Trojan Horse Laugh

IV

Daylon in transition. For twenty days the spiral has been upward. Tomorrow it will reach a peak. There is laughter in the streets and people sing.

The city has a new motto. The Original Home of Happiness. The city is proud of being the first one selected.

Everyone walks about with a look of secret glee, as though barely able to contain themselves with the thought of the epic joy that the morrow will bring.

And those that have not been adjusted find that they, too, are caught up in the holiday spirit, in the air of impending revel. Strangers grin at each other and whole buses, homeward bound from work, ring with song as everyone joins in. Old songs. “Let a Smile be Your Umbrella”, “Singing in the Rain”, “Smiles”, “Smile the While”.

Joe Morgan and Alice Pardette have grown very close in the past twenty days. To him it is a new relationship — a woman who can think as frankly and honestly as any man, who has about her none of the usual feminine deviousness, though physically she is so completely feminine as to make his pulse pound.

And Alice, too, finds something in Joe she has never before experienced. A man willing to take her at face value, a man who does not try to force their relationship into channels of undesired intimacies, a man who listens to what she says and who will argue, person to person, rather than man to woman.

Dusk is over the city and the buzzing neon lights up the overcast in hue of pink-orange. The old car is parked where often he parked with Sadie Barnum. H wonders what Sadie is doing. They look out over the city and they are not at case.

“Joe,” she said suddenly, “don’t you feel it when you’re down there with them?”

“You mean feel as though I want to go around grinning like an idiot, too? Yes, and it scares me, somehow. I knew a few other guys who didn’t want to have anything to do with being adjusted. Now they’re as bad as the ones who had the shots. That good cheer is like a big fuzzy cloud hanging over the city.”

“And it’s worse than last time, isn’t it, Joe?” she asked softly.

He nodded. “Worse in a funny way. It’s sort of like the city was a big machine and now the governor is broken and it’s moving too fast. It’s creaking its way up and up and up to where maybe it’ll spin apart.”

She said: “Or like a boat that was going over gentle regular waves and now the waves are getting bigger and bigger.”

He turned and grinned at her. “You know, we can scare each other into a tizzy.”

Alice didn’t respond to his grin. She said in a remote voice: “Tomorrow is going to be... odd. I feel it. Joe, let’s stay together tomorrow. Please.”

She rested her hand on his wrist.

Suddenly she was in his arms. For the first time.

Thirty seconds later Joe said unsteadily, “For a statistician you—”

“I guess you’d better make a joke of it, Joe. I guess maybe it’s the only thing you can do, Joe. I guess... it wasn’t ever this way before.”

Like a slow rocket rising for twenty days, bursting into a bright banner of flame on the twenty-first day.

Joe walked out of his apartment into the street, turned and stared incredulously at an elderly man who, laughing so hard that he wept, held himself up by clinging to a lamp-post. The impossible laughter was contagious, even as it frightened. Joe felt laughter stretching his lips, painting itself across his mouth.

At that moment he dodged aside, barely in time. A heavy convertible, a woman with tears of laughter streaming down her cheeks behind the wheel, bounced up over the curb. The old gentleman, still laughing, was cradled neatly on the bumper, was carried over and crushed against the gray stone front of the apartment building.

Blood ran in a heavy slow current down the slope of the sidewalk toward the gutter. The crowd gathered quickly. For just a fleeting second they wore solemn and then someone giggled and they were off. They howled with laughter and pounded each other’s shoulders and staggered in their laughter so that the blood was tracked in wavered lines back and forth.

Joe fought free of them, and, even with the horror in his mind, he walked rapidly down the street, his lips pulled back in a wide grin. Behind him he could hear the woman, between great shouts of laughter explaining, “I... I got laughing and the car... it came over here... and he was standing there and he... and he—” She couldn’t go on and her voice was drowned by the singing and laughing around her.

They were singing, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

The counterman where Joe usually had breakfast had just finished printing a large crude sign. “Everything on the house. What will you have?”

The girl next to Joe yelped and grabbed his arm, laughed into his face and said: “Tell’m I want gin.”

The man beyond the girl, holding his belly, wavered to the door, whooping with laughter. He kicked the front window out of the nearby liquor store, came back with the gin.

The girl ripped the lop off, lifted the bottle and drank heavily. More bottles were passed around. The liquor store man came in with an armful.

As Joe tried vainly to order his eggs, the girl, gin heavy on her breath, ran warm fingers up the back of Joe’s neck and, breathing rapidly, said: “Honeylamb, I don’t know who you are, but you’re cute as a hug. Who can work on a happy day like this? Come on along with me, huh?”

Joe, still feeling that infuriating smile on his lips, scared al her. She had a very respectable look about her, and she was well-dressed.

Joe meant to say, “No thanks.” He heard himself saying eagerly, “Sure. That sounds fine.”

They went arm in arm along the street and she stopped every ten paces to take another swig out of the bottle. Two blocks further she gave a little sigh, slipped down onto the sidewalk, rolled over onto her back and passed out. She had a warm smile on her lips.

Joe stood over her, laughing emptily, until a whole crowd of people, arm in arm, swept down on him, pushing him along with them. He saw a heavy heel tear open the mouth of the girl on the sidewalk, but Joe couldn’t stop laughing.

He went down Main Street and it was a delirium of laughter and song and the crash and tinkle of plate glass, the crunch of automobile accidents.

There was an enormous scream of laughter, getting closer every moment, and a large woman fell from a great height onto the sidewalk, bursting like a ripe fruit. Joe grew dizzy with laughter. The crowd who had caught him up passed by and Joe Morgan loaned against a building, tears running down his face, his belly cramped and sore from the laughter, but still horror held lightly to his mind with cold fingers.

