The Ultimate Egoist (40 page)

“I didn’t do anything,” I said plaintively. “I just … It just …”

She rubbed her lip. “I know, I know. Let’s see you put it back, smart man. Go ahead! Don’t look so helpless! Go
on!
”

I tried. I tried with everything I had, and you know, I couldn’t put it back? Truly. It wasn’t there, that’s all. You’ve got to have some belief in a thing before you can so much as imagine it; you have to allow for its possibility. That stone was gone, and gone for good. It was terrifying. It was something more inevitable, more completely final, than death.

Afterward we walked along together. Judith clung to my hand all the way down to the lake. She was considerably shaken. Oddly, I wasn’t. This thing was like a birthmark with me. I hadn’t quite realized I was this way until that day; and then I just had the feeling, “I’ll be damned, it’s true after all.”

It was true, and as time went on I realized more and more what was going to happen because of it. I was so certain that I couldn’t even worry about it. For your own peace of mind, I’d try not to get into the same frame of mind, if I were you. I know what I am talking about, because I am you, being as to how you are all figments of my imagination …

So there we were down at the lake, and as long as I was with Judith I was all right. She kept me from thinking about anything but her own magnificent self, and that was what was required to maintain the status quo. Anything I doubted had no chance to exist. I couldn’t doubt Judith. Not then I couldn’t. Ah, what a beauty she was! … too bad about Judith.

I stood there watching her dive. She was a wonder. Only girl I ever knew personally who could do a two-and-a-half off a twelve-foot board. Maybe she could fly like that because she was half-angel. I noticed Monte Carleau looking at her too, through his expensive polarized sunglasses. I went over to him and took the glasses away from him.

I didn’t like Monte. I guess I envied him that long brown chassis of his, and his blue-black hair. I can admit things like that now.

“Hey!” he barked, grabbing for the specs. “What’s the huge idea?”

I put on the glasses and watched Judith, who was poised for a
cutaway, up there on the twelve-foot, and I talked to Monte over my shoulder. “I don’t like you,” I told him. “I don’t like your staring at Judith. And I don’t like to see you wearing glasses on account of I feel like poking you every time I see you and I’d hate to hit a guy with glasses on.”

Judith did her cutaway and it was perfect. Then Monte grabbed me and twisted me around. He was thirty pounds heavier than I and one of those guys who takes credit to himself for being what he was born. “Gettin’ big, hey?” he barked. “Little ol’ Woodie, a tough guy after all these years! What’s that twist see in you anyway? She sure shows bad taste.”

“—and I don’t like a guy that fights with his mouth,” I said as if I hadn’t been interrupted. I could just see Monte Carleau lying flat on his back with a busted jaw.

As a matter of fact I did see Monte Carleau lying flat on his back with a busted jaw. I shrugged and walked over to where Judith was climbing out of the water.

“What happened to the glamour-boy?” she asked, seeing the crowd gathering around the writhing figure on the bank.

“Oh—he just overlooked a possibility.”

“Woodie—you didn’t hit him?”

“Nup.”

“Another—trick, Woodie?”

I didn’t answer. She watched me for a moment, standing near, smelling of wet wool and wonder. She looked down at her nails, drew a deep breath and shrugged. She saw the glasses and reached for them.

She put them on and looked out across the lake, and gasped at the way the polarized glass killed the glare. “That
is
something. How does it work?” she asked in the tone that women in love use, and which signifies, “You know this as well as everything else, you great, big, clever brute, you.”

I said vaguely, “Oh, it’s something about making the lightwaves all vibrate in one plane. I dunno.”

“It hardly seems possible.”

“No,” I said. I’m pretty simple about things like that, anyway.
As far as I was concerned it wasn’t possible …

“Ouch!” she said. “Ouch. I was looking at that patch on the lake where all that sun glare is, and the glasses killed it, and all of a sudden it was there, just as if I hadn’t had the glasses on at all … Woodie! Did you—?” She snatched off the glasses and stared at me with her eyes very wide.

I didn’t say anything. Just tried to think about something else.

“You’ve ruined a good pair of sunglasses,” she said.

“I’ve ruined an industry, I’m afraid.”

She twitched the glasses into the lake and crinkled up the smoothness over her eyes. “Woodie—this was funny for a while. I—think … oh darling, I’m so scared.”

