The Gallery - Rog Phillips

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Gallery by RAJ. Phillips. Aunt Matilda needed him desperately,
but when he arrived, she did not want him, and
neither did anyone else in his hometown. I was in
the midst of the fourth draft of my doctorate thesis
when Aunt Matilda's telegram came. It could not have come

(00:23):
at a worse time. The deadline for my thesis was
four days away, and there was a minimum of five
days of hard work to do on it. Yet I
was working around the clock. If it had been a
telegram informing me of her death, I could not have
taken time out to attend the funeral. If it had
been a telegram saying she was at death's door, I'm
very much afraid I would have had to call the

(00:45):
hospital and order them to keep her alive a few
days longer. Instead, it was a tersely worded appeal, Arthur,
stop come at once. Stop am in terrible trouble. Stop,
do not phone stop aunt Matilda. So there was nothing

(01:06):
else for me to do. I laid the telegram aside
and kept one working on my thesis. That is not
as heartless as it might seem. I simply could not
imagine Aunt Matilda in terrible trouble. The end of the
world I could imagine, but not Aunt Matilda in trouble.
She was the classic flat chested, ageless spinster, living alone

(01:27):
in the midst of her dustless bric a brac and
spode in a frame house of the same vintage as herself,
at the edge of the classic small town of Sumac,
near the southwest corner of Wisconsin. I had visited her
for two days over a year ago, and she looked
exactly the same as she had when I stayed with
her when I was six all summer. There was no question,

(01:51):
but she would someday attend my funeral when I died
of old age, and she would still look the same
as always. There was no conceald trouble of terrestrial origin
that could touch her or would want to. As it
turned out, I was right in that respect. I was
right in another respect too. By finishing my thesis, I

(02:12):
became a PhD on schedule. And if I had abandoned
all that and rushed to Sumac the moment I received
a telegram, it could not have materially altered the outcome
of things. And Aunt Matilda hanging on the wall of
my study knitting things for the Red Cross will attest
to that. You, of course might argue about her being there.

(02:35):
You might even insist that I am hanging on her
wall instead, and I would have to agree with you,
since it all depends on the point of view. And
as I sit here typing, I can look up and
see myself hanging on her wall. But perhaps I had
better begin at the beginning. When with my thesis behind me,
I arrived on the four to fifteen Milk Run, as

(02:57):
they call the train that stops on its way past Sumac,
I was in a very disturbed state of mind, as
anyone who ever turned in a doctor a thesis can
well imagine. For the life of me, I couldn't be
sure whether I had used symbol or token on line seven,
sheet twenty three of my thesis, and it was a
bad habit of mine to unconsciously interchange them unpredictably. And

(03:19):
I knew that doctor Walters could very well vote against
acceptance of my thesis on that ground alone. Also, I
had thought of a much better opening sentence to my thesis,
and was having to use will power to keep from
rushing back to the university to ask permission to change it.
I had practically no sleep during the fourteen hour run,

(03:40):
and what sleep I did have had been interrupted by
violent starts of awaking with a conviction that this or
that error in the initial draft of my thesis had
not been corrected by the final draft. And then, of
course I would have to think the thing through and
recall when I had made the correction before before I

(04:00):
could go back to sleep. So I was a wreck mentally,
if not physically, when I stepped off the train onto
the wooden depot platform that had certainly been built in
the Pleistiocene era, with my ox blood two suitor firmly
clutched in my left hand. With snorts of steam and
the loud clanking of loose drives, the train got underway,

(04:23):
its whistle wailing mournfully as the last empty coach car
sped past me and retreated into the distance. As I
stood there, my brain tingling with weariness, and listened to
the absolute silence of the town triumph over the last
distant wail of the train whistle, I became aware that

(04:43):
something about Sumac was different. What it was I didn't know.
I stood where I was a moment longer, trying to
analyze it in some indefinable way. Everything looked unreal. That
was as close as I could come to it, and
of course, having pinned it down that far, I at

