Ellison Wonderland Read online

  The trial was a manifest sadness to all who had seen him onstage, and the jury did not even have to be sent out to agree on a verdict of insanity.

  After all, whoever the fanatic was that the defense put on the stands, he was not sane, and was certainly no longer Richard Becker, the actor.

  For Dr. Charles Tedrow, the patient in restraining room 16 was a constant involvement. He was unable to divorce himself from the memory of a night three years before, when he had sat in an orchestra seat at the Henry Miller Theater, and seen Richard Becker, light and adroit, as the comical Tosspot in that season’s hit comedy, Never a Rascal.

  He was unable to separate his thoughts from the shape and form of the actor who had so immersed himself in The Method that for a time, in three acts, he was a blundering, maundering, larcenous alcoholic with a penchant for pomegranates and (as Becker had mouthed it onstage) “barratry on the low seas!” Separate them from this weird and many–faceted creature that lived its many lives in the padded cell numbered 16? Impossible.

  At first, there had been reporters, who had come to interview the Good Doctor in charge of Becker’s case; and to the last of these (for Dr. Tedrow had instituted restrictions on this sort of publicity) he had said, “To a man like Richard Becker, the world was very important. He was very much a man of his times; he had no real personality of his own, with the exception of that one overwhelming faculty and need to reflect the world around him. He was an actor in the purest sense of the word. The world gave him his personality, his attitudes, his facade, and the reason for his existence. Take those away from him, clap him up in a padded cell — as we were forced to do — and he begins to lose touch with reality.”

  “I understand,” the reporter had inquired carefully, “that Becker is re–living his roles, one after another. Is that true, Dr. Tedrow?”

  Charles Tedrow was, above all else, a compassionate man, and his fury at this remark, revealing as it did a leak in the sanitarium’s security, was unlike him. “Richard Becker is undergoing what might be called, in psychiatric terms, ‘induced hallucinatory regression.’ In his search for some reality, there in that room, he has fastened onto the method of assuming characters’ moods he had played onstage. From what I’ve been able to piece together from reviews of his shows, he is going back: from the most recent to the next and the next and so on.”

  The reporter had asked more questions, had made more superficial and phantasmagoric assumptions, until Dr. Charles Tedrow had concluded the interview forcibly.

  But even now, as he sat across from Richard Becker in the quiet office, he knew that almost nothing the reporter had conceived could rival what Becker had done to himself.

  “Tell me, Doctor,” the florid, bombastic traveling salesman who was Richard Becker asked, “what the hell’s new down the line?”

  “It’s really very quiet, these days, Ted,” the physician replied. Becker had been this way for two months now: submerged in the part of Ted Rogat, the loudmouth philandering protagonist of Chayefsky’s The Wanderer. For six months before that he had been Marco Polo, and before that the nervous, slack–jawed and incestuous son of The Glass of Sadness.

  “Hell, I remember one little chippie in, where was it, oh yeah, hell yes! It was K.C., good old K.C.! Man, she was a goodie! You ever been to K.C., Doc? I was a drummer in nylons when I worked K.C. Jeezus, lemme tell ya — ”

  It was difficult to believe the man who sat on the other side of the table was an actor. He looked the part, he spoke the part, he was Ted Rogat, and Dr. Tedrow could catch himself from time to time contemplating the release of this total stranger who had wandered into Richard Becker’s cell.

  He sat and listened to the story of the flame–hipped harlot in Kansas City who Ted Rogat had picked up in an Armenian Restaurant, and seduced with promises of nylons. He listened to it, and knew that whatever else was true of Richard Becker, this creature of many faces and many lives, he was no saner than the day he had killed that girl. After eighteen months in the sanitarium, he was going back, back, back through his acting career, and re–playing the roles; but never once coming to grips with reality.

  In the plight and disease of Richard Becker, Dr. Charles Tedrow saw a bit of himself, of all men, of his times and the thousand illnesses to which mortal flesh heir.