I spread my hands. “I can’t—
help
it, honey. Honestly. It’s just that—uh—since I figured something out up the trail there, anything I don’t believe just … isn’t. Just
can’t be!
”

She looked at me while she shook her head, so that her long green eyes slid back and forth. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all, Woodie.”

“Can’t be helped.”

“Let’s go back,” she said suddenly, and went to the dressing cabins.

I didn’t worry much about Judith for a while after that. There were too many other things to worry about.

I was looking at some pictures in a magazine one day, and ran across the picture of an albino catfish which had a profile like a shrimp and a complexion like a four-color cosmetic ad. Weirdest thing I ever saw, and I couldn’t be expected to believe it. A week later I read in the paper that the genus Clariidae had disappeared from the earth, simultaneously and with no apparent explanation—not only from its natural habitat, but from aquaria all over the world. I got quite a shock from that. You can imagine.

Good thing I’ve got a matter-of-fact sort of mind. Suppose I had been highly imaginative, now, like those characters who write for magazines. I might have believed in any old thing! “Ghosties and ghoulies and lang-leggedy beasties, and things that go boomp i’ th’ nicht—” as they put it in Scotland. People who believe in those things do see them, come to think of it. Maybe everybody’s like me, only
they don’t realize it. I hoped, at the time, that nobody ever would. Another like me could certainly complicate things. I’ve made enough of a hash of it. A nice, churned-up, illimitably negative hash.

It didn’t matter what the circumstances were in those next days, I drove a hard bargain with the fates. I could accept things—anything—unless something gave me cause to doubt. For quite a while I didn’t realize where this was leading me; then I saw that every recognized fact must wind up in incredulity. Take a fact; reason from it; sooner or later you’ll run up against something a little hard to take. My particular egocentricity led me to disbelieve, completely, anything I could not fully understand. For a lightweight like me that made my skepticism pretty inclusive after a while!

What I did was to get away from that summer resort—and Judith. She was the sort to stick to a man, no matter what. I wanted to find out “what.”

She didn’t want me to go. She was definite about it. “Something’s happened to you, Woodie,” she said quietly as she systematically threw out all the clothes I put in my suitcase, just as systematically as I put them in. “I told you before I don’t like it. Isn’t that enough to make you stop it?”

“I’m not doing anything I can stop,” I said.

“I would stop,” she said illogically, “if you asked
me
to.”

“I told you, darling—I’m not doing anything. Things happen, that’s all.”

“Matter,” she said suddenly, planting herself in front of me, “can be neither created nor destroyed.”

I sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed. She immediately sat beside, on, and around me. “You been reading books,” I said.

“Well, what about it? You’re worried because things happen. You made a rock vanish. But you can’t destroy matter. It has to turn into energy or something. So you just couldn’t have done it.”

“But I did.”

“That doesn’t matter. It isn’t logic,” she said, in a
quod erat demonstrandum
tone.

“You’re overlooking one thing, irresistible creature,” I said, pushing her away from me, “and that is the fact that I don’t believe that
precept about the indestructibility of matter, and never did. Therefore matter can be destroyed. Matter’s just a figment of my imagination, anyway.”

She opened and closed her lovely mouth twice and then said, “But in school—”

“
Damn
school!” I snapped. “Do I have to prove it to you?” I looked about the room for demonstration material, but couldn’t see anything offhand I could do without. I was travelling light. My eyes fell on her low-heeled pumps. “Look—you’ve lost your shoes someplace, I’ll wager.”

“I have not. I—
eek!
”

“—and your socks—”

“Woodie!”

“And that cute little blue beret—”

“Woodie, if you—”

“—what! No sunsuit?”

I suppose I went too far. As far as that was concerned, I should have realized that she didn’t need one. As for those—well, how was I supposed to know she didn’t use ’em?… I think that this was the only time I ever consciously did anything constructive with my creative imagination. Once somebody gave me a shapeless, hooded, scratchy burnoose from North Africa. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t comfortable, but it was the most all-fired enveloping garment ever devised by the mind of man. But she didn’t deserve this kind of treatment. When I thought “Cover up” I thought “Burnoose” automatically …

She clutched it around her. Now, get this. She didn’t say, “You’re a beast.” Or “heel.” Or “Schlemiel.” She said, “I think you’re wonderful, Woodie.” And she ran out, crying.

I sat there for a long time and then I finished my packing.

