“No,” Crainpool says dryly. His voice is parched.
“Physics breaks my heart, astronomy gives me the blue balls. I dassn’t bother with mathematics. I better not think about chemistry.”
“No.”
“You asshole, Mr. Crainpool. We’re blind. We ought to have white canes and dark glasses. There should be pencils in our caps. We should sit in the weather against tall buildings and use the caps as offices. Listen, listen to me. They’ve proof that all life is merely four simple compounds arranged on a spiral string of sugars and phosphates. We’re necklaces, Crainpool, sugar and spice and everything nice. We’re fucking candy. And your cocksucker and muffdiver are only guys with a sweet tooth. Listen, listen, there’s a theory now that certain things move faster than light. They think that atoms were lighter millions of years ago, gravity stronger. We live in a universe that puts on weight, that builds its body like a Sumo.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I don’t lead.”
“Please, Mr. Main—”
He is talking very quickly now. “I hear tell that matter enters our universe from another universe. That we get our physical laws from some universe in another country. That gravity comes like the post, imported like teak and coffee beans. Physical law like an unfavorable balance of payments. Our ways are not their ways, Mr. Crainpool. Jesus, atoms, atoms and the crap between stars.”
“Why are you killing me?”
“Hush. Einstein’s theory posited objects of infinite density within an infinitely small space. You see? Their atoms would be so fat and their gravity so dense that not even light could escape from them. That was a darkness, fella. Can you imagine such a darkness? That was a darkness so dark it was invisible. You could read your newspaper through it. Listen, listen to me. Wheeler and Ruffini predicted that by their x-rays we would know them — are you keeping up, are you getting any of this? — that they’d give themselves away circling visible stars, nibbling at them with their infinite gravity, drawing at them, giving the stars a toothache.”
“I don’t know why you want to kill—”
“They’ve been seen! In recent months. They’ve been detected. The black holes in the universe.”
“I don’t want you to shoot me, Mr. Main.”
“And for every black hole there’s a white hole. That’s what Hjellming thinks, how he accounts for the quasars. Are you reading me, Crainpool? The universes are leaking into each other. There’s this transfusion of law in the sky. I’m honest, I’m an honest man. Upright and respectable here in this universe I inhabit. I’m honest, but the fucking laws are leaking, the physical constants bleeding into each other like madras. God Himself nothing but a slow leak, some holy puncture, Nature’s and reality’s sacred flat. Matter and anti-matter. Inside our universe is another. Dig? Chinese boxes of universes. When I kill you in your room here tonight, maybe that’s virtue next-door. You think?”
“Why? Please, Mr. Main, why?”
“Shut up about why. I don’t know why!”
Crainpool changes his tactics. He stops whining and becomes almost angry. “You always have to have the last word,” he says. “You always have to do things big, don’t you? Big shot. You’d kill me for nothing, for the sake of your style.”
“My style? Nah.”
“You would. You think you’re so hot.”
“Me? No, I’m catching cold, I’m in a draft, I’ve got this chill. Brr, Crainpool, it’s the Ice Age in me, record snowfalls and not enough antifreeze in the world to grow a calory. My atoms, my gross thick atoms. Can you see me? Can you make me out?”
“I see you. I make you out. Like you said — you’re a parade.”
“Don’t believe everything they tell you, killer. I don’t give a fart for me. You can have my personality for a Green Stamp. My ego wore out years ago. Call Goodwill Industries, I’ll put it in a box on the front porch they can pick it up. Crainpool, dummy, this isn’t heroics, it ain’t no grandstand here. I’m a functional illiterate, I don’t know my ass from my elbow mystery-wise. If I can’t stand being a fool, it’s got nothing to do with pride. Screw the bubble reputation, I say, fuck fame and shove I. Gobble genes and blast being. I pass.”
Crainpool has had to strain to hear this last, leaning so far forward that he can almost pluck the gun from Main’s lap. “Then it makes no sense to kill me,” he says.
“All I wanted,” Main says so quietly that the clerk has to watch his lips to understand him, “was to know things. I’m honest, I’m an honest man. I took delight in the impersonal. I’ve lived with curiosity like the seven-year itch. That’s what attracted me to you guys, you mugs and malefactors, you villains and cutpurses. Who done it? What’s the motive? Cherchez la femme. What’s that? What does crime come to at last? Nothing. Crummy hornbook, lousy primer. Slim volume, Crainpool, pot fucking boiler, publisher’s remainder. You taught me nothing, mister. And where did I get the idea that by getting next to aberration I could…But what hurts, I mean what really hurts, is that if I had a brain as big as the Ritz I still wouldn’t know anything. We die dropouts. All of us. Disadvantaged and underachievers. I have questions. I’m up to here with questions. I never needed to be happy; I only needed to know. Simple stuff. A dopey kid of the next century could tell me. If I could only live long enough I would sit at his feet as if he was Socrates and he’d tell me…What? Whether Dubuque ever made it into the majors. If there’s crab grass on distant planets. Who won the war and what they were supposed to be fighting for and old Uncle Tom Cobbly and all. He’d rattle off the damn fool slogans of his time and I’d take them in like the Ten Commandments. What do I do with my wonder, I wonder?”
Crainpool stands up. He squeezes himself between Main and the bed and walks toward the door. “Please,” he says, “I’ll see you in the office. Go on home, Mr. Main, get some sleep.” He opens the door for him.
“What?”
“It’s pretty late, Mr. Main.”
“You off the hook?”
“I think so.”
“Out of the woods?”
“That’s the chance I’m taking.”
“And you’ll see me in the office.”
“Yes.”
“In the morning.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Phoenician smiles wearily. “You let me talk myself out, do your stalling for you.”
“You’re a reasonable man, Mr. Main. You’re a reasonable man, Alex.”
“Oyp and Glyp are dead.”
“Well, as you say, who can know what happened? I’m glad you closed the books on them. It was time.”
“That’s right.”
“You had a perfect record otherwise.”
“Sure.”
“They don’t change that.”
“No.”
“Do you want me to call a taxi for you?”
“Do you think they’re really dead? I mean, I’ve got no actual proof. It’s just a feeling.”
“You know those two. If they were alive we’d probably have heard something. We were bound to. Leopards don’t change their spots.”
“I guess.” He raises his pistol and aims it at Crainpool’s hand which is still on the door. “There was always someone to hunt,” he says. “A mystery I was good at. My line of country. But if Oyp and Glyp are dead—”
“Come on, Mr. Main, don’t—”
He fires and the bullet chips the knuckles of Crainpool’s hand. Astonished, the clerk raises the hand to his mouth and stares wild-eyed at the Phoenician. The blood makes it appear that he has been eating cherry pie.