(05:05):
once dismissed it as a trick of the mind produced
by tiredness. I began walking. The blanks of the platform
were certainly real enough. I circled the depot without going in,
and started walking in the direction of Ant Matilda's, which
was only a short eight blocks from the depot. As
I had known since I was six, the feeling of

(05:28):
the unreality of my surroundings persisted, and with it came
another feeling of an invisible pressure against me, almost a resentment,
not only from the people, but from the houses and
even the trees. Slowly I began to realize that it
couldn't be entirely my imagination. Most of the dozen or

(05:51):
so people I passed knew me, and I remembered suddenly
that every other time I had come to Ant Matilda's
they had stopped to talk to me and had had
to make some excuse to escape them. Now they were
behaving differently. They would look at me absently, as they
might at any stranger. Walking from the direction of the depot.
Then their eyes would light up with recognition, and they

(06:13):
would open their lips to greet me with hearty welcome. Then,
as though they just thought of something, they would change
and they would just say hello, Arthur and continue on
past me. It didn't take me long to conclude that
this strange behavior was probably caused by something in connection
with Aunt Matilda. Had she perhaps been named as correspondent

(06:37):
in the divorce of the local minister, Had she, of
all people, had a child out of wedlock. Things in
a small town can be deadly serious. So by the
time her familiar frame house came into view down the street,
I was ready to keep a straight face no matter what,
and reserve my chuckles for the privacy of her guest room.
It would be a new experience to find Aunt Matilda

(07:00):
guilty of any human frailty. It was slightly impossible, but
I had prepared myself for it, and that first day
her behavior convinced me I was right in my conclusion.
She appeared in the doorway as I came up the
front walk. She was breathing hard and as though she
had been running, and there was a dust streak on

(07:20):
the side of her thin face. Hello, Arthur, she said.
When I came up on the porch, she shook my
hand as limply as always and gave me a reluctant
duty peck on the cheek, and then backed into the
house to give me room to anterer. I glanced around
the familiar surroundings, waiting for her to blurt out the
cause of her telegram, and feeling a little guilty about

(07:43):
not having come. At once. I felt the loneliness inside
her more than I ever had before. There was a
terror way back in her eyes. You look tired, Arthur,
she said, yes, I said, glad of the opportunity she
had given me to explain. I had to finish my
thesis and I had to get it in by last night.

(08:04):
Two solid years of hard work and it had to
be done or the whole thing was for nothing. That's
why I couldn't come four days ago. And you seemed
quite insistent that I shouldn't call. I smiled to let
her know that I remembered about party lines in a
small town. It's just as well, she said, And while
I was trying to decide what the antecedent of her

(08:24):
remark was, she said, you can go back on the
morning train. You mean the trouble is over, I said, relieved. Yes,
she said, but she had hesitated. It was the first
time I had ever seen her tell a lie. You
must be hungry, she rushed on, put your suit case
in the kitchen wash up. She turned her back to

(08:46):
me and hurried into the kitchen. I was hungry the
memory of her homey cooking, did it. I glanced around
the front room. Nothing had changed, I thought. Then I
noticed the framed portrait of my father and his three
brothers was hanging where the large print of a basket
of fruit used to hang. The basket of fruit picture
was where the portrait should have been, and it was

(09:08):
entirely too big a picture for that spot. I would
never have thought Aunt Matilda could tolerate anything out of proportion,
and the darker area of the wallpaper where the fruit
picture had prevented fading, stood out like a sore thumb.
I looked around the room for other changes. The boat
picture that had hung to the right of the front

(09:28):
door was not there, on the floor under where it
should have been. I caught the flash of light from
a shard of glass next to it. The drape framing
of the window was not hanging right on impulse, I
went over and peaked behind the drape. There, leaning against
the wall was the boat picture, with fragments of splintered
glass still in it. From the evidence, it appeared that

