Galactic Pot-Healer Read Free Page B

still called up and asked for her advice.
    He read her the note.
    “Obviously it’s illegal,” Kate said. “But you know your business affairs don’t interest me. You’ll have to work it out by yourself or with whoever you’re currently sleeping with, probably some eighteen-year-old girl who doesn’t know any better, who doesn’t have any basis for comparison as an older woman would have.”
    “What do you mean ‘illegal’?” he asked. “What kind of pot is illegal?”
    “Pornographic pots. The kind the Chinese made during the war.”
    “Oh Christ,” he said; he hadn’t thought of that. Who but Kate would remember those! She had been lewdly fascinated by the one or two of them which had passed through his hands.
    “Call the police,” Kate said.
    “Anything else on your mind?” Kate said. “Now that you’ve interrupted my dinner and the dinner of everyone who’s over here tonight?”
    “Could I come over?” he said; loneliness crept through him and edged his question with the fear which Kate had always detected: the fear that she would retract into herimplacable chesspiece fort, the fort of her own mind and body out of which she ventured to inflict a wound, or two, and then disappear back in, leaving an expressionless mask to greet him. And, by means of that mask, she used his own failings to injure him.
    “No,” Kate said.
    “Why not?”
    “Because you have nothing to offer anyone in the way of talk or discussion or ideas. As you’ve said many times, your talent is in your hands. Or did you intend to come over and break one of my cups, my Royal Albert cups with the blue glaze, and then heal it? As a sort of magical incantation designed to throw everyone into fits of laughter.”
    Joe said, “I can contribute verbally.”
    “Give me an example.”
    “What?” he said, staring at her face on the screen of the phone.
    “Say something profound.”
    “You mean right now?”
    Kate nodded.
    “Beethoven’s music is firmly rooted in reality. That’s what makes him unique. On the other hand, genius as he was, Mozart—”
    “Shove it,” Kate said and hung up; the screen went blank.
    I shouldn’t have asked if I could come over, Joe realized with acute misery. It gave her that opening, that foot-in-the-psychic-door that she uses, that she preys on. Christ, he thought. Why did I ask? He got up and wandered drearily about his room; his motion became more and more aimless until at last he stopped and simply stood. I have to think about what really matters, he told himself. Not that she hung up or said anything nasty, but whether or not that note I got in the mail today means anything. Pornographic pots, he said to himself. She’s probably right. And it’s illegal to heal a pornographic pot, so there goes that.
    I should have realized it as soon as I read the note, he saidto himself. But that’s the difference between Kate and me. She would know right away. I probably wouldn’t have known until I had finished healing it and then taken a good firm look at it. I’m just not bright, he said to himself. Compared to her. Compared to the world.
    “The arithmetical total ejaculated in a leaky flow,” he thought fiercely. My best. At least I’m good at The Game. So what? he asked himself.
So what?
    Mr. Job, he thought, help me. The time has come. Tonight.
    Going rapidly into the tiny bathroom attached to his room he grabbed up the lid of the water closet of the toilet. Nobody, he had often thought, looks into a toilet. There hung the asbestos sack of quarters.
    And, in addition, a small plastic container floated. He had never seen it before in his life.
    Lifting it from the water he saw, with disbelief, that it contained a rolled up piece of paper. A note, floating in the water closet of his toilet, like a bottle launched at sea. Oh, this can’t really be, he thought, and felt like laughing. I mean Christ; it just can’t. But he did not laugh, because he felt fear. Fear that bordered on dread.