“Martine!” he said loudly.
No response. Except for himself, the house was empty.
Empty, he thought, and collapsing. Oh my God. He seated himself at the kitchen table and felt the chair give slightly under him; it did not give much, but he felt it; he felt the sagging.
I’m afraid, he thought. Where did she go?
He returned to the living room. Maybe she went next door to
borrow some spices or butter or something, he reasoned. Nonetheless, panic now filled him.
He looked at the poster. It was unframed. And the edges had been tom.
I know she framed it, he thought; he ran across the room to it, to examine it closely. Faded. ..the artist’s signature had faded; he could scarcely make it out. She insisted on framing it and under glare-free, reflection-free glass. But it isn’t framed and it’s tom! The most precious thing we own!
Suddenly he found himself crying. It amazed him, his tears. Martine is gone; the poster is deteriorated; the house is crumbling away; nothing is cooking on the stove. This is terrible, he thought. And I don’t understand it.
The ship understood it. The ship had been carefully monitoring Victor Kemmings’s brain wave patterns, and the ship knew that something had gone wrong. The wave-forms showed agitation and pain. I must get him out of this feed-circuit or I will kill him, the ship decided. Where does the flaw lie? it asked itself.
Worry dormant in the man; underlying anxieties. Perhaps if I intensify the signal. I will use the same source, but amp up the charge. What has happened is that massive subliminal insecurities have taken possession of him; the fault is not mine, but lies, instead, in his psychological makeup.
I will try an earlier period in his life, the ship decided. Before the neurotic anxieties got laid down.
In the backyard, Victor scrutinized a bee that had gotten itself trapped in a spider’s web. The spider wound up the bee with great care. That’s wrong, Victor thought. I’ll let the bee loose. Reaching up, he took hold of the encapsulated bee, drew it from
the web, and, scrutinizing it carefully, began to unwrap it.
The bee stung him; it felt like a little patch of flame. Why did it sting me? he wondered. I was letting it go.
He went indoors to his mother and told her, but she did not
listen; she was watching television. His finger hurt where the bee had stung up, but, more important, he did not understand why the bee would attack its rescuer. I won’t do that again, he said to himself.
“Put some Bactine on it,” his mother said at last, roused from
watching the TV.
He had begun to cry. It was unfair. It made no sense. He was perplexed and dismayed and he felt a hatred toward small living things, because they were dumb. They didn’t have any sense.
He left the house, played for a time on his swings, his slide, in his sandbox, and then he went into the garage because he heard a strange flapping, whirring sound, like a kind of fan. Inside the gloomy garage, he found that a bird was fluttering against the cobwebbed rear window, trying to get out. Below it, the cat, Dorky, leaped and leaped, trying to reach the bird.
He picked up the cat; the cat extended its body and its front legs, it extended its jaws and bit into the bird. At once the cat scrambled down and ran off with the still-fluttering bird.
Victor ran into the house. “Dorky caught a bird!” he told his
mother.
“That goddam cat.” His mother took the broom from the closet in the kitchen and ran outside, trying to find Dorky. The cat had concealed itself under the bramble bushes; she could
not reach it with the broom. “I’m going to get rid of that cat,” his mother said.
Victor did not tell her that he had arranged for the cat to catch the bird; he watched in silence as his mother tried and tried to pry Dorky out from her hiding place; Dorky was crunching up the bird; he could hear the sound of breaking bones, small bones. He felt a strange feeling, as if he should tell his mother what he had done, and yet if he told her she would punish him. I won’t do that again, he said to himself. His face, he realized, had turned red. What if his mother figured it out? What if she had some secret way of knowing? Dorky couldn’t tell her and the bird was dead. No one would ever know. He was safe.
But he felt bad. That night he could not eat his dinner. Both his parents noticed. They thought he was sick; they took his temperature. He said nothing about what he had done. His mother told his father about Dorky and they decided to get rid of Dorky. Seated at the table, listening, Victor began to cry.
“All right,” his father said gently. “We won’t get rid of her.
It’s natural for a cat to catch a bird.”
The next day he sat playing in his sandbox. Some plants grew up through the sand. He broke them off. Later his mother told him that had been a wrong thing to do.
Alone in the backyard, in his sandbox, he sat with a pail of water, forming a small mound of wet sand. The sky, which had been blue and clear, became by degrees overcast. A shadow passed over him and he looked up. He sensed a presence around him, something vast that could think.
You are responsible for the death of the bird, the presence
thought; he could understand its thoughts.
“I know,” he said. He wished, then, that he could die. That he could replace the bird and die for it, leaving it as it had been, fluttering against the cobwebbed window of the garage.
The bird wanted to fly and eat and live, the presence thought. “Yes,” he said miserably.
“You must never do that again,” the presence told him. “I’m sorry,” he said, and wept.
This is a very neurotic person, the ship realized. I am having an awful lot of trouble finding happy memories. There is too
much fear in him and too much guilt. He has buried it all, and yet it is still there, worrying him like a dog worrying a rag. Where can I go in his memories to find him solace? I must come up with ten years of memories, or his mind will be lost.
Perhaps, the ship thought, the error that I am making is in the area of choice on my part; I should allow him to select his own memories. However, the ship realized, this will allow an element of fantasy to enter. And that is not usually good. Still
I will try the segment dealing with his first marriage once again, the ship decided. He really loved Martine. Perhaps this time if I keep the intensity of the memories at a greater level the entropic factor can be abolished. What happened was a subtle vitiation of the remembered world, a decay of structure. I will try to compensate for that. So be it.
“Do you suppose Gilbert Shelton really signed this?” Martine said pensively; she stood before the poster, her arms folded; she rocked back and forth slightly, as if seeking a better perspective on the brightly colored drawing hanging on their living room wall. “I mean, it could have been forged. By a dealer somewhere along the line. During Shelton’s lifetime or after.”
“The letter of authentication,” Victor Kemmings reminded her.
“Oh, that’s right!” She smiled her warm smile. “Ray gave us the letter that goes with it. But suppose the letter is a forgery? What we need is another letter certifying that the first letter is authentic.” Laughing, she walked away from the poster.
“Ultimately,” Kemmings said, “we would have to have Gilbert Shelton here to personally testify that he signed it.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t know. There’s that story about the man bringing the Picasso picture to Picasso and asking him if it was authentic, and Picasso immediately signed it and said, ‘Now it’s authentic.’ ” She put her arm around Kemmings and, standing on tiptoe, kissed him on the cheek. “It’s genuine. Ray wouldn’t have given us a forgery. He’s the leading expert on counterculture art of the twentieth century. Do you know that he owns an actual lid of dope? It’s preserved under-”
“Ray is dead,” Victor said.
“What?” She gazed at him in astonishment. “Do you mean
something happened to him since we last-”
“He’s been dead two years,” Kemmings said. “I was responsible. I was driving the buzz car. I wasn’t cited by the police, but it
was my fault.”
“Ray is living on Mars!” She stared at him.
“I know I was responsible. I never told you. I never told