The Changed Man Read online

  The funeral was well attended because Dale had a large family and was well liked at the office. He sat between his own parents and Colly’s parents. The speakers droned on, and Dale, easily distracted, kept thinking of the fact that of all the mourners there, only a few were there in private grief. Only a few had actually known Colly, who preferred to avoid office functions and social gatherings; who stayed home with Brian most of the time being a perfect housewife and reading books and being, in the end, solitary. Most of the people at the funeral had come for Dale’s sake, to comfort him. Am I comforted? he asked himself. Not by my friends— they had little to say, were awkward and embarrassed. Only his father had had the right instinct, just embracing him and then talking about everything except Dale’s wife and son who were dead, so mangled in the incident that the coffin was never opened for anyone. There was talk of the fishing in Lake Superior this summer; talk of the bastards at Continental Hardware who thought that the 65-year retirement rule ought to apply to the president of the company; talk of nothing at all. But it was good enough. It distracted Dale from his grief.

  Now, however, he wondered whether he had really been a good husband for Colly. Had she really been happy, cooped up in the house all day? He had tried to get her out, get to meet people, and she had resisted. But in the end, as he wondered whether he knew her at all, he could not find an answer, not one he was sure of. And Brian—he had not known Brian at all. The boy was smart and quick, speaking in sentences when other children were still struggling with single words; but what had he and Dale ever had to talk about? All Brian’s companionship had been with his mother; all Colly’s companionship had been with Brian. In a way it was like their breathing—the last time Dale had heard them breathe—in unison, as if even the rhythms of their bodies were together. It pleased Dale somehow to think that they had drawn their last breath together, too, the unison continuing to the grave; now they would be lowered into the earth in perfect unison, sharing a coffin as they had shared every day since Brian’s birth.

  Dale’s grief swept over him again, surprising him because he had thought he had cried as much as he possibly could, and now he discovered there were more tears waiting to flow. He was not sure whether he was crying because of the empty house he would come home to, or because he had always been somewhat closed off from his family; was the coffin, after all, just an expression of the way their relationship had always been? It was not a productive line of thought, and Dale let himself be distracted. He let himself notice that his parents were breathing together.

  Their breaths were soft, hard to hear. But Dale heard, and looked at them, watched their chests rise and fall together. It unnerved him—was unison breathing more common than he had thought? He listened for others, but Colly’s parents were not breathing together, and certainly Dale’s breaths were at his own rhythm. Then Dale’s mother looked at him, smiled, and nodded to him in an attempt at silent communication. Dale was not good at silent communication; meaningful pauses and knowing looks always left him baffled. They always made him want to check his fly. Another distraction, and he did not think of breathing again.

  Until at the airport, when the plane was an hour late in arriving because of technical difficulties in Los Angeles. There was not much to talk to his parents about; even his father’s chatter failed him, and they sat in silence most of the time, as did most of the other passengers. Even a stewardess and the pilot sat near them, waiting silently for the plane to arrive.

  It was in one of the deeper silences that Dale noticed that his father and the pilot were both swinging their crossed legs in unison. Then he listened, and realized there was a strong sound in the gate waiting area, a rhythmic soughing of many of the passengers inhaling and exhaling together. Dale’s mother and father, the pilot, the stewardess, several other passengers, all were breathing together. It unnerved him. How could this be? Brian and Colly had been mother and son; Dale’s parents had been together for years. But why should half the people in the waiting area breathe together?

  He pointed it out to his father.

  “Kind of strange, but I think you’re right,” his father said, rather delighted with the odd event. Dale’s father loved odd events.

  And then the rhythm broke, and the plane taxied close to the windows, and the crowd stirred and got ready to board, even though the actual boarding was surely half an hour off.

  The plane broke apart at landing. About half the people in the airplane survived. However, the entire crew and several passengers, including Dale’s parents, were killed when the plane hit the ground.

  It was then that Dale realized that the breathing was not a result of coincidence, or the people’s closeness during their lives. It was a messenger of death; they breathed together because they were going to draw their last breath together. He said nothing about this thought to anyone else, but whenever he got distracted from other things, he tended to speculate on this. It was better than dwelling on the fact that he, a man to whom family had been very important, was now completely without family; that the only people with whom he was completely himself, completely at ease, were gone, and there was no more ease for him in the world. Much better to wonder whether his knowledge might be used to save lives. After all, he often thought, reasoning in a circular pattern that never seemed to end, if I notice this again, I should be able to alert someone, to warn someone, to save their lives. Yet if I were going to save their lives, would they then breathe in unison? If my parents had been warned, and changed flights, he thought, they wouldn’t have died, and therefore wouldn’t have breathed together, and so I wouldn’t have been able to warn them, and so they wouldn’t have changed flights, and so they would have died, and so they would have breathed in unison, and so I would have noticed and warned them … .

  More than anything that had ever passed through his mind before, this thought engaged him, and he was not easily distracted from it. It began to hurt his work; he slowed down, made mistakes, because he concentrated only on breathing, listening constantly to the secretaries and other executives in his company, waiting for the fatal moment when they would breathe in unison.

