Eyes in the Fishbowl Read online

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “It’s nothing to worry about. Some dumb clerk just forgot to turn it off.” Sara nodded, but she didn’t say anything, and she looked back over her shoulder again uneasily.

  I remember that it was some old movie that was showing on the TV, one of those old musicals with mobs of dancers in fancy costumes. I walked over to it and gave the knob a big whack and shut it off. “There!” I said, with a big phony self-confident grin. “That takes care of that. I press the magic button and —Presto! No more mysterious voices.”

  Sara smiled back, only it wasn’t a real smile; actually the way she looked at me was almost like an apology. It made me feel confused and stupid and helpless. I had an urge to yell or hit something, but all I did was whisper, “For cripes sake will you tell me what’s going on?”

  But she didn’t. I mean she didn’t tell me anything. Instead she walked on slowly, and I followed. We went back around to the east entrance, and Sara opened the door and I went out. The fog was even thicker, and the city seemed, more than ever, like the end of the world.

  I was outside before either of us said anything at all. Then Sara said, “Will you come back again?” I nodded and she closed the door and locked it. I watched her walking back towards the escalators with the night lights gleaming and then fading on her white dress until she disappeared in the darkness.

  It wasn’t until I was home in bed going over everything in my mind that I realized the voices hadn’t come from the TV set at all. We’d stood right there in front of the set for at least a minute before I turned it off, and it hadn’t made the slightest noise. The sound must have been turned off the whole time.

  Chapter 10

  Maybe alone on the elevator

  A chattering gasp was heard,

  Or a pattering rush on the escalator,

  Or perhaps it first occurred

  As a brush of fingers against the cages,

  Of the pet shop’s golden birds,

  They heard, they sensed, they almost faced it,

  And they said it was absurd;

  IT WAS THINKING about the voices and the silent TV set that gave me the idea for the first verse, because that’s the way it was with me. I sensed something that night that I didn’t let myself even think about for a long time afterwards because it seemed so crazy. Oh, I thought about what had happened all right, but mostly to figure out some logical explanation.

  I lay awake for a long time after I finally got home that night going over and over the whole thing in my mind. It occurred to me that there was a chance something had gone wrong with the sound part of the reception just as we came up—right after I heard the voices. But I knew it wasn’t too likely because the sound is usually the last part to go out when there is reception trouble; and if something does go wrong with it, it’s more apt to turn into static than into complete silence. Besides, there was the strange way Sara had acted. Finally there didn’t seem to be any other explanation: there really were people who were able to get into the store at night—and Sara did have something to do with them.

  The way I figured it out, Sara must have had some connection with somebody important in the store. Like maybe, her father was one of the owners or executives. That way she would have been able to hang around enough to get hold of some keys and a lot of information about schedules and things like that. And then maybe, she just got started letting other people into the store. Maybe just other kids now and then, like she let me in, or maybe there was a regular gang of some sort. If there was a gang, I was pretty sure it was made up of kids. I don’t know why exactly, except that Sara was so young, and also because of things I’d heard. Like, Madame Stregovitch had said that there had only been a little stealing, and Sara herself had said something about accidents and tricks being played. It all sounded like kid stuff.

  So I made up a theory, a long complicated one, about how Sara was a lonely rich kid who didn’t have many friends, and who thought up the Alcott-Simpson business as a way to meet people and have something exciting to do. It occurred to me that if she met somebody she really liked, maybe she’d lose interest in letting all the others in before they all got caught and got into serious trouble. I remembered that Sara had said that the dogs weren’t being used anymore and that the guards didn’t go on their rounds so often, so maybe she’d already stopped letting most of the others in, probably the ones who’d caused the trouble. Only I wasn’t just one of the others, because Sara had asked me if I would come back, and I had said yes.

