RICHARD McKENNA
                     Casey Agonistes

The late Richard McKenna was probably best known in his lifetime as
author of the fat and thoughtful bestselling main-stream novel The Sand
Pebbles—later made into a big-budget but inferior (to the book) screen
spectacular starring Steve McQueen—but during his short career, before
his tragically early death in 1964, he also wrote a handful of powerful and
elegant short science fiction stories that stand among the best work of the
first half of the 1960s. The roster of them, alas, is short: the strange and
wonderful novella “Fiddler’s Green,” “The Secret Place”—for which he won
a posthumous Nebula Award—“The Night of Hoggy Darn.” “Mine Own
Ways.” “Hunter, Come Home.” “Bramble Bush.” Many of them question the
nature of reality, and investigate our flawed and prejudiced perceptions of it
with a depth and complexity rivaled elsewhere at that time only by the work
of Philip K. Dick. Ail of them reveal the sure touch of a master craftsman,
and it is intriguing—if, of course, pointless—to wonder what kind of work
McKenna would be turning out now, if fate had spared him.

      The best of the McKenna stories, though, is the one that follows,
“Casey Agonistes,” one of the most powerful stories ever published in the
genre—or out of it, for that matter. Amazingly, it was McKenna’s first
published story.

      Almost all of McKenna’s short fiction was collected in Casey
Agonistes and Other Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories. A collection of
his essays, New Eyes For Old, was published after his death.

                                     ****

You can’t just plain die. You got to do it by the book.

     That’s how come I’m here in this TB ward with nine other recruits.
Basic training to die.

       You do it by stages. First a big ward, you walk around and go out and
they call you mister. Then, if you got what it takes, a promotion to this
isolation ward and they call you charles. You can’t go nowhere, you meet
the masks, and you get the feel of being dead.

      Being dead is being weak and walled off. You hear car noises, and
see little doll-people down on the sidewalks, but when they come to visit
you they wear white masks and nightgowns and talk past you in the wrong
voices. They’re scared you’ll rub some off on them. You would, too, if you
knew how.

      Nobody ever visits me. I had practice being dead before I come
here. Maybe that’s how I got to be charles so quick.

      It’s easy, playing dead here. You eat your pills, make out to sleep in
the quiet hours and drink your milk like a good little charles. You grin at their
phony joshing about how healthy you look and feel. You all know better, but
them’s the rules.

     Sick call is when they really make you know it. It’s a parade—the head
doctor and nurse, the floor nurse Mary Howard and two interns, all in masks
and nightgowns. Mary pushes the wheeled rack with our fever charts on it.
The doc is a tall skinhead with wooden eyes and pinchnose glasses. The
head nurse is fat, with little pig eyes and a deep voice.

       The doc can’t see, hear, smell or touch you. He looks at your
reflection in the chart and talks about you like you was real, but it’s Mary that
pulls down the cover and opens your pajama coat, and the interns poke and
look and listen and tell the doc what they see and hear. He asks them
questions for you to answer. You tell them how good you feel and they tell
him. He ain’t supposed to get contaminated.

      Mary’s small, dark and sweet and the head nurse gives her a bad
time. One intern is small and dark like Mary, but with soft black eyes and
very gentle. The other one is pink and chubby.

      The doc’s voice is high and thin, like he ain’t all there below decks.
The head nurse snaps at Mary, snips at the interns, and puts a kind of dog
wiggle in her voice when she talks to the doc.

       I’m glad not to know what’s under any of their masks, except maybe
Mary’s, because I can likely imagine better faces for them then God did.
The head nurse makes rounds, writing the book. When she catches us out
of line, like smoking or being up in a quiet hour, she gives Mary hell.

       She gives us hell too, like we was babies. She kind of hints that if we
ain’t respectful to her and obey her rules maybe she won’t let us die after
all.

      Christ, how I hate this hag! I hope I meet her in hell.
       That’s how it struck me, first day or two in isolation. I’d looked around
for old shipmates, like a guy does, but didn’t see any. On the third day one
recognized me. I thought I knew that gravel voice, but even after he told me
I couldn’t hardly believe it was old Slop Chute Hewitt.

       He was skin and bones and his blue eyes had a kind of puzzled look
like I saw in them once years ago when a big limey sucker punched him in
Nagasaki Joe’s. When I remembered that, it made me know, all right.