  He was eating alone in a restaurant when he heard it again. The sighs of breath came all together, from every table near him. It took him a few moments to be sure; then he leaped from the table and walked briskly outside. He did not stop to pay, for the breathing was still in unison at every table to the door of the restaurant.

  The maître d’, predictably, was annoyed at his leaving without paying, and called out to him. Dale did not answer. “Wait! You didn’t pay!” cried the man, following Dale out into the street.

  Dale did not know how far he had to go for safety from whatever danger faced everyone in the restaurant; he ended up having no choice in the matter. The maître d’ stopped him on the sidewalk, only a few doors down from the restaurant, tried to pull him back toward the place, Dale resisting all the way.

  “You can’t leave without paying! What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I can’t go back,” Dale shouted. “I’ll pay you! I’ll pay you right here!” And he fumbled in his wallet for the money as a huge explosion knocked him and the maître d’ to the ground. Flame erupted from the restaurant, and people screamed as the building began crumbling from the force of the explosion. It was impossible that anyone still inside the building could be alive.

  The maître d’, his eyes wide with horror, stood up as Dale did, and looked at him with dawning understanding. “You knew!” the maître d’ said. “You knew!”

  Dale was acquitted at the trial—phone calls from a radical group and the purchase of a large quantity of explosives in several states led to indictment and conviction of someone else. But at the trial enough was said to convince Dale and several psychiatrists that something was seriously wrong with him. He was voluntarily committed to an institution, where Dr. Howard Rumming spent hours in conversation with Dale, trying to understand his madness, his fixation on breathing as a sign of coming death.
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  “I’m sane in every other way, aren’t I, Doctor?” Dale asked, again and again.

  And repeatedly the doctor answered, “What is sanity? Who has it? How can I know?”

  Dale soon found that the mental hospital was not an unpleasant place to be. It was a private institution, and a lot of money had gone into it; most of the people there were voluntary commitments, which meant that conditions had to remain excellent. It was one of the things that made Dale grateful for his father’s wealth. In the hospital he was safe; the only contact with the outside world was on the television. Gradually, meeting people and becoming attached to them in the hospital, he began to relax, to lose his obsession with breathing, to stop listening quite so intently for the sound of inhalation and exhalation, the way that different people’s breathing rhythms fit together. Gradually he began to be his old, distractable self.

  “I’m nearly cured, Doctor,” Dale announced one day in the middle of a game of backgammon.

  The doctor sighed. “I know it, Dale. I have to admit it—I’m disappointed. Not in your cure, you understand. It’s just that you’ve been a breath of fresh air, you should pardon the expression.” They both laughed a little. “I get so tired of middle-aged women with fashionable nervous breakdowns.”

  Dale was gammoned—the dice were all against him. But he took it well, knowing that next time he was quite likely to win handily—he usually did. Then he and Dr. Rumming got up from their table and walked toward the front of the recreation room, where the television program had been interrupted by a special news bulletin. The people around the television looked disturbed; news was never allowed on the hospital television, and only a bulletin like this could creep in. Dr. Rumming intended to turn if off immediately, but then heard the words being said.

  “ … from satellites fully capable of destroying every major city in the United States. The President was furnished with a list of fifty-four cities targeted by the orbiting missiles. One of these, said the communiqué, will be destroyed immediately to show that the threat is serious and will be carried out. Civil defense authorities have been notified, and citizens of the fifty-four cities will be on standby for immediate evacuation.” There followed the normal parade of special reports and deep background, but the reporters were all afraid.

  Dale’s mind could not stay on the program, however, because he was distracted by something far more compelling. Every person in the room was breathing in perfect unison, including Dale. He tried to break out of the rhythm, and couldn’t.

  It’s just my fear, Dale thought. Just the broadcast, making me think that I hear the breathing.

  A Denver newsman came on the air then, overriding the network broadcast. “Denver, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the targeted cities. The city has asked us to inform you that orderly evacuation is to begin immediately. Obey all traffic laws, and drive east from the city if you live in the following neighborhoods … .”

  Then the newsman stopped, and, breathing heavily, listened to something coming through his earphone.

  The newsman was breathing in perfect unison with all the people in the room.

  “Dale,” Dr. Rumming said.

  Dale only breathed, feeling death poised above him in the sky.

  “Dale, can you hear the breathing?”

  Dale heard the breathing.

  The newsman spoke again. “Denver is definitely the target. The missiles have already been launched. Please leave immediately. Do not stop for any reason. It is estimated that we have less than—less than three minutes. My God,” he said, and got up from his chair, breathing heavily, running out of the range of the camera. No one turned any equipment off in the station—the tube kept on showing the local news set, the empty chairs, the tables, the weather map.

  “We can’t get out in time,” Dr. Rumming said to the inmates in the room. “We’re near the center of Denver. Our only hope is to lie on the floor. Try to get under tables and chairs as much as possible.” The inmates, terrified, complied with the voice of authority.

