Harlan Ellison - Shatterday

The zombie memory would not free me. I saw things I never could have imagined as a child. My father’s blue eyes, with the realization in them that all the dreams had been stolen from him, that he had lived his life and it had come to nothing, that he was dead and had never made his mark, had been here and was gone, and no one would remember or care. I saw, I remembered, I cared.

My child’s memories were of hatred, and revenge. Carl.

“My father did it to himself,” I said, walking upstairs. “He allowed his dreams to die. If he’d really had the courage to break loose and go to the Coast he would have done it,” I said entering my bedroom and going to the closet. “Carl had nothing to do with it. If it hadn’t been Carl, it would have been someone else in whom my father placed his trust. I can’t hate a man for not keeping a promise twenty-five years ago,” I said, pulling down my overnight case. “This is crazy. You can’t get me to do this.” I began packing for the flight to Chicago. I heard the sound of spikes being twisted out of wormwood.

It took Carl a long time to answer the door. He had a serious arthritic condition, and it was late. Highland Park was silent and sleeping. I stood under the porch light and saw Carl’s pale, tired eyes peering at me through the open-weave curtain behind the door’s glass panes. He blinked many times, and finally seemed to recognize me. He opened the door.

“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” he said. I put my hand against the half-opened door and pushed it slowly inward. Carl moved back and I walked in. My overnight case was still lying on the back seat of the rental compact at the curb. “Why didn’t you call me and tell me you were coming? How’s your mother?”

“Mom died three years ago.”

He blinked again. His liver-spotted forehead drew down and he thought about it. “Yes. I’d forgotten. Why didn’t you call me up on the phone and tell me you were coming?”

He closed and locked the door behind me. I walked into the darkened living room, only faintly outlined by the hall light. He followed me. He was wearing something I had only seen in period movies, a long nightgown that reached to his thin calves, white with blue veins prominent. The fabric was rough cotton, and like his calves was veined with blue pinstriping. I turned around to look at him. In my head I said, “This is crazy. Look at him. He’s an old man. He won’t even remember. What’s the point of this?”

And Jerry Olander said, “It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t remember. You remember. But if it makes you feel any better, tell him why you’ve come to kill him.”

“What are you doing here in the dead of night, I wish you’d called me up on the phone and told me,” Carl said.

I couldn’t see his face. He was standing with the hall light behind him. It was a black circle without feature. I said to him, “Do you remember a night a long time ago, in the red brick house you had on Maple Street, when Lillian was alive?”

“I remember the house. It was a small house. We had much bigger houses. Maybe you called and I was asleep.”

I moved toward him till he could see my face, lit along the sharp planes of cheeks and nose by the light over his shoulder. “I see it all now the way a little boy would see it, Uncle Carl. I’m looking out from under a dining room table, through the legs and cross-braces of chairs, watching you and my father on the screened back porch. You’re arguing. It was the first time I ever heard my father swear or raise his voice. I remember it very clearly, even if it isn’t true, because he was such a quiet person. You know that. He never raised his voice or got angry. He should have. He might not have died when he did, or died so miserably, if he’d raised his voice a few times.”

“What are you talking about?” Carl said. He was beginning to realize he wanted to be annoyed at his nephew barging in on him at three o’clock in the morning while he was still half-asleep. “Do you want something to eat? What are you doing here in Chicago? Don’t you live out there in California now?”

He hadn’t seen me in years. We had no contact. And here I stood before him, dragging him back through the dead years to a night he didn’t even remember. “Then you stood up and yelled at him, and he pushed back his chair till it fell over, and he yelled at you, and then you swung at him, and he hit you with a cushion off one of the chairs. And the next day he didn’t go down at seven-thirty to open the store while you stayed in and slept late and had a nice breakfast with Lillian. Do you remember all that, Uncle Carl?”

“Lillian is dead. She’s been gone a long time.”

I walked to the sofa and looked down. Then I walked back to him and took him by the arm. He resisted for a moment, but he was very old, and I wasn’t, and he came with me to the sofa, and I forced him to sit down. Then I took the pillow with the fringe, and I held it in one hand as I shoved him down, and held it over his face while he thrust himself up against it, until he stopped. It was over much more quickly than I’d thought. I’d always thought people struggle much harder to cling to life. But he was old, and his memories were gone.

And all the while I was begging Jerry Olander to stop. But he had spent four full years of wresting control from me, and in those four years of the war I had come to know he would win a battle or two. This was the first battle. And he had won. “Very efficient,” Jerry Olander said.

In the fourth year of the war with the homicidal maniac that had come to nest in my brain, a second hit was ordered. A woman I wasn’t even certain was still alive. She had had my dog gassed, put to sleep as they tell it to children, one summer when I was away at camp. Her name was Mrs. Corley, and she had lived down at the end of our street in Evanston.

I argued with Jerry Olander. “Why did you pick me to live in?” I had asked that question surely more than a hundred and fifty thousand times in four years.

“No particular reason. You haven’t got a wife, or many friends. You work at home most of the time—though I still can’t see how you make any kind of a living with that mail order catalogue—and nobody’s going to put you away too quickly because you talk to yourself.”

“Who are you?” I screamed, because I couldn’t get him out of me. He was like the eardrums refusing to pop when a plane lands. I couldn’t break his hold on me, no matter how hard I swallowed or held my nose and blew.

“The name is Jerry Olander,” he said, lightly, adding in an uncannily accurate imitation of Bogart, “and somebody’s always gotta take the fall, shweetheart.”

Then he made me go to the main branch of the public library, to look at all the telephone books. He didn’t have control of my vocal cords, couldn’t make my brain call the 312-555-1212 information operator in Chicago, to establish if Mrs. Corley still lived in Evanston. But he could make my legs carry me to my car, make my hands place themselves at 11:50 and 12:05 on the steering wheel, make my eyes run down the columns of names and phone numbers in the Evanston telephone directory in the library’s stacks.

She lived in the same house, at the same address, in the same world I had shared with her as a child.

Jerry Olander made my body drive to the savings and loan where I had my small account, made my right hand ink in the withdrawal slip, made my mouth smile as the teller handed me my last five hundred dollars.

And Jerry Olander made me tape the basement window of Mrs. Corley’s house before I broke it with a rock. Fighting him every step of the way, I was nonetheless made to walk silently through the basement to the steps, was made to climb them to the kitchen where I found old Mrs. Corley fixing herself a vegetarian dinner, and was made to tie and gag her.