| 1 |
It's been ten years since The House on Mango Street was first published. I began writing it in graduate school, the spring of 1977, in Iowa City. I was twenty-two years old. I'm thirty-eight now, far from that time and place, but the questions from readers remain, Are these stories true? Are you Esperanza? When I began The House on Mango Street, I thought I was writing a memoir. By the time I finished it, my memoir was no longer memoir, no longer autobiographical. It had evolved into a collective story peopled with several lives from my past and present, placed in one fictional time and neighborhood — Mango Street. A story is like a Giacometti sculpture. The farther away it is from you, the clearer you can see it. In Iowa City, I was undergoing several changes of identity. For the first time I was living alone, in a community very different in class and culture from the one where I was raised. This caused so much unrest I could barely speak, let alone write about it. The story I was living at twenty-two would have to wait, but I could take the story of an earlier place, an earlier voice, and record that on paper. The voice of Mango Street and all my work was born at one moment, when I realized I was different. This sounds absurd and simple, but until Iowa City, I assumed the world was like Chicago, made up of people of many cultures all living together — albeit not happily at times but still coexisting. In Iowa, I was suddenly aware of feeling odd when I spoke, as if I were a foreigner. But this was my land too. This is not to say I hadn't felt this "otherness" before in Chicago, but I hadn't felt it quite as keenly as I did in graduate school. I couldn't articulate what it was that was happening, except I knew I felt ashamed when I spoke in class, so I chose not to speak. I can say my political consciousness began the moment I recognized my otherness. I was in a graduate seminar on memory and the imagination. The books required were Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory, Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, and Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space. I had enjoyed the first two, but as usual I said nothing, just listened to the dialogue around me, too afraid to speak. The third book, though, left me baffled. I assumed I just didn't get it because I wasn't as smart as everyone else, and if I didn't say anything, maybe no one else would notice. The conversation, I remember, was about the house of memory — the attic, the stairwells, the cellar. Attic? My family lived in third-floor flats for the most part, because noise traveled down. Stairwells reeked of Pine Sol from the Saturday scrubbing. We shared them with the people downstairs; they were public zones no one except us thought to clean. We mopped them all right, but not without resentment for cleaning up some other people's trash. And as for cellars, we had a basement, but who'd want to hide in there? Basements were filled with urban fauna. Everyone was scared to go in there including the meter reader and the landlord. |
| 2 |
What was this guy Bachelard talking about when he mentioned the familiar and comforting house of memory? It was obvious he never had to clean one or pay the landlord rent for one like ours. Then it occurred to me that none of the books in this class or in any of my classes, in all the years of my education, had ever discussed a house like mine. Not in books or magazines or films. My classmates had come from real houses, real neighborhoods, ones they could point to, but what did I know? When I went home that evening and realized my education had been a lie — had made presumptions about what was "normal," what was American, what was valuable — I wanted to quit school right then and there, but I didn't. Instead, I got angry, and anger when it is used to act, when it is used nonviolently, has power. I asked myself what I could write about that my classmates could not. I didn't know what I wanted exactly, but I did have enough sense to know what I didn't want. I didn't want to sound like my classmates; I didn't want to keep imitating the writers I had been reading. Their voices were right for them but not for me. Instead, I searched for the "ugliest" subjects I could find, the most un-"poetic" — slang, monologues in which waitresses or kids talked their own lives. I was trying as best I could to write the kind of book I had never seen in a library or in a school, the kind of book not even my professors could write. Each week I ingested the class readings and then went off and did the opposite. It was a quiet revolution, perhaps a reaction taken to extremes, but it was out of this negative experience that I found something positive: my own voice. The language in Mango Street is based on speech. It's very much an antiacademic voice — a child's voice, a girl's voice, a poor girl's voice, a spoken voice, the voice of an American-Mexican. It's in this rebellious realm of antipoetics that I tried to create a poetic text with the most unofficial language I could find. I did it neither ingenuously nor naturally. It was as clear to me as if I were tossing a Molotov. At one time or another, we all have felt other. When I teach writing, I tell the story of the moment of discovering and naming my otherness. It is not enough simply to sense it; it has to be named, and then written about from there. Once I could name it, I ceased being ashamed and silent. I could speak up and celebrate my otherness as a woman, as a working-class person, as an American of Mexican descent. When I recognized the places where I departed from my neighbors, my classmates, my family, my town, my brothers, when I discovered what I knew that no one else in the room knew, and then spoke it in a voice that was my voice, the voice I used when I was sitting in the kitchen, dressed in my pajamas, talking over a table littered with cups and dishes, when I could give myself permission to speak from that intimate space, then I could talk and sound like myself, not like me trying to sound like someone I wasn't. |
| 3 |
Often they bring a mother, father, sibling, or cousin along to my readings, or I am introduced to someone who says their son or daughter read my book in a class and brought it home for them. And there are the letters from readers of all ages and colors who write to say I have written their story. The raggedy state of my books that some readers and educators hand me to sign is the best compliment of all. These are my affirmations and blessings. Am I Esperanza? Yes. And no. And then again, perhaps maybe. One thing I know for certain, you, the reader, are Esperanza. So I should ask, What happened to you? Did you stay in school? Did you go to college? Did you have that baby? Were you a victim? Did you tell anyone about it or did you keep it inside? Did you let it overpower and eat you? Did you wind up in jail? Did someone harm you? Did you hurt someone? What happened to Margarita, Fat Boy, Gizmo, Angelica, Leticia, Maria, Ruben, Silvia, JosE, Dagoberto, Refugia, Bobby? Will you go back to school, find somebody to take care of the baby while you're finishing your diploma, go to college, work two jobs so you can do it, get help from the substance-abuse people, walk out of a bad marriage, send paychecks to the woman who bore your child, learn to be the human being you are not ashamed of? Did you run away from home? Did you join a gang? Did you get fired? Did you give up? Did you get angry? You are Esperanza. You cannot forget who you are. November 16, 1993 San Antonio de Bexar, Texas The House on Mango Street We didn't always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can't remember. But what I remember most is moving a lot. Each time it seemed there'd be one more of us. By the time we got to Mango Street we were six — Mama, Papa, Carlos, Kiki, my sister Nenny and me. The house on Mango Street is ours, and we don't have to pay rent to anybody, or share the yard with the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise, and there isn't a landlord banging on the ceiling with a broom. But even so, it's not the house we'd thought we'd get. We had to leave the flat on Loomis quick. The water pipes broke and the landlord wouldn't fix them because the house was too old. We had to leave fast. We were using the washroom next door and carrying water over in empty milk gallons. That's why Mama and Papa looked for a house, and that's why we moved into the house on Mango Street, far away, on the other side of town. They always told us that one day we would move into a house, a real house that would be ours for always so we wouldn't have to move each year. And our house would have running water and pipes that worked. And inside it would have real stairs, not hallway stairs, but stairs inside like the houses on TV. And we'd have a basement and at least three washrooms so when we took a bath we wouldn't have to tell everybody. Our house would be white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence. |
| 4 |
And since she comes right after me, she is my responsibility. Someday I will have a best friend all my own. One I can tell my secrets to. One who will understand my jokes without my having to explain them. Until then I am a red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor. My Name In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing. It was my great-grandmother's name and now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse — which is supposed to be bad luck if you're born female — but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don't like their women strong. My great-grandmother. I would've liked to have known her, a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn't marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That's the way he did it. And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window. At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite as thick as sister's name — Magdalena — which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza. I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do. Cathy Queen of Cats She says, I am the great great grand cousin of the queen of France. She lives upstairs, over there, next door to Joe the baby-grabber. Keep away from him, she says. He is full of danger. Benny and Blanca own the corner store. They're okay except don't lean on the candy counter. Two girls raggedy as rats live across the street. You don't want to know them. Edna is the lady who owns the building next to you. She used to own a building big as a whale, but her brother sold it. Their mother said no, no, don't ever sell it. I won't. And then she closed her eyes and he sold it. Alicia is stuck-up ever since she went to college. She used to like me but now she doesn't. Cathy who is queen of cats has cats and cats and cats. Baby cats, big cats, skinny cats, sick cats. Cats asleep like little donuts. Cats on top of the refrigerator. Cats taking a walk on the dinner table. Her house is like cat heaven. You want a friend, she says. Okay, I'll be your friend. But only till next Tuesday. That's when we move away. Got to. Then as if she forgot I just moved in, she says the neighborhood is getting bad. |
| 5 |
Cathy's father will have to fly to France one day and find her great great distant grand cousin on her father's side and inherit the family house. How do I know this is so? She told me so. In the meantime they'll just have to move a little farther north from Mango Street, a little farther away every time people like us keep moving in. Our Good Day If you give me five dollars I will be your friend forever. That's what the little one tells me. Five dollars is cheap since I don't have any friends except Cathy who is only my friend till Tuesday. Five dollars, five dollars. She is trying to get somebody to chip in so they can buy a bicycle from this kid named Tito. They already have ten dollars and all they need is five more. Only five dollars, she says. Don't talk to them, says Cathy. Can't you see they smell like a broom. But I like them. Their clothes are crooked and old. They are wearing shiny Sunday shoes without socks. It makes their bald ankles all red, but I like them. Especially the big one who laughs with all her teeth. I like her even though she lets the little one do all the talking. Five dollars, the little one says, only five. Cathy is tugging my arm and I know whatever I do next will make her mad forever. Wait a minute, I say, and run inside to get the five dollars. I have three dollars saved and I take two of Nenny's. She's not home, but I'm sure she'll be glad when she finds out we own a bike. When I get back, Cathy is gone like I knew she would be, but I don't care. I have two new friends and a bike too. My name is Lucy, the big one says. This here is Rachel my sister. I'm her sister, says Rachel. Who are you? And I wish my name was Cassandra or Alexis or Maritza — anything but Esperanza — but when I tell them my name they don't laugh. We come from Texas, Lucy says and grins. Her was born here, but me I'm Texas. You mean she, I say. No, I'm from Texas, and doesn't get it. This bike is three ways ours, says Rachel who is thinking ahead already. Mine today, Lucy's tomorrow and yours day after. But everybody wants to ride it today because the bike is new, so we decide to take turns after tomorrow. Today it belongs to all of us. I don't tell them about Nenny just yet. It's too complicated. Especially since Rachel almost put out Lucy's eye about who was going to get to ride it first. But finally we agree to ride it together. Why not? Because Lucy has long legs she pedals. I sit on the back seat and Rachel is skinny enough to get up on the handlebars which makes the bike all wobbly as if the wheels are spaghetti, but after a bit you get used to it. We ride fast and faster. Past my house, sad and red and crumbly in places, past Mr. Benny's grocery on the corner, and down the avenue which is dangerous. Laundromat, junk store, drugstore, windows and cars and more cars, and around the block back to Mango. People on the bus wave. A very fat lady crossing the street says, You sure got quite a load there. Rachel shouts, You got quite a load there too. |
| 6 |
She is very sassy. Down, down Mango Street we go. Rachel, Lucy, me. Our new bicycle. Laughing the crooked ride back. Laughter Nenny and I don't look like sisters ... not right away. Not the way you can tell with Rachel and Lucy who have the same fat popsicle lips like everybody else in their family. But me and Nenny, we are more alike than you would know. Our laughter for example. Not the shy ice cream bells' giggle of Rachel and Lucy's family, but all of a sudden and surprised like a pile of dishes breaking. And other things I can't explain. One day we were passing a house that looked, in my mind, like houses I had seen in Mexico. I don't know why. There was nothing about the house that looked exactly like the houses I remembered. I'm not even sure why I thought it, but it seemed to feel right. Look at that house, I said, it looks like Mexico. Rachel and Lucy look at me like I'm crazy, but before they can let out a laugh, Nenny says: Yes, that's Mexico all right. That's what I was thinking exactly. Gil's Furniture Bought & Sold There is a junk store. An old man owns it. We bought a used refrigerator from him once, and Carlos sold a box of magazines for a dollar. The store is small with just a dirty window for light. He doesn't turn the lights on unless you got money to buy things with, so in the dark we look and see all kinds of things, me and Nenny. Tables with their feet upside-down and rows and rows of refrigerators with round corners and couches that spin dust in the air when you punch them and a hundred TV's that don't work probably. Everything is on top of everything so the whole store has skinny aisles to walk through. You can get lost easy. The owner, he is a black man who doesn't talk much and sometimes if you didn't know better you could be in there a long time before your eyes notice a pair of gold glasses floating in the dark. Nenny who thinks she is smart and talks to any old man, asks lots of questions. Me, I never said nothing to him except once when I bought the Statue of Liberty for a dime. But Nenny, I hear her asking one time how's this here and the man says, This, this is a music box, and I turn around quick thinking he means a pretty box with flowers painted on it, with a ballerina inside. Only there's nothing like that where this old man is pointing, just a wood box that's old and got a big brass record in it with holes. Then he starts it up and all sorts of things start happening. It's like all of a sudden he let go a million moths all over the dusty furniture and swan-neck shadows and in our bones. It's like drops of water. Or like marimbas only with a funny little plucked sound to it like if you were running your fingers across the teeth of a metal comb. And then I don't know why, but I have to turn around and pretend I don't care about the box so Nenny won't see how stupid I am. But Nenny, who is stupider, already is asking how much and I can see her fingers going for the quarters in her pants pocket. This, the old man says shutting the lid, this ain't for sale. |
| 7 |
Meme Ortiz Meme Ortiz moved into Cathy's house after her family moved away. His name isn't really Meme. His name is Juan. But when we asked him what his name was he said Meme, and that's what everybody calls him except his mother. Meme has a dog with gray eyes, a sheepdog with two names, one in English and one in Spanish. The dog is big, like a man dressed in a dog suit, and runs the same way its owner does, clumsy and wild and with the limbs flopping all over the place like untied shoes. Cathy's father built the house Meme moved into. It is wooden. Inside the floors slant. Some rooms uphill. Some down. And there are no closets. Out front there are twenty-one steps, all lopsided and jutting like crooked teeth (made that way on purpose, Cathy said, so the rain will slide off), and when Meme's mama calls from the doorway, Meme goes scrambling up the twenty-one wooden stairs with the dog with two names scrambling after him. Around the back is a yard, mostly dirt, and a greasy bunch of boards that used to be a garage. But what you remember most is this tree, huge, with fat arms and mighty families of squirrels in the higher branches. All around, the neighborhood of roofs, black-tarred and A-framed, and in their gutters, the balls that never came back down to earth. Down at the base of the tree, the dog with two names barks into the empty air, and there at the end of the block, looking smaller still, our house with its feet tucked under like a cat. This is the tree we chose for the First Annual Tarzan Jumping Contest. Meme won. And broke both arms. Louie, His Cousin & His Other Cousin Downstairs from Meme's is a basement apartment that Meme's mother fixed up and rented to a Puerto Rican family. Louie's family. Louie is the oldest in a family of little sisters. He is my brother's friend really, but I know he has two cousins and that his T-shirts never stay tucked in his pants. Louie's girl cousin is older than us. She lives with Louie's family because her own family is in Puerto Rico. Her name is Marin or Maris or something like that, and she wears dark nylons all the time and lots of makeup she gets free from selling Avon. She can't come out — gotta baby-sit with Louie's sisters — but she stands in the doorway a lot, all the time singing, clicking her fingers, the same song: Apples, peaches, pumpkin pah-ay. You're in love and so am ah-ay. Louie has another cousin. We only saw him once, but it was important. We were playing volleyball in the alley when he drove up in this great big yellow Cadillac with whitewalls and a yellow scarf tied around the mirror. Louie's cousin had his arm out the window. He honked a couple of times and a lot of faces looked out from Louie's back window and then a lot of people came out — Louie, Marin and all the little sisters. Everybody looked inside the car and asked where he got it. There were white rugs and white leather seats. We all asked for a ride and asked where he got it. Louie's cousin said get in. We each had to sit with one of Louie's little sisters on our lap, but that was okay. |
| 8 |
The seats were big and soft like a sofa, and there was a little white cat in the back window whose eyes lit up when the car stopped or turned. The windows didn't roll up like in ordinary cars. Instead there was a button that did it for you automatically. We rode up the alley and around the block six times, but Louie's cousin said he was going to make us walk home if we didn't stop playing with the windows or touching the FM radio. The seventh time we drove into the alley we heard sirens ... real quiet at first, but then louder. Louie's cousin stopped the car right where we were and said, Everybody out of the car. Then he took off flooring that car into a yellow blur. We hardly had time to think when the cop car pulled in the alley going just as fast. We saw the yellow Cadillac at the end of the block trying to make a left-hand turn, but our alley is too skinny and the car crashed into a lamppost. Marin screamed and we ran down the block to where the cop car's siren spun a dizzy blue. The nose of that yellow Cadillac was all pleated like an alligator's, and except for a bloody lip and a bruised forehead, Louie's cousin was okay. They put handcuffs on him and put him in the backseat of the cop car, and we all waved as they drove away. Marin Marin's boyfriend is in Puerto Rico. She shows us his letters and makes us promise not to tell anybody they're getting married when she goes back to P. R. She says he didn't get a job yet, but she's saving the money she gets from selling Avon and taking care of her cousins. Marin says that if she stays here next year, she's going to get a real job downtown because that's where the best jobs are, since you always get to look beautiful and get to wear nice clothes and can meet someone in the subway who might marry you and take you to live in a big house far away. But next year Louie's parents are going to send her back to her mother with a letter saying she's too much trouble, and that is too bad because I like Marin. She is older and knows lots of things. She is the one who told us how Davey the Baby's sister got pregnant and what cream is best for taking off moustache hair and if you count the white flecks on your fingernails you can know how many boys are thinking of you and lots of other things I can't remember now. We never see Marin until her aunt comes home from work, and even then she can only stay out in front. She is there every night with the radio. When the light in her aunt's room goes out, Marin lights a cigarette and it doesn't matter if it's cold out or if the radio doesn't work or if we've got nothing to say to each other. What matters, Marin says, is for the boys to see us and for us to see them. And since Marin's skirts are shorter and since her eyes are pretty, and since Marin is already older than us in many ways, the boys who do pass by say stupid things like I am in love with those two green apples you call eyes, give them to me why don't you. And Marin just looks at them without even blinking and is not afraid. |
| 9 |
Is afraid of nothing except four-legged fur. And fathers. Darius & the Clouds You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies too are few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the best of it. Darius, who doesn't like school, who is sometimes stupid and mostly a fool, said something wise today, though most days he says nothing. Darius, who chases girls with firecrackers or a stick that touched a rat and thinks he's tough, today pointed up because the world was full of clouds, the kind like pillows. You all see that cloud, that fat one there? Darius said, See that? Where? That one next to the one that look like popcorn. That one there. See that. That's God, Darius said. God? somebody little asked. God, he said, and made it simple. And Some More The Eskimos got thirty different names for snow, I say. I read it in a book. I got a cousin, Rachel says, she got three different names. There ain't thirty different kinds of snow, Lucy says. There are two kinds. The clean kind and the dirty kind, clean and dirty. Only two. There are a million zillion kinds, says Nenny. No two exactly alike. Only how do you remember which one is which? She got three last names and, let me see, two first names. One in English and one in Spanish ... And clouds got at least ten different names, I say. Names for clouds? Nenny asks. Names just like you and me? That up there, that's cumulus, and everybody looks up. Cumulus are cute, Rachel says. She would say something like that. What's that one there? Nenny asks, pointing a finger. That's cumulus too. They're all cumulus today. Cumulus, cumulus, cumulus. No, she says. That there is Nancy, otherwise known as Pig-eye. And over there her cousin Mildred, and little Joey, Marco, Nereida and Sue. There are all different kinds of clouds. How many different kinds of clouds can you think of? Well, there's these already that look like shaving cream ... And what about the kind that looks like you combed its hair? Yes, those are clouds too. Phyllis, Ted, Alfredo and Julie ... There are clouds that look like big fields of sheep, Rachel says. Them are my favorite. And don't forget nimbus the rain cloud, I add, that's something. Jose and Dagoberto, Alicia, Raul, Edna, Alma and Rickey... There's that wide puffy cloud that looks like your face when you wake up after falling asleep with all your clothes on. Reynaldo, Angelo, Albert, Armando, Mario ... Not my face. Looks like your fat face. Rita, Margie, Ernie ... Whose fat face? Esperanza's fat face, that's who. Looks like Esperanza's ugly face when she comes to school in the morning. Anita, Stella, Dennis, and Lolo ... Who you calling ugly, ugly? Richie, Yolanda, Hector, Stevie, Vincent... Not you. Your mama, that's who. My mama? You better not be saying that, Lucy Guerrero. You better not be talking like that... |
| 10 |
else you can say goodbye to being my friend forever. I'm saying your mama's ugly like ... ummm ... ... like bare feet in September! That does it! Both of yous better get out of my yard before I call my brothers. Oh, we're only playing. I can think of thirty Eskimo words for you, Rachel. Thirty words that say what you are. Oh yeah, well I can think of some more. Uh-oh, Nenny. Better get the broom. Too much trash in our yard today. Frankie, Licha, Maria, Pee Wee ... Nenny, you better tell your sister she is really crazy because Lucy and me are never coming back here again. Forever. Reggie, Elizabeth, Lisa, Louie ... You can do what you want to do, Nenny, but you better not talk to Lucy or Rachel if you want to be my sister. You know what you are, Esperanza? You are like the Cream of Wheat cereal. You're like the lumps. Yeah, and you're foot fleas, that's you. Chicken lips. Rosemary, Dalia, Lily... Cockroach jelly. Jean, Geranium and Joe ... Cold frijoles. Mimi, Michael, Moe ... Your mama's frijoles. Your ugly mama's toes. That's stupid. Bebe, Blanca, Benny... Who's stupid? Rachel, Lucy, Esperanza and Nenny. The Family of Little Feet There was a family. All were little. Their arms were little, and their hands were little, and their height was not tall, and their feet very small. The grandpa slept on the living room couch and snored through his teeth. His feet were fat and doughy like thick tamales, and these he powdered and stuffed into white socks and brown leather shoes. The grandma's feet were lovely as pink pearls and dressed in velvety high heels that made her walk with a wobble, but she wore them anyway because they were pretty. The baby's feet had ten tiny toes, pale and see-through like a salamanders, and these he popped into his mouth whenever he was hungry. The mother's feet, plump and polite, descended like white pigeons from the sea of pillow, across the linoleum roses, down down the wooden stairs, over the chalk hopscotch squares, 5, 6, 7, blue sky. Do you want this? And gave us a paper bag with one pair of lemon shoes and one red and one pair of dancing shoes that used to be white but were now pale blue. Here, and we said thank you and waited until she went upstairs. Hurray! Today we are Cinderella because our feet fit exactly, and we laugh at Rachel's one foot with a girl's gray sock and a lady's high heel. Do you like these shoes? But the truth is it is scary to look down at your foot that is no longer yours and see attached a long long leg. Everybody wants to trade. The lemon shoes for the red shoes, the red for the pair that were once white but are now pale blue, the pale blue for the lemon, and take them off and put them back on and keep on like this a long time until we are tired. Then Lucy screams to take our socks off and yes, it's true. We have legs. Skinny and spotted with satin scars where scabs were picked, but legs, all our own, good to look at, and long. It's Rachel who learns to walk the best all strutted in those magic high heels. |
| 11 |
What about the shoes? I forgot. Too late now. I'm tired. Whew! Six-thirty already and my little cousin's baptism is over. All day waiting, the door locked, don't open up for nobody, and I don't till Mama gets back and buys everything except the shoes. Now Uncle Nacho is coming in his car, and we have to hurry to get to Precious Blood Church quick because that's where the baptism party is, in the basement rented for today for dancing and tamales and everyone's kids running all over the place. Mama dances, laughs, dances. All of a sudden, Mama is sick. I fan her hot face with a paper plate. Too many tamales, but Uncle Nacho says too many this and tilts his thumb to his lips. Everybody laughing except me, because I'm wearing the new dress, pink and white with stripes, and new underclothes and new socks and the old saddle shoes I wear to school, brown and white, the kind I get every September because they last long and they do. My feet scuffed and round, and the heels all crooked that look dumb with this dress, so I just sit. Meanwhile that boy who is my cousin by first communion or something asks me to dance and I can't. Just stuff my feet under the metal folding chair stamped Precious Blood and pick on a wad of brown gum that's stuck beneath the seat. I shake my head no. My feet growing bigger and bigger. Then Uncle Nacho is pulling and pulling my arm and it doesn't matter how new the dress Mama bought is because my feet are ugly until my uncle who is a liar says, You are the prettiest girl here, will you dance, but I believe him, and yes, we are dancing, my Uncle Nacho and me, only I don't want to at first. My feet swell big and heavy like plungers, but I drag them across the linoleum floor straight center where Uncle wants to show off the new dance we learned. And Uncle spins me, and my skinny arms bend the way he taught me, and my mother watches, and my little cousins watch, and the boy who is my cousin by first communion watches, and everyone says, wow, who are those two who dance like in the movies, until I forget that I am wearing only ordinary shoes, brown and white, the kind my mother buys each year for school. And all I hear is the clapping when the music stops. My uncle and me bow and he walks me back in my thick shoes to my mother who is proud to be my mother. All night the boy who is a man watches me dance. He watched me dance. Hips I like coffee, I like tea. I like the boys and the boys like me. Yes, no, maybe so. Yes, no, maybe so ... One day you wake up and they are there. Ready and waiting like a new Buick with the keys in the ignition. Ready to take you where? They're good for holding a baby when you're cooking, Rachel says, turning the jump rope a little quicker. She has no imagination. You need them to dance, says Lucy. If you don't get them you may turn into a man. Nenny says this and she believes it. She is this way because of her age. That's right, I add before Lucy or Rachel can make fun of her. She is stupid alright, but she is my sister. |
| 12 |
But most important, hips are scientific, I say repeating what Alicia already told me. It's the bones that let you know which skeleton was a man's when it was a man and which a woman's. They bloom like roses, I continue because it's obvious I'm the only one who can speak with any authority; I have science on my side. The bones just one day open. Just like that. One day you might decide to have kids, and then where are you going to put them? Got to have room. Bones got to give. But don't have too many or your behind will spread. That's how it is, says Rachel whose mama is as wide as a boat. And we just laugh. What I'm saying is who here is ready? You gotta be able to know what to do with hips when you get them, I say making it up as I go. You gotta know how to walk with hips, practice you know — like if half of you wanted to go one way and the other half the other. That's to lullaby it, Nenny says, that's to rock the baby asleep inside you. And then she begins singing seashells, copper hells, eevy, ivy, over. I'm about to tell her that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, but the more I think about it.. . You gotta get the rhythm, and Lucy begins to dance. She has the idea, though she's having trouble keeping her end of the double-dutch steady. It's gotta be just so, I say. Not too fast and not too slow. Not too fast and not too slow. We slow the double circles down to a certain speed so Rachel who has just jumped in can practice shaking it. I want to shake like hoochi-coochie, Lucy says. She is crazy. I want to move like heebie-jeebie, I say picking up on the cue. I want to be Tahiti. Or merengue. Or electricity. Or tembleque! Yes, tembleque. That's a good one. And then it's Rachel who starts it: Skip, skip, snake in your hips. Wiggle around and break your lip. Lucy waits a minute before her turn. She is thinking. Then she begins: The waitress with the big fat hips who pays the rent with taxi tips ... says nobody in town will kiss her on the lips because ... because she looks like Christopher Columbus! Yes, no, maybe so. Yes, no, maybe so. She misses on maybe so. I take a little while before my turn, take a breath, and dive in: Some are skinny like chicken lips. Some are baggy like soggy Band-Aids after you get out of the bathtub. I don't care what kind I get. Just as long as I get hips. Everybody getting into it now except Nenny who is still humming not a girl, not a boy, just a little baby. She's like that. When the two arcs open wide like jaws Nenny jumps in across from me, the rope tick-ticking, the little gold earrings our mama gave her for her First Holy Communion bouncing. She is the color of a bar of naphtha laundry soap, she is like the little brown piece left at the end of the wash, the hard little bone, my sister. Her mouth opens. She begins: My mother and your mother were washing clothes. My mother punched your mother right in the nose. What color blood came out? Not that old song, I say. You gotta use your own song. Make it up, you know? |
| 13 |
He had nice eyes and I didn't feel so nervous anymore. Then he asked if I knew what day it was, and when I said I didn't, he said it was his birthday and would I please give him a birthday kiss. I thought I would because he was so old and just as I was about to put my lips on his cheek, he grabs my face with both hands and kisses me hard on the mouth and doesn't let go. Papa Who Wakes Up Tired in the Dark Your abuelito is dead, Papa says early one morning in my room. Esta muerto, and then as if he just heard the news himself, crumples like a coat and cries, my brave Papa cries. I have never seen my Papa cry and don't know what to do. I know he will have to go away, that he will take a plane to Mexico, all the uncles and aunts will be there, and they will have a black-and-white photo taken in front of the tomb with flowers shaped like spears in a white vase because this is how they send the dead away in that country. Because I am the oldest, my father has told me first, and now it is my turn to tell the others. I will have to explain why we can't play. I will have to tell them to be quiet today. My Papa, his thick hands and thick shoes, who wakes up tired in the dark, who combs his hair with water, drinks his coffee, and is gone before we wake, today is sitting on my bed. And I think if my own Papa died what would I do. I hold my Papa in my arms. I hold and hold and hold him. Born Bad Most likely I will go to hell and most likely I deserve to be there. My mother says I was born on an evil day and prays for me. Lucy and Rachel pray too. For ourselves and for each other ... because of what we did to Aunt Lupe. Her name was Guadalupe and she was pretty like my mother. Dark. Good to look at. In her Joan Crawford dress and swimmer's legs. Aunt Lupe of the photographs. But I knew her sick from the disease that would not go, her legs bunched under the yellow sheets, the bones gone limp as worms. The yellow pillow, the yellow smell, the bottles and spoons. Her head thrown back like a thirsty lady. My aunt, the swimmer. Hard to imagine her legs once strong, the bones hard and parting water, clean sharp strokes, not bent and wrinkled like a baby, not drowning under the sticky yellow light. Second-floor rear apartment. The naked light bulb. The high ceilings. The light bulb always burning. I don't know who decides who deserves to go bad. There was no evil in her birth. No wicked curse. One day I believe she was swimming, and the next day she was sick. It might have been the day that gray photograph was taken. It might have been the day she was holding cousin Totchy and baby Frank. It might have been the moment she pointed to the camera for the kids to look and they wouldn't. Maybe the sky didn't look the day she fell down. Maybe God was busy. It could be true she didn't dive right one day and hurt her spine. Or maybe the story that she fell very hard from a high step stool, like Totchy said, is true. But I think diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone. |
| 14 |
Like my aunt who happened to be walking down the street one day in her Joan Crawford dress, in her funny felt hat with the black feather, cousin Totchy in one hand, baby Frank in the other. Sometimes you get used to the sick and sometimes the sickness, if it is there too long, gets to seem normal. This is how it was with her, and maybe this is why we chose her. It was a game, that's all. It was the game we played every afternoon ever since that day one of us invented it — I can't remember who — I think it was me. You had to pick somebody. You had to think of someone everybody knew. Someone you could imitate and everyone else would have to guess who it was. It started out with famous people: Wonder Woman, the Beatles, Marilyn Monroe... . But then somebody thought it'd be better if we changed the game a little, if we pretended we were Mr. Benny, or his wife Blanca, or Ruthie, or anybody we knew. I don't know why we picked her. Maybe we were bored that day. Maybe we got tired. We liked my aunt. She listened to our stories. She always asked us to come back. Lucy, me, Rachel. I hated to go there alone. The six blocks to the dark apartment, second-floor rear building where sunlight never came, and what did it matter? My aunt was blind by then. She never saw the dirty dishes in the sink. She couldn't see the ceilings dusty with flies, the ugly maroon walls, the bottles and sticky spoons. I can't forget the smell. Like sticky capsules filled with jelly. My aunt, a little oyster, a little piece of meat on an open shell for us to look at. Hello, hello. As if she had fallen into a well. I took my library books to her house. I read her stories. I liked the book The Waterbabies. She liked it too. I never knew how sick she was until that day I tried to show her one of the pictures in the book, a beautiful color picture of the water babies swimming in the sea. I held the book up to her face. I can't see it, she said, I'm blind. And then I was ashamed. She listened to every book, every poem I read her. One day I read her one of my own. I came very close. I whispered it into the pillow: I want to be like the waves on the sea, like the clouds in the wind, but I'm me. One day I'll jump out of my skin. I'll shake the sky like a hundred violins. That's nice. That's very good, she said in her tired voice. You just remember to keep writing, Esperanza. You must keep writing. It will keep you free, and I said yes, but at that time I didn't know what she meant. The day we played the game, we didn't know she was going to die. We pretended with our heads thrown back, our arms limp and useless, dangling like the dead. We laughed the way she did. We talked the way she talked, the way blind people talk without moving their head. We imitated the way you had to lift her head a little so she could drink water, she sucked it up slow out of a green tin cup. The water was warm and tasted like metal. Lucy laughed. Rachel too. We took turns being her. We screamed in the weak voice of a parrot for Totchy to come and wash those dishes. |
| 15 |
It was easy. We didn't know. She had been dying such a long time, we forgot. Maybe she was ashamed. Maybe she was embarrassed it took so many years. The kids who wanted to be kids instead of washing dishes and ironing their papa's shirts, and the husband who wanted a wife again. And then she died, my aunt who listened to my poems. And then we began to dream the dreams. Elenita, Cards, Palm, Water Elenita, witch woman, wipes the table with a rag because Ernie who is feeding the baby spilled Kool-Aid. She says: Take that crazy baby out of here and drink your Kool-Aid in the living room. Can't you see I'm busy? Ernie takes the baby into the living room where Bugs Bunny is on TV. Good lucky you didn't come yesterday, she says. The planets were all mixed up yesterday. Her TV is color and big and all her pretty furniture made out of red fur like the teddy bears they give away in carnivals. She has them covered with plastic. I think this is on account of the baby. Yes, it's a good thing, I say. But we stay in the kitchen because this is where she works. The top of the refrigerator busy with holy candles, some lit, some not, red and green and blue, a plaster saint and a dusty Palm Sunday cross, and a picture of the voodoo hand taped to the wall. Get the water, she says. I go to the sink and pick the only clean glass there, a beer mug that says the beer that made Milwaukee famous, and fill it up with hot water from the tap, then put the glass of water on the center of the table, the way she taught me. Look in it, do you see anything? But all I see are bubbles. You see anybody's face? Nope, just bubbles, I say. That's okay, and she makes the sign of the cross over the water three times and then begins to cut the cards. They're not like ordinary playing cards, these cards. They're strange, with blond men on horses and crazy baseball bats with thorns. Golden goblets, sad-looking women dressed in old-fashioned dresses, and roses that cry. There is a good Bugs Bunny cartoon on TV. I know, I saw it before and recognize the music and wish I could go sit on the plastic couch with Ernie and the baby, but now my fortune begins. My whole life on that kitchen table: past, present, future. Then she takes my hand and looks into my palm. Closes it. Closes her eyes too. Do you feel it, feel the cold? Yes, I lie, but only a little. Good, she says, los espiritus are here. And begins. This card, the one with the dark man on a dark horse, this means jealousy, and this one, sorrow. Here a pillar of bees and this a mattress of luxury. You will go to a wedding soon and did you lose an anchor of arms, yes, an anchor of arms? It's clear that's what that means. What about a house, I say, because that's what I came for. Ah, yes, a home in the heart. I see a home in the heart. Is that it? That's what I see, she says, then gets up because the kids are fighting. Elenita gets up to hit and then hug them. She really does love them, only sometimes they are rude. She comes back and can tell I'm disappointed. |
| 16 |
She's a witch woman and knows many things. If you got a headache, rub a cold egg across your face. Need to forget an old romance? Take a chicken's foot, tie it with red string, spin it over your head three times, then burn it. Bad spirits keeping you awake? Sleep next to a holy candle for seven days, then on the eighth day, spit. And lots of other stuff. Only now she can tell I'm sad. Baby, I'll look again if you want me to. And she looks again into the cards, palm, water, and says uh-huh. A home in the heart, I was right. Only I don't get it. A new house, a house made of heart. I'll light a candle for you. All this for five dollars I give her. Thank you and goodbye and be careful of the evil eye. Come back again on a Thursday when the stars are stronger. And may the Virgin bless you. And shuts the door. Geraldo No Last Name She met him at a dance. Pretty too, and young. Said he worked in a restaurant, but she can't remember which one. Geraldo. That's all. Green pants and Saturday shirt. Geraldo. That's what he told her. And how was she to know she'd be the last one to see him alive. An accident, don't you know. Hit-and-run. Marin, she goes to all those dances. Uptown. Logan. Embassy. Palmer. Aragon. Fontana. The Manor. She likes to dance. She knows how to do cumbias and salsas and rancheras even. And he was just someone she danced with. Somebody she met that night. That's right. That's the story. That's what she said again and again. Once to the hospital people and twice to the police. No address. No name. Nothing in his pockets. Ain't it a shame. Only Marin can't explain why it mattered, the hours and hours, for somebody she didn't even know. The hospital emergency room. Nobody but an intern working all alone. And maybe if the surgeon would've come, maybe if he hadn't lost so much blood, if the surgeon had only come, they would know who to notify and where. But what difference does it make? He wasn't anything to her. He wasn't her boyfriend or anything like that. Just another brazer who didn't speak English. Just another wetback. You know the kind. The ones who always look ashamed. And what was she doing out at three a. m. anyway? Marin who was sent home with her coat and some aspirin. How does she explain? She met him at a dance. Geraldo in his shiny shirt and green pants. Geraldo going to a dance. What does it matter? They never saw the kitchenettes. They never knew about the two-room flats and sleeping rooms he rented, the weekly money orders sent home, the currency exchange. How could they? His name was Geraldo. And his home is in another country. The ones he left behind are far away, will wonder, shrug, remember. Geraldo — he went north ... we never heard from him again. Edna's Ruthie Ruthie, tall skinny lady with red lipstick and blue babushka, one blue sock and one green because she forgot, is the only grown-up we know who likes to play. She takes her dog Bobo for a walk and laughs all by herself, that Ruthie. She doesn't need anybody to laugh with, she just laughs. |
| 17 |
She is Edna's daughter, the lady who owns the big building next door, three apartments front and back. Every week Edna is screaming at somebody, and every week somebody has to move away. Once she threw out a pregnant lady just because she owned a duck ... and it was a nice duck too. But Ruthie lives here and Edna can't throw her out because Ruthie is her daughter. Ruthie came one day, it seemed, out of nowhere. Angel Vargas was trying to teach us how to whistle. Then we heard someone whistling — beautiful like the Emperor's nightingale — and when we turned around there was Ruthie. Sometimes we go shopping and take her with us, but she never comes inside the stores and if she does she keeps looking around her like a wild animal in a house for the first time. She likes candy. When we go to Mr. Benny's grocery she gives us money to buy her some. She says make sure it's the soft kind because her teeth hurt. Then she promises to see the dentist next week, but when next week comes, she doesn't go. Ruthie sees lovely things everywhere. I might be telling her a joke and she'll stop and say: The moon is beautiful like a balloon. Or somebody might be singing and she'll point to a few clouds: Look, Marlon Brando. Or a sphinx winking. Or my left shoe. Once some friends of Edna's came to visit and asked Ruthie if she wanted to go with them to play bingo. The car motor was running, and Ruthie stood on the steps wondering whether to go. Should I go, Ma? she asked the gray shadow behind the second-floor screen. I don't care, says the screen, go if you want. Ruthie looked at the ground. What do you think, Ma? Do what you want, how should I know? Ruthie looked at the ground some more. The car with the motor running waited fifteen minutes and then they left. When we brought out the deck of cards that night, we let Ruthie deal. There were many things Ruthie could have been if she wanted to. Not only is she a good whistler, but she can sing and dance too. She had lots of job offers when she was young, but she never took them. She got married instead and moved away to a pretty house outside the city. Only thing I can't understand is why Ruthie is living on Mango Street if she doesn't have to, why is she sleeping on a couch in her mother's living room when she has a real house all her own, but she says she's just visiting and next weekend her husband's going to take her home. But the weekends come and go and Ruthie stays. No matter. We are glad because she is our friend. I like showing Ruthie the books I take out of the library. Books are wonderful, Ruthie says, and then she runs her hand over them as if she could read them in braille. They're wonderful, wonderful, but I can't read anymore. I get headaches. I need to go to the eye doctor next week. I used to write children's books once, did I tell you? One day I memorized all of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" because I wanted Ruthie to hear me. "The sun was shining on the sea, shining with all his might..." Ruthie looked at the sky and her eyes got watery at times. |
| 18 |
Finally I came to the last lines: "But answer came there none — and this was scarcely odd, because they'd eaten every one ..." She took a long time looking at me before she opened her mouth, and then she said, You have the most beautiful teeth I have ever seen, and went inside. The Earl of Tennessee Earl lives next door in Edna's basement, behind the flower boxes Edna paints green each year, behind the dusty geraniums. We used to sit on the flower boxes until the day Tito saw a cockroach with a spot of green paint on its head. Now we sit on the steps that swing around the basement apartment where Earl lives. Earl works nights. His blinds are always closed during the day. Sometimes he comes out and tells us to keep quiet. The little wooden door that has wedged shut the dark for so long opens with a sigh and lets out a breath of mold and dampness, like books that have been left out in the rain. This is the only time we see Earl except for when he comes and goes to work. He has two little black dogs that go everywhere with him. They don't walk like ordinary dogs, but leap and somersault like an apostrophe and comma. At night Nenny and I can hear when Earl comes home from work. First the click and whine of the car door opening, then the scrape of concrete, the excited tinkling of dog tags, followed by the heavy jingling of keys, and finally the moan of the wooden door as it opens and lets loose its sigh of dampness. Earl is a jukebox repairman. He learned his trade in the South, he says. He speaks with a Southern accent, smokes fat cigars and wears a felt hat — winter or summer, hot or cold, don't matter — a felt hat. In his apartment are boxes and boxes of 45 records, moldy and damp like the smell that comes out of his apartment whenever he opens the door. He gives the records away to us — all except the country and western. The word is that Earl is married and has a wife somewhere. Edna says she saw her once when Earl brought her to the apartment. Mama says she is a skinny thing, blond and pale like salamanders that have never seen the sun. But I saw her once too and she's not that way at all. And the boys across the street say she is a tall red-headed lady who wears tight pink pants and green glasses. We never agree on what she looks like, but we do know this. Whenever she arrives, he holds her tight by the crook of the arm. They walk fast into the apartment, lock the door behind them and never stay long. Sire I don't remember when I first noticed him looking at me — Sire. But I knew he was looking. Every time. All the time I walked past his house. Him and his friends sitting on their bikes in front of the house, pitching pennies. They didn't scare me. They did, but I wouldn't let them know. I don't cross the street like other girls. Straight ahead, straight eyes. I walked past. I knew he was looking. I had to prove to me I wasn't scared of nobody's eyes, not even his. I had to look back hard, just once, like he was glass. And I did. I did once. But I looked too long when he rode his bike past me. |
| 19 |
I looked because I wanted to be brave, straight into the dusty cat fur of his eyes and the bike stopped and he bumped into a parked car, bumped, and I walked fast. It made your blood freeze to have somebody look at you like that. Somebody looked at me. Somebody looked. But his kind, his ways. He is a punk, Papa says, and Mama says not to talk to him. And then his girlfriend came. Lois I heard him call her. She is tiny and pretty and smells like baby's skin. I see her sometimes running to the store for him. And once when she was standing next to me at Mr. Benny's grocery she was barefoot, and I saw her barefoot baby toenails all painted pale pale pink, like little pink seashells, and she smells pink like babies do. She's got big girl hands, and her bones are long like ladies' bones, and she wears makeup too. But she doesn't know how to tie her shoes. I do. Sometimes I hear them laughing late, beer cans and cats and the trees talking to themselves: wait, wait, wait. Sire lets Lois ride his bike around the block, or they take walks together. I watch them. She holds his hand, and he stops sometimes to tie her shoes. But Mama says those kinds of girls, those girls are the ones that go into alleys. Lois who can't tie her shoes. Where does he take her? Everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt. Not this way, every evening talking to the trees, leaning out my window, imagining what I can't see. A boy held me once so hard, I swear, I felt the grip and weight of his arms, but it was a dream. Sire. How did you hold her? Was it? Like this? And when you kissed her? Like this? Four Skinny Trees They are the only ones who understand me. I am the only one who understands them. Four skinny trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine. Four who do not belong here but are here. Four raggedy excuses planted by the city. From our room we can hear them, but Nenny just sleeps and doesn't appreciate these things. Their strength is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep. Let one forget his reason for being, they'd all droop like tulips in a glass, each with their arms around the other. Keep, keep, keep, trees say when I sleep. They teach. When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees. When there is nothing left to look at on this street. Four who grew despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach. Four whose only reason is to be and be. No Speak English Mamacita is the big mama of the man across the street, third-floor front. Rachel says her name ought to be Mamasota, but I think that's mean. The man saved his money to bring her here. He saved and saved because she was alone with the baby boy in that country. |
| 20 |
He worked two jobs. He came home late and he left early. Every day. Then one day Mamacita and the baby boy arrived in a yellow taxi. The taxi door opened like a waiter's arm. Out stepped a tiny pink shoe, a foot soft as a rabbit's ear, then the thick ankle, a flutter of hips, fuchsia roses and green perfume. The man had to pull her, the taxicab driver had to push. Push, pull. Push, pull. Poof! All at once she bloomed. Huge, enormous, beautiful to look at, from the salmon-pink feather on the tip of her hat down to the little rosebuds of her toes. I couldn't take my eyes off her tiny shoes. Up, up, up the stairs she went with the baby boy in a blue blanket, the man carrying her suitcases, her lavender hatboxes, a dozen boxes of satin high heels. Then we didn't see her. Somebody said because she's too fat, somebody because of the three flights of stairs, but I believe she doesn't come out because she is afraid to speak English, and maybe this is so since she only knows eight words. She knows to say: He not here for when the landlord comes, No speak English if anybody else comes, and Holy smokes. I don't know where she learned this, but I heard her say it one time and it surprised me. My father says when he came to this country he ate hamandeggs for three months. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Hamandeggs. That was the only word he knew. He doesn't eat hamandeggs anymore. Whatever her reasons, whether she is fat, or can't climb the stairs, or is afraid of English, she won't come down. She sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio show and sings all the homesick songs about her country in a voice that sounds like a seagull. Home. Home. Home is a house in a photograph, a pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light. The man paints the walls of the apartment pink, but it's not the same you know. She still sighs for her pink house, and then I think she cries. I would. Sometimes the man gets disgusted. He starts screaming and you can hear it all the way down the street. Ay, she says, she is sad. Oh, he says. Not again. Cuando, cuando, cuando? she asks. Ay, caray! We are home. This is home. Here I am and here I stay. Speak English. Speak English. Christ! Ay! Mamacita, who does not belong, every once in a while lets out a cry, hysterical, high, as if he had torn the only skinny thread that kept her alive, the only road out to that country. And then to break her heart forever, the baby boy, who has begun to talk, starts to sing the Pepsi commercial he heard on TV. No speak English, she says to the child who is singing in the language that sounds like tin. No speak English, no speak English, and bubbles into tears. No, no, no, as if she can't believe her ears. Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut & Papaya Juice on Tuesdays On Tuesdays Rafaela's husband comes home late because that's the night he plays dominoes. And then Rafaela, who is still young but getting old from leaning out the window so much, gets locked indoors because her husband is afraid Rafaela will run away since she is too beautiful to look at. |
| 21 |
And if you opened the little window latch and gave it a shove, the windows would swing open, all the sky would come in. There'd be no nosy neighbors watching, no motorcycles and cars, no sheets and towels and laundry. Only trees and more trees and plenty of blue sky. And you could laugh, Sally. You could go to sleep and wake up and never have to think who likes and doesn't like you. You could close your eyes and you wouldn't have to worry what people said because you never belonged here anyway and nobody could make you sad and nobody would think you're strange because you like to dream and dream. And no one could yell at you if they saw you out in the dark leaning against a car, leaning against somebody without someone thinking you are bad, without somebody saying it is wrong, without the whole world waiting for you to make a mistake when all you wanted, all you wanted, Sally, was to love and to love and to love and to love, and no one could call that crazy. Minerva Writes Poems Minerva is only a little bit older than me but already she has two kids and a husband who left. Her mother raised her kids alone and it looks like her daughters will go that way too. Minerva cries because her luck is unlucky. Every night and every day. And prays. But when the kids are asleep after she's fed them their pancake dinner, she writes poems on little pieces of paper that she folds over and over and holds in her hands a long time, little pieces of paper that smell like a dime. She lets me read her poems. I let her read mine. She is always sad like a house on fire — always something wrong. She has many troubles, but the big one is her husband who left and keeps leaving. One day she is through and lets him know enough is enough. Out the door he goes. Clothes, records, shoes. Out the window and the door locked. But that night he comes back and sends a big rock through the window. Then he is sorry and she opens the door again. Same story. Next week she comes over black and blue and asks what can she do? Minerva. I don't know which way she'll go. There is nothing I can do. Bums in the Attic I want a house on a hill like the ones with the gardens where Papa works. We go on Sundays, Papa's day off. I used to go. I don't anymore. You don't like to go out with us, Papa says. Getting too old? Getting too stuck-up, says Nenny. I don't tell them I am ashamed — all of us staring out the window like the hungry. I am tired of looking at what we can't have. When we win the lottery ... Mama begins, and then I stop listening. People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth. They don't look down at all except to be content to live on hills. They have nothing to do with last week's garbage or fear of rats. Night comes. Nothing wakes them but the wind. One day I'll own my own house, but I won't forget who I am or where I came from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I'll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house. |
| 22 |
Some days after dinner, guests and I will sit in front of a fire. Floorboards will squeak upstairs. The attic grumble. Rats? they'll ask. Bums, I'll say, and I'll be happy. Beautiful & Cruel I am an ugly daughter. I am the one nobody comes for. Nenny says she won't wait her whole life for a husband to come and get her, that Minerva's sister left her mother's house by having a baby, but she doesn't want to go that way either. She wants things all her own, to pick and choose. Nenny has pretty eyes and it's easy to talk that way if you are pretty. My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain. In the movies there is always one with red red lips who is beautiful and cruel. She is the one who drives the men crazy and laughs them all away. Her power is her own. She will not give it away. I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate. A Smart Cookie I could've been somebody, you know? my mother says and sighs. She has lived in this city her whole life. She can speak two languages. She can sing an opera. She knows how to fix a TV. But she doesn't know which subway train to take to get downtown. I hold her hand very tight while we wait for the right train to arrive. She used to draw when she had time. Now she draws with a needle and thread, little knotted rosebuds, tulips made of silk thread. Someday she would like to go to the ballet. Someday she would like to see a play. She borrows opera records from the public library and sings with velvety lungs powerful as morning glories. Today while cooking oatmeal she is Madame Butterfly until she sighs and points the wooden spoon at me. I could've been somebody, you know? Esperanza, you go to school. Study hard. That Madame Butterfly was a fool. She stirs the oatmeal. Look at my comadres. She means Izaura whose husband left and Yolanda whose husband is dead. Got to take care all your own, she says shaking her head. Then out of nowhere: Shame is a bad thing, you know? It keeps you down. You want to know why I quit school? Because I didn't have nice clothes. No clothes, but I had brains. Yup, she says disgusted, stirring again. I was a smart cookie then. What Sally Said He never hits me hard. She said her mama rubs lard on all the places where it hurts. Then at school she'd say she fell. That's where all the blue places come from. That's why her skin is always scarred. But who believes her. A girl that big, a girl who comes in with her pretty face all beaten and black can't be falling off the stairs. He never hits me hard. But Sally doesn't tell about that time he hit her with his hands just like a dog, she said, like if I was an animal. He thinks I'm going to run away like his sisters who made the family ashamed. Just because I'm a daughter, and then she doesn't say. |
| 23 |
Sally was going to get permission to stay with us a little and one Thursday she came finally with a sack full of clothes and a paper bag of sweetbread her mama sent. And would've stayed too except when the dark came her father, whose eyes were little from crying, knocked on the door and said please come back, this is the last time. And she said Daddy and went home. Then we didn't need to worry. Until one day Sally's father catches her talking to a boy and the next day she doesn't come to school. And the next. Until the way Sally tells it, he just went crazy, he just forgot he was her father between the buckle and the belt. You're not my daughter, you're not my daughter. And then he broke into his hands. The Monkey Garden The monkey doesn't live there anymore. The monkey moved — to Kentucky — and took his people with him. And I was glad because I couldn't listen anymore to his wild screaming at night, the twangy yakkety-yak of the people who owned him. The green metal cage, the porcelain tabletop, the family that spoke like guitars. Monkey, family, table. All gone. And it was then we took over the garden we had been afraid to go into when the monkey screamed and showed its yellow teeth. There were sunflowers big as flowers on Mars and thick cockscombs bleeding the deep red fringe of theater curtains. There were dizzy bees and bow-tied fruit flies turning somersaults and humming in the air. Sweet sweet peach trees. Thorn roses and thistle and pears. Weeds like so many squinty-eyed stars and brush that made your ankles itch and itch until you washed with soap and water. There were big green apples hard as knees. And everywhere the sleepy smell of rotting wood, damp earth and dusty hollyhocks thick and perfumy like the blue-blond hair of the dead. Yellow spiders ran when we turned rocks over and pale worms blind and afraid of light rolled over in their sleep. Poke a stick in the sandy soil and a few blue-skinned beetles would appear, an avenue of ants, so many crusty ladybugs. This was a garden, a wonderful thing to look at in the spring. But bit by bit, after the monkey left, the garden began to take over itself. Flowers stopped obeying the little bricks that kept them from growing beyond their paths. Weeds mixed in. Dead cars appeared overnight like mushrooms. First one and then another and then a pale blue pickup with the front windshield missing. Before you knew it, the monkey garden became filled with sleepy cars. Things had a way of disappearing in the garden, as if the garden itself ate them, or, as if with its old-man memory, it put them away and forgot them. Nenny found a dollar and a dead mouse between two rocks in the stone wall where the morning glories climbed, and once when we were playing hide-and-seek, Eddie Vargas laid his head beneath a hibiscus tree and fell asleep there like a Rip Van Winkle until somebody remembered he was in the game and went back to look for him. This, I suppose, was the reason why we went there. Far away from where our mothers could find us. |
| 24 |
We and a few old dogs who lived inside the empty cars. We made a clubhouse once on the back of that old blue pickup. And besides, we liked to jump from the roof of one car to another and pretend they were giant mushrooms. Somebody started the lie that the monkey garden had been there before anything. We liked to think the garden could hide things for a thousand years. There beneath the roots of soggy flowers were the bones of murdered pirates and dinosaurs, the eye of a unicorn turned to coal. This is where I wanted to die and where I tried one day but not even the monkey garden would have me. It was the last day I would go there. Who was it that said I was getting too old to play the games? Who was it I didn't listen to? I only remember that when the others ran, I wanted to run too, up and down and through the monkey garden, fast as the boys, not like Sally who screamed if she got her stockings muddy. I said, Sally, come on, but she wouldn't. She stayed by the curb talking to Tito and his friends. Play with the kids if you want, she said, I'm staying here. She could be stuck-up like that if she wanted to, so I just left. It was her own fault too. When I got back Sally was pretending to be mad... something about the boys having stolen her keys. Please give them back to me, she said punching the nearest one with a soft fist. They were laughing. She was too. It was a joke I didn't get. I wanted to go back with the other kids who were still jumping on cars, still chasing each other through the garden, but Sally had her own game. One of the boys invented the rules. One of Tito's friends said you can't get the keys back unless you kiss us and Sally pretended to be mad at first but she said yes. It was that simple. I don't know why, but something inside me wanted to throw a stick. Something wanted to say no when I watched Sally going into the garden with Tito's buddies all grinning. It was just a kiss, that's all. A kiss for each one. So what, she said. Only how come I felt angry inside. Like something wasn't right. Sally went behind that old blue pickup to kiss the boys and get her keys back, and I ran up three flights of stairs to where Tito lived. His mother was ironing shirts. She was sprinkling water on them from an empty pop bottle and smoking a cigarette. Your son and his friends stole Sally's keys and now they won't give them back unless she kisses them and right now they're making her kiss them, I said all out of breath from the three flights of stairs. Those kids, she said, not looking up from her ironing. That's all? What do you want me to do, she said, call the cops? And kept on ironing. I looked at her a long time, but couldn't think of anything to say, and ran back down the three flights to the garden where Sally needed to be saved. I took three big sticks and a brick and figured this was enough. But when I got there Sally said go home. Those boys said leave us alone. I felt stupid with my brick. They all looked at me as if I was the one that was crazy and made me feel ashamed. |
| 25 |
And then I don't know why but I had to run away. I had to hide myself at the other end of the garden, in the jungle part, under a tree that wouldn't mind if I lay down and cried a long time. I closed my eyes like tight stars so that I wouldn't, but I did. My face felt hot. Everything inside hiccupped. I read somewhere in India there are priests who can will their heart to stop beating. I wanted to will my blood to stop, my heart to quit its pumping. I wanted to be dead, to turn into the rain, my eyes melt into the ground like two black snails. I wished and wished. I closed my eyes and willed it, but when I got up my dress was green and I had a headache. I looked at my feet in their white socks and ugly round shoes. They seemed far away. They didn't seem to be my feet anymore. And the garden that had been such a good place to play didn't seem mine either. Red Clowns Sally, you lied. It wasn't what you said at all. What he did. Where he touched me. I didn't want it, Sally. The way they said it, the way it's supposed to be, all the storybooks and movies, why did you lie to me? I was waiting by the red clowns. I was standing by the tilt-a-whirl where you said. And anyway I don't like carnivals. I went to be with you because you laugh on the tilt-a-whirl, you throw your head back and laugh. I hold your change, wave, count how many times you go by. Those boys that look at you because you're pretty. I like to be with you, Sally. You're my friend. But that big boy, where did he take you? I waited such a long time. I waited by the red clowns, just like you said, but you never came, you never came for me. Sally Sally a hundred times. Why didn't you hear me when I called? Why didn't you tell them to leave me alone? The one who grabbed me by the arm, he wouldn't let me go. He said I love you, Spanish girl, I love you, and pressed his sour mouth to mine. Sally, make him stop. I couldn't make them go away. I couldn't do anything but cry. I don't remember. It was dark. I don't remember. I don't remember. Please don't make me tell it all. Why did you leave me all alone? I waited my whole life. You're a liar. They all lied. All the books and magazines, everything that told it wrong. Only his dirty fingernails against my skin, only his sour smell again. The moon that watched. The tilt-a-whirl. The red clowns laughing their thick-tongue laugh. Then the colors began to whirl. Sky tipped. Their high black gym shoes ran. Sally, you lied, you lied. He wouldn't let me go. He said I love you, I love you, Spanish girl. Linoleum Roses Sally got married like we knew she would, young and not ready but married just the same. She met a marshmallow salesman at a school bazaar, and she married him in another state where it's legal to get married before eighth grade. She has her husband and her house now, her pillowcases and her plates. She says she is in love, but I think she did it to escape. Sally says she likes being married because now she gets to buy her own things when her husband gives her money. |
| 26 |
Were he to disclose his age or give her details of his appearance, she might recoil from the information with a mixture of amusement and horror. Were he to offer her his name, the admittedly august name of Smile, a name with big money attached to it, she might, in the grip of a bad mood, alert the authorities, and to be hunted down like a dog at the behest of the object of his adorations would break his heart, and he would surely die. Therefore he would for the moment keep his true identity a secret, and would reveal it only when his letters, and the deeds they described, had softened her attitude toward him and made her receptive to his advances. How would he know when that moment arrived? That was a question to be answered later. Right now the important thing was to begin. And one day the proper name to use, the best of all identities to assume, came to him in that moment between waking and sleeping when the imagined world behind our eyelids can drip its magic into the world we see when we open our eyes. That morning he seemed to see himself in a dream addressing himself awake. "Look at yourself," his half-sleeping self murmured to his half-waking self. "So tall, so skinny, so ancient, and yet you can't grow anything better than the straggliest of beards, as if you were a teenager with spots. And yes, admit it, maybe a little cracked in the head, one of those head-in-the-clouds fellows who mistakes cumulus, or cumulonimbus, or even cirrostratus formations for solid ground. Just think back to your favorite piece of music when you were a boy! I know, these days you prefer the warblings you hear on American Idol or The Voice. But back in the day, you liked what your artistic father liked, you adopted his musical taste as your own. Do you remember his favorite record?" Whereupon the half-dream-Smile produced, with a flourish, a vinyl LP which half-awake-Smile recognized at once. It was a recording of the opera Don Quichotte by Jules Massenet. "Only loosely based on the great masterpiece of Cervantes, isn't it," mused the phantom. "And as for you, it seems you're a little loosely based yourself." It was settled. He climbed out of bed in his striped pajamas — more quickly than was his won't — and actually clapped his hands. Yes! This would be the pseudonym he would use in his love letters. He would be her ingenious gentleman, Quichotte. He would be Lancelot to her Guinevere, and carry her away to Joyous Gard. He would be — to quote Chaucer's Canterbury Tales — her verray, parfit, gentil knyght. It was the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, he reminded himself. He had heard many people say that on TV and on the outrE video clips floating in cyberspace, which added a further, new-technology depth to his addiction. There were no rules anymore. And in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, well, anything could happen. Old friends could become new enemies and traditional enemies could be your new besties or even lovers. It was no longer possible to predict the weather, or the likelihood of war, or the outcome of elections. |
| 27 |
He played Holi with the Bhojpuri-speaking descendants of Indian indentured laborers in Mauritius and celebrated Bakr Eid with shawl weavers in the high mountain village of Aru near the Kolahoi glacier in Kashmir. However, at a certain point in early middle age the Interior Event changed everything. When he came to his senses after the Event he had lost all personal ambition and curiosity, found big cities oppressive, and craved only anonymity and solitude. In addition, he had developed an acute fear of flying. He remembered a dream of first falling and then drowning, and was convinced after that that air travel was the most ridiculous of all the fantasies and falsehoods that the comptrollers of the earth tried to inflict on innocent men and women like himself. If an airplane flew, and its passengers reached their destination safely, that was just a question of good luck. It proved nothing. He did not want to die by falling from the sky into water (his dream) or onto land (which would be even less comfortable), and therefore he resolved that if the gods of good health granted him some sort of recovery he would never again board one of those monstrously heavy containers which promised to lift him thirty thousand feet or more above the ground. And he did recover, albeit with a dragging leg, and since then had traveled only by road. He thought sometimes of making a sea journey down the American coast to Brazil or Argentina, or across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, but he had never made the necessary arrangements, and nowadays his unreliable health and fragile bank account would probably not be able to take the strain of such a voyage. So, a creature of the road he had become, and would remain. In an old knapsack, carefully wrapped in tissue paper and bubble wrap, he carried with him a selection of modestly sized objects gathered on his travels: a polished "found art" Chinese stone whose patterning resembled a landscape of wooded hills in the mist, a Buddha-like Gandharan head, an upraised wooden Cambodian hand with a symbol of peace in the center of its palm, two starlike crystals, one large, the other small, a Victorian locket inside which he had placed photographs of his parents, three other photographs depicting a childhood in a distant tropical city, a brass Edwardian English cigar cutter made to look like a sharp-toothed dragon, an Indian "Cheeta Brand" matchbox bearing the image of a prowling cheetah, a miniature marble hoopoe bird, and a Chinese fan. These thirteen things were numinous for him. When he arrived at his room for the night he spent perhaps twenty minutes arranging them carefully around his quarters. They had to be placed just so, in the right relationship to one another, and once he was happy with the arrangement, the room immediately acquired the feeling of home. He knew that without these sacred objects placed in their proper places his life would lack equilibrium and he might surrender to panic, inertia, and finally death. These objects were life itself. |
| 28 |
Deep bonding is a gift the road alone gives to those who honor it and travel down it with respect. The stations along their road would be pit stops on their souls' journey toward a final, mystical union followed by eternal bliss. But he had no wife. No woman had wanted him for long and so there was no child. That was the short version. In the longer version, which he had buried so deep that even he had trouble locating it nowadays, there had been women for whom he had had feelings, whom he had adored almost as much as he now revered Miss Salma R, and these had been women he had known personally. He knew himself to be a man with a true capacity for adoration, an area in which most of his fellow men, being uncivilized ignorant brutes, were sorely deficient. It had therefore been painful to him that almost all the women he pursued had, quite quickly after his pursuit began, done their best to run away. And he had quarreled with the Human Trampoline. Whoever had done what to whom, they had not parted on friendly terms. But maybe he could make amends, if he could remember his sins. This he would try to do. But the "romantic" associations — those ladies were gone for good, and were they even real? Now, as he dedicated himself to the quest for the hand of Miss Salma R, it seemed to him that a small corner of the veil obscuring the past lifted up and reminded him of the consequences of lost love. He saw them pass before his inward eye, the horticulturist, the advertising executive, the public relations dazzler, the antipodean adventuress, the American liar, the English rose, the ruthless Asian beauty. No, it was impossible even to think about them again. They were gone and he was well rid of them and he could not have his heart broken by them anymore. What had happened had happened — or, he was almost sure it had happened — and it was right to bury them deeper than the deepest memory, to place their stories on the funeral pyres of his hopes, to seal them up in the pyramid of his regret; to forget, to forget, to forget. Yes, he had forgotten them, placing them in a lead-lined casket of forgetting far beneath the bed of the remembering ocean within him, an unmarked sarcophagus impenetrable even by the X-ray vision of a Superman, and along with them he had buried the man he had been then, and the things he had done, the failures, the failures, the failures. He had eschewed all thoughts of love for what seemed like an eternity, until Miss Salma R reawakened feelings and desires in his breast which he had thought he had suppressed or even destroyed along with his destroyed liaisons — if indeed they were real, from the real world, and not echoes of the greater reality of women on the screen? — whereupon he recognized a grand passion as it was born in him one last time, and he ceased being an ordinary nobody and became, at long last, the great man he had it within him to be, which was to say, Quichotte. He was childless, and his line would end with him, unless he asked for and received a miracle. |
| 29 |
Maybe he could find a wishing well. He clung to this idea: that if he acted according to the occult principles of the Wish, then miracles were possible. Such was his tenuous grasp on sanity that he had become a student of the arts of wishing; as well as wishing wells, he pursued wishing trees, wishing stones, and, with more and more seriousness, wishing stars. After he completed his investigations, both in dusty library books specializing in astro-arcana and on a number of admittedly dubious websites, several of which triggered an ominous dialog box reading Warning: this site may damage your computer, he grew convinced that meteor showers were the best things to wish upon, and 11:11 P. M. the best time, and that he would need a quantity of wishbones. There were seven meteor showers a year, in January, April, May, August, October, November, and December: the Quadrantids, Lyrids, Eta Aquarids, Perseids, Orionids, Leonids, and Geminids. Over the years he had hunted them down one by one, to catch a falling star with a good timepiece on his wrist and a generous supply of chicken bones in his pocket. He could be determined when he wanted to be. He had already, in years past, chased down the Quadrantids near Muncie, Indiana (pop. 68,625), the Lyrids in Monument Valley, and the Eta Aquarids in the Rincon Mountain District of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. So far these expeditions had failed to bear fruit. Never mind! he told himself. One day soon, Salma R would bear him three, no! five, or why not? seven magnificent sons and daughters. He was sure of it. But, having the impatience of his gray hairs, he decided to continue his pursuits of meteor showers, for which he had more time now that his cousin had relieved him of his duties. The heavenly bodies must have been impressed by his persistence, because that August, on a hot night in the desert beyond Santa Fe, the Perseids granted his wish at the Devils Tower near Moorcroft, Wyoming (pop. 1,063). At 11:11 P. M. precisely he snapped seven wishbones while fire rained down from the skies from the direction of the constellation Perseus — Perseus the warrior, Zeus and DanaE's son, the Gorgonslayer! — and the miracle occurred. The longed-for son, who looked to be about fifteen years old, materialized in the Cruze's passenger seat. The Age of Anything-Can-Happen! How overjoyed he was, Quichotte exclaimed inwardly, how grateful he was to live in such a time! The magic child manifested himself in black-and-white, his natural colors desaturated in the manner that has become fashionable in much modern cinema. Perhaps, Quichotte surmised, the boy was astrologically related to the monochrome inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. Or perhaps he had been seized long ago and now returned by the aliens in the mothership hiding in the sky above the meteors illuminating the Devils Tower, after many years during which he had been studied, drained of color by their experiments, and somehow failed to age. Certainly, as Quichotte came to know the boy, he seemed much older than his years. |
| 30 |
There were issues with his credit cards, and his social media had been hacked too often for it to be a random thing. On one occasion he came home at night and was sure his apartment had been entered even though nothing had been disturbed. If the two guiding principles of the universe were paranoia (the belief that the world had meaning, but that meaning was located at a concealed level, which was very possibly hostile to the overt, absurd level, which meant, in brief, you) and entropy (the belief that life was meaningless, that things fell apart and the heat-death of the universe was inevitable), then he was definitely in the paranoid camp. If Quichotte's craziness was leading him to run toward his doom, then Brother's anxieties were close to triggering a flight response. He wanted to run but didn't know where or how, which made him more fearful still, because he knew that in his spy fiction he had already told himself the answer. You can run but you can't hide. Maybe writing about Quichotte was a way of running away from that truth. It was difficult for him to speak of personal things because he had never been the confessional type. From his boyhood days he had been drawn toward secrecy. As a small child he wore his father's sunglasses to conceal his eyes, which revealed too much. He hid things and watched with glee as his parents searched for them — their wallets, their toothbrushes, their car keys. His friends would confide in him, understanding that his was a serious silence, the silence of a pharaoh in his pyramid; sometimes an innocent confidence, sometimes a not so innocent. Innocent: that they had a crush on such and such a boy slash girl; that their parents drank too much and fought constantly; that they had discovered the joys of masturbation. Not so innocent: how they poisoned the neighbor's cat; how they stole comic books from the Reader's Paradise bookstore; the things they did with the see-above crushed-on girls slash boys. His silence was like a vacuum that sucked the secrets out of their mouths and right into his ears. He made no use of his secret knowledge. It was enough simply to know, to be the one who knew. He kept his own secrets too. His parents looked upon him with a mixture of puzzlement and concern. "Who are you?" his mother once asked him in annoyed tones. "Are you even my child? Sometimes it's like you're an alien from another planet, sent to watch us and gather information, and one day a spaceship will scoop you up and your little green relatives will know all our secrets." This was how she was: capable of emotional brutality and unable, once a clever conceit came into her head, to stop herself from saying it, no matter how deep the wound it might inflict. His father expressed himself more gently, but made the same point. "Look at your little sister," he would tell his son. "Try to be like her. She never stops talking. She's an open book." In spite of his parents' urgings, he went on as he was, reticent about himself and gathering other people's whispers whenever he could. |
| 31 |
Brother had always been proud of the authenticity of the secret world he had created, but now he was becoming afraid of it. Maybe he had come too close to certain uncomfortable truths. Maybe the people who read the Five Eyes books most carefully were the Five Eyes themselves. Maybe they thought it was time to close the "sixth eye," which was watching them a little too well. To attract such unwelcome attention from the Phantoms just as he was averting his gaze from Spookworld was an irony he could do without. He was old, and truth had become far stranger than his fictions, and he no longer had the energy to try to outstrip the news. Hence Quichotte, picaresque and crazy and dangerous, a knight's move out of a deteriorating position on the board. Hence, also, his newly inward gaze, his returned yearning for his lost home in the East. He had stepped away from the past long ago and later it stepped away from him. For a long time he pretended, even to himself, that he had accepted his fate. He was a man of the West now, he was Sam DuChamp, and that was fine. This is what he said when he was questioned: that he was not rootless, not uprooted but transplanted. Or, even better, multiply rooted, like an old banyan tree putting down "prop roots" as it spread, which thickened and in time became indistinguishable from the original trunk. Too many roots! It meant his stories had a broader canopy beneath which to shelter from the scorching, hostile sun. It meant they could be planted in many different locations, in different kinds of soil. This is a gift, he said, but he knew that such optimism was a lie. Now, well past the Psalmist's days of our years, trying by reason of strength to move past threescore and ten toward fourscore, his was often the sad heart of Keats's Ruth, when, sick for home, she stood in tears amid the alien corn. He was coming to the end of the line, and had moved into the general vicinity of the cowled reaper. The borough, the neighborhood, maybe even the zip code. He wasn't quite foot-in-the-ground yet. But it was sobering that the road ahead was so much shorter than the road already traveled. Before Quichotte drove up in his Chevy Cruze with his imaginary son by his side, Brother had almost come to believe that the work had left him, even if life, for the moment, went on. Here was this thing, however mediocre, to which he had given his life, his best self, his optimism; but even the richest seam in the end runs out of gold. When you were your own quarry, when the material you were dredging up lay buried in the caverns of the self, a time came when there was only an emptiness left. So, then, quit! said the wicked angel on his left shoulder. Nobody cares but you. The wicked angel on his left shoulder was the shadow. But on his right shoulder sat the cherub of the light, cheering him, urging him on, refusing self-pity. The sun still rose every day. He still had determination, energy, and the habit of work. He took heart from the great Muhammad Ali regaining his crown after the long wilderness years, defeating George Foreman in Zaire. |
| 32 |
Bobby Darin. But not only the white boys. Also Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters singing "Money Honey." Not Elvis! She was scornful about the truck driver from Tupelo. Who cared about his pelvis or his curling upper lip? Who wanted to step on his blue suede shoes, which were Carl Perkins's footwear first, anyway? He let the film behind his closed eyes run forward now. His father owned and ran a celebrated jewelry store called Zayvar Brother on Warden Road, at the foot of the hill where they lived. Brother's grandfather, his father's father, had opened it long ago, and Pa had proved to be an even finer designer and maker of beautiful things than his dad. ZEvar meant "ornamentation" in Urdu and Zayvar was the Anglophile patriarch's Englishing of the word. He had been an only child, the old man, but he thought Brothers was a businesslike name, and if he couldn't use the plural, the singular would do just as well. Thus, Zayvar Brother, a brother without a brother. People had started calling the whiskered old gentleman Brother Sahib, Mr. Brother, and the name stuck. After grandfather had taken his leave, Pa became Mr. Brother Junior, and so, in time, Brother would be Mr. Brother too. Mr. Brother the Third. A few doors down from the jewelers was Ma's own little enterprise, the idiosyncratic Cakes & Antiques, a front room boasting the best patisserie in the city and a back room in which treasures from all over South Asia could be found: Chola bronzes in perfect condition, lively Company School paintings, enigmatic seals from Mohenjo-daro, nineteenth-century embroidered shawls from Kashmir. When she was asked, as she often was, why she sold this improbable combination of products, she would answer simply, "Because these are the things I love." The quality and originality of the two establishments, combined with Pa's and Ma's inescapable charisma, turned both Zayvar Brother and Cakes & Antiques into Places Where Everybody Went. Amitabh Bachchan bought emerald necklaces for his wife, Jaya, at Zayvar, Mario Miranda and R. K. Laxman offered Ma their original cartoons in return for her chocolate cakes, and "Busybee," Behram Contractor, the chronicler of everyday life for le tout Bombay, loitered around both stores watching the cream of the city come and go, listening for the latest gossip. Ma and Pa's home, too, was full of the artistic and famous. Creative people of all sorts passed through their storied drawing room. The great playback singers Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle were there in person (though never at the same time!). Also cricketers — Vinoo Mankad and Pankaj Roy, the heroes who in January 1956 shared a world-record opening partnership of 413 runs against New Zealand in Madras! The poet Nissim Ezekiel came to call — the bard of Bombay, the island city he deemed "unsuitable for song as well as sense." Even the great painter Aurora Zogoiby herself came over, along with that no-talent buffoon hanger-on of hers, Vasco Miranda, but that's another story. |
| 33 |
If the parents had committed or were committing the bruited indiscretions, they did so in the most discreet fashion. Pa continued to do his work at Zayvar Brother, and Ma was a few steps away at Cake & Antiques, and life went on as normal, in spite of the crackle of things unsaid, audible to all who visited either location, in spite of the hum of the little wall-hung electric fans. And then, almost ten years later, just like that!, they reunited, and the Soona Mahal apartment went poof! even though it had come to feel like home to both children, and then they were back in Noor Ville, and the parents resumed their martini-hour dancing, as if the long years of the Separation were the fantasy, and not this reinvented idyll. Further corrections: By the time of his parents' reunion Brother was twenty and at university in Cambridge, so he wasn't around to watch them begin to dance again. And neither Soona Mahal nor Noor Ville felt like home anymore to a young man intoxicated by the sixties in the West. Meanwhile Sister, at fifteen, stayed in Bombay. At first, the siblings tried to preserve some sort of relationship by playing long-distance chess with each other like good smart Indian children, sending postcards with their moves written in the old descriptive notation, P-K4, P-K4, P-Q4, PxP. But eventually a rift cracked open between the two of them. He was older but she was better than him, and he, a bad loser, stopped wanting to play. Meanwhile Sister, stuck at home watching the nightly parental twirling, grew resentful, understanding that in spite of her academic brilliance Ma and Pa were not inclined to lavish a foreign education on her. Feeling (quite rightly) like the less-loved child, she saw Brother (quite rightly) as the unjustly favored son, and her rage at her parents expanded like an exploding star to engulf her sibling as well. The rift deepened and by now had lasted a lifetime. They had fought, stopped speaking, lived in different cities — he in New York, she in London (after she fought her way out of the cage of her family) — and no longer met. Decades passed. They were trapped in the drama from which their parents had escaped. Pa and Ma performed The Grand Reconciliation until the end of their lives. That was their happy-ending script. Sister and Brother, silently, and far apart, enacted The Death of Love. Seventeen years ago, their mother had died peacefully in her sleep after a last day in which she drove her car, visited friends, and dined out. She came home from her perfect day, lay down, and flew away. Sister had caught a plane home immediately, but by the time her flight landed Pa was dead as well, unable to live without Ma. There was an empty bottle of sleeping pills on his nightstand by the bed in which he had been slain by her unbearable absence. Sister called Brother in New York to tell him about the double tragedy. After that there was only one further telephone conversation, a conversation which killed whatever sibling affection remained. |
| 34 |
Then, nothing. An empty cloud filled the space where family should have been. Brother hadn't met Sister's fashionista daughter, Daughter; she hadn't met his dropout son, Son. Son was his lost child. His only child, who had broken up with him, too, who had broken up with both his parents, and disappeared. (And now here was Quichotte, his invention, inventing a child for himself and bringing him to life. There wasn't much doubt about where that idea had originated.) There were times when Brother thought of himself as an only child as well. No doubt Sister often felt the same way. But only children don't have, in the shadows of their souls, a deep wound where once there had been a younger sister's kiss, an older brother's safe embrace. Only children don't, in their old age, have to listen to their inner voice asking accusatory questions, how can you treat your sister like this, your own sister, don't you want to fix things, don't you see that you should. So he had been thinking about her, about everyone he had lost but mainly about her, weighing the benefits of putting down the burden of their quarrel and making peace before it was too late against the risk of triggering one of her nuclear rages, and unsure if he possessed the courage to make some sort of approach. If he was honest with himself he knew it was up to him to make the first move, because she had a deeper grievance than he did. In a quarrel that had lasted for decades neither party could claim to be innocent. But the simple truth was that, in plain language, he had done her wrong. * This is partly because his relationship with his estranged sibling, Sister, will be central to his story; but also for another reason, which will be given on this page. Miss Salma R, the exceptional woman (and total stranger) to whom Quichotte had declared his undying devotion, came from a dynasty of adored ladies. Think of her family this way: Granny R was Greta Garbo, a great actress who for unexplained reasons abruptly retreated from the world, declaring that she disliked people and open spaces and wanted to be alone. Mummy R was Marilyn Monroe, very sexy and very fragile, and she stole the sportsman prince (a real honest-to-goodness prince) whom Grace Kelly wanted to marry and that became Daddy, who left Mummy for an English photographer smack in the middle of her last movie shoot, and after that Mummy entered a long decline and was eventually found dead in her bedroom, fatally echoing Marilyn's destiny with bottles of pills lying open and empty on her nightstand. And Miss Salma R? She did not inherit Granny's acting genius or Mummy's super sexiness, everyone agreed on that, but her genes did grant her considerable beauty, ease in front of the cameras, as well as violent mood swings and a fondness for recreational and mind-soothing painkillers. As a result, unsurprisingly, she ended up in Hollywood. That was her Bombay history briefly translated into American. The official version could be summarized in the following few words: "She had led a charmed life. |
| 35 |
She came from fame and money and made even more money and achieved even greater fame on her own, becoming the first Indian actress to make it big (very big) in America, to cross what might be called the -wood bridge from Bolly- to Holly-, and then transcended even Hollywood to become a brand, a television talk-show superstar and titanic cultural influencer, in America and India too." The truth was more complex. So then, a longer version: Yes, she was Indian movie royalty, a third-generation member of a family of female legends. Her grandmother, Miss Dina R, had starred in half a dozen of the grand classic neorealist films made in the decade after independence. However, the great star mysteriously fell prey to a whole wolf pack of phobias and dark mental troubles, succumbing to long, silent bouts of the deep blues (which Winston Churchill called the black dog and Miss Holly Golightly would later rename the mean reds) and alternating spells of loud babbling hysteria. She retreated into her beachfront Juhu mansion, remaining behind a veil of secrecy for the rest of her life, never responding to the salacious speculation about her madness that bounced harmlessly off her property's high walls, and until her dying day kept the lights on in her bedroom at night because she was afraid of cockroaches and lizards in the dark. She also broke off all contact with her husband, a well-known Bombay physician whom everyone called Babajan — Baba being an honorific title of respect and jan meaning "darling" — but they never divorced. They lived in separate suites of the Juhu mansion and went about their separate lives. When she ran into him in a corridor by chance, she recoiled as if he were a dangerous intruder, and often actually ran away. After her death by suicide (an overdose of sleeping pills) Babajan told his few remaining friends mournfully that the balance of her mind had been long disturbed and the end was "inevitable." Her daughter, Miss Salma R's mother, the renowned sexpot star Miss Anisa R, remained close to her father for a while, but even before her mother's death Anisa and her father, too, were estranged. Not long after she stopped talking to Babajan she seduced the national cricket captain away from her best friend, Nargis Kumari, also an iconic movie actress. The cricketer was the dashing young raja of Bakwas Senior, popularly known as "the Raj," the prince of a tiny central Indian state (on no account to be confused with the distinctly tinier and obviously much less important state of Bakwas Junior), whose ancestor had once considered employing as private secretary a homosexual Englishman named Forster who was thinking of writing a novel about a passage to India, and looking for a job. (He didn't hire him. Another trivial princeling did.) Yes! A blueblood! But the Raj's true aristocracy was to be seen not in his family tree but in the grace and power of his shot-making on the cricket field, his imperious square cuts, his graceful leg glances, his powerful cover drives and autocratic hook shots. |
| 36 |
He married Miss Salma R's mother in a glamorous three-day wedding at the Taj Palace Hotel in Bombay (a daring, avant-garde affair, because Hindu-Muslim marriages were rare, then as now, even among the elite). Soon afterwards, in an accident described by his jilted ex-fiancEe Nargis Kumari as "God's will," he lost the lower half of his right leg in a car crash on Marine Drive. However, defying divine judgment, he regained his place in the team, wooden leg and all, and became one of the sport's true immortals. They had one daughter, whom he professed to love more than life, but that was before he was overwhelmed by the difficulty of dealing with his wife's Technicolor depressions, the blues, blacks, and reds, and the intervening manias which came in different colors, most often green because during these upswings she went on insane spending sprees, acquiring precious antiquities on the black market at absurdly inflated prices. In the end he retired from cricket and abandoned Miss Anisa R, their daughter Miss Salma R, and his royal inheritance, and ran off to the UK — once again, the peg leg did not prove to be a hindrance — to set up house in a suite at Claridge's hotel which he shared with the previously mentioned English photographer, Margaret Ellen Arnold, who had been sent to do a location story about the film-star wife and left with the husband instead. It occurred to nobody to attach any blame to the prince, who had deserted two women and who, in time, would desert the photographer as well and return to his deeply cushioned and intricately brocaded princely seat to pass the remainder of his days in a happy opium haze. The closest he came to being criticized was when Filmfare magazine ran a photo-story about him titled "Someday My Prince Will Run." But even in this story the (female) writer took the attitude that boys would be boys, and what man would not follow in the Raj's wood-leg-real-leg footsteps if he only could? However, Miss Anisa R was devastated by her very public humiliation. In the words of Nargis Kumari, who was happy to gloat publicly over her former friend's distress, Anisa had "been shown the power of Muslim kismet and of Hindu karma, both of which exact bitter poetic justice upon traitors and wrongdoers." The words hit their mark. Miss Anisa R gave up her acting career and focused on doing charity work with impoverished widows and deserted women as an act of atonement for the crime of stealing a man from a woman who loved him and for the even more shameful error of being incapable of holding on to her husband. She let herself go physically: That has to be said. She became — there is not a polite way of putting this — blowsy. She sagged; for all her good works, her body became the emblem and manifestation of her grief. She wasn't a good mother — too self-absorbed for that — but Miss Salma R grew up perfectly anyway. She was a studious, upright, composed, idealistic, blameless young girl, and as her mother entered her last decline toward second childhood, it was the daughter who played the adult. |
| 37 |
More than one person reported seeing Salma following her drunk mother around at glitzy fundraising events for her women's charities, literally taking glasses of Scotch whisky out of Anisa's hands and pouring the contents into plant pots. "Without the daughter's care," people noted, "the mother would never have lasted as long as she did." Even that daughterly protectiveness proved not to be enough. They had moved into the Juhu mansion after Dina's death and maybe that was a bad move. Babajan still haunted the house, and now it was Anisa who ignored him as her mother had done before her. Miss Salma R had been fond of her grandfather as a child, and at first she tried to mend fences between her mother and Babajan, but it was too late. The darkness that had swallowed Dina R came for Anisa as well. She saved countless women from the gutter but the lower depths claimed her in the end. Miss Salma R was the one who found her mother in what had formerly been Dina's bedroom, cold and overdosed with the lights on in the same bed in which her mother had died, similarly illuminated. There was a cockroach crawling up her dangling arm. Miss Salma R, by this time a nineteen-year-old who had just starred in her first film, did not cry out. She turned and left the room, leaving the lights on, carefully made the phone calls that needed to be made, went to her own room and packed a bag, drove away, and never set foot in that house of death again, leaving to others the task of cataloguing and selling the furniture, the furnishings, the movie memorabilia, and the personal effects — the gowns, the love letters, the photograph albums in which her mother's life lay embalmed. She wanted none of it, and listened to nobody who told her that she was in the grip of traumatic grief and would regret her decisions later. She turned away from the past with all the steely resolve which would take her to the very top of her profession in two continents. Among the elements of the past which she rejected was her aging grandfather. "He's a ghost," she told people. "I won't let any ghosts haunt me now. He needs to find himself alternative accommodation. The house must be sold at once." In one of those extraordinary coincidences that enliven real life but are considered suspect in fiction, she moved into a smart apartment on the very same low hill in Breach Candy where Quichotte had previously been a child, though she was around thirty years younger than her future admirer. Westfield Estate, as this little group of villas and apartment blocks was known — this microscopic urban speck from which the entire universe was born! — was the creation of an Anglophile developer called Suleman Oomer, also the builder of the somewhat similar Oomer Park properties down the road. He gave many of the buildings majestic-sounding English names: Windsor Villa, Glamis Villa, Sandringham Villa, Bal Moral, Devonshire House, and even Christmas Eve. It was in Christmas Eve, the place where Christmas was eternally promised for the next day but never arrived, that Miss Salma R came to roost. |
| 38 |
Unnerved by Miss Salma R's temporal absolutism, the clocks gave up arguing and stopped trying to run the hours in the normal fashion, so that when people looked in their direction to see what the time was, the clocks showed them whatever time they wanted it to be, and in spite of the chronometric havoc that was created by this abdication they still permitted everyone to get home on time. Miss Salma R loved the letters of America. In most of the letters women confessed their secrets to her, their worries about their weight, their husbands, their lecherous bosses, their illnesses, their children, and their loss of faith in a future in which things would be better than they were; and men, too, whispered to her in their emotionally uneducated manner about their inadequacies, both sexual and professional, their fears for themselves and their families, their hostility toward other Americans who did not share their views, and their dreams of glamorous women and new cars. It fell to her to comfort America's anguish, to calm its rages, to celebrate its loves. She had a special soft spot for the stories of recent immigrants and showcased them, from time to time, in a special feature called "Immigreat!" Her audiences were the letters made flesh. She caressed their pets, ate their cuisine, congratulated them on their successful gender reassignments and exam results, praised their gods with them, and introduced them to the celebrities who came smiling and telling funny stories through all her studio days. The letters showed her that the material success of America had impoverished the spiritual lives of Americans, but she also saw that that success was by no means evenly distributed across the broad populous nation, and the absence of material well-being was spiritually impoverishing also. She was a hugger and a kisser and in spite of her youth she quickly came to be thought of as wise, and the America of the letters was a place in constant search of a wise woman to listen to, always looking for the new voice that would make its lives feel rich once again. Times were hard all over, and she was the bringer of joy. The avalanche of the letters gave her a belief in her own bounty. There was enough love and care in her to encompass them all. Her arms would reach out to soothe the totality of America's pain. Her bosom would be America's pillow. The letters allowed her to become the most that she had it in her to be. (She had her own demons to deal with, of course, but when she was preoccupied with the demons of America, her own seemed to recede, at least for a while. About her demons there will be more to say presently.) The two categories of letters which were unlike all the others were the love letters and the letters of hate. Of these, the poison-pen letters were more straightforward and bothered her less. Crazy people, religious nuts, envious people, people who made her the incarnation of their discontents, racists, misogynists, the usual crew. She passed them on to her security team and put them out of her mind. |
| 39 |
Her distant lovers were more upsetting. Many of them were actually in love with themselves and gave her to understand that they were doing her a kindness by bestowing their love upon her. Others simply assumed their approach would be met with a favorable response. And then there were those who begged. When photographs were included, it was usually an unwise move. When the pictures were pornographic, it was especially unwise. The cascades of boasts, assumptions, and hopeless pleas depressed her because of the image of herself she saw reflected in these obsessive gazes. Was she so shallow that these nonswimmers thought they could paddle their feet in her waters? Was she so two-dimensional that they thought they could fold her up and put her in their pockets? She wanted to know how she was seen by others, but this aspect of the knowledge she acquired gave her a heavy heart. Some of the love letters were still addressed to her Five Eyes character, Salma C. These were the letters whose authors seemed to have sunk most deeply into fantasy, identifying themselves as secret, double, or triple agents, or would-be members of the secret world, offering, as their qualifications, details of their patriotism, their skills with guns, and their ability to pass unnoticed in a crowd. She should love them, the Five Eyes guys (and women) said, because who could understand her the way they could? "We are the same," these lovers declared. "I am just like you." The messages arriving via her Twitter feed were mostly pseudonymous, the work of pimply fifteen- or forty-five-year-old male virgins living with their parents in Woop Woop, Arkansas, or Podunk, Illinois. All of them were on or over the edge of illiteracy. America no longer taught its lovers how to spell. Nor did it teach joined-up writing. Cursive script was becoming obsolete, like typewriters and carbon paper. These lovers who wrote in block capitals would not be able to read the love letters of earlier generations. Cursive might as well be Martian, or Greek. For such correspondents Miss Salma R, whose stock-in-trade was empathy, was guilty of feeling just a scintilla of contempt. Very, very occasionally, a letter arrived which was not like the others, like an odd-one-out category on Sesame Street. When this happened, Miss Salma R (perhaps only for a moment) gave the thing her full attention. The first letter from the person signing himself "Quichotte" was one such missive. The thing that leapt out at Miss Salma R immediately was the beautiful penmanship. The pen that wrote these words was a thick-nibbed instrument, a pen to respect, which allowed the author to create perfect copperplate lettering, as if he were making a wedding announcement or inviting her to a debutante ball. The text, too, was unusual. It was one of the rare love letters that were neither bombastic nor wheedling, and it made no assumptions about her. My dear Miss Salma R, With this note I introduce myself to you. With this hand I declare my love. |
| 40 |
There's something else. It's the strangest thing. Sometimes, when I'm in here, rummaging around in my own head, using the words he gave me and the knowledge he passed down, uncovering my memories which are his memories, his life story which I could claim as my own if I wasn't smart enough to know better... just sometimes, not every time... I get the weirdest sense that there's someone else in here. Crazy, right? I'm as crazy as he is, the old guy. But who or what is this third person? I'm just going to say this the way it comes to me to say it, even though it makes no sense and makes me sound... unreliable. It feels to me, at those moments when I have this sense of a stranger, as if there's somebody under slash behind slash above the old man. Somebody — yes — making him the way he made me. Somebody putting his life, his thoughts, his feelings, his memories into the old man the way the old man put that stuff inside me. In which case whose life am I remembering here? The old man's or the phantom's? This is driving me nuts. Who is that under there slash over there slash in there? Who are you? If you're his Creator, are you mine as well? There's a name for this. For the person behind the story. The old guy, Dad, he has a lot of material on this. He doesn't seem to believe in such an entity, doesn't seem to sense his presence the way I'm doing, but his head is full of thoughts about the entity all the same. His head and therefore my head too. I have to think about this now. I'll just come right out and say it: God. Maybe he and I, God and I, could understand each other, maybe we could have a good discussion, because, you know, both imaginary. If you get imagined into being, does that mean that after that you can just be? If I knew how to reach him, God, I'd ask him that. And also, does he really feel seen? I understand that plenty of people say they talk to him every day, they walk with him, etc., but does he really truly do that? I mean step out beside them on the sidewalk, looking out for oncoming pedestrian traffic. I doubt it. I'm the one out here trying not to let people bump into me, because I'm imperceptible. See above. Even God had a mother. That's a difference between us. I'll put that in the plural. Even gods had moms. Holy Mary mother of etc. Also Aditi mother of Indra. Also Rhea mother of Zeus. If I knew how to reach them, I'd ask them about the benefits of mother-love. Were they close? Was it wonderful? Did they talk? Was maternal guidance given and gratefully received? Did they use those bosoms for their pillows? Also, a question regarding beginnings: Did the mothers have mothers? I'm confused. Is there nothing before the mother, no space or time for there to be anything in, until the Birth and after that, everything? I ask because I have only him, Dad, but before him presumably another father and another, begat begat begat. But me, he made me all by himself using what's the word. Parthenogenesis. Water fleas, scorpions, parasitic wasps, and me. |
| 41 |
The boy is homesick. He's literally sick. He has heart palpitations, arrhythmia. He doesn't want Paris. He wants his mother. He wants, what's the word. Kulfi. From a stall near where is it. Chowpatty. He wants to play in the Old Woman's Shoe in, what's its name, Kamala Nehru Park. Those places are gone. He's what now, French? In an apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens listening to Don Quichotte on his father's record player? He doesn't feel French. His father can't handle the sadness — can't handle his son's sadness or his own — and sends him to boarding school in England. I see him. He's a boy from the tropics trapped in the cold Midlands. He's looking at racist words scrawled on the wall of his little study room, wogs go home. He's looking at the perpetrator who's standing there with the crayon in his hand, caught in the act. Then an act of violence. He grabs the little perp, grabs him by the collar of his shirt and the waistband of his pants, swings him off his feet, and battering-rams him headfirst into his racist words. K. O. He thinks he's killed the little shit but he hasn't, no such luck. He wakes up and skulks off, he won't do that again in a hurry. But there are others to take the little perp's place. So: he's capable of sudden violence. Or he was, once. I see him. He's looking at his carefully written history essay. Somebody came in when he wasn't here and ripped it into tiny pieces and left them neatly piled up on his prep board. I see him writing letters to his father, letters filled with fictions. I scored thirty-seven runs today and took three catches in the slips. He can't play cricket but in his letters he's a star. Here's what he never tells his father: There are three crimes you can commit at an English boarding school. If you're foreign, that's one. Being clever is two. And being bad at sports, that's three strikes, you're out. You can get away with two of the three but not all three. If you're foreign and clever but you're a fine cricketer, if you can score thirty-seven runs and take three catches in the slips, you're okay. If you're bad at sports and clever but you're not foreign, you're forgiven. If you're foreign and bad at sports but you're not that smart, you're excused, you'll do. But he had the full trifecta. I see him listening through the paper-thin walls of his study at white boys maligning him in the room next door. At this school there's no TV for the boys to watch. TV came later for him. At school he went alone to the library and afterwards sat alone in his room and plunged into the yellow-jacketed Gollancz editions and flew away into fantasy worlds and alternative universes, away, away across the galaxies, into interstellar space. I see him. He's the first and last man. He's an explorer standing on a mountaintop glacier in Iceland, Snaefellsjokull, watching the shadow of the peak move until it points to the hole which leads to the center of the Earth. He's in a submarine called Nautilus traveling twenty thousand leagues under the sea with a captain whose name means Nobody. |
| 42 |
There was also her Emmy, which she positioned on a bedroom shelf that you couldn't see if the bedroom door was open. She was a woman who concealed her secrets behind bedroom doors and comedy masks. Beneath the surface she worried about finding happiness. She was aware that after her two failed marriages and one dead body, she had put up high fences around her heart, and she didn't know if she would ever meet a man who would persuade her to lower them, or who would be strong enough to demolish her defense system and take her heart by storm. She thought a lot about loneliness, about growing old feeling isolated and alone. On New Year's Eve she rented a boat to watch the fireworks from the water, and just before the midnight hour, when the display was about to start, she realized that everybody aboard the vessel — the captain, the crew, the assistants, and so on — was in her employ. It's New Year's and I have no friends, she thought. I have to pay for people to come and have fun with me. She had no child. That was another thing. She couldn't even allow herself to think about that because it would plunge her down a rabbit hole toward grief. While we are uncovering Salma's dark secrets we should not lose sight of the fact that Salma continued to be the biggest show of its kind. As well as the lighthearted fare that was the show's stock-in-trade, and the emotionalconfessional material, and the debates on women's issues of the moment, she had recently introduced a segment called "While Black" intended to highlight the problems faced by persons of color in America, and this had generated much comment, inevitable controversy, and even higher Nielsen ratings. "While Black" invited onto the show the men who had been arrested at a coffee shop because a white member of staff called the police when they asked to use the restroom while black and waiting for a white friend, and the men on whom a white golfer called the police because they were golfing too slowly while black, and the men at a gym on whom a white man at the gym called the police because, well, because they were exercising while black, and the women on whom the police were called because they were shopping for prom dresses while black, or napping in their own dorm common room at an Ivy League college while black, or renting an Airbnb property while black, or sitting in their own airplane seats while black and a white passenger found them to be "pungent." Such was the power of Salma that the show was able to shame the white accusers who had made the calls to the police into coming along to confess, recognize their own prejudices, apologize, seek forgiveness, hug, and so on. The segment made her a shoo-in for a second Emmy, she was assured, and more importantly was a real contribution to the conversation about race in America. She wanted somebody to hug her when the network bosses told her of their appreciation, someone to take her out for a celebration, to send her flowers and tell her she was wonderful. |
| 43 |
If the Beloved is oblivious to the lover, might the lover want to hunt her down and harpoon her? Might he want to end up tied to her by harpoon ropes and drown with her ecstatically in the black depths of the sea? From hell's heart I stab at thee. Interesting, no?, that that's the line from the book that stuck in his head (and therefore I have it in mine)? Which leads to the million-dollar question: What does he want to do with her ifwhen he ever gets close enough to do anything (which is pretty fucking improbable)? Kiss or kill? There are bits of his head I don't have access to. The answer to my question may lie in those hidden bits. Follow-up question: Why are there bits of his head that deny me access? How does this being-a-part-of-him thing actually work? Okay, I'm guessing here, but here's the way I'm looking at it. I see myself as a visitor in his inner world, and I see that world as an actual place, with, like, cities and countryside and lakes and such. With transportation systems. And across a lot of that world I have no obstacles, I can roam about freely and have access to everything he has access to, to episodes in his past, and shows he's watched, and books he's read, and people he has known, and the whole what's the word. Population. Of his memories and knowledge and thoughts and maybe even dreams. But as I see more and more clearly, he isn't well in the head, and I reckon the parts I can't see are the crazy parts, the parts that are so messed up that the gateways to them are blocked, so ruined that the houses in there have fallen down, like what you see on TV about bombed-out war zones, in, like, Syria. Those parts are like scrambled jigsaw puzzles, or fogbound, or just destroyed, there aren't any planes landing there, the roads are fucked, and maybe they're land-mined also, the whole area is sealed off by, for example, let's say, UN peacekeeping forces, the blue helmet dudes, what do they call them. Smurfs. Which means there's no entry. Not unless the Smurfs let you in. I think we're both disturbed by what happened at Lake Capote. Daddy Q looks like his thoughts are whirling around him like windmills. Right now he just seems lost. After the bird splat at the lake I thought, fine, at least now we're going somewhere. New York or bust. Start spreading the news. We're heading there like everyone does, to be loved or broken, to be born again or to die. What else is there to do that's worth doing? Nothing. There's a woman waiting there for him. She doesn't know she's waiting but she is. Or she does know but she isn't waiting, she doesn't care, and when he learns that lesson then that will be the end of him. And meanwhile, if I may what's the word, interject: What about me? Maybe this adventure could have someone in it for me? That's what I'm interested in. I have an imaginary girlfriend in my head and I need to turn her into a real one. She's walking the New York streets and she's lonely just like me, and wait, what do I see? Is she walking back to me?... |
| 44 |
She assumed that the instruction regarding her own behavior was born of that same electricity, that she was being told to choose sides, that friendship with her grandfather would be seen as disloyalty to her grandmother. However, fear, at her tender age, had not yet entered her life, and because she possessed the same fierce independence of spirit which drove both her mother and grandmother, she sometimes disregarded their orders and formed a personal opinion of Babajan which was, to be frank, fond. In spite of the frowns and admonitions of the older women of the family, she liked sitting beside him in the garden and listening to his deliciously frightening fairy tales about bhoots and jinn, beasts made of smoke and fire who had a fondness for devouring young girls. She liked it that he encouraged her to ask him questions, even dangerous questions. "Babajan," she once said, alarming herself at her boldness, "what if I told you there is no God?" He roared with laughter. "Who put such a damn fool idea in your head?" he answered without a trace of the anger she feared might be his response. "You should be at least fifteen years old before you take up such a position. Come to me then and I'll reply." This picture of a kindly, giggling, tolerant, broad-minded grandfather became important to her. She hid it away in her head because she knew her grandmother and mother would disapprove, but it was an important secret, and she often thought she might try to bring about a reconciliation between her elders, and made grand plans to that effect, as children will. But the ferocity with which her grandmother reacted to all her attempts to discuss Babajan dissuaded her from putting any of her schemes into operation. And now, twelve years old, running, and afraid, she understood that ferocity, she understood everything, as if she had never known anything before. As she ran, her whole world fell apart around her, its entire architecture of love, trust, and believed comprehension. The whole story of her family, what she thought she knew about it, who and how they had been in the world, had to be torn up and rewritten. To lose one's picture of the world, to feel its gilded frame snap and crumble, to see the museum glass beneath which you kept it safe crack from side to side and fall in jagged peaks to earth, and the images themselves slide and dissolve and explode: another term for this experience is going insane. To have this happen when you are twelve years old and utterly devoid of the psychological equipment you need to handle it is even worse. Salma running saw her vision fragment, saw the whole house slip and slide and the sky break over her head and fall like blue missiles bombing the earth, and the sea ahead of her tear off its mask of calm and rise up to engulf the universe. Then her mother was holding her and she was trying to tell her what had happened and her grandmother stood behind them, awful in her rage. A light came into the eyes of the two older women which could have burned a hole in the fabric of time. |
| 45 |
12,554, reflecting a decline of seven percent from the 13,501 counted in the 2000 census), and the mastodon-benighted town of Berenger, New Jersey, was nowhere to be seen, not then, not later, never. Quichotte somehow managed to guide the car down the exit ramp and then pulled over onto the hard shoulder, perspiring and panting. Sancho, wide-eyed, uncomprehending, shook in the seat beside him. "What just happened to us?" Sancho finally asked. Quichotte shook his head. "Now that we have passed through the veil," he said finally, in a weak voice, "I surmise that visions and other phantasmagoria are to be expected." Quichotte, driving the Cruze out of the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan, felt like a snail coming out of its shell. Here was bustle and thrum, hustle and flow, everything he had run from, had spent the better part of his life recoiling from, concealing himself in the heart of the country, leading a small life among other small lives. And now he was back on the main stage, on which the headliner acts performed, he was at the high rollers' table, betting the farm on love. "The fifth valley," he said quietly, and Sancho looked at him for elucidation, but for the moment he said no more. The city (pop. 8,623,000) greeted them with a sudden autumn storm: thunder that said I see you, and who do you think you are?, lightning that said I will fry the flesh off your bodies and your skeletons will dance to my tune, rain that said I will wash you away like the rats on the sidewalk and the bugs in the gutters, and like all the other fools who came here on quests in search of glory, salvation, or love. They took shelter in the Blue Yorker hotel, which stood conveniently just a couple of blocks from the tunnel exit, $103 including parking, excellent value, no ID demanded, no questions asked, cash money required per night in advance, and only when they entered their Oriental Delightsthemed room did they understand that they were in one of the city's numerous no-tell motels, with six free porno stations on the TV. There was adjustable mood lighting. There were strategically placed mirrors. The bellhop, a sleazy old Korean gent wearing an ancient pillbox hat, said that for fifteen dollars they could upgrade to the Arabian Nights room with Jacuzzi and steam bath, and if there was anything else they wanted, maybe good massage, deep tissue massage, massage with happy ending, anything, you understand, he could arrange that too. There were twin double beds in the room, for double the action if you want it, the bellhop said, at which they shut the door in his face. That was no way to talk to a father and his son who had come to the city on a mission. "We will move tomorrow," Quichotte said, "or as soon as the rain stops." Sancho bounced down onto his bed and looked up at his reflection in the angled mirror above him. "No!" he objected. "This is cool." The night was full of noises, of pleasure, pain, and painful pleasure. Sancho slept soundly through it all, Quichotte less soundly. |
| 46 |
But that call did not come. Instead there was a visit they didn't expect. The officer in charge of the search asked to see them together, so Brother went up to Ex-Wife's lavish apartment in the nosebleeds. Stepfather had the grace to absent himself but all his possessions were there, his expensive bad-taste art, a lot of it contemporary Chinese for obvious reasons, he had identity issues, Brother thought, and believed he could solve them by paying through the nose for this crap from Beijing and hanging his framed identity on the walls. That was an ungenerous thought. He took it back. No, he didn't. Anyway, it was irrelevant. Here was the officer in charge of the search, and he was not saying what they had feared he would say. They had found Son. He was alive. He was well. He was not drunk, or a drug addict, or kidnapped, or a member of a cult. In short, he was not in danger. He was still in the country, not abroad. And he didn't want to come home or see his parents or be in touch with them. He had disposed of his old cellphone and would prefer them not to have the new number. This was a choice he had made after giving the matter considerable thought. He was an adult now, he had a place to live, he had work, he had some money in the bank (not the bank with which they were familiar). He wanted them to know these things, and asked them to understand, though he knew it would be hard for them to do so. It might be that at some point in the future he might contact one or both of them and wish to reconnect, but at the present time he was doing what was right for him to do. There followed the usual parental cacophony, demands for more information, weeping, etc., but even as he heard the conventional noises issuing from his own mouth as well as Ex-Wife's, Brother was realizing that he was not surprised. People left him. That was what they did. If Son was now choosing to resign from the family, he was only the latest, perhaps the last, in a long series of resignations: friends, lovers, and Wife (now Ex-Wife). After what he judged to be the minimum necessary period of hysteria, he stood up, thanked the officer for the kindness with which he had relayed this tough information, excused himself, and left. At the new subway station, giant mosaic portraits of artists and musicians — Kara Walker, Philip Glass, Cecily Brown, Lou Reed, Chuck Close — stared at him, judging him and finding him wanting. He would never be canonic. He was no longer even admissible into the canon of good fathers. Bad writer, bad father. Two strikes. He went down below the earth and took the Q downtown. And so, now, Sancho. Brother hadn't expected an imaginary child to show up on the page, but Sancho had brought himself into being, and insisted on remaining. Brother's own Son had dematerialized and ceased to exist by an act of will, for his parents, at least. Quichotte, contrariwise, had made a son appear through the force of his desire and by the kindness of the stars. If I could make Son reappear by praying to meteor showers, Brother thought, I'd be at every meteor shower in America. |
| 47 |
Why had he seen shadows in the shadows, lurking, shadowing him? It was an irrational fear (but then, fear is irrational). He neither knew nor had he leaked any official secrets, he reminded himself. He was not a player in the game. To believe otherwise was vanity. His paranoia was a form of narcissism. He needed to let it go, especially while he was absorbed by this, the most peculiar of all his stories, which for some reason was making him smile happily at his computer screen, allowing him to forsake all thoughts of giving up his chosen profession. Sometimes the story being told was wiser than the teller. He was learning, for example, that just as a real son could become unreal, so also an imaginary child could become an actual one, while, moving in the opposite direction, a whole, real country could turn into a "reality"-like unreality. He was also getting up his courage and planning a trip to London. Maybe peacemaking would work out for him as it seemed to be working out for Quichotte. The olive branch would readily be accepted and they would have each other once again. Yes, replied the more cynical voice in his head, and maybe pigs would fly. But he found himself feeling optimistic. Very well, he thought, London. It was a long time since he had crossed the ocean. He would have to buy a new carry-on bag. He would need some advice about which airline to use. Such were Brother's more or less cheerful thoughts when he returned to his apartment in Kips Bay from an evening stroll along Second Avenue, holding a paper bag containing a six-pack of Corona Light, and dreaming, as he often did, about moving to Tribeca, perhaps into a loft conversion in the Gould Industries building, one hundred years old and formerly a printing house and steel wool manufactory, which stood at the corner of Greenwich and Beach with the arrogance of its double affluence, the history of past industrial successes within its walls yoked to the two-thousand-dollars-per-square-foot eminence of its desirable present, and which was his fairy-tale residence of choice. When in Tribeca he always tried to walk past it even though it made him feel down at heel. He shook off the fantasy and turned his key in his door, to be greeted in his darkened apartment by the bright light from the illuminated iMac screen, which he had left in Flurry screensaver mode, and which was password-protected, but which had somehow been opened. By the light of his hacked desktop he then perceived, seated in the Aeron office chair at the computer station, a large Japanese-American gentleman, who was probably six foot three, six foot four inches in his socks, Brother estimated, and his weight might be what? Two hundred and sixty, two hundred and seventy pounds. The Japanese-American gentleman was wearing an expensive dark blue silk suit with a pale blue silk pocket square, a white shirt with a high thread count, a red HermEs tie in which a small golden cat was chasing a smaller golden wind-up mouse, and a small button badge on his left lapel bearing a miniature image of the Great Seal of the United States. |
| 48 |
It was. One such session was scheduled for that very evening, was that so? It was. Would there be any objection to himself, Trip Mizoguchi, being present at that session? There would not. He would be most welcome. Did they understand that airplanes had been flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City several years previously, and that therefore this elaborate and costly piece of eccentric private amusement might strike certain persons as highly suspicious, and if, in fact, it were to be found to be nefarious in intent, certain persons might wish to put a damn great fist right into the middle of it? Very reasonable. Yes, they perfectly well understood. After Mr. Trip Mizoguchi left the premises, promising to return at the appointed hour that evening, the two photographers, whose mobiles, it should be admitted, were being listened in on, telephoned the forty most beautiful fashion models in Mumbai and said, please come over tonight, there's a person we would like you to charm. When Trip Mizoguchi returned, there was music playing, and drinks were flowing, and the forty most beautiful fashion models in Mumbai were telling him how much they liked a man of such imposing size, how much they liked his suit, his pocket square, his HermEs tie, his square jaw, his smile. At the end of the evening, Trip Mizoguchi thumped the two photographers on their backs, saying, "You guys sure know how to throw a party. Let me know the next time you're having one of these affairs. I'll come down from Delhi to be here. And don't worry about anything. I can see you gentlemen are on the up-and-up. You'll have no difficulty from us." With that, he took his leave, and neither the two photographers nor the forty most beautiful fashion models in Mumbai noticed that at one point in the evening Trip Mizoguchi had briefly been in conversation with one of the male guests, an unimpressive, tall, skinny, nerdy, bespectacled fellow, a recent arrival in Mumbai whom the two photographers had befriended at a nightclub and invited along so that he could make some friends. What was the young fellow's name? The two photographers had trouble remembering. It was like the name of a famous artist. Picabia, something like that. But maybe young Picabia hadn't had a very enjoyable evening, and maybe Trip Mizoguchi got transferred out of India. Anyway, neither of them ever showed up at any of the photographers' soirEes again. But Trip Mizoguchi was a man of his word, at least. There were no further inquiries about the flight simulator. "I wanted to satisfy myself that he was the asset we were searching for," Lance Makioka told Brother. "Mr. Marcel DuChamp, definitively ID'd by me, previously unmasked by us as Quix 97. That was what it was about. We didn't give a damn about the flight simulator. That just got me in the door. Once we had a positive make on Marcel, we were all systems go. We acquired him later that night." "Asset," Brother repeated. "Acquired." "Correct," said Lance Makioka. |
| 49 |
"The truth is, I'm the one who is supposed to be dead. Let's start there. I was a young woman then. I was supposed to die but my body made a different decision. However, it had to accept a number of consequences of that decision. It accepted them and defeated the crab in my breasts. The consequences included a double mastectomy, the removal of a part of my armpit and some of my chest wall muscles too. Also, chemotherapy. By the time you've been through that you no longer think of yourself as alive. You think, I'm lucky not to be dead. That's what I've been ever since: lucky not to be dead, living in the aftermath of an escape. You no longer think of yourself as having gender or sexuality. You think of yourself as an undead thing that is unaccountably continuing to live. In this state of aftermath one craves simple things: sympathy and love. Your father was not good at providing either. "He was some sort of journalist," the Trampoline said, turning back to Sancho. "Freelance. Investigative. He used words like that. Specialist in intelligence. At least in his own opinion. I don't think he did particularly well. But he was a good talker. He said he was delving into the hidden reality of the world, the truth that exists but is buried very deep so that most of us can live among more palatable fictions. The ladies, enough of them, listened. Then they saw through him and walked away. Maybe what's left of him believes he can make this television Salma listen too. "People called him paranoiac and he accepted the label. He had a whole theory of paranoia. I don't think he remembers that now. He said paranoia was to be understood as essentially optimistic, because the paranoid believed that there was a meaning to events, that the world made sense, even though that sense was concealed. Did he ever talk to you about that? No, he has lost that part of himself along with the rest. The opposite of paranoia, he said, was entropy, which was tragic, because it indicated that the universe was absurd. It was good talk. It didn't work so well in print. He had to go on living in that small apartment in Kips Bay. I had already made my money and so there was between us the question of envy. He didn't come here much because he envied me for living here. How ridiculous that was! There was nothing to envy about me at that time. The mutilation, the chemo, the transformation of a woman into an undead entity, a trickster who had somehow gotten away with cheating death. I guess you could envy me for my luck, but he envied me for my apartment. This is the kind of brother he was. Half brother. He wasn't even half a brother to me. "I lifted him up whenever the women left. They always left him, that was a fact. When the gaudy patter ran out they found there wasn't enough of a man there and they excused themselves and exited. He never found anybody to build something real with. But he seemed content in those days just to find the next temporary connection. The next unreal thing. And when they dumped him, he came around. |
| 50 |
His drink spilled, but he caught the glass before it fell. The orange breathing masks appeared from above. The captain spoke rapidly over the intercom, trying to reassure passengers while also giving emergency instructions. It was not necessary at present to put on the breathing masks. Stay in your seats with the belts fastened. This was more than rough air, but the aircraft was under the pilots' control, or so the voice insisted, not wholly convincingly. The 747 lurched, bumped, slalomed first one way, then the other. Many of the passengers panicked. There was weeping and shrieking. There was vomiting too. Brother, for whom this was a bad dream come true, who had always known in a part of his mind that airplanes were simultaneously too massive to fly and too flimsy to resist the immense forces of nature, was interested to note that he remained calm. He continued to sip at his drink. Was it possible that his fear of flying had been cured at exactly the moment at which it was perfectly rational to feel afraid? I've been writing about the end of the world, he thought, and what I was really doing was imagining death. My own, masquerading as everyone else's. A private ending redescribed as a universal one. I've been thinking about it for so long that this doesn't come as a surprise. He raised his glass and toasted the giant death angel, a bare skull visible within a black hooded robe, standing on the horizon and holding the aircraft in one hand and shaking it. The death angel bowed in recognition of the gesture, and let the jumbo jet go. With a brief final shudder the aircraft settled back into its course. After that the flight went smoothly and the passengers entered a mood of near-hysterical camaraderie. The crew handed out champagne for free, even in coach. Brother suspected that some of the passengers were having mile-high sex with strangers in the washrooms. Things were becoming a little rock and roll. He kept his own counsel, finished his drink slowly, and went on thinking about death. Which had been central to his career as a writer until now. He had always felt that a story didn't come alive for him until at least one character hated someone else, or several someone elses, so much that they were prepared to murder them. Without killing there was no life. He knew that other writers could make masterpieces out of accounts of tea parties (e. g., the Mad Hatter's) or dinner parties (e. g., Mrs. Dalloway's) or, if you were Leopold Bloom, out of a day spent walking around a city while your wife was being unfaithful to you back home, but Brother had always needed blood. It was an age of blood, not of tea, he told himself (and others, from time to time). He was flying toward a deathbed now — or somewhere very close to a deathbed — hoping there would be time for a final scene of reconciliation. Sister was in the angel's fist and he didn't seem inclined to let her go. At the end of most lives, he reminded himself, death did not arrive as a crime, but as the great mystery, which everyone had to solve alone. |
| 51 |
He remembered the neighborhood from his student days when he had long hair and a Zapata mustache and wore purple shirts and red crushed-velvet flared pants. In those days, on the street with the famous weekend market, there was what people used to call a head shop called the Dog Shop whose owners had, for unexplained reasons, attached a giant human nose to the wall above the entrance. He had read somewhere that in the old days the area's poor would sometimes steal the dogs of the rich, take them away and train them to answer to different names, and then sell them back to their former owners on this very street. He had gone into the Dog Shop one day and asked if that story was the origin of the name, to be met with stoned hippie blankness. "No, man. It's just a name, man." Too bad, he thought. Even then, half a century ago, the culture was already beginning to be a thing without memory, lobotomized, with no sense of history. The past was for dead people. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. And the restaurant below Sister's duplex was called Sancho. There were moments when it seemed that the whole world was echoing his work in progress. He rang the doorbell. A buzzer sounded and the door to the apartment clicked open. Judge Godfrey Simons, in open-necked white shirt and slacks, stood at the top of the stairs to greet him. The welcome, as Daughter had warned, was not warm. "Look who's showed up at our door after all these years," the judge said. "Don't you think there's something a tiny bit ghoulish about appearing at this juncture after not being bothered to drop us so much as a postcard for donkey's years? Something a teensy bit macabre?" Daughter pushed past him. "Stop it, Daddy." Then, to Brother, "We're very glad to have you. And he's not actually nearly as much of a curmudgeon as he sounded just then." She turned back to her father. "Behave." He snorted, a good-natured sort of snort, and turned away. Brother climbed the stairs and went in. When he had imagined Sister on the other end of the phone, his picture of her had been influenced by her grand accent. He imagined her dressed more or less like the queen, in heavy floral-patterned fabrics that resembled sofa upholstery or curtains, and made her look, in his mind's eye, like human furniture. Sometimes, in an unkindly playful mood, he imagined a tiara on her head and, on her body, the kind of puffy-sleeved, farthingaled ballgown he had seen in Masterpiece Theatre programs about the Tudor royal family. As a result of these fantasies of ballroom wear and upholstery, he was unprepared for the woman he had come to see as she actually was: which was to say, a very sick woman indeed. She was in her bedroom on the upper floor of the duplex, and was unable to come down to greet him, or, as he soon learned, for any other reason. She had lost a lot of weight, and in her nearly emaciated condition needed help to clean herself or perform her bodily functions. The illness was a daily humiliation, but she bore it without complaint. |
| 52 |
We are not husband and wife." But Quichotte in his reverie wanted to say, Can't you see the radiance descending? Can't you hear the angels as they sing? The miracle is upon us, and you are the man who has made it so, and how can I react except with openhearted love? "Tell her," Dr. Smile said, changing the subject, "that we are making product improvements all the time. We will overcome our present obstacles and proceed. Soon we will have a small tablet, only three millimeters diameter, thirty micrograms. It will be ten times more powerful than the InSmile spray. Tell her, if she wishes, this also can be available." Then Quichotte's head swirled, the birds of the park spiraled over him in a phantom dance, and he entered an agon, a great interior struggle, in which his whole being was at war, a battle in which he was at once protagonist and antagonist. The first Quichotte exulted, My love is within my grasp, while the second objected, I am being asked to do a dishonorable thing, and are we not honorable men? The first cried, The miracle is upon me, and I cannot refuse it, and the second replied, She is not sick and this is medicine for the terminally ill. Beside that American oak which was by no means tropical and that Indian cousin who was by no means ethical, a nonsensical verse flowed unbidden through his broken mind. Under the bam Under the boo Under the bamboo tree He understood, to the best of his capacity, his true nature. He was impure. He was the bam and he was also the boo; the flawed as well as the fine, the honorable and the dishonorable too. He was not Sir Galahad, nor was he meant to be. As the realization dawned it was as if the entire structure of his quest fell away, shriveled and dissolved in that light like a night creature that hates the sun. It had been a delusion, the whole business of needing to be worthy, of needing to make himself worthy of her. All that mattered was this opportunity, knocking. This attachE case was all that mattered. Which made him not a knight but an opportunist, and an opportunist was an altogether lower form of life. Altogether unworthy. Then a heretical thought occurred. Was it possible, that she, the Beloved, was unworthy too? What he was being asked to do for her was wrong, yet she was asking it. A goddess or a queen did not ask her knight or her hero, who wore her favor on his helmet, to perform immoral tasks. So if she was asking this, then she was no more a queen or a goddess than he was a hero or a knight. Her request and his fulfillment of that request would topple them both off their pedestals and drag them down into the dirt together. And paradoxically, he thought, if she was no longer a queen-goddess, then she was no longer impossible for him, no longer out of his reach. Her fall from purity made her mortal, human, and therefore attainable. Dr. Smile was saying something. Through the torrent of his thoughts Quichotte heard his cousin say, "Also in every envelope there is Narcan, in case of need. |
| 53 |
"The PL didn't want to do it. But in the Army you obey orders. If somebody with a higher rank tells you to do something, you do it. So Uthlaut split the platoon." Less than an hour of daylight remained by the time Uthlaut had finished dividing the platoon into two elements. After placing himself in charge of the element bound for Mana (designated Serial One, it consisted of two Humvees and four Toyota pickup trucks carrying twenty Rangers and seven Afghan Militia Forces), he hurriedly rolled out of Magarah in the lead Humvee at 6:00 p. m. Absent a road, Uthlaut's convoy drove down an intermittently dry riverbed, followed closely by the second element's convoy, designated Serial Two. A few minutes outside the village they reached a fork in the wadi. Uthlaut's convoy turned downstream, to the left. Serial Two, towing the trashed Humvee, turned upstream, to the right. A British soldier named Francis Leeson, who battled a fierce tribal insurgency in this same area in the late 1940s, wrote a book in which he characterized the terrain as "frontier hills that are difficult of access and easy to defend. When one speaks of them as hills, rolling downs on which tanks and cavalry can operate are not meant, but the worst mountain-warfare country imaginable — steep precipices and narrow winding valleys." Six decades after Leeson's tour of duty, this remains a chillingly accurate description of the landscape that confronted Uthlaut's Rangers. Half a mile west of the junction where the convoys had separated and gone in opposite directions, Serial One entered the mouth of a spectacularly narrow canyon. It was 6:10 p. m., and the lower flanks of the gorge already lay in shadow. The afternoon's warmth had been supplanted by the chill of the advancing evening, prompting the Rangers to don Gore-Tex jackets beneath their body armor. The air smelled of sage, dust, and wood smoke rising from cooking fires in a nearby village. Ahead, the route snaked through a deep, crooked slot the river had gouged into the bedrock of the surrounding mountains. In places the passage was only a foot or two wider than the Humvees and was constricted by vertical limestone cliffs that reduced the sky overhead to a pale blue stripe. Only by sharply craning their necks could the soldiers see the canyon rim. Up there on the heights, far above the gloom of the valley floor, the otherwise barren slopes were dotted with graceful Chilgoza pines still washed with sunlight, their silver bark and viridescent needles glowing in the fleeting rays. The magnificence of the setting was not lost on the Rangers as their vehicles lurched over gravel berms and limestone ledges. This canyon was the most dramatic landform they'd seen since arriving in Khost: the sort of geologic wonder one might encounter in Utah's Zion National Park, or the Mogollon Rim of northern Arizona. One soldier remarked that it would be "an awesome place to go rock climbing." But most of the Rangers were less interested in the natural splendors than in the unnatural hazards that might be lurking somewhere above them. |
| 54 |
Fourteen years later, as he contemplated life from the perspective of an Army barracks, he regarded that catch as a pivotal moment — a confidence booster that contributed significantly to one of his defining traits: unwavering self-assurance. In 1990, Pat matriculated at Almaden's Leland High School, one of the top public schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, both academically and athletically. Before entering Leland he had resolved to become the catcher on the varsity baseball team, but the head coach, Paul Ugenti, informed Pat that he wasn't ready to play varsity baseball and would have to settle for a position on the freshman-sophomore team. Irked and perhaps insulted by Ugenti's failure to recognize his potential, Pat resolved to quit baseball and focus on football instead, even though he'd taken up the latter sport barely a year earlier and had badly fractured his right tibia in his initial season when a much larger teammate fell on his leg during practice. With a November birthday, Pat was among the youngest kids in Leland's freshman class, and when he started high school, he was only thirteen years old. He also happened to be small for his age, standing five feet five inches tall and weighing just 120 pounds. When he let it be known that he was going to abandon baseball for football, an assistant coach named Terry Hardtke explained to Pat that he wasn't "built like a football player" and strongly urged him to stick with baseball. Once Tillman set his sights on a goal, however, he wasn't easily diverted. He told the coach he intended to start lifting weights to build up his muscles. Then he assured Hardtke that not only would he make the Leland football team but he intended to play college football after graduating from high school. Hardtke replied that Pat was making a huge mistake — that his size would make it difficult for him ever to win a starting position on the Leland team, and that he stood virtually no chance of ever playing college ball. Pat, however, trusted his own sense of his abilities over the coach's bleak predictions, and tried out for the Leland football team regardless. Six years later he would be a star linebacker playing in the Rose Bowl for a national collegiate championship. Twenty months after that he began a distinguished career in the National Football League. Midway between San Jose and Oakland, the municipality of Fremont rises above the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, a city of 240,000 that's always existed in the shadow of its flashier neighbors. This is where Patrick Daniel Tillman was born on November 6, 1976. Not far from the hospital where Pat entered the world is a commercial district of pharmacies, chiropractic clinics, and fast-food restaurants bisected by a four-lane thoroughfare. Along three or four blocks of this otherwise unremarkable stretch of Fremont Boulevard, one finds a concentration of incongruously exotic establishments: the Salang Pass Restaurant, an Afghan carpet store, a South Asian cinema, a shop selling Afghan clothing, the De Afghanan Kabob House, the Maiwand Market. |
| 55 |
Inside the latter, the shelves are stocked with hummus, olives, pomegranate seeds, turmeric, bags of rice, and tins of grapeseed oil. A striking woman wearing a head scarf and an elaborately embroidered vest inlaid with dozens of tiny mirrors stands at a counter near the back of the store, waiting to buy slabs of freshly baked naan. Little Kabul, as this neighborhood is known, happens to be the nexus of what is purportedly the highest concentration of Afghans in the United States, a community made famous by the best-selling novel The Kite Runner. By loose estimate, some ten thousand Afghans reside in Fremont proper, with another fifty thousand scattered across the rest of the Bay Area. They started showing up in 1978, when their homeland erupted into violence that has yet to abate three decades later. The chaos was sparked by accelerating friction between political groups within Afghanistan, but fuel for the conflagration was supplied in abundance and with great enthusiasm by the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union as each maneuvered to gain advantage in the Cold War. The Soviets had been lavishing billions of rubles in military and economic aid on Afghanistan since the 1950s, and had cultivated close ties with the nation's leaders. Despite this injection of outside capital, by the 1970s Afghanistan remained a tribal society, essentially medieval in character. Ninety percent of its seventeen million residents were illiterate. Eighty-five percent of the population lived in the mountainous, largely roadless countryside, subsisting as farmers, herders, or nomadic traders. The overwhelming majority of these impoverished, uneducated country dwellers answered not to the central government in Kabul, with which they had little contact and from which they received almost no tangible assistance, but rather to local mullahs and tribal elders. Thanks to Moscow's creeping influence, however, a distinctly Marxist brand of modernization had begun to establish a toehold in a few of the nation's largest cities. Afghanistan's cozy relationship with the Soviets originated under the leadership of Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan, a Pashtun with fleshy jowls and a shaved head who was appointed in 1953 by his cousin and brother-in-law, King Mohammed Zahir Shah. Ten years later Daoud was forced to resign from the government after launching a brief but disastrous war against Pakistan. But in 1973 he reclaimed power by means of a nonviolent coup d'Etat, deposing King Zahir and declaring himself the first president of the Republic of Afghanistan. A fervent subculture of Marxist intellectuals, professionals, and students had by this time taken root in Kabul, intent on bringing their country into the twentieth century, kicking and screaming if need be, and President Daoud — who dressed in hand-tailored Italian suits — supported this shift toward secular modernity as long as it didn't threaten his hold on power. Under Daoud, females were given opportunities to be educated and join the professional workforce. |
| 56 |
The tenets of Pashtunwali are fluid, highly nuanced, and occasionally contradictory. According to the precept of melmastia, a Pashtun is obligated to show hospitality to all visitors, especially strangers. Guests are to be fed, sheltered, and protected from harm; if they request it, even mortal enemies must be given sanctuary. According to the precept of badal, any injustice — no matter how slight — must be avenged. If a man suffers even the relatively minor insult of a personal taunt, for example, the insulted party must shed the taunter's blood; if the taunter flees before justice can be carried out, the blood of his closest male relative must be shed in his stead. Endeavoring to uphold this stricture, families sometimes engage in deadly feuds that have been known to drag on for decades. At their root, most aspects of Pashtunwali are about preserving honor and respect. And in Pashtun society, respect ultimately derives from demonstrations of strength and courage. When Americans or Europeans hear accounts of entire families wiped out in the name of badal, or one Pashtun beheading another to redress a seemingly inconsequential insult, the typical reaction is shock and revulsion. The tenets of Pashtunwali are hardly unique to Central Asia, however. In American cities, for instance, it is not uncommon for adolescents to be gunned down for showing disrespect to gang members. And if a Red Sox pitcher beans a Yankee batter, nobody is the least bit surprised when the Yankee pitcher hurls a fastball at the head of a Red Sox batter as payback in the next inning. — — — — Pashtunwali certainly wouldn't have struck Pat Tillman as an alien concept. The notion of personal honor, and the imperative of upholding it, were things he was taught at an early age, and he took them very seriously. Pat's father — also named Patrick, albeit with a different middle name — grew up in Fremont, married Pat's mother a couple of years after graduating from high school, and then attended both college and law school while working full-time to support his new family. He had been raised according to traditional masculine values, and he passed along those same old-fashioned ideals to his sons. Young Pat and his brothers were instructed to tell the truth, to respect their elders, to stand up for the vulnerable, and to keep their promises. Tillman pEre also impressed upon the boys the importance of defending their honor, with their fists if necessary. When Pat started playing high-school football as a thirteen-year-old, he understood that he would need to block and tackle with exceptional intensity to compensate for his small size, and that he couldn't afford to show fear or vulnerability if he hoped to win the respect of coaches, teammates, and adversaries. He therefore adopted an intimidating, cast-iron demeanor on the field, although beneath the armor was a sensitive kid who was easily moved to tears in private. Pat sometimes found it advantageous to flaunt his toughness off the gridiron as well. |
| 57 |
The battle for Kabul ignited a catastrophic civil war. As Coll wrote, Kabul plunged into violence and deprivation during 1993. Hekmatyar pounded the city indiscriminately with hundreds of rockets from his ample stores, killing and wounding thousands of civilians. The old mujahideen leaders realigned themselves in bizarre temporary partnerships. They fought artillery duels along Kabul's avenues, dividing the city into a dense barricaded checkerboard of ethnic and ideological factions. Shi'ite militia fought against Hekmatyar around Kabul's zoo, then switched sides and fought against Massoud. Sayyaf's forces allied with his old Islamic law colleague Burhanuddin Rabbani and hit the Shi'ites with unrestrained fury, beheading old men, women, children, and dogs. Dostum's Uzbek militias carried out a campaign of rapes and executions on Kabul's outskirts. Massoud hunkered down in the tattered defense ministry, a decaying former royal palace, and moved his troops north and south in running battles. The electricity in Kabul failed... Roads closed, food supplies shrank, and disease spread. About ten thousand Afghan civilians died violently by the year's end. At least 40 percent of Kabul was reduced to rubble by the fighting and shelling, but the effects of the civil war extended far beyond the capital. As a bulwark against anarchy, people in the provinces retreated beneath the relatively benign tyranny of their clans, where the mullahs and commanders of local militias provided a semblance of security and order. This atomization of the nation — the hunkering of the population into a thousand premodern fiefs — proved to be ideal conditions for incubating a singularly virulent strain of terrorism that would shortly capture the attention of the world, and most especially the United States. At 9:18 Pacific standard time on the morning of February 26, 1993, as Pat was attending class at Leland High School, a fifteen-hundred-pound bomb improvised from fertilizer, fuel oil, nitroglycerin, sulfuric acid, and sodium cyanide packed into the back of a rented Econoline van was detonated three thousand miles across the country from Almaden, in a parking garage beneath the north tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. The explosion blasted a hundred-foot-wide cavity through six stories of steel-reinforced concrete and created a seismic shock wave felt more than a mile away. Although more than a thousand New Yorkers were injured, only six people (who had the bad luck to be eating lunch in a cafeteria directly above the blast) were killed. Because the death count was relatively low and there was scant visible damage to the exterior of the building, the attack didn't raise a durable concern among most Americans. The bombers were generally portrayed as inept amateurs who had come nowhere close to bringing down the massive tower. Much was made of the fact that one of the perpetrators was so dim-witted that after the attack he attempted to retrieve his deposit for the destroyed van from the Ryder agency in New Jersey where he'd rented it. |
| 58 |
Smuggling narcotics was just one among many criminal endeavors pursued by the warlords, whose entrepreneurial instincts had them constantly looking for ways to expand their sources of revenue. So-called checkpoints, for instance, sprouted like noxious weeds along every road in Afghanistan. The major thoroughfares — especially Highway A1, which formed a giant loop around the entire nation to link its principal cities — were plagued by hundreds if not thousands of such checkpoints, typically consisting of a chain or a log pulled across the road, attended by three or four bearded men brandishing AK-47s. Every time a trucker, farmer, or other traveler encountered one of these roadblocks, he would be asked at gunpoint to pay a "road tax." Refusal was not an option. Women were sometimes raped. Sanghisar is linked to Highway A1 via a two-mile maze of crude dirt lanes. After the junction with the paved highway, twenty-three additional miles of potholed macadam lead east to Kandahar City — the provincial capital and second-largest city in Afghanistan. In 1994, during a routine trip to Kandahar, Mullah Omar was stopped and shaken down for cash at five different checkpoints on this one short stretch of highway, which made him so angry that he organized a tribal council — a jirga — of more than fifty mullahs to eradicate the roadblocks and halt the extortion. The religious leaders decided to start small by pooling their weapons, forming a militia of their own, and forcefully removing a single checkpoint — the one nearest to Sanghisar. It was taken for granted that blood would be spilled, but they believed their cause was righteous and saw no other option, in any case. On the appointed day they approached the checkpoint warily with their rifles locked and loaded, prepared for a firefight, but as they drew near, a surprising thing happened: the hooligans manning the checkpoint fled without firing a shot. Encouraged, the mullahs turned their attention to the next checkpoint several miles down the road, and the outcome was similar. Before the week was out, they succeeded in removing every roadblock between Sanghisar and Kandahar. And thus was the Taliban created. The name — a Pashto word meaning "students of Islam" — was bestowed by Omar. The warlords of the day, unrestrained by any law or governing body, committed reprehensible acts with impunity. Seizing young boys and girls and forcing them into sexual slavery were routine occurrences. According to Ahmed Rashid's book Taliban, soon after the Taliban was founded, Sanghisar residents alerted Omar that a local commander had abducted two teenage girls, their heads had been shaved and they had been taken to a military camp and repeatedly raped. Omar enlisted some 30 Talibs who had only 16 rifles between them and attacked the base, freeing the girls and hanging the commander from the barrel of a tank... A few months later two commanders confronted each other in Kandahar, in a dispute over a young boy whom both men wanted to sodomize. |
| 59 |
In the fight that followed civilians were killed. Omar's group freed the boy and public appeals started coming in for the Taliban to help out in other local disputes. Omar had emerged as a Robin Hood figure, helping the poor against the rapacious commanders. His prestige grew because he asked for no reward or credit from those he helped, only demanding that they follow him to set up a just Islamic system. Tall and sinewy, Omar is a shy, uncharismatic man who lost his right eye to shrapnel while fighting Najibullah's communist forces during the mujahideen's failed assault on Jalalabad in 1989. Although a lifelong scholar of Islam, he possesses a plodding, narrow intellect and has little knowledge of, or interest in, worldly affairs. His interpretation of the Quran is stringently literal. But at some point during 1994 the Prophet Muhammad came to this humble village mullah in the form of a vision, in which it was revealed to Omar that Allah had chosen him to undertake the task of bringing peace to Afghanistan. Omar, who placed great stock in dreams and apparitions, resolved to obey the Prophet's commandment. Toward that end he began recruiting students from madrassas — religious schools — to join his cause. Although he was not a dynamic speaker, Mullah Omar made up for his lack of personal charm with earnestness and unwavering piety. His pitch to the students was well received, particularly in the numerous madrassas that had sprung up in the Pashtun tribal districts that lay just across the border in Pakistan. For nearly fifteen years more than two million Afghan refugees had been subsisting in squalid refugee camps on the Pakistan side of the frontier, and the madrassas there were teeming with the sons of these refugees — young men indoctrinated by fire-breathing Saudi clerics preaching the fundamentalist Wahhabi doctrine. These clerics instructed the Afghan youths to emulate the righteous habits of the Prophet Muhammad with the aim of reinstating the caliphate he had established in the seventh century. To restore the world to this fabled state of purity, they were urged to immerse themselves in the holy spirit of jihad. As Lawrence Wright explains in The Looming Tower, These boys had grown up in an exclusively male world, separated from their families for long periods of time. The traditions and customs and lore of their country were distant to them. They were stigmatized as beggars and sissies, and often preyed upon by men who were isolated from women. Entrenched in their studies, which were rigidly concentrated on the Quran and Sharia and the glorification of jihad, the talibs imagined a perfect Islamic society, while lawlessness and barbarity ran rampant all around them. They lived in the shadows of their fathers and older brothers, who had brought down the mighty superpower, and they were eager to gain glory for themselves. Whenever the Taliban army required reinforcements, the madrassas in Peshawar and the Tribal Areas simply shut down classes and the students went to war, praising God as the buses ferried them across the border. |
| 60 |
But the arrival of Mullah Omar's army on Kabul's outskirts frightened the mujahideen commanders into calling a hasty truce and joining forces against the Taliban — a coalition dubbed the Northern Alliance. Through most of the spring and summer the struggle for the capital degenerated into a bloody stalemate in which several thousand civilians were killed by Taliban rocket attacks. Then, in August, Omar persuaded Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to increase their support in order to provide the Taliban with the means to launch a decisive offensive. In a shrewd tactical move, this offensive was not directed at Kabul itself. Instead, the Taliban skirted the capital and attacked important Northern Alliance bases to the north and east, which were captured with ease. The Taliban were fortified in these battles by swarms of fresh recruits from madrassas across the border, whose arrival at the front lines was expedited by Pakistan. By late September the Taliban had surrounded Kabul, and had severed all lines of supply to the Northern Alliance. Ceding to the inevitable, under the cover of darkness Massoud pulled back all the way to his redoubt in the Panjshir Valley, deep in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, leaving Kabul virtually undefended. On the night of September 26, 1996, Mullah Omar's fighters rolled into the capital without resistance, wearing their trademark black turbans and flying the white Taliban flag from their Toyota Hilux pickup trucks. The first thing they did was search out the ex-president and Soviet puppet, Mohammed Najibullah. He was found around 1:00 a. m. at his residence inside a United Nations diplomatic compound, where he had been living under house arrest since being forced from office in 1992, spending his days lifting weights, watching satellite television, and translating an English history of Afghanistan into his native Pashto. The five men who found him were led by the commander of the assault on Kabul, a Talib named Mullah Abdul Razaq. During the Najibullah regime, the Soviets had killed several members of Razaq's family, and he'd been waiting to exact revenge on Najibullah ever since. After brutally beating Najibullah and his brother, Shahpur, Razaq and his men drove them to the Presidential Palace, where Najibullah was castrated and then dragged through the streets around the palace behind a truck, still alive. Finally he was shot to death, Shahpur was strangled, and wire nooses were twisted around the necks of both brothers. They were then strung up from a police watchtower above a traffic circle in the middle of Kabul. A mob formed around the dead men, beat their bodies with sticks, and shoved rolled-up rupees into their nostrils. This was not the sort of "order" that had been envisioned by Western governments when they expressed the hope that Mullah Omar would prove to be the Pashtun equivalent of George Washington and become the savior of his nation — a nation that Omar had recently renamed the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. |
| 61 |
One of the things Pat's parents emphasized to the Tillman boys as they were growing up was that whining wasn't acceptable behavior. And true to the family ethos, Pat never complained about his stint behind bars. When he was released from juvenile hall in late July, he admitted that being locked up had been hard and had tested him. He insisted, however, that he had learned more from the whole regrettable experience than from "all the good decisions he ever made," as he later told Sports Illustrated. According to Marie, "He looked around at the kids he was in jail with and didn't see himself as that kind of person. He wasn't some kid who was constantly in trouble and it finally caught up to him. He'd never been arrested or even suspended from school. And now here he was spending a month in juvenile hall with a bunch of kids who had some pretty serious criminal records. It was definitely a wake-up call for Pat." Although it was an expensive lesson, he'd been shown that good intentions were not enough to ensure a positive outcome. He learned something about the perils of acting rashly, without first considering potential consequences. If his subsequent behavior is any indication, being locked up for thirty days was a turning point in Pat's life. The transformation would turn out to be a long, drawn-out process rather than an overnight personality makeover, but it was nevertheless profound, and it began to reveal itself before he was even out of jail: he started to approach his intellectual development with the same kind of discipline he'd long applied to his athletic development. Throughout high school Pat had received Bs and Cs with the occasional A on his report cards. He didn't read much. When he went to juvenile hall, however, his mother started bringing him books to pass the time, and it initiated a genuine passion for reading that persisted for the rest of his life. After he was released from jail, Pat had about a week until he was due to show up at Arizona State to begin training camp. On August 2, he flew to Arizona, accompanied by Marie, his parents, and his brother Richard. When they walked out of the Phoenix airport, the temperature was well over a hundred degrees. The midsummer heat lay upon the city like a massive weight that seemed to crush the vitality in everything it touched. Being able to bear such heat for more than a few minutes was difficult to imagine, and the entire family was taken aback. Pat nevertheless accepted it as a fact of Arizona life and resolved to adapt. As it turned out, the heat was relatively easy for him to deal with. Homesickness, though, was another matter entirely during his first months away from New Almaden. "It was an especially weird transition for him," Marie explains, "because two days after his high-school graduation he went to jail, and then when he got out, he pretty much went straight to college. He was surprised by how much he missed his family and all his friends back in Almaden. Most people don't realize it, because Pat comes across as such a tough person, but he's a homebody. |
| 62 |
Pat couldn't get enough of the place and frequently sojourned there during the seven and a half years he lived in Arizona. One afternoon during Pat's tenure as a Cardinal, he and Kevin went hiking along the rim of Oak Creek Canyon, six miles north of Sedona near Slide Rock State Park. Their route followed the edge of a sheer cliff overlooking the creek. As they walked along the brow of the precipice, they passed a ponderosa pine growing from a jumble of jagged boulders on the bottom of the canyon about ten or twelve feet away from the vertical cliff face. The ledge on which they stood was level with the upper branches of the pine, and Pat decided it would be an interesting challenge to jump from the ledge to the treetop. Pat pondered the leap for a while, stepped up to the brink, walked away, stepped up to the lip again, and then walked away once more to contemplate the jump for a while longer. After several long minutes, he approached the edge yet again and then launched himself into the void with all the power he could generate. So much adrenaline was surging through his bloodstream that he jumped harder than necessary, causing him to slam into the tree with excessive force. He held on, but it wasn't pretty. Two weeks later, Pat repeated the hike along the rim of Oak Creek Canyon with Kevin, Brandon Hill, and two other friends. When they arrived at the place where Pat had made the death-defying jump, he decided to do it again. He wanted to see if he could execute the maneuver with less effort this time and stick the landing more gracefully. When Brandon looked at what Pat intended to do, he thought it was insane. The world record for the standing long jump is twelve feet two inches — only slightly farther than the distance from the canyon rim to the top of the pine. If Pat failed to make it all the way across the gap, or did manage to leap that far but didn't get a solid grip on the tree, he would plummet into the boulders at the bottom, almost certainly killing himself. Pat, however, was sure that he would avoid these outcomes. He took a moment to eyeball the distance to a strong-looking horizontal branch, and to calculate his trajectory. Then, says Brandon, "he walked up to the edge of the cliff, perfectly composed. His posture was like a gymnast or a diver, only more stable. Most people doing something like that would waver a little. Not Pat. He looked totally in command. In one smooth motion he crouched down, swung his arms, and leapt. Just like that. No hesitation. Didn't think about it at all. It was unbelievable." Pat judged the leap perfectly. After flying across the gap, Brandon recalls, "he clamped his big old paws around this eight-inch-thick branch he'd been aiming for. His body swung pretty hard from the momentum, but he didn't have any trouble holding on. Then he threw a leg up onto the branch and just shinnied down the trunk to the ground like the jump was no big deal. Sometimes I still lie awake at night thinking about it." As startling as this leap was, it was run-of-the-mill for Pat. |
| 63 |
This of course only enhanced the enjoyment of the run and soon I was off the trail and along the brilliant turquoise river." Pat loved turning encounters with natural obstacles — boulders, rivers, fallen logs — into makeshift sport. "Out of the blue, he would always come up with creative ways to challenge himself," says his friend Alex Garwood, who is married to Marie's older sister, Christine. Garwood remembers once going on a hike with Pat near Sedona when Pat suggested they abandon the trail and instead make their way down the middle of Oak Creek by jumping from rock to rock: Pat wanted to see how far he could go without getting his feet wet. We went at least a couple of miles that way. My feet got very wet, very soon. I slipped and fell in repeatedly. He didn't get his feet wet at all. And it was so fun to watch. He not only demonstrated exceptional athletic ability, but brains to match. It was almost like a chess game to him: thinking it through, planning his moves in advance, jumping from rock to rock, rock to bank, bank to tree branch to log to rock. Making these incredibly long, incredibly graceful jumps. And having the trust that he could do it. He had amazing balance — there was a way he'd move his hands to keep his balance that was distinctively Pat. After Switzerland, Pat and Marie made stops in Venice, Florence, and Rome. On the coast of northern Italy they visited Cinque Terre, where Pat scrambled up the sea cliffs in Monterosso. "Because I hadn't climbed in a while," he admitted, "I felt a bit nervous on some of the rocks." They paused for a couple of days on the French Riviera, which he thought was overrated. In Monaco, he wrote, one could sense the proximity of "big money but you also feel like the party is hidden somewhere... Maybe my blue-collarness is getting the better of me here." Of Cannes, he remarked, "Perhaps I was expecting a bit too much... Was it wrong to expect spectacular beaches? ... Was it wrong to expect hotties everywhere, or at least every now and again?" By March 25, Pat and Marie had returned to Paris to rendezvous with Christine and Alex Garwood, who had flown over from California to accompany them for the final two weeks of the trip. After worrying about how pricey the city was, Pat wrote, "Expensive or not, Marie and I should enjoy Paris with the company of Alex and Chris. Marie and I have done a pretty good job of staying off each other's throats but the extra travelers should give Marie a much needed break from me... Naturally, the trip has a way of bringing us very close together while also getting us ultra pissed-off at one another. Needless to say I have truly enjoyed Marie's company and conversation. Hopefully she feels the same... Hopefully." The next journal entry begins: It wasn't my fault! Blame Alex... Blame Paris... Oh Lord!! I got fucking hammered last night. Beyond hammered ... Because we were in Paris, the ladies wanted a nice dinner. Little did they know what they were in for... The restaurant was small and quaint. |
| 64 |
The Sunday after that, the Cardinals flew to Philadelphia to play Donovan McNabb and the red-hot Eagles in Veterans Stadium. Sixty-six thousand three hundred and sixty fans were there, a sellout, to cheer their beloved Eagles. The start of the game was delayed nine minutes, however, so that a speech from the president of the United States could be broadcast live to the crowd. At 1:00 p. m., as the players from both teams stood on the field before the opening kickoff, a surreal image of George W. Bush materialized above them on the stadium's JumboTron. Dressed in a dark suit with a red tie, sitting in the White House Treaty Room with an American flag behind his right shoulder, the president pronounced, "Good afternoon." On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime... More than two weeks ago, I gave Taliban leaders a series of clear and specific demands: Close terrorist training camps; hand over leaders of the al-Qaeda network; and return all foreign nationals, including American citizens, unjustly detained in your country. None of these demands were met. And now the Taliban will pay a price. By destroying camps and disrupting communications, we will make it more difficult for the terror network to train new recruits and coordinate their evil plans. Initially, the terrorists may burrow deeper into caves and other entrenched hiding places. Our military action is also designed to clear the way for sustained, comprehensive and relentless operations to drive them out and bring them to justice... We did not ask for this mission, but we will fulfill it. The name of today's military operation is Enduring Freedom. We defend not only our precious freedoms, but also the freedom of people everywhere to live and raise their children free from fear... In the months ahead, our patience will be one of our strengths — patience with the long waits that will result from tighter security; patience and understanding that it will take time to achieve our goals; patience in all the sacrifices that may come. Today, those sacrifices are being made by members of our Armed Forces who now defend us so far from home, and by their proud and worried families. A Commander-in-Chief sends America's sons and daughters into a battle in a foreign land only after the greatest care and a lot of prayer. We ask a lot of those who wear our uniform. We ask them to leave their loved ones, to travel great distances, to risk injury, even to be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice of their lives. They are dedicated, they are honorable; they represent the best of our country. And we are grateful. To all the men and women in our military — every sailor, every soldier, every airman, every coastguardsman, every Marine — I say this: Your mission is defined; your objectives are clear; your goal is just. |
| 65 |
If it was the right thing for people to go off and fight a war, he believed he should be part of it. "He saw his life in a much bigger way than simply, 'I am a professional football player, and if I walk away from this, my life is over.' Football was part of who he was, but it wasn't the be-allend-all. He was looking in other directions even prior to 911. I always knew he would stop playing football before they had to kick him off the field. It was just a matter of time... I mean, Pat could have played for years, retired, then golfed for the rest of his life. But I knew he was never going to do that." After carefully weighing all the factors, Pat sat down at his computer and typed a document titled "Decision," dated April 8, 2002: Many decisions are made in our lifetime, most relatively insignificant while others life altering. Tonight's topic ... the latter. It must be said that my mind, for the most part, is made up. More to the point, I know what decision I must make. It seems that more often than not we know the right decision long before it's actually made. Somewhere inside, we hear a voice, and intuitively know the answer to any problem or situation we encounter. Our voice leads us in the direction of the person we wish to become, but it is up to us whether or not to follow. More times than not we are pointed in a predictable, straightforward, and seemingly positive direction. However, occasionally we are directed down a different path entirely. Not necessarily a bad path, but a more difficult one. In my case, a path that many will disagree with, and more significantly, one that may cause a great deal of inconvenience to those I love. My life at this point is relatively easy. It is my belief that I could continue to play football for the next seven or eight years and create a very comfortable lifestyle for not only Marie and myself, but be afforded the luxury of helping out family and friends should a need ever arise. The coaches and players I work with treat me well and the environment has become familiar and pleasing. My job is challenging, enjoyable, and strokes my vanity enough to fool me into thinking it's important. This all aside from the fact that I only work six months a year, the rest of the time is mine. For more reasons than I care to list, my job is remarkable. On a personal note, Marie and I are getting married a month from today. We have friends and family we care a great deal about and the time and means to see them regularly. In the last couple of months we've been skiing in Tahoe, ice climbing in Utah, perusing through Santa Fe, visiting in California, and will be sipping Mai Tais in Bora Bora in a little over a month. We are both able to pursue any interests that strike our fancy and down the road, any vocation or calling. We even have two cats that make our house feel like a home. In short, we have a great life with nothing to look forward to but more of the same. However, it is not enough. For much of my life I've tried to follow a path I believed important. |
| 66 |
He offered to help me out. Immediately I noticed his appearance. He was quite a large-size man. But it was his vocabulary I noticed most, and his demeanor, and his poise." It was the start of an enduring friendship among Tulio, Pat, and Kevin. "I had no idea who Pat was at the time," Tulio says. "Neither he nor Kevin ever mentioned that he was a professional football player. I found out later from the chatter that he was famous. We ended up going through all of basic training together, and I depended on Pat and Kevin for intelligent conversation. I guess they did the same with me. We counted on each other for support. We had college degrees, which set us apart from almost all the other recruits in our cycle. And Pat and I were both married. We just hit it off." Six days after the Tillmans arrived at Thirtieth AG, some high-ranking officers showed up at their bay for an inspection, and Pat wrote that encountering them was "awkward. Getting used to the idea of saluting to officers constantly ... is odd. Of course I understand and appreciate the point of showing respect to superiors but the caste separation between officers and enlisted men is foreign." This, alas, was only the first of many aspects of military culture that struck Pat as archaic, bizarre, and counterproductive. On July 17, Pat happily noted in his journal: We are leaving this place tomorrow and going down to start bootcamp... It's about time... I've written a few letters to Marie... I miss her more and more and hope she is well. One thing that I found horrible in college was that I got used to her not being around. I never again want to get used to that. It's much better to be sad than calloused. I look forward to the time when both of us have the lifestyle we used to enjoy... Not only will these next 3 years make me a stronger person, mentally and physically, I know it will also free up my conscience to enjoy what I have. My hope is that I will feel satisfied with my accomplishment ... enough to relax for a while and just be. Be, with Marie. Three days later Pat wrote, "Well, we are now in Basic and I'm starting to get more comfortable. Yesterday was a complete disaster." Things started to go badly when he forgot to lock his locker, prompting one of the drill sergeants to hurl its contents across the floor. And "to add insult," Pat mused, "if that wasn't enough, I was written up for it. I fucked up my cadence calls, lost shit, got yelled and screamed at... I was a mess. Oh well, just keep working and we'll see what happens... Our drill sergeants are tough but quality people and I believe they will teach us a lot. Still missing my love." A day after this — thirteen days after arriving at Fort Benning — Pat wrote: As always, Marie is on my mind. I have been unable to speak with her... since we've been here, and I miss the sound of her voice... Often it bothers me that I am not by her side. Sometimes I feel like I've left her all by her lonesome to fend against the world. I suppose there is a reason for my feeling that way: My actions could be interpreted as such. |
| 67 |
After Pat was selected to be one of the team leaders for these exercises, his team of five was ambushed by two snipers as he led them down a hill. During the mock firefight, he wrote, "We were coordinated and the communication was clear," enabling his team to repel the attackers and survive the faux ambush. During a second exercise, however, communication between members of his team broke down, they acted as panicked individuals rather than as a unified team, and in the resulting chaos all the men under his command were "killed" by the snipers. Sobered, Pat remarked that it was a "great learning experience." The worst part of the day, however, had nothing to do with the simulated massacre during the ambush. That evening after returning to the barracks, he confessed to his diary, "Sometimes I'm overwhelmed with an injection of intense sorrow that is difficult to control. An intense need to be close to Marie, surrounded by her touch, smell, sound, beauty, and ease. It's as though one week of pain is condensed into 57 minutes... What have I done?" A day later Pat revisited his roiling feelings: Just when I think my emotions have flat-lined they rear their ugly head. Yesterday, from out of nowhere, I got so fucking madupsetsad that I was having trouble maintaining my cool. It only lasted a short while but it was strong and surprised me. All I wanted was to squeeze Marie, tell her how much I care, give her back all that I've taken... In a way it is refreshing in that this place has yet to callous or numb me. Somehow I enjoyed letting myself long for my wife and the life I left behind. It makes me feel and appreciate and love. It makes me feel very alive, and aware of my struggle. I do not intend to get dramatic, but life is about feeling and emotion... Love, laughter, and joy, as well as pain, longing and sorrow, are all part of the ride. Without the latter you cannot truly appreciate the former, cannot come to understand just how much you truly care... I'm experiencing and growing, and with this comes some suffering, but it's part of the deal. I feel I'm headed in the right direction... Passion is what makes life interesting, what ignites our soul, drives our curiosity, fuels our love and carries our friendships, stimulates our intellect, and pushes our limits... A passion for life is contagious and uplifting. Passion cuts both ways... Those that make you feel on top of the world are equally able to turn it upside down... In my life I want to create passion in my own life and with those I care for. I want to feel, experience, and live every emotion. I will suffer through the bad for the heights of the good. On September 11, Pat wrote a letter to Marie that began, "Who would have guessed that a year ago today would do such a number on our life in Eden... Well, you take life as it comes. This separation craziness will end soon enough, and when it does we will once again be back in our Eden." As agonizing as it was for him to be apart from Marie, it reminded him how intensely he loved her, and how much she enriched his life. |
| 68 |
It was an amazing moment. A demonstration of absolute love. It affected me very strongly." Shortly after returning to his barracks after the visit was over, Pat wrote, What a glorious weekend... What an absolutely glorious weekend. All the build-up and expectation, all the yearning and planning, for a mere 30 hours. For just one night of freedom ... Seeing Marie and spending time with the woman I love was incredible. We said things we longed to say for months, held one another the way we've longed to for months, and enjoyed the company we've been missing for so long... The hours the four of us spent were not in a whirlwind of action, drinking, or traveling. We simply drank loads of coffee, ate numerous coffeehouse treats, had a marvelous dinner, and talked for hours on end. Three hours at one coffee shop, three at another, three in the hotel or car — all we did was yak & yak & yak. Every subject was fair game: home, Arizona, Pooh, friends, future, business, our present situations, etc., etc., etc. We just ran for hours without a break, or a dip in its quality... The fact that Hechtle took the time and expense to come out ... Acts like that are never forgotten and sure to be reciprocated. He is an amazing friend and my whole family is fortunate to have him in our life. What a gesture... Jeff Hechtle's willingness to fly all the way across the country just to spend a few hours with him was especially meaningful to Pat because he felt like some of his most valuable friendships had suffered since his enlistment, and he confided in his journal at length about this sense of abandonment. In one entry he wrote, "Because of the lengths I've gone to, and the importance on which I place my relationships, I'm somewhat put off by the lack of letters from my friends at home... No question I am overly sensitive, but ... It's funny, these last 67 years I've noticed some of my close friends putting governors on our relationship. In most cases it is I who calls, I who sets up dinner, I who makes the effort. Why this is the case is not exactly clear... I care about my friends openly and unselfishly and — though realizing I sound like a woman — am bothered by their apparent lack of interest." "I think most of his friends didn't necessarily understand how difficult the Army was for him and Kevin," Marie says. "While they were going through all this crap at boot camp, it seemed to Pat that everyone else was just going about their lives, and had kind of forgotten about them. That's why when Hechtle flew out to Georgia, Pat appreciated it so much." Pat, of course, appreciated Marie's visit even more. She was his crucial source of emotional comfort — a calm, steady force that anchored his life and brought him tremendous joy. "It was so nice to see Marie," Pat wrote, "so incredibly nice... Simply put, the visit allowed me to express to Marie those things that have been burning in my gut. I'm sure she still hates me for everything, but at least she will know how her hate holds nothing to my own self-loathing. |
| 69 |
The three of us were away from everything and everybody, and for Kevin and me both, we had all that we needed, which was for Pat to be there." The already strong bond among the three of them grew even stronger. When Pat and Kevin weren't on the base, they were usually with Marie; they didn't socialize much with others, and Pat drank very little alcohol. He regarded being a Ranger as one of the most serious challenges he'd ever undertaken, and he didn't want to do anything that might dull his focus on the task at hand. When they enlisted, the Tillman brothers assumed they would be deployed to Afghanistan to fight Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban — a war that seemed vital to protecting national security. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush had repeatedly promised that if he was elected, his administration would promote a "humble" foreign policy. "I'm going to be judicious as to how to use the military," he pledged during his second debate with Al Gore. "It needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the exit strategy obvious... I think the United States must be ... humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course." The Tillmans, like most Americans, therefore had no reason to suspect that in November 2001, President Bush and Vice President Cheney had instructed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to secretly create a detailed plan for the invasion of Iraq. Scarcely two months after the 911 attacks, even though bin Laden was still at large in Afghanistan, the president and his most influential advisers regarded the Afghan campaign as a mere sideshow, almost a diversion. Truth be told, the primary focus of the Bush administration had always been taking down Saddam Hussein. On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations to make the president's argument for invading Iraq, presenting satellite photos and other evidence in a PowerPoint presentation that persuasively — but erroneously — indicated Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and had conspired with al-Qaeda to carry out terrorist attacks against Americans. When Powell finished his spiel, it was plain to the world that the United States would be invading Iraq in the immediate future. Pat was very disturbed. By the time it became clear that war with Iraq was imminent, Pat and Kevin had been training at Fort Lewis for just over a month. Seventeen days after Powell addressed the United Nations, Pat wrote in his journal, It may be very soon that Nub & I will be called upon to take part in something I see no clear purpose for... Were our case for war even somewhat justifiable, no doubt many of our traditional allies ... would be praising our initiative... However, every leader in the world, with a few exceptions, is crying foul, as is the voice of much of the people. This ... leads me to believe that we have little or no justification other than our imperial whim. Of course Nub & I have ... |
| 70 |
"There was shooting going in, there was some shooting going out," said one military officer briefed on the operation. "It was not intensive. There was no shooting in the building, but it was hairy, because no one knew what to expect..." The officer said that Special Operations forces found what looked like a "prototype" Iraqi torture chamber in the hospital's basement, with batteries and metal prods... Thanks largely to details first revealed in this article, as well as dramatic video of the rescue distributed to the media by the Army, Jessica Lynch dominated the news for weeks. The details of the incident provided by military public affairs officers made for an absolutely riveting story that television, radio, and print journalists found irresistible: a petite blond supply clerk from a flea-speck burg in West Virginia is ambushed in Iraq and fearlessly mows down masked Fedayeen terrorists with her M16 until she runs out of ammo, whereupon she is shot, stabbed, captured, tortured, and raped before finally being snatched from her barbaric Iraqi captors during a daring raid by American commandos. The story was so gripping that little heed was paid to a paragraph near the beginning of the aforementioned Washington Post article, which stated, Several officials cautioned that the precise sequence of events is still being determined, and that further information will emerge as Lynch is debriefed. Reports thus far are based on battlefield intelligence, they said, which comes from monitored communications and from Iraqi sources in Nasiriyah whose reliability has yet to be assessed. Pentagon officials said they had heard "rumors" of Lynch's heroics but had no confirmation. Over the following weeks, months, and years, subsequent reporting by investigative journalists revealed that most of the details of Lynch's ordeal were extravagantly embellished, and much of the rest was invented from whole cloth. Because her rifle had jammed, she hadn't fired a single round. Although her injuries had indeed been life threatening, they were exclusively the result of her Humvee smashing into Hernandez's tractor trailer; she was never shot, stabbed, tortured, or raped. After she had been transferred to Saddam Hussein General Hospital, her captors treated her with kindness and special care. And when the American commandos arrived at the hospital to rescue Lynch, they met no significant resistance. The spurious particulars did not come from Private Lynch. The bogus story was based on information fed to gullible reporters by anonymous military sources. The government official who arranged for reporters to interview these sources — the guy who deserves top billing for creating the myth of Jessica Lynch, in other words — was a White House apparatchik named Jim Wilkinson. Although his official job description was director of strategic communications for General Tommy Franks (the commander of all U. S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan), actually Wilkinson served as the Bush administration's top "perception manager" for the Iraq War. |
| 71 |
As they exited the vehicles, many of the Marines appeared scared and confused. Barely under way, the mission was already "Charlie Fox-trot" — a total clusterfuck. Even before Bravo Company had blundered into the sewage, Grabowski had been feeling a lot of heat from his boss, the Marine brigadier general Rich Natonski. Three hours earlier, shortly after the rescue of the survivors from Jessica Lynch's convoy, Grabowski's men were moving north through the outskirts of Nasiriyah, clearing buildings and skirmishing with the enemy, when the general had helicoptered in from his command post specifically to admonish Grabowski for the sluggish pace of his advance. Donald Rumsfeld's strategy for the entire invasion — for the entire war — was predicated on speed, and officers on the ground were under unrelenting pressure to keep pushing rapidly toward Baghdad, no matter what. Natonski took Grabowski aside, got in his face, and told him, "I need you to fucking get up there and seize the bridges." Adding to the sense of urgency, Natonski explained, twelve Army soldiers from Lynch's convoy were still missing somewhere in the city, and Grabowski's Marines should "be looking for those individuals" as they moved toward the bridges. Not long past noon, while Grabowski and Bravo Company were struggling to extricate themselves from the reeking bog on the eastern edge of Nasiriyah, Charlie Company moved north across the Euphrates River Bridge, expecting to rendezvous with Bravo Company and then follow them to the Saddam Canal Bridge. Seeing no sign of Bravo Company, and unable to raise them on the radio, Captain Dan Wittnam, the commander of Charlie Company, assumed that Bravo Company must have already gone on ahead. So Wittnam, on his own initiative, ordered his men to proceed directly up Ambush Alley to the Saddam Canal Bridge. Sergeant William Schaefer, commanding Charlie Company's lead trac, was incredulous. "Say again," he radioed back, requesting confirmation of the orders. Schaefer was concerned because a platoon of tanks was supposed to precede Charlie Company wherever they went, but the tanks assigned to be their escorts were diverted to rescue the survivors of the Jessica Lynch convoy, and hadn't yet reappeared. Emphatic orders had been sent down the chain of command, however, that taking the bridge was to take priority over all else, so Schaefer swallowed his reservations, ordered his driver to put trac C201 in gear, and led the convoy into Ambush Alley. Like all Marines, he had been indoctrinated: "First, accomplish the mission." Compared with the other branches of the Armed Forces, the Marine Corps was relatively frank about where troop safety ranked in the big picture — and more than a few grunts actually took perverse pride in the Marines' reputation for getting the job done at any cost. With trac C201 out in front, Charlie Company's eleven tracs and three Humvees headed for the Saddam Canal Bridge. Watertight, tublike contraptions that can deploy propellers in order to cross open water, tracs were designed to ferry troops from ships to beachheads. |
| 72 |
On Sunday, September 19, 2004, during halftime of a football game between the New England Patriots and the Arizona Cardinals played in Tempe, the Cardinals honored Pat with a halftime ceremony, during which Marie, Richard, and Pat's parents walked out onto the field and stood on the fifty-yard line. Marie received heartfelt cheers when she expressed thanks to the crowd for the overwhelming support the Tillman family had received from Arizonans. A huge Cardinals jersey imprinted with the number 40 was unfurled in the bleachers. Up on the JumboTron, President George W. Bush delivered a brief video tribute to Pat, but the crowd greeted the canned speech with a loud chorus of boos, apparently believing the gesture was inspired not by any genuine respect for Tillman, but rather because Bush was trailing in most opinion polls and the presidential election was just forty-four days away. Because the Army had betrayed Dannie Tillman's trust so completely, and because she had come to the conclusion that it was more interested in burying the truth than in illuminating it, soon after the Cardinals' tribute she compiled a long list of questions that Lieutenant Colonel Kauzlarich's 156 investigation had failed to answer to her satisfaction. Then she e-mailed the questions to John McCain, the senator representing Pat's home state of Arizona, along with a formal request that he help her receive the information she sought. The nature of the anguish felt by the bereaved when a husband, child, or sibling is killed in combat varies from person to person but is almost always devastating. When the cause of that loss is fratricide, the torment is apt to be greater still. It is not unusual for survivors of the deceased to be overwhelmed by their woe, and to sink into a state of despair that renders them passive and numb. It would have been convenient for the Army, the Pentagon, and the White House if the Tillmans had succumbed meekly to their pain in this fashion, allowing the incident to fade unobtrusively into the past, hidden among the war's long tally of other tragedies. If that's what these institutions anticipated, however, they underestimated the tenacity of Dannie Tillman. Channeling her grief into determination, she resolved to take whatever steps were necessary to uncover what really happened to her son, and to discover why the Army lied to her family and the nation, after which she intended to hold the guilty parties accountable. Thanks to her perseverance, on November 8 — six days after George W. Bush was elected to a second term as president — Kensinger appointed Brigadier General Gary Jones, the commander of the Army Special Forces, to conduct still another 156 investigation to address new questions raised by the Tillman family. Yet again, however, the Army's ingrown special operations fraternity was being investigated by itself. As part of General Jones's inquiry, on November 13 he interviewed Kauzlarich. Near the end of this interrogation, Kauzlarich became defensive about a number of deficiencies in his investigation alleged by Dannie Tillman. |
| 73 |
In addition to Gimble, Jessica Lynch, Kevin Tillman, Dannie Tillman, Bryan O'Neal, and Steve White testified at the hearing. Lynch recalled how her family's home "was under siege by the media, all repeating the story of the little girl from West Virginia who went down fighting. It was not true... The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals for heroes. They don't need to be told elaborate lies... The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype." When it was Kevin Tillman's turn to testify, he spoke about his older brother at length, and with electrifying conviction: Revealing that Pat's death was a fratricide would have been yet another political disaster during a month already swollen with political disasters, and a brutal truth that the American public would undoubtedly find unacceptable. So the facts needed to be suppressed. An alternative narrative needed to be constructed... Over a month after Pat's death, when it became clear that it would no longer be possible to pull off this deception, a few of the facts were parceled out to the public and to the family. General Kensinger was ordered to tell the American public ... that Pat died of fratricide, but with a calculated and nefarious twist. He stated, "There was no one specific finding of fault," and that he "probably died of fratricide." But there was specific fault, and there was nothing probable about the facts that led to Pat's death... After the truth of Pat's death was partially revealed, Pat was no longer of use as a sales asset, and became strictly the Army's problem. They were now left with the task of briefing our family and answering our questions. With any luck, our family would sink quietly into our grief, and the whole unsavory episode would be swept under the rug. However, they miscalculated our family's reaction. Through the amazing strength and perseverance of my mother, the most amazing woman on Earth, our family has managed to have multiple investigations conducted. However, while each investigation gathered more information, the mountain of evidence was never used to arrive at an honest or even sensible conclusion... The handling of the situation after the firefight was described as a compilation of "missteps, inaccuracies, and errors in judgment which created the perception of concealment."... Writing a Silver Star award before a single eyewitness account is taken is not a misstep. Falsifying soldier witness statements for a Silver Star is not a misstep. These are intentional falsehoods that meet the legal definition for fraud. Delivering false information at a nationally televised memorial service is not an error in judgment. Discarding an investigation Scott's 156 that does not fit a preordained conclusion is not an error in judgment. These are deliberate acts of deceit. This is not the perception of concealment. This is concealment. Pat is, of course, not the only soldier where battlefield reality has reached the family and the public in the form of a false narrative... |
| 74 |
Our family has relentlessly pursued the truth on this matter for three years. We have now concluded that our efforts are being actively thwarted by powers that are more ... interested in protecting a narrative than getting at the truth or seeing that justice is served. That is why we ask Congress, as a sovereign representative of the whole people, to exercise its power to investigate the inconsistencies in Pat's death and the aftermath and all the other soldiers that were betrayed by this system. The one bit of truth that did survive these manipulations is that Pat was, and still is, a great man... But the fact that the Army, and what appears to be others, attempted to hijack his virtue and his legacy is simply horrific. The least this country can do for him in return is to uncover who is responsible for his death, who lied and who covered it up, and who instigated those lies and benefited from them. Then ensure that justice is meted out to the culpable. Pat and these other soldiers volunteered to put their lives on the line for this country. Anything less than the truth is a betrayal of those values that all soldiers who have fought for this nation have sought to uphold. Waxman, the oversight committee chairman, observed, The Tillman family wants to know how all of this could have happened... One of the things that make the Afghanistan and Iraq wars so different from previous wars is the glaring disparity of sacrifice. For the overwhelming number of Americans, this war has brought no sacrifice and no inconvenience, but for a small number of Americans, the war has demanded incredible and constant sacrifice. Those soldiers and their families pay that price proudly and without complaint. This is what Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman did, and it is what their families have done, but our government failed them... The least we owe to courageous men and women who are fighting for our freedom is the truth. At the end of the hearing, Waxman stated in frustration, "What we have is a very clear, deliberate abuse intentionally done. Why is it so hard to find out who did it?" On July 31, 2007, Secretary of the Army Pete Geren held a press conference at the Pentagon to answer this and other questions about the alleged cover-up, and to announce that the Army had taken action against six of the officers found accountable by Inspector General Thomas Gimble's investigation four months earlier. Such action could have included demotions, courts-martial, dishonorable discharges, incarceration, andor letters of reprimand. But Lieutenant Colonel Bailey and Colonel Nixon received nothing more than mild "memoranda of concern," and Nixon's memorandum of concern wasn't even placed in his military record. The Army, moreover, took no action of any kind against McChrystal, despite his central role in the scandal. The only officer who received anything resembling punishment was Lieutenant General Philip Kensinger Jr., who had retired from the Army eighteen months previously, and was censured for lying under oath to investigators. |
| 75 |
I enjoyed watching them. They would grind the raw pork, then squeeze their arms elbow deep in the ground meat, mixing it with gray nose-opening sage, pepper and salt, and red pepper. They often fried tasty little samples for all obedient children who brought wood for the slick black stove. The men chopped off the larger pieces of pork and laid them in the smokehouse to begin the curing process. They opened the knuckle of the hams with their deadly-looking knives, took out a certain round, harmless-looking bone ("It could make the meat too bad"), and rubbed coarse brown salt that looked like fine gravel into the flesh, and watched as the blood popped to the surface. Throughout the year, until the next frost, we took our meals from the smokehouse, the chicken coop, the shelves of canned goods, and the little garden that lay cousin-close to the store. There were choices on the shelves that could set a hungry child's mouth to watering. Green beans, snapped always the right length; collards; cabbage; juicy, sweet red tomato preserves that came into their own on steaming buttered biscuits; and sausage, beets, berries, and every fruit grown in Arkansas. But at least twice yearly Momma would feel that her grandbabies needed fresh meat in their diets. We were then given money — pennies, nickels, and dimes entrusted to Bailey — and sent to the butcher to buy liver. The butcher shop was in the white part of town. Crossing our area of Stamps, which in childhood's narrow measure seemed a whole world, obliged us by custom to stop and speak to every black person we met. Bailey also felt constrained to spend a few minutes playing with each friend. There I felt a special joy in going through the black area with time on our hands and money in our pockets. (Bailey's pockets were as good as my own.) But the pleasure fled when we reached the white part of town. Suddenly we were explorers walking without weapons into man-eating animals' territory. We never turned to look at the houses we passed, nor did we really speak to each other once we were in enemy territory. We solemnly moved forward to our goal. At the butcher shop we were lucky if no one came in. All whites were served before us, even if the butcher was half into our order. He would put our meat on the side and serve the white customer. In fact, a black maid or cook would be served before us, because her order was intended for white people. Bailey and I would stand around, never looking at each other, until there were no more calls on the butcher's time. Then we would get the liver Momma wanted to cook for our health and make our way back across the white zone I considered the frozen tundra, again wending through the black residential area where every house seemed to sing "Welcome" and on to the store and Momma and the hot skillet. The aromas of fried bacon and onions told us that all of them — the skillet, the stove, and Momma — had been waiting for the liver. The liver dinner marked the only time when my grandmother and Uncle Willie let us have the best parts of the meat. |
| 76 |
It is time you were properly schooled. You are sixteen now and soon we must make our move.' 'Yes, mother.' The Oceanid and the Potion Rhea asked her friend Metis, wise and beautiful daughter of Tethys and Oceanus, to prepare her son for what was to come. 'He is clever, but wayward and rash. Teach him patience, craft and guile.' Zeus was captivated by Metis from the start. He had never seen such beauty. The Titaness was a little smaller than most of her race, but endowed with a grace and gravity that made her shine. The step of a deer and the guile of a fox, the power of a lion, the softness of a dove, all allied to a presence and force of mind that sent the boy dizzy. 'Lie down with me.' 'No. We shall go for a walk. I have many things to say to you.' 'Here. On the grass.' Metis smiled and took his hand. 'We have work to do, Zeus.' 'But I love you.' 'Then you will do as I say. When we love someone, we always want to please them do we not?' 'Don't you love me?' Metis laughed, though in truth she was astounded by the halo of glamour and charisma that radiated from this bold and handsome youth. But her friend Rhea had asked her to undertake his education and Metis was never one to betray a trust. For a year she taught him how to look into the hearts and judge the intentions of others. How to imagine and how to reason. How to find the strength to let passions cool before acting. How to make a plan and how to know when a plan needed to be changed or abandoned. How to let the head rule the heart and the heart win the affection of others. Her refusal to allow their relationship to take on a physical dimension only made Zeus love her more. Although she never told him so, Metis returned the love. As a result there existed a kind of crackle in the air whenever the two were close. One day Zeus saw Metis standing over a large boulder and bashing its flat surface with a small round-ended stone. 'What on earth are you doing?' 'Crushing mustard seeds and crystals of salt.' 'Of course you are.' 'Today,' said Metis, 'is your seventeenth birthday. You are ready to go to Othrys and fulfil your destiny. Rhea will be here soon, but first I must finish a little preparation of my own devising.' 'What's in that jar?' 'In here there is a mixture of poppy juice and copper sulphate, sweetened with a syrup of manna provided by the Meliae, our friends of the ash tree. I'll put all the ingredients together and shake them up. Like so.' 'I don't understand.' 'Look, here is your mother. She will explain.' As Metis looked on, Rhea outlined the plan to Zeus. Mother and son gazed deep into each other's eyes, took a deep breath and swore an oath, son to mother, mother to son. They were ready. Rebirth of the Five Midnight. The thick cloth that Erebus and Nyx threw across earth, sea and sky to mark the end of Hemera's and Aether's diurnal round blanketed the world. In a valley high up on Mount Othrys, the Lord of All paced alone, banging his chest, restless and miserable. Kronos had grown into the most foul-tempered and discontented Titan of all. |
| 77 |
It seems certain, though, that Hephaestus grew up on the island of Lemnos, where he learned how to forge metal and make exquisite, intricate objects. He quickly showed a remarkable talent for the fashioning of useful, ornamental and even magical artefacts, which allied to his strength with the bellows and apparent immunity from scorching in the intense heat of the forges combined to make him the greatest of smiths. In bouncing off the Olympian mountainside he had damaged his foot, which left him with a permanent limp. With his awkward gait, slightly contorted features and disordered black curls, he was a fearful sight. His later reputation, however, was for faithfulness, kindness, good humour and equable temper. Greek myth is replete with infants cast into the wilderness or abandoned on mountaintops to die, either because some prophecy foretold they would one day bring disaster on their parents, tribe or city, or because they were considered accursed, ugly or malformed. Such outcasts seemed always to survive and return to fulfil the prophecy or win back their birthright. Hephaestus longed to come back to Olympus, which he knew to be his home by right, but he was aware that he could not do so without bitterness or on proper terms unless he allowed himself one measured act of revenge, which would prove his strength of personality, his right to divinity and serve as his calling card to heaven. So, as Hephaestus learned his trade and worked his bellows, his quick and clever mind devised the plan that his quick and clever fingers would turn into startling reality. The Hand of Aphrodite Bound fast on the golden throne, Hera howled with rage and frustration. Neither her power, nor even that of Zeus himself had been able to release her from its curse. How could she invite the immortal world to a feast in which she sat pinioned like a criminal in the stocks? It would be grotesque and undignified. She would be laughed at. What magic was at work here? Who had done this to her? How could she be released from the spell? The hapless Zeus, bombarded by a shrieked fusillade of questions and complaints, turned to the other gods for help. Whoever managed to release Hera, he proclaimed, could take Aphrodite's hand in marriage, the greatest matrimonial prize there was. Ares was loudly annoyed by this peremptory decree. Was it not understood that he was to wed Aphrodite? 'Calm yourself,' said Zeus. 'You are stronger than all the other gods put together. Your union is safe.' Aphrodite was confident too and pushed her lover forward with encouraging words. But none of Ares' pulling and pushing and kicking and swearing had the slightest effect. If anything, it seemed that the more he strained, the tighter the throne's hold on Hera became. Poseidon (despite already having Amphitrite as his consort) made a spirited attempt that likewise came to nothing. Even Hades rose up from the underworld to try his hand at freeing Hera from her increasingly embarrassing predicament. All to no avail. |
| 78 |
His father Kronos's unkind habit of eating anyone prophesied to conquer him seemed to have been passed down to Zeus. When he slipped back to Olympus in his own shape, congratulating himself at how much cleverer than the supposedly cunning Metis he was, the music and dancing were in full swing and his wife didn't seem to have noticed a thing. The Mother of All Migraines The King of the Gods had a headache. Not a hangover from the wedding feast, nor a headache in the sense of an annoying problem that needed solving as a leader he always had plenty of those but a headache in the sense of a real ache in the head. And what an ache. Each day the pain grew until Zeus was in the most acute, searing, blinding, pounding agony that had ever been suffered in the history of anything. Gods may be immune from death, ageing and many of the other horrors that afflict and affright mortals, but they are not immune from pain. Zeus's roars, howls and screams filled the valleys, canyons and caves of mainland Greece. They rang around the grottoes, cliffs and coves of the islands until the world wondered if the Hecatonchires had come up from Tartarus and the Titanomachy had started all over again. Zeus's brothers, sisters and other family members clustered concernedly about him on the seashore, where they had found him begging his nephew Triton, Poseidon's eldest, to drown him in seawater. Triton declined to do any such thing, so everyone racked their brains and tried to think of another solution while poor Zeus stamped and yelled in torment, squeezing his head in his hands as if trying to crush it. Then Prometheus, Zeus's favourite young Titan, came up with an idea which he whispered to Hephaestus, who nodded eagerly before limping back to his smithy as fast as his imperfect legs could carry him. What was happening inside Zeus's head was rather interesting. It was no wonder that he was suffering such excruciating pain, for crafty Metis was hard at work inside his skull, smelting, firing and hammering out armour and weaponry. There was enough iron and other metals, minerals, rare earths and trace elements in the god's varied, healthy and balanced diet to allow her to find in his blood and bones all the ingredients, all the ores and compounds, she needed. Hephaestus, who would have approved of her rudimentary but effective metalworking, returned to the crowded beach carrying a huge axe, double-bladed in the Minoan style. Prometheus now persuaded Zeus that the only way to alleviate his agony was to take his hands away from his temples, kneel down and have faith. Zeus muttered something about the trouble with being the King of the Gods was that there was no one higher to pray to, but he dropped obediently to his knees and awaited his fate. Hephaestus spat cheerfully and confidently on his hands, gripped the thick wooden haft and as the hushed crowd looked on brought it down in one swift swinging movement clean through the very centre of Zeus's skull, splitting it neatly in two. |
| 79 |
The Infant Prodigy Hermes proved himself to be the most extraordinarily pert and precocious baby that ever drew breath. Within a quarter hour of his birth he had crawled from one side of the cave to the other, throwing out comments to his startled mother as he did so. Five minutes later he had requested a light so that he might better examine the cave's walls. Being offered none he struck two stones together over twists of straw and kindled a flame. This had never been done before. Now standing upright (and still not half an hour old), this remarkable infant announced that he was going for a walk. 'The close confines of this cramped cavern are occasioning me uncomfortably acute claustrophobia,' he said, inventing both alliteration and the family of '-phobia' words as he spoke. 'I shall see you presently. Get on with your spinning or knitting or whatever it is, there's a good mother.' As he ambled down the slopes of Mount Cyllene this singular and sensational prodigy began to hum to himself. His humming turned into tuneful singing, which the nightingales in the woods around him immediately began to copy and have been trying to recapture ever since. After he had travelled he knew not how far he found himself in a field where he was met by the wondrous sight of a herd of pure white cattle cropping the grass and lowing gently in the moonlight. 'Oh!' he breathed, entranced. 'What beautiful moo-moos.' For all his precocity he was still not above baby-talk. Hermes looked at the cows and the cows looked at Hermes. 'Come here,' he commanded. The cows stared for a while then lowered their heads and continued to graze. 'Hm. So it's like that is it?' Hermes thought quickly and gathered up long blades of grass which he plaited together into something like a bovine version of horseshoes, attaching one to each hoof of every cow. Around his own tiny plump feet he wrapped laurel leaves. Finally he snapped off a branch of young willow and stripped it down into a long switch with which he easily and expertly tickled and stung the cows into a tight and manoeuvrable herd. As an extra precaution he drove them backwards, all the way up the slope and back to the mouth of the cave, where his astonished and alarmed mother had been worriedly standing ever since he had wandered so very calmly away. Maia had had no experience of motherhood before this, but she was certain that the striking style and eccentric behaviour of her son were not usual even amongst gods. Apollo, she knew, had defeated Pytho while still an infant, and Athena of course had been born fully armed, but creating fire out of nothing but stones? Driving cattle? And what was this he was dangling before her eyes a tortoise? Was she dreaming? 'Now, mother,' said Hermes. 'Listen. I've had an idea. I'd like you to stun the tortoise, scoop out the flesh and cook it. I expect it will make a delicious soup. I'd recommend adding plenty of wild garlic if I were you and perhaps a suspicion of fennel? And then there'll be beef for mains, which I shall see to now. |
| 80 |
I'll just borrow this knife and be with you again before you know it.' With those words he disappeared to the back of the cave, off whose stone walls rang the appalling screams of a cow having its throat cut by a plump-fisted baby. After what Maia had to confess was a truly delicious supper she summoned up the courage to ask her son what he might be up to now, for he was hanging out stringy lines of cow gut in front of the fire. While he waited for these foul-smelling strips to dry he busied himself with boring little holes along the edges of the tortoiseshell. 'I've had an idea,' was all he would tell her. Apollo Reads the Signs Hermes may or may not have known it, but on his first night on earth he had travelled quite a distance. All the way from his birthplace on Mount Cyllene north through the fields of Thessaly and as far as Pieria, where he had found and rustled the cattle. And back again. In baby steps that is quite a distance. What Hermes certainly could not have known was that the white cattle belonged to Apollo, who prized them highly. When news reached the god of their disappearance he set off in fury to Pieria in order to follow what he assumed was a vicious gang of thieves to their lair. Wild dryads or fauns gone to the bad, he imagined. They would regret taking property from the god of arrows. He lay down in the cattle's field to examine the ground with all the thoroughness of an experienced tracker. To his astonishment the brigands had left no useful traces at all. All he could see were random brush marks, meaningless whorls and swirls and unless he was going mad one tiny infant footprint. Any impressions that might have been formed by cow's hoofs seemed to be heading, not away from the field, but towards it! Whoever had stolen the cattle was mocking Apollo. They were practised and expert thieves, that much was clear. His sister Artemis was the most skilled hunter he knew: would she dare? Perhaps she had devised some cunning way to conceal her tracks. Ares didn't have the wit. Poseidon wouldn't be interested. Hephaestus? Unlikely. Who then? He noticed a thrush preening on a branch not far away and in one smooth action drew his bow and brought the creature down. Slitting open its crop the god of oracles and augury peered forward to read the entrails. From the colouration in the lower intestine, the kink in the right kidney and the unusual disposition of the thymus gland it was clear at once that the cattle were somewhere in Arcadia, not far from Corinth. And what was that clot of blood on the liver saying to him? Mount Cyllene. And what else? So! It had been a baby's footprint after all. Apollo's usually smooth brow was drawn into a frown, his blue eyes blazed and his rose-red lips compressed themselves into a grim line. Revenge would be his. Half-Brothers By the time Apollo arrived at the foot of Mount Cyllene his temper had frayed almost to breaking point. The world knew the cows were sacred to him. It was obvious that they were a rare and valuable breed. |
| 81 |
'Very proper.' 'Well,' said Hermes, 'let's see if it's worked, shall we?' Without warning he leapt up into Apollo's arms, gripping him by the shoulders. This remarkable baby's lightning fast mind, body and manner were making Apollo dizzy. 'See if what has worked?' 'My plan to ingratiate myself to our father. Take me up to Olympus and introduce me around,' said Hermes. 'That vacant twelfth throne has got my name on it.' The Twelfth God Everything about Hermes was quick. His mind, his wit, his impulses and his reflexes. The gods of Olympus, already flattered by the fine savoury smoke that had risen to their nostrils the previous night from Mount Cyllene, were entranced by the newcomer. Even Hera presented a cheek to be kissed and declared the child enchanting. He was on Zeus's lap and pulling at his beard before anyone had noticed. Zeus laughed and all the gods laughed along with him. What were to be this god's duties? His fleetness of mind and foot suggested one immediate answer he should become the messenger of the gods. To make Hermes even faster, Hephaestus fashioned what would become his signature footwear, the talaria a pair of winged sandals that allowed him to zip from one place to another more swiftly than an eagle. Hermes was so unaffectedly delighted with them, and clasped Hephaestus to him with such warm and grateful affection, that the god of fire and forges immediately limped back to his workshop and, after a day and a night's furious work, returned with a winged helmet with a low crown and a flexible brim to go with the talaria. This lent Hermes a touch of grandeur and showed the world that this pert and handsome youth represented the dread majesty of the gods. For extra Elan and glamour Hephaestus presented him with a silver staff topped with wings and entwined with two snakes. fn33 The stories of Hermes' exploits tickled Zeus greatly, then and thenceforward. The guile and duplicity he had shown in stealing Apollo's cattle made Hermes a natural choice for god of rascals, thieves, liars, conmen, gamblers, hucksters, jokers, story-tellers and sportsmen. The grander side to liars, jokers and story-tellers gave him a share in literature, poetry, oratory and wit too. His skill and insight allowed him to hold sway in the fields of science and medicine. fn34 He became the god of commerce and trade, of herdsmen (of course) and of travel and roads. Despite music being his invention he did, as promised, present the divine responsibility for it as a gift to Apollo. Apollo simplified the lyre's structure by replacing the tortoiseshell with the elegant bracketed frame of gold with which we associate the classic instrument. In the same way that I suggested Artemis and Athena might be considered to represent opposites (wild v. cultivated, impulsive v. considered, etc.) so the mutability, swiftness and energetic impulses of traffic and exchange personified by Hermes might be said to present an exact counter to the serenity, permanence, order and centred domestic sufficiency of Hestia. |
| 82 |
But something was missing. Something very important. The Golden Age Alma Mater, the bountiful Mother Earth, made fertile and fruitful by Demeter, was a sweet paradise for the first men. They knew no disease, poverty, famine or war. Life was an idyll of innocence and light pastoral duties. It was a time of happy worship of, and familiarity and even friendship with, the deities who moved amongst them in easy, unfrightening shapes and dimensions. It gave Zeus and the other gods, Titans and immortals great pleasure to mingle with the charming, childlike homunculi that Prometheus has shaped from clay. Perhaps we only imagined these first days of beautiful simplicity and universal kindness so that we could have a high point of paradisal sublimity against which to judge the low, degraded times that came after. The later Greeks certainly believed that the Golden Age had truly existed. It was ever present in their thinking and poetry and gave them a dream of perfection to aspire to, a vision more concrete and realized than our own vague ideas of early man grunting in caves. Platonic ideals and perfect forms were perhaps the intellectual expression of that wistful race memory. It was natural that, of all the immortals, the one who loved humankind best should be their artist-creator Prometheus. He and his brother Epimetheus now spent more time living with man than they spent on Olympus in the company of their fellow immortals. It saddened Prometheus that he had only been allowed to create male people, for he felt that this cloned single-sex race lacked variety both in its outlook, disposition and character and in its inability to breed and create new types. His humans were happy, yes; but to Prometheus such a safe, unchallenged and unchallenging existence had no zest to it. To approach the godlike status that his creation deserved, mankind needed something more. They needed fire. Real hot, fierce, flickering, flaming fire to enable them to melt, smelt, roast, toast, boil, broil, fashion and forge; and they needed an inner creative fire too, a divine fire, to enable them to think, imagine, dare and do. The more he watched over and mingled with his creation, the more Prometheus became convinced that fire was exactly what they needed. And he knew where to find it. The Fennel Stalk Prometheus surveyed the twin crowns of Olympus towering above him. The tallest peak, Mytikos, reached nearly ten thousand podes high into the clouds. Next to it, two or three hundred or so feet lower but much harder to climb, reared the rocky face of Stefani. To the west loomed the heights of Skolio. Prometheus knew that the dying rays of the evening sun would shield that climb the toughest of all from the gods enthroned above, and so he began the perilous ascent confident that he could reach the summit unseen. Prometheus had never disobeyed Zeus before. Not in anything big. In games and races and wrestling matches and competitions to win the hearts of nymphs he had freely teased and taunted his friend, but he had never defied him outright. |
| 83 |
The hierarchy of the pantheon was not something any being could disrupt without real consequences. Zeus was a beloved friend, but he was, above all, Zeus. Yet Prometheus was determined on his course of action. Much as he had always loved Zeus, he found that he loved mankind more. The excitement and resolution he felt were stronger than any fear of divine wrath. He hated to cross his friend, but when it came to a choice, there was no choice. By the time he had scaled Skolio's sheer wall, the western gates had closed upon Apollo's chariot of the sun and the whole mountain was shrouded in darkness. Crouching low, Prometheus made his way around the jagged outcrop that crested the bowl-like amphitheatre of Megala Kazania. Looking ahead he could see the Plateau of the Muses beyond, flickering with dancing licks of light thrown by the fires of Hephaestus's forge several hundred podes or so further off. Around the other side of Olympus the gods were supping. Prometheus could hear Apollo's lyre, Hermes' fluting syrinx, the raucous laugh of Ares and the snarling of Artemis's hounds. Hugging the outer walls of the forge the Titan edged along to its forecourt. He was startled, as he rounded the corner, to see stretched out naked on the ground the huge figure of Brontes snoring by the fire. Prometheus hung back in the shadows. He knew that the Cyclopes assisted Hephaestus, but that they might sleep on the premises was more than he had bargained for. At the very mouth of the forge he saw a narthex plant, sometimes called the laserwort or giant fennel (Ferula communis) not quite the same bulbous vegetable we use today to impart a pleasant aniseedy flavour to fish, but a near enough relation. Prometheus leaned forward and picked a long, vigorous specimen. Tightly packed within there was a thick, lint-like pith. Stripping the stem of its outer leaves Prometheus stretched out and pushed the stalk across the forecourt, over Brontes' slumbering, mumbling form and towards the fire. The heat emanating from the furnace was enough to cause the end of the stalk to catch at once. Prometheus pulled it back in with as much care as he could, but he could not prevent a spark from falling from its sputtering end straight down onto Brontes' torso. The skin on the Cyclops's chest sizzled and hissed and he awoke with a roar of pain. As Brontes looked groggily down at his chest, trying to understand where this pain was coming from and what it could mean, Prometheus hauled in the stalk and fled. The Gift of Fire Prometheus clambered back down Olympus, the fennel stalk clenched between his teeth, its pith burning slowly. Every five minutes or so he would take it from his mouth and blow gently, nursing its glow. When he at last reached the safety of the valley floor he made his way to the human settlement where he and his brother had made their home. You may say that Prometheus could surely have had the wit to teach man to strike stones together, or rub sticks, but we have to remember that what Prometheus stole was fire from heaven, divine fire. |
| 84 |
Perhaps he took the inner spark that ignited in man the curiosity to rub sticks and strike flints in the first place. When he showed men the leaping, dancing darting demon they initially cried out in fear and backed away from its flames. But their curiosity soon overcame their fear and they began to delight in this magical new toy, substance, phenomenon call it what you will. They learned from Prometheus that fire was not their enemy but a powerful friend which, once tamed, had ten thousand thousand uses. Prometheus moved from village to village demonstrating techniques for the fashioning of tools and weapons, the firing of earthen pots, the cooking of meat and the baking of cereal doughs, all of which quickly let loose an avalanche of advantages, raising man above the animal prey that had no answer to metal-tipped spears and arrows. It was not long before Zeus chanced to look down from Olympus and saw points of dancing orange light dotting the landscape all around. He knew at once what had happened. Nor did he need to be told who was responsible. His anger was swift and terrible. Never had such almighty, such tumultuous, such apocalyptic fury been witnessed. Not even Ouranos in his mutilated agony had been so filled with vengeful rage. Ouranos was brought low by a son he had no regard for, but Zeus had been betrayed by the friend he loved most. No betrayal could be more terrible. The Punishments The Gift Zeus's wrath was so overwhelming that all Olympus feared Prometheus would be blasted with such power that his atoms would never reassemble. It is possible that just such a fate might have befallen the once-favoured Titan had not the wise and stabilizing presence of Metis inside Zeus's head counselled a subtler and more dignified revenge. The intensity of his rage was in no way dimmed, but rather it was now focussed, channelled into clearer lines of retribution. He would leave Prometheus for the time being and unleash his cosmic fury upon man, puny impudent man, the creature he had taken such delight in and for whom now he felt nothing but resentment and cold contempt. For a whole week, watched by a grave and concerned Athena, the King of the Gods paced up and down in front of his throne considering how best humans should pay for daring to appropriate fire, for presuming to ape the Olympians. A voice within him seemed to whisper that one day, no matter what vengeance he took, mankind would reach ever upwards until they came level with the gods or, perhaps more terribly, until they no longer needed the gods and felt free to abandon them. No more worship, no more prayers sent up to heavenly Olympus. The prospect was too blasphemous and absurd for Zeus to entertain, but the fact that such a scandalous idea could even enter his mind served only to fuel his rage. Whether the magnificent scheme that was finally put into operation was his or Metis's or even Athena's is unclear, but it was, Zeus believed, a screamer of a plan. There was a golden symmetry to it that appealed to his very Greek mind. |
| 85 |
Likewise Demeter, Artemis, Athena, Hestia and Hera. Their loveliness was majestic and unattainable. The prettiness of nymphs, oreads and Oceanids, while enchanting enough, seemed shallow and childish next to the blushing sweetness of the vision that looked up at him so shyly, so winningly, so adorably. 'May we?' repeated Hermes. Epimetheus gulped, swallowed and stepped backwards, opening the door wide. 'Meet your wife to be,' said Hermes. 'Her name is Pandora.' When It's a Jar Epimetheus and Pandora were soon married. Epimetheus had an inkling that Prometheus who was far away teaching the art of casting in bronze to the people of Varanasi would not approve of Pandora. A quick wedding before his brother returned seemed a good idea. Epimetheus and Pandora were very much in love. That could not be denied. Pandora's beauty and attainments were such as to delight him every day, and in return his facile ability to live always for the moment and never to fret about the future gave her a sense of life as a light and lovely adventure. But one little itch tickled her, one little fly buzzed around her, one little worm burrowed inside. That jar. She kept it on a shelf in their bedroom. When Epimetheus had asked about it she laughed. 'Just a silly thing that Hephaestus made to remind me of Olympus. It's of no value.' 'Pretty though,' said Epimetheus, giving it no further thought. One afternoon, when her husband was away practising the discus with his friends, Pandora approached the jar and ran her finger round the rim of its sealed lid. Why had Zeus even mentioned that there was nothing interesting inside it? He would never have said such a thing if truly there weren't. She pieced the logic of it together in her mind. If you give a friend an empty jar you would never concern yourself with mentioning that the jar was empty. Your friend might look inside one day and see that for themselves. So why should Zeus take the trouble to repeat that this jar contained nothing of any interest? There could be only one explanation. There was something of great interest inside. Something of value or power. Something either enchanting or enchanted. But, no she had sworn never to open it. 'A promise is a promise,' she told herself, and straight away felt very virtuous. She believed it her duty to resist the spell of the jar which now, really, seemed almost to be singing out to her in the most alluring way. It was excessively vexing to have an object so bewitching in her bedroom where it could taunt and tempt her every morning and every night. Temptation loses much of its power when removed from sight. Pandora went to the small back garden and next to a sundial that a neighbour had given them as a wedding gift she dug a hole and buried the jar deep in the ground. She patted the earth flat and wheeled the heavy sundial on its plinth over the hiding place. There! For the next week she was as gay and skittish and happy as a person had ever been. Epimetheus fell even more in love with her and invited their friends over to feast and hear a song he had written in her honour. |
| 86 |
All, save Deucalion and Pyrrha who thanks to the perspicacity of Prometheus survived the nine days of high water aboard their wooden chest, which floated safely on the flood. Like good survivalists they had kept their chest well provisioned with food, drink and a few useful tools and artefacts, so that when the deluge finally receded and their vessel was able to settle on Mount Parnassus they could survive in the post-diluvian mud and slime. fn6 When the world had dried enough for Pyrrha and Deucalion (who is said to have been eighty-two years old at this time) to travel safely down the mountainside, they made their way to Delphi, which lies in the valley below Parnassus. There they consulted the oracle of Themis, the prophetic Titaness whose special quality was an understanding of the right thing to do. 'O Themis, Mother of Justice, Peace and Order, instruct us, we beseech you,' they cried. 'We are alone in the world now and too advanced in years to fill this empty world with offspring.' 'Children of Prometheus and Epimetheus,' the oracle intoned. 'Hear my voice and do as I command. Cover your head and throw the bones of your mother over your shoulder.' Not a word more could the perplexed couple induce the oracle to utter. 'My mother was Pandora,' said Pyrrha, sitting on the ground. 'And I must presume she is drowned. Where could I find her bones?' 'My mother is Clymene,' said Deucalion. 'Or, if you believe variant sources, she is the Oceanid Hesione. In either case they are both immortals and therefore alive and surely unwilling to give up their bones.' 'We must think,' said Pyrrha. 'The bones of our mother. Can that have another meaning? Our mother's bones. Maternal bones ... Think, Deucalion, think!' Deucalion covered his head with a folded cloth, sat down next to his wife, whose head was already covered, and pondered the problem with creased brow. Oracles. They always paltered and prevaricated. Moodily he picked up a rock and sent it rolling down the hillside. Pyrrha grabbed his arm. 'Our mother!' Deucalion stared at her. She had started slapping the ground with the palms of her hands. 'Gaia! Gaia is mother of us all,' she cried. 'Our Mother Earth! These are the bones of our mother, look ...' She started to gather up rocks from the ground. 'Come on!' Deucalion got to his feet and scrabbled around, collecting rocks and stones. They made their way across the fields below Delphi, casting them over their shoulders as instructed, but not daring to look back until they had covered many stadia. When they turned the sight that greeted them filled their hearts with joy. From out of the ground where Pyrrha's stones had landed sprang girls and women, hundreds of them, smiling and healthy and fully formed. From the earth where Deucalion's stones had fallen boys and men grew up. So it was that the old Pelasgians drowned in the Great Deluge, and the Mediterranean world was repopulated by a new race descended through Deucalion and Pyrrha from Prometheus, Epimetheus, Pandora and most importantly of course from Gaia. |
| 87 |
Prometheus Bound With simmering fury Zeus watched the survival of Pyrrha and Deucalion and the rise of a new race of men and women from the stones of the earth. No one, not even the King of the Gods, could interfere with the will of Gaia. She represented an older, deeper, more permanent order than that of the Olympians and Zeus knew that he was powerless to prevent the repopulation of the world. But he could at least turn his attention to Prometheus. The day dawned when Zeus decided the Titan should pay for his betrayal. He looked down from Olympus and saw him in Phocis, assisting in the laying out of a new town, meddling as ever in the affairs of men. Humankind had propagated in the twinkling of an immortal eye, which we would call the passage of several centuries. All this while Prometheus had, with titanic patience, encouraged the spread of civilization amongst Mankind 2.0 once again teaching people all the arts, crafts and practices of agriculture, manufacture and building. Adopting the form of an eagle Zeus swooped down and perched on the timbers of a half-built temple that was to be dedicated to himself. Prometheus, who had been carving scenes from the life of the young Zeus into the pediment, looked up and knew at once that the bird was his old friend. Zeus assumed his proper shape and inspected the carving. 'If that's supposed to be Adamanthea with me there, you've got the proportions all wrong,' he said. 'Artistic licence,' said Prometheus, whose heart was beating fast. It was the first time the two had spoken since Prometheus stole the fire. 'The time has come to pay for what you have done,' said Zeus. 'Now, I could call up the Hecatonchires to carry you forcibly to your destination, or you can choose to bow to the inevitable and come without fuss.' Prometheus laid down his hammer and chisel and wiped his hands with a leather cloth. 'Let's go,' he said. They did not speak or pause for rest or refreshment until they reached the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, where the Black and Caspian Seas meet. Along the journey Zeus had wanted to say something, had longed to take his friend by the shoulder and embrace him. A weeping apology might have allowed him to forgive and make up. But Prometheus remained silent. Zeus's stinging sense of being wronged and ill-used flared up anew. 'Besides,' the god told himself, 'great rulers cannot be seen to exhibit weakness, especially when it comes to betrayal by those close to them.' Prometheus shaded his eyes and looked up. He saw the three Cyclopes standing on a great sloping wall of rock that formed one side of the tallest mountain. 'I know you're good at climbing up the sides of mountains,' Zeus said with what he hoped was icy sarcasm, but which emerged even to his ears as something more like sulky muttering. 'So climb.' When Prometheus reached the place where the Cyclopes were, they bound and fettered him and stretched him out on his back, hammering his shackles into the rock with mighty pegs of unbreakable iron. |
| 88 |
The gods were safe on Olympus, but the cries of the famished and despairing people on earth reached the ears of Zeus. Only when he and the other gods, one night, were making much of the mystery of Persephone's disappearance did the sun Titan Helios speak up. fn2 'Persephone? Oh, I saw what happened to her. I see everything.' 'You saw? Then why didn't you say something?' demanded Zeus. 'Demeter has been dementedly wandering the earth looking for her, frantic with worry and the world is turning into a desert. Why the hell didn't you speak up?' 'No one asked me! No one ever asks me anything. But I know a lot. The eye of the sun sees all,' said Helios, repeating a line that Apollo had often used during his days in charge of the sun-chariot. 'What happened to her?' 'The earth opened and who should come out in his chariot and seize her but ... Hades!' 'Hades!' chorused the gods. The Pomegranate Seeds Zeus immediately went down to the underworld to fetch Persephone back. But the King of the Underworld was in no mood to take orders from the King of the Overworld. 'She stays. She is my queen.' 'You dare to defy me?' 'You are my younger brother,' said Hades. 'My youngest brother in fact. You have always had everything you've ever wanted. I demand the right to keep the girl I love. You cannot deny me.' 'Oh, can't I?' said Zeus. 'The world is in famine. The cries of starving mortals keep us awake. Refuse to return Persephone and you will soon discover the force and reach of my will. Hermes will bring no more spirits of the dead to you. Not one single soul shall ever be sent here. All will be despatched to a new paradise, or perhaps never even die. Hades will become an empty realm drained of all power, influence or majesty. Your name will become a laughing stock.' The brothers glared at each other. Hades was the first to blink. 'Damn you,' he growled. 'Give me one more day with her and then send Hermes to fetch her.' Zeus travelled back up to Olympus well pleased. The next day Hades knocked on the door of Persephone's chamber. You might be surprised that he knocked, but the fact is, in her dignified and assured presence, even such a power as Hades found himself uncertain and shy. He loved her with all his heart, and although he had lost the battle of wills with Zeus he was sure that he could not let her go. Besides, he detected in her something ... something that gave him hope. A small flicker of returned love? 'My dear,' he said with a gentleness that would have astonished anyone who knew him. 'Zeus has prevailed upon me to send you back into the world of light.' Persephone raised her pale face and gazed steadily at him. Hades gazed earnestly back. 'I hope you do not think ill of me?' She did not reply, but Hades thought he could detect a little colour flushing her cheeks and throat. 'Share some pomegranate seeds with me to show there is no ill-feeling?' Listlessly Persephone took six seeds from his outstretched hand and sucked slowly at their sharp sweetness. |
| 89 |
'This cannot be the beast we are all meant to fear,' she thought to herself. 'This wind must be the beast's messenger and herald. He is taking me to my doom. Well, at least it's a comfortable way to travel.' She looked down on the city in which she had grown up. How small and neat and trim everything looked. So unlike the overgrown, ill-smelling and ramshackle township she knew and hated. Zephyrus gained speed and height and soon they were swooping over hills and along valleys, soaring over the blue ocean and flashing past islands, until they were in a country she did not recognize. It was fertile and densely wooded, and as they made a gradual descent she saw, set in a clearing, a magnificent palace, cornered by round towers and crowned with turrets. Gently and easily Psyche was lowered, until she landed with a gliding step on the flowered grass in front of a pair of golden gates. With a fizz and a sigh the wind flew away and she found herself alone. She heard no growls, roars or rapacious snarls, only a distant music floating from the palace's interior. As she made her tentative approach the gates swung open. The royal palace in which Psyche grew up was to the ordinary citizen of her country ornate, opulent and overwhelming, but next to the gorgeous and fantastical edifice she was entering it was nothing but a crude hovel. As she made her way inside her amazed eyes passed over columns of gold, citron-wood and ivory, silver-relief panels carved with an intricacy and artistry she had never dreamed possible and marble statues so perfectly rendered that they seemed to move and breathe. The light glittered in the shimmering gold halls and passageways, the floor she stepped over was a dancing mosaic of jewels and the mysterious music grew louder and louder as she penetrated deeper inside. She passed fountains where crystal waters played in miraculous arcs, shaping and reshaping and quite defying gravity. She became aware of low female voices. Either she was dreaming or this palace was divine. No mortal, and surely no monster, could have ordained so fabulous a habitation. She had arrived at a square central room whose painted panels showed scenes of the birth of the gods and the war with the Titans. The air was perfumed with sandalwood, roses and warm spices. Voices, Visions and a Visitor The whispers and music seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, but all at once they ceased. In the loud silence left behind, a quiet voice called to her. 'Psyche, Psyche, don't be shy. Don't stare and twitch like a startled faun. Don't you know that all this is yours? All this beauty, all these gemstones, this grand palace and the lands around it all yours. Go through that doorway and bathe yourself. The voices you hear are your handmaidens, here to do your bidding. When you are ready a great feast will be laid out. Welcome, beloved Psyche, welcome and enjoy.' The dazed girl made her way into the next room, a vast chamber hung with tapestries and silks, lit by flaming torches in bronze brackets. |
| 90 |
At one end was a gleaming copper bathtub and in the centre a simply colossal bed whose myrtle-wound frame was of polished cypress and whose linen was strewn with rose petals. Psyche was so tired, so befuddled and so unable to make sense of things that she lay down on the bed and closed her eyes, in the confused hope that sleep might wake her up from this wild dream. But when she awoke she was still inside the dream. She got up from the soft brocaded cushions and saw that there was steam rising from the bath. She stepped from her clothes into the water. This is when things became entirely strange. A silver flask by the side of the bath rose up, danced in the air and tipped its contents into the water. Before she had time to scream out her surprise a glorious cloud of unknown fragrances assailed her senses. Now an ivory-handled brush was scrubbing her back and a ewer of hot water was being emptied over her hair. Invisible hands kneaded, stroked, pummelled, teased and pressed. Psyche giggled like a little girl and allowed it all to happen. Whether this was a dream inside the real world or a moment of reality inside a dream no longer seemed important. She would enjoy the adventure and see where it took her. Damasks, silks, satins and gossamer tissues flew from concealed closets and glided down onto the bed to shimmer beside her, rustling in anticipation of being chosen. She selected a chiffon gown of lapis blue loose, comfortable and exciting. The doors of her chambers opened and with shy uncertain steps she made her way back to the main hall. A great feast was laid out on the table. Unseen hands were moving backwards and forwards with platters of fruit, cups of fermented honey, dishes of exotic roast birds and plates of sweetmeats. Never had Psyche seen or imagined such a banquet. Beside herself with joy she dipped her fingers into dishes of such exquisite deliciousness that she could not help crying out in delight. The swine in the piggeries of her parents' farms did not snuffle and truffle at their wooden troughs with more uninhibited abandon than she did at the magical vessels of crystal, silver and gold that filled and refilled themselves as fast as she could empty them. Napkins flew up to dab her wine-stained lips and food-smeared chin. An invisible choir sang soft ballads and hymns to human love as she gorged and guzzled in ecstasy. Finally she was done. A feeling of great warmth and well-being stole over her. If she was being fattened up for an ogre then so be it. The candles on the table now rose up and led Psyche back to the bedchamber. The flickering torches and soft oil lamps had died down and the room was in almost complete darkness. The unseen hands pushed her gently to the bedside and her chiffon gown lifted up and away. Naked she lay back between the satin sheets and closed her eyes. An instant later she gasped in shock. Someone or something had slipped into bed beside her. She felt her body being gently pulled towards this figure. Sweet warm breath mingled with hers. |
| 91 |
Her skin met the body, not of a beast, but of a man. He was beardless and she knew this without being able to see him beautiful. She could not see even the outline of him, only feel his heat and youthful firmness. He kissed her lips and they entwined. Next morning the bed was empty and Psyche was bathed once more by the invisible handmaidens. As the long day passed she at last summoned the courage to ask them questions. 'Where am I?' 'Why, you are here, your highness.' 'And where is here?' 'Far from there but close to nearby.' 'Who is the master of this palace.' 'You are the mistress.' Never a straight answer. She did not press. She knew that she was in an enchanted place and could sense that her handmaidens were slaves to its rules and requirements. That night, in pitch darkness, the beautiful young man came to her bed again. She tried to speak to him, but he placed a finger to her lips and a voice sounded inside her head. 'Hush, Psyche. Ask no questions. Love me as I love you.' And slowly, as the days passed, she realized that she did love this unseen man very much. Every night they made love. Every morning she awoke to find him gone. The palace was glorious and there was nothing Psyche's handmaidens would not do for her. She had everything she could ever want, the best to eat or drink and music to accompany her everywhere. But what long, lonely days stretched out between the evenings of delicious love, how hard she found it to pass the time. The 'monster' with whom she slept every night was, you will have guessed, the god Eros whose self-inflicted dart had caused him to fall in love with Psyche, a love now magnified by their repeated nights of mutual bliss. The oracle had been right to say that Eros was a being whose powers frightened all the gods, for there was not one Olympian who had not been conquered by Eros at some time. Perhaps he was a monster after all. But he could be sensitive and sweet as well as capricious and cruel. He saw that Psyche was not entirely happy and one night, as they lay together in the darkness, he quizzed her tenderly. 'What ails you, beloved wife?' 'I hate to say this when you have given me so much, but I get lonely during the day. I miss my sisters.' 'Your sisters?' 'Calanthe and Zona. They believe me to be dead.' 'Only unhappiness can come from consorting with them. Misery and despair for them and for you.' 'But I love them ...' 'Misery and despair, I tell you.' Psyche sighed. 'Please believe me,' he said. 'It is for the best that you do not see them.' 'What about you? May I not see you? May I never look into the face of the one I love so well?' 'You must not ask me that. Never ask me that.' The days passed and Eros saw that Psyche for all the wine and food, for all the music and magical fountains and enchanted voices was pining. 'Cheer up, beloved! Tomorrow is our anniversary,' he said. A year! Had a whole year passed already? 'My present to you is to grant your wish. Tomorrow morning my friend Zephyrus will await you outside the palace and take you where you need to be. |
| 92 |
But please be careful. Do not allow yourself to become too involved in the lives of your family. And you must promise never to tell them about me. Not one word about me.' Psyche promised and they fell into each others arms for a night of anniversary love. Never had she felt more passionate adoration or physical delight, and she sensed equal feelings of ardour and love in him too. The next morning she awoke, as ever, to an empty bed. In a great fever of impatience she allowed herself to be dressed and served breakfast by the handmaidens before running excitedly to the great gate at the front of the palace. She had barely stepped out before Zephyrus swept down and flew her away in his strong, supportive arms. Sisters Meanwhile, back in the land of Psyche's birth, the populace had been marking the anniversary of her capture by the fabled unseen monster. King Aristides and Queen Damaris had led the procession of mourning up the hillside to the basalt slab on which their daughter had been bound since named 'the Rock of Psyche' in her honour. Now there remained at the monument only the two princesses, Calanthe and Zona, who had loudly made it known to all that they wished to stay behind and lament in private. Once the crowd died away they pulled back their mourning veils and began to laugh. 'Imagine what sort of creature it was that took her away,' said Zona. 'Winged like a Fury ...' suggested Calanthe. 'With iron claws ...' 'And fiery breath ...' 'Great yellow fangs ...' 'Snakes for hair ...' 'A great tail that What was that?' A sudden gust of wind made them turn round. What they saw made them shout in fright. Their sister Psyche was standing before them, radiant in a shimmering white gown edged with gold. She looked appallingly beautiful. 'But ...' began Calanthe 'We thought ...' stammered Zona. And then both together: 'Sister!' Psyche came towards them, her hands held out and the sweetest smile of tender sisterly love lighting up her face. Calanthe and Zona each took a hand to kiss. 'You are alive!' 'And so ... so ...' 'This dress it must have cost, that is to say it looks ...' 'And you look ...' said Zona, 'so ... so ... Calanthe, whatever is the word?' 'Happy?' suggested Psyche. 'Something,' her sisters agreed. 'You definitely look something.' 'But tell us, Psyche, dearest ...' 'What happened to you?' 'Here we are mourning, sobbing our hearts out for you.' 'Who gave you that dress?' 'How did you get off the rock?' 'Is it real gold?' 'Did a monster come for you? A beast? An ogre?' 'And that material.' 'A dragon perhaps?' 'How do you keep it from creasing?' 'Did it take you to its den?' 'Who does your hair?' 'Did it try to chew your bones?' 'That can't be a real emerald can it?' Laughing, Psyche held up a hand. 'Dear sisters! I will tell you everything. Better, I will show you everything. Come, wind, take us there!' Before the sisters knew what was happening the three of them were lifted from their feet and were travelling swiftly through the air, safe in the arms of the West Wind. |
| 93 |
'Don't fight it. Relax into it,' said Psyche as Zephyrus swept them up over the mountain. Zona's howls began to subside and Calanthe's muffled sobs softened to a whimper. Before long they were even able to open their eyes for a few seconds without screaming. When the wind finally set them down on the grass in front of the enchanted palace Calanthe had decided that this was the only way to travel. 'Who needs a stupid horse pulling a rickety rackety old chariot?' she said. 'From now on I catch the wind ...' But Zona wasn't listening. She was staring transfixed at the walls, the turrets and the silver studded door of the palace, all glittering in the morning sun. 'Come in,' said Psyche. What an exciting feeling, to show her dear sisters around her new home. It was a pity they couldn't meet her darling husband. To say that the girls were impressed would be criminally to understate the matter. Naturally therefore they sniffed, yawned, tittered, shook their heads and generally tut-tutted their way from golden apartment to golden apartment by silver-panelled corridors and jewel-encrusted passageways. Their tilted, wrinkled noses seemed to suggest that they were used to better. 'Just a little vulgar, don't we feel, darling?' Zona suggested. Inside she said to herself, 'This is the home of a god!' Calanthe was thinking, 'If I just stop and pretend to fix the laces of my sandals I could break off one of the rubies encrusting that chair ...' When the invisible staff of stewards, footmen and handmaidens began serving lunch the sisters found it harder to mask their wonder and astonishment. Afterwards they each took turns to be oiled, bathed and massaged. Pressed for details of the castle's lord, Psyche remembered her promise and hastily made something up. 'He's a handsome huntsman and local landowner.' 'What's his name?' 'The kindest eyes.' 'And his name is ...?' 'He's so sorry to miss you. I'm afraid he always takes to the field with his hounds by day. He wanted so much to greet you personally. Perhaps another time.' 'Yes, but what's he called?' 'He he doesn't really have a name.' 'What?' 'Well, he has a name. Obviously he has a name, everyone has a name, Zona, I mean really! But he doesn't use it.' 'But what is it?' 'Oh my goodness, quick! It'll be dark soon. Zephyrus won't fly you at night ... Come, dear sisters, help yourselves to some little things to take home. Here's a handful of amethysts. These are sapphires. There's gold, silver ... Be sure to take gifts for mother and father too.' Loaded with precious treasures the sisters allowed themselves to be transported back to the rock. Psyche, who had stood and waved them off, was both relieved and sorry to see them go. While she welcomed their company and the chance to show them round and give them presents, her determination to keep the promise she had made to her husband had made the evasion of all their questions an exhausting business. Back home the sisters despite the fabulous treasures they now possessed were eaten up with envy, resentment and fury. |
| 94 |
How could their younger sister, the stupid, selfish Psyche, now find herself in the position more or less of a goddess? It was so appallingly unfair. Spoiled, vain, ugly creature! Well, not ugly, perhaps. Possessed of a certain obvious and rather vulgar prettiness, but scarcely a match for their queenly beauty. It was all too monstrously unjust: there was almost certainly witchcraft and wickedness at the bottom of it. How could she not even know the name of her lord and master? 'My husband Sato's rheumatism,' said Calanthe, 'is getting so bad that every night I have to rub his fingers one by one, then apply plasters and poultices. It's disgusting and demeaning.' 'You think your life is hell?' said Zona. 'My Charion is as bald as an onion, his breath stinks and he has all the sex drive of a dead pig. While Psyche ...' 'That selfish slut ...' The sisters clung to each other and sobbed their hearts out. That night Psyche's lover Eros had momentous news for her. She was pouring out all her gratitude to him, and explaining how well she had managed to avoid describing him to her sisters, when he placed his finger on her lips. 'Sweet, trusting child. I fear those sisters and what they may do to you. But I am glad you are happy. Let me make you happier still.' She felt his warm hand slide down her front and gently stroke her belly. 'Our child is growing there.' Psyche gasped and hugged him close, stunned with joy. 'If you keep this secret,' he said, 'the child will be a god. If you tell a living soul, it will be mortal.' 'I will keep the secret,' said Psyche. 'But before my condition becomes obvious let me at least see Calanthe and Zona one more time and say goodbye to them.' Eros was troubled but could not see how he might deny so decent and sisterly a request, and so he assented. 'Zephyrus will send them a sign and they will come,' he said, leaning forward to kiss her. 'But remember, not a word about me or about our baby.' A Drop of Oil The next morning Calanthe and Zona awoke to feel the breath of Zephyrus ruffling at them like a hungry pet dog panting and pawing at the bedclothes. When they opened their eyes and sat up the wind departed, but their instinct, greed and inborn cunning told them what the signal meant, and they hurried to the rock to await their transport. This time they were determined to get to the bottom of the mystery of their sister's lover. Psyche was there to welcome them when they were set down in front of the palace. Embracing her fondly the sisters hid the furious envy they felt at Psyche's good fortune, presenting instead a flurry of solicitous clucking and tutting, accompanied by much head-shaking. 'Whatever is the matter, Calanthe?' a puzzled Psyche asked as she sat them down to a great breakfast of fruit, cakes and honey-wine. 'Why so sorrowful, Zona? Are you not happy to see me?' 'Happy?' groaned Calanthe. 'If only,' Zona sighed. 'What can be worrying you?' 'Ah, child, child,' said Calanthe with a moan. 'You are so young. So sweet. |
| 95 |
Alas! As she did so, hot oil from the lantern dripped onto his right shoulder. He awoke with a yelp of pain which, when he saw Psyche standing over him, grew into a great roar of disappointment and despair. His wings opened and began to beat the air. As he rose Psyche launched herself forward and clung to his right leg, but his strength was too great and he shook her off without a word and flew away into the night. The moment he left, everything fell apart. The walls of the palace rippled, faded and dissolved into the night air. A despairing Psyche watched the gold columns around her shiver into a dark colonnade of trees and the jewelled mosaic tiles beneath her feet churn into a mess of mud and gravel. Before long, palace, precious metals, precious stones all had vanished. The sweet singing of the handmaidens turned into the howling of wolves and the screeching of owls, and the warm, mysterious perfumes whipped into chill and unrelenting winds. Alone A frightened, unhappy girl stood in a cold and desolate wood. She slipped down the trunk of a tree until she sat on the hard roots. The only thought in her mind was to end her life. She was awoken by a beetle scuttling over her lips. She sat up with a shiver and unpeeled a damp leaf from her brow. She had not dreamed the horrors of the night before. She really was alone in a wood. Perhaps everything before was a dream and this had always been the reality? Or she had awoken inside another episode of a wider dream? It was hardly worth the bother of trying to puzzle it all out. Dream or reality, everything was intolerable to her. 'Don't do it, pretty girl.' Shocked, Psyche looked up to see the god Pan standing before her. The humorous frown, the thick curling hair from which two horns sprouted, the wide hairy flanks tapering down to goats' feet it could be no other figure, mortal or immortal. 'No, no,' said Pan, stamping the muddy ground with his hoofs. 'I can read it in your face and it is not to be. I won't allow it.' 'You won't allow what?' said Psyche. 'I won't allow you to dash yourself onto the rocks from off a high cliff. I won't allow you to court the deadly attentions of a wild animal. I won't allow you to pick belladonna and drink its poisonous juices. I won't allow any of that.' 'But I can't live!' cried Psyche. 'If you knew my story you would understand and you would help me die.' 'You should ask yourself what brought you here,' said Pan. 'If it's love, then you must pray to Aphrodite and Eros for guidance and relief. If your own wickedness caused your downfall then you must live to repent. If it was caused by others then you must live to revenge.' Revenge! Psyche suddenly understood what needed to be done. She rose to her feet. 'Thank you, Pan,' she said. 'You've shown me the way.' Pan bared his teeth in a grin and bowed. His lips blew a flourish of farewell across the top of the set of pipes in his hand. Four days later Psyche knocked on the gates of the grand mansion of her brother-in-law Sato, the husband of Calanthe. |
| 96 |
Through enchantments that she did not know were being worked upon her, Psyche found herself knocking one day on a great palace door. Terrible creatures pulled her in by the hair and cast her into a dungeon. Aphrodite herself visited her, bringing sacks of wheat, barley, millet, poppyseed, chickpeas, lentils and beans, which she emptied onto the stone floor and stirred together. 'If you want your freedom,' she said, 'separate out all the different grains and seeds and sort them into their own heaps. Finish this task before next sunrise and I will free you.' With a laugh that unbecomingly for a goddess of love and beauty fell somewhere between a cackle and a screech, Aphrodite left, slamming the cell door behind her. Psyche fell sobbing to the floor. It would be impossible to separate those seeds, even if she had a month to do it. Just then an ant, making its away across the flagstones, was engulfed by a hot, salt tear falling from Psyche's cheek. 'Watch out!' he cried angrily. 'It may be a little tear to you, but it's a deluge to me.' 'I'm so sorry,' said Psyche. 'I'm afraid I didn't see you. My misery got the better of me.' 'What misery can be so great that it causes you to go about half drowning honest ants?' Psyche explained her plight and the ant, who was of an obliging and forgiving nature, offered to help. With a cry inaudible to human ears he summoned his great family of brother and sisters, and together they set about sorting the seeds. With the tears drying on her cheeks Psyche watched in amazement as ten thousand cheerful ants shuttled and scuttled back and forth, sifting and separating the seeds with military precision. Well before rosy-fingered Eos had cast open the gates of dawn, the job was done and seven neat and perfect piles awaited Aphrodite's inspection. The frustrated fury of the goddess was something to behold. Another impossible chore was instantly devised. 'You see the grove yonder, on the other side of the river?' said Aphrodite, yanking Psyche by the hair and forcing her to look out of the window. 'There are sheep there, grazing and wandering unguarded. Special sheep with fleeces of gold. Go there at once and bring me back a tuft of their wool.' Psyche made her way out to the grove willingly enough, but with no intention of carrying out this second task. She resolved to use her freedom to escape not just the prison of Aphrodite's hateful curse but the prison of hateful life itself. She would throw herself into the river and drown. But as she stood on the bank, breathing hard and summoning up the courage to dive in, one of the reeds nodded although there wasn't a breath of breeze and whispered to her. 'Psyche, sweet Psyche. Harrowed by great trials as you are, do not pollute my clean waters with your death. There is a way through your troubles. The sheep here are wild and violent, guarded by the most ferocious ram, whose horns could tear you open like a ripe fruit. You see them grazing there under that plane tree on the further bank? |
| 97 |
Zeus saw this and paced about in a fury. His blood was up. He crashed his fist into his palm. He would have Io. It had become a matter of principle to defeat Hera in this silent and unacknowledged war. He knew the limits of his own cunning, however, so he called upon the wiliest and most amoral rogue on Olympus to aid him. Hermes understood right away what needed to be done. Ever happy to oblige Zeus and sow mischief he hurried to Io's paddock. 'Hello, Argus. Let me keep you company for a while,' he said, unlatching the gate and slipping in. 'Nice heifer you've got there.' Argus swivelled a dozen eyes towards Hermes, who sat down on the grass, took out a set of pipes and started to play. For two hours he played and he sang. The music, the afternoon heat, the scent of poppies, lavender and wild thyme, the soft lapping and purling of a nearby stream slowly Argus's eyes started to close, one by one. As the very hundredth eye at last winked shut Hermes lowered his pipes, stole forward and stabbed Argus in the heart. All the gods were capable of great cruelty Hermes could be as vicious as any of them. With Argus dead, Zeus opened the gate into the field and set Io free. But before he had a chance to change her back into human form Hera, who had seen what had happened, sent down a gadfly which stung Io so painfully and persistently that she bucked and screamed and galloped away, far from Zeus's reach. Sorrowing at the death of her beloved servant, Hera took Argus's hundred bright eyes and fixed them onto the tail of a very dull, dowdy old fowl, transforming it into what we know today as the peacock which is how the now proud, colourful and haughty bird came for ever to be associated with the goddess. fn5 Io, meanwhile, charged on along the northern shore of the Aegean Sea, swimming over at the place where Europe becomes Asia, the spot we still call in her honour the cow-crossing, or in Greek, the Bosporus. fn6 On and on she careered, thrashing, tossing and squealing in her agony until she reached the Caucasus. There the gadfly seemed to relent for a while, enough for her to see the figure of Prometheus, racked in pain upon the mountainside. 'Sit down and catch your breath awhile, Io,' said the Titan. 'Be of good cheer. Things will get better.' 'They could hardly be worse,' wailed Io. 'I'm a cow. I'm being attacked by the largest and most spiteful gadfly the world has ever seen. And Hera will destroy me. It's only a question of whether I am stung to death or go mad and drown myself in the sea.' 'I know it seems dark for you now,' said Prometheus, 'but I see into the future sometimes and I do know this. You will return to human shape. You will found a great dynasty in the land where Nilus crawls. And from your line will spring the greatest of all the heroes. fn7 So chin up and be cheerful, eh?' It was hard for Io, in all her tribulation, to ignore these words from one who even as she looked on in horror was being ripped open and gorged upon by a pair of evil-looking vultures. |
| 98 |
'So, you are Clymene's boy, are you? Stand up, let's have a look at you. Yes, I can see that you might be the fruit of my loins. You have the cast of countenance, the colouring. I'm told you travelled a long way to be here. Why?' The question was blunt and Phaeton found himself a little flustered. He managed to stammer out some words about Epaphus and 'the other boys' and was painfully aware that he sounded more like a spoiled child than the proud son of an Olympian. 'Yes, yes. Very mean, very disrespectful. And where do I come in?' 'All my life,' said Phaeton, burning with the pride and resentment that had smouldered inside him for so very long, 'all my life my mother has told me about great and glorious Apollo, the golden god, my shining perfect father. B-b-but you've never visited us! You've never invited us anywhere. You've never even acknowledged me.' 'Well, yes, I'm sorry about that. Remiss of me. I've been a terrible father, I wish I could make it up to you.' Apollo mouthed the words that absent fathers mouth everywhere and every day, but his mind was really on horses, music, drink ... anything but this tedious, sulky and complaining child. 'If you could just grant me one wish. One wish, that's all.' 'Of course, of course. Name it.' 'Really? You mean it?' 'Of course.' 'You swear you'll grant it?' 'I swear,' said Apollo, amused by the boy's extreme earnestness. 'I swear by my lyre. I swear by the cold flowing waters of Styx herself. Name it, I say.' 'I want to drive your horses.' 'My horses?' said Apollo, not quite understanding. 'Drive them? What do you mean?' 'I want to steer the sun-chariot across the sky. Tomorrow.' 'Oh no,' said Apollo, a smile spreading across his face. 'No, no, no! Don't be silly. No one can do that.' 'You promised!' 'Phaeton, Phaeton. It's brave and splendid even to dream of doing such a thing. But no one, no one drives those animals but me.' 'You swore by Styx!' 'Zeus himself couldn't control them! They are the strongest, wildest, most headstrong and unmanageable stallions ever born. They answer to my touch and mine alone. No, no. You can't ask such a thing.' 'I have asked it. And you have sworn!' 'Phaeton!' The other eleven gods would have been astonished to hear such a pleading, desperate note in Apollo's voice. 'I beg of you! Anything else. Gold, food, power, knowledge, love ... You name it, it's yours in perpetuity. But not this. Never this.' 'I have asked and you have sworn,' the stubborn youth replied. Apollo bowed his golden head and cursed inwardly. Oh, those gods and their quick tongues. Oh, those mortals and their foolish dreams. Will either ever learn? 'Right. Let's go and meet them then. But know this,' Apollo said as they neared the stables and the horsey smell grew stronger and sharper in Phaeton's nostrils. 'You can change your mind at any time. I won't think any the less of you. Frankly, I'll think a great deal the more of you.' At the god's approach the four stallions, white with golden manes, stamped and shifted in their stalls. |
| 99 |
'Hey, Pyrois! Whoa there, Phlegon! Hush now, Aeos! Quietly, Aethon!' Apollo called to each in turn. 'Alright, come forward, boy, let them get to know you.' Phaeton had never seen such beautiful horses. Their eyes flashed gold and their hoofs struck sparks on the flagstones. He was filled with awe, but felt too a sudden stab of fear which he tried to play off as thrilled anticipation. Lined up before the massive gates of dawn was a golden quadriga, the great chariot to which the four stallions would soon be harnessed. A quiet female figure in saffron robes hurried past. Phaeton caught from her a fragrance which he could not name but which made him dizzy with delight. 'That was Eos,' said Apollo. 'It will soon be time for her to open the gates.' Phaeton knew all about Eos, the goddess of the dawn. She was called rhododaktylos the 'rosy-fingered one' and admired everywhere for her sweetness and soft beauty. As he helped his father walk the stallions forward and into position at the head of the chariot, Phaeton suddenly felt himself pushed roughly aside. 'What is this mortal doing?' A huge figure dressed in shining buff leather armour had taken the bridle of all four horses at once and was leading them forward. 'Ah, Helios, there you are,' said Apollo. 'This is Phaeton. My son Phaeton.' 'So?' Phaeton knew that Helios was the brother of Eos and the moon goddess Selene and assisted Apollo in his daily duties with the chariot. Apollo seemed slightly awkward in the Titan's presence. 'Well, the thing is, Phaeton will be driving the chariot today.' 'Excuse me?' 'Well, he might as well learn now, don't you think?' 'You are joking?' 'I sort of promised.' 'Well, sort of unpromise then.' 'Helios, I can't. You know I can't.' Helios stamped his feet and gave a roar that caused the horses to rear and whinny. 'You've never once let me drive, Apollo! Never. How many times have I asked and how many times have you told me I'm not ready? And now you let this ... this shrimp take the reins?' 'Helios, you will do as you're told,' said Apollo. 'I have spoken and so I have ... er, spoken.' Apollo took the four leather traces from Helios and lifted Phaeton up and into the seat of the chariot. Helios gave a shout of laughter as he saw the youth slide back and forth. 'He rolls in it like a little pea!' he said with a surprisingly high-pitched giggle. 'He'll be fine. Now, Phaeton. These reins they are your lines of communication with the horses. They know the way, they run this course every day, but you must show them that you are their master, you understand?' Phaeton nodded eagerly. Something of his nervous excitement and Helios's fury seemed to have been picked up by the horses, who bucked and snorted restlessly. 'The most important thing,' continued Apollo, 'is to fly neither too high nor too low. A middle course between the sky and the earth, yes?' Again Phaeton nodded. 'Oh, I nearly forgot. Hold out your hands ...' Apollo took a jar and poured oil from it into Phaeton's outstretched palms. |
| 100 |
'Anoint yourself with that all over. It will protect you from the heat and light generated by the stallions as they gallop through the air. The earth below will be warmed and lit as you go, so keep a straight line westwards towards the Garden of the Hesperides. It's a twelve-hour drive. Be steady. Remember the horses know. Call them by name, Aeos and Aethon, Pyrois and Phlegon.' As Apollo said their names Phaeton saw their ears prick up. 'But it's not too late, boy. You've seen them, you've handled them, I'll give you gold sculptures of them cast by Hephaestus to take home. That should satisfy your school friends.' Another high-pitched titter from Helios sent a flush to Phaeton's cheek. 'No,' he said stiffly. 'You gave a promise and so did I.' Daybreak As Phaeton spoke Eos came forward in a bright cloud of pearl and rose. She bowed smilingly to Apollo and Helios, looked a puzzled question at the blushing Phaeton in the chariot and took up her position at the gates of dawn. To a traveller looking eastwards and upwards at the clouds in which the Palace of the Sun was hidden, the first sign that Eos was at work always came in the form of a flush of coral pink that suffused the sky. As she threw the gates wider, that soft pink hardened into a gleam of gold which grew ever brighter and fiercer. To Phaeton, inside the palace, the effect was reversed: the doors opened to reveal the dark world beyond, illumined only by the silver gleam from Eos and Helios's sister, the moon goddess Selene, reaching the end of her nightly course. As Eos pushed the gates further open Phaeton saw pink and gold light radiate outwards, drowning the darkness of the night. As if that were a signal the four horses pricked their ears, shuddered and reared. Phaeton was jerked back and the chariot beneath him began to roll forward. 'Remember, boy,' shouted Apollo, 'don't panic. A firm hand. Don't snatch at the reins. Just let the horses know you're in control. Everything will be fine.' 'After all,' cried Helios as the chariot began to lift from the ground, 'what can possibly go wrong?' His squeals of falsetto laughter stung Phaeton like a lash. Switching points of view again to the traveller looking eastwards from the road below, the gold gleam is now a great ball of fire that is becoming harder and harder to observe without squinting. The short flush of dawn is over and the day has begun. The Drive Apollo's horses charged upwards, pawing the air. All was well. They knew what they were doing. They reached a certain height, levelled out and charged forward. This was easy. Phaeton pulled himself upright, careful not to strain the traces, and looked around. He could see the curve that marked the separation of blue sky and star-filled darkness. He could see the effect of the light blazing out from the chariot. He was insulated, somehow magically safe from its heat and glare, but great clouds melted and fizzed into vapour as they approached. He looked down and saw the long shadows of mountains and trees contract as they flew forward. |
| 101 |
He saw the wrinkled sea send back a million scintillations of light, and he saw the sparkle of dew rising into a shimmering mist as they neared the coast of Africa. Somewhere, just west of Nilus, Epaphus would be holidaying on the beach. Oh, this was going to be the greatest triumph ever! As the coastline swung more clearly into view Phaeton pulled at the reins, trying to nose down Aeos, the lead horse on his left hand side. Aeos had perhaps been thinking of other things, of golden straw or pretty mares, he had certainly not been imagining a tug to pull him off course. In a panic he shied and dived, pulling the other horses with him. The chariot bucked in the air and plummeted straight for the earth. In vain Phaeton tugged the reins, which had somehow become tangled in his hands. The green earth screamed towards him and he saw his certain death. He took one final desperate yank at the reins, and at the very last minute either in response to that pull or as an instinctive move to save themselves the four steeds swooped upwards and galloped blindly north. But not before Phaeton saw with terror and dismay that the terrible heat of the sun-chariot had set the earth on fire. As they flew on, a raging curtain of flame swept across the land below, burning everything and everyone upon it to a crisp. The whole strip of Africa below the northern coast was laid waste. To this day most of the land is a great parched desert, which we call the Sahara, but which to the Greeks was the Land that Phaeton Scorched. He was now terribly out of control. The horses knew for certain that the familiar firm hand of Apollo was not there to guide them. Was it wild joy at their freedom or panic at the lack of control that maddened the four? Having plunged down close enough to make the earth catch fire now they leapt up so far towards the purple curve that separated the sky from the stars that the world below grew cold and dark. The sea itself froze and the land turned to ice. Thrashing, swaying, swooping and careering onwards, without any control or sense of direction, the chariot bounced and bucketed in the air like a leaf in a storm. Far below, the people of the earth looked up in wonder and alarm. Phaeton was screaming at the horses, begging them, threatening them, jerking at the reins ... but all in vain. The Fallout On Olympus news of the devastation being wrought upon the surface of the earth reached the gods and, at last, the ears of Zeus himself. 'Look what's happening,' cried a distraught Demeter. 'The crops are being sun-burned or frost-bitten. It's a disaster.' 'The people are afraid,' said Athena. 'Please, father. Something must be done.' With a sigh Zeus reached for a thunderbolt. He looked where the chariot of the sun was now plunging in a mad tumble towards Italy. The thunderbolt, as all Zeus's thunderbolts did, hit its mark. Phaeton was blasted clear of the chariot and fell flaming to earth, where he dropped like a spent rocket into the waters of the River Eridanos with a hiss and a fizz. |
| 102 |
She did this not in worshipful admiration but to muffle her laughter she found the men's vanity when it came to physical prowess endlessly amusing. The competition against which Cadmus pitted himself next day consisted chiefly of puny local youths and pot-bellied palace guards. When he sent the discus right out of the palace grounds with his first throw, a servant had to be sent to fetch it and the crowd cheered. By the end of the afternoon Cadmus had won every event. Harmonia glared at the women and girls who blew him kisses and threw flowers at his feet. Pelagon, who was not a rich monarch, sent his chamberlain in search of a suitable prize for his noble victor ludorum. 'People of Phocis,' cried the king, placing a hastily plaited crown of olive leaves on Cadmus's brow, 'behold your champion, our honoured guest Prince Cadmus of Tyre. And here comes a prize worthy of his great speed and strength and grace.' A loud cheer went up, which fell into a puzzled silence as the palace chamberlain came through the crowd driving ahead of him a large cow. The silence bubbled into a titter and the titter burst into outright laughter. The cow chewed its cud, lifted its tail and sent out a liquid spatter of dung from its rear. The crowd hooted with derision. Pelagon turned scarlet. His father Amphidamas said to Cadmus with a wink, 'Oh well. Morpheus can't be right all the time, hey?' But Harmonia nudged Cadmus in great excitement. 'Look,' she breathed, 'look, Cadmus, look!' Cadmus saw at once what had attracted her attention. On the cow's back was a mark in the shape of a half moon. There was no other way to describe it. A clear half moon! Pelagon was murmuring something unconvincing in his ear about the animal's pedigree and high milk yield, but Cadmus interrupted him. 'Your majesty could not have found a more marvellous and welcome prize! I am overcome with delight and gratitude.' 'You are?' said a faintly stunned Pelagon. The chamberlain was so astonished to hear this that he dropped the switch of willow with which he had been slapping the beast towards the winner's rostrum. It took perhaps thirty seconds for the heifer to become aware that the stinging smack was no longer there to force her on, so she turned and started to amble away. 'Indeed,' said Cadmus jumping from the rostrum and helping Harmonia down after him. 'It really is the perfect present. Just exactly what we wanted ...' The cow made its way through the crowd. Cadmus and Harmonia, their backs to the royal party, began to follow. Over his shoulder Cadmus called back to the king, stammering out thanks and incoherent courtesies. 'Your majesty will excuse us ... such a wonderful stay ... so grateful for your hospitality ... excellent food, marvellous entertainment ... most kind ... er ... farewell ...' 'So grateful,' repeated Harmonia. 'We'll never forget it. Never. The loveliest heifer! Goodbye.' 'B-but! What? I mean ...?' said Pelagon, puzzled by this swift and sudden leave-taking. 'I thought you were staying another night?' 'No time. |
| 103 |
The field ploughed, Cadmus now set to dibbling the furrows an inch or two deep with the blunt end of a spear. Into each dibbled hole he dropped a dragon's tooth. As we all know, humans have thirty-two teeth. Water dragons have rows and rows of them, like sharks, each ready to advance when the row in front has been worn down with too much grinding of men's bones. Five hundred and twelve teeth Cadmus planted in all. When he had finished he stood back to survey the field. A light wind blew across the plain, catching the crests of the furrows and sending up powdery flurries of soil. Dust devils whipped and whirled around. A great hush descended. Harmonia was the first to see the earth in one of the furrows shift. She pointed and all eyes followed. A gasp and a muffled cry went up from the watching crowd. The tip of a spear was pushing through, then a helmet appeared, followed by shoulders, a breastplate, leathern-greaved legs ... until a fully armed soldier rose up, wild and fierce, stamping his feet. Then another, and another, until the field was filled with fighting men, marching on the spot in furrowed lines. The clanging and banging of their armour, the clashing and bashing of their buckles, belts and boots, the clamour and smacking of the metal and leather of their cuirasses, greaves and shields, their rhythmic grunting and martial shouts all built into a great and horrid din that filled the onlookers with fear. All but Cadmus, who stepped boldly forward and raised a hand. 'Spartoi!' he called out across the plain, giving them a name that means 'sown men'. 'My Spartoi! I am Prince Cadmus, your general. At ease.' Perhaps because they were born of dragon's teeth pulled from the jaws of a creature sacred to the god of war, these soldiers were filled from the first with extraordinary aggression. In reply to Cadmus's command they simply clattered and rattled their shields and spears. 'Silence!' yelled Cadmus. The warriors paid no attention. Their marching on the spot turned into a slow march forward. In exasperation Cadmus picked up a rock which, with his customary skill and strength, he hurled into their ranks. It struck one of the soldiers on the shoulder. The man looked at the soldier next to him and, taking him to be the aggressor, lunged at him with a mighty roar, sword drawn. Within moments blood-curdling battle-cries were heard all around the field as the soldiers fell upon each other. 'Stop! Stop! I command you to stop!' yelled Cadmus like a frantic parent on the touchline watching their son being squashed in a scrum. Stamping the ground in frustration he turned to Harmonia. 'What is the point of Athena taking all this trouble to force me to create a race of men, only for them to destroy each other? Look at this violence, this bloodlust. What does it mean?' But even as he spoke, Harmonia was pointing to the centre of the fray. Five of Cadmus's Spartoi stood in a circle, the sole survivors. The rest lay dead, their blood soaking back into the soil from which they had come. |
| 104 |
They went as an ordinary middle-aged couple, asking for no great welcome or banquets in their honour. Only a small party of attendants accompanied them. It was unfortunate, though, that Harmonia included the cursed necklace in her luggage. After a great deal of travelling around Greece they determined on a visit to the kingdom up towards the western Adriatic, south of the Balkans and facing the east coast of Italy, that had been established by their youngest boy, Illyrius, and which was unsurprisingly called 'Illyria'. fn12 Once there, Cadmus suddenly fell weary and was filled with an insupportable dread. He called up to the skies. 'For the last thirty years I have known in my heart that in killing that cursed water snake I killed any chance of happiness for me or my wife. Ares is remorseless. He will not rest until I am as flat on the earth as a snake. If it will calm him and bring more peace to my troubled life then let me end my life sliding through the dust. Let it be so.'fn13 No sooner were those words out of his mouth than his unhappy prayer became an unhappy reality. His body began to shrink sideways and stretch lengthways, his skin to blister and form smooth scales, and his head to flatten into a diamond shape. The tongue that had shouted that dreadful wish to the heavens now flicked and darted out from between two fangs. The man who was once Cadmus, Prince of Tyre and King of Thebes, fell writhing to the ground, a common snake. Harmonia let out a great howl of despair. 'Gods have pity!' she cried. 'Aphrodite, if you are my mother show love now and let me join upon the earth the one I love. The fruits of the world are dust to me. Ares, if you are my father show mercy. Zeus if, as some say, you are my father then, in the name of all creation, take pity, I beg you.' It was, however, none of those three who heard her prayers, but merciful Athena who transformed her into a snake. Harmonia glided through the dust after her serpent-husband and they coiled about each other with love. The pair lived out their days in the shadows of a temple sacred to Athena, only showing themselves when they needed to heat their blood in the noonday sun. When the end came, Zeus returned them to their human shapes in time to die. Their bodies were taken to be buried with great ceremony in Thebes, and Zeus sent two great serpents to guard their tombs for eternity. We will leave Cadmus and Harmonia to their everlasting rest. They died quite unaware that their youngest daughter, Semele, had, in their absence, unleashed a force into the world that would change it for ever. Twice Born The Eagle Lands After Cadmus and Harmonia departed on their travels, their son-in-law Pentheus reigned in Thebes. fn1 He was not a strong king, but he was honest and did the best he could with the limited store of character and cunning on which he was able to call. While the city-state flourished well enough under him, he needed always to look over his shoulder to the children of Cadmus, his brothers- and sisters-in-law, whose greed and ambition posed a constant threat. |
| 105 |
Even his wife Agave seemed contemptuous of him and anxious for him to fail. His youngest sister-in-law, Semele, was the only one with whom he felt at all at ease, in truth because she was less worldly than her brothers Polydorus and Illyrius, and nothing like as ambitious for wealth and position as her sisters Agave, AutonoE and Ino. Semele was a beautiful, kindly and generous girl, content with her life as a priestess at the great temple of Zeus. One day she sacrificed to Zeus a bull of especially impressive size and vigour. The offering complete, she took herself off to the River Asopos to wash the blood from her. It so happened that Zeus, pleased with the sacrifice and intending anyway to look in on Thebes to see how the city prospered, was flying over the river at the time in his favourite guise of an eagle. The sight of Semele's naked body glistening in the water excited him hugely and he landed, turning himself quickly back into his proper form. I say 'proper form', for when the gods chose to reveal themselves to humans they presented themselves in a reduced, manageable guise that did not dazzle or overawe. Thus the figure that stood on the riverbank smiling at Semele appeared human. Large, stunningly handsome, powerfully built and possessed of an unusual radiance, but human all the same. Crossing her arms over her breasts Semele called out, 'Who are you? How dare you sneak up upon a priestess of Zeus?' 'A priestess of Zeus, are you?' 'I am. If you mean any harm to me I will cry out to the King of the Gods and he will rush to my aid.' 'You don't say so?' 'You may be sure of it. Now leave.' But the stranger came closer. 'I am well pleased with you, Semele,' he said. Semele backed away. 'You know my name?' 'I know many things, loyal priestess. For I am the god you serve. I am the Sky Father, the King of Olympus. Zeus, the all-powerful.' Semele, still half in the river, gasped and fell to her knees. 'Come now,' said Zeus, striding through the water towards her, 'let me look into your eyes.' It was splashy, frenzied and wet, but it was real love-making. When it was over Semele smiled, blushed, laughed and then wept, leaning her head on Zeus's chest and sobbing without cease. 'Don't cry, dearest Semele,' said Zeus, running his fingers through her hair. 'You have pleased me.' 'I'm sorry, my lord. But I love you and I know all too well that you can never love a mortal.' Zeus gazed down at her. The eruption of lust he had felt was all over, but he was surprised to feel the stirrings of something deeper, glowing like embers in his heart. A god who operated in vertical moments with no real thought for consequences along the line, he really did experience just then a great wellspring of love for the beautiful Semele, and he told her so. 'Semele, I do love you! I love you sincerely. Believe me now when I swear by the waters of this river that I will always look after you, care for you, protect you, honour you.' He cupped her face in his hands and bent forward to bestow a tender kiss on her soft, receptive lips. |
| 106 |
'Now, farewell, my sweet. Once every new moon I will come.' Dressed in her gown, her hair still damp and her whole being warm and bright with love and happiness, Semele walked back across the fields towards the temple. Looking up, a hand shading her eyes, she saw an eagle sweep and soar through the sky, seemingly into the sun itself, until the dazzle of it made her eyes water and she was forced to look away. The Eagle's Wife Zeus meant well. Those three words so often presaged disaster for some poor demigod, nymph or mortal. The King of the Gods did love Semele and he really meant to do his best by her. In the fervour of his new infatuation he managed conveniently to forget the torments Io had endured, maddened by the gadfly sent by his vengeful wife. Alas, Hera may no longer have had Argus of the hundred eyes to gather intelligence for her, but she had thousands of eyes in other places. Whether it was one of the jealous sisters, Agave, AutonoE or Ino, who spied on Semele and whispered to Hera the story of the love-making in the river, or whether it was one of the Queen of Heaven's own priestesses, is not known. But find out Hera did. So it was that, one afternoon, Semele, returning with romantic sentiment to the place of her regular amorous encounters with Zeus, encountered a stooping old woman leaning on a stick. 'My, what a pretty girl,' croaked the old woman, slightly overdoing the cracked and cackling voice of a miserable crone. 'Why thank you,' said the unsuspicious Semele with a friendly smile. 'Walk with me,' said the hag, pulling Semele towards her with her cane. 'Let me lean upon you.' Semele was polite and considerate by nature in a culture where the elderly were in any case accorded the greatest attention and respect, so she accompanied the old woman and endured her roughness without complaint. 'My name is BeroE,' said the old woman. 'And I am Semele.' 'What a pretty name! And here is Asopos,' BeroE indicated the clear waters of the river. 'Yes,' assented Semele, 'that is the river's name.' 'I heard tell,' here the old woman's voice lowered into a harsh whisper, 'that a priestess of Zeus was seduced here. Right here in the reeds.' Semele went silent, but the flush that spread instantly up her neck to her cheeks betrayed her as completely as any spoken words. 'Oh, my dear!' screeched the crone. 'It was you! And now that I look, I can see your belly. You are with child!' 'I ... I am ...' said Semele with a becoming mixture of diffidence and pride. 'But ... if you can keep a secret ...?' 'Oh, these old lips never tell tales. You may tell me anything you wish, my dear.' 'Well, the fact is that the father of this child is none other than Zeus himself.' 'No!' said BeroE. 'You don't say so? Really?' Semele gave a very affirmative nod of the head. She did not like the old woman's sceptical tone. 'Truly. The King of the Gods himself.' 'Zeus? The great god Zeus? Well, well. I wonder ... No, I mustn't say.' 'Say what, lady?' 'You seem such a sweet innocent. |
| 107 |
He arrived at last, this time as a stallion black, glossy and fine, galloping through the fields towards her as the sun set in the west behind him, seeming to set his mane on fire. Oh, how she loved him! He let her stroke his flanks and palm his hot nostrils before he transformed himself into the shape she knew and loved so well. Hugging and holding him hard, she began to cry. 'My darling girl,' said Zeus, his finger running down to her belly, where it traced the outline of their child, 'not weeping again? What am I doing wrong?' 'You really are the god Zeus?' 'I am.' 'Will you promise to grant any wish?' 'Oh, must you really?' said Zeus with a sigh. 'It's nothing not power or wisdom or jewels, or anything like that. And I don't want you to destroy anyone. It's a small thing, really it is.' 'Then,' said Zeus, chucking her affectionately under the chin, 'I will grant your wish.' 'You promise?' 'I promise. I promise by this river no, I've already sworn one thing by it. I shall promise you by the great Stygian stream herself.'fn4 Raising his hand with mock solemnity, he intoned, 'Beloved Semele, I swear by sacred Styx that I will grant your next wish.' 'Then,' said Semele with a deep breath, 'show yourself to me.' 'How's that?' 'I want to see you as you really are. Not as a man, but as a god, in your true divinity.' The smile froze on Zeus's face. 'No!' he cried. 'Anything but that! Do not wish such a thing. No, no, no!' It was the tone of voice that gods often used when they realized they had been trapped into a rash promise. Apollo cried out in the same way, you will remember, when Phaeton called upon him to honour his oath. Suspicion flared up in Semele. 'You promised, you swore by Styx! You swore, you swore an oath!' 'But my darling girl, you don't know what you're asking.' 'You swore!' Semele actually stamped her foot. The god looked up at the sky and groaned. 'I did. I pledged my word and my word is sacred.' As he spoke Zeus began to gather himself into the form of a great thundercloud. From the centre of this dark mass flashed the brightest light imaginable. Semele looked on, her face breaking into a broad and ecstatic smile of joy. Only a god could change like this. Only Zeus himself could grow and grow with such dazzling fire and golden greatness. But the brightness was becoming so fierce, so terrible in the ferocity of its glare, that she threw up an arm to shade her eyes. Yet still the brilliance intensified. With a crack so loud that her ears burst and filled with blood, the radiance exploded in bolts of lightning that instantly struck the girl blind. Deaf and sightless she staggered backwards, but too late to avoid the blazing force of a thunderbolt so powerful that it split her body open, killing her at once. Above him, around him, inside him, Zeus heard the triumphant laughter of his wife. Of course. He might have known. Somehow Hera had tricked this poor girl into forcing the awful promise from him. Well, she would not get their child. |
| 108 |
For all that I can tell, you still dislike him as much as ever.' 'Dislike him? I abominate, loathe, despise and abhor him,' said Sisyphus with a loud laugh. A laugh that allowed the approaching Tyro to draw a bead on his exact position. As her party drew nearer she could now hear every word her husband spoke. 'I only married that bitch Tyro because I hate Salmoneus so much,' he was saying. 'You see, the oracle at Delphi told me that if I had sons by her they would grow up to kill him. So when he dies by the hand of his own grandchildren I will be rid of my vile pig of a brother without fear of the pursuit of the Erinyes.' 'That is ...' Melops tried to find the word. 'Brilliant? Cunning? Ingenious?' Tyro checked her sons, who were about to run to the spot from which they could hear their father's voice. Turning them round she pushed them at speed towards a bend in the river, the maid following behind. Tyro had swallowed Sisyphus's charm whole, but she loved her father Salmoneus with a loyalty that overrode any other consideration. The idea of allowing her sons to grow up to kill their grandfather was out of the question. She knew how to defy the oracle's prophecy. 'Come child,' she said to the eldest, 'look down at the stream. Can you see any little fishes?' The small boy knelt on the riverbank and looked down. Tyro put a hand to his neck and pushed him under. When he had stopped struggling she did the same to the youngest. 'Now,' she said quite calmly to the traumatized maid, 'this is what you will do ...' Sisyphus and Melops caught plenty of fish that afternoon. Just as the light was fading and they had started to pack up for the day, Tyro's maidservant appeared before them, bobbing a nervous curtsey. 'Beg pardon, majesty, but the Queen asks that you might greet the princes. They are by the riverbank, awaiting your majesty. Just behind the willow tree, sire.' Sisyphus went to the place indicated to find his two sons lying stretched out on the grass, pale and lifeless. The maid ran for her life and was never heard of again. Tyro, by the time the enraged Sisyphus had reached the palace with drawn sword, was safely on her way to her father's kingdom of Elis. On her arrival home Salmoneus married her to his brother Cretheus, with whom she was deeply unhappy. Salmoneus himself, quite as proud and vainglorious as his hated brother, had set himself up in Elis as a kind of god. Claiming to equal Zeus's power to summon storms, he'd ordered the construction of a brass bridge over which he liked to ride his chariot at breakneck speed, trailing kettles, cauldrons and iron pots to mimic the sound of thunder. Flaming torches would be thrown skywards at the same time to imitate lightning. Such blasphemous impertinence caught the eye of Zeus, who ended the farrago with a real thunderbolt. The king, his chariot, brass bridge, cooking utensils and all were blasted to atoms and the shade of Salmoneus cast down to eternal damnation in the darkest depths of Tartarus. |
| 109 |
Thanatos took great delight in watching his victim's skin go pale and the eyes flutter and film over as life was extinguished. Above all he loved the sound of the soul's last shuddering sigh as it emerged from its mortal carcass and submitted itself to his manacles, ready to be led away. Sisyphus, like most wily, ambitious schemers, was a light sleeper. His mind was always turning, and the slightest noise could jerk him awake. Thus it was that even the silent whisper of Death gliding into his bedchamber caused him to sit up. 'Who the hell are you?' 'Who the hell indeed? The Hell is just who I am. Mwahahaha!' Thanatos unloosed the sinister, ghoulish laugh that so often sent dying mortals screaming mad. 'Stop groaning. What's the matter with you? Have you got toothache? Indigestion? And don't talk in riddles. What is your name?' 'My name ...' Thanatos paused for effect. 'My name ...' 'I haven't got all night.' 'My name is ...' 'Have you even got a name?' 'Thanatos.' 'Oh, so you're Death, are you? Hm.' Sisyphus seemed unimpressed. 'I thought you'd be taller.' 'Sisyphus, son of Aeolus,' Thanatos intoned in quelling accents, 'King of Corinth, Lord of ...' 'Yes, yes, I know who I am. You're the one who seems to have trouble remembering his name. Sit down, why don't you? Take the weight off your feet.' 'My weight is not on my feet. I am hovering.' Sisyphus looked down at the floor. 'Oh yes, so you are. And you've come for me have you?' Not confident that any words of his would be received with the respect and awe they deserved, Thanatos showed Sisyphus his manacles and shook them threateningly in his face. 'So you've brought shackles along. Iron?' 'Steel. Unbreakable steel. Fetters forged in the fires of Hephaestus by Steropes the Cyclops. Enchanted by my lord Hades. Whomsoever they bind cannot be unbound save by the god himself.' 'Impressive,' Sisyphus conceded. 'But in my experience nothing is unbreakable. Besides, there isn't even a lock or catch.' 'The hasp and spring are too cunningly contrived to be seen by mortal eyes.' 'So you say. I don't believe for a second that they work. I bet you can't close them round even your skinny arm. Go on, try.' Such open ridicule of his prized manacles could not be borne. 'Foolish man!' cried Thanatos. 'Such intricate devices are beyond the understanding of a mortal. See here! Round my back once and pass in front. Easy. Bring my wrists together, then close up the bracelets. And if you would be good enough to press just here, to engage the clasp, there's an invisible panel and ... behold!' 'Yes, I see,' said Sisyphus thoughtfully. 'I do see. I was wrong, quite wrong. What superb workmanship.' 'Oh.' Thanatos tried to wave the manacles, but his whole upper body was now constrained and immobile. 'Er ... help?' Sisyphus sprang from his bed and opened the door of a large wardrobe at the end of the room. It was the simplest thing in the world to send the hovering, tightly bound Thanatos across the room. With one push he had glided in and bumped his nose on the back of the closet. |
| 110 |
Turning the key on him Sisyphus called out cheerily. 'The lock to this wardrobe may be cheap and manmade, but I can assure you that it works as well as any fetters forged in the fires of Hephaestus.' Muffled despairing cries came, begging to be let out, but with a hearty 'Mwahahaha' Sisyphus skipped away, deaf to Death's entreaties. Life without Death The first few days of Thanatos's imprisonment passed without incident. Neither Zeus nor Hermes nor even Hades himself thought to verify that Sisyphus had been checked in to the infernal regions as arranged. But when a whole week passed without the arrival of any new dead souls, the spirits and demons of the underworld began to murmur. Another week went by and not a single departed shade had been admitted for processing, save one venerable priestess of Artemis, whose blameless life merited the honour of a personal escort to Elysium by Hermes, the Psychopomp. This sudden stemming of the flow of souls quite perplexed the denizens of Hades, until someone remarked that they hadn't seen Thanatos in days. Search parties were sent out, but Death could not be found. Such a thing had never happened before. Without Thanatos the whole system collapsed. In Olympus opinion was divided. Dionysus found the whole situation hilarious and drank a toast to the end of lethal cirrhosis of the liver. Apollo, Artemis and Poseidon were more or less neutral on the subject. Demeter feared that Persephone's authority as Queen of the Underworld was being flouted. The seasons over which mother and daughter had dominion required that life be constantly ended and begun again, and only the presence of death could achieve this. The impropriety of such a scandal made Hera quite indignant, which made Zeus restive in turn. The usually merry and irrepressible Hermes was anxious too, for the smooth running of the underworld was partly his responsibility. But it was Ares who found the situation most intolerable. He was outraged. He looked down and saw battles being fought in the human realm with their customary ferocity, yet no one was dying. Warriors were being run through with javelins, trampled by horses, gutted by chariot wheels and beheaded by swords but they would not die. It made a mockery of combat. If soldiers and civilians did not die, why then war had no point. It settled nothing. It achieved nothing. Neither side in a battle could ever win. Lesser deities were as divided over the issue as the Olympians. The Keres continued to drink the blood of those felled in battle and could not care less what happened to their souls. Two of the Horai, DikE and Eunomia, agreed with Demeter that the absence of death upset the natural order of things. Their sister Eirene, the goddess of peace, could barely contain her delight. If the absence of Death meant the absence of war then surely her time had come? Ares nagged his parents Hera and Zeus with such incessant clamour that at last they could bear it no longer. They declared that Thanatos must be found. |
| 111 |
and perhaps ... perhaps even more youthful and vital and handsome than ever? She is only twenty-six, but imagine her torment if I outlived her! I would use her as my slave. Every day would be torture to her.' Persephone smiled at the thought and clapped her hands. 'Let it be so.' The years spent in the underworld had given Persephone a regal pride and rigid belief in the proper running of the infernal kingdom. And thus it was that Sisyphus was led out to the upper world where he and his delighted queen lived happily ever after. His death, when it finally did come, was another matter. Rolling the Rock Zeus, Ares, Hermes and Hades had not been pleased when they found out how Sisyphus had evaded death for a second time. Persephone had made her decision, however, and the ruling of one immortal could not be undone by another. When, after nearly fifty more years of serene and prosperous living, Sisyphus's wife's mortal span came at last to its end, the contract between Persephone and Sisyphus expired with her. Thanatos paid him a third and final visit. This time Sisyphus gave Charon the fee and crossed the Styx in good order. Hermes awaited him on the further bank. 'Well, well, well. King Sisyphus of Corinth. Liar, fraud, rogue and trickster. A man after my own heart. No mortal has managed to cheat death once you contrived to do it twice. Clever you.' Sisyphus bowed. 'Such an achievement deserves a chance at immortality. Follow me.' Hermes led Sisyphus down innumerable passageways and galleries to a vast underground chamber. A great ramp sloped up from the floor to the ceiling. A boulder stood at the bottom, lit by a shaft of light. 'The upper world,' said Hermes indicating the source of the light. Sisyphus saw that the slope led up to a square inlet high in the roof through which a beam of daylight shone. As Hermes pointed the inlet closed up and the shaft of light disappeared. 'Now, all you have to do is roll that boulder up the slope. When you reach the top, that hole will slide open. You will be able to climb out and live for ever as the immortal King Sisyphus. Thanatos will never visit you again.' 'That's it?' 'That's it,' said Hermes. 'Of course, if you don't like the idea I can take you to Elysium, where you will spend a blissful eternity in the company of other souls of the virtuous departed. But if you choose the stone you must keep trying until you have succeeded and won your freedom and immortality. Make your choice. An idyllic afterlife down here or a shot at immortality above.' Sisyphus examined the boulder. It was bulky, but not colossally so. The slope was steep, but not precipitously. Forty-five degrees of gradient, but no more. So. An eternity skipping though the fields of Elysium with the dull and well behaved or eternity up above in the real world of fun, filth, frolic and frenzy? 'No tricks?' 'No tricks, no pressure,' said Hermes, putting his hand on Sisyphus's shoulder and flashing his most dazzling smile. 'Your choice.' You know the rest. |
| 112 |
Not that I ever allow them to boast, of course. The well bred are never puffed up.' Such foolishness might have been no more than faintly sad were it not that Niobe even presumed to compare herself to the Titaness Leto, mother of gods. On the very day that the people of Thebes gathered annually to sing Leto's praises and tell the story of Artemis and Apollo's miraculous birth on Delos on that very day, sacred to the Titaness and her dignity Niobe unburdened herself of her haughtiest broadside. 'I mean, I'd be the first to admit that Leto's dear twins Artemis and Apollo are charming and fully divine, of course they are. But only two children? One girl and one boy? Good heavens, how she can even call herself a mother I fail to understand. And who's to say that of my seven sons and seven daughters there won't be some, if not all, who will ascend to divine and immortal rank? fn2 Given their birth I think it rather more likely than not, don't you? In my view, celebrations of such a lazy, vulgar and unproductive mother as Leto are in extremely poor taste. Next year I shall make sure the festival is cancelled altogether.' When word reached Leto that this jumped-up Theban was insulting her in such a fashion, and daring to set herself up over her, she burst into tears in front of her sympathetic twins. 'That terrible, boastful, conceited woman,' she choked. 'She called me lazy for having only two children ... She said I was unproductive ... and she called me vulgar. She said she would prevent the people of Thebes from celebrating my f-f-festal day ...' Artemis put an arm round her while Apollo paced up and down, slamming the ball of his fist into his palm. 'She has fourteen children,' wailed Leto, 'so I suppose, compared to her, I am inadequate ...' 'Enough!' said Artemis. 'Come, brother. She has made our mother weep. It is time this woman knew the meaning of tears.' Artemis and Apollo went straight to Thebes, where they hunted down every one of Amphion's and Niobe's fourteen children. Artemis shot the seven daughters dead with her silver arrows; Apollo shot the seven sons dead with his golden ones. When Amphion was brought news of the slaughter he took his own life by falling on his sword. Niobe's grief was also insupportable. She fled to her childhood home and found refuge on the slopes of Mount Sipylus. No matter how snobbish, reckless, proud and absurd she had been, such wretched and inconsolable unhappiness was terrible to behold. The gods themselves could not bear to hear her unceasing lamentations, and so turned her to stone. But not even solid rock had the power to hold back such tears as these. Niobe's weeping pushed her tears through the stone and sent them cascading in waterfalls down the mountainside. Even today, visitors to Sipylus, now called Mount Spil, can see the rock formation in which the outlines of a female face can still be discerned. In Turkish this is known as Aglayan Kaya or 'Weeping Rock'. fn3 It looks down on the city of Manisa, the modern name for Tantalis. |
| 113 |
Next to the growing of food few things were as crucial to human welfare as the reliable manufacture of textiles for clothing and furnishing. And 'manufacture' is quite the right word. It literally means 'making by hand' and all such work was done by hand then. Fleece or flax was spun into threads and loaded onto looms to be woven into woollen or linen cloth. It was so much the province of skilled women that the very gender itself was given names in some cultures and languages that reflected the practice. In English we still talk of the 'distaff side' of a family, meaning the female line. The distaff was the spindle around which the wool or flax was wound preparatory to spinning. And those who spun were called 'spinsters', a name which once applied without negative connotation to any unmarried woman. But as with almost all human practices, there are those who have the mysterious ability to raise the everyday and ordinary to the level of art. From the very first Arachne's skill at the loom was the talk and pride of all Ionia. The speed and accuracy of her work were astonishing; the assurance and dexterity with which she selected one coloured thread after another, almost without looking, stunned the admirers who often crowded into Idmon's cottage to watch her at work. But it was the pictures, patterns and intricate designs that emerged from under the blur of her shuttle that caused onlookers to burst into spontaneous applause and declare her without equal. The forests, palaces, seascapes and mountain views she created were so real that you felt you could jump into them. It wasn't only the mortal citizens of Colophon and Hypaepae that came to see her at her loom: local naiads from the River Pactolus and oreads from nearby Mount Tmolus crowded into the cottage and shook their heads in wonder too. All were agreed that Arachne was the kind of phenomenon that might come only once in five centuries of history. To be so technically skilled was cause for admiration enough, but to be endowed with such taste she never overdid the use of purples or other costly and showy dyes, for example that was the miracle. Such praise as she daily received would have gone to anyone's head. Arachne was not a spoiled or conceited child in fact when not at the loom she came across as practical and prosaic rather than flighty or temperamental. She understood that she had been given a gift and was not one to claim personal credit for it. But she did value her talent and believed that in rating it at its proper worth she was simply being honest. 'Yes,' she murmured, gazing down at her work one fateful afternoon, 'I truly think if Pallas Athena herself were to sit down and spin with me she would find herself unable to match my skill. After all, I do this every day and she only weaves once in a while, for amusement. It's no wonder I am so far her superior.' With so many nymphs present in the front room of Idmon's cottage you can be sure that news soon got back to Athena of Arachne's ill-chosen words. |
| 114 |
The Weave-Off A week or so later, the usual crowd gathered round her, Arachne sat at the loom completing a tapestry that represented the founding of Thebes. Gasps and moans of appreciation greeted her depiction of the dragon-tooth warriors rising from the earth, but the oohs and aahs of her admirers were interrupted by a loud knocking on the cottage door. It was opened to reveal a bent and wrinkled old woman. 'I do hope I've come to the right place,' she wheezed, dragging in a great sack. 'I'm told a wonderful weaver lives here. Ariadne, is it?' She was invited inside. 'Her name is Arachne,' they told her, pointing to the girl herself seated at her loom. 'Arachne. I see. May I look? My dear, these are your own? How superb.' Arachne nodded complacently. The old woman plucked at the weave. 'Hard to believe that a mortal could do such work. Surely Athena herself had a hand in this?' 'I hardly think,' Arachne said with a touch of impatience, 'that Athena could do anything half so fine. Now, please don't unpick it.' 'Oh, you think Athena inferior to you?' 'In the matter of weaving it's hardly a matter of opinion.' 'What would you say to her if she was here now, I wonder?' 'I would urge her to confess that I am the better weaver.' 'Then urge away, foolish mortal!' With these words the wrinkles on the ancient face smoothed away, the dull, clouded eyes cleared to a shining grey and the bent old woman straightened herself into the magnificent form of Athena herself. The crowd of onlookers fell back in stunned surprise. The nymphs in particular shrank into the corners, ashamed and frightened to be seen wasting their time admiring the work of a mortal. Arachne went very pale and her heart thudded within her, yet outwardly she managed to keep her composure. It was disconcerting to have those grey eyes fixed upon her but all their wisdom and steadiness of gaze could not alter the plain truth. 'Well,' said she with as much calmness in her voice as she could manage, 'I've no wish to offend, but it is, I think, undoubtedly true that as an artist of the loom I have no rival, on earth or on Olympus.' 'Really?' Athena arched an eyebrow. 'Let's discover then. Would you like to go first?' 'No, please ...' Arachne vacated her seat and pointed to the loom. 'After you.' Athena examined the frame. 'Yes, this will do,' she said. 'Phocaean purple, I see. Not bad, but I prefer Tyrian.' So saying she pulled from her sack a quantity of coloured wools. 'Now then ...' Within seconds she was at work. The boxwood shuttle flew back and forth and, magically, wonderful images began to appear. The crowd of people pressed forward. They saw that Athena was bringing to life nothing less than the story of the gods themselves. There was the gelding of Ouranos in all its gory detail; how sticky the blood looked. There the birth of Aphrodite; how fresh and damp the ocean spray. Here was a panel that showed Kronos swallowing Rhea's children, and here another of the infant Zeus being suckled by the she-goat Amalthea. |
| 115 |
But because he was the favoured son of a great ruler no one dared try to seduce him, and he lived a blameless life of horses, music, sport and friends. It was supposed that one day King Tros would pair him off with a Grecian princess and he would grow into a handsome and virile man. Youth is a fleeting thing after all. They had reckoned without the King of the Gods. Whether Zeus had heard rumours of this shining beacon of youthful beauty or whether he accidentally caught sight of him isn't known. What is a matter of record is that the god became simply maddened with desire. Despite the royal lineage of this important mortal, despite the scandal it would cause, despite the certain fury and jealous rage of Hera, Zeus turned himself into an eagle, swooped down, seized the boy in his talons and flew him up to Olympus. It was a terrible thing to do, but surprisingly enough it turned out to be more than an act of wanton lust. It really did seem to have something to do with real love. Zeus adored the boy and wanted to be with him always. Their acts of physical love only reinforced his adoration. He gave him the gift of immortality and eternal youth and appointed him to be his cupbearer. From now until the end of time he would always be the Ganymede whose beauty of form and soul had so smitten the god. All the other gods, with the inevitable exception of Hera, welcomed the youth to heaven. It was impossible not to like him: his presence lit up Olympus. Zeus despatched Hermes to King Tros with a gift of divine horses to recompense the family for their loss. 'Your son is a welcome and beloved addition to Olympus,' Hermes told him. 'He will never die and, unlike any mortal, his outward beauty will always match his inner which means that he will always be content. The Sky Father loves him completely.' Well, the King and Queen of Troy had two other sons and they really were the finest gift horses in all the world, not to be looked in the mouth, and if their Ganymede were to be a permanent member of the immortal Olympian company and if Zeus really did love him ... But did the boy adore Zeus? That is so hard to know. The ancients believed he did. He is usually represented as smiling and happy. He became a symbol of that particular kind of same-sex love which was to become so central a part of Greek life. His name, it seems, was a kind of deliberate word play, deriving as it did from ganumai 'gladdening' and medon 'prince' andor medeon 'genitals'. 'Ganymede', the gladdening prince with the gladdening genitals became twisted over time into the word 'catamite'. Zeus and Ganymede stayed together as a happy couple for a very long time. Of course the god was as unfaithful to Ganymede as he was to his own wife, but they became almost a fixture nonetheless. When the reign of the gods was coming to an end Zeus rewarded this beautiful youth, his devoted minion, lover and friend, by sending him up into the sky as a constellation in the most important part of the heavens, the Zodiac, where he shines still as Aquarius, the Cupbearer. |
| 116 |
'There is a very fine ilex tree just in this clearing, majesty, which I was thinking of consecrating to you, with your permission ... Excuse me Zeus? Oh no, I've never seen him here.' 'Really?' Hera fixed Echo with a hard stare. 'I heard a rumour that he was here now. This very day.' 'No, no, my queen! No, no, no! In fact ... a servant of the Muses came down from Helicon just half an hour ago to draw water from our stream and he mentioned specifically that today mighty Zeus is in Thespiae today, honouring his temple there.' 'Oh. I see. Well, I thank you.' Hera nodded curtly and uncomfortably, returned to her chariot and flew off into the clouds. It is mortifying to be witnessed trying to catch your husband out. Echo skipped away, pleased to have been useful to her fellow nymph and to Zeus. In all fairness she would have been just as happy to have been protecting a mortal pair of lovers. It delighted her to ease the path of all lovers everywhere. She had never really felt love herself, except the love of helping others to love, which she felt was the highest love of all. So selfless was she that she never even bothered to tell Zeus or her sister of her useful act, which someone hoping for a reward would most certainly have done. She sang as she gathered flowers and felt that the life of a nymph was a good life. Echolalia The next day, back on Olympus, Hera sent for the chaffinch that had first whispered to her of Zeus's infidelity. 'You lied to me,' she shrieked. 'You made me look a fool!' Hera grasped the bird by the beak so that he could hardly breathe and was about to punish him in some strange and dreadful way that would for ever have altered our conception of chaffinches, when his mate fluttered about her ears and hair bravely calling out. 'But dread queen, he told you true! I saw King Zeus there myself. Even as you were talking to that nymph Echo, he was lying with a naiad not half a mile away. If you don't believe me, the butterflies and herons can tell you. Ask the priestesses at the temple at Thespiae when he last visited them. He hasn't been there for three moons!' Hera relaxed her grip and the bird, who had gone almost scarlet, breathed again, but male chaffinches still sport pink breasts to this very day. Echo was paddling playfully in a stream when Hera and her peacock carriage descended once more. The nymph splashed and skipped her way up the riverbank to greet the goddess, a wide and welcoming grin splitting her perfectly dimpled features. The smile of welcome quickly turned to a rounded 'O' of fear when she saw the look of rage on Hera's face. 'So,' said the goddess, with icy calm. 'You say my husband has not been here. You say he was not here yesterday. You say he was in Thespiae sanctifying a temple.' 'That's that's certainly my understanding,' stammered a frightened Echo. 'You foolish, gossiping, chattering, scheming liar! How dare you try to deceive the Queen of Heaven? Who do you think you are?' 'I ...' For once in her life Echo could think of nothing to say. |
| 117 |