  He returned Richard Becker, as well as Ted Rogat, to the security and tiny world of room 16.

  Two months later he brought him back, and spent a highly interesting three hours discussing group therapy with Herr Doktor Ernst Loebisch, credentials from the Munich Academy of Medicine and the Vienna Psychiatric Clinic. Four months after that, Dr. Tedrow got to know the surly and insipid Jackie Bishoff, juvenile delinquent and hero of “Streets of Night.”

  And almost a year later — to the day — Dr. Tedrow sat in his office with a bum, a derelict, a rheumy–eyed and dissipated vagabond who could only be the skid from Sweet Miracles, Richard Becker’s first triumph, twenty–four years before.

  What Richard Becker might look like, without camouflage, in his own shell, Tedrow had no idea. He was, now, to all intents and purposes, the seedy old tramp with the dirt caked into the sagged folds of his face.

  “Mr. Becker, I want to talk to you.”

  Hopelessness shined out of the old bum’s eyes. There was no answer.

  “Listen to me, Becker. Please listen to me, if you’re in there somewhere, if you can hear me. I want you to understand what I’m about to say; it’s very important.”

  A croak, cracked and forced, came from the bum’s lips, and he mumbled, “I need’a drink, yuh go’ uh drink fuh me, huh . . . ”

  Tedrow leaned across, his hand shaking as he took the old bum’s chin in his palm, and held it fixed, staring into this stranger’s eyes. “Now listen to me, Becker. You’ve got to hear me. I’ve gone through the files, and as far as I can tell, this was the first part you ever played. I don’t know what will happen! I don’t know what form this syndrome will take after you’ve used up all your other lives. But if you can hear me, you’ve got to understand that you may be approaching a crisis point in your — in your life.”

  The old bum licked cracked lips.

  “Listen! I’m here, I want to help you, I want to do something for you, Becker. If you’ll come out for an instant, just a second, we can establish contact. It’s got to be now or — ”

  He left it hanging. He had no way of knowing if–what. And as he lapsed into silence, as he released the bum’s chin, a strange alteration of facial muscles began, and the derelict’s countenance shifted, subtly ran like mercury, and for a second he saw a face he recognized. From the eyes that were no longer red–rimmed and bloodshot, Dr. Charles Tedrow saw intelligence peering out.

  “It sounds like fear, Doctor,” he said.

  And, “Goodbye, once more.”

  Then the light died, the features shifted once again, and the physician was staring once more at the empty face of a gutter–bred derelict.

  He sent the old man back to room 16. Later that day, he had one of the male nurses take in an 89-cent bottle of muscatel.

  “Speak up, man! What in the name of God is going on out there?”

  “I — I can’t explain it, Dr. Tedrow, but you’d better — you’d better get out here right away. It’s — it’s oh Jee–zus!”

  “What is it? Stop crying, Wilson, and tell me what the hell is wrong!”

  “It’s, it’s number 16 . . . it’s . . . ”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Keep everyone away from that room. Do you understand? Wilson! Do you understand me?”

  “Yessir, yessir. I’ll — oh Christ — hurry up Doc . . . ”

  He could feel his pajama pants bunched around his knees, under his slacks, as he floored the pedal of the ranch wagon. The midnight roads were jerky in the windshield, and the murk that he raced through was almost too grotesque to be a fact of nature.

/>   When he slewed the car into the drive, the gatekeeper threw the iron barrier back almost spastically. The ranch wagon chewed gravel, sending debris back in a wide fan, as Tedrow plunged ahead. When he screeched to a halt before the sanitarium, the doors burst open and the senior attendant, Wilson, raced down the steps.

  “This way, th–this way, Doctor Te — ”

  “Get out of my way, you idiot, I know which direction!” he shoved Wilson aside, and strode up the steps and into the building.

  “It started about an hour ago . . . we didn’t know what was happ — ”

  “And you didn’t call me immediately? Ass!”

