CHAPTER 7

It was a telephone exchange, with minute light-buttons flashing on and off. The switchboards were back-to-back; as the Governor walked slowly along he could see only the operators opposite. They were all girls he remembered poignantly, girls he had loved, whose images had filled his mind, girls he had wanted, courted, thought about through restless nights, girls he had been too timid, too awkward, too shy or inept to have. There was not one whose name or voice or scent he had forgotten. Sheila, whose spare, tanned body tormented his adolescence, smiled up at him with those tantalizing lips, thin but so perfectly, so sweetly curved. Beth, who swam and sailed and rode like a boy but constantly reminded him she was a girl, waved a free hand as she plugged into the board with the other. And there was Marge, Marge of the translucent skin, and hair the silvery gold of a full moon on a hot summer's night, Marge, whose exquisiteness it had been agony not to touch, hold, crush, raven. They were all there: Anne, Louise, Ellen, Charlotte, Gwen, Dot, Jill, Hermina, Belle, Sybil.... All those rewards ironic experience informed him belatedly he could have known. Grief swelled internally; he felt the tears flowing backward from his eyes down to his throat and lungs.

The girls' darting fingers snapped and unsnapped the connections in rapid rhythm. The pointed plugs were rifle bullets growing out of living vines rooted in the switchboards. This was his chance to call Marvin; what if some vital business had come up?

Yet he could not signal to the girls opposite: Connie, whose husband had contributed to his campaign for councilman, Martha, met at some dull affair, who had gotten tight with him. He could not ask them for an impersonal number; he dared not address them familiarly after realizing how fully he had failed them. The telephone exchange was a place where communication was impossible.

His steps slowed; he grudged leaving the women even though he could not reach or touch them, even though he was as helpless to stay as he had been to seduce. His sadness at the implacability of fate merged with a gentler, resigned nostalgia.

* * * * *

The last pair of switchboards was unoccupied. The Governor pulled a plug out from each; the vine-wires were straight and inflexible. They sped through the air, escaping his fingers, growing diagonally upward. Thinner tendrils sprang out from them at intervals and entwined into the rungs of a slanting ladder. Lampley put his foot on the lowest; it was springy but it held his weight without bending too far. He mounted rapidly.

Halfway up he looked back. The vines had sprouted umbrella-sized leaves, making a curtain between him and the exchange. He caught glimpses of blonde, red or brown heads and thought he heard weeping and laughter. Hummingbirds, moths and dragonflies in brilliant colors lit on the foliage; the leaves turned scarlet and orange. Gentle winds rustled them.

The wind on the floor to which he climbed was gray and desolate. Far across the emptiness he saw a twenty-four motored plane being warmed up while the waiting passengers cooled cups of coffee in the wash of the propellers. Equally distant in another direction, an ice-boat turned in narrow circles. Lightning flashed from dark clouds, thunder rolled steadily. Lampley walked to a stairway, iron-railed and steep.

Smell indicated that the floor above was used for chickens. Wire cages reached higher than a man's head, fryers stuck wan beaks through the openings into feed-troughs, pecking in brainless, suicidal intensity: tappetty-tappetty-tappetty tap-tap. Women with arms like thighs and breasts like rumps butchered methodically, wringing necks, cutting throats, chopping heads off. Spattered with blood, the women wiped their eyes with their great forearms, tossing sweaty hair out of their faces, joking, smearing entrails on their filthy aprons. The Governor hastily climbed the shallow wooden stairs ahead.

He was panting a little when he reached the sculptors' studio. Statues towered in impassive marble, porphyry, onyx, granite: men and women, gods and goddesses, dinosaurs, scorpions, dolphins, tortoises, dryads, satyrs, soaring abstractions--multiplaned figures, spheres, subtly out-of-round, curves and ovals in inescapable relationships. He put his hand against the cold stone; the aloof, remote smoothness reassured him.

