Damon Knight - Orbit 15

A man of no perspective and small importance, my uncle. A man committed to the service of his state, my uncle. A man who liked to pick his teeth and hear an occasional dirty story, my uncle.

Just one of the men who was commissioned to haul off giant’s shit. Not so terribly different from you, Polonius. Nor, I suppose, from me. Who among us is really that different?

At any rate, “It’s just a job,” my uncle liked to joke. “It’s no great matter.” One sniff would have convinced you otherwise. It was great matter indeed, and offensive.

But my uncle did his duty, every time the Man-Mountain was moved to do his, and he made a little extra pocket money selling fetish items to the curious, the kinky, the artistically sensitive.

In only a week’s time he had enough to buy a new wheelbarrow, a red one. He pushed it with his head in a cloud, serving the state. The exquisite vapor of the proud laborer emanated from every pore.

Of course, this could not last. People lost interest; my uncle’s markets dried up. The High Museum of Art can put on display only so many artificially fossilized, free-form coprolites.

The red wheelbarrow remained, that and my uncle’s pride. Although my aunt had adjusted to the new wheelbarrow and her husband’s pride, she could not accept her family’s sudden effluviance.

Eventually she moved. Later she suggested a trial separation. Finally she filed for divorce. And there was my uncle, a man of no perspective, brokenheartedly pushing his barrow in the service of the state.

Why don’t I recant? How can I deny the existence of our departed giant when my very own uncle still moves within the aura of his presence? How betray my uncle again? The answer is, I can’t.

6. Just what is it you want?

7. That’s all very well, but not very precise.

Would you like some advice?

It could be

YOU!

Someone who really cared about you, in a place

like that—how could he be real?

They took him to L. A. General.

He was an old man and he was sick.

When he woke up he was in a hospital bed. He was scared. He was afraid of hospitals. He’d never been sick before. So he was scared. The room was too clean. When you’re used to the street, clean places make you edgy. And there were no smells in the room. And it was sunny—too bright for his eyes.

They had him in a hospital gown. He felt naked. He rarely took a bath and just having his clothes off frightened him.

He felt cut off from his past, from reality. While he was unconscious the real world had seeped away from him. Or they had stolen it.

He closed his eyes, put his hands over his face and tried to remember. Tried to see in his mind’s eye what had happened, why he was in the hospital. But all he could see in the past was the street. An endless succession of nights in the street, all alike. And then this room.

He shivered. Then, after gazing at the clean, odorless, sunny room for some time, he pulled the blanket over his face, closed his eyes and waited.

After a time he slept.

He awoke because someone was calling his name.

“Bill,” the voice said. “Bill?”

He was Bill. The voice knew him. He opened his eyes and pulled the blanket down so he could see where the voice came from.

There was a screen in the ceiling over his bed. A gray-haired man, dressed in rumpled white, was on the screen. “Are you feeling any better, Bill?”

“Who are you?” said Bill.