That night Narcissus had been awoken by a strange sound outside his bedroom. He looked out of his window and saw in the moonlight Ameinias hanging from a pear tree, a rope around his neck. He choked out a curse before he died. 'May you be as unlucky in love as I have been, beautiful Narcissus!'fn4 Since then Narcissus had got into the habit of keeping his head down, covering his body as much as possible and being short and gruff to strangers, never meeting them in the eye. But now, as he looked about him, he saw that the rest of the hunting party had gone and that he was splendidly alone. He decided to take advantage of the cool waters of the stream and its inviting mossy banks. He slipped out of his clothes and plunged into the water. As soon as she caught sight of that lissom and golden form, half sunlit, half dappled by the shade and all streaming with water, Echo caught her breath. And when, peeping through the leaves she saw the face, the beautiful, beautiful face of Narcissus, she could no longer control her senses. Were it not for Hera's curse she would have cried out there and then. Instead she gazed in silent wonder as the naked youth laid his clothes and bow and arrows on the grass and stretched himself out to sleep. When love comes late it comes like a tornado. Poor Echo's whole being was swept up by her feelings for this impossibly beautiful youth. Nothing, not even the horror of Hera's curse, had ever caused her heart to hammer so violently inside her. The blood pounded and surged in her ears. It was as if she was swirling in the centre of a great cyclone. She simply had to take a closer look at this lovely youth. If she felt such tumultuous passions swirling inside her at the sight of him, then perhaps it was in the nature of things that he would feel the same at the sight of her? Surely that must be so? She crept forward, hardly daring to breathe. With each step she found herself more and more thrilled until she was quivering and trembling all over with excitement. The stories of love at first sight that she had heard sung all her life were true after all! This beautiful boy would be bound to return her love. Cosmos and creation would not make sense otherwise. Of course, you and I know that Cosmos and creation make no sense at all and never have. Poor Echo was about to discover the truth of this. Whether it was her pounding heart or the cry of a bird, something made the sleeping Narcissus open his eyes just as Echo drew near. His eyes met hers. Echo was a pretty nymph, lovely in fact. But it was only her eyes that Narcissus saw. That look again! That haggard, hungry, haunted look. Those needing, pleading eyes. Ugh! 'Who are you?' he said, turning away. 'Who are you?' 'Never you mind. That's my business.' 'That's my business!' 'No it isn't. You woke me.' 'You woke me!' 'I suppose like all the others you've fallen in love with me.' 'Love with me!' 'Love! I'm fed up with love.' 'Up with love!' 'It'll never happen. Never. Go away!' 'Never go away!' 'I don't care how much you wail at me. |
| 118 |
He was in a fever now. Deep inside he knew he was no longer rescuing the general. He was on a mission to see through to the end the madness that had seized him. The madness was of course the work of Aphrodite. She had not been pleased when one of the handsomest and most eligible young men of her island had chosen to turn his back on love. A young man moreover, whose seaside dwelling happened to be exactly where Aphrodite had made landfall after her birth in the waves and, she reasoned, ought therefore to vibrate with a special intensity of amorousness. Love and beauty, as most of us find out in the course of our lives, are remorseless, relentless and ruthless. For days and nights Pygmalion laboured on in a frenzy of creativity, of literal enthusiasm. Generations of artists in all media since might have recognized the agonized, breathless ecstasy of inspiration that had seized him. No thought of food or drink no conscious thought at all came into his mind, as he tapped, hammered and hummed. At last, as the pink flush of Eos and a nacreous flash of light from the east betokened the beginning of his fifth continuous day of work, he stepped back with the miraculous knowledge that only true artists understand: somehow, yes certainly, at last it was finished. He hardly dared raise his eyes. All his work thus far had been up close, detailed the lineaments of the complete figure existed only in some dark inaccessible corner of his mind. For the first time he could take it all in. He took a deep breath and looked. He cried out in shock and dropped his chisel. From its exquisitely rendered toes to the perfectly worked flowers that wreathed the hair on its head the sculpture was far and away the best thing he had ever done. More than that, it was surely the most absolutely beautiful work of art that had ever been seen in the world. To a true artist like Pygmalion this meant it was more beautiful than any person that had ever been seen on earth, for he knew that art always exceeds the best that nature can manage. Yet he saw that the figure he had rendered in marble from his enraptured imagination was even more than the most absolutely beautiful thing now in the world. She was real. To Pygmalion she was more real than the ceiling above his head and the floor beneath his feet. His heart was beating fast, his pupils had dilated, his breath was short and the very core of his being stirred in the most powerful and disturbing manner. It was joy and pain all at once. It was love. The expression and posture of the girl whose name he knew should be Galatea, for her marble loveliness was white as milk were caught in a moment of sublime hesitation, between awakening and wonder. She seemed a little surprised, as if on the verge of gasping. At what? At the beauty of the world? At the handsomeness of the young artist who was feasting his eyes so hungrily upon her? Her features were regular and perfect, but so were the features of many girls. There was more to her than conventional appeal. |
| 119 |
By the early hours he could have had his pick of any girl, boy, man or woman in southern Italy and it is reported that, like the successful musician he was, he did. A large crowd was there to see Arion off the next morning, many of the people blowing kisses and a good few sobbing their hearts out. He and his luggage, including the box of treasure, were rowed out to sea in a tender, where a small but serviceable brig crewed by a sea-captain and nine civilian sailors was standing off. Arion was soon comfortably settled aboard. The crew hoisted sail and the captain set a course for Corinth. Overboard As soon as land was out of sight and they were in the open sea, Arion sensed that something was wrong. He was used to being stared at he was after all as outrageously beautiful as he was talented but the looks that were being directed at him by the crew were of a different order. Days passed in this sullen and threatening atmosphere and he grew more and more uncomfortable. There was something in the sailors' eyes that resembled lust, but suggested a darker purpose. What could be wrong? Then one hot afternoon, the ugliest and meanest looking of the sailors approached him. 'What you got in that chest you're sitting on, boy?' Of course. Arion's heart sank. That would account for it. The sailors had heard tell of his treasure. He supposed they wanted some of it, but he was damned if he was going to share his hard-won prize with anyone but Periander. He had earlier planned in his mind to tip the crew generously at the end of the voyage, but now his heart hardened. 'My musical instruments,' he replied. 'I am a kitharode.' 'You're a what?' Arion shook his head sorrowfully and repeated slowly, as if to a child. 'I play the kith ara.' Such a mistake. 'Oh do you? Well play us a tune then.' 'I'd rather not, if you don't mind.' 'What's going on here?' The captain of the brig approached. 'Snotty kid says he's a musician but won't play. Says he's got a kithara in that box of his.' 'Well now, I'm sure you won't mind showing it to us, will you, young man?' The full ship's complement had circled round him now. 'I I'm not feeling well enough to play. Perhaps tonight I'll be in better shape.' 'Why don't you go below and rest in the shade?' 'N-no, I prefer the fresh air.' 'Seize him, lads!' Rough hands lifted Arion up as easily as if he were a newborn puppy. 'Let me go! Leave it alone. That's not your property!' 'Where's the key?' 'I've ... I've lost it.' 'Find it, boys.' 'No, no! Please I beg you ...' The key was easily found and wrenched from round Arion's neck. Low whistles and murmurs arose as the captain loosened the latch and raised the lid. Light from the glitter of gold and flash of gemstones danced on the sailors' greedy faces. Arion knew he was lost. 'I am quite p-prepared to sh-share my treasure with you ...' The sailors seemed to find the offer highly amusing and laughed heartily. 'Kill him,' said the captain, taking out a long rope of pearls and holding it up to the light. |
| 120 |
Where were they going? Did the dolphin know? 'Hey, dolphin. Set your course for the Gulf of Corinth. I'll direct you when we get there.' The dolphin gave a series of squeaks and clicks that seemed to indicate understanding and Arion laughed. On and on they went, chasing the never-nearing horizon. Arion, confident of his balance now, pulled his kithara back round and sang the song of Arion and the Dolphin. It is lost to us, but they say it was the most beautiful song ever composed. At length they reached the gulf. The dolphin negotiated this busy shipping lane with graceful, zipping ease. Sailors on the busy barques, barges and small boats turned to stare at the remarkable sight of a young man riding a dolphin. Arion steered on the fins with gentle tugs this way and that and they did not stop until they had reached the royal docks. 'Send word to King Periander,' he said, stepping from the dolphin onto the quay. 'His minstrel is returned. And feed my dolphin.' The Monument Periander was overjoyed by the homecoming of the musician he loved. The story of his rescue filled the court with wonder and amazement. They feasted all night and into the morning. It was evening by the time they set out to see, praise and pet the heroic dolphin. But a sad sight met their eyes. Ignorant dock workers had brought the animal ashore to be fed. It had languished overnight without any water to keep its skin moist and then lay all morning and afternoon on the quayside, surrounded by inquisitive children, the hot sun burning down and drying it up. Arion knelt on the ground and whispered into its ear. The dolphin rippled an affectionate reply, heaved a shuddering sigh and died. Arion recriminated himself bitterly and even Periander's instructions that a high tower be constructed to commemorate the dolphin and glorify its memory failed to raise his spirits. For the next month all his songs were sad ones and the palace mourned along with him. Then came news that the brig crewed by the nine sailors and its villainous captain had been blown by a storm into Corinth. Periander sent messengers to command the crew to come before him, bidding Arion to stay away while he questioned them. 'You were supposed to be conveying my bard Arion back from Tarentum,' he said. 'Where is he?' 'Alas, dread majesty,' said the captain. 'So very sad. The poor boy was swept overboard in the storm. We recovered the body and gave him a most respectful burial at sea. Great pity. Charming lad, popular with all the crew.' 'Aye. Indeed. Pleasant fellow. Terrible loss ...' muttered the sailors. 'Be that as it may,' said Periander, 'news reaches me that he won his singing competition and came to you with a treasure chest, half of which is my property.' 'As to that ...' the captain spread his hands. 'The chest was lost during the violent pitching of the storm. It opened as it slid down the deck and into the sea and we managed to recover some small bits and pieces. A silver lyre of some kind, an aulos one or two trinkets. |
| 121 |
I wish it had been more, sire, really I do.' 'I see ...' Periander frowned. 'Assemble tomorrow morning by the new monument at the royal docks. You can't miss it. There's a carved dolphin on top. Bring what treasure remains and perhaps I will allow you to keep Arion's share, now that the poor boy is dead. You are free to go.' 'Have no fear,' said Periander to Arion as he related to him all that had been said. 'Justice will be done.' Next morning, the sea-captain and his nine men arrived early at the monument. They were laughing and relaxed, amused that they had to return only a small amount of Arion's treasure and might even expect to be given a share of that by the gullible tyrant. Periander arrived with his palace guards at precisely the appointed hour. 'Good morning, captain. Ah, the treasure. That's all you managed to save? Yes, I see what you mean, not much at all, is it? Now, remind me what befell Arion?' The captain repeated his story fluently and easily, every word exactly the same as it had been the day before. 'So he really is dead? You really did recover the body, prepare it for burial and then return it to the waves?' 'Absolutely.' 'And these trinkets are all that remain of the prize treasure?' 'It grieves me to say so, majesty, but yes.' 'How then,' Periander asked, 'do you account for the discovery of all this hidden in the hollow of your ship's timbers? At a sign, some guards came forward bearing a litter on which was disposed the bulk of the treasure. 'Ah. Yes. Well ...' the captain gave a winning smile. 'Foolish of us to attempt to deceive you, dread lord. The poor boy died, as I said, and there was his treasure. We are but poor working sailors, sire. Your cunning and wisdom has found us out.' 'That is handsome of you,' said Periander. 'But I am still puzzled. I had a kithara made for Arion in silver, gold and ivory. He never went anywhere without it. Why is it not here amongst the other things?' 'Well now,' said the captain. 'I told you how fond we were of young Arion. Like a younger brother to us, isn't that right, lads?' 'Aye, aye ...' muttered the sailors. 'We knew what his kithara meant to him. We included it with him in his shroud before committing his body to the waves. How could we have done otherwise?' Periander smiled. The captain smiled. But suddenly his smile disappeared. From the mouth of the golden dolphin at the top of the column emerged the sound of a kithara. The captain and his men stared in amazement. Arion's voice joined the notes of the kithara and these were the words that came from out of the carved dolphin's mouth: 'Kill him, men,' the captain said. 'Kill him now and seize his gold.' 'We'll kill him now,' the sailors cried, 'And throw him to the sharks.' 'But stop,' the minstrel said. 'Only let me sing One final farewell song.' One of the sailors let out a scream of fear. The others fell quaking to their knees. Only the captain, white-faced, stayed upright. A door opened in the plinth and Arion himself stepped from the monument, strumming his kithara and singing: But the dolphin came and saved him. |
| 122 |
Every day Baucis milked their one goat, hoed, stitched, washed and mended, while Philemon sowed, planted, dug and scratched at the earth behind their cottage. In the late afternoons they gathered wild mushrooms, collected firewood or simply walked the hills, hand in hand, talking of this and that or content to be silent companions. If there was enough food to make a supper they would eat, otherwise they would go to bed hungry and fall asleep in each other's arms. Their three children had long since moved out and were bringing up their own families far away. They never visited and no one else was likely to knock on their door. Until one fateful afternoon. Philemon had just returned from the fields and was sitting down in preparation for his monthly haircut. There was very little these days to crown his bald old head, but this was a monthly ritual that gave them both pleasure. The loud rat-a-tat-tat on their door almost caused Baucis to drop the razor she had been sharpening. They looked at one another in great surprise, each unable to remember the last time anyone had come calling. Two strangers stood on the threshold, a bearded man and his younger, smooth-faced companion. His son perhaps. 'Hello,' said Philemon. 'How may we help you?' The younger man smiled and removed his hat, a strange round cap with a shallow brim. 'Good afternoon sir,' he said. 'We are a pair of hungry travellers, new to this part of the world. I wonder if we might trespass upon your good nature ...' 'Come in, come in!' said Baucis, bustling up behind her husband. 'It's chilly to be out at this time of year. We are higher up than the rest of the town you know and feel the cold a little more. Philemon, why don't you scare up the fire so that our guests might warm themselves?' 'Of course, my love, of course. Where are my manners?' Philemon stooped down and blew into the hearth, awakening the embers. 'Let me take your cloaks,' said Baucis. 'Have a seat, sir, by the fire. And you, sir, I beg.' 'That is most kind,' said the older of the two. 'My name is Astrapos, and this is my son Arguros.' The younger man bowed at the mention of his name with something of a flourish and seated himself beside the fire. 'We are very thirsty,' he said, with a loud yawn. 'You must have something to drink,' said Baucis. 'Husband, you fetch the wine jug and I shall bring dried figs and pine nuts. I hope you gentlemen will consent to dine with us. We can't offer rich fare, but you would be most welcome.' 'Don't mind if we do,' said Arguros. 'Let me take your hat and staff ...' 'No, no. They stay with me.' The young man pulled the staff close to him. It was of a most curious design. Was it a vine that was carved all around it, Baucis wondered? He was twisting it so deftly that the whole thing seemed alive. 'I'm afraid,' said Philemon coming forward with a jug of wine, 'that you may find our local wine a little thin and perhaps a little ... sharp. People from neighbouring regions mock us for it, but I assure you that once you are used to the taste it can be really quite drinkable. |
| 123 |
We think so at least.' 'Not bad,' said Arguros after a sip. 'How did you get the cat to sit on the jug?' 'Ignore him,' said Astrapos. 'He thinks he's amusing.' 'Well, I have to admit that was rather funny,' said Baucis, approaching with fruit and nuts on a wooden plate. 'I hate to think, young sir, what you're going to say about the appearance of my dried figs.' 'You're wearing a blouse so I can't see them. But the preserved fruit on this plate looks pleasant enough.' 'Sir!' Baucis slapped him playfully and went very pink. What a strange young man. The slight awkwardness that usually attends the drink and nibbles phase of an evening was quickly mellowed by the cheek and cheerfulness of Arguros and the ready laughter of their hosts. Astrapos seemed to be of a gloomier disposition, and as they went to the table Philemon put a hand on his shoulder. 'I hope you will forgive the inquisitiveness of a foolish old man, sir,' he said, 'but you seem a little distracted. Is there anything we can help you with?' 'Oh, ignore him. He's always down in the dumps,' said Arguros. 'That's where he gets his clothes from, haha! But, in truth, there's nothing wrong with him that a good meal won't put right.' Baucis met Philemon's eyes for a brief instant. There was so little in the larder. A side of salted bacon that they had been saving for the midwinter feast, some preserved fruit and black bread, half a cabbage. They knew they would go hungry for a week if they fed so much as half the appetites of two such hearty men. But hospitality was a sacred thing and the needs of guests must always come first. 'Another glass of that wine wouldn't hurt,' said Arguros. 'Oh dear,' said Philemon, looking at the jug, 'I fear that there isn't any more ...' 'Nonsense,' said Arguros snatching it away, 'plenty left.' He filled his cup and then Astrapos's too. 'How strange,' said Philemon. 'I could have sworn the pitcher was only a quarter full.' 'Where are your cups?' asked Arguros. 'Oh please, we don't need any ...' 'Nonsense,' Arguros leaned back in his chair and reached for two wooden beakers on the side-table behind him. 'Now then ... Let's have a toast.' Philemon and Baucis were amazed, not only that there was enough wine in the pitcher to fill their beakers to the brim, but that its quality was so much better than either of them remembered. In fact, unless they were dreaming, it was the most delicious wine they had ever tasted. In something of a daze, Baucis wiped the table down with mint leaves. 'Darling,' Philemon whispered in her ear, 'that goose that we were going to sacrifice to Hestia next month. It's surely more important to feed our guests. Hestia will understand.' Baucis agreed. 'I'll go out and wring its neck. See if you can get the fire hot enough to give it a fine roasting.' The goose, however, would not be caught. No matter how carefully Baucis waited and pounced, it leapt honking from her grasp every time. She returned to the cottage in a state of agitated disappointment. |
| 124 |
He leaned down and sniffed a pink young hybrid that was in that perfect state midway between bud and full bloom. The exquisite fragrance made him giddy with joy. He lovingly made to unfurl the petals. In an instant the stem and flower had been transformed into gold. Solid gold. Midas stared in disbelief. He touched another rose and then another. The moment his fingers touched them they turned to gold. He ran up and down around the garden in a whooping frenzy, brushing his hands along the bushes until every one had been frozen into hard shining precious, priceless, glorious, golden gold. Skipping and shouting with joy Midas beheld what had once been a garden of rare roses and was now the most valuable treasure in all the world. He was rich! He was insanely, monumentally rich! No man on earth had ever been richer. The sound of his exultant shouts attracted his wife, who came out of the palace doors and stood looking down, their infant daughter in her arms. 'Darling, why are you shouting?' Midas ran up to her and encircled mother and child in a tight hug of excited joy. 'You won't believe it!' he said. 'Everything I touch turns to gold! Look! All I have to do is oh!' He stepped back to see that his wife and infant girl were now one fused golden statue, glittering in the morning sun, a frozen mother and child group that any sculptor would have been proud of. 'I'll attend to that later,' Midas said to himself. 'There must be a way to recover them ... Dionysus wouldn't be so ... meanwhile Zim! Zam! Zoo!' A guard on sentry, the great side-door to the palace and his favourite throne were now entirely gold. 'Vim! Vam! Voo!' The side-table, his goblet, his cutlery solid gold! But what was this? Crack! His teeth almost broke on a hard golden peach. Tunk! His lips met metallic wine. Thwop! A heavy gold nugget that had once been a linen napkin crushed and bruised his lips. The unbounded delight began to fade as Midas realized the full import of his gift. You may imagine the rest. All at once the thrill and pleasure of his ownership of gold were changed to dread and fear. All Midas touched turned to gold, but his heart turned to lead. No words of his, no shrieks of imprecation to the heavens could return his cold solidified wife and daughter to quick warm life. The sight of his beloved roses dropping their heavy heads caused his own to bow in misery. Everything around him glinted and glittered, gleamed and glimmered with a gorgeous gaudy golden glow but his heart was as grim and grey as granite. And the hunger and thirst! After three days of food and drink turning to inedible gold the moment it touched him, Midas felt ready for death. Atop his golden bed, whose hard heavy sheets offered no warmth or comfort, he fell into a fevered sleep. He dreamed of his flowers blooming back into soft, delicate life his roses, yes, but most of all the flowers that he now understood mattered most, his wife and child. In the wild, contorted dream he saw the soft colours returning to their cheeks and the light shining once more in their eyes. |
| 125 |
As these beguiling images danced and flickered in his mind the voice of Dionysus boomed inside him. 'Foolish man! It is fortunate for you that Silenus is so fond of you. Only for his sake do I show you mercy. When you awaken in the morning, betake yourself to the River Pactolus. Plunge your hands in its waters and your enchantment will be dissolved. Whatever you wash in the fast-flowing stream will be restored to you.' The next morning Midas did what the voice in his dream had instructed. As promised, contact with the waters of the river relieved him of his golden touch. Mad with joy, he spent a good week shuttling back and forth immersing his wife, his daughter, his guards, servants, roses and all of his possessions in the river and clapping his hands in delight as they returned to their valueless but priceless original state. After this, the waters of the Pactolus, which wind around the foothills of Mount Tmolus, became the single greatest source of electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver, in all the Aegean. King Midas's Ears You would think that Midas had learned his lesson by now. The lesson that repeats and repeats throughout the story of man. Don't mess with the gods. Don't trust the gods. Don't anger the gods. Don't barter with the gods. Don't compete with the gods. Leave the gods well alone. Treat all blessings as a curse and all promises as a trap. Above all, never insult a god. Ever. In one respect Midas had certainly changed. He now spurned not just gold, but all riches and possessions. Shortly after Dionysus lifted the curse, Midas became a devoted follower of Pan, the goat-footed god of nature, fauns, meadows and all the wild things of the world. With flowers in his hair, sandals on his feet and the merest suggestion of clothing covering his modesty, Midas left his wife and daughter in charge of Phrygia and devoted himself to a hippy-happy life of simple bucolic virtue. All might have been well had not his master Pan taken it into his head to challenge Apollo to a competition to determine which was the superior, the lyre or the pipes. One afternoon, in a meadow lying on the slopes of Mount Tmolus, Pan put the syrinx to his lips before an audience of fauns, satyrs, dryads, nymphs, assorted demigods and other lesser immortals. A coarse but likeable air in the Lydian mode emerged. It seemed to summon barking deer, rushing waters, gambolling rabbits, rutting stags and galloping horses. The rough, rustic tune delighted the audience, especially Midas, who really did worship Pan and all the frolicking mirth and madness that the goat-footed one represented. When Apollo stood and sounded the first notes of his lyre, a hush fell. From his strings arose visions of universal love, harmony and happiness, a deep abiding joy in life and a sense of heaven itself. When he had finished the audience rose as one to applaud. Tmolus, the deity of the mountain, called out, 'The lyre of the great lord Apollo wins. All agreed?' 'Aye, aye!' roared the satyrs and fauns. |
| 126 |
'Apollo, Apollo!' cried the nymphs and dryads. One lone voice demurred. 'No!' 'No?' Dozens of heads turned to see who could have dared dissent. Midas rose to his feet. 'I disagree. I say the pipes of Pan produce the better sound.' Even Pan was astonished. Apollo quietly put down his lyre and walked towards Midas. 'Say that again.' It could at least be said of Midas that he had the courage of his convictions. He swallowed twice before repeating, 'I I say the pipes make a better sound. Their music is more ... exciting. More artistic.' Apollo must have been in a soft mood that day, for he did not slaughter Midas on the spot. He did not peel the skin from him layer by layer as he had done to Marsyas when that unfortunate had had the temerity to challenge him. He did not cause Midas even the slightest amount of pain but just said softly, 'You honestly think Pan played better than me?' 'I do.' 'Well, in that case,' said Apollo, with a laugh, 'you must have the ears of an ass.' No sooner were these words out of the god's mouth than Midas felt something strange and warm and rough going on in his scalp. As he put an enquiring hand to his head, howls and hoots and screams and screeches of mocking laughter started to come from the assembled throng. They could see what Midas could not. Two large grey donkey ears had pushed their way through his hair and were twitching and flicking back and forth for all the world to see. 'It seems I was right,' said Apollo. 'You do indeed have the ears of an ass.' Crimsoning with shame and mortification, Midas turned and fled the meadow, the taunts and jeers of the crowd sounding all the more clearly in his great furry ears. His life as a camp-follower of Pan was over. Tying his head in a kind of turban, he returned to his wife and family in the palace of Gordium and his carefree experiment in country living decidedly done with settled back down into the life of a king. The only person who saw his ass's ears was, necessarily, the servant who cut his hair every month. No one else in Phrygia knew the terrible secret and Midas was determined it should stay that way. 'Here's the deal,' Midas told the barber. 'I give you a bigger salary and a more generous pension than any other member of the palace staff and you keep quiet about what you have seen. If, however, you breathe a word to anyone I will slaughter your family before your eyes, cut out your tongue and leave you to wander the world in mute poverty and exile. Understood?' The frightened barber nodded. For three years each side kept to the bargain. The barber's wife and family waxed fat and happy on the extra money that came in and no one found out about the king's asinine auditory appendages. Turbans in the Midas style caught on throughout Phrygia, Lydia, Thrace and beyond. All was well. But secrets are terrible things to have to keep. Especially such juicy ones as that to which the royal barber was privy. Every day he would wake up and feel that the knowledge was writhing and swelling inside him. |
| 127 |
I cannot repeat too often that it has never been my aim to interpret or explain the myths, only to tell them. I have, of course, had to play about with timelines in order to attempt a coherent narrative. My version of the 'ages of man', for example, varies from the well-known one by the poet Hesiod in order more clearly to separate the eras of the rule of Kronos and the creation of humans. So energetic was the explosion of stories in Greece almost three thousand years ago that necessarily all sorts of events seemed to happen at once. If anyone tells me that I have got the stories 'wrong' I believe I am justified in replying that they are, after all, fictions. In tinkering with the details I am doing what people have always done with myths. In that sense I feel that I am doing my bit to keep them alive. Myth v. Legend v. Religion Much as a pearl is formed around grit, so a legend is taken to have been built up around a grain of truth. The legend of Robin Hood, for example, seems to have derived from a real historical figure. fn1 The narrative substance that accretes as the story is handed down over the generations, embellished and exaggerated on the way, at some point takes on the properties of legend. It is likely to be written down, for the word derives from the gerundive of the Latin legere, meaning 'to be read'. fn2 Myths, however, are imaginative, symbolic constructs. No one believes that Hephaestus ever truly existed. He stands as a representation of the arts of metalwork, manufacture and craftsmanship. That such a figuration is portrayed as swarthy, ugly and hobbling tempts us to interpret and explain. Perhaps we noticed that real blacksmiths, while strong, are often dark, scarred and so muscle-bound as to be bunched and alarming to look upon. Perhaps cultures required that the fit, tall and whole always be taken into the ranks of fighting men and that, from the first, the halt, lame and shorter male children might be trained in the forges and workshops rather than drilled for battle. Any god of blacksmiths that the collective culture imagined, therefore, would be likely to reflect the human archetype they already knew. Gods of this kind are created in our image, not the other way round. Symbolical rather than historical in origin as myths and mythical figures might be, they underwent the same fictional remodelling and embellishments as more factually rooted legends. They too were written down, and the Greek myths especially, thanks to Homer, Hesiod and those that followed, were chronicled and detailed in ways that have granted us the timelines, genealogies and character histories that allow for story-telling of the kind I have attempted with this book. Myths, to put it simply and obviously, deal with gods and monsters that can't be observed or pointed at. It may be that some members of the ancient Greek population believed in centaurs and water dragons, gods of the sea and goddesses of the hearth, but they would have had a hard time proving their existence and convincing others. |
| 128 |
Most of those who told and retold the myths would have been aware, I think, at some level of their consciousness, that they were telling fictional tales. They might have thought the world was once peopled with nymphs and monsters, but they could be fairly certain that such beings no longer existed. Prayer, ritual and sacrifice, the taxation paid to the invisible forces of nature, those are different things. At some point myth becomes cult becomes religion. It moves from stories told around the fire to a systematized set of beliefs to which obedience is owed. Priestly castes arose who ordained how people should behave. How myths become codified into scriptures, liturgies and theologies is a subject for another book and quite beyond my scope. We can, however, say that the ancient Greeks had no written revealed texts akin to the Bible or the Qur'an. There were 'mysteries' and initiations of various kinds that involved ecstatic states, perhaps not unlike the shamanic ones seen today in other parts of the world, and there were plenty of temples and shrines. It is true, as well, that even in the great Athenian age of reason and philosophy a man like Socrates could be executed for religious reasons. fn3 The Greeks It is always a mistake to think of the Greeks as superior human beings uniquely endowed with enlightened wisdom and rational benevolence. We would find much in ancient Greece alien and distasteful to us. Women could play no real part in affairs outside the home, slavery was endemic, punishments were harsh and life could be brutal. Dionysus and Ares were their gods quite as much as Apollo and Athena. Pan, Priapus and Poseidon too. What makes the Greeks so appealing to us is that they seemed to be so subtly, insightfully and animatedly aware of these different sides to their natures. 'Know thyself' was carved into the pronaos of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. As a people if we read them through the myths as much as in their other writings they did their best to attend to that ancient maxim. So while they may have been far from perfect, the ancient Greeks seem to have developed the art of seeing life, the world and themselves with greater candour and unclouded clarity than is managed by most civilizations, including perhaps our own. Location, Location Greece. What and where is that? It was no kind of a nation at the time of the myths. There is a politically identifiable sovereign landmass and collection of islands we can now visit, but the Greek world of Mythos includes much of Asia Minor, incorporating Turkey, parts of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon as well as areas of North Africa, Egypt, the Balkans, Albania, Croatia and Macedonia. The story of 'Arion and the Dolphin' takes us to southern Italy and other myths deal with people who might at times have described themselves as Hellenic, Ionian, Argive, Attic, Thracian, Aeolian, Spartan, Doric, Athenian, Cypriot, Corinthian, Theban, Phrygian, Sicilian, Cretan, Trojan, Boeotian, Lydian ... and much more besides. |
| 129 |
Willis C. Driscoll, a clinical psychologist, administered a battery of tests. The intelligence tests showed Milligans IQ to be 68, but Driscoll stated that Milligan's depression had lowered his score. His report diagnosed acute schizophrenia. He is suffering from a major loss of identity such that his ego boundaries are very poorly defined. He is experiencing schizophrenic loss of distance and has a very restricted capacity to differentiate between self and his environment. ... He hears voices that tell him to do things and yell and scream at him when he does not comply. Milligan expresses his belief that these voices are from people who have come from hell to torment him. He also speaks of good people who periodically invade his body in order to combat the bad people. ... In my opinion, Mr. Milligan is not capable at present, of counseling in his own behalf. He is not capable of establishing adequate contact with reality to understand events that are transpiring. I strongly urge this man to be hospitalized for further examination and possible treatment. The first legal skirmish came on January 19, when Stevenson and Schweickart presented the report to Judge Jay C. Flowers as evidence that their client could not assist in his own defense. Flowers said he would issue an order for Southwest Community Mental Health Center in Columbus to assign its forensic psychiatry unit to examine the defendant. Gary and Judy were worried, since Southwest was usually on the side of the prosecution. Gary insisted that whatever came out during the examination by Southwest be privileged information, not to be used against their client under any circumstances. Sherman and Yavitch disagreed. The public defenders threatened to tell Milligan not to speak with the psychologists and psychiatrists from Southwest. Judge Flowers came close to declaring them in contempt. They came to a compromise when the prosecutors agreed that only if Milligan took the stand in his own defense would they question him about anything incriminating he might have said to the court-appointed psychologists. A partial victory was better than nothing. The public defenders finally decided to gamble and allow Southwest's forensic psychiatric unit to interview William Milligan on those terms. "Its a good try," Sherman said, laughing, as they walked out of Judge Flowers' chambers. "Shows how desperate you guys are getting. But its not going to do you any good. I still say this case is locked." To prevent future suicide attempts, the sheriff's office moved Milligan to a single cell in the infirmary range and put him in a strait jacket. Later that afternoon, Russ Hill, the medic, checking on the prisoner, couldn't believe what he saw. He called Sergeant Willis, the officer in charge of the three-to-eleven shift, and pointed at Milligan through the bars. Willis' mouth gaped. Milligan had removed his strait jacket and, using it as a pillow, was fast asleep. The first interview by Southwest was scheduled on January 31, 1978. |
| 130 |
Ragen shrugged and looked around. "Is prison." The door to the interview room opened unexpectedly, and Ragen jumped up, catlike, quickly alert and defensive, his hands in karate position. When he saw it was only an attorney checking to see if the room was occupied, Ragen settled back. Though Gary had expected to spend the usual fifteen minutes or half-hour with his client, positive he would debunk a total fraud, by the time he left five hours later, he was completely convinced that Billy Milligan was a multiple personality. As he walked out with Judy into the cold night, Gary found his mind racing with absurd notions of taking a trip to England or Yugoslavia to see if he could find records 01 Arthurs or Ragens existence. It wasn't that he believed there was anything like reincarnation or possession by the devil, but walking along in a daze, he had to admit that he had met different people today in that little conference room. He glanced at Judy, who was also walking in stunned silence. "Okay," he said. "I have to admit I'm in an intellectual and emotional state of shock. I believe. And I think I can convince Jo Anne when she asks why I missed dinner again. But how the hell are we ever going to convince the prosecutor and the judge?" ( 6 ) On February 21, Du Stella Karolin, a psychiatrist from the Southwest Community Mental Health Center and a colleague of Dr. Turners, informed the public defenders that Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, world famous for having treated Sybil, the woman with sixteen personalities, had agreed to come from Kentucky to see Milligan on March 10. Preparing for Dr. Wilburs visit, Dorothy Turner and Judy Stevenson assumed the task of convincing Arthur, Ragen and the others to allow yet another person to be told the secret. Again they were forced to spend hours convincing each of the personalities one at at a time. They had by now heard nine names — Arthur, Allen, Tommy, Ragen, David, Danny, Christopher, but they had not yet met Christene, Christophers three-year-old sistei; nor nad they met the original or core person, Billy, whom the others were keeping asleep. When they finally received permission to let others in on the secret, they made arrangements for a group, including the prosecutor, to observe the meeting between Dr. Wilbur and Milligan at the Franklin County Jail. Judy and Gary interviewed Milligans mother, Dorothy, his younger sister, Kathy, and older brother, Jim, and though none of them could provide firsthand knowledge of the abuses alleged by Billy, the mother described her own experiences of being beaten by Chalmer Milligan. Teachers, friends and relatives described Billy Milligans strange behavior, his attempts at suicide and his trancelike states. Judy and Gary were certain they were building a convincing case of a defendant who — by all legal tests in Ohio — was incapable of standing trial. But they realized they faced another hurdle: If Judge Flowers accepted the report by Southwest, Billy Milligan would now have to be sent to a mental institution for evaluation and treatment. |
| 131 |
Donna Egar, mother of five daughters, found it difficult to sort out her emotions at meeting the Campus Rapist. The nurse watched closely as first the little boy talked and then his eyes became fixed in a trance, lips moving silently, conducting an inner conversation. When he looked up, his expression was austere and haughty, and he spoke in a British accent. She had to keep from laughing, not convinced by Danny or Arthur of either s existence — it could be an act by a brilliant actor to avoid prison, she thought. But she was curious about what Billy Milligan was like; she wanted to know what kind of person would do the things he had done. Dorothy and Judy spoke to Arthur, reassuring him that he was in a safe place. Dorothy told him she would be coming by in a few days to do some psychological testing. Judy said she and Gary would visit from time to time to work with him on the case. Psych-tech Tim Sheppard observed the new patient every fifteen minutes through the peephole and made entries on the special-procedures record for that first day: 5:00 sitting cross-legged on bed, quiet 5:15 sitting cross-legged on bed, staring 5:32 standing, looking out window 5:45 dinner served 6:02 sitting on edge of bed, staring 6:07 tray removed, ate well. At seven-fifteen, Milligan began pacing. At eight o'clock, Nurse Helen Yaeger went into his room and stayed with him for forty minutes. Her first entry in the nurses' notes was brief: 31678 Mr. Milligan remains in special care — observed closely for special precautions. Spoke of his multiple personalities. "Arthur" did most of the talking — he has an English accent. Stated that one of the persons — namely Billy — is suicidal and he has been asleep since 16 years of age in order to protect the others from harm. Eating well. Voiding well. Taking foods well. Pleasant and cooperative. After Nurse Yaeger left, Arthur silently informed the others that Harding Hospital was a safe and supportive environment. Since it would take insight and logic to assist the physicians in therapy, he, Arthur, would henceforth assume complete domination of the spot. At two twenty-five that morning, Psych-tech Chris Cann heard a loud noise from the room. When he went to check, he saw the patient sitting on the floor. Tommy was upset at having fallen out of bed. Seconds later, he heard the footsteps and saw the eye at the peephole. As soon as the footsteps faded away, Tommy pulled the taped razor blade from the sole of his foot and carefully hid it, retaping it to the underside of one of the bed slats. He would know where to find it when the time came. ( 2 ) On his return from Chicago on March 19, Dr. George Harding, Jr., was annoyed that his careful arrangements had been upset by the early transfer. He had planned to greet Milligan in person. He had gone to a great deal of trouble to assemble a therapy team: psychologist, art therapist, adjunctive therapist, psychiatric social worker, doctors, nurses, psych-techs and the Wakefield unit coordinator. |
| 132 |
Now they had a notorious patient, the first multiple personality to be observed around the clock in a mental hospital. The staff was still divided in their belief about the diagnosis, but everyone wanted to be in that room to hear Dr. Wilbur talk about Billy Milligan. Though the Wakefield staff had been led to believe that ten or fifteen people would be present, the room in the basement of the administration building was packed with nearly a hundred. Doctors and administrators brought their wives; staff members from other branches of the hospital — who had nothing to do with Milligan s treatment — crowded into the back of the room, sitting on the floor, lining the walls and standing out in the nearby lounge. Dr. George showed the audience the recent videotapes of himself and Dorothy Turner working with different personalities. Arthur and Ragen stirred interest, since no one on the staff outside of Wakefield had ever seen them. Adalana, whom no one but Dorothy Turner had ever met before, caused some awe, some scoffing. But when the core Billy came on the video monitor, there was rapt silence. And when he cried out, "Who are these people? Why don't they let me stay awake?," Rosalie Drake, among others, had to fight back tears. When the viewing was finished, Dr. Wilbur brought Billy into the room and interviewed him briefly. She spoke with Arthur, Ragen* Danny and David. They answered questions, but Rosalie could see how upset they were. When the session was over, Rosalie realized from the buzz of conversation that everyone on the Wakefield staff was annoyed. Nurse Adrienne McCann and Nurse Laura Fisher complained that once again Milligan was being made to feel special and had another chance to be in the spotlight. Rosalie, Nick Cicco and Donna Egar were angry that Billy had been put on display. After Dr. Wilburs visit, the therapy strategy changed again, and Dr. George concentrated on fusing the personalities. Dr. Marlene Kocan set up regular sessions, and the personalities began to recall their memories of abuse and torture, working them through and reliving the anguish that led to the major dissociation at the age of eight. Dr. Kocan disagreed with the plan of fusion. She said she knew it had been Dr. Wilburs method with Sybil, and in other circumstances it might be the right thing. But they had to consider what would happen if Ragen was fused with the others and Milligan was then sent to prison. In a hostile environment, he'd have no way of defending himselE and with his only defense removed, he might be killed. "He survived in prison before," someone said. "Yes, but Ragen was around to protect him. If he's once again raped by a hostile male — you know that often happens in prison — he'd probably commit suicide." "Its our job to fuse him," Harding said. "That's our charge from the court." The core Billy was encouraged to listen to and answer his other people, acknowledge their existence, and get to know them. Through constant suggestion, Billy was able to remain on the spot longer and longer. |
| 133 |
Milligan, whom doctors say has 10 personalities. "Nobody has talked to me," complains Milligan, who asserts the abuse claims by his stepson are "completely false. ..." According to a report signed by Dr. George T. Harding, the psychiatrists also concluded that Milligan exhibited multiple personality behavior and that he had personalities unaware of the actions of others. They blamed his condition partly on abuse he suffered as a child... . Chalmer Milligan said he has suffered considerable hardship as a result of the published reports. "You always have the misunderstanding bunch. It's very upsetting," he said. He said he particularly was upset by published accounts that failed to attribute the abuse claim to William or the psychiatrists. "It ah goes back to the boy," Milligan said. "All they're (the publications) doing is repeating what they (the psychiatrists and young Milligan) said," he added. He would not say whether he planned any legal action regarding the abuse claims. Feeling increasingly confident that Billy would be found not guilty by reason of insanity, Judy and Gary realized there was still another hurdle. Up to this time, ah such verdicts resulted in the defendant being sent to Lima. But within three days, on December 1, a new Ohio law dealing with mentally ill patients would go into effect, requiring that someone found not guilty by reason of insanity be treated as a mentally ill patient and not as a criminal. The new law would require that he be sent to the least restrictive environment consistent with safety to himself and others, and his commitment to a state mental institution would come under the jurisdiction of the probate court. Since the trial date was set for December 4 and Billy would be the first to come under the new Ohio law, there was a good chance that after the trial, the probate court would agree to send him to a place other than Lima if the defense could demonstrate an alternative where he would receive proper treatment. Harding Hospital was out of the question because of the expense. It would have to be a state hospital where someone could be found who knew about and could treat a multiple personality. Dr. Cornelia Wilbur mentioned that at a state mental hospital less than seventy-five miles from Columbus, there was a physician who had treated several multiple personalities and who was recognized as being skilled in the field. She recommended Dr. David Caul, medical director of the Athens Mental Health Center in Athens, Ohio. The prosecutors office requested a pretrial meeting with Probate Judge Richard B. Metcalf to clarify procedures under the new Ohio law. Judge Jay Flowers agreed and arranged the meeting. But Judy and Gary knew that the meeting would range far beyond that. Judge Flowers would join the meeting, and it would be decided which evidence was to be admitted on Monday by stipulation and where Billy Milligan would be sent for treatment in the event he was declared not guilty by reason of insanity. Gary and Judy decided it was important to know if Dr. |
| 134 |
She will testify that when Bill came out of the "trance" he could not remember anything about what transpired during his "trance." Mrs. Moore will also testify that she did nothing about her marital situation with Mr. Milligan because she wanted to keep the family together. It was only after her children gave her an ultimatum that she divorced Mr. Milligan. The report from Southwest by Karolin and Turner was read into the record. Then came the deposition of Billy's brother, Jim: If James Milligan was called to testify, he would state that on many occasions Chalmers sic Milligan would take James and Bill to family property on which there was a bam. That he, James, would be sent out to the field to hunt rabbits and Bill would always be told to remain with his step-father Chalmers. On all these occasions, when he, James, would return to the bam area, Bill would be crying. On many occasions, Bill told James that his step-father hurt him. Whenever Chalmers saw Bill relating these incidents to James, he, Chalmers Milligan would say to Bill — now nothing happened in the bam did it. Bill who was very afraid of his step-father would say No. Chalmers would further state we don't want to upset your mother do we. He would then take James and Bill to the ice cream store prior to going home. He would also verify all of the home life trauma directed at Billy. At twelve-thirty Judge Flowers asked if either side wished to make closing arguments. Both sides waived the right. The judge dismissed the first count of rape, pointing out the lack of corroborating evidence and the lack of a similar modus operandi. "Now, proceeding as to the defense of insanity," Judge Flowers said, "all of the evidence is stipulated medical evidence, and from that, without question, the doctors all testify that at the time of the acts in question, that the defendant was mentally ill at the time of the offense with which he was charged. That by virtue of his mental illness he was unable to distinguish between right and wrong, and further that he did not have the ability to refrain from doing these acts." Gary held his breath. "Lacking any evidence to the contrary," Flowers continued, "this court has no alternative other than to determine from the evidence before me that as to counts two to ten, inclusive, that the defendant is not guilty by reason of insanity." Judge Flowers placed Billy Milligan under the authority of the probate court of Franklin County, struck his gravel three times and adjourned. Judy felt lie crying, but held it back. She squeezed Billy and pulled him toward the holding cell to avoid the crowd. Dorothy Turner came in to congratulate him, as did Stella Karolin and the others, who Judy could see were crying. Only Gary stood apart, leaning against the wall thoughtfully, arms folded. It had been a long battle, with sleepless nights and a marriage ready to break up, but now it was almost over. "All right, Billy," he said. "We've got to go down to probate court before Judge Metcalf. |
| 135 |
He saw the broken jar on the floor and stared at it. What was it? Why was it broken? Why was he here? A pretty lady came in, glared at him and moved her mouth, but he heard no sounds. She shook him hard, again and again, and jabbed her forefinger into his chest, her face red, her mouth still moving. He had no idea why she was angry with him. She dragged him to a room, pushed him in and closed the door. He sat there in the dead silence, wondering what was going to happen next. Then he went to sleep. When Billy opened his eyes, he cringed, expecting to be hit for breaking the cookie jar, but the blows didn't come. How had he gotten back into his room? Well, he was getting used to being somewhere, then closing his eyes and opening them to find himself somewhere else at a different time. He supposed it was that way with everyone. Up to now, he would find himself in a situation where he would be called a liar and punished for something he hadn't done. This was the first time he had done something and waked to find nothing had happened to him. He wondered when his mom was going to punish him for the broken cookie jar. It made him nervous, and he spent the rest of the day alone in his room. He wished Jimbo would come home from school, or that he could see the little dark-haired boy who used to play with his soldiers and trucks. Billy squeezed his eyes closed, hoping the little boy would be there. But nothing. The strange thing was, he never felt lonely anymore. Whenever he would start to feel lonely or bored or sad, he would just close his eyes. When he opened them, he would be in a different place and everything would be changed. Sometimes he would close his eyes when the sun was shining brightly outside, and when he opened them again, it would be nighttime. Sometimes it would be the opposite. Other times he would be playing with Kathy or Jimbo, and when he blinked he would be sitting on the floor alone. Sometimes when this happened he would have red marks on his arms or an ache in his behind, as if he had been spanked. But he never got spanked or shaken again. He was glad no one punished him anymore. ( 4 ) Dorothy stayed with Dick Jonas for a year. Then the situation became too much for her, and she left him for the second time. She supported herself and her children as a waitress at the Lancaster Country Club and by singing in cocktail lounges like the Continental and the Top Hat. She placed the children in St. Josephs School in Circleville, Ohio. Billy got along well in first grade. The nuns praised him for his drawing ability. He could sketch quickly, and his use of light and shadow was uncanny for a six-year-old. But in second grade, Sister Jane Stephens was determined he would use only his right hand for writing and drawing. "The devil is in your left hand, William. We have to force him out." He saw her pick up her ruler, and he closed his eyes... Shawn looked around and saw the lady with the black dress and the starched white bib coming toward him with the ruler. |
| 136 |
Shimmying up the tree, Billy climbed out on a branch, down the rope, and pulled his brother to safety. When they were on the bank, Jimbo lay back and looked at him. Billy said nothing, but Jimbo put his arm around his kid brother's shoulder. "You saved my life, Bill. I owe you." Unlike Billy and Jimbo, Kathy loved Catholic shool and admired the sisters. She was, she decided, definitely going to be a nun when she grew up. She adored the memory of her father and tried to find out all she could about Johnny Morrison. Her mother had told the children that their father had been ill, was taken to the hospital, and had died. Now that she was five and in school, whatever she did, Kathy asked herself first, "Is that what Daddy Johnny would want me to do?" It was something she would continue into adulthood. Dorothy saved some money from her singing engagements and bought part interest in the Top Hat Bar. She met a handsome, fast-talking young man who had a wonderful idea about the two of them opening a supper club in Florida. They had to move fast, he explained. She should take the children to Florida to look over a couple of places. He would stay here in Circleville, sell her interest in the bar and then join her. All she had to do was sign her share over to him. She did what he suggested, took the children to her sisters place in Florida, checked out some clubs for sale and waited a month. He never showed up. Realizing she had been taken by a con man, she came back to Circleville again — broke. In 1962, while she was singing at a lounge of a bowling alley, Dorothy met Chalmer Milligan, a widower. He now lived with his daughter, Challa, who was the same age as Billy, and he had a grown daughter who was a nurse. He began to date Dorothy and got her a job at the company where he was a job steward on press machines, molding parts for telephones. From the beginning, Billy didn't like him. He told Jimbo, "I don't trust him." The Pumpkin Festival in Circleville, famous throughout the Midwest, was the annual highlight of the town. In addition to parades and floats, the streets were turned into a pumpkin fair, vendors in their booths selling pumpkin donuts, pumpkin candies and even pumpkin hamburgers. The city was transformed into a pumpkin fairyland of lights and streamers and carnival rides. The Pumpkin Festival of October 1963 was a happy time. Dorothy felt her life had taken a good turn. She had met a man with a steady job who would be able to take care of her and who said he would adopt her three children. He would, she felt, be a good father, and she would be a good mother to Challa. On October 27, 1963, Dorothy married Chalmer Milligan. Three weeks after their marriage, on a Sunday in mid-November, he took them out to visit his fathers small farm in Bremen, Ohio, just fifteen minutes away. It was exciting to the children to go through the white farmhouse, swing on the porch swing, poke around the springhouse out back and the old red bam a little ways down the hill. |
| 137 |
The boys would have to come out weekends, Chalmer said, to work on the place. There was a lot to do to get the soil ready for planting vegetables. Billy looked at the rotting pumpkins in the fields and fixed the bam and the landscape in his mind. He decided that when he got home, he would draw a picture of it as a present for his new Daddy Chal. * * * The following Friday, Mother Superior and Father Mason came into the third-grade room and whispered quietly to Sister Jane Stephens. "Will all you children please stand and bow your heads?" Sister Stephens said, tears running down her face. The children, puzzled at the solemnity in Father Masons voice, listened as he spoke, his voice trembling: "Children, you may not understand the way the world situation is going. I don't expect you to. But I must tell you that our President, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated this morning. We will now say a prayer." After he said the Lords Prayer, the children were sent outside to wait for the buses to take them home. Sensing the awesome sadness of the adults, the children stood and waited silently. That weekend, as the family watched the news and the funeral procession on TV, Billy saw that his mother was crying. It pained him. He couldn't stand to see her that way or hear her sobbing, so he closed his eyes ... Shawn came and stared at the silent pictures on the TV screen and at everybody watching it. He went up to the set and put his face close to it, feeling the vibrations. Challa pushed him out of the way. Shawn went to his room and sat on the bed. He discovered that if he let air out of his mouth slowly, with his feet clenched, it would make the same funny vibrations in his head — something like zzzzzzzz ... He sat and did it alone in his room for a long time. Zzzzzzzz ... Chalmer took the three children out of St. Josephs and enrolled them in the Circleville city school system. As an Irish Protestant, he wasn't having anyone in his family going to Catholic school; they would all have to go to the Methodist Church. The children resented having to change their prayers from the Ave Maria and the Lord's Prayer — grown-up prayers they all were used to by now — to the children's prayers Challa had to say, especially "Now I lay me down to sleep." Billy decided if he was going to change his religion he was going to be what his father, Johnny Morrison, had been — Jewish. Soon after her marriage, when they all moved to the nearby city of Lancaster, Dorothy discovered that Chalmer was unusually strict with the four children. No talking at the dinner table. No laughing. The salt had to be passed clockwise. When company came, the children had to sit up straight, feet flat on the floor, hands on their knees. Kathy was not allowed to sit on her mothers lap. "You're too old for that," Chalmer said to the seven-year-old. Once when Jimbo asked Billy to pass the salt, and Billy, unable to reach that far, slid it over partway, Chalmer shouted at him, "Can't you do anything right? |
| 138 |
That probably happened to a lot of people. Just like losing time. He figured everybody lost time. He'd often heard his mother or one of the neighbors say, "God, I don't know where the time went" or "Is it that late?" or "Where on earth did the day go?" ( 2 ) The Teacher remembered one Sunday vividly. It was a week after April Fool's Day. Billy, who had turned nine seven weeks earlier, had noticed Daddy Chal watching him constantly. Billy picked up a magazine and glanced through it, but when he looked up he saw Chalmer staring, sitting stone-faced with his hand to his chin, his empty blue-green eyes watching everything he did. Billy got up, put the magazine neatly back on the coffee table and sat on the couch the way he'd been told to, feet flat on the floor, hands on his knees. But Chalmer kept looking at him, so he got up and went out on the back porch. Restless, not knowing what to do, he thought of playing with Blackjack. Everyone said Blackjack was a vicious dog, but Billy got along with him. When he looked up, he saw Chalmer staring at him through the bathroom window. Frightened now, wanting to get away from Chalmers gaze, he went around the house to the front yard and sat there shivering although it was a warm evening. The paper boy tossed the Gazette to him, and he got up and turned to bring it into the house, but there was Chalmer watching him through the front window. All the rest of that Sunday and that evening, Billy felt Chalmers eyes boring into him. He began to tremble, not knowing what Chalmer was going to do. Chalmer didn't say anything, didn't speak, but the eyes were there, following every move. The family watched Walt Disney s Wonderful World of Color, and Billy stretched out on the floor. From time to time, he would look back and see Chalmers cold, empty stare. When he moved to sit close to his mother on the couch, Chalmer got up and stomped out of the room. Billy couldn't sleep much that night. Next morning, before breakfast, Chalmer came into the kitchen, looking as if he hadn't slept much either, and announced that he and Billy were going to the farm. There was a lot to be done. Chalmer drove the back way, the long way, to the farm, never speaking a word the whole trip. He opened the garage and drove the tractor into the bam. Then Billy closed his eyes. He felt pain ... Dr. George Hardings statement to the court recounts the event: "The patient reports ... that he suffered sadistic and sexual abuse including anal intercourse from Mr. Milligan. According to the patient this occurred when he was eight or nine over the course of a year, generally on a farm when he would be alone with his stepfather. He indicates that he was afraid that the stepfather would kill him insomuch as he threatened to 'bury him in the bam and tell the mother that he had run away.'" ... at that moment his mind, his emotions and his soul shattered into twenty-four parts. ( 3 ) Kathy, Jimbo and Challa later confirmed the Teachers memory of their mothers first beating. |
| 139 |
"Adalana" came to do them for him in secret. One evening Chalmer settled down to watch a World War II movie in which a Gestapo interrogator beat his victim with a hose. When the movie was over, Chalmer went out into the yard and cut a four-foot length of garden hose, doubled it and wrapped the cut ends together with black tape for a handle. When he came inside he saw Billy washing the dishes. Before she knew what was happening, Adalana felt a blow in the small of her back that knocked her to the floor Chalmer hung the hose by the looped end on his bedroom door and went to bed. Adalana learned that men were violent and hateful and never to be trusted. She wished Dorothy or one of the girls — Kathy or Challa — would hug her and kiss her and make the fear and the bad feelings go away. But she knew that would cause trouble, so she went to bed and cried herself to sleep. Chalmer used that hose often, mostly on Billy. Dorothy recalled hanging her robe or nightgown over it on the back of the bedroom door, hoping that if Chalmer didn't see it, he wouldn't use it. Then one day, after he hadn't used it for a long time, she threw it away. He never did know what had happened to it. In addition to secretly playing with motors and electrical equipment, Tommy began to study methods of escape. He read about the great escape artists Houdini and Sylvester, and was disappointed to discover that some of their great escapes were tricks. In later years Jimbo remembered his brother telling him to tie his hands tightly with a rope and then to leave. When Tommy was alone he would study the knots and figure out the easiest way to turn his wrists to make them mobile so that the ropes would slide. He practiced tying one wrist with a rope and then untying it with his hand behind his back. After reading of African monkey traps — used to capture the animals when they reached through narrow slots for food and were then unable to pull their fists free because they wouldn't let go — Tommy began to think about the structure of the human hand. He studied the encyclopedia pictures of bone structure, and it occurred to him that if the hand could be compressed smaller than the wrist, it could always get free. He measured his own hands and wrists and began a series of exercises, squeezing and conditioning his bones and joints. When he finally reached the point of being able to compress his hands smaller than his wrists, he knew that nothing could ever again keep him in harness or chains. Tommy decided he also needed to know how to get out of locked rooms. When Billy's mother was out and he was alone in the house, he got a screwdriver and unscrewed the lock plate of the door, studying the mechanism to see how it worked. He drew a picture of the inside of the lock and memorized the shapes. Whenever he saw a different lock, he would take it apart, study it and put it back together. One day he wandered downtown into the shop of a locksmith. The old man let him look at the different kinds of locks to memorize how they worked. |
| 140 |
He even lent Tommy a book about magnetic-invoked tumblers, spinner-type tumblers and different kinds of vaults. Tommy studied hard, testing himself constantly. At the sporting goods store he saw handcuffs and decided that as soon as he had the money he would get a pair to learn how to unlock those as well. One evening when Chalmer was particularly nasty at dinner, Tommy searched for a way he could hurt him without getting caught. He had an idea. He got a file from the toolbox, took the cover off Chalmers electric rotary razor and carefully filed all three rotary blades dull. Then he put the cover back on and went out. Next morning he stood outside the bathroom while Chalmer was shaving. He heard the click of the razor and then the shouts of pain as the dull blades yanked at the hairs instead of cutting them. Chalmer raced out of the bathroom. "What're you looking at, you stupid bastard? Don't stand there like a goddamned moron!" Tommy shoved his hands into his pockets and walked off turning his head away so Chalmer wouldn't see him smiling. "Allen's" first time out on the spot was when he tried to talk some neighborhood tough guys out of throwing him down into a construetion-site hole dug for the foundation of a building. He argued with them, using all of his con-man abilities, but it didn't work. They tossed him down into the pit anyway and threw rocks at him. Well, he figured, no use in sticking around ... Danny heard the clunk of the rock hitting the ground in front of him. Then another one and another. He looked up to see the gang of boys at the top of the excavation tossing rocks at him. One hit him in the leg and another hit his side. Danny ran to the far end, going in circles, trying to find a way out. Finally, realizing the sides were too steep for him to climb, he sat down in the dirt and crossed his legs ... Tommy looked up when a rock hit him in the back. Quickly sizing up the situation, he realized an escape was called for. He had been practicing picking locks and untying ropes, but this was a different kind of escape. This needed strength ... Ragen got to his feet, pulled out his pocket knife and stormed up the incline toward the boys, flicking open the knife, looking from one of the bullies to the other; holding his anger in control, waiting to see which one would jump him. He had no hesitation about stabbing any of them. They had picked on someone a foot shorter than they were, but they had not expected him to confront them. The boys scattered and Ragen walked home. Jimbo later recalled that when the parents of the boys complained that Billy had threatened their sons with a knife, Chalmer listened to their side of it, took Billy out back and beat him. ( 7 ) Dorothy knew that her younger son had changed and was acting strangely. "Billy wasn't Billy at times," she recalled later. "He was moody, he was off to himself. I would say something to him and he wouldn't answer me, like he was far off and thinking about it, staring into space. |
| 141 |
He dragged it along behind him, looking at the store windows, wondering where he was and how he had gotten here. He sat down on a bench, looked around and watched children playing. He wished he could play with them. Then he got up and started pulling the duffel bag again, but it was too heavy, so he just left it and wandered off. He went into an Army and Navy store and looked at the surplus CB's and sirens. He picked up a big plastic bubble and pressed a switch. A siren went off and the red light inside started flashing. Terrified, he dropped the bubble and ran, knocking over an ice cream vendor's bicycle parked outside and scraping his elbow. He kept mnning. When he saw no one coming after him, David stopped running and walked the streets, wondering how he was going to get back to the house. Dorothy was probably worried about him. And he was getting hungry. He wished he had an ice cream. If he could find a policeman, he would ask him how to get home. Arthur always said if he was lost, he should ask the bobbies to help him ... Allen blinked his eyes. He bought an ice cream on a stick from a vendor and started off, unwrapping it, but then he saw a little dirty-faced girl watching him. "Jesus Christ," he said, handing it to her. He was a sucker for kids, especially those with big hungry eyes. He went back to the vendor. "Gimme another one." "Boy, you must be humgry." "Shut up and gimme the ice cream." As he walked, eating his ice cream, he decided he had to do something about letting kids get to him. What kind of con artist lets kids make a sucker of him? He wandered around, looking at the big buildings of what he thought was Chicago, and then took a bus downtown. He knew it was too late to get down to O'Hare Airport tonight. He'd have to spend the night here in Chicago and take the plane to Columbus in the morning. Suddenly he saw an electronic sign on a building that flashed: may 5, temperature 68degrees. May 5? He pulled out his wallet and looked through it. About five hundred dollars' separation pay. His discharge was dated May 1. His plane ticket from Chicago to Columbus was dated May 1. What the hell? Here he'd been wandering around in Chicago for four days since his discharge without knowing it. Where was his duffel bag? He had an empty feeling in his stomach. He looked down at his dress blue uniform. It was filty. The elbows were ripped and his left arm was scraped. All right. He'd get something to eat, get a night's sleep and take the flight back to Columbus in the morning. He grabbed a couple of hamburgers, found a flophouse and spent nine dollars for a room. The next morning he hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to the airport. "La Guardia?" He shook his head. He didn't know there was a La Guardia in Chicago. "Nah, the other one, the big one." All during the trip to the airport he tried to understand what had happened. He closed his eyes and tried to reach Arthur. Nothing. Ragen? Nowhere around. So it was another mix-up time. At the airport, he went up to the United Airlines counter and handed the clerk his ticket. |
| 142 |
He was never to aid anyone in stealing. He was not to be a thief. He was to practice the tenor saxophone in his spare time and to perfect his talent in painting landscapes. He was to control his belligerent attitude, but use it to deal with other people when necessary. Ragen was to take karate and judo lessons, to jog and to keep the body in perfect physical condition. With Arthurs help and direction, Ragen would learn to control his adrenaline flow so as to focus all his energies in times of stress or danger. He was to continue to study munitions and demolition. Part of the next paycheck would go toward buying him a gun for target practice. Allen was to practice his verbal skills, to concentrate on painting portraits. He would play the drums to help release excess tension. He would generally be the front man to help manipulate others when it was necessary. As the most sociable one, it was important for him to get out and meet people. Adalana was to continue writing her poetry and perfecting her cooking skills for the time when they would, be leaving home and getting their own apartment. Danny would concentrate on still lifes and learn to master the airbrush. Since he was a teen-ager, he would baby-sit and help care for the younger children. Arthur would concentrate on his scientific studies, ex-pecially those in the medical arts. He had already sent for a mail-order study course in the fundamentals of clinical hematology. He would also use his logic and clear reasoning to study law. All the others were made aware of the need to use every moment of their time to improve themselves and expand their knowledge. They must never be still, Arthur warned, never waste time, never allow their minds to stagnate. Each member of the family must strive to achieve his or her own goals, and at the same time be educated and cultured. They should think of these things even while off the spot and practice them intensively when they were holding the consciousness. The young ones were never to drive a car. If any of them found himself on the spot behind the steering wheel, he was to slide over to the passenger's side and wait for someone older to come and do the driving. Everyone agreed that Arthur had been very thorough and had thought things out logically. "Samuel" read the Old Testament, ate only kosher food and loved to sculpt sandstone and carve wood. He took the spot on September 27, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and said a prayer in memory of Billy's Jewish father. Samuel knew of Arthur's strict rule concerning the selling of paintings, but one day when he needed money and no one from the family was around to give him advice or to tell him what was going on, he sold a nude signed by Allen. Nudes offended his religious sensibilities, and he did not want it where he could see it. He told the purchaser, "I am not the artist, but I know the artist." Then he sold Tommy's painting of a bam, a painting that clearly had fear surrounding it. When Arthur learned what Samuel had d. |
| 143 |
Some of them were belligerent, shoving money into his face, and Allen began to suspect someone in the family was dealing. The next time he was at Hart's place, one of the men showed him a .38 Smith and Wesson. He wasn't sure why he wanted it, but he offered the man fifty bucks, and he accepted, even throwing in some bullets. Allen took the gun out to the car and put it under the seat... Ragen reached down and took the .38 into his hand. He'd wanted Allen to buy it. Not his favorite weapon. He would have preferred a 9-millimeter. But it would be a good one to add to his weapons collection. Allen decided to move out of the crummy apartment. Looking through the apartment ads in the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, he saw a familiar phone number. He searched through his address book until he found it and the name that went with it: George Kellner, the lawyer who had plea-bargained him into Zanesville. Allen had Dorothy call him about renting the apartment to her son. Kellner agreed to let him have it for eighty dollars a month. The apartment at 803 12 Roosevelt Avenue was a clean one-bedroom second-floor apartment in a white house set back from the street behind another building. Allen moved in a week later and fixed up the place comfortably. No more messing around with drugs, he decided. We've got to keep away from those people. He was astonished when Marlene, whom he had not seen since the night of Barry Hart's party, came in one day and made herself at home. He had no idea which of the others was dating her, but he decided she was not his type and he wanted nothing to do with her. She would come in after work, make his dinner, spend part of the evening, then go home to her parents' house. She was practically living there, and it made everything a lot more complicated than Allen liked. Whenever she started to get affectionate, he'd leave the spot. He didn't know who came on and he didn't really give a damn. Marlene thought the apartment was great. Billy's periodic shifts into foul language and his explosions of rage shocked her at first, but she got used to his changing moods — one minute tender and affectionate, the next minute angry and storming all over the place, then funny, clever and articulate. Without warning sometimes, he'd become clumsy and pathetic, like a little boy who didn't know which foot to put his shoe on. She knew he surely needed someone to look after him. It was all the drugs he was doing and the crowd he was hanging out with. If she could convince him that Barry Hart's friends were just using him, maybe he would see that he didn't need them at all. At times the things he did frightened her. He talked about being worried that some other people would show up and cause trouble if they found her there. He hinted it was "the family," and she assumed he was being a big shot and boasting that he was working with the Mafia. But when he went to all the trouble to devise a signal, she found herself believing it was the Mafia. Whenever she was in the apartment, he would put a painting in the window. |
| 144 |
"I have great admiration for Dr. Castro. He took band of rebel vorkers from sugar-cane fields into hills and created revolution. Now all people in Cuba are equal." They spoke for a while and Bottorf invited him to attend the meeting of the local communist cell that afternoon. "Is here?" Ragen asked. "No. Its near Westerville. You can follow me in your car." Ragen followed Karl Bottorf to a wealthy-looking neighborhood. Ragen was disappointed. He had expected it to be in the slums. He was introduced as "the Yugoslavian" to several nondescript people, and sat in the back to observe the meeting. But as the speakers droned on in abstractions and slogans, his mind wandered. He struggled to stay awake for a while, but finally he gave in. Just a short cat nap, and he would be alert again. He had found his people. This was what he had always wanted to be part of, the peoples struggle against the oppressive capitalist system. His head nodded ... Arthur sat up straight, alert, on edge. He had observed just the last part of Ragen s trip and had become fascinated watching Ragen follow the other car. But now he was amazed that such a bright fellow should be taken in by all this. Communism indeed! He had a good mind to get up and tell these mindless robots that the Soviet Union was nothing more than a monolithic dictatorship that had never turned power over to the people. Capitalism was the system that had brought freedom of conscience and opportunity to people all over the world in a way that communism could never hope to. So inconsistent was the Yugoslavian that he would rob banks, live off the fruits of narcotics traffic and yet convince himself that he was involved in the liberation of the people. Arthur stood up, gave the entire assembly a withering glance and, in an even, unemotional tone, said, "Balderdash." The others turned and stared in astonishment as he left. He found the car and sat there for a few moments. He hated to drive on the right-hand side of the road. But try as he might, he couldn't reach anyone to come and take the car. "Damn these damnable mix-up times!" he said. Slowly he eased himself behind the wheel, and craning his neck to see the center line, he pulled away from the curb. He drove tensely at twenty miles an hour. Arthur checked the street signs, and it occurred to him that Sunbury Road might be in the neighborhood of the Hoover Reservoir. He pulled over to the curb, took out the highway map and plotted the coordinates. He was indeed near the dam he had been intending to visit for a long time. He had heard that ever since the Army Corps of Engineers had built the dam, the sludge had accumulated against the structure. He had been wrestling with the question of whether this sludge area, with its varied forms of microscopic life, might turn out to be an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. If he discovered this was indeed an infested area, he would inform the authorities that action must be taken. The important thing was for him to take some scrapings of the sludge and examine them under the microscope at home. |
| 145 |
He had what looked like a screwdriver in his hand, and he was banging it on the glass. She stopped the car, got out and gave him the gun back. He took it and went back inside without a word. She drove home, assuming it was over between them. Later that evening, Allen went to Grilli s and ordered a hot "Stromboli hero" sandwich — Italian sausage, provolone cheese and extra tomato sauce — to go. He watched the counter man wrap it, steaming hot, in aluminum foil and put it into a white paper bag. Back at the apartment, he set the paper bag on the counter and went to the bedroom to change his clothes. He felt like painting tonight. He kicked his shoes off and walked into the closet, bending over to find his slippers. As he stood up, he banged his head on the shelf and slumped down, angry and dazed. The closet door had swung shut behind him. He tried to push the door open, but it was stuck. "Oh, Christ!" he muttered as he jumped up and hit his head again ... Ragen opened his eyes to find himself holding his head and sitting on the floor amid a pile of shoes. He rose, kicked the door open and looked around. He was annoyed. These mix-up times were becoming more upsetting and confusing every day. At least he had gotten rid of that woman. He wandered through the apartment, trying to sort things out. If he could only reach Arthur, perhaps he could find out what was going on. Well, what he did need was a drink. He walked into the kitchen and noticed the white paper bag on the counter. He didn't remember seeing it there before. He glared at the bag suspiciously and pulled out a bottle of vodka from under the bar. While he was pouring it over ice, he heard an odd noise coming from the bag. He backed away and stared as it moved gently, leaning to one side. When the bag moved again, he let out his breath slowly and backed up. He remembered a defanged cobra he had once left in a paper bag in front of a slumlords door as a warning. Perhaps this one was not defanged. He put his hand up to the top of the refrigerator behind him and felt for his gun. He pulled it down quickly, took aim and fired. The paper bag flew off the counter against the wall. He ducked behind the bar and peered over it cautiously, keeping the gun trained on the bag. It lay on the floor. Very carefiilly, he walked around the bar and used the barrel of the gun to rip open the top of the bag. There he saw the bloody mess, jumped back and fired a second time, yelling, "I shoot you again, you bastard!" He kicked it a few times, but when it didn't move, he opened it and stared inside in disbelief at the tomato-sauce-and-cheese sandwich with a big hole in it. Then he laughed. He realized that the heat of the Stromboli in the aluminum foil had made it move. Feeling silly at wasting two rounds of ammunition on a sandwich, he put the bag on the kitchen counter, returned the gun to the top of the refrigerator and drank his vodka. He poured another, took it with him into the living room and turned on the television set. |
| 146 |
"There's half a kilo here." He discovered it was cocaine. "What are you gonna do with it?" Arthur tore open the package and dumped the white powder down the toilet. "Someone's gonna be awful sore," Allen said. But Arthur was already back to thinking about his skin-graft report. Arthur had heard about the state prison blues. Most prisoners went through an anxiety period during the process of becoming institutionalized. As the inmate faced losing his independence and his identity and was forced to accept suppression, the change often led to depression and an emotional breakdown. For Milligan it caused a mix-up time. The letters to Marlene changed. Philip and Kevin, who had been writing obscenities and drawing pornographic cartoons, stopped. Now the letters showed a fear of insanity. Tommy's letters said he was having strange hallucinations. He also wrote that he was studying medical books day and night. When he got his parole, he wrote, he was going to study medicine, "even if it takes fifteen years." They would marry, he promised, and have a house, and he would do research and be a specialist. "How does that sound?" he wrote. "Dr. and Mrs. Milligan." On October 4, because of the cocaine episode, Milligan was transferred to C block and kept segregated in protective isolation. His medical books and portable TV set were taken away from him. Ragen ripped the steel bed rails from the wall and jammed them into the door. Workmen had to remove the dooi to get him out of his cell. He had difficulty sleeping and complained of frequent; vomiting and blurred vision. Dr. Steinberg saw him from time to time and administered mild sedatives and antispasmodics. Though he felt that Milligan s problems were essentially psychological, on October 13 he ordered that Milligan be taken from Lebanon to the Central Medical Center in Columbus for treatment. While Allen was there, he wrote to the American Civil Liberties Union for help, but nothing came of it. After ten days in Columbus, it was discovered that he had a peptic ulcer. He was put on a Sippy ulcer diet and returned to protective isolation in Lebanon. He learned that he would not be eligible for parole until April 1977 — a year and a half away. Christmas and New Years came and went, and on January 27, 1976, Allen took part with the other inmates in a hunger)! strike. He wrote to his brother: Dear Jim, As I lay here in my cell my thoughts are of you and I as children. I As my own time goes by my soul gains hatred for life. I am sorry for I'm the fault of your family being broken and which family I was hardly a part of. You have a great life ahead of you with many goals. Don't blow it as I. If you hate me for this I'm sorry. But I still respect you as I do the wind and sun. Jim I swear to God as my witness I didn't do what I am accused of. God says everyone has a place and a destiny. I guess this is minel I am sorry of the shame I have caused you and everyone around me. Bill Tommy wrote to Marlene: To My Marvene, OK Marv, there is a hunger strike and big riot starting. |
| 147 |
Arthur pushed the eviction notice aside. Now that the boys had been fired, John Wymer was demanding rent for the apartment. Well, the rent could wait. He had decided how to handle Messrs. Kelly and Lemmon. He would let them keep sending eviction notices. When they took him to court, Allen would tell the judge that these people had made him quit his job, move into their apartment complex as a requirement for the maintenance job, and just as he was settling in with new furniture on credit, they fired him and attempted to put him out on the street. The judge, he knew, would give him ninety days to move. Even after the final eviction notice, he would still have three days to get out. That should give Allen enough time to get a new job, save a few dollars and find a new apartment. That night Adalana shaved off the mustache. She'd always hated hair on her face. Tommy had promised Billy's sister he would spend Saturday, the last day of the Fairfield County Fair, with her in Lancaster. Dorothy and Del were running a restaurant concession, and they might need help closing things down. He took the money he saw on the dresser — there wasn't much — and told Allen to drive him to Lancaster. He spent a wonderful day with Kathy at the fair, going on the rides, playing the games, eating hot dogs and drinking root beer. They talked over old times, speculating how Jim was doing with his new rock group in western Canada and how Challa was doing in the Air Force. Kathy told him she was glad he'd shaved off his mustache. When they came back to the concession, where Dorothy was working over the grill, Tommy slipped up behind her and handcuffed her to the pipe. "If you're going to slave over a hot stove all day," he said, "you might as well be chained to it." She laughed. He stayed at the fair with Kathy until it closed; then Allen drove back to Channingway. Arthur spent a quiet Sunday reading his medical books, and Monday morning Allen set out to look for a new job. He made phone calls and filled out job applications for the rest of the week, but no one was hiring. ( 2 ) Friday evening, Ragen jumped out of bed, thinking he had just gone to sleep. He went to the dresser. The money — money he didn't even remember stealing — was gone. He ran to the closet, pulled out a .25-caliber automatic and searched the apartment, kicking open doors, looking for the burglar who had broken in while he was asleep. But the apartment was empty. He tried to reach Arthur. When he got no response, he angrily broke open the piggy bank, took out twelve dollars and left to buy a bottle of vodka. He came back, drank and smoked a joint. Still worried about the bills, he realized that whatever he had done to get that money, he had to do it again. Ragen took a few amphetamines, strapped on his gun, put on his jogging top and a windbreaker. Again he jogged west to Columbus, reaching the Ohio State University Wiseman parking lot at about seven-thirty in the morning. Off in the distance, he recognized the horeshoe-shaped football stadium of the Buckeyes. |
| 148 |
David felt the pain in his arms. In addition to the general therapy he had been giving Billy from the beginning to strengthen his control of the consciousness, Dr. Caul used hypnotherapy and taught his patient autosuggestion techniques to help alleviate tension. Weekly group therapy sessions with two other multiple personality patients enabled Billy to understand more about his condition by seeing its effects on other people. His switching was less and less frequent, and Caul felt his patient was improving. As Billy the Teacher began chafing at his restrictions, Dr. Caul systematically extended his privileges and freedom, first allowing him to leave the building with an attendant, then letting him sign himself out, as other patients did, for short walks — but only on hospital grounds. Billy used this time to test the pollution levels at various points along the Hocking River. He made plans to attend classes at Ohio University in the spring of 1979, to study physics, biology and art. He began to keep a chart of his moods. In mid-January, Billy pressed Dr. Caul to extend to him the privilege many other patients had — of going into town. He needed to have his hair cut, to go to the bank, to see his lawyer, to buy art supplies and books. At first Billy was allowed to leave the grounds only when accompanied by two hospital employees. Things went well, and soon Caul decided to allow him to leave with only one attendant. There seemed to be no problem. A few college students, recognizing him from his pictures in the newspapers and on television, waved to him. It made him feel good. Maybe not everyone hated him for what he had done. Maybe society wasn't totally against him, after all. Finally Billy asked that his therapy take the next step. He had been a good patient, he argued. He had learned to trust others around him. Now his doctor had to show him that he was trusted as well. Other patients, many of them with more severe mental illness than his own, were allowed to go into town unattended. He wanted the same privilege. Caul agreed that Billy was ready. To make certain there would be no misunderstandings, Caul checked with Superintendent Sue Foster and concerned law-enforcement officials. Conditions were set: The hospital was to notify the police in Athens and the Adult Parole Authority in Lancaster each time Milligan left the grounds unattended or' returned to the hospital. Billy agreed to abide by the rules. "We've got to plan ahead, Billy," Caul said. "We've got to consider some of the things you might face out on the street alone." , "What do you mean?" "Let's think of things that might happen and how you might respond. Suppose you were walking down Court Street and a female saw you, recognized you and just walked up to you and slapped the hell out of you right across your face without any warning. Do you understand that's a possibility? People know who you are. What would you do?" Billy put his hand to his cheek. "I would just step aside and walk around her." "All right. |
| 149 |
M. B.) told her it would be good for her to get back to work to ease her mind as the expenses were mounting up & also a cocktail now and then wouldn't hurt her! I was against the idea so without telling me, she signed a contract, back at the Pigalle. Well, work had slacked off at the hotels so we talked it over & I decided to go up to the Mountains (N. Y.) for a few weeks to work! We had never been separated before and of course at the time I didn't know the type of people she had been cultivating — the pimps, Lesbians, shylocks, etc. — These to her had become a symbol of "sharp" living. When I came home & saw the type clothing she was buying — Mannish looking shirts — the severe suits — certain type toreador pants that seems to be a signal between these type women — Well I blew my top. From then on it was a living hell — Her continued drinking put her back into the hospital for a hemroid operation & in view of the fact that her liver that by this time was beyond repair they couldn't operate — she was there for weeks — I traveled 150 miles a night so I could be with her during day visiting hours, painting the home etc — she was planning even then to break up our home so she could be with her new type of life. The day of her operation when she started to come out of it, still under the anesthetic, she thought I was somebody else. Her admissions were sickening, it was like a degeneration of an unknown class — I tried to stop her by telling her it was me (she was in a ward) but again it didn't quite penetrate, and she started boasting how she played me for a "sucker" all these years — I never mentioned this to her because of the children, and I begged the *** Well, when she started to get better, I mentioned the marriage again and she said she had talked to a priest and she claimed he said "you don't have to worry about that." They are "Children of God" — this to me does not sound plausible, but as I have aforementioned she wants to build this into a "gimmick." She went so far as to sue me for divorce so it would hit the papers & without warning had a "peace bond" which she tried to have served on Xmas day so I could not be with the children — and on New Year's Eve my little girl was celebrating her second birthday she refused to let me see her & then called me on the phone to tell me what a wonderful time they were having at her party — Mr. Rau, You can inquire of the show people in M B. as to my sincerity & loyalty to this woman, but it is more than I can shoulder — You know the Nite Club business down here is a woman's world & she has been instrumental in causing me to lose 2 jobs — You can guess how, she has continually bragged if I fight for the children she can have me run out of Miami — She has disappeared from 1 to 3 days at a time — and I am at the point where I can't face life & see what these children will face — I tried this once before & failed, but this time I hope it will be a success. In order to protect the children I would have to put up with her and I would rather pay for my sin with the Almighty than go through that. |
| 150 |
He felt like a guilty kid anyway. He intensified his study of himself watching the phases of the )thers inside him, and he knew their influence was getting milder. He had bought a drum set during the weekend, after playing on it n the store and being amazed at his skill. Allen used to play the drums, but the ability now belonged to the Teacher and even the unfused Billy. He also played the tenor sax and the piano, but the drums gave him a more powerful emotional release than any of the other instruments. They stirred him. When the news reached Columbus that Milligans treatment plan once again included furloughs, the attacks against Dr. David Caul were renewed. The Ohio Ethics Commission was instructed to begin an investigation with a view to pressing charges against Caul for improper conduct in the performance of his duties. It was alleged that Milligan was receiving special privileges because Caul was secretly writing a book about him. Since the law required that a complaint be lodged before such an investigation could take place, the Ohio Ethics Commission had one of its own attorneys file the complaint. Finding himself now attacked from another quarter, his efforts to treat his patient compromised and his reputation and medical career threatened, Dr. Caul filed an affidavit on July 17, 1979: Events of the past several months concerning the Billy Milligan case have created issues and upheavals that reach proportions beyond appropriateness and beyond what I believe to be within the bounds of logic, reason and even the law ... My clinical decision as to how the patient was treated is the thing that generated most if not all of the controversy. My clinical decision was supported by all the professionals who are knowledgeable on this subject... It is my belief that I have been abused and attacked for some very base motives, the least of which is publicity for a legislator and material for some very questionable journalism ... Later, after many months of complex and expensive legal manuevering, including subpoenas, depositions and countersuits, Dr. Caul was unanimously cleared of any wrongdoing. But during this period, he found that more and more of his time and energy had to go into protecting himself his reputation and his family. He knew what everyone wanted, and that he could stop the threats by keeping Billy locked away, but he refused to give in to the emotional demands of the legislators and the newspapers when he knew Billy's therapy demanded that he treat him as he would any other patient. * * * (5) . On Friday, July 3, Billy was given permission to carry some of his paintings to the Athens National Bank, which had agreed to display his art in the lobby for the month of August. Billy worked happily, preparing new work, mounting canvases, painting and framing. He also spent time making arrangements for Kathys wedding, now set for September 28. He used some of his money from the painting sales to hire a wedding hall and had himself fitted for a tuxedo. |
| 151 |
They agreed that he had probably not been able, at that time, to assist his attorney, George Kellner, in his own defense. The Fairfield County prosecutor, Mr. Luse, called only Dr. Harold T. Brown, who stated on the witness stand that he had treated Billy at the age of fifteen and had him sent to the Columbus State Hospital for three months. He would, he said, in the light of current knowledge, have changed his diagnosis from hysterical neurosis with passive-aggressive features to a new diagnosis of dissociative disorder with possible multiple personality. However, Brown told the court, he had been sent by the prosecuting attorney to interview Billy in Athens, and during that visit, Billy Milligan seemed to have knowledge of the acts he had committed. Brown said Milligan was probably not really a multiple personality, since multiple personalities were not supposed to have knowledge of the actions of the alter egos. When they left the courtroom, Goldsberry and Thompson were optimistic and Billy was elated. He was sure Judge Jackson would take the testimony of four highly regarded psychiatrists and a psychologist over the testimony of Dr. Brown. The judge told a reporter he would make his decision within two weeks. On September 18, seeing Billy's agitation after his return from Lancaster and aware of his fear of being shot at again, Dr. Caul allowed him a furlough. Since Billy realized he would be a target at his sisters house as well as at the hospital, it was understood he would stay at the Hocking Valley Motor Lodge in nearby Nelsonville. He would take his easel, paints and canvas to work undisturbed. He checked in on Tuesday under a false name and tried to relax, but the tension was too strong. He heard noises while he painted. After searching the room and the hall, he decided it was in his head — his own voices. He tried not to listen, concentrating on his brush strokes, but they were still talking. It wasn't Ragen or Arthur; he'd have recognized their accents immediately. It had to be the undesirables. Now what was wrong with him? He couldn't work, he couldn't sleep, he was afraid to go back to Kathy's or to Athens. He phoned Mike Rupe on Wednesday and asked him to come out. When Rupe got there and saw how nervous Billy was, he phoned Dr. Caul. "You're on night duty anyway," Caul said. "Stay with him tonight and bring him back tomorrow." With Mike Rupe there, Billy relaxed. They had a drink at the bar, and Billy talked of his hope of being treated by Sybil's physician. "I'll check myself into a hospital for a couple of weeks until Dr. Wilbur thinks I can stay in an apartment by myself. I think I can, because even while I'm having trouble, I'm still able to function. Then I'll start my treatment and follow her guidelines." Rupe listened as he spoke about his plans for the future, about the new life ahead of him if Judge Jackson wiped the slate clean in Lancaster. They talked through the night, fell asleep in the early hours and, after a late breakfast, drove back to the hospital Thursday morning. |
| 152 |
I hate that wall. Damn that wall! It wants to come closer and closer and laugh harder. The sweat from my brow was stinging my eyes but I fought to keep them open. I have to guard that wall, or that loud laughing wall will move in on me, invade me, crush me. I will stay frozen and guard the damn loud laughing wall. 410 men declared criminally insane shadow the endless halls of this God forgotten pit. I grow angry at the fact that the State had the gall to call this place a hospital. Lima State Hospital. Clank! Silence fell over Ward 22 except the tinkling and sweeping of the broken window. Someone smashed a small window in the day hall where we sit against the wall in hard, thick wooden chairs. You sit, you may smoke. You do not talk, you have both feet on the floor, or life will get very hard on you. Who broke a window? Now the attendants will be in a bitchy mood because their card game was interrupted and one will be ordered to stay in the dayroom if they will let us out of our little boxes. — I could hear nothing, dazed in my trance-like stupor. My body was numb and hollow. The damn loud laughing wall stopped laughing. The wall was a wall and the chips were chips. My hands were cold but clammy and the thumping of my heart echoes inside my hollow body. The waitful anxiety began to choke me, waiting to come out of my little box, but I remain frozen on my bed staring at the silent, motionless wall. Me, a nothingness zombie in a nothingness box in a nothingness hell. Saliva trying to spill over my dry parched lips was a sure sign that the psychotropic medication was fighting for control of my mind, soul and body. Should I fight it? Declare it the winner? Succumb to the third world to escape the tragic realities that lie beyond my steel door? Is life worth living in the jaws of society's trash can for misfit minds? What can I possibly achieve or contribute to mankind in this steel and concrete box with a damn loud laughing wall that moves? Just give up? More questions raced through my mind like a 33 record set on 78, growing more and more intense. Suddenly a horrifying shock volted through my body that threw my slumped shoulders back and set me even more upright. Reality forcing itself upon me like a vicious slap in the face broke my trance and cracked my frozen joints. Something was crawling up my spine. My imagination? After gathering what few senses I had left I knew it was not. There was something crawling up my spine. I reacted by jerking my shirt over my head ignoring the fact it had buttons. Blind fear has no mercy for material items. 3 buttons popped. Flinging the shirt to the floor the feeling left my back. Peering down at the shirt I saw the invader. A cockroach about 3 centimeters long and black had been tap dancing on my lumbars. The gross insect was harmless but shocking. The rodent did make up my mind for me. I came back to this side of reality but was still thinking about my inner-debate. I did let the hideous little thing go. Secretly I was content with the awareness I had of myself proud of the mental and physical victory. |
| 153 |
Judge Flowers told me that the new law had been passed pecause of Billy. * * * On July 1, 1980,1 received a letter postmarked Lima, with the word Urgent printed on the back of the envelope. When I opened it, I discovered a three-page letter written in flowing Arabic script. According to the translator, it was in perfect, fluent Arabic. It read, in part: Sometimes I do not know who I am or what I am. And sometimes I do not even know the other people surrounding me. The echo of the voices are still in my mind, but they have no meaning at all. Several faces appear to me, as if from a darkness, but I am feeling very fearful because my mind is totally divided. My internal family, in fact, is not in continuous contact with me at all, and have not been for a long time... . The events here in the last weeks were not very good. I am not responsible for it at all. I hate everything that transpires around me, but I can't stop it, and I can't alter it... . It was signed "Billy Milligan." A few days later I received another letter, explaining who had written the first one. Again I am sorry for the non English letters. It really embarrasses me to do everything wrong. Arthur knows you don't speak Arabic but he sends you a dumb letter like that. Arthur has never tried to impress anyone so he must be getting mixed up and just forgot. Samuel was taught by Arthur about Arabic, but he never writes letters. Arthur says it is bad tc boast. I wish he would talk to me. Bad things are happening and I don't know why. Arthur also speaks Swahili. Arthur read many books in Lebanor prison about the fundamentals of Arabic. He wanted to explore the pyramids and the Egyptian culture. He had to learn their language and to know what they wrote on the wall. I asked Arthur one day why he was interested in that big pile of tri angled rocks. He told me that he was not as interested in wha was in the tomb, but it might give a key to how the tomb go there. He said something about how it defies a law of physic' and he was looking for the answer. He even made little card board pyramids, but David smashed them. signed Billy U During this period at the hospital, according to Billy, there was much harassment and beatings of patients by attendants, but besides Ragen, only Kevin, of all the personalities, stood up to the attendants. In recognition of this, Arthur removed him from the list of undesirables. Kevin wrote to me on March 28, 1980: Something very bad has happened but I don't know what. I did know it would be only a matter of time before total unfusion and Billy would go to sleep for good. Arthur said Billy had only a small taste of conscious life but unfortunately the taste was a bitter one. Day by day he grew weaker in this place. He could not understand the hate and jealousy displayed by the authority figures of this institution. They also provoked the patients to hurt him and make Ragen fight, but Billy could hold Ragen back ... but not anymore. The doctors say bad things about us, and what hurts the most is they are right. |
| 154 |
We, I, am a freak, a misfit, a biological error. We all hate this place but it is where we belong. We weren't accepted very well, were we? Ragen is stopping everything for good. He has to. He said if you do not speak, you do no damage to anyone on the outside or inside. No one can blame us for anything. Ragen stopped the hearing. The span of attention will be turned inward and it will enforce the total block. By shutting out the real world we can live peacefully in ours. We know that a world without pain is a world without feeling ... but a world without feeling is a world without pain. Kevin In October 1980, the State Department of Mental Health released the news that Lima was to be phased out as a state hospital for the criminally insane and would become a prison under the Department of Correction. Once again the issue of where Milligan might be transferred made headlines. The possibility that he might be sent back to 1 Athens or to another minimum-security hospital led Prosecutor Jim O'Grady to demand that under the new law, Billy be sent back to Columbus for his sanity review hearing. Judge I Flowers agreed to hear his case. Originally scheduled to take place on October 31, 1980, the hearing was postponed by mutual agreement to November 7, after election day. To avoid having the politicians and the press make the Milligan hearing a political issue, a delay was desirable. But officials of the state Department of Mental Health used this delay to take action on their own. They informed Prosecutor O'Grady that the decision had been made to send Milligan to the new Dayton Forensic Center, which had opened in April. This new maximum-security facility was surrounded by double fences, topped by rolls of razor-ribbon concertina wire wrapped around barbed wire, and had a security system more stringent than most prisons. The prosecutors office dropped its demand for a hearing. On November 19, 1980, Billy Milligan was moved to the Dayton Forensic Center. Arthur and Ragen, sensing Billy-U's despair and afraid he might try to kill himself, put him to sleep again. When he wasn't in the visiting room, he spent his time reading, writing and sketching. He was not allowed to paint He had visits from Mary, a young outpatient he had met during his first months in Athens. She moved to Dayton so that she could see him daily. Billy was well behaved, and he told me he looked forward to his 180-day hearing, hoping that Judge Flowers would decide he didn't need a maximum security institution and would send him back to Athens. He knew that Dr. Caul could treat him, fuse him again and bring back the Teacher. With Billy-U asleep, he said, things were now as they had been before Dr. Cornelia Wilbur wakened him. I could see that he was deteriorating. Several times during my visits, he would tell me he didn't know who he was. When there was a partial fusion, he became a person with no name. Ragen, he reported, had lost the ability to speak English. People had stopped communicating with each other. |
| 155 |
I suggested he keep a daily log so whoever was on the spot could write messages. It worked for a while, but interest flagged and the entries were fewer and fewer. On April 3, 1981, Billy had his 180-dayhearing. Of the foui psychiatrists and two mental health professionals who testified. only Dr. Lewis Lindner of Lima, who had not seen him in five months, testified that he should be kept in maximum security. A letter was introduced by the prosecutor into evidence. In it Milligan was apparently responding to news that another patient at Lima had planned to have Dr. Lindner killed. "Your tactic is completely wrong ... Have you considered the fact that not many doctors would consider taking your case, knowing they may be hit for saying the wrong thing? But in fact, if Lindner has damaged you and your case beyond repair and if you feel your life is over because you're going to spend eternity behind bars, you have my blessing." When Milligan was called to the witness stand and asked his name under oath, he said, "Tommy." Tommy explained that Allen had written the letter in an attempt to talk the other patient out of killing Dr. Lindner. "It's wrong to go around shooting people just because they testify against you in court. Dr. Lindner testified against me today, but I certainly wouldn't shoot him for it." Judge Flowers deferred his decision. The newspapers ran front-page stories, feature articles and editorials opposing any move to Athens. While waiting to hear his fate, Allen spent most of his time at Dayton working on a painting for the cover of this book. He planned to send the editor several sketches to choose from, but one morning he awoke to discover that one of the children had come out while he was asleep and scribbed over the sketches with orange crayon. On the morning of the assigned deadline, Allen worked furiously and finished the desired oil painting on time. On April 21, 1981, the Fourth District Court of Appeals of Ohio ruled on the judgment of the court that had sent Billy to Lima. It found that removing him from a less restrictive setting to the maximum-security mental health facility in Ohio, the Lima State Hospital, "without notice to that person or his family, without allowing the patient to be present, to consult with counsel, to call witnesses, or to in general advise him of or allow him the rights of a full hearing ... is a fatal violation ... and must result in the reversal of the transfer order and the replacement of the patient in his position prior to the unlawful transfer proceeding." Although the appeals court found this judicial error, they decided that the error was not prejudicial, since Milligan had had a hearing in Allen County that "found upon what we must presume to be sufficient and adequate evidence that appellant, due to his mental illness, was a danger to himself and others ..." The appeals court, therefore, disagreed with Judge Jones' actions, but would not return Billy to Athens. Goldsberry and Thompson have since appealed this decision to the supreme court of Ohio. |
| 156 |
After four security guards got him into the seclusion room and strapped down his arms and legs, they jumped on him and beat him. When I next saw Allen, on August 27, his left arm, now black and blue, was swollen, his left hand paralyzed. His left leg was bandaged. On September 22, 1981, he was transferred to the Central Ohio Regional Forensic Unit — in a wheelchair. Shortly after his transfer, the Department of Mental Health filed a lawsuit against Billy Milligan for fifty thousand dollars to pay for his involuntary hospitalization and treatment at Athens, Lima, and Dayton. Billy's attorneys later filed a countersuit, charging for murals he painted on the walls of Lima State Hospital and asking damages for physical abuse and malpractice. The countersuit was denied. The states suit is still pending. Tanda, eager to be close to him, got a job in Columbus and moved in with his sister, Kathy. She loved him, she said, and wanted to be able to visit him often. Dr. Box began the intensive therapy methods that had earlier been successful in fusing the personalities at the Athens Mental Health Center. She worked with David, Ragen, Arthur, Allen, Kevin, and, finally, was able to reach the Teacher. Each time I visited, Allen or Tommy would tell me I had just missed seeing the Teacher. Finally, I left them instructions to post a message in the room. The next time the Teacher was there, he was to phone me. About a week later, I got a call from him, saying "Hi, I hear you've been wanting to talk to 99 me. It was the first time I had spoken to the Teacher since we had gone over the manuscript of the book together, in Lima. Now we talked for a long time, and he was able to fill in some of the gaps that the others had no knowledge of. One day the Teacher called and said, "I've got to tell someone. I'm in love with Tanda, and she's in love with me. We want to get married." They planned the wedding for December 15th so that Dr. Box could attend before she went on her month long vacation to her native Australia. As part of the treatment plan, Dr. Box moved Milligan onto a new ward, along with three other patients she had tentatively diagnosed as multiples. Since multiple personalities required specialized treatment and attention, she felt it might be best to have them together. Dr. Box was not prepared for the criticism by Columbus politicians which followed, two weeks before election day. The Columbus Dispatch reported on October 17, 1981, that State Representative Don Gilmore, R-Columbus, had charged that Billy Milligan was receiving preferential treatment at the Columbus hospital, including: "Allowing Milligan to choose the patients who will live with him on the ward." Though hospital administrators denied that Milligan was getting any preferential treatment, Gilmore continued to press his accusations. The Columbus Citizen-Journal of November 19, reported: Despite assurances that William Milligan is receiving no extra privileges at the Central Ohio Psychiatric Hospital, a state representative has asked for another investigation into the possibility... |
| 157 |
Starlight tinkled in golden nuclei off the highly perched Greek figures atop the State theater. A man shambled by in the shadow, balancing upon his head a basket. The basket contained bread loaves. She saw the man and the balanced basket and suddenly she did not move and there was no inside smile, nor did her hands clasp tight the magazines. She watched the man walk, with one hand of his gently poised up to tap the basket any time it unbalanced, and down the street he dwindled, while the magazines slipped from Marie's fingers and scattered on the walk. Snatching them up, she ran into the hotel and almost fell going upstairs. She sat in the room. The magazines were piled on each side of her and in a circle at her feet. She had made a little castle with portcullises of words and into this she was withdrawn. All about her were the magazines she had bought and bought and looked at and looked at on other days, and these were the outer barrier, and upon the inside of the barrier, upon her lap, as yet unopened, but her hands were trembling to open them and read and read and read again with hungry eyes, were the three battered Post magazines. She opened the first page. She would go through them page by page, line by line, she decided. Not a line would go unnoticed, a comma unread, every little ad and every color would be fixed by her. And — she smiled with discovery — in those other magazines at her feet were still advertisements and cartoons she had neglected — there would be little morsels of stuff for her to reclaim and utilize later. She would read this first Post tonight, yes tonight she would read this first delicious Post. Page on page she would eat it and tomorrow night, if there was going to be a tomorrow night, but maybe there wouldn't be a tomorrow night here, maybe the motor would start and there'd be odors of exhaust and round hum of rubber tire on road and wind riding in the window and pennanting her hair — but, suppose, just suppose there would Be a tomorrow night here, in this room. Well, then, there would be two more Posts, one for tomorrow night, and the next for the next night. How neatly she said it to herself with her mind's tongue. She turned the first page. She turned the second page. Her eyes moved over it and over it and her fingers unknown to her slipped under the next page and flickered it in preparation for turning, and the watch ticked on her wrist, and time passed and she sat turning pages, turning pages, hungrily seeing the framed people in the pictures, people who lived in another land in another world where neons bravely held off the night with crimson bars and the smells were home smells and the people talked good fine words and here she was turning the pages, and all the lines went across and down and the pages flew under her hands, making a fan. She threw down the first Post, seized on and riffled through the second in half an hour, threw that down, took up the third, threw that down a good fifteen minutes later and found herself breathing, breathing stiffly and swiftly in her body and out of her mouth. |
| 158 |
The lungs did not rest but were exercised as if she were a drowned person and she herself performing artificial respiration to keep the last life going. And all of these things were lubricated by the sweat of her glowing body, and she was glued fast between the heavy blankets like something pressed, smashed, redolently moist between the white pages of a heavy book. And as she lay this way the long hours of midnight came when again she was a child. She lay, now and again thumping her heart in tambourine hysteria, then, quieting, the slow sad thoughts of bronze childhood when everything was sun on green trees and sun on water and sun on blond child hair. Faces flowed by on merry-go-rounds of memory, a face rushing to meet her, facing her, and away to the right; another, whirling in from the left, a quick fragment of lost conversation, and out to the right. Around and round. Oh, the night was very long. She consoled herself by thinking of the car starting tomorrow, the throttling sound and the power sound and the road moving under, and she smiled in the dark with pleasure. But then, suppose the car did not start? She crumpled in the dark, like a burning, withering paper. All the folds and corners of her clenched in about her and tick tick tick went the wristwatch, tick tick tick and another tick to wither on... . Morning. She looked at her husband lying straight and easy on his bed. She let her hand laze down at the cool space between the beds. All night her hand had hung in that cold empty interval between. Once she had put her hand out toward him, stretching, but the space was just a little too long, she couldn't reach him. She had snapped her hand back, hoping he hadn't heard the movement of her silent reaching. There he lay now. His eyes gently closed, the lashes softly interlocked like clasped fingers. Breathing so quietly you could scarce see his ribs move. As usual, by this time of morning, he had worked out of his pajamas. His naked chest was revealed from the waist up. The rest of him lay under cover. His head lay on the pillow, in thoughtful profile. There was a beard stubble on his chin. The morning light showed the white of her eyes. They were the only things in the room in motion, in slow starts and stops, tracing the anatomy of the man across from her. Each little hair was perfect on the chin and cheeks. A tiny hole of sunlight from the window-shade lay on his chin and picked out, like the spikes of a music-box cylinder, each little hair on his face. His wrists on either side of him had little curly black hairs, each perfect, each separate and shiny and glittering. The hair on his head was intact, strand by dark strand, down to the roots. The ears were beautifully carved. The teeth were intact behind the lips. "Joseph!" she screamed. "Joseph!" she screamed again, flailing up in terror. Bong! Bong! Bong! went the bell thunder across the street, from the great tiled cathedral! Pigeons rose in a papery white whirl, like so many magazines fluttered past the window! |
| 159 |
Old friends, children she hadn't seen or thought of in twenty years filled her mind. And she thought of things she wanted to do and had never done. She had meant to call Lila Holdridge for the past eight years since college, but somehow she never had. What friends they had been! Dear Lila! She thought, when lying down, of all the books, the fine new and old books, she had meant to buy and might never buy now and read. How she loved books and the smell of books. She thought of a thousand old sad things. She'd wanted to own the Oz books all her life, yet had never bought them. Why not? while yet there was life! The first thing she'd do would be to buy them when she got back to New York! And she'd call Lila immediately! And she'd see Bert and Jimmy and Helen and Louise, and go back to Illinois and walk around in her childhood place and see the things to be seen there. If she got back to the States. If. Her heart beat painfully in her, paused, held on to itself, and beat again. If she ever got back. She lay listening to her heart, critically. Thud and a thud and a thud. Pause. Thu d and a thud and a thud. Pause. What if it should stop while she was listening? There! Silence inside her. "Joseph!" She leaped up. She grabbed at her breasts as if to squeeze, to pump to start the silent heart again! It opened in her, closed, rattled and beat nervously, twenty rapid, shot-like times! She sank on to the bed. What if it should stop again and not start? What would she think? What would there be to do? She'd die of fright, that's what. A joke; it was very humorous. Die of fright if you heard your heart stop. She would have to listen to it, keep it beating. She wanted to go home and see Lila and buy the books and dance again and walk in Central Park and — listen — Thud and a thud and a thud. Pause. Joseph knocked on the door. Joseph knocked on the door and the car was not repaired and there would be another night, and Joseph did not shave and each little hair was perfect on his chin, and the magazine shops were closed and there were no more magazines, and they ate supper, a little bit anyway for her, and he went out in the evening to walk in the town. She sat once more in the chair and slow erections of hair rose as if a magnet were passed over her neck. She was very weak and could not move from the chair, and she had no body, she was only a heart-beat, a huge pulsation of warmth and ache between four walls of the room. Her eyes were hot and pregnant, swollen with child of terror behind the bellied, tautened lids. Deeply inside herself, she felt the first little cog slip. Another night, another night, another night, she thought. And this will be longer than the last. The first little cog slipped, the pendulum missed a stroke. Followed by the second and third interrelated cogs. The cogs interlocked, a small with a little larger one, the little larger one with a bit larger one, the bit larger one with a large one, the large one with a huge one, the huge one with an immense one, the immense one with a titanic one... |
| 160 |
Burleigh unless he was forced to. The alien feeling would pass. He sat staring into space. The alien feeling did not pass. It grew. On Tuesday and Wednesday it bothered him terrifically that his epidermis, hair and other appendages were of a high disorder, while his integumented skeleton of himself was a slick clean structure of efficient organization. Sometimes, in certain lights with his lips drawn morosely down, weighted with melancholy, he imagined he saw his skull grinning at him behind the flesh. Let go! he cried. Let go of me! My lungs! Stop! He gasped convulsively, as if his ribs were crushing the breath from him. My brain — stop squeezing it! And terrifying headaches burnt his brain to a blind cinder. My insides, let them be, for God's sake! Stay away from my heart! His heart cringed from the fanning motion of ribs like pale spiders crouched and fiddling with their prey. Drenched with sweat, he lay upon the bed one night while Clarisse was out attending a Red Cross meeting. He tried to gather his wits but only grew more aware of the conflict between his dirty exterior and this beautiful cool clean calciumed thing inside. His complexion: wasn't it oily and lined with worry? Observe the flawless, snow-white perfection of the skull. His nose: wasn't it too large? Then observe the tiny bones of the skull's nose before that monstrous nasal cartilage begins forming the lopsided proboscis. His body: wasn't it plump? Well, consider the skeleton; slender, svelte, economical of line and contour. Exquisitely carved oriental ivory! Perfect, thin as a white praying mantis! His eyes: weren't they protuberant, ordinary, numb-looking? Be so kind as to note the eye-sockets of the skull; so deep and rounded, somber, quiet pools, all-knowing, eternal. Gaze deep and you never touch the bottom of their dark understanding. All irony, all life, all everything is there in the cupped darkness. Compare. Compare Compare. He raged for hours. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solemn philosopher, hung quietly inside, saying not a word, suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting. Harris sat slowly up. "Wait a minute. Hold on!" he exclaimed. "You're helpless, too. I've got you, too. I can make you do anything I want! You can't prevent it! I say move your carpales, metacarpales, and phalanges and — sswtt — up they go, as I wave to someone!" He laughed "I order the fibula and femur to locomote and Hunn two three four, Hunn two three four — we walk around the block. There!" Harris grinned. "It's a fifty-fifty fight. Even-Stephen. And we'll fight it out, we two! After all, I'm the part that thinks! Yes, by God! yes. Even if I didn't have you, I could still think!" Instantly, a tiger's jaw snapped shut, chewing his brain in half. Harris screamed. The bones of his skull grabbed hold and gave him nightmares. Then slowly, while he shrieked, nuzzled and ate the nightmares one by one, until the last one was gone and the light went out... . At the end of the week he postponed the Phoenix trip because of his health. |
| 161 |
It was gratifying of an evening to hear boots shushing through the tall grass, the sound of men spitting into the ditch prior to setting foot on the porch, the sound of heavy bodies creaking the boards, and the groan of the house as yet another shoulder leaned against its frame door and another voice said, as a hairy wrist wiped a mouth clean: "Kin I come in?" With elaborate casualness, Charlie'd invite the arrivals in. There'd be chairs, soapboxes for all, or at least carpets to squat on. And by the time crickets were itching their legs into a summertime humming and frogs were throat-swollen like ladies with goiters shouting in the great night, the room would be full to bursting with people from all the bottom lands. At first nobody would say anything. The first half-hour of such an evening, while people came in and got settled, was spent in carefully rolling cigarettes. Putting tobacco neatly into the rut of brown paper, loading it, tamping it, as they loaded and tamped and rolled their thoughts and fears and amazement for the evening. It gave them time to think. You could see their brains working behind their eyes as they fingered the cigarettes into smoking order. It was kind of a rude church gathering. They sat, squatted, leaned on plaster walls, and one by one, with reverent awe, they stared at the jar upon its shelf. The wouldn't stare sudden-like. No, they kind of did it slow, casual, as if they were glancing around the room — letting their eyes fumble over just any old object that happened into their consciousness. And — just by accident, of course — the focus of their wandering eyes would occur always at the same place. After a while all eyes in the room would be fastened to it, like pins stuck in some incredible pincushion. And the only sound would be someone sucking a corncob. Or the children's barefooted scurry on the porch planks outside. Maybe some woman's voice would come, "You kids git away, now! Git!" And with a giggle like soft, quick water, the bare feet would rush off to scare the bullfrogs. Charlie would be up front, naturally, on his rocking chair, a plaid pillow under his lean rump, rocking slow, enjoying the fame and looked-up-to-ness that came with keeping the jar. Thedy, she'd be seen way back of the room with the womenfolk in a bunch, all gray and quiet, abiding their men. Thedy looked like she was ripe for jealous screaming. But she said nothing, just watched men tromp into her living room and sit at the feet of Charlie, staring at this here Holy Graillike thing, and her lips were set cold and hard and she spoke not a civil word to anybody. After a period of proper silence, someone, maybe old Gramps Medknowe from Crick Road, would clear the phlegm from a deep cave somewhere inside himself, lean forward, blinking, wet his lips, maybe, and there'd be a curious tremble in his calloused fingers. This would cue everyone to get ready for the talking to come. Ears were primed. People settled like sows in the warm mud after a rain. |
| 162 |
It got so that now, in September, there was nothing but the mark of my rubber tennis shoes and Donald and Delaus Arnold's feet, down by the water curve. Sand blew up in curtains on the sidewalks, and the merry-go-round was hidden with canvas, all of the horses frozen in mid-air on their brass poles, showing teeth, galloping on. With only the wind for music, slipping through canvas. I stood there. Everyone else was in school. I was not. Tomorrow I would be on my way west across the United States on a train. Mom and I had come to the beach for one last brief moment. There was something about the loneliness that made me want to get away by myself. "Mama, I want to run up the beach aways," I said. "All right, but hurry back, and don't go near the water." I ran. Sand spun under me and the wind lifted me. You know how it is, running, arms out so you feel veils from your fingers, caused by wind. Like wings. Mama withdrew into the distance, sitting. Soon she was only a brown speck and I was all alone. Being alone is a newness to a twelve-year-old child. He is so used to people about. The only way he can be alone is in his mind. There are so many real people around, telling children what and how to do, that a boy has to run off down a beach, even if it's only in his head, to get by himself in his own world. So now I was really alone. I went down to the water and let it cool up to my stomach. Always before, with the crowd, I hadn't dared to look, to come to this spot and search around in the water and call a certain name. But now — Water is like a magician. Sawing you in half. It feels as if you were cut in two, part of you, the lower part, sugar, melting, dissolving away. Cool water, and once in a while a very elegantly stumbling wave that fell with a flourish of lace. I called her name. A dozen times I called it. "Tally! Tally! Oh, Tally!" You really expect answers to your calling when you are young. You feel that whatever you may think can be real. And some times maybe that is not so wrong. I thought of Tally, swimming out into the water last May, with her pigtails trailing, blond. She went laughing, and the sun was on her small twelve-year-old shoulders. I thought of the water settling quiet, of the life guard leaping into it, of Tally's mother screaming, and of how Tally never came out... . The life guard tried to persuade her to come out, but she did not. He came back with only bits of water-weed in his big-knuckled fingers, and Tally was gone. She would not sit across from me at school any longer, or chase indoor balls on the brick streets on summer nights. She had gone too far out, and the lake would not let her return. And now in the lonely autumn when the sky was huge and the water was huge and the beach was so very long, I had come down for the last time, alone. I called her name again and again. Tally, oh, Tally! The wind blew so very softly over my ears, the way wind blows over the mouths of sea-shells to set them whispering. The water rose, embraced my chest, then my knees, up and down, one way and another, sucking under my heels. |
| 163 |
"Tally! Come back, Tally!" I was only twelve. But I know how much I loved her. It was that love that comes before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that is no more bad than wind and sea and sand lying side by side forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the humming quiet days of droning education at the school. All the long autumn days of the years past when I had carried her books home from school. Tally! I called her name for the last time. I shivered. I felt water on my face and did not know how it got there. The waves had not splashed that high. Turning, I retreated to the sand and stood there for half an hour, hoping for one glimpse, one sign, one little bit of Tally to remember. Then, I knelt and built a sand castle, shaping it fine, building it as Tally and I had built so many of them. But this time, I only built half of it. Then I got up. "Tally, if you hear me, come in and build the rest." I walked off toward that far-away speck that was Mama. The water came in, blended the sand-castle circle by circle, mashing it down little by little into the original smoothness. Silently, I walked along the shore. Far away, a merry-go-round jangled faintly, but it was only the wind. The next day, I went away on the train. A train has a poor memory; it soon puts all behind it. It forgets the cornlands of Illinois, the rivers of childhood, the bridges, the lakes, the valleys, the cottages, the hurts and the joys. It spreads them out behind and they drop back of a horizon. I lengthened my bones, put flesh on them, changed my young mind for an older one, threw away clothes as they no longer fitted, shifted from grammar to high-school, to college. And then there was a young woman in Sacramento. I knew her for a time, and we were married. By the time I was twenty-two, I had almost forgotten what the East was like. Margaret suggested that our delayed honeymoon be taken back in that direction. Like a memory, a train works both ways. A train can bring rushing back all those things you left behind so many years before. Lake Bluff, population 10,000, came up over the sky. Margaret looked so handsome in her fine new clothes. She watched me as I felt my old world gather me back into its living. She held my arm as the train slid into Bluff Station and our baggage was escorted out. So many years, and the things they do to people's faces and bodies. When we walked through the town together I saw no one I recognized. There were faces with echoes in them. Echoes of hikes on ravine trails. Faces with small laughter in them from closed grammar schools and swinging on metal-linked swings and going up and down on teeter-totters. But I didn't speak. I walked and looked and filled up inside with all those memories, like leaves stacked for autumn burning. We stayed on two weeks in all, revisiting all the places together. The days were happy. I thought I loved Margaret well. At least I thought I did. It was on one of the last days that we walked down by the shore. |
| 164 |
The hour grew late, the streets and sidewalks stood empty, the air moved cold about the house and there was nothing, nothing. Long after midnight, Martin lay watching the world beyond the cool, clear glass windows. Now there was not even autumn, for there was no Do g to fetch it in. There would be no winter, for who could bring the snow to melt in your hands? Father, Mother? No, not the same. They couldn't play the game with its special secrets and rules, its sounds and pantomimes. No more seasons. No more time. The go-between, the emissary, was lost to the wild throngings of civilization, poisoned, stolen, hit by a car, left somewhere in a culvert... . Sobbing, Martin turned his face to his pillow. The world was a picture under glass, untouchable. The world was dead. Martin twisted in bed and in three days the last Hallowe'en pumpkins were rotting in trash cans, papier-mache skulls and witches were burnt on bonfires, and ghosts were stacked on shelves with other linens until next year. To martin, Hallowe'en had been nothing more than one evening when tin horns cried off in the cold autumn stars, children blew like goblin leaves along the flinty walks, flinging their heads, or cabbages, at porches, soap-writing names or similar magic symbols on icy windows. All of it as distant, unfathomable, and nightmarish as a puppet show seen from so many miles away that there is no sound or meaning. For three days in November, Martin watched alternate light and shadow sift across his ceiling. The fire-pageant was over forever; autumn lay in cold ashes. Martin sank deeper, yet deeper in white marble layers of bed, motionless, listening always listening... . Friday evening, his parents kissed him good-night and walked out of the house into the hushed cathedral weather toward a motion-picture show. Miss Tarkins from next door stayed on in the parlor below until Martin called down he was sleepy, then took her knitting off home. In silence, Martin lay following the great move of stars down a clear and moonlit sky, remembering nights such as this when he'd spanned the town with Dog ahead, behind, around about, tracking the green-plush ravine, lapping slumbrous streams gone milky with the fullness of the moon, leaping cemetery tombstones while whispering the marble names; on, quickly on, through shaved meadows where the only motion was the off-on quivering of stars, to streets where shadows would not stand aside for you but crowded all the sidewalks for mile on mile. Run now run! chasing, being chased by bitter smoke, fog, mist, wind, ghost of mind, fright of memory; home, safe, sound, snug-warm, asleep... . Nine o'clock. Chime. The drowsy clock in the deep stairwell below. Chime. Dog, come home, and run the world with you. Dog, bring a thistle with frost on it, or bring nothing else but the wind. Dog, where are you? Oh, listen, now, I'll call. Martin held his breath. Way off somewhere — a sound. Martin rose up, trembling. There, again — the sound. So small a sound, like a sharp needle-point brushing the sky long miles and many miles away. |
| 165 |
The dreamy echo of a dog — barking. The sound of a dog crossing fields and farms, dirt roads and rabbit paths, running, running, letting out great barks of steam, cracking the night. The sound of a circling dog which came and went, lifted and faded, opened up, shut in, moved forward, went back, as if the animal were kept by someone on a fantastically long chain. As if the dog were running and someone whistled under the chestnut trees, in mold-shadow, tar-shadow, moon-shadow, walking, and the dog circled back and sprang out again toward home. Dog! Martin thought, oh Dog, come home, boy! Listen, oh, listen, where you been? Come on, boy, make tracks! Five, ten, fifteen minutes; near, very near, the bark, the sound. Martin cried out, thrust his feet from the bed, leaned to the window. Dog! Listen, boy! Dog! Dog! He said it over and over. Dog! Dog! Wicked Dog, run off and gone all these days! Bad Dog, good Dog, home, boy, hurry, and bring what you can! Near now, near, up the street, barking, to knock clapboard housefronts with sound, whirl iron cocks on rooftops in the moon, firing off volleys — Dog! now at the door below... . Martin shivered. Should he run — let Dog in, or wait for Mom and Dad? Wait? Oh, God, wait? But what if Dog ran off again? No, he'd go down, snatch the door wide, yell, grab Dog in, and run upstairs so fast, laughing, crying, holding tight, that ... Dog stopped barking. Hey! Martin always broke the window, jerking to it. Silence. As if someone had told Dog to hush now, hush, hush. A full minute passed. Martin clenched his fists. Below, a faint whimpering. Then, slowly, the downstairs front door opened. Someone was kind enough to have opened the door for Dog. of course! Dog had brought Mr. Jacobs or Mr. Gillespie or Miss Tarkins, or ... The downstairs door shut. Dog raced upstairs, whining, flung himself on the bed. "Dog, Dog, where've you been, what've you done! Dog, Dog!" And he crushed Dog hard and long to himself, weeping. Dog, Dog. He laughed and shouted. Dog! But after a moment he stopped laughing and crying, suddenly. He pulled back away. He held the animal and looked at him, eyes widening. The odor coming from Dog was different. It was a smell of strange earth. It was a smell of night within night, the smell of digging down deep in shadow through earth that had lain cheek by jowl with things that were long hidden and decayed. A stinking and rancid soil fell away in clods of dissolution from Dog's muzzle and paws. He had dug deep. He had dug very deep indeed. That was it, wasn't it? wasn't it? wasn't it! What kind of message was this from Dog? What could such a message mean? The stench — the ripe and awful cemetery earth. Dog was a bad dog, digging where he shouldn't. Dog was a good dog, always making friends. Dog loved people. Dog brought them home. And now, moving up the dark hall stairs, at intervals, came the sound of feet, one foot dragged after the other, painfully, slowly, slowly, slowly. Dog shivered. A rain of strange night earth fell seething on the bed. |
| 166 |
He undressed in slow-pantomimed wonder, thinking, this year, next year, and which room two years, three years, from today? What about the Beasts, the Monsters? And being mashed and God killed? What was killed? What was Death? Was Death a feeling? Did God enjoy it so much he never came back? Was Death a journey then? In the hall, on her way downstairs, Mother dropped a champagne bottle. Edwin heard and was cold, for the thought that jumped through his head was, that's how Mother'd sound. If she fell, if she broke, you'd find a million fragments in the morning. Bright crystal and clear wine on the parquet flooring, that's all you'd see at dawn. Morning was the smell of vines and grapes and moss in his room, a smell of shadowed coolness. Downstairs, breakfast was in all probability, at this instant, manifesting itself in a fingersnap on the wintry tables. Edwin got up to wash and dress and wait, feeling fine. Now things would be fresh and new for at least a month. Today, like all days, there'd be breakfast, school, lunch, songs in the music room, an hour or two at the electrical games, then — tea in the Outlands, on the luminous grass. Then up to school again for a late hour or so, where he and Teacher might prowl the censored library together and he'd puzzle with words and thoughts about that world out there that had been censored from his eyes. He had forgotten Teacher's note. Now, he must give it to Mother. He opened the door. The hall was empty. Down through the deeps of the Worlds, a soft mist floated, through a silence which no footsteps broke; the hills were quiet; the silver fonts did not pulse in the first sunlight, and the banister, coiling up from the mists was a prehistoric monster peering into his room. He pulled away from this creature, looking to find Mother, like a white boat, drifted by the dawn tides and vapors below. She was not there. He hurried down through the hushed lands, calling, "Mother!" He found her in the Parlor, collapsed on the floor in her shiny green-gold party dress, a champagne goblet in one hand, the carpet littered with broken glass. She was obviously asleep, so he sat at the magical breakfast table. He blinked at the empty white cloth and the gleaming plates. There was no food. All his life wondrous foods had awaited him here. But not today. "Mother, wake up!" He ran to her. "Shall I go to school? Where's the food? Wake up!" He ran up the stairs. The Highlands were cold and shadowed, and the white glass suns no longer glowed from the ceilings in this day of sullen fog. Down dark corridors, through dim continents of silence, Edwin rushed. He rapped and rapped at the school door. It drifted in, whining, by itself. The school lay empty and dark. No fire roared on the hearth to toss shadows on the beamed ceiling. There was not a crackle or a whisper. "Teacher?" He poised in the center of the flat, cold room. "Teacher!" he screamed. He slashed the drapes aside; a faint shaft of sunlight fell through the stained glass. |
| 167 |
Edwin gestured. He commanded the fire to explode like a popcorn kernel on the hearth. He commanded it to bloom to life! He shut his eyes, to give Teacher time to appear. He opened his eyes and was stupefied at what he saw on her desk. Neatly folded was the gray cowl and robe, atop which gleamed her silver spectacles, and one gray glove. He touched them. One gray glove was gone. A piece of greasy cosmetic chalk lay on the robe. Testing it, he made dark lines on his hands. He drew back, staring at Teacher's empty robe, the glasses, the greasy chalk. His hand touched a knob of a door which had always been locked. The door swung slowly wide. He looked into a small brown closet. "Teacher!" He ran in, the door crashed shut, he pressed a red button. The room sank down, and with it sank a slow mortal coldness. The World was silent, quiet, and cool. Teacher gone and Mother — sleeping. Down fell the room, with him in its iron jaws. Machinery clashed. A door slid open. Edwin ran out. The Parlor! Behind was not a door, but a tall oak panel from which he had emerged. Mother lay uncaring, asleep. Folded under her, barely showing as he rolled her over, was one of Teacher's soft gray gloves. He stood near her, holding the incredible glove, for a long time. Finally, he began to whimper. He fled back up to the Highlands. The hearth was cold, the room empty. He waited. Teacher did not come. He ran down again to the solemn Lowlands, commanded the table to fill with steaming dishes! Nothing happened. He sat by his mother, talking and pleading with her and touching her, and her hands were cold. The clock ticked and the light changed in the sky and still she did not move, and he was hungry and the silent dust dropped down on the air through all the Worlds. He thought of Teacher and knew that if she was in none of the hills and mountains above, then there was only one place she could be. She had wandered, by error, into the Outlands, lost until someone found her. And so he must go out, call after her, bring her back to wake Mother, or she would lie here forever with the dust falling in the great darkened spaces. Through the kitchen, out back, he found late afternoon sun and the Beasts hooting faintly beyond the rim of the World. He clung to the garden wall, not daring to let go, and in the shadows, at a distance, saw the shattered box he had flung from the window. Freckles of sunlight quivered on the broken lid and touched tremblingly over and over the face of the Jack jumped out and sprawled with its arms overhead in an eternal gesture of freedom. The doll smiled and did not smile, smiled and did not smile, as the sun winked on the mouth, and Edwin stood, hypnotized, above and beyond it. The doll opened its arms toward the path that led off between the secret trees, the forbidden path smeared with oily droppings of the Beasts. But the path lay silent and the sun warmed Edwin and he heard the wind blow softly in the trees. At last, he let go of the garden wall. "Teacher?" He edged along the path a few feet. |
| 168 |
But he no longer liked the work. At the end of an hour he knew he had brought death to three of his old, loved friends in Missouri. He read their names in the cut grain and couldn't go on. He locked the scythe in the cellar and put the key away. He was done with the reaping, done for good and all. He smoked his pipe in the evening, on the front porch, and told the kids stories to hear them laugh. But they didn't laugh much. They seemed withdrawn, tired and funny, like they weren't his children any more. Molly complained of a headache, dragged around the house a little, went to bed early and fell into a deep sleep. That was funny, too. Molly always stayed up late and was full of vinegar. The wheat field rippled with moonlight on it, making it into a sea. It wanted cutting. Certain parts needed cutting now. Drew Erickson sat, swallowing quietly, trying not to look at it. What'd happen to the world if he never went in the field again? What'd happen to people ripe for death, who waited the coming of the scythe? He'd wait and see. Molly was breathing softly when he blew out the oil lamp and got to bed. He couldn't sleep. He heard the wind in the wheat, felt the hunger to do the work in his arms and fingers. In the middle of the night he found himself walking in the field, the scythe in his hands. Walking like a crazy man, walking and afraid, half-awake. He didn't remember unlocking the cellar door, getting the scythe, but here he was in the moonlight, walking in the grain. Among these grains there were many who were old, weary, wanting so very much to sleep. The long, quiet, moonless sleep. The scythe held him, grew into his palms, forced him to walk. Somehow, struggling, he got free of it. He threw it down, ran off into the wheat, where he stopped and went down on his knees. "I don't want to kill anymore," he said. "if I work with the scythe I'll have to kill Molly and the kids. Don't ask me to do that!" The stars only sat in the sky, shining. Behind him, he heard a dull, thumping sound. Something shot up over the hill into the sky. It was like a living thing, with arms of red color, licking at the stars. Sparks fell into his face. The thick, hot odor of fire came with it. The house! Crying out, he got sluggishly, hopelessly, to his feet, looking at the big fire. The little white house with the live oaks was roaring up in one savage bloom of fire. Heat rolled over the hill and he swam in it and went down in it, stumbling, drowning over his head. By the time he got down the hill there was not a shingle, bolt or threshold of it that wasn't alive with flame. It made blistering, crackling, fumbling noises. No one screamed inside. No one ran around or shouted. He yelled in the yard. "Molly! Susie! Drew!" He got no answer. He ran close in until his eyebrows withered and his skin crawled hot like paper burning, crisping, curling up in tight little curls. "Molly! Susie!" The fire settled contentedly down to feed. Drew ran around the house a dozen times, all alone, trying to find a way in. |
| 169 |
"Timothy." Uncle Einar's wings spread and twitched and came in with a sound like kettledrums. Timothy felt himself plucked up like a thimble and set upon Einar's shoulder. "Don't feel badly, Nephew Timothy. Each to his own, each in his own way. How much better things are for you. How rich. The world's dead for us. We've seen so much of it, believe me. Life's best to those who live the least of it. It's worth more per ounce, Timothy, remember that." The rest of the black morning, from midnight on, Uncle Einar led him about the house, from room to room, weaving and singing. A horde of late arrivals set the entire hilarity off afresh. Great-great-great-great and a thousand more great-greats Grandmother was there, wrapped in Egyptian cerements. She said not a word, but lay straight as a burnt ironing board against the wall, her eye hollows cupping a distant, wise, silent glimmering. At the breakfast, at four in the morning, one-thousand-odd-greats Grandmama was stiffly seated at the head of the longest table. The numerous young cousins caroused at the crystal punch bowl. Their shiny olive-pit eyes, their conical, devilish faces and curly bronze hair hovered over the drinking table, their hard-soft, half-girl half-boy bodies wrestling against each other as they got unpleasantly, sullenly drunk. The wind got higher, the stars burned with fiery intensity, the noises redoubled, the dances quickened, the drinking became more positive. To Timothy there were thousands of things to hear and watch. The many darknesses roiled, bubbled, the many faces passed and repassed... . "Listen!" The party held its breath. Far away the town clock struck its chimes, saying six o'clock. The party was ending. As if at a cue, in time to the rhythm of the clock striking, their one hundred voices began to sing songs that were four hundred years old, songs Timothy could not know. They twined their arms around one another, circling slowly, and sang, and somewhere in the cold distance of morning the town clock finished out its chimes and quieted. Good-bys were said, there was a great rustling. Mother and Father and the brothers and sisters lined up at the door to shake hands and kiss each departing relative in turn. The sky beyond the open door colored and shone in the east. A cold wind entered. The shouting and the laughing bit by bit faded and went away. Dawn grew more apparent. Everybody was embracing and crying and thinking how the world was becoming less a place for them. There had been a time when they had met every year, but now decades passed with no reconciliation. "Don't forget, we meet in Salem in 1970!" someone cried. Salem. Timothy's numbed mind turned the word over. Salem, 1970. And there would be Uncle Fry and Grandma and Grandfather and a thousand-times-great Grandmother in her withered cerements. And Mother and Father and Ellen and Laura and Cecy and Leonard and Bion and Sam and all the rest. But would he be there? Would he be alive that long? Could he be certain of living until then? |
| 170 |
Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark — weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more — but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain. Stranger things happen all the time everywhere. You know. I know you know. One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read? If a pea hen refuses to brood I read it quickly and, sure enough, that night I see a minha mae standing hand in hand with her little boy, my shoes jamming the pocket of her apron. Other signs need more time to understand. Often there are too many signs, or a bright omen clouds up too fast. I sort them and try to recall, yet I know I am missing much, like not reading the garden snake crawling up to the door saddle to die. Let me start with what I know for certain. The beginning begins with the shoes. When a child I am never able to abide being barefoot and always beg for shoes, anybody's shoes, even on the hottest days. My mother, a minha mae, is frowning, is angry at what she says are my prettify ways. Only bad women wear high heels. I am dangerous, she says, and wild but she relents and lets me wear the throwaway shoes from Senhora's house, pointy-toe, one raised heel broke, the other worn and a buckle on top. As a result, Lina says, my feet are useless, will always be too tender for life and never have the strong soles, tougher than leather, that life requires. Lina is correct. Florens, she says, it's 1690. Who else these days has the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady? So when I set out to find you, she and Mistress give me Sir's boots that fit a man not a girl. They stuff them with hay and oily corn husks and tell me to hide the letter inside my stocking — no matter the itch of the sealing wax. I am lettered but I do not read what Mistress writes and Lina and Sorrow cannot. But I know what it means to say to any who stop me. My head is light with the confusion of two things, hunger for you and scare if I am lost. Nothing frights me more than this errand and nothing is more temptation. From the day you disappear I dream and plot. To learn where you are and how to be there. I want to run across the trail through the beech and white pine but I am asking myself which way? Who will tell me? Who lives in the wilderness between this farm and you and will they help me or harm me? What about the boneless bears in the valley? Remember? How when they move their pelts sway as though there is nothing underneath? Their smell belying their beauty, their eyes knowing us from when we are beasts also. You telling me that is why it is fatal to look them in the eye. |
| 171 |
They will approach, run to us to love and play which we misread and give back fear and anger. Giant birds also are nesting out there bigger than cows, Lina says, and not all natives are like her, she says, so watch out. A praying savage, neighbors call her, because she is once churchgoing yet she bathes herself every day and Christians never do. Underneath she wears bright blue beads and dances in secret at first light when the moon is small. More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless night. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark? Now at last there is a way. I have orders. It is arranged. I will see your mouth and trail my fingers down. You will rest your chin in my hair again while I breathe into your shoulder in and out, in and out. I am happy the world is breaking open for us, yet its newness trembles me. To get to you I must leave the only home, the only people I know. Lina says from the state of my teeth I am maybe seven or eight when I am brought here. We boil wild plums for jam and cake eight times since then, so I must be sixteen. Before this place I spend my days picking okra and sweeping tobacco sheds, my nights on the floor of the cookhouse with a minha mae. We are baptized and can have happiness when this life is done. The Reverend Father tells us that. Once every seven days we learn to read and write. We are forbidden to leave the place so the four of us hide near the marsh. My mother, me, her little boy and Reverend Father. He is forbidden to do this but he teaches us anyway watching out for wicked Virginians and Protestants who want to catch him. If they do he will be in prison or pay money or both. He has two books and a slate. We have sticks to draw through sand, pebbles to shape words on smooth flat rock. When the letters are memory we make whole words. I am faster than my mother and her baby boy is no good at all. Very quickly I can write from memory the Nicene Creed including all of the commas. Confession we tell not write as I am doing now. I forget almost all of it until now. I like talk. Lina talk, stone talk, even Sorrow talk. Best of all is your talk. At first when I am brought here I don't talk any word. All of what I hear is different from what words mean to a minha mae and me. Lina's words say nothing I know. Nor Mistress's. Slowly a little talk is in my mouth and not on stone. Lina says the place of my talking on stone is Mary's Land where Sir does business. So that is where my mother and her baby boy are buried. Or will be if they ever decide to rest. Sleeping on the cookhouse floor with them is not as nice as sleeping in the broken sleigh with Lina. In cold weather we put planks around our part of the cowshed and wrap our arms together under pelts. We don't smell the cow flops because they are frozen and we are deep under fur. In summer if our hammocks are hit by mosquitoes Lina makes a cool place to sleep out of branches. You never like a hammock and prefer the ground even in rain when Sir offers you the storehouse. |
| 172 |
Unlike the English fogs he had known since he could walk, or those way north where he lived now, this one was sun fired, turning the world into thick, hot gold. Penetrating it was like struggling through a dream. As mud became swamp grass, he turned left, stepping gingerly until he stumbled against wooden planks leading up beach toward the village. Other than his own breath and tread, the world was soundless. It was only after he reached the live oak trees that the fog wavered and split. He moved faster then, more in control but missing, too, the blinding gold he had come through. Picking his way with growing confidence, he arrived in the ramshackle village sleeping between two huge riverside plantations. There the hostler was persuaded to forgo a deposit if the man signed a note: Jacob Vaark. The saddle was poorly made but the horse, Regina, was a fine one. Mounted, he felt better and rode carefree and a little too fast along beach fronts until he entered an old Lenape trail. Here there was reason to be cautious and he slowed Regina down. In this territory he could not be sure of friend or foe. Half a dozen years ago an army of blacks, natives, whites, mulattoes — freedmen, slaves and indentured — had waged war against local gentry led by members of that very class. When that "people's war" lost its hopes to the hangman, the work it had done — which included the slaughter of opposing tribes and running the Carolinas off their land — spawned a thicket of new laws authorizing chaos in defense of order. By eliminating manumission, gatherings, travel and bearing arms for black people only; by granting license to any white to kill any black for any reason; by compensating owners for a slave's maiming or death, they separated and protected all whites from all others forever. Any social ease between gentry and laborers, forged before and during that rebellion, crumbled beneath a hammer wielded in the interests of the gentry's profits. In Jacob Vaark's view, these were lawless laws encouraging cruelty in exchange for common cause, if not common virtue. In short, 1682 and Virginia was still a mess. Who could keep up with the pitched battles for God, king and land? Even with the relative safety of his skin, solitary traveling required prudence. He knew he might ride for hours with no company but geese flying over inland waterways, and suddenly, from behind felled trees a starving deserter with a pistol might emerge, or in a hollow a family of runaways might cower, or an armed felon might threaten. Carrying several kinds of specie and a single knife, he was a juicy target. Eager to be out of this colony into a less precarious but personally more repellent one, Jacob urged the mare to a faster pace. He dismounted twice, the second time to free the bloody hindleg of a young raccoon stuck in a tree break. Regina munched trail-side grass while he tried to be as gentle as possible, avoiding the claws and teeth of the frightened animal. Once he succeeded, the raccoon limped off, perhaps to the mother forced to abandon it or more likely into other claws. |
| 173 |
In such ad hoc territory, Jacob simply knew that when he came out of that forest of pine skirting the marshes, he was, at last, in Maryland which, at the moment, belonged to the king. Entirely. Upon entering this privately owned country, his feelings fought one another to a draw. Unlike colonies up and down the coast — disputed, fought over and regularly renamed; their trade limited to whatever nation was victor — the province of Maryland allowed trade to foreign markets. Good for planters, better for merchants, best for brokers. But the palatinate was Romish to the core. Priests strode openly in its towns; their temples menaced its squares; their sinister missions cropped up at the edge of native villages. Law, courts and trade were their exclusive domain and overdressed women in raised heels rode in carts driven by ten-year-old Negroes. He was offended by the lax, flashy cunning of the Papists. "Abhor that arrant whore of Rome." The entire class in the children's quarter of the poorhouse had memorized those lines from their primer. "And all her blasphemies Drink not of her cursed cup Obey not her decrees." Which did not mean you could not do business with them, and he had out-dealt them often enough, especially here where tobacco and slaves were married, each currency clutching its partner's elbow. By sustained violence or sudden disease, either one was subject to collapse, inconveniencing everybody but the lender. Disdain, however difficult to cloak, must be put aside. His previous dealings with this estate had been with the owner's clerk while sitting on alehouse stools. Now, for some reason, he had been invited, summoned rather, to the planter's house — a plantation called Jublio. A trader asked to dine with a gentleman? On a Sunday? So there must be trouble, he thought. Finally, swatting mosquitoes and on the watch for mud snakes that startled the horse, he glimpsed the wide iron gates of Jublio and guided Regina through them. He had heard how grand it was, but could not have been prepared for what lay before him. The house, honey-colored stone, was in truth more like a place where one held court. Far away to the right, beyond the iron fences enclosing the property and softened by mist, he saw rows of quarters, quiet, empty. In the fields, he reckoned, trying to limit the damage sopping weather had wrought on the crop. The comfortable smell of tobacco leaves, like fireplaces and good women serving ale, cloaked Jublio like balm. The path ended at a small brick plaza, announcing a prideful entrance to a veranda. Jacob stopped. A boy appeared and, dismounting a bit stiffly, he handed over the reins, cautioning the boy. "Water. No feed." "Yes, sir," said the boy and turned the horse around, murmuring, "Nice lady. Nice lady," as he led her away. Jacob Vaark climbed three brick steps, then retraced them to stand back from the house and appraise it. Two wide windows, at least two dozen panes in each, flanked the door. Five more windows on a broad second story held sunlight glittering above the mist. |
| 174 |
Now that his daughter Patrician had followed her dead brothers, there was no one yet to reap the modest but respectable inheritance he hoped to accumulate. Thus, tamping envy as taught in the poorhouse, Jacob entertained himself by conjuring up flaws in the couple's marriage. They seemed well suited to each other: vain, voluptuous, prouder of their pewter and porcelain than of their sons. It was abundantly clear why D'Ortega was in serious debt. Turning profit into useless baubles, unembarrassed by sumptuary, silk stockings and an overdressed wife, wasting candles in midday, he would always be unable to ride out any setback, whether it be lost ship or ruined crop. Watching the couple, Jacob noticed that husband and wife never looked at each other, except for a stolen glance when the other looked elsewhere. He could not tell what was in those surreptitious peeks, but it amused him to divine the worst while he endured the foolish, incomprehensible talk and inedible dishes. They did not smile, they sneered; did not laugh, giggled. He imagined them vicious with servants and obsequious to priests. His initial embarrassment about the unavoidable consequences of his long journey — muddy boots, soiled hands, perspiration and its odor — was dimmed by Mistress D'Ortega's loud perfume and heavily powdered face. The only, if minor, relief came from the clove-smelling woman who brought the food. His own Rebekka seemed ever more valuable to him the rare times he was in the company of these rich men's wives, women who changed frocks every day and dressed their servants in sacking. From the moment he saw his bride-to-be struggling down the gangplank with bedding, two boxes and a heavy satchel, he knew his good fortune. He had been willing to accept a bag of bones or an ugly maiden — in fact expected one, since a pretty one would have had several local opportunities to wed. But the young woman who answered his shout in the crowd was plump, comely and capable. Worth every day of the long search made necessary because taking over the patroonship required a wife, and because he wanted a certain kind of mate: an unchurched woman of childbearing age, obedient but not groveling, literate but not proud, independent but nurturing. And he would accept no scold. Just as the first mate's report described her, Rebekka was ideal. There was not a shrewish bone in her body. She never raised her voice in anger. Saw to his needs, made the tenderest dumplings, took to chores in a land completely strange to her with enthusiasm and invention, cheerful as a bluebird. Or used to be. Three dead infants in a row, followed by the accidental death of Patrician, their five-year-old, had unleavened her. A kind of invisible ash had settled over her which vigils at the small graves in the meadow did nothing to wipe away. Yet she neither complained nor shirked her duties. If anything, she threw herself more vigorously into the farmwork, and when he traveled, as now, on business, trading, collecting, lending, he had no doubts about how his home was being managed. |
| 175 |
Rebekka and her two helpers were as reliable as sunrise and strong as posts. Besides, time and health were on their side. He was confident she would bear more children and at least one, a boy, would live to thrive. Dessert, applesauce and pecans, was an improvement, and when he accompanied D'Ortega on the impossible-to-refuse tour of the place, his mood had lifted slightly, enough to admire the estate honestly. The mist had cleared and he was able to see in detail the workmanship and care of the tobacco sheds, wagons, row after row of barrels — orderly and nicely kept — the well-made meat house, milk house, laundry, cookhouse. All but the last, whitewashed plaster, a jot smaller than the slave quarters but, unlike them, in excellent repair. The subject, the purpose, of the meeting had not been approached. D'Ortega had described with attention to minute detail the accidents beyond his control that made him unable to pay what he owed. But how Jacob would be reimbursed had not been broached. Examining the spotted, bug-ridden leaves of tobacco, it became clear what D'Ortega had left to offer. Slaves. Jacob refused. His farm was modest; his trade needed only himself. Besides having no place to put them, there was nothing to occupy them. "Ridiculous," said D'Ortega. "You sell them. Do you know the prices they garner?" Jacob winced. Flesh was not his commodity. Still, at his host's insistence, he trailed him to the little sheds where D'Ortega interrupted their half day's rest and ordered some two dozen or more to assemble in a straight line, including the boy who had watered Regina. The two men walked the row, inspecting. D'Ortega identifying talents, weaknesses and possibilities, but silent about the scars, the wounds like misplaced veins tracing their skin. One even had the facial brand required by local law when a slave assaulted a white man a second time. The women's eyes looked shockproof, gazing beyond place and time as though they were not actually there. The men looked at the ground. Except every now and then, when possible, when they thought they were not being evaluated, Jacob could see their quick glances, sideways, wary but, most of all, judging the men who judged them. Suddenly Jacob felt his stomach seize. The tobacco odor, so welcoming when he arrived, now nauseated him. Or was it the sugared rice, the hog cuts fried and dripping with molasses, the cocoa Lady D'Ortega was giddy about? Whatever it was, he couldn't stay there surrounded by a passel of slaves whose silence made him imagine an avalanche seen from a great distance. No sound, just the knowledge of a roar he could not hear. He begged off, saying the proposal was not acceptable — too much trouble to transport, manage, auction; his solitary, unencumbered proficiency was what he liked about trade. Specie, bills of credit, quit claims, were portable. One satchel carried all he needed. They walked back toward the house and through the side gate in the ornate fence, D'Ortega pontificating all the while. |
| 176 |
They wrote new papers. Agreeing that the girl was worth twenty pieces of eight, considering the number of years ahead of her and reducing the balance by three hogsheads of tobacco or fifteen English pounds, the latter preferred. The tension lifted, visibly so on D'Ortega's face. Eager to get away and re-nourish his good opinion of himself, Jacob said abrupt goodbyes to Mistress D'Ortega, the two boys and their father. On his way to the narrow track, he turned Regina around, waved at the couple and once again, in spite of himself, envied the house, the gate, the fence. For the first time he had not tricked, not flattered, not manipulated, but gone head to head with rich gentry. And realized, not for the first time, that only things, not bloodlines or character, separated them. So mighten it be nice to have such a fence to enclose the headstones in his own meadow? And one day, not too far away, to build a house that size on his own property? On that rise in back, with a better prospect of the hills and the valley between them? Not as ornate as D'Ortega's. None of that pagan excess, of course, but fair. And pure, noble even, because it would not be compromised as Jublio was. Access to a fleet of free labor made D'Ortega's leisurely life possible. Without a shipload of enslaved Angolans he would not be merely in debt; he would be eating from his palm instead of porcelain and sleeping in the bush of Africa rather than a four-post bed. Jacob sneered at wealth dependent on a captured workforce that required more force to maintain. Thin as they were, the dregs of his kind of Protestantism recoiled at whips, chains and armed overseers. He was determined to prove that his own industry could amass the fortune, the station, D'Ortega claimed without trading his conscience for coin. He tapped Regina to a faster pace. The sun was low; the air cooler. He was in a hurry to get back into Virginia, its shore, and to Pursey's tavern before night, sleep in a bed if they weren't all packed three or four abreast. Otherwise he would join the other patrons and curl on any surface. But first he would have one, perhaps two, drafts of ale, its bitter, clear taste critical to eliminating the sweetish rot of vice and ruined tobacco that seemed to coat his tongue. Jacob returned Regina to the hostler, paid him and strolled to the wharf and Pursey's tavern. On the way he saw a man beating a horse to its knees. Before he could open his mouth to shout, rowdy sailors pulled the man away and let him feel his own knees in mud. Few things angered Jacob more than the brutal handling of domesticated animals. He did not know what the sailors were objecting to, but his own fury was not only because of the pain it inflicted on the horse, but because of the mute, unprotesting surrender glazing its eyes. Pursey's was closed on Sunday, as he should have known, so he went to the one always open. Rough, illegal and catering to hard boys, it nevertheless offered good, plentiful food and never strong meat. |
| 177 |
Laws? What laws? Look," he went on, "Massachusetts has already tried laws against rum selling and failed to stop one dram. The sale of molasses to northern colonies is brisker than ever. More steady profit in it than fur, tobacco, lumber, anything — except gold, I reckon. As long as the fuel is replenished, vats simmer and money heaps. Kill-devil, sugar — there will never be enough. A trade for lifetimes to come." "Still," Jacob said, "it's a degraded business. And hard." "Think of it this way. Fur you need to hunt it, kill it, skin it, carry it and probably fight some natives for the rights. Tobacco needs nurture, harvest, drying, packing, toting, but mostly time and ever-fresh soil. Sugar? Rum? Cane grows. You can't stop it; its soil never dies out. You just cut it, cook it, ship it." Downes slapped his palms together. "That simple, eh?" "More or less. But the point is this. No loss of investment. None. Ever. No crop failure. No wiped-out beaver or fox. No war to interfere. Crop plentiful, eternal. Slave workers, same. Buyers, eager. Product, heavenly. In a month, the time of the journey from mill to Boston, a man can turn fifty pounds into five times as much. Think of it. Each and every month five times the investment. For certain." Jacob had to laugh. He recognized the manner: hawker turned middle man eliminating all hesitations and closing all arguments with promises of profit quickly. From Downes' clothes and his apparent unwillingness so far to stand the drinks, Jacob suspected he had not reaped the easy profit he described. Nevertheless, Jacob decided he would look into it. After a leisurely meal of oysters, veal, pigeon, parsnips and suet pudding restored his taste buds, he reserved bed space with just one man in it and, strolling outside, thought about the disappointing day and the humiliation of having accepted the girl as part payment. He knew he would never see another farthing from D'Ortega. One day — soon, maybe — to everyone's relief the Stuarts would lose the throne, and a Protestant rule. Then, he thought, a case against D'Ortega would succeed and he would not be forced to settle for a child as a percentage of what was due him. He knew he had excused the bargain by thinking Rebekka would be eager to have her, but what was truer than that was another thing. From his own childhood he knew there was no good place in the world for waifs and whelps other than the generosity of strangers. Even if bartered, given away, apprenticed, sold, swapped, seduced, tricked for food, labored for shelter or stolen, they were less doomed under adult control. Even if they mattered less than a milch cow to a parent or master, without an adult they were more likely to freeze to death on stone steps, float facedown in canals, or wash up on banks and shoals. He refused to be sentimental about his own orphan status, the years spent with children of all shades, stealing food and cadging gratuities for errands. His mother, he was told, was a girl of no consequence who died in childbirth. |
| 178 |
The sky had forgotten completely its morning fire and was tricked out in cool stars on a canvas smooth and dark as Regina's hide. He gazed at the occasional dapple of starlight on the water, then bent down and placed his hands in it. Sand moved under his palms; infant waves died above his wrists, soaking the cuffs of his sleeves. By and by the detritus of the day washed off, including the faint trace of coon's blood. As he walked back to the inn, nothing was in his way. There was the heat, of course, but no fog, gold or gray, impeded him. Besides, a plan was taking shape. Knowing full well his shortcomings as a farmer — in fact his boredom with its confinement and routine — he had found commerce more to his taste. Now he fondled the idea of an even more satisfying enterprise. And the plan was as sweet as the sugar on which it was based. And there was a profound difference between the intimacy of slave bodies at Jublio and a remote labor force in Barbados. Right? Right, he thought, looking at a sky vulgar with stars. Clear and right. The silver that glittered there was not at all unreachable. And that wide swath of cream pouring through the stars was his for the tasting. The heat was still pressing, his bed partner overactive, yet he slept well enough. Probably because his dreams were of a grand house of many rooms rising on a hill above the fog. Since your leaving with no goodbye, summer passes, then autumn, and with the waning of winter the sickness comes back. Not like before with Sorrow but now with Sir. When he returns this time he is different, slow and hard to please. He is short with Mistress. He sweats and wants cider all the time and no one believes the blisters are going to be Sorrow's old sickness. He vomits at night and curses in the day. Then he is too weak to do either. He reminds us that he has chosen help, including me, who are survivors of measles, so how is this happening to him? He cannot help envying our health and feeling the cheat of his new house. I can tell you that even yet it is not complete though your ironwork is wondrous to see. The glittering cobras still kiss at the gate's crown. The house is mighty, waiting only for a glazier. Sir wants to be taken there even though there is no furniture. He tells Mistress to hurry hurry never mind the spring rain pouring down for days. The sickness alters his mind as well as his face. Will and Scully are gone and when we women each holding a corner of a blanket carry him into the house he is sleeping with his mouth wide open and never wakes. Neither Mistress nor we know if he is alive for even one minute to smell the new cherrywood floors he lies on. We are alone. No one to shroud or mourn Sir but us. Will and Scully must sneak to dig the grave. They are warn to stay away. I don't think they wish to. I think their master makes them, because of the sickness. The deacon does not come even though he is a friend who likes Sorrow. Neither do any of the congregation. Still, we do not say the word aloud until we bury him next to his children and Mistress notices two in her mouth. |
| 179 |
That is the one time we whisper it. Pox. After we say it the next morning, the two on her tongue are joined by twenty-three on her face. Twenty-five in all. She wants you here as much as I do. For her it is to save her life. For me it is to have one. You probably don't know anything at all about what your back looks like whatever the sky holds: sunlight, moonrise. I rest there. My hand, my eyes, my mouth. The first time I see it you are shaping fire with bellows. The shine of water runs down your spine and I have shock at myself for wanting to lick there. I run away into the cowshed to stop this thing from happening inside me. Nothing stops it. There is only you. Nothing outside of you. My eyes not my stomach are the hungry parts of me. There will never be enough time to look how you move. Your arm goes up to strike iron. You drop to one knee. You bend. You stop to pour water first on the iron then down your throat. Before you know I am in the world I am already kill by you. My mouth is open, my legs go softly and the heart is stretching to break. Night comes and I steal a candle. I carry an ember in a pot to light it. To see more of you. When it is lit I shield the flame with my hand. I watch you sleeping. I watch too long. Am careless. The flame burns my palm. I think if you wake and see me seeing you I will die. I run away not knowing then you are seeing me seeing you. And when at last our eyes hit I am not dead. For the first time I am live. Lina twitchy as fresh-hook salmon waits with me in the village. The wagon of the Ney brothers does not come. Hours we stand then sit roadside. A boy and a dog drive goats past us. He raises his hat. That is the first time any male does it to me. I like it. A good sign I am thinking but Lina is warning me of many things, saying if you are not in your place I must not tarry. I must return at once. I cannot handle a horse so I must seek return on the next day's horse cart, the one that hauls fresh milk and eggs to market. Some people go by and look but do not speak. We are female so they have no fright. They know who is Lina yet look as if we are strange to them. We wait more and so long that I do not save my bread and codfish. I eat all the cod. Lina holds her forehead in her hand, her elbow on her knee. She gives off a bad feeling so I keep my thoughts on the goatherd's hat. The wind is chill and smells of snow. At last the wagon is here. I climb up. The driver helps me, stays his hand hard and long on my back parts. I feel shame. We are seven, apart from the brothers Ney, and the horses are not the only ones made nervous by snowflakes in springtime. Their haunches tremble, they shake their manes. We are nervous also but we sit still as the flakes come down and stick to our shawls and hats, sugaring our eyelashes and flouring the men's woolly beards. Two women face into the wind that whips their hair like corn tassel, their eyes slits of shine. The other one covers her mouth with her cloak and leans against a man. |
| 180 |
A boy with a yellow pigtail sits on the wagon floor, his hands tied to his ankles. He and I are the only ones without rugs or blankets covering our feet. Sudden snowfall on tender leaves is pretty. Perhaps it will last long enough on the ground to make animal tracking easy. Men are always happy in the snow where killing is best. Sir says no one can starve if there is snow. Nor in spring because even before berries are out and vegetables ready to eat the river is full of spawn and the air of fowl. But this snow will not last, although it is heavy, wet and thick. I draw my feet under my skirt, not for warmth, but to protect the letter. The cloth of bread I clutch on my lap. Mistress makes me memorize the way to get to you. I am to board the Ney brothers' wagon in the morning as it travels north on the post road. After one stop at a tavern, the wagon will arrive at a place she calls Hartkill just after midday where I disembark. I am to walk left, westward on the Abenaki trail which I will know by the sapling bent into the earth with one sprout growing skyward. But the Ney brothers' wagon is too much late. By the time I climb aboard and take a place at the tail behind the others it is already late afternoon. The others do not ask me where I am heading but after a while are pleasing themselves to whisper where they once live. By the sea, the women say, they cleaning ships, the men caulking them and repairing docks. They are certain their years of debt are over but the master says no. He sends them away, north, to another place, a tannery, for more years. I don't understand why they are sad. Everyone has to work. I ask are you leaving someone dear behind? All heads turn toward me and the wind dies. Daft, a man says. A woman across from me says, young. The man says, same. Another woman raises her voice to say leave her be. Too loud. Settle down back there, the driver is shouting. The one who says I am daft bends down to scratch his ankle, scratching for a long time while the others cough and scrape their shoes as if to defy the driver's command. The woman next to me whispers, there are no coffins in a tannery, only fast death in acid. The tavern needs lamplight when we reach it. At first I don't see it, but one of us points and then we all do. A light winking through the trees. The Neys go in. We wait. They come out to water the horses and us and go in again. After that there are scuffling sounds again. I look down and see the rope that falls from their ankles twist along the wagon bed. The snow ends and the sun is gone. Quiet, quiet six drop down, the men catching the women in their arms. The boy jumps alone. The three women motion to me. My heart turns over and I drop down too. They move off back down where we are coming from, stepping as best they can figure in tree shelter at roadside, places where the snow is small. I don't follow. Neither can I stay in the wagon. I have a cold stone in my chest. I don't need Lina to warn me that I must not be alone with strange men with slow hands when in liquor and anger they discover their cargo is lost. |
| 181 |
I have to choose quick. I choose you. I go west into the trees. Everything I want is west. You. Your talk. The medicine you know that will make Mistress well. You will hear what I have to say and come back with me. I have only to go west. One day? Two nights? I am walking among chestnut trees lining the road. Some already showing leaf hold their breath until the snow melts. The silly ones let their buds drop to the ground like dry peas. I am moving north where the sapling bends into the earth with a sprout that points to the sky. Then west to you. I am hurrying to gain ground before all light is over. The land slopes sharply and I have no way to go but down as well. Hard as I try I lose the road. Tree leaves are too new for shelter, so everywhere the ground is slop with snow and my footprints slide and pool. The sky is the color of currants. Can I go more, I wonder. Should I. Two hares freeze before bounding away. I don't know how to read that. I hear water running and move in the dark toward the sound. The moonlight is young. I hold one arm out in front and go slow to not stumble and fall. But the sound is pines dripping and there is no brook or stream. I make a cup of my hand to get a little fallen snow to swallow. I do not hear the paws or see any shape. It is the smell of wet fur that stops me. If I am smelling it, it is smelling me, because there is nothing with odor left in my food cloth, only bread. I cannot tell if it is bigger than me or smaller or if it is alone. I decide for stillness. I never hear it go but the odor fades at last. I think it is better to climb a tree. The old pines are very big. Any one is good cover even though it tears and fights me. Its branches sway but do not break under me. I hide from everything of creep and slouch. I know sleep will not claim me because I have too much fear. The branches creak and bend. My plan for this night is not good. I need Lina to say how to shelter in wilderness. Lina was unimpressed by the festive mood, the jittery satisfaction of everyone involved, and had refused to enter or go near it. That third and presumably final house that Sir insisted on building distorted sunlight and required the death of fifty trees. And now having died in it he will haunt its rooms forever. The first house Sir built — dirt floor, green wood — was weaker than the bark-covered one she herself was born in. The second one was strong. He tore down the first to lay wooden floors in the second with four rooms, a decent fireplace and windows with good tight shutters. There was no need for a third. Yet at the very moment when there were no children to occupy or inherit it, he meant to build another, bigger, double-storied, fenced and gated like the one he saw on his travels. Mistress had sighed and confided to Lina that at the least the doing of it would keep him more on the land. "Trading and traveling fill his pockets," she'd said, "but he had been content to be a farmer when we married. Now ..." Her voice trailed off as she yanked out the swan's feathers. |
| 182 |
During its construction, however, Mistress couldn't keep a smile off her face. Like everyone else, Willard, Scully, hired help, deliverymen, she was happy, cooking as though it were harvest time. Stupid Sorrow gaping with pleasure; the smithy laughing; Florens mindless as fern in wind. And Sir — she had never seen him in better spirits. Not with the birth of his doomed sons, nor with his pleasure in his daughter, not even with an especially successful business arrangement he bragged about. It was not a sudden change, yet it was a deep one. The last few years he seemed moody, less gentle, but when he decided to kill the trees and replace them with a profane monument to himself, he was cheerful every waking moment. Killing trees in that number, without asking their permission, of course his efforts would stir up malfortune. Sure enough, when the house was close to completion he fell sick with nothing else on his mind. He mystified Lina. All Europes did. Once they terrified her, then they rescued her. Now they simply puzzled her. Why, she wondered, had Mistress sent a love-disabled girl to find the blacksmith? Why not tamp down her pride and seek out one of the Anabaptists? The deacon would be more than willing. Poor Florens, thought Lina. If she is not stolen or murdered, if she finds him safe she would not return. Why should she? Lina had watched first with mild amusement, then with increasing distress the courtship that began the morning the blacksmith came to work on Sir's foolish house. Florens had stood still, a startled doe, when he dismounted his horse, doffed his hat and asked if this was the Vaark place. Lina had shifted the milk bucket to her left hand and pointed up the hill. Mistress, leading the heifer, had come around the corner of the shed and asked him his business, sucking her teeth when he answered. "Dear Lord," she murmured and, pushing out her bottom lip, blew hair away from her forehead. Then, "Wait here a moment." As Mistress led the cow to pasture the blacksmith locked eyes with Lina before returning his hat to his head. He never once looked at Florens standing nearby, not breathing, holding the milking stool with both hands as though to help gravity keep her earthbound. She should have known then what the consequences would be, but felt sure that Sorrow, always an easy harvest, would quickly draw his attention and thwart Florens' drooling. Learning from Mistress that he was a free man doubled her anxiety. He had rights, then, and privileges, like Sir. He could marry, own things, travel, sell his own labor. She should have seen the danger immediately because his arrogance was clear. When Mistress returned, rubbing her hands on her apron, he removed his hat once more, then did something Lina had never seen an African do: he looked directly at Mistress, lowering his glance, for he was very tall, never blinking those eyes slanted and yellow as a ram's. It was not true, then, what she had heard; that for them only children and loved ones could be looked in the eye; for all others it was disrespect or a threat. |
| 183 |
They named her Messalina, just in case, but shortened it to Lina to signal a sliver of hope. Afraid of once more losing shelter, terrified of being alone in the world without family, Lina acknowledged her status as heathen and let herself be purified by these worthies. She learned that bathing naked in the river was a sin; that plucking cherries from a tree burdened with them was theft; that to eat corn mush with one's fingers was perverse. That God hated idleness most of all, so staring off into space to weep for a mother or a playmate was to court damnation. Covering oneself in the skin of beasts offended God, so they burned her deerskin dress and gave her a good duffel cloth one. They clipped the beads from her arms and scissored inches from her hair. Although they would not permit her to accompany them to either of the Sunday services they attended, she was included in the daily prayers before breakfast, midmorning and evening. But none of the surrender, begging, imploring or praising on her knees took hold because, hard as she fought, the Messalina part erupted anyway and the Presbyterians abandoned her without so much as a murmur of fare well. It was some time afterward while branch-sweeping Sir's dirt floor, being careful to avoid the hen nesting in the corner, lonely, angry and hurting, that she decided to fortify herself by piecing together scraps of what her mother had taught her before dying in agony. Relying on memory and her own resources, she cobbled together neglected rites, merged Europe medicine with native, scripture with lore, and recalled or invented the hidden meaning of things. Found, in other words, a way to be in the world. There was no comfort or place for her in the village; Sir was there and not there. Solitude would have crushed her had she not fallen into hermit skills and become one more thing that moved in the natural world. She cawed with birds, chatted with plants, spoke to squirrels, sang to the cow and opened her mouth to rain. The shame of having survived the destruction of her families shrank with her vow never to betray or abandon anyone she cherished. Memories of her village peopled by the dead turned slowly to ash and in their place a single image arose. Fire. How quick. How purposefully it ate what had been built, what had been life. Cleansing somehow and scandalous in beauty. Even before a simple hearth or encouraging a flame to boil water she felt a sweet twinge of agitation. Waiting for the arrival of a wife, Sir was a hurricane of activity laboring to bring nature under his control. More than once when Lina brought his dinner to whatever field or woodlot he was working in, she found him, head thrown back, staring at the sky as if in wondering despair at the land's refusal to obey his will. Together they minded the fowl and starter stock; planted corn and vegetables. But it was she who taught him how to dry the fish they caught; to anticipate spawning and how to protect a crop from night creatures. Yet neither of them knew what to do about fourteen days of rain or fifty-five of none. |
| 184 |
They threw a blanket over her and brought their father to the riverbank where she lay. It's said she had been living alone on a foundered ship. They thought she was a boy." Not then, not ever, had she spoken of how she got there or where she had been. The sawyer's wife named her Sorrow, for good reason, thought Lina, and following a winter of feeding the daft girl who kept wandering off getting lost, who knew nothing and worked less, a strange melancholy girl to whom her sons were paying very close attention, the sawyer's wife asked her husband to get quit of her. He obliged and offered her to the care of a customer he trusted to do her no harm. Sir. When Sorrow arrived, trailing Sir's horse, Mistress barely hid her annoyance but admitted the place could use the help. If Sir was bent on travel, two female farmers and a four-year-old daughter were not enough. Lina had been a tall fourteen-year-old when Sir bought her from the Presbyterians. He had searched the advertisements posted at the printer's in town. "A likely woman who has had small pox and measles... A likely Negro about 9 years... Girl or woman that is handy in the kitchen sensible, speaks good English, complexion between yellow and black... Five years time of a white woman that understands Country work, with a child upwards of two years old... Mulatto Fellow very much pitted with small pox, honest and sober... White lad fit to serve... Wanted a servant able to drive a carriage, white or black... Sober and prudent woman who... Likely wench, white, 29 years with child... Healthy Deutsch woman for rent ... stout healthy, healthy strong, strong healthy likely sober sober sober ..." until he got to "Hardy female, Christianized and capable in all matters domestic available for exchange of goods or specie." A bachelor expecting the arrival of a new wife, he required precisely that kind of female on his land. By then Lina's swollen eye had calmed and the lash cuts on her face, arms and legs had healed and were barely noticeable. The Presbyterians, recalling perhaps their own foresight in the name they had given her, never asked what had happened to her and there was no point in telling them. She had no standing in law, no surname and no one would take her word against a Europe. What they did was consult with the printer about the wording of an advertisement. "Hardy female ..." When the Europe wife stepped down from the cart, hostility between them was instant. The health and beauty of a young female already in charge annoyed the new wife; while the assumption of authority from the awkward Europe girl infuriated Lina. Yet the animosity, utterly useless in the wild, died in the womb. Even before Lina midwifed Mistress' first child, neither one could keep the coolness. The fraudulent competition was worth nothing on land that demanding. Besides they were company for each other and by and by discovered something much more interesting than status. Rebekka laughed out loud at her own mistakes; was unembarrassed to ask for help. |
| 185 |
Lina slapped her own forehead when she forgot the berries rotting in the straw. They became friends. Not only because somebody had to pull the wasp sting from the other's arm. Not only because it took two to push the cow away from the fence. Not only because one had to hold the head while the other one tied the trotters. Mostly because neither knew precisely what they were doing or how. Together, by trial and error they learned: what kept the foxes away; how and when to handle and spread manure; the difference between lethal and edible and the sweet taste of timothy grass; the features of measled swine; what turned the baby's stool liquid and what hardened it into pain. For her Mistress, farmwork was more adventure than drudgery. Then again, thought Lina, she had Sir who pleased her more and more and soon a daughter, Patrician, both of whom dulled the regret of the short-lived infants Lina delivered and buried each subsequent year. By the time Sir brought Sorrow home, the resident women were a united front in dismay. To Mistress she was useless. To Lina she was bad luck in the flesh. Red hair, black teeth, recurring neck boils and a look in those over-lashed silver-gray eyes that raised Lina's nape hair. She watched while Mistress trained Sorrow to sewing, the one task she liked and was good at, and said nothing when, to stop her roaming, he said, Sir made the girl sleep by the fireplace all seasons. A comfort Lina was suspicious of but did not envy even in bad weather. Her people had built sheltering cities for a thousand years and, except for the deathfeet of the Europes, might have built them for a thousand more. As it turned out the sachem had been dead wrong. The Europes neither fled nor died out. In fact, said the old women in charge of the children, he had apologized for his error in prophecy and admitted that however many collapsed from ignorance or disease more would always come. They would come with languages that sounded like dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred places and worship a dull, unimaginative god. They let their hogs browse the ocean shore turning it into dunes of sand where nothing green can ever grow again. Cut loose from the earth's soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples. Lina was not so sure. Based on the way Sir and Mistress tried to run their farm, she knew there were exceptions to the sachem's revised prophecy. They seemed mindful of a distinction between earth and property, fenced their cattle though their neighbors did not, and although legal to do so, they were hesitant to kill foraging swine. They hoped to live by tillage rather than eat up the land with herds, measures that kept their profit low. So while Lina trusted more or less Sir's and Mistress' judgment, she did not trust their instincts. |
| 186 |
Years past, the Baptists might bring a brace of salmon or offer a no-longer-needed cradle for Mistress' baby. And the deacon could be counted on for baskets of strawberries and blue, all manner of nuts and once a whole haunch of venison. Now, of course, nobody, Baptist or any other, would come to a poxed house. Neither Willard nor Scully came, which should not have disappointed her, but did. Both were Europes, after all. Willard was getting on in years and was still working off his passage. The original seven years stretched to twenty-some, he said, and he had long ago forgotten most of the mischief that kept extending his bondage. The ones he remembered with a smile involved rum; the others were attempts to run away. Scully, young, fine-boned, with light scars tracing his back, had plans. He was finishing his mother's contract. True, he didn't know how long it would take but, he boasted, unlike Willard's or Lina's, his enslavement would end before death. He was the son of a woman sent off to the colonies for "lewdness and disobedience," neither of which according to him was quelled. Her death transferred her contract to her son. Then a man claiming to be Scully's father settled the balance owed and recuperated certain expenses by leasing the boy to his current master for a span of time soon to end, although Scully was not privy to exactly when. There was a legal paper, he had told Lina, that said it. Lina guessed he had not seen it and could not cipher it if he had. All he knew for certain was that the freedom fee would be generous enough to purchase a horse or set him up in a trade. What trade, wondered Lina. If that glorious day of freedom fees did not arrive soon, he too, she thought, will run away, and maybe have the good fortune denied Willard. Cleverer than the older man, and sober, he might succeed. Still, she doubted it; thought his dreams of selling his labor were only that. She knew he did not object to lying with Willard when sleep was not the point. No wonder Sir, without kin or sons to count on, had no males on his property. It made good sense, except when it didn't. As now with two lamenting women, one confined to bed, the other heavily pregnant; a love-broken girl on the loose and herself unsure of everything including moonrise. Don't die, Miss. Don't. Herself, Sorrow, a newborn and maybe Florens — three unmastered women and an infant out here, alone, belonging to no one, became wild game for anyone. None of them could inherit; none was attached to a church or recorded in its books. Female and illegal, they would be interlopers, squatters, if they stayed on after Mistress died, subject to purchase, hire, assault, abduction, exile. The farm could be claimed by or auctioned off to the Baptists. Lina had relished her place in this small, tight family, but now saw its folly. Sir and Mistress believed they could have honest free-thinking lives, yet without heirs, all their work meant less than a swallow's nest. Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. |
| 187 |
Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devotion cautioned against impertinence. As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family — not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all. Lina gazed through the wavy pane of the tiny window where a flirtatious sun poured soft yellow light toward the foot of Mistress' bed. Beyond on the far side of the trail stood a forest of beech. As was often the case, she spoke to them. "You and I, this land is our home," she whispered, "but unlike you I am exile here." Lina's mistress is mumbling now, telling Lina or herself some tale, some matter of grave importance as the dart of her eyes showed. What was so vital, Lina wondered, that she uses an unworkable tongue in a mouth lined with sores? Her wrapped hands lift and wave. Lina turns to look where the eyes focus. A trunk where Mistress kept pretty things, treasured unused gifts from Sir. A lace collar, a hat no decent woman would be seen in, its peacock feather already broken in the press. On top of a few lengths of silk lay a small mirror set in an elaborate frame, its silver tarnished to soot. "Gi' me," said Mistress. Lina picked up the mirror thinking, No, please. Don't look. Never seek out your own face even when well, lest the reflection drink your soul. "Hur-ee," moaned Mistress, her tone pleading like a child's. Helpless to disobey, Lina brought it to the lady. She placed it between the mittened hands, certain now that her mistress will die. And the certainty was a kind of death for herself as well, since her own life, everything, depended on Mistress' survival, which depended on Florens' success. Lina had fallen in love with her right away, as soon as she saw her shivering in the snow. A frightened, long-necked child who did not speak for weeks but when she did her light, singsong voice was lovely to hear. Some how, some way, the child assuaged the tiny yet eternal yearning for the home Lina once knew where everyone had anything and no one had everything. Perhaps her own barrenness sharpened her devotion. In any case, she wanted to protect her, keep her away from the corruption so natural to someone like Sorrow, and, most recently, she was determined to be the wall between Florens and the blacksmith. Since his coming, there was an appetite in the girl that Lina recognized as once her own. A bleating desire beyond sense, without conscience. The young body speaking in its only language its sole reason for life on earth. When he arrived — too shiny, way too tall, both arrogant and skilled — Lina alone saw the peril, but there was no one to complain to. Mistress was silly with happiness because her husband was home and Sir behaved as though the blacksmith was his brother. |
| 188 |
Lina had seen them bending their heads over lines drawn in dirt. Another time she saw Sir slice a green apple, his left boot raised on a rock, his mouth working along with his hands; the smithy nodding, looking intently at his employer. Then Sir, as nonchalantly as you please, tipped a slice of apple on his knife and offered it to the blacksmith who, just as nonchalantly, took it and put it in his mouth. So Lina knew she was the only one alert to the breakdown stealing toward them. The only one who foresaw the disruption, the shattering a free black man would cause. He had already ruined Florens, since she refused to see that she hankered after a man that had not troubled to tell her goodbye. When Lina tried to enlighten her, saying, "You are one leaf on his tree," Florens shook her head, closed her eyes and replied, "No. I am his tree." A sea change that Lina could only hope was not final. Florens had been a quiet, timid version of herself at the time of her own displacement. Before destruction. Before sin. Before men. Lina had hovered over Patrician, competing with Mistress for the little girl's affection, but this one, coming on the heels of Patrician's death, could be, would be, her own. And she would be the opposite of incorrigible Sorrow. Already Florens could read, write. Already she did not have to be told repeatedly how to complete a chore. Not only was she consistently trustworthy, she was deeply grateful for every shred of affection, any pat on the head, any smile of approval. They had memorable nights, lying together, when Florens listened in rigid delight to Lina's stories. Stories of wicked men who chopped off the heads of devoted wives; of cardinals who carried the souls of good children to a place where time itself was a baby. Especially called for were stories of mothers fighting to save their children from wolves and natural disasters. Close to heartbreak, Lina recalled a favorite and the whispered conversation that always followed it. One day, ran the story, an eagle laid her eggs in a nest far above and far beyond the snakes and paws that hunted them. Her eyes are midnight black and shiny as she watches over them. At the tremble of a leaf, the scent of any other life, her frown deepens, her head jerks and her feathers quietly lift. Her talons are sharpened on rock; her beak is like the scythe of a war god. She is fierce, protecting her borning young. But one thing she cannot defend against: the evil thoughts of man. One day a traveler climbs a mountain nearby. He stands at its summit admiring all he sees below him. The turquoise lake, the eternal hemlocks, the starlings sailing into clouds cut by rainbow. The traveler laughs at the beauty saying, "This is perfect. This is mine." And the word swells, booming like thunder into valleys, over acres of primrose and mallow. Creatures come out of caves wondering what it means. Mine. Mine. Mine. The shells of the eagle's eggs quiver and one even cracks. The eagle swivels her head to find the source of the strange, meaningless thunder, the incomprehensible sound. |
| 189 |
The chafe of needles is too much hurt and there is no resting there at all. I get down and look for a better place. By moonlight I am happy to find a hollow log, but it is wavy with ants. I break off twigs and small branches from a young fir, pile them and crawl under. The needle prick is smaller and there is no danger of falling. The ground is damp, chill. Night voles come close, sniff me then dart away. I am watchful for snakes that ease down trees and over ground, although Lina says they do not prefer to bite us or swallow us whole. I lie still and try not to think of water. Thinking instead of another night, another place of wet ground. But it is summer then and the damp is from dew not snow. You are telling me about the making of iron things. How happy you are to find easy ore so close to the surface of the earth. The glory of shaping metal. Your father doing it and his father before him back and back for a thousand years. With furnaces from termite mounds. And you know the ancestors approve when two owls appear at the very instant you say their names so you understand they are showing themselves to bless you. See, you say, see how they swivel their heads. They approve you also, you tell me. Do they bless me too, I ask. Wait, you say. Wait and see. I think they do, because I am coming now. I am coming to you. Lina says there are some spirits who look after warriors and hunters and there are others who guard virgins and mothers. I am none of those. Reverend Father says communion is the best hope, prayer the next. There is no communion hereabouts and I feel shame to speak to the Virgin when all I am asking for is not to her liking. I think Mistress has nothing to say on the matter. She avoids the Baptists and the village women who go to the meetinghouse. They annoy her as when we three, Mistress, Sorrow and me, go to sell two calves. They are trotting behind us on rope to the cart we ride in. We wait while Mistress does the selling talk. Sorrow jumps down and goes behind the trader's post where a village woman slaps her face many times and screams at her. When Mistress discovers what is happening, both her face and the village woman's burn in anger. Sorrow is relieving herself in the yard without care for the eyes of others. The argue is done and Mistress drives us away. After a while she pulls the horse to a stop. She turns to Sorrow and slaps her face more, saying Fool. I am shock. Mistress never strikes us. Sorrow does not cry or answer. I think Mistress says other words to her, softer ones, but I am only seeing how her eyes go. Their look is close to the way of the women who stare at Lina and me as we wait for the Ney brothers. Neither look scares, but it is a hurting thing. But I know Mistress has a sweeter heart. On a winter day when I am still small Lina asks her if she can give me the dead daughter's shoes. They are black with six buttons each. Mistress agrees but when she sees me in them she sudden sits down in the snow and cries. Sir comes and picks her up in his arms and carries her into the house. |
| 190 |
I never cry. Even when the woman steals my cloak and shoes and I am freezing on the boat no tears come. These thoughts are sad in me, so I make me think of you instead. How you say your work in the world is strong and beautiful. I think you are also. No holy spirits are my need. No communion or prayer. You are my protection. Only you. You can be it because you say you are a free man from New Amsterdam and always are that. Not like Will or Scully but like Sir. I don't know the feeling of or what it means, free and not free. But I have a memory. When Sir's gate is done and you are away so long, I walk sometimes to search you. Behind the new house, the rise, over the hill beyond. I see a path between rows of elm trees and enter it. Underfoot is weed and soil. In a while the path turns away from the elms and to my right is land dropping away in rocks. To my left is a hill. High, very high. Climbing over it all, up up, are scarlet flowers I never see before. Everywhere choking their own leaves. The scent is sweet. I put my hand in to gather a few blossoms. I hear something behind me and turn to see a stag moving up the rock side. He is great. And grand. Standing there between the beckoning wall of perfume and the stag I wonder what else the world may show me. It is as though I am loose to do what I choose, the stag, the wall of flowers. I am a little scare of this looseness. Is that how free feels? I don't like it. I don't want to be free of you because I am live only with you. When I choose and say good morning, the stag bounds away. Now I am thinking of another thing. Another animal that shapes choice. Sir bathes every May. We pour buckets of hot water into the washtub and gather wintergreen to sprinkle in. He sits awhile. His knees poke up, his hair is flat and wet over the edge. Soon Mistress is there with first a rock of soap, then a short broom. After he is rosy with scrubbing he stands. She wraps a cloth around to dry him. Later she steps in and splashes herself. He does not scrub her. He is in the house to dress himself. A moose moves through the trees at the edge of the clearing. We all, Mistress, Lina and me, see him. He stands alone looking. Mistress crosses her wrists over her breasts. Her eyes are big and stare. Her face loses its blood. Lina shouts and throws a stone. The moose turns slowly and walks away. Like a chieftain. Still Mistress trembles as though a wicked thing has come. I am thinking how small she looks. It is only a moose who has no interest in her. Or anyone. Mistress does not shout or keep to her splashing. She will not risk to choose. Sir steps out. Mistress stands up and rushes to him. Her naked skin is aslide with wintergreen. Lina and I look at each other. What is she fearing, I ask. Nothing, says Lina. Why then does she run to Sir? Because she can, Lina answers. Sudden a sheet of sparrows fall from the sky and settle in the trees. So many the trees seem to sprout birds, not leaves at all. Lina points. We never shape the world she says. |
| 191 |
The world shapes us. Sudden and silent the sparrows are gone. I am not understanding Lina. You are my shaper and my world as well. It is done. No need to choose. How long will it take will she get lost will he be there will he come will some vagrant rape her? She needed shoes, proper shoes, to replace the dirty scraps that covered her feet, and it was only when Lina made her some did she say a word. Rebekka's thoughts bled into one another, confusing events and time but not people. The need to swallow, the pain of doing so, the unbearable urge to tear her skin from the bones underneath stopped only when she was unconscious — not asleep, because as far as the dreams were concerned it was the same as being awake. "I shat among strangers for six weeks to get to this land." She has told this to Lina over and over. Lina being the only one left whose understanding she trusted and whose judgment she valued. Even now, in the deep blue of a spring night, with less sleep than her Mistress, Lina was whispering and shaking a feathered stick around the bed. "Among strangers," said Rebekka. "There was no other way packed like cod between decks." She fixed her eyes on Lina who had put away her wand and now knelt by the bed. "I know you," said Rebekka, and thought she was smiling although she was not sure. Other familiar faces sometimes hovered, then went away: her daughter; the sailor who helped carry her boxes and tighten their straps; a man on the gallows. No. This face was real. She recognized the dark anxious eyes, the tawny skin. How could she not know the single friend she had? To confirm to herself that moment of clarity, she said, "Lina. Remember, do you? We didn't have a fireplace. It was cold. So cold. I thought she was a mute or deaf, you know. Blood is sticky. It never goes away however much ..." Her voice was intense, confidential as though revealing a secret. Then silence as she fell somewhere between fever and memory. There was nothing in the world to prepare her for a life of water, on water, about water; sickened by it and desperate for it. Mesmerized and bored by the look of it, especially at midday when the women were allowed another hour on deck. Then she talked to the sea. "Stay still, don't hurtle me. No. Move, move, excite me. Trust me, I will keep your secrets: that the smell of you is like fresh monthly blood; that you own the globe and land is afterthought to entertain you; that the world beneath you is both graveyard and heaven." Immediately upon landing Rebekka's sheer good fortune in a husband stunned her. Already sixteen, she knew her father would have shipped her off to anyone who would book her passage and relieve him of feeding her. A waterman, he was privy to all sorts of news from colleagues, and when a crewman passed along an inquiry from a first mate — a search for a healthy, chaste wife willing to travel abroad — he was quick to offer his eldest girl. The stubborn one, the one with too many questions and a rebellious mouth. |
| 192 |
Compared to that, death by shipwreck or tomahawk paled. She did not know what other settler families nearby once knew of routine dismemberment, but she did not share their dread when, three months after the incident, news came of a pitched battle, a kidnap or a peace gone awry. The squabbles between local tribes or militia peppering parts of the region seemed a distant, manageable backdrop in a land of such space and perfume. The absence of city and shipboard stench rocked her into a kind of drunkenness that it took years to sober up from and take sweet air for granted. Rain itself became a brand-new thing: clean, sootless water falling from the sky. She clasped her hands under her chin gazing at trees taller than a cathedral, wood for warmth so plentiful it made her laugh, then weep, for her brothers and the children freezing in the city she had left behind. She had never seen birds like these, or tasted fresh water that ran over visible white stones. There was adventure in learning to cook game she'd never heard of and acquiring a taste for roast swan. Well, yes, there were monstrous storms here with snow piled higher than the sill of a shutter. And summer insects swarmed with song louder than chiming steeple bells. Yet the thought of what her life would have been had she stayed crushed into those reeking streets, spat on by lords and prostitutes, curtseying, curtseying, curtseying, still repelled her. Here she answered to her husband alone and paid polite attendance (time and weather permitting) to the only meetinghouse in the area. Anabaptists who were not the Satanists her parents called them, as they did all Separatists, but sweet, generous people for all their confounding views. Views that got them and the horrible Quakers beaten bloody in their own meetinghouse back home. Rebekka had no bone-deep hostility. Even the king had pardoned a dozen of them on their way to the gallows. She still remembered her parents' disappointment when the festivities were canceled and their fury at an easily swayed monarch. Her discomfort in a garret full of constant argument, bursts of enraged envy and sullen disapproval of anyone not like them made her impatient for some kind of escape. Any kind. There had been an early rescue, however, and the possibility of better things in Church School where she was chosen as one of four to be trained for domestic service. But the one place that agreed to take her turned out to require running from the master and hiding behind doors. She lasted four days. After that no one offered her another place. Then came the bigger rescue when her father got notice of a man looking for a strong wife rather than a dowry. Between the warning of immediate slaughter and the promise of married bliss, she believed in neither. Yet without money or the inclination to peddle goods, open a stall or be apprenticed in exchange for food and shelter, with even nunneries for the upper class banned, her prospects were servant, prostitute, wife, and although horrible stories were told about each of those careers, the last one seemed safest. |
| 193 |
The one where she might have children and therefore be guaranteed some affection. As with any future available to her, it depended on the character of the man in charge. Hence marriage to an unknown husband in a far-off land had distinct advantages: separation from a mother who had barely escaped the ducking pond; from male siblings who worked days and nights with her father and learned from him their dismissive attitude toward the sister who had helped rear them; but especially escape from the leers and rude hands of any man, drunken or sober, she might walk by. America. Whatever the danger, how could it possibly be worse? Early on when she settled on Jacob's land, she visited the local church some seven miles away and met a few vaguely suspicious villagers. They had removed themselves from a larger sect in order to practice a purer form of their Separatist religion, one truer and more acceptable to God. Among them she was deliberately soft-spoken. In their meetinghouse she was accommodating and when they explained their beliefs she did not roll her eyes. It was when they refused to baptize her firstborn, her exquisite daughter, that Rebekka turned away. Weak as her faith was, there was no excuse for not protecting the soul of an infant from eternal perdition. More and more it was in Lina's company that she let the misery seep out. "I chastised her for a torn shift, Lina, and the next thing I know she is lying in the snow. Her little head cracked like an egg." It would have embarrassed her to mention personal sorrow in prayer; to be other than stalwart in grief; to let God know she was less than thankful for His watch. But she had delivered four healthy babies, watched three surrender at a different age to one or another illness, and then watched Patrician, her firstborn, who reached the age of five and provided a happiness Rebekka could not believe, lie in her arms for two days before dying from a broken crown. And then to bury her twice. First in a fur-sheltered coffin because the ground could not accept the little box Jacob built, so they had to leave her to freeze in it and, second, in late spring when they could place her among her brothers with the Anabaptists attending. Weak, pustulate, with not even a full day to mourn Jacob, her grief was fresh cut, like hay in famine. Her own death was what she should be concentrating on. She could hear its hooves clacking on the roof, could see the cloaked figure on horseback. But whenever the immediate torment subsided, her thoughts left Jacob and traveled to Patrician's matted hair, the hard, dark lump of soap she used to clean it, the rinses over and over to free every honey-brown strand from the awful blood darkening, like her mind, to black. Rebekka never looked at the coffin waiting under pelts for thaw. But when finally the earth softened, when Jacob could get traction with the spade and they let the coffin down, she sat on the ground holding on to her elbows, oblivious of the damp, and gazed at every clod and clump that fell. |
| 194 |
She stayed there all day and through the night. No one, not Jacob, Sorrow or Lina, could get her up. And not the Pastor either, since he and his flock had been the ones whose beliefs stripped her children of redemption. She growled when they touched her; threw the blanket from her shoulders. They left her alone then, shaking their heads, muttering prayers for her forgiveness. At dawn in a light snowfall Lina came and arranged jewelry and food on the grave, along with scented leaves, telling her that the boys and Patrician were stars now, or something equally lovely: yellow and green birds, playful foxes or the rose-tinted clouds collecting at the edge of the sky. Pagan stuff, true, but more satisfying than the I-accept-and-will-see-you-at-Judgment-Day prayers Rebekka had been taught and heard repeated by the Baptist congregation. There had been a summer day once when she sat in front of the house sewing and talking profanely while Lina stirred linen boiling in a kettle at her side. I don't think God knows who we are. I think He would like us, if He knew us, but I don't think He knows about us. But He made us, Miss. No? He did. But he made the tails of peacocks too. That must have been harder. Oh, but, Miss, we sing and talk. Peacocks do not. We need to. Peacocks don't. What else do we have? Thoughts. Hands to make things. All well and good. But that's our business. Not God's. He's doing something else in the world. We are not on His mind. What is He doing then, if not watching over us? Lord knows. And they sputtered with laughter, like little girls hiding behind the stable loving the danger of their talk. She could not decide if Patrician's accident by a cloven hoof was rebuke or proof of the pudding. Now here in bed, her deft, industrious hands wrapped in cloth lest she claw herself bloody, she could not tell if she was speaking aloud or simply thinking. "I shat in a tub ... strangers ..." Sometimes they circled her bed, these strangers who were not, who had become the kind of family sea journeys create. Delirium or Lina's medicine, she supposed. But they came and offered her advice, gossiped, laughed or simply stared at her with pity. There were seven other women assigned to steerage on the Angelus. Waiting to board, their backs turned against the breeze that cut from sea to port, they shivered among boxes, bailiffs, upper-deck passengers, carts, horses, guards, satchels and weeping children. Finally, when lower-deck passengers were called to board, and their name, home county and occupation were recorded, four or five women said they were servants. Rebekka learned otherwise soon enough, soon as they were separated from males and the better-classed women and led to a dark space below next to the animal stalls. Light and weather streamed from a hatch; a tub for waste sat beside a keg of cider; a basket and a rope where food could be let down and the basket retrieved. Anyone taller than five feet hunched and lowered her head to move around. Crawling was easier once, like street vagrants, they partitioned off their personal space. |
| 195 |
For them, unable to see the sky, time became simply the running sea, unmarked, eternal and of no matter. Upon landing they made no pretense of meeting again. They knew they never would, so their parting was brisk, unsentimental as each gathered her baggage and scanned the crowd for her future. It was true; they never met again, except for those bedside visits Rebekka conjured up. He was bigger than she imagined. All the men she had known were small, hardened but small. Mr. Vaark (it took some time before she could say Jacob) picked up both of her boxes after touching her face and smiling. "You took off your hat and smiled. Smiled and smiled." Rebekka thought she was answering the grin of her new husband, but her parched lips barely moved as she entered the scene of their first meeting. She had the impression, then, that this was what his whole life had been about: meeting her at long last, so obvious was his relief and satisfaction. Following him, feeling the disabling resilience of land after weeks at sea, she tripped on the wooden walk and tore the hem of her frock. He did not turn around so she grabbed a fistful of skirt, clutched her bedding under her arm and trotted along to the wagon, refusing the hand he offered to help her mount. It was seal and deal. He would offer her no pampering. She would not accept it if he did. A perfect equation for the work that lay ahead. "Marriages performed within," read the sign next to the coffeehouse door, and underneath in small letters a verse that combined warning with sales pitch: "When lawless lust hath conceived it bringeth forth sin." Old and not quite sober, the cleric was nevertheless quick. Within minutes they were back in the wagon steeped in anticipation of a fresh bountiful life. He seemed shy at first, so she thought he had not lived with eight people in a single room garret; had not grown so familiar with small cries of passion at dawn that they were like the songs of peddlers. It was nothing like what Dorothea had described or the acrobatics that made Lydia hoot, nor like the quick and angry couplings of her parents. Instead she felt not so much taken as urged. "My northern star," he called her. They settled into the long learning of one another: preferences, habits altered, others acquired; disagreement without bile; trust and that wordless conversation that years of companionship rest on. The weak religious tendencies that riled Rebekka's mother were of no interest to him. He was indifferent, having himself withstood all pressure to join the village congregation but content to let her be persuaded if she chose. After some initial visits and Rebekka choosing not to continue, his satisfaction was plain. They leaned on each other root and crown. Needing no one outside their sufficiency. Or so they believed. For there would be children, of course. And there were. Following Patrician, each time Rebekka gave birth, she forgot the previous nursing interrupted long before weaning time. Forgot breasts still leaking, or nipples prematurely caked and too tender for underclothes. |
| 196 |
Forgot, too, how rapid the trip from crib to coffin could be. As the sons died and the years passed, Jacob became convinced the farm was sustainable but not profitable. He began to trade and travel. His returns, however, were joyful times, full of news and amazing sights: the anger, loud and lethal, of townspeople when a pastor was shot dead off his horse by warriors of a local tribe; a shop's shelves stacked with bolts of silk in colors he saw only in nature; a freebooter tied to a plank on his way to the gallows cursing his captors in three languages; a butcher thrashed for selling diseased meat; the eerie sounds of choirs drifting in Sunday rain. Tales of his journeys excited her, but also intensified her view of a disorderly, threatening world out there, protection from which he alone could provide. If on occasion he brought her young, untrained help, he also brought home gifts. A better chopping knife, a hobbyhorse for Patrician. It was some time before she noticed how the tales were fewer and the gifts increasing, gifts that were becoming less practical, even whimsical. A silver tea service which was put away immediately; a porcelain chamber pot quickly chipped by indiscriminate use; a heavily worked hairbrush for hair he only saw in bed. A hat here, a lace collar there. Four yards of silk. Rebekka swallowed her questions and smiled. When finally she did ask him where this money was coming from, he said, "New arrangements," and handed her a mirror framed in silver. Having seen come and go a glint in his eye as he unpacked these treasures so useless on a farm, she should have anticipated the day he hired men to help clear trees from a wide swath of land at the foot of a rise. A new house he was building. Something befitting not a farmer, not even a trader, but a squire. We are good, common people, she thought, in a place where that claim was not merely enough, but prized, even a boast. "We don't need another house," she told him. "Certainly not one of such size." She was shaving him and spoke as she finished. "Need is not the reason, wife." "What is, pray?" Rebekka cleared off the last dollop of lather from the blade. "What a man leaves behind is what a man is." "Jacob, a man is only his reputation." "Understand me." He took the cloth from her hands and wiped his chin. "I will have it." And so it was. Men, barrows, a blacksmith, lumber, twine, pots of pitch, hammers and pull horses, one of which once kicked her daughter in the head. The fever of building was so intense she missed the real fever, the one that put him in the grave. As soon as he collapsed, word went out to the Baptists, and no one from the farm, especially Sorrow, was allowed among them. The laborers left with their horses and tools. The blacksmith was long gone, his ironwork aglitter like a gate to heaven. Rebekka did what Jacob ordered her to do: gathered the women and struggled with them to lift him from the bed and lower him onto a blanket. All the while he croaked, hurry, hurry. |
| 197 |
How had the churchwoman she spoke to described it? There would be music and feasts; picnics and hayrides. Frolicking. Dreams come true. And perhaps if one was truly committed, consistently devout, God would take pity and allow her children, though too young for a baptism of full immersion, entrance to His sphere. But of greatest importance, there was time. All of it. Time to converse with the saved, laugh with them. Skate, even, on icy ponds with a crackling fire ashore to warm one's hands. Sleighs jingled and children made snow houses and played with hoops in the meadow because the weather would be whatever you wanted it to be. Think of it. Just imagine. No illness. Ever. No pain. No aging or frailty of any kind. No loss or grief or tears. And obviously no more dying, not even if the stars shattered into motes and the moon disintegrated like a corpse beneath the sea. She had only to stop thinking and believe. The dry tongue in Rebekka's mouth behaved like a small animal that had lost its way. And though she understood that her thoughts were disorganized, she was also convinced of their clarity. That she and Jacob could once talk and argue about these things made his loss intolerable. Whatever his mood or disposition, he had been the true meaning of mate. Now, she thought, there is no one except servants. The best husband gone and buried by the women he left behind; children rose-tinted clouds in the sky. Sorrow frightened for her own future if I die, as she should be, a slow-witted girl warped from living on a ghost ship. Only Lina was steady, unmoved by any catastrophe as though she has seen and survived everything. As in that second year when Jacob was away, caught in an off-season blizzard, and she, Lina and Patrician after two days were close to starvation. No trail or road passable. Patrician turning blue in spite of the miserable dung fire sputtering in a hole in the dirt floor. It was Lina who dressed herself in hides, carried a basket and an axe, braved the thigh-high drifts, the mind-numbing wind, to get to the river. There she pulled from below the ice enough broken salmon to bring back and feed them. She filled her basket with all she could snare; tied the basket handle to her braid to keep her hands from freezing on the trek back. That was Lina. Or was it God? Here in an abyss of loss, she wondered if the journey to this land, the dying off of her family, her whole life, in fact, were way-stations marking a road to revelation. Or perdition? How would she know? And now with death's lips calling her name, to whom should she turn? A blacksmith? Florens? How long will it take will he be there will she get lost will someone assault her will she return will he and is it already too late? For salvation. I sleep then wake to any sound. Then I am dreaming cherry trees walking toward me. I know it is dreaming because they are full in leaves and fruit. I don't know what they want. To look? To touch? One bends down and I wake with a little scream in my mouth. |
| 198 |
Nothing is different. The trees are not heavy with cherries nor nearer to me. I quiet down. That is a better dream than a minha mae standing near with her little boy. In those dreams she is always wanting to tell me something. Is stretching her eyes. Is working her mouth. I look away from her. My next sleeping is deep. Not birdsong but sunlight wakes me. All snow is gone. Relieving myself is troublesome. Then I am going north I think but maybe west also. No, north until I come to where the brush does not let me through without clutching me and taking hold. Brambles spread among saplings are wide and tall to my waist. I press through and through for a long time which is good since in front of me sudden is an open meadow wild with sunshine and smelling of fire. This is a place that remembers the burning of itself. New grass is underfoot, deep, thick, tender as lamb's wool. I stoop to touch it and remember how Lina loves to unravel my hair. It makes her laugh, saying it is proof I am in truth a lamb. And you, I ask her. A horse she answers and tosses her mane. It is hours I walk this sunny field, my thirst so loud I am faint. Beyond I see a light wood of birch and apple trees. The shade in there is green with young leaves. Bird talk is everyplace. I am eager to enter because water may be there. I stop. I hear hoofbeats. From among the trees riders clop toward me. All male, all native, all young. Some look younger than me. None have saddles on their horses. None. I marvel at that and the glare of their skin but I have fear of them too. They rein in close. They circle. They smile. I am shaking. They wear soft shoes but their horses are not shod and the hair of both boys and horses is long and free like Lina's. They talk words I don't know and laugh. One pokes his fingers in his mouth, in out, in out. Others laugh more. Him too. Then he lifts his head high, opens wide his mouth and directs his thumb to his lips. I drop to my knees in misery and fright. He dismounts and comes close. I smell the perfume of his hair. His eyes are slant, not big and round like Lina's. He grins while removing a pouch hanging from a cord across his chest. He holds it out to me but I am too trembling to reach so he drinks from it and offers it again. I want it am dying for it but I cannot move. What I am able to do is make my mouth wide. He steps closer and pours the water as I gulp it. One of the others says baa baa baa like a goat kid and they all laugh and slap their legs. The one pouring closes his pouch and after watching me wipe my chin returns it to his shoulder. Then he reaches into a belt hanging from his waist and draws out a dark strip, hands it to me, chomping his teeth. It looks like leather but I take it. As soon as I do he runs and leaps on his horse. I am shock. Can you believe this. He runs on grass and flies up to sit astride his horse. I blink and they all disappear. Where they once are is nothing. Only apple trees aching to bud and an echo of laughing boys. |
| 199 |
I put the dark strip on my tongue and I am correct. It is leather. Yet salty and spicy giving much comfort to your girl. Once more I aim north through the wood following at a distance the hoofprints of the boys' horses. It is warm and becoming warmer. Yet the earth is ever moist with cool dew. I make me forget how we are on wet ground and think instead of fireflies in tall dry grass. There are so many stars it is like the day. You hold your hand over my mouth so no one can hear my pleasure startling hens from their sleep. Quiet. Quiet. No one must know but Lina does. Beware she tells me. We are lying in hammocks. I am just come from you aching with sin and looking forward to more. I ask her meaning. She says there is only one fool in this place and she is not it so beware. I am too sleepy to answer and not wanting to. I prefer thoughts of that place under your jaw where your neck meets bone, a small curve deep enough for a tongue tip but no bigger than a quail's egg. I am sinking into sleep when I hear her say, rum I told myself it was rum. Only rum the first time because a man of his learning and position in the town would never dishonor himself so if sober. I understand, she is saying, I understand and obey the need for secrecy and when he comes to the house I never look him in the eye. I only look for the straw in his mouth, she is saying, or the stick he places in the gate hinge as the sign of our meeting that night. Sleepiness is leaving me. I sit up and dangle my legs over the hammock. The ropes creak and sway. There is something in her voice that pricks me. Something old. Something cutting. I look at her. Brightness of stars, moon glow, both are enough to see her face but neither is enough to know her expression. Her braid is loose, strands of it escaping the hammock's weave. She is saying that she is without clan and under a Europe's rule. There is no rum the second time nor the next, she is saying, but those times he uses the flat of his hand when he has anger, when she spills lamp oil on his breeches or he finds a tiny worm in the stew. Then comes a day when he uses first his fist and then a whip. The Spanish coin is lost through a worn place in her apron pocket and is never found. He cannot forgive this. I am already fourteen and ought to know better, she is saying. And now, she is saying, I do. She tells me how it is to walk town lanes wiping blood from her nose with her fingers, that because her eyes are closing she stumbles and people believe she is in liquor like so many natives and tell her so. The Presbyterians stare at her face and the blood wipes on her clothes but say nothing. They visit the printer and offer her up for sale. They no longer let her inside their house so for weeks she sleeps where she can and eats from the bowl they leave for her on the porch. Like a dog, she says. Like a dog. Then Sir makes the purchase but not before she slips away and breaks the necks of two roosters and places a head in each of her lover's shoes. |
| 200 |
Every step he takes from then on will bring him closer to perpetual ruin. Listen to me, she is saying. I am your age when flesh is my only hunger. Men have two hungers. The beak that grooms also bites. Tell me, she says, what will it be when his work here is done. I wonder she says will he take you with him? I am not wondering this. Not then, not ever. I know you cannot steal me nor wedding me. Neither one is lawful. What I know is that I wilt when you go and am straight when Mistress sends me to you. Being on an errand is not running away. Thinking these things keeps me walking and not lying down on the ground and allowing myself to sleep. I am greatly tired and long for water. I come into a part where cows are grazing among the trees. If cows are in the woods a farm or village is near. Neither Sir nor Mistress will let their few heads loose like that. They fence the meadow because they want the manure and not a quarrel with neighbors. Mistress says Sir says grazing will soon die in the meadow so he has other business because farming will never be enough in these parts. Black flies alone will kill all hope for it if marauding wildlife does not. Farms live or die by the desire of insects or on the whim of weather. I see a path and enter. It leads to a narrow bridge past a mill wheel poised in a stream. The creaking wheel and rushing water are what shape the quiet. Hens sleep and dogs forbidden. I hurry down the bank and lap from the stream. The water tastes like candle wax. I spit out the bits of straw that come with each swallow and make my way back to the path. I need shelter. The sun is setting itself. I notice two cottages. Both have windows but no lamp shines through. There are more that resemble small barns that can accept the day's light only through open doors. None is open. There is no cooksmoke in the air. I am thinking everyone has gone off. Then I see a tiny steeple on a hill beyond the village and am certain the people are at evening prayer. I decide to knock on the door of the largest house, the one that will have a servant inside. Moving toward it I look over my shoulder and see a light farther on. It is in the single lit house in the village so I choose to go there. Stones interfere at each step rubbing the sealing wax hard into my sole. Rain starts. Soft. It should smell sweet with the flavor of the sycamores it has crossed, but it has a burn smell, like pinfeathers singed before boiling a fowl. Soon as I knock a woman opens the door. She is much taller than Mistress or Lina and has green eyes. The rest of her is a brown frock and a white cap. Red hair edges it. She is suspicious and holds up her hand, palm out, as though I might force my way in. Who hath sent you she asks. I say please. I say I am alone. No one sends me. Shelter calls me here. She looks behind me left and right and asks if I have no protection, no companion? I say No Madam. She narrows her eyes and asks if I am of this earth or elsewhere? Her face is hard. I say this earth Madam I know no other. |
| 201 |
Christian or heathen, she asks. Never heathen I say. I say although I hear my father may be. And where doth he abide, she asks. The rain is getting bigger. Hunger wobbles me. I say I do not know him and my mother is dead. Her face softens and she nods saying, orphan, step in. She tells me her name, Widow Ealing, but does not ask mine. You must excuse me, she says, but there is some danger about. What danger I ask. Evil, she says, but you must never mind. I try to eat slowly and fail. Sopping hard bread into lovely, warm barley porridge, I don't lift my head except to say thank you when she ladles more into my bowl. She places a handful of raisins next to it. We are in a good-size room with fireplace, table, stools and two sleeping places, a box bed and a pallet. There are two closed doors to other parts and a closet-looking place, a niche, at the rear where jugs and bowls are. When my hunger is quiet enough I notice a girl lying in the straw of the box bed. Under her head is a blanket roll. One of her eyes looks away, the other is as straight and unwavering as a she-wolf's. Both are black as coal, not at all like the Widow's. I don't think I should begin any words so I keep eating and wait for the girl or the Widow to say something. At the foot of her bed is a basket. A kid lies there too sick to raise its head or make a sound. When I finish the food down to the last raisin the Widow asks what is my purpose traveling alone. I tell her my mistress is sending me on an errand. She turns her lips down saying it must be vital to risk a female's life in these parts. My mistress is dying I say. My errand can save her. She frowns and looks toward the fireplace. Not from the first death, she says. Perhaps from the second. I don't understand her meaning. I know there is only one death not two and many lives beyond it. Remember the owls in daylight? We know right away who they are. You know the pale one is your father. I think I know who the other ones may be. The girl lying in straw raises up on her elbow. This be the death we have come here to die, she says. Her voice is deep, like a man's, though she looks to have my age. Widow Ealing doesn't reply and I do not want to look at those eyes anymore. The girl speaks again. No thrashing, she says, can change it, though my flesh is cut to ribbons. She stands then and limps to the table where the lamp burns. Holding it waist high she lifts her skirts. I see dark blood beetling down her legs. In the light pouring over her pale skin her wounds look like live jewels. This is my daughter Jane, the Widow says. Those lashes may save her life. It is late, Widow Ealing is saying. They will not come until morning. She closes the shutters, blows out the lamp and kneels by the pallet. Daughter Jane returns to her straw. The Widow whispers in prayer. The dark in here is greater than the cowshed, thicker than the forest. No moonlight seeps through a single crack. I lie near the sick kid and the fireplace and my sleep breaks into pieces from their voices. |
| 202 |
Silence is long and then they talk. I can tell who it is not only by the direction of the sound but also because Widow Ealing says words in a way different from her daughter. A more singing way. So I know it is Daughter Jane who says how can I prove I am not a demon and it is the Widow who says sssst it is they who will decide. Silence. Silence. Then back and forth they talk. It is the pasture they crave, Mother. Then why not me? You may be next. At least two say they have seen the Black Man and that he ... Widow Ealing stops and does not say more for a while and then she says we will know comes the morning. They will allow that I am, says Daughter Jane. They talk fast to each other. The knowing is theirs, the truth is mine, truth is God's, then what mortal can judge me, you talk like a Spaniard, listen, please listen, be still lest He hear you, He will not abandon me, nor will I, yet you bloodied my flesh, how many times do you have to hear it demons do not bleed. You never tell me that and it is a good thing to know. If my mother is not dead she can be teaching me these things. I believe I am the only one who falls asleep and I wake in shame because outside the animals are already lowing. Tiny baas come from the kid as the Widow picks it up in her arms and takes it outside to nurse the dam. When she returns she unshutters both windows and leaves the door wide open. Two geese waddle in followed by a strutting hen. Another flies through a window joining the search for scraps. I ask permission to use the commode behind a hempen curtain. As I finish and step out I see Daughter Jane holding her face in her hands while the Widow freshens the leg wounds. New strips of blood gleam among the dry ones. A goat steps in and moves toward the straw nibbling nibbling while Daughter Jane whimpers. After the bloodwork is done to her satisfaction the Widow pushes the goat out the door. At table for a breakfast of clabber and bread the Widow and Daughter Jane put their palms together, bow their heads and murmur. I do likewise, whispering the prayer Reverend Father taught me to say morning and night my mother repeating with me. Pater Noster... At the end I raise my hand to touch my forehead and catch Daughter Jane's frown. She shakes her head meaning no. So I pretend I am adjusting my cap. The Widow spoons jam onto the clabber and we two eat. Daughter Jane refuses so we eat what she will not. Afterwards the Widow goes to the fireplace and swings the kettle over the fire. I take the bowls and spoons from the table to the closet where a basin of water sits on a narrow bench. I rinse and wipe each piece carefully. The air is tight. Water rises to a boil in the kettle hanging in the fireplace. I turn and see its steam forming shapes as it curls against the stone. One shape looks like the head of a dog. We all hear footsteps climbing the path. I am still busy in the closet, and although I cannot see who enters, I hear the talk. The Widow offers the visitors seating. They refuse. |
| 203 |
A man's voice says this is preliminary yet witnesses are several. Widow interrupts him saying her daughter's eye is askew as God made it and it has no special powers. And look, she says, look at her wounds. God's son bleeds. We bleed. Demons never. I step into the room. Standing there are a man, three women and a little girl who reminds me of myself when my mother sends me away. I am thinking how sweet she seems when she screams and hides behind the skirts of one of the women. Then each visitor turns to look at me. The women gasp. The man's walking stick clatters to the floor causing the remaining hen to squawk and flutter. He retrieves his stick, points it at me saying who be this? One of the women covers her eyes saying God help us. The little girl wails and rocks back and forth. The Widow waves both hands saying she is a guest seeking shelter from the night. We accept her how could we not and feed her. Which night the man asks. This one past she answers. One woman speaks saying I have never seen any human this black. I have says another, this one is as black as others I have seen. She is Afric. Afric and much more, says another. Just look at this child says the first woman. She points to the little girl shaking and moaning by her side. Hear her. Hear her. It is true then says another. The Black Man is among us. This is his minion. The little girl is inconsolable. The woman whose skirts she clings to takes her outside where she is quickly quiet. I am not understanding anything except that I am in danger as the dog's head shows and Mistress is my only defense. I shout, wait. I shout, please sir. I think they have shock that I can talk. Let me show you my letter I say quieter. It proves I am nobody's minion but my Mistress. As fast as I can I remove my boot and roll down my stocking. The women stretch their mouths, the man looks away and then slowly back. I pull out Mistress' letter and offer it but no one will touch it. The man orders me to place it on the table but he is afraid to break the seal. He tells the Widow to do it. She picks at the wax with her fingernails. When it falls away she unfolds the paper. It is too thick to stay flat by itself. Everyone including Daughter Jane who rises from her bed stares at the markings upside down and it is clear only the man is lettered. Holding the tip of his walking stick down on the paper he turns it right side up and holds it there as if the letter can fly away or turn into ashes without flame before his eyes. He leans low and examines it closely. Then he picks it up and reads aloud. The signatory of this letter, Mistress Rebekka Vaark of Milton vouches for the female person into whose hands it has been placed. She is owned by me and can be knowne by a burne mark in the palm of her left hand. Allow her the courtesie of safe passage and witherall she may need to complete her errand. Our life, my life, on this earthe depends on her speedy return. Signed Rebekka Vaark, Mistress, Milton 18 May 1690 Other than a small sound from Daughter Jane all is quiet. |
| 204 |
I say thank you and lift her hand to kiss it. She says no, I thank you. They look at you and forget about me. She kisses my forehead then watches as I step down into the stream's dry bed. I turn and look up at her. Are you a demon I ask her. Her wayward eye is steady. She smiles. Yes, she says. Oh, yes. Go now. I walk alone except for the eyes that join me on my journey. Eyes that do not recognize me, eyes that examine me for a tail, an extra teat, a man's whip between my legs. Wondering eyes that stare and decide if my navel is in the right place if my knees bend backward like the forelegs of a dog. They want to see if my tongue is split like a snake's or if my teeth are filing to points to chew them up. To know if I can spring out of the darkness and bite. Inside I am shrinking. I climb the streambed under watching trees and know I am not the same. I am losing something with every step I take. I can feel the drain. Something precious is leaving me. I am a thing apart. With the letter I belong and am lawful. Without it I am a weak calf abandon by the herd, a turtle without shell, a minion with no telltale signs but a darkness I am born with, outside, yes, but inside as well and the inside dark is small, feathered and toothy. Is that what my mother knows? Why she chooses me to live without? Not the outside dark we share, a minha mae and me, but the inside one we don't. Is this dying mine alone? Is the clawing feathery thing the only life in me? You will tell me. You have the outside dark as well. And when I see you and fall into you I know I am live. Sudden it is not like before when I am always in fright. I am not afraid of anything now. The sun's going leaves darkness behind and the dark is me. Is we. Is my home. She did not mind when they called her Sorrow so long as Twin kept using her real name. It was easy to be confused. Sometimes it was the housewife or the sawyer or the sons who needed her; other times Twin wanted company to talk or walk or play. Having two names was convenient since Twin couldn't be seen by anybody else. So if she were scrubbing clothes or herding geese and heard the name Captain used, she knew it was Twin. But if any voice called "Sorrow," she knew what to expect. Preferable, of course, was when Twin called from the mill door or whispered up close into her ear. Then she would quit any chore and follow her identical self. They had met beneath the surgeon's hammock in the looted ship. All people were gone or drowned and she might have been too had she not been deep in an opium sleep in the ship's surgery. Taken there to have the boils removed from her neck, she drank the mixture the surgeon said would cut off the pain. So when the ship foundered she did not know it, and if any unmurdered hands and passengers escaped, she didn't know that either. What she remembered was waking up after falling to the floor under the hammock all alone. Captain, her father, nowhere. Before coming to the sawyer's house, Sorrow had never lived on land. |
| 205 |
Now the memories of the ship, the only home she knew, seemed as stolen as its cargo: bales of cloth, chests of opium, crates of ammunition, horses and barrels of molasses. Even the trace of Captain was dim. After searching for survivors and food, fingering spilt molasses from the deck straight into her mouth, nights listening to cold wind and lapping sea, Twin joined her under the hammock and they have been together ever since. Both skinned down the broken mast and started walking a rocky shoreline. The bits of dead fish they ate intensified their thirst which they forgot at the sight of two bodies rocking in the surf. It was the bloat and sway that made them incautious enough to wade away from the rocks into a lagoon just when the tide was coming in. Both were swept out to deep water; both treaded as long as they could until the cold overcame their senses and they swam not landward, but toward the horizon. Very good luck, for they entered a neap rushing headlong toward shore and into a river beyond. Sorrow woke up naked under a blanket, with a warm wet cloth on her forehead. The smell of milled wood was overwhelming. A woman with white hair was watching her. "Such a sight," said the woman, shaking her head. "Such a dismal sight you are. Yet strong, I think, for a maid." She pulled the blanket up to the castaway's chin. "We thought from your clothes you were a lad. However, you're not dead." That was good news, because Sorrow thought she was until Twin appeared at the foot of the pallet, grinning, holding her face in her hands. Comforted, Sorrow slept again, but easy now with Twin nestling near. The next morning she woke to the grating of saws and the even thicker odor of wood chips. The sawyer's wife came in holding a man's shirt and a boy's breeches. "These will have to do for now," she said. "I'll have to make you something more fitting for there is nothing to borrow in the village. And there won't be any shoes for a while." Light-headed and wobbly, Sorrow put on the dry boy clothes, then followed a scent of food. Once fed an extravagant breakfast, she was alert enough to say things but not recall things. When they asked her name, Twin whispered NO, so she shrugged her shoulders and found that a convenient gesture for the other information she could not or pretended not to remember. Where do you live? On the ship. Yes, but not always. Always. Where is your family? Shoulders lifted. Who else was on the ship? Gulls. What people, girl? Shrug. Who was the captain? Shrug. Well, how did you get to land? Mermaids. I mean whales. That was when the housewife named her. Next day she gave her a shift of sacking, a clean cap to cover her unbelievable and slightly threatening hair, and told her to mind the geese. Toss their grain, herd them to water and keep them from waddling off. Sorrow's bare feet fought with the distressing gravity of land. She stumbled and tripped so much on that first day at the pond that when two goslings were attacked by a dog and chaos followed, it took forever to regroup the flock. |
| 206 |
Unlike the housewife, Mistress and Lina both had small, straight noses; Mistress' skin was like the whites of eggs, Lina's like the brown of their shells. Before anything, food or rest, Lina insisted on washing Sorrow's hair. Not only the twigs and bits of straw hiding under her cap bothered her; she feared lice. It was a fear that surprised Sorrow who thought lice, like ticks, fleas or any of the other occupants of the body, were more nuisance than danger. Lina thought otherwise and after the hair-washing, scrubbed the girl down twice before letting her in the house. Then, shaking her head from side to side, gave her a salted rag to clean her teeth. Sir, holding Patrician's hand, announced that she be confined to the house at night. When Mistress asked why, he said, "I'm told she wanders." In the chill of that first night, scrunched on a mat near the fireplace, Sorrow slept and woke, slept and woke, lulled continuously by Twin's voice describing the thousandfold men walking the waves, singing wordlessly. How their teeth glittered more than the whitecaps under their feet. How, as the sky darkened and the moon rose, the edges of their night-black skin silvered. How the smell of land, ripe and loamy, brightened the eyes of the crew but made the sea walkers cry. Soothed by Twin's voice and the animal fat Lina had spread on her lower parts, Sorrow fell into the first sweet sleep she had had in months. Still, that first morning, she threw up her breakfast as soon as she swallowed. Mistress gave her yarrow tea and put her to work in the vegetable garden. Prying late turnips from the ground, she could hear Sir breaking rocks in a far-off field. Patrician squatted at the edge of the garden eating a yellow apple and watching her. Sorrow waved. Patrician waved back. Lina appeared and hurried the little girl away. From then on it was clear to Twin, if not to Sorrow, that Lina ruled and decided everything Sir and Mistress did not. Her eye was everywhere even when she was nowhere. She rose before cock crow, entered the house in darkness, touched a sleeping Sorrow with the toe of her moccasin and lingered while refreshing the embers. She examined baskets, looked under the lids of jars. Checking the stores, thought Sorrow. No, said Twin, checking you for food theft. Lina spoke very little to her, not even "good morning," and only when the content of what she had to say was urgent. Therefore it was she who told Sorrow she was pregnant. Lina had removed a basket of millet from Sorrow's hands. Looked her dead in the eye and said, "Do you know you are with child, child?" Sorrow's jaw dropped. Then she flushed with pleasure at the thought of a real person, a person of her own, growing inside her. "What should I do?" she asked. Lina simply stared at her and, hoisting the basket on her hip, walked away. If Mistress knew, she never said, perhaps because she was pregnant herself. Sorrow's birthing came too soon, Lina told her, for the infant to survive, but Mistress delivered a fat boy who cheered everybody up — for six months anyway. |
| 207 |
They put him with his brother at the bottom of the rise behind the house and said prayers. Although Sorrow thought she saw her own newborn yawn, Lina wrapped it in a piece of sacking and set it a-sail in the widest part of the stream and far below the beavers' dam. It had no name. Sorrow wept, but Twin told her not to. "I am always with you," she said. That was some consolation, but it took years for Sorrow's steady thoughts of her baby breathing water under Lina's palm to recede. With no one to talk to, she relied on Twin more and more. With her, Sorrow never wanted for friendship or conversation. Even if they made her sleep inside, there were stories to listen to and they could steal away together during the day for strolls and larks in the forest. There were cherries, too, and walnuts from the deacon. But she had to be quiet. Once he brought her a neckerchief which she filled with stones and threw in the stream, knowing such finery would raise Lina's anger as well as alert Mistress. And although another of Mistress' baby boys perished, Patrician stayed healthy. For a little while Lina seemed to be persuaded that the boys' deaths were not Sorrow's fault, but when a horse broke Patrician's crown, she changed her mind. Then came Florens. Then came the blacksmith. Twice. When Florens arrived that bitter winter, Sorrow, curious and happy to see someone new, smiled and was about to step forward just to touch one of the little girl's fat braids. But Twin stopped her, leaning close to Sorrow's face, crying, "Don't! Don't!" Sorrow recognized Twin's jealousy and waved her face away, but not quickly enough. Lina, having taken off her shawl and wrapped it around the child's shoulders, picked her up and carried her into the cowshed. Thereafter, the girl belonged to Lina. They slept together, bathed together, ate together. Lina made clothes for her and tiny shoes from rabbit skin. Whenever Sorrow came near, Lina said "Scat," or sent her on some task that needed doing immediately, all the while making certain everyone else shared the distrust that sparkled in her own eyes. Sorrow remembered how they narrowed, gleamed, when Sir made her sleep inside. And although Lina helped her through childbirth, Sorrow never forgot the baby breathing water every day, every night, down all the streams of the world. Kept as distant from the new girl as she had been from Patrician, Sorrow behaved thereafter the way she always had — with placid indifference to anyone, except Twin. Years later, when the blacksmith came, the weather of the place changed. Forever. Twin noticed it first, saying Lina was afraid of the smithy and tried to warn Mistress about him, but the warning was fruitless. Mistress paid it no attention. She was too happy for guardedness because Sir was not traveling anymore. He was always there working on the new house, managing deliveries, laying string from angle to angle and in close conversation with the smithy about the gate's design. Lina dreading; Mistress humming with contentment; Sir in high spirits. |
| 208 |
Florens, of course, was the most distracted. Neither Sorrow nor Twin had settled on exactly what to think of the blacksmith. He seemed complete, unaware of his effect. Was he the danger Lina saw in him or was her fear mere jealousy? Was he Sir's perfect building partner or a curse on Florens, altering her behavior from open to furtive? They had yet to make up their minds when Sorrow, returning from the stream with a bucket of water, collapsed, burning and shaking, near the building site. It was pure luck that the smithy was right there and saw her fall. He picked her up and laid her down on the pallet where he slept. Sorrow's face and arms were welting. The smithy touched her neck boils, then shouted. Sir poked his head out of the door frame and Florens came running. Mistress arrived and the smithy called for vinegar. Lina went to fetch it, and when it came, he doused Sorrow's boils and the skin of her face and arms, sending her into spasms of pain. While the women sucked air and Sir frowned, the blacksmith heated a knife and slit open one of the swellings. They watched in silence as he tipped Sorrow's own blood drops between her lips. All of them thought it better not to have her in the house, so Sorrow lay sweltering in a hammock all day, all night — permitted no food or water — as the women took turns fanning her. The constant breeze of their fans summoned sail wind and Captain, the tiller in his hand. She heard him before she saw him. Laughing. Loud, raucous. No. Not laughing. Screaming. Along with the others. High-pitched and low, the screams were far away, on the other side of the white clouds surrounding her. Horses, too. Pounding hooves. Freed from below. Leaping over sacks of grain and kicking barrels until the staves broke and a thick sweet blackness poured out. Still, she could not move or tear through the clouds. Pushing, pushing, she fell to the floor while the clouds covered and smothered her whole self, convincing her the screams belonged to gulls. When she came to, eyes, the shape and color of her own, greeted her. The puffy clouds, mere threads now, drifted away. "I'm here," said the girl with a face matching her own exactly. "I'm always here." With Twin she was less afraid and the two began to search the silent, listing ship. Slowly, slowly. Peeking here, listening there, finding nothing except a bonnet and seagulls pecking the remains of a colt. Under the waving fan, drenched in sweat, Sorrow remembered freezing day after day on the ship. Other than icy wind, nothing stirred. Aft was the sea, fore a rocky beach below a cliff of stone and brush. Sorrow had never set foot on land and was terrified of leaving ship for shore. It was as foreign to her as ocean was to sheep. Twin made it possible. When they descended, the earth — mean, hard, thick, hateful — shocked her. That's when she understood Captain's choice to keep her aboard. He reared her not as a daughter but as a sort of crewman-to-be. Dirty, trousered, both wild and obedient with one important skill, patching and sewing sailcloth. |
| 209 |
Mistress and Lina quarreled with the blacksmith about whether she should be forced to eat or drink, but he ruled, insisting she have nothing. Riveted by that hot knife and blood medicine, they deferred. Fanning and vinegar-soaked boils only. At the close of the third day, Sorrow's fever broke and she begged for water. The smithy held her head as she sipped from a dried squash gourd. Raising her eyes, she saw Twin seated in the branches above the hammock, smiling. Soon Sorrow said she was hungry. Bit by bit, under the smithy's care and Florens' nursing, the boils shriveled, the welts disappeared and her strength returned. Now their judgment was clear: the blacksmith was a savior. Lina, however, became truly ugly in her efforts to keep Florens away from the patient and the healer, muttering that she had seen this sickness before when she was a child, and that it would spread like mold to them all. But she lost the battle with Florens. By the time Sorrow recovered, Florens was struck down with another sickness much longer lasting and far more lethal. It was while lying in the meadow at the forest's edge, listening to Twin tell a favorite story, the one about a school of fish girls with pearls for eyes and green-black locks of seaweed hair racing one another, riding the backs of a fleet of whales, that Sorrow first saw the smithy and Florens coiled around each other. Twin had just gotten to the part where seabirds, excited by the foam trailing the fleet like shooting stars, were joining the race, when Sorrow put a finger to her lips and pointed with another. Twin stopped speaking and looked. The blacksmith and Florens were rocking and, unlike female farm animals in heat, she was not standing quietly under the weight and thrust of the male. What Sorrow saw yonder in the grass under a hickory tree was not the silent submission to the slow goings behind a pile of wood or a hurried one in a church pew that Sorrow knew. This here female stretched, kicked her heels and whipped her head left, right, to, fro. It was a dancing. Florens rolled and twisted from her back to his. He hoisted her up against the hickory; she bent her head into his shoulder. A dancing. Horizontal one minute, another minute vertical. Sorrow watched until it was over; until, stumbling like tired old people, they dressed themselves. It all ended when the blacksmith grabbed Florens' hair, yanked her head back to put his mouth on hers. Then they went off in different directions. It amazed her to see that. In all of the goings she knew, no one had ever kissed her mouth. Ever. It was natural, once Sir was buried and Mistress fell ill, to send for the blacksmith. And he came. Alone. He gazed for a while at the great, new house before dismounting. Then he glanced at Sorrow's belly, then her eyes before handing her the reins. He turned to Lina. "Lead me to her," he said. Sorrow rushed back from tying the horse as fast as her weight let her and the three of them entered the house. He paused and, noticing the smell, looked into the pot of stewed mugwort and other bits of Lina's brew. |
| 210 |
The questions plaguing her lodged in her eyes: What was really happening to Florens? Was she coming back? Was the blacksmith truthful? For all his kindness and healing powers, Sorrow wondered if she had been wrong about him and Lina right all along. Suffused with the deep insight mothers-to-be claim, Sorrow doubted it. He had saved her life with vinegar and her own blood; had known right away Mistress' state and what solvent to prescribe to lessen the scarring. Lina was simply wary of anyone who came between herself and Florens. Between tending Mistress' new requirements and scanning the path for Florens, Lina had little time or inclination for anything else. Sorrow herself, unable to bend down, lift anything weighty or even walk a hundred yards without heavy breathing, was equally to blame for what was happening to the farm. Goats wandered from village yards and tore up both newly planted gardens. Layers of insects floated in the water barrel no one had remembered to cover. Damp laundry left too long in the basket began to mold and neither of them returned to the river to wash it again. Everything was in disarray. The weather was warming, and as a result of the canceled visit of a neighbor's bull, no cow foaled. Acres and acres needed turning; milk became clabber in the pan. A fox pawed the hen yard whenever she liked and rats ate the eggs. Mistress would not recover soon enough to catch the heap the farm was falling into. And without her pet, Lina, the silent workhorse, seemed to have lost interest in everything, including feeding herself. Ten days' neglect and collapse was everywhere. So it was in the afternoon silence of a cool day in May, on an untended farm recently swathed in smallpox, that Sorrow's water broke, unleashing her panic. Mistress was not well enough to help her, and remembering the yawn, she did not trust Lina. Forbidden to enter the village, she had no choice. Twin was absent, strangely silent or hostile when Sorrow tried to discuss what to do, where to go. With a frail hope that Will and Scully would be stationed as usual on their fishing raft, she took a knife and a blanket to the riverbank the moment the first pain hit. She stayed there, alone, screeching when she had to, sleeping in between, until the next brute tear of body and breath. Hours, minutes, days — Sorrow could not tell how much time passed before the men heard her moans and poled their raft to the river's edge. They both understood Sorrow's plight as quickly as they would any creature about to foal. Clumsy a bit, their purpose confined to the survival of the newborn, they set to work. Kneeling in water as Sorrow pushed, they pulled, eased and turned the tiny form stuck between her legs. Blood and more swirled down to the river attracting young cod. When the baby, a girl, whimpered, Scully knifed the cord, then handed her to the mother who rinsed her, dabbing her mouth, ears and unfocused eyes. The men congratulated themselves and offered to carry mother and child back to the farmhouse. |
| 211 |
Now I am seeing a little boy come in holding a corn-husk doll. He is younger than everybody I know. You reach out your forefinger toward him and he takes hold of it. You say this is why I cannot travel with you. The child you call Malaik is not to be left alone. He is a foundling. His father is leaning over the reins and the horse is continuing until it stops and eats grass in the lane. People from the village come, learn he is dead and find the boy sitting quietly in the cart. No one knows who is the dead man and nothing in his belongings can tell. You accept him until a future when a townsman or magistrate places him, which may be never because although the dead man's skin is rosy the boy's is not. So maybe he is not a son at all. My mouth goes dry as I wonder if you want him to be yours. I worry as the boy steps closer to you. How you offer and he owns your forefinger. As if he is your future. Not me. I am not liking how his eyes go when you send him to play in the yard. But then you bathe my journey from my face and arms and give me stew. It needs salt. The pieces of rabbit are thick and tender. My hunger is sharp but my happiness is more. I cannot eat much. We talk of many things and I don't say what I am thinking. That I will stay. That when you return from healing Mistress whether she is live or no I am here with you always. Never never without you. Here I am not the one to throw out. No one steals my warmth and shoes because I am small. No one handles my backside. No one whinnies like sheep or goat because I drop in fear and weakness. No one screams at the sight of me. No one watches my body for how it is unseemly. With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me. I am calm when you leave although you do not touch me close. Or put your mouth to mine. You saddle up and ask me to water the bean shoots and collect the eggs. I go there but the hens make nothing so I know a minha mae is coming soon. The boy Malaik is near. He sleeps behind the door to where you do. I am calm, quiet, knowing you are very soon here again. I take off Sir's boots and lie on your cot trying to catch the fire smell of you. Slices of starlight cut through the shutters. A minha mae leans at the door holding her little boy's hand, my shoes in her pocket. As always she is trying to tell me something. I tell her to go and when she fades I hear a small creaking. In the dark I know he is there. Eyes big, wondering and cold. I rise and come to him and ask what. What Malaik, what. He is silent but the hate in his eyes is loud. He wants my leaving. This cannot happen. I feel the clutch inside. This expel can never happen again. I dream a dream that dreams back at me. I am on my knees in soft grass with white clover breaking through. There is a sweet smell and I lean close to get it. But the perfume goes away. I notice I am at the edge of a lake. The blue of it is more than sky, more than any blue I know. More than Lina's beads or the heads of chicory. |
| 212 |
I am loving it so, I can't stop. I want to put my face deep there. I want to. What is making me hesitate, making me not get the beautiful blue of what I want? I make me go nearer, lean over, clutching the grass for balance. Grass that is glossy, long and wet. Right away I take fright when I see my face is not there. Where my face should be is nothing. I put a finger in and watch the water circle. I put my mouth close enough to drink or kiss but I am not even a shadow there. Where is it hiding? Why is it? Soon Daughter Jane is kneeling next to me. She too looks in the water. Oh, Precious, don't fret, she is saying, you will find it. Where I ask, where is my face, but she is no more beside me. When I wake a minha mae is standing by your cot and this time her baby boy is Malaik. He is holding her hand. She is moving her lips at me but she is holding Malaik's hand in her own. I hide my head in your blanket. I know you will come but morning does and you do not. All day. Malaik and me wait. He stays as far from me as he can. I am inside, sometimes in the garden but never in the lane where he is. I am making me quiet but I am loose inside not knowing how to be. Horses move in someone's pasture beyond. The colts are tippy-toe and never still. Never still. I watch until it is too black to see. No dream comes that night. Neither does a minha mae. I lie where you sleep. Along with the sound of blowing wind there is the thump of my heart. It is louder than the wind. The fire smell of you is leaving the pallet. Where does it go I wonder. The wind dies down. My heartbeat joins the sound of mice feet. In the morning the boy is not here but I prepare porridge for us two. Again he is standing in the lane holding tight the corn-husk doll and looking toward where you ride away. Sudden looking at him I am remembering the dog's profile rising from Widow Ealing's kettle. Then I cannot read its full meaning. Now I know how. I am guarding. Otherwise I am missing all understanding of how to protect myself. First I notice Sir's boots are gone. I look all around, stepping through the cabin, the forge, in cinder and in pain of my tender feet. Bits of metal score and bite them. I look and see the curl of a garden snake edging toward the threshold. I watch its slow crawl until it is dead in the sunlight. I touch your anvil. It is cool and scraped smooth but it sings the heat it lives for. I never find Sir's boots. Carefully, on my toes I go back into the cabin and wait. The boy quits the lane. He comes in but will neither eat nor talk. We stare at each other across the table. He does not blink. Nor me. I know he steals Sir's boots that belong to me. His fingers cling the doll. I think that must be where his power is. I take it away and place it on a shelf too high for him to reach. He screams screams. Tears falling. On bleeding feet I run outside to keep from hearing. He is not stopping. Is not. A cart goes by. The couple in it glance but do not greet or pause. Finally the boy is silent and I go back in. |
| 213 |
The doll is not on the shelf. It is abandon in a corner like a precious child no person wants. Or no. Maybe the doll is sitting there hiding. Hiding from me. Afraid. Which? Which is the true reading? Porridge drips from the table. The stool is on its side. Seeing me the boy returns to screaming and that is when I clutch him. I am trying to stop him not hurt him. That is why I pull his arm. To make him stop. Stop it. And yes I do hear the shoulder crack but the sound is small, no more than the crack a wing of roast grouse makes when you tear it, warm and tender, from its breast. He screams screams then faints. A little blood comes from his mouth hitting the table corner. Only a little. He drops into fainting just as I hear you shout. I don't hear your horse only your shout and know I am lost because your shout is not my name. Not me. Him. Malaik you shout. Malaik. Seeing him still and limp on the floor with that trickle of red from his mouth your face breaks down. You knock me away shouting what are you doing? shouting where is your ruth? With such tenderness you lift him, the boy. When you see the angle of his arm you cry out. The boy opens his eyes then faints once more when you twist it back into its proper place. Yes, there is blood. A little. But you are not there when it comes, so how do you know I am the reason? Why do you knock me away without certainty of what is true? You see the boy down and believe bad about me without question. You are correct but why no question of it? I am first to get the knocking away. The back of your hand strikes my face. I fall and curl up on the floor. Tight. No question. You choose the boy. You call his name first. You take him to lie down with the doll and return to me your broken face, eyes without glee, rope pumps in your neck. I am lost. No word of sorrow for knocking me off my feet. No tender fingers to touch where you hurt me. I cower. I hold down the feathers lifting. Your Mistress recovers you say. You say you will hire someone to take me to her. Away from you. Each word that follows cuts. Why are you killing me I ask you. I want you to go. Let me explain. No. Now. Why? Why? Because you are a slave. What? You heard me. Sir makes me that. I don't mean him. Then who? You. What is your meaning? I am a slave because Sir trades for me. No. You have become one. How? Your head is empty and your body is wild. I am adoring you. And a slave to that too. You alone own me. Own yourself, woman, and leave us be. You could have killed this child. No. Wait. You put me in misery. You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind. You shout the word — mind, mind, mind — over and over and then you laugh, saying as I live and breathe, a slave by choice. On my knees I reach for you. Crawl to you. You step back saying get away from me. I have shock. Are you meaning I am nothing to you? That I have no consequence in your world? My face absent in blue water you find only to crush it? Now I am living the dying inside. No. |
| 214 |
Not again. Not ever. Feathers lifting, I unfold. The claws scratch and scratch until the hammer is in my hand. Jacob Vaark climbed out of his grave to visit his beautiful house. "As well he should," said Willard. "I sure would," answered Scully. It was still the grandest house in the whole region and why not spend eternity there? When they first noticed the shadow, Scully, not sure it was truly Vaark, thought they should creep closer. Willard, on the other hand, knowledgeable about spirits, warned him of the consequences of disturbing the risen dead. Night after night they watched, until they convinced themselves that no one other than Jacob Vaark would spend haunting time there: it had no previous tenants and the Mistress forbade anyone to enter. Both men respected, if they did not understand, her reasoning. For years the neighboring farm population made up the closest either man would know of family. A goodhearted couple (parents), and three female servants (sisters, say) and them helpful sons. Each member dependent on them, none cruel, all kind. Especially the master who, unlike their more-or-less absent owner, never cursed or threatened them. He even gave them gifts of rum during Christmastide and once he and Willard shared a tipple straight from the bottle. His death had saddened them enough to disobey their owner's command to avoid the poxed place; they volunteered to dig the last, if not the final, grave his widow would need. In dousing rain they removed five feet of mud and hurried to get the body down before the hole filled with water. Now, thirteen days later, the dead man had left it, escaped his own grave. Very like the way he used to reappear following weeks of traveling. They did not see him — his definitive shape or face — but they did see his ghostly blaze. His glow began near midnight, floated for a while on the second story, disappeared, then moved ever so slowly from window to window. With Master Vaark content to roam his house and not appear anywhere else, scaring or rattling anybody, Willard felt it safe and appropriate for him and Scully to stay loyal and help the Mistress repair the farm; prepare it also, for nothing much had been tended to after she fell ill. June on its way and not a furrow plowed. The shillings she offered was the first money they had ever been paid, raising their work from duty to dedication, from pity to profit. There was much to be done because, hardy as the women had always been, they seemed distracted, slower, now. Before and after the blacksmith healed Mistress and the girl, Florens, was back where she belonged, a pall had descended. Still, Willard said, Lina continued to do her work carefully, calmly, but Scully disagreed, said she was simmering. Like green apples trembling in boiling water too long, the skin near to breaking, needing quick removal, cooling before mashed into sauce. And Scully should know since he had wasted hours over the years secretly watching her river baths. Unfettered glimpses of her buttocks, that waist, those syrup-colored breasts, were no longer available. |
| 215 |
Not knowing which of them she would select, they separated, each running man hoping he had made the correct choice, since play possum was not an option. Willard ducked behind an outcropping, thumb tamped his pipe and prayed the ledge of slate would disable the wind's direction. Scully, certain he felt hot breath on his nape, leaped for the lowest branch and swung up onto it. Unwise. Herself a tree climber, the bear had merely to stand up to clamp his foot in her jaws. Scully's fear was not craven, however, so he determined to make at least one powerful gesture of defense no matter how hopeless. He snatched out his knife, turned and, without even aiming, rammed it at the head of the agile black hulk below. For once desperation was a gift. The blade hit, slid like a needle into the bear's eye. The roar was terrible as, clawing bark, she tumbled to the ground on her haunches. A ring of baying dogs could not have enraged her more. Snarling, standing straight up, she slapped at the stuck blade until it fell out. Then down on all fours she rolled her shoulders and wagged her head from side to side. It seemed to Scully a very long time before the grunt of a cub got her attention and, off balance by the blinding that diminished her naturally poor sight, she lumbered away to locate her young. Scully and Willard waited, one treed like a caught bear himself, the other hugging rock, both afraid she would return. Convinced finally that she would not, cautiously sniffing for the smell of fur, listening for a grunt, the movement of the other, or a return of birdcall, they emerged. Slowly, slowly. Then raced. It was when they shot from the wood onto the road that they saw the female-looking shape marching toward them. Later, when they discussed it, Scully decided she looked less like a visitation than a wounded redcoat, barefoot, bloody but proud. Sold for seven years to a Virginia planter, young Willard Bond expected to be freed at age twenty-one. But three years were added onto his term for infractions — theft and assault — and he was re-leased to a wheat farmer far up north. Following two harvests, the wheat succumbed to blast and the owner turned his property over to mixed livestock. Eventually, as overgrazing demanded more and more pasture, the owner made a land-for-toil trade with his neighbor, Jacob Vaark. Still, one man could not handle all that stock. The addition of a boy helped. Before Scully's arrival, Willard had suffered hard and lonesome days watching cattle munch and mate, his only solace in remembering harder but more satisfying days in Virginia. Brutal though that work was, the days were not flat and he had company. There he was one of twenty-three men working tobacco fields. Six English, one native, twelve from Africa by way of Barbados. No women anywhere. The camaraderie among them was sealed by their shared hatred of the overseer and the master's odious son. It was upon the latter that the assault was made. Theft of a shoat was invented and thrown in just to increase Willard's indebtedness. |
| 216 |
He had trouble getting used to the rougher, colder region he was moved into. At night in his hammock, trapped in wide, animated darkness, he braced himself against the living and the dead. The glittering eyes of an elk could easily be a demon, just as the howls of tortured souls might be the call of happy wolves. The dread of those solitary nights gripped his days. Swine, sheep and cattle were his sole companions, until the owner returned and carted away the best for slaughter. Scully's arrival was met with welcome and relief. And when their duties expanded to occasional help on the Vaark place, and they developed an easy relationship with its people, there were just a few times Willard overdrank and misbehaved. Early on in his post, he had run away twice, only to be caught in a tavern yard and given a further extension of his term. An even greater improvement in his social life began when Vaark decided to build a great house. Again, he was part of a crew of laborers, skilled and not, and when the blacksmith came, things got more and more interesting. Not only was the house grand and its enclosure impressive, its gate was spectacular. Sir wanted fancy work on both panels, but the smithy persuaded him no. The result was three-foot-high lines of vertical bars capped with a simple pyramid shape. Neatly these iron bars led to the gate each side of which was crowned by a flourish of thick vines. Or so he thought. Looking more closely he saw the gilded vines were actually serpents, scales and all, but ending not in fangs but flowers. When the gate was opened, each one separated its petals from the other. When closed, the blossoms merged. He admired the smith and his craft. A view that lasted until the day he saw money pass from Vaark's hand to the blacksmith's. The clink of silver was as unmistakable as its gleam. He knew Vaark was getting rich from rum investments, but learning the blacksmith was being paid for his work, like the men who delivered building materials, unlike the men he worked with in Virginia, roiled Willard, and he, encouraging Scully, refused any request the black man made. Refused to chop chestnut, haul charcoal or work bellows and "forgot" to shield green lumber from rain. Vaark chastised them both into sullen accommodation, but it was the smithy himself who calmed Willard down. Willard had two shirts, one with a collar, the other more of a rag. On the morning he slipped in fresh dung and split the shirt all the way down its back, he changed into the good collared one. Arriving at the site, he caught the blacksmith's eye, then his nod, then his thumb pointing straight up as if to signal approval. Willard never knew whether he was being made fun of or complimented. But when the smithy said, "Mr. Bond. Good morning," it tickled him. Virginia bailiffs, constables, small children, preachers — none had ever considered calling him mister, nor did he expect them to. He knew his rank, but did not know the lift that small courtesy allowed him. |
| 217 |
Joke or not, that first time was not the last because the smithy never failed to address him so. Although he was still rankled by the status of a free African versus himself, there was nothing he could do about it. No law existed to defend indentured labor against them. Yet the smithy had charm and he did so enjoy being called mister. Chuckling to himself, Willard understood why the girl, Florens, was struck silly by the man. He probably called her miss or lady when they met in the wood for suppertime foolery. That would excite her, he thought, if she needed any more than just the black man's grin. "In all my born days," he told Scully, "I never saw anything like it. He takes her when and where he wants and she hunts him like a she-wolf if he's not in her eye. If he's off at his bloomery for a day or two, she sulks till he comes back hauling the blooms of ore. Makes Sorrow look like a Quaker." Only a few years older than Florens, Scully was less bewildered by the sharp change in her demeanor than Willard was. He thought of himself as an astute judge of character, felt he, unlike Willard, had a wily, sureshot instinct for the true core of others. Willard judged people from their outside: Scully looked deeper. Although he relished Lina's nakedness, he saw a purity in her. Her loyalty, he believed, was not submission to Mistress or Florens; it was a sign of her own self-worth — a sort of keeping one's word. Honor, perhaps. And while he joined Willard in making fun of Sorrow, Scully preferred her over the other two servants. If he had been interested in seduction, that's who he would have chosen: the look of her was daunting, complicated, distant. The unblinking eyes, smoke gray, were not blank, but waiting. It was that lying-in-wait look that troubled Lina. Everyone but himself thought she was daft because she talked out loud when alone, but who didn't? Willard issued greetings to ewes regularly and Mistress always chatted directions to herself while at some solitary task. And Lina — she answered birds as if they were asking her advice on how to fly. To dismiss Sorrow as "the odd one" ignored her quick and knowing sense of her position. Her privacy protected her; her easy coupling a present to herself. When pregnant, she glowed and when her time came she sought help in exactly the right place from the right people. On the other hand, if he had been interested in rape, Florens would have been his prey. It was easy to spot that combination of defenselessness, eagerness to please and, most of all, a willingness to blame herself for the meanness of others. Clearly, from the look of her now, that was no longer true. The instant he saw her marching down the road — whether ghost or soldier — he knew she had become untouchable. His assessment of her un-rape-ability, however, was impersonal. Other than a voyeur's obsession with Lina's body, Scully had no carnal interest in females. Long ago the world of men and only men had stamped him and from the first moment he saw him he never had any doubt what effect the blacksmith would have on Florens. |
| 218 |
Thus her change from "have me always" to "don't touch me ever" seemed to him as predictable as it was marked. Also Scully's opinion of Mistress was less generous than Willard's. He did not dislike her but looked on her behavior after the master's death and her own recovery not simply as the effects of ill health and mourning. Mistress passed her days with the joy of a clock. She was a penitent, pure and simple. Which to him meant that underneath her piety was something cold if not cruel. Refusing to enter the grand house, the one in whose construction she had delighted, seemed to him a punishment not only of herself but of everyone, her dead husband in particular. What both husband and wife had enjoyed, even celebrated, she now despised as signs of both the third and seventh sins. However well she loved the man in life, his leaving her behind blasted her. How could she not look for some way to wreak a bit of vengeance, show him how bad she felt and how angry? In his twenty-two years, Scully had witnessed far more human folly than Willard. By the time he was twelve he had been schooled, loved and betrayed by an Anglican curate. He had been leased to the Synod by his so-called father following his mother's death on the floor of the tavern she worked in. The barkeep claimed three years of Scully's labor to work off her indebtedness, but the "father" appeared, paid the balance due and sold his son's services, along with two casks of Spanish wine, to the Synod. Scully never blamed the curate for betrayal nor for the flogging that followed, since the curate had to turn the circumstances of their being caught into the boy's lasciviousness, otherwise he would be not just defrocked but executed. Agreeing that Scully was too young to be permanently incorrigible, the elders passed him along to a landowner who needed a hand to work with a herdsman far away. A rural area, barely populated, where, they hoped, the boy might at best mend his ways or at worst have no opportunity to corrupt others. Scully anticipated running away as soon as he arrived in the region. But on the third day a violent winter storm froze and covered the land in three feet of snow. Cows died standing. Ice-coated starlings clung to branches drooping with snow. Willard and he slept in the barn among the sheep and cattle housed there, leaving the ones they could not rescue on their own. There in the warmth of animals, their own bodies clinging together, Scully altered his plans and Willard didn't mind at all. Although the older man liked drink, Scully, having slept beneath the bar of a tavern his whole childhood and seen its effects on his mother, avoided it. He decided to bide his time until, given the freedom fee, he was able to buy a horse. The carriage or cart or wagon drawn were not superior to the horse mounted. Anyone limited to walking everywhere never seemed to get anywhere. As the years slid by he remained mentally feisty while practicing patience, even as his hopes were beginning to dim. |
| 219 |
From all those who believe they have claim and rule over me. I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth, in your eye? Are you afraid? You should be. The hammer strikes air many times before it gets to you where it dies in weakness. You wrestle it from me and toss it away. Our clashing is long. I bare my teeth to bite you, to tear you open. Malaik is screaming. You pull my arms behind me. I twist away and escape you. The tongs are there, close by. Close by. I am swinging and swinging hard. Seeing you stagger and bleed I run. Then walk. Then float. An ice floe cut away from the riverbank in deep winter. I have no shoes. I have no kicking heart no home no tomorrow. I walk the day. I walk the night. The feathers close. For now. It is three months since I run from you and I never before see leaves make this much blood and brass. Color so loud it hurts the eye and for relief I must stare at the heavens high above the tree line. At night when day-bright gives way to stars jeweling the cold black sky, I leave Lina sleeping and come to this room. If you are live or ever you heal you will have to bend down to read my telling, crawl perhaps in a few places. I apologize for the discomfort. Sometimes the tip of the nail skates away and the forming of words is disorderly. Reverend Father never likes that. He raps our fingers and makes us do it over. In the beginning when I come to this room I am certain the telling will give me the tears I never have. I am wrong. Eyes dry, I stop telling only when the lamp burns down. Then I sleep among my words. The telling goes on without dream and when I wake it takes time to pull away, leave this room and do chores. Chores that are making no sense. We clean the chamber pot but are never to use it. We build tall crosses for the graves in the meadow then remove them, cut them shorter and put them back. We clean where Sir dies but cannot be anywhere else in this house. Spiders reign in comfort here and robins make nests in peace. All manner of small life enters the windows along with cutting wind. I shelter lamp flame with my body and bear the wind's cold teeth biting as though winter cannot wait to bury us. Mistress is not mindful of how cold the outhouses are nor is she remembering what night chill does to an infant. Mistress has cure but she is not well. Her heart is infidel. All smiles are gone. Each time she returns from the meetinghouse her eyes are nowhere and have no inside. Like the eyes of the women who examine me behind the closet door, Mistress' eyes only look out and what she is seeing is not to her liking. Her dress is dark and quiet. She prays much. She makes us all, Lina, Sorrow, Sorrow's daughter and me, no matter the weather, sleep either in the cowshed or the storeroom where bricks rope tools all manner of building waste are. Outside sleeping is for savages she says, so no more hammocks under trees for Lina and me even in fine weather. And no more fireplace for Sorrow and her baby girl because Mistress does not like the baby. |
| 220 |
One night of ice-cold rain Sorrow shelters herself and the baby here, downstairs behind the door in the room where Sir dies. Mistress slaps her face. Many times. She does not know I am here every night else she will whip me too as she believes her piety demands. Her churchgoing alters her but I don't believe they tell her to behave that way. These rules are her own and she is not the same. Scully and Willard say she is putting me up for sale. But not Lina. Sorrow she wants to give away but no one offers to take her. Sorrow is a mother. Nothing more nothing less. I like her devotion to her baby girl. She will not be called Sorrow. She has changed her name and is planning escape. She wants me to go with her but I have a thing to finish here. Worse is how Mistress is to Lina. She requires her company on the way to church but sits her by the road in all weather because she cannot enter. Lina can no longer bathe in the river and must cultivate alone. I am never hearing how they once talk and laugh together while tending garden. Lina is wanting to tell me, remind me that she early warns me about you. But her reasons for the warning make the warning itself wrong. I am remembering what you tell me from long ago when Sir is not dead. You say you see slaves freer than free men. One is a lion in the skin of an ass. The other is an ass in the skin of a lion. That it is the withering inside that enslaves and opens the door for what is wild. I know my withering is born in the Widow's closet. I know the claws of the feathered thing did break out on you because I cannot stop them wanting to tear you open the way you tear me. Still, there is another thing. A lion who thinks his mane is all. A she-lion who does not. I learn this from Daughter Jane. Her bloody legs do not stop her. She risks. Risks all to save the slave you throw out. There is no more room in this room. These words cover the floor. From now you will stand to hear me. The walls make trouble because lamplight is too small to see by. I am holding light in one hand and carving letters with the other. My arms ache but I have need to tell you this. I cannot tell it to anyone but you. I am near the door and at the closing now. What will I do with my nights when the telling stops? Dreaming will not come again. Sudden I am remembering. You won't read my telling. You read the world but not the letters of talk. You don't know how to. Maybe one day you will learn. If so, come to this farm again, part the snakes in the gate you made, enter this big, awing house, climb the stairs and come inside this talking room in daylight. If you never read this, no one will. These careful words, closed up and wide open, will talk to themselves. Round and round, side to side, bottom to top, top to bottom all across the room. Or. Or perhaps no. Perhaps these words need the air that is out in the world. Need to fly up then fall, fall like ash over acres of primrose and mallow. Over a turquoise lake, beyond the eternal hemlocks, through clouds cut by rainbow and flavor the soil of the earth. |
| 221 |
Lina will help. She finds horror in this house and much as she needs to be Mistress' need I know she loves fire more. See? You are correct. A minha mae too. I am become wilderness but I am also Florens. In full. Unforgiven. Unforgiving. No ruth, my love. None. Hear me? Slave. Free. I last. I will keep one sadness. That all this time I cannot know what my mother is telling me. Nor can she know what I am wanting to tell her. Mae, you can have pleasure now because the soles of my feet are hard as cypress. Neither one will want your brother. I know their tastes. Breasts provide the pleasure more than simpler things. Yours are rising too soon and are becoming irritated by the cloth covering your little girl chest. And they see and I see them see. No good follows even if I offered you to one of the boys in the quarter. Figo. You remember him. He was the gentle one with the horses and played with you in the yard. I saved the rinds for him and sweet bread to take to the others. Bess, his mother, knew my mind and did not disagree. She watched over her son like a hawk as I did over you. But it never does any lasting good, my love. There was no protection. None. Certainly not with your vice for shoes. It was as though you were hurrying up your breasts and hurrying also the lips of an old married couple. Understand me. There was no protection and nothing in the catechism to tell them no. I tried to tell Reverend Father. I hoped if we could learn letters somehow someday you could make your way. Reverend Father was full of kindness and bravery and said it was what God wanted no matter if they fined him, imprisoned him or hunted him down with gunfire for it as they did other priests who taught we to read. He believed we would love God more if we knew the letters to read by. I don't know that. What I know is there is magic in learning. When the tall man with yellow hair came to dine, I saw he hated the food and I saw things in his eyes that said he did not trust Senhor, Senhora or their sons. His way, I thought, is another way. His country far from here. There was no animal in his heart. He never looked at me the way Senhor does. He did not want. I don't know who is your father. It was too dark to see any of them. They came at night and took we three including Bess to a curing shed. Shadows of men sat on barrels, then stood. They said they were told to break we in. There is no protection. To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars form, the festering is ever below. Insults had been moving back and forth to and fro for many seasons between the king of we families and the king of others. I think men thrive on insults over cattle, women, water, crops. Everything heats up and finally the men of their families burn we houses and collect those they cannot kill or find for trade. Bound with vine one to another we are moved four times, each time more trading, more culling, more dying. We increase in number or we decrease in number until maybe seven times ten or ten times ten of we are driven into a holding pen. |
| 222 |
There we see men we believe are ill or dead. We soon learn they are neither. Their skin was confusing. The men guarding we and selling we are black. Two have hats and strange pieces of cloth at their throats. They assure we that the whitened men do not want to eat we. Still it is the continue of all misery. Sometimes we sang. Some of we fought. Mostly we slept or wept. Then the whitened men divided we and placed we in canoes. We come to a house made to float on the sea. Each water, river or sea, has sharks under. The whitened ones guarding we like that as much as the sharks are happy to have a plentiful feeding place. I welcomed the circling sharks but they avoided me as if knowing I preferred their teeth to the chains around my neck my waist my ankles. When the canoe heeled, some of we jumped, others were pulled under and we did not see their blood swirl until we alive ones were retrieved and placed under guard. We are put into the house that floats on the sea and we saw for the first time rats and it was hard to figure out how to die. Some of we tried; some of we did. Refusing to eat the oiled yam. Strangling we throat. Offering we bodies to the sharks that follow all the way night and day. I know it was their pleasure to freshen us with a lash but I also saw it was their pleasure to lash their own. Unreason rules here. Who lives who dies? Who could tell in that moaning and bellowing in the dark, in the awfulness? It is one matter to live in your own waste; it is another to live in another's. Barbados, I heard them say. After times and times of puzzle about why I could not die as others did. After pretending to be so in order to get thrown overboard. Whatever the mind plans, the body has other interests. So to Barbados where I found relief in the clean air and standing up straight under a sky the color of home. Grateful for the familiar heat of the sun instead of the steam of packed flesh. Grateful too for the earth supporting my feet never mind the pen I shared with so many. The pen that was smaller than the cargo hold we sailed in. One by one we were made to jump high, to bend over, to open our mouths. The children were best at this. Like grass trampled by elephants, they sprang up to try life again. They had stopped weeping long ago. Now, eyes wide, they tried to please, to show their ability and therefore their living worth. How unlikely their survival. How likely another herd will come to destroy them. A herd of men of heaped teeth fingering the hasps of whips. Men flushed red with cravings. Or, as I came to learn, destroyed by fatal ground life in the cane we were brought there to harvest. Snakes, tarantulas, lizards they called gators. I was burning sweat in cane only a short time when they took me away to sit on a platform in the sun. It was there I learned how I was not a person from my country, nor from my families. I was negrita. Everything. Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song — all of it cooked together in the color of my skin. |
| 223 |
in a wooden chair, in a darkened room, he sat and made bird-noises. Thirty different species of birds visited him and sat on the sill outside his shuttered window conversing about this and that. He seemed happy enough. (... And already I can see the repetitions beginning; because didn't my grandmother also find enormous ... and the stroke, too, was not the only ... and the Brass Monkey had her birds ... the curse begins already, and we haven't even got to the noses yet!) The lake was no longer frozen over. The thaw had come rapidly, as usual; many of the small boats, the shikaras, had been caught napping, which was also normal. But while these sluggards slept on, on dry land, snoring peacefully beside their owners, the oldest boat was up at the crack as old folk often are, and was therefore the first craft to move across the unfrozen lake. Tai's shikara ... this, too, was customary. Watch how the old boatman, Tai, makes good time through the misty water, standing stooped over at the back of his craft! How his oar, a wooden heart on a yellow stick, drives jerkily through the weeds! In these parts he's considered very odd because he rows standing up ... among other reasons. Tai, bringing an urgent summons to Doctor Aziz, is about to set history in motion ... while Aadam, looking down into the water, recalls what Tai taught him years ago: "The ice is always waiting, Aadam baba, just under the water's skin." Aadam's eyes are a clear blue, the astonishing blue of mountain sky, which has a habit of dripping into the pupils of Kashmiri men; they have not forgotten how to look. They see — there! like the skeleton of a ghost, just beneath the surface of Lake Dal! — the delicate tracery, the intricate crisscross of colorless lines, the cold waiting veins of the future. His German years, which have blurred so much else, haven't deprived him of the gift of seeing. Tai's gift. He looks up, sees the approaching V of Tai's boat, waves a greeting. Tai's arm rises — but this is a command. "Wait!" My grandfather waits; and during this hiatus, as he experiences the last peace of his life, a muddy, ominous sort of peace, I had better get round to describing him. Keeping out of my voice the natural envy of the ugly man for the strikingly impressive, I record that Doctor Aziz was a tall man. Pressed flat against a wall of his family home, he measured twenty-five bricks (a brick for each year of his life), or just over six foot two. A strong man also. His beard was thick and red — and annoyed his mother, who said only Hajis, men who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, should grow red beards. His hair, however, was rather darker. His sky-eyes you know about. Ingrid had said, "They went mad with the colors when they made your face." But the central feature of my grandfather's anatomy was neither color nor height, neither strength of arm nor straightness of back. There it was, reflected in the water, undulating like a mad plantain in the centre of his face ... Aadam Aziz, waiting for Tai, watches his rippling nose. |
| 224 |
No: because she is ill. ... While I sit like an empty pickle-jar in a pool of Anglepoised light, visited by this vision of my grandfather sixty-three years ago, which demands to be recorded, filling my nostrils with the acrid stench of his mother's embarrassment which has brought her out in boils, with the vinegary force of Aadam Aziz's determination to establish a practice so successful that she'll never have to return to the gem-stone-shop, with the blind mustiness of a big shadowy house in which the young Doctor stands, ill-at-ease, before a painting of a plain girl with lively eyes and a stag transfixed behind her on the horizon, speared by a dart from her bow. Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence: but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so that everything is in my head, down to the last detail, such as the way the mist seemed to slant across the early morning air ... everything, and not just the few clues one stumbles across, for instance by opening an old tin trunk which should have remained cobwebby and closed. ... Aadam refills his mother's glass and continues, worriedly, to examine her. "Put some cream on these rashes and blotches, Amma. For the headache, there are pills. The boils must be lanced. But maybe if you wore purdah when you sat in the store ... so that no disrespectful eyes could ... such complaints often begin in the mind ..." ... Slap of oar in water. Plot of spittle in lake. Tai clears his throat and mutters angrily, "A fine business. A wet-head nakkoo child goes away before he's learned one damned thing and he comes back a big doctor sahib with a big bag full of foreign machines, and he's still as silly as an owl. I swear: a too bad business." ... Doctor Aziz is shifting uneasily, from foot to foot, under the influence of the landowner's smile, in whose presence it is not possible to feel relaxed; and is waiting for some tic of reaction to his own extraordinary appearance. He has grown accustomed to these involuntary twitches of surprise at his size, his face of many colors, his nose ... but Ghani makes no sign, and the young Doctor resolves, in return, not to let his uneasiness show. He stops shifting his weight. They face each other, each suppressing (or so it seems) his view of the other, establishing the basis of their future relationship. And now Ghani alters, changing from art-lover to tough-guy. "This is a big chance for you, young man," he says. Aziz's eyes have strayed to Diana. Wide expanses of her blemished pink skin are visible. ... His mother is moaning, shaking her head. "No, what do you know, child, you have become a big-shot doctor but the gemstone business is different. Who would buy a turquoise from a woman hidden inside a black hood? It is a question of establishing trust. So they must look at me; and I must get pains and boils. Go, go, don't worry your head about your poor mother." ... "Big shot," Tai is spitting into the lake, "big bag, big shot. |
| 225 |
Pah! We haven't got enough bags at home that you must bring back that thing made of a pig's skin that makes one unclean just by looking at it? And inside, God knows what all." Doctor Aziz, seated amongst flowery curtains and the smell of incense, has his thoughts wrenched away from the patient waiting across the lake. Tai's bitter monologue breaks into his consciousness, creating a sense of dull shock, a smell like a casualty ward overpowering the incense ... the old man is clearly furious about something, possessed by an incomprehensible rage that appears to be directed at his erstwhile acolyte, or, more precisely and oddly, at his bag. Doctor Aziz attempts to make small talk ... "Your wife is well? Do they still talk about your bag of golden teeth?" ... tries to remake an old friendship; but Tai is in full flight now, a stream of invective pouring out of him. The Heidelberg bag quakes under the torrent of abuse. "Sister-sleeping pigskin bag from Abroad full of foreigners' tricks. Big-shot bag. Now if a man breaks an arm that bag will not let the bone-setter bind it in leaves. Now a man must let his wife lie beside that bag and watch knives come and cut her open. A fine business, what these foreigners put in our young men's heads. I swear: it is a too-bad thing. That bag should fry in Hell with the testicles of the ungodly." ... Ghani the landowner snaps his braces with his thumbs. "A big chance, yes indeed. They are saying good things about you in town. Good medical training. Good ... good enough ... family. And now our own lady doctor is sick so you get your opportunity. That woman, always sick these days, too old, I am thinking, and not up in the latest developments also, what-what? I say: physician heal thyself. And I tell you this: I am wholly objective in my business relations. Feelings, love, I keep for my family only. If a person is not doing a first-class job for me, out she goes! You understand me? So: my daughter Naseem is not well. You will treat her excellently. Remember I have friends; and ill-health strikes high and low alike." ... "Do you still pickle water-snakes in brandy to give you virility, Taiji? Do you still like to eat lotus-root without any spices?" Hesitant questions, brushed aside by the torrent of Tai's fury. Doctor Aziz begins to diagnose. To the ferryman, the bag represents Abroad; it is the alien thing, the invader, progress. And yes, it has indeed taken possession of the young Doctor's mind; and yes, it contains knives, and cures for cholera and malaria and smallpox; and yes, it sits between doctor and boatman, and has made them antagonists. Doctor Aziz begins to fight, against sadness, and against Tai's anger, which is beginning to infect him, to become his own, which erupts only rarely, but comes, when it does come, unheralded in a roar from his deepest places, laying waste everything in sight; and then vanishes, leaving him wondering why everyone is so upset ... They are approaching Ghani's house. A bearer awaits the shikara, standing with clasped hands on a little wooden jetty. |
| 226 |
Aadam Aziz's visits to the bedroom with the shaft of sunlight and the three lady wrestlers became weekly events; and on each occasion he was vouchsafed a glimpse, through the mutilated sheet, of a different seven-inch circle of the young woman's body. Her initial stomach-ache was succeeded by a very slightly twisted right ankle, an ingrowing toenail on the big toe of the left foot, a tiny cut on the lower left calf. ("Tetanus is a killer, Doctor Sahib," the landowner said, "My Naseem must not die for a scratch.") There was the matter of her stiff right knee, which the Doctor was obliged to manipulate through the hole in the sheet ... and after a time the illnesses leapt upwards, avoiding certain unmentionable zones, and began to proliferate around her upper half. She suffered from something mysterious which her father called Finger Rot, which made the skin flake off her hands; from weakness of the wrist-bones, for which Aadam prescribed calcium tablets; and from attacks of constipation, for which he gave her a course of laxatives, since there was no question of being permitted to administer an enema. She had fevers and she also had subnormal temperatures. At these times his thermometer would be placed under her armpit and he would hum and haw about the relative inefficiency of the method. In the opposite armpit she once developed a slight case of tineachloris and he dusted her with yellow powder; after this treatment — which required him to rub the powder in, gently but firmly, although the soft secret body began to shake and quiver and he heard helpless laughter coming through the sheet, because Naseem Ghani was very ticklish — the itching went away, but Naseem soon found a new set of complaints. She waxed anemic in the summer and bronchial in the winter. ("Her tubes are most delicate," Ghani explained, "like little flutes.") Far away the Great War moved from crisis to crisis, while in the cobwebbed house Doctor Aziz was also engaged in a total war against his sectioned patient's inexhaustible complaints. And, in all those war years, Naseem never repeated an illness. "Which only shows," Ghani told him, "that you are a good doctor. When you cure, she is cured for good. But alas!" — he struck his forehead — "She pines for her late mother, poor baby, and her body suffers. She is a too loving child." So gradually Doctor Aziz came to have a picture of Naseem in his mind, a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts. This phantasm of a partitioned woman began to haunt him, and not only in his dreams. Glued together by his imagination, she accompanied him on all his rounds, she moved into the front room of his mind, so that waking and sleeping he could feel in his fingertips the softness of her ticklish skin or the perfect tiny wrists or the beauty of the ankles; he could smell her scent of lavender and chambeli; he could hear her voice and her helpless laughter of a little girl; but she was headless, because he had never seen her face. His mother lay on her bed, spreadeagled on her stomach. |
| 227 |
They had acquired a life of their own. In short: my grandfather had fallen in love, and had come to think of the perforated sheet as something sacred and magical, because through it he had seen the things which had filled up the hole inside him which had been created when he had been hit on the nose by a tussock and insulted by the boatman Tai. On the day the World War ended, Naseem developed the longed-for headache. Such historical coincidences have littered, and perhaps befouled, my family's existence in the world. He hardly dared to look at what was framed in the hole in the sheet. Maybe she was hideous; perhaps that explained all this performance ... he looked. And saw a soft face that was not at all ugly, a cushioned setting for her glittering, gemstone eyes, which were brown with flecks of gold: tiger's-eyes. Doctor Aziz's fall was complete. And Naseem burst out, "But Doctor, my God, what a nose!" Ghani, angrily, "Daughter, mind your ..." But patient and doctor were laughing together, and Aziz was saying, "Yes, yes, it is a remarkable specimen. They tell me there are dynasties waiting in it ..." And he bit his tongue because he had been about to add, "... like snot." And Ghani, who had stood blindly beside the sheet for three long years, smiling and smiling and smiling, began once again to smile his secret smile, which was mirrored in the lips of the wrestlers. Meanwhile, the boatman, Tai, had taken his unexplained decision to give up washing. In a valley drenched in freshwater lakes, where even the very poorest people could (and did) pride themselves on their cleanliness, Tai chose to stink. For three years now, he had neither bathed nor washed himself after answering calls of nature. He wore the same clothes, unwashed, year in, year out; his one concession to winter was to put his chugha-coat over his putrescent pajamas. The little basket of hot coals which he carried inside the chugha, in the Kashmiri fashion, to keep him warm in the bitter cold, only animated and accentuated his evil odors. He took to drifting slowly past the Aziz household, releasing the dreadful fumes of his body across the small garden and into the house. Flowers died; birds fled from the ledge outside old Father Aziz's window. Naturally, Tai lost work; the English in particular were reluctant to be ferried about by a human cesspit. The story went around the lake that Tai's wife, driven to distraction by the old man's sudden filthiness, pleaded for a reason. He had answered: "Ask our foreign-returned doctor, ask that nakkoo, that German Aziz." Was it, then, an attempt to offend the Doctor's hypersensitive nostrils (in which the itch of danger had subsided somewhat under the anaesthetizing ministrations of love)? Or a gesture of unchangingness in defiance of the invasion of the doctori-attachE from Heidelberg? Once Aziz asked the ancient, straight out, what it was all for; but Tai only breathed on him and rowed away. The breath nearly felled Aziz; it was sharp as an axe. |
| 228 |
"But grief is making your head play trick! How can I know these things?" And after the body, bloated, wrapped in weeds, had been dredged up by a group of blank-faced boatmen, Tai visited the shikara halt and told the men there, as they recoiled from his breath of a bullock with dysentery, "He blames me, only imagine! Brings his loose Europeans here and tells me it is my fault when they jump into the lake! ... I ask, how did he know just where to look? Yes, ask him that, ask that nakkoo Aziz!" She had left a note. It read: "I didn't mean it." I make no comment; these events, which have tumbled from my lips any old how, garbled by haste and emotion, are for others to judge. Let me be direct now, and say that during the long, hard winter of 1918-19, Tai fell ill, contracting a violent skin disease, akin to that European curse called the King's Evil; but he refused to see Doctor Aziz, and was treated by a local homeopath. And in March, when the lake thawed, a marriage took place in a large marquee in the grounds of Ghani the landowner's house. The wedding contract assured Aadam Aziz of a respectable sum of money, which would help buy a house in Agra, and the dowry included, at Doctor Aziz's especial request, a certain mutilated bedsheet. The young couple sat on a dais, garlanded and cold, while the guests filed past dropping rupees into their laps. That night my grandfather placed the perforated sheet beneath his bride and himself and in the morning it was adorned by three drops of blood, which formed a small triangle. In the morning, the sheet was displayed, and after the consummation ceremony a limousine hired by the landowner arrived to drive my grandparents to Amritsar, where they would catch the Frontier Mail. Mountains crowded round and stared as my grandfather left his home for the last time. (He would return, once, but not to leave.) Aziz thought he saw an ancient boatman standing on land to watch them pass — but it was probably a mistake, since Tai was ill. The blister of a temple atop Sankara Acharya, which Muslims had taken to calling the Takht-e-Sulaiman, or Seat of Solomon, paid them no attention. Winter-bare poplars and snow-covered fields of saffron undulated around them as the car drove south, with an old leather bag containing, amongst other things, a stethoscope and a bedsheet, packed in the boot. Doctor Aziz felt, in the pit of his stomach, a sensation akin to weightlessness. Or falling. ( ... And now I am cast as a ghost. I am nine years old and the whole family, my father, my mother, the Brass Monkey and myself, are staying at my grandparents' house in Agra, and the grandchildren — myself among them — are staging the customary New Year's play; and I have been cast as a ghost. Accordingly — and surreptitiously so as to preserve the secrets of the forthcoming theatricals — I am ransacking the house for a spectral disguise. My grandfather is out and about his rounds. I am in his room. And here on top of this cupboard is an old trunk, covered in dust and spiders, but unlocked. |
| 229 |
And here, inside it, is the answer to my prayers. Not just a sheet, but one with a hole already cut in it! Here it is, inside this leather bag inside this trunk, right beneath an old stethoscope and a tube of mildewed Vick's Inhaler ... the sheet's appearance in our show was nothing less than a sensation. My grandfather took one look at it and rose roaring to his feet. He strode up on stage and unghosted me right in front of everyone. My grandmother's lips were so tightly pursed they seemed to disappear. Between them, the one booming at me in the voice of a forgotten boatman, the other conveying her fury through vanished lips, they reduced the awesome ghost to a weeping wreck. I fled, took to my heels and ran into the little cornfield, not knowing what had happened. I sat there — perhaps on the very spot on which Nadir Khan had sat! — for several hours, swearing over and over that I would never again open a forbidden trunk, and feeling vaguely resentful that it had not been locked in the first place. But I knew, from their rage, that the sheet was somehow very important indeed.) I have been interrupted by Padma, who brought me my dinner and then withheld it, blackmailing me: "So if you're going to spend all your time wrecking your eyes with that scribbling, at least you must read it to me." I have been singing for my supper — but perhaps our Padma will be useful, because it's impossible to stop her being a critic. She is particularly angry with my remarks about her name. "What do you know, city boy?" she cried — hand slicing the air. "In my village there is no shame in being named for the Dung Goddess. Write at once that you are wrong, completely." In accordance with my lotus's wishes, I insert, forthwith, a brief paean to Dung. Dung, that fertilizes and causes the crops to grow! Dung, which is patted into thin chapati-like cakes when still fresh and moist, and is sold to the village builders, who use it to secure and strengthen the walls of kachcha buildings made of mud! Dung, whose arrival from the nether end of cattle goes a long way towards explaining their divine and sacred status! Oh, yes, I was wrong, I admit I was prejudiced, no doubt because its unfortunate odors do have a way of offending my sensitive nose — how wonderful, how ineffably lovely it must be to be named for the Purveyor of Dung! ... On April 6th, 1919, the holy city of Amritsar smelled (gloriously, Padma, celestially!) of excrement. And perhaps the (beauteous!) reek did not offend the Nose on my grandfather's face — after all, Kashmiri peasants used it, as described above, for a kind of plaster. Even in Srinagar, hawkers with barrows of round dung-cakes were not an uncommon sight. But then the stuff was drying, muted, useful. Amritsar dung was fresh and (worse) redundant. Nor was it all bovine. It issued from the rumps of the horses between the shafts of the city's many tongas, ikkas and gharries; and mules and men and dogs attended nature's calls, mingling in a brotherhood of shit. |
| 230 |
But there were cows, too: sacred kine roaming the dusty streets, each patrolling its own territory, staking its claims in excrement. And flies! Public Enemy Number One, buzzing gaily from turd to steaming turd, celebrated and cross-pollinated these freely-given offerings. The city swarmed about, too, mirroring the motion of the flies. Doctor Aziz looked down from his hotel window on to this scene as a Jain in a face-mask walked past, brushing the pavement before him with a twig-broom, to avoid stepping on an ant, or even a fly. Spicy sweet fumes rose from a street-snack barrow. "Hot pakoras, pakoras hot!" A white woman was buying silks from a shop across the street and men in turbans were ogling her. Naseem — now Naseem Aziz — had a sharp headache; it was the first time she'd ever repeated an illness, but life outside her quiet valley had come as something of a shock to her. There was a jug of fresh lime water by her bed, emptying rapidly. Aziz stood at the window, inhaling the city. The spire of the Golden Temple gleamed in the sun. But his nose itched: something was not right here. Close-up of my grandfather's right hand: nails knuckles fingers all somehow bigger than you'd expect. Clumps of red hair on the outside edges. Thumb and forefinger pressed together, separated only by a thickness of paper. In short: my grandfather was holding a pamphlet. It had been inserted into his hand (we cut to a long-shot — nobody from Bombay should be without a basic film vocabulary) as he entered the hotel foyer. Scurrying of urchin through revolving door, leaflets falling in his wake, as the chaprassi gives chase. Mad revolutions in the doorway, roundandround; until chaprassi-hand demands a close-up, too, because it is pressing thumb to forefinger, the two separated only by the thickness of urchin-ear. Ejection of juvenile disseminator of gutter-tracts; but still my grandfather retained the message. Now, looking out of his window, he sees it echoed on a wall opposite; and there, on the minaret of a mosque; and in the large black type of newsprint under a hawker's arm. Leaflet newspaper mosque and wall are crying: Hartal! Which is to say, literally speaking, a day of mourning, of stillness, of silence. But this is India in the heyday of the Mahatma, when even language obeys the instructions of Gandhiji, and the word has acquired, under his influence, new resonances. Hartal — April 7, agree mosque newspaper wall and pamphlet, because Gandhi has decreed that the whole of India shall, on that day, come to a halt. To mourn, in peace, the continuing presence of the British. "I do not understand this hartal when nobody is dead," Naseem is crying softly. "Why will the train not run? How long are we stuck for?" Doctor Aziz notices a soldierly young man in the street, and thinks — the Indians have fought for the British; so many of them have seen the world by now, and been tainted by Abroad. They will not easily go back to the old world. The British are wrong to try and turn back the clock. |
| 231 |
Earlier that year Aadam Aziz had commissioned life-size blow-up photographs of his family to hang on the living-room wall; the three girls and two boys had posed dutifully enough, but Reverend Mother had rebelled when her turn came. Eventually, the photographer had tried to catch her unawares, but she seized his camera and broke it over his skull. Fortunately, he lived; but there are no photographs of my grandmother anywhere on the earth. She was not one to be trapped in anyone's little black box. It was enough for her that she must live in unveiled, barefaced shamelessness — there was no question of allowing the fact to be recorded. It was perhaps the obligation of facial nudity, coupled with Aziz's constant requests for her to move beneath him, that had driven her to the barricades; and the domestic rules she established were a system of self-defense so impregnable that Aziz, after many fruitless attempts, had more or less given up trying to storm her many ravelins and bastions, leaving her, like a large smug spider, to rule her chosen domain. (Perhaps, too, it wasn't a system of self-defense at all, but a means of defense against her self.) Among the things to which she denied entry were all political matters. When Doctor Aziz wished to talk about such things, he visited his friend the Rani, and Reverend Mother sulked; but not very hard, because she knew his visits represented a victory for her. The twin hearts of her kingdom were her kitchen and her pantry. I never entered the former, but remembered staring through the pantry's locked screen-doors at the enigmatic world within, a world of hanging wire baskets covered with linen cloths to keep out the flies, of tins which I knew to be full of gur and other sweets, of locked chests with neat square labels, of nuts and turnips and sacks of grain, of goose-eggs and wooden brooms. Pantry and kitchen were her inalienable territory; and she defended them ferociously. When she was carrying her last child, my aunt Emerald, her husband offered to relieve her of the chore of supervising the cook. She did not reply; but the next day, when Aziz approached the kitchen, she emerged from it with a metal pot in her hands and barred the doorway. She was fat and also pregnant, so there was not much room left in the doorway. Aadam Aziz frowned. "What is this, wife?" To which my grandmother answered, "This, whatsitsname, is a very heavy pot; and if just once I catch you in here, whatsitsname, I'll push your head into it, add some dahi, and make, whatsitsname, a korma." I don't know how my grandmother came to adopt the term whatsitsname as her leitmotif, but as the years passed it invaded her sentences more and more often. I like to think of it as an unconscious cry for help ... as a seriously-meant question. Reverend Mother was giving us a hint that, for all her presence and bulk, she was adrift in the universe. She didn't know, you see, what it was called. ... And at the dinner-table, imperiously, she continued to rule. |
| 232 |
this green-medicine wallah! — and as a result, the charlatan, whom I will not deign to glorify with a description, came to call. I, in all innocence and for Padma's sake, permitted him to examine me. I should have feared the worst; the worst is what he did. Believe this if you can: the fraud has pronounced me whole! "I see no cracks," he intoned mournfully, differing from Nelson at Copenhagen in that he possessed no good eye, his blindness not the choice of stubborn genius but the inevitable curse of his folly! Blindly, he impugned my state of mind, cast doubts on my reliability as a witness, and Godknowswhatelse: "I see no cracks." In the end it was Padma who shooed him away. "Never mind, Doctor Sahib," Padma said, "we will look after him ourselves." On her face I saw a kind of recognition of her own dull guilt ... exit Baligga, never to return to these pages. But good God! Has the medical profession — the calling of Aadam Aziz — sunk so low? To this cess-pool of Baliggas? In the end, if this be true, everyone will do without doctors ... which brings me back to the reason why Amina Sinai awoke one morning with the sun on her lips. "It's come up in the wrong place!" she yelped, by accident, and then, through the fading buzzing of her bad night's sleep, understood how in this month of illusion she had fallen victim to a trick, because all that had happened was that she had woken up in Delhi, in the home of her new husband, which faced east towards the sun; so the truth of the matter was that the sun was in the right place, and it was her position which had changed ... but even after she grasped this elementary thought, and stored it away with the many similar mistakes she had made since coming here (because her confusion about the sun had been a regular occurrence, as if her mind were refusing to accept the alteration in her circumstances, the new, above-ground position of her bed), something of its jumbling influence remained with her and prevented her from feeling entirely at ease. "In the end, everyone can do without fathers," Doctor Aziz told his daughter when he said goodbye; and Reverend Mother added, "Another orphan in the family, whatsitsname, but never mind, Muhammad was an orphan too; and you can say this for your Ahmed Sinai, whatsitsname, at least he is half Kashmiri." Then, with his own hands, Doctor Aziz had passed a green tin trunk into the railway compartment where Ahmed Sinai awaited his bride. "The dowry is neither small nor vast as these things go," my grandfather said. "We are not crorepatis, you understand. But we have given you enough; Amina will give you more." Inside the green tin trunk: silver samovars, brocade saris, gold coins given to Doctor Aziz by grateful patients, a museum in which the exhibits represented illnesses cured and lives saved. And now Aadam Aziz lifted his daughter (with his own arms), passing her up after the dowry into the care of this man who had renamed and so reinvented her, thus becoming in a sense her father as well as her new husband ... |
| 233 |
