Killing Time Page 15

  In his father’s suit Detweiler sat down now on the narrow bed and began to Realize the experiences of a party of westward emigrants lashing their ox-pulled covered wagons up the slopes, winter on its way, biscuit and water running low, no game sighted in days, but ahead the awesome echoes, the blue and white infinity, a high-wheeling eagle: grand, splendid, unconditioned. But Detweiler did not like the wagonmaster’s curses, though he loved his blue-ginghamed daughter with her cornsilk hair.

  Today was blue for Detweiler. When he had put aside his Realization, the falling snow against the window looked blue. His father’s suit was navy, the necktie royal; even his shirt had a thin blue stripe. An enchanting color, deriving, like all hues, from the sun: there was an opinion that called it cold: not so, sparks were often blue, and very hot skies.

  “What else is blue?” he asked his mother, who was at that moment passing through the hallway.

  “The false name you selected,” she answered.

  “Oh yes.”

  “Joseph,” said she, “it just occurred to me: could I check into the matter for you?”

  Detweiler understood the reference and all its implications. She was offering by spiritual means to determine whether the man was dead, the man he had spoken of earlier.

  “I’d rather you did not, Mother. I better handle this myself.”

  Detweiler put on his coat. His haversack was packed and ready to go.

  Said his mother: “You certainly look fine in that suit. I was talking to your father yesterday and he hoped you would wear it sometime.”

  Detweiler neither believed nor disbelieved in his mother’s traffic with the otherworld. He saw no reason why he had to take a definitive position on it.

  He said: “How is he?”

  “Fine. Though of course it is a mistake to think they don’t have problems Over There, little annoyances, difficulties. It is of course Perfect, but not perfect in our sense. And there is one very, very unusual circumstance that the living never think of.”

  Detweiler raised his brows.

  His mother said: “Over There you cannot die to escape your troubles.”

  Cap in hand, pack on back, Detweiler kissed his mother and said: “Thanks for everything. I’ll send you some money if I get some.”

  “I know you will. God bless you, Joseph.” She went with him to the door and stood within its frame as he descended the stairway.

  When he reached the first landing, he stopped and, reflecting that he might not see her again in this life, he called up: “I really enjoyed breakfast.”

  She waved and he went down and out into the snow.

  The receptionist in the lobby of the newspaper building looked suspiciously at Detweiler’s haversack but sympathetically at his eyes. He had first asked for the managing editor but then turned his attention to her earrings, saying: “Aren’t they pretty!”

  Ever on guard against attempts to butter her up, she yet could not believe that his purpose was damaging to her, professionally, economically, sexually. Therefore she identified them as coral.

  “From the bottom of the sea,” Detweiler said in wonder. “To your ear.” She had a greatly attractive ear, too, pink as a shell.

  The young woman sensed in herself a tendency to relinquish her spirit to him. Still, she had a job to do.

  She asked: “Could I request the nature of your business? Won’t someone else do? The managing editor is terribly busy. You understand.”

  Detweiler was still looking at her ear.

  She felt the need to apologize, but he suddenly gazed into her eyes with profound grace.

  “Anybody who is aware of events, I guess, would be appropriate. I asked for the editor rather than a reporter because I figured he would be here, working at a desk. Whereas reporters are always out around town, aren’t they?”

  “Do you have a story?” the receptionist asked very seriously, for oftentimes unusual people came in off the street with such. In journalism you could not disallow a person on his appearance or manner.

  Detweiler thought for a moment, and then he nodded soberly. “It well may be. That’s what I have to find out.”

  The receptionist was all at once too shy to ask him more. She called a city reporter down on the intercom.

  When the newsman arrived Detweiler asked: “Are you on the Crime Desk?”

  “What’s that?” the man coldly replied, but Detweiler’s face showed a generosity he could not long withstand, and the reporter said amiably: “Well, I write about crime if it is a story.” He laughed and said: “Have you committed one?”

