14

   A small—heartbreakingly small—group of men and women trudged wanly up to the parked squib as Seth Morley activated the electrical dehatching mechanism. They stared at him bleakly as he stumbled out, stood swaying, trying to get control of his waning vitality.
   There they were. Russell, looking stern. His wife Mary, her face taut with alarm—then relief at seeing him. Wade Frazer, who looked tired. Dr. Milton Babble, chewing on his pipe in a reflexive, pointless way. Ignatz Thugg was not among them.
   Neither was Glen Belsnor.
   Leadenly, Seth Morley said, “Belsnor is dead, isn’t he?”
   They nodded.
   Russell said. “You’re the first of all of them to come back. We noticed late last night that Belsnor wasn’t guarding us. We got to him at the infirmary door; he was already dead.”
   “Electrocuted,” Dr. Babble said.
   “And you were gone,” Mary said. Her eyes remained glazed and hopeless, despite his return.
   “You better get back into bed in the infirmary,” Babble said to him. “I don’t know how you could still be alive. Look at you; you’re drenched with blood.”
   Together, they assisted him back to the infirmary. Mary fussily made up the bed; Seth Morley, swaying, stood waiting and then let them stretch his body out, propped up by pillows.
   “I’m going to work on your shoulder some more,” Babble said to him. “I think the artery is allowing seepage out into the—”
   Seth Morley said, “We’re on Earth.”
   They stared at him. Babble froze; he turned toward Seth, then mechanically returned to his task of fumbling with a tray of surgical instruments. Time passed, but no one spoke.
   “What is the Building?” Wade Frazer said, at last.
   “I don’t know. But they say I was there, once.” So on some level I do know, he realized. Maybe we all do. Perhaps at some time in the past all of us were there. Together.
   “Why are they killing us?” Babble said.
   “I don’t know that either,” Seth Morley answered.
   Mary said, “How do you know we’re on Earth?”
   “I was at London a little while ago. I saw it, the ancient, abandoned city. Mile after mile of it. Thousands of decaying, deserted houses, factories and streets. Bigger than any nonterran city anywhere in the galaxy. Where at one time six million people lived.”
   Wade Frazer said, “But there’s nothing on Terra except the aviary! And nobody except ostriches!”
   “Plus Interplan West military barracks and research installations,” Seth Morley said, but his voice ebbed; it lacked conviction and enthusiasm. “We’re an experiment,” he said, anyhow. “As we guessed last night. A military experiment being carried out by General Treaton.” But he did not believe it either. “What kind of military personnel wear black leather uniforms?” he said. “And jackboots… I think they’re called.”
   Russell, in a modulated, disinterested voice, said, “Aviary guards. A sop to keep up their morale. It’s very discouraging to work around ostriches; introduction of the new uniforms, three or four years back, has done a great deal of morale-boosting for the personnel.”
   Turning toward him, Mary said searchingly, “How do you happen to know that?”
   “Because,” Russell said, still calm. “I am one of them.” Reaching into his jacket he brought out a small, shiny erggun. “We carry this type of weapon.” He held the gun pointed toward them, meanwhile motioning them to stand closer together. “It was one chance out of a million that Morley got away.” Russell pointed to his right ear. “They’ve been periodically keeping me informed. I knew he was on his way back here, but I—and my various superiors—never thought he’d arrive.” He smiled at them. Graciously.
   A sharp thump sounded. Loudly.
   Russell half-turned, lowered his erggun and slumped down, letting the weapon fall. What is it? Seth Morley asked himself; he sat up, trying to see. He made out a shape, the shape of a man, walking into the room. The Walker? he thought. The Walker-on-Earth come to save us? The man held a gun—an old-fashioned lead slug pistol. Belsnor’s gun, he realized. But Ignatz Thugg has it. He did not understand. Neither did the others; they milled about incoherently as the man, holding the pistol, walked up to them.
   It was Ignatz Thugg.
   On the floor, Russell lay dying. Thugg bent, picked up the erggun, and put it away in his belt.
   “I came back,” Thugg said grimly.
   “Did you hear him?” Seth Morley said. “Did you hear Russell say that—”
   Thugg said, “I heard him.” He hesitated, then brought out the erggun; he handed it to Morley. “Somebody get the tranquilizer gun,” he said. “We’ll need all three. Are there any more? In the squib?”
   “Two in the squib,” Seth Morley said, accepting the erggun from Thugg. You’re not going to kill us? he wondered. The psychopathic countenance of Ignatz Thugg had relaxed; the strained attentiveness which had marked Thugg had relented. Thugg looked calm and alert; sanely so.
   “You’re not my enemies,” Thugg said. “They are.” He gestured with Belsnor’s pistol toward Russell. “I knew someone in the group was; I thought it was Belsnor, but I was wrong. I’m sorry.” He was silent for a time.
   The rest of them remained silent, too. Waiting to see what would happen. It would come soon, they all knew. Five weapons, Seth Morley said to himself. Pitiful. They have air-to-ground missiles, .88 millimeter cannon—God knows what else. Is it worth it, trying to fight them?
   “It is,” Thugg said, evidently reading his expression.
   Seth Morley said, “I think you’re right.”
   “I think I know,” Wade Frazer said, “what this experiment is all about.” The others waited for him to go on but he did not.
   “Say it,” Babble said.
   “Not until I’m sure,” Frazer said.
   Seth Morley thought, I think I know, too. And Frazer is right; until we know absolutely, until we have total proof, we had better not even discuss it.
   “I knew we were on Terra,” Mary Morley said quietly. “I recognized the moon; I’ve seen Luna in pictures… a long time ago when I was a child.”
   “And what did you infer from that?” Wade Frazer said.
   Mary said, “I—” She hesitated, glancing at her husband. “Isn’t it a military experiment by Interplan West? As all of us suspected?”
   “Yes,” Seth Morley said.
   “There’s another possibility,” Wade Frazer said.
   “Don’t say it,” Seth Morley said.
   “I think we had better say it,” Wade Frazer said. “We should face it openly, decide if it’s true, and then decide whether we want to go on and fight them.”
   “Say it,” Babble said, stammering from overintensity.
   Wade Frazer said, “We’re criminally insane. And at one time, probably for a long time, maybe years, we were kept inside what we call ‘the Building.’” He paused. “The Building, then, would be both a prison and a mental hospital. A prison for the—”
   “What about our settlement?” Babble said.
   “An experiment,” Frazer said. “But not by the military. By the prison and hospital authorities. To see if we could function on the outside… on a planet supposedly far away from Terra. And we failed. We began to kill one another.” He pointed at the tranquilizing gun. “That’s what killed Tallchief; that’s what started it all off. You did it, Babble. You killed Tallchief. Did you also kill Susie Smart?”
   “I did not,” Babble said thinly.
   “But you did kill Talichief.”
   “Why?” Ignatz Thugg asked him.
   Babble said, “I—guessed what we were. I thought Tallchief was what Russell turned out to be.”
   “Who killed Susie Smart?” Seth Morley asked Frazer.
   “I don’t know. I have no clue to that. Maybe Babble. Maybe you, Morley. Did you do it?” Frazer eyed Seth Morley. “No, I guess you didn’t. Well, maybe Ignatz did it. But my point is made; any one of us could have done it. We all have the inclination. That’s what got us into the Building.”
   Mary said, “I killed Susie.”
   “Why?” Seth Morley said. He could not believe it.
   “Because of what she was doing with you.” His wife’s voice was ultra calm. “And she tried to kill me; she had that replica of the Building trained. I did it in self-defense; she engineered it all.”
   “Christ,” Seth Morley said.
   “Did you love her that much?” Mary demanded. “That you can’t understand why I would do it?”
   Seth Morley said, “I barely knew her.”
   “You knew her well enough to—”
   “Okay,” Ignatz Thugg broke in. “It doesn’t matter, now. Frazer made his point; we all might have done it, and in every case one of us did.” His face twitched spasmodically. “I think you’re wrong. I just don’t believe it. We can’t be criminally insane.”
   “The killings,” Wade Frazer said. “I’ve known for a long time that everyone here was potentially homicidal. There’s a great deal of autism, of schizophrenic lack of adequate affect.” He indicated Mary Morley scathingly. “Look how she tells about murdering Susie Smart. As if it’s nothing at all.” He pointed at Dr. Babble. “And his account of Tallchief’s death—Babble killed a man he didn’t even know… just in case—in case!—he might be some kind of authority figure. Any kind of authority figure.”
   After an interval Dr. Babble said, “What I can’t fathom is, Who killed Mrs. Rockingham? That fine, dignified, educated woman … she never did any harm.”
   “Maybe nobody did kill her,” Seth Morley said. “She was infirm; maybe they came for her, the way they came for me. To remove her so she’d survive. That’s the reason they gave me for coming after me and taking me away; they said Babble’s work on my shoulder was defective and I would soon die.”
   “Do you believe that?” Ignatz Thugg asked.
   Truthfully, Seth Morley said, “I don’t know. It might have been. After all, they could have shot me here, the way they did Belsnor.” He thought, Is Belsnor the only one they killed? And we did the rest? It supported Frazer’s theory… and they might not have intended to kill Belsnor; they were in a hurry and evidently they thought their ergguns were set on stun.
   And they were probably afraid of us.
   “I think,” Mary said, “that they interfered with us as little as possible. After all, this was an experiment; they wanted to see how it would come out. And then they did see how it was coming out, so they sent Russell here… and they killed Belsnor. But maybe they saw nothing wrong with killing Belsnor; he had killed Tony. Even we understand the—” She searched for the word.
   “Unbalance,” Frazer said.
   “Yes, the unbalanced quality in that. He could have gotten the sword some other way.” Lightly, she put her hand on her husband’s injured shoulder. Very lightly, but with feeling. “That’s why they wanted to save Seth. He hadn’t killed anyone; he was innocent. And you—” She snarled at Ignatz Thugg, snarled with hatred. “You would have slipped in and murdered him as he lay here hurt.”
   Ignatz Thugg made a noncommittal gesture. Of dismissal. “And Mrs. Rockingham,” Mary finished. “She hadn’t killed anybody either. So they saved her, too. In the breakdown of an experiment of this type it would be natural for them to try to save as—”
   “All you’ve said,” Frazer interrupted, “tends to indicate that I’m right.” He smiled disdainfully, as if he were personally unconcerned. As if he were not involved.
   “There has to be something else at work,” Seth Morley said. “They wouldn’t have let the killings go on as long as they did. They must not have known. At least until they sent Russell. But I guess by then they knew.”
   “They may not be monitoring us properly,” Babble said. “If they relied on those little artificial insects that scurry around carrying miniature TV cameras—”
   “I’m sure they have more,” Seth Morley said. To his wife he said, “Go through Russell’s pockets; see what you can find. Labels in his clothing, what kind of watch or quasiwatch he’s wearing, bits of paper stuck away here and there.”
   “Yes,” she said, and, gingerly, began to remove Russell’s spick-and-span jacket.
   “His wallet,” Babble said, as Mary lifted it out. “Let me see what’s in it.” He took it from her, opened it. “Indentification. Ned W. Russell, residing at the dome-colony on Sirius 3. Twenty-nine years old. Hair: brown. Eyes: brown. Height: five eleven-and-a-half. Authorized to pilot class B and C vessels.” He looked deeper into the wallet. “Married. Here’s a 3-D photo of a young woman, undoubtedly his wife.” He rummaged further. “And this, pictures of a baby.”
   No one said anything for a time.
   “Anyhow,” Babble said presently, “there’s nothing of value on him. Nothing that tells us anything.” He rolled up Russell’s left sleeve. “His watch: Omega self-winding. A good watch.” He rolled up the brown canvas sleeve a little farther. “A tattoo,” he said. “On the inside of his lower arm. How strange; it’s the same thing I have tattooed on my arm, and in the same place.” He traced the tattoo on Russell’s arm with his finger. “‘Persus 9,’” he murmured. He unfastened his cuff and rolled back his own left sleeve. There, sure enough, was the same tattoo on his arm and in exactly the same place.
   Seth Morley said, “I have one on my instep.” Strange, he thought. And I haven’t thought about that tattoo in years.
   “How did you get yours?” Dr. Babble asked him. “I don’t remember getting mine; it’s been too long. And I don’t remember what it means… if I ever did know. It looks like some kind of identifying military service mark. A location. A military outpost at Persus 9.”
   Seth looked around at the rest of the group. All of them had acutely uncomfortable—and anxious—expressions on their faces.
   “All of you have the mark on you, too,” Babble said to them, after a long, long time had passed.
   “Does any one of you remember when you got this mark?” Seth Morley said. “Or why? Or what it means?”
   “I’ve had mine since I was a baby,” Wade Frazer said.
   “You were never a baby,” Seth Morley said to him.
   “What an odd thing to say,” Mary said.
   “I mean,” Seth Morley said, “that it isn’t possible to imagine him as a baby.”
   “But that’s not what you said,” Mary said.
