The Human Fly

A Story

by RALPH GUSTAFSON

THE morning proved hot and cloudless and the crowd which had assembled in front of Boulanger’s Hardware Store was becoming impatient. The handbills had promised that the climb would start at eleven sharp. For two weeks householders in the town had been inundated with pink notices announcing the death-defying climb in boldfaced type, superlatives, and exclamation points. The handbills had come in the mail, had been slipped under front doors, shoved into the hands of people in the streets.

The advertising had become irritating, but it had been effective. Spectators began to arrive as early as nine-thirty; an hour later the street was blocked. Policemen, posted at the nearest intersections, waved the traffic away from the clogged thoroughfare. Groups of late-comers kept attaching themselves to the mass of people until the crowd gave under the pressure and tossed up fractions onto window sills and lampposts, where they sat and clung, astoundingly individual. Despite the crush, a clear space, half the width of the street, remained before the entrance to the Boulanger building. A dozen cops lined its arc, leaning their backs against the crowd. But the core of the crowd was stationary. The people around the space made no move to enter it and even answered any pressure behind them with their own weight. The space was before that part of the face of the building which, as advertised, the Human Fly was to climb.

The crowd was restive. The clock tower of the post office on the corner struck the half hour harshly. From a lamppost someone yelled, “Where’s the Fly?” and was promptly answered, “He’s got cold feet.”

Nicholas looked around at the voice, which came from his left. The humorist, a little man holding a pipe out of his mouth, was looking about with a smirk on his face.

“Why don’t they begin?” Louise asked. Nicholas turned back to her and again wondered why she had insisted upon coming. She hated crowds. He knew that she disliked being touched, that submission to her own elaborate terms was the almost impossible fee. He examined the rich waves of hair escaping the pert skullcap she wore. His fingers instinctively wanted the feel of the blackness of her hair at the neckline crushed between the pads of his thumb and forefinger.

They were standing at the edge of the space before the entrance of the building. Nicholas had argued against the whole idea of lending oneself to a cheap and morbid advertising stunt, let alone making a pleasure out of pushing and being shoved in a crowd for two hours. Louise had only smiled and said that Mr. Boulanger had to sell his pots and pans, didn’t he? If she wanted to go, she did, that was all. But he wouldn’t pretend to understand or make a virtue of it. Nicholas had been prepared to call for Louise early enough so that at least they would be spared shoving into the jam. But Louise was less conformable. She had not started for the street until a quarter of an hour before the event was scheduled to start. She drove Nicholas into the alleyway behind the block of buildings in which the hardware store stood, left the car there, and led him up the back steps into the passageway between two buildings. She had arranged for the janitor to let them in at the side door. They walked through the offices, out of the front door, and across the space in front of the crowd.

Nicholas had felt his cheeks redden at their performance. The policemen merely gaped at their appearance from the wrong direction. Louise told them, “This will do very nicely, thank you,” and they let her and Nicholas through their line at the exact center of the semicircle as though she had a right to it from the simple fact of demanding it. There had been nothing else for the police to do. But Nicholas had seen the hostility of the people near-by and agreed within himself that it was a shabby trick, He whispered to Louise that they shouldn’t have come that way, and she replied without any attempt to modulate her voice that he needn’t be a fool if others were. He shut up before her intensity. He looked at her and for a moment dislike passed slowly through his mind — leaving him startled at the course his emotion had taken.

2

A MURMUR arose in the crowd. Two heads appeared in a raised window in the sixth story. They were apparently examining the lower sash. Nicholas looked up the line of windows to the roof. The sashes of each had been fixed with wooden inserts so that steady openings were made available from the base to the top of the building eight stories above.

Nicholas felt cheated. “All he needs now is a ladder.” It was as if the discovery that the windows had been fixed left their maneuver to get ahead of the crowd even shabbier.

“He can still fall, can’t he?” Louise might just as well have told him not to be a logical bore. And it was true. The face of the building presented opportunities enough for a distorted conclusion on the pavement below. Between each window and the one above it was a four-foot stretch of wall sheer of any handhold except the inch provided by an ornamental line of jutting bricks. Above the top window, seventy-seven feet above street level, the six-foot stretch of brick to the flat roof was folly.

The two heads in the window withdrew and presently three people appeared from the main entrance of the building. A couple came first, the woman in spangles and braid, the man in the faded sweater and trunks of an acrobat. Their costumes were tawdry in the daylight. They were followed by Mr. Lacroix, vice-president of Boulanger’s. Importantly extending both arms above his head, he commanded attention from various sectors of the crowd, and after two or three minutes of doubt whether his gestures would have any effect whatever, he began speaking. It was the great pride and honor of Boulanger’s Hardware Store — departments for everything needed in the kitchen and the home—it was with the greatest pleasure that Boulanger’s could present the Human Fly.

With all the persistent preparation, Boulanger’s had omitted to supply its vice-president with a microphone. His voice could hardly have been heard across the street. The crowd shoved closer. The people in front were jostled forward. Nicholas edged himself behind Louise and tried to take the pressure of the crowd from her. He put his arms around her waist.

