Дэймон Найт: Orbit 11

Saw only his horrified expression.

The hold was broken. She began to cry and was interrupted by a sensation that chilled her every bone. Mr. Wile was dying, and she felt it.

The fear, the futility of holding on. Skin on the skull was peeling away. Muscle burned. Gastric acid came up hot to fill the mouth, choke it. Plastic shot through the arteries to plug them; all canals were stuffed.

Green mold grew on the decaying head, because the head was forced free of caring. It belonged to the centuries. Blood gurgled in its throat, the last breaths. Teeth tore free of the lips, exploded in a fan. Around the stringy neck, the long purple scarf was rapidly tightening. Up to the chin and higher.

Alice felt it around her neck, the hot wool breath, the squeeze. She pulled at it with her hands and hands did not help. She opened her mouth and the woolen muffler filled it. It crept down her.

She coughed it up. Air filled her lungs. Death left her. She lay on top of Mr. Wile, on his bed.

Mr. Wile was dead. He had been thrust out, shaken from his last hold. Alice stood up slowly. She saw; she held his head in her hands and cried.

Dr. Teagrade said nothing. The private doctor hung his head.

“Ask the nurse to back off, will you?” the private doctor said.

“I think she liked him,” said Dr. Teagrade.

Alice backed off. She wiped her face with a Kleenex. How could she keep from crying, all the way home, about the old man? What could she have done? Alice asked no questions of herself on the way home. There were too many.

She climbed into her sleeping husband’s bed and waited for morning. All night she cried.

He stood in wet sneakers at the side of the stream and felt tadpoles between his fingers.

That morning the sky was bright blue and things had happened during the night. The apartment buildings had fallen. The traffic was all over the street. The supermarket stock had multiplied in the darkness and groceries were spilling out in mounds across the sidewalk, like bread swelling out of an oven. I saw a crowd of pedestrians trying to pull free from a fire hydrant; the crosstown bus’s wheels were in the asphalt up to their axles.

Blankets rumpled. Sunlight streaming in. Plants on the windowsill twisting, thrusting up virile cancerous-brown shoots. Central heating knocking, gurgling, steaming, rattling against the wall.

Last night she had taken one of the 16-ounce, screw-top, nonreturnable Pepsis from the $2.40 8-pack in the fridge. She didn’t really want it, drank two absentminded sips, left the bottle uncapped on the floor beside the bed. Undrinkable, this morning. Step over it, when you walk out to the kitchen.

Grab handfuls of cereal; burrow into the box for the special offer coupon; slop vitamin D milk; stack the bowl with other dirty dishes where roaches scuttle in and out over last night’s watermelon.

Turn on the radio, leave it on, loud. Go in the other room and forget it. Wipe tissues over mouth, cheeks, eyes, ears, anus, armpits. Ball them all up.

Pick up clothes from the unswept floor. Glance out of grimy windows while spraying face, hair, breasts with plastic. Awake, now, it’s morning.

What really happened last night? A new split in one of the door panels. Window gate padlock’s been tampered with. What went on on the fire escape? In the parking lot behind the brownstones? Where did those old mattresses come from?

No one knows. It’s daytime now.

That spring morning everyone in the city turned off the heat, plugged in the air conditioners. It forced the outside temperature up by ten degrees, made it good to get inside to the coolness.

The office blocks at the top of Sixth Avenue had grown again, like crystal cultures, feeding on chemicals carried on the heavy air. Multifaceted, they glittered sleek in the sun. Inside, secretaries drifted over furry floors while the elevators chimed.

A quick orgasm alone in the 42nd Street movie booth watching the hippie pull his girl’s skirt off and get her legs open for the camera to zoom in. Outside again bright and dusty day washed that brief trace of night from my mind. Squashy roll, tenderized beef, crunchy coleslaw, ice water, aluminum foil, crumpled dollar bills, the textures of eating.

And what did she do? Got on the wrong train, had to take a cab to reach the doctor in time for her checkup, lost the prescription, too late for the job interview but that one hadn’t paid much anyway, best off without it. So she caught up on lunch, bought a women’s magazine, sat reading in Madison Square Garden for an hour. Went home, showered, fresh clothes, makeup, another two sips from another 16-ounce, 8-pack, nonreturnable, screw-top Pepsi, discovered the radio still blaring, tuned it to a different station, left it to go watch TV and read another women’s magazine—left the last one on the subway. Decided which movie to see that night, redecided, reredecided, called a friend and talked long-distance for half an hour, went and retouched her makeup (waste basket overflowing with tissues now), put a record on and stared out of the window.

After the movie. Walking past Central Park. The reptile-cars are cruising in and out, headlights bleaching the broken asphalt. Sentient, predatory, closing on an awkward, stumbling pedestrian. A glimpse of gnarled hands up in front of etched face, glint of dusty-crumpled metal, restless rumbling exhausts.

A smothered cry.

Furtively, from windows scattered in the monoliths, shadowy faces peer out through broken Venetian blinds, around rusting air conditioners; background peeling room interiors flicker TV-blue.

Dust and fumes mingle as the cars drink the depleted air. Oxygen used up. Movement slows, engines die. The cars jerk and spasm, like a cluster of asphyxiated roaches. Headlights fade to yellow. Springs sag, tires deflate. A creak, a clang of cooling metal.

Out of the subway walking home on First Avenue. Almost empty even at the allnite grocery marts. The night is taking hold, gripping hard.

A foretaste: heavy figures approaching me on the sidewalk. The pair of them space out either side of me as they come closer.

—Do we hit him, Frank?

The long space of three footsteps.

—No.

They pass. Into the darkness.

Along the black-and-blue canyon of 10th Street, skirting tumbled garbage, congealed vomit, rusting fenders, Coke bottles, iron bars, smears of excrement dehydrated and brittle on the dead concrete.

The footsteps start behind me and I run, fire escapes rusty trees skeletal hands parading overhead under the smeared moon. The tripwire gets me across the shins, bites in, scrapes the skin off like pink apple peel. My face goes down mashing into a rusty can. Studded boots march braille into my back.

Inside the building, past the broken-open mailboxes, the junkie slithers out from under the stairs, trembling knife point aimed at my throat. I stumble-run up the stained steps, lungfuls of urine-tainted air, lightbulbs dancing, chest aching, slam the steel-paneled door behind me with a heart-beat to spare.

Lying on the dusty floor of my empty apartment where the furniture used to be. Dream-images of half-sleep. Then I sit up tense and alert, burglar’s hacksaw carving through the window bars, one lunge and I get him in the throat with my sawn-off pool cue. He tilts slowly like a high diver off the ten-meter board, falls turning, splashes onto the hard black road.

Down there, streetlights glint on upturned eyes of ten thousand criminals and hoodlums, gathered together silently gazing up hungry and waiting.

And even as I try to slide the iron bar of the police lock into its catch, the door shudders in against my palms and clumsy fingers let the bar slip. Doorknob in the groin punches me backward. His broken bottle carves my chest, blood welling up like water rising in grooved wet sand.