He looked at the blondes. They were watching him. In an empty lot in the back of his mind, a rabbit bounded for cover, where there was no cover, and the dogs sat watching, tongues lolling. Cold started at a spot at the base of his spine. It crept nuzzling into his armpits.
He drank and scooped up his change and left.
He ran to the corner and stood, and the trembling went away. The slush was beginning to freeze. It crunched a bit under his shoes. That was another thing. You didn’t have to eat, and you didn’t get cold. Ergo, one should be beyond fear. Go around being afraid of blondes and people will begin to point at you.
He snickered. The sound was as rigid as the rind of freeze atop the sidewalk slush. We have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Problem for the class: You got a guy, see. He’s dying of cancer or something, see. He’s in agony and somebody comes into his room and stands by his bed and lifts a big club to hammer him one. Is the guy afraid? If so, why? If he is, it means that fear is something divorced from an objective and intellectual appraisal of the total situation. It means fear is spawned in the guts, down there where the animal lives, down where the rabbit blood is.
A piece of paper scuttered around the corner and embraced his leg. He bent over, picked it loose and sent it on its way.
“Hell of a big hurry, aren’t you?” he said.
Tick, tack, tick, tack. By God, perfect marching. Ex-WACs? All blonde and all coming along. So what can blondes do to you? He stood his ground for a slow count of ten.
Tick, tack.
Fear rocketed into his throat and burst out his ears and he ran like hell.
A cruiser nailed him in the spotlight, tracking him like a floorshow, making him feel as though he were running, running, running in one spot. He stopped and leaned against a building, panting. The spot still held him. It nailed his eyes to the wall behind him. Big shoulders blocked it. Creak of leather and brass gleam.
“What you running for, chief?”
“It’s... a cold night. Keeping warm.”
The cuff slid him along the wall and the hand on his rancid suit yanked him back upright. “What you running for, I said?”
“Those three blondes coming. They’re after me.” He could hear them coming. The spot went away. He was blind. But he could hear them.
“After you, you creep?”
“Yes, I...”
“Johnny, we better dump the chief here off at the ward. Come on, Mr. Irresistible.”
Tick, tack, tock, tick. Silence.
“What do you girls want?”
Brass buttons took a high, hard, stiff-legged, stiff-armed leap. Martin fell into slush and rolled. Inside the cruiser, the driver stiffened, his head going bong on the metal roof.
Martin ran, bleating. An empty field and no cover. The wise eyes of the hunting dogs. Wait until he comes around again, fellows.
He turned, skidding in the freezing slush, and ran into an alley, tangling his legs in a bunch of trash, sprawling, clawing his way up again, running into a wall, stinging his hands. He turned. Three female silhouettes in the alley mouth. High-waisted, long-legged, stilt-heeled, cream-headed.
He made little sounds in his throat and pawed his way along the wall. An alley like a shoe box with one end missing — the end they were at.
He sat down and covered his eyes. Count to ten and they’ll go away. One-a-larry, two-a-larry, three-a-larry, four.
New spotlight. This was a different one. It came at him from a lot of little directions, like one of those trick showers with a dozen spray heads.
“Got um,” a blonde voice said.
“Up to spec, no?”
They stood outside the radiance.
“Color and out,” one said.
“Take um.”
Something grew in front of him, a red happy-new-year balloon. So it was a gag, maybe. It lobbed through the air toward him, turning in iridescence. He caught it. It was red jelly with a cellophane skin. It kept trying to slide down between his fingers.
“Yah-hah!” one of the blondes said.
It broke in his hands, showered green needles up to his nose to sizzle in his brain fat.
The sky broke in half and he went over backward and down, heels up and over, sizzling.
Martin slid naked across a mirrored floor. He was bug-sized and it was the mirror on his mother’s dressing table a million years ago. He stopped sliding and tried to sit up. The bracing hand skidded and he hit his head.
He tried more cautiously. He could sit up by carefully shifting his weight, but he couldn’t stand. The surface was frictionless. Compared to it, glare ice was like sandpaper.
He lay down and looked up. Overhead was nothing. He thought about that for quite a while. Nothing. No thing. Nothing, with a flaw in it. A little flaw. He peered at it. It was in the shape of a tiny naked man. He moved a leg. The tiny naked man moved a leg. Everything clicked into focus. A mirror under him and, at an incredible height above him, another.
Now, he thought, I’m a germ on a big microscope. His body felt odd. He managed to sit up again. He looked at himself. Clean. Impossibly, incredibly clean. His fingernails were snowy. His toenails were like white paper. His skin was clean and pink with a glow of health, but the old heart went thudding slowly and sickly along.
Silence. All he could hear was the roar of his blood in his ears. Like listening to a sea shell. There had been a big pink conch in his grandfather’s house.
“Hear the sea, Marty?”
The mirror tilted and he slid into a hole that wasn’t there before. He came out into a square blue room.
His three blondes were there, watching him. We don’t get pink elephants. We don’t get snakes and bugs. We get blondes.
He stood up, too aware of his nudity. They watched him calmly, ignoring it.
“Now, look,” he said, “can’t we be friends?”
They had changed. Their mouths were different — vivid green paint in a perfect rectangle. They looked at him with that calm pride of ownership. Nice doggy.
“Now, look,” he began again, and stopped when he noticed their strange dresses. He looked closer. Ladies, please, you can’t dress with a paint spray. But they had.
“This,” he said, “is a nightmare by Petty, out of Varga.”
The paint job was nicely shaded at the edges, but just a paint job. One of them stepped to him, grabbed him by the hair and tilted his head back. She looked into his eyes and made a little clucking sound. She turned and pointed to the corner.
“Yup now,” she said.
“How does one go about yupping?” he asked vacantly.
She looked at one of the other blondes, who said slowly and precisely. “Hurry — up — now, late.”
There was a pile of clothes in the comer. He went over, glad for a chance of regaining pants, even in a dream world. The garments were recognizable, the material wasn’t. A sartorial cartoon of the American male, mid-twentieth century. Every incongruity of the clothing exaggerated. Sleeve buttons like saucers. Shoulders padded out a foot on each side. No buttons, no snaps, no zippers. You just got inside them and they were on, somehow. The buttons on the suit were fakes. The suit was bright blue with a harsh red stripe.
Dressed, he felt like a straight man in a burlesque.
From a distance he heard a great shout. It sounded like “Yah-hah!” from ten thousand throats. He suddenly had the strong hunch that he was going on display.
The nearest blonde confirmed that hunch. She stepped over and clamped a metal circlet around his forehead.
Three golden chains dangled from his headpiece. Each blonde took one chain. The nearest one to one of the blue walls touched it. A slit appeared and folded back. They went through. The blondes began to strut. A midway strut. A stripper stomp.