Дэймон Найт - Orbit 8

“Don’t shout at me, hon.”

“I’m sorry,” Carpenter said. “I’m upset about Horden lying to me. Why would he do a thing like that? Deliberately keeping me in the dark.” He put his arms around her, wrapping her slight figure in his body. “Do you want me to quit the job?”

“It’s the thought of that poor man,” Anne said. “I don’t like the idea of you as some kind of jailer. I didn’t think you’d want to be used that way either.”

For a moment they stood together wordless and swaying slightly, enjoying the warmth of each other’s body. Then Anne broke away almost guiltily. “Think about it, hon,” she said.

“I will. I will.”

One morning the prisoner awoke and knew it could not go on. There was no purpose in remaining alive, in dragging his body through the torture of extreme cold or in dragging his mind through the torture of exhausted memories. The memories had sustained him at one time, but they were scanty and largely morbid glimpses of a childhood that had never seemed happy and of an adulthood that had so far been a chronicle of failure, of drifting from job to job and worthless relationship to worthless relationship. The more he reran these scenes in his mind the more unreal they seemed, like the less-than-credible plot of a particularly melodramatic movie. The movie faded out into mental blankness sometime before his imprisonment and picked up again sometime after, when existence was his cell and memory was no real memory at all but merely days running out like identical grains of sand. The terminal memory was a suitably bizarre one. He had once run a bar, a dim basement grotto beneath a pawnbroker’s in the slum area of the city. He remembered a poet, a young Jesus-haired character (who knows, he might have thought himself the messiah of his age) who used the bar’s toilet to fix himself and then came to sit and talk to him while the heroin worked in his blood, an untouched beer before him for appearances. He talked about things the bartender could understand: disillusionment, a lifetime of bad breaks and unkind people. He talked about what it was like to poison yourself with heroin until the kick began to kick you back, until it became a necessity like air. It was a form of suicide, the poet said, suicide without real decision, an easy suicide for people with weak minds. The bartender asked him if it was really any different from drinking yourself to death or, for that matter, driving a car until statistics singled you out as one of the x percent killed every year in motor accidents. The poet merely smiled and said no, he supposed all life for everybody was one prolonged suicide, that you started killing yourself on the day you were born.

The poet had once given the bartender a book of poems. They were by T. S. Eliot and the bartender had put the book aside, saying he didn’t read poetry. One morning he’d just opened up the bar when there was a scream of brakes outside. He went up to the road where a small crowd was already beginning to form. A big saloon was wedged diagonally across the road. Its rear fender had scraped paint from three cars parked along the opposite curb. Something was wedged under the rear wheels and the bartender saw it was the young poet. The driver, a plump man in a neat business suit, was leaning on the car’s open door. His face was streaked with blood from a cut on his forehead and he was appealing to the bystanders. “The kid must have been crazy ... He just stepped out in front of me. Did he want to get killed or something? What was I supposed to do? You saw it, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

The bartender went back to the bar. He remembered the Eliot poems and found the book. He read one called “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” which ended:

He didn’t understand the poem, except that it seemed black and pessimistic, somehow a suitable epitaph for the young poet.

Memory faded...

Perhaps it was a suitable epitaph for him too, the prisoner thought. The cold would kill him eventually, he knew, but he was afraid of the discomfort and suffering and that it would take too long. He dwelt on the fear. Briefly it seemed to warm him, but soon it was just another stale taste in his mouth. He realized that he wasn’t afraid, after all, and that he had come to an acceptance of what he had to do. It wasn’t fear that led to suicide, he realized, but a lack of fear and a lack of any prospect of ever experiencing fear again.

He took off his shirt and tore it clumsily with numbed fingers into strips. He tied the strips together until he had formed a serviceable rope several feet long. He tied one end tightly about his neck.

He went to stand beneath the small barred window slit. It required an almost superhuman effort to pull himself up to the slit, but he reflected that it would be the last effort ever required of him and jumped, wedging one hand into the slit and grabbing a bar with his cold fingers. The stone lip of the window cut at his wrist, sending shooting pains along his arm, but he hoisted himself up until he came abreast of the slit. Quickly he tied the rope’s other end around one of the bars. The strength was slipping rapidly out of his arms as he pulled the knot tight. He took a last look out of the slit. The sky was as cold and grey and hopeless as ever and with his last remaining strength he threw himself backward from the wall.

Carpenter dropped the cutting on Horden’s desk. Horden glanced at it briefly and said: “I see.”

“Why didn’t you tell me, Horden? You must have known what was going on.”

“Yes, I knew. But you’re making it sound unnecessarily sinister....”

“I’ve reason. You lied to me.”

“I told you a harmless untruth, yes. I didn’t see why such things should concern you. I still don’t. Really, does it matter? You were happy enough doing the job when you didn’t know about it. Does this really change anything?”

Carpenter went to the door. He felt confused by Horden’s questions. “A job’s a job,” he said, “even if I don’t particularly like myself for doing it. I don’t like being lied to, that’s all.”

Horden waited until Carpenter had left the office; then he leaned forward and pushed a button on his intercom.

Carpenter went down to the Box to find Elleston on duty.

“Where’s Levinson?” he asked. It disturbed him to find a familiar routine interrupted. “Is he sick?”

“More than sick,” Elleston said. “He’s dead.”

“Dead?” For a second the word genuinely puzzled Carpenter, like a case of jamais vu.

“Yeah, the poor little kike. Apparently he collapsed in the street yesterday, in the snow. He should never have gone out, not in that sort of weather, not with a heart condition like his.”

“He had a heart condition? I never knew that.”

“Yeah, he’d had a bad heart for years. He must have known it would catch up with him sooner or later.”

Carpenter felt a profound sorrow for the small, nervous Jew. He wondered if Levinson’s uncle really owned a delicatessen out east. Probably not. There had probably never even been an uncle.

“Well, I’m going to grab some rest,” Elleston said. “I sure hope they can get somebody to replace him soon.”

“They will,” Carpenter said. “There’s always somebody.”

Elleston nodded and left.