   “What difference does it make what I said?” He felt violently irritable. “So we do have one common element—this annotation chiseled into our flesh. Probably those who are dead have it, too. Susie and the rest of them. Well, let’s face it; we all have a slot of amnesia dug somewhere in our brains. Otherwise, we’d know why we got this tattoo and what it means. We’d know what Persus 9 is—or was at the time the tattoo was made. I’m afraid this confirms the criminally insane theory; we were probably given these marks when we were prisoners in the Building. We don’t remember that, so we don’t remember this tattoo either.” He lapsed into brooding introversion, ignoring, for the time, the rest of the group. “Like Dachau,” he said. “I think,” he said, “that it’s very important to find out what these marks mean. It’s the first really solid indication we’ve found as to who we are and what this settlement is. Can any of you suggest how we find out what Persus 9 means?”
   “Maybe the reference library on the squib,” Thugg said.
   Seth Morley said, “Maybe. We can try that. But first I suggest we ask the tench. And I want to be there. Can you get me into the squib along with you?” Because, he said to himself, if you leave me here I will, like Belsnor, be murdered.
   Dr. Babble said, “I’ll see that you’re gotten aboard—with this one proviso. First we ask the squib’s reference libraries. If it has nothing, then we’ll go searching out the tench. But if we can get it from the squib then we won’t be taking such a great—”
   “Fine,” Morley said. But he knew that the ship’s reference service would be unable to tell them anything.
   Under Ignatz Thugg’s direction they began the task of getting Seth Morley—and themselves—into the small squib.
   Propped up at the controls of the squib once more, Seth Morley snapped on REFERENCE. “Yezzz sirr,” it squeaked.
   “What is referred to by the designated Persus 9?” he asked. A whirr and then it spoke in its vodor voice. “I have no information on a Persussss 9,” REFERENCE said.
   “If it were a planet, would you have a record of it?”
   “Yezzz, if known to Interplan West or Interplan East authorities.”
   “Thanks,” Seth Morley shut off the REFERENCE service. “I had a feeling it wouldn’t know. And I have an even stronger feeling that the tench does know.” That, in fact, the tench’s ultimate purpose would be served by asking it this question. Why he thought that he did not know.
   “I’ll pilot the ship,” Thugg said. “You’re too injured; you lie down.”
   “There’s no place to lie down because of all these people,” Seth Morley said.
   They made room. And he stretched himself out gratefully. The squib, in the hands of Ignatz Thugg, zipped up into the sky. A murderer for a pilot, Seth Morley reflected. And a doctor who’s a murderer. And my wife. A murderess. He shut his eyes. The squib zoomed on, in search of the tench.
   “There it is,” Wade Frazer said, studying the viewscreen. “Bring the ship down.”
   “Okay,” Thugg said cheerfully. He moved the control ball; the ship at once began to descend.
   “Will they pick up our presence?” Babble said nervously. “At the Building?”
   “Probably,” Thugg said.
   “We can’t turn back now,” Seth Morley said. “Sure we can,” Thugg said. “But nobody said anything about it.” He adjusted the controls; the ship glided to a long, smooth landing and came to rest, bumping noisily.
   “Get me out,” Morley said, standing hesitantly; again his head rang. As if, he thought, a sixty cycle hum is being conducted through my brain. Fear, he thought; it’s fear that’s making me this way. Not my wound.
   They gingerly stepped from the squib onto parched and highly arid land. A thin smell, again like something burning, reached their noses. Mary turned away from the smell, paused to blow her nose.
   “Where’s the river?” Seth Morley said, looking around.
   The river had vanished.
   Or maybe we’re somewhere else, Seth Morley thought. Maybe the tench moved. And then he saw it—not far away. It had managed to blend itself almost perfectly with its local environment. Like a desert toad, he thought. Screwing itself backward into the sand.
   Rapidly, on a small piece of paper, Babble wrote. He handed it, when finished, to Seth Morley. For confirmation.
   WHAT IS PERSUS 9?
   “That’ll do.” Seth Morley handed the slip around; all of them soberly nodded. “Okay,” he said, as briskly as he could manage. “Put it in front of the tench.” The great globular mass of protoplasmic slush undulated slightly, as if aware of him. Then, as the question was placed before it, the tench began to shudder… as if, Morley thought, to get away from us. It swayed back and forth, evidently in distress. Part of it began to liquify.
   Something’s wrong, Seth Morley realized. It did not act like this before.
   “Stand back!” Babble said warningly; he took hold of Seth Morley by his good shoulder and propelled him bodily away.
   “My God,” Mary said, “it’s coming apart.” Turning swiftly, she ran; she hurried away from the tench and climbed back into the squib.
   “She’s right,” Wade Frazer said. He, too, retreated.
   Babble said, “I think it’s going to—” A loud whine from the tench sounded, shutting out his voice. The tench swayed, changed color; liquid oozed out from beneath it and formed a gray, disturbed pool on all sides of it. And then, as they stared fixedly in dismay, the tench ruptured. It split into two pieces, and, a moment later, into four; it had split again.
   “Maybe it’s giving birth,” Seth Morley said, above the eerie whine. By degrees, the whine had become more and more intense. And more and more urgent.
   “It’s not giving birth to anything,” Seth Morley said. “It’s breaking apart. We’ve killed it with our question; it isn’t able to answer. And instead it’s being destroyed. Forever.”
   “I’ll retrieve the question,” Babble knelt, whisked the slip of paper back from its spot close to the tench.
   The tench exploded.
   They stood for a time, not speaking, gazing at the ruin that had been the tench. Gelatin everywhere… a circle of it, on all sides of the central remains. Seth Morley took a few steps forward, in its direction; Mary and the others who had run away came slipping cautiously back, to stand with him and view it. View what they had done.
   “Why?” Mary demanded in agitation. “What could there have been about that question that—”
   “It’s a computer,” Seth Morley said. He could distinguish electronic components under the gelatin, exposed by the tench’s explosion, the hidden core—and electronic computer—lay visible. Wiring, transistors, printed circuits, tape storage drums, Thurston gate-response crystals, basic irmadium valves by the thousand, lying scattered everywhere on the ground like minute Chinese firecrackers… lady crackers, they’re called, Seth Morley said to himself. Pieces of it flung in all directions. Not enough left to repair; the tench, as he had intuited, was gone for good.
   “So all the time it was inorganic,” Babble said, apparently dazed. “You didn’t know that, did you Morley?”
   “I had an intuition,” Seth Morley said, “but it was the wrong one. I thought it would answer—be the only living thing that could answer—the question.” How wrong he had been.
   Wade Frazer said, “You were right about one thing, Morley. That question is the key question, evidently. But where do we go from here?”
   The ground surrounding the tench smoked, now, as if the gelatinous material and computer parts were starting into some kind of thermal chain reaction. The smoke had an ominous quality about it. Seth Morley, for reasons not understood, felt, sensed, the seriousness of their situation. Yes, he thought; a chain reaction which we have started but which we can’t stop. How far will it go? he wondered somberly. Already, large cracks had begun to appear in the ground adjacent to the tench. The liquid squirted from the dying, agonized tench, spilling now into the cracks… he heard, from far down, a low drumming noise, as if something immense and sickly-vile had been disturbed by the surface explosion.
   The sky turned dark.
   Incredulous, Wade Frazer said, “Good God, Morley; what have you done with your—question?” He gestured in a seizure of motor-spasms. “This place is breaking up!”
   The man was correct. Fissions had appeared everywhere now; in a few moments there would be no safe spot to stand on. The squib, Seth Morley realized. We’ve got to get back to it. “Babble,” he said hoarsely, “get us all into the squib.” But Babble had gone. Looking around in the turbulent gloom, Seth Morley saw no sign of him—nor of the others.
   They’re in the squib already, he told himself. As best he could he made his way in that direction. Even Mary, he realized. The bastards. He falteringly reached the hatch of the squib; it hung open.
   A fast-widening crack in the ground, almost six feet wide, appeared crashingly beside him; it burgeoned as he stood there. Now he found himself looking into the orifice. At the bottom something undulated. A slimy thing, very large, without eyes; it swam in a dark, stinking liquid and ignored him.
   “Babble,” he croaked, and managed to make the first step that led up into the squib. Now he could see in; he clambered clumsily up, using only his good arm.
   No one was in the squib.
   I’m Christ-awful alone, he said to himself. Now the squib shuddered and bucked as the ground beneath it heaved. Rain had begun; he felt hot, dark drops on him, acrid rain, as if it was not water but some other, less-pleasant substance. The drops seared his skin; he scrambled into the squib, stood wheezing and choking, wondering frantically where the others had gone. No sign of them. He hobbled to the squib’s viewscreen… the squib heaved; its hull shuddered and became unstable. It’s being pulled under, he said to himself. I’ve got to take off; I can’t spend any more time searching for them. He jabbed at a button and turned on the squib’s engine. Tugging on the control ball he sent the squib—with himself inside, alone—up into the dark and ugly sky… a sky obviously ominous to all life. He could hear the rain beating against the hull; the rain of what? he wondered. Like an acid. Maybe, he thought, it will eat its way through the hull and destroy both the squib and me.
   Seating himself, he clicked on the viewscreen to greatest magnification; he rotated it, simultaneously sending the squib into a rotating orbit.
   On the viewscreen appeared the Building. The river, swollen and mud-colored, angrily lapped at it. The Building, faced with its last danger, had thrown a temporary bridge across the river and, Seth Morley saw, men and women were crossing the bridge, crossing thereby the river, and going on into the Building.
   They were all old. Gray and fragile, like wounded mice, they huddled together and advanced step by step in the direction of the Building. They’re not going to make it, he realized. Who are they?
   Peering into the viewscreen he recognized his wife. But old, like the others. Hunched over, tottering, afraid… and then he made out Susie Smart. And Dr. Babble. Now he could distinquish them all. Russell, Ben Tallchief, Glen Belsnor, Wade Frazer, Betty Jo Berm, Tony Dunkelwelt, Babble, Ignatz Thugg, Maggie Walsh, old Bert Kosler—he had not changed, he had already been old—and Roberta Rockingham, and, at the end, Mary.
   The Form Destroyer has seized them, Seth Morley realized. And done this to them. And now they are on their way back to where they came from. Forever. To die there.
   The squib, around him, vibrated. Its hull clanged, again and again. Something hard and metallic was pinging off the hull. He sent the squib higher and the noise abated. What had done it? he wondered, again inspecting the viewscreen.
   And then he saw.
   The Building had begun to disintegrate. Parts of it, chunks of plastic and alloy bonded together, hurled as if in a giant wind up into the sky. The delicate bridge across the river broke, and as it fell it carried those crossing it to their death: they fell with the fragments of the bridge into the snarling, muddy water and vanished. But it made no difference; the Building was dying, too. They would not have been safe in it anyhow.
   I’m the only one who survived, he said to himself. Moaning with grief he revolved the control ball and the ship puttputted out of its orbit and on a tangent leading back to the settlement.
   The engine of the squib died into silence.
   He heard nothing, now, but the slap-slap of rain against its hull. The squib sailed in a great arc, dropping lower each moment.
   He shut his eyes. I did what I could throughout, he said to himself. There was nothing more possible for me. I tried.
   The squib hit, bounced, threw him from his chair onto the floor. Sections of the hull broke off, ripped away; he felt the acrid, acid-like rain pour in on him, drenching him. Opening his pain-glazed eyes he saw that the downpour had burned holes in his clothing; it was devouring his body. He perceived that in a fragment of a second—time seemed to have stopped as the squib rolled over and over, skated on its top across the terrain … he felt nothing, no fear, no grief, no pain any longer; he merely experienced the death of his ship—and of himself—as a kind of detached observer.
   The ship skidded, at last, to a halt. Silence, except for the drip-drip of the rain of acid on him. He lay half-buried in collapsed junk: portions of the control board and viewscreen, all shattered. Jesus, he thought. Nothing is left, and presently the earth will swallow the squib and me. But it does not matter, he thought, because I am dying. In emptiness, meaninglessness and solitude. Like all the others, who have gone before this fragment of the one-time group. Intercessor, he thought, intercede for me. Replace me; die for me.
   He waited. And heard only the tap-tap of the rain.