  “So much for my cure,” Dale said, his voice trembling. Rumming managed a half-smile. They lay together in the middle of the floor, leaving the furniture for everyone else because they knew that the furniture would do no good at all.

  “You definitely don’t belong here,” Rumming told him. “I never met a saner man in all my life.”

  Dale was distracted, however. Instead of his impending death he thought of Colly and Brian in their coffin. He imagined the earth being swept away in a huge wind, and the coffin being ashed immediately in the white explosion from the sky. The barrier is coming down at last, Dale thought, and I will be with them as completely as it is possible to be. He thought of Brian learning to walk, crying when he fell; he remembered Colly saying, “Don’t pick him up every time he cries, or he’ll just learn that crying gets results.” And so for three days Dale had listened to Brian cry and cry, and never lifted a hand to help the boy. Brian learned to walk quite well, and quickly. But now, suddenly, Dale felt again that irresistible impulse to pick him up, to put his pathetically red and weeping face on his shoulder, to say, That’s all right, Daddy’s holding you.

  “That’s all right, Daddy’s holding you,” Dale said aloud, softly. Then there was a flash of white so bright that it could be seen as easily through the walls as through the window, for there were no walls, and all the breath was drawn out of their bodies at once, their voices robbed from them so suddenly that they all involuntarily shouted and then, forever, were silent. Their shout was taken up in a violent wind that swept the sound, wrung from every throat in perfect unison, upward into the clouds forming over what had once been Denver.

  And in the last moment, as the shout was drawn from his lungs and the heat took his eyes out of his face, Dale realized that despite all his foreknowledge, the only life he had ever saved was that of a maitre d’hôtel, whose life, to Dale, didn’t mean a thing.

  FAT FARM

  THE RECEPTIONIST WAS surprised that he was back so soon.

  “Why, Mr. Barth, how glad I am to see you,” she said.

  “Surprised, you mean,” Barth answered. His voice rumbled from the rolls of fat under his chin.

  “Delighted.”

  “How long has it been?” Barth asked.

  “Three years. How time flies.”

  The receptionist smiled, but Barth saw the awe and revulsion on her face as she glanced over his immense body. In her job she saw fat people every day. But Barth knew he was unusual. He was proud of being unusual.

  “Back to the fat farm,” he said, laughing.

  The effort of laughing made him short of breath, and he gasped for air as she pushed a button and said, “Mr. Barth is back.”

  He did not bother to look for a chair. No chair could hold him. He did lean against a wall, however. Standing was a labor he preferred to avoid.

  Yet it was not shortness of breath or exhaustion at the slightest effort that had brought him back to Anderson’s Fitness Center. He had often been fat before, and he rather relished the sensation of bulk, the impression he made as crowds parted for him. He pitied those who could only be slightly fat—short people, who were not able to bear the weight. At well over two meters, Barth could get gloriously fat, stunningly fat. He owned thirty wardrobes and took delight in changing from one to another as his belly and buttocks and thighs grew. At times he felt that if he grew large enough, he could take over the world, be the world. At the dinner table he was a conqueror to rival Genghis Khan.

  It was not his fatness, then, that had brought him in. It was that at last the fat was interfering with his other pleasures. The girl he had been with the night before had tried and tried, but he was incapable—a sign that it was time to renew, refresh, reduce.

  “I am a man of pleasure,” he wheezed to the receptionist, whose name he never bothered to learn. She smiled back.

  “Mr. Anderson will be here in a moment.”

  “Isn’t it ironic,” he said, “that a man such as I, who i
s capable of fulfilling every one of his desires, is never satisfied!” He gasped with laughter again. “Why haven’t we ever slept together?” he asked.

  She looked at him, irritation crossing her face. “You always ask that, Mr. Barth, on your way in. But you never ask it on your way out.”

  True enough. When he was on his way out of the Anderson Fitness Center, she never seemed as attractive as she had on his way in.

  Anderson came in, effusively handsome, gushingly warm, taking Barth’s fleshy hand in his and pumping it with enthusiasm.

  “One of my best customers,” he said.

  “The usual,” Barth said.

  “Of course,” Anderson answered. “But the price has gone up.”

  “If you ever go out of business,” Barth said, following Anderson into the inner rooms, “give me plenty of warning. I only let myself go this much because I know you’re here.”

  “Oh,” Anderson chuckled. “We’ll never go out of business.”

  “I have no doubt you could support your whole organization on what you charge me.”

  “You’re paying for much more than the simple service we perform. You’re also paying for privacy. Our, shall we say, lack of government intervention.”

  “How many of the bastards do you bribe?”

  “Very few, very few. Partly because so many high officials also need our service.”

  “No doubt.”

  “It isn’t just weight gains that bring people to us, you know. It’s cancer and aging and accidental disfigurement. You’d be surprised to learn who has had our service.”

  Barth doubted that he would. The couch was ready for him, immense and soft and angled so that it would be easy for him to get up again.

  “Damn near got married this time,” Barth said, by way of conversation.

  Anderson turned to him in surprise.

  “But you didn’t?”