He threw the scissors away with relief. ‘Glad to hear that. Feel better.’ He looked at the ripe curves of her body, marvelling. ‘I hope all people are made the same way.’
‘If you aren’t the darndest hypochondriac I ever saw,’ she said. She snuggled to him. ‘Come on. What’s wrong? Tell, mamma.’
‘Something inside me,’ he said. ‘Something — I ate.’
The next morning and all afternoon at his down-town office, Mr. Harris found that the sizes, shapes and constructions of various bones in his body displeased him. At ten a.m. he asked to feel Mr. Smith’s elbow one moment. Mr. Smith obliged, but scowled suspiciously.
And after lunch Mr. Harris asked to touch Miss Laurel’s shoulderblade and she immediately pushed herself back against him, purring like a kitten, shutting her eyes in the mistaken belief that he wished to examine a few other anatomical delicacies. ‘Miss Laurel!’ he snapped. ‘Stop that!’
Alone, he pondered his neuroses. The war just over, the pressure of his work, the uncertainty of the future, probably had much to do with his mental outlook. He wanted to leave the office, get into his own business, for himself.
He had more than a little talent at artistic things, had dabbled in ceramics and sculpture. As soon as possible he’d get over into Arizona and borrow that money from Mr. Creldon. It would build him his kiln and set up his own shop. It was a worry. What a case he was. But it was a good thing he had contacted M. Munigant, who had seemed to be eager to understand and help him. He would fight it out with himself, not go back to either Munigant or Dr. Burleigh unless he was forced to. The alien feeling would pass. He sat staring into nothing.
The alien feeling did not pass. It grew.
On Tuesday and Wednesday it bothered him terrifically that his outer dermis, epidermis, hair and other appendages were of a high disorder, while the integumented skeleton of himself was a slick clean structure of efficient organization. Sometimes, in certain lights while his lips were drawn morosely downwards, weighted with melancholy, he imagined he saw his skull grinning at him behind the flesh. It had its nerve, it did!
‘Let go of me!’ he cried. ‘Let go of me! You’ve caught me, you’ve captured me! My lungs, you’ve got them in a vice! Release them!’
He experienced violent gasps as if his ribs were pressing in, choking the breath from him.
‘My brain; stop squeezing it!’
And terrible hot headaches caught his brain like a bivalve in the compressed clamp of skull-bones.
‘My vitals! All my organs, let them be, for God’s sake! Stay away from my heart!’ His heart seemed to cringe from the fanning nearness of his ribs. Ribs like pale spiders crouched and fiddling with their prey.
Drenched with sweat, he lay upon the bed one night while Clarisse was out attending a Red Cross meeting. He tried to gather his wits again, and always the conflict of his disorderly exterior and this cool calciumed thing inside him with all its exact symmetry.
His complexion: wasn’t it oily and lined with worry?
Observe the flawless, snow-white perfection of the skull.
His nose: wasn’t it too large?
Then observe the small tiny bones of the skull’s nose before that monstrous nasal cartilage begins forming Harris’s lopsided proboscis.
His body: wasn’t it a bit plump?
Well, then, consider the skeleton; so slender, so svelte, so economical of line and contour. Like exquisitely carved oriental ivory it is, perfected and thin as a reed.
His eyes: weren’t they protuberant and ordinary and numb-looking?
Be so kind as to note the eye-sockets of the skeleton’s skull; so deep and rounded, sombre, quiet, dark pools, all knowing, eternal. Gaze deeply into skull sockets and you never touch the bottom of their dark understanding with any plumb line. All irony, all sadism, all life, all everything is there in the cupped darkness.
Compare. Compare. Compare.
He raged for hours, glib and explosive. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solemn philosopher, quietly hung inside of Harris, saying not a word, quietly suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.
Then it came to Harris.
‘Wait a minute. Hold on a minute,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re helpless, too. I’ve got you, too. I can make you do anything I want you to! And you can’t prevent it! I say put up your carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges and — sswtt — up they go, as I wave to someone!’ He giggled.
‘I order the fibula and femur to locomote and Hunn two three four, Hunn two three four — we walk around the block. There.’
Harris grinned.