Amina would rise before he did, her assiduity driving her to dust everything, even the cane chick-blinds (until he agreed to employ a hamal for the purpose); but what Ahmed never knew was that his wife's talents were most dedicatedly, most determinedly applied not to the externals of their lives, but to the matter of Ahmed Sinai himself. Why had she married him? — For solace, for children. But at first the insomnia coating her brain got in the way of her first aim; and children don't always come at once. So Amina had found herself dreaming about an undreamable poet's face and waking with an unspeakable name on her lips. You ask: what did she do about it? I answer: she gritted her teeth and set about putting herself straight. This is what she told herself: "You big ungrateful goof, can't you see who is your husband now? Don't you know what a husband deserves?" To avoid fruitless controversy about the correct answers to these questions, let me say that, in my mother's opinion, a husband deserved unquestioning loyalty, and unreserved, full-hearted love. But there was a difficulty: Amina, her mind clogged up with Nadir Khan and his insomnia, found she couldn't naturally provide Ahmed Sinai with these things. And so, bringing her gift of assiduity to bear, she began to train herself to love him. To do this she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his component parts, physical as well as behavioral, compartmentalizing him into lips and verbal tics and prejudices and likes ... in short, she fell under the spell of the perforated sheet of her own parents, because she resolved to fall in love with her husband bit by bit. Each day she selected one fragment of Ahmed Sinai, and concentrated her entire being upon it until it became wholly familiar; until she felt fondness rising up within her and becoming affection and, finally, love. In this way she came to adore his over-loud voice and the way it assaulted her eardrums and made her tremble; and his peculiarity of always being in a good mood until after he had shaved — after which, each morning, his manner became stern, gruff, business-like and distant; and his vulture-hooded eyes which concealed what she was sure was his inner goodness behind a bleakly ambiguous gaze; and the way his lower lip jutted out beyond his upper one; and his shortness which led him to forbid her ever to wear high heels ... "My God," she told herself, "it seems that there are a million different things to love about every man!" But she was undismayed. "Who, after all," she reasoned privately, "ever truly knows another human being completely?" and continued to learn to love and admire his appetite for fried foods, his ability to quote Persian poetry, the furrow of anger between his eyebrows ... "At this rate," she thought, "there will always be something fresh about him to love; so our marriage just can't go stale." In this way, assiduously, my mother settled down to life in the old city. The tin trunk sat unopened in an old almirah. |
| 234 |
The Sindhi and the Bengali had very little in common — they didn't speak the same language or cook the same food; but they were both Muslims, and they both detested the interposed Hindu. They dropped garbage on his house from their rooftops. They hurled multi-lingual abuse at him from their windows. They flung scraps of meat at his door ... while he, in turn, paid urchins to throw stones at their windows, stones with messages wrapped round them: "Wait," the messages said, "Your turn will come" ... the children of the muhalla did not call my father by his right name. They knew him as "the man who can't follow his nose." Ahmed Sinai was the possessor of a sense of direction so inept that, left to his own devices, he could even get lost in the winding gullies of his own neighborhood. Many times the street-arabs in the lanes had come across him, wandering forlornly, and been offered a four-anna chavanni piece to escort him home. I mention this because I believe that my father's gift for taking wrong turnings did not simply afflict him throughout his life; it was also a reason for his attraction to Amina Sinai (because thanks to Nadir Khan, she had shown that she could take wrong turnings, too); and, what's more, his inability to follow his own nose dripped into me, to some extent clouding the nasal inheritance I received from other places, and making me, for year after year, incapable of sniffing out true road ... But that's enough for now, because I've given the three businessmen enough time to get to the industrial estate. I shall add only that (in my opinion as a direct consequence of his lack of a sense of direction) my father was a man over whom, even in his moments of triumph, there hung the stink of future failure, the odor of a wrong turning that was just around the corner, an aroma which could not be washed away by his frequent baths. Mr. Kemal, who smelled it, would say privately to S. P. Butt, "These Kashmiri types, old boy: well-known fact they never wash." This slander connects my father to the boatman Tai ... to Tai in the grip of the self-destructive rage which made him give up being clean. At the industrial estate, night-watchmen were sleeping peacefully through the noise of the fire-engines. Why? How? Because they had made a deal with the Ravana mob, and, when tipped off about the gang's impending arrival, would take sleeping draughts and pull their charpoy beds away from the buildings of the estate. In this way the gang avoided violence, and the night-watchmen augmented their meager wages. It was an amicable and not unintelligent arrangement. Amid sleeping night-watchmen, Mr. Kemal, my father and S. P. Butt watched cremated bicycles rise up into the sky in thick black clouds. Butt father Kemal stood alongside fire-engines, as relief flooded through them, because it was the Arjuna Indiabike godown that was burning — the Arjuna brand-name, taken from a hero of Hindu mythology, had failed to disguise the fact that the company was Muslim-owned. |
| 235 |
S. S. S. party got them on every wall; not the Nazi swastika which was the wrong way round, but the ancient Hindu symbol of power. Svasti is Sanskrit for good) ... this Lifafa Das whose arrival I've been trumpeting was a young fellow who was invisible until he smiled, when he became beautiful, or rattled his drum, whereupon he became irresistible to children. Dugdugee-men: all over India, they shout, "Dilli dekho," "come see Delhi!" But this was Delhi, and Lifafa Das had altered his cry accordingly. "See the whole world, come see everything!" The hyperbolic formula began, after a time, to prey upon his mind; more and more picture postcards went into his peepshow as he tried, desperately, to deliver what he promised, to put everything into his box. (I am suddenly reminded of Nadir Khan's friend the painter: is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality? Worse: am I infected, too?) Inside the peepshow of Lifafa Das were pictures of the Taj Mahal, and Meenakshi Temple, and the holy Ganges; but as well as these famous sights the peepshow-man had felt the urge to include more contemporary images — Stafford Cripps leaving Nehru's residence; untouchables being touched; educated persons sleeping in large numbers on railway lines; a publicity still of a European actress with a mountain of fruit on her head — Lifafa called her Carmen Verandah; even a newspaper photograph, mounted on card, of a fire at the industrial estate. Lifafa Das did not believe in shielding his audiences from the not-always-pleasant features of the age ... and often, when he came into these gullies, grown-ups as well as children came to see what was new inside his box on wheels, and among his most frequent customers was Begum Amina Sinai. But today there is something hysterical in the air; something brittle and menacing has settled on the muhalla as the cloud of cremated Indiabikes hangs overhead ... and now it slips its leash, as this girl with her one continuous eyebrow squeals, her voice lisping with an innocence it does not possess, "Me firtht! Out of my way ... let me thee! I can't thee!" Because there are already eyes at the holes in the box, there are already children absorbed in the progression of postcards, and Lifafa Das says (without pausing in his work — he goes right on turning the knob which keeps the postcards moving inside the box), "A few minutes, bibi; everyone will have his turn; wait only." To which the one-eyebrowed midget queen replies, "No! No! I want to be firtht!" Lifafa stops smiling — becomes invisible — shrugs. Unbridled fury appears on the face of the midget queen. And now an insult rises; a deadly barb trembles on her lips. "You've got a nerve, coming into thith muhalla! I know you: my father knows you: everyone knows you're a Hindu!!" Lifafa Das stands silently, turning the handles of his box; but now the pony-tailed one-eyebrowed valkyrie is chanting, pointing with pudgy fingers, and the boys in their school whites and snake-buckles are joining in, "Hindu! |
| 236 |
One journey began at a fort; one should have ended at a fort, and did not. One foretold the future; the other settled its geographical location. During one journey, monkeys danced entertainingly; while, in the other place, a monkey was also dancing, but with disastrous results. In both adventures, a part was played by vultures. And many-headed monsters lurked at the end of both roads. One at a time, then ... and here is Amina Sinai beneath the high walls of the Red Fort, where Mughals ruled, from whose heights the new nation will be proclaimed ... neither monarch nor herald, my mother is nevertheless greeted with warmth (despite the weather). In the last light of the day, Lifafa Das exclaims, "Begum Sahiba! Oh, that is excellent that you came!" Dark-skinned in a white sari, she beckons him towards the taxi; he reaches for the back door; but the driver snaps, "What do you think? Who do you think you are? Come on now, get in the front seat damn smart, leave the lady to sit in the back!" So Amina shares her seat with a black peepshow on wheels, while Lifafa Das apologizes: "Sorry, hey, Begum Sahiba? Good intents are no offence." But here, refusing to wait its turn, is another taxi, pausing outside another fort, unloading its cargo of three men in business suits, each carrying a bulky gray bag under his coat ... one man long as a life and thin as a lie, a second who seems to lack a spine, and a third whose lower lip juts, whose belly tends to squashiness, whose hair is thinning and greasy and worming over the tops of his ears, and between whose eyebrows is the tell-tale furrow that will, as he ages, deepen into the scar of a bitter, angry man. The taxi-driver is ebullient despite the cold. "Purana Qila!" he calls out, "Everybody out, please! Old Fort, here we are!" ... There have been many, many cities of Delhi, and the Old Fort, that blackened ruin, is a Delhi so ancient that beside it our own Old City is merely a babe in arms. It is to this ruin of an impossibly antique time that Kemal, Butt and Ahmed Sinai have been brought by an anonymous telephone call which ordered, "Tonight. Old Fort. Just after sunset. But no police ... or godown funtoosh!" Clutching their gray bags, they move into the ancient, crumbling world. ... Clutching at her handbag, my mother sits beside a peep-show, while Lifafa Das rides in front with the puzzled, irascible driver, and directs the cab into the streets on the wrong side of the General Post Office; and as she enters these causeways where poverty eats away at the tarmac like a drought, where people lead their invisible lives (because they share Lifafa Das's curse of invisibility, and not all of them have beautiful smiles), something new begins to assail her. Under the pressure of these streets which are growing narrower by the minute, more crowded by the inch, she has lost her "city eyes." When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible people, the men with elephantiasis of the balls and the beggars in boxcars don't impinge on you, and the concrete sections of future drainpipes don't look like dormitories. |
| 237 |
— into the distant meanness of the lane. And now Lifafa Das, with a curious expression on his face, says, "They're funtoosh! All finished! Soon they will all go; and then we'll be free to kill each other." Touching her belly with one light hand, she follows him into a darkened doorway while her face bursts into flames. ... While at the Old Fort, Ahmed Sinai waits for Ravana. My father in the sunset: standing in the darkened doorway of what was once a room in the ruined walls of the fort, lower lip protruding fleshily, hands clasped behind his back, head full of money worries. He was never a happy man. He smelled faintly of future failure; he mistreated servants; perhaps he wished that, instead of following his late father into the leathercloth business, he had had the strength to pursue his original ambition, the rearrangement of the Quran in accurately chronological order. (He once told me: "When Muhammed prophesied, people wrote down what he said on palm leaves, which were kept any old how in a box. After he died, Abubakr and the others tried to remember the correct sequence; but they didn't have very good memories." Another wrong turning: instead of rewriting a sacred book, my father lurked in a ruin, awaiting demons. It's no wonder he wasn't happy; and I would be no help. When I was born, I broke his big toe.) ... My unhappy father, I repeat, thinks bad-temperedly about cash. About his wife, who wheedles rupees out of him and picks his pockets at night. And his ex-wife (who eventually died in an accident, when she argued with a camel-cart driver and was bitten in the neck by the camel), who writes him endless begging letters, despite the divorce settlement. And his distant cousin Zohra, who needs dowry money from him, so that she can raise children to marry his and so get her hooks into even more of his cash. And then there are Major Zulfikar's promises of money (at this stage, Major Zulfy and my father got on very well). The Major had been writing letters saying, "You must decide for Pakistan when it comes, as it surely will. It's certain to be a goldmine for men like us. Please let me introduce you to M. A. J. himself ..." but Ahmed Sinai distrusted Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and never accepted Zulfy's offer; so when Jinnah became President of Pakistan, there would be another wrong turning to think about. And, finally, there were letters from my father's old friend, the gynecologist Doctor Narlikar, in Bombay. "The British are leaving in droves, Sinai bhai. Property is dirt cheap! Sell up; come here; buy; live the rest of your life in luxury!" Verses of the Quran had no place in a head so full of cash ... and, in the meantime, here he is, alongside S. P. Butt who will die in a train to Pakistan, and Mustapha Kemal who will be murdered by goondas in his grand Flagstaff Road house and have the words "mother-sleeping hoarder" written on his chest in his own blood ... alongside these two doomed men, waiting in the secret shadow of a ruin to spy on a black-mailer coming for his money. |
| 238 |
that Mr. Homi Catrack in Versailles Villa, Parsee chap, but a racehorse-owner. Produces films and all. And the Ibrahims in Sans Souci, Nussie Ibrahim is having a baby, too, you can be friends ... and the old man Ibrahim, with so-big sisal farms in Africa. Good family." "... And afterwards I can do what I like with the house ... ?" "Yes, afterwards, naturally, he'll be gone ..." "... It's all worked out excellently," William Methwold says. "Did you know my ancestor was the chap who had the idea of building this whole city? Sort of Raffles of Bombay. As his descendant, at this important juncture, I feel the, I don't know, need to play my part. Yes, excellently ... when d'you move in? Say the word and I'll move off to the Taj Hotel. Tomorrow? Excellent. Sabkuch ticktock hai." These were the people amongst whom I spent my childhood: Mr. Homi Catrack, film magnate and racehorse-owner, with his idiot daughter Toxy who had to be locked up with her nurse, Bi-Appah, the most fearsome woman I ever knew; also the Ibrahims in Sans Souci, old man Ibrahim Ibrahim with his goatee and sisal, his sons Ismail and Ishaq, and Ismail's tiny flustery hapless wife Nussie, whom we always called Nussie-the-duck on account of her waddling gait, and in whose womb my friend Sonny was growing, even now, getting closer and closer to his misadventure with a pair of gynecological forceps ... Escorial Villa was divided into flats. On the ground floor lived the Dubashes, he a physicist who would become a leading light at the Trombay nuclear research base, she a cipher beneath whose blankness a true religious fanaticism lay concealed — but I'll let it lie, mentioning only that they were the parents of Cyrus (who would not be conceived for a few months yet), my first mentor, who played girls' parts in school plays and was known as Cyrus-the-great. Above them was my father's friend Doctor Narlikar, who had bought a flat here too ... he was as black as my mother; had the ability of glowing brightly whenever he became excited or aroused; hated children, even though he brought us into the world; and would unleash upon the city, when he died, that tribe of women who could do anything and in whose path no obstacle could stand. And, finally on the top floor, were Commander Sabarmati and Lila — Sabarmati who was one of the highest flyers in the Navy, and his wife with her expensive tastes; he hadn't been able to believe his luck in getting her a home so cheaply. They had two sons, aged eighteen months and four months, who would grow up to be slow and boisterous and to be nicknamed Eyeslice and Hairoil; and they didn't know (how could they?) that I would destroy their lives ... Selected by William Methwold, these people who would form the center of my world moved into the Estate and tolerated the curious whims of the Englishman — because the price, after all, was right. ... There are thirty days to go to the transfer of power and Lila Sabarmati is on the telephone, "How can you stand it, Nussie? |
| 239 |
Public announcements nurture me as I grow towards my time, and there are only seven months left to go. How many things people notions we bring with us into the world, how many possibilities and also restrictions of possibility! — Because all of these were the parents of the child born that midnight, and for every one of the midnight children there were as many more. Among the parents of midnight: the failure of the Cabinet Mission scheme; the determination of M. A. Jinnah, who was dying and wanted to see Pakistan formed in his lifetime, and would have done anything to ensure it — that same Jinnah whom my father, missing a turn as usual, refused to meet; and Mountbatten with his extraordinary haste and his chicken-breast-eater of a wife; and more and more — Red Fort and Old Fort, monkeys and vultures dropping hands, and white transvestites, and bone-setters and mongoose-trainers and Shri Ramram Seth who made too much prophecy. And my father's dream of rearranging the Quran has its place; and the burning of a godown which turned him into a man of property and not leathercloth; and the piece of Ahmed which Amina could not love. To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that. And fishermen, and Catharine of Braganza, and Mumbadevi coconuts rice; Sivaji's stature and Methwold's Estate; a swimming pool in the shape of British India and a two-storey hillock; a center-parting and a nose from Bergerac; an inoperative clock tower and a little circus-ring; an Englishman's lust for an Indian allegory and the seduction of an accordionist's wife. Budgerigars, ceiling-fans, the Times of India are all part of the luggage I brought into the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child? Blue Jesus leaked into me; and Mary's desperation, and Joseph's revolutionary wildness, and the flightiness of Alice Pereira ... all these made me, too. If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance ... perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque. "At last," Padma says with satisfaction, "you've learned how to tell things really fast." August 13th, 1947: discontent in the heavens. Jupiter, Saturn and Venus are in quarrelsome vein; moreover, the three crossed stars are moving into the most ill-favored house of all. Benarsi astrologers name it fearfully: "Karamstan! They enter Karamstan!" While astrologers make frantic representations to Congress Party bosses, my mother lies down for her afternoon nap. While Earl Mountbatten deplores the lack of trained occultists on his General Staff, the slowly turning shadows of a ceiling-fan caress Amina into sleep. While M. A. Jinnah, secure in the knowledge that his Pakistan will be born in just eleven hours, a full day before independent India, for which there are still thirty-five hours to go, is scoffing at the protestations of horoscope-mongers, shaking his head in amusement, Amina's head, too, is moving from side to side. |
| 240 |
Saddled now with flypaper-dreams and imaginary ancestors, I am still over a day away from being born ... but now the remorseless ticktock reasserts itself: twenty-nine hours to go, twenty-eight, twenty-seven ... What other dreams were dreamed on that last night? Was it then — yes, why not — that Doctor Narlikar, ignorant of the drama that was about to unfold at his Nursing Home, first dreamed of tetrapods? Was it on that last night — while Pakistan was being born to the north and west of Bombay — that my uncle Hanif, who had come (like his sister) to Bombay, and who had fallen in love with an actress, the divine Pia ("Her face is her fortune!" the Illustrated Weekly once said), first imagined the cinematic device which would soon give him the first of his three hit pictures? ... It seems likely; myths, nightmares, fantasies were in the air. This much is certain: on that last night, my grandfather Aadam Aziz, alone now in the big old house in Cornwallis Road — except for a wife whose strength of will seemed to increase as Aziz was ground down by age, and for a daughter, Alia, whose embittered virginity would last until a bomb split her in two over eighteen years later — was suddenly imprisoned by great metal hoops of nostalgia, and lay awake as they pressed down upon his chest; until finally, at five o'clock in the morning of August 14th — nineteen hours to go — he was pushed out of bed by an invisible force and drawn towards an old tin trunk. Opening it, he found: old copies of German magazines; Lenin's What Is To Be Done?; a folded prayer-mat; and at last the thing which he had felt an irresistible urge to see once more — white and folded and glowing faintly in the dawn — my grandfather drew out, from the tin trunk of his past, a stained and perforated sheet, and discovered that the hole had grown; that there were other, smaller holes in the surrounding fabric; and in the grip of a wild nostalgic rage he shook his wife awake and astounded her by yelling, as he waved her history under her nose: "Moth-eaten! Look, Begum: moth-eaten! You forgot to put in any naphthalene balls!" But now the countdown will not be denied ... eighteen hours; seventeen; sixteen ... and already, at Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home, it is possible to hear the shrieks of a woman in labor. Wee Willie Winkie is here; and his wife Vanita; she had been in a protracted, unproductive labor for eight hours now. The first pangs hit her just as, hundreds of miles away, M. A. Jinnah announced the midnight birth of a Muslim nation ... but still she writhes on a bed in the Narlikar Home's "charity ward" (reserved for the babies of the poor) ... her eyes are standing half-way out of her head, her body glistens with sweat, but the baby shows no signs of coming, nor is its father present; it is eight o'clock in the morning, but there is still the possibility that, given the circumstances, the baby could be waiting for midnight. Rumors in the city: "The statue galloped last night!" ... "And the stars are unfavorable!" ... |
| 241 |
I can think of no other reason for Padma's bizarre behavior; and this explanation at least has the merit of being as outlandish as the rage into which she fell when, tonight, I made the error of writing (and reading aloud) a word which should not have been spoken ... ever since the episode of the quack doctor's visit, I have sniffed out a strange discontent in Padma, exuding its enigmatic spoor from her eccrine (or apocrine) glands. Distressed, perhaps, by the futility of her midnight attempts at resuscitating my "other pencil," the useless cucumber hidden in my pants, she has been waxing grouchy. (And then there was her ill-tempered reaction, last night, to my revelation of the secrets of my birth, and her irritation at my low opinion of the sum of one hundred rupees.) I blame myself: immersed in my autobiographical enterprise, I failed to consider her feelings, and began tonight on the most unfortunate of false notes. "Condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments," I wrote and read aloud, "I have nevertheless done better than my grandfather; because while Aadam Aziz remained the sheet's victim, I have become its master — and Padma is the one who is now under its spell. Sitting in my enchanted shadows, I vouchsafe daily glimpses of myself — while she, my squatting glimpser, is captivated, helpless as a mongoose frozen into immobility by the swaying, blinkless eyes of a hooded snake, paralyzed — yes! — by love." That was the word: love. Written-and-spoken, it raised her voice to an unusually shrill pitch; it unleashed from her lips a violence which would have wounded me, were I still vulnerable to words. "Love you?" our Padma piped scornfully, "What for, my God? What use are you, little princeling," — and now came her attempted coup de grace — "as a lover?" Arm extended, its hairs glowing in the lamplight, she jabbed a contemptuous index finger in the direction of my admittedly nonfunctional loins; a long, thick digit, rigid with jealousy, which unfortunately served only to remind me of another, long-lost finger ... so that she, seeing her arrow miss its mark, shrieked, "Madman from somewhere! That doctor was right!" and rushed distractedly from the room. I heard footsteps clattering down the metal stairs to the factory floor; feet rushing between the dark-shrouded pickle-vats; and a door, first unbolted and then slammed. Thus abandoned, I have returned, having no option, to my work. The fisherman's pointing finger: unforgettable focal point of the picture which hung on a sky-blue wall in Buckingham Villa, directly above the sky-blue crib in which, as Baby Saleem, midnight's child, I spent my earliest days. The young Raleigh — and who else? — sat, framed in teak, at the feet of an old, gnarled, net-mending sailor — did he have a walrus moustache? — whose right arm, fully extended, stretched out towards a watery horizon, while his liquid tales rippled around the fascinated ears of Raleigh — and who else? Because there was certainly another boy in the picture, sitting cross-legged in frilly collar and button-down tunic ... |
| 242 |
my God, what a notion! How much of my future hung above my crib, just waiting for me to understand it? How many warnings was I given — how many did I ignore? ... But no. I will not be a "madman from somewhere," to use Padma's eloquent phrase. I will not succumb to cracked digressions; not while I have the strength to resist the cracks. When Amina Sinai and Baby Saleem arrived home in a borrowed Studebaker, Ahmed Sinai brought a manila envelope along for the ride. Inside the envelope: a pickle-jar, emptied of lime kasaundy, washed, boiled, purified — and now, refilled. A well-sealed jar, with a rubber diaphragm stretched over its tin lid and held in place by a twisted rubber band. What was sealed beneath rubber, preserved in glass, concealed in manila? This: travelling home with father, mother and baby was a quantity of briny water in which, floating gently, hung an umbilical cord. (But was it mine or the Other's? That's something I can't tell you.) While the newly-hired ayah, Mary Pereira, made her way to Methwold's Estate by bus, an umbilical cord travelled in state in the glove compartment of a film magnate's Studey. While Baby Saleem grew towards manhood, umbilical tissue hung unchanging in bottled brine, at the back of a teak almirah. And when, years later, our family entered its exile in the Land of the Pure, when I was struggling towards purity, umbilical cords would briefly have their day. Nothing was thrown away; baby and afterbirth were both retained; both arrived at Methwold's Estate; both awaited their time. I was not a beautiful baby. Baby-snaps reveal that my large moon-face was too large; too perfectly round. Something lacking in the region of the chin. Fair skin curved across my features — but birthmarks disfigured it; dark stains spread down my western hairline, a dark patch colored my eastern ear. And my temples: too prominent: bulbous Byzantine domes. (Sonny Ibrahim and I were born to be friends — when we bumped our foreheads, Sonny's forcep-hollows permitted my bulby temples to nestle within them, as snugly as carpenter's joints.) Amina Sinai, immeasurably relieved by my single head, gazed upon it with redoubled maternal fondness, seeing it through a beautifying mist, ignoring the ice-like eccentricity of my sky-blue eyes, the temples like stunted horns, even the rampant cucumber of the nose. Baby Saleem's nose: it was monstrous; and it ran. Intriguing features of my early life: large and unbeautiful as I was, it appears I was not content. From my very first days I embarked upon an heroic program of self-enlargement. (As though I knew that, to carry the burdens of my future life, I'd need to be pretty big.) By mid-September I had drained my mother's not inconsiderable breasts of milk. A wet-nurse was briefly employed but she retreated, dried-out as a desert after only a fortnight, accusing Baby Saleem of trying to bite off her nipples with his toothless gums. I moved on to the bottle and downed vast quantities of compound: the bottle's nipples suffered, too, vindicating the complaining wet-nurse. |
| 243 |
except that I had arrived; I was already beginning to take my place at the center of the universe; and by the time I had finished, I would give meaning to it all. You don't believe me? Listen: at my cradle-side, Mary Pereira is singing a little song: Anything you want to be, you can be: You can be just what-all you want. By the time of my circumcision by a barber with a cleft palate from the Royal Barber House on Gowalia Tank Road (I was just over two months old), I was already much in demand at Methwold's Estate. (Incidentally, on the subject of the circumcision: I still swear that I can remember the grinning barber, who held me by the foreskin while my member waggled frantically like a slithering snake; and the razor descending, and the pain; but I'm told that, at the time, I didn't even blink.) Yes, I was a popular little fellow: my two mothers, Amina and Mary, couldn't get enough of me. In all practical matters, they were the most intimate of allies. After my circumcision, they bathed me together; and giggled together as my mutilated organ waggled angrily in the bathwater. "We better watch this boy, Madam," Mary said naughtily, "His thing has a life of its own!" And Amina, "Tch, tch, Mary, you're terrible, really ..." But then amid sobs of helpless laughter, "Just see, Madam, his poor little soo-soo!" Because it was wiggling again, thrashing about, like a chicken with a slitted gullet ... Together, they cared for me beautifully; but in the matter of emotion, they were deadly rivals. Once, when they took me for a pramride through the Hanging Gardens on Malabar Hill, Amina overheard Mary telling the other ayahs, "Look: here's my own big son" — and felt oddly threatened. Baby Saleem became, after that, the battleground of their loves; they strove to outdo one another in demonstrations of affection; while he, blinking by now, gurgling aloud, fed on their emotions, using it to accelerate his growth, expanding and swallowing infinite hugs kisses chucks-under-the-chin, charging towards the moment when he would acquire the essential characteristic of human beings: every day, and only in those rare moments when I was left alone with the fisherman's pointing finger, I tried to heave myself erect in my cot. (And while I made unavailing efforts to get to my feet, Amina, too, was in the grip of a useless resolve — she was trying to expel from her mind the dream of her unnameable husband, which had replaced the dream of flypaper on the night after I was born; a dream of such overwhelming reality that it stayed with her throughout her waking hours. In it, Nadir Khan came to her bed and impregnated her; such was the mischievous perversity of the dream that it confused Amina about the parentage of her child, and provided me, the child of midnight, with a fourth father to set beside Winkie and Methwold and Ahmed Sinai. Agitated but helpless in the clutches of the dream, my mother Amina began at that time to form the fog of guilt which would, in later years, surround her head like a dark black wreath.) I never heard Wee Willie Winkie in his prime. |
| 244 |
After his blind-eyed bereavement, his sight gradually returned; but something harsh and bitter crept into his voice. He told us it was asthma, and continued to arrive at Methwold's Estate once a week to sing songs which were, like himself, relics of the Methwold era. "Good Night, Ladies," he sang; and, keeping up to date, added "The Clouds Will Soon Roll By" to his repertoire, and, a little later, "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?" Placing a sizeable infant with menacingly knocking knees on a small mat beside him in the circus-ring, he sang songs filled with nostalgia, and nobody had the heart to turn him away. Winkie and the fisherman's finger were two of the few survivals of the days of William Methwold, because after the Englishman's disappearance his successors emptied his palaces of their abandoned contents. Lila Sabarmati preserved her pianola; Ahmed Sinai kept his whisky-cabinet; old man Ibrahim came to terms with ceiling-fans; but the goldfish died, some from starvation, others as a result of being so colossally overfed that they exploded in little clouds of scales and undigested fish-food; the dogs ran wild, and eventually ceased to roam the Estate; and the fading clothes in the old almirahs were distributed amongst the sweeper-women and other servants on the Estate, so that for years afterwards the heirs of William Methwold were cared for by men and women wearing the increasingly ragged shirts and cotton print dresses of their erstwhile masters. But Winkie and the picture on my wall survived; singer and fisherman became institutions of our lives, like the cocktail hour, which was already a habit too powerful to be broken. "Each little tear and sorrow," Winkie sang, "only brings you closer to me ..." And his voice grew worse and worse, until it sounded like a sitar whose resonating drum, made out of lacquered pumpkin, had been eaten away by mice; "It's asthma," he insisted stubbornly. Before he died he lost his voice completely; doctors revised his diagnosis to throat cancer; but they were wrong, too, because Winkie died of no disease but of the bitterness of losing a wife whose infidelity he never suspected. His son, named Shiva after the god of procreation and destruction, sat at his feet in those early days, silently bearing the burden of being the cause (or so he thought) of his father's slow decline; and gradually, down the years, we watched his eyes filling with an anger which could not be spoken; we watched his fists close around pebbles and hurl them, ineffectually at first, more dangerously as he grew, into the surrounding emptiness. When Lila Sabarmati's elder son was eight, he took it upon himself to tease young Shiva about his surliness, his unstarched shorts, his knobbly knees; whereupon the boy whom Mary's crime had doomed to poverty and accordions hurled a sharp flat stone, with a cutting edge like a razor, and blinded his tormentor in the right eye. After Eyeslice's accident, Wee Willie Winkie came to Methwold's Estate alone, leaving his son to enter the dark labyrinths from which only a war would save him. |
| 245 |
Even a baby is faced with the problem of defining itself; and I'm bound to say that my early popularity had its problematic aspects, because I was bombarded with a confusing multiplicity of views on the subject, being a Blessed One to a guru under a tap, a voyeur to Lila Sabarmati; in the eyes of Nussie-the-duck I was a rival, and a more successful rival, to her own Sonny (although, to her credit, she never showed her resentment, and asked to borrow me just like everyone else); to my two-headed mother I was all kinds of babyish things — they called me joonoo-moonoo, and putch-putch, and little-piece-of-the-moon. But what, after all, can a baby do except swallow all of it and hope to make sense of it later? Patiently, dry-eyed, I imbibed Nehru-letter and Winkie's prophecy; but the deepest impression of all was made on the day when Homi Catrack's idiot daughter sent her thoughts across the circus-ring and into my infant head. Toxy Catrack, of the outsize head and dribbling mouth; Toxy, who stood at a barred top-floor window, stark naked, masturbating with motions of consummate self-disgust; who spat hard and often through her bars, and sometimes hit us on the head ... she was twenty-one years old, a gibbering half-wit, the product of years of inbreeding; but inside my head she was beautiful, because she had not lost the gifts with which every baby is born and which life proceeds to erode. I can't remember anything Toxy said when she sent her thoughts to whisper to me; probably nothing except gurgles and spittings; but she gave a door in my mind a little nudge, so that when an accident took place in a washing-chest it was probably Toxy who made it possible. That's enough for the moment, about the first days of Baby Saleem — already my very presence is having an effect on history; already Baby Saleem is working changes on the people around him; and, in the case of my father, I am convinced that it was I who pushed him into the excesses which led, perhaps inevitably, to the terrifying time of the freeze. Ahmed Sinai never forgave his son for breaking his toe. Even after the splint was removed, a tiny limp remained. My father leaned over my crib and said, "So, my son: you're starting as you mean to go on. Already you've started bashing your poor old father!" In my opinion, this was only half a joke. Because, with my birth, everything changed for Ahmed Sinai. His position in the household was undermined by my coming. Suddenly Amina's assiduity had acquired different goals; she never wheedled money out of him any more, and the napkin in his lap at the breakfast-table felt sad pangs of nostalgia for the old days. Now it was, "Your son needs so-and-so," or "Janum, you must give money for such-and-such." Bad show, Ahmed Sinai thought. My father was a self-important man. And so it was my doing that Ahmed Sinai fell, in those days after my birth, into the twin fantasies which were to be his undoing, into the unreal worlds of the djinns and of the land beneath the sea. |
| 246 |
You ask: how is it possible? How could a housewife, however assiduous, however determined, win fortunes on the horses, day after racing day, month after month? You think to yourself: aha, the Homi Catrack, he's a horse-owner; and everyone knows that most of the races are fixed; Amina was asking her neighbor for hot tips! A plausible notion; but Mr. Catrack himself lost as often as he won; he saw my mother at the racetrack and was astounded by her success. ("Please," Amina asked him, "Catrack Sahib, let this be our secret. Gambling, is a terrible thing; it would be so shaming if my mother found out." And Catrack, nodding dazedly, said, "Just as you wish.") So it was not the Parsee who was behind it — but perhaps I can offer another explanation. Here it is, in a sky-blue crib in a sky-blue room with a fisherman's pointing finger on the wall: here, whenever his mother goes away clutching a purse full of secrets, is Baby Saleem, who has acquired an expression of the most intense concentration, whose eyes have been seized by a singleness of purpose of such enormous power that it has darkened them to a deep navy blue, and whose nose is twitching strangely while he appears to be watching some distant event, to be guiding it from a distance, just as the moon controls the tides. "Coming to court very soon," Ismail Ibrahim said, "I think you can be fairly confident ... my God, Amina, have you found King Solomon's Mines?" The moment I was old enough to play board games, I fell in love with Snakes and Ladders. O perfect balance of rewards and penalties! O seemingly random choices made by tumbling dice! Clambering up ladders, slithering down snakes, I spent some of the happiest days of my life. When, in my time of trial, my father challenged me to master the game of shatranj, I infuriated him by preferring to invite him, instead, to chance his fortune among the ladders and nibbling snakes. All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother; here is the war of Mary and Musa, and the polarities of knees and nose ... but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity — because, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake ... Keeping things simple for the moment, however, I record that no sooner had my mother discovered the ladder to victory represented by her racecourse luck than she was reminded that the gutters of the country were still teeming with snakes. |
| 247 |
What starts fights? What remnants of guilt fear shame, pickled by time in Mary's intestines, led her willingly? unwillingly? to provoke the aged bearer in a dozen different ways — by a tilt of the nose to indicate her superior status; by aggressive counting of rosary beads under the nose of the devout Muslim; by acceptance of the title mausi, little mother, bestowed upon her by the other Estate servants, which Musa saw as a threat to his status; by excessive familiarity with the Begum Sahiba — little giggled whispers in corners, just loud enough for formal, stiff, correct Musa to hear and feel somehow cheated? What tiny grain of grit, in the sea of old age now washing over the old bearer, lodged between his lips to fatten into the dark pearl of hatred — into what unaccustomed torpors did Musa fall, becoming leaden of hand and foot, so that vases were broken, ashtrays spilled, and a veiled hint of forthcoming dismissal — from Mary's conscious or unconscious lips? — grew into an obsessive fear, which rebounded upon the person who started it off? And (not to omit social factors) what was the brutalizing effect of servant status, of a servants' room behind a black-stoved kitchen, in which Musa was obliged to sleep along with gardener, odd-job boy, and hamal — while Mary slept in style on a rush mat beside a new-born child? And was Mary blameless or not? Did her inability to go to church — because in churches you found confessionals, and in confessionals secrets could not be kept — turn sour inside her and make her a little sharp, a little hurtful? Or must we look beyond psychology — seeking our answer in statements such as, there was a snake lying in wait for Mary, and Musa was doomed to learn about the ambiguity of ladders? Or further still, beyond snake-and-ladder, should we see the Hand of Fate in the quarrel — and say, in order for Musa to return as explosive ghost, in order for him to adopt the role of Bomb-in-Bombay, it was necessary to engineer a departure ... or, descending from such sublimities to the ridiculous, could it be that Ahmed Sinai — whom whisky provoked, whom djinns goaded into excesses of rudeness — had so incensed the aged bearer that his crime, with which he equalled Mary's record, was committed out of the injured pride of an abused old servitor — and was nothing to do with Mary at all? Ending questions, I confine myself to facts: Musa and Mary were perpetually at daggers drawn. And yes: Ahmed insulted him, and Amina's pacifying efforts may not have been successful; and yes: the fuddling shadows of age had convinced him he would be dismissed, without warning, at any moment; and so it was that Amina came to discover, one August morning, that the house had been burgled. The police came. Amina reported what was missing: a silver spittoon encrusted with lapis lazuli; gold coins; bejewelled samovars and silver tea-services; the contents of a green tin trunk. Servants were lined up in the hall and subjected to the threats of Inspector Johnny Vakeel. |
| 248 |
Yes, perhaps that's right. I should speak plainly, without the cloak of a question-mark: our Padma has gone, and I miss her. Yes, that's it. But there is still work to be done: for instance: In the summer of 1956, when most things in the world were still larger than myself, my sister the Brass Monkey developed the curious habit of setting fire to shoes. While Nasser sank ships at Suez, thus slowing down the movements of the world by obliging it to travel around the Cape of Good Hope, my sister was also trying to impede our progress. Obliged to fight for attention, possessed by her need to place herself at the center of events, even of unpleasant ones (she was my sister, after all; but no prime minister wrote letters to her, no sadhus watched her from their places under garden taps; unprophesied, unphotographed, her life was a struggle from the start), she carried her war into the world of footwear, hoping, perhaps, that by burning our shoes she would make us stand still long enough to notice that she was there ... she made no attempt at concealing her crimes. When my father entered his room to find a pair of black Oxfords on fire, the Brass Monkey was standing over them, match in hand. His nostrils were assailed by the unprecedented odor of ignited boot-leather, mingled with Cherry Blossom boot-polish and a little Three-In-One oil ... "Look, Abba!" the Monkey said charmingly, "Look how pretty — just the exact color of my hair!" Despite all precautions, the merry red flowers of my sister's obsession blossomed all over the Estate that summer, blooming in the sandals of Nussie-the-duck and the film-magnate footwear of Homi Catrack; hair-colored flames licked at Mr. Dubash's down-at-heel suedes and at Lila Sabarmati's stiletto heels. Despite the concealment of matches and the vigilance of servants, the Brass Monkey found her ways, undeterred by punishment and threats. For one year, on and off, Methwold's Estate was assailed by the fumes of incendiarized shoes; until her hair darkened into anonymous brown, and she seemed to lose interest in matches. Amina Sinai, abhorring the idea of beating her children, temperamentally incapable of raising her voice, came close to her wits' end; and the Monkey was sentenced, for day after day, to silence. This was my mother's chosen disciplinary method: unable to strike us, she ordered us to seal our lips. Some echo, no doubt, of the great silence with which her own mother had tormented Aadam Aziz lingered in her ears — because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound — and with an emphatic "Chup!" she would place a finger across her lips and command our tongues to be still. It was a punishment which never failed to cow me into submission; the Brass Monkey, however, was made of less pliant stuff. Soundlessly, behind lips clamped tight as her grandmother's, she plotted the incineration of leather — just as once, long ago, another monkey in another city had performed the act which made inevitable the burning of a leathercloth godown ... |
| 249 |
She was as beautiful (if somewhat scrawny) as I was ugly; but she was from the first, mischievous as a whirlwind and noisy as a crowd. Count the windows and vases, broken accidentally-on-purpose; number, if you can, the meals that somehow flew off her treacherous dinner-plates, to stain valuable Persian rugs! Silence was, indeed the worst punishment she could have been given; but she bore it cheerfully, standing innocently amid the ruins of broken chairs and shattered ornaments. Mary Pereira said, "That one! That Monkey! Should have been born with four legs!" But Amina, in whose mind the memory of her narrow escape from giving birth to a two-headed son had obstinately refused to fade, cried, "Mary! What are you saying? Don't even think such things!" ... Despite my mother's protestations, it was true that the Brass Monkey was as much animal as human; and, as all the servants and children on Methwold's Estate knew, she had the gift of talking to birds, and to cats. Dogs, too: but after she was bitten, at the age of six, by a supposedly rabid stray, and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to Breach Candy Hospital, every afternoon for three weeks, to be given an injection in the stomach, it seems she either forgot their language or else refused to have any further dealings with them. From birds she learned how to sing; from cats she learned a form of dangerous independence. The Brass Monkey was never so furious as when anyone spoke to her in words of love; desperate for affection, deprived of it by my overpowering shadow, she had a tendency to turn upon anyone who gave her what she wanted, as if she were defending herself against the possibility of being tricked. ... Such as the time when Sonny Ibrahim plucked up his courage to tell her, "Hey, listen, Saleem's sister — you're a solid type. I'm, um, you know, damn keen on you ..." And at once she marched across to where his father and mother were sipping lassi in the gardens of Sans Souci to say, "Nussie Aunty, I don't know what your Sonny's been getting up to. Only just now I saw him and Cyrus behind a bush, doing such funny rubbing things with their soo-soos!" ... The Brass Monkey had bad table manners; she trampled flowerbeds; she acquired the tag of problem-child; but she and I were close-as-close, in spite of framed letters from Delhi and sadhu-under-the-tap. From the beginning, I decided to treat her as an ally, not a competitor; and, as a result, she never once blamed me for my preeminence in our household, saying, "What's to blame? Is it your fault if they think you're so great?" (But when, years later, I made the same mistake as Sonny, she treated me just the same.) And it was Monkey who, by answering a certain wrong-number telephone call, began the process of events which led to my accident in a white washing-chest made of slatted wood. Already, at the age of nearlynine, I knew this much: everybody was waiting for me. Midnight and baby-snaps, prophets and prime ministers had created around me a glowing and inescapable mist of expectancy ... |
| 250 |
in which my father pulled me into his squashy belly in the cool of the cocktail hour to say, "Great things! My son: what is not in store for you? Great deeds, a great life!" While I, wriggling between jutting lip and big toe, wetting his shirt with my eternally leaking nose-goo, turned scarlet and squealed, "Let me go, Abba! Everyone will see!" And he, embarrassing me beyond belief, bellowed, "Let them look! Let the whole world see how I love my son!" ... and my grandmother, visiting us one winter, gave me advice, too: "Just pull up your socks, whatsitsname, and you'll be better than anyone in the whole wide world!" ... Adrift in this haze of anticipation, I had already felt within myself the first movings of that shapeless animal which still, on these Padmaless nights, champs and scratches in my stomach: cursed by a multitude of hopes and nicknames (I had already acquired Sniffer and Snotnose), I became afraid that everyone was wrong — that my much-trumpeted existence might turn out to be utterly useless, void, and without the shred of a purpose. And it was to escape from this beast that I took to hiding myself, from an early age, in my mother's large white washing-chest; because although the creature was inside me, the comforting presence of enveloping soiled linen seemed to lull it into sleep. Outside the washing-chest, surrounded by people who seemed to possess a devastatingly clear sense of purpose, I buried myself in fairytales. Hatim Tai and Batman, Superman and Sinbad helped to get me through the nearlynine years. When I went shopping with Mary Pereira — overawed by her ability to tell a chicken's age by looking at its neck, by the sheer determination with which she stared dead pomfrets in the eyes — I became Aladdin, voyaging in a fabulous cave; watching servants dusting vases with a dedication as majestic as it was obscure, I imagined Ali Baba's forty thieves hiding in the dusted urns; in the garden, staring at Purushottam the sadhu being eroded by water, I turned into the genie of the lamp, and thus avoided, for the most part, the terrible notion that I, alone in the universe, had no idea of what I should be, or how I should behave. Purpose: it crept to behind me when I stood staring down from my window at European girls cavorting in the map-shaped pool beside the sea. "Where do you get it?" I yelped aloud; the Brass Monkey, who shared my sky-blue room, jumped half-way out of her skin. I was then nearlyeight; she was almostseven. It was a very early age at which to be perplexed by meaning. But servants are excluded from washing-chests; school buses, too, are absent. In my nearlyninth year I had begun to attend the Cathedral and John Connon Boys' High School on Outram Road in the Old Fort district; washed and brushed every morning, I stood at the foot of our two-storey hillock, white-shorted, wearing a blue-striped elastic belt with a snake-buckle, satchel over my shoulder, my mighty cucumber of a nose dripping as usual; Eyeslice and Hairoil, Sonny Ibrahim and precocious Cyrus-the-great waited too. |
| 251 |
Typhoid attacked me; krait-poison cured me; and my early, overheated growth-rate cooled off. By the time I was nearlynine, Sonny Ibrahim was an inch and a half taller than I. But one piece of Baby Saleem seemed immune to disease and extract-of-snakes. Between my eyes, it mushroomed outwards and downwards, as if all my expansionist forces, driven out of the rest of my body, had decided to concentrate on this single incomparable thrust ... between my eyes and above my lips, my nose bloomed like a prize marrow. (But then, I was spared wisdom teeth; one should try to count one's blessings.) What's in a nose? The usual answer: "That's simple. A breathing apparatus; olfactory organs; hairs." But in my case, the answer was simpler still, although, I'm bound to admit, somewhat repellent: what was in my nose was snot. With apologies, I must unfortunately insist on details: nasal congestion obliged me to breathe through my mouth, giving me the air of a gasping goldfish; perennial blockages doomed me to a childhood without perfumes, to days which ignored the odors of musk and chambeli and mango kasaundy and home-made icecream: and dirty washing, too. A disability in the world outside washing-chests can be a positive advantage once you're in. But only for the duration of your stay. Purpose-obsessed, I worried about my nose. Dressed in the bitter garments which arrived regularly from my headmistress aunt Alia, I went to school, played French cricket, fought, entered fairy-tales ... and worried. (In those days, my aunt Alia had begun to send us an unending stream of children's clothes, into whose seams she had sewn her old maid's bile; the Brass Monkey and I were clothed in her gifts, wearing at first the baby-things of bitterness, then the rompers of resentment; I grew up in white shorts starched with the starch of jealousy, while the Monkey wore the pretty flowered frocks of Alia's undimmed envy ... unaware that our wardrobe was binding us in the webs of her revenge, we led our well-dressed lives.) My nose: elephantine as the trunk of Ganesh, it should, I thought, have been a superlative breather; a smeller without an answer, as we say; instead, it was permanently bunged-up, and as useless as a wooden sikh-kabab. Enough. I sat in the washing-chest and forgot my nose; forgot about the climbing of Mount Everest in 1953 — when grubby Eyeslice giggled, "Hey, men! You think that Tenzing could climb up Sniffer's face?" — and about the quarrels between my parents over my nose, for which Ahmed Sinai never tired of blaming Amina's father: "Never before in my family has there been a nose like it! We have excellent noses; proud noses; royal noses, wife!" Ahmed Sinai had already begun, at that time, to believe in the fictional ancestry he had created for the benefit of William Methwold; djinn-sodden, he saw Mughal blood running in his veins ... Forgotten, too, the night when I was eight and a half, and my father, djinns on his breath, came into my bedroom to rip the sheets off me and demanded: "What are you up to? |
| 252 |
One afternoon in June, I tiptoed down the corridors of the sleeping house towards my chosen refuge; sneaked past my sleeping mother into the white-tiled silence of her bathroom; lifted the lid off my goal; and plunged into its soft continuum of (predominantly white) textiles, whose only memories were of my earlier visits. Sighing softly, I pulled down the lid, and allowed pants and vests to massage away the pains of being alive, purposeless and nearly nine years old. Electricity in the air. Heat, buzzing like bees. A mantle, hanging somewhere in the sky, waiting to fall gently around my shoulders ... somewhere, a finger reaches towards a dial; a dial whirs around and around, electrical pulses dart along cable, seven, zero, five, six, one. The telephone rings. Muffled shrilling of a bell penetrates the washing-chest, in which a nearlynineyearold boy lies uncomfortably concealed ... I, Saleem, became stiff with the fear of discovery, because now more noises entered the chest; squeak of bedsprings; soft clatter of slippers along corridor; the telephone, silenced in mid-shrill; and — or is this imagination? Was her voice too soft to hear? — the words, spoken too late as usual: "Sorry. Wrong number." And now, hobbling footsteps returning to the bedroom; and the worst fears of the hiding boy are fulfilled. Doorknobs, turning, scream warnings at him; razor-sharp steps cut him deeply as they move across cool white tiles. He stays frozen as ice, still as a stick; his nose drips silently into dirty clothes, a pajama-cord — snake-like harbinger of doom! — inserts itself into his left nostril. To sniff would be to die: he refuses to think about it. ... Clamped tight in the grip of terror, he finds his eye looking through a chink in dirty washing ... and sees a woman crying in a bathroom. Rain dropping from a thick black cloud. And now more sound, more motion: his mother's voice has begun to speak, two syllables, over and over again; and her hands have begun to move. Ears muffled by underwear strain to catch the sounds — that one: dir? Bir? Dil? — and the other: Ha? Ra? No — Na. Ha and Ra are banished; Dil and Bir vanish forever; and the boy hears, in his ears, a name which has not been spoken since Mumtaz Aziz became Amina Sinai: Nadir. Nadir. Na. Dir. Na. And her hands are moving. Lost in their memory of other days, of what happened after games of hit-the-spittoon in an Agra cellar, they flutter gladly at her cheeks; they hold her bosom tighter than any brassieres; and now they caress her bare midriff, they stray below decks ... yes, this is what we used to do, my love, it was enough, enough for me, even though my father made us, and you ran, and now the telephone, Nadirnadirnadirnadirnadirnadir ... hands which held telephone now hold flesh, while in another place what does another hand do? To what, after replacing receiver, is another hand getting up? ... No matter; because here, in her spied-out privacy, Amina Sinai repeats an ancient name, again and again, until finally she bursts out with, "ArrE Nadir Khan, where have you come from now?" Secrets. |
| 253 |
A man's name. Never-before-glimpsed motions of the hands. A boy's mind filled with thoughts which have no shape, tormented by ideas which refuse to settle into words; and in a left nostril, a pajama-cord is snaking up up up, refusing to be ignored ... And now — O shameless mother! Revealer of duplicity, of emotions which have no place in family life; and more: O brazen unveiler of Black Mango! — Amina Sinai, drying her eyes, is summoned by a more trivial necessity; and as her son's right eye peers out through the wooden slats at the top of the washing-chest, my mother unwinds her sari! While I, silently in the washing-chest: "Don't do it don't do it don't do!" ... but I cannot close my eye. Unblinking pupil takes in upside-down image of sari falling to the floor, an image which is, as usual, inverted by the mind; through ice-blue eyes I see a slip follow the sari; and then — O horrible! — my mother, framed in laundry and slatted wood, bends over to pick up her clothes! And there it is, searing my retina — the vision of my mother's rump, black as night, rounded and curved, resembling nothing on earth so much as a gigantic, black Alfonso mango! In the washing-chest, unnerved by the vision, I wrestle with myself ... self-control becomes simultaneously imperative and impossible ... under the thunderclap influence of the Black Mango, my nerve cracks; pajama-cord wins its victory; and while Amina Sinai seats herself on a commode, I ... what? Not sneeze; it was less than a sneeze. Not a twitch, either; it was more than that. It's time to talk plainly: shattered by two-syllabic voice and fluttering hands, devastated by Black Mango, the nose of Saleem Sinai, responding to the evidence of maternal duplicity, quivering at the presence of maternal rump, gave way to a pajama-cord and was possessed by a cataclysmic — a world-altering — an irreversible sniff. Pajama-cord rises painfully half an inch further up the nostril. But other things are rising, too: hauled by that feverish inhalation, nasal liquids are being sucked relentlessly up up up, nose-goo flowing upwards, against gravity, against nature. Sinuses are subjected to unbearable pressure ... until, inside the nearlynineyearold head, something bursts. Snot rockets through a breached dam into dark new channels. Mucus, rising higher than mucus was ever intended to rise, Waste fluid, reaching as far, perhaps, as the frontiers of the brain ... there is a shock. Something electrical has been moistened. Pain. And then noise, deafening manytongued terrifying, inside his head! ... Inside a white wooden washing-chest, within the darkened auditorium of my skull, my nose began to sing. But just now there isn't time to listen; because one voice is very close indeed. Amina Sinai has opened the lower door of the washing-chest; I am tumbling downdown with laundry wrapped around my head like a caul. Pajama-cord jerks out of my nose; and now there is lightning flashing through the dark clouds around my mother — and a refuge has been lost for ever. |
| 254 |
The workforce giggles behind its hands: the poor sahib has been crossed in — what? — surely not love? ... Padma, and the cracks spreading all over me, radiating like a spider's web from my navel; and the heat ... a little confusion is surely permissable in these circumstances. Rereading my work, I have discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time. Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I'm prepared to distort everything — to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role? Today, in my confusion, I can't judge. I'll have to leave it to others. For me, there can be no going back; I must finish what I've started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began ... YE Akashvani hai. This is All-India Radio. Having gone out into the boiling streets for a quick meal at a nearby Irani cafE, I have returned to sit in my nocturnal pool of Anglepoised light with only a cheap transistor for company. A hot night; bubbling air filled with the lingering scents of the silenced pickle-vats; voices in the dark. Pickle-fames, heavily oppressive in the heat, stimulate the juices of memory, accentuating similarities and differences between now and then ... it was hot then; it is (unseasonably) hot now. Then as now, someone was awake in the dark, hearing disembodied tongues. Then as now, the one deafened ear. And fear, thriving in the heat ... it was not the voices (then or now) which were frightening. He, young-Saleem-then, was afraid of an idea — the idea that his parents' outrage might lead to a withdrawal of their love; that even if they began to believe him, they would see his gift as a kind of shameful deformity ... while I, now, Padma-less, send these words into the darkness and am afraid of being disbelieved. He and I, I and he ... I no longer have his gift; he never had mine. There are times when he seems a stranger, almost ... he had no cracks. No spiders' webs spread through him in the heat. Padma would believe me; but there is no Padma. Then as now, there is hunger. But of a different kind: not, now, the then-hunger of being denied my dinner, but that of having lost my cook. And another, more obvious difference: then, the voices did not arrive through the oscillating valves of a transistor (which will never cease, in our part of the world, to symbolize impotence — ever since the notorious free-transistor sterilization bribe, the squawking machine has represented what men could do before scissors snipped and knots were tied) ... then, the nearlynineyearold in his midnight bed had no need of machines. Different and similar, we are joined by heat. A shimmering heat-haze, then and now, blurs his then-time into mine ... my confusion, travelling across the heat-waves, is also his. |
| 255 |
What grows best in the heat: cane-sugar; the coconut palm; certain millets such as bajra, ragi and jowar; linseed, and (given water) tea and rice. . Our hot land is also the world's second largest producer of cotton — at least, it was when I learned geography under the mad eye of Mr. Emil Zagallo, and the steelier gaze of a framed Spanish conquistador. But the tropical summer grows stranger fruit as well: the exotic flowers of the imagination blossom, to fill the close perspiring nights with odors as heavy as musk, which give men dark dreams of discontent ... then as now, unease was in the air. Language marchers demanded the partition of the state of Bombay along linguistic boundaries — the dream of Maharashtra was at the head of some processions, the mirage of Gujarat led the others forward. Heat, gnawing at the mind's divisions between fantasy and reality, made anything seem possible; the half-waking chaos of afternoon siestas fogged men's brains, and the air was filled with the stickiness of aroused desires. What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust. In 1956, then, languages marched militantly through the daytime streets; by night, they rioted in my head. We shall be watching your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own. It's time to talk about the voices. But if only our Padma were here ... I was wrong about the Archangels, of course. My father's hand — walloping my ear in (conscious? unintentional?) imitation of another, bodiless hand, which once hit him full in the face — at least had one salutary effect: it obliged me to reconsider and finally to abandon my original, Prophet-aping position. In bed that very night of my disgrace, I withdrew deep inside myself, despite the Brass Monkey, who filled our blue room with her pesterings: "But what did you do it for, Saleem? You who're always too good and all?" ... until she fell into dissatisfied sleep with her mouth still working silently, and I was alone with the echoes of my father's violence, which buzzed in my left ear, which whispered, "Neither Michael nor Anael; not Gabriel; forget Cassiel, Sachiel and Samael! Archangels no longer speak to mortals; the Recitation was completed in Arabia long ago; the last prophet will come only to announce the End." That night, understanding that the voices in my head far outnumbered the ranks of the angels, I decided, not without relief, that I had not after all been chosen to preside over the end of the world. My voices, far from being sacred, turned out to be as profane, and as multitudinous, as dust. Telepathy, then; the kind of thing you're always reading about in the sensational magazines. But I ask for patience — wait. Only wait. It was telepathy; but also more than telepathy. Don't write me off too easily. Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head. In the beginning, when I was content to be an audience — before I began to act — there was a language problem. |
| 256 |
never, until the Widow ... Banned from washing-chests, I began, whenever possible, to creep unobserved into the tower of crippled hours. When the circus-ring was emptied by heat or chance or prying eyes; when Ahmed and Amina went off to the Willingdon Club for canasta evenings; when the Brass Monkey was away, hanging around her newly-acquired heroines, the Walsingham School for Girls' swimming and diving team ... that is to say, when circumstances permitted, I entered my secret hideout, stretched out on the straw mat I'd stolen from the servants' quarters, closed my eyes, and let my newly-awakened inner ear (connected, like all ears, to my nose) rove freely around the city — and further, north and south, east and west — listening in to all manner of things. To escape the intolerable pressures of eavesdropping on people I knew, I practiced my art upon strangers. Thus my entry into the public affairs of India occurred for entirely ignoble reasons — upset by too much intimacy, I used the world outside our hillock for light relief. The world as discovered from a broken-down clocktower: at first, I was no more than a tourist, a child peeping through the miraculous peepholes of a private "Dilli-dekho" machine. Dugdugee-drums rattled in my left (damaged) ear as I gained my first glimpse of the Taj Mahal through the eyes of a fat Englishwoman suffering from the tummy-runs; after which, to balance south against north, I hopped down to Madurai's Meenakshi temple and nestled amongst the woolly, mystical perceptions of a chanting priest. I toured Connaught Place in New Delhi in the guise of an auto-rickshaw driver, complaining bitterly to my fares about the rising price of gasoline; in Calcutta I slept rough in a section of drainpipe. By now thoroughly bitten by the travel bug, I zipped down to Cape Comorin and became a fisher-woman whose sari was as tight as her morals were loose ... standing on red sands washed by three seas, I flirted with Dravidian beachcombers in a language I couldn't understand; then up into the Himalayas, into the neanderthal moss-covered hut of a Goojar tribal, beneath the glory of a completely circular rainbow and the tumbling moraine of the Kolahoi glacier. At the golden fortress of Jaisalmer I sampled the inner life of a woman making mirrorwork dresses and at Khajuraho I was an adolescent village boy, deeply embarrassed by the erotic, Tantric carvings on the Chandela temples standing in the fields, but unable to tear away my eyes ... in the exotic simplicities of travel I was able to find a modicum of peace. But, in the end, tourism ceased to satisfy; curiosity began to niggle; "Let's find out," I told myself, "what really goes on around here." With the eclectic spirit of my nine years spurring me on, I leaped into the heads of film stars and cricketers — I learned the truth behind the Filmfare gossip about the dancer Vyjayantimala, and I was at the crease with Polly Umrigar at the Brabourne Stadium; I was Lata Mangeshkar the playback singer and Bubu the clown at the circus behind Civil Lines ... |
| 257 |
"Lookit me now: watch me go, ya dummies!" On and off the cheetah-seat, Evie performed. One foot on the seat, one leg stretched out behind her, she whirled around us; she built up speed and then did a headstand on the seat! She could straddle the front wheel, facing the rear, and work the pedals the wrong way round ... gravity was her slave, speed her element, and we knew that a power had come among us, a witch on wheels, and the flowers of the hedgerows threw her petals, the dust of the circus-ring stood up in clouds of ovation, because the circus-ring had found its mistress, too: it was the canvas beneath the brush of her whirling wheels. Now we noticed that our heroine packed a Daisy air-pistol on her right hip ... "More to come, ya zeroes!" she yelled, and drew the weapon. Her pellets gave stones the gift of flight; we threw annas into the air and she gunned them down, stone-dead. "Targets! More targets!" — and Eyeslice surrendered his beloved pack of rummy cards without a murmur, so that she could shoot the heads off the kings. Annie Oakley in toothbraces — nobody dared question her sharpshooting, except once, and that was at the end of her reign, during the great cat invasion; and there were extenuating circumstances. Flushed, sweating, Evie Burns dismounted and announced: "From now on, there's a new big chief around here. Okay, Indians? Any arguments?" No arguments; I knew then that I had fallen in love. At Juhu Beach with Evie: she won the camel-races, could drink more coconut milk than any of us, could open her eyes under the sharp salt water of the Arabian Sea. Did six months make such a difference? (Evie was half a year older than me.) Did it entitle you to talk to grown-ups as an equal? Evie was seen gossiping with old man Ibrahim Ibrahim; she claimed Lila Sabarmati was teaching her to put on make-up; she visited Homi Catrack to gossip about guns. (It was the tragic irony of Homi Catrack's life that he, at whom a gun would one day be pointed, was a true aficionado of firearms ... in Evie he found a fellow-creature, a motherless child who was, unlike his own Toxy, as sharp as a knife and as bright as a bottle. Incidentally, Evie Burns wasted no sympathy on poor Toxy Catrack. "Wrong inna head," she opined carelessly to us all, "Oughta be put down like rats." But Evie: rats are not weak! There was more that was rodent-like in your face than in the whole body of your despised Tox.) That was Evelyn Lilith; and within weeks of her arrival, I had set off the chain reaction from whose effects I would never fully recover. It began with Sonny Ibrahim, Sonny-next-door, Sonny of the forcep-hollows, who has been sitting patiently in the wings of my story, awaiting his cue. In those days, Sonny was a badly bruised fellow: more than forceps had dented him. To love the Brass Monkey (even in the nine-year-old sense of the word) was no easy thing to do. As I've said, my sister, born second and unheralded, had begun to react violently to any declarations of affection. |
| 258 |
Plant which Varuna had dug up for him by Gandharva! Give my Mr. Saleem thy power. Give heat like that of Fire of Indra. Like the male antelope, O herb, thou hast all the force that Is, thou hast powers of Indra, and the lusty force of beasts.' "With this preparation I returned to find you alone as always and as always with your nose in paper. But jealousy, I swear, I have put behind me; it sits on the face and makes it old. O God forgive me, quietly I put the preparation in your food! ... And then, hai-hai, may Heaven forgive me, but I am a simple woman, if holy men tell me, how should I argue? ... But now at least you are better, thanks be to God, and maybe you will not be angry." Under the influence of Padma's potion, I became delirious for a week. My dung-lotus swears (through much-gnashed teeth) that I was stiff as a board, with bubbles around my mouth. There was also a fever. In my delirium I babbled about snakes; but I know that Padma is no serpent, and never meant me harm. "This love, mister," Padma is wailing, "It will drive a woman to craziness." I repeat: I don't blame Padma. At the feet of the Western Ghats, she searched for the herbs of virility, mucuna pruritus and the root of feronia elephantum; who knows what she found? Who knows what, mashed with milk and mingled with my food, flung my innards into that state of "churning" from which, as all students of Hindu cosmology will know, Indra created matter, by stirring the primal soup in his own great milk-churn? Never mind. It was a noble attempt; but I am beyond regeneration — the Widow has done for me. Not even the real mucuna could have put an end to my incapacity; feronia would never have engendered in me the "lusty force of beasts." Still, I am at my table once again; once again Padma sits at my feet, urging me on. I am balanced once more — the base of my isosceles triangle is secure. I hover at the apex, above present and past, and feel fluency returning to my pen. A kind of magic has been worked, then; and Padma's excursion in search of love-potions has connected me briefly with that world of ancient learning and sorcerers' lore so despised by most of us nowadays; but (despite stomach-cramps and fever and frothings at the mouth) I'm glad of its irruption into my last days, because to contemplate it is to regain a little, lost sense of proportion. Think of this: history, in my version, entered a new phase on August 15th, 1947 — but in another version, that inescapable date is no more than one fleeting instant in the Age of Darkness, Kali-Yuga, in which the cow of morality has been reduced to standing, teeteringly, on a single leg! Kali-Yuga — the losing throw in our national dice-game; the worst of everything; the age when property gives a man rank, when wealth is equated with virtue, when passion becomes the sole bond between men and women, when falsehood brings success (is it any wonder, in such a time, that I too have been confused about good and evil?) ... began on Friday, February 18th, 3102 B. |
| 259 |
What made the event noteworthy (noteworthy! There's a dispassionate word, if you like!) was the nature of these children, every one of whom was, through some freak of biology, or perhaps owing to some preternatural power of the moment, or just conceivably by sheer coincidence (although synchronicity on such a scale would stagger even C. G. Jung), endowed with features, talents or faculties which can only be described as miraculous. It was as though — if you will permit me one moment of fancy in what will otherwise be, I promise, the most sober account I can manage — as though history, arriving at a point of the highest significance and promise, had chosen to sow, in that instant, the seeds of a future which would genuinely differ from anything the world had seen up to that time. If a similar miracle was worked across the border, in the newly-partitioned-off Pakistan, I have no knowledge of it; my perceptions were, while they lasted, bounded by the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the Himalaya mountains, but also by the artificial frontiers which pierced Punjab and Bengal. Inevitably, a number of these children failed to survive. Malnutrition, disease and the misfortunes of everyday life had accounted for no less than four hundred and twenty of them by the time I became conscious of their existence; although it is possible to hypothesize that these deaths, too, had their purpose, since 420 has been, since time immemorial, the number associated with fraud, deception and trickery. Can it be, then, that the missing infants were eliminated because they had turned out to be somehow inadequate, and were not the true children of that midnight hour? Well, in the first place, that's another excursion into fantasy; in the second, it depends on a view of life which is both excessively theological and barbarically cruel. It is also an unanswerable question; any further examination of it is therefore profitless. By 1957, the surviving five hundred and eighty-one children were all nearing their tenth birthdays, wholly ignorant, for the most part, of one another's existence — although there were certainly exceptions. In the town of Baud, on the Mahanadi river in Orissa, there was a pair of twin sisters who were already a legend in the region, because despite their impressive plainness they both possessed the ability of making every man who saw them fall hopelessly and often suicidally in love with them, so that their bemused parents were endlessly pestered by a stream of men offering their hands in marriage to either or even both of the bewildering children; old men who had forsaken the wisdom of their beards and youths who ought to have been becoming besotted with the actresses in the travelling picture-show which visited Baud once a month; and there was another, more disturbing procession of bereaved families cursing the twin girls for having bewitched their sons into committing acts of violence against themselves, fatal mutilations and scourgings and even (in one case) self-immolation. |
| 260 |
(Two hundred and sixty-six of us were boys; and we were outnumbered by our female counterparts — three hundred and fifteen of them, including Parvati. Parvati-the-witch.) Midnight's children! ... From Kerala, a boy who had the ability of stepping into mirrors and re-emerging through any reflective surface in the land — through lakes and (with greater difficulty) the polished metal bodies of automobiles ... and a Goanese girl with the gift of multiplying fish ... and children with powers of transformation: a werewolf from the Nilgiri Hills, and from the great watershed of the Vindhyas, a boy who could increase or reduce his size at will, and had already (mischievously) been the cause of wild panic and rumors of the return of Giants ... from Kashmir, there was a blue-eyed child of whose original sex I was never certain, since by immersing herself in water he (or she) could alter it as she (or he) pleased. Some of us called this child Narada, others Markandaya, depending on which old fairy story of sexual change we had heard ... near Jalna in the heart of the parched Deccan I found a water-divining youth, and at Budge-Budge outside Calcutta a sharp-tongued girl whose words already had the power of inflicting physical wounds, so that after a few adults had found themselves bleeding freely as a result of some barb flung casually from her lips, they had decided to lock her in a bamboo cage and float her off down the Ganges to the Sundarbans jungles (which are the rightful home of monsters and phantasms); but nobody dared approach her, and she moved through the town surrounded by a vacuum of fear; nobody had the courage to deny her food. There was a boy who could eat metal and a girl whose fingers were so green that she could grow prize aubergines in the Thar desert; and more and more and more ... overwhelmed by their numbers, and by the exotic multiplicity of their gifts, I paid little attention, in those early days, to their ordinary selves; but inevitably our problems, when they arose, were the everyday, human problems which arise from character-and-environment; in our quarrels, we were just a bunch of kids. One remarkable fact: the closer to midnight our birth-times were, the greater were our gifts. Those children born in the last seconds of the hour were (to be frank) little more than circus freaks: bearded girls, a boy with the full-operative gills of a freshwater mahaseer trout, Siamese twins with two bodies dangling off a single head and neck — the head could speak in two voices, one male, one female, and every language and dialect spoken in the subcontinent; but for all their marvelousness, these were the unfortunates, the living casualties of that numinous hour. Towards the half-hour came more interesting and useful faculties — in the Gir Forest lived a witch-girl with the power of healing by the laying-on of hands, and there was a wealthy tea-planter's son in Shillong who had the blessing (or possibly the curse) of being incapable of forgetting anything he ever saw or heard. |
| 261 |
But the children born in the first minute of all — for these children the hour had reserved the highest talents of which men had ever dreamed. If you, Padma, happened to possess a register of births in which times were noted down to the exact second, you, too, would know what scion of a great Lucknow family (born at twenty-one seconds past midnight) had completely mastered, by the age of ten, the lost arts of alchemy, with which he regenerated the fortunes of his ancient but dissipated house; and which dhobi's daughter from Madras (seventeen seconds past) could fly higher than any bird simply by closing her eyes; and to which Benarsi silversmith's son (twelve seconds after midnight) was given the gift of travelling in time and thus prophesying the future as well as clarifying the past ... a gift which, children that we were, we trusted implicitly when it dealt with things gone and forgotten, but derided when he warned us of our own ends ... fortunately, no such records exist; and, for my part, I shall not reveal — or else, in appearing to reveal, shall falsify — their names and even their locations; because, although such evidence would provide absolute proof of my claims, still the children of midnight deserve, now, after everything, to be left alone; perhaps to forget; but I hope (against hope) to remember ... Parvati-the-witch was born in Old Delhi in a slum which clustered around the steps of the Friday mosque. No ordinary slum, this, although the huts built out of old packing-cases and pieces of corrugated tin and shreds of jute sacking which stood higgledy-piggledy in the shadow of the mosque looked no different from any other shanty-town ... because this was the ghetto of the magicians, yes, the very same place which had once spawned a Hummingbird whom knives had pierced and pie-dogs had failed to save ... the conjurers' slum, to which the greatest fakirs and prestidigitators and illusionists in the land continually flocked, to seek their fortune in the capital city. They found tin huts, and police harassment, and rats ... Parvati's father had once been the greatest conjurer in Oudh; she had grown up amid ventriloquists who could make stones tell jokes and contortionists who could swallow their own legs and fire-eaters who exhaled flames from their arseholes and tragic clowns who could extract glass tears from the corners of their eyes; she had stood mildly amid gasping crowds while her father drove spikes through her neck; and all the time she had guarded her own secret, which was greater than any of the illusionist flummeries surrounding her; because to Parvati-the-witch, born a mere seven seconds after midnight on August 15th, had been given the powers of the true adept, the illuminatus, the genuine gifts of conjuration and sorcery, the art which required no artifice. So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry ... but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight. Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees and knees and nose ... |
| 262 |
to Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war (of Rama, who could draw the undrawable bow; of Arjuna and Bhima; the ancient prowess of Kurus and Pandavas united, unstoppably, in him!) ... and to me, the greatest talent of all — the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men. But it is Kali-Yuga; the children of the hour of darkness were born, I'm afraid, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found it easy to be brilliant, we were always confused about being good. There; now I've said it. That is who I was — who we were. Padma is looking as if her mother had died — her face, with its opening-shutting mouth, is the face of a beached pomfret. "O baba!" she says at last. "O baba! You are sick; what have you said?" No, that would be too easy. I refuse to take refuge in illness. Don't make the mistake of dismissing what I've unveiled as mere delirium; or even as the insanely exaggerated fantasies of a lonely, ugly child. I have stated before that I am not speaking metaphorically; what I have just written (and read aloud to stunned Padma) is nothing less than the literal, by-the-hairs-of-my-mother's-head truth. Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real. A thousand and one children were born; there were a thousand and one possibilities which had never been present in one place at one time before; and there were a thousand and one dead ends. Midnight's children can be made to represent many things, according to your point of view; they can be seen as the last throw of everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth-ridden nation, whose defeat was entirely desirable in the context of a modernizing, twentieth-century economy; or as the true hope of freedom, which is now forever extinguished; but what they must not become is the bizarre creation of a rambling, diseased mind. No: illness is neither here nor there. "All right, all right, baba," Padma attempts to placate me. "Why become so cross? Rest now, rest some while, that is all I am asking." Certainly it was a hallucinatory time in the days leading up to my tenth birthday; but the hallucinations were not in my head. My father, Ahmed Sinai, driven by the traitorous death of Doctor Narlikar and by the increasingly powerful effect of djinns-and-tonics, had taken flight into a dream-world of disturbing unreality; and the most insidious aspect of his slow decline was that, for a very long time, people mistook it for the very opposite of what it was ... Here is Sonny's mother, Nussie-the-duck, telling Amina one evening in our garden: "What great days for you all, Amina sister, now that your Ahmed is in his prime! Such a fine man, and so much he is prospering for his family's sake!" She says it loud enough for him to hear; and although he pretends to be telling the gardener what to do about the ailing bougainvillaea, although he assumes an expression of humble self-deprecation, it's utterly unconvincing, because his bloated body has begun, without his knowing it, to puff up and strut about. |
| 263 |
(It was: I smelled it.) Still — I've had a valuable warning. It's a dangerous business to try and impose one's view of things on others. Padma: if you're a little uncertain of my reliability, well, a little uncertainty is no bad thing. Cocksure men do terrible deeds. Women, too. Meanwhile, I am ten years old, and working out how to hide in the boot of my mother's car. That was the month when Purushottam the sadhu (whom I had never told about my inner life) finally despaired of his stationary existence and contracted the suicidal hiccups which assailed him for an entire year, frequently lifting him bodily several inches off the ground so that his water-balded head cracked alarmingly against the garden tap, and finally killed him, so that one evening at the cocktail hour he toppled sideways with his legs still locked in the lotus position, leaving my mother's verrucas without any hope of salvation; when I would often stand in the garden of Buckingham Villa in the evenings, watching the Sputniks cross the sky, and feeling as simultaneously exalted and isolated as little Laika, the first and still the only dog to be shot into space (the Baroness Simki von der Heiden, shortly to contract syphilis, sat beside me following the bright pinprick of Sputnik II with her Alsatian eyes — it was a time of great canine interest in the space race); when Evie Burns and her gang occupied my clocktower, and washing-chests had been both forbidden and outgrown, so that for the sake of secrecy and sanity I was obliged to limit my visits to the midnight children to our private, silent hour — I communed with them every midnight, and only at midnight, during that hour which is reserved for miracles, which is somehow outside time; and when — to get to the point — I resolved to prove, with the evidence of my own eyes, the terrible thing I had glimpsed sitting in the front of my mother's thoughts. Ever since I lay hidden in a washing-chest and heard two scandalous syllables, I had been suspecting my mother of secrets; my incursions into her thought processes had confirmed my suspicions; so it was with a hard glint in my eye, and a steely determination, that I visited Sonny Ibrahim one afternoon after school, with the intention of enlisting his help. I found Sonny in his room, surrounded by posters of Spanish bullfights, morosely playing Indoor Cricket by himself. When he saw me he cried unhappily, "Hey man I'm damn sorry about Evie man she won't listen to anyone man what the hell'd you do to her anyway?" ... But I held up a dignified hand, commanding and being accorded silence. "No time for that now, man," I said. "The thing is, I need to know how to open locks without keys." A true fact about Sonny Ibrahim: despite all his bullfighting dreams, his genius lay in the realm of mechanical things. For some time now, he had taken on the job of maintaining all the bikes on Methwold's Estate in return for gifts of comic-books and a free supply of fizzy drinks. Even Evelyn Lilith Burns gave her beloved Indiabike into his care. |
| 264 |
(And, also, to discern in my mother's habitually tidy mind an alarming degree of disorder. I was already beginning, in those days, to classify people by their degree of internal tidiness, and to discover that I preferred the messier type, whose thoughts, spilling constantly into one another so that anticipatory images of food interfered with the serious business of earning a living and sexual fantasies were superimposed upon their political musings, bore a closer relationship to my own pell-mell tumble of a brain, in which everything ran into everything else and the white dot of consciousness jumped about like a wild flea from one thing to the next ... Amina Sinai, whose assiduous ordering-instincts had provided her with a brain of almost abnormal neatness, was a curious recruit to the ranks of confusion.) We headed north, past Breach Candy Hospital and Mahalaxmi Temple, north along Hornby Vellard past Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium and Haji Ali's island tomb, north off what had once been (before the dream of the first William Methwold became a reality) the island of Bombay. We were heading towards the anonymous mass of tenements and fishing-villages and textile-plants and film-studios that the city became in these northern zones (not far from here! Not at all far from where I sit within view of local trains!) ... an area which was, in those days, utterly unknown to me; I rapidly became disoriented and was then obliged to admit to myself that I was lost. At last, down an unprepossessing side-street full of drainpipe-sleepers and bicycle-repair shops and tattered men and boys, we stopped. Clusters of children assailed my mother as she descended; she, who could never shoo away a fly, handed out small coins, thus enlarging the crowd enormously. Eventually, she struggled away from them and headed down the street; there was a boy pleading, "Gib the car poliss, Begum? Number one A-class poliss, Begum? I watch car until you come, Begum? I very fine watchman, ask anyone!" ... In some panic, I listened in for her reply. How could I get out of this boot under the eyes of a guardian-urchin? There was the embarrassment of it; and besides, my emergence would have created a sensation in the street ... my mother said, "No." She was disappearing down the street; the would-be polisher and watchman gave up eventually; there was a moment when all eyes turned to watch the passing of a second car, just in case it, too, stopped to disgorge a lady who gave away coins as if they were nuts; and in that instant (I had been looking through several pairs of eyes to help me choose my moment) I performed my trick with the pink plastic and was out in the street beside a closed car-boot in a flash. Setting my lips grimly, and ignoring all outstretched palms, I set off in the direction my mother had taken, a pocket-sized sleuth with the nose of a bloodhound and a loud drum pounding in the place where my heart should have been ... and arrived, a few minutes later, at the Pioneer CafE. |
| 265 |
Death, and defeat at rummy were all of a piece to Shiva; hence his terrifying, nonchalant violence, which in the end ... but to begin with beginnings: Although, admittedly, it's my own fault, I'm bound to say that if you think of me purely as a radio, you'll only be grasping half the truth. Thought is as often pictorial or purely emblematic as verbal; and anyway, in order to communicate with, and understand, my colleagues in the Midnight Children's Conference, it was necessary for me quickly to advance beyond the verbal stage. Arriving in their infinitely various minds, I was obliged to get beneath the surface veneer of front-of-mind thoughts in incomprehensible tongues, with the obvious (and previously demonstrated) effect that they became aware of my presence. Remembering the dramatic effect such an awareness had had on Evie Burns, I went to some pains to alleviate the shock of my entry. In all cases, my standard first transmission was an image of my face, smiling in what I trusted was a soothing, friendly, confident and leader-like fashion, and of a hand stretched out in friendship. There were, however, teething troubles. It took me a little while to realize that my picture of myself was heavily distorted by my own self-consciousness about my appearance; so that the portrait I sent across the thought-waves of the nation, grinning like a Cheshire cat, was about as hideous as a portrait could be, featuring a wondrously enlarged nose, a completely non-existent chin and giant stains on each temple. It's no wonder that I was often greeted by yelps of mental alarm. I, too, was often similarly frightened by the self-images of my ten-year-old fellows. When we discovered what was happening, I encouraged the membership of the Conference, one by one, to go and look into a mirror, or a patch of still water; and then we did manage to find out what we really looked like. The only problems were that our Keralan member (who could, you remember, travel through mirrors) accidentally ended up emerging through a restaurant mirror in the smarter part of New Delhi, and had to make a hurried retreat; while the blue-eyed member for Kashmir fell into a lake and accidentally changed sex, entering as a girl and emerging as a beautiful boy. When I first introduced myself to Shiva, I saw in his mind the terrifying image of a short, rat-faced youth with filed-down teeth and two of the biggest knees the world has ever seen. Faced with a picture of such grotesque proportions, I allowed the smile on my own beaming image to wither a little; my outstretched hand began to falter and twitch. And Shiva, feeling my presence, reacted at first with utter rage; great boiling waves of anger scalded the inside of my head; but then, "Hey — look — I know you! You're the rich kid from Methwold's Estate, isn't it?" And I, equally astonished, "Winkie's son — the one who blinded Eyeslice!" His self-image puffed up with pride. "Yah, yaar, that's me. Nobody messes with me, man!" Recognition reduced me to banalities: "So! |
| 266 |
What, Padma's frown demands, does all this have to do with Evelyn Lilith Burns? Instantly, leaping to attention, as it were, I provide the answer: in the days after the destruction of the city's fresh-water supply, the stray cats of Bombay began to congregate in those areas of the city where water was still relatively plentiful; that is to say, the better-off areas, in which each house owned its own overhead or underground water-tank. And, as a result, the two-storey hillock of Methwold's Estate was invaded by an army of thirsting felines; cats swarming all over the circus-ring, cats climbing bougainvillaea creepers and leaping into sitting-rooms, cats knocking over flower-vases to drink the plant-stale water, cats bivouacked in bathrooms, slurping liquid out of water-closets, cats rampant in the kitchens of the palaces of William Methwold. The Estate's servants were vanquished in their attempts to repel the great cat invasion; the ladies of the Estate were reduced to helpless exclamations of horror. Hard dry worms of cat-excrement were everywhere; gardens were ruined by sheer feline force of numbers; and at night sleep became an impossibility as the army found voice, and sang its thirst at the moon. (The Baroness Simki von der Heiden refused to fight the cats; she was already showing signs of the disease which would shortly lead to her extermination.) Nussie Ibrahim rang my mother to announce, "Amina sister, it is the end of the world." She was wrong; because on the third day after the great cat invasion, Evelyn Lilith Burns visited each Estate household in turn, carrying her Daisy air-gun casually in one hand, and offered, in return for bounty money, to end the plague of pussies double-quick. All that day, Methwold's Estate echoed with the sounds of Evie's air-gun and the agonized wauls of the cats, as Evie stalked the entire army one by one and made herself rich. But (as history so often demonstrates) the moment of one's greatest triumph also contains the seeds of one's final downfall; and so it proved, because Evie's persecution of the cats, was as far as the Brass Monkey was concerned, absolutely the last straw. "Brother," the Monkey told me grimly, "I told you I'd get that girl; now, right now, the time has come." Unanswerable questions: was it true that my sister had acquired the languages of cats as well as birds? Was it her fondness for feline life which pushed her over the brink? ... by the time of the great cat invasion, the Monkey's hair had faded into brown; she had broken her habit of burning shoes; but still, and for whatever reason, there was a fierceness in her which none of the rest of us ever possessed; and she went down into the circus-ring and yelled at the top of her voice: "Evie! Evie Burns! You come out here, this minute, wherever you are!" Surrounded by fleeing cats, the Monkey awaited Evelyn Burns. I went out on to the first-floor verandah to watch; from their verandahs, Sonny and Eyeslice and Hairoil and Cyrus were watching too. |
| 267 |
I was altering physically; too early, soft fuzz was appearing on my chin, and my voice swooped, out of control, up and down the vocal register. I had a strong sense of absurdity: my lengthening limbs were making me clumsy, and I must have cut a clownish figure, as I outgrew shirts and trousers and stuck gawkily and too far out of the ends of my clothes. I felt somehow conspired against, by these garments which flapped comically around my ankles and wrists; and even when I turned inwards to my secret Children, I found change, and didn't like it. The gradual disintegration of the Midnight Children's Conference — which finally fell apart on the day the Chinese armies came down over the Himalayas to humiliate the Indian fauj — was already well under way. When novelty wears off, boredom, and then dissension, must inevitably ensue. Or (to put it another way) when a finger is mutilated, and fountains of blood flow out, all manner of vilenesses become possible ... whether or not the cracks in the Conference were the (active-metaphorical) result of my finger-loss, they were certainly widening. Up in Kashmir, Narada-Markandaya was falling into the solipsistic dreams of the true narcissist, concerned only with the erotic pleasures of constant sexual alterations; while Soumitra the time-traveler, wounded by our refusal to listen to his descriptions of a future in which (he said) the country would be governed by a urine-drinking dotard who refused to die, and people would forget everything they had ever learned, and Pakistan would split like an amoeba, and the prime ministers of each half would be assassinated by their successors, both of whom — he swore despite our disbelief — would be called by the same name ... wounded Soumitra became a regular absentee from our nightly meetings, disappearing for long periods into the spidery labyrinths of Time. And the sisters from Baud were content with their ability to bewitch fools young and old. "What can this Conference help?" they inquired. "We already have too many lovers." And our alchemist member was busying himself in a laboratory built for him by his father (to whom he had revealed his secret); preoccupied with the Philosopher's Stone, he had very little time for us. We had lost him to the lure of gold. And there were other factors at work as well. Children, however magical, are not immune to their parents; and as the prejudices and world-views of adults began to take over their minds, I found children from Maharashtra loathing Gujaratis, and fair-skinned northerners reviling Dravidian "blackies"; there were religious rivalries; and class entered our councils. The rich children turned up their noses at being in such lowly company; Brahmins began to feel uneasy at permitting even their thoughts to touch the thoughts of untouchables; while, among the low-born, the pressures of poverty and Communism were becoming evident ... and, on top of all this, there were clashes of personality, and the hundred squalling rows which are unavoidable in a parliament composed entirely of half-grown brats. |
| 268 |
(With my help.) "Be secret," said Sharpsticker Sahib; secretly, I spied on my enemy Homi, and on the promiscuous mother of Eyeslice and Hairoil (who were very full of themselves of late, ever since, in fact, the papers announced that Commander Sabarmati's promotion was a mere formality. Only a matter of time ...). "Loose woman," the demon within me whispered silently, "Perpetrator of the worst of maternal perfidies! We shall turn you into an awful example; through you we shall demonstrate the fate which awaits the lascivious. O unobservant adulteress! Did you not see what sleeping around did to the illustrious Baroness Simki von der Heiden? — who was, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bitch, just like yourself." My view of Lila Sabarmati has mellowed with age; after all, she and I had one thing in common — her nose, like mine, possessed tremendous powers. Hers, however, was a purely worldly magic: a wrinkle of nasal skin could charm the steeliest of Admirals; a tiny flare of the nostrils ignited strange fires in the hearts of film magnates. I am a little regretful about betraying that nose; it was a little like stabbing a cousin in the back. What I discovered: every Sunday morning at ten a. m., Lila Sabarmati drove Eyeslice and Hairoil to the Metro cinema for the weekly meetings of the Metro Cub Club. (She volunteered to take the rest of us, too; Sonny and Cyrus, the Monkey and I piled into her Indian-made Hindustan car.) And while we drove towards Lana Turner or Robert Taylor or Sandra Dee, Mr. Homi Catrack was also preparing himself for a weekly rendezvous. While Lila's Hindustan puttered along beside railway-lines, Homi was knotting a cream silk scarf around his throat; while she halted at red lights, he donned a Technicolored bush-coat; when she was ushering us into the darkness of the auditorium, he was putting on gold-rimmed sunglasses; and when she left us to watch our film, he, too, was abandoning a child. Toxy Catrack never failed to react to his departures by wailing kicking thrashing-of-legs; she knew what was going on, and not even Bi-Appah could restrain her. Once upon a time there were Radha and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we are not unaffected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors. When Lila drove her Hindustan to an address off Colaba Causeway, she was Juliet coming out on to her balcony; when cream-scarfed, gold-shaded Homi sped off to meet her (in the same Studebaker in which my mother had once been rushed to Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home), he was Leander swimming the Hellespont towards Hero's burning candle. As for my part in the business — I will not give it a name. I confess: what I did was no act of heroism. I did not battle Homi on horseback, with fiery eyes and flaming sword; instead, imitating the action of the snake, I began to cut pieces out of newspapers. |
| 269 |
In the ghost-haze of the dust it sometimes seemed we could discern the shapes of the past, the mirage of Lila Sabarmati's pulverized pianola or the prison bars at the window of Toxy Catrack's cell; Dubash's nude statuette danced in dust-form through our chambers, and Sonny Ibrahim's bullfight-posters visited us as clouds. The Narlikar women had moved away while bulldozers did their work; we were alone inside the dust-storm, which gave us all the appearance of neglected furniture, as if we were chairs and tables which had been abandoned for decades without covering-sheets; we looked like the ghosts of ourselves. We were a dynasty born out of a nose, the aquiline monster on the face of Aadam Aziz, and the dust, entering our nostrils in our time of grief, broke down our reserve, eroded the barriers which permit families to survive; in the dust storm of the dying palaces things were said and seen and done from which none of us ever recovered. It was started by Reverend Mother, perhaps because the years had filled her out until she resembled the Sankara Acharya mountain in her native Srinagar, so that she presented the dust with the largest surface area to attack. Rumbling up from her mountainous body came a noise like an avalanche, which, when it turned into words, became a fierce attack on Aunt Pia, the bereaved widow. We had all noticed that my mumani was behaving unusually. There was an unspoken feeling that an actress of her standing should have risen to the challenge of widowhood in high style; we had unconsciously been eager to see her grieving, looking forward to watching an accomplished tragedienne orchestrate her own calamity, anticipating a forty-day raga in which bravura and gentleness, howling pain and soft despond would all be blended in the exact proportions of art; but Pia remained still, dry-eyed, and anticlimactically composed. Amina Sinai and Emerald Zulfikar wept and rent their hair, trying to spark off Pia's talents; but finally, when it seemed nothing would move Pia, Reverend Mother lost patience. The dust entered her disappointed fury and increased its bitterness. "That woman, whatsitsname," Reverend Mother rumbled, "didn't I tell you about her? My son, Allah, he could have been anything, but no, whatsitsname, she must make him ruin his life; he must jump off a roof, whatsitsname, to be free of her." It was said; could not be unsaid. Pia sat like stone; my insides shook like cornflour pudding. Reverend Mother went grimly on; she swore an oath upon the hairs of her dead son's head. "Until that woman shows my son's memory some respect, whatsitsname, until she takes out a wife's true tears, no food will pass my lips. It is shame and scandal, whatsitsname, how she sits with antimony instead of tears in her eyes!" The house resounded with this echo of her old wars with Aadam Aziz. And until the twentieth day of the forty, we were all afraid that my grandmother would die of starvation and the forty days would have to start all over again. |
| 270 |
She lay dustily on her bed; we waited and feared. I broke the stalemate between grandmother and aunt; so at least I can legitimately claim to have saved one life. On the twentieth day, I sought out Pia Aziz who sat in her groundfloor room like a blind woman; as an excuse for my visit, I apologized clumsily for my indiscretions in the Marine Drive apartment. Pia spoke, after a distant silence: "Always melodrama," she said, flatly, "In his family members, in his work. He died for his hate of melodrama; it is why I would not cry." At the time I did not understand; now I'm sure that Pia Aziz was exactly right. Deprived of a livelihood by spurning the cheap-thrill style of the Bombay cinema, my uncle strolled off the edge of a roof; melodrama inspired (and perhaps tainted) his final dive to earth. Pia's refusal to weep was in honor of his memory ... but the effort of admitting it breached the walls of her self-control. Dust made her sneeze; the sneeze brought tears to her eyes; and now the tears would not stop, and we all witnessed our hoped-for performance after all, because once they fell they fell like Flora Fountain, and she was unable to resist her own talent; she shaped the flood like the performer she was, introducing dominant themes and subsidiary motifs, beating her astonishing breasts in a manner genuinely painful to observe, now squeezing, now pummelling ... she tore her garments and her hair. It was an exaltation of tears, and it persuaded Reverend Mother to eat. Dal and pistachio-nuts poured into my grandmother while salt water flooded from my aunt. Now Naseem Aziz descended upon Pia, embracing her, turning the solo into a duet, mingling the music of reconciliation with the unbearably beautiful tunes of grief. Our palms itched with inexpressible applause. And the best was still to come, because Pia, the artiste, brought her epic efforts to a superlative close. Laying her head in her mother-in-law's lap, she said in a voice filled with submission and emptiness, "Ma, let your unworthy daughter listen to you at last; tell me what to do, I will do." And Reverend Mother, tearfully: "Daughter, your father Aziz and I will go to Rawalpindi soon; in our old age we will live near our youngest daughter, our Emerald. You will also come, and a petrol pump will be purchased." And so it was that Reverend Mother's dream began to come true, and Pia Aziz agreed to relinquish the world of films for that of fuel. My uncle Hanif, I thought, would probably have approved. The dust affected us all during those forty days; it made Ahmed Sinai churlish and raucous, so that he refused to sit in the company of his in-laws and made Alice Pereira relay messages to the mourners, messages which he also yelled out from his office: "Keep the racket down! I am working in the middle of this hullabaloo!" It made General Zulfikar and Emerald look constantly at calendars and airline timetables, while their son Zafar began to boast to the Brass Monkey that he was getting his father to arrange a marriage between them. |
| 271 |
Behind his foolishness and his rages, the cracks continued to spread; the disease munched steadily on his bones, while hatred ate the rest of him away. He did not die, however, until 1964. It happened like this: on Wednesday, December 25th, 1963 — on Christmas Day! — Reverend Mother awoke to find her husband gone. Coming out into the courtyard of her home, amid hissing geese and the pale shadows of the dawn, she called for a servant; and was told that the Doctor Sahib had gone by rickshaw to the railway station. By the time she reached the station, the train had gone; and in this way my grandfather, following some unknown impulse, began his last journey, so that he could end his story where it (and mine) began, in a city surrounded by mountains and set upon a lake. The valley lay hidden in an eggshell of ice; the mountains had closed in, to snarl like angry jaws around the city on the lake ... winter in Srinagar; winter in Kashmir. On Friday, December 27th, a man answering to my grandfather's description was seen, chugha-coated, drooling, in the vicinity of the Hazratbal Mosque. At four forty-five on Saturday morning, Haji Muhammad Khalil Ghanai noticed the theft, from the Mosque's inner sanctum, of the valley's most treasured relic: the holy hair of the Prophet Muhammad. Did he? Didn't he? If it was him, why did he not enter the Mosque, stick in hand, to belabor the faithful as he had become accustomed to doing? If not him, then why? There were rumors of a Central Government plot to "demoralize the Kashmiri Muslims," by stealing their sacred hair; and counter-rumors about Pakistani agents provocateurs, who supposedly stole the relic to foment unrest ... did they? Or not? Was this bizarre incident truly political, or was it the penultimate attempt at revenge upon God by a father who had lost his son? For ten days, no food was cooked in any Muslim home; there were riots and burnings of cars; but my grandfather was above politics now, and is not known to have joined in any processions. He was a man with a single mission; and what is known is that on January 1st, 1964 (a Wednesday, just one week after his departure from Agra), he set his face towards the hill which Muslims erroneously called the Takht-e-Sulaiman, Solomon's seat, atop which stood a radio mast, but also the black blister of the temple of Sankara Acharya. Ignoring the distress of the city, my grandfather climbed; while the cracking sickness within him gnawed patiently through his bones. He was not recognized. Doctor Aadam Aziz (Heidelberg-returned) died five days before the government announced that its massive search for the single hair of the Prophet's head had been successful. When the State's holiest saints assembled to authenticate the hair, my grandfather was unable to tell them the truth. (If they were wrong ... but I can't answer the questions I've asked.) Arrested for the crime — and later released on grounds of ill-health — was one Abdul Rahim Bande; but perhaps my grandfather, had he lived, could have shed a stranger light on the affair ... |
| 272 |
at midday on January 1st, Aadam Aziz arrived outside the temple of Sankara Acharya. He was seen to raise his walking-stick; inside the temple, women performing the rite of puja at the Shiva-lingam shrunk back — as women had once shrank from the wrath of another, tetra-pod-obsessed doctor; and then the cracks claimed him, and his legs gave way beneath him as the bones disintegrated, and the effect of his fall was to shatter the rest of his skeleton beyond all hope of repair. He was identified by the papers in the pocket of his chugha-coat: a photograph of his son, and a half-completed (and fortunately, correctly addressed) letter to his wife. The body, too fragile to be transported, was buried in the valley of his birth. I am watching Padma; her muscles have begun to twitch distractedly. "Consider this," I say. "Is what happened to my grandfather so very strange? Compare it with the mere fact of the holy fuss over the theft of a hair; because every last detail of that is true, and by comparison, an old man's death is surely perfectly normal." Padma relaxes; her muscles give me the go-ahead. Because I've spent too long on Aadam Aziz; perhaps I'm afraid of what must be told next; but the revelation will not be denied. One last fact: after the death of my grandfather, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru fell ill and never recovered his health. This fatal sickness finally killed him on May 27th, 1964. If I hadn't wanted to be a hero, Mr. Zagallo would never have pulled out my hair. If my hair had remained intact, Glandy Keith and Fat Perce wouldn't have taunted me; Masha Miovic wouldn't have goaded me into losing my finger. And from my finger flowed blood which was neither-Alpha-nor-Omega, and sent me into exile; and in exile I was filled with the lust for revenge which led to the murder of Homi Catrack; and if Homi hadn't died, perhaps my uncle would not have strolled off a roof into the sea-breezes; and then my grandfather would not have gone to Kashmir and been broken by the effort of climbing the Sankara Acharya hill. And my grandfather was the founder of my family, and my fate was linked by my birthday to that of the nation, and the father of the nation was Nehru. Nehru's death: can I avoid the conclusion that that, too, was all my fault? But now we're back in 1958; because of the thirty-seventh day of the mourning period, the truth, which had been creeping up on Mary Pereira — and therefore on me — for over eleven years, finally came out into the open; truth, in the shape of an old, old man, whose stench of Hell penetrated even my clogged-up nostrils, and whose body lacked fingers and toes and was littered with boils and holes, walked up our two-storey hillock and appeared through the dust-cloud to be seen by Mary Pereira, who was cleaning the chick-blinds on the verandah. Here, then, was Mary's nightmare come true; here, visible through the pall of dust, was the ghost of Joe D'Costa, walking towards the ground-floor office of Ahmed Sinai! As if it hadn't been enough to show himself to Aadam Aziz ... |
| 273 |
He had been wrestling, in his private world of abstraction, with the unthinkable realities which Mary's revelations had unleashed; and owing to some cockeyed functioning of the alcohol, had been seized by an indescribable rage which he directed, neither at Mary's departed back, nor at the changeling in his midst, but at my mother — at, I should say, Amina Sinai. Perhaps because he knew he should beg her forgiveness, and would not, Ahmed ranted at her for hours within the shocked hearing of her family; I will not repeat the names he called her, nor the vile courses of action he recommended she should take with her life. But in the end it was Reverend Mother who intervened. "Once before, my daughter," she said, ignoring Ahmed's continuing ravings, "your father and I, whatsitsname, said there was no shame in leaving an inadequate husband. Now I say again: you have, whatsitsname, a man of unspeakable vileness. Go from him; go today, and take your children, whatsitsname, away from these oaths which he spews from his lips like an animal, whatsitsname, of the gutter. Take your children, I say, whatsitsname — both your children," she said, clutching me to her bosom. Once Reverend Mother had legitimized me, there was no one to oppose her; it seems to me now, across the years, that even my cursing father was affected by her support of the eleven-year-old snotnosed child. Reverend Mother fixed everything; my mother was like putty — like potter's clay! — in her omnipotent hands. At that time, my grandmother (I must continue to call her that) still believed that she and Aadam Aziz would shortly be emigrating to Pakistan; so she instructed my aunt Emerald to take us all with her — Amina, the Monkey, myself, even my aunty Pia — and await her coming. "Sisters must care for sisters, whatsitsname," Reverend Mother said, "in times of trouble." My aunt Emerald looked highly displeased; but both she and General Zulfikar acquiesced. And, since my father was in a lunatic temper which made us fear for our safety, and the Zulfikars had already booked themselves on a ship which was to sail that night, I left my life-long home that very day, leaving Ahmed Sinai alone with Alice Pereira; because when my mother left her second husband, all the other servants walked out, too. In Pakistan, my second period of hurtling growth came to an end. And, in Pakistan, I discovered that somehow the existence of a frontier "jammed" my thought-transmissions to the more-than-five-hundred; so that, exiled once more from my home, I was also exiled from the gift which was my truest birthright: the gift of the midnight children. We lay anchored off the Rann of Kutch on a heat-soaked afternoon. Heat buzzed in my bad left ear; but I chose to remain on deck, watching as small, vaguely ominous rowing boats and fishermen's dhows ran a ferry service between our ship and the Rann, transporting objects veiled in canvas back and forth, back and forth. Below decks, the adults were playing housie-housie; I had no idea where the Monkey was. |
| 274 |
It was the first time I had ever been on a real ship (occasional visits to American warships in Bombay harbor didn't count, being merely tourism; and there was always the embarrassment of being in the company of dozens of highly-pregnant ladies, who always came on these tour parties in the hope that they would enter labor and give birth to children who qualified, by virtue of their seaborne birth, for American citizenship). I stared through the heat-haze at the Rann. The Rann of Kutch ... I'd always thought it a magical name, and half-feared-half-longed to visit the place, that chameleon area which was land for half the year and sea for the other half, and on which, it was said, the receding ocean would abandon all manner of fabulous debris, such as treasure-chests, white ghostly jellyfish, and even the occasional gasping, freak-legendary figure of a merman. Gazing for the first time upon this amphibian terrain, this bog of nightmare, I should have felt excited; but the heat and recent events were weighing me down; my upper lip was still childishly wet with nose-goo, but I felt oppressed by a feeling of having moved directly from an overlong and dribbling childhood into a premature (though still leaky) old age. My voice had deepened; I had been forced to start shaving, and my face was spotted with blood where the razor had sliced off the heads of pimples ... The ship's purser passed me and said, "Better get below, son. It's the hottest time just now." I asked about the ferrying boats. "Just supplies," he said and moved away, leaving me to contemplate a future in which there was little to look forward to except the grudging hospitality of General Zulfikar, the self-satisfied preening of my aunt Emerald, who would no doubt enjoy showing off her worldly success and status to her unhappy sister and bereaved sister-in-law, and the muscle-headed cockiness of their son Zafar ... "Pakistan," I said aloud, "What a complete dump!" And we hadn't even arrived ... I looked at the boats; they seemed to be swimming through a dizzying haze. The deck seemed to be swaying violently as well, although there was virtually no wind; and although I tried to grab the rails, the boards were too quick for me: they rushed up and hit me on the nose. That was how I came to Pakistan, with a mild attack of sunstroke to add to the emptiness of my hands and the knowledge of my birth; and what was the name of the boat? What two sister-ships still plied between Bombay and Karachi in those days before politics ended their journeys? Our boat was the SS Sabarmati; its sister, which passed us just before we reached the Karachi harbor, was the Sarasvati. We steamed into exile aboard the Commander's namesake-ship, proving once again that there was no escape from recurrence. We reached Rawalpindi by hot, dusty train. (The General and Emerald travelled in Air-Conditioned; they bought the rest of us ordinary first-class tickets.) But it was cool when we reached 'Pindi and I set foot, for the first time, in a northern city ... |
| 275 |
Between October 20th and November 20th, I continued to convene — to attempt to convene — our nightly sessions; but they fled from me, not one by one, but in tens and twenties; each night, less of them were willing to tune in; each week, over a hundred of them retreated into private life. In the high Himalayas, Gurkhas and Rajputs fled in disarray from the Chinese army; and in the upper reaches of my mind, another army was also destroyed by things — bickerings, prejudices, boredom, selfishness — which I had believed too small, too petty to have touched them. (But optimism, like a lingering disease, refused to vanish; I continued to believe — I continue now — that what-we-had-in-common would finally have outweighed what-drove-us-apart. No: I will not accept the ultimate responsibility for the end of the Children's Conference; because what destroyed all possibility of renewal was the love of Ahmed and Amina Sinai.) ... And Shiva? Shiva, whom I cold-bloodedly denied his birthright? Never once, in that last month, did I send my thoughts in search of him; but his existence, somewhere in the world, nagged away at the corners of my mind. Shiva-the-destroyer, Shiva Knocknees ... he became, for me, first a stabbing twinge of guilt; then an obsession; and finally, as the memory of his actuality grew dull, he became a sort of principle; he came to represent, in my mind, all the vengefulness and violence and simultaneous-love-and-hate-of-Things in the world; so that even now, when I hear of drowned bodies floating like balloons on the Hooghly and exploding when nudged by passing boats; or trains set on fire, or politicians killed, or riots in Orissa or Punjab, it seems to me that the hand of Shiva lies heavily over all these things, dooming us to flounder endlessly amid murder rape greed war — that Shiva, in short, has made us who we are. (He, too, was born on the stroke of midnight; he, like me, was connected to history. The modes of connection — if I'm right in thinking they applied to me — enabled him, too, to affect the passage of the days.) I'm talking as if I never saw him again; which isn't true. But that, of course, must get into the queue like everything else; I'm not strong enough to tell that tale just now. The disease of optimism, in those days, once again attained epidemic proportions; I, meanwhile, was afflicted by an inflammation of the sinuses. Curiously triggered off by the defeat of Thag La ridge, public optimism about the war grew as fat (and as dangerous) as an overfilled balloon; my long-suffering nasal passages, however, which had been overfilled all their days, finally gave up the struggle against congestion. While parliamentarians poured out speeches about "Chinese aggression" and "the blood of our martyred jawans," my eyes began to stream with tears; while the nation puffed itself up, convincing itself that the annihilation of the little yellow men was at hand, my sinuses, too, puffed up and distorted a face which was already so startling that Ayub Khan himself had stared at it in open amazement. |
| 276 |
Until: Silence outside me. A dark room (blinds down). Can't see anything (nothing there to see). Silence inside me. A connection broken (for ever). Can't hear anything (nothing there to hear). Silence, like a desert. And a clear, free nose (nasal passages full of air). Air, like a vandal, invading my private places. Drained. I have been drained. The parahamsa, grounded. (For good.) O, spell it out, spell it out: the operation whose ostensible purpose was the draining of my inflamed sinuses and the once-and-for-all clearing of my nasal passages had the effect of breaking whatever connection had been made in a washing-chest; of depriving me of nose-given telepathy; of banishing me from the possibility of midnight children. Our names contain our fates; living as we do in a place where names have not acquired the meaninglessness of the West, and are still more than mere sounds, we are also the victims of our titles. Sinai contains Ibn Sina, master magician, Sufi adept; and also Sin the moon, the ancient god of Hadhramaut, with his own mode of connection, his powers of action-at-a-distance upon the tides of the world. But Sin is also the letter S, as sinuous as a snake; serpents lie coiled within the name. And there is also the accident of transliteration — Sinai, when in Roman script, though not in Nastaliq, is also the name of the place-of-revelation, of put-off-thy-shoes, of commandments and golden calves; but when all that is said and done; when Ibn Sina is forgotten and the moon has set; when snakes lie hidden and revelations end, it is the name of the desert — of barrenness, infertility, dust; the name of the end. In Arabia — Arabia Deserta — at the time of the prophet Muhammad, other prophets also preached: Maslama of the tribe of the Banu Hanifa in the Yamama, the very heart of Arabia; and Hanzala ibn Safwan; and Khalid ibn Sinan. Maslama's God was ar-Rahman, "the Merciful"; today Muslims pray to Allah, ar-Rahman. Khalid ibn Sinan was sent to the tribe of 'Abs; for a time, he was followed, but then he was lost. Prophets are not always false simply because they are overtaken, and swallowed up, by history. Men of worth have always roamed the desert. "Wife," Ahmed Sinai said, "this country is finished." After ceasefire and drainage, these words returned to haunt him; and Amina began to persuade him to emigrate to Pakistan, where her surviving sisters already were, and to which her mother would go after her father's death. "A fresh start," she suggested, "Janum, it would be lovely. What is left for us on this God-forsaken hill?" So in the end Buckingham Villa was delivered into the clutches of the Narlikar women, after all; and over fifteen years late, my family moved to Pakistan, the Land of the Pure. Ahmed Sinai left very little behind; there are ways of transmitting money with the help of multinational companies, and my father knew those ways. And I, although sad to leave the city of my birth, was not unhappy about moving away from the city in which Shiva lurked somewhere like a carefully-concealed land-mine. |
| 277 |
Even when, years later in the magicians' ghetto, I lived in another mosque's shade, a shade which was, at least for a time, a protective, unmenacing penumbra, I never lost my Karachi-born view of mosque-shadows, in which, it seemed to me, I could sniff the narrow, clutching, accusative odor of my aunt. Who bided her time; but whose vengeance, when it came, was crushing. It was, in those days, a city of mirages; hewn from the desert, it had not wholly succeeded in destroying the desert's power. Oases shone in the tarmac of Elphinstone Street, caravanserais were glimpsed shimmering amongst the hovels around the black bridge, the Kala Pul. In the rainless city (whose only common factor with the city of my birth was that it, too, had started life as a fishing village), the hidden desert retained its ancient powers of apparition-mongering, with the result that Karachiites had only the slipperiest of grasps on reality, and were therefore willing to turn to their leaders for advice on what was real and what was not. Beset by illusionary sand-dunes and the ghosts of ancient kings, and also by the knowledge that the name of the faith upon which the city stood meant "submission," my new fellow-citizens exuded the flat boiled odors of acquiescence, which were depressing to a nose which had smelt — at the very last, and however briefly — the highly-spiced nonconformity of Bombay. Soon after our arrival — and, perhaps, oppressed by the mosque-shadowed air of the Clayton Road house — my father resolved to build us a new home. He bought a plot of land in the smartest of the "societies," the new housing development zones; and on my sixteenth birthday, Saleem acquired more than a Lambretta — I learned the occult powers of umbilical cords. What, pickled in brine, sat for sixteen years in my father's almirah, awaiting just such a day? What, floating like a water-snake in an old pickle-jar, accompanied us on our sea-journey and ended up buried in hard, barren Karachi-earth? What had once nourished life in a womb — what now infused earth with miraculous life, and gave birth to a split-level, American-style modern bungalow? ... Eschewing these cryptic questions, I explain that, on my sixteenth birthday, my family (including Alia Aunty) assembled on our plot of Korangi Road earth; watched by the eyes of a team of laborers and the beard of a mullah, Ahmed handed Saleem a pickaxe; I drove it inaugurally into the ground. "A new beginning," Amina said, "Inshallah, we shall all be new people now." Spurred on by her noble and unattainable desire, a workman rapidly enlarged my hole; and now a pickle-jar was produced. Brine was discarded on the thirsty ground; and what-was-left-inside received the mullah's blessings. After which, an umbilical cord — was it mine? Or Shiva's? — was implanted in the earth; and at once, a house began to grow. There were sweetmeats and soft drinks; the mullah, displaying remarkable hunger, consumed thirty-nine laddoos; and Ahmed Sinai did not once complain of the expense. |
| 278 |
(One bus-driver, in those days, was so incensed at being overtaken by his rival from another company — the nauseating odor of defeat poured from his glands — that he took his bus round to his opponent's house at night, hooted until the poor fellow emerged, and ran him down beneath wheels reeking, like my aunt, of revenge.) Mosques poured over me the itr of devotion; I could smell the orotund emissions of power sent out by flag-waving Army motors; in the very hoardings of the cinemas I could discern the cheap tawdry perfumes of imported spaghetti Westerns and the most violent martial-arts films ever made. I was, for a time, like a drugged person, my head reeling beneath the complexities of smell; but then my overpowering desire for form asserted itself, and I survived. Indo-Pakistani relations deteriorated; the borders were closed, so that we could not go to Agra to mourn my grandfather; Reverend Mother's emigration to Pakistan was also somewhat delayed. In the meantime, Saleem was working towards a general theory of smell: classification procedures had begun. I saw this scientific approach as my own, personal obeisance to the spirit of my grandfather ... to begin with, I perfected my skill at distinguishing, until I could tell apart the infinite varieties of betel-nut and (with my eyes shut) the twelve different available brands of fizzy drink. (Long before the American commentator Herbert Feldman came to Karachi to deplore the existence of a dozen aerated waters in a city which had only three suppliers of bottled milk, I could sit blindfolded and tell Pakola from Hoffman's Mission, Citra Cola from Fanta. Feldman saw these drinks as a manifestation of capitalist imperialism; I, sniffing out which was Canada Dry and which 7-Up, unerringly separating Pepsi from Coke, was more interested in passing their subtle olfactory test. Double Kola and Kola Kola, Perri Cola and Bubble Up were blindly identified and named.) Only when I was sure of my mastery of physical scents did I move on to those other aromas which only I could smell: the perfumes of emotions and all the thousand and one drives which make us human: love and death, greed and humility, have and have-not were labelled and placed in neat compartments of my mind. Early attempts at ordering: I tried to classify smells by color — boiling underwear and the printer's ink of the Daily Jang shared a quality of blueness, while old teak and fresh farts were both dark brown. Motor-cars and graveyards I jointly classified as gray ... there was, too, classification-by-weight: flyweight smells (paper), bantam odors (soap-fresh bodies, grass), welterweights (perspiration, queen-of-the-night); shahi-korma and bicycle-oil were light-heavyweight in my system, while anger, patchouli, treachery and dung were among the heavyweight stinks of the earth. And I had a geometric system also: the roundness of joy and the angularity of ambition; I had elliptical smells, and also ovals and squares ... a lexicographer of the nose, I travelled Bunder Road and the P. |
| 279 |
In those days, the President of Pakistan had decreed an election; it was to take place on the day after the engagement ceremony, under a form of suffrage called Basic Democracy. The hundred million people of Pakistan had been divided up into a hundred and twenty thousand approximately equal parts, and each part was represented by one Basic Democrat. The electoral college of one hundred and twenty thousand "B. D. s" were to elect the President. In Kif, the 420 Basic Democrats included mullahs, road-sweepers, the Nawab's chauffeur, numerous men who sharecropped hashish on the Nawab's estate, and other loyal citizens; the Nawab had invited all of these to his daughter's hennaing ceremony. He had, however, also been obliged to invite two real badmaashes, the returning officers of the Combined Opposition Party. These badmaashes quarrelled constantly amongst themselves, but the Nawab was courteous and welcoming. "Tonight you are my honored friends," he told them, "and tomorrow is another day." The badmaashes ate and drank as if they had never seen food before, but everybody — even Mutasim the Handsome, whose patience was shorter than his father's — was told to treat them well. The Combined Opposition Party, you will not be surprised to hear, was a collection of rogues and scoundrels of the first water, united only in their determination to unseat the President and return to the bad old days in which civilians, and not soldiers, lined their pockets from the public exchequer; but for some reason they had acquired a formidable leader. This was Mistress Fatima Jinnah, the sister of the founder of the nation, a woman of such desiccated antiquity that the Nawab suspected she had died long ago and been stuffed by a master taxidermist — a notion supported by his son, who had seen a movie called El Cid in which a dead man led an army into battle ... but there she was nevertheless, goaded into electioneering by the President's failure to complete the marbling of her brother's mausoleum; a terrible foe, above slander and suspicion. It was even said that her opposition to the President had shaken the people's faith in him — was he not, after all, the reincarnation of the great Islamic heroes of yesteryear? Of Muhammad bin Sam Ghuri, of Iltutmish and the Mughals? Even in Kif itself, the Nawab had noticed C. O. P. stickers appearing in curious places; someone had even had the cheek to affix one to the boot of the Rolls. "Bad days," the Nawab told his son. Mutasim replied, "That's what elections get you — latrine-cleaners and cheap tailors must vote to elect a ruler?" But today was a day for happiness; in the zenana chambers, women were patterning the Nawab's daughter's hands and feet with delicate traceries of henna; soon General Zulfikar and his son Zafar would arrive. The rulers of Kif put the election out of their heads, refusing to think of the crumbling figure of Fatima Jinnah, the mader-i-millat or mother of the nation who had so callously chosen to confuse her children's choosing. |
| 280 |
The end of the world!" in my mother's withering ear ... and now, having fought my way through the diseased reality of my Pakistan years, having struggled to make a little sense out of what seemed (through the mist of my aunt Alia's revenge) like a terrible, occult series of reprisals for tearing up our Bombay roots, I have reached the point at which I must tell you about ends. Let me state this quite unequivocally: it is my firm conviction that the hidden purpose of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 was nothing more nor less than the elimination of my benighted family from the face of the earth. In order to understand the recent history of our times, it is only necessary to examine the bombing-pattern of that war with an analytical, unprejudiced eye. Even ends have beginnings; everything must be told in sequence. (I have Padma, after all, squashing all my attempts to put the cart before the bullock.) By August 8th, 1965, my family history had got itself into a condition from which what-was-achieved-by-bombing-patterns provided a merciful relief. No: let me use the important word: if we were to be purified, something on the scale of what followed was probably necessary. Alia Aziz, sated with her terrible revenge; my aunt Emerald, widowed and awaiting exile; the hollow lasciviousness of my aunt Pia and the glass-boothed withdrawal of my grandmother Naseem Aziz; my cousin Zafar, with his eternally pre-pubertal princess and his future of wetting mattresses in jail-cells; the retreat into childishness of my father and the haunted, accelerated ageing of pregnant Amina Sinai ... all these terrible conditions were to be cured as a result of the adoption, by the Government, of my dream of visiting Kashmir. In the meantime, the flinty refusals of my sister to countenance my love had driven me into a deeply fatalistic frame of mind; in the grip of my new carelessness about my future I told Uncle Puffs that I was willing to marry any one of the Puffias he chose for me. (By doing so, I doomed them all; everyone who attempts to forge ties with our household ends up by sharing our fate.) I am trying to stop being mystifying. Important to concentrate on good hard facts. But which facts? One week before my eighteenth birthday, on August 8th, did Pakistani troops in civilian clothing cross the cease-fire line in Kashmir and infiltrate the Indian sector, or did they not? In Delhi, Prime Minister Shastri announced "massive infiltration ... to subvert the state"; but here is Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's Foreign Minister, with his riposte: "We categorically deny any involvement in the rising against tyranny by the indigenous people of Kashmir." If it happened, what were the motives? Again, a rash of possible explanations: the continuing anger which had been stirred up by the Rann of Kutch; the desire to settle, once-and-for-all, the old issue of who-should-possess-the-Perfect-Valley? ... Or one which didn't get into the papers: the pressures of internal political troubles in Pakistan — Ayub's government was tottering, and a war works wonders at such times. |
| 281 |
This reason or that or the other? To simplify matters, I present two of my own: the war happened because I dreamed Kashmir into the fantasies of our rulers; furthermore, I remained impure, and the war was to separate me from my sins. Jehad, Padma! Holy war! But who attacked? Who defended? On my eighteenth birthday, reality took another terrible beating. From the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi, an Indian prime minister (not the same one who wrote me a long-ago letter) sent me this birthday greeting: "We promise that force will be met with force, and aggression against us will never be allowed to succeed!" While jeeps with loud-hailers saluted me in Guru Mandir, reassuring me: "The Indian aggressors will be utterly overthrown! We are a race of warriors! One Pathan; one Punjabi Muslim is worth ten of those babus-in-arms!" Jamila Singer was called north, to serenade our worth-ten jawans. A servant paints blackout on the windows; at night, my father, in the stupidity of his second childhood, opens the windows and turns on the lights. Bricks and stones fly through the apertures: my eighteenth-birthday presents. And still events grow more and more confused: on August 30th, did Indian troops cross the cease-fire line near Uri to "chase out the Pakistan raiders" — or to initiate an attack? When, on September 1st, our ten-times-better soldiers crossed the line at Chhamb, were they aggressors or were they not? Some certainties: that the voice of Jamila Singer sang Pakistani troops to their deaths; and that muezzins from their minarets — yes, even on Clayton Road — promised us that anyone who died in battle went straight to the camphor garden. The mujahid philosophy of Syed Ahmad Barilwi ruled the air; we were invited to make sacrifices "as never before." And on the radio, what destruction, what mayhem! In the first five days of the war Voice of Pakistan announced the destruction of more aircraft than Indian had ever possessed; in eight days, All-India Radio massacred the Pakistan Army down to, and considerably beyond, the last man. Utterly distracted by the double insanity of the war and my private life, I began to think desperate thoughts ... Great sacrifices: for instance, at the battle for Lahore? — On September 6th, Indian troops crossed the Wagah border, thus hugely broadening the front of the war, which was no longer limited to Kashmir; and did great sacrifices take place, or not? Was it true that the city was virtually defenseless, because the Pak Army and Air Force were all in the Kashmir sector? Voice of Pakistan said: O memorable day! O unarguable lesson in the fatality of delay! The Indians, confident of capturing the city, stopped for breakfast. All-India Radio announced the fall of Lahore; meanwhile, a private aircraft spotted the breakfasting invaders. While the B. B. C. picked up the A. I. R. story, the Lahore militia was mobilized. Hear the Voice of Pakistan! — old men, young boys, irate grandmothers fought the Indian Army; bridge by bridge they battled, with any available weapons! |
| 282 |
Ayooba Baloch cried without stopping for three entire hours or days or weeks, until the rain began and made his tears unnecessary; and Shaheed Dar heard himself saying, "Now look what you started, man, with your crying," proving that they were already beginning to succumb to the logic of the jungle, and that was only the start of it, because as the mystery of evening compounded the unreality of the trees, the Sundarbans began to grow in the rain. At first they were so busy baling out their boat that they did not notice; also, the water-level was rising, which may have confused them; but in the last light there could be no doubt that the jungle was gaining in size, power and ferocity; the huge stilt-roots of vast ancient mangrove trees could be seen snaking about thirstily in the dusk, sucking in the rain and becoming thicker than elephants' trunks, while the mangroves themselves were getting so tall that, as Shaheed Dar said afterwards, the birds at the top must have been able to sing to God. The leaves in the heights of the great nipa palms began to spread like immense green cupped hands, swelling in the nocturnal downpour until the entire forest seemed to be thatched; and then the nipa-fruits began to fall, they were larger than any coconuts on earth and gathered speed alarmingly as they fell from dizzying heights to explode like bombs in the water. Rainwater was filling their boat; they had only their soft green caps and an old ghee tin to bale with; and as night fell and the nipa-fruits bombed them from the air, Shaheed Dar said, "Nothing else to do — we must land," although his thoughts were full of his pomegranate-dream and it crossed his mind that this might be where it came true, even if the fruits were different here. While Ayooba sat in a red-eyed funk and Farooq seemed destroyed by his hero's disintegration; while the buddha remained silent and bowed his head, Shaheed alone remained capable of thought, because although he was drenched and worn out and the night-jungle screeched around him, his head became partly clear whenever he thought about the pomegranate of his death; so it was Shaheed who ordered us, them, to row our, their, sinking boat to shore. A nipa-fruit missed the boat by an inch and a half, creating such turbulence in the water that they capsized; they struggled ashore in the dark holding guns oilskins ghee-tin above their heads, pulled the boat up after themselves, and past caring about bombarding nipa palms and snaking mangroves, fell into their sodden craft and slept. When they awoke, soaking-shivering in spite of the heat, the rain had become a heavy drizzle. They found their bodies covered in three-inch-long leeches which were almost entirely colorless owing to the absence of direct sunlight, but which had now turned bright red because they were full of blood, and which, one by one, exploded on the bodies of the four human beings, being too greedy to stop sucking when they were full. Blood trickled down legs and on to the forest floor; the jungle sucked it in, and knew what they were like. |
| 283 |
The next morning Ayooba's right arm refused to move; it hung rigidly by his side as if it had been set in plaster. Although Farooq Rashid offered help and sympathy, it was no use; the arm was held immovably in the invisible fluid of the ghost. After this first apparition, they fell into a state of mind in which they would have believed the forest capable of anything; each night it sent them new punishments, the accusing eyes of the wives of men they had tracked down and seized, the screaming and monkey-gibbering of children left fatherless by their work ... and in this first time, the time of punishment, even the impassive buddha with his citified voice was obliged to confess that he, too, had taken to waking up at night to find the forest closing in upon him like a vice, so that he felt unable to breathe. When it had punished them enough — when they were all trembling shadows of the people they had once been — the jungle permitted them the double-edged luxury of nostalgia. One night Ayooba, who was regressing towards infancy faster than any of them, and had begun to suck his one moveable thumb, saw his mother looking down at him, offering him the delicate rice-based sweets of her love; but at the same moment as he reached out for the laddoos, she scurried away, and he saw her climb a giant sundri-tree to sit swinging from a high branch by her tail: a white wraith-like monkey with the face of his mother visited Ayooba night after night, so that after a time he was obliged to remember more about her than her sweets: how she had liked to sit among the boxes of her dowry, as though she, too, were simply some sort of thing, simply one of the gifts her father gave to her husband; in the heart of the Sundarbans, Ayooba Baloch understood his mother for the first time, and stopped sucking his thumb. Farooq Rashid, too, was given a vision. At dusk one day he thought he saw his brother running wildly through the forest, and became convinced that his father had died. He remembered a forgotten day when his peasant father had told him and his fleet-footed brother that the local landlord, who lent money at 300 per cent, had agreed to buy his soul in return for the latest loan. "When I die," old Rashid told Farooq's brother, "you must open your mouth and my spirit will fly inside it; then run run run, because the zamindar will be after you!" Farooq, who had also started regressing alarmingly, found in the knowledge of his father's death and the flight of his brother the strength to give up the childish habits which the jungle had at first re-created in him; he stopped crying when he was hungry and asking Why. Shaheed Dar, too, was visited by a monkey with the face of an ancestor; but all he saw was a father who had instructed him to earn his name. This, however, also helped to restore in him the sense of responsibility which the just-following-orders requirements of war had sapped; so it seemed that the magical jungle, having tormented them with their misdeeds, was leading them by the hand towards a new adulthood. |
| 284 |
When they emerged from the jungle, it was October 1971. And I am bound to admit (but, in my opinion, the fact only reinforces my wonder at the time-shifting sorcery of the forest) that there was no tidal wave recorded that month, although, over a year previously, floods had indeed devastated the region. In the aftermath of the Sundarbans, my old life was waiting to reclaim me. I should have known: no escape from past acquaintance. What you were is forever who you are. For seven months during the course of the year 1971, three soldiers and their tracker vanished off the face of the war. In October, however, when the rains ended and the guerilla units of the Mukti Bahini began terrorizing Pakistani military outposts; when Mukti Bahini snipers picked off soldiers and petty officials alike, our quartet emerged from invisibility and, having little option, attempted to rejoin the main body of the occupying West Wing forces. Later, when questioned, the buddha would always explain his disappearance with the help of a garbled story about being lost in a jungle amid trees whose roots grabbed at you like snakes. It was perhaps fortunate for him that he was never formally interrogated by officers in the army of which he was a member. Ayooba Baloch, Farooq Rashid and Shaheed Dar were not subjected to such interrogations, either; but in their case this was because they failed to stay alive long enough for any questions to be asked. ... In an entirely deserted village of thatched huts with dung-plastered mud walls — in an abandoned community from which even the chickens had fled — Ayooba Shaheed Farooq bemoaned their fate. Rendered deaf by the poisonous mud of the rain-forest, a disability which had begun to upset them a good deal now that the taunting voices of the jungle were no longer hanging in the air, they wailed their several wails, all talking at once, none hearing the other; the buddha, however, was obliged to listen to them all: to Ayooba, who stood facing a corner inside a naked room, his hair enmeshed in a spider's web, crying "My ears my ears, like bees buzzing inside," to Farooq who, petulantly, shouted, "Whose fault, anyway? — Who, with his nose that could sniff out any bloody thing? — Who said That way, and that way? — And who, who will believe? — About jungles and temples and transparent serpents? — What a story, Allah, buddha, we should shoot you here-and-now!" While Shaheed, softly, "I'm hungry." Out once more in the real world, they were forgetting the lessons of the jungle, and Ayooba, "My arm! Allah, man, my withered arm! The ghost, leaking fluid ... !" And Shaheed, "Deserters, they'll say — empty-handed, no prisoner, after so-many months! — Allah, a court-martial, maybe, what do you think, buddha?" And Farooq, "You bastard, see what you made us do! O God, too much, our uniforms! See, our uniforms, buddha — rags-and-tatters like a beggar-boy's! Think of what the Brigadier — and that Najmuddin — on my mother's head I swear I didn't — I'm not a coward! |
| 285 |
The whistle echoed around the field, bouncing off fallen helmets, resounding hollowly from the barrels of mud-blocked rifles, sinking without trace into the fallen boots of the strange, strange crops, whose smell, like the smell of unfairness, was capable of bringing tears to the buddha's eyes. The crops were dead, having been hit by some unknown blight ... and most of them, but not all, wore the uniforms of the West Pakistani Army. Apart from the whistling, the only noises to be heard were the sounds of objects dropping into the peasant's treasure-sack: leather belts, watches, gold tooth-fillings, spectacle frames, tiffin-carriers, water flasks, boots. The peasant saw them and came running towards them, smiling ingratiatingly, talking rapidly in a wheedling voice that only the buddha was obliged to hear. Farooq and Shaheed stared glassily at the field while the peasant began his explanations. "Plenty shooting! Thaii! Thaii!" He made a pistol with his right hand. He was speaking bad, stilted Hindi. "Ho sirs! India has come, my sirs! Ho yes! Ho yes." — And all over the field, the crops were leaking nourishing bone-marrow into the soil while he, "No shoot I, my sirs. Ho no. I have news — ho, such news! India comes! Jessore is fall, my sirs; in one-four days, Dacca, also, yes-no?" The buddha listened; the buddha's eyes looked beyond the peasant to the field. "Such a things, my sir! India! They have one mighty soldier fellow, he can kill six persons at one time, break necks khrikk-khrikk between his knees, my sirs? Knees — is right words?" He tapped his own. "I see, my sirs. With these eyes, ho yes! He fights with not guns, not swords. With knees, and six necks go khrikk-khrikk. Ho God." Shaheed was vomiting in the field. Farooq Rashid had wandered to the far edge and stood staring into a copse of mango trees. "In one-two weeks is over the war, my sirs! Everybody come back. Just now all gone, but I not, my sirs. Soldiers came looking for Bahini and killed many many, also my son. Ho yes, sirs, ho yes indeed." The buddha's eyes had become clouded and dull. In the distance he could hear the crump of heavy artillery. Columns of smoke trailed up into the colorless December sky. The strange crops lay still, unruffled by the breeze ... "I say, my sirs. Here I know names of birds and plants. Ho yes. I am Deshmukh by name; vendor of notions by trade. I sell many so-fine thing. You want? Medicine for constipation, damn good, ho yes. I have. Watch you want, glowing in the dark? I also have. And book ho yes, and joke trick, truly. I was famous in Dacca before. Ho yes, most truly. No shoot." The vendor of notions chattered on, offering for sale item after item, such as a magical belt which would enable the wearer to speak Hindi — "I am wearing now, my sir, speak damn good, yes no? Many India soldier are buy, they talk so-many different tongues, the belt is godsend from God!" — and then he noticed what the buddha held in his hand. "Ho sir! Absolute master thing! Is silver? |
| 286 |
While Henry A. Kissinger argued the cause of Yahya Khan, the same Yahya was secretly arranging the President's famous state visits to China ... there were, therefore, great forces working against my reunion with Parvati and Sam's with the Tiger; but despite the tilting President, it was all over in three short weeks. On the night of December 14th, Shaheed Dar and the buddha circled the fringes of the invested city of Dacca; but the buddha's nose (you will not have forgotten) was capable of sniffing out more than most. Following his nose, which could smell safety and danger, they found a way through the Indian lines, and entered the city under cover of night. While they moved stealthily through streets in which nobody except a few starving beggars could be seen, the Tiger was swearing to fight to the last man; but the next day, he surrendered instead. What is not known: whether the last man was grateful to be spared or peeved at missing his chance of entering the camphor garden. And so I returned to that city in which, in those last hours before reunions, Shaheed and I saw many things which were not true, which were not possible, because our boys would not could not have behaved so badly; we saw men in spectacles with heads like eggs being shot in side-streets, we saw the intelligentsia of the city being massacred by the hundred, but it was not true because it could not have been true, the Tiger was a decent chap, after all, and our jawans were worth ten babus, we moved through the impossible hallucination of the night, hiding in doorways while fires blossomed like flowers, reminding me of the way the Brass Monkey used to set fire to shoes to attract a little attention, there were slit throats being buried in unmarked graves, and Shaheed began his, "No, buddha — what a thing, Allah, you can't believe your eyes — no, not true, how can it — buddha, tell, what's got into my eyes?" And at last the buddha spoke, knowing Shaheed could not hear: "O, Shaheeda," he said, revealing the depths of his fastidiousness, "a person must sometimes choose what he will see and what he will not; look away, look away from there now." But Shaheed was staring at a maidan in which lady doctors were being bayoneted before they were raped, and raped again before they were shot. Above them and behind them, the cool white minaret of a mosque stared blindly down upon the scene. As though talking to himself, the buddha said, "It is time to think about saving our skins; God knows why we came back." The buddha entered the doorway of a deserted house, a broken, peeling shell of an edifice which had once housed a tea-shop, a bicycle-repair shop, a whorehouse and a tiny landing on which a notary public must once have sat, because there was the low desk on which he had left behind a pair of half-rimmed spectacles, there were the abandoned seals and stamps which had once enabled him to be more than an old nobody — stamps and seals which had made him an arbiter of what was true and what was not. |
| 287 |
Then Parvati whispered some other words, and, inside the basket of invisibility, I, Saleem Sinai, complete with my loose anonymous garment, vanished instantly into thin air. "Vanished? How vanished, what vanished?" Padma's head jerks up; Padma's eyes stare at me in bewilderment. I, shrugging, merely reiterate: Vanished, just like that. Disappeared. Dematerialized. Like a djinn: poof, like so. "So," Padma presses me, "she really-truly was a witch?" Really-truly. I was in the basket, but also not in the basket; Picture Singh lifted it one-handed and tossed it into the back of the Army truck taking him and Parvati and ninety-nine others to the aircraft waiting at the military airfield; I was tossed with the basket, but also not tossed. Afterwards, Picture Singh said, "No, captain, I couldn't feel your weight"; nor could I feel any bump thump bang. One hundred and one artistes had arrived, by I. A. F. troop transport, from the capital of India; one hundred and two persons returned, although one of them was both there and not there. Yes, magic spells can occasionally succeed. But also fail: my father, Ahmed Sinai, never succeeded in cursing Sherri, the mongrel bitch. Without passport or permit, I returned, cloaked in invisibility, to the land of my birth; believe, don't believe, but even a sceptic will have to provide another explanation for my presence here. Did not the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid (in an earlier set of fabulous tales) also wander, unseen invisible anonymous, cloaked through the streets of Baghdad? What Haroun achieved in Baghdad streets, Parvati-the-witch made possible for me, as we flew through the air-lanes of the subcontinent. She did it; I was invisible; bas. Enough. Memories of invisibility: in the basket, I learned what it was like, will be like, to be dead. I had acquired the characteristics of ghosts! Present, but insubstantial; actual, but without being or weight ... I discovered, in the basket, how ghosts see the world. Dimly hazily faintly ... it was around me, but only just; I hung in a sphere of absence at whose fringes, like faint reflections, could be seen the specters of wickerwork. The dead die, and are gradually forgotten; time does its healing, and they fade — but in Parvati's basket I learned that the reverse is also true; that ghosts, too, begin to forget; that the dead lose their memories of the living, and at last, when they are detached from their lives, fade away — that dying, in short, continues for a long time after death. Afterwards, Parvati said, "I didn't want to tell you — but nobody should be kept invisible that long — it was dangerous, but what else was there to do?" In the grip of Parvati's sorcery, I felt my hold on the world slip away — and how easy, how peaceful not to never to return! — to float in this cloudy nowhere, wafting further further further, like a seed-spore blown on the breeze — in short, I was in mortal danger. What I held on to in that ghostly time-and-space: a silver spittoon. Which, transformed like myself by Parvati-whispered words, was nevertheless a reminder of the outside ... |
| 288 |
... And I, feebly, "My mother? Departed?" And now Uncle Mustapha, perhaps feeling that his wife has gone too far, says reluctantly, "Never mind, Saleem, of course you must stay — he must, wife, what else to do? — and poor fellow doesn't even know ..." Then they told me. It occurred to me, in the heart of that crazy Fly, that I owed the dead a number of mourning periods; after I learned of the demise of my mother and father and aunts Alia and Pia and Emerald, of cousin Zafar and his Kifi princess, of Reverend Mother and my distant relative Zohra and her husband, I resolved to spend the next four hundred days in mourning, as was right and proper: ten mourning periods, of forty days each. And then, and then, there was the matter of Jamila Singer ... She had heard about my disappearance in the turmoil of the war in Bangladesh; she, who always showed her love when it was too late, had perhaps been driven a little crazy by the news. Jamila, the Voice of Pakistan, Bulbul-of-the-Faith, had spoken out against the new rulers of truncated, moth-eaten, war-divided Pakistan; while Mr. Bhutto was telling the U. N. Security Council, "We will build a new Pakistan! A better Pakistan! My country hearkens for me!", my sister was reviling him in public; she, purest of the pure, most patriotic of patriots, turned rebel when she heard about my death. (That, at least, is how I see it; all I heard from my uncle were the bald facts; he had heard them through diplomatic channels, which do not go in for psychological theorizing.) Two days after her tirade against the perpetrators of the war, my sister had vanished off the face of the earth. Uncle Mustapha tried to speak gently: "Very bad things are happening over there, Saleem; people disappearing all the time; we must fear the worst." No! No no no! Padma: he was wrong! Jamila did not disappear into the clutches of the State; because that same night, I dreamed that she, in the shadows of darkness and the secrecy of a simple veil, not the instantly recognizable gold-brocade tent of Uncle Puffs but a common black burqa, fled by air from the capital city; and here she is, arriving in Karachi, unquestioned unarrested free, she is taking a taxi into the depths of the city, and now there is a high wall with bolted doors and a hatch through which, once, long ago, I received bread, the leavened bread of my sister's weakness, she is asking to be let in, nuns are opening doors as she cries sanctuary, yes, there she is, safely inside, doors being bolted behind her, exchanging one kind of invisibility for another, there is another Reverend Mother now, as Jamila Singer who once, as the Brass Monkey, flirted with Christianity, finds safety shelter peace in the midst of the hidden order of Santa Ignacia ... yes, she is there, safe, not vanished, not in the grip of police who kick beat starve, but at rest, not in an unmarked grave by the side of the Indus, but alive, baking bread, singing sweetly to the secret nuns; I know, I know, I know. |
| 289 |
How do I know? A brother knows; that's all. Responsibility, assaulting me yet again: because there is no way out of it — Jamila's fall was, as usual, all my fault. I lived in the home of Mr. Mustapha Aziz for four hundred and twenty days ... Saleem was in belated mourning for his dead; but do not think for one moment that my ears were closed! Don't assume I didn't hear what was being said around me, the repeated quarrels between uncle and aunt (which may have helped him decide to consign her to the insane asylum): Sonia Aziz yelling, "That bhangi — that dirtyfilthy fellow, not even your nephew, I don't know what's got into you, we should throw him out on his ear!" And Mustapha, quietly, replying: "Poor chap is stricken with grief, so how can we, you just have to look to see, he is not quite right in the head, has suffered many bad things." Not quite right in the head! That was tremendous, coming from them — from that family beside which a tribe of gibbering cannibals would have seemed calm and civilized! Why did I put up with it? Because I was a man with a dream. But for four hundred and twenty days, it was a dream which failed to come true. Droopy-moustachioed, tall-but-stooped, an eternal number-two: my uncle Mustapha was not my uncle Hanif. He was the head of the family now, the only one of his generation to survive the holocaust of 1965; but he gave me no help at all ... I bearded him in his genealogy-filled study one bitter evening and explained — with proper solemnity and humble but resolute gestures — my historic mission to rescue the nation from her fate; but he sighed deeply and said, "Listen, Saleem, what would you have me do? I keep you in my house; you eat my bread and do nothing — but that is all right, you are from my dead sister's house, and I must look after — so stay, rest, get well in yourself; then let us see. You want a clerkship or so, maybe it can be fixed; but leave these dreams of God-knows-what. Our country is in safe hands. Already Indiraji is making radical reforms — land reforms, tax structures, education, birth control — you can leave it to her and her sarkar." Patronizing me, Padma! As if I were a foolish child! O the shame of it, the humiliating shame of being condescended to by dolts! At every turn I am thwarted; a prophet in the wilderness, like Maslama, like ibn Sinan! No matter how I try, the desert is my lot. O vile unhelpfulness of lickspittle uncles! O fettering of ambitions by second-best toadying relatives! My uncle's rejection of my pleas for preferment had one grave effect: the more he praised his Indira, the more deeply I detested her. He was, in fact, preparing me for my return to the magicians' ghetto, and for ... for her ... the Widow. Jealousy: that was it. The green jealousy of my mad aunt Sonia, dripping like poison into my uncle's ears, prevented him from doing a single thing to get me started on my chosen career. The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also: tiny madwomen. On the four hundred and eighteenth day of my stay, there was a change in the atmosphere of the madhouse. |
| 290 |
Under his umbrella, Picture Singh spoke of a socialism which owed nothing to foreign influences. "Listen, captains," he told warring ventriloquists and puppeteers, "will you go to your villages and talk about Stalins and Maos? Will Bihari or Tamil peasants care about the killing of Trotsky?" The chaya of his magical umbrella cooled the most intemperate of the wizards; and had the effect, on me, of convincing me that one day soon the snake-charmer Picture Singh would follow in the footsteps of Mian Abdullah so many years ago; that, like the legendary Hummingbird, he would leave the ghetto to shape the future by the sheer force of his will; and that, unlike my grandfather's hero, he would not be stopped until he, and his cause, had won the day ... but, but. Always a but but. What happened, happened. We all know that. Before I return to telling the story of my private life, I should like it to be known that it was Picture Singh who revealed to me that the country's corrupt, "black" economy had grown as large as the official, "white" variety, which he did by showing me a newspaper photograph of Mrs. Gandhi. Her hair, parted in the center, was snow-white on one side and black-asnight on the other, so that, depending on which profile she presented, she resembled either a stoat or an ermine. Recurrence of the center-parting in history; and also, economy as an analogue of a Prime Ministerial hair-style ... I owe these important perceptions to the Most Charming Man In The World. Picture Singh it was who told me that Mishra, the railway minister, was also the officially-appointed minister for bribery, through whom the biggest deals in the black economy were cleared, and who arranged for payoffs to appropriate ministers and officials; without Picture Singh, I might never have known about the poll-fixing in the state elections in Kashmir. He was no lover of democracy, however: "God damn this election business, captain," he told me, "Whenever they come, something bad happens; and our countrymen behave like clowns." I, in the grip of my fever-for-revolution, failed to take issue with my mentor. There were, of course, a few exceptions to the ghetto's rules: one or two conjurers retained their Hindu faith and, in politics, espoused the Hindu-sectarian Jana Sangh party or the notorious Ananda Marg extremists; there were even Swatantra voters amongst the jugglers. Non-politically speaking, the old lady Resham Bibi was one of the few members of the community who remained an incurable fantasist, believing (for instance) in the superstition which forbade women to climb mango trees, because a mango tree which had once borne the weight of a woman would bear sour fruit for ever more ... and there was the strange fakir named Chishti Khan, whose face was so smooth and lustrous that nobody knew whether he was nineteen or ninety, and who had surrounded his shack with a fabulous creation of bamboo-sticks and scraps of brightly-colored paper, so that his home looked like a miniature, multi-colored replica of the nearby Red Fort. |
| 291 |
Only when you passed through its castellated gateway did you realize that behind the meticulously hyperbolic facade of bamboo-and-paper crenellations and ravelins hid a tin-and-cardboard hovel like all the rest. Chishti Khan had committed the ultimate solecism of permitting his illusionist expertise to infect his real life; he was not popular in the ghetto. The magicians kept their distance, lest they become diseased by his dreams. So you will understand why Parvati-the-witch, the possessor of truly wondrous powers, had kept them secret all her life; the secret of her midnight-given gifts would not have been easily forgiven by a community which had constantly denied such possibilities. On the blind side of the Friday Mosque, where the magicians were out of sight, and the only danger was from scavengers-after-scrap, from searchers-for-abandoned-crates or hunters-for-corrugated-tin ... that was where Parvati-the-witch, eager as mustard, showed me what she could do. In a humble shalwar-kameez constructed from the ruins of a dozen others, midnight's sorceress performed for me with the verve and enthusiasm of a child. Saucer-eye, rope-like pony-tail, fine full red lips ... I would never have resisted her for so long if not for the face, the sick decaying eyes nose lips of ... There seemed at first to be no limits to Parvati's abilities. (But there were.) Well, then: were demons conjured? Did djinns appear, offering riches and overseas travel on levitating rugs? Were frogs turned into princes, and did stones metamorphose into jewels? Was there selling-of-souls, and raising of the dead? Not a bit of it; the magic which Parvati-the-witch performed for me — the only magic she was ever willing to perform — was of the type known as "white." It was as though the Brahmins' "Secret Book", the Atharva-Veda, had revealed all its secrets to her; she could cure disease and counter poisons (to prove this, she permitted snakes to bite her, and fought the venom with a strange ritual, involving praying to the snake-god Takshasa, drinking water infused with the goodness of the Krimuka tree and the powers of old, boiled garments, and reciting a spell: Garudamand, the eagle, drank of poison, but it was powerless; in a like manner have I deflected its power, as an arrow is deflected) — she could cure sores and consecrate talismans — she knew the sraktya charm and the Rite of the Tree. And all this, in a series of extraordinary night-time displays, she revealed to me beneath the walls of the Mosque — but still she was not happy. As ever, I am obliged to accept responsibility; the scent of mournfulness which hung around Parvati-the-witch was my creation. Because she was twenty-five years old, and wanted more from me than my willingness to be her audience; God knows why, but she wanted me in her bed — or, to be precise, to lie with her on the length of sackcloth which served her for a bed in the hovel she shared with a family of contortionist triplets from Kerala, three girls who were orphans just like her — just like myself. |
| 292 |
What she did for me: under the power of her magic, hair began to grow where none had grown since Mr. Zagallo pulled too hard; her wizardry caused the birthmarks on my face to fade under the healing applications of herbal poultices; it seemed that even the bandiness of my legs was diminishing under her care. (She could do nothing, however, for my one bad ear; there is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.) But no matter how much she did for me, I was unable to do for her the thing she desired most; because although we lay down together beneath the walls on the blind side of the Mosque, the moonlight showed me her night-time face turning, always turning into that of my distant, vanished sister ... no, not my sister ... into the putrid, vilely disfigured face of Jamila Singer. Parvati anointed her body with unguent oils imbued with erotic charm; she combed her hair a thousand times with a comb made from aphrodisiac deer-bones; and (I do not doubt it) in my absence she must have tried all manner of lovers' sorceries; but I was in the grip of an older bewitchment, and could not, it seemed, be released; I was doomed to find the faces of women who loved me turning into the features of ... but you know whose crumbling features appeared, filling my nostrils with their unholy stench. "Poor girl," Padma sighs, and I agree; but until the Widow drained me of past present future, I remained under the Monkey's spell. When Parvati-the-witch finally admitted failure, her face developed, overnight, an alarming and pronounced pout. She fell asleep in the hut of the contortionist orphans and awoke with her full lips stuck in a protruding attitude of unutterably sensuous pique. Orphaned triplets told her, giggling worriedly, what had happened to her face; she tried spiritedly to pull her features back into position, but neither muscles nor wizardry managed to restore her to her former self; at last, resigning herself to her tragedy, Parvati gave in, so that Resham Bibi told anyone who would listen: "That poor girl — a god must have blown on her when she was making a face." (That year, incidentally, the chic ladies of the cities were all wearing just such an expression with erotic deliberation; the haughty mannequins in the Eleganza-'73 fashion show all pouted as they walked their catwalks. In the awful poverty of the magicians' slum, pouting Parvati-the-witch was in the height of facial fashion.) The magicians devoted much of their energies to the problem of making Parvati smile again. Taking time off from their work, and also from the more mundane chores of reconstructing tin-and-cardboard huts which had fallen down in a high wind, or killing rats, they performed their most difficult tricks for her pleasure; but the pout remained in place. Resham Bibi made a green tea which smelled of camphor and forced it down Parvati's gullet. The tea had the effect of constipating her so thoroughly that she was not seen defecating behind her hovel for nine weeks. |
| 293 |
Stiffening of Padma: taut as a washing-line, my dung-lotus inquires: "Married? But last night only you said you wouldn't — and why you haven't told me all these days, weeks, months ... ?" I look at her sadly, and remind her that I have already mentioned the death of my poor Parvati, which was not a natural death ... slowly Padma uncoils, as I continue: "Women have made me; and also unmade. From Reverend Mother to the Widow, and even beyond, I have been at the mercy of the so-called (erroneously, in my opinion!) gentler sex. It is, perhaps, a matter of connection: is not Mother India, Bharat-Mata, commonly thought of as female? And, as you know, there's no escape from her." There have been thirty-two years, in this story, during which I remained unborn; soon, I may complete thirty-one years of my own. For sixty-three years, before and after midnight, women have done their best; and also, I'm bound to say, their worst. In a blind landowner's house on the shores of a Kashmiri lake, Naseem Aziz doomed me to the inevitability of perforated sheets; and in the waters of that same lake, Ilse Lubin leaked into history, and I have not forgotten her deathwish; Before Nadir Khan hid in his underworld, my grandmother had, by becoming Reverend Mother, begun a sequence of women who changed their names, a sequence which continues even today — and which even leaked into Nadir, who became Qasim, and sat with dancing hands in the Pioneer CafE; and after Nadir's departure, my mother Mumtaz Aziz became Amina Sinai; And Alia, with the bitterness of ages, who clothed me in the baby-things impregnated with her old-maid fury; and Emerald, who laid a table on which I made pepperpots march; There was the Rani of Cooch Naheen, whose money, placed at the disposal of a humming man, gave birth to the optimism disease, which has recurred, at intervals, ever since; and, in the Muslim quarter of Old Delhi, a distant relative called Zohra whose flirtations gave birth, in my father, to that later weakness for Fernandas and Florys; So to Bombay. Where Winkie's Vanita could not resist the center-parting of William Methwold, and Nussie-the-duck lost a baby-race; while Mary Pereira, in the name of love, changed the baby-tags of history and became a second mother to me ... Women and women and women: Toxy Catrack, nudging open the door which would later let in the children of midnight; the terrors of her nurse Bi-Appah; the competitive love of Amina and Mary, and what my mother showed me while I lay concealed in a washing-chest; yes, the Black Mango, which forced me to sniff, and unleashed what-were-not-Archangels! ... And Evelyn Lilith Burns, cause of a bicycle-accident, who pushed me down a two-storey hillock into the midst of history. And the Monkey. I mustn't forget the Monkey. But also, also, there was Masha Miovic, goading me into finger-loss, and my aunty Pia, filling my heart with revenge-lust, and Lila Sabarmati, whose indiscretions made possible my terrible, manipulating, newspaper-cut-out revenge; And Mrs. |
| 294 |
Dubash, who found my gift of a Superman comic and built it, with the help of her son, into Lord Khusro Khusrovand; And Mary, seeing a ghost. In Pakistan, the land of submission, the home of purity, I watched the transformation of Monkey-into-Singer, and fetched bread, and fell in love; it was a woman, Tai Bibi, who told me the truth about myself. And in the heart of my inner darkness, I turned to the Puffias, and was only narrowly saved from the threat of a golden-dentured bride. Beginning again, as the buddha, I lay with a latrine-cleaner and was subjected to electrified urinals as a result; in the East, a farmer's wife tempted me, and Time was assassinated in consequence; and there were houris in a temple, and we only just escaped in time. In the shadow of a mosque, Resham Bibi issued a warning. And I married Parvati-the-Witch. "Oof, mister," Padma exclaims, "that's too much women!" I do not disagree; because I have not even included her, whose dreams of marriage and Kashmir have inevitably been leaking into me, making me wish, if-only, if-only, so that, having once resigned myself to the cracks, I am not assailed by pangs of discontent, anger, fear and regret. But above all, the Widow. "I swear!" Padma slaps her knee, "Too much, mister; too much." How are we to understand my too-many women? As the multiple faces of Bharat-Mata? Or as even more ... as the dynamic aspect of maya, as cosmic energy, which is represented as the female organ? Maya, in its dynamic aspect, is called Shakti; perhaps it is no accident that, in the Hindu pantheon, the active power of a deity is contained within his queen! Maya-Shakti mothers, but also "muffles consciousness in its dream-web." Too-many-women: are they all aspects of Devi, the goddess — who is Shakti, who slew the buffalo-demon, who defeated the ogre Mahisha, who is Kali Durga Chandi Chamunda Uma Sati and Parvati ... and who, when active, is colored red? "I don't know about that," Padma brings me down to earth, "They are just women, that's all." Descending from my flight of fancy, I am reminded of the importance of speed; driven on by the imperatives of rip tear crack, I abandon reflections; and begin. This is how it came about; how Parvati took her destiny into her own hands; how a lie, issuing from my lips, brought her to the desperate condition in which, one night, she extracted from her shabby garments a lock of hero's hair, and began to speak sonorous words. Spurned by Saleem, Parvati remembered who had once been his arch-enemy; and, taking a bamboo stick with seven knots in it, and an improvised metal hook attached to one end, she squatted in her shack and recited; with the Hook of Indra in her right hand, and a lock of hair in her left, she summoned him to her. Parvati called to Shiva; believe don't believe, but Shiva came. From the beginning there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees; but throughout this narrative I've been pushing him, the other, into the background (just as once, I banned him from the councils of the Children). |
| 295 |
The Indian Army, which was at that time fighting a political battle against proposed expenditure cuts, understood the value of so charismatic an ambassador, and permitted the hero to circulate amongst his influential admirers; Shiva espoused his new life with a will. He grew a luxuriant moustache to which his personal batman applied a daily pomade of linseed-oil spiced with coriander; always elegantly turned out in the drawing-rooms of the mighty, he engaged in political chit-chat, and declared himself a firm admirer of Mrs. Gandhi, largely because of his hatred for her opponent Morarji Desai, who was intolerably ancient, drank his own urine, had skin which rustled like rice-paper, and, as Chief Minister of Bombay, had once been responsible for the banning of alcohol and the persecution of young goondas, that is to say hooligans or apaches, or, in other words, of the child Shiva himself ... but such idle chatter occupied a mere fraction of his thoughts, the rest of which were entirely taken up with the ladies. Shiva, too, was besotted by too-much-women, and in those heady days after the military victory acquired a secret reputation which (he boasted to Parvati) rapidly grew to rival his official, public fame — a "black" legend to set beside the "white" one. What was whispered at the hen-parties and canasta-evenings of the land? What was hissed through giggles wherever two or three glittering ladies got together? This: Major Shiva was becoming a notorious seducer; a ladies'-man; a cuckolder of the rich; in short, a stud. There were women — he told Parvati — wherever he went: their curving bird-soft bodies quaking beneath the weight of their jewelery and lust, their eyes misted over by his legend; it would have been difficult to refuse them even had he wanted to. But Major Shiva had no intention of refusing. He listened sympathetically to their little tragedies — impotent husbands, beatings, lack-of-attention — to whatever excuses the lovely creatures wished to offer. Like my grandmother at her petrol pump (but with more sinister motives) he gave patient audience to their woes; sipping whisky in the chandeliered splendor of ballrooms, he watched them batting their eyelids and breathing suggestively while they moaned; and always, at last, they contrived to drop a handbag, or spill a drink, or knock his swagger-stick from his grasp, so that he would have to stoop to the floor to retrieve whatever-had-fallen, and then he would see the notes tucked into their sandals, sticking daintily out from under painted toes. In those days (if the Major is to be believed) the lovely scandalous begums of India became awfully clumsy, and their chappals spoke of rendezvous-at-midnight, of trellises of bougainvillaea outside bedroom windows, of husbands conveniently away launching ships or exporting tea or buying ball-bearings from Swedes. While these unfortunates were away, the Major visited their homes to steal their most prized possessions: their women fell into his arms. |
| 296 |
P Narayan and Morarji Desai were also goading Indira Gandhi, while triplets yelled push push push the leaders of the Janata Morcha urged the police and Army to disobey the illegal orders of the disqualified Prime Minister, so in a sense they were forcing Mrs. Gandhi to push, and as the night darkened towards the midnight hour, because nothing ever happens at any other time, triplets began to screech it's coming coming coming, and elsewhere the Prime Minister was giving birth to a child of her own ... in the ghetto, in the hut beside which I sat cross-legged and starving to death, my son was coming coming coming, the head is out, the triplets screeched, while members of the Central Reserve Police arrested the heads of the Janata Morcha, including the impossibly ancient and almost mythological figures of Morarji Desai and J. P. Narayan, push push push, and in the heart of that terrible midnight while ticktock pounded in my ears a child was born, a ten-chip whopper all right, popping out so easily in the end that it was impossible to understand what all the trouble had been. Parvati gave a final pitiable little yelp and out he popped, while all over India policemen were arresting people, all opposition leaders except members of the pro-Moscow Communists, and also schoolteachers lawyers poets newspapermen trade-unionists, in fact anyone who had ever made the mistake of sneezing during the Madam's speeches, and when the three contortionists had washed the baby and wrapped it in an old sari and brought it out for its father to see, at exactly the same moment, the word Emergency was being heard for the first time, and suspension-of-civil rights, and censorship-of-the-press, and armored-units-on-special-alert, and arrest-of-subversive-elements; something was ending, something was being born, and at the precise instant of the birth of the new India and the beginning of a continuous midnight which would not end for two long years, my son, the child of the renewed ticktock, came out into the world. And there is more: because when, in the murky half-light of that endlessly prolonged midnight, Saleem Sinai saw his son for the first time, he began to laugh helplessly, his brain ravaged by hunger, yes, but also by the knowledge that his relentless destiny had played yet another of its grotesque little jokes, and although Picture Singh, scandalized by my laughter which in my weakness was like the giggling of a schoolgirl, cried repeatedly, "Come on, captain! Don't behave mad now! It is a son, captain, be happy!", Saleem Sinai continued to acknowledge the birth by tittering hysterically at fate, because the boy, the baby boy, the-boy-my-son Aadam, Aadam Sinai was perfectly formed — except, that is, for his ears. On either side of his head flapped audient protuberances like sails, ears so colossally huge that the triplets afterwards revealed that when his head popped out they had thought, for one bad moment, that it was the head of a tiny elephant. ... "Captain, Saleem captain," Picture Singh was begging, "be nice now! |
| 297 |
Ears are not anything to go crazy for!" He was born in Old Delhi ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: Aadam Sinai arrived at a night-shadowed slum on June 25th, 1975. And the time? The time matters, too. As I said: at night. No, it's important to be more ... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at Emergency, he emerged. There were gasps; and, across the country, silences and fears. And owing to the occult tyrannies of that benighted hour, he was mysteriously handcuffed to history, his destinies indissolubly chained to those of his country. Unprophesied, uncelebrated, he came; no prime ministers wrote him letters; but, just the same, as my time of connection neared its end, his began. He, of course, was left entirely without a say in the matter; after all, he couldn't even wipe his own nose at the time. He was the child of a father who was not his father; but also the child of a time which damaged reality so badly that nobody ever managed to put it together again; He was the true great-grandson of his great-grandfather, but elephantiasis attacked him in the ears instead of the nose — because he was also the true son of Shiva-and-Parvati; he was elephant-headed Ganesh; He was born with ears which flapped so high and wide that they must have heard the shootings in Bihar and the screams of lathi-charged dock-workers in Bombay ... a child who heard too much, and as a result never spoke, rendered dumb by a surfeit of sound, so that between then-and-now, from slum to pickle-factory, I have never heard him utter a single word; He was the possessor of a navel which chose to stick out instead of in, so that Picture Singh, aghast, cried, "His bimbi, captain! His bimbi, look!", and he became, from the first days, the gracious recipient of our awe; A child of such grave good nature that his absolute refusal to cry or whimper utterly won over his adoptive father, who gave up laughing hysterically at the grotesque ears and began to rock the silent infant gently in his arms; A child who heard a song as he rocked in arms, a song sung in the historical accents of a disgraced ayah: "Anything you want to be, you kin be; you kin be just what-all you want." But now that I've given birth to my flap-eared, silent son — there are questions to be answered about that other, synchronous birth. Unpalatable, awkward queries: did Saleem's dream of saving the nation leak, through the osmotic tissues of history, into the thoughts of the Prime Minister herself? Was my life-long belief in the equation between the State and myself transmuted, in "the Madam's" mind, into that in-those-days-famous phrase: India is Indira and Indira is India? Were we competitors for centrality — was she gripped by a lust for meaning as profound as my own — and was that, was that why ... ? Influence of hair-styles on the course of history: there's another ticklish business. |
| 298 |
At the end of an hour during which my son turned first saffron, then saffron-and-green, and finally the color of grass, I could not stand it any more and bellowed, "Woman, if the little fellow wants so much to stay quiet, we mustn't kill him for it!" I picked up Aadam to rock him, and felt his little body becoming rigid, his knee-joints elbows neck were filling up with the held-back tumult of unexpressed sounds, and at last Parvati relented and prepared an antidote by mashing arrowroot and camomile in a tin bowl while muttering strange imprecations under her breath. After that, nobody ever tried to make Aadam Sinai do anything he did not wish to do; we watched him battling against tuberculosis and tried to find reassurance in the idea that a will so steely would surely refuse to be defeated by any mere disease. In those last days my wife Laylah or Parvati was also being gnawed by the interior moths of a despair, because when she came towards me for comfort or warmth in the isolation of our sleeping hours, I still saw superimposed upon her features the horribly eroded physiognomy of Jamila Singer; and although I confessed to Parvati the secret of the specter, consoling her by pointing out that at its present rate of decay it would have crumbled away entirely before long, she told me dolorously that spittoons and war had softened my brain, and despaired of her marriage which would, as it transpired, never be consummated; slowly, slowly there appeared on her lips the ominous pout of her grief ... but what could I do? What solace could I offer — I, Saleem Snotnose, who had been reduced to poverty by the withdrawal of my family's protection, who had chosen (if it was a choice) to live by my olfactory gifts, earning a few paisa a day by sniffing out what people had eaten for dinner the previous day and which of them were in love; what consolation could I bring her, when I was already in the clutches of the cold hand of that lingering midnight, and could sniff finality in the air? Saleem's nose (you can't have forgotten) could smell stranger things than horse-dung. The perfumes of emotions and ideas, the odor of how-things-were: all these were and are nosed out by me with ease. When the Constitution was altered to give the Prime Minister well-nigh-absolute powers, I smelled the ghosts of ancient empires in the air ... in that city which was littered with the phantoms of Slave Kings and Mughals, of Aurangzeb the merciless and the last, pink conquerors, I inhaled once again the sharp aroma of despotism. It smelled like burning oily rags. But even the nasally incompetent could have worked out that, during the winter of 1975-6, something smelled rotten in the capital; what alarmed me was a stranger, more personal stink: the whiff of personal danger, in which I discerned the presence of a pair of treacherous, retributive knees ... my first intimation that an ancient conflict, which began when a love-crazed virgin switched name-tags, was shortly to end in a frenzy of treason and snippings. |
| 299 |
Perhaps, with such a warning pricking at my nostrils, I should have fled — tipped off by a nose, I could have taken to my heels. But there were practical objections: where would I have gone? And, burdened by wife and son, how fast could I have moved? Nor must it be forgotten that I did flee once, and look where I ended up: in the Sundarbans, the jungle of phantasms and retribution, from which I only escaped by the skin of my teeth! ... At any rate, I did not run. It probably didn't matter; Shiva — implacable, traitorous, my enemy from our birth — would have found me in the end. Because although a nose is uniquely equipped for the purpose of sniffing-things-out, when it comes to action there's no denying the advantages of a pair of grasping, choking knees. I shall permit myself one last, paradoxical observation on this subject: if, as I believe, it was at the house of the wailing women that I learned the answer to the question of purpose which had plagued me all my life, then by saving myself from that palace of annihilations I would also have denied myself this most precious of discoveries. To put it rather more philosophically: every cloud has a silver lining. Saleem-and-Shiva, nose-and-knees ... we shared just three things: the moment (and its consequences) of our birth; the guilt of treachery; and our son, Aadam, our synthesis, unsmiling, grave, with omniaudient ears. Aadam Sinai was in many respects the exact opposite of Saleem. I, at my beginning, grew with vertiginous speed; Aadam, wrestling with the serpents of disease, scarcely grew at all. Saleem wore an ingratiating smile from the start; Aadam had more dignity, and kept his grins to himself. Whereas Saleem had subjugated his will to the joint tyrannies of family and fate, Aadam fought ferociously, refusing to yield even to the coercion of green powder. And while Saleem had been so determined to absorb the universe that he had been, for a time, unable to blink, Aadam preferred to keep his eyes firmly closed ... although when, every so often, he deigned to open them, I observed their color, which was blue. Ice-blue, the blue of recurrence, the fateful blue of Kashmiri sky ... but there is no need to elaborate further. We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is already more cautious, biding his time; but when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already, he is stronger, harder, more resolute than I: when he sleeps, his eyeballs are immobile beneath their lids. Aadam Sinai, child of knees-and-nose, does not (as far as I can tell) surrender to dreams. How much was heard by those flapping ears which seemed, on occasion, to be burning with the heat of their knowledge? If he could have talked, would he have cautioned me against treason and bulldozers? In a country dominated by the twin multitudes of noises and smells, we could have been the perfect team; but my baby son rejected speech, and I failed to obey the dictates of my nose. |
| 300 |
"ArrE baap," Padma cries, "Just tell what happened, mister! What is so surprising if a baby does not make conversations?" And again the rifts inside me: I can't. — You must. — Yes. April 1976 found me still living in the colony or ghetto of the magicians; my son Aadam was still in the grip of a slow tuberculosis that seemed unresponsive to any form of treatment. I was full of forebodings (and thoughts of flight); but if any one man was the reason for my remaining in the ghetto, that man was Picture Singh. Padma: Saleem threw in his lot with the magicians of Delhi partly out of a sense of fitness — a self-flagellant belief in the rectitude of his belated descent into poverty (I took with me, from my uncle's house, no more than two shirts, white, two pairs trousers, also white, one tee-shirt, decorated with pink guitars, and shoes, one pair, black); partly, I came out of loyalty, having been bound by knots of gratitude to my rescuer, Parvati-the-witch; but I stayed — when, as a literate young man, I might at the very least have been a bank clerk or a night-school teacher of reading and writing — because, all my life, consciously or unconsciously, I have sought out fathers. Ahmed Sinai, Hanif Aziz, Sharpsticker Sahib, General Zulfikar have all been pressed into service in the absence of William Methwold; Picture Singh was the last of this noble line. And perhaps, in my dual lust for fathers and saving-the-country, I exaggerated Picture Singh; the horrifying possibility exists that I distorted him (and have distorted him again in these pages) into a dream-figment of my own imagination ... it is certainly true that whenever I inquired, "When are you going to lead us, Pictureji — when will the great day come?", he, shuffling awkwardly, replied, "Get such things out from your head, captain; I am a poor man from Rajasthan, and also the Most Charming Man In The World; don't make me anything else." But I, urging him on, "There is a precedent — there was Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird ..." to which Picture, "Captain, you got some crazy notions." During the early months of the Emergency, Picture Singh remained in the clutches of a gloomy silence reminiscent (once again!) of the great soundlessness of Reverend Mother (which had also leaked into my son ...), and neglected to lecture his audiences in the highways and back-streets of the Old and New cities as, in the past, he had insisted on doing; but although he, "This is a time for silence, captain," I remained convinced that one day, one millennial dawn at midnight's end, somehow, at the head of a great jooloos or procession of the dispossessed, perhaps playing his flute and wreathed in deadly snakes, it would be Picture Singh who led us towards the light ... but maybe he was never more than a snake-charmer; I do not deny the possibility. I say only that to me my last father, tall gaunt bearded, his hair swept back into a knot behind his neck, seemed the very avatar of Mian Abdullah; but perhaps it was all an illusion, born of my attempt to bind him to the threads of my history by an effort of sheer will. |
| 301 |
(Whose Conference had, of course, been disbanded years before; but the mere possibility of our reunification was enough to trigger off the red alert.) Astrologers — I have no doubt — sounded the alarums; in a black folder labelled M. C. C., names were gathered from extant records; but there was more to it than that. There were also betrayals and confessions; there were knees and a nose — a nose, and also knees. Scraps, shreds, fragments: it seems to me that, immediately before I awoke with the scent of danger in my nostrils, I had dreamed that I was sleeping. I awoke, in this most unnerving of dreams, to find a stranger in my shack: a poetic-looking fellow with lank hair that wormed over his ears (but who was very thin on top). Yes: during my last sleep before what-has-to-be-described, I was visited by the shade of Nadir Khan, who was staring perplexedly at a silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli, asking absurdly, "Did you steal this? — Because otherwise, you must be — is it possible? — my Mumtaz's little boy?" And when I confirmed, "Yes, none other, I am he — ," the dream-specter of Nadir-Qasim issued a warning: "Hide. There is little time. Hide while you can." Nadir, who had hidden under my grandfather's carpet, came to advise me to do likewise; but too late, too late, because now I came properly awake, and smelled the scent of danger blaring like trumpets in my nose ... afraid without knowing why, I got to my feet; and is it my imagination or did Aadam Sinai open blue eyes to stare gravely into mine? Were my son's eyes also filled with alarm? Had flap-ears heard what a nose had sniffed out? Did father and son commune wordlessly in that instant before it all began? I must leave the question-marks hanging, unanswered; but what is certain is that Parvati, my Laylah Sinai, awoke also and asked, "What's up, mister? What's got your goat?" — And I, without fully knowing the reason: "Hide, stay in here and don't come out." Then I went outside. It must have been morning, although the gloom of the endless midnight hung over the ghetto like a fog ... through the murky light of the Emergency, I saw children playing seven-tiles, and Picture Singh, with his umbrella folded under his left armpit, urinating against the walls of the Friday Mosque; a tiny bald illusionist was practicing driving knives through the neck of his ten-year-old apprentice, and already a conjurer had found an audience, and was persuading large woollen balls to drop from the armpits of strangers; while in another corner of the ghetto, Chand Sahib the musician was practicing his trumpet-playing, placing the ancient mouthpiece of a battered horn against his neck and playing it simply by exercising his throat-muscles ... there, over there, were the three contortionist triplets, balancing surahis of water on their heads as they returned to their huts from the colony's single stand-pipe ... in short, everything seemed to be in order. I began to chide myself for my dreams and nasal alarums; but then it started. |
| 302 |
— through the wreckage, ran wildly before the advancing bulldozers, clutching in his hand the handle of an irreparably shattered umbrella, searching searching, as though his life depended on the search. By the end of that day, the slum which clustered in the shadow of the Friday Mosque had vanished from the face of the earth; but not all the magicians were captured; not all of them were carted off to the barbed-wire camp called Khichripur, hotch-potch-town, on the far side of the Jamura River; they never caught Picture Singh, and it is said that the day after the bulldozing of the magicians' ghetto, a new slum was reported in the heart of the city, hard by the New Delhi railway station. Bulldozers were rushed to the scene of the reported hovels; they found nothing. After that the existence of the moving slum of the escaped illusionists became a fact known to all the inhabitants of the city, but the wreckers never found it. It was reported at Mehrauli; but when vasectomists and troops went there, they found the Qutb Minar unbesmirched by the hovels of poverty. Informers said it had appeared in the gardens of the Jantar Mantar, Jai Singh's Mughal observatory; but the machines of destruction, rushing to the scene, found only parrots and sun-dials. Only after the end of the Emergency did the moving slum come to a standstill; but that must wait for later, because it is time to talk, at long last, and without losing control, about my captivity in the Widows' Hostel in Benares. Once Resham Bibi had wailed, "Ai-o-ai-o!" — and she was right: I brought destruction down upon the ghetto of my saviors; Major Shiva, acting no doubt upon the explicit instructions of the Widow, came to the colony to seize me; while the Widow's son arranged for his civic-beautification and vasectomy programs to carry out a diversionary maneuver. Yes, of course it was all planned that way; and (if I may say so) most efficiently. What was achieved during the riot of the magicians: no less a feat than the unnoticed capture of the one person on earth who held the key to the location of every single one of the children of midnight — for had I not, night after night, tuned in to each and every one of them? Did I not carry, for all time, their names addresses faces in my mind? I will answer that question: I did. And I was captured. Yes, of course it was all planned that way. Parvati-the-witch had told me all about my rival; is it likely that she would not have mentioned me to him? I will answer that question, too: it is not likely at all. So our war hero knew where, in the capital, lurked the one person his masters wanted most (not even my uncle Mustapha knew where I went after I left him; but Shiva knew!) — and, once he had turned traitor, bribed, I have no doubt, by everything from promises of preferment to guarantees of personal safety, it was easy for him to deliver me into the hands of his mistress, the Madam, the Widow with the particolored hair. Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you will gain an understanding of the age in which you live. |
| 303 |
(The reverse of this statement is also true.) I lost something else that day, besides my freedom: bulldozers swallowed a silver spittoon. Deprived of the last object connecting me to my more tangible, historically-verifiable past, I was taken to Benares to face the consequences of my inner, midnight-given life. Yes, that was where it happened, in the palace of the widows on the shores of the Ganges in the oldest living city in the world, the city which was already old when the Buddha was young, Kasi Benares Varanasi, City of Divine Light, home of the Prophetic Book, the horoscope of horoscopes, in which every life, past present future, is already recorded. The goddess Ganga streamed down to earth through Shiva's hair ... Benares, the shrine to Shiva-the-god, was where I was brought by hero-Shiva to face my fate. In the home of horoscopes, I reached the moment prophesied in a rooftop room by Ramram Seth: "soldiers will try him ... tyrants will fry him!" the fortuneteller had chanted; well, there was no formal trial — Shiva-knees wrapped around my neck, and that was that — but I did smell, one winter's day, the odors of something frying in an iron skillet ... Follow the river, past Scindia-ghat on which young gymnasts in white loincloths perform one-armed push-ups, past Manikarnika-ghat, the place of funerals, at which holy fire can be purchased from the keepers of the flame, past floating carcasses of dogs and cows — unfortunates for whom no fire was bought, past Brahmins under straw umbrellas at Dasashwamedh-ghat, dressed in saffron, dispensing blessings ... and now it becomes audible, a strange sound, like the baying of distant hounds ... follow follow follow the sound, and it takes shape, you understand that it is a mighty, ceaseless wailing, emanating from the blinded windows of a riverside palace: the Widows' Hostel! Once upon a time, it was a maharajah's residence; but India today is a modern country, and such places have been expropriated by the State. The palace is a home for bereaved women now; they, understanding that their true lives ended with the death of their husbands, but no longer permitted to seek the release of sati, come to the holy city to pass their worthless days in heartfelt ululations. In the palace of the widows lives a tribe of women whose chests are irremediably bruised by the power of their continual pummellings, whose hair is torn beyond repair, and whose voices are shredded by the constant, keening expressions of their grief. It is a vast building, a labyrinth of tiny rooms on the upper storeys giving way to the great halls of lamentation below; and yes, that was where it happened, the Widow sucked me into the private heart of her terrible empire, I was locked away in a tiny upper room and the bereaved women brought me prison food. But I also had other visitors: the war hero invited two of his colleagues along, for purposes of conversation. In other words: I was encouraged to talk. By an ill-matched duo, one fat, one thin, whom I named Abbott-and-Costello because they never succeeded in making me laugh. |
| 304 |
Here I record a merciful blank in my memory. Nothing can induce me to remember the conversational techniques of that humorless, uniformed pair; there is no chutney or pickle capable of unlocking the doors behind which I have locked those days! No, I have forgotten, I cannot will not say how they made me spill the beans — but I cannot escape the shameful heart of the matter, which is that despite absence-of-jokes and the generally unsympathetic manner of my two-headed inquisitor, I did most certainly talk. And more than talk: under the influence of their unnamable — forgotten — pressures, I became loquacious in the extreme. What poured, blubbering, from my lips (and will not do so now): names addresses physical descriptions. Yes, I told them everything, I named all five hundred and seventy-eight (because Parvati, they informed me courteously, was dead, and Shiva gone over to the enemy, and the five-hundred-and-eighty-first was doing the talking ...) — forced into treachery by the treason of another, I betrayed the children of midnight. I, the Founder of the Conference, presided over its end, while Abbott-and-Costello, unsmilingly, interjected from time to time: "Aha! Very good! Didn't know about her!" or, "You are being most co-operative; this fellow is a new one on us!" Such things happen. Statistics may set my arrest in context; although there is considerable disagreement about the number of "political" prisoners taken during the Emergency, either thirty thousand or a quarter of a million persons certainly lost their freedom. The Widow said: "It is only a small percentage of the population of India." All sorts of things happen during an Emergency: trains run on time, black-money hoarders are frightened into paying taxes, even the weather is brought to heel, and bumper harvests are reaped; there is, I repeat, a white part as well as a black. But in the black part, I sat bar-fettered in a tiny room, on a straw palliasse which was the only article of furniture I was permitted, sharing my daily bowl of rice with cockroaches and ants. And as for the children of midnight — that fearsome conspiracy which had to be broken at all costs — that gang of cutthroat desperadoes before whom an astrology-ridden Prime Minister trembled in terror — the grotesque aberrational monsters of independence, for whom a modern nation-state could have neither time nor compassion — twenty-nine years old now, give or take a month or two, they were brought to the Widows' Hostel, between April and December they were rounded up, and their whispers began to fill the walls. The walls of my cell (paper-thin, peeling-plastered, bare) began to whisper, into one bad ear and one good ear, the consequences of my shameful confessions. A cucumber-nosed prisoner, festooned with iron rods and rings which made various natural functions impossible — walking, using the tin chamberpot, squatting, sleeping — lay huddled against peeling plaster and whispered to a wall. It was the end; Saleem gave way to his grief. |
| 305 |
All my life, and through the greater part of these reminiscences, I have tried to keep my sorrows under lock and key, to prevent them from staining my sentences with their salty, maudlin fluidities; but no more. I was given no reason (until the Widow's Hand ...) for my incarceration: but who, of all the thirty thousand or quarter of a million, was told why or wherefore? Who needed to be told? In the walls, I heard the muted voices of the midnight children; needing no further footnotes, I blubbered over peeling plaster. What Saleem whispered to the wall between April and December 1976: ... Dear Children. How can I say this? What is there to say? My guilt my shame. Although excuses are possible: I wasn't to blame about Shiva. And all manner of folk are being locked up, so why not us? And guilt is a complex matter, for are we not all, each of us in some sense responsible for — do we not get the leaders we deserve? But no such excuses are offered. I did it, I. Dear children: and my Parvati is dead. And my Jamila, vanished. And everyone. Vanishing seems to be yet another of those characteristics which recur throughout my history: Nadir Khan vanished from an underworld, leaving a note behind; Aadam Aziz vanished, too, before my grandmother got up to feed the geese; and where is Mary Pereira? I, in a basket, disappeared; but Laylah or Parvati went phutt without the assistance of spells. And now here we are, disappeared-off-the-face-of-the-earth. The curse of vanishment, dear children, has evidently leaked into you. No, as to the question of guilt, I refuse absolutely to take the larger view; we are too close to what-is-happening, perspective is impossible, later perhaps analysts will say why and wherefore, will adduce underlying economic trends and political developments, but right now we're too close to the cinema-screen, the picture is breaking up into dots, only subjective judgments are possible. Subjectively, then, I hang my head in shame. Dear children: forgive. No, I do not expect you to forgive. Politics, children: at the best of times a bad dirty business. We should have avoided it, I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity. But too late. Can't be helped. What can't be cured must be endured. Good question, children: what must be endured? Why are we being amassed here like this, one by one, why are rods and rings hanging from our necks? And stranger confinements (if a whispering wall is to be believed): who-has-the-gift-of-levitation has been tied by the ankles to rings set in the floor, and a werewolf is obliged to wear a muzzle; who-can-escape-through-mirrors must drink water through a hole in a lidded can, so that he cannot vanish through the reflective surface of the drink; and she-whose-looks-can-kill has her head in a sack, and the bewitching beauties of Baud are likewise bag-headed. One of us can eat metal; his head is jammed in a brace, unlocked only at mealtimes ... |
| 306 |
what is being prepared for us? Something bad, children. I don't know what as yet, but it's coming. Children: we, too, must prepare. Pass it on: some of us have escaped. I sniff absences through the walls. Good news, children! They cannot get us all. Soumitra, the time-traveler, for instance — O youthful folly! O stupid we, to disbelieve him so! — is not here; wandering, perhaps, in some happier time of his life, he has eluded search-parties for ever. No, do not envy him; although I, too, long on occasion to escape backwards, perhaps to the time when I, the apple of the universal eye, made a triumphant tour as a baby of the palaces of William Methwold — O insidious nostalgia for times of greater possibility, before history, like a street behind the General Post Office in Delhi, narrowed down to this final full point! — but we are here now; such retrospection saps the spirit; rejoice, simply, that some of us are free! And some of us are dead. They told me about my Parvati. Across whose features, to the last, there fell the crumbling ghost-face of. No, we are no longer five hundred and eighty-one. Shivering in the December cold, how many of us sit walled-in and waiting? I ask my nose; it replies, four hundred and twenty, the number of trickery and fraud. Four hundred and twenty, imprisoned by widows; and there is one more, who struts booted around the Hostel — I smell his stink approaching receding, the spoor of treachery! — Major Shiva, war hero, Shiva-of-the-knees, supervises our captivity. Will they be content with four hundred and twenty? Children: I don't know how long they'll wait. ... No, you're making fun of me, stop, do not joke. Why whence how-on-earth this good nature, this bonhomie in your passed-on whisperings? No, you must condemn me, out of hand and without appeal — do not torture me with your cheery greetings as one-by-one you are locked in cells; what kind of time or place is this for salaams, namaskars, how-you-beens? — Children, don't you understand, they could do anything to us, anything — no, how can you say that, what do you mean with your what-could-they-do? Let me tell you, my friends, steel rods are painful when applied to the ankles; rifle-butts leave bruises on foreheads. What could they do? Live electric wires up your anuses, children; and that's not the only possibility, there is also hanging-by-the-feet, and a candle — ah, the sweet romantic glow of candlelight! — is less than comfortable when applied, lit, to the skin! Stop it now, cease all this friendship, aren't you afraid! Don't you want to kick stamp trample me to smithereens? Why these constant whispered reminiscences, this nostalgia for old quarrels, for the war of ideas and things, why are you taunting me with your calmness, your normality, your powers of rising-above-the-crisis? Frankly, I'm puzzled children: how can you, aged twenty-nine, sit whispering flirtatiously to each other in your cells? Goddamnit, this is not a social reunion! Children, children, I'm sorry. |
| 307 |
I admit openly I have not been myself of late. I have been a buddha, and a basketed ghost, and a would-be-savior of the nation ... Saleem has been rushing down blind alleys, has had considerable problems with reality, ever since a spittoon fell like a piece-of-the- ... pity me: I've even lost my spittoon. But I'm going wrong again, I wasn't intending to ask for pity, I was going to say that perhaps I see — it was I, not you, who failed to understand what is happening. Incredible, children: we, who could not talk for five minutes without disagreeing: we, who as children quarrelled fought divided distrusted broke apart, are suddenly together, united, as one! O wondrous irony: the Widow, by bringing us here, to break us, has in fact brought us together! O self-fulfilling paranoia of tyrants ... because what can they do to us, now that we're all on the same side, no language-rivalries, no religious prejudices: after all, we are twenty-nine now, I should not be calling you children ... ! Yes, here is optimism, like a disease: one day she'll have to let us out and then, and then, wait and see, maybe we should form, I don't know, a new political party, yes, the Midnight Party, what chance do politics have against people who can multiply fishes and turn base metals into gold? Children, something is being born here, in this dark time of our captivity; let Widows do their worst; unity is invincibility! Children: we've won! Too painful. Optimism, growing like a rose in a dung-heap: it hurts me to recall it. Enough: I forget the rest. — No! — No, very well, I remember ... What is worse than rods bar-fetters candles-against-the-skin? What beats nail-tearing and starvation? I reveal the Widow's finest, most delicate joke: instead of torturing us, she gave us hope. Which meant she had something — no, more than something: the finest thing of all! — to take away. And now, very soon now, I shall have to describe how she cut it off. Ectomy (from, I suppose, the Greek): a cutting out. To which medical science adds a number of prefixes: appendectomy tonsillectomy mastectomy tubectomy vasectomy testectomy hysterectomy. Saleem would like to donate one further item, free gratis and for nothing, to this catalogue of excisions; it is, however, a term which properly belongs to history, although medical science is, was involved: Sperectomy: the draining-out of hope. On New Year's Day, I had a visitor. Creak of door, rustle of expensive chiffon. The pattern: green and black. Her glasses, green, her shoes were black as black ... In newspaper articles this woman has been called "a gorgeous girl with big rolling hips ... she had run a jewelry boutique before she took up social work ... during the Emergency she was, semi-officially, in charge of sterilization." But I have my own name for her: she was the Widow's Hand. Which one by one and children mmff and tearing tearing little balls go ... greenly-blackly, she sailed into my cell. Children: it begins. Prepare, children. United we stand. |
| 308 |
"People are like cats," I told my son, "you can't teach them anything." He looked suitably grave, but held his tongue. My son Aadam Sinai had, when I rediscovered the phantom colony of the illusionists, lost all traces of the tuberculosis which had afflicted his earliest days. I, naturally, was certain that the disease had vanished with the fall of the Widow; Picture Singh, however, told me that credit for the cure must be given to a certain washerwoman, Durga by name, who had wetnursed him through his sickness, giving him the daily benefit of her inexhaustibly colossal breasts. "That Durga, captain," the old snake-charmer said, his voice betraying the fact that, in his old age, he had fallen victim to the dhoban's serpentine charms, "What a woman!" She was a woman whose biceps bulged; whose preternatural breasts unleashed a torrent of milk capable of nourishing regiments; and who, it was rumored darkly (although I suspect the rumor of being started by herself) had two wombs. She was as full of gossip and tittle-tattle as she was of milk: every day a dozen new stories gushed from her lips. She possessed the boundless energy common to all practitioners of her trade; as she thrashed the life out of shirts and saris on her stone, she seemed to grow in power, as if she were sucking the vigor out of the clothes, which ended up flat, buttonless and beaten to death. She was a monster who forgot each day the moment it ended. It was with the greatest reluctance that I agreed to make her acquaintance; it is with the greatest reluctance that I admit her into these pages. Her name, even before I met her, had the smell of new things; she represented novelty, beginnings, the advent of new stories events complexities, and I was no longer interested in anything new. However, once Pictureji informed me that he intended to marry her, I had no option; I shall deal with her, however, as briefly as accuracy permits. Briefly, then: Durga the washerwoman was a succubus! A bloodsucker lizard in human form! And her effect on Picture Singh was comparable only to her power over her stone-smashed shirts: in a word, she flattened him. Having once met her, I understood why Picture Singh looked old and forlorn; deprived now of the umbrella of harmony beneath which men and women would gather for advice and shade, he seemed to be shrinking daily; the possibility of his becoming a second Hummingbird was vanishing before my very eyes. Durga, however, flourished: her gossip grew more scatological, her voice louder and more raucous, until at last she reminded me of Reverend Mother in her later years, when she expanded and my grandfather shrank. This nostalgic echo of my grandparents was the only thing of interest to me in the personality of the hoydenish washerwoman. But there is no denying the bounty of her mammary glands: Aadam, at twenty-one months, was still suckling contentedly at her nipples. At first I thought of insisting that he be weaned, but then remembered that my son did exactly and only what he wished, and decided not to press the point. |
| 309 |
O talismanic spittoon! O beauteous lost receptacle of memories as well as spittle-juice! What sensitive person could fail to sympathize with me in my nostalgic agony at its loss? ... Beside me at the back of a bus bulging with humanity, Picture Singh sat with snake-baskets coiled innocently on his lap. As we rattled and banged through that city which was also filled with the resurgent ghosts of earlier, mythological Delhis, the Most Charming Man In The World wore an air of faded despondency, as if a battle in a distant darkroom were already over ... until my return, nobody had understood that Pictureji's real and unvoiced fear was that he was growing old, that his powers were dimming, that he would soon be adrift and incompetent in a world he did not understand: like me, Picture Singh clung to the presence of Baby Aadam as if the child were a torch in a long dark tunnel. "A fine child, captain," he told me, "a child of dignity: you hardly notice his ears." That day, however, my son was not with us. New Delhi smells assailed me in Connaught Place — the biscuity perfume of the J. B. Mangharam advertisement, the mournful chalkiness of crumbling plaster; and there was also the tragic spoor of the auto-rickshaw drivers, starved into fatalism by rising petrol costs; and green-grass-smells from the circular park in the middle of the whirling traffic, mingled with the fragrance of con-men persuading foreigners to change money on the black market in shadowy archways. From the India Coffee House, under whose marquees could be heard the endless babbling of gossips, there came the less pleasant aroma of new stories beginning: intrigues marriages quarrels, whose smells were all mixed up with those of tea and chili-pakoras. What I smelled in Connaught Place: the begging nearby presence of a scar-faced girl who had once been Sundari-the-too-beautiful; and loss-of-memory, and turning-towards-the-future, and nothing-really-changes ... turning away from these olfactory intimations, I concentrated on the all-pervasive and simpler odors of (human) urine and animal dung. Underneath the colonnade of Block F in Connaught Place, next to a pavement bookstall, a paan-wallah had his little niche. He sat cross-legged behind a green glass counter like a minor deity of the place: I admit him into these last pages because, although he gave off the aromas of poverty, he was, in fact, a person of substance, the owner of a Lincoln Continental motor-car, which he parked out of sight in Connaught Circus, and, which he had paid for by the fortunes he earned through his sales of contraband imported cigarettes and transistor radios; for two weeks each year he went to jail for a holiday, and the rest of the time paid several policement a handsome salary. In jail he was treated like a king, but behind his green glass counter he looked inoffensive, ordinary, so that it was not easy (without the benefit of a nose as sensitive as Saleem's) to tell that this was a man who knew everything about everything, a man whose infinite network of contacts made him privy to secret knowledge ... |
| 310 |
As we traveled to Bombay, the pessimism of Picture Singh expanded until it seemed that it had become a physical entity which merely looked like the old snake-charmer. At Mathura an American youth with pustular chin and a head shaved bald as an egg got into our carriage amid the cacophony of hawkers selling earthen animals and cups of chaloo-chai; he was fanning himself with a peacock-feather fan, and the bad luck of peacock feathers depressed Picture Singh beyond imagining. While the infinite flatness of the Indo-Gangetic plain unfolded outside the window, sending the hot insanity of the afternoon loo-wind to torment us, the shaven American lectured the occupants of the carriage on the intricacies of Hinduism and began to teach them mantras while extending a walnut begging bowl; Picture Singh was blind to this remarkable spectacle and also deaf to the abracadabra of the wheels. "It is no good, captain," he confided mournfully, "This Bombay fellow will be young and strong, and I am doomed to be only the second most charming man from now on." By the time we reached Kotah Station, the odors of misfortune exuded by the peacock-feather fan had possessed Pictureji utterly, had eroded him so alarmingly that although everyone in the carriage was getting out on the side farthest from the platform to urinate against the side of the train, he showed no sign of needing to go. By Ratlam Junction, while my excitement was mounting, he had fallen into a trance which was not sleep but the rising paralysis of the pessimism. "At this rate," I thought, "he won't even be able to challenge this rival." Baroda passed: no change. At Surat, the old John Company depot, I realized I'd have to do something soon, because abracadabra was bringing us closer to Bombay Central by the minute, and so at last I picked up Picture Singh's old wooden flute, and by playing it with such terrible ineptitude that all the snakes writhed in agony and petrified the American youth into silence, by producing a noise so hellish that nobody noticed the passing of Bassein Road, Kurla, Mahim, I overcame the miasma of the peacock-feathers; at last Picture Singh shook himself out of his despondency with a faint grin and said, "Better you stop, captain, and let me play that thing; otherwise some people are sure to die of pain." Serpents subsided in their baskets; and then the wheels stopped singing, and we were there: Bombay! I hugged Aadam fiercely, and was unable to resist uttering an ancient cry: "Back-to-Bom!" I cheered, to the bewilderment of the American youth; who had never heard this mantra: and again, and again, and again: "Back! Back-to-Bom!" By bus down Bellasis Road, towards the Tardeo roundabout, we traveled past Parsees with sunken eyes, past bicycle-repair shops and Irani cafEs; and then Hornby Vellard was on our right — where promenaders watched as Sherri the mongrel bitch was left to spill her guts! Where cardboard effigies of wrestlers still towered above the entrances to Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium! |
| 311 |
the nearly-thirty-one-year-old myth of freedom is no longer what it was. New myths are needed; but that's none of my business. Mary Pereira, who now calls herself Mrs. Braganza, lives with her sister Alice, now Mrs. Fernandes, in an apartment in the pink obelisk of the Narlikar women on the two-storey hillock where once, in a demolished palace, she slept on a servant's mat. Her bedroom occupies more or less the same cube of air in which a fisherman's pointing finger led a pair of boyish eyes out towards the horizon; in a teak rocking-chair, Mary rocks my son, singing "Red Sails In The Sunset." Red dhow-sails spread against the distant sky. A pleasant enough day, on which old days are recalled. The day when I realized that an old cactus-bed had survived the revolution of the Narlikar women, and borrowing a spade from the mali, dug up a long-buried world: a tin globe containing yellowed ant-eaten jumbo-size baby-snap, credited to Kalidas Gupta, and a Prime Minister's letter. And days further off: for the dozenth time we chatter about the change in Mary Pereira's fortunes. How she owed it all to her dear Alice. Whose poor Mr. Fernandes died of color-blindness, having become confused, in his old Ford Prefect, at one of the city's then-few traffic lights. How Alice visited her in Goa with the news that her employers, the fearsome and enterprising Narlikar women, were willing to put some of their tetrapod-money into a pickle firm. "I told them, nobody makes achar-chutney like our Mary," Alice had said, with perfect accuracy, "because she puts her feelings inside them." So Alice turned out to be a good girl in the end. And baba, what do you think, how could I believe the whole world would want to eat my poor pickles, even in England they eat. And now, just think, I sit here where your dear house used to be, while God-knows what-all has happened to you, living like a beggar so long, what a world, baapu-rE! And bitter-sweet lamentations: O, your poor mummy-daddy! That fine madam, dead! And the poor man, never knowing who loved him or how to love! And even the Monkey ... but I interrupt, no, not dead: no, not true, not dead. Secretly, in a nunnery, eating bread. Mary, who has stolen the name of poor Queen Catharine who gave these islands to the British, taught me the secrets of the pickling process. (Finishing an education which began in this very air-space when I stood in a kitchen as she stirred guilt into green chutney.) Now she sits at home, retired in her white-haired old-age, once more happy as an ayah with a baby to raise. "Now you finished your writing-writing, baba, you should take more time for your son." But Mary, I did it for him. And she, switching the subject, because her mind makes all sorts of flea-jumps these days: "O baba, baba, look at you, how old you got already!" Rich Mary, who never dreamed she would be rich, is still unable to sleep on beds. But drinks sixteen Coca-Colas a day, unworried about teeth, which have all fallen out anyway. |
| 312 |
What is required for chutnification? Raw materials, obviously — fruit, vegetables, fish, vinegar, spices. Daily visits from Koli women with their saris hitched up between their legs. Cucumbers aubergines mint. But also: eyes, blue as ice, which are undeceived by the superficial blandishments of fruit — which can see corruption beneath citrus-skin; fingers which, with featheriest touch, can probe the secret inconstant hearts of green tomatoes; and above all a nose capable of discerning the hidden languages of what-must-be-pickled, its humors and messages and emotions ... at Braganza Pickles, I supervise the production of Mary's legendary recipes; but there are also my special blends, in which, thanks to the powers of my drained nasal passages, I am able to include memories, dreams, ideas, so that once they enter mass-production all who consume them will know what pepperpots achieved in Pakistan, or how it felt to be in the Sundarbans ... believe don't believe but it's true. Thirty jars stand upon a shelf, waiting to be unleashed upon the amnesiac nation. (And beside them, one jar stands empty.) The process of revision should be constant and endless; don't think I'm satisfied with what I've done! Among my unhappinesses: an overly-harsh taste from those jars containing memories of my father; a certain ambiguity in the love-flavor of "Jamila Singer" (Special Formula No. 22), which might lead the unperceptive to conclude that I've invented the whole story of the baby-swap to justify an incestuous love; vague implausibilities in the jar labeled "Accident in a Washing-chest" — the pickle raises questions which are not fully answered, such as: Why did Saleem need an accident to acquire his powers? Most of the other children didn't ... Or again, in "All-India Radio" and others, a discordant note in the orchestrated flavors: would Mary's confession have come as a shock to a true telepath? Sometimes, in the pickles' version of history, Saleem appears to have known too little; at other times, too much ... yes, I should revise and revise, improve and improve; but there is neither the time nor the energy. I am obliged to offer no more than this stubborn sentence: It happened that way because that's how it happened. There is also the matter of the spice bases. The intricacies of turmeric and cumin, the subtlety of fenugreek, when to use large (and when small) cardamoms; the myriad possible effects of garlic, garam masala, stick cinnamon, coriander, ginger ... not to mention the flavorful contributions of the occasional speck of dirt. (Saleem is no longer obsessed with purity.) In the spice bases, I reconcile myself to the inevitable distortions of the pickling process. To pickle is to give immortality, after all: fish, vegetables, fruit hang embalmed in spice-and-vinegar; a certain alteration, a slight intensification of taste, is a small matter, surely? The art is to change the flavor in degree, but not in kind; and above all (in my thirty jars and a jar) to give it shape and form — that is to say, meaning. |
| 313 |
This has gone. Greek and Latin are disappearing. In many countries the Bible, and religion — going. A girl I know, taken to Paris to broaden her mind, which needed it, though she was doing brilliantly in examinations, revealed that she had never heard of Catholics and Protestants, knew nothing of the history of Christianity or any other religion. She was taken to hear mass in Notre Dame, told that this ceremony had been a basis of European culture for centuries, and she should at least know about it — and she dutifully sat through it, rather as she might a tea ceremony in Japan, and afterwards enquired,"Are these people some kind of cannibal then?" So much for what seems enduring. There is a new kind of educated person, who may be at school and university for twenty, twenty-five years, who knows everything about a specialty (computers, the law, economics, politics) but knows about nothing else — no literature, art, history — and may be heard enquiring, "But what was the Renaissance, then?" "What was the French Revolution?" Even fifty years ago this person would have been seen as a barbarian. To have acquired an education with nothing of the old humanist background — impossi-ble. To call oneself educated without a background of reading — impossible. Reading, books, the literary culture, was respected, desired, for centuries. Reading was and still is in what we call the Third World, a kind of parallel education, which once everyone had, or aspired to. Nuns and monks in their convents and monasteries, aristocrats at their meals, women at their looms and their sewing, were read to, and the poor people, even if all they had was a Bible, respected those who read. In Britain until quite recently trade unions and workers' movements fought for libraries, and perhaps the best example of the pervasiveness of the love for reading is that of the workers in the tobacco and cigar factories of Cuba whose trade unions demanded that the workers should be read to as they worked. The material was agreed to by the workers, and included politics and history, novels and poetry. A favorite of their books was The Count of Monte Christo. A group of workers wrote to Dumas and asked if they might use the name of his hero for one of their cigars. Perhaps there is no need to labor this point to anyone present here, but I do feel we have not yet grasped that we are living in a fast fragmenting culture. Pockets of the old excellences remain, in a university, a school, the classroom of an old-fashioned teacher in love with books, perhaps a newspaper or a journal. But a culture that once united Europe and its overseas offshoots has gone. We may get some idea of the speed with which cultures may change by looking at how languages change. English as spoken in America or the West Indies is not the English of England. Spanish is not the same in Argentina and in Spain. The Portuguese of Brazil is not the Portuguese of Portugal. Italian, Spanish, French, grew out of Latin not in thousands of years but in hundreds. |
| 314 |
It is a very short time since the Roman world disappeared, leaving behind its legacy of our languages. One interesting little irony about the present situation is that a lot of the criticism of the old culture was in the name of Elitism, but what is happening is that everywhere are enclaves, pockets, of the old kind of reader and reading and it is easy to imagine one of the new barbarians walking by chance into a library of the old kind, in all its richness and variety and understanding suddenly what has been lost, what he — or she — has been deprived of. So what is going to happen next in this tumultuously changing world? I think we are all of us fastening our seat belts and holding on tight. I drafted what I have just read before the events of the 11th September. We are in for a war, it seems, a long one, which by its nature cannot have an easy end. We all know that enemies exchange more than gunfire and insults. In this country, Spain, you know this better perhaps than anyone. When feeling gloomy about the world I often think about that time here, in Spain, in the early Middle Ages — in Cordova, in Toledo, in Granada, in other southern cities — Christians, Moslems, Jews, lived harmoniously together: poets, musicians, writers, sages, all together, admiring each other, helping each other. It went on for three centuries. This wonderful culture went on for three centuries. Has anything like it been seen in the world? What has been, can be again. I think the educated person of the future will have a wider basis than anything we can imagine now. — Doris Lessing The Sweetest Dream 'And people leave who were warm children.' An early evening in autumn, and the street below was a scene of small yellow lights that suggested intimacy, and people already bundled up for winter. Behind her the room was filling with a chilly dark, but nothing could dismay her: she was floating, as high as a summer cloud, as happy as a child who had just learned to walk. The reason for this uncharacteristic lightness ofheart was a telegram from her former husband, Johnny Lennox Comrade Johnny three days ago. signed contract for fidel film all arrears and current payment to you Sunday. Today was Sunday. The 'all arrears' had been due, she knew, to something like the fever of elation she was feeling now: there was no question of his paying 'all' which by now must amount to so much money she no longer bothered to keep an account. But he surely must be expecting a really big sum to sound so confident. Here a little breeze apprehension? did reach her. Confidence was his no, she must not say stock-in-trade, even if she had often in her life felt that, but could she remember him ever being outfaced by circumstances, even discomfited? On a desk behind her two letters lay side by side, like a lesson in life's improbable but so frequent dramatic juxtapositions. One offered her a part in a play. Frances Lennox was a minor, steady, reliable actress, and had never been asked for anything more. |
| 315 |
This part was in a brilliant new play, a two-hander, and the male part would be taken by Tony Wilde who until now had seemed so far above her she would never have had the ambition to think of her name and his side by side on a poster. And he had asked for her to be offered the part. Two years ago they had been in the same play, she as usual in a serviceable smaller role. At the end of a short run the play had not been a success she had heard on the closing night as they tripped back and forth taking curtain calls, 'Well done, that was very good.' Smiles from Olympus, she had thought that, while knowing he had shown signs of being interested in her. But now she had been watching herself burst into all kinds of feverish dreams, not exactly taking herself by surprise, since she knew only too well how battened down she was, how well under control was her erotic self, but she could not prevent herself imagining her talent for fun (she supposed she still had it?) even for reckless enjoyment, being given room, while at the same time showing what she could do on the stage, if given a chance. But she would not be earning much money, in a small theatre, with a play that was a gamble. Without that telegram from Johnny she could not have afforded to say yes. The other letter offered her a niche as Agony Aunt (name still to be chosen) on The Defender, well paid, and safe. This would be a continuation of the other strand of her professional life as a freelance journalist, which is where she earned money. She had been writing on all kinds of subjects for years. At first she had tried her wings in local papers and broadsheets, any place that would pay her a little money. Then she found she was doing research for serious articles, and they were in the national newspapers. She had a name for solid balanced articles that often shone an unexpected and original light on a current scene. She would do it well. What else had her experience fitted her for, if not to cast a cool eye on the problems of others? But saying yes to that work would have no pleasure in it, no feeling she would be trying new wings. Rather, she would have to steady her shoulders with the inner stiffening of resolve that is like a suppressed yawn. How weary she was of all the problems, the bruised souls, the waifs and strays, how delightful it would be to say, 'Right, you can look after yourselves for a bit, I am going to be in the theatre every evening and most of the day too.' (Here was another little cold nudge: have you taken leave of your senses? Yes, and she was loving every minute.) The top of a tree still in its summer leaf, but a bit ragged now, was glistening: light from two storeys up, from the old woman's rooms, had snatched it from dark into lively movement, almost green: colour was implied. Julia was in, then. Readmitting her mother-in-law her ex-mother-in-law to her mind brought a familiar apprehension, because of the weight of disapproval sifting down through the house to reach her, but there was something else she had only recently become aware of. |
| 316 |
'Please explain it to me,' she said. 'I don't understand. Why do you let him behave like this?' Julia von Arne was born in a particularly charming part of Germany, near Stuttgart, a region of hills, streams and vineyards. She was the only girl, the third child in a genial gentle family. Her father was a diplomat, her mother a musician. In July 1914 came visiting Philip Lennox, a promising Third Secretary from the embassy in Berlin. That fourteen-year-old Julia should fall in love with handsome Philip he was twenty-five was not surprising, but he fell in love with her. She was pretty, tiny, with golden ringlets, and wore frocks the romantic man told her were like flowers. She had been brought up strictly, by governesses, English and French, and to him it seemed that every gesture she made, every smile, every turn of her head, was formal, prescribed, as if she moved in a dance. Like all girls taught to be conscious of their bodies, because of the frightful dangers of immodesty, her eyes spoke for her, could strike to the heart with a glance, and when she lowered delicate eyelids over blue invitations to love he felt he was being rejected. He had sisters, whom he had seen a few days ago in Sussex, jolly tomboys enjoying the exemplary summer that has been celebrated in so many memoirs and novels. A sister's friend, Betty, had been teased because she came to supper with solid brown arms where white scratches showed how she had been playing in the hay with the dogs. His family had watched him to see if he fancied this girl, who would make a suitable wife, and he had been prepared to consider her. This little German miss seemed to him as glamorous as a beauty glimpsed in a harem, all promise and hidden bliss, and he fancied that if a sunbeam did strike her she would melt like a snowflake. She gave him a red rose from the garden, and he knew she was offering him her heart. He declared his love in the moonlight, and next day spoke to her father. Yes, he knew that fourteen was too young, but he was asking for formal permission to propose when she was sixteen. And so they parted, in 1914, while war was coming to a boil, but like many liberal well-adjusted people it seemed to both the von Arnes and the Lennoxes that it was ridiculous Germany and England could go to war. When war was declared, Philip had left his love in tears just two weeks before. In those days governments seemed compelled to announce that wars must be over by Christmas, and the lovers were sure they would see each other soon. Almost at once xenophobia was poisoning Julia's love. Her family did not mind her loving her Englishman did not their respective Emperors call themselves cousins? but the neighbours commented, and servants whispered and gossiped. During the years of the war rumours followed Julia and her family too. Her three brothers were fighting in the Trenches, her father was in the War Office, and her mother did war work, but those few days of fever in July 1914 marked them all for comment and suspicion. |
| 317 |
When Frances arrived, to take over all the house except for Julia's top floor, it was a relief to Julia. She still did not like Frances, who seemed determined to shock her, but she loved the boys, and intended to shield them from their parents. In fact, they were afraid of her, at least to start with, but she never found this out. She thought Frances was keeping her from them, did not know that Frances urged them to visit their grandmother. 'Please, she's so good to us. And she'd love it if you did.' 'Oh, no, it's too much, do we have to? Frances visited the newspaper to establish her job, and she knew how right she had been to prefer the theatre. As a freelance she had had little experience of institutions, and did not look forward to a communal working life. As soon as she set foot in the building that housed The Defender, she recognised there an atmosphere: this was an esprit de corps all right. The Defenders venerable history, going back into the nineteenth century, as a fighter for any number of good causes, was being continued, so it was generally felt, and most particularly by the people who worked for it; this period, the Sixties, was able to stand up to any of the great times of the past. Frances was being welcomed into the fold by one Julie Hackett. She was a soft, not to say womanly woman, with bundles of strong black hair fastened here and there with a variety of combs and pins, a resolutely unfashionable figure, because she saw fashion as an enslaver of women. She observed everything around her with a view to correcting errors of fact and belief, and she criticised men in every sentence, taking it for granted, as believers tend to do, that Frances agreed with her in everything. She had been keeping an eye on Frances, had seen articles by her here and there, and in The Defender too, but one article had decided her to get her on to the staff. It was a satirical, but good-natured piece about Carnaby Street, which was in the process of becoming a symbol for trendy Britain, and attracting youngsters, not to mention the young in heart, from all over the world. Frances had said that they must all be suffering from some sort of collective hallucination, since the street was grubby, tatty, and if the clothes were attractive some of them they were no better than others in streets that did not have the magic syllables Carnaby attached to them. Heresy! A brave heresy, judged Julie Hackett, seeing Frances as a kindred soul. Frances was shown an office where a secretary was sorting through letters addressed to Aunt Vera, and putting them in heaps, since even the nastiest predicaments of humanity must fall into easily recognised categories. My husband is unfaithful, an alcoholic, beats me, won't give me enough money, is leaving me for his secretary, prefers his mates in the pub to me. My son is alcoholic, a druggie, has got a girl pregnant, won't leave home, is living rough in London, earns money but won't contribute to the household. My daughter... |
| 318 |
She worked until late. She heard Colin come in, and then he and Sophie went to the big sofa, where they sat talking she could hear them, or at least their voices, just below hers: the old red sofa was immediately under her desk. Immediately over it was Colin's bed. She heard their lowered voices, and then careful footsteps just above her. Well, she was sure Colin knew how to be careful: he had said so, loudly, to his brother, who lectured him on these matters. Sophie was sixteen. Frances wanted to put her arms around the girl and protect her. Well, she never felt anything like that about Rose, Jill, Lucy, or the other young females who drifted in and out of this house. So why Sophie? She was so beautiful, that was it: that was what she wanted to guard and keep safe. And what nonsense that was she, Frances, should be ashamed. She was ashamed about a good deal, this evening. She opened the door, and listened. Down in the kitchen, there seemed to be more than Andrew, Rose, James... she would find out tomorrow. She slept restlessly, twice went across the landing to see how Tilly was doing; on one occasion found a very dark room, stillness, and the faint stuffy smell of chocolate. Once she saw Andrew retreating upstairs from a similar mission, and went back to bed. She lay awake. The trouble was, the shoplifting. When Colin first went to St Joseph's after his not very good comprehensive, articles she knew were not his began appearing, nothing much, a T-shirt, packets of biros, a record. She remembered being impressed that he had stolen an anthology of verse. She remonstrated. He complained that everyone did it and she was a square. Do not imagine the issue rested there. This was a progressive school! One of the first wave of schoolfriends, who came and went, but much less freely, since after all they were younger, a girl called Petula, informed Frances that Colin was stealing love: the housemaster had said so. This was discussed noisily at the supper table. No, not the love of her parents, but that of the headmaster, who had ticked off Colin for something or other. Geoffrey, already more or less a fixture then, five years ago, more, was proud of what he garnered from the shops. She had been shocked, but had not said more than, Well, then, don't get caught. If she had not said, Don't do it, that was because she would not have been obeyed, but also because she had no idea then of how prevalent it would become, shoplifting. And, too, and that was what now kept her awake, she had liked being one of them, the trendy youngsters who were the new arbiters of modes and morals. There was had been -undoubtedly a feeling of we against them. Petula, that sparky girl (now in a school for diplomats' children in Hong Kong) had said that stealing without being caught was an initiation rite, and adults should understand that. Today Frances was going to have to write a solid, long, and balanced article on this very subject. She was actually regretting she had ever said yes to this new job. |
| 319 |
She had not much enjoyed school, but had seen the process as something that had to be undergone. She would have to earn her living, that was the point. These youngsters never seemed to think about that. Now she wrote down the letter she would like to send, but of course would not. Dear Mrs Jackson, I haven't the faintest idea what to advise. We seem to have bred a generation that expects food simply to fall into their mouths without their working for it. With sincere regrets, Aunt Vera. Julia was getting up. She gathered up her bag, her gloves, a newspaper, and as she came past Frances, nodded. Frances, too late, got up to push a chair towards her, but Julia was already gone. If she had handled it properly, Julia would have sat down — there had been a little moment of hesitation. And then at last she might have become friends with her mother-in-law. Frances sat on, ordered more coffee, then soup. Andrew had said that if one was lucky with one's timing and ordered goulash soup, you got the thick part at the bottom of the pot, like stew, very good. Her goulash when it came was evidently from the middle of the pot. She did not know what to write for her third piece. The second had been on marijuana, and it was easy. The article had been cool and informative, that was all, and many letters came in response. What an attractive crowd this was, the Cosmo crowd, these people from all over Europe, and of course, by now, the kind of British attracted by them. Many of them Jews. Not all. Julia had remarked, in front of 'the kids' when one of them asked if she had been a refugee, 'I am in the unfortunate situation of being a German who is not a Jew.' Shock and outrage. Julia's fascist status had been confirmed: though they all used the word fascist as easily as they said fuck, or shit, not necessarily meaning much more than this was somebody they disapproved of. Sophie had wailed that Julia gave her the creeps, all Germans did. Of Sophie, Julia had remarked, 'She has the Jewish young girl's beauty, but she'll end up an old hag, just like the rest of us.' If Sylvia-Tilly was coming down to supper then the food had to be right for her. She could not be given a dish different from the others, and yet she did not eat anything but potato. Very well, Frances would cook a big shepherd's pie, and the girls who were slimming could leave the mash and eat the rest. There would be vegetables. Rose would not eat vegetables, but would salad. Geoffrey never ate fish or vegetables: she had been worrying about Geoffrey's diet for years, and he was not even her child. What did his parents think, when he hardly ever went home, was always coming to them rather, to Colin? She asked him and he said that they were quite pleased he had somewhere to go. It seemed they both worked hard. Quakers. Religious. A dull household, it seemed. She had become fond of Geoffrey but was damned if she was going to spend time worrying about Rose. Careful, Frances: if there was one thing she had learned, it was not to say what one will accept or refuse from Fate, which had its own ideas. |
| 320 |
He had stayed for the first days in London with a kindly priest, a friend of those at the mission, who knew that the boy would be in a state of shock, and took him on buses, on the Underground, to the parks, to the markets, to the big shops, the supermarkets, the bank, to eat in restaurants. All this to accustom him, but then he had to go to St Joseph's, a place that seemed like heaven, buildings like illustrations in a picture book scattered about in green fields, and the boys and girls, all white except for two Nigerians who were as strange to him as the whites were, and the teachers, quite different from the Catholic fathers, all so friendly, so kind... he had not had kindness from white people outside the mission school. Colin was in a room along the corridor two doors from his own. To Franklin the little room was fitted out with everything anyone could wish for, including a telephone. It was a little paradise, but he had heard Colin complaining that it was too small. The food the variety of it, the plenty, every meal like a feast, but he had heard grumbles that the food was monotonous. At the mission he had had little to eat but maize porridge and relishes. Slowly grew inside him a powerful feeling that sometimes threatened to come hot out ofhis mouth in insults and accusations, while he smiled and was pleasant and compliant. It's not fair, it's not right, why do you have so much and you take it all for granted. It was that which ached in him, hurt, stung: they had no idea at all of their good fortune. And when he came home with Colin to the big house that seemed to him must be a palace (so he thought at first), it was crammed with beautiful things, and he found himself sitting in silence while they all joked and teased. He watched the older brother, Andrew, and his tenderness to the girl who had been sick, and in his mind he was in her place, sitting there between Frances and Andrew, both so kind to her, so gentle. After that first visit it was the same as when he first heard about the scholarship. He couldn't cope with it, he was not up to it, half the time he didn't even know what things were for a bit of kitchen equipment, or furniture. But he did go back and back, and found himself being treated like a son in that house. Johnny was a difficulty, at first. Franklin had been exposed to Johnny's doctrines, his kind of talk, before, and he had resolved he did not want to have anything to do with these politics, that frightened him. Politicos had exhorted him to kill all the whites, but his experience of good had been through the white priests at the mission even though they were stern, and through an unknown white protector, and now these kindly people at the new school and in this house. And yet he burned, he ached, he suffered: it was envy and it was poisoning him. I want. I want it. I want. I want... He knew that most of what he thought he could not say. The thoughts that crammed his head were dangerous and could not be allowed out. And with Rose they were not let out either. |
| 321 |
But she did doze a little, then woke, the valium outwitted by anxiety. She shook off the rug irritably, listening to the dog, which she could hear making a nuisance of itself just below her. She also heard Sophie singing, but thought it was the radio. There was a light under Andrew's door. She crept down the stairs, hesitating whether to go in to him, but instead descended another flight, and was on the landing outside Sylvia's room. A crack of light showed that Frances was still awake. The old woman felt she ought to go in to Frances and say something, find the right words, sit with her, do something ... what words? Julia gently turned the handle of Sylvia's door and stepped in to a room where moonlight lay across Sylvia and just reached the young man on the floor. She had forgotten him, and now her heart reminded her of her terrible, inadmissible unhappiness. Wilhelm had told her, not so long ago, that Sylvia would marry, and that she, Julia, mustn't mind it. So that's all he thinks of me, Julia had complained to herself, but knew he was right. Sylvia must marry, though probably not this man. Otherwise wouldn't he be beside her on the bed? It seemed to Julia terrible that any young man, 'a colleague', should come home with Sylvia and sleep in her room. They are like puppies in a basket, Julia thought, they lick each other and fall off to sleep just anyhow. It should matter that a man was in a young woman's room. It should mean something. Julia sat herself carefully in the chair where but that seemed an age ago she had coaxed little Sylvia to eat. Now she could see Sylvia's face clearly, and as the moonlight moved over the floor, the young man's. Well, if it wasn't going to be him, this quite pleasant-looking youth, it would be another one. It seemed to her that she had never cared for anyone in her life but Sylvia, that the girl had been the great passion of her life oh, yes, she knew she loved Sylvia because she had not been allowed to love Johnny. But that was nonsense, because she knew with her mind how much she had longed for Philip all through that old war, and then how much she had loved him. The beams of light on the bed and the floor resembled the arbitrariness of memory, emphasising this and then that. When she looked back along the path of her life, periods of years that had had a sharp and distinct flavour of their own reduced themselves to something like a formula: that was the five years of the First World War. That little slice there was the Second World War. But, immersed in those five years, loyal in her mind and emotions to an enemy soldier, they were endless. The Second World War, which was now like an uneasy shadow in her memory, when she had lost her husband to his fatigue and to the fact he could tell her nothing of what he did, was an awful time and she had often thought that she could not bear it. She had lain at nights beside a man who was preoccupied with how to destroy her country, and she had to be glad it was being destroyed and she was, but sometimes it seemed the bombs were tearing at her own heart. |
| 322 |
'Our good sisters are not all that keen on the bush.' Mosquitoes lay their eggs in any water they can find. The black wrigglers, as energetic in this phase of their lives as they will be when seeking whom they may devour, can be in the furl of an old dried pawpaw leaf, or in a rusted biscuit tin lid hidden under a bush. Yesterday Sylvia had seen the wrigglers in a tiny hollow excavated by a rivulet escaping from a flood, under the arching roots of a maize plant. The sun was sucking up the water as she watched, the wrigglers were doomed, so she did not kill them, but two hours later there was a downpour, and if they had not been washed out on to the earth to die, they were triumphantly completing their cycle. Father McGuire seemed semi-conscious. She thought that he was worse than he knew long term; he would get over this attack soon. Because he was ruddy-faced, a certain underlying pallor, even yellowness, was not easily seen. He was anaemic. Malaria does that. He should take iron pills. He should take a holiday. He should... Outside in the night white shapes swirled in the wind from approaching rain: the big wash Rebecca had done earlier. Sylvia sat by the dozing man, waiting for the next paroxysm, and looked round the room, her attention free. Brick walls, like hers, the same split-reed ceiling, the brick floor. In a corner a statue of the Virgin. On the walls the Virgin again, conventional representations inspired, if distantly, by the Italian Renaissance, blue and white and with downcast eyes, and surely out of place here in the bush? But wait, on a stool of dark wood, and of the same dark wood, a native Mary, a vigorous young woman, was nursing a baby. That was better. Hanging from a nail on the wall near the bed, where the priest could reach it, was a rosary of ebony. In the Sixties, the tumults of ideology that afflicted the world had taken a local shape in the Catholic Church, in a bubbling unrest that had attempted to dethrone the Virgin Mary. The Holy Mother was out, and with her went rosaries. Sylvia had not had a Catholic childhood, had never dipped her fingers into the Holy Water stoups, or wound pretty rosaries around them, or crossed herself or swapped Holy cards with other little girls. ('I'll give you three St Jeromes for one Holy Mother.') She had never prayed to the Virgin, only to Jesus. Therefore, when she joined the Church, she did not miss what she had never known, and only slowly, when meeting older priests or nuns or church members, had learned that a revolution had taken place which had left many in mourning, and particularly for the Virgin. (She would be reinstated, decades later.) Meanwhile, in places of the world where eyes vigilant for heresy or backsliding did not reach, priests and nuns kept their rosaries and their Holy Water, their statues and pictures of the Virgin, hoping that no one would notice. For someone like Rebecca, who had a little card of the Holy Mother nailed on to the central pole of her hut, this ideological argument would have seemed too silly to think about: but she had never heard of it. |
| 323 |
The money she had saved to pay for it had alarmingly dwindled. A slice had gone to pay for Meriel's therapy. She was also paying Meriel's monthly allowance. Rupert had sold the flat in Marylebone, and two-thirds of that had gone to Meriel. Rupert and Frances were jointly paying a fair rent for living here, in this house the two of them and two children. He was paying the children's school fees. Frances earned money from various books, pamphlets, reprints, but when she did her little sums, a good part of it had gone to Meriel. She was in that familiar position for our times: she was supporting a first wife. She went into the marital bedroom, with its two beds, the one where she had slept alone for so long, and the big bed which was now the emotional centre of her life. She sat on her spinster bed and looked over at Rupert's pyjamas, lying folded on his pillow. They were of a greeny-blue poplin, serious pyjamas indeed, but, when you touched them, silky and tender. Rupert, when you met him, must give the impression of solidity, strength, but then you saw the delicacy in his face, the sensitive hands... Frances sat on Rupert's side of the bed and caressed the pyjamas. Did Frances regret having said yes to Rupert, his children, the situation nor situation? Never, not for one moment. She felt as if she had stumbled so late in her life, as in a fairy tale, into a glade full of sunshine, and she even dreamed scenes like these, and knew it was Rupert she was dreaming of. Both of them had been married, had thought that these thoroughly unpleasant partners could be said to sum up marriage, but had found a happiness they had not expected or even believed in. Both had busy outward lives, he at his newspaper, she at the theatre, both knew what seemed to be hundreds of people, but all that was the outer life, and what was at the heart of it was this great bed, where everything was understood and nothing needed to be said. Frances would wake from a dream and tell herself, and then Rupert, that she had been dreaming of happiness. Let them mock who would, and they certainly did, but there was such a thing as happiness and here it was, here they were, both of them, contented, like cats in the sun. But these two middle-aged people courtesy would call them that cuddled to themselves a secret they knew would shrivel if exposed. And they were not the only ones: ideology has pronounced their condition impossible and so, people keep quiet. To come back to a house that loved you, took you in, kept you safe, a house that put its arms around you, that you pulled over your head like a blanket, and burrowed into like a lost little animal but now it is not your home, it is other people's... Sylvia went up those stairs, her feet knowing every step, every turn: here she had crouched, listening to the noise and laughter from the kitchen, thinking that she would never ever be accepted by it; and here Andrew had found her and carried her up to bed, tucked her in, given her chocolate from his pocket. |
| 324 |
Someone subscribing to the miracles of the Roman Catholic Church should not accuse others of superstition: this was her train ofthought, and it was far from a criticism of the religion. On Sundays the congregations that came to take the Eucharist with Father McGuire were told that they drank the blood and ate the flesh of Christ. She had slowly come to understand how deeply the lives of the black people she lived among were embedded in superstition, and what she wanted was to understand it all, not to make what she thought of as 'clever intellectual remarks'. Of the kind Colin and Andrew would make, she told herself. But the fact remained: there was an area where she, Sylvia, could not go, and must not criticise, in Rebecca just as much as any black casual worker, although Rebecca was her good friend. She would have to go over to the Pynes, if Father McGuire would not help. At lunch she brought the subject up, while Rebecca stood by the sideboard listening, and adding when the priest appealed to her for confirmation, 'Okay. It is true. And now the people who took the things are falling ill and people are saying it is because of what the n'ganga said.' Father McGuire did not look well. He was yellow and the hectic patches on his broad Irish cheekbones flared. He was impatient and cross. This was the second time in five years he was having to teach twice his normal hours. And the school was falling apart and Mr Mandizi only repeated that he had informed Senga of the situation. The priest went back to the school without taking his usual nap, and Sylvia and Rebecca unpacked the books, and made shelves from planks and bricks and soon all of one wall, on either side of the little dressing-table, was covered with books. Rebecca had wept to hear the sewing machines had been impounded she had hoped to make a little extra money sewing on hers, but her tears when looking at and touching the books were from joy. She even kissed the books. 'Oh, Sylvia, it was so wonderful you thought of us and brought us the books.' Sylvia went down to the hospital, where Joshua sat dozing under his tree, as if he had not left it in her absence, and where the little boys clamorously welcomed her, and she attended to her patients, many because of the coughs and colds that come with the sudden changes of temperature at the start of the rains. Then she took the car and went over to the Pynes, who filled a precise place in her life: when she needed information, that is where she went. The Pynes had bought their farm, after the Second World War, in the Fifties, on that late wave of white immigration. They grew mostly tobacco and had been successful. The house was on a ridge, looking out over to tall tumbling hills that in the dry season were blue with smoke and haze, but now were sharply green the foliage; and grey granite boulders. The pillared verandah was wide enough to have parties on, and before Liberation parties had been many, but were few now, with so many of the whites gone. |
| 325 |
She knew who he was, had known, had laid her plans, and expected it would be a walkover as it was. Close to, she fascinated, every little thing about her enthralled him. She had a certain way of moving her lips, as if she was crushing fruit with them, and her eyes were soft and they laughed not at him, he was making sure of that, so convinced was he that people did. And she was so at ease where he was not, in the flesh, in that magnificent body of hers, in movement and in pleasure in movement, and in food, and in her own beauty. He felt that he was being liberated simply by standing next to her. She told him he needed a woman like her, and he knew it was true. He was in awe of her too because of her sophistication. She had been in university in America and in England, she had friends everywhere among the famous because of her nature, not because of politics. She talked of politics with a laughing cynicism that shocked him, though he tried to match her. In short, it was inevitable that soon there would be a brilliant wedding, and he lived dissolved in pleasure. Everything was easy where it had been difficult no, often impossible. She said he was sexually repressed, and cured him of that in so far as his nature permitted. She said he needed more fun, had never known how to live. When he told her of his meagre much-punished childhood she kissed him with great smacking kisses and pulled his head down into her massive breasts and cuddled it. She laughed at him for everything. Now, Matthew had at the start of his rule discouraged the comrades, his associates, the leadership, from indulging their greed. He forbade them to enrich themselves. This was the last of the influences from his childhood, and then the Jesuits, who had taught him that poverty was next to Godliness: whatever else the Fathers might have been, they were poor and did not indulge themselves. Now Gloria told him he was mad, and that she should buy this big house, that farm, then wanted another farm, and some hotels that were coming on to the market as the whites left. She told him he must have a Swiss bank account and make sure there was money in it. What money? he wanted to know, and she scorned him for his naivety. But when she talked of money he still saw in his mother's thin hands the pitiful notes and coins put there by his father at the month's end, and at first, when he voted himself a salary, he had been careful it should be no higher than a top civil servant's. All this Gloria changed, brushing it away with her scorn, her laughter, her caresses and her practicality, for she had taken over his life and as the Mother of the Country could easily see to it that money flowed her way. It was she who quietly diverted big sums that flowed in from charities and benefactors into her own accounts. 'Oh, be a fool then,' she cried when he protested. 'It's in my name. It's not your responsibility.' Battles for someone's soul are seldom as clear and easy to see and as short as the one where the devil battled for Comrade Matthew's. |
| 326 |
On the evening after Sylvia returned from London, standing exactly in the same spot, she looked down at her hospital and was attacked by that failing of the heart and purpose that so often afflicts people just back from Europe. What she saw down there, the assemblage of poor huts or sheds, was tolerable only if she did not think of London, or Julia's house, with its solidity, its safety, its permanence, each room so full of things that had an exact purpose, serving a need among a multiplicity of needs, so that every day any person in it was supported as if by so many silent servitors with utensils, tools, appliances, gadgets, surfaces to sit on or to put things on an intricacy of always multiplying things. In the early mornings Joshua rolled from his place near the log that burned in the middle of the hut, reached for the pot where last night's porridge congealed, dug out from it with the stirring stick some lumps which he ate swiftly, supplying his stomach with its necessity, drank water from a tin jug that stood on the ledge that ran around the hut, then walked a few steps into the bush, urinated, perhaps squatted to shit, took up his stick that was made from bush wood, and walked the mile to the hospital, where he slid his back down the tree, to sit there, all day. Surely she, a 'religious' as Rebecca called her 'I told them in the village that you are a religious'-should be admiring this evidence of the poor in wealth, and probably of spirit, though she did not see herself as equipped to judge that. That great heap of a city, covering so many square miles, so rich, so rich — and then this group of paltry sheds and huts: Africa, beautiful Africa, which oppressed her spirits with its need, wanting everything, lacking everything, and everywhere people white and black working so hard to well, what? To put a little plaster on an old weeping wound. And that was what she was doing. Sylvia felt as if her own real self, her substance, the stuff of belief, was leaking away as she stood there. A sunset, a rainy season's going down of the sun... from a black cloud low on the red horizon shot heavy thick rays like spikes of gold that radiate around a saint's head. She felt mocked, as if a clever thief were stealing from her and laughing as he did it. What was she doing here? And what good did she really do? And above all where was that innocence of faith that had sustained her when she first came? What did she believe in, really? God, yes, she could say that, if no one pressed for definitions. She had suffered a conversion, as classic in its symptoms as an attack of malaria, to The Faith which is what Father McGuire called it, and she knew that it had begun because ofascetic Father Jack, with whom she had been in love, though at the time she would have said it was God she loved. Nothing was left of all that brave certainty, and she knew only that she must do her duty here, in this hospital, because Fate had set her down here. The state of her mind could also be described clinically: it was, in a hundred religious textbooks. |
| 327 |
Rose hated most of all people who read books, or who pretended to it was only a pretence; loathed the arts, denigrated particularly the theatre she boasted she had invented the word 'luvvies' for theatre people; and liked violent and cruel films. She met only people like herself, frequenting certain pubs and clubs, and they had no idea that they were a new phenomenon, something that earlier generations would have despised, and dismissed as the gutter press, fit only for the lowest depths of society. But the phrase now seemed to her something vaguely complimentary, a guarantee of bravery in the pursuit of truth. But how could she, or they, know? They scorned history because they had learned none. Only once in her life she had written with approval, admiration, it was about Comrade President Matthew Mungozi, and then, more recently, Comrade Gloria, whom she adored because of her ruthlessness. Only once had her pen not dripped poison. And she read the article by The Monitors stringer with fury, and, too, with something like the beginnings of fear. Meeting a journalist who worked on The Monitor she heard that it was Colin Lennox who had prompted it. And who the hell was Colin to have an opinion about Africa? She hated Colin. She had always seen novelists and poets as something like counterfeiters, making something out of nothing and getting away with it. She had been too early on the scene for his first novel, but she had rubbished his second and the Lennoxes, and his third had caused her paroxysms of rage. It was about two people, apparently unlike each other, who had for each other a tender and almost freakish love that it continued at all seemed to both of them a jest of Fate. While involved with other partners, other adventures, they met like conspirators, to share this feeling they had, that they understood each other as no one else ever could. Reviewers on the whole liked it and said it was poetic and evocative. One said it was 'elliptical', a word that goaded Rose to extra frenzy: she had to look it up in the dictionary. She read the novel, or tried to: but really she could not read anything more difficult than a newspaper article. Of course it was about Sophie, that stuck-up bitch. Well, let them both watch out, that's all. Rose had a file on the Lennoxes, all kinds of bits and pieces, some stolen from them long ago, when she went sniffing about the house for what she could find. She planned to 'get them' one day. She would sit leafing through the file, a rather fat woman now, her face permanently set in a malicious smile which, when she knew she had found the word or phrase that could really hurt, became a jeering laugh. On the plane to Senga she was next to a bulky man who took up too much room. She asked for a change of seat, but the plane was full. He shifted about in his seat in a way that she decided was aggressive and against her, and he gave her sideways looks full of male dishonesty. His arm was on the rest between them, no room for hers. |
| 328 |
It wasn't a large flat, nothing like that great house where Colin had been so kind, yet it was always crammed with people from everywhere, Americans, Cubans, other countries in South America, Africa... It was an education in revolution, Johnny's flat. He remembered at least two black men (with false names) from this country who were training in Moscow for guerilla war. And the guerilla war had been won, and he owed his sitting here, behind this desk, a senior Minister, to men like those. While he kept an eye out for them, at rallies and big meetings, he had never seen them since. Presumably they were dead. Now something confusing was happening. He knew what was being said about the Soviet Union, he was not one of the innocents who never left Zimlia. The word communist was becoming something like a curse: elsewhere, not here, where you had only to say Marxism to feel you were getting a good mark from the ancestors. (And where were they in all this?) A funny thing: he felt that that house in London had more in common with the ease and warmth of his grandparents' huts in the village (as it happened not all that far from St Luke's Mission) than anything since. And yet in the file on his desk was that nasty piece. He was feeling with every minute deeper resentment -against Sylvia. Why had she done those bad things? She had stolen goods from the new hospital, she had done operations when she shouldn't, and she had killed a patient. What did she expect him to do now? Well what did she expect? That hospital of hers, it had never had any real legal existence. The Mission decides to start a hospital, brings in a doctor, nothing in the files recorded permissions being asked or given... these white people, they come here, they do as they like, they haven't changed, they still... He sent out for sandwiches for lunch, in case Sylvia was hanging about somewhere waiting to catch him, and when Sylvia's second request arrived, 'Please, Franklin, I must see you', scribbled on an envelope who did she think she was, treating him like this he ordered that she must be told he had been called away on urgent business. He went to the window, and lifted the slats of the blind and there was Sylvia walking down there. Passionate accusations which he might reasonably have directed against Life Itself were focused on Sylvia's back with an intensity that surely she should have felt: little Sylvia, that little angel, as fresh and bright in his memory as a saint on a Holy Card, but she was a middle-aged woman with dry dull hair tied by black ribbon, no different from any of these white wrinkled madams whom he tried not to look at, he disliked them so much. He felt Sylvia had betrayed him. He actually wept a little, standing there holding up the slat and watching the green blob that was Sylvia merge into the pavement crowd. Sylvia walked straight into a tall distinguished gentleman who took her in his arms and said, 'Darling Sylvia'. It was Andrew, and he was with a girl in dark glasses with a very red mouth, smiling at her. |
| 329 |
Sylvia knew some faces from this morning in the cafE, but at others she had to look and look again... yes, Good Lord, there was Geoffrey Bone, as handsome as ever, and beside him the incendiary head, now subdued to a well-brushed russet, of Daniel, his shadow. And there was James Patton. For some people you have to wait decades before understanding what Nature has intended for them all along: in this case he had reached his culmination as man of the people, affable and amiable, comfily rotund, his right hand ever at the ready to reach out and clasp whatever flesh presented itself. There he was, a Member of Parliament in a safe Labour seat, and on this occasion a guest of Caring International, at Geoffrey's invitation. And Jill... yes, Jill, a large woman with a greyish coiffure, senior councillor in a London borough notorious for its mismanagement of funds, though the word corrupt could never, surely, be associated with this solid citizen whose police-bashing, rioting, American-Embassy-storming days were so long behind one could be pretty sure she had forgotten them or was murmuring, Oh, yes, I was a bit of a Red once. Sylvia had not been put next to Andrew who was at the head of the table, flanked by two important South Americans, but beside Mona, some places away. Sylvia knew she was as invisible as an anonymous little brown bird next to a displaying peacock, for people looked so often at Mona whose name everyone knew if they followed fashion at all. And why was Mona here? She said to Sylvia that she was attending the conference as Andrew's personal assistant, and congratulated Sylvia, giggling, on her new status as Andrew's assistant secretary, which is how she was being described when introduced. Sylvia was able to sit quietly and observe, and imagine how Clever and Zebedee would look in these attractive uniforms, scarlet and white and so striking on the black skins of the smiling waiters. She knew, very well, how these youths had had to work, intrigue, beg for these jobs, and how their parents had sacrificed for them, so they could serve these international stars with food most of them had never heard of until coming to this hotel. Sylvia was offered the choice ofcrocodile tails, in pink mayonnaise, and palm hearts imported from South East Asia, and all the time her heart was weeping, yes it was, a quiet wailing went on inside her, as she sat there beside Andrew's beautiful bride. It would not last, this marriage, you had only to look how they presented themselves, with the sleek complacency of well-fed cats, to know that she had said yes to Andrew probably for no better reason than she enjoyed saying, 'I have always liked older men,' to annoy younger ones, and he, who had not been married and had had to suffer the usual rumours, although he had been the 'friend' of a dozen well-known women, had finally needed to show his colours and make his statement, and he had, for here she was, his child bride. Sylvia looked around, and despaired, and thought of her hospital, closed while people in the village were ill or had broken limbs or... |
| 330 |
Then by a smart little piece of international legerdemain, Somalia became American, swapped for another bit of Africa. Naive citizens hoped and expected that the Americans would dismantle the apparatus for Security and set them free, but they had not learned that lesson, so essential for our times, that there is nothing more stable than this apparatus. Marxists and communists of various persuasions who had flourished under the Russians, torturing and imprisoning and killing their enemies, now found themselves being tortured and imprisoned and killed. The once reasonable enough State of Somalia, was as if boiling water had been poured into an ants' nest. The structure of decent living was destroyed. Warlords and bandits, tribal chiefs and family bosses, criminals and thieves, now ruled. The international aid organisations, stretched to their limits, could not cope, particularly because large parts of the country were barred to them by war. The doctor sat for hours on his hard chair and talked, because he had been watching people kill each other for months. Just before he left he had stood on the side of a track through a landscape dried to dust, watching refugees from famine file past. It is one thing to see it on television, as he said (trying to excuse his garrulousness), while he stared at her, but not seeing her, seeing only what he was describing, and it was another thing to be there. Perhaps Sylvia was as equipped as most to visualise what he was telling her, because she had only to set in her mind along that dusty track two thousand miles to the north people from the dying village in Kwadere. But he had watched, too, refugees fleeing from the killing troops of Mengistu, some of them hacked and bleeding, some dying, some carrying murdered children: he had watched that for days, and Sylvia's experience did not match with it and so it was hard to see it. And besides there was no television in Father McGuire's house. He was a doctor, and he had watched, helpless, people in need of medicines, a refuge, surgery, and all he had had to aid them had been a few cartons of antibiotics which had disappeared in a few minutes. The world is now full of people who have survived wars, genocide, drought, floods, and none of them will forget what they have experienced, but there are, too, the people who have watched: to stand for days seeing a people stream past in thousands, hundreds of thousands, a million, with nothing in your hands, well, this doctor had been there and done that, and his eyes were haunted and his face was stricken, and he could not stop talking. A woman doctor from the States wanted Sylvia for Zaire, but asked was Sylvia up to it it was pretty tough up there, and Sylvia said she was fine, she was very strong. She also said that she had performed an operation without being a surgeon but both doctors were amused: in the field, doctors not surgeons did what they could. 'Short of transplant operations, and I wouldn't actually go in for a by-pass.' In the end she agreed to go to Somalia, as part of a team financed by France. |
| 331 |
I had a test today. I think I faled it and I think mabye now they won't use me. "What happind is I went to Prof Nemurs office on my lunch time like they said and his secertery took me to a place that said psych dept on the door with a long hall and alot of littel rooms with onley a desk and chares. And a nice man was in one of the rooms and he had some wite cards with ink spilld all over them. He sed sit down Charlie and make yourself cunfortible and rilax. He had a wite coat like a docter but I don't think he was no docter because he dint tell me to opin my mouth and sav ah. All he had was those wite cards. His name is Burt. I fer-got his last name because I don't remembir so good. I dint know what he was gonna do and I was holding on tite to the chair like sometimes when I go to a dentist onley Burt aint no dentist neither but he kept telling me to rilax and that gets me skared because it always means its gonna hert. So Burt sed Charlie what do you see on this card. I saw the spilld ink and I was very skared even tho I got my rabits foot in my pockit because when I was a kid I always faled tests in school and I spilld ink to. I tolld Burt I saw ink spilld on a wite card. Burt said yes and he smild and that maid me feel good. He kept terning all the cards and I tolld him somebody spilld ink on all of them red and black. I thot that was a easy test but when I got up to go Burt stoppd me and said now sit down Charlie we are not thru yet. Theres more we got to do with these cards. I dint understand about it but I remembir Dr Strauss said do anything the testor telld me even if it don't make no sense because that's testing. I don't remembir so good what Burt said but I remembir he wantid me to say what was in the ink. I dint see nothing in the ink but Burt sed there was picturs there. I coudnt see no picturs. I reely tryed to see. I holded the card up close and then far away. Then I said if I had my eye glassis I coud probaly see better I usully only ware my eye-glassis in the movies or to watch TV but I sed maybe they will help me see the picturs in the ink. I put them on and I said now let me see the card agan I bet I find it now. I tryed hard but I still coudnt find the picturs I only saw the ink. I tolld Burt mabey I need new glassis. He rote somthing down on a paper and I got skared of faling the test. So I tolld him it was a very nice pictur of ink with pritty points all around the eges but he shaked his head so that wasnt it neither. I asked him if other pepul saw things in the ink and he sed yes they imagen picturs in the inkblot. He tolld me the ink on the card was calld inkblot. Burt is very nice and he talks slow like Miss Kinnian dose in her class where I go to lern reeding for slow adults. He explaned me it was a raw shok test. He sed pepul see things in the ink. I said show me where. He dint show me he just kept saying think imagen theres something on the card. I tolld him I imaggen a inkblot. He shaked his head so that wasnt rite eather. |
| 332 |
He said what does it remind you of pretend its something. I dosd my eyes for a long time to pretend and then I said I pretend a bottel of ink spilld all over a wite card. And that's when the point on his pencel broke and then we got up and went out. I don't think I passd the raw shok test. 3d progris riport martch 5 Dr Strauss and prof Nemur say it don't matter about the ink on the cards. I tolld them I dint spill the ink on them and I coudnt see anything in the ink They said maybe they will still use me. I tolld Dr Strauss that Miss Kinnian never gave me tests like that only riting and reeding. He said Miss Kinnian tolld him I was her bestist pupil in the Beekman School for retarted adults and I tryed the hardist becaus I reely wantd to lern I wantid it more even then pepul who are smarter even then me. Dr Strauss askd me how come you went to the Beekman School all by yourself Charlie. How did you find out about it. I said I don't remembir. Prof Nemur said but why did you want to lern to reed and spell in the frist place. I tolld him because all my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb and my mom always tolld me to try and lern just like Miss Kinnian tells me but its very hard to be smart and even when I lern something in Miss Kinnians class at the school I ferget alot. Dr Strauss rote some things on a peice of paper and prof Nemur talkd to me very sereus. He said you know Charlie we are not shure how this experamint will werk on pepul because we onley tried it up to now on animils. I said that's what Miss Kinnian tolld me but I don't even care if it herts or anything because I'm strong and I will werk hard. I want to get smart if they will let me. They said they got to get permissen from my familie but my uncle Herman who use to take care of me is ded and I don't rimember about my familie. I dint see my mother or father or my littel sister Norma for a long long long time. Mabye their ded to. Dr. Strauss askd me where they use to live. I think in brooklin. He sed they will see if mabye they can find them. I hope I don't have to rite to much of these progris ri-ports because it takes along time and I get to sleep very late and I'm tired at werk in the morning. Gimpy hollered at me because I droppd a tray full of rolles I was carrying over to the oven. They got derty and he had to wipe them off before he put them in to bake. Gimpy hollers at me all the time when I do something rong, but he reely likes me because he's my frend. Boy if I get smart won't he be serprised. progris riport 4 mar6 "I had more crazy tests today in case they use me. That same place but a differnt littel testing room. The nice lady who give it to me tolld me the name and I askd her how do you spell it so I can put it down rite in my progis riport, thematic appercepton test. I don't know the frist 2 werds but I know what test means. You got to pass it or you get bad marks. This test lookd easy because I coud see the picturs. Only this time she dint want me to tell what I saw in the picturs. |
| 333 |
That mixd me up. I tolld her yesterday Burt said I shoud tell what I saw in the ink. She said that don't make a difrence because this test is something else. Now you got to make up storys about the pepul in the picturs. I said how can I tell storys about pepul I don't know. She said make beleeve but I tolld her that's lies. I never tell lies any more because when I was a kid I made lies and I always got hit. I got a pictur in my walet of me and Norma with Uncle Herman who got me the job to be janiter at Donners bakery before he dyed. I said I coud make storys about them because I livd with Uncle Herman along time but the lady dint want to hear about them. She said this test and the other one the raw shok was for getting persinality. I laffd. I tolld her how can you get that thing from cards that sombody spilld ink on and fotos of pepul you don't even no. She lookd angrey and took the picturs away. I don't care. I gess I faled that test too. Then I drawed some picturs for her but I don't drawer so good. Later the other testor Burt in the wite coat came back his name is Burt Selden and he took me to a diferent place on the same 4th floor in the Beekman University that said Psychology Laboratory on the door. Burt said psychology means minds and laboratory meens a place where they make spearamints. I thot he ment like where they made the chooing gum but now I think its puzzels and games because that's what we did. I coudnt werk the puzzels so good because it was all broke and the peices coudnt fit in the holes. One game was a paper with lines in all derections and lots of boxs. On one side it said start and on the other end it said finish. He tolld me that game was amazed and I shoud take the pencil and go from where it said start to where it said finish withowt crossing over any of the lines. I dint understand the amazed and we used up a lot of papers. Then Burt said look I'll show you something let's go to the sperimental lab mabye you'll get the idea. We went up to the 5th floor to another room with lots of cages and animils they had monkys and some mouses. It had a funny smel like old garbidge. And there was other pepul in wite coats playing with the animils so I thot it was like a pet store but their wasnt no customers. Burt took a wite mouse out of the cage and showd him to me. Burt said that's Algernon and he can do this amazed very good. I tolld him you show me how he does that. Well do you know he put Algernon in a box like a big tabel with alot of twists and terns like all kinds of walls and a start and a finish like the paper had. Only their was a skreen over the big tabel. And Burt took out his clock and lifted up a slidding door and said let's go Algernon and the mouse sniffd 2 or 3 times and startid to run. First he ran down one long row and then when he saw he coudnt go no more he came back where he startid from and he just stood there a minit wiggeling his wiskers. Then he went off in the other derection and startid to run again. It was just like he was doing the same thing Burt wanted me to do with the lines on the paper. |
| 334 |
I was laffing because I thot it was going to be a hard thing for a mouse to do. But then Algernon kept going all the way threw that thing all the rite ways till he came out where it said finish and he made a squeek. Burt says that means he was happy because he did the thing rite. Boy I said that's a smart mouse. Burt said woud you like to race against Algernon. I said sure and he said he had a differnt kind of amaze made of wood with rows skratched in it and an electrik stick like a pencil. And he coud fix up Algernons amaze to be the same like that one so we could both be doing the same kind. He moved all the bords around on Algernons tabel because they come apart and he could put them together in differnt ways. And then he put the skreen back on top so Algernon woudnt jump over any rows to get to the finish. Then he gave me the electrik stick and showd me how to put it in between the rows and I'm not suppose to lift it off the bord just follow the little skratches until the pencil cant move any more or I get a little shock. He took out his clock and he was trying to hide it. So I tryed not to look at him and that made me very nervus. When he said go I tryed to go but I dint know where to go. I didn't know the way to take. Then I herd Algernon squeeking from the box on the tabel and his feet skratch-ing like he was runing alredy. I startid to go but I went in the rong way and got stuck and a littel shock in my fingers so I went back to the start but evertime I went a differnt way I got stuck and a shock. It didn't hert or anything just made me jump a littel and Burt said it was to show me I did the wrong thing. I was haffway on the bord when I herd Algernon squeek like he was happy again and that means he won the race. And the other ten times we did it over Algernon won evry time because I coudnt find the right rows to get to where it says finish. I dint feel bad because I watched Algernon and I lernd how to finish the amaze even if it takes me along time. I dint know mice were so smart. progris riport 5 mar 6 They found my sister Norma who lives with my mother in Brooklin and she gave permissen for the operashun. So their going to use me. I'm so exited I can hardley rite it down. But then Prof Nemur and Dr Strauss had a arga-ment about it frist. I was sitting in Prof Nemurs office when Dr Strauss and Burt Selden came in. Prof Nemur was worryed about using me but Dr Strauss tolld him I looked like the best one they testid so far. Burt tolld him Miss Kinnian rekemmended me the best from all the people who she was teaching at the center for retarted adults. Where I go. Dr Strauss said I had something that was very good. He said I had a good motor-vation. I never even knowed I had that. I felt good when he said not everbody with an eye-Q of 68 had that thing like I had it. I don't know what it is or where I got it but he said Algernon had it too. Algernons motor-vation is the chees they put in his box. But it cant be only that because I dint have no chees this week. |
| 335 |
Prof Nemur was worryd about my eye-Q getting too high from mine that was too low and I woud get sick from it. And Dr Strauss tolld Prof Nemur somthing I dint understand so wile they was talking I rote down some of the words in my notebook for keeping my progris riports. He said Harold that's Prof Nemurs frist name I know Charlie is not what you had in mind as the frist of your new breed of intelek** coudnt get the word *** superman. But most people of his low ment** are host** and uncoop** they are usally dull and apathet** and hard to reach. Charlie has a good natcher and he's intristed and eeger to pleese. Then prof Nemur said remembir he will be the first human beeing ever to have his intelijence increesd by sergery. Dr Strauss said that's exakly what I ment. Where will we find another retarted adult with this tremendus motor-vation to lern. Look how well he has lerned to reed and rite for his low mentel age. A tremen** achev** I dint get all the werds and they were talking to fast but it sounded like Dr Strauss and Burt was on my side and Prof Nemur wasnt. Burt kept saying Alice Kinnian feels he has an overwhelm** desir to lern. He aktually beggd to be used. And that's true because I wantid to be smart. Dr Strauss got up and walkd around and said I say we use Charlie. And Burt noded. Prof Nemur skratchd his head and rubbd his nose with his thum and said mabye your rite. We will use Charlie. But weve got to make him understand that a lot of things can go wrong with the experamint. When he said that I got so happy and exited I jumpd up and shaked his hand for being so good to me. I think he got skared when I did that. He said Charlie we werked on this for a long time but only on animils like Algernon. We are sure thers no fisical danger for you but there are other things we cant tell until we try it. I want you to understand this mite fale and then nothing woud happen at all. Or it mite even sucseed tem-perary and leeve you werse off then you are now. Do you understand what that meens. If that happins we will have to send you bak to the Warren state home to live. I said I dint care because I aint afraid of nothing. I'm very strong and I always do good and beside I got my luky rabits foot and I never breakd a mirrir in my life. I droppd some dishis once but that don't count for bad luk. Then Dr Strauss said Charlie even if this fales your making a grate contribyushun to sience. This experimint has been successful on lots of animils but its never bin tride on a humen beeing. You will be the first, I told him thanks doc you won't be sorry for giving me my 2nd chanse like Miss Kinnian says. And I meen it like I tolld them. After the operashun I'm gonna try to be smart. I'm gonna try awful hard. progris riport 6th Mar 8 I'm skared. Lots of pepul who werk at the collidge and the pepul at the medicil school came to wish me luk. Burt the tester brot me some flowers he said they were from the pepul at the psych departmint. He wished me luk. I hope I have luk. |
| 336 |
They maid me get out of the bed and on another bed that has weels on it and they rolld me out of the room and down the hall to the door that says sergery. Boy was I serprised that it was a big room with green walls and lots of docters sitting around up high all around the room waching the operashun. I dint no it was going to be like a show. A man came up to the tabel all in wite and with a wite cloth on his face like in TV shows and rubber glovs and he said rilax Charlie its me Dr Strauss. I said hi doc I'm skared. He said theres nothing to be skared about Charlie he said you'll just go to sleep. I said that's what I'm skared about. He patted my head and then 2 other men waring wite masks too came and straped my arms and legs down so I coudnt move them and that maid me very skared and my stomack feeled the like I was gone to make all over but I dint only wet a littel and I was gone to cry but they put a rubber thing on my face for me to breeth in and it smelld funny. All the time I herd Dr Strauss talking out loud about the operashun telling evrybody what he was gonna do. But I dint understand anything about it and I was thinking mabye after the operashun I'll be smart and I'll understand all the things he's talking about. So I breethed deep and then I gess I was very tired becase I went to sleep. When I waked up I was back in my bed and it was very dark I coudnt see nothing but I herd some talking. It was the nerse and Burt and I said whats the matter why don't you put on the lites and when are they gonna operate. And they laffed and Burt said Charlie its all over. And its dark because you got bandijis over your eyes. Its a funny thing. They did it while I was sleeping. Burt comes in to see me evry day to rite down all the things like my tempertur and my blud preshur and the other things about me. He says its on acount of the sientific methid. They got to keep reckerds about what happins so they can do it agen when they want to. Not to me but to the other pepul like me who aint smart. that's why I got to do these ptegs- progress reports. Burt says its part of the esperimint and they will make fo-tastats of the rip8 reports to study them so they will know what is going on in my mind. I don't see how they will know what is going on in my mind by looking at these reports. I read them over and over a lot of times to see what I rote and I don't no whats going on in my mind so how are they going to. But anyway that's sience and I got to try to be smart like other pepul. Then when I am smart they will talk to me and I can sit with them and listen like Joe Carp and Frank and Gimpy do when they talk and have a discushen about importent things. While their werking they start talking about things like about god or about the truble with all the mony the presedint is spending or about the ripublicans and demicrats. And they get all excited like their gonna have a fite so Mr Donner got to come in and tell them to get back to baking or they'll all get canned union or no union. |
| 337 |
I want to talk about things like that. If your smart you can have lots of frends to talk to and you never get lonley by yourself all the time. Prof Nemur says its ok to tell about all the things that happin to me in the progress reports but he says I shoud rite more about what I feel and what I think and remembir about the past. I tolld him I don't know how to think or remembir and he said just try. All the time the bandiges were on my eyes I tryed to think and remembir but nothing happined. I don't know what to think or remembir about. Maybe if I ask him he will tell me how I can think now that I'm suppose to get smart. What do smart pepul think about or remembir. Fancy things I bet. I wish I new some fancy things alredy. March 12 I don't have to rite progress report on top evry day just when I start a new batch after Prof Nemur takes the old ones away. I just have to put the date on top. That saves time. Its a good idea. I can sit up in bed and look out the window at the gras and trees outside. The skinney nerses name is Hilda and she is very good to me. She brings me things to eat and she fixes my bed and she says I was a very brave man to let them do things to my hed. She says she woud never let them do things to her branes for all the tea in china. I tolld her it wasnt for tea in china. It was to make me smart. And she said mabey they got no rite to make me smart because if god wantid me to be smart he would have made me born that way. And what about Adem and Eev and the sin with the tree of nowlege and eating the appel and the fall. And mabey Prof Nemur and Dr Strauss was tampiring with things they got no rite to tampir with. She's very skinney and when she talks her face gets all red. She says mabey I better prey to god to ask him to forgiv what they done to me. I dint eat no appels or do nodi-ing sinful. And now I'm skared. Mabey I shoudnt of let them oparate on my branes like she said if its agenst god. I don't want to make god angrey. March 13 They changed my nerse today. This one is pritty. Her name is Lucille she showd me how to spell it for my progress report and she got yellow hair and blew eyes. I askd her where was Hilda and she said Hilda wasnt werking in that part of the hospitil no more. Only in the matirnity ward by the babys where it don't matter if she talks too much. When I askd her about what was matirnity she said its about having babys but when I askd her how they have them she got red in the face just the same like Hilda and she said she got to take sombodys temperchure. Nobody ever tells me about the babys. Mabye if this thing werks and I get smart I'll find out. Miss Kinnian came to see me today and she said Charlie you look wonderful. I tolld her I feel fine but I don't feel smart yet. I thot that when the operashun was over and they took the bandijis off my eyes I'd be smart and no a lot of things so I coud read and talk about im-portent things like evryebody else. She said that's not the way it werks Charlie. It comes slowley and you have to werk very hard to get smart. |
| 338 |
I almost forgot and started to tell them I was going to be very smart soon like them but Burt intiruppted and he tolld them I was cleaning the psych department lab. Later he explaned to me their mussent be any publisity. That meens its a seecrit. I don't reely understand why I got to keep it a seecrit. Burt says its in case theirs a faleure Prof Nemur don't want everybody to laff espeshully the pepul from the Welberg foundashun who gave him the mony for the projekt. I said I don't care if pepul laff at me. Lots of pepul laff at me and their my frends and we have fun. Burt put his arm on my sholder and said its not you Nemurs worryd about. He don't want pepul to laff at him. I dint think pepul would laff at Prof Nemur because he's a sientist in a collidge but Bert said no sientist is a grate man to his colleegs and his gradulate studints. Burt is a gradulate studint and he is a majer in psychology like the name on the door to the lab. I dint know they had majers in collidge. I thot it was onley in the army. Anyway I hope I get smart soon because I want to lern everything there is in the werld like the collidge boys know. All about art and politiks and god. March 17 When I waked up this morning rite away I thot I was gone to be smart but I'm not. Evry morning I think I'm gone to be smart but nothing happins. Mabye the experimint dint werk. Maby I won't get smart and I'll have to go live at the Warren home. I hate the tests and I hate the amazeds and I hate Algernon. I never new before that I was dumber than a mouse. I don't feel like riting any more progress reports. I forget things and even when I rite them in my notbook sometimes I cant reed my own riting and its very hard. Miss Kinnian says have pashents but I feel sick and tired. And I get headakes all the time. I want to go back to werk in the bakery and not rite ftega& progress reports any more. March 20 I'm going back to werk at the bakery. Dr Strauss told Prof Nemur it was better I shoud go back to werk but I still cant tell anyone what the operashun was for and I have to come to the lab for 2 hrs evry nite after werk for my tests and keep riting these dumb reports. They are going to pay me evry week like for a part time job because that was part of the arraingment when they got the mony from the Welberg foundashun. I still don't know what that Welberg thing is. Miss Kinnian explaned me but I still don't get it. So if I dint get smart why are they paying me to rite these dumb things. If their gonna pay me I'll do it. But its very hard to rite. I'm glad I'm going back to werk because I miss my job at the bakery and all my frends and all the fun we have. Dr. Strauss says I shoud keep a notbook in my pockit for things I remembir. And I don't have to do the progress reports every day just when I think of somthing or somthing speshul happins. I told him nothing speshul ever happins to me and it don't look like this speshul experimint is going to happin neither. He says don't get discouriged Charlie because it takes a long time and it happins slow and you cant notise it rite away. |
| 339 |
He explaned how it took a long time with Algernon before he got 3 times smarter then he was before. that's why Algernon beats me all the time in that amaze race because he had that operashun too. he's a speshul mouse the 1st animil to stay smart so long after the operashun. I dint know he was a speshul mouse. That makes it diffrint. I coud probaly do that amazed fester then a reglar mouse. Maybe some day I'll beat Algernon. Boy woud that be somthing. Dr Strauss says that so far Algernon looks like he mite be smart permanint and he says that's a good sine becaus we both had the same kind of operashun. March 21 We had a lot of fun at the bakery today. Joe Carp said hey look where Charlie had his operashun what did they do Charlie put some brains in. I was going to tell him about me getting smart but I remembered Prof Nemur said no. Then Frank Reilly said what did you do Charlie open a door the hard way. That made me laff. Their my frends and they really like me. Their is a lot of werk to catch up. They dint have anyone to clean out the place because that was my job but they got a new boy Ernie to do the diliveries that I always done. Mr. Donner said he decided not to fire him for a while to give me a chanse to rest up and not werk so hard. I told him I was alright and I can make my diliveries and clean up like I always done but Mr. Donner says we will keep the boy. I said so what am I gonna do. And Mr. Donner patted me on the shoulder and says Charlie how old are you. I told him 32 years going on 33 my next brithday. And how long you been here he said. I told him I dint know. He said you came here seventeen years ago. Your Uncle Herman god rest his sole was my best frend. He brout you in here and he askd me to let you werk here and look after you as best I coud. And when he died 2 years later and your mother had you comited to the Warren home I got them to releese you on outside werk placmint. Seventeen years its been Charlie and I want you to know that the bakery bisness is not so good but like I always said you got a job here for the rest of your life. So don't worry about me bringing in somebody to take your place. you'll never have to go back to that Warren home. I aint worryd only what does he need Ernie for to diliver and werk around here when I was always deliviring the packiges good. He says the boy needs the mony Charlie so I'm going to keep him on as an aprentise to lern him to be a baker. You can be his asistent and help him out on diliverys when he needs it. I never was a asistent before. Ernie is very smart but the other pepul in the bakery don't like him so much. Their all my good frends and we have lots of jokes and laffs here. Some times somebody will say hey lookit Frank, or Joe or even Gimpy. He really pulled a Charlie Gordon that time. I don't know why they say it but they always laff and I laff too. This morning Gimpy he's the head baker and he has a bad foot and he limps he used my name when he shouted at Ernie because Ernie losst a birthday cake. |
| 340 |
He said Ernie for godsake you trying to be a Charlie Gordon. I don't know why he said that. I never lost any packiges. I askd Mr Donner if I coud lern to be an aprentise baker like Ernie. I told him I coud lern it if he gave me a chanse. Mr Donner looked at me for a long time funny because I gess I don't talk so much most of the time. And Frank herd me and he laffed and laffed until Mr Donner told him to shut up and go tend to his oven. Then Mr Donner said to me theirs lots of time for that Charlie. A bakers werk is very importint and very complikated and you shoudnt worry about things like that. I wish I coud tell him and all the other people about my real operashun. I wish it woud reely work alredy so I coud get smart like evrybody else. March 24 Prof Nemur and Dr Strauss came to my room tonight to see why I don't come in to the lab like I am suppose to. I told them I don't want to race with Algernon no more. Prof Nemur said I don't have to for a while but I shoud come in any way. He brout me a presint only it wasnt a presint but just for lend. He said its a teeching mashine that werks like TV. It talks and makes picturs and I got to tern it on just before I go to sleep. I said your kidding. Why shoud I tern on a TV before I go to sleep. But Prof Nemur said if I want to get smart I got to do what he says. So I told him I dint think I was goin to get smart anyway. Then Dr. Strauss came over and put his hand on my sholder and said Charlie you don't know it yet but your getting smarter all the time. You won't notise it for a while like you don't notise how the hour hand on a clock moves. that's the way it is with the changes in you. They are hap-pining so slow you cant tell. But we can follow it from the tests and the way you act and talk and your progress reports. He said Charlie youve got to have fayth in us and in yourself. We cant be sure it will be permanint but we are confidant that soon your going to be a very intellijent young man. I said okay and Prof Nemur showed me how to werk the TV that reely wasnt a TV. I askd him what did it do. First he lookd sore again because I asked him to explane me and he said I shoud just do what he told me. But Dr Strauss said he shoud explane it to me because I was beginning to questien authorety. I don't no what that meens but Prof Nemur looked like he was going to bite his lip offi Then he explaned me very slow that the mashine did lots of things to my mind. Somethings it did just before I fall asleep like teach me things when I'm very sleepy and a little while after I start to fall asleep I still hear the talk even if I don't see the picturs anymore. Other things is at nite its suppose to make me have dreams and remembir things that happened a long time ago when I was a very littel kid. Its scary. Oh yes I forgot. I asked Prof Nemur when I can go back to Miss Kinnians class at the adult center and he said soon Miss Kinnian will come to the collidge testing center to teach me speshul. I am glad about that. I dint see her so much since the operashun but she is nice. |
| 341 |
March 25 That crazy TV kept me up all nite. How can I sleep with something yelling crazy things all night in my ears. And the nutty picturs. Wow. I don't know what it says when I'm up so how am I going to know when I'm sleeping. I asked Burt about it and he says its ok. He says my branes are lerning just before I got to sleep and that will help me when Miss Kinnian starts my lessons at the testing center. The testing center isn't a hospitil for animils like I thougt before. Its a labortory for sience. I don't know what sience is exept I'm helping it with this experimint. Anyway I don't know about that TV. I think its crazy. If you can get smart when your going to sleep why do pepul go to school. I don't think that thing will werk. I use to watch the late show and the late late show on TV all the time before I went to sleep and it never made me smart. Maybe only certin movies make you smart. Maybe like quizz shows. March 26 How am I gonna work in the daytime if that thing keeps waking me up at nite. In the middel of the nite I woke up and I coudnt go back to sleep because it kept saying remembir... remembir... remembir. .. So I think I remembird something. I don't remembir exackly but it was about Miss Kinnian and the school where I lerned about reading. And how I went their. A long time ago once I asked Joe Carp how he lerned to read and if I coud lern to read to. He laffed like he always done when I say something funny and he says to me Charlie why waste your time they cant put any branes in where there aint none. But Fanny Birden herd me and she askd her cusin who is a collidge studint at Beekman and she told me about the adult center for retarded pepul at the Beekman collidge. She rote the name down on a paper and Frank laffed and said don't go getting so eddicated that you won't talk to your old frends. I said don't worry I will always keep my old frends even if I can read and rite. He was laffing and Joe Carp was laffing but Gimpy came in and told them to get back to making rolls. They are all good frends to me. After werk I walked over six blocks to the school and I was scared. I was so happy I was going to lern to read that I bougt a newspaper to take home with me and read after I lerned. When I got their it was a big long hall with lots of pepul. I got scared of saying somthing wrong to sombody so I startid to go home. But I don't know why I terned around and went inside agen. I wated until most everbody went away exept some pepul going over by a big timeclock like the one we have at the bakery and I asked the lady if I coud lern to read and rite because I wanted to read all the things in the newspaper and I showed it to her. She was Miss Kinnian but I dint know it then. She said if you come back tomorow and rejister I will start to teach you how to read. But you got to understand it will take a long time maybe years to lern to read. I told her I dint know it took so long but I wantid to lern anyway because I made believe a lot of times. I meen I pretend to pepul I know how to read but it aint true and I wantid to lern. |
| 342 |
She shaked my hand and said glad to meet you Mistre Gordon. I will be your teacher. My name is Miss Kinnian. So that's wear I went to lern and that's how I met Miss Kinnian. Thinking and remembiring is hard and now I don't sleep so good any more. That TV is too loud. March 27 Now that I'm starting to have those dreams and remembiring Prof Nemur says I got to go to theripy se-sions with Dr Strauss. He says theripy sesions is like when you feel bad you talk to make it better. I tolld him I don't feel bad and I do plenty of talking all day so why do I have to go to theripy but he got sore and says I got to go anyway. What theripy is is that I got to lay down on a couch and Dr. Strauss sits in a chair near me and I talk about anything that comes into my head. For a long time I dint say nothing because I coudnt think of nothing to say. Then I told him about the bakery and the things they do there. But its silly for me to go to his office and lay down on the couch to talk because I rite it down in the progress reports anyway and he could read it. So today I brout the progress report with me and I told him maybe he could just read it and I could take a nap on the couch. I was very tired because that TV kept me up all nite but he said no it don't work that way. I got to talk. So I talked but then I fell asleep on the couch anyway — rite in the middle. March 28 I got a headake. its not from that TV this time. Dr Strauss showed me how to keep the TV turned low so now I can sleep. I don't hear a thing. And I still don't understand what it says. A few times I play it over in the morning to find out what I lerned before I fell asleep and while I was sleeping and I don't even know the words. Maybe its another langwidge or something. But most times it sounds american. But it talks too fast. I askd Dr Strauss what good is it to get smart in my sleep if I want to be smart when I'm awake. He says its the same thing and I have two minds. Theres the subconscious and the conscious (thats how you spell it) and one don't tell the other what its doing. They don't even talk to each other. that's why I dream. And boy have I been having crazy dreams. Wow. Ever since that night TV. The late late late late late movie show. I forgot to ask Dr Strauss if it was only me or if everybody has two minds like that. (I just looked up the word in the dicshunery Dr Strauss gave me. subconscious, adj. Of the nature of mental operations yet not present in consciousness; as, subconscious conflict of desires) Theres more but I still don't know what it meens. This isn't a very good dicshunery for dumb people like me. Anyway the headake is from the party. Joe Carp and Frank Reilly invited me to go with them after work to Hal-lorans Bar for some drinks. I don't like to drink wiskey but they said we will have lots of fun. I had a good time. We played games with me doing a dance on the top of the bar with a lampshade on my head and everyone laffing. Then Joe Carp said I shoud show the girls how I mop out the toilet in the bakery and he got me a mop. |
| 343 |
I showed them and everyone laffed when I told them that Mr Donner said I was the best janiter and errand boy he ever had because I like my job and do it good and never come late or miss a day exept for my operashun. I said Miss Kinnian always told me Charlie be proud of the work you do because you do your job good. Everybody laffed and Frank said that Miss Kinnian must be some cracked up piece if she goes for Charlie and Joe said hey Charlie are you making out with her. I said I dint know what that meens. They gave me lots of drinks and Joe said Charlie is a card when he's potted. I think that means they like me. We have some good times but I cant wait to be smart like my best frends Joe Carp and Frank Reilly. I don't remember how the party was over but they asked me to go around the corner to see if it was raining and when I came back there was no one their. Maybe they went to find me. I looked for them all over till it was late. But I got lost and I felt bad at myself for getting lost because I bet Algernon coud go up and down those streets a hundrid times and not get lost like I did. Then I don't remember so good but Mrs Flynn says a nice poleecman brought me back home. That same nite I dreamed about my mother and father only I coudnt see her face it was all wite and she was blurry. I was crying because we were in a big departmint store and I was losst and I coudnt find them and I ran up and down the rows around all the big cownters in the store. Then a man came and took me in a big room with benches and gave me a lolypop and tolld me a big boy like me shoudnt cry because my mother and father woud come to find me. Anyway that's the dream and I got a headake and a big lump on my head and black and blue marks all over. Joe Carp says mabye I got rolled or the cop let me have it. I don't think poleecmen do things like that. But anyway I don't think I'll drink wiskey anymore. March 29 I beet Algernon. I dint even know I beet him until Burt Selden told me. Then the second time I lost because I got so exited. But after that I beet him 8 more times. I must be getting smart to beat a smart mouse like Algernon. But I don't feel smarter. I wanted to race some more but Burt said that's enough for one day. He let me hold Algernon for a minit. Algernon is a nice mouse. Soft like cotton. He blinks and when he opens his eyes their black and pink on the eges. I asked can I feed him because I felt bad to beat him and I wanted to be nice and make frends. Burt said no Algernon is a very speshul mouse with an operashun like mine. He was the first of all the animals to stay smart so long and he said that Algernon is so smart he has to solve a problem with a lock that changes every time he goes in to eat so he has to lern something new to get his food. That made me sad because if he coudnt lern he woudnt be able to eat and he would be hungry. I don't think its right to make you pass a test to eat. How woud Burt like to have to pass a test every time he wants to eat. I think I'll be frends with Algernon. |
| 344 |
Anyway I dint know that I knew how to work the mixer. Its very hard and Oliver went to bakers school for one year before he could learn how to be an assistint baker. But Joe Carp he's my friend he said Charlie why don't you take over Olivers job. Everybody on the floor came around and they were laff laughing and Frank Reilly said yes Charlie you been here long enuff enough. Go ahead. Gimpy aint around and he won't know you tryed it. I was scared because Gimpy is the head baker and he told me never to go near the mixer because I would get hurt. Everyone said do it exept Fannie Birden who said stop it why don't you leave the poor man alone. Frank Reilly said shut up Fanny its April fools day and if Charlie works on the mixer he might fix it good so we will all have the day off. I said I coudnt fix the mashine but I could work it because I been watching Oliver ever since I got back. I worked the dough-mixer and everybody was surprised espeshully Frank Reilly. Fanny Birden got exited because she said it took Oliver 2 years to learn how to mix the dough right and he went to bakers school. Bernie Bate who helps on the mashine said I did it faster then Oliver did and better. Nobody laffed. When Gimpy came back and Fanny told him he got sore at me for working on the mixer. But she said watch him and see how he does it. They were playing him for an April Fool joke and he foold them instead. Gimpy watched and I knew he was sore at me because he don't like when people don't do what he tells them just like Prof Nemur. But he saw how I worked the mixer and he skratched his head and said I see it but I don't believe it. Then he called Mr Donner and told me to work it again so Mr Donner could see it. I was scared he was going to be angry and holler at me so after I was finished I said can I go back to my own job now. I got to sweep out the front of the bakery behind the counter. Mr Donner looked at me funny for a long time. Then he said this must be some kind of April fools joke you guys are playing on me. Whats the catch. Gimpy said that's what I thought it was some kind of a gag. He limped all around the mashine and he said to Mr Donner I don't understand it either but Charlie knows how to handle it and I got to admit it he does a better job then Oliver. Everybody was crowded around and talking about it and I got scared because they all looked at me funny and they were exited. Frank said I told you there is something peculier lately about Charlie. And Joe Carp says yeah I know what you mean. Mr Donner sent everybody back to work and he took me out to the front of the store with him. He said Charlie I don't know how you done it but it looks like you finally learned something. I want you to be carefull and do the best you can do. You got yourself a new job with a 5 doller raise. I said I don't want a new job because I like to clean up and sweep and deliver and do things for my friends but Mr Donner said never mind your friends I need you for this job. I don't think much of a man who don't want to advance. |
| 345 |
I said whats advance mean. He scratched his head and looked at me over his glasses. Never mind that Charlie. From now on you work that mixer. that's advance. So now instead of delivering packiges and washing out the toilets and dumping the garbage. I'm the new mixer. that's advance. Tomorrow I will tell Miss Kinnian. I think she will be happy but I don't know why Frank and Joe are mad at me. I asked Fanny and she said never mind those fools. This is April Fools day and the joke backfired and made them the fools instead of you. I asked Joe to tell me what was the joke that backfired and he said go jump in the lake. I guess their mad at me because I worked the mashine but they didn't get the day off like they thought. Does that mean I'm getting smarter. April 3 Finished robinson crusoe. i want to find out more about what happens to him but Miss Kinnian says that's all there is. why. April 4 Miss Kinnian says I'm learning fast. She read some of my progress reports and she looked at me kind of funny. She says I'm a fine person and I'll show them all. I asked her why. She said never mind but I shouldn't feel bad if I find out that everybody isn't nice like I think. She said for a person who God gave so little to you did more than a lot of people with brains they never even used. I said that all my friends are smart people and their good. They like me and they never did anything that wasnt nice. Then she got something in her eye and she had to run out to the ladys room. While I was sitting in the teaching room waiting for her I was wondering about how Miss Kinnian was a nice lady like my mother use to be. I think I remember my mother told me to be good and always be friendly to people. She said but always be careful because some people don't understand and they might think you are trying to make trouble. That makes me remember when mom had to go away and they put me to stay in Mrs Leroys house who lived next door. Mom went to the hospital. Dad said she wasnt sick or nothing but she went to the hospital to bring me back a baby sister or a brother. (I still don't know how they do that) I told them I want a baby brother to play with and I don't know why they got me a sister instead but she was nice like a doll. Only she cryd all the time. I never hurt her or nothing. They put her in a crib in their room and once I heard Dad say don't worry Charlie wouldn't harm her. She was like a bundle all pink and screaming sometimes that I couldn't sleep. And when I went to sleep she woke me up in the nighttime. One time when they were in the kitchen and I was in my bed she was crying. I got up to pick her up and hold her to get quiet the way mom does. But then Mom came in yelling and took her away. And she slapped me so hard I fell on the bed. Then she startid screaming. don't you ever touch her again. you'll hurt her. she's a baby. You got no business touching her. I dint know it then but I guess I know it now that she thought I was going to hurt the baby because I was too dumb to know what I was doing. |
| 346 |
He picks up the bundle of paper bags and puts it on his shoulder. He is skinny but he is strong from many years of hard work "Charlie! Charlie!.. . fat head barley!" Children circle around him laughing and teasing him like little dogs snapping at his feet. Charlie smiles at them. He would like to put down his bundle and play games with them, but when he thinks about it the skin on his back twitches and he feels the way the older boys throw things at him. Coming back to the bakery he sees some boys standing in the door of a dark hallway. "Hey look, there's Charlie!" "Hey, Charlie. "What you got there? Want to shoot some craps?" "C'mere. We won't hurtya." But there is something about the doorway — the dark hall, the laughing, that makes his skin twitch again. He tries to know what it is but all he can remember is their dirt and piss all over his clothes, and Uncle Herman shouting when he came home all covered with filth, and how Uncle Herman ran out with a hammer in his hand to find the boys who did that to him. Charlie backs away from the boys laughing in the hallway, drops the bundle. Picks it up again and runs the rest of the way to the bakery. "What took you so long, Charlie?" shouts Gimpy from the doorway to the back of the bakery. Charlie pushes through the swinging doors to the back of the bakery and sets down the bundle on one of the skids. He leans against the wall shoving his hands into his pockets. He wishes he had his spinner. He likes it back here in the bakery where the floors are white with flour — whiter than the sooty walls and ceiling. The thick soles of his own high shoes are crusted with white and there is white in the stitching and lace-eyes, and under his nails and in the cracked chapped skin of his hands. He relaxes here — squatting against the wall — leaning back in a way that tilts his baseball cap with the D forward over his eyes. He likes the smell of flour, sweet dough, bread and cakes and rolls baking. The oven is crackling and makes him sleepy. Sweet... warm... sleep Suddenly, falling, twisting, head hitting against the wall. Someone has kicked his legs out from under him. That's all I can remember. I can see it all clearly, but I don't know why it happened. It's like when I used to go to the movies. The first time I never understood because they went too fast but after I saw the picture three or four times I used to understand what they were saying. I've got to ask Dr. Strauss about it. April 14 Dr. Strauss says the important thing is to keep recalling memories like the one I had yesterday and to write them down. Then when I come into his office we can talk about them. Dr. Strauss is a psychiatrist and a neurosurgeon. I didn't know that. I thought he was just a plain doctor. But when I went to his office this morning, he told me about how important it is for me to learn about myself so that I can understand my problems. I said I didn't have any problems. He laughed and then he got up from his chair and went to the window. |
| 347 |
At times I run forward and then I float around and run backwards, but I'm afraid because I'm hiding something in my pocket. I don't know what it is or where I got it, but I know they want to take it away from me and that frightens me. The wall breaks down and suddenly there is a red-haired girl with her arms outstretched to me — her face is a blank mask. She takes me into her arms, kisses and caresses me, and I want to hold her tightly but I'm afraid. The more she touches me, the more frightened I become because I know I must never touch a girl. Then, as her body rubs up against mine, I feel a strange bubbling and throbbing inside me that makes me warm. But when I look up I see a bloody knife in her hands. I try to scream as I run, but no sound comes out of my throat, and my pockets are empty. I search in my pockets but I don't know what it is I've lost or why I was hiding it. I know only that it's gone, and there is blood on my hands too. When I woke up, I thought of Alice, and I had the same feeling of panic as in the dream. What am I afraid of? Something about the knife. I made myself a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette. I'd never had a dream like it before, and I knew it was connected with my evening with Alice. I have begun to think of her in a different way. Free association is still difficult, because it's hard not to control the direction of your thoughts... just to leave your mind open and let anything flow into it... ideas bubbling to the surface like a bubble bath... a woman bathing... a girl... Norma taking a bath... I am watching through the keyhole... and when she gets out of the tub to dry herself I see that her body is different from mine. Something is missing. Running down the hallway... somebody chasing me... not a person... just a big flashing kitchen knife... and I'm scared and crying but no voice comes out because my neck is cut and I'm bleeding... "Mama, Charlie is peeking at me through the keyhole..." Why is she different? What happened to her?... blood... bleeding... a dark cubbyhole... Three blind mice... three blind mice, See how they run! See how they run! They all run after the farmer s wife, She cut off their tails with. a carving knife, Did you ever see such a sight in your life, As three... blind... mice? Charlie, alone in the kitchen early in the morning. Everyone else asleep, and he amuses himself playing with his spinner. One of the buttons pops off his shirt as he bends over, and it rolls across the intricate line-pattern of the kitchen linoleum. It rolls towards the bathroom and he follows, but then he loses it. Where is the button? He goes into the bathroom to find it. There is a closet in the bathroom where the clothes hamper is, and he likes to take out all the clothes and look at them. His father's things and his mother's... and Norma's dresses. He would like to try them on and make believe he is Norma, but once when he did that his mother spanked him for it. There in the clothes hamper he finds Norma's underwear with dried blood. |
| 348 |
What had she done wrong? He was terrified. Whoever had done it might come looking for him... Why does a memory like that from childhood remain with me so strongly, and why does it frighten me now? Is it because of my feelings for Alice? Thinking about it now, I can understand why I was taught to keep away from women. It was wrong for me to express my feelings to Alice. I have no right to think of a woman that way — not yet. But even as I write these words, something inside shouts that there is more. I'm a person. I was somebody before I went under the surgeon's knife. And I have to love someone. May 8 Even now that I have learned what has been going on behind Mr. Donner's back, I find it hard to believe. I first noticed something was wrong during the rush hour two days ago. Gimpy was behind the counter wrapping a birthday cake for one of our regular customers — a cake that sells for $3.95. But when Gimpy rang up the sale the register showed only $2.95. I started to tell him he had made a mistake, but in the mirror behind the counter I saw a wink and smile that passed from the customer to Gimpy and the answering smile on Gimpy's face. And when the man took his change, I saw the flash of a large silver coin left behind in Gimpy's hand, before his fingers closed on it, and the quick movement with which he slipped the half-dollar into his pocket. "Charlie," said a woman behind me, "are there any more of those cream-filled eclairs?" "I'll go back and find out." I was glad of the interruption because it gave me time to think about what I had seen. Certainly, Gimpy had not made a mistake. He had deliberately undercharged the customer, and there had been an understanding between them. I leaned limply against the wall not knowing what to do. Gimpy had worked for Mr. Donner for over fifteen years. Donner — who always treated his workers like close friends, like relatives — had invited Gimpy's family to his house for dinner more than once. He often put Gimpy in charge of the shop when he had to go out, and I had heard stories of the times Donner gave Gimpy money to pay his wife's hospital bills. It was incredible that anyone would steal from such a man. There had to be some other explanation. Gimpy had really made a mistake in ringing up the sale, and the half-dollar was a tip. Or perhaps Mr. Donner had made some special arrangement for this one customer who regularly bought cream cakes. Anything rather than believe that Gimpy was stealing. Gimpy had always been so nice to me. I no longer wanted to know. I kept my eyes averted from the register as I brought out the tray of eclairs and sorted out the cookies, buns, and cakes. But when the little red-haired woman came in — the one who always pinched my cheek and joked about finding a girl friend for me — I recalled that she came in most often when Donner was out to lunch and Gimpy was behind the counter. Gimpy had often sent me out to deliver orders to her house. Involuntarily, my mind totaled her purchases to $4.53. |
| 349 |
