Flash and Filigree by Terry Southern Read Free Book Online

lights, as hidden tubes that dealt from nowhere every corner with gentle searching light, did almost as sunlight passing paper screens faintly tinted blue: and the illusion of permitting no shadow gave a soft uncertain swiftness to the room.
    The young man sat with his hands, which seemed not to move unnecessarily, turned palms up, gathering, as it were, calm from the air; and the effect of this was the evident strength of stillness in his face and shoulders. Apparently he represented an unknown house, one with which the Clinic had never taken account.
    Beth Jackson had given him a cup of hot coffee, with a dram or so medicinal rum in it, and had drawn off one for herself as she bade the young man sit to dry before an electric heater of the large, reflector type. In only a seersucker suit he was soaked to the skin, and when he half rose to hand her the catalogue, his smile at last breaking the stillness as though it were a book of comics for a grown child he handed her, his forward foot on the marble floor made a swamp-step squish that caused Beth Jackson to close the book on the very place he had opened it.
    “Gracious that won’t do,” she cried, and was up to fetch a heavy towel from an open cupboard near. “Now give them a good rub,” she, at her most bluff humor, “or else you’ll be staying on here as a patient !”
    She sat down opposite, bent forward for the moment with her outstretched fingers in touching adjustments to the spanning tilt of red copper between them, properly set as now to mirror and cup the glittered heat in a swirl at its center-source where it cast edgewise out in diffusion one flat, elemental image of the burning coils, which were yet, themselves, as the source, small, diversely-sized, and of a wire-like complexity.
    “Dr. Hauptman will have him one salesman less, and one patient more!” she revised, jovial now, settling in comfort with the balanced phrase that, too, may have represented a joke, since Dr. Hauptman had been dead for years. This was something the young man could not have known, though he did smile with her now, and shyly enough to encourage her bluff.
    “Oh yes, it’s very funny, isn’t it?” as she pretended to admonish him, while not wanting anything really ever to be other than funny between them. “It’s all very funny to you young people while you’ve got your health, but wait till the doctor starts dropping by twice an hour with a needle for you then you change your tune, believe me, I’ve seen it too often.” And her dart-round eyes, caught up as they were in the wide day-gray of his own, narrowed to serious as she finished, thinking certainly of treatments given there in her own department.
    “Doctor Hauptman, you mean?” said the young man, more than half in his innocence.
    And this had almost floored her. Yet, first it simply set her agape, aback the flat moon face as clawed by one terribly thin lightning frown, caught for the instant stark between two lights. But the good faith of the young man was above question, so then she just broke up, laughing.
    It began, this laugh, as one of those laughs that are real: rumbling down in the pit of herself—as if where swarmed a myriad globule things through the dark glistening confusion had touched two such liquid drops uniquely in this chance in ten million to burst back reacting, billowed out, unending, roll upon unchained roll: while each, as a brief deep centered chortle, spun unrising there in fixed revolution, was thrown and sprang plant-like outward, in claiming out, through red-faced tearfulness to double her gasping forward on the chair in the farthest tips of her person and back again, its bulk-shuddering reverberations.
    “Dr. Hauptman and his needle,” said the young man, playing it out, hiding his face in feigned alarm. “Look out!”
    “Yes, yes,” she cried, breathless, giving up, waving him off with her hand. “Oh yes!” It was too much. “Dr. Hauptman’s needle!” she repeated, falsely