Backteria and Other Improbable Tales Read Free Page B

relief like pulsing tubes of blue spaghetti. His shoes might force a nail to grow back in. There might be poisoning in his system, blood rotting at the edges and flowing deep in congested waves.
    He washed carefully and, when he shaved, his hand shook for fear he would cut his throat. He’d meant to get an electric razor. Why did he always forget? He looked in the cabinet. It was full of death. An unwary opening of bottles, a swallow and quick finish. He slammed the cabinet door shut and hurried out of the bathroom.
    He descended slowly on the stairs so he wouldn’t fall and shatter his body at the foot of the steps. His house was a trap, a snare set by himself and all the men and women who made it what it was. Shifting rugs and loose connections. Smooth floor and smoother bathtubs, burning radiators and fireplaces and furnaces. Broken glass and razor blades and splinters and sharp knives. Man built himself a home and filled it with menace. It was all right when you didn’t think about it. But then something happened and you thought about it all the time.
    At breakfast he wondered if maybe Lucy was poisoning him. She loved him. He knew that. She had married him and borne him two fine children. But maybe she was poisoning him. Maybe there was poison in the orange juice, sprinkled in with the salt and pepper and the sugar. Maybe he was packing death into his veins shouting—Here! Run riot in my blood!
    He shuddered when she brushed against him. He was afraid for the children. And he was afraid of the children. They were his. He loved them with all his heart. He was afraid of them. Breakfast and supper on weekdays were agonies of wretched ambivalence. It got so he hated everyone at some time or another.
    The subway station was very crowded. There were people lined up at the edge of the platform. The train whistled far away. They all shifted on their feet and moved closer to the edge. They touched him, pushed him, shoved him. He wanted to scream. They were trying to push him over the edge.
    Suppose they did. Suppose the great steel mass slammed into him and crushed him to a pulp on the track, severed his limbs from his body, sent sprays of his blood into the air, splattered his organs on the black ties, coated the pillars with his flesh.
    He wanted to yell, to strike out blindly, to fight for his life. But he was civilized. He was a modern. He was a man. He couldn’t cry or shriek. He had to pretend he wasn’t afraid. He must make-believe he was used to this—the surrounding of death in life.
    The train was crowded. It was always crowded in the morning. The sweat trickled down his face and across his neck and down from his armpits. The people were packed against him. Packed people were death. Alone they were bad enough. In a mass, in a swaying dimlit mass, they were death itself. They mingled with each other, each of them joined with another and, all added up, they were crawling twisting death, all around him. Calling him, plucking at his clothes with flesh-tattered skeleton fingers.
    He wondered if he should get off and take the local because there were always less people on the local.
    But it was figuring like that that killed a man. Suppose he got on the local in order to avoid the crowds on the express. That day the local would have an accident. He knew it would. That was the way.
    Then again, the local went under the river and the express went over it. If he was going to face death then he would rather it was on the express than on the local. Because it would be better to fall off the bridge. There might be a chance—just an outside chance—that he would get to a window and maybe swim up to the surface. He could see the light anyway. It would be better to see the light.
    If there was an accident under the river he couldn’t see anything. It would be pitch black. If the tunnel walls collapsed and the water rushed in, he’d be drowned in muddy torrential darkness. It would be dark because the electricity would short