  “We just thought, we just thought it was another one of his stages, you know how he is . . . ”

  Tedrow snorted in disgust and threw off his topcoat as he made his way rapidly down the corridor to the section of the sanitarium that housed the restraining rooms.

  As they came into the annex, through the heavy glass–portaled door, he heard the scream for the first time.

  In that scream, in that tormented, pleading, demanding and hopelessly lost tremor there were all the sounds of fear he had ever heard. In that voice he heard even his own voice, his own soul, crying out for something.

  For an unnameable something, as the scream came again.

  “Give me some light!”

  Another world, another voice, another life. Some evil and empty beseeching from a corner of a dust–strewn universe. Hanging there timelessly, vibrant in colorless agony. A million tired and blind stolen voices all wrapped into that one howl, all the eternal sadnesses and losses and pains ever known to man. It was all there, as the good in the world was sliced open and left to bleed its golden fluid away in the dirt. It was a lone animal being eaten by a bird of prey. It was a hundred children crushed beneath iron treads. It was one good man with his entrails in his blood–soaked hands. It was the soul and the pain and the very vital fiber of life, draining away, without light, without hope, without succor.

  “Give me some light!”

  Tedrow flung himself at the door, and threw back the bolt on the observation window. He stared for a long and silent moment as the scream trembled once more on the air, weightlessly, transparently, tingling off into emptiness. He stared, and felt the impact of a massive horror stifle his own cry of disbelief and terror.

  Then he spun away from the window and hung there, sweat– drenched back flat to the wall, with the last sight of Richard Becker he would ever hope to see, burned forever behind his eyes.

  The sound of his sobs in the corridor held the others back. They stared silently, still hearing that never–spoken echo reverberating down and down and down the corridors of their minds:

  Give me some light!

  Fumbling beside him, Tedrow slammed the observation window shut, and then his arm sank back to his side.

  Inside room 16, lying up against the far wall, his back against the soft passive padding, Richard Becker looked out at the door, at the corridor, at the world, forever.

  Looked out as he had in his first moment of life: purely and simply.

  Without a face. From his hairline to his chin, a blank, empty, featureless expanse. Empty. Silent. Devoid of sight or smell or sound. Blank and faceless, a creature God had never deigned to bless with a mirror to the world. His Method now was gone.

  Richard Becker, actor, had played his last part, and had gone away, taking with him Richard Becker, a man who had known all the sights, all the sounds, all the life of fear.

  What can I tell you? When I was a kid in Painesville, Ohio, and involved in the intricacies of Jack Armstrong, The Green Hornet, I Love A Mystery, Hop Harrigan and Dick Tracy, anything was possible. Under the side porch of our house, magic lands of adventure and intrigue made themselves known to me in the pages of comic books that chronicled the adventures of the Sandman, Captain America and Bucky, the Human Torch, the Boy Commandos, Captain Marvel, Starman, Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash and (my favorite) Hawkman. My Saturday afternoons of quivering joy were secretively spent in the Utopia Theater, that stood next to the Cleveland Trust, where Kresge’s 5 and 10 now looms. And in that tiny movie house I saw my first Dick Tracy serial, starring Ralph Byrd. I saw the Shadow with Victor Jory. I shivered at The Clutching Hand and cheered Don Winslow Of The Navy and hissed as The Crimson Skull doomed the hero to a room whose walls came inexorably together. It was a golden time, before TV, in which the imagination and the need to be young were coupled with a world of wonders. In my world, at the corner of Harmon Drive and Mentor Avenue, was a wonderful dark woods, just like the one in

  Gnomebody

  Did you ever feel your nose running and you wanted to wipe it, but you couldn’t? Most people do, sometime or other, but I’m different. I let it run.

