Deadline at Dawn

“Don’t you think I’ve tried?” she asked him sullenly. “I’ve priced the fare until I know it backwards. I’ve been down there so many times to inquire, I know the bus schedule by heart. There’s only one through once a day, and that leaves at six in the morning. There’s an evening one you can take, but you have to stop overnight in Chicago. And overnight — in Chicago or anywhere else — you lose your nerve; you’d only turn around and come back again. I know; don’t ask me why, I know. Once I even got as far as the terminal, had my bag all packed next to me, sat there waiting for them to open the gates. I couldn’t make it; I backed out at the last minute. Turned my ticket in, and dragged myself back here.”

“But why? Why can’t you go, if you want to that bad? What’s holding you?”

“Because I didn’t make good. I didn’t make the grade. They think I’m in a big Broadway flash-production. I’m just a taxi; just a hired duffle-bag you push around the floor. See that piece of paper there, with nothing on it but ‘Dear Mom’? That’s part of the reason; the stuff I’ve been writing home to them. Now I haven’t got the courage to go back and face them all and admit that I’m a flop. It takes plenty, and I haven’t got enough.”

“But they’re your folks, they’re your own people; they’d understand, they’d be the first to try to make it easy on you, to buck you up.”

“I know; I could tell Mom anything. It isn’t that. It’s all the friends and neighbors. She’s probably been bragging to them about me for years, reading my letters, you know how it goes. Sure, Mom and the other girls would stand by me, they wouldn’t say a word; but it would hurt them just the same. I don’t want to do that. I always wanted to go back and make them proud of me. Now I’ve got to go back and make them feel sorry for me. There’s a big difference there.” She looked up at him, shook her head. “But that’s only part of the reason. That isn’t the main reason at all.”

“Then what is?”

“I can’t tell you. You’d only laugh at me. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Why would I laugh? Why wouldn’t I understand? I’m from home too, aren’t I? I’m here in the city just like you.”

“Then here it is,” she said. “It’s the city itself. You think of it as just a place on the map, don’t you? I think of it as a personal enemy, and I know I’m right. The city’s bad; it gets you down. It’s got a half-nelson on me right now, and that’s what’s holding me, that’s why I can’t get away.”

“But houses, stone and cement buildings, they haven’t got arms, they can’t reach out and hold you back, if you want to go.”

“I told you wouldn’t understand. They don’t have to have arms. When there are that many of them bunched together, they give off something into the air. I don’t know fancy language; I only know there’s an intelligence of its own hanging over this place, coming up from it. It’s mean and bad and evil, and when you breathe too much of it for too long, it gets under your skin, it gets into you — and you’re sunk, the city’s got you. Then all you’ve got to do is sit and wait, and in a little while it’s finished the job, it’s turned you into something that you never wanted to be or thought you’d be. Then it’s too late. Then you can go anywhere — home or anywhere else — and you just keep on being what it made you from then on.”

This time he just looked at her without answering.

“I know that sounds spooky to you. I know you don’t believe me. But I know I’m right. I’ve felt it, I tell you. There’s a brain, something that thinks on its own, hanging over it. Watching you, playing with you, like a cat does a mouse. It’ll let you go a little ways away from it — like it did me, to the bus terminal — and then just when you think you’ve made it, you’re going to get away altogether, it’ll reach out after you and haul you back again. You think it’s your own free mind, but it isn’t; you think you changed your mind, but you didn’t. It’s the vapor, the fumes — there’s a certain word, see if I can remember it — the miasma given off by the city, that’s got into you already, that does it for you. Or you could say it’s like a whirlpool. If you sit quiet in the middle of it, don’t try to get away, you don’t feel anything. But when you get too near the outside, trying to work your way out, is when it sucks you back again. I know what I’m saying. There’ve been times I could almost feel the pull of it. Like when you’re in swimming and an undertow gets you. You can’t see anything, but you can feel the drag of it. You’re the only one that knows it’s there, but you’re the only one that has to. It’s you it’s hauling under. You can’t break that by yourself; now do you see what I mean?”