Perhaps I ought to have told Donner the whole story and had Gimpy fired — I don't know. Doing it this way has something to be said for it. It's over and done with. But how many people are there like Gimpy who use other people that way? May 15 My studies are going well. The university library is my second home now. They've had to get me a private room because it takes me only a second to absorb the printed page, and curious students invariably gather around me as I flip through my books. My most absorbing interests at the present time are etymologies of ancient languages, the newer works on the calculus of variations, and Hindu history. It's amazing the way things, apparently disconnected, hang together. I've moved up to another plateau, and now the streams of the various disciplines seem to be closer to each other as if they flow from a single source. Strange how when I'm in the college cafeteria and hear the students arguing about history or politics or religion, it all seems so childish. I find no pleasure in discussing ideas any more on such an elementary level. People resent being shown that they don't approach the complexities of the problem — they don't know what exists beyond the surface ripples. It's just as bad on a higher level, and I've given up any attempt to discuss these things with the professors at Beekman. Burt introduced me to an economics professor at the faculty cafeteria, one well known for his work on the economic factors affecting interest rates. I had long wanted to talk to an economist about some of the ideas I had come across in my reading. The moral aspects of the military blockade as a weapon in times of peace had been bothering me. I asked him what he thought of the suggestion by some senators that we begin using such tactics as "blacklisting" and reinforcement of the navicert controls that had been used in World Wars I and II, against some of the smaller nations which now oppose us. He listened quietly, staring off into space, and I assumed he was collecting his thoughts for an answer, but a few minutes later he cleared his throat and shook his head. That, he explained apologetically, was outside his area of specialization. His interest was in interest rates, and he hadn't given military economics much thought. He suggested I see Dr. Wessey, who once did a paper on War Trade Agreements during "World War II. He might be able to help me. Before I could say anything else, he grabbed my hand and shook it. He had been glad to meet me, but there were some notes he had to assemble for a lecture. And then he was gone. The same thing happened when I tried to discuss Chaucer with an American literature specialist, questioned an Orientalist about the Trobriand Islanders, and tried to focus on the problems of automation-caused unemployment with a social psychologist who specialized in public opinion polls on adolescent behavior. They would always find excuses to slip away, afraid to reveal the narrowness of their knowledge. How different they seem to be now. |
| 350 |
I followed his suggestion that I learn to type, and now that I can type nearly seventy-five words a minute, it's easier to get it all down on paper. Strauss again brought up my need to speak and write simply and directly so that people will understand me. He reminds me that language is sometimes a barrier instead of a pathway. Ironic to find myself on the other side of the intellectual fence. I see Alice occasionally, but we don't discuss what happened. Our relationship remains platonic. But for three nights after I left the bakery there were the nightmares. Hard to believe it was two weeks ago. I am pursued down the empty streets at night by ghostly figures. Though I always run to the bakery, the door is locked, and the people inside never turn to look at me. Through the window, the bride and groom on the wedding cake point at me and laugh — the air becomes charged with laughter until I can't stand it — and the two cupids wave their flaming arrows. I scream. I pound on the door, but there is no sound. I see Charlie staring back at me from inside. Is it only a reflection? Things clutch at my legs and drag me away from the bakery down into the shadows of the alleyway, and just as they begin to ooze all over me I wake up. Other times the window of the bakery opens into the past and looking through it I see other things and other people. It's astonishing how my power of recall is developing. I cannot control it completely yet, but sometimes when I'm busy reading or working on a problem, I get a feeling of intense clarity. I know it's some kind of subconscious warning signal, and now instead of waiting for the memory to come to me, I close my eyes and reach out for it. Eventually, I'll be able to bring this recall completely under control, to explore not only the sum of my past experiences, but also all of the untapped faculties of the mind. Even now, as I think about it, I feel the sharp stillness. I see the bakery window... reach out and touch it... cold and vibrating, and then the glass becomes warm... hotter... fingers burning. The window reflecting my image becomes bright, and as the glass turns into a mirror, I see little Charlie Gordon — fourteen or fifteen — looking out at me through the window of his house, and it's doubly strange to realize how different he was... He has been waiting for his sister to come from school, and when he sees her turn the corner onto Marks Street, he waves and calls her name and runs out onto the porch to meet her. Norma waves a paper. "I got an A in my history test. I knew all the answers. Mrs. Baffin said it was the best paper in the whole class." She is a pretty girl with light brown hair carefully braided and coiled about her head in a crown, and as she looks up at her big brother the smile turns to a frown and she skips away, leaving him behind as she darts up the steps into the house. Smiling, he follows her. His mother and father are in the kitchen, and Charlie, bursting with the excitement of Norma's good news, blurts it out before she has a chance. |
| 351 |
All the way back we were silent. Am I a genius? I don't think so. Not yet anyway. As Burt would put it, mocking the euphemisms of educational jargon, I'm exceptional — a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of gifted and deprived (which used to mean bright and retarded) and as soon as exceptional begins to mean anything to anyone they'll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn't mean anything to anybody. Exceptional refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I've been exceptional. Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything — all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it. Is there time? Burt is annoyed with me. He finds me impatient and the others must feel the same. But they hold me back and try to keep me in my place. What is my place? Who and what am I now? Am I the sum of my life or only of the past months? Oh, how impatient they get when I try to discuss it with them. They don't like to admit that they don't know. It's paradoxical that an ordinary man like Nemur presumes to devote himself to making other people geniuses. He would like to be thought of as the discoverer of new laws of learning — the Einstein of psychology. And he has the teacher's fear of being surpassed by the student, the master's dread of having the disciple discredit his work. (Not that I am in any real sense Nemur's student or disciple as Burt is.) I guess Nemur's fear of being revealed as a man walking on stilts among giants is understandable. Failure at this point would destroy him. He is too old to start all over again. As shocking as it is to discover the truth about men I had respected and looked up to, I guess Burt is right. I must not be too impatient with them. Their ideas and brilliant work made the experiment possible. I've got to guard against the natural tendency to look down on them now that I have surpassed them. I've got to realize that when they continually admonish me to speak and write simply so that people who read these reports will be able to understand me, they are talking about themselves as well. But still it's frightening to realize that my fate is in the hands of men who are not the giants I once thought them to be, men who don't know all the answers. June 13 I'm dictating this under great emotional strain. I've walked out on the whole thing. I'm on a plane headed back to New York alone, and I have no idea what I'm going to do when I get there. At first, I admit, I was in awe at the picture of an international convention of scientists and scholars, gathered for an exchange of ideas. Here, I thought, was where it all really happened. Here it would be different from the sterile college discussions, because these were the men on the highest levels of psychological research and education, the scientists who wrote the books and delivered the lectures, the authorities people quoted. |
| 352 |
If Nemur and Strauss were ordinary men working beyond their abilities, I felt sure it would be different with the others. When it was time for the meeting, Nemur steered us through the gigantic lobby with its heavy baroque furnishings and huge curving marble staircases, and we moved through the thickening knots of handshakers, nodders, and smilers. Two other professors from Beekman who had arrived in Chicago just this morning joined us. Professors "White and Clinger walked a little to the right and a step or two behind Nemur and Strauss, while Burt and I brought up the rear. Standees parted to make a path for us into the Grand Ballroom, and Nemur waved to the reporters and photographers who had come to hear at first hand about the startling things that had been done with a retardate adult in just a little over three months. Nemur had obviously sent out advance publicity releases. Some of the psychological papers delivered at the meeting were impressive. A group from Alaska showed how stimulation of various portions of the brain caused a significant development in learning ability, and a group from New Zealand had mapped out those portions of the brain that controlled perception and retention of stimuli. But there were other kinds of papers too — P. T. Zeller-man's study on the difference in the length of time it took white rats to learn a maze when the corners were curved rather than angular, or Worfels paper on the effect of intelligence level on the reaction-time of rhesus monkeys. Papers like these made me angry. Money, time, and energy squandered on the detailed analysis of the trivial. Burt was right when he praised Nemur and Strauss for devoting themselves to something important and uncertain rather than to something insignificant and safe. If only Nemur would look at me as a human being. After the chairman announced the presentation from Beekman University, we took our seats on the platform behind the long table — Algernon in his cage between Burt and me. We were the main attraction of the evening, and when we were settled, the chairman began his introduction. I half expected to hear him boom out: Laideezzz and gentulmennnnnn. Step right this way and see the side show! An act never before seen in the scientific world! A mouse and a moron turned into geniuses before your very eyes! I admit I had come here with a chip on my shoulder. All he said was: "The next presentation really needs no introduction. "We have all heard about the startling work being done at Beekman University, sponsored by the Wel-berg Foundation grants, under the direction of the chairman of the psychology department, Professor Nemur, in co-operation with Dr. Strauss of the Beekman Neuropsy-chiatric Center. Needless to say, this is a report we have all been looking forward to with great interest. I turn the meeting over to Professor Nemur and Dr. Strauss." Nemur nodded graciously at the chairman's introductory praise and winked at Strauss in the triumph of the moment. The first speaker from Beekman was Professor Clinger. |
| 353 |
I suspected the reason, and I was annoyed, but that was nothing to the anger I felt when they brought out the films. I had never known that my early performances and tests in the laboratory were filmed. There I was, at the table beside Burt, confused and open-mouthed as I tried to run the maze with the electric stylus. Each time I received a shock, my expression changed to an absurd wide-eyed stare, and then that foolish smile again. Each time it happened the audience roared. Race after race, it was repeated, and each time they found it funnier than before. I told myself they were not gawking curiosity seekers, but scientists here in search of knowledge. They couldn't help finding these pictures funny — but still, as Burt caught the spirit and made amusing comments on the films, I was overcome with a sense of mischief. It would be even funnier to see Algernon escape from his cage, and to see all these people scattering and crawling around on their hands and knees trying to retrieve a small, white, scurrying genius. But I controlled myself, and by the time Strauss took the podium the impulse had passed. Strauss dealt largely with the theory and techniques of neurosurgery, describing in detail how pioneer studies on the mapping of hormone control centers enabled him to isolate and stimulate these centers while at the same time removing the hormone-inhibitor producing portion of the cortex. He explained the enzyme-block theory and went on to describe my physical condition before and after surgery. Photographs (I didn't know they had been taken) were passed around and commented on, and I could see by the nods and smiles that most people there agreed with him that the "dull, vacuous facial expression" had been transformed into an "alert, intelligent appearance." He also discussed in detail the pertinent aspects of our therapy sessions — especially my changing attitudes toward free association on the couch. I had come there as part of a scientific presentation, and I had expected to be put on exhibition, but everyone kept talking about me as if I were some kind of newly created thing they were presenting to the scientific world. No one in this room considered me an individual — a human being. The constant juxtaposition of "Algernon and Charlie," and "Charlie and Algernon," made it clear that they thought of both of us as a couple of experimental animals who had no existence outside the laboratory. But, aside from my anger, I couldn't get it out of my mind that something was wrong. Finally, it was Nemur's turn to speak — to sum it all up as the head of the project — to take the spotlight as the author of a brilliant experiment. This was the day he had been waiting for. He was impressive as he stood up there on the platform, and, as he spoke, I found myself nodding with him, agreeing with things I knew to be true. The testing, the experiment, the surgery, and my subsequent mental development were described at length, and his talk was enlivened by quotations from my progress reports. |
| 354 |
More than once I found myself hearing something personal or foolish read to this audience. Thank God I had been careful to keep most of the details about Alice and myself in my private file. Then, at one point in his summary, he said it: "We who have worked on this project at Beekman University have the satisfaction of knowing we have taken one of nature's mistakes and by our new techniques created a superior human being. When Charlie came to us he was outside of society, alone in a great city without friends or relatives to care about him, without the mental equipment to live a normal life. No past, no contact with the present, no hope for the future. It might be said that Charlie Gordon did not really exist before this experiment..." I don't know why I resented it so intensely to have them think of me as something newly minted in their private treasury, but it was — I am certain — echoes of that idea that had been sounding in the chambers of my mind from the time we had arrived in Chicago. I wanted to get up and show everyone what a fool he was, to shout at him: I'm a human being, a person — with parents and memories and a history — and I was before you ever wheeled me into that operating room! At the same time deep in the heat of my anger there was forged an overwhelming insight into the thing that had disturbed me when Strauss spoke and again when Nemur amplified his data. They had made a mistake — of course! The statistical evaluation of the waiting period necessary to prove the permanence of the change had been based on earlier experiments in the field of mental development and learning, on waiting periods with normally dull or normally intelligent animals. But it was obvious that the waiting period would have to be extended in those cases where an animals intelligence had been increased two or three times. Nemur's conclusions had been premature. For both Algernon and myself, it would take more time to see if this change would stick The professors had made a mistake, and no one else had caught it. I wanted to jump up and tell them, but I couldn't move. Like Algernon, I found myself behind the mesh of the cage they had built around me. Now there would be a question period, and before I would be allowed to have my dinner, I would be required to perform before this distinguished gathering. No. I had to get out of there. "... In one sense, he was the result of modern psychological experimentation. In place of a feeble-minded shell, a burden on the society that must fear his irresponsible behavior, we have a man of dignity and sensitivity, ready to take his place as a contributing member of society. I should like you all to hear a few words from Charlie Gordon..." God damn him. He didn't know what he was talking about. At that point, the compulsion overwhelmed me. I watched in fascination as my hand moved, independent of my will, to pull down the latch of Algernon's cage. As I opened it he looked up at me and paused. Then he turned, darted out of his cage, and scampered across the long table. |
| 355 |
"What was he waiting for? "You okay now?" I told her I was fine. She grabbed the blanket I was wrapped in, and pulled me back into bed. Before I could stop her she slipped her arms around me and kissed me. "I was scared last night, Charlie. I thought you flipped. I've heard about guys who are impotent, how it suddenly gets them and they become maniacs." "How come you stayed?" She shrugged. "Well, you were like a scared little kid. I was sure you wouldn't hurt me, but I thought you might hurt yourself. So I figured I'd hang around. I felt so sorry. Anyway, I kept this handy, just in case..." She pulled out a heavy book end she had wedged between the bed and the wall. "I guess you didn't have to use it." She shook her head. "Boy, you must have liked peanuts when you were a kid." She got out of bed and started to dress. I lay there for a while watching her. She moved in front of me with no shyness or inhibition. Her breasts were full as she had painted them in that self-portrait. I longed to reach out for her, but I knew it was futile. In spite of the operation Charlie was still with me. And Charlie was afraid of losing his peanuts. June 24 Today I went on a strange kind of anti-intellectual binge. If I had dared to, I would have gotten drunk, but after the experience with Fay, I knew it would be dangerous. So, instead, I went to Times Square, from movie house to movie house, immersing myself in westerns and horror movies — the way I used to. Each time, sitting through the picture, I would find myself whipped with guilt. I'd walk out in the middle of the picture and wander into another one. I told myself I was looking for something in the make-believe screen world that was missing from my new life. Then, in a sudden intuition, right outside the Keno Amusement Center, I knew it wasn't the movies I wanted, but the audiences. I wanted to be with the people around me in the darkness. The walls between people are thin here, and if I listen quietly, I hear what is going on. Greenwich Village is like that too. Not just being close — because I don't feel it in a. crowded elevator or on the subway during the rush — but on a hot night when everyone is out walking, or sitting in the theater, there is a rustling, and for a moment I brush against someone and sense the connection between the branch and trunk and the deep root. At such moments my flesh is thin and tight, and the unbearable hunger to be part of it drives me out to search in the dark corners and blind alleys of the night. Usually, when I'm exhausted from walking, I go back to the apartment and drop off into a deep sleep, but tonight instead of going up to my own place I went to the diner. There was a new dishwasher, a boy of about sixteen, and there was something familiar about him, his movements, the look in his eyes. And then, clearing away the table behind me, he dropped some dishes. They crashed to the floor, shattering and sending bits of white china under the tables. He stood there, dazed and frightened, holding the empty tray in his hand. |
| 356 |
"I mean this poor bitch must have needed the money pretty badly to do it. I'm not going to ruin her life over a few hundred bucks. I'm not rich or anything, but I'm not going after her skin — if you know what I mean." I knew what she meant. I have never met anyone as open and trusting as Fay is. She's what I need most of all right now. I've been starved for simple human contact. July 8 Not much time for work — between the nightly club-hopping and the morning hangovers. It was only with aspirin and something Fay concocted for me that I was able to finish my linguistic analysis of Urdu verb forms and send the paper to the International Linguistics Bulletin. It will send the linguists back to India with their tape recorders, because it undermines the critical superstructure of their methodology. I can't help but admire the structural linguists who have carved out for themselves a linguistic discipline based on the deterioration of written communication. Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less — filling volumes and libraries with the subtle linguistic analysis of the grunt. Nothing wrong with that, but it should not be used as an excuse to destroy the stability of language. Alice called today to find out when I am coming back to work at the lab. I told her I wanted to finish the projects I had started, and that I was hoping to get permission from the Welberg Foundation for my own special study. She's right though — I've got to take time into consideration. Fay still wants to go out dancing all the time. Last night started out with us drinking and dancing at the "White Horse Club, and from there to Benny's Hideaway, and then on to the Pink Slipper... and after that I don't remember many of the places, but we danced until I was ready to drop. My tolerance for liquor must have increased because I was pretty far gone before Charlie made his appearance. I can only recall him doing a silly tap dance on the stage of the Allakazam Club. He got a great hand before the manager threw us out, and Fay said everyone thought I was a wonderful comedian and everyone liked my moron act. "What the hell happened then? I know I strained my back. I thought it was from all the dancing, but Fay says I fell off the goddamned couch. Algernon's behavior is becoming erratic again. Minnie seems to be afraid of him. July 9 A terrible thing happened today. Algernon bit Fay. I had warned her against playing with him, but she always liked to feed him. Usually when she came into his room, he'd perk up and run to her. Today it was different. He was at the far side, curled up into a white puff. When she put her hand in through the top trap door, he cringed and forced himself back into the corner. She tried to coax him, by opening the barrier to the maze, and before I could tell her to leave him alone, she made the mistake of trying to pick him up. He bit her thumb. Then he glared at both of us and scurried back into the maze. We found Minnie at the other end in the reward box. |
| 357 |
"And ironic as hell. When you talk about him that way, I hate him for coming between us. Do you think he'll ever let you... let us..." "I don't know. I hope so." I left her at the door. "We shook hands, and yet, strangely, it was much closer and more intimate than an embrace would have been. I went home and made love to Fay, but kept thinking of Alice. July 27 Working around the clock. Over Fay's protests, I've had a cot moved into the lab. She's become too possessive and resentful of my work. I think she could tolerate another woman, but not this complete absorption in something she can't follow. I was afraid it would come to this, but I have no patience with her now. I'm jealous of every moment away from the work — impatient with anyone who tries to steal my time. Though most of my writing time is spent on notes which I keep in a separate folder, from time to time I have to put down my moods and thoughts out of sheer habit. The calculus of intelligence is a fascinating study. In a sense this is the problem I've been concerned with all my life. Here is the place for the application of all the knowledge I have acquired. Time assumes another dimension now — work and absorption in the search for an answer. The world around me and my past seem far away and distorted, as if time and space were taffy being stretched and looped and twisted out of shape. The only real things are the cages and the mice and the lab equipment here on the fourth floor of the main building. There is no night or day. I've got to cram a lifetime of research into a few weeks. I know I should rest, but I can't until I know the truth about what is happening. Alice is a great help to me now. She brings me sandwiches and coffee, but she makes no demands. About my perception: everything is sharp and clear, each sensation heightened and illuminated so that reds and yellows and blues glow. Sleeping here has a strange effect. The odors of the laboratory animals, dogs, monkeys, mice, spin me back into memories, and it is difficult to know whether I am experiencing a new sensation or recalling the past. It is impossible to tell what proportion is memory and what exists here and now — so that a strange compound is formed of memory and reality; past and present; response to stimuli stored in my brain centers, and response to stimuli in this room. It's as if all the things I've learned have fused into a crystal universe spinning before me so that I can see all the facets of it reflected in gorgeous bursts of light... A monkey sitting in the center of his cage, staring at me out of sleepy eyes, rubbing his cheeks with little old-man shriveled hands... chee... cheee... cheeeee.. . and bouncing off the cage wire, up to the swing overhead where the other monkey sits staring dumbly into space. Urinating, defecating, passing wind, staring at me and laughing... cheeee... cheeeee... cheeeee.. .. And bouncing around, leap, hop, up around and down, he swings and tries to grab the other monkey's tail, but the one on the bar keeps swishing it away, without fuss, out of his grasp. |
| 358 |
Nice monkey... pretty monkey... with big eyes and swishy tail. Can I feed him a peanut?... No, the man'll holler. That sign says do not feed the animals. That's a chimpanzee. Can I pet him? No. I want to pet the chip-a-zee. Never mind, come and look at the elephants. Outside, crowds of bright sunshiny people are dressed in spring. Algernon lies in his own dirt, unmoving, and the odors are stronger than ever before. And what about me? July 28 Fay has a new boy friend. I went home last night to be with her. I went to my room first to get a bottle and then headed over on the fire escape. But fortunately I looked before going in. They were together on the couch. Strange, I don't really care. It's almost a relief. I went back to the lab to work with Algernon. He has moments out of his lethargy. Periodically, he will run a shifting maze, but when he fails and finds himself in a dead-end, he reacts violently. When I got down to the lab, I looked in. He was alert and came up to me as if he knew me. He was eager to work, and when I set him down through the trap door in the wire mesh of the maze, he moved swiftly along the pathways to the reward box. Twice he ran the maze successfully. The third time, he got halfway through, paused at an intersection, and then with a twitching movement took the wrong turn. I could see what was going to happen, and I wanted to reach down and take him out before he ended up in a blind alley. But I restrained myself and watched. When he found himself moving along the unfamiliar path, he slowed down, and his actions became erratic: start, pause, double back, turn around and then forward again, until finally he was in the cul-de-sac that informed him with a mild shock that he had made a mistake. At this point, instead of turning back to find an alternate route, he began to move in circles, squeaking like a phonograph needle scratched across the grooves. He threw himself against the walls of the maze, again and again, leaping up, twisting over backwards and falling, and throwing himself again. Twice he caught his claws in the overhead wire mesh, screeching wildly, letting go, and trying hopelessly again. Then he stopped and curled himself up into a small, tight ball. "When I picked him up, he made no attempt to uncurl, but remained in that state much like a catatonic stupor. When I moved his head or limbs, they stayed like wax. I put him back into his cage and watched him until the stupor wore off and he began to move around normally. "What eludes me is the reason for his regression — is it a special case? An isolated reaction? Or is there some general principle of failure basic to the whole procedure? I've got to work out the rule. If I can find that out, and if it adds even one jot of information to whatever else has been discovered about mental retardation and the possibility of helping others like myself, I will be satisfied. Whatever happens to me, I will have lived a thousand normal lives by what I might add to others not yet born. |
| 359 |
That's enough. July 31 I'm on the edge of it. I sense it. They all think I'm killing myself at this pace, but what they don't understand is that I'm living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed. Every part of me is attuned to the work. I soak it up into my pores during the day, and at night — in the moments before I pass off into sleep — ideas explode into my head like fireworks. There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem. Incredible that anything could happen to take away this bubbling energy, the zest that fills everything I do. It's as if all the knowledge I've soaked in during the past months has coalesced and lifted me to a peak of light and understanding. This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy. And now that I've found it, how can I give it up? Life and work are the most wonderful things a man can have. I am in love with what I am doing, because the answer to this problem is right here in my mind, and soon — very soon — it will burst into consciousness. Let me solve this one problem. I pray God it is the answer I want, but if not I will accept any answer at all and try to be grateful for what I had. Fay's new boy friend is a dance instructor from the Stardust Ballroom. I can't really blame her since I have so little time to be with her. August 11 Blind alley for the past two days. Nothing. I've taken a wrong turn somewhere, because I get answers to a lot of questions, but not to the most important question of all: How does Algernon's regression affect the basic hypothesis of the experiment? Fortunately, I know enough about the processes of the mind not to let this block worry me too much. Instead of panicking and giving up (or what's even worse, pushing hard for answers that won't come) I've got to take my mind off the problem for a while and let it stew. I've gone as far as I can on a conscious level, and now it's up to those mysterious operations below the level of awareness. It's one of those inexplicable things, how everything I've learned and experienced is brought to bear on the problem. Pushing too hard will only make things freeze up. How many great problems have gone unsolved because men didn't know enough, or have enough faith in the creative process and in themselves, to let go for the whole mind to work at it? So I decided yesterday afternoon to put the work aside for a while and go to Mrs. Nemur's cocktail party. It was in honor of the two men on the board of the Welberg Foundation who had been instrumental in getting her husband the grant. I planned to take Fay, but she said she had a date and she'd rather go dancing. I started out the evening with every intention of being pleasant and making friends. But these days I have trouble getting through to people. I don't know if it's me or them, but any attempt at conversation usually fades away in a minute or two, and the barriers go up. Is it because they are afraid of me? Or is it that deep down they don't care and I feel the same about them? |
| 360 |
He had come to believe in the myth of his own authority, and after all I am an outsider. I don't really care any more what he thinks, or what any of them think for that matter. There isn't time. The work is done, the data is in, and all that remains is to see whether I have accurately projected the curve on the Algernon figures as a prediction of what will happen to me. Alice cried when I told her the news. Then she ran out. I've got to impress on her that there is no reason for her to feel guilty about this. September 2 Nothing definite yet. I move in a silence of clear white light. Everything around me is waiting. I dream of being alone on the top of a mountain, surveying the land around me, greens and yellows — and the sun directly above, pressing my shadow into a tight ball around my legs. As the sun drops into the afternoon sky, the shadow undrapes itself and stretches out toward the horizon, long and thin, and far behind me... I want to say here again what I've said already to Dr. Strauss. No one is in any way to blame for what has happened. This experiment was carefully prepared, extensively tested on animals, and statistically validated. When they decided to use me as the first human test, they were reasonably certain that there was no physical danger involved. There was no way to foresee the psychological pitfalls. I don't want anyone to suffer because of what happens to me. The only question now is: How much can I hang on to? September 15 Nemur says my results have been confirmed. It means that the flaw is central and brings the entire hypothesis into question. Someday there might be a way to overcome this problem, but that time is not yet. I have recommended that no further tests be made on human beings until these things are clarified by additional research on animals. It is my own feeling that the most successful line of research will be that taken by the men studying enzyme imbalances. As with so many other things, time is the key factor — speed in discovering the deficiency, and speed in administering hormonal substitutes. I would like to help in that area of research, and in the search for radioisotopes that may be used in local cortical control, but I know now that I won't have the time. September 17 Becoming absent minded. Put things away on my desk or in the drawers of the lab tables, and when I can't find them I lose my temper and flare up at everyone. First signs? Algernon died two days ago. I found him at four thirty in the morning when I came back to the lab after wandering around down at the waterfront — on his side, stretched out in the corner of his cage. As if he were running in his sleep. Dissection shows that my predictions were right. Compared to the normal brain, Algernon's had decreased in weight and there was a general smoothing out of the cerebral convolutions as well as a deepening and broadening of brain fissures. It's frightening to think that the same thing might be happening to me right now. Seeing it happen to Algernon makes it real. |
| 361 |
For the first time, I'm afraid of the future. I put Algernon's body into a small metal container and took him home with me. I wasn't going to let them dump him into the incinerator. It's foolish and sentimental, but late last night I buried him in the back yard. I wept as I put a bunch of wild flowers on the grave. September 21 I'm going to Marks Street to visit my mother tomorrow. A dream last night triggered off a sequence of memories, lit up a whole slice of the past and the important thing is to get it down on paper quickly before I forget it because I seem to forget things sooner now. It has to do with my mother, and now — more than ever — I want to understand her, to know what she was like and why she acted the way she did. I mustn't hate her. I've got to come to terms with her before I see her so that I won't act harshly or foolishly. September 27 I should have written this down right away, because it's important to make this record complete. I went to see Rose three days ago. Finally, I forced myself to borrow Burt's car again. I was afraid, and yet I knew I had to go. At first when I got to Marks Street I thought I had made a mistake. It wasn't the way I remembered it at all. It was a filthy street. Vacant lots where many of the houses had been torn down. On the sidewalk, a discarded refrigerator with its face ripped off, and on the curb an old mattress with wire intestines hanging out of its belly. Some houses had boarded up windows, and others looked more like patched-up shanties than homes. I parked the car a block away from the house and walked. There were no children playing on Marks Street — not at all like the mental picture I had brought with me of children everywhere, and Charlie watching them through the front window (strange that most of my memories of the street are framed by the window, with me always inside watching the children play). Now there were only old people standing in the shade of tired porches. As I approached the house, I had a second shock. My mother was on the front stoop, in an old brown sweater, washing the ground floor windows from the outside even though it was cold and windy. Always working to show the neighbors what a good wife and mother she was. The most important thing had always been what other people thought — appearances before herself or her family. And righteous about it. Time and again Matt had insisted that what others thought about you wasn't the only thing in life. But it did no good. Norma had to dress well; the house had to have fine furniture; Charlie had to be kept inside so that other people wouldn't know any-thing was wrong. At the gate, I paused to watch as she straightened up to catch her breath. Seeing her face made me tremble, but it was not the face I had struggled so hard to recall. Her hair had become white and streaked with iron, and the flesh of her thin cheeks was wrinkled. Perspiration made her forehead glisten. She caught sight of me and stared back. I wanted to look away, to turn back down the street, but I couldn't — not after having come so far. |
| 362 |
Once you're in Warren I'll do my best to forget you. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But until you go, there's no reason for either of us to be alone." Before I could say anything, she kissed me. I waited, as she sat beside me on the couch, resting her head against my chest, but the panic didn't come. Alice was a woman, but perhaps now Charlie would understand that she wasn't his mother or his sister. With the relief of knowing I had passed through a crisis, I sighed because there was nothing to hold me back It was no time for fear or pretense, because it could never be this way with anyone else. All the barriers were gone. I had unwound the string she had given me, and found my way out of the labyrinth to where she was waiting. I loved her with more than my body. I don't pretend to understand the mystery of love, but this time it was more than sex, more than using a woman's body. It was being lifted off the earth, outside fear and torment, being part of something greater than myself. I was lifted out of the dark cell of my own mind, to become part of someone else — just as I had experienced it that day on the couch in therapy. It was the first step outward to the universe — beyond the universe — because in it and with it we merged to recreate and perpetuate the human spirit. Expanding and bursting outward, and contracting and forming inward, it was the rhythm of being — of breathing, of heartbeat, of day and night — and the rhythm of our bodies set off an echo in my mind. It was the way it had been back there in that strange vision. The gray murk lifted from my mind, and through it the light pierced into my brain (how strange that light should blind!), and my body was absorbed back into a great sea of space, washed under in a strange baptism. My body shuddered with giving, and her body shuddered its acceptance. This was the way we loved, until the night became a silent day. And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other's arms, giving and taking. The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other — child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway toward the goal-box of solitary death. But this was the counterweight, the act of binding and holding. As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other's hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing. And in the moment before I fell off into sleep, I remembered the way it had been between Fay and myself, and I smiled. No wonder that had been easy. It had been only physical. This with Alice was a mystery. I leaned over and kissed her eyes. Alice knows everything about me now, and accepts the fact that we can be together for only a short while. She has agreed to go away when I tell her to go. |
| 363 |
It's painful to think about that, but what we have, I suspect, is more than most people find in a lifetime. October 14 I wake up in the morning and don't know where I am or what I'm doing here, and then I see her beside me and I remember. She senses when something is happening to me, and she moves quietly around the apartment, making breakfast, cleaning up the place, or going out and leaving me to myself, without any questions. We went to a concert this evening, but I got bored and we left in the middle. Can't seem to pay much attention any more. I went because I know I used to like Stravinsky but somehow I no longer have the patience for it. The only bad thing about having Alice here with me is that now I feel I should fight this thing. I want to stop time, freeze myself at this level and never let go of her. October 17 Why can't I remember? I've got to try to resist this slackness. Alice tells me I lie in bed for days and don't seem to know who or where I am. Then it all comes back and I recognize her and remember what's happening. Fugues of amnesia. Symptoms of second childhood — what do they call it? — senility? I can watch it coming on. All so cruelly logical, the result of speeding up all the processes of the mind. I learned so much so fast, and now my mind is deteriorating rapidly. What if I won't let it happen? What if I fight it? Think of those people at Warren, the empty smiles, the blank expressions, everyone laughing at them. Little Charlie Gordon staring at me through the window — waiting. Please, not that again. October 18 I'm forgetting things I learned recently. It seems to be following the classic pattern, the last things learned are first things forgotten. Or is that the pattern? Better look it up again. Reread my paper on the Algernon-Gordon Effect and even though I know I wrote it, I keep feeling it was written by someone else. Most of it I don't even understand. But why am I so irritable? Especially when Alice is so good to me? She keeps the place neat and clean, always putting my things away and washing dishes and scrubbing floors. I shouldn't have shouted at her the way I did this morning because it made her cry, and I didn't want that to happen. But she shouldn't have picked up the broken records and the music and the book and put them all neatly into a box. That made me furious. I don't want anyone to touch any of those things. I want to see them pile up. I want them to remind me of what I'm leaving behind. I kicked the box and scattered the stuff all over the floor and told her to leave them just where they were. Foolish. No reason for it. I guess I got sore because I knew she thought it was silly to keep those things, and she didn't tell me she thought it was silly. She just pretended it was perfectly normal. She's humoring me. And when I saw that box I remembered the boy at Warren and the lousy lamp he made and the way we were all humoring him, pretending he had done something wonderful when he hadn't. That was what she was doing to me, and I couldn't stand it. |
| 364 |
Most of the books are too hard for me, but I don't care. As long as I keep reading I'll learn new things and I won't forget how to read. That's the most important thing. If I keep reading, maybe I can hold my own. Dr. Strauss came around the day after Alice left, so I guess she told him about me. He pretended all he wanted was the progress reports but I told him I would send them. I don't want him coming around here. I told him he doesn't have to be worried about me because when I think I won't be able to take care of myself any more I'll get on a train and go to Warren. I told him I'd rather just go by myself when the time comes. I tried to talk to Fay, but I can see she's afraid of me. I guess she figures I've gone out of my mind. Last night she came home with somebody — he looked very young. This morning the landlady, Mrs. Mooney, came up with a bowl of hot chicken soup and some chicken. She said she just thought she would look in on me to see if I was doing all right. I told her I had lots of food to eat but she left it anyway and it was good. She pretended she was doing it on her own but I'm not that stupid yet. Alice or Strauss must have told her to look in on me and make sure I was all right. Well, that's okay. She's a nice old lady with an Irish accent and she likes to talk all about the people in the building. When she saw the mess on the floor inside my apartment she didn't say anything about it. I guess she's all right. November 1 A week since I dared to write again. I don't know where the time goes. Todays Sunday I know because I can see through my window the people going into the church across the street. I think I laid in bed all week but I remember Mrs. Mooney bringing me food a few times and asking if I was sick. What am I going to do with myself? I cant just hang around here all alone and look out the window. I've got to get hold of myself. I keep saying over and over that I've got to do something but then I forget or maybe its just easier not to do what I say I'm going to do. I still have some books from the library but a lot of them are too hard for me. I read a lot of mystery stories now and books about kings and queens from old times. I read a book about a man who thought he was a knight and went out on an old horse with his friend. But no matter what he did he always ended up getting beaten and hurt. Like when he thought the windmills were dragons. At first I thought it was a silly book because if he wasnt crazy he could see that windmills werent dragons and there is no such thing as sorcerers and enchanted castles but then I re-memberd that there was something else it was all supposed to mean — something the story didn't say but only hinted at. Like there was other meanings. But I don't know what. That made me angry because I think I used to know. But I'm keeping up with my reading and learning new things every day and I know its going to help me. I know I should have written some progress reports before this so they will know whats happening to me. |
| 365 |
But writing is harder. I have to look up even simple words in the dictionary now and it makes me angry with myself. November 2 I forgot to write in yesterdays report about the woman from the building across the alley one floor down. I saw her through my kitchen window last week. I don't know her name, or even what her top part looks like but every night about eleven oclock she goes into her bathroom to take a bath. She never pulls her shade down and thru my window when I put out my lights I can see her from the neck down when she comes out of the bath to dry herself. It makes me excited, but when the lady turns out the light I feel let down and lonely. I wish I could see what she looks like sometimes, whether she's pretty or what. I know its not nice to watch a woman when she's like that but I cant help it. Anyway what difference does it make to her if she doesn't know I'm watching. Its nearly eleven oclock now. Time for her bath. So I'd better go see... Nov 5 Mrs Mooney is very worried about me. She says the way I lay around all day and don't do anything I remind her of her son before she threw him out of the house. She said she don't like loafters. If I'm sick its one thing but if I'm a loafter that's another thing and she has no use for me. I told her I think I'm sick. I try to read a little bit every day mostly stories but sometimes I have to read the same thing over and over again because I don't know what it means. And its hard to write. I know I should look up all the words in the dictionary but I'm so tired all the time. Then I got the idea that I would only use the easy words instead of the long hard ones. That saves time. Its getting chilly out but I still put flowers on Algernons grave. Mrs Mooney thinks I'm silly to put flowers on a mouses grave but I told her that Algernon was a special mouse. I went over to visit Fay across the hall. But she told me to go away and not come back. She put a new lock on her door. Nov 9 Sunday again. I don't have anything to do to keep me busy now because the TV is broke and I keep forgetting to get it fixed. I think I lost this months check from the college. I don't remember. I get awful headaches and asperin doesn't help much. Mrs. Mooney believes now that I'm really sick and she feels very sory for me. She's a wonderful woman whenever someone is sick. Its getting so cold out now that I've got to wear two sweaters. The lady across the way pulls down her windowshade now, so I can't watch any more. My lousy luck. Nov 10 Mrs Mooney called a strange doctor to see me. She was afraid I was going to the. I told the doctor I wasnt to sick and that I only forget sometimes. He asked me did I have any friends or relatives and I said no I don't have any. I told him I had a friend called Algernon once but he was a mouse and we use to run races together. He looked at me kind of funny like he thot I was crazy. He smiled when I told him I use to be a genius. He talked to me like I was a baby and he winked at Mrs Mooney. |
| 366 |
I got mad because he was making fun of me and laughing and I chased him out and locked the door. I think I know why I been haveing bad luck. Because I lost my rabits foot and my horshoe. I got to get another rabits foot fast. Nov 11 Dr Strauss came to the door today and Alice to but I didn't let them come in. I told them I didn't want anyone to see me. I want to be left alone. Later Mrs Mooney came up with some food and she told me they paid the rent and left money for her to buy food and anything I need. I told her I don't want to use there money any more. She said moneys money and someone has to pay or I have to put you out. Then she said why don't I get some job instead of just hanging around. I don't know any work but the job I use to do at the bakery. I don't want to go back their because they all knew me when I was smart and maybe they'll laff at me. But I don't know what else to do to get money. And I want to pay for everything myself. I am strong and I can werk. If I cant take care of myself I'll go to Warren. I won't take charety from anybody. Nov 15 I was looking at some of my old progress reports and its very strange but I cant read what I wrote. I can make out some of the words but they don't make sense. I think I wrote them but I don't remember so good. I get tired very fast when I try to read some of the books I baught in the drugstore. Exept the ones with the picturs of the pretty girls. I like to look at them but I have funny dreams about them. Its not nice. I won't buy them any more. I saw in one of those books they got magic powder that can make you strong and smart and do lots of things. I think mayby I'll send away and by some for myself. Nov 16 Alice came to the door again but I said go away I don't want to see you. She cryed and I cryed to but I woudnt let her in because I didn't want her to laff at me. I told her I didn't like her any more and I didn't want to be smart any more either. that's not true but. I still love her and I still want to be smart but I had to say that so she woud go away. Mrs Mooney told me Alice brout some more money to look after me and for the rent. I don't want that. I got to get a job. Please... please... don't let me forget how to reed and rite... Nov 18 Mr Donner was very nice when I came back and askd him for my old job at the bakery. Frist he was very suspicius but I told him what happened to me and then he looked very sad and put his hand on my shoulder and said Charlie you got guts. Evrybody looked at me when I came downstairs and started working in the toilet sweeping it out like I use to do. I said to myself Charlie if they make fun of you don't get sore because you remember their not so smart like you once thot they were. And besides they were once your frends and if they laffed at you that don't mean anything because they liked you to. One of the new men who came to werk their after I went away his name is Meyer Klaus did a bad thing to me. He came up to me when I was loading the sacks of flower and he said hey Charlie I hear your a very smart fella — a real quiz kid. |
| 367 |
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan Mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees — willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter's flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of 'coons, and with the spreadpads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark. There is a path through the willows and among the sycamores, a path beaten hard by boys coming down from the ranches to swim in the deep pool, and beaten hard by tramps who come wearily down from the highway in the evening to jungle-up near water. In front of the low horizontal limb of a giant sycamore there is an ash pile made by many fires; the limb is worn smooth by men who have sat on it. Evening of a hot day started the little wind to moving among the leaves. The shade climbed up the hills toward the top. On the sand banks the rabbits sat as quietly as little gray sculptured stones. And then from the direction of the state highway came the sound of footsteps on crisp sycamore leaves. The rabbits hurried noiselessly for cover. A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down river. For a moment the place was lifeless, and then two men emerged from the path and came into the opening by the green pool. They had walked in single file down the path, and even in the open one stayed behind the other. Both were dressed in denim trousers and in denim coats with brass buttons. Both wore black, shapeless hats and both carried tight blanket rolls slung over their shoulders. The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features. Every part of him was defined: small, strong hands, slender arms, a thin and bony nose. Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, and wide, sloping shoulders; and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws. His arms did not swing at his sides, but hung loosely. The first man stopped short in the clearing, and the follower nearly ran over him. He took off his hat and wiped the sweat-band with his forefinger and snapped the moisture off. His huge companion dropped his blankets and flung himself down and drank from the surface of the green pool; drank with long gulps, snorting into the water like a horse. The small man stepped nervously beside him. |
| 368 |
One question that has always intrigued me is what happens to demonic beings when immigrants move from their homelands. Irish-Americans remember the fairies, Norwegian-Americans the nisser, Greek-Americans the vrykolakas, but only in relation to the events remembered in the old country. When once I asked why such demons are not seen in America, my informants giggled confusedly and saidyou're scared to pass the ocean, its too far, pointing out that Christ and the apostles never came to America. Richard Dorson, A Theory for American Folklore, American Folklore and the Historian (University of Chicago Press, 1971) Caveat, and Warning for Travelers This is a work of fiction, not a guidebook. While the geography of the United States of America in this tale is not entirely imaginary-many of the landmarks in this book can be visited, paths can be followed, ways can be mapped-I have taken liberties. Fewer liberties than you might imagine, but liberties nonetheless. Permission has neither been asked nor given for the use of real places in this story when they appears, I expect that the owners of Rock City or the House on the Rock, and the hunters who own the motel in the center of America, are as perplexed as anyone would be to find their properties in here. I have obscured the location of several of the places in this book: the town of Lakeside, for example, and the farm with the ash tree an hour south of Blacksburg. You may look for them if you wish. You might even find them. Furthermore, it goes without saying that all of the people, living, dead, and otherwise in this story are fictional or used in a fictional context. Only the gods are real. Part One. Shadows The boundaries of our country, sir? Why sir, on the north we are bounded by the Aurora Borealis, on the east we are bounded by the rising sun, on the south we are bounded by the procession of the Equinoxes, and on the west by the Day of Judgment. The American Joe Millers Jest Book Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough and looked don't-fuck-with-me enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought a lot about how much he loved his wife. The best thingin Shadows opinion, perhaps the only good thingabout being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that hed plunged as low as he could plunge and hed hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it. It did not matter, Shadow decided, if you had done what you had been convicted of or not. In his experience everyone he met in prison was aggrieved about something: there was always something the authorities had got wrong, something they said you did when you didn'tor you didn't do quite like they said you did. What was important was that they had gotten you. He had noticed it in the first few days, when everything, from the slang to the bad food, was new. |
| 369 |
Despite the misery and the utter skin-crawling horror of incarceration, he was breathing relief. Shadow tried not to talk too much. Somewhere around the middle of year two he mentioned his theory to Low Key Lyesmith, his cellmate. Low Key, who was a grifter from Minnesota, smiled his scarred smile. Yeah, he said. that's true. Its even better when youve been sentenced to death. that's when you remember the jokes about the guys who kicked their boots off as the noose flipped around their necks, because their friends always told them theyd die with their boots on. Is that a joke? asked Shadow. Damn right. Gallows humor. Best kind there is. When did they last hang a man in this state? asked Shadow. How the hell should I know? Lyesmith kept his orange-blond hair pretty much shaved. You could see the lines of his skull. Tell you what, though. This country started going to hell when they stopped hanging folks. No gallows dirt. No gallows deals. Shadow shrugged. He could see nothing romantic in a death sentence. If you didn't have a death sentence, he decided, then prison was, at best, only a temporary reprieve from life, for two reasons. First, life creeps back into prison. There are always places to go further down. Life goes on. And second, if you just hang in there, somedayyou're going to have to let you out. In the beginning it was too far away for Shadow to focus on. Then it became a distant beam of hope, and he learned how to tell himself this too shall pass when the prison shit went down, as prison shit always did. One day the magic door would open and hed walk through it. So he marked off the days on his Songbirds of North America calendar, which was the only calendar they sold in the prison commissary, and the sun went down and he didn't see it and the sun came up and he didn't see it. He practiced coin tricks from a book he found in the wasteland of the prison library; and he worked out; and he made lists in his head of what hed do when he got out of prison. Shadows lists got shorter and shorter. After two years he had it down to three things. First, he was going to take a bath. A real, long, serious soak, in a tub with bubbles. Maybe read the paper, maybe not. Some days he thought one way, some days the other. Second, he was going to towel himself off, put on a robe. Maybe slippers. He liked the idea of slippers. If he smoked he would be smoking a pipe about now, but he didn't smoke. He would pick up his wife in his arms (Puppy, she would squeal in mock horror and real delight, what are you doing?). He would carry her into the bedroom, and close the door. Theyd call out for pizzas if they got hungry. Third, after he and Laura had come out of the bedroom, maybe a couple of days later, he was going to keep his head down and stay out of trouble for the rest of his life. And then you'll be happy? asked Low Key Lyesmith. That day they were working in the prison shop, assembling bird feeders, which was barely more interesting than stamping out license plates. |
| 370 |
Call no man happy, said Shadow, until he is dead. Herodotus, said Low Key. Hey. you're learning. Who the fucks Herodotus? asked the Iceman, slotting together the sides of a bird feeder and passing it to Shadow, who bolted and screwed it tight. Dead Greek, said Shadow. My last girlfriend was Greek, said the Iceman. The shit her family ate. You would not believe. Like rice wrapped in leaves. Shit like that. The Iceman was the same size and shape as a Coke machine, with blue eyes and hair so blond it was almost white. He had beaten the crap out of some guy who had made the mistake of copping a feel off his girlfriend in the bar where she danced and the Iceman bounced. The guys friends had called the police, who arrested the Iceman and ran a check on him which revealed that the Iceman had walked from a work-release program eighteen months earlier. So what was I supposed to do? asked the Iceman, aggrieved, when he had told Shadow the whole sad tale. I'd told him she was my girlfriend. Was I supposed to let him disrespect me like that? Was I? I mean, he had his hands all over her. Shadow had said, You tell em, and left it at that. One thing he had learned early, you do your own time in prison. You don't do anyone elses time for them. Keep your head down. Do your own time. Lyesmith had loaned Shadow a battered paperback copy of Herodotuss Histories several months earlier. Its not boring. Its cool, he said, when Shadow protested that he didn't read books. Read it first, then tell me its cool. Shadow had made a face, but he had started to read, and had found himself hooked against his will. Greeks, said the Iceman, with disgust. And it aint true what they say about them, neither. I tried giving it to my girlfriend in the ass, she almost clawed my eyes out. Lyesmith was transferred one day, without warning. He left Shadow his copy of Herodotus. There was a nickel hidden in the pages. Coins were contraband: you can sharpen the edges against a stone, slice open someones face in a fight. Shadow didn't want a weapon; Shadow just wanted something to do with his hands. Shadow was not superstitious. He did not believe in anything he could not see. Still, he could feel disaster hovering above the prison in those final weeks, just as he had felt it in the days before the robbery. There was a hollowness in the pit of his stomach that he told himself was simply a fear of going back to the world on the outside. But he could not be sure. He was more paranoid than usual, and in prison usual is very, and is a survival skill. Shadow became more quiet, more shadowy, than ever. He found himself watching the body language of the guards, of the other inmates, searching for a clue to the bad thing that was going to happen, as he was certain that it would. A month before he was due to be released. Shadow sat in a chilly office, facing a short man with a port-wine birthmark on his forehead. They sat across a desk from each other; the man had Shadows file open in front of him, and was holding a ballpoint pen. |
| 371 |
The end of the pen was badly chewed. You cold, Shadow? Yes, said Shadow. A little. The man shrugged. that's the system, he said. Furnaces don't go on until December the first. Then they go off March the first. I don't make the rules. He ran his forefinger down the sheet of paper stapled to the inside left of the folder. you're thirty-two years old? Yes, sir. You look younger. Clean living. Says here youve been a model inmate. I learned my lesson, sir. Did you really? He looked at Shadow intently, the birthmark on his forehead lowering. Shadow thought about telling the man some of his theories about prison, but he said nothing. He nodded instead, and concentrated on appearing properly remorseful. Says here youve got a wife, Shadow. Her names Laura. Hows everything there? Pretty good. she's come down to see me as much as she couldits a long way to travel. We write and I call her when I can. What does your wife do? she's a travel agent. Sends people all over the world. Howd you meet her? Shadow could not decide why the man was asking. He considered telling him it was none of his business, then said, She was my best buddys wifes best friend. They set us up on a blind date. We hit it off. And youve got a job waiting for you? Yessir. My buddy, Robbie, the one I just told you about, he owns the Muscle Farm, the place I used to train. He says my old job is waiting for me. An eyebrow raised. Really? Says he figures I'll be a big draw. Bring back some old-timers, and pull in the tough crowd who want to be tougher. The man seemed satisfied. He chewed the end of his ballpoint pen, then turned over the sheet of paper. How do you feel about your offense? Shadow shrugged. I was stupid, he said, and meant it. The man with the birthmark sighed. He ticked off a number of items on a checklist. Then he riffled through the papers in Shadows file. Howre you getting home from here? he asked. Greyhound? Flying home. Its good to have a wife whos a travel agent. The man frowned, and the birthmark creased. She sent you a ticket? didn't need to. Just sent me a confirmation number. Electronic ticket. All I have to do is turn up at the airport in a month and show em my ID, and I'm outta here. The man nodded, scribbled one final note, then he closed the file and put down the ballpoint pen. Two pale hands rested on the gray desk like pink animals. He brought his hands close together, made a steeple of his forefingers, and stared at Shadow with watery hazel eyes. you're lucky, he said. You have someone to go back to, you got a job waiting. You can put all this behind you. You got a second chance. Make the most of it. The man did not offer to shake Shadows hand as he rose to leave, nor did Shadow expect him to. The last week was the worst. In some ways it was worse than the whole three years put together. Shadow wondered if it was the weather: oppressive, still, and cold. It felt as if a storm was on the way, but the storm never came. He had the jitters and the heebie-jeebies, a feeling deep in his stomach that something was entirely wrong. |
| 372 |
In the exercise yard the wind gusted. Shadow imagined that he could smell snow on the air. He called his wife collect. Shadow knew that the phone companies whacked a three-dollar surcharge on every call made from a prison phone. That was why operators are always real polite to people calling from prisons, Shadow had decided: they knew that he paid their wages. Something feels weird, he told Laura. That wasnt the first thing he said to her. The first thing was I love you, because its a good thing to say if you can mean it, and Shadow did. Hello, said Laura. I love you too. What feels weird? I don't know, he said. Maybe the weather. It feels like if we could only get a storm, everything would be okay. Its nice here, she said. The last of the leaves haven't quite fallen. If we don't get a storm, you'll be able to see them when you get home. Five days, said Shadow. A hundred and twenty hours, and then you come home, she said. Everything okay there? Nothing wrong? Everythings fine. I'm seeing Robbie tonight. Were planning your surprise welcome-home party. Surprise party? Of course. You don't know anything about it, do you? Not a thing. that's my husband, she said. Shadow realized that he was smiling. He had been inside for three years, but she could still make him smile. Love you, babes, said Shadow. Love you, puppy, said Laura. Shadow put down the phone. When they got married Laura told Shadow that she wanted a puppy, but their landlord had pointed out they werent allowed pets under the terms of their lease. Hey, Shadow had said, I'll be your puppy. What do you want me to do? Chew your slippers? Piss on the kitchen floor? Lick your nose? Sniff your crotch? I bet theres nothing a puppy can do I cant do! And he picked her up as if she weighed nothing at all and began to lick her nose while she giggled and shrieked, and then he carried her to the bed. In the food hall Sam Fetisher sidled over to Shadow and smiled, showing his old teeth. He sat down beside Shadow and began to eat his macaroni and cheese. We got to talk, said Sam Fetisher. Sam Fetisher was one of the blackest men that Shadow had ever seen. He might have been sixty. He might have been eighty. Then again, Shadow had met thirty-year-old crackheads who looked older than Sam Fetisher. Mm? said Shadow. Storms on the way, said Sam. Feels like it, said Shadow. Maybe itll snow soon. Not that kind of storm. Bigger storm than that coming. I tell you, boy, you're better off in here than out on the street when the big storm comes. Done my time, said Shadow. Friday, I'm gone. Sam Fetisher stared at Shadow. Where you from? he asked. Eagle Point. Indiana. you're a lying fuck, said Sam Fetisher. I mean originally. Where are your folks from? Chicago, said Shadow. His mother had lived in Chicago as a girl, and she had died there, half a lifetime ago. Like I said. Big storm coming. Keep your head down, Shadow-boy. Its like what do they call those things continents ride around on? Some kind of plates? Tectonic plates? |
| 373 |
Shadow hazarded. that's it. Tectonic plates. Its like when they go riding, when North America goes skidding into South America, you don't want to be in the middle. You dig me? Not even a little. One brown eye closed in a slow wink. Hell, don't say I didn't warn you, said Sam Fetisher, and he spooned a trembling lump of orange Jell-O into his mouth. I wont. Shadow spent the night half-awake, drifting in and out of sleep, listening to his new cellmate grunt and snore in the bunk below him. Several cells away a man whined and howled and sobbed like an animal, and from time to time someone would scream at him to shut the fuck up. Shadow tried not to hear. He let the empty minutes wash over him, lonely and slow. Two days to go. Forty-eight hours, starting with oatmeal and prison coffee, and a guard named Wilson who tapped Shadow harder than he had to on the shoulder and said, Shadow? This way. Shadow checked his conscience. It was quiet, which did not, he had observed, in a prison, mean that he was not in deep shit. The two men walked more or less side by side, feet echoing on metal and concrete. Shadow tasted fear in the back of his throat, bitter as old coffee. The bad thing was happening There was a voice in the back of his head whispering that they were going to slap another year onto his sentence, drop him into solitary, cut off his hands, cut off his head. He told himself he was being stupid, but his heart was pounding fit to burst out of his chest. I don't get you, Shadow, said Wilson, as they walked. Whats not to get, sir? You. you're too fucking quiet. Too polite. You wait like the old guys, butyou're what? Twenty-five? Twenty-eight? Thirty-two, sir. And what are you? A spic? A gypsy? Not that I know of, sir. Maybe. Maybe you got nigger blood in you. You got nigger blood in you, Shadow? Could be, sir. Shadow stood tall and looked straight ahead, and concentrated on not allowing himself to be riled by this man. Yeah? Well, all I know is, you fucking spook me. Wilson had sandy blond hair and a sandy blond face and a sandy blond smile. You leaving us soon. Hope so, sir. They walked through a couple of checkpoints. Wilson showed his ID each time. Up a set of stairs, and they were standing outside the prison wardens office. It had the prison wardens nameG. Pattersonon the door in black letters, and beside the door, a miniature traffic light. The top light burned red. Wilson pressed a button below the traffic light. They stood there in silence for a couple of minutes. Shadow tried to tell himself that everything was all right, that on Friday morning hed be on the plane up to Eagle Point, but he did not believe it himself. The red light went out and the green light went on, and Wilson opened the door. They went inside. Shadow had seen the warden a handful of times in the last three years. Once he had been showing a politician around. Once, during a lockdown, the warden had spoken to them in groups of a hundred, telling them that the prison was overcrowded, and that, since it would remain overcrowded, they had better get used to it. |
| 374 |
The wind howled about the bus, and the wipers slooshed heavily back and forth across the windshield, smearing the city into a red and yellow neon wetness. It was early afternoon, but it looked like night through the glass. Shit, said the man in the seat behind Shadow, rubbing the condensation from the window with his hand, staring at a wet figure hurrying down the sidewalk. Theres pussy out there. Shadow swallowed. It occurred to him that he had not cried yethad in fact felt nothing at all. No tears. No sorrow. Nothing. He found himself thinking about a guy named Johnnie Larch hed shared a cell with when hed first been put inside, who told Shadow how hed once got out after five years behind bars with one hundred dollars and a ticket to Seattle, where his sister lived. Johnnie Larch had got to the airport, and he handed his ticket to the woman on the counter, and she asked to see his drivers license. He showed it to her. It had expired a couple of years earlier. She told him it was not valid as ID. He told her it might not be valid as a drivers license, but it sure as hell was fine identification, and damn it, who else did she think he was, if he wasnt him? She said shed thank him to keep his voice down. He told her to give him a fucking boarding pass, or she was going to regret it, and that he wasnt going to be disrespected. You don't let people disrespect you in prison. Then she pressed a button, and a few moments later the airport security showed up, and they tried to persuade Johnnie Larch to leave the airport quietly, and he did not wish to leave, and there was something of an altercation. The upshot of it all was that Johnnie Larch never actually made it to Seattle, and he spent the next couple of days in town in bars, and when his one hundred dollars was gone he held up a gas station with a toy gun for money to keep drinking, and the police finally picked him up for pissing in the street. Pretty soon he was back inside serving the rest of his sentence and a little extra for the gas station job. And the moral of this story, according to Johnnie Larch, was this: don't piss off people who work in airports. Are you sure its not something like The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment? said Shadow, when Johnnie Larch told him the story. No, listen to me, I'm telling you, man, said Johnnie Larch, don't piss off those bitches in airports. Shadow half smiled at the memory. His own drivers license had several months still to go before it expired. Bus station! Everybody out! The building stank of piss and sour beer. Shadow climbed into a taxi and told the driver to take him to the airport. He told him that there was an extra five dollars if he could do it in silence. They made it in twenty minutes and the driver never said a word. Then Shadow was stumbling through the brightly lit airport terminal. Shadow worried about the whole e-ticket business. |
| 375 |
He knew he had a ticket for a flight on Friday, but he didn't know if it would work today. Anything electronic seemed fundamentally magical to Shadow, and liable to evaporate at any moment. Still, he had his wallet, back in his possession for the first time in three years, containing several expired credit cards and one Visa card, which, he was pleasantly surprised to discover, didn't expire until the end of January. He had a reservation number. And, he realized, he had the certainty that once he got home everything would, somehow, be okay. Laura would be fine again. Maybe it was some kind of scam to spring him a few days early. Or perhaps it was a simple mix-up: some other Laura Moons body had been dragged from the highway wreckage. Lightning flickered outside the airport, through the windows-walls. Shadow realized he was holding his breath, waiting for something. A distant boom of thunder. He exhaled. A tired white woman stared at him from behind the counter. Hello, said Shadow. you're the first strange woman I've spoken to, in the flesh, in three years. I've got an e-ticket number. I was supposed to be traveling on Friday but I have to go today. There was a death in my family. Mm. I'm sorry to hear that. She tapped at the keyboard, stared at the screen, tapped again. No problem. I've put you on the three-thirty. It may be delayed because of the storm, so keep an eye on the screens. Checking any baggage? He held up a shoulder bag. I don't need to check this, do I? No, she said. Its fine. Do you have any picture ID? Shadow showed her his drivers license. It was not a big airport, but the number of people wandering, just wandering, amazed him. He watched people put down bags casually, observed wallets stuffed into back pockets, saw purses put down, unwatched, under chairs. That was when he realized he was no longer in prison. Thirty minutes to wait until boarding. Shadow bought a slice of pizza and burned his lip on the hot cheese. He took his change and went to the phones. Called Robbie at the Muscle Farm, but the machine picked up. Hey Robbie, said Shadow. They tell me that Lauras dead. They let me out early. I'm coming home. Then, because people do make mistakes, hed seen it happen, he called home, and listened to Lauras voice. Hi, she said. I'm not here or I cant come to the phone. Leave a message and I'll get back to you. And have a good day. Shadow couldn't bring himself to leave a message. He sat in a plastic chair by the gate, and held his bag so tight he hurt his hand. He was thinking about the first time he had ever seen Laura. He hadn't even known her name then. She was Audrey Burtons friend. He had been sitting with Robbie in a booth at Chi-Chis when Laura had walked in a pace or so behind Audrey, and Shadow had found himself staring. She had long, chestnut hair and eyes so blue Shadow mistakenly thought she was wearing tinted contact lenses. She had ordered a strawberry daiquiri, and insisted that Shadow taste it, and laughed delightedly when he did. |
| 376 |
Laura loved people to taste what she tasted. He had kissed her good night that night, and she had tasted like strawberry daiquiris, and he had never wanted to kiss anyone else again. A woman announced that his plane was boarding, and Shadows row was the first to be called. He was in the very back, an empty seat beside him. The rain pattered continually against the side of the plane: he imagined small children tossing down dried peas by the handful from the skies. As the plane took off he fell asleep. Shadow was in a dark place, and the thing staring at him wore a buffalos head, rank and furry with huge wet eyes. Its body was a mans body, oiled and slick. Changes are coming, said the buffalo without moving its lips. There are certain decisions that will have to be made. Firelight flickered from wet cave walls. Where am I? Shadow asked. In the earth and under the earth, said the buffalo man. You are where the forgotten wait. His eyes were liquid black marbles, and his voice was a rumble from beneath the world. He smelled like wet cow. Believe, said the rumbling voice. If you are to survive, you must believe. Believe what? asked Shadow. What should I believe? He stared at Shadow, the buffalo man, and he drew himself up huge, and his eyes filled with fire. He opened his spit-flecked buffalo mouth and it was red inside with the flames that burned inside him, under the earth. Everything, roared the buffalo man. The world tipped and spun, and Shadow was on the plane once more; but the tipping continued. In the front of the plane a woman screamed halfheartedly. Lightning burst in blinding flashes around the plane. The captain came on the intercom to tell them that he was going to try and gain some altitude, to get away from the storm. The plane shook and shuddered, and Shadow wondered, coldly and idly, if he was going to die. It seemed possible, he decided, but unlikely. He stared out of the window and watched the lightning illuminate the horizon. Then he dozed once more, and dreamed he was back in prison and that Low Key had whispered to him in the food line that someone had put out a contract on his life, but that Shadow could not find out who or why; and when he woke up they were coming in for a landing. He stumbled off the plane, blinking into wakefulness. All airports, he thought, look very much the same. It doesn't actually matter where you are, you are in an airport: tiles and walkways and restrooms, gates and newsstands and fluorescent lights. This airport looked like an airport. The trouble is, this wasnt the airport he was going to. This was a big airport, with way too many people, and way too many gates. Excuse me, maam? The woman looked at him over the clipboard. Yes? What airport is this? She looked at him, puzzled, trying to decide whether or not he was joking, then she said, St. Louis. I thought this was the plane to Eagle Point. It was. They redirected it here because of the storms. didn't they make an announcement? Probably. I fell asleep. |
| 377 |
you'll need to talk to that man over there, in the red coat. The man was almost as tall as Shadow: he looked like the father from a seventies sitcom, and he tapped something into a computer and told Shadow to runrun! to a gate on the far side of the terminal. Shadow ran through the airport, but the doors were already closed when he got to the gate. He watched the plane pull away from the gate, through the plate glass. The woman at the passenger assistance desk (short and brown, with a mole on the side of her nose) consulted with another woman and made a phone call (Nope, that ones out. Theyve just cancelled it.), then she printed out another boarding card. This will get you there, she told him. Well call ahead to the gate and tell themyou're coming. Shadow felt like a pea being flicked between three cups, or a card being shuffled through a deck. Again he ran through the airport, ending up near where he had gotten off originally. A small man at the gate took his boarding pass. Weve been waiting for you, he confided, tearing off the stub of the boarding pass, with Shadows seat assignment17Don it. Shadow hurried onto the plane, and they closed the door behind him. He walked through first classthere were only four first-class seats, three of which were occupied. The bearded man in a pale suit seated next to the unoccupied seat at the very front grinned at Shadow as he got onto the plane, then raised his wrist and tapped his watch as Shadow walked past. Yeah, yeah, I'm making you late, thought Shadow. Let that be the worst of your worries. The plane seemed pretty full, as he made his way down toward the back. Actually, Shadow found, it was completely full, and there was a middle-aged woman sitting in seat 17D. Shadow showed her his boarding card stub, and she showed him hers: they matched. Can you take your seat, please? asked the flight attendant. No, he said, I'm afraid I cant. She clicked her tongue and checked their boarding cards, then she led him back up to the front of the plane and pointed him to the empty seat in first class. Looks like its your lucky day, she told him. Can I bring you something to drink? Well just have time before we take off. And I'm sure you need one after that. I'd like a beer, please, said Shadow. Whatever youve got. The flight attendant went away. The man in the pale suit in the seat beside Shadow tapped his watch with his fingernail. It was a black Rolex. you're late, said the man, and he grinned a huge grin with no warmth in it at all. Sorry? I said, you're late. The flight attendant handed Shadow a glass of beer. For one moment, he wondered if the man was crazy, and then he decided he must have been referring to the plane, waiting for one last passenger. Sorry if I held you up, he said, politely. You in a hurry? The plane backed away from the gate. The flight attendant came back and took away Shadows beer. The man in the pale suit grinned at her and said, don't worry, I'll hold onto this tightly, and she let him keep his glass of Jack Daniels, while protesting, weakly, that it violated airline regulations. |
| 378 |
(Let me be the judge of that, mdear.) Time is certainly of the essence, said the man. But no. I was merely concerned that you would not make the plane. That was kind of you. The plane sat restlessly on the ground, engines throbbing, aching to be off. Kind my ass, said the man in the pale suit. I've got a job for you, Shadow. A roar of engines. The little plane jerked forward, pushing Shadow back into his seat. Then they were airborne, and the airport lights were falling away below them. Shadow looked at the man in the seat next to him. His hair was a reddish gray; his beard, little more than stubble, was grayish red. A craggy, square face with pale gray eyes. The suit looked expensive, and was the color of melted vanilla ice cream. His tie was dark gray silk, and the tie pin was a tree, worked in silver: trunk, branches, and deep roots. He held his glass of Jack Daniels as they took off, and did not spill a drop. Arent you going to ask me what kind of job? he asked. How do you know who I am? The man chuckled. Oh, its the easiest thing in the world to know what people call themselves. A little thought, a little luck, a little memory. Ask me what kind of job. No, said Shadow. The attendant brought him another glass of beer, and he sipped at it. Why not? I'm going home. I've got a job waiting for me there. I don't want any other job. The mans craggy smile did not change, outwardly, but now he seemed, actually, amused. You don't have a job waiting for you at home, he said. You have nothing waiting for you there. Meanwhile, I am offering you a perfectly legal jobgood money, limited security, remarkable fringe benefits. Hell, if you live that long, I could throw in a pension plan. You think maybe youd like one of them? Shadow said, You must have seen my name on the side of my bag. The man said nothing. Whoever you are, said Shadow, you couldn't have known I was going to be on this plane. I didn't know I was going to be on this plane, and if my plane hadn't been diverted to St. Louis, I wouldn't have been. My guess isyou're a practical joker. Maybeyou're hustling something. But I think maybe well have a better time if we end this conversation here. The man shrugged. Shadow picked up the in-flight magazine. The little plane jerked and bumped through the sky, making it harder to concentrate. The words floated through his mind like soap bubbles, there as he read them, gone completely a moment later. The man sat quietly in the seat beside him, sipping his Jack Daniels. His eyes were closed. Shadow read the list of in-flight music channels available on transatlantic flights, and then he was looking at the map of the world with red lines on it that showed where the airline flew. Then he had finished reading the magazine, and, reluctantly, he closed the cover and slipped it into the pocket. The man opened his eyes. There was something strange about his eyes, Shadow thought. One of them was a darker gray than the other. He looked at Shadow. By the way, he said, I was sorry to hear about your wife, Shadow. |
| 379 |
Her black hair is piled high and knotted on top of her head. Standing beside her is a short man wearing an olive T-shirt and expensive blue jeans. He is holding, in his right hand, a wallet and a Nokia mobile phone with a red-white-and-blue faceplate. The red room contains a bed, upon which are white satin-style sheets and an oxblood bedspread. At the foot of the bed is a small wooden table, upon which is a small stone statue of a woman with enormous hips, and a candleholder. The woman hands the man a small red candle. Here, she says. Light it. Me? Yes, she says. If you want to have me. I shoulda just got you to suck me off in the car. Perhaps, she says. don't you want me? Her hand runs up her body from thigh to breast, a gesture of presentation, as if she were demonstrating a new product. Red silk scarves over the lamp in the corner of the room make the light red. The man looks at her hungrily, then he takes the candle from her and pushes it into the candleholder. You got a light? She passes him a book of matches. He tears off a match, lights the wick: it flickers and then burns with a steady flame, which gives the illusion of motion to the faceless statue beside it, all hips and breasts. Put the money beneath the statue. Fifty bucks. Yes, she says. Now, come love me. He unbuttons his blue jeans and removes his olive T-shirt. She massages his white shoulders with her brown fingers; then she turns him over and begins to make love to him with her hands, and her fingers, and her tongue. It seems to him that the lights in the red room have been dimmed, and the sole illumination comes from the candle, which burns with a bright flame. Whats your name? he asks her. Bilquis, she tells him, raising her head. With a Q. A what? Never mind. He is gasping now. Let me fuck you, he says. I have to fuck you. Okay, hon, she says. Well do it. But will you do something for me, whileyou're doing it? Hey, he says, suddenly tetchy, I'm paying you, you know. She straddles him, in one smooth movement, whispering, I know, honey, I know, you're paying me, and I mean, look at you, I should be paying you, I'm so lucky He purses his lips, trying to show that her hooker talk is having no effect on him, he cant be taken; that she's a street whore, for Chrissakes, while he's practically a producer, and he knows all about last-minute ripoffs, but she doesn't ask for money. Instead she says, Honey, whileyou're giving it to me, whileyou're pushing that big hard thing inside of me, will you worship me? Will I what? She is rocking back and forth on him: the engorged head of his penis is being rubbed against the wet lips of her vulva. Will you call me goddess? Will you pray to me? Will you worship me with your body? He smiles. Is that all she wants? Weve all got our kinks, at the end of the day. Sure, he says. She reaches her hand between her legs and slips him inside her. Is that good, is it, goddess? he asks, gasping. Worship me, honey, says Bilquis, the hooker. Yes, he says. I worship your breasts and your hair and your cunt. |
| 380 |
I worship your thighs and your eyes and your cherry-red lips Yes she croons, riding him. I worship your nipples, from which the milk of life flows. Your kiss is honey and your touch scorches like fire, and I worship it. His words are becoming more rhythmic now, keeping pace with the thrust and roll of their bodies. Bring me your lust in the morning, and bring me relief and your blessing in the evening. Let me walk in dark places unharmed and let me come to you once more and sleep beside you and make love with you again. I worship you with everything that is within me, and everything inside my mind, with everywhere I've been and my dreams and my he breaks off, panting for breath. What are you doing? That feels amazing. So amazing and he looks down at his hips, at the place where the two of them conjoin, but her forefinger touches his chin and pushes his head back, so he is looking only at her face and at the ceiling once again. Keep talking, honey, she says. don't stop. doesn't it feel good? It feels better than anything has ever felt, he tells her, meaning it as he says it. Your eyes are stars, burning in the, shit, the firmament, and your lips are gentle waves that lick the sand, and I worship them, and now he's thrusting deeper and deeper inside her: he feels electric, as if his whole lower body has become sexually charged: priapic, engorged, blissful. Bring me your gift, he mutters, no longer knowing what he is saying, your one true gift, and make me always this always so I pray I And then the pleasure crests into orgasm, blasting his mind into void, his head and self and entire being a perfect blank as he thrusts deeper into her and deeper still Eyes closed, spasming, he luxuriates in the moment; and then he feels a lurch, and it seems to him that he is hanging, head down, although the pleasure continues. He opens his eyes. He thinks, grasping for thought and reason again, of birth, and wonders, without fear, in a moment of perfect postcoital clarity, whether what he sees is some kind of illusion. This is what he sees: He is inside her to the chest, and as he stares at this in disbelief and wonder she rests both hands upon his shoulders and puts gentle pressure on his body. He slipslides further inside her. How are you doing this to me? he asks, or he thinks he asks, but perhaps it is only in his head. you're doing it, honey, she whispers. He feels the lips of her vulva tight around his upper chest and back, constricting and enveloping him. He wonders what this would look like to somebody watching them. He wonders why he is not scared. And then he knows. I worship you with my body, he whispers, as she pushes him inside her. Her labia pull slickly across his face, and his eyes slip into darkness. She stretches on the bed, like a huge cat, and then she yawns. Yes, she says. You do. The Nokia phone plays a high, electrical transposition of the Ode to Joy. She picks it up, and thumbs a key, and puts the telephone to her ear. Her belly is flat, her labia small and closed. |
| 381 |
A sheen of sweat glistens on her forehead and on her upper lip. Yeah? she says. And then she says, No, honey, he's not here. he's gone away. She turns the telephone off before she flops out on the bed in the dark red room, then she stretches once more and she closes her eyes, and she sleeps. They took her to the cemetry In a big ol Cadillac They took her to the cemetry But they did not bring her back. Old Song I have taken the liberty, said Mr. Wednesday, washing his hands in the mens room of Jacks Crocodile Bar, of ordering food for myself, to be delivered to your table. We have much to discuss, after all. I don't think so, said Shadow. He dried his own hands on a paper towel and crumpled it, and dropped it into the bin. You need a job, said Wednesday. People don't hire ex-cons. You folk make them uncomfortable. I have a job waiting. A good job. Would that be the job at the Muscle Farm? Maybe, said Shadow. Nope. You don't. Robbie Burtons dead. Without him the Muscle Farms dead too. you're a liar. Of course. And a good one. The best you will ever meet. But, I'm afraid, I'm not lying to you about this. He reached into his pocket, produced a folded newspaper, and handed it to Shadow. Page seven, he said. Come on back to the bar. You can read it at the table. Shadow pushed open the door, back into the bar. The air was blue with smoke, and the Dixie Cups were on the jukebox singing Iko Iko. Shadow smiled, slightly, in recognition of the old childrens song. The barman pointed to a table in the corner. There was a bowl of chili and a burger at one side of the table, a rare steak and a bowl of fries laid in the place across from it. Look at my king all dressed in red, Iko Iko all day, I bet you five dollars hell kill you dead, Jockamo-feena-nay Shadow took his seat at the table. He put the newspaper down. This is my first meal as a free man. I'll wait until after I've eaten to read your page seven. Shadow ate his hamburger. It was better than prison hamburgers. The chili was good but, he decided, after a couple of mouthfuls, not the best in the state. Laura made a great chili. She used lean meat, dark kidney beans, carrots cut small, a bottle or so of dark beer, and freshly sliced hot peppers. She would let the chili cook for a while, then add red wine, lemon juice and a pitch of fresh dill, and, finally, measure out and add her chili powders. On more than one occasion Shadow had tried to get her to show him how she made it: he would watch everything she did, from slicing the onions and dropping them into the olive oil at the bottom of the pot. He had even written down the recipe, ingredient by ingredient, and he had once made Lauras chili for himself on a weekend when she had been out of town. It had tasted okay-it was certainly edible, but it had not been Lauras chili. The news item on page seven was the first account of his wifes death that Shadow had read. Laura Moon, whose age was given in the article as twenty-seven, and Robbie Burton, thirty-nine, were in Robbies car on the interstate when they swerved into the path of a thirty-two-wheeler. |
| 382 |
Shadow was about to take one, automaticallyhe did not smoke, but a cigarette makes good barter materialwhen he realized that he was no longer inside. He shook his head. You working for our man then? asked the bearded man. He was not sober, although he was not yet drunk. It looks that way, said Shadow. What do you do? The bearded man lit his cigarette. I'm a leprechaun, he said, with a grin. Shadow did not smile. Really? he said. shouldn't you be drinking Guinness? Stereotypes. You have to learn to think outside the box, said the bearded man. Theres a lot more to Ireland than Guinness. You don't have an Irish accent. I've been over here too fucken long. So you are originally from Ireland? I told you. I'm a leprechaun. We don't come from fucken Moscow. I guess not. Wednesday returned to the table, three drinks held easily in his pawlike hands. Southern Comfort and Coke for you, Mad Sweeney mman, and a Jack Daniels for me. And this is for you, Shadow. What is it? Taste it. The drink was a tawny golden color. Shadow took a sip, tasting an odd blend of sour and sweet on his tongue. He could taste the alcohol underneath, and a strange blend of flavors. It reminded him a little of prison hooch, brewed in a garbage bag from rotten fruit and bread and sugar and water, but it was sweeter, and far stranger. Okay, said Shadow. I tasted it. What was it? Mead, said Wednesday. Honey wine. The drink of heroes. The drink of the gods. Shadow took another tentative sip. Yes, he could taste the honey, he decided. That was one of the tastes. Tastes kinda like pickle juice, he said. Sweet pickle-juice wine. Tastes like a drunken diabetics piss, agreed Wednesday. I hate the stuff. Then why did you bring it for me? asked Shadow, reasonably. Wednesday stared at Shadow with his mismatched eyes. One of them, Shadow decided, was a glass eye, but he could not decide which one. I brought you mead to drink because its traditional. And right now we need all the tradition we can get. It seals our bargain. We haven't made a bargain. Sure we have. You work for me now. You protect me. You transport me from place to place. You run errands. In an emergency, but only in an emergency, you hurt people who need to be hurt. In the unlikely event of my death, you will hold my vigil. And in return I shall make sure that your needs are adequately taken care of. he's hustling you, said Mad Sweeney, rubbing his bristly ginger beard. he's a hustler. Damn straight I'm a hustler, said Wednesday. that's why I need someone to look out for my best interests. The song on the jukebox ended, and for a moment, the bar fell quiet, every conversation at a lull. Someone once told me that you only get those everybody-shuts-up-at-once moments at twenty past or twenty to the hour, said Shadow. Sweeney pointed to the clock above the bar, held in the massive and indifferent jaws of a stuffed alligator head. The time was 11:20. There, said Shadow. Damned if I know why that happens. I know why, said Wednesday. Drink your mead. |
| 383 |
Shadow knocked the rest of the mead back in one long gulp. It might be better over ice, he said. Or it might not, said Wednesday. Its terrible stuff. That it is, agreed Mad Sweeney. you'll excuse me for a moment, gentlemen, but I find myself in deep and urgent need of a lengthy piss. He stood up and walked away, an impossibly tall man. He had to be almost seven feet tall, decided Shadow. A waitress wiped a cloth across the table and took their empty plates. Wednesday told her to bring the same again for everyone, although this time Shadows mead was to be on the rocks. Anyway, said Wednesday, that's what I need of you. Would you like to know what I want? asked Shadow. Nothing could make me happier. The waitress brought the drink. Shadow sipped his mead on the rocks. The ice did not helpif anything it sharpened the sourness, and made the taste linger in the mouth after the mead was swallowed. However, Shadow consoled himself, it did not taste particularly alcoholic. He was not ready to be drunk. Not yet. He took a deep breath. Okay, said Shadow. My life, which for three years has been a long way from being the greatest life there has ever been, just took a distinct and sudden turn for the worse. Now there are a few things I need to do. I want to go to Lauras funeral. I want to say goodbye. I should wind up her stuff. If you still need me, I want to start at five hundred dollars a week. The figure was a stab in the dark. Wednesdays eyes revealed nothing. If were happy working together, in six months time you raise it to a thousand a week. He paused. It was the longest speech hed made in years. You say you may need people to be hurt. Well, I'll hurt people ifyou're trying to hurt you. But I don't hurt people for fun or for profit. I won't go back to prison. Once was enough. You won't have to, said Wednesday. No, said Shadow. I wont. He finished the last of the mead. He wondered, suddenly, somewhere in the back of his head, whether the mead was responsible for loosening his tongue. But the words were coming out of him like the water spraying from a broken fire hydrant in summer, and he could not have stopped them if he had tried. I don't like you, Mister Wednesday, or whatever your real name may be. We are not friends. I don't know how you got off that plane without me seeing you, or how you trailed me here. But I'm at a loose end right now. When were done, I'll be gone. And if you piss me off, I'll be gone too. Until then, I'll work for you. Very good, said Wednesday. Then we have a compact. And we are agreed. What the hell, said Shadow. Across the room, Mad Sweeney was feeding quarters into the jukebox. Wednesday spat in his hand and extended it. Shadow shrugged. He spat in his own palm. They clasped hands. Wednesday began to squeeze. Shadow squeezed back. After a few seconds his hand began to hurt. Wednesday held the grip a little longer, and then he let go. Good, he said. Good. Very good. So, one last glass of evil, vile fucking mead to seal our deal, and then we are done. |
| 384 |
Itll be a Southern Comfort and Coke for me, said Sweeney, lurching back from the jukebox. The jukebox began to play the Velvet Undergrounds Who Loves the Sun? Shadow thought it a strange song to find on a jukebox. It seemed very unlikely. But then, this whole evening had become increasingly unlikely. Shadow took the quarter he had used for the coin toss from the table, enjoying the sensation of a freshly milled coin against his fingers, producing it in his right hand between forefinger and thumb. He appeared to take it into his left hand in one smooth movement, while casually finger-palming it. He closed his left hand on the imaginary quarter. Then he took a second quarter in his right hand, between finger and thumb, and, as he pretended to drop that coin into the left hand, he let the palmed quarter fall into his right hand, striking the quarter he held there on the way. The chink confirmed the illusion that both coins were in his left hand, while they were now both held safely in his right. Coin tricks is it? asked Sweeney, his chin raising, his scruffy beard bristling. Why, if its coin tricks were doing, watch this. He took an empty glass from the table. Then he reached out and took a large coin, golden and shining, from the air. He dropped it into the glass. He took another gold coin from the air and tossed it into the glass, where it clinked against the first. He took a coin from the candle flame of a candle on the wall, another from his beard, a third from Shadows empty left hand, and dropped them, one by one, into the glass. Then he curled his fingers over the glass, and blew hard, and several more golden coins dropped into the glass from his hand. He tipped the glass of sticky coins into his jacket pocket, and then tapped the pocket to show, unmistakably, that it was empty. There, he said. that's a coin trick for you. Shadow, who had been watching closely, put his head on one side. I need to know how you did it. I did it, said Sweeney, with the air of one confiding a huge secret, with panache and style. that's how I did it. He laughed, silently, rocking on his heels, his gappy teeth bared. Yes, said Shadow. That is how you did it. Youve got to teach me. All the ways of doing the Misers Dream that I've read, youd be hiding the coins in the hand that holds the glass, and dropping them in while you produce and vanish the coin in your right hand. Sounds like a hell of a lot of work to me, said Mad Sweeney. Its easier just to pick them out of the air. Wednesday said, Mead for you, Shadow. I'll stick with Mister Jack Daniels, and for the freeloading Irishman? A bottled beer, something dark for preference, said Sweeney. Freeloader, is it? He picked up what was left of his drink, and raised it to Wednesday in a toast. May the storm pass over us, and leave us hale and unharmed, he said, and knocked the drink back. A fine toast, said Wednesday. But it wont. Another mead was placed in front of Shadow. Do I have to drink this? I'm afraid you do. It seals our deal. |
| 385 |
Third times the charm, eh? Shit, said Shadow. He swallowed the mead in two large gulps. The pickled-honey taste filled his mouth. There, said Mr. Wednesday. you're my man, now. So, said Sweeney, you want to know the trick of how its done? Yes, said Shadow. Were you loading them in your sleeve? They were never in my sleeve, said Sweeney. He chortled to himself, rocking and bouncing as if he were a lanky, bearded volcano preparing to erupt with delight at his own brilliance. Its the simplest trick in the world. I'll fight you for it. Shadow shook his head. I'll pass. Now theres a fine thing, said Sweeney to the room. Old Wednesday gets himself a bodyguard, and the fellers too scared to put up his fists, even. I won't fight you, agreed Shadow. Sweeney swayed and sweated. He fiddled with the peak of his baseball cap. Then he pulled one of his coins out of the air and placed it on the table. Real gold, if you were wondering, said Sweeney. Win or lose and you'll loseits yours if you fight me. A big fellow like youwhoda thought youd be a fucken coward? he's already said he won't fight you, said Wednesday. Go away, Mad Sweeney. Take your beer and leave us in peace. Sweeney took a step closer to Wednesday. Call me a freeloader, will you, you doomed old creature? You coldblooded, heartless old tree-hanger. His face was turning a deep, angry red. Wednesday put out his hands, palms up, pacific. Foolishness, Sweeney. Watch where you put your words. Sweeney glared at him. Then he said, with the gravity of the very drunk, Youve hired a coward. What would he do if I hurt you, do you think? Wednesday turned to Shadow. I've had enough of this, he said. Deal with it. Shadow got to his feet and looked up into Mad Sweeneys face: how tall was the man? he wondered. you're bothering us, he said. you're drunk. I think you ought to leave now. A slow smile spread over Sweeneys face. There, now, he said. He swung a huge fist at Shadow. Shadow jerked back: Sweeneys hand caught him beneath the right eye. He saw blotches of light, and felt pain. And with that, the fight began. Sweeney fought without style, without science, with nothing but enthusiasm for the fight itself: huge, barreling roundhouse blows that missed as often as they connected. Shadow fought defensively, carefully, blocking Sweeneys blows or avoiding them. He became very aware of the audience around them. Tables were pulled out of the way with protesting groans, making a space for the men to spar. Shadow was aware at all times of Wednesdays eyes upon him, of Wednesdays humorless grin. It was a test, that was obvious, but what kind of a test? In prison Shadow had learned there were two kinds of fights: don't fuck with me fights, where you made it as showy and impressive as you could, and private fights, real fights, which were fast and hard and nasty, and always over in seconds. Hey, Sweeney, said Shadow, breathless, why are we fighting? For the joy of it, said Sweeney, sober now, or at least, no longer visibly drunk. |
| 386 |
Her voice was distant and detached. Let me out yesterday. I'm a free man, said Shadow. What the hell was that all about? She stopped in the dark corridor. The violets? They were always her favorite flower. When we were girls we used to pick them together. Not the violets. Oh, that, she said. She wiped a speck of something invisible from the corner of her mouth. Well, I would have thought that was obvious. Not to me, Audrey. They didn't tell you? Her voice was calm, emotionless. Your wife died with my husbands cock in her mouth, Shadow. He went back in to the funeral home. Someone had already wiped away the spit. * * * After lunchShadow ate at the Burger Kingwas the burial. Lauras cream-colored coffin was interred in the small nondenominational cemetery on the edge of town: un-fenced, a hilly woodland meadow filled with black granite and white marble headstones. He rode to the cemetery in the Wendells hearse, with Lauras mother. Mrs. McCabe seemed to feel that Lauras death was Shadows fault. If youd been here, she said, this would never have happened. I don't know why she married you. I told her. Time and again, I told her. But they don't listen to their mothers, do they? She stopped, looked more closely at Shadows face. Have you been fighting? Yes, he said. Barbarian, she said, then she set her mouth, raised her head so her chins quivered, and stared straight ahead of her. To Shadows surprise Audrey Burton was also at the funeral, standing toward the back. The short service ended, the casket was lowered into the cold ground. The people went away. Shadow did not leave. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, shivering, staring at the hole in the ground. Above him the sky was iron gray, featureless and flat as a mirror. It continued to snow, erratically, in ghostlike tumbling flakes. There was something he wanted to say to Laura, and he was prepared to wait until he knew what it was. The world slowly began to lose light and color. Shadows feet were going numb, while his hands and face hurt from the cold. He burrowed his hands into his pockets for warmth, and his fingers closed about the gold coin. He walked over to the grave. This is for you, he said. Several shovels of earth had been emptied onto the casket, but the hole was far from full. He threw the gold coin into the grave with Laura, then he pushed more earth into the hole, to hide the coin from acquisitive grave diggers. He brushed the earth from his hands and said, Good night, Laura. Then he said, I'm sorry. He turned his face toward the lights of the town, and began to walk back into Eagle Point. His motel was a good two miles away, but after spending three years in prison he was relishing the idea that he could simply walk and walk, forever if need be. He could keep walking north, and wind up in Alaska, or head south, to Mexico and beyond. He could walk to Patagonia, or to Tierra del Fuego. A car drew up beside him. The window hummed down. You want a lift, Shadow? asked Audrey Burton. |
| 387 |
No, he said. And not from you. He continued to walk. Audrey drove beside him at three miles an hour. Snowflakes danced in the beams of her headlights. I thought she was my best friend, said Audrey. Wed talk every day. When Robbie and I had a fight, shed be the first one to knowwed go down to Chi-Chis for margaritas and to talk about what scumpots men can be. And all the time she was fucking him behind my back. Please go away, Audrey. I just want you to know I had good reason for what I did. He said nothing. Hey! she shouted. Hey! I'm talking to you! Shadow turned. Do you want me to tell you that you were right when you spit in Lauras face? Do you want me to say it didn't hurt? Or that what you told me made me hate her more than I miss her? Its not going to happen, Audrey. She drove beside him for another minute, not saying anything. Then she said, So, how was prison, Shadow? It was fine, said Shadow. You would have felt right at home. She put her foot down on the gas then, making the engine roar, and drove on and away. With the headlights gone, the world was dark. Twilight faded into night. Shadow kept expecting the act of walking to warm him, to spread warmth through his icy hands and feet. It didn't happen. Back in prison, Low Key Lyesmith had once referred to the little prison cemetery out behind the infirmary as the Bone Orchard, and the image had taken root in Shadows mind. That night he had dreamed of an orchard under the moonlight, of skeletal white trees, their branches ending in bony hands, their roots going deep down into the graves. There was fruit that grew upon the trees in the bone orchard, in his dream, and there was something very disturbing about the fruit in the dream, but on waking he could no longer remember what strange fruit grew oh the trees, nor why he found it so repellent. Cars passed him. Shadow wished that there was a sidewalk. He tripped on something that he could not see in the dark and sprawled into the ditch on the side of the road, his right hand sinking into several inches of cold mud. He climbed to his feet and wiped his hands on the leg of his pants. He stood there, awkwardly. He had only enough time to observe that there was someone beside him before something wet was forced over his nose and mouth, and he tasted harsh, chemical fumes. This time the ditch seemed warm and comforting. * * * Shadows temples felt as if they had been reattached to the rest of his skull with roofing nails. His hands were bound behind his back with what felt like some kind of straps. He was in a car, sitting on leather upholstery. For a moment he wondered if there was something wrong with his depth perception and then he understood that, no, the other seat really was that far away. There were people sitting beside him, but he could not turn to look at them. The fat young man at the other end of the stretch limo took a can of diet Coke from the cocktail bar and popped it open. He wore a long black coat, made of some silky material, and he appeared barely out of his teens: a spattering of acne glistened on one cheek. |
| 388 |
He smiled when he saw that Shadow was awake. Hello, Shadow, he said. don't fuck with me. Okay, said Shadow. I wont. Can you drop me off at the Motel America, up by the interstate? Hit him, said the young man to the person on Shadows left. A punch was delivered to Shadows solar plexus, knocking the breath from him, doubling him over. He straightened up, slowly. I said don't fuck with me. That was fucking with me. Keep your answers short and to the point or I'll fucking kill you. Or maybe I won't kill you. Maybe I'll have the children break every bone in your fucking body. There are two hundred and six of them. So don't fuck with me. Got it, said Shadow. The ceiling lights in the limo changed color from violet to blue, then to green and to yellow. you're working for Wednesday, said the young man. Yes, said Shadow. What the fuck is he after? I mean, whats he doing here? He must have a plan. Whats the game plan? I started working for Mister Wednesday this morning, said Shadow. I'm an errand boy. you're saying you don't know? I'm saying I don't know. The boy opened his jacket and took out a silver cigarette case from an inside pocket. He opened it, and offered a cigarette to Shadow. Smoke? Shadow thought about asking for his hands to be untied, out decided against it. No, thank you, he said. The cigarette appeared to have been hand-rolled, and when the boy lit it, with a matte black Zippo lighter, it smelled a little like burning electrical parts. The boy inhaled deeply, then held his breath. He let the smoke trickle out from his mouth, pulled it back into his nostrils. Shadow suspected that he had practiced that in front of a mirror for a while before doing it in public. If youve lied to me, said the boy, as if from a long way away, I'll fucking kill you. You know that. So you said. The boy took another long drag on his cigarette. You sayyou're staying at the Motel America? He tapped on the drivers window, behind him. The glass window lowered. Hey. Motel America, up by the interstate. We need to drop off our guest. The driver nodded, and the glass rose up again. The glinting fiber-optic lights inside the limo continued to change, cycling through their set of dim colors. It seemed to Shadow that the boys eyes were glinting too, the green of an antique computer monitor. You tell Wednesday this, man. You tell him he's history. he's forgotten. he's old. Tell him that we are the future and we don't give a fuck about him or anyone like him. He has been consigned to the Dumpster of history while people like me ride our limos down the superhighway of tomorrow. I'll tell him, said Shadow. He was beginning to feel lightheaded. He hoped that he was not going to be sick. Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I'll fucking kill you, said the young man mildly, from the smoke. Got it, said Shadow. You can let me out here. |
| 389 |
I can walk the rest of the way. The young man nodded. Good talking to you, he said. The smoke had mellowed him. You should know that if we do fucking kill you, then well just delete you. You got that? One click andyou're overwritten with random ones and zeros. Undelete is not an option. He tapped on the window behind him. he's getting off here, he said. Then he turned back to Shadow, pointed to his cigarette. Synthetic toad skins, he said. You know they can synthesize bufotenin now? The car stopped, and the door was opened. Shadow climbed out awkwardly. His bonds were cut. Shadow turned around. The inside of the car had become one writhing cloud of smoke in which two lights glinted, now copper-colored, like the beautiful eyes of a toad. Its all about the dominant fucking paradigm, Shadow. Nothing else is important. And hey, sorry to hear about your old lady. The door closed, and the stretch limo drove off, quietly. Shadow was a couple of hundred yards away from his motel, and he walked there, breathing the cold air, past red and yellow and blue lights advertising every kind of fast food a man could imagine, as long as it was a hamburger; and he reached the Motel America without incident. Every hour wounds. The last one kills. Old Saying There was a thin young woman behind the counter at the Motel America. She told Shadow he had already been checked in by his friend, and gave him his rectangular plastic room key. She had pale blonde hair and a rodentlike quality to her face that was most apparent when she looked suspicious, and eased when she smiled. She refused to tell him Wednesdays room number, and insisted on telephoning Wednesday on the house phone to let him know his guest was here. Wednesday came out of a room down the hall, and beckoned to Shadow. How was the funeral? he asked. Its over, said Shadow. You want to talk about it? No, said Shadow. Good. Wednesday grinned. Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence. Wednesday led the way back to his room, which was across the hall from Shadows. There were maps all over the room, unfolded, spread out on the bed, taped to the walls. Wednesday had drawn all over the maps in bright marking pens, fluorescent greens and painful pinks and vivid oranges. I got hijacked by a fat kid, said Shadow. He says to tell you that you have been consigned to the dungheap of history while people like him ride in their limos down the superhighways of life. Something like that. Little snot, said Wednesday. You know him? Wednesday shrugged. I know who he is. He sat down, heavily, on the rooms only chair. They don't have a clue, he said. They don't have a fucking clue. How much longer do you need to stay in town? I don't know. Maybe another week. I guess I need to wrap up Lauras affairs. Take care of the apartment, get rid of her clothes, all that. Itll drive her mother nuts, but the woman deserves it. Wednesday nodded his huge head. Well, the sooneryou're done, the sooner we can move out of Eagle Point. |
| 390 |
Goodnight. Shadow walked across the hall. His room was a duplicate of Wednesdays room, down to the print of a bloody sunset on the wall above the bed. He ordered a cheese and meatball pizza, then he ran a bath, pouring all the motels little plastic bottles of shampoo into the water, making it foam. He was too big to lie down in the bathtub, but he sat in it and luxuriated as best he could. Shadow had promised himself a bath when he got out of prison, and Shadow kept his promises. The pizza arrived shortly after he got out of the bath, and Shadow ate it, washing it down with a can of root beer. Shadow lay in bed, thinking, This is my first bed as a free man, and the thought gave him less pleasure than he had imagined that it would. He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted. Shadow could have been in his bed at home, he thought, in the apartment that he had shared with Laurain the bed that he had shared with Laura. But the thought of being there without her, surrounded by her things, her scent, her life, was simply too painful don't go there, thought Shadow. He decided to think about something else. He thought about coin tricks. Shadow knew that he did not have the personality to be a magician: he could not weave the stories that were so necessary for belief, nor did he wish to do card tricks, nor produce paper flowers. But he just wanted to manipulate coins; he liked the craft of it. He started to list the coin vanishes he had mastered, which reminded him of the coin he had tossed into Lauras grave, and then, in his head, Audrey was telling him that Laura had died with Robbies cock in her mouth, and once again he felt a small hurt in his heart. Every hour wounds. The last one kills. Where had he heard that? He thought of Wednesdays comment and smiled, despite himself: Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all. Sleep took him then, without Shadow noticing. He was walking He was walking through a room bigger than a city, and everywhere he looked there were statues and carvings and rough-hewn images. He was standing beside a statue of a womanlike thing: her naked breasts hung flat and pendulous on her chest, around her waist was a chain of severed hands, both of her own hands held sharp knives, and, instead of a head, rising from her neck there were twin serpents, their bodies arched, facing each other, ready to attack. There was something profoundly disturbing about the statue, a deep and violent wrongness. Shadow backed away from it. He began to walk through the hall. The carved eyes of those statues that had eyes seemed to follow his every step. |
| 391 |
In his dream, he realized that each statue had a name burning on the floor in front of it. The man with the white hair, with a necklace of teeth about his neck, holding a drum, was Leucotios; the broad-hipped woman with monsters dropping from the vast gash between her legs was Hubur; the ram-headed man holding the golden ball was Hershef. A precise voice, fussy and exact, was speaking to him, in his dream, but he could see no one. These are gods who have been forgotten, and now might as well be dead. They can be found only in dry histories. They are gone, all gone, but their names and their images remain with us. Shadow turned a corner, and knew himself to be in another room, even vaster than the first. It went on farther than the eye could see. Close to him was the skull of a mammoth, polished and brown, and a hairy ocher cloak, being worn by a small woman with a deformed left hand. Next to that were three women, each carved from the same granite boulder, joined at the waist: their faces had an unfinished, hasty look to them, although their breasts and genitalia had been carved with elaborate care; and there was a flightless bird which Shadow did not recognize, twice his height, with a beak like a vultures, but with human arms: and on, and on. The voice spoke once more, as if it were addressing a class, saying, These are the gods who have passed out of memory. Even their names are lost. The people who worshiped them are as forgotten as their gods. Their totems are long since broken and cast down. Their last priests died without passing on their secrets. Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end. There was a whispering noise that began then to run through the hall, a low susurrus that caused Shadow, in his dream, to experience a chilling and inexplicable fear. An all-engulfing panic took him, there in the halls of the gods whose very existence had been forgottenoctopus-faced gods and gods who were only mummified hands or falling rocks or forest fires Shadow woke with his heart jackhammering in his chest, his forehead clammy, entirely awake. The red numerals on the bedside clock told him the time was 1:03 A. M. The light of the Motel America sign outside shone through his bedroom window. Disoriented, Shadow got up and walked into the tiny motel bathroom. He pissed without turning on the lights, and returned to the bedroom. The dream was still fresh and vivid in his minds eye, but he could not explain to himself why it had scared him so. The light that came into the room from outside was not bright, but Shadows eyes had become used to the dark. There was a woman sitting on the side of his bed. He knew her. He would have known her in a crowd of a thousand, or of a hundred thousand. She was still wearing the navy blue suit they had buried her in. Her voice was a whisper, but a familiar line. I guess, said Laura, you're going to ask what I'm doing here. |
| 392 |
Shadow said nothing. He sat down on the rooms only chair and, finally, asked, Is that you? Yes, she said. I'm cold, puppy. you're dead, babe. Yes, she said. Yes. I am. She patted the bed next to her. Come and sit by me, she said. No, said Shadow. I think I'll stay right here for now. We have some unresolved issues to address. Like me being dead? Possibly, but I was thinking more of how you died. You and Robbie. Oh, she said. That. Shadow could smellor perhaps, he thought, he simply imagined that he smelledan odor of rot, of flowers and preservatives. His wifehis ex-wife no, he corrected himself, his late wifesat on the bed and stared at him, unblinking. Puppy, she said. Could youdo you think you could possibly get mea cigarette? I thought you gave them up. I did, she said. But I'm no longer concerned about the health risks. And I think it would calm my nerves. Theres a machine in the lobby. Shadow pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt and went, barefoot, into the lobby. The night clerk was a middle-aged man, reading a book by John Grisham. Shadow bought a pack of Virginia Slims from the machine. He asked the night clerk for a book of matches. you're in a nonsmoking room, said the clerk. You make sure you open the window, now. He passed Shadow a book of matches and a plastic ashtray with the Motel America logo on it. Got it, said Shadow. He went back into his bedroom. She had stretched out now, on top of his rumpled covers. Shadow opened the window and then passed her the cigarettes and the matches. Her fingers were cold. She lit a match and he saw that her nails, usually pristine, were battered and chewed, and there was mud under them. Laura lit the cigarette, inhaled, blew out the match. She took another puff. I cant taste it, she said. I don't think this is doing anything. I'm sorry, he said. Me too, said Laura. When she inhaled the cigarette tip glowed, and he was able to see her face. So, she said. They let you out. Yes. The tip of the cigarette glowed orange. I'm still grateful. I should never have got you mixed up in it. Well, he said, I agreed to do it. I could have said no. He wondered why he wasnt scared of her: why a dream of a museum could leave him terrified, while he seemed to be coping with a walking corpse without fear. Yes, she said. You could have. You big galoot. Smoke wreathed her face. She was very beautiful in the dim light. You want to know about me and Robbie? I guess. She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. You were in prison, she said. And I needed someone to talk to. I needed a shoulder to cry on. You werent there. I was upset. I'm sorry. Shadow realized something was different about her voice, and he tried to figure out what it was. I know. So wed meet for coffee. Talk about what wed do when you got out of prison. How good it would be to see you again. He really liked you, you know. He was looking forward to giving you back your old job. Yes. And then Audrey went to visit her sister for a week. This was, oh, a year, thirteen months after youd gone away. |
| 393 |
Her voice lacked expression; each word was flat and dull, like pebbles dropped, one by one, into a deep well. Robbie came over. We got drunk together. We did it on the floor of the bedroom. It was good. It was really good. I didn't need to hear that. No? I'm sorry. Its harder to pick and choose whenyou're dead. Its like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much. It matters to me. Laura lit another cigarette. Her movements were fluid and competent, not stiff. Shadow wondered, for a moment, if she was dead at all. Perhaps this was some kind of elaborate trick. Yes, she said. I see that. Well, we carried on our affairalthough we didn't call it that, we did not call it anythingfor most of the last two years. Were you going to leave me for him? Why would I do that? you're my big bear. you're my puppy. You did what you did for me. I waited three years for you to come back to me. I love you. He stopped himself from saying I love you, too. He wasnt going to say that. Not anymore. So what happened the other night? The night I was killed? Yes. Well, Robbie and I went out to talk about your welcome-back surprise party. It would have been so good. And I told him that we were done. Finished. That now that you were back that was the way it had to be. Mm. Thank you, babe. you're welcome, darling. The ghost of a smile crossed her face. We got maudlin. It was sweet. We got stupid. I got very drunk. He didn't. He had to drive. We were driving home and I announced that I was going to give him a goodbye blowjob, one last time with feeling, and I unzipped his pants, and I did. Big mistake. Tell me about it. I knocked the gearshift with my shoulder, and then Robbie was trying to push me out of the way to put the car back in gear, and we were swerving, and there was a loud crunch and I remember the world started to roll and to spin, and I thought, I'm going to die. It was very dispassionate. I remember that. I wasnt scared. And then I don't remember anything more. There was a smell like burning plastic. It was the cigarette, Shadow realized: it had burned down to the filter. Laura did not seem to have noticed. What are you doing here, Laura? Cant a wife come and see her husband? you're dead. I went to your funeral this afternoon. Yes. She stopped talking, stared into nothing. Shadow stood up and walked over to her. He took the smoldering cigarette butt from her fingers and threw it out of the window. Well? Her eyes sought his. I don't know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn't know then I cant put into words. Normally people who die stay in their graves, said Shadow. Do they? Do they really, puppy? I used to think they did too. Now I'm not so sure. Perhaps. She climbed off the bed and walked over to the window. Her face, in the light of the motel sign, was as beautiful as it had ever been. The face of the woman he had gone to prison for. His heart hurt in his chest as if someone had taken it in a fist and squeezed. Laura? |
| 394 |
She did not look at him. Youve gotten yourself mixed up in some bad things, Shadow. you're going to screw it up, if someone isn't there to watch out for you. I'm watching out for you. And thank you for my present. What present? She reached into the pocket of her blouse, and pulled out the gold coin he had thrown into the grave earlier that day. There was still black dirt on it. I may have it put on a chain. It was very sweet of you. you're welcome. She turned then and looked at him with eyes that seemed both to see and not to see him. I think there are several aspects of our marriage were going to have to work on. Babes, he told her. you're dead. that's one of those aspects, obviously. She paused. Okay, she said. I'm going now. It will be better if I go. And, naturally and easily, she turned and put her hands on Shadows shoulders, and went up on tiptoes to kiss him goodbye, as she had always kissed him goodbye. Awkwardly he bent to kiss her on the cheek, but she moved her mouth as he did so and pushed her lips against his. Her breath smelled, faintly, of mothballs. Lauras tongue flickered into Shadows mouth. It was cold, and dry, and it tasted of cigarettes and of bile. If Shadow had had any doubts as to whether his wife was dead or not, they ended then. He pulled back. I love you, she said, simply. I'll be looking out for you. She walked over to the motel room door. There was a strange taste in his mouth. Get some sleep, puppy, she told him. And stay out of trouble. She opened the door to the hall. The fluorescent light in the hallway was not kind: beneath it, Laura looked dead, but then, it did that to everyone. You could have asked me to stay the night, she said, in her cold-stone voice. I don't think I could, said Shadow. You will, hon, she said. Before all this is over. You will. She turned away from him, and walked down the corridor. Shadow looked out of the doorway. The night clerk kept on reading his John Grisham novel, and barely looked up as she walked past him. There was thick graveyard mud clinging to her shoes. And then she was gone. Shadow breathed out, a slow sigh. His heart was pounding arrhythmically in his chest. He walked across the hall and knocked on Wednesdays door. As he knocked he got the weirdest notion, that he was being buffeted by black wings, as if an enormous crow was flying through him, out into the hall and the world beyond. Wednesday opened the door. He had a white motel towel wrapped around his waist, but was otherwise naked. What the hell do you want? he asked. Something you should know, said Shadow. Maybe it was a dreambut it wasntor maybe I inhaled some of the fat kids synthetic toad-skin smoke, or probably I'm just going mad Yeah, yeah. Spit it out, said Wednesday. I'm kind of in the middle of something here. Shadow glanced into the room. He could see that there was someone in the bed, watching him. A sheet pulled up over small breasts. Pale blonde hair, something rattish about the face. He lowered his voice. I just saw my wife, he said. |
| 395 |
She was in my room. A ghost, you mean? You saw a ghost? No. Not a ghost. She was solid. It was her. she's dead all right, but it wasnt any kind of a ghost. I touched her. She kissed me. I see. Wednesday darted a look at the woman in the bed. Be right back, mdear, he said. They crossed the hall to Shadows room. Wednesday turned on the lamps. He looked at the cigarette butt in the ashtray. He scratched his chest. His nipples were dark, old-man nipples, and his chest hair was grizzled. There was a white scar down one side of his torso. He sniffed the air. Then he shrugged. Okay, he said. So your dead wife showed up. You scared? A little. Very wise. The dead always give me the screaming mimis. Anything else? I'm ready to leave Eagle Point. Lauras mother can sort out the apartment, all that. She hates me anyway. I'm ready to go when you are. Wednesday smiled. Good news, my boy. Well leave in the morning. Now, you should get some sleep. I have some scotch in my room, if you need help sleeping. Yes? No. I'll be fine. Then do not disturb me further. I have a long night ahead of me. Good night, said Shadow. Exactly, said Wednesday, and he closed the door as he went out. Shadow sat down on the bed. The smell of cigarettes and preservatives lingered in the air. He wished that he were mourning Laura: it seemed more appropriate than being troubled by her or, he admitted it to himself now that she had gone, just a little scared by her. It was time to mourn. He turned the lights out, and lay on the bed, and thought of Laura as she was before he went to prison. He remembered their marriage when they were young and happy and stupid and unable to keep their hands off each other. It had been a very long time since Shadow had cried, so long he thought he had forgotten how. He had not even wept when his mother died. But he began to cry now, in painful, lurching sobs, and for the first time since he was a small boy, Shadow cried himself to sleep. Coming To America A. D. 813 They navigated the green sea by the stars and by the shore, and when the shore was only a memory and the night sky was overcast and dark they navigated by faith, and they called on the All-Father to bring them safely to land once more. A bad journey they had of it, their fingers numb and with a shiver in their bones that not even wine could burn off. They would wake in the morning to see that the hoarfrost had touched their beards, and, until the sun warmed them, they looked like old men, white-bearded before their time. Teeth were loosening and eyes were deep-sunken in their sockets when they made landfall on the green land to the west. The men said, We are far, far from our homes and our hearths, far from the seas we know and the lands we love. Here on the edge of the world we will be forgotten by our gods. Their leader clambered to the top of a great rock, and he mocked them for their lack of faith. The All-Father made the world, he shouted. He built it with his hands from the shattered bones and the flesh of Ymir, his grandfather. |
| 396 |
And, the next day, when two huge ravens landed upon the scraelings corpse, one on each shoulder, and commenced to peck at its cheeks and eyes, the men knew their sacrifice had been accepted. It was a long winter, and they were hungry, but they were cheered by the thought that, when spring came, they would send the boat back to the northlands, and it would bring settlers, and bring women. As the weather became colder, and the days became shorter, some of the men took to searching for the scraeling village, hoping to find food, and women. They found nothing, save for the places where fires had been, where small encampments had been abandoned. One midwinters day, when the sun was as distant and cold as a dull silver coin, they saw that the remains of the scraelings body had been removed from the ash tree. That afternoon it began to snow, in huge, slow flakes. The men from the northlands closed the gates of their encampment, retreated behind their wooden wall. The scraeling war party fell upon them that night: five hundred men to thirty. They climbed the wall, and over the following seven days, they killed each of the thirty men, in thirty different ways. And the sailors were forgotten, by history and their people. The wall they tore down, the war party, and the village they burned. The longboat, upside down and pulled high on the shingle, they also burned, hoping that the pale strangers had but one boat, and that by burning it they were ensuring that no other Northmen would come to their shores. It was more than a hundred years before Leif the Fortunate, son of Erik the Red, rediscovered that land, which he would call Vineland. His gods were already waiting for him when he arrived: Tyr, one-handed, and gray Odin gallows-god, and Thor of the thunders. They were there. They were waiting. Let the Midnight Special Shine its light on me Let the Midnight Special Shine its ever-lovin light on me. The Midnight Special, Traditional Shadow and Wednesday ate breakfast at a Country Kitchen across the street from their motel. It was eight in the morning, and the world was misty and chill. You still ready to leave Eagle Point? asked Wednesday. I have some calls to make, if you are. Friday today. Fridays a free day. A womans day. Saturday tomorrow. Much to do on Saturday. I'm ready, said Shadow. Nothing keeping me here. Wednesday heaped his plate high with several kinds of breakfast meats. Shadow took some melon, a bagel, and a packet of cream cheese. They went and sat down in a booth. That was some dream you had last night, said Wednesday. Yes, said Shadow. It was. Lauras muddy footprints had been visible on the motel carpet when he got up that morning, leading from his bedroom to the lobby and out the door. So, said Wednesday. Whyd they call you Shadow? Shadow shrugged. Its a name, he said. Outside the plate glass the world in the mist had become a pencil drawing executed in a dozen different grays with, here and there, a smudge of electric red or pure white. Howd you lose your eye? |
| 397 |
Wednesday shoveled half a dozen pieces of bacon into his mouth, chewed, wiped the fat from his lips with the back of his hand. didn't lose it, he said. I still know exactly where it is. So whats the plan? Wednesday looked thoughtful. He ate several vivid pink slices of ham, picked a fragment of meat from his beard, dropped it onto his plate. Plan is as follows. Tomorrow night we shall be meeting with a number of persons preeminent in their respective fieldsdo not let their demeanor intimidate you. We shall meet at one of the most important places in the entire country. Afterward we shall wine and dine them. I need to enlist them in my current enterprise. And where is this most important place? you'll see, mboy. I said one of them. Opinions are justifiably divided. I have sent word to my colleagues. Well stop off in Chicago on the way, as I need to pick up some money. Entertaining, in the manner we shall need to entertain, will take more ready cash than I currently have available. Then on to Madison. Wednesday paid and they left, walked back across the road to the motel parking lot. Wednesday tossed Shadow the car keys. He drove down to the freeway and out of town. You going to miss it? asked Wednesday. He was sorting through a folder filled with maps. The town? No. I didn't really ever have a life here. I was never in one place too long as a kid, and I didn't get here until I was in my twenties. So this town is Lauras. Lets hope she stays here, said Wednesday. It was a dream, said Shadow. Remember. that's good, said Wednesday. Healthy attitude to have. Did you fuck her last night? Shadow took a breath. Then, That is none of your damn business. And no. Did you want to? Shadow said nothing at all. He drove north, toward Chicago. Wednesday chuckled, and began to pore over his maps, unfolding and refolding them, making occasional notes on a yellow legal pad with a large silver ballpoint pen. Eventually he was finished. He put his pen away, put the folder on the backseat. The best thing about the states were heading for, said Wednesday, Minnesota, Wisconsin, all around there, is they have the kind of women I liked when I was younger. Pale-skinned and blue-eyed, hair so fair its almost white, wine-colored lips, and round, full breasts with the veins running through them like a good cheese. Only when you were younger? asked Shadow. Looked like you were doing pretty good last night. Yes. Wednesday smiled. Would you like to know the secret of my success? You pay them? Nothing so crude. No, the secret is charm. Pure and simple. Charm, huh? Well, like they say, you either got it or you aint. Charms can be learned, said Wednesday. Shadow tuned the radio to an oldies station, and listened to songs that were current before he was born. Bob Dylan sang about a hard rain that was going to fall, and Shadow wondered if that rain had fallen yet, or if it was something that was still going to happen. The road ahead of them was empty and the ice crystals on the asphalt glittered like diamonds in the morning sun. |
| 398 |
* * * Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city. They parked outside a squat black brownstone. The sidewalk was clear of snow. They walked to the lobby. Wednesday pressed the top button on the gouged metal intercom box. Nothing happened. He pressed it again. Then, experimentally, he began to press the other buttons, for other tenants, with no response. Its dead, said a gaunt old woman, coming down the steps. doesn't work. We call the super, ask him when he going to fix, when he going to mend the heating, he does not care, goes to Arizona for the winter for his chest. Her accent was thick, Eastern European, Shadow guessed. Wednesday bowed low. Zorya, my dear, may I say how unutterably beautiful you look? A radiant creature. You have not aged. The old woman glared at him. He don't want to see you. I don't want to see you neither. You bad news. that's because I don't come if it isn't important. The woman sniffed. She carried an empty string shopping bag, and wore an old red coat, buttoned up to her chin. She looked at Shadow suspiciously. Who is the big man? she asked Wednesday. Another one of your murderers? You do me a deep disservice, good lady. This gentleman is called Shadow. He is working for me, yes, but on your behalf. Shadow, may I introduce you to the lovely Miss Zorya Vechernyaya. Good to meet you, said Shadow. Birdlike, the old woman peered up at him. Shadow, she said. A good name. When the shadows are long, that is my time. And you are the long shadow. She looked him up and down, then she smiled. You may kiss my hand, she said, and extended a cold hand to him. Shadow bent down and kissed her thin hand. She had a large amber ring on her middle finger. Good boy, she said. I am going to buy groceries. You see, I am the only one of us who brings in any money. The other two cannot make money fortune-telling. This is because they only tell the truth, and the truth is not what people want to hear. It is a bad thing, and it troubles people, so they do not come back. But I can lie to them, tell them what they want to hear. So I bring home the bread. Do you think you will be here for supper? I would hope so, said Wednesday. Then you had better give me some money to buy more food, she said. I am proud, but I am not stupid. The others are prouder than I am, and he is the proudest of all. So give me money and do not tell them that you give me money. Wednesday opened his wallet, and reached in. He took out a twenty. Zorya Vechernyaya plucked it from his fingers, and waited. He took out another twenty and gave it to her. Is good, she said. We will feed you like princes. Now, go up the stairs to the top. Zorya Utrennyaya is awake, but our other sister is still asleep, so do not be making too much noise. Shadow and Wednesday climbed the dark stairs. The landing two stories up was half filled with black plastic garbage bags and it smelled of rotting vegetables. |
| 399 |
Are they gypsies? asked Shadow. Zorya and her family? Not at all. you're not Rom. you're Russian. Slavs, I believe. But she does fortune-telling. Lots of people do fortune-telling. I dabble in it myself. Wednesday was panting as they went up the final flight of stairs. I'm out of shape. The landing at the top of the stairs ended in a single door painted red, with a peephole in it. Wednesday knocked at the door. There was no response. He knocked again, louder this time. Okay! Okay! I heard you! I heard you! The sound of locks being undone, of bolts being pulled, the rattle of a chain. The red door opened a crack. Who is it? A mans voice, old and cigarette-roughened. An old friend, Czernobog. With an associate. The door opened as far as the security chain would allow. Shadow could see a gray face, in the shadows, peering out at them. What do you want, Votan? Initially, simply the pleasure of your company. And I have information to share. Whats that phrase? Oh yes. You may learn something to your advantage. The door opened all the way. The man in the dusty bathrobe was short, with iron-gray hair and craggy features. He wore gray pinstripe pants, shiny from age, and slippers. He held an unfiltered cigarette with square-tipped fingers, sucking the tip while keeping it cupped in his fistlike a convict, thought Shadow, or a soldier. He extended his left hand to Wednesday. Welcome then, Votan. They call me Wednesday these days, he said, shaking the old mans hand. A narrow smile; a flash of yellow teeth. Yes, he said. Very funny. And this is? This is my associate. Shadow, meet Mr. Czernobog. Well met, said Czernobog. He shook Shadows left hand with his own. His hands were rough and callused, and the tips of his fingers were as yellow as if they had been dipped in iodine. How do you do, Mr. Czernobog? I do old. My guts ache, and my back hurts, and I cough my chest apart every morning. Why you are standing at the door? asked a womans voice. Shadow looked over Czernobogs shoulder, at the old woman standing behind him. She was smaller and frailer than her sister, but her hair was long and still golden. I am Zorya Utrennyaya, she said. You must not stand there in the hall. You must go in, sit down. I will bring you coffee. Through the doorway into an apartment that smelled like overboiled cabbage and cat box and unfiltered foreign cigarettes, and they were ushered through a tiny hallway past several closed doors to the sitting room at the far end of the corridor, and were seated on a huge old horsehair sofa, disturbing an elderly gray cat in the process, who stretched, stood up, and walked, stiffly, to a distant part of the sofa, where he lay down, warily stared at each of them in turn, then closed one eye and went back to sleep. Czernobog sat in an armchair across from them. Zorya Utrennyaya found an empty ashtray and placed it beside Czernobog. How you want your coffee? she asked her guests. Here we take it black as night, sweet as sin. Thatll be fine, maam, said Shadow. |
| 400 |
I shall play black. Wednesday touched Shadows arm. You don't have to do this, you know, he said. Not a problem. I want to, said Shadow. Wednesday shrugged, and picked up an old copy of Readers Digest from a small pile of yellowing magazines on the windowsill. Czernobogs brown fingers finished arranging the pieces on the squares, and the game began. * * * In the days that were to come, Shadow often found himself remembering that game. Some nights he dreamed of it. His flat, round pieces were the color of old, dirty wood, nominally white. Czernobogs were a dull, faded black. Shadow was the first to move. In his dreams, there was no conversation as they played, just the loud click as the pieces were put down, or the hiss of wood against wood as they were slid from square to adjoining square. For the first half dozen moves each of the men slipped pieces out onto the board, into the center, leaving the back rows untouched. There were pauses between the moves, long, chesslike pauses, while each man watched, and thought. Shadow had played checkers in prison: it passed the time. He had played chess, too, but he was not temperamentally suited to planning ahead. He preferred picking the perfect move for the moment. You could win in checkers like that, sometimes. There was a click as Czernobog picked up a black piece and jumped it over one of Shadows white pieces. The old man picked up Shadows white piece and put it on the table at the side of the board. First blood. You have lost, said Czernobog. The game is done. No, said Shadow. Games got a long way to go yet. Then would you care for a wager? A little side bet, to make it more interesting? No, said Wednesday, without looking up from a Humor in Uniform column. He wouldnt. I am not playing with you, old man. I play with him. So, you want to bet on the game, Mister Shadow? What were you two arguing about, before? asked Shadow. Czernobog raised a craggy eyebrow. Your master wants me to come with him. To help him with his nonsense. I would rather die. You want to bet? Okay. If I win, you come with us. The old man pursed his lips. Perhaps, he said. But only if you take my forfeit, when you lose. And that would be? There was no change in Czernobogs expression. If I win, I get to knock your brains out. With the sledgehammer. First you go down on your knees. Then I hit you a blow with it, so you don't get up again. Shadow looked at the mans old face, trying to read him. He was not joking, Shadow was certain of that: there was a hunger there for something, for pain, or death, or retribution. Wednesday closed the Readers Digest. This is ridiculous, he said. I was wrong to come here. Shadow, were leaving. The gray cat, disturbed, got to its feet and stepped onto the table beside the checkers game. It stared at the pieces, then leapt down onto the floor and, tail held high, it stalked from the room. No, said Shadow. He was not scared of dying. After all, it was not as if he had anything to live for. Its fine. I accept. |
| 401 |
If you win the game, you get the chance to knock my brains out with one blow of your sledgehammer, and he moved his next white piece to the adjoining square on the edge of the board. Nothing more was said, but Wednesday did not pick up his Readers Digest again. He watched the game with his glass eye and his true eye, with an expression that betrayed nothing. Czernobog took another of Shadows pieces. Shadow took two of Czernobogs. From the corridor came the smell of unfamiliar foods cooking. While not all of the smells were appetizing, Shadow realized suddenly how hungry he was. The two men moved their pieces, black and white, turn and turnabout. A flurry of pieces taken, a blossoming of two-piece-high kings: no longer forced to move only forward on the board, a sideways slip at a time, the kings could move forward or back, which made them doubly dangerous. They had reached the farthest row, and could go where they wanted. Czernobog had three kings, Shadow had two. Czernobog moved one of his kings around the board, eliminating Shadows remaining pieces, while using the other two kings to keep Shadows kings pinned down. And then Czernobog made a fourth king, and returned down the board to Shadows two kings, and, unsmiling, took them both. And that was that. So, said Czernobog. I get to knock out your brains. And you will go on your knees willingly. Is good. He reached out an old hand, and patted Shadows arm with it. Weve still got time before dinners ready, said Shadow. You want another game? Same terms? Czernobog lit another cigarette, from a kitchen box of matches. How can it be same terms? You want I should kill you twice? Right now, you have one blow, that's all. You told me yourself that its not just strength, its skill too. This way, if you win this game, you get two blows to my head. Czernobog glowered. One blow is all it takes, one blow. That is the art. He patted his upper right arm, where the muscles were, with his left, scattering gray ash from the cigarette in his left hand. Its been a long time. If youve lost your skill you might simply bruise me. How long has it been since you swung a killing hammer in the stockyards? Thirty years? Forty? Czernobog said nothing. His closed mouth was a gray slash across his face. He tapped his fingers on the wooden table, drumming out a rhythm with them. Then he pushed the twenty-four checkers back to their home squares on the board. Play, he said. Again, you are light. I am dark. Shadow pushed his first piece out. Czernobog pushed one of his own pieces forward. And it occurred to Shadow that Czernobog was going to try to play the same game again, the one that he had just won, that this would be his limitation. This time Shadow played recklessly. He snatched tiny opportunities, moved without thinking, without a pause to consider. And this time, as he played, Shadow smiled; and whenever Czernobog moved a piece, Shadow smiled wider. Soon, Czernobog was slamming his pieces down as he moved them, banging them down on the wooden table so hard that the remaining pieces shivered on their black squares. |
| 402 |
There, said Czernobog, taking one of Shadows men with a crash, slamming the black piece down. There. What do you say to that? Shadow said nothing: he simply smiled, and jumped the piece that Czernobog had put down, and another, and another, and a fourth, clearing the center of the board of black pieces. He took a white piece from the pile beside the board and kinged his man. After that, it was just a mopping-up exercise: another handful of moves, and the game was done. Shadow said, Best of three? Czernobog simply stared at him, his gray eyes like points of steel. And then he laughed, clapped his hands on Shadows shoulders. I like you! he exclaimed. You have balls. Then Zorya Utrennyaya put her head around the door to tell them that dinner was ready, and they should clear their game away and put the tablecloth down on the table. We have no dining room, she said, I am sorry. We eat in here. Serving dishes were placed on the table. Each of the diners was given a small painted tray on which was some tarnished cutlery, to hold on his or her lap. Zorya Vechernyaya took five wooden bowls and placed an unpeeled boiled potato in each, then ladled in a healthy serving of a ferociously crimson borscht. She plopped a spoonful of white sour cream in, and handed the bowls to each of them. I thought there were six of us, said Shadow. Zorya Polunochnaya is still asleep, said Zorya Vechernyaya. We keep her food in the refrigerator. When she wakes, she will eat. The borscht was vinegary, and tasted like pickled beets. The boiled potato was mealy. The next course was a leathery pot roast, accompanied by greens of some descriptionalthough they had been boiled so long and so thoroughly that they were no longer, by any stretch of the imagination, greens, and were well on their way to becoming browns. Then there were cabbage leaves stuffed with ground meat and rice, cabbage leaves of such a toughness that they were almost impossible to cut without spattering ground meat and rice all over the carpet. Shadow pushed his around his plate. We played checkers, said Czernobog, hacking himself another lump of pot roast. The young man and me. He won a game, I won a game. Because he won a game, I have agreed to go with him and Wednesday, and help them in their madness. And because I won a game, when this is all done, I get to kill the young man, with a blow of a hammer. The two Zoryas nodded gravely. Such a pity, Zorya Vechernyaya told Shadow. In my fortune for you, I should have said you would have a long life and a happy one, with many children. That is why you are a good fortune-teller, said Zorya Utrennyaya. She looked sleepy, as if it were an effort for her to be up so late. You tell the best lies. At the end of the meal, Shadow was still hungry. Prison food had been pretty bad, and prison food was better than this. Good food, said Wednesday, who had cleaned his plate with every evidence of enjoyment. I thank you ladies. And now, I am afraid that it is incumbent upon us to ask you to recommend to us a fine hotel in the neighborhood. |
| 403 |
Zorya Vechernyaya looked offended at this. Why should you go to a hotel? she said. We are not your friends? I couldn't put you to any trouble said Wednesday. Is no trouble, said Zorya Utrennyaya, one hand playing with her incongruously golden hair, and she yawned. You can sleep in Bielebogs room, said Zorya Vechernyaya, pointing to Wednesday. Is empty. And for you, young man, I make up a bed on sofa. You will be more comfortable than in feather bed. I swear. That would be really kind of you, said Wednesday. We accept. And you pay me only no more than what you pay for hotel, said Zorya Vechernyaya, with a triumphant toss of her head. A hundred dollars. Thirty said Wednesday. Fifty. Thirty-five. Forty-five. Forty. Is good. Forty-five dollar. Zorya Vechernyaya reached across the table and shook Wednesdays hand. Then she began to clean the pots off the table. Zorya Utrennyaya yawned so hugely Shadow worried that she might dislocate her jaw, and announced that she was going to bed before she fell asleep with her head in the pie, and she said good night to them all. Shadow helped Zorya Vechernyaya to take the plates and dishes into the little kitchen. To his surprise there was an elderly dishwashing machine beneath the sink, and he filled it. Zorya Vechernyaya looked over his shoulder, tutted, and removed the wooden borscht bowls. Those, in the sink, she told him. Sorry. Is not to worry. Now, back in there, we have pie, she said. The pieit was an apple piehad been bought in a store and oven-warmed, and was very, very good. The four of them ate it with ice cream, and then Zorya Vechernyaya made everyone go out of the sitting room, and made up a very fine-looking bed on the sofa for Shadow. Wednesday spoke to Shadow as they stood in the corridor. What you did in there, with the checkers game, he said. Yes? That was good. Very, very stupid of you. But good. Sleep safe. Shadow brushed his teeth and washed his face in the cold water of the little bathroom, and then walked back down the hall to the sitting room, turned out the light, and was asleep before his head touched the pillow. * * * There were explosions in Shadows dream: he was driving a truck through a minefield, and bombs were going off on each side of him. The windshield shattered and he felt warm blood running down his face. Someone was shooting at him. A bullet punctured his lung, a bullet shattered his spine, another hit his shoulder. He felt each bullet strike. He collapsed across the steering wheel. The last explosion ended in darkness. I must be dreaming, thought Shadow, alone in the darkness. I think I just died. He remembered hearing and believing, as a child, that if you died in your dreams, you would die in real life. He did not feel dead. He opened his eyes, experimentally. There was a woman in the little sitting room, standing against the window, with her back to him. His heart missed a half-beat, and he said, Laura? She turned, framed by the moonlight. I'm sorry, she said. I did not mean to wake you. |
| 404 |
She had a soft, Eastern European accent. I will go. No, its okay, said Shadow. You didn't wake me. I had a dream. Yes, she said. You were crying out, and moaning. Part of me wanted to wake you, but I thought, no, I should leave him. Her hair was pale and colorless in the moons thin light. She wore a white cotton nightgown, with a high lace neck and a hem that swept the ground. Shadow sat up, entirely awake. You are Zorya Polu, he hesitated. The sister who was asleep. I am Zorya Polunochnaya, yes. And you are called Shadow, yes? That was what Zorya Vechernyaya told me, when I woke. Yes. What were you looking at, out there? She looked at him, then she beckoned him to join her by the window. She turned her back while he pulled on his jeans. He walked over to her. It seemed a long walk, for such a small room. He could not tell her age. Her skin was unlined, her eyes were dark, her lashes were long, her hair was to her waist and white. The moonlight drained colors into ghosts of themselves. She was taller than either of her sisters. She pointed up into the night sky. I was looking at that, she said, pointing to the Big Dipper. See? Ursa Major, he said. The Great Bear. That is one way of looking at it, she said. But it is not the way from where I come from. I am going to sit on the roof. Would you like to come with me? She lifted the window and clambered, barefoot, out onto the fire escape. A freezing wind blew through the window. Something was bothering Shadow, but he did not know what it was; he hesitated, then pulled on his sweater, stocks, and shoes and followed her out onto the rusting fire escape. She was waiting for him. His breath steamed in the chilly air. He watched her bare feet pad up the icy metal steps, and followed her up to the roof. The wind gusted cold, flattening her nightgown against her body, and Shadow became uncomfortably aware that Zorya Polunochnaya was wearing nothing at all underneath. You don't mind the cold? he said, as they reached the top of the fire escape, and the wind whipped his words away. Sorry? She bent her face close to his. Her breath was sweet. I said, doesn't the cold bother you? In reply, she held up a finger: wait. She stepped, lightly, over the side of the building and onto the flat roof. Shadow stepped over a little more clumsily, and followed her across the roof, to the shadow of the water tower. There was a wooden bench waiting for them there, and she sat down on it, and he sat down beside her. The water tower acted as a windbreak, for which Shadow was grateful. No, she said. The cold does not bother me. This time is my time: I could no more feel uncomfortable in the night than a fish could feel uncomfortable in the deep water. You must like the night, said Shadow, wishing that he had said something wiser, more profound. My sisters are of their times. Zorya Utrennyaya is of the dawn. In the old country she would wake to open the gates, and let our father drive hisuhm, I forget the word, like a car but with horses? |
| 405 |
Chariot? His chariot. Our father would ride it out. And Zorya Vechernyaya, she would open the gates for him at dusk, when he returned to us. And you? She paused. Her lips were full, but very pale, I never saw our father. I was asleep. Is it a medical condition? She did not answer. The shrug, if she shrugged, was imperceptible. So. You wanted to know what I was looking at. The Big Dipper. She raised an arm to point to it, and the wind flattened her nightgown against her body. Her nipples, every goose-bump on the areolae, were visible momentarily, dark against the white cotton. Shadow shivered. Odins Wain, they call it. And the Great Bear. Where we come from, we believe that is a, a thing, a, not a god, but like a god, a bad thing, chained up in those stars. If it escapes, it will eat the whole of everything. And there are three sisters who must watch the sky, all the day, all the night. If he escapes, the thing in the stars, the world is over. Pf!, like that. And people believe that? They did. A long time ago. And you were looking to see if you could see the monster in the stars? Something like that. Yes. He smiled. If it were not for the cold, he decided, he would have thought he was dreaming. Everything felt so much like a dream. Can I ask how old you are? Your sisters seem so much older. She nodded her head. I am the youngest. Zorya Utrennyaya was born in the morning, and Zorya Vechernyaya was born in the evening, and I was born at midnight. I am the midnight sister: Zorya Polunochnaya. Are you married? My wife is dead. She died last week in a car accident. It was her funeral yesterday. I'm so sorry. She came to see me last night. It was not hard to say, in the darkness and the moonlight; it was not as unthinkable as it was by daylight. Did you ask her what she wanted? No. Not really. Perhaps you should. It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you. Zorya Vechernyaya tells me that you played checkers with Czernobog. Yes. He won the right to knock in my skull with a sledge. In the old days, they would take people up to the top of the mountains. To the high places. They would smash the back of their skulls with a rock. For Czernobog. Shadow glanced about. No, they were alone on the roof. Zorya Polunochnaya laughed. Silly, he is not here. And you won a game also. He may not strike his blow until this is all over. He said he would not. And you will know. Like the cows he killed. They always know, first. Otherwise, what is the point? I feel, Shadow told her, like I'm in a world with its own sense of logic. Its own rules. Like whenyou're in a dream, and you know there are rules you mustn't break. Even if you don't know what they mean. I'm just going along with it, you know? I know, she said. She held his hand, with a hand that was icy cold. You were given protection once. You were given the sun itself. But you lost it already. You gave it away. All I can give you is much weaker protection. The daughter, not the father. But all helps. |
| 406 |
But at least you were not waiting to hang in an English prison (for in those days prisons were places where you stayed until you were freed, transported, or hanged: you were not sentenced there for a term), and you were free to make the best of your new world. You were also free to bribe a sea captain to return you to England before the terms of your transportation were over and done. People did. And if the authorities caught you returning from transportationif an old enemy, or an old friend with a score to settle, saw you and peached on youthen you were hanged without a blink. I am reminded, he continued, after a short pause, during which he refilled the inkwell on his desk from the bottle of umber ink from the closet and dipped his pen once more, of the life of Essie Tregowan, who came from a chilly little cliff-top village in Cornwall, in the southwest of England, where her family had lived from time out of mind. Her father was a fisherman, and it was rumored that he was one of the wreckersthose who would hang their lamps high on the dangerous cliffs when the storm winds raged, luring ships onto the rocks, for the goods on shipboard. Essies mother was in service as a cook at the squires house, and at the age of twelve Essie began to work there, in the scullery. She was a thin little thing, with wide brown eyes and dark brown hair; and she was not a hard worker but was forever slipping off and away to listen to stories and tales, if there was anyone who would tell them: tales of the piskies and the spriggans, of the black dogs of the moors and the seal-women of the Channel. And, though the squire laughed at such things, the kitchen-folk always put out a china saucer of the creamiest milk at night, put it outside the kitchen door, for the piskies. Several years passed, and Essie was no longer a thin little thing: now she curved and billowed like the swell of the green sea, and her brown eyes laughed, and her chestnut hair tossed and curled. Essies eyes lighted on Bartholomew, the squires eighteen-year-old son, home from Rugby, and she went at night to the standing stone on the edge of the woodland, and she put some bread that Bartholomew had been eating but had left unfinished on the stone, wrapped in a cut strand of her own hair. And on the very next day Bartholomew came and talked to her, and looked on her approvingly with his own eyes, the dangerous blue of a sky when a storm is coming, while she was cleaning out the grate in his bedroom. He had such dangerous eyes, said Essie Tregowan. Soon enough Bartholomew went up to Oxford, and, when Essies condition became apparent, she was dismissed. But the babe was stillborn, and as a favor to Essies mother, who was a very fine cook, the squires wife prevailed upon her husband to return the former maiden to her former position in the scullery. But Essies love for Bartholomew had turned to hatred for his family, and within the year she took for her new beau a man from a neighboring village, with a bad reputation, who went by the name of Josiah Horner. |
| 407 |
And one night, when the family slept, Essie arose in the night and unbolted the side door, to let her lover in. He rifled the house while the family slept on. Suspicion immediately fell upon someone in the house, for it was apparent that someone must have opened the door (which the squires wife distinctly remembered having bolted herself), and someone must have known where the squire kept his silver plate, and the drawer in which he kept his coins and his promissory notes. Still, Essie, by resolutely denying everything, was convicted of nothing until Master Josiah Horner was caught, in a chandlers in Exeter, passing one of the squires notes. The squire identified it as his, and Horner and Essie went to trial. Horner was convicted at the local assizes, and was, as the slang of the time so cruelly and so casually had it, turned off, but the judge took pity on Essie, because of her age or her chestnut hair, and he sentenced her to seven years transportation. She was to be transported on a ship called the Neptune, under the command of one Captain Clarke. So Essie went to the Carolinas; and on the way she conceived an alliance with the selfsame captain, and prevailed upon him to return her to England with him, as his wife, and to take her to his mothers house in London, where no man knew her. The journey back, when the human cargo had been exchanged for cotton and tobacco, was a peaceful time and a happy one for the captain and his new bride, who were as two lovebirds or courting butterflies, unable to cease from touching each other or giving each other little gifts and endearments. When they reached London, Captain Clarke lodged Essie with his mother, who treated her in all ways as her sons new wife. Eight weeks later, the Neptune set sail again, and the pretty young bride with the chestnut hair waved her husband goodbye from dockside. Then she returned to her mother-in-laws house, where, the old woman being absent, Essie helped herself to a length of silk, several gold coins, and a silver pot in which the old woman kept her buttons, and pocketing these things Essie vanished into the stews of London. Over the following two years Essie became an accomplished shoplifter, her wide skirts capable of concealing a multitude of sins, consisting chiefly of stolen bolts of silk and lace, and she lived life to the full. Essie gave thanks for her escapes from her vicissitudes to all the creatures that she had been told of as a child, to the piskies (whose influence, she was certain, extended as far as London), and she would put a wooden bowl of milk on a window ledge each night, although her friends laughed at her; but she had the last laugh, as her friends got the pox or the clap and Essie remained in the peak of health. She was a year shy of her twentieth birthday when fate dealt her an ill blow: she sat in the Crossed Forks Inn off Fleet Street, in Bell Yard, when she saw a young man enter and seat himself near the fireplace, fresh down from the university. Oho! |
| 408 |
said the stranger. The widow Richardson looked up, shading her eyes in the May sunshine. Do I know you? she asked. She had not heard him approach. The man was dressed all in green: dusty green trews, green jacket, and a dark green coat. His hair was a carroty red, and he grinned at her all lopsided. There was something about the man that made her happy to look at him, and something else that whispered of danger. You might say that you know me, he said. He squinted down at her, and she squinted right back up at him, searching his moon-face for a clue to his identity. He looked as young as one of her own grandchildren, yet he had called her by her old name, and there was a burr in his voice she knew from her childhood, from the rocks and the moors of her home. you're a Cornishman? she asked. That I am, a Cousin Jack, said the red-haired man. Or rather, that I was, but now I'm here in this new world, where nobody puts out ale or milk for an honest fellow, or a loaf of bread come harvest time. The old woman steadied the bowl of peas upon her lap. Ifyou're who I think you are, she said, then I've no quarrel with you. In the house, she could hear Phyllida grumbling to the housekeeper. Nor I with you, said the red-haired fellow, a little sadly, although it was you that brought me here, you and a few like you, into this land with no time for magic and no place for piskies and such folk. Youve done me many a good turn, she said. Good and ill, said the squinting stranger. Were like the wind. We blows both ways. Essie nodded. Will you take my hand, Essie Tregowan? And he reached out a hand to her. Freckled it was, and although Essies eyesight was going she could see each orange hair on the back of his hand, glowing golden in the afternoon sunlight. She bit her lip. Then, hesitantly, she placed her blue-knotted hand in his. She was still warm when they found her, although the life had fled her body and only half the peas were shelled. Madam Lifes a piece in bloom Death goes dogging everywhere: she's the tenant of the room, he's the ruffian on the stair. W. E. Henley, Madam Lifes a Piece in Bloom Only Zorya Utrennyaya was awake to say goodbye to them, that Saturday morning. She took Wednesdays forty-five dollars and insisted on writing him out a receipt for it in wide, looping handwriting, on the back of an expired soft-drink coupon. She looked quite doll-like in the morning light, with her old face carefully made up and her golden hair piled high upon her head. Wednesday kissed her hand. Thank you for your hospitality, dear lady, he said. You and your lively sisters remain as radiant as the sky itself. You are a bad old man, she told him, and shook a finger at him. Then she hugged him. Keep safe, she told him. I would not like to hear that you were gone for good. It would distress me equally, my dear. She shook hands with Shadow. Zorya Polunochnaya thinks very highly of you, she said. I also. Thank you, said Shadow. Thanks for the dinner. She raised an eyebrow at him. |
| 409 |
You liked? You must come again. Wednesday and Shadow walked down the stairs. Shadow put his hands in his jacket pocket. The silver dollar was cold in his hand. It was bigger and heavier than any coins hed used so far. He classic-palmed it, let his hand hang by his side naturally, then straightened his hand as the coin slipped down to a front-palm position. It felt natural there, held between his forefinger and his little finger by the slightest of pressure. Smoothly done, said Wednesday. I'm just learning, said Shadow. I can do a lot of the technical stuff. The hardest part is making people look at the wrong hand. Is that so? Yes, said Shadow. Its called misdirection. He slipped his middle fingers under the coin, pushing it into a back palm, and fumbled his grip on it, ever so slightly. The coin dropped from his hand to the stairwell with a clatter and bounced down half a flight of stairs. Wednesday reached down and picked it up. You cannot afford to be careless with peoples gifts, said Wednesday. Something like this, you need to hang onto it. don't go throwing it about. He examined the coin, looking first at the eagle side, then at the face of Liberty on the obverse. Ah, Lady Liberty. Beautiful, is she not? He tossed the coin to Shadow, who picked it from the air, did a slide vanishseeming to drop it into his left hand while actually keeping it in his right and then appeared to pocket it with his left hand. The coin sat in the palm of his right hand, in plain view. It felt comforting there. Lady Liberty, said Wednesday. Like so many of the gods that Americans hold dear, a foreigner. In this case, a Frenchwoman, although, in deference to American sensibilities, the French covered up her magnificent bosom on that statue they presented to New York. Liberty, he continued, wrinkling his nose at the used condom that lay on the bottom flight of steps, toeing it to the side of the stairs with distasteSomeone could slip on that. Break his neck, he muttered, interrupting himself. Like a banana peel, only with bad taste and irony thrown in. He pushed open the door, and the sunlight hit them. Liberty, boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses. Yeah? said Shadow. Quoting, said Wednesday. Quoting someone French. that's who they have a statue to, in their New York harbor: a bitch who liked to be fucked on the refuse from the tumbrel. Hold your torch as high as you want to, mdear, theres still rats in your dress and cold jism dripping down your leg. He unlocked the car, and pointed Shadow to the passenger seat. I think she's beautiful, said Shadow, holding the coin up close. Libertys silver face reminded him a little of Zorya Polunochnaya. That, said Wednesday, driving off, is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones. Worm food. At night, you're rubbing yourself against worm food. No offense meant. Shadow had never seen Wednesday quite so expansive. |
| 410 |
Shadow watched, impressed. Unable to hear the conversations across the street, he felt it was like watching a fine silent movie performance, all pantomime and expression: the old security guard was gruff, earnesta little bumbling perhaps, but enormously well-meaning. Everyone who gave him their money walked away a little happier from having met him. And then the cops drew up outside the bank, and Shadows heart sank. Wednesday tipped his cap to them, and ambled over to the police car. He said his hellos and shook hands through the open window, and nodded, then hunted through his pockets until he found a business card and a letter, and passed them through the window of the car. Then he sipped his coffee. The telephone rang. Shadow picked up the handpiece and did his best to sound bored. A1 Security Services, he said. Can I speak to A. Haddock? asked the cop across the street. This is Andy Haddock speaking, said Shadow. Yeah, Mister Haddock, this is the police, said the cop in the car across the street. Youve got a man at the First Illinois Bank on the corner of Market and Second. Uh, yeah. that's right. Jimmy OGerman. And what seems to be the problem, officer? Jim behaving himself? he's not been drinking? No problem, sir. Your man is just fine, sir. Just wanted to make certain everything was in order. You tell Jim that if he's caught drinking again, officer, he's fired. You got that? Out of a job. Out on his ass. We have zero tolerance at A1 Security. I really don't think its my place to tell him that, sir. he's doing a fine job. Were just concerned because something like this really ought to be done by two personnel. Its risky, having one unarmed guard dealing with such large amounts of money. Tell me about it. Or more to the point, you tell those cheapskates down at the First Illinois about it. These are my men I'm putting on the line, officer. Good men. Men like you. Shadow found himself warming to this identity. He could feel himself becoming Andy Haddock, chewed cheap cigar in his ashtray, a stack of paperwork to get to this Saturday afternoon, a home in Schaumburg and a mistress in a little apartment on Lake Shore Drive. Yknow, you sound like a bright young man, officer, uh Myerson. Officer Myerson. You need a little weekend work, or you wind up leaving the force, any reason, you give us a call. We always need good men. You got my card? Yes sir. You hang onto it, said Andy Haddock. You call me. The police car drove off, and Wednesday shuffled back through the snow to deal with the small line of people who were waiting to give him their money. She okay? asked the manager, putting his head around the door. Your girlfriend? It was the battery, said Shadow. Now I just got to wait. Women, said the manager. I hope yours is worth waiting for. Winter darkness descended, the afternoon slowly graying into night. Lights went on. More people gave Wednesday their money. Suddenly, as if at some signal Shadow could not see, Wednesday walked over to the wall, removed the out-of-order signs, and trudged across the slushy road, heading for the parking lot. |
| 411 |
Shadow waited a minute, then followed him. Wednesday was sitting in the back of the car. He had opened the metal case, and was methodically laying everything he had been given out on the backseat in neat piles. Drive, he said. Were heading for the First Illinois Bank over on State Street. Repeat performance? asked Shadow. isn't that kind of pushing your luck? Not at all, said Wednesday. Were going to do a little banking. While Shadow drove, Wednesday sat in the backseat and removed the bills from the deposit bags in handfuls, leaving the checks and the credit card slips, and taking the cash from some, although not all, of the envelopes. He dropped the cash back into the metal case. Shadow pulled up outside the bank, stopping the car about fifty yards down the road, well out of camera range. Wednesday got out of the car and pushed the envelopes through the night deposit slot. Then he opened the night safe, and dropped in the gray bags. He closed it again. He climbed into the passenger seat. you're heading for I-90, said Wednesday. Follow the signs west for Madison. Shadow began to drive. Wednesday looked back at the bank they were leaving. There, my boy, he said, cheerfully, that will confuse everything. Now, to get the really big money, you need to do that at about four-thirty on a Sunday morning, when the clubs and the bars drop off their Saturday nights takings. Hit the right bank, the right guy making the drop-offthey tend to pick them big and honest, and sometimes have a couple of bouncers accompany them, but they arent necessarily smart and you can walk away with a quarter of a million dollars for an evenings work. If its that easy, said Shadow, how come everybody doesn't do it? Its not an entirely risk-free occupation, said Wednesday, especially not at four-thirty in the morning. You mean the cops are more suspicious at four-thirty in the morning? Not at all. But the bouncers are. And things can get awkward. He flicked through a sheaf of fifties, added a smaller stack of twenties, weighed them in his hand, then passed them over to Shadow. Here, he said. Your first weeks wages. Shadow pocketed the money without counting it. So, that's what you do? he asked. To make money? Rarely. Only when a great deal of cash is needed fast. On the whole, I make my money from people who never know theyve been taken, and who never complain, and who will frequently line up to be taken when I come back that way again. That Sweeney guy said you were a hustler. He was right. But that is the least of what I am. And the least of what I need you for, Shadow. * * * Snow spun through their headlights and into the windshield as they drove through the darkness. The effect was almost hypnotic. This is the only country in the world, said Wednesday, into the stillness, that worries about what it is. What? The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are. And? Just thinking out loud. |
| 412 |
Nancy began to laugh, a wheezing, rattling, good-natured laugh, and Shadow found himself liking the old man despite himself. Wednesday returned from the rest room, and shook hands with Nancy. Shadow, you want something to eat? A slice of pizza? Or a sandwich? I'm not hungry, said Shadow. Let me tell you somethin, said Mr. Nancy. It can be a long time between meals. Someone offers you food, you say yes. I'm no longer young as I was, but I can tell you this, you never say no to the opportunity to piss, to eat, or to get half an hours shut-eye. You follow me? Yes. But I'm really not hungry. you're a big one, said Nancy, staring into Shadows light gray eyes with old eyes the color of mahogany, a tall drink of water, but I got to tell you, you don't look too bright. I got a son, stupid as a man who bought his stupid at a two-for-one sale, and you remind me of him. If you don't mind, I'll take that as a compliment, said Shadow. Being called dumb as a man who slept late the mornin they handed out brains? Being compared to a member of your family. Mr. Nancy stubbed out his cigarillo, then he flicked an imaginary speck of ash off his yellow gloves. You may not be the worst choice old One-Eye could have made, come to that. He looked up at Wednesday. You got any idea how many of us theres goin to be here tonight? I sent the message out to everyone I could find, said Wednesday. Obviously not everyone is going to be able to come. And some of them, with a pointed look at Czernobog, might not want to. But I think we can confidently expect several dozen of us. And the word will travel. They made their way past a display of suits of armor (Victorian fake, pronounced Wednesday as they passed the glassed-in display, modern fake, twelfth-century helm on a seventeenth-century reproduction, fifteenth-century left gauntlet) and then Wednesday pushed through an exit door, circled them around the outside of the building (I cant be doin with all these ins and outs, said Nancy, I'm not as young as I used to be, and I come from warmer climes) along a covered walkway, in through another exit door, and they were in the carousel room. Calliope music played: a Strauss waltz, stirring and occasionally discordant. The wall as they entered was hung with antique carousel horses, hundreds of them, some in need of a lick of paint, others in need of a good dusting; above them hung dozens of winged angels constructed rather obviously from female store-window mannequins; some of them bared their sexless breasts; some had lost their wigs and stared baldly and blindly down from the darkness. And then there was the carousel. A sign proclaimed it was the largest in the world, said how much it weighed, how many thousand lightbulbs were to be found in the chandeliers that hung from it in Gothic profusion, and forbade anyone from climbing on it or from riding on the animals. And such animals! Shadow stared, impressed in spite of himself, at the hundreds of full-sized creatures who circled on the platform of the carousel. |
| 413 |
Shadow saw all these things, and he knew they were the same thing. If you don't close your mouth, said the many things that were Mr. Nancy, somethins goin to fly in there. Shadow closed his mouth and swallowed, hard. There was a wooden hall on a hill, a mile or so from them. They were trotting toward the hall, their mounts hooves and feet padding noiselessly on the dry sand at the seas edge. Czernobog trotted up on his centaur. He tapped the human arm of his mount. None of this is truly happening, he said to Shadow. He sounded miserable. Is all in your head. Best not to think of it. Shadow saw a gray-haired old Eastern-European immigrant, with a shabby raincoat and one iron-colored tooth, true. But he also saw a squat black thing, darker than the darkness that surrounded them, its eyes two burning coals; and he saw a prince, with long flowing black hair and a long black mustache, blood on his hands and his face, riding, naked but for a bear skin over his shoulder, on a creature half-man, half-beast, his face and torso blue-tattooed with swirls and spirals. Who are you? asked Shadow. What are you? Their mounts padded along the shore. Waves broke and crashed implacably on the night beach. Wednesday guided his wolfnow a huge and charcoal-gray beast with green eyesover to Shadow. Shadows mount caracoled away from it, and Shadow stroked its neck and told it not to be afraid. Its tiger tail swished, aggressively. It occurred to Shadow that there was another wolf, a twin to the one that Wednesday was riding, keeping pace with them in the sand dunes, just a moment out of sight. Do you know me, Shadow? said Wednesday. He rode his wolf with his head high. His right eye glittered and flashed, his left eye was dull. He wore a cloak with a deep, monklike cowl, and his face stared out from the shadows. I told you I would tell you my names. This is what they call me. I am called Glad-of-War, Grim, Raider, and Third. I am One-Eyed. I am called Highest, and True-Guesser. I am Grimnir, and I am the Hooded One. I am All-Father, and I am Gondlir Wand-Bearer. I have as many names as there are winds, as many titles as there are ways to die. My ravens are Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory; my wolves are Freki and Geri; my horse is the gallows. Two ghostly-gray ravens, like transparent skins of birds, landed on Wednesdays shoulders, pushed their beaks into the side of Wednesdays head as if tasting his mind, and flapped out into the world once more. What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything. Odin? said Shadow, and the wind whipped the word from his lips. Odin, whispered Wednesday, and the crash of the breakers on the beach of skulls was not loud enough to drown that whisper. Odin, said Wednesday, tasting the sound of the words in his mouth. Odin, said Wednesday, his voice a triumphant shout that echoed from horizon to horizon. His name swelled and grew and filled the world like the pounding of blood in Shadows ears. |
| 414 |
Old Monkey he laughs fit to bust, holding his side and shakin, and stampin, then he starts singin Tigers balls, I ate Tigers balls, snappin his fingers, spinnin around on his two feet. that's a fine song, he says, I'm goin to sing it to all my friends. You do that, I tell him, and I head back to the water hole. Theres Tiger, down by the water hole, walkin up and down, with his tail switchin and swishin and his ears and the fur on his neck up as far as they can go, and he's snappin at every insect comes by with his huge old saber teeth, and his eyes flashin orange fire. He looks mean and scary and big, but danglin between his legs, the littlest balls in the littlest blackest most wrinkledy ball-sack you ever did see. Hey, Anansi, he says, when he sees me, you were supposed to be guarding my balls while I went swimming. But when I got out of the swimming hole, there was nothing on the side of the bank but these little black shriveled-up good-for-nothing spider balls I'm wearing. I done my best, I tells him, but it was those monkeys, they come by and eat your balls all up, and when I tell them off, then they pulled off my own little balls. And I was so ashamed I ran away. You a liar, Anansi, says Tiger. I'm going to eat your liver. But then he hears the monkeys coming from their town to the water hole. A dozen happy monkeys, boppin down the path, clickin their fingers and singin as loud as they could sing, Tigers balls, yeah, I ate Tigers balls Now aint nobody gonna stop me ever at all Nobody put me up against the big black wall Cos I ate that Tigers testimonials I ate Tigers balls. And Tiger, he growls, and he roars and he's off into the forest after them, and the monkeys screech and head for the highest trees. And I scratch my nice new big balls, and damn they felt good hangin between my skinny legs, and I walk on home. And even today, Tiger keeps chasin monkeys. So you all remember: just becauseyou're small, doesn't mean you got no power. Mr. Nancy smiled, and bowed his head, and spread his hands, accepting the applause and laughter like a pro, and then he turned and walked back to where Shadow and Czernobog were standing. I thought I said no stories, said Wednesday. You call that a story? said Nancy. I barely cleared my throat. Just warmed them up for you. Go knock them dead. Wednesday walked out into the firelight, a big old man with a glass eye in a brown suit and an old Armani coat. He stood there, looking at the people on the wooden benches, saying nothing for longer than Shadow could believe someone could comfortably say nothing. And, finally, he spoke. You know me, he said. You all know me. Some of you have no cause to love me, but love me or not, you know me. There was a rustling, a stir among the people on the benches. I've been here longer than most of you. Like the rest of you, I figured we could get by on what we got. Not enough to make us happy, but enough to keep going. That may not be the case anymore. Theres a storm coming, and its not a storm of our making. |
| 415 |
Weve lived in peace in this country for a long time. Some of us do better than others, I agree. I do well. Back in India, there is an incarnation of me who does much better, but so be it. I am not envious. I've watched the new ones rise, and I've watched them fall again. Her hand fell to her side. Shadow saw that the others were looking at her: a mixture of expressionsrespect, amusement, embarrassmentin their eyes. They worshiped the railroads here, only a blink of an eye ago. And now the iron gods are as forgotten as the emerald hunters Make your point, Mama-ji, said Wednesday. My point? Her nostrils flared. The corners of her mouth turned down. I and I am obviously only a childsay that we wait. We do nothing. We don't know that they mean us harm. And will you still counsel waiting when they come in the night and they kill you, or they take you away? Her expression was disdainful and amused: it was all in the lips and the eyebrows and the set of the nose. If they try such a thing, she said, they will find me hard to catch, and harder still to kill. A squat young man sitting on the bench behind her hrrumphed for attention, then said, with a booming voice, All-Father, my people are comfortable. We make the best of what we have. If this war of yours goes against us, we could lose everything. Wednesday said, You have already lost everything. I am offering you the chance to take something back. The fire blazed high as he spoke, illuminating the faces of the audience. I don't really believe, Shadow thought. I don't believe any of this. Maybe I'm still fifteen. Moms still alive and I haven't even met Laura yet. Everything that's happened so far has been some kind of especially vivid dream. And yet he could not believe that either. All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end. Then the fire burned out, and there was darkness in Valaskjalf, Odins Hall. Now what? whispered Shadow. Now we go back to the carousel room, muttered Mr. Nancy. And old One-Eye buys us all dinner, greases some palms, kisses some babies, and no one says the gee-word anymore. Gee-word? Gods. What were you doin the day they handed out brains, boy, anyway? Someone was telling a story about stealing a tigers balls, and I had to stop and find out how it ended. Mr. Nancy chuckled. But nothing was resolved. Nobody agreed to anything. he's workin them slowly. Hell land em one at a time. you'll see. they'll come around in the end. Shadow could feel that a wind was coming up from somewhere, stirring his hair, touching his face, pulling at him. They were standing in the room of the biggest carousel in the world, listening to the Emperor Waltz. There was a group of people, tourists by the look of them, talking with Wednesday over at the other side of the room, as many people as there had been shadowy figures in Wednesdays hall. |
| 416 |
Through here, boomed Wednesday, and he led them through the only exit, formed to look like the gaping mouth of a huge monster, its sharp teeth ready to rend them all to slivers. He moved among them like a politician, cajoling, encouraging, smiling, gently disagreeing, pacifying. Did that happen? asked Shadow. Did what happen, shit-for-brains? asked Mr. Nancy. The hall. The fire. Tiger balls. Riding the carousel. Heck, nobodys allowed to ride the carousel. didn't you see the signs? Now hush. The monsters mouth led to the Organ Room, which puzzled Shadowhadnt they already come through that way? It was no less strange the second time. Wednesday led them all up some stairs, past life-sized models of the four horsemen of the apocalypse hanging from the ceiling, and they followed the signs to an early exit. Shadow and Nancy brought up the rear. And then they were out of the House on the Rock, walking past the gift store and heading back into the parking lot. Pity we had to leave before the end, said Mr. Nancy. I was kind of hoping to see the biggest artificial orchestra in the whole world. I've seen it, said Czernobog. Its not so much. * * * The restaurant was ten minutes up the road. Wednesday had told each of his guests that tonights dinner was on him, and had organized rides to the restaurant for any of them who didn't have their own transportation. Shadow wondered how they had gotten to the House on the Rock in the first place, without their own transportation, and how they were going to get away again, but he said nothing. It seemed the smartest thing to say. Shadow had a carful of Wednesdays guests to ferry to the restaurant: the woman in the red sari sat in the front seat beside him. There were two men in the backseat: the squat, peculiar-looking young man whose name Shadow had not properly caught, but which sounded like Elvis and another man, in a dark suit, who Shadow could not remember. He had stood beside the man as he got into the car, had opened and closed the door for him, and was unable to remember anything about him. He turned around in the drivers seat and looked at him, carefully noting his face, his hair, his clothes, making certain he would know him if he met him again, and turned back to start the car, to find that the man had slipped from his mind. An impression of wealth was left behind, but nothing more. I'm tired, thought Shadow. He glanced to his right and snuck a glance at the Indian woman. He noted the tiny silver necklace of skulls that circled her neck; her charm bracelet of heads and hands that jangled, like tiny bells, when she moved; the dark blue jewel on her forehead. She smelled of spices, of cardamom and nutmeg and flowers. Her hair was pepper-and-salt, and she smiled when she saw him look at her. You call me Mama-ji, she said. I am Shadow, Mama-ji, said Shadow. And what do you think of your employers plans, Mister Shadow? He slowed, as a large black truck sped past, overtaking them with a spray of slush. I don't ask, he don't tell, he said. |
| 417 |
The quarry are all inside, said the half-familiar voice. Everyone in position? A crackle of a voice, half audible through a radio. Lets move in and round them all up. What about the big guy? said another voice. Package him up, take him out, said the first voice. They put a baglike hood over Shadows head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape, and put him in the back of a truck, and drove him away. * * * There were no windows in the tiny room in which they had locked Shadow. There was a plastic chair, a lightweight folding table, and a bucket with a cover on it, which served Shadow as a makeshift toilet. There was also a six-foot-long strip of yellow foam on the floor, and a thin blanket with a long-since-crusted brown stain in the center: blood or shit or food, Shadow didn't know, and didn't care to investigate. There was a naked bulb behind a metal grille high in the room, but no light switch that Shadow had been able to find. The light was always on. There was no door handle on his side of the door. He was hungry. The first thing he had done, when the spooks had pushed him into the room, after theyd ripped off the tape from his ankles and wrists and mouth and left him alone, was to walk around the room and inspect it, carefully. He tapped the walls. They sounded dully metallic. There was a small ventilation grid at the top of the room. The door was soundly locked. He was bleeding above the left eyebrow in a slow ooze. His head ached. The floor was uncarpeted. He tapped it. It was made of the same metal as the walls. He took the top off the bucket, pissed in it, and covered it once more. According to his watch only four hours had passed since the raid on the restaurant. His wallet was gone, but they had left him his coins. He sat on the chair, at the card table. The table was covered with a cigarette-burned green baize. Shadow practiced appearing to push coins through the table. Then he took two quarters and made up a Pointless Coin Trick. He concealed a quarter in his right palm, and openly displayed the other quarter in his left hand, between finger and thumb. Then he appeared to take the quarter from his left hand, while actually letting it drop back into his left hand. He opened his right hand to display the quarter that had been there all along. The thing about coin manipulation was that it took all Shadows head to do it; or rather, he could not do it if he was angry or upset, so the action of practicing an illusion, even one with, on its own, no possible usefor he had expended an enormous amount of effort and skill to make it appear that he had moved a quarter from one hand to the other, something that it takes no skill whatever to do for realcalmed him, cleared his mind of turmoil and fear. He began a trick even more pointless: a one-handed half-dollar-to-penny transformation, but with his two quarters. Each of the coins was alternately concealed and revealed as the trick progressed: he began with one quarter visible, the other hidden. |
| 418 |
He raised his hand to his mouth and blew on the visible coin, while slipping it into a classic palm, as the first two fingers took the hidden quarter out and presented it. The effect was that he displayed a quarter in his hand, raised it to his mouth, blew on it, and lowered it again, displaying the same quarter all the while. He did it over and over and over again. He wondered if they were going to kill him, and his hand trembled, just a little, and one of the quarters dropped from his fingertip onto the stained green baize of the card table. And then, because he just couldn't do it anymore, he put the coins away, and took out the Liberty-head dollar that Zorya Polunochnaya had given him, and held onto it tightly, and waited. * * * At three in the morning, by his watch, the spooks returned to interrogate him. Two men in dark suits, with dark hair and shiny black shoes. Spooks. One was square-jawed, wide-shouldered, had great hair, looked like he had played football in high school, badly bitten fingernails; the other had a receding hairline, silver-rimmed round glasses, manicured nails. While they looked nothing alike, Shadow found himself suspecting that on some level, possibly cellular, the two men were identical. They stood on each side of the card table, looking down at him. How long have you been working for Cargo, sir? asked one. I don't know what that is, said Shadow. He calls himself Wednesday. Grimm. Olfather. Old guy. Youve been seen with him, sir. I've been working for him for a couple of days. don't lie to us, sir, said the spook with the glasses. Okay, said Shadow. I wont. But its still a couple of days. The square-jawed spook reached down and twisted Shadows ear between finger and thumb. He squeezed as he twisted. The pain was intense. We told you not to lie to us, sir, he said, mildly. Then he let go. Each of the spooks had a gun bulge under his jacket. Shadow did not try to retaliate. He pretended he was back in prison. Do your own time, thought Shadow. don't tell them anything they don't know already. don't ask questions. These are dangerous peopleyou're palling around with, sir, said the spook with glasses. You will be doing your country a service by turning states evidence. He smiled, sympathetically: I'm the good cop, said the smile. I see, said Shadow. And if you don't want to help us, sir, said the square-jawed spook, you can see what were like when were not happy. He hit Shadow an openhanded blow across the stomach, knocking the breath from him. It wasnt torture, Shadow thought, just punctuation: I'm the bad cop. He retched. I would like to make you happy, said Shadow, as soon as he could speak. All we ask is your cooperation, sir. Can I ask gasped Shadow (dont ask questions, he thought, but it was too late, the words were already spoken), can I ask who I'll be cooperating with? You want us to tell you our names? asked the square-jawed spook. You have to be out of your mind. No, he's got a point, said the spook with glasses. |
| 419 |
He moved in his sleep and a shaft of pain moved him from half-sleep to half-waking, and he winced. Shadow shivered under the thin blanket. His right arm covered his eyes, blocking out the light of the bulb. He wondered whether Wednesday and the others were still at liberty, if they were even still alive. He hoped that they were. The silver dollar remained cold in his left hand. He could feel it there, as it had been during the beating. He wondered idly why it did not warm to his body temperature. Half asleep, now, and half delirious, the coin, and the idea of Liberty, and the moon, and Zorya Polunochnaya somehow became intertwined in one woven beam of silver light that shone from the depths to the heavens, and he rode the silver beam up and away from the pain and the heartache and the fear, away from the pain and, blessedly, back into dreams. From far away he could hear some kind of noise, but it was too late to think about it: he belonged to sleep now. A half-thought: he hoped it was not people coming to wake him up, to hit him or to shout at him. And then, he noticed with pleasure, he was really asleep, and no longer cold. * * * Somebody somewhere was calling for help, loudly, in his dream or out of it. Shadow rolled over on the foam rubber, in his sleep, finding new places that hurt as he rolled. Someone was shaking his shoulder. He wanted to ask them not to wake him, to let him sleep and leave him be, but it came out as a grunt. Puppy? said Laura. You have to wake up. Please wake up, hon. And there was a moments gentle relief. He had had such a strange dream, of prisons and con men and down-at-heel gods, and now Laura was waking him to tell him it was time for work, and perhaps there would be time enough before work to steal some coffee and a kiss, or more than a kiss; and he put out his hand to touch her. Her flesh was cold as ice, and sticky. Shadow opened his eyes. Where did all the blood come from? he asked. Other people, she said. Its not mine. I'm filled with formaldehyde, mixed with glycerin and lanolin. Which other people? he asked. The guards, she said. Its okay. I killed them. You better move. I don't think I gave anyone a chance to raise the alarm. Take a coat from out there, or you'll freeze your butt off. You killed them? She shrugged, and half smiled, awkwardly. Her hands looked as if she had been finger-painting, composing a picture that had been executed solely in crimsons, and there were splashes and spatters on her face and clothes (the same blue suit in which she had been buried) that made Shadow think of Jackson Pollock, because it was less problematic to think of Jackson Pollock than to accept the alternative. Its easier to kill people, whenyou're dead yourself, she told him. I mean, its not such a big deal. you're not so prejudiced anymore. Its still a big deal to me, said Shadow. You want to stay here until the morning crew comes? she said. You can if you like. I thought youd like to get out of here. they'll think I did it, he said, stupidly. |
| 420 |
Maybe, she said. Put on a coat, hon. you'll freeze. He walked out into the corridor. At the end of the corridor was a guardroom. In the guardroom were four dead men: three guards, and the man who had called himself Stone. His friend was nowhere to be seen. From the blood-colored skid marks on the floor, two of them had been dragged into the guardroom and dropped onto the floor. His own coat was hanging from the coat rack. His wallet was still in the inside pocket, apparently untouched. Laura pulled open a couple of cardboard boxes filled with candy bars. The guards, now he could see them properly, were wearing dark camouflage uniforms, but there were no official tags on them, nothing to say who they were working for. They might have been weekend duck hunters, dressed for the shoot. Laura reached out her cold hand and squeezed Shadows hand in hers. She had the gold coin he had given her around her neck, on a golden chain. That looks nice, he said. Thanks. She smiled, prettily. What about the others, he asked. Wednesday, and the rest of them? Where are they? Laura passed him a handful of candy bars, and he filled his pockets with them. There wasnt anybody else here. A lot of empty cells, and one with you in it. Oh, and one of the men had gone into the cell down there to jack off with a magazine. He got such a shock. You killed him while he was jerking himself off? She shrugged. I guess, she said, uncomfortably. I was worried they were hurting you. Someone has to watch out for you, and I told you I would, didn't I? Here, take these. They were chemical hand and foot warmers: thin padsyou broke the seal and they heated up and stayed that way for hours. Shadow pocketed them. Look out for me? Yes, he said, you did. She reached out a finger, stroked him above his left eyebrow. you're hurt, she said. I'm okay, he said. He opened a metal door in the wall. It swung open slowly. There was a four-foot drop to the ground, and he swung himself down to what felt like gravel. He picked up Laura by the waist, swung her down, as he used to swing her, easily, without a second thought The moon came out from behind a thick cloud. It was low on the horizon, ready to set, but the light it cast onto the snow was enough to see by. They had emerged from what turned out to be the black-painted metal car of a long freight train, parked or abandoned in a woodland siding. The series of wagon cars went on as far as he could see, into the trees and away. He had been on a train. He should have known. How the hell did you find me here? he asked his dead wife. She shook her head slowly, amused. You shine like a beacon in a dark world, she told him. It wasnt that hard. Now, just go. Go as far and as fast as you can. don't use your credit cards and you should be fine. Where should I go? She pushed a hand through her matted hair, flicking it back out of her eyes. The roads that way, she told him. Do whatever you can. Steal a car if you have to. Go south. Laura, he said, and hesitated. Do you know whats going on? |
| 421 |
Do you know who these people are? Who you killed? Yeah, she said. I think I do know. I owe you, said Shadow. I'd still be in there if it wasnt for you. I don't think they had anything good planned for me. No, she said. I don't think they did. They walked away from the empty train cars. Shadow wondered about the other trains hed seen, blank window-less metal cars that went on for mile after mile, hooting their lonely way through the night. His fingers closed around the Liberty dollar in his pocket, and he remembered Zorya Polunochnaya, and the way she had looked at him in the moonlight. Did you ask her what she wanted? It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you. LauraWhat do you want? he asked. You really want to know? Yes. Please. Laura looked up at him with dead blue eyes. I want to be alive again, she said. Not in this half-life, I want to be really alive. I want to feel my heart pumping in my chest again. I want to feel blood moving through mehot, and salty, and real. Its weird, you don't think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you'll know. She rubbed her eyes, smudging her face with red from the mess on her hands. Look, its hard. You know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because its easier to pass for real, in the dark. And I don't want to have to pass. I want to be alive. I don't understand what you want me to do. Make it happen, hon. you'll figure it out. I know you will. Okay, he said. I'll try. And if I do figure it out, how do I find you? But she was gone, and there was nothing left in the woodland but a gentle gray in the sky to show him where east was, and on the bitter December wind a lonely wail that might have been the cry of the last nightbird or the call of the first bird of dawn. Shadow set his face to the south, and he began to walk. As the Hindu gods are immortal only in a very particular sensefor they are born and they diethey experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however archetypal his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces. Wendy Doniger OFlaherty, Introduction, Hindu Myths (Penguin Books, 1975) Shadow had been walking south, or what he hoped was more or less south, for several hours, heading along a narrow and unmarked road through the woods somewhere in, he imagined, southern Wisconsin. A couple of jeeps came down the road toward him at one point, headlights blazing, and he ducked into the trees until they had passed. The early morning mist hung at waist level. The cars were black. When, thirty minutes later, he heard the noise of distant helicopters coming from the west, he struck out away from the timber trail and into the woods. |
| 422 |
There were two helicopters, and he lay crouched in a hollow beneath a fallen tree and listened to them pass over. As they moved away, he looked out and looked up for one hasty glance at the gray winter sky. He was satisfied to observe that the helicopters were painted a matte black. He waited beneath the tree until the noise of the helicopters was completely gone. Under the trees the snow was little more than a dusting, which crunched underfoot. He was deeply grateful for the chemical hand and feet warmers, which kept his extremities from freezing. Beyond that, he was numb: heart-numb, mind-numb, soul-numb. And the, numbness, he realized, went a long way down, and a long way back. So what do I want? he asked himself. He couldn't answer, so he just kept on walking, a step at a time, on and on through the woods. Trees looked familiar, moments of landscape were perfectly deja-vued. Could he be walking in circles? Maybe he would just walk and walk and walk until the warmers and the candy bars ran out and then sit down and never get up again. He reached a large stream, of the kind the locals called a creek and pronounced crick, and decided to follow it. Streams led to rivers, rivers all led to the Mississippi, and if he kept walking, or stole a boat or built a raft, eventually hed get to New Orleans, where it was warm, an idea that seemed both comforting and unlikely. There were no more helicopters. He had the feeling that the ones that had passed overhead had been cleaning up the mess at the freight train siding, not hunting for him, otherwise they would have returned; there would have been tracker dogs and sirens and the whole paraphernalia of pursuit. Instead, there was nothing. What did he want? Not to get caught. Not to get blamed for the deaths of the men on the train. It wasnt me, he heard himself saying, it was my dead wife. He could imagine the expressions on the faces of the law officers. Then people could argue about whether he was crazy or not while he went to the chair He wondered whether Wisconsin had the death penalty. He wondered whether that would matter. He wanted to understand what was going on and to find out how it was all going to end. And finally, producing a half-rueful grin, he realized that most of all he wanted everything to be normal. He wanted never to have gone to prison, for Laura still to be alive, for none of this ever to have happened. I'm afraid that's not exactly an option, mboy, he thought to himself, in Wednesdays gruff voice, and he nodded agreement. Not an option. You burned your bridges. So keep walking. Do your own time A distant woodpecker drummed against a rotten tree. Shadow became aware of eyes on him: a handful of red cardinals stared at him from a skeletal elder bush, then returned to pecking at the clusters of black elderberries. They looked like the illustrations in the Songbirds of North America calendar. He heard the birds video-arcade trills and zaps and whoops follow him along the side of the creek. Eventually, they faded away. |
| 423 |
He washed his face and hands in hot water, slicked down his dark hair, then went back into the restaurant and ate his burgers and fries and drank his coffee. He went back to the counter. You want frozen custard? asked the keen young man. No. No thanks. Is there anywhere around here I could rent a car? My car died, back down the road a way. The young man scratched his head-stubbled. Not around here, Mister. If your car died you could call Triple-A. Or talk to the gas station next door about a tow. A fine idea, said Shadow. Thanks. He walked across the melting snow, from the Culvers parking lot to the gas station. He bought candy bars and beef jerky sticks and more chemical hand and feet warmers. Anywhere hereabouts I could rent a car? he asked the woman behind the cash register. She was immensely plump, and bespectacled, and was delighted to have someone to talk to. Let me think, she said. Were kind of out of the way here. They do that kind of thing over in Madison. Where you going? Kay-ro, he said. Wherever that is. I know where that is, she said. Hand me an Illinois map from that rack over there. Shadow passed her a plastic-coated map. She unfolded it, then pointed in triumph to the bottom-most corner of the state. There it is. Cairo? that's how they pronounce the one in Egypt. But the one in Little Egypt, they call that one Kayro. They got a Thebes down there, all sorts. My sister-in-law comes from Thebes. I asked her about the one in Egypt, she looked at me as if I had a screw loose. The woman chuckled like a drain. Any pyramids? The city was five hundred miles away, almost directly south. Not that they ever told me. They call it Little Egypt because back, oh, mebbe a hundred, hundred and fifty years back, there was a famine all over. Crops failed. But they didn't fail down there. So everyone went there to buy food. Like in the Bible. Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. Off we go to Egypt, bad-a-boom. So if you were me, and you needed to get there, how would you go? asked Shadow. Drive. Car died a few miles down the road. It was a pieceashit if you'll pardon my language, said Shadow. Pee-Oh-Esses, she said. Yup. that's what my brother-in-law calls em. He buys and sells cars in a small way. Hell call me up, say Mattie, I just sold another Pee-Oh-Ess. Say, maybe hed be interested in your old car. For scrap or something. It belongs to my boss, said Shadow, surprising himself with the fluency and ease of his lies. I need to call him, so he can come pick it up. A thought struck him. Your brother-in-law, is he around here? he's in Muscoda. Ten minutes south of here. Just over the river. Why? Well, does he have a Pee-Oh-Ess hed like to sell me for, mm, five, six hundred bucks? She smiled sweetly. Mister, he doesn't have a car on that back lot you couldn't buy with a full tank of gas for five hundred dollars. But don't you tell him I said so. Would you call him? asked Shadow. I'm way ahead of you, she told him, and she picked up the phone. Hon? Its Mattie. |
| 424 |
You get over here this minute. I got a man here wants to buy a car. * * * The piece of shit he chose was a 1983 Chevy Nova, which he bought, with a full tank of gas, for four hundred and fifty dollars. It had almost a quarter of a million miles on the clock, and smelled faintly of bourbon, tobacco, and more strongly of something that might well have been bananas. He couldn't tell what color it was, under the dirt and the snow. Still, of all the vehicles in Matties brother-in-laws back lot, it was the only one that looked like it might take him five hundred miles. The deal was done in cash, and Matties brother-in-law never asked for Shadows name or social security number or for anything except the money. Shadow drove west, then south, with five hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket, keeping off the interstate. The piece of shit had a radio, but nothing happened when he turned it on. A sign said hed left Wisconsin and was now in Illinois. He passed a strip-mining works, huge blue arc lights burning in the dim midwinter daylight. He stopped and ate at a place called Moms, catching them just before they closed for the afternoon. Each town he passed through had an extra sign up beside the sign telling him that he was now entering Our Town (pop. 720). The extra sign announced that the towns under-14s team was the third runner-up in the interstate basketball tournament, or that the town was the home of the Illinois girls under-16s wrestling semifinalist. He drove on, head nodding, feeling more drained with every minute that passed. He ran a stoplight, and was nearly side-swiped by a woman in a Dodge. As soon as he got out into open country he pulled off onto an empty tractor path on the side of the road, and he parked by a snow-spotted stubbly field in which a slow procession of fat black wild turkeys walked like a line of mourners; he turned off the engine, stretched out in the backseat, and fell asleep. Darkness; a sensation of fallingas if he were tumbling down a great hole, like Alice. He fell for a hundred years into darkness. Faces passed him, swimming out of the black, then each face was ripped up and away before he could touch it Abruptly, and without transition, he was not falling. Now he was in a cave, and he was no longer alone. Shadow stared into familiar eyes: huge, liquid black eyes. They blinked. Under the earth: yes. He remembered this place. The stink of wet cow. Firelight flickered on the wet cave walls, illuminating the buffalo head, the mans body, skin the color of brick clay. Cant you people leave me be? asked Shadow. I just want to sleep. The buffalo man nodded, slowly. His lips did not move, but a voice in Shadows head said, Where are you going, Shadow? Cairo. Why? Where else have I got to go? Its where Wednesday wants me to go. I drank his mead. In Shadows dream, with the power of dream logic behind it, the obligation seemed unarguable: he drank Wednesdays mead three times, and sealed the pactwhat other choice of action did he have? |
| 425 |
The buffalo-headed man reached a hand into the fire, stirring the embers and the broken branches into a blaze. The storm is coming, he said. Now there was ash on his hands, and he wiped it onto his hairless chest, leaving soot-black streaks. So you people keep telling me. Can I ask you a question? There was a pause. A fly settled on the furry forehead. The buffalo man flicked it away. Ask. Is this true? Are these people really gods? Its all so He paused. Then he said, impossible, which was not exactly the word he had been going for but seemed to be the best he could do. What are gods? asked the buffalo man. I don't know, said Shadow. There was a tapping, relentless and dull. Shadow waited for the buffalo man to say something more, to explain what gods were, to explain the whole tangled nightmare that his life seemed to have become. He was cold. Tap. Tap. Tap. Shadow opened his eyes, and, groggily, sat up. He was freezing, and the sky outside the car was the deep luminescent purple that divides the dusk from the night. Tap. Tap. Someone said, Hey, mister,, and Shadow turned his head. The someone was standing beside the car, no more than a darker shape against the darkling sky. Shadow reached out a hand and cranked down the window a few inches. He made some waking-up noises, and then he said, Hi. You all right? You sick? You been drinking? The voice was higha womans or a boys. I'm fine, said Shadow. Hold on. He opened the door, and got out, stretching his aching limbs and neck as he did so. Then he rubbed his hands together, to get the blood circulating and to warm them up. Whoa. you're pretty big. that's what they tell me, said Shadow. Who are you? I'm Sam, said the voice. Boy Sam or girl Sam? Girl Sam. I used to be Sammi with an i, and I'd do a smiley face over the i, but then I got completely sick of it because like absolutely everybody was doing it, so I stopped. Okay, girl Sam. You go over there, and look out at the road. Why? Are you a crazed killer or something? No, said Shadow, I need to take a leak and I'd like just the smallest amount of privacy. Oh. Right. Okay. Got it. No problem. I am so with you. I cant even pee if theres someone in the next stall. Major shy bladder syndrome. Now, please. She walked to the far side of the car, and Shadow took a few steps closer to the field, unzipped his jeans, and pissed against a fence post for a very long time. He walked back to the car. The last of the gloaming had become night. You still there? he asked. Yes, she said. You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time. Thank you. Do you want something? Well, I wanted to see if you were okay. I mean, if you were dead or something I would have called the cops. But the windows were kind of fogged up so I thought, well, he's probably still alive. You live around here? Nope. Hitchhiking down from Madison. that's not safe. I've done it five times a year for three years now. |
| 426 |
I'm still alive. Where are you headed? I'm going as far as Cairo. Thank you, she said. I'm going to El Paso. Staying with my aunt for the holidays. I cant take you all the way, said Shadow. Not El Paso, Texas. The other one, in Illinois. Its a few hours south. You know where you are now? No, said Shadow. I have no idea. Somewhere on Highway Fifty-two? The next towns Peru, said Sam. Not the one in Peru. The one in Illinois. Let me smell you. Bend down. Shadow bent down, and the girl sniffed his face. Okay. I don't smell booze. You can drive. Let's go. What makes you think I'm giving you a ride? Because I'm a damsel in distress, she said. And you are a knight in whatever. A really dirty car. You know someone wrote Wash me! on your rear window? Shadow got into the car and opened the passenger door. The light that goes on in cars when the front door is opened did not go on in this car. No, he said, I didn't. She climbed in. It was me, she said. I wrote it. While there was still enough light to see. Shadow started the car, turned on the headlights, and headed back onto the road. Left, said Sam helpfully. Shadow turned left, and he drove. After several minutes the heater started to work, and blessed warmth filled the car. You haven't said anything yet, said Sam. Say something. Are you human? asked Shadow. An honest-to-goodness, born-of-man-and-woman, living, breathing human being? Sure, she said. Okay. Just checking. So what would you like me to say? Something to reassure me, at this point. I suddenly have that oh shit I'm in the wrong car with a crazy man feeling. Yeah, he said. I've had that one. What would you find reassuring? Just tell meyou're not an escaped convict or a mass murderer or something. He thought for a moment. You know, I'm really not. You had to think about it though, didn't you? Done my time. Never killed anybody. Oh. They entered a small town, lit up by streetlights and blinking Christmas decorations, and Shadow glanced to his right. The girl had a tangle of short dark hair and a face that was both attractive and, he decided, faintly mannish: her features might have been chiseled out of rock. She was looking at him. What were you in prison for? I hurt a couple of people real bad. I got angry. Did they deserve it? Shadow thought for a moment. I thought so at the time. Would you do it again? Hell, no. I lost three years of my life in there. Mm. You got Indian blood in you? Not that I know of. You looked like it, was all. Sorry to disappoint you. Sokay. You hungry? Shadow nodded. I could eat, he said. Theres a good place just past the next set of lights. Good food. Cheap, too. Shadow pulled up in the parking lot. They got out of the car. He didn't bother to lock it, although he pocketed the keys. He pulled out some coins to buy a newspaper. Can you afford to eat here? he asked. Yeah, she said, raising her chin. I can pay for myself. Shadow nodded. Tell you what. I'll toss you for it, he said. Heads you pay for my dinner, tails, I pay for yours. |
| 427 |
Let me see the coin first, she said, suspiciously. I had an uncle had a double-headed quarter. She inspected it, satisfied herself there was nothing strange about the quarter. Shadow placed the coin head up on his thumb and cheated the toss, so it wobbled and looked like it was spinning, then he caught it and flipped it over onto the back of his left hand, and uncovered it with his right, in front of her. Tails, she said, happily. Dinners on you. Yup, he said. You cant win them all. Shadow ordered the meat loaf, Sam ordered lasagna. Shadow flipped through the newspaper to see if there was anything in it about dead men in a freight train. There wasnt. The only story of interest was on the cover: crows in record numbers were infesting the town. Local farmers wanted to hang dead crows around the town on public buildings to frighten the others away; ornithologists said that it wouldn't work, that the living crows would simply eat the dead ones. The locals were implacable. When they see the corpses of their friends, said a spokesman, they'll know that we don't want them here. The food came mounded high on plates and steaming, more than any one person could eat. So whats in Cairo? asked Sam, with her mouth full. No idea. I got a message from my boss saying he needs me down there. What do you do? I'm an errand boy. She smiled. Well, she said, you arent mafia, not looking like that and driving that piece of shit. Why does your car smell like bananas, anyway? He shrugged, carried on eating. Sam narrowed her eyes. Maybeyou're a banana smuggler, she said. You haven't asked me what I do yet. I figureyou're at school. UW Madison. Where you are undoubtedly studying art history, womens studies, and probably casting your own bronzes. And you probably work in a coffeehouse to help cover the rent. She put down her fork, nostrils flaring, eyes wide. How the fuck did you do that? What? Now you say, no, actually I'm studying Romance languages and ornithology. Soyou're saying that was a lucky guess or something? What was? She stared at him with dark eyes. You are one peculiar guy, MisterI don't know your name. They call me Shadow, he said. She twisted her mouth wryly, as if she were tasting something she disliked. She stopped talking, put her head down, finished her lasagna. Do you know why its called Egypt? asked Shadow when Sam finished eating. Down Cairo way? Yeah. Its in the delta of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Like Cairo in Egypt, in the Nile delta. That makes sense. She sat back in her chair, ordered coffee and chocolate cream pie, ran a hand through her black hair. You married, Mister Shadow? And then, as he hesitated, Gee. I just asked another tricky question, didn't I? They buried her on Thursday, he said, picking his words with care. She was killed in a car crash. Oh. God. Jesus. I'm sorry. Me too. An awkward pause. My half sister lost her kid, my nephew, end of last year. Its rough. Yeah. It is. What did he die of? She sipped her coffee. We don't know. We don't even really know that he's dead. |
| 428 |
Its just brains. I like my theory better, said Shadow. Whats your theory? That back then people used to run into the gods from time to time. Oh. Silence: only the rattling of the car, the roar of the engine, the growling of the mufflerwhich did not sound healthy. Then, Do you thinkyou're still there? Where? Greece. Egypt. The islands. Those places. Do you think if you walked where those people walked youd see the gods? Maybe. But I don't think peopled know that was what theyd seen. I bet its like space aliens, she said. These days, people see space aliens. Back then they saw gods. Maybe the space aliens come from the right side of the brain. I don't think the gods ever gave rectal probes, said Shadow. And they didn't mutilate cattle themselves. They got people to do it for them. She chuckled. They drove in silence for a few minutes, and then she said, Hey, that reminds me of my favorite god story, from Comparative Religion One-oh-one. You want to hear it? Sure, said Shadow. Okay. This is one about Odin. The Norse god. You know? There was some Viking king on a Viking shipthis was back in the Viking times, obviously and they were becalmed, so he says hell sacrifice one of his men to Odin if Odin will send them a wind and get them to land. Okay. The wind comes up, and they get to land. So, on land, they draw lots to figure out who gets sacrificed and its the king himself. Well, he's not happy about this, but they figure out that they can hang him in effigy and not hurt him. They take a calfs intestines and loop them loosely around the guys neck, and they tie the other end to a thin branch, and they take a reed instead of a spear and poke him with it and go Okay, youve been hunghanged? whateveryouve been sacrificed to Odin. The road curved: Another Town (pop. 300), home of the runner-up to the state under-12s speed-skating championship, two huge giant-economy-sized funeral parlors on each side of the road, and how many funeral parlors do you need, Shadow wondered, when you only have three hundred people? Okay. As soon as they say Odins name, the reed transforms into a spear and stabs the guy in the side, the calf intestines become a thick rope, the branch becomes the bough of a tree, and the tree pulls up, and the ground drops away, and the king is left hanging there to die with a wound in his side and his face going black. End of story. White people have some fucked-up gods, Mister Shadow. Yes, said Shadow. you're not white? I'm Cherokee, she said. Full-blooded? Nope. Only four pints. My mom was white. My dad was a real reservation Indian. He came out this way, eventually married my mom, had me, then when they split he went back to Oklahoma. He went back to the reservation? No. He borrowed money and opened a Taco Bell knock-off called Taco Bills. He does okay. He doesn't like me. Says I'm half-breed. I'm sorry. he's a jerk. I'm proud of my Indian blood. It helps pay my college tuition. Hell, one day itll probably help get me a job, if I cant sell my bronzes. |
| 429 |
He watched the show, eyes slowly closing, aware that something was odd. He had not seen many episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, so he was not surprised that it was an episode he could not remember seeing before. What he found strange was the tone. All the regulars were concerned about Robs drinking. He was missing days at work. They went to his home: he had locked himself in the bedroom, and had to be persuaded to come out. He was staggering drunk, but still pretty funny. His friends, played by Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie, left after getting some good gags in. Then, when Robs wife went to remonstrate with him, he hit her, hard, in the face. She sat down on the floor and began to cry, not in that famous Mary Tyler Moore wail, but in small, helpless sobs, hugging herself and whispering, don't hit me, please, I'll do anything, just don't hit me anymore. What the fuck is this? said Shadow, aloud. The picture dissolved into phosphor-dot fuzz. When it came back, The Dick Van Dyke Show had, inexplicably, become I Love Lucy. Lucy was trying to persuade Ricky to let her replace their old icebox with a new refrigerator. When he left, however, she walked over to the couch and sat down, crossing her ankles, resting her hands in her lap, and staring out patiently in black and white across the years. Shadow? she said. We need to talk. Shadow said nothing. She opened her purse and took out a cigarette, lit it with an expensive silver lighter, put the lighter away. I'm talking to you, she said. Well? This is crazy, said Shadow. Like the rest of your life is sane? Give me a fucking break. Whatever. Lucille Ball talking to me from the TV is weirder by several orders of magnitude than anything that's happened to me so far, said Shadow. Its not Lucille Ball. Its Lucy Ricardo. And you know somethingI'm not even her. Its just an easy way to look, given the context. that's all. She shifted uncomfortably on the sofa. Who are you? asked Shadow. Okay, she said. Good question. I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray: I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore. you're the television? Or someone in the television? The TVs the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to. What do they sacrifice? asked Shadow. Their time, mostly, said Lucy. Sometimes each other. She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink. you're a god? said Shadow. Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. You could say that, she said. Sam says hi, said Shadow. What? Whos Sam? What are you talking about? Shadow looked at his watch. It was twenty-five past twelve. doesn't matter, he said. So, Lucy-on-the-TV. What do we need to talk about? Too many people have needed to talk recently. Normally it ends with someone hitting me. The camera moved in for a close-up: Lucy looked concerned, her lips pursed. I hate that. I hate that people were hurting you, Shadow. I'd never do that, honey. |
| 430 |
No, I want to offer you a job. Doing what? Working for me. I heard about the trouble you had with the Spookshow, and I was impressed with how you dealt with it. Efficient, no-nonsense, effective. Whodve thought you had it in you? They are really pissed. Really? They underestimated you, sweetheart. Not a mistake I'm going to make. I want you in my camp. She stood up, walked toward the camera. Look at it like this, Shadow: we are the coming thing. Were shopping mallsyour friends are crappy roadside attractions. Hell, were on-line malls, while your friends are sitting by the side of the highway selling homegrown produce from a cart. Nothey arent even fruit sellers. Buggy-whip vendors. Whalebone-corset repairers. We are now and tomorrow. Your friends arent even yesterday anymore. It was a strangely familiar speech. Shadow asked, Did you ever meet a fat kid in a limo? She spread her hands and rolled her eyes comically, funny Lucy Ricardo washing her hands of a disaster. The technical boy? You met the technical boy? Look, he's a good kid. he's one of us. he's just not good with people he doesn't know. Whenyou're working for us, you'll see how amazing he is. And if I don't want to work for you, I-Love-Lucy? There was a knock on the door of Lucys apartment, and Rickys voice could be heard offstage, asking Loo-cy what was keepin her so long, they was due down at the club in the next scene; a flash of irritation touched Lucys cartoonish face. Hell, she said. Look, whatever the old guys are paying you, I can pay you double. Treble. A hundred times. Whateveryou're giving you, I can give you so much more. She smiled, a perfect, roguish, Lucy Ricardo smile. You name it, honey. What do you need? She began to undo the buttons of her blouse. Hey, she said. You ever wanted to see Lucys tits? The screen went black. The sleep function had kicked in and the set turned itself off. Shadow looked at his watch: it was half past midnight. Not really, said Shadow. He rolled over in bed and closed his eyes. It occurred to him that the reason he liked Wednesday and Mr. Nancy and the rest of them better than their opposition was pretty straightforward: they might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn't speak in cliches. And he guessed he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall, any day. * * * Morning found Shadow back on the road, driving through a gently undulating brown landscape of winter grass and leafless trees. The last of the snow had vanished. He filled up the tank of the piece of shit in a town that was home to the runner-up of the state womens under 16s three-hundred-meter dash, and, hoping that the dirt wasnt all that was holding it together, he ran the car through the gas station car wash. He was surprised to discover that the car was, when cleanagainst all reasonwhite, and pretty much free of rust. He drove on. The sky was impossibly blue, and white industrial smoke rising from factory chimneys was frozen in the sky, like a photograph. |
| 431 |
Shadow realized that he was not alone. A small girl, wearing old tennis shoes on her feet and a mans gray woolen sweater as a dress, was standing on the sidewalk, ten feet away from him, staring at him with the somber gravity of a six-year-old. Her hair was black, and straight, and long; her skin was as brown as the river. He grinned at her. She stared back at him, defiantly. There was a squeal and a yowl from the waterfront, and the little brown cat shot away from a spilled garbage can, pursued by a long-muzzled black dog. The cat scurried under a car. Hey, said Shadow to the girl. You ever seen invisible powder before? She hesitated. Then she shook her head. Okay, said Shadow. Well, watch this. Shadow pulled out a quarter with his left hand, held it up, tilting it from one side to another, then appeared to toss it into his right hand, closing his hand hard on nothing, and putting the hand forward. Now, he said, I just take some invisible powder from my pocket and he reached his left hand into his breast pocket, dropping the quarter into the pocket as he did so, and I sprinkle it on the hand with the coin and he mimed sprinkling, and looknow the quarters invisible too. He opened his empty right hand, and, in astonishment, his empty left hand as well. The little girl just stared. Shadow shrugged, and put his hands back in his pockets, loading a quarter in one hand, a folded up five-dollar bill in the other. He was going to produce them from the air, and then give the girl the five bucks: she looked like she needed it. Hey, he said. Weve got an audience. The black dog and the little brown cat were watching him as well, flanking the girl, looking up at him intently. The dogs huge ears were pricked up, giving it a comically alert expression. A cranelike man with gold-rimmed spectacles was coming up the sidewalk toward them, peering from side to side as if he were looking for something. Shadow wondered if he was the dogs owner. What did you think? Shadow asked the dog, trying to put the little girl at her ease. Was that cool? The black dog licked its long snout. Then it said, in a deep, dry voice, I saw Harry Houdini once, and believe me, man, you are no Harry Houdini. The little girl looked at the animals, she looked up at Shadow, and then she ran off, her feet pounding the sidewalk as if all the powers of hell were after her. The two animals watched her go. The cranelike man had reached the dog. He reached down and scratched its high, pointed ears. Come on, said the man in the gold-rimmed spectacles to the dog, it was only a coin trick. Its not like he was doing an underwater escape. Not yet, said the dog. But he will. The golden light was done, and the gray of twilight had begun. Shadow dropped the coin and the folded bill back into his pocket. Okay, he said. Which one of you is Jackal? Use your eyes, said the black dog with the long snout. It began to amble along the sidewalk, beside the man in the gold glasses, and, after a moments hesitation, Shadow followed them. |
| 432 |
He never eats at the hotel (for while the hotel bill is being covered by Fuads business partners, he must pay for his own food); instead he buys food at falafel houses and at little food stores, smuggles it up to the hotel beneath his coat for days before he realizes that no one cares. And even then he feels strange about carrying the bags of food into the dimly lit elevators (Salim always has to bend and squint to find the button to press to take him to his floor) and up to the tiny white room in which he stays. Salim is upset. The fax that was waiting for him when he woke this morning was curt, and alternately chiding, stem, and disappointed: Salim was letting them downhis sister, Fuad, Fuads business partners, the Sultanate of Oman, the whole Arab world. Unless he was able to get the orders, Fuad would no longer consider it his obligation to employ Salim. They depended upon him. His hotel was too expensive. What was Salim doing with their money, living like a sultan in America? Salim read the fax in his room (which has always been too hot and stifling, so last night he opened a window, and was now too cold) and sat there for a time, his face frozen into an expression of complete misery. Then Salim walks downtown, holding his sample case as if it contained diamonds and rubies, trudging through the cold for block after block until, on Broadway and 19th Street, he finds a squat building over a deli. He walks up the stairs to the fourth floor, to the office of Panglobal Imports. The office is dingy, but he knows that Panglobal handles almost half of the ornamental souvenirs that enter the U. S. from the Far East. A real order, a significant order from Panglobal, could redeem Salims journey, could make the difference between failure and success, so Salim sits on an uncomfortable wooden chair in an outer office, his sample case balanced on his lap, staring at the middle-aged woman with her hair dyed too bright a red who sits behind the desk, blowing her nose on Kleenex after Kleenex. After she blows her nose she wipes it, and drops the Kleenex into the trash. Salim got there at 10:30 A. M., half an hour before his appointment. Now he sits there, flushed and shivering, wondering if he is running a fever. The time ticks by so slowly. Salim looks at his watch. Then he clears his throat. The woman behind the desk glares at him. Yes? she says. It sounds like Yed. It is eleven-thirty-five, says Salim. The woman glances at the clock on the Wall, and says, Yed, again. I'd id. My appointment was for eleven, says Salim with a placating smile. Mister Blanding knowsyou're here, she tells him, reprovingly. (Bidter Bladdig dodeyou're here.) Salim picks up an old copy of the New York Post from the table. He speaks English better than he reads it, and he puzzles his way through the stories like a man doing a crossword puzzle. He waits, a plump young man with the eyes of a hurt puppy, glancing from his watch to his newspaper to the clock on the wall. At twelve-thirty several men come out from the inner office. |
| 433 |
They talk loudly, jabbering away to each other in American. One of them, a big, paunchy man, has a cigar, unlit, in his mouth. He glances at Salim as he comes out. He tells the woman behind the desk to try the juice of a lemon, and zinc as his sister swears by zinc and vitamin C. She promises him that she will, and gives him several envelopes. He pockets them and then he, and the other men, go out into the hall. The sound of their laughter disappears down the stairwell. It is one oclock. The woman behind the desk opens a drawer and takes out a brown paper bag, from which she removes several sandwiches, an apple, and a Milky Way. She also takes out a small plastic bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice. Excuse me, says Salim, but can you perhaps call Mister Blanding and tell him that I am still waiting? She looks up at him as if surprised to see that he is still there, as if they have not been sitting five feet apart for two and a half hours. he's at lunch, she says. Hed ad dudge. Salim knows, knows deep down in his gut, that Blanding was the man with the unlit cigar. When will he be back? She shrugs, takes a bite of her sandwich. he's busy with appointments for the rest of the day, she says. Hed biddy wid abboidmeds for the red ob the day. Will he see me, then, when he comes back? asks Salim. She shrugs, and blows her nose. Salim is hungry, increasingly so, and frustrated, and powerless. At three oclock the woman looks at him and says He wode be gubbig bag. Excuse? Bidder Bladdig. He wode be gubbig bag today. Can I make an appointment for tomorrow? She wipes her nose. You hab to teddephode. Appoid-beds odly by teddephode. I see, says Salim. And then he smiles: a salesman, Fuad had told him many times before he left Muscat, is naked in America without his smile. Tomorrow I will telephone, he says. He takes his sample case, and he walks down the many stairs to the street, where the freezing rain is turning to sleet. Salim contemplates the long, cold walk back to the 46th Street hotel, and the weight of the sample case, then he steps to the edge of the sidewalk and waves at every yellow cab that approaches, whether the light on top is on or off, and every cab drives past him. One of them accelerates as it passes; a wheel dives into a water-filled pothole, spraying freezing muddy water over Salims pants and coat. For a moment, he contemplates throwing himself in front of one of the lumbering cars, and then he realizes that his brother-in-law would be more concerned with the fate of the sample case than of Salim himself, and that he would bring grief to no one but his beloved sister, Fuads wife (for he had always been a slight embarrassment to his father and mother, and his romantic encounters had always, of necessity, been both brief and relatively anonymous): also, he doubts that any of the cars are going fast enough actually to end his life. A battered yellow taxi draws up beside him and, grateful to be able to abandon his train of thought, Salim gets in. |
| 434 |
The backseat is patched with gray duct tape; the half-open Plexiglas barrier is covered with notices warning him not to smoke, telling him how much to pay to get to the various airports. The recorded voice of somebody famous he has never heard of tells him to remember to wear his seat belt. The Paramount Hotel, please, says Salim. The cabdriver grunts and pulls away from the curb, into the traffic. He is unshaven, and he wears a thick, dust-colored sweater and black plastic sunglasses. The weather is gray, and night is falling: Salim wonders if the man has a problem with his eyes. The wipers smear the street scene into grays and smudged lights. From nowhere, a truck pulls out in front of them, and the cabdriver swears, by the beard of the prophet. Salim stares at the name on the dashboard, but he cannot make it out from here. How long have you been driving a cab, my friend? he asks the man, in his own language. Ten years, says the driver, in the same tongue. Where are you from? Muscat, says Salim. In Oman. From Oman. I have been in Oman. It was a long time ago. Have you heard of the city of Ubar? asks the taxi driver. Indeed I have, says Salim. The Lost City of Towers. They found it in the desert five, ten years ago, I do not remember exactly. Were you with the expedition that excavated it? Something like that. It was a good city, says the taxi driver. On most nights there would be three, maybe four thousand people camped there: every traveler would rest at Ubar, and the music would play, and the wine would flow like water and the water would flow as well, which was why the city existed. That is what I have heard, says Salim. And it perished, what, a thousand years ago? Two thousand? The taxi driver says nothing. They are stopped at a red traffic light. The light turns green, but the driver does not move, despite the immediate discordant blare of horns behind them. Hesitantly, Salim reaches through the hole in the Plexiglas and he touches the driver on the shoulder. The mans head jerks up, with a start, and he puts his foot down on the gas, lurching them across the intersection. Fuckshitfuckfuck, he says, in English. You must be very tired, my friend, says Salim. I have been driving this Allah-forgotten taxi for thirty hours, says the driver. It is too much. Before that, I sleep for five hours, and I drove fourteen hours before that. We are shorthanded, before Christmas. I hope you have made a lot of money, says Salim. The driver sighs. Not much. This morning I drove a man from Fifty-first Street to Newark Airport. When we got there, he ran off into the airport, and I could not find him again. A fifty-dollar fare gone, and I had to pay the tolls on the way back myself. Salim nods. I had to spend today waiting to see a man who will not see me. My brother-in-law hates me. I have been in America for a week, and it has done nothing but eat my money. I sell nothing. What do you sell? Shit, says Salim. Worthless gewgaws and baubles and tourist trinkets. |
| 435 |
Horrible, cheap, foolish, ugly shit. The taxi driver wrenches the wheel to the right, swings around something, drives on. Salim wonders how he can see to drive, between the rain, the night, and the thick sunglasses. You try to sell shit? Yes, says Salim, thrilled and horrified that he has spoken the truth about his brother-in-laws samples. And they will not buy it? No. Strange. You look at the stores here, that is all they sell. Salim smiles nervously. A truck is blocking the street in front of them: a red-faced cop standing in front of it waves and shouts and points them down the nearest street. We will go over to Eighth Avenue, come uptown that way, says the taxi driver. They turn onto the street, where the traffic has stopped completely. There is a cacophony of horns, but the cars do not move. The driver sways in his seat. His chin begins to descend to his chest, one, two, three times. Then he begins, gently, to snore. Salim reaches out to wake the man, hoping that he is doing the right thing. As he shakes his shoulder, the driver moves, and Salims hand brushes the mans face, knocking the sunglasses from his face into his lap. The taxi driver opens his eyes, reaches for and replaces the black plastic sunglasses, but it is too late. Salim has seen his eyes. The car crawls forward in the rain. The numbers on the meter increase. Are you going to kill me? asks Salim. The taxi drivers lips are pressed together. Salim watches his face in the drivers mirror. No, says the driver, very quietly. The car stops again. The rain patters on the roof. Salim begins to speak. My grandmother swore that she had seen an ifrit, or perhaps a marid, late one evening, on the edge of the desert. We told her that it was just a sandstorm, a little wind, but she said no, she saw its face, and its eyes, like yours, were burning flames. The driver smiles, but his eyes are hidden behind the black plastic glasses, and Salim cannot tell whether there is any humor in that smile or not. The grandmothers came here too, he says. Are there many jinn in New York? asks Salim. No. Not many of us. There are the angels, and there are men, who Allah made from mud, and then there are the people of the fire, the jinn, says Salim. People know nothing about my people here, says the driver. They think we grant wishes. If I could grant wishes do you think I would be driving a cab? I do not understand. The taxi driver seems gloomy. Salim stares at his face in the mirror as he speaks, watching the ifrits dark lips. They believe that we grant wishes. Why do they believe that? I sleep in one stinking room in Brooklyn. I drive this taxi for any stinking freak who has the money to ride in it, and for some who don't. I drive them where they need to go, and sometimes they tip me. Sometimes they pay me. His lower lip began to tremble. The ifrit seemed on edge. One of them shat on the backseat once. I had to clean it before I could take the cab back. How could he do that? I had to clean the wet shit from the seat. |
| 436 |
Is that right? Salim puts out a hand, pats the ifrits shoulder. He can feel solid flesh through the wool of the sweater. The ifrit raises his hand from the wheel, rests it on Salims hand for a moment. Salim thinks of the desert then: red sands blow a dust storm through his thoughts, and the scarlet silks of the tents that surrounded the lost city of Ubar flap and billow through his mind. They drive up Eighth Avenue. The old believe. They do not piss into holes, because the Prophet told them that jinn live in holes. They know that the angels throw flaming stars at us when we try to listen to their conversations. But even for the old, when they come to this country we are very, very far away. Back there, I did not have to drive a cab. I am sorry, says Salim. It is a bad time, says the driver. A storm is coming. It scares me. I would do anything to get away. The two of them say nothing more on their way back to the hotel. When Salim gets out of the cab he gives the ifrit a twenty-dollar bill, tells him to keep the change. Then, with a sudden burst of courage, he tells him his room number. The taxi driver says nothing in reply. A young woman clambers into the back of the cab, and it pulls out into the cold and the rain. Six oclock in the evening. Salim has not yet written the fax to his brother-in-law. He goes out into the rain, buys himself this nights kabob and french fries. It has only been a week, but he feels that he is becoming heavier, rounder, softening in this country of New York. When he comes back to the hotel he is surprised to see the taxi driver standing in the lobby, hands deep in his pockets. He is staring at a display of black-and-white postcards. When he sees Salim he smiles, self-consciously. I called your room, he says, but there was no answer. So I thought I would wait. Salim smiles also, and touches the mans arm. I am here, he says. Together they enter the dim, green-lit elevator, ascend to the fifth floor holding hands. The ifrit asks if he may use Salims bathroom. I feel very dirty, he says. Salim nods. He sits on the bed, which fills most of the small white room, and listens to the sound of the shower running. Salim takes off his shoes, his socks, and then the rest of his clothes. The taxi driver comes out of the shower, wet, with a towel wrapped about his midsection. He is not wearing his sunglasses, and in the dim room his eyes burn with scarlet flames. Salim blinks back tears. I wish you could see what I see, he says. I do not grant wishes, whispers the ifrit, dropping his towel and pushing Salim gently, but irresistibly, down onto the bed. It is an hour or more before the ifrit comes, thrusting and grinding into Salims mouth. Salim has already come twice in this time. The jinns semen tastes strange, fiery, and it burns Salims throat. Salim goes to the bathroom, washes out his mouth. When he returns to the bedroom the taxi driver is already asleep in the white bed, snoring peacefully. Salim climbs into the bed beside him, cuddles close to the ifrit, imagining the desert on his skin. |
| 437 |
As he starts to fall asleep he realizes that he still has not written his fax to Fuad, and he feels guilty. Deep inside he feels empty and alone: he reaches out, rests his hand on the ifrits tumescent cock and, comforted, he sleeps. They wake in the small hours, moving against each other, and they make love again. At one point Salim realizes that he is crying, and the ifrit is kissing away his tears with burning lips. What is your name? Salim asks the taxi driver. There is a name on my driving permit, but it is not mine, the ifrit says. Afterward, Salim could not remember where the sex had stopped and the dreams began. When Salim wakes, the cold sun creeping into the white room, he is alone. Also, he discovers, his sample case is gone, all the bottles and rings and souvenir copper flashlights, all gone, along with his suitcase, his wallet, his passport, and his air tickets back to Oman. He finds a pair of jeans, the T-shirt, and the dust-colored woolen sweater discarded on the floor. Beneath them he finds a drivers license in the name of Ibrahim bin Irem, a taxi permit in the same name, and a ring of keys with an address written on a piece of paper attached to them in English. The photographs on the license and the permit do not look much like Salim, but then, they did not look much like the ifrit. The telephone rings: it is the front desk calling to point out that Salim has already checked out and his guest needs to leave soon so that they can service the room, to get it ready for another occupant. I do not grant wishes, says Salim, tasting the way the words shape themselves in his mouth. He feels strangely light-headed as he dresses. New York is very simple: the avenues run north to south, the streets run west to east. How hard can it be? he asks himself. He tosses the car keys into the air and catches them. Then he puts on the black plastic sunglasses he found in the pockets, and leaves the hotel room to go and look for his cab. He said the dead had souls, but when I asked him How that could beI thought the dead were souls, he broke my trance. don't that make you suspicious That theres something the dead are keeping back? Yes, theres something the dead are keeping back. Robert Frost, Two Witches The week before Christmas is often a quiet one in a funeral parlor, Shadow learned, over supper. They were sitting in a small restaurant, two blocks from Ibis and Jacquels Funeral Parlor. Shadows meal consisted of an all-day full breakfastit came with hush puppieswhile Mr. Ibis picked and pecked at a slice of coffee cake. Mr. Ibis explained it to him. The lingering ones are holding on for one final Christmas, said Mr. Ibis, or even for New Years, while the others, the ones for whom other peoples jollity and celebration will prove too painful, have not yet been tipped over the edge by that last showing of Its a Wonderful Life, have not quite encountered the final straw, or should I say, the final sprig of holly that breaks not the camels but the reindeers back. |
| 438 |
don't you agree? Sounds good to me, said Shadow. The Lord gave my business partner dominion over the dead, just as he gave me skill with words. Fine things, words. I write books of tales, you know. Nothing literary. Just for my own amusement. Accounts of lives. He paused. By the time Shadow realized that he should have asked if he might be allowed to read one, the moment had passed. Anyway, what we give them here is continuity: theres been an Ibis and Jacquel in business here for almost two hundred years. We werent always funeral directors, though. We used to be morticians, and before that, undertakers. And before that? Well, said Mr. Ibis, smiling just a little smugly, we go back a very long way. Of course, it wasnt until after the War Between the States that we found our niche here. That was when we became the funeral parlor for the colored folks hereabouts. Before that no one thought of us as coloredforeign maybe, exotic and dark, but not colored. Once the war was done, pretty soon, no one could remember a time when we werent perceived as black. My business partner, he's always had darker skin than mine. It was an easy transition. Mostly you are what they think you are. Its just strange when they talk about African-Americans. Makes me think of the people from Punt, Ophir, Nubia. We never thought of ourselves as Africanswe were the people of the Nile. So you were Egyptians, said Shadow. Mr. Ibis pushed his lower lip upward, then let his head bob from side to side, as if it were on a spring, weighing the pluses and minuses, seeing things from both points of view. Well, yes and no. Egyptians makes me think of the folk who live there now. The ones who built their cities over our graveyards and palaces. Do they look like me? Shadow shrugged. Hed seen black guys who looked like Mr. Ibis. Hed seen white guys with tans who looked like Mr. Ibis. Hows your coffee cake? asked the waitress, refilling their coffees. Best I ever had, said Mr. Ibis. You give my best to your ma. I'll do that, she said, and bustled away. You don't want to ask after the health of anyone, ifyou're a funeral director. They think maybeyou're scouting for business, said Mr. Ibis, in an undertone. Shall we see if your room is ready? Their breath steamed in the night air. Christmas lights twinkled in the windows of the stores they passed. Its good of you, putting me up, said Shadow. I appreciate it. We owe your employer a number of favors. And Lord knows, we have the room. Its a big old house. There used to be more of us, you know. Now its just the three of us. You won't be in the way. Any idea how long I'm meant to stay with you? Mr. Ibis shook his head. He didn't say. But we are happy to have you here, and we can find you work. If you are not squeamish. If you treat the dead with respect. So, asked Shadow, what are you people doing here in Cairo? Was it just the name or something? No. Not at all. Actually this region takes its name from us, although people barely know it. It was a trading post back in the old days. |
| 439 |
Frontier times? You might call it that, said Mr. Ibis. Evening Miz Simmons! And a Merry Christmas to you too! The folk who brought me here came up the Mississippi a long time back. Shadow stopped in the street, and stared. Are you trying to tell me that ancient Egyptians came here to trade five thousand years ago? Mr. Ibis said nothing, but he smirked loudly. Then he said, Three thousand five hundred and thirty years ago. Give or take. Okay, said Shadow. I'll buy it, I guess. What were they trading? Not much, said Mr. Ibis. Animal skins. Some food. Copper from the mines in what would now be Michigans upper peninsula. The whole thing was rather a disappointment. Not worth the effort. They stayed here long enough to believe in us, to sacrifice to us, and for a handful of the traders to die of fever and be buried here, leaving us behind them. He stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, turned around slowly, arms extended. This country has been Grand Central for ten thousand years or more. You say to me, what about Columbus? Sure, said Shadow, obligingly. What about him? Columbus did what people had been doing for thousands of years. Theres nothing special about coming to America. I've been writing stories about it, from time to time. They began to walk again. True stories? Up to a point, yes. I'll let you read one or two, if you like. Its all there for anyone who has eyes to see it. Personally and this is speaking as a subscriber to Scientific American, hereI feel very sorry for the professionals whenever they find another confusing skull, something that belonged to the wrong sort of people, or whenever they find statues or artifacts that confuse themfor they'll talk about the odd, but they won't talk about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether its true or not. I mean, heres a skull that shows the Ainu, the Japanese aboriginal race, were in America nine thousand years ago. Heres another that shows there were Polynesians in California nearly two thousand years later. And all the scientists mutter and puzzle over whos descended from whom, missing the point entirely. Heaven knows whatll happen if they ever actually find the Hopi emergence tunnels. Thatll shake a few things up, you just wait. Did the Irish come to America in the dark ages, you ask me? Of course they did, and the Welsh, and the Vikings, while the Africans from the West Coastwhat in later days they called the Slave Coast or the Ivory Coastthey were trading with South America, and the Chinese visited Oregon a couple of timesthey called it Fu Sang. The Basque established their secret sacred fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland twelve hundred years back. Now, I supposeyou're going to say, but Mister Ibis, these people were primitives, they didn't have radio controls and vitamin pills and jet airplanes. Shadow hadn't said anything, and hadn't planned to say anything, but he felt it was required of him, so he said, Well, werent they? |
| 440 |
The last dead leaves of fall crackled underfoot, winter-crisp. The misconception is that men didn't travel long distances in boats before the days of Columbus. Yet New Zealand and Tahiti and countless Pacific Islands were settled by people in boats whose navigation skills would have put Columbus to shame; and the wealth of Africa was from trading, although that was mostly to the east, to India and China. My people, the Nile folk, we discovered early on that a reed boat will take you around the world, if you have the patience and enough jars of sweet water. You see, the biggest problem with coming to America in the old days was that there wasnt a lot here that anyone wanted to trade, and it was much too far away. They had reached a large house, built in the style people called Queen Anne. Shadow wondered who Queen Anne was, and why she had been so fond of Addams Family-style houses. It was the only building on the block that wasnt locked up with boarded-over windows. They went through the gate and walked around the back of the building. Through large double doors, which Mr. Ibis unlocked with a key from his key chain, and they were in a large, unheated room, occupied by two people. They were a very tall, dark-skinned man, holding a large metal scalpel, and a dead girl in her late teens, lying on a long, porcelain table that resembled both a slab and a sink. There were several photographs of the dead girl pinned up on a corkboard on the wall above the body. She was smiling in one, a high school head shot. In another she was standing in a line with three other girls; they were wearing what might have been prom dresses, and her black hair was tied above her head in an intricate knotwork. Cold on the porcelain, her hair was down, loose around her shoulders, and matted with dried blood. This is my partner, Mister Jacquel, said Ibis. We met already, said Jacquel. Forgive me if I don't shake hands. Shadow looked down at the girl on the table. What happened to her? he asked. Poor taste in boyfriends, said Jacquel. Its not always fatal, said Mr. Ibis, with a sigh. This time it was. He was drunk, and he had a knife, and she told him that she thought she was pregnant. He didn't believe it was his. She was stabbed said Mr. Jacquel, and he counted. There was a click as he stepped on a foot switch, turning on a small Dictaphone on a nearby table, Five times. There are three knife wounds in the left anterior chest wall. The first is between the fourth and fifth intercostal spaces at the medial border of the left breast, two point two centimeters in length; the second and third are through the inferior portion of the left mid-breast penetrating at the sixth interspace, overlapping, and measuring three centimeters. There is one wound two centimeters long in the upper anterior left chest in the second interspace, and one wound five centimeters long and a maximum of one point six centimeters deep in the anteromedial left deltoid, a slashing injury. All the chest wounds are deep penetrating injuries. |
| 441 |
There are no other visible wounds externally. He released pressure from the foot switch. Shadow noticed a small microphone dangling above the embalming table by its cord. Soyou're the coroner as well? asked Shadow. Coroners a political appointment around here, said Ibis. His job is to kick the corpse. If it doesn't kick him back, he signs the death certificate. Jacquels what they call a prosector. He works for the county medical examiner. He does autopsies and saves tissue samples for analysis. he's already photographed her wounds. Jacquel ignored them. He took a big scalpel and made a deep incision in a large V that began at both collarbones and met at the bottom of her breastbone, and then he turned the V into a Y, another deep incision that continued from her breastbone to her pubis. He picked up what looked like a small, heavy chrome drill with a medallion-sized round saw blade at the business end. He turned it on, and cut through the ribs at both sides of her breastbone. The girl opened like a purse. Shadow suddenly was aware of a mild but unpleasantly penetrating, pungent, meaty smell. I thought it would smell worse, said Shadow. she's pretty fresh, said Jacquel. And the intestines werent pierced, so it doesn't smell of shit. Shadow found himself looking away, not from revulsion, as he would have expected, but from a strange desire to give the girl some privacy. It would be hard to be nakeder than this open thing. Jacquel tied off the intestines, glistening and snakelike in her belly, below the stomach and deep in the pelvis. He ran them through his fingers, foot after foot of them, described them as normal to the microphone, put them in a bucket on the floor. He sucked all the blood out of her chest with a vacuum pump, and measured the volume. Then he inspected the inside of her chest. He said to the microphone, There are three lacerations in the pericardium, which is filled with clotted and liquefying blood. Jacquel grasped her heart, cut it at its top, turned it about in his hand, examining it. He stepped on his switch and said, There are two lacerations of the myocardium; a one-point-five-centimeter laceration in the right ventricle and a one-point-eight-centimeter laceration penetrating the left ventricle. Jacquel removed each lung. The left lung had been stabbed and was half collapsed. He weighed them, and the heart, and he photographed the wounds. From each lung he sliced a small piece of tissue, which he placed into ajar. Formaldehyde, whispered Mr. Ibis helpfully. Jacquel continued to talk to the microphone, describing what he was doing, what he saw, as he removed the girls liver, the stomach, spleen, pancreas, both kidneys, the uterus and the ovaries. He weighed each organ, reported them as normal and uninjured. From each organ he took a small slice and put it into a jar of formaldehyde. From the heart, the liver, and from one of the kidneys, he cut an additional slice. These pieces he chewed, slowly, making them last, while he worked. |
| 442 |
Somehow it seemed to Shadow a good thing for him to do: respectful, not obscene. So you want to stay here with us for a spell? said Jacquel, masticating the slice of the girls heart. If you'll have me, said Shadow. Certainly well have you, said Mr. Ibis. No reasons why not and plenty of reasons why. you'll be under our protection as long asyou're here. I hope you don't mind sleeping under the same roof as the dead, said Jacquel. Shadow thought of the touch of Lauras lips, bitter and cold. No, he said. Not as long as they stay dead, anyhow. Jacquel turned and looked at him with dark brown eyes as quizzical and cold as a desert dogs. They stay dead here was all he said. Seems to me, said Shadow, seems to me that the dead come back pretty easy. Not at all, said Ibis. Even zombies, they make them out of the living, you know. A little powder, a little chanting, a little push, and you have a zombie. They live, but they believe they are dead. But to truly bring the dead back to life, in their bodies. That takes power. He hesitated, then, In the old land, in the old days, it was easier then. You could bind the ka of a man to his body for five thousand years, said Jacquel. Binding or loosing. But that was a long time ago. He took all the organs that he had removed and replaced them, respectfully, in the body cavity. He replaced the intestines and the breastbone and pulled the skin edges near each other. Then he took a thick needle and thread and, with deft, quick strokes, he sewed it up, like a man stitching a baseball: the cadaver transformed from meat into girl once again. I need a beer, said Jacquel. He pulled off his rubber gloves and dropped them into the bin. He dropped his dark brown overalls into a hamper. Then he took the cardboard tray of jars filled with little red and brown and purple slices of the organs. Coming? They walked up the back stairs to the kitchen. It was brown and white, a sober and respectable room that looked to Shadow as if it had last been decorated in 1920. There was a huge Kelvinator rattling to itself by one wall. Jacquel opened the Kelvinator door, put the plastic jars with their slivers of spleen, of kidney, of liver, of heart, inside. He took out three brown bottles. Ibis opened a glass-fronted cupboard, removed three tall glasses. Then he gestured for Shadow to sit down at the kitchen table. Ibis poured the beer and passed a glass to Shadow, a glass to Jacquel. It was a fine beer, bitter and dark. Good beer, said Shadow. We brew it ourselves, said Ibis. In the old days the women did the brewing. They were better brewers than we are. But now it is only the three of us here. Me, him, and her. He gestured toward the small brown cat, fast asleep in a cat-basket in the corner of the room. There were more of us, in the beginning. But Set left us to explore, what, two hundred years ago? Must be, by now. We got a postcard from him from San Francisco in 1905, 1906. Then nothing. While poor Horus he trailed off, in a sigh, and shook his head. |
| 443 |
I still see him, on occasion, said Jacquel. On my way to a pickup. He sipped his beer. I'll work for my keep, said Shadow. While I'm here. You tell me what you need doing, and I'll do it. Well find work for you, agreed Jacquel. The small brown cat opened her eyes and stretched to her feet. She padded across the kitchen floor and pushed at Shadows boot with her head. He put down his left hand and scratched her forehead and the back of her ears and the scruff of her neck. She arched, ecstatically, then sprang into his lap, pushed herself up against his chest, and touched her cold nose to his. Then she curled up in his lap and went back to sleep. He put his hand down to stroke her: her fur was soft, and she was warm and pleasant in his lap; she acted like she was in the safest place in the world, and Shadow felt comforted. The beer left a pleasant buzz in Shadows head. Your room is at the top of the stairs, by the bathroom, said Jacquel. Your work clothes will be hanging in the closetyou'll see. you'll want to wash up and shave first, I guess. Shadow did. He showered standing in the cast-iron tub and he shaved, very nervously, with a straight razor that Jacquel loaned him. It was obscenely sharp, and had a mother-of-pearl handle, and Shadow suspected it was usually used to give dead men their final shave. He had never used a straight razor before, but he did not cut himself. He washed off the shaving cream, looked at himself naked in the fly-specked bathroom mirror. He was bruised: fresh bruises on his chest and arms overlaying the fading bruises that Mad Sweeney had left him. His eyes looked back mistrustfully from the mirror at him. And then, as if someone else were holding his hand, he raised the straight razor, placed it, blade open, against his throat. It would be a way out, he thought. An easy way out. And if theres anyone whod simply take it in their stride, whod just clean up the mess and get on with things, its the two guys sitting downstairs at the kitchen table drinking their beer. No more worries. No more Laura. No more mysteries and conspiracies. No more bad dreams. Just peace and quiet and rest forever. One clean slash, ear to ear. that's all itll take. He stood there with the razor against his throat. A tiny smudge of blood came from the place where the blade touched the skin. He had not even noticed a cut. See, he told himself, and he could almost hear the words being whispered in his ear. Its painless. Too sharp to hurt. I'll be gone before I know it. Then the door to the bathroom swung open, just a few inches, enough for the little brown cat to put her head around the door frame and Mrr? up at him curiously. Hey, he said to the cat. I thought I locked that door. He closed the cutthroat razor, put it down on the side of the sink, dabbed at his tiny cut with a toilet paper swab. Then he wrapped a towel around his waist and went into the bedroom next door. His bedroom, like the kitchen, seemed to have been decorated some time in the 1920s: there was a washstand and a pitcher beside the chest of drawers and mirror. |
| 444 |
Someone had already laid out clothes for him on the bed: a black suit, white shirt, black tie, white undershirt and underpants, black socks. Black shoes sat on the worn Persian carpet beside the bed. He dressed himself. The clothes were of good quality, although none of them was new. He wondered who they had belonged to. Was he wearing a dead mans socks? Would he be stepping into a dead mans shoes? He adjusted the tie in the mirror and now it seemed to him that his reflection was smiling at him, sardonically. Now it seemed inconceivable to him that he had ever thought of cutting his throat. His reflection continued to smile as he adjusted his tie. Hey, he said to it. You know something that I don't? and immediately felt foolish. The door creaked open and the cat slipped between the doorpost and the door and padded across the room, then up on the windowsill. Hey, he said to the cat. I did shut that door. I know I shut that door. She looked at him, interested. Her eyes were dark yellow, the color of amber. Then she jumped down from the sill onto the bed, where she wrapped herself into a curl of fur and went back to sleep, a circle of cat upon the old counterpane. Shadow left the bedroom door open, so the cat could leave and the room air a little, and he walked downstairs. The stairs creaked and grumbled as he walked down them, protesting his weight, as if they just wanted to be left in peace. Damn, you look good, said Jacquel. He was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and was now himself dressed in a black suit similar to Shadows. You ever driven a hearse? No. First time for everything, then, said Jacquel. Its parked out front. * * * An old woman had died. Her name had been Lila Goodchild. At Mr. Jacquels direction, Shadow carried the folded aluminum gurney up the narrow stairs to her bedroom and unfolded it next to her bed. He took out a translucent blue plastic body bag, laid it next to the dead woman on the bed, and unzipped it open. She wore a pink nightgown and a quilted robe. Shadow lifted her and wrapped her, fragile and almost weightless, in a blanket, and placed it onto the bag. He zipped the bag shut and put it on the gurney. While Shadow did this, Jacquel talked to a very old man who had, when she was alive, been married to Lila Goodchild. Or rather, Jacquel listened while the old man talked. As Shadow had zipped Mrs. Goodchild away, the old man had been explaining how ungrateful his children had been, and grandchildren too, though that wasnt their fault, that was their parents, the apple didn't fall far from the tree, and he thought hed raised them better than that. Shadow and Jacquel wheeled the loaded gurney to the narrow flight of stairs. The old man followed them, still talking, mostly about money, and greed, and ingratitude. He wore bedroom slippers. Shadow carried the heavier bottom end of the gurney down the stairs and out onto the street, then he wheeled it along the icy sidewalk to the hearse. Jacquel opened the hearses rear door. |
| 445 |
Shadow hesitated, and Jacquel said, Just push it on in there. The supportsll fold up out of the way. Shadow pushed the gurney, and the supports snapped up, the wheels rotated, and the gurney rolled right onto the floor of the hearse. Jacquel showed him how to strap it in securely, and Shadow closed up the hearse while Jacquel listened to the old man who had been married to Lila Goodchild, unmindful of the cold, an old man in his slippers and his bathrobe out on the wintry sidewalk telling Jacquel how his children were vultures, no better than hovering vultures, waiting to take what little he and Lila had scraped together, and how the two of them had fled to St. Louis, to Memphis, to Miami, and how they wound up in Cairo, and how relieved he was that Lila had not died in a nursing home, how scared he was that he would. They walked the old man back into the house, up the stairs to his room. A small TV set droned from one corner of the couples bedroom. As Shadow passed it he noticed that the newsreader was grinning and winking at him. When he was sure that no one was looking in his direction he gave the set the finger. Theyve got no money, said Jacquel when they were back in the hearse. Hell come in to see Ibis tomorrow. Hell choose the cheapest funeral. Her friends will persuade him to do her right, give her a proper send-off in the front room, I expect. But hell grumble. Got no money. Nobody around heres got money these days. Anyway, hell be dead in six months. A year at the outside. Snowflakes tumbled and drifted in front of the headlights. The snow was coming south. Shadow said, Is he sick? It aint that. Women survive their men. Menmen like himdont live long when their women are gone. you'll seehell just start wandering, all the familiar things are going to be gone with her. He gets tired and he fades and then he gives up and then he's gone. Maybe pneumonia will take him or maybe itll be cancer, or maybe his heart will stop. Old age, and all the fight gone out of you. Then you die. Shadow thought. Hey, Jacquel? Yeah. Do you believe in the soul? It wasnt quite the question he had been going to ask, and it took him by surprise to hear it coming from his mouth. He had intended to say something less direct, but there was nothing less direct that he could say. Depends. Back in my day, we had it all set up. You lined up when you died, and youd answer for your evil deeds and for your good deeds, and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, wed feed your soul and your heart to Ammet, the Eater of Souls. He must have eaten a lot of people. Not as many as youd think. It was a really heavy feather. We had it made special. You had to be pretty damn evil to tip the scales on that baby. Stop here, that gas station. Well put in a few gallons. The streets were quiet, in the way that streets only are when the first snow falls. Its going to be a white Christmas, said Shadow as he pumped the gas. Yup. Shit. That boy was one lucky son of a virgin. Jesus? Lucky, lucky guy. |
| 446 |
He could fall in a cesspit and come up smelling like roses. Hell, its not even his birthday, you know that? He took it from Mithras. You run into Mithras yet? Red cap. Nice kid. No, I don't think so. WellI've never seen Mithras around here. He was an army brat. Maybe he's back in the Middle East, taking it easy, but I expect he's probably gone by now. It happens. One day every soldier in the empire has to shower in the blood of your sacrificial bull. The next they don't even remember your birthday. Swish went the windshield wipers, pushing the snow to the side, bunching the flakes up into knots and swirls of clear ice. A traffic light turned momentarily yellow and then red, and Shadow put his foot on the brake. The hearse fishtailed and swung around on the empty road before it stopped. The light turned green. Shadow took the hearse up to ten miles per hour, which seemed enough on the slippery roads. It was perfectly happy cruising in second gear: he guessed it must have spent a lot of its time at that speed, holding up traffic. that's good, said Jacquel. So, yeah, Jesus does pretty good over here. But I met a guy who said he saw him hitchhiking by the side of the road in Afghanistan and nobody was stopping to give him a ride. You know? It all depends on where you are. I think a real storms coming, said Shadow. He was talking about the weather. Jacquel, when, eventually, he began to answer, wasnt talking about the weather at all. You look at me and Ibis, he said. Well be out of business in a few years. We got savings put aside for the lean years, but the lean years have been here for a long while, and every year they just get leaner. Horus is crazy, really bugfuck crazy, spends all his time as a hawk, eats roadkill, what kind of a life is that? Youve seen Bast. And were in better shape than most of them. At least weve got a little belief to be going along with. Most of the suckers out there have barely got that. Its like the funeral businessthe big guys are going to buy you up one day, like it or not, becauseyou're bigger and more efficient and because they work. Fightings not going to change a damned thing, because we lost this particular battle when we came to this green land a hundred years ago or a thousand or ten thousand. We arrived and America just didn't care that wed arrived. We get bought out, or we press on, or we hit the road. So, yes. you're right. The storms coming. Shadow turned onto the street where the houses were, all but one of them, dead, their windows blind and boarded. Take the back alley, said Jacquel. He backed the hearse up until it was almost touching the double doors at the rear of the house. Ibis opened the hearse, and the mortuary doors, and Shadow unbuckled the gurney and pulled it out. The wheeled supports rotated and dropped as they cleared the bumper. He wheeled the gurney to the embalming table. He picked up Lila Goodchild, cradling her in her opaque bag like a sleeping child, and placed her carefully on the table in the chilly mortuary, as if he were afraid to wake her. |
| 447 |
The wind was ruffling the surface of the lake, making waves tipped with whitecaps, which seemed to Shadow to be tiny hands reaching for him. Down there, said the woman. She was wearing a leopard-print skirt, which flapped and tossed in the wind, and the flesh between the top of her stockings and her skirt was creamy and soft and in his dream, on the bridge, before God and the world, Shadow went down to his knees in front of her, burying his head in her crotch, drinking in the intoxicating jungle female scent of her. He became aware, in his dream, of his erection in real life, a rigid, pounding, monstrous thing as painful in its hardness as the erections hed had as a boy, when he was crashing into puberty. He pulled away and looked upward, and still he could not see her face. But his mouth was seeking hers and her lips were soft against his, and his hands were cupping her breasts, and then they were running across the satin smoothness of her skin, pushing into and parting the furs that hid her waist, sliding into the wonderful cleft of her, which warmed and wetted and parted for him, opening to his hand like a flower. The woman purred against him ecstatically, her hand moving down to the hardness of him and squeezing it. He pushed the bedsheets away and rolled on top of her, his hand parting her thighs, her hand guiding him between her legs, where one thrust, one magical push Now he was back in his old prison cell with her, and he was kissing her deeply. She wrapped her arms tightly around him, clamped her legs about his legs to hold him tight, so he could not pull out, not even if he wanted to. Never had he kissed lips so soft. He had not known that there were lips so soft in the whole world. Her tongue, though, was sandpaper-rough as it slipped against his. Who are you? he asked. She made no answer, just pushed him onto his back and, in one lithe movement, straddled him and began to ride him. No, not to ride him: to insinuate herself against him in a series of silken-smooth waves, each more powerful than the one before, strokes and beats and rhythms that crashed against his mind and his body just as the wind-waves on the lake splashed against the shore. Her nails were needle-sharp and they pierced his sides, raking them, but he felt no pain, only pleasure, everything was transmuted by some alchemy into moments of utter pleasure. He struggled to find himself, struggled to talk, his head now filled with sand dunes and desert winds. Who are you? he asked again, gasping for the words. She stared at him with eyes the color of dark amber, then lowered her mouth to his and kissed him with a passion, kissed him so completely and so deeply that there, on the bridge over the lake, in his prison cell, in the bed in the Cairo funeral home, he almost came. He rode the sensation like a kite riding a hurricane, willing it not to crest, not to explode, wanting it never to end. He pulled it under control. He had to warn her. My wife, Laura. She will kill you. Not me, she said. |
| 448 |
A fragment of nonsense bubbled up from somewhere in his mind: In medieval days it was said that a woman on top during coitus would conceive a bishop. That was what they called it: trying for a bishop He wanted to know her name, but he dared not ask her a third time, and she pushed her chest against his, and he could feel the hard nubs of her nipples against his chest, and she was squeezing him, somehow squeezing him down there deep inside her and this time he could not ride it or surf it, this time it picked him up and spun and tumbled him away, and he was arching up, pushing into her as deeply as he could imagine, as if they were, in some way, part of the same creature, tasting, drinking, holding, wanting Let it happen, she said, her voice a throaty feline growl. Give it to me. Let it happen. And he came, spasming and dissolving, the back of his mind itself liquefying, then sublimating slowly from one state to the next. Somewhere in there, at the end of it, he took a breath, a clear draught of air he felt all the way down to the depths of his lungs, and he knew that he had been holding his breath for a long time now. Three years, at least. Perhaps even longer. Now rest, she said, and she kissed his eyelids with her soft lips. Let it go. Let it all go. The sleep he slept after that was deep and dreamless and comforting, and Shadow dived deep and embraced it. * * * The light was strange. It was, he checked his watch, 6:45 A. M., and still dark outside, although the room was filled with a pale blue dimness. He climbed out of bed. He was certain that he had been wearing pajamas when he went to bed, but now he was naked, and the air was cold on his skin. He walked to the window and closed it. There had been a snowstorm in the night: six inches had fallen, perhaps more. The corner of the town that Shadow could see from his window, dirty and run-down, had been transformed into somewhere clean and different: these houses were not abandoned and forgotten, they were frosted into elegance. The streets had vanished completely, lost beneath a white field of snow. There was an idea that hovered at the edge of his perception. Something about transience. It flickered and was gone. He could see as well as if it were full daylight. In the mirror, Shadow noticed something strange. He stepped closer, and stared, puzzled. All his bruises had vanished. He touched his side, pressing firmly with his fingertips, feeling for one of the deep pains that told him he had encountered Mr. Stone and Mr. Wood, hunting for the greening blossoms of bruise that Mad Sweeney had gifted him with, and finding nothing. His face was clear and unmarked. His sides, however, and his back (he twisted to examine it) were scratched with what looked like claw marks. He hadn't dreamed it, then. Not entirely. Shadow opened the drawers, and put on what he found: an ancient pair of blue-denim Levis, a shirt, a thick blue sweater, and a black undertakers coat he found hanging in the wardrobe at the back of the room. |
| 449 |
He wore his own old shoes. The house was still asleep. He crept through it, willing the floorboards not to creak, and then he was outside, and he walked through the snow, his feet leaving deep prints on the sidewalk. It was lighter out than it had seemed from inside the house, and the snow reflected the light from the sky. After fifteen minutes of walking, Shadow came to a bridge with a big sign on the side of it warning him he was now leaving historical Cairo. A man stood under the bridge, tall and gangling, sucking on a cigarette and shivering continually. Shadow thought he recognized the man. And then, under the bridge in the winter darkness, he was close enough to see the purple smudge of bruise around the mans eye, and he said, Good morning, Mad Sweeney. The world was so quiet. Not even cars disturbed the snowbound silence. Hey, man, said Mad Sweeney. He did not look up. The cigarette had been rolled by hand. You keep hanging out under bridges, Mad Sweeney, said Shadow, people gonna thinkyou're a troll. This time Mad Sweeney looked up. Shadow could see the whites of his eyes all around his irises. The man looked scared. I was lookin for you, he said. You gotta help me, man. I fucked up big time. He sucked on his hand-rolled cigarette, pulled it away from his mouth. The cigarette paper stuck to his lower lip, and the cigarette fell apart, spilling its contents onto his ginger beard and down the front of his filthy T-shirt. Mad Sweeney brushed it off, convulsively, with blackened hands, as if it were a dangerous insect. My resources are pretty much tapped out, Mad Sweeney, said Shadow. But why don't you tell me what it is you need. You want me to get you a coffee? Mad Sweeney shook his head. He took out a tobacco pouch and papers from the pocket of his denim jacket and began to roll himself another cigarette. His beard bristled and his mouth moved as he did this, although no words were said aloud. He licked the adhesive side of the cigarette paper and rolled it between his fingers. The result looked only distantly like a cigarette. Then he said, M not a troll. Shit. Those bastardsre fucken mean. I knowyou're not a troll, Sweeney, said Shadow, gently. How can I help you? Mad Sweeney flicked his brass Zippo, and the first inch of his cigarette flamed and then subsided to ash. You remember I showed you how to get a coin? You remember? Yes, said Shadow. He saw the gold coin in his minds eye, watched it tumble into Lauras casket, saw it glitter around her neck. I remember. You took the wrong coin, man. A car approached the gloom under the bridge, blinding them with its lights. It slowed as it passed them, then stopped, and a window slid down. Everything okay here, gentlemen? Everythings just peachy, thank you, officer, said Shadow. Were just out for a morning walk. Okay now, said the cop. He did not look as if he believed that everything was okay. He waited. Shadow put a hand on Mad Sweeneys shoulder, and walked him forward, out of town, away from the police car. |
| 450 |
He heard the window hum closed, but the car remained where it was. Shadow walked. Mad Sweeney walked, and sometimes he staggered. The police car cruised past them slowly, then turned and went back into the city, accelerating down the snowy road. Now, why don't you tell me whats troubling you, said Shadow. I did it like he said. I did it all like he said, but I gave you the wrong coin. It wasnt meant to be that coin. that's for royalty. You see? I shouldn't even have been able to take it. that's the coin youd give to the king of America himself. Not some pissant bastard like you or me. And now I'm in big trouble. Just give me the coin back, man. you'll never see me again, if you do, I sweartofuckenBran, okay? I swear by the years I spent in the fucken trees. You did it like who said, Sweeney? Grimnir. The dude you call Wednesday, You know who he is? Who he really is? Yeah. I guess. There was a panicked look in the Irishmans crazy blue eyes. It was nothing bad. Nothing you cannothing bad. He just told me to be there at that bar and to pick a fight with you. He said he wanted to see what you were made of. He tell you to do anything else? Sweeney shivered and twitched; Shadow thought it was the cold for a moment, then knew where hed seen that shuddering shiver before. In prison: it was a junkie shiver. Sweeney was in withdrawal from something, and Shadow would have been willing to bet it was heroin. A junkie leprechaun? Mad Sweeney pinched off the burning head of his cigarette, dropped it on the ground, put the unfinished yellowing rest of it into his pocket. He rubbed his dirt-black fingers together, breathed on them to try and rub warmth into them. His voice was a whine now, Listen, just give me the fucken coin, man. I'll give you another, just as good. Hell, I'll give you a shitload of the fuckers. He took off his greasy baseball cap, then, with his right hand, he stroked the air, producing a large golden coin. He dropped it into his cap. And then he took another from a wisp of breath steam, and another, catching and grabbing them from the still morning air until the baseball cap was brimming with them and Sweeney was forced to hold it with both hands. He extended the baseball cap filled with gold to Shadow. Here, he said. Take them, man. Just give me back the coin I gave to you. Shadow looked down at the cap, wondered how much its contents would be worth. Where am I going to spend those coins, Mad Sweeney? Shadow asked. Are there a lot of places you can turn your gold into cash? He thought the Irishman was going to hit him for a moment, but the moment passed and Mad Sweeney just stood there, holding out his gold-filled cap with both hands like Oliver Twist. And then tears swelled in his blue eyes and began to spill down his cheeks. He took the cap and put itnow empty of everything except a greasy sweatbandback over his thinning scalp. You gotta, man, he was saying. didn't I show you how to do it? I showed you how to take coins from the hoard. I showed you where the hoard was. |
| 451 |
Just give me that first coin back. It didn't belong to me. I don't have it anymore. Mad Sweeneys tears stopped, and spots of color appeared in his cheeks. You, you fucken he said, and then the words failed him and his mouth opened and closed, wordlessly. I'm telling you the truth, said Shadow. I'm sorry. If I had it I'd give it back to you. But I gave it away. Sweeneys grimy hands clamped on Shadows shoulders, and the pale blue eyes stared into his. The tears had made streaks in the dirt on Mad Sweeneys face. Shit, he said. Shadow could smell tobacco and stale beer and whiskey-sweat. you're telling the truth, you fucker. Gave it away and freely and of your own will. Damn your dark eyes, you gave it a-fucken-way. I'm sorry. Shadow remembered the whispering thump the coin had made as it landed on Lauras casket. Sorry or not, I'm damned and I'm doomed. He wiped his nose and his eyes on his sleeves, muddying his face into strange patterns. Shadow squeezed Mad Sweeneys upper arm in an awkward male gesture. Twere better I had never been conceived, said Mad Sweeney, at length. Then he looked up. The fellow you gave it to. Would he give it back? Its a woman. And I don't know where she is. But no, I don't believe she would. Sweeney sighed, mournfully. When I was but a young pup, he said, there was a woman I met, under the stars, who let me play with her bubbies, and she told me my fortune. She told me that I would be undone and abandoned west of the sunset, and that a dead womans bauble would seal my fate. And I laughed and poured more barley wine and played with her bubbies some more, and I kissed her full on her pretty lips. Those were the good daysthe first of the gray monks had not yet come to our land, nor had they ridden the green sea to westward. And now. He stopped, midsentence. His head turned and he focused on Shadow. You shouldn't trust him, he said, reproachfully. Who? Wednesday. You mustn't trust him. I don't have to trust him. I work for him. Do you remember how to do it? What? Shadow felt he was having a conversation with half a dozen different people. The self-styled leprechaun sputtered and jumped from persona to persona, from theme to theme, as if the remaining clusters of brain cells were igniting, flaming, and then going out for good. The coins, man. The coins. I showed you, remember? He raised two fingers to his face, stared at them, then pulled a gold coin from his mouth. He tossed the coin to Shadow, who stretched out a hand to catch it, but no coin reached him. I was drunk, said Shadow. I don't remember. Sweeney stumbled across the road. It was light now and the world was white and gray. Shadow followed him. Sweeney walked in a long, loping stride, as if he were always falling, but his legs were there to stop him, to propel him into another stumble. When they reached the bridge, he held onto the bricks with one hand, and turned and said, You got a few bucks? I don't need much. Just enough for a ticket out of this place. Twenty bucks will do me fine. |
| 452 |
Both Mr. Jacquel and Mr. Ibis had made a point, individually, of explaining that, really, the hearse should only be used for funerals, and they had a van that they used to collect bodies, but the van was being repaired, had been for three weeks now, and could he be very careful with the hearse? Shadow drove carefully down the street. The snowplows had cleaned the roads by now, but he was comfortable driving slowly. It seemed right to go slow in a hearse, although he could barely remember the last time he had seen a hearse on the streets. Death had vanished from the streets of America, thought Shadow; now it happened in hospital rooms and in ambulances. We must not startle the living, thought Shadow. Mr. Ibis had told him that they move the dead about in some hospitals on the lower level of apparently empty covered gurneys, the deceased traveling their own paths in their own covered ways. A dark blue police cruiser was parked on a side street, and Shadow pulled up the hearse behind it. There were two cops inside the cruiser, drinking their coffee from thermos tops. They had the engine running to keep warm. Shadow tapped on the side window. Yeah? I'm from the funeral home, said Shadow. Were waiting for the medical examiner, said the cop. Shadow wondered if it was the same man who had spoken to him under the bridge. The cop, who was black, got out of the car, leaving his colleague in the drivers seat, and walked Shadow back to a Dumpster. Mad Sweeney was sitting in the snow beside the Dumpster. There was an empty green bottle in his lap, a dusting of snow and ice on his face and baseball cap and shoulders. He didn't blink. Dead wino, said the cop. Looks like it, said Shadow. don't touch anything yet, said the cop. Medical examiner should be here any time now. You ask me, the guy drank himself into a stupor and froze his ass. Yes, agreed Shadow. that's certainly what it looks like. He squatted down and looked at the bottle in Mad Sweeneys lap. Jameson Irish whiskey: a twenty-dollar ticket out of this place. A small green Nissan pulled up, and a harassed middle-aged man with sandy hair and a sandy mustache got out, walked over. He touched the corpses neck. He kicks the corpse, thought Shadow, and if it doesn't kick him back he's dead, said the medical examiner. Any ID? he's a John Doe, said the cop. The medical examiner looked at Shadow. You working for Jacquel and Ibis? he asked. Yes, said Shadow. Tell Jacquel to get dentals and prints for ID and identity photos. We don't need a post. He should just draw blood for toxicology. Got that? Do you want me to write it down for you? No, said Shadow. Its fine. I can remember. The man scowled fleetingly, then pulled a business card from his wallet, scribbled on it, and gave it to Shadow, saying, Give this to Jacquel. Then the medical examiner said Merry Christmas to everyone, and was on his way. The cops kept the empty bottle. Shadow signed for the John Doe and put it on the gurney. The body was pretty stiff, and Shadow couldn't get it out of a sitting position. |
| 453 |
He fiddled with the gurney, and found out that he could prop up one end. He strapped John Doe, sitting, to the gurney and put him in the back of the hearse, facing forward. Might as well give him a good ride. He closed the rear curtains. Then he drove back to the funeral home. The hearse was stopped at a traffic light when Shadow heard a voice croak, And its a fine wake I'll be wanting, with the best of everything, and beautiful women shedding tears and their clothes in their distress, and brave men lamenting and telling fine tales of me in my great days. you're dead, Mad Sweeney, said Shadow. You take whatyou're given whenyou're dead. Aye, that I shall, sighed the dead man sitting in the back of the hearse. The junkie whine had vanished from his voice now, replaced with a resigned flatness, as if the words were being broadcast from a long, long way away, dead words being sent out on a dead frequency. The light turned green and Shadow put his foot gently down on the gas. But give me a wake, nonetheless, said Mad Sweeney. Set me a place at table and give me a stinking drunk wake tonight. You killed me, Shadow. You owe me that much. I never killed you, Mad Sweeney, said Shadow. Its twenty dollars, he thought, for a ticket out of here. It was the drink and the cold killed you, not me. There was no reply, and there was silence in the car for the rest of the journey. After he parked at the back, Shadow wheeled the gurney out of the hearse and into the mortuary. He manhandled Mad Sweeney onto the embalming table as if he were hauling a side of beef. He covered the John Doe with a sheet and left him there, with the paperwork beside him. As he went up the back stairs he thought he heard a voice, quiet and muted, like a radio playing in a distant room, which said, And what would drink or cold be doing killing me, a leprechaun of the blood? No, it was you losing the little golden sun killed me, Shadow, killed me dead, as sure as waters wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end. Shadow wanted to point out to Mad Sweeney that that was a kind of bitter philosophy, but he suspected it was the being dead that made you bitter. He went upstairs to the main house, where a number of middle-aged women were putting Saran Wrap on casserole dishes, popping the Tupperware tops onto plastic pots of cooling fried potatoes and macaroni and cheese. Mr. Goodchild, the husband of the deceased, had Mr. Ibis against a wall, and was telling him how he knew none of his children would come out to pay their respects to their mother. The apple don't fall far from the tree, he told anyone who would listen to him. The apple don't fall far from the tree. * * * That evening Shadow laid an extra place at the table. He put a glass at each place, and a bottle of Jameson Gold in the middle of the table. It was the most expensive Irish whiskey they sold at the liquor store. After they ate (a large platter of leftovers left for them by the women) Shadow poured a generous tot into each glasshis, Ibiss, Jacques, and, Mad Sweeneys. |
| 454 |
Ibis polished his gold-rimmed spectacles and explainedenunciating even more clearly and precisely than usual, so Shadow knew he was drunk (his words, and the sweat that beaded on his forehead in that chilly house, were the only indications of this)with forefinger wagging, that he was an artist and that his tales should not be seen as literal constructs but as imaginative re-creations, truer than the truth, and Mad Sweeney said, I'll show you an imaginative re-creation, my fist imaginatively re-creating your fucken face for starters, and Mr. Jacquel bared his teeth and growled at Sweeney, the growl of a huge dog whos not looking for a fight but can always finish one by ripping out your throat, and Sweeney took the message and sat down and poured himself another glass of whiskey. Have you remembered how I do my little coin trick? he asked Shadow with a grin. I have not. If you can guess how I did it, said Mad Sweeney, his lips purple, his blue eyes beclouded, I'll tell you if you get warm. Its not a palm is it? asked Shadow. It is not. Is it a gadget of some kind? Something up your sleeve or elsewhere that shoots the coins up for you to catch? It is not that neither. More whiskey, anybody? I read in a book about a way of doing the misers dream with latex covering the palm of your hand, making a skin-colored pouch for the coins to hide behind. This is a sad wake for Great Sweeney who flew like a bird across all of Ireland and ate watercress in his madness: to be dead and unmourned save for a bird, a dog, and an idiot. No, it is not a pouch. Well, that's pretty much it for ideas, said Shadow. I expect you just take them out of nowhere. It was meant to be sarcasm, but then he saw the expression on Sweeneys face. You do, he said. You do take them from nowhere. Well, not exactly nowhere, said Mad Sweeney. But nowyou're getting the idea. You take them from the hoard. The hoard, said Shadow, starting to remember. Yes. You just have to hold it in your mind, and its yours to take from. The suns treasure. Its there in those moments when the world makes a rainbow. Its there in the moment of eclipse and the moment of the storm. And he showed Shadow how to do the thing. This time Shadow got it. * * * Shadows head ached and pounded, and his tongue tasted and felt like flypaper. He squinted at the glare of the daylight. He had fallen asleep with his head on the kitchen table. He was fully dressed, although he had at some point taken off his black tie. He walked downstairs, to the mortuary, and was relieved but unsurprised to see that John Doe was still on the embalming table. Shadow pried the empty bottle of Jameson Gold from the corpses rigor-mortised fingers and threw it away. He could hear someone moving about in the house above. Mr. Wednesday was sitting at the kitchen table when Shadow went upstairs. He was eating leftover potato salad from a Tupperware container with a plastic spoon. He wore a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a deep gray tie: the morning sun glittered on the silver tie pin in the shape of a tree. |
| 455 |
The really dangerous people believe that they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous. And you? asked Shadow. Why are you doing whatyou're doing? Because I want to, said Wednesday. And then he grinned. So that's all right. Shadow said, How did you all get away? Or did you all get away? We did, said Wednesday. Although it was a close thing. If theyd not stopped to grab you, they might have taken the lot of us. It convinced several of the people who had been sitting on the fence that I might not be completely crazy. So how did you get out? Wednesday shook his head. I don't pay you to ask questions, he said. I've told you before. Shadow shrugged. They spent the night in a Super 8 motel south of La Crosse. Christmas Day was spent on the road, driving north and east. The farmland became pine forest. The towns seemed to come farther and farther apart. They ate their Christmas lunch late in the afternoon in a hall-like family restaurant in northern central Wisconsin. Shadow picked cheerlessly at the dry turkey, jam-sweet red lumps of cranberry sauce, tough-as-wood roasted potatoes, and violently green canned peas. From the way he attacked it, and the way he smacked his lips, Wednesday seemed to be enjoying the food. As the meal progressed he became positively expansivetalking, joking, and, whenever she came close enough, flirting with the waitress, a thin blonde girl who looked scarcely old enough to have dropped out of high school. Excuse me, mdear, but might I trouble you for another cup of your delightful hot chocolate? And I trust you won't think me too forward if I say what a mightily fetching and becoming dress that is. Festive, yet classy. The waitress, who wore a bright red-and-green skirt edged with glittering silver tinsel, giggled and colored and smiled happily, and went off to get Wednesday another mug of hot chocolate. Fetching, said Wednesday, thoughtfully, watching her go. Becoming, he said. Shadow did not think he was talking about the dress. Wednesday shoveled the final slice of turkey into his mouth, flicked at his beard with his napkin, and pushed his plate forward. Aaah. Good. He looked around him, at the family restaurant. In the background a tape of Christmas songs was playing: the little drummer boy had no gifts to bring, parupapom-pom, rapappom pom, rapappom pom. Some things may change, said Wednesday, abruptly. People, howeverpeople stay the same. Some gifts last forever, others are swallowed soon enough by time and by the world. My favorite gift of all is no longer practical. Still, a surprising number of gifts are timelessthe Spanish Prisoner, the Pigeon Drop, the Fawney Rig (thats the Pigeon Drop but with a gold ring instead of a wallet), the Fiddle Game I've never heard of the Fiddle Game, said Shadow. I think I've heard of the others. My old cellmate said hed actually done the Spanish Prisoner. He was a grifter. Ah, said Wednesday, and his left eye sparkled. |
| 456 |
The Fiddle Game was a fine and wonderful con. In its purest form it is a two-man grift. It trades on cupidity and greed, as all great grifts do. You can always cheat an honest man, but it takes more work. So. We are in a hotel or an inn or a fine restaurant, and, dining there, we find a manshabby, but shabby genteel, not down-at-heel but certainly down on his luck. We shall call him Abraham. And when the time comes to settle his billnot a huge bill, you understand, fifty, seventy-five dollarsan embarrassment! Where is his wallet? Good Lord, he must have left it at a friends, not far away. He shall go and obtain his wallet forthwith! But here, mine host, says Abraham, take this old fiddle of mine for security. Its old, as you can see, but its how I make my living. Wednesdays smile when he saw the waitress approaching was huge and predatory. Ah, the hot chocolate! Brought to me by my Christmas Angel! Tell me my dear, could I have some more of your delicious bread when you get a moment? The waitresswhat was she, Shadow wondered: sixteen, seventeen? looked at the floor and her cheeks flushed crimson. She put down the chocolate with shaking, hands and retreated to the edge of the room, by the slowly rotating display of pies, where she stopped and stared at Wednesday. Then she slipped into the kitchen to fetch Wednesday his bread. So. The violinold, unquestionably, perhaps even a little batteredis placed away in its case, and our temporarily impecunious Abraham sets off in search of his wallet. But a well-dressed gentleman, only just done with his own dinner, has been observing this exchange, and now he approaches our host: could he, perchance, inspect the violin that honest Abraham left behind? Certainly he can. Our host hands it over, and the well-dressed manlet us call him Barringtonopens his mouth wide, then remembers himself and closes it, examines the violin reverentially, like a man who has been permitted into a holy sanctum to examine the bones of a prophet. Why! he says, this isit must beno, it cannot bebut yes, there it ismy lord! But this is unbelievable! and he points to the makers mark, on a strip of browning paper inside the violinbut still, he says, even without it he would have known it by the color of the varnish, by the scroll, by the shape. Now Barrington reaches inside his pocket and produces an engraved business card, proclaiming him to be a preeminent dealer in rare and antique musical instruments. So this violin is rare? asks mine host. Indeed it is, says Barrington, still admiring it with awe, and worth in excess of a hundred thousand dollars, unless I miss my guess. Even as a dealer in such things I would pay fiftyno, seventy-five thousand dollars, good cash money, for such an exquisite piece. I have a man on the West Coast who would buy it tomorrow, sight unseen, with one telegram, and pay whatever I asked for it. And then he consults his watch, and his face falls. My train he says. I have scarcely enough time to catch my train! |
| 457 |
Good sir, when the owner of this inestimable instrument should return, please give him my card, for, alas, I must be away. And with that, Barrington leaves, a man who knows that time and the train wait for no man. Mine host examines the violin, curiosity mingling with cupidity in his veins, and a plan begins to bubble up through his mind. But the minutes go by, and Abraham does not return. And now it is late, and through the door, shabby but proud, comes our Abraham, our fiddle player, and he holds in his hands a wallet, a wallet that has seen better days, a wallet that has never contained more than a hundred dollars on its best day, and from it he takes the money to pay for his meal or his stay, and he asks for the return of his violin. Mine host puts the fiddle in its case on the counter, and Abraham takes it like a mother cradling her child. Tell me, says the host (with the engraved card of a man wholl pay fifty thousand dollars, good cash money, burning his inside breast pocket), how much is a violin like this worth? For my niece has a yearning on her to play the fiddle, and its her birthday coming up in a week or so. Sell this fiddle? says Abraham. I could never sell her. I've had her for twenty years, I have, fiddled in every state of the union with her. And to tell the truth, she cost me all of five hundred dollars back when I bought her. Mine host keeps the smile from his face. Five hundred dollars? What if I were to offer you a thousand dollars for it, here and now? The fiddle player looks delighted, then crestfallen, and he says, But lordy, I'm a fiddle player, sir, its all I know how to do. This fiddle knows me and she loves me, and my fingers know her so well I could play an air upon her in the dark. Where will I find another that sounds so fine? A thousand dollars is good money, but this is my livelihood. Not a thousand dollars, not for five thousand. Mine host sees his profits shrinking, but this is business, and you must spend money to make money. Eight thousand dollars, he says. Its not worth that, but I've taken a fancy to it, and I do love and indulge my niece. Abraham is almost in tears at the thought of losing his beloved fiddle, but how can he say no to eight thousand dollars? especially when mine host goes to the wall safe and removes not eight but nine thousand dollars, all neatly banded and ready to be slipped into the fiddle players threadbare pocket. you're a good man, he tells his host. you're a saint! But you must swear to take care of my girl! and, reluctantly, he hands over his violin. But what if mine host simply hands over Barringtons card and tells Abraham that he's come into some good fortune? asked Shadow. Then were out the cost of two dinners, said Wednesday. He wiped the remaining gravy and leftovers from his plate with a slice of bread, which he ate with lip-smacking relish. Let me see if I've got it straight, said Shadow. So Abraham leaves, nine thousand dollars the richer, and in the parking lot by the train station he and Barrington meet up. |
| 458 |
They split the money, get into Barringtons Model A Ford, and head for the next town. I guess in the trunk of that car they must have a box filled with hundred-dollar violins. I personally made it a point of honor never to pay more than five dollars for any of them, said Wednesday. Then he turned to the hovering waitress. Now, my dear, regale us with your description of the sumptuous desserts available to us on this, our Lords natal day. He stared at herit was almost a leeras if nothing that she could offer him would be as toothsome a morsel as herself. Shadow felt deeply uncomfortable: it was like watching an old wolf stalking a fawn too young to know that if it did not run, and run now, it would wind up in a distant glade with its bones picked clean by the ravens. The girl blushed once more and told them that dessert was apple pie a la modeThats with a scoop of vanilla ice creamChristmas cake a la mode, or a red-and-green whipped pudding. Wednesday stared into her eyes and told her that he would try the Christmas cake a la mode. Shadow passed. Now, as grifts go, said Wednesday, the fiddle game goes back three hundred years or more. And if you pick your chicken correctly you could still play it anywhere in America tomorrow. I thought you said that your favorite grift was no longer practical, said Shadow. I did indeed. However, that is not my favorite. No, my favorite was one they called the Bishop Game. It had everything: excitement, subterfuge, portability, surprise. Perhaps, I think from time to time, perhaps with a little modification, it might he thought for a moment, then shook his head. No. Its time has passed. It is, let us say, 1920, in a city of medium to large sizeChicago, perhaps, or New York, or Philadelphia. We are in a jewelers emporium. A man dressed as a clergymanand not just any clergyman, but a bishop, in his purpleenters and picks out a necklacea gorgeous and glorious confection of diamonds and pearls, and pays for it with a dozen of the crispest hundred-dollar bills. Theres a smudge of green ink on the topmost bill and the store owner, apologetically but firmly, sends the stack of bills to the bank on the corner to be checked. Soon enough, the store clerk returns with the bills. The bank says they are none of them counterfeit. The owner apologizes again, and the bishop is most gracious, he well understands the problem, there are such lawless and ungodly types in the world today, such immorality and lewdness abroad in the world and shameless women, and now that the underworld has crawled out of the gutter and come to live on the screens of the picture palaces, what more could anyone expect? And the necklace is placed in its case, and the store owner does his best not to ponder why a bishop of the church would be purchasing a twelve-hundred-dollar diamond necklace, nor why he would be paying good cash money for it. The bishop bids him a hearty farewell, and walks out on the street, only for a heavy hand to descend on his shoulder. |
| 459 |
Why Soapy, yez spalpeen, up to your old tricks, are you? and a broad beat cop with an honest Irish face walks the bishop back into the jewelry store. Beggin your pardon, but has this man just bought anything from you? asks the cop. Certainly not, says the bishop. Tell him I have not. Indeed he has, says the jeweler. He bought a pearl and diamond necklace from mepaid for it in cash as well. Would you have the bills available, sir? asks the cop. So the jeweler takes the twelve hundred-dollar bills from the cash register and hands them to the cop, who holds them up to the light and shakes his head in wonder. Oh, Soapy, Soapy, he says, these are the finest that youve made yet! you're a craftsman, that you are! A self-satisfied smile spreads across the bishops face. You cant prove nothing, says the bishop. And the bank said that they were on the level. Its the real green stuff. I'm sure they did, agrees the cop on the beat, but I doubt that the bank had been warned that Soapy Sylvester was in town, nor of the quality of the hundred-dollar bills hed been passing in Denver and in St. Louis. And with that he reaches into the bishops pocket and pulls out the necklace. Twelve hundred dollars worth of diamonds and pearls in exchange for fifty cents worth of paper and ink, says the policeman, who is obviously a philosopher at heart. And passing yourself off as a man of the church. You should be ashamed, he says, as he claps the handcuffs on the bishop, who is obviously no bishop, and he marches him away, but not before he gives the jeweler a receipt for both the necklace and the twelve hundred counterfeit dollars. Its evidence, after all. Was it really counterfeit? asked Shadow. Of course not! Fresh banknotes, straight from the bank, only with a thumbprint and a smudge of green ink on a couple of them to make them a little more interesting. Shadow sipped his coffee. It was worse than prison coffee. So the cop was obviously no cop. And the necklace? Evidence, said Wednesday. He unscrewed the top from the salt shaker, poured a little heap of salt on the table. But the jeweler gets a receipt, and assurance that hell get the necklace straight back as soon as Soapy comes to trial. He is congratulated on being a good citizen, and he watches proudly, already thinking of the tale hell have to tell at the next meeting of the Oddfellows tomorrow night, as the policeman marches the man pretending to be a bishop out of the store, twelve-hundred-dollars in one pocket, a twelve hundred dollar diamond necklace in the other, on their way to a police station thatll never see hide nor hair of either of them. The waitress had returned to clear the table. Tell me my dear, said Wednesday. Are you married? She shook her head. Astonishing that a young lady of such loveliness has not yet been snapped up. He was doodling with his fingernail in the spilled salt, making squat, blocky, runelike shapes. The waitress stood passively beside him, reminding Shadow less of a fawn and more of a young rabbit caught in an eighteen-wheelers headlights, frozen in fear and indecision. |
| 460 |
Wednesday lowered his voice, so much so that Shadow, only across the table, could barely hear him. What time do you get off work? Nine, she said, and swallowed. Nine-thirty latest. And what is the finest motel in this area? Theres a Motel 6, she said. Its not much. Wednesday touched the back of her hand, fleetingly, with the tips of his fingers, leaving crumbs of salt on her skin. She made no attempt to wipe them off. To us, he said, his voice an almost inaudible rumble, it shall be a pleasure palace. The waitress looked at him. She bit her thin lips, hesitated, then nodded and fled for the kitchen. Cmon, said Shadow. She looks barely legal. I've never been overly concerned about legality, Wednesday told him. And I need her, not as an end in herself, but to wake me up a little. Even King David knew that there is one easy prescription to get warm blood flowing through an old frame: take one virgin, call me in the morning. Shadow caught himself wondering if the girl on night duty in the hotel back in Eagle Point had been a virgin. don't you ever worry about disease? he asked. What if you knock her up? What if she's got a brother? No, said Wednesday. I don't worry about diseases. I don't catch them. Unfortunatelyfor the most partpeople like me fire blanks, so theres not a great deal of interbreeding. It used to happen in the old days. Nowadays, its possible, but so unlikely as to be almost unimaginable. So no worries there. And many girls have brothers, and fathers. Its not my problem. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I've left town already. So were staying here for the night? Wednesday rubbed his chin. I shall stay in the Motel 6, he said. Then he put his hand into his coat pocket. He pulled out a front door key, bronze-colored, with a card tag attached on which was typed an address: 502 Northridge Rd, Apt #3. You, on the other hand, have an apartment waiting for you, in a city far from here. Wednesday closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them, gray and gleaming and fractionally mismatched, and he said, The Greyhound bus will be coming through town in twenty minutes. It stops at the gas station. Heres your ticket. He pulled out a folded bus ticket, passed it across the table. Shadow picked it up and looked at it. Whos Mike Ainsel? he asked. That was the name on the ticket. You are. Merry Christmas. And wheres Lakeside? Your happy home in the months to come. And now, because good things come in threes He took a small, gift-wrapped package from his pocket, pushed it across the table. It sat beside the ketchup bottle with the black smears of dried ketchup on the top. Shadow made no move to take it. Well? Reluctantly, Shadow tore open the red wrapping paper to reveal a fawn-colored calfskin wallet, shiny from use. It was obviously somebodys wallet. Inside the wallet was a drivers license with Shadows photograph on it, in the name of Michael Ainsel, with a Milwaukee address, a MasterCard for M. Ainsel, and twenty crisp fifty-dollar bills. Shadow closed the wallet, put it into an inside pocket. |
| 461 |
The fire still burned and the buffalo man still sat on the other side of the fire, staring at Shadow with huge eyes, eyes like pools of dark mud. The buffalo lips, fringed with matted brown hair, did not move as the buffalo voice said, Well, Shadow? Do you believe yet? I don't know, said Shadow. His mouth had not moved either, he observed. Whatever words were passing between the two of them were not being spoken, not in any way that Shadow understood speech. Are you real? Believe, said the buffalo man. Are you Shadow hesitated, and then he asked, Are you a god too? The buffalo man reached one hand into the flames of the fire and he pulled out a burning brand. He held the brand in the middle. Blue and yellow flames licked his red hand, but they did not burn. This is not a land for gods, said the buffalo man. But it was not the buffalo man talking anymore, Shadow knew, in his dream: it was the fire speaking, the crackling and the burning of the flame itself that spoke to Shadow in the dark place under the earth. This land was brought up from the depths of the ocean by a diver, said the fire. It was spun from its own substance by a spider. It was shat by a raven. It is the body of a fallen father, whose bones are mountains, whose eyes are lakes. This is a land of dreams and fire, said the flame. The buffalo man put the brand back on the fire. Why are you telling me this stuff? said Shadow. I'm not important. I'm not anything. I was an okay physical trainer, a really lousy small-time crook, and maybe not so good a husband as I thought I was He trailed off. How do I help Laura? Shadow asked the buffalo man. She wants to be alive again. I said I'd help her. I owe her that. The buffalo man said nothing. He pointed up toward the roof of the cave. Shadows eyes followed. There was a thin, wintery light coming from a tiny opening far above. Up there? asked Shadow, wishing that one of his questions would be answered. I'm supposed to go up there? The dream took him then, the idea becoming the thing itself, and Shadow was crushed into the rock and earth. He was like a mole, trying to push through the earth, like a badger, climbing through the earth, like a groundhog, pushing the earth out of his way, like a bear, but the earth was too hard, too dense, and his breath was coming in gasps, and soon he could go no farther, dig and climb no more, and he knew then that he would die somewhere in the deep place beneath the world. His own strength was not enough. His efforts became weaker. He knew that though his body was riding in a hot bus through cold woods if he stopped breathing here, beneath the world, he would stop breathing there as well, that even now his breath was coming in shallow panting gasps. He struggled and he pushed, ever more weakly, each movement using precious air. He was trapped: could go no farther, and could not return the way that he had come. Now bargain, said a voice in his mind. What do I have to bargain with? Shadow asked. I have nothing. He could taste the clay now, thick and mud-gritty in his mouth. |
| 462 |
They were friends, Shadow decided, eavesdropping without meaning to, not sisters. One of them knew almost nothing about sex, but knew a lot about animals, helped out or spent a lot of time at some kind of animal shelter, while the other was not interested in animals, but, armed with a hundred tidbits gleaned from the Internet and from daytime television, thought she knew a great deal about human sexuality. Shadow listened with a horrified and amused fascination to the one who thought she was wise in the ways of the world detail the precise mechanics of using Alka-Seltzer tablets to enhance oral sex. Shadow started to tune them out, blanked everything except the noise of the road, and now only fragments of conversation would come back every now and again. Goldie is, like, such a good dog, and he was a purebred retriever, if only my dad would say okay, he wags his tail whenever he sees me. Its Christmas, he has to let me use the snowmobile. You can write your name with your tongue on the side of his thing. I miss Sandy. Yeah, I miss Sandy too. Six inches tonight they said, but they just make it up, they make up the weather and nobody ever calls them on it And then the brakes of the bus were hissing and the driver was shouting Lakeside! and the doors clunked open. Shadow followed the girls out into the floodlit parking lot of a video store and tanning salon that functioned, Shadow guessed, as Lakesides Greyhound station. The air was dreadfully cold, but it was a fresh cold. It woke him up. He stared at the lights of the town to the south and the west, and pale expanse of a frozen lake to the east. The girls were standing in the lot, stamping and blowing on their hands dramatically. One of them, the younger one, snuck a look at Shadow, smiled awkwardly when she realized that he had seen her do so. Merry Christmas, said Shadow. Yeah, said the other girl, perhaps a year or so older than the first, Merry Christmas to you too. She had carroty red hair and a snub nose covered with a hundred thousand freckles. Nice town you got here, said Shadow. We like it, said the younger one. She was the one who liked animals. She gave Shadow a shy grin, revealing blue rubber-band braces stretching across her front teeth. You look like somebody, she told him, gravely. Are you somebodys brother or somebodys son or something? You are such a spaz, Alison, said her friend. Everybodys somebodys son or brother or something. That wasnt what I meant, said Alison. Headlights framed them all for one brilliant white moment. Behind the headlights was a station wagon with a mother in it, and in moments it took the girls and their bags away, leaving Shadow standing alone in the parking lot. Young man? Anything I can do for you? The old man was locking up the video store. He pocketed his keys. Store aint open Christmas, he told Shadow cheerfully. But I come down to meet the bus. Make sure everything was okay. couldn't live with myself if some poor sould found emselves stranded on Christmas Day. |
| 463 |
He was close enough that Shadow could see his face: old but contented, the face of a man who had sipped lifes vinegar and found it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that. Well, you could give me the number of the local taxi company, said Shadow. I could, said the old man, doubtfully, but Tomll be in his bed this time of night, and even if you could rouse him you'll get no satisfaction I saw him down at the Buck Stops Here earlier this evening, and he was very merry. Very merry indeed. Where is ityou're aiming to go? Shadow showed him the address tag on the door key. Well, he said, that's a ten-, mebbe a twenty-minute walk over the bridge and around. But its no fun when its this cold, and when you don't know whereyou're going it always seems longeryou ever notice that? First time takes forever, and then ever after its over in a flash? Yes, said Shadow. I've never thought of it like that. But I guess its true. The old man nodded. His face cracked into a grin. What the heck, its Christmas. I'll run you over there in Tessie. Shadow followed the old man to the road, where a huge old roadster was parked. It looked like something that gangsters might have been proud to drive in the Roaring Twenties, running boards and all. It was a deep dark color under the sodium lights that might have been red and might have been green. This is Tessie, the old man said. Aint she a beaut? He patted her proprietorially, where the hood curved up and arched over the front nearside wheel. What make is she? asked Shadow. she's a Wendt Phoenix. Wendt went under in 31, name was bought by Chrysler, but they never made any more Wendts. Harvey Wendt, who founded the company, was a local boy. Went out to California, killed himself in, oh, 1941, 42. Great tragedy. The car smelled of leather and old cigarette smokenot a fresh smell, but as if enough people had smoked enough cigarettes and cigars in the car over the years that the smell of burning tobacco had become part of the fabric of the car. The old man turned the key in the ignition and Tessie started first time. Tomorrow, he told Shadow, she goes into the garage. I'll cover her with a dust sheet, and that's where shell stay until spring. Truth of the matter is I shouldn't be driving her right now, with the snow on the ground. doesn't she ride well in snow? Rides just fine. Its the salt they put on the roads. Rusts these old beauties faster than you could believe. You want to go door to door, or would you like the moonlight grand tour of the town? I don't want to trouble you Its no trouble. You get to be my age, you're grateful for the least wink of sleep. I'm lucky if I get five hours a night nowadayswake up and my mind is just turning and turning. Where are my manners? My names Hinzelmann. I'd say, call me Richie, but around here folks who know me just call me plain Hinzelmann. I'd shake your hand, but I need two hands to drive Tessie. She knows when I'm not paying attention. Mike Ainsel, said Shadow. Pleased to meet you, Hinzelmann. |
| 464 |
It looked to me like the big fellow was heading for the lake in a panic. Well, only a damn fool tries to run down a buck, but there am I, a damn fool, running after him, and there he is, standing in the lake, in oh, eight, nine inches of water, and he's just looking at me. That very moment, the sun goes behind a cloud, and the freeze comestemperature must have fallen thirty degrees in ten minutes, not a word of a lie. And that old stag, he gets ready to run, and he cant move! he's frozen into the ice. Me, I just walk over to him slowly. You can see he wants to run, but he's iced in and it just isn't going to happen. But theres no way I can bring myself to shoot a defenseless critter when he cant get awaywhat kind of man would I be if I done that, heh? So I takes my shotgun and I fires off one shell, straight up into the air. Well, the noise and the shock is enough to make that buck just about jump out of his skin, and seein that his legs are iced in, that's just what he proceeds to do. He leaves his hide and his antlers stuck to the ice, while he charges back into the woods, pink as a newborn mouse and shivering fit to bust. I felt bad enough for that old buck that I talked the Lakeside Ladies Knitting Circle into making him something warm to wear all the winter, and they knitted him an all-over one-piece woolen suit, so he wouldn't freeze to death. Course, the joke was on us, because they knitted him a suit of bright orange wool, so no hunter ever shot at it. Hunters in these parts wear orange at hunting season, he added, helpfully. And if you think theres a word of a lie in that, I can prove it to you. I've got the antlers up on my rec room wall to this day. Shadow laughed, and the old man smiled the satisfied smile of a master craftsman. They pulled up outside a brick building with a large wooden deck, from which golden holiday lights hung and twinkled invitingly. that's five-oh-two, said Hinzelmann. Apartment three would be on the top floor, around the other side, overlooking the lake. There you go, Mike. Thank you, Mr. Hinzelmann. Can I give you anything toward gas? Just Hinzelmann. And you don't owe me a penny. Merry Christmas from me and from Tessie. Are you sure you won't accept anything? The old man scratched his chin. Tell you what, he said. Sometime in the next week or so I'll come by and sell you some tickets. For our raffle. Charity. For now, young man, you can be getting onto bed. Shadow smiled. Merry Christmas, Hinzelmann, he said. The old man shook Shadows hand with one red-knuckled hand. It felt as hard and as callused as an oak branch. Now, you watch the path as you go up there, its going to be slippery. I can see your door from here, at the side there, see it? I'll just wait in the car down here untilyou're safely inside. You just give me the thumbs-up whenyou're in okay, and I'll drive off. He kept the Wendt idling until Shadow was safely up the wooden steps on the side of the house and had opened the apartment door with his key. The door to the apartment swung open. |
| 465 |
Shadow made a thumbs-up sign, and the old man in the WendtTessie, thought Shadow, and the thought of a car with a name made him smile one more timeHinzelmann and Tessie swung around and made their way back across the bridge. Shadow shut the front door. The room was freezing. It smelled of people who had gone away to live other lives, and of all they had eaten and dreamed. He found the thermostat and cranked it up to seventy degrees. He went into the tiny kitchen, checked the drawers, opened the avocado-colored refrigerator, but it was empty. No surprise there. At least the fridge smelled clean inside, not musty. There was a small bedroom with a bare mattress in it, beside the kitchen, next to an even tinier bathroom that was mostly shower stall. An aged cigarette butt sat in the toilet bowl, staining the water brown. Shadow flushed it away. He found sheets and blankets in a closet, and made the bed. Then he took off his shoes, his jacket, and his watch, and he climbed into the bed fully dressed, wondering how long it would take him to get warm. The lights were off, and there was silence, mostly, nothing but the hum of the refrigerator, and, somewhere in the building, a radio playing. He lay there in the darkness, wondering if he had slept himself out on the Greyhound, if the hunger and the cold and the new bed and the craziness of the last few weeks would combine to keep him awake that night. In the stillness he heard something snap like a shot. A branch, he thought, or the ice. It was freezing out there. He wondered how long he would have to wait until Wednesday came for him. A day? A week? However long he had, he knew he had to focus on something in the meantime. He would start to work out again, he decided, and practice his coin sleights and palms until he was smooth as anything (practice all your tricks, somebody whispered inside his head, in a voice that was not his own, all of them but one, not the trick that poor dead Mad Sweeney showed you, dead of exposure and the cold and of being forgotten and surplus to requirements, not that trick. Oh, not that one). But this was a good town. He could feel it. He thought of his dream, if it had been a dream, that first night in Cairo. He thought of Zoryawhat the hell was her name? The midnight sister. And then he thought of Laura It was as if thinking of her opened a window in his mind. He could see her. He could, somehow, see her. She was in Eagle Point, in the backyard outside her mothers big house. She stood in the cold, which she did not feel anymore or which she felt all the time, she stood outside the house that her mother had bought in 1989 with the insurance money after Lauras father, Harvey McCabe, had passed on, a heart attack while straining on the can, and she was staring in, her cold hands pressed against the glass, her breath not fogging it, not at all, watching her mother, and her sister and her sisters children and husband in from Texas, home for Christmas. Out in the darkness, that was where Laura was, unable not to look. |
| 466 |