  After a while I got too sleepy for long complicated theories, but I went on thinking about Sara clear up until I went to sleep; and even afterward—because I dreamed a lot of crazy stuff that night, and Sara kept drifting in and out of the dream. It was one of those long mixed-up dreams where all sorts of crazy things keep happening, and when I woke up I could only remember bits and pieces of it here and there. But there was one part about me riding this fantastic black horse with a silver mane and tail. I was riding it right down the middle of the street and all the cars were stopping and honking, and then I was riding it up the stairs in the main building at Randolph High. The stairs kept getting longer and longer and wider and wider, and a lot of the kids I know at Randolph were running up the stairs trying to keep up with me on the black horse, and I was laughing and waving back at them. And then all of a sudden the horse started to grow, and he got bigger and bigger until I was like some little monkey clinging to his back, and he began to kick and jump and plunge around. Then I was lying on the ground, and the horse was standing over me as big as a house; and way up on his back I saw Sara, and she was leaning over and reaching down as if she were trying to help me. I could see her as plain as day. She had on the same white dress she’d worn that night at the store, and the wind was whipping her hair across her face so that all I could see was her eyes and they were full of tears the way they’d been when I’d tried to make her explain everything.

  When I woke up the next morning, the fog was all gone and it was a bright, sunny day. Everything seemed different. All the things that had happened at Alcott-Simpson’s, particularly all the strange unexplainable things, seemed faded and indistinct and sort of a part of the dream I had just been having. During the next few days it all blended and mixed together until at times I wasn’t really sure which things had actually happened and which had been part of the dream. I went to school and to work, but for a day or two I didn’t go into Alcott-Simpson’s at all. I wanted to see Sara again very much, but I didn’t want to be in Alcott-Simpson’s again at night, and I had a feeling that if I saw Sara again I wouldn’t have much choice. Two or three times I walked all around the Alcott-Simpson block, but I didn’t go inside. Not even to get warm, in spite of the fact that it had turned foggy again and very cold.

  Once I stopped for a while to talk to José. “Hi, José,” I said. “What’s new? Seen any more police dogs lately?”

  “No, no dogs,” José said. “Them dog men geeve up and go away long time ago.”

  “Gave up?” I asked.

  “Sure. Dogs don’ do no good. Them dogs go in there and they jus’ lie down and cry.”

  “Lie down and cry?” I said. “What makes them do that? I thought those dogs were supposed to be great at patrolling stores and places like that.”

  José just shrugged and rolled up his eyes in a way that meant it was too much for him to explain. I stepped inside his booth to get warm by the little foot-warmer stove that he kept there. I bent over it and warmed my hands. “This is the coldest fog I’ve ever seen,” I said.

  José nodded. “Spirit-fog,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “You know my friend Luke?” José asked.

  I nodded. Luke was an old man who had been a janitor at Alcott-Simpson’s for years and years. He was a good friend of José’s, and he used to come over to the stand during his breaks, just to pass the time of day.

  “Luke tell me about theese spirit-fog,” José said. “Back where Luke come from in
the big hill country, they have theese theengs.”

  “What things?”

  “Theese fog, that comes white and cold in the place where the spirit leeves, een a low and lonely place between the tall hills. And Luke say that sometimes a man go into theese fog—and he not come out.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve heard some of Luke’s ghost stories before. He has a million of them. It’s just superstition. I’ll bet he doesn’t really believe all that stuff he tells himself.”

  “Maybe not,” José said. “Maybe not.”

  I had heard Lukes’s stories before, and I’d never paid much attention to them; but that night I was glad when the fog began to thin a few blocks from Alcott-Simpson’s. By the time I got home it was practically gone.

  Right about then if anyone had asked me if I’d ever go back in Alcott-Simpson’s again after hours—that is, if I ever had the chance, and it wasn’t likely I ever would—I’d have told them that wild horses couldn’t drag me. But that very night I did a funny thing. After I’d finished my homework, I got my guitar down off the wall and began to practice. I didn’t decide to do it, I just did it. And while I was practicing I caught myself several times thinking of something to play in terms of what Sara might like to hear. I told myself I was really stupid, but the thought kept coming back. Anyway, regardless of what I was practicing for, I had to admit that it felt great to play again. It had been months since I’d even touched the guitar and I was very rusty, but actually I was surprised how quickly my fingers loosened up and it all began to come back.

