In the Problem Pit

I wrote this story on a balcony of the Century Vl/yM Hotel in Beverly Hills one afternoon, while my wife was taking a nap in our room and, having finished it, could not quite decide what to do next. I was pleased with it, and I thought it was science fiction, but I wasn't at all sure that anyone else would. So I sent it to Damon Knight for an opinion. He never said whether he thought it was sf or not, but he did publish it in Orbit.

I remember a winter when the cold snapped and stung, and it would not snow. It was a very long time ago, and in the afternoons Paulie O'Shaughnessy would come by for me after school and we'd tell each other what we were going to do with our lives. I remember standing with Paulie on the corner, with my breath white and my teeth aching from the cold air, talking. It was too cold to go to the park and we didn't have any money to go anywhere else. We thumbed through the magazines in the secondhand bookstore until the lady threw us out. "Let's hitch downtown," said Paulie; but I could feel how cold the wind would be on the back of the trolley cars and I wouldn't. "Let's sneak in the Carlton," I said, but Paulie had been caught sneaking in to see the Marx Brothers the week before and the usher knew his face. We ducked into the indoor miniature golf course for a while; it had been an automobile showroom the year before and still smelled of gas. But we were the only people there, and conspicuous, and when the man who rented out the clubs started toward us we left.

So we Boy Scout-trotted down Flatbush Avenue to the big old library, walk 50, trot 50, the cold air slicing into the insides of our faces, past the apple sellers and the wine-brick stores, gasping and grunting at each other, and do you know what? Paulie picked a book off those dusty old shelves. We didn't have cards, but he liked it too much to leave it unfinished. He walked out with it under his coat; and 15 years later, shriveled and shrunken and terrified of the priest coming toward his bed, he died of what he read that day. It's true. I saw it happen. And the damn book was only Beau Geste.

I remember the summer that followed. I still didn't have any money but I had found girls. That was the summer when Franklin Roosevelt flew to Chicago in an airplane to accept his party's nomination to the Presidency, and it was hotter than you would believe. Standing on the corner, the sparks from the trolley wheels were almost invisible in the bright sun. We hitched to the beach when we could, and Paulie's pale, Jewish-looking face got red and then freckled. He hated that; he wanted to be burned black in the desert sun, or maybe clear-skinned and cleft-chinned with the mark of a helmet strap on his jaw.

But I didn't see much of Paulie that summer. He had finished all the Wren books by then and was moving on to-Daredevil Aces; he'd wheedled a World War French bayonet out of his uncle and had taken a job delivering suits for a tailor shop, saving his money to buy a .22. I saw much more of his sister. She was 15 then, which was a year older than Paulie and I were. In his British soldier-of-fortune role-playing he cast her as much younger. "Sport," he said to me, eyes a little narrowed, half-smile on his lips, "do what you like. But not with Kitty."

As a matter of fact, in the end I did do pretty much as I liked with Kitty, but we had each married somebody else before that and it was a long way from 1932. But even in 1932 I tried. On a July evening I finally got her to go up on the roof with me; it was no good; somebody else was there ahead of us, and Kitty wouldn't stay with them there. "Let's sit on the stoop," she said. But that was right out in the street, with all the kids playing king-of-the-hill on a pile of sand.

So I took her by the elbow, and I walked her down the Avenue, talking about Life and Courage and War. She had heard the whole thing before, of course, as much as she would listen to, but from Paulie, not from me. She listened.

It was ritual courtship, as formal as a dog lifting his leg. It did not seem to me that it mattered what I said,, as long as what I said was masculine.

You can't know how masculine I wanted to be for Kitty. She was without question the prettiest doll around. She looked like—-well, like Ginger Rogers, if you remember, with a clean, friendly face and the neatest, slimmest hips. She knew that. She was studying dancing. She was also studying men, and God knows what she thought she was learning from me.

When we got to Dean Street I changed from authority on war to authority on science and told her that the heat was only at ground level. Just a little way above our heads, I told her, the air was always cool and fresh. "Let's go up on^he fire escape," I said, nudging her toward the Adantic Theatre.