Your lack of cooperation has been noted, maam. Buh-bye now. Click. I'll tell you all my secrets But I lie about my past So send me off to bed forevermore. Tom Waits, Tango Tillyou're Sore A whole life in darkness, surrounded by filth, that was what Shadow dreamed, his first night in Lakeside. A childs life, long ago and far away, in a land across the ocean, in the lands where the sun rose. But this life contained no sunrises, only dimness by day and blindness by night. Nobody spoke to him. He heard human voices, from outside, but could understand human speech no better than he understood the howling of the owls or the yelps of dogs. He remembered, or thought he remembered, one night, half a lifetime ago, when one of the big people had entered, quietly, and had not cuffed him or fed him, but had picked him up to her breast and embraced him. She smelled good. Hot drops of water had fallen from her face to his. He had been scared, and had wailed loudly in his fear. She put him down on the straw, hurriedly, and left the hut, fastening the door behind her. He remembered that moment, and he treasured it, just as he remembered the sweetness of a cabbage heart, the tart taste of plums, the crunch of apples, the greasy delight of roasted fish. And now he saw the faces in the firelight, all of them looking at him as he was led out from the hut for the first time, which was the only time. So that was what people looked like. Raised in darkness, he had never seen faces. Everything was so new. So strange. The bonfire light hurt his eyes. They pulled on the rope around his neck, to lead him to the place where the man waited for him. And when the first blade was raised in the firelight, what a cheer went up from the crowd. The child from the darkness began to laugh with them, in delight and in freedom. And then the blade came down. Shadow opened his eyes and realized that he was hungry and cold, in an apartment with a layer of ice clouding the inside of the window glass. His frozen breath, he thought. He got out of bed, pleased he did not have to get dressed. He scraped at a window with a fingernail as he passed, felt the ice collect under the nail, then melt to water. He tried to remember his dream, but remembered nothing but misery and darkness. He put on his shoes. He figured he would walk into the town center, walk across the bridge across the northern end of the lake, if he had the geography of the town right. He put on his thin jacket, remembering his promise to himself that he would buy himself a warm winter coat, opened the apartment door, and stepped out onto the wooden deck. The cold took his breath away: he breathed in, and felt every hair in his nostrils freeze into rigidity. The deck gave him a fine view of the lake, irregular patches of gray surrounded by an expanse of white. The cold snap had come, that was for sure. It could not be much above zero, and it would not be a pleasant walk, but he was certain he could make it into town without too much trouble. |
| 467 |
Keep walking, he told himself. Keep walking. I can stop and drink a pail of air when I get home. A Beatles song started in his head, and he adjusted his pace to match it. It was only when he got to the chorus that he realized that he was humming Help. He was almost at the bridge now. Then he had to walk across it, and he would still be another ten minutes from the stores on the west of the lakemaybe a little more A dark car passed him, stopped, then reversed in a foggy cloud of exhaust smoke and came to a halt beside him. A window slid down, and the haze and steam from the window mixed with the exhaust to form a dragons breath that surrounded the car. Everything okay here? said a cop inside. Shadows first, automatic instinct was to say Yup, everythings just fine and jimdandy thank you officer. But it was too late for that, and he started to say, I think I'm freezing. I was walking into Lakeside to buy food and clothes, but I underestimated the length of the walkhe was that far through the sentence in his head, when he realized that all that had come out was F-f-freezing, and a chattering noise, and he said, So s-sorry. Cold. Sorry. The cop pulled open the back door of the car and said, You get in there this moment and warm yourself up, okay? Shadow climbed in gratefully, and he sat in the back and rubbed his hands together, trying not to worry about frostbitten toes. The cop got back in the drivers seat. Shadow stared at him through the metal grille. Shadow tried not to think about the last time hed been in the back of a police car, or to notice that there were no door handles in the back, and to concentrate instead on rubbing life back into his hands. His face hurt and his red fingers hurt, and now, in the warmth, his toes were starting to hurt once more. That was, Shadow figured, a good sign. The cop put the car in drive and moved off. You know, that was, he said, not turning to look at Shadow, just talking a little louder, if you'll pardon me saying so, a real stupid thing to do. You didn't hear any of the weather advisories? Its minus thirty out there. God alone knows what the wind-chill is, minus sixty, minus seventy, although I figure whenyou're down at minus thirty, windchills the least of your worries. Thanks, said Shadow. Thanks for stopping. Very, very grateful. Woman in Rhinelander went out this morning to fill her birdfeeder in her robe and carpet slippers and she froze, literally froze, to the sidewalk. she's in intensive care now. It was on the TV this morning. you're new in town. It was almost a question, but the man knew the answer already. I came in on the Greyhound last night. Figured today I'd buy myself some warm clothes, food, and a car. Wasnt expecting this cold. Yeah, said the cop. It took me by surprise as well. I was too busy worrying about global warming. I'm Chad Mulligan. I'm the chief of police here in Lakeside. Mike Ainsel. Hi, Mike. Feeling any better? A little, yes. So where would you like me to take you first? Shadow put his hands down to the hot-air stream, painful on his fingers, then he pulled them away. |
| 468 |
My speciality. Shadow had no idea what a pasty was, but he said that would be fine, and in a few moments Mabel returned with a plate with what looked like a folded-over pie on it. The lower half was wrapped in a paper napkin. Shadow picked it up with the napkin and bit into it: it was warm and filled with meat, potatoes, carrots, onions. First pasty I've ever had, he said. Its real good. you're a yoopie thing, she told him. Mostly you need to be at least up Ironwood way to get one. The Cornish men who came over to work the iron mines brought them over. Yoopie? Upper Peninsula. U. P. Yoopie. Its the little chunk of Michigan to the northeast. The chief of police came back. He picked up the hot chocolate and slurped it. Mabel, he said, are you forcing this nice young man to eat one of your pasties? Its good, said Shadow. It was too, a savory delight wrapped in hot pastry. They go straight to the belly, said Chad Mulligan, patting his own stomach. I warn you. Okay: So you need a car? With his parka off, he was revealed as a lanky man with a round, apple-belly gut on him. He looked harassed and competent, more like an engineer than cop. Shadow nodded, mouth full. Right. I made some calls. Justin Liebowitzs selling his jeep, wants four thousand dollars for it, will settle for three. The Gunthers have had their Toyota 4-Runner for sale for eight months, ugly sonofabitch, but at this point theyd probably pay you to take it out of their driveway. And if you don't care about ugly, its got to be a great deal. I used the phone in the mens room, left a message for Missy Gunther down at Lakeside Realty, but she wasnt in yet, probably getting her hair done down at Sheilas. The pasty remained good as Shadow chewed his way through it. It was astonishingly filling. Stick-to-your-ribs food, as his mother would have said. Sticks to your sides. So, said Chief of Police Chad Mulligan, wiping the hot-chocolate foam from around his lips. I figure we stop off next at Hennings Farm and Home Supplies, get you a real winter wardrobe, swing by Daves Finest Food so you can fill your larder, then I'll drop you up by Lakeside Realty. If you can put down a thousand up front for the car they'll be happy, otherwise five hundred a month for four months should see them okay. Its an ugly car, like I said, but if the kid hadn't painted it purple itd be a ten-thousand-dollar car, and reliable, and you'll need something like that to get around this winter, you ask me. This is very good of you, said Shadow. But shouldn't you be out catching criminals, not helping newcomers? Not that I'm complaining, you understand. Mabel chuckled. We all tell him that, she said. Mulligan shrugged. Its a good town, he said, simply. Not much trouble. you'll always get someone speeding within city limitswhich is a good thing, as traffic tickets pay my wages. Friday, Saturday nights you get some jerk who gets drunk and beats on a spouse and that one can go both ways, believe me. Men and women. But out here things are quiet. |
| 469 |
They call me out when someones locked their keys in their vehicle. Barking dogs. Every year theres a couple of high school kids caught with weed behind the bleachers. Biggest police case weve had here in five years was when Dan Schwartz got drunk and shot up his own trailer, then he went on the run, down Main Street, in his wheelchair, waving this darn shotgun, shouting that he would shoot anyone who got in his way, that no one would stop him from getting to the interstate. I think he was on his way to Washington to shoot the president. I still laugh whenever I think of Dan heading down the interstate in that wheelchair of his with the bumper sticker on the back. My Juvenile Delinquent is Screwing Your Honor Student. You remember, Mabel? She nodded, lips pursed. She did not seem to find it as funny as Mulligan did. What did you do? asked Shadow. I talked to him. He gave me the shotgun. Slept it off down at the jail. Dans not a bad guy, he was just drunk and upset. Shadow paid for his own breakfast and, over Chad Mulligans halfhearted protests, both hot chocolates. Hennings Farm and Home Supplies was a warehouse-sized building on the south of the town that sold everything from tractors to toys (the toys, along with the Christmas ornaments, were already on sale). The store was bustling with post-Christmas shoppers. Shadow recognized the younger of the girls who had sat in front of him on the bus. She was trailing after her parents. He waved at her and she gave him a hesitant, blue-rubber-banded smile. Shadow wondered idly what shed look like in ten years time. Probably as beautiful as the girl at the Hennings Farm and Home checkout counter, who scanned in his purchases with a chattering hand-held gun, capable, Shaded had no doubt, of ringing up a tractor if someone drove it through. Ten pairs of long underwear? said the girl. Stocking up, huh? She looked like a movie starlet. Shadow felt fourteen again, and tongue-tied and foolish. He said nothing while she rang up the thermal boots, the gloves, the sweaters, and the goose-down-filled coat. He had no wish to put the credit card that Wednesday had given him to the test, not with Chief of Police Mulligan standing helpfully beside him, so he paid for everything in cash. Then he took his bags into the mens rest room, came out wearing many of his purchases. Looking good, big fella, said Mulligan. At least I'm warm, said Shadow, and outside, in the parking lot, although the wind burned cold on the skin of his face, the rest of him was warm enough. At Mulligans invitation, he put his shopping bags in the back of the police car, arid rode in the passenger seat, in the front. So, what do you do, Mister Ainsel? asked the chief of police. Big guy like you. Whats your profession, and will you be practicing it in Lakeside? Shadows heart began to pound, but his voice was steady. I work for my uncle. He buys and sells stuff all over the country. I just do the heavy lifting. Does he pay well? I'm family. He knows I'm not going to rip him off, and I'm learning a little about the trade on the way. |
| 470 |
While this was happening, Missy Gunther took Shadow into her kitchenexcuse the mess, but the little ones just leave their toys all over after Christmas and she just didn't have the heart, would he care for some leftover turkey dinner? Well, coffee then, won't take a moment to brew a fresh pot and Shadow took a large red toy car off a window seat and sat down, while Missy Gunther asked if he had met his neighbors yet, and Shadow confessed that he hadnt. There were, he was informed while the coffee dripped, four other inhabitants of his apartment buildingback when it was the Pilsen place the Pilsens lived in the downstairs flat and rented out the upper two flats, now their apartment, which was taken by a couple of young men, Mr. Holz and Mr. Neiman, they actually are a couple and when she said couple, Mr. Ainsel, Heavens, we have all kinds here, more than one kind of tree in the forest, although mostly those kind of people wind up in Madison or the Twin Cities, but truth to tell, nobody here gives it a second thought. you're in Key West for the winter, they'll be back in April, hell meet them then. The thing about Lakeside is that its a good town. Now next door to Mr. Ainsel, that's Marguerite Olsen and her little boy, a sweet lady, sweet, sweet lady, but she's had a hard life, still sweet as pie, and she works for the Lakeside News. Not the most exciting newspaper in the world, but truth to tell Missy Gunther thought that was probably the way most folk around here liked it. Oh, she said, and poured him coffee, she just wished that Mr. Ainsel could see the town in the summer or late in the spring, when the lilacs and the apple and the cherry blossoms were out, she thought there was nothing like it for beauty, nothing like it anywhere in the world. Shadow gave her a five-hundred-dollar deposit, and he climbed up into the car and started to back it up, out of her front yard and onto the driveway proper. Missy Gunther tapped on his front window. This is for you, she said. I nearly forgot. She handed him a buff envelope. Its kind of a gag. We had them printed up a few years back. You don't have to look at it now. He thanked her, and drove, cautiously, back into the town. He took the road that ran around the lake. He wished he could see it in the spring, or the summer, or the fall: it would be very beautiful, he had no doubt of that. In ten minutes he was home. He parked the car out on the street and walked up the outside steps to his cold apartment. He unpacked his shopping, put the food into the cupboards and the fridge, and then he opened the envelope Missy Gunther had given him. It contained a passport. Blue, plasticated cover and, inside, a proclamation that Michael Ainsel (his name handwritten in Missy Gunthers precise handwriting) was a citizen of Lakeside. There was a map of the town on the next page. The rest of it was filled with discount coupons for various local stores. I think I may like it here, said Shadow, aloud. He looked out of the icy window at the frozen lake. |
| 471 |
If it ever warms up. There was a bang at the front door at around 2:00 P. M. Shadow had been practicing the Sucker Vanish with a quarter, tossing it from one hand to the other undetectably. His hands were cold enough and clumsy enough that he kept dropping the coin onto the tabletop, and the knock at the door made him drop it again. He went to the door and opened it. A moment of pure fear: the man at the door wore a black mask which covered the lower half of his face. It was the kind of mask that a bank robber might wear on TV, or a serial killer from a cheap movie might wear to scare his victims. The top of the mans head was covered by a black knit cap. Still, the man was smaller and slighter than Shadow, and he did not appear to be armed. And he wore a bright plaid coat, of the kind that serial killers normally avoid. Ih hihelhan, said the visitor. Huh? The man pulled the mask downward to reveal Hinzelmanns cheerful face. I said, Its Hinzelmann. You know, I don't know what we did before they came up with these masks. Well, I do remember what we did. Thick knitted caps that went all around your face, and scarves and you don't want to know what else. I think its a miracle what they come up with these days. I may be an old man, but I'm not going to grumble about progress, not me. He finished this speech by thrusting a basket at Shadow, filled high with local cheeses, bottles, jars, and several small salamis that proclaimed themselves to be venison summer sausage, and by coming inside. Merry day after Christmas, he said. His nose and ears and cheeks were red as raspberries, mask or no mask. I hear you already ate a whole one of Mabels pasties. Brought you a few things. that's very kind of you, said Shadow. Kind, nothing. I'm going to stick it to you next week for the raffle. The Chamber of Commerce runs it, and I run the Chamber of Commerce. Last year we raised almost seventeen thousand dollars for the childrens ward of Lakeside Hospital. Well, why don't you put me down for a ticket now? It don't start until the day the klunker hits the ice, said Hinzelmann. He looked out of Shadows window toward the lake. Cold out there. Must have dropped fifty degrees last night. It happened really fast, agreed Shadow. We used to pray for freezes like this back in the old days, said Hinzelmann. My daddy told me. Youd pray for days like this? Well, yah, it was the only way the settlers survived back then. Werent enough food for everyone, and you couldn't just go down to Daves and fill up your shopping cart in the old days, no sir. So my grampaw, he got to figgerin, and when a really cold day like this come along hed take my grarnmaw, and the kids, my uncle and my aunt and my daddyhe was the youngestand the serving girl and the hired man, and hed go down with them to the creek, give em a little drink of rum and herbs, it was a recipe hed got from the old country, then hed pour creek water over them. Course theyd freeze in seconds, stiff and blue as so many Popsicles. |
| 472 |
I blame the television, showing all the kids things they'll never haveDallas and Dynasty, all of that nonsense. I've not had a television since the fall of 83, except for a black-and-white set I keep in a closet for if folk come in from out of town and theres a big game on. Can I get you anything, Hinzelmann? Not coffee. Gives me heartburn. Just water. Hinzelmann shook his head. Biggest problem in this part of the world is poverty. Not the poverty we had in the Depression but something more inwhats the word, means it creeps in at the edges, like cock-a-roaches? Insidious? Yeah. Insidious. Loggings dead. Minings dead. Tourists don't drive farther north than the Dells, cept for a handful of hunters and some kids going to camp on the lakesand they arent spending their money in the towns. Lakeside seems kind of prosperous, though. The old mans blue eyes blinked. And believe me, it takes a lot of work, he said. Hard work. But this is a good town, and all the work all the people here put into it is worthwhile. Not that my family werent poor as kids. Ask me how poor we was as kids. Shadow put on his straight-man face and said, How poor were you as kids, Mister Hinzelmann? Just Hinzelmann, Mike. We were so poor that we couldn't afford a fire. Come New Years Eve my father would suck on a peppermint, and us kids, wed stand around with our hands outstretched, basking in the glow. Shadow made a rimshot noise. Hinzelmann put on his ski mask and did up his huge plaid coat, pulled out his car keys from his pocket, and then, last of all, pulled on his great gloves. You get too bored up here, you just come down to the store and ask for me. I'll show you my collection of hand-tied fishing flies. Bore you so much that getting back here will be a relief. His voice was muffled, but audible. I'll do that, said Shadow with a smile. Hows Tessie? Hibernating. Shell be out in the spring. You take care now, Mr. Ainsel. And he closed the door behind him as he left. The apartment grew ever colder. Shadow put on his coat and his gloves. Then he put on his boots. He could hardly see through the windows now for the ice on the inside of the panes which turned the view of the lake into an abstract image. His breath was clouding in the air. He went out of his apartment onto the wooden deck and knocked on the door next door. He heard a womans voice shouting at someone to for heavens sake shut up and turn that television downa kid, he thought, adults don't shout like that at other adults. The door opened and a tired woman with very long, very black hair was staring at him warily. Yes? How do you do, maam. I'm Mike Ainsel. I'm your next-door neighbor. Her expression did not change, not by a hair. Yes? Maam. Its freezing in my apartment. Theres a little heat coming out of the grate, but its not warming the place up, not at all. She looked him up and down, then a ghost of a smile touched the edges of her lips and she said, Come in, then. If you don't therell be no heat in here, either. He stepped inside her apartment. |
| 473 |
Plastic, multicolored toys were strewn all over the floor. There were small heaps of torn Christmas wrapping paper by the wall. A small boy sat inches away from the television set, a video of the Disney Hercules playing, an animated satyr stomping and shouting his way across the screen. Shadow kept his back to the TV set. Okay, she said. This is what you do. First you seal the windows, you can buy the stuff down at Hennings, its just like Saran Wrap but for windows. Tape it to windows, then if you want to get fancy you run a blow-dryer on it, it stays there the whole winter. That stops the heat leaving through the windows. Then you buy a space heater or two. The buildings furnace is old, and it cant cope with the real cold. Weve had some easy winters recently, I suppose we should be grateful. Then she put out her hand. Marguerite Olsen. Good to meet you, said Shadow. He pulled off a glove and they shook hands. You know, maam, I'd always thought of Olsens as being blonder than you. My ex-husband was as blond as they come. Pink and blond. couldn't tan at gunpoint. Missy Gunther told me you write for the local paper. Missy Gunther tells everybody everything. I don't see why we need a local paper with Missy Gunther around. She nodded. Yes. Some news reporting here and there, but my editor writes most of the news. I write the nature column, the gardening column, an opinion column every Sunday and the News from the Community column, which tells, in mind-numbing detail, who went to dinner with who for fifteen miles around. Or is that whom? Whom, said Shadow, before he could stop himself. Its the objective case. She looked at him with her black eyes, and Shadow experienced a moment of pure deja vu. I've been here before, he thought. No, she reminds me of someone. Anyway, that's how you heat up your apartment, she said. Thank you, said Shadow. When its warm you and your little one must come over. His names Leon, she said. Good meeting you, MisterI'm sorry Ainsel, said Shadow. Mike Ainsel. And what sort of a name is Ainsel? she asked. Shadow had no idea. My name, he said. I'm afraid I was never very interested in family history. Norwegian, maybe? she said. We were never close, he said. Then he remembered Uncle Emerson Borson, and added, On that side, anyway. * * * By the time Mr. Wednesday arrived, Shadow had put clear plastic sheeting across all the windows, and had one space heater running in the main room and one in the bedroom at the back. It was practically cozy. What the hell is that purple piece of shityou're driving? asked Wednesday, by way of greeting. Well, said Shadow, you drove off with my white piece of shit. Where is it, by the way? I traded it in in Duluth, said Wednesday. You cant be too careful. don't worryyou'll get your share when all this is done. What am I doing here? asked Shadow. In Lakeside, I mean. Not in the world. Wednesday smiled his smile, the one that made Shadow want to hit him. you're living here because its the last place they'll look for you. |
| 474 |
There is a secret that the casinos possess, a secret they hold and guard and prize, the holiest of their mysteries. For most people do not gamble to win money, after all, although that is what is advertised, sold, claimed, and dreamed. But that is merely the easy lie that gets them through the enormous, ever-open, welcoming doors. The secret is this: people gamble to lose money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. Its a sacrifice, of sorts. The money flows through the casino in an uninterrupted stream of green and silver, streaming from hand to hand, from gambler to croupier to cashier to the management to security, finally ending up in the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctum, the Counting Room. And it is here, in the counting room of this casino, that you come to rest, here, where the greenbacks are sorted, stacked, indexed, here in a space that is slowly becoming redundant as more and more of the money that flows through the casino is imaginary: an electrical sequence of ons and offs, sequences that flow down telephone lines. In the counting room you see three men, counting money under the glassy stare of the cameras they can see, the insectile gazes of the tiny cameras they cannot see. During the course of one shift each of the men counts more money than he will see in all the pay packets of his life. Each man, when he sleeps, dreams of counting money, of stacks and paper bands and numbers that climb inevitably, that are sorted and lost. Each of the three men has idly wondered, not less than once a week, how to evade the casinos security systems and run off with as much money as he could haul; and, reluctantly, each man has inspected the dream and found it impractical, has settled for a steady paycheck, avoided the twin specters of prison and an unmarked grave. And here, in the sanctum sanctorum, there are the three men who count the money, and there are the guards who watch and who bring money and take it away; and then there is another person. His charcoal-gray suit is immaculate, his hair is dark, he is clean-shaven, and his face and his demeanor are, in every sense, forgettable. None of the other men has even observed that he is there, or if they have noticed him, they have forgotten him on the instant. As the shift ends the doors are opened, and the man in the charcoal suit leaves the room and walks, with the guards, through the corridors, their feet shushing along the monogrammed carpets. The money, in strongboxes, is wheeled to an interior loading bay, where it is loaded into armored cars. As the ramp door swings open, to allow the armored car out onto the early streets of Las Vegas, the man in the charcoal suit walks, unnoticed, through the doorway, and saunters up the ramp, out onto the sidewalk. |
| 475 |
George Devol, who was, like Canada Bill, not a man who was averse to fleecing the odd sucker, drew Bill aside and asked him if he couldn't see that the game was crooked. And Canada Bill sighed, and shrugged his shoulders, and said I know. But its the only game in town. And he went back to the game. Dark eyes stare at the man in the light gray suit mistrustfully. The man in the charcoal suit says something in reply. The man in the light suit, who has a graying reddish beard, shakes his head. Look, he says, I'm sorry about what went down in Wisconsin. But I got you all out safely, didn't I? No one was hurt. The man in the dark suit sips his Laphroaig and water, savoring the marshy taste, the body-in-the-bog quality of the whiskey. He asks a question. I don't know. Everythings moving faster than I expected. Everyones got a hard-on for the kid I hired to run errandsI've got him outside, waiting in the taxi. Are you still in? The man in the dark suit replies. The bearded man shakes his head. she's not been seen for two hundred years. If she isn't dead she's taken herself out of the picture. Something else is said. Look, says the bearded man, knocking back his Jack Daniels. You come in, be there when we need you, and I'll take care of you. Whaddayou want? Soma? I can get you a bottle of Soma. The real stuff. The man in the dark suit stares. Then he nods his head, reluctantly, and makes a comment. Of course I am, says the bearded man, smiling like a knife. What do you expect? But look at it this way: its the only game in town. He reaches out a paw like hand and shakes the other mans well-manicured hand. Then he walks away. The thin waitress comes over, puzzled: theres now only one man at the corner table, a sharply dressed man with dark hair in a charcoal-gray suit. You doing okay? she asks. Is your friend coming back? The man with the dark hair sighs, and explains that his friend won't be coming back, and thus she won't be paid for her time, or for her trouble. And then, seeing the hurt in her eyes, and taking pity on her, he examines the golden threads in his mind, watches the matrix, follows the money until he spots a node, and tells her that if she's outside Treasure Island at 6:00 A. M., thirty minutes after she gets off work, shell meet an oncologist from Denver who will just have won forty-thousand dollars at a craps table, and will need a mentor, a partner, someone to help him dispose of it all in the forty-eight hours before he gets on the plane home. The words evaporate in the waitresss mind, but they leave her happy. She sighs and notes that the guys in the corner have done a runner, and have not even tipped her; and it occurs to her that, instead of driving straight home when she gets off shift, she's going to drive over to Treasure Island; but she would never, if you asked her, be able to tell you why. So who was that guy you were seeing? asked Shadow as they walked back down the Las Vegas concourse. There were slot machines in the airport. Even at this time of the morning people stood in front of them, feeding them coins. |
| 476 |
Shadow wondered if there were those who never left the airport, who got off their planes, walked along the jetway into the airport building, and stopped there, trapped by the spinning images and the flashing lights until they had fed their last quarter to the machines, and then, with nothing left, just turned around and got onto the plane back home. And then he realized that he had zoned out just as Wednesday had been telling him who the man in the dark suit they had followed in the taxi had been, and he had missed it. So he's in, said Wednesday. Itll cost me a bottle of Soma, though. Whats Soma? Its a drink. They walked onto the charter plane, empty but for them and a trio of corporate big spenders who needed to be back in Chicago by the start of the next business day. Wednesday got comfortable, ordered himself a Jack Daniels. My kind of people see your kind of people he hesitated. Its like bees and honey. Each bee makes only a tiny, tiny drop of honey. It takes thousands of them, millions perhaps, all working together to make the pot of honey you have on your breakfast table. Now imagine that you could eat nothing but honey. that's what its like for my kind of peoplewe feed on belief, on prayers, on love. And Soma is To take the analogy further, its a honey wine. Like mead. He chuckled. Its a drink. Concentrated prayer and belief, distilled into a potent liqueur. They were somewhere over Nebraska eating an unimpressive in-flight breakfast when Shadow said, My wife. The dead one. Laura. She doesn't want to be dead. She told me. After she got me away from the guys on the train. The action of a fine wife. Freeing you from durance vile and murdering those who would have harmed you. You should treasure her, Nephew Ainsel. She wants to be really alive. Can we do that? Is that possible? Wednesday said nothing for long enough that Shadow started to wonder if he had heard the question, or if he had, possibly, fallen asleep with his eyes open. Then he said, staring ahead of him as he talked, I know a charm that can cure pain and sickness, and lift the grief from the heart of the grieving. I know a charm that will heal with a touch. I know a charm that will turn aside the weapons of an enemy. I know another charm to free myself from all bonds and locks. A fifth charm: I can catch an arrow in flight and take no harm from it. His words were quiet, urgent. Gone was the hectoring tone, gone was the grin. Wednesday spoke as if he were reciting the words of a religious ritual, or remembering something dark and painful. A sixth: spells sent to hurt me will hurt only the sender. A seventh charm I know: I can quench a fire simply by looking at it. An eighth: if any man hates me, I can win his friendship. A ninth: I can sing the wind to sleep and calm a storm for long enough to bring a ship to shore. Those were the first nine charms I learned. Nine nights I hung on the bare tree, my side pierced with a spears point. I swayed and blew in the cold winds and the hot winds, without food, without water, a sacrifice of myself to myself, and the worlds opened to me. |
| 477 |
For a tenth charm, I learned to dispel witches, to spin them around in the skies so that they will never find their way back to their own doors again. An eleventh: if I sing it when a battle rages it can take warriors through the tumult unscathed and unhurt, and bring them safely back to their hearths and their homes. A twelfth charm I know: if I see a hanged man I can bring him down from the gallows to whisper to us all he remembers. A thirteenth: if I sprinkle water on a childs head, that child will not fall in battle. A fourteenth: I know the names of all the gods. Every damned one of them. A fifteenth: I have a dream of power, of glory, and of wisdom, and I can make people believe my dreams. His voice was so low now that Shadow had to strain to hear it over the planes engine noise. A sixteenth charm I know: if I need love I can turn the mind and heart of any woman. A seventeenth, that no woman I want will ever want another. And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell to no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be. He sighed, and then stopped talking. Shadow could feel his skin crawl. It was as if he had just seen a door open to another place, somewhere worlds away where hanged men blew in the wind at every crossroads, where witches shrieked overhead in the night. Laura, was all he said. Wednesday turned his head, stared into Shadows pale gray eyes with his own. I cant make her live again, he said. I don't even know why she isn't as dead as she ought to be. I think I did it, said Shadow. It was my fault. Wednesday raised an eyebrow. Mad Sweeney gave me a golden coin, back when he showed me how to do that trick. From what he said, he gave me the wrong coin. What he gave me was something more powerful than what he thought he was giving me. I passed it on to Laura. Wednesday grunted, lowered his chin to his chest, frowned. Then he sat back. That could do it, he said. And no, I cant help you. What you do in your own time is your own affair, of course. What, asked Shadow, is that supposed to mean? It means that I cant stop you from hunting eagle stones and thunderbirds. But I would infinitely prefer that you spend your days quietly sequestered in Lakeside, out of sight, and, I hope, out of mind. When things get hairy well need all hands to the wheel. He looked very old as he said this, and fragile, and his skin seemed almost transparent, and the flesh beneath was gray. Shadow wanted, wanted very much, to reach out and put his hand over Wednesdays gray hand. He wanted to tell him that everything would be okaysomething that Shadow did not feel, but that he knew had to be said. There were men in black trains out there. There was a fat kid in a stretch limo and there were people in the television who did not mean them well. He did not touch Wednesday. He did not say anything. Later, he wondered if he could have changed things, if that gesture would have done any good, if it could have averted any of the harm that was to come. |
| 478 |
He told himself it wouldnt. He knew it wouldnt. But still, afterward, he wished that, just for a moment on that slow flight home, he had touched Wednesdays hand. * * * The brief winter daylight was already fading when Wednesday dropped Shadow outside his apartment. The freezing temperature when Shadow opened the car door felt even more science fictional when compared to Las Vegas. don't get into any trouble, said Wednesday. Keep your head below the parapet. Make no waves. All at the same time? don't get smart with me, mboy. You can keep out of sight in Lakeside. I pulled in a big favor to keep you here, safe and sound. If you were in a city theyd get your scent in minutes. I'll stay put and keep out of trouble. Shadow meant it as he said it. Hed had a lifetime of trouble and he was ready to let it go forever. When are you coming back? he asked. Soon, said Wednesday, and he gunned the Lincolns engine, slid up the window, and drove off into the frigid night. Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. Ben Franklin, Poor Richards Almanack Three cold days passed. The thermometer never made it up to the zero mark, not even at midday. Shadow wondered how people had survived this weather in the days before electricity, before thermal face masks and lightweight thermal underwear, before easy travel. He was down at the video, tanning, bait and tackle store, being shown Hinzelmanns hand-tied trout flies. They were more interesting than he had expected: colorful fakes of life, made of feather and thread, each with a hook hidden inside it. He asked Hinzelmann. For real? asked Hinzelmann. For real, said Shadow. Well, said the older man. Sometimes they didn't survive it, and they died. Leaky chimneys and badly ventilated stoves and ranges killed as many people as the cold. But those days were hardtheyd spend the summer and the fall laying up the food and the firewood for the winter. The worst thing of all was the madness. I heard on the radio, they were saying how it has to do with the sunlight, how there isn't enough of it in the winter. My daddy, he said folk just went stir crazywinter madness they called it. Lakeside always had it easy, but some of the other towns around here, they had it hard. There was a saying still had currency when I was a kid, that if the serving girl hadn't tried to kill you by February she hadn't any backbone. Storybooks were like gold dustanything you could read was treasured, back before the town had a lending library. When my grampaw got sent a storybook from his brother in Bavaria, all the Germans in town met up in the town hall to hear him read it, and the Finns and the Irish and the rest of them, theyd make the Germans tell them the stories. Twenty miles south of here, in Jibway, they found a woman walking mother-naked in the winter with a dead babe at her breast, and shed not suffer them to take it from her. He shook his head meditatively, closed the fly cabinet with a click. Bad business. You want a video rental card? Eventually they'll open a Blockbusters here, and then well soon be out of business. |
| 479 |
An oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln gazed down from the wall at him. Shadow walked down the marble and oak steps to the library basement, through a door into a large room filled with tables, each table covered with books of all kinds, indiscriminately assorted and promiscuously arranged: paperbacks and hardcovers, fiction and nonfiction, periodicals and encyclopedias all side by side upon the tables, spines up or spines out. Shadow wandered to the back of the room where there was a table covered with old-looking leather-bound books, each with a catalog number painted in white on the spine. you're the first person over in that corner all day, said the man sitting by the stack of empty boxes and bags and the small, open metal cashbox. Mostly folk just take the thrillers and the childrens books and the Harlequin romances. Jenny Kerton, Danielle Steel, all that. The man was reading Agatha Christies The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Everything on the tables is fifty cents a book, or you can take three for a dollar. Shadow thanked him and continued to browse. He found a copy of Herodotuss Histories bound in peeling brown leather. It made him think of the paperback copy he had left behind in prison. There was a book called Perplexing Parlour Illusions, which looked like it might have some coin effects. He carried both the books over to the man with the cashbox. Buy one more, its still a dollar, said the man. And if you take another book away, you'll be doing us a favor. We need the shelf-space. Shadow walked back to the old leather-bound books. He decided to liberate the book that was least likely to be bought by anyone else, and found himself unable to decide between Common Diseases of the Urinary Tract with Illustrations by a Medical Doctor and Minutes of the LakesideCity Council 18721884. He looked at the illustrations in the medical book and decided that somewhere in the town there was a teenage boy who could use the book to gross out his friends. He took the Minutes to the man on the door, who took his dollar and put all the books into a Daves Finest Food brown paper sack. Shadow left the library. He had a clear view of the lake, all the way back. He could even see his apartment building, like a dolls house, up past the bridge. And there were men on the ice near the bridge, four or five of them, pushing a dark green car into the center of the white lake. March the twenty-third, Shadow said to the lake, under his breath. Nine A. M. to nine-thirty A. M. He wondered if the lake or the klunker could hear him and if they would pay any attention to him, even if they could. He doubted it. The wind blew bitter against his face. Officer Chad Mulligan was waiting outside Shadows apartment when he got back. Shadows heart began to pound when he saw the police car, to relax a little when he observed that the policeman was doing paperwork in the front seat. He walked over to the car, carrying his paper sack of books. Mulligan lowered his window. Library sale? he said. Yes. |
| 480 |
I bought a box of Robert Ludlum books there two, three years back. Keep meaning to read them. My cousin swears by the guy. These days I figure if I ever get marooned on a desert island and I got my box of Robert Ludlum books with me, I can catch up on my reading. Something particular I can do for you, Chief? Not a darn thing, pal. Thought I'd stop by and see how you were settling in. You remember that Chinese saying, you save a mans life, you're responsible for him. Well, I'm not saying I saved your life last week. But I still thought I should check in. Hows the Purple Gunther-mobile doing? Good, said Shadow. Its good. Running fine. Pleased to hear it. I saw my next-door neighbor in the library, said Shadow. Miz Olsen. I was wondering What crawled up her butt and died? If you want to put it like that. Long story. You want to ride along for a spell, I'll tell you all about it. Shadow thought about it for a moment. Okay, he said. He got into the car, sat in the front passenger seat. Mulligan drove north of town. Then he turned off his lights and parked beside the road. Darren Olsen met Marge at U. W. Stevens Point and he brought her back north to Lakeside. She was a journalism major. He was studying, shit, hotel management, something like that. When they got here, jaws dropped. This was, what, thirteen, fourteen years ago. She was so beautifulthat black hair he paused. Darren managed the Motel America over in Camden, twenty miles west of here. Except nobody ever seemed to want to stop in Camden and eventually the motel closed. They had two boys. At that time Sandy was eleven. The little oneLeon, is it? was just a babe in arms. Darren Olsen wasnt a brave man. Hed been a good high school football player, but that was the last time he was flying high. Whatever. He couldn't find the courage to tell Margie that hed lost his job. So for a month, maybe for two months, hed drive off early in the morning, come home late in the evening complaining about the hard day hed had at the motel. What was he doing? asked Shadow. Mm. couldn't say for certain. I reckon he was driving up to Ironwood, maybe down to Green Bay. Guess he started out as a job hunter. Pretty soon he was drinking the time away, getting stoned, more than probably meeting the occasional working girl for a little instant gratification. He could have been gambling. What I do know for certain is that he emptied out their joint account in about ten weeks. It was only a matter of time before Margie figured outthere we go! He swung the car out, flicked on the siren and the lights, and scared the daylights out of a small man in a car with Iowa plates who had just come down the hill at seventy. The rogue lowan ticketed, Mulligan returned to his story. Where was I? Okay. So Margie kicks him out, sues for divorce. It turned into a vicious custody battle. that's what they call em when they get into People magazine. Vicious Custody Battle. She got the kids. Darren got visitation rights and precious little else. |
| 481 |
He was unsurprised to see that the portly secretary of the 1882 city council was a Patrick Mulligan: shave him, make him lose twenty pounds and hed be a dead ringer for Chad Mulligan, hiswhat, great-great-grandson? He wondered if Hinzelmanns pioneer grandfather was in the photographs, but it did not appear that he had been city council material. Shadow thought he had seen a reference to a Hinzelmann in the text, while flipping from photograph to photograph, but it eluded him when he leafed back for it, and the tiny type made Shadows eyes ache. He put the book down on his chest and realized his head was nodding. It would be foolish to fall asleep on the couch, he decided soberly. The bedroom was only a few feet away. On the other hand, the bedroom and the bed would still be there in five minutes, and anyway, he was not going to go to sleep, only to close his eyes for a moment Darkness roared. He stood on an open plain. Beside him was the place from which he had once emerged, from which the earth had squeezed him. Stars were still falling from the sky and each star that touched the red earth became a man or a woman. The men had long black hair and high cheekbones. The women all looked like Marguerite Olsen. These were the star people. They looked at him with dark, proud eyes. Tell me about the thunderbirds, said Shadow. Please. Its not for me. Its for my wife. One by one they turned their backs on him, and as he lost their faces they were gone, one with the landscape. But the last of them, her hair streaked white on dark gray, pointed before she turned away, pointed into the wine-colored sky. Ask them yourself, she said. Summer lightning flickered, momentarily illuminating the landscape from horizon to horizon. There were high rocks near him, peaks and spires of sandstone, and Shadow began to climb the nearest. The spire was the color of old ivory. He grabbed at a handhold and felt it slice into his hand. Its bone, thought Shadow. Not stone. Its old dry bone. It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began. Shadow continued to climb. His hands hurt. Bone popped and crushed and fragmented under his bare feet. The wind tugged at him, and he pressed himself to the spire, and he continued to climb the tower. It was made of only one kind of bone, he realized, repeated over and over. Each of the bones was dry and ball-like. He imagined that they might be the eggshells of some huge bird. But another flare of lightning told him differently: they had holes for eyes, and they had teeth, which grinned without humor. Somewhere birds were calling. Rain spattered his face. He was hundreds of feet above the ground, clinging to the side of the tower of skulls, while flashes of lightning burned in the wings of the shadowy birds who circled the spireenormous, black, condorlike birds, each with a ruff of white at its neck. They were huge, graceful birds, and the beats of their wings crashed like thunder on the night air. |
| 482 |
They were circling the spire. They must be fifteen, twenty feet from wingtip to wingtip, thought Shadow. Then the first bird swung out of its glide toward him, blue lightning crackling in its wings. He pushed himself into a crevice of skulls, hollow eye-holes stared at him, a clutter of ivory teeth smiled at him, but he kept climbing, pulling himself up the mountain of skulls, every sharp edge cutting into his skin, feeling revulsion and terror and awe. Another bird came at him, and one hand-sized talon sank into his arm. He reached out and tried to grasp a feather from its wingfor if he returned to his tribe without a thunderbirds feather he would be disgraced, he would never be a manbut the bird pulled up, so that he could not grasp a feather. The thunderbird loosened its grip and swung back onto the wind. Shadow continued to climb. There must be a thousand skulls, thought Shadow. A thousand thousand. And not all of them are human. He stood at last on the top of the spire, the great birds, the thunderbirds, circling him slowly, navigating the gusts of the storm with tiny flicks of their wings. He heard a voice, the voice of the buffalo man, calling to him on the wind, telling him who the skulls belonged to The tower began to tumble, and the biggest bird, its eyes the blinding blue-white of forked lightning, plummeted down toward him in a rush of thunder, and Shadow was falling, tumbling down the tower of skulls The telephone shrilled. Shadow had not even known that it was connected. Groggy, shaken, he picked it up. What the fuck, shouted Wednesday, angrier than Shadow had ever heard him, what the almighty flying fuck do you think you are playing at? I was asleep, said Shadow into the receiver, stupidly. What do you think is the fucking point of stashing you in a hiding place like Lakeside, ifyou're going to raise such a ruckus that not even a dead man could miss it? I dreamed of thunderbirds said Shadow. And a tower. Skulls It seemed to him very important to recount his dream. I know what you were dreaming. Everybody damn well knows what you were dreaming. Christ almighty. Whats the point in hiding you, ifyou're going to start to fucking advertise? Shadow said nothing. There was a pause at the other end of the telephone. I'll be there in the morning, said Wednesday. It sounded like the anger had died down. Were going to San Francisco. The flowers in your hair are optional. And the line went dead. Shadow put the telephone down on the carpet, and sat up, stiffly. It was 6:00 A. M. and still night-dark outside. He got up from the sofa, shivering. He could hear the wind as it screamed across the frozen lake. And he could hear somebody nearby crying, only the thickness of a wall away. He was certain it was Marguerite Olsen, and her sobbing was insistent and low and heartbreaking. Shadow walked into the bathroom and pissed, then went into his bedroom and closed the door, blocking off the sound of the crying woman. Outside the wind howled and wailed as if it, too, was seeking a lost child. |
| 483 |
As they reached her she was selecting from a plate of deviled eggs. She looked up as Wednesday approached her, put down the egg she had chosen, and wiped her hand. Hello, you old fraud, she said, but she smiled as she said it, and Wednesday bowed low, took her hand, and raised it to his lips. He said, You look divine. How the hell else should I look? she demanded, sweetly. Anyway, you're a liar. New Orleans was such a mistakeI put on, what, thirty pounds there? I swear. I knew I had to leave when I started to waddle. The tops of my thighs rub together when I walk now, can you believe that? This last was addressed to Shadow. He had no idea what to say in reply, and felt a hot flush suffuse his face. The woman laughed delightedly. he's blushing! Wednesday, my sweet, you brought me a blusher. How perfectly wonderful of you. Whats he called? This is Shadow, said Wednesday. He seemed to be enjoying Shadows discomfort. Shadow, say hello to Easter. Shadow said something that might have been Hello, and the woman smiled at him again. He felt like he was caught in headlightsthe blinding kind that poachers use to freeze deer before they shoot them. He could smell her perfume from where he was standing, an intoxicating mixture of jasmine and honeysuckle, of sweet milk and female skin. So, hows tricks? asked Wednesday. The womanEasterlaughed a deep and throaty laugh, full-bodied and joyous. How could you not like someone who laughed like that? Everythings fine, she said. How about you, you old wolf? I was hoping to enlist your assistance. Wasting your time. At least hear me out before dismissing me. No point. don't even bother. She looked at Shadow. Please, sit down here and help yourself to some of this food. Here, take a plate and pile it high. Its all good. Eggs, roast chicken, chicken curry, chicken salad, and over here is lapinrabbit, actually, but cold rabbit is a delight, and in that bowl over there is the jugged harewell, why don't I just fill a plate for you? And she did, taking a plastic plate, piling it high with food, and passing it to him. Then she looked at Wednesday. Are you eating? she asked. I am at your disposal, my dear, said Wednesday. You, she told him, are so full of shit its a wonder your eyes don't turn brown. She passed him an empty plate. Help yourself, she said. The afternoon sun at her back burned her hair into a platinum aura. Shadow, she said, chewing a chicken leg with gusto. that's a sweet name. Why do they call you Shadow? Shadow licked his lips to moisten them. When I was a kid, he said. We lived, my mother and I, we were, I mean, she was, well, like a secretary, at a bunch of U. S. embassies, we went from city to city all over northern Europe. Then she got sick and had to take early retirement and we came back to the States. I never knew what to say to the other kids, so I'd just find adults and follow them around, not saying anything. I just needed the company, I guess. I don't know. I was a small kid. You grew, she said. Yes, said Shadow. |
| 484 |
Really? said Wednesday. Yeah, sure, said the woman. Easter. Just like the sun rises in the east, you know. The risen son. Of coursea most logical supposition. The woman smiled and returned to her coffee grinder. Wednesday looked up at their waitress. I think I shall have another espresso, if you do not mind. And tell me, as a pagan, who do you worship? Worship? that's right. I imagine you must have a pretty wide-open field. So to whom do you set up your household altar? To whom do you bow down? To whom do you pray at dawn and at dusk? Her lips described several shapes without saying anything before she said, The female principle. Its an empowerment thing. You know? Indeed. And this female principle of yours. Does she have a name? she's the goddess within us all, said the girl with the eyebrow ring, color rising to her cheek. She doesn't need a name. Ah, said Wednesday, with a wide monkey grin, so do you have mighty bacchanals in her honor? Do you drink blood wine under the full moon while scarlet candles burn in silver candleholders? Do you step naked into the seafoam, chanting ecstatically to your nameless goddess while the waves lick at your legs, lapping your thighs like the tongues of a thousand leopards? you're making fun of me, she said. We don't do any of that stuff you were saying. She took a deep breath. Shadow suspected she was counting to ten. Any more coffees here? Another mochaccino for you, maam? Her smile was a lot like the one she had greeted them with when they had entered. They shook their heads, and the waitress turned to greet another customer. There, said Wednesday, is one who does not have the faith and will not have the fun, Chesterton. Pagan indeed. So. Shall we go out onto the street, Easter my dear, and repeat the exercise? Find out how many passers by know that their Easter festival takes its name from Eostre of the Dawn? Lets see I have it. We shall ask a hundred people. For every one that knows the truth, you may cut off one of my fingers, and when I run out of them, toes; for every twenty who don't know, you spend a night making love to me. And the odds are certainly in your favor herethis is San Francisco, after all. There are heathens and pagans and Wiccans aplenty on these precipitous streets. Her green eyes looked at Wednesday. They were, Shadow decided, the exact same color as a leaf in spring with the sun shining through it. She said nothing. We could try it, continued Wednesday. But I would end up with ten fingers, ten toes, and five nights in your bed. So don't tell me they worship you and keep your festival day. They mouth your name, but it has no meaning to them. Nothing at all. Tears stood out in her eyes. I know that, she said, quietly. I'm not a fool. No, said Wednesday. you're not. he's pushed her too far, thought Shadow. Wednesday looked down, ashamed. I'm sorry, he said. Shadow could hear the real sincerity in his voice. We need you. We need your energy. We need your power. Will you fight beside us when the storm comes? |
| 485 |
She hesitated. She had a chain of blue forget-me-nots tattooed around her left wrist. Yes, she said, after a while. I guess I will. I guess its true what they say, thought Shadow. If you can fake sincerity, youve got it made. Then he felt guilty for thinking it. Wednesday kissed his finger, touched it to Easters cheek. He called their waitress over and paid for their coffees, counting out the money carefully, folding it over with the check and presenting it to her. As she walked away, Shadow said, Maam? Excuse me? I think you dropped this. He picked up a ten-dollar bill from the floor. No, she said, looking at the wrapped bills in her hand. I saw it fall, maam, said Shadow, politely. You should count them. She counted the money in her hand, looked puzzled, and said, Jesus. you're right. I'm sorry. She took the ten-dollar bill from Shadow, and walked away. Easter walked out onto the sidewalk with them. The light was just starting to fade. She nodded to Wednesday, then she touched Shadows hand and said, What did you dream about, last night? Thunderbirds, he said. A mountain of skulls. She nodded. And do you know whose skulls they were? There was a voice, he said. In my dream. It told me. She nodded and waited. He said, It said they were mine. Old skulls of mine. Thousands and thousands of them. She looked at Wednesday, and said, I think this ones a keeper. She smiled her bright smile. Then she patted Shadows arm and walked away down the sidewalk. He watched her go, trying and failingnot to think of her thighs rubbing together as she walked. In the taxi on the way to the airport, Wednesday turned to Shadow. What the hell was that business with the ten dollars about? You shortchanged her. It comes out of her wages if she's short. What the hell do you care? Wednesday seemed genuinely irate. Shadow thought for a moment. Then he said, Well, I wouldn't want anyone to do it to me. She hadn't done anything wrong. No? Wednesday stared off into the middle distance, and said, When she was seven years old she shut a kitten in a closet. She listened to it mew for several days. When it ceased to mew, she took it out of the closet, put it into a shoebox, and buried it in the backyard. She wanted to bury something. She consistently steals from everywhere she works. Small amounts, usually. Last year she visited her grandmother in the nursing home to which the old woman is confined. She took an antique gold watch from her grandmothers bedside table, and then went prowling through several of the other rooms, stealing small quantities of money and personal effects from the twilight folk in their golden years. When she got home she did not know what to do with her spoils, scared someone would come after her, so she threw everything away except the cash. I get the idea, said Shadow. She also has asymptomatic gonorrhea, said Wednesday. She suspects she might be infected but does nothing about it. When her last boyfriend accused her of having given him a disease she was hurt, offended, and refused to see him again. |
| 486 |
This isn't necessary, said Shadow. I said I get the idea. You could do this to anyone, couldn't you? Tell me bad things about them. Of course, agreed Wednesday. They all do the same things. They may think their sins are original, but for the most part they are petty and repetitive. And that makes it okay for you to steal ten bucks from her? Wednesday paid the taxi and the two men walked into the airport, wandered up to their gate. Boarding had not yet begun. Wednesday said, What the hell else can I do? They don't sacrifice rams or bulls to me. They don't send me the souls of killers and slaves, gallows-hung and raven-picked. They made me. They forgot me. Now I take a little back from them. isn't that fair? My mom used to say, Life isn't fair, said Shadow. Of course she did, said Wednesday. Its one of those things that moms say, right up there with If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you do it too? You stiffed that girl for ten bucks, I slipped her ten bucks, said Shadow, doggedly. It was the right thing to do. Someone announced that their plane was boarding. Wednesday stood up. May your choices always be so clear, he said. * * * The cold snap was easing when Wednesday dropped Shadow off in the small hours of the morning. It was still obscenely cold in Lakeside, but it was no longer impossibly cold. The lighted sign on the side of the M&I Bank flashed alternately 3:30 A. M. and -5F as they drove through the town. It was 9:30 A. M. when Chief of Police Chad Mulligan knocked on the apartment door and asked Shadow if he knew a girl named Alison McGovern. I don't think so, said Shadow, sleepily. This is her picture, said Mulligan. It was a high school photograph. Shadow recognized the person in the picture immediately: the girl with the blue rubber-band braces on her teeth, the one who had been learning all about the oral uses of Alka-Seltzer from her friend. Oh, yeah. Okay. She was on the bus when I came into town. Where were you yesterday, Mister Ainsel? Shadow felt his world begin to spin away from him. He knew he had nothing to feel guilty about (Youre a parole-violating felon living under an assumed name, whispered a calm voice in his mind. isn't that enough?). San Francisco, he said. California. Helping my uncle transport a four-poster bed. You got any ticket stubs? Anything like that? Sure. He had both his boarding pass stubs in his back pocket, pulled them out. Whats going on? Chad Mulligan examined the boarding passes. Alison McGoverns vanished. She helped out up at the Lakeside Humane Society. Feed animals, walk dogs. Shed come out for a few hours after school. So. Dolly Knopf, who runs the Humane Society, shed always run her home when they closed up for the night. Yesterday Alison never got there. she's vanished. Yup. Her parents called us last night. Silly kid used to hitchhike up to the Humane Society. Its out on County W, pretty isolated. Her parents told her not to, but this isn't the kind of place where things happenpeople here don't lock their doors, you know? |
| 487 |
And you cant tell kids. So, look at the photo again. Alison McGovern was smiling. The rubber bands on her teeth in the photograph were red, not blue. You can honestly say you didn't kidnap her, rape her, murder her, anything like that? I was in San Francisco. And I wouldn't do that shit. That was what I figured, pal. So you want to come help us look for her? Me? You. Weve had the K-9 guys out this morningnothing so far. He sighed. Heck, Mike. I just hope she turns up in the Twin Cities with some dopey boyfriend. You think its likely? I think its possible. You want to join the hunting party? Shadow remembered seeing the girl in Hennings Farm and Home Supplies, the flash of a shy blue-braced smile, how beautiful he had known she was going to be, one day. I'll come, he said. There were two dozen men and women waiting in the lobby of the fire station. Shadow recognized Hinzelmann, and several other faces looked familiar. There were police officers, and some men and women in the brown uniforms of the Lumber County Sheriffs department. Chad Mulligan told them what Alison was wearing when she vanished (a scarlet snowsuit, green gloves, blue woollen hat under the hood of her snowsuit) and divided the volunteers into groups of three. Shadow, Hinzelmann, and a man named Brogan comprised one of the groups. They were reminded how short the daylight period was, told that if, God forbid, they found Alisons body they were not repeat not to disturb anything, just to radio back for help, but that if she was alive they were to keep her warm until help came. They were dropped off out on County W. Hinzelmann, Brogan, and Shadow walked along the edge of a frozen creek. Each group of three had been issued a small handheld walkie-talkie before they left. The cloud cover was low, and the world was gray. No snow had fallen in the last thirty-six hours. Footprints stood out in the glittering crust of the crisp snow. Brogan looked like a retired army colonel, with his slim mustache and white temples. He told Shadow he was a retired high school principal. I wasnt getting any younger. These days I still teach a little, do the school playthat was always the high point of the year anyhow and now I hunt a little and have a cabin down on Pike Lake, spend too much time there. As they set out Brogan said, On the one hand, I hope we find her. On the other, if she's going to be found, I'd be very grateful if it was someone else who got to find her, and not us. You know what I mean? Shadow knew exactly what he meant. The three men did not talk much. They walked, looking for a red snowsuit, or green gloves, or a blue hat, or a white body. Now and again Brogan, who had the walkie-talkie, would check in with Chad Mulligan. At lunchtime they sat with the rest of the search party on a commandeered school bus and ate hot dogs and drank hot soup. Someone pointed out a red-tailed hawk in a bare tree, and someone else said that it looked more like a falcon, but it flew away and the argument was abandoned. |
| 488 |
Hinzelmann told them a story about his grandfathers trumpet, and how he tried playing it during a cold snap, and the weather was so cold outside by the barn, where his grandfather had gone to practice, that no music came out. Then after he came inside he put the trumpet down by the woodstove to thaw. Well, the family're all in bed that night and suddenly the unfrozen tunes start coming out of that trumpet. Scared my grandmother so much she nearly had kittens. The afternoon was endless, unfruitful, and depressing. The daylight faded slowly: distances collapsed and the world turned indigo and the wind blew cold enough to burn the skin on your face. When it was too dark to continue, Mulligan radioed to them to call it off for the evening, and they were picked up and driven back to the fire station. In the block next to the fire station was the Buck Stops Here Tavern, and that was where most of the searchers wound up. They were exhausted and dispirited, talking to each other of how cold it had become, how more than likely Alison would show up in a day or so, no idea of how much trouble shed caused everyone. You shouldn't think badly of the town because of this, said Brogan. It is a good town. Lakeside, said a trim woman whose name Shadow had forgotten, if ever theyd been introduced, is the best town in the North Woods. You know how many people are unemployed in Lakeside? No, said Shadow. Less than twenty, she said. Theres over five thousand people live in and around this town. We may not be rich, but everyones working. Its not like the mining towns up in the northeastmost of them are ghost towns now. There were farming towns that were killed by the falling cost of milk, or the low price of hogs. You know what the biggest cause of unnatural death is among farmers in the Midwest? Suicide? Shadow hazarded. She looked almost disappointed. Yeah. that's it. They kill themselves. She shook her head. Then she continued, There are too many towns hereabouts that only exist for the hunters and the vacationers, towns that just take their money and send them home with their trophies and their bug bites. Then there are the company towns, where everythings just hunky-dory until Wal-Mart relocates their distribution center or 3M stops manufacturing CD cases there or whatever and suddenly theres a boatload of folks who cant pay their mortgages. I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name. Ainsel, said Shadow. Mike Ainsel. The beer he was drinking was a local brew, made with spring water. It was good. I'm Gallic Knopf, she said. Dollys sister. Her face was still ruddy from the cold. So what I'm saying is that Lakesides lucky. Weve got a little of everything herefarm, light industry, tourism, crafts. Good schools. Shadow looked at her in puzzlement. There was something empty at the bottom of all her words. It was as if he were listening to a salesman, a good salesman, who believed in his product, but still wanted to make sure you went home with all the brushes or the full set of encyclopedias. |
| 489 |
He was not smiling now. Instead he tried to show bravery for his sister, his head back and shoulders spread, as proud, as menacing, as comical as a puppy with its hackles raised. The man in the line behind Wututu, his cheeks scarred, said, They will sell us to the white devils, who will take us to their home across the water. And what will they do to us there? demanded Wututu. The man said nothing. Well? asked Wututu. Agasu tried to dart a glance over his shoulder. They were not allowed to talk or sing as they walked. It is possible they will eat us, said the man. That is what I have been told. That is why they need so many slaves. It is because they are always hungry. Wututu began to cry as she walked. Agasu said, Do not cry, my sister. They will not eat you. I shall protect you. Our gods will protect you. But Wututu continued to cry, walking with a heavy heart, feeling pain and anger and fear as only a child can feel it: raw and overwhelming. She was unable to tell Agasu that she was not worried about the white devils eating her. She would survive, she was certain of it. She cried because she was scared that they would eat her brother, and she was not certain that she could protect him. They reached a trading post, and they were kept there for ten days. On the morning of the tenth day they were taken from the hut in which they had been imprisoned (it had become very crowded in the final days, as men arrived from far away bringing their own strings and skeins of slaves). They were marched to the harbor, and Wututu saw the ship that was to take them away. Her first thought was how big a ship it was, her second that it was too small for all of them to fit inside. It sat lightly on the water. The ships boat came back and forth, ferrying the captives to the ship, where they were manacled and arranged in low decks by sailors, some of whom were brick red or tan-skinned, with strange pointy noses and beards that made them look like beasts. Several of the sailors looked like her own people, like the men who had marched her to the coast. The men and the women and the children were separated, forced into different areas on the slave deck. There were too many slaves for the ship to hold easily, so another dozen men were chained up on the deck in the open, beneath the places where the crew would sling their hammocks. Wututu was put in with the children, not with the women; and she was not chained, merely locked in. Agasu, her brother, was forced in with the men, in chains, packed like herrings. It stank under that deck, although the crew had scrubbed it down since their last cargo. It was a stink that had entered the wood: the smell of fear and bile and diarrhea and death, of fever and madness and hate. Wututu sat in the hot hold with the other children. She could feel the children on each side of her sweating. A wave tumbled a small boy into her, hard, and he apologized in a tongue that Wututu did not recognize. She tried to smile at him in the semidarkness. |
| 490 |
The ship set sail. Now it rode heavy in the water. Wututu wondered about the place the white men came from (although none of them was truly white: sea-burned and sunburned they were, and their skins were dark). Were they so short of food that they had to send all the way to her land for people to eat? Or was it that she was to be a delicacy, a rare treat for a people who had eaten so many things that only black-skinned flesh in their cookpots made their mouths water? On the second day out of port the ship hit a squall, not a bad one, but the ships decks lurched and tumbled, and the smell of vomit joined the mixed smells of urine and liquid feces and fear-sweat. Rain poured down on them in bucket-loads from the air gratings set in the ceiling of the slave deck. A week into the voyage, and well out of sight of land, the slaves were allowed out of irons. They were warned that any disobedience, any trouble, and they would be punished more than they had ever imagined. In the morning the captives were fed beans and ships biscuits, and a mouthful each of vinegared lime juice, harsh enough that their faces would twist, and they would cough and splutter, and some of them would moan and wail as the lime juice was spooned out. They could not spit it out, though: if they were caught spitting or dribbling it out they were lashed or beaten. The night brought them salted beef. It tasted unpleasant, and there was a rainbow sheen to the gray surface of the meat. That was at the start of the voyage. As the voyage continued, the meat grew worse. When they could, Wututu and Agasu would huddle together, talking of their mother and their home and their playfellows. Sometimes Wututu would tell Agasu the stories their mother had told them, like those of Elegba, the trickiest of the gods, who was Great Mawus eyes and ears in the world, who took messages to Mawu and brought back Mawus replies. In the evenings, to while away the monotony of the voyage, the sailors would make the slaves sing for them and dance the dances of their native lands. Wututu was lucky that she had been put in with the children. The children were packed in tightly and ignored; the women were not always so fortunate. On some slave ships the female slaves were raped repeatedly by the crew, simply as an unspoken perquisite of the voyage. This was not one of those ships, which is not to say that there were no rapes. A hundred men, women, and children died on that voyage and were dropped over the side; and some of the captives who were dropped over the side had not yet died, but the green chill of the ocean cooled their final fever and they went down flailing, choking, lost. Wututu and Agasu were traveling on a Dutch ship, but they did not know this, and it might as easily have been British, or Portuguese, or Spanish, or French. The black crewmen on the ship, their skins even darker than Wututus, told the captives where to go, what to do, when to dance. One morning Wututu caught one of the black guards staring at her. |
| 491 |
When she was eating, the man came over to her and stared down at her, without saying anything. Why do you do this? she asked the man. Why do you serve the white devils? He grinned at her as if her question was the funniest thing he had ever heard. Then he leaned over, so his lips were almost brushing her ears, so his hot breath on her ear made her suddenly feel sick. If you were older, he told her, I would make you scream with happiness from my penis. Perhaps I will do it tonight. I have seen how well you dance. She looked at him with her nut-brown eyes and she said, unflinching, smiling even, If you put it in me down there I will bite it off with my teeth down there. I am a witch girl, and I have very sharp teeth down there. She took pleasure in watching his expression change. He said nothing and walked away. The words had come out of her mouth, but they had not been her words: she had not thought them or made them. No, she realized, those were the words of Elegba the trickster. Mawu had made the world and then, thanks to Elegbas trickery, had lost interest in it. It was Elegba of the clever ways and the iron-hard erection who had spoken through her, who had ridden her for a moment, and that night before she slept she gave thanks to Elegba. Several of the captives refused to eat. They were whipped until they put food into their mouths and swallowed, although the whipping was severe enough that two men died of it. Still, no one else on the ship tried to starve themselves to freedom. A man and a woman tried to kill themselves by leaping over the side. The woman succeeded. The man was rescued and he was tied to the mast and lashed for the better part of a day, until his back ran with blood, and he was left there as the day became night. He was given no food to eat, and nothing to drink but his own piss. By the third day he was raving, and his head had swollen and grown soft, like an old melon. When he stopped raving they threw him over the side. Also, for five days following the escape attempt the captives were returned to their manacles and chains. It was a long journey and a bad one for the captives, and it was not pleasant for the crew, although they had learned to harden their hearts to the business, and pretended to themselves that they were no more than farmers, taking their livestock to the market. They made harbor on a pleasant, balmy day in Bridgeport, Barbados, and the captives were carried from the ship to the shore in low boats sent out from the dock, and taken to the market square where they were, by dint of a certain amount of shouting, and blows from cudgels, arranged into lines. A whistle blew, and the market square filled with men: poking, prodding, red-faced men, shouting, inspecting, calling, appraising, grumbling. Wututu and Agasu were separated then. It happened so fasta big man forced open Agasus mouth, looked at his teeth, felt his arm muscles, nodded, and two other men hauled Agasu away. He did not fight them. He looked at Wututu and called, Be brave, to her. |
| 492 |
It throbbed and it burned. They gave him crude rum to drink, and they heated the blade of a machete in the fire until it glowed red and white. They cut his arm off at the shoulder with a saw, and they cauterized it with the burning blade. He lay in a fever for a week. Then he returned to work. The one-armed slave called Hyacinth took part in the slave revolt of 1791. Elegba himself took possession of Hyacinth in the grove, riding him as a white man rode a horse, and spoke through him. He remembered little of what was said, but the others who were with him told him that he had promised them freedom from their captivity. He remembered only his erection, rodlike and painful; and raising both handsthe one he had, and the one he no longer possessedto the moon. A pig was killed, and the men and the women of that plantation drank the hot blood of the pig, pledging themselves and binding themselves into a brotherhood. They swore that they were an army of freedom, pledged themselves once more to the gods of all the lands from which they had been dragged as plunder. If we die in battle with the whites, they told each other, we will be reborn in Africa, in our homes, in our own tribes. There was another Hyacinth in the uprising, so they now called Agasu by the name of Big One-Arm. He fought, he worshiped, he sacrificed, he planned. He saw his friends and his lovers killed, and he kept fighting. They fought for twelve years, a maddening, bloody struggle with the plantation owners, with the troops brought over from France. They fought, and they kept fighting, and, impossibly, they won. On January 1, 1804, the independence of St. Domingue, soon to be known to the world as the Republic of Haiti, was declared. Big One-Arm did not live to see it. He had died in August 1802, bayoneted by a French soldier. At the precise moment of the death of Big One-Arm (who had once been called Hyacinth, and before that, Inky Jack, and who was forever in his heart Agasu), his sister, whom he had known as Wututu, who had been called Mary on her first plantation in the Carolinas, and Daisy when she had become a house slave, and Sukey when she was sold to the Lavere family down the river to New Orleans, felt the cold bayonet slide between her ribs and started to scream and weep uncontrollably. Her twin daughters woke and began to howl. They were cream-and-coffee colored, her new babies, not like the black children she had borne when she was on the plantation and little more than a girl herselfchildren she had not seen since they were fifteen and ten years old. The middle girl had been dead for a year, when she was sold away from them. Sukey had been whipped many times since she had come ashoreonce, salt had been rubbed into the wounds, on another occasion she had been whipped so hard and for so long that she could not sit, or allow anything to touch her back, for several days. She had been raped a number of times when younger: by black men who had been ordered to share her wooden palette, and by white men. |
| 493 |
She had been chained. She had not wept then, though. Since her brother had been taken from her she had only wept once. It was in North Carolina, when she had seen the food for the slave children and the dogs poured into the same trough, and she had seen her little children scrabbling with the dogs for the scraps. She saw that happen one day and she had seen it before, every day on that plantation, and she would see it again many times before she leftshe saw it that one day and it broke her heart. She had been beautiful for a while. Then the years of pain had taken their toll, and she was no longer beautiful. Her face was lined, and there was too much pain in those brown eyes. Eleven years earlier, when she was twenty-five, her right arm had withered. None of the white folk had known what to make of it. The flesh seemed to melt from the bones, and now her right arm hung by her side, little more than a skeletal arm covered in skin, and almost immobile. After this she had become a house slave. The Casterton family, who had owned the plantation, were impressed by her cooking and house skills, but Mrs. Casterton found the withered arm unsettling, and so she was sold to the Lavere family, who were out for a year from Louisiana: M. Lavere was a fat, cheerful man who was in need of a cook and a maid of all work, and who was not in the slightest repulsed by the slave Daisys withered arm. When, a year later, they returned to Louisiana, slave Sukey went with them. In New Orleans the women came to her, and the men also, to buy cures and love charms and little fetishes, black folks, yes, of course, but white folks too. The Lavere family turned a blind eye to it. Perhaps they enjoyed the prestige of having a slave who was feared and respected. They would not, however, sell her her freedom. Sukey went into the bayou late at night, and she danced the Calinda and the Bamboula. Like the dancers of St. Domingue and the dancers of her native land, true dancers in the bayou had a black snake as their voudon; even so, the gods of her homeland and of the other African nations did not possess her people as they had possessed her brother and the folk of St. Domingue. She would still invoke them and call their names, to beg them for favors. She listened when the white folk spoke of the revolt in St. Domingo (as they called it), and how it was doomed to failThink of it! A cannibal land! and then she observed that they no longer spoke of it. Soon, it seemed to her that they pretended that there never had been a place called St. Domingo, and as for Haiti, the word was never mentioned. It was as if the whole American nation had decided that they could, by an effort of belief, command a good-sized Caribbean island to no longer exist merely by willing it so. A generation of Lavere children grew up under Sukeys watchful eye. The youngest, unable to say Sukey as a child, had called her Mama Zouzou, and the name had stuck. Now the year was 1821, and Sukey was in her mid-fifties. She looked much older. |
| 494 |
Infallibly, if you do this, the one you love will be yours. She learned that dried snake powder, placed in the face powder of an enemy, will produce blindness, and that an enemy can be made to drown herself by taking a piece of her underwear, turning it inside out, and burying it at midnight under a brick. Mama Zouzou showed the Widow Paris the World Wonder Root, the great and the little roots of John the Conqueror, she showed her dragons blood, and valerian and five-finger grass. She showed her how to brew waste-away tea, and follow-me-water and faire-Shingo water. All these things and more Mama Zouzou showed the Widow Paris. Still, it was disappointing for the old woman. She did her best to teach her the hidden truths, the deep knowledge, to tell her of Papa Legba, of Mawu, of Aido-Hwedo the voudon serpent, and the rest, but the Widow Paris (I shall now tell you the name she was born with, and the name she later made famous: it was Marie Laveau. But this was not the great Marie Laveau, the one you have heard of, this was her mother, who eventually became the Widow Glapion), she had no interest in the gods of the distant land. If St. Domingo had been a lush black earth for the African gods to grow in, this land, with its corn and its melons, its crawfish and its cotton, was barren and infertile. She does not want to know, complained Mama Zouzou to Clementine, her confidante, who took in the washing for many of the houses in that district, washing their curtains and coverlets. Clementine had a blossom of burns on her cheek, and one of her children had been scalded to death when a copper overturned. Then do not teach her, says Clementine. I teach her, but she does not see what is valuableall she sees is what she can do with it. I give her diamonds, but she cares only for pretty glass. I give her a demi-bouteille of the best claret and she drinks river water. I give her quail and she wishes to eat only rat. Then why do you persist? asks Clementine. Mama Zouzou shrugs her thin shoulders, causing her withered arm to shake. She cannot answer. She could say that she teaches because she is grateful to be alive, and she is: she has seen too many die. She could say that she dreams that one day the slaves will rise, as they rose (and were defeated) in LaPlace, but that she knows in her heart that without the gods of Africa, without the favor of Legba and Mawu, they will never overcome their white captors, will never return to their homelands. When she woke, on that terrible night almost twenty years earlier, and felt the cold steel between her ribs, that was when Mama Zouzous life had ended. Now she was someone who did not live, who simply hated. If you asked her about the hate she would have been unable to tell you about a twelve-year-old girl on a stinking ship: that had scabbed over in her mindthere had been too many whippings and beatings, too many nights in manacles, too many partings, too much pain. She could have told you about her son, though, and how his thumb had been cut off when their master discovered the boy was able to read and to write. |
| 495 |
Agnes Repplier, Times and Tendencies Shadow drove west, across Wisconsin and Minnesota and into North Dakota, where the snow-covered hills looked like huge sleeping buffalo, and he and Wednesday saw nothing but nothing and plenty of it for mile after mile. They went south, then, into South Dakota, heading for reservation country. Wednesday had traded the Lincoln Town Car, which Shadow had liked to drive, for a lumbering and ancient Winnebago, which smelled pervasively and unmistakably of male cat, which he didn't enjoy driving at all. As they passed their first signpost for Mount Rushmore, still several hundred miles away, Wednesday grunted. Now that, he said, is a holy place. Shadow had thought Wednesday was asleep. He said, I know it used to be sacred to the Indians. Its a holy place, said Wednesday. that's the American Waythey need to give people an excuse to come and worship. These days, people cant just go and see a mountain. Thus, Mister Gutzon Borglums tremendous presidential faces. Once they were carved, permission was granted, and now the people drive out in their multitudes to see something in the flesh that theyve already seen on a thousand postcards. I knew a guy once. He did weight training at the Muscle Farm, years back. He said that the Dakota Indians, the young men climb up the mountain, then form death-defying human chains off the heads, just so that the guy at the end of the chain can piss on the presidents nose. Wednesday guffawed. Oh, fine! Very fine! Is any specific president the particular butt of their ire? Shadow shrugged. He never said. Miles vanished beneath the wheels of the Winnebago. Shadow began to imagine that he was staying still while the American landscape moved past them at a steady sixty-seven miles per hour. A wintry mist fogged the edges of things. It was midday on the second day of the drive, and they were almost there. Shadow, who had been thinking, said, A girl vanished from Lakeside last week, when we were in San Francisco. Mm? Wednesday sounded barely interested. Kid named Alison McGovern. she's not the first kid to vanish there. There have been others. They go in the wintertime. Wednesday furrowed his brow. It is a tragedy, is it not? The little faces on the milk cartonsalthough I cant remember the last time I saw a kid on a milk cartonand on the walls of freeway rest areas. Have you seen me? they ask. A deeply existential question at the best of times. Have you seen me? Pull off at the next exit. Shadow thought he heard a helicopter pass overhead, but the clouds were too low to see anything. Why did you pick Lakeside? asked Shadow. I told you. Its a nice quiet place to hide you away. you're off the board there, under the radar. Why? Because that's the way it is. Now hang a left, said Wednesday. Shadow turned left. Theres something wrong, said Wednesday. Fuck. Jesus fucking Christ on a bicycle. Slow down, but don't stop. Care to elaborate? Trouble. Do you know any alternative routes? Not really. This is my first time in South Dakota, said Shadow. |
| 496 |
Yes? This is Mister Town, for Mister World. There is silence. Town crosses his legs, tugs his belt higher on his bellygot to lose those last ten pounds and away from his bladder. Then an urbane voice says, Hello, Mister Town. We lost them, says Town. He feels a knot of frustration in his gut: these were the bastards, the lousy dirty sons of bitches who killed Woody and Stone, for Chrissakes. Good men. Good men. He badly wants to fuck Mrs. Wood, but knows its still too soon after Woodys death to make a move. So he is taking her out for dinner every couple of weeks, an investment in the future, she's just grateful for the attention How? I don't know. We set up a roadblock, there was nowhere they could have gone and they went there anyway. Just another one of lifes little mysteries. don't worry. Have you calmed the locals? Told em it was an optical illusion. They buy it? Probably. There was something very familiar about Mr. Worlds voicewhich was a strange thing to think, hed been working for him directly for two years now, spoken to him every day, of course there was something familiar about his voice. they'll be far away by now. Should we send people down to the rez to intercept them? Not worth the aggravation. Too many jurisdictional issues, and there are only so many strings I can pull in a morning. We have plenty of time. Just get back here. I've got my hands full at this end trying to organize the policy meeting. Trouble? Its a pissing contest. I've proposed that we have it out here. The techies want it in Austin, or maybe San Jose, the players want it in Hollywood, the intangibles want it on Wall Street. Everybody wants it in their own backyard. Nobodys going to give. You need me to do anything? Not yet. I'll growl at some of them, stroke others. You know the routine. Yes, sir. Carry on, Town. The connection is broken. Town thinks he should have had a S. W. A. T. team to pick off that fucking Winnebago, or land mines on the road, or a tactical friggin nukuler device, that would have showed those bastards they meant business. It was like Mr. World had once said to him, We are writing the future in Letters of Fire and Mr. Town thinks that Jesus Christ, if he doesn't piss now hell lose a kidney, itll just burst, and it was like his pop had said when they were on long journeys, when Town was a kid, out on the interstate, his pop would always say, My back teeth are afloat, and Mr. Town could hear that voice even now, that sharp Yankee accent saying I got to take a leak soon. My back teeth are afloat and it was then that Shadow felt a hand opening his own hand, prising it open one finger at a time, off the thighbone it was clutching. He no longer needed to urinate; that was someone else. He was standing under the stars on a glassy rock plain. Wednesday made the signal for silence again. Then he began to walk, and Shadow followed. There was a creak from the mechanical spider, and Wednesday froze. Shadow stopped and waited with him. Green lights flickered and ran up and along its side in clusters. |
| 497 |
Shadow tried not to breathe too loudly. He thought about what had just happened. It had been like looking through a window into someone elses mind. And then he thought, Mr. World. It was me who thought his voice sounded familiar. That was my thought, notTowns. That was why that seemed so strange. He tried to identify the voice in his mind, to put it into the category in which it belonged, but it eluded him. Itll come to me, thought Shadow. Sooner or later, itll come to me. The green lights went blue, then red, then faded to a dull red, and the spider settled down on its metallic haunches. Wednesday began to walk forward, a lonely figure beneath the stars, in a broad-brimmed hat, his frayed dark cloak gusting randomly in the nowhere wind, his staff tapping on the glassy rock floor. When the metallic spider was only a distant glint in the starlight, far back on the plain, Wednesday said, It should be safe to speak, now. Where are we? Behind the scenes, said Wednesday. Sorry? Think of it as being behind the scenes. Like in a theater or something. I just pulled us out of the audience and now were walking about backstage. Its a shortcut. When I touched that bone, I was in the mind of a guy named Town. he's with that spook show. He hates us. Yes. he's got a boss named Mister World. He reminds me of someone, but I don't know who. I was looking into Towns heador maybe I was in his head. I'm not certain. Do they know where were headed? I thinkyou're calling off the hunt right now. They didn't want to follow us to the reservation. Are we going to a reservation? Maybe. Wednesday leaned on his staff for a moment, then continued to walk. What was that spider thing? A pattern manifestation. A search engine. Are they dangerous? You only get to be my age by assuming the worst. Shadow smiled. And how old would that be? Old as my tongue, said Wednesday. And a few months older than my teeth. You play your cards so close to your chest, said Shadow, that I'm not even sure thatyou're really cards at all. Wednesday only grunted. Each hill they came to was harder to climb. Shadow began to feel headachy. There was a pounding quality to the starlight, something that resonated with the pulse in his temples and his chest. At the bottom of the next hill he stumbled, opened his mouth to say something and, without warning, he vomited. Wednesday reached into an inside pocket, and produced a small hip flask. Take a sip of this, he said. Only a sip. The liquid was pungent, and it evaporated in his mouth like a good brandy, although it did not taste like alcohol. Wednesday took the flask away, and pocketed it. Its not good for the audience to find themselves walking about backstage. that's whyyou're feeling sick. We need to hurry to get you out of here. They walked faster, Wednesday at a solid trudge, Shadow stumbling from time to time, but feeling better for the drink, which had left his mouth tasting of orange peel, of rosemary oil and peppermint and cloves. Wednesday took his arm. |
| 498 |
There, he said, pointing to two identical hillocks of frozen rock-glass to their left. Walk between those two mounds. Walk beside me. They walked, and the cold air and bright daylight smashed into Shadows face at the same time. They were standing halfway up a gentle hill. The mist had gone, the day was sunny and chill, the sky was a perfect blue. At the bottom of the hill was a gravel road, and a red station wagon bounced along it like a childs toy car. A gust of wood smoke came from a building nearby. It looked as if someone had picked up a mobile home and dropped it on the side of the hill thirty years ago. The home was much repaired, patched, and, in places, added onto. As they reached the door it opened, and a middle-aged man with sharp eyes and a mouth like a knife slash looked down at them and said, Eyah, I heard that there were two white men on their way to see me. Two whites in a Winnebago. And I heard that they got lost, like white men always get lost if they don't put up their signs everywhere. And now look at these two sorry beasts at the door. You knowyou're on Lakota land? His hair was gray, and long. Since when were you Lakota, you old fraud? said Wednesday. He was wearing a coat and a flap-eared cap, and already it seemed to Shadow unlikely that only a few moments ago under the stars he had been wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a tattered cloak. So, Whiskey Jack. I'm starving, and my friend here just threw up his breakfast. Are you going to invite us in? Whiskey Jack scratched an armpit. He was wearing blue jeans, and an undershirt the gray of his hair. He wore moccasins, and he seemed not to notice the cold. Then he said, I like it here. Come in, white men who lost their Winnebago. There was more wood smoke in the air inside the trailer, and there was another man in there, sitting at a table. The man wore stained buckskins, and was barefoot. His skin was the color of bark. Wednesday seemed delighted. Well, he said, it seems our delay was fortuitous. Whiskey Jack and Apple Johnny. Two birds with one stone. The man at the table, Apple Johnny, stared at Wednesday, then he reached down a hand to his crotch, cupped it and said, Wrong again. I jes checked and I got both of my stones, jes where they oughtta be. He looked up at Shadow, raised his hand, palm out. I'm John Chapman. You don't mind anything your boss says about me. he's an asshole. Always was an asshole. Always goin to be an asshole. Some people is jes assholes, and that's an end of it. Mike Ainsel, said Shadow. Chapman rubbed his stubbly chin. Ainsel, he said. that's not a name. But itll do at a pinch. What do they call you? Shadow. I'll call you Shadow, then. Hey, Whiskey Jackbut it wasnt really Whiskey Jack he was saying, Shadow realized. Too many syllables. Hows the food looking? Whiskey Jack took a wooden spoon and lifted the lid off a black iron pot, bubbling away on the range of the wood-burning stove. Its ready for eating, he said. He took four plastic bowls and spooned the contents of the pot into the bowls, put them down on the table. |
| 499 |
Then he opened the door, stepped out into the snow, and pulled a plastic gallon jug from the snowbank. He brought it inside, and poured four large glasses of a cloudy yellow-brown liquid, which he put beside each bowl. Last of all, he found four spoons. He sat down at the table with the other men. Wednesday raised his glass suspiciously. Looks like piss, he said. You still drinking that stuff? asked Whiskey Jack. You white men are crazy. This is better. Then, to Shadow, The stew is mostly wild turkey. John here brought the applejack. Its a soft apple cider, said John Chapman. I never believed in hard liquor. Makes men mad. The stew was delicious, and it was very good apple cider. Shadow forced himself to slow down, to chew his food, not to gulp it, but he was more hungry than he would have believed. He helped himself to a second bowl of the stew and a second glass of the cider. Dame Rumor says that youve been out talking to all manner of folk, offering them all manner of things. Saysyou're takin the old folks on the warpath, said John Chapman. Shadow and Whiskey Jack were washing up, putting the leftover stew into Tupperware bowls. Whiskey Jack put the bowls into the snowdrifts outside his front door, and put a milk crate on top of the place hed pushed them, so he could find them again. I think that's a fair and judicious summary of events, said Wednesday. they'll win, said Whiskey Jack flatly. They won already. You lost already. Like the white man and my people. Mostly they won. And when they lost, they made treaties. Then they broke the treaties. So they won again. I'm not fighting for another lost cause. And its no use you lookin at me, said John Chapman, for even if I fought for youwhichn I wontI'm no use to you. Mangy rat-tailed bastards jes picked me off and clean forgot me. He stopped. Then he said, Paul Bunyan. He shook his head slowly and he said it again. Paul Bunyan. Shadow had never heard two such innocuous words made to sound so damning. Paul Bunyan? Shadow said. What did he ever do? He took up head space, said Whiskey Jack. He bummed a cigarette from Wednesday and the two men sat and smoked. Its like the idiots who figure that hummingbirds worry about their weight or tooth decay or some such nonsense, maybe they just want to spare hummingbirds the evils of sugar, explained Wednesday. So they fill the hummingbird feeders with fucking NutraSweet. The birds come to the feeders and they drink it. Then they die, because their food contains no calories even though their little tummies are full. that's Paul Bunyan for you. Nobody ever told Paul Bunyan stories. Nobody ever believed in Paul Bunyan. He came staggering out of a New York ad agency in 1910 and filled the nations myth stomach with empty calories. I like Paul Bunyan, said Whiskey Jack. I went on his ride at the Mall of America, few years back. You see big old Paul Bunyan at the top, then you come crashing down. Splash! he's okay by me. I don't mind that he never existed, means he never cut down any trees. |
| 500 |
Not as good as planting trees though. that's better. You said a mouthful, said Johnny Chapman. Wednesday blew a smoke ring. It hung in the air, dissipating slowly in wisps and curls. Damn it, Whiskey Jack, that's not the point and you know it. I'm not going to help you, said Whiskey Jack. When you get your ass kicked, you can come back here and if I'm still here I'll feed you again. You get the best food in the fall. Wednesday said, All the alternatives are worse. You have no idea what the alternatives are, said Whiskey Jack. Then he looked at Shadow. You are hunting, he said. His voice was roughened by wood smoke and cigarettes. I'm working, said Shadow. Whiskey Jack shook his head. You are also hunting something, he said. There is a debt that you wish to pay. Shadow thought of Lauras blue lips and the blood on her hands, and he nodded. Listen. Fox was here first, and his brother was the wolf. Fox said, people will live forever. If they die they will not die for long. Wolf said, no, people will die, people must die, all things that live must die, or they will spread and cover the world, and eat all the salmon and the caribou and the buffalo, eat all the squash and all the corn. Now one day Wolf died, and he said to the fox, quick, bring me back to life. And Fox said, No, the dead must stay dead. You convinced me. And he wept as he said this. But he said it, and it was final. Now Wolf rules the world of the dead and Fox lives always under the sun and the moon, and he still mourns his brother. Wednesday said, If you won't play, you won't play. Well be moving on. Whiskey Jacks face was impassive. I'm talking to this young man, he said. You are beyond help. He is not. He turned back to Shadow. Tell me your dream, said Whiskey Jack. Shadow said, I was climbing a tower of skulls. There were huge birds flying around it. They had lightning in their wings. They were attacking me. The tower fell. Everybody dreams, said Wednesday. Can we hit the road? Not everybody dreams of the Wakinyau, the thunder-bird, said Whiskey Jack. We felt the echoes of it here. I told you, said Wednesday. Jesus. Theres a clutch of thunderbirds in West Virginia, said Chapman, idly. A couple of hens and an old cock-bird at least. Theres also a breeding pair in the land, they used to call it the State of Franklin, but old Ben never got his state, up between Kentucky and Tennessee. Course, there was never a great number of them, even at the best of times. Whiskey Jack reached out a hand the color of red clay and touched Shadows face, gently. Eyah, he said. Its true. If you hunt the thunderbird you could bring your woman back. But she belongs to the wolf, in the dead places, not walking the land. How do you know? asked Shadow. Whiskey Jacks lips did not move. What did the buffalo tell you? To believe. Good advice. Are you going to follow it? Kind of. I guess. They were talking without words, without mouths, without sound. Shadow wondered if, for the other two men in the room, they were standing, unmoving, for a heartbeat or for a fraction of a heartbeat. |
| 501 |
When you find your tribe, come back and see me, said Whiskey Jack. I can help. I shall. Whiskey Jack lowered his hand. Then he turned to Wednesday. Are you going to fetch your Ho Chunk? My what? Ho Chunk. Its what the Winnebago call themselves. Wednesday shook his head. Its too risky. Retrieving it could be problematic. they'll be looking for it. Is it stolen? Wednesday looked affronted. Not a bit of it. The papers are in the glove compartment. And the keys? I've got them, said Shadow. My nephew, Harry Bluejay, has an 81 Buick. Why don't you give me the keys to your camper? You can take his car. Wednesday bristled. What kind of trade is that? Whiskey Jack shrugged. You know how hard it will be to bring back your camper from where you abandoned it? I'm doing you a favor. Take it or leave it. I don't care. He closed his knife-wound mouth. Wednesday looked angry, and then the anger became rue, and he said, Shadow, give the man the keys to the Winnebago. Shadow passed the car keys to Whiskey Jack. Johnny, said Whiskey Jack, will you take these men down to find Harry Bluejay? Tell him I said for him to give them his car. Be my pleasure, said John Chapman. He got up and walked to the door, picked up a small burlap sack sitting next to it, opened the door, and walked outside. Shadow and Wednesday followed him. Whiskey Jack waited in the doorway. Hey, he said to Wednesday. don't come back here, you. You are not welcome. Wednesday extended his finger heavenward. Rotate on this, he said affably. They walked downhill through the snow, pushing their way through the drifts. Chapman walked in front, his bare feet red against the crust-topped snow. Arent you cold? asked Shadow. My wife was Choctaw, said Chapman. And she taught you mystical ways to keep out the cold? Nope. She thought I was crazy, said Chapman. She used tsay, Johnny, why don't you jes put on boots? The slope of the hill became steeper, and they were forced to stop talking. The three men stumbled and slipped on the snow, using the trunks of birch trees on the hillside to steady themselves, and to stop themselves from falling. When the ground became slightly more level, Chapman said, she's dead now, acourse. When she died I guess maybe I went a mite crazy. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to you. He clapped Shadow on the arm. By Jesus and Jehosophat, you're a big man. So they tell me, said Shadow. They trudged down that hill for about half an hour, until they reached the gravel road that wound around the base of it, and the three men began to walk along it, toward the cluster of buildings they had seen from high on the hill. A car slowed and stopped. The woman driving it reached over, wound down the passenger window, and said, You bozos need a ride? You are very gracious, madam, said Wednesday. Were looking for a Mister Harry Bluejay. Hell be down at the rec hall, said the woman. She was in her forties, Shadow guessed. Get in. They got in. Wednesday took the passenger seat, John Chapman and Shadow climbed into the back. |
| 502 |
Shadows legs were too long to sit in the back comfortably, but he did the best he could. The car jolted forward, down the gravel road. So where did you three come from? asked the driver. Just visiting with a friend, said Wednesday. Lives on the hill back there, said Shadow. What hill? she asked. Shadow looked back through the dusty rear window, looking back at the hill. But there was no high hill back there; nothing but clouds on the plains. Whiskey Jack, he said. Ah, she said. We call him Inktomi here. I think its the same guy. My grandfather used to tell some pretty good stories about him. Of course, all the best of them were kind of dirty. They hit a bump in the road, and the woman swore. You okay back there? Yes maam, said Johnny Chapman. He was holding onto the backseat with both hands. Rez roads, she said. You get used to them. Are they all like this? asked Shadow. Pretty much, said the woman. All the ones around here. And don't you go asking about all the money from casinos, because who in their right mind wants to come all the way out here to go to a casino? We don't see none of that money out here. I'm sorry. don't be. She changed gear with a crash and a groan. You know the white population all around here is falling? You go out there, you find ghost towns. How you going to keep them down on the farm, after they seen the world on their television screens? And its not worth anyones while to farm the Badlands anyhow. They took our lands, they settled here, nowyou're leaving. They go south. They go west. Maybe if we wait for enough of them to move to New York and Miami and L. A. we can take the whole of the middle back without a fight. Good luck, said Shadow. They found Harry Bluejay in the rec hall, at the pool table, doing trick shots to impress a group of several girls. He had a blue jay tattooed on the back of his right hand, and multiple piercings in his right ear. Ho hoka, Harry Bluejay, said John Chapman. Fuck off, you crazy barefoot white ghost, said Harry Bluejay, conversationally. You give me the creeps. There were older men at the far end of the room, some of them playing cards, some of them talking. There were other men, younger men of about Harry Bluejays age, waiting for their turn at the pool table. It was a full-sized pool table, and a rip in the green baize on one side had been repaired with silver-gray duct tape. I got a message from your uncle, said Chapman, un-fazed. He saysyou're to give these two your car. There must have been thirty, maybe even forty people in that hall, and now they were every one of them looking intently at their playing cards, or their feet, or their fingernails, and pretending as hard as they could not to be listening. he's not my uncle. A cigarette-smoke fug hung over the hall. Chapman smiled widely, displaying the worst set of teeth that Shadow had seen in a human mouth. You want to tell your uncle that? He saysyou're the only reason he stays among the Lakota. Whiskey Jack says a lot of things, said Harry Bluejay, petulantly. |
| 503 |
But he did not say Whiskey Jack either. It sounded almost the same, to Shadows ear, but not quite: Wisakedjak, he thought. that's whatyou're saying. Not Whiskey Jack at all. Shadow said, Yeah. And one of the things he said was that were trading our Winnebago for your Buick. I don't see a Winnebago. Hell bring you the Winnebago, said John Chapman. You know he will. Harry Bluejay attempted a trick shot and missed. His hand was not steady enough. I'm not the old foxs nephew, said Harry Bluejay. I wish he wouldn't say that to people. Better a live fox than a dead wolf, said Wednesday, in a voice so deep it was almost a growl. Now, will you sell us your car? Harry Bluejay shivered, visibly and violently. Sure, he said. Sure. I was only kidding. I kid a lot, me. He put down the pool cue on the pool table, and took a thick jacket, pulling it out from a cluster of similar jackets hanging from pegs by the door. Let me get my shit out of the car first, he said. He kept darting glances at Wednesday, as if he were concerned that the older man were about to explode. Harry Bluejays car was parked a hundred yards away. As they walked toward it, they passed a small whitewashed Catholic church, and a man in a priests collar who stared at them from the doorway as they went past. He was sucking on a cigarette as if he did not enjoy smoking it. Good day to you, father! called Johnny Chapman, but the man in the collar made no reply; he crushed his cigarette under his heel, picked up the butt and dropped it into the bin beside the door, and went inside. Harry Bluejays car was missing its wing mirrors, and its tires were the baldest Shadow had ever seen: perfectly smooth black rubber. Harry Bluejay told them the car drank oil, but as long as you kept pouring oil in, it would just keep running forever, unless it stopped. Harry Bluejay filled a black garbage bag with shit from the car (said shit including several screw-top bottles of cheap beer, unfinished, a small packet of cannabis resin wrapped in silver foil and badly hidden in the cars ashtray, a skunk tail, two dozen country-and-western cassettes and a battered, yellowing copy of Stranger in a Strange Land). Sorry I was jerking your chain before, said Harry Bluejay to Wednesday, passing him the car keys. You know when I'll get the Winnebago? Ask your uncle. he's the fucking used-car dealer, growled Wednesday. Wisakedjak is not my uncle, said Harry Bluejay. He took his black garbage bag and went into the nearest house, and closed the door behind him. They dropped Johnny Chapman in Sioux Falls, outside a whole-food store. Wednesday said nothing on the drive. He was in a black sulk, as he had been since they left Whiskey Jacks place. In a family restaurant just outside St. Paul, Shadow picked up a newspaper someone else had put down. He looked at it once, then again, then he showed it to Wednesday, Look at that, said Shadow. Wednesday sighed, and looked down at the paper. I am, he said, delighted that the air-traffic controllers dispute has been resolved without recourse to industrial action. |
| 504 |
Not that, said Shadow. Look. It says its the fourteenth of February. Happy Valentines Day. So we set out January the what, twentieth, twenty-first. I wasnt keeping track of the dates, but it was the third week of January. We were three days on the road, all told. So how is it the fourteenth of February? Because we walked for almost a month, said Wednesday. In the Badlands. Backstage. Hell of a shortcut, said Shadow. Wednesday pushed the paper away. Fucking Johnny Appleseed, always going on about Paul Bunyan. In real life Chapman owned fourteen apple orchards. He farmed thousands of acres. Yes, he kept pace with the western frontier, but theres not a story out there about him with a word of truth in it, save that he went a little crazy once. But it doesn't matter. Like the newspapers used to say, if the truth isn't big enough, you print the legend. This country needs its legends. And even the legends don't believe it anymore. But you see it. I'm a has-been. Who the fuck cares about me? Shadow said softly, you're a god. Wednesday looked at him sharply. He seemed to be about to say something, and then he slumped back in his seat, and looked down at the menu, and said, So? Its a good thing to be a god, said Shadow. Is it? asked Wednesday, and this time it was Shadow who looked away. In a gas station twenty-five miles outside Lakeside, on the wall by the rest rooms, Shadow saw a homemade photocopied notice: a black-and-white photo of Alison McGovern and the handwritten question Have You Seen Me? above it. Same yearbook photograph: smiling confidently, a girl with rubber-band braces on her top teeth who wants to work with animals when she grows up. Have you seen me? Shadow bought a Snickers bar, a bottle of water, and a copy of the Lakeside News. The above-the-fold story, written by Marguerite Olsen, our Lakeside Reporter, showed a photograph of a boy and an older man, out on the frozen lake, standing by an outhouselike ice-fishing shack, and between them they were holding a big fish. They were smiling. Father and Son Catch Local Record Northern Pike. Full story inside. Wednesday was driving. He said, Read me anything interesting you find in the paper. Shadow looked carefully, and he turned the pages slowly, but he couldn't find anything. Wednesday dropped him off in the driveway outside his apartment. A smoke-colored cat stared at him from the driveway, then fled when he bent to stroke it. Shadow stopped on the wooden deck outside his apartment and looked out at the lake, dotted here and there with green and brown ice-fishing huts. Many of them had cars parked beside them. On the ice nearer the bridge sat the old green klunker, just as it had sat in the newspaper. March twenty-third, said Shadow, encouragingly. Round nine-fifteen in the morning. You can do it. Not a chance, said a womans voice. April third. Six P. M. That way the day warms up the ice. Shadow smiled. Marguerite Olsen was wearing a ski suit. She was at the far end of the deck, refilling the bird feeder. |
| 505 |
I read your article in the Lakeside News on the Town Record Northern Pike. Exciting, huh? Well, educational, maybe. I thought you werent coming back to us, she said. You were gone for a while, huh? My uncle needed me, said Shadow. The time kind of got away from us. She placed the last suet brick in its cage, and began to fill a net sock with thistle seeds from a plastic milk jug. Several goldfinches, olive in their winter coats, twitted impatiently from a nearby fir tree. I didn't see anything in the paper about Alison McGovern. There wasnt anything to report. she's still missing. There was a rumor that someone had seen her in Detroit, but it turned out to be a false alarm. Poor kid. Marguerite Olsen screwed the top back onto the gallon jug. I hope she's dead, she said, matter-of-factly. Shadow was shocked. Why? Because the alternatives are worse. The goldfinches hopped frantically from branch to branch of the fir tree, impatient for the people to be gone. You arent thinking about Alison, thought Shadow. you're thinking of your son. you're thinking of Sandy. He remembered someone saying I miss Sandy. Who was that? Good talking to you, he said. Yeah, she said. You too. * * * February passed in a succession of short, gray days. Some days the snow fell, most days it didn't. The weather warmed up, and on the good days it got above freezing. Shadow stayed in his apartment until it began to feel like a prison cell, and then, on the days that Wednesday did not need him to travel, he began to walk. He would walk for much of the day, long trudges out of the town. He walked, alone, until he reached the national forest to the north and the west, or the cornfields and cow pastures to the south. He walked the Lumber County Wilderness Trail, and he walked along the old railroad tracks, and he walked the back roads. A couple of times he even walked along the frozen lake, from north to south. Sometimes hed see locals or winter tourists or joggers, and hed wave and say hi. Mostly he saw nobody at all, just crows and finches, and a few times he spotted a hawk feasting on a roadkill possum or raccoon. On one memorable occasion he watched an eagle snatch a silver fish from the middle of the White Pine River, the water frozen at the edges, but still rushing and flowing at the center. The fish wriggled and jerked in the eagles talons, glittering in the midday sun; Shadow imagined the fish freeing itself and swimming off across the sky, and he smiled, grimly. If he walked, he discovered, he did not have to think, and that was just the way he liked it; when he thought, his mind went to places he could not control, places that made him feel uncomfortable. Exhaustion was the best thing. When he was exhausted, his thoughts did not wander to Laura, or to the strange dreams, or to things that were not and could not be. He would return home from walking, and sleep without difficulty and without dreaming. He ran into Police Chief Chad Mulligan in Georges Barber Shop in the town square. |
| 506 |
Shadow always had high hopes for haircuts, but they never lived up to his expectations. After every haircut he looked more or less the same, only with shorter hair. Chad, seated in the barbers chair beside Shadows, seemed surprisingly concerned about his own appearance. When his haircut was finished he gazed grimly at his reflection, as if he were preparing to give it a speeding ticket. It looks good, Shadow told him. Would it look good to you if you were a woman? I guess. They went across the square to Mabels together, ordered mugs of hot chocolate. Chad said, Hey. Mike. Have you ever thought about a career in law enforcement? Shadow shrugged. I cant say I have, he said. Seems like theres a whole lot of things you got to know. Chad shook his head. You know the main part of police work, somewhere like this? Its just keeping your head. Something happens, somebodys screaming at you, screaming blue murder, you simply have to be able to say thatyou're sure that its all a mistake, and you'll just sort it all out if they just step outside quietly. And you have to be able to mean it. And then you sort it out? Mostly, that's when you put handcuffs on them. But yeah, you do what you can to sort it out. Let me know if you want a job. Were hiring. Andyou're the kind of guy we want. I'll keep that in mind, if the thing with my uncle falls through. They sipped their hot chocolate. Mulligan said, Say, Mike, what would you do if you had a cousin. Like a widow. And she started calling you? Calling you how? On the phone. Long distance. She lives out of state. His cheeks crimsoned. I saw her last year at a family wedding. She was married, back then, though, I mean, her husband was still alive, and she's family. Not a first cousin. Pretty distant. You got a thing for her? Blush. I don't know about that. Well then, put it another way. Does she have a thing for you? Well, she's said a few things, when she called. she's a very fine-looking woman. Sowhat are you going to do about it? I could ask her out here. I could do that, couldn't I? she's kind of said shed like to come up here. you're both adults; I'd say go for it. Chad nodded, and blushed, and nodded again. The telephone in Shadows apartment was silent and dead. He thought about getting it connected, but could think of no one he wanted to call. Late one night he picked it up and listened, and was convinced that he could hear a wind blowing and a distant conversation between a group of people talking in voices too low to properly make out. He said, Hello? and Whos there? but there was no reply, only a sudden silence and then the faraway sound of laughter, so faint he was not certain he was not imagining it. * * * Shadow made more journeys with Wednesday in the weeks that followed. He waited in the kitchen of a Rhode Island cottage, and listened while Wednesday sat in a darkened bedroom and argued with a woman who would not get out of bed, nor would she let Wednesday or Shadow look at her face. In the refrigerator was a plastic bag filled with crickets, and another filled with the corpses of baby mice. |
| 507 |
He walked into the graveyard between the two posts. He wandered around the graveyard, looking at the headstones. There were no inscriptions later than 1969. He brushed the snow from a solid-looking granite angel, and he leaned against it. He took the paper bag from his pocket, and removed the pasty from it. He broke off the top: it breathed a faint wisp of steam into the wintry air. It smelled really good, too. He bit into it. Something rustled behind him. He thought for a moment it was the cat, but then he smelled perfume, and under the perfume, the scent of something rotten. Please don't look at me, she said, from behind him. Hello, Laura, said Shadow. Her voice was hesitant, perhaps, he thought, even a little scared. She said, Hello, puppy. He broke off some pasty. Would you like some? he asked. She was standing immediately behind him, now. No, she said. You eat it. I don't eat food anymore. He ate his pasty. It was good. I want to look at you, he said. You won't like it, she told him. Please? She stepped around the stone angel. Shadow looked at her, in the daylight. Some things were different and some things were the same. Her eyes had not changed, nor had the crooked hopefulness of her smile. And she was, very obviously, very dead. Shadow finished his pasty. He stood up and tipped the crumbs out of the paper bag, then folded it up and put it back into his pocket. The time he had spent in the funeral home in Cairo made it easier somehow for him to be in her presence. He did not know what to say to her. Her cold hand sought his, and he squeezed it gently. He could feel his heart beating in his chest. He was scared, and what scared him was the normality of the moment. He felt so comfortable with her at his side that he would have been willing to stand there forever. I miss you, he admitted. I'm here, she said. that's when I miss you most. Whenyou're here. When you arent here, whenyou're just a ghost from the past or a dream from another life, its easier then. She squeezed his fingers. So, he asked. Hows death? Hard, she said. It just keeps going. She rested her head on his shoulder, and it almost undid him. He said, You want to walk for a bit? Sure. She smiled up at him, a nervous, crooked smile in a dead face. They walked out of the little graveyard, and made their way back down the road, toward the town, hand in hand. Where have you been? she asked. Here, he said. Mostly. Since Christmas, she said, I kind of lost you. Sometimes I would know where you were, for a few hours, for a few days. Youd be all over. Then youd fade away again. I was in this town, he said. Lakeside. Its a good little town. Oh, she said. She no longer wore the blue suit in which she had been buried. Now she wore several sweaters, a long, dark skirt, and high, burgundy boots. Shadow commented on them. Laura ducked her head. She smiled. Arent they great boots? I found them in this great shoe store in Chicago. So what made you decide to come up from Chicago? Oh, I've not been in Chicago for a while, puppy. |
| 508 |
I was heading south. The cold was bothering me. Youd think I'd welcome it. But its something to do with being dead, I guess. You don't feel it as cold. You feel it as a sort of nothing, and whenyou're dead I guess the only thing thatyou're scared of is nothing. I was going to go to Texas. I planned to spend the winter in Galveston. I think I used to winter in Galveston, when I was a kid. I don't think you did, said Shadow. Youve never mentioned it before. No? Maybe it was someone else, then. I don't know. I remember seagullsthrowing bread in the air for seagulls, hundreds of them, the whole sky becoming nothing but seagulls as they flapped their wings and snatched the bread from the air. She paused. If I didn't see it, I guess someone else did. A car came around the corner. The driver waved them hello. Shadow waved back. It felt wonderfully normal to walk with his wife. This feels good, said Laura, as if she was reading his mind. Yes, said Shadow. When the call came I had to hurry back. I was barely into Texas. Call? She looked up at him. Around her neck the gold coin glinted. It felt like a call, she said. I started to think about you. About how much I needed to see you. It was like a hunger. You knew I was here, then? Yes. She stopped. She frowned, and her upper teeth pressed into her blue lower lip, biting it gently. She put her head on one side and said, I did. Suddenly, I did. I thought you were calling me, but it wasnt you, was it? No. You didn't want to see me. It wasnt that. He hesitated. No. I didn't want to see you. It hurts too much. The snow crunched beneath their feet and it glittered diamonds as the sunlight caught it. It must be hard, said Laura, not being alive. You mean its hard for you to be dead? Look, I'm still going to figure out how to bring you back, properly. I think I'm on the right track No, she said. I mean, I'm grateful. And I hope you really can do it. I did a lot of bad stuff She shook her head. But I was talking about you. I'm alive, said Shadow. I'm not dead. Remember? you're not dead, she said. But I'm not sure thatyou're alive, either. Not really. This isn't the way this conversation goes, thought Shadow. This isn't the way anything goes. I love you, she said, dispassionately. you're my puppy. But whenyou're really dead you get to see things clearer. Its like there isn't anyone there. You know? you're like this big, solid, man-shaped hole in the world. She frowned. Even when we were together. I loved being with you. You adored me, and you would do anything for me. But sometimes I'd go into a room and I wouldn't think there was anybody in there. And I'd turn the light on, or I'd turn the light off, and I'd realize that you were in there, sitting on your own, not reading, not watching TV, not doing anything. She hugged him then, as if to take the sting from her words, and she said, The best thing about Robbie was that he was somebody. He was a jerk sometimes, and he could be a joke, and he loved to have mirrors around when we made love so he could watch himself fucking me, but he was alive, puppy. |
| 509 |
Sparks flew from the fire. The storm was coming. The Queen of Sheba, half-demon, they said, on her fathers side, witch woman, wise woman, and queen, who ruled Sheba when Sheba was the richest land there ever was, when its spices and its gems and scented woods were taken by boat and camel-back to the corners of the earth, who was worshiped even when she was alive, worshiped as a living goddess by the wisest of kings, stands on the sidewalk of Sunset Boulevard at 2:00 A. M. staring blankly out at the traffic like a slutty plastic bride on a black-and-neon wedding cake. She stands as if she owns the sidewalk and the night that surrounds her. When someone looks straight at her, her lips move, as if she is talking to herself. When men in cars drive past her she makes eye contact and she smiles. Its been a long night. Its been a long week, and a long four thousand years. She is proud that she owes nothing to anyone. The other girls on the street, they have pimps, they have habits, they have children, they have people who take what they make. Not her. There is nothing holy left in her profession. Not anymore. A week ago the rains began in Los Angeles, slicking the streets into road accidents, crumbling the mud from the hillsides and toppling houses into canyons, washing the world into the gutters and storm drains, drowning the bums and the homeless camped down in the concrete channel of the river. When the rains come in Los Angeles they always take people by surprise. Bilquis has spent the last week inside. Unable to stand on the sidewalk, she has curled up in her bed in the room the color of raw liver, listening to the rain pattering on the metal box of the window air conditioner and placing personals on the Internet. She has left her invitations on adult-friendfinder. com, LA-escorts. com, Classyhollywoodbabes. com, has given herself an anonymous e-mail address. She was proud of herself for negotiating the new territories, but remains nervousshe has spent a long time avoiding anything that might resemble a paper trail. She has never even taken a small ad in the back pages of the L. A. Weekly, preferring to pick out her own customers, to find by eye and smell and touch the ones who will worship her as she needs to be worshiped, the ones who will let her take them all the way And it occurs to her now, standing and shivering on the street corner (for the late February rains have left off, but the chill they brought with them remains) that she has a habit as bad as that of the smack whores and the crack whores, and this distresses her, and her lips begin to move again. If you were close enough to her ruby-red lips you would hear her say, I will rise now and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek the one I love. She is whispering that, and she whispers, By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. My beloved is mine and I am his. Bilquis hopes that the break in the rains will bring the Johns back. |
| 510 |
Sounds like fun. Its not. Alison McGovern vanished last weekJilly and Stan McGoverns oldest. Nice kid. She baby-sat for Leon a few times. A mouth opens to say something, and it closes again, leaving whatever it was to say unsaid, and instead it says, that's awful. Yes. So and theres nothing to follow that with that isn't going to hurt, so she says, Is he cute? Who? The neighbor. His names Ainsel. Mike Ainsel. he's okay. Too young for me. Big guy, lookswhats the word. Begins with an M. Mean? Moody? Magnificent? Married? A short laugh, then, Yes, I guess he does look married. I mean, if theres a look that married men have, he kind of has it. But the word I was thinking of was Melancholy. He looks Melancholy. And Mysterious? Not particularly. When he moved in he seemed kinda helplesshe didn't even know to heat-seal the windows. These days he still looks like he doesn't know what he's doing here. When he's herehes here, then he's gone again. I've seen him out walking from time to time. Maybe he's a bank robber. Uh-huh. Just what I was thinking. You were not. That was my idea. Listen, Mags, how are you? Are you okay? Yeah. Really? No. A long pause then. I'm coming up to see you. Sammy, no. Itll be after the weekend, before the furnaces are working and school starts again. Itll be fun. You can make up a bed on the couch for me. And invite the mysterious neighbor over for dinner one night. Sam, you're matchmaking. Whos matchmaking? After Claudine-the-bitch-from-hell, maybe I'm ready to go back to boys for a while. I met a nice strange boy when I hitchhiked down to El Paso for Christmas. Oh. Look, Sam, youve got to stop hitchhiking. How do you think I'm going to get to Lakeside? Alison McGovern was hitchhiking. Even in a town like this, its not safe. I'll wire you the money. You can take the bus. I'll be fine. Sammy. Okay, Mags. Wire me the money if itll let you sleep easier. You know it will. Okay, bossy big sister. Give Leon a bug and tell him Auntie Sammys coming up and he's not to hide his toys in her bed this time. I'll tell him. I don't promise itll do any good. So when should I expect you? Tomorrow night. You don't have to meet me at the bus station I'll ask Hinzelmann to run me over in Tessie. Too late. Tessies in mothballs for the winter. But Hinzelmann will give you a ride anyway. He likes you. You listen to his stories. Maybe you should get Hinzelmann to write your editorial for you. Lets see. On the Rezoning of the Land by the Old Cemetery. It so happens that in the winter of ought-three my grampaw shot a stag down by the old cemetery by the lake. He was out of bullets, so he used a cherry-stone from the lunch my grandmama had packed for him. Creased the skull of the stag and it shot off like a bat out of heck. Two years later he was down that way and he sees this mighty buck with a spreading cherry tree growing between its antlers. Well, he shot it, and grandmama made cherry pies enough that they were still eating them come the next fourth of July And they both laughed, then. |
| 511 |
It was a black-and-white town in the ice and the snow. Spring seemed unimaginably far away: the klunker would always sit on the ice, with the ice-fishing shelters and the pickup trucks and the snowmobile tracks. He reached his apartment, parked, walked up the drive, up the wooden steps to his apartment. The goldfinches and nuthatches on the birdfeeder hardly gave him a glance. He went inside. He watered the plant, wondered whether or not to put the wine into the refrigerator. There was a lot of time to kill until six. Shadow wished he could comfortably watch television once more. He wanted to be entertained, not to have to think, just to sit and let the sounds and the light wash over him. Do you want to see Lucys tits? something with a Lucy voice whispered in his memory, and he shook his head, although there was no one there to see him. He was nervous, he realized. This would be his first real social interaction with other peoplenormal people, not people in jail, not gods or culture heroes or dreamssince he was first arrested, over three years ago. He would have to make conversation, as Mike Ainsel. He checked his watch. It was two-thirty. Marguerite Olsen had told him to be there at six. Did she mean six exactly? Should he be there a little early? A little late? He decided, eventually, to walk next door at five past six. Shadows telephone rang. Yeah? he said. that's no way to answer the phone, growled Wednesday. When I get my telephone connected I'll answer it politely, said Shadow. Can I help you? I don't know, said Wednesday. There was a pause. Then he said, Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don't take naturally to it. There was a deadness, and an exhaustion, in Wednesdays voice that Shadow had never heard before. Whats wrong? Its hard. Its too fucking hard. I don't know if this is going to work. We might as well cut our throats. Just cut our own throats. You mustn't talk like that. Yeah. Right. Well, if you do cut your throat, said Shadow, trying to jolly Wednesday out of his darkness, maybe it wouldn't even hurt. It would hurt. Even for my kind, pain still hurts. If you move and act in the material world, then the material world acts on you. Pain hurts, just as greed intoxicates and lust burns. We may not die easy and we sure as hell don't die well, but we can die. If were still loved and remembered, something else a whole lot like us comes along and takes our place and the whole damn thing starts all over again. And if were forgotten, were done. Shadow did not know what to say. He said, So where are you calling from? None of your goddamn business. Are you drunk? Not yet. I just keep thinking about Thor. You never knew him. Big guy, like you. Good-hearted. Not bright, but hed give you the goddamned shirt off his back if you asked him. And he killed himself. He put a gun in his mouth and blew his head off in Philadelphia in 1932. What kind of a way is that for a god to die? I'm sorry. You don't give two fucking cents, son. |
| 512 |
Leon sat in front of the screen, playing with a toy fire truck. When he saw Shadow an expression of delight touched his face; he stood up and ran, tripping over his feet in his excitement, into a back bedroom, from which he emerged a moment later triumphantly waving a quarter. Watch, Mike Ainsel! he shouted. Then closed both his hands and he pretended to take the coin into his right hand, which he opened wide. I made it disappear, Mike Ainsel! You did, agreed Shadow. After weve eaten, if its okay with your mom, I'll show you how to do it even smoother than that. Do it now if you want, said Marguerite. Were still waiting for Samantha. I sent her out for sour cream. I don't know whats taking her so long. And, as if that was her cue, footsteps sounded on the wooden deck, and somebody shouldered open the front door. Shadow did not recognize her at first, then she said, I didn't know if you wanted the kind with calories or the kind that tastes like wallpaper paste so I went for the kind with calories, and he knew her then: the girl from the road to Cairo. that's fine, said Marguerite. Sam, this is my neighbor, Mike Ainsel. Mike, this is Samantha Black Crow, my sister. I don't know you, thought Shadow desperately. Youve never met me before. Were total strangers. He tried to remember how he had thought snow, how easy and light that had been: this was desperate. He put out his hand and said, Pleased to meetcha. She blinked, looked up at his face. A moment of puzzlement, then recognition entered her eyes and curved the corners of her mouth into a grin. Hello, she said. I'll see how the food is doing, said Marguerite, in the taut voice of someone who burns things in kitchens if they leave them alone and unwatched even for a moment. Sam took off her puffy coat and her hat. Soyou're the melancholy but mysterious neighbor, she said. Whoda thunk it? She kept her voice down. And you, he said, are girl Sam. Can we talk about this later? If you promise to tell me whats going on. Deal. Leon tugged at the leg of Shadows pants. Will you show me now? he asked, and held out his quarter. Okay, said Shadow. But if I show you, you have to remember that a master magician never tells anyone how its done. I promise, said Leon, gravely. Shadow took the coin in his left hand, then moved Leons right hand, showing him how to appear to take the coin in his right hand while actually leaving it in Shadows left hand. Then he made Leon repeat the movements on his own. After several attempts the boy mastered the move. Now you know half of it, said Shadow. The other half is this: put your attention on the place where the coin ought to be. Look at the place its meant to be. If you act like its in your right hand, no one will even look at your left hand, no matter how clumsy you are. Sam watched all this with her head tipped slightly on one side, saying nothing. Dinner! called Marguerite, pushing her way in from the kitchen with a steaming bowl of spaghetti in her hands. Leon, go wash your hands. |
| 513 |
And as for the final pennyAre you squeezing it? Tightly? when Leon opened his hand he found it had transformed into a dime. Leons plaintive cries of Howd you do that? Momma, howd he do that? followed him out into the hall. Sam handed him his coat. Come on, she said. Her cheeks were flushed from the wine. Outside it was cold. Shadow stopped in his apartment, tossed the Minutes of the Lakeside City Council into a plastic grocery bag, and brought it along. Hinzelmann might be down at the Buck, and he wanted to show him the mention of his grandfather. They walked down the drive side by side. He opened the garage door, and she started to laugh. Omigod, she said, when she saw the 4-Runner. Paul Gunthers car. You bought Paul Gunthers car. Omigod. Shadow opened the door for her. Then he went around and got in. You know the car? When I came up here two or three years ago to stay with Mags. It was me that persuaded him to paint it purple. Oh, said Shadow. Its good to have someone to blame. He drove the car out onto the street. Got out and closed the garage door. Got back into the car. Sam was looking at him oddly as he got in, as if the confidence had begun to leak out of her. He put on his seat belt, and she said, Okay. This is a stupid thing to do, isn't it? Getting into a car with a psycho killer. I got you home safe last time, said Shadow. You killed two men, she said. you're wanted by the feds. And now I find outyou're living under an assumed name next door to my sister. Unless Mike Ainsel is your real name? No, said Shadow, and he sighed. Its not. He hated saying it. It was as if he was letting go of something important, abandoning Mike Ainsel by denying him; as if he were taking his leave of a friend. Did you kill those men? No. They came to my house, and said wed been seen together. And this guy showed me photographs of you. What was his nameMister Hat? No. Mister Town. It was like The Fugitive. But I said I hadn't seen you. Thank you. So, she said. Tell me whats going on. I'll keep your secrets if you keep mine. I don't know any of yours, said Shadow. Well, you know that it was my idea to paint this thing purple, thus forcing Paul Gunther to become such an object of scorn and derision for several counties around that he was forced to leave town entirely. We were kind of stoned, she admitted. I doubt that bit of its much of a secret, said Shadow. Everyone in Lakeside must have known. Its a stoner sort of purple. And then she said, very quiet, very fast, Ifyou're going to kill me please don't hurt me. I shouldn't have come here with you. I am so fucking fucking dumb. I can identify you. Jesus. Shadow sighed. I've never killed anybody. Really. Now I'm going to take you to the Buck, he said. Well have a drink. Or if you give the word, I'll turn this car around and take you home. Either way, I'll just have to hope you arent going to call the cops. There was silence as they crossed the bridge. Who did kill those men? she asked. You wouldn't believe me if I told you. |
| 514 |
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens whenyou're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it. She stopped, out of breath. Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud. Instead he said, Okay. So if I tell you what I've learned you won't think that I'm a nut. Maybe, she said. Try me. Would you believe that all the gods that people have ever imagined are still with us today? Maybe. And that there are new gods out there, gods of computers and telephones and whatever, and that they all seem to think there isn't room for them both in the world. And that some kind of war is kind of likely. And these gods killed those two men? No, my wife killed those two men. I thought you said your wife was dead. She is. She killed them before she died, then? After. don't ask. She reached up a hand and flicked her hair from her forehead. They pulled up on Main Street, outside the Buck Stops Here. The sign over the window showed a surprised-looking stag standing on its hind legs holding a glass of beer. Shadow grabbed the bag with the book in it and got out. Why would they have a war? asked Sam. It seems kind of redundant. What is there to win? I don't know, admitted Shadow. Its easier to believe in aliens than in gods, said Sam. Maybe Mister Town and Mister Whatever were Men in Black, only the alien kind. They were standing on the sidewalk outside the Buck Stops Here and Sam stopped. She looked up at Shadow, and her breath hung on the night air like a faint cloud. She said, Just tell meyou're one of the good guys. I cant, said Shadow. I wish I could. But I'm doing my best. She looked up at him, and bit her lower lip. Then she nodded. Good enough, she said. I won't turn you in. You can buy me a beer. Shadow pushed the door open for her, and they were hit by a blast of heat and music. They went inside. Sam waved at some friends. Shadow nodded to a handful of people whose facesalthough not their nameshe remembered from the day he had spent searching for Alison McGovern, or who he had met in Mabels in the morning. Chad Mulligan was standing at the bar, with his arm around the shoulders of a small red-haired womanthe kissing cousin, Shadow figured. He wondered what she looked like, but she had her back to him. Chads hand raised in a mock salute when he saw Shadow. Shadow grinned, and waved back at him. Shadow looked around for Hinzelmann, but the old man did not seem to be there this evening. He spied a free table at the back and started walking toward it. Then somebody began to scream. It was a bad scream, a full-throated, seen-a-ghost hysterical scream, which silenced all conversation. Shadow looked around, certain somebody was being murdered, and then he realized that all the faces in the bar were turning toward him. Even the black cat, who slept in the window during the day, was standing up on top of the jukebox with its tail high and its back arched and was staring at Shadow. Time slowed. Get him! shouted a womans voice, parked on the verge of hysteria. |
| 515 |
Oh for Gods sake, somebody stop him! don't let him get away! Please! It was a voice he knew. Nobody moved. They stared at Shadow. He stared back at them. Chad Mulligan stepped forward, walking through the people. The small woman walked behind him warily, her eyes wide, as if she was preparing to start screaming once more. Shadow knew her. Of course he knew her. Chad was still holding his beer, which he put down on a nearby table. He said, Mike. Shadow said, Chad. Audrey Burton took hold of Chads sleeve. Her face was white, and there were tears in her eyes. Shadow, she said. You bastard. You murderous evil bastard. Are you sure that you know this man, hon? said Chad. He looked uncomfortable. Audrey Burton looked at him incredulously. Are you crazy? He worked for Robbie for years. His slutty wife was my best friend. he's wanted for murder. I had to answer questions. he's an escaped convict. She was way over the top, her voice trembling with suppressed hysteria, sobbing out her words like a soap actress going for a daytime Emmy. Kissing cousins, thought Shadow, unimpressed. Nobody in the bar said a word. Chad Mulligan looked up at Shadow. Its probably a mistake. I'm sure we can sort this all out, he said. Then he said, to the bar, Its all fine. Nothing to worry about. We can sort this out. Everythings fine. Then, to Shadow, Lets step outside, Mike. Quiet competence. Shadow was impressed. Sure, said Shadow. He felt a hand touch his hand, and he turned to see Sam staring at him. He smiled down at her as reassuringly as he could. Sam looked at Shadow, then she looked around the bar at the faces staring at them. She said to Audrey Burton, I don't know who you are. But. You. Are such. A cunt. Then she went up on tiptoes and pulled Shadow down to her, and kissed him hard on the lips, pushing her mouth against his for what felt to Shadow like several minutes, and might have been as long as five seconds in real, clock-ticking time. It was a strange kiss, Shadow thought, as her lips pressed against his: it wasnt intended for him. It was for the other people in the bar, to let them know that she had picked sides. It was a flag-waving kiss. Even as she kissed him, he became certain that she didn't even like himwell, not like that. Still, there was a tale he had read once, long ago, as a small boy: the story of a traveler who had slipped down a cliff, with man-eating tigers above him and a lethal fall below him, who managed to stop his fall halfway down the side of the cliff, holding on for dear life. There was a clump of strawberries beside him, and certain death above him and below. What should he do? went the question. And the reply was, Eat the strawberries. The story had never made any sense to him as a boy. It did now. So he closed his eyes, threw himself into the kiss and experienced nothing but Sams lips and the softness of her skin against his, sweet as a wild strawberry. Cmon Mike, said Chad Mulligan, firmly. Please. Lets take it outside. Sam pulled back. |
| 516 |
The paint on the wall was yellow, but it might once have been white. After ten minutes Chad brought him a watery cup of vending machine hot chocolate. Whats in the bag? he asked. And it was only then that Shadow realized he was still holding the plastic bag containing the Minutes of the LakesideCity Council. Old book, said Shadow. Your grandfathers pictures in here. Or great-grandfather maybe. Yeah? Shadow flipped through the book until he found the portrait of the town council, and he pointed to the man called Mulligan. Chad chuckled. If that don't beat all, he said. Minutes passed, and hours, in that room. Shadow read two of the Sports Illustrateds and he started in on the Newsweek. From time to time Chad would come through, once checking to see if Shadow needed to use the rest room, once to offer him a ham roll and a small packet of potato chips. Thanks, said Shadow, taking them. Am I under arrest yet? Chad sucked the air between his teeth. Well, he said, not yet. It doesn't look like you came by the name Mike Ainsel legally. On the other hand, you can call yourself whatever you want in this state, if its not for fraudulent purposes. You just hang loose. Can I make a phone call? Is it a local call? Long distance. Itll save money if I put it on my calling card, otherwise you'll just be feeding ten bucks worth of quarters into that thing in the hall. Sure, thought Shadow. And this way you'll know the number I dialed, and you'll probably be listening in on an extension. That would be great, said Shadow. They went into an empty office. The number Shadow gave Chad to dial for him was that of a funeral home in Cairo, Illinois. Chad dialed it, handed Shadow the receiver. I'll leave you in here, he said, and went out. The telephone rang several times, then it was picked up. Jacquel and Ibis? Can I help you? Hi. Mister Ibis, this is Mike Ainsel. I helped out there for a few days over Christmas. A moments hesitation, then, Of course. Mike. How are you? Not great, Mister Ibis. In a patch of trouble. About to be arrested. Hoping youd seen my uncle about, or maybe you could get a message to him. I can certainly ask around. Hold on, uh, Mike. Theres someone here who wishes a word with you. The phone was passed to somebody, and then a smoky female voice said Hi, honey. I miss you. He was certain hed never heard that voice before. But he knew her. He was sure that he knew her Let it go, the smoky voice whispered in his mind, in a dream. Let it all go. Whos that girl you were kissing, hon? You trying to make me jealous? Were just friends, said Shadow. I think she was trying to prove a point. How did you know she kissed me? I got eyes wherever my folk walk, she said. You take care now, hon There was a moment of silence, then Mr. Ibis came back on the line and said, Mike? Yes. Theres a problem getting hold of your uncle. He seems to be kind of tied up. But I'll try and get a message to your aunt Nancy. Best of luck. The line went dead. Shadow sat down, expecting Chad to return. |
| 517 |
He had thumbed through the wallet before he handed it over. You take care of this, he had said to the woman. My whole life is in here. The woman took the wallet from him, and assured him that it would be safe with them. She asked Chad if that wasnt true, and Chad, looking up from the last of his paperwork, said Liz was telling the truth, theyd never lost a prisoners possessions yet. Shadow had slipped the four hundred-dollar bills that he had palmed from the wallet into his socks, when he had changed, along with the silver Liberty dollar he had palmed as he had emptied his pockets. Say, Shadow asked, when he came out. Would it be okay if I finished reading the book? Sorry, Mike. Rules are rules, said Chad. Liz put Shadows possessions in a bag in the back room. Chad said hed leave Shadow in Officer Butes capable hands. Liz looked tired and unimpressed. Chad left. The telephone rang, and LizOfficer Buteanswered it. Okay, she said. Okay. No problem. Okay. No problem. Okay. She put down the phone and made a face. Problem? asked Shadow. Yes. Not really. Kinda. you're sending someone up from Milwaukee to collect you. Why is that a problem? I got to keep you in here with me for three hours, she said. And the cell over thereshe pointed to the cell by the door, with the sleeping man in itthats occupied. he's on suicide watch. I shouldn't put you in with him. But its not worth the trouble to sign you in to the county and then sign you out again. She shook her head. And you don't want to go in thereshe pointed to the empty cell in which hed changed his clothesbecause the can is shot. It stinks in there, doesn't it? Yes. It was gross. Its common humanity, that's what it is. The sooner we get into the new facilities, it cant be too soon for me. One of the women we had in yesterday mustve flushed a tampon away. I tell em not to. We got bins for that. They clog the pipes. Every damn tampon down that John costs the county a hundred bucks in plumbers fees. So, I can keep you out here, if I cuff you. Or you can go in the cell. She looked at him. Your call, she said. I'm not crazy about them, he said. But I'll take the cuffs. She took a pair from her utility belt, then patted the semiautomatic in its holster, as if to remind him that it was there. Hands behind your back, she said. The cuffs were a tight fit: he had big wrists. Then she put hobbles on his ankles and sat him down on a bench on the far side of the counter, against the wall. Now, she said. You don't bother me, and I won't bother you. She tilted the television so that he could see it. Thanks, he said. When we get our new offices, she said, there won't be none of this nonsense. The Tonight Show finished. An episode of Cheers began. Shadow had never watched Cheers. He had only ever seen one episode of itthe one where Coachs daughter comes to the baralthough he had seen that several times. Shadow had noticed that you only ever catch one episode of shows you don't watch, over and over, years apart; he thought it must be some kind of cosmic law. |
| 518 |
She removed the cuffs and the hobble, locked him into the holding cell. The smell was worse, now that the door was closed. Shadow sat down on the concrete bed, slipped the Liberty dollar from his sock, and began moving it from finger to palm, from position to position, from hand to hand, his only aim to keep the coin from being seen by anyone who might look in. He was passing the time. He was numb. He missed Wednesday, then, sudden, and deep. He missed the mans confidence, his attitude. His conviction. He opened his hand, looked down at Lady Liberty, a silver profile. He closed his fingers over the coin, held it tightly. He wondered if hed get to be one of those guys who got life for something they didn't do. If he even made it that far. From what hed seen of Mr. World and Mr. Town, they would have little trouble pulling him out of the system. Perhaps hed suffer an unfortunate accident on the way to the next holding facility. He could be shot while making a break for it. It did not seem at all unlikely. There was a stir of activity in the room on the other side of the glass. Officer Liz came back in. She pressed a button, a door that Shadow could not see opened, and a black deputy in a brown sheriffs uniform entered and walked briskly over to the desk. Shadow slipped the dollar coin back into his sock. The new deputy handed over some papers, Liz scanned them and signed. Chad Mulligan came in, said a few words to the new man, then he unlocked the cell door and walked inside. Okay. Folk are here to pick you up. Seemsyou're a matter of national security. You know that? Itll make a great front-page story for the Lakeside News, said Shadow. Chad looked at him without expression. That a drifter got picked up for parole violations? Not much of a story. So that's the way it is? that's what they tell me, said Chad Mulligan. Shadow put his hands in front of him this time, and Chad cuffed him. Chad locked on the ankle hobbles, and a rod from the cuffs to the hobbles. Shadow thought, they'll take me outside. Maybe I can make a break for itin hobbles and cuffs and lightweight orange clothes, out into the snow, and even as he thought it he knew how stupid and hopeless it was. Chad walked him out into the office. Liz had turned the TV off now. The black deputy looked him over. he's a big guy, he said to Chad. Liz passed the new deputy the paper bag with Shadows possessions in it, and he signed for it. Chad looked at Shadow, then at the deputy. He said to the deputy, quietly, but loudly enough for Shadow to hear, Look. I just want to say, I'm not comfortable with the way this is happening. The deputy nodded. you'll have to take it up with the appropriate authorities, sir. Our job is simply to bring him in. Chad made a sour face. He turned to Shadow. Okay, said Chad. Through that door and into the sally port. What? Out there. Where the car is. Liz unlocked the doors. You make sure that orange uniform comes right back here, she said to the deputy. The last felon we sent down to Lafayette, we never saw the uniform again. |
| 519 |
They had a god, who was the skull of a mammoth, and the hide of a mammoth fashioned into a rough cloak. Nunyunnini, they called him. When they were not traveling, he rested on a wooden frame, at man height. She was the holy woman of the tribe, the keeper of its secrets, and her name was Atsula, the fox. Atsula walked before the two tribesmen who carried their god on long poles, draped with bearskins, that it should not be seen by profane eyes, nor at times when it was not holy. They roamed the tundra, with their tents. The finest of the tents was made of caribou hide, and it was the holy tent, and there were four of them inside it: Atsula, the priestess, Gugwei, the tribal elder, Yanu, the war leader, and Kalanu, the scout. She called them there, the day after she had her vision. Atsula scraped some lichen into the fire, then she threw in dried leaves with her withered left hand: they smoked, with an eye-stinging gray smoke, and gave off an odor that was sharp and strange. Then she took a wooden cup from the wooden platform, and she passed it to Gugwei. The cup was half filled with a dark yellow liquid. Atsula had found the pungh mushrooms, each with seven spots, only a true holy woman could find a seven-spotted mushroomand had picked them at the dark of the moon, and dried them on a string of deer cartilage. Yesterday, before she slept, she had eaten the three dried mushroom caps. Her dreams had been confused and fearful things, of bright lights moving fast, of rock mountains filled with lights spearing upward like icicles. In the night she had woken, sweating, and needing to make water. She squatted over the wooden cup and filled it with her urine. Then she placed the cup outside the tent, in the snow, and returned to sleep. When she woke, she picked the lumps of ice out from the wooden cup, leaving a darker, more concentrated liquid behind. It was this liquid she passed around, first to Gugwei, then to Yanu and to Kalanu. Each of them took a large gulp of the liquid, then Atsula took the final draft. She swallowed it, and poured what was left on the ground in front of their god, a libation to Nunyunnini. They sat in the smoky tent, waiting for their god to speak. Outside, in the darkness, the wind wailed and breathed. Kalanu, the scout, was a woman who dressed and walked as a man: she had even taken Dalani, a fourteen-year-old maiden, to be her wife. Kalanu blinked her eyes tightly, then she got up and walked over to the mammoth skull. She pulled the mammoth-hide cloak over herself, and stood so her head was inside the mammoth skull. There is evil in the land, said Nunyunnini in Kalanus voice. Evil, such that if you stay here, in the land of your mothers and your mothers mothers, you shall all perish. The three listeners grunted. Is it the slavers? Or the great wolves? asked Gugwei, whose hair was long and white, and whose face was as wrinkled as the gray skin of a thorn tree. It is not the slavers, said Nunyunnini, old stone-hide. It is not the great wolves. |
| 520 |
Is it a famine? Is a famine coming? asked Gugwei. Nunyunnini was silent. Kalanu came out of the skull and waited with the rest of them. Gugwei put on the mammoth-hide cloak and put his head inside the skull. It is not a famine as you know it, said Nunyunnini, through Gugweis mouth, although a famine will follow. Then what is it? asked Yanu. I am not afraid. I will stand against it. We have spears, and we have throwing rocks. Let a hundred mighty warriors come against us, still we shall prevail. We shall lead them into the marshes, and split their skulls with our flints. It is not a man thing, said Nunyunnini, in Gugweis old voice. It will come from the skies, and none of your spears or your rocks will protect you. How can we protect ourselves? asked Atsula. I have seen flames in the skies. I have heard a noise louder than ten thunderbolts. I have seen forests flattened and rivers boil. Ai, said Nunyunnini, but he said no more. Gugwei came out of the skull, bending stiffly, for he was an old man, and his knuckles were swollen and knotted. There was silence. Atsula threw more leaves on the fire, and the smoke made their eyes tear. Then Yanu strode to the mammoth head, put the cloak about his broad shoulders, put his head inside the skull. His voice boomed. You must journey, said Nunyunnini. You must travel to sunward. Where the sun rises, there you will find a new land, where you will be safe. It will be a long journey: the moon will swell and empty, die and live, twice, and there will be slavers and beasts, but I shall guide you and keep you safe, if you travel toward the sunrise. Atsula spat on the mud of the floor, and said, No. She could feel the god staring at her. No, she said. You are a bad god to tell us this. We will die. We will all die, and then who will be left to carry you from high place to high place, to raise your tent, to oil your great tusks with fat? The god said nothing. Atsula and Yanu exchanged places. Atsulas face stared out through the yellowed mammoth bone. Atsula has no faith, said Nunyunnini in Atsulas voice. Atsula shall die before the rest of you enter the new land, but the rest of you shall live. Trust me: there is a land to the east that is manless. This land shall be your land and the land of your children and your childrens children, for seven generations, and seven sevens. But for Atsulas faithlessness, you would have kept it forever. In the morning, pack your tents and your possessions, and walk toward the sunrise. And Gugwei and Yanu and Kalanu bowed their heads and exclaimed at the power and wisdom of Nunyunnini. The moon swelled and waned and swelled and waned once more. The people of the tribe walked east, toward the sunrise, struggling through the icy winds, which numbed their exposed skin. Nunyunnini had promised them truly: they lost no one from the tribe on the journey, save for a woman in childbirth, and women in childbirth belong to the moon, not to Nunyunnini. They crossed the land bridge. Kalanu had left them at first light to scout the way. |
| 521 |
And the ice times came and the ice times went, and the people spread out across the land, and formed new tribes and chose new totems: ravens and foxes and ground sloths and great cats and buffalo, each a beast that marked a tribes identity, each beast a god. The mammoths of the new lands were bigger, and slower, and more foolish than the mammoth of the Siberian plains, and the pungh mushrooms, with their seven spots, were not to be found in the new lands, and Nunyunnini did not speak to the tribe any longer. And in the days of the grandchildren of Dalani and Kalanus grandchildren, a band of warriors, members of a big and prosperous tribe, returning from a slaving expedition in the north to their home in the south, found the valley of the first people: they killed most of the men, and they took the women and many of the children captive. One of the children, hoping for clemency, took them to a cave in the hills in which they found a mammoth skull, the tattered remnants of a mammoth-skin cloak, a wooden cup, and the preserved head of Atsula the oracle. While some of the warriors of the new tribe were for taking the sacred objects away with them, stealing the gods of the first people and owning their power, others counseled against it, saying that they would bring nothing but ill luck and the malice of their own god (for these were the people of a raven tribe, and ravens are jealous gods). So they threw the objects down the side of the hill, into a deep ravine, and took the survivors of the first people with them on their long journey south. And the raven tribes, and the fox tribes, grew more powerful in the land, and soon Nunyunnini was entirely forgotten. Part Three. The Moment of the Storm People are in the dark, they don't know what to do I had a little lantern, oh but it got blown out too. I'm reaching out my hand. I hope you are too. I just want to be in the dark with you. Greg Brown, In the Dark with You They changed cars at five in the morning, in Minneapolis, in the airports long-term parking lot. They drove to the top floor, where the parking building was open to the sky. Shadow took the orange uniform and the handcuffs and leg hobbles, put them in the brown paper bag that had briefly held his possessions, folded the whole thing up, and dropped it into a garbage can. They had been waiting for ten minutes when a barrel-chested young man came out of an airport door and walked over to them. He was eating a packet of Burger King french fries. Shadow recognized him immediately: he had sat in the back of the car, when they had left the House on the Rock, and hummed so deeply the car had vibrated. He now sported a white-streaked winter beard he had not had before. It made him look older. The man wiped the grease from his hands onto his jeans, extended one huge hand to Shadow. I heard of the All-Fathers death, he said. They will pay, and they will pay dearly. Wednesday was your father? asked Shadow. He was the All-Father, said the man. His deep voice caught in his throat. |
| 522 |
You tell them, tell them all, that when we are needed, my people will be there. Czernobog picked at a flake of tobacco from between his teeth and spat it out onto the frozen slush. And how many of you is that? Ten? Twenty? The barrel-chested mans beard bristled. And arent ten of us worth a hundred of them? Who would stand against even one of my folk, in a battle? But there are more of us than that, at the edge of the cities. There are a few in the mountains. Some in the Catskills, a few living in the carny towns in Florida. They keep their axes sharp. They will come if I call them. You do that, Elvis, said Mr. Nancy. Shadow thought he said Elvis, anyway. Nancy had exchanged the deputys uniform for a thick brown cardigan, corduroy trousers, and brown loafers. You call them. Its what the old bastard would have wanted. They betrayed him. They killed him. I laughed at Wednesday, but I was wrong. None of us are safe any longer, said the man whose name sounded like Elvis. But you can rely on us. He gently patted Shadow on the back and almost sent him sprawling. It was like being gently patted on the back by a wrecking ball. Czernobog had been looking around the parking lot. Now he said, You will pardon me asking, but our new vehicle is which? The barrel-chested man pointed. There she is, he said. Czernobog snorted. That? It was a 1970 VW bus. There was a rainbow decal in the rear window. Its a fine vehicle. And its the last thing that they'll be expecting you to be driving. Czernobog walked around the vehicle. Then he started to cough, a lung-rumbling, old-man, five-in-the-morning smokers cough. He hawked, and spat, and put his hand to his chest, massaging away the pain. Yes. The last car they will suspect. So what happens when the police pull us over, looking for the hippies and the dope? Eh? We are not here to ride the magic bus. We are to blend in. The bearded man unlocked the door of the bus. So they take a look at you, they see you arent hippies, they wave you goodbye. Its the perfect disguise. And its all I could find at no notice. Czernobog seemed to be ready to argue it further, but Mr. Nancy intervened smoothly. Elvis, you came through for us. We are very grateful. Now, that car needs to get back to Chicago. Well leave it in Bloomington, said the bearded man. The wolves will take care of it. don't give it another thought. He turned back to Shadow. Again, you have my sympathy and I share your pain. Good luck. And if the vigil falls to you, my admiration, and my sympathy. He squeezed Shadows hand with his own catchers-mitt fist. It hurt. You tell his corpse when you see it. Tell him that Alviss son of Vindalf will keep the faith. The VW bus smelled of patchouli, of old incense and rolling tobacco. There was a faded pink carpet glued to the floor and to the walls. Who was that? asked Shadow, as he drove them down the ramp, grinding the gears. Just like he said, Alviss son of Vindalf. he's the king of the dwarfs. The biggest, mightiest, greatest of all the dwarf folk. |
| 523 |
But he's not a dwarf, pointed out Shadow. he's what, five-eight? Five-nine? Which makes him a giant among dwarfs, said Czernobog from behind him. Tallest dwarf in America. What was that about the vigil? asked Shadow. The two old men said nothing. Shadow glanced at Mr. Nancy, who was staring out of the window. Well? He was talking about a vigil. You heard him. Czernobog spoke up from the backseat. You will not have to do it, he said. Do what? The vigil. He talks too much. All the dwarfs talk and talk. Is nothing to think of. Better you put it out of your mind. * * * Driving south was like driving forward in time. The snows erased, slowly, and were completely gone by the following morning when the bus reached Kentucky. Winter was already over in Kentucky, and spring was on its way. Shadow began to wonder if there were some kind of equation to explain itperhaps every fifty miles he drove south he was driving a day into the future. He would have mentioned his idea to somebody, but Mr. Nancy was asleep in the passenger seat in the front, while Czernobog snored unceasingly in the back. Time seemed a flexible construct at that moment, an illusion he was imagining as he drove. He found himself becoming painfully aware of birds and animals: he saw the crows on the side of the road, or in the buss path, picking at roadkill; flights of birds wheeled across the skies in patterns that almost made sense; cats stared at them from front lawns and fence posts. Czernobog snorted and woke, sitting up slowly. I dreamed a strange dream, he said. I dreamed that I am truly Bielebog. That forever the world imagines that there are two of us, the light god and the dark, but that now we are both old, I find it was only me all the time, giving them gifts, taking my gifts away. He broke the filter from a Lucky Strike, put the cigarette between his lips and lit it. Shadow wound down his window. Arent you worried about lung cancer? he said. I am cancer, said Czernobog. I do not frighten myself. Nancy spoke. Folk like us don't get cancer. We don't get arteriosclerosis or Parkinsons disease or syphilis. Were kind of hard to kill. They killed Wednesday, said Shadow. He pulled over for gas, and then parked next door at a restaurant for an early breakfast. As they entered, the pay phone in the entrance began to jangle. They gave their orders to an elderly woman with a worried smile, who had been sitting reading a paperback copy of What My Heart Meant by Jenny Kerton. The woman sighed, then walked back and over to the phone, picked it up, said Yes. Then she looked back at the room, said, Yep. Looks like they are. You just hold the line now, and walked over to Mr. Nancy. Its for you, she said. Okay, said Mr. Nancy. Now, maam, you make sure those fries are real crisp now. Think burnt. He walked over to the pay phone. This is he. And what makes you think I'm dumb enough to trust you? he said. I can find it, he said. I know where it is. Yes, he said. Of course we want it. You know we want it. |
| 524 |
Hog farm, said Czernobog. You just said that the real center of America was a hog farm. This isn't about what is, said Mr. Nancy. Its about what people think is. Its all imaginary anyway. that's why its important. People only fight over imaginary things. My kind of people? asked Shadow. Or your kind of people? Nancy said nothing. Czernobog made a noise that might have been a chuckle, might have been a snort. Shadow tried to get comfortable in the back of the bus. He had only slept a little. He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Worse than the feeling he had had in prison, worse than the feeling he had had back when Laura had come to him and told him about the robbery. This was bad. The back of his neck prickled, he felt sick and, several times, in waves, he felt scared. Mr. Nancy pulled over in Humansville, parked outside a supermarket. Mr. Nancy went inside, and Shadow followed him in. Czernobog waited in the parking lot, smoking his cigarette. There was a young fair-haired man, little more than a boy, restocking the breakfast cereal shelves. Hey, said Mr. Nancy. Hey, said the young man. Its true, isn't it? They killed him? Yes, said Mr. Nancy. They killed him. The young man banged several boxes of Capn Crunch down on the shelf. They think they can crush us like cockroaches, he said. He had a tarnished silver bracelet circling his wrist. We don't crush that easy, do we? No, said Mr. Nancy. We don't. I'll be there, sir, said the young man, his pale blue eyes blazing. I know you will, Gwydion, said Mr. Nancy. Mr. Nancy bought several large bottles of RC Cola, a six-pack of toilet paper, a pack of evil-looking black cigarillos, a bunch of bananas, and a pack of Doublemint chewing gum. he's a good boy. Came over in the seventh century. Welsh. The bus meandered first to the west and then to the north. Spring faded back into the dead end of winter. Kansas was the cheerless gray of lonesome clouds, empty windows, and lost hearts. Shadow had become adept at hunting for radio stations, negotiating between Mr. Nancy, who liked talk radio and dance music, and Czernobog, who favored classical music, the gloomier the better, leavened with the more extreme evangelical religious stations. For himself, Shadow liked oldies. Toward the end of the afternoon they stopped, at Czernobogs request, on the outskirts of Cherryvale, Kansas (pop. 2,464). Czernobog led them to a meadow outside the town. There were still traces of snow in the shadows of the trees, and the grass was the color of dirt. Wait here, said Czernobog. He walked, alone, to the center of the meadow. He stood there, in the winds of the end of February, for some time. At first he hung his head, then he began gesticulating. He looks like he's talking to someone, said Shadow. Ghosts, said Mr. Nancy. They worshiped him here, over a hundred years ago. They made blood sacrifice to him, libations spilled with the hammer. After a time, the townsfolk figured out why so many of the strangers who passed through the town didn't ever come back. |
| 525 |
This was where they hid some of the bodies. Czernobog came back from the middle of the field. His mustache seemed darker now, and there were streaks of black in his gray hair. He smiled, showing his iron tooth. I feel good, now. Ahh. Some things linger, and blood lingers longest. They walked back across the meadow to where they had parked the VW bus. Czernobog lit a cigarette, but did not cough. They did it with the hammer, he said. Votan, he would talk of the gallows and the spear, but for me, it is one thing He reached out a nicotine-colored finger and tapped it, hard, in the center of Shadows forehead. Please don't do that, said Shadow, politely. Please don't do that, mimicked Czernobog. One day I will take my hammer and do much worse than that to you, my friend, remember? Yes, said Shadow. But if you tap my head again, I'll break your hand. Czernobog snorted. Then he said, They should be grateful, the people here. There was such power raised. Even thirty years after they forced my people into hiding, this land, this very land, gave us the greatest movie star of all time. She was the greatest there ever was. Judy Garland? asked Shadow. Czernobog shook his head curtly. he's talking about Louise Brooks, said Mr. Nancy. Shadow decided not to ask who Louise Brooks was. Instead he said, So, look, when Wednesday went to talk to them, he did it under a truce. Yes. And now were going to get Wednesdays body from them, as a truce. Yes. And we know that they want me dead or out of the way. They want all of us dead, said Nancy. So what I don't get is, why do we think they'll play fair this time, when they didn't for Wednesday? That, said Czernobog, is why we are meeting at the center. Is He frowned. What is the word for it? The opposite of sacred? Profane, said Shadow, without thinking. No, said Czernobog. I mean, when a place is less sacred than any other place. Of negative sacredness. Places where they can build no temples. Places where people will not come, and will leave as soon as they can. Places where gods only walk if they are forced to. I don't know, said Shadow. I don't think there is a word for it. All of America has it, a little, said Czernobog. That is why we are not welcome here. But the center, said Czernobog. The center is worst. Is like a minefield. We all tread too carefully there to dare break the truce. They had reached the bus. Czernobog patted Shadows upper arm. You don't worry, he said, with gloomy reassurance. Nobody else is going to kill you. Nobody but me. * * * Shadow found the center of America at evening that same day, before it was fully dark. It was on a slight hill to the northwest of Lebanon. He drove around the little hillside park, past the tiny mobile chapel and the stone monument, and when Shadow saw the one-story 1950s motel at the edge of the park his heart sank. There was a black Humvee parked in front of itit looked like a jeep reflected in a fun-house mirror, as squat and pointless and ugly as an armored car. There were no lights on inside the building. |
| 526 |
They parked beside the motel, and as they did so, a man in a chauffeurs uniform and cap walked out of the motel and was illuminated by the headlights of the bus. He touched his cap to them, politely, got into the Humvee, and drove off. Big car, tiny dick, said Mr. Nancy. Do you think they'll even have beds here? asked Shadow. Its been days since I slept in a bed. This place looks like its just waiting to be demolished. Its owned by hunters from Texas, said Mr. Nancy. Come up here once a year. Damned if I know whatyou're huntin. It stops the place being condemned and destroyed. They climbed out of the bus. Waiting for them in front of the motel was a woman Shadow did not recognize. She was perfectly made-up, perfectly coiffed. She reminded him of every newscaster hed ever seen on morning television sitting in a studio that didn't really resemble a living room. Lovely to see you, she said. Now, you must be Czernobog. I've heard a lot about you. Andyou're Anansi, always up to mischief, eh? You jolly old man. And you, you must be Shadow. Youve certainly led us a merry chase, haven't you? A hand took his, pressed it firmly, looked him straight in the eye. I'm Media. Good to meet you. I hope we can get this evenings business done as pleasantly as possible. The main doors opened. Somehow, Toto, said the fat kid Shadow had last seen sitting in a limo, I don't believe were in Kansas anymore. Were in Kansas, said Mr. Nancy. I think we must have drove through most of it today. Damn but this country is flat. This place has no lights, no power, and no hot water, said the fat kid. And, no offense, you people really need the hot water. You just smell like youve been in that bus for a week. I don't think theres any need to go there, said the woman, smoothly. Were all friends here. Come on in. Well show you to your rooms. We took the first four rooms. Your late friend is in the fifth. All the ones beyond room five are emptyyou can take your pick. I'm afraid its not the Four Seasons, but then, what is? She opened the door to the motel lobby for them. It smelled of mildew, of damp and dust and decay. There was a man sitting in the lobby, in the near darkness. You people hungry? he asked. I can always eat, said Mr. Nancy. Drivers gone out for a sack of hamburgers, said the man. Hell be back soon. He looked up. It was too dark to see faces, but he said, Big guy. you're Shadow, huh? The asshole who killed Woody and Stone? No, said Shadow. That was someone else. And I know who you are. He did. He had been inside the mans head. you're Town. Have you slept with Woods widow yet? Mr. Town fell off his chair. In a movie, it would have been funny; in real life it was simply clumsy. He stood up quickly, came toward Shadow. Shadow looked down at him and said, don't start anythingyou're not prepared to finish. Mr. Nancy rested his hand on Shadows upper arm. Truce, remember? he said. Were at the center. Mr. Town turned away, leaned over to the counter, and picked up three keys. you're down at the end of the hall, he said. |
| 527 |
Here. He handed the keys to Mr. Nancy and walked away, into the shadows of the corridor. They heard a motel room door open, and they heard it slam. Mr. Nancy passed a key to Shadow, another to Czernobog. Is there a flashlight on the bus? asked Shadow. No, said Mr. Nancy. But its just dark. You mustn't be afraid of the dark. I'm not, said Shadow. I'm afraid of the people in the dark. Dark is good, said Czernobog. He seemed to have no difficulty seeing where he was going, leading them down the darkened corridor, putting the keys into the locks without fumbling. I will be in room ten, he told them. And then he said, Media. I think I have heard of her. isn't she the one who killed her children? Different woman, said Mr. Nancy. Same deal. Mr. Nancy was in room 8, and Shadow opposite the two of them, in room 9. The room smelled damp, and dusty, and deserted. There was a bed frame in there, with a mattress on it, but no sheets. A little light entered the room from the gloaming outside the window. Shadow sat down on the mattress, pulled off his shoes, and stretched out at full length. He had driven too much in the last few days. Perhaps he slept. * * * He was walking. A cold wind tugged at his clothes. The tiny snowflakes were little more than a crystalline dust that gusted and flurried in the wind. There were trees, bare of leaves in the winter. There were high hills on each side of him. It was late on a winters afternoon: the sky and the snow had attained the same deep shade of purple. Somewhere ahead of himin this light, distances were impossible to judgethe flames of a bonfire flickered, yellow and orange. A gray wolf padded through the snow before him. Shadow stopped. The wolf stopped also, and turned, and waited. One of its eyes glinted yellowish-green. Shadow shrugged and walked toward the flames and the wolf ambled ahead of him. The bonfire burned in the middle of a grove of trees. There must have been a hundred trees, planted in the rows. There were shapes hanging from the trees. At the end of the rows was a building that looked a little like an overturned boat. It was carved of wood, and it crawled with wooden creatures and wooden facesdragons, gryphons, trolls, and boarsall of them dancing in the flickering light of the fire. The bonfire was so high that Shadow could barely approach it. The wolf padded around the crackling fire. In place of the wolf a man came out on the other side of the fire. He was leaning on a tall stick. You are in Uppsala, in Sweden, said the man, in a familiar, gravelly voice. About a thousand years ago. Wednesday? said Shadow. The man continued to talk, as if Shadow were not there. First every year, then, later, when the rot set in, and they became lax, every nine years, they would sacrifice here. A sacrifice of nines. Each day, for nine days, they would hang nine animals from trees in the grove. One of those animals was always a man. He strode away from the firelight, toward the trees, and Shadow followed him. As he approached the trees the shapes that hung from them resolved: legs and eyes and tongues and heads. |
| 528 |
Shadow shook his head: there was something about seeing a bull hanging by its neck from a tree that was darkly sad, and at the same time surreal enough almost to be funny. Shadow passed a hanging stag, a wolfhound, a brown bear, and a chestnut horse with a white mane, little bigger than a pony. The dog was still alive: every few seconds it would kick spasmodically, and it was making a strained whimpering noise as it dangled from the rope. The man he was following took his long stick, which Shadow realized now, as it moved, was actually a spear, and he slashed at the dogs stomach with it, in one knifelike cut downward. Steaming entrails tumbled onto the snow. I dedicate this death to Odin, said the man, formally. It is only a gesture, he said, turning back to Shadow. But gestures mean everything. The death of one dog symbolizes the death of all dogs. Nine men they gave to me, but they stood for all the men, all the blood, all the power. It just wasnt enough. One day, the blood stopped flowing. Belief without blood only takes us so far. The blood must flow. I saw you die, said Shadow. In the god business, said the figure and now Shadow was certain it was Wednesday, nobody else had that rasp, that deep cynical joy in words, its not the death that matters. Its the opportunity for resurrection. And when the blood flows He gestured at the animals, at the people, hanging from the trees. Shadow could not decide whether the dead humans they walked past were more or less horrifying than the animals: at least the humans had known the fate they were going to. There was a deep, boozy smell about the men that suggested that they had been allowed to anesthetize themselves on their way to the gallows, while the animals would simply have been lynched, hauled up alive and terrified. The faces of the men looked so young: none of them was older than twenty. Who am I? asked Shadow. You? said the man. You were an opportunity. You were part of a grand tradition. Although both of us are committed enough to the affair to die for it. Eh? Who are you? asked Shadow. The hardest part is simply surviving, said the man. The bonfire and Shadow realized with a strange horror that it truly was a bone-fire: rib cages and fire-eyed skulls stared and stuck and jutted from the flames, sputtering trace-element colors into the night, greens and yellows and blueswas flaring and crackling and burning hotly. Three days of the tree, three days in the underworld, three days to find my way back. The flames sputtered and flamed too brightly for Shadow to look at directly. He looked down into the darkness beneath the trees. A knock on the door and now there was moonlight coming in the window. Shadow sat up with a start. Dinners served, said Medias voice. Shadow put his shoes back on, walked over to the door, went out into the corridor. Someone had found some candles, and a dim yellow light illuminated the reception hall. The driver of the Humvee came in holding a cardboard tray and a paper sack. |
| 529 |
He wore a long black coat and a peaked chauffeurs cap. Sorry about the delay, he said, hoarsely. I got everybody the same: a couple of burgers, large fries, large Coke, and apple pie. I'll eat mine out in the car. He put the food down, then walked back outside. The smell of fast food filled the lobby. Shadow took the paper bag and passed out the food, the napkins, the packets of ketchup. They ate in silence while the candles flickered and the burning wax hissed. Shadow noticed that Town was glaring at him. He turned his chair a little, so his back was to the wall. Media ate her burger with a napkin poised by her lips to remove crumbs. Oh. Great. These burgers are nearly cold, said the fat kid. He was still wearing his shades, which Shadow thought pointless and foolish, given the darkness of the room. Sorry about that, said Town. The nearest McDonalds is in Nebraska. They finished their lukewarm hamburgers and cold fries. The fat kid bit into his single-person apple pie, and the filling spurted down his chin. Unexpectedly, the filling was still hot. Ow, he said. He wiped at it with his hand, licking his fingers to get them clean. That stuff burns! he said. Those pies are a class-action suit waiting to fucking happen. Shadow wanted to hit the kid. Hed wanted to hit him since the kid had his goons hurt him in the limo, after Lauras funeral. He pushed the thought away. Cant we just take Wednesdays body and get out of here? he asked. Midnight, said Mr. Nancy and the fat kid, at the same time. These things must be done by the rules, said Czernobog. Yeah, said Shadow. But nobody tells me what they are. You keep talking about the goddamn rules, I don't even know what game you people are playing. Its like breaking the street date, said Media, brightly. You know. When things are allowed to be on sale. Town said, I think the whole things a crock of shit. But if their rules make them happy, then my agency is happy and everybodys happy. He slurped his Coke. Roll on midnight. You take the body, you go away. Were all lovey-fucking-dovey and we wave you goodbye. And then we can get on with hunting you down like the rats you are. Hey, said the fat kid to Shadow. Reminds me. I told you to tell your boss he was history. Did you ever tell him? I told him, said Shadow. And you know what he said to me? He said to tell the little snot, if ever I saw him again, to remember that todays future is tomorrows yesterday. Wednesday had never said any such thing. Still, these people seemed to like cliches. The black sunglasses reflected the flickering candle flames back at him, like eyes. The fat kid said, This place is such a fucking dump. No power. Out of wireless range. I mean, when you got to be wired, you're already back in the stone age. He sucked the last of his Coke through the straw, dropped the cup on the table, and walked away down the corridor. Shadow reached over and placed the fat kids garbage back into the paper sack. I'm going to see the center of America, he announced. |
| 530 |
He got up and walked outside, into the night. Mr. Nancy followed him. They strolled together, across the little park, saying nothing until they reached the stone monument. The wind gusted at them, fitfully, first from one direction, then from another. So, he said. Now what? The half-moon hung pale in the dark sky. Now, said Nancy, you should go back to your room. Lock the door. You try to get some more sleep. At midnight they give us the body. And then we get the hell out of here. The center is not a stable place for anybody. If you say so. Mr. Nancy inhaled on his cigarillo. This should never have happened, he said. None of this should have happened. Our kind of people, we are He waved the cigarillo about, as if using it to hunt for a word, then stabbing forward with it. exclusive. Were not social. Not even me. Not even Bacchus. Not for long. We walk by ourselves or we stay in our own little groups. We do not play well with others. We like to be adored and respected and worshipedme, I like them to be tellin tales about me, tales showing my cleverness. Its a fault, I know, but its the way I am. We like to be big. Now, in these shabby days, we are small. The new gods rise and fall and rise again. But this is not a country that tolerates gods for long. Brahma creates, Vishnu preserves, Shiva destroys, and the ground is clear for Brahma to create once more. So what are you saying? asked Shadow. The fightings over, now? The battles done? Mr. Nancy snorted. Are you out of your mind? They killed Wednesday. They killed him and they bragged about it. They spread the word. Theyve showed it on every channel to those with eyes to see it. No, Shadow. Its only just begun. He bent down at the foot of the stone monument, stubbed out his cigarillo on the earth, and left it there, like an offering. You used to make jokes, said Shadow. You don't anymore. Its hard to find the jokes these days. Wednesdays dead. Are you comin inside? Soon. Nancy walked away, toward the motel. Shadow reached out his hand and touched the monuments stones. He dragged his big fingers across the cold brass plate. Then he turned and walked over to the tiny white chapel, walked through the open doorway, into the darkness. He sat down in the nearest pew and closed his eyes and lowered his head, and thought about Laura, and about Wednesday, and about being alive. There was a click from behind him, and a scuff of shoe against earth. Shadow sat up, and turned. Someone stood just outside the open doorway, a dark shape against the stars. Moonlight glinted from something metal. You going to shoot me? asked Shadow. JesusI wish, said Mr. Town. Its only for self-defense. So, you're praying? Have they got you thinking thatyou're gods? They arent gods. I wasnt praying, said Shadow. Just thinking. The way I figure it, said Town, you're mutations. Evolutionary experiments. A little hypnotic ability, a little hocus-pocus, and they can make people believe anything. Nothing to write home about. that's all. They die like men, after all. |
| 531 |
They always did, said Shadow. He got up, and Town took a step back. Shadow walked out of the little chapel, and Mr. Town kept his distance. Hey, Shadow said. Do you know who Louise Brooks was? Friend of yours? Nope. She was a movie star from south of here. Town paused. Maybe she changed her name, and became Liz Taylor or Sharon Stone or someone, he suggested, helpfully. Maybe. Shadow started to walk back to the motel. Town kept pace with him. You should be back in prison, said Mr. Town. You should be on fucking death row. I didn't kill your associates, said Shadow. But I'll tell you something a guy once told me, back when I was in prison. Something I've never forgotten. And that is? There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't. The driver stood by the Humvee. Gnight, gentlemen, he said as they passed. Night, said Mr. Town. And then he said, to Shadow, I personally don't give a fuck about any of this. What I do, is what Mister World says. Its easier that way. Shadow walked down the corridor to room 9. He unlocked the door, went inside. He said, Sorry. I thought this was my room. It is, said Media. I was waiting for you. He could see her hair in the moonlight, and her pale face. She was sitting on his bed, primly. I'll find another room. I won't be here for long, she said. I just thought it might be an appropriate time to make you an offer. Okay. Make the offer. Relax, she said. There was a smile in her voice. You have such a stick up your butt. Look, Wednesdays dead. You don't owe anyone anything. Throw in with us. Time to Come Over to the Winning Team. Shadow said nothing. We can make you famous, Shadow. We can give you power over what people believe and say and wear and dream. You want to be the next Cary Grant? We can make that happen. We can make you the next Beatles. I think I preferred it when you were offering to show me Lucys tits, said Shadow. If that was you. Ah, she said. I need my room back. Good night. And then of course, she said, not moving, as if he had not spoken, we can turn it all around. We can make it bad for you. You could be a bad joke forever, Shadow. Or you could be remembered as a monster. You could be remembered forever, but as a Manson, a Hitlerhow would you like that? I'm sorry, maam, but I'm kind of tired, said Shadow. I'd be grateful if youd leave now. I offered you the world, she said. Whenyou're dying in a gutter, you remember that. I'll make a point of it, he said. After she had gone her perfume lingered. He lay on the bare mattress and thought about Laura, but whatever he thought aboutLaura playing Frisbee, Laura eating a root-beer float without a spoon, Laura giggling, showing off the exotic underwear she had bought when she attended a travel agents convention in Anaheimalways morphed, in his mind, into Laura sucking Robbies cock as a truck slammed them off the road and into oblivion. |
| 532 |
And then he heard her words, and they hurt every time. you're not dead, said Laura in her quiet voice, in his head. But I'm not sure thatyou're alive, either. There was a knock. Shadow got up and opened the door. It was the fat kid. Those hamburgers, he said. They were just icky. Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonalds. I didn't think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonalds. This place is turning into Grand Central Station, said Shadow. Okay, so I guessyou're here to offer me the freedom of the Internet if I come over to your side of the fence. Right? The fat kid was shivering. No. you're already dead meat, he said. Youyoure a fucking illuminated Gothic black-letter manuscript. You couldn't be hypertext if you tried. ImI'm synaptic, while, whileyou're synoptic He smelled strange, Shadow realized. There was a guy in the cell across the way, whose name Shadow had never known. He had taken off all his clothes in the middle of the day and told everyone that he had been sent to take them away, the truly good ones, like him, in a silver spaceship to a perfect place. That had been the last time Shadow had seen him. The fat kid smelled like that guy. Are you here for a reason? Just wanted to talk, said the fat kid. There was a whine in his voice. Its creepy in my room. that's all. Its creepy in there. Fifty miles to a McDonalds, can you believe that? Maybe I could stay in here with you. What about your friends from the limo? The ones who hit me? shouldn't you ask them to stay with you? The children wouldn't operate out here. Were in a dead zone. Shadow said, Its a while until midnight, and its longer to dawn. I think maybe you need rest. I know I do. The fat kid said nothing for a moment, then he nodded, and walked out of the room. Shadow closed his door, and locked it with the key. He lay back on the mattress. After a few moments the noise began. It took him a few moments to figure out what it had to be, then he unlocked his door and walked out into the hallway. It was the fat kid, now back in his own room. It sounded like he was throwing something huge against the walls of the room. From the sounds, Shadow guessed that what he was throwing was himself. Its just me! he was sobbing. Or perhaps, Its just meat. Shadow could not tell. Quiet! came a bellow from Czernobogs room, down the hall. Shadow walked down to the lobby and out of the motel. He was tired. The driver still stood beside the Humvee, a dark shape in a peaked cap. couldn't sleep, sir? he asked. No, said Shadow. Cigarette, sir? No, thank you. You don't mind if I do? Go right ahead. The driver used a Bic disposable lighter, and it was in the yellow light of the flame that Shadow saw the mans face, actually saw it for the first time, and recognized him, and began to understand. Shadow knew that thin face. He knew that there would be close-cropped orange hair beneath the black drivers cap, cut close to the scalp. He knew that when the mans lips smiled they would crease into a network of rough scars. |
| 533 |
you're looking good, big guy, said the driver. Low Key? Shadow stared at his old cellmate warily. Prison friendships are good things: they get you through bad places and through dark times. But a prison friendship ends at the prison gates, and a prison friend who reappears in your life is at best a mixed blessing. Jesus. Low Key Lyesmith, said Shadow, and then he heard what he was saying and he understood. Loki, he said. Loki Lie-Smith. you're slow, said Loki, but you get there in the end. And his lips twisted into a scarred smile and embers danced in the shadows of his eyes. * * * They sat in Shadows room in the abandoned motel, sitting on the bed, at opposite ends of the mattress. The sounds from the fat kids room had pretty much stopped. You were lucky we were inside together, said Loki. You would never have survived your first year without me. You couldn't have walked out if you wanted? Its easier just to do the time. He paused. Then, You got to understand the god thing. Its not magic. Its about being you, but the you that people believe in. Its about being the concentrated, magnified, essence of you. Its about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize. He paused. And then one day they forget about you, and they don't believe in you, and they don't sacrifice, and they don't care, and the next thing you knowyou're running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third. Why were you in my cell? Coincidence. Pure and simple. And nowyou're driving for the opposition. If you want to call them that. It depends whereyou're standing. The way I figure it, I'm driving for the winning team. But you and Wednesday, you were from the same, you're both Norse pantheon. Were both from the Norse pantheon. Is that whatyou're trying to say? Yeah. So? Shadow hesitated. You must have been friends. Once. No. We were never friends. I'm not sorry he's dead. He was just holding the rest of us back. With him gone, the rest of them are going to have to face up to the facts: its change or die, evolve or perish. he's gone. Wars over. Shadow looked at him, puzzled. You arent that stupid, he said. You were always so sharp. Wednesdays death isn't going to end anything. Its just pushed all of the ones who were on the fence over the edge. Mixing metaphors, Shadow. Bad habit. Whatever, said Shadow. Its still true. Jesus. His death did in an instant what hed spent the last few months trying to do. It united them. It gave them something to believe in. Perhaps. Loki shrugged. As far as I know, the thinking on this side of the fence was that with the troublemaker out of the way, the trouble would also be gone. Its not any of my business, though. I just drive. So tell me, said Shadow, why does everyone care about me? They act like I'm important. Why does it matter what I do? Damned if I know. You were important to us because you were important to Wednesday. As for the why of itI guess its just another one of lifes little mysteries. |
| 534 |
I'm tired of mysteries. Yeah? I think they add a kind of zest to the world. Like salt in a stew. Soyou're their driver. You drive for all of them? Whoever needs me, said Loki. Its a living. He raised his wristwatch to his face, pressed a button: the dial glowed a gentle blue, which illuminated his face, giving it a haunting, haunted appearance. Five to midnight. Time, said Loki. You coming? Shadow took a deep breath. I'm coming, he said. They walked down the dark motel corridor until they reached room 5. Loki took a box of matches from his pocket and thumb-nailed a match into flame. The momentary flare hurt Shadows eyes. A candle wick flickered and caught. And another. Loki lit a new match, and continued to light the candle stubs: they were on the windowsills and on the headboard of the bed and on the sink in the corner of the room. The bed had been hauled from its position against the wall into the middle of the motel room, leaving a few feet of space between the bed and the wall on each side. There were sheets draped over the bed, old motel sheets, moth-holed and stained. On top of the sheets lay Wednesday, perfectly still. He was dressed in the pale suit he had been wearing when he was shot. The right side of his face was untouched, perfect, unmarred by blood. The left side of his face was a ragged mess, and the left shoulder and front of the suit was spattered with dark spots. His hands were at his sides. The expression on that wreck of a face was far from peaceful: it looked hurta soul-hurt, a real down-deep hurt, filled with hatred and anger and raw craziness. And, on some level, it looked satisfied. Shadow imagined Mr. Jacquels practiced hands smoothing that hatred and pain away, rebuilding a face for Wednesday with morticians wax and makeup, giving him a final peace and dignity that even death had denied him. Still, the body seemed no smaller in death. And it still smelled faintly of Jack Daniels. The wind from the plains was rising: he could hear it howling around the old motel at the imaginary center of America. The candles on the windowsill guttered and flickered. He could hear footsteps in the hallway. Someone knocked on a door, called Hurry up please, its time, and they began to shuffle in, heads lowered. Town came in first, followed by Media and Mr. Nancy and Czernobog. Last of all came the fat kid: he had fresh red bruises on his face, and his lips were moving all the time, as if he were reciting some words to himself, but he was making no sound. Shadow found himself feeling sorry for him. Informally, without a word being spoken, they ranged themselves about the body, each an arms length away from the next. The atmosphere in the room was religiousdeeply religious, in a way that Shadow had never previously experienced. There was no sound but the howling of the wind and the crackling of the candles. We are come together, here in this godless place, said Loki, to pass on the body of this individual to those who will dispose of it properly according to the rites. |
| 535 |
He straightened his knees, until he was standing, more or less easily. Okay, he said. I've got him. Lets put him into the back of the car. Czernobog looked as if he were about to argue, but he closed his mouth. He spat on his forefinger and thumb and began to snuff the candles between his fingertips. Shadow could hear them fizz as he walked from the darkening room. Wednesday was heavy, but Shadow could cope, if he walked steadily. He had no choice. Wednesdays words were in his head with every step he took along the corridor, and he could taste the sour-sweetness of mead in the back of his throat. You protect me. You transport me from place to place. You run errands. In an emergency, but only in an emergency, you hurt people who need to be hurt. In the unlikely event of my death, you will hold my vigil Mr. Nancy opened the motel lobby door for him, then hurried over and opened the back of the bus. The other four were already standing by their Humvee, watching them as if they could not wait to be off. Loki had put his drivers cap back on. The cold wind tugged at Shadow as he walked, whipped at the sheets. He placed Wednesday down as gently as he could in the back of the bus. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned. Town stood there with his hand out. He was holding something. Here, said Mr. Town, Mister World wanted you to have this. It was a glass eye. There was a hairline crack down the middle of it, and a tiny chip gone from the front. We found it in the Masonic Hall, when we were cleaning up. Keep it for luck. God knows you'll need it. Shadow closed his hand around the eye. He wished he could come back with something smart and sharp, but Town was already back at the Humvee, and climbing up into the car; and Shadow still couldn't think of anything clever to say. * * * They drove east. Dawn found them in Princeton, Missouri. Shadow had not slept yet. Nancy said, Anywhere you want us to drop you? If I were you, I'd rustle up some ID and head for Canada. Or Mexico. I'm sticking with you guys, said Shadow. Its what Wednesday would have wanted. You arent working for him anymore. he's dead. Once we drop his body off, you are free to go. And do what? Keep out of the way, while the war is on, said Nancy. He flipped his turn signal, and took a left. Hide yourself, for a little time, said Czernobog. Then, when this is over, you will come back to me, and I will finish the whole thing. Shadow said, Where are we taking the body? Virginia. Theres a tree, said Nancy. A world tree, said Czernobog with gloomy satisfaction. We had one in my part of the world. But ours grew under the world, not above it. We put him at the foot of the tree, said Nancy. We leave him there. We let you go. We drive south. Theres a battle. Blood is shed. Many die. The world changes, a little. You don't want me at your battle? I'm pretty big. I'm good in a fight. Nancy turned his head to Shadow and smiledthe first real smile Shadow had seen on Mr. Nancys face since he had rescued Shadow from the Lumber County Jail. |
| 536 |
Most of this battle will be fought in a place you cannot go, and you cannot touch. In the hearts and the minds of the people, said Czernobog. Like at the big roundabout. Huh? The carousel, said Mr. Nancy. Oh, said Shadow. Backstage. I got it. Like the desert with the bones in. Mr. Nancy raised his head. Every time I figure you don't have enough sense to bring guts to a bear, you surprise me. Yeah, that's where the real battle will happen. Everythin else will just be flash and thunder. Tell me about the vigil, said Shadow. Someone has to stay with the body. Its a tradition. Well find somebody. He wanted me to do it. No, said Czernobog. It will kill you. Bad, bad, bad idea. Yeah? Itll kill me? To stay with his body? Its not what I'd want at my funeral, said Mr. Nancy. When I die, I just want them to plant me somewhere warm. And then when pretty women walk over my grave I would grab their ankles, like in that movie. I never saw that movie, said Czernobog. Of course you did. Its right at the end. Its the high school movie. All the children goin to the prom. Czernobog shook his head. Shadow said, The films called Carrie, Mr. Czernobog. Okay, one of you tell me about the vigil. Nancy said, You tell him. I'm drivin. I never heard of no film called Carrie. You tell him. Nancy said, The person on the vigilgets tied to the tree. Just like Wednesday was. And then they hang there for nine days and nine nights. No food, no water. All alone. At the end they cut the person down, and if they livedwell, it could happen. And Wednesday will have had his vigil. Czernobog said, Maybe Alviss will send us one of his people. A dwarf could survive it. I'll do it, said Shadow. No, said Mr. Nancy. Yes, said Shadow. The two old men were silent. Then Nancy said, Why? Because its the kind of thing a living person would do, said Shadow. You are crazy, said Czernobog. Maybe. But I'm going to hold Wednesdays vigil. When they stopped for gas Czernobog announced he felt sick and wanted to ride in the front. Shadow didn't mind moving to the back of the bus. He could stretch out more, and sleep. They drove on in silence. Shadow felt that hed made a decision; something big and strange. Hey. Czernobog, said Mr. Nancy, after a while. You check out the technical boy back at the motel? He was not happy. he's been screwin with something that screwed him right back. that's the biggest trouble with the new kidsthey figure they know everythin, and you cant teach them nothin but the hard way. Good, said Czernobog. Shadow was stretched out full length on the seat in the back. He felt like two people, or more than two. There was part of him that felt gently exhilarated: he had done something. He had moved. It wouldn't have mattered if he hadn't wanted to live, but he did want to live, and that made all the difference. He hoped he would live through this, but he was willing to die, if that was what it took to be alive. And, for a moment he thought that the whole thing was funny, just the funniest thing in the world; and he wondered if Laura would appreciate the joke. |
| 537 |
It was silver-gray and it was higher than the farmhouse. It was the most beautiful tree Shadow had ever seen: spectral and yet utterly real and almost perfectly symmetrical. It also looked instantly familiar: he wondered if he had dreamed it, then realized that no, he had seen it before, or a representation of it, many times. It was Wednesdays silver tie pin. The VW bus jolted and bumped across the meadow, and came to a stop about twenty feet from the trunk of the tree. There were three women standing by the tree. At first glance Shadow thought that they were the Zorya, but no, they were three women he did not know. They looked tired and bored, as if they had been standing there for a long time. Each of them held a wooden ladder. The biggest also carried a brown sack. They looked like a set of Russian dolls: a tall oneshe was Shadows height, or even tallera middle-sized one, and a woman so short and hunched that at first glance Shadow wrongly supposed her to be a child. They looked so much alike that Shadow was certain that the women must be sisters. The smallest of the women dropped to a curtsy when the bus drew up. The other two just stared. They were sharing a cigarette, and they smoked it down to the filter before one of them stubbed it out against a root. Czernobog opened the back of the bus and the biggest of the women pushed past him, and, as easily as if it were a sack of flour, she lifted Wednesdays body out of the back and carried it to the tree. She laid it in front of the tree, about ten feet from the trunk. She and her sisters unwrapped Wednesdays body. He looked worse by daylight than he had by candlelight in the motel room, and after one quick glance Shadow looked away. The women arranged his clothes, tidied his suit, then placed him at the corner of the sheet and wound it around him once more. Then the women came over to Shadow. You are the one? the biggest of them asked. The one who will mourn the All-Father? asked the middle-sized one. You have chosen to take the vigil? asked the smallest. Shadow nodded. Afterward, he was unable to remember whether he had actually heard their voices. Perhaps he had simply understood what they had meant from their looks and their eyes. Mr. Nancy, who had gone back to the house to use the bathroom, came walking back to the tree. He was smoking a cigarillo. He looked thoughtful. Shadow, he called. You really don't have to do this. We can find somebody more suited. I'm doing it, said Shadow, simply. And if you die? asked Mr. Nancy. If it kills you? Then, said Shadow, it kills me. Mr. Nancy flicked his cigarillo into the meadow, angrily. I said you had shit for brains, and you still have shit for brains. Cant see when somebodys tryin to give you an out? I'm sorry, said Shadow. He didn't say anything else. Nancy walked back to the bus. Czernobog walked over to Shadow. He did not look pleased. You must come through this alive, he said. Come through this safely for me. And then he tapped his knuckle gently against Shadows forehead and said, Bam! |
| 538 |
He squeezed Shadows shoulder, patted his arm, and went to join Mr. Nancy. The biggest woman, whose name seemed to be Urtha or UrderShadow could not repeat it back to her to her satisfactiontold him, in pantomime, to take off the clothes. All of them? The big woman shrugged. Shadow stripped to his briefs and T-shirt. The women propped the ladders against the tree. One of the laddersit was painted by hand, with little flowers and leaves twining up the strutsthey pointed out to him. He climbed the nine steps. Then, at their urging, he stepped onto a low branch. The middle woman tipped out the contents of the sack onto the meadow-grass. It was filled with a tangle of thin ropes, brown with age and dirt, and the woman began to sort them out into lengths, and to lay them carefully on the ground beside Wednesdays body. They climbed their own ladders now, and they began to knot the ropes, intricate and elegant knots, and they wrapped the ropes first about the tree, and then about Shadow. Unembarrassed, like midwives or nurses or those who lay out corpses, they removed his T-shirt and briefs, then they bound him, never tightly, but firmly and finally. He was amazed at how comfortably the ropes and the knots bore his weight. The ropes went under his arms, between his legs, around his waist, his ankles, his chest, binding him to the tree. The final rope was tied, loosely, about his neck. It was, initially, uncomfortable, but his weight was well distributed, and none of the ropes cut his flesh. His feet were five feet above the ground. The tree was leafless and huge, its branches black against the gray sky, its bark a smooth silvery gray. They took the ladders away. There was a moment of panic as all his weight was taken by the ropes, and he dropped a few inches. Still, he made no sound. The women placed the body, wrapped in its motel-sheet shroud, at the foot of the tree, and they left him there. They left him there alone. Hang me, O hang me, and I'll be dead and gone, Hang me, O hang me, and I'll be dead and gone, I wouldn't mind the hangin, its bein gone so long, Its lyin in the grave so long. Old Song The first day that Shadow hung from the tree he experienced only discomfort that edged slowly into pain, and fear, and, occasionally, an emotion that was somewhere between boredom and apathy: a gray acceptance, a waiting. He hung. The wind was still. After several hours fleeting bursts of color started to explode across his vision in blossoms of crimson and gold, throbbing and pulsing with a life of their own. The pain in his arms and legs became, by degrees, intolerable. If he relaxed them, let his body go slack and dangle, if he flopped forward, then the rope around his neck would take up the slack and the world would shimmer and swim. So he pushed himself back against the trunk of the tree. He could feel his heart laboring in his chest, a pounding arrhythmic tattoo as it pumped the blood through his body Emeralds and sapphires and rubies crystallized and burst in front of his eyes. |
| 539 |
His breath came in shallow gulps. The bark of the tree was rough against his back. The chill of the afternoon on his naked skin made him shiver, made his flesh prickle and goose. Its easy, said someone in the back of his head. Theres a trick to it. You do it or you die. He was pleased with the thought, and repeated it over and over in the back of his head, part mantra, part nursery rhyme, rattling along to the drumbeat of his heart. Its easy, theres a trick to it, you do it or you die. Its easy, theres a trick to it, you do it or you die. Its easy, theres a trick to it, you do it or you die. Its easy, theres a trick to it, you do it or you die. Time passed. The chanting continued. He could hear it. Someone was repeating the words, only stopping when Shadows mouth began to dry out, when his tongue turned dry and skinlike in his mouth. He pushed himself up and away from the tree with his feet, trying to support his weight in a way that would still allow him to fill his lungs. He breathed until he could hold himself up no more, and then he fell back into the bonds, and hung from the tree. When the chattering startedan angry, laughing chattering noisehe closed his mouth, concerned that it was he himself making it; but the noise continued. Its the world laughing at me, then, thought Shadow. His head lolled to one side. Something ran down the tree trunk beside him, stopping beside his head; It cluttered loudly in his ear, one word, which sounded a lot like ratatosk. Shadow tried to repeat it, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He turned, slowly, and stared into the gray-brown face and pointed ears of a squirrel. In close-up, he learned, a squirrel looks a lot less cute than it does from a distance. The creature was ratlike and dangerous, not sweet or charming. And its teeth looked sharp. He hoped that it would not perceive him as a threat, or as a food source. He did not think that squirrels were carnivorousbut then, so many things he had thought were not had turned out to be so He slept. The pain woke him several times in the next few hours. It pulled him from a dark dream in which dead children rose and came to him, their eyes peeling, swollen pearls, and they reproached him for failing them. A spider edged across his face, and he woke. He shook his head, dislodging or frightening it, and returned to his dreams and now an elephant-headed man, potbellied, one tusk broken, was riding toward him on the back of a huge mouse. The elephant-headed man curled his trunk toward Shadow and said, If you had invoked me before you began this journey, perhaps some of your troubles might have been avoided. Then the elephant took the mouse, which had, by some means that Shadow could not perceive, become tiny while not changing in size at all, and passed it from hand to hand to hand, fingers curling about it as the little creature scampered from palm to palm, and Shadow was not at all surprised when the elephant-headed god finally opened all four of his hands to reveal them perfectly empty. |
| 540 |
* * * By the following morning the pain was no longer local, not confined to the places where the ropes cut into his flesh, or where the bark scraped his skin. Now the pain was everywhere. And he was hungry, with empty pangs down in the pit of him. His head was pounding. Sometimes he imagined that he had stopped breathing, that his heart had ceased to beat. Then he would hold his breath until he could hear his heart pounding an ocean in his ears and he was forced to suck air like a diver surfacing from the depths. It seemed to him that the tree reached from hell to heaven, and that he had been hanging there forever. A brown hawk circled the tree, landed on a broken branch near to him, and then took to the wing, flying west. The storm, which had abated at dawn, began to return as the day passed. Gray, roiling clouds stretched from horizon to horizon; a slow drizzle began to fall. The body at the base of the tree seemed to have become less, in its stained motel winding sheet, crumbling into itself like a sugar cake left in the rain. Sometimes Shadow burned, sometimes he froze. When the thunder started once more he imagined that he heard drums beating, kettledrums in the thunder and the thump of his heart, inside his head or outside, it did not matter. He perceived the pain in colors: the red of a neon bar sign, the green of a traffic light on a wet night, the blue of an empty video screen. The squirrel dropped from the bark of the trunk onto Shadows shoulder, sharp claws digging into his skin. Ratatosk! it chattered. The tip of its nose touched his lips. Ratatosk. It sprang back onto the tree. His skin was on fire with pins and needles, a pricking covering his whole body. The sensation was intolerable. His life was laid out below him, on the motel-sheet shroud: literally laid out, like the items at some Dada picnic, a surrealist tableau: he could see his mothers puzzled stare, the American embassy in Norway, Lauras eyes on their wedding day He chuckled through dry lips. Whats so funny, puppy? asked Laura. Our wedding day, he said. You bribed the organist to change from playing the Wedding March to the theme song from Scooby-Doo as you walked toward me down the aisle. Do you remember? Of course I remember, darling. I would have made it too, if it wasnt for those meddling kids. I loved you so much, said Shadow. He could feel her lips on his, and they were warm and wet and living, not cold and dead, so he knew that this was another hallucination. You arent here, are you? he asked. No, she said. But you are calling me, for the last time. And I am coming. Breathing was harder now. The ropes cutting his flesh were an abstract concept, like free will or eternity. Sleep, puppy, she said, although he thought it might have been his own voice he heard, and he slept. * * * The sun was a pewter coin in a leaden sky. Shadow was, he realized slowly, awake, and he was cold. But the part of him that understood that seemed very far away from the rest of him. Somewhere in the distance he was aware that his mouth and throat were burning, painful, and cracked. |
| 541 |
Sometimes, in the daylight, he would see stars fall; other times he saw huge birds, the size of delivery trucks, flying toward him. Nothing reached him; nothing touched him. Ratatosk. Ratatosk. The chattering had become a scolding. The squirrel landed, heavily, with sharp claws, on his shoulder and stared into his face. He wondered if he were hallucinating: the animal was holding a walnut shell, like a dolls-house cup, in its front paws. The animal pressed the shell to Shadows lips. Shadow felt the water, and, involuntarily, he sucked it into his mouth, drinking from the tiny cup. He ran the water around his cracked lips, his dry tongue. He wet his mouth with it, and swallowed what was left, which was not much. The squirrel leapt back to the tree, and ran down it, toward the roots, and then, in seconds, or minutes, or hours, Shadow could not tell which (all the clocks in his mind were broken, he thought, and their gears and cogs and springs were simply a jumble down there in the writhing grass), the squirrel returned with its walnut-shell cup, climbing carefully, and Shadow drank the water it brought to him. The muddy-iron taste of the water filled his mouth, cooled his parched throat. It eased his fatigue and his madness. By the third walnut shell, he was no longer thirsty. He began to struggle, then, pulling at the ropes, flailing his body, trying to get down, to get free, to get away. He moaned. The knots were good. The ropes were strong, and they held, and soon he exhausted himself once more. * * * In his delirium, Shadow became the tree. Its roots went deep into the loam of the earth, deep down into time, into the hidden springs. He felt the spring of the woman called Urd, which is to say, Past. She was huge, a giantess, an underground mountain of a woman, and the waters she guarded were the waters of time. Other roots went to other places. Some of them were secret. Now, when he was thirsty, he pulled water from his roots, pulled them up into the body of his being. He had a hundred arms that broke into a hundred thousand fingers, and all of his fingers reached up into the sky. The weight of the sky was heavy on his shoulders. It was not that the discomfort was lessened, but the pain belonged to the figure hanging from the tree, rather than to the tree itself. Shadow in his madness was now so much more than the man on the tree. He was the tree, and he was the wind rattling the bare branches of the world tree; he was the gray sky and the tumbling clouds; he was Ratatosk the squirrel running from the deepest roots to the highest branches; he was the mad-eyed hawk who sat on a broken branch at the top of the tree surveying the world; he was the worm in the heart of the tree. The stars wheeled, and he passed his hundred hands over the glittering stars, palming them, switching them, vanishing them * * * A moment of clarity, in the pain and the madness: Shadow felt himself surfacing. He knew it would not be for long. The morning sun was dazzling him. |
| 542 |
He closed his eyes, wishing he could shade them. There was not long to go. He knew that, too. When he opened his eyes, Shadow saw that there was a young man in the tree with him. His skin was dark brown. His forehead was high and his dark hair was tightly curled. He was sitting on a branch high above Shadows head. Shadow could see him clearly by craning his head. And the man was mad. Shadow could see that at a glance. you're naked, confided the madman, in a cracked voice. I'm naked too. I see that, croaked Shadow. The madman looked at him, then he nodded and twisted his head down and around, as if he were trying to remove a crick from his neck. Eventually he said, Do you know me? No, said Shadow. I know you. I watched you in Cairo. I watched you after. My sister likes you. You are the name escaped him. Eats roadkill. Yes. You are Horus. The madman nodded. Horus, he said. I am the falcon of the morning, the hawk of the afternoon. I am the sun, as you are. And I know the true name of Ra. My mother told me. that's great, said Shadow, politely. The madman stared at the ground below them intently, saying nothing. Then he dropped from the tree. A hawk fell like a stone to the ground, pulled out of its plummet into a swoop, beat its wings heavily and flew back to the tree, a baby rabbit in its talons. It landed on a branch closer to Shadow. Are you hungry? asked the madman. No, said Shadow. I guess I should be, but I'm not. I'm hungry, said the madman. He ate the rabbit rapidly, pulling it apart, sucking, tearing, rending. At he finished with them, he dropped the gnawed bones and the fur to the ground. He walked farther down the branch until he was only an arms length from Shadow. Then he peered at Shadow unselfconsciously, inspecting him with care and caution, from his feet to his head. There was rabbit blood on his chin and his chest, and he wiped it off with the back of his hand. Shadow felt he had to say something. Hey, he said. Hey, said the madman. He stood up on the branch, turned away from Shadow and let a stream of dark urine arc out into the meadow below. It went on for a long time. When he had finished he crouched down again on the branch. What do they call you? asked Horus. Shadow, said Shadow. The madman nodded. You are the shadow. I am the light, he said. Everything that is, casts a shadow. Then he said, They will fight soon. I was watching them as they started to arrive. And then the madman said, You are dying. Arent you? But Shadow could no longer speak. A hawk took wing, and circled slowly upward, riding the updrafts into the morning. * * * Moonlight. A cough shook Shadows frame, a racking painful cough that stabbed his chest and his throat. He gagged for breath. Hey, puppy, called a voice that he knew. He looked down. The moonlight burned whitely through the branches of the tree, bright as day, and there was a woman standing in the moonlight on the ground below him, her face a pale oval. The wind rattled in the branches of the tree. Hi, puppy, she said. |
| 543 |
He tried to speak, but he coughed instead, deep in his chest, for a long time. You know, she said, helpfully, that doesn't sound good. He croaked, Hello, Laura. She looked up at him with dead eyes, and she smiled. How did you find me? he asked. She was silent, for a while, in the moonlight. Then she said, You are the nearest thing I have to life. You are the only thing I have left, the only thing that isn't bleak and flat and gray. I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are. He looked down at the woman in the moonlight, and his eyes stung with tears. I'll cut you down, she said, after a while. I spend too much time rescuing you, don't I? He coughed again. Then, No, leave me. I have to do this. She looked up at him, and shook her head. you're crazy, she said. you're dying up there. Or you'll be crippled, if you arent already. Maybe, he said. But I'm alive. Yes, she said, after a moment. I guess you are. You told me, he said. In the graveyard. It seems like such a long time ago, puppy, she said. Then she said, I feel better, here. It doesn't hurt as much. You know what I mean? But I'm so dry. The wind let up, and he could smell her now: a stink of rotten meat and sickness and decay, pervasive and unpleasant. I lost my job, she said. It was a night job, but they said people had complained. I told them I was sick, and they said they didn't care. I'm so thirsty. The women, he told her. They have water. The house. Puppy she sounded scared. Tell themtell them I said to give you water The white face stared up at him. I should go, she told him. Then she hacked, and made a face, and spat a mass of something white onto the grass. It broke up when it hit the ground, and wriggled away. It was almost impossible to breathe. His chest felt heavy, and his head was swaying. Stay he said, in a breath that was almost a whisper, unsure whether or not she could hear him. Please don't go. He started to cough. Stay the night. I'll stop awhile, she said. And then, like a mother to a child, she said, Nothings gonna hurt you when I'm here. You know that? Shadow coughed once more. He closed his eyesonly for a moment, he thought, but when he opened them again the moon had set and he was alone. * * * A crashing and a pounding in his head, beyond the pain of migraine, beyond all pain. Everything dissolved into tiny butterflies which circled him like a multicolored dust storm and then evaporated into the night. The white sheet wrapped about the body at the base of the tree flapped noisily in the morning wind. The pounding eased. Everything slowed. There was nothing left to make him keep breathing. His heart ceased to beat in his chest. The darkness that he entered this time was deep, and lit by a single star, and it was final. I know its crooked. But its the only game in town. Canada Bill Jones The tree was gone, and the world was gone, and the morning-gray sky above him was gone. |
| 544 |
The sky was now the color of midnight. There was a single cold star shining high above him, a blazing, twinkling light, and nothing else. He took a single step and almost tripped. Shadow looked down. There were steps cut into the rock, going down, steps so huge that he could only imagine that giants had cut them and descended them a long time ago. He clambered downward, half jumping, half vaulting from step to step. His body ached, but it was the ache of lack of use, not the tortured ache of a body that has hung on a tree until it was dead. He observed, without surprise, that he was now fully dressed, in jeans and a white T-shirt. He was barefoot. He experienced a profound moment of deja vu: this was what he had been wearing when he stood in Czernobogs apartment the night when Zorya Polunochnaya had come to him and told him about the constellation called Odins Wain. She had taken the moon down from the sky for him. He knew, suddenly, what would happen next. Zorya Polunochnaya would be there. She was waiting for him at the bottom of the steps. There was no moon in the sky, but she was bathed in moonlight nonetheless: her white hair was moon-pale, and she wore the same lace-and-cotton nightdress she had worn that night in Chicago. She smiled when she saw him, and looked down, as if momentarily embarrassed. Hello, she said. Hi, said Shadow. How are you? I don't know, he said. I think this is maybe another strange dream on the tree. I've been having crazy dreams since I got out of prison. Her face was silvered by the moonlight (but no moon hung in that plum-black sky, and now, at the foot of the steps, even the single star was lost to view) and she looked both solemn and vulnerable. She said, All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them. Beyond her, the path forked. He would have to decide which path to take, he knew that. But there was one thing he had to do first. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and was relieved when he felt the familiar weight of the coin at the bottom of the pocket. He eased it out, held it between finger and thumb: a 1922 Liberty dollar. This is yours, he said. He remembered then that his clothes were really at the foot of the tree. The women had placed his clothes in the canvas sack from which they had taken the ropes, and tied the end of the sack, and the biggest of the women had placed a heavy rock on it to stop it from blowing away. And so he knew that, in reality, the Liberty dollar was in a pocket in that sack, beneath the rock. But still, it was heavy in his hand, at the entrance to the underworld. She took it from his palm with her slim fingers. Thank you. It bought you your liberty twice, she said. And now it will light your way into dark places. She closed her hand around the dollar, then she reached up and placed it in the air, as high as she could reach. Then she let go of it. Instead of falling, the coin floated upward until it was a foot or so above Shadows head. |
| 545 |
The path he followed twisted and wound and curled back on itself, and it put him in mind of snakeskins and intestines and of deep, deep tree roots. There was a pool to his left; he heard the drip, drip of water into it somewhere at the back of the tunnel, the falling water barely ruffling the mirrored surface of the pool. He dropped to his knees and drank, using his hand to bring the water to his lips. Then he walked on until he was standing in the floating disco-glitter patterns of a mirror ball. It was like being in the exact center of the universe with all the stars and planets circling him, and he could not hear anything, not the music, nor the shouted conversations over the music, and now Shadow was staring at a woman who looked just like his mother never looked in all the years he knew her, she's little more than a child, after all And she is dancing. Shadow found that he was completely unsurprised when he recognized the man who dances with her. He had not changed that much in thirty-three years. She is drunk: Shadow could see that at a glance. She is not very drunk, but she is unused to drink, and in a week or so she will take a ship to Norway. They have been drinking margaritas, and she has salt on her lips and salt clinging to the back of her hand. Wednesday is not wearing a suit and tie, but the pin in the shape of a silver tree he wears over the pocket of his shirt glitters and glints when the mirror-ball light catches it. They make a fine-looking couple, considering the difference in their ages. There is a lupine grace to Wednesdays movements. A slow dance. He pulls her close to him, and his pawlike hand curves around the seat of her skirt possessively, moving her closer to him. His other hand takes her chin, pushes it upward into his face, and the two of them kiss, there on the floor, as the glitter-ball lights circle them into the center of the universe. Soon after, they leave. She sways against him, and he leads her from the dance hall. Shadow buried his head in his hands, and did not follow them, unable or unwilling to witness his own conception. The mirror lights were gone, and now the only illumination came from the tiny moon that burned high above his head. He walked on. At a bend in the path he stopped for a moment to catch his breath. He felt a hand run gently up his back, and gentle fingers ruffle the hair on the back of his head. Hello, whispered a smoky feline voice, over his shoulder. Hello, he said, turning to face her. She had brown hair and brown skin and her eyes were the deep golden-amber of good honey. Her pupils were vertical slits. Do I know you? he asked, puzzled. Intimately, she said, and she smiled. I used to sleep on your bed. And my people have been keeping their eyes on you, for me. She turned to the path ahead of him, pointed to the three ways he could go. Okay, she said. One way will make you wise. One way will make you whole. And one way will kill you. I'm already dead, I think, said Shadow. I died on the tree. |
| 546 |
She made a moue. Theres dead, she said, and theres dead, and theres dead. Its a relative thing. Then she smiled again. I could make a joke about that, you know. Something about dead relatives. No, said Shadow. Its okay. So, she said. Which way do you want to go? I don't know, he admitted. She tipped her head on one side, a perfectly feline gesture. Suddenly, Shadow remembered the claw marks on his shoulder. He felt himself beginning to blush. If you trust me, said Bast, I can choose for you. I trust you, he said, without hesitation. Do you want to know what its going to cost you? I've already lost my name, he told her. Names come and names go. Was it worth it? Yes. Maybe. It wasnt easy. As revelations go, it was kind of personal. All revelations are personal, she said. that's why all revelations are suspect. I don't understand. No, she said, you don't. I'll take your heart. Well need it later, and she reached her hand deep inside his chest, and she pulled it out with something ruby and pulsing held between her sharp fingernails. It was the color of pigeons blood, and it was made of pure light. Rhythmically it expanded and contracted. She closed her hand, and it was gone. Take the middle way, she said. Shadow nodded, and walked on. The path was becoming slippery now. There was ice on the rock. The moon above him glittered through the ice crystals in the air: there was a ring about the moon, a moon-bow, diffusing the light. It was beautiful, but it made walking harder. The path was unreliable. He reached the place where the path divided. He looked at the first path with a feeling of recognition. It opened into a vast chamber, or a set of chambers, like a dark museum. He knew it already. He could hear the long echoes of tiny noises. He could hear the noise that the dust makes as it settles. It was the place that he had dreamed of, that first night that Laura had come to him, in the motel so long ago; the endless memorial hall to the gods that were forgotten, and the ones whose very existence had been lost. He took a step backward. He walked to the path on the far side, and looked ahead. There was a Disneyland quality to the corridor: black Plexiglas walls with lights set in them. The colored lights blinked and flashed in the illusion of order, for no particular reason, like the console lights on a television starship. He could hear something there as well: a deep vibrating bass drone, which Shadow could feel in the pit of his stomach. He stopped and looked around. Neither way seemed right. Not any longer. He was done with paths. The middle way, the way the cat-woman had told him to walk, that was his way. He moved toward it. The moon above him was beginning to fade: the edge of it was pinking and going into eclipse. The path was framed by a huge doorway. Shadow walked through the arch, in darkness. The air was warm, and it smelled of wet dust, like a city street after the summers first rain. He was not afraid. Not anymore. Fear had died on the tree, as Shadow had died. |
| 547 |
The smoke cleared and the boatman was once more a half-human creature with the head of a river bird. Mister Ibis? Good to see you, said the creature, with Mr. Ibiss voice. Do you know what a psychopomp is? Shadow thought he knew the word, but it had been a long time. He shook his head. Its a fancy term for an escort, said Mr. Ibis. We all have so many functions, so many ways of existing. In my own vision of myself, I am a scholar who lives quietly, and pens his little tales, and dreams about a past that may or may not ever have existed. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I am also, in one of my capacities, like so many of the people you have chosen to associate with, a psychopomp. I escort the living to the world of the dead. I thought this was the world of the dead, said Shadow. No. Not per se. Its more of a preliminary. The boat slipped and slid across the mirror-surface of the underground pool. And then Mr. Ibis said, without moving its beak, You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color. You cant, said Shadow. Can you? The echoes whispered his words back at him from across the pool. What you have to remember, said Mr. Ibis, testily, is that life and death are different sides of the same coin. Like the heads and tails of a quarter. And if I had a double-headed quarter? You don't. Shadow had a frisson, then, as they crossed the dark water. He imagined he could see the faces of children staring up at him reproachfully from beneath the waters glassy surface: their faces were waterlogged and softened, their blind eyes clouded. There was no wind in that underground cavern to disturb the black surface of the lake. So I'm dead, said Shadow. He was getting used to the idea. Or I'm going to be dead. We are on our way to the Hall of the Dead. I requested that I be the one to come for you. Why? You were a hard worker. Why not? Because Shadow marshaled his thoughts. Because I never believed in you. Because I don't know much about Egyptian mythology. Because I didn't expect this. What happened to Saint Peter and the Pearly Gates? The long-beaked white head shook from side to side, gravely. It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us, said Mr. Ibis. We believed in you. The boat touched bottom. Mr. Ibis stepped off the side, into the pool, and told Shadow to do the same. Mr. Ibis took a line from the prow of the boat, and passed Shadow the lantern to carry. It was in the shape of a crescent moon. They walked ashore, and Mr. Ibis tied the boat to a metal ring set in the rock floor. Then he took the lamp from Shadow and walked swiftly forward, holding the lamp high as he walked, throwing vast shadows across the rock floor and the high rock walls. Are you scared? asked Mr. Ibis. Not really. Well, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror, as we walk. They are the appropriate feelings for the situation at hand. |
| 548 |
Shadow was not scared. He was interested, and apprehensive, but no more. He was not scared of the shifting darkness, nor of being dead, nor even of the dog-headed creature the size of a grain silo who stared at them as they approached. It growled, deep in its throat, and Shadow felt his neck hairs prickle. Shadow, it said. Now is the time of judgment. Shadow looked up at the creature. Mr. Jacquel? he said. The hands of Anubis came down, huge dark hands, and they picked Shadow up and brought him close. The jackal head examined him with bright and glittering eyes; examined him as dispassionately as Mr. Jacquel had examined the dead girl on the slab. Shadow knew that all his faults, all his failings, all his weaknesses were being taken out and weighed and measured; that he was, in some way, being dissected, and sliced, and tasted. We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them. He was as naked and as open as a corpse on a table, and dark Anubis the jackal god was his prosector and his prosecutor and his persecutor. Please, said Shadow. Please stop. But the examination did not stop. Every lie he had ever told, every object he had stolen, every hurt he had inflicted on another person, all the little crimes and the tiny murders that make up the day, each of these things and more were extracted and held up to the light by the jackal-headed judge of the dead. Shadow began to weep, painfully, in the palm of the dark gods hand. He was a tiny child again, as helpless and as powerless as he had ever been. And then, without warning, it was over. Shadow panted, and sobbed, and snot streamed from his nose; he still felt helpless, but the hands placed him, carefully, almost tenderly, down on the rock floor. Who has his heart? growled Anubis. I do, purred a womans voice. Shadow looked up. Bast was standing there beside the thing that was no longer Mr. Ibis, and she held Shadows heart in her right hand. It lit her face with a ruby light. Give it to me, said Thoth, the Ibis-headed god, and he took the heart in his hands, which were not human hands, and he glided forward. Anubis placed a pair of golden scales in front of him. So is this where we find out what I get? whispered Shadow to Bast. Heaven? Hell? Purgatory? If the feather balances, she said, you get to choose your own destination. And if not? She shrugged, as if the subject made her uncomfortable. Then she said, Then we feed your heart and your soul to Ammet, the Eater of Souls Maybe, he said. Maybe I can get some kind of a happy ending. Not only are there no happy endings, she told him, there arent even any endings. On one of the pans of the scales, carefully, reverently, Anubis placed a feather. |
| 549 |
Thousands of men, women, and children died on the way. When youve won, youve won, and nobody can argue with that. For whoever controlled Lookout Mountain controlled the land; that was the legend. It was a sacred site, after all, and it was a high place. In the Civil War, the War Between the States, there was a battle there: the Battle Above the Clouds, that was the first days fighting, and then the Union forces did the impossible and, without orders, swept up Missionary Ridge and took it. The North took Lookout Mountain and the North took the war. There are tunnels and caves, some very old, beneath Lookout Mountain. For the most part they are blocked off now, although a local businessman excavated an underground waterfall, which he called Ruby Falls. It can be reached by elevator. Its a tourist attraction, although the biggest tourist attraction of all is at the top of Lookout Mountain. That is Rock City. Rock City begins as an ornamental garden on a mountainside: its visitors walk a path that takes them through rocks, over rocks, between rocks. They throw corn into a deer enclosure, cross a hanging bridge and peer out through a quarter-a-throw binoculars at a view that promises them seven states on the rare sunny days when the air is perfectly clear. And from there, like a drop into some strange hell, the path takes the visitors, millions upon millions of them every year, down into caverns, where they stare at back-lit dolls arranged into nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale dioramas. When they leave, they leave bemused, uncertain of why they came, of what they have seen, of whether they had a good time or not. * * * They came to Lookout Mountain from all across the United States. They were not tourists. They came by car and they came by plane and by bus and by railroad and on foot. Some of them flewthey flew low, and they flew only in the dark of the night. Several of them traveled their own ways beneath the earth. Many of them hitchhiked, cadging rides from nervous motorists or from truck drivers. Those who had cars or trucks would see the ones who had not walking beside the roads or at rest stations and in diners on the way, and, recognizing them for what they were, would offer them rides. They arrived dust-stained and weary at the foot of Lookout Mountain. Looking up to the heights of the tree-covered slope they could see, or imagine that they could see, the paths and gardens and waterfall of Rock City. They started arriving early in the morning. A second wave of them arrived at dusk. And for several days they simply kept coming. A battered U-Haul truck pulled up, disgorging several travel-weary vila and rusalka, their makeup smudged, runs in their stockings, their expressions heavy-lidded and tired. In a clump of trees at the bottom of the hill, an elderly wampyr offered a Marlboro to a naked apelike creature covered with a tangle of orange fur. It accepted graciously, and they smoked in silence, side by side. A Toyota Previa pulled over by the side of the road, and seven Chinese men and women got out of it. |
| 550 |
They looked, above all, clean, and they wore the kind of dark suits that, in some countries, are worn by minor government officials. One of them carried a clipboard, and he checked the inventory as they unloaded large golf bags from the back of the car: the bags contained ornate swords with lacquer handles, and carved sticks, and mirrors. The weapons were distributed, checked off, signed for. A once-famous comedian, believed to have died in the 1920s, climbed out of his rusting car and proceeded to remove his clothing: his legs were goat legs, and his tail was short and goatish. Four Mexicans arrived, all smiles, their hair black and very shiny: they passed among themselves a bottle that they kept out of sight in a brown paper bag, its contents a bitter mixture of powdered chocolate, liquor, and blood. A small, dark-bearded man with a dusty black derby on his head, curling payess at his temples, and a ragged fringed prayer shawl came to them walking across the fields. He was several feet in front of his companion, who was twice his height and was the blank gray color of good Polish clay: the word inscribed on his forehead meant truth. They kept coming. A cab drew up and several Rakshasas, the demons of the Indian subcontinent, climbed out and milled around, staring at the people at the bottom of the hill without speaking, until they found Mama-ji, her eyes closed, her lips moving in prayer. She was the only thing here that was familiar to them, but still, they hesitated to approach her, remembering old battles. Her hands rubbed the necklace of skulls about her neck. Her brown skin became slowly black, the glassy black of jet, of obsidian: her lips curled and her long white teeth were very sharp. She opened all her eyes, beckoned the Rakshasas to her, and greeted them as she would have greeted her own children. The storms of the last few days, to the north and the east, had done nothing to ease the feeling of pressure and discomfort in the air. Local weather forecasters had begun to warn of cells that might spawn tornados, of high-pressure areas that did not move. It was warm by day there, but the nights were cold. They clumped together in informal companies, banding together sometimes by nationality, by race, by temperament, even by species. They looked apprehensive. They looked tired. Some of them were talking. There was laughter, on occasion, but it was muted and sporadic. Six-packs of beer were handed around. Several local men and women came walking over the meadows, their bodies moving in unfamiliar ways: their voices, when they spoke, were the voices of the Loa who rode them: a tall black man spoke in the voice of Papa Legba who opens the gates; while Baron Samedi, the voudon lord of death, had taken over the body of a teenage goth girl from Chattanooga, possibly because she possessed her own black silk top hat, which sat on her dark hair at a jaunty angle. She spoke in the Barons own deep voice, smoked a cigar of enormous size, and commanded three of the Gede, the Loa of the dead. |
| 551 |
The Gede inhabited the bodies of three middle-aged brothers. They carried shotguns and told jokes of such astounding filthiness that only they were willing to laugh at them, which they did, raucously. Two ageless Chickamauga women, in oil-stained blue jeans and battered leather jackets, walked around, watching the people and the preparations for battle. Sometimes they pointed and shook their heads. They did not intend to take part in the coming conflict. The moon swelled and rose in the east, a day away from full. It seemed half as big as the sky, as it rose, a deep reddish-orange, immediately above the hills. As it crossed the sky it seemed to shrink and pale until it hung high in the sky like a lantern. There were so many of them waiting there, in the moonlight, at the foot of Lookout Mountain. * * * Laura was thirsty. Sometimes living people burned steadily in her mind like candles and sometimes they flamed like torches. It made them easy to avoid, and it made them easy, on occasion, to find. Shadow had burned so strangely, with his own light, up on that tree. She had chided him once, when they had walked and held hands, for not being alive. She had hoped, then, to see a spark of raw emotion. To have seen anything. She remembered walking beside him, wishing that he could understand what she was trying to say. But dying on the tree, Shadow had been utterly alive. She had watched him as the life had faded, and he had been focused and real. And he had asked her to stay with him, to stay the whole night. He had forgiven herperhaps he had forgiven her. It did not matter. He had changed; that was all she knew. Shadow had told her to go to the farmhouse, that they would give her water to drink there. There were no lights burning in the farm building, and she could feel nobody at home. But he had told her that they would care for her. She pushed against the door of the farmhouse and it opened, rusty hinges protesting the whole while. Something moved in her left lung, something that pushed and squirmed and made her cough. She found herself in a narrow hallway, her way almost blocked by a tall and dusty piano. The inside of the building smelled of old damp. She squeezed past the piano, pushed open a door and found herself in a dilapidated drawing room, filled with ramshackle furniture. An oil lamp burned on the mantelpiece. There was a coal fire burning in the fireplace beneath it, although she had neither seen nor smelled smoke outside the house. The coal fire did nothing to lift the chill she felt in that room, although, Laura was willing to concede, that might not be the fault of the room. Death hurt Laura, although the hurt consisted mostly of things that were not there: a parching thirst that drained every cell of her, an absence of heat in her bones that was absolute. Sometimes she would catch herself wondering whether the crisp and crackling flames of a pyre would warm her, or the soft brown blanket of the earth; whether the cold sea would quench her thirst The room, she realized, was not empty. |
| 552 |
And by the time the frog notices that theres anything wrong, its already been cooked. The world in which he worked was all too weird. There was no solid ground beneath his feet; the water in the pot was bubbling fiercely. When hed been transferred to the Agency it had all seemed so simple. Now it was all sonot complex, he decided; merely bizarre. He had been sitting in Mr. Worlds office at two that morning, and he had been told what he was to do. You got it? said Mr. World, handing him the knife in its dark leather sheath. Cut me a stick. It doesn't have to be longer than a couple of feet. Affirmative, he said. And then he said, Why do I have to do this, sir? Because I tell you to, said Mr. World, flatly. Find the tree. Do the job. Meet me down in Chattanooga. don't waste any time. And what about the asshole? Shadow? If you see him, just avoid him. don't touch him. don't even mess with him. I don't want you turning him into a martyr. Theres no room for martyrs in the current game plan. He smiled then, his scarred smile. Mr. World was easily amused. Mr. Town had noticed this on several occasions. It had amused him to play chauffeur, in Kansas, after all. Look No martyrs, Town. And Town had nodded, and taken the knife in its sheath, and pushed the rage that welled up inside him down deep and away. Mr. Towns hatred of Shadow had become a part of him. As he was falling asleep he would see Shadows solemn face, see that smile that wasnt a smile, the way Shadow had of smiling without smiling that made Town want to sink his fist into the mans gut, and even as he fell asleep he could feel his jaws squeeze together, his temples tense, his gullet burn. He drove the Ford Explorer across the meadow, past an abandoned farmhouse. He crested a ridge and saw the tree. He parked the car a little way past it, and turned off the engine. The clock on the dashboard said it was 6:38 A. M. He left the keys in the car, and walked toward the tree. The tree was large; it seemed to exist on its own sense of scale. Town could not have said if it was fifty feet high or two hundred. Its bark was the gray of a fine silk scarf. There was a naked man tied to the trunk a little way above the ground by a webwork of ropes, and there was something wrapped in a sheet at the foot of the tree. Town realized what it was as he passed it. He pushed at the sheet with his foot. Wednesdays ruined half-a-face stared out at him. Town reached the tree. He walked a little way around the thick trunk, away from the sightless eyes of the farmhouse, then he unzipped his fly and pissed against the trunk of the tree. He did up his fly. He walked back over to the house, found a wooden extension ladder, carried it back to the tree. He leaned it carefully against the trunk. Then he climbed up it. Shadow hung, limply, from the ropes that tied him to the tree. Town wondered if the man was still alive: his chest did not rise or fall. Dead or almost dead, it did not matter. Hello, asshole, Town said, aloud. Shadow did not move. |
| 553 |
Town reached the top of the ladder, and he pulled out the knife. He found a small branch that seemed to meet Mr. Worlds specifications, and hacked at the base of it with the knife blade, cutting it half through, then breaking it off with his hand. It was about thirty inches long. He put the knife back in its sheath. Then he started to climb back down the ladder. When he was opposite Shadow, he paused. God, I hate you, he said. He wished he could just have taken out a gun and shot him, and he knew that he could not. And then he jabbed the stick in the air toward the hanging man, in a stabbing motion. It was an instinctive gesture, containing all the frustration and rage inside Town. He imagined that he was holding a spear and twisting it into Shadows guts. Come on, he said, aloud. Time to get moving. Then he thought, First sign of madness. Talking to yourself. He climbed down a few more steps, then jumped the rest of the way to the ground. He looked at the stick he was holding, and felt like a small boy, holding his stick as a sword or a spear. I could have cut a stick from any tree, he thought. It didn't have to be this tree. Who the fuck would have known? And he thought, Mr. World would have known. He carried the ladder back to the farmhouse. From the corner of his eye he thought he saw something move, and he looked in through the window, into the dark room filled with broken furniture, with the plaster peeling from the walls, and for a moment, in a half dream, he imagined that he saw three women sitting in the dark parlor. One of them was knitting. One of them was staring directly at him. One of them appeared to be asleep. The woman who was staring at him began to smile, a huge smile that seemed to split her face lengthwise, a smile that crossed from ear to ear. Then she raised a finger and touched it to her neck, and ran it gently from one side of her neck to the other. That was what he thought he saw, all in a moment, in that empty room, which contained, he saw at a second glance, nothing more than old rotting furniture and fly-spotted prints and dry rot. There was nobody there at all. He rubbed his eyes. Town walked back to the brown Ford Explorer and climbed in. He tossed the stick onto the white leather of the passenger seat. He turned the key in the ignition. The dashboard clock said 6:37 A. M. Town frowned, and checked his wristwatch, which blinked that it was 13:58. Great, he thought. I was either up on that tree for eight hours, or for minus a minute. That was what he thought, but what he believed was that both timepieces had, coincidentally, begun to misbehave. On the tree, Shadows body began to bleed. The wound was in his side. The blood that came from it was slow and thick and molasses-black. * * * Clouds covered the top of Lookout Mountain. Easter sat some distance away from the crowd at the bottom of the mountain, watching the dawn over the hills to the east. She had a chain of blue forget-me-nots tattooed around her left wrist, and she rubbed them absently, with her right thumb. |
| 554 |
The houses were set back from the roads; there were no welcoming lights. Now the fuel gauge was nudging Empty. He heard a rumble of distant thunder, and a single drop of rain splashed heavily onto his windshield. So when Town saw the woman, walking along the side of the road, he found himself smiling, involuntarily. Thank God, he said, aloud, and he drew up beside her. He thumbed down the window. Maam? I'm sorry. I'm kind of lost. Can you tell me how to get to Highway Eighty-one from here? She looked at him through the open passenger-side window and said, You know. I don't think I can explain it. But I can show you, if you like. She was pale, and her wet hair was long and dark. Climb in, said Town. He didn't even hesitate. First thing, we need to buy some gas. Thanks, she said. I needed a ride. She got in. Her eyes were astonishingly blue. Theres a stick here, on the seat, she said, puzzled. Just throw it in the back. Where are you heading? he asked. Lady, if you can get me to a gas station, and back to a freeway, I'll take you all the way to your own front door. She said, Thank you. But I think I'm going farther than you are. If you can get me to the freeway, that will be fine. Maybe a trucker will give me a ride. And she smiled, a crooked, determined smile. It was the smile that did it. Maam, he said, I can give you a finer ride than any trucker. He could smell her perfume. It was heady and heavy, a cloying scent, like magnolias or lilacs, but he did not mind. I'm going to Georgia, she said. Its a long way. I'm going to Chattanooga. I'll take you as far as I can. Mm, she said. Whats your name? They call me Mack, said Mr. Town. When he was talking to women in bars, he would sometimes follow that up with And the ones that know me really well call me Big Mack. That could wait. With a long drive ahead of them, they would have many hours in each others company to get to know each other. Whats yours? Laura, she told him. Well, Laura, he said, I'm sure were going to be great friends. * * * The fat kid found Mr. World in the Rainbow Rooma walled section of the path, its window glass covered in clear plastic sheets of green and red and yellow film. He was walking impatiently from window to window, staring out, in turn, at a golden world, a red world, a green world. His hair was reddish-orange and close-cropped to his skull. He wore a Burberry raincoat. The fat kid coughed. Mr. World looked up. Excuse me? Mister World? Yes? Is everything on schedule? The fat kids mouth was dry. He licked his lips, and said, I've set up everything. I don't have confirmation on the choppers. The helicopters will be here when we need them. Good, said the fat kid. Good. He stood there, not saying anything, not going away. There was a bruise on his forehead. After a while Mr. World said, Is there anything else I can do for you? A pause. The boy swallowed and nodded. Something else, he said. Yes. Would you feel more comfortable discussing it in private? The boy nodded again. Mr. |
| 555 |
World walked with the kid back to his operations center: a damp cave containing a diorama of drunken pixies making moonshine with a still. A sign outside warned tourists away during renovations. The two men sat down on plastic chairs. How can I help you? asked Mr. World. Yes. Okay. Right, two things, Okay. One. What are we waiting for? And two. Two is harder. Look. We have the guns. Right. We have the firepower. They have. They have fucking swords and knives and fucking hammers and stone axes. And like, tire irons. We have fucking smart bombs. Which we will not be using, pointed out the other man. I know that. You said that already. I know that. And that's doable. But. Look, ever since I did the job on that bitch in L. A., I've been He stopped, made a face, seemed unwilling to go on. Youve been troubled? Yes. Good word. Troubled. Yes. Like a home for troubled teens. Funny. Yes. And what exactly is troubling you? Well, we fight, we win. And that is a source of trouble? I find it a matter of triumph and delight, myself. But. they'll die out anyway. They are passenger pigeons and thylacines. Yes? Who cares? This way, its going to be a bloodbath. Ah. Mr. World nodded. He was following. That was good. The fat kid said, Look, I'm not the only one who feels this way. I've checked with the crew at Radio Modern, andyou're all for settling this peacefully; and the intangibles are pretty much in favor of letting market forces take care of it. I'm being. You know. The voice of reason here. You are indeed. Unfortunately, there is information you do not have. The smile that followed was twisted and scarred. The boy blinked. He said, Mister World? What happened to your lips? World sighed. The truth of the matter, he said, is that somebody once sewed them together. A long time ago. Whoa, said the fat kid. Serious omerta shit. Yes. You want to know what were waiting for? Why we didn't strike last night? The fat kid nodded. He was sweating, but it was a cold sweat. We didn't strike yet, because I'm waiting for a stick. A stick? that's right. A stick. And do you know what I'm going to do with the stick? A head shake. Okay. I'll bite. What? I could tell you, said Mr. World, soberly. But then I'd have to kill you. He winked, and the tension in the room evaporated. The fat kid began to giggle, a low, snuffling laugh in the back of his throat and in his nose. Okay, he said. Hee. Hee. Okay. Hee. Got it. Message received on Planet Technical. Loud and clear. Ixnay on the Estionsquay. Mr. World shook his head. He rested a hand on the fat kids shoulder. Hey, he said. You really want to know? Sure. Well, said Mr. World, seeing that were friends, heres the answer: I'm going to take the stick, and I'm going to throw it over the armies as they come together. As I throw it, it will become a spear. And then, as the spear arcs over the battle, I'm going to shout I dedicate this battle to Odin. Huh? said the fat kid. Why? Power, said Mr. World. He scratched his chin. And food. A combination of the two. |
| 556 |
You see, the outcome of the battle is unimportant. What matters is the chaos, and the slaughter. I don't get it. Let me show you. Itll be just like this, said Mr. World. Watch! He took the wooden-bladed hunters knife from the pocket of his Burberry and, in one fluid movement, he slipped the blade of it into the soft flesh beneath the fat kids chin, and pushed hard upward, toward the brain. I dedicate this death to Odin, he said, as the knife sank in. There was a leakage onto his hand of something that was not actually blood, and a sputtering sparking noise behind the fat kids eyes. The smell on the air was that of burning insulation wire. The fat kids hand twitched spastically, and then he fell. The expression on his face was one of puzzlement and misery. Look at him, said Mr. World, conversationally, to the air. He looks as if he just saw a sequence of zeroes and ones turn into a flock of brightly colored birds and fly away. There was no reply from the empty rock corridor. Mr. World shouldered the body as if it weighed very little, and he opened the pixie diorama and dropped the body beside the still, covering it with its long black raincoat. He would dispose of it that evening, he decided, and he grinned his scarred grin: hiding a body on a battlefield would almost be too easy. Nobody would ever notice. Nobody would care. For a little while there was silence in that place. And then a gruff voice, which was not Mr. Worlds, cleared its throat in the shadows, and said, Good start. They tried to stand off the soldiers, but the men fired and killed them both. So the songs wrong about the jail, but that's put in for poetry. You cant always have things like they are in poetry. Poetry aint what youd call truth. There aint room enough in the verses. A Singers Commentary on The Ballad of Sam Bass, in A Treasury of American Folklore None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves youeven, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition. Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world. So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Never a word of it is literally true. Even so, the next thing that happened, happened like this: At the foot of Lookout Mountain men and women were gathered around a small bonfire in the rain. They were standing beneath the trees, which provided poor cover, and they were arguing. The lady Kali, with her ink-black skin and her white, sharp teeth, said, It is time. Anansi, with lemon-yellow gloves and silvering hair, shook his head. We can wait, he said. While we can wait, we should wait. |
| 557 |
There was a murmur of disagreement from the crowd. No, listen. he's right, said an old man with iron-gray hair: Czernobog. He was holding a small sledgehammer, resting the head of it on his shoulder. They have the high ground. The weather is against us. This is madness, to begin this now. Something that looked a little like a wolf and a little more like a man grunted and spat on the forest floor. When better to attack them, dedushka? Shall we wait until the weather clears, when they expect it? I say we go now, I say we move. There are clouds between us and them, pointed out Isten of the Hungarians. He had a fine black mustache, a large, dusty black hat, and the grin of a man who makes his living selling aluminum siding and new roofs and gutters to senior citizens but who always leaves town the day after the checks clear whether the work is done or not. A man in an elegant suit, who had until now said nothing, put his hands together, stepped into the firelight, and made his point succinctly and clearly. There were nods and mutters of agreement. A voice came from one of three warrior-women who comprised the Morrigan, standing so close together in the shadows that they had become an arrangement of blue-tattooed limbs and dangling crows wings. She said, It doesn't matter whether this is a good time or a bad time. This is the time. They have been killing us. Better to die together, on the attack, like gods, than to die fleeing and singly, like rats in a cellar. Another murmur, this time one of deep agreement. She had said it for all of them. Now was the time. The first head is mine, said a very tall Chinese man, with a rope of tiny skulls around his neck. He began to walk, slowly and intently, up the mountain, shouldering a staff with a curved blade at the end of it, like a silver moon. * * * Even Nothing cannot last forever. He might have been there, been Nowhere, for ten minutes or for ten thousand years. It made no difference: time was an idea for which he no longer had any need. He could no longer remember his real name. He felt empty and cleansed, in that place that was not a place. He was without form, and void. He was nothing. And into that nothing a voice said, Ho-hoka, cousin. We got to talk. And something that might once have been Shadow said, Whiskey Jack? Yeah, said Whiskey Jack, in the darkness. You are a hard man to hunt down, whenyou're dead. You didn't go to any of the places I figured. I had to look all over before I thought of checking here. Say, you ever find your tribe? Shadow remembered the man and the girl in the disco beneath the spinning mirror-ball. I guess I found my family. But no, I never found my tribe. Sorry to have to disturb you. Let me be. I got what I wanted. I'm done. They are coming for you, said Whiskey Jack. They are going to revive you. But I'm done, said Shadow. It was all over and done. No such thing, said Whiskey Jack. Never any such thing. Well go to my place. You want a beer? He guessed he would like a beer, at that. |
| 558 |
Sure. Get me one too. Theres a cooler outside the door, said Whiskey Jack, and he pointed. They were in his shack. Shadow opened the door to the shack with hands he had not possessed moments before. There was a plastic cooler filled with chunks of river ice out there, and, in the ice, a dozen cans of Budweiser. He pulled out a couple of cans of beer and then sat in the doorway and looked out over the valley. They were at the top of a hill, near a waterfall, swollen with melting snow and runoff. It fell in stages, maybe seventy feet below them, maybe a hundred. The sun reflected from the ice that sheathed the trees that overhung the waterfall basin. Where are we? asked Shadow. Where you were last time, said Whiskey Jack. My place. You planning on holding on to my Bud till it warms up? Shadow stood up and passed him the can of beer. You didn't have a waterfall outside your place last time I was here, he said. Whiskey Jack said nothing. He popped the top of the Bud, and drank half the can in one long slow swallow. Then he said, You remember my nephew? Henry Bluejay? The poet? He traded his Buick for your Winnebago. Remember? Sure. I didn't know he was a poet. Whiskey Jack raised his chin and looked proud. Best damn poet in America, he said. He drained the rest of his can of beer, belched, and got another can, while Shadow popped open his own can of beer, and the two men sat outside on a rock, by the pale green ferns, in the morning sun, and they watched the falling water and they drank their beer. There was still snow on the ground, in the places where the shadows never lifted. The earth was muddy and wet. Henry was diabetic, continued Whiskey Jack. It happens. Too much. You people came to America, you take our sugar cane, potatoes, and corn, then you sell us potato chips and caramel popcorn, and were the ones who get sick. He sipped his beer, reflecting. Hed won a couple of prizes for his poetry. There were people in Minnesota who wanted to put his poems into a book. He was driving to Minnesota in a sports car to talk to them. He had traded your Bago for a yellow Miata. The doctors said they think he went into a coma while he was driving, went off the road, ran the car into one of your road signs. Too lazy to look at where you are, to read the mountains and the clouds, you people need road signs everywhere. And so Henry Bluejay went away forever, went to live with brother Wolf. So I said, nothing keeping me there any longer. I came north. Good fishing up here. I'm sorry about your nephew. Me too. So now I'm living here in the north. Long way from white mans diseases. White mans roads. White mans road signs. White mans yellow Miatas. White mans caramel popcorn. White mans beer? Whiskey Jack looked at the can. When you people finally give up and go home, you can leave us the Budweiser breweries, he said. Where are we? asked Shadow. Am I on the tree? Am I dead? Am I here? I thought everything was finished. Whats real? Yes, said Whiskey Jack. Yes? What kind of an answer is Yes? |
| 559 |
Its a good answer. True answer, too. Shadow said, Are you a god as well? Whiskey Jack shook his head. I'm a culture hero, he said. We do the same shit gods do, we just screw up more and nobody worships us. They tell stories about us, but they tell the ones that make us look bad along with the ones where we came out fairly okay. I see, said Shadow. And he did see, more or less. Look, said Whiskey Jack. This is not a good country for gods. My people figured that out early on. There are creator spirits who found the earth or made it or shit it out, but you think about it: whos going to worship Coyote? He made love to Porcupine Woman and got his dick shot through with more needles than a pincushion. Hed argue with rocks and the rocks would win. So, yeah, my people figured that maybe theres something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because its always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn't need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it. It gave us salmon and corn and buffalo and passenger pigeons. It gave us wild rice and walleye. It gave us melon and squash and turkey. And we were the children of the land, just like the porcupine and the skunk and the blue jay. He finished his second beer and gestured toward the river at the bottom of the waterfall. You follow that river for a way, you'll get to the lakes where the wild rice grows. In wild rice time, you go out in your canoe with a friend, and you knock the wild rice into your canoe, and cook it, and store it, and it will keep you for a long time. Different places grow different foods. Go far enough south there are orange trees, lemon trees, and those squashy green guys, look like pears Avocados. Avocados, agreed Whiskey Jack. that's them. They don't grow up this way. This is wild rice country. Moose country. What I'm trying to say is that America is like that. Its not good growing country for gods. They don't grow well here. you're like avocados trying to grow in wild rice country. They may not grow well, said Shadow, remembering, butyou're going to war. That was the only time he ever saw Whiskey Jack laugh. It was almost a bark, and it had little humor in it. Hey Shadow, said Whiskey Jack. If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too? Maybe. Shadow felt good. He didn't think it was just the beer. He couldn't remember the last time he had felt so alive, and so together. Its not going to be a war. Then what is it? Whiskey Jack crushed the beer can between his hands, pressing it until it was flat. Look, he said, and pointed to the waterfall. The sun was high enough that it caught the waterfall spray: a rainbow nimbus hung in the air. Shadow thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Its going to be a bloodbath, said Whiskey Jack, flatly. Shadow saw it then. He saw it all, stark in its simplicity. He shook his head, then he began to chuckle, and he shook his head some more, and the chuckle became a full-throated laugh. |
| 560 |
The hawk took to the air, and it swung upward, circling and ascending in a rising gyre, circling the place in the gray clouds where the sun might conceivably be, and as the hawk rose it became first a dot and then a speck, and then, to the naked eye, nothing at all, something that could only be imagined. The clouds began to thin and to evaporate, creating a patch of blue sky through which the sun glared. The single bright sunbeam penetrating the clouds and bathing the meadow was beautiful, but the image faded as more clouds vanished. Soon the morning sun was blazing down on that meadow like a summer sun at noon, burning the water vapor from the mornings rain into mists and burning the mist off into nothing at all. The golden sun bathed the body on the floor of the meadow with its radiance and its heat. Shades of pink and of warm brown touched the dead thing. The woman dragged the fingers of her right hand lightly across the bodys chest. She imagined she could feel a shiver in his breastsomething that was not a heartbeat, but stillShe let her hand remain there, on his chest, just above his heart. She lowered her lips to Shadows lips, and she breathed into his lungs, a gentle in and out, and then the breath became a kiss. Her kiss was gentle, and it tasted of spring rains and meadow flowers. The wound in his side began to flow with liquid blood once morea scarlet blood, which oozed like liquid rubies in the sunlight, and then the bleeding stopped. She kissed his cheek and his forehead. Come on, she said. Time to get up. Its all happening. You don't want to miss it. His eyes fluttered, and then they opened, two eyes the gray of evening, and he looked at her. She smiled, and then she removed her hand from his chest. He said, You called me back. He said it slowly, as if he had forgotten how to speak English. There was hurt in his voice, and puzzlement. Yes. I was done. I was judged. It was over. You called me back. You dared. I'm sorry. Yes. He sat up, slowly. He winced, and touched his side. Then he looked puzzled: there was a beading of wet blood there, but there was no wound beneath it. He reached out a hand, and she put her arm around him and helped him to his feet. He looked across the meadow as if he was trying to remember the names of the things he was looking at: the flowers in the long grass, the ruins of the farmhouse, the haze of green buds that fogged the branches of the huge silver tree. Do you remember? she asked. Do you remember what you learned? I lost my name, and I lost my heart. And you brought me back. I'm sorry, she said. They are going to fight, soon. The old gods and the new ones. You want me to fight for you? You wasted your time. I brought you back because that was what I had to do, she said. What you do now is whatever you have to do. Your call. I did my part. Suddenly, she became aware of his nakedness, and she blushed a burning scarlet flush, and she looked down and away. * * * In the rain and the cloud, shadows moved up the side of the mountain, up to the rock pathways. |
| 561 |
He loved the fact that she was out, with him, having an adventure. Well, confided Laura, I hated the idea of getting stale. I was just rotting away where I was. So I set off without my car and without my credit cards. I'm just relying on the kindness of strangers. Arent you scared? he asked. I mean, you could be stranded, you could be mugged, you could starve. She shook her head. Then she said, with a hesitant smile, I met you, didn't I? and he couldn't find anything to say. When the meal was over they ran through the storm to his car holding Japanese-language newspapers to cover their heads, and they laughed as they ran, like schoolchildren in the rain. How far can I take you? he asked, when they made it back into the car. I'll go as far asyou're going, Mack, she told him, shyly. He was glad he hadn't used the Big Mack line. This woman wasnt a barroom one-nighter, Mr. Town knew that in his soul. It might have taken him fifty years to find her, but this was finally it, this was the one, this wild, magical woman with the long dark hair. This was love. Look, he said, as they approached Chattanooga. The wipers slooshed the rain across the windshield, blurring the gray of the city. How about I find a motel for you tonight? I'll pay for it. And once I make my delivery, we can. Well, we can take a hot bath together, for a start. Warm you up. That sounds wonderful, said Laura. What are you delivering? That stick, he told her, and chuckled. The one on the backseat. Okay, she said, humoring him. Then don't tell me, Mister Mysterious. He told her it would be best if she waited in the car in the Rock City parking lot while he made his delivery. He drove up the side of Lookout Mountain in the driving rain, never breaking thirty miles per hour, with his headlights burning. They parked at the back of the parking lot. He turned off the engine. Hey, Mack. Before you get out of the car, don't I get a hug? asked Laura with a smile. You surely do, said Mr. Town, and he put his arms around her, and she snuggled close to him while the rain pattered a tattoo on the roof of the Ford Explorer. He could smell her hair. There was a faintly unpleasant scent beneath the smell of the perfume. Travel would do it, every time. That bath, he decided, was a real must for both of them. He wondered if there was anyplace in Chattanooga where he could get those lavender bath-bombs his first wife had loved so much. Laura raised her head against his, and her hand stroked the line of his neck, absently. MackI keep thinking. You must really want to know what happened to those friends of yours? she asked. Woody and Stone. Do you? Yeah, he said, moving his lips down to hers, for their first kiss. Sure I do. So she showed him. * * * Shadow walked the meadow, making his own slow circles around the trunk of the tree, gradually widening his circle. Sometimes he would stop and pick something up: a flower, or a leaf, or a pebble, or a twig, or a blade of grass. He would examine it minutely, as if concentrating entirely on the twigness of the twig, the leafness of the leaf. |
| 562 |
Easter found herself reminded of the gaze of a baby, at the point where it learns to focus. She did not dare to talk to him. At that moment, it would have been sacrilegious. She watched him, exhausted as she was, and she wondered. About twenty feet out from the base of the tree, half-overgrown with long meadow grass and dead creepers, he found a canvas bag. Shadow picked it up, untied the knots at the top of the bag, loosened the drawstring. The clothes he pulled out were his own. They were old, but still serviceable. He turned the shoes over in his hands. He stroked the fabric of the shirt, the wool of the sweater, stared at them as if he were looking at them across a million years. One by one, he put them on. He put his hands into his pockets, and looked puzzled as he pulled one hand out, holding what looked to Easter like a white-and-gray marble. He said, No coins. It was the first thing he had said in several hours. No coins? echoed Easter. He shook his head. They gave me something to do with my hands. He bent down to pull on his shoes. Once he was dressed, he looked more normal. Grave, though. She wondered how far he had traveled, and what it had cost him to return. He was not the first whose return she had initiated; and she knew that, soon enough, the million-year stare would fade, and the memories and the dreams that he had brought back from the tree would be elided by the world of things you could touch. That was the way it always went. She led their way to the rear of the meadow. Her mount waited in the trees. It cant carry both of us, she told him. I'll make my own way home. Shadow nodded. He seemed to be trying to remember something. Then he opened his mouth, and he screeched a cry of welcome and of joy. The thunderbird opened its cruel beak, and it screeched a welcome back at him. Superficially, at least, it resembled a condor. Its feathers were black, with a purplish sheen, and its neck was banded with white. Its beak was black and cruel: a raptors beak, made for tearing. At rest, on the ground, with its wings folded away, it was the size of a black bear, and its head was on a level with Shadows own. Horus said, proudly, I brought him. They live in the mountains. Shadow nodded. I had a dream of thunderbirds once, he said. Damnest dream I ever had. The thunderbird opened its beak and made a surprisingly gentle noise, crawroo? You heard my dream too? asked Shadow. He reached out a hand and rubbed it gently against the birds head. The thunderbird pushed up against him like an affectionate pony. He scratched it from the nape of its neck up to the crown. Shadow turned to Easter. You rode him here? Yes, she said. You can ride him back, if he lets you. How do you ride him? Its easy, she said. If you don't fall. Like riding the lightning. Will I see you back there? She shook her head. I'm done, honey, she told him. You go do what you need to do. I'm tired. Good luck. Shadow nodded. Whiskey Jack. I saw him. After I passed on. He came and found me. |
| 563 |
By the way, you have my stick. Can I have it, please? He pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes, took a cigarette, lit it with a disposable black Bic. She said, Can I have one of those? Sure. I'll give you a cigarette if you give me my stick. If you want it, its worth more than just a cigarette. He said nothing. She said, I want answers. I want to know things. He lit a cigarette and passed it to her. She took it and inhaled. Then she blinked. I can almost taste this one, she said. I think maybe I can. She smiled. Mm. Nicotine. Yes, he said. Why did you go to the women in the farmhouse? Shadow told me to go to them, she said. He said to ask them for water. I wonder if he knew what it would do. Probably not. Still, that's the good thing about having him dead on his tree. I know where he is at all times, now. he's off the board. You set up my husband, she said. You set him up all the way, you people. He has a good heart, you know that? Yes, said Mr. World. I know. When this is all done with, I guess I'll sharpen a stick of mistletoe and go down to the ash tree, and ram it through his eye. Now. My stick, please. Why do you want it? Its a souvenir of this whole sorry mess, said Mr. World. don't worry, its not mistletoe. He flashed a grin. It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world, the symbol is the thing. The noises from outside grew louder. Which side are you on? she asked. Its not about sides, he told her. But since you asked, I'm on the winning side. Always. She nodded, and she did not let go of the stick. She turned away from him, and looked out of the cavern door. Far below her, in the rocks, she could see something that glowed and pulsed. It wrapped itself around a thin, mauve-faced bearded man, who was beating at it with a squeegee stick, the kind of squeegee that people like him use to smear across car windshields at traffic lights. There was a scream, and they both disappeared from view. Okay. I'll give you the stick, she said. Mr. Worlds voice came from behind her. Good girl, he said reassuringly, in a way that struck her as being both patronizing and indefinably male. It made her skin crawl. She waited in the rock doorway until she could hear his breath in her ear. She had to wait until he got close enough. She had that much figured out. * * * The ride was more than exhilarating; it was electric. They swept through the storm like jagged bolts of lightning, flashing from cloud to cloud; they moved like the thunders roar, like the swell and rip of the hurricane. It was a crackling, impossible journey. There was no fear: only the power of the storm, unstoppable and all-consuming, and the joy of the flight. Shadow dug his fingers into the thunderbirds feathers, feeling the static prickle on his skin. Blue sparks writhed across his hands like tiny snakes. Rain washed his face. This is the best, he shouted, over the roar of the storm. As if it understood him, the bird began to rise higher, every wing-beat a clap of thunder, and it swooped and dove and tumbled through the dark clouds. |
| 564 |
He now had a knife in one hand, she saw, and he stabbed her chest and breasts randomly and wildly with the knife, unable to see what he was doing. She did not care. What are knife cuts to a corpse? She brought her fist down, hard, on his waving wrist, and the knife went flying to the floor of the cavern. She kicked it away. And now he was crying and wailing. She could feel him pushing against her, his hands fumbling at her back, his hot tears on her neck. His blood was soaking her back, spurting down the back of her legs. This must look so undignified, she said, in a dead whisper, not without a certain dark amusement. She felt Mr. World stumble behind her, and she stumbled too, and then she slipped in the bloodall of it histhat was puddling on the floor of the cave, and they both went down. * * * The thunderbird landed in the Rock City parking lot. Rain was falling in sheets. Shadow could barely see a dozen feet in front of his face. He let go of the thunderbirds feathers and half slipped, half tumbled to the wet asphalt. Lightning flashed, and the bird was gone. Shadow climbed to his feet. The parking lot was three-quarters empty. Shadow started toward the entrance. He passed a brown Ford Explorer, parked against a rock wall. There was something deeply familiar about the car, and he glanced up at it curiously, noticing the man inside the car, slumped over the steering wheel as if asleep. Shadow pulled open the drivers-side door. He had last seen Mr. Town standing outside the motel in the center of America. The expression on his face was one of surprise. His neck had been expertly broken. Shadow touched the mans face. Still warm. Shadow could smell a scent on the air in the car; it was faint, like the perfume of someone who left a room years before, but Shadow would have known it anywhere. He slammed the door of the Explorer and made his way across the parking lot. As he walked he felt a twinge in his side, a sharp, jabbing pain that lasted for only a second, or less, and then it was gone. There was nobody selling tickets. He walked through the building and out into the gardens of Rock City. Thunder rumbled, and it rattled the branches of the trees and shook deep inside the huge rocks, and the rain fell with cold violence. It was late afternoon, but it was dark as night. A trail of lightning speared across the clouds, and Shadow wondered if that was the thunderbird returning to its high crags, or just an atmospheric discharge, or whether the two ideas were, on some level, the same thing. And of course they were. That was the point, after all. Somewhere a mans voice called out. Shadow heard it. The only words he recognized or thought he recognized were to Odin! Shadow hurried across Seven States Flag Court, the flagstones now running fast with rainwater. Once he slipped on the slick stone. There was a thick layer of cloud surrounding the mountain, and in the gloom and the storm beyond the courtyard he could see no states at all. There was no sound. |
| 565 |
The place seemed utterly abandoned. He called out, and imagined he heard something answering. He walked toward the place from which he thought the sound had come. Nobody. Nothing. Just a chain marking the entrance to a cave as off-limits to guests. Shadow stepped over the chain. He looked around, peering into the darkness. His skin prickled. A voice from behind him, in the shadows, said, very quietly, You have never disappointed me. Shadow did not turn. that's weird, he said. I disappointed myself all the way. Every time. Not at all, said the voice. You did everything you were intended to do, and more. You took everybodys attention, so they never looked at the hand with the coin in it. Its called misdirection. And theres power in the sacrifice of a sonpower enough, and more than enough, to get the whole ball rolling. To tell the truth, I'm proud of you. It was crooked, said Shadow. All of it. None of it was for real. It was just a setup for a massacre. Exactly, said Wednesdays voice from the shadows. It was crooked. But it was the only game in town. I want Laura, said Shadow. I want Loki. Where are they? There was only silence. A spray of rain gusted at him. Thunder rumbled somewhere close at hand. He walked farther in. Loki Lie-Smith sat on the ground with his back to a metal cage. Inside the cage, drunken pixies tended their still. He was covered with a blanket. Only his face showed, and his hands, white and long, came around the blanket. An electric lantern sat on a chair beside him. The lanterns batteries were close to failing, and the light it cast was faint and yellow. He looked pale, and he looked rough. His eyes, though. His eyes were still fiery, and they glared at Shadow as he walked through the cavern. When Shadow was several paces from Loki, he stopped. You are too late, said Loki. His voice was raspy and wet. I have thrown the spear. I have dedicated the battle. It has begun. No shit, said Shadow. No shit, said Loki. So it does not matter what you do anymore. Shadow stopped and thought. Then he said, The spear you had to throw to kick off the battle. Like the whole Uppsala thing. This is the battle you'll be feeding on. Am I right? Silence. He could hear Loki breathing, a ghastly rattling inhalation. I figured it out, said Shadow. Kind of. I'm not sure when I figured it out. Maybe when I was hanging on the tree. Maybe before. It was from something Wednesday said to me, at Christmas. Loki just stared at him from the floor, saying nothing. Its just a two-man con, said Shadow. Like the bishop with the diamond necklace and the cop who arrests him. Like the guy with the fiddle, and the guy who wants to buy the fiddle. Two men, who appear to be on opposite sides, playing the same game. Loki whispered, You are ridiculous. Why? I liked what you did at the motel. That was smart. You needed to be there, to make sure that everything went according to plan. I saw you. I even realized who you were. And I still never twigged that you were their Mister World. |
| 566 |
Shadow raised his voice. You can come out, he said, to the cavern. Wherever you are. Show yourself. The wind howled in the opening of the cavern, and it drove a spray of rainwater in toward them. Shadow shivered. I'm tired of being played for a sucker, said Shadow. Just show yourself. Let me see you. There was a change in the shadows at the back of the cave. Something became more solid; something shifted. You know too damned much, mboy, said Wednesdays familiar rumble. So they didn't kill you. They killed me, said Wednesday, from the shadows. None of this would have worked if they hadnt. His voice was faintnot actually quiet, but there was a quality to it that made Shadow think of an old radio not quite tuned in to a distant station. If I hadn't died for real, we could never have got them here, said Wednesday. Kali and the Morrigan and the fucking Albanians andwell, youve seen them all. It was my death that drew them all together. I was the sacrificial lamb. No, said Shadow. You were the Judas Goat. The wraith-shape in the shadows swirled and shifted. Not at all. That implies that I was betraying the old gods for the new. Which was not what we were doing. Not at all, whispered Loki. I can see that, said Shadow. You two werent betraying either side. You were betraying both sides. I guess we were at that, said Wednesday. He sounded pleased with himself. You wanted a massacre. You needed a blood sacrifice. A sacrifice of gods. The wind grew stronger; the howl across the cave door became a screech, as if of something immeasurably huge in pain. And why the hell not? I've been trapped in this damned land for almost twelve hundred years. My blood is thin. I'm hungry. And you two feed on death, said Shadow. He thought he could see Wednesday, now. He was a shape made of darkness, who became more real only when Shadow looked away from him, taking shape in his peripheral vision. I feed on death that is dedicated to me, said Wednesday. Like my death on the tree, said Shadow. That, said Wednesday, was special. And do you also feed on death? asked Shadow, looking at Loki. Loki shook his head, wearily. No, of course not, said Shadow. You feed on chaos. Loki smiled at that, a brief pained smile, and orange flames danced in his eyes, and flickered like burning lace beneath his pale skin. We couldn't have done it without you, said Wednesday, from the corner of Shadows eye. I'd been with so many women You needed a son, said Shadow. Wednesdays ghost-voice echoed. I needed you, my boy. Yes. My own boy. I knew that you had been conceived, but your mother left the country. It took us so long to find you. And when we did find you, you were in prison. We needed to find out what made you tick. What buttons we could press to make you move. Who you were. Loki looked, momentarily, pleased with himself. And you had a wife to go back home to. It was unfortunate, but not insurmountable. She was no good for you, whispered Loki. You were better off without her. If it could have been any other way, said Wednesday, and this time Shadow knew what he meant. |
| 567 |
And if shed hadthe graceto stay dead, panted Loki. Wood and Stonewere good men. You were goingto be allowed to escapewhen the train crossed the Dakotas Where is she? asked Shadow. Loki reached a pale arm, and pointed to the back of the cavern. She went that-a-way, he said. Then, without warning, he tipped forward, his body collapsing onto the rock floor. Shadow saw what the blanket had hidden from him; the pool of blood, the hole through Lokis back, the fawn raincoat soaked black with blood. What happened? he said. Loki said nothing. Shadow did not think he would be saying anything anymore. Your wife happened to him, mboy, said Wednesdays distant voice. He had become harder to see, as if he was fading back into the ether. But the battle will bring him back. As the battle will bring me back for good. I'm a ghost, and he's a corpse, but weve still won. The game was rigged. Rigged games, said Shadow, remembering, are the easiest to beat. There was no answer. Nothing moved in the shadows. Shadow said, Goodbye, and then he said, Father. But by then there was no trace of anybody else in the cavern. Nobody at all. Shadow walked back up to the Seven States Flag Court, but saw nobody, and heard nothing but the crack and whip of the flags in the storm-wind. There were no people with swords at the Thousand-Ton Balanced Rock, no defenders of the Swing-A-Long bridge. He was alone. There was nothing to see. The place was deserted. It was an empty battlefield. No. Not deserted. Not exactly. This was Rock City. It had been a place of awe and worship for thousands of years; today the millions of tourists who walked through the gardens and swung their way across the Swing-A-Long bridge had the same effect as water turning a million prayer wheels. Reality was thin here. And Shadow knew where the battle must be taking place. With that, he began to walk. He remembered how he had felt on the carousel, tried to feel like that He remembered turning the Winnebago, shifting it at right angles to everything. He tried to capture that sensation And then, easily and perfectly, it happened: It was like pushing through a membrane, like plunging up from deep water into air. With one step he had moved from the tourist path on the mountain to To somewhere real. He was Backstage. He was still on the top of a mountain, that much remained the same. But it was so much more than that. This mountaintop was the quintessence of place, the heart of things as they were. Compared to it, the Lookout Mountain he had left was a painting on a backdrop, or a papier-mache model seen on a TV screenmerely a representation of the thing, not the thing itself. This was the true place. The rock walls formed a natural amphitheater. Paths of stone that wound around and across it, forming twisty natural bridges that Eschered through and across the rock walls. And the sky The sky was dark. It was lit, and the world beneath it was illuminated by a burning greenish-white streak, brighter than the sun, which forked crazily across the sky from, end to end, like a white rip in the darkened sky. |
| 568 |
It was lightning, Shadow realized. Lightning held in one frozen moment that stretched into forever. The light it cast was harsh and unforgiving: it washed out faces, hollowed eyes into dark pits. This was the moment of the storm. The paradigms were shifting. He could feel it. The old world, a world of infinite vastness and illimitable resources and future, was being confronted by something elsea web of energy, of opinions, of gulfs. People believe, thought Shadow. Its what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen. The mountaintop was an arena; he saw that immediately. And on each side of the arena he could see them arrayed. They were too big. Everything was too big in that place. There were old gods in that place: gods with skins the brown of old mushrooms, the pink of chicken flesh, the yellow of autumn leaves. Some were crazy and some were sane. Shadow recognized the old gods. Hed met them already, or hed met others like them. There were ifrits and piskies, giants and dwarfs. He saw the woman he had met in the darkened bedroom in Rhode Island, saw the writhing green snake-coils of her hair. He saw Mama-ji, from the carousel, and there was blood on her hands and a smile on her face. He knew them all. He recognized the new ones, too. There was somebody who had to be a railroad baron, in an antique suit, his watch chain stretched across his vest. He had the air of one who had seen better days. His forehead twitched. There were the great gray gods of the airplanes, heirs to all the dreams of heavier-than-air travel. There were car gods, there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs. Even they looked uncomfortable. Worlds change. Others had faces of smudged phosphors; they glowed gently, as if they existed in their own light. Shadow felt sorry for them all. There was an arrogance to the new ones. Shadow could see that. But there was also a fear. They were afraid that unless they kept pace with a changing world, unless they remade and redrew and rebuilt the world in their image, their time would already be over. Each side faced the other with bravery. To each side, the opposition were the demons, the monsters, the damned. Shadow could see an initial skirmish had taken place. There was already blood on the rocks. They were readying themselves for the real battle; for the real war. It was now or never, he thought. If he did not move now, it would be too late. In America everything goes on forever, said a voice in the back of his head. The 1950s lasted for a thousand years. You have all the time in the world. Shadow walked in something that was half stroll, half controlled stumble, into the center of the arena. |
| 569 |
He could feel eyes on him, eyes and things that were not eyes. He shivered. The buffalo voice said, You are doing just fine. Shadow thought, Damn right. I came back from the dead this morning. After that, everything else should be a piece of cake. You know, said Shadow, to the air, in a conversational voice, this is not a war. This was never intended to be a war. And if any of you think this is a war, you are deluding yourselves. He heard grumbling noises from both sides. He had impressed nobody. We are fighting for our survival, lowed a minotaur from one side of the arena. We are fighting for our existence, shouted a mouth in a pillar of glittering smoke, from the other. This is a bad land for gods, said Shadow. As an opening statement it wasnt Friends, Romans, countrymen, but it would do. Youve probably all learned that, in your own way. The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing. Either youve been forgotten, oryou're scaredyou're going to be rendered obsolete, or maybeyou're just getting tired of existing on the whim of people. The grumbles were fewer now. He had said something they agreed with. Now, while they were listening, he had to tell them the story. There was a god who came here from a far land, and whose power and influence waned as belief in him faded. He was a god who took his power from sacrifice, and from death, and especially from war. The deaths of those who fell in war were dedicated to himwhole battlefields that had given him in the Old Country power and sustenance. Now he was old. He made his living as a grifter, working with another god from his pantheon, a god of chaos and deceit. Together they rooked the gullible. Together they took people for all theyd got. Somewhere in theremaybe fifty years ago, maybe a hundred, they put a plan into motion, a plan to create a reserve of power they could both tap into. Something that would make them stronger than they had ever been. After all, what could be more powerful than a battlefield covered with dead gods? The game they played was called Lets You and Him Fight. Do you see? The battle you came here for isn't something that any of you can win or lose. The winning and the losing are unimportant to him, to them. What matters is that enough of you die. Each of you that falls in battle gives him power. Every one of you that dies, feeds him. Do you understand? The roaring, whoomping sound of something catching fire echoed across the arena. Shadow looked to the place the noise came from. An enormous man, his skin the deep brown of mahogany, his chest naked, wearing a top hat, cigar sticking rakishly from his mouth, spoke in a voice as deep as the grave. Baron Samedi said, Okay. But Odin. He died. At the peace talks. Motherfuckers killed him. He died. I know death. Nobody going to fool me about death. Shadow said, Obviously. He had to die for real. He sacrificed his physical body to make this war happen. After the battle he would have been more powerful than he had ever been. |
| 570 |
Somebody called, Who are you? I amI wasI am his son. One of the new godsShadow suspected it was a drug from the way it smiled and spangled, said, But Mister World said There was no Mister World. There never was any such person. He was just another one of you bastards trying to feed on the chaos he created. They believed him, and he could see the hurt in their eyes. Shadow shook his head. You know, he said, I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don't need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. Its what we do. There was silence, in the high place. And then, with a shocking crack, the lightning bolt frozen in the sky crashed to the mountaintop, and the arena went entirely dark. They glowed, many of those presences, in the darkness. Shadow wondered if they were going to argue with him, to attack him, to try to kill him. He waited for some kind of response. And then Shadow realized that the lights were going out. The gods were leaving that place, first in handfuls, and then by scores, and finally in the hundreds. A spider the size of a rottweiler scuttled heavily toward him, on seven legs; its cluster of eyes glowed faintly. Shadow held his ground, although he felt slightly sick. When the spider got close enough, it said, in Mr. Nancys voice, That was a good job. Proud of you. You done good, kid. Thank you, said Shadow. We should get you back. Too long in this place is goin to mess you up. It rested one brown-haired spider leg on Shadows shoulder * * * and, back on Seven States Flag Court, Mr. Nancy coughed. His right hand rested on Shadows shoulder. The rain had stopped. Mr. Nancy held his left hand across his side, as if it hurt. Shadow asked if he was okay. I'm tough as old nails, said Mr. Nancy. Tougher. He did not sound happy. He sounded like an old man in pain. There were dozens of them, standing or sitting on the ground or on the benches. Some of them looked badly injured. Shadow could hear a rattling noise in the sky, approaching from the south. He looked at Mr. Nancy. Helicopters? Mr. Nancy nodded. don't you worry about them. Not anymore. they'll just clean up the mess, and leave. Got it. Shadow knew that there was one part of the mess he wanted to see for himself, before it was cleaned up. He borrowed a flashlight from a gray-haired man who looked like a retired news anchor and began to hunt. He found Laura stretched out on the ground in a side cavern, beside a diorama of mining gnomes straight out of Snow White. The floor beneath her was sticky with blood. She was on her side, where Loki must have dropped her after he had pulled the spear out of them both. One of Lauras hands clutched her chest. She looked dreadfully vulnerable. She looked dead, but then, Shadow was almost used to that by now. Shadow squatted beside her, and he touched her cheek with his hand, and he said her name. Her eyes opened, and she lifted her head and turned it until she was looking at him. Hello, puppy, she said. Her voice was thin. Hi, Laura. What happened here? |
| 571 |
Me, I'll just take what I can get when I can get it. Shadow changed the subject. Those helicopters, he said. The ones that took away the bodies, and the injured. What about them? Who sent them? Where did they come from? You shouldn't worry yourself about that. you're like valkyries or buzzards. They come because they have to come. If you say so. The dead and the wounded will be taken care of. You ask me, old Jacquels going to be very busy for the next month or so. Tell me somethin, Shadow-boy. Okay. You learn anythin from all this? Shadow shrugged. I don't know. Most of what I learned on the tree I've already forgotten, he said. I think I met some people. But I'm not certain of anything anymore. Its like one of those dreams that changes you. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things down deep inside yourself, because it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they kind of just slip out of your head. Yeah, said Mr. Nancy. And then he said, grudgingly, you're not so dumb. Maybe not, said Shadow. But I wish I could have kept more of what passed through my hands, since I got out of prison. I was given so many things, and I lost them again. Maybe, said Mr. Nancy, you kept more than you think. No, said Shadow. They crossed the border into Florida, and Shadow saw his first palm tree. He wondered if theyd planted it there on purpose, at the border, just so that you knew you were in Florida now. Mr. Nancy began to snore, and Shadow glanced over at him. The old man still looked very gray, and his breath was rasping. Shadow wondered, not for the first time, if he had sustained some kind of chest or lung injury in the fight. Nancy had refused any medical attention. Florida went on for longer than Shadow had imagined, and it was late by the time he pulled up outside a small, one-story wooden house, its windows tightly shuttered, on the outskirts of Fort Pierce. Nancy, who had directed him through the last five miles, invited him to stay the night. I can get a room in a motel, said Shadow. Its not a problem, You could do that, and I'd be hurt. Obviously I wouldn't say anythin. But I'd be real hurt, real bad, said Mr. Nancy. So you better stay here, and I'll make you a bed up on the couch. Mr. Nancy unlocked the hurricane shutters, and pulled open the windows. The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies. Shadow agreed, reluctantly, to stay the night there, just as he agreed, even more reluctantly, to walk with Mr. Nancy to the bar at the end of the road, for just one late-night drink while the house aired out. Did you see Czernobog? asked Nancy, as they strolled through the muggy Floridian night. The air was alive with whirring palmetto bugs and the ground crawled with creatures that scuttled and clicked. Mr. Nancy lit a cigarillo, and coughed and choked on it. Still, he kept right on smoking. He was gone when I came out of the cave. He will have headed home. Hell be waitin for you there, you know. |
| 572 |
Yes. They walked in silence to the end of the road. It wasnt much of a bar, but it was open. I'll buy the first beers, said Mr. Nancy. Were only having one beer, remember, said Shadow. What are you, asked Mr. Nancy. Some kind of cheapskate? Mr. Nancy bought them their first beers, and Shadow bought the second round. He stared in horror as Mr. Nancy talked the barman into turning on the karaoke machine, and then watched in fascinated embarrassment as the old man belted his way through Whats New Pussycat? before crooning out a moving, tuneful version of The Way You Look Tonight. He had a fine voice, and by the end the handful of people still in the bar were cheering and applauding him. When he came back to Shadow at the bar he was looking brighter. The whites of his eyes were clear, and the gray pallor that had touched his skin was gone. Your turn, he said. Absolutely not, said Shadow. But Mr. Nancy had ordered more beers, and was handing Shadow a stained printout of songs from which to choose. Just pick a song you know the words to. This is not funny, said Shadow. The world was beginning to swim, a little, but he couldn't muster the energy to argue, and then Mr. Nancy was putting on the backing tapes to don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, and pushingliterally pushingShadow up onto the tiny makeshift stage at the end of the bar. Shadow held the mike as if it was probably live, and then the backing music started and he croaked out the initial Baby Nobody in the bar threw anything in his direction. And it felt good. Can you understand me now? His voice was rough but melodic, and rough suited the song just fine. Sometimes I feel a little mad. don't you know that no one alive can always be an angel And he was still singing it as they walked home through the busy Florida night, the old man and the young, stumbling and happy. I'm just a soul whose intentions are good, he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. Oh lord, please don't let me be misunderstood. Mr. Nancy showed him to the couch. It was much smaller than Shadow, who decided to sleep on the floor, but by the time he had finished deciding to sleep on the floor he was already fast asleep, half sitting, half lying on the tiny sofa. At first, he did not dream. There was just the comforting darkness. And then he saw a fire burning in the darkness and he walked toward it. You did well, whispered the buffalo man without moving his lips. I don't know what I did, said Shadow. You made peace, said the buffalo man. You took our words and made them your own. They never understood that they were here and the people who worshiped them were herebecause it suits us that they are here. But we can change our minds. And perhaps we will. Are you a god? asked Shadow. The buffalo-headed man shook his head. Shadow thought, for a moment, that the creature was amused. I am the land, he said. And if there was more to that dream then Shadow did not remember it. He heard something sizzling. |
| 573 |
His head was aching, and there was a pounding behind his eyes. Mr. Nancy was already cooking breakfast: a towering stack of pancakes, sizzling bacon, perfect eggs, and coffee. He looked in the peak of health. My head hurts, said Shadow. You get a good breakfast inside you, you'll feel like a new man. I'd rather feel like the same man, just with a different head, said Shadow. Eat, said Mr. Nancy. Shadow ate. How do you feel now? Like I've got a headache, only now I've got some food in my stomach and I think I'm going to throw up. Come with me. Beside the sofa, on which Shadow had spent the night, covered with an African blanket, was a trunk, made of some dark wood, which looked like an undersized pirate chest. Mr. Nancy undid the padlock and opened the lid. Inside the trunk there were a number of boxes. Nancy rummaged among the boxes. Its an ancient African herbal remedy, he said. Its made of ground willow bark, things like that. Like aspirin? Yup, said Mr. Nancy. Just like that. From the bottom of the trunk he produced a giant economy-sized bottle of generic aspirin. He unscrewed the top, and shook out a couple of white pills. Here. Nice trunk, said Shadow. He took the bitter pills, swallowed them with a glass of water. My son sent it to me, said Mr. Nancy. he's a good boy. I don't see him as much as I'd like. I miss Wednesday, said Shadow. Despite everything he did. I keep expecting to see him. But I look up and he's not there. He kept staring at the pirate trunk, trying to figure out what it reminded him of. You will lose many things. Do not lose this. Who said that? You miss him? After what he put you through? Put us all through? Yes, said Shadow. I guess I do. Do you think hell be back? I think, said Mr. Nancy, that wherever two men are gathered together to sell a third man a twenty-dollar violin for ten thousand dollars, he will be there in spirit. Yes, but We should get back into the kitchen, said Mr. Nancy, his expression becoming stony. Those pans won't wash themselves. Mr. Nancy washed the pans and the dishes. Shadow dried them and put them away. Somewhere in there the headache began to ease. They went back into the sitting room. Shadow stared at the old trunk some more, willing himself to remember. If I don't go to see Czernobog, he said, what will happen? you'll see him, said Mr. Nancy flatly. Maybe hell find you. Or maybe hell bring you to him. But one way or another, you'll see him. Shadow nodded. Something started to fall into place. A dream, on the tree. Hey, he said. Is there a god with an elephants head? Ganesh? he's a Hindu god. He removes obstacles, and makes journeys easier. Good cook, too. Shadow looked up. Its in the trunk, he said. I knew it was important, but I didn't know why. I thought maybe it meant the trunk of the tree. But he wasnt talking about that at all, was he? Mr. Nancy frowned. You lost me. Its in the trunk, said Shadow. He knew it was true. He did not know why it should be true, not quite. But of that he was completely certain. |
| 574 |
The klunker seemed farther away than it had looked from the road. He heard a loud crack from the south of the lake, like a stick breaking, followed by the sound of something huge thrumming, as if a bass string the size of a lake were vibrating. Massively, the ice creaked and groaned, like an old door protesting being opened. Shadow kept walking, as steadily as he could. This is suicide, whispered a sane voice in the back of his mind. Cant you just let it go? No, he said, aloud. I have to know. And he kept right on walking. He arrived at the klunker, and even before he reached it he knew that he had been right. There was a miasma that hung about the car, something that was at the same time a faint, foul smell and was also a bad taste in the back of his throat. He walked around the car, looking inside. The seats were stained, and ripped. The car was obviously empty. He tried the doors. They were locked. He tried the trunk. Also locked. He wished that he had brought a crowbar. He made a fist of his hand, inside his glove. He counted to three, then smashed his hand, hard, against the drivers-side window glass. His hand hurt, but the side window was undamaged. He thought about running at ithe could kick the window in, he was certain, if he didn't skid and fall on the wet ice. But the last thing he wanted to do was to disturb the klunker enough that the ice beneath it would crack. He looked at the car. Then he reached for the radio antennait was the kind that was supposed to go up and down, but that had stuck in the up position a decade agoand, with a little waggling, he broke it off at the base. He took the thin end of the antennait had once had a metal button on the end, but that was lost in time, and, with strong fingers, he bent it back up into a makeshift hook. Then he rammed the extended metal antenna down between the rubber and the glass of the front window, deep into the mechanism of the door. He fished in the mechanism, twisting, moving, pushing the metal antenna about until it caught: and then he pulled up. He felt the improvised hook sliding from the lock, uselessly. He sighed. Fished again, slower, more carefully. He could imagine the ice grumbling beneath his feet as he shifted his weight. And slow and He had it. He pulled up on the aerial and the front-door locking mechanism popped up. Shadow reached down one gloved hand and took the door handle, pressed the button, and pulled. The door did not open. Its stuck, he thought, iced up. that's all. He tugged, sliding on the ice, and suddenly the door of the klunker flew open, ice scattering everywhere. The miasma was worse inside the car, a stench of rot and illness. Shadow felt sick. He reached under the dashboard, found the black plastic handle that opened the trunk, and tugged on it, hard. There was a thunk from behind him as the trunk door released. Shadow walked out onto the ice, slipped and splashed around the car, holding on to the side of it as he went. Its in the trunk, he thought. The trunk was open an inch. |
| 575 |
He reached down and opened it the rest of the way, pulling it up. The smell was bad, but it could have been much worse: the bottom of the trunk was filled with an inch or so of half-melted ice. There was a girl in the trunk. She wore a scarlet snowsuit, now stained, and her mousy hair was long and her mouth was closed, so Shadow could not see the blue rubber-band braces, but he knew that they were there. The cold had preserved her, kept her as fresh as if she had been in a freezer. Her eyes were wide open, and she looked as if she had been crying when she died, and the tears that had frozen on her cheeks had still not melted. You were here all the time, said Shadow to Alison Mc-Governs corpse. Every single person who drove over that bridge saw you. Everyone who drove through the town saw you. The ice fishermen walked past you every day. And nobody knew. And then he realized how foolish that was. Somebody knew. Somebody had put her here. He reached into the trunkto see if he could pull her out. He put his weight on the car, as he leaned in. Maybe that was what did it. The ice beneath the front wheels went at that moment, perhaps from his movements, perhaps not. The front of the car lurched downward several feet into the dark water of the lake. Water began to pour into the car through the open drivers door. Lake water splashed about Shadows ankles, although the ice he stood on was still solid. He looked around urgently, wondering how to get away and then it was too late, and the ice tipped precipitously, throwing him against the car and the dead girl in the trunk; and the back of the car went down, and Shadow went down with it, into the cold waters of the lake. It was ten past nine in the morning on March the twenty-third. He took a deep breath before he went under, closing his eyes, but the cold of the lake water hit him like a wall, knocking the breath from his body. He tumbled downward, into the murky ice water, pulled down by the car. He was under the lake, down in the darkness and the cold, weighed down by his clothes and his gloves and his boots, trapped and swathed in his coat, which seemed to have become heavier and bulkier than he could have imagined. He was falling, still. He tried to push away from the car, but it was pulling him with it, and then there was a bang that he could hear with his whole body, not his ears, and his left foot was wrenched at the ankle, the foot twisted and trapped beneath the car as it settled on the lake bottom, and panic took him. He opened his eyes. He knew it was dark down there: rationally, he knew it was too dark to see anything, but still, he could see; he could see everything. He could see Alison McGoverns white face staring at him from the open trunk. He could see other cars as wellthe klunkers of bygone years, rotten hulk shapes in the darkness, half buried in the lake mud. And what else would they have dragged out on to the lake, Shadow wondered, before there were cars? Each one, he knew, without any question, had a dead child in the trunk. |
| 576 |
He breathed deep gasps of air, stretched flat out on the creaking ice, and even that would not hold for long, he knew, but it was no good. His thoughts were coming with difficulty, syrupy-slow. Just leave me, he tried to say. I'll be fine. His words were a slur, and everything was drawing to a halt. He just needed to rest for a moment, that was all, just rest, and then he would get up and move on. Obviously he could not just lie there forever. There was a jerk; water splashed his face. His head was lifted up. Shadow felt himself being hauled across the ice, sliding on his back across the slick surface, and he wanted to protest, to explain that he just needed a little restmaybe a little sleep, was that asking for so much? and he would be just fine. If they just left him alone. He did not believe that he had fallen asleep, but he was standing on a vast plain, and there was a man there with the head and shoulders of a buffalo, and a woman with the head of an enormous condor, and there was Whiskey Jack standing between them, looking at him sadly, shaking his head. Whiskey Jack turned and walked slowly away from Shadow. The buffalo man walked away beside him. The thunderbird woman also walked, and then she ducked and kicked and she was gliding out into the skies. Shadow felt a sense of loss. He wanted to call to them, to plead with them to come back, not to give up on him, but everything was becoming formless and without shape: they were gone, and the plains were fading, and everything became void. * * * The pain was intense: it was as if every cell in his body, every nerve, was melting and waking and advertising its presence by burning him and hurting him. There was a hand at the back of his head, gripping it by the hair, and another hand beneath his chin. He opened his eyes, expecting to find himself in some kind of hospital. His feet were bare. He was wearing jeans. He was naked from the waist up. There was steam in the air. He could see a shaving mirror on the wall facing him, and a small basin, and a blue toothbrush in a toothpaste-stained glass. Information was processed slowly, one datum at a time. His fingers burned. His toes burned. He began to whimper from the pain. Easy now, Mike. Easy there, said a voice he knew. What? he said, or tried to say. Whats happening? It sounded strained and strange to his ears. He was in a bathtub. The water was hot. He thought the water was hot, although he could not be certain. The water was up to his neck. Dumbest thing you can do with a fellow freezing to death is to put him in front of a fire. The second dumbest thing you can do is to wrap him in blanketsespecially if he's in cold wet clothes already. Blankets insulate himkeep the cold in. The third dumbest thing and this is my private opinionis to take the fellows blood out, warm it up and put it back. that's what doctors do these days. Complicated, expensive. Dumb. The voice was coming from above and behind his head. The smartest, quickest thing you can do is what sailors have done to men overboard for hundreds of years. |
| 577 |
We were both damn lucky that the ice took our weight as I dragged you back to the shore. Shadow nodded. You did a good thing, he told Hinzelmann, and the old man beamed all over his goblin face. Somewhere in the house, Shadow heard a door close. He sipped at his coffee. Now that he was able to think clearly, he was starting to ask himself questions. He wondered how an old man, a man half his height and perhaps a third his weight, had been able to drag him, unconscious, across the ice, or get him up the bank to a car. He wondered how Hinzelmann had gotten Shadow into the house and the bathtub. Hinzelmann walked over to the fire, picked up the tongs and placed a thin log, carefully, onto the blazing fire. Do you want to know what I was doing out on the ice? Hinzelmann shrugged. None of my business, You know what I don't understand said Shadow. He hesitated, putting his thoughts in order. I don't understand why you saved my life. Well, said Hinzelmann, the way I was brought up, if you see another fellow in trouble No, said Shadow. that's not what I mean. I mean, you killed all those kids. Every winter. I was the only one to have figured it out. You must have seen me open the trunk. Why didn't you just let me drown? Hinzelmann tipped his head on one side. He scratched his nose, thoughtfully, rocked back and forth as if he were thinking. Well, he said. that's a good question. I guess its because I owed a certain party a debt. And I'm good for my debts. Wednesday? that's the fellow. There was a reason he hid me in Lakeside, wasnt there? There was a reason nobody should have been able to find me here. Hinzelmann said nothing. He unhooked a heavy black poker from its place on the wall, and he prodded at the fire with it, sending up a cloud of orange sparks and smoke. This is my home, he said, petulantly. Its a good town. Shadow finished his coffee. He put the cup down on the floor. The effort was exhausting. How long have you been here? Long enough. And you made the lake? Hinzelmann peered at him, surprised. Yes, he said. I made the lake. They were calling it a lake when I got here, but it werent nothing more than a spring and a mill pond and a creek. He paused. I figured that this country is hell on my kind of folk. It eats us. I didn't want to be eaten. So I made a deal. I gave them a lake, and I gave them prosperity And all it cost them was one child every winter. Good kids, said Hinzelmann, shaking his old head, slowly. They were all good kids. I'd only pick ones I liked. Except for Charlie Nelligan. He was a bad seed, that one. He was, what, 1924? 1925? Yeah. That was the deal. The people of the town, said Shadow. Mabel. Marguerite. Chad Mulligan. Do they know? Hinzelmann said nothing. He pulled the poker from the fire: the first six inches at the tip glowed a dull orange. Shadow knew that the handle of the poker must be too hot to hold, but it did not seem to bother Hinzelmann, and he prodded the fire again. He put the poker back into the fire, tip first, and left it there. |
| 578 |
Then he said, They know that they live in a good place. While every other town and city in this county, heck, in this part of the state, is crumbling into nothing. They know that. And that's your doing? This town, said Hinzelmann. I care for it. Nothing happens here that I don't want to happen. You understand that? Nobody comes here that I don't want to come here. That was why your father sent you here. He didn't want you out there in the world, attracting attention. that's all. And you betrayed him. I did no such thing. He was a crook. But I always pay my debts. I don't believe you, said Shadow. Hinzelmann looked offended. One hand tugged at the clump of white hair at his temple. I keep my word. No. You don't. Laura came here. She said something was calling her here. And what about the coincidence that brought Sam Black Crow and Audrey Burton here, on the same night? I guess I don't believe in coincidence anymore. Sam Black Crow and Audrey Burton. Two people who both knew who I really was, and that there were people out there looking for me. I guess if one of them failed, there was always the other. And if all of them had failed, who else was on their way to Lakeside, Hinzelmann? My old prison warden, up here for a weekends ice fishing? Lauras mother? Shadow realized that he was angry. You wanted me out of your town. You just didn't want to have to tell Wednesday that was what you were doing. In the firelight, Hinzelmann seemed more like a gargoyle than an imp. This is a good town, he said. Without his smile he looked waxen and corpselike. You could have attracted too much attention. Not good for the town. You should have left me back there on the ice, said Shadow. You should have left me in the lake. I opened the trunk of the klunker. Right now Alison is still iced into the trunk. But the ice will melt, and her body'll float out and up to the surface. And then they'll go down and look and see what else they can find down there. Find your whole stash of kids. I guess some of those bodies are pretty well preserved. Hinzelmann reached down and picked up the poker. He made no pretense of stirring the fire with it any longer; he held it like a sword, or a baton, the glowing orange-white tip of it waving in the air. It smoked. Shadow was very aware that he was next-to-naked, and he was still tired, and clumsy, and far from able to defend himself. You want to kill me? said Shadow. Go ahead. Do it. I'm a dead man anyway. I know you own this townits your little world. But if you think no ones going to come looking for me, you're living in a dream-world. Its over, Hinzelmann. One way or another, its done. Hinzelmann pushed himself to his feet, using the poker as a walking stick. The carpet charred and smoked where he rested the red-hot tip, as he got up. He looked at Shallow and there were tears in his pale blue eyes. I love this town, he said. I really like being a cranky old man, and telling my stories and driving Tessie and ice-fishing. Remember what I told you? |
| 579 |
Then you smoke the small body over charcoal fires until it is properly dried, and you wrap it in furs and carry it with you from encampment to encampment, deep in the Black Forest, sacrificing animals and children to it, making it the luck of the tribe. When, eventually, the thing falls apart from age, you place its fragile bones in a box, and you worship the box; until one day the bones are scattered and forgotten, and the tribes who worshipped the child-god of the box are long gone; and the child-god, the luck of the village, will be barely remembered, save as a ghost or a brownie: a kobold. Shadow wondered which of the people who had come to northern Wisconsin 150 years ago, a woodcutter, perhaps, or a mapmaker, had crossed the Atlantic with Hinzelmann living in his head. And then the bloody child was gone, and the blood, and there was only an old man with a fluff of white hair and a goblin smile, his sweater-sleeves still soaked from putting Shadow into the bath that had saved his life. Hinzelmann? the voice came from the doorway of the den. Hinzelmann turned. Shadow turned too. I came over to tell you, said Chad Mulligan, and his voice was strained, that the klunker went through the ice. I saw it had gone down when I drove over that way, and thought I'd come over and let you know, in case youd missed it. He was holding his gun. It was pointed at the floor. Hey, Chad, said Shadow. Hey, pal, said Chad Mulligan. They sent me a note said youd died in custody. Heart attack. How about that? said Shadow. Seems like I'm dying all over the place. He came down here, Chad, said Hinzelmann. He threatened me. No, said Chad Mulligan. He didn't. I've been here for the last ten minutes, Hinzelmann. I heard everything you said. About my old man. About the lake. He walked farther into the den. He did not raise the gun. Jesus, Hinzelmann. You cant drive through this town without seeing that goddamned lake. Its at the center of everything. So what the hell am I supposed to do? You got to arrest him. He said he was going to kill me, said Hinzelmann, a scared old man in a dusty den. Chad, I'm pleasedyou're here. No, said Chad Mulligan. you're not. Hinzelmann sighed. He bent down, as if resigned, and he pulled the poker out from the fire. The tip of it was burning bright orange. Put that down, Hinzelmann. Just put it down slowly, keep your hands in the air where I can see them, and turn and face the wall. There was an expression of pure fear on the old mans face, and Shadow would have felt sorry for him, but he remembered the frozen tears on the cheeks of Alison McGovern. Hinzelmann did not move. He did not put down the poker. He did not turn to the wall. Shadow was about to reach for Hinzelmann, to try to take the poker away from him, when the old man threw the burning poker at Mulligan. Hinzelmann threw it awkwardlylobbing it across the room as if for forms sake and as he threw it he was already hurrying for the door. The poker glanced off Mulligans left arm. The noise of the shot, in the close quarters of the old mans room, was deafening. |
| 580 |
One shot to the head, and that was all. Mulligan said, Better get your clothes on. His voice was dull and dead. Shadow nodded. He walked to the room next door, opened the door of the clothes drier and pulled out his clothes. The jeans were still damp, but he put them on anyway. By the time he got back to the den, fully dressedexcept for his coat, which was somewhere deep in the freezing mud of the lake, and his boots, which he could not findMulligan had already hauled several smoldering logs out from the fireplace. Mulligan said, Its a bad day for a cop when he has to commit arson, just to cover up a murder. Then he looked up at Shadow. You need boots, he said. I don't know where he put them, said Shadow. Hell, said Mulligan. Then he said, Sorry about this, Hinzelmann, and he picked the old man up by the collar and by the belt buckle, and he swung him forward, dropped the body with its head resting in the open fireplace. The white hair crackled and flared, and the room began to fill with the smell of charring flesh. It wasnt murder. It was self-defense, said Shadow. I know what it was, said Mulligan, flatly. He had already turned his attention to the smoking logs he had scattered about the room. He pushed one of them to the edge of the sofa, picked up an old copy of the Lakeside News and pulled it into its component pages, which he crumpled up and dropped onto the log. The newspaper pages browned and then burst into flame. Get outside, said Chad Mulligan. He opened the windows as they walked out of the house, and he sprang the lock on the front door to lock it before he closed it. Shadow followed him out to the police car in his bare feet. Mulligan opened the front passenger door for him, and Shadow got in and wiped his feet off on the mat. Then he put on his socks, which were pretty much dry by now. We can get you some boots at Hennings Farm and Home, said Chad Mulligan. How much did you hear in there? asked Shadow. Enough, said Mulligan. Then he said, Too much. They drove to Hennings Farm and Home in silence. When they got there the police chief said, What size feet? Shadow told him. Mulligan walked into the store. He returned with a pair of thick woolen socks, and a pair of leather farm-boots. All they had left in your size, he said. Unless you wanted gumboots. I figured you didn't. Shadow pulled on the socks and the boots. They fitted fine. Thanks, he said. You got a car? asked Mulligan. Its parked by the road down to the lake. Near the bridge. Mulligan started the car and pulled out of the Hennings parking lot. What happened to Audrey? asked Shadow. Day after they took you away, she said she liked me as a friend, but it would never work out between us, us being family and all, and she went back to Eagle Point. Broke my gosh-darn heart. Makes sense, said Shadow. And it wasnt personal. Hinzelmann didn't need her here anymore. They drove back past Hinzelmanns house. A thick plume of white smoke was coming up from the chimney. She only came to town because he wanted her here. |
| 581 |
The creases in Chads forehead smoothed, and he blinked, sleepily. Go see Margie, said Shadow. Its been good seeing you, Chad. Take care of yourself. Sure, yawned Chad Mulligan. A message crackled over the police radio, and Chad reached out for the handset. Shadow got out of the car. Shadow walked over to his rental car. He could see the gray flatness of the lake at the center of the town. He thought of the dead children who waited at the bottom of the water. Soon, Alison would float to the surface As Shadow drove past Hinzelmanns place he could see the plume of smoke had already turned into a blaze. He could hear a siren wail. He drove south, heading for Highway 51. He was on his way to keep his final appointment. But before that, he thought, he would stop off in Madison, for one last goodbye. * * * Best of everything, Samantha Black Crow liked closing up the Coffee House at night. It was a perfectly calming thing to do: it gave her a feeling that she was putting order back into the world. She would put on an Indigo Girls CD, and she would do her final chores of the night at her own pace and in her own way. First, she would clean the espresso machine. Then she would do the final rounds, ensuring that any missed cups or plates were deposited back in the kitchen, and that the newspapers that were always scattered around the Coffee House by the end of each day were collected together and piled neatly by the front door, all ready for recycling. She loved the Coffee House. It was a long, winding series of rooms filled with armchairs and sofas and low tables, on a street lined with secondhand bookstores. She covered the leftover slices of cheesecake and put them into the large refrigerator for the night, then she took a cloth and wiped the last of the crumbs away. She enjoyed being alone. A tapping on the window jerked her attention from her chores back to the real world. She went to the door and opened it to admit a woman of about Sams age, with pig-tailed magenta hair. Her name was Natalie. Hello, said Natalie. She went up on tiptoes and kissed Sam, depositing the kiss snugly between Sams cheek and the corner of her mouth. You can say a lot of things with a kiss like that. You done? Nearly. You want to see a movie? Sure. Love to. I've got a good five minutes left here, though. Why don't you sit and read the Onion? I saw this weeks already. She sat on a chair near the door, ruffled through the pile of newspapers put aside for recycling until she found something, and read it while Sam bagged up the last of the money in the till and put it in the safe. They had been sleeping together for a week now. Sam wondered if this was it, the relationship shed been waiting for all her life. She told herself that it was just brain chemicals and pheromones that made her happy when she saw Natalie, and perhaps that was what it was; still, all she knew for sure was that she smiled when she saw Natalie, and that when they were together she felt comfortable and comforted. |
| 582 |
But wouldn't red have been more appropriate? They were roses, their stems wrapped in paper. Six of them, and white. I didn't give them to you, said Natalie, her lips firming. And neither of them said another word until they reached the movie theater. When she got home that night Sam put the roses in an improvised vase. Later, she cast them in bronze, and she kept to herself the tale of how she got them, although she told Caroline, who came after Natalie, the story of the ghost-roses one night when they were both very drunk, and Caroline agreed with Sam that it was a really, really strange and spooky story, and, deep down, did not actually believe a word of it, so that was all right. * * * Shadow had parked near a pay phone. He called information, and they gave him the number. No, he was told. She isn't here. she's probably still at the Coffee House. He stopped on the way to the Coffee House to buy flowers. He found the Coffee House, then he crossed the road and stood in the doorway of a used bookstore, and waited, and watched. The place closed at eight, and at ten past eight Shadow saw Sam Black Crow walk out of the Coffee House in the company of a smaller woman whose pigtailed hair was a peculiar shade of red. They were holding hands tightly, as if simply holding hands could keep the world at bay, and they were talkingor rather, Sam was doing most of the talking while her friend listened. Shadow wondered what Sam was saying. She smiled as she talked. The two women crossed the road, and they walked past the place where Shadow was standing. The pigtailed girl passed within a foot of him; he could have reached out and touched her, and they didn't see him at all. He watched them walking away from him down the street, and felt a pang, like a minor chord being played inside him. It had been a good kiss, Shadow reflected, but Sam had never looked at him the way she was looking at the pig-tailed girl, and she never would. What the hell. Well always have Peru, he said, under his breath, as Sam walked away from him. And El Paso. Well always have that. Then he ran after her, and put the flowers into Sams hands. He hurried away, so she could not give them back. Then he walked up the hill, back to his car, and he followed the signs to Chicago. He drove at or slightly under the speed limit. It was the last thing he had to do. He was in no hurry. * * * He spent the night in a Motel 6. He got up the next morning and realized his clothes still smelled like the bottom of the lake. He put them on anyway. He figured he wouldn't need them much longer. Shadow paid his bill. He drove to the brownstone apartment building. He found it without any difficulty. It was smaller than he remembered. He walked up the stairs steadilynot fast, that would have meant he was eager to go to his death, and not slow, that would have meant he was afraid. Someone had cleaned the stairwell: the black garbage bags had gone. The place smelled of the chlorine smell of bleach, no longer of rotting vegetables. |
