While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction Read online

  When they stopped singing, Jenny picked me out to kid around with. “Hello, tall, dark, and handsome,” she said to me. “Did the old icebox drive you out of the house?” She had a sponge rubber face at the top of the door, with springs embedded in it and a loudspeaker behind it. Her face was so real, I almost had to believe there was a beautiful woman inside the refrigerator—with her face stuck through a hole in the door.

  I kidded her back. “Look, Mrs. Frankenstein,” I said to her, “why don’t you go off in a corner somewhere and make some ice cubes? I want to have a private talk with your boss.”

  Her face turned from pink to white. Her lips trembled. Then her lips pulled down and dragged her whole face out of shape. She shut her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at such a terrible person. And then, as God is my judge, she squeezed out two fat tears. They ran down her cheeks, then down her white enamelled front to the floor.

  I smiled and winked at George to let him know how slick I thought his act was, and that I really did want to see him.

  He didn’t smile back. He didn’t like me for talking to Jenny that way. You would have thought I’d spit in the eye of his mother or sister or something.

  A kid about ten years old came up to George and said, “Hey, Mister, I bet I know how she works. You got a midget in there.”

  “You’re the first one who ever guessed,” George said. “Now that everybody knows, I might as well let the midget out.” He motioned for Jenny to come out on the sidewalk with him.

  I expected her to waddle and clank like a tractor, because she weighed seven hundred pounds. But she had a light step to go with that beautiful face of hers. I never saw such a case of mind over matter. I forgot all about the refrigerator. All I saw was her.

  She sidled up to George. “What is it, Sweetheart?” she said.

  “The jig is up,” George said. “This bright boy knows you’re a midget inside. Might as well come on out and get some fresh air and meet the nice people.” He hesitated just long enough and looked just glum enough to make the people think maybe they were really going to see a midget.

  And then there was a whirr and a click, and Jenny’s door swung open. There wasn’t anything inside but cold air, stainless steel, porcelain, and a glass of orange juice. It was a shock to everybody—all that beauty and personality on the outside, and all that cold nothing on the inside.

  George took a sip from the glass of orange juice, put it back in Jenny and closed her door.

  “I’m certainly glad to see you taking care of yourself for a change,” Jenny said. You could tell she was crazy about him, and that he broke her heart about half the time. “Honestly,” she said to the crowd, “the poor man should be dead of scurvy and rickets by now, the way he eats.”

  An audience is the nuttiest thing there is, if you ever stop to think about it. Here George had proved there wasn’t anything inside Jenny, and here the crowd was, twenty seconds later, treating her like a real human being again. The women were shaking their heads to let Jenny know they knew what a trial it was to get a man to take care of himself. And the men were giving George secret looks to let him know they knew what a good pain it was to have a woman always treating you like a baby.

  The only person who wasn’t going along with the act, who wasn’t being a boob for the pleasure of it, was the kid who’d guessed there was a midget inside. He was sore about being wrong, and his big ambition was to bust up the act with truth—Truth with a capital T. He’ll grow up to be a scientist someday. “All right,” the kid said, “if there isn’t a midget in there, then I know exactly how it works.”

  “How, honey?” said Jenny. She was all ears for whatever bright little thing this kid was going to say. She really burned him up.

  “Radio controls!” the kid said.

  “Oooooo!” said Jenny. She was thrilled. “That would be a grand way to do it!”

  The kid turned purple. “You can joke around all you want,” he said, “but that’s the answer and you know it.” He challenged George. “What’s your explanation?” he said.

  “Three thousand years ago,” said George, “the sultan of Alla-Bakar fell in love with the wisest, most affectionate, most beautiful woman who ever lived. She was Jenny, a slave girl.

  “The old sultan knew there would be constant bloodshed in his kingdom,” said George, “because men who saw Jenny always went mad for her love. So the old sultan had his court magician take Jenny’s spirit out of her body and put it in a bottle. This he locked up in his treasury.