The Adantic was locked up tight that year; Paulie and I were not the only kids who didn't have movie money. But the fire escapes were open, three flights of strap-iron stairs going up to what we called nigger heaven. I don't know why, exactly. The colored kids from the neighborhood didn't sit up there, in fact. I never saw them in the movies at all. The fire escapes made a good place to go. Paulie and I went up there a lot, when he wasn't working, to look down on everybody in the street and not have anyone know we were watching them. So Kitty and I went up to the second landing and sat on the steps, and in a minute I put my arm around her.

And all of this, you know, I'd thought out like two or three months in advance, going up there by myself and experimentally bouncing my tail up and down on the steps to test for discomfort, calculating in a wet morning in May what it would be like right after dark in August, and all. It was a triumph of 14-year-old forethought. Or it would have been if it had come to anything. But somebody coughed, higher up on the fire escape.

Kitty jabbed me with her elbow, and we listened. Somebody was mumbling softly up above us. I don't know if he had heard us coming. I don't think so. I stood up and peered around the landing, and I saw candlelight, and an old man's face, terribly lined and unshaven and sad. He was living there. All around the top landing he had carefully put up sheets of cardboard from grocery cartons, I suppose to keep the rain out. If it rained. Or perhaps just to keep him out of public view. He was sitting on a blanket, leaning his forearm on one knee, looking at the candle, talking to himself.

And that was the end of that. We tiptoed down the stairs, and Kitty said she had to go home. And did. Otherwise, I honestly think that in the long run I would have married her.

I remember the years of the war, the headlines and the blackouts and the crazy way everything was changing under my very eyes. Paulie had it made. He enlisted first thing, and wrote me clipped, concise letters about the joys of close-order drill. I remember buying his old car the last time he came home on furlough, with his cuffs tucked in his paratrooper boots, telling deadpan stories about the hazards of basic training. The car was a 1931 Buick, with a jug cork in the gas tank instead of a cap. I sold it for the price of two train tickets when I ran out of gas-ration coupons in Pittsburgh, on my honeymoon. Not with Kitty. Kitty had gone far out of my life by then. Her dancing lessons had paid off: amateur-night tap dancer to Film Fun model to showgirl at the International Casino; and then she'd gone abroad to Paris with a troupe and been caught in the Occupation. Well. Mutatis mutandis and plus 9a change and so on. Or, as one might say, things keep getting all screwed up.

I breezed through the war. Barring a company clerk in Jefferson Barracks who I really wanted to kill, there was nothing I couldn't handle; Paulie had lied. Or maybe for me it was a different war. I had got into newspaper work, which let me get into Special Services when my time came. Nobody was shooting at unit managers for USO shows. I went through forty-one months of exaltation and shame. You see, this was the war that really mattered and had to be won; and how I burned, with what a blue-white flame, with pride to be a part of it. And how I groveled before anyone who would listen because my part was mostly chasing enlisted men away from big-breasted starlets. Do you suppose it's really true that somebody had to do that job, too? I couldn't believe it, but it was because of that that I met Kitty again.

She turned up looking for a job as a translator, looking very much as she always had. She was different, though. She was married, to this very nice captain she had met during Occupation days in Paris, and she had become a German national. It was a grand reunion. I took her to dinner and she told me that Paulie had been wounded in the Salerno landing and was still in the hospital. And a little bit later she told me about her husband, the darling, dimpled SS officer, who was now a POW on the Eastern front. And for four months in Wiesbaden she lived in my billet with me, translating day and night; and, actually, that's what happened to that first marriage of mine, because my wife found out about it. I don't think she would have minded a Fraulein. She minded my shacking up with a girl I'd known before I knew her.

I remember more consequential causes than I can count. When I look inside my skin I don't see anything but consequences; all I am is the casual aftereffects of, item, an unemployed carpenter evicted from his home and, item, a classification clerk who had been in the newspaper game himself once, and all the other itemized seeds that have now blossomed into 52-year-old me.

