“Hey,” he called. “I live upstairs. I heard your TV. Let’s meet; okay?” He waited, listening. No sound and no motion; his words had not pried the person loose. “I brought you a cube of margarine,” he said, standing close to the door in an effort to speak through its thickness. “My name’s J. R. Isidore and I work for the well-known animal vet Mr. Hannibal Sloat; you’ve heard of him. I’m reputable; I have a job. I drive Mr. Sloat’s truck.”
The door, meagerly, opened and he saw within the apartment a fragmented and misaligned shrinking figure, a girl who cringed and slunk away and yet held onto the door, as if for physical support. Fear made her seem ill; it distorted her body lines, made her appear as if someone had broken her and then, with malice, patched her together badly. Her eyes, enormous, glazed over fixedly as she attempted to smile.
He said, with sudden understanding, “You thought no one lived in this building. You thought it was abandoned.”
Nodding, the girl whispered, “Yes.”
“But,” Isidore said, “it’s good to have neighbors. Heck, until you came along I didn’t have any.” And that was no fun, god knew.
“You’re the only one?” the girl asked. “In this building besides me?” She seemed less timid, now; her body straightened and with her hand she smoothed her dark hair. Now he saw that she had a nice figure, although small, and nice eyes markedly established by long black lashes. Caught by surprise, the girl wore pajama bottoms and nothing more. And as he looked past her he perceived a room in disorder. Suitcases lay here and there, opened, their contents half spilled onto the littered floor. But this was natural; she had barely arrived.
“I’m the only one besides you,” Isidore said. “And I won’t bother you.” He felt glum; his offering, possessing the quality of an authentic old pre-war ritual, had not been accepted. In fact the girl did even seem aware of it. Or maybe she did not understand what a cube of margarine was for. He had that intuition; the girl seemed more bewildered than anything else. Out of her depth and helplessly floating in now-receding circles of fear. “Good old Buster,” he said, trying to reduce her rigid postural stance. “You like him? I watch him every morning and then again at night when I get home; I watch him while I’m eating dinner and then his late late show until I go to bed. At least until my TV set broke.”
“Who — ” the girl began and then broke off; she bit her lip as if savagely angry. Evidently at herself.
“Buster Friendly,” he explained. It seemed odd to him that this girl had never heard of Earth’s most knee-slapping TV comic. “Where did you come here from? ” he asked curiously.
“I don’t see that it matters.” She shot a swift glance upward at him. Something that she saw seemed to ease her concern; her body noticeably relaxed. “I’ll be glad to receive company,” she said, “later on when I’m more moved in. Right now, of course, it’s out of the question.”
“Why out of the question?” He was puzzled; everything about her puzzled him. Maybe, he thought, I’ve been living here alone too long. I’ve become strange. They say chickenheads are like that. The thought made him feel even more glum. “I could help you unpack,” he ventured; the door, now, had virtually shut in his face. “And your furniture.”
The girl said, “I have no furniture. All these things” — she indicated the room behind her — “they were here.”
“They won’t do,” Isidore said. He could tell that at a glance. The chairs, the carpet, the tables — all had rotted away; they sagged in mutual ruin, victims of the despotic force of time. And of abandonment. No one had lived in this apartment for years; the ruin had become almost complete. He couldn’t imagine how she figured on living in such surroundings. “Listen,” he said earnestly. “If we go all over the building looking we can probably find you things that aren’t so tattered. A lamp from one apartment, a table from another.”
“I’ll do it,” the girl said. “Myself, thanks.”
“You’d go into those apartments alone?” He could not believe it.
“Why not?” Again she shuddered nervously, grimacing in awareness of saying something wrong.
Isidore said, “I’ve tried it. Once. After that I just come home and go in my own place and I don’t think about the rest. The apartments in which no one lives — hundreds of them and all full of the possessions people had, like family photographs and clothes. Those that died couldn’t take anything and those who emigrated didn’t want to. This building, except for my apartment, is completely kipple-ized.”
“Kipple-ized’?” She did not comprehend.
“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.”
“I see.” The girl regarded him uncertainly, not knowing whether to believe him. Not sure if he meant it seriously.
“There’s the First Law of Kipple,” he said. “‘Kipple drives out nonkipple.’ Like Gresham’s law about bad money. And in these apartments there’s been nobody there to fight the kipple.”
“So it has taken over completely,” the girl finished. She nodded. “Now I understand.”
“Your place, here,” he said, “this apartment you’ve picked — it’s too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apts. But — ” He broke off.
“But what?”
Isidore said, “We can’t win.”
“Why not? The girl stepped into the hall, closing the door behind her; arms folded self-consciously before her small high breasts she faced him, eager to understand. Or so it appeared to him, anyhow. She was at least listening.
“No one can win against kipple,” he said, “except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.” He added, “Except of course for the upward climb of Wilbur Mercer.”
The girl eyed him. “I don’t see any relation.”
“That’s what Mercerism is all about.” Again he found himself puzzled. “Don’t you participate in fusion? Don’t you own an empathy box?”
After a pause the girl said carefully, “I didn’t bring mine with me. I assumed I’d find one here.”
“But an empathy box,” he said, stammering in his excitement, “is the most personal possession you have! It’s an extension of your body; it’s the way you touch other humans, it’s the way you stop being alone. But you know that. Everybody knows that. Mercer even lets people like me — ” He broke off. But too late; he had already told her and he could see by her face, by the flicker of sudden aversion, that she knew. “I almost passed the IQ test,” he said in a low, shaky voice. “I’m not very special, only moderately; not like some you see. But that’s what Mercer doesn’t care about.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” the girl said, “you can count that as a major objection to Mercerism.” Her voice was clean and neutral; she intended only to state a fact, he realized. The fact of her attitude toward chickenheads.
“I guess I’ll go back upstairs,” he said, and started away from her, his cube of margarine clutched; it had become plastic and damp from the squeeze of his hand.
The girl watched him go, still with the neutral expression on her face. And then she called, “Wait.”
Turning, he said, “Why?”
“I’ll need you. For getting myself adequate furniture. From other apartments, as you said.” She strolled toward him, her bare upper body sleek and trim, without an excess gram of far. “What time do you get home from work? You can help me then.”
Isidore said, “Could you maybe fix dinner for us? If I brought home the ingredients?”
“No, I have too much to do.” The girl shook off the request effortlessly and he noticed that, perceived it without understanding it. Now that her initial fear had diminished, something else had begun to emerge from her. Something more strange. And, he thought, deplorable. A coldness. Like, he thought, a breath from the vacuum between inhabited worlds, in fact from nowhere: it was not what she did or said but what she did not do and say. “Some other time,” the girl said, and moved back toward her apartment door.