The Cat's Pajamas

This has been going on since you were sixteen years old. You’re now twenty-five, and four hours a night is still enough sleep.

You have few glass objects in your house. You shave with an electric razor, because a safety razor sometimes cuts you and you cannot afford to bleed.

You are a hemophiliac. You start bleeding and you can’t stop. Your father was the same way—though he served only as a frightening example. He cut his finger once, fairly deeply, and died on the way to the hospital from blood loss. There was also hemophilia on your mother’s side of the family, and that was where you got it.

In your right inside coat pocket you carry, always, a small bottle of coagulant tablets. If you cut yourself you immediately swallow them. The coagulant formula spreads through your system to supply the necessary clotting material to stop the seepage of blood.

So this is how your life goes. You need only four hours of sleep and you stay away from sharp objects. Each waking day of your life is almost twice as long as the average man’s, but your life expectancy is short, so it comes to an ironic balance.

It will be long hours until the morning mail. So you tap out four thousand words on a story with your typewriter. At nine o’clock when the postal box in front of your door clicks you stack the typewritten sheets, clip them together, check the carbon copy and file them under the heading NOVEL IN PROGRESS. Then, smoking a cigarette, you go for the mail.

You take the mail from the box. A check for three hundred dollars from a national magazine, two rejections from lesser houses, and a small cardboard box tied with green string.

After shuffling over the letters you turn to the box, untie it, flip open the top, reach in, and pull out the thing that is inside it.

“Damn!”

You drop the box. A splash of quick red spreads on your fingers. Something bright has flashed in the air with a chopping movement. There was the whir of a metal spring, whining.

Blood begins to run smoothly, swiftly from your wounded hand. You stare at it for a moment, stare at the sharp object on the floor, the little bestial contraption with the razor embedded in a springed trap that clipped shut when you pulled it out, and caught you unawares!

Fumbling, trembling, you reach into your pocket, getting blood all over yourself, and pull out the bottle of tablets and gulp several down.

Then, while you are waiting for the stuff to clot, you wrap the hand in a handkerchief and, gingerly, pick up the contraption and set it on the table.

After staring at it for ten minutes you sit down and have yourself a cigarette clumsily, and your eyelids jerk and flicker and your vision melts and hardens and remelts the objects of the room, and finally you have the answer.

… Someone doesn’t like me.... Someone doesn’t like me at all …

The phone rings. You get it.

“Douglas speaking.”

“Hello, Rob. This is Jerry.”

“Oh, Jerry.”

“How are you, Rob?”

“Pale and shaken.”

“How come?”

“Somebody sent me a razor in a box.”

“Stop kidding.”

“Seriously. But you wouldn’t want to hear.”

“How’s the novel, Rob?”

“I won’t ever finish it if people keep sending me sharp objects. I expect to get a cut-glass Swedish vase in the next mail. Or a magician’s cabinet with a large collapsible mirror.”

“Your voice sounds funny,” says Jerry.

“It should. As for the novel, Gerald, it is going great guns. I’ve just done another four thousand words. In this scene I show the great love of Anne J. Anthony for Mr. Michael M. Horn.”

“You’re asking for trouble, Rob.”