There was a stricken look in her eyes. “I... I was so anxious to make that call. One of the other girls wanted to, but it had to be me. I thought it would be exciting telling somebody that they’d won a fifty-thousand-dollar prize.”
The lieutenant reached over and clumsily patted the girl’s shoulder as she buried her face in her hands. “You had no way of knowing,” he said again. A nearby machine began to clack out a telegram, imprinting the words on the long paper tape. The lieutenant turned and walked stolidly out of the Western Union office.
Miranda
They put a plate in the back of my head and silver pins in the right thighbone. The arms were in traction longer than the legs. The eye, of course, was something they couldn’t fix.
It was a big, busy place they had there. The way I had come in, I guess, was a sort of challenge to the doctors. A post-graduate course. See, gentlemen, this thing is alive — indubitably alive. Watch, now. We will paste it back together the way God made it. Or almost as good.
My friends came — for a while. For a few months. I wasn’t too cordial. I didn’t need them. It was the same thing every time. How terrible to be all strung with wires and weights! Aren’t you going mad from boredom, George?
I wasn’t going mad from boredom. I learned how to keep my face from laughing, how to laugh on the inside. As if I was sitting back there in my mind, hugging myself, shrieking with laughter, rocking from side to side, laughing and laughing. But nothing but silence on the outside. The faraway dignity of the very sick.
They brought me in and I was dead. That is, for all practical purposes. The heart had no right to keep beating.
But you see, I knew. When you know a thing like that, you can’t die. When you know a thing like that, it is unfinished business.
Poor George. Poor old George.
And me all the time laughing away. It was a joke that I could understand, but nobody else would. The joke goes like this. I’ll tell you and you can laugh with me too. We’ll rock and giggle together. Once upon a time there was a good-natured, broad-shouldered slob named George A. Corliss who lived in an eleven-thousand-dollar frame house in an orderly little suburban community called Joanna Center. He lived at 88 April Lane. He made a hundred and thirty-eight fifty each and every week in a New York publishing house, carried a little more insurance than he should have, loved his dainty, fragile-boned, gray-eyed, silver-blond little wife named Connie very much indeed. In fact this slob had his happiest moments when Connie would give him a speculative look and tell him that he really did look a little like Van Johnson. This George Corliss, he made replicas of early American furniture in a basement workshop, bought a new Plymouth every time he had the old one about paid for, conscientiously read “good books” while commuting, and often brooded about the childlessness of the Corliss household, a thorn in his side.
He drove too fast, smoked too much, knocked off too many cocktails. In all respects a very average guy. But what George didn’t know was that Connie, the little silver-blond wife, feeling the thirties coming on, had acquired an itch for a Latin-type twenty-two-year-old kid, a gas pumper at the local lubritorium, a pinch-waisted kid with melting eyes, muscles, and a fast line of chatter. Since the kid obviously could not support Connie in the style to which George had gradually accustomed her, nothing seemed simpler than to find some nice safe way of knocking George off and glomming onto the fifty-six thousand bucks his demise would bring in.
So one day when George had told Connie in advance that he had to take a run up to a mountain town called Crane, New York, to dicker with a recalcitrant author, Connie took the Plymouth to the garage and the kid, Louie Palmer by name, did a judicious job of diddling with the tie-rod ends with the idea of their parting when a turn was taken at high speed.
So I took a turn at high speed. Rather, I tried to take it. The steering wheel went loose and gummy in my hands. They killed me, all right. They killed George, the slob, all right.
Funny, how it was. Take the moment the car started rolling. I had maybe one second of consciousness left. And in that second a lot of little things added up. I’d had the steering checked in town that week. Connie always buying gas in one-dollar quantities. The funny way she’d said goodbye. At the last minute I wanted her to come along. She was emphatic about saying no. And there was the time I found the initialed cigarette case on the car floor. She took it and I forgot it until I saw that Louie Palmer using it. Then he got all red and bothered and said it had slipped out of his pocket while he was checking the car, maybe when he reached in to yank the gimmick that releases the hood.
And before things went out for me, in a blinding whiteness that reached across the world, I said to myself, almost calmly, “George, you’re not going to let this kill you.”
But it did kill the George I was talking to. The man who came out of the coma eight days later wasn’t the old furniture builder, huckster, and loving husband.
No, he was the new George. The boy who could lie there and laugh inside at his joke. They tried to kill him and they did. And now he was going to kill them. Murder by a corpse. There’s something you can get your teeth into and laugh at. But don’t let it move the face muscles. It might pull out some of the deep stitches.
“You’re the luckiest man in the world,” the young doctor said. Young, with a nose like a bird’s beak and no more hair than a stone.
“Sure,” I said.
“I would have bet ten thousand to one against you.”
“Good thing you didn’t.” I wanted him to go away. I wanted to think about Connie and Louie and just how I would do it to them.
He fingered the wasted arm muscles. “Doing those exercises?”
“Every day, Doc.” I liked to see him wince when I called him Doc.
He clucked and muttered and prodded. “I warned you that you might not ever be able to walk again, the way those nerves were pinched. But the nurse told me you took a few steps today. I don’t understand it.”
I looked him in the eye, with the one I had left. “You see, Doc,” I said, “I’ve got everything to live for.”
The way I said it made him uneasy.
“Mr. Corliss, you’re not going to be exactly as good as new. We can improve that face for you by hooking a plastic eye in those muscles so that the eye will turn in its socket, but the two big scars will still show. You’ll limp for a few years and you will have to be very careful for the rest of your life, protecting that plate in your head from any sudden jars. No sports, you understand. Bridge is going to be your speed.”
“You’ve said this before, Doc.”
“I want to impress it on you. A man can’t go through what you went through and expect—”
“Doc, I don’t expect a thing. I was thrown through a shatter-proof windshield and then the car rolled across me.”
He didn’t like me as a person. He loved me as a case. I made his mouth water. He had showed me to every doctor within a ten-mile radius. He was writing me up for some kind of medical journal. The before-and-after pictures were going to go in his scrapbook. But we always parted with him looking as though he wished I was healthy enough to hit in the mouth.
Pain to the average person is just that. Pain. Nothing else. A mashed finger or a bad headache. But when you have it a long time something else happens to it. It turns into something else. You live with it and get to know it. With me, it was a color. Green. Green is supposed to be restful. I would see it behind my eyes. Eye, I should say. I’d wake up in the night and look at the color. Dull dark green. That was good. That was above standard. That was more than you could expect. But there were the nights in the beginning when it was a hot, bright, harsh green, pulsating like a crazy living plant. That was when the night nurse was always there. During the first weeks she used the needle when it was bad, and later it was pills, which never worked as fast or as well.