Transmigration (25 page)

 

 

"But you feel I should be greatly impressed by the Ian Ross that is?"

 

 

"Not that. But give me a chance, Anita."

 

 

"Sometimes," she said with a good pretense of coolness, "a traveling
salesman must hate the customer who won't listen. Yet surely everybody has
a right to opt out of being a customer? Suppose I just don't want to buy?"

 

 

"That's just it. You don't know whether you want to buy or not. And you're
refusing to try and find out."

 

 

He was right, and she knew it.

 

 

Pressing his momentary advantage, he said. "I want you, Anita, and I'm
not such a fool as to pretend I don't, just because you won't make up
your mind. Think for a moment and then give me a straight answer. Am I
really wasting my time?"

 

 

He was making it hard for her to temporize. He was doing all he could
to force her to say yes or no.

 

 

"Yes," she said.

 

 

"You mean it?" he said steadily.

 

 

"Of course I mean it."

 

 

"I'm going to ask you again. Do you want me to go out through this window
and never come near you again?"

 

 

"Yes."

 

 

"You're sure?"

 

 

"Yes, yes, yes!"

 

 

He hesitated, then nodded. "Goodbye, Anita," he said, and opened the
window.

 

 

She didn't move. As Ross climbed out and closed the window, she sent
out a frantic, wordless appeal to Fletcher.

 

 

Fletcher entirely ignored it. He had interfered in the lives of all his
hosts, but at this moment he must not interfere, and he knew it.

 

 

--Please! she begged.
--Help me!

 

 

Fletcher turned his back on her.

 

 

She knew Ross had meant what he said. He had pride. He had demanded a
final answer, and predictably she had chosen the status quo. But now it
was clear that her answer could not leave things as they were. Though
she didn't want Ross, she even less wented to lose him.

 

 

And in her irrationality Fletcher suddenly saw his own.

 

 

 

 

Searle had said he couldn't fail. Well, Searle was crazy. What Searle
had done to him could never be justified, even by Searle's conviction
that it had to be done. Searle had meddled mistakenly and unforgivably
in his early childhood.

 

 

Yet, in dying, Searle had given him valuable clues which he had resolutely
refused to look at.

 

 

Failure was what he expected, so he failed.

 

 

Loneliness was what he expected, so he was lonely.

 

 

Although since John Fletcher died -- and perhaps it was significant and
relevant, after all, that John Fletcher had had to die anyway -- he had
achieved what gave some appearance of success with the lives of others,
it was still very hard for him to face the idea that if he changed what
he expected, he could change what he achieved.

 

 

He did not want vast power.

 

 

He did not want the responsibility of exerting it.

 

 

It was simpler to deny that he possessed it.

 

 

And Anita said, when the man she loved asked her if she wanted him never
to come near her again: "Yes."

 

 

 

 

Anita ran to the window and threw it up.

 

 

"Ian!" she called. In the bright moonlight she saw him clearly in the
yard below. He had not taken the chance of jumping from the coal cellar
roof to the wall.

 

 

Without conscious thought she started to climb out of the window. The
fact that Ross had twice reached and left her roof by that route made it
an obviously practical one. Although she was not a militant feminist she
was an active girl who believed that within reason she could do anything
a man could. Suddenly reckless, she had every intention of climbing out
on the roof and down to Ross.

 

 

Then, with one knee on the sill and the other stretching for the roof
below, she remembered she was naked but for a thin robe. She made a
violent gesture to draw her wrap about her, lost her balance, lost her
grip, and found herself facing the dark sky, falling face upward.

 

 

Fletcher had heard that a dying man sometimes saw his whole life parade
past him in a split second. In the fraction more than a second of the
fall, he saw not only his own life, but what had happened since.

 

 

Falling or fear of falling had dominated his life and afterlife. There
was no doubt some deep symbolism attached to it: falling equaled failing,
perhaps?

 

 

The drop was not the terrifying one from the top of the Scott Monument
or the Westfield skyscraper or the office building from which Sheila
had fallen to her death. But it was twice the drop that had killed
Fletcher. It was interminable. It lasted a million years.

 

 

Anita was going to die. She was screaming and Fletcher realized she
knew that she was going to die. Curiously, Fletcher felt no fear, only
surprise that he was still inside of Anita's body. Why had he not escaped
as usual? But then, apart from the time when his own fear had made him
leave Judy, he had often escaped only at the moment of death. Perhaps
the same would happen again.

 

 

Another thing which possibly assuaged his terror was the fact that Anita
was falling backward, facing the night sky. She could not see the ground
rushing to meet her.

 

 

But she was terrified. She did not want to die. And she, independently,
looked back on her own life and was horrified to see what a wasteland
it was.

 

 

That was her own reaction to her life.

 

 

The fall at last ended.

 

 

Anita knew nothing about how it ended until she found herself on her feet,
dazed, but otherwise unharmed. For long seconds she could not understand
what had happened.

 

 

Then she saw Ross leaning against the wall of the house, barely able to
stand. His face was an ashen blur of agony. His right arm hung in a way
which showed it was broken, and even in the gloom there was something
terribly wrong about his left shoulder. "You caught me," she breathed.

 

 

He managed to grin. "Maiden, before I carry you across the threshold
you'll have to lose about two hundred pounds. You must weigh a ton
at least."

 

 

"You saved my life."

 

 

"Think nothing of it. I'd have done the same for anybody. Now, before
I actually expire, what about getting some help?"

 

 

Anita's landlady, many years before, had been a nurse. She coped
competently, while Anita rang for an ambulance. Ross's arm was broken in
two places at least, and his left shoulder, as well as being dislocated,
was probably fractured.

