Peace on Earth

IN HIDING

It was a private loony bin for millionaires. Somehow you never hear about insane millionaires. A movie star or a statesman or even a king can go insane but not a millionaire. At least not judging from the newspapers which put revolutions and the fall of governments in small print buried in the middle of the paper but on the front page they tell you absolutely everything about the mental state of a practically naked young woman with big breasts, or a snake that crawled up a circus elephant’s trunk, causing the animal to go on a rampage in a supermarket and crush three hundred cans of Campbell’s tomato soup along with a register and one checkout girl. An insane millionaire would be welcome in a paper like that. But millionaires don’t like publicity whether they’re insane or not. Insanity might help a movie star’s career but not a millionaire’s. A movie star doesn’t even have to have acting ability, or a voice, they can dub in another, and her real face can be totally unlike her posters and films, the main thing is to have “it,” and she’ll have “it” if she’s getting divorced again or buys a convertible upholstered with ermine or poses nude for Playboy or has an affair with a pair of octogenarian Quaker Siamese twins. Today a politician too must have a great voice, a great smile, and a great body to win voters over the television. But millionaires can only be hurt by such things, not to mention the market. A millionaire has to be calm, predictable, and reserved. Any unpredictability better be hidden. And because it has become extraordinarily difficult to hide from the press these days, millionaire asylums serve as invisible fortresses, invisible because inconspicuous: there are no uniformed guards, no slavering dogs on leashes, no barbed wire, for that only whets a reporter’s appetite. Such an asylum should look uninteresting, and above all it will never call itself an insane asylum. The asylum I found myself in was supposedly for people with ulcers and bad hearts. How then, you ask, did I know straight off that it was a loony bin?

We weren’t allowed inside until Dr. House, a trusted colleague of Tarantoga’s, came to get us. He asked if I wouldn’t like to take a little walk in the park while he talked with Tarantoga. So I felt sure he assumed I was insane. Apparently the professor hadn’t had time to fill him in, because we left Australia in such a hurry. House deposited me among flower beds, fountains, and hedges, and our bags were whisked away by two attractive women in elegant suits who didn’t look at all like nurses, which also set me thinking, but the clincher was when a potbellied old man in pajamas, seeing me, moved over so I could sit beside him on the lawn swing, which I did, to be polite. We swung back and forth in silence for a while, then he asked if I wouldn’t mind urinating on him, though he put it more crudely. I was so taken aback that instead of refusing I asked him why. This agitated him. He got up and walked away, limping on his left foot and muttering to himself, probably about me. I looked around the park, glancing now and then at my left hand and foot, as you might at a purebred dog that you’ve recently been given and that has already bitten a few people. The fact that they were behaving themselves now, swinging quietly with me, was not at all reassuring. I remembered the events of the last few days and thought that in my head another mind lurked side by side with mine, a mind also mine yet inaccessible, which was worse than schizophrenia because you can be cured of that, and worse than the disease of St. Vitus because there all that can happen is that you dance, while I was condemned to a life of mad antics within. Patients were walking along the paths, some followed at a distance by an electric golf cart, probably in case the patient got tired. Finally I hopped off the swing to see if Dr. House had finished talking with Tarantoga and that’s how I met Kramer. He was riding piggyback on an elderly servant dripping with sweat and blue in the face because Kramer must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. I felt sorry for the servant but said nothing and stepped aside to let them pass, figuring that in my present situation I shouldn’t involve myself. Kramer, however, slid off the old man and introduced himself. Evidently interested in a new face. I couldn’t remember what my last name was supposed to be at the asylum though Tarantoga and I had agreed on one. All I could remember was the first name, Jonathan. Kramer liked my informality and asked me to call him Adelaide.