  The next Saturday was a calm clear day with a softness in the air that almost felt like spring. On my way to Palm Avenue to do my regular Saturday morning jobs, I walked past Alcott-Simpson’s and everything looked bright and normal. The morning sun sparkled off its hundreds of windows and lightened the gray of its stone walls. I decided that as soon as I’d finished my work, I’d drop by for a quick visit. If Sara was still hanging around the store, she’d probably be wondering where I’d been. While I swept out at the travel bureau and washed display cases at the stationers store, I was thinking over my “poor little rich kid” theory about Sara, wondering where she lived and what her life had been like to make her so—well, strange really, or at least different.

  But when I stopped by Alcott-Simpson’s on my way home, I couldn’t find Sara anywhere. The store wasn’t at all crowded, so it shouldn’t have been difficult to find someone; but I didn’t see Sara anywhere. As a matter of fact, for a nice warm Saturday, Alcott-Simpson’s was amazingly empty; but then, I told myself, maybe it was only because a lot of the customers had taken advantage of the good weather to get out of town for the weekend. Anyway, I looked around pretty thoroughly and I didn’t see anyone I knew very well. I even dropped by Madame Stregovitch’s counter, but there was a different clerk on duty—someone I’d never seen before. I tried asking her some questions, but she seemed nervous and snappy. She said she didn’t know anything at all. She didn’t know for sure, but she thought that Madame Stregovitch had been ill. “But I’m not sure,” she said. “I haven’t been sure about anything at all, lately.”

  That night right after dinner I went to my room. I knew what I had in mind when I changed my clothes and put my guitar in its plastic case, but I didn’t stop to think about it very much. I moved quickly, as if I had an appointment to keep. When I was all ready, I dropped by the kitchen to tell Dad I was going out.

  Dad wasn’t in the kitchen, but nearly everyone else in the neighborhood was. Phil and Dunc and a couple of their girl friends were sitting around the fireplace arguing about where they ought to go to spend the evening. As usual the problem seemed to be that nobody had any money. The youngest Grover kid was crawling along on the floor, dragging a dishtowel and watching Charity, who was hiding behind a chair leg and getting ready to pounce out as the dishtowel went by. Matt and Mr. Rosen, an old chess friend of Dad’s from up the street, had the chess board out on the kitchen table.

  I took the dishtowel away from the kid and made a werewolf snarl at him; he rolled over on his back like a puppy coaxing to be played with. Charity must have thought I wanted to play, too, because she danced out sideways from under the chair and grabbed me by the ankle. But I didn’t have any time to play. I shook Charity loose and asked loudly if anyone happened to know where my dad was. Everybody looked up blankly, like they couldn’t remember who I was for a minute. “My Dad?” I repeated, “you know, the guy who lives here?”

  “Oh yeah, him,” Phil said. “He retired to his studio just a minute ago—” he stopped and fluttered his eyebrows “—with a charmer from the P.T.A.”

  It might have taken me a minute to figure out what he was talking about, except that just then I heard the piano and, a second later, a horrible screeching soprano with a vibrato like an excited turkey. “Ohhh-say can you seeeeee?” the voice warbled. I knew, then, what was going on. Dad had told me about this dame who’d been over a couple of times to practice her singing. She was the mother of one of his piano students, and she imagined herself to be a singer. Somehow she’d talked the P.T.A. she belonged to into asking her to lead the National Anthem at their next meeting. Of course she wasn’t paying Dad anything for coaching her. She was just “dropping by a couple of times to warm up with a piano.” Dad told me about it as if it were kind of a joke on him, but I had an idea that it was one charity he regretted. That kind of a voice would be like scraping chalk on a blackboard as far as Dad was concerned.