Obscured--not hidden, but certainly not put out for all to see--were groups in wood, soapstone, chalk, jade, concrete, glass, bone. Mermaids, centaurs, demons, incubi, basilisks, cockatrices, foetuses, were carved in meticulous detail. Monsters, congenitally malformed, crouched next to cyclops, multi-limbed children, hermaphrodites, twins joined chest to chest, mouthless, earless, armless creatures. He shuddered away from them, turned back to the nobler creations; always his eye found another collection of horror for him to gaze at.

* * * * *

He was reluctant to leave this place of quietness and aspiration, of fascinating disgust. The stairway leading up was a continuance. The flight was of chalcedony, wide, sweeping upward in the grand manner, curving outward at the base and dividing in two halfway up; it was covered with slime which bubbled and stank in decay.

He trod fastidiously through the contamination, wiping his feet free of the clinging rot at the top. A bespectacled ape with a stethoscope dangling from the pocket of his white jacket seized Lampley's hand, dug his fingers into the wrist, feeling for the pulse with an unbreakable grip. The jacket was his only garment; it was not quite long enough to cover his genitals.

"Get a stretcher, Nurse," the ape called over his shoulder. He stood on tiptoe to peer first into the Governor's right eye, and then the left, holding the lids open gently.

"There's nothing wrong with me," protested Lampley.

"Let's hope not," murmured the ape soothingly. "We'll soon find out."

Another ape in white cap and starched white skirts pedaled with bare feet a bicycle attached to a gurney. "Just get on this," said the ape-doctor.

"I can walk," contended Lampley.

"We have our rules," insisted the ape-doctor firmly but not unpleasantly. "If you are cooperative it will be easier all around."

The ape-nurse smiled at the Governor, opening her mouth wide to show her fangs. "You can sit, you know; you don't have to lie down."

Lampley seated himself on the edge of the gurney. The ape-nurse pedalled vigorously; the doctor trotted alongside, consulting the bulbous watch on his furry arm. The dial had no hands, numerals or glass, only buttons marked, HOT, RUTTING, COLD, BANANA, JAVA, RESET. "I don't understand," said Lampley.

"Don't worry," advised the doctor. "None of us understand. Just remember there's nothing to worry about. We're here only to help you."

"But I don't need help."

The two apes exchanged significant glances and the nurse picked a flea off the doctor's thigh. "That's what they all say," commented the doctor pityingly. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. The tempo of uncivilized life is such it's a wonder more don't break under it."

"I--" began the Governor, and stopped. He could deny nothing.

They entered a white-floored room shaped like a tepee, with white walls leaning together, coming to a point at an incandescent light above. The nurse pedalled the gurney under the cone and rested her head on her arms. Five other ape-doctors came through the shining walls which closed unbroken behind them. "Good-day, Doctor," they greeted in unison.

"Good-day, Doctor," replied the ape-doctor. "We have a most uninteresting case here."

A short ape plucked at his lower lip and grinned at the Governor. "Lucky you," he wheezed in a stage whisper. "He never discharges the interesting ones."

The other apes laughed; even the head doctor had trouble suppressing his smile. "Now, gentle-pithecanthropes," he said, "I'd like to have your opinions."

* * * * *

An emaciated ape with a hearing-aid adjusted an ophthalmoscope and squinted at the Governor. "What's its case-history?" he asked gruffly.

"The usual thing: congenital logophilia, the ordinary childhood disorders--inflammation of the gizzard, febrile larynx, minor pyromania, swollen presence--distention of the id, a liberal murmur, optical inversion, pathological increment of the epidermis, cancer of the body politic. Nothing to corruscate a clinician."

"Mmmmm," muttered a muscular ape, balancing himself on his knuckles and shaking his head soberly. "I don't dig these non-arboreal climbers. Smacks of delusion."

"Now Doctor," admonished the head physician, "are you making a diagnosis before all the returns are in? We haven't even started to count the ballots."

"The polls aren't closed yet," the nurse raised her head to point out. "That's a joke, see?"

A fat ape-doctor removed her cap and stuck it on one side of his head. "How's his colostrum?"

"What about his colophon?" inquired an old, stooped, graying ape.

"I'm more interested in his collyrium," said the short ape.