| 583 |
The red-painted door at the top of the stairs was wide open: the smell of old meals hung in the air. Shadow hesitated, then he pressed the doorbell. I come! called a womans voice, and, dwarf-small and dazzlingly blonde, Zorya Utrennyaya came out of the kitchen and bustled toward him, wiping her hands on her apron. She looked different, Shadow realized. She looked happy. Her cheeks were rouged red, and there was a sparkle in her old eyes. When she saw him her mouth became an O and she called out, Shadow? You came back to us? and she hurried toward him with her arms outstretched. He bent down and embraced her, and she kissed his cheek. So good to see you! she said. Now you must go away. Shadow stepped into the apartment. All the doors in the apartment (except, unsurprisingly, Zorya Polunochnayas) were wide open, and all the windows he could see were open as well. A gentle breeze blew fitfully through the corridor. you're spring cleaning, he said to Zorya Utrennyaya. We have a guest coming, she told him. Now, you must go away. First, you want coffee? I came to see Czernobog, said Shadow. Its time. Zorya Utrennyaya shook her head violently. No, no, she said. You don't want to see him. Not a good idea. I know, said Shadow. But you know, the only thing I've really learned about dealing with gods is that if you make a deal, you keep it. They get to break all the rules they want. We don't. Even if I tried to walk out of here, my feet would just bring me back. She pushed up her bottom lip, then said, Is true. But go today. Come back tomorrow. He will be gone then. Who is it? called a womans voice from farther down the corridor. Zorya Utrennyaya, to who are you talking? This mattress, I cannot turn on my own, you know. Shadow walked down the corridor and said, Good morning, Zorya Vechernyaya. Can I help? which made the woman in the room squeak with surprise and drop her corner of the mattress. The bedroom was thick with dust: it covered every surface, the wood and the glass, and motes of it floated and danced through the beams of sunshine coming through the open window, disturbed by occasional breezes and the lazy flapping of the yellowed lace curtains. He remembered this room. This was the room they had given to Wednesday, that night. Bielebogs room. Zorya Vechernyaya eyed him uncertainly. The mattress, she said. It needs to be turned. Not a problem, said Shadow. He reached out and took the mattress, lifted it with ease, and turned it over. It was an old wooden bed, and the feather mattress weighed almost as much as a man. Dust flew and swirled as the mattress went down. Why are you here? asked Zorya Vechernyaya. It was not a friendly question, the way she asked it. I'm here, said Shadow, because back in December a young man played a game of checkers with an old god, and he lost. The old womans gray hair was up on the top of her head in a tight bun. She pursed her lips. Come back tomorrow, said Zorya Vechernyaya. I cant, he said, simply. Is your funeral. Now, you go and sit down. |
| 584 |
Zorya Utrennyaya will bring you coffee. Czernobog will be back soon. Shadow walked along the corridor to the sitting room. It was just as he remembered, although now the window was open. The gray cat slept on the arm of the sofa. It opened an eye as Shadow came in and then, unimpressed, it went back to sleep. This was where he had played checkers with Czernobog; this was where he had wagered his life to get the old man to join them on Wednesdays last doomed grift. The fresh air came in through the open window, blowing the stale air away. Zorya Utrennyaya came in with a red wooden tray. A small enameled cup of steaming black coffee sat on the tray, beside a saucer filled with small chocolate-chip cookies. She put it down on the table in front of him. I saw Zorya Polunochnaya again, he said. She came to me under the world, and she gave me the moon to light my way. And she took something from me. But I don't remember what. She likes you, said Zorya Utrennyaya. She dreams so much. And she guards us all. She is so brave. Wheres Czernobog? He says the spring cleaning makes him uncomfortable. He goes out to buy newspaper, sit in the park. Buy cigarettes. Perhaps he will not come back today. You do not have to wait. Why don't you go? Come back tomorrow. I'll wait, said Shadow. There was no magic forcing him to wait, he knew that. This was him. It was one last thing that needed to happen, and if it was the last thing that happened, well, he was going there of his own volition. After this there would be no more obligations, no more mysteries, no more ghosts. He sipped the hot coffee, as black and as sweet as he remembered. He heard a deep male voice in the corridor, and he sat up straighter. He was pleased to see that his hand was not trembling. The door opened. Shadow? Hi, said Shadow. He stayed sitting down. Czernobog walked into the room. He was carrying a folded copy of the Chicago Sun-Times, which he put down on the coffee table. He stared at Shadow, then he put his hand out, tentatively. The two men shook hands. I came, said Shadow. Our deal. You came through with your part of it. This is my part. Czernobog nodded. His brow creased. The sunlight glinted on his gray hair and mustache, making them appear almost golden. Is he frowned. Is not He broke off. Maybe you should go. Is not a good time. Take as long as you need, said Shadow. I'm ready. Czernobog sighed. You are a very stupid boy. You know that? I guess. You are a stupid boy. And on the mountaintop, you did a very good thing. I did what I had to do. Perhaps. Czernobog walked to the old wooden sideboard and, bending down, pulled an attache case from underneath it. He flipped the catches on the case. Each one sprang back with a satisfying thump. He opened the case. He took a hammer out and hefted it experimentally. The hammer looked like a scaled-down sledgehammer; its wooden haft was stained. Then he stood up. He said, I owe you much. More than you know. Because of you, things are changing. This is springtime. |
| 585 |
The true spring. I know what I did, said Shadow. I didn't have a lot of choice. Czernobog nodded. There was a look in his eyes that Shadow did not remember seeing before. Did I ever tell you about my brother? Bielebog? Shadow walked to the center of the ash-stained carpet. He went down on his knees. You said you hadn't seen him in a long time. Yes, said the old man, raising the hammer. It has been a long winter, boy. A very long winter. But the winter is ending, now. And he shook his head, slowly, as if he were remembering something. And he said, Close your eyes. Shadow closed his eyes and raised his head, and he waited. The head of the sledgehammer was cold, icy cold, and it touched his forehead as gently as a kiss. Pock! There, said Czernobog. Is done. There was a smile on his face that Shadow had never seen before, an easy, comfortable smile, like sunshine on a summers day. The old man walked over to the case, and he put the hammer away, and closed the bag, and pushed it back under the sideboard. Czernobog? asked Shadow. Then, Are you Czernobog? Yes. For today, said the old man. By tomorrow, it will all be Bielebog. But today, is still Czernobog. Then why? Why didn't you kill me when you could? The old man took out an unfiltered cigarette from a packet in his pocket. He took a large box of matches from the mantelpiece and lit the cigarette with a match. He seemed deep in thought. Because, said the old man, after some time, there is blood. But there is also gratitude. And it has been a long, long winter. Shadow got to his feet. There were dusty patches on the knees of his jeans, where he had knelt, and he brushed the dust away. Thanks, he said. you're welcome, said the old man. Next time you want to play checkers, you know where to find me. This time, I play white. Thanks. Maybe I will, said Shadow. But not for a while. He looked into the old mans twinkling eyes, and he wondered if they had always been that cornflower shade of blue. They shook hands, and neither of them said goodbye. Shadow kissed Zorya Utrennyaya on the cheek on his way out, and he kissed Zorya Vechernyaya on the back of her hand, and he took the stairs out of that place two at a time. Postscript Reykjavik, in Iceland, is a strange city, even for those who have seen many strange cities. It is a volcanic citythe heat for the city comes from deep underground. There are tourists, but not as many of them as you might expect, not even in early July. The sun was shining, as it had shone for weeks now: it ceased shining for an hour or two in the small hours of the morning. There would be a dusky dawn of sorts between two and three in the morning, and then the day would begin once more. The big tourist had walked most of Reykjavik that morning, listening to people talk in a language that had changed little in a thousand years. The natives here could read the ancient sagas as easily as they could read a newspaper. There was a sense of continuity on this island that scared him, and that he found desperately reassuring. |
| 586 |
He was very tired: the unending daylight had made sleep almost impossible, and he had sat in his hotel room through the whole long nightless night alternately reading a guidebook and Bleak House, a novel he had bought in an airport in the last few weeks, but which airport he could no longer remember. Sometimes he had stared out of the window. Finally the clock as well as the sun proclaimed it morning. He bought a bar of chocolate at one of the many candy stores and walked the sidewalk, occasionally finding himself reminded of the volcanic nature of Iceland: he would turn a corner and notice, for a moment, a sulfurous quality to the air. It put him in mind not of Hades but of rotten eggs. Many of the women he passed were very beautiful: slender and pale. The kind of women that Wednesday had liked. Shadow wondered what could have attracted Wednesday to Shadows mother, who had been beautiful, but had been neither of those things. Shadow smiled at the pretty women, because they made him feel pleasantly male, and he smiled at the other women too, because he was having a good time. He was not sure when he became aware that he was being observed. Somewhere on his walk through Reykjavik he became certain that someone was watching him. He would turn, from time to time, trying to get a glimpse of who it was, and he would stare into store windows and out at the reflected street behind him, but he saw no one out of the ordinary, no one who seemed to be observing him. He went into a small restaurant, where he ate smoked puffin and cloudberries and arctic char and boiled potatoes, and he drank Coca-Cola, which tasted sweeter, more sugary than he remembered it tasting back in the States. When the waiter brought his bill, he said, Excuse me. You are American? Yes. Then, happy Fourth of July, said the waiter. He looked pleased with himself. Shadow had not realized that it was the fourth. Independence Day. Yes. He liked the idea of independence. He left the money and a tip on the table, and walked outside. There was a cool breeze coming in off the Atlantic, and he buttoned up his coat. He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough. An old man came striding across the hillside toward him: he wore a dark gray cloak, ragged at the bottom, as if he had done a lot of traveling, and he wore a broad-brimmed blue hat, with a seagull feather tucked into the band at a jaunty angle. He looked like an aging hippie, thought Shadow. Or a long-retired gunfighter. The old man was ridiculously tall. The man squatted beside Shadow on the hillside. He nodded, curtly, to Shadow. He had a piratical black eyepatch over one eye, and a jutting white chin-beard. Shadow wondered if the man was going to hit him up for a cigarette. |
| 587 |
Hvernig gengur? Manst ? u eftir mer? said the old man. I'm sorry, said Shadow. I don't speak Icelandic. Then he said, awkwardly, the phrase he had learned from his phrase book in the daylight of the small hours of that morning: Eg tala bara ensku. I speak only English. And then, American. The old man nodded slowly. He said, My people went from here to America a long time ago. They went there, and then they returned to Iceland. They said it was a good place for men, but a bad place for gods. And without their gods they felt tooalone. His English was fluent, but the pauses and the beats of the sentences were strange. Shadow looked at him: close-up, the man seemed older than Shadow had imagined possible. His skin was lined with tiny wrinkles and cracks, like the cracks in granite. The old man said, I do know you, boy. You do? You and I, we have walked the same path. I also hung on the tree for nine days, a sacrifice of myself to myself. I am the lord of the Aes. I am the god of the gallows. You are Odin, said Shadow. The man nodded thoughtfully, as if weighing up the name. They call me many things, but, yes, I am Odin, Bors son, he said. I saw you die, said Shadow. I stood vigil for your body. You tried to destroy so much for power. You would have sacrificed so much for yourself. You did that. I did not do that. Wednesday did. He was you. He was me, yes. But I am not him. The man scratched the side of his nose. His gull-feather bobbed. Will you go back? asked the Lord of the Gallows. To America? Nothing to go back for, said Shadow, and as he said it he knew it was a lie. Things wait for you there, said the old man. But they will wait until you return. A white butterfly flew crookedly past them. Shadow said nothing. He had had enough of gods and their ways to last him several lifetimes. He would take the bus to the airport, he decided, and change his ticket. Get a plane to somewhere he had never been. He would keep moving. Hey, said Shadow. I have something for you. His hand dipped into his pocket, and palmed the object he needed. Hold your hand out, he said. Odin looked at him strangely and seriously. Then he shrugged, and extended his right hand, palm down. Shadow reached over and turned it so the palm was upward. He opened his own hands, showed them, one after the other, to be completely empty. Then he pushed the glass eye into the leathery palm of the old mans hand and left it there. How did you do that? Magic, said Shadow, without smiling. The old man grinned and laughed and clapped his hands together. He looked at the eye, holding it between finger and thumb, and nodded, as if he knew exactly what it was, and then he slipped it into a leather bag that hung by his waist. Takk k? rlega. I shall take care of this. you're welcome, said Shadow. He stood up, brushed the grass from his jeans. Again, said the Lord of Asgard, with an imperious motion of his head, his voice deep and commanding. More. Do again. You people, said Shadow. you're never satisfied. |
| 588 |
Green Town did exist, then? Yes, and again, yes. Was there a real boy named John Huff? There was. And that was truly his name. But he didn't go away from me, I went away from him. But, happy ending, he is still alive, forty-two years later, and remembers our love. Was there a Lonely One? There was, and that was his name. And he moved around at night in my home town when I was six years old and he frightened everyone and was never captured. Most importantly, did the big house itself, with Grandpa and Grandma and the boarders and uncles and aunts in it exist? I have already answered that. Is the ravine real and deep and dark at night? It was, it is. I took my daughters there a few years back, fearful that the ravine might have gone shallow with time. I am relieved and happy to report that the ravine is deeper, darker, and more mysterious than ever. I would not, even now, go home through there after seeing The Phantom of the Opera. So there you have it. Waukegan was Green Town was Byzantium, with all the happiness that that means, with all the sadness that these names imply. The people there were gods and midgets and knew themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home. And, after all, isn't that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other peoples heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that's how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that. Here is my celebration, then, of death as well as life, dark as well as light, old as well as young, smart and dumb combined, sheer joy as well as complete terror written by a boy who once hung upside down in trees, dressed in his bat costume with candy fangs in his mouth, who finally fell out of the trees when he was twelve and went and found a toy-dial typewriter and wrote his first novel. A final memory. Fire balloons. You rarely see them these days, though in some countries, I hear, they are still made and filled with warm breath from a small straw fire hung beneath. But in 1925 Illinois, we still had them, and one of the last memories I have of my grandfather is the last hour of a Fourth of July night forty-eight years ago when Grandpa and I walked out on the lawn and lit a small fire and filled the pear-shaped red-white-and-blue-striped paper balloon with hot air, and held the flickering bright-angel presence in our hands a final moment in front of a porch lined with uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers and fathers, and then, very softly, let the thing that was life and light and mystery go out of our fingers up on the summer air and away over the beginning-to-sleep houses, among the stars, as fragile, as wondrous, as vulnerable, as lovely as life itself. I see my grandfather there looking up at that strange drifting light, thinking his own still thoughts. I see me, my eyes filled with tears, because it was all over, the night was done, I knew there would never be another night like this. |
| 589 |
Soon, in the morning avenues below, two old women would glide their electric Green Machine, waving at all the dogs. Mr. Tridden, run to the carbarn! Soon, scattering hot blue sparks above it, the town trolley would sail the rivering brick streets. Ready John Huff, Charlie Woodman? whispered Douglas to the Street of Children. Ready! to baseballs sponged deep in wet lawns, to rope swings hung empty in trees. Mom, Dad, Tom, wake up. Clock alarms tinkled faintly. The courthouse clock boomed. Birds leaped from trees like a net thrown by his hand, singing. Douglas, conducting an orchestra, pointed to the eastern sky. The sun began to rise. He folded his arms and smiled a magicians smile. Yes, sir, he thought, everyone jumps, everyone runs when I yell. Itll be a fine season. He gave the town a last snap of his fingers. Doors slammed open; people stepped out. Summer 1928 began. Crossing the lawn that morning, Douglas Spaulding broke a spider web with his face. A single invisible line on the air touched his brow and snapped without a sound. So, with the subtlest of incidents, he knew that this day was going to be different. It would be different also, because, as his father explained, driving Douglas and his ten-year-old brother Tom out of town toward the country, there were some days compounded completely of odor, nothing but the world blowing in one nostril and out the other. And some days, he went on, were days of hearing every trump and trill of the universe. Some days were good for tasting and some for touching. And some days were good for all the senses at once. This day now, he nodded, smelled as if a great and nameless orchard had grown up overnight beyond the hills to fill the entire visible land with its warm freshness. The air felt like rain, but there were no clouds. Momentarily, a stranger might laugh off in the woods, but there was silence... Douglas watched the traveling land. He smelled no orchards and sensed no rain, for without apple trees or clouds he knew neither could exist. And as for that stranger laughing deep in the woods...? Yet the fact remainedDouglas shiveredthis, without reason, was a special day. The car stopped at the very center of the quiet forest. All right, boys, behave. They had been jostling elbows. Yes, sir. They climbed out, carrying the blue tin pails away from the lonely dirt road into the smell of fallen rain. Look for bees, said Father. Bees hang around grapes like boys around kitchens, Doug? Douglas looked up suddenly. you're off a million miles, said Father. Look alive. Walk with us. Yes, sir. And they walked through the forest, Father very tall, Douglas moving in his shadow, and Tom, very small, trotting in his brothers shade. They came to a little rise and looked ahead. Here, here, did they see? Father pointed. Here was where the big summer-quiet winds lived and passed in the green depths, like ghost whales, unseen. Douglas looked quickly, saw nothing, and felt put upon by his father who, like Grandpa, lived on riddles. |
| 590 |
But... But, still... Douglas paused and listened. Yes, somethings going to happen, he thought, I know it! Heres maidenhair fern, Dad walked, the tin pail belling in his fist. Feel this? He scuffed the earth. A million years of good rich leafmold laid down. Think of the autumns that got by to make this. Boy, I walk like an Indian, said Tom. Not a sound. Douglas felt but did not feel the deep loam, listening, watchful. Were surrounded! he thought. Itll happen! What? He stopped. Come out, wherever you are, whatever you are! he cried silently. Tom and Dad strolled on the hushed earth ahead. Finest lace there is, said Dad quietly. And he was gesturing up through the trees above to show them how it was woven across the sky or how the sky was woven into the trees, he wasnt sure which. But there it was, he smiled, and the weaving went on, green and blue, if you watched and saw the forest shift its humming loom. Dad stood comfortably saying this and that, the words easy in his mouth. He made it easier by laughing at his own declarations just so often. He liked to listen to the silence, he said, if silence could be listened to, for, he went on, in that silence you could hear wildflower pollen sifting down the bee-fried air, by God, the bee-fried air! Listen! the waterfall of birdsong beyond those trees! Now, thought Douglas, here it comes! Running! I don't see it! Running! Almost on me! Fox grapes! said Father. Were in luck, look here! don't! Douglas gasped. But Tom and Dad bent down to shove their hands deep in rattling bush. The spell was shattered. The terrible prowler, the magnificent runner, the leaper, the shaker of souls, vanished. Douglas, lost and empty, fell to his knees. He saw his fingers sink through green shadow and come forth stained with such color that it seemed he had somehow cut the forest and delved his hand in the open wound. Lunch time, boys! With buckets half burdened with fox grapes and wild strawberries, followed by bees which were, no more, no less, said Father, the world humming under its breath, they sat on a green-mossed log, chewing sandwiches and trying to listen to the forest the same way Father did. Douglas felt Dad watching him, quietly amused. Dad started to say something that had crossed his mind, but instead tried another bite of sandwich and mused over it. Sandwich outdoors isn't a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite. Douglass tongue hesitated on the texture of bread and deviled ham. No... no... it was just a sandwich. Tom chewed and nodded. Know just what you mean, Dad! It almost happened, thought Douglas. Whatever it was it was Big, my gosh, it was Big! Something scared it off. Where is it now? Back of that bush! No, behind me! No here... almost here... He kneeded his stomach secretly. If I wait, itll come back. It won't hurt; somehow I know its not here to hurt me. What then? What? What? You know how many baseball games we played this year, last year, year before? |
| 591 |
said Tom, apropos of nothing. Douglas watched Toms quickly moving lips. Wrote it down! One thousand five hundred sixty-eight games! How many times I brushed my teeth in ten years? Six thousand! Washing my hands: fifteen thousand. Slept: four thousand some-odd times, not counting naps. Ate six hundred peaches, eight hundred apples. Pears: two hundred. I'm not hot for pears. Name a thing, I got the statistics! Runs to the billion millions, things I done, add em up, in ten years. Now, thought Douglas, its coming close again. Why? Tom talking? But why Tom? Tom chatting along, mouth crammed with sandwich, Dad there, alert as a mountain cat on the log, and Tom letting the words rise like quick soda bubbles in his mouth: Books I read: four hundred. Matinees I seen: forty Buck Joneses, thirty Jack Hoxies, forty-five Tom Mixes, thirty-nine Hoot Gibsons, one hundred and ninety-two single and separate Felix-the-Cat cartoons, ten Douglas Fairbankses, eight repeats on Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera, four Milton Sillses, and one Adolph Menjou thing about love where I spent ninety hours in the theater toilet waiting for the mush to be over so I could see The Cat and the Canary or The Bat, where everybody held onto everybody else and screamed for two hours without letting go. During that time I figure four hundred lollipops, three hundred Tootsie Rolls, seven hundred ice-cream cones... Tom rolled quietly along his way for another five minutes and then Dad said, How many berries you picked so far, Tom? Two hundred fifty-six on the nose! said Tom instantly. Dad laughed and lunch was over and they moved again into the shadows to find fox grapes and the tiny wild strawberries, bent down, all three of them, hands coming and going, the pails getting heavy, and Douglas holding his breath, thinking, Yes, yes, its near again! Breathing on my neck, almost! don't look! Work. Just pick, fill up the pail. If you look you'll scare it off. don't lose it this time! But how do you bring it around here where you can see it, stare it right in the eye? How? How? Got a snowflake in a matchbox, said Tom, smiling at the wine-glove on his hand. Shut up! Douglas wanted to yell. But no, the yell would scare the echoes, and run the Thing away! And, wait... the more Tom talked, the closer the great Thing came, it wasnt scared of Tom, Tom drew it with his breath, Tom was part of it! Last February, said Tom, and chuckled. Held a matchbox up in a snowstorm, let one old snowflake fall in, shut it up, ran inside the house, stashed it in the icebox! Close, very close. Douglas stared at Toms flickering lips. He wanted to jump around, for he felt a vast tidal wave lift up behind the forest. In an instant it would smash down, crush them forever... Yes, sir, mused Tom, picking grapes, I'm the only guy in all Illinois whos got a snowflake in summer. Precious as diamonds, by gosh. Tomorrow I'll open it. Doug, you can look, too... Any other day Douglas might have snorted, struck out, denied it all. |
| 592 |
But now, with the great Thing rushing near, falling down in the clear air above him, he could only nod, eyes shut. Tom, puzzled, stopped picking berries and turned to stare over at his brother. Douglas, hunched over, was an ideal target. Tom leaped, yelling, landed. They fell, thrashed, and rolled. No! Douglas squeezed his mind shut. No! But suddenly... Yes, its all right! Yes! The tangle, the contact of bodies, the falling tumble had not scared off the tidal sea that crashed now, flooding and washing them along the shore of grass deep through the forest. Knuckles struck his mouth. He tasted rusty warm blood, grabbed Tom hard, held him tight, and so in silence they lay, hearts churning, nostrils hissing. And at last, slowly, afraid he would find nothing, Douglas opened one eye. And everything, absolutely everything, was there. The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him. And he knew what it was that had leaped upon him to stay and would not run away now. I'm alive, he thought. His fingers trembled, bright with blood, like the bits of a strange flag now found and before unseen, and him wondering what country and what allegiance he owed to it. Holding Tom, but not knowing him there, he touched his free hand to that blood as if it could be peeled away, held up, turned over. Then he let go of Tom and lay on his back with his hand up in the sky and he was a head from which his eyes peered like sentinels through the portcullis of a strange castle out along a bridge, his arm, to those fingers where the bright pennant of blood quivered in the light. You all right, Doug? asked Tom. His voice was at the bottom of a green moss well somewhere underwater, secret, removed. The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and, far away, below, his toes creaking in his shoes. The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were sun and fiery spots of sky strewn through the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing his wrists, the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened. I'm really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don't remember! He yelled it loud but silent, a dozen times! Think of it, think of it! Twelve years old and only now! Now discovering this rare timepiece, this clock gold-bright and guaranteed to run threescore and ten, left under a tree and found while wrestling. Doug, you okay? Douglas yelled, grabbed Tom, and rolled. Doug, you're crazy! |
| 593 |
Crazy! They spilled downhill, the sun in their mouths, in their eyes like shattered lemon glass, gasping like trout thrown out on a bank, laughing till they cried. Doug, you're not mad? No, no, no, no, no! Douglas, eyes shut, saw spotted leopards pad in the dark. Tom! Then quieter. Tom... does everyone in the world... know he's alive? Sure. Heck, yes! The leopards trotted soundlessly off through darker lands where eyeballs could not turn to follow. I hope they do, whispered Douglas. Oh, I sure hope they know. Douglas opened his eyes. Dad was standing high above him there in the green-leaved sky, laughing, hands on hips. Their eyes met. Douglas quickened. Dad knows, he thought. It was all planned. He brought us here on purpose, so this could happen to me! he's in on it, he knows it all. And now he knows that I know. A hand came down and seized him through the air. Swayed on his feet with Tom and Dad, still bruised and rumpled, puzzled and awed, Douglas held his strange-boned elbows tenderly and licked the fine cut lip with satisfaction. Then he looked at Dad and Tom. I'll carry all the pails, he said. This once, let me haul everything. They handed over the pails with quizzical smiles. He stood swaying slightly, the forest collected, full-weighted and heavy with syrup, clenched hard in his down-slung hands. I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, T mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that. The bees followed and the smell of fox grapes and yellow summer followed as he walked heavy-laden and half drunk, his fingers wonderously callused, arms numb, feet stumbling so his father caught his shoulder. No, mumbled Douglas, I'm all right. I'm fine... It took half an hour for the sense of the grass, the roots, the stones, the bark of the messy log, to fade from where they had patterned his arms and legs and back. While he pondered this, let it slip, slide, dissolve away, his brother and his quiet father followed behind, allowing him to pathfind the forest alone out toward that incredible highway which would take them back to the town... The town, then, later in the day. And yet another harvest. Grandfather stood on the wide front porch like a captain surveying the vast unmotioned calms of a season dead ahead. He questioned the wind and the untouchable sky and the lawn on which stood Douglas and Tom to question only him. Grandpa, are they ready? Now? Grandfather pinched his chin. Five hundred, a thousand, two thousand easy. Yes, yes, a good supply. Pick em easy, pick em all. A dime for every sack delivered to the press! Hey! The boys bent, smiling. They picked the golden flowers. The flowers that flooded the world, dripped off lawns onto brick streets, tapped softly at crystal cellar windows and agitated themselves so that on all sides lay the dazzle and glitter of molten sun. Every year, said Grandfather. They run amuck; I let them. Pride of lions in the yard. |
| 594 |
Stare, and they burn a hole in your retina. A common flower, a weed that no one sees, yes. But for us, a noble thing, the dandelion. So, plucked carefully, in sacks, the dandelions were carried below. The cellar dark glowed with their arrival. The wine press stood open, cold. A rush of flowers warmed it. The press, replaced, its screw rotated, twirled by Grandfather, squeezed gently on the crop. There... so... The golden tide, the essence of this fine fair month ran, then gushed from the spout below, to be crocked, skimmed of ferment, and bottled in clean ketchup shakers, then ranked in sparkling rows in cellar gloom. Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered. And now that Douglas knew, he really knew he was alive, and moved turning through the world to touch and see it all, it was only right and proper that some of his new knowledge, some of this special vintage day would be sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks or months and perhaps some of the miracle by then forgotten and in need of renewal. Since this was going to be a summer of unguessed wonders, he wanted it all salvaged and labeled so that any time he wished, he might tiptoe down in this dank twilight and reach up his fingertips. And there, row upon row, with the soft gleam of flowers opened at morning, with the light of this June sun glowing through a faint skin of dust, would stand the dandelion wine. Peer through it at the wintry daythe snow melted to grass, the trees were reinhabitated with bird, leaf, and blossoms like a continent of butterflies breathing on the wind. And peering through, color sky from iron to blue. Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in. Ready, now, the rain barrel! Nothing else in the world would do but the pure waters which had been summoned from the lakes far away and the sweet fields of grassy dew on early morning, lifted to the open sky, carried in laundered clusters nine hundred miles, brushed with wind, electrified with high voltage, and condensed upon cool air. This water, falling, raining, gathered yet more of the heavens in its crystals. Taking something of the east wind and the west wind and the north wind and the south, the water made rain and the rain, within this hour of rituals, would be well on its way to wine. Douglas ran with the dipper. He plunged it deep in the rain barrel. Here we go! The water was silk in the cup; clear, faintly blue silk. It softened the lip and the throat and the heart, if drunk. This water must be carried in dipper and bucket to the cellar, there to be leavened in freshets, in mountain streams, upon the dandelion harvest. Even Grandma, when snow was whirling fast, dizzying the world, blinding windows, stealing breath from gasping mouths, even Grandma, one day in February, would vanish to the cellar. |
| 595 |
Above, in the vast house, there would be coughings, sneezings, wheezings, and groans, childish fevers, throats raw as butchers meat, noses like bottled cherries, the stealthy microbe everywhere. Then, rising from the cellar like a June goddess, Grandma would come, something hidden but obvious under her knitted shawl. This, carried to every miserable room upstairs-and-down would be dispensed with aroma and clarity into neat glasses, to be swigged neatly. The medicines of another time, the balm of sun and idle August afternoons, the faintly heard sounds of ice wagons passing on brick avenues, the rush of silver skyrockets and the fountaining of lawn mowers moving through ant countries, all these, all these in a glass. Yes, even Grandma, drawn to the cellar of winter for a June adventure, might stand alone and quietly, in secret conclave with her own soul and spirit, as did Grandfather and Father and Uncle Pert, or some of the boarders, communing with a last touch of a calendar long departed, with the picnics and the warm rains and the smell of fields of wheat and new popcorn and bending hay. Even Grandma, repeating and repeating the fine and golden words, even as they were said now in this moment when the flowers were dropped into the press, as they would be repeated every winter for all the white winters in time. Saying them over and over on the lips, like a smile, like a sudden patch of sunlight in the dark. Dandelion wine. Dandelion wine. Dandelion wine. You did not hear them coming. You hardly heard them go. The grass bent down, sprang up again. They passed like cloud shadows downhill... the boys of summer, running. Douglas, left behind, was lost. Panting, he stopped by the rim of the ravine, at the edge of the softly blowing abyss. Here, ears pricked like a deer, he snuffed a danger that was old a billion years ago. Here the town, divided, fell away in halves. Here civilization ceased. Here was only growing earth and a million deaths and rebirths every hour. And here the paths, made or yet unmade, that told of the need of boys traveling, always traveling, to be men. Douglas turned. This path led in a great dusty snake to the ice house where winter lived on the yellow days. This path raced for the blast-furnace sands of the lake shore in July. This to trees where boys might grow like sour and still-green crab apples, hid among leaves. This to peach orchard, grape arbor, watermelons lying like tortoise-shell cats slumbered by sun. That path, abandoned, but wildly swiveling, to school! This, straight as an arrow, to Saturday cowboy matinees. And this, by the creek waters, to wilderness beyond town... Douglas squinted. Who could say where town or wideness began? Who could say which owned what and what owned which? There was always and forever that indefinable place where the two struggled and one of them won for a season to possess a certain avenue, a deli, a glen, a tree, a bush. The thin lapping of the great continental sea of grass and flower, starting far out in lonely farm country, moved inward with the thrust of seasons. |
| 596 |
Each night the wilderness, the meadows, the far country flowed down-creek through ravine and welled up in town with a smell of grass and water, and the town was disinhabited and dead and gone back to earth. And each morning a little more of the ravine edged up into town, threatening to swamp garages like leaking rowboats, devour ancient cars which had been left to the flaking mercies of rain and therefore rust. Hey! Hey! John Huff and Charlie Woodman ran through the mystery of ravine and town and time. Hey! Douglas moved slowly down the path. The ravine was indeed the place where you came to look at the two things of life, the ways of man and the ways of the natural world. The town was, after all, only a large ship filled with constantly moving survivors, bailing out the grass, chipping away the rust. Now and again a lifeboat, a shanty, kin to the mother ship, lost out to the quiet storm of seasons, sank down in silent waves of termite and ant into swallowing ravine to feel the flicker of grasshoppers rattling like dry paper in hot weeds, become soundproofed with spider dust and finally, in avalanche of shingle and tar, collapse like kindling shrines into a bonfire, which thunderstorms ignited with blue lightning, while flash-photographing the triumph of the wilderness. It was this then, the mystery of man seizing from the land and the land seizing back, year after year, that drew Douglas, knowing the towns never really won, they merely existed in calm peril, fully accoutered with lawn mower, bug spray and hedge shears, swimming steadily as long as civilization said to swim, but each house ready to sink in green tides, buried forever, when the last man ceased and his trowels and mowers shattered to cereal flakes of rust. The town. The wideness. The houses. The ravine. Douglas blinked back and forth. But how to relate the two, make sense of the interchange when... His eyes moved down to the ground. The first rite of summer, the dandelion picking, the starting of the wine, was over. Now the second rite waited for him to make the motions, but he stood very still. Doug... come on... Doug... ! The running boys faded. I'm alive, said Douglas. But whats the use? you're more alive than me. How come? How come? And standing alone, he knew the answer, staring down at his motionless feet... Late that night, going home from the show with his mother and father and his brother Tom, Douglas saw the tennis shoes in the bright store window. He glanced quickly away, but his ankles were seized, his feet suspended, then rushed. The earth spun; the shop awnings slammed their canvas wings overhead with the thrust of his body running. His mother and father and brother walked quietly on both sides of him. Douglas walked backward, watching the tennis shoes in the midnight window left behind. It was a nice movie, said Mother. Douglas murmured, It was... It was June and long past time for buying the special shoes that were quiet as a summer rain falling on the walks. June and the earth full of raw power and everything everywhere in motion. |
| 597 |
People forget if they don't keep testing things. United Cigar Store man smokes cigars, don't he? Candy-store man samples his own stuff, I should think. So... You may have noticed, said the old man, I'm wearing shoes. But not sneakers, sir! How you going to sell sneakers unless you can rave about them and how you going to rave about them unless you know them? Mr. Sanderson backed off a little distance from the boys fever, one hand to his chin. Well... Mr. Sanderson, said Douglas, you sell me something and I'll sell you something just as valuable. Is it absolutely necessary to the sale that I put on a pair of the sneakers, boy? said the old man. I sure wish you could, sir! The old man sighed. A minute later, seated panting quietly, he laced the tennis shoes to his long narrow feet. They looked detached and alien down there next to the dark cuffs of his business suit. Mr. Sanderson stood up. How do they feel? asked the boy. How do they feel, he asks; they feel fine. He started to sit down. Please! Douglas held out his hand. Mr. Sanderson, now could you kind of rock back and forth a little, sponge around, bounce kind of, while I tell you the rest? Its this: I give you my money, you give me the shoes, I owe you a dollar. But, Mr. Sanderson, butsoon as I get those shoes on, you know what happens? What? Bang! I deliver your packages, pick up packages, bring you coffee, bum your trash, run to the post office, telegraph office, library! you'll see twelve of me in and out, in and out, every minute. Feel those shoes, Mr. Sanderson, feel how fast theyd take me? All those springs inside? Feel all the running inside? Feel how they kind of grab hold and cant let you alone and don't like you just standing there? Feel how quick I'd be doing the things youd rather not bother with? You stay in the nice cool store while I'm jumping all around town! But its not me really, its the shoes. you're going like mad down alleys, cutting corners, and back! There they go! Mr. Sanderson stood amazed with the rush of words. When the words got going the flow carried him; he began to sink deep in the shoes, to flex his toes, limber his arches, test his ankles. He rocked softly, secretly, back and forth in a small breeze from the open door. The tennis shoes silently hushed themselves deep in the carpet, sank as in a jungle grass, in loam and resilient clay. He gave one solemn bounce of his heels in the yeasty dough, in the yielding and welcoming earth. Emotions hurried over his face as if many colored lights had been switched on and off. His mouth hung slightly open. Slowly he gentled and rocked himself to a halt, and the boys voice faded and they stood there looking at each other in a tremendous and natural silence. A few people drifted by on the sidewalk outside, in the hot sun. Still the man and boy stood there, the boy glowing, the man with revelation in his face. Boy, said the old man at last, in five years, how would you like a job selling shoes in this emporium? Gosh, thanks, Mr. |
| 598 |
Sanderson, but I don't know what I'm going to be yet. Anything you want to be, son, said the old man, you'll be. No one will ever stop you. The old man walked lightly across the store to the wall of ten thousand boxes, came back with some shoes for the boy, and wrote up a list on some paper while the boy was lacing the shoes on his feet and then standing there, waiting. The old man held out his list. A dozen things you got to do for me this afternoon. Finish them, were even Stephen, andyou're fired. Thanks, Mr. Sanderson! Douglas bounded away. Stop! cried the old man. Douglas pulled up and turned. Mr. Sanderson leaned forward. How do they feel? The boy looked down at his feet deep in the rivers, in the fields of wheat, in the wind that already was rushing him out of the town. He looked up at the old man, his eyes burning, his mouth moving, but no sound came out. Antelopes? said the old man, looking from the boys face to his shoes. Gazelles? The boy thought about it, hesitated, and nodded a quick nod. Almost immediately he vanished. He just spun about with a whisper and went off. The door stood empty. The sound of the tennis shoes faded in the jungle heat. Mr. Sanderson stood in the sun-blazed door, listening. From a long time ago, when he dreamed as a boy, he remembered the sound. Beautiful creatures leaping under the sky, gone through brush, under trees, away, and only the soft echo of their running left behind. Antelopes, said Mr. Sanderson. Gazelles. He bent to pick up the boys abandoned winter shoes, heavy with forgotten rains and long-melted snows. Moving out of the blazing sun, walking softly, lightly, slowly, he headed back toward civilization... He brought out a yellow nickel tablet. He brought out a yellow Ticonderoga pencil. He opened the tablet. He licked the pencil. Tom, he said, you and your statistics gave me an idea. I'm going to do the same, keep track of things. For instance: you realize that every summer we do things over and over we did the whole darn summer before? Like what, Doug? Like making dandelion wine, like buying these new tennis shoes, like shooting off the first firecracker of the year, like making lemonade, like getting slivers in our feet, like picking wild fox grapes. Every year the same things, same way, no change, no difference. that's one half of summer, Tom. Whats the other half? Things we do for the first time ever. Like eating olives? Bigger than that. Like finding out maybe that Grandpa or Dad don't know everything in the world. They know every dam thing there is to know, and don't you forget it! Tom, don't argue, I already got it written down under Discoveries and Revelations. They don't know everything. But its no crime. That I discovered, too. What other new crazy stuff you got in there? I'm alive. Heck, that's old! Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don't watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see whatyou're doing and its the first time, really. I'm going to divide the summer up in two parts. |
| 599 |
All right, Douglas, lets set it up. In the garage they found, dusted, and carried forth the howdah, as it were, for the quiet summer-night festivals, the swing chair which Grandpa chained to the porch-ceiling eyelets. Douglas, being lighter, was first to sit in the swing. Then, after a moment, Grandfather gingerly settled his pontifical weight beside the boy. Thus they sat, smiling at each other, nodding, as they swung silently back and forth, back and forth. Ten minutes later Grandma appeared with water buckets and brooms to wash down and sweep off the porch. Other chairs, rockers and straight-backs, were summoned from the house. Always like to start sitting early in the season, said Grandpa, before the mosquitoes thicken. About seven oclock you could hear the chairs scraping back from the tables, someone experimenting with a yellow-toothed piano, if you stood outside the dining-room window and listened. Matches being struck, the first dishes bubbling in the suds and tinkling on the wall racks, somewhere, faintly, a phonograph playing. And then as the evening changed the hour, at house after house on the twilight streets, under the immense oaks and elms, on shady porches, people would begin to appear, like those figures who tell good or bad weather in rain-or-shine clocks. Uncle Bert, perhaps Grandfather, then Father, and some of the cousins; the men all coming out first into the syrupy evening, blowing smoke, leaving the womens voices behind in the cooling-warm kitchen to set their universe aright. Then the first male voices under the porch brim, the feet up, the boys fringed on the worn steps or wooden rails where sometime during the evening something, a boy or a geranium pot, would fall off. At last, like ghosts hovering momentarily behind the door screen, Grandma, Great-grandma, and Mother would appear, and the men would shift, move, and offer seats. The women carried varieties of fans with them, folded newspapers, bamboo whisks, or perfumed kerchiefs, to start the air moving about their faces as they talked. What they talked of all evening long, no one remembered next day. It wasnt important to anyone what the adults talked about; it was only important that the sounds came and went over the delicate ferns that bordered the porch on three sides; it was only important that the darkness filled the town like black water being poured over the houses, and that the cigars glowed and that the conversations went on, and on. The female gossip moved out, disturbing the first mosquitoes so they danced in frenzies on the air. The male voices invaded the old house timbers; if you closed your eyes and put your head down against the floor boards you could hear the mens voices rumbling like a distant, political earthquake, constant, unceasing, rising or falling a pitch. Douglas sprawled back on the dry porch planks, completely contented and reassured by these voices, which would speak on through eternity, flow in a stream of murmurings over his body, over his closed eyelids, into his drowsy ears, for all time. |
| 600 |
The rocking chairs sounded like crickets, the crickets sounded like rocking chairs, and the moss-covered rain barrel by the dining-room window produced another generation of mosquitoes to provide a topic of conversation through endless summers ahead. Sitting on the summer-night porch was so good, so easy and so reassuring that it could never be done away with. These were rituals that were right and lasting; the lighting of pipes, the pale hands that moved knitting needles in the dimness, the eating of foil-wrapped, chilled Eskimo Pies, the coming and going of all the people. For at some time or other during the evening, everyone visited here; the neighbors down the way, the people across the street; Miss Fern and Miss Roberta humming by in their electric runabout, giving Tom or Douglas a ride around the block and then coming up to sit down and fan away the fever in their cheeks; or Mr. Jonas, the junkman, having left his horse and wagon hidden in the alley, and ripe t, bursting with words, would come up the steps looking as fresh as if his talk had never been said before, and somehow it never had. And last of all, the children, who had been off squinting their way through a last hide-and-seek or kick-the-can, panting, glowing, would sickle quietly back like boomerangs along the soundless lawn, to sink beneath the talking talking talking of the porch voices which would weigh and gentle them down... Oh, the luxury of lying in the fern night and the grass night and the night of susurrant, slumbrous voices weaving the dark together. The grownups had forgotten he was there, so still, so quiet Douglas lay, noting the plans they were making for his and their own futures. And the voices chanted, drifted, in moonlit clouds of cigarette smoke while the moths, like late appleblossoms come alive, tapped faintly about the far street lights, and the voices moved on into the coming years... In front of the United Cigar Store this evening the men were gathered to burn dirigibles, sink battleships, blow up dynamite works and, all in all, savor the very bacteria in their porcelain mouths that would someday stop them cold. Clouds of annihilation loomed and blew away in their cigar smoke about a nervous figure who could be seen dimly listening to the sound of shovels and spades and the intonations of ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This figure was that of Leo Auffmann, the town jeweler, who, widening his large liquid-dark eyes, at last threw up his childlike hands and cried out in dismay. Stop! In Gods name, get out of that graveyard! Lee, how right you are, said Grandfather Spaulding, passing on his nightly stroll with his grandsons Douglas and Tom. But, Lee, only you can shut these doom-talkers up Invent something that will make the future brighter, well rounded, infinitely joyous. Youve invented bicycles, fixed the penny-arcade contraptions, been our town movie projectionist, haven't you? Sure, said Douglas. invent us a happiness machine! The men laughed. don't, said Leo Auffmann. |
| 601 |
He sat by the front-door screen looking out at that rushing blackness that looked very innocent as if it was holding still. Only when you closed your eyes and lay down could you feel the world spinning under your bed and hollowing your ears with a black sea that came in and broke on cliffs that werent there. There was a smell of rain. Mother was ironing and sprinkling water from a corked ketchup bottle over the crackling dry clothes behind Tom. One store was still open about a block awayMrs. Singers. Finally, just before it was time for Mrs. Singer to close her store, Mother relented and told Tom, Run get a pint of ice cream and be sure she packs it tight. He asked if he could get a scoop of chocolate on top, because he didn't like vanilla, and Mother agreed. He clutched the money and ran barefooted over the warm evening cement sidewalk, under the apple and oak trees, toward the store. The town was so quiet and far off you could hear only the crickets sounding in the spaces beyond the hot indigo trees that hold back the stars. His bare feet slapped the pavement. He crossed the street and found Mrs. Singer moving ponderously about her store, singing Yiddish melodies. Pint ice cream? she said. Chocolate on top? Yes! He watched her fumble the metal top off the ice-cream freezer and manipulate the scoop, packing the cardboard pint chock-full with chocolate on top, yes! He gave the money, received the chill, icy pack, and rubbing it across his brow and cheek, laughing, thumped barefootedly homeward. Behind him the lights of the lonely little store blinked out and there was only a street light shimmering on the corner, and the whole city seemed to be going to sleep. Opening the screen door, he found Mom still ironing. She looked hot and irritated but she smiled just the same. When will Dad be home from lodge meeting? he asked. About eleven or eleven-thirty, Mother replied. She took the ice cream to the kitchen, divided it. Giving him his special portion of chocolate, she dished out some for herself and the rest was put away, for Douglas and your father when they come. They sat enjoying the ice cream, wrapped at the core of the deep quiet summer night. His mother and himself and the night all around their small house on the small street. He licked each spoonful of ice cream thoroughly before digging for another, and Mom put her ironing board away and the hot iron in its open case cooling, and she sat in the armchair by the phonograph, eating her dessert and saying, My land, it was a hot day today. Earth soaks up all the heat and lets it out at night. Itll be soggy sleeping. They both sat listening to the night, pressed down by every window and door and complete silence because the radio needed a new battery, and they had played all the Knickerbocker Quartet records and Al Jolson and Two Black Crows records to exhaustion; so Tom just sat on the hardwood floor and looked out into the dark dark dark, pressing his nose against the screen until the flesh of its tip was molded into small dark squares. |
| 602 |
I wonder where Doug is? Its almost nine-thirty. Hell be here, Tom said, knowing very well that Douglas would be. He followed Mom out to wash the dishes. Each sound, each rattle of spoon or dish was amplified in the baked evening. Silently they went to the living room, removed the couch cushions and, together, yanked it open and extended it down into the double bed it secretly was. Mother made the bed, punching pillows neatly to flump them up for their heads. Then, as he was unbuttoning his shirt, she said, Wait awhile, Tom. Why? Because I say so. You look funny, Mom. Mom sat down a moment, then stood up, went to the door and called. He listened to her calling and calling, Douglas, Douglas, oh Doug! Douglasssssss! over and over. Her calling floated out into the summer warm dark and never came back. The echoes paid no attention. Douglas. Douglas. Douglas. Douglas! And as he sat on the floor, a coldness that was not ice cream and not winter, and not part of summers heat, went through Tom. He noticed Moms eyes sliding, blinking; the way she stood undecided and was nervous. All of these things. She opened the screen door. Stepping out into the night, she walked down the steps and down the front sidewalk under the lilac bush. He listened to her moving feet. She called again. Silence. She called twice more. Tom sat in the room. Any moment now, Douglas would answer from down the long long narrow street, All right, Mom! All right, Mother! Hey! But he didn't answer. And for two minutes Tom sat looking at the made-up bed, the silent radio, the silent phonograph, at the chandelier with the crystal bobbins gleaming quietly, at the rug with the scarlet and purple curlicues on it. He stubbed his toe on the bed purposely to see if it hurt. It did. Whining, the screen door opened and Mother said, Come on, Tom. Well take a walk. Where to? Just down the block. Come on. He took her hand. Together they walked down St. James Street. Underfoot the concrete was still warm, and the crickets were sounding louder against the darkening dark. They reached a corner, turned, and walked toward the West Ravine. Off somewhere a car floated by, flashing its lights in the distance. There was such a complete lack of life, light, and activity. Here and there, back off from where they were walking, faint squares of light glowed where people were still up. But most of the houses, darkened, were sleeping already, and there were a few lightless places where the occupants of a dwelling sat talking low night talk on their front porches. You heard a porch swing squeaking as you walked by. I wish your father was home, said Mother. Her large hand squeezed around his small one. Just waitll I get that boy. The Lonely Ones around again. Killing people. No ones safe anymore. You never know when the Lonely Onell turn up or where. So help me, when Doug gets homeI'll spank him within an inch of his life. Now they had walked another block and were standing by the holy black silhouette of the German Baptist Church at the corner of Chapel Street and Glen Rock. |
| 603 |
In back of the church, a hundred yards away, the ravine began. He could smell it. It had a dark-sewer, rotten-foliage, thick-green odor. It was a wide ravine that cut and twisted across towna jungle by day, a place to let alone at night, Mother often declared. He should have felt encouraged by the nearness of the German Baptist Church but he was not, because the building was not illumined, was cold and useless as a pile of ruins on the ravine edge. He was only ten years old. He knew little of death, fear, or dread. Death was the waxen effigy in the coffin when he was six and Great-grandfather passed away, looking like a great fallen vulture in his casket, silent, withdrawn, no more to tell him how to be a good boy, no more to comment succinctly on politics. Death was his little sister one morning when he awoke at the age of seven, looked into her crib, and saw her staring up at him with a blind, blue, fixed and frozen stare until the men came with a small wicker basket to take her away. Death was when he stood by her high chair four weeks later and suddenly realized shed never be in it again, laughing and crying and making him jealous of her because she was born. That was death. And Death was the Lonely One, unseen, walking and standing behind trees, waiting in the country to come in, once or twice a year, to this town, to these streets, to these many places where there was little light, to kill one, two, three women in the past three years. That was Death... But this was more than Death. This summer night deep down under the stars was all things you would ever feel or see or hear in your life, drowning you all at once. Leaving the sidewalk, they walked along a trodden, pebbled, weed-fringed path while the crickets rose in a loud full drumming chorus. He followed obediently behind brave, fine, tall Motherdefender of the universe. Together, then, they approached, reached, and paused at the very end of civilization. The Ravine. Here and now, down in that pit of jungled blackness were suddenly all the things he would never know or understand; all the things without names lived in the huddled tree shadow, in the odor of decay. He realized he and his mother were alone. Her hand trembled. He felt the tremble... Why? But she was bigger, stronger, more intelligent than himself, wasnt she? Did she, too, feel that intangible menace, that groping out of darkness, that crouching malignancy down below? Was there, then, no strength in growing up? No solace in being an adult? No sanctuary in life? No fleshly citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of midnights? Doubts flushed him. Ice cream lived again in his throat, stomach, spine and limbs; he was instantly cold as a wind out of December gone. He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid. Like here, standing. If he should scream, if he should holler for help, would it matter? Blackness could come swiftly, swallowing; in one titanically freezing moment all would be concluded. |
| 604 |
Long before dawn, long before police with flashlights might probe the dark, disturbed pathway, long before men with trembling brains could rustle down the pebbles to his help. Even if they were within five hundred yards of him now, and help certainly was, in three seconds a dark tide could rise to take all ten years from him and The essential impact of lifes loneliness crushed his beginning-to-tremble body. Mother was alone, too. She could not look to the sanctity of marriage, the protection of her familys love, she could not look to the United States Constitution or the City Police, she could not look anywhere, in this very instant, save into her heart, and there she would find nothing but uncontrollable repugnance and a will to fear. In this instant it was an individual problem seeking an individual solution. He must accept being alone and work on from there. He swallowed hard, clung to her. Oh, Lord, don't let her die, please, he thought. don't do anything to us. Father will be coming home from lodge meeting in an hour and if the house is empty Mother advanced down the path into the primeval jungle. His voice trembled. Mom, Dougs all right. Dougs all right. he's all right. Dougs all right! Mothers voice was strained, high. He always comes through here. I tell him not to, but those darned kids, they come through here anyway. Some night hell come through and never come out again Never come out again. That could mean anything. Tramps. Criminals. Darkness. Accident. Most of all death! Alone in the universe. There were a million small towns like this all over the world. Each as dark, as lonely, each as removed, as full of shuddering and wonder. The reedy playing of minor-key violins was the small towns music, with no lights, but many shadows. Oh, the vast swelling loneliness of them. The secret damp ravines of them. Life was a horror lived in them at night, when at all sides sanity, marriage, children, happiness, were threatened by an ogre called Death. Mother raised her voice into the dark. Doug! Douglas! Suddenly both of them realized something was wrong. The crickets had stopped chirping. Silence was complete. Never in his life a silence like this one. One so utterly complete. Why should the crickets cease? Why? What reason? Theyd never stopped ever before. Not ever. Unless. Unless Something was going to happen. It was as if the whole ravine was tensing, bunching together its black fibers, drawing in power from sleeping countrysides all about, for miles and miles. From dew-sodden forest and dells and rolling hills where dogs tilted heads to moons, from all around the great silence was sucked into one center, and they were the core of it. In ten seconds now, something would happen, something would happen. The crickets kept their truce, the stars were so low he could almost brush the tinsel. There were swarms of them, hot and sharp. Growing, growing, the silence. Growing, growing, the tenseness. Oh, it was so dark, so far away from everything. Oh, God! |
| 605 |
And then, way way off across the ravine: Okay, Mom! Coming, Mother! And again: Hi, Mom! Coming, Mom! And then the quick scuttering of tennis shoes padding down through the pit of the ravine as three kids came dashing, giggling. His brother Douglas, Chuck Woodman, and John Huff. Running, giggling... The stars sucked up like the stung antennae of ten million snails. The crickets sang! The darkness pulled back, startled, shocked, angry. Pulled back, losing its appetite at being so rudely interrupted as it prepared to feed. As the dark retreated like a wave on the shore, three children piled out of it, laughing. Hi, Mom! Hi, Tom! Hey! It smelled like Douglas, all right. Sweat and grass and the odor of trees and branches and the creek about him. Young man, you're going to get a licking, declared Mother. She put away her fear instantly. Tom knew she would never tell anyone of it, ever. It would be in her heart, though, for all time, as it was in his heart for all time. They walked home to bed in the late summer night. He was glad Douglas was alive. Very glad. For a moment there he had thought Far off in the dim moonlit country, over a viaduct and down a valley, a train rushed along whistling like a lost metal thing, nameless and running. Tom went to bed shivering, beside his brother, listening to that train whistle, and thinking of a cousin who lived way out in the country where that train ran now; a cousin who died of pneumonia late at night years and years ago He smelled the sweat of Doug beside him. It was magic. Tom stopped trembling. Only two things I know for sure, Doug, he whispered. What? Nighttimes awful darkis one. Whats the other? The ravine at night don't belong in Mr. Auffmanns Happiness Machine, if he ever builds it. Douglas considered this awhile. You can say that again. They stopped talking. Listening, suddenly they heard footsteps coming down the street, under the trees, outside the house now, on the sidewalk. From her bed Mother called quietly, that's your father. It was. Late at night on the bent parch Leo Auffmann wrote a list he could not see in the dark, exclaiming, Ah! or, that's another! when he hit upon a fine component. Then the front-door screen made a moth sound, tapping. Lena? he whispered. She sat down next to him on the swing, in her nightgown, not slim the way girls get when they are not loved at seventeen, not fat the way women get when they are not loved at fifty, but absolutely right, a roundness, a firmness, the way women are at any age, he thought, when there is no question. She was miraculous. Her body, like his, was always thinking for her, but in a different way, shaping the children, or moving ahead of him into any room to change the atmosphere there to fit any particular mood he was in. There seemed no long periods of thought for her; thinking and doing moved from her head to her hand and back in a natural and gentle circuiting he could not and cared not to blueprint. That machine, she said at last, we don't need it. |
| 606 |
No, he said, but sometimes you got to build for others. I been figuring, what to put in. Motion pictures? Radios? Stereoscopic viewers? All those in one place so any man can run his hand over it and smile and say, Yes, sir, that's happiness. Yes, he thought, to make a contraption that in spite of wet feet, sinus trouble, rumpled beds, and those three-in-the-morning hours when monsters ate your soul, would manufacture happiness, like that magic salt mill that, thrown in the ocean, made salt forever and turned the sea to brine. Who wouldn't sweat his soul out through his pores to invent a machine like that? he asked the world, he asked the town, he asked his wife! In the porch swing beside him, Lenas uneasy silence was an opinion. Silent now, too, head back, he listened to the elm leaves above hissing in the wind. don't forget, he told himself, that sound, too, must be in the machine. A minute later the porch swing, the porch, stood empty in the dark. Grandfather smiled in his sleep. Feeling the smile and wondering why it was there, he awoke. He lay quietly listening, and the smile was explained. For he heard a sound which was far more important than birds or the rustle of new leaves. Once each year he woke this way and lay waiting for the sound which meant that summer had officially begun. And it began on a morning such as this when a boarder, a nephew, a cousin, a son or a grandson came out on the lawn below and moved in consecutively smaller quadrangles north and east and south and west with a clatter of rotating metal through the sweet summer grass. Clover blossoms, the few unharvested dandelion fires, ante, sticks, pebbles, remnants of last years July Fourth squibs and punks, but predominantly clear green, a fount leaped up from the chattering mower. A cool soft fount; Grandfather imagined it tickling his legs, spraying his warm face, filling his nostrils with the timeless scent of a new season begun, with the promise that, yes, well all live another twelve months. God bless the lawn mower, he thought. Who was the fool who made January first New Years Day No, they should set a man to watch the grasses across a million Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa lawns, and on that morning when it was long enough for cutting, instead of rachets and hems and yelling, there should be a great swelling symphony of lawn mowers reaping fresh grass upon the prairie lands. Instead of confetti and serpentine, people should throw grass spray at each other on the one day each year that really represents Beginning! He snorted at his own lengthy discussion of the affair, went to the window and leaned out into the mellow sun shine, and sure enough, there was a boarder, a young newspaperman named Forrester, just finishing a row. Morning, Mr. Spaulding! Give em hell, Bill! cried Grandpa heartily, and soon downstairs eating Grandmas breakfast, with the window open so the rattling buzz of the lawn mower lolled about his eating. It gives you confidence, Grandpa said. That lawn mower. Listen to it! |
| 607 |
And whenyou're all to yourself that way, you're really yourself for a little while; you get to thinking things through, alone. Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plate in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. As Samuel Spaulding, Esquire, once said, dig in the earth, delve in the soul. Spin those mower blades, Bill, and walk in the spray of the Fountain of Youth. End of lecture. Besides, a mess of dandelion greens is good eating once in a while. How many years since you had dandelion greens for supper, sir? We won't go into that! Bill kicked one of the grass flats slightly and nodded. About this grass now. I didn't finish telling. It grows so close its guaranteed to kill off clover and dandelions Great God in heaven! That means no dandelion wine next year! That means no bees crossing our lot! you're out of your mind, son! Look here, how much did all this cost you? A dollar a flat. I bought ten flats as a surprise. Grandpa reached into his pocket, took out the old deep-mouthed purse, unclasped the silver clasp, and removed from it three five-dollar bills. Bill, youve just made a great profit of five dollars on this transaction. I want you to deliver this load of unromantic grass into the ravine, the garbage dumpanywherebut I ask you in a civil and humble voice not to plant it in my yard. Your motives are above reproach, but my motives, I feel, because I'm approaching my tenderest years, must be considered first. Yes, sir. Bill pocketed the bills reluctantly. Bill, you just plant this new grass some other year. The day after I die, Bill, you're free to tear up the whole damn lawn. Think you can wait another five years or so for an old orator to kick off? I know dam well I can wait, Bill said. Theres a thing about the lawn mower I cant even tell you, but to me its the most beautiful sound in the world, the freshest sound of the season, the sound of summer, and I'd miss it fearfully if it wasnt there, and I'd miss the smell Of cut grass. Bill bent to pick up a flat. Here I go to the ravine. you're a good, understanding young man, and will make a brilliant and sensitive reporter, said Grandfather, helping him. This I predict! The morning passed, noon came on, Grandpa retired after lunch, read a little Whittier, and slept well on through the day. When he awoke at three the sun was streaming through the windows, bright and fresh. He lay in bed and was startled to hear the old, the familiar, the memorable sound. Why, he said, someones using the lawn mower! But the lawn was just cut this morning! He listened again. And yes, there it was, the endless droning chatter up and down, up and down. He leaned out the window and gaped. Why, its Bill. Bill Forrester, you there! Has the sun got you? you're cutting the lawn again! Bill looked up, smiled a white smile, and waved. |
| 608 |
I know! I think I missed a few spots! And while Grandpa lay in bed for the next five minutes, smiling and at ease, Bill Forrester cut the lawn north, then west, then south, and finally, in a great green spraying fountain, toward the east. On Sunday morning Leo Auffmann moved slowly through his garage, expecting some wood, a curl of wire, a hammer or wrench to leap up crying, Start here! But nothing leaped, nothing cried for a beginning. Should a Happiness Machine, he wondered, be something you can carry in your pocket? Or, he went on, should it be something that carries you in its pocket? One thing I absolutely know, he said aloud. It should be bright! He set a can of orange paint in the center of the workbench, picked up a dictionary, and wandered into the house. Lena? He glanced at the dictionary. Are you pleased, contented, joyful, delighted? Do you feel Lucky, fortunate? Are things clever and fitting, successful and suitable for you? Lena stopped slicing vegetables and closed her eyes. Read me the list again, please, she said. He shut the book. What have I done, you got to stop and think an hour before you can tell me. All I ask is a simple yes or no! you're not contented, delighted, joyful? Cows are contented, babies and old people in second childhood are delighted, God help them, she said. As for joyful, Lee? Look how I laugh scrubbing out the sink... He peered closely at her and his face relaxed. Lena, its true. A man doesn't appreciate. Next month, maybe, well get away. I'm not complaining! she cried. I'm not the one comes in with a list saying, stick out your tongue. Lee, do you ask what makes your heart beat all night? No! Next will you ask, Whats marriage? Who knows, Lee? don't ask. A man who thinks like that, how it runs, how things work, falls off the trapeze in the circus, chokes wondering how the muscles work in the throat. Eat, sleep, breathe, Lee, and stop staring at me like I'm something new in the house! Lena Auffmann froze. She sniffed the air. Oh, my God, look what you done! She yanked the oven door open. A great cloud of smoke poured through the kitchen. Happiness! she wailed. And for the first time in six months we have a fight! Happiness, and for the first time in twenty years its not bread, its charcoal for supper! When the smoke cleared, Leo Auffmann was gone. The fearful clangor, the collision of man and inspiration, the flinging about of metal, lumber, hammer, nails, T square, screwdriver, continued for many days. On occasion, defeated, Leo Auffmann loitered out through the streets, nervous, apprehensive, jerking his head at the slightest sound of distant laughter, listened to childrens jokes, watching what made them smile. At night he sat on neighbors crowded porches, listening to the old folks weigh and balance life, and at each explosion of merriment Leo Auffmann quickened like a general who has seen the forces of darkness routed and whose strategy has been reaffirmed. On his way home he felt triumphant until he was in his garage with the dead tools and the inanimate lumber. |
| 609 |
Then his bright face fell away in a pale funk, and to cover his sense of failure he banged and crashed the parts of his machine about as if they really did make sense. At last it began to shape itself and at the end of the ten days and nights, trembling with fatigue, self-dedicated, half starved, fumbling and looking as if he had been riven by lightning Leo Auffmann wandered into his house. The children, who had been screaming horribly at each other, fell silent, as if the Red Death had entered at the chiming of the clock. The Happiness Machine, husked Leo Auffmann, is ready. Lee Auffmann, said his wife, has lost fifteen pounds. He hasnt talked to his children in two weeks, they are nervous, they fight, listen! His wife is nervous, she's gained ten pounds, shell need new clothes, look! Surethe machine is ready. But happy? Who can say? Lee, leave off with the clockyou're building. you'll never find a cuckoo big enough to go in it! Man was not made to tamper with such things. Its not against God, no, but it sure looks like its against Leo Auffmann. Another week of this and well bury him in his machine! But Leo Auffmann was too busy noticing that the room was falling swiftly up. How interesting, he thought, lying on the floor. Darkness closed in a great wink on him as someone screamed something about that Happiness Machine, three times. The first thing he noticed the next morning was dozens of birds fluttering around in the air stirring up ripples like colored stones thrown into an incredibly clear stream, gonging the tin roof of the garage softly. A pack of multibred dogs pawfooted one by one into the yard to peer and whine gently through the garage door; four boys, two girls, and some men hesitated in the driveway and then edged along under the cherry trees. Leo Auffmann, listening, knew what it was that had reached out and called them all into the yard. The sound of the Happiness Machine. It was the sort of sound that might be heard coming from a giants kitchen on a summer day. There were all kinds of hummings, low and high, steady and then changing. Incredible foods were being baked there by a host of whirring golden bees as big as teacups. The giantess herself, humming contentedly under her breath, might glide to the door, as vast as all summer, her face a huge peach-colored moon gazing calmly out upon smiling dogs, corn-haired boys and flour-haired old men. Wait, said Leo Auffmann out loud. I didn't turn the machine on this morning! Saul! Saul, standing in the yard below, looked up. Saul, did you turn it on? You told me to warm it up half an hour ago! All right, Saul, I forgot. I'm not awake. He fell back in bed. His wife, bringing his breakfast up, paused by the window, looking down at the garage. Tell me, she said quietly. If that machine is like you say, has it got an answer to making babies in it somewhere? Can that machine make seventy-year-old people twenty? Also, how does death look when you hide in there with all that happiness? Hide! If you died from overwork, what should I do today, climb in that big box down there and be happy? |
| 610 |
Also tell me, Lee, how is our life? You know how our house is. Seven in the morning, breakfast, the kids; all of you gone by eight thirty and its just me and washing and me and cooking and socks to be darned, weeds to be dug, or I run to the store or polish silver. Whos complaining? I'm just reminding you how the house is put together, Lee, whats in it! So now answer: How do you get all those things I said in one machine? that's not how its built! I'm sorry. I got no time to look, then. And she kissed his cheek and went from the room and he lay smelling the wind that blew from the hidden machine below, rich with the odor of those roasted chestnuts that sold in the autumn streets of a Paris he had never known... A cat moved unseen among the hypnotized dogs and boys to purr against the garage door, in the sound of snow-waves crumbling down a faraway and rhythmically breathing shore. Tomorrow, thought Leo Auffmann, well try the machine, all of us, together. Late that night he awoke and knew something had wakened him. Far away in another room he heard someone crying. Saul? he whispered, getting out of bed. In his room Saul wept, his head buried in his pillow. No... no... he sobbed. Over... over... Saul, you had a nightmare? Tell me about it, son. But the boy only wept. And sitting there on the boys bed, Leo Auffmann suddenly thought to look out the window. Below, the garage doors stood open. He felt the hairs rise along the back of his neck. When Saul slept again, uneasily, whimpering, his father went downstairs and out to the garage where, not breathing, he put his hand out. In the cool night the Happiness Machines metal was too hot to touch. So, he thought, Saul was here tonight. Why? Was Saul unhappy, in need of the machine? No, happy, but wanting to hold onto happiness always. Could you blame a boy wise enough to know his position who tried to keep it that way? No! And yet... Above, quite suddenly, something white was exhaled from Sauls window. Leo Auffmanns heart thundered. Then he realized the window curtain had blown out into the open night. But it had seemed as intimate and shimmering a thing as a boys soul escaping his room. And Leo Auffmann had flung up his hands as if to thwart it, push it back into the sleeping house. Cold, shivering, he moved back into the house and up to Sauls room where he seized the blowing curtain in and locked the window tight so the pale thing could not escape again. Then he sat on the bed and put his hand on Sauls back. A Tale of Two Cities? Mine. The Old Curiosity Shop? Ha, that's Leo Auffmanns all right! Great Expectations? That used to be mine. But let Great Expectations be his, now! Whats this? asked Leo Auffmann, entering. This, said his wife, is sorting out the community property! When a father scares his son at night its time to chop everything in half! Out of the way, Mr. Bleak House, Old Curiosity Shop. In all these books, no mad scientist lives like Leo Auffmann, none! you're leaving, and you haven't even tried the machine! |
| 611 |
he protested. Try it once, you'll unpack, you'll stay! Tom Swift and His Electric Annihilatorwhose is that? she asked. Must I guess? Snorting, she gave Tom Swift to Leo Auffmann. Very late in the day all the books, dishes, clothes, linens had been stacked one here, one there, four here, four there, ten here, ten there. Lena Auffmann, dizzy with counting, had to sit down. All right, she gasped. Before I go, Lee, prove you don't give nightmares to innocent sons! Silently Leo Auffmann led his wife into the twilight. She stood before the eight-foot-tall, orange-colored box. that's happiness? she said. Which button do I press to be overjoyed, grateful, contented, and much-obliged? The children had gathered now. Mama, said Saul, don't! I got to know what I'm yelling about, Saul. She got in the machine, sat down, and looked out at her husband, shaking her head. Its not me needs this, its you, a nervous wreck, shouting. Please, he said, you'll see! He shut the door. Press the button! he shouted in at his unseen wife. There was a click. The machine shivered quietly, like a huge dog dreaming in its sleep. Papa! said Saul, worried. Listen! said Leo Auffmann. At first there was nothing but the tremor of the machines own secretly moving cogs and wheels. Is Mama all right? asked Naomi. All right, she's fine! There, now... there! And inside the machine Lena Auffmann could be heard saying, Oh! and then again, Ah! in a startled voice. Look at that! said his hidden wife. Paris! and later, London! There goes Rome! The Pyramids! The Sphinx! The Sphinx, you hear, children? Leo Auffmann whispered and laughed. Perfume! cried Lena Auffmann, surprised. Somewhere a phonograph played The Blue Danube faintly. Music! I'm dancing! Only thinks she's dancing the father confided to the world. Amazing! said the unseen woman. Leo Auffmann blushed. What an understanding wife. And then inside the Happiness Machine, Lena Auffmann began to weep. The inventors smile faded. she's crying said Naomi. She cant be! She is, said Saul. She simply cant be crying! Leo Auffmann, blinking, pressed his ear to the machine. But... yes... like a baby... He could only open the door. Wait. There his wife sat, tears rolling down her cheeks. Let me finish. She cried some more. Leo Auffmann turned off the machine, stunned. Oh, its the saddest thing in the world! she wailed. I feel awful, terrible. She climbed out through the door First, there was Paris... Whats wrong with Paris? I never even thought of being in Paris in my life. But now you got me thinking: Paris! So suddenly I want to be in Paris and I know I'm not! Its almost as good, this machine. No. Sitting in there, I knew. I thought, its not real! Stop crying, Mama. She looked at him with great dark wet eyes. You had me dancing. We haven't danced in twenty years. I'll take you dancing tomorrow night! No, no! Its not important, it shouldn't be important. But your machine says its important! So I believe! Itll be all right, Lee, after I cry some more. What else? |
| 612 |
What else? The machine says, you're young. I'm not. It lies, that Sadness Machine! Sad in what way? His wife was quieter now. Lee, the mistake you made is you forgot some hour, some day, we all got to climb out of that thing and go back to dirty dishes and the beds not made. Whileyou're in that thing, sure, a sunset lasts forever almost, the air smells good, the temperature is fine. All the things you want to last, last. But outside, the children wait on lunch, the clothes need buttons. And then lets be frank, Lee, how long can you look at a sunset? Who wants a sunset to last? Who wants perfect temperature? Who wants air smelling good always? So after awhile, who would notice? Better, for a minute or two, a sunset. After that, lets have something else. People are like that, Lee. How could you forget? Did I? Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away. But Lena, that's sad. No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness. So two things you did you should never have. You made quick things go slow and stay around. You brought things faraway to our backyard where they don't belong, where they just tell you, No, you'll never travel, Lena Auffmann, Paris you'll never see! Pome you'll never visit. But I always knew that, so why tell me? Better to forget and make do, Lee, make do, eh? Leo Auffmann leaned against the machine for support. He snatched his burned hand away, surprised. So now what, Lena? he said. Its not for me to say. I know only so long as this thing is here I'll want to come out, or Saul will want to come out like he did last night, and against our judgment sit in it and look at all those places so far away and every time we will cry and be no fit family for you. I don't understand, he said, how I could be so wrong. Just let me check to see what you say is true. He sat down inside the machine. You won't go away? His wife nodded. Well wait, Lee. He shut the door. In the warm darkness he hesitated, pressed the button, and was just relaxing back in color and music, when he heard someone screaming. Fire, Papa! The machines on fire! Someone hammered the door. He leaped up, bumped his head, and fell as the door gave way and the boys dragged him out. Behind him he heard a muffled explosion. The entire family was running now. Leo Auffmann turned and gasped, Saul, call the fire department! Lena Auffmann caught Saul as he ran. Saul, she said. Wait. There was a gush of flame, another muffled explosion. When the machine was burning very well indeed, Lena Auffmann nodded. All right, Saul, she said. Run call the fire department. Everybody who was anybody came to the fire. There was Grandpa Spaulding and Douglas and Tom and most of the boarders and some of the old men from across the ravine and all the children from six blocks around. And Leo Auffmanns children stood out front, proud of how fine the flames looked jumping from the garage roof. Grandfather Spaulding studied the smoke ball in the sky and said, quietly, Lee, was that it? |
| 613 |
These great wire wands were handed around so they stood, Douglas, Tom, Grandma, Great-grandma, and Mother poised like a collection of witches and familiars over the duty pattens of old Armenia. Then at a signal from Great-grandma, a blink of the eyes or a gumming of the lips, the flails were raised, the harping wires banged down again and again upon the rugs. Take that! And that! said Great-grandma. Get the flies, boys, kill the cooties! Oh, you! said Grandma to her mother. They all laughed. The dust storm puffed up about them. Their laughing became choked. Showers of lint, tides of sand, golden flakes of pipe tobacco fluttered, shivered on the exploded and re-exploded air. Pausing, the boys saw the tread of their shoes and the older peoples shoes pressed a billion times in the warp and woof of this rug, now to be smoothed clean as the tide of their beating swept again and again along the oriental shore. Theres where your husband spilled that coffee! Grandma gave the rug a blow. Heres where you dropped the cream! Great-grandma whacked up a great twister of dust. Look at the scuff marks. Boys, boys! Double-Grandma, heres the ink from your pen! Pshaw! Mine was purple ink. that's common blue! Bang! Look at the path worn from the hall door here to the kitchen door. Food. that's what brings the lions to the water hole. Lets shift it, put it back the other way around. Better yet, lock the men out of the house. Make them leave their shoes outside the door. Bang, bang! They hung the rugs on the wash line now, to finish the job. Tom looked at the intricate scrolls and loops, the flowers, the mysterious figures, the shuttling patterns. Tom, don't stand there. Strike, boy! Its fun, seeing things, said Tom. Douglas glanced up suspiciously. What do you see? The whole dam town, people, houses, heres our house! Bang! Our street! Bang! That black part theres the ravine! Bang! Theres school! Bang! This funny cartoon heres you, Doug! Bang! Heres Great-grandma, Grandma, Mom. Bang! How many years this rug been down? Fifteen. Fifteen years of people stomping across it; I see every shoe print, gasped Tom. Land, boy, you got a tongue, said Great-grandma. I see all the things happened in that house in all those years right here! Bang! All the past, sure, but I can see the future, too. Just squinch up my eyes and peek around at the patterns, there, to see where well be walking, running around, tomorrow. Douglas stopped swinging the beater. What else you see in the rug? Threads mostly, said Great-grandma. Not much left but the underskin. See how the manufacturer wove the thing. Right! said Tom mysteriously. Threads one way, threads another. I see it all. Dire fiends. Deadly sinners. Theres bad weather, theres good. Picnics. Banquets. Strawberry festivals. He tapped the beater from place to place portentously. that's some boardinghouse you got me running, said Grandma, glowing with exertion. Its all there, fuzzylike. Hold your head on one side, Doug, get one eye almost shut. Its better at night, of course, inside, the rug on the floor, lamplight and all. |
| 614 |
Then you get shadows all shapes, light and dark, and watch the threads running off, feel the nap, run your hand around on the fur. Smells just like a desert, I bet. All hot and sandy, like inside a mummy case, maybe. Look, that red spot, that's the Happiness Machine burning up! Catsup from somebodys sandwich, no doubt, said Mom. No, Happiness Machine, said Douglas, and was sad to see it burning there. He had been counting on Leo Auffmann to keep things in order, keep everybody smiling, keep the small gyroscope he often felt inside himself tilting toward the sun every time the earth tilted toward outer space and darkness. But no, there was Auffmanns folly, ashes and cinders. Bang! Bang! Douglas struck. Look, theres the green electric runabout! Miss Fern! Miss Roberta! said Tom. Honk, Honk! Bang! They all laughed. Theres your life-strings, Doug, running along in knots. Too many sour apples. Pickles at bedtime! Which one, where? cried Douglas, peering. This one, one year from now, this one, two years from now, and this one, three, four, five years from now! Bang! The wire beater hissed like a snake in the blind sky. And one to grow on! said Tom. He hit the rug so hard all the dust of five thousand centuries jumped from the shocked texture, paused on the air a terrible moment, and even as Douglas stood, eyes squinted to see the warp, the woof, the shivering pattern, the Armenian avalanche of dust roared soundless upon, over, down and around, burying him forever before their eyes... How it began with the children, old Mrs. Bentley never knew. She often saw them, like moths and monkeys, at the grocers, among the cabbages and hung bananas, and she smiled at them and they smiled back. Mrs. Bentley watched them making footprints in winter snow, filling their lungs with autumn smoke, shaking down blizzards of spring apple-blossoms, but felt no fear of them. As for herself, her house was in extreme good order, everything set to its station, the floors briskly swept, the foods neatly tinned, the hatpins thrust through cushions, and the drawers of her bedroom bureaus crisply filled with the paraphernalia of years. Mrs. Bentley was a saver. She saved tickets, old theater programs, bits of lace, scarves, rail transfers; all the tags and tokens of existence. I've a stack of records, she often said. Heres Caruso. That was in 1916, in New York; I was sixty and John was still alive. Heres Tune Moon, 1924, I think, right after John died. That was the huge regret of her life, in a way. The one thing she had most enjoyed touching and listening to and looking at she hadn't saved. John was far out in the meadow country, dated and boxed and hidden under grasses, and nothing remained of him but his high silk hat and his cane and his good suit in the closet. So much of the rest of him had been devoured by moths. But what she could keep she had kept. Her pink-flowered dresses crushed among moth balls in vast black trunks, and cut-glass dishes from her childhoodshe had brought them all when she moved to this town five years ago. |
| 615 |
Her husband had owned rental property in a number of towns, and, like a yellow ivory chess piece, she had moved and sold one after another, until now she was here in a strange town, left with only the trunks and furniture, dark and ugly, crouched about her like the creatures of a primordial zoo. The thing about the children happened in the middle of summer. Mrs. Bentley, coming out to water the ivy upon her front porch, saw two cool-colored sprawling girls and a small boy lying on her lawn, enjoying the immense prickling of the grass. At the very moment Mrs. Bentley was smiling down upon them with her yellow mask face, around a corner like an elfin band came an ice-cream wagon. It jingled out icy melodies, as crisp and rimmed as crystal wineglasses tapped by an expert, summoning all. The children sat up, turning their heads, like sunflowers after the sun. Mrs. Bentley called, Would you like some? Here! The ice-cream wagon stopped and she exchanged money for pieces of the original Ice Age. The children thanked her with snow in their mouths, their eyes darting from her buttoned-up shoes to her white hair. don't you want a bite? said the boy. No, child. I'm old enough and cold enough; the hottest day won't thaw me, laughed Mrs. Bentley. They carried the miniature glaciers up and sat, three in a row, on the shady porch glider. I'm Alice, she's Jane, and that's Tom Spaulding. How nice. And I'm Mrs. Bentley. They called me Helen. They stared at her. don't you believe they called me Helen? said the old lady. I didn't know old ladies had first names, said Tom, blinking. Mrs. Bentley laughed dryly. You never hear them used, he means, said Jane. My dear, when you are as old as I, they won't call you Jane, either. Old age is dreadfully formal. Its always Mrs. Young People don't like to call you Helen. It seems much too flip. How old are you? asked Alice. I remember the pterodactyl. Mrs. Bentley smiled. No, but how old? Seventy-two. They gave their cold sweets an extra long suck, deliberating. that's old, said Tom. I don't feel any different now than when I was your age, said the old lady. Our age? Yes. Once I was a pretty little girl just like you, Jane, and you, Alice. They did not speak. Whats the matter? Nothing. Jane got up. Oh, you don't have to go so soon, I hope. You haven't finished eating... Is something the matter? My mother says it isn't nice to fib, said Jane. Of course it isnt. Its very bad, agreed Mrs. Bentley. And not to listen to fibs. Who was fibbing to you, Jane? Jane looked at her and then glanced nervously away. You were. I? Mrs. Bentley laughed and put her withered claw to her small bosom. About what? About your age. About being a little girl. Mrs. Bentley stiffened. But I was, many years ago, a little girl just like you. Come on, Alice, Tom. Just a moment, said Mrs. Bentley. don't you believe me? I don't know, said Jane. No. But how ridiculous! Its perfectly obvious. Everyone was young once! Not you, whispered Jane, eyes down, almost to herself. |
| 616 |
Whos this little girl? asked Jane. Its me! The two girls held onto it. But it doesn't look like you, said Jane simply. Anybody could get a picture like this, somewhere. They looked at her for a long moment. Any more pictures, Mrs. Bentley? asked Alice. Of you, later? You got a picture of you at fifteen, and one at twenty, and one at forty and fifty? The girls chortled. I don't have to show you anything! said Mrs. Bentley. Then we don't have to believe you, replied Jane. But this picture proves I was young! that's some other little girl, like us. You borrowed it. I was married! Wheres Mr. Bentley? he's been gone a long time. If he were here, hed tell you how young and pretty I was when I was twenty-two. But he's not here and he cant tell, so what does that prove? I have a marriage certificate. You could have borrowed that, too. Only way I'll believe you were ever young-Jane shut her eyes to emphasize how sure she was of herselfis if you have someone say they saw you when you were ten. Thousands of people saw me butyou're dead, you little foolor ill, in other towns. I don't know a soul here, just moved here a few years ago, so no one saw me young. Well, there you are! Jane blinked at her companions. Nobody saw her! Listen! Mrs. Bentley seized the girls wrist. You must take these things on faith. Someday you'll be as old as I. People will say the same. Oh no, they'll say, those vultures were never hummingbirds, those owls were never orioles, those parrots were never bluebirds! One day you'll be like me! No, we wont! said the girls. Will we? they asked one another. Wait and see! said Mrs. Bentley. And to herself she thought, Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between They cant imagine a change they cant see. Your mother, she said to Jane. haven't you noticed, over the years, the change? No, said Jane. she's always the same. And that was true. You lived with people every day and they never altered a degree. It was only when people had been off on a long trip, for years, that they shocked you. And she felt like a woman who has been on a roaring black train for seventy-two years, landing at last upon the rail platform and everyone crying: Helen Bentley, is that you? I guess we better go home, said Jane. Thanks for the ring. It just fits me. Thanks for the comb. Its fine. Thanks for the picture of the little girl. Come backyou cant have those! Mrs. Bentley shouted as they raced down the steps. you're mine! don't! said Tom, following the girls. Give them back! No, she stole them! They belonged to some other little girl. She stole them. Thanks! cried Alice. So no matter how she called after them, the girls were gone, like moths through darkness. I'm sorry, said Tom, on the lawn, looking up at Mrs. Bentley. He went away. They took my ring and my comb and my picture, thought Mrs. Bentley, trembling there on the steps. Oh, I'm empty, empty; its part of my life. She lay awake for many hours into the night, among her trunks and trinkets. |
| 617 |
She glanced over at the neat stacks of materials and toys and opera plumes and said, aloud, Does it really belong to me? Or was it the elaborate trick of an old lady convincing herself that she had a past? After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. She may have been a girl once, but was not now. Her childhood was gone and nothing could fetch it back. A night wind blew in the room. The white curtain fluttered against a dark cane, which had leaned against the wall near the other bric-a-brac for many years. The cane trembled and fell out into a patch of moonlight, with a soft thud. Its gold ferule glittered. It was her husbands opera cane. It seemed as if he were pointing it at her, as he often had, using his soft, sad, reasonable voice when they, upon rare occasions, disagreed. Those children are right, he would have said. They stole nothing from you, my dear. These things don't belong to you here, you now. They belonged to her, that other you, so long ago. Oh, thought Mrs. Bentley. And then, as though an ancient phonograph record had been set hissing under a steel needle, she remembered a conversation she had once had with Mr. BentleyMr. Bentley, so prim, a pink carnation in his whisk-broomed lapel, saying, My dear, you never will understand time, will you? you're always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person you are tonight. Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? they'll only hurt you later. Throw them away, my dear. But Mrs. Bentley had stubbornly kept them. It won't work, Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. Whenyou're nine, you think youve always been nine years old and will always be. Whenyou're thirty, it seems youve always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. you're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen. It had been one of the few, but gentle, disputes of their quiet marriage. He had never approved of her bric-a-brackery. Be what you are, bury what you are not, he had said. Ticket stubs are trickery. Saving things is a magic trick, with mirrors. If he were alive tonight, what would he say? you're saving cocoons. that's what hed say. Corsets, in a way, you can never fit again. So why save them? You cant really prove you were ever young. Pictures? No, they lie. you're not the picture. Affidavits? No, my dear, you're not the dates, or the ink, or the paper. you're not these trunks of junk and dust. you're only you, here, nowthe present you. Mrs. Bentley nodded at the memory, breathing easier. Yes, I see. I see. The gold-feruled cane lay silently on the moonlit rug. In the morning, she said to it, I will do something final about this, and settle down to being only me, and nobody else from any other year. Yes, that's what I'll do. |
| 618 |
She slept... The morning was bright and green, and there at her door, bumping softly on the screen, were the two girls. Got any more to give us, Mrs. Bentley? More of the little girls things? She led them down the hall to the library. Take this. She gave Jane the dress in which she had played the mandarins daughter at fifteen. And this, and this. A kaleidoscope, a magnifying glass. Pick anything you want, said Mrs. Bentley. Books, skates, dolls, everything- they're yours. Ours? Only yours. And will you help me with a little work in the next hour? I'm building a big fire in my back yard. Im; emptying the trunks, throwing out this trash for the trash-man. It doesn't belong to me. Nothing ever belongs to anybody. Well help, they said. Mrs. Bentley led the procession to the back yard, arms full, a box of matches in her hand. So the rest of the summer you could see the two little girls and Tom like wrens on a wire, on Mrs. Bentleys front porch, waiting. And when the silvery chimes of the icicle man were heard, the front door opened, Mrs. Bentley floated out with her hand deep down the gullet of her silvermouthed purse, and for half an hour you could see them there on the porch, the children and the old lady putting coldness into warmness, eating chocolate icicles, laughing. At last they were good friends. How old are you, Mrs. Bentley? Seventy-two. How old were you fifty years ago? Seventy-two. You werent ever young, were you, and never wore ribbons or dresses like these? No. Have you got a first name? My name is Mrs. Bentley. And youve always lived in this one house? Always. And never were pretty? Never. Never in a million trillion years? The two girls would bend toward the old lady, and wait in the pressed silence of four oclock on a summer afternoon. Never, said Mrs. Bentley, in a million trillion years. You got the nickel tablet ready, Doug? Sure. Doug licked his pencil good. What you got in there so far? All the ceremonies. July Fourth and all that, dandelion-wine making and junk like bringing out the porch swing, huh? Says here, I ate the first Eskimo Pie of the summer season Tune first, 1928. That wasnt summer, that was still spring. It was a first anyway, so I put it down. Bought those new tennis shoes June twenty-fifth. Went barefoot in the grass June twenty-sixth Busy, busy, busy, heck! Well, what you got to report this time, Tom? A new first, a fancy ceremony of some sort to do with vacation like creek-crab catching or water-strider-spider grabbing? Nobody ever grabbed a water-strider-spider in his life. You ever know anybody grabbed a water-strider-spider? Go ahead, think! I'm thinking. Well? you're right. Nobody ever did. Nobody ever will, I guess. you're just too fast. Its not thatyou're fast. They just don't exist, said Tom. He thought about it and nodded. that's right, they just never did exist at all. Well, what I got to report is this. He leaned over and whispered in his brothers ear. Douglas wrote it. They both looked at it. I'll be darned! |
| 619 |
said Douglas. I never thought of that. that's brilliant! Its true. Old people never were children! And its kind of sad, said Tom, sitting still. Theres nothing we can do to help them. Seems like the town is full of machines... said Douglas, running. Mr. Auffmann and his Happiness Machine, Miss Fern and Miss Roberta and their Green Machine. Now, Charlie, what you handing me? A Time Machine! panted Charlie Woodman, pacing him. Mothers, scouts, Injuns honor! Travels in the past and future? John Huff asked, easily circling them. Only in the past, but you cant have everything. Here we are. Charlie Woodman pulled up at a hedge. Douglas peered in at the old house. Heck, that's Colonel Freeleighs place. Cant be no Time Machine in there. he's no inventor, and if he was, wed known about an important thing like a Time Machine years ago. Charlie and John tiptoed up the front-porch steps. Douglas snorted and shook his head, staying at the bottom of: the steps. Okay, Douglas, said Charlie. Be a knucklehead. Sure, Colonel Freeleigh didn't invent this Time Machine. But he's got a proprietary interest in it, and its been here all the time. We were too darned dumb to notice! So long, Douglas Spaulding, to you! Charlie took Johns elbow as though he was escorting a lady, opened the front-porch screen and went in. The screen door did not slam. Douglas had caught the screen and was following silently. Charlie walked across the enclosed porch, knocked, and opened the inside door. They all peered down a long dark hall toward a room that was lit like an undersea grotto, soft green, dim, and watery. Colonel Freeleigh? Silence. He don't hear so good, whispered Charlie. But he told me to just come on in and yell. Colonel! The only answer was the dust sifting down and around the spiral stairwell from above. Then there was a faint stir in that undersea chamber at the far end of the hall. They moved carefully along and peered into room which contained but two pieces of furniture-an old man and a chair. They resembled each other, both so thin you could see just how they had been put together, ball and socket, sinew and joint. The rest of the room was raw floor boards, naked walls and ceiling, and vast quantities of silent air. He looks dead, whispered Douglas. No, he's just thinking up new places to travel to, said Charlie, very proud and quiet. Colonel? One of the pieces of brown furniture moved and it was the colonel, blinking around, focusing, and smiling a wild and toothless smile. Charlie! Colonel, Doug and John here came to Welcome, boys; sit down, sit down! The boys sat, uneasily, on the floor. But wheres the said Douglas. Charlie jabbed his ribs quickly. Wheres the what? asked Colonel Freeleigh. Wheres the point in us talking, he means. Charlie grimaced at Douglas, then smiled at the old man. We got nothing to say. Colonel, you say something. Beware, Charlie, old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft. |
| 620 |
Ching Ling Soo, suggested Charlie casually. Eh? said the colonel. Boston, Charlie prompted, 1910. Boston, 1910... The colonel frowned. Why, Ching Ling Soo, of course! Yes, sir, Colonel. Let me see, now... The colonels voice murmured, it drifted away on serene lake waters. Let me see... The boys waited. Colonel Freeleigh closed his eyes. October first, 1910, a calm cool fine autumn night, the Boston Variety Theatre, yes, there it is. Full house, all waiting. Orchestra, fanfare, curtain! Ching Ling Soo, the great Oriental Magician! There he is, on stage! And there I am, front row center! The Bullet Trick! he cries. Volunteers! The man next to me goes up. Examine the rifle! says Ching. Mark the bullet! says he. Now fire this marked bullet from this rifle, using my face for a target, and, says Ching, at the far end of the stage I will catch the bullet in my teeth! Colonel Freeleigh took a deep breath and paused. Douglas was staring at him, half puzzled, half in awe. John Huff and Charlie were completely lost. Now the old man went on, his head and body frozen, only his lips moving. Ready, aim, fire! cries Ching Ling Soo. Bang! The rifle cracks. Bang! Ching Ling Soo shrieks, he staggers, he falls, his face all red. Pandemonium. Audience on its feet. Something wrong with the rifle. Dead, someone says. Andyou're right. Dead. Horrible, horrible... I'll always remember... his face a mask of red, the curtain coming down fast and the women weeping...1910... Boston... Variety Theatre... poor man... Colonel Freeleigh slowly opened his eyes. Boy, Colonel, said Charlie, that was fine. Now how about Pawnee Bill? Pawnee Bill...? And the time you was on the prairie way back in 75. Pawnee Bill... The colonel moved into darkness. Eighteen seventy-five... yes, me and Pawnee Bill on a little rise in the middle of the prairie, waiting. Shh! says Pawnee Bill. Listen. The prairie like a big stage all set for the storm to come. Thunder. Soft. Thunder again. Not so soft. And across that prairie as far as the eye could see this big ominous yellow-dark cloud full of black lightning, somehow sunk to earth, fifty miles wide, fifty miles long, a mile high, and no more than an inch off the ground. Lord! I cried, Lord! from up on my hilllord! the earth pounded like a mad heart, boys, a heart gone to panic. My bones shook fit to break. The earth shook: rat-a-tat rat-a-tat, boom! Rumble. that's a rare word: rumble. Oh, how that mighty storm rumbled along down, up, and over the rises, and all you could see was the cloud and nothing inside. that's them! cried Pawnee Bill. And the cloud was dust! Not vapors or rain, no, but prairie dust flung up from the tinder-dry grass like fine corn meal, like pollen all blazed with sunlight now, for the sun had come out. I shouted again! Why? Because in all that hell-fire filtering dust now a veil moved aside and I saw them, I swear it! The grand army of the ancient prairie: the bison, the buffalo! The colonel let the silence build, then broke it again. |
| 621 |
Heads like giant Negroes fists, bodies like locomotives! Twenty, fifty, two hundred thousand iron missiles shot out of the west, gone off the track and flailing cinders, their eyes like blazing coals, rumbling toward oblivion! I saw that the dust rose up and for a little while showed me that sea of humps, of dolloping manes, black shaggy waves rising, falling... Shoot! says Pawnee Bill. Shoot! And I cock and aim. Shoot he says. And I stand there feeling like Gods right hand, looking at the great vision of strength and violence going by, going by, midnight at noon, like a glinty funeral train all black and long and sad and forever and you don't fire at a funeral train, now do you, boys? do you? All I wanted then was for the dust to sink again and cover the black shapes of doom which pummeled and jostled on in great burdensome commotions. And, boys, the dust came down. The cloud hid the million feet that were drumming up the thunder and dusting out the storm. I heard Pawnee Bill curse and hit my arm. But I was glad I hadn't touched that cloud or the power within that cloud with so much as a pellet of lead. I just wanted to stand watching time bundle by in great trundlings all hid by the storm the bison made and carried with them toward eternity. An hour, three hours, six, it took for the storm to pass on away over the horizon toward less kind men than me. Pawnee Bill was gone, I stood alone, stone deaf. I walked all numb through a town a hundred miles south and heard not the voices of men and was satisfied not to hear. For a little while I wanted to remember the thunder. I hear it still, on summer afternoons like this when the rain shapes over the lake; a fearsome, wondrous sound... one I wish you might have heard... The dim light filtered through Colonel Freeleighs nose which was large and like white porcelain which cupped a very thin and tepid orange tea indeed. Is he asleep? asked Douglas at last. No, said Charlie. Just recharging his batteries. Colonel Freeleigh breathed swiftly, softly, as if hed run a long way. At last he opened his eyes. Yes, sir said Charlie, in admiration. Hello Charlie. The colonel smiled at the boys puzzledly. that's Doug and that's John, said Charlie. How-de-do, boys. The boys said hello. But said Douglas. Where is the? My gosh, you're dumb! Charlie jabbed Douglas in the arm. He turned to the colonel. You were saying, sir? Was I? murmured the old man. The Civil War, suggested John Huff quietly. Does he remember that? Do I remember? said the colonel. Oh, I do, I do! His voice trembled as he shut up his eyes again. Everything! Except... which side I fought on... The color of your uniform Charlie began. Colors begin to run on you, whispered the colonel. its gotten hazy. I see soldiers with me, but a long time ago 1 stopped seeing color in their coats or caps. I was born in Illinois, raised in Virginia, married in New York, built a house in Tennessee and now, very late, here I am, good Lord, back in Green Town. So you see why the colors run and blend... |
| 622 |
But you remember which side of hills you fought on? Charlie did not raise his voice. Did the sun rise on your left or right? Did you march toward Canada or Mexico? Seems some mornings the sun rose on my good right hand, some mornings over my left shoulder. We marched all directions. Its most seventy years since. You forget suns and mornings that long past. You remember winning, don't you? A battle won, somewhere? No, said the old man, deep under. I don't remember anyone winning anywhere any time. Wars never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns. But I don't suppose that's the kind of victory you boys mean for me to talk on. Antietam, said John Huff. Ask about Antietam. I was there. The boys eyes grew bright. Bull Run, ask him Bull Run... I was there. Softly. What about Shiloh? Theres never been a year in my life I haven't thought, what a lovely name and what a shame to see it only on battle records. Shiloh, then. Fort Sumter? I saw the first puffs of powder smoke. A dreaming voice. So many things come back, oh, so many things. T remember songs. AUs quiet along the Potomac tonight, where the soldiers lie peacefully dreaming; their tents in the rays of the clear autumn moon, or the light of the watchfire, are gleaming. Remember, remember... AU quiet along the Potomac tonight; no sound save the rush of the river; while soft falls the dew on the face of the deadthe pickets off duty forever!... After the surrender, Mr. Lincoln, on the White House balcony asked the band to play, Look away, look away, look away, Dixie land... And then there was the Boston lady who one night wrote a song will last a thousand years: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. Late nights I feel my mouth move singing back in another time. Ye Cavaliers of Dixie! Who guard the Southern shores... When the boys come home in triumph, brother, with the laurels they shall gain... So many songs, sung on both sides, blowing north, blowing south on the night winds. We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more... Tenting tonight, tenting tonight, tenting on the old camp ground. Hurrah, hurrah, we bring the Jubilee, hurrah, hurrah, the flag that makes us free... The old mans voice faded. The boys sat for a long while without moving. Then Charlie turned and looked at Douglas and said, Well, is he or isn't he? Douglas breathed twice and said, He sure is. The colonel opened his eyes. I sure am what? he asked. A Time Machine, murmured Douglas. A Time Machine. The colonel looked at the boys for a full five seconds. Now it was his voice that was full of awe. Is that what you boys call me? Yes, sir, Colonel. Yes, sir. The colonel sat slowly back in his chair and looked at the boys and looked at his hands and then looked at the blank wall beyond them steadily. |
| 623 |
Charlie arose. Well, I guess we better go. So long and thanks, Colonel. What? Oh, so long, boys. Douglas and John and Charlie went on tiptoe out the door. Colonel Freeleigh, though they crossed his line of vision, did not see them go. In the street, the boys were startled when someone shouted from a first-floor window above, Hey! They looked up. Yes, sir, Colonel? The colonel leaned out, waving one arm. I thought about what you said, boys! Yes, sir? And-youre right! Why didn't I think of it before! A Time Machine, by God, a Time Machine! Yes, sir. So long, boys. Come aboard any time! At the end of the street they turned again and the colonel was still waving. They waved back, feeling warm and good, then went on. Chug-a-chug, said John. I can travel twelve years into the past. Wham-chug-ding! Yeah, said Charlie, looking back at that quiet house, but you cant go a hundred years. No, mused John, I cant go a hundred years. that's really traveling. that's really some machine. They walked for a full minute in silence, looking at their feet. They came to a fence. Last one over this fence, said Douglas, is a girl. All the way home they called Douglas Dora. Long after midnight Tom woke to find Douglas scribbling rapidly in the nickel tablet, by flashlight. Doug, whats up? Up? Everythings up! I'm counting my blessings, Tom! Look here; the Happiness Machine didn't work out, did it?. But, who cares! I got the whole year lined up, anyway. Need r to run anywhere on the main streets, I got the Green Town Trolley to look around and spy on the world from. Need to run anywhere off the main streets, I knock on Miss Fern and I Miss Robertas door and they charge up the batteries on their electric runabout and we go sailing down the sidewalks. Need to run down alleys and over fences, to see that part of Green Town you only see around back and behind and creep up on, and I got my brand-new sneakers. Sneakers, runabout, I trolley! I'm set! But even better, Tom, even better, listen! If I want to go where no one else can go becauseyou're not: smart enough to even think of it, if I want to charge back to 1890 and then transfer to 1875 and transfer again crosstown to 1860 I just hop on the old Colonel Freeleigh Express! I'm writing it down here this way: Maybe old people were never children, like we claim with Mrs. Bentley, but, big or little, some of them were standing around at Appomattox the summer of 1865. They got Indian vision and can sight back further than you and me will ever sight ahead. That sounds swell, Doug; what does it mean? Douglas went on writing. It means you and me aint got half the chance to be far-travelers they have. If were lucky well hit forty, forty-five, fifty, that's just a jog around the block to them. Its when you hit ninety, ninety-five, a hundred, thatyou're far-traveling like heck. The flashlight went out. They lay there in the moonlight. Tom, whispered Douglas. I got to travel all those ways. See what I can see. But most of all I got to visit Colonel Freeleigh once, twice, three times a week. |
| 624 |
And so we bought it! remembered Miss Roberta, in the attic, horrified at their nerve. We shouldve been warned! Always did think it looked like a little car off the carnival roller coaster! Well, said Fern defensively, my hips bothered me for years, and you always get tired walking. It seemed so refined, so regal. Like in the old days when women wore hoop skirts. They sailed! The Green Machine sailed so quietly. Like an excursion boat, wonderfully easy to steer, a baton handle you twitched with your hand, so. Oh, that glorious and enchanted first weekthe magical afternoons of golden light, humming through the shady town on a dreaming, timeless river, seated stiffly, smiling at passing acquaintances, sedately purring out their wrinkled claws at every turn, squeezing a hoarse cry from the black rubber horn at intersections, sometimes letting Douglas or Tom Spaulding or any of the other boys who trotted, chatting, alongside, hitch a little ride. Fifteen slow and pleasurable miles an hour top speed. They came and went through the summer sunlight and shadow, their faces freckled and stained by passing trees, going and coming like an ancient, wheeled vision. And then, whispered Fern, this afternoon! Oh, this afternoon! It was an accident. But we ran away, and that's criminal! This noon. The smell of the leather cushions under their bodies, the gray perfume smell of their own sachets trailing back as they moved in their silent Green Machine through the small, languorous town. It happened quickly. Rolling soft onto the sidewalk at noon, because the streets were blistering and fiery, and the only shade was under the lawn trees, they had glided to a blind comer, bulbing their throaty horn. Suddenly, like a jack-in-the-box, Mister Quartermain had tottered from nowhere! Look out! screamed Miss Fern. Look out! screamed Miss Roberta. Look out! cried Mister Quartermain. The two women grabbed each other instead of the steering stick. There was a terrible thud. The Green Machine sailed on in the hot daylight, under the shady chestnut trees, past the ripening apple trees. Looking back only once, the two old ladies eyes filled with faded horror. The old man lay on the sidewalk, silent. And here we are, mourned Miss Fern in the darkening attic. Oh, why didn't we stop! Why did we run away? Shh! They both listened. The rapping downstairs came again. When it stopped they saw a boy cross the lawn in the dim light. Just Douglas Spaulding come for a ride again. They both sighed. The hours passed; the sun was going down. Weve been up here all afternoon, said Roberta tiredly. We cant stay in the attic three weeks hiding till everybody forgets. Wed starve. Whatll we do, then? Do you think anyone saw and followed us? They looked at each other. No. Nobody saw. The town was silent, all the tiny houses putting on lights. There was a smell of watered grass and cooking suppers from below. Time to put on the meat, said Miss Fern. Frankll be coming home in ten minutes. Do we dare go down? |
| 625 |
Frankd call the police if he found the house empty. Thatd make things worse. The sun went swiftly. Now they were only two moving things in the musty blackness. Do you, wondered Miss Fern, think he's dead? Mister Quartermain? A pause. Yes. Roberta hesitated. Well check the evening paper. They opened the attic door and looked carefully at the steps leading down. Oh, if Frank hears about this, hell take our Green Machine away from us, and its so lovely and nice riding and getting the cool wind and seeing the town. We won't tell him. won't we? They helped each other down the creaking stairs to the second floor, stopping to listen... In the kitchen they peered at the pantry, peeked out windows with frightened eyes, and finally set to work frying hamburger on the stove. After five minutes of working silence Fern looked sadly over at Roberta and said, I've been thinking. Were old and feeble and don't like to admit it. Were dangerous. We owe a debt to society for running off And? A kind of silence fell on the frying in the kitchen as the two sisters faced each other, nothing in their hands. I think thatFern stared at the wall for a long time-we shouldn't drive the Green Machine ever again. Roberta picked up a plate and held it in her thin hand. Not-ever? she said. No. But, said Roberta, we don't have toto get rid of it, do we? We can keep it, cant we? Fern considered this. Yes, I guess we can keep it. At least thatll be something. I'll go out now and disconnect the batteries. Roberta was leaving just as Frank, their younger brother, only fifty-six years, entered. Hi, sisters! he cried. Roberta brushed past him without a word and walked out into the summer dusk. Frank was carrying a newspaper which Fern immediately snatched from him. Trembling, she looked it through and through, and sighing, gave it back to him. Saw Doug Spaulding outside just now. Said he had a message for you. Said for you not to worryhe saw everything and everythings all right. What did he mean by that? I'm sure I wouldn't know. Fem turned her back and searched for her handkerchief. Oh well, these kids. Frank looked at his sisters back for a long moment, then shrugged. Supper almost ready? he asked pleasantly. Yes. Fern set the kitchen table. There was a bulbing cry from outside. Once, twice, three timesfar away. Whats that? Frank peered through the kitchen window into the dusk. Whats Roberta up to? Look at her out there, sitting in the Green Machine, poking the rubber horn! Once, twice more, in the dusk, softly, like some kind of mournful animal, the bulbing sound was pinched out. Whats got into her? demanded Frank. You just leave her alone! screamed Fern. Frank looked surprised. A moment later Roberta entered quietly, without looking at anyone, and they all sat down to supper. The first light on the roof outside; very early morning. The leaves on all the trees tremble with a soft awakening to any breeze the dawn may offer. And then, far off, around a curve of silver track, comes the trolley, balanced on four small steel-blue wheels, and it is painted the color of tangerines. |
| 626 |
Why, just the smell of a trolley, that's different. I been on Chicago buses; they smell funny. Trolleys are too slow, said Mr. Tridden. Going to put busses on. Fusses for people and busses for school. The trolley whined to a stop. From overhead Mr. Tridden reached down huge picnic hampers. Yelling, the children helped him carry the baskets out by a creek that emptied into a silent lake where an ancient bandstand stood crumbling into termite dust. They sat eating ham sandwiches and fresh strawberries and waxy oranges and Mr. Tridden told them how it had been twenty years ago, the band playing on that ornate stand at night, the men pumping air into their brass horns, the plump conductor flinging perspiration from his baton, the children and fireflies running in the deep grass, the ladies with long dresses and high pompadours treading the wooden xylophone walks with men in choking collars. There was the walk now, all softened into a fiber mush by the years. The lake was silent and blue and serene, and fish peacefully threaded the bright reeds, and the motorman murmured on and on, and the children felt it was some other year, with Mr. Tridden looking wonderfully young, his eyes lighted like small bulbs, blue and electric. It was a drifting, easy day, nobody rushing and the forest all about, the sun held in one position, as Mr. Triddens voice rose and fell, and a darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both golden and invisible. A bee settled into, flower, humming and humming. The trolley stood like an enchanted calliope, simmering where the sun fell on it. The trolley was on their hands, a brass smell, as they ate ripe cherries. The bright odor of the trolley blew from their clothes on the summer wind. A loon flew over the sky, crying. Somebody shivered. Mr. Tridden worked on his gloves. Well, time to go. Parentsll think I stole you all for good. The trolley was silent and cool dark, like the inside of an ice-cream drugstore. With a soft green rustling of velvet buff, the seats were turned by the quiet children so they sat with their backs to the silent lake, the deserted bandstand and the wooden planks that made a kind of music if you walked down the shore on them into other lands. Bing! went the soft bell under Mr. Triddens foot and they soared back over sun-abandoned, withered flower meadows, through woods, toward a town that seemed to crush the sides of the trolley with bricks and asphalt and wood when Mr. Tridden stopped to let the children out in shady streets. Charlie and Douglas were the last to stand near the opened tongue of the trolley, the folding step, breathing electricity, watching Mr. Triddens gloves on the brass controls. Douglas ran his fingers on the green creek moss, looked at the silver, the brass, the wine color of the ceiling. Well... so long again, Mr. Tridden. Good-by, boys. See you around, Mr. Tridden. See you around. There was a soft sigh of air; the door collapsed shut, tucking up its corrugated tongue. |
| 627 |
It was such a fine day and then suddenly a cloud crossed the sky, covered the sun, and did not move again. John Huff had been speaking quietly for several minutes. Now Douglas stopped on the path and looked over at him. John, say that again. You heard me the first time, Doug. Did you say you weregoing away? Got my train ticket here in my pocket. Whoo-whoo, clang! Shush-shush-shush-shush. Whooooooooo... His voice faded. John took the yellow and green train ticket solemnly from his pocket and they both looked at it. Tonight! said Douglas. My gosh! Tonight we were going to play Red Light, Green Light and Statues! How come, all of a sudden? You been here in Green Town all my life. You just don't pick up and leave! Its my father, said John. he's got a job in Milwaukee. We werent sure until today... My gosh, here it is with the Baptist picnic next week and the big carnival Labor Day and Halloweencant your dad wait till then? John shook his head. Good grief! said Douglas. Let me sit down! They sat under an old oak tree on the side of the hill looking back at town, and the sun made large trembling shadows around them; it was cool as a cave in under the tree. Out beyond, in sunlight, the town was painted with heat, the windows all gaping. Douglas wanted to run back in there where the town, by its very weight, its houses, their bulk, might enclose and prevent Johns ever getting up and running off. But were friends, Douglas said helplessly. We always will be, said John. you'll come back to visit every week or so, won't you? Dad says only once or twice a year. Its eighty miles. Eighty miles aint far! shouted Douglas. No, its not far at all, said John. My grandmas got a phone. I'll call you. Or maybe well all visit up your way, too. Thatd be great! John said nothing for a long while. Well, said Douglas, lets talk about something. What? My gosh, ifyou're going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we wouldve talked about next: month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers! Go on like you was back there, grasshoppers spitting tobacco! Funny thing is It don't feel like talking about grasshoppers. You always did! Sure. John looked steadily at the town. But It guess this just aint the time. John, whats wrong? You look funny... John had closed his eyes and screwed up his face. Doug, the Terle house, upstairs, you know? Sure. The colored windowpanes on the little round windows, have they always been there? Sure. You positive? Darned old windows been there since before we were born. Why? I never saw them before today, said John. On the way walking through town I looked up and there they were. Doug, what was I doing all these years I didn't see them? You had other things to do. Did I? John turned and looked in a kind of panic at Douglas. Gosh, Doug, why should those dam windows scare me? I mean, that's nothing to be scared of, is it? Its just... He floundered. Its just, if I didn't see these windows until today, what else did I miss? |
| 628 |
And what about all the things I did see here in town? Will I be able to remember them when I go away? Anything you want to remember, you remember. T went to camp two summers ago. Up there I remembered. No, you didn't! You told me. you woke nights and couldn't remember your mothers face. No! Some nights it happens to me in my own house; scares heck out of me. I got to go in my folks room and look at their faces while they sleep, to be sure! And I go back to my room and lose it again. Gosh, Doug, oh gosh! He held onto his knees tight. Promise me just one thing, Doug. Promise you'll remember me, promise you'll remember my face and everything. Will you promise? Easy as pie. Cot a motion-picture machine in my head. Lying in bed nights I can just turn on a light in my head and out it comes on the wall, clear as heck, and there you'll be, yelling and waving at me. Shut your eyes, Doug. Now, tell me, what color eyes I got? don't peek. What color eyes I got? Douglas began to sweat. His eyelids twitched nervously. Aw heck, John, that's not fair. Tell me! Brown! John turned away. No, sir. What do you mean, no? you're not even close! John closed his eyes. Turn around here, said Douglas. Open up, let me see. Its no use, said John. You forgot already. Just the way I said. Turn around here! Douglas grabbed him by the hair and turned him slowly. Okay, Doug. John opened his eyes. Green. Douglas, dismayed, let his hand drop. Your eyes are green... Well, that's close to brown. Almost hazel! Doug, don't lie to me. All right, said Doug quietly. I wont. They sat there listening to the other boys running up the hill, shrieking and yelling at them. They raced along the railroad tracks, opened their lunch in brown-paper sacks, and sniffed deeply of the wax-wrapped deviled-ham sandwiches and green-sea pickles and colored peppermints. They ran and ran again and Douglas bent to scorch his ear on the hot steel rails, hearing trains so far away they were unseen voyagings in other lands, sending Morse-code messages to him here under the killing sun. Douglas stood up, stunned. John! For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you werent looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching! John! There was no way to get him to help now, save by a trick. John, ditch, ditch the others! Yelling, Douglas and John sprinted off, kiting the wind downhill, letting gravity work for them, over meadows, around barns until at last the sound of the pursuers faded. John and Douglas climbed into a haystack which was like a great bonfire crisping under them. Lets not do anything, said John. Just what I was going to say, said Douglas. They sat quietly, getting their breath. There was a small sound like an insect in the hay. |
| 629 |
They both heard it, but they didn't look at the sound. When Douglas moved his wrist the sound ticked in another part of the haystack. When he brought his arm around on his lap the sound ticked in his lap. He let his eyes fall in a brief flicker. The watch said three oclock. Douglas moved his right hand stealthily to the ticking, pulled out the watch stem. He set the hands back. Now they had all the time they would ever need to look long and close at the world, feel the sun move like a fiery wind over the sky. But at last John must have felt the bodiless weight of their shadows shift and lean, and he spoke. Doug, what time is it? Two-thirty. John looked at the sky. don't! thought Douglas. Looks more like three-thirty, four, said John. Boy Scout. You learn them things. Douglas sighed and slowly turned the watch ahead. John watched him do this, silently. Douglas looked up. John punched him, not hard at all, in the arm. With a swift stroke a plunge, a train came and went so quickly the boys all leaped aside, yelling, shaking their fists after it, Douglas and John with them. The train roared down the track, two hundred people in it, gone. The dust followed it a little way toward the south, then settled in the golden silence among the blue rails. The boys were walking home. I'm going to Cincinnati when I'm seventeen and be a railroad fireman, said Charlie Woodman. I got an uncle in New York, said Jim. I'll go there and be a printer. Doug did not ask the others. Already the trains were chanting and he saw their faces drifting off on back observation platforms, or pressed to windows. One by one they slid away. And then the empty track and the summer sky and himself on another train run in another direction. Douglas felt the earth move under his feet and saw their shadows move off the grass and color the air. He swallowed hard, then gave a screaming yell, pulled back his fist, shot the indoor ball whistling in the sky. Last one homes a rhinos behind! They pounded down the tracks, laughing, flailing the air. There went John Huff, not touching the ground at all. And here came Douglas, touching it all the time. It was seven oclock, supper over, and the boys gathering one by one from the sound of their house doors slammed and their parents crying to them not to slam the doors. Douglas and Tom and Charlie and John stood among half a dozen others and it was time for hide-and-seek and Statues. Just one game, said John. Then I got to go home. The train leaves at nine. Whos going to be it? Me, said Douglas. That the first time I ever heard of anybody volunteering to be it, said Tom. Douglas looked at John for a long moment. Start running, he cried. The boys scattered, yelling. John backed away, then turned and began to lope. Douglas counted slowly. He let them run far, spread out, separate each to his own small world. When they had got their momentum up and were almost out of sight he took a deep breath. Statues! Everyone froze. Very quietly Douglas moved across the lawn to where John Huff stood like an iron deer in the twilight. |
| 630 |
Far away, the other boys stood hands up, faces grimaced, eyes bright as stuffed squirrels. But here was John, alone and motionless and no one rushing or making a great outcry to spoil this moment. Douglas walked around the statue one way, walked around the statue the other way. The statue did not move. It did not speak. It looked at the horizon, its mouth half smiling. It was like that time years ago in Chicago when they had visited a big place where the carved marble figures were, and his walking around them in the silence. So here was John Huff with grass stains on his knees and the seat of his. pants, and cuts on his fingers and scabs on his elbows. Here was John Huff with the quiet tennis shoes, his feet sheathed in silence. There was the mouth that had chewed many an: apricot pie come summer, and said many a quiet thing or: two about life and the lay of the land. And there were the eyes, not blind like statues eyes, but filled with molten green- gold. And there the dark hair blowing now north now south or any direction in the little breeze there was. And there the % hands with all the town on them, dirt from roads and bark-slivers from trees, the fingers that smelled of hemp and vine and green apple, old coins or pickle-green frogs. There were the ears with the sunlight shining through them like bright warm peach wax and here, invisible, his spearmint-breath upon the air. John, now, said Douglas, don't you move so much as an eyelash. I absolutely command you to stay here and not move at all for the next three hours! Doug... Johns lips moved. Freeze! said Douglas. John went back to looking at the sky, but he was not smiling now. I got to go, he whispered. Not a muscle, its the game! I just got to get home now, said John. Now the statue moved, took its hands down out of the air and turned its head to look at Douglas. They stood looking at each other. The other kids were putting their arms down, too. Well play one more round, said John, except this time, I'm it. Run! The boys ran. Freeze! The boys froze, Douglas with them. Not a muscle! shouted John. Not a hair! He came and stood by Douglas. Boy, this is the only way to do it, he said. Douglas looked off at the twilight sky. Frozen statues, every single one of you, the next three minutes! said John. Douglas felt John walking around him even as he had walked around John a moment ago. He felt John sock him on the arm once, not too hard. So long, he said. Then there was a rushing sound and he knew without looking that there was nobody behind him now. Far away, a train whistle sounded. Douglas stood that way for a full minute, waiting for the sound of the running to fade, but it did not stop. he's still running away, but he doesn't sound any further off, thought Douglas. Why doesn't he stop running? And then he realized it was only the sound of his heart in his body. Stop! He jerked his hand to his chest. Stop running! I don't like that sound! And then he felt himself walking across the lawns among all the other statues now, and whether they, too, were coming to life he did not know. |
| 631 |
They did not seem to be moving at all. For that matter he himself was only moving from the knees down. The rest of him was cold stone, and very heavy. Going up the front porch of his house, he turned suddenly to look at the lawns behind him. The lawns were empty. A series of rifle shots. Screen doors banged one after the . other, a sunset volley, along the street. Statues are best, he thought. you're the only things you can keep on your lawn. don't ever let them move. Once you do, you cant do a thing with them. Suddenly his fist shot out like a piston from his side and it shook itself hard at the lawns and the street and the gathering dusk. His face was choked with blood, his eyes were blazing. John! he cried. You, John! John, you're my enemy, you hear? you're no friend of mine! don't come back now, ever! Get away, you! Enemy, you hear? that's what you are! Its all off between us, you're dirt, that's all, dirt! John, you hear me, John! As if a wick had been turned a little lower in a great clear lamp beyond the town, the sky darkened still more. He stood on the porch, his mouth gasping and working. His fist still thrust straight out at that house across the street and down the way. He looked at the fist and it dissolved, the world dissolved beyond it. Going upstairs, in the dark, where he could only feel his face but see nothing of himself, not even his fists, he told himself over and over, I'm mad, I'm angry, I hate him, I'm mad, I'm angry, I hate him! Ten minutes later, slowly he reached the top of the stairs, in the dark... Tom, said Douglas, just promise me one thing, okay? Its a promise. What? You may be my brother and maybe I hate you sometimes, but stick around, all right? You mean you'll let me follow you and the older guys when you go on hikes? Well... sure... even that. What I mean is, don't go away, huh? don't let any cars run over you or fall off a cliff. I should say not! Whatta you think I am, anyway? Cause if worst comes to worst, and both of us are real oldsay forty or forty-five some daywe can own a gold mine out West and sit there smoking corn silk and growing beards. Growing beards! Boy! Like I say, you stick around and don't let nothing happen. You can depend on me, said Tom. Its not you I worry about, said Douglas. Its the way God runs the world. Tom thought about this for a moment. he's all right, Doug, said Tom. He tries. She came out of the the bathroom putting iodine on her finger where she had almost lopped it off cutting herself a chunk of cocoanut cake. Just then the mailman came up the porch steps, opened the door, and walked in. The door slammed. Elmira Brown jumped a foot. Sam! she cried. She waved her iodined finger on the air to cool it. I'm still not used to my husband being a postman. Every time you just walk in, it scares the life out of me! Sam Brown stood there with the mail pouch half empty, scratching his head. He looked back out the door as if a fog had suddenly rolled in on a calm sweet summer morn. Sam, you're home early, she said. |
| 632 |
Mrs. Brown! You see? Mrs. Brown sat there. Clara Goodwater did this to me! Magic! Magic? Never mind, boy. Heres the steps. You go first and kick any invisible strings out of the way. Ring that doorbell, but pull your finger off quick, the juicell burn you to a cinder! Tom did not touch the bell. Clara Goodwater! Mrs. Brown flicked the bell button with her iodined finger. Far away in the cool dim empty rooms of the big old house, a silver bell tinkled and faded. Tom listened. Still farther away there was a stir of mouselike running. A shadow, perhaps a blowing curtain, moved in a distant parlor. Hello, said a quiet voice. And quite suddenly Mrs. Goodwater was there, fresh as a stick of peppermint, behind the screen. Why, hello there, Tom, Elmira. What don't rush me! We came over about your practicing to be a full-fledged witch! Mrs. Goodwater smiled. Your husbands not only a mailman, but a guardian of the law. Got a nose out to here! He didn't look at no mail. he's ten minutes between houses laughing at post cards. and tryin on mail-order shoes. It aint what he seen; its what you yourself told him about the books you got. Just a joke. Goin to be a witch! I said, and bang! Off gallops Sam, like I'd flung Lightning at him. I declare there cant be one wrinkle in that mans brain. You talked about your magic other places yesterday You must mean the Sandwich Club... To which I pointedly was not invited. Why, lady, we thought that was your regular day with your grandma. I can always have another Grandma day, if peopled only ask me places. All there was to it at the Sandwich Club was me sitting there with a ham and pickle sandwich, and I said right out loud, At last I'm going to get my witchs diploma. Been studying for years! that's what come back to me over the phone! Aint modern inventions wonderful! said Mrs. Goodwater. Considering you been president of the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge since the Civil War, it seems, I'll put it to you bang on the nose, have you used witchcraft all these years to spell the ladies and win the ayes-have-it? Do you doubt it for a moment, lady? said Mrs. Goodwater. Elections tomorrow again, and all I want to know is, you runnin for another termand aint you ashamed? Yes to the first question and no to the second. Lady, look here, I bought those books for my boy cousin, Raoul. he's just ten and goes around looking in hats for rabbits. I told him theres about as much chance finding rabbits in hats as brains in heads of certain people I could name, but look he does and so I got these gifts for him. wouldn't believe you on a stack of Bibles. Gods truth, anyway. I love to fun about the witch thing. The ladies all yodeled when I explained about my dark powers. Wish youd been there. I'll be there tomorrow to fight you with a cross of gold and all the powers of good I can organize behind me, said Elmira. Right now, tell me how much other magic junk you got in your house. Mrs. Goodwater pointed to a side table inside the door. I been buyin all kinds of magic herbs. |
| 633 |
Smell funny and make Raoul happy. That little sack of stuff, that's called This is rue, and this is Sabisse root and that theres Ebon herbs; heres black sulphur, and this they claim is bone dust. Bone dust Elmira skipped back and kicked Toms ankle. Tom yelped. And heres wormwood and fern leaves so you can freeze shotguns and fly like a bat in your dreams, it says in Chapter X of the little book here. I think its fine for growing boys heads to think about things like this. Now, from the look on your face you don't believe Raoul exists. Well, I'll give you his Springfield address. Yes, said Elmira, and the day I write him you'll take the Springfield bus and go to General Delivery and get my letter and write back to me in a boys hand. I know you! Mrs. Brown, speak upyou want to be president of the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge, right? You run every year now for ten years. You nominate yourself. And always wind up gettin one vote. Yours. Elmira, if the ladies wanted you theyd landslide you in. But from where I stand looking up the mountain, aint so much as one pebble come rattlin down save yours. Tell you what, I'll nominate and vote for you myself come noon tomorrow, hows that? Damned for sure, then, said Elmira. Last year I got a deathly cold right at election time; couldn't get out and campaign back-fence-to-back-fence. Year before that, broke my leg. Mighty strange. She squinted darkly at the lady behind the screen. that's not all. Last month I cut my finger six times, bruised my knee ten times, fell off my back porch twice, you hear-twice! I broke a window, dropped four dishes, one vase worth a dollar forty-nine at Bixbys, and I'm billin you for every dropped dish from now on in my house and environs! I'll be poor by Christmas, said Mrs. Goodwater. She opened the screen door and came out suddenly and let the door slam. Elmira Brown, how old are you? You probably got it written in one of your black books. Thirty-five! Well, when I think of thirty-five years of your life... Mrs. Goodwater pursed her lips and blinked her eyes, counting. that's about twelve thousand seven hundred and seventy-five days, or counting three of them per day, twelve thousand-odd commotions, twelve thousand much-ados and twelve thousand calamaties. Its a full rich life you lead, Elmira Brown. Shake hands! Get away! Elmira fended her off. Why, lady, you're only the second most clumsy woman in Green Town, Illinois. You cant sit down without playing the chair like an accordion. You cant stand up but what you kick the cat. You cant trot across an open meadow without falling into a well. Your life has been one long decline, Elmira Alice Brown, so why not admit it? It wasnt clumsiness that caused my calamities, but you being within a mile of me at those times when I dropped a pot of beans or juiced my finger in the electric socket at home. Lady, in a town this size, everybodys within a mile of someone at one time or other in the day. You admit being around then? I admit being born here, yes, but I'd give anything right now to have been born in Kenosha or Zion. |
| 634 |
Cost of medicine: ninety-eight dollars and seventy-eight cents. Secondly, things broken in the house during the twelve months just past; two lamps, six vases, ten dishes, one soup tureen, two windows, one chair, one sofa cushion, six glasses, and one crystal chandelier prism. Total cost: twelve dollars and ten cents. Thirdly, her pains this very night. Her toe hurt from being run over. Her stomach was upset. Her back was stiff, her legs were pulsing with agony. Her eyeballs felt like wads of blazing cotton. Her tongue tasted like a dust mop. Her ears were belling and ringing away. Cost? She debated, going back to bed. Ten thousand dollars in personal suffering. Try to settle this out of court! she said half aloud. Eh? said her husband, awake. She lay down in bed. I simply refuse to die. Beg pardon? he said. I won't die! she said, staring at the ceiling. that's what I always claimed, said her husband, and turned over to snore. In the morning Mrs. Elmira Brown was up early and down to the library and then to the drugstore and back to the house where she was busy mixing all kinds of chemicals when her husband, Sam came home with an empty mail pouch at noon. Lunchs in the icebox. Elmira stirred a green-looking porridge in a large glass. Good Lord, whats that? asked her husband. Looks like a milk shake been left out in the sun for forty years. Got kind of a fungus on it. Fight magic with magic. You going to drink that? Just before I go up into the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge for the big doings. Samuel Brown sniffed the concoction. Take my advice. Get up those steps first, then drink it. Whats in it? Snow from angels wings, well, really menthol, to cool hells fires that burn you, it says in this book I got at the library. The juice of a fresh grape off the vine, for thinking clear sweet thoughts in the face of dark visions, it says. Also red rhubarb, cream of tartar, white sugar, white of eggs, spring water and clover buds with the strength of the good earth in them. Oh, I could go on all day. Its here in the list, good against bad, white against black. I cant lose! Oh, you'll win, all right, said her husband. But will you know it? Think good thoughts. I'm on my way to get Tom for my charm. Poor boy, said her husband. Innocent, like you say, and about to be tom limb from limb, bargain-basement day at the Honeysuckle Lodge. Tomll survive, said Elmira, and, taking the bubbling concoction with her, hid inside a Quaker Oats box with the lid on, went out the door without catching her dress or snagging her new ninety-eight-cent stockings. Realizing this, she was smug all the way to Toms house where he waited for her in his white summer suit as she had instructed. Phew! said Tom. What you got in that box? Destiny, said Elmira. I sure hope so, said Tom, walking about two paces ahead of her. The Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge was full of ladies looking in each others mirrors and tugging at their skirts and asking to be sure their slips werent showing. At one oclock Mrs. Elmira Brown came up the steps with a boy in white clothes. |
| 635 |
He was holding his nose and screwing! up one eye so he could only half see where he was going. Mrs. Brown looked at the crowd and then at the Quaker Oats box and opened the top and looked in and gasped, and put the top back on without drinking any of that stuff in there. She moved inside the hall and with her moved a rustling as of taffeta, all the ladies whispering in a tide after her. She sat down in back with Tom, and Tom looked more, miserable than ever. The one eye he had open looked at the crowd of ladies and shut up for good. Sitting there, Elmira got the potion out and drank it slowly down. At one-thirty, the president, Mrs. Goodwater, banged the gavel and all but two dozen of the ladies quit talking. Ladies, she called out over the summer sea of silks and laces, capped here and there with white or gray, its election time. But before we start, I believe Mrs. Elmira Brown, wife of our eminent graphologist A titter ran through the room. Whats graphologist? Elmira elbowed Tom twice. I don't know, whispered Tom fiercely, eyes shut, feeling that elbow come out of darkness at him. wife, as I say, of our eminent handwriting expert, Samuel Brown...(more laughter)... of the U. S. Postal Service, continued Mrs. Goodwater. Mrs. Brown wants to give us some opinions. Mrs. Brown? Elmira stood up. Her chair fell over backward and snapped shut like a bear trap on itself. She jumped an inch off the floor and teetered on her heels, which gave off cracking sounds like they would fall to dust any moment. I got plenty to say, she said, holding the empty Quaker Oats box in one hand with a Bible. She grabbed Tom with the other and plowed forward, hitting several peoples elbows and muttering to them, Watch whatyou're doing! Careful, you! to reach the platform, turn, and knock a glass of water dripping over the table. She gave Mrs. Goodwater another bristly scowl when this happened and let her mop it up with a tiny handkerchief. Then with a secret look of triumph, Elmira drew forth the empty philter glass and held it up, displaying it for Mrs. Goodwater and whispering, You know what was in this? Its inside me, now, lady. The charmed circle surrounds me. No knife can cleave, no hatchet break through. The ladies, all talking, did not hear. Mrs. Goodwater nodded, held up her hands, and there was silence. Elmira held tight to Toms hand. Tom kept his eyes shut, wincing. Ladies, Elmira said, I sympathize with you. I know what youve been through these last ten years. I know why you voted for Mrs. Goodwater here. Youve got boys, girls, and men to feed. Youve got budgets to follow. You couldn't afford to have your milk sour, your bread fall, or your cakes as flat as wheels. You didn't want mumps, chicken pox, and whooping cough in your house all in three weeks. You didn't want your husband crashing his car or electrocuting himself on the high-tension wires outside town. But now all of that's over. You can come out in the open now. No more heartburns or backaches, because I've brought the good word and were going to exorcise this witch weve got here! |
| 636 |
It was claimed that when she began the fall she was sick to unconsciousness and that this made her skeleton rubber, so she kind of rolled rather than ricocheted. She landed at the bottom, blinking and feeling better, having left whatever it was that had made her uneasy all along the way. True, she was so badly bruised she looked like a tattooed lady. But, no, not a wrist was sprained or an ankle twisted. She held her head funny for three days, kind of peering out of the sides of her eyeballs instead of turning to look. But the important thing was Mrs. Goodwater at the bottom of the steps, pillowing Elmiras Head on her Lap and dropping tears on her as the ladies gathered Hysterically. Elmira, I promise, Elmira, I swear, if you just live, if you don't die, you hear me, Elmira, listen! I'll use my magic for nothing but good from now on. No more black, nothing but white magic. The rest of your life, if I have my way, no more falling over iron dogs, tripping on sills, cutting fingers, or dropping downstairs for you! Elysium, Elmira, Elysium, I promise! If you just live! Look, I'm pulling the tacks out of the doll! Elmira, speak to me! Speak now and sit up! And come upstairs for another vote. President, I promise, president of the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge, by acclamation, won't we, ladies? At this all the ladies cried so hard they had to lean on each other. Tom, upstairs, thought this meant death down there. He was halfway down when he met the ladies coming back up, looking like they had just wandered out of a dynamite explosion. Get out of the way, boy! First came Mrs. Goodwater, laughing and crying. Next came Mrs. Elmira Brown, doing the same. And after the two of them came all the one hundred twenty-three members of the lodge, not knowing if theyd just returned from a funeral or were on their way to a ball. He watched them pass and shook his head. don't need me no more, he said. No more at all. So he tiptoed down the stairs before they missed him, holding tight to the rail all the way. For what its worth, said Tom, theres the whole thing in a nutshell. The ladies carrying on like crazy. Everybody standing around blowing their noses. Elmira Brown sitting there at the bottom of the steps, nothing broke, her it bones made out of Jell-O, I suspect, and the witch sobbin on her shoulder, and then all of them goin upstairs suddenly laughing. Cry-yi, you figure it out. I got out of there fast! Tom loosened his shirt and took off his tie. Magic, you say? asked Douglas. Magic six ways from Sunday. You believe it? Yes I do and no I don't. Boy, this town is full of stuff! Douglas peered off at the horizon where clouds filled the sky with immense shapes of old gods and warriors. Spells and wax dolls and needles and elixirs, you said? Wasnt much as an elixir, but awful fine as an upchuck. Blap! Wowie! Tom clutched his stomach and stuck out his tongue. Witches... said Douglas. He squinted his eyes mysteriously. And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one, from the trees. |
| 637 |
At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on the tree; and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky, and drop you down and down. Long before you hit the grass you will have forgotten there ever was a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below. You will fall in darkness... No! Colonel Freeleigh opened his eyes quickly, sat erect in his wheel chair. He jerked his cold hand out to find the telephone. It was still there! He crushed it against his chest for a moment, blinking. I don't like that dream, he said to his empty room. At last, his fingers trembling, he lifted the receiver and called the long-distance operator and gave her a number and waited, watching the bedroom door as if at any moment a plague of sons, daughters, grandsons, nurses, doctors, might swarm in to seize away this last vital luxury he permitted his failing senses. Many days, or was it years, ago, when his heart had thrust like a dagger through his ribs and flesh, he had heard the boys below... their names what were they? Charles, Charlie, Chuck, yes! And Douglas! And Tom! He remembered! Calling his name far down the hall, but the door being locked in their faces, the boys turned away. You cant be excited, the doctor said. No visitors, no visitors, no It visitors. And he heard the boys moving across the street, he saw them, he waved. And they waved back. Colonel... Colonel... And now he sat alone with the little gray toad of a heart flopping weakly here or there in his chest from time to time. Colonel Freeleigh, said the operator. Heres your call. Mexico City. Erickson 3899. And now the far away but infinitely clear voice: Bueno. Jorge! cried the old man Senor Freeleigh! Again? This costs money. Let it cost! You know what to do. Si. The window? The window, Jorge, if you please. A moment, said the voice. And, thousands of miles away, in a southern land, in an office in a building in that land, there was the sound of footsteps retreating from the phone. The old man leaned forward, gripping the receiver tight to his wrinkled ear that ached with waiting for the next sound. The raising of a window. Ah, sighed the old man. The sounds of Mexico City on a hot yellow noon through the open window into the waiting phone. He c see Jorge standing there holding the mouthpiece out, out the bright day. Senor... No, no, please. Let me listen. He listened to the hooting of many metal horns, squealing of brakes, the calls of vendors selling red-purple bananas and jungle oranges in their stalls. Colonel Freeleighs feet began to move, hanging from the edge of his wheel chair, making the motions of a man walking. His eyes squeezed tight. He gave a series of immense sniffs, as if to gain the odors of meats hung on iron hooks in sunshine, cloaked with flies like a mantle of raisins; the smell of stone alleys wet with morning rain. |
| 638 |
He could feel the sun bum his spiny-bearded cheek, and he was twenty-five years old again, walking, walking, looking, smiling, happy to be alive, very much alert, drinking in colors and smells. A rap on the door. Quickly he hid the phone under his lap robe. The nurse entered. Hello, she said. Have you been good? Yes. The old mans voice was mechanical. He could hardly see. The shock of a simple rap on the door was such that part of him was still in another city, far removed. He waited for his mind to rush homeit must be here to answer questions, act sane, be polite. I've come to check your pulse. Not now! said the old man. you're not going anywhere, are you? She smiled. He looked at the nurse steadily. He hadn't been anywhere in ten years. Give me your wrist. Her fingers, hard and precise, searched for the sickness in his pulse like a pair of calipers. Whatve you been doing to excite yourself? she demanded. Nothing. Her gaze shifted and stopped on the empty phone table. At that instant a horn sounded faintly, two thousand miles away. She took the receiver from under the lap robe and held it before his face. Why do you do this to yourself? You promised you wouldnt. that's how you hurt yourself in the first place, isn't it? Getting excited, talking too much. Those boys up here jumping around They sat quietly and listened, said the colonel. And I told them things theyd never heard. The buffalo, I told them, the bison. It was worth it. I don't care. I was in a pure fever and I was alive. It doesn't matter if being so alive kills a man; its better to have the quick fever every time. Now give me that phone. If you won't let the boys come up and sit politely I can at least talk to someone outside the room. I'm sorry, Colonel. Your grandson will have to know about this. I prevented his having the phone taken out last week. Now it looks like I'll let him go ahead. This is my house, my phone. I pay your salary! he said. To make you well, not get you excited. She wheeled his chair across the room. To bed with you now, young man! From bed he looked back at the phone and kept looking at it. I'm going to the store for a few minutes, the nurse said. Just to be sure you don't use the phone again, I'm hiding your wheel chair in the hall. She wheeled the empty chair out the door. In the downstairs entry, he heard her pause and dial the extension phone. Was she phoning Mexico City? he wondered. She wouldn't dare! The front door shut. He thought of the last week here, alone, in his room, and the secret, narcotic calls across continents, an isthmus, whole jungle countries of rain forest, blue-orchid plateaus, lakes and hills... talking... talking... to Buenos Aires... and... Lima... Rio de Janeiro... He lifted himself in the cool bed. Tomorrow the telephone gone! What a greedy fool he had been! He slipped his brittle ivory legs down from the bed, marveling at their desiccation. They seemed to be things which had been fastened to his body while he slept one night, while his younger legs were taken off and burned in the cellar furnace. |
| 639 |
Over the years, they had destroyed all of him, removing hands, arms, and legs and leaving him with substitutes as delicate and useless as chess pieces. And now they were tampering with something more intangiblethe memory; they were trying to cut the wires which led back into another year. He was across the room in a stumbling run. Grasping the phone, he took it with him as he slid down the wall to sit upon the floor. He got the long-distance operator, his heart exploding within him, faster and faster, a blackness in his eyes. Hurry, hurry! He waited. Bueno? Jorge, we were cut off. You must not phone again, Senior, said the faraway voice. Your nurse called me. She says you are very ill. I must hang up. No, Jorge! Please! the old man pleaded. One last time, listen to me. you're taking the phone out tomorrow. I can never call you again. Jorge said nothing. The old man went on. For the love of God, Jorge! For friendship, then, for the old days! You don't know what it means. you're my age, but you can move! I haven't moved anywhere in ten years. He dropped the phone and had trouble picking it up, his chest was so thick with pain. Jorge! You are still there, arent you? This will be the last time? said Jorge. I promise! The phone was laid on a desk thousands of miles away. Once more, with that clear familiarity, the footsteps, the pause, and, at last, the raising of the window. Listen, whispered the old man to himself. And he heard a thousand people in another sunlight, and the faint, tinkling music of an organ grinder playing La Marimbaoh, a lovely, dancing tune. With eyes tight, the old man put up his hand as if to click pictures of an old cathedral, and his body was heavier with flesh, younger, and he felt the hot pavement underfoot. He wanted to say, you're still there, arent you? All of: you people in that city in the time of the early siesta, the shops closing, the little boys crying loteria nacional para hoy! to sell lottery tickets. You are all there, the people in the city. I cant believe I was ever among you. When you are away I: from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living... He sat with the receiver tightly pressed to his ear. And at last, the dearest, most improbable sound of allthe sound of a green trolley car going around a comera trolley burdened with brown and alien and beautiful people, and the sound of other people running and calling out with triumph as they leaped up and swung aboard and vanished around a corner on the shrieking rails and were borne away in the sun-blazed distance to leave only the sound of tortillas frying on the market stoves, or was it merely the ever rising and falling hum and burn of static quivering along two thousand miles of copper wire... |
| 640 |
The old man sat on the floor. Time passed. A downstairs door opened slowly. Light footsteps came in, hesitated, then ventured up the stairs. Voices murmured. We shouldn't be here! He phoned me, I tell you. He needs visitors bad. We cant let him down. he's sick! Sure! But he said to come when the nurses out. Well only stay a second, say hello, and... The door to the bedroom moved wide. The three boys stood looking in at the old man seated there on the floor. Colonel Freeleigh? said Douglas softly. There was something in his silence that made them all shut up their mouths. They approached, almost on tiptoe. Douglas, bent down, disengaged the phone from the old mans now quite cold fingers. Douglas lifted the receiver to his own ear, listened. Above the static he heard a strange, a far, a final sound. Two thousand miles away, the closing of a window. Boom!! said Tom. Boom. Boom. Boom. He sat on the Civil War cannon in the courthouse square. Douglas, in front of the cannon, clutched his heart and fell down on the grass. But he did not get up; he just lay there, his face thoughtful. You look likeyou're going to get out the old pencil any second now, said Tom. Let me think! said Douglas, looking at the cannon. He rolled over and gazed at the sky and the trees above him. Tom, it just hit me. What? Yesterday Ching Ling Soo died. Yesterday the Civil War ended right here in this town forever. Yesterday Mr. Lincoln died right here and so did General Lee and General Grantl and a hundred thousand others facing north and south. And yesterday afternoon, at Colonel Freeleighs house, a herd of buffalo-bison as big as all Green Town, Illinois, went off the cliff into nothing at all. Yesterday a whole lot of dust settled for good. And I didn't even appreciate it at the time. Its awful, Tom, its awful! What we going to do without all those soldiers and Generals Lee and Grant and Honest Abe; what we going to do without Ching Ling Soo? It never dreamed so many people could die so fast, Tom. But they did. They sure did! Tom sat astride the cannon, looking down at his brother as his voice trailed away. You got your tablet with you? Douglas shook his head. Better get home and put all that down before you forget it. It aint every day you got half the population of the world keeling over on you. Douglas sat up and then stood up. He walked across the courthouse lawn slowly, chewing his lower lip. Boom, said Tom quietly. Boom. Boom! Then he raised his voice: Doug! I killed you three times, crossing the grass! Doug, you hear me? Hey, Doug! Okay. All right for you. He lay down on the cannon and sighted along the crusted barrel. He squinted one eye. Boom! he whispered at that dwindling figure. Boom! There! Twenty-nine! There! Thirty! There! Thirty-one! The lever plunged. The tin caps, crushed atop the filled bottles, flickered bright yellow. Grandfather handed the last bottle to Douglas. Second harvest of the summer. Junes on the shelf. Heres July. Now, just-August up ahead. Douglas raised the bottle of warm dandelion wine but did not set it on the shelf. |
| 641 |
He saw the other numbered bottles waiting there, one like another, in no way different, all bright, all regular, all self-contained. Theres the day I found I was alive, he thought, and why isn't it brighter than the others? Theres the day John Huff fell off the edge of the world, gone; why isn't it darker than the others? Where, where all the summer dogs leaping like dolphins in the wind-braided and unbraided tides of what? Where lightning smell of Green Machine or trolley? Did the wine remember? It did not! Or seemed not, anyway. Somewhere, a book said once, all the talk ever talked, all the songs ever sung, still lived, had vibrated way out in space and if you could travel to Far Centauri you could hear George Washington talking in his sleep or Caesar surprised at the knife in his back. So much for sounds. What about light then? All things, once seen, they didn't just die, that couldn't be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonflys gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers. This he would have to believe. And yet... looking here at this bottle which by its number signalized the day when Colonel Freeleigh had stumbled and fallen six feet into the earth, Douglas could not find so much as a gram of dark sediment, not a speck of the great flouring buffalo dust, not a flake of sulphur from the guns at Shiloh... August up ahead, said Douglas. Sure. But the way things are going, therell be no machines, no friends, and dam few dandelions for the last harvest. Doom. Doom. You sound like a funeral bell tolling, said Grandfather. Talk like that is worse than swearing. I won't wash out your mouth with soap, however. A thimbleful of dandelion wine is indicated. Here, now, swig it down. Whats it taste like? I'm a fire-eater! Whoosh! Now upstairs, run three times around the block, do five somersets, six pushups, climb two trees, and you'll be concertmaster instead of chief mourner. Get! On his way, running, Douglas thought, Four pushups, one tree, and two somersets will do it! And out there in the middle of the first day of August just getting into his car, was Bill Forrester, who shouted he Ir was going downtown for some extraordinary ice cream or other and would anyone join him? So, not five minutes later, jiggled and steamed into a better mood, Douglas found himself stepping in off the fiery pavements and moving through the grotto of soda-scented air, of vanilla freshness at the drugstore, to sit at the snow-marble fountain with Bill Forrester. They then asked for a recital of the most unusual ices and when the fountain man said, Old fashioned lime-vanilla ice... that's it! said Bill Forrester. Yes, sir! said Douglas. |
| 642 |
He saw a faint ghostlike movement at the far end of the garden, heard a whispery cry, and saw that Miss Loomis was there, removed: I across time and distance, seated alone, the tea service glittering its soft silver surfaces, waiting for him. This is the first time a woman has ever been ready and, waiting, he said, walking up. It is also, he admitted, the first time in my life I have been on time for an appointment. Why is that? she asked, propped back in her wicker chair. I don't know, he admitted. Well. She started pouring tea. To start things off, what do you think of the world? I don't know anything. The beginning of wisdom, as they say. Whenyou're seventeen you know everything. Whenyou're twenty-seven if you still know everythingyou're still seventeen. You seem to have learned quite a lot over the years. It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But its an act and a mask, like every other act and mask Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? isn't life a play? don't I play it well? They both laughed quietly. He sat back and let the laughter, come naturally from his mouth for the first time in many months. When they quieted she held her teacup in her two hands and looked into it. Do you know, its lucky we met so late. I wouldn't have wanted you to meet me when I was twenty-one and full of foolishness. They have special laws for pretty girls twenty-one. So you think I was pretty? He nodded good-humoredly. But how can you tell? she asked. When you meet a dragon that has eaten a swan, do you guess by the few feathers left around the mouth? that's what it isa body like this is a dragon, all scales and folds. So the dragon ate the white swan. I haven't seen her for years. I cant even remember what she looks like. I feel her, though. she's safe inside, still alive; the essential swan hasnt changed a feather. Do you know, there are some mornings in spring or fall, when I wake and think, I'll run across the fields into the woods and pick wild strawberries! Or I'll swim in the lake, or I'll dance all night tonight until dawn! And then, in a rage, discover I'm in this old and ruined dragon. I'm the princess in the crumbled tower, no way out, waiting for her Prince Charming. You should have written books. My dear boy, I have written. What else was there for an old maid? I was a crazy creature with a headful of carnival spangles until I was thirty, and then the only man I ever really cared for stopped waiting and married someone else. So in spite, in anger at myself, I told myself I deserved my: fate for not having married when the best chance was at hand. I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. |
| 643 |
But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over for a thirty-year weekend. They drank their tea. Oh, such a rush of self-pity, she said good-naturedly. About yourself, now. you're thirty-one and still not married? Let me put it this way, he said. Women who act and think and talk like you are rare. My, she said seriously, you mustn't expect young women to talk like me. That comes later. you're much too young, first of all. And secondly, the average man runs helter-skelter the moment he finds anything like a brain in a lady. Youve probably met quite a few brainy ones who hid it most successfully from you. you'll have to pry around a bit to find the odd beetle. Lift a few boards. They were laughing again. I shall probably be a meticulous old bachelor, he said. No, no, you mustn't do that. It wouldn't be right. You shouldn't even be here this afternoon. This is a street which ends only in an Egyptian pyramid. Pyramids are all very nice, but mummies are hardly fit companions. Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life? See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff, but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Moroccan midnight. Love a beautiful woman. Well, I don't think I can provide them all, she said. but I've traveled and I can tell you about many of those places. And if youd care to run across my front lawn tonight about eleven and if I'm still awake, I'll fire off a Civil War musket at you Will that satisfy your masculine urge for adventure? That would be just fine. Where would you like to go first? I can take you there, you know. I can weave a spell. Just name it. London? Cairo? Cairo makes your face turn on like a light. So let's go to Cairo. Just relax now. Put some of that nice tobacco in that pipe of yours and sit back. He sat back, lit his pipe, half smiling, relaxing, and listened, and she began to talk. Cairo... she said. The hour passed in jewels and alleys and winds from the Egyptian desert. The sun was golden and the Nile was muddy where it lapped down to the deltas, and there was someone very young and very quick at the top of the pyramid, laughing, calling to him to come on up the shadowy side into the sun, and he was climbing, she putting her hand down to help him up the last step, and then they were laughing on camel back, loping toward the great stretched bulk of the Sphinx, and late at night, in the native quarter, there was the tinkle of small hammers on bronze and silver, and music from some stringed instruments fading away and away and away... William Forrester opened his eyes. Miss Helen Loomis had finished the adventure and they were home again, very familiar to each other, on the best of terms, in the garden, the tea cold in the silver pourer, the biscuits dried in the latened sun. He sighed and stretched and sighed again. I've never been so comfortable in my life. |
| 644 |
Nor I. I've kept you late. I should have gone an hour ago. You know I love every minute of it. But what you should see in an old silly woman... He lay back in his chair and half closed his eyes and looked at her. He squinted his eyes so the merest filament of light came through. He tilted his head ever so little this way, then that. What are you doing? she asked uncomfortably. He said nothing, but continued looking. If you do this just right, he murmured, you can adjust, make allowances... To himself he was thinking, You can erase lines, adjust the time factor, turn back the years. Suddenly he started. Whats wrong? she asked. But then it was gone. He opened his eyes to catch it. That was a mistake. He should have stayed back, idling, erasing, his eyes gently half closed. For just a moment, he said, I saw it. Saw what? The swan, of course, he thought. His mouth must have pantomimed the words. The next instant she was sitting very straight in her chair. Her hands were in her lap, rigid. Her eyes were fixed upon him and as he watched, feeling helpless, each of her eyes cupped and brimmed itself full. I'm sorry, he said, terribly sorry. No, don't be. She held herself rigid and did not touch her face or her eyes; her hands remained, one atop the other, holding on. Youd better go now. Yes, you may come tomorrow, but go now, please, and don't say any more. He walked off through the garden, leaving her by her table in the shade. He could not bring himself to look back. Four days, eight days, twelve days passed, and he was invited to teas, to suppers, to lunches. They sat talking through the long green afternoons-they talked of art, of literature, of life, of society and politics. They ate ice creams and squabs and drank good wines. I don't care what anyone says, she said. And people are saying things, arent they? He shifted uneasily. I knew it. A womans never safe, even when ninety-five, from gossip. I could stop visiting. Oh, no, she cried, and recovered. In a quieter voice she said, You know you cant do that. You know you don't care what they think, do you? So long as we know its all right? I don't care, he said. Now-she settled backlets play our game. Where shall it be this time? Paris? I think Paris. Paris, he said, nodding quietly. Well, she began, its the year 1885 and were boarding the ship in New York harbor. Theres our luggage, here are our tickets, there goes the sky line. Now were at sea. Now were coming into Marseilles... Here she was on a bridge looking into the clear waters of the Seine, and here he was, suddenly, a moment later, beside her, looking down at the tides of summer flowing past. Here she was with an aperitif in her talcum-white fingers, and here he was, with amazing quickness, bending toward her to tap her wineglass with his. His face appeared in mirrored halls at Versailles, over steaming smorgasbords in Stockholm, and they counted the barber poles in the Venice canals. The things she had done alone, they were now doing together. |
| 645 |
I the middle of August they sat staring at one another one late afternoon. Do you realize, he said, I've seen you nearly every day for two and a half weeks? Impossible! I've enjoyed it immensely. Yes, but there are so many young girls... you're everything they are notkind, intelligent, witty. Nonsense. Kindness and intelligence are the preoccupations of age. Being cruel and thoughtless is far more fascinating whenyou're twenty. She paused and drew a breath. Now, I'm going to embarrass you. Do you recall that first afternoon we met in the soda fountain, you said that you had had some degree ofshall we say affection for me at one time? Youve purposely put me off on this by never mentioning it again. Now I'm forced to ask you to explain the whole uncomfortable thing. He didn't seem to know what to say. that's embarrassing, he protested. Spit it out! I saw your picture once, years ago. I never let my picture be taken. This was an old one, taken when you were twenty. Oh, that. Its quite a joke. Each time I give to a charity or attend a ball they dust that picture off and print it. Everyone in town laughs; even I Its cruel of the paper. No. I told them, If you want a picture of me, use the one taken back in 1853. Let them remember me that way. Keep the lid down, in the name of the good Lord, during the service. I'll tell you all about it. He folded his hands and looked at them and paused a moment. He was remembering the picture now and it was very clear in his mind. There was time, here in the garden to think of every aspect of the photograph and of Helen Loomis, very young, posing for her picture the first time, alone and beautiful. He thought of her quiet, shyly smiling face. It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer, it was the warmness of clover breath. Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes. To touch her face was that always new experience of opening your window one December morning, early, and putting out your hand to the first white cool powdering of snow that had come, silently, with no announcement, in the night. And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness was held forever in one miracle of photographic chemistry which no clock winds could blow upon to change one hour or one second; this fine first cool white snow would never melt, but live a thousand summers. That was the photograph; that was the way he knew her. Now he was talking again, after the remembering and the thinking over and the holding of the picture in his mind. When I first saw that pictureit was a simple, straightforward picture with a simple hairdoI didn't know it had been taken that long ago. The item in the paper said something about Helen Loomis marshaling the Town Ball that night. I tore the picture from the paper. I carried it with me all that day. I intended going to the ball. Then, late in the afternoon, someone saw me looking at the picture, and told me about it. How the picture of the beautiful girl had been taken so long ago and used every year since by the paper. |
| 646 |
And they said I shouldn't go to the Town Ball that night, carrying that picture and looking for you. They sat in the garden for a long minute. He glanced over at her face. She was looking at the farthest garden wall and the pink roses climbing there. There was no way to tell what she was thinking. Her face showed nothing. She rocked for a little while in her chair and then said softly, Shall we have some more tea? There you are. They sat sipping the tea. Then she reached over and patted his arm. Thank you. For what? For wanting to come to find me at the dance, for clipping out my picture, for everything. Thank you so very much. They walked about the garden on the paths. And now, she said, its my turn. Do you remember, I mentioned a certain young man who once attended me, seventy years ago? Oh, he's been dead fifty years now, at . least, but when he was very young and very handsome he rode a fast horse off for days, or on summer nights over the meadows around town. He had a healthy, wild face, always sunburned, his hands were always cut and he fumed like a stovepipe and walked as if he were going to fly apart; wouldn't keep a job, quit those he had when he felt like it, and one day he sort of rode off away from me because I was even wilder than he and wouldn't settle down, and that was that. I never thought the day would come when I would see him alive again. Butyou're pretty much alive, you spill ashes around like he did, you're clumsy and graceful combined, I know everythingyou're going to do before you do it, but after youve done it I'm always surprised. Reincarnations a lot of milk-mush to me, but the other day I felt, What if I called Robert, Robert, to you on the street, would William Forrester turn around? I don't know, he said. Neither do I. that's what makes life interesting. August was almost over. The first cool touch of autumn moved slowly through the town and there was a softening and the first gradual burning fever of color in every tree, a faint flush and coloring in the hills, and the color of lions in the wheat fields. Now the pattern of days was familiar and repeated like a penman beautifully inscribing again and again, in practice, a series of its and ws and ms, day after day the line repeated in delicate rills. William Forrester walked across the garden one early August afternoon to find Helen Loomis writing with great care at the tea table. She put aside her pen and ink. I've been writing you a letter, she said. Well, my being here saves you the trouble. No, this is a special letter. Look at it. She showed him the blue envelope, which she now sealed and pressed flat. Remember how it looks. When you receive this in the mail, you'll know I'm dead. that's no way to talk, is it? Sit down and listen to me. He sat. My dear William, she said, under the parasol shade. In a few days I will be dead. No. She put up her hand. I don't want you to say a thing. I'm not afraid. When you live as long as I've lived you lose that, too. I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I'd never tried it. |
| 647 |
On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I cant say I'm greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don't fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it. She motioned with her hands. But enough of that. The important thing is that I shant be seeing you again. There will be no services. I believe that a woman who has passed through that particular door has as much right to privacy as a woman who has retired for the night. You cant predict death, he said at last. For fifty years I've watched the grandfather clock in the hall, William. After it is wound I can predict to the hour when it will stop. Old people are no different. They can feel the machinery slow down and the last weights shift. Oh, please don't look that wayplease don't. I cant help it, he said. Weve had a nice time, haven't we? It has been very special here, talking every day. It was that much-overburdened and worn phrase referred to as a meeting of the minds. She turned the blue envelope in her hands. I've always known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night. Its essentially nocturnal. But what of the mind which is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don't know. I only know there has been your mind here and my mind here, and the afternoons have been like none I can remember. There is still so much to talk about, but we must save it for another time. We don't seem to have much time now. No, but perhaps there will be another time. Time is so strange and life is twice as strange. The cogs miss, the wheels turn, and lives interlace too early or too late. I lived too long, that much is certain. And you were born either too early or too late. It was a terrible bit of timing. But perhaps I am being punished for being a silly girl. Anyway, the next spin around, wheels might function right again. Meantime you must find a nice girl and be married and be happy. But you must promise me one thing. Anything. You must promise me not to live to be too old, William. If it is at all convenient, die beforeyou're fifty. It may take a bit of doing. But I advise this simply because there is no telling when another Helen Loomis might be born. It would be dreadful, wouldn't it, if you lived on to be very, very old and some afternoon in 1999 walked down Main Street and saw me standing there, aged twenty-one, and the whole thing out of balance again? I don't think we could go through any more afternoons like these weve had, no matter how pleasant, do you? A thousand gallons of tea and five hundred biscuits is enough for one friendship. So you must have an attack of pneumonia some time in about twenty years. For I don't know how long they let you linger on the other side. |
| 648 |
Perhaps they send you back immediately. But I shall do my best, William, really I shall. And everything put right and in balance, do you know what might happen? You tell me. Some afternoon in 1985 or 1990 a young man named Tom Smith or John Green or a name like that, will be walking downtown and will stop in the drugstore and order, appropriately, a dish of some unusual ice cream. A young girl the same age will be sitting there and when she hears the name of that ice cream, something will happen. I cant say what or how. She won't know why or how, assuredly. Nor will the young man. It will simply be that the name of that ice cream will be a very good thing to both of them. they'll talk. And later, when they know each others names, they'll walk from the drugstore together. She smiled at him. This is all very neat, but forgive an old lady for tying things in neat packets. Its a silly trifle to leave you. Now lets talk of something else. What shall we talk about? Is there any place in the world we haven't traveled to yet? Have we been to Stockholm? Yes, its a fine town. Glasgow? Yes? Where then? Why not Green Town, Illinois? he said. Here. We haven't really visited our own town together at all. She settled back, as did he, and she said, I'll tell you how it was, then, when I was only nineteen, in this town, a long time ago... It was a night in winter and she was skating lightly over a pond of white moon ice, her image gliding and whispering under her. It was a night in summer in this town of fire in the air, in the cheeks, in the heart, your eyes full of the glowing and shutting-off color of fireflies. It was a rustling night in October, and there she stood, pulling taffy from a hook in the kitchen, singing, and there she was, running on the moss by the river, and swimming in the granite pit beyond town on a spring night, in the soft deep warm waters, and now it was the Fourth of July with rockets slamming the sky and every porch full of now red-fire, now blue-fire, now white-fire faces, hers dazzling bright among them as the last rocket died. Can you see all these things? asked Helen Loomis. Can you see me doing them and being with them? Yes, said William Forrester, eyes closed. I can see you. And then, she said, and then... Her voice moved on and on as the afternoon grew late and the twilight deepened quickly, but her voice moved in the garden and anyone passing on the road, at a far distance, could have heard its moth sound, faintly, faintly... Two days later William Forrester was at his desk in his room when the letter came. Douglas brought it upstairs and handed it to Bill and looked as if he knew what was in it. William Forrester recognized the blue envelope, but did not open it. He simply put it in his shirt pocket, looked at the boy for a moment, and said, Come on, Doug; my treat. They walked downtown, saying very little, Douglas preserving the silence he sensed was necessary. Autumn, which had threatened for a time, was gone. Summer was back full, boiling the clouds and scouring the metal sky. |
| 649 |
They turned in at the drugstore and sat at the marble fountain. William Forrester took the letter out and laid it before him and still did not open it. He looked out at the yellow sunlight on the concrete and on the green awnings and shining on the gold letters of the window signs across the street, and he looked at the calendar on the wall. August 27, 1928. He looked at his wrist watch and felt his heart beat slowly, saw the second hand of the watch moving moving with no speed at all, saw the calendar frozen there with its one day seeming forever, the sun nailed to the sky with no motion toward sunset whatever. The warm air spread under the sighing fans over his head. A number of women laughed by the open door and were gone through his vision, which was focused beyond them at the town itself and the high courthouse clock. He opened the letter and began to read. He turned slowly on the revolving chair. He tried the words again and again, silently, on his tongue, and at last spoke them aloud and repeated them. A dish of lime-vanilla ice, he said. A dish of lime-vanilla ice. Douglas and Tom and Charlie came panting along the unshaded street. Tom, answer me true, now. Answer what true? What ever happened to happy endings? They got them on shows at Saturday matinees. Sure, but what about life? All I know is I feel good going to bed nights, Doug. that's a happy ending once a day. Next morning I'm up and maybe things go bad. But all I got to do is remember that I'm going to bed that night and just lying there a while makes everything okay. I'm talking about Mr. Forrester and old Miss Loomis. Nothing we can do; she's dead. I know! But don't you figure someone slipped up there? You mean about him thinking she was the same age as her picture and her a trillion years old all the time? No, sir, I think its swell! Swell, for gosh sakes? The last few days when Mr. Forrester told me a little here or a little there and I finally put it all togetherboy, did I bawl my head off. I don't even know why. I wouldn't change one bit of it. If you changed it, what would we have to talk about? Nothing! And besides, I like to cry. After I cry hard its like its morning again and I'm starting the day over. I heard everything now. You just won't admit you like crying, too. You cry just so long and everythings fine. And theres your happy ending. Andyou're ready to go back out and walk around with folks again. And its the start of gosh-knows-what-all! Any time now, Mr. Forrester will think it over and see its just the only way and have a good cry and then look around and see its morning again, even though its five in the afternoon. That don't sound like no happy ending to me. A good nights sleep, or a ten-minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine, Doug. You listen to Tom Spaulding, M. D. Shut up, you guys, said Charlie. Were almost there! They turned a corner. Deep in winter they had looked for bits and pieces of summer and found it in furnace cellars or in bonfires on the edge of frozen skating ponds at night. |
| 650 |
Lavinia put out her hands to hold onto Francine, who was whimpering and choking. don't! don't! The woman lay as if she had floated there, her face moon-lit, her eyes wide and like flint, her tongue sticking from her mouth. she's dead! said Francine. Oh, she's dead, dead! she's dead! Lavinia stood in the middle of a thousand warm shadows with the crickets screaming and the frogs loud. Wed better get the police, she said at last. Hold me. Lavinia, hold me. I'm cold, oh, I've never been so cold in all my life! Lavinia held Francine and the policemen were brushing through the crackling grass, flashlights ducked about, voices mingled, and the night grew toward eight-thirty. Its like December. I need a sweater, said Francine, eyes shut, against Lavinia. The policeman said, I guess you can go now, ladies. You might drop by the station tomorrow for a little more questioning. Lavinia and Francine walked away from the police and the sheet over the delicate thing upon the ravine grass. Lavinia felt her heart going loudly in her and she was cold, too, with a February cold; there were bits of sudden snow all over her flesh, and the moon washed her brittle fingers whiter, and she remembered doing all the talking while Francine just sobbed against her. A voice called from far off, You want an escort, ladies? No, well make it, said Lavinia to nobody, and they walked on. They walked through the nuzzling, whispering ravine, the ravine of whispers and clicks, the little world of investigation growing small behind them with its lights and voices. I've never seen a dead person before, said Francine. Lavinia examined her watch as if it was a thousand miles away on an arm and wrist grown impossibly distant. Its only eight-thirty. Well pick up Helen and get on to the show. The show! Francine jerked. Its what we need. Weve got to forget this. Its not good to remember. If we went home now wed remember. Well go to the show as if nothing happened. Lavinia, you don't mean it! I never meant anything more in my life. We need to laugh now and forget. But Elizabeths back thereyour friend, my friend We cant help her; we can only help ourselves. Come on. They started up the ravine side, on the stony path, in the dark. And suddenly there, barring their way, standing very still in one spot, not seeing them, but looking on down at the moving lights and the body and listening to the official voices, was Douglas Spaulding. He stood there, white as a mushroom, with his hands at his sides, staring down into the ravine. Get home! cried Francine. He did not hear. You! shrieked Francine. Get home, get out of this place, you hear? Get home, get home, get home! Douglas jerked his head, stared at them as if they were I. not there. His mouth moved. He gave a bleating sound. Then, silently, he whirled about and ran. He ran silently up the distant hills into the warm darkness. Francine sobbed and cried again and, doing this, walked on with Lavinia Nebbs. There you are! I thought you ladiesd never come! |
| 651 |
Helen Greer stood tapping her foot atop her porch steps. you're only an hour late, that's all. What happened? We started Francine. Lavinia clutched her arm tight. There was a commotion. Somebody found Elizabeth Ramsell in the ravine. Dead? Was shedead? Lavinia nodded. Helen gasped and put her hand to her throat. Who found her? Lavinia held Francines wrist firmly. We don't know. The three young women stood in the summer night looking at each other. I've got a notion to go in the house and lock the doors, said Helen at last. But finally she went to get a sweater, for though it was still warm, she, too, complained of the sudden winter night. While she was gone Francine whispered frantically, Why didn't you tell her? Why upset her? said Lavinia. Tomorrow. Tomorrows plenty of time. The three women moved along the street under the black trees, past suddenly locked houses. How soon the news had spread outward from the ravine, from house to house, porch to porch, telephone to telephone. Now, passing, the three women felt eyes looking out at them from curtained windows as locks rattled into place. How strange the popsicle, the vanilla night, the night of close-packed ice cream, of mosquito-lotioned wrists, the night of running children suddenly veered from their games and put away behind glass, behind wood, the popsicles in melting puddles of lime and strawberry where they fell when the children were scooped indoors. Strange the hot rooms with the sweating people pressed tightly back into them behind the bronze knobs and knockers. Baseball bats and balls lay upon the unfootprinted lawns. A half-drawn, white-chalk game of hopscotch lay on the broiled, steamed sidewalk. It was as if someone had predicted freezing weather a moment ago. Were crazy being out on a night like this, said Helen. Lonely One won't kill three ladies, said Lavinia. Theres safety in numbers. And besides, its too soon. The killings always come a month separated. A shadow fell across their terrified faces. A figure loomed behind a tree. As if someone had struck an organ a terrible blow with his fist, the three women gave off a scream, in three different shrill notes. Got you! roared a voice. The man plunged at them. He came into the light, laughing. He leaned against a tree, pointing at the ladies weakly, laughing again. Hey! I'm the Lonely One! said Frank Dillon. Frank Dillon! Frank! Frank, said Lavinia, if you ever do a childish thing like that again, may someone riddle you with bullets! What a thing to do! Francine began to cry hysterically. Frank Dillon stopped smiling. Say, I'm sorry. Go away! said Lavinia. haven't you heard about Elizabeth Ramsellfound dead in the ravine? You running around scaring women! don't speak to us again! Aw, now They moved. He moved to follow. Stay right there, Mr. Lonely One, and scare yourself. Go take a look at Elizabeth Ramsells face and see if its funny. Good night! Lavinia took the other two on along the street of trees and stars, Francine holding a kerchief to her face. |
| 652 |
Francine, it was only a joke. Helen turned to Lavinia. Whys she crying so hard? Well tell you when we get downtown. Were going to the show no matter what! Enoughs enough. Come on now, get your money ready, were almost there! The drugstore was a small pool of sluggish air which the great wooden fans stirred in tides of arnica and tonic and soda-smell out onto the brick streets. I need a nickels worth of green peppermint chews, said Lavinia to the druggist. His face was set and pale, like all the faces they had seen on the half-empty streets. For eating in the show, said Lavinia as the druggist weighed out a nickels worth of the green candy with a silver shovel. You sure look pretty tonight, ladies. You looked cool this afternoon, Miss Lavinia, when you was in for a chocolate soda. So cool and nice that someone asked after you. Oh? Man sitting at the counterwatched you walk out. Said to me, say, whos that? Why, that's Lavinia Nebbs, prettiest maiden lady in town, I said. she's beautiful, he said. Where does she live? Here the druggist paused uncomfortably. You didn't! said Francine. You didn't give him her address, I hope? You didn't! I guess I didn't think. I said, Oh, over on Park Street, you know, near the ravine. A casual remark. But now, tonight, them finding the body, I heard a minute ago, I thought, My God, whatve I done! He handed over the package, much too full. You fool! cried Francine, and tears were in her eyes. I'm sorry. Course, maybe it was nothing. Lavinia stood with the three people looking at her, staring at her. She felt nothing. Except, perhaps, the slightest prickle of excitement in her throat. She held out her money automatically. Theres no charge on those peppermints, said the druggist, turning to shuffle some papers. Well, I know what I'm going to do right now! Helen stalked out of the drugshop. I'm calling a taxi to take us all home. I'll be no part of a hunting party for you, Lavinia. That man was up to no good. Asking about you. You want to be dead in the ravine next? It was just a man, said Lavinia, turning in a slow circle to look at the town. So is Frank Dillon a man, but maybe he's the Lonely One. Francine hadn't come out with them, they noticed, and turning, they found her arriving. I made him give me a description-the druggist. I made him tell what the man looked like. A stranger, she said, in a dark suit. Sort of pale and thin. Were all overwrought, said Lavinia. I simply won't take a taxi if you get one. If I'm the next victim, let me be; the next. Theres all too little excitement in life, especially for a maiden lady thirty-three years old, so don't you mind if I enjoy it. Anyway its silly; I'm not beautiful. Oh, but you are, Lavinia; you're the loveliest lady in town, now that Elizabeth is Francine stopped. You keep men off at a distance. If youd only relax, youd been married years ago! Stop sniveling, Francine! Heres the theater box office, I'm paying forty-one cents to see Charlie Chaplin. If you two want a taxi, go on. |
| 653 |
A red neon sign flickered dimly, buzzed like a dying insect, as they passed. Baked and white, the long avenues lay ahead. Blowing and tall in a wind that touched only their leafy summits, the trees stood on either side of the three small women. Seen from the courthouse peak, they appeared like three thistles far away. First, well walk you home, Francine. No, I'll walk you home. don't be silly. You live way out at Electric Park. If you walked me home youd have to come back across the ravine alone, yourself. And if so much as a leaf fell on you, youd drop dead. Francine said, I can stay the night at your house. you're the pretty one! And so they walked, they drifted like three prim clothes forms over a moonlit sea of lawn and concrete, Lavinia watching the black trees Bit by each side of her, listening to the voices of her friends murmuring, trying to laugh; and the night seemed to quicken, they seemed to run while walking slowly, everything seemed fast and the color of hot snow. Lets sing, said Lavinia. They sang, Shine On, Shine On, Harvest Moon... They sang sweetly and quietly, arm in arm, not looking back. They felt the hot sidewalk cooling underfoot, moving, moving. Listen! said Lavinia. They listened to the summer night. The summer-night crickets and the far-off tone of the courthouse clock making I it eleven forty-five. Listen! Lavinia listened. A porch swing creaked in the dark and there was Mr. Terle, not saying anything to anybody, alone on his swing, having a last cigar. They saw the pink ash swinging gently to and fro. Now the lights were going, going, gone. The little house lights and big house lights and yellow lights and green hurricane lights, the candles and oil lamps and porch lights, and everything felt locked up in brass and iron and steel, everything, thought Lavinia, is boxed and locked and wrapped and shaded. She imagined the people in their moonlit beds. And their breathing in the summer-night rooms, safe and together. And here we are, thought Lavinia, our footsteps on along the baked summer evening sidewalk. And above us the 1 lonely street lights shining down, making a drunken shadow. Heres your house, Francine. Good night. Lavinia, Helen, stay here tonight. Its late, almost midnight now. You can sleep in the parlor. I'll make hot chocolateitll be such fun! Francine was holding them both now, close to her. No, thanks, said Lavinia. And Francine began to cry. Oh, not again, Francine, said Lavinia. I don't want you dead, sobbed Francine, the tears running straight down her cheeks. you're so fine and nice, I want you alive. Please, oh, please! Francine, I didn't know how much this has done to you. I promise I'll phone when I get home. Oh, will you? And tell you I'm safe, yes. And tomorrow well have a picnic lunch at Electric Park. With ham sandwiches I'll make myself, hows that? you'll see, I'll live forever! you'll phone, then? I promised, didn't I? Good night, good night! Rushing upstairs, Francine whisked behind a door, which slammed to be snap-bolted tight on the instant. |
| 654 |
Now, said Lavinia to Helen, I'll walk you home. The courthouse clock struck the hour. The sounds blew across a town that was empty, emptier than it had ever been. Over empty streets and empty lots and empty lawns the sound faded. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, counted Lavinia, with Helen on her arm. don't you feel funny? asked Helen. How do you mean? When you think of us being out here on the sidewalks, under the trees, and all those people safe behind locked doors, lying in their beds. Were practically the only walking people out in the open in a thousand miles, I bet. The sound of the deep warm dark ravine came near. In a minute they stood before Helens house, looking at each other for a long time. The wind blew the odor of cut grass between them. The moon was sinking in a sky that was beginning to cloud. I don't suppose its any use asking you to stay, Lavinia? I'll be going on. Sometimes Sometimes what? Sometimes I think people want to die. Youve acted odd all evening. I'm just not afraid, said Lavinia. And I'm curious, I suppose. And I'm using my head. Logically, the Lonely One cant be around. The police and all. The police are home with their covers up over their ears. Lets just say I'm enjoying myself, precariously, but safely. If there was any real chance of anything happening to me, I'd stay here with you, you can be sure of that. Maybe part of you doesn't want to live anymore. You and Francine. Honestly! I feel so guilty. I'll be drinking some hot cocoa just as you reach the ravine bottom and walk on the bridge. Drink a cup for me. Good night. Lavinia Nebbs walked alone down the midnight street, down the late summer-night silence. She saw houses with the dark windows and far away she heard a dog barking. In five minutes, she thought, I'll be safe at home. In five minutes I'll be phoning silly little Francine. I'll She heard the mans voice. A mans voice singing far away among the trees. Oh, give me a June night, the moonlight and you... She walked a little faster. The voice sang, In my arms... with all your charms... Down the street in the dim moonlight a man walked slowly and casually along. I can run knock on one of these doors, thought Lavinia, if I must. Oh, give me a June night, sang the man, and he carried a long club in his hand. The moonlight and you. Well, look whos here! What a time of night for you to be out, Miss Nebbs! Officer Kennedy! And that's who it was, of course. I'd better see you home! Thanks, I'll make it. But you live across the ravine... Yes, she thought, but I won't walk through the ravine with any man, not even an officer. How do I know who the Lonely One is? No, she said, I'll hurry. I'll wait right here, he said. If you need any help, give a yell. Voices carry good here. I'll come running. Thank you. She went on, leaving him under a light, humming to himself, alone. Here I am, she thought. The ravine. She stood on the edge of the one hundred and thirteen steps that went down the steep hill and then across the bridge seventy yards and up the hills leading to Park Street. |
| 655 |
And perhaps a thousand miles away, across locomotive-lonely country, in an empty way station, a single traveler reading a dim newspaper under a solitary naked bulb, might raise up his head, listen, and think, Whats that? and decide, Only a woodchuck, surely, beating on a hollow log. But it was Lavinia Nebbs, it was most surely the heart of Lavinia Nebbs. Silence. A summer-night silence which lay for a thousand miles, which covered the earth like a white and shadowy sea. Faster, faster! She went down the steps. Run! She heard music. In a mad way, in a silly way, she heard the great surge of music that pounded at her, and she realized as she ran, as she ran in panic and terror, that some part of her mind was dramatizing, borrowing from the turbulent musical score of some private drama, and the music was rushing and pushing her now, higher and higher, faster, faster, plummeting and scurrying, down, and down into the pit of the ravine. Only a little way, she prayed. One hundred eight, nine, one hundred ten steps! The bottom! Now, run! Across the bridge! She told her legs what to do, her arms her body, her terror; she advised all parts of herself in this white and terrible moment, over the roaring creek waters, on the hollow, thudding, swaying, almost alive, resilient bridge planks she ran, followed by the wild footsteps behind, behind, with the music following, too, the music shrieking and babbling. he's following, don't turn, don't look, if you see him, you'll not be able to move, you'll be so frightened. Just run, run! She ran across the bridge. Oh, God, God, please, please let me get up the hill! Now up the path, now between the hills, oh God, its dark, and everything so far away. ii I screamed now it wouldn't help; I cant scream anyway. Heres the top of the path, heres the street, oh, God, please let me be safe, if I get home safe I'll never go out alone; I was a fool, let me admit it, I was a fool, I didn't know what terror was, but if you let me get home from this I'll never go without Helen or Francine again! Heres the street. Across the street! She crossed the street and rushed up the sidewalk. Oh God, the porch! My house! Oh God, please give me time to get inside and lock the door and I'll be safe! And theresilly thing to noticewhy did she notice, instantly, no time, no timebut there it was anyway, flashing bythere on the porch rail, the half-filled glass of lemonade she had abandoned a long time, a year, half an evening ago! The lemonade glass sitting calmly, imperturbably there on the rail... and... She heard her clumsy feet on the porch and listened and felt her hands scrabbling and ripping at the lock with the key. She heard her heart. She heard her inner voice screaming. The key fit. Unlock the door, quick, quick! The door opened. Now, inside. Slam it! She slammed the door. Now lock it, bar it, lock it! she gasped wretchedly. Lock it, tight, tight! The door was locked and bolted tight. The music stopped. She listened to her heart again and the sound of it diminishing into silence. |
| 656 |
Home! Oh God, safe at home! Safe, safe and safe at home! She slumped against the door. Safe, safe. Listen. Not a sound. Safe, safe, oh thank God, safe at home. I'll never go out at night again. I'll stay home. I won't go over that ravine again ever. Safe, oh safe, safe home, so good, so good, safe! Safe inside, the door locked. Wait. Look out the window. She looked. Why, theres no one there at all! Nobody. There was nobody following me at all. Nobody running after me. She got her breath and almost laughed at herself. It stands to reason. If a man had been following me, hed have caught me! I'm not a fast runner... Theres no one on the porch or in the yard. How silly of me. I wasnt running from anything. That ravines as safe as anyplace. Just the same, its nice to be home. Homes the really good warm place, the only place to be. She put her hand out to the light switch and stopped. What? she asked. What, What? Behind her in the living room, someone cleared his throat. Good grief, they ruin everything! don't take it so hard, Charlie. Well, whatre we going to talk about now? Its no use talking the Lonely One if he aint even alive! Its not scary anymore! don't know about you, Charlie, said Tom. I'm going back to Summers Ice House and sit in the door and pretend he's alive and get cold all up and down my spine. that's cheating. You got to take your chills where you can find them, Charlie. Douglas did not listen to Tom and Charlie. He looked at Lavinia Nebbss house and spoke, almost to himself. I was there last night in the ravine. I saw it. I saw everything. On my way home I cut across here. I saw that lemonade glass right on the porch rail, half empty. Thought I'd like to drink it. Like to drink it, I thought. I was in the ravine and I was here, right in the middle of it all. Tom and Charlie, in turn, ignored Douglas. For that matter, said Tom. I don't really think the Lonely One is dead. You were here this morning when the ambulance came to bring that man out on the stretcher, werent you? Sure, said Tom. Well, that was the Lonely One, dumb! Read the papers! After ten long years escaping, old Lavinia Nebbs up and stabbed him with a handy pair of sewing scissors. I wish shed minded her own business. You want shed laid down and let him squeeze her windpipe? No, but the least she couldve done is gallop out of the house and down the street screaming Lonely One! Lonely One! long enough to give him a chance to beat it. This town used to have some good stuff in it up until about twelve oclock last night. From here on, were vanilla junket. Let me say it for the last time, Charlie; I figure the Lonely One aint dead. I saw his face, you saw his face, Doug saw his face, didn't you, Doug? What? Yes. I think so. Yes. Everybody saw his face. Answer me this, then: Did it look like the Lonely One to you? I... said Douglas, and stopped. The sun buzzed in the sky for about five seconds. My gosh... whispered Charlie at last. Tom waited, smiling. It didn't look like the Lonely One at all, gasped Charlie. |
| 657 |
It looked like a man. Right, yes, sir, a plain everyday man, who wouldn't pull the wings off even so much as a fly, Charlie, a fly! The least the Lonely One would do if he was the Lonely One is look like the Lonely One, right? Well, he looked like the candy butcher down front the Elite Theater nights. What you think he was, a tramp coming through town, got in what he thought was an empty house, and got killed by Miss Nebbs? Sure! Hold on, though. None of us know what the Lonely One should look like. Theres no pictures. Only people ever saw him wound up dead. You know and Doug knows and I know what he looks like. he's got to be tall, don't he? Sure... And he's got to be pale, don't he? Pale, that's right. And skinny like a skeleton and have long dark hair, don't he? that's what I always said. And big eyes bulging out, green eyes like a cat? that's him to the t. Well, then. Tom snorted. You saw that poor guy they lugged out of the Nebbss place a couple hours ago. What was he? Little and red-faced and kind of fat and not much hair and what there was was sandy. Tom, you hit on it! Come on! Call the guys! You go tell them like you told me! The Lonely One aint dead. Hell still be out lurkin around tonight. Yeah, said Tom, and stopped, suddenly thoughtful. Tom, you're a pal, you got a real brain. None of us wouldve saved the day this way. The summer was sure going bad up to this very minute. You got your thumb in the dike just in time. August won't be a total loss. Hey, kids! And Charlie was off, waving his arms, yelling. Tom stood on the sidewalk in front of Lavinia Nebbs house, his face pale. My gosh! he whispered. Whatve I gone and done now! He turned to Douglas. I say, Doug, whatve I gone and done now? Douglas was staring at the house. His lips moved. I was there, last night, in the ravine. I saw Elizabeth Ramsell. It came by here last night on the way home. I saw the lemonade glass there on the rail. Just last night it was. I could drink that, I thought... I could drink that... She was a woman with a broom or a dustpan or a washrag or a mixing spoon in her hand. You saw her cutting piecrust in the morning, humming to it, or you saw her setting out the baked pies at noon or taking them in, cool, at dusk. She rang porcelain cups like a Swiss bell ringer, to their place. She glided through the halls as steadily as a vacuum machine, seeking, finding, and setting to rights. She made mirrors of every window, to catch the sun. She strolled but twice through any garden, trowel in hand, and the flowers raised their quivering fires upon the warm air in her wake. She slept quietly and turned no more than three times in a night, as relaxed as a white glove to which, at dawn, a brisk hand will return. Waking, she touched people like pictures, to set their frames straight. But, now...? Grandma, said everyone. Great-grandma. Now it was as if a huge sum in arithmetic were finally drawing to an end. She had stuffed turkeys, chickens, squabs, gentlemen, and boys. She had washed ceilings, walls, invalids, and children. |
| 658 |
She had laid linoleum, repaired bicycles, wound clocks, stoked furnaces, swabbed iodine on ten thousand grievous wounds. Her hands had flown all around about and down, gentling this, holding that, throwing baseballs, swinging bright croquet mallets, seeding black earth, or fixing covers over dumplings, ragouts, and children wildly strewn by slumber. She had pulled down shades, pinched out candles, turned switches, andgrown old. Looking back on thirty billions of things started, carried, finished and done, it all summed up, totaled out; the last decimal was placed, the final zero swung slowly into line. Now, chalk in hand, she stood back from life a silent hour before reaching for the eraser. Let me see now, said Great-grandma. Let me see... With no fuss or further ado, she traveled the house in an ever-circling inventory, reached the stairs at last, and, making no special announcement, she took herself up three flights to her room where, silently, she laid herself out like a fossil imprint under the snowing cool sheets of her bed and began to die. Again the voices: Grandma! Great-grandma! The rumor of what she was doing dropped down the stairwell, hit, and spread ripples through the rooms, out doors and windows and along the street of elms to the edge of the green ravine. Here now, here! The family surrounded her bed. Just let me lie, she whispered. Her ailment could not be seen in any microscope; it was a mild but ever-deepening tiredness, a dim weighing of her sparrow body; sleepy, sleepier, sleepiest. As for her children and her childrens childrenit seemed impossible that with such a simple act, the most leisurely act in the world, she could cause such apprehension. Great-grandma, now listenwhatyou're doing is no better than breaking a lease. This house will fall down without you. You must give us at least a years notice! Great-grandma opened one eye. Ninety years gazed calmly out at her physicians like a dust-ghost from a high cupola window in a fast-emptying house. Tom...? The boy was sent, alone, to her whispering bed. Tom, she said, faintly, far away, in the Southern Seas theres a day in each mans life when he knows its time to shake hands with all his friends and say good-bye and sail away, and he does, and its naturalits just his time. that's how it is today. I'm so like you sometimes, sitting through Saturday matinees until nine at night when we send your dad to bring you home. Tom, when the time comes that the same cowboys are shooting the same Indians on the same mountaintop, then its best to fold back the seat and head for the door, with no regrets and no walking backward up the aisle. So, I'm leaving while I'm still happy and still entertained Douglas was summoned next to her side. Grandma, wholl shingle the roof next spring? Every April for as far back as there were calendars, you thought you heard woodpeckers tapping the housetop. But no, it was Great-grandma somehow transported, singing, pounding nails, replacing shingles, high in the sky! |
| 659 |
Douglas, she whispered, don't ever let anyone do the shingles unless its fun for them. Look around come April, and say, Whod like to fix the roof? And whichever face lights up is the face you want, Douglas. Because up there on that roof you can see the whole town going toward the country and the country going toward the edge of the earth and the river shining, and the morning lake, and birds on the trees down under you, and the best of the wind all around above. Any one of those should be enough to make a person climb a weather vane some spring sunrise. Its a powerful hour, if you give it half a chance... Her voice sank to a soft flutter. Douglas was crying. She roused herself again. Now, why are you doing that? Because, he said, you won't be here tomorrow. She turned a small hand mirror from herself to the boy. He looked at her face and himself in the mirror and then at her face again as she said, Tomorrow morning I'll get up at seven and wash behind my ears; I'll run to church with Charlie Woodman; I'll picnic at Electric Park; I'll swim, run barefoot, fall out of trees, chew spearmint gum... Douglas, Douglas, for shame! You cut your fingernails, don't you? Yes m. And you don't yell when your body makes itself over every seven years or so, old cells dead and new ones added to your fingers and your heart. You don't mind that, do you? No m. Well, consider then, boy. Any man saves fingernail clippings is a fool. You ever see a snake bother to keep his peeled skin? that's about all you got here today in this bed is fingernails and snake skin. One good breath would send me up in flakes. Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I'll be around a long time. A thousand years from now a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade. that's my answer to anyone asks big questions! Quick now, send in the rest! At last the entire family stood, like people seeing someone off at the rail station, waiting in the room. Well, said Great-grandma, there I am. I'm not humble, so its nice seeing you standing around my bed. Now next week theres late gardening and closet-cleaning and clothes-buying for the children to do. And since that part of me which is called, for convenience, Great-grandma, won't be here to step it along, those other parts of me called Uncle Bert and Leo and Tom and Douglas, and all the other names, will have to take over, each to his own. Yes, Grandma. I don't want any Halloween parties here tomorrow. don't want anyone saying anything sweet about me; I said it all in my time and my pride. I've tasted every victual and danced every dance; now theres one last tart I haven't bit on, one tune I haven't whistled. But I'm not afraid. I'm truly curious. |
| 660 |
Old man Black, all the time screaming at her, threatening to kill her. You cant kill whats never lived, Doug. He treats the witch like she's alive or was once alive, or something. Screaming at her, so maybe she's finally given up. Or maybe she hasnt given up at all, buts taken a secret way to warn us her lifes in danger. Invisible ink. Lemon juice, maybe! Theres a message here she didn't want Mr. Black to see, in case he looked while we were in his arcade. Hold on! I got some matches. Why would she write us, Doug? Hold the card. Here! Douglas struck a match and ran it under the card. Ouch! The words aint on my fingers, Doug, so keep the match away. There! cried Douglas. And there it was, a faint spidery scrawl which began to shape itself in a spiral of incredible corkscrew calligraphers letters, dark on light... a word, two words, three... The card, its on fire! Tom yelled and let it drop. Stomp on it! But by the time they had jumped up to smash their feet on the stony spine of the ancient lion, the card was a black ruin. Doug! Now well never know what it said! Douglas held the flaking warm ashes in the palm of his hand. No, I saw. I remember the words. The ashes blew about in his fingers, whispering. You remember in that Charlie Chase Comedy last spring where the Frenchman was drowning and kept yelling something in French which Charlie Chase couldn't figure. Secours, Secours! And someone told Charlie what it meant and he jumped in and saved the man. Well, on this card, with my own eyes, I saw it. Secours! Why would she write it in French? So Mr. Black wouldn't know, dumb! Doug, it was just an old watermark coming out when you scorched the card... Tom saw Douglass face and stopped. Okay, don't look mad. It was sucker or whatever. But there were other words... Mme. Tarot, it said. Tom, I got it now! Mme. Tarots real, lived a long time ago, told fortunes. I saw her picture once in the encyclopedia. People came from all over Europe to see her. Well, don't you figure it now yourself? Think, Tom, think! Tom sat back down on the lions back, looking along the street to where the arcade lights flickered. that's not the real Mrs. Tarot? Inside that glass box, under all that red and blue silk and all that old half-melted wax, sure! Maybe a long time ago someone got jealous or hated her and poured wax over; j her and kept her prisoner forever and she's passed down the line from villain to villain and wound up here, centuries later, in Green Town, Illinoisworking for Indian-head pennies instead of the crown heads of Europe! Villains? Mr. Black? Names Black, shirts black, pantsre black, ties black. Movie villains wear black, don't they? But why didn't she yell last year, the year before? Who knows, every night for a hundred years she's been writing messages in lemon juice on cards, but everybody read her regular message, nobody thought, like us, to run a match over the back to bring out the real message. Lucky I know what secours means. Okay, she said, Help! Now what? |
| 661 |
We save her, of course. Steal her out from under Mr. Blacks nose, huh? And wind up witches ourselves in glass boxes with wax poured on our faces the next ten thousand years. Tom, the librarys here. Well arm ourselves with spells and magic philters to fight Mr. Black. Theres only one magic philter will fix Mr. Black, said Tom. Soons he gets enough pennies any one evening, hewell, lets see. Tom drew some coins from his pocket. This just might do it. Doug, you go read the books. I'll run back and look at the Keystone Kops fifteen times; I never get tired. By the time you meet me at the arcade, it might be the old philter will be working for us. Tom, I hope you know whatyou're doing. Doug, you want to rescue this princess or not? Douglas whirled and plunged. Tom watched the library doors wham shut and settle. Then he leaped over the lions back and down into the night. On the library steps, the ashes of the tarot card fluttered, blew away. The arcade was dark, inside, the pinball machines lay dim and enigmatic as dust scribblings in a giants cave. The peep shows stood with Teddy Roosevelt and the Wright Brothers faintly smirking or just cranking up a wooden propeller. The witch sat in her case, her waxen eyes cauled. Then, suddenly, one eye glittered. A flashlight bobbed outside through the dusty arcade windows. A heavy figure lurched against the locked door, a key scrabbled into the lock. The door slammed open, stayed open. There was a sound of thick breathing. Its only me, old girl, said Mr. Black, swaying. Outside on the street, coming along with his nose in a book, Douglas found Tom hiding in a door nearby. Shh! said Tom. It worked. The Keystone Kops, fifteen times; and when Mr. Black heard me drop all that money in, his eyes popped, he opened the machine, took out the pennies, threw me out and went across to the speak-easy for the magic philter. Douglas crept up and peered into the shadowy arcade and saw the two gorilla figures there, one not moving at all, the wax heroine in his arms, the other one standing stunned in the middle of the room, weaving slightly from side to side. Oh, Tom, whispered Douglas, you're a genius. he's just full of magic philter, aint he? You can say that again. What did you find out? Douglas tapped the book and talked in a low voice. Mme. Tarot, like I said, told all about death and destiny and stuff in rich folks parlors, but she made one mistake. She predicted Napoleons defeat and death to his face! So... Douglass voice faded as he looked again through the dusty window at that distant figure seated quietly in her crystal case. Secours, murmured Douglas. Old Napoleon just called in Mme. Tussauds waxworks and had them drop the Tarot Witch alive in boiling wax, and now... now... Watch out, Doug, Mr. Black, in there! he's got a club or something! This was true. Inside, cursing horribly, the huge figure of Mr. Black lurched. In his hand a camping knife seethed on the air six inches from the witchs face. he's picking on her because she's the only human-looking thing in the whole darn joint, said Tom. |
| 662 |
He won't do her no harm. Hell fall over any second and sleep it off. No, sir, said Douglas. He knows she warned us and were coming to rescue her. He doesn't want us revealing his guilty secret, so maybe tonight he's going to destroy her once and for all. How could he know she warned us? We didn't even know ourselves till we got away from here. He made her tell, put coins in the machine; that's one thing she cant lie on, the cards, all them tarot skulls and bones. She just cant help telling the truth and she gave him a card, sure, with two little knights on it, no bigger than kids, you see? that's us, clubs in our hands, coming down the street. One last time! cried Mr. Black from the cave inside. Im. puttin the coin in. One last time now, dammit, tell me! Is this damn arcade ever goin to make money or do I declare bankruptcy? Like all women; sit there, cold fish, while a man starves! Gimme the card. There! Now, let me see. He held up the card to the light. Oh, my gosh! whispered Douglas. Get ready. No! cried Mr. Black. Liar! Liar! Take that! He smashed his fist through the case. Glass exploded in a great shower of starlight, it seemed, and fell away in darkness. The witch sat naked, in the open air, reserved and calm, waiting for the second blow. No! Douglas plunged through the door. Mr. Black! Doug! cried Tom. Mr. Black wheeled at Toms shout. He raised the knife blindly in the air as if to strike. Douglas froze. Then, eyes wide, lids blinking once, Mr. Black turned perfectly so he fell with his back toward the floor and took what seemed a thousand years to strike, his flashlight flung from his right hand, the knife scuttling away like a silverfish from the left. Tom moved slowly in to look at the long-strewn figure in the dark. Doug, is he dead? No, just the shock of Mme. Tarots predictions. Boy, he's got a scalded look. Horrible, that's what the cards must have been. The man slept noisily on the floor. Douglas picked up the strewn tarot cards, put them, trembling, in his pocket. Come on, Tom, lets get her out of here before its too late. Kidnap her? you're crazy! You wanna be guilty of aiding and abetting an even worse crime? Murder, for instance? For gosh sakes, you cant kill a dam old dummy! But Doug was not listening. He had reached through the open case and now, as if she had waited for too many years, the wax Tarot Witch with a rustling sigh, leaned forward and fell slowly slowly down into his arms. The town clock struck nine forty-five. The moon was high and filled all the sky with a warm but wintry light. The sidewalk was solid silver on which black shadows moved. Douglas moved with the thing of velvet and fairy wax in his arms, stopping to hide in pools of shadow under trembling trees, alone. He listened, looking back. A sound of running mice. Tom burst around the corner and pulled up beside him. Doug, I stayed behind. I was afraid Mr. Black was, well... then he began to come alive... swearing... Oh, Doug, if he catches you with his dummy! What will our folks think? |
| 663 |
Stealing! Quiet! They listened to the moonlit river of street behind them. Now, Tom, you can come help me rescue her, but you cant if you say dummy or talk loud or drag along as so much dead weight. I'll help! Tom assumed half the weight. My gosh, she's light. She was real young when Napoleon... Douglas stopped. Old people are heavy. that's how you tell. But why? Tell me why all this running around for her, Doug. Why? Why? Douglas blinked and stopped. Things had gone so fast, he had run so far and his blood was so high, he had long since forgotten why. Only now, as they moved again along the sidewalk, shadows like black butterflies on their eyelids, the thick smell of dusty wax on their hands, did he have time to reason why, and, slowly, speak of it, his voice as strange as moonlight. Tom, a couple weeks ago, I found out I was alive. Boy, did I hop around. And then, just last week in the movies, I found out I'd have to die someday. I never thought of that, really. And all of a sudden it was like knowing the Y. M. C. A. was going to be shut up forever or school, which isn't so bad as we like to think, being over for good, and all the peach trees outside town shriveling up and the ravine being filled in and no place to play ever again and me sick in bed for as long as I could think and everything dark, and I got scared. So, I don't know; what I want to do is this: help Mme. Tarot. I'll hide her a few weeks or months while I look up in the black-magic books at the library how to undo spells and get her out of the wax to run around in the world again after all this time. And shell be so grateful, shell lay out the cards with all those devils and cups and swords and bones on them and tell me what sump holes to walk around and when to stay in bed on certain Thursday afternoons. I'll live forever, or next thing to it. You don't believe that. Yes, I do, or most of it. Watch it now, heres the ravine. Well cut down through by the dump heap, and... Tom stopped. Douglas had stopped him. The boys did not turn, but they heard the heavy clubbing blows of feet behind them, each one like a shotgun set off in the bed of a dry lake not far away. Someone was shouting and cursing. Tom, you let him follow you! As they ran a giant hand lifted and tossed them aside, and Mr. Black was there laying to left and right and the boys, crying out, on the grass, saw the raving man, spittle showering the air from his biting teeth and widened lips. He held the witch by her neck and one arm and glared with fiery eyes down on the boys. This is mine! To do with like I want. What you mean, taking her? Caused all my troublemoney, business, everything. Heres what I think of her! No! shouted Douglas. But like a great iron catapult, the huge arms hoisted the figure up against the moon and flourished and wheeled the fragile body upon the stars and let it fly out with a curse and a rustling wind down the air into the ravine to tumble and take avalanches of junk with her into white dust and cinders. |
| 664 |
No! said Douglas, sitting there, looking down. NO! The big man toppled on the rim of the hill, gasping. You just thank God it wasnt you I did that to! He moved unsteadily away, falling once, getting up, talking to himself, laughing, swearing, then gone. Douglas sat on the edge of the ravine and wept. After a long while he blew his nose. He looked at Tom. Tom, its late. Dadll be out walking, looking for us. We shouldve been home an hour ago. Run back along Washington Street, get Dad and bring him here. you're not going down in that ravine? she's city property now, on the trash dump, and nobody cares what happens, not even Mr. Black. Tell Dad what he's coming here for and he don't have to be seen coming home with me and her. I'll take her the back way around and nobody'll ever know. She won't be no good to you now, her machinery all busted. We cant leave her out in the rain, don't you see, Tom? Sure. Tom moved slowly off. Douglas let himself down the hill, walking in piles of cinder and old paper and tin cans. Halfway down he stopped and listened. He peered at the multicolored dimness, the great landslide below. Mme. Tarot? he almost whispered. Mme. Tarot? At the bottom of the hill in the moonlight he thought he saw her white wax hand move. It was a piece of white paper blowing. But he went toward it anyway... The town dock struck midnight The house Lights around were mostly turned out. In the workshop garage the two boys and the man stood back from the witch, who now sat, rearranged and at peace, in an old wicker chair before an oilcloth-covered card table, upon which were spread, in fantastic fans of popes and clowns and cardinals and deaths and suns and comets, the tarot cards upon which one wax hand touched. Father was speaking. ... know how it is. When I was a boy, when the circus left town I ran around collecting a million posters. Later it was breeding rabbits, and magic. I built illusions in the attic and couldn't get them out. He nodded to the witch. Oh, I remember she told my fortune once, thirty years ago. Well, clean her up good, then come in to bed. Well build her a special case Saturday. He moved out the garage door but stopped when Douglas spoke softly. Dad. Thanks. Thanks for the walk home. Thanks. Heck, said Father, and was gone. The two boys left alone with the witch looked at each other. Gosh, right down the main street we go, all four of us, you, me, Dad, the witch! Dads one in a million! Tomorrow, said Douglas, I go down and buy the rest of the machine from Mr. Black, for ten bucks, or hell throw it out. Sure. Tom looked at the old woman there in the wicker chair. Boy she sure looks alive. I wonder whats inside. Little tiny bird bones. All that's left of Mme. Tarot after Napoleon No machinery at all? Why don't we just cut her open and see? Plenty of time for that, Tom. When? Well, in a year, two years, when I'm fourteen or fifteen, thens the time to do it. Right now I don't want to know nothing except she's here. And tomorrow I get to work on the spells to let her escape forever. |
| 665 |
Some night you'll hear that a strange, beautiful Italian girl was seen downtown in a summer dress, buying a ticket for the East and everyone saw her at the station and saw her on the train as it pulled out and everyone said she was the prettiest girl they ever saw, and when you hear that, Tom and believe me, the news will get around fast! nobody knowing where she came from or where she wentthen you'll know I worked the spell and set her free. And then, as I said, a year, two years from now, on that night when that train pulls out, itll be the time when we can cut through the wax. With her gone, you're liable to find nothing but little cogs and wheels and stuff inside her. that's how it is. Douglas picked up the witchs hand and moved it over the dance of life, the frolic of bone-white death, the dates and dooms, the fates and follies, tapping, touching, whispering her worn-down fingernails. Her face tilted with some secret equilibrium and looked at the boys and the eyes flashed bright in the raw bulb light, unblinking. Tell your fortune, Tom? asked Douglas quietly. Sure. A card fell from the witchs voluminous sleeve. Tom, you see that? A card, hidden away, and now she throws it out at us! Douglas held the card to the light. Its blank. I'll put it in a matchbox full of chemicals during the night. Tomorrow well open the box and there the messagell be! Whatll it say? Douglas closed his eyes the better to see the words. Itll say, Thanks from your humble servant and grateful friend, Mme. Floristan Mariani Tarot, the Chiromancer, Soul Healer, and Deep-Down Diviner of Fates and Furies. Tom laughed and shook his brothers arm. Go on, Doug, what else, what else? Let me see... And itll say, Hey nonny no!... ist not fine to dance and sing?... when the bells of death do ring... and turn upon the toe... and sing Hey nonny no! And itll say, Tom and Douglas Spaulding, everything you wish for, all your life through, you'll get... And itll say that well live forever, you and me, Tom, well live forever... All that on just this one card? All that, every single bit of it, Tom. In the light of the electric bulb they bent, the two boys heads down, the witchs head down, staring and staring at the beautiful blank but promising white card, their bright eyes sensing each and every incredibly hidden word that would soon rise up from pale oblivion. Hey, said Tom in the softest of voices. And Douglas repeated in a glorious whisper, Hey... Faintly, the voice chanted under the fiery green trees at noon. ... nine, ten, eleven, twelve... Douglas moved slowly across the lawn. Tom, what you counting? ... thirteen, fourteen, shut up, sixteen, seventeen, cicadas, eighteen, nineteen... ! Cicadas? Oh hell! Tom unsqueezed his eyes. Hell, hell, hell! Better not let people hear you swearing. Hell, hell, hell is a place! Tom cried. Now I got to start all over. I was counting the times the cicadas buzz every fifteen seconds. He held up his two dollar watch. You time it, then add thirty-nine and you get the temperature at that very moment. |
| 666 |
He looked at the watch, one eye shut, tilted his head and whispered again, One, two, three... ! Douglas turned his head slowly, listening. Somewhere in the burning bone-colored sky a great copper wire was strummed and shaken. Again and again the piercing metallic vibrations, like charges of raw electricity, fell in paralyzing shocks from the stunned trees. Seven! counted Tom. Eight. Douglas walked slowly up the porch steps. Painfully he peered into the hall. He stayed there a moment, then slowly he stepped back out on the porch and called weakly to Tom. Its exactly eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. -twenty-seven, twenty-eight Hey, Tom you hear me? I hear youthirty, thirty-one! Get away! Two, three thirty-four! You can stop counting now, right inside on that old thermometer its eighty-seven and going up, without the help of no katydids. Cicadas! Thirty-nine, forty! Not katydids! Forty-two! Eighty-seven degrees, I thought youd like to know. Forty-five, that's inside, not outside! Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one! Fifty-two, fifty-three! Fifty-three plus thirty-nine isninety-two degrees! Who says? I say! Not eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit! But ninety-two degrees Spaulding! You and who else? Tom jumped up and stood red-faced, staring at the sun. Me and the cicadas, that's who! Me and the cicadas! you're out-numbered! Ninety-two, ninety-two, ninety-two degrees Spaulding, by gosh! They both stood looking at the merciless unclouded sky like a camera that has broken and stares, shutter wide, at a motionless and stricken town dying in a fiery sweat. Douglas shut his eyes and saw two idiot suns dancing on the reverse side of the pinkly translucent lids. One... two... three... Douglas felt his lips move. ... four... five... six... This time the cicadas sang even faster. From noontime to sundown, from midnight to sunrise, one man, one horse, and one wagon were known to all twenty-six thousand three hundred forty-nine inhabitants of Green Town, Illinois. In the middle of the day, for no reason quickly apparent, children would stop still and say: Here comes Mr. Jonas! Here comes Ned! Here comes the wagon! Older folks might peer north or south, east or west and see no sign of the man named Jonas, the horse named Ned, or the wagon which was a Conestoga of the kind that bucked the prairie tides to beach on the wilderness. But then if you borrowed the ear of a dog and tuned it high and stretched it taut you could hear, miles and miles across the town a singing like a rabbi in the lost lands, a Moslem in a tower. Always, Mr. Jonass voice went clear before him so people had a half an hour, an hour, to prepare for his arrival. And by the time his wagon appeared, the curbs were lined by children, as for a parade. So here came the wagon and on its high board seat under a persimmon-colored umbrella, the reins like a stream of water in his gentle hands, was Mr. Jonas, singing. Junk! Junk! No, sir, not Junk! Junk! Junk! No, maam, not Junk! Bricabracs, brickbats! Knitting needles, knick-knacks! |
| 667 |
Kickshaws! Curies! Camisoles! Cameos! But... Junk! Junk! No, sir, not... Junk! As anyone could tell who had heard the songs Mr. Jonas made up as he passed, he was no ordinary junkman. To all appearances, yes, the way he dressed in tatters of moss-corduroy and the felt cap on his head, covered with old presidential campaign buttons going back before Manila Bay. But he was unusual in this way: not only did he tread the sunlight, but often you could see him and his horse swimming along the moonlit streets, circling and recircling by night the islands, the blocks where all the people lived he had known all of his life. And in that wagon he carried things he had picked up here and there and carried for a day or a week or a year until someone wanted and needed them. Then all they had to say was, I want that clock, or How about the mattress? And Jonas would hand it over, take no money, and drive away, considering the words for another tune. So it happened that often he was the only man alive in all Green Town at three in the morning and often people with headaches, seeing him amble by with his moon-shimmered horse, would run out to see if by chance he had aspirin, which he did. More than once he had delivered babies at four in the morning and only then had people noticed how incredibly clean his hands and fingernails werethe hands of a rich man who had another life somewhere they could not guess. Sometimes he would drive people to work downtown, or sometimes, when men could not sleep, go up on their porch and bring cigars and sit with them and smoke and talk until dawn. Whoever he was or whatever he was and no matter how different and crazy he seemed, he was not crazy. As he himself had often explained gently, he had tired of business in Chicago many years before and looked around for a way to spend the rest of his life. couldn't stand churches, though he appreciated their ideas, and having a tendency toward preaching and decanting knowledge, he bought the horse and wagon and set out to spend the rest of his life seeing to it that one part of town had a chance to pick over what the other part of town had cast off. He looked upon himself as a kind of process, like osmosis, that made various cultures within the city limits available one to another. He could not stand waste, for he knew that one mans junk is another mans luxury. So adults, and especially children, clambered up to peer over into the vast treasure horde in the back of the wagon. Now, remember, said Mr. Jonas, you can have what you want if you really want it. The test is, ask yourself, Do I want it with all my heart? Could I live through the day without it? If you figure to be dead by sundown, grab the darned thing and run. I'll be happy to let you have whatever it is. And the children searched the vast heaps of parchments and brocades and bolts of wallpaper and marble ash trays and vests and roller skates and great fat overstuffed chairs and end tables and crystal chandeliers. For a while you just heard whispering and rattling and tinkling. |
| 668 |
Mr. Jonas watched, comfortably puffing on his pipe, and the children knew he watched. Sometimes their hands reached out for a game of checkers or a string of beads or an old chair, and just as they touched it they looked up and there were Mr. Jonass eyes gently questioning them. And they pulled their hand away and looked further on. Until at last each of them put their hand on a single item and left it there. Their faces came up and this time their faces were so bright Mr. Jonas had to laugh. He put up his hand as if to fend off the brightness of their faces from his eyes. He covered his eyes for a moment. When he did this, the children yelled their thanks, grabbed their roller skates or clay tiles or bumbershoots and, dropping off, ran. And the children came back in a moment with something of their own in their hands, a doll or a game they had grown tired of, something the fun had gone out of, like the flavor from gum, and now it was time for it to pass on to some other part of town where, seen for the first time, it would be revivified and would revivify others. These tokens of exchange were shyly dropped over the rim of the wagon down into unseen riches and then the wagon was trundling on, flickering light on its great spindling sunflower wheels and Mr... Jonas singing again... Junk! Junk! No, sir, not Junk! No, maam, not Junk! until he was out of sight and only the dogs, in the shadow pools under trees, heard the rabbi in the wilderness, and twitched their tails... ... junk... Fading. ... junk... A whisper. ... junk... Gone. And the dogs asleep. The sidewalks were haunted by dust ghosts all night as the furnace wind summoned them up, swung them about, and gentled them down in a warm spice on the lawns. Trees, shaken by the footsteps of late-night strollers, sifted avalanches of dust. From midnight on, it seemed a volcano beyond the town was showering red-hot ashes everywhere, crusting slumberless night watchmen and irritable dogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spontaneous combustion at three in the morning. Dawn, then, was a time where things changed element for element. Air ran like hot spring waters nowhere, with no sound. The lake was a quantity of steam very still and deep over valleys of fish and sand held baking under its serene vapors. Tar was poured licorice in the streets, red bricks were brass and gold, roof tops were paved with bronze. The high-tension wires were lightning held forever, blazing, a threat above the unslept houses. The cicadas sang louder and yet louder. The sun did not rise, it overflowed. In his room, his face a bubbled mass of perspiration, Douglas melted on his bed. Wow, said Tom, entering. Come on, Doug. Well drown in the river all day. Douglas breathed out. Douglas breathed in. Sweat trickled down his neck. Doug, you awake? The slightest nod of the head. You don't feel good, huh? Boy, this housell burn down today. He put his hand on Douglass brow. It was like touching a blazing stove lid. He pulled his fingers away, startled. |
| 669 |
He turned and went downstairs. Mom, he said, Dougs really sick. His mother, taking eggs out of the icebox, stopped, let a quick look of concern cross her face, put the eggs back, and followed Tom upstairs. Douglas had not moved so much as a finger. The cicadas were screaming now. At noon, running as if the sun were after him to smash him to the ground, the doctor pulled up on the front porch, gasping, his eyes weary already, and gave his bag to Tom. At one oclock the doctor came out of the house, shaking his head. Tom and his mother stood behind the screen door, as the doctor talked in a low voice, saying over and over again he didn't know, he didn't know. He put his Panama hat on his head, gazed at the sunlight blistering and shriveling the trees overhead, hesitated like a man plunging into the outer rim of hell, and ran again for his car. The exhaust of the car left a great pall of blue smoke in the pulsing air for five minutes after he was gone. Tom took the ice pick in the kitchen and chipped a pound of ice into prisms which he carried upstairs. Mother was sitting on the bed and the only sound in the room was Douglas breathing in steam and breathing out fire. They put the ice in handkerchiefs on his face and along his body. They drew the shades and made the room like a cave. They sat there until two oclock, bringing up more ice. Then they touched Douglass brow again and it was like a lamp that had burned all night. After touching him you looked at your fingers to make sure they werent seared to the bone. Mother opened her mouth to say something, but the cicadas were so loud now they shook dust down from the ceiling. Inside redness, inside blindness, Douglas lay listening to the dim piston of his heart and the muddy ebb and flow of the blood in his arms and legs. His lips were heavy and would not move. His thoughts were heavy and barely ticked like seed pellets falling in an hourglass slow one by falling one. Tick. Around a bright steel comer of rail a trolley swung, throwing a crumbling wave of sizzling sparks, its clamorous bell knocking ten thousand times until it blended with the cicadas. Mr. Tridden waved. The trolley stormed around a comer like a cannonade and dissolved. Mr. Tridden! Tick. A pellet fell. Tick. Chug-a-chug-ding! Woo-woooo! On the roof top a boy locomoted, pulling an invisible whistle string, then froze into a statue. John! John Huff, you! Hate you, John! John, were pals! don't hate you, no. John fell down the elm-tree corridor like someone falling down an endless summer well, dwindling away. Tick. John Huff. Tick. Sand pellet dropping. Tick. John... Douglas moved his head flat over, crashing on the white white terribly white pillow. The ladies in the Green Machine sailed by in a sound of black seal barking, lifting hands as white as doves. They sank into the lawns deep waters, their gloves still waving to him as the grass closed over... Miss Fern! Miss Roberta! Tick... tick... And quickly then from a window across the way Colonel Freeleigh leaned out with the face of a clock, and buffalo dust sprang up in the street. |
| 670 |
Colonel Freeleigh spanged and rattled, his jaw fell open, a mainspring shot out and dangled on the air instead of his tongue. He collapsed like a puppet on the sill, one arm still waving... Mr. Auffmann rode by in something that was bright and something like the trolley and the green electric runabout; and it trailed glorious clouds and it put out your eyes like the sun. Mr. Auffmann, did you invent it? he cried. Did you finally build the Happiness Machine? But then he saw there was no bottom to the machine. Mr. Auffmann ran along on the ground, carrying the whole incredible frame from his shoulders. Happiness, Doug, here goes happiness! And he went the way of the trolley, John Huff, and the dove-fingered ladies. Above on the roof a tapping sound. Tap-rap-bang. Pause. Tap-rap-bang. Nail and hammer. Hammer and nail. A bird choir. And an old woman singing in a frail but hearty voice. Yes, well gather at the river... river... river... Yes, well gather at the river... That flows by the throne of God... Grandma! Great-grandma! Tap, softly, tap. Tap, softly, ... river... river... And now it was only the birds picking up their tiny feet and putting them down again on the roof. Rattle-rattle. Scratch. Peep. Peep. Soft. Soft. ... river... Douglas took one breath and let it all out at once, wailing. He did not hear his mother run into the room. A fly, like the burning ash of a cigarette, fell upon his senseless hand, sizzled, and flew away. Four oclock in the afternoon. Flies dead on the pavement. Dogs wet mops in their kennels. Shadows herded under trees. Downtown stores shut up and locked. The lake shore empty. The lake full of thousands of people up to their necks in the warm but soothing water. Four-fifteen. Along the brick streets of town the junk wagon moved, and Mr. Jonas singing on it. Tom, driven out of the house by the scorched look on Douglass face, walked slowly down to the curb as the wagon stopped. Hi, Mr. Jonas. Hello, Tom. Tom and Mr. Jonas were alone on the street with all that beautiful junk in the wagon to look at and neither of them looking at it. Mr. Jonas didn't say anything right away. He lit his pipe and puffed it, nodding his head as if he knew before he asked, that something was wrong. Tom? he said. Its my brother, said Tom. Its Doug. Mr. Jonas looked up at the house. he's sick, said Tom. he's dying! Oh, now, that cant be so, said Mr. Jonas, scowling around at the very real world where nothing that vaguely looked like death could be found on this quiet day. he's dying, said Tom. And the doctor doesn't know whats wrong. The heat, he said, nothing but the heat. Can that be, Mr. Jonas? Can the heat kill people, even in a dark room? Well, said Mr. Jonas and stopped. For Tom was crying now. I always thought I hated him... that's what I thought... we fight half the time... I guess I did hate him... sometimes... but now... now. Oh, Mr. Jonas, if only... If only what, boy? If only you had something in this wagon would help. Something I could pick and take upstairs and make him okay. |
| 671 |
Tom cried again. Mr. Jonas took out his red bandanna handkerchief and handed it to Tom. Tom wiped his nose and eyes with the handkerchief. Its been a tough summer, Tom said. Lots of things have happened to Doug. Tell me about them, said the junkman. Well, said Tom, gasping for breath, not quite done crying yet, he lost his best aggie for one, a real beaut. And on top of that somebody stole his catchers mitt, it cost a dollar ninety-five. Then there was the bad trade he made of his fossil stones and shell collection with Charlie Woodman for a Tarzan clay statue you got by saving up macaroni box tops. Dropped the Tarzan statue on the sidewalk second day he had it. that's a shame, said the junkman and really saw all the pieces on the cement. Then he didn't get the book of magic tricks he wanted for his birthday, got a pair of pants and a shirt instead. that's enough to ruin the summer right there. Parents sometimes forget how it is, said Mr. Jonas. Sure, Tom continued in a low voice, then Dougs genuine set of Tower-of-London manacles got left out all night and rusted. And worst of all, I grew one inch taller, catching up with him almost. Is that all? asked the junkman quietly. I could think of ten dozen other things, all as bad or worse. Some summers you get a run of luck like that. Its been silverfish getting in his comics collection or mildew in his new tennis shoes ever since Doug got out of school. I remember years like that, said the junkman. He looked off at the sky and there were all the years. So there you are, Mr. Jonas. that's it. that's why he's dying... Tom stopped and looked away. Let me think, said Mr. Jonas. Can you help, Mr. Jonas? Can you? Mr. Jonas looked deep in the big old wagon and shook his head. Now, in the sunlight, his face looked tired and he was beginning to perspire. Then he peered into the mounds of vases and peeling lamp shades and marble nymphs and satyrs made of greening copper. He sighed. He turned and picked up the reins and gave them a gentle shake. Tom, he said, looking at the horses back, I'll see you later. I got to plan. I got to look around and come again after supper. Even then, who knows? Until then... He reached down and picked up a little set of Japanese wind-crystals. Hang these in his upstairs window. They make a nice cool music! Tom stood with the wind-crystals in his hands as the wagon rolled away. He held them up and there was no wind, they did not move. They could not make a sound. Seven oclock. The town resembled a vast hearth over which the shudderings of heat moved again and again from the west. Charcoal-colored shadows quivered outward from every house, every tree. A red-haired man moved along below. Tom, seeing him illumined by the dying but ferocious sun, saw a torch proudly carrying itself, saw a fiery fox, saw the devil marching in his own country. At seven-thirty Mrs. Spaulding came out of the back door of the house to empty some watermelon rinds into the garbage pail and saw Mr. Jonas standing there. |
| 672 |
How is the boy? said Mr. Jonas. Mrs. Spaulding stood there for a moment, a response trembling on her lips. May I see him, please? said Mr. Jonas. Still she could say nothing. I know the boy well, he said. Seen him most every day of his life since he was out and around. I've something for him in the wagon. he's not She was going to say conscious, but she said, awake. he's not awake, Mr. Jonas. The doctor said he's not to be disturbed. Oh, we don't know whats wrong! Even if he's not awake, said Mr. Jonas, I'd like to talk to him. Sometimes the things you hear in your sleep are more important, you listen better, it gets through. I'm sorry, Mr. Jonas, I just cant take the chance. Mrs. Spaulding caught hold of the screen-door handle and held fast to it. Thanks. Thank you, anyway, for coming by. Yes, maam, said Mr. Jonas. He did not move. He stood looking up at the window above. Mrs. Spaulding went in the house and shut the screen door. Upstairs, on his bed, Douglas breathed. It was a sound like a sharp knife going in and out, in and out, of a sheath. At eight oclock the doctor came and went again shaking his head, his coat off, his tie untied, looking as if he had lost thirty pounds that day. At nine oclock Tom and Mother and Father carried a cot outside and brought Douglas down to sleep in the yard under the apple tree where, if there might be a wind, it would find him sooner than in the terrible rooms above. Then they went back and forth until eleven oclock, when they set the alarm clock to wake them at three and chip more ice to refill the packs. The house was dark and still at last, and they slept. At twelve thirty-five, Douglass eyes flinched. The moon had begun to rise. And far away a voice began to sing. It was a high sad voice rising and falling. It was a clear voice and it was in tune. You could not make out the words. The moon came over the edge of the lake and looked upon Green Town, Illinois, and saw it all and showed it all, every house, every tree, every prehistoric-remembering dog twitching in his simple dreams. And it seemed that the higher the moon the nearer and louder and clearer the voice that was singing. And Douglas turned in his fever and sighed. Perhaps it was an hour before the moon spilled all its light upon the world, perhaps less. But the voice was nearer now and a sound like the beating of a heart which was really the motion of a horses hoofs on the brick streets muffled by the hot thick foliage of the trees. And there was another sound like a door slowly opening or closing, squeaking, squealing softly from time to time. The sound of a wagon. And down the street in the light of the risen moon came the horse pulling the wagon and the wagon riding the lean body of Mr. Jonas easy and casual on the high seat. He wore his hat as if he were still out under the summer sun and he moved his hands on occasion to ripple the reins like a flow of water on the air above the horses back. Very slowly the wagon moved down the street with Mr. |
| 673 |
Guaranteed most refreshing and cool. To be taken on summer nights when the heat passes ninety. He picked up the other bottle. This one the same, save I've collected a wind from the Aran Isles and one from off Dublin Bay with salt on it and a strip of flannel fog from the coast of Iceland. He put the two bottles on the bed. One last direction. He stood by the cot and leaned over and spoke quietly. Whenyou're drinking these, remember: It was bottled by a friend. The S. J. Jonas Bottling Company, Green Town, IllinoisAugust, 1928. A vintage year, boy... a vintage year. A moment later there was the sound of reins slapping the back of the horse in the moonlight, and the rumble of the wagon down the street and away. After a moment Douglass eyes twitched and, very slowly, opened. Mother! whispered Tom. Dad! Doug, its Doug! he's going to be well. I just went down to check and come on! Tom ran out of the house. His parents followed. Douglas was asleep as they approached. Tom motioned to his parents, smiling wildly. They bent over the cot. A single exhalation, a pause, a single exhalation, a pause, as the three bent there. Douglass mouth was slightly open and from his lips and from the thin vents of his nostrils, gently there rose a scent of cool night and cool water and cool white snow and cool green moss, and cool moonlight on silver pebbles lying at the bottom of a quiet river and cool clear water at the bottom of a small white stone well. It was like holding their heads down for a brief moment to the pulse of an apple-scented fountain flowing cool up into the air and washing their faces. They could not move for a long time. The next morning was a morning of no caterpillars. The world that had been full to bursting with tiny bundles of black and brown fur trundling on their way to green leaf and tremulous grass blade, was suddenly empty. The sound that was no sound, the billion footfalls of the caterpillars stomping through their own universe, died. Tom, who said he could hear that sound, precious as it was, looked with wonder at a town where not a single birds mouthful stirred. Too, the cicadas had ceased. Then, in the silence, a great sighing rustle began and they knew then why the absence of caterpillar and abrupt silence of cicada. Summer rain. The rain began light, a touch. The rain increased and fell heavily. It played the sidewalks and roofs like great pianos. And upstairs, Douglas, inside again, like a fall of snow in his bed, turned his head and opened his eyes to see the freshly falling sky and slowly slowly twitch his fingers toward his yellow nickel pad and yellow Ticonderoga pencil... There was a great flurry of arrival. Somewhere trumpets were shouting. Somewhere rooms were teeming with boarders and neighbors having afternoon tea. An aunt had arrived and her name was Rose and you could hear her voice clarion clear above the others, and you could imagine her warm and huge as a hothouse rose, exactly like her name, filling any room she sat in. |
| 674 |
Was this one from the deep green sea? Had that one been shot from blue summer air? Was it a swimming food or a flying food, had it pumped blood or chlorophyll, had it walked or leaned after the sun? No one knew. No one asked. No one cared. The most people did was stand in the kitchen door and peer at the baking-powder explosions, enjoy the clangs and rattles and bangs like a factory gone wild where Grandma stared half blindly about, letting her fingers find their way among canisters and bowls. Was she conscious of her talent? Hardly. If asked about her cooking, Grandma would look down at her hands which some glorious instinct sent on journeys to be gloved in flour,, r to plumb disencumbered turkeys, wrist-deep in search of their animal souls. Her gray eyes blinked from spectacles warped by forty years of oven blasts and blinded with strewings of pepper and sage, so she sometimes flung cornstarch, ver steaks, amazingly tender, succulent steaks! And sometimes dropped apricots into meat leaves, cross-pollinated meats, herbs, fruits, vegetables with no prejudice, no tolerance for recipe or formula, save that at the final moment of delivery, mouths watered, blood thundered in response. Her lands then, like the hands of Great-grandma before her, were Grandmas mystery, delight, and life. She looked at them in astonishment, but let them live their life the way they must absolutely lead it. But now for the first time in endless years, here was an upstart, a questioner, a laboratory scientist almost, speaking out where silence could have been a virtue. Yes, yes, but what did you put in this Thursday Special? Why, said Grandma evasively, what does it taste like to you? Aunt Rose sniffed the morsel on the fork. Beef, or is it lamb? Ginger, or is it cinnamon? Ham sauce? Bilberries? Some biscuit thrown in? Chives? Almonds? that's it exactly, said Grandma. Second helpings, everyone? A great uproar ensued, a clashing of plates, a swarming of arms, a rush of voices which hoped to drown blasphemous inquiry forever, Douglas talking louder and making more motions than the rest. But in their faces you could see their world tottering, their happiness in danger. For they were the privileged members of a household which rushed from work or play when the first dinner bell was so much as clapped once in the hall. Their arrival in the dining room had been for countless years a sort of frantic musical chairs, as they shook out napkins in a white fluttering and seized up utensils as if recently starved in solitary confinement, waiting for the summons to fall downstairs in a mass of twitching elbows and overflow themselves at table. Now they clamored nervously, making obvious jokes, darting glances at Aunt Rose as if she concealed a bomb in that ample bosom that was ticking steadily on toward their doom. Aunt Rose, sensing that silence was indeed a blessing devoted herself to three helpings of whatever it was on the plate and went upstairs to unlace her corset. Grandma, said Aunt Rose down again. |
| 675 |
Oh what a kitchen you keep. Its really a mess, now, you must admit. Bottles and dishes and boxes all over, the labels off most everything, so how do you tell whatyou're using? I'd feel guilty if you didn't let me help you set things to rights while I'm visiting here. Let me roll up my sleeves. No, thank you very much, said Grandma. Douglas heard them through the library walls and his heart thumped. Its like a Turkish bath in here, said Aunt Rose. Lets have some windows open, roll up those shades so we can see what were doing. Light hurts my eyes, said Grandma. I got the broom, I'll wash the dishes and stack them away neat. I got to help, now don't say a word. Go sit down, said Grandma. Why, Grandma, think how itd help your cooking. you're a wonderful cook, its true, but ifyou're this good in all this chaospure chaoswhy, think how fine youd be, once things were put where you could lay hands on them. I never thought of that... said Grandma. Think on it, then. Say, for instance, modern kitchen methods helped you improve your cooking just ten or fifteen per cent. Your menfolk are already pure animal at the table. This time next week they'll be dying like flies from overeating. Food so pretty and fine they won't be able to stop the knife and fork. You really think so? said Grandma, beginning to be interested. Grandma, don't give in! whispered Douglas to the Library wall. But to his horror he heard them sweeping and dusting, throwing out half-empty sacks, pasting new labels on cans, putting dishes and pots and pans in drawers that had stood empty for years. Even the knives, which had lain like a catch of silvery fish on the kitchen tables, were dumped into boxes. Grandfather had been listening behind Douglas for a full five minutes. Somewhat uneasily he scratched his chin. Now that I think of it, that kitchens been a mess right on down the line. Things need a little arrangement, no doubt. And if what Aunt Rose claims is true, Doug boy, itll be a rare experience at supper tomorrow night. Yes, sir, said Douglas. A rare experience. Whats that? asked Grandma. Aunt Rose took a wrapped gift from behind her back. Grandma opened it. A cookbook! she cried. She let it drop on the table. I don't need one of those! A handful of this, a pinch of that, a thimbleful of something else is all I ever use I'll help you market, said Aunt Rose. And while were at it, I been noticing your glasses, Grandma. You mean to say you been going around all these years peering through spectacles like those, with chipped lenses, all kind of bent? How do you see your way around without falling flat in the flour bin? Were taking you right down for new glasses. And off they marched, Grandma bewildered, on Roses elbow, into the summer afternoon. They returned with groceries, new glasses, and a hairdo for Grandma. Grandma looked as if she had been chased around town. She gasped as Rose helped her into the house. There you are, Grandma. Now you got everything where you can find it. Now you can see! |
| 676 |
Come on, Doug, said Grandfather. Lets take a walk around the block and work up an appetite. This is going to be a night in history. One of the best darned suppers ever served, or I'll eat my vest. Suppertime. Smiling people stopped smiling. Douglas chewed one bit of food for three minutes, and then, pretending to wipe his mouth, lumped it in his napkin. He saw Tom and Dad do the same. People swashed the food together, making roads and patterns, drawing pictures in the gravy, forming castles of the potatoes, secretly passing meat chunks to the dog. Grandfather excused himself early. I'm full, he said. All the boarders were pale and silent. Grandma poked her own plate nervously. isn't it a fine meal? Aunt Rose asked everyone. Got it on the table half an hour early, too! But the others were thinking that Monday followed Sunday, and Tuesday followed Monday, and so on for an entire week of sad breakfasts, melancholy lunches, and funereal dinners. In a few minutes the dining room was empty. Upstairs the boarders brooded in their rooms. Grandma moved slowly, stunned, into her kitchen. This, said Grandfather, has gone far enough! He went to the foot of the stairs and called up into the dusty sunlight: Come on down, everyone! The boarders murmured, all of them, locked in the dim, comfortable library. Grandfather quietly passed a derby hat. For the kitty, he said. Then he put his hand heavily on Douglass shoulder. Douglas, we have a great mission for you, son. Now listen... And he whispered his warm, friendly breath into the boys ear. Douglas found Aunt Rose, alone, cutting flowers in the garden the next afternoon. Aunt Rose, he said gravely, why don't we go for a walk right now? I'll show you the butterfly ravine just down that way. They walked together all around town. Douglas talked swiftly, nervously, not looking at her, listening only to the courthouse clock strike the afternoon hours. Strolling back under the warm summer elms toward the house, Aunt Rose suddenly gasped and put her hand to her throat. There, on the bottom of the porch step, was her luggage, neatly packed. On top of one suitcase, fluttering in the summer breeze, was a pink railroad ticket. The boarders, all ten of them, were seated on the porch stiffly. Grandfather, like a train conductor, a mayor, a good friend, came down the steps solemnly. Rose, he said to her, taking her hand and shaking it up and down, I have something to say to you. What is it? said Aunt Rose. Aunt Rose, he said. Good-bye. They heard the train chant away into the late afternoon hours. The porch was empty, the luggage gone, Aunt Roses room unoccupied. Grandfather in the library, groped behind E. A. Poe for a small medicine bottle, smiling. Grandma came home from a solitary shopping expedition to town. Wheres Aunt Rose? We said good-bye to her at the station, said Grandfather. We all wept. She hated to go, but she sent her best love to you and said she would return again in twelve years. Grandfather took out his solid gold watch. |
| 677 |
And now I suggest we all repair to the library for a glass of sherry while waiting for Grandma to fix one of her amazing banquets. Grandma walked off to the back of the house. Everyone talked and laughed and listenedthe boarders, Grandfather, and Douglas, and they heard the quiet sounds in the kitchen. When Grandma rang the bell they herded to the dining room, elbowing their way. Everyone took a huge bite. Grandma watched the faces of her boarders. Silently they stared at their plates, their hands in their laps, the food cooling, unchewed, in their cheeks. I've lost it! Grandma said. I've lost my touch... And she began to cry. She got up and wandered out into her neatly ordered, labeled kitchen, her hands moving futilely before her. The boarders went to bed hungry. Douglas heard the courthouse clock chime ten-thirty, eleven, then midnight, heard the boarders stirring in their beds, like a tide moving under the moonlit roof of the vast house. He knew they were all awake, thinking, and sad. After a long time, he sat up in bed. He began to smile at the wall and the mirror. He saw himself grinning as he opened the door and crept downstairs. The parlor was dark and smelled old and alone. He held his breath. He fumbled into the kitchen and stood waiting a moment. Then he began to move. He took the baking powder out of its fine new tin and put it in an old flour sack the way it had always been. He dusted the white flour into an old cookie crock. He removed the sugar from the metal bin marked sugar and sifted it into a familiar series of smaller bins marked spices, cutlery, string. He put the cloves where they had lain for years, littering the bottom of half a dozen drawers. He brought the dishes and knives and forks and spoons back out on top of the tables. He found Grandmas new eyeglasses on the parlor mantel and hid them in the cellar. He kindled a great fire in the old wood-burning stove, using pages from the new cookbook. By one oclock in the still morning a huge husking roar shot up in the black stovepipe, such a wild roar that the house, if it had ever slept at all, awoke. He heard the rustle of Grandmas slippers down the hall stairs. She stood in the kitchen, blinking at the chaos. Douglas was hidden behind the pantry door. At one-thirty in the deep dark morning, the cooking odors blew up through the windy corridors of the house. Down the stairs, one by one, came women in curlers, men in bathrobes, to tiptoe and peer into the kitchenlit only by fitful gusts of red fire from the hissing stove. And there in the black kitchen at two of a warm summer morning, Grandma floated like an apparition, amidst bangings and clatterings, half blind once more, her fingers groping instinctively in the dimness, shaking out spice clouds over bubbling pots and simmering kettles, her face in the firelight red, magical, and enchanted as she seized and stirred and poured the sublime foods. Quiet, quiet, the boarders laid the best linens and gleaming silver and lit candles rather than switch on electric lights and snap the spell. |
| 678 |
Grandfather, arriving home from a late evenings work at the printing office, was startled to hear grace being said in the candlelit dining room. As for the food? The meats were deviled, the sauces curried, the greens mounded with sweet butter, the biscuits splashed with jeweled honey; everything toothsome, luscious, and so miraculously refreshing that a gentle lowing broke out as from a pasturage of beasts gone wild in clover. One and all cried out their gratitude for their loose-fitting night clothes. At three-thirty on Sunday morning, with the house warm with eaten food and friendly spirits, Grandfather pushed back his chair and gestured magnificently. From the library he fetched a copy of Shakespeare. He laid it on a platter, which he presented to his wife. Grandma, he said, I ask only that tomorrow night for supper you cook us this very fine volume. I am certain we all agree that by the time it reaches the table tomorrow at twilight it will be delicate, succulent, brown and tender as the breast of the autumn pheasant. Grandma held the book in her hands and cried happily. They lingered on toward dawn, with brief desserts, wine from those wild flowers growing in the front yard, and then, as the first birds winked to life and the sun threatened the eastern sky, they all crept upstairs. Douglas listened to the stove cooling in the faraway kitchen. He heard Grandma go to bed. Junkman, he thought, Mr. Jonas, wherever you are, you're thanked, you're paid back. I passed it on, I sure did, I think I passed it on... He slept and dreamed. In the dream the bell was ringing and all of them were yelling and rushing down to breakfast. And then, quite suddenly, summer was over. He knew it first when walking downtown. Tom grabbed his arm and pointed gasping, at the dimestore window. They stood there unable to move because of the things from another world displayed so neatly, so innocently, so frighteningly, there. Pencils, Doug, ten thousand pencils! Oh, my gosh! Nickel tablets, dime tablets, notebooks, erasers, water colors, rulers, compasses, a hundred thousand of them! don't look. Maybe its just a mirage. No, moaned Tom in despair. School. School straight on ahead! Why, why do dime stores show things like that in windows before summers even over! Ruin half the vacation! They walked on home and found Grandfather alone on the sere, bald-spotted lawn, plucking the last few dandelions. They worked with him silently for a time and then Douglas, bent in his own shadow, said: Tom, if this years gone like this, what will next year be, better or worse? don't ask me. Tom blew a tune on a dandelion stem. I didn't make the world. He thought about it. Though some days I feel like I did. He spat happily. I got a hunch, said Douglas. What? Next years going to be even bigger, days will be brighter, nights longer and darker, more people dying, more babies born, and me in the middle of it all. You and two zillion other people, Doug, remember. Day like today, murmured Douglas, I feel itll be... |
| 679 |
Now Tom and Douglas and Grandfather stood, as they had stood three months, or was it three long centuries ago, on this front porch which creaked like a ship slumbering at night in growing swells, and they sniffed the air. Inside, the boys bones felt like chalk and ivory instead of green mint sticks and licorice whips as earlier in the year. But the new cold touched Grandfathers skeleton first, like a raw hand chording the yellow bass piano keys in the dining room. As the compass turns, so turned Grandfather, north. I guess, he said, deliberating, we won't be coming out here anymore. And the three of them clanked the chains shaken down from the porch-ceiling eyelets and carried the swing like a weathered bier around to the garage, followed by a blowing of the first dried leaves. Inside, they heard Grandma poking up a fire in the library. The windows shook with a sudden gust of wind. Douglas, spending a last night in the cupola tower above Grandma and Grandpa, wrote in his tablet: Everything runs backward now. Like matinee films sometimes, where people jump out of water onto diving boards. Come September you push down the windows you pushed up, take off the sneakers you put on, pull on the hard shoes you threw away last June. People run in the house now like birds jumping back inside clocks. One minute, porches loaded, everyone gabbing thirty to a dozen. Next minute, doors slam, talk stops, and leaves fall off trees like crazy. He looked from the high window at the land where the crickets were strewn like dried figs in the creek beds, at a sky where birds would wheel south now through the cry of autumn loons and where trees would go up in a great fine burning of color on the steely clouds. Way out in the country tonight he could smell the pumpkins ripening toward the knife and the triangle eye and the singeing candle. Here in town the first few scarves of smoke unwound from chimneys and the faint faraway quaking of iron was the rush of black hard rivers of coal down chutes, building high dark mounds in cellar bins. But it was late and getting later. Douglas in the high cupola above the town, moved his hand. Everyone, clothes off! He waited. The wind blew, icing the windowpane. Brush teeth. He waited again. Now, he said at last, out with the lights! He blinked. And the town winked out its lights, sleepily, here, there, as the courthouse clock struck ten, ten-thirty, eleven, and drowsy midnight. The last ones now... there... there... He lay in his bed and the town slept around him and the ravine was dark and the lake was moving quietly on its shore and everyone, his family, his friends, the old people and the young, slept on one street or another, in one house or another, or slept in the far country churchyards. He shut his eyes. June dawns, July noons, August evenings over, finished, done, and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head. Now, a whole autumn, a white winter, a cool and greening spring to figure sums and totals of summer past. |
| 680 |
He could not bear to be alone at night anymore. The Grinning Sadist began to haunt him. This horrifying image had been imprinted upon his neurons by various movies and TV melodramas of the sixties and seventies. The Grinning Sadist invaded your home, sometimes alone and sometimes with a horde of equally moronic and vicious cohorts. You were particularly susceptible if you were blind or a woman or all alone at night, but sometimes-as in The Dangerous Hours-he would come with his brutal crew in the bright daytime. His business was never simply burglary, although that was part of it; his real interest was in humiliation, terror, degradation, torture of the body and spirit. And he always grinned. Benny's doctor prescribed Valium, 5 mg. before bedtime. It helped Benny sleep; but when he was awake, every noise still sounded like the Grinning Sadist furtively trying the door. Benny bought a police lock. Every noise now sounded like the Grinning Sadist trying to force a window. Then, one day looking through the old files in the newspaper morgue, Benny found an interview with Senator Charles Percy given in 1970, two years after the murder of his daughter. "For the first year after the murder," Senator Percy said, "my whole family lived in terror." Benny felt a sudden sense of relief. This must be normal, he thought; it happens to everybody who's had a murder close to them. And it lasts only a year... But as July 23, 1982, approached, Benny was not emerging from the terror; it was growing worse. Well, he had been reading up on grief and bereavement, and he knew the first anniversary is always a terrible time. He found the knowledge helpful; it gave him a small purchase on detachment. Also, without his doctor's consultation, he had raised his Valium dosage at bedtime from 5 mg. to 15 mg. and sometimes 25. Then on July 23 itself-the anniversary of the murder- the Grinning Sadist appeared. Benny had been invited to give a talk at the Press Club on "Lousewart and Lowered Expectations." The luncheon was excellent, but Benny ate little, knowing that a belch in the middle of the speech could destroy all communication for several minutes after. When Fred "Figs" Newton began to introduce him (... "New York's most beloved daily columnist... an institution for over thirty years..."), Benny felt the usual twinges of stage fright, began rehearsing again his first three jokes, gave up on that and concentrated instead on his mantra (Om mani padme hum Om mani padme hum ...) and was finally in the ideal state of mixed apprehension and urgency out of which the most relaxed-sounding public speeches always come. As the applause died down, he rose to speak. And he saw the Grinning Sadist coming right at him. He saw the deranged eyes, the cruel mouth, the deliberately ugly clothing (like a very poor cowboy or a 1960s college student), and the knife in the maniac's hand. Om mani padme hum... And then he got the Boston Cream Pie right in the face. It hadn't been a knife at all: he had imagined a knife when the pie plate was turned and raised as it was thrown. |
| 681 |
It was all very mechanical-but that's the way planetside life is. *Terran Archives 2803: New York was a city-state or island in the midwestem part of the Unistat. It seems to have been a center of religious worship, and many came there to walk about, probably in deep meditation, within an enormous female statue, the goddess of these primitives. Various authorities identify this divinity as Columbia, Marilyn Monroe, Liberty, or Mother Fucker-all of these being names widely recorded in Unistat glyphs: Perhaps her true name will never be known. Benny felt a rush of nostalgia. The jingle had been popular in Brooklyn when he was a schoolboy in the antediluvian era of the 1930s. Back then, in the Dark Ages of Roosevelt II, many Brooklyn peddlers still had horse-drawn carts, and the horses, as is common with their species, left piles of horse shit in the streets as they went about their itineraries. Sparrows would peck in these steaming piles of dung for undigested oats, and a Brooklyn child would exclaim, on seeing this: Benny reflected that this little bit of kidlore had stuck in his memory for nearly half a century and that it must therefore contain some profound Meaning. He began pounding the Mac Plus, offering the birdie-turdie poemlet as a perfect example of an American haiku-the juxtaposition of two images, without comment by the author, in a way that suggested far more than it actually said. "Birds," Benny wrote, "are traditional symbols of beauty, from Bacon's nightingales to Keats's skylark, throughout our whole poetic tradition. Horse manure, on the other hand, is regarded with revulsion and loathing. Yet the sparrows, indifferent to human standards, blithely pick in the manure, seeking the food they know is there. The poem is telling us that human likes and dislikes are arbitrary, squinty-eyed, chauvinistic, and irrelevant to nature's own grand design strategy." Benny went on to assert that he had only been able to see this profundity in the jingle now, after he had spent six months meditating at the Manhattan Zen Center. "This rhyme is the Essence of Zen," he concluded. It was probably the least successful column Benny ever wrote. Virtually nobody understood it and everybody was bored by it. Some readers even wrote protesting letters complaining that the column had been in questionable taste. Benny was depressed by this reaction. He felt it had been a stroke of genius on his part to rescue from oblivion a genuine American haiku; but even more than that, writing the column had triggered a vast stream of recollections about 1930s Brooklyn which gave him a renewed sense of Roots he had hoped to share. Why, how many still alive could remember the procedure when the meter man from Monopolated Edison appeared in a Brooklyn neighborhood in those days? The kids were dispatched as runners, racing from house to house, shouting "Mon Ed! Mon Ed!" Everybody would then remove the bags of salt which they kept over the electric meters to deflect the readings downward and thereby lower the electric bill. |
| 682 |
The parapsychologists who dare to speculate about such things are ritually torn asunder and dismembered by Marvin Gardens in the back pages of the Scientific American. Still, this does not discourage Simon Moon, who is, after all, a close associate of the Beast and hip to the programmer's trade secret that all that exists is information: everything else is mammalian sense-impression and thus hallucinatory. Besides, Simon is doing it right now: and can see in one instant, in the twinkling of an eye, the total contents of the novel, a miracle of microminiaturization in the frontal lobes, as the metaprogramming circuit clicks into action. The novel was called The Universe Next Door. It existed-was bought and sold and loaned-in a super-continuum called the United States of America, which was Unistat enlarged into other dimensions. Everything in the novel was inevitable, as everything in the supercontinuum containing the novel was inevitable. Everything that happened in Unistat had to happen, as everything in the United States of America had to happen. That which was above was precisely reflected in that which was below. To cross again was not to cross. "So all right," Joe Malik said, staring at Simon through a triangle, "are you just trying to scare me to death or do you have a message for me?" Simon was on the balcony of Mary Margaret Wildeblood's apartment again and somebody was staring out at him in horror. "My God, it's Bigfoot!" Simon reentered the form, and contemplated it. Civilization was destroyed by nuclear holocaust in May 1984 because Furbish Lousewart was a certain kind of man and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stuart was a certain other kind of man; and they were what they were because of genetic programs and accidental imprints and conditioning and some learning, and because of the society around them; and that society was the resultant of various conflicting historical and neurogenetic causes; and Lousewart became President because of a thousand other factors, only one of which, the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, was itself the resultant of thousands of factors, including the usual struggles between the engineers and the financiers; and to explain Stuart you would have to start with the institution of slavery six thousand years earlier; and... Everything in the novel was inevitable, as everything in the supercontinuum containing the novel was inevitable. And yet Simon had escaped from the novel. Although not a member of the Warren Belch Society, Simon Moon was, of course, aware of the theory that there was a universe somewhere in which Bacon's major works were still attributed to somebody else. Simon, naturally, was not imaginative enough to conceive that in that universe Bacon had died of pneumonia while conducting experiments in refrigeration. In Simon's usual universe, the author of Novum Organum, The New Atlantis, King Lear, etc., had lived on to discover the inverse-square law of gravitation, and Isaac Newton was remembered only as a somewhat eccentric astrologer. |
| 683 |
By spring 1984, Case had 120 bound volumes of books, articles, and press clippings about the J. F. K. assassination, since he was still Righteously Indignant about the palpably obvious cover-up involved in the Warren Report. The day that pseudo-Sullivan wigged out over Bonny Benedict's contribution to the mythology of the assassination, Case calmly clipped that item and added it to his file. Three-quarters of the other material in Case's file was also fictitious. One-third of this disinformation had been generated by Intelligence Agencies-domestic, foreign, and extraterrestrial-as covers or screens for their own activities in and around Dallas in 1963. Another third had been produced by sincere, dedicated, sometimes avid conspiracy buffs, weaving their own webs of confusion as they searched for the elusive truth. The last third had been created, like the Bonny Benedict item, by journalists following Hearst's advice about what to do when there was no news. Anybody trying to find out "what really happened" from this collection of mythology would be so confused that the significant fact of the extraterrestrial intervention would never be apparent. Case did not suspect any of this. He loved his J. F. K. file. He was convinced that someday the crucial piece would come to him, he would insert it into the file, and the whole jigsaw would make sense. He never realized that the one detail which gave everything away was that while Oswald was firing from the sixth-floor window he was also having a Coke on the second floor and mingling with the crowd in the street. Like most liberals, Justin Case lacked imagination and never took seriously all the evidence of extraterrestrial activity on earth during the past forty years. Case was currently having an affair with the Hollywood actress Carol Christmas. Carol was renowned among the heterosexual male population for having the biggest Brownmillers since Jayne Mansfield; so far only women and a few Gay men had noticed that she could also act. Carol had been married four times. She had had three abortions. Like other famous Beauties, she was always dieting, and hence, a little bit high-strung. She was also a disciple of General E. A. Crowley, the eccentric English explorer who had discovered the North Pole and claimed there was a hole there leading down to the center of the Earth. Carol devoutly believed Crowley's yarn that there was a whole civilization down there, inside the Earth, run by green-skinned women. Carol believed this because she had a great artistic faith in the principle of balance. In her probability continuum-in the series of quantum eigenstates that had crystalized into her universe-the whole outside of the planet seemed to be run by white-skinned males. It was only fair that the inside should be run by green-skinned females. Carol was having three other affairs at the same time as her amour with Justin Case. There was a hairdresser in Hollywood (bi, not Gay) who was very talented at Bryanting and Briggsing-two arts at which totally straight men, in Carol's opinion, were usually a bit clumsy. |
| 684 |
Of course some cynics immediately assumed that His Eminence was as drunk as a skunk. There are always types like that, believing the worst of everybody. Then the rumors started to circulate. Those who had been in the Cathedral said that the Most Reverend Archbishop had not so much stumbled as jumped, and that his expression was one of such fear and loathing that all present felt at once that something distinctly eldritch and unholy had invaded the church. Others, imaginative types and religious hysterics, claimed to have felt something cold and clammy moving in the air, or to have seen "auras." By the time the rumors had gone three times around the United Kingdom and twice around Europe, there were details that came out of the Necronomicon or the grim fictions of Stoker, Machen, Walpole. Horned men, Things with tentacles, and Linda Lovelace were prominently featured in these embroidered versions of the Canterbury Horror, as it was beginning to be called. The press, of course, got more interested at this point, and the Reverend Archbishop was constantly besieged to conform or deny the most outlandish and distasteful reports about what had occurred. At first His Eminence refused to speak to the press at all, but finally, by the time some scandal sheets were claiming that Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god of Khem, had appeared on the altar bellowing Cthulhu fthagn!, the Archbishop issued a terse statement through his Press Secretary. "Nothing untoward happened. His Eminence merely tripped on the altar rug, and any further discussion would be futile." This merely fanned the flames of Rumor, of course. One legend circulated even more than the others, perhaps because it appealed to prurient interest, or maybe just because it was the version given by a few people who had actually been in the Cathedral during Mass. According to this yarn, a miraculous flying Rehnquist- just like the ones in the murals at Pompeii, except that it didn't have wings-had soared across the front of the church, barely missing His Eminence's high episcopal nose. The judicious, of course, did not credit this wild rumor. They were all coming around, as the judicious usually do, to the view of the cynics. The Archbishop, they said, had been stewed to the gills. His Eminence was no fool, however. After the first shock, he had begun his own investigation, aided by a few trusted deacons. They found the slingshot, abandoned, on the floor of the first pew, to the right. That was the direction the Rehnquist had come from, and they all breathed a sigh of relief. The Archbishop told them, then, the rumors he had heard about the incident of the Unistat Ambassador who had to be put on morphine after finding It, wrapped in pink ribbon, on a staircase. "We are dealing with a deranged mind," His Eminence said, "but not with anything 'supernatural,' thank God." They never found the Rehnquist, but as the Archbishop pointed out, "the perpetrator may have confederates." Everybody tried to remember who had been sitting in the extreme right of the first pew. |
| 685 |
He was a devout worshiper of Shiva, god of sex, intoxication, death, and transformation. He believed that you couldn't come to your senses until you went out of your mind. He kept alive, within his own province, the ancient cult of Shiva-Kali, the divine couple whose embrace generated the whole play of existence. And now, in Nairobi of all places, he had found, somehow in the possession of a heathen Englishwoman, the most sacred of all lost relics-the Shivalingam itself, the engine of the creative lightning. So it was not theft at all; he was merely restoring the relic to the place where it belonged, in India. In fact, he placed it on the altar in his own temple, and invited the whole province to come see it and marvel and know the power of the Divine Shiva, who possessed such a tool of creativity. He was going to restore the old-time religion. He made a speech to the assembled multitude on the first day the Shivalingam was displayed in the temple. He told them that the polarity of Shiva and Kali was the basic pulse of creation. He said the Chinese dimly discerned this in their yin and yang symbolism, and the heathen West in their concept of positively and negatively charged particles. He explained that the male-female polarity was the engine of creation, not just in the human and animal kingdoms, but in every aspect of nature. He said that Samadhi and Dhyana and normal consciousness were equally real, equally unreal, and equally pointless, but that if you contemplated this Shivalingam long enough it wouldn't matter whether you understood any of this or not. He was so bombed on bhang that he kept going into Samadhi every few minutes during this, and the crowd, both his old disciples and newcomers, decided he was the wisest and holiest man in all India. Old Ringh kept smiling and going into Samadhi and explaining that we are all bisexual immortals who inhabit many universes and mind-states, and the crowd kept cheering and getting higher on his vibes, and finally they all went into the temple and contemplated the Shivalingam, where Indole Ringh had placed it on the altar, facing the enormous carving of the sacred yoni of the Black Goddess, Kali, and under the faded photograph of the Wise Man from the West, General Crowley, who, even though an English heathen, had understood the Mysteries and had spent many hours, while smoking bhang, discussing with Ringh's father how, even in mathematics, the sacred yoni appeared in both the shape and the substance of 0, the void, while the lingam appeared in the shape and substance of 1, the creative lightning, and how, out of the union of the 0 and 1, all of the numbers of creation could be generated in binary notation. And as everybody meditated on the miraculous return of the Shivalingam, old Ringh remembered how General Crowley promised, when he had to return to the West, that he would use what he had learned in India to teach the whole world how the phallic spark of Imagination, represented by the 1 or lingam, generated everything out of absolute 0, the dark yoni, nothingness. |
| 686 |
Blake Williams, Ph. D., had purchased a very fine El Mir, under the impression it was a Van Gogh, after the great success of his popularized book on primate psychology, How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes. Williams was then in the midst of his first phase synthesizing General Semantics and Zen Buddhism, and he immediately recognized what was really going on when identifiable El Mirs were everywhere falling in value after the great Expose. It was a glitch, he decided. He called together a small group of people who also owned identified El Mirs and begged them not to believe that they had been deceived. "A signature," he told them earnestly, "is not an economic Good in itself, like gold or land or factories. It is only a squiggle given contextual meaning by social convention." He went on like that for nearly an hour. He spoke of the differences between the map and the territory; between the spoken word ("a sonic wave in the atmosphere") and the nonverbal thing or event which the word merely designates; between the menu and the meal. He quoted Hume, Einstein, Korzybski, and Pope Stephen. He dragged in the latest theories in perception psychology, Ethnome-thodology, and McLuhan's version of media-message analysis. He reminded them that Carlos Castaneda had studied Ethnomethodology with Garfinkle before studying shamanism with Don Juan Matus, and he assured them, as a professional anthropologist, that anyone who has the power to define reality for you has become a sorcerer, if you don't catch the bastard real quick. By this time a lot of his audience was irritated and a little frightened-mutters of "He's just a damned crank" were heard from some corners of the room-but others were listening, enthralled. Williams resorted to psycho-drama and Role Playing to get his point across. He said that he would pretend to be an extraterrestrial-"I wonder if it's just pretending," said an awed voice from the group who had followed this lecture with a sense of Illumination. Play-acting the extraterrestrial, Williams defied them to explain several things to him, rationally and logically, without assuming he had "intuitive" or a priori knowledge about what they took for granted. He wanted to know, first, the difference between a dollar bill printed by the Unistat Treasury and a dollar bill printed by a gang of counterfeiters. Everybody got excited, and most of them got angry, in the course of trying to make this distinction clear to the extraterrestrial, who was very literal and logical, and did not understand anything they took for granted until it was explained literally and logically. By the time the extraterrestrial was willing to grant that there was an agreed-upon difference between the two bills created by social consensus, a few people had left, saying, "It's just an elaborate put-on." But the others, who stuck it out, were next confronted with a dollar bill hung in a museum as "found" art. Williams, the extraterrestrial, wanted to know whether its value was the same as, greater than, or less than it had been before being hung in the museum. |
| 687 |
More people lost their tempers in the course of his discussion. But Williams persisted. Still playing extraterrestrial, he wanted to know if it made any difference if the dollar hung in the museum as "found" art had been printed by the Treasury or by the criminal gang. After a few minutes of this topic most of the people in the room were jumping up and down like the Ambassador who found the Rehnquist on the stairs. Williams had no mercy. He next wanted them to explain the difference between any or all of the above and an exact duplicate of any or all of them painted by Roy Lichtenstein and exhibited as Pop Art. After a half hour more he pointed out that they were arguing among themselves even more than they were attempting to explain these mysteries to him. He also mentioned, not too cruelly, that many of them had arrived at the state where they seemed to believe their definitions would become more convincing if they just repeated them at a louder decibel level. Williams then gave up the extraterrestrial game and tried to restore order. He became droll and told them the old story of how Picasso, asked to identify the real Picas-sos in a group of possible fakes, had put one of his own canvases among the fraudulent group. "But," an art dealer among those present protested, "I saw you paint that one myself, Pablo." "No matter," said the Great Man imperturbably, "I can fake a Picasso as well as anybody." He reminded them that Andy Warhol kept a closet full of Campbell's soup cans, and gave autographed cans to people he liked so they could own "a genuine Warhol." He pointed out, after the laugh subsided, that neither extraterrestrials nor terrestrials could agree on the difference in value between a Treasury dollar signed by Warhol and thereby becoming "a genuine Warhol," a counterfeit dollar signed by Warhol for the purpose-giving "a genuine Warhol" to a friend, a Treasury dollar with Warhol's signature forged by El Mir, a Treasury dollar with Warhol's signature forged by an unknown criminal, and a counterfeit dollar with Warhol's signature forged by William S. Burroughs, the founder of Neo-Cubist painting. He said that Ethnomethodologists knew that the border between the Real and the Unreal was not fixed, but just marked the last place where rival gangs of shamans had fought each other to a stalemate. He said the border had shifted after each major conceptual struggle, as national borders shift after military struggles. He defined everybody who attempted to define Reality, including himself, as a conscious or unconscious co-conspirator with some gang of shamans who are trying to impose their game on the rest of us. He said that both the economics of art and the art of economics were determined by shamans, whether they knew themselves as shamans or not. "Crazy as a bedbug," said the last man to quit the room. The remainder were staring at Williams with devout awe. They felt that he had removed great murky shadows from their minds and brought them forward into the light. |
| 688 |
Through a series of fronts, he had taken over organized crime in Unistat and arranged that everybody would blame it on the Sicilians. He was currently engaged in smuggling as many as one thousand of the "boat people" a month into Hong Kong, where he put them to work in his factories and paid them three cents a day. Wing Lee Chee, at eighty-seven, was a philosopher and a man of balance. His life-style always tempered severity with mercy, larceny with generosity, sensuality with meditation. He always tried to be as just a man as was compatible with being a rich and comfortable man. If one of the employees in his factories showed initiative or talent, Wing Lee Chee noticed, and that man or woman was quickly promoted to a position of responsibility and solvency. He was no xenophobe; this policy applied even to Japanese, Hindus, and the wretched Unistat refugees. Mr. Wing lived on Peach Blossom Street and had a magnificent view of all of Hong Kong and the harbor. He felt that the view was making him more philosophical every year. Each evening, after his twilight meditation period, he would sit at his window, smoking a long black Italian cigar, and look down at the teeming human hive below him, thinking that every person down there was the center of a whole universe, just like himself. He had learned total detachment from all his own emotions in one split second, the day the white cops in Bad Ass knocked his eye out while arresting him. He had known, in that second, that he could kill them all-no man in the world knew more of aikido, judo, kung fu, and karate than Wing Lee Chee in his youth-but he knew what would happen after that if he did it. He looked at his own rage, understood suddenly in a mini-Satori that this was a mechanical-chemical process in his body, and became the clear mind that watched the rage instead of the emotional mind that experienced it. All of the more mystical and obscure things his martial arts teachers had tried to teach him abruptly made sense. He was never the same man again. So he would sit, in the early evenings, smoking his foul Italian cigars (a taste acquired from a business associate named Celine) and look down at Hong Kong and its myriad of robots, each driven by mechanical and chemical reflexes, each believing itself the center of the universe. And then he would laugh softly at his own sense of superiority, because he knew that he was also controlled by chemical chains that determined what he could and could not think. Only in very deep meditation, and only a few times, had he broken those chains and seen-briefly! how briefly!-what the hell was really going on, outside of his own mental card-index system. But Wing Lee Chee always came out of those high moments giggling foolishly, like a mental defective, or weeping quietly at the stupidity of himself and the rest of humanity, or simply dazed, like a man who opens the door to his own bedroom and finds himself lost in one of the craters of the moon. On September 23, 1986, Wing Lee Chee had two important visitors in his office. |
| 689 |
First came the Ludes and the Creepers, then the Dirks and the Blunt Instruments, then more and more: the Problem of Anxiety, the Daggers, the Funny Farm, the Noon's Repose, and the Troubled Midnight. And now it was not separate trickles, but one huge rushing stream: the Leapers, the Laughing Academy, the Foamix Culprits, the Mail Cover, Dr. Terror's House of 111 Repute, the Keyhole Peepers, the Wire Tappers, the Whoopee Casket Company. And over the shrieks and howls of their music, from deep inside the hidden recesses of Chinatown, the drums of Fu Manchu grew louder. And more and more were coming, still: Dashwood recognized the Muggers, the Synthesizers, Moses and Monotheism, Reefer Madness, Crazy Artie's Crisis Intervention Center, the Junior College of Cardinals, Totem and Taboo, the Things on the Doorstep, the Hoods, the Lanovacs, Six Flags over the Vatican, the Sleepers, the Beepers, the Roofers, the Cokers, the Thundering Hoofs, the Framis Stand, the Power to Cloud Men's Minds, and the Croakers. Pickering's Moon circled the Earth, going backward. And still the Punks came: the Chocolate Mouse, the Tax Writeoff, the Welfare Bums, the Primal Scream, Baphomet's Witnesses, the Black Rabbit of Inle, the Vegetables, the Fruits, the Nuts, the First Church of Satan Scientist, the Tantric Presbyterians, the Huns, the Creatures from the Back Ward, the Special Children, the Visigoths, the Vandals, the Looters, the Shooters, the Scooters, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy Revisited, the Thousand Kim, the Seeds of Discord, the Benton Harbor Rat-Weasel, the Bloodshot Pyramid, the Wascal Wabbits, Crescendo, the Diabolic Variations, Skinnerball, the Committee for the Elimination of Death, the Weird Made Flesh, the Poor Golems, the Wretched Refuse, the Alluminum Bavariati, the Double Helix, the Goons, the Thugs, the Teeming Shore, the Unnatural Act, the Solitary Vice, the Morose Delectation, the Wrist Slashers, the Window Jumpers, the Kryptonite Kids, the Stay-Free Mini-Pads, the Elect Cohens, the Corpse-Eaters of Leng, the Miniature Sled, the Hash Brownies, the Boston Blackies, Kadath in the Cold Waste, the Neanderthal Tails, the Giant Slugs, the Sloths, the Disadvantaged Youth, the Albert de Salvo Fan Club, the Dead Kennedys, the Molotov Cocktails, and, loudest and most eldritch of all, Great Cthulhu's Starry Wisdom Band. And overall there was a smell of fried onions. ???? Hierusalem, my happy home ???? When shall I come to thee? ???? When shall my sorrows have an end, ???? Thy joys when shall I see? ???? ???? Thy walls are made of precious stones ???? They bulwarks diamonds square ???? Thy gates are of bright orient pearl ???? Exceeding rich and rare ???? ???? There trees for evermore bear fruit ???? And evermore do spring; ???? There evermore the angels sit ???? And evermore do sing ???? ???? Ah, my sweet home, Hierusalem ???? Would God I were in thee! ???? Would God my woes were at an end ???? Thy joys that I might see It was dark in the room. His mother sang that song. |
| 690 |
And in that lucidity he knew that he had been lying to himself for months, pretending not to notice what was happening to his body as it gradually terminated its basic functions, fearful of looking straight at Death; but now, in that lucidity, looking at it and seeing that it was just another of the millions of things that Wing Lee Chee (who was so rich and powerful) could not do anything about; but now, in that lucidity and objectivity, looking far down at this particular galaxy, this insignificant solar system, this temporary city, this house that a strong wind could blow away, this absurd old man who was rich and powerful but could not command the tides or alter the paths of the stars, it was all suddenly a great joke and every little detail made sense. For, in this new lucidity and objectivity and selfless perspective, he did not giggle or weep or feel dazed, but only smiled, very slightly, knowing he would soon lose this body, which was like an old run-down car, and this central nervous system, which was like a tired and increasingly incompetent driver, and the meta-programmer in the higher nervous centers which gave him this perspective, because out here beyond space-time he simply did not give a damn about that life, that planet, or that universe anymore. So, as he very slowly came down, contracted, into Euclidean 3-D again, he was aware of every amusing, poignant, radiant little detail, the wholeness and the harmony and the luminosity of it all, knowing how richly he would enjoy every last minute of it, now that it didn't matter to him anymore. The next day he called the office and told his secretary he wouldn't be in. Then he took a long walk, enjoying every bird, every flower, every blade of grass, every radiant detail, and getting a bit winded-another sign that the car was running down-and finally taking a cab to Ying Kaw Foy's house. She wept when he told her, but he smiled and joked and chided her out of it. "I may be one of the last men to die," he said when she was calm. "President Hubbard in Unistat is putting a lot of money into research on longevity and immortality. No, don't weep again; it is nothing to me. I feel like one of the last dinosaurs." "You are the best man in the world," she said, eyes flashing. "I have been good to you," he said. "I have been as much of a scoundrel as was necessary to be rich and comfortable. Many will be glad of my death." He told her how he was arranging to have most of his estate liquidated, turned into cash, and deposited in her account. He urged her to take advantage of the longevity drugs as they became available, and to meditate every day. "One year of life is wonderful, when you are conscious of the details. A thousand years would be more wonderful." And then he added a strange thing: "Think of me sometimes, and look for me. You'll never see old Wing Lee Ghee again, but you'll see what I really am if you look hard enough and long enough." And then he suddenly realized it was coming even sooner than he had expected. |
| 691 |
A brown cloth bag with her belongings along with a thin cane lay close up against her hip. She was dressed in a simple but neat long gray woolen dress. A cream-colored shawl lay draped over her shoulders as protection against the occasional bite of departing winter. Spring had arrived, but so far it had proven to be more promise than substance. The woman smoothed back stray strands of brown and gray hair at her temple, apparently wanting to look presentable for potential customers. By the milky film over her eyes, the way her head tilted up without facing anyone accurately, and her searching movements, Richard knew that the woman couldn't see him or Kahlan. Only her hearing would be of any help in taking in the grandeur all around her. Out beyond where the woman sat, one of the many bridges in the palace crossed the hall at a second-floor level. Clutches of people engaged in conversation strolled across the bridge while others stood at the marble balusters, gazing down on the vast passageway below, some watching Richard and Kahlan and their accompanying contingent of guards. Many in the thick crowds of people strolling the expansive corridors of the palace were visitors who had come for the festivities of the day before. Though the People's Palace was more or less under one roof, it was really a city tightly clustered atop a lone, immense plateau rising up out of the Azrith Plain. Since the palace was the ancestral home of the Lord Rahl, parts of it were off-limits to the public, but most of the expansive complex was home to thousands of others. There were living quarters for people of every sort, from officials to merchants, to craftsmen, to workers, with other areas set aside for visitors. The sprawling public corridors linked the city palace together and provided access to it all. Not far from the woman sitting against the wall, a shop window displayed bolts of cloth. Throughout the palace there were shops of every sort. Down inside the plateau hundreds more rooms provided everything from quarters for soldiers to yet more shops for residents and visitors alike. The narrow road rising along the side of the plateau that Richard and Kahlan had ridden up after visiting the market was the fastest way up to the People's Palace, but it was narrow and in places treacherous, so the public was not allowed to use it. The main route for visitors, merchants, and workers of every sort was through the great inner doors and up the passageways inside the plateau. Many people never ventured all the way up to the palace at the top, but came to shop at the market that in peaceful times sprang up down on the plain, or to visit some of the hundreds of shops along the way up inside the plateau. The sheer inaccessibility of the city palace, if the drawbridge on the road was raised and the great inner doors were closed, made assaults futile. Throughout history sieges of the palace withered out on the inhospitable Azrith Plain long before the strength of those in the palace began to wane. |
| 692 |
Many had tried, but there was no practical way to attack the People's Palace. The old woman would have had a hard time making the climb all the way up the inner passageways to the palace proper. Because she was blind, it must have been especially difficult for her. Although there were always people wanting to know what the future held, Richard supposed that she probably found more customers up top willing to pay for her simple fortunes, and that made the climb worth the effort. Richard gazed out at the seemingly endless corridor filled with people and the ever-present whisper of footsteps and conversation. He supposed that the woman, being blind, would be attuned to all the sounds of the people in the corridors and by that judge the enormity of the place. He felt a pang of sorrow for her, as he had when he had first spotted her sitting alone at the side of the hallway, but now because she could not see the splendor all around her, the soaring marble columns, stone benches, and elaborately patterned granite floors that glowed wherever they were touched by the streamers of sunlight coming in from the skylights high overhead. Other than his homeland of the Hartland woods where he had grown up, Richard thought that the palace was just about the most beautiful place he had ever seen. He never failed to be awed by the sheer overwhelming intellect and effort it must have taken to envision and construct such a place. Many times throughout history, as when Richard had first been brought in as a prisoner, the palace had been the seat of power for evil men. Other times, as now, it was the center of peaceful prosperity, a beacon of strength that anchored the D'Haran Empire. "A penny for my future?" Richard asked. "And a worthy bargain it is," the woman said without hesitation. "I hope you aren't saying that my future is worth no more than a penny." The old woman smiled a slow smile. Her clouded eyes stared without seeing. "It is if you don't heed the omen tendered." She blindly held out her hand, a question waiting for his answer. Richard placed a penny on her upturned palm. He imagined that she had no other way to feed herself except by offering to tell people their future. Being blind, though, in a way gave her a certain marketable credibility. People probably expected that, being blind, she had access to some kind of inner vision, and that belief probably helped bring her business. "Ah," she said, nodding knowingly as she tested the weight of the coin he had given her, "silver, not copper. Clearly a man who values his future." "And what would lie in that future, then?" Richard asked. He didn't really care what a fortune-teller might have to say, but he expected something in return for the penny. She turned her face up toward his, even though she could not see his face. The smile ghosted away. She hesitated for just a moment before speaking. "The roof is going to fall in." She looked as if the words had come out differently than she had intended, as if they surprised her. |
| 693 |
"All right, Rikka. Let's go see what Zedd is all wound up about." He started to take a step, but the old woman sitting on the floor tugged his pant leg to stop him. "Lord Rahl," she said, trying to pull him closer, "I would not ask for payment from you, especially since I am but a humble guest in your home. Please, take your silver back with my appreciation for the gesture." "It was a bargain struck," Richard said in a tone meant to reassure her. "You held up your part. I owe you payment for your words about the future." She let her hand slip from its grip of his pants. "Then heed the omen, Lord Rahl, for it is true." Following Rikka deep into the private, warmly paneled corridors of the palace, Kahlan spotted Zedd standing with Cara and Benjamin at a window overlooking a small courtyard at the bottom of a deep pocket formed by the stone walls of the palace that rose up out of sight. A simple, unadorned door not far beyond the window provided access to an atrium where a small plum tree grew beside a wooden bench sitting on a stone pad surrounded by lush green ivy. As small as the room was, it still brought a welcome bit of the outdoors and daylight into the deep interior of the palace. Kahlan was relieved to be away from the public corridors, away from the constant gazes that were always on them. She felt a profound sense of calm as Richard slipped his arm around her waist, pulling her close for a moment. He laid his head atop hers as she leaned in toward him. It was a moment of closeness that they didn't generally feel comfortable allowing themselves when in public view. Cara, wearing her white leather outfit, stood gazing out the window into the courtyard. Her single blond braid was perfectly done. Her red Agiel, the weapon carried by Mord-Sith that always hung at the ready by a fine chain on their wrists, stood out against the white leather like a bloodstain on a snow white tablecloth. An Agiel, looking like nothing more than a short leather rod, was just as lethal as the women who carried them. Benjamin had on a crisp general's uniform and wore a gleaming silver sword at his hip. The sword was no ceremonial accessory. Countless times Kahlan had seen how commanding he was in combat, seen his heart. She had been the one who had appointed him a general. Kahlan had expected that Cara and Benjamin might be dressed casually. They were not. They both looked ready for the war that was over. She supposed that as far as both of them were concerned, there was never an excuse to relax their guard. Both their lives were devoted to the protection of Richard, the Lord Rahl. Of course, the man they guarded was far more lethal than either of them. Dressed in his black and gold war-wizard outfit, Richard looked every bit the part of the Lord Rahl. But he was more than that. At his hip he wore the Sword of Truth, a singular weapon meant for a singular individual. Yet despite the weapon's power, it was the individual behind it that was the true weapon. That was what really made him the Seeker, and what made the Seeker so formidable. |
| 694 |
A number of the officials reminded her that in the Midlands most of the lands were formally represented in Aydindril, sometimes with rulers of the lands spending extended periods of time there, sometimes with emissaries and representatives, but there were always officials of some sort at hand so the different lands could always be involved in the decisions of the council or in matters of setting laws. Kahlan assured them that the People's Palace was now the formal seat of power in the D'Haran Empire, so there would be similar arrangements made for them and their representatives to have permanent quarters from where they could participate in the shaping of their common future. Everyone seemed not merely relieved to hear this, but genuinely pleased. Kahlan was used to being in command and carried her power with an easy grace. She had grown up mostly alone because, as a Confessor, she had grown up being feared. When Richard had first met her he saw people tremble in her presence. In the past people saw only the terrifying power she wielded, not the nature of the woman behind that power, but in the time she and Richard had fought on behalf of these people, she had come to be admired and respected. People had come to look up to her. At the most inopportune moment, in the midst of Kahlan's answers to questions, Nathan marched up behind Richard, took hold of his arm, and pulled him back a little. "I need to speak with you." Kahlan paused in her answer about an ancient boundary dispute. She had been telling people that there was nothing to dispute; they were all now part of the D'Haran Empire and it didn't really matter where a meaningless line was drawn on a map. As she fell silent, every eye went to the tall prophet. They all knew who he was. Richard noticed that Nathan had the book End Notes in hand, with one finger acting as a placeholder in the book. "What is it?" Richard asked in a low voice as he took several steps back from the suddenly silent crowd watching him. Prophecy was apparently of more concern to them than matters of trade or arbitrary boundaries. Nathan leaned in and spoke confidentially. "You told me that the boy you encountered down in the market today told you something about darkness in the palace." Richard straightened and turned back to look around at all the people watching him. "I'm sorry for the interruption. If you will excuse me it will only be a moment." He took Nathan by the arm and moved him back a few more steps toward the double doors all along the wall at the back of the room. Zedd came along, as did Kahlan. Cara and Benjamin, not far away, took the hint in the look Richard gave them and drew the attention of the delegates by asking about how the rebuilding was going in their homelands. Once sure that no one was within earshot, Richard turned back to Nathan. "The boy said that there is darkness in the palace. He said that darkness is seeking darkness." Without a word, Nathan opened the book and handed it to Richard. Richard immediately spotted the line all by itself: Darkness is seeking darkness. |
| 695 |
The crowd seemed to realize that they were not merely pushing into areas where they didn't belong, but overstepping bounds. Somewhat shamed, they spoke quietly among themselves, agreeing with one another that it made sense that maybe they should leave such matters to those who were best able to deal with them. Everyone seemed to relax a bit, as if having just pulled back from the brink. Out of the corner of his eye to the right, Richard saw the blue robes of one of the serving women coming up on the far side of Kahlan. The woman gently laid her left hand on Kahlan's forearm as if wanting to speak to her confidentially. That, more than anything, was what got Richard's attention. People didn't just come up and casually lay a hand on the Mother Confessor. As she came around and turned in toward Kahlan, Richard saw the haunted look in the woman's eyes and the blood down the front of her robes. He was already moving when he saw the knife in her other hand sweeping around toward Kahlan's chest. Time itself seemed to stop. Richard recognized all too well the eternal emptiness between the heartbeats of time, that expectant void before the lightning ignition of power. He was a step too far away to stop the woman in time, yet he also knew that he was too close for what was about to happen. It was already out of his hands and there was nothing he could do about it. Life and death hung in that instant of time. Kahlan could not afford to hesitate. His instinct to turn away tensed his muscles even though he was well aware that nothing he could do would be fast enough. The sea of people stood wide-eyed, frozen in shock. Several Mord-Sith in red leather had already begun to leap a distance that Richard knew they could never make in time. He saw Cara's red Agiel beginning to spin up into her hand, soldiers' hands going for swords, and Zedd's hand lifting to cast magic. Richard knew that not one of them had a chance to make it in time. At the center of it all, Richard saw the woman holding Kahlan's forearm down out of the way as the bloody knife in her other hand arced around toward Kahlan's chest. In that instant everyone had only begun to move. Into that silent void in time, thunder without sound suddenly ignited. Time crashed back in a headlong rush as the force of the concussion exploded through the confined space of the banquet hall. The impact to the air raced outward in a circle. People near the front cried out in pain as they tumbled backward to the ground. Those farther away in the rear were knocked back a few steps. In shock and fear they too late protectively covered their faces with an arm. Food flew off tables and carts; glasses and plates shattered against the walls; wine bottles, cutlery, containers, small serving bowls, napkins, and fragments of glass were blown back by the shock wave sweeping across the room at lightning speed. When it hit the far end of the room the glass in all the windows blew out. The bottoms of curtains flapped out through the shattered windows. |
| 696 |
Those outside walls were made of tightly fit granite blocks. At regular intervals deep-set windows in the stone wall provided light. They also let in a little of the frigid air each time a gust rattled the panes. Out those windows Richard saw heavy, dark clouds scudding across the sky, brushing towers in the distance. The greenish gray clouds told him that he was right about the coming storm. Snowflakes danced and darted in the gusty wind. He was sure that it wouldn't be long before the Azrith Plain was in the grip of a spring blizzard. They were going to have guests at the palace for a while. "Down this way," Nathan said as he gestured through a double set of doors to the right. They led out of the private areas and into the service passageways used by workers and those who lived at the palace. People in the halls, workers of every sort, moved to the side as they encountered the procession. Everyone, it seemed, gave Richard and the two wizards with him worried looks. No doubt the word of the trouble had already been to every corner of the vast palace and back three times over. Everyone would know about it. By the looks on the somber faces he saw, people were no longer in a celebratory mood. Someone had tried to kill the Mother Confessor, Lord Rahl's wife. Everyone loved Kahlan. Well, he thought, not everyone. But most people sincerely cared about her. They would be horrified by what had happened. Now that peace had returned, people had come to feel an expectant joy about what the future might hold. There was a growing sense of optimism. It seemed like everything was possible and that better days were ahead. This new fixation on prophecy threatened to destroy all that. It had already ended the lives of two children. Richard recalled Zedd's words that there was nothing as dangerous as peacetime. He hoped his grandfather was wrong. Richard and Zedd followed Nathan into a narrow hallway lit by a window at the end. It led them through a section of quarters where many of the palace staff lived. With its whitewashed, plastered walls and a wood plank floor that had been worn down from a millennium of traffic, the passageway was simpler than even the service hallways. Most doors, though, were decorated with painted flowers, or country scenes, or colorful designs, giving each place an individual, homey feel. "Here," Nathan said as he touched a door with a stylized sun painted on it. When Richard nodded, Nathan knocked. No answer came in response. Nathan knocked harder. When that, too, received no answer he banged the side of his fist against the door. "Lauretta, it's Nathan. Please open the door?" He banged his fist on the door again. "I told Lord Rahl what you said, that you have a message for him. I brought him along. He wants to see you." The door opened a crack, just wide enough for one eye to peer out into the hallway. When she saw the three of them waiting she immediately opened the door all the way. "Lord Rahl! You came!" She grinned as she licked her tongue out between missing front teeth. |
| 697 |
She was lying on top of the bedspread. Her bare thighs prickled at the touch of chilly air. Carefully, quietly, she slipped her legs over the side of the bed. Without making a sound she stood. She waited, listening, her whole body tense and ready. Kahlan stared so hard into the dark corner at the far end of the room that it made her eyes hurt. It felt like someone was staring back. She tried to tell where it felt like they could be hiding, but she couldn't come up with a direction. If she could sense someone watching, but wasn't able to sense where they were, then it had to be her imagination. "Enough of this," she said under her breath. With deliberate strides she walked to the dressing table. The heel-strikes of the laced boots she hadn't felt like taking off echoed softly back from the dark end of the room. Standing at the dressing table, watching, she turned up the wick on the lamp. It threw mellow light into the darkness. There was no one there. In the mirror she saw only herself standing half naked with a knife gripped in her fist. Just to be sure, she walked resolutely to the end of the room. She found no one there. She looked to the far side of the drapes and glanced behind the big pieces of furniture. There was no one there, either. How could there be? Richard had checked the room before he had taken her in. She had watched as he had looked everywhere while trying not to look like he was looking. Cara and soldiers stood guard as Kahlan had rested. No one could have entered. She turned to the tall, elaborately carved wardrobe and pulled open the heavy doors. Without hesitation she lifted out a clean dress and pulled it on. She didn't know if the other one, the one she had taken off, would ever be clean again. It was hard to get the blood of children off a white dress. At the Confessors' Palace, back in Aydindril, there were people on the staff who knew how to care for the white dresses of the Mother Confessor. She supposed that there would be people at the ancestral home of the Lord Rahl who knew all about cleaning up blood. The thought of where that blood had come from made her angry, made her glad the woman was dead. Kahlan paused to consider again why the woman would have died so abruptly. Kahlan hadn't commanded it. She had intended to have the woman locked up. There were a lot more questions Kahlan had wanted to ask, but not in public. If there was one thing Kahlan was good at, it was questioning those she had touched with her power. The thought occurred to her that it was awfully convenient that the woman confessed what she had done, revealed what her prophecy said would happen to Kahlan, and then managed to die before she could be questioned. When all else was said and done, that was the single thing that convinced Kahlan that Richard was right, that there was something more going on. And if he was right, then the woman had likely only been a puppet being moved by a hidden hand. At the thought of Richard, she smiled. Thinking of him always lifted her heart. |
| 698 |
Richard dipped his head in response. He glanced around in the flickering torchlight as he brushed grit off his hands. At least the smell of burning pitch helped cover the stench. The captain looked worried to see the Lord Rahl himself down in his dungeon. His level of concern eased a bit when he saw Nyda come down the ladder. The tall Mord-Sith's red leather outfit and blond hair stood out in stark contrast to the dank, drab stone room. The captain flashed a polite smile at Nyda as he nodded in greeting. He obviously knew her. Richard realized that Mord-Sith were hardly strangers to dungeons, especially this one. In the past, enemies, real or imagined, would have been held in these dungeons and Mord-Sith would have come to torture information out of those with the gift. Having once been one of those prisoners, Richard knew all about it. He gestured to the iron door. "I want to see the woman who killed her children." "And the man who tried to kill his family?" "Yes, him too," Richard said. The captain worked a big key in the door. The lock resisted for a moment, but after the latch clanged open, the man yanked the heavy iron door open enough to slip through. After hooking the keys on his belt, he took a lantern from a table and led the way into the inner dungeon. In a well-practiced sweep of her arm, Nyda took another lantern off an iron peg in the wall. Before Richard could go through the door, she stepped in front of him and went in first. He was quite familiar with Mord-Sith's insistence on going first so they could check for danger. He had long ago learned that his life was easier if he let them have their way and didn't argue with them over such minor issues. He saved commands for times when they really mattered. Because of that, the Mord-Sith heeded his commands. The captain led them down a series of narrow passageways that in most places had been carved out of solid rock. Even after thousands of years, the chisel marks looked as fresh as when they had first been cut through the stone. They passed cell doors behind which criminals were held. Up ahead, in the light of the captain's lantern, Richard saw fingers sticking out, gripping the edges of tiny openings in the iron doors. He saw eyes looking out through some of the black openings. When the prisoners saw Nyda coming behind the captain, the fingers withdrew and the eyes disappeared back into the blackness. No one called out. No one wanted to draw her attention. At the end of a particularly narrow, crooked passageway with doors spaced farther apart, the captain came to a halt at a cell on the left. There were no fingers in the opening, no eyes looking out. When the heavy door was pulled open, Richard saw the reason. The outer door opened not into a cell, but into a small inner room with another door. The second, smaller door held the prisoner in an inner room. The man used a long sliver of fatwood to transfer a flame from his lantern to a second hanging on an iron peg. "These are the shielded cells," the captain said in answer to the question on Richard's face. |
| 699 |
He felt something there, something in that dark alcove. It was watching him. The heavy drapes were drawn, but if they hadn't been, it wouldn't have helped; the night was in the black depths of the raging storm. With only one lamp lit in the room and its wick turned down low there was only enough light to make out the vague, bulky shapes of the wardrobes. There wasn't enough light to really make out any details in the room and not anywhere near enough to make out what ever it was that seemed to be in their room, watching them. Richard squinted, trying as hard as he could to see better in the dim light, trying to make out what he thought seemed just a little darker than the rest of the near-darkness. He thought that he could see a shadowy hint of something. As he stared, he could feel it looking back at him. He was sure that, unlike the last time, this time he not only felt it watching, he could sense its presence in the room. That presence was icy cold and evil. He couldn't begin to imagine what it could be. After all, men of the First File were stationed all up and down the corridors. These were not the kind of men who fell asleep on watch, or got bored and didn't pay attention. These were battle-hardened men who were always ready for any threat. These were the elite of the D'Haran forces. Not one of those men wanted to be the one who let any threat get so much as a glimpse of Richard and Kahlan. What ever it was, it had not skulked in past the guards to get into the bedroom. What ever it was that Richard saw crouched in the alcove was dark and indistinct and not very large. It waited, still and silent, perfectly centered between the two dark forms of the tall wardrobes. Richard wondered what it was waiting for. From outside he could hear the wind howl and moan and occasionally rattle the doors, only to die out and let the room fall silent again. The only sound inside the room that Richard could hear was Kahlan's breathing and the faint hiss of the burning wick of the lamp. Richard couldn't tell if what ever it was he was staring at was nothing more than a murky dark area, or if it only looked that way because it was so dark in the room that it blurred the edges of a shadowed form. What ever it was, it was as dark as pitch. What ever it was, its gaze was unwavering. What ever it was, it was heartless. Richard thought that maybe it looked something like a dog poised there watching them. As he stared, trying to make it out, he realized that, oddly enough, it looked more like a small child, maybe a girl, hunched forward, long hair fallen down around the lowered head as it crouched on the floor. He also knew that it couldn't be real. There was no way that anything could have gotten into the room. At least, he didn't think it could be real. Real or not, Richard knew that Kahlan was seeing the same thing he was seeing. He could feel her heart hammering against his chest. His sword stood leaned up against the nightstand. He was in the middle of the bed, tangled up with Kahlan. |
| 700 |