  “I might have. I thought maybe you could check for me.”

  The reporter sucked back his smile. He suddenly had a feeling about Detweiler and stared plaintively at him: he feared ingenuousness.

  Detweiler said: “I didn’t want to go to the police because they would be annoyed if it turned out not to be a crime.”

  “They would?” The reporter found himself at the mercy of this small, odd individual. For one thing he had difficulty in assessing Detweiler’s age, seeing him, absurdly, as a kind of adolescent old man.

  “Oh sure. I don’t want to make fun of the cops,” Detweiler explained. “That is pretty rotten, considering the risks they take to protect us all from violence. I wouldn’t want to turn out to be a crank, like those people who call up the police and say, ‘I put a bomb in the so-and-so hotel lobby.’ Then they clear the place and search and it turns out to be not true: the caller’s threat was empty, and he had misused the considerable power of a citizen in this day and age. That couldn’t be done in the eras before the invention of the telephone. The crank would have had to send a note and then wait until delivery had been made: too long, and he wouldn’t be sure the proper authority had got it.”

  Detweiler was talking a lot because he had a great sense of well-being from having the ear of a gentleman of the press, a person with the means of vast communication at his fingertips. For himself, Detweiler disapproved of writing. Words were elements of another kind of reality than that which claimed his primary attention. He would have written things if by so doing he could create actual states or situations, if by writing “John is happy,” John would indeed be rendered happy. But if John was already blissful, to write that would be solely to describe. If John was unhappy, it would be a lie.

  However, writing was a reporter’s business, and Detweiler did not feel it corrupting to be written about. Indeed, he relished telling his story through another person. Newspapermen always said what they wished anyway: the guilt would not be on his own head. A clever person could fish out the truth. The main thing was to get it told. For example, there might be great value in publishing an explanation of why he wanted his penis to be amputated. Perhaps others had the same aim and had been frustrated as he had been. There was no limit to what men, any man, could do. Detweiler wondered whether the reporter had any sense of his own potential.

  The reporter said, timidly: “Would you like to come up to the city room? Would you rather talk there?” He glanced about at the people moving through the lobby, suggesting that Detweiler found them distracting or at least craved privacy.

  “Sure,” said Detweiler. “Any place where you would feel at ease.”

  The floor they got off on was the scene of much activity and businesslike clamor: vital machines and talking men. Detweiler nodded here and there, but most people were too involved in newspaper matters to respond. In the center of all this the reporter claimed a desk as his own and got Detweiler an extra chair.

  “Now,” he said, “I don’t know your name.”

  Detweiler answered expansively: “That is beside the point for the moment. What I had in mind is if you could determine whether recently a man was killed in a lunch counter.”

  “Where?” The reporter looked quickly at Detweiler’s hands. It was instinctive, murder being usually a labor of the fingers: on a trigger, a knife, even around a vial of poison. Detweiler’s were small and boyish, even to the scab over a minor cut
he might have got from playing mumbletypeg. His eye, however, was black, had been from the beginning of the interview. The reporter had of course registered that but not noticed it until now.

  “You should see the other guy, huh?” he essayed to joke, but Detweiler showed polite quizzicality.

  “Could you find out?”

  He was a stubborn little guy, had a moral force to him. The reporter was amused by his arrogance, but nevertheless called the police.

  “Results nil,” he said as he broke the connection some moments later. “No killings. No luncheonette fights you could fit in have been reported, anyway. Why don’t you just forget about it?”

  “I don’t like rudeness,” Detweiler said. “But the counterman I hit might have been deaf, you see? He might not have heard me. If so, I was wrong. I should have been more patient, maybe.” He winced. “But he did hear me when I ordered coffee, so why not when I asked for sugar doughnuts?”

  The reporter could not understand what was interesting about this inconsequential affair, but he found himself caught up in it. Detweiler’s earnestness was irresistible.

  “Hell,” he said, “we all have moments when we are not at the top of our form, but then time passes.”