‘It’s a fifty-fifty fight. Even steven. And we’ll fight it out, we two, we shall. After all, I’m the part that thinks!’ That was good, it was a triumph, he’d remember that. ‘Yes, by God, yes. I’m the part that thinks. If I didn’t have you, even then I could still think!’
Instantly, he felt a pain strike his head. His cranium, crowding in slowly, began giving him some of his own treatment back.
At the end of the week he had postponed the Phoenix trip because of his health. Weighing himself on a penny scales he saw the slow glide of the red arrow as it pointed to: 164.
He groaned. ‘Why, I’ve weighed 175 for ten years. I can’t have lost ten pounds.’ He examined his cheeks in the fly-dotted mirror. Cold primitive fear rushed over him in odd little shivers. ‘Hold on! I know what you’re about, you.’
He shook his finger at his bony face, particularly addressing his remarks to his superior maxillary, his inferior maxillary, to his cranium and to his cervical vertebrae.
‘You rum thing, you. Think you can starve me off, make me lose weight, eh? A victory for you, is that it? Peel the flesh off, leave nothing but skin on bone. Trying to ditch me, so you can be supreme, ah? No, no!’
He fled into a cafeteria.
Ordering turkey, dressing, creamed potatoes, four vegetables, three desserts, he soon found he could not eat it, he was sick to his stomach. He forced himself. His teeth began to ache. ‘Bad teeth, is it?’ he wanted to know, angrily. ‘I’ll eat in spite of every tooth clanging and banging and rattling so they fall in my gravy.’
His head ached, his breathing came hard from a constricted chest, his teeth pulsed with pain, but he had one small victory. He was about to drink milk when he stopped and poured it into a vase of nasturtiums. ‘No calcium for you, my boy, no more calcium for you. Never again shall I eat foods with calcium or other bone-fortifying minerals. I’ll eat for one of us, not both, my lad.’
‘One hundred and fifty pounds,’ he said, the following week to his wife. ‘Do you see how I’ve changed?’
‘For the better,’ said Clarisse. ‘You were always a little plump for your height, darling.’ She stroked his chin. ‘I like your face, it’s so much nicer, the lines of it are so firm and strong now.’
‘They’re not my lines, they’re his, damn him! You mean to say you like him better than you like me?’ he demanded indignantly.
‘Him? Who’s ‘him’?’
In the parlour mirror, beyond Clarisse, his skull smiled back at him behind his fleshy grimace of hatred and despair.
Fuming, he popped malt tablets into his mouth. This was one way of gaining weight when you couldn’t keep other foods down. Clarisse noticed the malt pellets. ‘But, darling, really, you don’t have to regain the weight for me,’ she said.
‘Oh, shut up!’ he felt like saying.
She came to him and sat down and made him lie so his head was in her lap. ‘Darling,’ she said. ‘I’ve watched you lately. You’re so — badly off. You don’t say anything, but you look — hunted. You toss in bed at night.
Maybe you should go to a psychiatrist. But I think I can tell you everything he would say. I’ve put it all together, from hints you’ve let escape you. I can tell you that you and your skeleton are one and the same, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
United you stand, divided you fall. If you two fellows can’t get along like an old married couple in the future, go back and see Dr. Burleigh. But first, relax. You’re in a vicious circle, the more you worry, the more your bones stick out, the more your bones stick out, the more you worry. After all, now, who picked this fight — you or that anonymous entity you claim is lurking around behind your alimentary canal?’
He closed his eyes. ‘I did. I guess I did. Oh, my darling, I love you so.’
‘You rest now,’ she said softly. ‘Rest and forget.’
Mr. Harris felt buoyed up for half a day, then he began to sag again. It was all very well to say everything was imagination, but this particular skeleton, by God, was fighting back.
Harris set out for M. Munigant’s office late in the day.
Walking for half an hour until he found the address, he caught sight of the name Mr. Munigant initialled in ancient, flaking gold on a glass plate outside the building. Then, his bones seemed to explode from their moorings, blasted and erupted with pain. He could hardly see in his wet, pain-filled eyes. So violent were the pains that he staggered away. When he opened his eyes again he had rounded a corner. M. Munigant’s
