“After we had walked for a while the first day I saw two of my girl friends ahead. He said, ‘I’ll leave you now.’ and I got that queer blinking feeling and he went off. I was glad, because I wouldn’t have know how to introduce him.
“That first walk set a pattern. We’d always meet and part in the same way. And I still had the oddest trouble remembering him and of course I never mentioned him to a soul. Away from the park I’d say, ‘You dreamed him, Jane,’ almost meaning it. But the next afternoon Id’ go to the park and he’d appear and I’d walk with him and have the feeling of a friend seeing into my mind. It went on that way for quite a while.”
Carr got up and took he glass. He noticed that one of the window shades had about an inch of blackness under it and he went over and pulled it down to the sill.
“And then things changed?” he asked as he made more drinks.
“In a way.”
“Did he start to make love to you?”
“No. Perhaps he should have. Perhaps thing would have been better if he had. But he couldn’t. Because, you see, he was trying to do a very difficult and delicate thing. He wanted me to exist both inside the life-machine and out of it at the same time, without my knowing it. Away from the park I’d just be part of the machine, going through the required motions in a sort of trance. Then at the park with him, I’d break the pattern, but without spoiling the pattern of the rest of my life. Because at that park I’d have just been wandering by myself most of the time, and if he saw I was about to meet someone else, bringing me back into the pattern, he could always drift off.
“He wanted me for a friend, because he was all alone, but he didn’t want me alone with him in his dangerous existence, where he’d have to be responsible for me.
“All this meant that he had to be very careful about our meetings and I’d have to be careful about them too. He made me understand, though he didn’t exactly say so, that our walks together were governed by magic rules and everything would be spoiled if they were once broken. For instance, I must never hurry to meet him. It must always happen as if by accident. We must never try to go any special place together. We must talk as familiarly as the closest friends and yet never ask each other our names, and he must always leave me without warning and without arranging when or where we were to meet again. As if everything happened by a quiet, fatalistic enchantment.
“Actually he was trying to drive along beside a part of my life’s pattern, an unknown intruder, while I was to be his dream-child, or dream-love, you might say, whom he had awakened, but left entranced in the pattern of her old life, not really changed.
“But he couldn’t do it. Not for long. As it turned out, things had to change. No matter how had he tried, he couldn’t conceal from me that there was something horribly important behind what was happening so idly. I sensed a terrible, mute tension inside him. Even when his voice was gentlest and most impersonal I could feel that seething flood of energy, locked up, frustrated, useless. Eventually it began to seep over into me. We’d be walking along slowly and for no good reason my heart would begin to pound, I could hardly breathe, there’d be a ringing in my ears, and little spasms of tension would race up and down me. And all the while he’d be talking ever so calmly. It was awful.
“Perhaps if he ha made love to me…though of course that would have spoiled his whole plan, and, from his point of view, exposed me to dangers that he didn’t feel he had the right to make me share. Still, perhaps if he’d have spoken to me frankly, told me exactly how things were, asked me to share his miserable, hunted life with him, it would have been better.
“But he didn’t. And then things began to get much worse.”
Carr gave her another drink. “How do you mean?”
Jane looked up at him. Now that she was caught up in her story, she looked younger than ever, and then unevenly blond hair, heavy lipstick, and tight black dress seemed ludicrous, as if she’d fixed herself that way for an adolescent joke.
“We were stuck, that’s what it amounted to, and we began to rot. I suppose that’s the meaning of decadence—it never springs from action but from avoiding action. At any rate, all those things he said, that had at first delighted me because they matched my thoughts, now began to terrify me. Because, you see, I believed that those queer thoughts of mine were just quirks of my mind, and that by sharing them with someone Id’ get rid of them. I kept waiting for him to tell me how silly and baseless they were. But he never did. Instead, I began to see from the way he talked that my queer thoughts weren’t illusions at all, but the ultimate truth about the real world. Nothing did mean anything. Snores actually were a kind of engine-puffing and printed words had no more real meaning than wind-tracings in sand. Other people weren’t alive, really alive, like you were, except perhaps for a few ghostlike kindred souls. You were all alone.
“I had discovered his great secret, you see, in spite of all his attempts to hide it from me. Though I didn’t tell him that I knew.
‘Now the walks in the park did begin to affect the rest of my life. Not so much as to change its pattern, of course, but its moods. All day I’d be plunged in gloom. My father and mother seemed a million miles away, my classes at the academy the most unbearable stupidity in the world. I couldn’t read books although I studied the words ever so closely. I didn’t understand some of the things I said, the mere appearance of a building or a street could frighten me, and sometimes in the middle of my practicing I’d snatch my hands away as if the keys had bitten me. Though, as I say, this didn’t change the pattern of my life and of course no one noticed—how could they, parts of a machine in a machine world?—except Gigolo my cat.”
She looked at Carr strangely. “Some animals are really alive, you know, just like some people. Perhaps they catch it from the people. They look at you when you’re outside the pattern, and then you know.”
“I know,” said Carr. “Gigolo looked at me once.”
“And not only cats,” Jane said.
“What do you mean?” Carr asked uneasily. He had remembered Miss Hackman’s references to “the beast.”
“Nothing in particular,” Jane said after a moment. Carr didn’t tell her his thoughts.
“Anyway,” Jane continued, “Gigolo knew. Sometimes he acted afraid and spat at me, and sometimes he came purring to me in a most affectionate way—then sometimes he watched at the windows and doors for hours, as if he were on guard. I was lost and not one soul tried to save me, not even my man in the park. He, in a way, least of all—because I think he realized the change in me, but still wanted to save his pleasant dream.”
She took a drink and leaned back. “And then one autumn day when the clouds were low and the fallen leaves crackled under our feet, and we’d walked farther together than ever before, in fact, for once he’d come with me a little way out of the park, and I was pleased at that—well, just then I happened to look across the street and I noticed a spruce young man looking at us. That made me glade too, for it was the first time I remembered anyone seeming to look at both of us together, and I was always hoping that something would break in on us and get us unstuck. I called my friend’s attention to the young man. He peered around through his thick glasses.