“Are you in great pain?” the girl asked anxiously; her face, in his rear-view mirror, still showed nervousness, even panic. The situation was too much for her.
“No,” he said.
“What was the drug?”
“They didn’t say.” The mescaline had virtually worn off, now; thank God his six physiology had the strength to combat it: he did not relish the idea of piloting a slow-moving flipflap through the midday Los Angeles traffic while on a hit of mescaline. And, he thought savagely, a big hit. Despite what she said.
She. Alys. Why are the records blank? he asked silently. The records–where were they? He peered about, stricken. Oh. On the seat beside him; automatically he had thrust them in as he himself got into the flipflap. So they’re okay. I can try to play them again on another phonograph.
“The nearest hospital,” the heavy-set girl said, “is St. Martin’s at Thirty-fifth and Webster. It’s small, but I went there to have a wart removed from my hand, and they seemed very conscientious and kind.”
“We’ll go there,” Jason said.
“Are you feeling worse or better?”
“Better,” he said.
“Did you come from the Buckman’s house?”
“Yes.” He nodded.
The girl said, “Is it true that they’re brother and sister, Mr. and Mrs. Buckman? I mean–”
“Twins,” he said.
“I understand that,” the girl said. “But you know, it’s strange; when you see them together it’s as if they’re husband and wife. They kiss and hold hands, and he’s very deferential to her and then sometimes they have terrible fights.” The girl remained silent a moment and then leaning forward said, “My name is Mary Anne Dominic. What is your name?”
“Jason Taverner,” he informed her. Not that it meant anything. After all. After what had seemed for a moment–but then the girl’s voice broke into his thoughts.
“I’m a potter,” she said shyly. “These are pots I’m taking to the post office to mail to stores in northern California, especially to Gump’s in San Francisco and Frazer’s in Berkeley.”
“Do you do good work?” he asked; almost all of his mind, his faculties, remained fixed in time, fixed at the instant he had opened the bathroom door and seen her–it–on the floor. He barely heard Miss Dominic’s voice.
“I try to. But you never know. Anyhow, they sell.”
“You have strong hands,” he said, for want of anything better to say; his words still emerged semireflexively, as if he were uttering them with only a fragment of his mind.
“Thank you,” Mary Anne Dominic said.
Silence.
“You passed the hospital,” Mary Anne Dominic said. “It’s back a little way and to the left.” Her original anxiety had now crawled back into her voice. “Are you really going there or is this some–”
“Don’t be scared,” he said, and this time he paid attention to what he said; he used all his ability to make his tone kind and reassuring. “I’m not an escaped student. Nor am I an escapee from a forced-labor camp.” He turned his head and looked directly into her face. “But I am in trouble.”
“Then you didn’t take a toxic drug.” Her voice wavered. It was as if that which she had most feared throughout her whole life had finally overtaken her.
“I’ll land us,” he said. “To make you feel safer. This is far enough for me. Please don’t freak; I won’t hurt you.” But the girl sat rigid and stricken, waiting for–well, neither of them knew.
At an intersection, a busy one, he landed at the curb, quickly opened the door. But then, on impulse, he remained within the flipflap for a moment, turned still in the girl’s direction.
“Please get out,” she quavered. “I don’t mean to be impolite, but I’m really scared. You hear about hunger-crazed students who somehow get through the barricades around the campuses–”
“Listen to me,” he said sharply, breaking into her flow of speech.
“Okay.” She composed herself, hands on her lapful of packages, dutifully–and fearfully–waiting.
Jason said, “You shouldn’t be frightened so easily. Or life is going to be too much for you.”
“I see.” She nodded humbly, listening, paying attention as if she were at a college classroom lecture.
“Are you always afraid of strangers?” he asked her.
“I guess so.” Again she nodded; this time she hung her head as if he had admonished her. And in a fashion he had.
“Fear,” Jason said, “can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Mary Anne Dominic said. “One day about a year ago there was this dreadful pounding on my door, and I ran into the bathroom and locked myself in and pretended I wasn’t there, because I thought somebody was trying to break in . . . and then later I found out that the woman upstairs had got her hand caught in the drain of her sink–she has one of those Disposall things– and a knife had gotten down into it and she reached her hand down to get it and got caught. And it was her little boy at the door–”
“So you do understand what I mean,” Jason interrupted.
“Yes. I wish I wasn’t that way. I really do. But I still am.”
Jason said, “How old are you?”
“Thirty–two.”
That surprised him; she seemed much younger. Evidently she had not ever really grown up. He felt sympathy for her; how hard it must have been for her to let him take over her ffipflap. And her fears had been correct in one respect: he had not been asking for help for the reason he claimed.
He said to her, “You’re a very nice person.”
“Thank you,” she said dutifully. Humbly.
“See that coffee shop over there?” he said, pointing to a modern, well-patronized cafe. “Let’s go over there. I want to talk to you.” I have to talk to someone, anyone, he thought, or six or not I am going to lose my mind.
“But,” she protested anxiously, “I have to get my packages into the post office before two so they’ll get the midafternoon pickup for the Bay Area.”
“We’ll do that first, then,” he said. Reaching for the ignition switch, he pulled out the key, handed it back to Mary Anne Dominic. “You drive. As slowly as you want.”
“Mr.–Taverner,” she said. “I just want to be let alone.”
“No,” he said. “You shouldn’t be alone. It’s killing you; it’s undermining you. All the time, every day, you should be somewhere with people.”
Silence. And then Mary Anne said, “The post office is at Fbrty-ninth and Fulton. Could you drive? I’m sort of nervous.”
It seemed to him a great moral victory; he felt pleased. He took back the key, and shortly, they were on their way to Forty-ninth and Fulton.
22
Later, they sat in a booth at a coffee shop, a clean and attractive place with young waitresses and a reasonably loose patronage. The jukebox drummed out Louis Panda’s “Memory of Your Nose.” Jason ordered coffee only; Miss Dominic had a fruit salad and iced tea.
“What are those two records you’re carrying?” she asked.
He handed them to her.
“Why, they’re by you. If you’re Jason Taverner. Are you?”
“Yes.” He was certain of that, at least.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you sing,” Mary Anne Dominic said. “I’d love to, but I don’t usually like pop music; I like those great old-time folk singers out of the past, like Buffy St. Marie. There’s nobody now who could sing like Buffy.”
“I agree,” he said somberly, his mind still returning to the house, the bathroom, the escape from the frantic brownuniformed private cop. _It wasn’t the mescaline_, he told himself once again. Because the cop saw it, too.
Or saw _something_.
“Maybe he didn’t see what I saw,” he said aloud. “Maybe he just saw her lying there. Maybe she fell. Maybe–” He thought, Maybe I should go back.
“Who didn’t see what?” Mary Anne Dominic asked, and then flushed bright scarlet. “I didn’t mean to poke into your life; you said you’re in trouble and I can see you have something weighty and heavy on your mind that’s obsessing you.”
“I have to be sure,” he said, “what actually happened. Everything is there in that house.” And on these records, he thought.
Alys Buckman knew about my TV program. She knew about my records. She knew which one was the big hit; she owned it. But–.
There had been no music on the records. Broken stylus, hell–some kind of sound, distorted perhaps, should have come out. He had handled records too long and phonographs too long not to know that.
“You’re a moody person,” Mary Anne Dominic said. From her small cloth purse she had brought a pair of glasses; she now laboriously read the bio material on the back of the record jackets.