4

Most of the fog had thinned away, but the evening was quickening. Rain clouds threatened. Kane sat at his desk, his eyes deep wells in a haggard face, a man with an urgent task, pursued. He had read the case histories of all the inmates and now was absorbed in a psychiatric textbook. He underlined frequently with a yellow soft-lead pencil. It was the evening of his arrival.

He adjusted the desk lamp, craning the light down closer to the book; then he lowered his head and rested his eyes, breathing deeply and noisily, almost asleep. He roused himself abruptly, rubbed his eyes and continued to read. He underlined a portion of the text. It dealt with the curative aspects of shock treatment. He studied it for a time. Then he glanced at Cutshaw’s medal. It was still on his desk.

The office door flew open. It was Cutshaw, attired in swimming trunks, a beach towel over his shoulder. He wore a black armband and gripped the handle of a child’s pail and shovel. His feet were shod in frogman’s flippers and the swimming trunks and towel were patterned in a matching Polynesian motif. He slammed the office door behind him. “Let’s go to the beach,” he demanded.

Kane pushed the lamp head even lower, so that his face was hidden in darkness. “It’s night and it’s starting to rain,” he said gently.

Cutshaw walked forward, the rubber flippers thwacking squeakily against the polished oaken floor. His brows were beetled together in a scowl. “I see you’re determined to start an argument! Okay, then, let’s play doctor.”

“No.”

“Then jacks; do you want to play jacks?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Good Christ, you don’t want to do anything!” Cutshaw shrieked. “There’s nothing to do around this place! I’m going crazy!”

“Cutshaw—”

“What do I have to do just to get in a word with you? Offer sacrifice? Well, here then!” He upended the beach pail onto Kane’s desk and then lifted it off and tossed it away, disclosing a mound of shaped damp earth atop an open dossier. “I’ve brought you a mud pie; now can I talk to you?”

“Will you talk about the moon?”

“Listen, everyone knows the moon is Roquefort; I’ve come here to talk about Colonel Fell.”

“What about him?”

“What about him? Are you a stone? Christ. Captain Nam-mack approached him this morning complaining of a strange and wondrous malady, and do you know what that quack prescribed? He said, ‘Here, take this. It’s a suicide pill with a mild laxative side effect.’ What kind of bedside manner is that?”

“What’s wrong with Nammack?” Kane asked softly.

“He’s got a tipped uterus.”

“I see.”

“Tell that to Nammack and see if it comforts him in his agony. What shall I tell him? ‘Listen, Nammack, take it easy? I’ve talked to Colonel Kane and while he sympathizes with you, he says to stuff your fucking uterus with suicide pills and aspirin, seeing as Fell is erratic but fair’? And that he also said, ‘I see’?” The astronaut switched to a whining tone. “Let’s go to the beach,” he repeated. “Come on!” He attempted to stamp his foot in pout and the rubber flipper cracked like a whip against the floor.

“It’s dark and it’s raining,” Kane replied.

Cutshaw’s face contorted into rage. He picked up the beach-pail shovel from the desk and broke it in two with a splintery snap. “There! I break the arrow of peace!” He flung away the pieces. “Son of a bitch! Listen, who the hell are you? I’m starting to think that you’re Fairbanks in some fucking new weirdo disguise. He came around once in the skin of a caribou, but we recognized him, the jerk. Do you know what we did to him then? We gave him the silent treatment! Hell, we didn’t even nod to him, that insolent, antlered schmuck. Finally he split.” The astronaut’s eyes narrowed as he scrutinized Kane. “Are you really a Catholic?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Tough shit. I’m a Flaming Knight Rampant of the Christian Hussars.

Would you like to ask me what we believe in?”

“What do you believe in?”

“That colonels consort with elks. Now get out of here, Hud! I’m losing patience with you swiftly!”

“You want me to leave?” Kane asked him.

Cutshaw lunged over the desk and seized Kane’s wrist. “Are you mad?” His eyes bulged wide in fear. “And lose the only friend I’ve got?” he cried. “Oh, God, don’t do it, Hud, please! Don’t go away! Don’t leave me alone in this house of horrors!”

The colonel’s eyes welled up with pity. “No, I won’t go away, I promise.

Sit down. Sit down and we’ll talk,” he said soothingly.

“Yes!” shrieked Cutshaw. “I want to talk! I want therapy!” He released Kane’s wrist and was instantly calm again. He flapped his way to the couch against the wall, where he flung himself down and stretched out on his back, staring up at the ceiling. “God, where do I begin?”

