He let them lie.
The clock on the wall had, to be sure, stopped dead.
In fact, the electricity had been turned off.
The phone did not ring. He picked it up. Of course. It—like its friend the clock—was stone dead.
Tolliver! Tolliver! How was he doing all this?
Such things simply do not happen in an ordered universe of draglines and scoop-shovels and reinforced concrete.
He sat and thought dark, murderous thoughts about that old sonofabitch, Fred Tolliver.
A 747 boomed sonically overhead and the big heavy-plate window of his eleventh floor office cracked, splintered, and fell in around his feet.
Unknowing confluence of resonating emotions, Fred Tolliver sat in his house, head in hands, miserable beyond belief, aware only of pain and anger. His cello lay on its back on the floor beside him. He had tried playing a little today, but all he could think of was that terrible man Weisel, and the terrible bathroom that was filling with water, and the terrible stomach pains his feelings of hatred were giving him.
Electrons resonate. So do emotions. S
peak of “damned places” and one speaks of locations where powerful emotional forces have been penned up. One cannot doubt, if one has ever been inside a prison where the massed feelings of hatred, deprivation, claustrophobia and brutalization have seeped into the very stones. One can feel it. Emotions resonate: at a political rally, a football game, an encounter group, a rock concert, a lynching.
There are four billion people in the world. A world that has grown so complex and uncaring with systems and brutalization, of individuals because of the inertia produced by those systems’ perpetuation of self, that merely to live is to be assaulted daily by circumstances. Electrons dance. The emotions sing. Four billion, resonating like insects. The charge is built up; the surface tension is reached; the limit of elasticity is passed; the charge seeks release; the focus is sought: the weakest link, the fault line, the most tremblingly frangible element, AnyTolliver, EveryTolliver.
Like the discharge of a lightning bolt, the greater the charge on the Tolliver, the greater its tendency to escape. The force of the four billion driving the electrons in their mad dance away from the region of highest excess toward the region of greatest deficiency. Pain as electromotive force. Frustration as electric potential. The electrons jump the insulating gap of love and friendship and kindness and humane behavior and the power is unleashed.
Like the discharge of the lightning bolt, the power seeks and finds its focus, leaps the gap, and the bolt of energy is unleashed.
Does the lightning rod know it is draining off the dangerous electrical charge? Is there sentience in a Leyden jar? Does not the voltaic pile continue to sleep while current is drawn off? Does the focus know it has unleashed the anger and frustration of the four billion?
Fred Tolliver sat in misery, the cello forgotten, the pain of having been cheated, of being impotent against the injustice, eating at his stomach. His silent scream: at that moment the most dominant in the entire universe. Chance. It could have been anyone; or perhaps, as Chesterton said, “Coincidences are a spiritual sort of puns.”
His phone rang. He did not move to pick up the receiver. It rang again. He did not move. His stomach burned and roiled. There was a scorched-earth desperation in him. Nine thousand dollars overcharge. Thirty-seven hundred dollars by the original contract. Twelve thousand seven hundred dollars. He had had to take a second mortgage on the house. Five more months than the estimated two Weisel had said it would take to complete the job. Seven months of filth and plaster dust and inept workmen tramping through his little house with mud and dirt and dropping cigarette butts on his floor.
I’m sixty-two years old, he thought, frantically. My God, I’m an old man. A moment ago I was just middle-aged, and now I’m an old man… I never felt old before. It’s good Betsy never lived to see me like this; she would cry. But this thing with the bathroom is a terrible thing, an awful thing, it’s made me an old man, poor, in financial straits; and I don’t know how to save myself. He’s ruined my life… he’s killed me… I’ II never be able to get even, to put away a little… if the thing with the knees gets any worse, there could be big doctor bills, specialists maybe… the Blue Cross would never cover it… what am I going to do, please God help me… what am I going to do?
He was an old man, retired and very tired, who had thought he could make it through. He had figured it out so he could just barely slide through. But the pains in the back of his knees had begun three years before, and though they had not flared up in sixteen months, he remembered how he would simply fall down, suddenly, ludicrously, fall down: the legs prickling with pins and needles as though he had sat cross-legged for a long time. He was afraid to think about the pains too much. They might come back if he thought about them too much.
But he didn’t really believe that thinking about things could make them happen. Thinking didn’t make things change in the real world. Fred Tolliver did not know about the dance of the emotions, the resonance of the electrons. He did not know about a sixty-two-year-old lightning rod that leaked off the terror and frustration of four billion people, all crying out silently just as Fred Tolliver cried out. For help that never came.
The phone continued to ring. He did not think about the pains he had felt in the back of his knees, as recently as sixteen months ago. He did not think about it, because he did not want it to return. It was only a low-level throbbing now, and he wanted it to stay that way. He didn’t want to feel pins and needles. He wanted his money back. He wanted the sound of gurgling under the floor of the guest bathroom to stop. He wanted William Weisel to make good.
He answered the phone. It rang once too often for him to ignore it.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Tolliver? Is that you?”
“Yes, this is Fred Tolliver. Who’s calling?”
“Evelyn Hand. I haven’t heard from you about my violin, and I’m going to need it late next week…”
He had forgotten. In all the anguish with Weisel, he had forgotten Evelyn Hand, and her damaged violin. And she had paid him already.
“Oh, my gosh, Miss Hand, I’m awfully sorry! I’ve just had the most awful business going on these last months, a man built me a guest bathroom, and he overcharged me nine thousand dollars, and it’s all broken and…”
He stopped. This was unbecoming. He coughed with embarrassment, giving himself a moment to gather his composure. “I’m just as terribly sorry and ashamed as I can be, Miss Hand. I haven’t had a chance to get to the repairs. But I know you need it a week from today…”
“A week from yesterday, Mr. Tolliver. Thursday, not Friday.”
“Oh. Yes, of course. Thursday.” She was a nice woman, really. Very slim, delicate fingers and a gentle, warm voice. He had thought perhaps they might go to the Smorgasbord for a meal, and they might get to know each other. He wanted companionship. It was so necessary; now, particularly, it was so necessary. But the memory of Betsy was always there, singing softly within him; and he had said nothing to Evelyn Hand.
“Are you there, Mr. Tolliver?”
“Uh, yes. Yes, of course. Please forgive me. I’m so wrought up these days. I’ll get to it right away. Please don’t you worry about it.”