The Small Assassin, Ray Bradbury

The Small Assassin

JUST when the idea occurred to her that she was being murdered she could not tell. There had been little subtle signs, little suspicions for the past month; things as deep as sea tides in her, like looking at a perfectly calm stretch of cerulean water and liking it and wanting to bathe in it, and finding, just as the tide takes your body into it, that monsters dwell just under the surface, things unseen, bloated, many-armed, sharp-finned, malignant and inescapable.

A room floated around her in an effluvium of hysteria. Sharp instruments hovered and there were voices and people in sterile white masks.
My name, she thought. My name; what is it?

Alice Leiber. It came to her. David Leiber’s wife. But it gave her no comfort. She was alone with these silent whispering white people and there was great pain and nausea and death-fear in her.

I am being murdered before their eyes. These doctors, these nurses don’t realize what hidden thing has happened to me. David doesn’t know. Nobody knows except me and — the killer, the small assassin, the little murderer.

I am dying and I can’t tell them how. They’d laugh and call me one in delirium. They’ll see the murderer and hold him and like him and they won’t think him responsible for my death. Here I am, in front of God and man, dying, and there is no one to believe my story, everyone to doubt me, comfort me with lies, bury me in ignorance, mourn me and salvage my murderer.

Where is David? she wondered. In the outer room, smoking one cigarette after another, listening to the long tickings of the very slow clock?

Sweat exploded from all of her body at once, and with it a crying and agonizing. Now. Now! Try and kill me, she screamed. Try, try, but I won’t die! I won’t!

There was a hollow in her. A vacuity. Suddenly there was no pain. Exhaustion. Blackness. It was over. It was all over. Oh, God. She plummeted rapidly down and struck against a black nothingness which gave way to another nothing and another nothing and another and still another. . .

Footsteps. Gentle, approaching footsteps. The sound of people trying to be quiet.
Far away, a voice said, ‘She’s asleep. Don’t disturb her.’

An odour of tweeds, a pipe, a certain shaving lotion. She knew David was standing over her. And beyond him the immaculate odour of Dr. Jeffers.
She did not open her eyes. ‘I’m awake,’ she said, quietly. It was a surprise, a relief to be able to speak, to not be dead.

‘Alice,’ someone said, and it was David beyond her closed eyes, his hands holding one of her tired ones.
Would you like to meet the murderer, David? she thought. That’s who you’re here to see now, aren’t you? I hear your voice asking to see him, so there’s nothing but for me to point him out to you.

David stood over her. She opened her eyes. The room came into focus. Moving a weak hand she pulled aside a coverlet.

The murderer looked up at David Leiber with a small red-faced, blue-eyed calm. Its eyes were deep and sparkling.
‘Why!’ cried David Leiber, smiling. ‘Why, he’s a fine baby!’

Dr. Jeffers was waiting for David Leiber the day he showed up at the hospital to take his wife and new child home. He motioned Leiber into a chair in his office, gave him a cigar, lit one for himself, sat on the edge of his desk, puffing solemnly for a long moment. Then he cleared his throat, looked David Leiber straight in the eye and said, ‘Your wife doesn’t like her child, Dave.’

‘What!’
‘It’s been a hard thing for her. The whole thing. She’ll need a lot of love in this next year. I didn’t say much at the time, but she was hysterical in the delivery room. The strange things she said. I won’t repeat them. All I’ll say is that she feels alien to the child. Now, this may simply be a thing we can clear up with one or two questions.’ He sucked on his cigar another moment, then said, ‘Is this child a ‘wanted’ child, Dave?’

‘Why do you ask?’
‘It’s vital.’
‘Yes. Yes, it is a ‘wanted’ child. It was planned. We planned it together. Alice was so happy, a year ago, when — ‘

‘Mmm — that makes it more difficult. Because if the child was unplanned, it would be a simple case of a mother who hates the idea of motherhood. That doesn’t fit Alice.’ Dr. Jeffers took his cigar from his lips, rubbed his hand across his jaw, tongued the inside of his cheek. ‘It must be something else, then. Perhaps something buried in her childhood that’s coming out now. Or it might be the simple temporary doubt and distrust of any mother who’s gone through the unusual pain and near-death that Alice has.