  Detweiler regarded this statement with care as a young fellow quietly but rapidly took away some papers from the desk. The place was only superficially in confusion: actually there was a scheme. The newspaper would appear on schedule, assembled, organized from all this movement and noise. It was a marvel of directed energy, that’s what Detweiler liked about it. He had no interest in news in any particular sense, except now to wonder how these purposeful people were able to choose from all that happened incessantly, those relatively few items which they felt were worth writing about.

  “Yes,” he said, “it’s not easy to pierce the illusion that Time goes somewhere from which it cannot be recovered except in the counterfeit form of history, the representation or reproduction but not the actuality.”

  “Pardon?” asked the newspaperman. He had not really suspected that Detweiler was a nut, for all the apparent evidence of nonconformity in the lad. He was briefly desperate: he should have brushed him off downstairs.

  But Detweiler was no boor. He knew the man had work to do and was not likely to be in a contemplative mood amid the jangle of a hundred telephones.

  Therefore he got to his feet and said: “I want to thank you for your kindness. Perhaps we can work together again when who listened to Allen’s identification of them both. The managing editor, for so he was, also harped on money.

  At last Detweiler put up his hands. It was getting too noisy. He said: “With all respect, the only thing you have said that interests me is about the syndication. If I tell my story for you, you can get it published all over the country?”

  Of this he received vociferous confirmation from a roomful of those who should know. The editor had sent out the summons. The publisher himself, and all his executives, were now there and listening to Detweiler. It was pretty nice to have such attention, and though importunate, they were all mannerly.

  “Well, O.K.,” Detweiler agreed. “Then I’ll do it. Can you get me a lawyer?”

  The publisher said: “I’ll get you Melrose.”

  “Is he good?”

  The publisher laughed in affirmation, and the managing editor, who had turned paternal, said: “Son, he is the best. He has never lost a murder case.”

  Detweiler felt misunderstood. “Oh,” he said, “if you’re going to call it murder, I might as well have gone to the police.”

  The others fell silent, and the managing editor said: “Son, you want to tell us about it?”

  “Sure,” said Detweiler and began to talk about Realization into the microphone of a recording machine they hooked up for him: it was marvelous to know one’s expression was being preserved indefinitely: in itself, an aid, like photography, to a kind of mechanical Realization. Useful, though not the real thing: only a machine, condemned to the monotonous inanimate circuits, producing not the voice but an electronic imitation. Still, it was a handsome, precision device, and Detweiler enjoyed his association with it.

  They let him talk on uninterruptedly until a secretary brought in a handful of contracts for him to sign. Having done so, he was about to resume when the managing editor said: “Son, we are paying you a lot of money and we don’t consider that your philosophy is worth that. We haven’t heard you say yet how you will plead. Did you murder those people?”

  Detweiler kept control of himself, no easy task, but he understood that attacking this man would only be detrimental to his aim. He thought again of the possibly deaf counterman. It might be that the editor was deaf, if not physically, then morally: so many people were. Which was why Detweiler had decided to tell his story through the news medium: everybody read the papers. So he held on, gripping the arms of the leather chair in which he sat.

  He said carefully: “I never murdered anybody in my life. The money means very little to me except insofar as I can use it to further my work. And my sole purpose in talking to you gentlemen of the press is to disseminate knowledge of my work. Realization means not only recovering the past, making it current and thus ending the bondage of Time. It also means realization of the potential of the human race.

  “I don’t want to insult you fellows, but have you ever thought of the futility of what you do? There is another newspaper every single day: all those that have gone before are dead. All you powerful, clever, and wealthy men are slaves to that rhythm. Do you seriously believe that the quality of existence would be changed if you suddenly one day failed to bring out an issue? Would life stop because you did not write about it? Or do you write about life at all? I mean the funda mental kind of life that a snake lives, or a fish in the sea, or a bird.