"You're a card, Doctor," cried the fat ape and the muscular ape together.

"Well, well," said the head physician tolerantly. "Fun is fun, but we must consider the patient."

"Consider the patient," ordered the nurse sternly, retrieving her cap.

"Patients are a virtue, get them while you can, hyster in a woman, prostate in a man," chanted the thin ape. "Let's get on with it."

"I see definite signs of softening of the hardening," remarked the old ape.

"Pardon me, Doctor," protested the thin ape, "surely these are classic symptoms of hardening of the softening."

"Weakening of the perspicates," muttered the muscular ape.

"Inversion of the fluctuates," amended the fat ape.

"Disconvection of the interregnum with complicated indications of pronobis-paxvobiscum," said the jovial ape, scratching between his shoulderblades.

"Are we in complete disagreement?" questioned the head doctor cheerfully.

"Apesolutely, Doctor," confirmed the old consultant. "Apesculapius and Hippocrapes confirm our capabilities."

The nurse whipped a corncob pipe with a long curved stem from under her skirts and stuck it in the fat ape's mouth. The muscular ape rubbed two sticks together till they burst into flame. The thin ape handed over a pair of goggles. When the glasses were adjusted and the pipe going to his satisfaction, the fat ape said, "Let the diagnosis continue. Silence in the court!"

The jovial ape produced a compass and rested it on Lampley's knee. "Shoot the works, cousin," he commanded.

The nurse sang in a growly voice, "The one shines least, the none shines nest, but I know where the run shines in your vest--"

"Silence in the court!" repeated the fat ape. "Spin, cousin."

* * * * *

Lampley looked down at the compass, saw it had no glass. The points were marked, FORTH, Forth Forth-Least, Forth Least by Forth, Forth-Least; Least Forth Least, Forth Least by Least, LEAST; Least by Mouth Least by Least, Mouth Least; Mouth _Mouth_ Least, Mouth Least by Mouth, MOUTH; Mouth by Mouth-Best, Mouth-Best by Mouth, Best Mouth, Mouth-Best by Best, Best-Mouth by Best, BEST; Best by Forth-Best, Forth-Best by Best, Forth-Best; Forth-Best by Forth, Forth by Forth-Best, FORTH. The magnetic needle wobbled loosely. Lampley spun it clumsily. The head physician pressed the studs on his watch. All the apes crowded in front of the Governor so he could not see the compass. He knew when the needle stopped, however.

* * * * *

"Incredible!" cried the old ape.

"Beautiful!" cried the fat ape.

"Scientific!" cried the jovial ape.

"On the button!" cried the thin ape.

"Haven't seen anything like it since I was an interne!" cried the muscular ape.

"Very nice," said the head physician. "I take it we are agreed?"

"Unequivocally," said the nurse. "Wow! Let's go!"

"Acute epistemology," said the thin ape tonelessly.

"Chronic voracity," said the fat ape satisfiedly.

"Inflamed igloosensesisty," said the jesting ape happily.

"Dubious proneity," said the old ape solemnly.

"Delusions of humanity," said the muscular ape sadly.

"Delusions of humanity," repeated the whole college mournfully.

"Good, very good indeed," observed the head physician, swinging from a trapeze and playing a xylophone with his toes. "Hold him temporarily under observation--"

"No sedation, Doctor," warned the old ape.

"No medication, Doctor," enjoined the muscular ape.

"No inflation, Doctor," suggested the thin ape.

"No castration, Doctor," put in the jovial ape.

"No vindication, Doctor," added the fat ape.

"--pending release and discharge," concluded the head doctor.

"What about infection?" asked the nurse.

"Humanity is not contagious," they all reminded her together.

The practitioners took pomegranates, figs, dates, mangoes and papayas from their jacket pockets and began munching them earnestly. The nurse pedalled Lampley through the white walls. "Are you ever lucky," she informed him chattily. "They might have put you in a strait-jacket and fed you orally."

"But there's nothing wrong with me."

