The Collected Stories (17 page)

At 8:13 a.m. the alarm clock in the laboratory gave the ringing word. Eddie touched a button in the substructure of an ordinary glass coffeepot, from whose spout two tubes proceeded into the wall. A soft hiss followed: the coffeepot steamed and clouded and cleared.

Forty seconds later Mr. Clop howled, “Jesus, who farted?” although the smell was not quite like that at all, Eddie the concoctor knew. It was at least
meant
to be greener, skunkier, closer to the deterrents built into animals and flowers, but stronger. He was informed immediately of a certain success by the bellows of the coal delivery men, the high cries of the old ladies.

Satisfied, Eddie touched another button, this at the base of Mrs. Spitz's reconstructed vacuum cleaner. The reverse process used no more than two minutes. The glass clouded, the spout was stoppered, the genie returned.

Eddie knew it would take the boys a little longer to get free of their observation posts and the people who were observing them. During that speck of time his heart sank as hearts may do after a great act of love. He suffered a migraine from acceding desolation. When Carl brought excited news, he listened sadly, for what is life? he thought.

“God, great!” cried Carl. “History-making! Crazee! Eddie, Eddie, a mystery! No one knows how what where …”

“Yet,” Eddie said. “You better quiet down, Carl.”

“But listen, Eddie, nobody can figure it out,” said Carl. “How long did it last? It ended before that fat dope, Goredinsky, got out of our toilet. She was hollering and pulling up her bloomers and pulling down her dress. I watched from the door. It laid me sidewise. She's not even supposed to use that toilet. It's ours.”

“Yeh,” said Eddie.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, listen. My father kept saying, ‘Jesus dear, did I forget to open an exhaust someplace? Jesus dear, what did I do? Did I wreck up the flues? Tell me, tell me, give me a hint!' “

“Your father's a very nice old guy,” Eddie said coldly.

“Oh, I know that,” said Carl.

“Wonderful head,” said Arnold, who had just entered.

“Look at my father,” Eddie said, taking the dim and agitated view. “Look at him, he sits in that store, he doesn't shave, maybe twice a week. Sometimes he doesn't move an hour or two. His nose drips, so the birds know he's living. That lousy sonofabitch, he used to be a whole expert on world history, he supports a stinking zoo and that filthy monkey that can't even piss straight” … Bitterness for his cramped style and secondhand pants took his breath away. So he laughed and let them have the facts. “You know, my old man was so hard up just before he got married and he got such terrific respect for women (he respects women, let me tell you) that you know what he did? He snuck into the Bronx Zoo and he rammed it up a chimpanzee there. You're surprised, aren't you! Listen to me, they shipped that baby away to France. If my father'd've owned up, we'd've been rich. It makes me sore to think about. He'd've been the greatest buggerer in recorded history. He'd be wanted in pigsties and stud farms. They'd telegraph him a note from Irkutsk to get in on those crazy cross-pollination experiments. What he could do to winter wheat! That cocksucker tells everyone he went over to Paris to see if his cousins were alive. He went over to get my big brother Itzik. To bring him home. To aggravate my mother and me.”

“Aw …” said Carl.

“So that's it,” said Shmul, a late reporter, playing alongside Eddie. “That's how you got so smart. Constant competition with an oddball sibling … Aha …”

“Please,” said Arnold, his sketch pad wobbly on his knee. “Please, Eddie, raise your arms like that again, like you just did when you were mad. It gives me an idea.”

“Jerks,” said Eddie, and spat on the spotless laboratory floor. “A bunch of jerks.”

Still and all, the nineteenth-century idea that progress is immanent is absolutely correct. For his sadness dwindled and early August was a time of hard work and glorious conviviality. The mystery of the powerful non-toxic gas from an unknowable source remained. The boys kept their secret. Outsiders wondered. They knew. They swilled Coke like a regiment which has captured all the enemy pinball machines without registering a single tilt.

Saturday nights at the lab were happy, ringing with 45 r.p.m.s, surrounded by wonderful women. All kinds of whistling adventures were recorded by Shmul. … He had it all written down: how one night Mr. Clop wandered in looking for fuses and found Arnold doing life sketches of Rita Niskov. She held a retort over one breast in order to make technical complications for Arnold, who was ambitious. “Keep it up, keep it up, son,” mumbled Clop, to whom it was all a misunderstanding.