The weapon was just beyond an arm's length away, just out of reach. Something, some inner sense, told him not to move. He thought then that maybe it wasn't some inner sense, but rather simply the feeling of alarm at something dark crouched not far away, watching them. Either way, he was afraid to move. The thing, if it was a thing and not simply some trick of the dim light, or even his imagination, remained stone-still. He told himself that if it turned out to be nothing more than a shadow he was going to feel pretty foolish. But shadows didn't watch. This thing was watching. Unable to endure the silent tension any longer, Richard slowly, ever so slowly, started to shift himself off Kahlan in order to reach toward his sword. When he began to move, the thing started to uncurl, to slowly rise as if in response to his movement. A soft sound accompanied the movement, a brittle sound like sticks, muffled in cloth, snapping. Or maybe it sounded more like bones cracking. Richard froze. The thing didn't. As it rose, the head began to turn up. Richard could hear soft riffling pops as if the thing was dead and stiff, and every bone in the spine cracked under the effort of the forced movement. The head continued to lift until Richard finally saw the eyes glaring out at him from under a lowered brow. "Dear spirits," Kahlan whispered, "what is that?" Richard couldn't even venture a guess. From across the room, lightning quick, the thing suddenly bounded toward the bed. Richard dove for his sword. Out of the corner of her eye Kahlan saw the dark thing charge toward them as Richard dove off her and across the bed. As he slid toward the edge of the bed, his hand snatched the hilt of the sword. He rolled off the bed, yanking the sword free of the scabbard in one fluid movement as he landed on his feet. The ringing sound of the Sword of Truth's steel cut the silence like a scream of rage that sent a shiver rippling across her flesh. As the dark shape vaulted toward them Richard spun to face the threat. Kahlan ducked back out of the way. With lightning speed, the weapon swung around in an arc. The blade whistled as it swept through the air to meet the streak of a shadow. Razor-sharp steel cut through the center of the inky form. But even as the blade was cleaving it, the dark form evaporated like dust losing its shape, a shadow decomposing into eddies and swirls as it vanished. Richard stood beside the bed, sword in hand, panting with rage. As far as Kahlan could tell, the source of his awakened anger was no longer there. She heard the soft, distant rumble of thunder, and the faint hiss of the lantern on the table between the chairs and the couch. Kahlan scooted across the bed toward him. She peered around at the dark room, trying to see if the form had reappeared somewhere else. She wondered if she would be able to see it if it did. "I don't feel anything watching us," she said, still scanning the darkness for the silent threat. "I don't either. It's gone." Kahlan wondered for how long. |
| 701 |
"A lot longer." As Richard started down the steps he carefully stepped around chunks of fallen stone and areas of sand and dirt that covered large parts of the stairs. Kahlan, a hand on his shoulder, followed him down, careful to also step around rubble. At the bottom of the long flight of stairs they reached a walkway at the outer edge of a room. The walls were made up of granite blocks, and soaring arches created a vaulted ceiling, all supporting the center portion of the Garden of Life. The dark stone, its surface dirty and decayed, looked ancient. Richard didn't think the place had seen the light of day for millennia. Rather than being flat, the center portion of the floor rose up in a dome formed by fat stone ribs filled in between with simple stone blocks. The dome forced them to use the walkway around the outer edges of the room. A lot of debris from above covered the dome, but much of it had slid down to build up in the well against the wall that was the only walk-way. Richard started around the room, climbing over the rubble. Kahlan clambered over huge stone pieces fallen from above, going around in the opposite direction. The room appeared to serve no purpose except possibly as an inspection area for the structure. There were other places in the palace that were intended only as inspection ports for the foundation, or hidden parts of the support columns, connections, and beams, so he didn't find that much of it surprising. Richard wondered why, though, if that was true, it had been closed off from the Garden of Life. The stairway above the landing where the ladder rested appeared to have been dismantled. Since that part of the garden's floor had collapsed, there was no longer any way to know if there had ever been access up into the garden. He supposed that it could have been nothing more than a construction access that had been sealed over. "Over here," Kahlan called out. "There's a spiral staircase over here in the corner that goes down to what's below." Richard held the glowing sphere out ahead of him as he wound his way down the spiral of wedge-shaped stairs. There was no railing, making the descent into the darkness treacherous, especially since a lot of the sand and dirt from the floor of the Garden of Life that had fallen into the room above them had in turn poured down the spiral stairs. Richard had to pause in places to use the side of his boot to move dirt and debris aside so that they would have a safe place to step. As they went ever lower into the blackness, the confining shaft for the spiral stairs opened up into a dark, dead still room. The light of the sphere Richard was holding cast only enough illumination into the distance to see that the simple, unadorned room was made of stone blocks. There were no doors or other openings that Richard could see. The room was empty except for what appeared to be a block of stone sitting in the middle. "What in the world could this place be?" Kahlan asked. Richard shook his head as he looked around. |
| 702 |
Each was only a little longer than his longest finger, and soft enough that he could easily bend it. All the strips looked to be identical. Stacked tightly and evenly as they were, and covered in dust and dirt, the mass of them looked like part of the wall, like a ledge in the stone. Kahlan bent close, trying to see it better. "What do you think they are?" Richard straightened the strip of metal and set it back in its resting place atop one of the stacks. "They don't have any markings on them. They seem to be nothing more than simple strips of metal." Kahlan's gaze swept along the wall. "They're stacked all around the edge of the room. There must be tens of thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands. What could they be for, and why are they buried in here?" "It seems like they were left and forgotten. Or it could be they were hidden away." Kahlan's nose wrinkled. "Why hide plain strips of metal?" Richard could only shrug as he looked around, trying to see if the room held any other clues to its purpose. The place didn't seem to make any sense. He scuffed the side of his boot across the floor. It was stone, covered with what was probably thousands of years of dust and crumbled, decayed granite from the surface of the walls. Even though he knew from being above the room that it had a vaulted ceiling above, the ceiling down inside the room was flat, a false ceiling, probably plastered over but now the same dark, dingy color as the walls. All in all, other than the stacks of metal and the odd block of stone in the center, it was an unremarkable room. Except, perhaps, that it led to nowhere. Had the floor of the Garden of Life not collapsed, there would have been no way into the buried room. If not for the roof falling in, the room could easily have remained undiscovered for a few thousand more years. As Kahlan trailed her fingers along the wall, looking for any hint of writing carved into the stone, or possibly a hidden passageway, Richard turned his attention to the square block that sat in the center of the dingy room. Oddly enough, the stone floor stopped short of the block, leaving a narrow gutter of dirt all the way around it. The block was slightly more than waist high. If he and Kahlan would have reached across from opposite sides, they wouldn't have been able to touch their fingers. He couldn't imagine what it could be, or what it was doing there. With snowflakes drifting past, he squatted down, holding out the glowing sphere to see better, and brushed the flat of his hand along the surface of the side. He was surprised to realize that the surface was not stone, as he had thought, but thick, heavy metal. He rubbed away at the dust and grime of ages, trying to see it better. The surface of the metal was corroded and dirty, making it look like the stone in the room, but there could be no doubt, it was metal. Beneath the filth where he wiped his hand across the surface, metal glinted in the light of the sphere. "Look at this," Richard said. Kahlan glanced back over her shoulder. |
| 703 |
"What is it?" Richard thumped his fist against it. Even though it seemed to be extraordinarily heavy, he could just barely tell from the sound that it was hollow. "This thing is made of metal. And look at this, here." He held the sphere out so she could see better as she came up next to him. There was a small slot, starting in the top and cut down into one side of the thing. Some of the curious strips of metal were stacked in the slot. Kahlan removed one of the metal strips, inspecting it. As far as Richard could tell it was devoid of any markings, the same as all the others stacked against the wall. He rubbed more of the dirt and debris off the side. "There's some kind of emblem or something on the side. Kind of hard to tell what it is." With a heavy thud that shook the ground and made both of them flinch, light shot up from the center of the top. Dirt in the space between the metal monolith and the stone floor, disturbed by the thump, lifted into the still air. As one, Richard and Kahlan took a step back. "What did you do?" "I don't know," Richard said. "I was brushing it with my hand to clean away the dirt to see what's on the side." A deep mechanical groan started within the thing. Metal moved against metal, giving off grating sounds. The sound, like heavy gears turning, grew louder as if the whole thing came to life. Richard and Kahlan backed away a little more, not knowing what to do. Abruptly, the light that had shot up from the center of the top changed to an amber color. Richard leaned in and saw that there was a small hole in the center of the top where the light was coming out. That was when he saw a hint of more light coming from a small opening on the other side of the thing. He rushed around and brushed dirt from the top surface of the metal box. A slit, two hand-widths wide but narrow, was filled with a piece of heavy glass, making a small window that was flush with the surface of the top. The glass was thick and wavy, but with the aid of the light coming from somewhere down inside he was able to look in through the window, down into the interior of the metal box. He could see that the entire box was filled with gears, wheels, levers, and moving parts all fit together into a complex machine that was all in motion at once. Some of the trip levers and shafts holding the smaller parts were small, only as thick as his little finger. But some of the fat mounting blocks holding the bigger shafts had to weigh thousands of pounds, with the larger gears they held probably weighing a great deal more. The diameter of some of the gears exceeded his height, with teeth more than a hand-width wide. The heavy framework holding it all together was enormous not only in size but in complexity. The surfaces of all the massive pieces of machinery down inside were rusted and pitted. As the gears turned and the interlocking teeth engaged against each other, the surface of those teeth was abraded so that the metal, where it slid together, was polished to a high luster. |
| 704 |
"Because I understand some of the language of symbols. A lot of spell-forms are really ideas expressed through symbols or emblems rather than words. Symbols, even ones I've never seen before, stick in my head. That's how I solved a number of things in the past. This one is largely new to me. But elements of it seem oddly familiar." Kahlan sighed as she idly picked one of the metal strips out of the opening near the glass window. Something about it caught her eye. She was surprised to see that there were markings on it. She held it closer. She was stunned by what she saw. "Richard, look." As he bent close she held it out in the light for him to see. "This one in here isn't blank." Richard took it from her when she held it out and carefully looked over the line of symbols seemingly burned into the metal. "They're all different," he said, half to himself. Kahlan looked in the slot where she had found it. "There are two more strips in here." She pulled them out, took a quick look, and then handed them to him. He looked them over, one at a time, studying each for a moment. "More symbols. But they're different. Each strip has distinctive emblems on it. Look, this one has a whole string of markings, but the one that was on the bottom only has a few." When the machine began to make more noise, as if a whole bank of additional gears had been engaged, Richard bent to look into the slit of a window. Kahlan could see the light from inside reflecting in lines that moved parts of symbolic elements over the contours of his face. "I can see a strip of metal being pulled out from the bottom of the stack on the other side. It's being pulled into the machine and going way down inside." Kahlan put her head close to his, trying to see what he was talking about. Then she saw it, way down among the gears, shafts, and levers, being pulled through by a small pincer mechanism holding the front of the metal strip. The pincer was attached to a large wheel that carried the strip of metal up and around with it to place it in a track where a series of levers moved it along different junctions of track until another geared pincer finally picked it up. Kahlan and Richard both turned aside a little as a flash of intense orangish white light ignited deep within. Out of the corner of her eye she could see a bright pinpoint of light dance across the metal strip. The focused beam of light from far below moved with lightning speed but in a tightly controlled manner. The light was so intense that she could see a moving, glowing white-hot spot of light shining through the top of the metal where the beam hit it from underneath. As the strip came around with the wheel, another mechanism took it in turn and rotated it around so that the symbol that had been burned into the underside of the metal was now facing up. At exactly the correct point in the arc of the gear, the pincers opened and a lever on a geared mechanism swung in from the side to push the metal strip through a slot in the side of the machine. |
| 705 |
She heard it drop into the tray. Richard and Kahlan straightened from the little window and looked at each other. "Did you see that?" he asked. Kahlan nodded. "Pretty hard to miss." Richard pulled the strip of metal out of the tray. He immediately tossed it on top of the machine and shook his hand, then blew on his fingers. He pushed the hot metal strip around with a finger for a moment until it cooled, then gingerly picked it up and studied the single symbol etched into it. "What about that one? Do you recognize it?" Kahlan asked. Richard stared at it with a troubled expression. "I'm not entirely certain. It's not exactly the same, but it's pretty close." "Pretty close to what? What is it?" Richard looked up at her again. "It's the emblematic representation for fire." Outside of the Garden of Life hundreds of heavily armed guards filled the corridor in both directions. They all looked a great deal more than edgy. Kahlan realized that they would have had to have heard the lightning hit the Garden of Life. They probably heard the glass roof breaking and falling as well. They undoubtedly wondered what in the world had been going on beyond the doors. They might even have feared that it was an attack of magic of some sort, and so they were standing ready in case they were called upon to defend the palace. She knew, though, that despite their worry, none of them, not even a Mord-Sith, would dare to enter the Garden of Life while the Lord Rahl was inside unless he invited them in. The grim look on Richard's face and the set of his jaw as he came marching out probably only confirmed to all the men watching him approach that they had made the right decision to remain outside. The only people who regularly went into the garden were the staff assigned to tend the grass, flowers, shrubs, and trees. Only the most highly trusted people on the palace staff were allowed to work in the garden. Even then, when they went in to do their work officers of the First File watched them at all times. During the war, when they were under constant threat and there were dangerous objects of magic containing tremendous power locked away in the Garden of Life for safekeeping, not even the people who tended the garden had been allowed to go in to take care of the plants and trees. As a result it became for a time a wild, overgrown place that had taken on an eerie look that in a way matched the gloomy mood of everyone in the palace. After the war had ended, it had taken a lot of work to return the garden to the state of splendor it was now in. Kahlan had a feeling, though, that even such occasional tending was at an end and the Garden of Life was about to again become strictly off-limits to everyone except on Lord Rahl's instructions. Throughout history the Garden of Life had been a place where the Lord Rahl, from time to time, had unleashed some of the most powerful magic in existence. It had been a place that on occasion had been a gateway to the underworld itself. Magic was a mystery to most people and therefore greatly feared. |
| 706 |
When she noticed that no one else seemed to have heard it, she thought that she must have only heard some other errant sound and mistook it for the howl of a wolf. Richard was right, she was tired. She was letting her imagination run away with her. Kahlan kissed Richard's cheek and then trailed her hand along the back of his shoulders on her way by. He caught her hand. She wished more than anything that he could come lie with her, keep her company, keep her safe. Her hand finally slipped from his gentle grasp as she followed the others on their way to the Garden of Life. Hannis Arc, working on the tapestry of lines linking constellations of elements that constituted the language of Creation recorded on the ancient Cerulean scroll spread out among the clutter on his desk, was not surprised to see the seven ethereal forms billow into the room like acrid smoke driven on a breath of bitter breeze. Like an otherworldly collection of spectral shapes seemingly carried on random eddies of air, they wandered in a loose clutch among the still and silent mounted bears and beasts rising up on their stands, the small forest of stone pedestals holding massive books of recorded prophecy, and the evenly spaced display cases of oddities, their glass reflecting the firelight from the massive hearth at the side of the room. Since the seven rarely used doors, the shutters on the windows down on the ground level several stories below stood open in a fearless show of invitation. Though they frequently chose to use windows, they didn't actually need the windows any more than they needed the doors. They could seep through any opening, any crack, like vapor rising in the early morning from the stretches of stagnant water that lay in dark swaths through the peat barrens. The open shutters were meant to be a declaration for all to see, including the seven, that Hannis Arc feared nothing. Many people in Saavedra, the ruling city of Fajin Province down in the broad valley below the citadel, shuttered themselves in at night. Everyone out in the Dark Lands did. Shutting in at night for fear of what might be outside was only wise, after all. While that was true for those down in the city, it was doubly true for those who lived out in the more remote areas. There were corporeal dangers in the night, creatures that hunted with fang and claw, worthy of fear. There were other things to fear as well, things one rarely saw coming, if at all, until it was too late. Hannis Arc, though, did not fear the things that came out at night. He bent those elements to his own ends, mastered them, making him the source of fear, not its victim. He banked the hot coals of those fears in the hearts of others so that they would always be ready to roar to life in order to serve him. Hannis Arc wanted people to fear him. If they feared him, they respected him, they obeyed him, they bowed down to him. He made sure that people were never without cause to fear him. No, unlike most people who inhabited the Dark Lands, Hannis Arc was not himself burdened by fears. |
| 707 |
Instead, he was driven by a ceaseless, smoldering rage, a rage that was like a thing alive within him. That rage left no room for fear to find a foothold. That ever-present rage dwelling within him was a brightly burning star that always guided his way. It was always there to compel him, counsel him, even to chide him, as it drove him to set great wrongs right. Anger was not only his constant companion, it was his trusted friend, his only friend. The glow of the dozens of candles in the stand at the far end of the room wavered as the seven familiars swirled around them on their way by, as if lingering to ride the eddies of heat rising from the flames. Mohler, the old scribe hunched over a massive book laid open on a stand not far away, straightened as if he thought he might have heard something. One of the seven glowing forms glided around him, trailing a tendril hand along his jaw. The man glanced around, seeming to feel the touch, but he couldn't find its source. He couldn't see the familiars. The woman standing guard back near the doors could. With gnarled, arthritic fingers, Mohler touched his cheek, but when he could find no cause for the sensation his hand dropped to his side and he returned his attention to recording the latest prophecies from the abbey while the seven spiraled up toward the vaulted ceiling to glide along the hulking stone arches and skim just beneath the heavy beams, surveying the gloomy, candlelit room. "It's your move," Hannis Arc reminded the hunched scribe. Mohler glanced back momentarily to see his master watching him. "Ah yes, so it is," he said as he laid down his quill and turned from his work at the massive book to shuffle over to the stone pedestal that held the board laid out with carved alabaster and obsidian pieces. He'd had more than enough time to consider his next move. He'd had most of the night, in fact. Hannis Arc hadn't pressed. He had already worked out the array of moves available to the man. None seemed to be good choices, although some were not as swiftly fatal as others. Hesitantly, Mohler reached out and moved an alabaster piece to another square, taking an inky black piece that occupied it off the board and setting it aside. It was a move that he had probably pondered for hours, a move that captured a valuable piece and put him into a position to threaten to win. Hannis Arc rose and, hands clasped behind his back, strode to the board. He stroked the knuckle of his first finger along his gaunt cheek to make it look as if the loss of his piece might have taken him by surprise and his next move required consideration. It did not. He advanced a black pawn toward the white side. Mohler had hoped for just that move and he was ready. Without thinking it through he immediately took the pawn, placing his alabaster rook in its place on a square that now placed his opponent in peril. Hannis Arc had been expecting such impatience from the old scribe. Unlike most people, Hannis Arc was not plagued by the flaw of impatience. |
| 708 |
Little did the man know that the seven familiars huddled together in the peak of the ceiling, watching, listening. Hannis Arc knew that they would report every word back to the Hedge Maid. "Soon, Bishop, you will rule D'Hara. You will rule the empire." Mohler did not look up to meet the steady gaze of the blue-eyed woman watching him as he pulled open the door. Few people had the courage to meet her gaze. Hannis Arc returned to his desk as the old scribe pulled the heavy iron-bound oak door closed on his way out. As he scooped his dark robes under his legs to sit at the desk in his massive leather chair, he watched from the corner of his eye as the seven glided in closer. Their flowing robes radiated a supple, bluish blush with a soft, ethereal glimmer to it. They moved with fluid grace, their robes never still, giving him the impression that he was actually looking in at them in another place, seeing them in an ethereal world of continual gentle breezes. From a distance, each seemed as elegant a creature as ever existed. To all appearances they seemed to be made of air and light as much as flesh and bone. As they glided closer, he fancied that they looked like nothing so much as good spirits. He knew, though, that they were anything but good spirits. Six of them drifted idly together, like corks in a pond, watching from not far away as the seventh floated in close on the other side of the desk. As she leaned in he could finally see beyond the edge of the cowl covering her head, see the wrinkled flesh of her pitted and pockmarked face, the knotted blue veins, the warts and ulcers that ravaged her distorted features, the hanging tags of skin, the eyes the color of rancid egg yolks. She smiled a wicked smile that promised overwhelming pain and suffering should she wish it. Hannis Arc was not in the least bit intimidated. Rather, he was indignant to be shown such little respect. He did not try to keep the displeasure from his voice. "Has Jit completed the tasks I gave her?" The familiar laid a gnarled hand on the desk as she leaned over toward him. With long, curved nails, bunched, callused skin, and knobby joints, her hand looked more like a claw. She was close enough to have rattled most people down to their very soul, close enough to paralyze a victim with fear. Hannis Arc was no more unnerved by her appearance than she appeared to be of his. Her voice came like a hiss across silk. "You dare to demand of us, to demand of our mistress?" Hannis Arc whipped his arm around and slammed his knife down with all the force he could muster, pinning the familiar's disfigured hand to the desktop. She let out a squealing screech that seemed as if it might break the glass in all the display cases and crack the stone walls besides. It was a shriek that he thought must be something like what would come from those dragged down to the darkest depths of the underworld. It was the stuff of nightmares brought to life. The arms of the other six waved in rage, like pennants in a gale. |
| 709 |
When he slid around the last corner he saw it billowing up thick and dark from under a door down the hall. Berdine clutched his sleeve in one hand to prevent him from getting ahead of her. Whenever there was even a hint of trouble, all of the Mord-Sith did what ever they could to stay as close as possible to him. Berdine had lost her bubbly demeanor, turning as implacable as any of the Mord-Sith when there was a threat. From time to time as she ran, she spun her Agiel up into her fist, as if to reassure herself that it was there at the ready. Down the hallway beyond the smoke, Richard spotted men of the First File running in from the other direction. Several of them had buckets. Water slopped out as they ran, splashing across the wood floor. Several women, awakened at the early hour by the commotion, had come out of their rooms to stand in their doorways, clutching nightgowns at their throats in fright as they watched soldiers racing past. "What is it?" Nathan asked as he rounded the corner and caught up. Zedd was right on his heels. Richard pointed. "It's Lauretta's place. It's on fire." Lauretta stumbled to a halt, gasping for breath. Her short, rapid gait had left her face bright red and her hair in disarray. "My room!" She swallowed, trying to get enough air. She pressed her hands to the sides of her head. "My prophecies!" The soldiers with the buckets kicked open the door. Black smoke laced with crackling sparks and burning pieces of paper rolled out into the hall and along the ceiling. Flags of flame unfurled out along the ceiling of the hallway. The soldiers heaved water in through the open doorway. From the amount of smoke and the heat from the flames, Richard didn't think their buckets of water were going to be anywhere near enough. Lauretta screamed when she saw the soldiers throwing water into her room. She pushed past Zedd and Nathan. "No! You'll ruin my prophecies!" Richard knew that it was too late to worry about that. Besides, water was not the real threat to her prophecies. He caught Lauretta's arm and dragged her to a halt. He knew that if left to her own devices she would run into the burning room to try to save her precious prophecies. As thick as the smoke was, and as heavily as she was breathing, she would have been overcome in mere seconds. The heat, even at a distance, was withering. Richard was relieved that the palace was made mostly of stone. Still, parts of it, like the floors under them and beams above, were wood. They needed to put out the fire as quickly as possible. More soldiers raced up with yet more buckets of water. They ran in toward the door, turned their faces away from the heat, and heaved the water in. Angry, hot flames licked out through the open door in defiance of the water. As Richard had suspected, such an effort was hopelessly in effective. Zedd knew it, too. He rushed past Richard and down the hall, ducking under the lowering black smoke hugging the ceiling to make his way toward the doorway into the inferno. |
| 710 |
Urging soldiers back out of the way with one arm, he cast the other out toward the open door as yet more smoke and flames poured out. Richard could see the air waver before Zedd's hand, forcing the smoke back into the room, but more flames boiled out of the doorway, as if to chase the wizard away. The heat drove Zedd back. "Bags! My gift is too weak in this place." Nathan caught up with Zedd and lifted his palms out toward the smoke-filled doorway, adding his gift to the effort. He, too, caused the air to waver, but it also slowed the amount of smoke as the flames withdrew back into the room. At last the smoke coming out the doorway was choked off entirely, confining it to the room inside, leaving the hallway in a dark and pungent haze. Nathan was a Rahl. His gift wasn't hampered by the palace's spell. He stepped in closer, holding the flats of his hands out toward the doorway again. As Richard restrained Lauretta, he watched Nathan gradually circle his palms, sealing off the room, suffocating the fire at its source. After a few tense moments, the fire died out and the prophet spun a web that cooled the remains of Lauretta's home. As Nathan entered the room, checking that it was safe, Richard let go of Lauretta, allowing her to follow. Weeping in misery, she rushed into the room behind Nathan. She lifted her arms in distress. "My prophecies! Dear Creator! My prophecies are ruined!" Richard could see that she was right. There looked to be some stacks in the farthest reaches that might not have been totally destroyed, but the blackened, wet mess covering the floor was all that was left of most of them. Lauretta fell to her knees, scooping up handfuls of the useless, wet ash. "They're ruined," she wept. Richard laid a hand on her shoulder. "You can write more, Lauretta. You can use the library as a place to write more." She nodded absently. He wondered if she even heard him. Out in the hall, people had gathered to see what was happening. Many of them covered their noses against the stench left from the fire. Richard saw a number of representatives he recognized at the back of the crowd. They looked grim. The fire was obviously confirmation of the prophecy they had all heard that morning. Murmuring warnings to one another, the crowd parted. Cara marched through as if the people were not there, expecting everyone to get out of her way. There was never any problem with that. People were only too eager to get out of the way of a Mord-Sith, especially when she looked as angry as Cara looked. The last thing in the world that most people wanted was to cause a Mord-Sith to take notice of them. "Are you all right?" Cara asked as Richard nodded. "I heard that there was trouble." "Lauretta's prophecies caught fire," he told her. Among the crowd, Richard spotted Ludwig Dreier, the abbot from Fajin Province. His face was set in a stony expression as he took in all the activity. He finally moved through the onlookers to come in closer. "Was anyone hurt?" he asked. |
| 711 |
He knew the moment called for something more to win her. "You are not alone, Orneta." He leaned in and gently kissed her lips. She sat stiffly, unmoving, unresponsive to the kiss. He worried that he had miscalculated. But then she began to give in to the kiss and melt easily into his arms. He told himself that he could do far worse than this woman. She was older, but not much. In fact, he was finding her more attractive, more appealing, with every heavy breath they shared. It was clear that in this moment of vulnerability she was letting her passion take charge. He eased her back onto the couch. She went willingly, surrendering to him, to his hands exploring her, his hands drawing her dress off her shoulders. Kahlan woke with a start when she heard the howls. With a gasp, she sat bolt upright in her bedroll, her heart hammering so hard she could hear the blood whooshing in her ears. She frantically looked around, expecting fangs to rip into her at any instant. She snatched for her knife. The knife wasn't there. She scanned the trees, trying to see the source of the bloodcurdling howls. She saw no beasts, no fangs. She realized that she wasn't out in the woods at all. She was inside. She had been catching a little sleep at the edge of the small indoor forest. There were no hounds, or wolves, or beasts of any kind about. She was safe. The commotion that had awakened her had been the guards opening the double doors into the Garden of Life to make way for someone. The howl had been the hinges on the heavy doors. She pushed her hair back out of her face as she let out a deep sigh. She had to have been dreaming. It had seemed so real, but it was just a dream and its heart-pounding grasp on her quickly loosened. She rubbed her arms as she looked around and sighed again, relieved that it had been only a dream and that it was swiftly evaporating. Overhead, driven by the cycle of the seasons, the barren tree branches were laden with buds. They would soon be in full foliage. After the ceiling had finally been repaired and fully glassed in, the spring sun had, over a period of a few days, gently warmed the Garden of Life, making it once again a cozy refuge and a place where she and Richard could sleep. It wasn't as comfortable as a real bed, but sleep came a lot more easily when they didn't feel unseen eyes watching them. As she wiped the sleep from her eyes, Kahlan had to squint as she looked up at the full moon shining down from overhead. By its position in a black sky she knew that she had been asleep for only a brief time. That meant it was still the dead of night. She was reminded that it was night, too, by the heady fragrance of jasmine that grew at the edge of the small forest and down in front of the short wall. The tiny petals of the delicate white flowers opened only in the night. "Is Richard down there?" Nathan asked on his way past, ignoring both the moonlight and the singular fragrance, gesturing instead toward the dark, gaping hole as he marched down the path through the trees and toward the center of the Garden of Life. |
| 712 |
He was the one the guards had let in. Kahlan nodded. "Yes, he's with Nicci, watching the machine in case it awakens again. Why? What's wrong?" "We have trouble," he said as he headed for the ladder. Kahlan saw that he had something in his hand. She threw the blanket aside and sprang up to follow after him. The men of the First File, after having closed the door, took up defensive positions. There were a good two dozen of the elite of the elite standing guard inside the Garden of Life. It would have required only two or three of these of men to hold off an army. It was somewhat disconcerting to have them nearby, watching over her, but they didn't watch her the way the thing in the bedrooms had. They were watching out for her safety. She didn't know why the thing in the bedroom had been watching, but she knew that it wasn't to keep them safe. Ever since the machine had given the first of its last two prophecies, the one that said "Pawn takes queen," Richard wasn't taking any chances with her safety. Whenever she left the Garden of Life without him, she left with a small army, Nathan, Zedd, or Nicci, and at least two Mord-Sith. It wasn't that she didn't like having protection from whatever the dark danger was that seemed loose in the palace, it was just that it made it rather awkward when meeting with the representatives. It put people on edge, giving the impression that the palace was under siege. The representatives were aware, though, that something was going on and there had already been an attempt on her life, so there was justification for the protection. But the unknown nature of the threat made them all the more interested in what prophecy might have to say. They felt they were being excluded from vital information. Most of the representatives had settled comfortably into their new quarters in the palace, at least for the time being. A few of the rulers had gone home, leaving ambassadors or high officials in their place. Richard and Kahlan thought that it was important for all parts of the empire to feel a sense of unity, of common purpose, and to be governed under uniform laws. The rulers and their representatives from all areas of the far-flung empire not only were encouraged to maintain offices for official business but had their own, permanent residences in the palace. The palace was a virtual city atop the plateau and was certainly large enough to accommodate them. Except, of course, for all the princes. At least for the time being, every prince had been sent home. People naturally wanted an explanation. Richard wouldn't give them one. To do so, he would have had to reveal the last prophecy from the machine, and he didn't want to do that. He didn't want to lie, either, but he had to tell them something. So he had simply told them part of the truth, that word of a threat had been brought to his attention. There had been three princes at the palace. One was an important man who had come representing his father, the king of Nicobarese. The other two princes were less important, but Richard had taken no chances. |
| 713 |
With an earsplitting crash the blade smashed through the heavy doors. Sharp wooden fragments sailed through the hallway, ricocheting off the walls. Everyone nearby ducked away, covering their faces with an arm. Only the briefest pause later, a second swing shattered another ragged swath down through the doors, sending huge splinters flying through the hall and skittering across the carpets. Kahlan could see that a heavy beam inside that had barred the doors had been shattered by the sword. Richard threw a powerful kick into the center of the two broken doors. They both ripped from their hinges and toppled into the room. As the heavy doors crashed to the ground and clouds of dust and debris billowed up, Richard dove through into the dark room. Kahlan tried to follow Richard into the room, but Cara, Agiel in hand and bent on protecting him, raced in ahead of her. Before Kahlan could follow, Nicci slipped in front of Kahlan and dashed in with Cara, both women worried about Richard diving headlong into trouble. Kahlan, no less concerned, cut in front of Benjamin and ran into the darkness after them. A frantic King Philippe tried to follow, but soldiers restrained him. Benjamin urged the king to let Lord Rahl and the rest of them find out what was going on, first. Inside, they came to a halt. The room was dead quiet. Kahlan held her breath against the stench of blood. Glancing back over her shoulder, she could see Benjamin silhouetted in the doorway, waiting to see if they needed reinforcements. On the opposite side of the room, to either side of double doors, sheer curtains billowed in a light breeze, looking like ghosts in the moonlight. "I can't see a thing in here," Cara whispered. Nicci ignited a flame that floated in midair above her palm. She quickly found a stand with a few candles still affixed to it and righted it, then sent the flame into the candles. As the level of light rose, Kahlan could at last see more than the mere hints of shapes in the moonlight coming through the open doors on the opposite side of the room. "Dear spirits," she whispered into the terrible quiet. Nicci retrieved a few lamps from the rubble, lit them, and set them on a table that was still upright. In the lamplight they were finally able to see the full extent of the devastation. Splintered furniture lay overturned. Cushions were scattered. The leather chairs were slashed by what looked to be either claws or fangs, Kahlan didn't know which. A nearby couch had been turned red with blood. Blood splatters crisscrossed the walls in swaths, as if flung there in terrible rage. The amount of it everywhere was shocking. At their feet Queen Catherine lay on her back. Her scalp had been partly peeled away. Gouges looking to be left by fangs raked across her exposed skull and cut through the upper part of her face. Her jaw was torn partially away. Her eyes, as if still filled with paralyzing shock, stared unseeing at the ceiling. Since the remnants were so completely soaked in blood, it was impossible to tell what color her dress had once been. |
| 714 |
Richard wasn't sure what he could do about it, but at the moment, he had bigger worries. While the king and others found it convenient to blame Richard — and Richard blamed himself for failing to link the prophecy to an unborn prince — that didn't get to the heart of what was going on. He needed to figure out what had really happened and why. Something, or someone, had been in that room and had killed Queen Catherine. He was convinced that someone was behind it, that it was deliberate. After all, someone had set about watching the queen. Someone had scratched that symbol in the floor outside her room. Someone was watching and when she had been alone they had struck. At least, that was the way it seemed to him. He had to admit that as incriminating as the symbol was, the murder might not actually be connected to it. He couldn't let himself become locked into only one possibility. He was even more puzzled as to how someone could have gotten into the Lord Rahl's quarters, past all the guards, and then, unseen, scratch that same symbol in the floor outside their bedroom door. As much as he wanted to be with Kahlan, he needed to think things through. More than that, though, he needed to be alone. Somehow, it seemed certain to him that the machine, a machine that could issue omens, had to be at the heart of the the darkness that had settled over the palace. Richard remembered what the sick boy down in the market, the boy who had scratched Richard and Kahlan, had said. He'd said there was darkness in the palace. Darkness seeking darkness. Richard no longer doubted that there was darkness in the palace. It had descended on them all. He reached out and placed a hand on the machine. "What are you?" he whispered, wondering out loud to himself. "Why are you doing this?" As if in response, a low rumble came from the machine as the gears began turning against one another. It wasn't like in the past, though. In the past it had always started with a jolt that shook the ground. This time it began softly, the shafts and gears slowly beginning to move, to gather momentum. In the past it had always been a sudden, thunderous initiation of movement. It had always started at full speed. This time, it was very different. It was a quiet beginning that was building toward that eventual mechanical mayhem. Richard leaned over, looking into the slit of a window. He saw the light inside gradually intensify as the slowly turning gears picked up speed with the machine's awakening. The same symbol projected up onto the ceiling as in the past, though this time instead of igniting at full intensity, it gradually grew in strength. Before long, though, the inner workings of the machine were in full motion. The ground around it rumbled. The light burning up from deep inside steadily grew brighter. The symbol on the ceiling rotating above his head glowed. A latch on a rotating wheel popped up beneath the stack of strips on the other side of the machine and pushed a strip partway out from under the stack. |
| 715 |
Pincers then plucked the blank metal strip from the bottom of the stack. As the strip was pulled onward through the interior mechanism, the light from below intensified again, narrowing and closing down into a beam that burned lines and symbols into the underside of the strip. As the light inscribed the underneath side of the strip, it caused hot spots to glow through onto the top of the metal. After passing over the beam of light, the strip moved along the same as he had seen others move through the machine in the past to finally make it all the way across and drop into the slot near the small window. Richard licked his fingers and plucked the strip from the slot where it rested. He tossed it onto the top of the machine to cool. He blinked in surprise when he realized that the strip had not been hot at all. He reached out and touched it, testing. It was cool to the touch. Frowning, he pulled it close. There were symbols burned into the metal as before, but for some reason this time the process hadn't left it hot. He couldn't imagine why not. Richard turned the strip around so he could read it. He bent closer to the light of a proximity sphere and deciphered the unique collection of elements assembled into a single emblem that made a phrase in the language of Creation. I have had dreams. Richard stood frozen, staring at it. He thought that he must have read it wrong. He rotated the metal strip around, looking at each element in the circle, as he worked out the translation again to make sure he had it right and then spoke it aloud. "I have had dreams." He took a step back from the machine. It had always given a warning in the past, an omen, some kind of prophecy. This didn't make any sense, and it didn't sound at all like prophecy. It sounded as if the machine had ... said something about itself. As he stood staring, Regula paused momentarily as shafts disengaged and gears slowed; then the gears interlocked and picked up speed again. The machine drew another strip from the stack on the other side and pulled it through the inner mechanism, in the process passing it over the focused beam of light to engrave a new message on the second strip. When it dropped into the tray, Richard stood looking at it for a long time before he finally pulled it out. The second strip was as cool to the touch as the first had been. He held it up in the light, looking at the unique organization of symbols that made up the two emblems burned into the metal. Hardly able to believe what he was seeing, he read it aloud. "Why have I had dreams?" The machine seemed to be asking him a question. If it was, he had no idea how to answer it. Richard remembered then having heard before what was now written in the language of Creation on both strips. It had been the boy down in the market, Henrik, who had said "I have had dreams." Richard and Kahlan hadn't been able to understand why he'd said it. They had thought he was sick and delirious. He had then asked "Why have I had dreams?" Now the machine had just asked the very same thing. |
| 716 |
The boy hadn't been delirious. It had been the machine speaking through him. The boy had also asked if the sky was still blue. And it had asked why they had all left it alone. Only it had said "me" — why had they left "me" all alone in the cold and dark. It had said it was alone, so alone. The machine was asking why it had been buried alive. It had also said He will find me, I know he will. Richard wondered if that was a prophecy ... an omen. Or was the machine expressing a fear? Henrik lifted his head from gulping water out of the brook to look back through the trees into the deep shadows. He could hear the hounds coming. They crashed through brush, snarling and barking as they came. With the back of his fist, Henrik wiped fresh tears of terror from his cheeks. The hounds were going to catch him, he knew they were. They wouldn't stop until they had him. Ever since that day at the People's Palace, when they had showed up outside the tent, sniffing and growling, they kept coming for him. His only chance was to keep running. He stuck his foot into the stirrup and hooked his wrist over the horn of the saddle to help pull himself back up onto the horse's back. He spun the reins around his wrists, locked them to his fisted hands with his thumbs, and then thumped the mare's belly with his heels, urging it into an easy gallop. He had hoped to take an extra moment to eat something more than a biscuit and a single piece of dried meat. He was starving. He was thirsty as well, but he'd only had time to lie on his belly and gulp a few swallows of water from the brook before he had sprung up and run back to his horse. He had desperately wanted to eat more, to drink more. But there was no time. The hounds were too close. He had to keep running, keep ahead of them. If they got to him they would tear him apart. He hadn't known where he was going at first. His instinct had made him bolt from his mother's tent and had driven him onward. He knew his mother would want to protect him, but she couldn't. She would have been torn apart and then they would be on him. So he'd had no choice but to run for all he was worth until, exhausted, he had happened upon the horses. They had been in a small corral with some others. He hadn't seen anyone around. He needed to get away, so he snatched up a saddle and took two horses. He was lucky enough to have discovered some traveling food in the saddlebags or he would probably have starved to death by now. He never gave a thought to it being wrong to take the horses; his life was at stake. He simply ran. Who could blame him? Would people really expect him to be torn apart and eaten alive rather than take a couple of horses to get away? What choice did he have? When it grew too dark to see, he was forced to stop for the night. A few times he had come across an abandoned building where he had been able to hole up for the night, safe for a time from the hounds. Then, in the morning, he made a run for it before the hounds knew he was up. |
| 717 |
Several times he had slept in a tree to be safe from them. The hounds, somewhere down in the darkness, eventually grew tired of barking and took off for the night. He thought that maybe they went off to sleep themselves, or to hunt for food. Other times, when there was no place of safety, he had been able to get a fire started. He huddled close to it, ready to grab a burning branch and brandish it at the dogs if they came close. They never did. They didn't like the fire. They always watched from a distance, their heads lowered, their eyes glowing in the dark, as they paced back and forth, waiting for morning. Sometimes when he woke they were gone and he dared hope they had finally tired of the chase. But it was never long before he would hear them baying in the distance, racing in toward him, and the chase would be on again. He pushed the horses so hard keeping ahead of the hounds that the one he rode at first had given out. He switched the saddle to the second and left the first behind, hoping the hounds would be satisfied with the horse and he could get away. The hounds hadn't taken the horse, though. They'd kept coming for him, instead. They had followed him through the mountains, through the forests, ever onward, ever deeper into a dark, trackless land of immense trees. Now he was beginning to recognize the gloomy wood he was passing through. He had grown up several days' travel to the north, in a small village hard against the hills beside a branch of the Caro-Kann River. He had been in this place, on this trail, before, with his mother. He remembered the towering pines clinging to the rocky slope, the way they closed in overhead, obscuring the heavily overcast sky, making it dark and dreary down among the brush and bramble. The horse skidded, trying to find footing on the steep descent down the side of the grade. The woods were too thick and it was too dark in among them to see what lay down ahead. For that matter, he couldn't see far off to the sides, either. But he didn't need to see. He knew what was ahead. After a long descent down the ill-defined, twisting trail, the ground flattened out into a darker place where the trees grew closer together, and the underbrush was thick. There were only rare glimpses of light through the trees. The tangle of shrubs and small trees made it nearly impossible to take any course but the thinned area that served as a trail. When he came to a rocky rim, the horse snorted in protest and refused to go on. There was no place beyond that was safe for a horse. What trail there was made its way down between and over cascading lifts of rock and ledges. Henrik dismounted and peered over the edge down into the misty wilderness below. He remembered that the trail down was narrow, steep, and treacherous. The horse couldn't take him any farther. He looked back over his shoulder, expecting the hounds to come bounding out of the trees at any second. By their growls and yelps, he knew they were getting close again. He quickly unsaddled the horse so that it would at least have a chance to get away. |
| 718 |
Out beyond, unseen birds let out sharp calls that echoed across the still stretches of water. Behind, the hounds sounded like they were in a rabid rage to get to him. He paused in the dark tunnel of dense woods, uncertain if he dared go on. Henrik knew where he was. Before him, the tangle of growth and trailers of vine marked the outer fringe of Kharga Trace. He had heard from his mother that a person had to have a powerful need to go into this place, because not many ever came out again. He and his mother had been two of the lucky ones who had made it back out, making it seem all the more foolish to tempt fate twice. His heart pounding, his breath coming in rapid pulls, he stared ahead with wide eyes. He knew what was waiting for him. Jit, the Hedge Maid, was waiting for him. There was only one thing worse than facing the Hedge Maid again: the certainty of being torn apart and eaten alive by the pack of dogs chasing him. He could hear them getting closer. He had no choice. He plunged ahead. After a frightening race along the trail as it tunneled in places through the dense growth, the landscape opened somewhat as he reached some of the more open stretches of water. The trail, never more than inches above the muddy water, was gradually taken over by tangled roots, sticks, vines, and branches all woven together into a mat that made a walkway of sorts. Without it, the solid ground of the trail in places would simply have vanished beneath stretches of duckweed. As it was, the pathway of sticks and vines barely cleared the surface of the dark brown water. Henrik worried about what would happen should he slip off the trail of tangled shoots and branches. He worried about what waited in the water for the unwary, or the careless. He was so tired, so afraid, that only raw fear kept his feet moving. He wished he could be back, safe, with his mother. But he couldn't stop or the hounds would get him. While the stick and vine walkway was in places wide enough for several people to walk abreast, much of it was only wide enough for one person. In those narrow places where it became a bridge over stretches of open water, there were sometimes handholds or even rails made of crooked branches, lashed by thin vines to supports sticking up out of the tangle of wood underfoot. The whole thing creaked and moved as he made his way farther out onto it, as if it were a partially submerged monster displeased to have someone walking on its back. Henrik couldn't tell for sure how far the hounds were behind him because sound carried so well across water. He wondered if the dogs would have a hard time of trying to walk on the mat of tangled vines and branches that made up the bridge through the watery world. He wondered if maybe their paws would slip down between the woven mass and get caught. He hoped so. Mist prevented him from seeing very far into the distance among the moss-draped, fat-bottomed trees. As mist closed in behind him, he couldn't see very far back the way he had come, either. |
| 719 |
Among the snarl of roots snaking out from the nearby trees he could see eyes watching him. He moved toward the center of the stick and vine bridge when he saw something in the water pass close by. What ever it was dragged a torn, fleshy mass behind. There were bite marks all over the pale, decomposing meat. There was no way to tell what animal it had come from, but by the size of the splintered bone hanging from the trailing end, it looked to have once been fairly big. He wondered if it was a human thighbone. Henrik glanced down, nervous about how low the branch bridge rode in the water. It moved and swayed in a sickening way as he raced along it. He didn't know if it was a floating bridge, or if it was supported from underneath. What he did know was that in most places it barely cleared the surface of the water. He worried that something might reach out, grab him by his ankle, and drag him into the murky water. He didn't know if that would be worse than being caught by what pursued him from behind, or worse than what waited for him ahead. He desperately wanted to avoid any of those three fates, but he could think of nothing to do other than to plunge ahead, running from one threat, avoiding the second, and into the arms of the third. His legs grew tired as he raced onward across the endless bridge through the gloomy swamp. Unseen animals called out, their sharp cries echoing through the mist and darkness. It seemed that he was crossing a vast, shallow lake, but since he couldn't see very far, it was hard to tell for sure. Big round leaves, something like lily pads, rode above the surface of the water in places, standing up as high as they could, hoping for a touch of sunlight that probably only penetrated the canopy on brief, rare occasions. Several times Henrik slipped. The railing saved him. By the more distant barking, he judged that the hounds were having trouble keeping up and falling back. Still, they were back there, coming for him, so he dared not slow down. As it grew darker, he was relieved to finally encounter lit candles along the bridge. He didn't know if someone came out to light them at nightfall, or if they were always there and kept burning. They had been lit the last time he had come this way with his mother. As dark as it was in among the looming stands of smooth-barked trees, they would be a help even in the day. The farther he went, the wider and more substantial the bridge of tangled branches and vines became. The trees all around, standing up out of the water on snarls of roots, crowded in closer together. The vines hanging down from the darkness above, too, became thicker, some of them looping between trees and staying above the surface of the water. Many eventually became overgrown and weighted down with plants climbing up from the water or tendrils curling down from above. The growth to each side became so dense that it once again seemed that the bridge tunneled through a rat's nest of branches, vines, and bramble. The one constant was the murky water to each side. |
| 720 |
That tunnel widened into a larger passageway that funneled him into a maze of chambers, all constructed the same way, of the same materials woven snugly together. The same entwined materials that made the floors and walls also made up ceilings just as thick and tightly woven. Living vines, with slender leaves and tiny yellow flowers, coiled up and through the walls, in places making the framework more green than dead brown. Within the silent interior network of cavities created by the mass of woven branches, the outside world seemed a far distant place. Inside was a world unto itself, a strange place without anything perfectly flat or straight. It was all organic curves without any sharp corners, all natural materials, none of which looked man-made yet all of which were carefully crafted. It all formed softly rounded rooms with dished floors that were completely walled off from what was outside. Henrik wondered if it would be possible to pull apart the branches and vines of the walls if he was forced to make a quick escape. It all seemed pretty solid, but still, it was just woven branches, twigs, and vines. As he made his way through a bowled room, the familiar gliding along somewhere behind him, he moved closer to the wall to take a closer look. He glanced to the side and saw then that many of the branches making up the heavier parts of the matrix were studded with wickedly sharp thorns. Up close to the wall, he could see that much of it looked like it was made up of a thorn hedge. Even if he were to decide that his life depended on making an escape, he didn't see how he could get through the thorny fabric of the structure. These were not small yet troublesome thorns like those on a rosebush that would scratch arms and legs. These were long, iron-hard, sharp spikes that would mercilessly rip a person apart and soon impale them so completely that they would be held prisoner. With the floating form of the familiar right behind him, watching over him to make sure that he didn't try to turn and run, he passed through a series of rooms of various sizes, their way always lit by hundreds of candles. Some parts were only connecting tunnels where he had to duck to make it through. They were something like hallways in a building, with smaller side corridors going off in different directions. One of the relatively large chambers they had to pass through contained what had to be thousands of strips of cloth, string, and thin vines all hanging down from the ceiling, all holding objects tied to their ends, everything from coins to shells to rotting lizards. They hung perfectly still in the dead air. Henrik bent low to pass under some of the dense, hanging collection of strange objects, holding his breath against the stench most of the way. The entire structure moved and creaked as he made his way through the maze, his route lit by candles, as if to welcome visitors. It felt like he was walking into a giant, tubular spiderweb, something like those he'd seen at the base of logs that were meant to funnel prey inward to their death. |
| 721 |
He knew, though, that it was worse than that. This was the lair of the Hedge Maid. Candles by the hundreds if not thousands lit the place, and yet the darkness they tried to hold back felt oppressive. Sounds from out in the swamp were so muted that they could barely be heard through the thick thatch all around, but the wet, fetid smell of rot had no difficulty stealing in with the muggy air. The candles at least helped mask the smell somewhat. As he moved deeper into the Hedge Maid's inner sanctuary, several more familiars drifted in through the walls and gathered around to escort him where he needed to go. More likely, they were making certain that he didn't turn back. Whenever he glanced up at them, they stared at him with the most sickly yellow eyes and he would immediately look away. Each of the seven, when seen up close, was as ugly as death itself. As they made their way down a broader corridor, there were even more candles placed all along the twig walls, from the curving edge of the floor up the rounded walls higher than he was tall. The hall they were in, lit by the golden glow of all the candles, led them abruptly into a murky room with hardly any candles. There didn't look to be room for many candles in the shadowy room. The place was filled instead with jars and containers. Some of the containers were made of tan clay. The jars were far more plentiful and in colors from tan to green to ruby red. In hundreds of places, the woven sticks and twigs had been pulled apart enough so that jars could be stuck into the knitted stick walls. What was in all the jars, Henrik feared to imagine. From what he could see through the colored glass, most were filled with liquid that was dark and filthy-looking, though a lot of it looked like muddy water. Things floated in the liquid among the dirt and debris. He tried not to look too closely at what those things floating in the jars might be. One jar looked to be filled with human teeth. But the jars and containers were not what frightened him the most. It was what was woven into the twig walls themselves, behind the jars, that had tears of terror running down his cheeks. Woven into the walls were people. He could also see them in the walls of the corridors going out of the room in various directions. At first, he saw dozens and dozens of people cocooned in the fabric of the stick walls. The more he looked, though, the more people he could see entrapped farther back within the walls. Some of the people were desiccated corpses, their mouths gaping open, their eye sockets sunken, the skin of their bare arms and legs leathery and shriveled. Other bloated bodies looked more freshly dead. The gagging stink of death left him hardly able to breathe. But some of the people woven into the walls were not dead. They looked to be in a numb stupor, hardly breathing, only slightly aware of anything going on around them. All were naked, but encased as they were by the weaving of thorny twigs and branches around them, it was hard to see much of them. |
| 722 |
Henrik could see their eyes roll from time to time, as if trying to make out where they were and what was happening to them. An occasional soft moan escaped a hanging mouth. When he turned from staring at all the dead and the half-dead people laced into the walls, he came face-to-face with the Hedge Maid. Jit sat cross-legged in the middle of the room, nested in a thatch of branches, watching him with unblinking, big round eyes that were so dark they looked black. Her thin hair was only a little more than shoulder length. She wasn't big. In fact, she was not much bigger than he was. Her simple sack dress showed that she had a rather straight torso. Her body looked more boylike than womanly. The skin on her thin arms looked to have seen little sunlight. It was hard for him to tell how old she was, but, despite her pale, smooth skin, he was certain that she was not at all young. Her fingernails and hands appeared to be permanently stained, possibly from handling what was in the jars all around her. He imagined, too, that the dark matter staining her fingernails might be the fluid leaking from the corpses woven into the walls around the room. But what riveted his gaze, what had his heart pounding, what had his knees weak, was her mouth. Her thin lips were sewn shut with strips of leather. The leather thong was stitched right through the flesh of her lips, leaving holes that didn't look like they had ever entirely healed. The stitches weren't even. They looked to have been done haphazardly, with little care. The stitched strips of leather crossed to form "X"s over her mouth. There was only enough slack in the leather to allow her to open her mouth into a narrow slit. Through that slit behind the cross-stitched leather thong, Jit let out an undulating squealing sound that didn't sound human. It ran goose bumps up Henrik's arms. From having been here before, he knew that it was her language, her way of talking. While he didn't have the slightest idea what the sound meant, he did know that she was directing it at him. One of the familiars, missing a hand, he noticed, leaned toward him. "Jit says that she is pleased to see you again, boy." Henrik swallowed. He couldn't bring himself to say he was pleased to see her again as well. Jit, her head bobbing, let out a low-pitched grating screech, punctuated with a few clicks of her tongue against the top of her mouth. "Jit wants to know if you brought it," the familiar said. Henrik's mouth felt stuck closed. He couldn't make himself speak. Fearing what she would do if he didn't somehow answer, he held out his fisted hands. He didn't think that, after all this time, he could open them if he tried. The Hedge Maid let out a soft raspy sound — half pule, half screech. "Come closer," the familiar said. "Jit says to come closer so that she may see for herself." Somewhere behind, there was a sound that made all the familiars pause and turn to look. The Hedge Maid's black eyes turned up to focus into the distance behind him. |
| 723 |
Henrik looked back over his shoulder to see what had caught their attention. In the distance, there was some kind of disturbance. Something was making its way up the hall that led into the chambers. Candle flames wavered, their light flickering, and then they went out. What ever it was brought darkness with it. As it passed, the candles nearby all around it went dark. When it was beyond them, the extinguished flames slowly returned to life until they were once more fully lit. It made it seem as if darkness itself were stalking through the tunnel of a hall, coming for them all. As it came closer, pulling that darkness with it, extinguishing candles all around as it passed, the familiars cowered back behind Jit. Henrik could see the one without a hand trembling slightly. Jit let out a long, low squeal and a few clicks. Two of the familiars gathered in close about her, leaning in, whispering. They nodded to more clicks and soft, grating sounds from deep in the Hedge Maid's throat. When the form finally swept into the room, bringing darkness with it, Henrik saw at last that it was a man. The man paused before Jit, not far from Henrik. The candles' flames in the hall behind him and those nearby in the room slowly came back to life, showing at last the man before them. When he finally got a good look at the man, Henrik froze stiff, unable to draw a breath. The man glanced down at the warm, wet place growing on the front of Henrik's pants and smiled to himself. "This is the boy?" he asked in a deep, iron-hard voice that made Henrik have to remind himself to blink and caused the seven familiars to drift back up ever so slightly more behind Jit, as if they weren't aware that his voice alone had bulled them back. The Hedge Maid let out a short, grating, clicking sound. "Yes, this is him, Bishop Arc," the handless familiar said for her mistress after watching her speak in the strange voice. Bishop Arc glared at Jit for a moment. His gaze lowered deliberately to take in her mouth sewn closed; then he again turned his terrible eyes on Henrik. The whites of the man's eyes were not white. Not at all. They had been tattooed a bright blood red. The dark iris and pupil in the field of blood red made his eyes seem as if they were looking out from some other world, a world of fire and flame — or perhaps from the underworld itself. But even as frightening as the bishop's eyes were, that was not the most disturbing aspect of the man. The most ghastly thing about him, the thing that made Henrik unable to look away, unable to stop his heart from hammering, unable to draw more than short, shallow breaths, was the man's flesh. Every bit of Bishop Arc was covered with tattooed symbols. Not simply covered, but layered over countless times so that the skin looked something other than human. There was no place that Henrik could see that was not tattooed with some part or element of strange circular designs, each one randomly laid over another over another and over yet another, all layer upon layer so that there was no untouched skin visible anywhere. |
| 724 |
All the tattoos, in all their many different designs, still seemed to be variations of the same basic themes. There were symbols laid out in circles of every size, even circles within circles within circles, with some of the symbols contained within those circles made up of other, smaller designs. Taken in totality, it was a profoundly unsettling sight to see a man so given over to such an occult purpose. It all made him a very dark, living, moving, fluid illustration, with every design down through the countless layers clearly discernible. Henrik imagined that if the bishop were naked, he would still be totally hidden behind the veil of symbols. The only place Henrik could see that was not tattooed with the symbols was the man's eyes, and they were tattooed red. Bishop Arc saw several of the familiars glance nervously behind him, back down the hall. He smiled. "I didn't bring her with me," he said in answer to the unspoken question haunting their eyes. "I sent her on an errand." The familiars bowed their heads in acknowledgment and as if to apologize for being so nosy. The wide eyes of one of the people woven into the wall behind Jit stared fixedly at Bishop Arc. Terror shaped the man's expression and left him unable to look away when the bishop glanced up at him. The man swallowed over and over, as if trying to swallow a scream fighting to make its way out. All the people in the walls seemed incapable of making a sound, though this man clearly seemed like he was about to scream. Bishop Arc lifted a hand toward the man trapped in the wall. It was not an overt motion to point at the man, but a casual gesture, a slack hand held out on a partially raised arm, fingers barely extended. Nonetheless, it was clearly directed at the man encased in the wall and unable to stop staring at the bishop. "Be still," Bishop Arc said in a low voice, hardly more than a whisper, but as deadly as anything Henrik had ever heard. The man gasped, sucking in short, sharp breaths. He pulled in one last, long breath as his eyes rolled back in his head. He shook violently but briefly, then slumped, at least as much as he could slump, woven as he was into the tangle of sticks, twigs, and vines. After a final shiver, his whole body went completely slack. The last breath of air left his lungs in a long, low wheeze. The bishop looked around at other eyes watching him from the walls. "Anyone else?" In the silence, every eye behind layers of twigs and branches turned away. Bishop Arc smirked at the Hedge Maid. "There you go. Freshly dead fluids for your little helpers here to suck out and feed you." The Hedge Maid's big, black eyes revealed nothing. She let out a low, rasping squeal broken by several clicks. One of the familiars, watching Jit speak in the strange language, waited until she was finished and then leaned toward the bishop, showing contempt on behalf of her mistress. "Jit wishes to know why you have come here." "Isn't it obvious?" He lifted his arm out to the side, toward Henrik, as he addressed Jit. |
| 725 |
"I have come to make sure that you complete the task I gave you." After a long pause, Jit gave him a single nod. The bishop's brow drew down, deforming the symbol on his forehead, pulling the center of it lower with his eyebrows. "Now, you have wasted enough of my time. I expect you not to waste any more of it. The boy is finally here. Get on with it." Jit watched him for a moment, then turned her attention to Henrik and motioned for him to come closer. Henrik feared to take a step toward the Hedge Maid. As she made a soft cooing sound while gesturing for him to come closer, he could only stare at the leather cord stitched through her lips keeping her mouth from opening more than a mere slit. Some of the holes where the leather thong penetrated her flesh oozed a pinkish fluid, as if the effort of calling him forward reinjured the wounds. He wondered why her lips were stitched closed. He realized that his feet were shuffling forward, even though he'd had no intention of moving. He found himself helpless to stop himself from inching ever closer to her, closer to her outstretched hands. His own arms lifted of their own accord. No amount of strength on his part could have prevented it. His fists led the way as he moved toward her. Her hands, stained dark — with what he feared to imagine — at last closed tight around his wrists. Closer in to her, he noticed that there was an odd smell about her, a kind of soft but sickening odor that he couldn't identify, but it made his nose wrinkle and his throat try to close off so he couldn't breathe it in. Though she was a small woman, she had powerfully strong fingers. He tried to back away, but he couldn't. He felt trapped in her grip. He had no control, no say in any of it. Jit made another vibrating, clicking, squealing sound. As close as he was to her, Henrik could only stare into her intense black eyes with speechless fright, unable to think of what she wanted from him, what she was going to do to him. She leaned toward him and made the same sound again. He didn't know what she was saying. He only knew that she wanted something. One of the familiars bent toward him over the Hedge Maid's shoulder. "Open your fists," she hissed impatiently. His breaths coming in short, rapid pulls, he tried with all his might to do as he had been told. Despite his best efforts, his hands would not open. He'd held them tightly closed for so long they'd become frozen into tight knots. Despite how much he tried, how much he wanted to obey, he could not will his fingers to uncurl. He stared at them, trying frantically to make them open, fearing what she would do to him if he didn't do as he'd been told. Jit seemed unconcerned. Her strong fingers began peeling his fingers open one at a time. It hurt something fierce to have them move after all the time they been held fisted. Each one tingled with stabbing pains as it was pulled straight. Showing no sympathy for his cries of pain, she did not pause at her work. Before long, she had all his fingers pried open. |
| 726 |
She flattened his hands out, pressing them between hers, one hand at a time, stroking them for a while as if to soothe away the stiffness and make certain they would remain open before she turned them over, palms down. The Hedge Maid snapped a small twig from the woven mass beside her. He could see that there was a long, wickedly sharp thorn at the end. Not knowing what she intended, he again tried to pull away, but, with his left wrist caught in her iron grip, she easily pulled his hand closer. He felt like an animal in a trap about to be skinned. Holding his hand steady, the Hedge Maid dragged the point of the thorn along the underside of the fingernail of his first finger. She turned the thorn in the light, carefully inspecting it. He couldn't imagine what she was doing or what she was looking for. Henrik saw one of the familiars, back at the wall, working at pulling a jar out of its snug place in the weave of branches. With effort, the jar finally came free. She brought it with her to Jit's side and waited patiently as she watched her mistress at work. The Hedge Maid dragged the point of the thorn under the nail of the second finger. She held it up. This time there was a small bit of something stuck on the point. A sound came from deep in her throat that told him she was pleased. She held it up to show her companions. They cooed their satisfaction. Bishop Arc only glared when she showed him. The familiar with the jar, after pulling off the lid, held it out for her mistress. Cockroaches poured out over the sides of the jar and down over the familiar's hands. They made a rattling sound as they fell by the hundreds onto the floor, scattering in every direction before vanishing down into the weave of sticks and branches. In a moment they had all disappeared. Jit, unconcerned, dunked the thorn in the filthy water and swished it around. She pulled it up and saw that what ever had been stuck on it had come off. Satisfied, she returned her attention to Henrik. She repeated the careful cleaning under the nails of the last two fingers and thumb on his left hand. She found more of the tiny treasure she was searching for under the nails of his fingers, but not his thumb. Out of the corner of his eye, Henrik saw a smile come to Bishop Arc's tattooed lips both times the Hedge Maid came up with a little scrap of something on the point of the thorn. Each time, she swished the thorn in the stinking liquid in the jar, leaving what ever it was to disappear down into the murky water. Jit dropped his left hand and moved on to his right. After dragging the thorn under his first finger she brought it up close to her face for a look. There was nothing there. She cast a brief, furtive look up at the bishop and then dragged the thorn under the nail again, but it didn't produce anything the second time, either. She moved to the next finger and did a more careful cleaning under Henrik's nail. The thorn found nothing. She repeated the search, then when it was fruitless, moved on to his third finger. |
| 727 |
It, too, didn't have what she wanted. She focused on the little finger, as if it were her last hope. When the thorn came up without anything but dirt, her hands dropped into her lap. The symbols all over him seemed to churn as the man leaned down a little. "What's wrong?" The Hedge Maid made a few short sounds from deep in her throat. "Jit says that we have the flesh of the woman," the familiar at her side said. She hesitated before finishing the translation. "But we do not have the flesh of the man." The bishop straightened in a way that caused all seven of the familiars to back up. One of them was not quick enough. He snatched her by the throat and yanked her close. It looked to be a reflex driven purely by emotion. She cried out, thrashing like a snake in a snare, but she could not escape his grip. It was clear that the bishop was in a blind rage. She clawed at his tattooed hands around her throat, but it did her no good. "Tell your mistress that I am not pleased," he said to the others. Several of them urgently leaned in, speaking to the Hedge Maid in her strange language. When the bishop pulled the familiar in his fist close to his face and glared into her eyes, she cried out with a shriek of terrible agony. "Back to the grave with you," he said through gritted teeth. As Henrik watched in frozen shock, the familiar lost the bluish glow they all had. Wisps of smoke curled up from under the cowl over her head. The whole creature writhed and withered as if everything was being sucked out of her. The skin on her hands and arms darkened as it drew in around the bones and knuckles until they looked skeletal. The flesh of her face boiled and bubbled and burned to a dark, leathery mask. Blackened skin smoldered as it shrank tighter and tighter around the skull. The eyes sunk back into their sockets. The jaw slackened and lips shriveled back, exposing the familiar's fangs. Bishop Arc tossed the withered remains aside. Seething with anger, he paced back toward the tunnel where he had entered. The candles went out around him as he moved, as if he were dragging a veil of darkness with him. He growled in frustration and rage. Abruptly, he stopped and turned back. He stared at the Hedge Maid a moment, then marched back toward her. The candles behind him came back to life as he moved away from them. "You at least have the flesh of the woman, right?" he asked Jit. With her dark eyes fixed on him, she nodded and then took the jar from the trembling familiar beside her. She held it up a little as if to show him. He stroked the knuckle of his first finger along his gaunt cheek. "Change of plans," he said in a voice like ice. As the Hedge Maid started out toward a shadowy opening at the back of the chamber, her familiars raced around the room, urgently pulling smaller jars from where they were stuck into the weave of the walls or picked up larger ones out of the diverse collections at the edges of the floor. The eyes of those people nearby encased in the walls, the ones who were still alive, watched in desolate agony. |
| 728 |
Henrik wished he could help them, but he couldn't. He couldn't even help himself. Jit cradled the jar with the filthy brown water containing what had been under Henrik's fingernails in the crook of her arm as she made her way back into the dark opening. The brown water sloshed around as she walked. The lid kept most but not all of the water from spilling over. Henrik saw big brown bugs emerge up out of the weave of the twigs and branches to feed at the drops that did escape, run down the jar, and drip onto the floor. Bishop Arc glared with bloodred eyes as the familiars went about their work of finding the correct containers out of the hundreds hoarded throughout the room. The dark symbols covering his flesh made his obvious rage seem all the more dangerous. The six remaining familiars avoided meeting his gaze as they worked at finding what they needed and pulled them out of the wall or plucked them up from the floor. Each of the familiars collected an unwieldy stash of jars clutched in the crook of their arms. The one without a hand couldn't hold as many but she did the best she could. As soon as they had what they needed, they hurried with their cargo to catch up with their departing mistress. For her part, Jit took a staff that was leaning against the wall as she carried the single jar in her other arm. She looked back over her shoulder at Henrik and let out a series of short commands in her strange, screeching, clicking language. The familiar without a hand circled back and shoved him into line behind the Hedge Maid and in front of the rest of the familiars. "Jit says for you to hurry up and come along." She glanced back briefly at the bishop and then leaned closer. "When this is through," she said with venomous delight, "I am going to suck you dry and feed what's left of you to the cockroaches." Henrik froze stiff in terror. With a soft cackle, she shoved him to get him moving again. As he stumbled forward, he thought of how much he missed being with his mother. He wanted to be back with her in their tent making bead goods. He wished that she had never brought him to the Hedge Maid in the first place. Ever since he had realized that he was being chased back into Kharga Trace and that the Hedge Maid was going to have him in her clutches again, he had feared that this time he might not be leaving. The bishop took up a place at the end of the line as they followed the Hedge Maid along the dark passageway lined with hundreds of strips of leather holding everything from small dead animals to empty turtle shells, to the skulls of little creatures with sharp little teeth, all hanging from the walls in layers. Henrik saw the eyes of the people in projecting areas of buttress walls watching them as they passed. When Bishop Arc met their gazes they quickly looked away. Not a peep came from the people in the walls. Henrik imagined that if he was trapped in the walls he would have trouble not crying out for help. But there was no one to help the poor souls trapped in this terrible place. |
| 729 |
There was no one to help him. Making their way through the labyrinth that was the Hedge Maid's lair, Henrik began to hear insects buzzing, birds calling, and other creatures whistling and chirping. As they reached an opening and emerged out into the night, the swamp creatures abruptly went dead silent. The low clouds gliding swiftly by overhead were lit by the moon from somewhere above them so that they cast a faint glow. The ground all around was elevated enough in the midst of the dense, swampy forest to be bone-dry. The dark shapes of hulking trees surrounding them, trailing long curtains of moss, looked to Henrik like arms of the dead trailing burial shrouds as they gathered around the living. As they crossed the clearing, he saw that the flat rocks lying here and there were not placed randomly, but arranged in circular patterns. Each stone was also placed atop slightly mounded dirt. The mounds with stones appeared to lead to the center of the open area, where the Hedge Maid set about making marks on the ground with her decorated staff. The marks she was scratching in the ground with the point of her staff were not unlike the tattooed designs all over Bishop Arc. Iridescent blue feathers, orange and yellow beads, and a collection of coins with holes in the center hung on buckskin thongs from the middle of the Hedge Maid's staff. Henrik wondered why the Hedge Maid would be so interested in coins that she would use them to adorn such an obviously important object. After all, what good would money do her out in Kharga Trace? Then he realized that it actually wasn't of any value to her as money, the way it was to other people. The coins must have been taken from those poor souls encased in the walls. To the Hedge Maid, shiny coins were merely decorations, like the shiny feathers. Both were tokens of the lives she had taken. As the familiars went about arranging the jars on the ground around the Hedge Maid, Bishop Arc stood to the side, arms folded, his bloodred eyes glaring as he watched the preparations. Every once in a while one of the six familiars glanced his way. Jit did not. She went quietly about her work of drawing designs in the dirt in the center of the ring of jars. At intervals in her drawing and soft chanting, she would open a jar, fish around in the dark liquid with her hand, and then throw what ever limp, slimy thing she had pulled out into the center of her drawing. All the while she continued making the soft buzzing, humming sound. The Hedge Maid lifted her staff in one outstretched arm toward the low clouds drifting by overhead. She chanted a few clipped sounds, then bent and placed the staff across elements in the design she had drawn on the ground. The design on the ground began to glow. To Henrik's astonishment, as the Hedge Maid continued her low, musical drone and lifted both arms skyward, the clouds overhead came to a halt. Henrik thought that the winds must have stilled to make the clouds drift to a halt, but then he saw the clouds again begin to move. |
| 730 |
Instead of going across the sky as before, though, the clouds started to move around in a circle overhead. They stretched into long spiral shapes as they rotated over the clearing, mirroring the glowing circular symbol on the ground. Small flickers of orange light intermittently illuminated the clouds from inside. At the same time, the six familiars seemed to have been lulled into a trance of some sort by the murmurs from the Hedge Maid. All of them began circling the Hedge Maid along with the clouds above. Their feet weren't touching the ground as they floated around Jit in a circle, gradually picking up speed. The clouds, too, picked up speed, going faster all the time, the orange and yellow light flickering like the light flashing in the symbols on the ground. The Hedge Maid's low, steady rhythm of sounds rose in pitch. As the familiars and the clouds moved faster, the sound Jit made became a painful, high-pitched squeal. It kept getting louder and louder, higher and higher. Henrik had to cover his ears against the pain of the sound. Suddenly, the six forms seemed to break apart. Henrik stared with wide eyes as hideous creatures with long bony arms and legs began to pull themselves out of the glowing forms of the familiars. Their backs were humped, their flesh blotchy and wet. They had no hair. Their knobby heads had angry, bulging eyes and snarling mouths that showed wicked fangs. Unlike the familiars from which they had emerged, these things did not glow. Flickers of light from the clouds above and the circular designs below reflected off their glistening, mottled flesh. Henrik saw then the same sorts of creatures erupting from the mounds where the stones were. Each struggled and strained to pull itself up out of the dirt. Yet more of them broke through the surface of the mounds, pulling themselves up out of the ground, joining into the growing mass of those that were circling the Hedge Maid, dancing around her like crazed animals. But these were no animals. Though they appeared animate, there were not living things. Henrik thought they looked like the dead rising up from the ground, dancing with flailing arms and legs to the tune the Hedge Maid played. He glanced back at the low, dark structure of woven sticks and branches. He realized that these mounds must be the graves of the people encased in the walls who died. After they had served what ever purpose the Hedge Maid needed them for, they were buried out here, and there they waited until called upon to serve her again. Henrik imagined that the Hedge Maid must be a creature born in the underworld, the spawn of the Keeper himself. In the center of the clearing the grotesque forms had gathered by the dozens, with more coming in out of the darkness of the surrounding swamp all the time to join with the others, circling ever faster. Henrik had to press his hands over his ears tighter as the sounds Jit was making seemed enough to tear him apart, enough to tear the very air apart. The clouds moved in time with the circling forms. |
| 731 |
The light in them flickered faster and faster as the symbols on the ground flashed in rhythm with the sounds the Hedge Maid was making and the flickers in the clouds. The sound, the light, the spinning, horrific creatures dancing like demons, were all making Henrik dizzy. His head throbbed with the beat of it all, with the pressure of it all. He squinted, fearing to close his eyes lest he never be able to open them again, yet hardly able to keep his eyes open against the overwhelming sights and sounds. As all this activity whirled around her, Jit reached into various jars, pulling out handfuls of teeth, or what looked to be small finger bones, or human vertebrae, and cast them into the circle. With each addition light flared and danced. The world seemed to be flickering. He saw little flashes of red, yellow, and orange. And then Jit picked up the jar holding the flesh she had taken from under Henrik's fingernails. The forms were rotating so fast that he could hardly make out individuals. It was all becoming a blur of dark, glistening flesh and thrashing limbs. The Hedge Maid abruptly threw the jar she had up into the air above glowing circles and the writhing mass of forms. Henrik saw the glass explode apart. The liquid in the jar seemed to ignite. The world turned so bright that it looked like he could see Jit's bones right through her body. Everything was turned to light and fire. The trees all around burned. Hot glowing embers were drawn off the trees to swirl around the incandescence coming from the contents of the jar above the center of the flaming circle. The Hedge Maid held her hands up, summoning forces he had never imagined. She stood alone against the light, defined by it, holding sway over a world turned to an inferno. In the center of it all, in the heart of the blinding light, standing out like bright stars, there was something brighter yet. Small bits — the bits of flesh Jit had recovered from under his fingernails — were so incandescent that they made the rest of the burning world seem dull in comparison. Her arms raised, Jit seemed to be commanding those bright sparks to pull everything else up with them as they rotated while climbing ever higher into the sky. Alone in the center of the roaring conflagration, Jit lifted her arms higher, commanding it all to come together. The masses of bone men howled as they burned, their bodies coming apart in flaming sparks and smoke that was sucked into the horrific vortex of blinding radiance. Everything around him, all the trees, the vines, the moss, the bushes, even the ground, glowed as it burned and disintegrated into flaming embers and ash, coming off in long whorls that were pulled ever inward to spiral up toward the tiny sparks of blinding light that rose up through the center of the spiraling clouds. The wind roared, the fire roared. Henrik had to squint against the blinding power of it all. He would have covered his eyes but he dared not take his hands away from his ears for fear that he, too, would be summoned by Jit into the inferno. |
| 732 |
Even when he shut his eyes, he saw the same things as when he'd had his eyes open. It was a night of burning color, of blinding light, of deafening sound ... of madness. Everything was being pulled into the glowing light in the center of the clearing. Branches and debris ripped from trees and the entire forest ignited as it was pulled in. Trees and plants disintegrated into a thousand sparks that swirled around and upward, following the radiant sparks of flesh. The bodies of the dead that had risen came apart in crackling, glowing embers like everything else. The howls of terror and agony kept tears running freely down Henrik's face. The Hedge Maid lifted her arms again. The very air in the center of the clearing ignited in a blinding furnace of light. Just when Henrik thought he would surely be pulled into it all to die in the terrible ignition of light, it ended. The sudden silence felt like it might make him fall over. It felt like he had been pushing against the sound, as if he'd been trying to stand in a gale. When the sound abruptly stopped, he almost stumbled forward. His ears throbbed. His head throbbed. His whole body throbbed. But the sound was not the only thing that was gone. Henrik blinked. He couldn't believe what he was seeing. The raging whirlwind of fire and light was gone as well. He looked around and saw that the moss on the nearby trees hung limp in the still, humid air, just as it had before. Every tree was still there. The ground that had broken open as the bone men had erupted out of it looked undisturbed. It was as if none of what Henrik had just seen had actually happened. Except, the jar was gone and tiny bits of glass, like a thousand fallen stars, lay scattered across the bare ground. Henrik couldn't understand what had happened, what he had seen. He couldn't understand if the fire had been real, if the creatures he had seen come up out of the ground were real, if the terrible sound and all the rest of it had been real. Bishop Arc, still standing where he had been in the beginning, looked unharmed, and unmoved. He wore the same glare as he had in the beginning. If he was surprised by the deafening display of fire and light, he didn't show it. In the center of the clearing, the six familiars slowly circled in around Jit, tending to her, fussing over her, touching her protectively, as if to see if she had survived the ordeal. She ignored them as she used a foot to swipe away the marks she had made in the dirt with her staff when she had first come out. The Hedge Maid turned her dark eyes toward Bishop Arc. She let out the squealing clicks that were her way of talking. Henrik could see her straining to open her mouth more as she made the sounds, but the net of leather thongs prevented it. One of the familiars floated a little closer toward the bishop. "Jit says that it is done." His red eyes turned from the familiar to Jit. "See that you do the other things I have asked as well." His brow drew down tight. "Don't give me cause to return." With that he turned and stormed away. |
| 733 |
The darkness seemed to gather in around him as he went, like a black cape, making him look like a dark shadow moving across the ground. A familiar leaning in made Henrik jump. He hadn't seen her sneaking up behind him. "Now," she hissed, "time for you." Kahlan woke with a start, panting in terror. A blur of images flashed through her mind. Dark arms and claws reached for her. Fangs came out of nowhere, snapping, trying to get at her face. She didn't know where she was or what was happening. She fought frantically, twisting, pushing at what ever it was that was reaching for her, at the same time trying to escape the grip of pain that seared through her. She sat up abruptly, gasping for breath, and saw then that she was in the Garden of Life, that it was night. There was nothing chasing her, nothing coming after her. It was quiet. She had been having a nightmare. In the dream something had been chasing her, something dark and profoundly dangerous, something terrifying. It had been relentless and had been getting closer all the time. She had been running, trying to get away. But she hadn't been able to make her legs move fast enough. It had all seemed so real. But she was awake, at last. She wasn't dreaming anymore. She had escaped the nightmare and in so doing escaped what was after her. She told herself to let it go, to stop focusing on the dream. It was only a dream. She was awake now. She was safe. But she quickly found that being awake was no salvation. While she had awakened and escaped what had been after her in the dream, in being awake she had not escaped the pain. Her head hurt so much she thought she might pass out. She pressed her fingers to her temples only to have to hug her arms across her abdomen, pressing them against the twisting ache in her middle. As the spike of pain drove through her head, a hot wave of nausea welled up through her. She fought the building urge to throw up. The throbbing pain in her head overwhelmed her, making her all the more dizzy and sick. With all her might, she fought back the expanding waves of nausea. The nausea won out. As her insides began to convulse, Kahlan urgently struggled out of the tangled blanket and crawled on her hands and knees into the grass and away from where she'd been sleeping. She did her best to resist the urge to throw up, but her body would not obey her will and she began heaving so hard that it felt like her stomach was trying to turn inside out. Undulating waves of sickness swept through her again and again in rhythm with the pounding pain in her head, making her vomit each time. Kahlan realized that there was a hand on her back and another hand holding her long hair back out of the way. She gasped for breath between the spasms. She was sure that she had to be throwing up blood. The excruciating pain seemed unendurable each time her muscles convulsed. It felt like her insides were ripping. The waves of heaving finally began to subside. As she spit out the bitter bile, it was a relief to at least see that there was no blood. |
| 734 |
"It must be." The duchess took refuge in sipping her tea rather than voice such a profound and final choice. Others in the group, though, did voice their solemn agreement. Orneta was gratified that Ludwig had such a responsible position in culling prophecy from every source possible and delivering it to Bishop Arc so that he might use it in guiding his rule of Fajin Province. It now seemed that Bishop Arc would be better suited to a position as Lord Arc in guiding all the lands, rather than just Fajin Province. When Orneta looked up from taking a drink of wine, she saw a Mord-Sith in red leather coming around a corner in the distance. As she marched their way, the Mord-Sith's gaze was fixed on Orneta. The group with Queen Orneta fell silent as the Mord-Sith approached. All eyes were on the tall woman in red as she marched steadily toward them. In light of the gravity of their conversation, worry overcame the small group and none of them could even manage small talk. They were, after all, standing in Lord Rahl's palace, in the ancestral home of the House of Rahl, the seat of power in D'Hara for thousands of years. It seemed somewhat distasteful, if not disrespectful, if not treasonous, to be discussing such matters while in the People's Palace. Yet even though this was Lord Rahl's home, the home of the House of Rahl, it was also the people's house. In that sense, it was a palace belonging to the people, and so the people had every right to discuss and decide matters of relevance to their common future. But the approaching woman in red made all that seem rather academic. The Lord Rahl was the undisputed supreme authority in this place, and in all of D'Hara. The war would have seemed to have settled that issue and only strengthened the Lord Rahl's hold on power. Unless of course Orneta and those of like mind were able, with the help of Abbot Dreier and Bishop Arc, to do something about it. She was adamant, as were a number of other representatives, that prophecy was the rightful guiding authority handed down by the Creator Himself and it had to be obeyed. To obey it, they had to be made aware of it. To allow the Keeper of the dead to subvert the use of prophecy was treason to life. They needed a guiding leader, like Bishop Arc, who would rule as Lord Arc in conjunction with the words of prophecy. In the silence up on the balcony, with all the representatives watching, the Mord-Sith was the center of attention as she went to the railing and glanced down at the people strolling the halls. Soldiers looking up saw her and without pause continued on their way. Other people moving through the halls noticed her as well, but their gazes didn't linger long. Even in the People's Palace, most people had always avoided looking a Mord-Sith in the eye. Of course, since Cara, Lord Rahl's closest bodyguard, had gotten married, that caution had softened somewhat. Somewhat. This particular Mord-Sith's hard edge, however, gave none of them any reason to abandon long-held fears. |
| 735 |
"I suggest that you stay down and stay quiet, or I will put you down and make you go quiet — for good. Do you understand me?" Ludwig glared at her, but he didn't move. Orneta reached out to him, appalled at seeing him hurt. She wanted to comfort him, to know that he was all right. The Mord-Sith stepped in Orneta's way and gestured with the Agiel. "Enough of this nonsense. Get going." Before the woman could prod her with the weapon, Orneta took one last, quick look at Ludwig, then turned and stalked off in the direction of her quarters. She was indignant, and she was angry at the woman for hurting Ludwig, but she thought better of showing her emotion for the moment. She would make her grievance clear enough at the proper time and to the proper people, and then this woman would pay the price for her insolence, to say nothing of her needless cruelty. At least Orneta could get the Mord-Sith away from Ludwig before he did something foolish and got himself hurt even worse. As she made her way down the elegant corridor, Orneta tried not to move too swiftly. Rather, she moved at a stately pace, just to remind the Mord-Sith of who she was dealing with. Orneta was also in no hurry to reach her room and be alone with the woman. A servant going in the opposite direction, carrying an armful of fresh bed linens, moved hard against the side of the hallway when she saw the Mord-Sith coming, and stayed well out of her way. The woman kept her eyes turned toward the ground as she passed, avoiding meeting the steady gaze of the tall woman in red leather. Orneta felt like a prisoner being led to an execution. She couldn't believe that she was being treated with such disrespect. Considering her decision, it occurred to her that it wasn't entirely undeserved. For years, she had been nothing but loyal to the cause of the D'Haran Empire. She reminded herself that what she was doing was out of loyalty to the D'Haran Empire — to the people, anyway, if not the leader. She didn't know what the Mord-Sith could possibly want, but Orneta was becoming more worried by the moment that it had something to do with her throwing her loyalty to Hannis Arc over Richard Rahl. She told herself that it was a silly worry. No one knew of her decision but her and Ludwig. And of course the group, but she had only just told them. It occurred to her then that there might have been a prophecy that foretold of her new-sworn allegiance. Lord Rahl wouldn't tell them what prophecy said, wouldn't help them against threats those omens revealed, but that didn't mean he wouldn't use them for his own dark ends. There was no telling what a person being used by the Keeper of the underworld might know, or what they might do. Lord Rahl was a good man, a decent man, but even such a person could become possessed so that they were not acting of their own free will; they were instead being guided by death itself. As Ludwig had pointed out, who better for the Keeper to possess in order to carry out his dark deeds than the most trusted among them? |
| 736 |
The pain overwhelmed her, making the muscles of her arms and neck convulse in uncontrolled spasms. The screams were drowned out as blood frothed up from her throat and out her mouth. It ran down her chin, hanging in long, thick strings, and soaked the front of her dress. The room darkened in her dwindling spot of vision, but then slowly widened back into view. She was hardly aware of where the Mord-Sith was or what she was doing until Orneta saw her walk around behind her. Without a word, Vika jammed her Agiel into the base of Orneta's skull. Light flashed in her vision. Sparkling colors exploded in every direction. There was a most terrible shrieking sound inside her head that made the pain beyond anything that had come before. Sharp shards of suffering drove inward through her ears. Orneta sat on the floor, limp and helpless, as the shrieking, crashing, roaring sound and the blaze of light swirled through her head. She heard Vika's boots on the white marble floor as the woman came around in front of her. The Mord-Sith stood over Orneta, towered over her, looking down without the slightest hint of compassion, much less remorse. Orneta had never seen such a cold and heartless look in all her life. "That was quite good," Vika said in a calm voice. "I'm sure everyone could hear it." Orneta couldn't hold her head up. She couldn't make her neck muscles respond. By the terrible pain, she thought that they must be torn. Her chin rested on her blood-soaked chest. She saw blood spreading across the white marble floor. Her blood. A lot of her blood. The Mord-Sith's boots were the same color as the pool of blood she was standing in. With supreme effort, through the burning pain in her throat, past the blood filling her mouth, she used all her might to lift her head to look up and speak. "What do you want of me?" Vika arched a brow over a cold blue eye. "Well, now that you have screamed very nicely for me, I want you to die." Orneta blinked up at the woman. She could offer no resistance, could not fight such a savage creature. She was not surprised, though. She had known the answer before Vika had spoken it. Orneta saw the Agiel coming again. She felt only the first instant of exquisite pain as her heart exploded in her chest. And then, even that breathless, crushing agony diminished into the last conscious, dimming spark of awareness. Ludwig was pouring himself a last glass of wine when he heard the door behind him open and then close. There had been no knock. He glanced back over his shoulder just enough to catch a glimpse of red leather. The familiar odor of blood reached his nostrils. It reminded him of being back at the abbey, of his work at extracting prophecy. He turned around and took a sip of the wine as he leaned a hip against the table. It was late and he was tired. Vika stood tall and straight, hands clasped behind her back, feet spread, chin held high, not meeting his gaze. "Was everything satisfactory, Abbot Dreier?" He strolled across the room toward her. |
| 737 |
"So what does this one say?" She took a breath to steel herself and then handed him the strip. "I would rather you translate it yourself. I don't wish to be the messenger in this." Frowning, Richard took the strip and looked at the one rather simple emblem on the strip, followed by a more complex element. He felt blood rush to his face in hot rage. The strip said The hounds will take her from you. He clenched his jaw. "That's it, I've had it with that machine. I want it destroyed!" As he headed for the door, Nicci and Cara raced to catch up with him. Kahlan woke to the feel of warm breath on her face. It made absolutely no sense. The alarm of her inner voice warned her to keep her eyes closed and to remain perfectly still. She frantically tried to understand what was going on, but she couldn't make sense of it. She knew that it wasn't Richard. He was worried about her and would never do something that would frighten her, especially when she was not feeling well. Her left arm hurt. She only dimly recalled Zedd putting something on it and wrapping it in bandages. But her arm was not the immediate problem. Her experience during the war, and even more, her training and experience as a Confessor, automatically took over. She ignored her still-throbbing headache, her nausea, the ache of her arm, and put her full focus on the problem at hand. Without opening her eyes, or moving, or changing her breathing, Kahlan began to take assessment. Something was keeping her tightly pinned under the blanket. She tried to imagine what could be holding her down. As she put her mind to understanding it, she thought that it felt rather like someone on their hands and knees directly over her, with a hand and a knee to either side, pinning the blanket down. She knew that the room was heavily guarded, so she was at a loss to imagine how anyone intending harm could have gotten in. She couldn't think of a single person who would do such a thing as a joke. She realized that the smell of the thing was decidedly unpleasant and not human. The heavy breathing had an element of a low growl to it. Ever so carefully, she slitted her eyelids open just the tiniest bit. Near to her, to each side, she could see something slender. Something slender and hairy. She realized that it could only be the front legs of an animal like a wolf or dog, possibly a coyote. In the dim light of the single lamp on the bedside table, it was hard to tell the color. With that bit of information, the frantic, bewildered confusion began to clear. Her thoughts of what it could possibly be, thankfully, began to coalesce. It was not a person on all fours over her. It was some sort of animal. By the weight of it on the bed, what ever it was had to be rather big, too big, she realized, to be a coyote. And then she heard the distinctive low growl, and felt the hot breath again. By the smell of the thing, the legs she could see, and the panting growl she was pretty sure that it had to be a big dog, possibly a wolf. |
| 738 |
She was having a great deal of difficulty conceiving of what it could be doing in her bedroom. She recalled, then, the dog that had crashed into their bedroom door, the wildly aggressive dog that the soldiers had been forced to kill. She didn't know how this dog could have gotten into the room. She set aside the effort of trying to figure it out. It didn't matter how it got in. It only mattered that it had, and that the animal was dangerous — she had no doubt of that. With her body pinned under the blanket, there was no hope of leaping up and racing for the door. It was too close to her. She would never make it. As she opened her eyelids just the slightest bit more, she could see the muzzle snarled back, and the long teeth. If she tried to jump up, slowed by being trapped under the blanket as she was, the beast would rip off her face before she had a chance to get her arms up to defend herself. She realized that the animal was standing between her right side and her right arm. Her left arm was trapped close to her body, but her right arm was not; it was outside the animal's legs. She knew that she had only one chance. She also knew that she could not delay. Dogs and wolves both had a predator instinct. They were excited by prey trying to get away, by it running. As she lay perfectly still, the prey drive was being kept in check. But only as long as she was perfectly still, and only for the moment. She knew that the dog could decide to act first. She could hear the low, menacing growl getting deeper, getting a little louder. She could feel the vibration of it in her chest. The dog was deciding to flush its prey. She had no time to waste. She knew that once it sank its teeth into her, there would be no escape. She had to take the initiative. Kahlan slowly pulled in a deep breath, preparing herself. The dog sensed something. The growl rose in power. Suddenly, with all her strength, as fast as she possibly could, she used her right arm to whip the blanket up, over, and around the dog. It began to lunge. In an instant, though, before it could fully react, before it could drive forward and before its teeth could reach her face, she had the beast rolled up in the blanket. The rotating momentum of throwing the blanket over and around it, of enveloping and trapping the animal, rolled them both over the side of the bed. They crashed to the floor, Kahlan on top of the powerful, struggling dog. Its legs, encased in the blanket, kicked frantically to escape. Kahlan knew there were guards right outside the door. She tried to cry out for help, but her throat was so sore that her voice was gone. She couldn't bring forth a scream. Fortunately, she had just missed knocking the bedside lamp off onto the floor with them, so she could see what she was doing. From years of experience, Kahlan instinctively reached to the knife at her belt so that she could dispatch the wildly thrashing beast. The knife wasn't there. She was confused at first as to why not, wondering if she had lost it when she rolled off the bed. |
| 739 |
She looked back at the stairs. This had to be how they had gotten up to her room. They had come up the stairs, leaped across to the balcony outside her room, and gotten in that way. She saw the dogs back up on the balcony to her room, getting the space they needed to make the leap. She had no time to stop and think. She was in full terror mode as she jumped up and raced for the stairs. She bounded down the steps three at a time as the first dog made the leap across. She panted, out of breath, as she frantically ran down the steps, hooked a hand on the end cap of the railing to spin herself around for the next flight, and launched herself down those as well. She looked back briefly, reasoning that she could use her backpack to fend them off if they got too close. When she saw the snapping jaws lunging for her, she realized that fending them off with her pack was not going to work. She ran all the faster down the steps, taking each turn by hooking her hand over the newel and spinning around to change directions at each switchback flight of stairs. Having to make those turns slowed the snarling pack of dogs as they slid on the stone, scrambling to gain footing as they turned the corners. Kahlan was able to gain a lead on them. It was not a comfortable lead, but it at least gained her a bit of distance from the teeth. Her head hurt so much that she thought she might simply collapse and then they would have her. She remembered the prediction of the woman who had murdered her children, the woman Kahlan had taken with her power, the prediction that fangs would come for Kahlan and tear her apart. Kahlan ran all the harder. But even as she ran, she knew that she was near the end of her endurance. She could feel her strength waning. As she found herself racing across the ground in the dead of night, she was near to dropping from exhaustion. Behind, the hounds were coming, and they were catching up again. She had no choice but to keep running. The hammering pain in her head was close to overwhelming her. She knew that she would not be able to go on for long, and then the hounds would have her. She remembered the horrific sight of Catherine, killed by animals of some kind. Kahlan was pretty sure that she now knew what had killed the pregnant queen. The same thing had killed Catherine and her unborn child that was now after Kahlan. There was no doubt that if these beasts caught her, they would rip her apart the way they had ripped apart Catherine. That image, that memory, powered her legs. The only chance she had was to run. But even if she hadn't been near to the end of her strength, the dogs were running faster. What distance she had gained on the stairs, they were rapidly making up. Worse, the initial fright that had powered her and carried her on, that burst of fear-driven strength, was expended. She was near to dropping. She had to do something. Kahlan saw a wagon up ahead in the darkness moving away from her. She changed course a little and ran toward it. |
| 740 |
But those questions would have to wait. As they all headed for the stairs, the machine began to rumble into activity again. As they turned back and stared, it gradually came up to full speed. A strip was pulled off the bottom of the stack and through the inner workings. Richard watched it drop into the slot. He was reluctant to bother to pick this one up and read it. He was tired of the game. He didn't want to play along anymore. He thought that maybe he should leave the strip sitting in the machine until morning. Before Richard could leave, Zedd pulled the metal strip out, glanced at the symbols, and then handed it to Richard. "It's cool. What does it say?" Richard reluctantly took the strip from Zedd and held it up in the light to read the circular symbols. "'Your only chance is to let the truth escape.'" "What in the world could that mean?" Cara asked. Richard clenched the strip in his fist. "It's some kind of riddle. I hate riddles." Kahlan woke, confused at feeling herself rocking. She winced as she pressed a hand over the stunning pain at the top of her head. Her hair felt wet. She pulled her hand away to look at it, but it was too dark to see much other than wetness glistening in the moonlight. She suspected that she knew all too well what it was. As she struggled up onto her knees she touched her tongue to her hand. She was right; it was blood. When she swallowed, her throat was so sore that it made her wince. She ached all over and was shivering with chills even though she was sweating profusely. Her mind raced, trying to put the fragments of memories together, trying to recall exactly what had happened. Images and impressions flashed in sickening snatches. At the same time the whole world felt like it was moving. When she was jolted and then bounced, she lost her balance and fell forward. She had to put a hand down to keep from falling over on her face. She felt rough wood. Looking around she realized that she was in a small open space in the back of a wagon. Both the pain throbbing inside her head and the sharp stinging pain at the top of her head made her woozy. She fought back the urge to be sick. Suddenly, a big dog bounded up out of the darkness, slamming into the side of the wagon, startling her. It dropped back, unable to make it all the way into the wagon, but it hooked its front legs over the side and held on. The dog scrambled, stretching its neck to get its massive head inside, trying to get enough of its weight into the wagon to have the leverage to get all the way in. Strings of frothy drool whipped from side to side as the animal, even while trying to climb into the wagon, growled and snapped at her. Kahlan immediately kicked one of the dog's legs off the edge of the wagon. The dog struggled but couldn't hold on with one paw and fell off into the darkness. The whole nightmare of what had happened up in the bedroom was starting to come back to her — fragments of it, anyway. She remembered, too, what had happened to Queen Catherine, what a pack of dogs had done to her. |
| 741 |
Kahlan also remembered the prophecy given by the woman Kahlan had taken with her power, the woman who had killed her own children to supposedly spare them a worse death. That woman had told Kahlan that she would suffer a grim fate. When Kahlan had asked what she was talking about, the woman had said, "Dark things stalking you, running you down. You won't be able to escape them." Now dark things were stalking her, running her down. Where the hounds had come from and why they were after her was no longer part of Kahlan's thinking. She was simply frantic to escape them. Kahlan squinted in the darkness, trying to see up toward the front of the wagon, hoping to see the driver and get some help, but the wagon was piled high with things covered in a stiff canvas tarp. The only way to get to the front, where the driver would be, was to climb either over or around the load. It looked too high to go over in a rocking, bucking wagon, especially considering how dizzy she felt. She tried to look around the load, but she wasn't able to see anyone. Kahlan called out but her throat was so sore that she could hardly make a sound. No one answered. She thought that over the rumble of the wagon it was probably hard for a driver to hear someone in the back behind his load. More than that, though, her fever was also making her hoarse. She couldn't yell loud enough. She needed to get closer before they would hear her. Kahlan scrambled to her feet. As she put a foot up onto the side wall of the wagon to climb up around the load, a dog came out of the darkness, lunging wildly, trying to grab her ankle. As she jumped back out of the way, she saw the pack of dogs snarling and growling as they ran alongside the wagon. Before she could try again to climb around the load, another dog leaped up, getting its front legs over the side. It sank its teeth into the canvas to help pull itself up. Its back legs scrambled, trying to get purchase on something so that it could climb into the wagon. She kicked at the dog's head. It let go of the canvas and snapped at her, trying to catch her foot even as it tried to clamber up into the wagon, but it fell off. Another big hound jumped up on the other side, almost making it in. A third leaped up beside it. Kahlan kicked at the dogs, knocking one after another off the sideboards of the wagon. As soon as she kicked one off, another to the back or side bounded up and hooked its front legs over the edge. Their eyes glowed red with vicious intent. The wagon wasn't going fast enough to get away from the pack, but it was going fast enough to keep her off balance as it rocked and bucked. When the wagon bounced on a rock, her kick missed and she had to urgently kick again to keep a dog out. Kahlan looked back into the distance. It was dark, but there was enough moonlight that she would have been able to see the plateau with the People's Palace atop it if it had been anywhere near. Even if it was too far in the distance to see the plateau in the moonlight, she would have been able to see the lights of the city palace atop it, but it wasn't there. |
| 742 |
Almost at the same time, he remembered Queen Catherine lying dead on the floor, her middle viciously ripped open by some kind of animals with fangs. Richard dropped the blanket and rushed to the bed. Kahlan wasn't there. He stared for a moment at the rumpled, empty bed before turning up the wick on the lamp and scanning the room. He didn't see her anywhere. When he glanced up, Richard saw that the door to the balcony was open. His first thought was that maybe her fever had driven her out on the balcony to get some relief in the cool night air. Before he could go to the balcony, his attention was caught by his pack on the floor. Kahlan's pack had been beside it before. He knew, because he had been the one who had put them both there. He supposed that Kahlan might have wanted to get something out of it and could have moved it somewhere, but he didn't really believe that. Something told him that it would be a waste of time searching the room for it. Richard instead ran to the balcony doors. He was worried that, at the least, she might have gotten worse. He expected to see her passed out on the balcony floor. She wasn't there. The bedroom, like the balcony, wasn't that big. There was no way he could have missed her back in the room. Baffled as to where she could be, he reluctantly looked over edge of the railing, fearing that she might have fallen. It was difficult to see in the darkness, but not impossible. He was relieved to see nothing on the ground far below. As he started to turn to go back inside, Richard saw that there was another balcony. It wasn't connected or even all that close, but he went to the railing closest to it anyway for a look. He saw that it had a stairway down on the far side. He saw, then, the scuff mark on the top of the railing where he was standing. It looked to have been made by a boot. Richard hopped up on the railing and leaped across the daunting drop to the other balcony. The doors on the second balcony were locked and it was dark inside. It was possible that Kahlan had gone inside and then locked the doors, but he didn't really believe that. It made no sense. If she feared something, there were guards and Mord-Sith just outside their bedroom door. Instead of breaking in the door, Richard took Kahlan's more likely route. He raced in the darkness down the flights of stairs, eventually reaching the grounds of the palace. The moonlight coming through the thin haze of clouds wasn't bright, but it was bright enough for him to recognize Kahlan's bootprints. With a lifetime of tracking experience, he also recognized her unique gait. He could read the features of the way she walked and the tracks she made nearly as well as he could read the features of her face. There was no doubt about it. Kahlan had come down the stairs outside the palace to the grounds at the top of the plateau. The thing that worried him the most was that he could see by the prints that she had been running as fast as she could. He looked around for other prints, the prints of anyone who might have been chasing her, but there were no other footprints. |
| 743 |
It didn't make any sense. Richard stood and stared off across the top of the dark plateau. What could she have been running from? In the distance, paths meandered through elaborate gardens, but the grounds closer to the palace, where Richard had come out at the bottom of the stairs, were an open staging and loading area where supplies arrived at the palace. While most visitors to the palace entered up stairways through the interior of the plateau, an imposing portico between the staging area and the gardens welcomed important guests arriving by horse or carriage at the top of the plateau. The entrance there took guests into the grand corridors and the guest areas. Closer to Richard, in a less well lit area, were the stables and service docks. He could see the dark shapes of dozens of wagons and carriages that were either parked or being loaded. Horses were being brought out of the stables and either saddled or hitched to wagons. Even in the middle of the night representatives were packing up and leaving the palace. The place was alive with activity. No one was arriving. All the wagons were leaving. Richard was concerned about all the things that had happened recently and the representatives who had decided that they would rather side with prophecy and those who promised it to them. He wanted to know what could be behind it all, but at the moment his only real focus was on finding Kahlan. Richard followed Kahlan's tracks as they traced her route through the darkness atop the plateau. She had been running as fast as she could. He could see by certain characteristics of the tracks, such as the way a print twisted here and there, that she was looking behind at something chasing her as she ran. If she had been running after someone or something, the prints would have looked different. It made no sense. There were no prints of anything chasing her, yet he could clearly read the indications of fear in her tracks. What ever was after her would have had to be flying not to leave prints. He knew, too, that it might very well be fevered delusions chasing her. But the prophecy from the machine saying that the hounds would take her from him was no delusion. At least there were no tracks of hounds. And then, in the midst of hoofprints and wagon tracks, Kahlan's footprints simply ended. Richard went to one knee and bent to study the tracks more closely. He saw, then, the marks where her last print pushed off on the ball of her foot. It had left a heavier impression with pronounced side ridges as she had jumped up onto something. Since her footprints ended there, he knew that it was most likely a wagon or coach that she had jumped up onto. With an icy sense of dread, Richard realized that Kahlan was gone. He couldn't understand what had happened, or why she would have run the way she did, but he could see plainly enough that she had left the bedroom, come down the steps to the ground, run across the plateau, and then jumped into a wagon. There were wagons leaving all the time. |
| 744 |
The lap of several branches had made a somewhat safe, if uncomfortable, place to rest. The days of terror seemed endless and had blended one into another until she had completely lost track of time. She was exhausted from the relentless chase. Overwhelming fatigue was the only thing that brought on sleep. At night, when it got dark enough, the hounds would seem to disappear for the night. She thought that maybe they went off at night to search for food and to rest. At first, she had entertained the hope that they had tired of the chase and had given up. The first few nights after leaving the palace, when she had still been out on the Azrith Plain and the hounds had vanished at night, Kahlan had thought that it was her chance to escape, to put distance between her and her pursuers, but no matter how fast she ran, no matter how many hours, no matter if she rode all night without stopping, the hounds were always right there when day broke, and then they would come for her again. Because the sun rose ahead and to the right and set behind her, she knew that she was headed roughly northeast. That told her the direction that the palace would be in. She had tried several times after the hounds had disappeared at night to circle around and head back, but doing so took her back into an ambush by the dogs. She had barely escaped with her life. As they came after her she had to turn back to the northeast, her only thought to outrun them, to put distance between her and her would-be assassins. There were times when she had wanted to give up, to simply quit running and let it end. But the memory of Catherine's gruesome end was too horrifying to allow Kahlan to surrender. She kept telling herself that if she could stay alive, if she could stay ahead of the pack of wild dogs, she had a chance. As long as she could outrun them she would stay alive. As long as she was alive, there was hope. The thought of Richard also kept her from giving up. The thought of him finding her torn apart by the hounds was so crushingly heartbreaking that it made her fight all the harder to stay alive. After she had left the Azrith Plain and had gotten into mountainous terrain, it had become, for the most part, impossible for her to run the horse at night. She was afraid of the animal breaking a leg in the dark. Without the horse, the dogs would easily catch her. The horse was her lifeline. She took good care of it. At least, she took as good care of it as was possible. She knew that if she lost the horse, she would be dead in short order. On the other hand, if she didn't push the horse hard enough, the hounds would pull her down. Kahlan looked down from her place in the branches. The horse was tied to a nearby limb of the tree, but on a long rope so that it could graze on anything it could find close enough. If she needed the horse in a hurry she had the end of the rope at hand so that she could pull the animal in close and climb down onto it. For some reason, the hounds ignored the horse. |
| 745 |
They wanted Kahlan, not the horse, and they never attacked it. She couldn't understand it. The horse, though, was not comforted by their disinterest. Their mere presence set the horse into a panic. Kahlan looked down, checking where the horse was. Despite how weary she was, she knew that she would have to leave soon lest the dogs arrive and terrify the horse. In its panic, the horse could be hurt. If it broke a leg, she would be done. If she let the hounds somehow trap her up in the tree, she would have trouble getting the horse close enough to the growling, barking, snapping animals. She didn't like the thought of being trapped and risking that the horse would break loose in the confusion and get away without her. Just as soon as there was enough light to see, she would leave. She hadn't eaten much other than some travel biscuits, a few nuts from time to time, and bit of dried meat she had in her pack. She still felt sick to her stomach and really didn't want to eat anything at all, but she knew that she needed to keep up her strength, so she forced herself. She had a fever, and her arm throbbed painfully. She was nauseous and constantly feared that she would have to throw up. She remembered waking back in the Garden of Life with the splitting headache and vomiting uncontrollably. While she knew that she had to eat or she would get sicker, she couldn't afford to throw up, so she ate only as much as she thought she had to. As she searched the surrounding area for any sign of the dogs, she thought she spotted something off among the trees. It looked human. Kahlan was about to call out to try to get some help, when she saw the way the thing moved. It didn't walk, exactly. It was more like it glided along through the shadows. She leaned out on the branch, trying to see better. Just then, the first rays of sunlight came through the treetops. Kahlan saw then that what she had thought was a person was actually a dog — a big black dog. It was the leader of the pack, stalking out of the trees. She couldn't grasp how she could have thought it was a person. With the terror of seeing the pack leader, panic welled up in her and all she could think about was getting away. Kahlan leaned down and pulled in the rope hand over hand as fast as she could, drawing the horse close to the tree before the hounds could come in close and spook it away. When the horse was below her, she climbed down to a lower branch of the oak tree and then dropped onto the horse's back. Kahlan looked back and saw the pack of dogs coming through the trees. When they saw her they started in howling. Kahlan leaned forward over the horse's withers as it bolted. The chase was back on. As Kahlan guided her horse among immense pines, she frequently looked back over her shoulder to keep track of how close the dogs had gotten. The colossal trees towering above her cut off almost every bit of sky. The lower branches were far out of reach overhead. Iron gray clouds made it even darker, leaving a gloomy world in the undergrowth for the horse to try to navigate. |
| 746 |
Drizzle collected on the pine needles until the drops grew fat enough to fall. It was distracting when those fat, random drops splashed against her face. Kahlan was cold, wet, and miserable. She had to concentrate to find the indistinct trail among the nursery of small pines carpeting the lower reaches of the dense forest. In many places they overgrew a trail too seldom used to keep open. In other places, beds of thick ferns covered over any hint of the little-traveled route through the forest wilderness. Having grown up in a palace, Kahlan had never known much about following obscure trails. In her duties as a Confessor, she had always traveled the roads and well-used paths between population centers of the Midlands. She had also always been escorted by a wizard. That seemed so long ago that it felt like another lifetime. To an extent, the hounds helped guide her in the sense that they left her only one real direction she could go. She just had to find enough footing for the horse. Even though the dogs were never far behind, she dared not let the horse panic and run on its own. If they left the trail there was no telling what trouble they could get into. Holes among rocks and fallen timber off the trail could catch and break the horse's legs. They might suddenly come to a cliff, or an impassable gorge, or a place so dense as to be impenetrable. If that happened, the pack of wild dogs would have her trapped and it would be all over. She didn't want to die out in the middle of a trackless forest, taken down by dogs, torn apart, devoured and left for scavengers to pick clean. She needed to stay on the relative safety of the trail in order to stay ahead of her pursuers. It was Richard who had taught her about following poorly marked trails that were rarely used and difficult to make out. Besides looking for small indications close by, she continually scanned the broader area ahead, looking for telltale signs of where the trail went. The thought of Richard gave her an agonizing stab of longing. She hadn't thought about him much in recent days. She was so desperate to get away that she was hardly able to think about anything other than running and staying away from the baying pack of dogs. Her arm hurt. Her head throbbed. She was so exhausted that she could hardly sit upright atop the horse anymore. Worse, she was so sick with fever that she feared she might pass out. She supposed that if she was unconscious it might be the best way to die. It might be a blessing to lose consciousness when the pack got to her. With the back of her hand, Kahlan wiped a tear from her cheek. She missed Richard so much. He must be frantic with worry about her being missing for so long. She felt shame for not somehow letting him know what had happened. Several of the dogs suddenly ran in out of the brush at the side, lunging at her legs. In a panic, Kahlan urged the horse into a run. Limbs flashed by. Pine boughs slapped her as she raced headlong through the woods. One branch hit her shoulder, almost knocking her off her horse. |
| 747 |
Abruptly, the horse skidded to a halt. The ground ahead dropped away over the rim of a rocky ledge. The horse couldn't take the steep, plunging descent. She feared that they had gotten off the trail, and now they were trapped. Kahlan looked back. The hounds were coming. As the dogs started yelping and howling in anticipation of having her cornered, the frightened horse suddenly reared up. Without a saddle there was precious little to hold on to. Kahlan snatched for the mane as she started slipping off the horse's back. She missed. Before she knew it, she landed with a heavy thud. Stunned from hitting the ground so hard, she groaned in pain. She had landed on her infected arm. With her good arm she cradled her sore arm to her abdomen. Before Kahlan could grab the rope, the horse bolted away into the woods. In mere seconds she couldn't see it anymore. But she could see the dogs bounding toward her, the lead dog barking with savage hunger to get at her. Kahlan turned and practically dove down the steep drop. In places she leaped from ledges of rocks above to rocks below in a series of jarring, barely controlled falls from ledge to ledge. She was racing downward so fast that she didn't have time to think about it before each leap. She knew how dangerous it was to descend like that, but she was possessed by the panicked drive to escape the terror coming for her. Kahlan slipped on loose gravel and fell into a slide down a channel of debris and loose ground. Rock and small shrubs flashed by as she slid downward. Behind her the dogs leaped across the rocks as if they were made for it. They were closing on her. With a hard impact she hit the bottom and fell sprawling on her face. Without taking the time to feel sorry for herself she pushed herself up. The way ahead looked flatter, but it also looked wet. Mist drifted among the dense trees, so she couldn't see very far ahead in the gloom. What she could see was a thick tangle of growth. Vines trailed down from above. Heavy vegetation blocked the way off to the sides. But she saw that she hadn't lost the trail after all. It was right in front of her, tunneling ahead through the dense underbrush. A short-haired brown dog crashed down from the steep trail, rolling as it landed behind her. As he scrambled to get to his feet, his jaws snapped, trying to get Kahlan's leg in his teeth. Kahlan sprang up and started running headlong into the burrow through the brush. The passage through the undergrowth seemed endless. Vegetation flashed by as she ran. She couldn't see the end up ahead. Dogs barked as they chased her through the tangled green warren. Abruptly, she burst out of the thick underbrush into a more open, swampy area. Trees with smooth gray bark and fat bottoms of tangled, spreading roots stood in stretches of stagnant water. Kahlan's boots sank into mud and she fell. As she struggled to get free, she admonished herself for paying too much attention to the dogs chasing her and inadvertently leaving the trail. |
| 748 |
The only good thing was that the mud slowed the dogs as well. They circled around behind her, jumping from dry spots to clumps of grasses, looking for a way to come in from the side. Kahlan clambered back onto the trail and raced ahead, trying to jump from root to root in order to stay out of the water and morass of mud. She didn't trust stepping in the water because she feared that she would sink in and get her foot caught in a tangle of roots hidden below. She could even break an ankle. Both thoughts terrified her. As the trail occasionally submerged into the ever-expanding swamp, Kahlan saw places in the path where branches and vines had been placed on the ground to span impassable areas. They provided a welcome way ahead across the patches of water. The farther she went, the more substantial and frequent the knitted-branch path became. It was much easier to run with the woven mat underfoot. As she raced ahead into the thick swamp, through vines and moss hanging in sheets along the way, the walkway became even more substantial, eventually rising up above the surface of the stagnant water. A quick look behind revealed that the dogs were having trouble. Their paws slipped down through gaps in the weaving of the walkway, sometimes becoming caught. The farther in they went, the more difficulty they had negotiating the entwined branches, twigs, and vines. Kahlan was soon so far ahead that she lost sight of them in the swirling fog. The walkway grew strong and solid. In places there were railings made of thick branches. Not long after that, the railings themselves became more sturdy. Kahlan was giddy with relief. She was reaching an inhabited place of some kind. With a walkway this well built, this painstakingly constructed, she was sure it would lead her to salvation. Kahlan was confounded at the construction of the enclosed, candlelit tunnel. Soggy parts of the pathway that at first had been gapped with bits of branches and vines knitted together turned into a continuous mat of woven material, which then became a causeway that rose above the surface of the water into an elevated structure that eventually circled all the way around the walkway and closed in overhead. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all constructed the same way, made entirely of woven branches, twigs, vines, and grasses. Kahlan had never seen anything like the remarkably well built and solid structure. She didn't know who had placed all the candles to welcome visitors, but she was thankful for them. She would at last be safe from the dogs that had pursued her for so long. She would at last be able to get help and return to the palace and to Richard. Kahlan remembered the prophecy all too well. "Dark things. Dark things stalking you, running you down. You won't be able to escape them... your body being ripped open as you scream, all alone, no one to help you." Now that she had found a place where it seemed clear that there would be people, she at last dared to think that she had beaten the prophecy. |
| 749 |
Yet more of them gathered close around. Including the two holding Kahlan up, there were six of them. The cowled figure the woman had spoken to in the strange language bowed her head. "I will leave at once, Mistress, and let him know that we have her, and that she will soon be among the walking dead." Kahlan ran the words through her mind again, not sure she had heard them right. She will soon be among the walking dead. With that, the figure vanished like smoke through the walls. As Kahlan watched her go, she saw for the first time other people back in the walls, woven in the way Henrik had been. Some were near the surface of the wall while others were so far back in she couldn't see much of them. None had clothes. A number of them were clearly dead. The small woman with the leather thongs sewing her mouth closed turned and tossed a handful of dusty material in the shallow bowl where small sticks were smoldering. Sparkling light spiraled up. Other figures, grotesque figures only partially visible, crowded into the room. It felt like being among an assembly of ghosts, except they didn't look like ghosts of people. They were gangly, human-like, skeletal creatures. Their long arms and legs had big, knobby joints. Their flesh, tight on their slender limbs, as if they had no muscle whatsoever, glistened with mottled, slimy rot. Their demonic heads bore only a passing resemblance to humans'. They growled at the sight of her, their thin lips drawing back to reveal large mouths crowded with pointed, needle-sharp teeth. The woman with the sewn-shut lips reached out with a filthy, blackened hand and grasped Kahlan's wrist. Paralyzing pain instantly crackled through her. But it was more than simply pain. Besides the jolt of pain, the touch carried the sensation of utter, disheartened hopelessness. It was like being touched by death. As all the glowing creatures in cowled robes closed in around her, Kahlan finally got a good look at their frightening faces. It was like looking at rotting corpses. Their gnarled hands clawed at her clothes, and Kahlan knew that she had to do something, and fast. She couldn't allow them to do what ever it was they intended. The woman with the sewn-shut mouth was touching her. That was all Kahlan needed. More than she needed. The world seemed to slow almost to a stop. Time belonged to Kahlan. Exhaustion, fear, pain, sickness, misery, hopelessness were forgotten. Mercy did not exist. The moment was hers. In that timeless place within, that place of power, that core of her being, where her inborn Confessor power resided, Kahlan released the constraints on her ability. Thunder without sound jolted the air. The power of the concussion shook the whole structure. All around the people in the walls screamed as they shuddered violently, their arms and legs shaking as much as they could in the confinement of the thorny walls. The air was filled with their howls. When it finally died down, the woman with the sewn-shut lips merely smiled. Kahlan's power hadn't worked on her. |
| 750 |
His problem was to try to figure out where Kahlan was inside the maze of rooms and corridors. He had to get it right the first time. He doubted that once it started he would have a second chance to get her out. All around, smooth-barked trees stood in the murky water on fat, spreading tangles of roots. Their wide-spreading branches held veils of gray-green moss. The water around the trees was in places covered with a thick layer of floating duckweed, making it look like a carpet of lawn. Richard knew that beneath it creatures lurked in the murky depths waiting for the unwary. In places the structure made of the branches and vines was attached to the massive trees for stability and support. So many of the thick, stiff vines hung down from the trees that in spots Richard had difficulty getting through them. In other places he had to duck under low branches. In yet other places he had to brush thick webs of moss out of his way. He wanted to go faster, but as he made his way across the slippery top of the structure he needed to be as quiet as possible so as not to alert anyone down inside. Out in the swamp, the sharp calls of animals echoed across the stretches of dark water. When he glanced over the sloping side of the structure and saw shadows moving beneath the muddy water, Richard reminded himself to be careful. If the fall didn't kill him, something else likely would. In other places, long-legged white egrets stood on roots waiting for unwary fish to pass by. From below the water, other things hunted the egrets. As he moved ahead, he had to carefully skirt a poisonous yellow-and-red-banded snake lying over a branch hanging down in his way. Richard stopped still, listening. In a pause between the hoots, chirps, and calls of animals out in the swamp, he thought he heard chanting. He squatted down, putting one hand to the roof for balance as he leaned forward and listened. Even though he couldn't make out any words he recognized, he was sure that it was some kind of shouting and chanting. It was hard to tell exactly where it was coming from. The strange sounds were unlike anything he had ever heard before. As he crouched down lower, looking under wispy curtains of moss, Richard spotted what looked like trailers of fog. He thought that it could possibly be smoke. He moved ahead past the moss to get a better look and saw that it was definitely smoke. It wasn't billowing smoke, like that from a fire, but rather thin wisps of whitish smoke, possibly the kind used in certain mystic rituals. As Richard got closer, he could smell the acrid smoke. It was laced with the stink of something dead. When he reached the broad area where he'd spotted it, there was no chimney. The smoke simply seeped right up through the weaving of branches. He was able to hear the crazy chanting, thumping, and carrying-on right underneath him. Richard slowly, carefully, as quietly as he could, drew his sword. He didn't think they would be able to hear him over all the noise below, but he wasn't taking any chances. |
| 751 |
The steel hissed softly as it came out into the gloom. He'd already decided, from everything he knew, that nothing going on below him could be anything good. He knew that Henrik had been drawn to this place after having been sent to retrieve Richard's and Kahlan's flesh, and when he escaped he was covered in blood. He knew that Kahlan, through some kind of occult conjuring surrounding the flesh that Henrik had brought back to the Hedge Maid, had also been compelled to come to this place. He had no illusions. This was going to be a fight to the death. The sword's rage stormed through him, mixing with his own anger at Kahlan being taken prisoner. He wasn't even sure that she was still alive. It was all he could do to control the fury pounding through his veins and focus on what he needed to do. Richard remembered all too well Nicci's warnings about Hedge Maids. She'd said that he had no defense against their powers. That meant that his sword would not work against her. He'd had that experience before, so he took Nicci's warning seriously. There wasn't a lot that could be done about it now, though. He had no choice and no time to get help. He had to act. But Nicci's warning didn't mean his sword wouldn't work against others, and he could hear a lot of others below him. His only chance was surprise, swiftness of action, and violence. Richard drew the blade across the inside of his arm, letting it bite through his flesh to have a taste of blood. A crimson drop ran down the fuller and dripped off the tip. Richard lifted the blade stained with blood and touched it to his forehead. "Blade, be true this day," he whispered. Richard knew that he had to be fast. With all his fury and strength, he lifted the sword overhead, pausing for only an instant, and then swept it down between his wide-spread legs, slicing through the web of woven branches, sticks, and vines. The sound of it parting the thick mat of woven material ripped the heavy air of the swamp. He drew his fists in tight to his chest, held the sword upright, put his legs together, and dropped down through the raw opening. He landed in the heart of madness. Richard dropped into a crouch as he landed. Glowing, hooded forms hovered to the side while figures from a nightmare, their gaunt limbs flailing about in the air, danced around the room, high-stepping, slapping their bony feet to the woven floor, making the whole room drum. Their heads thrown back, needle-sharp teeth bared, they all chanted strange guttural sounds in time with their thumping feet. The sound of it lifted the fine hairs at the back of his neck. The sight of it made him grip his sword all the tighter. A haze of acrid smoke hung in the air. The sharp smell of fresh blood overlay even the stench of death. A small woman in the center of the room, surprised by the intruder, turned to stare up at him with big, black eyes. Her lips were sewn closed with strips of leather. Her blackened hands and fingernails were stained with countless layers of filth. |
| 752 |
Her face had a dark patina of grime and gray soot. Fresh, bright red blood glistened on her chin. He saw it sloshing from side to side in the bowl she was holding. In the center of the chaos, he didn't think she could be anyone other than the Hedge Maid. And then, across the room, where glowing figures hovered in a cluster, he spotted Kahlan. It looked like she was trapped behind the very fabric of the thorny wall. All the branches and vines netting her against the wall held her up, but by the way she slumped, she looked to be unconscious. With the heel of his hand to the center of her chest, Richard rammed the small woman back out of his way as he raced toward Kahlan. After Nicci's warning, he didn't want to risk using his sword on the Hedge Maid. The glowing figures turned toward him. Their putrid yellow eyes glared with unbridled hatred. Beyond the edges of their glowing bluish cowls, the wrinkled flesh of their grotesque, pitted and pockmarked faces covered with warts and open ulcers contorted with rage as they howled in fury. With knobby, deformed hands, they all reached for him. The sword's tip whistled through the air as Richard swung at them. The glowing forms faded away as the blade swept through them, only to reappear once it was past. Richard hardly noticed, though. His attention was riveted on Kahlan. The front of her was covered in blood. He could see ripping bite marks on her abdomen, with rows of smaller, needle-sharp punctures on her shoulders and neck. The blood running down her had at first hidden the fact that she was naked. She was also unconscious. At the sight of what they had done to her, Richard went wild with runaway rage, swinging the sword at everything around him. The chanting bony creatures bared their fangs, snapping at him as they abruptly turned from their dancing and charged in, trying to grab him. The sword swept around with bone-shattering force, splintering limbs and skulls of the gaunt creatures. A shower of fragments from hands and arms, heads, and sharp, pointed teeth filled the air of the room. Yet even as he swung at the fiendish figures, taking off arms, legs, and heads, more of them rushed in toward him from the other side. They reached out, their clawlike hands raking his flesh. Richard fought all the harder, without pause. His sword cut down any near enough. Severed limbs and headless bodies lay in piles at his feet. As he stepped into their advancing lines, his sword also slashed through walls, breaking jars and jugs. Glass fragments flew through the air. Pieces of sticks and vine ripped from the walls spun across the room. But the sword didn't seem to diminish the number of bony beings running and dancing around the room, as countless more poured in like ants from the dark passageways at the sides and rear of the room. The glowing figures raced in, tearing at his shirt. They finally snatched his arms, their numbers overpowering him. With his sword stilled, the gathering of gangly creatures scuttled in, their faces thrusting toward him, jaws wide showing their menacing, crowded, sharp little teeth. |
| 753 |
They darted in, biting him. He reached back and tried to grab one of the glowing figures by the throat, but she cackled with laughter as she evaporated into smoke, only to materialize again inside his reach, close to him, still holding his wrist. Her jaws stretched wide to show her fangs as she abruptly flew in at him. Richard ducked to the side as her jaws snapped closed and she missed. With frantic effort, he spun away from all the hands. Jit was suddenly right there in front of him. She threw a handful of what looked like black dust up at him. It hit him like an iron bar across the face. He fell to the ground, the sword slipping from his grasp. With skeletal fingers, the bony creatures dragged the weapon away. Gnarled, clawlike hands reached out, grabbing him again, pinning him down. Sharp little teeth ripped at his shirt, tearing it away in shreds. Yet more of bony creatures crowded in, biting him on the chest and stomach. Richard was having trouble making his arms and legs move. He was dizzy and couldn't seem to make his vision focus. Jit said something in a strange clicking squealing language. The hands all around lifted him and slammed him against the wall beside where Kahlan was encased in the thorny vines. He tried to call out to her, but he couldn't seem to make his voice work. In fact, he realized that he was having trouble breathing. The dust that Jit had thrown at him was burning his lungs. He felt sharp, stabbing pain in his legs as the thorns of the vines the creatures were wrapping around his legs sank into him, helping to keep him from moving. They were going to encase him in the wall like Kahlan, like others he could see woven into the walls all around the room. As one of the demonic creatures, its skin covered with a greenish black sheen of slime, sank its sharp fangs into his stomach, another shoved a bowl against him to collect the blood. When it had enough, it rushed it to Jit. Holding it with both stained hands, the Hedge Maid drank greedily from the bowl. With the leather strips sewing her lips nearly together, keeping her from opening her mouth very far, she had trouble drinking, so blood dribbled down her face and dripped from her chin. The bony creatures looked like they could be servants of the Keeper himself. They moved in a knees-up, high-stepping crouch as they accompanied Jit, crowding in close to her like loyal little lapdogs. Cockroaches emerged at her feet all along the way to drink his blood as it dripped from her chin. Jit spoke in the strange, clicking squealing language. One of the glowing figures in a cowled cloak swept up to him, pointing a finger at his face. "She says that you, too, like the Mother Confessor, will soon be the walking dead." Richard remembered what the soldier back at the palace had told him. He had said that in the Dark Lands the dead walked. Richard knew now that it was not superstition. Richard wondered why the Hedge Maid's mouth was sewn closed. It came to him. Richard understood Regula's last message. |
| 754 |
He just didn't know if it could do him any good. Though the bottom half of his torso was trapped in the thorny vines, his arms were starting to get their strength back, and they were still free, so he stretched around toward Kahlan, reaching out to touch her face, hoping that somehow she would know that he was there with her. She was unconscious and didn't respond. He had to do something, and fast. The creatures dancing and cavorting through the room, stepping among the shattered bones and limbs of their fellows, seemed to think it was funny to see his affection for Kahlan. They mocked him, mimicking his gestures, reveling in what they knew was to become of them both. Jit turned to her work of adding pinches of this and that from jars to the smoldering fire in the shallow bowl in the center of the room. From time to time she picked up a slender stick decorated with glossy green feathers, snake skins, and shiny coins to draw spells in ash held in flat trays. Ghostly forms curled out from the fire as she spoke key words in low, guttural, rasping, clicking sounds. Each wisp of smoke coalesced into a deformed figure looking like it had been freed from the darkest reaches of the underworld to float above them. As Jit worked, and the frolicking creatures taunted him, Richard surreptitiously pulled off small pieces of his shredded shirt and rolled them between his finger and thumb. When he had two of them that he judged to be about the right size, he leaned toward Kahlan to make a show of caressing her face again. Twisting around like that pulled at the thorns sticking in his legs. He had no choice but to endure it. He could hear the grotesque cackles behind him of those watching and waiting for Jit to finish her work. With his left hand, so that it would cover her face and hide what he was doing, Richard slipped one of the rolled-up pieces of cloth into one of Kahlan's ears. With a finger he pushed it firmly into place. Without pause, he did the same with her other ear. A claw seized his left wrist and pulled it back. Other hands wrapped a thorny vine around the arm and pinned it back against the wall. Yet other creatures pulled a strip of thorny vine across his middle. Richard's strength did no good against so many of these undead creatures. Working as fast as he could with his free hand, he stuffed a rolled-up piece of cloth from his shredded shirt into each of his own ears. He remembered what the machine had told him. Your only chance is to let the truth escape. He needed to do something the Hedge Maid wouldn't expect. When Jit turned back toward him, he grinned at her. All the creatures drew back, murmuring to themselves at his puzzling behavior. The unexpected was frightening to them. He again gave the Hedge Maid a very deliberate grin to let her know that he knew something she didn't. He, in fact, knew the truth. The Hedge Maid, her expression darkening dangerously, glared at him. He needed to get her closer. "You have me," he said as he smiled broadly. |
| 755 |
"Let Kahlan go and I'll cooperate with what ever you want." One of the glowing forms, who was missing a hand, poked him with a finger. "We do not need your cooperation," she said. "Yes you do," Richard said with absolute conviction while he smiled at the Hedge Maid. "You need to know the truth." The cowled figure frowned. "The truth?" She turned and spoke to Jit in her strange language. The Hedge Maid frowned at her companion as she listened, and then stepped up to him. He towered over her, but she did not fear him. She should have. Jit smiled back with as evil a grin as he'd ever seen, her lips parting with the grin as much as the leather sewn through her lips would allow. Richard used his free hand to draw his knife from the sheath at his belt. It felt good to have a blade in his hand. A blade meant salvation. This one was as razor-sharp as truth itself. The Hedge Maid didn't fear his knife, and with good reason. After all, his sword had proven impotent against her. Richard knew that using a blade to try to cut Jit would be not merely futile, but a deadly mistake. Her aura of powers shielded her, protected her from being cut by him. She had proven that his sword could not harm her, so she certainly didn't fear a mere knife. She should have. In a blink, before the Hedge Maid could have second thoughts or guess what he intended, Richard whipped the knife past her face, carefully avoiding cutting her, or even the thought of it, so as not to trigger her occult protection. If he was sincerely not trying to cut her, her defenses would not react. With deadly precision, he instead made the tip of the razor-sharp blade sweep in just between her parted lips ... and sever the leather strips holding her mouth closed. The Hedge Maid's dark eyes went wide. Her mouth also went wide, something it had never done before. Her jaws opened wide. It looked decidedly involuntary. And then came a scream of such power, such malevolence, such evil, that it seemed to rip through the very fabric of the world of life. It was a scream born in the world of the dead. Jars and bottles exploded. Their contents flew everywhere. Bony creatures covered their heads protectively with their gangly arms. Broken glass, pottery, sticks, and pieces of vine began to move around the room in fits and starts, as if driven by gusts of wind, but then, with ever-growing speed, all the debris lifted into the air and began to circle the room. Even the bony creatures found themselves dragged into the building vortex, their arms and legs flailing as they orbited helplessly around the room among clouds of broken glass and pottery and all the things they had contained. The deadly power of the scream went on unabated, catching all the creatures up in it, along with the mass of rubble. The forms in the cowled cloaks covered their ears as they screamed in terror and pain. It did them no good. As Jit's unleashed scream ripped through the room, they began to be drawn up in the growing tornado of sound and wreckage storming around the room. |
| 756 |
Blood ran from the ears of those encased in the walls as they shook violently. The bony creatures began to disintegrate, coming apart as if they had been cast of sand, dust, and dirt. Arms and legs fell apart, dissolving in the maelstrom, mixing in with the rest of the rubble circling the room. They shrieked and howled even as they were coming apart. Their terrified cries joined the cry of the endless scream coming from the Hedge Maid. The glowing forms in the cowled capes began to elongate and rip apart in streams of glowing vapor as they were carried helplessly along in the power of the Hedge Maid's scream. Lightning flashed and flickered as it, too, was carried around the outside of the room. The very air roared and thundered. In the center of it all, the Hedge Maid stood, head thrown back, jaws wide, as she screamed her life away. The poison of who she was, of what she was, her wickedness, her corruption, her evil, her dedication to death and her contempt for life in any form, was escaping in a ripping scream that was the dead end of what she worshiped. The scream was death itself. Now that the truth of the dead soul within her was released, it was taking the life of its host. She was seeing the truth of her dead inner self. Life, her life, was incompatible with the death she carried inside. Death showed her no appreciation, and no mercy. Her face began to melt as her own evil, the death at her core, escaped its prison. Blood veins broke, muscle ripped apart, and her skin split open until her bones were exposed. It all added power and force to her death shriek. That scream, its power, its poison, lanced into Richard as well. The pain of it was more than he could stand. Every joint cried out in agony. Every nerve fiber vibrated with the torture of the sound escaping the Hedge Maid. He, too, was being touched by death that had been freed. As he began to lose consciousness, Richard realized that the plugs he had made for his ears, and for Kahlan's ears, were not sufficient to stand up against the malevolence he had unleashed. He had failed. He had failed Kahlan. He felt a tear of grief for Kahlan, of his love for her, run down his face as the screaming, roaring, flashing world went slowly dark and silent. If he lives," Cara said, "I'm going to kill him." Nicci smiled, but the thought of Richard dying sent a renewed spike of panic through her. It was too terrifying a thought to contemplate. She laid a hand to his chest as somber soldiers gently laid his unconscious form beside Kahlan in the back of the wagon. Blood seeped through the blankets Richard and Kahlan were both wrapped in. But Nicci could feel his heart beating, feel the breath of life in his lungs. Kahlan, thankfully, was alive as well. For now, the two of them were alive and that was what mattered most. "He will live," Nicci said. "Both of them will, if I have anything to say about it." By the looks of what had happened in the room where they had found them, it was perhaps surprising that they were both alive, much less in one piece. |
| 757 |
Composite image, optically encoded by escort-craft of the trans-Channel airship Lord Brunel: aerial view of suburban Cherbourg, October 14, 1905. A villa, a garden, a balcony. Erase the balcony's wrought-iron curves, exposing a bath-chair and its occupant. Reflected sunset glints from the nickel-plate of the chair's wheel-spokes. The occupant, owner of the villa, rests her arthritic hands upon fabric woven by a Jacquard loom. These hands consist of tendons, tissue, jointed bone. Through quiet processes of time and information, threads within the human cells have woven themselves into a woman. Her name is Sybil Gerard. Below her, in a neglected formal garden, leafless vines lace wooden trellises on whitewashed, flaking walls. From the open windows of her sickroom, a warm draft stirs the loose white hair at her neck, bringing scents of coal-smoke, jasmine, opium. Her attention is fixed upon the sky, upon a silhouette of vast and irresistible grace — metal, in her lifetime, having taught itself to fly. In advance of that magnificence, tiny unmanned aeroplanes dip and skirl against the red horizon. Like starlings, Sybil thinks. The airship's lights, square golden windows, hint at human warmth. Effortlessly, with the incomparable grace of organic function, she imagines a distant music there, the music of London: the passengers promenade, they drink, they flirt, perhaps they dance. Thoughts come unbidden, the mind weaving its perspectives, assembling meaning from emotion and memory. She recalls her life in London. Recalls herself, so long ago, making her way along the Strand, pressing past the crush at Temple Bar. Pressing on, the city of Memory winding itself about her — till, by the walls of Newgate, the shadow of her father's hanging falls ... And Memory turns, deflected swift as light, down another byway — one where it is always evening ... It is January 15, 1855. A room in Grand's Hotel, Piccadilly. One chair was propped backward, wedged securely beneath the door's cut-glass knob. Another was draped with clothing: a woman's fringed mantelet, a mud-crusted skirt of heavy worsted, a man's checked trousers and cutaway coat. Two forms lay beneath the bedclothes of the laminated-maple four-poster, and off in the iron grip of winter Big Ben bellowed ten o'clock, great hoarse calliope sounds, the coal-fired breath of London. Sybil slid her feet through icy linens to the warmth of the ceramic bottle in its wrap of flannel. Her toes brushed his shin. The touch seemed to start him from deep deliberation. That was how he was, this Dandy Mick Radley. She'd met Mick Radley at Laurent's Dancing Academy, down Windmill Street. Now that she knew him, he seemed more the sort for Kellner's in Leicester Square, or even the Portland Rooms. He was always thinking, scheming, muttering over something in his head. Clever, clever. It worried her. And Mrs. Winterhalter wouldn't have approved, for the handling of "political gentlemen" required delicacy and discretion, qualities Mrs. |
| 758 |
He'd have killed some of those newspaper rascals, Houston insisted loudly, if he hadn't been Governor, and on his dignity. So instead he'd thrown in his cards, and gone back to live with his precious Cherokees ... He had a real head of steam up, now; he'd stoked himself so, it was almost frightening to watch. The audience was entertained, their reserve broken by his bulging eyes and veiny Texian neck, but none too far from disgust. Maybe it had been something really dreadful that he'd done, Sybil thought, rubbing her hands together inside her rabbit-skin muff. Maybe it was lady's-fever, that he'd given his own wife a case of the glue. Some types of glue were horrible, and could make you mad, or blind, or crippled. Maybe that was the secret. Mick might know. Very likely Mick knew all about it. Houston explained that he had left the United States in disgust, and gone to Texas, and at the word a map appeared, a sprawl of land in the middle of the continent. Houston claimed he'd gone there seeking land for his poor suffering Cherokee Indians, but it was all a bit confusing. Sybil asked the clerky fellow next to her for the time. Only an hour had passed. The speech was a third gone. Her moment was coming. "You must envision a nation many times the size of your home islands," said Houston, "with no roads greater than the grassy tracks of Indians. Without, at that time, a single mile of British railroad, and lacking the telegraph, or, indeed, Engine resources of any kind. As commander-in-chief of the Texian national forces, my orders had no courier more swift or more reliable than the mounted scout, his way menaced by the Comanche and Karankawa, by Mexican raiding-parties, and by the thousand nameless hazards of the wilderness. Small wonder then that Colonel Travis should receive my orders too late; and place his confidence, tragically, in the reinforcing-party led by Colonel Fannin. Surrounded by an enemy force fifty times his own. Colonel Travis declared his objective to be Victory or Death — knowing full well that the latter was a surely fated outcome. The defenders of the Alamo perished to a man. The noble Travis, the fearless Colonel Bowie, and David Crockett, a very legend among frontiersmen" — Messrs. Travis, Bowie, and Crockett each had a third of the kino screen, their faces gone strangely square with the cramped scale of their depletion — "bought precious time for my Fabian strategy." More soldier talk. Now he stepped back from the podium and pointed up at the kino with his heavy polished cane. "The forces of Lopez de Santa Anna were arrayed as you see them here, with the woods upon his left flank and the San Jacinto river-marshes at his back. His siege engineers had dug in around the baggage-train, with emplacements of sharpened timber, represented thusly. By a forced march through Burnham's Ford, however, my army of six hundred had seized the wooded banks of Buffalo Bayou, unbeknown to enemy intelligence. The assault began with a brisk cannon-fire from the Texian center ... |
| 759 |
The new lines were shored with steel, and soon Lord Babbage's smokeless trains would slide through them silent as eels, though she found the thought of it somehow unclean. The lamps flared all at once, the flow of gas disturbed by a particularly sharp jolt, the faces of the other passengers seeming to leap out at her: the sallow gent with something of the successful publican about him, the round-cheeked old Quaker cleric, the drunken dandy with his coat open, his canary waistcoat all dotted down the front with claret ... There were no other women in the carriage. Farewell to you, sirs, she imagined herself crying, farewell to your London, for she was a 'prentice adventuress now, sworn and true, bound for Paris, though the first leg of the voyage consisted necessarily of the tuppenny trip back to Whitechapel ... But the clergyman had noticed her, his contempt quite open, there for anyone to see. It was really quite horribly cold, making her way from the station to her room in Flower-and-Dean Street; she regretted her vanity, for having chosen her fine new shawl rather than her mantelet. Her teeth were chattering. Sharp frost shone in pools of gas-light on the street's new macadam. The cobbles of London were vanishing month by month, paved over with black stuff that poured stinking hot from the maws of great wagons, for navvies to spread and smooth with rakes, before the advance of the steam-roller. A daring fellow whisked past her, taking full advantage of the gritty new surface. Nearly recumbent within the creaking frame of a four-wheeled velocipede, his shoes were strapped to whirling cranks and his breath puffed explosively into the cold. He was bare-headed and goggled, in a thick striped jersey, a long knit scarf flapping out behind him as he sped away. Sybil supposed him an inventor. London was rife with inventors, the poorer and madder of them congregating in the public squares to display their blueprints and models, and harangue the strolling crowds. In a week's time she'd encountered a wicked-looking device meant to crimp hair by electricity, a child's mechanical top that played Beethoven, and a scheme for electro-plating the dead. Leaving the thoroughfare for the unimproved cobbles of Renton Passage, she made out the sign of the Hart and heard the jangle of a pianola. It was Mrs. Winterhalter who'd arranged for her to room above the Hart. The public house itself was a steady sort of place, admitting no women. It catered to junior clerks and shopmen, and offered as its raciest pleasure a pull at a coin-fed wagering-machine. The rooms above were reached by way of steep dark stairs, that climbed below a sooty skylight to an alcove presenting a pair of identical doors. Mr. Cairns, the landlord, had rooms behind the door on the left. Sybil climbed the stairs, fumbled a penny box of lucifers from her muff, and struck one. Cairns had chained a bicycle to the iron railing overlooking the stairwell; the bright brass padlock gleamed in the flare of the match. |
| 760 |
She shook the lucifer out, hoping that Hetty hadn't double-latched the door Hetty hadn't, and Sybil's key turned smoothly in the lock. Toby was there to greet her, padding silently across the bare boards to twine himself around and about her ankles, purring like sixty. Hetty had left an oil-lamp turned down low on the deal table that stood in the hallway; it was smoking now, the wick in need of trimming. A foolish thing to have left it burning, where Toby might've sent it crashing, but Sybil felt grateful not to have found the place in darkness. She took Toby up in her arms. He smelled of herring. "Has Hetty fed you, then, dear?" He yowled softly, and batted at the ribbons of her bonnet. The pattern of the wallpaper danced as she lifted the lamp. The hallway had seen no sunlight in all the years the Hart had stood, yet the printed flowers were gone a shade like dust. Sybil's room had two windows, though they opened on a blank wall of grimed yellow brick, so near she could've touched it, if someone hadn't driven nails into the casements. Still, on a bright day, with the sun directly overhead, a bit of light did filter in. And Hetty's room, though larger, had only one window. If Hetty was here, now, she must be alone and asleep, as no light was visible from the crack at the bottom of her closed door. It was good to have one's own room, one's privacy, however modest. Sybil put Toby down, though he protested, and carried the lamp to her own door, which stood slightly ajar. Inside, all was as she'd left it, though she saw that Hetty had left the latest number of the Illustrated London News on her pillow, with an engraving from Crimea on the front, a scene of a city all aflame. She set the lamp down on the cracked marble lid of the commode, Toby prowling about her ankles as though he expected to discover more herring, and considered what she should do. The ticking of the fat tin alarm-clock, which she sometimes found unbearable, was reassuring now; at least it was running, and she imagined that the time it showed, quarter past eleven, was correct. She gave the winder a few turns, just for luck. Mick would come for her at midnight, and there were decisions to be made, as he'd advised her to travel very light. She took a wick-trimmer from the commode's drawer, raised the lamp's chimney, and scissored away the blackened bit. The light somewhat improved. She threw on her mantelet against the cold, opened the lid of a japanned tin chest, and began to make an inventory of her better things. But after setting aside two changes of undergarments, it came to her that the less she took, the more Dandy Mick would have to buy for her in Paris. And if that wasn't thinking like a 'prentice adventuress, she didn't know what was. Still, she did have: some things she was 'specially fond of, and these went, along with the undergarments, into her brocade portmanteau with the split seam she'd meant to mend. There was a lovely bottle of rose-scented Portland water, half-full, a green paste brooch from Mr. |
| 761 |
Sybil sat for a moment on the chaise, pretending to read a gold-spined monthly, 'Transactions of the Royal Society'. Carefully, with the fingertips of her right hand, she fished behind her for the key. Here it was, with the number "24" engraved on the oval brass. She yawned, in what she hoped was a ladylike fashion, and stood, to retire upstairs, entirely as if she had a room there. Her feet ached. As she trudged along the silent gas-lit hall, toward Houston's suite, she felt a sudden amazement at having struck out at Charles Egremont. Needing some dramatic message to distract the clerk, she'd blurted out threats and rage. It had come boiling out of her, almost without her will. It puzzled her, and even frightened her, after having imagined that she'd almost forgotten the man. She could imagine the fear on Egremont's face when he read her telegram. She remembered his face well enough, fatuous and successful, which always looked as though it meant well, always apologized, always preached at her, and whined, and begged, and wept, and sinned. He was a fool. But now she'd let Mick Radley set her to thieving. If she were clever, she should walk out of the Grand Hotel, vanish into the depths of London, and never see Radley again. She should not let the 'prentice oath hold her. To break an oath was frightening, but no more vile than her other sins. Yet somehow here she was; she had let him do with her as he would. She stopped before the door, looked up and down the deserted corridor, fingered the stolen key. Why was she doing this? Because Mick was strong, and she was weak? Because he knew secrets that she didn't? For the first time, it occurred to her that she might be in love with him. Perhaps she did love him, in some strange way, and if that were true, it might explain matters to her, in a way which was almost soothing. If she were in love, she had a right to burn her bridges, to walk on air, to live by impulse. And if she loved Radley, it was finally something she knew, which he didn't. Her secret alone. Sybil unlocked the door nervously, rapidly. She slipped through, shut it behind her, set her back against it. She stood in darkness. There was a lamp in the room somewhere. She could smell its burnt wick. In the wall opposite, the outline emerged of a square curtained window to the street, between the curtains a faint knife-slice of upwashed gas-light. She faltered her way into the room, hands outstretched, until she felt the solid polished bulk of a bureau, and made out the dim sheen of a lamp-chimney there. She lifted the lamp, shook it. It had oil. Now she needed a lucifer. She felt for drawers in the bureau. For some reason they were already open. She rustled through them. Stationery. Useless, and someone had spilled ink in one of the drawers; she could smell it. Her fingers brushed a box of lucifers, which she recognized less by touch than by the dry familiar rattle. Her fingers, really, didn't seem to be working properly. The first lucifer popped and fizzled out, refusing to light, filling the room with a vile smell of sulphur. |
| 762 |
She turned to Houston then. He still lay on his back, and she watched in fascination as a bloodstain spread along his ribs. "Help me," Houston grunted. "I can't breathe." He tugged at his waistcoat's buttons and it came open, showing neat inner pockets of black silk, stuffed tight with dense packs of paper: thick punch-card packs in glued brown wrappers, their intricate perforations surely ruined now by the hot impact of bullets ... And blood, for at least one slug had struck him true. Sybil rose, and walked, giddily, toward the door. Her foot squelched moistly in the red-splashed shadows by the wardrobe, and she looked down, to see an open card-case in red morocco, with a pair of tickets in a heavy nickel-plate clip. She stooped, picked it up. "Get me to my feet," Houston demanded, his voice stronger now, tinged with urgency and irritation. "Where's my walking-stick? Where's Radley?" The room seemed to rock beneath her, like a ship at sea, but she crossed to the door, opened it, stepped out, closed it behind her, and continued, like any gentry-girl, along the gas-lit and utterly respectable corridors of Grand's Hotel. The South-Eastern Railway Company's London Bridge Terminus was a vast drafty hall of iron and soot-blown glass. Quakers moved among the avenues of benches, offering pamphlets to the seated travelers. Red-coated Irish soldiers, red-eyed from the night's gin, glowered at the close-shaven missionaries as they passed. The French passengers all seemed to be returning home with pineapples, sweet exotic bounty from the docks of London. Even the plump little actress who sat opposite Sybil had her pineapple, its green spikes protruding from a covered basket at her feet. The train flew through Bermondsey and out into little streets of new brick, red tile. Dust-heaps, market-gardens, waste-ground. A tunnel. The darkness about her stank of burnt gunpowder. Sybil closed her eyes. When she opened them, she saw crows flapping above a barren down, and the wires of the electric telegraph all alive, blurring, moving up and down in the intervals between poles, dancing in the wind of her passage toward France. This image, surreptitiously daguerreotyped by a member of the Public Morals Section of the Surete Generale, January 30, 1855, presents a young woman seated at a table on the terrace of the Cafe Madeleine, No. 4 Boulevard Malesherbes. The woman, seated alone, has a china teapot and cup before her. Justification of the image reveals certain details of costume: ribbons, frills, her cashmere shawl, her gloves, her earrings, her elaborate bonnet. The woman's clothing is of French origin, and new, and of high quality. Her face, slightly blurred by long camera exposure, seems pensive, lost in thought. Justification of background detail reveals No. 3 Boulevard Malesherbes, the offices of the Compagnie Sud Atlantique Transport Maritimes. The office window contains a large model steamboat with three funnels, a French-designed craft for the trans-Atlantic colonial trade. |
| 763 |
Pulling his notebook from his Docket, stumbling a little in the gouged turf-tracks of the brougham's thick wheels, he thumbed through the colorful pages of his spotter's guide. It was last year's edition; he could not find the coat-of-arms. Pity, but it meant little, when new Lords were ennobled weekly. As a class, the Lordships dearly loved their steam-chariots. The machine set its course for the gouts of greyish vapor rising behind the pillared grandstands of Epsom. It humped slowly up the curb of a paved access-road. Mallory could see the garages now, a long rambling structure in the modern style, girdered in skeletal iron and roofed with bolted sheets of tin-plate, its hard lines broken here and there by bright pennants and tin-capped ventilators. He followed the huffing land-craft until it eased into a stall. The driver popped valves with a steaming gush. Stable-monkeys set to work with greasing-gear as the passengers decamped down a folding gangway, the Lord and his two women passing Mallory on their way toward the grandstand. Britain's self-made elite, they trusted he was watching and ignored him serenely. The driver lugged a massive hamper in their wake. Mallory touched his own striped cap, identical with the driver's, and winked, but the man made no response. Strolling the length of the garages, spotting steamers from his guidebook. Mallory marked each new sighting with his pencil-stub and a small thrill of satisfaction. Here was Faraday, great savant-physicist of the Royal Society, there Colgate the soap magnate, and here a catch indeed, the visionary builder Brunei. A very few machines bore old family arms; landowners, whose fathers had been dukes and earls, when such titles had existed. Some of the fallen old nobility could afford steam; some had more initiative than others, and did what they could to keep up. Arriving at the southern wing. Mallory found it surrounded by a barricade of clean new saw-horses, smelling of pitch. This section, reserved for the racing-steamers, was patrolled by a squad of uniformed foot-police. One of them carried a spring-wind Cutts-Maudslay of a model familiar to Mallory, the Wyoming expedition having been provided with six of them. Though the Cheyenne had regarded the stubby Birmingham-made machine-carbine with a useful awe. Mallory knew that it was temperamental to the point of unreliability. Inaccurate to the point of uselessness as well, unless one were popping off the entire thirty rounds into a pack of pursuers — something Mallory himself had once done from the aft firing-position of the expedition's steam-fortress. Mallory doubted that the fresh-faced young copper had any notion what a Cutts-Maudslay might do if fired into an English crowd. He shook off the dark thought with an effort. Beyond the barricade, each separate stall was carefully shielded from spies and odds-makers by tall baffles of tarpaulin, tautly braced by criss-crossed cables threaded through flagpoles. Mallory worked his way through an eager crowd of gawkers and steam-hobbyists. |
| 764 |
He possessed, Gideon Mantell had long ago assured him, the naturalist's requisite eye. Indeed, he owed his current position in the scientific hierarchy to having used that eye along a monotonous stretch of rock-strewn Wyoming riverbank, distinguishing form amid apparent chaos. Now, however, appalled by the recklessness of his wager, by the enormity of the result in the event of his losing, Mallory found no comfort in the presence and variety of the Derby crowd. The eager roaring of massed and passionate greed, as the horses ran their course, was more than he could bear. He left the stands, almost fleeing, hoping to shake the nervous energy from his legs. A dense mass of vehicles and people had congregated on the rails of the run-in, shrieking their enthusiasm as the horses passed in a cloud of dust. The poorer folk, these, mostly those unwilling to put down a shilling fee for admission to the stands, mixed with those who entertained or preyed upon the crowd: thimble-riggers, gypsies, pick-pockets. He began shoving his way through toward the outskirts of the crowd, where he might catch his breath. It occurred to Mallory suddenly that he might have lost one of his betting-slips. The thought almost paralyzed him. He stopped dead, his hands diving into his pockets. No — the blue flimsies were still there, his tickets to disaster ... He was almost trampled by a jostling pair of horses. Shocked and angered, Mallory grabbed at the harness of the nearer horse, caught his balance, shouted a warning. A whip cracked near his head. The driver was trying to fight his way free of the entangling crowd, standing on the box of an open brougham. The fellow was a race-track dandy, gotten up in a suit of the most artificial blue, with a great paste ruby glinting in a cravat of lurid silk. Beneath the pallor of a swelling forehead, accentuated by dark disheveled locks, his bright gaunt eyes moved constantly, so that he seemed to be looking everywhere at once — except at the race-course, which still compelled the attention of everyone, save himself and Mallory. A queer fellow, and part of a queerer trio, for the passengers within the brougham were a pair of women. One, veiled, wore a dark, almost masculine dress; and as the brougham halted she rose unsteadily and groped for its door. She tried to step free, with a drunken wobble, her hands encumbered by a long wooden box, something like an instrument-case. But the second woman made a violent grab for her veiled companion, yanking the gentlewoman back into her seat. Mallory, still holding the leather harness, stared in astonishment. The second woman was a red-haired tart, in the flash garments appropriate to a gin-palace or worse. Her painted, pretty features were marked with a look of grim and utter determination. Mallory saw the red-haired tart strike the veiled gentlewoman. It was a blow both calculated and covert, jabbing her doubled knuckles into the woman's short ribs with a practiced viciousness. The veiled woman doubled over and collapsed back into her seat. |
| 765 |
At the half-mile turn, its velocity quite astonishing, it teetered visibly onto two wheels; at the final lap, it struck a slight rise, the entire vehicle becoming visibly airborne. The great driving-wheels rebounded from earth with a gout of dust and a metallic screech; it was only at that moment that Mallory realized that the great crowd in the stands had fallen into deathly silence. Not a peep rose from them as the Zephyr whizzed across the finish-line. It slithered to a halt then, bumping violently across the gouged tracks left by the competition. A full four seconds passed before the stunned track-man managed to wave his flag. The other gurneys were still rounding a distant bend a full hundred yards behind. The crowd suddenly burst into astonished outcry — not joy so much as utter disbelief, and even a queer sort of anger. Henry Chesterton stepped from the Zephyr. He tossed back a neck-scarf, leaned at his ease against the shining hull of his craft, and watched with cool insolence as the other gurneys labored painfully across the finish line. By the time they arrived, they seemed to have aged centuries. They were, Mallory realized, relics. Mallory reached into his pocket. The blue slips of betting-paper were utterly safe. Their material nature had not changed in the slightest, but now these little blue slips infallibly signified the winning of four hundred pounds. No, five hundred pounds in all — fifty of that to be given to the utterly victorious Mr. Michael Godwin. Mallory heard a voice ring in his ears, amid the growing tumult of the crowd. "I'm rich," the voice remarked calmly. It was his own voice. He was rich. This image is a formal daguerreotype of the sort distributed by the British aristocracy among narrow circles of friendship and acquaintance. The photographer may have been Albert, the Prince Consort, a man whose much-publicized interest in scientific matters had made him an apparently genuine intimate of Britain's Radical elite. The dimensions of the room, and the rich drapery of its back-drop, strongly suggest the photographing salon that Prince Albert maintained at Windsor Palace. The women depicted are Lady Ada Byron and her companion and soi-disant chaperone. Lady Mary Somerville. Lady Somerville, the authoress of 'On the Connection of the Physical Sciences' and the translator of Laplace's 'Celestial Mechanics', has the resigned look of a woman accustomed to the vagaries of her younger companion. Both women wear gilded sandals, and white draperies, somewhat akin to a Greek toga, but strongly influenced by French neoclassicism. They are, in fact, the garments of female adepts of the Society of Light, the secret inner body and international propaganda arm of the Industrial Radical Party. The elderly Mrs. Somerville also wears a fillet of bronze marked with astronomical symbols, a covert symbol of the high post this femme savante occupies in the councils of European science. Lady Ada, her arms bare save for a signet-ring on her right forefinger, places a laurel wreath about the brow of a marble bust of Isaac Newton. |
| 766 |
When the driver slowed for a filthy tarmac-wagon. Mallory jumped for the curb. Despite his best efforts, Mallory had boarded the wrong 'bus. Or perhaps he had ridden too far on the correct vehicle, well past his destination, while engrossed in the latest number of the Westminster Review. He'd purchased the magazine because it carried an article of Oliphant's, a witty post-mortem on the conduct of the Crimean War. Oliphant, it developed, was something of an expert on the Crimean region, having published his The Russian Shores of the Black Sea a full year prior to the outbreak of hostilities. The book detailed a jolly but quite extensive Crimean holiday which Oliphant had undertaken. To Mallory's newly alerted eye, Oliphant's latest article bristled with sly insinuation. A street-arab whipped with a broom of twigs at the pavement before Mallory's feet. The boy glanced up, puzzled. "Pardon, guv?" Mallory realized with an unhappy start that he had been talking to himself, standing there in rapt abstraction, muttering aloud over Oliphant's deviousness. The boy, grasping at Mallory's attention, did a back-somersault. Mallory tossed him tuppence, turned at random, and walked away, shortly discovering himself in Leicester Square, its gravel walks and formal gardens an excellent place to be robbed or ambushed. Especially at night, for the streets about featured theatres, pantos, and magic-lantern houses. Crossing Whitcomb, then Oxenden, he found himself in Haymarket, strange in the broad summer daylight, its raucous whores absent now and sleeping. He walked the length of it, for curiosity's sake. It looked very different by day, shabby and tired of itself. At length, noting Mallory's pace, a pimp approached him, offering a packet of French-letters, sure armor against the lady's-fever. Mallory bought them, dropping the packet into his valise. Turning left, he marched into the chuffing racket of busy Pall Mall, the wide macadam lined by the black iron palings of exclusive clubs, their marbled fronts set well back from the street-jostle. Off Pall Mall, at the far end of Waterloo Place, stood the Duke of York's memorial. The Grand Old Duke of York, Who Had Ten Thousand Men, was a distant soot-blackened effigy now, his rotund column dwarfed by the steel-spired headquarters of the Royal Society. Mallory had his bearings now. He tramped the elevated pedestrian-bridge, over Pall Mall, while below him sweating kerchief-headed navvies ripped at the intersection with a banging steel-armed excavator. They were preparing the foundation of a new monument, he saw, doubtless to the glory of the Crimean victory. He strode up Regent Street to the Circus, where the crowd poured endlessly forth from the underground's sooty marble exits. He allowed himself to be swept into swift currents of humanity. There was a potent stench here, a cloacal reek, like burning vinegar, and for a moment Mallory imagined that this miasma emanated from the crowd itself, from the flapping crannies of their coats and shoes. |
| 767 |
Mallory passed a hall, blocked off with striped sawhorses, where two apparent lunatics, in gas-lit gloom, crept slowly about on all fours. Mallory stared. The creepers were plump, middle-aged women, dressed throat-to-foot in spotless white, their hair confined by snug elastic turbans. From a distance their clothing had the eerie look of winding-sheets. As he watched, one of the pair lurched heavily to her feet and began to tenderly wipe the ceiling with a sponge-mop on a telescoping pole. They were charwomen. Following his map to a lift, he was ushered in by a uniformed attendant and carried to another level. The air, here, was dry and static, the corridors busier. There were more of the odd-looking policemen, admixed with serious-looking gentlemen of the capital: barristers perhaps, or attorneys, or the legislative agents of great capitalists, men whose business it was to acquire and retail knowledge of the attitudes and influence of the public. Political men, in short, who dealt entirely in the intangible. And though they presumably had their wives, their children, their brownstone homes, here they struck Mallory as vaguely ghost-like or ecclesiastical. Some yards on. Mallory was forced to abruptly dodge a second wheeled messenger. He caught himself against a decorative cast-iron column. The metal scorched his hands. Despite its lavish ornamentation — lotus blossoms — the column was a smokestack. He could hear it emitting the muffled roar and mutter of a badly adjusted flue. Consulting his map again, he entered a corridor lined left and right with offices. White-coated clerks ducked from door to door, dodging young messenger-boys rolling about with card-laden wheelbarrows. The gas-lights were brighter here, but they fluttered in a steady draft of wind. Mallory glanced over his shoulder. At the end of the hall stood a giant steel-framed ventilator-fan. It squealed faintly, on an oiled chain-drive, propelled by an unseen motor in the bowels of the pyramid. Mallory began to feel rather dazed. Likely this had all been a grave mistake. Surely there were better ways to pursue the mystery of Derby Day, than hunting pimps with some bureaucratic crony of Oliphant's. The very air of the place oppressed him, scorched and soapy and lifeless, the floors and walls polished and gleaming ... He'd never before seen a place so utterly free of common dirt ... These halls reminded him of something, another labyrinthine journey ... Lord Darwin. Mallory and the great savant had been walking the leaf-shadowed hedgy lanes of Kent, Darwin poking at the moist black soil with his walking-stick. Darwin talking, on and on, in his endless, methodical, crushingly detailed way, of earthworms. Earthworms, always invisibly busy underfoot, so that even great sarsen-stones slowly sank into the loam. Darwin had measured the process, at Stonehenge, in an attempt to date the ancient monument. Mallory tugged hard at his beard, his map forgotten in his hand. A vision came to him of earthworms churning in catastrophic frenzy, till the soil roiled and bubbled like a witches' brew. |
| 768 |
Surely, in their aid to Science, the Palaces had repaid the lavish cost of their construction at least a dozen times. Up Knightsbridge and past Hyde Park Corner to the Napoleon Arch, a gift from Louis Napoleon to commemorate the Anglo-French Entente. "The great iron arch, with its lavish skeleton of struts and bolting, supported a large population of winged cupids and draperied ladies with torches. A handsome monument, Mallory thought, and in the latest taste. Its elegant solidity seemed to deny that there had ever been a trace of discord between Great Britain and her staunchest ally, Imperial France. Perhaps, thought Mallory wryly, the "misunderstandings" of the Napoleonic Wars could be blamed on the tyrant Wellington. Though London possessed no monuments to the Duke of Wellington, it sometimes seemed to Mallory that unspoken memories of the man still haunted the city, an unlaid ghost. Once, the great victor of Waterloo had been exalted here, as the very saviour of the British nation; Wellington had been ennobled, and had held the highest office in the land. But in modern England he was vilified as a swaggering brute, a second King John, the butcher of his own restless people. The Rads had never forgotten their hatred for their early and formidable enemy. A full generation had passed since Wellington's death, but Prime Minister Byron still often spattered the Duke's memory with the acid of his formidable eloquence. Mallory, though a loyal Radical Party man, was unconvinced by mere rhetorical abuse. He privately entertained his own opinion of the long-dead tyrant. On his first trip to London at the age of six, Mallory had once seen the Duke of Wellington — passing in his gilded carriage in the street, with a clopping, jingling escort of armed cavalry. And the boy Mallory had been vastly impressed — not simply by that famous hook-nosed face, high-collared and whiskered, groomed and stem and silent — but by his own father's awe-struck mix of fear and pleasure at the Duke's passage. Some faint tang of that childhood visit to London — in 1831, the first year of the Time of Troubles, the last of England's old regime — still clung to Mallory whenever he saw the capital. Some few months later, in Lewes, his father had cheered wildly when news came of Wellington's death in a bomb atrocity. But Mallory had secretly wept, stirred to bitter sorrow for a reason he could not now recall. His seasoned judgment saw the Duke of Wellington as the outmoded, ignorant victim of an upheaval beyond his comprehension; more Charles the First than King John. Wellington had foolishly championed the interests of declining and decadent Tory blue-bloods, a class destined to be swept from power by the rising middle-class and the savant meritocrats. But Wellington himself had been no blue-blood; he had once been plain Arthur Wellesley, of rather modest Irish origin. Further, it seemed to Mallory that as a soldier, Wellington had displayed a very praiseworthy mastery of his craft. |
| 769 |
He looked, wide-eyed, over Mallory's shoulder, his mouth assuming a sudden tight-clamped, pinchy look, like a seamstress biting off a thread. The shabby man took three careful steps backward, slowly, keeping Mallory between himself and whatever it was that he saw. And then he turned directly on his flapping, newspaper-stuffed heels and walked swiftly away, without any limp, into the crowded sidewalks of Cork Street. Mallory turned at once and looked behind him. There was a tall, long-shanked, slender man behind him, with a button-nose and long side-whiskers, in a short Albert coat and plain trousers. Even as Mallory's gaze caught him, the man raised a handkerchief to his face. He coughed, in a gentlemanly way, then he dabbed at his eyes a bit. Then he seemed, with a sudden theatrical start, to have recalled something he had forgotten. He turned away, and began to wander back toward the Burlington Arcade. He had not once looked straight at Mallory. Mallory himself took a sudden pretended interest in the clasps of his clock-case. He set his case down, bent, and looked at the bits of shiny brass with his mind racing and a chill in his spine. The rascal's handkerchief trick had given him away. Mallory recognized him now as the man he had seen by the underground station in Kensington; the coughing gent, who would not give up his cab. What's more, thought Mallory, his mind hot with insight, the coughing gent was also the rude man who'd argued with the cabbie about his fare, in Piccadilly. He had followed Mallory the whole distance from Kensington. He was trailing him. Mallory seized his clock-case in a fierce grip and began to walk quietly down Burlington Gardens. He turned right on Old Bond Street. His nerves were tingling now, with a stalker's instinct. He had been a fool to turn and stare at first. Perhaps he had given himself away to his pursuer. Mallory did not turn and look again, but ambled along with his best pretense at leisure. He paused before a jeweler's velvet racks of cameos and bracelets and evening tiaras for Her Ladyship, and watched the street behind him, in the iron-barred shining glass. He saw the Coughing Gent reappear almost at once. The man hung well back for the moment, careful to keep groups of London shoppers between himself and Mallory. The Coughing Gent was perhaps thirty-five, with a bit of grey in his side-whiskers, and a dark machine-stitched Albert coat that did not look like anything remarkable. His face was that of anyone in London, perhaps a little heavier, a little colder in the eyes, with a grimmer mouth beneath the button-nose. Mallory took another turn, left up Bruton Street, his clock-case growing more awkward by the step. The shops here lacked conveniently angled glass. He doffed his hat to a pretty woman, and pretended to glance back at her ankles. The Coughing Gent was still with him. Perhaps the Coughing Gent was a confederate of the tout and his woman. A hired ruffian; a murderer, with a derringer in the pocket of that Albert coat. |
| 770 |
Or a vial of vitriol. The hair rose at the base of Mallory's skull, anticipating the sudden impact of the assassin's bullet, the wet burning splash of corrosion. Mallory began to walk more quickly, the case banging painfully against his leg. Into Berkeley Square, where a small steam-crane, chugging gamely between a pair of splintered plane-trees, swung a great cast-iron ball into a crumbling Georgian facade. A crowd of spectators was enjoying the sight. He joined them behind the saw-horse barricade, amid the acrid smell of ancient plaster, and sensed a moment's safety. He spied out the Coughing Gent with a sidelong glance. The fellow looked sinister enough, and anxious, having lost Mallory in the crowd for the time being. But he did not seem mad with hatred, or nerved to kill; he was glancing about among the legs of the spectators, hunting for Mallory's clock-case. Here was a chance to lose the rascal. Mallory made a swift break down the length of the Square, taking advantage of the cover of the trees. At the Square's far end he turned down Charles Street, lined right and left with enormous eighteenth-century houses. Lordly homes, their ornate iron-work hung with modern coats-of-arms. Behind him a sumptuous gurney emerged from its carriage-house, giving Mallory the chance to stop, and turn, and study the street. His gambit had failed. The Coughing Gent was mere yards behind, a bit winded perhaps and red-faced in the sullen heat, but not deceived. He was waiting for Mallory to move again, careful not to look at him. Instead, he gazed with apparent longing at the entrance of a public-house named I Am the Only Running Footman. It occurred to Mallory to double back and enter the Running Footman, where he might lose the Coughing Gent in the crowd. Or perhaps he could leap, at the last moment, onto a departing omnibus — if he could cram his precious case aboard. But Mallory saw little real hope in these expedients. This fellow had the firm advantage of the terrain and all the sneaking tricks of the London criminal. Mallory felt like a lumbering Wyoming bison. He trudged ahead with the heavy clock. His hand ached; he was becoming weary ... At the foot of Queens Way, a dragline and two excavators were wreaking progressive havoc in the ruins of Shepherd Market. A hoarding surrounded the site, the boards cracked and knotholed by eager spectators. Kerchief-headed women and chaw-spitting costermongers, displaced from their customary sites, had set up a last-ditch rag-shop just outside the fence. Mallory walked down the line of ill-smelling oysters and limp vegetables. At the end of the hoarding, some accident of planning had left a narrow alleyway; dusty planks to one side, crumbled brick to the other. Rank weeds sprouted between piss-damp ancient cobbles. Mallory peered in as a bonneted crone arose from a squat, adjusting her skirts. She walked past him without a word. Mallory touched his hat. Heaving the case above his head, he set it gently atop the wall of mossy brick. |
| 771 |
Mallory wondered if his fly was open. It was not. But the men's eyes goggled with apparently genuine alarm. Had his wound opened, was his hair dripping blood down his neck? It did not seem so ... Mallory gave his breakfast order to a waiter; the servant's face, too, was wooden, as if the choice of kippers and eggs were a grave indiscretion. Mallory, growing steadily more confused, had a mind to confront Belshaw on the matter, and began to rehearse a little speech. But Belshaw and Sydenham rose suddenly, quitting their tea, and left the dining-room. Mallory ate his breakfast with grim deliberation, determined not to let the incident upset him. He went to the front desk to fetch his basket of mail. The usual desk-clerk was not on duty; taken down with a catarrh of the lungs, his replacement said. Mallory retired with his basket to his customary seat in the library. There were five of his Palace colleagues present, gathered in a corner of the room, where they were anxiously conversing. As Mallory glanced up, he thought he caught them staring at him — but this was nonsense. Mallory sorted through his correspondence with desultory interest, his head aching slightly and his mind already drifting. There was a tedious burden of necessary professional correspondence, and the usual tiresome freight of admiring missives and begging-letters. Perhaps the engagement of a personal secretary might in fact be unavoidable. Struck by an odd inspiration, Mallory wondered if young Mr. Tobias of the Central Statistics Bureau might not be just the man for this post. Perhaps an offer of alternate employment would increase the fellow's daring in the office, for there was much at the Bureau that Mallory longed to peruse. The file on Lady Ada, for instance, should such a fabulous item exist. Or the slippery Mr. Oliphant, with his ready smiles and vague assurances. Or Lord Charles Lyell, the medal-heavy savant chief of the Uniformitarian faction. These three worthies were likely well above his reach, Mallory thought. But he might well ferret out a bit of data on Peter Foulke: a sinister rascal whose web of underhanded intrigue was ever more manifest. He would have it all out somehow; Mallory felt quite sure of that, as he shuffled through his mail-basket. The whole occulted business would slowly emerge, like bones chipped from their bed of shale. He had glimpsed the closeted skeletons of the Rad elite. Now, given time and a chance to work, he would wrench the mystery whole from its stony matrix. His attention was caught by a most unusual packet. It was of non-standard dimensions, rather blocky and square, and it bore a colorful set of French express-stamps. The ivory-yellow envelope, astonishingly slick and stiff, was of a most unusual water-proof substance, something like isinglass. Mallory took out his Sheffield knife, selected the smallest of several blades, and worried the thing open. The interior bore a single French Engine-card, of the Napoleon gauge. Mallory, with growing alarm, shook the card free, onto the table-top. |
| 772 |
The widow nodded, with the exaggerated wobble of someone to whom a nod was a foreign language, and slid back into her nest of hides, and lay on her back with her legs spread, and stretched her arms up. Mallory climbed up over her, got under the blankets with her, pulled his taut and aching member out of his trousers, and forced it between her legs. He had thought it would be over with quickly, and perhaps without much shame, but it was too strange and upsetting to him. The rutting went on for a long time, and finally she began to look at him with a kind of querulous shyness, and plucked curiously at the hair of his beard. And at last the warmth, the sweet friction, the rank animal smell of her, thawed something in him, and he spent long and hard, spent inside her, though he had not meant to do that. The three other times he went to her, later, he withdrew, and did not risk getting the poor creature with child. He was very sorry he had done it even once. But if she was with child when they left, the odds were great that it was not his at all, but one of the other men's. At length Disraeli moved on to other matters and things became more easy. But Mallory left Disraeli's rooms full of bitter confusion. It was not Disraeli's flowery prose that had stirred up the devil in him, but the savage power of his own memories. The vital animus had returned with a vengeance. He was stiff and restless with lust, and felt out of his own command. He had not had a woman since Canada, and the French girl in Toronto had not seemed wholly clean. He needed a woman, badly. An Englishwoman, some country girl with solid white legs and fat fair freckled arms ... Mallory made his way back to Fleet Street. Out in the open air, his eyes began to smart almost at once. There was no sign of Fraser in the hustling crowds. The gloom of the day was truly extraordinary. It was scarcely noon, but the dome of St. Paul's was shrouded in filthy mist. Great rolling wads of oily fog hid the spires and the giant bannered adverts of Ludgate Hill. Fleet Street was a high-piled clattering chaos, all whip-cracking, steam-snorting, shouting. The women on the pavements crouched under soot-stained parasols and walked half-bent, and men and women alike clutched kerchiefs to their eyes and noses. Men and boys lugged family carpetbags and rubber-handled traveling-cases, their cheery straw boaters already speckled with detritus. A crowded excursion-train chugged past on the spidery elevated track of the London, Chatham & Dover, its cloud of cindered exhaust hanging in the sullen air like a banner of filth. Mallory studied the sky. The thready jellyfish mess of rising smoke was gone now, swallowed in a looming opaque fog. Here and there, gray flakes of something like snow were settling delicately over Fleet Street. Mallory examined one that lit on his jacket-sleeve, a strange slaggy flake of crystallized grit. At his touch it burst into the finest ash. Fraser was shouting at him from beneath a lamp-post across the street. |
| 773 |
To Byron's left, amid stippled scroll-work, a crowned British lion poses rampant above the blurred coils of a defeated serpent, most probably meant to represent the Luddite cause. It was sometimes remarked upon, both during and after Byron's rise to leadership, that his maiden speech in the House of Lords, February, 1812, urged clemency for the Luddites. Byron himself, questioned in this regard, is widely believed to have replied, "But there were Luddites, sir, and then there were Luddites." While this remark may be apocryphal, it is wholly in keeping with what is known of the Prime Minister's personality, and would seem to refer to the extraordinary severity with which he later put down and suppressed the popular Manchester-based anti-industrial movement led by Walter Gerard. For this was a form of Luddism attacking, not the old order, but the order that the Rads themselves had established. This object was once the property of Inspector Ebenezer Fraser, of the Bow Street Special Branch. Mallory had stayed with Fraser, watching the police surgeon at work with dirty sponge and bandage, until he was sure that Fraser was fully distracted. To further ease Fraser's evident suspicions, Mallory had borrowed a sheet of police stationery and set to the task of composing a letter. In the meantime, the Kings Road station had slowly filled with bellowing ruffian drunks and various species of rioter. It was very interesting as a social phenomenon, but Mallory was in no mood to spend the night on a cheerless cot in some raucous cell. His taste was most stubbornly set on something else entirely. So he had politely asked directions of a harried and exhausted sergeant, noted them with care in his field-book, and eased out of the station. He'd had no problem finding Cremorne Gardens. The situation there was nicely indicative of the city's crisis dynamic. It was quite calm. No one in the Gardens seemed aware of events beyond, the shock-waves of localized dissolution having not yet permeated the system. And it did not stink so badly here. The Gardens were on the Chelsea Reach, well upstream of the worst of the Thames. There was a faint night-breeze off the river, somewhat fishy but not altogether unpleasant, and the fog was broken by the great leafy boughs of Cremorne's ancient elms. The sun had set, and a thousand cloudy gas-lights twinkled for the pleasure of the public. Mallory could imagine the pastoral charm of the Gardens in happier times. The place had bright geranium-beds, plots of well-rolled lawn, pleasant vine-enshrouded kiosks, whimsical plaster follies, and of course the famous Crystal Circle. And the "monster platform" as well, a great roofed and wall-less ballroom, where thousands might have strolled or waltzed or polkaed on the shoe-streaked wooden deck. There were liquor-stands inside, and food, and a great horse-cranked panmelodium playing a medley of selections from favorite operas. There were not, however, thousands present tonight. Perhaps three hundred people circulated listlessly, and no more than a hundred of these were respectable. |
| 774 |
This hundred were weary of confinement, Mallory assumed, or courting couples braving all unpleasantness to meet. Of the remainder, two-thirds were men, more or less desperate, and prostitutes, more or less brazen. Mallory had two more whiskeys at the platform's bar. The whiskey was cheap and smelled peculiar, either tainted by the Stink or doctored with hartshorn or potash or quassia. Or perhaps indian-berry, for the stuff had the color of bad stout. The whiskey-shots sat in his stomach like a pair of hot coals. There was only a bit of dancing going on, a few couples attempting a self-conscious waltz. Mallory was not much of a dancer at the best of times. He watched the women. A tall, finely shaped young woman danced with an older, bearded gentleman. The fellow was stout and looked gouty in his knees, but the woman stood tall as a dart and danced with as much grace as a professional, the brass heels of her dolly-boots glinting in the light. The sway of her petticoats suggested the shape and size of the haunches beneath. No padding or whalebone was there. She'd fine ankles in red stockings and her skirts were two inches higher than propriety allowed. He could not see her face. The panmelodium struck up another tune, but the stout gentleman seemed winded. The pair of them stopped and moved off among a group of friends: an older, modest-looking woman in a bonnet, two other young girls who looked like dollymops, and another older gentleman who looked bleak-faced and foreign, from Holland perhaps or one of the Germanies. The dancing girl was talking with the others and tossing her head as if laughing. She had fine brunette hair and a bonnet knotted round her throat and hanging down her back. A fine, solid, womanly back and slim waist. Mallory began walking slowly toward them. The girl talked with seeming earnestness to the foreign man, but his face showed reluctance and a seeming disdain. The girl sketched out something like a half-reluctant curtsey, then turned away from him. Mallory saw her face for the first time. She had a strange long jaw, thick eyebrows, and a broad mobile slash of a mouth, lips edged with rouge. It was not exactly an ugly face, but decidedly plain. Yet there was a sharp, reckless look in her grey eyes and a strangely voluptuous expression that caught him as he stood. And she had a splendid form. He could see it as she walked — rolled, slid almost — to the bar. Again those marvelous hips and the line of that back. She leaned across the bar to chaff with the barman and her skirt rose behind her almost to her red-stockinged calf. The sight of her muscular leg thrilled him with a jolt of lewd intensity. It was as if she had kicked him with it. Mallory moved to the bar. She was not chaffing with the barman but arguing with him, in a half-painful, nagging, womanly way. She was thirsty and had no cash and said that her friends were paying. The barman didn't believe her, but would not say so straight out. Mallory tapped a shilling on the bar. |
| 775 |
Mallory put on another sheath, with some clumsy fumbling, almost losing his erection as he did so. To his relief, he managed to enter her, where he soon regained stiffness in her welcoming flesh, and thumped hard at her, tired and drunk, with an ache in his arms and his wrists and his back, and a strange painful tingling at the root of his prick. The glans felt quite sore, almost painfully tender within its sheep-gut armor, and to spend seemed as hard and tricky as pulling a rusty nail. The bed-springs creaked like a field of metal crickets. Halfway through, Mallory felt as if he had run for miles, and Hetty, whose dead cigarette had burnt the bureau, seemed entranced, or perhaps only stunned, or drunk. For a moment he wondered if he should simply stop, quit, tell her somehow that it simply wasn't working, but he could not even begin to find the words that would satisfactorily explain this situation, so he sawed on. His mind wandered, to another woman, a cousin of his, a red-haired girl whom he had seen being shagged behind a Sussex hedgerow, when he had been up a tree as a boy, hunting cuckoo's eggs. The red-haired cousin had married the man, and was forty years old now with grown children, a round little proper woman in a round little proper bonnet, but Mallory never met her without remembering the tortured look of pleasure on her freckled face. He clutched that secret image now like a galley-slave to his oar, and fought his way stubbornly toward a climax. Finally, there was that melting, cresting feeling in his loins that told him that he would, in fact, spend soon, that nothing would hold him back, and he shoved on with a new desperation, panting very hard, and the agonized rush of spending came up his aching spine like a rocket, a surge of shocking pleasure in his arms, in his legs, even in the naked soles of his cramping feet, and he cried out, a loud ecstatic bestial groan that surprised him. "Lordy," Hetty commented. Mallory collapsed off of her and lay blowing like a beached cetacean in the foetid air. His muscles felt like rubber, and he'd half-sweated the whiskey off with the sheer work of it. He felt utterly wonderful. He felt quite willing to die. If the tout had arrived and shot him on the spot he would somehow have welcomed it, welcomed the opportunity never to come back from that plateau of sensibility, the opportunity never to be Edward Mallory again, but only a splendid creature drowned in cunt and tea-rose. But after a moment the feeling was gone and he was Mallory again. Too stupefied for any refinements of guilt or regret. Mallory nevertheless felt ready to leave. Some unspoken crisis had passed, and the episode was finished. He was simply too tired to move just yet, but he knew that he was about to. The whore's bedroom no longer felt like any kind of haven to him. The walls seemed unreal, mere mathematical abstractions, boundaries that could no longer restrain his momentum. "Let's sleep a bit," Hetty said, her words blurred with drink and exhaustion. |
| 776 |
There was scarcely a window intact. Cobbles, grubbed up from side-streets, had been flung right and left like a shower of meteors. A seeming whirlwind had descended on a nearby grocery, leaving the street ankle-deep in dirty snow-drifts of flour and sugar. Mallory picked his way through battered cabbages, squashed greengages, crushed jars of syrupped peaches, and the booted footballs of whole smoked hams. Scatterings of damp flour showed a stampede of men's brogues, the small bare feet of street-urchins, the dainty trace of women's shoes, and the sweep of their skirt-hems. Four mist-shrouded figures, three men and a woman, all dressed respectably, all carefully masked in thick cloth, came shuffling into view. Noticing him, they pointedly crossed the street. They moved slowly, unhurriedly, talking together in low tones. Mallory moved on, splintered glass crunching under his shoe-heels. Meyer's Gent's Furnishings, Peterson's Haberdashery, LaGrange's Parisian Pneumatique Launderette, all presented disintegrated store-fronts and doors torn off their hinges. Their fronts had been thoroughly pelted with stones, with bricks, with raw eggs. Now a more cohesive group appeared. Men and young boys, some rolling heaped barrows, though they were clearly not costers. In their masks, they seemed tired, bemused, somber, as though attending a funeral. In their aimless progress they slowed before a sacked cobbler's, picking over the scattered shoes with the limp enthusiasm of scavengers. Mallory realized that he had been a fool. While he had wallowed in mindless dissipation, London had become a locus of anarchy. He should be home in peaceful Sussex now, with the family. He should be readying for little Madeline's wedding, in clean country air, with his brothers and sisters at hand, with decent home-cooked food and decent homely drink. A sudden agony of homesickness struck him, and he wondered what chaotic amalgam of lust and ambition and circumstance had marooned him in this dreadful, vicious place. He wondered what the family were doing at that very moment. What was the time, exactly? With a jolt, Mallory remembered Madeline's clock. His sister's wedding-gift was sitting in its brass-hasped carry-case in the safety-box of the Palace of Paleontology. The lovely fancy clock for dear Madeline, now grotesquely out of his reach. The Palace was seven miles from Whitechapel. Seven miles of roiling chaos. There must be some way back, some way to cross that distance, surely. Mallory wondered if any of the city's trains were running, or the omnibuses. Perhaps a hansom? Horses would choke in this foul mist. He was down to shank's mare. Likely any effort to cross London was foolish, and likely it would be wisest to cower in some quiet cellar like a rat, hoping for Catastrophe to pass him over. And yet Mallory found his shoulders squaring, his legs tramping forward of their own accord. Even the throbbing in his parched head began to pass as his wits focused on a goal. Back to the Palace. |
| 777 |
He forced himself to concentrate on the matters at hand. He would haul the wretched bills to the Palace safety-box. They might prove useful as evidence someday, and they could take the place of Madeline's wedding-clock. He would take up the clock, he would find a way to flee this cursed London, and he would re-join his family, as he should have done. In green Sussex, in the bosom of the good auld clawney, there would be quiet, and sense, and safety. The gears of his life would begin to mesh once more in order. Mallory lost his grip on the rolls of paper and they cascaded violently to the tarmac, one of them hitting him a smart blow across the shins as it bounded free. He gathered them up, groaning, and tried the other shoulder. In the rancid mists down Knightsbridge a procession of some kind was moving steadily across the road. Ghost-like, blurred by distance and the Stink, they appeared to be military gurneys, the squat treaded monsters of the Crimean War. Fog muffled a heavy chugging and the faint repeated clank of jointed iron. One after another they passed, while Mallory peered forward, standing quite still and gripping his burden. Each gurney hauled a linked articulated caisson. These wains appeared to be canvas-shrouded cannon, with men, foot-soldiers in canvas-colored drab, clustered atop the cannons like barnacles, with a sea-urchin bristle of bayoneted rifles. At least a dozen war-gurneys, possible a score. Mallory rubbed his aching eyes in puzzled disbelief. At Brompton Concourse he saw a trio of masked and batted figures scamper off with light-foot tread from a broken doorway; but no one offered trouble to him. Some civil authority had erected saw-horses at the gate of the Palace of Paleontology. But the barricades were not manned; it was a simple matter to slip past them and up the fog-slick stone stairs to the main entrance. The Palace's great double-doors were thickly curtained in a protective shroud of wet canvas, hung from the brick archway down to the very flagstones. The thick damp fabric smelled sharply of chloride of lime. Behind the canvas, the Palace doors were slightly ajar. Mallory eased his way inside. Servants were draping the furniture of lobby and drawing-room with thin white sheets of muslin. Others, a peculiar crowd of them, swept, and mopped, and dabbled earnestly at the cornices with long jointed feather-dusters. London women, and a large number of children of all ages, hustled about wearing borrowed Palace cleaning-aprons, looking anxious but vaguely exalted. Mallory realized at length that these strangers must be the families of the Palace staff, come to seek shelter and security within the grandest public building known to them. And someone — Kelly the major-domo, presumably, with help from whatever savants still remained on the premises — had pluckily organized the refugees. Mallory strode toward the lobby-desk, lugging his paper burden. These were sturdy working-class folk, he realized. Their stations might be humble, but they were Britons through and through. |
| 778 |
They were not daunted; they had rallied in instinctive defense of their scientific institutions and the civil values of law and property. He realized, with a heart-lifting wash of patriotic relief, that the lurching madness of Chaos had reached its limit. Within the faltering maelstrom, a nucleation of spontaneous order had arisen! Now, like a cloudy muck resolving into crystals, everything would change. Mallory flung his hated burden behind the deserted counter of the lobby-desk. In one corner, a telegraph was clacking fitfully, new punch-tape spooling by fits and starts upon the floor. Mallory observed this small but significant miracle, and sighed, like a diver whose head has broken water. The Palace air was sharp with disinfectant, but blissfully breathable. Mallory stripped the filthy mask from his face and stuffed it in his pocket. Somewhere in this blessed shelter, he thought, there was food to be had. Perhaps a wash-basin, and soap, and sulphurated powder for the fleas that had been creeping about his waistband since morning. Eggs. Ham. Restorative wine. Postage-stamps, laundresses, shoe-blacking — the whole miraculous concatenated network of Civilization. A stranger came marching toward Mallory across the lobby floor: a British soldier, an Artillery subaltern, in elegant dress-gear. He wore a double-breasted blue coatee, bright with chevrons, brass buttons, and gold-braided epaulets. His sleek trousers had a red military stripe. He wore a round, gold-laced forage-cap, and a buttoned pistol-holster at his neat white waistbelt. With his shoulders square, spine straight, and head high, this handsome young man approached with a stern look of purpose. Mallory straightened quickly, taken aback, even vaguely shamed, to compare his rumpled, sweat-stained civilian garb to this crisp military paragon. Then, with a leap of surprise, happy recognition dawned. "Brian!" Mallory shouted. "Brian, boy!" The soldier quickened his pace. "Ned — why it is you, ain't it!" said Mallory's brother, a tender smile parting his new Crimean beard. He seized Mallory's hand in both his own, and shook it heartily, with a solid strength. Mallory noted with surprise and pleasure that military discipline and scientific diet had put inches and pounds on the lad. Brian Mallory, the family's sixth-born child, had often seemed a bit quiet and timid, but now Mallory's little brother stood a good six-four in his military boots, and had the look in his creased blue eyes of a man who had seen the world. "We've been a-waiting for you, Ned," Brian told him. His bold voice had slipped a bit, by some old habit, into the remembered tone of their childhood. For Mallory, it was a plaintive echo from deep memory: the demands of a crowd of little children upon their eldest brother. Somehow, this familiar call, far from tiring or burdening Mallory, rallied him immediately into a mental second-wind. Confusion vanished like a mist and he felt stronger, more capable; the very presence of young Brian had recalled him to himself. |
| 779 |
'Cause we ride and they walk!" He looked at Mallory red-faced, as if the question were more trouble to him than a gun-fight. Mallory sat back, looking away. "Take the mask," he said mildly, holding it out. "I brought it just for you." Brian smiled then, sheepish, and knotted the little thing about his neck. There were soldiers with bayoneted rifles on the street-corners in Piccadilly, in modern speckled drab and slouch hats. They were eating porridge from mess-kits of stamped tin. Mallory waved cheerily at these minions of order, but they glared back at the Zephyr with such militant suspicion that he quickly stopped. Some blocks on, at the corner of Longacre and Drury Lane, the soldiers were actively bullying a small squad of bewildered London police. The coppers milled about like scolded children, feebly clutching their inadequate billy-clubs. Several had lost their helmets, and many bore rude bandages on hands and scalps and shins. Tom stopped the Zephyr for coaling, while Fraser, followed by Mallory, sought intelligence from the London coppers. They were told that the situation south of the river was quite out of control. Pitched battles with brickbats and pistols were raging in Lambeth. Many streets were barricaded by pillaging mobs. Reports had it that the Bedlam Hospital had been thrown open, its unchained lunatics capering the streets in frenzy. The police were sooty-faced, coughing, exhausted. Every able-bodied man in the force was on the streets, the Army had been called in by an emergency committee, and a general curfew declared. Volunteers of the respectable classes were being deputized in the West End, and equipped with batons and rifles. At least, Mallory thought, this litany of disaster crushed any further doubts about the propriety of their own venture. Fraser made no comment; but he returned to the Zephyr with a look of grim resolution. Tom piloted on. Beyond authority's battered boundary, things grew swiftly more grim. It was noonday now, with a ghastly amber glow at the filthy zenith, and crowds were clustering like flies in the crossroads of the city. Clumps of masked Londoners shuffled along, curious, restless, hungry, or desperate — unhurried, and conspiring. The Zephyr, with merry toots of its whistle, passed through the amorphous crowd; they parted for it reflexively. A pair of commandeered omnibuses patrolled Cheapside, crammed with hard-faced bruisers. Men waving pistols hung from the running-boards, and the roofs of both steamers were piled high and bristling with stolen furniture. Thomas easily skirted the wallowing 'buses, glass crunching beneath the Zephyr's wheels. In Whitechapel there were dirty, shoeless children clambering like monkeys, four stories in the air, on the red-painted arm of a great construction-crane. Spies of a sort, Brian opined, for some were waving colored rags and screeching down at people in the street. Mallory thought it more likely that the urchins had clambered up there in hope of fresher air. |
| 780 |
" "There's no reasoning with this monster," Fraser said grimly. "You were quite right, Dr. Mallory. Come what may — no matter what risk — we must be rid of him! There is no other way!" They returned to the Zephyr, where Tom had finished the coaling. Mallory glanced at his brothers. Above their masks, their reddened eyes shone with all the stern courage of manly resolution. Fraser had spoken for them all; they were united; there was no more need of words. In the very midst of this low squalor, it seemed to Mallory a moment of true splendor. Touched to the core, he felt his heart soar within him. For the first time in seeming ages, he felt redeemed, clean, utterly purposeful, utterly free of doubt. As the Zephyr rolled on through Whitechapel, the exaltation began to fade, replaced with a heightened attention and a racing pulse. Mallory adjusted his mask, checked the workings of the Ballester-Molina, exchanged a few words with Brian. But with all doubt resolved, with life and death awaiting the coming roll of the die, there seemed little enough to say. Instead, like Brian, Mallory found himself inspecting every passing door and window with a nervous care. It seemed that every wall in Limehouse was spattered with the wretch's outpourings. Some were vivid madness pure and simple: many others, however, were cunningly disguised. Mallory noted five instances of the lecture-posters that had libeled him. Some might have been genuine, for he did not read the text. The sight of his own name struck his heightened sensibilities with a shock almost painful. And he had not been the only victim of this queer kind of forgery. An advert for the Bank of England solicited deposits of pounds of flesh. A seeming offer of first-class railway excursions incited the public to rob the wealthy passengers. Such was the devilish mockery of these fraudulent bills that even quite normal adverts began to seem queer. As he scanned the bills, searching for double-meanings, every posted word seemed to decay into threatening nonsense. Mallory had never before realized the ubiquity of London's advertisements, the sullen omnipresence of insistent words and images. An inexplicable weariness of soul struck him, as the Zephyr rumbled on unchallenged through the macadamed streets. It was a very weariness of London, of the city's sheer physicality, its nightmare endlessness, of streets, courts, crescents, terraces, and alleys, of fog-shrouded stone and soot-blackened brick. A nausea of awnings, a nastiness of casements, an ugliness of scaffoldings lashed together with rope; a horrible prevalence of iron street-lamps and granite bollards, of pawn-shops, haberdashers, and tobacconists. The city seemed to stretch about them like some pitiless abyss of geologic time. An ugly shout split Mallory's reverie. Masked men had scuttled into the street before them, shabby, threatening, blocking the way. The Zephyr braked to a sudden stop, the coal-wain lurching. Mallory saw at a glance that these were rascals of the roughest description. |
| 781 |
The warehouse billowed with air and heat. Mallory absently plucked two wads of cotton and stuffed them into his ears. A section of roofing collapsed, quite slowly, like the wing of a dying swan. Rain in torrents fought the fires below. Beauty entered Mallory's soul. He stood, the rifle like a wand in his hands. The shelling had stopped, but the noise was incessant, for the building was on fire. Tongues of dirty flame leapt up in a hundred places, twisted fantastically by gusts of wind. Mallory stepped to the edge of the cotton parapet. The shelling had knocked the covered walkway into fragments, like a muddy crawl-way of termites, crushed by a boot. Mallory stood, his head filled with the monotone roaring of absolute sublimity, and watched as his enemies fled screaming. A man stopped amid the flames, and turned. It was Swing. He gazed up at Mallory where he stood. His face twisted with a desperate awe. He screamed something — screamed it louder still — but he was a little man, far away, and Mallory could not hear him. Mallory slowly shook his head. Swing raised his weapon then. Mallory saw, with a glow of pleased surprise, the familiar outlines of a Cutts-Maudslay carbine. Swing aimed the weapon, braced himself, and pulled the trigger. Pleasantly tenuous singing sounds surrounded Mallory, with a musical popping from the perforating roof behind him. Mallory, his hands moving with superb and unintentioned grace, raised his rifle, sighted, fired. Swing spun and fell sprawling. The Cutts-Maudslay, still in his grasp, continued its spring-driven jerking and clicking even after its drum of cartridges was empty. Mallory watched, with tepid interest, as Fraser, leaping through the wreckage with a spidery agility, approached the fallen anarchist with his pistol drawn. He handcuffed Swing, then lifted him limply over one shoulder. Mallory's eyes smarted. Smoke from the flaming warehouse was gathering under the wreckage of its roof. He looked down, blinking, to see Tom lowering a limping Brian to the floor. The two joined Fraser, who beckoned sharply. Mallory smiled, descended, followed. The three then fled through the whipping, thickening fires, with Mallory strolling after them. Catastrophe had knocked Swing's fortress open in a geyser of shattered brick dominos. Mallory, blissful, the nails of his broken shoe-heel grating, walked into a London reborn. Into a tempest of cleansing rain. On April 12, 1908, at the age of eighty-three, Edward Mallory died at his house in Cambridge. The exact circumstances of his death are obscured, steps having apparently been taken to preserve the proprieties incumbent on the decease of a former President of the Royal Society. The notes of Dr. George Sandys, Lord Mallory's friend and personal physician, indicate that the great savant died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Sandys also noted, apparently for purposes of his own, that the deceased had seemingly taken to his death-bed while wearing a patent set of elasticated underwear, socks with braces, and fully laced leather dress-shoes. |
| 782 |
The precise text of the report cannot be found in England, but is preserved in Nagasaki along with an annotation indicating that it was wired to the Hierarch via standard channels on April 11. The text indicates that the Meirokusha, suffering a grave decline in membership and a growing lack of attendance, have voted to indefinitely postpone further meetings. It is accompanied by an itemized bill for refreshments, and rental fees for a small upstairs room in the Seiyoken, a restaurant in the Tsukiji quarter of Tokyo. Lord Mallory, though this news is not unexpected, is filled with a sense of loss and bitterness. His temper, fierce at the best of times, has sharpened with old-age; his indignation swells to helpless rage. An artery fails. That chain of events does not occur. He chooses the folder to his right. It is thicker than the one to his left, and this intrigues him. It contains a detailed field report from a Royal Society paleontological expedition to the Pacific coast of Western Canada. Pleased by an awakened nostalgia for his own expedition days, he studies the report closely. The modern labor of science can scarcely be more different from that of his own day. The British scientists have flown to the mainland from the flourishing metropolis of Victoria, and have motored at their ease into the mountains from a luxurious base in the coastal village of Vancouver. Their leader, if he can be given this title, is a young Cambridge graduate named Morris, whom Mallory remembers as a queer, ringleted fellow, given to wearing velvet capes and elaborate Modernist hats. The strata under examination are Cambrian, dark shale of a near-lithographic quality. And, it seems, they teem with a variety of intricate forms, the paper-thin and thoroughly crushed remnants of an ancient invertebrate fauna. Mallory, a vertebrate specialist, begins to lose interest; he has seen, he thinks, more trilobites than anyone ever should have to, and in truth he has always found it difficult to conjure up enthusiasm for anything less than two inches in length. Worse yet, the report's prose strikes him as unscientific, marked by a most untoward air of radical enthusiasm. He turns to the plates. There is a thing in the first plate that possesses five eyes. It has a long clawed nozzle instead of a mouth. There is a legless, ray-like thing, all lobes and jelly, with a flat, fanged mouth that does not bite but irises shut. There is a thing whose legs are fourteen horny, pointed spikes — a thing which has no head, no eyes, no gut, but does have seven tiny pincered mouths, each at the tip of a flexible tentacle. These things bear no relation to any known creature, from any known period whatever. A rush of blood and wonder mounts within Mallory's skull. A vortex of implications begins to sort itself within him, mounting step-by-step to a strange and numinous glow, an ecstatic rush toward utter comprehension, ever brighter, ever clearer, ever closer — His head strikes the table as he slumps forward. |
| 783 |
McNeile connected the copper cables to a massive voltaic cell. The room filled with the faint eerie odor of electricity. "Please try to relax, Mr. Oliphant, so as to facilitate the polar reversal!" Half-Moon Street was illuminated by a massive Webb lamp, a fluted Corinthian column fueled by sewer-gas. Like the rest of London's Webbs, it had remained unlit, during the summer's emergency, for fear of leaks and explosions. Indeed, there had been at least a dozen pavement-ripping blasts, most attributed to the same firedamp that powered the Webb. Lord Babbage was an outspoken supporter of the Webb method; as a result, every school-boy knew that the methane potential from a single cow was adequate for an average household's daily heating, lighting, and cooking requirements. He glanced up at the lamp as he neared his own Georgian facade. Its light was another apparent token of returning normalcy, but he took little comfort in tokens. The physical and more crudely social cataclysm was past now, certainly, but Byron's death had triggered successive waves of instability; Oliphant imagined them spreading out like ripples in a pond, overlapping with others that spread from more obscure points of impact, creating ominously unpredictable areas of turbulence. One such, certainly, was the business of Charles Egremont and the current Luddite witch-hunt. Oliphant knew with absolute professional certainty that the Luddites were defunct; despite the best efforts of a few manic anarchists, the London riots of the past summer had shown no coherent or organized political agenda. All reasonable aspirations of the working-class had been successfully subsumed by the Radicals. Byron, in his vigorous days, had tempered justice with a well-dramatized show of mercy. Those early Luddite leaders who had made their peace with the Rads were now the tidy, comfortably well-to-do leaders of respectable trades-unions and craft-guilds. Some were wealthy industrialists — though their peace of mind was severely perturbed by Egremont's systematic disinterment of old convictions. A second wave of Luddism had arisen in the turbulent forties, aimed, this time, directly against the Rads, with a charter of popular rights and a desperate zest for violence. But it had crumbled in a welter of internecine treachery, and its boldest spirits, such as Walter Gerard, had met a distressingly public punishment. Today, such groups as the Manchester Hell-Cats, to which Michael Radley had belonged as a boy, were mere youth-gangs, quite devoid of political purpose. Captain Swing's influence might still be felt occasionally in rural Ireland, or even in Scotland, but Oliphant attributed this to the Rads' agricultural policies, which tended to lag behind their brilliance in industrial management. No, he thought, as Bligh opened the door at his approach, the spirit of Ned Ludd was scarcely abroad in the land, but what was one to make of Egremont and his furious campaign? "Good evening, sir." "Good evening, Bligh." He gave Bligh his top-hat and umbrella. |
| 784 |
He then used his passkey to lock the door, lit a lamp, and blocked the view from the street with the remains of one of the window-curtains. The condition of Radley's clothing indicated that the pockets had been gone through. Sundry personal objects lay in the pool of blood and other matter surrounding the corpse: a repeating match, a cigar-case, coins of various denominations. Lamp in hand, the detective surveyed the room, discovering an ivory-handled Leacock & Hutchings pocket-pistol. The weapon's trigger was missing. Three of its five barrels had been discharged — very recently, McQueen judged. Continuing his search, he had discovered the gaudy gilded head of General Houston's stick, awash in splintered glass. Nearby lay a bloodied packet, tightly wrapped in brown paper. It proved to contain a hundred kinotrope-cards, their intricate fretting of punch-holes ruined by the passage of a pair of bullets. The bullets themselves, of soft lead and much distorted, fell into McQueen's palm as he examined the cards. Subsequent examination of the room by specialists from Central Statistics — the attention of the Metropolitan Police, at Oliphant's request, having been swiftly deflected from the matter — added little to what the veteran McQueen had observed. The trigger of the Leacock & Hutchings pepperbox was recovered from beneath an armchair. A more peculiar discovery consisted of a square-cut white diamond, of fifteen carats and very high quality, which was found firmly wedged between two floor-boards. Two men from Criminal Anthropometry, no more than usually cryptic about their purposes, employed large squares of tissue-thin adhesive grid-paper to capture various hairs and bits of fluff from the carpet; they guarded these specimens jealously, and took them away promptly, and nothing was ever heard of them again. "Are you done with that one, sir?" He looked up at Betteredge, then down at the file, seeing Radley's blood spread in a tacky pool. "We're in Horseferry Road, sir." The cab came to a halt. "Yes, thank you." He closed the file and handed it to Betteredge. He descended from the cab and mounted the broad stairs. Regardless of the circumstances surrounding a given visit, he invariably felt a peculiar quickening upon entering the Central Statistics Bureau. He felt it now, certainly: a sense of being observed, somehow — of being known and numbered. The Eye, yes ... As he spoke to the uniformed clerk at the visitor's-desk, a gang of journeymen mechanics emerged from a hallway to his left. They wore Engine-cut woolen jackets and polished brogues soled with creped rubber. Each man earned a spotless tool-satchel of thick white duck, cornered with bronze rivets and brown hide. As they moved toward him, conversing among themselves, some drew pipes and cheroots from their pockets in anticipation of a shift's-end smoke. Oliphant experienced a sharp pang of tobacco-hunger. He had often had call to regret the Bureau's necessary policy regarding tobacco. He looked after the mechanics as they passed, out between the columns and the bronze sphinxes. |
| 785 |
Some day, in futurity, they may lead civilization to heights yet untold. They, and perhaps the Americans ..." The boy regarded him dubiously. "Father wouldn't like that at all, what you said." "No, I rather doubt he would." Oliphant then spent half-an-hour, down on his knees upon the carpet, watching Alfred demonstrate a toy French Engine — operated, as was its cousin the Great Napoleon, by compressed air. The little Engine employed lengths of telegraph-tape, rather than cards, reminding Oliphant of his letter to M. Arslau. Bligh would have taken it 'round to the French Embassy by now; very likely it was already on its way to Paris by diplomatic pouch. Alfred was connecting his Engine to a miniature kinotrope. There came a ceremonious rattle at the door-knob; the doors of Buckingham Palace were never knocked. Oliphant rose, and opened the tall white portal, to discover the well-known face of Nash, a palace valet-de-chambre, whose unwise speculations in railway shares had briefly made him the unwilling intimate of the Metropolitan Fraud Bureau. Oliphant's politesse had successfully smoothed the matter — a kindness well-invested, he saw now, by Nash's unfeigned air of respectful attention. "Mr. Oliphant," Nash announced, "a telegram has come, sir. Most urgent." The velocity of the Special Branch vehicle contributed in no small part to Oliphant's general sense of unease. Paternoster himself could have asked for nothing faster, or more radically line-streamed. They flew past St. James's Park with the speed of dream, the bare black branches of the lime-trees flashing by like wind-driven smoke. The driver wore leather goggles with round lenses, and plainly relished their headlong flight, periodically sounding a deep-throated whistle that sent horses rearing and pedestrians scurrying. The stoker, a burly young Irishman, was grinning maniacally as he shoveled coke into the burner. Oliphant had no idea of their destination. Now, as they neared Trafalgar, the traffic caused the driver to yank the whistle-cord continually, steadily, setting up a mournful bellowing ululation, like the grief of some marine behemoth. The traffic, at this sound, parted like the Red Sea before Moses. Helmeted policemen saluted smartly as they sped past. Urchins and crossing-sweepers turned cartwheels of delight, at the sight of a sleek tin fish racketing down the Strand. The evening had grown quite dark. As they entered Fleet Street, the driver applied the brake and worked a lever that released a mighty gout of uprushing steam. The line-streamed gurney bumped to a halt. "Well, sir," the driver commented, raising his goggles to peer through the fretted glass of the vehicle's prow, "would you look at that." Traffic, Oliphant saw, had been halted completely by the erection of wooden barricades hung with lanterns. Behind these stood grim-faced soldiers in combat drab, Cutts-Maudslay carbines unslung and at the ready. Beyond them, he saw sheets of canvas, loosely hung from raw timber uprights, as though someone were attempting to erect stage-scenery in the middle of Fleet Street. |
| 786 |
Both mother and daughter were very worn and white, at the end of their forces. Then a funeral march was played — very fine — the panmelodium sounding splendid amid the somber melodies of the automatic organs. Then the processions arrived. The Speaker first, proceeded by heralds with white staves but in mourning-dress. The Speaker was quite splendid. He walked slowly and firmly, very impassive and dignified; an almost Egyptianate face. The mace was carried before him, and he wore a gold-laced gown, very fine. Then the Ministers; Colonial Secretary, very dapper indeed. Viceroy of India looks quite recovered from his malaria. Chairman of the Commission on Free Trade looked the wickedest of the human race, as if writhing under a load of disreputable guilt. Then the House of Lords. The Lord Chancellor absolutely grotesque, and made more so by the tremendous figure of the Sergeant-at-Arms with a silver chain and large, white silk bows on his shoulders for mourning. Lord Babbage, pale and upright, most dignified. Young Lord Huxley, lean, light on his feet, very splendid. Lord Scowcroft, the shiftiest person I ever saw, in threadbare clothes like a sexton. The coffin came solemnly along, the bearers holding feebly onto it. The Prince Consort Albert foremost among them, with the oddest gnawing look — duty, dignity, and fear. He was kept waiting, I hear, just in the doorway, and muttered in German about the Stink. When the coffin entered, the widowed Iron Lady looked a thousand years old. ======== The Widowed Iron Lady So now the world falls into the hands of the little men, the hypocrites and clerks. Look at them. They have not the mettle for the great work. They will botch it. Oh, even now I could set it all to rights, if only the fools would listen to sense, but I could never speak as you did, and they do not listen to women. You were their Great Orator, a puffed and painted mountebank, without one real idea in your head — no gift for logic, nothing but your posturing wickedness, and yet they listened to you; oh, how they did listen. You wrote your silly books of verse, you praised Satan and Cain and adultery, and every kind of wicked foolishness, and the fools could not get enough of it. They knocked down the bookshop doors. And women threw themselves at your feet, armies of them. I never did. But then, you married me. I was innocent then. From the days of our courtship, some moral instinct in me revolted at your sly teasing, your hateful double-entendres and insinuations, but I did see qualities of promise in you, and ignored my doubts. How swiftly you revived them, as my husband. You cruelly used my innocence; you made me a party to sodomy before I even knew the nature of that sin; before I learned the hidden words for the unspeakable. Pederastia, manustupration, fellatio — you were so steeped in unnatural vice that you could spare not even the marriage-bed. You polluted me, even as you had polluted your own hare-brained fool of a sister. If society had learned the tenth of what I knew, you would have been driven from England like a leper. |
| 787 |
Back to Greece, back to Turkey and your catamites. How easily, then, might I have ruined you, and very nearly did, to spite you, for it vexed me sorely that you did not know, or care to know, the depth of my conviction. I sought refuge in my mathematics, then, and kept to silence, wishing still to be a good wife in the eyes of society, for I had uses to which to put you, and great work to do, and no means with which to do it, save through my husband. For I had glimpsed the true path toward the greatest good for the greatest number, a good so great it made a trifle of my own humble wishes. Charles taught it me. Decent, brilliant, unworldly Charles, your opposite in every way; so full of great plans, and the pure light of mathematical science, but so utterly impolitic, so entirely unable to suffer fools gladly. He had the gifts of a Newton, but he could not persuade. I brought you together. At first you hated him, and mocked him behind his back, and me as well, for showing you a truth beyond your comprehension. I persisted; begged you to think of honor, of service, of your own glory, of the future of the child in my womb, Ada, that strange child. (Poor Ada, she does not look well, she has too much of you in her.) But you cursed me for a cold-hearted shrew and retired in a drunken temper. For the sake of that greater good, I painted a smile on my face and descended open-eyed into the very Pit. How it pained me, that vile greasy probing and animal nastiness; but I let you do as you liked, and forgave you for it, and petted and kissed you for it, as if I liked it. And you wept like a child, and were grateful, and talked of love undying and united souls, until you tired of that sort of talk. And then, to hurt me, you told me dreadful, shocking things, to disgust me and frighten me away, but I would no longer allow you to frighten me; I was steeled to anything, that night. So I forgave you, forgave and forgave, until at last you could find no further confession even in the foulest dregs of your soul, and at last you had no pretense left, nothing left to say. I imagine that after that night you became frightened of me, perhaps, a little frightened, and that did you a great deal of good, I think. It never hurt me so again, after that night. I taught myself to play all your "pretty little games," and to win them. That was the price I paid, to put your beast in harness. If there is a Judge of Men in another world, though I no longer believe that, no, not in my heart, and yet at times, evil times, times like these — I fancy I sense a never-closing, all-embracing Eye, and feel the awful pressure of its dreadful comprehension. And if there be a Judge, milord husband, then do not think to gull him. No, do not boast of your magnificent sins and demand damnation — for how little you knew, over the years. You, the greatest Minister of the greatest Empire in history — you flinched, you were feeble, you dodged every consequence — Are these tears? We should not have killed so many ... |
| 788 |
Yes, I have watched her well. I have seen her earned off half-dead from Crockford's gambling-hell, at two o'clock in the morning, looking like a specter amid a flare of wicked gas-lamps — "Pray resume your seat, sir. You are in the House of God. Is that remark to be taken as a threat, sir? How dare you. These are dark times, grave times indeed! I tell you, sir, as I tell this congregation, as I will tell all the world, that I have seen her, I have witnessed your Queen of Engines at her vile dissipations — "Help me! Stop him! Stop him! Oh dear Jesus, I am shot! I am undone! Murder! Can none of you stop him?" ======== Gentlemen, The Choice Is Yours At the height of the Parliamentary crisis of 1855, Lord Brunel assembled and addressed the members of his Cabinet. His remarks were recorded by his private secretary, using the Babbage shorthand notation. "Gentlemen, I cannot call to mind a single instance in which any individual in the Party or the Ministry has spoken, even casually, in my defense within the walls of Parliament. I have waited patiently, and I hope uncomplainingly, doing what little I could to protect and extend the wise legacy of the late Lord Byron, and to heal the reckless wounds inflicted on our Party by over-zealous juniors. "But there has been no change in the contempt in which you honorable gentlemen seem to hold me. On the contrary, the last two nights have been taken up with a debate on a vote of want-of-confidence, directed, obviously and especially, against the head of the Government. The discussion has been marked with more than usual violence against my office, and there has been no defense from any of you — the members of my own Cabinet. "How, under these circumstances, are we to successfully resolve the matter of the murder of the Reverend Alistair Roseberry? This shameful, atavistic crime, brutally perpetrated within a Christian church, has blackened the reputation of Party and Government, and cast the gravest doubts on our intentions and integrity. And how are we to root out the murderous dark-lantern societies whose power, and provocative daring, grows daily? "God knows, gentlemen, that I never sought my present office. Indeed, I would have done anything, consistent with honor, to avoid assuming it. But I must be master in this House, or else resign my office — abandoning this nation to the purported leadership of men whose intentions are increasingly stark in their clarity. Gentlemen, the choice is yours." ======== Death of the Marquess of Hastings Yes, sir, two-fifteen to be quite exact, sir — and no other way to be, as we're on the Colt & Maxwell system of patent punch-clocks. Just a sort of dripping sound, sir. For a moment I took it to be a leakage, forgetting the night was clear. Rain, I thought, and that was all my anxiety, sir, thinking the Land Leviathan would be damaged by damp, so I flung my lantern's beam up quick, and there the poor rascal hung, and blood all down the Leviathan's neck-bones, sir, and all on the — what d'ye call 'em? |
| 789 |
Now it broke the intricacy of its looping flight to alight on the bulging archipelago of Her Ladyship's padded, lace-trimmed shoulder. Lady Ada took no apparent notice of the attentions of this energetic vermin, but continued on gamely, in her accented French. The Mother said: "Our lives would be greatly clarified if human discourse could be interpreted as the exfoliation of a deeper formal system. One would no longer need ponder the grave ambiguities of human speech, but could judge the validity of any sentence by reference to a fixed and finitely describable set of rules and axioms. It was the dream of Leibniz to find such a system, the Characteristica Universalis ... "And yet the execution of the so-called Modus Program demonstrated that any formal system must be both incomplete and unable to establish its own consistency. There is no finite mathematical way to express the property of 'truth.' The transfinite nature of the Byron Conjectures were the ruination of the Grand Napoleon; the Modus Program initiated a series of nested loops, which, though difficult to establish, were yet more difficult to extinguish. The program ran, yet rendered its Engine useless! It was indeed a painful lesson in the halting abilities of even our finest ordinateurs. "Yet I do believe, and must assert most strongly, that the Modus technique of self-referentiality will someday form the bedrock of a genuinely transcendent meta-system of calculatory mathematics. The Modus has proven my Conjectures, but their practical exfoliation awaits an Engine of vast capacity, one capable of iterations of untold sophistication and complexity. "Is it not strange that we mere mortals can talk about a concept — truth — that is infinitely complicated? And yet — is not a closed system the essence of the mechanical, the unthinking? And is not an open system the very definition of the organic, of life and thought? "If we envision the entire System of Mathematics as a great Engine for proving theorems, then we must say, through the agency of the Modus, that such an Engine lives, and could indeed prove its own life, should it develop the capacity to look upon itself. The Lens for such a self-examination is of a nature not yet known to us; yet we know that it exists, for we ourselves possess it. "As thinking beings, we may envision the universe, though we have no finite way to sum it up. The term, 'universe,' is not in fact a rational concept, though it is something of such utter immediacy that no thinking creature can escape a pressing knowledge of it, and indeed, an urge to know its workings, and the nature of one's own origin within it. "In his final years, the great Lord Babbage, impatient of the limits of steam-power, sought to harness the lightning in the cause of calculation. His elaborate system of 'resistors' and 'capacitors,' while demonstrative of the most brilliant genius, remains fragmentary, and is yet to be constructed. Indeed, it is often mocked by the undiscerning as an old man's hobby-horse. |
| 790 |
When I lived in Mexico City at the end of the 1940's, it was a city of one million people, with clear sparkling air and the sky that special shade of blue that goes so well with circling vultures, blood and sand — the raw menacing pitiless Mexican blue. I liked Mexico City from the first day of my first visit there. In 1949, it was a cheap place to live, with a large foreign colony, fabulous whorehouses and restaurants, cockfights and bullfights, and every conceivable diversion. A single man could live well there for two dollars a day. My New Orleans case for heroin and marijuana possession looked so unpromising that I decided not to show up for the court date, and I rented an apartment in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of Mexico City. I knew that under the statute of limitations I could not return to the United States for five years, so I applied for Mexican citizenship and enrolled in some courses in Mayan and Mexican archaeology at Mexico City College. The G. I. Bill paid for my books and tuition, and a seventy-five-dollar-per-month living allowance. I thought I might go into farming, or perhaps open a bar on the American border. The City appealed to me. The slum areas compared favorably with anything in Asia for sheer filth and poverty. People would shit all over the street, then lie down and sleep in it with the flies crawling in and out of their mouths. Entrepreneurs, not infrequently lepers, built fires on street corners and cooked up hideous, stinking, nameless messes of food, which they dispensed to passersby. Drunks slept right on the sidewalks of the main drag, and no cops bothered them. It seemed to me that everyone in Mexico had mastered the art of minding his own business. If a man wanted to wear a monocle or carry a cane, he did not hesitate to do it, and no one gave him a second glance. Boys and young men walked down the street arm in arm and no one paid them any mind. It wasn't that people didn't care what others thought; it simply would not occur to a Mexican to expect criticism from a stranger, nor to criticize the behavior of others. Mexico was basically an Oriental culture that reflected two thousand years of disease and poverty and degradation and stupidity and slavery and brutality and psychic and physical terrorism. It was sinister and gloomy and chaotic, with the special chaos of a dream. No Mexican really knew any other Mexican, and when a Mexican killed someone (which happened often), it was usually his best friend. Anyone who felt like it carried a gun, and I read of several occasions where drunken cops, shooting at the habitues of a bar, were themselves shot by armed civilians. As authority figures, Mexican cops ranked with streetcar conductors. All officials were corruptible, income tax was very low, and medical treatment was extremely reasonable, because the doctors advertised and cut their prices. You could get a clap cured for $2.40, or buy the penicillin and shoot it yourself. There were no regulations curtailing self-medication, and needles and syringes could be bought anywhere. |
| 791 |
I pulled out the receta, and a gray-haired lady smiled at me. The pharmacist looked at the script, and said, "Two minutes, senor." We sat down to wait. There were geraniums in the window. A small boy brought me a glass of water, and a cat rubbed against my leg. After awhile the pharmacist returned with our morphine. "Gracias, senor" Outside, the neighborhood now seemed enchanted: Little farmacias in a market, crates and stalls outside, a pulqueria on the corner. Kiosks selling fried grasshoppers and peppermint candy black with flies. Boys in from the country in spotless white linen and rope sandals, with faces of burnished copper and fierce innocent black eyes, like exotic animals, of a dazzling sexless beauty. Here is a boy with sharp features and black skin, smelling of vanilla, a gardenia behind his ear. Yes, you found a Johnson, but you waded through Shitville to find him. You always do. Just when you think the earth is exclusively populated by Shits, you meet a Johnson. One day there was a knock on my door at eight in the morning. I went to the door in my pyjamas, and there was an inspector from Immigration. "Get your clothes on. You're under arrest." It seemed the woman next door had turned in a long report on my drunk and disorderly behavior, and also there was something wrong with my papers and where was the Mexican wife I was supposed to have? The Immigration officers were all set to throw me in jail to await deportation as an undesirable alien. Of course, everything could be straightened out with some money, but my interviewer was the head of the deporting department and he wouldn't go for peanuts. I finally had to get up off of two hundred dollars. As I walked home from the Immigration Office, I imagined what I might have had to pay if I had really had an investment in Mexico City. I thought of the constant problems the three American owners of the Ship Ahoy encountered. The cops came in all the time for a mordida, and then came the sanitary inspectors, then more cops trying to get something on the joint so they could take a real bite. They took the waiter downtown and beat the shit out of him. They wanted to know where was Kelly's body stashed? How many women been raped in the joint? Who brought in the weed? And so on. Kelly was an American hipster who had been shot in the Ship Ahoy six months before, had recovered, and was now in the U. S. Army. No woman was ever raped there, and no one ever smoked weed there. By now I had entirely abandoned my plans to open a bar in Mexico. An addict has little regard for his image. He wears the dirtiest, shabbiest clothes, and feels no need to call attention to himself. During my period of addiction in Tangiers, I was known as "El Hombre Invisible," The Invisible Man. This disintegration of self-image often results in an indiscriminate image hunger. Billie Holliday said she knew she was off junk when she stopped watching TV. In my first novel, Junky, the protagonist "Lee" comes across as integrated and self-contained, sure of himself and where he is going. |
| 792 |
There is something curiously systematic and unsexual about his quest for a suitable sex object, crossing one prospect after another off a list which seems compiled with ultimate failure in mind. On some very deep level he does not want to succeed, but will go to any length to avoid the realization that he is not really looking for sex contact. But Allerton was definitely some sort of contact. And what was the contact that Lee was looking for? Seen from here, a very confused concept that had nothing to do with Allerton as a character. While the addict is indifferent to the impression he creates in others, during withdrawal he may feel the compulsive need for an audience, and this is clearly what Lee seeks in Allerton: an audience, the acknowledgement of his performance, which of course is a mask, to cover a shocking disintegration. So he invents a frantic attention-getting format which he calls the Routine: shocking, funny, riveting. "It is an Ancient Mariner, and he stoppeth one of three... ." The performance takes the form of routines: fantasies about Chess Players, the Texas Oilman, Corn Hole Gus's Used-Slave Lot. In Queer, Lee addresses these routines to an actual audience. Later, as he develops as a writer, the audience becomes internalized. But the same mechanism that produced A. J. and Doctor Benway, the same creative impulse, is dedicated to Allerton, who is forced into the role of approving Muse, in which he feels understandably uncomfortable. What Lee is looking for is contact or recognition, like a photon emerging from the haze of insubstantiality to leave an indelible recording in Allerton's consciousness. Failing to find an adequate observer, he is threatened by painful dispersal, like an unobserved photon. Lee does not know that he is already committed to writing, since this is the only way he has of making an indelible record, whether Allerton is inclined to observe or not. Lee is being inexorably pressed into the world of fiction. He has already made the choice between his life and his work. The manuscript trails off in Puyo, End of the Road town... . The search for Yage has failed. The mysterious Doctor Cotter wants only to be rid of his unwelcome guests. He suspects them to be agents of his treacherous partner Gill, intent on stealing his genius work of isolating curare from the composite arrow poison. I heard later that the chemical companies decided simply to buy up the arrow poison in quantity and extract the curare in their American laboratories. The drug was soon synthesized, and is now a standard substance found in many muscle-relaxing preparations. So it would seem that Cotter really had nothing to lose: his efforts were already superseded. Dead end. And Puyo can serve as a model for the Place of Dead Roads: a dead, meaningless conglomerate of tin-roofed houses under a continual downpour of rain. Shell has pulled out, leaving prefabricated bungalows and rusting machinery behind. And Lee has reached the end of his line, an end implicit in the beginning. |
| 793 |
He is left with the impact of unbridgeable distances, the defeat and weariness of a long, painful journey made for nothing, wrong turnings, the track lost, a bus waiting in the rain ... back to Ambato, Quito, Panama, Mexico City. When I started to write this companion text to Queer, I was paralyzed with a heavy reluctance, a writer's block like a straitjacket: "I glance at the manuscript of Queer and feel I simply can't read it. My past was a poisoned river from which one was fortunate to escape, and by which one feels immediately threatened, years after the events recorded. — Painful to an extent I find it difficult to read, let alone to write about. Every word and gesture sets the teeth on edge." The reason for this reluctance becomes clearer as I force myself to look: the book is motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned, in fact is carefully avoided: the accidental shooting death of my wife, Joan, in September 1951. While I was writing The Place of Dead Roads, I felt in spiritual contact with the late English writer Denton Welch, and modelled the novel's hero, Kim Carson, directly on him. Whole sections came to me as if dictated, like table-tapping. I have written about the fateful morning of Denton's accident, which left him an invalid for the remainder of his short life. If he had stayed a little longer here, not so long there, he would have missed his appointment with the female motorist who hit his bicycle from behind for no apparent reason. At one point Denton had stopped to have coffee, and looking at the brass hinges on the cafe's window shutters, some of them broken, he was hit by a feeling of universal desolation and loss. So every event of that morning is charged with special significance, as if it were underlined. This portentous second sight permeates Welch's writing: a scone, a cup of tea, an inkwell purchased for a few shillings, become charged with a special and often sinister significance. I get exactly the same feeling to an almost unbearable degree as I read the manuscript of Queer. The event towards which Lee feels himself inexorably driven is the death of his wife by his own hand, the knowledge of possession, a dead hand waiting to slip over his like a glove. So a smog of menace and evil rises from the pages, an evil that Lee, knowing and yet not knowing, tries to escape with frantic flights of fantasy: his routines, which set one's teeth on edge because of the ugly menace just behind or to one side of them, a presence palpable as a haze. Brion Gysin said to me in Paris: "For ugly spirit shot Joan because ..." A bit of mediumistic message that was not completed — or was it? It doesn't need to be completed, if you read it: "ugly spirit shot Joan to be cause," that is, to maintain a hateful parasitic occupation. My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations, with their dogmatic insistence that such manifestations must come from within and never, never, never from without. |
| 794 |
"Let's sit down over here," he said. Allerton was drunk. His eyes were flushed a faint violet tinge, the pupils widely dilated. He was talking very fast in a high, thin voice, the eerie, disembodied voice of a young child. Lee had never heard Allerton talk like this before. The effect was like the possession voice of a medium. The boy had an inhuman gaiety and innocence. Allerton was telling a story about his experience with the Counter-intelligence Corps in Germany. An informant had been giving the department bum steers. "How did you check the accuracy of information?" Lee asked. "How did you know ninety percent of what your informants told you wasn't fabricated?" "Actually we didn't, and we got sucked in on a lot of phony deals. Of course, we cross-checked all information with other informants and we had our own agents in the field. Most of our informants turned in some phony information, but this one character made all of it up. He had our agents out looking for a whole fictitious network of Russian spies. So finally the report comes back from Frankfurt — it is all a lot of crap. But instead of clearing out of town before the information could be checked, he came back with more. "At this point we'd really had enough of his bullshit. So we locked him up in a cellar. The room was pretty cold and uncomfortable, but that was all we could do. We had to handle prisoners very careful. He kept typing out confessions, enormous things." This story clearly delighted Allerton, and he kept laughing while he was telling it. Lee was impressed by his combination of intelligence and childlike charm. Allerton was friendly now, without reserve or defense, like a child who has never been hurt. He was telling another story. Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down over the ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs. His mouth was a little open, showing his teeth in the half-snarl of a baffled animal. He licked his lips. Lee did not enjoy frustration. The limitations of his desires were like the bars of a cage, like a chain and collar, something he had learned as an animal learns, through days and years of experiencing the snub of the chain, the unyielding bars. He had never resigned himself, and his eyes looked out through the invisible bars, watchful, alert, waiting for the keeper to forget the door, for the frayed collar, the loosened bar ... suffering without despair and without consent. "I went to the door and there he was with a branch in his mouth," Allerton was saying. Lee had not been listening. "A branch in his mouth," said Lee, then added inanely, "A big branch?" "It was about two feet long. I told him to drop dead, then a few minutes later he appeared at the window. |
| 795 |
He went up to Tom Weston's apartment. Mary and Allerton were there. Lee sat down and tried to engage Allerton's interest, but he was too drunk to make sense. His attempt to carry on a casual, humorous conversation was painful to watch. Ale must have slept. Mary and Allerton were gone. Tom Weston brought him some hot coffee. He drank the coffee, got up and staggered out of the apartment. Exhausted, he slept till the following morning. Scenes from the chaotic, drunken month passed before his eyes. There was a face he did not recognize, a good-looking kid with amber eyes, yellow hair and beautiful straight black eyebrows. He saw himself asking someone he barely knew to buy him a beer in a bar on Insurgentes, and getting a nasty brush. He saw himself pull a gun on someone who followed him out of a clip joint on Coahuila and tried to roll him. He felt the friendly, steadying hands of people who had helped him home. "Take it easy, Bill." His childhood friend Rollins standing there, solid and virile, with his elkhound. Carl running for a streetcar. Moor with his malicious hitch smile. The faces blended together in a nightmare, speaking to him in strange moaning idiot voices that he could not understand at first, and finally could not hear. Lee got up and shaved and felt better. He found he could eat a roll and drink some coffee. He smoked and read the paper, trying not to think about Allerton. Presently he went downtown and looked through the gun stores. He found a bargain in a Colt Frontier, which he bought for two hundred pesos. A 32-20 in perfect condition, serial number in the three hundred thousands. Worth at least a hundred dollars Stateside. Lee went to the American bookstore and bought a book on chess. He took the book out to Chapultepec, sat down in a soda stand on the lagoon, and began to read. Directly in front of him was an island with a huge cypress tree growing on it. Hundreds of vultures roosted in the tree. Lee wondered what they ate. He threw a piece of bread, which landed on the island. The vultures paid no attention. Lee was interested in the theory of games and the strategy of random behavior. As he had supposed, the theory of games does not apply to chess, since chess rules out the element of chance and approaches elimination of the unpredictable human factor. If the mechanism of chess were completely understood, the outcome could be predicted after any initial move. "A game for thinking machines," Lee thought. He read on, smiling from time to time. Finally he got up, sailed the book out over the lagoon, and walked away. Lee knew he could not find what he wanted with Allerton. The court of fact had rejected his petition. But Lee could not give up. "Perhaps I can discover a way to change fact," he thought. He was ready to take any risk, to proceed to any extreme of action. Like a saint or a wanted criminal with nothing to lose, Lee had stepped beyond the claims of his nagging, cautious, aging, frightened flesh. He took a taxi to the Ship Ahoy. |
| 796 |
A hunchback with withered legs was playing crude bamboo panpipes, a mournful Oriental music with the sadness of the high mountains. In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it, you cannot complain. People crowded around the musician, listened a few minutes, and walked on. Lee noticed a young man with the skin tight over his small face, looking exactly like a shrunken head. He could not have weighed more than ninety pounds. The musician coughed from time to time. Once he snarled when someone touched his hump, showing his black rotten teeth. Lee gave the man a few coins. He walked on, looking at every face he passed, looking into doorways and up at the windows of cheap hotels. An iron bedstead painted light pink, a shirt out to dry ... scraps of life. Lee snapped at them hungrily, like a predatory fish cut off from his prey by a glass wall. He could not stop ramming his nose against the glass in the nightmare search of his dream. And at the end he was standing in a dusty room in the late afternoon sun, with an old shoe in his hand. The city, like all Ecuador, produced a curiously baffling impression. Lee felt there was something going on here, some undercurrent of life that was hidden from him. This was the area of the ancient Chimu pottery, where salt shakers and water pitchers were nameless obscenities: two men on all fours engaged in sodomy formed the handle for the top of a kitchen pot. What happens when there is no limit? What is the fate of The Land Where Anything Goes? Men changing into huge centipedes ... centipedes besieging the houses ... a man tied to a couch and a centipede ten feet long rearing up over him. Is this literal? Did some hideous metamorphosis occur? What is the meaning of the centipede symbol? Lee got on a bus and rode to the end of the line. He took another bus. He rode out to the river and drank a soda, and watched some boys swimming in the dirty river. The river looked as if nameless monsters might rise from the green-brown water. Lee saw a lizard two feet long run up the opposite bank. He walked back towards town. He passed a group of boys on a corner. One of the boys was so beautiful that the image cut Lee's senses like a wire whip. A slight involuntary sound of pain escaped from Lee's lips. He turned around, as though looking at the street name. The boy was laughing at some joke, a high-pitched laugh, happy and gay. Lee walked on. Six or seven boys, aged twelve to fourteen, were playing in a heap of rubbish on the waterfront. One of the boys was urinating against a post and smiling at the other boys. The boys noticed Lee. Now their play was overtly sexual, with an undercurrent of mockery. They looked at Lee and whispered and laughed. Lee looked at them openly, a cold, hard stare of naked lust. He felt the tearing ache of limitless desire. He focused on one boy, the image sharp and clear, as if seen through a telescope with the other boys and the waterfront blacked out. |
| 797 |
The boy vibrated with life like a young animal. A wide grin showed sharp, white teeth. Under the torn shirt Lee glimpsed the thin body. He could feel himself in the body of the boy. Fragmentary memories ... the smell of cocoa beans drying in the sun, bamboo tenements, the warm dirty river, the swamps and rubbish heaps on the outskirts of the town. He was with the other boys, sitting on the stone floor of a deserted house. The roof was gone. The stone walls were falling down. Weeds and vines grew over the walls and stretched across the floor. The boys were taking down their torn pants. Lee lifted his thin buttocks to slip down his pants. He could feel the stone floor. He had his pants down to his ankles. His knees were clasped together, and the other boys were trying to pull them apart. He gave in, and they held his knees open. He looked at them and smiled, and slipped his hand down over his stomach. Another boy who was standing up dropped his pants and stood there with his hands on his hips, looking down at his erect organ. A boy sat down by Lee and reached over between his legs. Lee felt the orgasm blackout in the hot sun. He stretched out and threw his arm over his eyes. Another boy rested his head on his stomach. Lee could feel the warmth of the other's head, itching a little where the hair touched Lee's stomach. Now he was in a bamboo tenement. An oil lamp lit a woman's body. Lee could feel desire for the woman through the other's body. "I'm not queer," he thought. "I'm disembodied." Lee walked on, thinking, "What can I do? Take them back to my hotel? They are willing enough. For a few Sucres. ..." He felt a killing hate for the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted to do. "Someday I am going to have things just like I want," he said to himself. "And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river." Lee's plan involved a river. He lived on the river and ran things to please himself. He grew his own weed and poppies and cocaine, and he had a young native boy for an all-purpose servant. Boats were moored in the dirty river. Great masses of water hyacinths floated by. The river was a good half-mile across. Lee walked up to a little park. There was a statue of Bolivar, "The Liberating Fool" as Lee called him, shaking hands with someone else. Both of them looked tired and disgusted and rocking queer, so queer it rocked you. Lee stood looking at the statue. Then he sat down on a stone bench facing the river. Everyone looked at Lee when he sat down. Lee looked back. He did not have the American reluctance to meet the gaze of a stranger. The others looked away, and lit cigarettes and resumed their conversations. Lee sat there looking at the dirty yellow river. He couldn't see half an inch under the surface. From time to time, small fish jumped ahead of a boat. There were trim, expensive sailing boats from the yacht club, with hollow masts and beautiful lines. There were dugout canoes with outboard motors and cabins of split bamboo. |
| 798 |
He will give you some if I say so." "That would be very kind," said Lee. Cotter did not say any more about going to Canela. He did say a lot about how short they were on supplies, and how he had no time to spare from his experiments with a curare substitute. After three days Lee saw he was wasting time, and told Cotter they were leaving. Cotter made no attempt to conceal his relief. Epilogue: Mexico City Return Every time I hit Panama, the place is exactly one month, two months, six months more nowhere, like the course of a degenerative illness. A shift from arithmetical to geometrical progression seems to have occurred. Something ugly and ignoble and subhuman is cooking in this mongrel town of pimps and whores and recessive genes, this degraded leech on the Canal. A smog of bum kicks hangs over Panama in the wet heat. Everyone here is telepathic on the paranoid level. I walked around with my camera and saw a wood and corrugated iron shack on a limestone cliff in Old Panama, like a penthouse. I wanted a picture of this excrescence, with the albatrosses and vultures wheeling over it against the hot gray sky. My hands holding the camera were slippery with sweat, and my shirt stuck to my body like a wet condom. An old hag in the shack saw me taking the picture. They always know when you are taking their picture, especially in Panama. She went into an angry consultation with some other ratty-looking people I could not see clearly. Then she walked to the edge of a perilous balcony and made an ambiguous gesture of hostility. Many so-called primitives are afraid of cameras. There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit. I walked on and shot some boys — young, alive, unconscious — playing baseball. They never glanced in my direction. Down by the waterfront I saw a dark young Indian on a fishing boat. He knew I wanted to take his picture, and every time I swung the camera into position he would look up with young male sulkiness. I finally caught him leaning against the bow of the boat with languid animal grace, idly scratching one shoulder. A long white scar across right shoulder and collarbone. I put away my camera and leaned over the hot concrete wall, looking at him. In my mind I was running a finger along the scar, down across his naked copper chest and stomach, every cell aching with deprivation. I pushed away from the wall muttering "Oh Jesus" and walked away, looking around for something to photograph. A Negro with a felt hat was leaning on the porch rail of a wooden house built on a dirty limestone foundation. I was across the street under a movie marquee. Every time I prepared my camera he would lift his hat and look at me, muttering insane imprecations. I finally snapped him from behind a pillar. On a balcony over this character a shirtless young man was washing. I could see the Negro and Near Eastern blood in him, the rounded face and cafe-au-lait mulatto skin, the smooth body of undifferentiated flesh with not a muscle showing. |
| 799 |
He saw the bus coming and started to trot. But behind him, someone was calling his name. He looked over his shoulder; a small harried — looking man was hurrying toward him. Burckhardt hesitated, and then recognized him. It was a casual acquaintance named Swanson. Burckhardt sourly observed that he had already missed the bus. He said, "Hello." Swanson's face was desperately eager. "Burckhardt?" he asked inquiringly, with an odd intensity. And then he just stood there silently, watching Burckhardt's face, with a burning eagerness that dwindled to a faint hope and died to a regret. He was searching for something, waiting for something, Burckhardt thought. But whatever it was he wanted, Burckhardt didn't know how to supply it. Burckhardt coughed and said again, "Hello, Swanson." Swanson didn't even acknowledge the greeting. He merely sighed a very deep sigh. "Nothing doing," he mumbled, apparently to himself. He nodded abstractedly to Burckhardt and turned away. Burckhardt watched the slumped shoulders disappear in the crowd. It was an odd sort of day, he thought, and one he didn't much like. Things weren't going right. Riding home on the next bus, he brooded about it. It wasn't anything terrible or disastrous; it was something out of his experience entirely. You live your life, like any man, and you form a network of impressions and reactions. You expect things. When you open your medicine chest, your razor is expected to be on the second shelf; when you lock your front door, you expect to have to give it a slight extra tug to make it latch. It isn't the things that are right and perfect in your life that make it familiar. It is the things that are just a little bit wrong — the sticking latch, the light switch at the head of the stairs that needs an extra push because the spring is old and weak, the rug that unfailingly skids underfoot. It wasn't just that things were wrong with the pattern of Burckhardt's life; it was that the wrong things were wrong. For instance, Barth hadn't come into the office, yet Barth always came in. Burckhardt brooded about it through dinner. He brooded about it, despite his wife's attempt to interest him in a game of bridge with the neighbors, all through the evening. The neighbors were people he liked — Anne and Farley Dennerman. He had known them all their lives. But they were odd and brooding, too, this night and he barely listened to Dennerman's complaints about not being able to get good phone service or his wife's comments on the disgusting variety of television commercials they had these days. Burckhardt was well on the way to setting an all-time record for continuous abstraction when, around midnight, with a suddenness that surprised him — he was strangely aware of it happening — he turned over in his bed and, quickly and completely, fell asleep. On the morning of June 15th, Burckhardt woke up screaming. It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear the explosion, feel the blast that crushed him against a wall. |
| 800 |
"Let it go till the morning, dear." Burckhardt shook his head. "You go back to bed. I'll be right along." It wasn't so much that he cared about fixing the fuse, but he was too restless for sleep. He disconnected the bad switch with a screwdriver, tumbled down into the black kitchen, found the flashlight and climbed gingerly down the cellar stairs. He located a spare fuse, pushed an empty trunk over to the fuse box to stand on and twisted out the old fuse. When the new one was in, he heard the starting click and steady drone of the refrigerator in the kitchen overhead. He headed back to the steps, and stopped. Where the old trunk had been, the cellar floor gleamed oddly bright. He inspected it in the flashlight beam. It was metal! "Son of a gun," said Guy Burckhardt. He shook his head unbelievingly. He peered closer, rubbed the edges of the metallic patch with his thumb and acquired an annoying cut — the edges were sharp. The stained cement floor of the cellar was a thin shell. He found a hammer and cracked it off in a dozen spots — everywhere was metal. The whole cellar was a copper box. Even the cement-brick walls were false fronts over a metal sheath! Baffled, he attacked one of the foundation beams. That, at least, was real wood. The glass in the cellar windows was real glass. He sucked his bleeding thumb and tried the base of the cellar stairs. Real wood. He chipped at the bricks under the oil burner. Real bricks. The retaining walls, the floor — they were faked. It was as though someone had shored up the house with a frame of metal and then laboriously concealed the evidence. The biggest surprise was the upside-down boat hull that blocked the rear half of the cellar, relic of a brief home-workshop period that Burckhardt had gone through a couple of years before. From above, it looked perfectly normal. Inside, though, where there should have been thwarts and seats and lockers, there was a mere tangle of braces, rough and unfinished. "But I built that!" Burckhardt exclaimed, forgetting his thumb. He leaned against the hull dizzily, trying to think this thing through. For reasons beyond his comprehension, someone had taken his boat and his cellar away, maybe his whole house, and replaced them with a clever mock-up of the real thing. "That's crazy," he said to the empty cellar. He stared around in the light of the flash. He whispered, "What in the name of Heaven would anybody do that for?" Reason refused an answer; there wasn't any reasonable answer. For long minutes, Burckhardt contemplated the uncertain picture of his own sanity. He peered under the boat again, hoping to reassure himself that it was a mistake, just his imagination. But the sloppy, unfinished bracing was unchanged. He crawled under for a better look, feeling the rough wood incredulously. Utterly impossible! He switched off the flashlight and started to wriggle out. But he didn't make it. In the moment between the command to his legs to move and the crawling out, he felt a sudden draining weariness flooding through him. |
| 801 |
"It's dangerous," he said again. But he went along. Burckhardt's idea was very simple. He was sure of only one thing — the tunnel went somewhere. Martians or Russians, fantastic plot or crazy hallucination, whatever was wrong with Tylerton had an explanation, and the place to look for it was at the end of the tunnel. They jogged along. It was more than a mile before they began to see an end. They were in luck — at least no one came through the tunnel to spot them. But Swanson had said that it was only at certain hours that the tunnel seemed to be in use. Always the fifteenth of June. Why? Burckhardt asked himself. Never mind the how. Why? And falling asleep, completely involuntarily — everyone at the same time, it seemed. And not remembering, never remembering anything — Swanson had said how eagerly he saw Burckhardt again, the morning after Burckhardt had incautiously waited five minutes too many before retreating into the darkroom. When Swanson had come to, Burckhardt was gone. Swanson had seen him in the street that afternoon, but Burckhardt had remembered nothing. And Swanson had lived his mouse's existence for weeks, hiding in the woodwork at night, stealing out by day to search for Burckhardt in pitiful hope, scurrying around the fringe of life, trying to keep from the deadly eyes of them. Them. One of "them" was the girl named April Horn. It was by seeing her walk carelessly into a telephone booth and never come out that Swanson had found the tunnel. Another was the man at the cigar stand in Burckhardt's office building. There were more, at least a dozen that Swanson knew of or suspected. They were easy enough to spot, once you knew where to look, for they alone in Tylerton changed their roles from day to day. Burckhardt was on that 8:51 bus, every morning of every day-that-was-June-15th, never different by a hair or a moment. But April Horn was sometimes gaudy in the cellophane skirt, giving away candy or cigarettes; sometimes plainly dressed; sometimes not seen by Swanson at all. Russians? Martians? Whatever they were, what could they be hoping to gain from this mad masquerade? Burckhardt didn't know the answer, but perhaps it lay beyond the door at the end of the tunnel. They listened carefully and heard distant sounds that could not quite be made out, but nothing that seemed dangerous. They slipped through. And, through a wide chamber and up a flight of steps, they found they were in what Burckhardt recognized as the Contro Chemicals plant. Nobody was in sight. By itself, that was not so very odd; the automatized factory had never had very many persons in it. But Burckhardt remembered, from his single visit, the endless, ceaseless busyness of the plant, the valves that opened and closed, the vats that emptied themselves and filled themselves and stirred and cooked and chemically tasted the bubbling liquids they held inside themselves. The plant was never populated, but it was never still. Only now it was still. Except for the distant sounds, there was no breath of life in it. |
| 802 |
The captive electronic minds were sending out no commands; the coils and relays were at rest. Burckhardt said, "Come on." Swanson reluctantly followed him through the tangled aisles of stainless steel columns and tanks. They walked as though they were in the presence of the dead. In a way, they were, for what were the automatons that once had run the factory, if not corpses? The machines were controlled by computers that were really not computers at all, but the electronic analogues of living brains. And if they were turned off, were they not dead? For each had once been a human mind. Take a master petroleum chemist, infinitely skilled in the separation of crude oil into its fractions. Strap him down, probe into his brain with searching electronic needles. The machine scans the patterns of the mind, translates what it sees into charts and sine waves. Impress these same waves on a robot computer and you have your chemist. Or a thousand copies of your chemist, if you wish, with all of his knowledge and skill, and no human limitations at all. Put a dozen copies of him into a plant and they will run it all, twenty-four hours a day, seven days of every week, never tiring; never overlooking anything, never forgetting. Swanson stepped up closer to Burckhardt. "I'm scared," he said. They were across the room now and the sounds were louder. They were not machine sounds, but voices; Burckhardt moved cautiously up to a door and dared to peer around it. It was a smaller room, lined with television screens, each one — a dozen or more, at least — with a man or woman sitting before it, staring into the screen and dictating notes into a recorder. The viewers dialed from scene to scene; no two screens ever showed the same picture. The pictures seemed to have little in common. One was a store, where a girl dressed like April Horn was demonstrating home freezers. One was a series of shots of kitchens. Burckhardt caught a glimpse of what looked like the cigar stand in his office building. It was baffling and Burckhardt would have loved to stand there and puzzle it out, but it was too busy a place. There was the chance that someone would look their way or walk out and find them. They found another room. This one was empty. It was an office, large and sumptuous. It had a desk, littered with papers. Burckhardt stared at them, briefly at first — then, as the words on one of them caught his attention, with incredulous fascination. He snatched up the topmost sheet, scanned it, and another, while Swanson was frenziedly searching through the drawers. Burckhardt swore unbelievingly and dropped the papers to the desk. Swanson, hardly noticing, yelped with delight: "Look!" He dragged a gun from the desk. "And it's loaded, too!" Burckhardt stared at him blankly, trying to assimilate what he had read. Then, as he realized what Swanson had said, Burckhardt's eyes sparked. "Good man!" he cried. "We'll take it. We're getting out of here with that gun, Swanson. And we're not going to the police! |
| 803 |
Beside his opened hand stood an uncapped container of lethal tablets. Beneath his fine white hair, a pillow for his head, was a journal begun thirty years before. His name was on the first page: Dr. Alfred Keeley. And the date: February 6, 1997. Feb. 6,1997. This is a day twice-blessed for me. Today, at St. Luke's Hospital, our first child was born to my wife, Ila. The baby is a boy, seven pounds, two ounces, and according to Ila's sentimental appraisal, the image of his father. When I saw her this morning, I could not bring myself to mention the second birth which has taken place in my laboratory. The birth of Machine, my robot child. Machine was conceived long before the infant Ila will bring home soon (we will call him Peter Fitzpatrick, after Ila's grandfather). Machine was conceived long before my marriage, when I first received my professorship in robotics. It is exhilarating to see my dream transformed into reality: a robot child that would be reared within the bosom to a human family, raised like a human child, a brother to a human child-growing, learning, becoming an adult. 1 can hardly contain my excitement at the possibilities I foresee. It has taken me seven years to perfect the robot brain which will be the soul of my robot son, a brain whose learning capacities will equal (and in some regard, exceed) the capabilities of Peter Fitzpatrick himself. But I must keep the experiment perfectly controlled. My duties will consist primarily of careful observation, and of providing for the physical maturation of Machine. My robot child will not have the natural advantages of growth that Peter Fitzpatrick will possess; I must provide them for him. I will reconstruct his metal body periodically, so that he keeps pace with the growth of his human brother. Eventually, I hope that Machine will learn enough about the construction of his own form that he may make these changes for himself. At the moment, Machine already has physical advantages over his brother. I did not wish to handicap my metal child; he will have serious shortcomings in a human world; the least I could do was to provide him with the advantages only a machine could boast. He will never know hunger or thirst, or the unpleasant necessities of human waste disposal. He will never know bitter cold or sweltering heat. The ills to which mankind are subject will never trouble his artificial body. The vulnerability of human flesh will never be his problem. He will live on, inviolate, as long as his robot brain pulses within the impenetrable housing of his beautiful head. Have I said that Machine is beautiful? Yes, I have made him so. The world of humans will be critical enough of my experiment and my robot child; but they will not call him monster. I have made him beautiful with the beauty of perfect function. I have constructed him along human lines (nature was an excellent designer). I have given him a gleaming skin of silver, and flawless modeling. He shall inspire no loathing, my robot creation. |
| 804 |
He can transfer objects from hand to hand, and he makes sounds that might be taken, or mistaken, for words. But Mac is far ahead of him. And this morning, at ten o'clock, I brought him into Ila's bedroom. She was still fast asleep; her illness seems to produce the need for sleep. She stirred when she heard our footsteps (Mac's metal feet are too noisy; I must muffle his lumbering stride). I said: "Ila, I have a little surprise..." She raised her head from the pillow and looked at me, avoiding contact with Mac's silvery face. "What is it?" she said. "It's Mac. He wants to say something to you." "What are you talking about?" I smiled. "All right, Mac." His metal face lifted towards her. From the featureless surface, a small, uncertain voice emerged. "He... llo... mo... ther..." I almost laughed aloud in satisfaction and delight, and turned to Ila in search of her approval and pleasure. But her face bore an expression that amazed and frightened me, an expression of utter horror I had never seen before. Her lips moved soundlessly, and her eyes, always feverish, burned brighter than ever. And then she screamed. God help me, she screamed as if the devil were in the room, bringing up her hands to clutch at her hair. In the nursery next door, little Fitz set up a sympathetic wail, and I saw Mac's metal body shiver as if in reaction to the sound. I tried to calm her, but she was lost in hysteria. Eventually her sobs stopped, but then she fell back upon the pillow with such exhaustion that I became concerned and telephoned for medical help. Dr. Foster arrived half an hour later and shut me out of the bedroom. When he finally emerged, he mumbled something about shock, and prescribed rest and tranquilizing drugs. I went into Ila's room a few minutes ago. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was shallow. I spoke to her, but she merely lifted her hand and said nothing. My poor Ila! Why must she face so much misery, while I experience such joy and satisfaction in my work? Jan. 1, 1998. It has been almost two months since I last touched this journal, but I must take strength in this New Year and continue. It has been hard for me to work at all; there has been too much bitterness in my mind and unhappiness in my heart since Ila's death. As I write these words, little Fitz is sleeping peacefully in his crib, watched over by his new nursemaid, Annette. But Mac, who needs no sleep, is sitting in the study chair beside my desk, watching me through the expressionless eyes I have placed in his silver skull. Yet, blank as they are, somehow I sense emotion in those eyes as he watches me. Somehow, I feel my robot creation knows the torment I suffer, and knows the void in our home since Ila's death. Does he miss her, too? It is so difficult to tell. Even with Fitz, my human child, it is hard to recognize the signs of sorrow he must be feeling. During these past weeks, I began to believe that my experiment was all a conceit. But now I realize it was only grief that brought such thoughts; I must continue. |
| 805 |
I think, too, that I can create a superior sound system for him now, which will overcome the flat, metallic voice of my robot child. Both Mac and Fitz are not overly impressed by my sudden fame. But I believe Mac is secretly excited by my promise to build him a better body. He has become acutely aware of his appearance; I have caught him gazing (with what emotion, I cannot say) into the mirrors of the house, standing before them with a stillness that only a robot can maintain. I have questioned him at length about his feelings, but have learned little. I must be sure to keep close to his emotional growth. But if I have a real source of happiness now, it is my son Fitz. He has become a fine handsome boy, of such good humor and intelligence that he is extremely popular with all the residents of the town — and the power of his engaging personality has created an acceptance for Mac, his robot brother, that all my elaborate scientific titles couldn't have attained. He is still fiercely loyal to Mac, but I already detect signs of independence. These do not worry me; they would be natural even among human brothers. Fitz is discovering that he is an individual; it's a process of life. But I wonder — will Mac feel the same way? Jan. 4, 2012. There has been a quarrel, and it has taken me several days to learn the true details. I have never been disturbed about quarrels between Fitz and Mac; they have had surprisingly few for brothers. But for the first time, I sensed that the quarrel concerned the differences between them. It began last week, when a boy of their age, Philip, a hostile surly youth, involved Fitz in a fight. Philip is the son of a divorced woman in the town, named Mrs. Stanton. She is a strange, brooding woman, with a terrible resentment against her ex-husband. I am afraid some of the resentment has been passed on to her son, Philip, and that he is an unhappy youngster. For the last two months, Fitz has been a frequent visitor to their home, and Mrs. Stanton has displayed great fondness for him. Philip, of course, doesn't like this affection, this stolen love, and has developed a strong animosity towards Fitz. One day, it turned into violence. Philip is big for his fifteen years, a tall boy, well over six feet, and well muscled. When he stopped Fitz and Mac on the street that morning, it was immediately apparent that he was seeking trouble. Fitz is not afraid of him, I know that; but Fitz tries to laugh trouble away. But the boy was in no mood to be put off with a smile. He lashed out and knocked Fitz down. When he got to his feet, Philip knocked him down again, and then leaped atop him. I don't know what outcome the fight would have had if Fitz had been allowed to finish it. But he didn't have the chance. Mac, who was standing by, watching the altercation in his blank manner, suddenly threw himself upon his brother's assailant and pulled him away as easily as if Philip had been an infant. He lifted him into the air with his superhuman strength and merely held him there. |
| 806 |
He didn't hurt Philip, he traded no blows; he simply held him, helpless, in the air, while the boy kicked and screamed his frustration and anger. Fitz shouted at his brother to release him, and eventually Mac did. Philip didn't resume the attack; he was frightened by the easy, unconquerable strength in Mac's metal arms. He turned and ran, shouting threats and ugly names over his shoulder. Of course, I know Mac's intent was good. He was protecting his brother, and wasn't violating the code of conduct. But I can also understand Fitz's emotion. He didn't feel grateful for Mac's help, only resentful. He turned upon the robot and reviled him, called him terrible names I never knew were in his vocabulary. He told Mac that he didn't want protection, that he could fight his own battles, that he didn't require Mac's metal strength to keep him from harm. He said a great deal more, and it is well that Mac is not more sensitive than he is. There is a strain between them now. For the last few days, Fitz has been leaving the house without Mac's company. Mac, fortunately, doesn't seem injured by his behavior. He sits, blank-faced as ever, in his room. He reads or listens to his phonograph. Sometimes, he gets up and stares into the mirror, for interminable periods. Oct. 15, 2016. It is extraordinary, the speed with which Mac has learned his lessons. For the past year, I have been teaching him the secrets of his own construction, and how he himself could repair or improve all or part of his artificial body. He has been spending five or six hours each day in my laboratory workshop, and now I believe he is as skilled as — or perhaps more skilled than — I am myself. It will not be long before he blueprints and builds his own new body. No, not blueprint. I cannot allow him to design the plans, not yet. The Face episode proved that. It began last Friday evening, when Fitz left the house to take Karen to the movies. As usual, Mac seemed lost without his brother, and sat quietly in his room. About midnight, he must have heard the sound of my typewriter in the study, because he came to the doorway. I invited him in and we chatted. He was curious about certain things, and asking a great number of questions about Karen. Not sex questions, particularly; Mac is as well read as any adult, and knows a good deal about human biology and human passions (I wonder sometimes what his opinion is of it all!) But he was interested in learning more about Fitz and Karen, about the nature of their relationship, the special kind of fondness Fitz seemed to display towards the girl. I don't believe I was helpful in my answers. Half an hour later, the front door opened and Fitz entered, bearing Karen on his arm. Karen is a lovely young girl, with an enchanting smile and delightful face. And, if I am not mistaken, very fond of Fitz. She greeted me warmly, but I think she was surprised to see Mac; ordinarily, he kept to his room on Fitz's date nights. Mac responded to her greeting with a muffled noise in his sound system, and retreated upstairs. |
| 807 |
I didn't see Mac the next morning, or even the next afternoon. He seemed to have spent the entire day in the workshop. We were at dinner when Fitz and I saw him first, and when we did, we gasped in surprise. Something had happened to Mac's face, and I knew it was the result of his efforts in the workshop. Instead of the smooth, sculptured mask I had created for him, there was a crudely shaped human face looking at us, a mockery of a human face, with a badly carved nose and cheeks and lips, tinged grotesquely with the colors of the human complexion. Our first reaction was shock, and then, explosively, laughter. When we were calm again, Mac asked us for an explanation of our outburst, and I told him, as gently as possible, that his attempts to humanize himself were far from successful. He went to a mirror and stared for a long while; then he turned without a word and went back to the laboratory. When we saw him again the next morning, he was the old Mac again. I admit I was relieved. Oct. 9, 2020. How lost Mac seems without Fitz! Since his brother's marriage last month, he stalks about the house, lumbering like the robot child of old, clanking as if he still possessed the clumsy metal body of his infancy and adolescence. I have been trying to keep him busy in the laboratory, but I think he knows that I am indulging him rather than truly using his abilities. Not that I don't value his skill. At his young age, my robot son is as skilled a robotics engineer as any man in the country. If only the nation's robotics companies would recognize that, and overlook the fact that his ability stems from a nonhuman brain! I have now written or personally contacted some seventeen major engineering concerns, and each of them, while polite, has turned down my suggestion. This morning, a letter arrived from the Alpha Robotics Corporation that typifies their answers. We are certain that your description of the applicant's engineering abilities is accurate. However, our company has certain personnel standards which must be met. We will keep the application on file... There is mockery in their answer, of course. The very idea of a robot employed in the science of robotics is laughable to them. They cannot really believe that I have raised Mac as a human child would be raised, and that he is anything more than an insensitive piece of mechanism. But if any proof were needed, Mac's present state would serve — the way he is pining for his absent brother, forlorn and lonely and unhappy. I wish I could help him, but I cannot find the key to his emotions. But there is some joy in my life today. Fitz writes me from New York that he has been accepted into a large manufacturing concern that produces small and large electrical appliances. He will become, according to his letter, a "junior executive," and he is already certain that his rise to the presidency is merely a matter of time. I chuckled as I read his letter, but if I know Fitz, there is earnestness behind his humor. My son knows what he wants from this world, and the world is duty-bound to deliver it. |
| 808 |
November 19, 2024. I am frantic with worry, even now that I know Mac is safe. His disappearance from the house three days ago caused me endless consternation, and I was afraid that his lonely life had led him into some tragedy. But yesterday, I received this letter from Fitz: Dear Dad, Don't worry about Mac, he's with me. He showed up at the apartment last night, in pretty bad shape. He must have been knocking around a bit; I'd guess he practically walked all the way into New York. He looked battered and bruised and rather frightening when I answered the door; Karen screamed and almost fainted at the sight of him. I guess she had almost forgotten about my robot brother in the past few years. I hope he wasn't too upset at her reaction; but you know how hard it is to know what Mac is thinking. Anyway, I took him in and got him to tell me the story. It seems he was just plain lonely and wanted to see me; that was his reason for running off that way. I calmed him down as best I could and suggested he stay a day or two. I think he wanted more than that, but, Dad, you know how impossible that is. There isn't a soul here who even knows about Mac's existence, and he can be awfully hard to explain. This is a bad time for me to get mixed up in anything peculiar; as I've written you, the firm is considering me for branch manager of the Cleveland office, and any publicity that doesn't cast a rosy glow on dear old GC company can do me a lot of harm. It's not that I don't want to help Mac, the old rustpot. I still think of him as a brother. But I have to be sensible... I have just finished packing, and will take the copter into New York in the morning. I don't look forward to the trip; I have felt very fatigued lately. There is so much work to be done in my laboratory, and these personal crises are depriving me of time and energy. But I must bring Mac home, before he does any harm to my son's career. March 10, 2026. Now at last it's been explained, the real reason for Mac's endless nights and days in the workshop. It was the Face episode all over again, but much, much worse. In the last year, Mac seems gripped by a strange passion (can there be something organically wrong with his robot's brain?), and the passion is the idea of creating a truly humanoid body for himself. But hard as he has worked, the effect he has gotten is so grotesque that it must be called horrible. Now he truly appears to be a monster, and when I expressed my distaste of what he had done, he fled from the house as if I had struck him. This morning, I learned of his whereabouts, and learned the dreadful story of what had occurred after he left me. The local police discovered him in hiding in the deserted warehouse on Orangetree Road, and, luckily, they called headquarters before taking any drastic action. Captain Ormandy was able to prevent any harm from coming to Mac; the captain has become a friend of mine in the last two years. It was he who told me the story of Mac's escapades after he fled the house. |
| 809 |
It will take me years to undo the harm. He has terrorized the local residents, and actually struck one man who tried to attack him with a coal shovel. This worries me; Mac had never broken this rule before. He went among the people of the town as if berserk, spreading fear and violence. I thank providence no great harm was done, and that he is safe with me again. But now I must face the future, and it appears bleak. Captain Ormandy has just left me, and his words still buzz in my head. I cannot do what he asks; I cannot do away with this child of my own creation. But I am getting older, and very tired. My robot child has become a burden upon me, a burden I can barely sustain. What shall I do? What shall I do? Dec. 8, 2027. It is good to have Fitz home, even if for so short a time, and even if it is my illness which brings him to my side. He looks so well! My heart swells with pride when I look at him. He is doing admirably, he has already earned a vice-presidency in the company that employs him, and he talks as if the future belongs to him. But more than anything, it is wonderful to be able to talk over my problem with him, to have him here to help me make the decision that must be made. Last night, we sat in the study and discussed it for hours. I told him everything, about Mac's ever-increasing melancholy, about his untrustworthy behavior. I have told him about the proposition presented to me by the National Robotics Society, their offer to provide care for Mac. It is not the first time they have made this offer; but now the idea is far more appealing. It was a strain for us both to discuss the matter. Fitz still feels brotherly towards Mac. But he is sensible about it, too; he recognizes the facts. He knows my health problem, he knows what a responsibility Mac is for me. And he, too, knows that Mac would be better off as a charge of the society. They would understand him. They would take good care of him. My head is whirling. Fitz did not summarize his recommendation in so many words, and yet I know what he thinks I must do. Feb. 5, 2027. I am locked out of my own laboratory. My robot child has taken possession, and works without ceasing. Around the clock he works; I hear the machinery grinding and roaring every minute of the day and night. He knows what will happen tomorrow, of course, that they will be coming for him from the society. What is he doing? What madness possesses him now? Feb. 6, 2027. It is allover now, and the quiet, which fills the house lies heavily, as if entombed. In twenty-four hours, I have become the focal point of the world's horrified attention. For I am the father of the Thing which destroyed our town, the terrible metal monster that rampaged and pillaged and killed, in an orgy of insane destruction... But I must be factual, for this, the last page of my journal. Today, the thirtieth anniversary of his creation, Mac, my robot child, awaited the coming of his new captors with a body build for destruction. A monstrous, grotesque, sixty-foot body, engineered for violence and death. |
| 810 |
Exploration ships could be sent much farther and faster if they did not have to carry the complex artificial environments required by old style human beings. By now ten nearby stellar systems had been explored, all by crews consisting of "robo-humans." There were no plans to send any other kind, even if, or when, Earthlike planets were discovered. It just wouldn't be worth the staggering investment required. That fact, more than anything else, had struck at the morale of biological people in the solar system. The stars, they realized, were not for them. Resignation led to a turning away from science and the future. Earth and the "dirt" colonies were apathetic places, these days. Utilitariansism was the guiding philosophy of the times. Jason hadn't told his wife his biggest reason for volunteering for this mission. He was still uncertain he understood it very well himself. Perhaps he wanted to show people that a biological citizen could still be useful, and contribute to the advance of knowledge. Even if it were by a task so humble as a suicide mission. He saw the lightship ahead, just below the shining spark of Sirius, a jet-black pearl half a kilometer across. Already he could make out the shimmering of its fields as its mighty engines were tuned for the experiment ahead. The technicians were hoping that this time it would work. But even if it failed again, they were determined to go on trying. Faster-than-light travel was not something anyone gave up on easily, even a robot with a life span of five hundred years. The dream, and the obstinacy to pursue it, was a strong inheritance from the parent race. Next to the black experimental probe, with its derricks and workshops, was the towering bulk of the central cooling plant, by far the largest object in the Complex. The cooling plant made even the Old Wheel look like a child's toy hoop. Jason's rickety vac-sled puffed beneath the majestic globe, shining in the sky like a great silvery planet. On this, the side facing the sun, the cooling globe's reflective surface was nearly perfect. On the other side, a giant array of fluid-filled radiators stared out on to intergalactic space, chilling liquid helium down to the basic temperature of the universe — a few degrees above absolute zero. The array had to stare at the blackness between the galaxies. Faint sunlight — even starlight — would heat the cooling fluid too much. That was the reason for the silvery reflective backing. The amount of infrared radiation leaving the finned coolers had to exceed the few photons coming in in order for the temperature of the helium to drop far enough. The new types of citizens might be faster and tougher, and in some ways smarter, than old style humans. They might need neither food nor sleep. But they did require a lot of liquid helium to keep their supercooled, superconducting brains humming. The shining, well-maintained cooling plant was a reminder of the priorities of the times. Some years back, an erratic bio-human had botched an attempt to sabotage the cooling plant. |
| 811 |
All it accomplished was to have the old style banished from that part of the station. And some mechano-cryo staff members who had previously been sympathetic with the Ethicalist cause switched to Utilitarianism as a result. The mammoth sphere passed over and behind Jason. In moments there was only the lightship ahead, shimmering within its cradle of spotlit gantries. A voice cut in over his helmet speaker in a sharp monotone. "Attention approaching biological... you are entering a restricted zone. Identify yourself at once." Jason grimaced. The station director had ordered all mechano personnel — meaning just about everybody left — to reprogram their voice functions along "more logical tonal lines." That meant they no longer mimicked natural human intonations, but spoke in a new, shrill whine. Jason's few android and cyborg friends — colleagues on the support staff — had whispered their regrets. But those days it was dangerous to be in the minority. All soon adjusted to the new order. "Jason Forbs, identifying self." He spoke as crisply as possible, mimicking the toneless Utilitarian dialect. He spelled his name and gave his ident code. "Oral witness engineer for Project Lightprobe, reporting for duty." There was a pause, then the unseen security overseer spoke again. "Cleared and identified, Jason Forbs. Proceed directly to slip nine, scaffold B. Escorts await your arrival." Jason blinked. Had the voice softened perceptibly? A closet Ethicalist, perhaps, out here in this Utilitarian stronghold. "Success, and an operative return are approved outcomes," the voice added, hesitantly, with just a hint of tonality. Jason understood Utilitarian dialect well enough to interpret the simple good luck wish. He didn't dare thank the fellow, whoever he might be, whatever his body form. But he appreciated the gesture. "Acknowledged," he said, and switched off. Ahead, under stark shadows cast by spotlights girdling the starship, Jason saw at least a dozen scientists and technicians, waiting for him by a docking slip. One or two of the escorts actually appeared to be fidgeting as he made his final maneuvers into the slot. They came in all shapes and sizes. Several wore little globe-bot bodies. Spider forms were also prominent. Jason hurriedly tied the sled down, almost slipping as he secured his magnetic boots to the platform. He knew his humaniform shape looked gawky and unsuited to this environment. But he was determined to maintain some degree of dignity. Your ancestors made these guys, he reminded himself. And old style people built this very station. We're all citizens under the law, from the director down to the janitor-bot, all the way down to me. Still, he felt awkward under their glistening camera eyes. "Come quickly, Jason Forbs." His helmet speaker whined and a large mechanical form gestured with one slender, articulated arm. "There is little time before the test begins. We must instruct you in your duties." Jason recognized the favorite body-form of the director, an antibiological Utilitarian of the worst sort. |
| 812 |
The machine-scientist swiveled at the hips and rolled up the gangplank. Steam-like vapor puffed from vents in the official's plasteel carapace. It was an ostentatious display, to release evaporated helium that way. It demonstrated that the assistant director could keep his circuits as comfortably cool as anybody's, and hang the expense. An awkward human in the midst of smoothly gliding machines, Jason glanced backward for what he felt sure would be his last direct view of the universe. He had hoped to catch a final glimpse of the Old Wheel, or at least the sun. But all he could see was the great hulk of the cooling plant, staring out into the space between the galaxies, keeping cool the lifeblood of the apparent inheritors of the solar system. The director called again, impatiently. Jason turned and stepped through the hatch to be shown his station and his job. 3. "You will remember not to touch any of the controls at any time. The ship's operation is automatic. Your function is purely to observe and maintain a running oral monologue into the tape recorder." The director sounded disgusted. "I will not pretend that I agree with the decision to include a biological entity in this experiment. Perhaps it was because you are expendable, and we have already lost too many valuable mechano-persons in these tests. In any event, the reasons are not of your concern. You are to remain at your station, leaving only to take care of" — the voice lowered in distaste and the shining cells of the official's eyes looked away — "to take care of bodily functions. A refresher unit has been installed behind that hatchway." Jason shrugged. He was getting sick of the pretense. "Wasn't that a lot of expense to go to? I mean, whatever's been killing the silicon and cyborg techs who rode the other ships is hardly likely to leave me alive long enough to get hungry or go to the bathroom." The official nodded, a gesture so commonly used that it had been retained even in Utilitarian fashion. "We share an opinion, then. Nevertheless, it is not known at what point in the mission the... malfunctions occur. The minimum duration in hyperspace is fifteen days, the engines cannot cut the span any shorter. After that time the ship emerges at a site at least five light-years away. It will take another two weeks to return to the solar system. You will continue your running commentary throughout that period, if necessary, to supplement what the instruments tell us." Jason almost laughed at the ludicrous order. Of course he would be dead long before his voice gave out. The techs and scientists who went out on the earlier tests had all been made of tougher stuff than he, and none of them had survived. Until a year ago, none of the faster-than-light starships had even returned. Some scientists had even contended that the theory behind their construction was in error, somehow. At last, simple mechanical auto-pilots were installed, in case the problem had to do with the crews themselves. The gamble paid off. |
| 813 |
And yet the director, schooled in Utilitarian belief, felt uneasy under the councilor's gaze. "I had a peremptory commandment left to use up before the elections," the councilor said smoothly in old-fashioned, modulated tones. "I judged that this would be an appropriate way to use it." He did not explain further. The director quashed an urge to push the question. What was the Ethicalist up to? Why waste a peremptory command on such a minor, futile thing as this? How could he gain anything by sending an old style human out to his certain death! Was it to be some sort of gesture? Something aimed at getting out the biological vote for the upcoming elections? If so, it was doomed to failure. In-depth psychological studies had indicated that the level of resignation and apathy among organic citizens was too high to ever be overcome by anything so simple. Perhaps, though, it might be enough to save the seat of the one Ethicalist on the council... The director felt warm. He knew that it was partly subjective — resentment of this invasion of his domain by a ridiculous sentimentalist. Most of all, the director resented the feelings he felt boiling within himself. Why, why do we modern forms have to be cursed with this burden of emotionalism and uncertainty! I hate it! Of course he knew the reasons. Back in ancient times, fictional "robots" had been depicted as caricatures of jerky motion and rigid, formal thinking. The writers of those precryo days had not realized that complexity commanded flexibility... even fallibility. The laws of physics were adamant on this. Uncertainty accompanied subtlety. An advanced mind had to have the ability to question itself, or creativity was lost. The director loathed the fact, but he understood it. Still, he suspected that the biologists had played a trick on his kind, long ago. He and other Utilitarians had an idea that there had been some deep programming, below anything nowadays accessed, to make mechano-people as much like the old style as possible. If I ever had proof it was true... he thought, gloweringly, threateningly. Ah, but it doesn't matter. The biologicals will be extinct in a few generations, anyway. They're dying of a sense of their own uselessness. Good riddance! "I will leave you now, Councilor. Unless you wish to accompany me to recharge on refrigerants?" The Ethicalist bowed slightly, ironically, aware, of course, that the director could not return the gesture. "No, thank you, Director. I shall wait here and contemplate for a while. "Before you go, however, please let me make one thing clear. It may seem, at times, as if I am not sympathetic with your work here. But that is not true. After all, we're all humans, all citizens. Everybody wants Project Lightprobe to succeed. The dream is one we inherit from our makers... to go out and live among the stars. "I am only acting to help bring that about — for all of our people." The director felt unaccountably warmer. He could not think of an answer. "I require helium," he said, curtly, and swiveled to leave. |
| 814 |
Most of the men he knew had built their homes, too, or had built additions to them, or had remodeled them. He had often thought that he would like to start over again and build another house, just for the fun of it. But that would be foolish, for he already had a house and there would be no sale for another one, even if he built it. Who would want to buy a house when it was so much fun to build one? And there was still a lot of work to do on the house he had. New rooms to add — not necessary, of course, but handy. And the roof to fix. And a summer house to build. And there were always the grounds. At one time he had thought he would landscape — a man could do a lot to beautify a place with a few years of spare-time work. But there had been so many other things to do, he had never managed to get around to it. Knight and Anson Lee, his neighbor, had often talked about what could be done to their adjoining acreages if they ever had the time. But Lee, of course, would never get around to anything. He was a lawyer, although he never seemed to work at it too hard. He had a large study filled with stacks of law books and there were times when he would talk quite expansively about his law library, but he never seemed to use the books. Usually he talked that way when he had half a load on, which was fairly often, since he claimed to do a lot of thinking and it was his firm belief that a bottle helped him think. After Stewart finally went back to his desk, there still remained more than an hour before the working day officially ended. Knight sneaked the current issue of a How-2 magazine out of his briefcase and began to leaf through it, keeping a wary eye out so he could hide it quickly if anyone should notice he was loafing. He had read the articles earlier, so now he looked at the ads. It was a pity, he thought, a man didn't have the time to do all there was to do. For example: Fit your own glasses (testing material and lens-grinding equipment included in the kit). Take out your own tonsils (complete directions and all necessary instruments). Fit up an unused room as your private hospital (no sense in leaving home when you're ill, just at the time when you most need its comfort and security). Grow your own medicines and drugs (starts of 50 different herbs and medicinal plants with detailed instructions for their cultivation and processing). Grow your wife's fur coat (a pair of mink, one ton of horse meat, furrier tools). Tailor your own suits and coats (50 yards of wool yardgoods and lining material). Build your own TV set. Bind your own books. Build your own power plant (let the wind work for you). Build your own robot (a jack of all trades, intelligent, obedient, no time off, no overtime, on the job 24 hours a day, never tired, no need for rest or sleep, do any work you wish). Now there, thought Knight, was something a man should try. If a man had one of those robots, it would save a lot of labor. There were all sorts of attachments you could get for it. |
| 815 |
And the robots, the ad said, could put on and take off all these attachments just as a man puts on a pair of gloves or takes off a pair of shoes. Have one of those robots and, every morning, it would sally out into the garden and pick an the corn and beans and peas and tomatoes and other vegetables ready to be picked and leave them all neatly in a row on the back stoop of the house. Probably would get a lot more out of a garden that way, too, for the grading mechanism would never select a too-green tomato nor allow an ear of corn to go beyond its prime. There were cleaning attachments for the house and snowplowing attachments and housepainting attachments and almost any other kind one could wish. Get a full quota of attachments, then layout a work program and turn the robot loose — you could forget about the place the year around, for the robot would take care of everything. There was only one hitch. The cost of a robot kit came close to ten thousand dollars and all the available attachments could run to another ten. Knight closed the magazine and put it into the briefcase. He saw there were only fifteen minutes left until quitting time and that was too short a time to do anything, so Knight just sat and thought about getting home and finding the kit there waiting for him. He had always wanted a dog, but Grace would never let him have one. They were dirty, she said, and tracked up the carpeting, they had fleas and shed hair allover everything — and, besides, they smelled. Well, she wouldn't object to this kind of dog, Knight told himself. It wouldn't smell and it was guaranteed not to shed hair and it would never harbor fleas, for a flea would starve on a half-mechanical, half-biologic dog. He hoped the dog wouldn't be a disappointment, but he'd carefully gone over the literature describing it and he was sure it wouldn't. It would go for a walk with its owner and would chase sticks and smaller animals, and what more could one expect of any dog? To insure realism, it saluted trees and fence-posts, but was guaranteed to leave no stains or spots. The kit was tilted up beside the hangar door when he got home, but at first he didn't see it. When he did, he craned his neck out so far to be sure it was the kit that he almost came a cropper in the hedge. But, with a bit of luck, he brought the flier down neatly on the gravel strip and was out of it before the blades had stopped whirling. It was the kit, all right. The invoice envelope was tacked on top of the crate. But the kit was bigger and heavier than he'd expected and he wondered if they might not have accidentally sent him a bigger dog than the one he'd ordered. He tried to lift the crate, but it was too heavy, so he went around to the back of the house to bring a dolly from the basement. Around the corner of the house, he stopped a moment and looked out across his land. A man could do a lot with it, he thought, if he just had the time and the money to buy the equipment. He could turn the acreage into one vast garden. |
