Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

HE straightened the handle which spun the top and he polished the metal before marking off the spirals with a pencil and he borrowed a can of sewing machine oil and oiled up the spinning spiral on the handle so that it worked smoothly. Then he went about the painting.

He wasn't much good at it, but he went about it doggedly. He carefully painted in the colors, red, then green, then yellow, and he hoped the colors were right, for he couldn't remember exactly what the colors had been. Although, probably it didn't make much difference what the colors were, just so they were bright and ran in a spiral.

He got paint on his hands and on his clothes and on the chair he laid the top on and he spilled the can of red paint on the floor, but he picked it up real quick so that scarcely any of it ran out onto the carpeting.

Finally the job was finished and it looked fairly good.

He worried about whether it would be dry by morning, but he read the labels on the cans and labels said the paint was quick drying, so he was somewhat relieved.

He was ready now, ready to see what he would find when he spun the top. It might be fairyland, and it might be nothing. Most likely it would be nothing. For more would go into it than the spinning of the top — the mind and the confidence and the pure simplicity of a child. And he didn't have that any longer.

He went out and closed and locked the door behind him, then went down the stairs. The town and the hotel were too small to have elevators. Although not so small a town as the little village that had been «town» to him in his childhood days, that little village where they still sat out on the bench in front of the store and looked up at you with sidewise glances and asked you impudent, prying questions out of which to weave the fabric of long gossiping.

He chuckled, thinking of what they'd say when the word got back to the little town, slowly, as news always gets back to a little town, of how he had fled from Cliffwood on the threat of being lynched.

He could hear them talking now.

"A sly one," they would say. "He always was a sly one and not up to any good. His Ma and Pa were real good people, though. Beats hell how a son sometimes turns out even when his Ma and Pa were honest people."

He went through the lobby and out the door and into the street.

He stopped at a diner and ordered a cup of coffee and the waitress said to him, "Nice night, isn't it."

"Yes, it is," he said.

"You want anything to go with that coffee, mister?"

"No," said Vickers. "Just the coffee." He had money now — Ann had sent it quickly enough — but he found, not surprisingly, that he had no appetite, no desire at all for food.

She moved on up the counter and wiped off imaginary spots with a cloth she carried in her hand.

A top, he thought. Where did it tie in? He'd take the top to the house and spin it and would know once and for all if there were a fairyland — well, no, not exactly that. He'd know if he could get back into fairyland.

And the house. Where did the house tie in?

Or did either the house or the top tie in?

And if they didn't tie in, why had Horton Flanders written:

"Go back and travel the paths you walked in childhood. Maybe there you will find a thing you'll need — or something that is missing." He wished he could remember the exact words Flanders had used, but he could not.

So he had come back and he had found a top and, more than that, he had remembered fairyland. And why, he asked himself, in all the years since he had been eight years old, had he never before recalIed that walk in fairyland?

It had made a deep impression on him at the time, of that there was no doubt, for once he had remembered it had been as clear and sharp as if it had just happened.

But something had made him forget it, some mental block, perhaps. Something had made him forget it. And something had made him know that the metal mouse had wanted to be trapped. And something had made him instinctively refuse Crawford's proposition. _Something_.

The waitress came back down the counter and leaned on her elbow.

"They're starting a new picture at the Grand tonight," said the girl. "I'd love to see it, but I can't get off."

Vickers did not answer.

"You like pictures, mister?" asked the girl.

"I don't know," said Vickers. "I seldom go to them."

Her face said she sympathized with anyone who didn't. "I just live for them," she said. "They're so natural."

He looked up at her and saw that she wore the face of Everyone. It was the face of the two women who talked in the seat behind him on the bus; it was the face of Mrs. Leslie, saying to him, "Some of us are going to organize a Pretentionist Club…" It was the face of those who did not dare sit down and talk with themselves, the people who could not be alone a minute, the people who were tired without knowing they were tired and afraid without knowing that they were afraid.

And, yes, it was the face of Mrs. Leslie's husband, crowding drink and women into a barren life. It was the grinding anxiety that had become commonplace, that sent people fleeing for psychological shelters against the bombs of uncertainty.

Gaiety no longer was sufficient, cynicism had run out, and flippancy had never been more than a temporary shield. So now the people fled to the drug of pretense, identifying themselves with another life and another time and place — at the movie theater or on the television screen or in the Pretentionist movement. For so long as you were someone else you need not be yourself.

He finished his coffee and went out into the quiet street.

Overhead a jet flashed past, streaking low, the mutter of its tubes bouncing back against the walls. He watched its lights draw twin lines of fire over the night horizon, and then went for a walk.