The shade swayed. The fly started on its trip across the ceiling. He shifted his weight from arms to buttocks, slid one foot to the floor. The springs creaked, but no worse than before. In a moment he was crouching beside the bed. The mutterings were still unintelligible. He took a cautious step toward the door.
The knob stopped moving. There was a scrape of metal on wood and the swish of water. Then footsteps plodding away from the door.
Carr hesitated. Then he quickly tiptoed to the door, eased open the bolt, paused again, opened the door a slit and peered out.
The cleaning woman was walking away, pail in one hand; mop, broom, duster, and dustpan in the other. Straggly plumes of hair stuck up from the rag wound around her hair. A damp, dirty blue apron was tied in a hard knot behind her waist. The heels of her shoes ran off at the sides.
Carr opened the door farther. He wet his lips. “Hello,” he said huskily.
The cleaning woman kept walking away.
He stepped into the hall. “Hello,” he called, getting control of his voice. Then, louder, “Hello!”
Not by a moment’s hesitation, not by the slightest alteration in her trudging gait, did the cleaning woman indicate that she heard.
“Hello!” Carr shouted.
The cleaning woman disappeared at an even pace down the stairs. Carr gazed after her. But his mind was listening to the drone of lone-forgotten phrases from a college psychology class:
To explain human behavior, it need not be assumed that consciousness exists. After all, we can never penetrate to the inner life of other individuals. We can never prove that such an inner life exists. But we need not. All the actions of human beings can be adequately accounted for on the assumption that human beings are unconscious mechanisms.
He edged blinding back into his rooms, bolted the door behind him, slumped against it.
At least, he told himself, the things at his door had not been what he had most feared.
But it had been almost worse.
Why, he asked himself, had he bothered to shout? Why had he sought last, unnecessary confirmation?
He already knew, had known ever since he had recovered his memory and fled from the streets.
Knew what he had known, known and rejected, at least four times before: when he had been ignored by the dumpy man and the doctor at General Employment, when he had watched Marcia in her bedroom, when he had spied on Jane’s parents in their apartment, when he had run away from the Pendleton party.
But then he had known it only for fleeting moments.
This time it had gripped his mind for hours.
It was insane, incredible.
But it was true.
Nothing else could explain his experiences.
Jane knew, the small dark man knew, these other three knew.
And now he knew.
The universe was a machine. The people in it, save for a very few, were mindless mechanisms, clockwork things of flesh and bone. So long as you made the proper clockwork motions, they seemed to react intelligently. But when you stopped, they went on just the same. When you quite being part of the clockworks, they ignored you.
How else explain the times when he had been ignored? By the dumpy man, Tom and the doctor. By the desk clerk at Marcia’s and by Marcia herself, when he had come minutes ahead of the clockwork rhythm. By Jane’s parents. By Marcia at the Pendleton party—she hadn’t been pretending to dance with someone as she twirled by herself; she had been mindlessly dancing with another clockworks figure (himself) that had moved from its proper place in the clockworks.
How else explain the times when he and Jane had been ignored? In the tavern, in the music shop, at the movie house, at the chess club. In the stacks of the library, in the streets of the Loop, at Goldie’s Casablanca. Or when Fred and he had been ignored—that crazy ride that should have set people staring and a dozen police cars and motor-cycles on their trail; and that crazy, unnoticed pursuit through the library.
How else explain the times when those other three had been ignored? The slap. Miss Hackman going through his desk. Mr. Wilson helping himself to the cigarettes. Their open talk in the tobacco shop and in front of Jane’s parents.
How else the things that hadn’t fitted? The dumpy man talking to the air. Pianos that played themselves and elevators that rose without occupants. Marcia calling him about the “wonderful evening” they’d spent together, when actually he’d run away. (For a moment he had a ghostly glimpse of her talking to an invisible companion at the Kungsholm, the waiter setting loaded plates before an empty chair. Jane’s mother stroking non-existent hair, whimpering to an absent girl. And now the cleaning woman mindlessly trying a door that, in the vast operation plan of a clockworks universe, was not supposed to be bolted; repeated the action, like a toy obstructed in mid-performance, until the appointed time came for her to finish cleaning his room and go away.
There were no other explanations. The universe was a machine. Teeming Chicago was a city of the dead, the mindless, the inanimate, in which you were more alone than in the most desolate wilderness. The face you looked at, the faces that looked at you, that smiled and frowned and spoke, had behind them only black emptiness.
Except for a few, a mostly horrible few.
What might some people do if they awakened to the knowledge that they alone had minds and consciousness, that they could do what they wanted and the machine could not stop them, that all authority was truly blind?
They would run amuck like soldiers in a conquered city, like drunken thieves in a department store at night. Treating all the people around them like the lay-figures they were. Exulting in their power. (He saw in his mind those three looking down at a sleeping Chicago.) Obeying all their hidden impulses. Satisfying all their secretest, darkest desires.
A few of them might band together, perhaps because they had awakened together. Say a wall-eyed blonde and an affable-seeming older man and a young man without a hand…
And a beast.
Jane had written, “Some animals are alive.” And he, Carr, had once been noticed when he shouldn’t have been, by a cat.
Yes, a few might band together. But except for that, they would be intensely suspicious. Afraid that some greedy, merciless group like themselves might become aware of them and destroy them, because absolute tyrants always fear and hate each other. Afraid, above all, that other people might come alive, more and more people, and punish them for their crimes.
As they satisfied their desires, as they had their “fun,” they would guiltily watch for the slightest signs of true life around them, in order to crush it out.
That was why those three had trailed Jane, why they had wanted to “check” on her.
The slap had been a test. If Jane had reacted to it, she would have been lost.
That was why Miss Hackman had searched his desk—for sights that he was something more than a mindless automaton.
That was why the small dark man with glasses was afraid. That was the great danger against which Jane had warned him, the “private underworld” she didn’t want to drag him into.
Three people preying on the dead city of Chicago, watching for the faintest hints of consciousness in the lay-figures around them.
Carr realized that he was shaking. Mustn’t they have seen him staring out the window at them this morning, conspicuous against the otherwise drearily unbroken façade? Mightn’t they even now be coming up the stairs, or standing noiselessly outside the door at which he was staring so fearfully?