Уолтер Тевис - The Man Who Fell to Earth

The musical came on in strong vulgar colors, as if, by glaring force, it could erase the memory of the newsreel. It was called The Shari Leslie Story , and was dull and noisy. Bryce tried to lose himself in the aimless movement and color, but found he could not and had to content himself at first with the tight bosoms and long legs of the young women in the picture. This was distracting enough in itself, but it was the kind of distraction that could be painful, as well as absurd, for a middle-aged widower. Squirming, confronted by blatant sensuality, he shifted his attention to the photography, and became for the first time aware that the technical quality of the images was striking. The line and detail, though blown up on a huge Dupliscope screen, appeared as sharp as in a contact print. He blinked, seeing this now, and then cleaned his glasses on his handkerchief. There was no doubt of it, the images were perfect. He knew a smattering of photochemistry; this quality did not seem quite possible, with what he knew of dye-transfer processes and three-emulsion color films. He caught himself whistling softly in astonishment, and watched the rest of the movie with a greater interest—only occasionally distracted when one of the pink images would peel off a brassiere—a thing he had never got used to in the movies.

Afterward, on his way out of the theater, he stopped a moment to look at the advertisements for the film, to see what they might say about the color process. This was not at all hard to find; blazoned across the garish ads was a banner that read: In The New, New Color Sensation WORLDCOLOR. There was, however, nothing more than this, except for the little circled R that meant “registered trademark,” and in infinitesimal print, below, Registered by W. E. Corp. He fished around in his mind for combinations that would fit the initials, but with the freakish whimsicality that his mind would sometimes produce, the only things he found were absurd: Wan Eagles, Wamsutta Enchiladas, Wealthy Engineers, Worldly Eros. He shrugged his shoulders, and, hands in his pants pockets, began walking down the evening street, into the neon heart of the little college town.

Restless, a little irritated, not wanting just yet to have to go home and stare at those papers again, he found himself looking for one of the beer parlors where the students hung out. He found one, a small taproom named Henry’s, an arty little place with German beer mugs in the front windows. He had been there before, but only in the mornings. This was one of his few active vices. He had found, since the time eight years ago when his wife had died (in a glossy hospital, with a three-pound tumor in her stomach), that there were certain things to be said in favor of drinking in the mornings. He had discovered, quite by accident, that it could be a fine thing, on a gray, dismal morning—a morning of limp, oyster-colored weather—to be gently but firmly drunk, making a pleasure of melancholy. But it had to be undertaken with a chemist’s precision; bad things could happen in the event of a mistake. There were nameless cliffs that could be fallen over, and on gray days there were always self-pity and grief nibbling about, like earnest mice, at the corner of morning drunkenness. But he was a wise man, and he knew about these matters. Like morphine it all depended upon proper measurements.

He opened the door of Henry’s and was greeted by the subdued agony of a juke box that dominated the center of the room, pulsating with bass sound and red light, like a diseased and frenetic heart. He walked in, a little unsteadily, between rows of plastic booths, normally empty and colorless in the mornings, now jammed with students. Some of them were muttering earnestly; many were bearded and fashionably shabby—like theatrical anarchists, or “agents of a foreign power” from the old, old movies of the thirties. And behind the beards? Poets? Revolutionaries? One of them, a student in his organic chemistry course, wrote articles for the student paper about free love and the “decayed corpse of the Christian ethic, polluting the wellsprings of life.” Bryce nodded to him, and the boy gave him an embarrassed glare, over the sulky beard. Nebraska and Iowa farm boys, most of them, signing disarmament petitions, discussing socialism. For a moment he felt uneasy; a tired old Bolshevik wearing a tweed coat amid the new class.

He found a narrow space at the bar and ordered a glass of beer from a woman with graying bangs and black-rimmed glasses. He had never seen her there before; he was served in the mornings by a taciturn and dyspeptic old man named Arthur. This woman’s husband? He smiled at her vaguely, taking the beer. He gulped at it quickly, feeling uncomfortable, wanting to get out. On the juke box, now behind his head, a record had started playing a folk song, with a zither thrumming metallically. Oh Lordie, Pick a Bale of Cotton! Oh Lordie … Next to him at the bar a white girl was talking to a sad-eyed girl about the “structure” of poetry and asking her if the poem “worked,” a kind of talk that made Bryce shudder. How goddamned knowing could these children be? Then he remembered the cant he had talked, during the year that he had majored in English, when he was in his twenties: “levels of meaning.” “the semantic problem.” “the symbolical level.” Well, there were plenty of substitutes for knowledge and insight—false metaphors everywhere. He finished his beer and then, not knowing why, ordered another, even though he wanted to leave, to get away from the noise and the posturing. And wasn’t he being unfair to these kids, being a pompous ass? Young people always looked foolish, were deceived by appearances—as was everybody else. Better they should grow beards than join fraternities or become debaters. They would learn enough about that kind of bland idiocy soon enough, when they got out of school, shaven, and looked for jobs. Or was he wrong there too? There was always the chance that they—at least some of them—were honest-to-God Ezra Pounds, would never shave the beards, would become brilliant and shrill Fascists, Anarchists, Socialists, and die in unheard-of European cities, the authors of fine poems, the painters of meaningful pictures, men of no fortune, and with a name to come. He finished the beer and had another. Drinking it, there flashed across his mind the image of the theater poster and the giant word, Worldcolor, and it occurred to him that the W of W. E. Corp, might stand for Worldcolor. Or, perhaps, World. And the E? Elimination? Exhibitionism? Eroticism? Or, he smiled grimly, just Exit? He smiled wisely at the red-jacketed girl next to him, who was talking now about the “texture” of language. She could not have been more than eighteen. She gave him a dubious look, her dark eyes serious. And then he felt something hurt him; she was so pretty. He stopped smiling, finished his beer quickly, and left. As he passed the booth on the way out, the Organic Chemistry student with the beard said, “Hello, Professor Bryce,” his voice very decent. Bryce nodded to him, mumbled, and pushed his way out the door into the warm night.

It was eleven o’clock, but he did not want to go home. For a moment he thought of calling Gelber, his one close friend on the faculty, but decided not to. Gelber was a sympathetic man; but there did not seem to be anything to say right now. He did not want to talk about himself, his fear, his cheap lust, his dreadful and foolish life. He kept walking.

Just before midnight he stopped in the town’s one all-night drugstore, empty except for an aged clerk behind the gleaming, plastic lunch counter. He sat down and ordered coffee and, after his eyes became accustomed to the false brilliance of the fluorescent lights, began to gaze idly about the counter, reading the display labels on aspirin bottles, camera equipment, packages of razor blades…. He was squinting, and his head was beginning to hurt. The beer; the light… Sun tan lotion and pocket combs. And then something caught his eyes and held them. Worldcolor: 35mm Camera Film, printed on each of a row of square blue boxes, next to the pocket combs, under a card of nail clippers. It startled him, he did not know why. The clerk was standing near, and abruptly Bryce said, “Let me see that film, please.”