Star Science Fiction 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  * * * *

  May 1.

  Yoshi says, and she wears an old stocking of mine on her head for a turban, help them be two. She says: Do shave Will’s hair and sacrifice it to Shiva-with-the-Four-Arms that he sever them into two times two. Burn Will’s hair. But Phil’s hair should be done up with cow dung. That will help them be two.

  * * * *

  November 9.

  Will’s cold is hanging on. We still kept him indoors today. He’s rather cross and a bit run down. Got himself badly scratched up, along the left leg, while playing in his play-pen with some train tracks. When Phil came home I’ll be darned if he hadn’t his leg scratched up too. The right one. He had crawled off towards the garden fence and fallen against the barbed wire.

  * * * *

  December 13.

  Yoshi said, in a magical singsong voice not her own: Don’t bathe them in water, which makes for sameness. Will should be rubbed with the fat of a hilsa, but for Phil you should get the twice-chewed hay of a sacred cow and boil it in palm oil, with leaves of sandalwood and minusops. That you should rub on Phil. It will make them different.

  * * * *

  February 12.

  There is a Peter Toledo and a Peter MacGregor among the boys down at the Mission Nursery. Peter Toledo is small and dark and flabby, and Peter MacGregor is tall and blond and springy. They haven’t got a thing in common but their name. And that Phil is picking on Peter Toledo and Will is bothering Peter MacGregor. Today Phil took Peter Toledo’s cookies, up in the dining room, and bit him when he cried, while Will kicked Peter MacGregor off the swing, down in the backyard, and rocked himself wildly and burst with laughter when he saw that Peter had got hurt.

  * * * *

  Christmas.

  It seems so strange, these two children who are really only one. And you don’t know where one ends and the other begins. Will is for Phil, Phil is for Will, and there seems to be no room for anybody else. The space between them seems different from the space around, permeated by invisible communications. I’ve looked it up in the books, and it seems to be all perfectly normal the way it is. James says each one has a soul, each one of them is alone before God. But sometimes I wonder.

  * * * *

  May 5.

  Phil has grown faster than Will. He is almost an inch taller now. But Will is getting so bossy. Phil—”My Phil”—he has to do everything just the way Will wants him to. Phil is such a good boy. He does not mind. This morning Will wetted Phil’s bed. I know he did, because Phil’s bed was dry when I picked him up for his bath. But Will said: “Phil made wettywetty in his beddy. Bad Phil.” And Phil looked at us so sorrowfully with guilty eyes. I really think he believed he did it.

  * * * *

  Halloween.

  Yoshi said: Their karmas are two. They are two. She sat on a stool by the bead curtain front door, spreading her shawl over Will and Phil on her sides, and she held their hands—Will’s left, Phil’s right joined on her lap. The heart and the head line will never meet on Will’s palm; he’s going to be an impulsive boy. Phil will be pensive. See, where they join, the head and the heart line, in one. This swelling shows fortune and foresight. The life line is long but the mountain of love is shrivelled; dimpled and broken his pride and reliance. Will too shows good fortune but is reckless and wild. The field of Dishnana augurs abundance, but the mountain of love is like Phil’s, just like Phil’s, and his life line is cut through by Asuras. Their karmas are two, said Yoshi.

  * * * *

  Palm Sunday.

  I gave Phil a bunny with floppy ears, but he cried till Will got one just like it. I gave Willy a set of jinglebells but he broke them in two, half for him, half for Philly. I gave them a team of galloping horses hitched to a covered wagon. They cried they did not want one but two. But there wasn’t another one, not in all of Vanyambadi. So they cried and they said: We are scared of it, take it away!

  * * * *

  This is as far as she got. Poor mother. Here her hand was halted.

  Had she listened to Yoshi, perhaps the earth would have tarried. And we were to leave anyway, for Dad had been called to the Christ Church in Chicago. But the earth did not wait. God knows why it was sore at me and my Will.

  There is not much I can remember. A sulky day of frightening colors. The kitten vomited and mewed, and the sheep dog had his tail between his legs. Yoshi was off to the village. Rice wine, too much rice wine, 1 remem­ber they said. Has anybody ever seen a sunset like this, they said. A cloud with a golden rim was hovering over the horizon like a monster. Then I felt dizzy, trying to hold myself on all fours, and sick to my stomach. When it was over, the house had crumbled and the yard was gaping and smoking and the sheep dog was howling at the ruins and Dad took me in his arms and kissed me and carried me away. Mother had gone to Heaven, he said, and Will had gone with her so she wouldn’t be lonely, but Philly and Daddy would go to Chicago. The stars had long tails and swirled over the sky through the ship’s bull’s eye.

  Poor father. Had he listened to me, we might have found Will, for he was not in Heaven. I heard his voice calling in the night and wept to the nurse who came to soothe me. “My Will is crying, my Will wants me.” I heard him often and knew him to be sick and looking for us. Phil is missing Will so, they said.