“Free-associate,” Kane suggested.

Cutshaw turned and eyed him severely. He got up off the couch, thumped over to the desk and recovered his medal, then returned to the couch and lay supine. “And now a few words about my

childhood. I was born in North Dakota in a tiny—”

“Your records say Brooklyn,” said Kane.

“Listen, I’ll come over there-okay?-and you come lie down here and we’ll see how well you do! Whose therapy is this?”

“Yours,” said Kane.

“Can’t I ask a rhetorical question without some asshole trying to answer it? Be quiet!” Cutshaw shouted. He flipped over on his belly. “I had three maiden aunts,” he recited calmly. “Their names were Ugly, Vulgar and Tawdry, and every Christmas they’d buy me a Monopoly game from a thrift shop, except that the board was always missing: I never had a fucking board. Sure, I finally made one, but how does it sound: ‘Go directly to jack-knife and do not pass frog’? Hell, I never even saw a proper board until I was almost twenty, and I had to put ice on the back of my neck to stop trembling! Ah, well, screw it; so I never had a board. But I’d never use that as a cop-out, Hud, that Jack the Ripper bullshit. Yeah, sure: Jack the Ripper was misunderstood. At the age of six he had a lucky knife called ‘Rosebud’ and somebody stole it, so Jack spent the rest of his lifetime looking for it, but Jack had this silly idea that the knife had been hidden in someone’s throat. Now, do you buy that crap? You can answer.”

“No,” said Kane.

“You’re funny that way. There were kids on my block who tortured caterpillars; they’d cut them up and burn them. And you know why they did it? Because they were bastards. Every mean insensitive grown-up bastard started as a bastard. Show me a kid who tortures caterpillars and I’ll show you a son of a bitch. Do you approve? I crave approval. I need approval. I would rather have approval than a jelly roll with yogurt. Incidentally, have you noticed that Groper never showers? It’s because we’d see the caterpillar blood on his legs! The hateful bastard!

He’s a regular Santa Claus: every Christmas he jumps in his sled and delivers napalm to the poor. That son of a bitch. A dumb stray dog with a coiled-up tail came up and whined and licked his shoe one day on the drawbridge, and Groper right away whipped out a jack-knife and sliced the dog’s tail off, cropped it real close, and the dog is screaming and going crazy and then Groper says he helped it on account of the fleas; they collect in the tail. Christ, he’s up to his knees in caterpillar blood! You know, he used to be a writer for Time magazine and for years he always talked in captions: he was always saying, ‘After the melon, a grape,’ and things like that in the fucking mess hall. Also, he loved to say ‘brouhaha.’ But that was in the old days, Hud. I mean, now he only does it when he drinks. The poor slob was a colonel once, did you know that? Then he said ‘brouhaha’ in front of MacArthur and they busted him back to major. Wake up. Are you awake?” The astronaut turned for a look at Kane.

“Yes, I’m awake,” said Kane.

“So I see; but you were nodding, Catherine Earnshaw.” Cutshaw flopped over on his back once again and then queried, “What do you think of asps?”

“Asps?”

“You are absolutely incapable of giving a man a straight answer!”

Cutshaw produced a lollipop from a pocket and began to lick at it noisily.

“Cutshaw, why do you wear that armband?”

“Because I’m in mourning.”

“For whom?”

“For God.” Cutshaw sat up, removed the flippers and threw them down. “That’s right.” Now he threw away the lollipop. “I don’t belong to the God Is Alive and Living in Argentina Club.” Cutshaw stood up and began to pace in agitation. “Basta! No more talk about God! Wrap it up, that’s enough. Let’s get back to psychiatry.” He paused by the desk. “That reminds me. Some psychiatrist! You haven’t even asked me if I have obsessions.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, I do. I hate feet. Christ, I can’t stand the sight of them. How could a so-called beautiful God give us ugly padding things like feet!”

“So you can walk.”

“I don’t want to walk, I want to fly! Feet are disfiguring and disgraceful.” Cutshaw looked down at his own bare feet, strode over to the couch, sat down and tugged the flippers back on. “If God exists,” he said, “he’s a fink. Or more likely a foot: a giant, omniscient, omnipotent Foot. Do you think that is blasphemous?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I believe that I capitalized the F.”

