Nightmare at 20,000 Feet

number, no Mary works there. I told him who I was. I asked him if I worked there.

“Stop the kidding around,” he said. “See you Monday night.”

I called up my cousin, my sister, her cousin, her sister, her parents. No answer. Not even ringing. None of the numbers work. Then they’re all gone.

Sunday

I don’t know what to do. All day I’ve been sitting in the living room looking out at the street. I’ve been watching to see if anybody I know comes by the house. But they don’t. They’re all strangers.

I’m afraid to leave the house. That’s all there is left. Our furniture and our clothes.

I mean my clothes. Her closet is empty. I looked into it this morning when I woke up and there wasn’t a scrap of clothing left. It’s like a magic act, everything disappearing, it’s like…

I just laughed. I must be…

I called the furniture store. It’s open Sunday afternoons. They said they had no record of us buying a bed. Would I like to come in and check?

I hung up and looked out the window some more.

I thought of calling up my aunt in Detroit. But I can’t remember the number. And it isn’t in my address book any more. The entire book is blank. Except for my name on the cover stamped in gold.

My name. Only my name. What can I say? What can I do? Everything is so simple. There’s nothing to do.

I’ve been looking at my photograph album. Almost all the pictures are different. There aren’t any people on them.

Mary is gone and all of our friends and our relatives.

It’s funny

In the wedding picture I sit all by myself at a huge table covered with food. My left arm is out and bent as though I were embracing my bride. And all along the table are glasses floating in the air.

Toasting me.

Monday morning

I just got back the letter I sent Jim. It has NO SUCH ADDRESS stamped on the envelope.

I tried to catch the mailman but I couldn’t. He was gone before I woke up.

I went down to the grocer before. He knew me. But when I asked him about Mary he said stop kidding, I’d die a bachelor and we both knew it.

I have only one more idea. It’s a risk, but I’ll have to take it. I’ll have to leave the house and go downtown to the Veteran’s Administration. I want to see if my records are there. If they are, they’ll have something about my schooling and about my marriage and the people who were in my life.

I’m taking this book with me. I don’t want to lose it. If I lost it, then I wouldn’t have a thing in the world to remind me that I’m not insane.

Monday night

The house is gone.

I’m sitting in the corner candy store.

When I got back from the V.A. I found an empty lot there. I asked some of the boys playing there if they knew me. They said they didn’t. I asked them what happened to the house. They said they’d been playing in that empty lot since they were babies.

The V.A. didn’t have any records about me. Not a thing.

That means I’m not even a person now. All I have is all I am, my body and the clothes on it. All the identification papers are gone from my wallet.

My watch is gone too. Just like that. From my wrist.

It had an inscription on the back. I remember it.

To my own darling with all my love. Mary.

I’m having a cup of cof

8 – LEGION OF PLOTTERS

Then there was the man who sniffed interminably…

He sat next to Mr Jasper on the bus. Every morning he would come grunting up the front step and weave along the aisle to plop himself down beside Mr Jasper’s slight form.

And — sniff! he would go as he perused his morning paper — sniff, sniff!

Mr Jasper would writhe. And wonder why the man persisted in sitting next to him. There were other seats available, yet the man invariably dropped his lumpish frame beside Mr Jasper and sniffed the miles away, winter and summer.

It wasn’t as if it were cold out. Some Los Angeles mornings were coldish, granted. But they certainly did not warrant this endless sniffling as though pneumonia were creeping through the man’s system.

And it gave Mr Jasper the willies.

He made several attempts to remove himself from the man’s sphere of sniffling. First of all, he moved back two seats from his usual location. The man followed him. I see, surmised a near-fuming Mr Jasper, the man is in the habit of sitting by me and hasn’t noticed that I’ve moved back two seats.

The following day Mr Jasper sat on the other side of the aisle. He sat with irascible eye watching the man weave his bulk up the aisle. Then his vitals petrified as the man’s tweeded person plumped down by him. He glared an abominating glare out the window.

Sniff! — went the man — Sa-niff! — and Mr Jasper’s dental plates ground together in porcelain fury.

The next day he sat near the back of the bus. The man sat next to him. The next day he sat near the front of the bus. The man sat next to him. Mr Jasper sat amidst his corroding patience for a mile and a third. Then, jaded beyond endurance, he turned to the man.

‘Why are you following me?’ he asked, his voice a trembling plaint.

The man was caught in mid-sniff. He gaped at Mr Jasper with cow like, uncomprehending eyes. Mr Jasper stood and stumbled the bus length away from the man. There he stood swaying from the overhead bar, his eyes as stone. The way that sniffing fool had looked at him, he brooded. It was insufferable. As if, by heaven, he had done something offensive!

Well, at least, he was momentarily free of those diurnally dripping nostrils. Crouched muscles unflexed gratefully. He signed with relief.

And the boy standing next to him whistled twenty-three choruses of Dixie.

Mr Jasper sold neckties.

It was an employment ridden with vexations, an employment guaranteed to scrape away the lining of any but the most impassive stomachs.

Mr Jasper’s stomach walls were of the most susceptive variety.

They were stormed daily by aggravation, by annoyance and by women. Women who lingered and felt the wool and cotton and silk and walked away with no purchase. Women who beleaguered Mr Jasper’s inflammable mind with interrogations and decrees and left no money but only a rigid Mr Jasper, one jot nearer to inevitable detonation.

With every taxing customer, a gushing host of brilliantly nasty remarks would rise up in Mr Jasper’s mind, each one surpassing the one before. His mind would positively ache to see them free, to let them pour like torrents of acid across his tongue and, burning hot, spout directly into the women’s faces.

But invariably close was the menacing phantom of floorwalker or store buyer. It flitted through his mind with ghostly dominion, shunting aside his yearning tongue, calcifying his bones with unspent wrath.

Then there were the women in the store cafeteria… They talked while they ate and they smoked and blew