I heard Mr. Miller say: “How does it feel?”
I turned toward him and said: “You ask that question out of curiosity. Our language is too vague, too indefinite in terminology for me to give you an adequate idea of the physical sensation. I see on your face a certain fear of the unknown. Fear is the emotion of a child.”
“How about your memory?”
I stared at him coldly. I said: “I can remember everything. Memory in itself is a poor term. It implies the possibility of error. There is no such possibility. All that has happened to me, all that my senses have touched, is available in my mind. Do you wish to make a test?”
“I’m wearing an old tie, Bill. When have you seen it before?”
“I saw it first on the afternoon of January eleventh, nineteen forty-one. I have seen it twenty-one times since that date. In 1942 I saw in a shop window, a duplicate of it. It retailed for four dollars and fifty cents.”
I could see Mr. Miller was looking at me with respect, also with dislike. His opinion of me made no difference whatsoever. The Professor was looking proud. That also is a foolish human emotion.
Mr. Miller said: “You’re off duty, Bill. Come back here tomorrow at this time, and we’ll take a reading on what’s happened.”
“I will be here,” I said, looking at their stupid animal faces, making the mental reservation that I would come back provided there was an adequate reason. I knew that it was the height of absurdity to do anything without reason.
I went down in the elevator. The car was still in front of the building in Mr. Miller’s personal parking place. Foolish-looking people scuttled by me. I didn’t dislike them. They didn’t amuse me. They were simply and obviously foolish — a fact to be recorded. Their faces mirrored their haste, greed, irritation. I was not irritated. I got into Mr. Miller’s car and drove off. It was an obvious decision. I knew that it would be far simpler than taking the subway. I also knew that Mr. Miller would not report it as theft. There would be too many questions.
At each light I glanced around, looking for traffic policemen. When there were none, I drove through the red lights, ignoring the silly fist-waving and shouts of the pedestrians. How foolish to waste my time waiting for a symbol to change when I knew that my driving skill was adequate to go through the red lights without accident.
I stopped in front of my house and looked at the barroom next door. Certain economic facts were obvious. I had paid a certain amount of money for my house. The bar next door reduced the value. It had been purchased with the money for which I had labored. Hence the barroom was making an ex-post-facto reduction of the value of my labor, without any recompense to me. Thus, it was up to the owner of the barroom to pay me the difference between the two values of my house. It was a clear line of reasoning. There was no greed in it. It was an equation, with all the terms written out in my head. A rapid calculation was made. The bar should pay me twelve hundred dollars.
I walked in. I noticed that it was small, the new decorations already tarnished, and it had that air of failure which is so recognizable.
I asked the owner if I could have a word with him, and I identified myself as the chauffeur for Mr. Genesee Miller. I lowered my voice and said that I had a proposition for him whereby we could both make some money. It was interesting to see the gleam come into his close-set eyes, the licking of the dry lips.
I said: “I overheard, by accident, Mr. Miller’s plan to take over this entire block and build a hospital. It is going through, and in a week they will start buying the titles to the various pieces of property in this block. It is obvious that if I were to hold out for a high price, Mr. Miller would fire me. I own the house next door. I could sell it today for fifty-six hundred dollars. If someone else owned it, they could hold out for eight thousand. You look like a man who knows the angles. Suppose you buy the house from me for sixty-eight hundred, and then we both stand to make twelve hundred dollars.”
It was interesting to watch his cluttered mind at work on the proposition. He didn’t know whether to trust me or not. I was certain of my ground, because I had overheard talk of just such a proposition — except that it wasn’t my block that Mr. Miller was interested in.
It had been in the newspapers, too.
I said: “If you’re in doubt, check Page Four, Column Three of the News for June eighteenth. The headline says: ‘Philanthropist to Endow Hospital.’ ”
“I seen that,” he said, and licked his lips some more. “It’s this block, huh?”
I waited while he went into the back and made several phone-calls. Two hours later we sat in the back room with a lawyer and two other parties, and made out the transfer papers. Then we went to the bank, and I deposited a certified check to my account for sixty-eight hundred. That was exactly what I had paid for the house. I wrote a check clearing the balance of the mortgage, and with thirty-nine hundred cash, through the bank’s officers, I purchased, sight unseen, a nearly new bungalow in a better section with one less bedroom than the house which I had sold.
I had no fear of reprisal. When the owner of the bar and his friends found out that I had told them lies, they might attempt to be difficult. In fact, they might arrange to give me a beating. I had no fear. I knew that they would stop short of making serious trouble.
When I arrived home at five, Gerald, Marg’s lazy brother, was asleep on the couch. Marg came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel.
I jabbed Gerald in the stomach with my finger. He awakened.
“What’s the matter, Bill?” he asked. “You look sort of grim.”
“I’m not the least bit grim,” I said. “I merely have some information for you. Today I sold this house and bought another. There is no room in the new house for you. You will have to leave.”
Marg gasped: “Sold this house! Sold it! And you never even asked me—”
“I knew you wanted to leave the neighborhood.”
“But Bill, we’ve always done this sort of thing together — talked it over, I mean.”
“I have talked things over with you because you are my wife and it is expected that I do so. You have never contributed any sound ideas to such discussions, and it was merely to salve your vanity that I included you in the past. I no longer have any desire to salve your vanity.”
“Are you drunk, Bill Smith?”
“Drinking is a foolish adjustment designed to reduce inhibitions. The proper mind is not inhibited. You heard my words to your brother? He is lazy, selfish and emotionally a child. He has few abilities which he could sell in order to earn a living. He suspects that the world owes him a living. Well, I am disabusing him of that notion.”
“Bill Smith,” she said, “you can’t talk that way to me, and you can’t talk that way to my brother.”
“You are irritable and upset,” I said calmly, “and you refuse to recognize the irrefutable workings of pure intelligence. Of late you have been a nagging, irritable woman, and you have had a fear in your mind that something is wrong with you physically. Since I am expected to live with you, I intend to send you to the best available clinic to determine if your irritability and nervousness has a physical basis. Naturally, you are afraid to go, just as, before I found the way to use my intelligence, I was afraid to send you.”
She stood staring at me, and Gerald sat on the couch edge, looking as though someone had hit him on the head. At that moment the door was flung open and a policeman came in holding James, my eldest, firmly by the upper arm. James was struggling to get free, and his face was white. In it I could read fear, hate and resentment of authority.