If so, then a little time should heal that. I thought I’d tell you, though, Dave. It’ll help you be easy and tolerant with her. If she says anything about — well — about wishing the child had been born dead, smooth it over, will you, son? And if things don’t get along, the three of you drop in on me. I’m always glad to see old friends, eh? Here, take another cigar along for — ah — for the baby.’

It was a bright spring afternoon. Their car hummed along wide, tree-lined boulevards. Blue sky, flowers, a warm wind. Dave talked a lot, lit his cigar, talked some more. Alice answered directly, softly, relaxing a bit more as the trip progressed. But she held the baby not tightly enough or warmly enough or motherly enough to satisfy the queer ache in Dave’s mind. She seemed to be merely carrying a porcelain figurine.

He tried joviality. ‘What’ll we name him?’ he asked.

Alice Leiber watched green trees slide by. ‘Let’s not name him yet,’ she said. ‘I’d rather wait until we get an exceptional name for him. Don’t blow smoke in his face.’ Her sentences ran together with no distinction of tone between one or the other. The last statement held no motherly reproof, no interest, no irritation. She just mouthed it and it was said.
The husband, disquieted, dropped the cigar from the window. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

The baby rested in the crook of its mother’s arm, shadows of sun and tree changing its face over and again. His blue eyes opened like fresh blue spring flowers. Moist noises came from the tiny, pink, elastic mouth.
Alice gave her baby a quick glance. Her husband felt her shiver against him.

‘Cold?’ he asked.
‘A chill. Better raise the window, David.’
It was more than a chill. He rolled the window thoughtfully up.
Suppertime.

Candles flickered odd dances of light-shadow about the large, amply-furnished dining-room. There was good familiarity in eating together again for both of them; friendliness and relaxation in passing salt or sharing the last biscuit, or commenting on flavours.

David Leiber had brought the child from the nursery, propped him at a tiny, bewildered angle, supported by many pillows, in a newly purchased high-chair.
Alice watched her knife and fork move. ‘He’s not high-chair size,’ she said.

‘Fun having him here, anyway,’ said Leiber, feeling fine. ‘Everything’s fun. At the office, too. Orders up to my nose. If I don’t watch myself I’ll make another fifteen thousand this year. Hey, look at Junior, will you? Drooling all down his chin!’ He reached over to dab at the baby’s chin with his napkin. From the corner of his eye he realized that Alice wasn’t even watching. He finished the job.

‘I guess it wasn’t very interesting,’ he said, back again at his food. A minor irritation rose in him, disregarding all self-argument. ‘But one would think a mother’d take some interest in her own child, wouldn’t one?’

Alice jerked her chin up. ‘Don’t speak that way. Not in front of him! Later, if you must.’

‘Later?’ he cried. ‘In front of, in back of, what’s the difference?’ He quieted suddenly, swallowed, was sorry. ‘All right. Okay. I know how it is.’
After dinner she let him carry the baby upstairs. She didn’t tell him to; she let him.

Coming down, he found her standing by the radio, listening to music she wasn’t hearing. Her eyes were closed, her whole attitude one of wondering, self-questioning. She started when he appeared.

Suddenly, she was at him, against him, soft, quick; the same. Nothing different. Her lips found him, kept him. He was stunned by her. He laughed, unexpectedly, and deeply. Something cold in him thawed and melted; like fear of winter melting at spring, his fear went now. Now that the baby was gone, upstairs, out of the room, she began to breathe again, live again. She was free. And this in itself made a subtle worry in him, but he let it go, enjoyed her being against him. She was whispering, rapidly, endlessly.

‘Thank you, thank you, darling. For being yourself, always. Yourself, you, and nobody and nothing else! Dependable, so very dependable!’
He had to laugh. ‘My father told me, ‘son, provide for your family!”

Wearily, she rested her dark, shining hair against his neck. ‘You’ve overdone it. Sometimes I wish we were just the way we were when we were first married. No responsibilities, nothing but ourselves. No — no babies.’

She took him too eagerly by the hand, a flushed strangeness in her white face, unnaturally intense. It seemed there were many things for her to say and couldn’t, so she said the next best thing, a fair substitute.

‘A third element’s come in. Before, it was just you and I. We protected