(09:50):
Aunt Matilda had either been trying to hang the picture
where it belonged or taking it down, and it had
slipped out of her hands and fallen, and she had
hidden it behind the and hastily swept up the broken glass.
But why, even granting that Aunt Matilda might behave in
such an erratic fashion, which was obvious from the evidence,

(10:12):
I couldn't imagine a sensible reason. It occurred to me
faciously that she might have gone in for pictures of musclemen,
and seeing me coming up the street, she had rushed
them into hiding and brought out the old pictures. That
could account for the evidence. Except for one thing I
hadn't dallied. She could not possibly have seen me earlier

(10:33):
than sixty seconds before I came up the front walk. Still,
the telegrapher at the depot could have called her and
told her I was here when he saw me get
off the train. I shrugged the matter off and went
to the guest room. It too, was the same as always,
except for one thing, a picture. It was a color
photograph of the church taken from the street. The picture

(10:55):
was in a frame, but without glass hanging over it,
and was about eight inches wide and thirty high. It
was a very good picture, very very lifelike. There was
a car parked at the curb in front of the church,
and someone inside the car smoking a cigarette, and it
was so real I would have sworn I could see
the streamer of smoke rising from the cigarette moving. The

(11:21):
odor of good food came from the kitchen, reminding me
to get busy. I opened my two suitor and took
out my toilet kit and went to the bathroom. I shaved,
brushed my teeth, comb my hair. Afterwards, I popped into
my room just for a second to put my toilet
kit on the dresser, and hurried to the dining room.
Something nagged at the back of my mind all the
time I was eating. After dinner, Aunt Matilda suggested I'd

(11:45):
better get some sleep. I couldn't argue. I was already
asleep on my feet. Her fried chicken and creamed gravy
and mashed potatoes had been in opiate. I didn't even
bother to hang up my clothes. I slipped into the
heaven of comfort of the bed and closed my eyes,
and the next minute it was morning. Getting out of bed,
I stopped in mid motion. The picture of the church

(12:06):
was no longer on the wall, and as I stared
at the blank spot where it had been, the thing
that nagged me during dinner last night finally leaped into consciousness.
When I had dashed into the room and out again
last night, on the way to the dining room, I
had glanced briefly at the picture and something had been
different about it. Now I knew what had been different.

(12:27):
The car had no longer been in front of the church.
I lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of
the bed. I thought about that picture and simply could
not bring myself to believe the accuracy of that fleeting impression.
Aunt Matilda had slipped into my room and removed the
picture while I was slept. That was obvious. Why had

(12:49):
she done that? The fleeting impression that I couldn't be
positive about would give her a sensible reason. I studied
my memory of that picture as I had closely studied it.
It had been a remarkable picture. The more I recalled
its details, the more remarkable it became. I couldn't remember
any surface gloss or graining to it. But of course

(13:13):
I had not been looking for such things. Only an
expert photographer would notice or recognize such technical details. My
thoughts turned in the direction of Aunt Matilda and her telegram.
Her source of income, I knew was her part of
the estate of my grandfather, and amounted to something like
thirty thousand dollars. I knew that she was terrified of

(13:34):
touching one cent of the capital, and lived well within
the income from good sound stocks. I took her telegram
out of the pocket of my coat, which was hanging
over the back of a chair. Come at once, stop,
am in terrible trouble. The only kind of terrible trouble
Matilda could be in was if some swindler talked her

(13:55):
out of some of her capital, and that definitely would
not be easy to do. I grinned to myself at
the recollection of her worrying herself sick over what would
happen to her if there was a revolution and the
new government refused to honor the old government bonds. Things
began to make sense her telegram, then those pictures moved

(14:16):
around in the front room, and the one she had
forgotten to hide in the guest room. If the other
pictures were anything like it, I could see how Aunt
Matilda might cash in on part of her securities to
invest in what she thought was a sure thing. But
sure things are only as good as the people in
control of them. Many a sure thing has been lost

