Harlan Ellison - Ellison Wonderland

I could have sworn my legs were made of ice and they were melting me down to the kitchen linoleum. I turned around and—that’s right—Da Campo was in the doorway to the dining room.

“What do you want?” I bluffed, stepping forward threateningly.

“I came over to borrow a cup of sugar and talk a little, John,” said Da Campo, smiling. The utter incongruity of it! Borrowing a cup of sugar! It was too funny to equate with weird plants and odd goings-on in the house across the street. It took the edge off my belligerence quite effectively. “S-sure, I suppose I can find the wife’s sugar.” Then it occurred to me: “How do you know my name?” “How do you know mine?”

“Why I—I asked the neighbors. Like to know who’s living across the street, that’s all.”

“Well, that’s how I know yours, John. I asked my neighbors.”

“Which ones? The Schwachters? Heffman? Brown?”

He waved his hand absently, “Oh…just the neighbors, that’s all. How about that sugar?”

I opened one of the cabinets and took out the sugar bowl. Da Campo didn’t have a cup, so I took one down- -one of the old blue set—and filled it for him.

“Thanks,” he said, “feel like that talk now?”

Somehow, I wasn’t frightened of him, as I was by that sheet of items. It was easy to feel friendly toward the big, grey-eyed, grey-haired man in the sport shirt and slacks. Just another typical suburban neighbor.

“Sure, come on into the living room,” I answered, moving past him.

When Da Campo had found a reasonably comfortable position in one of Charlotte’s doubly-damned modem chairs, I tried to make small conversation. “I’ve never noticed a TV antenna on your house. Don’t tell me an inside one works over there. No one this far out seems to be able to make one of those gadgets bring in anything decently.” “We don’t have television.”

“Oh, “ I said.

The silence hauled itself around the room several times, and I tried again. “Uh—how come we never see you at the new Civic Center? Got some sweet bowling alleys down there and the little theatre group is pretty decent. Like to see—”

“Look, John, I thought I might come over and try to explain about myself, about us—Ellie and me.” He seemed so intent, so earnest, I leaned forward.

“What do you mean? You don’t have to—”

“No, no, I mean it,” he cut me off. “I know everyone in the neighborhood has been wondering about us. Why We don’t go out much, why we don’t invite you over, everything like that.” He held up his hands in fumbling motions, as though he were looking for the words. Then he let his hands fall, as though he knew he would never find the words.

“No, I don’t think anyone has—”

He stopped me again with a shake of the head. His eyes were very deep and very sad and I didn’t quite know what to say. I suddenly realized how far out of touch with real people I’d gotten in my years of commuting. There’s something cold and impersonal about a nine-to-five job and a ride home with total strangers. Even total strangers that live in the same town. I just looked at Da Campo.

“It’s simple, really,” he said, rubbing his hands together, looking down at them as though they had just grown from the ends of his arms.

“I got mixed up with some pretty strange people a few years ago, and well, I went to jail for a while. When I came out I couldn’t get a job and we had to move. By then Ellie had drawn into a shell and…well, it just hasn’t been easy.”

I didn’t know why he was telling me all this and I found myself embarrassed. I looked around for something to break the tension, and then pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I held them out to him and he looked up from his hands for a second, shaking his head. He went back to staring at them as I lit a cigarette. I was hoping he wouldn’t go on, but he did.

“Reason I’m telling you this is that you must have thought me pretty odd this afternoon. The only thing I have is my garden, and Ellie, and we don’t like living as alone as we do, but it’s better this way. That’s the way we have to do it. At least for a while.”

For a second I got the impression he had skimmed the top of my mind and picked off my wonderment at his telling me the story. Then I shook off the feeling and said, “That’s understandable. If I ever did wonder about you and Mrs. Da Campo, well, it’s something I won’t do any more. And feel free to drop over any time you get the urge.” He looked thankful, as though I’d offered him the Northern Hemisphere, and stood up.,

“Thanks a lot, John. I was hoping you’d understand.”

We shook hands, I asked him if he wanted to call up the Missus and come over for dinner, but he said no thanks and we’d certainly get together again soon.

He left, and I wasn’t surprised to see the cup of sugar sitting on an end table where he’d set it down. Nice guy, I thought to myself.

I Then I thought of that staring plant, which he hadn’t explained at all, and some of the worry returned. I shrugged it off. After three weeks I forgot it entirely. But Da Campo and I never got together as he’d suggested.

At least not at the Civic Center.

Da Campo kept going to the City on the 7:40 and coming back on the 5:35 every day. But somehow, we never sat together, and never spoke to one another. I made tentative gestures once or twice, but he indicated disinterest, so I stopped.

Ellie Da Campo would always be waiting at the station, parked a few cars down from Charlotte in her station wagon, and Clark Da Campo would pop into it and they’d be off before most of the rest of us were off the train.

I stopped wondering about the absence of light or life or smoke or anything else around the Da Campo house. hold, figuring the guy knew what he was doing. I also took pains to caution Jamie to stay strictly off-limits, with or without baseball.

I also stopped wondering because I had enough headaches from the office to take full-time precedence on my brain-strain.

Then one morning, something changed my careful hands-off policies.

They had to change. My fingers were pushed into the pie forcibly.

I was worried sick over the Gillings business. The Gillings Mills were trying to branch over into territory held by another of our Association’s members, trying to buy timber land out from under the other. It looked like a drastic shake-up was in the near offing.

The whole miserable mess had been heaped on me, and I’d not only been losing my Saturdays—and a few Sundays to boot—but my hair was, so help me God, whitening, and the oculist said all the paperwork had played Hell with my eyes. I was sick to tears of the thing, but it was me all the way, and if I didn’t play it right mergers might not merge, commitments might not be committed, and John Weiler might find himself on the outside. Mornings on the train were a headache and a nightmare. Faces blurred into one runny grey smear, and the clickety-clack didn’t carry me back. It made my bead throb and my bones ache and it made me bate the universe. Not just the world—the universe! All of it.

I unzipped my briefcase and opened it on my lap. The balding $25,000-a-year man sharing the seat harrumphed once and gathered the folds of his Harris tweed about his paunch. He went back to the Times with a nasty side glance at me.

I mentally stuck my tongue out and bent to the paperwork.

I was halfway through an important field agent’s report that might—just barely might—provide the loophole I was seeking to stop the gobbling by the Gillings Mills, and I walked out of the station with my briefcase under my arm, my nose in the report, with a sort of mechanical stride.

About halfway down the subway ramp I realized I didn’t know where the bloody Hell I was. Hurrying men and women surrounded me, streaming like salmon heading to spawn. I was somewhere under Grand Central’s teeming passageway labyrinth, heading for an exit that would bring me out into the street somewhere near my building.