The astronaut studied Kane as though attempting to evaluate him. “How many times,” he asked him finally, “can a person break a shish kebab skewer in half?” He stood up on the couch, reached out for the mounted head of a boar, and gripping its tusks, began to sway gently back and forth in midair. “Everything has parts,” he continued, in that posture. “The skewer has parts. Now, how many times can I break it in half? An infinite number of times or only a limited number of times? If the answer’s an infinite number of times, then the skewer must be infinite. Which is moose piss, why don’t we face it. But if I can only cut the skewer in half for a limited number of times… if I get down to a piece of skewer that can no longer be cut in half-I mean, assuming I were Foot and could do anything I wanted-then I’m down to a piece of skewer that has no parts. But if it has no parts, it can’t exist! Am I right? No. I see it in your eyes. You think I’m a crazy old man.”

“Not at all,” responded Kane. “You have merely failed to distinguish between the real and mental orders. Mentally-or theoretically-there isn’t any limit at all on how many times you can halve that skewer; but in the real order of things-or in other words, practically speaking-you would finally come to a point where, when you cut the skewer in half, the halves would convert themselves into energy.”

“Foot, you are wise!” breathed the astronaut. Something gleamed in his eyes. He dropped to the floor with a rubbery thwack, went over to the desk and replaced the medal in front of Kane. “You pass,” he said. “Now can you prove that there is a Foot?”

“I simply believe it,” said Kane.

“Can you prove it?”

“There are some arguments for reason.”

“Oh, are those the same things that we used to justify dropping atomic bombs on Japan? If they are, fuck them!” Cutshaw leaned over and spread the contents of the bucket all over Kane’s desk. “Here, draw diagrams in the dirt.” He threw himself face down on the couch. “This had better be good,” he warned, a cushion muffling his voice.

“There is a biochemical argument,” Kane said tentatively. “It isn’t a proof, exactly….”

Cutshaw turned on his side, yawned elaborately and checked his watch. “In order for life to have appeared spontaneously on earth,” Kane resumed, “there first had to be in existence a protein molecule of a certain dyssymmetrical configuration, the configuration point nine. But according to the laws of probability, for one of these molecules to appear by chance alone would require a volume of matter of more than-well-many trillions and trillions of times that of the size of the entire known universe; and considered strictly from the angle of time—”

“Timewise.”

“Considered from the angle of time, and given a volume of matter equivalent to the earth’s, such a probability would require ten to the two hundred and something power billions of years- a number with so many zeros in it you couldn’t fit them into a book the size of The Brothers Karamazov. And that’s just one molecule. For life to appear, you would have to have millions in existence and at roughly the same time. Which I find more fantastic than simply believing in a God.”

Cutshaw sat up. “Are you finished?”

“Yes.”

Cutshaw stood up and went to the door, where he turned and said cryptically, “Tawdry Groper eats unblessed venison.” Then he turned again and strode from view. The crash of a hammer pounding plaster resounded through the wall. Kane walked out of his office. To the right of the door he saw Fairbanks, wearing an Air Force high-altitude helmet. He was holding a short-handled sledgehammer and was glaring at a hole in the wall. Groper raced up to him, cursing. “I hid it, goddammit, I hid it!” He ripped the hammer from Fairbanks’ hand. “How the hell did you find it?” he yelled.

“I wouldn’t dare tell you that,” said Fairbanks. He whipped the hammer back out of Groper’s clutch and told him, “Kindly stand aside.”

“You little—”

Groper had lifted an arm as though to strike him, when Kane intervened.

“Major Groper!”

“Sir, he’s been—”

“I don’t care what he’s done; you are not to lay hands on any of these men at any time for any reason.”

“But, Colonel—”

Groper was about to say more, but as his eyes looked into Kane’s, he broke off, took a step backward, saluted stiffly and retreated to his quarters.

Kane regarded the inmate kindly. “You’re Captain Fairbanks,” he said.

“Not today.”

“I’m sorry. I was sure you were—”

“Not today. Understand me? Multiple personality. ‘My house has many mansions.’ ”

“Yes.”

“I am Dr. Franz von Pauli.”

Kane put a fatherly arm around his shoulder. Far down the hall he caught a glimpse of Cutshaw staring at them from the dormitory door. Kane looked at the hole gouged out of the wall and said, “Why did you do that, Captain Fairbanks?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Why did you do that to the wall?”

“I thought you were kidding.” The inmate’s eyes were intense and pale blue and set in an innocent pudgy face that belonged at a junior college tea dance. “I do it,” he replied, “in the interest of science and nucleonics; because I’m convinced we can walk through walls! Not just me; I mean anyone. Cops. People. People in Nashville.