      He said glad to see me there and we both laughed. Some of the
others shuffled over in striped bathrobes and all of a sudden I was in like
Flynn, knowing Slop Chute. I found out they called the head doc Uncle
Death. The fat nurse was Mama Death. The blond intern was Pink Waldo,
the dark one Curly Waldo, and Mary was Mary. Knowing things like that is a
kind of password.

      They said Curly Waldo was sweet on Mary, but he was a poor Italian.
Pink Waldo come of good family and was trying to beat him out. They were
pulling for Curly Waldo.

       When they left, Slop Chute and me talked over old times in China. I
kept seeing him like he was on the John D. Edwards, sitting with a cup of
coffee topside by the after fireroom hatch, while his snipes turned to down
below. He wore bleached dungarees and shined shoes and he looked like
a lord of the earth. His broad face and big belly. The way he stoked chow
into himself in the guinea pullman—that’s what give him his name. The way
he took aboard beer and samshu in the Kongmoon Happiness Garden. The
way he swung the little ne-sans dancing in the hotels on Skibby Hill. Now…
Godalmighty! It made me know.

      But he still had the big jack-lantern grin.

      “Remember little Connie that danced at the Palais?” he asked.

      I remember her, half Portygee, cute as hell.

      “You know, Charley, now I’m headed for scrap, the onliest one damn
thing I’m sorry for is I didn’t shack with her when I had the chance.”

      “She was nice,” I said.

      “She was green fire in the velvet, Charley. I had her a few times when
I was on the Monocacy. She wanted to shack and I wouldn’t never do it.
Christ, Christ, I wish I did, now!”

      “I ain’t sorry for anything, that I can think of.”

    “You’ll come to it, sailor. For every guy there’s some one thing.
Remember how Connie used to put her finger on her nose like a Jap girl?”

     “Now, Mr Noble, you mustn’t keep arthur awake in quiet hour. Lie
down yourself, please.”

      It was Mama Death, sneaked up on us.

     “Now rest like a good boy, charles, and we’ll have you home before
you know it,” she told me on her way out.

      I thought a thought at her.

                                       ****

The ward had green-gray linoleum, high, narrow windows, a sparcolor
overhead, and five bunks on a side. My bunk was at one end next to the
solarium. Slop Chute was across from me in the middle. Six of us was
sailors, three soldiers, and there was one marine.

     We got mucho sack time, training for the long sleep. The marine
bunked next to me and I saw a lot of him.

      He was a strange guy. Name of Carnahan, with a pointed nose and a
short upper lip and a go-to-hell stare. He most always wore his radio
earphones and he was all the time grinning and chuckling like he was in a
private world from the rest of us.

     It wasn’t the program that made him grin, either, like I thought first.
He’d do it even if some housewife was yapping about how to didify the
dumplings. He carried on worst during sick call. Sometimes Uncle Death
looked across almost like he could hear it direct.

     I asked him about it and he put me off, but finally he told me. Seems
he could hypnotize himself to see a big ape and then make the ape clown
around. He told me I might could get to see it too. I wanted to try, so we
did.

     “He’s there,” Carnahan would say. “Sag your eyes, look out the
corners. He won’t be plain at first.”
      “Just expect him, he’ll come. Don’t want him to do anything. You just
feel. He’ll do what’s natural,” he kept telling me.

       I got where I could see the ape—Casey, Carnahan called him—in
flashes. Then one day Mama Death was chewing out Mary and I saw him
plain. He come up behind Mama and—I busted right out laughing.

      He looked like a bowlegged man in an ape suit covered with
red-brown hair. He grinned and made faces with a mouth full of big yellow
teeth and he was furnished like John Keeno himself. I roared.

     “Put on your phones so you’ll have an excuse for laughing,” Carnahan
whispered. “Only you and me can see him, you know.”

                                      ****

Fixing to be dead, you’re ready for God knows what, but Casey was sure
something.

     “Hell, no he ain’t real,” Carnahan said. “We ain’t so real ourselves any
more. That’s why we can see him.”

      Carnahan told me okay to try and let Slop Chute in on it. It ended we
cut the whole gang in, going slow so the masks wouldn’t get suspicious.

      It bothered Casey at first, us all looking at him. It was like we all had a
string on him and he didn’t know who to mind. He backed and filled and
tacked and yawed all over the ward not able to steer himself. Only when
Mama Death was there and Casey went after her, then it was like all the
strings pulled the same way.

