The Man Who Melted (15 page)

Now she was using him up. She was gambling
his
organs.

‘She's used up,' Pfeiffer thought at Gayet. But Pfeiffer could only glimpse Gayet's thoughts. His wife was not exposed.

Nor was she defenseless.

She thrust the image of the furry boy at Pfeiffer, and Pfeiffer felt his head
being forced down upon the furry boy's lap. But it suddenly wasn't the furry boy anymore. It was Pfeiffer's father!

There was no distance now. Pfeiffer was caught, tiny and vulnerable. Gayet and his wife were swallowing him, thoughts and all.

It was Joan who saved him. She pulled him away, and he became the world again, wrapped in snow, in whiteness. He was safe again, as if inside Joan's cold womb.

‘Look now,' Joan said an instant later, and like a revelation, Pfeiffer saw Gayet's cards, saw them buried in Gayet's eyes with the image of his aging wife. In that instant, Pfeiffer saw into Gayet and forgot himself. Gayet's wife was named Grace, and she had been eroded from too many surgeries, too many deformation games. She was his Blue Angel (yes, he had seen the ancient film), and Gayet the fool.

The fool held an Ace of Hearts and a Five of Diamonds.

Now Pfeiffer felt that the odds were with him. It was a familiar sensation for gamblers, a sense of harmony, of being a benevolent extension of the cards. No anger, no fear, no hate, just victory. Pfeiffer called Gayet's hand, thereby preventing Gayet from drawing another card, such as a Lucky Three, which would have given him a count of nine.

Pfeiffer won the hand, and he thanked Joan, who was a constant presence, part of his rhythm and harmony; and she dreamed of the victorious cats that padded through the lush vegetation of Pfeiffer's sphere.

The cats that rutted, then devoured each other.

Pfeiffer won the next hand. Thus he won the second game; Pfeiffer and his opponent were now even. The next game would determine the outcome. Pfeiffer felt that calm, cold certainty that he would take Gayet's heart. This obsession to expose and ruin his opponent became more important than winning or losing organs; it was bright and fast flowing, refreshing as water.

He was in a better world now, a more complete, fulfilling plane of reality. All gamblers dreamed of this: losing or winning everything, but being inside the game. Even Joan was carried away by the game. She, too, wanted to rend, whittle away at the couple across the table, take their privacies, turn over their humiliations like worry beads.

Joan knew it as Junkie's Revenge, this harmonizing of destructiveness. Pfeiffer blocked out her thought, for she was also thinking about Ray. Deep down, in the quick of his unconsciousness, Pfeiffer knew he would lose joyously and follow his friend Raymond to a dark, mutual epiphany.

Everyone was exposed now, battle-weary, mentally and physically exhausted, yet lost in play, lost in perfect, concentrated time. Pfeiffer could see Gayet's face, both as Gayet saw himself and as Grace saw him. A wide nose, dark complexion, low forehead, large ears; yet it was a strong face, and handsome in a feral, almost frightening way—or so Grace thought. Gayet saw himself as weak; the flesh of his face was too loose.

Gayet was a failure, although he had made his career and fortune in the Exchange. He had wanted to be a mathematician, but he was lazy and had lost the “knack” by twenty-five. Gayet would have made a brilliant mathematician, and he knew it.

And Grace was a whore, using herself and everyone else. Here was the woman with great religious yearnings, who had wanted to join a religious order, but was blackballed by the cults because of her obsession for gambling and psyconductors, who would never plug-into another Crier. Who yearned for the dead, for the dark spaces. But Pfeiffer could only see into her a little. She was a cold bitch and, more than any of the others, had reserves of strength.

This last game would be psychological surgery. Tearing with the knife, pulping with the bludgeon. Pfeiffer won the first hand. This was joy; so many organs to win or lose, so little time. Let Raymond have his corpses, he still won't find Josiane.

Pfeiffer lost the next hand. Gayet exposed Joan, who revealed Pfeiffer's cards without realizing it. Gayet had opened her up, penetrated all that efficiency and order to expose anger and lust and uncontrolled, oceanic pity. Joan's emotions writhed and crawled over her like beautifully colored, slippery snakes.

Pfeiffer had been too preoccupied to protect her.