He grew talkative. He’d been terribly bored since his depression lifted. The anguish had kept him from being bored. His depression, he explained to me, resulted from his inability to fall asleep if he first didn’t lie in bed and fantasize a while. In the beginning he pictured the stocks he bought going up and the ones he sold plummeting. Then he pictured having a million dollars. When he got a million, he pictured two, then three, but after five it lost its charm. He had to find new ground for his imagination. It was not easy, he said with a sigh. You can’t fantasize about what you already have or can obtain right away. For a while he pictured getting rid of his third wife without paying a cent in alimony, but then he managed to do just that. House still didn’t appear, and Kramer had got his hooks into me. For a while he used people he was mad at to fall asleep. But that was a mistake because such fantasizing fired up the hate inside him and then he had to take sleeping pills to fall asleep, but the doctors said he shouldn’t on account of his enlarged liver, so the only way then to get rid of the hate was to get rid of the objects of it. No, of course he didn’t hire some Mafia hit man, that kind of thing is strictly for the movies. He hired a real professional, and a hundred thousand dollars a throw was nothing. No, not killing, when you kill someone, you can’t really do anything to him. Nor did he derive any particular satisfaction from physical torture. An enemy or a competitor should be ruined, shown pity, and that’s the end of it. It’s like a corporate raid on the personal level. Kramer had an intellectual side, too, which he concealed from his fellow millionaires, he read books, even de Sade. A sad case, that! Fantasizing about impalement, flaying, and disembowlment while he sat in a hovel with nothing to pick on but flies. The poor have it easy! Everything lures the poor man, everything appeals to him. Every beautiful woman is beyond his reach. Which is why the porn industry does so well. Pneumatic women with pouting fat-lipped mouths, detailed descriptions of orgies plus special oils and paraphernalia, it’s all surrogate and silly. Orgies are so tiresome anyway, there’s nodiing to talk about, nothing left to fantasize about. Oh to have an unfulfillable longing! Adelaide shook his head and said that he had foolishly cut off the branch he sat on by settling those old scores. Now, having nothing to dream about, he suffered from chronic insomnia. He hired a professional fantasist, probably a writer or poet. The man did come up with a few passable ideas for him, but a good fantasy compels its realization and after that it’s gone, so they had to be all but impossible. I interrupted to say that that shouldn’t be so hard. Move a continent. Saw the moon into four equal parts. Eat the leg of the President of the United States in Chinese duck sauce (I pulled out all the stops, after all I was talking to a madman). Have intercourse with a firefly at the moment of its brightest light. Walk on water, become a national holiday, change places with God. Pay the terrorists to leave ministers, ambassadors, and company executives alone and go after the people who really deserve it.

Adelaide was looking at me now not only with fondness but also with admiration. “A pity we didn’t meet sooner, Jonathan,” he sighed. “You’re on the right track, but, you see, with continents and moons and miracles there’s no personal involvement. A true fantasist’s emotions have to be engaged. And fireflies don’t do anything for me. But a good fantasy isn’t really a matter of lust or fury, it’s like a rainbow, it’s there and not there, and then you fall asleep. During the day I never had time for rainbows. My writer expert stated that the number of one’s possible fantasies is inversely proportional to the amount of one’s liquid assets. For him who has everything dreams are no longer possible. Change places with God? God forbid! But I would have hired you anyway.”

On the broad leaf of a low needleless cactus was a large slug. An ugly thing, and that was no doubt why Adelaide nodded to his servant. “Eat that,” he said, pointing. At the same time he pulled a checkbook and pen out of his pajama pocket.

“How much will he do it for?” I wondered. The servant put out his hand for the slug but I stopped him.

“I’ll give you a thousand dollars more than Mr. Kramer if you don’t eat it,” I said, taking my notebook from my pocket. It was covered with the same green plastic as Adelaide’s checkbook.

The servant froze. In the face of the millionaire was hesitation, and I didn’t know whether or not we would start bidding now. My resources were certainly no match for Kramer’s. So I had to change tactics.

“How much will you eat it for, Adelaide?” I asked, opening my notebook as though I were about to write a check. This delighted him. The servant was no longer in the picture.

“I’ll give you a blank check if you swallow it without chewing and describe to me how it moves in your stomach,” he said in a hoarse voice.

“Unfortunately I had breakfast already and I don’t eat between meals,” I said with a smile. “Anyway your bank account must be controlled by trustees.”

“No, you’re wrong! Chase Manhattan always honors my checks.”

“Perhaps, but I’m not hungry. Let’s return to fantasies.” This conversation had so absorbed me that I forgot all about my left side but it reminded me. We were moving away from the slug of contention when I tripped the millionaire and at the same time chopped him in the neck so that he fell flat on the grass. I relate this in the first person though it was my left foot and left hand that did it.

