because you were depressed? That was for pansies.
“Then I thought, `But that’s Clyde Umney, and Clyde is make-believe . . . just a figment of your imagination.’ That
idea wouldn’t live, though. It’s the dumbbells of the world–politicians and lawyers, for the most part–who sneer at
imagination, and think a thing isn’t real unless they can smoke it or stroke it or feel it or fuck it. They think that way
because they have no imagination themselves, and they have no idea of its power. I knew better. Hell, I ought to– my
imagination has been buying my food and paying the mortgage for the last ten years or so.
`Àt the same time, I knew I couldn’t go on living in what I used to think of as `the real world,’ by which I suppose we
all mean `the only world.’ That’s when I started to realize there was only one place left where I could go and feel
welcome, and only one person I could be when I got there. The place was here–Los Angeles, in 1930-something. And
the person was you.”
I heard that faint whirring sound coming from inside his gadget again, but I didn’t turn around.
Partly because I was afraid to.
And partly because I no longer knew if I could.
_______________________________________________________________________
VI. Umney’s Last Case.
On the street seven stories below, a man was frozen with his head half-turned to look at the woman on the corner, who
was climbing up the step of the eight-fifty bus headed downtown. She had exposed a momentary length of beautiful
leg, and this was what the man was looking at. A little farther down the street a boy was holding out his battered old
baseball glove to catch the ball frozen in mid-air just above his head. And, floating six feet above the street like a ghost
called up by a third-rate swami at a carnival seance, was one of the newspapers from Peoria Smith’s overturned table.
Incredibly, I could see the two photographs on it from up here: Hitler above the fold, the recently deceased Cuban
bandleader below it.
Landry’s voice seemed to come from a long way off.
`Àt first I thought that meant I’d be spending the rest of my life in some nut-ward, thinking I was you, but that was all
right, because it would only be my physical self locked up in the funny-farm, do you see? And then, gradually, I began
to realize that it could be a lot more than that . . . that maybe there might be a way
I could actually . . . well . . . slip all
the way in. And do you know what the key was?’
“Yes,” I said, not looking around. That whir came again as something in his gadget revolved, and suddenly the
newspaper frozen in mid-air flapped off down the frozen Boulevard. A moment or two later an old DeSoto rolled
jerkily through the intersection of Sunset and Fernando. It struck the boy wearing the baseball glove, and both he and
the DeSoto sedan disappeared. Not the ball, though. It fell into the street, rolled halfway to the gutter, then froze solid
again.
“You do?’ He sounded surprised.
“Yeah. Peoria was the key.”
“That’s right.” He laughed, then cleared his throat–nervous sounds, both of them.
`Ì keep forgetting that you’re me.”
It was a luxury I didn’t have.
`Ì was fooling around with a new book, and not getting anywhere. I’d tried Chapter One six different ways to Sunday
before realizing a really interesting thing: Peoria Smith didn’t like you.”
That made me swing around in a hurry. “The hell you say!”
`Ì didn’t think you’d believe it, but it’s the truth, and I’d somehow known it all along. I don’t want to convene the lit
class again, Clyde, but I’ll tell you one thing about my trade–writing stories in the
first person is a funny, tricky
business. It’s as if everything the writer knows comes from his main character, like a series of letters or dispatches from
some far-off battle zone. It’s very rare for the writer to have a secret, but in this case I did. It was as if your little part