  There was a mirror in the dressing room at the Nursery School in Chicago. I looked at it, while the teacher but-toned up my snowsuit, and called, overjoyed, “There is my Will.” The other children too began to point at their selves in the mirror and shouted names and jumped and laughed. There is another Dick. Where is the other Helen? My Tommy! Many a one fancied a twin. It was a game like another. Thus my Will faded to fantasy and then was forgotten. He was put away with the old toys for new ones.

  That was thirty years ago.

  * * * *

  CHICAGO TRIBUNE, December 4, 1952. AUTHOR SLAIN IN APARTMENT BY DRUNKEN WIFE. Rome, December 3. William Sailor, thirty-four-year-old Anglo-Indian, was murdered this afternoon in his apartment in Via Sistina. Apparently he was attacked by his wife, the former Martha Egan, a television starlet, with a hunt­ing knife. The woman, who was found to be doped and drunk, stabbed his left cheek and wounded his left arm. While Sailor was staggering and trying to regain his senses, the woman fired two shots from a pistol. Sailor was killed instantly. Neighbors and police were brought to the scene by the shots. Mrs. Sailor suffered a nervous breakdown. The Sailors had been heard quarrelling sev­eral times before.

  Sailor lost all his family during the earthquake of Vanyambadi, India, in 1921. At sixteen he joined the British Merchant Navy and led an adventurous life that took him over most of the Asian and African coasts. After the war he settled in Rome where he married Martha Egan in 1949. William Sailor is the author of numerous books on travel and adventure. His best known work is a novel, No Home for Strangers.

  * * * *

  “Did you see that, Phil?” Robby McNutting said over the luncheon table. “It’s this morning’s Trib. He looked just exactly like you. My word, I’ve never seen such a likeness in all my life. Look at the forehead, generous like yours; the short cropped hair, the questioning eyes. Must be dark, like yours. The long straight nose, and the folds down the mouth, deeper on one side. Look, he even draws one shoulder up like you. Your mirror image.” And he handed the page to Phil.

  The paper trembled in Phil’s hand so he put it down before him on the table and wiped over it with the back of his spoon as though to flatten it, or to see whether it was really there. Jim Wilder pushed his chair round the corner of the table, to look at the picture too, and Ted Con­nally, on the opposite side, got up, walked round, leaned his arms on the back of Phil’s chair, and looked over his shoulder.

  “Boy,” Jim Wilder said, “it’s almost uncanny.”

  “Phil, old fellow,” Ted Connally guffawed, slapping him on the shoulder, “how does it feel to have been murdered?”

  “Oh, come on,” Robby McNutting said helpfully, “you can’t tell from a telephoto. Maybe the
man looked altogether different.”

  Phil kept staring at the picture and the story. “And I knew it, I knew it, I knew it all the time,” he mumbled. Then he poured down his Martini, and McNutting’s and Wilder’s and what was left of Ted Connally’s second, and staggered out of the Club.

  * * * *

  CHICAGO TRIBUNE, December 8, 1952. MURDER­ESS DEFENDED BY VICTIM’S DOUBLE. Rome, De­cember 7. Theophil Thorndike, a Chicago banker, arrived here today by plane from New York. He claimed to be the twin brother of William Sailor who was murdered by his wife on December 3. Thomdike said he had documents to prove the relationship. People who knew William Sailor said the similarity to Thorndike was astounding. Thorndike hired a lawyer to defend Mrs. Sailor and obtained her transfer, pending trial, to a private room at the sanatorium Villa Igea.

  * * * *

  They certainly had explained my coming. But probably she had not listened. She was easily distracted. When I opened the door she seemed utterly unprepared.

  She stared at me, buried her face in her hands, then stared again, forlorn. She jerked up from the red uphol­stered armchair in which she had been resting and retreated towards the red-framed window, groping blindly backwards with her arms, always staring at me, through me, at the red rousing wall. She leaned against the window, her palms cooling on the glass pane. Her black open hair fell over her black shoulders. Her face was pale and contorted. A witch condemned to the stake, a poor sick suffering girl. “Go away,” she hissed, “please go away and leave me alone.”

  “How do you do, Martha.” The calm swing of a trained business voice sounded utterly out of place, even to me. “I am Will’s brother Phil Thorndike. From Chi­cago. Didn’t they tell you?” There was not another sound to be gotten out of her. She stood there black and twisted, her arms spread out, a barren tree against the darkling sky. A quarter of an hour, perhaps half an hour, and night fell. I stole towards the door and slipped out.

  * * * *

  The next morning he brought her roses and candies.

  “Hello, Martha, you look fine today. Had a good rest? It was cold in Chicago when I left, you know; the wings of the plane were heavy with ice. We had a hard time tak­ing off. Didn’t he ever tell you he had a brother? He probably didn’t remember. I couldn’t either, but then I knew it even though he ceased to be real long ago, in a certain way. Dad kept talking about him and mother, and there were pictures and the baby book. I’ll show them to you. Look, I bought a copy of No Home for Strangers. Started reading it. He must have been a tough guy. You know, I wanted to be a writer, too. Took a couple of courses in creative writing at college. But then, I met—Martha—my wife’s name was Martha too—and then I got a job at the Morris Trust Company and went to Lass School. I guess that didn’t leave much time for anything else. Why don’t you try these candies? You smoke? You know, I don’t know a soul here in Rome. It’s funny. But there are American bars all over the place. Hot dogs deluxe—the Romans take them so seriously and they’re terribly fashionable. But I don’t like it here. People star­ing at me. `That must be William Sailor’s brother’—do I really look so much like Will?”

