The Black Gondolier and Other Stories

THE REPAIR PEOPLE

Ann looked at the mutilated big gray clay figure bedded in pale yellow excelsior in the coffin-size shipping crate that came jerking in and bumped to a stop before Jack and her. Its crude man-shape, its tortured muteness, and in particular the signs stenciled on its partly-dismembered sections—FOOT, KNEE, GENITALS, BELLY—squeezed tears from her eyes.

“The poor guy, what he must have been through,” she managed to get out.

Jack kicked the crate.

He said, “Whatever shape he's in, he brought it on himself. First lesson for apprentices down here: you can't be sympathetic."

Ann fought back outrage. Jack didn't seem to have just the professional unfeeling of a journeyman, but personal vindictiveness too. She wished she's never seen that ad: HELP THE POOR BLOBS, THEY NEED YOU, BECOME A REPAIR PERSON. She wished she'd strangled the surge of idealism it had roused in her. Besides, the remembered advertisement kept blurring and changing words and spellings in her mind.

“Those stencils now,” Jack was saying, “they just show what the guy was thinking of when he fouled up. I'll give you a clue: it wasn't other people."

He squatted by the hacked gray shoulders and ran his eye from end to clay end.

“God has it easy, He only has to create ‘em.” He looked sideways down the line of crates. “Gotta get started!"

Stiffening two fingers and bracing them with a thumb, he suddenly drove them down in an obscene karate blow knuckle-deep in the clay forehead two inches above the blind eyes. Wet grayness splashed like mud. He swiftly jerked his fingers out.

“Stung me,” he mumbled, sucking the tips. He eyed Ann. “That's a good sign."

The clay head vibrated. Something small and dark and round and heavy-looking like a musket ball came buzzing out of the hole and hovered like a horsefly. Ann shrank away. Barely glancing at its zig-zag path, Jack snatched up a close-meshed butterfly net and snagged it at arm's stretch, instantly flipping the metal hoop to confine it. Then he laid the net down beside him. From time to time the dark thing hummed enraged and humped the netting as it tunneled about under the net, seeking escape.

“The psyche? The consciousness?” Ann quavered. Then, more softly still, “His soul? A bit of God?" “You name it, kid,” Jack quipped. “Here, smooth these out."

He was handing her swiftly, one by one, brightly colored gossamer films he was drawing out of the widening hole in the clay head, like a stage magician taking silk handkerchiefs out of a fishbowl.

They rippled and tugged irrationally as she smoothed and tried to flatten them—a mischievous spectrum, blue as Heaven, red as Hell, all colors. As she spread them out on the surgically gleaming table, she got the impression that there were fantastically detailed pictures lined on them, but she was unable to study them, it was all she could do to keep up with Jack. (Straighten out there! Lie down, damn you!) Journeymen seemed to have one working speed, apprentices another. Soon there were enough square films for a rainbow chessboard.

“Dreams,” Jack told her. “Crumpled spectral planes inside the skull. Angel dreams. Devil dreams. Wrapping the core—” he touched with his elbow the bump in the buzzing net—"to soothe it. Comfiest blanketing. No wonder when it got away from them and snagged in the black unconsciousness it bezerked!” He shoved his hand wrist-deep in the clay, swivelled his fingers around all the way, paused, then withdrew a wet-looking black silk bag. “There!—that's the lot! Get ready a three by five inch one­ way frontal window."

“What color?—on the opaque side?” she asked, shuffling through the frontal blanks in her bin.

“Flesh, what'd you think?” he told her with heavy patience. “Now lemme see.” As she trimmed the blank to size by eye, he swiftly selected four films from the rainbow field, then dove his other hand into the humping net and captured the dark thing there. The buzzing grew louder. He winced but didn't let go as he wrapped it up orderly in the films, like a bumblebee in silk handkerchiefs, changing his hold on it at every moment.

“Gotta keep it well wrapped and comforted,” he explained. “The power of illusion.” (Ann noted the angry buzz had sunk almost to a purring) “Yellow for sunlight and kicks,” he said of the first and outmost film as he checked them off. Then, “Blue for the sky and God. Green for the forest and deeps. Red for blood and danger. There, that's the bunch.” He carefully replaced the four-times-wrapped packet, as if setting it on a central needlepoint inside the clay skull. To Ann's surprise it stayed there, humming softly. Then with a sweep of his long arm Jack gathered together all the other films and crumpled them swiftly into the wet black silk bag and tossed it after the packet. It hung in the hole a moment, a puffy cushion, then fell—or was sucked—out of sight.

“You gotta put back every least thing you take out,” he told Ann. “There's another basic for you. And you gotta leave ‘em unconscious. We'll hope that this time the surplus dreams stay there. Now gimme that window."

As Jack fitted the flexible pane into the clay, Ann said, grieving at the uncouth gray, “He'll never be able to hide his mind from the outside now. Not for the tiniest time."

Jack said, “Nope."

The advert flared in Ann's memory: BE A HELP PERSON, REPAIR THE SLOBS, THEY HURT. Oh, why, why had she ...? She asked, “How'll he ever be able to sleep with the light always coming in his forehead?"

Jack said, “He can go in the real dark if he has to. Not everything's a motel with pale curtains."

Ann said, “But in the day with the sunlight or bright glows always pouring down it'll be so hot."

Jack shrugged. “Better to burn than go bats, kid."

He got the flesh-colored window flush in the gray clay and pressed that flat, making a seal. He touched a button and blue light pulsed on the gray clay. Then he leaned back and said, “Arba da Carba."

Ann asked, “Who's that?"

Jack said, “Not who, what, kid. Say it backwards. God doesn't use words at all, just breath."

The hacked clay worked rhythmically and grew smooth—and pink as the window in its forehead. Its eyes opened and rolled blindly from side to side. Its mouth gaped and it began to breath noisily. The left corner of its mouth started to convulse in a two-second tic. Ann watched with wonder, then her expression became one of staring hopelessness and distaste.

“Oh why,” she asked, “oh why did they ever decide to replace most regular people with these miserable globs?"

“Because they're cheaper,” Jack told her. “They don't cause trouble, they don't rebel, they just suffer. And they never die, they only break down."

The crate slid away and was replaced by another. Ann continued to stare.

“Break's over, let's get going,” Jack barked, placing his fisted hand, thumb turned down, over the new shape's livid brow. What's a matter, kid, you got something better to do?"