“Forgive me,” I said, thinking quickly, “but that was my fantasy.” I helped him up. He was not so much offended as stunned. It was obvious no one had ever treated him like that, either here or before the asylum.

“A clever fellow,” he said, brushing off the dirt. “But don’t do that again, because I might slip a disk. And start fantasizing about you.” He laughed an evil laugh. “So what is wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, of course, but why are you here?”

“To get a little rest.”

I saw Dr. House at the far end of the shady path. He lifted his hand, beckoned for me, then turned and went toward the pavilion.

“I have to go, Adelaide,” I said, slapping him on the back. “We’ll fantasize another time.”

From the open door came the pleasant coolness of air conditioning. The walls were pale green and the place as quiet as pharaoh’s tomb, with a thick carpet white like the fur of a polar bear. Dr. House was waiting for me in his office. Tarantoga was there too and seemed embarrassed. In his lap was a briefcase stuffed with papers which he sorted through while House pointed to an armchair. I sat down with a sinking feeling that I was getting into something I would not be able to get out of in one piece.

Dr. House sat at his desk reading a newspaper. Then Tarantoga finally found what he had been looking for.

“This is how it is, Ijon… I saw two attorneys, two of the best, to assess your situation from the legal point of view. I said nothing about your Mission, of course, and sketched your story only in the most general terms. A man gains access to certain highly secret information and must report it to a certain division of the government, but he is callotomized before he can do this, and part of what he learned is forgotten, residing no doubt in the right hemisphere of his brain. What is his duty now? What steps can the government take legally to retrieve the information? Both lawyers said it is a difficult case because it sets a precedent. If it is decided in court, expert witnesses will have to be called in, though their testimony might or might not be ignored. In any case without a subpoena you cannot be subjected to any examination or experiment, if that’s the route the government wishes to take.”

Dr. House raised his head from his paper. “An amusing case,” he said, taking a bag of ginger cookies from a drawer, sliding them onto a plate and pushing the plate in my direction. “I realize, Mr. Tichy, that you are not amused, but every paradox of the circulus vitiosus variety is amusing. Do you know what lateralization is?”

“Of course,” I answered, frowning as my left hand reached for a cookie that I didn’t want at all. But wanting even less to make a fool of myself, I bit into it. “I’ve read plenty about it. In the average man the left hemisphere is dominant because it governs speech. The right is generally silent though it understands simple sentences and sometimes can even read a little. If left lateralization is not strong, the right hemisphere may be more independent and also have more linguistic ability. In rare cases there is almost no lateralization and then the centers of speech are found in both hemispheres, which can cause stuttering and other problems…”

“Very good.” House smiled at me approvingly. “From what I have been told I would conclude that your left brain, as we sometimes call it, is distinctly dominant, but that the right is unusually active. To be certain of this, though, I would need to examine you at length.”

“Where is the paradox?” I asked, trying inconspicuously to avoid my left hand because it was putting more ginger cookies into my mouth.

“The value of questioning your right brain depends on the degree of your right lateralization. We must first determine that degree, which means examining you, but to examine you we need your consent. In other words, the court experts could not go beyond what I am saying now: that the court’s decision depends upon the extent of the lateralization of Ijon Tichy, but that cannot be determined without examination. One must examine you to decide whether you can be examined. Do you understand?”

“Yes. What do you advise me to do, doctor?”

“I cannot advise you to do anything, because I am in the same boat as the court and the experts. No one in the world, including you, knows what your right brain holds. Your idea to use sign language has been done before but without significant results, because the right lateralization in those cases was too weak.”

“And that’s really all you can tell me?”

“You might put your left arm in a sling or better yet a cast. It betrays you.”

“What do you mean?”

Dr. House pointed at the plate of ginger cookies.

“The right brain usually likes sweets more than the left. There have been statistical studies. I wanted to show you how simply someone could establish your lateralization. As a right-handed person you would have reached for the cookies with your right hand — or not at all.”

“But why should I keep my arm in a cast? What good would that do?”

Dr. House shrugged.