      The more we watched him the plainer and stronger he got till finally he
started being his own man. He came and went as he pleased and we never
knew what he’d do next except that there’d be a laugh in it. Casey got more
and more there for us, but he never made a sound.

       He made a big difference. We all wore our earphones and giggled
like idiots. Slop Chute wore his big sideways grin more often. Old Webster
almost stopped griping.

     There was a man filling in for a padre came to visitate us every week.
Casey would sit on his knee and wiggle and drool, with one finger between
those strong, yellow teeth.
     The man said the radio was a Godsend to us patient spirits in our
hour of trial. He stopped coming.

      Casey made a real show out of sick call. He kissed Mama Death
smack on her mask, danced with her and bit her on the rump. He rode
piggy back on Uncle Death. He even took a hand in Mary’s romance.

       One Waldo always went in on each side of a bunk to look, listen and
feel for Uncle. Mary could go on either side. We kept count of whose side
she picked and how close she stood to him. That’s how we figured Pink
Waldo was ahead.

      Well, Casey started to shoo her gently in by Curly Waldo and then
crowd her closer to him. And, you know, the count began to change in
Curly’s favor. Casey had something.

     If no masks were around to bedevil, Casey would dance and turn
handsprings. He made us all feel good.

     Uncle Death smelled a rat and had the radio turned off during sick call
and quiet hours. But he couldn’t cut off Casey.

                                   ****

Something went wrong with Roby, the cheerful black boy next to Slop
Chute. The masks were all upset about it and finally Mary come told him on
the sly. He wasn’t going to make it. They were going to flunk him back to the
big ward and maybe back to the world.

       Mary’s good that way. We never see her face, of course, but I always
imagine for her a mouth like Venus has, in that picture you see her standing
in the shell.

      When Roby had to go, he come around to each bunk and said
goodbye. Casey stayed right behind him with his tongue stuck out. Roby
kept looking around for Casey, but of course he couldn’t see him.

    He turned around, just before he left the ward, and all of a sudden
Casey was back in the middle and scowling at him. Roby stood looking at
Casey with the saddest face I ever saw him wear. Then Casey grinned and
waved a hand. Roby grinned back and tears run down his black face. He
waved and shoved off.
      Casey took to sleeping in Roby’s bunk till another recruit come in.

      One day two masked orderlies loaded old Webster the whiner onto a
go-to-Jesus cart and wheeled him off to X-ray. They said. But later one
came back and wouldn’t look at us and pushed Webster’s locker out and
we knew. The masks had him in a quiet room for the graduation exercises.

     They always done that, Slop Chute told me, so’s not to hurt the
morale of the guys not able to make the grade yet. Trouble was, when a
guy went to X-ray on a go-to-Jesus cart he never knew till he got back
whether he was going to see the gang again.

     Next morning when Uncle Death fell in for sick call, Casey come
bouncing down the ward and hit him a haymaker plumb on the mask.

      I swear the bald-headed bastard staggered. I know his glasses fell
off and Pink Waldo caught them. He said something about a moment of
vertigo, and made a quick job of sick call. Casey stayed right behind him
and kicked his stern post every step he took.

    Mary favored Curly Waldo’s side that day without any help from
Casey.

      After that Mama Death really got ugly. She slobbered loving care all
over us to keep us from knowing what we was there for. We got baths and
back rubs we didn’t want. Quiet hour had to start on the dot and be really
quiet. She was always reading Mary off in whispers, like she knew it
bothered us.

     Casey followed her around aping her duck waddle and poking her
behind now and again. We laughed and she thought it was at her and I
guess it was. So she got Uncle Death to order the routine temperatures
taken rectally, which she knew we hated. We stopped laughing and she
knocked off the rectal temperatures. It was a kind of unspoken agreement.
Casey give her a worse time than ever, but we saved our laughing till she
was gone.

      Poor Slop Chute couldn’t do anything about his big, lopsided grin that
was louder than a belly laugh. Mama give him a real bad time. She arthured
the hell out of him.

      He was coming along first rate, had another hemorrhage, and they
started taking him to the clinic on a go-to-Jesus cart instead of in a chair. He
was supposed to use ducks and a bedpan instead of going to the head, but
he saved it up and after lights out we used to help him walk to the head.
That made his reflection in the chart wrong and got him in deeper with
Uncle Death.

      I talked to him a lot, mostly about Connie. He said he dreamed about
her pretty often now.

      “I figure it means I’m near ready for the deep six, Charley.”

      “Figure you’ll see Connie then?”

