Peter Reed
Cosmic Knot
Arthur Blauden’s thin nose wrinkled with distaste as he climbed the narrow staircase to the Cryzc apartment. The odor in the stairwell was composed of equal parts of cabbage, faulty plumbing and economic despair.
It had all seemed so romantic, back in college, doing case work that would reveal at last the workings of immutable sociological laws. But in three years of field work as a social worker, Arthur Blauden had found, to his ultimate distress, that though he loved mankind as a whole, he detested its individual unwashed components.
Take this fantastic Cryzc family as an example. Sitting down in the department car parked in the littered street, Arthur Blauden had looked over his original report on the case and refreshed his memory, concentration a bit impaired by a noisy game of stickball in the same block.
A DP family, they were, front some Balkan fragment of a country, now using up good tax dollars. A pity.
He knocked on the door. Firmly. He heard footsteps inside and the door opened. A weary-looking woman with a broad expressionless face stared at him for a moment and then a smile broke like an unexpected sunrise.
“Friend, friend,” she shouted. She swung the door wide. “Come!”
Arthur went in and sat cautiously on the edge of a chair, his black briefcase across his knees. The husband came out of another room, knuckling sleep-puffed eyes, wearing an underwear top and work pants. Small grubby faces peered around corners. Too many small grubby faces.
“Really!” Arthur said, counting them.
The couple stared at him. The man was huge, husky, bovine.
“They told me you need more money,” Arthur said severely, raising his voice as he always did when speaking to this sort. At the sound of authority, the woman made an old-world curtsey, born of habit.
“More money, yah,” the man said, nodding his head violently. “More.”
“Aren’t you working? You know. Working!” Arthur shouted.
“Working? Yah. Forty dollar week working.”
They, thought Arthur, are really too, too stupid. The department would not only disapprove the request for more welfare, but would very probably cut the existing amount.
“Why do you need more?” he shouted. “Why more money? Why?”
The man and woman looked at each other. The gutterals of their own language leapt, snapped, crackled. They both stared dubiously at Arthur.
“Must say?” Mr. Cryzc asked.
“No say, no money,” Arthur said, feeling quite pleased with the simplicity of the ultimatum.
The woman plucked at the cheap cloth of her dress. She looked at the floor, pointed shyly at a closed door with her finger. “Food. Food for Franzie.”
Arthur checked his old report form. “Franz. Your eldest. He should be six by now. Surely a six year old doesn’t eat very much.”
“Eat much,” the woman said solemnly. “Eat much. Eat...”
“I heard you, my dear woman. Let me see this child that... Oh, I see. He is sick and needs special food. Is that it?”
“Not sick,” the man said sullenly.
Arthur stood up. “I’ll take a look at the boy.”
They made no move toward the door. “Not make laugh,” the woman said, staring down at the frayed rug, “Please not make laugh, sir.”
“Of course I won’t laugh,” Arthur said with a waspish voice.
The woman spoke to the man. The man went to the door. He turned the key in the lock and then slid back the bolt that Arthur had not noticed before.
The man stood aside and Arthur walked in. He recoiled violently and far enough to take him backwards out of the room. He made a thin gasping sound.
“No be fraid,” Mr. Cryzc said.
Arthur went in more cautiously and took a second look. The child sat in the middle of a double bed. He looked like Buddha, and like a baby and like Winston Churchill, and also like a caricature in yellowish lard as big as a man and half again as wide. He looked at Arthur with small unwinking eyes set into a vast wide flat face. Arthur had seen that sort of expression on the faces of the blind, but he knew that this... this child wasn’t blind. It was vision turned inward.
“Does... it talk?” Arthur asked.
“One time much talk. Now no more,” Mrs. Cryzc said.
There was no denying the flicker of intelligence in the eyes. When it moved big hands, the meaty slabs of muscle on the shoulders and arms moved slothfully.
“Eat much,” Mr. Cryzc said.
“And I should well imagine that he would,” Arthur said softly.
“Ah?” said Mrs. Cryzc.
“Nothing,” Arthur said.
“All time ties knots,” Mr. Cryzc said jovially.
“What? He what?” Arthur asked.
“Waiting, please,” Mr. Cryzc said. He trotted out of the room. He came back in a moment with four lengths of dirty clothesline, each piece about two feet long.
“Watch knots,” Mr. Cryzc said. He threw Franzie a length of line. The big hands caught it. The eyes looked into Arthur’s eyes. Arthur could have sworn they held a look of amused contempt.
Franzie looked down at the length of rope. The big hands moved with darting speed. Arthur had been an eagle scout. But after the first two twists he was lost. The knot grew. Loop and twist and this end through here and that through there. Then the giant child found both ends and tugged. Arthur could have sworn that the rope was somehow pulled “through” itself into nothingness.
“Huh!” he said hollowly.
Mr. Cryzc threw Franzie another piece of rope. He pushed hard against Arthur’s shoulder, and Arthur ended up right beside the bed.
“Watch. Do slow, Franzie. Do slow for the sir.”
Franzie built the complicated knot slowly. Once again he tugged. There was no rope.
“A trick. Sleight of hand,” Arthur said.
They could not attract its attention again. It was as though they had ceased to exist. They went out into the other room. Arthur sat down as though clubbed behind the knees. He took out a handkerchief and dabbed delicately at his forehead.
“Fourth dimension,” he babbled, “Incredible. Some sort of mutation. I...”
Mr. Cryzc tapped his wife on the shoulder and then thumped himself on the chest. “Not from us, that Franzie. Giff my name. Cryzc. Find Franzie in boosh. DP camp. Nobody know. Big flash-boom in night. Nobody know what. Find Franzie in morning.”
Arthur Blauden’s mind skipped nimbly from Mars to Venus and sped back to Earth with an idea that seemed better the clearer it became.
“Would you give up Franzie?” he asked. They looked at each other. They argued in their own language.
“Must have good home.”
“My dear woman, he would have a far bet... He would be well cared for, Mrs. Cryzc. The best doctors. All the food he wants. And he’ll see the world. Just for a few hours a day he’ll tie knots for people who come to see him.”
“Circus?” Mr. Cryzc demanded, an acquisitive gleam in his eye.
Arthur caught himself in time. “No,” he lied, “just a few doctors and professors. To see if... ah... they can help him.”
“Come get tomorrow?” Mr. Cryzc asked. Arthur nodded. “Better bring truck,” said Mr. Cryzc grimly, “Last time out on street, people throwing stones.”
Arthur went lightly down the stairs. He hurried out to the car. There was a great deal to do. Adoption papers would be the soundest legal device. In the back of his mind was the sonorous sound of the barker’s voice. “...and Franzie, the creature not of Earth. See him tie golden ropes into nothingness...”
As the car turned the corner he was mentally wording his resignation.
Forty-eight hours later Arthur Blauden stood in the living room of his apartment staring at Franzie who sat on a double mattress on the floor, looking out the window.