(14:38):
to the original investors by stupid decisions leading to bankruptcy,
and many a seemingly sure thing has fleeced a lot
of innocent victims. Slowly, as I thought it out, I
became sure that that was what had happened. Then why
Aunt Matilda's about face, hiding the pictures and telling me
to go back to Chicago. She threatened whoever was behind

(15:01):
this and gotten her money back, or had she become
convinced that her financial venture was sound. In either case,
why was she trying to keep me from knowing about
the pictures? I made up my mind, whether Aunt Matilda
liked it or not, I was going to stay until
I got to the bottom of things. What Aunt Matilda

(15:22):
evidently didn't realize was that no inventor who really had
something would waste time trying to find backing in a
place like Sumac. Getting dressed, I decided the first on
the agenda. That first on the agenda would be to
find where Aunt Matilda had hidden those pictures and to
get a good look at them. That was simpler than
I expected it to be. When I came out of

(15:43):
my room, I stuck my head in the kitchen doorway
and said good morning to her, and she leaped to
her feet to get some breakfast ready for me. It
was obvious that she was anxious to get me fed
and out of the house. Then I simply took the
two steps past the bathroom door to the door to
her bedroom and went in. The pictures were stacked against
the side of her dresser. Though one of the church

(16:05):
was the first one. It was on its side with
a silent whistle of amazement. I bent down to watch it.
The car was not parked at the curb in it,
but there were several children walking along, obviously on their
way to school, and they were walking moving. I picked

(16:28):
up the picture. It was as heavy as it should be,
but not more. A faint whisper of sound seemed to
come from it. I put my ear closer and heard
the children's voices. I explored with my ear close to
the surface, and found that the voices were loudest when
my ear was closest to the one talking, as though

(16:48):
the voices came out of the picture directly from the images.
All it needed to be perfect was a volume control somewhere.
I searched and found it behind the upper right corner
of the picture. I twisted it very slowly, and the
voices became louder. I turned it back to the position
it had been in the next picture was of the

(17:09):
railroad depot. The telegrapher and baggage clerk were going around
the side of the depot towards the tracks. A freight
train was rushing through the picture. Even as I watched
it in the picture, I heard the wail of a
train whistle in the distance, and it was coming from
outside across town. That freight train was going through town

(17:32):
right now. I put the pictures back the way they
had been and stole softly from Aunt Matilda's bedroom to
the bathroom and closed the door. No wonder Aunt Matilda
invested in this thing, I said to my image in
the mirror as I shaved picture. TV would make all
other TV receivers obsolete. Color TV at that and some

(17:54):
new principal and stereophonic sound. What about the fact that
neither picture had been plugged into an outlet probably run
by batteries. What about the lack of weight? Obviously a
new TV principle was involved. Maybe it required fewer circuits
and less power. What about the broadcasting and the cameras

(18:17):
permanently set up? What about the broadcast channels? There had
been ten or twelve pictures I had only looked at two,
was each a different scene? Twelve different broadcasting stations in Sumac.
It had me dizzy. Probably the new TV principle was
so simple that all that could be taken care of

(18:38):
without millions of dollars worth of equipment. A new respect
for Aunt Matilda grew in me. She had latched onto
a moneymaker. It didn't hurt to know that I was
her favorite nephew either. With my PhD in physics and
my aunt as one of the stockholders, I could probably
land a good job with the company. What a deal.

(18:58):
By the time I finished shaving, I was whistling. I
was still whistling when I went into the kitchen for breakfast.
You'll have to hurry, Arthur, Aunt Matilda said, your train
leaves in forty five minutes. I'm not leaving, I said, cheerfully.
I went over to the bright breakfast nook and sat
down and took a cautious sip of coffee. I grunted

(19:19):
my approval of it and looked around toward Aunt Matilda's smiling.
She was staring at me with wide eyes. She looked
as haggard, as though she had just heard she had
a week to live. But you must go, she croaked,
as though not going were unthinkable. Nonsense, you old fox,

(19:39):
I said, I know a good thing as well as
you do. I want to get a job with that outfit.
She came toward me with a wild expression on her face.
Get out, she screamed, Get out of my house. I
won't have it. You catch that train and get out
of town, do you hear? But Aunt Matilda, I protested.