15

   Glen Belsnor removed the polyencephalic cylinder from his aching head, set it carefully down, rose unsteadily to a standing position. He rubbed his forehead and experienced pain. That was a bad one, he said to himself. We did not do well this time at all.
   Going unsteadily to the dining hail of the ship he poured himself a glass of tepid, bottled water. He then rummaged in his pockets until he found his powerful analgesic tablet, popped it into his mouth, swallowed it with more of the reprocessed water.
   Now, in their cubicles, the others stirred. Wade Frazer tugged at the cylinder which enclosed his brain and skull and scalp and, a few cubicles off, Sue Smart, too, appeared to be returning to active awareness of a homoencephalic kind.
   As he helped Sue Smart off with her heavy cylinder he heard a groan. A lament, telling of deep suffering. It was Seth Morley, he discovered. “Okay,” Belsnor said. “I’ll get to you as soon as I can.”
   All of them were coming out of it, now. Ignatz Thugg yanked violently at his cylinder, managed to detach it from its screw-lock base at his chin… he sat up, his eyes swollen, an expression of displeasure and hostility on his wan, narrow face.
   “Give me a hand,” Belsnor said. “I think Morley is in shock. Maybe you better get Dr. Babble up.”
   “Morley’ll be all right,” Thugg said huskily; he rubbed his eyes, grimacing as if nauseated. “He always is.”
   “But he’s in shock—his death must have been a bad one.” Thugg stood up, nodding dully. “Whatever you say, captain.”
   “Get them warm,” Belsnor said. “Set up the standby heat to a higher notch.” He bent over the prone Dr. Milton Babble. “Come on, Milt,” he said emphatically as he removed Babble’s cylinder.
   Here and there others of the crew sat up. Groaned.
   Loudly, to them all, Captain Belsnor said, “You are all right now. This one turned out to be a fiasco, but you are going—as always—to be fine. Despite what you’ve gone through. Dr. Babble will give you a shot of something to ease the transition from polyencephalic fusion to normal homoencephalic functioning.” He waited a moment, then repeated what he had said.
   Seth Morley, trembling, said, “Are we aboard Persus 9?”
   “You are back on the ship,” Belsnor informed him. “Back aboard Persus 9. Do you remember how you died, Morley?”
   “Something awful happened to me,” Seth Morley managed to say.
   “Well,” Belsnor pointed out, “you had that shoulder wound.”
   “I mean later. After the tench. I remember flying a squib … it lost power and split up—disintegrated in the atmosphere. I was either torn or knocked into pieces; I was all over the squib, by the time it had finished plowing up the landscape.”
   Belsnor said, “Don’t expect me to feel sorry for you.” After all, he himself, in the polyencephalic fusion, had been electrocuted.
   Sue Smart, her long hair tangled, her right breast peeping slyly from between the buttons of her blouse, gingerly touched the back of her head and winced.
   “They got you with a rock,” Belsnor told her.
   “But why?” Sue asked. She seemed dazed, still. “What did I do wrong?”
   Belsnor said, “It wasn’t your fault. This one turned out to be a hostile one; we were venting our long-term, pent-up aggressiveness. Evidently.” He could remember, but only with effort, how he had shot Tony Dunkelwelt, the youngest member of the crew. I hope he won’t be too angry, Captain Belsnor said to himself. He shouldn’t be. After all, in venting his own hostility, Dunkelwelt had killed Bert Kosler, the cook of Persus 9.
   We snuffed ourselves virtually out of existence, Captain Belsnor noted to himself. I hope—I pray!—the next one is different. It should be; as in previous times we probably managed to get rid of the bulk of our hostilities in that one fusion, that (what was it?) Delmak-O episode.
   To Babble, who stood unsteadily fooling with his disarranged clothing, Belsnor said, “Get moving, doctor. See who needs what. Painkiller, tranquilizers, stimulants… they need you. But—” He leaned close to Babble. “Don’t give them anything we’re low on, as I’ve told you before, and as you ignore.”
   Leaning over Betty Jo Berm, Babble said, “Do you need some chemical-therapy help, Miss Berm?”
   “I—I think I’ll be okay,” Betty Jo Berm said as she sat painstakingly up. “If I can just sit here and rest…” She managed a brief, cheerless smile. “I drowned,” she said. “Ugh.” She made a weary, but now somewhat relieved, face.
   Speaking to all of them, Belsnor said quietly but with firm insistence, “I’m reluctantly writing off that particular construct as too unpleasant to try for again.”
   “But,” Frazer pointed out, lighting his pipe with shaking fingers, “it’s highly therapeutic. From a psychiatric standpoint.”
   “It got out of hand,” Sue Smart said.
   “It was supposed to,” Babble said as he worked with the others, rousing them, finding out what they wanted. “It was what we call a total catharsis. Now we’ll have less free-floating hostility surging back and forth between everyone here on the ship.”
   Ben Tallchief said, “Babble, I hope your hostility toward me is over.” He added, “And for what you did to me—” He glared.
   “‘The ship,’” Seth Morley murmured.
   “Yes,” Captain Belsnor said, slightly, sardonically, amused. “And what else have you forgotten this time? Do you want to be briefed?” He waited, but Seth Morley said nothing. Morley seemed still to be entranced. “Give him some kind of amphetamine,” Belsnor said to Dr. Babble. “To get him into a lucid state.” It usually came to this with Seth Morley; his ability to adapt to the abrupt transition between the ship and the polyencephalically-determined worlds was negligible.
   “I’ll be okay,” Seth Morley said. And shut his weary eyes.
   Clambering to her feet, Mary Morley came over to him, sank down beside him and put her lean hand on his shoulder. He started to slide away from her, remembering the injury to his shoulder … and then he discovered that, strangely, the pain had gone. Cautiously, he patted his shoulder. No injury. No blood-seeping wound. Weird, he thought. But—I guess it’s always this way. As I seem to recall.
   “Can I get you anything?” his wife asked him.
   “Are you okay?” he asked her. She nodded. “Why did you kill Sue Smart?” he said. “Never mind,” he said, seeing the strong, wild expression on her face. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but this one really bothered me. All the killing. We’ve never had so much of it before; it was dreadful. We should have been yanked out of this one by the psychocircuitbreaker as soon as the first murder took place.”
   “You heard what Frazer said,” Mary said. “It was necessary; we were building too many tensions here on the ship.”
   Morley thought, I see now why the tench exploded. When we asked it, What does Persus 9 mean? No wonder it blew up… and, with it, took the entire construct. Piece by piece.
   The large, far-too-familiar cabin of the ship forced itself onto his attention. He felt a kind of dismal horror, seeing it again. To him the reality of the ship was far more unpleasant than—what had it been called?—Delmak-O, he recalled. That’s right. We arranged random letters, provided us by the ship’s computer… we made it up and then we were stuck with what we made up. An exciting adventure turned into gross murder. Of all of us, by the time it had finished.
   He examined his calendar wristwatch. Twelve days had passed. In real time, twelve whole, overly long days; in polyencephalic time, only a little over twenty-four hours. Unless he counted the “eight years” at Tekel Upharsin, which he could not really do: it had been a manufactured recall-datum, implanted in his mind during fusion, to add the semblance of authenticity in the polyencephalic venture.
   What did we make up? he asked himself blearily. The entire theology, he realized. They had fed into the ship’s computer all the data they had in their possession concerning advanced religions. Into T.E.N.C.H. 889B had gone elaborated information dealing with Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Zoroastrianism, Tibetan Buddhism… a complex mass, out of which T.E.N.C.H. 889B was to distill a composite religion, a synthesis of every factor involved. We made it up, Seth Morley thought, bewildered; memory of Specktowsky’s Book still filled his mind. The Intercessor, the Mentufacturer, the Walker-on-Earth—even the ferocity of the Form Destroyer. Distillate of man’s total experience with God—a tremendous logical system, a comforting web deduced by the computer from the postulates given it—in particular the postulate that God existed.
   And Specktowsky… he shut his eyes, remembering.
   Egon Specktowsky had been the original captain of the ship. He had died during the accident which had disabled them. A nice touch by T.E.N.C.H. 889B, to make their dear former captain the author of the galaxy-wide worship which had acted as the base of this, their latest world. The awe and near-worship which they all felt for Egon Specktowsky had been neatly carried over to their episode on Delmak-O because for them, in a sense, he was a god—functioned, in their lives, as a god would. This touch had given the created world a more plausible air; it fitted in perfectly with their preconceptions.
   The polyencephalic mind, he thought. Originally an escape toy to amuse us during our twenty-year voyage. But the voyage had not lasted twenty years; it would continue until they died, one by one, in some indefinably remote epoch, which none of them could imagine. And for good reason: everything, especially the infinitude of the voyage, had become an endless nightmare to them.
   We could have survived the twenty years, Seth Morley said to himself, Knowing it would end; that would have kept us sane and alive. But the accident had come and now they circled, forever, a dead star. Their transmitter, because of the accident, functioned no longer, and so an escape toy, typical of those generally used in long, interstellar flights, had become the support for their sanity.
   That’s what really worries us, Morley realized. The dread that one by one we will slip into psychosis, leaving the others even more alone. More isolated from man and everything associated with man.
   God, he thought, how I wish we could go back to Alpha Centaurus. If only…
   But there was no use thinking about that.
   Ben Tallchief, the ship’s maintenance man, said, “I can’t believe that we made up Specktowsky’s theology by ourselves. It seemed so real. So—airtight.”
   Belsnor said, “The computer did most of it; of course it’s airtight.”
   “But the basic idea was ours,” Tony Dunkelwelt said. He had fixed his attention on Captain Belsnor. “You killed me in that one,” he said.
   “We hate one another,” Belsnor said. “I hate you; you hate me. Or at least we did before the Delmak-O episode.” Turning to Wade Frazer he said, “Maybe you’re right; I don’t feel so irritated now.” Gloomily, he said, “But it’ll come back, give or take a week or so.”
   “Do we really hate one another that much?” Sue Smart asked.
   “Yes,” Wade Frazer said.
   Ignatz Thugg and Dr. Babble helped elderly Mrs. Rockingham to her feet. “Oh dear,” she gasped, her withered and ancient face red, “that was just simply dreadful! What a terrible, terrible place; I hope we never go there again.” Coming over, she plucked at Captain Belsnor’s sleeve. “We won’t have to live through that again, will we? I do think, in all honesty, that life aboard the ship is far preferable to that wicked, uncivilized little place.”
   “We won’t be going back to Delmak-O,” Belsnor said.
   “Thank heavens,” Mrs. Rockingham seated herself; again Thugg and Dr. Babble assisted her. “Thank you,” she said to them. “How kind of you. Could I have some coffee, Mr. Morley?”
   “‘Coffee’?” he echoed and then he remembered; he was the ship’s cook. All the precious food supplies, including coffee, tea and milk, were in his possession. “I’ll start a pot going,” he told them all.
   In the kitchen he spooned heaping tablespoonfuls of good black ground coffee into the top of the pot. He noticed, then, as he had noticed many times before, that their store of coffee had begun to run low. In another few months, they would be out entirely.
   But this is a time at which coffee is needed, he decided, and continued to spoon the coffee into the pot. We are all shaken up, he realized. As never before.
   His wife Mary entered the galley. “What was the Building?”
   “The Building.” He filled the coffee pot with reprocessed water. “That was the Boeing plant on Proxima 10. Where the ship was built. Where we boarded it, remember? We were sixteen months at Boeing, getting trained, testing the ship, getting everything aboard and straightened out. Getting Persus 9 spaceworthy.”
   Mary shivered and said, “Those men in black leather uniforms.”
   “I don’t know,” Seth Morley said.
   Ned Russell, the ship’s M.P., entered the galley. “I can tell you what they were. The black leather guards were indications of our attempt to break it up and start again—they were directed by the thoughts of those who had ‘died.’”
   “You would know,” Mary said shortly.
   “Easy,” Seth Morley said, putting his arm around her shoulder. From the start, many of them had not gotten along well with Russell. Which, considering his job, could have been anticipated.
   “Someday, Russell,” Mary said, “you’re going to try to take over the ship… take it away from Captain Belsnor.”
   “No,” Russell said mildly. “All I’m interested in is keeping the peace. That’s why I was sent here; that’s what I intend to do. Whether anyone else wants me to or not.”
   “I wish to God,” Seth Morley said, “that there was really an Intercessor.” He still had trouble believing that they had made up Specktowsky’s theology. “At Tekel Upharsin,” he said, “when the Walker-on-Earth came to me, it was so real. Even now it seems real. I can’t shake it off.”
   “That’s why we created it,” Russell pointed out. “Because we wanted it; because we didn’t have it and needed to have it. Now we’re back to reality, Morley; once again we have to face things as they are. It doesn’t feel too good, does it?”
   “No,” Seth Morley said.
   Russell said, “Do you wish you were back on Delmak-O?”
   After a pause he said, “Yes.”
   “So do I,” Mary said, at last.
   “I’m afraid,” Russell said, “that I have to agree with you. As bad as it was, as bad as we acted… at least there was hope. And back here on the ship—” He made a convulsive, savage, slashing motion. “No hope. Nothing! Until we grow old like Mrs. Rockingham and die.”
   “Mrs. Rockingham is lucky,” Mary said bitterly. “Very lucky,” Russell said, and his face became swollen with impotence and bleak anger. And suffering.

16

   After dinner that “night” they gathered in the ship’s control cabin. The time had come to plot out another polyencephalic world. To make it function it had to be a joint projection from all of them; otherwise, as in the final stages of the Delmak-O world, it would rapidly disintegrate.
   In fifteen years they had become very skilled.
   Especially Tony Dunkelwelt. Of his eighteen years, almost all had been spent aboard Persus 9. For him, the procession of polyencephalic worlds had become a normal way of life.
   Captain Belsnor said, “We didn’t do so bad, in a way; we got rid of almost two weeks.”
   “What about an aquatic world this time?” Maggie Walsh said. “We could be dolphin-like mammals living in warm seas.”
   “We did that,” Russell said. “About eight months ago. Don’t you remember it? Let’s see… yes; we called it Aquasoma 3 and we stayed there three months of real time. A very successful world, I would say, and one of the most durable. Of course, back then we were less hostile.”
   Seth Morley said, “Excuse me.” He rose and walked from the ship’s cabin into the narrow passageway.
   There he stood, alone, rubbing his shoulder. A purely psychosomatic pain remained in it, a memory of Delmak-O which he would probably carry for a week. And that’s all, he thought, that we have left of that particular world. Just a pain, a rapidly-fading memory.
   How about a world, he thought, in which we lie good and dead, buried in our coffins? That’s what we really want.
   There had been no suicides aboard the ship for the last four years. Their population had become stabilized, at least temporarily.
   Until Mrs. Rockingham dies, he said to himself.
   I wish I could go with her, he thought. How long, really, can we keep on? Not much longer. Thugg’s wits are scrambled; so are Frazer’s and Babble’s. And me, too, he thought. Maybe I’m gradually breaking down, too. Wade Frazer is right; the murders on Delmak-O show how much derangement and hostility exists in all of us.
   In that case, he thought suddenly, each escape world will be more feral… Russell is right. It is a pattern.
   He thought, We will miss Roberta Rockingham when she dies; of us, she is the most benign and stable.
   Because, he realized, she knows she is soon going to die.
   Our only comfort. Death.
   I could open vents here and there, he realized, and our atmosphere would be gone. Sucked out into the void. And then, more or less painlessly, we could all die. In one single, brief instant.
   He placed his hand on the emergency release-lock of a nearby hatch vent. All I have to do, he said to himself, is move this thing counterclockwise.
   He stood there, holding onto the release-lock, but doing nothing. What he intended to do had made him frozen, as if time had stopped. And everything around him looked twodimensional.
   A figure, coming down the corridor from the rear of the ship, approached him. Bearded, with flowing, pale robes. A man, youthful and erect, with a pure, shining face.
   “Walker,” Seth Morley said.
   “No,” the figure said. “I am not the Walker-on-Earth. I am the Intercessor.”
   “But we invented you! We and T.E.N.C.H. 889B.” The Intercessor said, “I am here to take you away. Where would you like to go, Seth Morley? What would you like to be?”
   “An illusion, you mean?” he said. “Like our polyencephalic worlds?”
   “No,” the Intercessor said, “You will be free; you will die and be reborn. I will guide you to what you want, and to what is fitting and proper for you. Tell me what it is.”
   “You don’t want me to kill the others,” Seth Morley said, with abrupt comprehension. “By opening the vents.”
   The Intercessor inclined his head in a nod. “It is for each of them to decide. You may decide only for yourself.”
   “I’d like to be a desert plant,” Seth Morley said. “That could see the sun all day. I want to be growing. Perhaps a cactus on some warm world. Where no one will bother me.”
   “Agreed.”
   “And sleep,” Seth Morley said. “I want to be asleep but still aware of the sun and of myself.”
   “That is the way with plants,” the Intercessor said. “They sleep. And yet they know themselves to exist. Very well.” He held out his hand to Seth Morley. “Come along.”
   Reaching, Seth Morley touched the Intercessor’s extended hand. Strong fingers closed around his own hand. He felt happy. He had never before been so glad.
   “You will live and sleep for a thousand years,” the Intercessor said, and guided him away from where he stood, into the stars.
   Mary Morley, stricken, said to Captain Belsnor, “Captain, I can’t find my husband.” She felt wet slow tears make their way down her cheeks. “He’s gone,” she said, in a half-wail.
   “You mean he isn’t on the ship anymore?” Belsnor said. “How could he get out without opening one of the hatches? They’re the only way out of here, and if he opened one of the hatches our internal atmosphere would cease; we’d all be dead.”
   “I know that,” she said.
   “Then he still must be on the ship. We can search for him after we have our next polyencephalic world plotted out.”
   “Now,” she said fiercely. “Look for him now.”
   “I can’t,” Belsnor said.
   Turning, she started away from him.
   “Come back. You have to help.”
   “I’m not coming back,” she said. She continued on, down the narrow corridor, into the galley. I think he was here last, she said to herself. I still sense him here, in the galley, where he spends so much of his time.
   Huddled in the cramped little galley she heard their voices dim, gradually and slowly, into silence. They’ve gone into polyencephalic fusion again, she realized. Without me, this time. I hope they’re happy now. This is the first time I haven’t gone with them, she thought. I’ve missed out. What should I do? she asked herself. Where should I go?
   Alone, she realized. Seth’s gone; they’re gone. And I can’t make it by myself.
   By degrees she crept back into the control cabin of the ship.
   There they lay, in their individual cubicles, the many-wired cylinders covering their heads. All cylinders were in use except for hers… and for Seth’s. She stood there, trembling with hesitation. What did they feed into the computer this time? she wondered. What are the premises, and what has T.E.N.C.H. 889B deduced from that?
   What is the next world going to be like?
   She examined the faintly-humming computer… but, of all of them, only Glen Belsnor really knew how to operate it. They had of course used it, but she could not decipher the settings. The coded output baffled her, too; she remained by the computer, holding the punched tape in her hands… and then, with effort, made up her mind. It must be a reasonably good place, she told herself. We’ve built up so much skill, so much experience; it’s not like the nightmare worlds we found ourselves in at first.
   True, the homicidal element, the hostility, had grown. But the killings were not real. They were as illusory as killings in a dream.
   And how easily they had taken place. How easy it had been for her to kill Susie Smart.
   She lay down on the cot which belonged to her, anchored within her own particular cubicle, plugged in the life-protek mechanism, and then, with relief, placed the cylinder over her head and shoulders. Its modulated hummm sounded faintly in her ears: a reassuring noise and one which she had heard so many times in the past, over the long and weary years.
   Darkness covered her; she breathed it into herself, accepting it, demanding it… the darkness took over and, presently, she realized that it was night. She yearned, then, for daylight. For the world to be exposed—the new world which she could not yet see.
   Who am I? she asked herself. Already it had become unclear in her mind. The Persus 9, the loss of Seth, their empty, trapped lives—all these faded from her like a burden released. She thought only of the daylight ahead; lifting her wrist to her face she tried to read her watch. But it was not running. And she could not see.
   She could make out stars, now, patterns of light interladen with drifts of nocturnal fog.
   “Mrs. Morley,” a fussy male voice said.
   She opened her eyes, fully awake. Fred Gossim, Tekel Upharsin Kibbutz’s top engineer, walked toward her carrying official papers. “You got your transfer,” he told her; he held out the papers and Mary Morley accepted them. “You’re going to a colony settlement on a planet called—” He hesitated, frowning. “Delmar.”
   “Delmak-O,” Mary Morley said, scanning the transfer orders. “Yes—and I’m to go there by noser.” She wondered what kind of place Delmak-O was; she had never heard of it. And yet it sounded highly interesting; her curiosity had been stirred up.
   “Did Seth get a transfer, too?” she asked.
   “‘Seth’?” Gossim raised an eyebrow. “Who’s ‘Seth’?”
   She laughed. “That’s a very good question. I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t matter. I’m so glad to get this transfer—”
   “Don’t tell me about it,” Gossim said in his usual harsh way. “As far as I’m concerned you’re abandoning your responsibilities to the kibbutz.” Turning, he stalked off.
   A new life, Mary Morley said to herself. Opportunity and adventure and excitement. Will I like Delmak-O? she wondered. Yes. I know I will.
   On light feet she danced toward her living area in the kibbutz’s central building-complex. To begin to pack.

