‘You bet you don’t,’ she said grimly. ‘Arlene Katz was saying just the other day that when men under fifty have heart attacks, they almost never come out of the hospital again. And you’re only forty-one. You have to stand up for yourself, Howard. Stop being such a pushover.’
‘I guess so,’ he said glumly.
Alex Trebek came back on and gave the Final Jeopardy answer: ‘This group of hippies crossed the United States in a bus with writer Ken Kesey.” The Final Jeopardy music began to play. The two men contestants were writing busily. Mildred, the woman with the microwave oven in her ear, looked lost. At last she began to scratch something. She did it with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
Vi took a deep swallow from her glass. ‘Hey!’ she said. ‘Not bad! And only two-sixty-seven a six-pack!’
Howard drank some himself. It was nothing special, but it was wet, at least, and cool.
Soothing.
Neither of the male contestants was even close. Mildred was also wrong, but she, at least, was in the ball-park. ‘Who were the Merry Men?’ she had written.
‘Merry Pranksters, you dope,’ Howard said.
Vi looked at him admiringly. ‘You know all the answers, Howard, don’t you?’
‘I only wish I did,’ Howard said, and sighed.
Howard didn’t care much for beer, but that night he helped himself to three cans of Vi’s new find nevertheless. Vi commented on it, said that if she had known he was going to like it that much, she would have stopped by the drugstore and gotten him an IV hookup. Another time-honored Vi-ism. He forced a smile. He was actually hoping the beer would send him off to sleep quickly.
He was afraid that, without a little help, he might be awake for quite awhile, thinking about what he had imagined he’d seen in the bathroom sink. But, as Vi had often informed him, beer was full of vitamin P, and around eight-thirty, after she had retired to the bedroom to put on her nightgown, Howard went reluctantly into the bathroom to relieve himself.
First he walked over to the bathroom sink and forced himself to look in.
Nothing.
This was a relief (in the end, a hallucination was still better than an actual finger, he had discovered, despite the possibility of a brain tumor), but he still didn’t like looking down the drain. The brass cross-hatch inside that was supposed to catch things like clots of hair or dropped bobby-pins had disappeared years ago, and so there was only a dark hole rimmed by a circle of tarnished steel. It looked like a staring eyesocket.
Howard took the rubber plug and stuck it into the drain.
That was better.
He stepped away from the sink, put up the toilet ring (Vi complained bitterly if he forgot to put it down when he was through, but never seemed to feel any pressing need to put it back up when she was), and addressed the John. He was one of those men who only began to urinate immediately when the need was extreme (and who could not urinate at all in crowded public lavatories — the thought of all those men standing in line behind him just shut down his circuits), and he did now what he almost always did in the few seconds between the aiming of the instrument and the commencement of target practice: he recited prime numbers in his mind.
He had reached thirteen and was on the verge of flowing when there was a sudden sharp sound from behind him: pwuck! His bladder, recognizing the sound of the rubber plug being forced sharply out of the drain even before his brain did, clamped shut immediately (and rather painfully).
A moment later that sound — the sound of the nail clipping lightly against the porcelain as the questing finger twisted and turned — began again. Howard’s skin went cold and seemed to shrink until it was too small to cover the flesh beneath. A single drop of urine spilled from him and plinked in the bowl before his penis actually seemed to shrink in his hand, retreating like a turtle seeking the safety of its shell.
Howard walked slowly and not quite steadily over to the washbasin. He looked in.
The finger was back. It was a very long finger, but seemed otherwise normal. Howard could see the nail, which was neither bitten nor abnormally long, and the first two knuckles. As he watched, it continued to tap and feel its way around the basin.
Howard bent down and looked under the sink. The pipe, which came out of the floor, was no more than three inches in diameter. It was not big enough for an arm. Besides, it made a severe bend at the place where the sink trap was. So just what was that finger attached to? What could it be attached to?
Howard straightened up again, and for one alarming moment he felt that his head might simply detach itself from his neck and float away. Small black specks flocked across his field of vision.
I’m going to faint! he thought. He grabbed his right earlobe and yanked it once, hard, the way a frightened passenger who has seen trouble up the line might yank the Emergency Stop cord of a railroad car. The dizziness passed . . . but the finger was still there.
It was not a hallucination. How could it be? He could see a tiny bead of water on the nail, and a tiny thread of whiteness beneath it — soap, almost surely soap. Vi had washed her hands after using the John.
It could be a hallucination, though. It still could be. Just because you see soap and water on it, does that mean you can’t be imagining it? And listen, Howard — if you’re not imagining it, what’s it doing in there? How did it get there in the first place? And how come Vi didn’t see it?
Call her, then — call her in! his mind instructed, and in the next microsecond countermanded its own order. No! Don’t do that! Because if you go on seeing it and she doesn’t —
Howard shut his eyes tight and for a moment lived in a world where there were only red flashes of light and his own crazy heartbeat.
When he opened them again, the finger was still there.
‘What are you?’ he whispered through tightly stretched lips. ‘What are you, and what are you doing here?’
The finger stopped its blind explorations at once. It swivelled — and then pointed directly at Howard. Howard blundered a step backward, his hands rising to his mouth to stifle a scream. He wanted to tear his eyes away from the wretched, awful thing, wanted to flee the bathroom in a rush (and never mind what Vi might think or say or see) . . . but for the moment he was paralyzed and unable to tear his gaze away from the pink-white digit, which now resembled nothing so much as an organic periscope.
Then it curled at the second knuckle. The end of the finger dipped, touched the porcelain, and resumed its tapping circular explorations once more.
‘Howie?’ Vi called. ‘Did you fall in?’
‘Be right out!’ he called back in an insanely cheery voice.
He flushed away the single drop of pee which had fallen into the toilet, then moved toward the door, giving the sink a wide berth. He did catch sight of himself in the bathroom mirror, however; his eyes were huge, his skin wretchedly pale. He gave each of his cheeks a brisk pinch before leaving the bathroom, which had become, in the space of one short hour, the most horrible and inexplicable place he had ever visited in his life.
When Vi came out into the kitchen to see what was taking him so long, she found Howard looking into the refrigerator.
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘A Pepsi. I think I’ll go down to Lah’s and get one.’
‘On top of three beers and a bowl of cherry-vanilla ice cream? You’ll bust, Howard!’
‘No, I won’t,’ he said. But if he wasn’t able to offload what his kidneys were holding, he might.
‘Are you sure you feel all right?’ Vi was looking at him critically, but her tone was gentler now
— tinged with real concern. ‘Because you look terrible. Really.’
‘Well,’ he said reluctantly, ‘there’s been some flu going around the office. I suppose — ‘
‘I’ll go get you the damned soda, if you really need it,’ she said.
‘No you won’t,’ Howard interposed hastily. ‘You’re in your nightgown. Look — I’ll put on my coat.’
‘When was the last time you had a soup-to-nuts physical, Howard? It’s been so long I’ve forgotten.’
‘I’ll look it up tomorrow,’ he said vaguely, going into the little foyer where their coats were hung. ‘It must be in one of the insurance folders.’