The wounded

By Philip José Farmer

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Title: The wounded

Author: Philip José Farmer

Release date: August 9, 2024 [eBook #74219]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1954

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOUNDED ***





                              The Wounded

                         By Philip José Farmer

                    Women wondered how he could be
                  so cruel--and so utterly charming.

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                   Fantastic Universe October 1954.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


    _The winged and shining fancy that hovers with irony-tipped talons
    about the writings of Philip José Farmer needs no introduction to
    our pages. We can no longer hail him as a brilliant new discovery,
    for in two short years he has become an established writer with
    a widely discussed novel to his credit. It seems peculiarly
    appropriate that the author of_ THE LOVERS _should grace his
    present theme with a wit barbed so entrancingly._


Those polaroid glasses they give you at the 3-D movies were the cause
of my downfall.

When the show was over I went into the lobby and stood there a moment
while I studied my schedule. I was supposed to go to a big party given
by one of the prime numbers of the Four Hundred. I didn't have an
invitation, but that never bothered me. Biggest gate-crasher in the
world, that's me.

I heard a gasp and looked up to see this beautiful young woman staring
at me. She had forgotten to take off her 3-D glasses and that, I
instantly realized, was the trouble. Somehow, the polarization was just
right to make me visible. Or let's say that I was always visible but
nobody recognized me.

The view she got enabled her eyes to make that subtle but necessary
shift and see me as I really am.

I thought, _I'd have to tell Mother about this_. Then I walked out
fast. I ignored her calls--she even addressed me by the right name,
though the accent was wrong--and I hopped into a taxi with my violin
case under my arm. I told the cabbie to lose the taxi in which she was
tailing me. He did, or seemed to.

As soon as I entered the penthouse, a house detective seized my arm. I
pointed to the violin case under my arm. His piggish eyes roved over it
as he munched upon a sandwich he held in his other hand. He was one of
the wounded, always eating to stuff the ache and the hollowness of it.

"Listen, kid," he said, "aren't you sort of young to be playing in an
orchestra?"

"I'm older than you think," I replied. "Besides, I'm not connected with
this orchestra."

"Oh, a soloist, heh? A child prodigy, heh?"

He was being sarcastic as many of the wounded are. I could pass for
twenty-five any day or night.

"You might call me that," I said truthfully.

"One of our hostess' cute little surprises, heh?" he growled, jerking a
thumb at the tall middle-aged woman standing in the middle of a group
of guests.

She happened at that moment to be looking at her husband. He had a
beautiful young thing backed into a corner and was talking in a very
intimate manner to her.

The light was just right so I could see the flash of green deep within
my hostess' eyes. It was the green of a long-festering wound.

Her husband was one of my casualties, too, but his clothing covered the
swelling of the injured spot. The girl he was talking to was pretty,
but she was one of the half-dead. Before the party was over, however,
she would come to life with the shock of pain. When I hit them, they
know it.

I glanced around at the party-goers, many of whom exhibited the
evidences of their wounds like the medieval beggars who hoped to win
sympathy and alms by thrusting their monstrous deformities under your
nose.

There was the financier whose face-twisting tic was supposed to spring
from worry over business. I alone knew that it wasn't business that
caused it, that he looked to his wife for healing, and she wouldn't
give it to him.

And there was the thin-lipped woman whose wound was the worst of all,
because she couldn't feel it and would not even admit it existed. But
I could see her hurt in the disapproving looks she gave to those who
drank, who laughed loudly, who spilled cigarette ashes on the rug, who
said anything not absolutely out of Mrs. Grundy. I could read it in the
tongue she used as a file across the nerves of her husband.

I wandered around a while, drinking champagne and listening to the
conversation of the wounded and the unwounded. It was the same as
it was in the beginning of my profession, a feverish interest in
themselves on the part of the unwounded and a feverish interest in
their healers on the part of the wounded.

After a while, just as I was about to open my violin case and go to
work, I saw the young woman enter--the one who had recognized me. She
still had the 3-D glasses. She carried them in her hand now, but she
put them on to glance around the room. It was just my luck for her
to be one of the invited. I tried to evade her search but she was
persistent.

She swept triumphantly towards me finally. She carried a large
cardboard box in her arms. She halted in front of me and set the box at
her feet. Certain she could identify me from now on, she then removed
her glasses.

She was very beautiful, healthy-looking, and with no outward signs of
her wounds.

If it hadn't been that her eyes were so bright I'd have thought she was
one of the half-dead. But there was no mistaking the phosphorescent
glow of the warm wound deep within her eyes.

I glanced at my watch and said coolly, "What's on your mind, Miss?"

"I'm in love with you!" She said it breathlessly.

I had trouble suppressing a groan. "Why?" I said, though I knew well
enough.

