Shock 3

Then there was the man who sniffed interminably...

He sat next to Mr Jasper on the bus. Every morning he would come grunting up the front step and weave along the aisle to plop himself down beside Mr Jasper's slight form.

And �C sniff! he would go as he perused his morning paper �C sniff, sniff!

Mr Jasper would writhe. And wonder why the man persisted in sitting next to him. There were other seats available, yet the man invariably dropped his lumpish frame beside Mr Jasper and sniffed the miles away, winter and summer.

It wasn't as if it were cold out. Some Los Angeles mornings were coldish, granted. But they certainly did not warrant this endless sniffling as though pneumonia were creeping through the man's system.

And it gave Mr Jasper the willies.

He made several attempts to remove himself from the man's sphere of sniffling. First of all, he moved back two seats from his usual location. The man followed him. I see, surmised a near-fuming Mr Jasper, the man is in the habit of sitting by me and hasn't noticed that I've moved back two seats.

The following day Mr Jasper sat on the other side of the aisle. He sat with irascible eye watching the man weave his bulk up the aisle. Then his vitals petrified as the man's tweeded person plumped down by him. He glared an abominating glare out the window.

Sniff! �C went the man �C Sa-niff! �C and Mr Jasper's dental plates ground together in porcelain fury.

The next day he sat near the back of the bus. The man sat next to him. The next day he sat near the front of the bus. The man sat next to him. Mr Jasper sat amidst his corroding patience for a mile and a third. Then, jaded beyond endurance, he turned to the man.

'Why are you following me?' he asked, his voice a trembling plaint.

The man was caught in mid-sniff. He gaped at Mr Jasper with cow like, uncomprehending eyes. Mr Jasper stood and stumbled the bus length away from the man. There he stood swaying from the overhead bar, his eyes as stone. The way that sniffing fool had looked at him, he brooded. It was insufferable. As if, by heaven, he had done something offensive!

Well, at least, he was momentarily free of those diurnally dripping nostrils. Crouched muscles unflexed gratefully. He signed with relief.

And the boy standing next to him whistled twenty-three choruses of Dixie.

Mr Jasper sold neckties.

It was an employment ridden with vexations, an employment guaranteed to scrape away the lining of any but the most impassive stomachs.

Mr Jasper's stomach walls were of the most susceptive variety.

They were stormed daily by aggravation, by annoyance and by women. Women who lingered and felt the wool and cotton and silk and walked away with no purchase. Women who beleaguered Mr Jasper's inflammable mind with interrogations and decrees and left no money but only a rigid Mr Jasper, one jot nearer to inevitable detonation.

With every taxing customer, a gushing host of brilliantly nasty remarks would rise up in Mr Jasper's mind, each one surpassing the one before. His mind would positively ache to see them free, to let them pour like torrents of acid across his tongue and, burning hot, spout directly into the women's faces.

But invariably close was the menacing phantom of floorwalker or store buyer. It flitted through his mind with ghostly dominion, shunting aside his yearning tongue, calcifying his bones with unspent wrath.

Then there were the women in the store cafeteria... They talked while they ate and they smoked and blew clouds of nicotine into his lungs at the very moment he was trying to ingest a bowl of tomato soup into his ulcered stomach. Poof! went the ladies and waved their pretty hands to dispel the unwanted smoke.

Mr Jasper got it all.

Eyes beginning to emboss, he would wave it back. The women returned it. Thus did the smoke circulate until thinned out or reinforced by new, yet more intense, exhalations. Poof! And between waving and ladling and swallowing, Mr Jasper had spasms. The tannic acid of his tea hardly served to stem the course of burning in his stomach. He would pay his forty cents with oscillating fingers and return to work, a cracking man.

To face a full afternoon of complaints and queries and thumbing of merchandise and the topping of all by the girl who shared the counter with him and chewed gum as though she wanted the people in Arabia to hear her chewing. The smacking and the popping and the grinding made Mr Jasper's insides do frenzied contortions, made him stand statue like and disordered or else burst out with a hissing:

'Stop that disgusting sound!'

Life was full of irritations.

Then there were the neighbours, the people who lived upstairs and on the sides. The society of them, that ubiquitous brotherhood which always lived in the apartments around Mr Jasper.

