Smith said, “Can I—hurriedly—give you one more I’ve got? This came via the Namangan translator. Listen.” He pawed feverishly with long, classic fingers at his own folded sheet of paper. “ ‘The Chesspiece Made Insolvent.’ Famous movie circa—“
“_The Pawnbroker_,” Joe said tonelessly.
“Yes! You’re right there on it, Fernwright, really right there and swinging both arms and a tail as well. Another? Don’t hang up! I have a truly good one, here!”
“Give it to Hirshmeyer in Berlin,” Joe said, and hung up.
I am dying, he said to himself.
Seated there, in the tattered, antiquated chair, he saw, dully, that the red warning light of his mail tube had come on, presumably as of the last few minutes. Odd, he thought. There’s no delivery until one-fifteen this afternoon. He thought, Special delivery? And punched the button.
A letter rolled out. Special delivery.
He opened it. Inside, a slip of paper. It said:
POT-HEALER, I NEED YOU. AND I WILL PAY.
No signature. No address except his, as destination. My god, he thought, this is something real and big. I know it.
He carefully moved his chair around so that he faced the red warning light of the mail tube. And prepared to wait. Until it comes, he said to himself. Unless I physically starve to death first. I will not voluntarily die, now, he thought harshly. I want to stay alive. And wait. And wait.
He waited.
2
Nothing more came down the mail tube that day and Joe Fernwright trudged “home.”
“Home” consisted of a room on a subsurface level of a huge apartment building. Once, the Jiffi-view Company of Greater Cleveland came by every six months and created a 3-D projection, animated, of a view of Carmel, California. This “view” filled his room’s “window,” or ersatz window. However, of late, due to his bad financial situation, Joe had given up trying to imagine that he lived on a great hill with a view of the sea and of towering redwoods; he had become content—or rather resigned—to face blank, inert, black glass. And in addition, if that wasn’t enough, he had let his psycho-lease lapse: the encephalic gadget installed in a closet of his room which, while he was “home,” compelled his brain to believe that his ersatz view of Carmel was authentic.
The delusion was gone from his brain and the illusion was gone from his window. Now, “home” from work, he sat in a state of depression, reflecting, as always, on the futile aspects of his life.
Once, the Cleveland Historical Artifacts Museum had sent him regular work. His hot-needle device had melded many fragments, had re-created into a single homogeneous unit one ceramic item after another as his father had before him. But that was over, now; all the ceramic objects owned by the museum had been healed.
Here, in his lonely room, Joe Fernwright contemplated the lack of ornamentation. Time after time, wealthy owners of precious and broken pots had come to him, and he had done what they wanted; he had healed their pots, and they had gone away. Nothing remained after them; no pots to grace his room in place of the window. Once, seated like this, he had pondered the heat-needle which he made use of. If I press this little device against my breast, he had ruminated, and turn it on, and put it near my heart, it would put an end to me in less than a second. It is, in some ways, a powerful tool. The failure which is my life, he had thought again and again, would cease. Why not?
But there was the strange note which he had received in the mail. How had the person—or persons—heard of him? To get clients he ran a perpetual small ad in Ceramics Monthly . . . and via this ad the thin trickle of work, throughout the years, had come. Had come and now, really, had gone. But this. The strange note!
He picked up the receiver of his phone, dialed, and in a few seconds faced his ex-wife, Kate. Blond and hard lined, she glared at him.
“Hi,” he said, in a friendly sort of fashion.
“Where’s last month’s alimony check?” Kate said.
Joe said, “I’m onto something. I’ll be able to pay all my back alimony if this—“
“This what?” Kate interrupted. “Some new nuthead idea dredged out of the depths of what you call your brain?”
“A note,” he said. “I want to read it to you to see if you can infer anything more from it than I can.” His ex-wife, although he hated her for it—and for a lot more—had a quick mind. Even now, a year after their divorce, he still relied on her powerful intellect. It was odd, he had once thought, that you could hate a person and never want to see them again, and yet at the same time seek them out and ask their advice. Irrational. Or, he thought, is it a sort of superrationality? To rise above hate . . .
Wasn’t it the hate which was irrational? After all, Kate had never done anything to him—nothing except make him excessively aware, intently aware, always aware, of his inability to bring in money. She had taught him to loathe himself, and then, having done that, she had left him.
And he still called up and asked for her advice.
He read her the note.
“Obviously it’s illegal,” Kate said. “But you know your business affairs don’t interest me. You’ll have to work it out by yourself or with whoever you’re currently sleeping with, probably some eighteen-year-old girl who doesn’t know any better, who doesn’t have any basis for comparison as an older woman would have.”
“What do you mean ‘illegal’?” he asked. “What kind of pot is illegal?”
“Pornographic pots. The kind the Chinese made during the war.”
“Oh Christ,” he said; he hadn’t thought of that. Who but Kate would remember those! She had been lewdly fascinated by the one or two of them which had passed through his hands.
“Call the police,” Kate said.
“I—“
“Anything else on your mind?” Kate said. “Now that you’ve interrupted my dinner and the dinner of everyone who’s over here tonight?”
“Could I come over?” he said; loneliness crept through him and edged his question with the fear which Kate had always detected: the fear that she would retract into her implacable chesspiece fort, the fort of her own mind and body out of which she ventured to inflict a wound, or two, and then disappear back in, leaving an expressionless mask to greet him. And, by means of that mask, she used his own failings to injure him.
“No,” Kate said.
“Why not?”
“Because you have nothing to offer anyone in the way of talk or discussion or ideas. As you’ve said many times, your talent is in your hands. Or did you intend to come over and break one of my cups, my Royal Albert cups with the blue glaze, and then heal it? As a sort of magical incantation designed to throw everyone into fits of laughter.”
Joe said, “I can contribute verbally.”
“Give me an example.”
“What?” he said, staring at her face on the screen of the phone.
“Say something profound.”
“You mean right now?”
Kate nodded.
“Beethoven’s music is firmly rooted in reality. That’s what makes him unique. On the other hand, genius as he was, Mozart—“
“Shove it,” Kate said and hung up; the screen went blank. I shouldn’t have asked if I could come over, Joe realized with acute misery. It gave her that opening, that foot-in-thepsychic-door that she uses, that she preys on. Christ, he thought. Why did I ask? He got up and wandered drearily about his room; his motion became more and more aimless until at last he stopped and simply stood. I have to think about what really matters, he told himself. Not that she hung up or said anything nasty, but whether or not that note I got in the mail today means anything. Pornographic pots, he said to himself. She’s probably right. And it’s illegal to heal a pornographic pot, so there goes that.
I should have realized it as soon as I read the note, he said to himself. But that’s the difference between Kate and me. She would know right away. I probably wouldn’t have known until I had finished healing it and then taken a good firm look at it. I’m just not bright, he said to himself. Compared to her. Compared to the world.
“The arithmetical total ejaculated in a leaky flow,” he thought fiercely. My best. At least I’m good at The Game. So what? he asked himself. So what?
Mr. Job, he thought, help me. The time has come. Tonight. Going rapidly into the tiny bathroom attached to his room he grabbed up the lid of the water closet of the toilet. Nobody, he had often thought, looks into a toilet. There hung the asbestos sack of quarters.