“You know,” Mr. Crody said. “Beyond the grave. The after life. You can laugh, Stuart, but it’s true; when he has a beer he goes into this trance, like you see him in now, and he has occult vision or something. You ask Tony or Connie and some of these other people; they were here, too.”
Now Connie was leaning over the slumped, twitching figure in the center of the cart. “Hoppy, what’s the light from? Is it God?” She laughed nervously. “You know, like in the Bible. I mean, is it true?”
Hoppy said mumblingly, “Gray darkness. Like ashes. Then a great flatness. Nothing but fires burning, light is from the burning fires. They burn forever. Nothing alive.”
“And where are you?” Connie asked.
“I’m—floating,” Hoppy said. “Floating near the ground … no, now I’m very high. I’m weightless, I don’t have a body any more so I’m high up, as high as I want to be. I can hang here, if I want; I don’t have to go back down. I like it up here and I can go around the Earth forever. There it is down below me and I can just keep going around and around.”
Going up beside the cart, Mr. Crody the jeweler said, “Uh, Hoppy, isn’t there anybody else?’ Are each of us doomed to isolation?”
Hoppy mumbled, “I—see others, now. I’m drifting back down, I’m landing among the grayness. I’m walking about.”
Walking, Stuart thought. On what? Legs but no body; what an after life. He laughed to himself. What a performance, he thought. What crap. But he, too, came up beside the cart, now, squeezing in to be able to see.
“Is it that you’re born into another life, like they teach in the East?” an elderly lady customer in a cloth coat asked.
“Yes,” Hoppy said, surprisingly. “A new life. I have a different body; I can do all kinds of things.”
“A step up,” Stuart said.
“Yes,” Hoppy mumbled. “A step up. I’m like everybody else; in fact I’m better than anybody else. I can do anything they can do and a lot more. I can go wherever I want, and they can’t. They can’t move.”
“Why can’t they move?” the frycook demanded.
“Just can’t,” Hoppy said. “They can’t go into the air or on roads or ships; they just stay. It’s all different from this. I can see each of them, like they’re dead, like they’re pinned down and dead. Like corpses.”
“Can they talk?” Connie asked.
“Yes,” the phoce said, “they can converse with each other. But—they have to—“ He was silent, and then he smiled; his thin, twisted face showed joy. “They can only talk through me.”
I wonder what that means, Stuart thought. It sounds like a megalomaniacal daydream, where he rules the world. Compensation because he’s defective … just what you’d expect a phoce to imagine.
It did not seem so interesting to Stuart, now that he had realized that. He moved away, back toward his booth, where his lunch waited.
The frycook was saying, “Is it a good world, there? Tell me if it’s better than this or worse.”
“Worse,” Hoppy said. And then he said, “Worse for you. It’s what everybody deserves; it’s justice.”
“Better for you, then,” Connie said, in a questioning way.
“Yes,” the phoce said.
“Listen,” Stuart said to the waitress from where he sat, “can’t you see it’s just psychological compensation because he’s defective? It’s how he keeps going, imagining that. I don’t see how you can take it seriously.”
“I don’t take it seriously,” Connie said. “But it’s interesting; I’ve read about mediums, like they’re called. They go into trances and can commune with the next world, like he’s doing. Haven’t you ever heard of that? It’s a scientific fact, I think. Isn’t it, Tony?” She turned to the frycook for support.
“I don’t know,” Tony said moodily, walking slowly back to his grill to pick up his spatula.
The phoce, now, seemed to have fallen deeper into his beer-induced trance; he seemed asleep, in fact, no longer seeing anything or at least no longer conscious of the people around him or attempting to communicate his vision—or whatever it was—to them. The séance was over.
Well, you never know, Stuart said to himself. I wonder what Fergesson would say to this; I wonder if he’d want somebody who’s not only physically crippled but an epileptic or whatever working for him. I wonder if I should or shouldn’t mention this to him when I get back to the store. If he hears he’ll probably fire Hoppy right on the spot; I wouldn’t blame him. So maybe I better not say anything, he decided.
The phoce’s eyes opened. In a weak voice he said, “Stuart.”
“What do you want?” Stuart answered.
“I—“ The phoce sounded frail, almost ill, as if the experience had been too much for his weak body. “Listen, I wonder … ” He drew himself up, then rolled his cart slowly over to Stuart’s booth. In a low voice he said, “I wonder, could you push me back to the store? Not right now but when you’re through eating. I’d really appreciate it.”
“Why?” Stuart said. “Can’t you do it?”
“I don’t feel good,” the phoce said.
Stuart nodded. “Okay. When I’m finished eating.”
“Thanks,” the phoce said.
Ignoring him stonily, Stuart continued eating. I wish it wasn’t obvious I know him, he thought to himself. I wish he’d wheel off and wait somewhere else. But the phoce had sat down, rubbing his forehead with the left extensor, looking too spent to move away again, even to his place at the other end of the coffee shop.
Later, as Stuart pushed the phoce in his cart back up the sidewalk toward Modern TV, the phoce said in a low voice,
“It’s a big responsibility, to see beyond.”
“Yeah,” Stuart murmured, maintaining ‘his remoteness, doing his duty only, no more; he pushed the cart and that was all. Just because I’m pushing you, he thought, doesn’t mean I have to converse with you.
“The first time it happened,” the phoce went on, but Stuart cut him off.
“I’m not interested.” He added, “I just want to get back and see if they fired off the rocket yet. It’s probably in orbit by now.”
“I guess so,” the phoce said.
At the intersection they waited for the light to change.
“The first time it happened,” the phoce said, “it scared me.” As Stuart pushed him across the street he went on, “I knew right away what it was I was seeing. The smoke and the fires … everything all smudged. Like a mining pit or a place where they process slag. Awful.” He shuddered. “But is this so terrific the way it is now? Not for me.”
“I like it,” Stuart said shortly.
“Naturally,” the phoce said. “You’re -not a biological sport.”
Stuart grunted.
“You know what my earliest memory from childhood is?” the phoce said in a quiet voice. “Being carried to church in a blanket. Laid out on a pew like a—“ His voice broke. “Carried in and out in that blanket, inside it, so no one could see me. That was my mother’s idea. She couldn’t stand my father carrying me on his back, where people could see.”
Stuart grunted.
“This is a terrible world,” the phoce said. “Once you Negroes had to suffer; if you lived in the South you’d be suffering now. You forget all about that because they let you forget, but me-they don’t let me forget. Anyhow, I don’t want to forget, about myself I mean. In the next world it all will be different. You’ll find out because you’ll be there, too.”
“No,” Stuart said. “When I die I’m dead; I don’t have a soul.”
“You, too,” the phoce said, and he seemed to be gloating; his voice had a malicious, cruel tinge of relish. “I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” the phoce said, “one time I saw you.”
Frightened in spite of himself, Stuart said, “Aw—“
“One time,” the phoce insisted, more firmly now. “It was you; no doubt about it. Want to know what you were doing?”
“Naw.”
“You were eating a dead rat raw.”
Stuart said nothing, but he pushed the cart faster and faster, down the sidewalk as fast as he could go, back to the store.
When they got back to the store they found the crowd of people still in front of the TV set. And the rocket had been fired off; it had just left the ground, and it was not known yet if the stages had performed properly.
Hoppy wheeled himself back downstairs to the repair department and Stuart remained upstairs before the set. But the phoce’s words had upset him so much that he could not concentrate on the TV screen; he wandered off, and then, seeing Fergesson in the upstairs office, walked that way.
At the office desk, Fergesson sat going over a pile of contracts and charge tags. Stuart approached him “Listen. That goddam Hoppy—“