Yes, it had been a very empty, purposeless life indeed, Phil told himself, at the same time wondering why even that thought could not mar his present happiness.
He came out of his reverie and saw that the cat was marching down the bed, closely inspecting his naked body.
"Hey, we're friends, but that's going too far. Leave me some privacy!" Chuckling, he swung out of bed, grabbing up a light robe as his body left the cone of radiant heat projected from the ceiling fixture. While shouldering into the robe he hummed a couple of bars from "Kiss Me, Darling, in Free-Fall" and did a shuffling step that brought the cat hurrying over to play tag with his toes.
"Where did you come from, Lucky?" Phil repeated and turned toward the window. In the three steps it took him to reach it, his gaze lit on the near-empty dispenser of sleeping pills and for a moment the eerie doubt came back: mightn't this morning's overdose have triggered off or paralleled a really big change in his mind? After all, this cat wasn't normal (and neither were hallucinations!) and his crazy, inexplicable happiness was altogether too much like the inner world of godlike perfection into which the paranoiac is supposed to retreat.
But then he was at the window experiencing a new twist in his mood and the doubt was forgotten.
The window opened on a deep, very narrow bay in the remodeled monster hotel in which Phil roomed. If he risked his neck by leaning out very far, he could just manage to look out of the bay and glimpse an advertisement-encrusted corner of Fun Incorporated's wrestling center and the helicopter field on its roof. The hotel had been built as a luxury palace for the new war-rich of the 1970's but during the great housing shortage of the 1980's its vast rooms had been cut up into tiny sleeping cells. It retained, however, at least one feature from its lordly days: the large circular windows formed of two sheets of polarizing glass, the inner of which could be rotated, allowing a person to blacken his window or have it fully transparent or enjoy any shade of twilight. One other very unusual luxury touch was that the windows could actually be opened, swinging on pivots at top and bottom. Nowadays, with radiant sleep-heating general throughout the hotel and the air-conditioning system anything but trustworthy, this last feature was put to real use more often than might have been expected, though windows were still kept closed most of the daytime.
It had always seemed to Phil that the great gray wall just ten feet from his window, with its rows of ominous portholes, many of them blackened, was the grimmest sight in the world—a symbol of the way he was walled off from life and people.
But now, as he stood leaning out just a little, his cropped hair brushing the tarnished circular rim, it seemed to him that he could imagine his way through that wall as if it were made of some material that conducted emotion as copper conducts electricity. Not see or think through it, but feel through it to the multiple texture of warm, pitiful, admirable, ridiculous human lives in the cubicles behind: the two-fifths happy ones, the nine-tenths sad ones, the ones who nursed fears and frustrations because you had to nurse something, the ones who hammered fears and frustrations into a painful armor, the old man apprehensively sorting his limp ration stamps from three communo-capitalist wars, the boy playing spaceship and pretending the blacked-out window was the porthole of a comic-book intergalactic liner, the three unemployed secretaries—one of them pacing—the lovers whose rendezvous was tainted with worries about the Federal Bureau of Morality, the fat man feeling a girl's caress by radio handie and thinking of something long ago, the old woman coddling her dread of war-germs and atomic ashes by constantly dusting, dusting, dusting....
Well, his new self certainly had a vivid imagination, Phil decided with a smile.
An old hand came out of a porthole three floors down and shook something—or nothing—from a dustpan.