Confessions of a Crap Artist

Philip Kindred Dick

Introduction
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Confessions of a Crap Artist
by Philip K. Dick

   To Tessa,
   the dark-haired girl who cared about me when it mattered most; that is, all the time.
   This is to her with love.

Introduction
by Paul Williams

   Confessions of a Crap Artist was written in 1959. It is a tour de force, one of the most extraordinary novels I’ve ever read. There are, I believe, two essential reasons why it has taken Philip K. Dick sixteen years to get this novel published. The first reason is the intensity of the picture the author paints. This is the sort of book that makes editors shiver with (perhaps unconscious) revulsion, and leaves them grasping at any sort of excuse (“I don’t like the shifting viewpoint”) to reject it and get it out of their minds. The people are too real.
   The second reason is that it is a “mainstream” novel written by an author who had already established himself as a fairly successful science fiction writer. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a science fiction writer to be accepted as a serious novelist when he’s not writing science fiction.
   Philip K. Dick was born in 1928. He began writing professionally in the early 1950’s, and although he steadily submitted short stories and novels to mainstream publishers as well as science fiction markets throughout the 1950’s, it was only as a science fiction writer that he was able to get into print. His first short story appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1952; his first novel, Solar Lottery, was published by Ace Books in 1955. Since then, he has had thirty-one other books published in the United States, all of them science fiction.
   Despite Dick’s considerable popularity—in North America and especially in Europe (where over 100 different editions of his books are in print)—Confessions of a Crap Artist is the first non-science-fiction book by Philip K. Dick that has ever been published. It is one of at least eleven “experimental mainstream novels” (his term) that Dick wrote during the first ten years of his professional career.
   Confessions is “experimental” only in that it was written without regard for novelistic conventions. Dick’s value as a writer lies in his unusual and unusually vivid perceptions of the world we live in and the way people behave, especially the way they behave towards each other. These perceptions dictate the form and substance of his novels. In this case, the story is told in the first person by each of three different characters, in different chapters; there are also sections where third person narrative is used. This is unusual, but it works; those few novels of Dick’s where he has tried to shoehorn his perceptions into a “novelistic structure” that did not originate within himself do not work half as well. Dick’s books are uniquely structured, not out of self-conscious experimentation in the manner of writers who are aware of themselves as part of some “avant-garde” movement, but out of simple necessity.
   Dick made some fascinating comments about his attitude towards writing in a letter to Eleanor Dimoff at Harcourt, Brace and Company, written February 1st, 1960, at a time when Dick was most actively engaged in trying to market his “mainstream” novels:


   Now, I don’t know how deeply to go into this, in this letter. The intuitive—I might say, gestalting—method by which I operate has a tendency to cause me to ‘see’ the whole thing at once… Mozart operated this way. The problem for him was simply to get it down. If he lived long enough, he did so; if not, then not. In other words, according to me (but not according to you people) my work consists of getting down that which exists in my mind; my method up to now has been to develop notes of progressively greater completeness… If I believed that the first jotting-down actually carried the whole idea, I would be a poet, not a novelist; I believe that it takes about 60,000 words for me to put down my original idea in its absolute entirety.


   Philip K. Dick has three particular talents that have allowed him to not only “put down” his visions but to bring them to life: his ability to create believable, sympathetic characters; his sense of horror; and his sense of humor.
   Confessions of a Crap Artist is the story of four people who live in and perceive very different universes but whose lives get hopelessly tangled together through the usual combination of destiny, accident, and their own deliberate actions (stress on the latter—the novel is at its most acute in the scenes where each character assesses his own situation and then deliberately acts in such a manner as to dig himself deeper into the pit). Jack Isidore, the “crap artist” of the title, is a simple-minded lost soul, fascinated by bits of information and incapable of distinguishing fact from fantasy—seeing the world through his eyes is a bizarre, unforgettable experience. He is not an idiot in the tradition of Faulkner’s and Dostoievski’s famous idiots; his idiocy is close enough to our normalcy to scare us.
   Fay Hume, Jack’s sister, is an intelligent, attractive, hopelessly selfish woman, married to a beer-drinking, inarticulate regular guy named Charley Hume who owns a small factory in Marin County. They live in an absurdly non-functional modern house in Point Reyes, a rural outpost several hours north of San Francisco, with two daughters and some livestock and an incredible electric bill. Charley’s purpose in Fay’s life seems to have been to build her this dream house; that done, he withers in her eyes and she turns her attention to a young married man named Nathan Anteil. Nathan is a true intellectual, a law student; he spots Fay for what the is immediately, but is drawn to her anyway. Why? He doesn’t know; perhaps even the author doesn’t know; he only knows that it’s true, this is the way people are.
   And the story is disturbing, hilarious, and utterly believable because the reader, too, can’t help recognizing the truth when he sees it, however crazy it is. Charley attacks his wife because she makes him buy Tampax; it’s ridiculous, but who among us can fail to see the sanity underneath Charley’s madness? Who can fail to identify with Fay in her moments of self-realization, such as the following soliloquy? It’s funny, of course; but it’s too accurate not to also be painful:


   Almost at once I felt, acutely, that I was a hysterical nut. They shouldn’t trust you with the phone, I said to myself. Getting up from the bed I paced around the bedroom. Now it’ll get all over town, I realized. Fay Hume calls up some people in Point Reyes and raves like a drunk. That’s what they’ll say: I was drunk. Sheriff Chisholm will be by to take me away. Maybe I ought to phone him myself and eliminate the middleman.


   The reality of Philip Dick’s characters stems quite simply from the fact that they are real to him; he hears them talking, in his mind, and records their conversations and thoughts—his dialogue, in almost all of his novels, is excellent. He is especially good at capturing the interactions between people; the authenticity of his work lies not so much in what people say as in how they respond to each other. In a conversation in 1974, Dick told me, “Well, the idea of a single protagonist, I never could understand that too well… What I’ve felt is that problems are multipersonal, they involve us all, there’s no such thing as a private problem… .It’s only a form of ignorance, when I wake up in the morning, and I fall over the chair and break my nose, and I’m broke, and my wife’s left me—It’s my ignorance that makes me think I’m an entire universe and that these miseries are my own and they’re not affecting the rest of the world. If I could only look down from a satellite, I would see all the world, everybody getting up and, in some analogous way, falling over a chair and breaking something.”
   The humor in the novel, in everything Dick says and writes, is self-evident (“I stood in the middle of my room doing absolutely nothing except respiring, and, of course, keeping other normal processes going”). Dick writes from the center of some vast despair that is, however, never final; the reverse of cynicism is at work here. No matter how miserable and absurd his characters’ actions and thoughts are, Dick’s attitude toward his characters is always, finally, sympathetic—he loves and understands them, his books affirm a faith and affection for humanity, in spite of all our idiocies. The result is somehow comic. In Confessions particularly, every little hilarious detail of the awful vanity of our minds is mercilessly exposed. It is possible a woman could drive a man to such a state that he would assassinate his own pet theep? You better believe it.
   But the humor in no way dilutes the horror. The horror in all of Dick’s novels is that the world around us is cruel and insane, and the more courageously we struggle to remove the blinders from our eyes and see things as they really are, the more we suffer. Awareness is pain; and Dick’s characters are cursed with awareness, like the autistic child in Martian Time-Slip who hears the noise of the universe decaying. In Confessions of a Crap-Artist, the horror is that human beings torture each other, and fail repeatedly to do what is best both for the people around them and for themselves. We are dimly—sometimes even acutely—aware of the interconnectedness of our lives, but we don’t seem to be able to put that awareness to work for us, in fact our efforts to do so only make things worse. The novel is summed up in Jack Isidore’s poignant observation: “In fact, the whole world is full of nuts. It’s enough to get you down.”
   Here are Philip K. Dick’s thoughts on Confessions of a Crap Artist, from a letter dated January 19, 1975:


   When I wrote Confessions I had the idea of creating the most idiotic protagonist, ignorant and without common sense, a walking symposium of nitwit beliefs and opinions… an outcast from our society, a totally marginal man who sees everything from the outside only and hence must guess as to what’s going on.
   In the Dark Ages there was an Isidore of Seville, Spain, who wrote an encyclopedia, the shortest ever written: about thirty-five pages, as I recall. I hadn’t realized how ignorant they were then until I realized that Isidore of Seville’s encyclopedia was considered a masterpiece of educated compilations for a hell of a long time.
   It came to me, then, back in the ‘50’s, to wonder, What if I created a modern-day Isidore, this one of Seville, California, and had him sort of write something for our time like that of Isidore of Seville, Spain? What would be the analog? Obviously, a schizoid person, a loner, like my protagonist. But underneath, most important of all, I wanted to show that this ignorant outsider was a man, too, like we are; he has the same heart as we, and sometimes is a good person.
   In reading the novel over now, I am amazed to find that I agree even more that Jack Isidore of Seville, California, is no dummy; I am amazed to see how, below the surface of gabble which he prattles constantly, he has a sort of shrewdly appraising subconscious which sees maybe very darkly into events, but shit—as I finished the novel this time I thought, to my surprise, Maybe ol’ Jack Isidore is right! Maybe he doesn’t just see as well aswe do, but in fact—incredibly, really—somehow and somewhat better.
   In other words, I had sympathy for him when I wrote it back in the ‘50s, but now I have I think even more sympathy, as if time has begun to vindicate Jack Isidore. His painfully-arrived-at opinions are in some strange, beautiful way lacking in the preconceptions which tell the rest of us what must be true and what must not be, come hell or high water. Jack Isidore starts with no preconceptions, takes his information from wherever he can find it, and winds up with bizarre but curiously authentic conclusions. Like an observer from another planet entirely, he is a kind of gutter sociologist among us. I like him; I approve of him. I wonder, another twenty years from now, if his opinions may not seem even more right on. He is, in many ways, a superior person.
   At the end, for instance, when he realizes he was wrong, that the world is not going to end, he is able to survive this extraordinary (for him) realization; he adjusts. I wonder if we could do as well if we learned that he was right, and we were wrong. But perhaps most important of all, as Jack himself observed, didn’t we see all the normal human beings, the sane and educated and balanced ones, destroy themselves in truly dreadful ways? And see Jack steer clear, throughout, of virtually all moral wrongdoing? If his common sense, his practical judgment as to what is, and as to what he can or can’t do, is fucked, what about his refusal to be led into criminal and evil acts? He stays free; from a realistic standpoint he is doomed and damned, but from a moral one, a spiritual one if you will, he winds up untarnished… and it is certainly his victory, and a measure of his shrewd judgment, that he realizes this and points it out.
   So Jack has insight into himself and the world around him to an enormous degree. He is no dummy. From a purely survival standpoint, maybe he will—and ought to—make it. Maybe, like the Emperor Claudius of Rome, like “The Idiot,” he is one of God’s favored fools; maybe he is an authentic avatar of Parsifal, the guileless fool of the medieval legends… if so, we can use him, and a lot more like him.
   This forgiving man, capable of evaluating without prejudice (in the final analysis) the hearts and actions of his fellow men, is to me a sort of romantic hero; I certainly had myself in mind when I wrote it, and now, after reading it again so many years later, I am pleased at my inner model, my alter self, Jack Isidore of Seville, California: more selfless than I am, more kind, and in a deep deep way a better man.


   Confessions of a Crap Artist is, in Phil Dick’s opinion, easily the finest of his non-science fiction novels, and one of the best books he has ever written (ranking, in the undersigned’s opinion, with Dick’s Hugo-Award-winning The Man In The High Castle and his equally brilliant Martian Time-Slip). It is also, I think, one of the most penetrating novels anyone has written about life in America in the midtwentieth century.
   Philip K. Dick was living in Point Reyes, California, when he wrote this novel, Shortly after completing it, he married the woman who had inspired him to create Fay Hume, and they lived together for the next five years.
   New York City,
   February, 1975