  “In 1933,” said George, “Lionel O. Heartline, president of the General Household Appliances Company, bought a curious bottle while on a business trip to fabled Baghdad. He brought it home, opened it, and out came the spirit of Jenny—three thousand years old. I was working in the Research Laboratory of GH at the time, and Mr. Heartline asked me what I could provide in the way of a new body for Jenny. So I rigged the shell of a refrigerator with a face, a voice, and feet—and with spirit controls, which work on Jenny’s willpower alone.”

  It was such a silly story, I forgot it as soon as I’d chuckled at it. It took me weeks to realize that George wasn’t just hamming it up when he told the story from his heart. He was getting as close to the truth about Jenny as he ever dared get. He was getting close to it with poetry.

  “And, hey presto!—here she is,” said George.

  “Baloney!” the scientific kid yelled. But the audience wasn’t with him, never would be.

  Jenny let out a big sigh, thinking about those three thousand years in a bottle. “Well,” she said, “that part of my life’s all over now. No use crying over spilt milk. On with the show.”

  She slunk into the Mart, and everybody but George and I toddled right in behind her.

  George, still controlling her with his toes, ducked into the cab of the moving van. I followed him and stuck my head in the window. There he was, the top of his trick shoes rippling while his toes made Jenny talk a blue streak in the Mart. At nine o’clock on a sunshiny morning he was taking a big drink from a bottle of booze.

  When his eyes stopped watering and his throat stopped stinging he said to me, “What you looking at me that way for, Sonny Jim? Didn’t you see me drink my orange juice first like a good boy? It isn’t as though I was drinking before breakfast.”

  “Excuse me,” I said. I got away from the truck to give him time to pull himself together, and to give me time, too.

  “When I saw that beautiful GHA refrigerator in the Research Laboratory,” Jenny was saying in the Mart, “I said to George, ‘That’s the flawless white body for me.’ ” She glanced at me and then at George, and she shut up and her party smile went away for a couple of seconds. Then she cleared her throat and went on. “Where was I?” she said.

  George wasn’t about to get out of the cab. He was staring through the windshield now at something very depressing five thousand miles away. He was ready to spend the whole day like that.

  Jenny finally ran out of small talk, and she came to the door and called him. “Honey,” she called, “are you coming in pretty soon?”

  “Keep your shirt on,” George said. He didn’t look at her.

  “Is—is everything all right?” she said.

  “Grand,” George said, still staring through the windshield. “Just grand.”

  I did my best to think this was part of a standard routine, to find something clever and funny in it. But Jenny wasn’t playing to the crowd. They couldn’t even see her face. And she wasn’t playing to me, either. She was playing to George and George was playing to her, and they would have played it the same way if they’d been alone in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

  “Honey,” Jenny said, “there are a lot of nice people waiting inside.” She was embarrassed, and she knew darn good and well I’d caught him boozing it up.

  “Hooray,” said George.

  “Sweetheart,” she said, “the show must go on.”

  “Why?” said George.

  Up to then, I’d never known
how joyless what they call a joyless laugh could be. Jenny gave a joyless laugh to get the crowd to thinking that what was going on was simply hysterical. The laugh sounded like somebody breaking champagne glasses with a ball-peen hammer. It didn’t just give me the willies. It gave everybody the willies.

  “Did—did you want something, young man?” she said to me.

  What the hell—there was no talking to George, so I talked to her. “I’m from the Indianapolis office. I—I have a message about his wife,” I said.

  George turned his head. “About my what?” he said.

  “Your—your ex-wife,” I said.

  The crowd was out on the sidewalk again, confused and shuffling around and wondering when the funny part was going to come. It sure was a screwy way to sell refrigerators. Sully Harris was starting to get sore.

  “Haven’t heard from her for twenty years,” George said. “I can go another twenty without hearing from her, and feel no pain. Thanks just the same.” He stared through the windshield again.

