yet. Well, a thief who stole only gutted old pulp magazines was hardly a serious menace—more like a trashman, a helpful scavenger.
The tension that had been knotting him departed at last. He realized he was very thirsty. He got a split of ginger ale from the small refrigerator and drank it eagerly. While he made coffee on the hot plate, he sketchily straightened the disordered half of the bed and turned on the shaded light at its head. He carried over his coffee and the two books he’d shown Cal that morning, and settled himself comfortably, and read around in them and speculated.
When he realized it was getting darker outside, he poured himself more coffee and carried it down to Cal’s. The door was ajar. Inside, Cal’s shoulders were lifting rhythmically as she played with furious precision, her ears covered with large padded phones. Franz couldn’t be sure whether he heard the ghost of a concerto, or only the very faint thuds of the keys.
Saul and Gun were talking quietly on the couch, Gun with a green bottle beside him. Remembering this morning’s bitter words he’d overheard, Franz looked for signs of strain, but all seemed harmony. Perhaps he’d read too much into their words.
Saul Rosenzweig, a thin man with dark hair shoulder-length and dark-circled eyes, quirked a smile and said, “Hello. Calvina asked us down to keep her company while she practices, though you’d think a couple of window dummies could do the job as well. But Calvina’s a romantic puritan at heart. Deep inside she wants to frustrate us.”
Cal had taken off her headphones and stood up. Without a word or a look at anyone, or anything apparently, she picked up some clothes and vanished like a sleepwalker into the bathroom, whence there came presently the sound of showering.
Gun grinned at Franz and said, “Greetings. Sit down and join the devotees of silence. How goes the writer’s life?”
They talked inconsequentially and lazily of this and that. Saul carefully made a long thin cigarette. Its piney smoke was pleasant, but Franz and Gun smilingly declined to share, Gun tilting his green bottle for a long swallow.
Cal reappeared in a surprisingly short time, looking fresh and demure in a dark brown dress. She poured herself a tall thin glass of orange juice from the fridge and sat down.
“Saul,” she said quietly, “you know my long name is not Calvina, but Calpurnia—the minor Roman Cassandra who kept warning Caesar. I may be a puritan, but I wasn’t named for Calvin. My parents were both born Presbyterians, it’s true, but my father early progressed into Unitarianism and died a devout Ethical Culturist. He used to pray to Emerson and swear by Robert Ingersoll. While my mother was, rather frivolously, into Bahai. And I don’t own a couple of window dummies, or I might use them. No, no pot, thank you. I have to hold myself intact until tomorrow night. Gun, thanks for humoring me. It does help to have people in the room, even when I’m incommunicada. It helps especially when evening begins to close in. That ale smells wonderful, but alas, same reason as no pot. Franz, you’re looking quietly prodigious. What happened at Corona Heights?”
Pleased that she had been thinking about him and observing him so closely and accurately, Franz told the story of his adventure. He was struck by how in the telling it became rather trivial-seeming and less frightening, though paradoxically more entertaining—the writer’s curse and blessing.
Gun happily summed up. “So you go to investigate this apparition or what-not, and find it’s pulled the big switch and is thumbing its nose at you from your own window two miles away. ‘Taffy went to my house’—that’s neat.”
Saul said, “Your Taffy story reminds me of my Mr. Edwards. He gets the idea that two enemies in a parked car across the street from the hospital have got a pain-ray projector trained on him. We wheel him over there so he can see for himself there ain’t no one in any of the cars. He’s very much relieved and keeps thanking us, but when we get him back to his room, he lets out a sudden squeal of agony. Seems his enemies have taken advantage of his absence to plant a pain-ray projector somewhere in the walls.”
“Oh, Saul,” Cal said in mildly scathing tones, “we’re not all of us your hospital people—at least yet. Franz, I wonder if those two innocent-seeming little girls may not have been involved. You said they were running around and dancing, like your pale brown thing. I’m sure that if there’s such a thing as psychic energy, little girls have lots of it.”
“I’d say you have a good artistic imagination. That angle hadn’t even occurred to me,” Franz told her, acutely aware that he was beginning to disparage the whole incident, but unable to help himself. “Saul, I may very well have been projecting—at least in part—but if so, what? Also, the figure was nondescript, remember, and wasn’t doing anything objectively sinister.”
Saul said, “Look, I wasn’t suggesting any parallel. That’s your idea, and Cal’s. I was just reminded of another weird incident.”
Gun guffawed. “Saul doesn’t think we’re all completely crazy. Just fringe-psychotic.”
There was a knock and then the door opened as Dorotea Luque let herself in. She sniffed and looked at Saul. She was a slender version of her brother, with a beautiful Inca profile and jet-black hair. She had a small parcel-post package of books for Franz.
“I wondered you’d be down here, and then I heard you talk,” she explained. “Did you find the e-scary things to write about with your… how you say… ?” She made binoculars of her hands and held them to her eyes, and then looked questioningly around when they all laughed.
While Cal got her a glass of wine, Franz hastened to explain. To his surprise, she took the figure in the window very seriously.
“But are you e-sure you weren’t ripped off?” she demanded anxiously. “We’ve had an e-stealer on the second floor, I think.”
“My portable TV and tape recorder were there,” he told her. “A thief would take those first.”
“But how about your marrowbone?” Saul put in. “Taffy get that?”
“And did you close your transom and double-lock your door?” Dorotea persisted, illustrating with a vigorous twist of her wrist. “Is double-lock now?”
“I always double-lock it,” Franz assured her. “I used to think it was only in detective stories they slipped locks with a plastic card. But then I found I could slip my own with a photograph. The transom, no. I like it open for ventilation.”
“Should always close the transom, too, when you go out,” she pronounced. “All of you, you hear me? Is thin people can get through transoms, you better believe. Well, I am glad you weren’t ripped off.
Cal smiled and said to Saul and Gun, “Why shouldn’t a modern city have its special ghosts, like castles and graveyards and big old manor houses once had?”
Saul said, “My Mrs. Willis thinks the skyscrapers are out to get her. At night they make themselves still skinnier, she says, and come sneaking down the streets after her.”
Gun said, “I once heard lightning whistle over Chicago. There was a thunderstorm over the Loop, and I was on the South Side at the university, right near the site of the first atomic pile. There’d be a flash on the northern horizon and then, seven seconds later, not thunder, but this high-pitched moaning scream. I had the idea that all the elevated tracks were audio-resonating a radio component of the flash.”
Cal said eagerly, “Why mightn’t the sheer mass of all that steel—? Franz, tell them about the book.”
He repeated what he’d told her this morning about
Gun broke in. “And he says our modern cities are our Egyptian pyramids? That’s beautiful. Just imagine how, when we’ve all been killed off by pollution (nuclear, chemical, smothered in unbiodegradable plastic, red tides of dying microlife, the nasty climax of our climax culture), an archaeological expedition arrives by spaceship from another solar system and starts to explore us like a bunch of goddamn Egyptologists! They’d use roving robot probes to spy through our utterly empty cities, which would be too dangerously radioactive for anything else, as dead and deadly as our poisoned seas. What would they make of World Trade Center in New York City and the Empire State Building? Or the Sears Building in Chicago? Or even the Transamerica Pyramid here? Or that space- launch assembly building at Canaveral that’s so big you can fly light planes around inside? They’d probably decide they were all built for religious and occult purposes, like Stonehenge. They’d never imagine people lived and worked there. No question, our cities will be the eeriest ruins ever. Franz, this de Castries had a sound idea—the sheer