“Very well. I shouldn’t say this but I will. You know about piranha?”

“The small carnivorous fish.”

“As a rule they don’t attack a man in the water. But if he has the least cut, one drop of blood is enough for them to attack. The language skills of the right brain are no greater than those of a three-year-old child, and usually less. With you, they are considerable. If that fact gets out, you are in serious trouble.”

“Perhaps he should just go to the Lunar Agency,” said Tarantoga, “and put himself in their hands. They owe him something, since he risked his neck for them…”

“That may not be the worst solution, but it is not a good one either. There is no good solution.”

“Why?” Tarantoga and I asked.

“Because the more they extract from the right brain, the more they’ll want, which could mean, to put it politely, a long isolation.”

“A month? Two?”

“Or a year or more. Normally the right brain communicates with the world through the left, in speech and writing. It has never happened that the right has learned, and fluently, a whole language. But the stakes are so high in your case that they will put more effort into this area of research than all the specialists combined have done to date.”

“Yet we must do something,” muttered Tarantoga.

Dr. House rose. “True, but not necessarily today. At the moment there’s no hurry. Mr. Tichy may stay here if he likes, for a couple of months. Perhaps in that time things will become clearer.”

Too late I learned how right Dr. House was. Since no one can help me better than I myself, I have written down everything that has happened, read it into a tape recorder, burned all the notes, and now will put the recorder and the cassette in a jar and bury them under the cactus where I met the slug. I am speaking now to use up the end of the tape. The expression “I met the slug” seems wrong somehow. You can meet a cow, or a monkey or an elephant, but hardly a slug. Could this be because you can meet only a party who is able to take notice of you? I doubt that the slug noticed me although it moved its little horns. It’s not a question of size. No one says “I met a flea,” on the other hand one can meet a very small child. Why am I using the end of the tape for such nonsense? I’ll bury the jar and from now on write notes in a code I’ve thought up. I’ll call my right hemisphere It or maybe Andi, which is and I, I and I, but maybe that’s too transparent. The tape ends now and I’m reaching for the shovel.

July 8th / An awful heat wave. Everyone’s in pajamas or a bathing suit. Me too. Through Kramer I’ve met two other millionaires, Sturman and Padderhorn. Melancholiacs both. Sturman is about sixty, jowly, a big belly, bow-legs, and he whispers. Gives the impression that he’s telling secrets. He says his is a hopeless case. His depression worsened recently because he can’t remember why he got depressed in the first place. He has three daughters, all married and unfaithful, and photographers send him flagrante delicto photographs and he has to pay them off. Trying to be of help, I suggested that this might be the cause of his depression but he said no, he was used to it. I really don’t know why I’m putting this down. It’s not very interesting. Padderhorn doesn’t talk. Supposedly he merged with a Japanese company and it soured. A dull group. Gagstein’s the worst. He chuckles and drools. And exposes himself. I must avoid these characters. Dr. House tells me that tomorrow someone is coming whom I can trust as I trust him. A young intern, but in reality he’s an ethnologist and writing a work on millionaires in the context of small-group dynamics or something like that.

July 9th / Tarantoga has left and I am now alone with House, his assistant, and the millionaires who wander the park. House told me privately that he prefers not to learn the extent of my right lateralization because what is not known cannot be stolen. The assistant revealed to me after I swore I was no millionaire that he is doing fieldwork. He is studying the customs and attitudes of millionaires just as one might study the beliefs of a primitive tribe. The young ethnologist and I have had long evening conversations over a bottle of Teachers in the small laboratory, using beakers for glasses. I’ve also met a few other Croesuses. The most boring people in the world. The ethnologist agrees with me. He begins to fear that he will not be able to gather enough data here.

“You know what?” I told him. “You could do a comparative study: The Rich Then and Now. The state or foundations as patron of the arts is a recent phenomenon. In ancient Rome the patrons were private citizens. The protectors of art, muses, and so on. Rich men and princes took care of artists, sculptors, and painters. They took an interest. But these ones” — I pointed out the window with my thumb at the park, which was dark in the night — “are interested in nothing but market quotations. Take me, for example: I am fairly well known. Because of my travel books I’ve received a ton of letters, but among my millions of readers there has not been one millionaire. Why is that? Most millionaires, I’m told, live in Texas. We have three of them here. Even as lunatics they’re boring. What is the reason? The Roman rich were intellectually alive, but these are not. What did this? The market? Money? And how?”

