Free Nightmare At 20,000 Feet by Richard Matheson Page B

she is digging nails into the pillow and moaning my name and wishing she were dead.
    His shoes clicked rapidly on the sidewalk. God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who would create and find that we must lose our hearts for it because we cannot afford to spend our time at it.
    It was a beautiful day. His eyes saw that but his mind would not attest to it. The trees were thick with green and the air warm and fresh. Spring breezes flooded down the streets. He felt them brush over him as he walked down the block, crossed Main Street to the bus stop.
    He stood there on the corner looking back at the house.
    She is in there, his mind persisted in analysis. In there, the house in which we've lived for more than eight years. She is packing or crying or doing something. And soon she will call the Campus Cab Company. A cab will come driving out. The driver will honk the horn, Sally will put on her light spring coat and take her suitcase out on the porch. She will lock the door behind her for the last time.
    "No-"
    He couldn't keep the word from strangling in his throat. He kept staring at the house. His head ached. He saw everything weaving. I'm sick, he thought.
    "I'm sick!"
    He shouted it. There was no one around to hear. He stood gazing at the house. She is going away forever, said his mind.
    Very well then! I'll write, write, write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.
    A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth.
    He glanced aside as the green-striped bus topped the distant hill and approached. He put the briefcase under his arm and reached into his coat pocket for a token. There was a hole in the pocket. Sally had been meaning to sew it. Well, she would never sew it now. What did it matter anyway?
    I would rather have my soul intact than the suit of clothes I wear.
    Words, words, he thought, as the bus stopped before him. They flood through me now that she is leaving. Is that evidence that it is her presence that clogs the channels of thought?
    He dropped the token in the coin box and weaved down the length of the bus. He passed a professor he knew and nodded to him distractedly. He slumped down on the back seat and stared at the grimy, rubberized floor boards.
    This is a great life, his mind ranted. I am so pleased with this, my life and these, my great and noble accomplishments.
    He opened the briefcase a moment and looked in at the thick prospectus he had outlined with the aid of Dr. Ramsay.
    First week-1. Everyman. Discussion of. Reading of selections from Classic Readings For College Freshmen. 2. Beowulf. Reading of. Class discussion. Twenty minute quotation quiz.
    He shoved the sheaf of papers back into the briefcase. It sickens me, he thought. I hate these things. The classics have become anathema to me. I begin to loathe the very mention of them. Chaucer, the Elizabethan poets, Dryden, Pope, Shakespeare. What higher insult to a man than to grow to hate these names because he must share them by part with unappreciative clods? Because he must strain them thin and make them palatable for the dullards who should better be digging ditches.
    He got off the bus downtown and started down the long slope of Ninth Street.
    Walking, he felt as though he were a ship with its hawser cut, prey to a twisted network of currents. He felt apart from the city, the country, the world. If someone told me I were a ghost, he thought, I would be inclined to believe.
    What is she doing now?
    He wondered about it as the buildings floated past him. What is she thinking as I stand here and the town of Fort drifts by me like vaporous stage flats? What are her hands holding? What expression has she on her lovely face?
    She is alone in the house, our house. What might have been our home. Now it is only a shell, a hollow box with sticks