And another night Blanchie Spitz took off everything but her drawers and her brassière and because of a teaspoon of rum in a quart and a half of Coke decided to do setting-up exercises to the tune of the “Nutcracker Suite.” “Ah, Blanchie,” said Carl, nearly nauseous with love, “do me a belly dance, baby.” “I don't know what a belly dance is, Carl,” she said, and to the count of eight went into a deep knee bend. Arnold lassoed her with Rita's skirt, which he happened to have in his hand. He dragged Blanchie off to a corner, where he slapped her, dressed her, asked her what her fee was and did it include relatives, and before she could answer he slapped her again, then took her home, Rita's skirt flung over one shoulder. This kind of event will turn an entire neighborhood against the most intense chronology of good works. Rita's skirt, hung by a buttonhole, fluttered for two days from the iron cellar railing and was unclaimed. Girls, Shmul editorialized in his little book, live a stone-age life in a blown-glass cave.

Eddie had to receive most of this chattery matter from Shmul. The truth is that Eddie did not take frequent part in the festivities, as Saturday was his father's movie night. Mr. Teitelbaum would have closed the shop, but the manager of the Loew's refused to sell Itzik a ticket. “Show me,” said Mr. Teitelbaum, “where it says no monkeys.” “Please,” said the manager, “this is my busy night.” Itzik had never been alone, for although he was a brilliant monkey, in the world of men he is dumb. “Ach,” said Mr. Teitelbaum, “you know what it's like to have a monkey for a pet? It's like raising up a moron. You get very attached, no matter what, and very tied down.”

“Still and all, things are picking up around here,” said Carl.

About a week after the unpleasant incident with the girls (which eventually drove the entire Niskov family about six blocks uptown where they were unknown), Eddie asked for an off-schedule meeting. School was due to begin in three weeks, and he was determined to complete the series which would prove his War Attenuator marketable among the nations.

“Don't exaggerate,” said Shmul. “What we have here is a big smell.”

“Non-toxic,” Eddie pointed out. “No matter how concentrated, non-toxic. Don't forget that, Klein, because that's the beauty of it. An instrument of war that will not kill. Imagine that.”

“O.K.,” he said. “I concede. So?”

“Shmul, you got an eye. What did the people do during the last test? Did they choke? Did their eyes run? What happened?”

“I already told you, Eddie. Nothing happened. They only ran. They ran like hell. They held their noses and they tore out the door and a couple of kids crawled up the coal ramp. Everybody gave a yelp and then ran.”

“What about your father, Carl?”

“Oh, for Christ's sake, if I told you once, I told you twenty times, he got out fast. Then he stood on the steps, holding his nose and figuring who to pass the buck to.”

“Well, that's what I mean, boys. It's the lesson of the cockroach segregator. The peaceful guy who listens to the warning of his senses will survive generations of defeat. Who needs the inheritance of the louse with all that miserable virulence in his nucleic acid? Who? I haven't worked out the political strategy altogether, but our job here, anyway, is just to figure out the technology.”

“O.K., now the rubber tubes have to be extended up to the first and second floor of 1432, 1434, 1436—the three attached buildings. Do not drill into Michailovitch on the corner, as this could seep into the ice-cream containers and fudge and stuff, and I haven't tested out all comestibles. If you work today and tomorrow, we should be done by Thursday. On Friday the test goes forward; by noon we ought to have all reports and know what we have. Any questions? Carl, get the tools, you're in charge. I have to fix this goddamn percolator and see what the motor's like. We'll meet on Friday morning. Same time—7:30 a.m.”

Then Eddie hurried back to the shop to clean the bird cages which he had forgotten about for days because of the excitement in his mind. Itzik offered him a banana. He accepted. Itzik peeled it for him, then got a banana for himself. He threw the peels into the trash can, for which Eddie kissed him on his foolish face. He jumped to Eddie's shoulder to tease the birds. Eddie did not like him to do this, for those birds will give you psittacosis (said Eddie) if you aggravate them too much. This is an untested hypothesis, but it makes sense; as you know, people who loathe you will sneeze in your face when their mucous membranes are most swollen or when their throat is host to all kinds of cocci.