“No, it’s something else. The rich of old were believers. They wanted to serve God, but without mortifying the flesh. Building a cathedral or supporting a painter, making a Last Supper possible or a Moses, or something big and splendid with a spire, in that they saw a dividend, Mr. Tichy, for they saw Him in it,” and he pointed to the ceiling, the sky. “And others followed their example. It became the thing to do. A prince, doge, or magnate surrounded himself with gardeners and coachmen, scribblers and painters. Louis XV hired Boucher to do portraits of naked women. Boucher’s third-rate, of course, but his work has survived, while the coachmen and gardeners have left nothing.”

“The gardeners produced Versailles.”

“The point is that those rich didn’t understand art but thought it was in their interest. Today, in the age of specialization, they couldn’t care less… What’s wrong? A chest pain?”

“No. I think I’ve been robbed.”

My hand was in fact on my heart, because the inside pocket of my jacket was empty.

“Impossible. There are no kleptomaniacs here. You must have left your wallet in your room.”

“No. I had it in my pocket when I came in. I know because I was going to show you a picture of me with a beard.”

“But there’s no one else here, and I haven’t even come near you…”

I had the glimmer of an idea.

“Please tell me exactly what I did from the time we entered.”

“You sat down, and I took the bottle from the cupboard. What were we talking about then? Kramer. You told me about the slug, but I wasn’t watching you, I was looking for clean beakers. When I turned, you were sitting… no, standing. Next to the tachistoscope. Over here. You were looking into it when I gave you your whiskey… We drank, and you went back to where you are sitting now.”

I got up and looked at the apparatus. A chair, a console, a black partition with a pair of eyepieces, side lamps, a screen, and the box of a projector. I turned on a switch and the screen lit up. I looked behind the partition: oxidized black plates. Between the partition and a black plate was a space no wider than a letterbox slot. I tried to get my hand in but it was too narrow.

“Any tweezers around here?” I asked. “As long as possible…”

“I don’t know. I don’t see any. Here’s a piece of wire.”

“Let’s have it.”

I twisted it into a hook, let it down into the crack, and touched something soft. After a few unsuccessful tries, a black leather corner appeared. I needed my other hand to grab it, but the hand refused. The young ethnologist helped me retrieve my wallet.

“It’s It,” I said, lifting my left hand.

“But how? Didn’t you feel anything? And for what reason?”

“No, I didn’t notice. And it wasn’t easy, either, because the pocket is on the left side. It was done nimbly, delicately, like a professional thief. But that’s the speciality of the right brain, coordination, in games, in sports. For what reason? I can only guess. It’s a nonverbal intelligence, logical but a bit childish. Perhaps in order that I lose my identity. With no identifying papers or cards a man is nameless to those who do not know him.”

“Ah… to make you disappear? But that is magical thinking.”

“Yes. And it’s not good.”

“But It only wants to help you. Which is not surprising, after all It is also you. Though a little isolated.”

“This is not good because Its wanting to help me means that It believes something is threatening me in this situation. We can laugh now, but the next time…”

House came to see me later that evening. I was sitting on the bed in my pajamas inspecting my left calf, which had a bad bruise.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine, but…”

And I told him about the wallet.

“Curious. You really felt nothing?”

Then I saw the bruise and remembered. As I had looked into the tachistoscope, my left leg hit against something hard. It hurt, but I paid no attention. That’s when the pocket must have been picked.

“Most interesting,” said Dr. House. “The left hand cannot perform complicated movements without alerting the muscles on the right side of the body. Therefore it was necessary to distract you.”

“With this?” I indicated the bruise.

“Precisely. The left hand and left foot worked together. When you felt the pain, you felt nothing else in that moment, and a moment was enough.”

“Does this sort of thing happen often?”

“It is extremely rare.”

“But what if someone wanted to get at me — could he use the same trick? For instance, stab me on the right so the right wouldn’t interrupt while the left was being interrogated?”