  When I opened the door to the studio, the P.T.A. prima donna unclasped her hands and drifted to a stop in the midst of “the perilous night.” Dad turned around from the piano looking so grateful for the interruption that for a minute I felt sorry for him, even if he had brought it on himself.

  “Uh, excuse me,” I said. “Dad, Jerry Davidson wants me to give him a lesson on the guitar. I won’t be back until late.” It didn’t happen to be a lie. Both statements were true. They just didn’t have anything to do with each other. Dad looked at the guitar case and for a second his eyes crinkled up with pleasure. Then suddenly he cooled it and said, “I see. Well, I guess that will be all right,” in a carefully indifferent tone of voice. It was easy to see that he was trying not to show that he was happy to see me doing something with music again. It was a perfectly obvious put-on; he never was any good at pretending.

  I was on my way down the stairs before it occurred to me what his problem was. He was probably thinking that if he approved of something, I’d quit wanting to do it. I had to admit to myself that it had worked that way at times lately. But I didn’t know he knew it.

  Chapter 11

  IT WAS DARK when I got to Alcott-Simpson’s, but it wasn’t foggy and there were a lot more people on the streets than there had been the last time I’d been there at night. I walked around the block, stopping for a few minutes at each entrance. Inside everything looked the same as it had before, dim lights and white-draped counters. I went back around and stopped again at each entrance, but all it got me was some suspicious stares from passers-by. Finally I admitted to myself that it was pretty stupid to think that I could get in that way again—at least, not unless I let Sara know I was coming. She might not be there; she might be there but not know I was outside; or she might even know and be afraid to open the door because of there being so many people on the sidewalks. It had just been a coincidence the time before.

  I knew it would look strange if I went home so early, and it occurred to me that I might do what I’d pretended I was going to do. So I called Jerry from a pay phone, and luckily he was at home. When he heard that I was on my way over with my guitar, he got very enthusiastic. I’d given him a couple of lessons when I first got to know him, before I decided to quit music for good, and he’d been after me for a long time to teach him some more.

  So instead of seeing Sara that night, I sat around and played the guitar at Jerry’s house. Actually it turned out to be not a bad evening. We ate a lot of food that Jerry’s mother fixed for us, and Jerry
called up another friend of his who wanted to start on the guitar. This guy, whose name is Brett Atwood, came over and I showed them some chords and strums, and the three of us worked out a couple of new arrangements for some old songs. It turned out that Brett had a great voice and he even knew something about music, so together we came up with some pretty good ideas.

  After we’d been fooling around for quite a while, I decided to play some of the things I’d written. It was the first time I’d done any of my own stuff for anyone except my dad and some of the people around home; but everything seemed to be going so well that I decided to try it. I was really surprised at the reaction I got. Actually, they made such a fuss I was a little embarrassed. I mean, they really knocked themselves out. Like for instance, Brett—who is a much more swinging type than either Jerry or me—said, “Jerry, Baby, you have really been holding out on me. You said he was good, but you didn’t tell me the cat had a bad case of genius.”

  Afterwards I took the bus home, and when I got off downtown to transfer I walked by Alcott-Simpson’s again. It was late by then, and everything in the area was closed up tight. Almost all the pedestrian traffic had stopped and the fog was rolling in, drifting down into the canyons between the tall buildings. Inside Alcott-Simpson’s, everything seemed just the same as before. But I waited for a while, and all at once I thought I saw something move way back near the escalator. It was so dark back there it was hard to be sure, but then I thought I saw it again on the same spot. It wasn’t coming closer or going away; it was as if someone was just standing there watching. I waited, straining my eyes to see, and whatever it was waited, too. Then a police car drove by slowly, and the cop stared at me so I had to move on. A bus was rolling up to the corner, so I hurried and caught it and went on home. By the time the bus had arrived at our stop I’d figured it out, and gone back to thinking about the evening at Jerry’s. What I’d decided was that I’d only been watching a dust sheet draped over something way back in shadows. I’d only imagined I’d seen it move.