  “Cannot what you do be seen as a game or even a dream? Does it matter? Won’t there always be another inning even if any one or all of you have quit? Your own time runs out, but Time continues. Yet human beings usually fancy themselves as superior to animals. Animals don’t have newspapers or policemen or clocks, that is, unless they are domesticated. Mind you, I’m not saying that men should or can live like animals. Too much has happened—”

  “Joseph.” It was the publisher who now broke in. Had the editor spoken at that point, Detweiler would probably have tried to eliminate him. He had gripped the chair so tightly that four fingers of each hand had penetrated the leather, broken through into the stuffing. But the publisher was someone new. Also he had promised to get this splendid lawyer Melrose, and Detweiler was counting on that: he needed an eloquent advocate to say what he wanted said, before he went to the electric chair.

  “Joseph, you say you are not a murderer, is that right? But did you have anything to do with the Starr women and the boarder on Christmas Eve? Did you see them, did you talk to them? If not, how did you spend your time that evening?”

  Detweiler nodded. “There you have it—’time’ again.” He shook his head. “Frustrating, isn’t it? But far from hopeless!” Then he said: “Oh, I killed them all right. But it wasn’t murder, because I had nothing to gain.”

  Chapter 12

  THE LOCAL OFFICERS who came to the paper to take Detweiler into custody began by squinting hostilely at him and certainly did not shake the hand he offered. There were five of them, two of high rank with extra insignia, and to each Detweiler introduced himself, saying “Joe Detweiler,” and putting his hand out five times. Nobody took it, but the lowest-ranking policeman, a detective in mufti, could not help murmuring something in return: not actually his name, but a pleasant mutter, then glanced fearfully at the leading inspector, who ignored him.

  The inspector had been instructed by his superiors to register a protest against the publisher’s having kept Detweiler under wraps for six hours, but once within the paneled office, up to his shins in the moss-green carpet, facing the self-reliant man who had the ear of millions of readers locally, not to mention those reached by his syndicate, the in
spector merely gave his own name much as Detweiler had done to him, though with less assurance. He did not seek to shake hands.

  The publisher disregarded the police. Instead he was reading the statement that Detweiler had dictated; trying to, anyway. Trying to see how something readable could be made from it. As it stood it comprised thousands of words of insane rubbish, with no further reference to the homicides after the first sentence: “I killed them, but that is not important. Time is the sole essential. Can we free ourselves from its bondage? That is the question. Professor Einstein says that time slows down as speed increases, referring to physical motion. But what of mental motion? Can the mind move at a speed that will kill Time? Can a moment be stopped, suspended, frozen, as light can in a motion-picture projector; and reversed, relived? This is worth consideration….”

  Detweiler was an insane killer. Thus the rules applying to his and the publisher’s relationship were quite different from those for which there was precedent. The paper had run the memoirs of heads of state and five-star generals: the publisher’s friends, neither homicides nor maniacs. Men of power, like himself only more so; therefore the publisher neither really liked nor trusted them. Detweiler was actually a powerless nonentity in the usual sense of the term. The publisher felt paternal towards him, if anything; even fond of this boy, who had yet murdered three persons with his bare hands.

  Savagery did not frighten the publisher, at least not at his habitual remove from it. He had nothing to fear from Detweiler in a physical way. Yet, though his soul shriveled as the killer talked on hour after hour about Time and Realization and Mind and Will, he was ever more disinclined to interrupt. There was that about an obsession, even a lunatic’s, which commanded respect. Indeed, all successful men were obsessed: the publisher himself, who had begun life as a rich boy but refused to accept the cretinism which so often accompanies inherited wealth; labored in his father’s warehouses without privilege, sold want-ads, battered his way to the top while a weaker character might have sauntered there, the result being that though not every President had kissed his hindquarters, none had kicked them with impunity. Therefore he felt a certain organic affinity with Detweiler, even with Detweiler, crazy killer, who was prepared to die to get his message across.