They were a unity, those people. There was a touchstone of attitude in their behaviour, a distinct criterion of method.

It consisted of walking with extra weighty tread, of reassembling furniture with sustained regularity, of throwing wild and noisy parties every other night and inviting only those people who promised to wear hobnailed boots and dance the chicken reel. Of arguing about all subjects at top voice, of playing only cowboy and hillbilly music on a radio whose volume knob was irretrievably stuck at its farthest point. Of owning a set of lungs disguised as a two to twelve months old child, which puffed out each morning to emit sounds reminiscent of the lament of air raid sirens.

Mr Jasper's present nemesis was Albert Radenhausen, Junior, age seven months, possessor of one set of incredibly hardy lungs which did their best work between four and five in the morning.

Mr Jasper would find himself rolling on to his thin back in the dark, furnished, two-room apartment. He would find himself staring at the ceiling and waiting for the sound. It got to a point where his brain dragged him from needed sleep exactly ten seconds before four each morning. If Albert Radenhausen, Junior, chose to slumber on, it did no good to Mr Jasper. He just kept waiting for the cries.

He would try to sleep, but jangling concentration made him prey, if not to the expected wailing, then to the host of other sounds which beset his hypersensitive ears.

A car coughing past in the street. A rattle of Venetian blind. A set of lone footsteps somewhere in the house. The drip of a faucet, the barking of a dog, the rubbing legs of crickets, the creaking of wood. Mr Jasper could not control it all. Those sound makers he could not stuff, pad, twist off, adjust to �C kept plaguing him. He would shut his eyes until they hurt, grip tight fists at his sides.

Sleep still eluded. He would jolt up, heaving aside the sheets and blankets, and sit there staring numbly into the blackness, waiting for Albert Radenhausen, Junior, to make his utterance so he could lie down again.

Analysing in the blackness, his mind would click out progressions of thought. Unduly sensitive? �C he would comment within. I deny this vociferously. I am aware, Mr Jasper would self-claim. No more. I have ears. I can hear, can't I?

It was suspicious.

What morning in the litter of mornings that notion came, Mr Jasper could not recall. But once it had come it would not be dismissed. Though the definition of it was blunted by passing days, the core remained unremovable.

Sometimes in a moment of teeth-gritting duress, the idea would reoccur. Other times it would be only a vague current of impression flowing beneath the surface.

But it stuck. All these things that happened to him. Were they subjective or objective, within or without? They seemed to pile up so often, each detail linking until the sum of provocations almost drove him mad. It almost seemed as though it were done with intent. As if...

As if it were a plan.

Mr Jasper experimented.

Initial equipment consisted of one white pad, lined, plus his ball-point pen. Primary approach consisted of jotting down various exasperations with the time of their occurrence, the location, the sex of the offender and the relative grossness of the annoyance; this last aspect gradated by numbers ranging from one to ten.

Example one, clumsily notated while still half asleep.

Baby crying, 4.52 a.m., next door to room, male, 7.

Following this entry, Mr Jasper settled back on his flattened pillow with a sigh approximating satisfaction. The start was made. In a few days he would know with assurance if his unusual speculation was justified.

Before he left the house at eight-seventeen a.m., Mr Jasper had accumulated three more entries; viz:

Loud thumping on floor, 6.33 a.m., upstairs from room, male (guess), 5.

Traffic noise, 7.00 a.m. outside of room, males, 6.

Radio on loud, 7.40 a.m. on, upstairs from room, female, 7.

One rather odd facet of Mr Jasper's efforts came to his attention as he left his small apartment. This was, in short, that he had put down much of his temper through this simple expedient of written analysis. Not that the various noises had failed, at first, to set his teeth on edge and cause his hands to flex involuntarily at his sides. They had not. Yet the translation of amorphous vexation into words, the reduction of an aggravation to one succinct memorandum somehow helped. It was strange but pleasing.

The bus trip to work provided further notations.

The sniffing man drew one immediate and automatic entry. But once that irritant was disposed of, Mr Jasper was alarmed to note the rapid accumulation of four more. No matter where he moved on the bus there was fresh cause for drawing pen-point from scabbard and stabbing out more words.