1

   I am made out of water. You wouldn’t know it, because I have it bound in. My friends are made out of water, too. All of them. The problem for us is that not only do we have to walk around without being absorbed by the ground but we also have to earn our livings.
   Actually there’s even a greater problem. We don’t feel at home anywhere we go. Why is that?
   The answer is World War Two.
   World War Two began on December 7, 1941. In those days I was sixteen years old and going to Seville High. As soon as I heard the news on the radio I realized that I was going to be in it, that our president had his opportunity now to whip the Japs and the Germans, and that it would take all of us pulling shoulder to shoulder. The radio was one I built myself. I was always putting together superhet five-tube ac-dc receivers. My room was overflowing with earphones and coils and condensers, along with plenty of other technical equipment.
   The radio announcement interrupted a bread commercial that went:
   “Homer! Get Homestead bread instead!”
   I used to hate that commercial, and I had just jumped up to turn to another frequency when all at once the woman’s voice was cut off. Naturally I noticed that; I didn’t have to think twice to be aware that something was up. Here I had my German colonies stamps—those that show the Kaiser’s yacht the Hohenzollern—spread out only a little way from the sunlight, and I had to get them mounted before anything happened to them. But I stood in the middle of my room doing absolutely nothing except respiring, and, of course, keeping other normal processes going. Maintaining my physical side while my mind was focussed on the radio.
   My sister and mother and father, naturally, had gone away for the afternoon, so there was nobody to tell. That made me livid with rage. After the news about the Jap planes dropping bombs on us, I ran around and around, trying to think who to call up. Finally I ran downstairs to the living room and phoned Hermann Hauck, who I went around with at Seville High and who sat next to me in Physics 2A. I told him the news, and he came right over on his bicycle. We sat around listening for further word, discussing the situation.
   While discussing, we lit up a couple of Camels.
   “This means Germany and Italy’ll get right in,” I told Hauck. “This means war with the Axis, not just the Japs. Of course, we’ll have to lick the Japs first, then turn our attention to Europe.”
   “I’m sure glad to see our chance to clobber those Japs,” Hauck said. We both agreed with that. “I’m itching to get in,” he said. We both paced around my room, smoking and keeping our ears on the radio. “Those crummy little yellow-bellies,” Hermann said. “You know, they have no culture of their own. Their whole civilization, they stole it from the Chinese. You know, they’re actually descended more from apes; they’re not actually human beings. It’s not like fighting real humans.”
   “That’s true,” I said.
   Of course, this was back in 1941, and an unscientific statement like that didn’t get questioned. Today we know that the Chinese don’t have any culture either. They went over to the Reds like the mass of ants that they are. It’s a natural life for them. Anyhow it doesn’t really matter, because we were bound to have trouble with them sooner or later anyhow. We’ll have to lick them someday like we licked the Japs. And when the time comes we’ll do it.
   It wasn’t long after December 7 that the military authorities put up the notices on the telephone poles, telling Japs that they had to be out of California by such and such a date. In Seville—which is about forty miles south of San Francisco—we had a number of Japs doing business; one ran a flower nursery, another had a grocery store—the usual small-time businesses that they run, cutting pennies here and there, getting their ten kids to do all the work, and generally living on a bowl of rice a day. No white person can compete with them because they’re willing to work for nothing. Anyhow, now they had to get out whether they liked it or not. In my estimation it was for their own good anyhow, because a lot of us were stirred up about Japs sabotaging and spying. At Seville High a bunch of us chased a Jap kid and kicked him around a little, to show how we felt. His father was a dentist, as I recall.
   The only Jap that I knew at all was a Jap who lived across the street from us, an insurance salesman. Like all of them, he had a big garden out on the sides and rear of his house, and in the evenings and on weekends he used to appear wearing khaki pants, a t-shirt, and tennis shoes, with an armload of garden hose and a sack of fertilizer, a rake and a shovel. He had a lot of Jap vegetables that I never recognized, some beans and squash and melons, plus the usual beets and carrots and pumpkins. I used to watch him scratching out the weeds around the pumpkins, and I’d always say:
   “There’s Jack Pumpkinhead out in his garden, again. Searching for a new head.”
   He did look like Jack Pumpkinhead, with his skinny neck and his round head; his hair was shaved, like the college students have theirs, now,’and he always grinned. He had huge teeth, and his lips never covered them.
   The idea of this Jap wandering around with a rotting head, in search of a fresh head, used to dominate me, back at that time before the Japs were moved out of California. He had such an unhealthy appearance—mostly because he was so thin and tall and stooped—that I conjectured as to what ailed him. It looked to me to be t.b. For a while I had the fear—it bothered me for weeks—that one day he’d be out in the garden, or walking down his path to get into his car, and his neck would snap and his head would bounce off his shoulders and roll down to his feet. I waited in fear for this to happen, but I always had to look out when I heard him. And whenever he was around I could hear him, because he continually hawked and spat. His wife spat, too, and she was very small and pretty. She looked almost like a movie star. But her English, according to my mother, was so bad that there was no use of anybody trying to talk to her; all she did was giggle.
   The notion that Mr. Watanaba looked like Jack Pumpkinhead could never have occurred to me if I hadn’t read the Oz books in my younger years; in fact I still had a few of them around my room as late as World War Two. I kept them with my science-fiction magazines, my old microscope and rock collection, and the model of the solar system that I had built in junior high school for science class. When the Oz books were first written, back around 1900, everybody took them to be completely fiction, as they did with Jules Verne’s books and H.G. Wells’. But now we’re beginning to see that although the particular characters, such as Ozma and the Wizard and Dorothy, were all creations of Baum’s mind, the notion of a civilization inside the world is not such a fantastic one. Recently, Richard Shaver has given a detailed description of a civilization inside the world, and other explorers are alerted for similar finds. It may be, too, that the lost continents of Mu and Atlantis will be found to be part of the ancient culture of which the interior lands played a major role.
   Today, in the 1950s, everyone’s attention is turned upward, to the sky. Life on other worlds preoccupies people’s attention. And yet, any moment, the ground may open up beneath our feet, and strange and mysterious races may pour out into our very midst. It’s worth thinking about, and out in California, with the earthquakes, the situation is particularly pressing. Every time there’s a quake I ask myself: is this going to open up the crack in the ground that finally reveals the world inside? Will this be the one?
   Sometimes at the lunch hour break, I ye discussed this with the guys I work with, even with Mr. Poity, who owns the firm. My experience has been that if any of them are conscious of non-terrestrial races at all, they’re concerned only with UFO’s, and the races we’re encountering, without realizing it, in the sky. That’s what I would call intolerance, even prejudice, but it takes a long time, even in this day and age, for scientific facts to become generally known. The mass of scientists themselves are slow to change, so it’s up to us, the scientifically-trained public, to be the advance guard. And yet I’ve found, even among us, there are so many that just don’t give a damn. My sister, for instance. During the last few years she and her husband have been living up in the north western part of Marin County, and all they seem to care about up there is Zen Buddhism. And so here’s an example, right in my own family, of a person who has turned from scientific curiosity to an Asiatic religion that threatens to submerge the questioning rational faculty as surely as Christianity.
   Anyhow, Mr. Poity takes an interest, and I’ve loaned him a few of the Col. Churchward books on Mu.
   My job with the One-Day Dealers’ Tire Service is an interesting one, and it makes some use of my skill with tools, although little use of my scientific training. I’m a tire regroover. What we do is pick up smoothies, that is, tires that are worn down so they have little or no tread left, and then I and the other regroovers take a hot point and groove right down to the casing, following the old tread pattern, so it looks as if there’s still rubber on the tire—whereas in actual fact there’s only the fabric of the casing left. And then we paint the regrooved tire with black rubbery paint, so it looks like a pretty darn good tire. Of course, if you have it on your car and you so much as back over a warm match, then boom! You have a flat. But usually a regrooved tire is good for a month or so. You can’t buy tires like I make, incidentally. We deal wholesale only, that is, with used car lots.
   The job doesn’t pay much, but it’s sort of fun, figuring out the old tread pattern—sometimes you can scarcely see it. In fact, sometimes only an expert, a trained technician like myself, can see it and trace it. And you have to trace perfectly, because if you leave the old tread pattern, there’s a gouge mark that even an idiot can recognize as not having been made by the original machine. When I get done regrooving a tire, it doesn’t look hand-done by any means. It looks exactly the way it would look if a machine had done it, and, for a negroover, that’s the most satisfying feeling in the world.

2

   Seville, California has a good public library. But the best thing about living in Seville is that in only a twenty-minute drive you’re over into Santa Cruz where the beach is and the amusement park is. And it’s four lanes all the way.
   To me, though, the library has been important in forming my education and convictions. On Fridays, which is my day off, I go down around ten in the morning and read Life and the cartoons in the Saturday Evening Post, and then if the librarians aren’t watching me, I get the photography magazines from the rack and read them over for the purpose of finding those special ant poses that they have the girls doing. And if you look carefully in the front and back of the photography magazines, you find ads that nobody else notices, ads there for you. But you need to be familiar with the wording. Anyhow, what those ads get you, if you send in the dollar, is something different from what you see even in the best magazines; like Playboy or Esquire. You get photos of girls doing something else entirely, and in some ways they’re better, although usually the girls are older—sometimes even baggy old hags—and they’re never pretty, and, worst of all, they have big fat saggy breasts. But they are doing really unusual things, things that you’d never ordinarily expect to see girls do in pictures—not especially dirty things, because after all, these come through the Federal mails from Los Angeles and Glendale—but things such as one I remember in which one girl was lying down on the floor, wearing a black lace bra and black stockings and French heels, and this other girl was mopping her all over with a mop from a bucket of suds. That held my attention for months. And then there was another I remember, of a girl wearing the usual—as above—pushing another girl similarly attired down a ladder so that the victim-girl (if that’s what you call it; at least, that’s how I usually think of it) was all bent and lopsided, as if her arms and legs were broken—like a rag doll or something, as if she’s been run over.
   And then always there’s the ones you get in which the stronger girl, the master, has the other tied up. Bondage pictures, they’re called. And better than that are the bondage drawings. They’re really competent artists who draw those… some are really worth seeing. Others, in fact most of them, are the run-of-the-mill junk, and really shouldn’t be allowed to go through the mails, they’re so crude.
   For years I’ve had a strange feeling looking at these pictures, not a dirty feeling—nothing to do with sexuality or relations—but the same feeling you get when you’re high up on a mountain, breathing that pure air, the way it is over by Big Basin Park, where the redwoods are, and the mountain streams. We used to go hunting around in those redwoods, even though naturally it’s illegal to hunt in a state or Federal park. We’d get a couple of deer, now and then. The guns we used weren’t mine, though. I borrowed the one I used from Harvey St. James.
   Usually when there’s anything worth doing, all three of us, myself and St. James and Bob Paddleford, do it together, using St. James’ ‘57 Ford convertible with the double pipes and twin spots and dropped rearend. It’s quite a car, known all around Seville and Santa Cruz; it’s gold-colored, that baked on enamel, with purple trim that we did by hand. And we used moulded fiber-glass to get those sleek lines. It looks more like a rocket ship than a can; it has that look of outer space and velocities nearing the speed of light.
   For a really big time, where we go is across the Sierras to Reno; we leave late Friday, when St. James gets off from his job selling suits at Hapsberg’s Menswear, shoot over to San Jose and pick up Paddleford—he works for Shell Oil, down in the blueprint department—and then we’re off to Reno. We don’t sleep Friday night at all; we get up there late and go right to work playing the slots or blackjack. Then around ten o’clock Saturday morning we take a snooze in the car, find a washroom to shave and change our shirts and ties, and then we’re off looking for women. You can always find that kind of women around Reno; it’s a really filthy town.
   I actually don’t enjoy that part too much. It plays no role in my life, any more than any other physical activity. Even to look at me you’d recognize that my main energies are in the mind.
   When I was in the sixth grade I started wearing glasses because I read so many funny books. Tip Top Comics and King Comics and Popular Comics… . those were the first comic books to appear, back in the mid ‘thirties, and then there were a whole lot more. I read them all, in grammar school, and traded them around with other kids. Later on, in junior high, I started reading Astonishing Stories, which was a pseudo-science magazine, and Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder. In fact, I had an almost complete file of Thrilling Wonder, which was my favorite. It was from an ad in Thrilling that I got the lucky lodestone that I still carry around with me. That was back around 1939.
   All my family have been thin, my mother excepted, and as soon as I put on those silver-framed glasses they always gave to boys in those days, I immediately looked scholarly, like a real book worm. I had a high forehead anyhow. Then later, in high school, I had dandruff to quite an extent, and this made my hair seem lighter than it actually was. Once in a while I had a stammer that bothered me, although I found that if I suddenly bent down, as if brushing something from my leg, I could speak the word okay, so I got in the habit of doing that. I had, and still have, an indentation on my cheek, by my nose, left over from having had the chicken pox. In high school I felt nervous a great deal of the time, and I used to pick at it until it became infected. Also, I had other skin troubles, of the acne type, although in my case the spots got a purple texture that the dermatologist said was due to some low-grade infection throughout my body. As a matter of fact, although I’m thirty-four, I still break out in boils once in a while, not on my face but on my butt or arm pits.
   In high school I had some nice clothes, and that made it possible for me to step out and be popular. In particular I had one blue cashmere sweater that I wore for almost four years, until it got to smelling so bad the gym instructor made me throw it away. He had it in for me anyhow, because I never took a shower in gym.
   It was from the American Weekly, not from any magazines, that I got my interest in science.
   Possibly you remember the article they had, in the May 4th 1935 issue, on the Sargasso Sea. At that time I was ten years old, and in the high fourth. So I was just barely old enough to read something besides funny books. There was a huge drawing, in six or seven colors, that covered two whole opened-up pages; it showed ships, stuck in the Sargasso Sea, that had been there for hundreds of years. It showed the skeletons of the sailors, covered with sea weed. The rotting sails and masts of the ships. And all different kinds of ships, even some ancient Greek and Roman ones, and some from the time of Columbus, and then the Norsemen’s ships. Jumbled in together. Never stirring. Stuck there forever, trapped by the Sargasso Sea.
   The article told how ships got drawn in and trapped, and how none ever got away. There were so many that they were side by side, for miles. Every kind of ship that existed, although later on when there were steamships, fewer ships got stuck, obviously because they didn’t depend on wind currents but had their own power.
   The article affected me because in many ways it reminded me of an episode on Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, that had seemed very important to me, having to do with the Elephants’ Lost Graveyard. I remember that Jack had had a metal key that, when struck, resonated strangely, and was the key to the graveyard. For a long time I knocked every bit of metal I came across against something to make it resonate, trying to produce that sound and find the Elephants’ Lost Graveyard on my own (a door was supposed to open in the rock somewhere). When I read the article on the Sargasso Sea I saw an important resemblance; the Elephants’ Lost Graveyard was sought for because of all the ivory, and in the Sargasso Sea there was millions of dollars worth of jewels and gold, the cargoes of the trapped ships, just waiting to be located and claimed. And the difference between the two was that the Elephants’ Lost Graveyard wasn’t a scientific fact but just a myth brought back by fever-crazed explorers and natives, whereas the Sargasso Sea was scientifically established.
   On the floor of our living room, in the house we rented back in those days on Illinois Avenue, I had the article spread out, and when my sister came home with my mother and father I tried to interest her in it. But at that time she was only eight. We got into a terrible fight about it, and the upshot was that my father grabbed up the American Weekly and threw it into the paper bag of refuse under the sink. That upset me so badly that I had a fantasy about him, dealing with the Sargasso Sea. It was so disgusting that even now I can’t bear to think about it. That was one of the worst days in my life, and I always held it against Fay, my sister, that she was responsible for what happened; if she had read the article and listened to me talk about it, as I wanted her to, nothing would have gone wrong. It really got me down that something so important, and, in a sense, beautiful, should be degraded the way it was that day. It was as if a delicate dream was trampled on and destroyed.
   Neither my father nor mother were interested in science. My father worked with another man, an Italian, as a carpenter and housepainter, and, for a number of years, he was with the Southern Pacific Railroad, in the maintenance department at the Gilroy Yards. He never read anything himself except the San Francisco Examiner and Reader’s Digest and the National Geographic. My mother subscribed to Liberty, HERE and then, when that went out of business, she read Good Housekeeping. Neither of them had any education scientific or otherwise. They always discouraged me and Fay from reading, and off and on during my childhood they raided my rooms and burned everything in the way of reading material that they could get their hands on, even library books. During World War Two, when I was in the Service and overseas fighting on Okinawa, they went into my room at home, the room that had always belonged to me, gathered up all my science-fiction magazines and scrapbooks of girl pictures, and even my Oz books and Popular Science magazines, and burned them, just as they had done when I was a child. When I got back from defending them against the enemy I found that there was nothing to read in the whole house. And all my valuable reference files of unusual scientific facts were gone forever. I do remember, though, what was probably the most startling fact from that file of thousands. Sunlight has weight. Every year the earth weighs ten thousand pounds more, because of the sunlight that reaches it from the sun. That fact has never left my mind, and the other day I calculated that since I first learned the fact, in 1940, almost one million nine hundred thousand pounds of sunlight have fallen on the earth.
   And then, too, a fact that is becoming more and more known to intelligent persons. An application of mind-power can move an object at a distance! This is something I’ve known all along, because as a child I used to do it. In fact, my whole family did it, even my father. It was a regular activity that we engaged in, especially when out in public places such as restaurants. One time we all concentrated on a man wearing a gray suit and got him to reach his right hand back and scratch his neck. Another time, in a bus, we influenced a big old colored woman to get to her feet and get off the bus, although that took some doing, probably because she was so heavy. This was spoiled one day, however, by my sister, who when we were concentrating on a man across a waiting room from us suddenly said,
   “What a lot of crap.”
   Both my mother and father were furious at her, and my father gave her a shaking, not so much for using a word like that at her age (she was about eleven) but for interrupting our mind concentration. I guess she picked up the word from some of the boys at Millard Fillmore Grammar School, where she was in the fifth grade at that time. Even that young she had started getting rough and tough; she liked to play kickball and baseball, and she was always down on the boys’ playground instead of with the girls. Like me, she has always been thin. She used to be able to run very well, almost like a professional athlete, and she used to grab something like, say, my weekly package of Jujubees that I always bought on Saturday morning with my allowance, and ran off somewhere and ate it. She has never gotten much of a figure, even now that she’s more than thirty years old. But she has nice long legs and a springy walk, and two times a week she goes to a modern dance class and does exercises. She weighs about 116 pounds.
   Because of being a tomboy she always used men’s words, and when she got married the first time she married a man who made his living as owner of a little factory that makes metal signs and gates. Until his heart attack he was a pretty rough guy. The two of them used to go climbing up and down the cliffs out at Point Reyes, up where they live in Marin County, and for a time they had two arabian horses that they rode. Strangely, he had his heart attack playing badminton, a child’s game. The birdie got hit over his head—by Fay—and he ran backward, tripped over a gopher hole, and fell over on his back. Then he got up, cursed a blue streak when he saw that his racket had snapped in half, started into the house for another racket, and had his heart attack coming back outdoors again.
   Of course, he and Fay had been quarreling a lot, as usual, and that may have had something to do with it. When he got mad he had no control over the language he used, and Fay has always been the same way—not merely using gutter words, but in the indiscriminate choice of insults, harping on each other’s weak points and saying anything that might hurt, whether true or not—in other words, saying anything, and very loud, so that their two children got quite an earful. Even in his normal conversation Charley has always been foulmouthed, which is something you might expect from a man who grew up in a town in Colorado. Fay always enjoyed his language. The two of them made quite a pair. I remember one day when the three of us were out on their patio, enjoying the sun, when I happened to say something, I think having to do with space travel, and Charley said to me,
   “Isidore, you sure are a crap artist.”
   Fay laughed, because it made me so sore. It made no difference to her that I was her brother; she didn’t care who Charley insulted. The irony of a slob like that, a paunchy, beer-drinking ignorant mid-westener who never got through high school, calling me a “crap artist” lingered in my mind and caused me to select the ironic title that I have on this work. I can just see all the Charley Humes in the world, with their portable radios tuned to the Giants’ ballgames, a big cigar sticking out of their mouth, that slack, vacant expression on their fat red faces… and it’s slobs like that who’re running this country and its major businesses and its army and navy, in fact everything. It’s a perpetual mystery to me. Charley only employed seven guys at his iron works, but think of that: seven human beings dependent on a farmer like that for their very livelihood. A man like that in a position to blow his nose on the rest of us, on anybody who has sensitivity or talent.


