The buildings were old, sagging with age. Their foundations showed great cracks radiating upward. Windows were broken. And what looked like stiff tall weeds grew in the land around. It was a scene of ruin and despair, and of a ponderous, timeless, inertial heaviness.
“Jack, he’s drawing a slum!” Leo exclaimed.
That was it, a decaying slum. Buildings that had stood for years, perhaps even decades, which had passed their prime and dwindled into their twilight, into senility and partial abandonment.
Pointing at a yawning crack which he had just drawn, Manfred said, “Gubbish.” His hand traced the weeds, the broken windows. Again he said, “Gubbish.” He glanced at them, smiling in a frightened way.
“What does that mean, Manfred?” Jack asked.
There was no answer. The boy continued to sketch. And as he sketched, the buildings, before their eyes, grew older and older, more in ruins with each passing moment.
“Let’s go,” Leo said hoarsely.
Jack took the boy’s paper and crayons and got him on his feet. The three of them re-entered the ‘copter.
“Look, Jack,” Leo said. He was intently examining the boy’s drawing. “What he’s written over the entrance of the building.”
In twisted, wavering letters Manfred had written:
AM-WEB
“Must be the name of the building,” Leo said.
“It is,” Jack said, recognizing the word; it was a contraction of a co-op slogan, “Alle Menschen werden Brüder.” “All men become brothers,” he said under his breath. “It’s on co-op stationery.” He remembered it well.
Now, taking his crayons once more, Manfred resumed his work. As the two men watched, the boy began to draw something at the top of the picture. Dark birds, Jack saw. Enormous, dusky, vulture-like birds.
At a broken window of the building, Manfred drew a round face with eyes, nose, a turned-down, despairing mouth. Someone within the building, gazing out silently and hopelessly, as if trapped within.
“Well,” Leo said. “Interesting.” His expression was one of grim outrage. “Now, why would he want to draw that? I don’t think that’s a very wholesome or positive attitude; why can’t he draw it like it’s going to be, new and immaculate, with children playing and pets and contented people?”
Jack said, “Maybe he draws what he sees.”
“Well, if he sees that, he’s ill,” Leo said. “There are so many bright, wonderful things he could see instead; why would he want to see that?”
“Perhaps he has no choice,” Jack said. _Gubbish_, he thought. I wonder; could _gubbish_ mean time? The force that to the boy means decay, deterioration, destruction, and, at last, death? The force at work everywhere, on everything in the universe.
And is that all he sees?
If so, Jack thought, no wonder he’s autistic; no wonder he can’t communicate with us. A view of the universe that partial–it isn’t even a complete view of time. Because time also brings new things into existence; it’s also the process of maturation and growth. And evidently Manfred does not perceive time in that aspect.
Is he sick because he sees this? Or does he see this because he is sick? A meaningless question, perhaps, or anyhow one that can’t be answered. This is Manfred’s view of reality, and according to us, he is desperately ill; he does not perceive the rest of reality, which we do. And it is a dreadful section which he does see: reality in its most repellent aspect.
Jack thought, _And people talk about mental illness as an escape!_ He shuddered. It was no escape; it was a narrowing, a contracting of life into, at last, a moldering, dank tomb, a place where nothing came or went; a place of total death.
The poor damned kid, he thought. How can he live from one day to the next, having to face the reality he does?
Somberly, Jack returned to the job of piloting the ‘copter. Leo looked out the window, contemplating the desert below. Manfred, with the taut, frightened expression on his face, continued to draw.
They gubbled and gubbled. He put his hands to his ears, but the product crept up through his nose. Then he saw the place. It was where he wore out. They threw him away there, and gubbish lay in heaps up to his waist; gubbish filled the air.
“What is your name?”
“Steiner, Manfred.”
“Age.”
“Eighty-three.”
“Vaccinated against smallpox?”
“Yes.”
“Any venereal diseases?”
“Well, a little clap, that’s all.”
“V.D. clinic for this man.”