“A professional would do it differently. An injection of Amytal in the left carotid artery, and the left brain goes to sleep while the right is awake. It lasts a few minutes.”

“And that’s sufficient?”

“If not, you insert a little tube into the artery and give the Amytal in drops. After a while the right hemisphere falls asleep too, because the brain arteries are connected by the so-called collaterals. Then you have to wait a while before you can begin again.”

I rolled down my pajama leg.

“I don’t know how long I can sit here waiting for I don’t know what. A little knowledge is better than none. Why don’t you handle it, doctor?”

“But can’t you do this yourself? You’ve found a way to communicate between one hand and the other. Have you learned anything by that method?”

“Very little.”

“Does It refuse to answer questions?”

“Rather, Its answers are incomprehensible. I know only this: It remembers in a different way. Perhaps in whole pictures, whole scenes. But when It tries to put it in words, riddles result. Possibly everything should be recorded in order and treated as a kind of symbolic shorthand.”

“More a task for a cryptographer than a doctor. Suppose you took such notes. What would that give you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. And on that note I’ll say good night.” He left. I turned out the light and lay down but couldn’t sleep. I lay on my back. After a while my left hand raised itself and several times, slowly, patted my cheek. Evidently it felt sorry for me. I got up, took a Seconal, and with both Ijon Tichys extinguished I sank into oblivion.

My situation was not only bad, it was idiotic. Hiding in an insane asylum without knowing from whom. Waiting without knowing for what. I tried talking to myself by hand but although It answered more willingly than before, I couldn’t understand It. I rooted through the asylum library and filled my room with textbooks, monographs, and piles of professional journals to find out once and for all who or what I was on my right hemisphere’s side. My hand answered, making a clear effort to be cooperative, and it even learned new words and expressions which encouraged me to question further and at the same time made me uneasy. What if It became my equal or even passed me? Then I would not only have to take It into account but listen to It or maybe it would even come to a tug of war where I would not remain in the middle but be torn in two forever and struggle like a stepped-on beetle, some of whose legs pull forward while others pull back. At night I dreamed about escaping and wandering among dark crags and didn’t even know which half of me was dreaming it. What I found out from the pile of books is true: the left brain, deprived of contact with the right, grows colorless, its language becomes dry which you can tell by the infrequency of adjectives. Reading over some of my notes, I saw that that was happening to me. But aside from such details I learned nothing from the publications of the experts. There were a lot of hypotheses but none of them fit me, and I got furious with these scientists who claimed to know better than I did what it was like to be me doubled. One day, I was ready to abandon all caution and go to New York, to the Lunar Agency, but the next morning that seemed to be the last thing I should do. I hadn’t heard from Tarantoga and even though I’d asked him to wait for a sign from me, his silence too began to irritate me.

Finally I decided to pull myself together like the old, whole Ijon Tichy. I would go to Berlin, a small town about two miles from the asylum, to buy a typewriter so I could cross-examine my left hand and type its answers until I had enough of them to see if there was any sense there. It was possible of course that I was a right-sided moron and it was only my personal vanity that kept me from seeing this. Blair, Goddeck, Shapiro, Rosenkrantz, Bombardino, and McCloskey held that in the muteness of the right hemisphere lay an unplumbed depth of talent, intuition, instinct, perhaps even a kind of genius, for this region contained all the wonders that left-handed rationalism refused to acknowledge: telepathy, clairvoyance, the traveling of the spirit to other planes, and visions, and states of mystic transport and enlightenment. But Kleist, Zuckerkandel, Pinotti, Veehold, Meyer, Ottitchkin, Nüerlö, and eighty other experts said nonsense. Yes, a sounding board, an organizer of emotions, an associative system, an echo chamber of thought, and perhaps some memory, but nothing that could be put in words, for the right brain was a nonlogical freak, an eccentric, a dreamer, a boaster, a hermit, a soul but in the raw state, it was flour and yeast but only the left brain could bake the bread. And a third opinion ran thus: the right was the engine, the left the steering mechanism. The right was therefore at a distance from the world and so had to be led, translated into human speech, commented upon, disciplined, and made into a person by the left brain.