      “No. Just hope I won’t have to go on thinking about her then. I want it
to be all night in and no reveille.”

      “Yeah,” I said, “me too. What ever become of Connie?”

    “I heard she ate poison right after the Reds took over Shanghai. I
wonder if she ever dreamed about me?”

     “I bet she did, Slop Chute,” I said. “She likely used to wake up
screaming and she ate the poison just to get rid of you.”

      He put on his big grin.

      “You regret something too, Charley. You find it yet?”

       “Well, maybe,” I said. “Once on a stormy night at sea on the Black
Hawk I had a chance to push King Brody over the side. I’m sorry now I
didn’t.”

      “Just come to you?”

       “Hell, no, it come to me three days later when he give me a week’s
restriction in Tsingtao. I been sorry ever since.”

      “No. It’ll smell you out, Charley. You wait.”

      Casey was shadow boxing down the middle of the ward as I shuffled
back to my bunk.

                                      ****

It must’ve been spring because the days were longer. One night, right after
the nurse come through, Casey and Carnahan and me helped Slop Chute
walk to the head. While he was there he had another hemorrhage.

     Carnahan started for help but Casey got in the way and motioned him
back and we knew Slop Chute didn’t want it.

      We pulled Slop Chute’s pajama top off and steadied him. He went on
his knees in front of the bowl and the soft, bubbling cough went on for a
long time. We kept flushing it. Casey opened the door and went out to keep
away the nurse.

     Finally it pretty well stopped. Slop Chute was too weak to stand. We
cleaned him up and I put my pajama top on him, and we stood him up. If
Casey hadn’t took half the load, we’d’a never got him back to his bunk.

     Godalmighty! I used to carry hundred-kilo sacks of cement like they
was nothing.

     We went back and cleaned up the head. I washed out the pajama top
and draped it on the radiator. I was in a cold sweat and my face burned
when I turned in.

        Across the ward Casey was sitting like a statue beside Slop Chute’s
bunk.

       Next day was Friday, because Pink Waldo made some crack about
fish to Curly Waldo when they formed up for sick call. Mary moved closer to
Curly Waldo and gave Pink Waldo a cold look. That was good.

      Slop Chute looked waxy, and Uncle Death seemed to see it because
a gleam come into his wooden eyes. Both Waldos listened all over Slop
Chute and told Uncle what they heard in their secret language. Uncle
nodded, and Casey thumbed his nose at him.

     No doubt about it, the ways was greased for Slop Chute. Mama Death
come back soon as she could and began to loosen the chocks. She
slobbered arthurs all over Slop Chute and flittered around like women do
when they smell a wedding. Casey give her extra special hell, and we all
laughed right out and she hardly noticed.

      That afternoon two orderly-masks come with a go-to-Jesus cart and
wanted to take Slop Chute to X-ray. Casey climbed on the cart and scowled
at them.

        Slop Chute told ‘em shove off, he wasn’t going.
     They got Mary and she told Slop Chute please go, it was doctor’s
orders.

     Sorry, no, he said.

     “Please, for me, Slop Chute,” she begged.

     She knows our right names—that’s one reason we love her. But Slop
Chute shook his head, and his big jaw bone stuck out.

    Mary—she had to then—called Mama Death. Mama waddled in, and
Casey spit in her mask.

      “Now, arthur, what is this, arthur, you know we want to help you get
well and go home, arthur,” she arthured at Slop Chute. “Be a good boy now,
arthur, and go along to the clinic.”

     She motioned the orderlies to pick him up anyway. Casey hit one in
the mask and Slop Chute growled, “Sheer off, you bastards!”

     The orderlies hesitated.

      Mama’s little eyes squinted and she wiggled her hands at them. “Let’s
not be naughty, arthur. Doctor knows best, arthur.”

      The orderlies looked at Slop Chute and at each other. Casey
wrapped his arms around Mama Death and began chewing on her neck. He
seemed to mix right into her, someway, and she broke and run out of the
ward.

      She came right back, though, trailing Uncle Death. Casey met him at
the door and beat hell out of him all the way to Slop Chute’s bunk. Mama
sent Mary for the chart, and Uncle Death studied Slop Chute’s reflection for
a minute. He looked pale and swayed a little from Casey’s beating.

     He turned toward Slop Chute and breathed in deep and Casey was
on him again. Casey wrapped his arms and legs around him and chewed at
his mask with those big yellow teeth. Casey’s hair bristled and his eyes
were red as the flames of hell.