Garlic breath, 8.27 a.m., bus, male, 7.

Heavy jostling, 8.28 a.m., bus, both sexes, 8.

Feet stepped on. No apology, 8.29 a.m., bus, woman, 9.

Driver telling me to go to back of bus, 8.33 a.m., bus, male, 9-

Then Mr Jasper found himself standing again beside the man with the uncommon cold. He did not take the pad from his pocket but his eyes closed and his teeth clamped together bitterly. Later he erased the original grading for the man.

10! he wrote in a fury.

And at lunch, amidst usual antagonisations, Mr Jasper, with a fierce and jaundiced eye, saw system to it all.

He seized on a blank pad page.

1. At least one irritation per five minutes. (Twelve per hour.) Not perfectly timed. Some occurring two in a minute.

Clever. Trying to throw me off the track by breaking continuity.

2. Each of the 12 hourly irritations is worse than the one before. The last of the 12 almost makes me explode.

THEORY: By placing the irritations so that each one tops the preceding one the final hourly addition is thus designed to provide maximum nerve impact: i.e. - Steering me into insanity!

He sat there, his soup getting cold, a wild scientific lustre to his eyes, investigatory heat churning up his system. Yes, by Heaven, yes, yes, yes!

But he must make sure.

He finished his lunch, ignoring smoke and chattering and unpalatable food. He slunk back to his counter. He spent a joyous afternoon scribbling down entries in his journal of convulsions.

The system held.

It stood firm before unbiased test. One irritation per five minutes. Some of them, naturally, were so subtle that only a man with Mr Jasper's intuitive grasp, a man with a quest, could notice them. These aggravations were underplayed.

And cleverly so! �C realised Mr Jasper. Underplayed and intended to dupe.

Well, he would not be duped.

Tie rack knocked over, 1.18 p.m., store, female, 7.

Fly walking on hand, 1.43 p.m., store, female (?), 8.

Faucet in washroom splashing clothes, 2.19 p.m., store (sex), 9.

Refusal to buy tie because torn, 2.38 p.m., store, WOMAN, 10.

These were typical entries for the afternoon.

They were jotted down with a bellicose satisfaction by a shaking Mr Jasper. A Mr Jasper whose incredible theory was being vindicated.

About three o'clock he decided to eliminate those numbers from one to five since no provocations were mild enough to be judged so leniently.

By four he had discarded every grading but nine and ten.

By five he was seriously considering a new system which began at ten and ranged up to twenty-five.

Mr Jasper had planned to compile at least a week's annotations before preparing his case. But, somehow, the shocks of the day weakened him. His entries grew more heated, his penmanship less legible.

And, at eleven that night, as the people next door got their second wind and resumed their party with a great shout of laughter, Mr Jasper hurled his pad against the wall with a choking oath and stood there trembling violently. It was definite.

They were out to get him.

Suppose, he thought, there was a secret legion in the world. And that their prime devotion was to drive him from his senses.

Wouldn't it be possible for them to do this insidious thing without another soul knowing it? Couldn't they arrange their maddening little intrusions on his sanity so cleverly that it might always seem as if he were at fault; that he was only a hypersensitive little man who saw malicious intent in every accidental irritation? Wasn't that possible?

Yes. His mind pounded out the acceptance over and over.

It was conceivable, feasible, possible and, by heaven, he believed it!

Why not? Couldn't there be a great sinister legion of people who met in secret cellars by guttering candlelight? And sat there, beady eyes shining with nasty intent, as their leader spoke of more plans for driving Mr Jasper straight to hell?

Sure! Agent X assigned to the row behind Mr Jasper at a movie, there to talk during parts of the picture in which Mr Jasper was most absorbed, there to rattle paper bags at regular intervals, there to masticate popcorn deafeningly until Mr Jasper hunched up, blind-raging, into the aisle and stomped back to another seat.

And here, Agent Y would take over with candy and crinkly wrappers and extra moist sneezes.

Possible. More than possible. It could have been going on for years without his ever acquiring the slightest inkling of its existence. A subtle, diabolical intrigue, near impossible to detect. But now, at last, stripped of its concealing robes, shown in all its naked, awful reality.