  That got a nervous laugh out of the crowd, and Sully Harris looked relieved.

  Jenny came up to me, bumped up against me, and whispered out of the corner of her mouth, “What about Nancy?”

  “She’s very sick,” I whispered. “I guess she’s dying. She wants to see him one last time.”

  Somewhere in the back of the van a deep humming sound quit. It was the sound of Jenny’s brains. Jenny’s face turned into dead sponge rubber—turned into something as stupid as anything you’ll ever see on a department store clothes dummy. The yellow-green lights in her blue glass eyes winked out.

  “Dying?” said George. He opened the door of the cab to get some air. The big Adam’s apple in his scrawny throat went up and down, up and down. He flapped his arms feebly. “Show’s over, folks,” he said.

  Nobody moved right away. Everybody was stunned by all this unfunny real life in the middle of make-believe.

  George kicked off his trick shoes to show how really over the show was. He couldn’t make himself speak again. He sat there, turned sideways in the cab, staring at his bare feet on the running board. The feet were narrow and bony and blue.

  The crowd shuffled away, their day off to a very depressing start. Sully Harris and I hung around the van, waiting for George to take his head out of his hands. Sully was heartbroken about what had happened to the crowd.

  George mumbled something in his hands that we didn’t catch.

  “How’s that?” Sully asked him.

  “When somebody tells you you’ve got to come like that,” George said, “you’ve got to come?”

  “If—if she’s your ex-wife, if you walked out on her twenty years ago,” Sully said, “then how come you gotta fall apart now on account of her—in front of my customers, in front of my store?”

  George didn’t answer him.

  “If you want a train or an airplane reservation or a company car,” I said to George, “I’ll get it for you.”

  “And leave the van?” George said. He said it as though I’d made a very fatheaded suggestion. “There’s a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of equipment in there, Sonny Jim,” he said. He shook his head. “Leave all that valuable equipment around for somebody to—” His sentence petered out. And I saw there wasn’t any sense to arguing with what he was saying, because he was really getting at something else. The van was his home, and Jenny and her brains were his reason for being—and the thought of going somewhere without them after all these years scared him stiff.

  “I’ll go in the van,” he said. “I can make better time that way.” He got out of the cab and got some excitement going—so no one would point out that moving vans weren’t famous as fast transportation. “You come with me,” he said, “and we can drive straight through.”

  I called the office, and they told me that not only could I go with Jenny and George—I had to go. They said that George was the most dedicated employee the company had, next to Jenny, and that I was to do anything I could to help him in this time of need.

  When I got back from telephoning, George was off telephoning somewhere else himself. He’d put on a pair of sneakers and left the magic shoes behind. Sully Harris had picked up the magic shoes, and was looking inside.

  “My God,” Sully said to me, “it’s like these little buttons all over an accordion in there.” He slipped his hand into a shoe. He left it in there for about a minute before he got nerve enough to push a button.

  “Fuh,” Jenny said. She was perfectly deadpan.

  Sully pushed another button.

  “Fuh,” Jenny said.

  He pushed another button. Jenny

  Jenny smiled like Mona Lisa.

  Sully pushed several buttons.

  “Burplappleneo,” said Jenny. “Bama-uzztrassit. Shuh,” she said. She did a right face and stuck out her tongue.

  Sully lost his nerve. He put the magic shoes down by the van the way you’d put bedroom slippers by a bed. “Boy—” he said, “those people aren’t gonna come back here. They’re gonna think it’s a morgue or something after that show he put on. I just thank God for one thing.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “At least they didn’t find out whose voice and face the refrigerator’s got.”

  “Whose?” I said.

  “You didn’t know?” said Sully. “Hell—he made a mold of her face and put it on Jenny. Then he had her record every sound in the English language. Every sound Jenny makes, she made first.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Nancy, or whatever her name is,” Sully said. “Right after the honeymoon he did all that. The dame that’s dying now.”