      Uncle Death staggered back across the ward and fetched up against
Carnahan’s bunk. The other masks were scared spitless, looking all around,
kind of knowing.
      Casey pulled away, and Uncle Death said maybe he was wrong,
schedule it for tomorrow. All the masks left in a hurry except Mary. She went
back to Slop Chute and took his hand.

      “I’m sorry, Slop Chute,” she whispered.

     “Bless you, Connie,” he said, and grinned. It was the last thing I ever
heard him say.

                                     ****

Slop Chute went to sleep, and Casey sat beside his bunk. He motioned me
off when I wanted to help Slop Chute to the head after lights out. I turned in
and went to sleep.

      I don’t know what woke me. Casey was moving around fidgety-like,
but of course not making a sound. I could hear the others stirring and
whispering in the dark too.

     Then I heard a muffled noise—the bubbling cough again, and spitting.
Slop Chute was having another hemorrhage and he had his head under the
blankets to hide the sound. Carnahan started to get up. Casey waved him
down.

      I saw a deeper shadow high in the dark over Slop Chute’s bunk. It
came down ever so gently and Casey would push it back up again. The
muffled coughing went on.

      Casey had a harder time pushing back the shadow. Finally he climbed
on the bunk straddle of Slop Chute and kept a steady push against it.

      The blackness came down anyway, little by little. Casey strained and
shifted his footing. I could hear him grunt and hear his joints crack.

      I was breathing forced draft with my heart like to pull off its bed bolts.
I heard other bedsprings creaking. Somebody across from me whimpered
low, but it was sure never Slop Chute that done it.

      Casey went to his knees, his hands forced almost level with his head.
He swung his head back and forth and I saw his lips curled back from the
big teeth clenched tight together… Then he had the blackness on his
shoulders like the weight of the whole world.
      Casey went down on hands and knees with his back arched like a
bridge. Almost I thought I heard him grunt… and he gained a little.

      Then the blackness settled heavier, and I heard Casey’s tendons pull
out and his bones snap. Casey and Slop Chute disappeared under the
blackness, and it overflowed from there over the whole bed… and more…
and it seemed to fill the whole ward.

      It wasn’t like going to sleep, but I don’t know anything it was like.

      The masks must’ve towed off Slop Chute’s hulk in the night, because
it was gone when I woke up.

      So was Casey.

     Casey didn’t show up for sick call and I knew then how much he
meant to me. With him around to fight back I didn’t feel as dead as they
wanted me to. Without him I felt deader than ever. I even almost liked
Mama Death when she charlesed me.

     Mary came on duty that morning with a diamond on her third finger
and a brighter sparkle in her eye. It was a little diamond, but it was Curly
Waldo’s and it kind of made up for Slop Chute.

      I wished Casey was there to see it. He would’ve danced all around
her and kissed her nice, the way he often did. Casey loved Mary.

      It was Saturday, I know, because Mama Death come in and told some
of us we could be wheeled to a special church hooraw before breakfast
next morning if we wanted. We said no thanks. But it was a hell of a
Saturday without Casey. Sharkey Brown said it for all of us—“With Casey
gone, this place is like a morgue again.”

      Not even Carnahan could call him up.

      “Sometimes I think I feel him stir, and then again I ain’t sure,” he said.
“It beats hell where he’s went to.”

     Going to sleep that night was as much like dying as it could be for
men already dead.

                                      ****

Music from far off woke me up when it was just getting light. I was going to
try to cork off again, when I saw Carnahan was awake.

     “Casey’s around somewhere,” he whispered.

     “Where?” I asked, looking around. “I don’t see him.”

     “I feel him,” Carnahan said. “He’s around.”

      The others began to wake up and look around. It was like the night
Casey and Slop Chute went under. Then some-thing moved in the
solarium…

     It was Casey.

      He come in the ward slow and bashful-like, jerking his head all around,
with his eyes open wide, and looking scared we was going to throw
something at him. He stopped in the middle of the ward.

     “Yea, Casey!” Carnahan said in a low, clear voice.

     Casey looked at him sharp.

     “Yea, Casey!” we all said. “Come aboard, you hairy old bastard!”

      Casey shook hands with himself over his head and went into his
dance. He grinned… and I swear to God it was Slop Chute’s big, lopsided
grin he had on.

     For the first time in my whole damn life I wanted to cry.

                                   ****