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about two months before the onset of the happiness,
intending to work on a cure for something. I recall distinctly
my elation in finding a place so congenial and so precisely
what I had had in mind. I turned to Wagner and handed him
the key. "Go," I said, "and find for us those supplies of which
we will have need. Do not pay too dearly, neither shall you
`cut corners' so that the difference will fall to your own
purse."
"You may trust me, Master," he said. I did, too. We had an
understanding.
Well, you can imagine my chagrin when, upon arriving at
the lab the following morning, I found the entire wall space
within covered with 1 x 8 white pine shelves, and on the
shelves hundreds and hundreds of little bottles of chemicals.
Calcium carbonate. Manganese dioxide. Copper sulfate. Little
bottles with powder-blue labels and white plastic twist-off
caps. In one corner was a monstrous pile of microscope
slides, cloudy with previous use, unwashed and crusty. In an
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old liquor carton were thousands of rubber stoppers, some
with one hole, some with two holes, and some with no holes
at all. Wagner had not bought any glassware to use them in.
"I ran out of funds," he said.
You may picture my pique. I hit him across the face, and
he whimpered his apology. I sat down on the stool that he
had thoughtfully purchased for me. No worktable. The very
first thing that he should have acquired. I couldn't even begin
without a slate-topped worktable. No Bunsen burner. No lens
paper. No asbestos pad. No test-tube brush. I was helpless.
"What are we going to do, Master?" asked Wagner.
"Oh, shut up and let me think," I said. I regret those tones
that I used on poor, faithful Wagner. But things are different
now. He is gone, lost forever, and all that I have left is the
knowledge of my responsibility for his lostness. This fearful
weight bears me down, forces the very lifebreath of life from
me, and I can never ease the pain. Oh, that I could enjoy
anew the conscienceless freedom of those long-dead days.
But I am sure that it is impossible. I am not a scientist now.
(Perhaps you have noticed from the loveliness of the words
that I have become a poet. It happened overnight. I had
nothing to do with it. Fate, I suppose.) And so an entire
lifetime's training and desire are made meaningless. I might
as well retire; go learn to play shuffleboard with the others
who discovered that they are no longer short-order cooks,
bank guards, scissor sharpeners. Ah, the futility of striving.
All that we can ask for is to be happy, eh?
And they were, and where did it get them? People just
don't know when they're well off. There always has to be
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something wrong, the serpent in the garden, that sort of
thing. At first, when the signs pointed to nothing in particular,
I thought it was all very charming. Men and women frolicking
in the streets, everybody smiling and emptying wastepaper
baskets from their office windows, cars playfully aiming
themselves at each other and steering away at the last
moment like the Dodgem at Euclid Beach Park when I was a
tad. But it couldn't just stay that way, could it? No, not with
people the way they are. Larger doses of joy were required.
The search for outlets became frantic; people expended
enormous amounts of energy, exhausting themselves and
their city to show how happy they were. No one (except the
scientists, who were immune) slept, or ate, or cried. Early on,
singing was the rage. Then skipping down the sidewalk and
walking barefoot through the Park Avenue fountains. Then
nudity, though never any sort of overt sexual contact. For
some unknown reason the abandonment of sorrow brought
with it a rebirth of chastity. A sort of forced innocence that
turned my stomach. Wagner agreed.
And, finally, dancing. Everybody danced, except us
scientists, who continued to work. When things definitely
began to look bad we pooled our resources and wrote papers.
My friend Larry did a paper on the effect of eight million
people dancing on the already overstressed geological
formations on which Manhattan rests. He orchestrated a
somber score, to coin a phrase: the island sinking beneath
the waves, the city sitting like the cracked skin on a chocolate
pudding, the people dancing their cares away, the night
away, beneath a lunatic moon. It was then that we organized
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ourselves, made over our already overtaxed fraternity of
learning into the ragged irregular army of good-cause
mendicants it is today.
Thanks to my years of experience in observation I could
tell that the reveling multitudes were not really happy. There
were moments when an individual had to catch his breath.
Then, for just a few seconds, I imagine that he asked himself,
"Hey, precisely what are we celebrating?" But then he'd look
around and see everyone else dancing away to some
hypothetical inner beat, and he'd find it again and smile and
begin twisting. I didn't mind the inconvenience they were
causing me as much as I was saddened by the overwhelming
display of mass delusion. Several times I caught the arm of
one of them and said, "You're not truly happy. You millions of
people are just fooling yourselves. Come on back to the real
thing. Come on back to life." But I never got anywhere that
way. It was as though I had lost touch somehow with my
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