“Don't, Itzikel,” he said gently, and put the monkey down. Then Itzik hung from Eddie's shoulder by one long arm, eating the banana behind his back. “That's how I like to see you,” said Mr. Teitelbaum when he looked into the shop. “Once in a while anyway.”

Eddie was near the end of a long summer's labor. He could bear being peaceful and happy.

On Friday morning Carl, Arnold, and Shmul waited outside. They had plenty of bubble gum and lollipops in which Eddie had personally invested. They were responsible for maintaining equilibrium among the little children who might panic. They also had notebooks, and in these reports each boy was expected to cover only one building.

Inside, Eddie played a staccato note on the button under the percolator. After that it was very simple. People poured from the three buildings. Tenants on the upper floors, which were not involved, poked their heads out the windows because of the commotion. The controls were so fine that they had gotten only the barest whiff and had assumed it to be the normal smell of morning rising from the cracked back of the fish market three blocks east.

Eddie had agreed not to leave the laboratory until reports came in from the other boys. He was perplexed when half an hour had passed and they did not appear. There wasn't even a book to read. So he busied himself disconnecting his home-constructed appliances, funneling the residue powder into a paper envelope which he kept in his back pocket. Suddenly he worried about everyone. What could happen to Itsy Bitsy Michailovitch, who sat outside his father's store spinning a yo-yo and singing a no-song to himself all day? He was in fact a goddamn helpless idiot. What about Mrs. Spitz, who would surely stop to put her corset on and would faint away and maybe crack her skull on a piece of rococo mahogany? What about heart failure in people over forty? What about the little Susskind kids? They were so wild, so baffled out of sense, they might jump into the dumbwaiter shaft.

He was scrubbing the sink, trying to uproot his miserable notions, when the door opened. Two policemen came in and put their hands on him. Eddie looked up and saw his father. Their eyes met and because of irrevocable pain, held. That was the moment (said Shmul, later on after that and other facts) that Eddie fell headfirst into the black heart of a deep depression. This despair required all his personal attention for years.

No one could make proper contact with him again, to tell him the news. Did he know that he had caused the death of all his father's stock? Even the three turtles, damn it, every last minnow, even the worms that were the fishes' Sunday dinner had wriggled their last. The birds were dead at the bottom of their clean cages.

Itzik Halbfunt lay in a coma from which he would not recover. He lay in Eddie's bed on Eddie's new mattress, between Eddie's sheets. “Let him die at home,” said Mr. Teitelbaum, “not with a bunch of poodles at Speyer's.”

He caressed his scrawny shoulder that was itchy and furry and cried, “Halbfunt, Halbfunt, you were my little friend.”

No matter how lovingly a person or a doctor rapped at the door to Eddie's mind, Eddie refused to say “Come in.” Carl Clop called loudly, taking a long distance, local stop, suburban train several times to tell Eddie that it was really he who had thought it would be wonderful to see old Teitelbaum run screaming with hysterical Itzik. For the pleasure this sight would give, Carl had connected the rubber tubes to a small vent between the basement of 1436 and the rear of the pet shop. He had waited at the corner and, sure enough, they had come at last, Mr. Teitelbaum running and Itzik gasping for breath. Clop's bad luck, said Clop, to have a son who wasn't serious.

Eddie was remanded to the custody of Dr. Scott Tully, director of A Home for Boys, in something less than three weeks. The police impounded Shmul's notebooks but learned only literary things about faces and the sex habits of adolescent boys. Also found was an outline of a paper Eddie had planned for the antivivisectionist press, describing his adventures as a self-prepared subject for the gas tolerance experiments. It was entitled
NO GUINEA PIG FRONTS FOR ME.
As any outsider can judge, this is an insane idea.

Eddie was cared for at A Home for Boys by a white-frocked attendant, cross-eyed and muscle-bound, with strong canines oppressing his lower lip, a nose neatly broken and sloppily jointed. This was Jim Sunn and he was kind to Eddie. “Because he's no trouble to me, Mr. Teitelbaum, he's a good boy. If he opens his eyes wide, I know he wants to go to the bathroom. He ain't crazy, Mr. Teitelbaum, he just got nothing to say right now, is all. I seen a lot of cases, don't you worry.”