Joan's first thought was to expose Pfeiffer, but Pfeiffer opened up to her, buried her in white thought that was as cold and numbing as ice, and apologized without words, but with soft, rounded, comforting thoughts. She accepted it, but couldn't trust him; he was hard inside, and as damaged as Ray.

The dealer gave Pfeiffer a Three of Diamonds and an Ace of Clubs. That only gave him four points; he would have to draw again. He kept his thoughts from Joan, for she was covering him. She could attack Gayet and his whore, expose them for their cards. Gayet's heart was not simply his organ, not now, not to Pfeiffer. It was his whole life, life itself. To rip it away from him would be to conquer life, if only for a moment. It was life affirming. It was being alive. Suddenly he thought of Raymond, who was embracing a corpse to find his past.

‘Close yourself up.' Joan said, ‘You're bleeding.' She did not try to penetrate his thoughts of Mantle—that would have exposed Pfeiffer even more dangerously.

‘Help me,' Pfeiffer asked Joan. This hand would determine whether he would win or lose the game…and his heart. Once again she became his cloak, his atmosphere, and she weaved her icy threads of white thought into his.

Pfeiffer couldn't see Gayet's cards, and nervously asked Joan to do something. Gayet was playing calmly, well covered by Grace, who simply hid him. No extravagance there.

Joan emptied her mind, became neutral, unseen; yet she was a needle of cold, coherent thought. She prodded, probed, touched her opponents' thoughts. It was like swimming through an ever-changing world of dots and bars, tangible as iron, fluid as water. As if Gayet's and Grace's thoughts were luminous points on a fluorescent screen.

And still she went unnoticed.

Gayet was like Pfeiffer, Joan thought. Seemingly placid, controlled, but that was all gingerbread to hide a weak house. He was so much weaker than Grace, who was supporting and cloaking him. But Grace was concentrating her energies on Gayet; and she had the fever, as if she were gambling her own organs once again. Undoubtedly, Grace expected Joan and Pfeiffer to go for Gayet, who had read the cards.

So Joan went for Grace, who was in the gambler's frenzy as the hand was being played. Joan slipped past Grace's thoughts, worked her way into the woman's mind, through the dark labyrinths and channels of her memory, and into the dangerous country of the unconscious. Invisible as air, she listened to Grace, read her, discovered:

A sexual miasma. Being brutally raped as a child. After a riot in Manosque. Raped in a closet, for God's sake. The man tore her open with a rifle barrel, then inserted himself. Taking her, just as she was taking Gayet, piece by bloody piece. Just as others had taken her in rooms like this, in this casino, in this closet.

And Gayet…. Now Joan could see him through Grace: imperturbable Gayet who had so much money and so little life, who was so afraid of his wife's past, of her lovers, and the liberations he called perversions. But he called
everything
a perversion.

How she hated him beneath what she called “love.”

But he looked just like the man who had raped her in that closet so long ago. She could not remember the man's face—so effectively had she blocked it out of her mind—yet she was stunned when she first met Gayet. She felt attracted to him but also repelled; she was in love.

Through Joan, Pfeiffer saw Gayet's cards: he had a Deuce and a Six of Clubs. He could call his hand, but he wasn't sure of the Deuce. It looked like a Heart, but it could just as easily be a Diamond. If he called it wrong, he would lose the hand, and his heart.

‘I can't be sure,' Pfeiffer said to Joan, expecting help.

But Joan was in trouble. Grace had discovered her, and she was stronger than Joan had imagined. Joan was trapped inside Grace's mind, and Grace, who could not face what Joan had found, denied it.

And snapped.

Joan, realizing she was fighting for her life, screamed for the gamesmaster to deactivate the game. But her screams were lost, for Grace instantly slipped into the gamesmaster's mind and caught him, too. She had the psychotic's strength of desperation, and Joan realized that Grace would kill them all rather than face the truth about herself and Gayet.

Instantly Grace went after Pfeiffer. To kill him. She blamed him for Joan's presence, and Joan felt crushing pain as if she were being buried alive in the dirt of Grace's mind.

Grace grasped Pfeiffer with a thought, wound dark filaments around him which could not be burned away by white thought or anything else; and like
a spider, she wrapped her prey in darkness and looked for physiological weakness, any flaw, perhaps a blood vessel which might rupture in his head….