 

 

Sensing the landlady's curiosity and disapproval, Anita said: "I've been
a fool, but not in the way you think."

 

 

Mrs. Sandford said: "I always thought you were a quiet, sensible girl."

 

 

"Too quiet and too sensible. That's why this happened."

 

 

When the ambulance came it took them both away. Anita, after finding
herself miraculously on her feet, had forgotten about herself altogether.
But of course she had bruises, and the ambulance men insisted on taking
her for X-rays.

 

 

She was allowed to see. Ross some hours later.

 

 

"Ian," she said. "That was a wonderful thing you did."

 

 

He frowned. "Look, Anita, don't let's get this all wrong. I was down
there when you fell. Whoever it was, even a stranger, I'd have had to
try to help."

 

 

She nodded. "All right, have it your way. But remember, even before that,
I was coming after you."

 

 

She leaned over and kissed him.

 

 

 

 

After that Anita's views on the continued presence of Fletcher were very
similar to those of Gerry.

 

 

--Why don't you find some lonely shepherd who's pining for company?
Someone who likes voices in his head?

 

 

--I never do the finding. And if you want to be rid of me, it's up to you.

 

 

--Yes, I know about that. It's not a situation without precedent any
more. Well, anything Judy and Ian can do, I can do.

 

 

--Do you have any ideas?

 

 

--I wouldn't have opened the subject if I hadn't.

 

 

--What are you going to do?

 

 

--You'll find out. You won't like it.

 

 

She told Mrs. Sandford that for the next week at least she would be
having all her meals out.

 

 

Mrs. Sandford, friendly again, nodded. The hospital. I understand."

 

 

Although Ross would not have been detained on account of his broken arm,
the fractured shoulder was more serious and he would have to be in the
hospital for several weeks. Rules at the small convalescent home to
which he had been sent were not strict. Anita could get in to see him
at almost any time.

 

 

Anita did visit Ross very frequently. But she did not have her meals out.
She didn't have them at all.

 

 

Fletcher expostulated:

 

 

--This is crazy. You'll kill yourself. And short of that you won't
dislodge me.

 

 

--I think I will.

 

 

She drank at will; tea, coffee, milk or soft drinks. She sometimes ate
biscuits or dry toast, but nothing more substantial.

 

 

--It's like trying to starve a tapeworm to deathl Fletcher exclaimed.

 

 

--Methinks he doth protest too much.

 

 

--What does that mean?

 

 

--If it's nothing to you that I've stopped eating, why get so concerned
about it?

 

 

As the days passed, Fletcher had to admit to himself, though he did not
admit to Anita, that her method was not wholly composed of madness. Even
before she had lost the unwanted nine pounds, her primary objective,
he was so ravenous he found himself incapable of thinking of anything
but food, while she, never in the slightest concerned over eating for
eating's sake, was almost indifferent to the missed meals.

 

 

--Business girls often lunch on a glass of milk and a sandwich, she told
him airily.

 

 

--But you have the glass of milk and no sandwich.

 

 

--Well, it saves money.

 

 

Sometimes he tried to force her to take a solid meal, but with no success.
She was determined, and he was prevented from exerting his full power
by several considerations, including the fact that she was coming to no
real harm.

 

 

It was demonstrated beyond all argument that two minds in the same body
reacted differently to the same stimuli. Food was relatively unimportant
to Anita. She had a cup of tea and a piece of dry toast and if she still
felt hungry, it didn't really matter, not compared with more important
things like seeing Ross in twenty minutes, or getting rid of the cuckoo
in her mind. But Fletcher ached for food, tormenting himself with visions
of huge steaks, great plates of spaghetti and cheese, or vast mounds of
curry and rice.

 

 

His gluttony, cruelly exposed, disgusted him. Anita was certainly eating
less than she should, and would harm herself if she went on as she
was doing for long. Yet she was harming herself very little; she lost
eleven pounds and then for a time seemed incapable of losing any more,
partly because she never stinted her intake of fluids. Even after that,
when she began to grow gaunt, her cheeks becoming hollow and her bones
starting to protrude, she experienced few ill effects beyond lassitude.

 

 

Fletcher, on the other hand, was cut down to size. Searle's grandiose
conception of him prompted only hollow laughter. Because he could not
stuff himself (or rather, Anita) with vast volumes of animal and vegetable
matter, he became nothing. Even thinking, save of food, became impossible.

 

 

He wanted to die, as Searle had wanted to die.

 

 

Intercepting the thought, Anita took him to his nameless grave in the
town's biggest cemetery.

 

 

--There you are, under the soil. That's you, Fletcher. Have you finally
made up your mind to go there, when I drive you out?

 

 

He could not understand her lack of sympathy, the cruelty that he knew
was quite foreign to her. He knew and understood that she wanted to be
herself, without his interference, but her cruelty shocked him. This
was not Anita.

 

 

And then in one of the moments of clarity that were becoming less frequent,
so tortured was his incorporate spirit by an entirely corporate weakness,
he saw that the cruelty was part of her determination. She was locked
in mortal combat with him, and she would never give in. Ross, who knew
now what was going on, kept begging her to find another way. But she
had made up her mind. If necessary, she would starve herself to death.

 

 

In an unguarded moment, she let him see another reason for her cruelty. If
affection were food to him, he must have none. She would give him neither
food nor affection.

 

 

The end was as unexpected to her as to him. She felt fine, except for
the lassitude. She had just been to see Ross, and had to run to be in
time for a class she could not afford to miss.