  They call me square. They say, “Smitty, you are a square. You are so square, you got corners!” This, they mean, indicates I am an oddball and had better shape up or ship out. So all right, so I’m a goof–off as far as they think. Maybe I do get a little sore at things that don’t matter, but if Underfeld hadn’t’a layed into me that day in the gym at school, nothing would have happened. The trouble is, I get aggravated so easy about little things, like not making the track team, that I’m no good at studies. This makes the teachers not care for me even a little. Besides, I won’t take their guff. But that thing with track. It broke me up really good.

  There I was standing in the gym, wearing these dirty white gym shorts with a black stripe down the side. And old Underfeld, that’s the track coach, he comes up and says, “Whaddaya doin’, Smitty?”

  Well, anyone with 20/40 eyesight coulda seen what I was doing. I was doing push–ups. “I’m doing push–ups,” I said. “Whaddaya think I’m doing? Raising artichokes?”

  That was most certainly not the time to wise off to old Underfeld. I could see the steam pressure rising in the jerk’s manner, and next thing he blows up all over the joint: “Listen, you little punk! Don’t get so mouthy with me. In fact, I’m gonna tell you now, ’cause I don’t want ya hangin’ around the gym or track no more: You just ain’t good enough. In a short sprint you got maybe a little guts, but when it comes to a long drag, fifty guys in this school give their right arms to be on the team beat you to the tape. I’m sorry. Get out!”

  He is sorry. Like hell!

  He is no more sorry than I am as I say, “Ta hell with you, you chowderhead, you got no more brains than these ignorant sprinters that will fall dead before they get to the tape.”

  Underfeld looks at me like I had stuck him in the seat of his sweat pants with a fistful of pins and kind of gives a gasp, “What did you say?” he inquires, breathless like.

  “I don’t mumble, do I?” I snapped.

  “Get out of here! Get outta here! Geddouddaere!”

  He was making quite a fuss as I kicked out the door to the dressing rooms.

  As I got dressed I gave the whole thing a good think. I was pretty sure that a couple of those stinkin’ teachers I had guffed had put wormhead Underfeld up to it. But what can a guy do? I’m just a kid, so says they. They got the cards stacked six ways from Culbertson, and that’s it.

  I was pretty damned sore as I kicked out the front door. I decided to head for The Woods and try to get it off my mind. That I was cutting school did not bother me. My mother, maybe. But me? No. It was The Woods for me for the rest of the afternoon.

  Those Woods. Something funny about them. D’ja ever notice, sometimes right in the middle of a big populated section they got a little stand of woods, real deep and shadowy, you can’t see too far into them? You try to figure out why someone hasn’t bought up the plot and put a house on it, or why they haven’t made it into a playground? Well, that’s what my Woods were.

  They faced back on a street full of those cracker–box houses constructed by the government, the factory workers shouldn’t sleep on the curbs. On the other sid
e, completely boxing them in, was a highway, running straight through to the big town. It isn’t really big, but it makes the small town seem not so small.

  I used to cut school and go there to read. In the center is a place where everything has that sort of filtery light that seeps down be-tween the tree branches, where there’s a big old tree that is strictly one all alone.

  What I mean is that tree is great. Big thing, stretches and’s lost in the branches of the other trees, it’s so big. And the roots look like they were forced up out of the ground under pressure, so all’s you can see are these sweeping arcs of thick roots, all shiny and risen right out, forming a little bowl under the tree.

  Reason I like it so much there, is that it’s quieter than anything, and you can feel it. The kind of quiet a library would like to have, but doesn’t. To cap all this, the rift in the branches is just big enough so sunlight streams right through and makes a great reading light. And when the sun moves out of that rift, I know it’s time to run for home. I make it in just enough time so that Mom doesn’t know I was cutting, and thinks I was in school all day.

  So last week — I’d been going to The Woods off, on for about two years — I tagged over there, after that creep Underfeld told me I was his last possible choice for the track team. I had a copy of something or other, I don’t remember now, I was going to read.

  I settled down with my rump stuck into that bowl in the roots, and my feet propped against some smaller rootlings. With that little scrubby plant growth that springs up around the bases of trees, it was pretty comfortable, so I started reading.