The left side of Watkins’s head bulged. His cheekbone enlarged. That ear began to change shape and draw toward a point.
Stunned, Shaddack backed away from him.
Watkins followed, raising his voice, speaking with a slight slur but with no less force, not with real anger but with fear and an unsettling touch of savagery “Why the hell would any of us want to evolve to some higher form with even fewer pleasures of the body and the heart? Intellectual pleasures aren’t enough, Shaddack. Life is more than that. A life that’s only intellectual isn’t tolerable.”
As Watkins’s brow gradually sloped backward, slowly melting away like a wall of snow in the sun, heavier accretions of bone began to build up around his eyes.
Shaddack backed into the dresser.
Still approaching, Watkins said, “Jesus! Don’t you see yet? Even a man confined to a hospital bed, paralyzed from the neck down, has more in his life than intellectual interests; no one’s stolen his emotions from him; no one’s reduced him to fear and pure intellect. We need pleasure, Shaddack, pleasure, pleasure. Life without it is terrifying. Pleasure makes life worth living.”
“Stop.”
“You’ve made it impossible for us to experience the pleasurable release of emotion, so we can’t fully experience pleasures of the flesh, either, because we’re creatures of a high order and need the emotional aspect to truly enjoy physical pleasure. It’s both or neither in human beings.”
Watkins’s hands, fisted at his sides, were becoming larger, with swollen knuckles and tobacco-brown, pointed nails.
“You’re transforming,” Shaddack said.
Ignoring him, speaking more thickly as the shape of his mouth began to change subtly, Watkins said, “So we revert to a savage, altered state. We retreat from our intellect. In the cloak of the beast, our only pleasure is the pleasure of the flesh, the flesh, flesh … but at least we’re no longer aware of what we’ve lost, so the pleasure remains intense, so intense, deep and sweet, sweet, so sweet. You’ve made….. made our lives intolerable, gray and dead, dead, all dead, dead….. so we have to devolve in mind and in body … to find a worthwhile existence. We … we have to flee … from the horrible restrictions of this narrowed life … this very narrowed life you’ve given us. Men aren’t machines. Men … men … men are not machines!”
“You’re regressing. For God’s sake, Loman!”
Watkins halted and seemed disoriented. Then he shook his head, as if to cast off his confusion as he might a veil. He raised his hands, looked at them, and cried out in terror. He glanced past Shaddack, at the dresser mirror, and his cry grew louder, shriller.
Abruptly Shaddack was acutely aware of the stench of blood, to which he had somewhat accustomed himself. Watkins must be even more affected by it, though not repulsed, no, not in the least repulsed, but excited.
Lightning flashed and thunder shook the night again, and rain suddenly came down in torrents, beating on the windows and drumming on the roof.
Watkins looked from the mirror to Shaddack, raised a hand as if to strike him, then turned and staggered out of the room, into the hall, away from the ripe stink of blood. Out there he dropped to his knees, then onto his side. He curled into a ball, shaking violently, gagging, whimpering, snarling, and intermittently chanting, “No, no, no, no.”
57
When he pulled back from the brink and felt in control of himself once more, Loman sat up and leaned against the wall. He was wet with perspiration again, and shaky with hunger. The partial transformation and the energy expended to keep it from going all the way had left him drained. He was relieved but also felt unfulfilled, as if some great prize had been within his reach but then had been snatched away just as he had touched it.
A hollow, somewhat susurrant sound surrounded him. At first he thought it was an internal noise, all in his head, perhaps the soft boom and sizzle of brain cells flaring and dying from the strain of thwarting the regressive urge. Then he realized it was rain hammering on the roof of the bungalow.