As he held her closely, Nicholas shifted his forearms upward until he could feel the small weight of her breasts on them. The sensation familiarly excited him. She had never allowed him any physical intimacy until they had become engaged — after he had been invalided home just before the end of the war in Europe, He had silenced a machinegun nest by bayonet and had been sent home with a burst of shrapnel in his back and with the D.S.O. It had been vaguely understood before he had left for overseas that they would marry, but he had never felt sure until after his return. His exploit at Nijmegen seemed to make a difference to Louise. She had made him tell it in detail, and it was only then, in the hospital, that he knew she wanted him to touch her. But as he now stood protecting and holding Louise he found himself questioning her. He sensed that she was unaware of him, that she was not sharing his feeling that the crowd, the whole morning had taken meaning when he put his arms around her. Nicholas relaxed the tension of his arms. Perhaps his need for expressed affection, his uncertainty of himself, made him too demanding.

The vice-president had finished his declaration. He made a condescending gesture to the Human Fly to carry on and then re-entered the building with the woman wearing the sadly pretentious costume, whom he had introduced as the daring wife of the Human Fly. The Fly turned to the building.

He was a slight little man who immediately engaged the sympathy of Nicholas and struck him with pathos. The forlorn expression of his features was ludicrously contrasted by a resentful fuzz of reddish hair which covered to an exact line the back half of his head. The combination of such a comical circumstance with the daring of what he did no doubt ensured the Human Fly his success. His appearance on the first window sill restored at once the good humor of the crowd and was the signal for hand clapping and a few shouts. But the reception jarred Nicholas as obtuse. The preliminary bows, flexings of muscle, and testings of support which the man had gone through had been empty of any attempt to establish the fiction that the theatrical flourish was important to the success of the climb. It was plain to Nicholas that the man had gone through his act by rote, and it made him depressed. He resented the lettering, BOULAXGER’S BUYS ARE BEST, attached across the back of the man’s sweater.

Nicholas began to sentimentalize. The man was capable of better things than such futile sensation mongering. His appealing attention toward his wife and her ignobling indifference during the vicepresident’s oration hinted at a drama greater than that which the man was now providing. Nicholas decided the man was foolishly and hopelessly entangled in an unworthy love. It would be as if the teasing habit which Louise had of drawing attention to his own diffidence in company were really meant as ridicule, as if Louise forced him into irrational demonstrations to prove that his love was at the same time independent yet worthy of return. The Human Fly clinging to the second-story sill of Boulanger’s was deliberately placing the responsibility for a human life on the love of the woman in shabby braid. It was a threat and an appeal.

Nicholas laughed. The man was probably a shoddy exhibitionist who beat his wife.

“Do you find this funny?”

The focus of Nicholas’s mind sharpened on the present. “No — no, I was only laughing to myself.” He had irritated Louise. “I was only thinking of this man climbing the building and an elevator inside.”

“Well, you can still use it.” There was no amusement in Louise’s voice and Nicholas turned the remark against himself. Louise knew heights made him giddy. His lame improvisation aggravated Nicholas’s resentment. He constantly felt a necessity to switch his thoughts into something which he felt Louise might prefer him to say. It was a habit of mind of which Nicholas was only half aware — but he was conscious of following it often enough to be left uncertain. Alternately he measured himself as dull and inadequate or unwillingly suspected that Louise in some inexplicable way was making him appear so. As he often did, Nicholas now avoided bringing himself to a conclusion. He said nothing more to Louise and let his attention be taken up outside himself.

3

THE Human Fly had reached the fourth story. He was climbing cautiously but steadily. From each sill he drew himself upright by using the opening made at the top of each window; then taking his weight on his left forearm and transversely on his right foot raised against the side of the window aperture, he inched his body upward until the fingers of his right arm made the ornamental projection of bricks in the middle of the space of wall between the windows. To those watching below, the man seemed for a moment to be clinging to sheer wall. Then his left foot found the top of the slightly open sash as his left hand grasped the sill above.

Nicholas quickly admitted that the challenge of the building, despite the fixed windows, was being more than fairly met. The promise that the climb would be “death-defying” was not mere publicity jargon. An error in the rhythm of the man’s muscles between the windows would pitch him to the street below. Every nine feet, the man consigned his life, for a fraction of a minute, to the traction of the rubber on his running shoes, then to the contraction of his fingertips on an inch of brick.

Nicholas’s indignation against flamboyant advertisement sharpened to anger against whatever had committed the courageous pinch of life to the monstrous fortuity of its position. As he watched the Human Fly, a slowly struggling thorax of green liquid hoisted on its waving pairs of viscous legs at the direction of the grotesque multiplex eyes, Nicholas felt sick with humiliation. He looked away, lowered his eyes to Louise. She was tense, staring at the gamble above her. Nicholas searched the assurance of her eyes, her cheek, the tangible assurance of the curve of her lips. The familiar impulse surged through him to negate his passion with them. To possess and in the possession free himself of them.

