He burst into the twilight of the embankment.
Without checking his pace, he crossed it and dove toward the oily water.
He had a glimpse of black pilings rushing by. His head was struck a heavy blow. There was a rush of pain.
He was conscious of the coldness of the water, of the weight of his clothes, of fading light, of nothingness.
Chapter Fourteen
The Cleared Vision
First there was a throbbing. Then the throbbing split into two parts: pain and a slow rocking. Then several sensations: The reek of burning oil and water-rotted wood. The feel of blankets against naked skin. A swaying light. A low ceiling. A general ache. A faint nausea.
Then the realization that all this centered in one person and that person was himself.
Then a great misty oval above him that slowly unblurred into a face. A huge pale face with wide heavy jaws that suggested glandular dysfunction. A wide mouth with pendant underlip and yellowed teeth. Heavily seamed cheeks, a bashed-in nose, cavernous eye-sockets with large unwinking eyes, the whites faintly muddied. Tufty black eyebrows shot with gray. Above, a great white dome of forehead. The expression was one of brooding solitude.
Carr felt a big hand under his shoulders lifting him effortlessly. A thick glass was gently pushed against his lips.
“Here.”
It was whisky and water. Carr drank it in small swallows. Then he looked at the face again. He recognized the giant bargeman who had once looked up at him on the bridge. He guessed he was in the cabin of the black motor-barge.
But he didn’t want to think. It wasn’t the pain so much as a general sick listlessness. He was content to lie back in the blankets.
The bargeman stood up. He was so tall that in spite of his stooping, his head barely missed the small, curved beams that supported the roof of the cabin, and from one of which a flaring oil lamp hung.
“You’ll live, all right,” he said in a rumbling voice. “Though I wouldn’t have sworn to it when I fished you out. How’d you get in that fix anyway? Who was it you bothered? I suppose you went around stirring things up, like most of the other fools. The gang don’t like that. It spoils their show. You ought to learn to live quiet, like I do.” And he reached out a big splay-fingered hand and poured himself a drink of whisky in the tumbler from which Carr had drunk.
The paint on the walls was blackened and peeling. At the far end was a small cookstove, a pantry, a sink, and a rusty watertank bracketed to the ceiling. At the same height were several ventilation slits but Carr couldn’t see out of them. He noticed his clothes drying on a short washline. Opposite the bunk was a wide sliding door, shut. There were several chests and boxes about. Next to the door was a bookcase made of fruit crates. It was packed with thick volumes. Tacked to the wall wherever space allowed were pictures of prizefighters, cut from newspapers, and cheap reproductions of engravings and etchings by Dore and Goya.
The bargeman poured himself another drink of whisky and sat down in a gray unpainted chair. He scratched the hair on his chest where it brushed out around his undershirt. He frowned at Carr.
“How’d you catch on, anyway?” He sat forward, elbows on knees. “Most folks don’t, you know. They can’t.”
He paused, as if to let his words sink in. Then, “It happened to me pretty sudden,” he continued. “My name’s Jules. Old Jules. I used to be a sailor, but I liked to think I’d go to one of the big libraries and make them get me all sorts of books. Philosophy, metaphysics,” he split the syllables carefully, “science, even a little religion, I’d read in them and try to figure out the world. What was it all about, anyway? Why was I here? What was the point in the whole business of getting born and working and dying? What was the use of it? Why’d it have to go on and on?
“And why’d it have to be so damn complicated? Why all the building and tearing down? Why’d there have to be cities, with crowded streets and busses and cable cars and electric cars and big openwork steel boxes built to the sky to be hung with stone and wood—my only friend got killed falling off one of those steel boxkites. Shouldn’t there be a simpler way of doing it all? Why did things have to be so mixed up that a man like myself couldn’t have a single clear decent thought?”
Carr listened dreamily. The whisky was taking effect. His head didn’t ache so badly now.
“More’n that, why weren’t people a real part of the world?” the other continued, taking a gulp of whiskey from the glass. “Why didn’t they show more honest-to-God response? Yes, that was it—response. For instance, when you slept with a woman, why was it something you had, and she didn’t? Why, when you went to a prize fight, were the bruisers only so much meat, and the crowd a lot of little screaming popinjays? Why was a war nothing but marching and blather and bother? Why’d everybody have to go through their whole lives so dead, doing everything so methodical and prissy, like they was a Sunday School picnic or an orphan’s parade?”
He rubbed the back of his neck and pulled his chair a little closer.
“And then all of a sudden, when I was reading one of the science books, it come to me. The answer was all there, printed out plain to see, only nobody could see it. It was just this: Nobody was really alive. Back of other people’s foreheads there wasn’t any real thoughts…just nerves, just wheels. You didn’t need thoughts or minds, or love or fear, to explain things. The whole universe—stars and man and dirt and worms and atoms, the whole shooting match—was just one big engine.”
He finished his drink.
Carr turned his head a little so that he could see the bargeman more clearly. It almost soothed him to hear the horrors of the last few days spoken out so casually.
“So there it was all laid out for me,” the bargeman continued. “That was why there was no honest-to-God response in people. They were just machines. The fighters was just machines made for fighting. The people that watched them was just machines for stamping and screaming and swearing. A woman was just a loving machine, all nicely adjusted to give you a good time…but the farthest start was nearer to you than the mind behind that mouth you kissed.
“D’ja get what I mean? People just machines, set to do a certain job and then die. If you kept on being the machine you were supposed to be, well and good. Then your actions fitted with other people’s. But if you didn’t, if you started doing something else, then the others didn’t respond. They just went on doing what was called for. It wouldn’t matter what you did, they’d just go on making the motions they were set to make. They might be set to make love, and you might decide you wanted to fight. Then they’d go on making love while you fought them. Or it might happen the other way. Somebody might be talking about Edison. And you’d happen to say something about Ingersoll. But he’d just go on talking about Edison. You were all alone!”
He slewed around in his chair and poured himself another whisky.
“All alone. Except for a few others—not more than one in a hundred thousand, I guess—who wake up and figure things out. But they go crazy and run themselves to death, or else turn mean. Mostly they turn mean. They get a cheap little kick out of pushing things around that can’t push back. All over the world you’ll find them—little gangs of three or four, half a dozen—who’ve waked up, just to get their cheap kicks. Maybe it’s a couple of coppers in Frisco, a schoolteacher in K.C., some artists in New York, some rich kids in Florida, some undertakers in London—who’ve found out that all the people walking around are just dead folks and to be treated no decenter. Maybe it’s a couple of guards over at one of those death-camps they had in Europe, who see how bad things are and get their fun out of making it a little worse. Just a little. A mean little. They don’t dare to really destroy in a big way, because they know they machine feeds them and tends them, and because they’re always scared they’ll be noticed by gangs like themselves and wiped out; It’s fear drives them, always fear. They haven’t the guts to really wreck the whole shebang, but they get a kick out of scribbling their dirty pictures on it, out of meddling and messing with it. I’ve seen some of their fun, as they call it, sometimes hidden away, sometimes in the open streets. It’s lousy and rotten.