"Get tired," advised the nurse. "Your needle is stuck." She dismounted. "Stay where you are," she said when he started to get off too. "So long, cousin--don't take any wooden colonics."

The gurney moved on by itself, picking up speed. It careened through dazzling corridors, down ramps, up inclines, through wards, at such a dizzying pace he could see only the footrails of the beds with their clipboards of charts. Doors flipped open at his coming and swung back after him. Finally the gurney stopped so suddenly he slid forward smoothly onto the floor. When he picked himself up the vehicle was whizzing around a corner.

He was on a turntable, so nicely fitted into the floor that only a hairline crack defined it. It revolved slowly past curious scenes of men and women being cupped and leeched, poulticed with manure or steaming tripes, packed in snow, offered acrid inhalents or foul broths; of madmen worshipped or chained and beaten, of babies deformed for beauty's sake and old people eaten for economy's.

* * * * *

When he stepped off the turntable he was in a pleasant but definitely institutionalized room. An elderly man, derby hatted, blew patiently into a mute saxophone. A woman with waist-long white hair, lips drawn in sharply over empty gums, passed an unthreaded shuttle across a loom. A girl, rocking evenly back and forth, smiled knowingly, secretively. A bald man with dirty cheeks and smudged scalp, his tongue caught intently between his teeth, lay prone before a collection of posters, carefully painting mustaches on the faces of women, blotting out the faces of men.

At the other end of the room the Governor saw his mother. She was knitting slowly, diligently. Her arthritis, he thought sympathetically. He went to her. "Hello Mother." He kissed her cheek.

She finished two more stitches before she spoke. "How are you, Almon?" she asked placidly. "Isn't this a charming place?"

"You like it here, Mother?"

"Well, it isn't like being in one's own home. And of course they do serve lambchops without the paper frills," she complained. "I suppose it's all right, but I must say they look rather naked."

"But you're all right otherwise?"

"My eyes bother me, there's something wrong with the lights. The food hurts my gums and I'm short of breath and I never can seem to get comfortable clothes that aren't dowdy. And the newspapers are full of horrors--"

"Yes, yes," he interrupted impatiently. "But they treat you well, don't they?"

She put down her knitting. "It depends entirely what you mean by that, Almon. If your poor father had lived no one would ever have hustled me around the way they do here."

"Are they rude to you, Mother?"

"They certainly don't act as I should expect persons to act toward a lady."

"They don't--they don't ... handle you roughly?"

"My dear boy! What a question. They wouldn't _dare_."

He sank into a chair. "That's good. It's all right then."

"I shouldn't go as far as to say that." She resumed her knitting. "They read my letters," she announced in a loud whisper.

"What letters?" he asked.

"Now Almon, don't pry."

"I'm sorry, Mother. I only thought there might be something I could do about it."

"Don't be ridiculous, Almon. What could a boy do about such things?"

He was silent, despondent. "Oh, Mother...." He wanted to say that it was too easy to dismiss all questions as having too many answers or none at all--to say that the simplest questions, the ones apparently most irrelevant or meaningless were least susceptible of reply. What he wanted to say was true enough--or rather, it was true, but not enough. There were no answers, yet everything was an answer of sorts. "Oh, Mother," he said, "I don't know."

"Of course you don't," she agreed sharply. "Here, wind my wool for me."

Obediently he picked up the strand lying on her lap and began looping it around her outstretched hands. The yarn was kinked and lusterless. "Where do you get your wool?" he asked conversationally.

She cackled. "Now dear boy, don't try to catch me on one as old as that. I simply will not say from the sheep I count when I'm going to sleep. I just won't."

"I'm sorry, Mother."

"Are you really? Truly contrite? Genuinely humble?"

"I--I suppose so."

"Oh, suppositions. Theories. Vapors. Hopes. Pooh. Gracious, can't you wind faster?"

"Something seems to be holding the wool back."

"Nonsense! Oh, see what you've done, you clumsy boy! You're unravelling my cushion."

"I'm sorry, Mother."

She hurled her knitting in his face. "Take him away," she screamed. "He's a monster--can't you see?"