   Their house, up in Marin County, cost them a lot of money because they built it themselves. They bought ten acres of land back in 1951, when they first got married, and then, while they were living in Petaluma where Charley’s factory is, they hired an architect and got their plans drawn up for their house.
   In my opinion, Fay’s whole motive for getting mixed up with a man like that in the first place was to finally wind up with a house such as she did wind up with. After all, when he met her he already owned his factory and netted a good forty thousand a year (at least to hear him tell it). Our family had never had any money; we ate off a set of dime store blue willow for ten years, and I don’t think my father ever owned a new suit at any time in his life. Of course, by winning a scholarship and being able to go on to college, Fay started meeting men from good homes—the frat boys who always horse around with big-game bonfires and the like. For a year or so she went steady with a boy studying to be a law student, a fairy-like creature who never did appeal much to me, although he liked to play pin ball machines—to learn the mathematical odds, as he explained it. Charley met her by chance, in a roadside grocery store on highway One near Fort Ross. She was ahead of him in line, buying hamburger buns and Coca-Cola and cigarettes, and humming a Mozart tune which she had learned in a college music course. Charley thought it was an old hymn that he had sung back in Canon City, Colorado, and he started talking to her. Outside the grocery store he had his Mercedes-Benz car parked, and she could see it, with that three-point star sticking up from the radiator. Naturally Charley had on his Mercedes-Benz pin, sticking out of his shirt, so she and the rest of the world could see whose car it was. And she had always wanted a good car, especially a foreign one.
   As I construct it, based on my fairly thorough knowledge of both of them, the conversation went like this:
   “Is that car out there a six or an eight?” Fay asked him.
   “A six,” Charley said.
   “Good god,” Fay said, “Only a six?”
   “Even the Rolls Royce is a six,” Charley said. “Those Europeans don’t make eights. What do you need eight cylinders for?”
   “Good god. The Rolls Royce a six.”
   All her life Fay had wanted to ride in a Rolls Royce. She had seen one once, parked at the curb by a fancy restaurant in San Francisco. The three of us, she and I and Charley, walked all around it.
   “That’s a terrific car,” Charley said, and proceeded to give us details on how it worked. I couldn’t have cared less. If I had my choice I’d like a Thunderbird or a Corvette. Fay listened to him as we walked on, and I could see that she wasn’t too interested either. Something had distressed her.
   “They’re so flashy-looking,” she said. “I always thought of a Rolls as a classic-looking car. Like a World War One military sedan. An officers’ car.”
   Consider to yourself if you’ve ever actually seen a new Rolls. They’re small, metallic, streamlined but also chunky. Heavy-looking. Like some of the Jaguar saloon models, only more impressive. British streamlining, if you get the picture. Personally I wouldn’t have one on a bet, and I could see that Fay was wrestling with the same reaction. This one had a silver-blue finish, with lots of chrome. In fact the whole car had a polished look, and this appealed to Charley, who liked metal and not wood or plastic.
   “There’s a real car,” he said. Obviously he could see that he wasn’t getting across to either of us; all he could do was repeat himself in his customary clumsy way. Besides his gutter words he had the vocabulary of a six year old, just a few words to cover everything. “That’s a car,” he said finally, as we got to the house we had come to San Francisco to visit. “But it would look out of place in Petaluma.”
   “Especially parked in the lot at your plant,” I said.
   Fay said, “What a waste it would be—putting all that money into a car. Twelve thousand dollars.”
   “Hell, I could pick up one for a lot less,” Charley said. “I know the guy who runs the British Motor Car agency down here.”
   No doubt he wanted the car, and, left to himself, he possibly would have bought it. But their money had to go into their house, whether Charley liked it or not. Fay wouldn’t let him buy any more cars. He had owned, besides the Mercedes, a Triumph and a Studebaker Golden Hawk, and of course several trucks for the business. Fay had told the architect to put radiant heating into the house, the resistance wire type, and up in the country where they were, it would cost them a fortune in electricity. Everyone else up there uses Butane or burns wood. On the cow pasture Fay was having a swanky modern San Francisco type of house built, with recessed bath tubs, plenty of tile and mahogany panelling, fluorescent lighting, custom kitchen, electric washer and drier combination—the works, including a custom hi-fl combination with speakers built right into the walls. The house had a glass side looking out onto the acres, and a fireplace in the center of the living room, a circular barbecue type with a huge black chimney stuck over it. Naturally the floor had to be asphalt tile, in case logs rolled out. Fay had four bedrooms built, plus a study that could be used by guests. Three bathrooms in all, one for the children, one for guests, one for herself and Charley. And a sewing rooni, a utility room, a family room, dining room—even a room for the freezer. And of course a tv room.
   The whole house rested on a concrete slab. That, and the asphalt tile, made it so cold that the radiant heating could never be shut off except in the hottest part of summer. If you shut it off when you went to bed, by morning the house was like a cold-storage vault. After it had been built, and Charley and Fay and the two children had moved into it, they discovered that even with the fireplace and radiant heating the house was cold from October through April, and that during the wet season the water failed to drain off the soil, and, instead, seeped into the house around the frames holding the glass and under the doors. For two months in 1955 the house sat in a pool of water. A contractor had to come out and build a whole new drainage system to carry water away from the house. And in 1956 they put 220 volt wall heaters with manual switches and thermostats both into every room of the house; the damp and cold had begun to mildew all the clothes and the sheets on the beds. They also found that in winter the electric power was interrupted for several days on end, and during that time they could not cook on the electric stove, and the pump that pumped their water, being electric, failed to pump; the water heater was electric, too, so that everything had to be cooked and heated over the fireplace. Fay even had to wash clothes in a zinc bucket propped up in the fireplace. And all four of them got the flu every winter that they lived up there. They had three separate heating systems, and yet the house remained drafty; for instance, the long hall between the children’s rooms and the front part of the house had no heat at all, and when the kids came scampering out in their pajamas at night they had to go from their warm rooms into the cold and then back into the heat of the living room again. And they did that every night at least six times.
   Worse than anything else, Fay could never find a baby sitter up there in the country, and the consequence was that gradually she and Charley stopped visiting people. People had to visit them, and it took an hour and a half of difficult driving to get up there to Drake’s Landing from San Francisco.
   And yet, they loved the house. They had four black-faced sheep cropping grass outside their glass side, their arabian horses, a collie dog as large as a pony that won prizes, and some of the most beautiful imported ducks in the world. During the time that I lived up there with them, I enjoyed some of the most interesting moments of my life.

3

   In his Ford pick-up truck he drove with Elsie on the seat beside him, bouncing up and down as they turned across the gravel, from the asphalt, using the shoulders of the road. On the hillside sheep grazed. A white farmhouse below them.
   “Will you get me some gum?” Elsie asked. “At the store? Will you get me some Black Jack gum?”
   “Gum,” he said, clutching the wheel. He drove faster; the steering wheel spun in his hands. I have to get a box of Tampax, he said to himself. Tampax and chewing gum. What will they say down at the Mayfair Market? How can I do it?
   He thought, How can she make me do it? Buy her Tampax for her.
   “What do we have to get at the store?” Elsie chanted.
   “Tampax,” he said. “And your gum.” He spoke with such fury that the baby turned to peer fearfully up at him.
   “W-what?” she murmured, shrinking away to lean against the door.
   “She’s embarrassed to buy it,” he said, “so I have to buy it for her. She makes me walk in and buy it.” And he thought, I’m going to kill her.
   Of course, she had a good excuse. He had had the car—had been at friends’, down in Olema… .she phoned, said would he pick it up on his drive back. And the Mayfair closed in an hour or so; it closed either at five or six, he could not remember exactly. Sometimes one time, some days—weekdays—another.
   What happens? he wondered, if she doesn’t get it? Do they bleed to death? Tampax a stopper, like a cork. Or—he tried to imagine it. But he did not know where the blood came from. One of those regions. Hell, I’m not supposed to know about that. That’s her business.
   But, he thought, when they need it they need it. They have to get hold of it.
   Buildings with signs appeared. He entered Point Reyes Station by crossing the bridge over Paper Mill Creek. Then the marsh lands to his left… the road swung to the left, past Cheda’s Garage and Harold’s Market. Then the old abandoned hotel.
   In the dirt field that was the Mayfair’s parking lot he parked next to an empty hay truck.
   “Come on,” he said to Elsie, holding the door open for her. She did not stir and he grabbed her by the arm and swung her from the seat and down; she stumbled and he kept his grip on her, leading her away from the car, toward the street.
   I can buy a lot of stuff, he thought. Get a whole basketful and then they won’t notice.
   In the entrance of the Mayfair, fright overcame him; he stopped and bent down, pretending to tie his shoe.
   “Is your shoe untied?” Elsie asked.
   He said, “You know god damn well it is.” He untied the lace and retied it.
   “Don’t forget to buy the Tampax,” Elsie told him.
   “Shut up,” he said with fury.
   “You’re a bad boy,” Elsie said, beginning to cry. Her voice wailed. “Go away.” She began to slap at him; he straightened up and she retreated, still slapping.
   Taking hold of her arm he propelled her into the store, past the wooden counters, to the shelves of canned food. “Listen, god damn you,” he said to her, bending down. “You keep still and stick close to me, or when we get back to the car I’m going to whale you good; you hear me? You understand? If you keep quiet I’ll get you your gum. You want your gum? You want the gum?” He led her to the candy rack by the door. Reaching down he gave her two packages of Black Jack gum. “Now keep quiet,” he said, “so I can think. I have to think.” He added, “I have to remember what I’m supposed to get.”
   He put bread and a head of lettuce and a package of cereal into a cart; he bought several things that he knew were always needed, frozen orange juice and a carton of Pall Malls. And then he went by the counter where the Tampax was. Nobody was around. He put a box of the Tampax into the cart, down with the other items. “Okay,” he said to Elsie. “We’re through.” Without slowing he pushed the cart toward the check stand.
   At the check stand two of the women clerks, in their blue smocks, stood bending over a snapshot. A woman customer, an older lady, had handed it to them; the three of them discussed the snapshot. And, directly across from the check stand, a young woman examined the different wines. So he wheeled the cart back to the rear of the store and began unloading the different items from it. But then he realized that the clerks had seen him pushing the cart, so he could not empty it; he had to buy something, or they would think it was strange, him filling a cart and then a little later walking out without buying anything. They might think he was sore. So he put only the Tampax box back; the rest he kept in the cart. He wheeled the cart back to the check stand and got in line.
   “What about the Tampax?” Elsie asked, in a voice so overlain with caution that, had he not known what word was meant, he would not have been able to understand her.
   “Forget it,” he said.
   After he had paid the clerk he carried the bag of groceries across the street to the pick-up truck. Now what? he asked himself, feeling desperate. I have to get it. And if I go back I’ll be more conspicuous than ever. Maybe I can drive down to Fairfax and get it, at one of those big new drugstores.
   Standing there, he could not decide. Then he caught sight of the Western Bar. What the hell, he thought. I’m going to sit in there and decide. He took hold of Elsie’s hand and led her down the street to the bar. But, on the brick steps, he realized that with the child along he could not get in.
   “You’re going to have to stay in the car,” he told her, starting back. At once she began to cry and drag against his weight. “For a couple of seconds—you know they won’t let you in the bar.”
   “No!” the child screamed, as he dragged her back across the street. “I don’t want to sit in the car. I want to go with you!”
   He put her into the cab of the truck and locked the doors.


