“You save money that way.” Hasson drank from the glass which Werry pushed over to him. The lager it contained did not impress him as a beer, but he was grateful for its cleansing and tingling coolness. He eyed Werry over the rim of his glass, wondering what he wanted to talk about and hoping that no marked response would be required on his part. It seemed that every conversational exchange he had made since arriving in Tripletree had added to his burden of stresses, and it was a process which could not go on indefinitely, or even for much longer.
Werry took a long drink of beer and leaned forward with a solemn expression on his face. “Rob,” he said, his voice charged with sincerity, “I really envy you.”
“Is it my money or my looks?” Hasson parried, genuinely surprised.
“I’m not kidding, Rob. I envy you because you’re a human being.”
Hasson produced a lopsided smile. “And you aren’t?”
“That’s exactly it.” Werry was speaking with the utmost conviction, like a preacher trying to make a convert. “I’m not a human being.”
Hasson, although baffled, realized with a sinking feeling that his tete-a-tete with Werry was not going to be an easy run. “Al, you’d pass for a human being any day.”
“But that’s all I do — I pass for a human being.”
“Rhetorically speaking,” Hasson said, wishing that Werry would get on with making his point in a more direct manner.
Werry shook his head. “It might be rhetoric, and it might not. Is it right to regard yourself as human if you haven’t got any human feelings? Isn’t that what the word human means -having humanity?”
“I’m sorry, Al” Hasson decided to show some impatience. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. What’s the problem?”
Werry drank more beer, his eyes remaining fixed on Hasson’s, somehow transferring a weight of responsibility to him. “You saw what happened at my place this morning. Buck came walking in like he owned the place and started leaning on me in front of my kid — and I just stood there and took it. What would you have done, Rob? What would you have done if you’d been in my shoes?”
“It’s hard to say,” Hasson replied, toying with his glass.
“All right — would you have got mad at him?”
“I daresay I would.”
“That’s it, you see. I didn’t get mad — because there’s something wrong with me. I don’t feel anything. Sometimes I hear this little voice telling me I ought to get mad in a situation like that, but it doesn’t carry any weight with me. I’m not afraid of Buck, but I don’t care enough about anything to make it worth my while to stand up to him. Not even my own boy.”
Hasson felt totally inadequate to receive such a confidence. “I don’t think any of us are qualified to analyse ourselves the way you’re trying to do, Al.”
“There’s no analysis — I’m just reporting certain facts,” Werry said doggedly. “There’s something wrong with me, something about the way I’m put together, and it affects everything I do, big or small. Tell the truth, Rob — when we met at the rail station yesterday you didn’t know me from Adam, did you?”
“I haven’t got much of a memory,” Hasson said, feeling he had lost the thread of the discussion.
“It doesn’t matter how good your memory is — the point is that you know what it’s safe to forget. You know what you can let go. But I’m so busy trying to convince people I’m one of the boys that I remember everything that happens so that I can enthuse about it afterwards and tell everybody about the great times we had, but the truth is I never have any great times. I don’t really exist, Rob.”
Hasson began to feel embarrassed. “Listen, Al, do you think this is a…
“It’s true,” Werry cut in. “I don’t really exist. I go around in my uniform most of the time, because when I’m wearing it I can convince myself I’m the city reeve. I haven’t even got a sense of humour, Rob. I don’t know what’s funny and what isn’t. All I do is remember things that other people laugh at, and then when I hear them again I laugh too, but when I hear a joke the first time I’m not even sure if it is a joke.
“I can’t even argue with people, because as soon as I hear the other guy’s point of view that becomes my point of view, as well. Then when I run into somebody who starts telling me the opposite I side with him right off.
“I don’t even …” Werry paused to drink more beer, again fixing Hasson with an intent, brooding stare. “I don’t even get much of a kick out of sex. I’ve read about the ecstasy of love, but I’ve never experienced it. When I’m on the lob and it’s right at the big moment … you know, when people are supposed to feel they’re knocking on the door of paradise … all I can think about is that I might have left the lights on in my car, or that my backside is cold. Things like that.”
Hasson felt a sudden heartless desire to laugh. He picked up his glass and studied the swarming of the tiny bubbles in the beer froth.
“That’s part of the reason Sybil walked out on me,” Werry continued. “We had arguments about the treatment for Theo’s eyes — she wanted to let the hospital cut the middle out of them, and I wouldn’t hear of it — but I think she got sick of living with somebody who was nobody. That’s why I get on okay with May. She’s another nobody. Her one ambition in life is to go around looking cute, and that’s all she does, so I know where I am with her.”
There was a longer pause, and Hasson knew that Werry had spoken his piece and that it was up to him to make some appropriate response. He glanced down at the plastic bag containing his dream cassettes and wished he could be locked in his bedroom in the parchment-coloured shade at drawn curtains, with the television set bestowing its sweet absolution. The unfairness of the situation-here was another person making impossible demands upon him — began to weigh heavily on his mind.
“Al,” he said finally, “why are you telling me all this?”
Werry looked slightly nonplussed. “I thought you would want to know — after what you’ve seen at my place — but I’ve probably got it wrong.”
“No, naturally I’d be concerned about a friend’s problems — it’s just that I’ve no idea of anything to say which might help.”
Werry gave him a wan smile. “Who said I wanted help, Rob? I’d need to care about things being wrong before I could care about getting them put right.” He finished his half-litre of beer and signalled a waiter at the other side of the room to bring a replacement.
Hasson gazed at him for a moment, then took refuge in a classical British non-sequitur. “Do you think there’ll be any change in the weather?”