House offered me the use of his car. He was not surprised by my plan and did not try to dissuade me. On a scrap of paper he drew a map of the main street and made a cross where the department store was. But I wouldn’t make it today, he said, because it was Saturday and the store closed at 1:00. I spent all Sunday in the park avoiding Adelaide. On Monday I couldn’t find House anywhere so I took the bus that left every hour. It was nearly empty: the black driver, and two children licking ice-cream cones. The town, a few miles from the asylum, was an old-fashioned American town. One wide street, houses with low hedges, gardens, fences, mailboxes, telephone poles, and a couple of larger buildings at the corner. A mailman stood talking to a fat, sweaty man in a flowery shirt whose dog, a big shaggy mongrel, was lifting its leg on a lamp post. I got out not far from them, and when the bus drove off in a cloud of foul smoke, I looked for the department store Dr. House had told me of. It was on the other side of the street, large and with big windows. Two employees in uniform were loading boxes by motor cart onto a truck. The sun beat down. The truck driver, sitting with his door open, drank beer from a can, not his first because there were empty cans at his feet. He was a black man completely white-haired though his face was not old. On the sunny side of the street walked two women, the younger pushing a baby carriage with the top up, the older peering into the carriage and saying something. Despite the heat she wore a black wool shawl over her head and shoulders. The women passed a car repair shop with its doors open and a couple of shining cars inside, you could hear the whoosh of water and hiss of air. I noted all this as I stepped from the curb to cross the street to the department store. I stopped because a long dark-green Lincoln that was parked about fifty feet away suddenly moved in my direction. The front windshield was so tinted I couldn’t see the driver. I got back up on the curb to let him pass but he braked sharply in front of me. I thought he wanted to ask me something, but someone grabbed me from behind and covered my mouth with his hand. I was so surprised that I didn’t even try to defend myself. A man sitting in the back seat opened the car door, and I started to struggle but I couldn’t make a sound. The mailman dived at us and grabbed me by the legs. Then there was a sharp crack and in an instant the whole scene changed.

The old woman dropped her shawl on the sidewalk and turned to us. She held a short machine gun with both hands and fired a volley at the car, putting holes in the radiator and tires. The white-haired black man, not drinking beer now, was behind the wheel and with one sharp turn his truck blocked the Lincoln’s way. The shaggy mongrel sprang at the old woman but fell writhing to the asphalt, meanwhile the mailman let go of me, jumped back, took from his bag something round and black, and hurled it at the women. There was a boom and white smoke and the young woman fell to her knees behind the baby carriage which opened up and started shooting a column of foamy liquid like a huge fire extinguisher at the driver of the Lincoln who had jumped out onto the sidewalk. Before the foam covered him I saw that he was not a black man but only wore a black mask and held a revolver. The stream hit the windshield of the limousine with such force that the glass shattered and some of it hit the mailman. The fat man who gripped me from behind all this time retreated, protecting himself with my body. From the garage several people in overalls ran out and pulled him off me. All this took no more than five seconds.

One of the cars inside the garage backed out and two men in smocks threw a net over the driver of the Lincoln, taking care not to touch him as he was covered with gluey foam. The fat man and the mailman, now handcuffed, were pushed into this car. I stood staring as the man who had opened the rear door of the Lincoln got out slowly with his hands up and walked obediently to the truck where the white-haired black man put handcuffs on him. No one even spoke to me. The car drove away. The truck holding the driver who’d been shot and his accomplice also pulled away, and the woman picked up the black shawl, brushed it off, put the machine gun back into the carriage, raised its hood, and walked on as if nothing had happened. The street was again quiet and empty. Only the large limousine with flat tires and broken headlights plus the dead dog were proof that I hadn’t dreamed this.

Next to the department store was a low wooden house with a porch and a garden full of sunflowers. A sunburned gentleman, his hair so blond it was almost white, stood in the open window with his elbows comfortably on the windowsill and a pipe in his hand. He gave me a quiet but eloquent look that seemed to say: “You see?” Only then did I become aware of something that was even stranger than the kidnapping attempt: though my ears still rang with the shots, the screams, and the explosions, not a single window had opened and no one was looking out into the street — as if I was on an empty movie set. I stood there for a good while, not sure what to do. Buying a typewriter no longer seemed important.