Through brimming eyes ho saw the street turn into a scone of wild, bacchanalian revel where people without fear, without shame, without modesty, with nothing left but lust and laughter, cavorted, more than half mad with the excesses of their glee.

Slowly he made his way to the News Building. In the lobby he saw Sadie Barnum with a stranger. He saw how eager her lips were and she turned glazed eyes toward Joe and laughed and turned back to the man.

And then he stumbled out, bumping into an old man he had seen in the bank. The old man, with an endless dry chuckle, walked slowly wearing a postman’s mailbag. The bag was crammed full of bills of all denominations. He cackled into Joe’s face, stuffed a handful of bills into Joe’s side pocket, went on down the street, throwing handfuls into the air. The wind whipped them about and they landed on the sidewalk where they wore trampled by people who had no inclination to pick them up.

A fat grinning man sat in the window of the jewelry store, cross-legged, throwing rings out onto the sidewalk through the shattered window.

“Happy New Year!” he yelled as Joe went by.

And then a woman had come from somewhere and she clung to Joe’s neck with moist hands and her eyes were wide and glassy.

Her weight knocked Joe down. He got to his feet and. she lay there and laughed up at him. Joe looked across the street to where a burly man strode along dragging another woman by the wrist. A small cold portion of Joe’s mind told him, “There is Alice. That is Alice. You have to do something.”

He ran between the spasms of helpless laughter and at last he spun the big man around. He wanted to hit him, but instead he collapsed against him and they both howled with insane glee.

Alice sat on the sidewalk, the tears dripping off her chin, her mouth spread in a fantastic smile. He picked her up, held her tightly, staggered off with her. She kept trying to kiss him.

He knew that he had to get her out of there, and soon.

Twice she was taken away from him by men who roared with joy and twice he staggered back, got hold of her again.

A crowd of men were going down the street, tipping over every car, having the time of their lives. A grinning cop watched them. One of the men took out a gun, pointed it at the cop and emptied it. The cop sat down on the street and laughed and hugged his perforated belly until he died.

Two men stood playing Russian Roulette. They passed the gun back and forth and each man spun the chamber before sucking on the barrel, pulling the trigger.

As Joe staggered by, clutching Alice, the gun went off, spattering them both with tiny flecks of brain tissue from the exploded skull. The man lurched into them, yelled, “Wanna play? Come-on, play with me!”

“Play his game, Joe,” Alice squealed.

But Joe, spurred by his hidden store of horror, pulled her along, got her to the car. He shoved her in, climbed behind the wheel, got the motor started.

In the first block a woman tried to ram him. He slammed on the brakes. She went across his bows, smashed two people on the sidewalk and crashed through the main window of a supermarket.

Joe, with Alice gasping helplessly beside him, went three blocks north, turned onto Wilson Avenue and headed out of town. His eyes streamed so that he could barely see.

Ten miles from Daylon he turned up a dirt road, parked in a wide shallow ditch, pulled Alice out of the car, hauled her up across a sloping field to where a wide grassy bank caught the morning sunshine.

They lay side by side and the gasps of laughter came with less and less frequency. Alice, her eyes tortured, pulled herself to her feet, went over behind the shelter of a line of brush and he could hear that she was being very ill. In a few moments the reaction hit him. He was ill, too.

They found a brook at the foot of the field and cleaned up. Their clothes were smeared with dots of blood from the city.

Back on the grassy bank she rolled onto her stomach, cradled her head in her arms and cried monotonously while he gently stroked her dark hair.

Finally she got control of herself. She sat up and he gave her a lighted cigarette.

She said: “I’ll never be without the memory of those hours, Joe. Never.”

He thought of the scenes, still vivid in his mind, “Do you think you’re different?”

“Thank God, Joe, that you found file when you did. Thank God that you kept hold of a little bit of sanity! There was a cold objective place down in me and I could see everything around me and I knew the horror of it, but I couldn’t stop joining in.”

“Me, too. My mouth’s sore from laughing. And my sides.”

Because it had to be talked out, because it couldn’t be permitted to stay inside to fester, they told of what they had seen, leaving much unsaid, but nothing misunderstood.

He told her about Sadie Barnum and her eyes were soft with pity.

After a long silence he said: “What can we do?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? I won’t let you go back, Joe.”

“What could I do if I went back? Pick the money off the streets?”

He remembered the old man with the mailbag. He took the crumpled bills out of his pocket. Seven hundreds, three fifties and four ones.

Her fingers were light on his arm. “Joe, we’ve got to let the rest of the country know what happens.”

He shrugged. “They wouldn’t even print my dispatches. Why should they listen to me now?”

“But we can’t just sit here! Think of the children back in the city, Joe. Can’t we... save any of them?”

“Let me think,” he said. “Let me think of some way we could keep from getting infected by that... that insanity back there.”

She said softly: “Suppose you couldn’t hear all that... that laughing around you?”

He jumped up and snapped his fingers. “I’ll bet that’s part of it. Not all of it, because deaf men join lynch mobs. But some of it. If you couldn’t see and couldn’t hear, you’d still sense the excitement around you and some of it would still get to you. You need something to take your mind off it, like in the old days when they bit on bullets, you know, for operations.”

“Like a toothache,” she said.

“I’m going to try it, kitten,” Joe Morgan said. “With my ears stuffed up with cloth and with my pet filling removed and a pebble in the socket where I can bite down on it. I have to see what’s going on down there.”

“And I go with you, Joe. I won’t stay here alone and I can help and if it should start to get you, darling, I’ll be there to... to help you.”