(20:00):
In the end, I had to get out or she
would have had a stroke. She was shaking like a leaf,
her skin modeled, her eyes wild. As I went down
the front steps with my bag. You get that train,
do you hear? Was the last thing she screamed at
me as I hurried toward main street. However, I had
no intention of leaving town with Aunt Matilda upset. That way,

(20:23):
I'd let her have time to cool off and then
come back. Meanwhile, I'd try to get to the bottom
of things. A thing as big as wall TV in
full color and stereophonic sound must be the talk of
the town. I'd find out where they had their office
and go talk to them. A career was something like
that would be the best thing I could ever hope
to find, and getting in on the ground floor. It

(20:46):
surprised me that Aunt Matilda could be so insanely greedy.
I shook my head in wonder. It didn't figure. I
had breakfast at the hotel cafe and made a point
of telling the waitress, who knew me, that it was
my second breakfast and that I had intended to catch
the morning train back to Chicago, but maybe I wouldn't.
After I finished eating, I asked if it would be

(21:08):
okay to leave my suitcase behind the counter While I
looked around a bit, She showed me where to put
it so it would be out of the way. When
I paid for my breakfast, I half turned away and
then turned back casually. Oh, by the way, I said,
where's this wall TV place. This what she said, you know,

(21:31):
I said, color TV like a picture you hang on
the wall. All the color faded from her face. Her
eyes went past me, staring. I turned in the direction
she was staring, and on the wall, above the plate
glass front of the cafe was a picture. That is,
there was a picture frame and a pair of dark

(21:53):
glasses that took up most of the picture, with the
lower part of a forehead and the upper part of
a nose. I had noticed it once while I was eating,
and had assumed it was a display ad for sunglasses.
Now I looked at it more closely, but could not
detect movement in it. It still looked like an ad

(22:13):
for sunglasses. I don't know what you're talking about, I
heard the waitress say, her voice edged with fear. Huh,
I said, turning my head back to look at her. Oh, well,
never mind. I left the cafe with every outward appearance
of casual innocence, but inside I was beginning to realize

(22:34):
for the first time the possibilities and the danger that
could lie in the use of this new TV development
that had been a big brother is watching you set
up back there in the cafe, except that it had
been a girl instead of a man, judging from the
style of the sunglasses and the smoothness of the nose
and the forehead. I had wandered about the broadcasting end

(22:55):
of things. Now I knew that had been the t
V I. And somewhere there was a framed picture hanging
on the wall, bringing in everything that took place in
the cafe, including everything that was said, everything I had
said too. It was an ominous feeling. Aunt Matilda almost

(23:15):
had a stroke trying to get me out of town.
Now I knew why she was caught in this thing
and wanted to save me. Four days ago she had
probably not fully realize the potentiality for evil of the invention,
but by the time I showed up she knew it well.
She was right, this was not something for me to tackle.

(23:36):
I would keep up my appearance of not suspecting anything
and catch that train Aunt Matilda wanted me to catch.
From way out in the country, came the whistle of
the approaching Milk Run, the train that would take me
back to Chicago. In Chicago, I would go to the FBI,
and I would tell them the whole thing. They wouldn't
believe me, of course, but they would investigate. If the
thing hadn't spread any further than Sumac, it would be

(23:59):
a simple matter to see. I'd hurry back to the
cafe and get my suitcase and tell the waitress I
had decided to catch the train after all. I turned around,
Only I didn't turn around. That's as nearly as I
could describe it. I did turn around, I know I did.
But the town turned around with me and the sun

