlimited language.

By this time Roger knew either someone was trying to talk to him, or he was going insane. Odds were bad.

He was invited to a party. He went because they asked him. He paid a dollar at the door: a woman who had had her left breast removed for what he found out later were non-carcinogenic reasons, took the money. She was topless; she smiled a great deal. He also discovered, later in the evening, that these people had answered an advertisement in an underground newspaper. It had been headed with a photograph from Tod Browning’s Freaks— pinhead twins joined at the rump. Roger did not feel at ease with them.

In the group was a man who sought carnal knowledge of blimps. He had been arrested three times for trying to fuck the Goodyear dirigible. Even among his own kind he was looked on with distaste; unable to find the species of sex partners his pathology demanded, he had grown steadily more perverted and had taken to attacking helicopters; the mere mention of an autogyro gave him a noticeable erection.

He was offered a sloe gin fizz in a pink frosted glass by a young woman who removed her glass eye and sucked on it while discussing the moral imperatives of the sponge boycott in Brooksville, Florida. She rolled the eye around on her tongue and Roger walked away quickly.

“The dollar was for the spaghetti,” explained a man with a prosthetic arm and a leather cone where his nose should have been. “My wife would have told you about that when she invited you, because you’re a celebrity and we certainly don’t want to charge you, but if we made an exception, well, everyone would want the dollar back. But you can have as much spaghetti as you want.” He pulled the cone forward on its elastic band and scratched at the raw, red scar-tissue beneath. “Actually, I’ll tell you what: come on in the bathroom for a couple of minutes and I can slip the buck back to you, they’ll never know.” Roger slipped sidewise around a bookcase and left the man scratching.

The room was rather nice, large and airy, filled with kinetic sculptures and found object constructs that covered the walls and dominated the floor space. There were half a hundred light paintings of bent neon tubing and fluorescent designs. They looked expensive. Roger wondered why his dollar was necessary.

Seven people were seated at the feet of a moon-faced woman perched on a three-legged aluminum stool. The entire left side of her face was blotched with a huge strawberry birthmark. She had a coatimundi on her shoulder; it was nibbling leaves of lettuce she had safety-pinned to her dress like epaulets.

A man who bore a startling resemblance to a plucked carrion bird snagged Roger’s arm as he moved toward the front door. He stammered hideously. “Uh…uh…uh…” he babbled, till something snapped in his right cheek and he launched into a convoluted diatribe that began with a confession of his having been defrocked as a molecular biologist, veered insanely through a recitation of the man’s affection for Bermuda shorts, and reached a far horizon at which he said, with eyes rolling: “Now everybody doesn’t know this,” and he pulled Roger closer, “but the universe, the entire frigging universe is going to collapse around everyone’s ears in just seventy-two billion years. I smoke a lot.”

Roger skinned loose, and turning, thumped against a dwarf who had been surreptitiously trying to look up the skirt of a young woman with a harelip. “Excuse me,” Roger said, assisting the dwarf to his feet. He brushed him off and started to move, but the dwarf had thrown both arms around Roger’s leg. “They remaindered me,” the dwarf said, rather pathetically. “Before, I swear before the damned book had a chance, they remaindered me. Can you perceive the pain, the exquisite pain of being carried into Marboro’s on Third and seeing a stack, a virtual, a veritable, I mean motherGod a phallic Annapuroa moun tain of copies of the finest, what I mean the sincerest study of the anopheles mosquito ever written. That book was a work of love, excuse me for using the word but I mean to say ardor; and those butchers at Doubleday, those mau-maus, my God. they’re vivisectionists, for Pete’s sake…if he were alive today, Ferdinand de Lesseps would absolutely whirl in his grave.”