As soon as they got back to the house Hasson went up to his room and locked the door. The bed had been neatly made up and somebody had drawn back the curtains to admit the days snow- reflected brilliance. He set his new purchases out on a tallboy, selected a cassette and dropped it into a slot on the television set. Gratifyingly familiar music seeped into the air and under the set’s proscenium tiny figures began to act out a domestic comedy, part of a series he had watched in England only twelve months earlier. He drew the curtains together, shed his outer clothing and got into the beds stoically waiting for the spasms in his back to subside. The artificial world of the television stage occupied his entire field of vision. It was as though he had retreated through time and space, back into his previous life, and he felt safe.
He had completed a day and a half of rest and recuperation and the thought of three further months of same kind of thing was unbearable. It was much better to be curled up in a womb-cave of eider, and to submerge his mind in the dreaming of other men’s dreams.
six
Contrary to Hasson’s fears and expectations, his new life in quite abruptly Tripletree became easy to bear.
One of the things which came to his rescue was a kind of variable time effect he had noticed previously when visiting a foreign country on leave. He had a theory that personal time was not measured by the clock, but by the number of fresh sensory impressions recorded by the mind. On the first day or two of a vacation, especially if the surroundings were very different to those of his daily norm, he continually experienced new sensations and those days seemed almost endless. The vacation felt as though it would go on for ever. Suddenly, however, the new environment became familiar, the number and frequency of surprise encounters with undiluted reality decreased, the mind returned to its customary complacency — and as soon as that state of consciousness was reached the remaining days of the holiday flickered by like on a speeded-up projector.
Hasson’s theory had always depressed him a little because it both explained and confirmed the existence of a phenomenon described to him by his father — the acceleration of subjective time during later life. He had always sworn to himself that he would never get into a sense-numbing, mind-deadening rut, that he would never let the months and seasons and years slip through his fingers, but all at once he found the process working to his advantage. Time began to go faster, and the demands of each day grew less.
Keeping his is promise to Oliver Pan, he began taking large spoonfuls of powdered brewer’s yeast. At first he found the bitter, tongue- substance almost impossible to swallow and had to swill it down with glasses of fruit juice. An immediate effect was that he became so bloated with internal gas production was that he had difficulty in bending over, but Oliver had told him in advance that such a symptom would be proof of how much he needed the yeast’s rich supply of B-vitamins. Placing his faith in Oliver’s advice, he persevered with the yeast, rehearsing in his mind what he could remember from the impromptu lecture on its value as a source of anti-stress vitamins, biotin, cholin, folic acid, inositol, niacin, nucleic acid, pantothenic acid, iron, phosphorus and whole protein, as well as the complete B- vitamin complex. None of the biochemical terms had much meaning for Hasson, but two days after beginning the treatment he awoke to find that the mouth ulcers — which had plagued him for months — had vanished without trace. That benefit alone, he decided, was worth anything that Oliver was going to charge him.
He also began chewing tiny fragments of the ginseng root twice a day. It was a dark reddish-brown in colour, almost as tough as high-impact plastic, and tasted vaguely of grass. Hasson failed to see what good it could do him, but after his success with the mouth ulcers he was more than willing to give all of Oliver’s recommendations a fair trial. His digestion improved, the gaseous pressure faded from his abdomen, his appetite returned, and in a short time he rediscovered a simple pleasure — that of looking forward to meals.
The food provided in the Werry household was not always to Hasson’s taste, but in the middle of his second week there Ginny Carpenter — who had maintained her attitude of casual hostility towards him — departed on unspecified family business for a stay in Vancouver. May Carpenter did most of the cooking after that, and although she had her own set of culinary shortcomings these were more than compensated for in Hasson’s view by the absence of her mother. It turned out that May had a part-time job in the office of a plant-hire company in Tripletree. She went to it four days a week, which meant that when Theo was at school Hasson had the house to himself, an arrangement which suited him perfectly.
He continued to spend as much time as possible watching television in his room, but in spite of his avowed wish to keep the shutters closed on the world he found himself thinking more and more about the real-life problems of his hosts. Al Werry, after his strange Saturday morning confessional in the downtown bar, reverted to his normal persona, going about his business with his suggestion of a swagger, looking fit and cheerful and competent, the picture of a well-adjusted career cop. He oversaw the activities of his minuscule force with a breezy carelessness which seemed not to have been affected by anything that had been said by Buck Morlacher.
Hasson was surprised to note that Morlacher — after having impinged on his life three times in rapid succession, each time looking more like a volcano on the point of eruption — had quieted down and virtually effaced himself from the scene. He wondered if Morlacher’s change of attitude was simply due to the fact that the big man had other business interests and only got around to bedevilling Werry on occasion, or if it was something to do with May Carpenter. It was difficult for Hasson to be certain, but he had a feeling that the relationship between the two had developed since the encounter he had witnessed from the bathroom, and he became intrigued with the problem of determining what sort of person actually lived behind May’s facade of primitive, uncomplicated sexuality.
According to Werry the facade was all there was. It was a judgement Hasson had thought to be unfair and insensitive, but as the days wore on he began to accept the fact that it was impossible to hold any kind of conversation with May. It began to appear to him that she was a gorgeous female android with only two modes of operation — signalling a romantic interest in the men she met, and actually indulging that interest. Hasson, perhaps by failing to make the correct responses, had confused the identification processes and caused himself to be placed in a category with which the mechanism was not programmed to deal. At times he felt guilty over thinking about another human being in such terms and decided that the failure in communications was due to his own real inadequacies, rather than those he imagined in May, but that insight — if insight it was — had no material effect on their relationship or lack of it. It appeared that she was prepared to deal with him only on her own terms and those terms were unacceptable to Hasson, partly out of consideration for Al Werry, partly because a remnant of pride would not allow him to stand in line with Buck