“Sir, my teeth. They’re in the bag, along with my eyes.”
“Your eyes, oh yes. Give this man his teeth and eyes before you take him to the V.D. clinic. How about your ears, Steiner?”
“Got ’em on, sir. Thank you, sir.”
They tied his hands with gauze to the sides of the bed because he tried to pull out the catheter. He lay facing the window, seeing through the dusty, cracked glass.
Outside, a bug on tall legs picked through the heaps. It ate, and then something squashed it and went on, leaving it squashed with its dead teeth sunk into what it had wanted to eat. Finally its dead teeth got up and crawled out of its mouth in different directions.
He lay there for a hundred and twenty-three years and then his artificial liver gave out and he fainted and died. By that time they had removed both his arms and legs up to the pelvis because those parts of him had decayed.
He didn’t use them anyhow. And without arms he didn’t try to pull the catheter out, and that pleased them.
I been at AM-WEB for a long time, he said. Maybe you can get me a transistor radio so I can tune in Friendly Fred’s Breakfast Club; I like to hear the tunes, they play a lot of the old-time favorites.
Something outside gives me hay fever. Must be those yellow flowering weeds, why do they let them get so tall?
I once saw a ballgame.
For two days he lay on the floor, in a big puddle, and then the landlady found him and called for the truck to bring him here. He snored all the way, it woke him up. When they tried to give him grapefruit juice he could only work one arm, the other never worked again ever. He wished he could still make those leather belts, they were fun and took lots of time. Sometimes he sold them to people who came by on the weekend.
“Do you know who I am, Manfred?”
“No.”
“I’m Arnie Kott. Why don’t you laugh or smile sometimes, Manfred? Don’t you like to run around and play?”
As he spoke Mr. Kott gubbled from both his eyes.
“Obviously he doesn’t, Arnie, but that’s not what concerns us here anyhow.”
“What do you see, Manfred? Let us in on what you see. All those people, are they going to live there, is that it? Is that right, Manfred? Can you see lots of people living there?”
He put his hands over his face, and the gubble stopped.
“I don’t see why this kid never laughs.”
Gubble, gubble.
10
Inside Mr. Kott’s skin were dead bones, shiny and wet. Mr. Kott was a sack of bones, dirty and yet shiny-wet. His head was a skull that took in greens and bit them; inside him the greens became rotten things as something ate them to make them dead.
He could see everything that went on inside Mr. Kott, the teeming gubbish life. Meanwhile, the outside said, “I love Mozart. I’ll put this tape on.” The box read: “Symphony 40 in G mol., K. 550.” Mr. Kott fiddled with the knobs of the amplifier. “Bruno Walter conducting,” Mr. Kott told his guests. “A great rarity from the golden age of recordings.”
A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from the speakers, like the convulsions of corpses. Mr. Kott shut off the tape transport.
“Sorry,” he muttered. It was an old coded message, from Rockingham or Scott Temple or Anne, from someone, anyhow; Mr. Kott, he knew that. He knew that by accident it had found its way into his library of music.
Sipping her drink, Doreen Anderton said, “What a shock. You should spare us, Arnie. Your sense of humor–”
“An accident,” Arnie Kott said angrily. He rummaged for another tape. Aw, the hell with it, he thought. “Listen, Jack,” he said, turning. “I’m sorry to make you come here when I know your dad’s visiting, but I’m running out of time; show me your progress with the Steiner boy, O.K.?” His anticipation and concern made him stutter. He looked at Jack expectantly.
But Jack Bohlen hadn’t heard him; he was saying something to Doreen there on the couch where the two of them sat together.
“We’re out of booze,” Jack said, setting down his empty glass.
“God sake,” Arnie said, “I got to hear how you’ve done, Jack. Can’t you give me anything? Are you two just going to sit there necking and whispering? I don’t feel good.” He went unsteadily into the kitchen, where Heliogabalus sat on a tall stool, like a dunce, reading a magazine. “Fix me a glass of warm water and baking soda,” Arnie said.