(24:23):
and the clouds and the countryside, So maybe I only
thought I turned around. When I tried to stop walking,
it was different. I simply could not stop walking. Nothing
was in control of my mind. It was more like
stepping on the brakes and the brake's not responding. I

(24:46):
gave up trying, More curious about what was happening than alarmed.
I walked two blocks along Main Street. Ahead of me,
I saw a sign. It was the only new sign
I had seen in Sumac, in ornate neon script, and
it said portraits by Lana. I don't know whether my
feet took me inside independently of my mind or not,

(25:09):
because I was sure that this was the place, and
I wanted to go anyway. Not much had been done
to modernize the interior of the shop, I remembered the
last time I had been here, it had been a
stamp collector headquarters run by mister Mason and his wife.
The counter was still there, but instead of stamp displays,
it held a variety of standard portraits, such as you

(25:31):
can see in any portrait studio. None of the TV
portraits were on display here. The same bell that used
to tinkle when I came into the stamp store tinkled
in back of the partition when I came in a
moment later, the curtain in the doorway of the partition
parted and a girl came out. How can I describe her?
In appearance? She was any one of a thousand smartly

(25:54):
dressed brunettes that wait on you in quality photograph studios,
And yet she wasn't. She was as much above that
in cut as in the average smartly dressed girl is
above a female alcoholic after a ten day drunk. She
was perfect, too perfect. She was a type of girl

(26:14):
a man would dream of meeting some day, but if
he ever did, he would run like hell, because it
never hoped to live up to any such perfection. You
have come to have your portrait taken she asked, I
am Lana. I thought you already had my portrait, I said,
didn't you get it from that eye in the hotel cafe.

(26:37):
It's not the same thing, Lana said, through an eye.
You remain a variable in the mantram complex. It takes
the camera to fix you so that you are an
iconic and variant in the mantram. She smiled and half
turned toward the curtain she had come through. Would you
step this way please, she invited. How much will it cost?

(26:59):
I said, not moving? Nothing, of course, she said, Terrestrial
money is of no use to me, since you have
nothing I would care to buy. And don't be alarmed.
No harm will come to you or anyone else. A
fleeting expression of concern came over her face. I realized
that many of the people of Sumac are quite alarmed,

(27:19):
but that is to be expected of people uneducated enough
to still be superstitious. I went past her through the curtain.
Behind the partition I expected to see out of this
world scientific equipment stacked to the ceiling. Instead, there was
only a portrait camera on a tripod. It had a
long bellows and would take a plate the same size

(27:41):
as that picture of the church. I had seen you see,
Lana said, it's just a camera. She smiled disarmingly. I
went toward it casually, and suddenly I stopped, as though
another mind controlled my actions. When I gave up the
idea I had had of a smash, of smashing the camera,

(28:02):
the control vanished. There was no lens in the lens frame.
Where's the lens? I said, It doesn't use a glass lens,
Lana said, When I take the picture, a lens forms
just long enough to focus the elements of your body
into a man tram fix. She touched my shoulder. Would
you sit down over there please? What do you mean

(28:24):
a man tram fix? I asked her. She paused by
the camera and smiled at me. I use your language,
she said. In some of your legends, you have the
notion of a man tram or what you consider magical spell.
In one aspect, the notion is of magical words that
can manipulate natural forces directly. The notion of a devil

(28:46):
doll is a little closer. Only, instead of actual substance
from the subject hair, fingernail, and so on, the mantram
matrix takes the detailed force pattern of the subject through
the lens when it forms, so in your concepts, what
results is an iconic man tram, but it operates both ways.