Joan tried to bring herself away from the pain, from the concrete weight crushing her. Ironically, she wondered if thought had mass. What a stupid thought to die with, she told herself, and she suddenly remembered a story Ray had once told her about a dying rabbi who was annoyed at the minions praying around him because he was trying to listen to two washerwomen gossiping outside. Later, Ray had confessed that it wasn't a Jewish story, it was Buddhist.

She held onto that thought, remembered Ray laughing like a little boy after his confession. The pain eased as she followed her thoughts.

…If thought had mass.

She was thinking herself free, escaping Grace by finding the proper angle, as if thought and emotion and pain were mathematical.

That done in an instant.

But if she was to save Pfeiffer's life, and her own, she had to do something immediately. She showed Grace her past. Showed her that she had married Gayet because he had the face of the man who had raped her as a child.

Gayet, seeing this too, screamed. How he loathed Grace, but not nearly so much as she loathed herself. He had tried to stop Grace, but he was too weak. He too had been caught.

As if cornered, as if she were back in the closet with her rapist, she attacked Gayet. Only now she had a weapon. She thought him dead, trapped him in a scream, and as if he were being squeezed from the inside, his blood pressure rose. She had found a weakened blood vessel in his head, and it ruptured.

The effort weakened Grace, and a few seconds later the gamesmaster was able to regain control and disconnect everyone. Gayet was immediately hooked into a life-support unit which applied CPR techniques to keep his heart beating. But he was dead.

Joan saw that….

As Gayet died, a tunnel seemed to open up inside him. It was silver, and it was also black. It was felt rather than seen. It was the fabled silver cord, the
dead connection; and Joan was too close, for she could barely keep herself from being plunged into its narrow confines, sucked through its vortices.

She could resist the dark spaces only because of her connection with Pfeiffer. Because he would not let go of her….

Suddenly, like electricity passing through an outlet, a familiar presence came through the tunnel and smashed into their thoughts.

It was drawn to Joan through the dark spaces like a fleck of metal to a magnet.

It was Mantle, and he thought he had found Josiane.

For an instant, Joan and Pfeiffer and Mantle fused together, incandescently merging souls and selves. But before they could fuse inescapably, Pfeiffer recoiled, released his psychic grip on Joan, and protected himself behind skeins of white thought, as he had been trained to do.

Without Pfeiffer, Joan was sucked into the tunnel like a leaf carried by a dark current. She could feel Mantle slip past her, another ghost in the dark. Now she was adrift in the black and silver places. Alone. ‘Help me, Ray,' she screamed, looking for him, unable to find her way back to life. ‘Where are you? I can't find you.'

Then she heard him, his thoughts made cold and thin by the dark spaces. But he was calling Josiane….

‘No,' she screamed, drowning in distance. ‘Come back.' But he could not come back, and she could only hate him for leaving her because she was not Josiane. But her emotions began to evaporate like sweat. She was made of dark stuff now.

I'm dead, she told herself, and the thought swallowed her; and she, in turn, swallowed the thought, becoming smaller and smaller in the process, lifting and falling through the layers, through the thermoclines of the dark.

Still she called to Mantle.

But her pain and hatred became one long silvery-dark thought.

Toward morning, just before the edge of the sky turned gray, Mantle dreamed that he heard whispers.

He listened and heard his name.

Lost and crying for help, too distant to be heard closely, Josiane whispered to him. She wandered through the hidden reaches of his mind, dredging up memories.

But it wasn't Josiane calling. It was Joan.

With a sudden shock of recognition, Mantle sat up in bed. He blinked away the last vestiges of his dream and looked around. He was alone; Roberta and Danielle had left the room sometime during the night. “Joan?” he said aloud, then again, questioning. He remembered searching the dark spaces for Josiane…remembered being drawn to her as if he were a speck of iron and she the magnet. Then he remembered being pulled right out of the darkness into blazing, blinding light and smashing into another presence. But it wasn't Josiane!

Overwhelmed, he had escaped back into the quiet rustlings of the dark spaces.

Now Mantle was certain that Joan, and not Josiane, had been calling to him in his dreams. But that was impossible. Yet he remembered smashing through her thoughts like a rock thrown into a fire. The damp bedsheet clung to his sweaty legs and abdomen. He called her again. “Joan…?”

The word seemed suspended, as if made of light like the videotect, which loomed above him.