  “Why don’t you shut up?”

  * * * *

  “Hello Martha. Feeling better today?”

  “Say, how long are you going to hang around here?”

  “Oh, Martha, I want to stay as long as necessary. I want to help you.... I’ve finished Will’s book. Do you like it, Martha?”

  “I hate it. And I hate Will. I hate both of you. Oh, don’t go! Please don’t go away.”

  Martha wept, fitfully and fearfully. Her face on her arm on the red polished hospital table. Her back shaking. Tears clogging her nose and choking her throat. The world, coming to an end with each long pressed sob, vanished trembling behind the wall of tears. The void closed in, tightening on her deluged temples, her squeezed lungs. She wept on Phil’s hand stretched to stroke soothingly her jerking shoulders. “Poor girl,” he said. “I know it. I know it all. Cry it out. Cry it all out of your system.”

  She stroked his face, blindly, gratefully.

  “The scar,” she said, and had suddenly stopped weep­ing. “The scar on your cheek, on your right cheek.” She looked at him in new horror.

  “Nothing. An accident. A crash. Three months ago. It’s all healed now.”

  * * * *

  Martha: Good morning Phil. How nice of you to come so early.

  Phil: Had a good rest?

  Martha: Just fine. Thanks. And you?

  Phil: I got up early and took a walk in the city.

  Martha: It’s a wonderful city.

  Phil: People sitting outdoors in the caf6s.

  Martha: In Via Veneto.

  Phil: In December. In Chicago it’s blizzards.

  Martha: And here the light is lambent on the red stones.

  Phil: Youjust walk for hours, just walk and get lost.

  Martha: One discovery opening into another.

  Phil: Don’t you love it?

  Martha: I loved it.

  Phil: How long have you been living here, Martha?

  Martha: Seven, almost eight years. It’s almost eight years.

  Phil: Met Will in Rome?

  Martha: At Dermott McDermott’s.

  Phil: You know Dermott?

  Martha. Of course I do. I was staying with him, and you know Freddy.

  Phil: Freddy? It’s years and years.

  Martha: He pays him ninety dollars a month.

  Phil: Just for the fun of sleeping with him.

  Martha: Freddy is a terrible mess.

  Phil: I don’t see what Dermott finds in him.

  Martha: Sometimes he won’t speak to Dermott all day.

  Phil: I think he hates Dermott. I think he will kill Dermott some day.

  Martha: When Dermott wants to dress up and go to the show, Freddy won’t

  shave and he’ll hang around in dirty jeans, and he’ll go out into the street and talk to the whores.

  Phil: Like and like keep good company.

  Martha: He won’t do a thing at home. The bathroom, always messy. He’d

  use up the last piece of soap.

  Phil: The last piece of toilet paper.

  Martha: But he’d never dream of replacing it.

  Phil: Never. You had to do it all.

  Martha: What are you smiling at? Am I boring you? I guess I am boring you.

  Phil: Not in the least, Martha.

  Martha: Will smiled, just before that gun went off.

  Phil: Smiled, just like that.

  Martha: I sometimes think: You. Simply you. You almost did it. You died.

  You scared me. Don’t do it again. I must be more careful. That must never happen again. Phil, I am so scared.

  Phil: How did Will and Dermott get along?

  Martha: At first, famously. That is, Will adored Dermott.

  Phil: And Dermott just loves being adored.

  Martha: For Will, Dermott was a real writer, and artist. Dermott had to

  check every comma Will wrote.

  Phil: Poor Will. And he himself wasn’t a real writer?

  Martha: Just thrillers, you know. And he said he did not know any language

  at all.

  Phil: He must have known Hindi, as a child.

  Martha: He forgot it, and English he never learned. Just picked it up from

  the boys in the Navy.

  Phil: And read a lot, I guess.

  Martha: But it was not his language. And lately he started getting mixed up

  with Italian.

  Phil: He had no language.

  Martha: It does something to your mind, he said.

  Phil: Huprooted. Kicked around in world and creeds and systems. So

  huprooted. All of us.

  Martha: And did he show off in front of Dermott, spend­ing silly amounts of

  money, you know, and telling him how many copies of his latest book had been sold and in how many languages it had been translated.

&nbs
p; Phil: Dermott couldn’t care less.

  Martha: And he said it read best in Persian, although there were a few minor

  mistakes in the trans­lation.

  Phil: That’s sheer snobbism.

  Martha: I don’t know why he picked up with me in the first place; whether it

  was because he cared for me or whether he thought it would hurt Dermott. You know, he was jealous of Dermott, at the same time.

  Phil: And you?