(29:11):
You'll see what I mean by that. With another placating smile,
she stepped behind the camera and without warning, light seemed
to explode from the very air around me, without any source.
For a brief second, I seemed to see not a
glittering lens, but a black, bottomless hole form in the
metal circle at the front of the camera, and an

(29:33):
experience I am familiar with now. It seemed to rush
into the bottomless darkness of that hole and back again,
at the rate of thousands of times a second, arriving
at some formless destination, and each time feeling it take
on more of form there. That wasn't so bad, was it,
Lanta said. I felt strangely detached, as though I were

(29:56):
in two places at the same time, And I told her, so,
you'll get used to it, she assured me. In fact,
you'll get to enjoy it. I do, especially when I've
made several prints. Why are you doing this, I asked,
who are you? What are you? I'm a photographer, Lenna said,

(30:17):
I'm connected with the Natural History Museum of the Planet.
I live on. I go to various places and take pictures,
and they go into exhibits for the people to watch.
She pulled the curtain aside for me to leave. You're
going to let me leave just like that, I said,
of course, She smiled again. You're free to go wherever

(30:38):
you wish, to your aunts or back to Chicago. I
was glad to get your portrait. In return, I'll send
you one of the prints, and would you like one
of your aunts? Actually, when she came in to have
her picture taken, it was for the purpose of sending
it to you. She was my first customer. I've taken
a special liking to her and given her several pictures. Yes,

(31:03):
I said, I would like one of Aunt Matilda. When
I emerged from the shop, I discovered, to my surprise
that the train was just pulling into the depot and
urged to get far away from Sumac possessed me. I
trotted to the cafe to get my bag, and when
the train pulled out, I was on it. There's little
more to tell. In Chicago, once again, I spent a

(31:23):
most exasperating two days trying to inform the FBI, the police,
or anyone who would listen to me. My fingers couldn't
dial the correct phone number, and at the crucial moment,
each time I grew tongue tied. My last attempt was
a letter to the FBI, which I couldn't remember to mail,
and when I finally did remember, I couldn't find it.

(31:45):
Then the express package from Sumac came. With fingers that
visibly trembled. I took out the two framed pictures, one
of Aunt Matilda in the process of dusting the front room.
All of her pictures that she had hidden from me
were back in their places on the wall. While I
watched her move about. She went into the sewing room,
and there I saw a picture on the wall that

(32:06):
looked familiar. It was of me, an opened express package
at my feet, a framed picture held in my hands,
and I was staring at it intently. In the picture
I was holding, Aunt Matilda looked in my direction and waved,
smiling in the prim way she smiles when she is contented.

(32:27):
I understood she had me with her. Now. I laid
the picture down carefully and took the second one out
of the box. It was not a picture at all,
It was a mirror. It couldn't be anything except a mirror,
And yet suddenly I realized it wasn't. The uncanny feeling

(32:49):
came over me that I had transposed into the mirror
and was looking out at myself. Even as I got
that feeling, I shifted and was outside the mirror looking
at my image. I found that I could be in
either place by a sort of mental shift, something like
staring at one of the geometrical optical illusions you can

(33:11):
find in any psychology textbook in the chapter on illusions
and seeing it becomes something else. It was strange at first,
then it became fun, and now as I write this,
it is a normal thing. My portrait is where it
should be, on the medicine cabinet, in the bathroom where
the mirror used to be. But I can transpose to

(33:32):
any of the copies of my portrait anywhere, to a
Matilda's sewing room, or to the museum, or to Lana's
private collection. The only thing is it's almost impossible to
tell when I shift or where I shift to. It
just seems to happen. The reason for that is that
my surroundings, no matter in what direction I look, are

(33:53):
exactly identical with my real surroundings. My physical surroundings are
duplicated exactly in all of my portraits, just as Aunt
Matilda's are in the portrait of her that hangs on
my study wall. She is the invariant of each of
her iconic man trams, and her surroundings are the variables
that enter and leave the screen. I am the invariant

(34:16):
in my own portraits, wherever they are. So except for
the slight twist in my mind that takes place when
I shift, that I have learned to recognize from practice
in front of my mirror each morning when I shave,
and except for the portrait of Aunt Matilda, I would
never be able to suspect what happens. If Lena had

