Harlan Ellison: Shatterday

“We’ll name the first one after you, Peter,” Jay said, and hung up.

That was Wednesday.

There were no phone calls that day. Novins lay there, the television set mindlessly playing and replaying the five minute instruction film on the pay-movie preview channel, the ghostimage of a dark-haired girl in a gray suit showing him how to charge a first-run film to his hotel bill. After many hours he heard himself reciting the instructions along with her. He slept a great deal. He thought about Jeanine and Patty, the girl in Denver whose name he could not recall, and Jamie.

After many more hours, he thought about insects, but he didn’t know what that meant. There were no phone calls that day. It was Thursday.

Shortly before midnight, the fever broke, and he cried himself back to sleep.

A key turned in the lock and the hotel room door opened. Novins was sitting in a mass-produced imitation of a Saarinen pedestal chair, its seat treated with Scotch-Gard. He had been staring out the window at the geometric irrelevancy of the glasswall buildings. It was near dusk, and the city was gray as cardboard.

He turned at the sound of the door opening and was not surprised to see himself walk in.

Jay’s nose and cheeks were still red from the cold outside. He unzipped his jacket and stuffed his kid gloves into a pocket, removed the jacket and threw it on the unmade bed. “Really cold out there,” he said. He went into the bathroom and Novins heard the sound of water running.

Jay returned in a few minutes, rubbing his hands together. “That helps,” he said. He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at Novins.

“You look terrible, Peter,” he said.

“I haven’t been at all well,” Novins answered dryly. “I don’t seem to be myself these days.”

Jay smiled briefly. “I see you’re coming to terms with it. That ought to help.”

Novins stood up. The thin light from the room-long window shone through him like white fire through milk glass. “You’re looking well,” he said.

“I’m getting better, Peter. It’ll be a while, but I’m going to be okay.”

Novins walked across the room and stood against the wall, hands clasped behind his back. He could barely be seen. “I remember the archetypes from Jung. Are you my shadow, my persona, my anima or my animus?”

“What am I now, or what was I when I got loose?”

“Either way.”

“I suppose I was your shadow. Now I’m the self.”

“And I’m becoming the shadow.”

“No, you’re becoming a memory. A bad memory.”

“That’s pretty ungracious.”

“I was sick for a long time, Peter. I don’t know what the trigger was that broke us apart, but it happened and I can ‘t be too sorry about it. If it hadn’t happened I’d have been you till I died. It would have been a lousy life and a miserable death.”

Novins shrugged. “Too late to worry about it now. Things working out with Jamie?”

Jay nodded. “Yeah. And Mom comes in Tuesday afternoon. I’m renting a car to pick her up at Kennedy. I talked to her doctors. They say she doesn’t have too long. But for whatever she’s got, I’m determined to make up for the last twenty-five years since Dad died.”

Novins smiled and nodded. “That’s good.”

“Listen,” Jay said slowly, with difficulty, “I just came over to ask if there was anything you wanted me to do… anything you would’ve done if… if it had been different.”

Novins spread his hands and thought about it for a moment. “No, I don’t think so, nothing special. You might try and get some money to Jeanine’s mother, for Jeanine’s care, maybe. That wouldn’t hurt.”

“I already took care of it. I figured that would be on your mind.”

Novins smiled. “That’s good. Thanks.”

“Anything else… ?”

Novins shook his head. They stayed that way, hardly moving, till night had fallen outside the window. In the darkness, Jay could barely see Novins standing against the wall. Merely a faint glow.

Finally, Jay stood and put on his jacket, zipped up and put on his left glove. “I’ve got to go.”

Novins spoke from the shadows. “Yeah. Well, take care of me, will your’

Jay didn’t answer. He walked to Novins and extended his right hand. The touch of Novins’s hand in his was like the whisper of a cold wind; there was no pressure.

Then he left.

Novins walked back to the window and stared out. The last remaining daylight shone through him. Dimly.

When the maid came in to make up the bed, she found the room was empty. It was terribly cold in the room on the forty-fifth floor. When Peter Novins did not return that day, or the next, the management of the’ Americana marked him as a skip, and turned it over to a collection agency.

In due course the bill was sent to Peter Novins’s apartment on Manhattan’s upper east side.

It was promptly paid, by Peter Jay Novins, with a brief, but sincere note of apology.