A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

I brought the car up to me — it was an automatic — and on the short, sleek glide down, a momentary impulse occurred to me to go up to Charlie when I got down below. He was the doorman. Go up to Charlie, hand him the gun, and say: “Better ring in to the police. I just killed her up there. I just killed twelve-ten.”

But it had started to fade even before I got all the way down. Then when I got out and didn’t see him around anywhere, that scotched it entirely. You don’t hang around waiting to report you’ve killed someone. You do it with your throttle wide open or not at all.

Then when I emerged into the street, I saw where he was. He was one house length down, in front of the next building, helping some people get into a taxi there. It must have dropped a fare off there, and couldn’t roll back to his stop-whistle because of the traffic coming on behind, so he and his party had had to go down there after it. They were bulky, and the furs on the women made them even bulkier, and they took a great deal of handling to shoe-horn in. His attention was fully occupied, and his back was to me.

He hadn’t seen me going in either. Must have gone around the corner for a quick coffee break.

How strange, I thought, he didn’t see me at either of the two points that count. But in between I bet he was killing time hanging around here in front of the entrance with nothing to do. That’s the way those things go sometimes: try not to be seen, and everybody spots you; don’t give a good damn whether or not you are, and everybody looks right through you just as though you weren’t there.

I turned away from him and went on my way, up the street and about my business. The past was dead. The future was resignation, fatality, and could only end one way now. The present was numbness, that could feel nothing. Like Novocaine needled into your heart. What was there in all the dimensions of time for me?

I turned left at the first up-and-down transverse I came to, and went down it for a block, and stopped in for a drink at a place. I needed one bad, I was beginning to feel shaky inside now. I’d been in this place before. It was called Felix’s (a close enough approximation, with a change of just one letter). It was three or four steps down, what you might call semi-below-side-walk-level. It was kept in a state of chronic dimness, a sort of half-light. Some said so you couldn’t see how cut and watered your drinks were.

It was just the place for me though. I didn’t want a bright light shining on me. That would come quick enough, in some precinct back room.

My invisibility had run out though. I had no sooner sat down than, before my drink had even had time to get in front of me, a girl came over to me. From behind, naturally; that was the only way she could. She tapped me on the shoulder with two fingers.

I didn’t know her, but she knew me, at second hand, it seemed. I leaned my ear toward her a little, so if she said anything I could hear what it was.

“Your friend wants to know why you don’t recognize him any more,” was what she said, reproachfully. And with that prim propriety that sometimes comes with a certain amount of alcohol — and almost invariably when a feeling of social unsurety goes with it — she added, “You shouldn’t be that way. He only wanted you to come over and join us.”

“What friend? Where?” I said grudgingly.

She pointed with the hand that was holding the change left over from the record player she’d just been to, which impeded the accuracy of her point somewhat because she had to keep three fingers bunched over in order to hang onto the coins. “In the booth. Don’t you see him?”

“How can I see anybody from here?” I asked her sullenly. “They’re all wearing shadow masks halfway up their faces. All I can see is their foreheads.” (The edge of the bar drew a line at about that height all around the room; the lights were below it, on the inside.)

“But he could see you,” she challenged. “And so could I.”

“Well, he’s been in here longer than me. I only just now walked in through the door.” I thought that would get rid of her and break it up. Instead it brought on a controversy.

She gave the sort of little-girl grimace that goes with the expression “Oo, what you just said,” or “Oo, I’m going to tell on you.” Rounded her mouth to a big O, and her eyes to match. Which sat strangely on her along with the come-on makeup and the Martinis or whatever they had been.

“You’ve been buzzing around up here for the better part of an hour. First you were sitting in one place, then in another, then you went over to the cigarette machine. Then you were gone for a while — I guess to the telephone or the men’s room — and then you came back again. We had our eyes on you the whole time. Every time he hollered your name out, you’d look and then you’d look away again. So it wasn’t that you didn’t hear, it was you didn’t want to h—”

“What is my name then, if he hollered it so many times?”