   God damn people, he thought. Both of them. They’re driving me out of my cottonplucking mind.
   At the bar he drank a Gin Buck. No one else was there, so he felt relaxed and able to think. The bar was as always dark, spacious.
   I could go into the hardware store, he thought, and buy her some kind of a present. A bowl or something. A kitchen gadget.
   And then the intention to kill her returned. I’ll go home and run into the house and beat the shit out of her, he thought. I’ll beat her; I will.
   He had a second Gin Buck.
   “What time is it? he asked the bartender.

   “Five fifteen,” the bartender said. Several other men had wandered in and were drinking beer.

   “Do you know what time the Mayfair closes?” he asked the bartender. One of the men said he thought it closed at six. An argument began between him and the bartender.
   “Forget it,” Charley Hume said.
   After he had drunk down a third Gin Buck he decided to go back to the Mayfair and get the Tampax. He paid for his drinks and left the bar. Presently he found himself back in the Mayfair, roaming around among the shelves, past the canned soups and packages of spaghetti.
   In addition to the Tampax he bought a jar of smoked oysters, a favorite of Fay’s. Then he returned to the pick-up truck. Elsie had fallen asleep, resting against the door. He pulled on the door for a moment, trying to open it, and then he remembered that he had locked it. Where the hell was the key? Putting down his paper bag he groped in his pockets. Not in the ignition switch… he put his face to the doorwindow. God in heaven, it wasn’t there either. So where could it be? He rapped on the glass and called,
   “Hey, wake up. Will you?” Again he rapped. At last Elsie sat up and became aware of him. He pointed to the glove compartment. “See if the key’s in there,” he yelled. “Pull up the button,” he yelled, pointing to the lock-button on the inside of the door. “Pull it up so I can get in.”
   Finally she unlocked the door. “What did you get?” she asked, reaching for the paper bag. “Anything for me?”
   There was a spare key under the floormat; he kept it there all the time. Using it, he started up the car. Never find out where it went, he decided. Have to get a duplicate made. Once more he searched his coat pockets… and there it was, in his pocket, where it was supposed to be. Where he had put it. Christ, he thought. I must really be stoned. Backing from the lot, he drove up highway One, in the direction that he had come.
   When he reached the house, and had parked in the garage beside Fay’s Buick, he gathered together the two bags of groceries and started along the path to the front door. The door was open, and classical music could be heard. He could see Fay, through the glass side of the house; at the dish drier she scraped plates, her back to him. Their collie Bing got up from the mat in front of the door to greet him and Elsie. Its feathery tail brushed against him and it lunged with pleasure, nearly upsetting him and causing him to drop one of the bags. With the side of his foot he pushed the dog out of his way and edged through the front door, into the living room. Elsie departed along the path to the rear patio, leaving him by himself.
   “Hi,” Fay called from the other part of the house, her voice obscured by the music. He failed, for a moment, to grasp that it was her voice he heard; for a moment it seemed only a noise, an impediment in the music. Then she appeared, gliding at him with her springy, padding walk, meanwhile drying her hands on a dishtowel. At her waist she had tied a sash into a bow; she wore tight pants and sandals, and her hair was uncombed. God, how pretty she looks, he thought. That marvelous alert walk of hers … ready to whip around in the opposite direction. Always conscious of the ground under her.
   As he opened the bags of groceries he gazed down at her legs, seeing in his mind the high span that she reached, in the mornings, during her exercises. One leg up as she crouched on the floor… fastening her fingers about her ankle, while she bent to one side. What strong leg-muscles she has, he thought. Enough to cut a man in half. Bisect him, desex him. Part of that learned from the horse, from riding bareback and clutching that damn animal’s sides.
   “Look what I got for you,” he said, holding out the jar of smoked oysters.
   Fay said, “Oh—” And took the jar, accepting it with the manner that meant she understood that he had gotten it for her with such deep purpose, some desire to express his feelings. Of all the people in the world, she was the best at accepting a gift. Understanding how he felt, or how the children or neighbors or anyone felt. Never said too much, never overdid it, and always pointed out the important traits of the gift, why it was so valuable to her. She looked up at him and her mouth moved into the quick, grimace-like smile—tilting her head on one side she regarded him.
   “And this,” he said, getting out the Tampax.
   “Thanks,” she said, accepting it from him. As she took the box he drew back, and, hearing himself give a gasp, he hit her in the chest. She flew backwards, away from him, dropping the bottle of smoked oysters; at that he ran at her—she was sliding down against the side of the table, knocking the lamp off as she tried to catch herself—and hit her again, this time sending her glasses flying from her face. At once she rolled over, with stuff from the table clattering down on her.
   At the doorway, Elsie began to scream. Bonnie appeared—he saw her white, wide-eyed face—but she said nothing; she stood gripping the doorknob… .she had been in the bedroom. “Mind your own business,” he yelled at the children. “Go on,” he yelled. “Get out of here.” He ran a few steps toward them; Bonnie remained where she was, but the baby turned and fled.
   Kneeling down, he got a good grip on his wife and lifted her to a sitting position. A ceramic ashtray that she had made had broken; he began collecting the pieces with his left hand, supporting her with his right. She slumped against him, her eyes open, her mouth slack; she seemed to be glaring down at the floor, her forehead wrinkled, as if she were trying to make sense of what had happened. Presently she unbuttoned two buttons of her shirt and put her hand inside, to stroke her chest. But she was too dazed to talk.
   He said, by way of explanation, “You know how I feel about getting that damn stuff. Why can’t you get it yourself? Why do I have to go down and get it?”
   Her head swung upward, until she gazed directly at him. The dark color of her eyes reminded him of that in his children’s eyes: the same enlargement, the depth. They, all of them, reacted by this floating backward from him, this flying further and further along a line that he could not imagine or follow. All three of them together… . and he, left out. Facing only this outer surface. Where had they gone? Off to commune and confer. Accusation shining at him… .he heard nothing, but saw very well. Even the walls had eyes.
   And then she got up and past him, not easily, but with a squeezing push of her hand; her fingers thrust him away, toppling him. In motion she had terrific strength. She bowled him over in order to get away. Kicked him aside, just to spring up. Heels, hands—she walked over him and was gone, across the room, not moving lightly but striking the asphalt tile floor with the soles of her feet, impacting so that she gained good traction—she could not afford to fall. At the door she made a mistake with the knob; she had a moment in which she could not go any further.
   At once he was after her, talking all the way. “Where are you going?” No reply could be expected; he did not even wait. “You have to admit you know how I feel. I’ll bet you think I stopped off and had a couple of drinks at the Western. Well, I’ve got news for you.”
   By then she had the door open. Down the cypress needle path she went, only her back visible to him, her hair, shoulders, belt, legs and heels. Showed me her heels, he thought. She got to the car, her Buick parked in the garage. Standing in the doorway he watched her back out. God, how fast she can go backward in that car… the long gray Buick off down the driveway, its nose, its grill and headlights facing him. Through the open gate, onto the road. Which way? Toward the sheriff’s house? She’s going to turn me in, he thought. I deserve it. Felony wife-beating.
   The Buick rolled out of sight, leaving exhaust smoke hanging. The noise of its engine remained audible to him; he pictured it going along the narrow road, turning this way and that, both car and road turning together; she knew the road so well that she would never go off, not even in the worst fog. What a really superb driver, he thought. I take off my hat to her.
   Well, she’ll either come back with Sheriff Chisholm or she’ll cool off.
   But now he saw something he did not expect: the Buick reappeared, rolling into the driveway, narrowly missing the gate. Christ! The Buick rolled up and halted directly ahead of him. Fay jumped out and came toward him.
   “How come you’re back?” he said, speaking as matter-of-factly as possible.
   Fay said, “I don’t want to leave the kids here with you.”
   “Hell,” he said, dumbfounded.
   “May I take them?” she said, facing him. “Do you mind?” Her words poured out briskly.
   “Suit yourself,” he said, having trouble speaking. “For how long did you mean? Just for right now?”
   “I don’t know,” she said.
   “I think we ought to be able to talk this over,” he said. “We should be able to sit down about it. Let’s go on inside. Okay?”
   Passing by him, into the house, Fay said, “Do you mind if I try to calm the children?” She disappeared beyond the edge of the kitchen cabinets; presently he heard her calling the girls, somewhere off in the bedroom area of the house.
   “You don’t have to worry about any more rough stuff,” he said, following after her.
   “What?” she said, from within one of the bathrooms, hers, which was off their bedroom and which the girls used occasionally.
   “That was something I had to get out of my system,” he said, blocking the doorway as she started out of the bathroom.
   Fay said, “Did the girls go outside?”
   “Very possibly,” he said.
   “Would you mind letting me past?” Her voice showed the strain she felt. And, he saw, she held her hand inside her shirt, against her chest. “I think you cracked a rib,” she said, breathing through her mouth. “I can hardly get my breath.” But her manner was calm. She had gotten complete control of herself; he saw that she was not afraid of him, only wary. That perfect wariness of hers… the quickness of her responses. But she had let him haul off and let fly—she hadn’t been wary enough. So, he thought, she’s not such a hot specimen after all. If she’s in such darn good physical shape—if those exercises she takes in the morning are worth doing—she should have been able to block my right. Of course, he thought, she’s pretty good at tennis and golf and ping pong… .so she’s okay. And she keeps her figure better than any of the other women up here… I’ll bet she’s got the best figure in the whole Marin County PTA.


   While Fay found and comforted the children, he roamed about the house, looking for something to do. He carried a pasteboard carton of trash out to the incinerator and set fire to it. Then, taking a screwdriver from the workshop, he tightened up the large brass screws that held the strap to her new leather purse… .the screws came loose from time to time, dumping one end of her purse at odd moments. Anything else? he asked himself, pausing.
   In the living room the radio had stopped playing classical music and had started on some dinner jazz. So he went to find another station. And then, while he tuned the dial, he began thinking about dinner. It occurred to him to go into the kitchen and see how things were going.
   He found that he had interrupted her while she was making the salad. A half-opened can of anchovies lay on the sideboard, beside a head of lettuce, tomatoes, and a green pepper. On the electric range—a wall installation that he had supervised—a pot of water boiled. He turned the knob from hi to sim. Picking up a paring knife, he began to peel an avocado… Fay had never been good at peeling avocados—she was too impatient. He always did that job himself.