* * * * *

The other inmates threw up their heads and howled in unison. One sufferer, naked to the waist, his distorted face set in a dreadful smile, his hands stiffened into claws, ran into the room and danced around the Governor. Two women, their streaming hair starched with dirt, shrieked, "He did it, he did it. He's the peeping tom." A man shambled in a circle, head down, muttering, "Womb, tomb, boom; boom, womb, tomb; tomb, boom, womb."

Two sternly expressionless attendants led the Governor to the elevator. "You are discharged for conduct unbecoming a patient and a gentle."

"But I--"

"If it weren't for this," said one of the attendants coldly, indicating his white coat, "I'd call you out myself, you cad."

"Don't demean yourself, brother," urged the other attendant. "He'll suffer now."

A group of orderlies appeared. Those in front beat upon enamel sputum dishes with hammers used to test reflexes. After them came a number with dilators, tubes and other objects which they employed as fifes and flutes. The color-bearer dipped his caduceus to the ground while the band played the rogues' march. A doctor drew his scalpel and cut the Governor's buttons from the cuff of his jacket.

The elevator doors opened. The clerk peeled off a white smock and tossed it out. "Step to the rear of the car please," he urged the Governor.

* * * * *

Lampley stumbled in. The elevator swished upward, then ran backward for interminable miles. It stopped; mechanics with rubber wrenches, paper hammers and cloth screwdrivers removed the steel doors, replacing them with a glass one. The clerk moved the control lever; the elevator rose again.

Once more it was in the shaft lined with porcelain-faced bricks. The Governor noticed how meticulously they had been set in place, each fitting so neatly against the next, no course of mortar thicker than the one above or below.

The clerk left the door open and leaned against it as Lampley wandered between the rows of grand pianos. The drops from the stalactites tinkled as monotonously as before on the exposed strings of the instruments. Plink plink, plink plink, plink plunk. It seemed to him--he was by no means sure--that on his first visit the pianos had all been identical. Now they were rosewood, mahogany, maple, ebony. Some were enamelled a startling white, one gleamed in dull silver, the varnish on another sparkled with crushed glass. He paused before a grand of such modest finish and unobtrusive wood that it commanded instant attention among more flamboyant peers. The Governor sat down before it, striking a key with his middle finger. Plink. What a work is man, he thought; I will my finger to move and it moves--what incomparable engineering! Plink. He had forgotten even how to play a scale; the stalactites could do as well or better. Plink plink, plink plunk.

In imagination he played the piano with perfect mastery, without effort, without barrier between conception and performance. The exquisite music flowed from his fingers and laved the air. His heart burst with exaltation. The power of his playing infected all the nearby pianos; they exploded into the same melody.

Plink plink. Miss Brewster would have said primly, If that was your ambition, you should have practiced. Hours and hours and hours every day. Plink plink. And then Miss Brewster would not have smacked his hands and when he thought of her when he was bigger he wouldn't have.... Plink plunk. A stupid fancy.

He got up impatiently. Could that be the unicorn lurking in the shadows? He walked slowly toward it. The creature showed no fear of him, made no attempt to run away. Trembling a little, Lampley put out his hand. The unicorn nuzzled his palm. Lampley touched the golden horn, ran his fingers through the foamy mane. The unicorn looked at him with its blue eyes; Lampley felt infinitely rewarded.

The unicorn was smaller than he had thought--as small as a pony. They walked together between the pianos, the beast breathing gently, the man reassuring himself of affection by rubbing the soft coat. All the pain of struggle began slowly to drain from his body; he knew he could be content to stay here.

Only when they were almost at the elevator did the unicorn throw up his head, toss his mane and gallop off. The Governor turned to pursue but the clerk, still leaning in the open door, stopped him. "It's no use," he called, not unkindly. "You couldn't catch him unless he wanted you to."

"But he ..." began Lampley.

"A whim," said the clerk. "They're all alike."

Sadly he entered the elevator. It was only as the door was closing he realized the plinking from the stalactites had stopped as he touched the unicorn.