It’s the spaces! The empty spaces between the atoms in my body-or yours:

you don’t mind my getting personal? No. If it gets you uptight, let me know.”

“Go ahead.”

“You got a headache?”

Kane had winced as though in reaction to a sudden, stabbing pain, lowering his head and pinching the bridge of his nose. His eyes were closed. “No,” he said softly.

“Terrific. Look, it’s all in the size of the empty spaces between the atoms in that wall: when you look at it relative to the size of the atoms themselves-well, the size of the spaces is immense! It’s like the distance, frankly speaking, between the earth and the planet Mars, and—”

“Come to the point, please, Captain Fairbanks,” said Kane in a voice that reflected strain, yet was not unkind.

“What’s the hurry?” asked Fairbanks. “The atoms won’t leave. Hell, they’re not going anyplace.”

“Yes.”

“Colonel, atoms can be smashed; they cannot fly!”

Kane reacted to something like pain again.

“Do you have to go toy-toy?” asked Fairbanks. “Number two?”

Kane shook his head.

“Listen, don’t be ashamed; we’re only human.”

Kane lowered his arm from the inmate’s shoulder. “Tell me why you strike the wall.”

“You’re dogged. I like that: dogged but fair. Now listen. The spaces-the same immense and empty spaces between the atoms in that wall exist between the atoms in your body as well! So walking through the wall is merely a matter of gearing the holes between the atoms in my body to the holes between the atoms in that wall! That naughty stubborn fucking—”

Fairbanks ended his statement with another great swing of his hammer. Plaster flew out in all directions. He looked sullen; he stared at the hole he had just produced. “Nothing,” he muttered.

Then he looked at Kane. “I keep experimenting, see. I concentrate hard. I try to exert the full force of my mind on the atoms in my body so they’ll mix and rearrange; so they’ll fit just exactly those spaces in the wall. And then I try the experimental method -I try to walk through the wall. Like now. I just took a running dash, and I failed-horribly!”

He swung once more at the wall and another hole gaped forth. “Stuck-up cunts,” he muttered.

“Why did you do that?” asked Kane.

“I am punishing the atoms! I am making of them an example! An object lesson! A thing! So when the others see what’s coming -when they see I’m not kidding around-why, they’ll fall into line! They’ll let me pass through!” Fairbanks accompanied the end of his statement with another vicious swing. “Independent snots!” he said, glaring at the wall. “Shape up or ship out!”

“May I?” asked Kane, gently lifting the hammer from the inmate’s grasp.

“Sure!” growled Fairbanks. “Swing! Enjoy! Maybe they’ll listen to a stranger!”

“I had something else in mind.”

The inmate looked outraged and grabbed for the hammer. First he gave a tug then a vigorous pull; but the hammer did not move from Kane’s grip. He looked down at the hammer, and then up at Kane, his eyes a little fuddled. “Your grip is very strong,” he said at last.

“I think,” said Kane, “that your problem may lie in the properties of the hammer: some nuclear imbalance impinging on the ions.”

“Interesting theory,” said Fairbanks.

“Would you mind if I kept the hammer for study?”

Suddenly Fairbanks began to scream. He struggled furiously to regain the hammer. Krebs and Christian appeared and restrained him. He was hysterical.

“Medication is indicated here,” said Kane.

“I’ll have to find Colonel Fell,” Krebs told him. “I haven’t seen him.”

“Who else has a key to the drug locker?”

“No one,” said Krebs. Fairbanks kept shrieking. His eyes bulged out.

“Not even a medical orderly?” asked Kane.

“No, sir. Not since we had the pilferage, sir.”

“From the drug locker? What was taken?”

“The colonel’s Cadbury Fruit and Nut bars, sir. He stores them there.”

He paused and then added, “It’s the temperature, sir.”

Kane released the hammer and Fairbanks subsided. “There may be a recurrence,” Kane said softly. “You’d better find him.”

“Yes, sir.”

Fairbanks looked puzzled. “Where the fuck did this hammer come from?” he asked. Kane slipped it from his grasp and Krebs and Christian led the inmate away. Kane stood rooted, looking down at the hammer in his hands. Then he clutched at his head.

Groper was watching him from the second floor, where he stood by the balustrade. Kane looked up at him as if he had known he was being watched. Groper walked quickly toward his bedroom.