I remember more than I absolutely want to, in fact, and some things I remember in the context of a certain time and a certain place when, in fact, I really learned them later on.

The man on the landing. Years after the war, when I had become a TV producer doing a documentary on the Depression, I put one of my research girls on checking him out. She was a good girl, and tracked him down. That's how I know he had been a carpenter. The banks closed and the jobs vanished, and he wound up on the fire escape. It happened that when the police chased him away a reporter was in the precinct house, and he wrote the story my girl found.

And I remember Paulie, 29 years old and weighing a fast 90 pounds, gasping hoarsely as he reached out to shake my hand in the VA hospital ward, the day before he died. He had been there for three years, dying all that time. He looked like his own grandfather. That was a consequence, too: a landing in the second wave at Salerno and a mine the engineers had missed. He got his Purple Heart for a broken spine that kept getting worse until it was so bad that it killed him.

I think I've seen the place where he got it—assuming that I remembered what he said well enough, or understood him well enough, when he was concentrating mostly on dying. I think the place it happened was on the city beach at Salerno, way at the north horn of that crescent, about where there's a little restaurant built out over the water on stilts. I stood there one afternoon on that beach, looking at the floating turds and pizza crusts, trying to see the picture of Paulie hitting the mine and being thrown into the sky in a fountain of saltwater and blood. But it wasn't any good. I can only see what I've seen, not what I've been told about. I couldn't see the causality. All I could do was ask myself questions about it: What made him sign up for his hero suit? Was it really reading that Percival Christopher Wren book when he was 13 years old? Or: What made me alive, and sort of rich, when Paulie was so poor and dead? Was it the four or five really good contacts I made in the USO that turned me into a genius television producer? Is there any of me, or of any of us, that isn't just consequence?

I think, and I've thought it over a lot, that everything that ever happened keeps on happening, extending tendrils of itself endlessly into the moving present tense of time, producing its echoes, and explosions and extinctions forever. Just being careful isn't enough to save us, but we do have to be careful. Smoky Bear wouldn't lie to you about that.

If I'd married Kitty I think we would have had fine kids, even grandchildren by now; but I didn't, not even batting .500 out of my two chances at her. First it was the old man on the fire escape, then it was the kindly Nazi she decided to go back to waiting for. She waited very well and for a long time, all through the years while the Russians were taking their time about letting him go and all through the de-Nazification trials after that. I suppose by then she felt she was too old to want to start a family. And none of my own wives have really wanted the PTA bit.

And think of the consequences of that—I mean, the negative consequences of the babies that Kitty and I didn't have. Did we miss out on a new Mozart? A Lee Harvey Oswald? Maybe just a hell of a solid Brooklyn fireman who might have saved a more largely consequential life than his own, or mine? Think of them. And that's all you can do with those particular consequences, because they didn't get born.

Percival Christopher Wren didn't mean to kill Paulie. The sad old derelict on the fire escape never intended to break up Kitty and me. Intentions don't matter.

We all live in each others' pockets. If I drive -my car along Mulholland Drive tonight, I only mean to keep my date with that pretty publicity girl from Paramount. I don't even know you're alive, do I? But the car is burning up the gasoline and pumping out the poison gas that makes the smog; and maybe it's just that little bit of extra exhaust fume in the air that bubbles your lungs out with emphysema. It doesn't matter to you what I mean to do. You're just as dead. I don't suppose I ever in my life really meant to hurt anybody, except possibly that J.B. company clerk. But he got off without a scratch, and meanwhile I may be killing you.

So I walk out on my balcony and stare through the haze at the lights of Los Angeles. I look at where they all live, the black militants and the aerospace engineers, the Desilu sound men and the storefront soul-savers, the kids who go to the Academie Fran§aise and the little old ladies with/"Back Up Our Boys" bumper stickers on their cars. I remember what they, and you, and each and every one of you have done to me, this half a century I've been battered and bribed into my present shape and status; but what are they, and all of you, doing to each other this night?