MYRA said, “I just can’t get used to it.” She was sitting on the dim side of the room, hands in her lap, looking at the carpet. Near her, Milt Kalish sat uncomfortably, wishing for more light and holding an unlit cigar in his hand.
From the next room came the intermittent sound of hammering.
“We don’t know yet, Myra,” said Kalish.
“Can’t you tell?” she asked, with a bitter undertone. “I know. He’s going to have to go to a sanitarium, or a rest home or whatever name you want to call it. He probably won’t come back. I knew it and I could see it on your face, even before dinner. So why won’t you admit it?”
Kalish sighed. “Maybe it isn’t that simple.”
“Simple!” she said.
Kalish did not move; his mind registered the implied resentment, classified it and filed it away. He said nothing and did not move, and his hostility toward the world of people stayed buried so deeply that Myra could only sense that it must be there, not feel it or use it.
The hammering started again and Kalish saw Myra’s hands clench. Then it stopped and there were footsteps in the kitchen.
Myra looked straight ahead.
Jones came into the room, stooping a little, his spectacle rims catching the light. He had a tack hammer in his hand. He went to the secretary, opened the top drawer and scrabbled up a handful of pencils.
“Fred,” said Kalish, “have you got time to sit down and talk to me a little?”
“Shudas papaialishus,” replied Jones. He turned around and went out.
Myra’s voice was thin with strain. “What was that? More Russian?”
“No.”
“What then?”
Kalish shrugged his shoulders and twisted his neck slightly. It helped the little tickle of pain between his shoulder-blades, but it wasn’t a gesture he permitted himself during office hours. “Lithuanian, perhaps. I didn’t recognize it. I’m not really a linguist; I just pick up a few words here and there from my patients.”
“What was that he kept saying all during dinner? That was Russian.”
Kalish blinked. “Yes. Pogebele—ruin, devastation.”
“Why Russian? That’s all I want to know. We never had any trouble—I think I could stand it, but it’s that one extra thing on top of everything else.” She began to cry. “Russian!”
“You don’t know where he might have picked it up?”
“No.” She added bitterly, “Two nights ago—when I told you about, when I thought he was coming out of it—I asked him. And he said it was because his great-great-great-I-forget-how-many-times grandson was a Russian. Then I knew he was crazy.”
JONES was building a maze. He had started with little rectangular strips of wood from an orange crate, all different sizes, and when the crate gave out he had begun using strips of tin, held together at the corners by all-purpose cement and lead pencils.
“Maze” was the nearest word. It was a little like a model for a mad architect’s building, skeletons of rooms piled one on another, first the wood from the orange crate; then tin, all at different levels, all open at the ends, so that you could look all the way through it. He did not know what he wanted it for.
Myra and some man were standing behind him, watching.
They didn’t bother Jones. In one ear and out the other. Now a top piece here and then we start a new cell …
He reached for the tin and found only a snippet, not big enough for anything. There had been a bigger piece on the bench, he remembered, but no matter. He wandered down the bench, looking at things. There was a scrap of linoleum—
Somebody’s arm in a blue pinstripe sleeve appeared just as he reached for it and took the linoleum away.
What else? Jones started musingly across the garage workshop, thinking and looking. Kerosene can—big one, empty, standing in the comer. He could cut that up with the tin snips, probably. But just as he got to it, the same blue pinstripe arm came and took it away.
Jones looked around in mild annoyance. The pinstripe man was standing there, with the can in one hand and the piece of tin in the other. Myra stood right beside him.
He reached for the tin; that would be better than fooling around cutting up a kerosene can. The blue pinstripe held it away from him.
“Fred, do you remember me? Milt Kalish? We used to live next door in Long Branch. Remember?”
“Kalish,” he said agreeably, and reached for the tin again.
Pinstripe held it away from him. “Not quite yet, Fred. First tell me what you’re building here. Can you tell me now? Do you want to tell me what you’re building here?”
“A thing,” explained Jones. He made descriptive motions with his hands. “You know.”
MYRA put a handkerchief over her mouth and went away.
Jones reached for the tin.
“Not yet, Fred. Tell me, who is Dulcie?”
Dulcie … A pulsating hum. A close warmth. A darkness. He could feel her around him, especially when he closed his eyes, but she was a long way away. It was hard for her to talk to him, hard for him to listen.
“Is she a person?”
Ridiculous idea … He grinned, shook his head.
“Is Dulcie female?”
Well, yes. You would have to say so, he supposed.
He nodded.
The voice kept on. Had Dulcie told him to make the thing, what was it for, did he see her, hear her? “Does she talk to anybody else besides you?”
“Not yet,” Jones said. And that was enough. He turned around and went back to his bench, in case the piece of tin should be there, after all, and it was. He cut rectangles of tin with the snips, carefully, and began to build a new cell that would finish the fourth tier.
Their voices trickled through his head. “I think we’ll leave him alone now for a few minutes. You said there were some papers?”
“Downstairs. In his study.”
Pinstripe was gone, which meant Jones could go on with his work.
He began cutting linoleum into neat strips. Linoleum would do fine.
“Fred—” she began weepily.
He was cementing the first wall of a new cell that had nothing to lean against. That was the hardest part, making the first wall solid and straight. People didn’t know.
“Fred, can’t you talk to me?”
The linoleum was working very well. He had no way of being sure, but he had a feeling he was almost through.
A Myra hand came and yanked away the rest of the linoleum. Jones noticed the heavy paper of the calendar on the wall and pulled it down. He cut a few strips of it experimentally.
It worked fine.
THE maze was finished. Jones knew what it was for.
The reason it looked weird to other people was that it reminded them of a building. And of course, if you tried to make a building out of it, it was all wrong.
It was a model of something else altogether: a model of a way of thinking. It was, you might say, a constant reminder. In and around and down. In and around and down. Jones tilted the thing gently to see better. In and around and. In and around. In and. In.
It was like looking at one of those hypnotic spiral disks, but with a difference. Looking at a spiral only stunned your forebrain, opened up your skull to let any suggestion in. But looking into the maze forced your mind into a definite pattern, over and over—like tuning a radio receiver to one station, or like making a lock that would fit only one key.
Jones’s mind was perfectly clear. He knew the maze was to make him hear Dulcie better. And he heard her.