(34:37):
taken my picture without my knowing it, and I had
never seen one of her collection of portraits, nor even
heard of an iconic man Tram, I would have absolutely
nothing to go on to suspect the truth that I know,
except for one thing. I don't quite know how to
explain it, except that I must actually transfer to one

(34:59):
of my portraits, and transferring I am more real than
what shall I call it? The photographic reproduction of my
real surroundings. Then sometimes the photographic reproduction. The iconic illusion
that is my environment when I am in one of
my portraits on me fades just enough so that I

(35:20):
can look out into the reality where my portrait hangs
and see and even hear the watchers as ghosts in
my solid reality. Quite often I can only hear them,
and then they are voices out of nowhere, sometimes addressing
me directly, just as often talking to one another and

(35:40):
ignoring my presence. But when I can see them too,
they appear as ghostly but sharp, clear visions that seem
to be present in my solid looking environment there but
somewhat transparent. I have often seen and talked to Lana
in this manner in her far off world where I
am part of her private collection. In fact, I can

(36:02):
almost always tell when I shift to my portrait in
her gallery, because I am suddenly exhilarated and remain so
until I shift back or to some other portrait. This
is so even when she is not there but out
on one of her many photographic expeditions. When she is

(36:22):
there and she is watching me and my thoughts are
quiet and my mind receptive, she becomes visible, a ghost
in my study or the lab where I work or
if I am asleep in my dreams like an angel
or a goddess, and we talk back in the physical reality,
of course, no one else can hear her voice. My

(36:45):
real body is going through its routine work almost automatically,
but my mind, my consciousness, is focused into my portrait
in Lana's gallery and we are talking. And of course
in the real world, I am talking too, but my
associates can't see who I'm talking to, and it would
be useless to try to explain to them. So I'm

(37:05):
getting quite a reputation as a nut. You can imagine that,
But why should I mind? My reality has a much
broader and more complex scope than the limited reality of
my associates. I might be fired or even sent to
a state hospital, except for the fact that Lana foresees
such problems and teaches me enough things in my field
that are unknown to Earth so that my employers consider

(37:28):
me too valuable to lose. If this story or fiction,
the ending would have to be that I am in
love with Lana and she with me, and there would
be a nice, conclusive ending where she comes back to
Earth to marry me and carry me back to her world,
where we would live happily ever after. But the truth
of the matter is that I'm not in love with Lana,

(37:48):
nor is she with me. Sometimes I think I am
her favorite portrait, but nothing more. But really everything is
so interesting Lana's gallery where I hang, the museum, where
there are new faces each time I look out, and
new voices when I can't see out, Aunt Matilda's sewing
room where she is at the moment, and all sumac

(38:08):
as she goes about her normal pattern of living. It
is a rich, full life that I live, shifting here
and there in consciousness, while my physical body goes about
its necessary tasks as often unguided as not what a
reputation I'm getting for absent mindedness too. And out of
it all has come a perspective that, when I feel

(38:29):
it strongly, makes me feel almost like a god. In
that perspective, all my portraits, and there are many now,
in many worlds and in many places on this world,
blend into one. That one is the stage of my life,
but not a stage, really a show window. Yes, that's it,

(38:50):
a show window where the watchers pass. I live in
a show window that opens out in many worlds and
many places that are hidden from me. By ave that
sometimes grows thin, so I can see through it. And
from the other side of that veil, even when I
cannot see through it, come the voices of the watchers
as they pass by or pause to look at me.

(39:12):
And I am not the only one. There are others,
more and more of them as Lana comes back on
her photographic expeditions for the museum. None that I have
met understand what it is about as fully as I do.
Some have an insight into the true state of things,
but very very few that's understandable. Lana can't give the

(39:34):
same time to them that she gives to me. There
aren't that many hours in a day. And you see,
I am her favorite. If I were not, she would
never have permitted me to tell you all this. So
I must be her favorite. Doesn't that make sense? I
am her favorite. The End of the Gallery by rog

(39:58):
Phillips