Mr Jasper lay abed, cogitating.

No, he thought with a scant remainder of rationality, it is silly. It is a point outlandishly taken.

Why should these people do these things? That was all one had to ask. What was their motive?

Wasn't it absurd to think that all these people were out to get him? Dead, Mr Jasper was worth nothing. Certainly his two thousand dollar policy subdivided among a vast hidden legion would not amount to more than three or four cents a plotter. Even if he were to be coerced into naming them all as his beneficiaries.

Why, then, did Mr Jasper find himself drifting helplessly into the kitchenette? Why, then, did he stand there so long, balancing the long carving knife in his hand? And why did he shake when he thought of his idea?

Unless it was true.

Before he retired Mr Jasper put the carving blade into its cardboard sheath. Then, almost automatically, he found himself sliding the knife into the inside pocket of his suit coat.

And, horizontal in the blackness, eyes open, his flat chest rising and falling with unsteady beat, he sent out his bleak ultimatum to the legion that might be: 'If you are there, I will take no more.'

Then there was Albert Radenhausen, Junior, again at four in the morning. Jolting Mr Jasper into waking state, touching one more match to his inflammable system. There were the footsteps, the car horns, the dogs barking, the blinds rattling, the faucet dripping, the blankets bunching, the pillow flattening, the pyjamas twisting. And morning with its burning toast and bad coffee and broken cup and loud radio upstairs and broken shoelace.

And Mr Jasper's body grew rigid with unspeakable fury and he whined and hissed and his muscles petrified and his hands shook and he almost wept. Forgotten was his pad and list, lost in violent temper. Only one thing remained. And that... was self-defence.

For Mr Jasper knew then there was a legion of plotters and he knew also that the legion was redoubling its efforts because he did know and would fight back.

He fled the apartment and hurried down the street, his mind tormented. He must get control, he must! It was the crucial moment, the time of ferment. If he let the course of things go on unimpeded, the madness would come and the legion would have its victim.

Self-defence!

He stood, white-jawed and quivering, at the bus stop, trying with utmost vigour to resist. Never mind that exploding exhaust! Forget that strident giggle of passing female agent. Ignore the rising, mounting crescendo of split nerves. They would not win! His mind a rigid, waiting spring, Mr Jasper vowed victory.

On the bus, the man's nostrils drew mightily and people bumped into Mr Jasper and he gasped and knew that any moment he was going to scream and it would happen.

Sniff, sniff! went the man -SNIFF!

Mr Jasper moved away tensely. The man had never sniffed that loudly before. It was in the plan. Mr Jasper's hand fluttered up to touch the hard length of knife beneath his coat.

He shoved through packed commuters. Someone stepped on his foot. He hissed. His shoelace broke again. He bent over to fix it, and someone's knee hit the side of his head. He straightened up dizzily in the lurching bus, a strangled curse almost prying through his pressed, white lips.

One last hope remaining. Could he escape? The question punched away his senses. A new apartment? He'd moved before. On what he could afford there was no way of finding anything better. He'd always have the same type of neighbours.

A car instead of bus travel? He couldn't afford it.

Leave his miserable job? All sales jobs were just as bad and it was all he knew and he was getting older.

And even if he changed everything �C everything! �C the legion would still pursue him, tracking him down ruthlessly from tension to tension until the inevitable breakdown.

He was trapped.

And, suddenly, standing there with all the people looking at him, Mr Jasper saw the hours ahead, the days, the years -an agonizing, crushing heap of annoyances and irritations and mind-searing aggravations. His head snapped around as he looked at everybody.

And his hair almost stood on end because he realised that all the people in the bus were members of the legion too. And he was helpless in their midst, a pawn to be buffeted about by their vicious, inhuman presence, his rights and individual sanctities endlessly subject to their malevolent conspiracy.

'No!' He screamed it out at them.

And his hand flew in beneath his coat like an avenging bird. And the blade flashed and the legion backed away screaming and, with a frenzied lunge, Mr Jasper fought his war for sanity.

MAN STABS SIX IN CROWDED BUS; IS SHOT BY POLICE

No Motive Found For Wild Attack