For reference—as a prototype, a model—I got out some of my few remaining Thrilling Wonder Stories magazines and selected stories that had especially impressed me. After studying them I was able to perceive the methods by which the authors had dramatized their points. So I set to work with the magazines open on the desk beside me.
If Charley would be coming home soon it was imperative for me to get my fictionalized account before him almost at once. He would need it as a basis on which to act in reference to the situation.
When Fay returned home that night she said that possibly within a week Charley would be home. Fortunately I had made good progress on my work during the day, and I felt sure I would complete it. As it turned out, I got the account done the following day, and on Friday I took the bus down to San Francisco, carrying the account with me rolled up and fastened with a rubber band.
After spending a short time in the public library going over the new magazines, I took a bus to the U.C. Hospital. I found Charley out on the sundeck, in a wheelchair, wearing a bathrobe.
“Hi,” I said.
He glanced at me. Immediately his eyes made out the rolled-up tube of paper that I carried, and I saw that he understood—at least in a general way—what it was I had for him. He started to speak, then changed his mind.
“It won’t be long now,” I said. “Before you’re back home.”
He nodded slightly.
Pulling a chair up I sat down across from him.
“Don’t read me that thing,” he said.
I said, “These are the dramatized facts.”
“Get out of here,” he said.
That upset and confused me. I sat fooling with the rubber band, feeling like a fool. I had done all this work, and for what? Finally I said, “The difference between us and the animals is that we can use words. Isn’t that right?”
With obvious reluctance he nodded.
“We expand our environment,” I said. “We learn through the written word. We’d never even know about far-distant places such as Siam if we couldn’t read.” I went on, amplifying this idea; he listened but said nothing. After I had finished, he still said nothing. I waited, and then I unrolled the rubber band from the tube, flattened the sheets of paper, and very carefully began to read.
After I had come to the end I sat waiting for his reaction.
“How’d you even put together a thing like that?” he said, in a tone of voice suggesting that he was virtually ready to burst out laughing. His whole face seemed twisted out of shape and his eyes shone as if at the same time he was mad as hell. I saw that his hands were shaking. “It sounds like something out of an old pulp magazine,” he said. “Whene’d you get those phrases like ‘breasts like mounds of whipped cream’ and ‘red-tipped cones of pure ecstasy’?”
I couldn’t have been more embarrassed. Putting away the sheets of paper I mumbled, “I was simply trying to vivify it.”
He stared at me with that same mixture of expressions on his face. Now he had begun to flush, and his breathing became more rapid. For a moment I thought he was going to sneeze. But then he laughed. I felt my own face flush with humiliation. Charley laughed harder and harder.
“Read me that one pant again,” he said finally in a choked voice. “That about ‘I saw her gown open to the waist and fastened by only a single jewel at her navel.’ “ And he again went into paroxysms of laughter.
His reaction horrified me. I had no inkling that he would respond in this manner, and it totally unnerved me; I found myself twitching and muttering, unable to speak.
“Also that part that goes—” He tried to remember; I saw his lips moving. “About ‘as I kissed her hot, sweet lips I pushed her backward toward the couch. Her body yielded—’“
I interrupted, “It’s not fair to harp on individual phrases. It’s the over-all work that’s important. I tried to be absolutely accurate in this account. This is vital information that you ought to have at your disposal so you’ll be able to act. Isn’t that so? You need information to act.”
“Act,” he said. “What do you mean?”
“When you get back home,” I said, seeing nothing complex about it.
“Listen,” Charley said. “This is all in your mind. You’re out of your head. You’re a psycho. Anybody who’d write a thing like that about his sister is a psycho; let’s face it. Don’t you know that? Haven’t you ever faced the fact that you’re a warped, stunted, asshole type?”
An orderly or a nurse—on someone—came along the corridor. Charley raised his voice and yelled at them.
“Get this asshole out of here! He’s driving me nuts!”
I voluntarily got up and left, then. I was glad to get out of there All the way home on the bus I was shaking with anger and disbelief; it was one of the worst days in my life, and I knew I’d never forget it as long as I lived.
As the bus was passing through Samuel P. Taylor Park, the idea came to me to appeal to a disinterested person. To put this whole situation, my efforts and Charley’s response—the whole business, before them and let them impartially judge if I hadn’t done what was absolutely right.
First I thought of writing a letter to either the San Rafael Journal or to the Baywood Press. I even went so far as to begin composing, in my head, such a letter.
But then I thought of a better solution. Unrolling my presentation, I carefully went over it, editing out some of the phrases that Charley had called my attention to. Then I rolled it up again and wrote Claudia Hambro’s name and address on it.
When the bus reached Inverness Park, I got off and walked up the road to Mrs. Hambro’s house. Without making any noise that would disturb anyone in the house, I slipped the pages of the presentation under the door. Then I left.
After I had gotten almost all the way to Inverness—walking took much more time than using the bus—I suddenly realized that I hadn’t put my own name on the presentation. For a moment I halted and toyed with the idea of going back. But then I realized that Mrs. Hambro would know whom it was from; there would be a telepathic communication between her and me, as soon as she saw the presentation. And, in the presentation itself, there were Fay’s name and Nat Anteil’s name, of course. So she would have no trouble discovering who had left it.
Cheered up, I reached the house with rapid steps. I had actually opened the front door and started inside before I remembered, all at once, that in a month the world was coming to an end, on a date that I had decided, and that all these people, Charley and Fay and Nat Anteil and Gwen—all of them would be dead anyhow. And so in a sense it did not matter. It did not matter whether I got the facts to Charley or not. It did not matter what Charley did as a result of knowing those facts. Nothing any of them did mattered. They were just so much radioactive dust, the whole bunch of them. Just handfuls of black, radioactive, ashy dust.
That realization, that picture of them, stayed in my mind vividly for days after that. I could not get it out of my mind, even if I wanted to; several times I tried to think of something else, but that picture came right back.
13
One afternoon, when Nat Anteil drove over to the Hume home, the two girls greeted him excitedly as he parked his car.
“One of the sheep had a lamb!” Bonnie shouted, as he got out of the car. “She had a lamb just a couple of minutes ago!”
“We saw it through the window!” Elsie shouted at him. “The Bluebirds saw it; we were baking bread and we saw four black feet and I said, Look there’s a lamb, and it was. Mommy says it’s a female lamb, it’s a girl lamb. They’re out in back on the patio looking at it.” The girls skipped and raced along beside him as he went through the house and opened the back door onto the patio.