When I got back to the city and into my room I felt much better. The way I was now, I had to have things around me that I knew and was used to. They lent solidity to a quivering old universe. As long as they stood firm, the universe was safe.

My room was pretty nice. If you came to see me, we could drink coffee, if you didn’t mind getting up every time I reached for the
sugar. Small. The carpet was on the wall and there was a Navajo rug on the floor. Couple of pastels and a nice charcoal of Judith. Indirect lighting, which meant a disk of black cardboard hanging by rubber bands from the otherwise unshaded bulb. Books. Bed. A radio that was going twenty-four hours a day.

Why should there be only twenty-four hours in a day?

I throttled the thought before it got anywhere.

I switched on both lights, the radio, and the hotplate under my coffee brewer. That humming noise was the meter turning like a phonograph playing the “Landlord’s Blues” (the utilities were included in the three fifty a week).

While I was hanging up my coat, Drip burst in, bellowing “Hiyah, Woodie? Hiyah, pal, back huh. What happened, huh?”

I closed the closet, spun around and gave him the old one-two on the mouth and chin, planted a foot in his stomach, and kicked him out in the hall. Opposite my door is what was first a crack, then a dent, now a hollow, where the Drip had continually hit it. I didn’t have anything against him, but I’d asked him, I’d asked him time and time again, to knock before he came in.

As soon as I had the door closed he bumped timidly upon it.

“Who is it?”

“Me?”

I opened up. “Oh. Hello, Drip.”

He came in and started his greetings and salutations all over again. Poor old Drip. He’d been pushed around by half the population from Eastport to Sandy Hook, and if he minded it, it never showed. He had a voice which was squeaky without being high, a curving stance that was apprehensive rather than round-shouldered, a complexion which was more pink than healthy, shoulders which were much broader than they were strong, and an untruthful aggressive chin. The guy was whacked but harmless.

He once asked me what I thought of him and I said, “You’re the Creator’s transition between a hypothesis and a theory.” He’s still trying to figure it out … if he’s where he can figure anything.

Drip was useful, though. I don’t care who you are, if you are with the Drip, you feel superior. So he was useful. The fact that he felt
correspondingly inferior was his hard luck. It was no one’s fault that he pushed an eight-ball ahead of him through life. Certainly not his.

He talked like this:

“Gee? Woodie? It’s good to see you again? What are you going to do. Go back to work. Without? Finishing your vacation. Gee? Something must have. Did you fight. With Judith? Gosh … everything happens to you?”

“Do you want some coffee and stop crossquestioning me,” I said.

“I’m sorry.” The phrase was a reflex with him.

“What’ve you been doing with yourself, Drip?”

“Nothing? Nothing? Why are you.
Back
, Woodie?”

“Well, I’ll tell you.” I scratched my head. “Oh, hell. Never mind. Drip, I’m going to grab an oil can.”

“Sh-ship out. On a tanker again? Oh, Woodie, you can’t.
Do
that? I thought you’d quit going to sea.”

“I can do anything,” I said with conviction. “I’m—jittery around here, thassall.”

He looked at the Arabian prayer-rug on the wall and the way it was reflected in the big mirror across the room. “If you go, could I have your room,” he whispered as if he were asking me to die for him.

“No, boy. I want you to come with me.”

“What?” he screamed. “Me. On a ship. Oh? No! Nonono!”

Looking at Drip, putting sugar in his coffee, I felt suddenly sorry for him. I wanted to help him. I wanted him to share the exultance I had known in the days before I met Judith and had dropped the anchor.

“Sure. Why not, Drip? I hit my first ship when I was sixteen, and I got treated all right.”

“Oh, yes,” he said without sarcasm, “you can do all sorts of things. Not me? I could never do the things you’ve done?”

“Nuts,” I said. Being with Drip always did one of two things: made me think how wonderful I was, or how pathetic he was. This was the latter case. In trying to help him out a little, I completely forgot my new potentialities. That’s where I made my mistake. “Look,” I said, “why is it that you’re afraid of the ghost of your own
shadow? I think it’s because you refuse to make the effort to overcome your fear. If you’re afraid of the dark, turn the light out. If you’re afraid of falling, jump off a roof—just a little garage roof some place. If you’re afraid of women, stick around them. And if you’re afraid to ship out, for gosh sakes come along with me. I’ll get a quartermaster’s job and you can be ordinary seaman on my watch. I’ll show you the ropes. But on any account, face your fear.”