Damon Knight - Orbit 20

I returned to Karath’s villa after that. He congratulated me but got down to essentials quickly. I had only a couple of months to train for the next Olympic prelims.

Then disaster struck. I had no words left. At first I thought it was only exhaustion. I grew listless. I put the cover over my typewriter, then hid it under my desk, where it reproached me silently. The other trainees whispered about me. I had to face the truth: I had a writer’s block. I might never write again. No one ever discussed writer’s block, considering it indelicate, but I knew others had gone mute.

Karath was kind and sympathetic, although he knew I could not remain at the villa; he had to worry about contagion. He was too courteous to ask me to leave. I left by myself, one cold cloudy morning, not wanting to see the other trainees gloat, and took a shuttle to New Zealand.

Blocked and miserable, I shut myself off from all news. I received a few kind notes, which I did not answer; nothing is worse than the pity of other writers. Yet even in that state I had to view the next Olympics.

Reina Takake took the gold; I found out she had gone back to Karath after I left. I watched her receive it, hating her, hating my former best friend more than I had ever hated anyone.

That did it. Hate and envy always do. Something jogged loose in my brain and I started writing again. Let’s face it, I’m not fit for anything else. I only hope I can be a contender once more.

A purse that always has one more coin in the bottom of it, no matter how many you take out—that was what Matthew Quoin had been offered in a dubious transaction a long time ago. And how could a man ever lose by such a bargain as that?

People sometimes became exasperated with Matthew Quoin, that tedious old shuffler. Sometimes? Well, they were exasperated with him almost all the time. It isn’t that people aren’t patient and kind-hearted. All of them in our town are invariably so. But Matthew could sure ruffle a kind-hearted surface.

“Oh, he is so slow about it!” people said of him. That wasn’t true, Matthew’s fingers flew lightninglike when he was involved in a transaction. It was just that so very many movements were required of him to get anything at all transacted.

And then the stories that he told about his past, a very far-distant past according to him, were worn out by repetition.

“Oh, was I ever the cock of the walk!” he would say. “I left a trail of twenty-dollar gold pieces around the world three times, and that was when twenty dollars was still worth something. I always paid everything with twenty-dollar gold pieces, and there was no way that I could ever run out of them. Ten of them, a hundred of them, a thousand of them, I could lay them out whenever they were needed. I had a cruse of oil that would never be empty, as the Bible says. I had a pocketbook that would never be without coin. I was the cock of the walk. Plague take it all, I still am! Has anybody ever seen me without money?”

No, nobody had. It was just that, of late years, it took Matthew’s money so long to add up. And often people had to wait behind him for a long time while he counted it out, and they became sulky and even furious.

When people became weary of listening to Matthew’s stories (and of late years he could feel their weariness for him like a hot blast) he went and talked to the pigeons. They, at least, had manners.

“The bloom is off the plum now,” he would tell those redfooted peckers, “and the roses of life have become a little ratty for me. But I will not run out of coin. I have the promise that I will not. I got that promise as part of a dubious transaction, but the promise has held up now for more years and decades than you would believe. And I will not die till I am death-weary of taking coin out of my pocketbook: I have that promise also. How would I ever be weary of drawing coins out of my pocketbook?

“This began a long time ago, you see, when the pigeons were no bigger than the jenny-wrens are now. They had just started to mint the American twenty-dollar gold piece, and I had them in full and never-ending flow. I tell you that a man can make an impression if he has enough gold pieces. Ah, the ladies who were my friends! Lola Montez, Squirrel Alice, Marie Laveau, Sarah Bernhardt, Empress Elizabeth of Austria. And the high ladies were attracted to me for myself as well as for my money. I was the golden cock of the golden walk.

“You ask what happened to those golden days?” Matthew said to the pigeons, who hadn’t asked anything except maybe, “How about springing for another box of Crackerjacks?”

“Oh, the golden days are still with me, though technically they are the copper days now. I was promised eight bright eons of ever-flowing money, and the eighth of the eons could last (along with my life) as long as I wished it to last.

“And, when the first eon of flowing money slipped into the second, it didn’t diminish my fortune much. It was still an unending stream of gold. Now they were five-dollar gold pieces instead of twenty-dollar gold pieces, but when there is no limit to the number of them, what difference does that make? I would take one out of my pocketbook, and immediately there would be another one in it waiting to be taken.”

“I suppose I really had the most fun when I was known as the Silver Dollar Kid,” Matthew Quoin told them. He was talking to squirrels rather than pigeons now, and it was a different day. But one day was very much like another.

“I never cared overly for money. I just don’t want to run out of it. And I have the promise that my pocketbook will always have one more coin in it. I liked the sound of silver dollars on a counter, and I’d ring them down as fast as one a second when I wished to make an impression. And they rang like bells. I was in my pleasant maturity then, and life was good to me. I was a guy they all noticed. They called me ‘Show Boat’ and ‘the Silver Dollar Sport.’ I always tipped a dollar for everything. That was when money was worth ten times what it is now and a dollar was really something. What, squirrels, another sack of peanuts, you say? Sure I can afford it! The girl at the kiosk will be a little impatient with me because it takes me so long to get enough coins out, but we don’t care about that, do we?”

The fact was that Matthew Quoin, though he still commanded a shining and unending stream of money, had a poor and shabby look about him in these days of the eighth eon. As part of an old and dubious transaction, he had the promise that he could live as long as he wished, but that didn’t prevent him from becoming quite old.

He had a grubby little room. He would get up at three o’clock every Friday morning and begin to pull coins one at a time (there was no possible way except one at a time) out of his pocketbook. It was one of those small, three-section, snap-jaw pocketbooks such as men used to carry to keep their coins and bills in. It was old, but it was never-failing.

Matthew would draw the coins out one at a time. He would count them into piles. He would roll them into rolls. And at eight o’clock in the morning, when his weekly rent was due, he would pay it proudly, twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents. So he would be fixed for another week. It took him from three until eight o’clock every Friday morning to do this; but he cat-napped quite a bit during that time. All oldsters cat-nap a lot.

And it didn’t really take him very long (no more than five or six minutes) to draw out enough coins for one of his simple lunch-counter meals. But some people are a little bit testy at having to wait even five or six minutes behind an old man at the cashier’s stand.

“I was known as the Four-Bit Man for a few years, and that was all right,” Matthew Quoin said. “Then I was known as the Two-Bit Man for a few other years, and that was all right too.” This was a different day, and Matthew was talking to a flock of grackle-birds who were committing slaughter on worms, slugs, and other crawlers in the grass of City Park. “It didn’t begin to hurt till I was known as the Dime-a-Time Man,” Matthew said, “and that stuck in the throat of my pride a little bit, although it shouldn’t have. I was still the cock of the grassy walk even though I didn’t have as many hens as I had once. I had good lodgings, and I had plenty to eat and drink. I could buy such clothes as I needed, though it flustered me a bit to make a major purchase. We had come into the era of the hundred-dollar overcoat then, and to draw out one thousand coins, one by one, with people perhaps waiting, can be a nervous thing.