Stephen Leigh - Card Sharks

"My mother went crazy," he said then, "after the wild card business. Most likely, I was a big part of it. I don't know. Maybe it would have happened anyway. Maybe there was a schizoid gene involved. I loved her, and I saw her change. She spent her last years in asylums, died in one. I thought about it a lot in those days, wondering whether I might wind up that way, too. I was afraid of that kind of change. Then every time I took drugs to postpone sleeping I did go bonkers. I'm sure I know what she felt like, some of the things she went through…."

"Wouldn't it have been better just to sleep then?" Hannah asked. "After all, it was going to happen anyway."

Croyd turned and he was smiling.

"That's the same thing Rudo asked me," he said, and he walked slowly back to the table.

"I didn't know the answer then," he continued, "but he helped me to find it. It's a part of my life lie." He seated himself and folded his hands before him. "The way I came to see it, sleep for me represents a big unknown change. In a way, it's like death, and all of my normal death-fears are attached to it. But there's more to it than that. Rudo made me look into it deeply and I saw that my fear of insanity is also there. I always know that I'll be changed, and at some primitive level of my mind I fear that I'll wake up psychotic, like her, and it'll never go away. I saw her change too much."

He laughed then.

"Ironic," he said, "the way we make these stories we're always telling ourselves work. In a way, I drive myself crazy regularly to keep from going crazy. That's one of my places of irrationality. Everybody's got them."

"I'd think that once a therapist discovered that his first order of business would be to try to get rid of it."

Croyd nodded.

"Rudo told me that that's what most of them would try to do. But he wasn't at all certain but that it might be serving just that function — keeping me sane in the long run."

She shook her head.

"You've lost me," she said.

"Understandable. This part doesn't apply to nats. It has only to do with manifestations of the wild card virus. Rudo, as I said, had read all of the literature on the virus. He'd been impressed by certain conjectures based on anecdotal evidence, since there was no way of running controlled studies on them, due to the effect that there is a psychosomatic component to the virus's manifestation. Like, there was once a kid — we called him Kid Dinosaur — who'd loved dinosaur books. He came up with the ability to turn himself into kid-sized replicas of different dinosaurs. And there's Hits Mack, a panhandler I know who can go up to any vending machine, hit it once and have it deliver him anything he wants from its display. That's all. It's the simplest wild card ability I know. Takes care of his meals and allows him to devote a hundred percent of his panhandling income to booze. He once told me that something like that had been a daydream of his for years. Lives on Twinkies and Fritos and stale chocolate bars. Happy man.

"Anyway," he went on, "Rudo felt that the anecdotal evidence was persuasive, and that there was a way to test it now. Me. He proposed inducing dauerschlaf in me by means of drugs and hypnosis that worked with the fears behind my life lie and caused me to change in an agreed-upon fashion. If it worked it would show that there was a psychosomatic component. It wouldn't be of help to any joker or ace in the world but me, though, and it could only be used to help me because of the periodic nature of my condition.

"So we set out to prove it, if we could. If the results were positive, he'd explained, then I could decide on the sort of body I wanted to live in for the rest of my life and whatever power I wanted to accompany it, and he'd induce it. He'd do it again for several times after that, to reinforce it, along with suggestions that it would always turn out that way, and I'd be set as a well-adjusted ace."

Croyd finished his beer, went back for another, stamping out a line of passing ants along the way.

"Is that where he crossed you up?" she asked.

"Nope, we tried it and it worked," he said. "He was right. So were the other people who'd made guesses along these lines. I told him I wanted to come out looking like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca — I'd always liked that movie — and when I woke up I was a dead ringer for Bogie."

"Really? And what about a wild card ability? Was he able to do something with that, also?"

Croyd smiled.

"Yes," he said. "It was just a small ability, but for some reason it stuck. Maybe because it was so small it didn't take up much space wherever these things are managed. It followed me through any number of changes. Haven't used it in years, though. Wait a minute."

He raised his beer can, took a slow drink, stared off into the distance.

"Play it, Sam," he said in a strangely altered voice. Then, "Play it!"

The tape recorder clicked to a halt. Then the Play button was depressed. The sounds of a piano playing "As Time Goes By" emerged from the small speaker.

She stared for several moments at the machine, then reached over and turned it off. Immediately, she set it on Record again.

"How — How do you manage it if there's no tape recorder around?"

"Almost anything that can be induced to vibrate in the audible range will do," he said. "I don't know how. Maybe it's even a smaller ability than Hits Mack's."

"So you woke up looking like Rick, and you could provide your own soundtrack whenever you wanted."

"Yes."

"What happened next?"

"He gave me a couple of weeks to enjoy it. Wanted to observe me and be sure there were no undesirable side-effects. I went out and got stopped on the streets and approached in restaurants for autographs. Rudo wrote up his notes. He did send me to some friends for a full physical at that time, too. I still had an abnormally high metabolism and my usual insomnia."

"I wonder whether those notes still exist, somewhere?" she said.

Croyd shrugged.

"Don't know," he said. "Wouldn't matter anyway. I wouldn't want anyone to mess with the process that way again."

"What happened?"

"We saw each other regularly during the next couple of weeks. I went over ideas of what I wanted to look like and what I wanted to be able to do. I didn't want to stay the way I was. It was fun the first few days, but after a while it wears kind of thin, looking like someone famous. I wanted to be sort of average in height and build, sandy-haired, not bad-looking but not real handsome. And I decided on a kind of telepathic persuasive ability I once had. You get in less trouble if you can talk your way out of things. And it could come in handy if I ever wanted to be a salesman. Rudo in the meantime said that he was studying medical literature, looking for anything else that might be useful in my case, to help nail down the change good and tight, to make it permanent. Once, when we were having lunch together, I remember him saying, 'Croyd, for all of that you know you'll still be a caricature of humanity. I just wish it were within my power to wipe out everything that demon bug did to you — wipe out all of the others, too, for that matter — and leave the human race as clean as it was before.'

"'I appreciate everything you're doing, Doc,' I said. 'Seems like you've been devoting almost every waking minute to my case these past few weeks.'

"'I think it's the most important case I've ever had,' he replied.

"'Any new developments on the technical end of things?'

"'Yes, I think there might be a way to reinforce the change by using certain levels of radiation on your nervous system,' he said.

"'Radiation? I thought we were going the purely psychological route through dauerschlaf .'

"'This is some very new stuff,' he said. 'I'm still looking into it.'