4

   In the spring of 1958 my older brother Jack, who was living in Seville, California, and was then thirty-three, stole a can of chocolatecovered ants from a supermarket and was caught by the store manager and turned over to the police.
   We drove down from Marin County, my husband and I, to make sure that he had gotten through it all right.
   The police had let him go; the store hadn’t pressed charges, although they had made him sign a statement admitting that he had stolen the ants. Their idea was that he would never dare steal a can of ants from them again, since, if he were caught a second time, his signed statement would put him in the city jail. It was a horse-trading deal; he got to go home—which was all he would be thinking about, with his limited brain—and the store could count on his absence from then on—he would not even dare be seen in the store, or even rooting around the empty orange crates in the rear by the loading dock.
   For several months Jack had rented a room on Oil Street near Tyler, which is in the colored district of Seville, although colored or not it is one of the few interesting parts of the town. There are little dried-up stores twenty to a block that set out on the sidewalk every morning a stack of bedsprings and galvanized iron tubs and hunting knives. Always, when we were in our teens, we used to imagine that every store was a front for something. The rent there is cheap, too, and with that loathesome little job of his at that crooked tire outfit, plus his expenses for clothes and going out with his pals, he has always had to live in such places.
   We parked in a 25 cent an hour lot and jaywalked across the street, among the yellow busses, to the rooming house. It made Charley nervous to be down in such a district; he kept peering at his trousers to see if he had walked on anything—obviously psychological, because in his work he is always up to his ass in metal filings and sparks and grease. The pavement was covered with gum wrappers and spit and dog urine and old contraceptives, and Charley got that grim disapproving Protestant expression.
   “Just make sure you wash your hands after we leave,” I said.
   “Can you get venereal disease from lamp posts or mail boxes?” Charley asked me.
   “You can if you have that sort of mind,” I said.
   Upstairs in the damp, dark hall we rapped on Jack’s door. I had been there only once before, but I recognized his room by the great stain on the ceiling, probably from an ancient overflowed toilet.
   “You suppose he thought they were a delicacy?” Charley asked me. “Or did he disapprove of a supermarket stocking ants?”
   I said, “You know he’s always loved animals.”
   From within the room we could hear stirrings, as if Jack had been in bed. The time was one-thirty in the afternoon. The door did not open, however, and presently the stirrings died down.
   “It’s Fay,” I said, close to the door.
   A pause, and then the door was unlocked.
   The room was neat, as it of course would have to be if Jack were to live there. Everything was clean; all objects were stacked in order, where he could find them, and of course he had carried this to the shopping newses: he had a pile of them, opened and flattened, stacked by the window. He saved everything, especially tinfoil and string. The bed had been turned back, to air it, and he seated himself on the exposed sheets. Placing his hands on his knees he gazed up at us.
   He had, because of this crisis, reverted to wearing the clothes that, as a child, he had worn around the house. Here again was the pair of brown corduroy slacks that our mother had picked out for him back in the early ‘forties. And he had on a blue cotton shirt—clean, but so repeatedly washed that it had turned white. The collar was almost nothing but threads and all the buttons were off it. He had fastened the front together with paperclips.
   “You poop,” I said.
   Roaming around, Charley said, “Why do you save all this junk?” He had come upon a table covered with small washed rocks.
   “I got those because of the possibility of radioactive ores,” Jack said.
   That meant that, even with his job, he still took his long walks. Sure enough, in his closet, under a heap of sweaters that had fallen from their hangers, a cardboard box of worn-out Army surplus boots had been carefully tied up with twine and marked in Jack’s crabbed handwriting. Every month or so, as a high school boy, he had worn out a pair of boots, those old-fashioned high topped boots with hooks on the tops.
   To me this was more serious than the stealing, and I cleared a heap of Life magazines from a chair and seated myself, having decided to stay long enough for a real talk with him. Charley, naturally, remained standing to keep me aware that he wanted to go. Jack made him nervous. They did not know each other at all, but while Jack paid no attention to him, Charley always seemed to imagine that something to his disadvantage was going to happen. After he had met Jack for the first time he told me straightforwardly—Charley never could keep anything to himself—that my brother was the most screwed-up person he had ever met. When I asked him why he said that, he answered that he knew god damn well that Jack did not have to act the way he did; he acted like that because he wanted to. To me the distinction was meaningless, but Charley always set great store by such matters.
   The long walks had begun in junior high school, back in the ‘thirties, before World War Two. We were living on a street named Garibaldi Street, and during the Spanish Civil War because of the feeling against the Italians the street name was changed to Cervantes Street. Jack soon got the notion that all the street names were going to be changed and for a while he seemed to be living among the new names—all ancient writers and poets, no doubt—but when no other street names were changed that mood passed. Anyhow it had made the world situation seem real to him for a month or so, and we thought of that as an improvement; up to then he had seemed unable to imagine either the war as an actual event or, for that matter, the real world itself in which that war was taking place. He had never been able to distinguish between what he read and what he actually experienced. To him, vividness was the criterion, and those nauseating accounts in the Sunday supplements about lost continents and jungle goddesses had always been more compelling and convincing than the daily headlines.
   “Are you still working?” Charley said from behind him.
   “Of course he is,” I said.
   But Jack said, “I temporarily gave up my job at the tire place.”
   “Why?” I demanded.
   “I’m too busy,” Jack said.
   “Doing what?”
   He pointed to a pile of notebooks, filled, I could see, with pages of his writing. At one time he had spent his spare time writing letters to the newspapers, and here, once more, he was involved in some long. winded crank project, probably elaborating some scheme for irrigating the Sahara Desert. Picking up the first notebook, Charley thumbed through it and then tossed it down. “It’s a diary,” he said.
   “No,” Jack said, arising. His thin, knobby face got that cold, superior look, that travesty of the hauteur of the scholar who faces the layman. “It’s a scientific account of proven facts,” he said.
   I said, “How are you supporting yourself’?” I knew instinctively how he was supporting himself; he was once again depending on handouts from home, from our parents—who, at this late point in their lives, couldn’t afford to support anyone, scarcely themselves.
   “I’m okay,” Jack said. But of course he would say that; as soon as money came in he spent it, usually for flashy clothes, or else lost it or lent it or invested it in some madness he heard about in a pulp magazine: giant mushrooms, perhaps, or skin-healing salve to be peddled from door to door. At least the tire job, although bordering on the crooked, had been steady.
   “How much money do you have?” I demanded, keeping after him.
   “I’ll see,” he said. He opened a dresser drawer. From it he took a cigar box. He sat down on the bed, again on the sheets, and, placing the cigar box on his lap, opened it. The cigar box was empty except for a few dozen pennies and three nickels.
   “Are you trying to get another job?” I asked.
   “Yes,” he said.
   In the past he had held the dregs ofjobs: he had helped deliver washing machines for an appliance store; he had uncrated vegetables for a grocery store; he had swept out a drug store; once he had even given out tools at the Alameda Naval Air Station. During the summer he had now and then hired himself out as a fruit picker and gotten carried, by open truck, miles out into the country; that was his favorite job because he got to stuff himself with fruit. And in the fall he invariably walked to the Heinz cannery near San Jose and filled cans with bartlett pears.
   “You know what you are?” I said. “You’re the most ignorant, inept individual on the face of the globe. In my entire life I’ve never seen anyone with such rubbish in their head. How do you manage to stay alive at all? How the hell did you get born into my family? There never were any nuts before you.”
   “Take it easy,” Charley said.
   “It’s true,” I said to him. “Good god, he probably thinks this is the bottom of the ocean and we’re living in a castle left over from Atlantis. What year is this?” I asked Jack. “Why did you steal those ants?” I said. “Why? Tell me.” Grabbing him I started to shake him, as I had done as a child, a very small child, when I had first heard him spout the nutty rubbish that filled his mind. When in exasperation—and fear—I had realized that his brain simply had a warp to it, that in distinguishing fact from fiction he chose fiction, and between good sense and foolishness he preferred foolishness. He could tell the difference—but he preferred the rubbish; he stuffed it into himself with great systemization. Like some creep in the Middle Ages memorizing all that absurd St. Thomas Aquinas system about the universe, that creaky, false structure that finally collapsed—except for little intellectual swamp-like areas, such as in my brother’s brain.
   Jack said, “I needed to perform an experiment.”
   “What kind?” I demanded.
   “There are known cases of toads staying alive in suspended animation in mud for centuries,” Jack said.
   I saw, then, what his mind had conceived: that the ants, being dipped in chocolate, might be preserved, embalmed, and might be brought back to life.
   “Get me out of here,” I said to Charley.
   Opening the door I left the room and went out into the hall. I was really shaking; I couldn’t stand it. Charley followed after me and then said, in a low voice,
   “He obviously can’t take care of himself.”
   “That’s for sure,” I said. I felt that if I didn’t get into some place I could have a drink I’d go out of my mind. I wished to hell we hadn’t driven down from Marin County; I hadn’t seen Jack in months and at this point I would have been glad never to see him again.
   “Look, Fay,” Charley said. “He’s your flesh and blood. You can’t just leave him.”
   “I sure can,” I said.
   “He ought to be up in the country,” Charley said. “In the healthy air. Where he could be with animals.”
   Several times Charley had tried to get my brother up to the farm area around Petaluma; he wanted to get him onto one of the big dairy farms as a milker. All Jack would have to do was open a wooden door, head a cow in, push the electric gadgets onto its teats, start the vacuum working, stop the vacuum at the right moment, unhook the cow, go on to the next cow. Over and over again—the pit, as far as creative jobs go, but something that Jack could handle. It paid about a dollar and a half an hour, and the milkers got their meals and a bunkhouse to sleep in. Why not? And he’d be up where there were animals—big dirty cows crapping and swilling, crapping and swilling.
   “I’m not against it,” I said. We knew a number of the ranchers; we could easily get him on as a novice milker.
   “Let’s drive him back up with us,” Charley said.


   To get him up to Marin County we had to pack all his valuables, his collection of facts, his rocks, his writing and drawings, and all his junky clothes and his elegant sweaters and slacks that he put on to dazzle the punks at Reno on weekends… everything got put in boxes and loaded in the rear of the Buick. When he had finished—Charley did the actual work; I sat in the front seat of the car reading, and Jack disappeared for an hour to say good-bye to some of his pals—the room was almost empty, except for the shopping news piles, which I refused to let him bring.
   Just like his room when he was a child, I thought. During the war, when he had been, for a few months, in the Service, we had gone in and cleared out everything and destroyed it. Naturally, when he got back—given a medical discharge because of allergies… he had spells of asthma—he had a terrible fit, and then a long drawn-out depression. He pined for the missing junk. And after that, instead of growing up and getting involved in something more reasonable, he had moved out and gotten a room of his own and begun all over again.
   As Charley drove off toward the freeway going north, with me beside him and Jack with all his boxes in the back, I dreaded what would become of my house with my loony brother taking up residence in it, even for a few days. However, we did have the utility room which we could turn over to him. And the children kept their part of the house a mess as it was. Surely he couldn’t do more than draw on the walls with crayon, grind clay into the curtains and couch cushions, spill paint on the patio concrete, leave last month’s socks stuffed in the sugar shaker, sneeze in his soup, fall down while carrying out the garbage and cut his eye half out of his head on a sardine can lid. A child is a filthy amoral animal, without instincts or sense, that fouls its own nest if given a chance. Ofthand I can’t think of any redeeming features in a child, except that as long as it is small it can be kicked around. Charley and I lived in the front part of the house, and, in the rear, the children gradually pushed their mess forward inch by inch. until we and Mrs. Medini would go in and clean it all up, throw everything away, burn all the rubbish, and then the process would begin again. Jack would simply add to the chaos; he would bring nothing new, only more of the same.
   Of course, being physically mature, he could not be handled as we handled the children, and this frightened me. In some respects I had been frightened of him for years; always I felt that I never could tell what he might do or say next, what unnatural ideas might spill out—that he regarded lamp posts as authority figures, perhaps, and policemen as objects made out of wine. I know that, as a child, he had had the notion that various people’s heads wene going to fall off; he had told us about that. And I know that he believed his high school geometry teacher to be a rooster wearing a suit… .an idea that he may have gotten from seeing an old Charley Chaplin movie. Certainly that teacher had a rooster-like way of stalking around the front of the classroom.
   Suppose, for instance, he ran amock and ate the neighbors’ sheep. In farm country, sheep-killing is a major crime, and a thing that kills sheep is always shot on sight. Once a farm boy had gone around breaking the necks of all the new calves for miles around… .no one had been able to figure out why, but no doubt it was the rural equivalent for the city child’s breaking windows on knifing auto tires. Vandalism in the country, though, so often involves killing, because farm property is expressed in terms of flocks of ducks and chickens, herds of dairy cows, lambs and sheep, even goats. To the right of us the Landners, an old couple, raised goats, and every so often they killed and ate a goat, having such things as goat stew and goat soup. To people in the country, a prize sheep or cow is to be guarded against any menace; they are used to poisoning rats and shooting foxes and coons and dogs and cats who infringe, and I could just see Jack being shot, some night, while crawling under a barbed wire fence with a bloody lamb in his jaws.
   So now, driving back to Drake’s Landing, I was beginning to pick up morbid anxiety fantasies… having them for Jack, possibly, as he seemed to be rather calm and undisturbea.
   But that is one aspect of country life. I have sat in the living room, listening to Bach on the hi-fi, and looked through the windows and across the field to the ranch on the hillside beyond, and seen some ghastly act taking place: some old rancher in his manure-impregnated blue jeans, his boots and hat, out with an ax knocking in the skull of a dog found nosing around his chicken coop. Nothing to do but keep on listening to Bach and trying to read “By Love Possessed.” And of course we killed our own ducks when it came time to eat them, and the dog killed gophers and squirrels daily. And at least once a week we found a half-eaten deer head by the front door, carried there by the dog from a garbage can somewhere in the neighborhood.
   Of course there was simply the problem of having a horse’s ass like Jack undenfoot all the time. It was easy for Charley; he spent all day down at the plant, and in the evenings he shut himself up in his study and did paper work, and on weekends he usually went outdoors and used the noto-tiller or the chain saw. Contemplating my brother lounging around the house all day made me realize how neally coopedup you are in the country; there’s no place to go and nobody to visit—you just sit home all day reading or doing housework or taking care of the kids. When did I get out of the house? On Tuesday and Thursday nights I had my sculpture class down in San Rafael. On Wednesday afternoon I had the Bluebirds over, to bake bread on weave mats. On Monday morning I drove down to San Francisco to see Doctor Andrews, my analyst. On Friday morning I drove over to Petaluma to the Purity Market to shop. And on Tuesday afternoon I had my modern dance at the hall. And that was it, except for occasionally having dinner with the Finebungs or the Meritans on driving out on weekends to the beach. The most exciting thing that had happened in years was the hay truck losing its load on the Petaluma road and smashing in Alise Hatfield’s station wagon with her and her three kids inside. And the four teenagers who got beaten up at Olema by the twenty loggers. This is the country. This isn’t the city.
   You’re lucky, up where we live, to be able to get the daily San Francisco Chronicle; they don’t deliver it—you have to drive over to the Mayfair Market and buy it off the stands.
   As we drove through San Francisco, Jack perked up and began to comment on the buildings and traffic. The city obviously stimulated him, no doubt unwholesomely. He caught sight of the tiny, scrunchedtogether shops along Mission and he wanted to stop. Luckily we got out of the South of Market district and onto Van Ness. Charley gazed at the various imported cans in the dealers’ display windows, but Jack did not seem interested. When we got onto the Golden Gate Bridge neither of them paid attention to the incredible view of the City and the Bay and the Marin hills; both of them had no capacity to enjoy anything esthetically—for Charley things had to be financially valuable, and for Jack they had to be—what? God knows. Weird facts, like the rain of frogs. Miracles and the like. This spectacular sight was wasted on both of them, but I kept my eyes on the view as long as possible, until finally we were out of the hills, past the forts, and back among the rubbishy little suburban towns, Mill Valley, San Rafael—the pit, as far as I’m concerned. The really all-time low, with the dirt and smog, and always the County machinery tearing up the roads for a new freeway.
   At a slow nate we drove through Ross and San Anselmo, fighting the commute traffic. And then, past Fairfax, we left the stores and apartments and got out on that stretch in the first pasture land, the first canyons. All at once there were cows instead of gas stations.
   “How does it look to you?” Charley asked my brother.
   Jack said, “It’s deserted.”
   With bitterness, I said, “Well, who’d want to live out here with the cows.”
   “A cow has four stomachs,” Jack said.
   White’s Hill impressed him, with its terribly steep and winding grade, and then, on the far side, the San Geronimo Valley made the three of us feel pleased. Charley got the Buick up to eighty-five on the straightaway, and the warm mid-day wind, the fresh-smelling country wind, blew in around us and cleaned the can of the smell of moldy paper and old laundry. The fields on both sides of us had turned brown from the sun and lack of water, but around the clusters of live oak trees, mixed in with the granite boulders, we saw grass and wild flowers.
   We would have liked to have lived down here, closer to San Francisco, but land cost too much and the traffic, in summer, had a depressing element to it, the resort people heading for Lagunitas and the cabins there and the campers on their way to Samuel Taylor Park. Now we passed through Lagunitas with its one general stone, and then the road curved, suddenly as always, forcing Charley to slow so radically that the nose of the Buick sank down and all four tires squealed. The warm dry sunlight disappeared and we were down deep in the redwoods, sniffing the stream, the wet needles, the cold, dark places where ferns grew in July.
   Rousing himself, Jack said, “Hey, didn’t we go picnicking here once?” He craned his neck at the sight of the tables and barbecue pits.
   “No,” I said. “That was Muir Woods. You were nine.”
   After we had reached the hills overlooking Olema and Tomales Bay, Jack began to recognize that he had passed entirely out of the town area and had entered the country. He noticed the shabby, peeling old wooden windmills, the boarded-up abandoned buildings, the chickens scratching in driveways, and that indubitable sign of the country: the butane tanks mounted one behind each house. There, too, was the sign to the right of the road just before reaching the Inverness Wye: so-and-so well driller.
   As we drove by Paper Mill Creek he saw the fishermen down in the water and he saw, for the first time in his life, a flashing white egret out on the marshes, fishing.
   “You see blue heron up here,” I said. “And once we saw a flock of wild swan. Eighteen of them, on an inlet near Drake’s Esteno.”
   After we had passed thnough Drake’s Landing and had started up the narrow blacktop road, Saw Mill Road, to our place, Jack said, “It’s sure quiet up here.”
   “Yes,” Charley said. “At night you’ll hear the cows bellowing.”
   “They sound like dinosaurs stuck in the swamp,” I said.
   Perched on the telephone wires, at the last bend of the road, was a falcon. I told Jack how that particular falcon spent his time standing on the wire, year in year out, catching frogs and grasshoppers. Sometimes he looked sleek, but other times his feathers had a molting, disreputable look. And not far from us the Hallinans lost goldfish from their outdoor pond to a kingfisher who stationed himself in the cypress tree nearby.
   Not so many years ago elk and bear had roamed around the hills overlooking Tomales Bay, and the winter before, Charley claimed to have spotted a huge black leg at the edge of his headlights; something had gone off into the woods, and if it wasn’t a bean it was a man in a bean suit. But I did not discuss this with Jack. There was no point in providing him with the local myths, because he would soon enough concoct myths of his own; and it would not be beans or elk that meandered down into the vegetable garden after dark and ate the rhubarb—it would be Martians whose flying saucers had landed in the Inverness canyons. Now it occurred to me to remember the feverish flying saucer activity at Inverness Park; a rabid group already existed, that would no doubt draw Jack into their midst and give him the benefit of their twice-weekly explorations into hypnosis, reincarnation, Zen Buddhism, ESP, and of course UFOs.