  We made seven hundred miles in sixteen hours, and I don’t believe George said ten words to me the whole time. He did do some talking, but not to me. It was in his sleep, and I guess he was talking to Jenny. He would say something like “Uffa-mf-uffa” while he was snoozing next to me. Then his toes would wiggle in his sneakers, signalling for Jenny to give him whatever answer he wanted to hear.

  He didn’t have the magic shoes on, so Jenny didn’t do anything. She was strapped up against a wall in the dark in the back of the van. George didn’t worry much about her until we got within about an hour of where we were going. Then he got as fidgety as a beagle. Every ten minutes or so he’d think Jenny had busted loose and was crashing around in her brains. We would have to pull over and stop, and go around in back and make sure she was fine.

  You talk about plain living: the inside of the van looked like a monk’s cell in a television station’s control room. I’d seen floorboards that were wider and springier than George’s cot. Everything that was for George in the van was cheap and uncomfortable. I wondered at first where the quarter of a million dollars he’d talked about was. But every time he passed his flashlight beam over Jenny’s brains I got more excited. Those brains were the most ingenious, most complicated, most beautiful electronic system I’ll ever see. Money was no object where Jenny was concerned.

  As the sun came up we turned off the highway and banged over chuckholes into the hometown of the General Household Appliances Company. Here was the town where I’d started my career, where he’d started his career, where he’d brought his bride so long ago.

  George was driving. The banging woke me up, and it shook something loose in George. All of a sudden he had to talk. He went off like an alarm clock.

  “Don’t know her!” he said. “Don’t know her at all, Sonny Jim!” He bit the back of his hand, trying to drown out the pain in his heart. “I’m coming to see a perfect stranger, Sonny Jim,” he said. “All I know is she was very beautiful once. I loved her more than anything on earth once, and she broke everything I had into little pieces. Career, friendships, home—kaput.” George hit the horn button, blasted the bejeepers out of the dawn with the van’s big bullhorn. “Don’t ever idolize a woman, Sonny Jim!” he yelled.

  We banged over another chuckhole. George had to grab the wheel with both hands. Steadying down the tru
ck steadied him down, too. He didn’t talk anymore till we got where we were going.

  Where we were going was a white mansion with pillars across the front. It was Norbert Hoenikker’s house. He was doing very well. He was assistant director of GHA research. He’d been George’s best friend years before—before he’d taken George’s wife Nancy away from him.

  Lights were on all over the house. We parked the van behind a doctor’s car out front. We knew it was a doctor’s car because it had a tag with those twined snakes on it up above the back license plate. The minute we parked, the front door of the house opened, and Norbert Hoenikker came out. He was wearing a bathrobe and slippers, and he hadn’t slept all night.

  He didn’t shake hands with George. He didn’t even say hello. He started right out with a rehearsed speech. “George,” he said. “I’m going to stay out here while you go in. I want you to consider it your house while you’re in there—with complete freedom for you and Nancy to say absolutely anything you have to say to each other.”

  The last thing George wanted to do was to go in there and face Nancy alone. “I—I haven’t got anything to say to her,” he said. He actually put his hand on the ignition key, got ready to start up the van and roar away.

  “She has things to say to you,” Mr. Hoenikker said. “She’s been asking for you all night. She knows you’re out here now. Lean close when she talks. She isn’t very strong.”

  George got out, shambled up the walk to the house. He walked like a diver on the bottom of the sea. A nurse helped him into the house and closed the door.

  “Is there a cot in back?” Mr. Hoenikker asked me.

  “Yessir,” I said.

  “I’d better lie down,” he said.

  Mr. Hoenikker lay down on the cot, but he couldn’t get any rest. He was a tall, heavy man, and the cot was too little for him. He sat up again. “Got a cigarette?” he said.

  “Yessir,” I said. I gave him one and lit it. “How is she, sir?” I said.