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building s elevators even knew who
Tolliver was! Well, Belle knew, but what the hell did she have to do with him?
Okay, so it wasn t going so good with Belle. So they hadn t really reconciled
that innocent little thing he d had with the lab technician at Mt. Sinai. So
what? That was no reason for her to ditch a good thing.
Damn that Tolliver!
He slammed his hand onto the desk, missed slightly, caught the edge and drove
a thick splinter of wood into the fat of his palm, at the same time scattering
the small stack of telegrams across his lap and the floor.
Wincing with pain, he sucked at the splinter till it came out. He used one of
the telegram envelopes to blot the blood from his hand.
Telegrams?
He opened the first one. The Bank of America, Beverly Hills branch 213, was
pleased to advise him they were calling due his loans. All five of them. He
opened the second one.
His broker, Shearson Hayden Stone Inc., was overjoyed to let him know that all
sixteen of the stocks in which he had speculated heavily, on margin, of
course, had virtually plummeted off the big board and he had to come up with
seventy-seven thousand dollars by noon today or his portfolio was wiped out.
It was a quarter to eleven by the wall clock. (Or had it, inexplicably,
stopped?) He opened the third one. He had failed his est class and Werner
Erhard himself had sent the telegram, adding in what Weisel took to be an
unnecessarily gloating tone, that Weisel had no human potential worth
expanding. He opened the fourth one. His Wassermann had come back from Mt.
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Sinai. It was positive. He opened the fifth one.
The Internal Revenue Service was ecstatic at being able to let him know they
were planning to audit his returns for the past five years, and were seeking a
loophole in the tax laws that permitted them to go back further, possibly to
the start of the Bronze Age.
There were others, five or six more. He didn t bother opening them. He didn t
want to learn who had died, or that the state of Israel had discovered Weisel
was, in actuality, Bruno
The Butcher Krutzmeier, a former prison guard at Mauthausen, personally
responsible for the deaths of three thousand Gypsies, Trade Unionists, Jews,
Bolsheviks and Weimar democrats, or that the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey
Department was gleefully taking this opportunity to advise him that the
precise spot over which he sat was expected to collapse into the magma at the
center of the Earth and by the way we ve canceled your life insurance.
He let them lie.
The clock on the wall had, to be sure, stopped dead.
In fact, the electricity had been turned off.
The phone did not ring. He picked it up. Of course. It--like its friend the
clock--was stone dead.
Tolliver! Tolliver!
How was he doing all this?
Such things simply do not happen in an ordered universe of draglines and
scoop-
shovels and reinforced concrete.
He sat and thought dark, murderous thoughts about that old sonofabitch, Fred
Tolliver.
A 747 boomed sonically overhead and the big heavy-plate window of his eleventh
floor office cracked, splintered, and fell in around his feet.
Unknowing confluence of resonating emotions, Fred Tolliver sat in his house,
head in hands, miserable beyond belief, aware only of pain and anger. His
cello lay on its back on the floor beside him. He had tried playing a little
today, but all he could think of was that terrible man Weisel, and the
terrible bathroom that was filling with water, and the terrible stomach pains
his feelings of hatred were giving him.
Electrons resonate. So do emotions. S
peak of damned places and one speaks of locations where powerful emotional
forces have been penned up. One cannot doubt, if one has ever been inside a
prison where the
massed feelings of hatred, deprivation, claustrophobia and brutalization have
seeped into the very stones. One can feel it. Emotions resonate: at a
political rally, a football game, an encounter group, a rock concert, a
lynching.
There are four billion people in the world. A world that has grown so complex
and uncaring with systems and brutalization, of individuals because of the
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