Louise suddenly was aware of his attention. For a fraction of a second her eyes diverted. Their command and scorn struck him. The curt gesture of her body to free itself from contact with him was redundant. In his imagination, Nicholas saw the flat of his hand strike her cheek so that her head jerked. But he stood there, his hands at his sides, his breath moving heavily. Then he hated himself, the constant preoccupation with his own insides, the romanticism which he allowed his passion. He stood, trying to detach the pulsing drive of his thought and emotion. But the truth behind his imagination again gripped him: it was as if he saw Louise’s eyes fill with horror, follow the hurtling body, fascinated, the drop of the building to the street at her feet, her absorption away from him smashed obscenely and finally on the pavement.

Nicholas looked up. “He’s going to make it,” he said.

Louise did not reply, and as he looked up, Nicholas himself became absorbed by what he saw. The Fly had reached the space between the top window and the roof where the stretch of brick was greater. It seemed impossibly higher than the height of the climber. He saw the small clutching figure above him pause. For a minute the Fly made no movement as he clung to the last window, then one of his arms groped awkwardly behind him. The crowd in the street below watched without sound or movement, caught between an assured excitement and possible horror. Again the arm of the Fly gestured. He was in difficulty. Then Nicholas made out what it was. The man had taken a handkerchief and was drying each of his hands. The speck on the building was stationary for a moment more, then began to grope upwards.

It was over quickly. With a studied smoothness the Fly, balancing on his toes on the window’s top aperture, slid his body upright, reached for the width of an ornamental beam-end, and in the impetus provided simultaneously by a foothold on the projecting line of brick and repulsion from the beamend leaped for the edge. For an instant his body seemed poised in space, then his arm went over and he was on the roof.

4

THE crowd burst into applause. Nicholas had hardly had time to follow the agile grace of the feat. Shouts were added to the clapping as the Human Fly, a diminutive silhouette against the light sky, reappeared at the edge of the roof. Another figure joined him. It was his wife. They bowed to each other and to the street below. Then as the Fly withdrew from sight, the woman began gest iculating toward the crowd. At first Nicholas couldn’t make out her meaning, then he saw little colored leaves of paper floating down toward the spectators below. Really, the other had been enough without Boulanger’s advertising more of his bargains.

Nicholas moved impatiently. “Let’s go.” At least they needn’t, go through the anticlimax.

But Louise still stared upward. “It isn’t over yet.”

Nicholas looked back. The Fly was again in sight. As his wife finished distributing her pile of leaflets to the air, he placed first a table at the edge of the roof, then a rocking chair on it. The spangles of the woman’s costume glinted tinily in the sun as she turned to steady the table. The Fly, stepping up on it, struck a posture with his arms spread toward the sky, then sat down in the chair, lighted a cigarette, and began rocking. At the same time a voice burst forth with startling raucousness in front of Nicholas. A loud-speaker began belching words at the crowd. It was the vice-president again, from the interior of the store.

“For godsake let’s go!” Nicholas said.

Without taking her eyes from the top of the building, Louise said, “Well go, then.”Then Nicholas remembered how she had said, “It isn’t over yet.” In the same way. Tense, with anger and fascination, yet coldly objective. The tone behind the words somehow implicated Nicholas. Instinctively he felt humiliated and mocked. He gave way to the anger and frustration which flooded up within him. “I will,” he said.

But he found it impossible to get through the crowd behind him. It was still intent on the scene above. Nicholas surrendered before the resentment of the people he was disturbing and stopped a few feet away from Louise. He could see little of her except the round of her tiny skullcap bent back toward him as she gazed upward. Nicholas again checked himself as an exaggerating fool. And she would need his help when the crowd broke up. He stood a moment looking at the tiny skullcap, wondering, then looked to the top of the building.

The Fly was in the midst of a handstand on the seat of the rocking chair, his body a short parenthesis against the sky. His wife was steadying the table which held the chair. Nicholas’s mind returned to what he had imagined was between them. The man whose daring was a plea and a warning to her love, a proof to subvert the injustice of the image in her eyes — a saddened, comical, hapless figure who by florid acrobatics only could express his love.

Then it happened. The woman had straightened away from the table into a melodramatic pose indicating her inverted husband and Nicholas later could remember nothing about the apparently perfect poise of the Fly to demand her movement. Suddenly she made a quick grab for the table. The rocking chair lurched and in a graceful arc the man came over the side of the building. He fell with ridiculous ease. A tiny apostrophe in slowmotion, upright, in control, that enlarged into the hurtling twisting figure of the Human Fly. The sound of the impact filled Nicholas’s belly with nausea. He had heard such a cry as the Fly’s before — under bombardment.

Nicholas found himself beside Louise. “Don’t look, Louise! Don’t look!” He pulled her round against him.

“Get away from me!”

In his astonishment at her command, he did as he was told. He looked blankly at her. She was staring at the motionless figure huddled on the pavement. Something white stuck grotesquely up through the lettering on its back. Then the edge of the crowd disintegrated and, as he still looked at Louise, Nicholas’s mind came alive. Turning against the surge of people, he viciously fought a path away from her.