As they filed out of the store, the checkers gave him a look of scorn.
The assistant manager, counting money and setting tape, said to him, "Did you mean for me to run, too?"
"No," he said, only half-hearing him; his mind was on his experiment.
"I tried to duck down under the register," the assistant manager said.
"Thanks," he said. Going out of the store, he locked the door after him, and then he crossed the lot toward the Volkswagen.
But in the Volkswagen was a heavy-set, black German shepherd which eyed him as he approached. And the front bumper of the car had a deep dent in it. And the car needed a wash.
Talk about psychological experiments, he said to himself. It wasn't his car. It wasn't Margo. He had glimpsed the VW drive onto the lot at about the time she usually came for him. The rest had been supplied by his mind.
He started back in the direction of the store. As he got near, the glass door opened and the assistant manager stuck his head out and said, "Victor, your wife's on the phone. She wants you."
"Thanks," he said, catching the door and passing on inside and over to the wall phone.
"Honey," Margo said, when he said hello, "I'm sorry I didn't get down to pick you up; do you still want me to come, or do you want to go ahead on the bus? If you're tired I can get you, but probably it would be faster just to catch the bus."
"I'll catch the bus," he said.
Margo said, "I've been out in Sammy's clubhouse, listening on his crystal set. It's fascinating!"
"Fine," he said, starting to hang up. "I'll see you later."
"We listened to all sorts of broadcasts."
After saying good night to the assistant manager he walked down to the corner and caught a bus. Soon he was riding home, along with shoppers and employees, old ladies and school children.
A city ordinance forbade smoking in a public conveyance, but he felt disturbed enough to light a cigarette. By opening the window next to him he managed to get the smoke to go out, and not into the face of the woman next to him.
My experiment was a whizzer, he said to himself. It worked better than I wanted.
He had assumed that the checkers would scatter in various directions, one toward the door, one toward the wall, one away from the door. That would have supported his theory that this situation, in which they found themselves, was in some manner episodic. That a good part of their lives had been spent elsewhere, and in an elsewhere that none of them remembered.
But -- each should have had his own reflexes. Not the same for all four of them. They had all bolted in the same direction. It had been the wrong direction, but it had been uniform. They had acted as a group, not as individuals.
That meant, simply, that the prior and substantial experiences of the four had been similar.
How could that be?
His theory didn't cover that.
And, smoking his cigarette and maneuvering the smoke out the bus window, he could not immediately concoct another theory.
Except, he realized, some mediocre explanation; for instance, that the four checkers had attended some sort of function together. They might have lived in a boardinghouse together, or eaten in the same café over a period of years, been in school together.
We have a hodge-podge of leaks in our reality, he said to himself. A drop here, a couple of drops over in that corner. A moist spot forming on the ceiling. But where's it getting in? What's it mean?
He put his mind into rational order. Let's see how I came across it, he said to himself. I ate too much lasagne, and I hurried away from a poker game, in which I held a medium-fair hand, to take a pill in a dark bathroom.
Is there anything previous to that?
No, he decided. Previous to that it's a sunny universe. Kids romping, cows mooing, dogs wagging. Men clipping lawns on Sunday afternoon, while listening to the ball game on TV. We could have gone on forever. Noticed nothing.
Except, he realized, Ragle's hallucination.
And what, he wondered, is the hallucination? Ragle had never quite got around to telling him.
But it goes something along the lines of my experience, he said to himself. Somehow, in some manner, Ragle found himself poking through reality. Enlarging the hole. Or been faced with its enlargement, perhaps a splitting rent opening up, a great gash.
We can put everything we know together, he realized, but it doesn't tell us anything, except that something is wrong. And we knew that to start with. The clues we are getting don't give us a solution; they only show us how far-reaching the wrongness is.
I think, though, he thought, we made a mistake in letting Bill Black walk off with that phone book.
And what should we do now? he asked himself. Conduct more psychological experiments?
No. One told him enough. The one he had conducted involuntarily in his bathroom. Even this last one had done more harm than good, had introduced confusion rather than verification.
Don't confuse me any more, he thought. I'm bewildered enough now to last me the rest of my life. What do I know for sure? Maybe Ragle is right; we ought to pull out the big philosophy books and start boning up on Bishop Berkeley and whoever the rest of them are -- he did not remember any philosophy well enough even to know the names.
Maybe, he thought, if I squeeze my eyes darn near shut, so just a crack of light shows, and I concentrate like hell on this bus, on the weary, hefty old women shoppers with their bulging shopping bags, and the chattering schoolgirls, and the clerks reading the evening paper, and the red-necked driver, maybe they'll all go away. The squeaking seat under me. The smelly fumes every time the bus starts up. The jolting. The swaying. The ads over the windows. Maybe it'll just fade away....
Squeezing his eyes together he tried to dislodge the presence of the bus and passengers. For ten minutes he tried. His mind fell into a stupor. The navel, he thought blearily. Concentration on one point. He picked out the buzzer on the side of the bus opposite him. The round, white buzzer. Go, he thought. Fade away.
Fade away.
Fade
Fa
F
...
With a start, he awoke. He had drifted off.
Self-hypnosis, he declared. Nodding off into a doze, like the other passengers around him. Heads lolling together, in time to the motion of the bus. Left, right. Forward. Sideways. Right. Left. The bus stopped at a light. The heads remained on an even angle.
Back, as the bus started.
Forward, as the bus stopped.
Fade away.
Fade
Fa
And then, through his half-closed eyes, he saw the passengers fade away.
Lo and behold! he thought. How pleasant it was.
No. It wasn't fading at all.
The bus and its passengers hadn't faded a bit. Throughout the bus a deep change had begun taking place, and like his experiment in the store it did not fit; it was not what he wanted.
Damn you, he thought. Fade away!
The sides of the bus became transparent. He saw out into the street, the sidewalk and stores. Thin support struts, the skeleton of the bus. Metal girders, an empty hollow box. No other seats. Only a strip, a length of planking, on which upright featureless shapes like scarecrows had been propped. They were not alive. The scarecrows lolled forward, back, forward, back. Ahead of him he saw the driver; the driver had not changed. The red neck. Strong, wide back. Driving a hollow bus.
The hollow men, he thought. We should have looked up poetry.
He was the only person on the bus, outside of the driver. The bus actually moved. It moved through town, from the business section to the residential section. The driver was driving him home.
When he opened his eyes wide again, all the nodding people had returned. The shoppers. The clerks. The school children. The noise and smells and chatter.
Nothing works right, he thought to himself.