“What about those names?” He was almost dancing around her.
“Well, in the Hebrew Bible, before God created the Earth, the Earth was tohu oobohu. The oo means and. And tohu and bohu —gee, it’s hard to translate.”
“Try,” he implored her. “ Try.”
“Oh, for example, the usual English translation of tohu oobohu is without form and void. But bohu really means empty in a lot of—”
“Foreigners,” he chortled. “I knew they were foreigners. And up to no good. With names like that.”
“I don’t agree with you, Mr. Blake,” she said very stiffly. “I don’t agree with you at all about those names being no good. Not when they come from the Hebrew.” And she never showed him any friendliness again.
Two weeks later, Blake got a message from the home office of Wellington Jimm Sons, Inc., Real Estate, that almost shoved his reason off the corner of the slippery throne it still occupied. Tohu Bohu had given notice. They were quitting the premises at the end of the month.
For a day or so, he walked around talking to himself. The elevator operators reported hearing him say things like: “They’re the most complete foreigners there could be—they don’t even belong in the physical universe!” The scrubwomen shivered in their locker room as they told each other of the mad, mad light in his eyes as he’d muttered, with enormous gestures: “Of course—thirteenth floor. Where else do you think they could stay, the nonexistent so-and-so’s? Hah!” And once when Miss Kerstenberg had caught him glaring at the water cooler and saying, They’re trying to turn the clock back a couple of billion years and start all over, I bet. Filthy fifth columnists!” she thought tremulously of notifying the F.B.I., but decided against it. After all, she reasoned, once the police start snooping around a place, you never can tell who they’ll send to jail.
And, besides, after a little while, Sydney Blake straightened out. He began shaving every morning once more and the darkness left his nails. But he was definitely not the crisp young realtor of yore. There was a strange, skirling air of triumph about him almost all the time.
Came the last day of the month. All morning, load after load of furniture had been carried downstairs and trucked away. As the last few packages came down, Sydney Blake, a fresh flower in his buttonhole, walked up to the elevator nearest his office and stepped inside.