"You're the one who did it!" she replied. "Did you think that,
recognizing you, I would ever let you go?"

"What do you want me to do about it?"

"Marry me."

"That'd be no good for you," I said. "I would never be at home. I keep
all kinds of hours. Your life would be worse than that of the wife of
any traveling salesman. Besides," I added, "I don't love you."

Usually that floors them. But not this one. She rocked with the punch
and calmly pointed at my violin case.

"You can remedy that," she said.

"Why in Hades should I? Do you think any sane person would deliberately
hurt himself in that manner?"

"Am I not desirable?" she asked. "Would I not be good to come home to?
Don't you often long for somebody you can talk to, somebody who will
get your meals and listen to your troubles, somebody who _cares_?"

Well, of course I've heard those exact words a billion or more times
before. Not that they were always directed at me. Nevertheless, there
was nothing new in them.

"And," she repeated, "am I not desirable?"

"Yes," I said, looking at my wristwatch and getting uneasy because of
the delay. "But that has nothing to do with it. When my marriage was
annulled--oh, somewhere back in the eighteenth century, or was it the
sixteenth--I swore by all the gods I'd never marry again. Moreover,
Mother says I'm too busy...."

"Are you man or mouse?" she flashed.

"Neither!" I flashed back. "Besides, Mother is my employer. What would
I do if she fired me? Become like one of those?"

I glanced contemptuously at the guests.

She knew what I was thinking, for she cried, "Look at me! I'm wounded!
But am I like them? Am I one of the halt, the lame, the blind? Am I
like that detective who swells himself into a gross human balloon
because he stuffs the growing void of his hurt with food?

"Am I like our hostess, whose green wound caused her to drive away
two husbands because it festered so deep she went into a delirium of
unfounded imaginings about them? And then got a third who fulfilled the
image she'd built up of the first two?

"And am I like that thin-lipped woman who deep-freezes her wound
because she is mortally afraid of pain? And do I behave as some of
these women here who throw themselves at every man who might give
temporary healing, all the while knowing deep within them that the
wound will become more poisonous?

"Is it my fault if most of these people don't cultivate their wounds,
if they grow sickly and twisted and ill-smelling plants from them
instead of the lovely and colorful and sweet flower that grows in me?"

She seized my shoulders, said, "Look me in the eye! Can you see what
_you_ and you _alone_, did? Is it disgusting, gangrenous? Or is it
beautiful? And if it does turn poisonous, whose fault is it? Who
refused to heal me?"

Her eloquence was overwhelming. I trembled. I wasn't affected when I
overheard other wounded addressing their potential healers thus. But
when _I_ was talked to in such a manner, I shook, and I remembered the
early days when my first wife and I had tended each other's injuries.

"Sorry," I mumbled, abashed before this raging yet tender mortal. "I
must be going."

"No you don't!" she said firmly. She stopped and lifted the lid from
the paper box. I saw it was crammed with those damned 3-D glasses.

"After I tailed you here," she said, "I returned to that theater and
bought a hundred tickets and with them got these. Now, if you don't
come with me where we can at least talk, I'll pass them out and
everybody will see you for what you are. And don't think for a moment
that those who've suffered because of you won't tear you limb from limb
and string you up to the highest chandelier!"

"Nonsense," I mumbled.

I felt suddenly shaky. And so unnerved was I that I rushed away from
her and out into the hall. All I wanted to do was to get into the
elevator, alone and unobserved, and speed away with the speed of light,
half way around the world.

Do you know, I think that that clever young wench had planned that very
move? She knew I'd be so upset, I'd forget my violin case. For, as I
stood fretting before the elevator door, she stepped into the hall and
called, "Lover!"

I turned--then I screamed, "No! No!" I backed away, my hands spread
despairingly before me.

No use. The bow she'd taken from my case strummed. The arrow struck me
in the heart....

Later, when I tried to explain to Mother, I found myself forced to
defend myself against her contention that I had _wanted_ the mortal to
wound me, that I was putting my own selfish desires above my duties to
her and our profession. My argument was weakened by my secret belief
that she might be right.

Mother raged, but my clever wife--these modern women!--showed Mother
that she and her son could not alone keep up with the expanding
population. A good part of the world belonged to the half-dead, and
they would continue to take it over unless we got some speed and
efficiency into our work.

Mother became convinced. That is why I now have so many helpers--hired
through a detective agency--and why we all now carry sub-machine guns
in our violin cases instead of the picturesque but obsolete bow.

Modern times demand modern methods; there are so many to be wounded
that we just simply _must_ use the spraygun technique. There is no more
individual attention, true, but then that never really mattered. What
you do with your wound is up to you. Find your own healer.

I, Cupid, have found mine and it truly pleases me.





*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOUNDED ***


    

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