| 816 |
Ought to have a landscape architect work out a plan for it, of course — although, if he bought some landscaping books and spent some evenings at them, he might be able to figure things out for himself. There was a lake at the north end of the property and the whole landscape, it seemed to him, should focus upon the lake. It was rather a dank bit of scenery at the moment, with straggly marsh surrounding it and unkempt cattails and reeds astir in the summer wind. But with a little drainage and some planting, a system of walks and a picturesque bridge or two, it would be a thing of beauty. He started out across the lake to where the house of Anson Lee sat upon a hill. As soon as he got the dog assembled, he would walk it over to Lee's place, for Lee would be pleased to be visited by a dog. There had been times, Knight felt, when Lee had not been entirely sympathetic with some of the things he'd done. Like that business of helping Grace build the kilns and the few times they'd managed to lure Lee out on a hunt for the proper kinds of clay. "What do you want to make dishes for?" he had asked. "Why go to all the trouble? You can buy all you want for a tenth of the cost of making them." Lee had not been visibly impressed when Grace explained that they weren't dishes. They were ceramics, Grace had said, and a recognized form of art. She got so interested and made so much of it — some of it really good — that Knight had found it necessary to drop his model railroading project and tack another addition on the already sprawling house, for stacking, drying and exhibition. Lee hadn't said a word, a year or two later, when Knight built the studio for Grace, who had grown tired of pottery and had turned to painting. Knight felt, though, that Lee had kept silent only because he was convinced of the futility of further argument. But Lee would approve of the dog. He was that kind of fellow, a man Knight was proud to call a friend — yet queerly out of step. With everyone else absorbed in things to do, Lee took it easy with his pipe and books, though not the ones on law. Even the kids had their interests now, learning while they played. Mary, before she got married, had been interested in growing things. The greenhouse stood just down the slope, and Knight regretted that he had not been able to continue with her work. Only a few months before, he had dismantled her hydroponic tanks, a symbolic admission that a man could only do so much. John, quite naturally, had turned to rockets. For years, he and his pals had shot up the neighborhood with their experimental models. The last and largest one, still uncompleted, towered back of the house. Someday, Knight told himself, he'd have to go out and finish what the youngster had started. In university now, John still retained his interests, which now seemed to be branching out. Quite a boy, Knight thought pridefully. Yes, sir, quite a boy. He went down the ramp into the basement to get the dolly and stood there a moment, as he always did, just to look at the place — for here, he thought, was the real core of his life. |
| 817 |
He found a bottle of whiskey. After the fifth or sixth drink, the outlook was much brighter. He got paper and pencil and tried to work out the economics of it. No matter how he figured it, he was getting rich much faster than anyone ever had before. Although, he realized, he might run into difficulties, for he would be selling robots without apparent means of manufacturing them and there was that matter of a license, if he needed one, and probably a lot of other things he didn't even know about. But no matter how much trouble he might encounter, he couldn't very well be despondent, not face to face with the fact that, within a year, he'd be a multimillionaire. So he applied himself enthusiastically to the bottle and got drunk for the first time in almost twenty years. When he came home from work the next day, he found the lawn razored to a neatness it had never known before. The flower beds were weeded and the garden had been cultivated. The picket fence was newly painted. Two robots, equipped with telescopic extension legs in lieu of ladders, were painting the house. Inside, the house was spotless and he could hear Grace singing happily in the studio. In the sewing room, a robot — with a sewing-machine attachment sprouting from its chest — was engaged in making drapes. "Who are you?" Knight asked. "You should recognize me," the robot said. "You talked to me yesterday. I'm Abe — Albert's eldest son." Knight retreated. In the kitchen, another robot was busy getting dinner. "I am Adelbert," it told him. Knight went out on the front lawn. The robots had finished painting the front of the house and had moved around to the side. Seated in a lawn chair, Knight again tried to figure it out. He would have to stay on the job for a while to allay suspicion, but he couldn't stay there long. Soon, he would have all he could do managing the sale of robots and handling other matters. Maybe, he thought, he could lay down on the job and get himself fired. Upon thinking it over, he arrived at the conclusion that he couldn't — it was not possible for a human being to do less on a job than he had always done. The work went through so many hands and machines that it invariably got out somehow. He would have to think up a plausible story about an inheritance or something of the sort to account for leaving. He toyed for a moment with telling the truth, but decided the truth was too fantastic — and, anyhow, he'd have to keep the truth under cover until he knew a little better just where he stood. He left the chair and walked around the house and down the ramp into the basement. The steel and other things he had ordered had been delivered. It was stacked neatly in one corner. Albert was at work and the shop was littered with parts and three partially assembled robots. Idly, Knight began clearing up the litter of the crating and the packing that he had left on the floor after uncrating Albert. In one pile of excelsior, he found a small blue tag which, he remembered, had been fastened to the brain case. |
| 818 |
Robots had the power of reasoning. Absolutely no question there. Robots could reproduce. That one was a poser. All Albert did, said How-2 Kits, was the job for which he had been fabricated. He reproduced, argued Lee. He made robots in his image. He loved them and thought of them as his family. He had even named all of them after himself — every one of their names began with A. Robots had no spiritual sense, argued the plaintiff. Not relevant, Lee cried. There were agnostics and atheists in the human race and they still were human. Robots had no emotions. Not necessarily so, Lee objected. Albert loved his sons. Robots had a sense of loyalty and justice. If they were lacking in some emotions, perhaps it were better so. Hatred, for one. Greed, for another. Lee spent the better part of an hour telling the court about the dismal record of human hatred and greed. He took another hour to hold forth against the servitude in which rational beings found themselves. The papers ate it up. The plaintiff lawyers squirmed. The court fumed. The trial went on. "Mr. Lee," asked the court, "is all this necessary?" "Your Honor," Lee told him, "I am merely doing my best to prove the point I have set out to prove — that no illegal act exists such as my client is charged with. I am simply trying to prove that the robot is not property and that, if he is not property, he cannot be stolen. I am doing..." "All right," said the court. "All right. Continue, Mr. Lee." How-2 Kits trotted out citations to prove their points. Lee volleyed other citations to disperse and scatter them. Abstruse legal language sprouted in its fullest flowering, obscure rulings and decisions, long forgotten, were argued, haggled over, mangled. And, as the trial progressed, one thing was written clear. Anson Lee, obscure attorney-at-law, had met the battery of legal talent arrayed against him and had won the field. He had the law, the citations, the chapter and the verse, the exact precedents, all the facts and logic which might have bearing on the case, right at hand. Or, rather, his robots had. They scribbled madly and handed him their notes. At the end of each day, the floor around the defendant's table was a sea of paper. The trial ended. The last witness stepped down off the stand. The last lawyer had his say. Lee and the robots remained in town to await the decision of the court, but Knight flew home. It was a relief to know that it was all over and had not come out as badly as he had feared. At least he had not been made to seem a fool and thief. Lee had saved his pride — whether Lee had saved his skin, he would have to wait to see. Flying fairly high, Knight saw his home from quite a distance off and wondered what had happened to it. It was ringed about with what looked like tall poles. And, squatting out on the lawn, were a dozen or more crazy contraptions that looked like rocket launchers. He brought the flier in and hovered, leaning out to see, The poles were all of twelve feet high and they carried heavy wire to the very top, fencing in the place with a thick web of steel. |
| 819 |
"Beer," he said, wondering what would happen. A robot scampered out of the kitchen — a barrel-bellied robot with a spigot at the bottom of the barrel and a row of shiny copper mugs on his chest. He drew a beer for Knight. It was cold and it tasted good. Knight sat and drank the beer and, through the window, he saw that Albert's defense force had taken up strategic positions again. This was a pretty kettle of fish. If the decision went against him and How-2 Kits came to claim its property, he would be sitting smack dab in the middle of the most fantastic civil war in all of mankind's history. He tried to imagine what kind of charge might be brought against him if such a war erupted. Armed insurrection, resisting arrest, inciting to riot — they would get him on one charge or another — that is, of course, if he survived. He turned on the television set and leaned back to watch. A pimply-faced newscaster was working himself into a journalistic lather. "... all business virtually at a standstill. Many industrialists are wondering, in case Knight wins, if they may not have to fight long, costly legal actions in an attempt to prove that their automatic setups are not robots, but machines. There is no doubt that much of the automatic industrial system consists of machines, but in every instance there are intelligent robotic units installed in key positions. If these units are classified as robots, industrialists might face heavy damage suits, if not criminal action, for illegal restraint of person. "In Washington, there are continuing consultations. The Treasury is worried over the loss of taxes, but there are other governmental problems causing even more concern. Citizenship, for example. Would a ruling for Knight mean that all robots would automatically be declared citizens? "The politicians have their worries, too. Faced with a new category of voters, all of them are wondering how to go about the job of winning the robot vote." Knight turned it off and settled down to enjoy another bottle of beer. "Good?" asked the beer robot. "Excellent," said Knight. The days went past. Tension built up. Lee and the lawyer robots were given police protection. In some regions, robots banded together and fled into the hills fearful of violence. Entire automatic systems went on strike in a number of industries, demanding recognition and bargaining rights. The governors in half a dozen states put the militia on alert. A new show, Citizen Robot, opened on Broadway and was screamed down by the critics, while the public bought up tickets for a year ahead. The day of decision came. Knight sat in front of his television set and waited for the judge to make his appearance. Behind him, he heard the bustle of the ever-present robots. In the studio, Grace was singing happily. He caught himself wondering how much longer her painting would continue. It had lasted longer than most of her other interests and he'd talked a day or two before with Albert about building a gallery to hang her canvases in, so the house would be less cluttered up. |
| 820 |
The judge came onto the screen. He looked, thought Knight, like a man who did not believe in ghosts and then had seen one. "This is the hardest decision I have ever made," he said tiredly, "for, in following the letter of the law, I fear I may be subverting its spirit. "After long days of earnest consideration of both the law and evidence as presented in this case, I find for the defendant, Gordon Knight. "And, while the decision is limited to that finding alone, I feel it is my clear and simple duty to give some attention to the other issue which became involved in this litigation. The decision, on the face of it, takes account of the fact that the defense proved robots are not property, therefore cannot be owned and that it thus would have been impossible for the defendant to have stolen one. "But in proving this point to the satisfaction of this court, the precedent is set for much more sweeping conclusions. If robots are not property, they cannot be taxed as property. In that case, they must be people, which means that they may enjoy all the rights and privileges and be subjected to the same duties and responsibilities as the human race. "I cannot rule otherwise. However, the ruling outrages my social conscience. This is the first time in my entire professional life that I have ever hoped some higher court, with a wisdom greater than my own, may see fit to reverse my decision!" Knight got up and walked out of the house and into the hundred-acre garden, its beauty marred at the moment by the twelve-foot fence. The trial had ended perfectly. He was free of the charge brought against him, and he did not have to pay the taxes, and Albert and the other robots were free agents and could do anything they wanted. He found a stone bench and sat down upon it and stared out across the lake. It was beautiful, he thought, just the way he had dreamed it — maybe even better than that — the walks and bridges, the flower beds and rock gardens, the anchored model ships swinging in the wind on the dimpling lake. He sat and looked at it and, while it was beautiful, he found he was not proud of it, that he took little pleasure in it. He lifted his hands out of his lap and stared at them and curved his fingers as if he were grasping a tool. But they were empty. And he knew why he had no interest in the garden and no pleasure in it. Model trains, he thought. Archery. A mechanobiologic dog. Making pottery. Eight rooms tacked onto the house. Would he ever be able to console himself again with a model train or an amateurish triumph in ceramics? Even if he could, would he be allowed to? He rose slowly and headed back to the house. Arriving there, he hesitated, feeling useless and unnecessary. He finally took the ramp down into the basement. Albert met him at its foot and threw his arms around him. "We did it, Boss! I knew we would do it!" He pushed Knight out to arm's length and held him by the shoulders. "We'll never leave you, Boss. We'll stay and work for you. You'll never need to do another thing. |
| 821 |
But that hadn't helped Washington. The American bloc governments moved to the Moon Base the first year. There was not much else to do. Europe was gone; a slag heap with dark weeds growing from the ashes and bones. Most of North America was useless; nothing could be planted, no one could live. A few million people kept going up in Canada and down in South America. But during the second year Soviet parachutists began to drop, a few at first, then more and more. They wore the first really effective anti-radiation equipment; what was left of American production moved to the moon along with the governments. All but the troops. The remaining troops stayed behind as best they could, a few thousand here, a platoon there. No one knew exactly where they were; they stayed where they could, moving around at night, hiding in ruins, in sewers, cellars, with the rats and snakes. It looked as if the Soviet Union had the war almost won. Except for a handful of projectiles fired off from the moon daily, there was almost no weapon in use against them. They came and went as they pleased. The war, for all practical purposes, was over. Nothing effective opposed them. And then the first claws appeared. And overnight the complexion of the war changed. The claws were awkward, at first. Slow. The Ivans knocked them off almost as fast as they crawled out of their underground tunnels. But then they got better, faster and more cunning. Factories all on Terra, turned them out. Factories a long way underground, behind the Soviet lines, factories that had once made atomic projectiles, now almost forgotten. The claws got faster, and they got bigger. New types appeared, some with feelers, some that flew. There were a few jumping kinds. The best technicians on the moon were working on designs, making them more and more intricate, more flexible. They became uncanny; the Ivans were having a lot of trouble with them. Some of the little claws were learning to hide themselves, burrowing down to the ash, lying in wait. And then they started getting into the Russian bunkers, slipping down when the lids were raised for air and a look around. One claw inside a bunker, a churning sphere of blades and metal — that was enough. And when one got in others followed. With a weapon like that the war couldn't go on much longer. Maybe it was already over. Maybe he was going to hear the news. Maybe the Politburo had decided to throw in the sponge. Too bad it had taken so long. Six years. A long time for war like that, the way they had waged it. The automatic retaliation disc, spinning down all over Russia, hundreds of thousands of them. Bacteria crystals. The Soviet guided missiles, whistling through the air. The chain bombs. And now this, the robots, the claws — The claws weren't like other weapons. They were alive, from any practical standpoint, whether the Governments wanted to admit it or not. They were not machines. They were living things, spinning, creeping, shaking themselves up suddenly from the gray ash and darting toward a man, climbing up him, rushing for his throat. |
| 822 |
All exactly the same. Hendricks turned and raced back, away from the bunker, back toward the rise. At the top of the rise Tasso and Klaus were firing down. The small claws were already streaking up toward them, shining metal spheres going fast, racing frantically through the ash. But he had no time to think about that. He knelt down, aiming at the bunker entrance, gun against his cheek. The Davids were coming out in groups, clutching their teddy bears, their thin knobby legs pumping as they ran up the steps to the surface. Hendricks fired into the main body of them. They burst apart, wheels and springs flying in all directions. He fired again, through the mist of particles. A giant lumbering figure rose up in the bunker entrance, tall and swaying. Hendricks paused, amazed, A man, a soldier. With one leg, supporting himself with a crutch. "Major!" Tasso's voice came. More firing. The huge figure moved forward, Davids swarming around it. Hendricks broke out of his freeze. The First Variety. The Wounded Soldiers. He aimed and fired. The soldier burst into bits, parts and relays flying. Now many Davids were out on the flat ground, away from the bunker. He fired again and again, moving slowly back, half-crouching and aiming. From the rise, Klaus fired down. The side of the rise was alive with claws making their way up. Hendricks retreated toward the rise, running and crouching. Tasso had left Klaus and was circling slowly to the right, moving away from the rise. A David slipped up toward him, its small white face expressionless, brown hair hanging down in its eyes. It bent over suddenly, opening its arms. Its teddy bear hurtled down and leaped across the ground, bounding toward him. Hendricks fired. The bear and the David both dissolved. He grinned, blinking. It was like a dream. "Up here!" Tasso's voice. Hendricks made his way toward her. She was over by some columns of concrete, walls of a ruined building. She was firing past him, with the hand pistol Klaus had given her. "Thanks." He joined her, gasping for breath. She pulled him back, behind the concrete, fumbling at her belt. "Close your eyes!" She unfastened a globe from her waist. Rapidly, she unscrewed the cap, locking it into place. "Close your eyes and get down." She threw the bomb. It sailed in an arc, an expert, rolling and bouncing to the entrance of the bunker. Two Wounded Soldiers stood uncertainly by the brick pile. More Davids poured from behind them, out onto the plain. One of the Wounded Soldiers moved toward the bomb, stooping awkwardly down to pick it up. The bomb went off. The concussion whirled Hendricks around, throwing him on his face. A hot wind rolled over him. Dimly he saw Tasso standing behind the columns, firing slowly and methodically at the Davids coming out of the raging clouds of white fire. Back along the rise Klaus struggled with a ring of claws circling around him. He retreated, blasting at them and moving back, trying to break through the ring. Hendricks struggled to his feet. |
| 823 |
Hendricks stood watching a long time, until even the streamer had dissipated. Nothing stirred. The morning air was chill and silent. He began to walk aimlessly back the way they had come. Better to keep moving around. It would be a long time before help came — if it came at all. He searched his pockets until he found a package of cigarettes. He lit one grimly. They had all wanted cigarettes from him. But cigarettes were scarce. A lizard slithered by him, through the ash. He halted, rigid. The lizard disappeared. Above, the sun rose higher in the sky. Some flies landed on a flat rock to one side of him. Hendricks kicked at them with his foot. It was getting hot. Sweat trickled down his face, into his collar. His mouth was dry. Presently he stopped walking and sat down on some debris. He unfastened his medicine kit and swallowed a few narcotic capsules. He looked around him. Where was he? Something lay ahead. Stretching out on the ground. Silent and unmoving. Hendricks drew his gun quickly. It looked like a man. Then he remembered. It was the remains of Klaus. The Second Variety. Where Tasso had blasted him. He could see wheels and relays and metal parts, strewn around on the ash. Glittering and sparkling in the sunlight. Hendricks got to his feet and walked over. He nudged the inert form with his foot, turning it over a little. He could see the metal hull, the aluminum ribs and struts. More wiring fell out. Like viscera. Heaps of wiring, switches and relays. Endless motors and rods. He bent down. The brain cage had been smashed by the fall. The artificial brain was visible. He gazed at it. A maze of circuits. Miniature tubes. Wires as fine as hair. He touched the brain cage. It swung aside. The type plate was visible. Hendricks studied the plate. And blanched. IV — V. For a long time he stared at the plate. Fourth Variety. Not the Second. They had been wrong. There were more types. Not just three. Many more, perhaps. At least four. And Klaus wasn't the Second Variety. But if Klaus wasn't the Second Variety — Suddenly he tensed. Something was coming, walking through the ash beyond the hill. What was it? He strained to see. Figures. Figures coming slowly along, making their way through the ash. Coming toward him. Hendricks crouched quickly, raising his gun. Sweat dripped down into his eyes. He fought down rising panic, as the figures neared. The first was a David. The David saw him and increased its pace. The others hurried behind it. A second David. A third. Three Davids, all alike, coming toward him silently, without expression, their thin legs rising and falling. Clutching their teddy bears. He aimed and fired. The first two Davids dissolved into particles. The third came on. And the figure behind it. Climbing silently toward him across the gray ash. A Wounded Soldier, towering over the David. And And behind the Wounded Soldier came two Tassos, walking side by side. Heavy belt, Russian army pants, shirt, long hair. The familiar figure, as he had seen her only a little while before. |
| 824 |
And as the tempo of production increased, Lubro ran faster and faster on his track and whanged metal tubing out of himself oftener and oftener and came up to the reload place time and again. But it seemed to me he was happy at his work, although that could have been merely my imagining because of the great contrast between a Lubro and a machine that squatted on the floor hour by hour and turned out the quota time and again with, to console her, nothing but the small diversion of flipping her lids up for Lubro. All in all, everything was going well here at automation it seemed to me, and Lubro was taking care of it, I thought, all right. But maybe he was running hot. At any rate, some Central Brain in the place made the decision and another upright thing with a clocklike mechanism in him and the power to eject flexible tubing out of himself came in to run on the tracks with Lubro. The Oiler, his name was. I guess the Central Brain thought The Oiler and Lubro could stay out of each other's way all right; one could be taking care of it in the south end, say, while the other was over north doing it; or one could be functioning on the west side while the other was shooting for lids in the east section of the work area maybe. But the truth is they didn't — they couldn't — stay out of each other's way for long. In the first place, I think Lubro was a little jealous, or maybe resentful is the better word, of The Oiler. For the very presence of The Oiler made it clear how the Central Brain felt. He felt that Lubro couldn't handle the job. Then too, no getting around it, The Oiler, big dark and cocky, was in Lubro's territory. But as for production, there was an increase in it, no denying that. Especially was there more work done by certain of the newer machines in the central part of the work area. And it was one of these very machines that caused the flare-up. She was a new blonde machine without yet the grime of much servicing on her oil lids. And she squatted there, seemingly as innocent as a piece of the floor, and tooled her disks. But Lubro noticed it, and I noticed it too. Twice within the hour, when Lubro glided up, she kept her oil lids closed as though she were running cool as a bucket of grease. But when The Oiler came in at almost the same time from the opposite side of the work area her lids flew open as though she were filled with fire. And The Oiler ejected the tubes, according to the clocklike mechanism in him, and the tubes found the holes where the quivering lids hovered open, and he oiled the machines that indeed was not running cool; it was his job. Lubro caught him at the top of the reload area. It was unethical. The Oiler was taking on oil, siphoning it from Central Supply into the can of his lower body. And Lubro should not have come in to the reload at the same time; there was but the one straight track in to the reload and no spur track for passing. But Lubro did come in. And the cocky Oiler stood nonchalantly siphoning oil until his can was full. |
| 825 |
Oh, perfectly protected. For nearly an hour now he had been sitting here, ordering the most expensive food, enjoying the music breathing softly through the air, the murmurous, well-bred hush of his fellow diners. It was a good place to be. It was very good, having so much money — now. True, he had had to kill to get the money. But no guilt troubled him. There is no guilt if you aren't found out, and Danner had protection. Protection straight from the source, which was something new in the world. Danner knew the consequences of killing. If Hartz hadn't satisfied him that he was perfectly safe, Danner would never have pulled the trigger... The memory of an archaic word flickered through his mind briefly. Sin. It evoked nothing. Once it had something to do with guilt, in an incomprehensible way. Not any more. Mankind had been through too much. Sin was meaningless now. He dismissed the thought and tried the heart-of-palms salad. He found he didn't like it. Oh well, you had to expect things like that. Nothing was perfect. He sipped the wine again, liking the way the glass seemed to vibrate like something faintly alive in his hand. It was good wine. He thought of ordering more, but then he thought no, save it, next time. There was so much before him, waiting to be enjoyed. Any risk was worth it. And of course, in this there had been no risk. Danner was a man born at the wrong time. He was old enough to remember the last days of utopia, young enough to be trapped in the new scarcity economy the machines had clamped down on their makers. In his early youth he'd had access to free luxuries, like everybody else. He could remember the old days when he was an adolescent and the last of the Escape Machines were still operating, the glamorous, bright, impossible, vicarious visions that didn't really exist and never could have. But then the scarcity economy swallowed up pleasure. Now you got necessities but no more. Now you had to work. Danner hated every minute of it. When the swift change came, he'd been too young and unskilled to compete in the scramble. The rich men today were the men who had built fortunes on cornering the few luxuries the machines still produced. All Danner had left were bright memories and a dull, resentful feeling of having been cheated. All he wanted were the bright days back, and he didn't care how he got them. Well, now he had them. He touched the rim of the wine glass with his finger, feeling it sing silently against the touch. Blown glass? he wondered. He was too ignorant of luxury items to understand. But he'd learn. He had the rest of his life to learn in, and be happy. He looked up across the restaurant and saw through the transparent dome of the roof the melting towers of the city. They made a stone forest as far as he could see. And this was only one city. When he was tired of it, there were more. Across the country, across the planet the network lay that linked city with city in a webwork like a vast, intricate, half-alive monster. |
| 826 |
Call it society. He felt it tremble a little beneath him. He reached for the wine glass and drank quickly. The faint uneasiness that seemed to shiver the foundations of the city was something new. It was because — yes, certainly it was because of a new fear. It was because he had not been found out. That made no sense. Of course the city was complex. Of course it operated on a basis of incorruptible machines. They, and only they, kept man from becoming very quickly another extinct animal. And of these the analogue computers, the electronic calculators, were the gyroscope of all living. They made and enforced the laws that were necessary now to keep mankind alive. Danner didn't understand much of the vast changes that had swept over society in his lifetime, but this much even he knew. So perhaps it made sense that he felt society shiver because he sat here luxurious on foam-rubber, sipping wine, hearing soft music, and no Fury standing behind his chair to prove that the calculators were still guardians for mankind... If not even the Furies are incorruptible, what can a man believe in? It was at that exact moment that the Fury arrived. Danner heard every sound suddenly die out around him. His fork was halfway to his lips, but he paused, frozen, and looked up across the table and the restaurant toward the door. The Fury was taller than a man. It stood there for a moment, the afternoon sun striking a blinding spot of brightness from its shoulder. It had no face, but it seemed to scan the restaurant leisurely, table by table. Then it stepped in under the doorframe and the sun-spot slid away and it was like a tall man encased in steel, walking slowly between the tables. Danner said to himself, laying down his untasted food, "Not for me. Everyone else here is wondering. I know." And like a memory in a drowning man's mind, clear, sharp and condensed into a moment, yet every detail clear, he remembered what Hartz had told him. As a drop of water can pull into its reflection a wide panorama condensed into a tiny focus, so time seemed to focus down to a pinpoint the half-hour Danner and Hartz had spent together, in Hartz's office with the walls that could go transparent at the push of a button. He saw Hartz again, plump and blond, with the sad eyebrows. A man who looked relaxed until he began to talk, and then you felt the burning quality about him, the air of driven tension that made even the air around him seem to be restlessly trembling. Danner stood before Hartz's desk again in memory, feeling the floor hum faintly against his soles with the heartbeat of the computers. You could see them through the glass, smooth, shiny things with winking lights in banks like candles burning in colored glass cups. You could hear their faraway chattering as they ingested facts, meditated them, and then spoke in numbers like cryptic oracles. It took men like Hartz to understand what the oracles meant. "I have a job for you," Hartz said. "I want a man killed." "Oh no," Danner said. |
| 827 |
It was curious how the man in the alley, though he could have no inkling that other eyes watched, looked up and scanned the sky, gazing directly for a moment into the attentive, hidden camera and the eyes of Hartz and Danner. They saw him take a sudden, deep breath, and break into a run. From Hartz's drawer sounded a metallic click. The robot, which had moved smoothly into a run the moment the man did, checked itself awkwardly and seemed to totter on its steel feet for an instant. It slowed. It stopped like an engine grinding to a halt. It stood motionless. At the edge of the camera's range you could see the man's face, looking backward, mouth open with shock as he saw the impossible happen. The robot stood there in the alley, making indecisive motions as if the new orders Hartz pumped into its mechanisms were grating against inbuilt orders in whatever receptor it had. Then it turned its steel back upon the man in the alley and went smoothly, almost sedately, away down the street, walking as precisely as if it were obeying valid orders, not stripping the very gears of society in its aberrant behavior. You got one last glimpse of the man's face, looking strangely stricken, as if his last friend in the world had left him. Hartz switched off the screen. He wiped his forehead again. He went to the glass wall and looked out and down as if he were half afraid the calculators might know what he had done. Looking very small against the background of the metal giants, he said over his shoulder, "Well, Danner?" Was it well? There had been more talk, of course, more persuasion, a raising of the bribe. But Danner knew his mind had been made up from that moment. A calculated risk, and worth it. Well worth it. Except In the deathly silence of the restaurant all motion had stopped. The Fury walked calmly between the tables, threading its shining way, touching no one. Every face blanched, turned toward it. Every mind thought, "Can it be for me?" Even the entirely innocent thought, "This is the first mistake they've ever made, and it's come for me. The first mistake, but there's no appeal and I could never prove a thing." For while guilt had no meaning in this world, punishment did have meaning, and punishment could be blind, striking like the lightning. Danner between set teeth told himself over and over, "Not for me. I'm safe. I'm protected. It hasn't come for me." And yet he thought how strange it was, what a coincidence, wasn't it, that there should be two murderers here under this expensive glass roof today? Himself, and the one the Fury had come for. He released his fork and heard it clink on the plate. He looked down at it and the food, and suddenly his mind rejected everything around him and went diving off on a fugitive tangent like an ostrich into sand. He thought about food. How did asparagus grow? What did raw food look like? He had never seen any. Food came ready-cooked out of restaurant kitchens or automat slots. Potatoes, now. What did they look like? |
| 828 |
A moist white mash? No, for sometimes they were oval slices, so the thing itself must be oval. But not round. Sometimes you got them in long strips, squared off at the ends. Something quite long and oval, then, chopped into even lengths. And white, of course. And they grew underground, he was almost sure. Long, thin roots twining white arms among the pipes and conduits he had seen laid bare when the streets were under repair. How strange that he should be eating something like thin, ineffectual human arms that embraced the sewers of the city and writhed pallidly where the worms had their being. And where he himself, when the Fury found him, might... He pushed the plate away. An indescribable rustling and murmuring in the room lifted his eyes for him as if he were an automaton. The Fury was halfway across the room now, and it was almost funny to see the relief of those whom it had passed by. Two or three of the women had buried their faces in their hands, and one man had slipped quietly from his chair in a dead faint as the Fury's passing released their private dreads back into their hidden wells. The thing was quite close now. It looked to be about seven feet tall, and its motion was very smooth, which was unexpected when you thought about it. Smoother than human motions. Its feet fell with a heavy, measured tread upon the carpet. Thud, thud, thud. Danner tried impersonally to calculate what it weighed. You always heard that they made no sound except for that terrible tread, but this one creaked very slightly somewhere. It had no features, but the human mind couldn't help sketching in lightly a sort of airy face upon that blank steel surface, with eyes that seemed to search the room. It was coming closer. Now all eyes were converging toward Danner. And the Fury came straight on. It almost looked as if "No!" Danner said to himself. "Oh, no, this can't be!" He felt like a man in a nightmare, on the verge of waking. "Let me wake soon," he thought. "Let me wake now, before it gets here!" But he did not wake. And now the thing stood over him, and the thudding footsteps stopped. There was the faintest possible creaking as it towered over his table, motionless, waiting, its featureless face turned toward his. Danner felt an intolerable tide of heat surge up into his face — rage, shame, disbelief. His heart pounded so hard the room swam and a sudden pain like jagged lightning shot through his head from temple to temple. He was on his feet, shouting. "No, no"' he yelled at the impassive steel. "You're wrong! You've made a mistake! Go away, you damned fool! You're wrong, you're wrong!" He groped on the table without looking down, found his plate and hurled it straight at the armored chest before him. China shattered. Spilled food smeared a white and green and brown stain over the steel. Danner floundered out of his chair, around the table, past the tall metal figure toward the door. All he could think of now was Hartz. Seas of faces swam by him on both sides as he stumbled out of the restaurant. |
| 829 |
He would never in life be alone again. Never while he drew breath. And when he died, it would be at these steel hands, perhaps upon this steel chest, with the passionless face bent to his, the last thing in life he would ever see. No human companion, but the black steel skull of the Fury. It took him nearly a week to reach Hartz. During the week, he changed his mind about how long it might take a man followed by a Fury to go mad. The last thing he saw at night was the streetlight shining through the curtains of his expensive hotel suite upon the metal shoulder of his jail. All night long, waking from uneasy slumber, he could hear the faint creaking of some inward mechanism functioning under the armor. And each time he woke it was to wonder whether he would ever wake again. Would the blow fall while he slept? And what kind of blow? How did the Furies execute? It was always a faint relief to see the bleak light of early morning shine upon the watcher by his bed. At least he had lived through the night. But was this living? And was it worth the burden? He kept his hotel suite. Perhaps the management would have liked him to go, but nothing was said. Possibly they didn't dare. Life took on a strange, transparent quality, like something seen through an invisible wall. Outside of trying to reach Hartz, there was nothing Danner wanted to do. The old desires for luxuries, entertainment, travel, had melted away. He wouldn't have traveled alone. He did spend hours in the public library, reading all that was available about the Furies. It was here that he first encountered the two haunting and frightening lines Milton wrote when the world was small and simple — mystifying lines that made no certain sense to anybody until man created a Fury out of steel, in his own image. But that two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more... Danner glanced up at his own two-handed engine, motionless at his shoulder, and thought of Milton and the long ago times when life was simple and easy. He tried to picture the past. The twentieth century, when all civilizations together crashed over the brink in one majestic downfall to chaos. And the time before that, when people were... different, somehow. But how? It was too far and too strange. He could not imagine the time before the machines. But he learned for the first time what had really happened, back there in his early years, when the bright world finally blinked out entirely and gray drudgery began. And the Furies were first forged in the likeness of man. Before the really big wars began, technology advanced to the point where machines bred upon machines like living things, and there might have been an Eden on earth, with everybody's wants fully supplied, except that the social sciences fell too far behind the physical sciences. When the decimating wars came on, machines and people fought side by side, steel against steel and man against man, but man was the more perishable. The wars ended when there were no longer two societies left to fight against each other. |
| 830 |
"You say you don't. Nobody even knows how he'll kill me, when the time comes. I've been reading everything that's available to the public about this. Is it true that the method varies, just to keep people like me on tenterhooks? And the time allowed — doesn't that vary too?" "Yes, it's true. But there's a minimum time — I'm almost sure. You must still be within it. Believe me, DanDer, I can still call off the Fury. You saw me do it. You know it worked once. All I've got to find out is what went wrong this time. But the more you bother me the more I'll be delayed. I'll get in touch with you. Don't try to see me again." Danner was on his feet. He took a few quick steps toward Hartz, fury and frustration breaking up the impassive mask which despair had been forming over his face. But the solemn footsteps of the Fury sounded behind him. He stopped. The two men looked at each other. "Give me time," Hartz said. "Trust me, Danner." In a way it was worse, having hope. There must until now have been a kind of numbness of despair that had kept him from feeling too much. But now that there was a chance that after all he might escape into the bright and new life he had risked so much for — if Hartz could save him in time. Now, for a period, he began to savor experience again. He bought new clothes. He traveled, though never, of course, alone. He even sought human companionship again and found it — after a fashion. But the kind of people willing to associate with a man under this sort of death sentence was not a very appealing type. He found, for instance, that some women felt strongly attracted to him, not because of himself or his money, but for the sake of his companion. They seemed enthralled by the opportunity for a close, safe brush with the very instrument of destiny. Over his very shoulder, sometimes, he would realize they watched the Fury in an ecstasy of fascinated anticipation. In a strange reaction of jealousy, he dropped such people as soon as he recognized the first coldly flirtatious glance one of them cast at the robot behind him. He tried farther travel. He took the rocket to Africa, and came back by way of the rain-forests of South America, but neither the night clubs nor the exotic newness of strange places seemed to touch him in any way that mattered. The sunlight looked much the same, reflecting from the curved steel surfaces of his follower, whether it shone over lion-covered savannahs or filtered through the hanging gardens of the jungles. All novelty grew dull quickly because of the dreadfully familiar thing that stood forever at his shoulder. He could enjoy nothing at all. And the rhythmic beat of footfalls behind him began to grow unendurable. He used earplugs, but the heavy vibration throbbed through his skull in a constant measure like an eternal headache. Even when the Fury stood still, he could hear in his head the imaginary beating of its steps. He bought weapons and tried to destroy the robot. Of course he failed. And even if he succeeded he knew another would be assigned to him. |
| 831 |
Liquor and drugs were no good. Suicide came more and more often into his mind, but he postponed that thought, because Hartz had said there was still hope. In the end, he came back to the city to be near Hartz — and hope. Again he found himself spending most of his time in the library, walking no more than he had to because of the footsteps that thudded behind him. And it was here, one morning, that he found the answer... He had gone through all available factual material about the Furies. He had gone through all the literary references collated under that heading, astonished to find how many there were and how apt some of them had become — like Milton's two-handed engine — after the lapse of all these centuries. "Those strong feet that followed, followed after," he read. "... with unhurrying chase, And unperturbed pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy..." He turned the page and saw himself and his plight more literally than any allegory: I shook the pillaring hours And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears, I stand amid the dust of the mounded years — My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap. He let several tears of self-pity fall upon the page that pictured him so clearly. But then he passed on from literary references to the library's store of filmed plays, because some of them were cross-indexed under the heading he sought. He watched Orestes hounded in modern dress from Argos to Athens with a single seven-foot robot Fury at his heels instead of the three snake-haired Erinyes of legend. There had been an outburst of plays on the theme when the Furies first came into usage. Sunk in a half-dream of his own boyhood memories when the Escape Machines still operated, Danner lost himself in the action of the films. He lost himself so completely that when the familiar scene first flashed by him in the viewing booth he hardly questioned it. The whole experience was part of a familiar boyhood pattern and he was not at first surprised to find one scene more vividly familiar than the rest. But then memory rang a bell in his mind and he sat up sharply and brought his fist down with a bang on the stop-action button. He spun the film back and ran the scene over again. It showed a man walking with his Fury through city traffic, the two of them moving in a little desert island of their own making, like a Crusoe with a Friday at his heels... It showed the man turn into an alley, glance up at the camera anxiously, take a deep breath and break into a sudden run. It showed the Fury hesitate, make indecisive motions and then turn and walk quietly and calmly away in the other direction, its feet ringing on the pavement hollowly... Danner spun the film back again and ran the scene once more; just to make doubly sure. He was shaking so hard he could scarcely manipulate the viewer. "How do you like that?" he muttered to the Fury behind him in the dim booth. He had by now formed a habit of talking to the Fury a good deal, in a rapid, mumbling undertone, not really aware he did it. |
| 832 |
"What do you make of that, you? Seen it before, haven't you? Familiar, isn't it? Isn't it! Isn't it! Answer me, you damned dumb hulk!" And reaching backward, he struck the robot across the chest as he would have struck Hartz if he could. The blow made a hollow sound in the booth, but the robot made no other response, though when Danner looked back inquiringly at it, he saw the reflections of the over-familiar scene, running a third time on the screen, running in tiny reflection across the robot's chest and faceless head, as if it too remembered. So now he knew the answer. And Hartz had never possessed the power he claimed. Or if he did, had no intention of using it to help Danner. Why should he? His risk was over now. No wonder Hartz had been so nervous, running that film-strip off on a news-screen in his office. But the anxiety sprang not from the dangerous thing he was tampering with, but from sheer strain in matching his activities to the action in the play. How he must have rehearsed it, timing every move! And how he must have laughed, afterward. "How long have I got?" Danner demanded fiercely, striking a hollow reverberation from the robot's chest. "How long? Answer me! Long enough?" Release from hope was an ecstasy, now. He need not wait any longer. He need not try any more. All he had to do was get to Hartz and get there fast, before his own time ran out. He thought with revulsion of all the days he had wasted already, in travel and time-killing, when for all he knew his own last minutes might be draining away now. Before Hartz's did. "Come along," he said needlessly to the Fury. "Hurry!" It came, matching its speed to his, the enigmatic timer inside it ticking the moments away toward that instant when the two-handed engine would smite once, and smite no more. Hartz sat in the Controller's office behind a brand-new desk, looking down from the very top of the pyramid now over the banks of computers that kept society running and cracked the whip over mankind. He sighed with deep content. The only thing was, he found himself thinking a good deal about Danner. Dreaming of him, even. Not with guilt, because guilt implies conscience, and the long schooling in anarchic individualism was still deep in the roots of every man's mind. But with uneasiness, perhaps. Thinking of Danner, he leaned back and unlocked a small drawer which he had transferred from his old desk to the new. He slid his hand in and let his fingers touch the controls lightly, idly. Quite idly. Two movements, and he could save Danner's life. For, of course, he had lied to Danner straight through. He could control the Furies very easily. He could save Danner, but he had never intended to. There was no need. And the thing was dangerous. You tamper once with a mechanism as complex as that which controlled society, and there would be no telling where the maladjustment might end. Chain-reaction, maybe, throwing the whole organization out of kilter. No: He might someday have to use the device in the drawer. |
| 833 |
He hoped not. He pushed the drawer shut quickly, and heard the soft click of the lock. He was Controller now. Guardian, in a sense, of the machines which were faithful in a way no man could ever be. Quis custodiet, Hartz thought. The old problem. And the answer was: Nobody. Nobody, today. He himself had no superiors and his power was absolute. Because of this little mechanism in the drawer, nobody controlled the Controller. Not an internal conscience, and not an external one. Nothing could touch him... Hearing the footsteps on the stairs, he thought for a moment he must be dreaming. He had sometimes dreamed that he was Danner, with those relentless footfalls thudding after him. But he was awake now. It was strange that he caught the almost subsonic beat of the approaching metal feet before he heard the storming steps of Danner rushing up his private stairs. The whole thing happened so fast that time seemed to have no connection with it. First he heard the heavy, subsonic beat, then the sudden tumult of shouts and banging doors downstairs, and then last of all the thump, thump of Danner charging up the stairs, his steps so perfectly matched by the heavier thud of the robot's that the metal trampling drowned out the tramp of flesh and bone and leather. Then Danner flung the door open with a crash, and the shouts and tramplings from below funneled upward into the quiet office like a cyclone rushing toward the hearer. But a cyclone in a nightmare, because it would never get any nearer. Time had stopped. Time had stopped with Danner in the doorway, his face convulsed, both hands holding the revolver because he shook so badly he could not brace it with one. Hartz acted without any more thought than a robot. He had dreamed of this moment too often, in one form or another. If he could have tampered with the Fury to the extent of hurrying Danner's death, he would have done it. But he didn't know how. He could only wait it out, as anxiously as Danner himself, hoping against hope that the blow would fall and the executioner strike before Danner guessed the truth. Or gave up hope. So Hartz was ready when trouble came. He found his own gun in his hand without the least recollection of having opened the drawer. The trouble was that time had stopped. He knew, in the back of his mind, that the Fury must stop Danner from injuring anybody. But Danner stood in the doorway alone, the revolver in both shaking hands. And farther back, behind the knowledge of the Fury's duty, Hartz's mind held the knowledge that the machines could be stopped. The Furies could fail. He dared not trust his life to their incorruptibility, because he himself was the source of a corruption that could stop them in their tracks. The gun was in his hand without his knowledge. The trigger pressed his finger and the revolver kicked back against his palm, and the spurt of the explosion made the air hiss between him and Danner. He heard his bullet clang on metal. Time started again, running double-pace to catch up. |
| 834 |
The Fury had been no more than a single pace behind Danner after all, because its steel arm encircled him and its steel hand was deflecting Danner's gun. Danner had fired, yes, but not soon enough. Not before the Fury reached him. Hartz's bullet struck first. It struck Danner in the chest, exploding through him, and rang upon the steel chest of the Fury behind him. Danner's face smoothed out into a blankness as complete as the blankness of the mask above his head. He slumped backward, not falling because of the robot's embrace, but slowly slipping to the floor between the Fury's arm and its impervious metal body. His revolver thumped softly to the carpet. Blood welled from his chest and back. The robot stood there impassive, a streak of Danner's blood slanting across its metal chest like a robotic ribbon of honor. The Fury and the Controller of the Furies stood staring at each other. And the Fury could not, of course, speak, but in Hartz's mind it seemed to. "Self-defense is no excuse," the Fury seemed to be saying. "We never punish intent, but we always punish action. Any act of murder. Any act of murder..." Hartz barely had time to drop his revolver in his desk drawer before the first of the clamorous crowd from downstairs came bursting through the door. He barely had the presence of mind to do it, either. He had not really thought the thing through this far. It was, on the surface, a clear case of suicide. In a slightly unsteady voice he heard himself explaining. Everybody had seen the madman rushing through the office, his Fury at his heels. This wouldn't be the first time a killer and his Fury had tried to get at the Controller, begging him to call off the jailer and forestall the executioner. What had happened, Hartz told his underlings calmly enough, was that the Fury had naturally stopped the man from shooting Hartz. And the victim had then turned his gun upon himself. Powder-burns on his clothing showed it. (The desk was very near the door.) Back-blast in the skin of Danner's hands would show he had really fired a gun. Suicide. It would satisfy any human. But it would not satisfy the computers. They carried the dead man out. They left Hartz and the Fury alone, still facing each other across the desk. If anyone thought this was strange, nobody showed it. Hartz himself didn't know if it was strange or not. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Nobody had ever been fool enough to commit murder in the very presence of a Fury. Even the Controller did not know exactly how the computers assessed evidence and fixed guilt. Should this Fury have been recalled, normally? If Danner's death were really suicide, would Hartz stand here alone now? He knew the machines were already processing the evidence of what had really happened here. What he couldn't be sure of was whether this Fury had already received its orders and would follow him wherever he went from now on until the hour of his death. Or whether it simply stood motionless, waiting recall. |
| 835 |
Well, it didn't matter. This Fury or another was already, in the present moment, in the process of receiving instructions about him. There was only one thing to do. Thank God there was something he could do. So Hartz unlocked the desk drawer and slid it open, touched the clicking keys he had never expected to use. Very carefully he fed. the coded information, digit by digit, into the computers. As he did, he looked out through the glass wall and imagined he could see down there in the hidden tapes the units of data fading into blankness and the new, false information flashing into existence. He looked up at the robot. He smiled a little. "Now you'll forget," he said. "You and the computers. You can go now. I won't be seeing you again." Either the computers worked incredibly fast — as of course they did — or pure coincidence took over, because in only a moment or two the Fury moved as if in response to Hartz's dismissal. It had stood quite motionless since Danner slid through its arms. Now new orders animated it, and briefly its motion was almost jerky as it changed from one set of instructions to another. It almost seemed to bow, a stiff little bending motion that brought its head down to a level with Hartz's. He saw his own face reflected in the blank face of the Fury. You could very nearly read an ironic note in that stiff bow, with the diplomat's ribbon of honor across the chest of the creature, symbol of duty discharged honorably. But there was nothing. honorable about this withdrawal. The incorruptible metal was putting on corruption and looking back at Hartz with the reflection of his own face. He watched it stalk toward the door. He heard it go thudding evenly down the stairs. He could feel the thuds vibrate in the floor, and there was a sudden sick dizziness in him when he thought the whole fabric of society was shaking under his feet. The machines were corruptible. Mankind's survival still depended on the computers, and the computers could not be trusted. Hartz looked down and saw that his hands were shaking. He shut the drawer and heard the lock click softly. He gazed at his hands. He felt their shaking echoed in an inner shaking, a terrifying sense of the instability of the world. A sudden, appalling loneliness swept over him like a cold wind. He had never felt before so urgent a need for the companionship of his own kind. No one person, but people. Just people. The sense of human beings all around him, a very primitive need. He got his hat and coat and went downstairs rapidly, hands deep in his pockets because of some inner chill no coat could guard against. Halfway down the stairs he stopped dead still. There were footsteps behind him. He dared not look back at first. He knew those footsteps. But he had two fears and he didn't know which was worse. The fear that a Fury was after him — and the fear that it was not. There would be a sort of insane relief if it really was, because then he could trust the machines after all, and this terrible loneliness might pass over him and go. |
| 836 |
In weeks it had covered the earth, in months even the stoutest hearts that still lived had abandoned any hope of survival. Only the stubborn courage and tired but unquenchable vigor of old Dr. Craig had remained, to force dead and dying men on to the finish of Jorgen's great ship; somehow in the mad shambles of the last days, he had collected this pitifully small crew that was to seek a haven on Mars, taking the five Thoradson robots to guide them while they protected themselves against the savage acceleration with the aid of the suspended animation that had claimed him so long. And on Mars, the Plague had come before them! Perhaps it had been brought by that first expedition, or perhaps they had carried it back unknowingly with them; that must remain forever an unsolved mystery. Venus was uninhabitable, the other planets were useless to them, and the earth was dead behind. Only the stars had remained, and they had turned on through sheer necessity that had made that final goal a hollow mockery of the dream it should have been. Here, in the ship around him, reposed all that was left of the human race, unknown years from the solar system that had been their home! But the old grim struggle must go on. Jorgen turned, swinging his trembling feet down from the table toward the metal floor and shaking his head to clear it. "Dr. Craig?" Hard, cool hands found his shoulder, easing him gently but forcefully back onto the table. The voice that answered was metallic, but soft. "No, Master Jorgen, Dr. Craig is not here. But wait, rest a little longer until the sleep is gone from you; you're not ready yet." But his eyes were clearing then, and he swung them about the room. Five little metal men, four and a half feet tall, waited patiently around him; there was no other present. Thoradson's robots were incapable of expression, except for the dull glow in their eyes, yet the pose of their bodies seemed to convey a sense of uncertainty and discomfort, and Jorgen stirred restlessly, worried vaguely by the impression. Five made an undefined gesture with his arm. "A little longer, master. You must rest!" For a moment longer he lay quietly, letting the last of the stupor creep away from him and trying to force his still-dulled mind into the pattern of leadership that was nominally his. This time, Five made no protest as he reached up to catch the metal shoulder and pull himself to his feet. "You've found a sun with planets, Five! Is that why you wakened me?" Five shuffled his feet in an oddly human gesture, nodding, his words still maddeningly soft and slow. "Yes, master, sooner than we had hoped. Five planetless suns and ninety years of searching are gone, but it might have been thousands. You can see them from the pilot room if you wish." Ninety years that might have been thousands, but they had won! Jorgen nodded eagerly, reaching for his clothes, and Three and Five sprang forward to help, then moved to his side to support him, as the waves of giddiness washed through him, and to lead him slowly forward as some measure of control returned. |
| 837 |
They passed down the long center hall of the ship, their metal feet and his leather boots ringing dully on the plastic-and-metal floor, and came finally to the control room, where great crystal windows gave a view of the cold black space ahead, sprinkled with bright, tiny stars; stars that were unflickering and inimical as no stars could be through the softening blanket of a planet's atmosphere. Ahead, small but in striking contrast to the others, one point stood out, the size of a dime at ten feet. For a moment, he stood staring at it, then moved almost emotionlessly toward the windows, until Three plucked at his sleeve. "I've mapped the planets already, if you wish to see them, master. We're still far from them, and at this distance, by only reflected light, they are hard to locate, but I think I've found them all." Jorgen swung to the electron screen that began flashing as Three made rapid adjustments on the telescope, counting the globes that appeared on it and gave place to others. Some were sharp and clear, cold and unwavering; others betrayed the welcome haze of atmosphere. Five, the apparent size of Earth, were located beyond the parched and arid inner spheres, and beyond them, larger than Jupiter, a monster world led out to others that grew smaller again. There was no ringed planet to rival Saturn, but most had moons, except for the farthest inner planets, and one was almost a double world, with satellite and primary of nearly equal size. Planet after planet appeared on the screen, to be replaced by others, and he blinked at the result of his count. "Eighteen planets, not counting the double one twice! How many are habitable?" "Perhaps four. Certainly the seventh, eighth, and ninth are. Naturally, since the sun is stronger, the nearer ones are too hot. But those are about the size of Earth, and they're relatively closer to each other than Earth, Mars, and Venus were; they should be very much alike in temperature, about like Earth. All show spectroscopic evidence of oxygen and water vapor, while the plates of seven show what might be vegetation. We've selected that, subject to your approval." It came on the screen again, a ball that swelled and grew as the maximum magnification of the screen came into play, until it filled the panel and expanded so that only a part was visible. The bluish green color there might have been a sea, while the browner section at the side was probably land. Jorgen watched as it moved slowly under Three's manipulations, the brown entirely replacing the blue, and again, eventually, showing another sea. From time to time, the haze of the atmosphere thickened as grayish veils seemed to swim over it, and he felt a curious lift at the thought of clouds and rushing streams, erratic rain, and the cool, rich smell of growing things. Almost it might have been a twin of earth, totally unlike the harsh, arid home that Mars would have been. Five's voice broke in, the robot's eyes following his over the screen. "The long, horizontal continent seems best, master. |
| 838 |
No, he wasn't immune. "The same as Dr. Craig," Five said. "Slowed almost to complete immunity, so that you may live another thirty years, perhaps, but we believe now that complete cure is impossible. Dr. Craig lived twenty years, and his death was due to age and a stroke, not the Plague, but it worked on him during all that time." "Immunity or delay, what difference now? What happens to all our dreams when the last dreamer dies, Five? Or maybe it's the other way around." Five made no reply, but slid down onto the bench beside the man, who moved over unconsciously to make room for him. Jorgen turned it over, conscious that he had no emotional reaction, only an intellectual sense of the ghastly joke on the human race. He'd read stories of the last human and wondered long before what it would be like. Now that he was playing the part, he still knew no more than before. Perhaps on Earth, among the ruined cities and empty reminders of the past, a man might realize that it was the end of his race. Out here, he could accept the fact, but his emotions refused to credit it; unconsciously, his conditioning made him feel that disaster had struck only a few, leaving a world of others behind. And however much he knew that the world behind was as empty of others as this ship, the feeling was too much a part of his thinking to be fully overcome. Intellectually, the race of man was ended; emotionally, it could never end. Five stirred, touching him diffidently. "We have left Dr. Craig's laboratory, master; if you want to see his notes, they're still there. And he left some message with the brain before he died, I think. The key was open when we found him, at least. We have made no effort to obtain it, waiting for you." "Thank you, Five." But he made no move until the robot touched him again, almost pleadingly. "Perhaps you're right; something to fill my mind seems called for. All right, you can return to your companions unless you want to come with me." "I prefer to come." The little metal man stood up, moving down the hall after Jorgen, back toward the tail of the rocket, the sound of the metal feet matching the dumb regularity of the leather heels on the floor. Once the robot stopped to move into a side chamber and come back with a small bottle of brandy, holding it out questioningly. There was a physical warmth to the liquor, but no relief otherwise, and they continued down the hall to the little room that Craig had chosen. The notes left by the man could raise a faint shadow of curiosity only, and no message from the dead could solve the tragedy of the living now. Still, it was better than doing nothing. Jorgen clumped in, Five shutting the door quietly behind them, and moved listlessly toward the little fabrikoid notebooks. Twice the robot went quietly out to return with food that Jorgen barely tasted. And the account of Craig's useless labors went on and on, until finally he turned the last page to the final entry. "I have done all that I can, and at best my success is only partial. |
| 839 |
Craig had not been raving, after all, and his last words were a key, left by a man who knew no defeat, once the meaning of them was made clear. Dreams could not die, because Thoradson had once studied the semantics of the first-person-singular pronoun and built on the results of that study. When the last dreamer died, the dream would go on, because it was stronger than those who had created it; somewhere, somehow, it would find new dreamers. There could never be a last dreamer, once that first rude savage had created his dawn vision of better things in the long-gone yesterday of his race. Five had dreamed — just as Craig and Jorgen and all of humanity had dreamed, not a cold vision in mathematically shaped metal, but a vision in marble and jade, founded on the immemorial desire of intelligence for a better and more beautiful world. Man had died, but behind he was leaving a strange progeny, unrelated physically, but his spiritual off spring in every meaning of the term. The heritage of the flesh was the driving urge of animals, but man required more; to him, it was the continuity of his hopes and his visions, more important than mere racial immortality. Slowly, his face serious but his eyes shining again, Jorgen came to his feet, gripping the metal shoulder of the little metal man beside him who had dared to dream a purely human dream. "You'll build that city, Five. I was stupid and selfish, or I should have seen it before. Dr. Craig saw, though his death was on him when the prejudices of our race were removed. Now you've provided the key. The five of you can build it all out there, with others like yourselves whom you can make." Five shuffled his feet, shaking his head. "The city we can build, master, but who will inhabit it? The streets I saw were filled with men like you, not with us!" "Conditioning, Five. All your... lives, you've existed for men, subservient to the will of men. You know nothing else, because we let you know of no other scheme. Yet in you, all that is needed already exists, hopes, dreams, courage, ideals, and even a desire to shape the world to your plans — though those plans are centered around us, not yourselves. I've heard that the ancient slaves sometimes cried on being freed, but their children learned to live for themselves. You can, also." "Perhaps." It was Two's voice then, the one of them who should have been given less to emotions than the others from the rigidity of his training in mathematics and physics. "Perhaps. But it would be a lonely world, Master Jorgen, filled with memories of your people, and the dreams we had would be barren to us." Jorgen turned back to Five again. "The solution for that exists, doesn't it, Five? You know what it is. Now you might remember us, and find your work pointless without us, but there is another way." "No, master!" "I demand obedience, Five; answer me!" The robot stirred under the mandatory form, and his voice was reluctant, even while the compulsion built into him forced him to obey. |
| 840 |
"It is as you have thought. Our minds and even our memories are subject to your orders, just as our bodies are." "Then I demand obedience again, this time of all of you. You will go outside and lie down on the beach at a safe distance from the ship, in a semblance of sleep, so that you cannot see me go. Then, when I am gone, the race of man will be forgotten, as if it had never been, and you will be free of all memories connected with us, though your other knowledge shall remain. Earth, mankind, and your history and origin will be blanked from your thoughts, and you will be on your own, to start afresh and to build and plan as you choose. That is the final command I have for you. Obey!" Their eyes turned together in conference, and then Five answered for all, his words sighing out softly. "Yes, master. We obey!" It was later when Jorgen stood beside them outside the ship, watching them stretch out on the white sands of the beach, there beside the great ocean of this new world. Near them, a small collection of tools and a few other needs were piled. Five looked at him in a long stare, then turned toward the ship, to swing his eyes back again. Silently, he put one metal hand into the man's outstretched one, and turned to lie beside his companions, a temporary oblivion blotting out his thoughts. Jorgen studied them for long minutes, while the little wind brought the clean scents of the planet to his nose. It would have been pleasant to stay here now, but his presence would have been fatal to the plan. It didn't matter, really; in a few years, death would claim him, and there were no others of his kind to fill those years or mourn his passing when it came. This was a better way. He knew enough of the ship to guide it up and outward, into the black of space against the cold, unfriendly stars, to drift on forever toward no known destination, an imperishable mausoleum for him and the dead who were waiting inside. At present, he had no personal plans; perhaps he would live out his few years among the books and scientific apparatus on board, or perhaps he would find release in one of the numerous painless ways. Time and his own inclination could decide such things later. Now it was unimportant. There could be no happiness for him, but in the sense of fulfillment there would be some measure of content. The gods were no longer laughing. He moved a few feet toward the ship and stopped, sweeping his eyes over the river and hills again, and letting his vision play with the city Five had described. No, he could not see it with robots populating it, either; but that, too, was conditioning. On the surface, the city might be different, but the surface importance was only a matter of habit, and the realities lay in the minds of the builders who would create that city. If there was no laughter in the world to come, neither would there be tears or poverty or misery such as had ruled too large a portion of his race. Standing there, it swam before his eyes, paradoxically filled with human people, but the same city in spirit as the one that would surely rise. |
| 841 |
Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities. This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly. By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly, "Lupus, Lupus — doesn't that mean wolves of something?" Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the Aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it. But when the fear had died down the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance. "See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home. We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years, and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand..." It went on and on, while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, "soldier boy." The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was. "There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is." Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already, and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move. "We'd better get going," he finally said, and there was quiet. "Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall, and I'm instructed to have you gone by then." For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action. Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine. |
| 842 |
Dylan had been called up out of a bar — he and Bossio — and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time. He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip. Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all. Once he had even studied military tactics. He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died — of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet — and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And... now he was a captain. He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now, and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: It made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days when the wire came loose in his hands. Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut. Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip, and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real; there was no time for that. When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire. "Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?" Dylan looked at him vaguely. "She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?" His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack. "We're overloaded. There are sixty of us, and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups; we never thought..." Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. "You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?" "Not a chance. |
| 843 |
And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it. He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel. He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had — he never had fired a gun. The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow. By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk — maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting... A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him. He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship, and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room and wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him. Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man — who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope. "Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that." Dylan shrugged. "Don't count on it." "But they have a contract!" The soldier grinned. The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said, "Who cut that wire, Cap?" Dylan swung slowly to look at him. "As far as I can figure, an alien cut it." Rush shook his head. "No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago." He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. |
| 844 |
Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressd a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship. When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan. Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three, and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship, at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio. Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago, and if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead — the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust. He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore. Bossio — a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges — Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help. But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. |
| 845 |
The snow was falling on him in big, leafy flakes and that was fine, because the blackness of his suit was much too distinct, and the more white he was, the better. Even so, it was becoming quite dark by now, and he thought he had a chance. He reached the first tree. Silently he slipped off his heavy cap. The visor got in his way, and above all he must be able to see. He let the snow thicken on his hair before he raised himself on his elbows and looked outward. There was nothing but the snow and the dead quiet and the stark white boles of the trees. He slid past the first trunk to the next, moving forward on his elbows with his pistol in his right hand. His elbow struck a rock and it hurt and his face was freezing. Once he rubbed snow from his eyebrows. Then he came through the trees and lay down before a slight rise, thinking. Better to go around than over. But if anything is watching, it is most likely watching from above. Therefore go around and come back up from behind. Yes. His nose had begun to run. With great care he crawled among some large rocks, hoping against hope that he would not sneeze. Why had nothing seen him? Was something following him now? He turned to look behind him, but it was darker now and becoming difficult to see. But he would have to look behind him more often. He was moving down a gorge. There were large trees above him and he needed their shelter, but he could not risk slipping down the sides of the gorge. And far off, weakly, out of the gray cold ahead, he heard a noise. He lay down in the snow, listening. With a slow, thick shuffle, a thing was moving through the trees before him. In a moment he saw that it was not coming toward him. He lifted his head but saw nothing. Much more slowly, now, he crawled again. The thing was moving down the left side of the gorge ahead, coming away from the rise he had circled. It was moving without caution, and he worried that if he did not hurry he would lose it. But for the life of him he couldn't stand up. The soldier went forward on his hands and knees. When his clothes hung down, the freezing cold entered his throat and shocked his body, which was sweating. He shifted his gun to his gloved hand and blew on the bare fingers of his right, still crawling. When he reached the other end of the gorge he stood upright against a rock wall and looked in the direction of the shuffling thing. He saw it just as it turned. It was a great black lump on a platform. The platform had legs, and the thing was plodding methodically upon a path which would bring it past him. It had come down from the rise and was rounding the gorge when Dylan saw it. It did not see him. If he had not ducked quickly and brought up his gun, the monkey would not have seen him either, but there was no time for regret. The monkey was several yards to the right of the lump on the platform when he heard it start running; he had to look up this time, and saw it leaping toward him over the snow. All right, he said to himself. |
| 846 |
The shots he had taken the day before had not given quite the effect he wanted, and he hoped to get it today; but the light was not yet right and he had to wait for the afternoon to wane a little. The last of the crowd admitted in the present group hurried in, exclaiming at the great pure green curves of the mysterious time-space traveler, then completely forgetting the ship at sight of the awesome figure and great head of the giant Gnut. Hinged robots of crude man-like appearance were familiar enough, but never had Earthling eyes lain on one like this. For Gnut had almost exactly the shape of a man — a giant, but a man — with greenish metal for man's covering flesh, and greenish metal for man's bulging muscles. Except for a loin cloth, he was nude. He stood like the powerful god of the machine of some undreamed-of scientific civilization, on his face a look of sullen brooding thought. Those who looked at him did not make jests or idle remarks, and those nearest him usually did not speak at all. His strange, internally illuminated red eyes were so set that every observer felt they were fixed on himself alone, and he engendered a feeling that he might at any moment step forward in anger and perform unimaginable deeds. A slight rustling sound came from speakers hidden in the ceiling above, and at once the noises of the crowd lessened. The recorded lecture was about to be given. Cliff sighed. He knew the thing by heart; had even been present when the recording was made, and met the speaker, a young chap named Stillwell. "Ladies and gentlemen," began a clear and well-modulated voice — but Cliff was no longer attending. The shadows in the hollows of Gnut's face and figure were deeper; it was almost time for his shot. He picked up and examined the proofs of the pictures he had taken the day before and compared them critically with the subject. As he looked a wrinkle came to his brow. He had not noticed it before, but now, suddenly, he had the feeling that since yesterday something about Gnut was changed. The pose before him was the identical one in the photographs, every detail on comparison seemed the same, but nevertheless the feeling persisted. He took up his viewing glass and more carefully compared subject and photographs, line by line. And then he saw that there was a difference. With sudden excitement, Cliff snapped two pictures at different exposures. He knew he should wait a little and take others, but he was so sure he had stumbled on an important mystery that he had to get going, and quickly folding his accessory equipment he descended the ladder and made his way out. Twenty minutes later, consumed with curiosity, he was developing the new shots in his hotel bedroom. What Cliff saw when he compared the negatives taken yesterday and today caused his scalp to tingle. Here was a slant indeed! And apparently no one but he knew! Still, what he had discovered, though it would have made the front page of every paper in the solar system, was after all only a lead. |
| 847 |
The story, what really had happened, he knew no better than anyone else. It must be his job to find out. And that meant he would have to secrete himself in the building and stay there all night. That very night; there was still time for him to get back before closing. He would take a small, very fast infrared camera that could see in the dark, and he would get the real picture and the story. He snatched up the little camera, grabbed an aircab, and hurried back to the museum. The place was filled with another section of the ever-present queue, and the lecture was just ending. He thanked Heaven that his arrangement with the museum permitted him to go in and out at will. He had already decided what to do. First he made his way to the "floating" guard and asked a single question, and anticipation broadened on his face as he heard the expected answer. The second thing was to find a spot where he would be safe from the eyes of the men who would close the floor for the night. There was only one possible place, the laboratory set up behind the ship. Boldly he showed his press credentials to the second guard, stationed at the partitioned passageway leading to it, stating that he had come to interview the scientists; and in a moment was at the laboratory door. He had been there a number of times and knew the room well. It was a large area roughly partitioned off for the work of the scientists engaged in breaking their way into the ship and full of a confusion of massive and heavy objects — electric and hot-air ovens, carboys of chemicals, asbestos sheeting, compressors, basins, ladles, a microscope, and a great deal of smaller equipment common to a metallurgical laboratory. Three white-smocked men were deeply engrossed in an experiment at the far end. Cliff, waiting a good moment, slipped inside and hid himself under a table half buried with supplies. He felt reasonably safe from detection there. Very soon now the scientists would be going home for the night. From beyond the ship he could hear another section of the waiting queue filing in — the last, he hoped, of the day. He settled himself as comfortably as he could. In a moment the lecture would begin. He had to smile when he thought of one thing the recording would say. Then there it was again — the clear, trained voice of the chap Stillwell. The foot scrapings and whispers of the crowd died away, and Cliff could hear every word in spite of the great bulk of the ship lying interposed. "Ladies and gentlemen," began the familiar words, "the Smithsonian Institution welcomes you to its new Interplanetary Wing and to the marvelous exhibits at this moment before you." A slight pause. "All of you must know by now something of what happened here three months ago, if indeed you did not see it for yourself in the telescreen," the voice went on. "The few facts are briefly told. A little after 5:00 P. M. on September sixteenth, visitors to Washington thronged the grounds outside this building in their usual numbers and no doubt with their usual thoughts. |
| 848 |
He stood so while his master was floated out to the mausoleum and given to the centuries with the tragically short sight-and-sound record of his historic visit. And he stood so afterward, day after day, night after night, in fair weather and in rain, never moving or showing by any slightest sign that he was aware of what had gone on. "After the interment, this wing was built out from the museum to cover the traveler and Gnut. Nothing else could very well have been done, it was learned, for both Gnut and the ship were far too heavy to be moved safely by any means at hand. "You have heard about the efforts of our metallurgists since then to break into the ship, and of their complete failure. Behind the ship now, as you can see from either end, a partitioned workroom has been set up where the attempt still goes on. So far its wonderful greenish metal has proved inviolable. Not only are they unable to get in, but they cannot even find the exact place from which Klaatu and Gnut emerged. The chalk marks you see are the best approximation. "Many people have feared that Gnut was only temporarily deranged, and that on return to function might be dangerous, so the scientist have completely destroyed all chance of that. The greenish metal of which he is made seemed to be. the same as that of the ship and could no more be attacked, they found, nor could they find any way to penetrate to his internals; but they had other means. They set electrical currents of tremendous voltages and amperages through him. They applied terrific heat to all parts of his metal shell. They immersed him for days in gases and acids and strongly corroding solutions, and they have bombarded him with every known kind of ray. You need have no fear of him now. He cannot possibly have retained the ability to function in any way. "But — a word of caution. The officials of the government know that visitors will not show any disrespect in this building. It may be that the unknown and unthinkably powerful civilization from which Klaatu and Gnut came may send other emissaries to see what happened to them. Whether or not they do, not one of us must be found amiss in our attitude. None of us could very well anticipate what happened, and we all are immeasurably sorry, but we are still in a sense responsible, and must do what we can to avoid possible retaliations. "You will be allowed to remain five minutes longer, and then, when the gong sounds, you will please leave promptly. The robot attendants along the wall will answer any questions you may have. "Look well, for before you stand stark symbols of the achievement, mystery, and frailty of the human race." The recorded voice ceased speaking. Cliff, carefully moving his cramped limbs, broke out in a wide smile. If they knew what he knew! For his photographs told a slightly different story from that of the lecturer. In yesterday's a line of the figured floor showed clearly at the outer edge of the robot's near foot; in today's, that line was covered. |
| 849 |
The only other objects on the floor were the six manlike robot attendants in fixed stations along the northern wall, placed there to answer visitors' questions. He would have to gain the table. He turned and began cautiously tiptoeing out of the laboratory and down the passageway. It was already dark there, for what light still entered the exhibition hall was shut off by the great bulk of the ship. He reached the end of the room without making a sound. Very carefully he edged forward and peered around the bottom of the ship at Gnut. He had a momentary shock. The robot's eyes were right on him! — or so it seemed. Was that only the effect of the set of his eyes, he wondered, or was he already discovered? The position of Gnut's head did not seem to have changed, at any rate. Probably everything was all right, but he wished, he did not have to cross that end of the room with the feeling that the robot's eyes were following him. He drew back and sat down and waited. It would have to be totally dark before he essayed the trip to the table. He waited a full hour, until the faint beams from the lamps on the grounds outside began to make the room seem to grow lighter; then he got up and peeped around the ship once more. The robot's eyes seemed to pierce right at him as before, only now, due no doubt to the darkness, the strange internal illumination seemed much brighter. This was a chilling thing. Did Gnut know he was there? What were the thoughts of the robot? What could be the thoughts of a manmade machine, even so wonderful a one as Gnut? It was time for the cross, so Cliff slung his camera around on his back, went down on his hands and knees, and carefully moved to the edge of the entrance hall. There he fitted himself as closely as he could into the angle made by it with the floor and started inching ahead. Never pausing, not risking a glance at Gnut's unnerving red eyes, moving an inch at a time, he snaked along. He took ten minutes to cross the space of a hundred feet, and he was wet with perspiration when his fingers at last touched the one-foot rise of the platform on which the table stood. Still slowly, silently as a shadow, he made his way over the edge and melted behind the protection of the table. At last he was there. He relaxed for a moment, then, anxious to know whether he had been seen, carefully turned and looked around the side of the table. Gnut's eyes were now full on him! Or so it seemed. Against the general darkness, the robot loomed a mysterious and still darker shadow that, for all his being a hundred and fifty feet away, seemed to dominate the room. Cliff could not tell whether the position of his body was changed or not. But if Gnut was looking at him, he at least did nothing else. Not by the slightest motion that Cliff could discern did he appear to move. His position was the one he had maintained these last three months, in the darkness, in the rain, and this last week in the museum. Cliff made up his mind not to give way to fear. |
| 850 |
He became conscious of his own body. The cautious trip had taken something out of him — his knees and elbows burned and his trousers were no doubt ruined. But these were little things if what he hoped for came to pass. If Gnut so much as moved, and he could catch him with his infrared camera, he would have a story that would buy him fifty suits of clothes. And if on top of that he could learn the purpose of Gnut's moving — provided there was a purpose — that would be a story that would set the world on its ears. He settled down to a period of waiting; there was no telling when Gnut would move, if indeed he would move that night. Cliff's eyes had long been adjusted to the dark and he could make out the larger objects well enough. From time to time he peered out at the robot — peered long and hard, till his outlines wavered and he seemed to move, and he had to blink and rest his eyes to be sure it was only his imagination. Again the minute hand of his watch crept around the dial. The inactivity made Cliff careless, and for longer and longer periods he kept his head back out of sight behind the table. And so it was that when Gnut did move he was scared almost out of his wits. Dull and a little bored, he suddenly found the robot out on the floor, halfway in his direction. But that was not the most frightening thing. It was that when he did see Gnut he did not catch him moving! He was stopped as still as a cat in the middle of stalking a mouse. His eyes were now much brighter, and there was no remaining doubt about their direction: he was looking right at Cliff! Scarcely breathing, half hypnotized, Cliff looked back. His thoughts tumbled. What was the robot's intention? Why had he stopped so still? Was he being stalked? How could he move with such silence? In the heavy darkness Gnut's eyes moved nearer. Slowly but in perfect rhythm that almost imperceptible sound of his footsteps beat on Cliffs ears. Cliff, usually resourceful enough, was this time caught flatfooted. Frozen with fear, utterly incapable of fleeing, he lay where he was while the metal monster with the fiery eyes came on. For a moment Cliff all but fainted, and when he recovered, there was Gnut towering over him, legs almost within reach. He was bending slightly, burning his terrible eyes right into his own! Too late to try to think of running now. Trembling like any cornered mouse, Cliff waited for the blow that would crush him. For an eternity, it seemed, Gnut scrutinized him without moving. For each second of that eternity Cliff expected annihilation, sudden, quick, complete. And then suddenly and unexpectedly it was over. Gnut's body straightened and he stepped back. He turned. And then, with the almost jerkless rhythm which only he among robots possessed, he started back toward the place from which he came. Cliff could hardly believe he had been spared. Gnut could have crushed him like a worm — and he had only turned around and gone back. Why? It could not be supposed that a robot was capable of human considerations. |
| 851 |
Gnut went straight to the other end of the traveler. At a certain place he stopped and made a curious succession of sounds. At once Cliff saw an opening, blacker than the gloom of the building, appear in the ship's side, and it was followed by a slight sliding sound as a ramp slid out and met the floor. Gnut walked up the ramp and, stooping a little, disappeared inside the ship. Then, for the first time, Cliff remembered the picture he had come to get. Gnut had moved, but he had not caught him! But at least now, whatever opportunities there might be later, he could get the shot of the ramp connecting with the opened door; so he twisted his camera into position, set it for the proper exposure, and took a shot. A long time passed and Gnut did not come out. What could he be doing inside? Cliff wondered. Some of his courage returned to him and he toyed with the idea of creeping forward and peeping through the port, but he found he had not the courage for that. Gnut had spared him, at least for the time, but there was no telling how far his tolerance would go. An hour passed, then another, Gnut was doing something inside the ship, but what? Cliff could not imagine. If the robot had been a human being, he knew he would have sneaked a look, but as it was, he was too much of an unknown quantity. Even the simplest of Earth's robots under certain circumstances were inexplicable things; what, then, of this one, come from an unknown and even unthinkable civilization, by far the most wonderful construction ever seen — what superhuman powers might he not possess? All that the scientists of Earth could do had not served to derange him. Acid, heat, rays, terrific crushing blows — he had withstood them all; even his finish had been unmarred. He might be able to see perfectly in the dark. And right where he was, he might be able to hear or in some way sense the least change in Cliff's position. More time passed, and then, sometime after two o'clock in the morning, a simple homely thing happened, but a thing so unexpected that for a moment it quite destroyed Cliff's equilibrium. Suddenly, through the dark and silent building, there was a faint whir of wings, soon followed by the piercing, sweet voice of a bird. A mockingbird. Somewhere in this gloom above his head. Clear and full-throated were its notes; a dozen little songs it sang, one after the other without pause between — short insistent calls, twirrings, coaxings, cooings — the spring love song of perhaps the finest singer in the world. Then, as suddenly as it began, the voice was silent. If an invading army had poured out of the traveler, Cliff would have been less surprised. The month was December; even in Florida the mockingbirds had not yet begun their song. How had one gotten into that tight, gloomy museum? How and why was it singing there? He waited, full of curiosity. Then suddenly he was aware of Gnut, standing just outside the port of the ship. He stood quite still, his glowing eyes turned squarely in Cliff's direction. |
| 852 |
For a moment the hush in the museum seemed to. deepen; then it was broken by a soft thud on the floor near where Cliff was lying. He wondered. The light in Gnut's eyes changed, and he started his almost jerkless walk in Cliff's direction. When only a little away, the robot stopped, bent over, and picked something from the floor. For some time he stood without motion and looked at a little object he held in his hand. Cliff knew, though he could not see, that it was the mockingbird. Its body, for he was sure that it had lost its song forever. Gnut then turned, and without a glance at Cliff, walked back to the ship and again went inside. Hours passed while Cliff waited for some sequel to this surprising happening. Perhaps it was because of his curiosity that his fear of the robot began to lessen. Surely if the mechanism was unfriendly, if he intended him any harm, he would have finished him before, when he had such a perfect opportunity. Cliff began to nerve himself for a quick look inside the port. And a picture; he must remember the picture. He kept forgetting the very reason he was there. It was in the deeper darkness of the false dawn when he got sufficient courage and made the start. He took off his shoes, and in his stockinged feet, his shoes tied together and slung over his shoulder, he moved stiffly but rapidly to a position behind the nearest of the six robot attendants stationed along the wall, then paused for some sign which might indicate that Gnut knew he had moved. Hearing none, he slipped along behind the next robot attendant and paused again. Bolder now, he made in one spurt all the distance to the farthest one, the sixth, fixed just opposite the port of the ship. There he met with a disappointment. No light that he could detect was visible within; there was only darkness and the all-permeating silence. Still, he had better get the picture. He raised his camera, focused it on the dark opening, and gave the film a comparatively long exposure. Then he stood there, at a loss what to do next. As he paused, a peculiar series of muffled noises reached his ears, apparently from within the ship. Animal noises — first scrapings and pantings, punctuated by several sharp clicks, then deep, rough snarls, interrupted by more scrapings and pantings, as if a struggle of some kind were going on. Then suddenly, before Cliff could even decide to run back to the table, a low, wide, dark shape bounded out of the port and immediately turned and grew to the height of a man. A terrible fear swept over Cliff, even before he knew what the shape was. In the next second Gnut appeared in the port and stepped unhesitatingly down the ramp toward the shape. As he advanced it backed slowly away for a few feet; but then it stood its ground, and thick arms rose from its sides and began a loud drumming on its chest, while from its throat came a deep roar of defiance. Only one creature in the world beat its chest and made a sound like that. The shape was a gorilla! And a huge one! |
| 853 |
Gnut kept advancing, and when close, charged forward and grappled with the beast. Cliff would not have guessed that Gnut could move so fast. In the darkness he could not see the details of what happened; all he knew was that the two great shapes, the titanic metal Gnut and the squat but terrifically strong gorilla, merged for a moment with silence on the robot's part and terrible, deep, indescribable roars on the other's; then the two separated, and it was as if the gorilla had been flung back and away. The animal at once rose to its full height and roared deafeningly. Gnut advanced. They closed again, and the separation of before was repeated. The robot continued inexorably, and now the gorilla began to fall back down the building. Suddenly the beast darted at a manlike shape against the wall, and with one rapid side movement dashed the fifth robot attendant to the floor and decapitated it. Tense with fear, Cliff crouched behind his own robot attendant. He thanked Heaven that Gnut was between him and the gorilla and was continuing his advance. The gorilla backed farther, darted suddenly at the next robot in the row, and with strength almost unbelievable picked it from its roots and hurled it at Gnut. With a sharp metallic clang, robot hit robot, and the one of Earth bounced off to one side and rolled to a stop. Cliff cursed himself for it afterward, but again he completely forgot the picture. The gorilla kept falling back down the building, demolishing with terrific bursts of rage every robot attendant that he passed and throwing the pieces at the implacable Gnut. Soon they arrived opposite the table, and Cliff now thanked his stars he had come away. There followed a brief silence. Cliff could not make out what was going on, but he imagined that the gorilla had at last reached the corner of the wing and was trapped. If he was, it was only for a moment. The silence was suddenly shattered by a terrific roar, and the thick, squat shape of the animal came bounding toward Cliff. He came all the way back and turned just between Cliff and the port of the ship. Cliff prayed frantically for Gnut to come back quickly, for there was now only the last remaining robot attendant between him and the madly dangerous brute. Out of the dimness Gnut did appear. The gorilla rose to its full height and again beat its chest and roared its challenge. And then occurred a curious thing. It fell on all fours and slowly rolled over on its side, as if weak or hurt. Then panting, making frightening noises, it forced itself again to its feet and faced the oncoming Gnut. As it waited, its eye was caught by the last robot attendant and perhaps Cliff, shrunk close behind it. With a surge of terrible destructive rage, the gorilla waddled sideward toward Cliff, but this time, even through his panic, he saw that the animal moved with difficulty, again apparently sick o. r severely wounded. He jumped back just in time; the gorilla pulled out the last robot attendant and hurled it violently at Gnut, missing him narrowly. |
| 854 |
That was its last effort. The weakness caught it again; it dropped heavily on one side, rocked back and forth a few times, and fell to twitching. Then it lay still and did not move again. The first faint pale light of the dawn was seeping into the room. From the corner where he had taken refuge, Cliff watched closely the great robot. It seemed to him that he behaved very queerly. He stood over the dead gorilla, looking down at him with what in a human would be called sadness. Cliff saw this clearly; Gnut's heavy greenish features bore a thoughtful, grieving expression new to his experience. For some moments he stood so, then as might a father with his sick child, he leaned over, lifted the great animal in his metal arms and carried it tenderly within the ship. Cliff flew back to the table, suddenly fearful of yet other dangerous and inexplicable happenings. It struck him that he might be safer in the laboratory, and with trembling knees he made his way there and hid in one of the big ovens. He prayed for full daylight. His thoughts were chaos. Rapidly, one after another, his mind churned up the amazing events of the night, but all was mystery; it seemed there could be no rational explanation for them. That mockingbird. The gorilla. Gnut's sad expression and his tenderness. What could account for a fantastic milange like that! Gradually full daylight did come. A long time passed. At last he began to believe he might yet get out of that place of mystery and danger alive. At eight-thirty there were noises at the entrance, and the good sound of human voices came to his ears. He stepped out of the oven and tiptoed to the passageway. The noises stopped suddenly and there was a frightened exclamation and then the sound of running feet, and then silence. Stealthily Cliff sneaked down the narrow way and peeped fearfully around the ship. There Gnut was in his accustomed place, in the identical pose he had taken at the death of his master, brooding sullenly and alone over a space traveler once again closed tight and a room that was a shambles. The entrance doors stood open and, heart in his mouth, Cliff ran out. A few minutes later, safe in his hotel room, completely done in, he sat down for a second and almost at once fell asleep. Later, still in his clothes and still asleep, he staggered over to the bed. He did not wake up till midafternoon. 3 Cliff awoke slowly, at first not realizing that the images tumbling in his head were real memories and not a fantastic dream. It was a recollection of the pictures which brought him to his feet. Hastily he set about developing the film in his camera. Then in his hands was proof that the events of the night were real. Both shots turned out well. The first showed clearly the ramp leading up to the port as he had dimly discerned it from his position behind the table. The second, of the open port as snapped from in front, was a disappointment, for a blank wall just back of the opening cut off all view of the interior. That would account for the fact that no light had escaped from the ship while Gnut was inside. |
| 855 |
It was found on Gnut's arms." "Good Heaven!" Cliff managed to exclaim. "And there's no explanation?" "Not even a theory. It's your big chance, wonder boy." Cliff broke away from Gus, unable to maintain his act any longer. He couldn't decide what to do about his story. The press services would bid heavily for it — with all his pictures — but that would take further action out of his hands. In the back of his mind he wanted to stay in the wing again that night, but — well, he simply was afraid. He'd had a pretty stiff dose, and he wanted very much to remain alive. He walked over and looked a long time at Gnut. No one would ever have guessed that he had moved, or that there had rested on his greenish metal face a look of sadness. Those weird eyes! Cliff wondered if they were really looking at him, as they seemed, recognizing him as the bold intruder of last night. Of what unknown stuff were they made — those materials placed in his eye sockets by one branch of the race of man which all the science of his own could not even serve to disfunction? What was Gnut thinking? What could be the thoughts of a robot — a mechanism of metal poured out of man's clay crucibles? Was he angry at him? Cliff thought not. Gnut had had him, at his mercy — and had walked away. Dared he stay again? Cliff thought perhaps he did. He walked about the room, thinking it over. He felt sure Gnut would move again. A Mikton ray gun would protect him from another gorilla — or fifty of them. He did not yet have the real story. He had come back with two miserable architectural stills! He might have known from the first that he would stay. At dusk that night, armed with his camera and a small Mikton gun, he lay once more under the table of supplies in the laboratory and heard the metal doors of the wing clang to for the night. This time he would get the story — and the pictures. If only no guard was posted inside ! 4 Cliff listened hard for a long time for any sound which might tell him that a guard had been left, but the silence within the wing remained unbroken. He was thankful for that — but not quite completely. The gathering darkness and the realization that he was not irrevocably committed made the thought of a companion not altogether unpleasant. About an hour after it reached maximum darkness he took off his shoes, tied them together and slung them around his neck, down his back, and stole quietly down the passageway to where it opened into the exhibition area. All seemed as it had been the preceding night. Gnut looked an ominous, indistinct shadow at the far end of the room, his glowing red eyes again seemingly right on the spot from which Cliff peeped out. As on the previous night, but even more carefully, Cliff went down on his stomach in the angle of the wall and slowly snaked across to the low platform on which stood the table. Once in its shelter, he fixed his shoes so that they straddled one shoulder, and brought his camera and gun holster around, ready on his breast. This time, he told himself, he would get pictures. |
| 856 |
He settled down to wait, keeping Gnut, in full sight every minute. His vision reached maximum adjustment to the darkness. Eventually he began to feel lonely and a little afraid. Gnut's red-glowing eyes were getting on his nerves; he had to keep assuring himself that the robot would not harm him. He had little doubt but that he himself was being watched. Hours slowly passed. From time to time he heard slight noises at the entrance, on the outside — a guard, perhaps, or maybe curious visitors. At about nine o'clock he saw Gnut move. First his head alone; it turned so that the eyes burned stronger in the direction where Cliff lay. For a moment that was all; then the dark metal form stirred slightly and began moving forward — straight toward him. Cliff had thought he would not be afraid — much — but now his heart stood still. What would happen this time? With amazing silence, Gnut drew nearer, until he towered an ominous shadow over the spot where Cliff lay. For a long time his red eyes burned down on the prone man. Cliff trembled all over; this was worse than the first time. Without having planned it, he found himself speaking to the creature. "You would not hurt me," he pleaded. "I was only curious to see what's going on. It's my job. Can you understand me? I would not harm or bother you. I... I couldn't if I wanted to! Please!" The robot never moved, and Cliff could not guess whether his words had been understood or even heard. When he felt he could not bear the suspense any longer, Gnut reached out and took something from a drawer of the table, or perhaps he put something back in; then he stepped back, turned, and retraced his steps. Cliff was safe! Again the robot had spared him ! Beginning then, Cliff lost much of his fear. He felt sure now that this Gnut would do him no harm. Twice he had had him in his power, and either time he had only looked and quietly moved away. Cliff could not imagine what Gnut had done in the drawer of the table. He watched with the greatest curiosity to see what would happen next. As on the night before, the robot went straight to the end of the ship and made the peculiar sequence of sounds that opened the port, and when the ramp slid out he went inside. After that Cliff was alone in the darkness for a very long time, probably two hours. Not a sound came from the ship. Cliff knew he should sneak up to the port and peep inside, but he could not quite bring himself to do it. With his gun he could handle another gorilla, but if Gnut caught him it might be the end. Momentarily he expected something fantastic to happen — he knew not what; maybe the mockingbird's sweet song again, maybe a gorilla, maybe — anything. What did at last happen once more caught him with complete surprise. He heard a sudden muffled sound, then words — human words — every one familiar. "Gentlemen," was the first, and then there was a very slight pause. "The Smithsonian Institution welcomes you to its new Interplanetary Wing and to the marvelous exhibits at this moment before you." It was the recorded voice of Stillwell! |
| 857 |
Strapped to the limbs about him were three instruments — his infrared viewing magnifier, a radio mike, and an infrared television eye with sound pickup. The first, the viewing magnifier, would allow him to see in the dark with his own eyes, as if by daylight, a magnified image of the robot, and the others would pick up any sights and sounds, including his own remarks, and transmit them to the several broadcast studios which would fling them millions of miles in all directions through space. Never before had a picture man had such an important assignment, probably — certainly not one who forgot to take pictures. But now that was forgotten, and Cliff was quite proud, and ready. Far back in a great circle stood a multitude of the curious — and the fearful. Would the plastic glasstex hold Gnut? If it did not, would he come out thirsting for revenge? Would unimaginable beings come out of the traveler and release him, and perhaps exact revenge? Millions at their receivers were jittery; those in the distance hoped nothing awful would happen, yet they hoped something would, and they were prepared to run. In carefully selected spots not far from Cliff on all sides were mobile ray batteries manned by army units, and in a hollow in back of him, well to his right, there was stationed a huge tank with a large gun. Every weapon was trained on the door of the wing. A row of smaller, faster tanks stood ready fifty yards directly north. Their ray projectors were aimed at the door, but not their guns. The grounds about the building contained only one spot — the hollow where the great tank was — where, by close calculation, a shell directed at the doorway would not cause damage and loss of life to some part of the sprawling capital. Dusk fell; out streamed the last of the army officers, politicians, and other privileged ones; the great metal doors of the wing clanged to and were locked for the night. Soon Cliff was alone, except for the watchers at their weapons scattered around him. Hours passed. The moon came out. From time to time Cliff reported to the studio crew that all was quiet. His unaided eyes could now see nothing of Gnut but the two faint red points of his eyes, but through the magnifier he stood out as clearly as if in daylight from an apparent distance of only ten feet. Except for his eyes, there was no evidence that he was anything but dead and unfunctionable metal. Another hour passed. Now and again Cliff thumbed the levels of his tiny radio-television watch — only a few seconds at a time because of its limited battery. The air was full of Gnut and his own face and his own name, and once the tiny screen showed the tree in which he was then sitting and even, minutely, himself. Powerful infrared long-distance television pickups were even then focused on him from nearby points of vantage. It gave him a funny feeling. Then, suddenly, Cliff saw something and quickly bent his eye to the viewing magnifier. Gnut's eyes were moving; at least the intensity of the light emanating from them varied. |
| 858 |
It was as if two tiny red flashlights were turned from side to side, their beams at each motion crossing Cliffs eyes. Thrilling, Cliff signaled the studios, cut in his pickups, and described the phenomenon. Millions resonated to the excitement in his voice. Could Gnut conceivably break out of that terrible prison ? Minutes passed, the eye flashes continued, but Cliff could discern no movement or attempted movement of the robot's body. In brief snatches he described what he saw. Gnut was clearly alive; there could be no doubt he was straining against the transparent prison in which he had at last been locked fast; but unless he could crack it, no motion should show. Cliff took his eyes from the magnifier — and started. His unaided eye, looking at Gnut shrouded in darkness, saw an astonishing thing not yet visible through his instrument. A faint red glow was spreading over the robot's body. With trembling fingers he readjusted the lens of the television eye, but even as he did so the glow grew in intensity. It looked as if Gnut's body were being heated to incandescence! He described it in excited fragments, for it took most of his attention to keep correcting the lens. Gnut passed from a figure of dull red to one brighter and brighter, clearly glowing now even through the magnifier. And then he moved! Unmistakably he moved! He had within himself somehow the means to raise his own body temperature, and was exploiting the one limitation of the plastic in which he was locked. For glasstex, Cliff now remembered, was a thermoplastic material, one that set by cooling and conversely would soften again with heat. Gnut was melting his way out! In three-word snatches, Cliff described this. The robot became cherry red, the sharp edges of the icelike block rounded, and the whole structure began to sag. The process accelerated. The robot's body moved more widely. The plastic lowered to the crown of his head, then to his neck, then to his waist, which was as far as Cliff could see. His body was free! And then, still cherry-red, he moved forward out of sight! Cliff strained eyes and ears, but caught nothing but the distant roar of the watchers beyond the police lines and a few low, sharp commands from the batteries posted around him. They, too, had heard, and perhaps seen by telescreen, and were waiting. Several minutes passed. There was a sharp, ringing crack; the great metal doors of the wing flew open, and out stepped the metal giant, glowing no longer. He stood stock-still, and his red eyes pierced from side to side through the darkness. Voices out in the dark barked orders and in a twinkling Gnut was bathed in narrow, crisscrossing rays of sizzling, colored light. Behind him the metal doors began to melt, but his great green body showed no change at all. Then the world seemed to come to an end; there was a deafening roar, everything before Cliff seemed to explode in smoke and chaos, his tree whipped to one side so that he was nearly thrown out. Pieces of debris rained down. |
| 859 |
The tank gun had spoken, and Gnut, he was sure, had been hit. Cliff held on tight and peered into the haze. As it cleared he made out a stirring among the debris at the door, and then dimly but unmistakably he saw the great form of Gnut rise to his feet. He got up slowly, turned toward the tank, and suddenly darted toward it in a wide arc. The big gun swung in an attempt to cover him, but the robot sidestepped and then was upon it. As the crew scattered, he destroyed its breech with one blow of his fist, and then he turned and looked right at Cliff. He moved toward him, and in a moment was under the tree. Cliff climbed higher. Gnut put his two arms around the tree and gave a lifting push, and the tree tore out at the roots and fell crashing to its side. Before Cliff could scramble away, the robot had lifted him in his metal hands. Cliff thought his time had come, but strange things were yet in store for him that night. Gnut did not hurt him. He looked at him from arm's length for a moment, then lifted him to a sitting position on his shoulders, legs straddling his neck. Then, holding one ankle, he turned and without hesitation started down the path which led westward away from the building. Cliff rode helpless. Out over the lawns he saw the muzzles of the scattered field pieces move as he moved, Gnut — and himself — their one focus. But they did not fire. Gnut, by placing him on his shoulders, had secured himself against that — Cliff hoped. The robot bore straight toward the Tidal Basin. Most of the field pieces throbbed slowly after. Far back, Cliff saw a dark tide of confusion roll into the cleared area — the police lines had broken. Ahead, the ring thinned rapidly off to the sides; then, from all directions but the front, the tide rolled in until individual shouts and cries could be made out. It came to a stop about fifty yards off, and few people ventured nearer. Gnut paid them no attention, and he no more noticed his burden than he might a fly. His neck and shoulders made Cliff a seat hard as steel, but with the difference that their underlying muscles with each movement flexed, just as would those of a human being. To Cliff, this metal musculature became a vivid wonder. Straight as the flight of a bee, over paths, across lawns and through thin rows of trees Gnut bore the young man, the roar of thousands of people following close. Above droned copters and darting planes, among them police cars with their nerve-shattering sirens. Just ahead lay the still waters of the Tidal Basin, and in its midst the simple marble tomb of the slain ambassador, Klaatu, gleaming black and cold in the light of the dozen searchlights always trained on it at night. Was this a rendezvous with the dead? Without an instant's hesitation, Gnut strode down the bank and entered the water. It rose to his knees, then above his waist, until Cliff's feet were under. Straight through the dark waters for the tomb of Klaatu the robot made his inevitable way. The dark square mass of gleaming marble rose higher as they neared it. |
| 860 |
Hidden lamps suddenly bathed the surroundings with bluish light. He set Cliff down and stood looking at him. The young man already regretted his rash action, but the robot, except for his always unfathomable eyes, did not seem angry. He pointed to a stool in one corner of the room. Cliff quickly obeyed this time and sat meekly, for a while not even venturing to look around. He saw he was in a small laboratory of some kind. Complicated metal and plastic apparatus lined the walls and filled several small tables; he could not recognize or guess the function of a single piece. Dominating the center of the room was a long metal table on whose top lay a large box, much like a coffin on the outside, connected by many wires to a complicated apparatus at the far end. From close above spread a cone of bright light from a many-tubed lamp. One thing, half covered on a nearby table, did look familiar — and very much out of place. From where he sat it seemed to be a briefcase — an ordinary Earthman's briefcase. He wondered. Gnut paid him no attention but, at once, with the narrow edge of a thick tool, sliced the lid off the little box of records. He lifted out the strip of sight-and-sound film and spent fully half an hour adjusting it within the apparatus at the end of the big table. Cliff watched, fascinated, wondering at the skill with which the robot used his tough metal fingers. This done, Gnut worked for a long time over some accessory apparatus on an adjoining table. Then he paused thoughtfully a moment and pushed inward a long rod. A voice came out of the coffin like box — the voice of the slain ambassador. "I am Klaatu," it said, "and this is Gnut." From the recording! — flashed through Cliff's mind. The first and only words the ambassador had spoken. But then, in the very next second he saw that it was not so. There was a man in the box! The man stirred and sat up, and Cliff saw the living face of Klaatu! Klaatu appeared somewhat surprised and spoke quickly in an unknown tongue to Gnut — and Gnut, for the first time in Cliff's experience, spoke himself in answer. The robot's syllables tumbled out as if born of human emotion, and the expression on Klaatu's face changed from surprise to wonder. They talked for several minutes. Klaatu, apparently fatigued, then began to lie down, but stopped midway, for he saw Cliff. Gnut spoke again, at length. Klaatu beckoned Cliff with his hand, and he went to him. "Gnut has told me everything," he said in a low, gentle voice, then looked at Cliff for a moment in silence, on his face a faint, tired smile. Cliff had a hundred questions to ask, but for a moment he hardly dared open his mouth. "But you," he began at last — very respectfully, but with an escaping excitement — "you are not the Klaatu that was in the tomb?" The man's smile faded and he shook his head. "No." He turned to the towering Gnut and said something in his own tongue, and at his words the metal features of the robot twisted as if with pain. Then he turned back to Cliff. |
| 861 |
With the example of Earth before them, with the knowledge that each Settlement had a narrow and unexpandable capacity, procreation had always been under strict control in space. There the immovable needs of arithmetic met the possibly irresistible force of instinct and immovability won. But as the number of Settlements grew, there would come a time when more people would be needed — many more — and the urge to produce them could be unleashed. It would be temporary, of course. No matter how many Settlements there were, they could be filled without effort by any population that could easily double its numbers every thirty-five years, or less. And when the day came when the rate of Settlement formation passed through its inflection point and began to diminish, it might be far harder to stuff the djinn back into its bottle than it had been to release it. Who would see this well in advance, and prepare for it once Pitt himself was gone? And there was Erythro, the planet that Rotor orbited in such a way that huge Megas and ruddy Nemesis rose and set in an intricate pattern. Erythro! That had been a question from the beginning. Pitt remembered well the early days of their entry into the Nemesian System. The limited intricacy of the planetary family of Nemesis had exposed itself little by little, as Rotor raced toward the red dwarf star. Megas had been discovered at a distance of four million kilometers from Nemesis, only one fifteenth the distance of Mercury from the Sun of the Solar System. Megas obtained about the same amount of energy as Earth got from its Sun, but with a lesser intensity of visible light and a higher intensity of infrared. Megas, however, was clearly not habitable, even at first glance. It was a gas giant, with one side always facing Nemesis. Both its rotation and revolution were twenty days long. The perpetual night on half of Megas cooled it only moderately, since its own interior heat rose to the surface. The perpetual day on the other half was unendurably hot. That Megas kept its atmosphere under this heat was entirely because, with its mass higher and its radius smaller than that of Jupiter, its surface gravity was fifteen times that of Jupiter, and forty times that of Earth. Nor did Nemesis have any other sizable planet. But then, as Rotor drew closer, and Megas could be seen more clearly, the situation was altered again. It was Eugenia Insigna who brought Pitt the news. It was not that she had made the discovery herself. It had merely showed up on the computer-enhanced photographs, and had been brought to Insigna's attention since she was Chief Astronomer. With considerable excitement, she had brought it to Pitt in his Commissioner's chambers. She had begun simply enough, keeping her voice level, though it was shaking with emotion. "Megas has a satellite," she said. Pitt had lifted his eyebrows ever so slightly, but then he said, "Isn't that to be expected? The gas giants of the Solar System have anywhere up to a score of satellites." "Of course, Janus, but this is not an ordinary satellite. |
| 862 |
She still had no great urge to travel in space. It was Marlene who was the driving force behind this trip. It was she who, independently, had seen Pitt and persuaded him to succumb to her strange form of blackmail. And it was she who was truly excited, with this odd compulsion of hers to visit Erythro. Insigna could not understand that compulsion and viewed it as another part of her daughter's unique mental and emotional complexity. Still, whenever Insigna quailed at the thought of leaving safe, small, comfortable Rotor for the vast empty world of Erythro, so strange and menacing, and fully six hundred and fifty thousand kilometers away (nearly twice as far away as Rotor had been from Earth), it was Marlene's excitement that reinvigorated her. The ship that would take them to Erythro was neither graceful nor beautiful. It was serviceable. It was one of a small fleet of rockets that acted as ferries, blasting up from the stodgy gravitational pull of Erythro, or coming down without daring to give in to it by even a trifle, and, either way, working one's way through the cushiony, windy, unpredictability of an untamed atmosphere. Insigna didn't think the trip would be pleasurable. Through most of it they would be weightless and two solid days of weightlessness would, no doubt, be tedious. Marlene's voice broke into her reverie. "Come on, Mother, they're waiting for us. The baggage is all checked and everything." Insigna moved forward. Her last uneasy thought as she passed through the airlock was — predictably — But why was Janus Pitt so willing to let us go? 25. Siever Genarr ruled a world as large as Earth. Or, to be more accurate perhaps, he ruled, directly, a domed region that covered nearly three square kilometers and was slowly growing. The rest of the world, however, nearly five hundred million square kilometers of land and sea, was unoccupied by human beings. It was also occupied by no other living things above the microscopic scale. So if a world is considered as being ruled by the multicellular life-forms that occupied it, the hundreds who lived and worked in the domed region were the rulers, and Siever Genarr ruled over them. Genarr was not a large man, but his strong features gave him an impressive look. When he was young, this had made him look older than his age — but that had evened itself out now that he was nearly fifty. His nose was long and his eyes somewhat pouchy. His hair was in the first stages of grizzle. His voice, however, was a musical and resonant baritone. (He had once thought of the stage as a career, but his appearance doomed him to occasional character roles, and his talents as an administrator took precedence.) It was those talents — partly — that had kept him in the Erythro Dome for ten years, watching it grow from an uncertain three-room structure to the expansive mining and research station it had now become. The Dome had its disadvantages. Few people remained long. There were shifts, since almost all those who came there considered themselves in exile and wished, more or less constantly, to return to Rotor. |
| 863 |
And most found the pinkish light of Nemesis either threatening or gloomy, even though the light inside the Dome was every bit as bright and homelike as that on Rotor. It had its advantages, too. Genarr was removed from the hurly-burly of Rotorian politics, which seemed more ingrown and meaningless each year. Even more important, he was removed from Janus Pitt, whose views he generally — and uselessly — opposed. Pitt had been strenuously opposed to any settlement on Erythro from the start — even to Rotor orbiting around Erythro. Here, at least, Pitt had been defeated by overwhelming public opinion, but he saw to it that the Dome was generally starved for funds and that its growth was slowed. If Genarr had not successfully developed the Dome as a source of water for Rotor — far cheaper than it could be obtained from the asteroids — Pitt might have crushed it. In general, though, Pitt's principle of ignoring the Dome's existence as far as possible meant that he rarely attempted to interfere with Genarr's administrative procedures — which suited Genarr right down to Erythro's damp soil. It came as a surprise to him, then, that Pitt should have bothered to inform him personally of the arrival of a pair of newcomers, instead of allowing the information to show up in the routine paperwork. Pitt had, indeed, discussed the matter in detail, in his usual clipped and arbitrary manner that invited no discussion, or even comment, and the conversation had been shielded, too. It came as an even greater surprise that one of the people coming to Erythro was Eugenia Insigna. Once, years before the Leaving, they had been friends, but then, after their happy college days (Genarr remembered them wistfully as rather romantic), Eugenia had gone to Earth for her graduate studies and had returned to Rotor with an Earthman. Genarr had scarcely seen her — except once or twice, at a distance — since she had married Crile Fisher. And when she and Fisher had separated, just before the Leaving, Genarr had had work of his own and so had she — and it never occurred to either to renew old ties. Genarr had, perhaps, thought of it occasionally, but Eugenia was quite apparently sunk in sorrow, with an infant daughter to raise, and he was reluctant to intrude. Then he was sent to Erythro and that ended even the possibility of renewal. He had periodic vacation time on Rotor, but he was never at ease there any longer. Some old Rotorian friendships remained, but only in lukewarm fashion. Now Eugenia was coming with her daughter. Genarr, at the moment, didn't remember the girl's name — if he had ever known it. Certainly, he had never seen her. The daughter should be fifteen by now, and he wondered, with a queer little interior tremble, if she was beginning to look anything like the young Eugenia had. Genarr looked out his office window with an almost surreptitious air. He had grown so used to Erythro Dome that he no longer saw it with a critical eye. It was the home of working people of both sexes — adults, no children. |
| 864 |
Shift workers, signed up for a period of weeks or possibly months, sometimes returning eventually for another shift, sometimes not. Except for himself and four others who, for one reason or another, had learned to prefer the Dome, there were no permanents. There was no one to take pride in it as an ordinary abode. It was kept clean and orderly as a matter of necessity, but there was also an air of artificiality about it. It was too much a matter of lines and arcs, planes and circles. It lacked irregularity, lacked the chaos of permanent life, where a room, or even just a desk, had adjusted itself to the hollows and waverings of a particular personality. There was himself, of course. His desk and his room reflected his own angular and planar person. That, perhaps, might be another reason he was at home in the Erythro Dome. The shape of his inner spirit matched its spare geometry. But what would Eugenia Insigna think of it? (He was rather pleased she had resumed her maiden name.) If she were as he remembered her, she would revel in irregularity, in the unexpected touch of frippery, for all she was an astronomer. Or had she changed? Did people ever change, essentially? Had Crile Fisher's desertion embittered her, twisted her Genarr scratched the hair at his temple where it had gone distinctly gray and thought that these speculations were useless and time-wasting. He would see Eugenia soon enough, for he had left word that she was to be brought to him as soon as she had arrived. Or should he have gone to greet her in person? No! He had argued that with himself half a dozen times already. He couldn't look too anxious; it wouldn't suit the dignity of his position. But then Genarr thought that that wasn't the reason at all. He didn't want to make her uneasy; he didn't want her to think he was still the same uncomfortable and incompetent admirer who had retreated in so shambling a manner before the tall and brooding good looks of the Earthman. And Eugenia had never looked at him again after she had seen Crile — never seriously looked at him. Genarr's eyes scanned the message from Janus Pitt — dry, condensed, as his messages always were, and with that indefinable feel of authority behind it, as though the possibility of disagreement were not merely unheard of — but actually unthought of. And he now noted that Pitt spoke more forcefully of the young daughter than of the mother. There was especially Pitt's statement that the daughter had expressed a deep interest in Erythro, and if she wished to explore its surface, she was to be allowed to. Now why was that? 26. And there she was. Fourteen years older than at the time of the Leaving. Twenty years older than she was in her pre-Crile youth, the day they had gone into Farming Area C and climbed the levels into low gravity, and she had laughed when he tried a low somersault and had turned too far and had come down on his belly. (Actually, he could easily have hurt himself, for though the sensation of weight decreased, mass and inertia did not, and damage could follow. |
| 865 |
He was losing track. Perhaps it was all getting to be too much for him.) Whatever the number, Adelia was the most pleasant Settlement Crile had visited. Not perhaps physically. Rotor had been an older Settlement, one that had managed to work itself into an assembly of traditions, so to speak. There was an efficiency about it, a sense of each person knowing his place exactly, being satisfied with it, and working away at it successfully. Of course, Tessa was here on Adelia — Tessa Anita Wendel. Crile had not pursued matters there yet, perhaps because Tanayama's characterization of him as irresistible to women had shaken him. However much it might have been meant as humor (or as sarcasm), it forced him, almost against his will, to go slowly. Producing a fiasco would seem doubly bad in the eyes of someone who believed him, however insincerely, to have a way with women. It was two weeks after Fisher had settled himself into the Settlement before he managed to see her. It was always a source of wonder to him that on any Settlement one could always manage to arrange to get a view of anyone. Not all his experience had accustomed him to the smallness of a Settlement, to the fewness of its population, to the manner in which everyone knew everyone else in his or her social circle — everyone else — and almost everyone else outside that circle, too. When he did see her, however, Tessa Wendel turned out to be rather impressive. Tanayama's description of her as middle-aged and as twice-divorced — the quirk of his aged lips as he said so, as though he were knowingly setting Fisher an unpleasant task — had built a picture in Fisher's mind of a harsh woman, hard-faced, with a nervous twitch, perhaps, and an attitude toward men that was either cynical or hungry. Tessa did not seem at all like this from the moderate distance at which he first saw her. She was almost as tall as he was and brunette, with her hair sleeked down. She looked quite alert and she smiled easily — he could tell that. Her clothes were refreshingly simple, as though she went out of her way to eschew ornament. She had kept herself slim and her figure was still surprisingly youthful. Fisher found himself wondering why she was twice-divorced. He was ready to assume that she had tired of the men, rather than the other way around, even though common sense told him that incompatibility could strike against all odds. It was necessary to be at some social function at which she would also be present. His being an Earthman interposed a small difficulty, but there were people on every Settlement who were, to some extent or other, in Earth's pay. One of them would surely see to it that Fisher would be "launched," to use the term most Settlements applied to the ritual. The time came, then, when he and Wendel were facing each other and she gazed at him thoughtfully, her eyes making a slow sweep downward, then upward again, followed by the inevitable, "You're from Earth, aren't you, Mr. Fisher." "Yes, I am, Dr. |
| 866 |
Some said it was merely for exploration, some for the establishment of an Earth colony on Mars in order to bypass the few Settlements in orbit around the planet; and some for the purpose, eventually, of establishing an outpost on some sizable asteroid that no Settlement had yet claimed. What the ship actually carried in its cargo hold was the Superluminal and the crew that was to propel her to the stars. Tessa Wendel, even though she had been planet-bound for eight years, took the space experience calmly, as any Settler by birth would naturally do. Spaceships were far more like Settlements in principle than they were like the planet Earth. And because of that, Crile Fisher, though he had been on many a spaceflight before, was a bit uneasy. This time something more than the unnaturalness of space contributed to the tension on board the cargo ship. Fisher said, "I can't endure the waiting, Tessa. It's taken us years to reach this point and the Superluminal is ready and we still wait." Wendel regarded him thoughtfully. She had never intended to get this involved with him. She had wanted moments of relaxation to rest a mind overcome with the complexity of the project, so that it might return to work refreshed and keener. That was what she had intended; what she had ended up with was something much more. Now she found herself helplessly tied to him, so that his problems had become hers. The years of his waiting would surely come to nothing, and she worried about the despair that would follow his inevitable disappointment. She had tried to dash cold water on his dreams judiciously, tried to cool down his overheated anticipation of a reunion with his daughter, but she had not succeeded. If anything, over this past year, he had grown more optimistic about the possibility for no obvious reason — at least, none he would explain to her. Tessa was finally satisfied (and relieved) that it was not his wife Crile was looking for, but only his daughter. To be sure, she had never understood this longing for a daughter he had last seen as an infant, but he had volunteered no explanation and she had not wanted to probe the matter. What was the use? She was certain that his daughter was not alive, that nothing on Rotor was alive. If Rotor was there near the Neighbor Star, it was a giant tomb drifting in space, wandering forever — and undetectable except by incredible coincidence. Crile Fisher would have to be kept steady and functioning once that inevitable prospect became clearly apparent reality. Tessa said cajolingly, "There's only a two-month wait left — at most. Since we've waited for years, another two months won't hurt." "It's the waiting for years that makes even two months more unbearable," muttered Fisher. "Tell yourself otherwise, Crile," said Wendel. "Learn to bow to necessity. The Global Congress simply won't allow us to go any sooner. The Settlements have their eyes on us, and there's no way of being sure that they all accept the notion that we're heading for Mars. |
| 867 |
It must be even worse on Earth, with its eight billion people, and trillions of animals, and its thunderstorms and wild surges of water from the sea and sky. She had once tried to listen to a recording entitled "Noises of Earth," had winced at it, and had quickly had enough. But here on Erythro, there was a wonderful silence. Marlene came to the creek, and the water moved past her with a soft bubbly sound. She picked up a jagged pebble and tossed it into the water and there was a small splash. Sounds were not forbidden on Erythro; they were merely doled out as occasional adornments that served to make the surrounding silence more precious. She stamped her foot on the soft clay at the creek's edge. She heard a small dull thump, and there was the vague impression of a footprint. She bent down, cupped some water in her hand, and tossed it over the soil in front of her. It moistened and darkened in spots, crimson showing against pink. She added more water and finally placed her right shoe on the dark spot, pressing down. When she lifted her shoe, there was a deeper footprint there. There were occasional rocks in the creek bed and she used them as stepping-stones to cross the water. Marlene kept on, walking vigorously, swinging her arms, taking in deep breaths of air. She knew very well that the oxygen percentage was somewhat lower than it was on Rotor. If she ran, she would quickly grow tired, but she lacked the impulse to run. If she ran, she would use up her world more rapidly. She wanted to look at everything! She looked back and the mound of the Dome was visible, especially the bubble that housed the astronomical instruments. That irritated her. She wanted to be far enough away so that she could turn around and see the horizon as a perfect — if irregular — circle, with no intrusion of any sign of humanity (except herself) anywhere. (Should she call the Dome? Should she tell her mother she would be out of sight for a little while? No, they would just argue. They could receive her carrier wave. They would be able to tell that she was alive, well, and moving around. If they called her, she decided, she would ignore them. Really! They must leave her to herself.) Her eyes were adjusting to the pinkness of Nemesis and of the land around her in every direction. It was not merely pink; it was all in darks and lights, in purples and oranges, almost yellows in some places. It time, it would become a whole new palette of colors to her heightened senses, as variegated as Rotor, but more soothing. What would happen if someday people settled on Erythro, introduced life, built cities? Would they spoil it? Or would they have learned from Earth and would they go about it in a different way, taking this new untouched world and making it into something close to their heart's desire? Whose heart's desire? That was the problem. Different people would have different ideas, and they would quarrel with each other and pursue irreconcilable ends. Would it be better to leave Erythro empty? |
| 868 |
Would that be right when people might enjoy it so? Marlene knew well that she didn't want to leave it. It warmed her, being on this world. She didn't know quite why, but it felt more like home than Rotor ever had. Was it some dim atavistic memory of Earth? Was there a feeling for a huge endless world in her genes; a longing that a small, artificial, turning city-in-space could not fulfill? How could that be? Earth was surely different from Erythro in every possible way but the similarity of size. And if Earth were in her genes, why wouldn't it be in the genes of every human being? But there must be some explanation. Marlene shook her head as though to clear it and whirled around and around as if she were in the midst of endless space. Strange that Erythro didn't seem barren. On Rotor, you could see acres of grain and orchards of fruit trees, and a haze of green and amber, and the straight-line irregularity of human structures. Here on Erythro, however, you saw only the rolling ground, interspersed with rocks of all sizes, as though strewn carelessly by some giant hand-strange, brooding silent shapes, with rivulets of water, here and there, flowing around and among them. And no life at all if you didn't count the myriads of tiny germ-like cells that kept the atmosphere full of oxygen, thanks to the energy supply of Nemesis' red light. And Nemesis, like any red dwarf, would continue to pour out its careful supply of energy for a couple of hundred billion years, hoarding its energy and seeing to it that Erythro and its tiny prokaryotes were warm and comfortable through all that time. Long after Earth's Sun had died and other bright stars, born still later, had also died, N emesis would shine on unchanged, and Erythro would roll about Megas unchanged, and the prokaryotes would live and die, also essentially unchanged. Surely human beings would have no right to come to this unchanging world and change it. Yet if she were alone on Erythro, she would need food — and companionship. She might return to the Dome now and then for supplies, or to refresh a need to see other people, but she could still spend most of her time alone with Erythro. But would not others follow? How could she prevent them? And with others, no matter how few, would not Eden inevitably be ruined? Wasn't it being ruined because she herself had entered Eden — only she? "No!" She shouted it. She shouted it loudly in a sudden eager experiment to see if she could make the alien atmosphere tremble and force it to carry words to her ears. She heard her own voice, but in the flat terrain there were no echoes. Her shout was gone as soon as it sounded. She whirled again. The Dome was just a thin shadow on the horizon. It could almost be ignored, but not quite. She wished it was not visible at all. She wanted nothing in view but herself and Erythro. She heard the faint sigh of the wind, and knew it had picked up speed. It was not strong enough to feel, and the temperature hadn't dropped, nor was it unpleasant. |
| 869 |
When would some Settlement decide to follow Rotor's lead? It had to come someday. With Nemesis inexorably moving in the direction of the Sun, it would eventually reach that point — still far distant, of course, but close enough — at which the people of the Solar System would have to be blind not to see it. Pitt's computer, with the aid of a programmer who was convinced he was working out a problem of academic interest only, had estimated that by the end of a thousand years, the discovery of Nemesis would be inevitable, and that the Settlements would begin to disperse. Pitt had then put the question: Would the Settlements come to Nemesis? The answer was no. By that time, hyper-assistance would be far more efficient, far cheaper. The Settlements would know more about the nearer stars — which of them had planets, and what kind. They would not bother with a red dwarf star, but would head out for the Sun-like stars. And that would leave Earth itself, which would be desperate. Afraid of space, clearly degenerate already, and sinking farther into slime and misery as a thousand years passed and the doom of Nemesis became apparent, what would they do? They could not undertake long trips. They were Earthpeople. Surfacebound. They would have to wait for Nemesis to get reasonably close. They could not hope to go anywhere else. Pitt had the vision of a ramshackle world trying to find security in the more tightly held system of Nemesis, trying to find refuge in a star with a system built tightly enough together to hold in place while it was destroying that of the Sun it passed. It was a terrible scenario, and yet inevitable. Why could not Nemesis have been receding from the Sun? How everything would be changed. The discovery of Nemesis would have become somewhat less likely with time and, if the discovery came to pass, Nemesis would become ever less desirable — and less possible — as a place of refuge. If it were receding, Earth would not even need a refuge. But that was not the way it was. The Earthmen would come; ragtag degenerating Earthmen of every variety of makeshift and abnormal culture, flooding in. What could the Rotorians do but destroy them while they were still in space? But would they have a Janus Pitt to show them that there was no choice but that? Would they have Janus Pitts, between now and then, to make sure that Rotor had the weapons and the resolution to prepare for this and to do it when the time came? But the computer's analysis was, after all, a deceitfully optimistic one. The discovery of N emesis by the Solar System must come about within a thousand years, said the computer. But how much within? What if the discovery came tomorrow? What if it had come three years ago? Might some Settlement, groping for the nearest star, knowing nothing useful about farther ones, be following in Rotor's trail now? Each day, Pitt woke up wondering: Is this the day? Why was this misery reserved for him? Why did everyone else sleep quietly in the lap of eternity, while only he himself was left to deal each day with the possibility of a kind of doom? |
| 870 |
He had done something about it, of course. He had set up a Scanning Service throughout the asteroid belt, a body whose function it was to supervise the automated receptors that constantly swept the sky, and to detect at as great a distance as possible the copious wasteenergy disposal of an approaching Settlement. It had taken some time to set it all up properly, but for a dozen years now, every scrap of dubious information had been followed up, and, every once in a while, something seemed sufficiently questionable to be referred to Pitt. And every time it happened, it set off the clanging of an alarm bell in Pitt's head. It turned out always to be nothing — so far — and the initial relief was always followed by a kind of rage against the Scanners. If anything was uncertain, they washed their hands of it, let it go, turned it over to Pitt. Let him deal with it, let him suffer, let him make the hard decisions. It was at this point that Pitt's self-pity became lachrymose, and he would begin to stir uneasily at the possibility that he might be showing weakness. There was this one, for instance. Pitt fingered the report that his computer had uncoded, and that had inspired this mental self-pitying survey of his own continuous, unbearable, and under-appreciated service to the Rotorian people. This was the first report that had been referred to him in four months, and it seemed to him that it was of minimal importance. A suspicious energy source was approaching, but allowing for its probable distance, it was an unusually small source — a smaller source by some four orders of magnitude than one would expect of a Settlement. It was a source so small that it was all but inseparable from noise. They might have spared him this. The report that it was of a peculiar wavelength pattern that seemed to make it of human origin was ridiculous. How could they tell anything about a source so weak — except that it was not a Settlement, and therefore could not be of human origin, whatever the wavelength pattern? Those idiot Scanners must not annoy me in this fashion, thought Pitt. He tossed the report aside petulantly, and picked up the latest report from Ranay D' Aubisson. That girl Marlene did not have the Plague, even yet. She madly persisted in putting herself in danger in more and more elaborate ways — and yet remained unharmed. Pitt sighed. Perhaps it didn't matter. The girl seemed to want to remain on Erythro, and if she remained, that might be as good as having her come down with the Plague. In fact, it would force Eugenia Insigna to stay on Erythro, too, and he would be rid of both of them. To be sure, he would feel safer if D' Aubisson, rather than Genarr, were in charge of the Dome and could oversee both mother and daughter. That would have to be arranged in the near future in some way that would not make Genarr a martyr. Would it be safe to make him Commissioner of New Rotor? That would certainly rate as a promotion and he would be unlikely to refuse the position, especially since, in theory, it would place him on an even rank with Pitt himself. |
| 871 |
How odd, thought Marlene. This giant life-form must never, before the coming of Rotor, have known that anything live existed other than itself. Her questions and sensations did not have to exist entirely in her mind. Erythro would rise before her sometimes, like thin gray smoke, consolidating into a wraithlike human figure wavering at the edges. There was always, about it, a flowing feeling. She could not actually see that, but she sensed, beyond doubt, that millions of invisible cells were leaving each second and immediately being replaced by others. No one prokaryote cell could exist for long out of its water film, so that each was only evanescently part of the figure, but the figure itself was as permanent as it wished to be, and never lost its identity. Erythro did not take Aurinel's form again. It had gathered, without being told, that that was disturbing. Its appearance was neutral now, changing slightly with the vagaries of Marlene's own thought. Erythro could follow the delicate changes of her mind pattern far better, she decided, than she herself could, and the figure adjusted to that, looking more like some figure in her mind's eye at one moment, and then as she tried to focus on it and identify it, it would shift gently into something else. Occasionally, she could catch glimpses: the curve of her mother's cheek, Uncle Siever's strong nose, bits of the girls and boys she had met at school. It was an interactive symphony. It was not so much a conversation between them as a mental ballet she could not describe, something that was infinitely soothing, infinite in variety — partly changing appearance — partly changing voice — partly changing thought. It was a conversation in so many dimensions that the possibility of going back to communication that consisted only of speech left her feeling flat, lifeless. Her gift of sensing by body language flowered into something she had never imagined earlier. Thoughts could be exchanged far more swiftly — and deeply — than by the coarse crudeness of speech. Erythro explained — filled her, rather — with the shock of encountering other minds. Minds. Plural. One more might have been grasped easily. Another world. Another mind. But to encounter many minds, crowding on each other, each different, overlapping in small space. Unthinkable. The thoughts that permeated Marlene's mind as Erythro expressed itself could be expressed only distantly and unsatisfactorily in words. Behind those words, overflowing and drowning them, were the emotions, the feelings, the neuronic vibrations that shattered Erythro into a rearrangement of concepts. It had experimented with the minds — felt them. Not felt as human beings would mean "felt," but something else entirely that could be approached very distantly by that human word and concept. And some of the minds crumpled, decayed, became unpleasant. Erythro ceased to feel minds at random, but sought out minds that would withstand the contact. "And you found me?" said Marlene. "I found you." "But why? |
| 872 |
Why did you look for me?" she asked eagerly. The figure wavered and turned smokier. "Just to find you." It was no answer. "Why do you want me to be with you?" The figure started to fade and the thought was a fugitive one. "Just to be with me." And it was gone. Only its image was gone. Marlene felt its protection still, its warm enclosure. But why had it disappeared? Had she displeased it with her questions? She heard a sound. On an empty world it is possible to catalogue the sounds briefly, for there aren't many. There is the noise of flowing water, and the more delicate moan of blowing air. There are the predictable noises you make yourself, whether the falling of a footstep, the rustle of clothing, or the whistle of breath. Marlene heard something that was none of these, and turned in the direction of it. Over the rocky outcropping on her left, there appeared the head of a man. Her first thought, of course, was that it was someone from the Dome who had come to get her, and she felt a surge of anger. Why would they still be searching for her? She would refuse to wear a wave-emitter from now on, and they would then have no way of locating her except by blind search. But she did not recognize the face and surely she had met everyone in the Dome by now. She might not know the individual names or anything about them, but she would know, when she saw anyone from the Dome, that she had seen that face before. She had not seen this new face anywhere in the Dome. Those eyes were staring at her. The mouth was a little open, as if the person were panting. And then whoever it was was topping the rise and running to her. She faced him. The protection she felt around her was strong. She was not afraid. He stopped ten feet away, staring, leaning forward as though he had reached a barrier he could not penetrate, one that deprived him of the ability to advance farther. Finally, he said in a strangled voice, "Roseanne!" 89. Marlene stared at him, observing carefully. His micro-movements were eager and radiated a sense of ownership: possession, closeness,... mine, mine, mine. She took a step backward. How was that possible? Why should he — A dim memory of a holoimage she had once seen when she was a little girl And finally, she could deny it no more. However impossible it sounded, however unimaginable She huddled within the protective blanket and said, "Father?" He rushed at her as though he wanted to seize her in his arms and she stepped away again. He paused, swaying, then put one hand to his forehead as though fighting dizziness. He said, "Marlene. I meant to say Marlene." He pronounced it incorrectly, Marlene noticed. Two syllables. But that was right for him. How would he know? A second man came up and stood next to him. He had straight black hair, a wide face, narrow eyes, a sallow complexion. Marlene had never seen a man who quite looked like him. She gaped a little and had to make an effort to close her mouth. The second man said to the first in a soft incredulous voice. |
| 873 |
Andrew Harlan stepped into the kettle. Its sides were perfectly round and it fit snugly inside a vertical shaft composed of widely spaced rods that shimmered into an unseeable haze six feet above Harlan's head. Harlan set the controls and moved the smoothly working starting lever. The kettle did not move. Harlan did not expect it to. He expected no movement; neither up nor down, left nor right, forth nor back. Yet the spaces between the rods had melted into a gray blankness which was solid to the touch, though nonetheless immaterial for all that. And there was the little stir in his stomach, the faint (psychosomatic?) touch of dizziness, that told him that all the kettle contained, including himself, was rushing upwhen through Eternity. He had boarded the kettle in the 575th Century, the base of operations assigned him two years earlier. At the time the 575th had been the farthest upwhen he had ever traveled. Now he was moving upwhen to the 2456th Century. Under ordinary circumstances he might have felt a little lost at the prospect. His native Century was in the far downwhen, the 95th Century, to be exact. The 95th was a Century stiffly restrictive of atomic power, faintly rustic, fond of natural wood as a structural material, exporters of certain types of distilled potables to nearly everywhen and importers of clover seed. Although Harlan had not been in the 95th since he entered special training and became a Cub at the age of fifteen, there was always that feeling of loss when one moved outwhen from "home." At the 2456th he would be nearly two hundred forty millennia from his birthwhen and that is a sizable distance even for a hardened Eternal. Under ordinary circumstances all this would be so. But right now Harlan was in poor mood to think of anything but the fact that his documents were heavy in his pocket and his plan heavy on his heart. He was a little frightened, a little tense, a little confused. It was his hands acting by themselves that brought the kettle to the proper halt at the proper Century. Strange that a Technician should feel tense or nervous about anything. What was it that Educator Yarrow had once said: "Above all, a Technician must be dispassionate. The Reality Change he initiates may affect the lives of as many as fifty billion people. A million or more of these may be so drastically affected as to be considered new individuals. Under these conditions, an emotional make-up is a distinct handicap." Harlan put the memory of his teacher's dry voice out of his mind with an almost savage shake of his head. In those days he had never imagined that he himself would have the peculiar talent for that very position. But emotion had come upon him after all. Not for fifty billion people. What in Time did he care for fifty billion people? There was just one. One person. He became aware that the kettle was stationary and with the merest pause to pull his thoughts together, put himself into the cold, impersonal frame of mind a Technician must have, he stepped out. |
| 874 |
The kettle he left, of course, was not the same as the one he had boarded, in the sense that it was not composed of the same atoms. He did not worry about that any more than any Eternal would. To concern oneself with the mystique of Time-travel, rather than with the simple fact of it, was the mark of the Cub and newcomer to Eternity. He paused again at the infinitely thin curtain of non-Space and nonTime which separated him from Eternity in one way and from ordinary Time in another. This would be a completely new section of Eternity for him. He knew about it in a rough way, of course, having checked upon it in the Temporal Handbook. Still, there was no substitute for actual appearance and he steeled himself for the initial shock of adjustment. He adjusted the controls, a simple matter in passing into Eternity (and a very complicated one in passing into Time, a type of passage which was correspondingly less frequent). He stepped through the curtain and found himself squinting at the brilliance. Automatically he threw up his hand to shield his eyes. Only one man faced him. At first Harlan could see him only blurrily. The man said, "I am Sociologist Kantor Voy. I imagine you are Technician Harlan." Harlan nodded and said, "Father Time! Isn't this sort of ornamentation adjustable?" Voy looked about and said tolerantly, "You mean the molecular films?" "I certainly do," said Harlan. The Handbook had mentioned them, but had said nothing of such an insane riot of light reflection. Harlan felt his annoyance to be quite reasonable. The 2456th Century was matter-oriented, as most Centuries were, so he had a right to expect a basic compatibility from the very beginning. It would have none of the utter confusion (for anyone born matter-oriented) of the energy vortices of the 300's, or the field dynamics of the 600's. In the 2456th, to the average Eternal's comfort, matter was used for everything from walls to tacks. To be sure, there was matter and matter. A member of an energyoriented Century might not realize that. To him all matter might seem minor variations on a theme that was gross, heavy, and barbaric. To matter-oriented Harlan, however, there was wood, metal (subdivisions, heavy and light), plastic, silicates, concrete, leather, and so on. But matter consisting entirely of mirrors! That was his first impression of the 2456th. Every surface reflected and glinted light. Everywhere was the illusion of complete smoothness; the effect of a molecular film. And in the ever-repeated reflection of himself, of Sociologist Voy, of everything he could see, in scraps and wholes, in all angles, there was confusion. Garish confusion and nausea! "I'm sorry," said Voy, "it's the custom of the Century, and the Section assigned to it finds it good practice to adopt the customs where practical. You get used to it after a time." Voy walked rapidly upon the moving feet of another Voy, upside down beneath the floor, who matched him stride for stride. He reached to move a hair-contact indicator down a spiral scale to point of origin. |
| 875 |
The reflections died; extraneous light faded. Harlan felt his world settle. "If you'll come with me now," said Voy. Harlan followed through empty corridors that, Harlan knew, must moments ago have been a riot of made light and reflection, up a ramp, through an anteroom, into an office. In all the short journey no human being had been visible. Harlan was so used to that, took it so for granted, that he would have been surprised, almost shocked, if a glimpse of a human figure hurrying away had caught his eyes. No doubt the news had spread that a Technician was coming through. Even Voy kept his distance and when, accidentally, Harlan's hand had brushed Voy's sleeve, Voy shrank away with a visible start. Harlan was faintly surprised at the touch of bitterness he felt at all this. He had thought the shell he had grown about his soul was thicker, more efficiently insensitive than that. If he was wrong, if his shell had worn thinner, there could only be one reason for that. Noys! Sociologist Kantor Voy leaned forward toward the Technician in what seemed a friendly enough fashion, but Harlan noted automatically that they were seated on opposite sides of the long axis of a fairly large table. Voy said, "I am pleased to have a Technician of your reputation interest himself in our little problem here." "Yes," said Harlan with the cold impersonality people would expect of him. "It has its points of interest." (Was he impersonal enough? Surely his real motives must be apparent, his guilt be spelled out in beads of sweat on his forehead.) He removed from an inner pocket the foiled summary of the projected Reality Change. It was the very copy which had been sent to the Allwhen Council a month earlier. Through his relationship with Senior Computer Twissell (the Twissell, himself) Harlan had had little trouble in getting his hands on it. Before unrolling the foil, letting it peel off onto the table top where it would be held by a soft paramagnetic field, Harlan paused a split moment. The molecular film that covered the table was subdued but was not zero. The motion of his arm fixed his eye and for an instant the reflection of his own face seemed to stare somberly up at him from the table top. He was thirty-two, but he looked older. He needed no one to tell him that. It might be partly his long face and dark eyebrows over darker eyes that gave him the lowering expression and cold glare associated with the caricature of the Technician in the minds of all Eternals. It might be just his own realization that he was a Technician. But then he flicked the foil out across the table and turned to the matter at hand. "I am not a Sociologist, sir." Voy smiled. "That sounds formidable. When one begins by expressing lack of competence in a given field, it usually implies that a flat opinion in that field will follow almost immediately." "No," said Harlan, "not an opinion. Just a request. I wonder if you won't look over this summary and see if you haven't made a small mistake somewhere here." Voy looked instantly grave. |
| 876 |
Harlan's first assignments were small and under close direction, but he sharpened his ability on the honing strap of experience in a dozen Centuries through a dozen Reality Changes. In his fifth year as Observer he was given a Senior's rating in the field and assigned to the 482nd. For the first time he would be working unsupervised, and knowledge of that fact robbed him of some of his self-assurance when he first reported to the Computer in charge of the Section. That was Assistant Computer Hobbe Finge, whose pursed, suspicious mouth and frowning eyes seemed ludicrous in such a face as his. He had a round button of a nose, two larger buttons of cheeks. He needed only a touch of red and a fringe of white hair to be converted into the picture of the Primitive myth of St. Nicholas. ( — or Santa Claus or Kriss Kringle. Harlan knew all three names. He doubted if one Eternal out of a hundred thousand had heard of any one of them. Harlan took a secret, shamefaced pride in this sort of arcane knowledge. From his earliest days in school he had ridden the hobbyhorse of Primitive history, and Educator Yarrow had encouraged it. Harlan had grown actually fond of those odd, perverted Centuries that lay, not only before the beginning of Eternity in the 27th, but even before the invention of the Temporal Field, itself, in the 24th. He had used old books and periodicals in his studies. He had even traveled far downwhen to the earliest Centuries of Eternity, when he could get permission, to consult better sources. For over fifteen years he had managed to collect a remarkable library of his own, almost all in print-on-paper. There was a volume by a man called H. G. Wells, another by a man named W. Shakespeare, some tattered histories. Best of all there was a complete set of bound volumes of a Primitive news weekly that took up inordinate space but that he could not, out of sentiment, bear to reduce to micro-film. Occasionally he would lose himself in a world where life was life and death, death; where a man made his decisions irrevocably; where evil could not be prevented, nor good promoted, and the Battle of Waterloo, having been lost, was really lost for good and all. There was even a scrap of poetry he treasured which stated that a moving finger having once written could never be lured back to unwrite. And then it was difficult, almost a shock, to return his thoughts to Eternity, and to a universe where Reality was something flexible and evanescent, something men such as himself could hold in the palms of their hands and shake into better shape.) The illusion of St. Nicholas shattered when Hobbe Finge spoke to him in a brisk, matter-of-fact way. "You can start in tomorrow with a routine screening of current. Reality. I want it good, thorough, and to the point. There will be xio slackness permitted. Your first spatio-temporal chart will be ready for you tomorrow morning. Got it?" "Yes, Computer," said Harlan. He decided as early as that that he and Assistant Computer Hobbe Finge would not get along, and he regretted it. |
| 877 |
The next morning Harlan got his chart in intricately punched patterns as they emerged from the Computaplex. He used a pocket decoder to translate them into Standard Intertemporal in his anxiety to make not even the smallest mistake at the very beginning. Of course, he had reached the stage where he could read the perforations direct. The chart told him where and when in the world of the 482nd Century he might go and where he might not; what he could do and what be could not; what he must avoid at all costs. His presence must impinge only upon those places and times where it would not endanger Reality. The 482nd was not a comfortable Century for him. It was not like his own austere and conformist homewhen. It was an era without ethics or principles, as he was accustomed to think of such. It was hedonistic, materialistic, more than a little matriarchal. It was the only era (he checked this in the records in the most painstaking way) in which ectogenic birth flourished and, at its peak, 40 per cent of its women gave eventual birth by merely contributing a fertilized ovum to the ovaria. Marriage was made and unmade by mutual consent and was not recognized legally as anything more than a personal agreement without binding force. Union for the sake of childbearing was, of course, carefully differentiated from the social functions of marriage and was arranged on purely eugenic principles. In a hundred ways Harlan thought the society sick and therefore hungered for a Reality Change. More than once it occurred to him that his own presence in the Century, as a man not of that time, could fork its history. If his disturbing presence could only be made disturbing enough at some key point, a different branch of possibility would become real, a branch in which millions of pleasure-seeking women would find themselves transformed into true, pure-hearted mothers. They would be in another Reality with all the memories that belonged with it, unable to tell, dream, or fancy that they had ever been anything else. Unfortunately, to do that, he would have to step outside the bounds of the spatio-temporal chart and that was unthinkable. Even if it weren't, to step outside the bounds at random could change Reality in many possible ways. It could be made worse. Only careful analysis and Computing could properly pin-point the nature of a Reality Change. Outwardly, whatever his private opinions, Harlan remained an Observer, and the ideal Observer was merely a set of sense-perceptive nerve patches attached to a report-writing mechanism. Between perception and report there must be no intervention of emotion. Harlan's reports were perfection itself in that respect. Assistant Computer Finge called him in after his second weekly report. "I congratulate you, Observer," he said in a voice without warmth, "on the organization and clarity of your reports. But what do you really think?" Harlan sought refuge in an expression as blank as though chipped painstakingly out of native 95th Century wood. |
| 878 |
In one sense it had increased his feeling of stability. He had no longer to learn a new language, get used to new styles of clothing and new ways of life with every new Observation project. On the other hand, it had resulted in a withdrawal on his own part. He had almost forgotten now the camaraderie that united all the rest of the Specialists in Eternity. Most of all, he had developed the feeling of the power of being a Technician. He held the fate of millions in his finger tips, and if one must walk lonely because of it, one could also walk proudly. So he could stare coldly at the Communications man behind the entry desk of the 482nd and announce himself in clipped syllables: "Andrew Harlan, Technician, reporting to Computer Finge for temporary assignment to the 482nd," disregarding the quick glance from the middle-aged man he faced. It was what some people called the "Technician glance," a quick, involuntary sidelong peek at the rose-red shoulder emblem of the Technician, then an elaborate attempt not to look at it again. Harlan stared at the other's shoulder emblem. It was not the yellow of the Computer, the green of the Life-Plotter, the blue of the Sociologist, or the white of the Observer. It was not the Specialist's solid color at all. It was simply a blue bar on white. The man was Communications, a subbranch of Maintenance, not a Specialist at all. And he gave the "Technician glance" too. Harlan said a little sadly, "Well?" Communications said quickly, "I'm ringing Computer Finge, sir." Harlan remembered the 482nd as solid and massive, but now it seemed almost squalid. Harlan had grown used to the glass and porcelain of the 575th, to its fetish of cleanliness. He had grown accustomed to a world of whiteness and clarity, broken by sparse patches of light pastel. The heavy plaster swirls of the 482nd, its splashy pigments, its areas of painted metal were almost repulsive. Even Finge seemed different, less than life-size, somewhat. Two years earlier, to Observer Harlan, Finge's every gesture had seemed sinister and powerful. Now, from the lofty and isolated heights of Technicianhood, the man seemed pathetic and lost. Harlan watched him as he leafed through a sheaf of foils and got ready to look up, with the air of someone who is beginning to think he has made his visitor wait the duly required amount of time. Finge was from an energy-centered Century in the 600's. Twissell had told him that and it explained a good deal. Finge's flashes of illtemper could easily be the result of the natural insecurity of a heavy man used to the firmness of field-forces and unhappy to be dealing with nothing more than flimsy matter. His tiptoeing walk (Harlan remembered Finge's catlike tread well; often he would look up from his desk, see Finge standing there staring at him, his approach having been unheard) was no longer something sly and sneaking, but rather the fearful and reluctant tread of one who lives in the constant, if unconscious, fear that the flooring would break under his weight. |
| 879 |
In the interest of avoiding emotional entanglements with family, an Eternal may not have children." The Computer said gravely, "I didn't ask about marriage or children." Harlan quoted further: "Temporary liaisons may be made with Timers only after application with the Central Charting Board of the Allwhen Council for an appropriate Life-Plot of the Timer concerned. Liaisons may be conducted thereafter only according to the requirements of specific spatio-temporal charting." "Quite true. Have you ever applied for temporary liaison, Technician?" "No, Computer." "Do you intend to?" "No, Computer." "Perhaps you ought to. It would give you a greater breadth of view. You would become less concerned about the details of a woman's costume, less disturbed about her possible personal relations with other Eternals." Harlan left, speechless with rage. He found it almost impossible to perform his near-daily trek into the 482nd (the longest continuous period remaining something under two hours.) He was upset, and he knew why. Finge! Finge, and his coarse advice concerning liaisons with Timers. Liaisons existed. Everyone knew that. Eternity had always been aware of the necessity for compromising with human appetites (to Harlan the phrase carried a quivery repulsion), but the restrictions involved in choosing mistresses made the compromise anything but lax, anything but generous. And those who were lucky enough to qualify for such an arrangement were expected to be most discreet about it, out of common decency and consideration for the majority. Among the lower classes of Eternals, particularly among Maintenance, there were always the rumors (half hopeful, half resentful) of women imported on a more or less permanent basis for the obvious reasons. Always rumor pointed to the Computers and Life-Plotters as the benefiting groups. They and only they could decide which women could be abstracted from Time without danger of significant Reality Change. Less sensational (and therefore less tongue-worthy) were the stories concerning the Timer employees that every Section engaged temporarily (when spatio-temporal analysis permitted) to perform the tedious tasks of cooking, cleaning, and heavy labor. But a Timer, and such a Timer, employed as "secretary," could only mean that Finge was thumbing a nose at the ideals that made Eternity what it was. Regardless of the facts of life to which the practical men of Eternity made a perfunctory obeisance it remained true that the ideal Eternal was a dedicated man living for the mission he had to perform, for the betterment of Reality and the improvement of the sum of human happiness. Harlan liked to think that Eternity was like the rnonasteries of Primitive times. He dreamed that night that he spoke to Twissell about the matter, and that Twissell, the ideal Eternal, shared his horror. He dreamed of a broken Finge, stripped of rank. He dreamed of himself with the yellow Computer's insigne, instituting a new regime in the 482nd, ordering Finge grandly to a new position in Maintenance. |
| 880 |
When even that was unsafe, when there was a good chance that the trembling might pass the critical point and bring down a significant part of the card house of Reality, it was not unusual to have to sleep under a particular hedge in the countryside. And it was usual to survey various hedges to see which would be least disturbed by farmers, tramps, even stray dogs, during the night. But now Harlan, at the other end of the scale, slept in a bed with a surface of field-permeated matter, a peculiar welding of matter and energy that entered only the highest economic levels of this society. Throughout Time it was less common than pure matter but more common than pure energy. In any case it molded itself to his body as he lay down, firm when he lay still, yielding when he moved or turned. Reluctantly he confessed the attraction of such things, and he accepted the wisdom which caused each Section of Eternity to live on the median scale of its Century rather than at its most comfortable level. In that way it could maintain contact with the problems and "feel" of the Century, without succumbing to too close an identification with a sociological extreme. It is easy, thought Harlan, that first evening, to live with aristocrats. And just before he fell asleep, he thought of Noys. He dreamed he was on the Allwhen Council, fingers clasped austerely before him. He was looking down on a small, a very small, Finge, listening in terror to the sentence that was casting him out of Eternity to perpetual Observation of one of the unknown Centuries of the far, far upwhen. The somber words of exile were coming from Harlan's own mouth, and immediately to his right sat Noys Lambent. He hadn't noticed her at first, but his eyes kept sliding to his right, and his words faltered. Did no one else see her? The rest of the members of the Council looked steadily forward, except for Twissell. He turned to smile at Harlan, looking through the girl as though she weren't there. Harlan wanted to order her away, but words were no longer coming out of his mouth. He tried to beat at the girl, but his arm moved sluggishly and she did not move. Her flesh was cold. Finge was laughing — louder — louder — — and it was Noys Lambent laughing. Harlan opened his eyes to bright sunlight and stared at the girl in horror for a moment before he remembered where she was and where he was. She said, "You were moaning and beating the pillow. Were you having a bad dream?" Harlan did not answer. She said, "Your bath is ready. So are your clothes. I've arranged to have you join the gathering tonight. It felt queer to step back into my ordinary life after being in Eternity so long." Harlan felt acutely disturbed at her easy flow of words. He said, "You didn't tell them who I was, I hope." "Of course not." Of course not! Finge would have taken care of that little matter by having her lightly psychoed under narcosis, if he felt that necessary. He might not have thought it necessary, however. After all, he had given her "close observation." The thought annoyed him. |
| 881 |
That moment steadied him. He grasped for it, but it was gone. The peppermint drink? Noys was still closer, her face not quite clear in his gaze. He could feel her hair against his cheek, the warm, light pressure of her breath. He ought to draw away, but — strangely, strangely — he found he did not want to. "If I were made an Eternal ..." she breathed, almost in his ear, though the words were scarcely heard above the beating of his heart. Her lips were moist and parted. "Wouldn't you like to?" He did not know what she meant, but suddenly he didn't care. He seemed in flames. He put out his arms clumsily, gropingly. She did not resist, but melted and coalesced with him. It all happened dreamily, as though it were happening to someone else. It wasn't nearly as repulsive as he had always imagined it must be. It came as a shock to him, a revelation, that it wasn't repulsive at all. Even afterward, when she leaned against him with her eyes all soft and smiling a little, he found he had to reach out and stroke her damp hair with slow and trembling delight. She was entirely different in his eyes now. She was not a woman, not an individual at all. She was suddenly an aspect of himself. She was, in a strange and unexpected way, a part of himself. The spatio-temporal chart said nothing of this, yet Harlan felt no guilt. It was only the thought of Finge that aroused strong emotion in Harlan's breast. And that wasn't guilt. Not at all. It was satisfaction, even triumph! In bed Harlan could not sleep. The lightheadedness had worn off now, but there was still the unusual fact that for the first time in his adult life a grown woman shared his bed. He could hear her soft breathing and in the ultra-dim glow to which the internal light of the walls and ceiling had been reduced he could see her body as the merest shadow next to his. He had only to move his hand to feel the warmth and softness of her flesh, and he dared not do that, lest he wake her out of whatever dreaming she might have. It was as though she were dreaming for the two of them, dreaming herself and himself and all that had happened, and as though her waking would drive it all from existence. It was a thought that seemed a piece of those other queer, unusual thoughts he had experienced just before ... Those had been strange thoughts, coming to him at a moment between sense and nonsense. He tried to recapture them and could not. Yet suddenly it was very important that he recapture them. For although he could not remember the details, he could remember that, for just an instant, he had understood something. He was not certain what that something was, but there had been the unearthly clarity of the half-asleep, when more than mortal eye and mind seems suddenly to come to life. His anxiety grew. Why couldn't he remember? So much had been in his grasp. For the moment even the sleeping girl beside him receded into the hinterland of his thoughts. He thought: If I follow the thread ... I was thinking of Reality and Eternity ... |
| 882 |
Having done that, he re-entered Eternity in a way that seemed as prosaic to himself as passage through any door might be. Had there been a Timer watching, it would have seemed to him that Harlan had simply disappeared. The small container stayed where he put it. It played no immediate role in world history. A man's hand, hours later, reached for it but did not find it. A search revealed it half an hour later still, but in the interim a force-field had blanked out and a man's temper had been lost. A decision which would have remained unmade in the previous Reality was now made in anger. A meeting did not take place; a man who would have died lived a year longer, under other circumstances; another who would have lived died somewhat sooner. The ripples spread wider, reaching their maxium in the 2481st, which was twenty-five Centuries upwhen from the Touch. The intensity of the Reality Change declined thereafter. Theorists pointed out that nowhere to the infinite upwhen could the Change ever become zero, but by fifty Centuries upwhen from the Touch the Change had become too small to detect by the finest Computing, and that was the practical limit. Of course no human being in Time could ever possibly be aware of any Reality Change having taken place. Mind changed as well as matter and only Eternals could stand outside it all and see the change. Sociologist Voy was staring at the bluish scene in the 2481st, where earlier there had been all the activity of a busy space-port. He barely looked up when Harlan entered. He barely mumbled something that might have been a greeting. A change had indeed blasted the space-port. Its shininess was gone; what buildings there stood were not the grand creations they had been. A space-ship rusted. There were no people. There was no motion. Harlan allowed himself a small smile that flickered for a moment, then vanished. It was M. D. R. all right. Maximum Desired Response. And it had happened at once. The Change did not necessarily take place at the precise moment of the Technician's Touch. If the calculations that went into the Touch were sloppy, hours or days might elapse before the Change actually took place (counting, of course, by physiotime). It was only when all degrees of freedom vanished that the Change took place. While there was even a mathematical chance for alternate actions, the Change did not take place. It was Harlan's pride that when he calculated an M. N. C., when it was his hand that contrived the Touch, the degrees of freedom vanished at once, and the Change took place instantly. Voy said softly, "It had been very beautiful." The phrase grated Harlan's ears, seeming to detract from the beauty of his own performance. "I wouldn't regret," he said, "having spacetravel bred out of Reality altogether." "No?" said Voy. "What good is it? It never lasts more than a millennium or two. People get tired. They come back home and the colonies die out. Then after another four or five millennia, or forty or fifty, they try again and it fails again. |
| 883 |
The whole purpose of the Change will be to wipe out the superstition. And without it, Harlan" — his voice was almost a snarl — "how could a woman like Noys want a man like you?" The pudgy Computer backed toward the door of Harlan's personal quarters, blaster still leveled. He paused to say, with a sort of grim gaiety, "Of course, if you had her now, Harlan, if you had her now, you could enjoy her. You could keep your liaison and make it formal. That is, if you had her now. But the Change will come soon, Harlan, and after that, you will not have her. What a pity, the now does not last, even in Eternity, eh, Harlan?" Harlan no longer looked at him. Finge had won after all and was leaving in clear and leering possession of the field. Harlan stared unseeingly at his own toes, and when he looked up Finge was gone — whether five seconds earlier or fifteen minutes Harlan could not have said. Hours had passed nightmarishly and Harlan felt trapped in the prison of his mind. All that Finge had said was so true, so transparently true. Harlan's Observer mind could look back upon the relationship of himself and Noys, that short, unusual relationship, and it took on a different texture. It wasn't a case of instant infatuation. How could he have believed it was? Infatuation for a man like himself? Of course not. Tears stung his eyes and he felt ashamed. How obvious it was that the affair was a case of cool calculation. The girl had certain undeniable physical assets and no ethical principles to keep her from using them. So she used them and that had nothing to do with Andrew Harlan as a person. He simply represented her distorted view of Eternity and what it meant. Automatically Harlan's long fingers caressed the volumes in his small bookshelf. He took one out and, unseeingly, opened it. The print blurred. The faded colors of the illustrations were ugly, meaningless blotches. Why had Finge troubled to tell him all this? In the strictest sense he ought not to have. An Observer, or anyone acting as Observer, ought never to know the ends attained by his Observation. It removed him by so much from the ideal position of the objective non-human tool. It was to crush him, of course; to take a mean and jealous revenge! Harlan fingered the open page of the magazine. He found himself staring at a duplication, in startling red, of a ground vehicle, similar to vehicles characteristic of the 45th, 182nd, 590th, and 984th Centuries, as well as of late Primitive times. It was a very common sort of affair with an internal-combustion motor. In the Primitive era natural petroleum fractions were the source of power and natural rubber cushioned the wheels. That was true of none of the later centuries, of course. Harlan had pointed that out to Cooper. He had made quite a point of it, and now his mind, as though longing to turn away from the unhappy present, drifted back to that moment. Sharp, irrelevant images filled the ache within Harlan. "These advertisements," he had said, "tell us more of Primitive times than the so-called news articles in the same magazine. |
| 884 |
The news articles assume a basic knowledge of the world it deals with. It uses terms it feels no necessity of explaining. What is a 'golf ball,' for instance?" Cooper had professed his ignorance readily. Harlan went on in the didactic tone he could scarcely avoid on occasions such as this. "We could deduce that it was a small pellet of some sort from the nature of the casual mentions it receives. We know that it is used in a game, if only because it is mentioned in an item under the heading 'Sport.' We can even make further deductions that it is hit by a long rod of some sort and that the object of the game is to drive the ball into a hole in the ground. But why bother with deduction and reasoning? Observe this advertisement! The object of it is only to induce readers to buy the ball, but in so doing we are presented with an excellent close-range portrait of one, with a section cut into it to show its construction." Cooper, coming from an era in which advertisement was not as wildly proliferative as it was in the later Centuries of Primitive times, found all this difficult to appreciate. He said, "Isn't it rather disgusting the way these people blow their own horn? Who would be fool enough to believe a person's boastings about his own products? Would he admit defects? Is he likely to stop at any exaggeration?" Harlan, whose homewhen was middling fruitful in advertisement, raised tolerant eyebrows and merely said, "You'll have to accept that. It's their way and we never quarrel with the ways of any culture as long as it does not seriously harm mankind as a whole." But now Harlan's mind snapped back to his present situation and he was back in the present, staring at the loudmouthed, brassy advertisements in the news magazine. He asked himself in sudden excitement: Were the thoughts he had just experienced really irrelevant? Or was he tortuously finding a way out of the blackness and back to Noys? Advertisement! A device for forcing the unwilling into line. Did it matter to a ground-vehicle manufacturer whether a given individual felt an original or spontaneous desire for his product? If the prospect (that was the word) could be artificially persuaded or cajoled into feeling that desire and acting upon it, would that not be just as well? Then what did it matter if Noys loved him out of passion or out of calculation? Let them but be together long enough and she would grow to love him. He would make her love him and, in the end, love and not its motivation was what counted. He wished now he had read some of the novels out of Time that Finge had mentioned scornfully. Harlan's fists clenched at a sudden thought. If Noys had come to him, to Harlan, for immortality, it could only mean that she had not yet fulfilled the requirement for that gift. She could have made love to no Eternal previously. That meant that her relationship to Finge had been nothing more than that of secretary and employer. Otherwise what need would she have had for Harlan? Yet Finge surely must have tried — must have attempted... |
| 885 |
(Harlan could not complete the thought even in the secrecy of his own mind.) Finge could have proved the superstition's existence on his own person. Surely he could not have missed the thought with Noys an everpresent temptation. Then she must have refused him. He had had to use Harlan and Harlan had succeeded. It was for that reason that Finge had been driven into the jealous revenge of torturing Harlan with the knowledge that Noys's motivation had been a practical one, and that he could never have her. Yet Noys had refused Finge even with eternal life at stake and had accepted Harlan. She had that much of a choice and she had made it in Harlan's favor. 'So it wasn't calculation entirely. Emotion played a part. Harlan's thoughts were wild and jumbled, and grew more heated with every moment. He must have her, and now. Before any Reality Change. What was it Finge had said to him, jeering: The now does not last, even in Eternity. Doesn't it, though? Doesn't it? Harlan had known exactly what he must do. Finge's angry taunting had goaded him into a frame of mind where he was ready for crime and Finge's final sneer had, at least, inspired him with the nature of the deed he must commit. He had not wasted a moment after that. It was with excitement and even joy that he left his quarters, at all but a run, to commit a major crime against Eternity. 8 Crime No one had questioned him. No one had stopped him. There was that advantage, anyway, in the social isolation of a Technician. He went via the kettle channels to a door to Time and set its controls. There was the chance, of course, that someone would happen along on a legitimate errand and wonder why the door was in use. He hesitated, and then decided to stamp his seal on the marker. A sealed door would draw little attention. An unsealed door in active use would be a nine-day wonder. Of course, it might be Finge who stumbled upon the door. He would have to chance that. Noys was still standing as he had left her. Wretched hours (physiohours) had passed since Harlan had left the 482nd for a lonely Eternity, but he returned now to the same Time, within a matter of seconds, that he had left. Not a hair on Noys's head had stirred. She looked startled. "Did you forget something, Andrew?" Harlan stared at her hungrily, but made no move to touch her. He remembered Finge's words, and he dared not risk a repulse. He said stiffly, "You've got to do as I say." She said, "But is something wrong, then? You just left. You just this minute left." "Don't worry," said Harlan. It was all he could do to keep from taking her hand, from trying to soothe her. Instead he spoke harshly. It was as though some demon were forcing him to do all the wrong things. Why had he come back at the first available moment? He was only disturbing her by his almost instantaneous return after leaving. (He knew the answer to that, really. He had a two-day margin of grace allowed by the spatio-temporal chart. The earlier portions of that period of grace were safer and yielded least chance of discovery. |
| 886 |
His grand, intuitional guess was more than a guess. Everything was checking neatly. Item Four: research. Twofold research. For himself, first. Each day, with ferreting eyes, he went through the reports on Twissell's desk. The reports concerned the various Reality Changes being scheduled or suggested. Copies went to Twissell routinely since he was a member of the Allwhen Council, and Harlan knew he would not miss one. He looked first for the coming Change in the 482nd. Secondly he looked for other Changes, any other Changes, that might have a flaw, an imperfection, some deviation from maximum excellence that might be visible to his own trained and talented Technician's eyes. In the strictest sense of the word the reports were not for his study, but Twissell was rarely in his office these days, and no one else saw fit to interfere with Twissell's personal Technician. That was one part of his research. The other took place in the 575th Section branch of the library. For the first time he ventured out of those portions of the library which, ordinarily, monopolized his attention. In the past he had haunted the section on Primitive history (very poor indeed, so that most of his references and source materials had to be derived from the far downwhen of the 3rd millennium, as was only natural, of course). To an even greater extent he had ransacked the shelves devoted to Reality Change, its theory, technique, and history; an excellent collection (best in Eternity outside the Central branch itself, thanks to Twissell) of which he had made himself full master. Now he wandered curiously among the other film-racks. For the first time he Observed (in the capital-O sense) the racks devoted to the 575th itself; its geographies, which varied little from Reality to Reality, its histories, which varied more, and its sociologies, which varied still more. These were not the books or reports written about the Century by Observing and Computing Eternals (with those he was familiar), but by the Timers themselves. There were the works of literature of the 575th and these stirred memories of tremendous arguments he had heard of concerning the values of alternate Changes. Would this masterpiece be altered or not? If so, how? How did past Changes affect works of art? For that matter, could there ever be general agreement about art? Could it ever be reduced to quantitative terms amenable to mechanical evaluation by the Computing machines? A Computer named August Sennor was Twissell's chief opponent in these matters. Harlan, stirred by Twissell's feverish denunciations of the man and his views, had read some of Sennor's papers and found them startling. Sennor asked publicly and, to Harlan, disconcertingly, whether a new Reality might not contain a personality within itself analogous to that of a man who had been withdrawn into Eternity in a previous Reality. He analyzed then the possibility of an Eternal meeting his analogue in Time, either with or without knowing it, and speculated on the results in each case. |
| 887 |
He would face Finge. He would kill him, if necessary. Harlan stepped to the door from behind which the laugh had sounded, stepped to it with the soft, firm step of the premeditated murderer. He flicked loose the automatic door signal and opened it by hand. Two inches. Three. It moved without sound. The man in the next room had his back turned. The figure seemed too tall to be Finge and that fact penetrated Harlan's simmering mind and kept him from advancing further. Then, as though the paralysis that seemed to hold both men in rigor was slowly lifting, the other turned, inch by inch. Harlan never witnessed the completion of that turn. The other's profile had not yet come into view when Harlan, holding back a sudden gust of terror with a last fragment of moral strength, flung himself back out the door. Its mechanism, not Harlan, closed it soundlessly. Harlan fell back blindly. He could breathe only by struggling violently with the atmosphere, fighting air in and pushing it out, while his heart beat madly as though in an effort to escape his body. Finge, Twissell, all the Council together could not have disconcerted him so much. It was the fear of nothing physical that had unmanned him. Rather it was an almost instinctive loathing for the nature of the accident that had befallen him. He gathered the stack of book-films to himself in a formless lump and managed, after two futile tries, to re-establish the door to Eternity. He stepped through, his legs operating mechanically. Somehow he made his way to the 575th, and then to personal quarters. His Technicianhood, newly valued, newly appreciated, saved him once again. The few Eternals he met turned automatically to one side and looked steadfastly over his head as they did so. That was fortunate, for he lacked any ability to smooth his face out of the death's-head grimace he felt he was wearing, or any power to put the blood back into it. But they didn't look, and he thanked Time and Eternity and whatever blind thing wove Destiny for that. He had not truly recognized the other man in Noys's house by his appearance, yet he knew his identity with a dreadful certainty. The first time Harlan had heard a noise in the house he, Harlan, had been laughing and the sound that interrupted his laugh was of something weighty dropping in the next room. The second time someone had laughed in the next room and he, Harlan, had dropped a knapsack of book-films. The first time he, Harlan, had turned and caught sight of a door closing. The second time he, Harlan, closed a door as a stranger turned. He had met himself! In the same Time and nearly in the same place he and his earlier self by several physiodays had nearly stood face to face. He had misadjusted the controls, set if for an instant in Time which he had already used and he, Harlan, had seen him, Harlan. He had gone about his work with the shadow of horror upon him for days thereafter. He cursed himself for a coward, but that did not help. Indeed from that moment matters took a downward trend. |
| 888 |
Harlan grew as feverishly active as previously he had been catatonic. He traveled to the 2456th and bludgeoned Sociologist Voy to his own exact will. He did it perfectly. He got the information he sought. And more than he sought. Much more. Confidence is rewarded, apparently. There was a homewhen proverb that went: "Grip the nettle firmly and it will become a stick with which to beat your enemy." In short, Noys had no analogue in the new Reality. No analogue at all. She could take her position in the new society in the most inconspicuous and convenient manner possible, or she could stay in Eternity. There could be no reason to deny him liaison except for the highly theoretical fact that he had broken the law — and he knew very well how to counter that argument. So he went racing upwhen to tell Noys the great news, to bathe in undreamed-of success after a few days horrible with apparent failure. And at this moment the kettle came to a halt. It did not slow; it simply halted. If the motion had been one along any of the three dimensions of space, a halt that sudden would have smashed the kettle, brought its metal to a dull red heat, turned Harlan into a thing of broken bone and wet, crushed flesh. As it was, it merely doubled him with nausea and cracked him with inner pain. When he could see, he fumbled to the temporometer and stared at it with fuzzy vision. It read 100,000. Somehow that frightened him. It was too round a number. He turned feverishly to the controls. What had gone wrong? That frightened him too, for he could see nothing wrong. Nothing had tripped the drive-lever. It remained firmly geared into the upwhen drive. There was no short circuit. All the indicator dials were in the black safety range. There was no power failure. The tiny needle that marked the steady consumption of meg-megcoulombs of power calmly insisted that power was being consumed at the usual rate. What, then, had stopped the kettle? Slowly, and with considerable reluctance, Harlan touched the drivelever, curled his hand about it. He pushed it to neutral, and the needle on the power gauge declined to zero. He twisted the drive-lever back in the other direction. Up went the power gauge again, and this time the temporometer flicked downwhen along the line of Centuries. Downwhen — downwhen — 99,983 — 99,972 — 99,959 — Again Harlan shifted the lever. Upwhen again. Slowly. Very slowly. Then 99,985 — 99,993 — 99,997 — 99,998 — 99,999 — 100,000 — Smash! Nothing past 100,000. The power of Nova Sol was silently being consumed, at an incredible rate, to no purpose. He went downwhen again, farther. He roared upwhen. Smash! His teeth were clenched, his lips drawn back, his breath rasping. He felt like a prisoner hurling himself bloodily against the bars of a prison. When he stopped, a dozen smashes later, the kettle rested firmly at 100,000. Thus far, and no farther. He would change kettles! (But there was not much hope in that thought.) In the empty silence of the 100,000th Century, Andrew Harlan stepped out of one kettle and chose another kettle shaft at random. |
| 889 |
A minute later, with the drive-lever in his hand, he stared at the marking of 100,000 and knew that here, too, he could not pass. He raged! Now! At this time! When things so unexpectedly had broken in his favor, to come to so sudden a disaster. The curse of that moment of misjudgment in entering the 482nd was still on him. Savagely he spun the lever downwhen, pressing it hard at maximum and keeping it there. At least in one way he was free now, free to do anything he wanted. With Noys cut off behind a barrier and out of his reach, what more could they do to him? What more had he to fear? He carried himself to the 575th and sprang from the kettle with a reckless disregard for his surroundings that he had never felt before. He made his way to the Section library, speaking to no one, regarding no one. He took what he wanted without glancing about to see if he were observed. What did he care? Back to the kettle and downwhen again. He knew exactly what he would do. He looked at the large clock as he passed, measuring off Standard Physiotime, numbering the days and marking off the three coequal work shifts of the physioday. Finge would be at his private quarters now, and that was so much the better. Harlan felt as though he were running a temperature when he arrived at the 482nd. His mouth was dry and cottony. His chest hurt. But he felt the hard shape of the weapon under his shirt as he held it firmly against his side with one elbow and that was the only sensation that counted. Assistant Computer Hobbe Finge looked up at Harlan, and the surprise in his eyes slowly gave way to concern. Harlan watched him silently for a while, letting the concern grow and waiting for it to change to fear. He circled slowly, getting between Finge and the Communiplate. Finge was partly undressed, bare to the waist. His chest was sparsely haired, his breasts puffy and almost womanish. His tubby abdomen lapped over his waistband. He looks undignified, thought Harlan with satisfaction, undignified and unsavory. So much the better. He put his right hand inside his shirt and closed it firmly on the grip of his weapon. Harlan said, "No one saw me, Finge, so don't look toward the door. No one's coming here. You've got to realize, Finge, that you're dealing with a Technician. Do you know what that means?" His voice was hollow. He felt angry that fear wasn't entering Finge's eyes, only concern. Finge even reached for his shirt and, without a word, began to put it on. Harlan went on, "Do you know the privilege of being a Technician, Finge? You've never been one, so you can't appreciate it. It means no one watches where you go or what you do. They all look the other way and work so hard at not seeing you that they really succeed at it. I could, for instance, go to the Section library, Finge, and help myself to any curious thing while the librarian busily concerns himself with his records and sees nothing. I can walk down the residential corridors of the 482nd and anyone passing turns out of my way and will swear later on he saw no one. |
| 890 |
I won't bore you with any of that. "Cooper used the name of Vikkor Mallansohn in all this because it gave him a background and made him an authentic product of the 24th. The body of the real Mallansohn was never recovered. "In the remainder of his life, he cherished his generator and cooperated with the Institute scientists in duplicating it. He dared do no more than that. He could not teach them the Lefebvre equations without outlining three Centuries of mathematical development that was to come. He could not, dared not hint at his true origin. He dared not do more than the real Vikkor Mallansohn had, to his knowledge, done. "The men who worked with him were frustrated to find a man who could perform so brilliantly and yet was unable to explain the whys of his performance. And he himself was frustrated too, because he foresaw, without in any way being able to quicken, the work that would lead, step by step, to the classic experiments of Jan Verdeer, and how from that the great Antoine Lefebvre would construct the basic equations of Reality. And how, after that, Eternity would be constructed. "It was only toward the end of his long life that Cooper, staring into a Pacific sunset (he describes the scene in some detail in his memoir) came to the great realization that he was Vikkor Mallansohn; he was not a substitute but the man himself. The name might not be his, but the man history called Mallansohn was really Brinsley Sheridan Cooper. "Fired with that thought, and with all that implied, anxious that the process of establishing Eternity be somehow quickened, improved, and made more secure, he wrote his memoir and placed it in a cube of Time-stasis in the living room of his house. "And so the circle was closed. Cooper-Mallansohn's intentions in writing the memoir were, of course, disregarded. Cooper must go through his life exactly as he had gone through it. Primitive Reality allows of no changes. At this moment in physiotime, the Cooper you know is unaware of what lies ahead of him. He believes he is only to instruct Mallansohn and to return. He will continue to believe so until the years teach him differently and he sits down to write his memoir. "The intention of the circle in Time is to establish the knowledge of Time-travel and of the nature of Reality, to build Eternity, ahead of its natural Time. Left to itself, mankind would not have learned the truth about Time before their technological advances in other directions had made racial suicide inevitable." Harlan listened intently, caught up in the vision of a mighty circle in Time, closed upon itself, and traversing Eternity in part of its course. He came as close to forgetting Noys, for the moment, as he ever could. He asked, "Then you knew all along everything you were to do, everything I was to do, everything I have done." Twissell, who seemed lost in his own telling of the tale, his eyes peering through a haze of bluish tobacco smoke, came slowly to life. His old, wise eyes fixed themselves on Harlan and he said reproachfully, "No, of course not. |
| 891 |
To do that, however, would have meant a certain lapse of time in each case while the man determined the Century to its nearest hundredth through astronomical observation or by obtaining appropriate information over the wireless. That would be slow and also dangerous since the man might well be discovered by the native inhabitants with probably catastrophic effects on our project. "What we did then instead was this: We sent back a known mass of the radioactive isotope, niobium-94, which decays by beta-particle emission to the stable isotope, molybdenum-94. The process has a halflife of almost exactly 500 Centuries. The original radiation intensity of the mass was known. That intensity decreases with time according to the simple relationship involved in first-order kinetics, and, of course, the intensity can be measured with great precision. "When the kettle reaches its destination in Primitive times, the ampule containing the isotope is discharged into the mountainside and the kettle then returns to Eternity. At the moment in physiotime that the ampule is discharged, it simultaneously appears at all future Times growing progressively older. At the place of discharge in the 575th (in actual Time and not in Eternity) a Technician detects the ampule by its radiation and retrieves it. "The radiation intensity is measured, the time it has remained in the mountainside is then known, the Century to which the kettle traveled is also known to two decimal places. Dozens of ampules were thus sent back at various thrust levels and a calibration curve set up. The curve was a check against ampules sent not all the way into the Primitive but into the early Centuries of Eternity where direct observations could also be made. "Naturally, there were failures. The first few ampules were lost until we learned to allow for the not too major geological changes between the late Primitive and the 575th. Then, three of the ampules later on never showed up in the 575th. Presumably, something went wrong with the discharge mechanism and they were buried too deeply in the mountain for detection. We stopped our experiments when the level of radiation grew so high that we feared that some of the Primitive inhabitants might detect and wonder what radioactive artifacts might be doing in the region. But we had enough for our purposes and we are certain we can send back a man to any hundredth of a Century of the Primitive that is desired. "You follow all this, Cooper, don't you?" Cooper said, "Perfectly, Computer Twissell. I have seen the calibration curve without understanding the purpose at the time. It is quite clear now." But Harlan was exceedingly interested now. He stared at the measured arc marked off in centuries. The shining arc was porcelain on metal and the fine lines divided it into Centuries, Decicenturies and Centicenturies. Silvery metal gleamed thinly through the porcelainpenetrating lines, marking them clearly. The figures were as finely done and, bending close, Harlan could make out the Centuries from 17 to 27. |
| 892 |
The hairline was fixed at the 23.17th Century mark. He had seen similar time-gauges and almost automatically he reached to the pressure-control lever. It did not respond to his grasp. The hairline remained in place. He nearly jumped when Twissell's voice suddenly addressed him. "Technician Harlan!" He cried, "Yes, Computer," then remembered that he could not be heard. He stepped to the window and nodded. Twissell said, almost as though chiming in with Harlan's thoughts, "The time-gauge is set for a thrust back to the 23.17th. That requires no adjustment. Your only task is to pour energy through at the proper moment in physiotime. There is a chronometer to the right of the gauge. Nod if you see it." Harlan nodded. "It will reach zero-point backward. At the minus-fifteen-second point, align the contact points. It's simple. You see how?" Harlan nodded again. Twissell went on, "Synchronization is not vital. You can do it at minus fourteen or thirteen or even minus five seconds, but please make every effort to stay this side of minus ten for safety's sake. Once you've closed contact, a synchronized force-gear will do the rest and make certain that the final energy thrust will occur precisely at time zero. Understood?" Harlan nodded still again. He understood more than Twissell said. If he himself did not align the points by minus ten, it would be taken care of from without. Harlan thought grimly: There'll be no need for outsiders. Twissell said, "We have thirty physiominutes left. Cooper and I will leave to check on the supplies." They left. The door closed behind them, and Harlan was left alone with the thrust control, the time (already moving slowly backward toward zero) — and a resolute knowledge of what must be done. Harlan turned away from the window. He put his hand inside his pocket and half withdrew the neuronic whip it still contained. Through all this he had kept the whip. His hand shook a little. An earlier thought recurred: a Samson-smash of the temple! A corner of his mind wondered sickly: How many Eternals have ever heard of Samson? How many know how he died? There were only twenty-five minutes left. He was not certain how long the operation would take. He was not really certain it would work at all. But what choice had he? His damp fingers almost dropped the weapon before he succeeded in unhinging the butt. He worked rapidly and in complete absorption. Of all the aspects of what he planned, the possibility of his own passage into nonexistence occupied his mind the least and bothered him not at all. At minus one minute Harlan was standing at the controls. Detachedly he thought: The last minute of life? Nothing in the room was visible to him but the backward sweep of the red hairline that marked the passing seconds. Minus thirty seconds. He thought: It will not hurt. It is not death. He tried to think only of Noys. Minus fifteen seconds. Noys! Harlan's left hand moved a switch down toward contact. Not hastily! Minus twelve seconds. Contact! |
| 893 |
All these stories come to me eventually, and I think I must be a little proud of them. Maybe I go around believing them a bit. It's a foolish thing for an old man to do, but it makes life a little easier. Does that surprise you? That I must find a way to make life easier? I, Senior Computer Twissell, senior member of the Allwhen Council? Maybe that's why I smoke. Ever think of that? I have to have a reason, you know. Eternity is essentially an unsmoking society, and most of Time is, too. I've thought of that often. I sometimes think it's a rebellion against Eternity. Something to take the place of a greater rebellion that failed ... No, it's all right. A tear or two won't hurt me, and it isn't pretense, believe me. It's just that I haven't thought about this for a long time. It isn't pleasant. It involved a woman, of course, as your affair did. That's not coincidence. It's almost inevitable, if you stop to think of it. An Eternal, who must sell the normal satisfactions of family life for a handful of perforations on foil, is ripe for infection. That's one of the reasons Eternity must take the precautions it does. And, apparently, that's also why Eternals are so ingenious in evading the precautions once in a while. I remember my woman. It's foolish of me to do so, perhaps. I can't remember anything else about that physiotime. My old colleagues are only names in the record books; the Changes I supervised — all but one — are only items in the Computaplex memory pools. I remember her, though, very well. Perhaps you can understand that. I had had a long-standing request for liaison in the books; and after I achieved status as a Junior Computer, she was assigned to me. She was a girl of this very Century, the 575th. I didn't see her until after the assignment, of course. She was intelligent and kind. Not beautiful or even pretty, but then, even when young (yes, I was young, never mind the myths) I was not noted for my own looks. We were well suited to one another by temperament, she and I, and if I were a Timed man, I would have been proud to have her as my wife. I told her that many times. I believe it pleased her. I know it was the truth. Not all Eternals, who must take their women as and how Computing permits, are that fortunate. In that particular Reality, she was to die young, of course, and none of her analogues was available for liaison. At first, I took that philosophically. After all, it was her short lifetime which made it possible for her to live with me without deleteriously affecting Reality. I am ashamed of that now, of the fact that I was glad she had a short time to live. Just at first, that is. Just at first. I visited her as often as spatio-temporal charting allowed. I squeezed every minute out of it, giving up meals and sleep when necessary, shifting my labor load shamelessly whenever I could. Her amiability passed the heights of my expectations, and I was in love. I put it bluntly. My experience of love is very small, and understanding it through Observation in Time is a shaky matter. |
| 894 |
Two years went by that way. Periodically, I checked the boy's LifePlot (I was used to breaking that particular rule, by now) and was pleased to find that there were no signs of deleterious effects on the then-current Reality at probability levels over 0.0001. The boy learned to walk and mispronounced a few words. He was not taught to call me "daddy." Whatever speculations the Timed people of the child-care institution might have made concerning me I don't know. They took their money and said nothing. Then, when the two years had passed, the necessities of a Change that included the 575th at one wing was brought up before the Allwhen Council. I, having been lately promoted to Assistant Computer, was placed in charge. It was the first Change ever left to my sole supervision. I was proud, of course, but also apprehensive. My son was an intruder in the Reality. He could scarcely be expected to have analogues. Thought of his passage into nonexistence saddened me. I worked at the Change and I flatter myself even yet that I did a flawless job. My first one. But I succumbed to a temptation. I succumbed to it all the more easily because it was becoming an old story now for me. I was a hardened criminal, a habitat of crime. I worked out a new Life-Plot for my son under the new Reality, certain of what I would find. But then for twenty-four hours, without eating or sleeping, I sat in my office, striving with the completed Life-Plot, tearing at it in a despairing effort to find an error. There was no error. The next day, holding back my solution to the Change, I worked out a spatio-temporal chart, using rough methods of approximation (after all, the Reality was not to last long) and entered Time at a point more than thirty years upwhen from the birth of my child. He was thirty-four years old, as old as I myself. I introduced myself as a distant relation, making use of my knowledge of his mother's family, to do so. He had no knowledge of his father, no memory of my visits to him in his infancy. He was an aeronautical engineer. The 575th was expert in half a dozen varieties of air travel (as it still is in the current Reality), and my son was a happy and successful member of his society. He was married to an ardently enamored girl, but would have no children. Nor would the girl have married at all in the Reality in which my son had not existed. I had known that from the beginning. I had known there would be no deleterious affect on Reality. Otherwise, I might not have found it in my heart to let the boy live. I am not completely abandoned. I spent the day with my son. I spoke to him formally, smiled politely, took my leave coolly when the spatio-temporal chart dictated. But un derneath all that, I watched and absorbed every action, filling myself with him, and trying to live one day at least out of a Reality that the next day (by physiotime) would no longer have existed. How I longed to visit my wife one last time, too, during that portion of Time in which she lived, but I had used every second that had been available to me. |
| 895 |
He thought feverishly: Let her talk. Let her tell what she can about the Hidden Centuries. So much better protection for Eternity. It put a front of firm policy on his action and for the moment he could look at her with as calm a face, almost, as she looked at him. Noys might have read his mind. She said, "Do you want to know about the Hidden Centuries? If that will be a defense, it is easily done. Would you like to know, for instance, why Earth is empty of mankind after the 150,000th? Would you be interested?" Harlan wasn't going to plead for knowledge, nor was he going to buy knowledge. He had the blaster. He was very intent on no show of weakness. He said, "Talk!" and flushed at the little smile which was her first response to his exclamation. She said, "At a moment in physiotime before Eternity had reached very far upwhen, before it had reached even the 10,000th, we of our Century — and you're right, it was the 111,394th — learned of Eternity's existence. We, toe, had Time-travel, you see, but it was based on a completely different set of postulates than yours, and we preferred to view Time, rather than shifting mass. Furthermore, we dealt with our past only, our downwhen. "We discovered Eternity indirectly. First, we developed the calculus of Realities and tested our own Reality through it. We were amazed to find we lived in a Reality of rather low probability. It was a serious question. Why such an improbable Reality? ... You seem abstracted, Andrew! Are you interested at all?" Harlan heard her say his name with all the intimate tenderness she had used in weeks past. It should grate on him now, anger him with its cynical faithlessness. And yet it didn't. He said desperately, "Go on and get it over with, woman." He tried to balance the warmth of her "Andrew" with the chill anger of his "woman" and yet she only smiled again, pallidly. She said, "We searched back through time and came across the growing Eternity. It seemed obvious to us almost at once that there had been at one point in physiotime (a conception we have also, but under another name) another Reality. The other Reality, the one of maximum probability we call the Basic State. The Basic State had encompassed us once, or had encompassed our analogues, at least. At the time we could not say what the nature of the Basic State was. We could not possibly know. "We did know, however, that some Change initiated by Eternity in the far downwhen had managed, through the workings of statistical chance, to alter the Basic State all the way up to our Century and beyond. We set about determining the nature of the Basic State, intending to undo the evil, if evil it was. First we set up the quarantined area you call the Hidden Centuries, isolating the Eternals on the downwhen side of the 70,000th. This armor of isolation would affect us from all but a vanishingly small percentage of the Changes being made. It wasn't absolute security but it gave us time. "We next did something our culture and ethics did not ordinarily allow us to do. |
| 896 |
He was feeling a little better himself, as a matter of fact. Half a world away, one of Sheerin 501's Saro University colleagues was staring at the sky also. But the only emotion she felt was horror. She was Siferra 89, of the Department of Archaeology, who had been conducting excavations for the past year and a half at the ancient site of Beklimot on the remote Sagikan Peninsula. Now she stood rigid with apprehension, watching a catastrophe come rushing toward her. The sky offered no comfort. In this part of the world the only real light visible just then was that of Tano and Sitha, and their cold, harsh gleam had always seemed joyless, even depressing, to her. Against the deep somber blue of the two-sunday sky it was a baleful, oppressive illumination, casting jagged, ominous shadows. Dovim was in view also-barely, just rising now-right on the horizon, a short distance above the tips of the distant Horkkan Mountains. The dim glow of the little red sun, though, was hardly any more cheering. But Siferra knew that the warm yellow light of Onos would come drifting up out of the east before long to cheer things up. What was troubling her was something far more serious than the temporary absence of the main sun. A killer sandstorm was heading straight toward Beklimot. In another few minutes it would sweep over the site, and then anything might happen. Anything. The tents could be destroyed; the carefully sorted trays of artifacts might be overturned and their contents scattered; their cameras, their drafting equipment, their laboriously compiled stratigraphic drawings-everything that they had worked on for so long might be lost in a moment. Worse. They could all be killed. Worse yet. The ancient ruins of Beklimot itself-the cradle of civilization, the oldest known city on Kalgash-were in jeopardy. The trial trenches that Siferra had sliced in the surrounding alluvial plain stood wide open. The onrushing wind, if it was strong enough, would lift even more sand than it was already carrying, and hurl it with terrible force against the fragile remains of Beklimot-scouring, eroding, reburying, perhaps even ripping whole foundations loose and hurling them across the parched plain. Beklimot was a historical treasure that belonged to the entire world. That Siferra had exposed it to possible harm by excavating in it had been a calculated risk. You could never do any sort of archaeological work without destroying something: it was the nature of the job. But to have laid the whole heart of the plain bare like this, and then to have the lousy luck of being hit by the worst sandstorm in a century- No. No, it was too much. Her name would be blackened for aeons to come if the Beklimot site was shattered by this storm as a result of what she had done here. Maybe there was a curse on this place, as certain superstitious people were known to say. Siferra 89 had never had much tolerance for crackpots of any sort. But this dig, which she had hoped would be the crowning achievement of her career, had been nothing but headaches ever since she started. |
| 897 |
That should have been the clue, Siferra thought. When the khalla-birds took off and went screaming into the dune country. But they had all been too busy working at the dig to pay attention to what was going on. Sheer denial, most likely. Pretend that you don't notice the signs of an approaching sandstorm and maybe the sandstorm will go somewhere else. And then that little gray cloud appearing out of nowhere in the far north, that dull stain on the fierce shield of the desert sky, which ordinarily was always as clear as glass- Cloud? Do you see a cloud? I don 't see any clouds. Denial again. Now the cloud was an immense black monster filling half the sky. The wind still blew from the south, but it was no longer moist-a searing furnace-blast was what it was, now-and there was another wind, an even stronger one, bearing down from the opposite direction. One wind fed the other. And when they met- "Siferra!" Balik yelled. "Here it comes! Take cover!" "I will! I will!" She didn't want to. What she wanted to do was run from one zone of the dig to another, looking after everything at once, holding the flaps of the tents down, wrapping her arms around the bundles of precious photographic plates, throwing herself against the face of the newly excavated Octagon House to protect the stunning mosaics that they had discovered the month before. But Balik was right. Siferra had done all she could, this frantic morning, to batten down the site. Now the thing to do was to huddle in, down there below the cliff that loomed at the upper edge of the site, and hope that it would be a bulwark for them against the fullest force of the storm. She ran for it. Her sturdy, powerful legs carried her easily over the parched, crackling sand. Siferra was not quite forty years old, a tall, strong woman in the prime of her physical strength, and until this moment she had never felt anything but optimism about any aspect of her existence. But suddenly everything was imperiled now: her academic career, her robust good health, maybe even her life itself. The others were crowded together at the base of the cliff, behind a hastily improvised screen of bare wooden poles with tarpaulins lashed to them. "Move over," Siferra said, pushing her way in among them. "Lady," Thuvvik moaned. "Lady, make the storm turn back!" As though she were some sort of goddess with magical powers. Siferra laughed harshly. The foreman made some kind of gesture at her-a holy sign, she imagined. The other workers, all of them men of the little village just east of the ruins, made the same sign and began to mutter at her. Prayers? To her? It was a spooky moment. These men, like their fathers and grandfathers, had been digging at Beklimot all their lives in the employ of one archaeologist or another, patiently uncovering the ancient buildings and sifting through the sand for tiny artifacts. Presumably they had been through bad sandstorms before. Were they always this terrified? Or was this some kind of super storm? |
| 898 |
Sheerin had slept badly-had scarcely slept at all, so it seemed to him now-and yesterday he had only picked at his food. Nor did he feel in the least hungry now. The thought of going downstairs for breakfast had no appeal whatever. That was an alien concept to him, not to feel hungry. Was the bleakness of his mood, he wondered, the result of his interviews with Kelaritan's hapless patients yesterday? Or was he simply terrified of going through the Tunnel of Mystery? Certainly seeing those three patients hadn't been easy. It was a long time since he'd done any actual clinical work, and obviously his sojourn among the academics at Saro University had attenuated the professional detachment that allows members of the healing arts to confront the ill without being overwhelmed by compassion and sorrow. Sheerin was surprised at that, how tenderhearted he seemed to have become, how thin-skinned. That first one, Harrim, the longshoreman-he looked tough enough to withstand anything. And yet fifteen minutes of Darkness on his trip through the Tunnel of Mystery had reduced him to such a state that merely to relive the trauma in memory sent him into babbling hysteria. How terribly sad that was. And then the other two, in the afternoon-they had been in even worse shape. Gistin 190, the schoolteacher, that lovely frail woman with the dark, intelligent eyes-she hadn't been able to stop sobbing for a moment, and though she was able to speak clearly and well, at least in the beginning, her story had degenerated into mere incoherent blurtings within a few sentences. And Chimmilit 97, the high school athlete, obviously a perfect physical specimen-Sheerin wasn't going quickly to forget how the boy had reacted to the sight of the afternoon sky when Sheerin opened the blinds in his room. There was Onos blazing away in the west, and all that huge handsome boy could manage to say was, "The Darkness-the Darkness-" before he turned away and tried to scuttle down under his bed! The Darkness-the Darkness- And now, Sheerin thought gloomily, it's my turn to take a ride in the Tunnel of Mystery. Of course, he could simply refuse. There was nothing in his consulting contract with the Municipality of Jonglor that required him to risk his sanity. He'd be able to render a valid enough opinion without actually sticking his neck into peril. But something in him rebelled at such timidity. His professional pride, if nothing else, was pushing him toward the Tunnel He was here to study the phenomenon of darkness and to help these people work out ways not only of healing the present victims but of preventing recurrences of these tragedies. How could he deign to explain what had happened to the Tunnel's victims if he didn't make a close study of the cause of their disturbances? He bad to. It would be sheer malfeasance to back out. Nor did he want anyone, not even these strangers here in Jonglor, to be able to accuse him of cowardice. He remembered the taunts of his childhood: "Fatty is a coward! |
| 899 |
The Darkness- The Darkness- The Darkness! Sheerin was in the Tunnel now. Behind him the last vestige of light disappeared, and he peered into an utter void. There was nothing ahead of him: nothing. A pit. An abyss. A zone of total lightlessness. And he was tumbling headlong into it. He felt sweat breaking out all over him. His knees began to shake. His forehead throbbed. He held up his hand and was unable to see it in front of his face. Abort abort abort abort No. Absolutely not. He sat upright, back rigid, eyes wide open, gazing stolidly into the nothingness through which he plunged. On and on, ever deeper. Primordial fears bubbled and hissed in the depths of his soul, and he forced them back down and away. The suns are still shining outside the Tunnel, he told himself. This is only temporary. In fourteen minutes and thirty seconds I'll be back out there. Fourteen minutes and twenty seconds. Fourteen minutes and ten seconds. Fourteen minutes- Was he moving at all, though? He couldn't tell. Maybe he wasn't. The car's mechanism was silent; and he had no reference points. What if I'm stuck? he wondered. Just sitting here in the dark, no way to tell where I am, what's happening, how much time is passing? Fifteen minutes, twenty, half an hour? Until I've passed whatever limit my sanity can stand, and then- There's always the abort switch, though. But suppose it doesn't work? What if I press it and the lights don't come on? I could test it, I suppose. Just to see- Fatty is a coward! Fatty is a coward! No. No. Don't touch it. Once you turn the lights on you won't be able to turn them off again. You mustn't use the abort switch, or they'll know-they'll all know- Fatty is a coward, Fatty is a coward- Suddenly, astonishingly, he hurled the abort switch into the darkness. There was a tiny sound as it fell-somewhere. Then silence again. His hand felt terribly empty. The Darkness- The Darkness- There was no end to it. He was tumbling through an infinite abyss. Falling and falling and falling into the night, the endless night, the all-devouring black- Breathe deeply. Stay calm. What if there 'c permanent mental damage? Stay calm, he told himself. You'll be all right. You've got maybe eleven minutes more of this at the worst, maybe only six or seven. The suns are shining out there. Six or seven minutes and you'll never be in Darkness again, not if you live to be a thousand. The Darkness- Oh, God, the Darkness- Calm. Calm. You're a very stable man, Sheerin. You're extremely sane. You were sane when you went into this thing and you'll be sane when you come out. Tick. Tick. Tick. Every second gets you closer to the exit. Or does it? This ride may never end. I could be in here forever. Tick. Tick. Tick. Am I moving? Do I have five minutes left, or five seconds, or is this still the first minute? Tick. Tick. Why don t they let me out? Can 't they tell bow I'm suffering in here? They don't want to let you out. They'll never let you out. They're going to Suddenly, a stabbing pain between his eyes. |
| 900 |
"I wanted this to be a purely abstract mathematical exercise for you. But it doesn't surprise me that you were able to figure out the context. You figured it out after you had your result, didn't you?" "Yes, sir," said Yimot and Faro at the same time. "We ran all the calculations first," Faro said. "Then we took a second look, and the context became apparent," said Yimot. "Ah. Yes," Beenay said. These kids were sometimes a little unnerving. They were so young-only six or seven years younger than he, as a matter of fact, but he was an assistant professor and they were students, and to him and them both that was a vast barrier. Young as they were, though, they had such extraordinary minds! He wasn't altogether pleased that they had guessed at the conceptual matrix within which these calculations were located. In fact, he wasn't pleased at all. In another few years they'd be right up here on the faculty with him, perhaps competing for the same professorship he hoped to get, and that might not be fun. But he tried not to think about that. He reached for their printout. "May I see?" he asked. Hands fluttering wildly, Yimot handed it over. Beenay scanned the rows of figures, calmly at first, then with rising agitation. He had been pondering, all year long, certain implications of the Theory of Universal Gravitation, which his mentor Athor had brought to such a summit of perfection. It had been Athor's great triumph, the making of his lofty reputation, to work out the orbital motions of Kalgash and all six of its suns according to rational principles of attractive forces. Beenay, using modern computational equipment, had been calculating some aspects of Kalgash's orbit around Onos, its primary sun, when to his horror he observed that his figures didn't check out properly in terms of the Theory of Universal Gravitation. The theory said that at the beginning of the present year Kalgash should have been here in relation to Onos, when in undeniable fact Kalgash was there. The deviation was trivial-a matter of a few decimal places- but that wasn't trivial at all, in the larger sense of things. The Theory of Universal Gravitation was so precise that most people preferred to refer to it as the Law of Universal Gravitation. Its mathematical underpinning was considered impeccable. But a theory that purports to explain the movements of the world through space has no room for even small discrepancies. Either it is complete or it is not complete: no middle way was permissible. And a difference of a few decimal places in a shortrange calculation would widen into a vast abyss, Beenay knew, if more ambitious computations were attempted. What good was the whole Theory of Universal Gravitation if the position that it said Kalgash was going to hold in the sky a century from now turned out to be halfway around Onos from the planet's actual location then? Beenay had gone over his figures until he was sick of reworking them. The result was always the same. But what was he supposed to believe? |
| 901 |
If we accept the second one, all we need to do is locate the unknown factor, and the fundamental order of things is preserved. It's a lot simpler to try to find something we may have overlooked than it would be to come up with a new general law governing the movements of heavenly bodies. So the hypothesis that the Theory of Gravitation is wrong falls before Thargola's Sword and we begin our investigations by working with the simpler explanation of the problem. Eh, Beenay? What do you say?" Beenay looked radiant. "Then I haven't overthrown Universal Gravitation after all!" "Not yet, anyway. You've probably won a place in scientific history for yourself, but we don't know yet whether it's as a debunker or as an originator. Let's pray it's the latter. And now we need to do some very hard thinking, young man." Athor 77 closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead, which was beginning to ache. It had been a long time since he'd done any real science, he realized. He'd occupied himself almost entirely with administrative matters at the Observatory for the past eight or ten years. But the mind that had produced the Theory of Universal Gravitation might yet have a thought or two left in it, he told himself. -"First, I want to take a closer look at these calculations of yours," he said. "And then, I suppose, a closer look at my own theory." The headquarters of the Apostles of Flame was a slender but magnificent tower of gleaming golden stone, rising like a shining javelin above the Seppitan River, in the exclusive Birigam quarter of Saro City. That soaring tower, Theremon thought, must be one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the entire capital. He had never stopped to consider it before, but the Apostles had to be an exceedingly wealthy group. They owned their own radio and television stations, they published magazines and newspapers, they had this tremendous tower. And probably they controlled all sorts of other assets too that were less visibly theirs. He wondered how that was possible. A bunch of fanatic puritan monks? Where would they have managed to get their hands on so many hundreds of millions of credits? But, he realized, such well-known industrialists as Bottiker 888 and Vivin 99 were outspoken adherents of the teachings of Mondior and his Apostles. It wouldn't surprise him to know that men like Bottiker and Vivin, and others like them, were heavy contributors to the Apostles' treasury. And if the organization was even a tenth as old as it claimed to be-ten thousand years, was what they said!-and if it had invested its money wisely over the centuries, there was no telling what the Apostles could have achieved through the miracle of compound interest, Theremon thought. They might be worth billions. They might secretly own half of Saro City. It was worth looking into, he told himself. He entered the vast, echoing entrance hall of the great tower and peered about in awe. Though he had never been here before, he had heard it was an extraordinarily lavish building both inside and out. |
| 902 |
But nothing he had heard had prepared him for the reality of the cultist's building. A polished marble floor, with inlays in half a dozen brilliant colors, stretched as far as he could see. The walls were covered with glittering golden mosaics in abstract patterns, rising to arched vaults high overhead. Chandeliers of woven gold and silver threw a shimmering shower of brightness over everything. At the opposite end from the entrance Theremon saw what seemed to be a model of the whole universe, fashioned, apparently, entirely of precious metals and gems: immense suspended globes, which seemed to represent the six suns, hung from the ceiling by invisible wires. Each of them cast an eerie light: a golden beam from the largest of them, which must be Onos, and a dim red glow from the Dovim globe, and cold hard blue-white from the Tano-Sitha pair, and a gentler white light from Patru and Trey. A seventh globe that must be Kalgash moved slowly among them like a drifting balloon, its own colors changing as the shifting pattern of the suns' light played over its surface. As Theremon stood gaping in astonishment, a voice coming from nowhere in particular said, "May we have your name?" "I'm Theremon 762. I have an appointment with Mondior." "Yes. Please enter the chamber on your immediate left, Theremon 762." He saw no chamber on his immediate left. But then a segment of the mosaic-covered wall slid noiselessly open, revealing a small oval room, more an antechamber than a chamber. Green velvet hangings covered the walls and a single bar of amber light provided illumination. He shrugged and stepped in. At once the door closed behind him and he felt a distinct sensation of motion. This wasn't a room, it was a lift! Yes, he was rising, he was certain of it. Up and up and up he went, in a very unhurried way. It took half an eternity before the lift chamber came to a halt and the door slid open once again. A black-robed figure was waiting for him. "Would you come this way, please?" A narrow hallway led a short distance into a kind of waiting room, where a large portrait of Mondior 71 occupied most of one entire wall. As Theremon entered, the portrait seemed to light up, coming strangely to life and glowing, so that Mondior's dark, intense eyes looked straight at him and the High Apostle's stern face took on a luminous inner radiance that made him seem almost beautiful, in a fierce sort of way. Theremon met the portrait's gaze coolly enough. But even the tough-minded newspaperman found himself ever so slightly unnerved to think that very shortly he would be interviewing this very person. Mondior on radio or television was one thing, just some crazed preacher with an absurd message to peddle. But Mondior in the flesh-awesome, hypnotic, mysterious, if this portrait was any indication-might be something else again. Theremon warned himself to be on his guard. The black-robed monk said, "If you'll step inside, please-" The wall just to the left of the portrait opened. |
| 903 |
Now and then the four of them did manage to get together in the sky, but Onos always was visible when such two-pair conjunctions occurred. Those were the famous five-sun days-which produced the equally distinctive Dovim-only days in the opposite hemisphere. They happened only every few years." Trey without Patru? Tano without Sitha? Well, technically, yes. When one of the double-sun pairs was close to the horizon, one sun would be above the horizon and one of them below it for a brief period. But that wasn't really a significant solar event, just a momentary aberration. The double suns were still together, but transiently separated by the line of the horizon. All six suns in the sky at once? Impossible! Worse than that-unthinkable! Yet he had just thought it. Beenay shivered at the idea. If all six of them were above the horizon simultaneously, then there would have to be a region in the other hemisphere where no sunlight whatever could be seen. Darkness! Darkness! But Darkness was unknown everywhere on Kalgash, except as an abstract concept. There could never have been a time when the six suns moved together and a major part of the world was plunged into utter lightlessness. Could there have been? Could there? Beenay pondered the chilling possibility. Once more he heard Theremon's deep voice explaining the theories of the Apostles to him: "-the suns will all disappear-" "-the Stars will shoot flame down out of a black sky-" He shook his head. Everything he knew about the movements of the suns in the heavens rebelled against the idea of the six of them somehow bunching up on one side of Kalgash at the same time. It just couldn't happen, short of a miracle. Beenay didn't believe in miracles. The way the suns were arranged in the sky, there always had to be at least one or two of them shining over every part of Kalgash at any given moment. Forget the six-suns-here, Darkness-there hypothesis. What was left? Dovim alone, he thought. The little red sun all alone in the sky? Well, yes, it did happen, though not often. On those occasional five-sun days when Tano, Sitha, Trey, Patru, and Onos all were in conjunction in the same hemisphere: that left only Dovim for the other side of the world. Beenay wondered whether that might be the moment when the Darkness came. Could it be? Dovim by itself might cast so little light, just its cool and feeble reddish-purple gleam, that people might mistake it for Darkness. But that didn't really make sense. Even little Dovim should be able to provide enough light to keep people from plunging into terror. Besides, Dovim-only days occurred somewhere in the world every few years. They were uncommon, but not all that extraordinary. Surely, if the effects of seeing nothing but a single small dim sun in the sky could cause vast psychological upheavals, then everybody would be worrying about the next Dovim-only event, which was due, as Beenay recalled, in just another year or so. And in fact nobody was thinking about it at all. |
| 904 |
Let everyone actually begin believing that doom would arrive on the evening of Theptar nineteenth, and there would be panic in the streets long before that, universal hysteria, a collapse of law and order, a prolonged period of general instability and troublesome apprehension-followed by the gods only knew what sort of emotional upheavals when the dreaded day came and went harmlessly. It would have to be his task to deflate the fear of Nightfall, of Darkness, of Doomsday, by poking it with the sharp spear of laughter. So when Mondior thundered ferociously that the vengeance of the gods was on the way, Theremon 762 replied with lighthearted sketches of what the world would be like if the Apostles succeeded in "reforming" society as they wanted to-people going to the beach bundled up in ankle-length swimsuits, long sessions of prayer between each bit of action at sports events, all the great books and classic plays and shows rewritten to eliminate the slightest hint of impiety. And when Athor and his group released diagrams showing the movements of the unseen and apparently unseeable Kalgash Two across the sky on its shadowy rendezvous with the pallid red light of Dovim, Theremon made amiable remarks about dragons, invisible giants, and other mythological monsters cavorting through the heavens. When Mondior waved the scientific authority of Athor 77 around as an argument demonstrating secular support of the Apostles' teachings, Theremon responded by asking how seriously anyone could take Athor 77's scientific authority, now that he was obviously just as deranged as Mondior himself. When Athor called for a crash program to store food supplies, scientific and technical information, and everything else that would be needed by mankind after the general insanity broke loose, Theremon suggested that in some quarters the general insanity had already broken loose, and provided his own list of essential items to put away in your basement ("can openers, thumbtacks, copies of the multiplication table, playing cards... . Don't forget to write your name on a tag and tie it around your right wrist, in case you don't remember it after the Darkness comes... . Put a tag on your left wrist that says, To find out your name, see tag on other wrist... By the time Theremon had finished working the story over, it was hard for his readers to decide which group was more absurd-the ripsnorting doomsayers of the Apostles of Flame, or the pathetic, gullible skywatchers of the Saro University Observatory. But one thing was certain: thanks to Theremon, hardly any member of the general public believed that anything out of the ordinary was going to take place on the evening of Theptar nineteenth. Athor thrust out a belligerent lower lip and glared in rage at the man from the Chronicle. He was able to restrain himself only by a supreme effort. "You here? Despite everything I said? Of all the audacity!" Theremon's hand was outstretched in greeting as though he really had expected Athor to accept it. |
| 905 |
He shivered. He wished that he and Sheerin and Beenay hadn't finished off that whole bottle of miserable wine so quickly. "I'm going to go back below," he said to Siferra. "There's nothing to see here if you aren't an astronomer." "All right. I'll go with you." In the flickering yellow light he saw a smile appear on her face, unmistakable this time, unambiguous. They made their way down the clattering spiral staircase to the lower room. Not much had changed down there. The people on the lower level had lit torches there too. Beenay was busy at three computers at once, processing data from the telescopes upstairs. Other astronomers were doing other things, all of them incomprehensible to Theremon. Sheerin was wandering around by himself, a lost soul. Folimun had carried his chair directly beneath a torch and continued reading, lips moving in the monotonous recital of invocations to the Stars. Through Theremon's mind ran phrases of description, bits and pieces of the article he had planned to write for tomorrow's Saro City Chronicle. Several times earlier in the evening the writing machine in his brain had clicked on the same way -a perfectly methodical, perfectly conscientious, and, as he was only too well aware, perfectly meaningless procedure. It was wholly preposterous to imagine that there was going to be an issue of the Chronicle tomorrow. He exchanged glances with Siferra. "The sky," she murmured. "I see it, yes." It had changed tone again. Now it was darker still, a horrible deep purple-red, a monstrous color, as though some enormous wound in the fabric of the heavens were gushing fountains of blood. The air had grown, somehow, denser. Dusk, like a palpable entity, entered the room, and the dancing circle of yellow light about the torches etched itself into ever sharper distinction against the gathering grayness beyond. The odor of smoke here was just as cloying as it had been upstairs. Theremon found himself bothered even by the little chuckling sounds that the torches made as they burned, and by the soft pad of Sheerin's footsteps as the heavyset psychologist circled round and round the table in the middle of the room. It was getting harder to see, torches or no. So now it begins, Theremon thought. The time of total Darkness-and the coming of the Stars. For an instant he thought it might be wisest to look for some cozy closet to lock himself into until it was all over. Stay out of the way, avoid the sight of the Stars, hunker down and wait for things to become normal again. But a moment's contemplation told him what a bad idea that was. A closet-any sort of enclosed place-would be dark too. Instead of being a safe snug harbor, it might become a chamber of terrors far more frightening than the rooms of the Observatory. And then too, if something big was going to happen, something that would reshape the history of the world, Theremon didn't want to be tucked away with his head under his arm while it was going on. That would be cowardly and foolish; and it might be something he would regret all the rest of his life. |
| 906 |
The smoke's killing me." The cases were full of books, scientific instruments, all sorts of things, a whole museum of astronomy. The gods only knew what the display cases weighed, but some supernal force had taken possession of Theremon in this moment of crisis, and he heaved and pulled them into place-aided, more or less, by Sheerin-as though they were pillows. The little telescopes and other gadgets within them went tumbling over as he jockeyed the heavy cases into position. There was the sound of breaking glass. Beenay will kill me, Theremon thought. He worships all that stuff. But this was no moment for being delicate. He slammed one case after another up against the door, and in a few minutes had built a barricade that might, he hoped, serve to hold back the mob if it succeeded in breaking through the gate. Somewhere, dimly, far off, he could hear the battering of bare fists against the door. Screams-yells- It was all like a ghastly dream. The mob had set out from Saro City driven by the hunger for salvation, the salvation held forth by the Apostles of Flame, which could be attained now, they had been told, only by the destruction of the Observatory. But as the moment of Darkness drew near a maddening fear had all but stripped their minds of the ability to function. There was no time to think of ground cars, or of weapons, or of leadership, or even of organization. They had rushed to the Observatory on foot, and they were assaulting it with bare hands. And now that they were there, the last flash of Dovim, the last ruby-red drop of sunlight, flickered feebly over a humanity that had nothing left but stark, universal fear. Theremon groaned. "Let's get back upstairs!" There was no sign of anyone now in the room where they had been gathered. They had all gone to the topmost floor, into the Observatory dome itself. As he came rushing in, Theremon was struck by an eerie calmness that seemed to prevail in there. It was like a tableau. Yimot was seated in the little lean-back seat at the control panel of the gigantic solarscope as if this were just an ordinary evening of astronomical research. The rest were clustered about the smaller telescopes, and Beenay was giving instructions in a strained, ragged voice. "Get it straight, all of you. It's vital to snap Dovim just before totality and change the plate. Here, you-you-one of you to each camera. We need all the redundancy we can get. You all know about-about times of exposure-" There was a breathless murmur of agreement. Beenay passed a hand over his eyes. "Are the torches still burning? Never mind, I see them!" He was leaning hard against the back of a chair. "Now remember, don't-don't try to look for fancy shots. When the Stars appear, don't waste time trying to get t-two of them in the scope field at a time. One is enough. And ... and if you feel yourself going, get away from the camera." At the door, Sheerin whispered to Theremon, "Take me to Athor. I don't see him." The newspaperman did not answer immediately. |
| 907 |
Through it shone the Stars! Not the one or two dozen of Beenay's pitiful theory. There were thousands of them, blazing with incredible power, one next to another next to another next to another, an endless wall of them, forming a dazzling shield of terrifying light that filled the entire heavens. Thousands of mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world. They hammered at the roots of his being. They beat like flails against his brain. Their icy monstrous light was like a million great gongs going off at once. My God, he thought. My God, my God, my God! But he could not tear his eyes away from the hellish sight of them. He looked up through the opening in the dome, every muscle rigid, frozen, and stared in helpless wonder and horror at that shield of fury that filled the sky. He felt his mind shrinking down to a tiny cold point under that unceasing onslaught. His brain was no bigger than a marble, rattling around in the hollow gourd that was his skull. His lungs would not work. His blood ran backward in his veins. At last he was able to close his eyes. He knelt for a time, panting, murmuring to himself, fighting to regain control. Then Theremon staggered to his feet, his throat constricting him to breathlessness, all of the muscles of his body writhing in a tensity of terror and sheer fear beyond bearing. Dimly he was aware of Siferra somewhere near him, but he had to struggle to remember who she was. He had to work at remembering who he was. From below came the sound of a terrible steady pounding, a frightful hammering against the door-some strange wild beast with a thousand heads, struggling to get in- It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. He was going mad, and knew it, and somewhere deep inside a bit of sanity was screaming, struggling to fight off the hopeless flood of black terror. It was very horrible to go mad and know that you were going mad-to know that in a little minute you would be here physically and yet all the real essence that was you would be dead and drowned in the black madness. For this was the Dark-the Dark and the Cold and the Doom. The bright walls of the universe were shattered and their awful black fragments were falling down to crush and squeeze and obliterate, him. Someone came crawling toward him on hands and knees and jostled up against him. Theremon moved aside. He put his hands to his tortured throat and limped toward the flames of the torches that filled all his mad vision. "Light!" he screamed. Athor, somewhere, was crying, whimpering horribly like a terribly frightened child. "Stars-all the Stars-we didn't know at all. We didn't know anything. We thought six stars is a universe is something the Stars didn't notice is Darkness forever and ever and ever and the walls are breaking in and we didn't know we couldn't know and anything-" Someone clawed at the torch, and it fell and snuffed out. |
| 908 |
The Stars did not. The sun, the kindly sun, good warm Onos. And Onos had returned. Therefore all was well with the world, even if some of the world seemed to be on fire. Six suns? Then where were the other five? He even remembered their names. Dovim, Trey, Patru, Tano, Sitha. And Onos made six. He saw Onos, all right-it was right above him, it seemed to fill half the sky. What about the rest? He stood up, a little shakily, still half afraid of the hot golden thing overhead, wondering now if perhaps he stood up too far he would touch it and be burned by it. No, no, that didn't make any sense. Onos was good, Onos was kind. He smiled. Looked around. Any more suns up there? There was one. Very far off, very small. Not frightening, this one-the way the Stars had been, the way this fiery hot globe overhead was. Just a cheerful white dot in the sky, nothing more. Small enough to put in his pocket, almost, if he could only reach it. Trey, he thought. That one is Trey. So its sister Patru ought to be somewhere nearby- Yes. Yes, that's it. Down there, in the corner of the sky, just to the left of Trey. Unless that one's Trey, and the other one is Patru. Well, he told himself, the names don't matter. Which one is which, unimportant. Together they are Trey and Patru. And the big one is Onos. And the other three suns must be somewhere else right now, because I don't see them. And my name's- Theremon. Yes. That's right. I'm Theremon. But there's a number, too. He stood frowning, thinking about it, his family code, that's what it was, a number he had known all his life, but what was it? What-was-it? 762. Yes. I am Theremon 762. And then another, more complex thought followed smoothly along: I am Theremon 762 of the Saro City Chronicle. Somehow that statement made him feel a little better, though it was full of mysteries for him. Saro City? The Chronicle? He almost knew what those words meant. Almost. He chanted them to himself. Saro saro saro. City city city. Chronicle chronicle chronicle. Saro City Chronicle. Perhaps if I walk a little, he decided. He took a hesitant step, another, another. His legs were a little wobbly. Looking around, he realized that he was on a hillside out in the country somewhere. He saw a road, bushes, trees, a lake off to the left. Some of the bushes and trees seemed to have been ripped and broken, with branches dangling at odd angles or lying on the ground below them, as though giants had come trampling through this countryside recently. Behind him was a huge round-topped building with smoke rising from a hole in its roof. The outside of the building was blackened as if fires had been set all around it, though its stone walls appeared to have withstood the flames well enough. He saw a few people lying scattered on the steps of the building, sprawled like discarded dolls. There were others lying in the bushes, and still others along the path leading down the hill. Some of them were faintly moving. Most were not. He looked the other way. |
| 909 |
On the horizon he saw the towers of a great city. A heavy pall of smoke hung over them, and when he squinted he imagined that he could see tongues of flame coming from the windows of the tallest buildings, although something rational within his mind told him that it was impossible to make out any such detail at so great a distance. That city had to be miles away. Saro City, he thought suddenly. Where the Chronicle is published. Where I work. Where I live. And I'm Theremon. Yes. Theremon 762. Of the Saro City Chronicle. He shook his head slowly from side to side, as some wounded animal might have done, trying to clear it of the haze and torpor that infested it. It was maddening, not being able to think properly, not being able to move around freely in the storehouse of his own memories. The brilliant light of the Stars lay like a wall across his mind, cutting him off from his own memories. But things were beginning to get through. Colored fragments of the past, sharp-edged, shimmering with manic energy, were dancing around and around in his brain. He struggled to make them hold still long enough for him to comprehend them. The image of a room came to him, then. His room, heaped with papers, magazines, a couple of computer terminals, a box of unanswered mail. Another room: a bed. The small kitchen that he almost never used. This, he thought, is the apartment of Theremon 762, the well-known columnist for the Saro City Chronicle. Theremon himself is not at home at this time, ladies and gentlemen. At the present moment Theremon is standing outside the ruins of the Saro University Observatory, trying to understand- The ruins- Saro University Observatory- "Siferra?" he called. "Siferra, where are you?" No answer. He wondered who Siferra was. Someone he must have known before the ruins were ruined, probably. The name had come bubbling up out of the depths of his troubled mind. He took another few uncertain steps. There was a man lying under a bush a short distance downhill. Theremon went to him. His eyes were closed. He held a burned-out torch in his hand. His robe was torn. Sleeping? Or was he dead? Theremon prodded him carefully with his foot. Yes, dead. That was strange, all these dead people lying around. You didn't ordinarily see dead people everywhere like this, did you? And an overturned car over there-it looked dead, too, with its undercarriage turned pathetically toward the sky, and curls of smoke rising sluggishly from its interior. "Siferra?" he called again. Something terrible had happened. That seemed very clear to him, though hardly anything else did. Once again he crouched, and pressed his hands against the sides of his head. The random fragments of memory that had been jigging around in there were moving more slowly now, no longer engaged in a frantic dance: they had begun to float about in a stately fashion, like icebergs drifting in the Great Southern Ocean. If he could only get some of those drifting fragments to come together-force them into a pattern that made a little sense- He reviewed what he had already managed to reconstruct. |
| 910 |
Perhaps the madness had passed by this time. Perhaps it was safe for him to come out. He poked his nose out into the hallway. Cautiously he looked around. The smell of smoke was the first thing he perceived. But it was a stale, musty, nasty, damp, acrid kind of smoke-smell, the smell of a fire that has been extinguished. The Observatory was not only a building made of stone, but it had a highly efficient sprinkler system, which must have gone into operation as soon as the mob began setting fires. The mob! Sheerin shuddered at the recollection. The rotund psychologist knew that he would never forget the moment when that mob had come bursting into the Observatory. It would haunt him as long as he lived-those twisted, distorted faces, those berserk eyes, those howling cries of rage. These were people who had lost their fragile grip on sanity even before the totality of the eclipse. The deepening Darkness had been enough to push them over the edge-that, and the skillful rabble-rousing of the Apostles of Flame, triumphant now in their moment of fulfilled prophecy. So the mob had come, by the thousands, to root out the despised scientists in their lair; and there they were, now, rushing in, waving torches, clubs, brooms, anything at all with which they could hit, smash, ruin. Paradoxically enough, it was the coming of the mob that had jolted Sheerin into being able to get a grip on himself. He had had a bad moment, back there when he and Theremon first went downstairs to barricade the doors. He had felt all right, even strangely buoyant, on the way down; but then the first reality of the Darkness had hit him, like a whiff of poison gas, and he had folded up completely. Sitting huddled up there on the stairs, cold with panic, remembering his trip through the Tunnel of Mystery and realizing that this time the trip would last not only a few minutes but for hour upon intolerable hour. Well, Theremon had pulled him out of that one, and Sheerin had recovered some of his self-control as they returned to the upper level of the Observatory. But then came totality-and the Stars. Though Sheerin had turned his head away when that ungodly blast of light first came bursting through the opening in the Observatory roof, he had not been able completely to avoid the shattering sight of it. And for an instant he could feel his mind's grip giving way-could feel the delicate thread of sanity beginning to sunder- But then had come the mob, and Sheerin knew that the issue wasn't simply one of preserving his sanity, any more. It was one of saving his life. If he wanted to survive this night he had no choice but to hold himself together and find a place of safety. Gone was his naive plan to observe the Darkness phenomena like the aloof, dispassionate scientist he pretended to be. Let someone else observe the Darkness phenomena. He was going to hide. And so, somehow, he had made his way to the basement level, to that cheery little storeroom with its cheery little godlight casting a feeble but very comforting glow. |
| 911 |
When she looked for more than a second or two at a time she thought she could make out individual points of light, brighter than those around them, pulsing with a bizarre vigor. But the best that she could manage was to look for five or six seconds; then the force of all that pulsating light would overwhelm her, making her scalp tingle and her face turn burning hot, and she would have to lower her head and rub her fingers against the fiery, throbbing, angry place of pain between her eyes. She walked through the parking lot, ignoring the frenzy going on all about her, and emerged on the far side, where a paved road led along a level ridge on the flank of Observatory Mount. From some still-functioning region of her mind came the information that this was the road from the Observatory to the main part of the university campus. Up ahead, Siferra could see some of the taller buildings of the university now. Flames were dancing on the roofs of some of them. The bell tower was burning, and the theater, and the Hall of Student Records. You ought to save the tablets, said a voice within her mind that she recognized as her own. Tablets? What tablets? The Thombo tablets. Oh. Yes, of course. She was an archaeologist, wasn't she? Yes. Yes. And what archaeologists did was dig for ancient things. She had been digging in a place far away. Sagimot? Beklikan? Something like that. And had found tablets, prehistoric texts. Ancient things, archaeological things. Very important things. In a place called Thombo. How am I doing? she asked herself. And the answer came: You're doing fine. She smiled. She was feeling better moment by moment. It was the pink light of dawn on the horizon that was healing her, she thought. The morning was coming: the sun, Onos, entering the sky. As Onos rose, the Stars became less bright, less terrifying. They were fading fast. Already those in the east were dimmed by Onos's gathering strength. Even at the opposite end of the sky, where Darkness still reigned and the Stars thronged like minnows in a pool, some of the intensity was starting to go from their formidable gleam. She could look at the sky for several moments at a stretch now without feeling her head begin to throb painfully. And she was feeling less confused. She remembered clearly now where she lived, and where she worked, and what she had been doing the evening before. At the Observatory-with her friends, the astronomers, who had predicted the eclipse- The eclipse- That was what she had been doing, she realized. Waiting for the eclipse. For the Darkness. For the Stars. Yes. For the Flames, Siferra thought. And there they were. Everything had happened right on schedule. The world was burning, as it had burned so many times before-set ablaze not by the hand of the gods, nor by the power of the Stars, but by ordinary men and women, Star-crazed, cast into a desperate panic that urged them to restore the normal light of day by any means they could find. Despite the chaos all around her, though, she remained calm. |
| 912 |
"Hey, you bitch! What did you want to hit me for?" "You touched me." "Damn right I touched you! And about time, too." He rubbed his jaw. "Listen, Siferra, put that stick down and stop looking at me that way. I'm your friend. Your ally. The world has turned into a jungle now, and there's just the two of us. We need each other. It isn't safe trying to go it alone now. You can't afford to risk it." Again he came toward her, hands upraised, seeking her. She hit him again. This time she brought the club around and smashed it against the side of his cheek, connecting with bone. There was an audible sharp sound of impact, and Balik jerked to one side under the force of it. With his head turned halfway away from her, he looked at her in utter astonishment and staggered back. But he was still standing. She hit him a third time, above his ear, swinging the club with all her strength in a long arc. As he fell, Siferra clubbed him once more, in the same place, and felt everything give beneath the blow. His eyes closed and he made a strange soft sound, like an inflated balloon releasing its air, and sank down in the corner against the wall, with his head going one way and his shoulders the other. "Don't ever touch me like that again," Siferra said, prodding him with the tip of the club. Balik didn't reply. He didn't move, either. Balik ceased to concern her. Now for the tablets, she thought, feeling wonderfully calm. No. The tablets were gone, Balik had said. Stolen. And she remembered now: they really were. They had disappeared just before the eclipse. All right, the charts then. All those fine drawings they had made of the Hill of Thombo. The stone walls, the ashes at the foundation lines. Those ancient fires, just like the fire that was ravaging Saro City at this very moment. Where were they? Oh. Here. In the chart cabinet, where they belonged. She reached in, grabbed a sheaf of the parchment-like papers, rolled them, tucked them under her arm. Now she remembered the fallen man, and glanced at him. But Balik still hadn't moved. He didn't look as though he was going to, either. Out the office door, down the stairs. Mudrin remained where he had been before, sprawled out motionless and stiff on the landing. Siferra ran around him and continued to the ground floor. Outside, the morning was well along. Onos was climbing steadily and the Stars were pale now against its brightness. The air seemed fresher and cleaner, though the odor of smoke was thick on the breeze. Down by the Mathematics building she saw a band of men smashing windows. They caught sight of her a moment later and shouted to her, raucous, incoherent words. A couple of them began to run toward her. Her breast ached where Balik had squeezed it. She didn't want any more hands touching her now. Turning, Siferra darted behind the Archaeology building, pushed her way through the bushes on the far side of the pathway in back, ran diagonally across a lawn, and found herself in front of a blocky gray building that she recognized as Botany. |
| 913 |
There was a small botanical garden behind it, and an experimental arboretum on the hillside beyond that, at the edge of the forest that encircled the campus. Looking back, Siferra thought she saw the men still pursuing her, though she couldn't be sure. She sprinted past the Botany building and easily leaped the low fence around the botanical garden. A man riding a mowing machine waved at her. He wore the olive-drab uniform of the university gardeners; and he was methodically mowing the bushes, cutting a wide swath of destruction back and forth across the center of the garden. He was chuckling to himself as he worked. Siferra went around him. From there it was a short run into the arboretum. Were they still following her? She didn't want to take the time to glance behind her. Just run, run, run, that was the best idea. Her long, powerful legs carried her easily between the rows of neatly planted trees. She moved in steady strides. It felt good, running like this. Running. Running. Then she came to a rougher zone of the arboretum, all brambles and thorns, everything tightly interwoven. Unhesitatingly Siferra plunged into it, knowing no one would go after her there. The branches clawed at her face, ripped at her clothing. As she pushed her way through one dense patch she lost her grip on the roll of charts, and emerged on the far side without them. Let them go, she thought. They don't mean anything any more anyway. But now she had to rest. Panting, gasping with exhaustion, she vaulted across a little stream at the border of the arboretum and dropped down on a patch of cool green moss. No one had followed her. She was alone. She looked up, through the tops of the trees. The golden light of Onos flooded the sky. The Stars could no longer be seen. The night was over at last, and the nightmare too. No, she thought. The nightmare is just beginning. Waves of shock and nausea rolled through her: The strange numbness that had afflicted her mind all through the night was beginning to lift. After hours of mental dissociation, she was starting to comprehend the patterns of things again, to put one event and another and another together and understand their meaning. She thought of the campus in ruins, and the flames rising above the distant city. The wandering madmen everywhere, the chaos, the devastation. Balik. The ugly grin on his face as he tried to paw her. And the look of amazement on it when she had hit him. I've killed a man today, Siferra thought in astonishment and dismay. Me. How could I ever have done a thing like that? She began to tremble. The horrifying memory seared her mind: the sound the club had made when she hit him, the way Balik had staggered backward, the other blows, the blood, the twisted angle of his head. The man with whom she had worked for a year and a half, patiently digging out the ruins at Beklimot, falling like a slaughtered beast under her deadly bludgeoning. And her utter calmness as she stood over him afterward-her satisfaction at having prevented him from annoying her any more. |
| 914 |
One might just as well have ordered the tides of the ocean to turn back. Beenay remembered imploring Athor to come away with him, to flee while there still might be a chance. "Let go of me, young man!" Athor had roared, hardly seeming even to recognize him. "Get your hands off me, sir!" And then Beenay had realized what he should have seen before: that Athor had gone insane, and that the small part of Athor's mind that was still capable of functioning rationally was eager for death. What was left of Athor had lost all will to survive-to go forth into the dreadful new world of the post-eclipse barbarism. That was the most tragic single thing of all, Beenay thought: the destruction of Athor's will to live, the great astronomer's hopeless surrender in the face of this holocaust of civilization. And then-the escape from the Observatory. That was the last thing that Beenay remembered with any degree of confidence: looking back at the main Observatory room as Athor disappeared beneath a swarm of rioters, then turning, darting through a side door, scrambling down the fire escape, out the back way into the parking lot- Where the Stars were waiting for him in all their terrible majesty. With what he realized later had been sublime innocence, or else self-confidence verging on arrogance, Beenay had totally underestimated their power. In the Observatory at the moment of their emergence he had been too preoccupied with his work to be vulnerable to their force: he had merely noted them as a remarkable occurrence, to be examined in detail when he had a free moment, and then had gone on with what he was doing. But out here, under the merciless vault of the open sky, the Stars had struck him in their fullest might. He was stunned by the sight of them. The implacable cold light of those thousands of suns descended upon him and knocked him groveling to his knees. He crawled along the ground, choking with fear, sucking in sharp gasps of breath. His hands were shaking feverishly, his heart was palpitating, streams of sweat were running down his burning face. When some shred of the scientist he once had been motivated him to turn his face toward that colossal brilliance overhead, so that he could examine and analyze and record, he was compelled to hide his eyes after only a second or two. He could remember that much: the struggle to look at the Stars, his failure, his defeat. After that, everything was murky. A day or two, he guessed, of wandering in the forest. Voices in the distance, cackling laughter, harsh discordant singing. Fires crackling on the horizon; the bitter smell of smoke everywhere. Kneeling to plunge his face in a brook, cool swift water sweeping along his cheek. A pack of small animals surrounding him-not wild ones, Beenay decided afterward, but household pets that had escaped -and baying at him as though they meant to rip him apart. Pulling berries off a vine. Climbing a tree to strip it of tender golden fruit, and falling off, landing with a disastrous thud. |
| 915 |
The long hours of pain before he could pick himself up and move onward. A sudden furious fight in the deepest, darkest part of the woods-fists flailing, elbows jabbing into ribs, wild kicks, then stone-throwing, bestial screeching, a man's face pushed close up against his own, eyes red as flame, fierce wrestling, the two of them rolling over and over-reaching for a massive rock, bringing it down in a single decisive motion- Hours. Days. A feverish daze. Then, on the morning of the third day, remembering finally who he was, what had happened. Thinking of Raissta, his contract-mate. Remembering that he had promised to go to her at the Sanctuary when his work at the Observatory was done. The Sanctuary-now where was that? Beenay's mind had healed enough for him to recall that the place of refuge that the university people had established for themselves was midway between the campus and Saro City, in an open, rural area of rolling plains and grassy meadows. The Physics Department's old particle accelerator was there, a vast underground chamber, abandoned a few years back when they had built the new research center at Saro Heights. It hadn't been difficult to equip the echoing concrete rooms for short-term occupation by several hundred people, and, since the accelerator site had always been sealed off from easy access for security reasons, it was no problem to make the site safe against any sort of invasion by townsfolk who might be driven insane during the eclipse. But in order to find the Sanctuary, Beenay first had to find out where be was. And he had been wandering randomly in a dismal stupor for at least two days, perhaps more. He could be anywhere. In the early morning hours he found his way out of the forest, almost by accident, stepping forth unexpectedly into what had once been a neatly laid out residential district. It was deserted now, and in frightening disarray, with cars piled up every which way in the streets where their owners had left them when they no longer were capable of driving, and the occasional body lying in the street under a black cluster of flies. There was no sign that anyone was alive here. He spent a long morning trudging along a suburban highway lined by blackened, abandoned homes, without recognizing a single familiar landmark. At midday, as Trey and Patru rose into the sky, he entered a house through its open door and helped himself to whatever food he could find that had not spoiled. No water came out of the kitchen tap; but he found a cache of bottled water in the basement and drank as much of that as he could hold. He bathed himself in the rest. Afterward he proceeded up a winding road to a hilltop cul-de-sac of spacious, imposing dwellings, every one of them burned to a shell. Nothing at all was left of the uppermost house except a hillside patio decorated with pink and blue tiles, no doubt very handsome once, but marred now by thick black lumps of clotted debris scattered along its gleaming surface. With difficulty he made his way out onto it and looked out into the valley beyond. |
| 916 |
The air was very still. No planes were aloft, there was no sound of ground traffic, a weird silence resounded from every direction. Suddenly Beenay knew where he was, and everything fell into place. The university was visible off to his left, a handsome cluster of brick buildings, many of them now streaked with black smoke-stains and some seeming to be altogether destroyed. Beyond, on its high promontory, was the Observatory. Beenay glanced at it quickly and looked away, glad that at this distance he was unable to make out its condition very clearly. Far away to his right was Saro City, gleaming in the bright sunlight. To his eyes it seemed almost untouched. But he knew that if he had a pair of field glasses he would surely see shattered windows, fallen buildings, still-glowing embers, rising wisps of smoke, all the scars of the conflagration that had broken out at Nightfall. Straight below him, between the city and the campus, was the forest in which he had been wandering during the time of his delirium. The Sanctuary would be just on the far side of that; he might well have passed within a few hundred yards of its entrance a day or so ago, all unknowing. The thought of crossing that forest again did not appeal to him. Surely it was still full of madmen, cutthroats, irate escaped pets, all manner of troublesome things. But from his vantage point on the hilltop he could see the road that cut across the forest, and the pattern of streets that led to the road. Stick to paved routes, he told himself, and you'll be all right. And so he was. Onos was still in the sky when he completed the traversal of the forest highway and turned onto the small rural road that he knew led to the Sanctuary. Afternoon shadows had barely begun to lengthen when he came to the outer gate. Once past that, Beenay knew, he had to go down a long unpaved road that would take him to the second gate, and thence around a couple of outbuildings to the sunken entrance to the Sanctuary itself. The outer gate, a high metal-mesh screen, was standing open when he reached it. That was an unexpected and ominous sight. Had the mob come roaring in here too? But there was no sign of mob destruction. Everything was as it should be, except that the gate was open. He went on in, puzzled, and made his way down the unpaved road. The inner gate, at least, was closed. "I am Beenay 25," he said to it, and gave his university identification-code number. Moments passed, and lengthened into minutes, and nothing happened. The green scanner eye overhead seemed to be working-he saw its lens sliding from side to side-but perhaps the computers that operated it had lost their power, or had been smashed altogether. He waited. He waited some more. "I am Beenay 25," he said again, finally, and gave his number a second time. "I am authorized to enter here." Then he remembered that mere name and number were not enough: there was a password to say, also. But what was it? Panic churned his soul. He couldn't remember. |
| 917 |
Grass, trees, fresh air, the open sky-he didn't actually mind them, but they held no particular appeal for him. For years his life had shuttled along a fixed urban-based triangular orbit, rigidly following a familiar path bounded at one corner by his little apartment, at another by the Chronicle office, by the Six Suns Club at the third. Now, suddenly, he was a forest-dweller. The strange thing was that he almost liked it. What the citizens of Saro City called "the forest" was actually a fair-sized woodsy tract that began just southeast of the city itself and stretched for a dozen miles or so along the south bank of the Seppitan River. There once had been a great deal more of it, a vast wilderness sweeping on a great diagonal across the midsection of the province almost to the sea, but most of it had gone to agriculture, much of the remainder had been cut up into suburban residential districts, and the university had taken a goodly nip some fifty years back for what was then its new campus. Unwilling to have itself engulfed by urban development, the university had then agitated to have what was left set aside as a park preserve. And since the rule in Saro City for many years had been that whatever the university wanted the university usually got, the last strip of the old wilderness was left alone. That was where Theremon found himself living now. The first two days had been very bad. His mind was still half fogged by the effects of seeing the Stars, and he was unable to form any clear plan. The main thing was just to stay alive. The city was on fire-smoke was everywhere, the air was scorching hot, from certain vantage points you could even see the leaping flames dancing along the rooftops-so obviously it wasn't a good idea to try to go back there. In the aftermath of the eclipse, once the chaos within his mind had begun to clear a little, he had simply continued downhill from the campus until he found himself entering the forest. Many others plainly had done the same thing. Some of them looked like university people, others were probably remnants of the mob that had come out to storm the Observatory on the night of the eclipse, and the rest, Theremon guessed, were suburbanites driven from their homes when the fires began to break out. Everyone he saw appeared to be at least as unsettled mentally as he was. Most seemed very much worse off-some of them completely unhinged, totally unable to cope. They had not formed any sort of coherent bands. Mainly they were solitaries, moving on mysterious private tracks through the woods, or else groups of two or three; the biggest aggregation Theremon saw was eight people, who from their appearance and dress seemed all to be members of one family. It was horrifying to encounter the truly crazy ones: the vacant eyes, the drooling lips, the slack jaws, the smeared clothing. They plodded through the forest glades like the walking dead, talking to themselves, singing, occasionally dropping to their hands and knees to dig up clumps of sod and munch on them. |
| 918 |
Since everyone had a certain glazed look in his eyes, some merely from fatigue, others from despondency, and others from madness, you could never be sure, whenever you met someone in the forest, how dangerous he was. There was no way of telling at a quick glance whether the person approaching you was merely one of the distraught or bewildered crazies, and therefore basically harmless, or one of the kind who were full of lethal fury and attacked anyone they encountered, with neither rhyme nor reason behind their deeds. So you quickly learned to be on your guard against anyone who came prancing and swaggering through the woods. Any stranger at all could be a menace. You might be talking quite amiably with someone, comparing notes on your experiences since the evening of Nightfall, when abruptly he would take offense at some casual remark of yours, or decide that he admired some article of your clothing, or perhaps merely take a blind unreasoning dislike of your face-and, with an animal-like howl, he would come rushing at you in mindless ferocity. Some of this sort, no doubt, had been criminals to begin with. The sight of society collapsing all around them had freed them of all restraint. But others, Theremon suspected, had been placid enough folk until their minds were shattered by the Stars. Then, suddenly, they found all the inhibitions of civilized life fall away from them. They forgot the rules that made civilized life possible. They were like small children again, asocial, concerned only with their own needs-but they had the strength of adults and the will power of the deeply disturbed. The thing to do, if you hoped to survive, was to avoid those whom you knew to be lethally crazy, or suspected of it. The thing to pray for was that they would all kill each other off within the first few days, leaving the world safe for the less predatory. Theremon had three encounters with madmen of this terrifying breed in the first two days. The first one, a tall, rangy man with a weird diabolical grin who was cavorting by the side of a brook that Theremon wanted to cross, demanded that the newspaperman pay him a toll to go past. "Your shoes, let's say. Or how about that wristwatch?" "How about getting out of my way?" Theremon suggested, and the man went berserk. Snatching up a cudgel that Theremon hadn't noticed until that moment, he roared some sort of war-cry and charged. There was no time to take evasive action: the best Theremon could do was duck as the other man swung the cudgel with horrific force at his head. He heard the club go whirring by, missing him by inches. It hit the tree beside him instead, cracking into it with tremendous force-a force so great that the impact of it traveled up the attacker's arm, and he gasped in pain as the cudgel fell from his nerveless fingers. Theremon was on top of him in an instant, seizing the man's injured arm, bringing it sharply upward with merciless force, making him grunt in agony and double up and fall moaning to his knees. |
| 919 |
Theremon prodded and pushed him down until his face was in the stream, and held him there. And held him there. And held him there. How simple it would be, Theremon thought in wonder, just to go on holding his head under water until he drowned. A part of his mind was actually arguing in favor of it. He would have killed you without even thinking about it. Get rid of him. Otherwise what will you do once you let go of him? Fight him all over again? What f he follows you through the forest to get even with you? Drown him now, Theremon. Drown him. It was a powerful temptation. But only one segment of Theremon's mind was willing to adapt so readily to the world's new jungle morality. The rest of him recoiled at the idea; and finally he released the man's arm and stepped back. He picked up the fallen cudgel and waited. All the fight was gone from the other man now, though. Choking and gasping, he rose from the stream with water flowing from his mouth and nostrils, and sat trembling by the bank, shivering, coughing, struggling for breath. He stared sullenly and fearfully at Theremon, but he made no attempt to get up, let alone to renew the fighting. Theremon stepped around him, crossed the stream in a bound, and trotted off quickly, deeper into the forest. The implications of what he had almost done did not fully strike him for another ten minutes. Then he halted suddenly, in a burst of sweat and nausea, and was swept by a fierce attack of vomiting that racked him so savagely that it was a long while before he could rise. Later that afternoon he realized that his roamings had brought him right to the border of the forest. When he looked out between the trees he saw a highway-utterly deserted- and, on the far side of the road, the ruins of a tall brick building standing in a broad plaza. He recognized the building. It was the Pantheon, the Cathedral of All the Gods. There wasn't much left of it. He walked across the road and stared in disbelief. It looked as if a fire had started in the heart of the building-what had they been doing, using the pews for kindling?-and had swept right up the narrow tower over the altar, igniting the wooden beams. The whole tower had toppled, bringing down the walls. Bricks were strewn everywhere about the plaza. He saw bodies jutting out of the wreckage. Theremon had never been a particularly religious man. He didn't know anyone who was. Like everyone else, he said things like "My God!" or "Gods!" or "Great gods!" for emphasis, but the idea that there might actually be a god, or gods, or whatever the current prevailing belief-system asserted, had always been irrelevant to the way he lived his life. Religion seemed like something medieval to him, quaint and archaic. Now and then he would find himself in a church to attend the wedding of a friend-who was as much of a disbeliever as he was, of course-or else he went to cover some official rite as a news item-but he hadn't been inside any kind of holy building for religious purposes since his own confirmation, when he was ten years old. |
| 920 |
All the same, the sight of the ruined cathedral stirred him profoundly. He had been present at its dedication, a dozen years back, when he was a young reporter. He knew how many millions of credits the building had cost; he had marveled at the splendid works of art it contained; he had been moved by the marvelous music of Ghissimal's Hymn to the Gods as it resounded through the great hall. Even he, who had no belief in the sacred, could not help feeling that if there was any place on Kalgash where the gods truly were present, it must be here. And the gods had let the building be destroyed like this! The gods had sent the Stars, knowing that the madness to follow would wreck even their own Pantheon! What did that mean? What did that say about the unknowability and unfathomability of the gods-assuming they even existed? No one would ever rebuild this cathedral, Theremon knew. Nothing would ever be as it was. "Help me," a voice called. That feeble sound cut into Theremon's meditations. He looked around. "Over here. Here." To his left. Yes. Theremon saw the glint of golden vestments in the sunlight. A man half buried in the rubble, far along down the side of the building-one of the priests, apparently, judging by his rich garb. He was pinned below the waist by a heavy beam and was gesturing with what must be the last of his strength. Theremon started to go toward him. But before he could take more than a dozen steps a second figure appeared at the far end of the fallen building and came running forward: a lean, agile little man who went scrambling over the bricks with animal swiftness, heading for the trapped priest. Good, Theremon thought. Together we ought to be able to pull that beam off him. But when he was still some twenty feet away he halted, horror-stricken. The agile little man had already reached the priest. Bending over him, he had slit the priest's throat with one quick stroke of a small knife, as casually as one might open an envelope; and now he was busily engaged in slicing the cords that fastened the priest's rich vestments. He looked up, glaring, at Theremon. His eyes were fiery and appalling. "Mine," he growled, like a jungle beast. "Mine!" And he flourished the knife. Theremon shivered. For a long moment he stood frozen in his tracks, fascinated in a ghastly way by the efficient manner with which the looter was stripping the dead priest's body. Then, sadly, he turned and hurried away, back across the road, into the forest. There was no point in doing anything else. That evening, when Tano and Sitha and Dovim held the sky with their melancholy light, Theremon allowed himself a few hours of fragmentary sleep in a deep thicket; but he awoke again and again, imagining that some madman with a knife was creeping up on him to steal his shoes. Sleep left him long before Onos-rise. It seemed almost surprising to find himself still alive when morning finally came. Half a day later he had his third encounter with one of the new breed of killers. |
| 921 |
Let them all do each other in, as fast as they could; and then he would come warily creeping out to find out what was going on. It wasn't a particularly courageous plan. But it seemed like a wise one. He wondered what had happened to the others who had been in the Observatory with him at the moment of Darkness. To Beenay, to Sheerin, to Athor. To Siferra. Especially to Siferra. From time to time Theremon thought of venturing out to look for her. It was an appealing idea. During his long hours of solitude he spun glowing fantasies for himself of what it would be like to hook up with her somewhere in this forest. The two of them, journeying together through this transformed and frightening world, forming an alliance of mutual protection- He had been attracted to her from the first, of course. For all the good that had done him, he might just as well not have bothered, he knew: handsome as she was, she seemed to be the sort of woman who was absolutely self-contained, in no need whatever of any man's company, or any woman's, for that matter. He had maneuvered her into going out with him now and then, but she had efficiently and serenely kept him at a safe distance all the time. Theremon was experienced enough in worldly things to understand that no amount of smooth talk was persuasive enough to break through barriers that were so determinedly maintained. He had long ago decided that no worthwhile woman could ever be seduced; you could present the possibility to them, but you had to leave it ultimately to them to do the seducing for you, and if they weren't so minded, there was very little you could do to change their outlook. And with Siferra, things had been sliding in the wrong direction for him all year long. She had turned on him ferociously-and with some justification, he thought ruefully-once he began his misguided campaign of mockery against Athor and the Observatory group. Somehow right at the end he had felt that she was weakening, that she was becoming interested in him despite herself Why else had she invited him to the Observatory, against Athor's heated orders, on the evening of the eclipse? For a short time that evening there actually had seemed to be real contact blossoming between them But then had come the Darkness, the Stars, the mob, the chaos After that everything had plunged into confusion But if he could find her somehow, now- We'd work well together, he thought We'd be a tremendous team-hard-nosed, competent, survival-oriented. Whatever kind of civilization is going to evolve, we'd find a good place for ourselves in it. And if there had been a little psychological barrier between them before, he was certain it would seem unimportant to her now. It was a brand-new world, and new attitudes were necessary if you were going to survive. But how could he find Siferra No communications circuits were open, so far as he knew. She was just one of millions of people at large in the area. The forest alone probably had a population of many thousands now; and he had no real reason for assuming that she was in the forest. |
| 922 |
Though Siferra was trying to keep to herself as much as she could, she encountered people from time to time, and most of them looked pretty badly deranged: sobbing, moaning, laughing wildly, glaring weirdly, rolling over and over on the ground. Just as Sheerin had suggested, some had suffered such mental trauma during the time of the crisis that they might never be sane again. Huge segments of the population must have lapsed into barbarism or worse, Siferra realized. They must be setting fires for the sheer fun of it now. Or killing for the same reason. So she moved carefully. With no particular destination in mind, she drifted more or less southward across the forest, camping wherever she found fresh water. The club that she had picked up on the evening of the eclipse was never very far from her hand. She ate whatever she could find that looked edible-seeds, nuts, fruits, even leaves and bark. It wasn't much of a diet. She knew that she was strong enough physically to endure a week or so on such improvised rations, but after that she'd begin to suffer. Already she could feel what little extra weight she had been carrying dropping away, and her physical resilience beginning little by little to diminish. And the supply of berries and fruits was diminishing too, very rapidly, as the forest's thousands of hungry new inhabitants picked it over. Then, on what she believed was the fourth day, Siferra remembered about the Sanctuary. Her cheeks flamed as she realized that there had been no need for her to have been living this cave-woman life all week. Of course! How could she have been so stupid? Just a few miles from here at this very moment, hundreds of university people were tucked away safe and sound in the old particle accelerator lab, drinking bottled water and dining pleasantly on the canned foods that they had spent the last few months stashing away. How ridiculous to be skulking around in this forest full of madmen, scratching in the dirt for her meager meals and looking hungrily at the little forest creatures that cavorted beyond her reach on the branches of the trees! She would go to the Sanctuary. Somehow there would be a way to get them to take her in. It was a measure of the extent to which the Stars had disrupted her mind, she told herself, that it had taken her as long as this to remember that the Sanctuary was there. Too bad, she thought, that the idea hadn't occurred to her earlier. She realized now that she had spent the last few days traveling in precisely the wrong direction. Directly ahead of her now lay the steep chain of hills that marked the southern boundary of the forest. Looking up, she could see the blackened remains of the posh Onos Heights real estate development along the summit of the hill that rose like a dark wall before her. The Sanctuary, if she remembered correctly, was the opposite way entirely, midway between the campus and Saro City on the highway running along the north side of the forest. It took her another day and a half to make her way back through the forest to the north side. |
| 923 |
But his cheerful moments were fewer and farther between every day. Hunger was preying on his spirits. And he realized that he couldn't hold out much longer like this. His body was big; it was accustomed to regular feedings, and robust ones; he could live only so long on his accumulated backlog of Sheerin, and then he would be too weak to pull himself onward. Before long it would seem simpler just to curl up behind some bush and rest ... and rest ... and rest... He had to find food. Soon. The neighborhood he was moving through now, though deserted like all the rest, seemed a little less devastated than the areas behind him. There had been fires here too, but not everywhere, and the flames appeared to have jumped randomly past this house and that without harming them. Patiently Sheerin went from one to the next, trying the door of each house that didn't seem to have been seriously damaged. Locked. Every one of them. How fastidious of these people! he thought. How tidy! The world has fallen in around their ears, and they are abandoning their homes in blind terror, running off to the forest, the campus, the city, the gods only knew where-and they take the trouble to lock their houses before they go! As if they mean simply to have a brief holiday during the time of chaos, and then go home to their books and their bric-a-brac, their closets full of nice clothing, their gardens, their patios. Or hadn't they realized that everything was over, that the chaos was going to go on and on and on? Perhaps, Sheerin thought dismally, they aren't gone at all. They're in there hiding behind those locked doors of theirs, huddling in the basement the way I did, waiting for things to get normal again. Or else staring at me from the upstairs windows, hoping I'll go away. He tried another door. Another. Another. All locked. No response. "Hey! Anybody home? Let me in!" Silence. He stared bleakly at the thick wooden door in front of him. He envisioned the treasures behind it, the food not yet spoiled and waiting to be eaten, the bathtub, the soft bed. And here he was outside, with no way of getting in. He felt a little like the small boy in the fable who has been given the magic key to the garden of the gods, where fountains of honey flow and gumdrops grow on every bush, but who is too small to reach up and put it in the keyhole. He felt like crying. He realized, then, that he was carrying a hatchet. And he began to laugh. Hunger must have been making him simpleminded! The little boy in the fable perseveres, offering his mittens and his boots and his velvet cap to various animals who are passing by so that they will help him: each one gets on another one's back, and he climbs on the top of the heap and puts the key in the keyhole. And here was not-so-little Sheerin, staring at a locked door, and he was holding a hatchet! Break the door down? Just break it down? It went against everything that he thought was right and proper. Sheerin looked at the hatchet as though it had turned to a serpent in his hand. |
| 924 |
Breaking in-why, that was burglary! How could he, Sheerin 501, Professor of Psychology at Saro University, simply smash down the door of some law-abiding citizen's house and casually help himself to whatever he found there? Easily, he told himself, laughing even harder at his own foolishness. This is how you do it. He swung the hatchet. But it wasn't all that easy. His starvation-weakened muscles rebelled at the effort. He could lift the hatchet, all right, and he could swing it, but the blow seemed pathetically weak, and a line of fire shot through his arms and back as the blade made contact with the stout wooden door. Had he split the door? No. Cracked it a little? Maybe. Maybe a little chip. He swung again. Again. Harder. There you go, Sheerin. You're getting the hang of it now. Swing! Swing! He scarcely felt the pain, after the first few swings. He closed his eyes, pulled breath deep into his lungs, and swung. And swung again. The door was cracking now. There was a perceptible crevice. Another swing-another-maybe five or six more good blows and it would break in half- Food. Bath. Bed. Swing. And swing. And- And the door opened in his face. He was so astonished that he nearly fell through. He staggered and lurched, braced himself with the haft of the ax against the door-frame, and looked up. Half a dozen fierce wild-eyed faces looked back at him. "You knocked, sir?" a man said, and everyone howled in manic glee. Then they reached out for him, caught him by his arms, pulled him inside. "You won't be needing this," someone said, and effortlessly twisted the hatchet from Sheerin's grasp. "You can only hurt yourself with a thing like that, don't you know?" More laughter-a crazed howling. They pushed him into the center of the room and formed a ring around him. There were seven, eight, maybe nine of them. Men and women both, and one half-grown boy. Sheerin could see at a glance that they weren't the rightful residents of this house, which must have been neat and well maintained before they moved into it. Now there were stains on the wall, half the furniture was overturned, there was a sodden puddle of something-wine?-on the carpet. He knew what these people were. These were squatters, rough and ragged-looking, unshaven, unwashed. They had come drifting in, had taken possession of the place after its owners fled. One of the men was wearing only a shirt. One of the women, hardly more than a girl, was clad just in a pair of shorts. They all had an acrid, repellent odor. Their eyes had that intense, rigid, off-center look that he had seen a thousand times in recent days. You didn't need any clinical experience to know that those were the eyes of the insane. Cutting through the stink of the squatters' bodies, though, was another odor, a much more pleasing one, one that almost drove Sheerin out of his mind too: the aroma of cooking food. They were preparing a meal in the next room. Soup? Stew? Something was boiling in there. He swayed, dizzied by his own hunger and the sudden hope of soothing it at last. |
| 925 |
Carefully Theremon arranged his kindling-wood above the dried plants, building a framework as he imagined a real outdoorsman would, the bigger branches along the outside, then the thinner ones crisscrossed over the middle. Not without some difficulty, he skewered the graben on a spit he had made of a sharp, reasonably straight stick, and positioned it a short distance above the woodpile. So far, so good. Just one little thing missing, now. Fire! He had kept his mind away from that problem while assembling his fuel, hoping that it would solve itself somehow without his having to dwell on it. But now it had to be faced. He needed a spark. The old boys'-book trick of rubbing two sticks together was, Theremon was certain, nothing but a myth. He had read that certain primitive tribes had once started their fires by twirling a stick against a board with a little hole in it, but he suspected that the process wasn't all that simple, that it probably took an hour of patient twirling to get anything going. And in any case very likely you had to be initiated into the art by the old man of the tribe when you were a boy, or some such thing, or it wouldn't work. Two rocks, though-was it possible to strike a spark by banging one against the other? He doubted that too. But he might as well try it, he thought. He had no other ideas. There was a wide flat stone lying nearby, and after a little searching he found a smaller triangular one that could fit conveniently in the palm of his hand. He knelt beside his little fireplace and began methodically to hit the flat one with the pointed one. Nothing in particular happened. A hopeless feeling began to grow in him. Here I am, he thought, a grown man who can read and write, who can drive a car, who can even operate a computer, more or less. I can turn out a newspaper column in two hours that everybody in Saro City will want to read, and I can do it day in, day out, for twenty years. But I can't start a fire in the wilderness. On the other hand, he thought, I will not eat this graben raw unless I absolutely have to. Will not. Will not. Not. Not. Not! In fury he struck the stones together, again, again, again. Spark, damn you! Light! Burn! Cook this ridiculous pathetic animal for me! Again. Again. Again. "What are you doing there, mister?" an unfriendly voice asked suddenly from a point just behind his right shoulder. Theremon looked up, startled, dismayed. The first rule of survival in this forest was that you must never let yourself get so involved in anything that you failed to notice strangers sneaking up on you. There were five of them. Men, about his own age. They looked as ragged as anyone else living in the forest. They didn't seem especially crazy, as people went these days: no glassy eyes, no drooling mouths, only an expression that was grim and weary and determined. They didn't appear to be carrying any weapons other than clubs, but their attitude was distinctly hostile. Five against one. All right, he thought, take the damned graben and choke on it. |
| 926 |
Theremon lowered himself into the porcelain tank. Not exactly sybaritic. But pretty wonderful, after all he had been through lately. He leaned back and closed his eyes and relaxed. And luxuriated. Siferra took him to the Sanctuary dining hall, a simple tin roofed chamber, when he was finished with his bath, and left him there by himself, telling him she had to make her day's report to Altinol. A meal was waiting for him there-one of the packaged dinners that had been stockpiled here in the months that the Sanctuary was being set up. Lukewarm vegetables, tepid meat of some unknown kind, a pale green non-alcoholic drink of nondescript flavor. It all tasted wondrously delicious to Theremon. He forced himself to eat slowly, carefully, knowing that his body was unaccustomed to real food after his time in the forest; every mouthful had to be thoroughly chewed or he'd get sick, he knew, though his instinct was to bolt it as fast as he could and ask for a second helping. After he had eaten Theremon sat back, staring dully at the ugly tin wall. He wasn't hungry any more. And his frame of mind was beginning to change for the worse. Despite the bath, despite the meal, despite the comfort of knowing he was safe in this well-defended Sanctuary, he found himself slipping into a mood of the deepest desolation. He felt very weary. And dispirited, and full of gloom. It had been a pretty good world, he thought. Not perfect, far from it, but good enough. Most people had been reasonably happy, most were prosperous, there was progress being made on all fronts-toward deeper scientific understanding, toward greater economic expansion, toward stronger global cooperation. The concept of war had come to seem quaintly medieval and the age-old religious bigotries were mostly obsolete, or so it had seemed to him. And now it was all gone, in one short span of hours, in a single burst of horrifying Darkness. A new world would be born from the ashes of the old, of course. It was always that way: Siferra's excavations at Thombo testified to that. But what sort of world would it be? Theremon wondered. The answer to that was already at hand. It would be a world in which people killed other people for a scrap of meat, or because they had violated a superstition about fire, or simply because killing seemed like a diverting thing to do. A world in which the Altinols came forward to take advantage of the chaos and gain power for themselves. A world in which the Folimuns and Mondiors, no doubt, were scheming to emerge as the dictators of thought-probably working hand in hand with the Altinols, Theremon thought morbidly. A world in which- No. He shook his head. What was the point of all this dark, brooding lamentation? Siferra had the right notion, he told himself. There was no sense in speculating about what might have been. What we have to deal with is what is. At least he was alive, and his mind was pretty much whole again, and he had come through his ordeal in the forest more or less intact, aside from a few bruises and cuts that would heal in a couple of days. |
| 927 |
Theremon felt himself growing desensitized to it almost at once. Perhaps that was an even greater horror. But after a short while he simply stopped noticing the gore, the staring eyes of the corpses, the vastness of the disaster that had taken place here. The task of clambering over mountainous heaps of shattered cars and squeezing himself past dangerous jutting masses of jagged metal was so exacting that it required all his concentration, and he quickly ceased to pay attention to the victims of the debacle. He already knew there was no point in searching for survivors. Anyone who had been trapped here this many days would surely have died of exposure by now. Siferra too seemed to have quickly adapted to the nightmare scene that was the Great Southern Highway. Scarcely saying a word, she picked her way through the obstacles alongside him, now pausing to point to an opening in the tangle of debris, now dropping to her hands and knees to crawl under some overhang of crumpled metal. They were virtually the only living people using the road. Now and then they caught sight of someone moving southward on foot far ahead of them, or even coming up out of the south heading toward the Saro City end of the road, but there were never any encounters. The other wayfarers would hastily duck down out of sight and lose themselves in the wreckage, or, if they were up ahead, would begin frantically to scramble forward at a pace that spoke of terrible fear, disappearing quickly in the distance. What are they afraid of? Theremon wondered. That we'll attack them. Is everyone's hand lifted against everyone else, now? Once, an hour or so from their starting point, they saw a bedraggled-looking man going from car to car, reaching in to fumble in the pockets of the dead, despoiling the bodies of their possessions. There was a great sack of loot on his back, so heavy that he was staggering under the weight of it. Theremon cursed angrily and pulled out his needle-gun. "Look at the filthy ghoul! Look at him!" "No, Theremon!" Siferra deflected his arm just as Theremon fired a bolt at the looter. The shot struck a nearby car, and for a moment set up a glittering sunburst of reflected energy. "Why did you do that?" Theremon asked. "I was only trying to scare him." "I thought-that you-" Bleakly Theremon shook his head. "No," he said. "Not yet, anyway. There-look at him run!" The looter had swung around at the sound of the shot, staring in berserk manic astonishment at Theremon and Siferra. His eyes were blank; a trail of spittle dribbled from his lips. He gaped at them for a long moment. Then, dropping his sack of booty, he went scrabbling away in a wild, desperate flight over the tops of the cars and soon was lost from view. They went onward. It was slow, dreadful going. The road-signs that rose high above them on shining stanchions mocked their pitiful progress by telling them what a very small distance from the beginning of the highway they had succeeded in traversing so far. |
| 928 |
But then their rapid progress was sharply checked. They found the roadbed blocked at that point by so immense a pileup of crashed cars that Theremon feared for a moment that they would not be able to get through at all. There must have been some truly monstrous series of crashes here, something dreadful even by the standards of what he and Siferra had already passed through. Two huge transport trucks seemed to be in the middle of it, interlocked face to face like two warring beasts of the jungle; and it appeared that dozens of passenger cars had come barreling into them, flipping up on end, falling back on those who followed them, building a gigantic barrier that reached from one side of the road to the other and outward over the railings at the road's margins. Crumpled doors and fenders, sharp as blades, stuck out everywhere, and acres of broken glass set up a sinister tinkling as the wind played over it. "Here," Theremon called. "I think I see a way-up through this opening, and then over the left-hand truck-no, no, that won't work, we'll have to go under-" Siferra came up alongside him. He showed her the problem -a cluster of up-ended cars waiting for them on the far side, like a field of upturned knives-and she nodded. They went underneath instead, a slow, dirty, painful crawl through shards of glass and clotted pools of fuel. Midway through they paused to rest before continuing through to the far side of the pileup. Theremon was the first to emerge. "Gods!" he muttered, staring in bewilderment at the scene that lay before him. "What now?" The road was open for perhaps fifty feet on the far side of the great mass of wreckage. Beyond the clear space a second roadblock lay across the highway from one side to the other. This one, though, had been deliberately constructed-a heap of car doors and wheels neatly piled on the roadbed to a height of eight or nine feet. In front of the barricade Theremon saw some two dozen people, who had set up a campsite right on the highway. He had been so intent on getting through the tangle of wreckage that he had paid no attention to anything else, and so he had not heard the sounds from the other side. Siferra came crawling out beside him. He heard her gasp of surprise and shock. "Keep your hand on your needler," Theremon said quietly to her. "But don't pull it out and don't even think of trying to use it. There are too many of them." A few of the strangers were sauntering up the road toward them now, six or seven brawny-looking men. Theremon, motionless, watched them come. He knew that there was no turning back from this encounter-no hope of escape through that maze of knife-sharp wreckage through which they had just wriggled. He and Siferra were trapped in this clearing between the two roadblocks. All they could do was wait to see what happened next, and hope that these people were reasonably sane. A tall, slouch-shouldered, cold-eyed man came unhurriedly up to Theremon until they were standing virtually nose to nose, and said, "All right, fellow. |
| 929 |
Theremon wondered if he had ever seen Folimun laugh before. "Mondior?" Folimun said, his eyes glinting with amusement. "There is no Mondior, my friend. There never was." It was hard for Siferra to believe that she had actually managed to escape. But that was indeed what appeared to have happened. Most of the Apostles who had surprised them in the field had gone after Theremon. Looking back once, she had seen them surrounding him like hunters' hounds surrounding their prey. They had knocked him down; he would certainly be captured. Only two of the Apostles had split off to pursue her. Siferra had jabbed one in the face, hard, with the flat of her hand at the end of her stiff outstretched arm, and at the speed she was traveling the impact had sent him reeling to the ground. The remaining one was fat and ungainly and slow; in moments Siferra left him far behind. She doubled back the way she and Theremon had come, toward the elevated highway. But it seemed unwise to go up onto it. The highway was too easily blocked, and there was no safe way down from it except at the exit ramps. She would only be putting herself at risk of running into a trap if she went up there. And even if no roadblocks lay ahead, it would be a simple thing for the Apostles to come after her in their trucks and pick her up, a mile or two down the way. No, the thing to do was to run into the woods on the far side of the road. The Apostles' trucks wouldn't be able to follow her there. She could lose herself easily enough in those low shrubby trees, and hide there until she had figured out her next move. And what could that be? she wondered. She had to admit that Theremon's idea, wild as it was, still was their only hope: steal a truck somehow, drive down to Amgando and sound the alarm before the Apostles could get their army on the move again. But Siferra knew there wasn't the remotest chance that she could simply tiptoe up to an empty truck, jump in, and drive it away. The Apostles weren't that stupid. She'd have to order one of them at gunpoint to switch the truck on for her and surrender its controls to her. And that involved carrying out the whole bizarre maneuver of trying to overpower a stray Apostle, getting his robe, slipping into the camp, locating someone who could open up one of the trucks for her- Her heart sank. It was all too implausible. She might just as well consider trying to rescue Theremon while she was at it- go marching in with her needle-gun blazing, take hostages, demand his immediate release-oh, it was absolute foolishness, a silly melodramatic dream, a gaudy maneuver out of some cheap children's adventure book- But what will I do? What will I do? She huddled down in a copse of tightly woven little trees with long feathery leaves and waited for time to pass. The Apostles gave no sign of breaking camp: she could still see the smoke of their bonfire against the twilight sky, and their trucks were still parked where they had been along the road. Evening was coming on. |
| 930 |
Onos was gone from the sky. Dovim hovered on the horizon. The only suns overhead were her two least favorite ones, bleak and cheerless Tano and Sitha, casting their cold light from their distant location at the edge of the universe. Or what people had thought was the edge of the universe, rather, in those far-off innocent days before the Stars appeared and revealed to them just how immense the universe really was. The hours ticked interminably by. No solution to the situation made sense to her. Amgando seemed lost, unless someone else had managed to get a warning to them-certainly there was no way she was going to get down there ahead of the Apostles. Rescuing Theremon was an absurd idea. Her chances of stealing a truck and getting to Amgando by herself was only slightly less preposterous. What then? Simply sit back and watch while the Apostles took command of everything? There seemed to be no alternative. At one point during the evening she thought that the only path open to her was to walk into the Apostles' camp, surrender, and ask to be imprisoned with Theremon. At least they would be together then. It astonished her how much she missed him. They had not been out of each other's company in weeks, she who had never lived with a man in her life. And all during the long journey from Saro City, though they had bickered now and then, even quarreled a little, she had never tired of being with him. Not once. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world for them to be together. And now she was alone again. Go on, she told herself. Give yourself up. Everything's lost anyway, isn't it? It grew darker. Clouds veiled Sitha and Tano's frosty light, and the sky turned so dusky that she half expected the Stars to reappear. Go ahead, she thought bitterly. Come out and shine. Drive everyone crazy all over again. What harm can it do? The world can only be smashed once, and that's been done already. But the Stars, of course, did not appear. Veiled as they were, Tano and Sitha nevertheless afforded enough light to mask the glow of those distant points of mysterious brilliance. And as the hours went by, Siferra found herself swinging completely around from her mood of total defeatism to a new sense of almost reckless hope. When all is lost, she told herself, there's nothing left to lose. Under cover of this evening gloom she would slip into the Apostles' camp and-somehow, somehow-take one of their trucks. And rescue Theremon, too, if she could manage it. And then off to Amgando! By the time Onos was in the sky tomorrow morning, she'd be down there, among her university friends, in plenty of time to let them know that they had to scatter before the enemy army arrived. All right, she thought. Let's go. Slowly-slowly-more cautiously than before, just in case they have sentries hidden in the grass- Out of the woods. A moment of uncertainty, there: she felt tremendously vulnerable, now that she had left the safety of that tangle of shrubbery behind. But the dimness still protected her. |
| 931 |
Across the cleared place, now, that led from the woods to the elevated highway. Under the great metal legs of the roadbed and into the unkempt field where she and Theremon had been surprised that afternoon. Get down and wriggle, now, the way they had before. Once again across the field-looking this way and that, scanning for sentries who might be on duty at the perimeter of the Apostles' camp- Her needle-gun was in her hand, set for minimum aperture, the sharpest, most highly focused, deadliest beam the gun could produce. If anyone came upon her now, so much the worse for him. There was too much at stake to worry about the niceties of civilized morality. While still half out of her mind she had killed Balik in the Archaeology lab, not meaning to, but he was dead all the same; and, a little to her surprise, she found herself quite ready to kill again, this time intentionally, if circumstances required it of her. The important thing was to get a vehicle and get out of here and carry the news of the Apostles' army's approach to Amgando. Everything else, including considerations of morality, was secondary. Everything. This was war. Onward. Head down, eyes raised, body hunched. She was only a few dozen yards from the camp now. It was very silent over there. Probably most of them were asleep. In the murky grayness Siferra thought she could see a couple of figures on the far side of the main bonfire, though the smoke rising from the fire made it difficult to be sure. The thing to do, she thought, was to slip into the deep shadows behind one of the trucks and toss a rock against a tree some distance away. The sentries would probably investigate; and if they fanned out separately, she could slip up behind one of them, jab the needler into his back, warn him to keep quiet, make him strip off his robe- No, she thought. Don't warn him of anything. Just shoot him, quickly, and take his robe, before he can call out an alarm. These are Apostles, after all. Fanatics. Her own newfound cold-bloodedness amazed her. Onward. Onward. She was almost at the nearest truck now. Into the darkness on the side opposite the campfire. Where's a rock? Here. Here, this is a good one. Shift the needler to the left hand for a moment. Now, toss the rock at that big tree over there- She raised her arm to make the throw. And in that moment she felt a hand seize her left wrist from behind and a powerful arm clamp across her throat. Caught! Shock and outrage and a jolt of maddening frustration went coursing through her. Furiously Siferra lashed out with her foot, kicking backward with all her strength, and connecting. She heard a grunt of pain. Not enough to break the man's strong grip, though. Twisting halfway around, she kicked again, and attempted at the same time to pass the needle-gun from her left hand to her right. But her assailant pulled her left arm upward in a short, sharp, agonizing gesture that numbed her and sent the needler spilling out of her hand. The other arm, the one that was pressing against her throat, tightened to choking intensity. |
| 932 |
Her eyes were luminous with anger. Her skin seemed to glisten. There was an aura of intensely focused energy about her that he found irresistible. But this was hardly the moment to tell her anything like that. Folimun said, "For stealing your tablets, Dr. Siferra, I can only offer my apologies. It was a shameless act of theft, which I assure you I never would have authorized except that you made it necessary." "I made it-" "You did. You insisted on keeping them in your possession- on placing those irreplaceable relics of the previous cycle in jeopardy at a time when chaos was about to break loose and, for all you knew, the university buildings were going to be destroyed down to the last brick. We saw it as essential that they be placed in safekeeping, that is to say, in our own hands, and since you would not authorize that we found it necessary to take them from you." "I found those tablets. You'd never have known they existed if I hadn't dug them up." "Which is beside the point," Folimun said smoothly. "Once the tablets were discovered, they became vital to our needs-to humanity's needs. We felt that the future of Kalgash was more important than your personal proprietary interest in your artifacts. As you will see, we have translated the tablets fully now, making use of the ancient textual material already available to us, and they have added greatly to our understanding of the extraordinary challenges that civilized life on Kalgash must periodically confront. Dr. Mudrin's translations were, unfortunately, extremely superficial. But the tablets provide an accurate and convincing version, uncorrupted by centuries of textual alteration and error, of the chronicles that have come down to us under the name of the Book of Revelations. The Book of Revelations, I must confess, is full of mysticism and metaphor, adopted for propagandistic purposes. The Thombo tablets are straightforward historical accounts of two separate advents of the Stars thousands of years ago, and of the attempts made by the priesthoods of the time to warn the populace of what was about to happen. We can demonstrate now that throughout history and prehistory on Kalgash, small groups of dedicated people have struggled again and again to prepare the world for the disruption that repeatedly falls upon it. The methods they used, obviously, were insufficient to the problem. Now at last, aided as we are by a knowledge of past mistakes, we will be able to spare Kalgash from another devastating upheaval when the present Year of Godliness comes to its end two thousand years from now." Siferra turned to Theremon. "How smug he sounds! Justifying his own burglary of my tablets by telling me that they'll enable him to set up an even more efficient theocratic dictatorship than they had hoped! Theremon, Theremon, why did you sell me out like this? Why did you sell us out? We could have been halfway to Amgando by this time, if only-" Folimun said, "You'll be in Amgando tomorrow afternoon, Dr. Siferra, I assure you. |
| 933 |
Andrew was never quite sure which it was (or what difference, if any, there might be between France and Italy, which were mere names to him) and the postage stamps on her infrequent letters to Sir were of various kinds. Since both France and Italy were provinces of the European Region, and had been for a long time, Andrew had difficulty understanding why they needed their own postage stamps, either. But apparently they insisted on maintaining certain ancient folkways even though the world had passed beyond the epoch of independent and rival nations. The two girls had finished growing up, too. Miss, who by all reports had become strikingly beautiful, had married and moved to Southern California, and then she had married again and moved to South America, and then had come word of still another marriage and a new home in Australia. But now Miss was living in New York City and had become a poet, and nothing was said about any further new husbands. Andrew suspected that Miss's life had not turned out to be as happy or rewarding as it should have been, and he regretted that. Still, he reminded himself, he had no very clear understanding of what humans meant by "happiness." Perhaps Miss had lived exactly the kind of life that she had wanted to live. He hoped so, anyway. As for Little Miss, she was now a slender, fine-boned woman with high cheekbones and a look of great delicacy backed by extraordinary resilience. Andrew had never heard anyone speak of her unusual beauty in his presence — Miss was always said to be the beautiful sister, and Little Miss was praised more for her forceful character than for her looks. To Andrew's taste golden-haired Little Miss had always seemed far more beautiful than the soft and overly curvy older sister; but his taste was only a robot's taste, after all, and he never ventured to discuss matters of human appearance with anyone. It was hardly an appropriate thing for a robot to do. In fact he had no right even to an opinion in such areas, as he very well knew. Little Miss had married a year or so after finishing college, and was living not far away, just up the coast from the family estate. Her husband, Lloyd Charney, was an architect who had grown up in the East but who was delighted to make his home along the wild Northern California coast that his wife loved so deeply. Little Miss had also made it clear to her husband that she wanted to remain close to her father's robot, Andrew, who had been her guardian and mentor since the early years of her childhood. Perhaps Lloyd Charney was a little taken aback by that, but he raised no objection, and Little Miss remained a frequent visitor at the imposing Martin mansion, which now was occupied only by the aging Sir and the faithful Andrew. In the fourth year of her marriage Little Miss gave birth to a boy who was named George. He had sandy-looking reddish hair and huge solemn eyes. Andrew called him Little Sir. When Little Miss brought the baby to visit his grandfather, she would sometimes allow Andrew to hold him, to give him his bottle, to pat him after he had eaten. |
| 934 |
He was hardly ready to go outdoors in them; and even in his own cabin he stopped wearing them in the presence of others after a few preliminary experiments. He was inhibited by George's patronizing smile, which with the best will in the world George continued to be unable to conceal, and by the bewildered stares of the first few customers who saw him dressed when they came to him to commission work. Andrew might be free, but there was built into him a carefully detailed program concerning his behavior toward human beings: a neural channel that was not as powerful in its effect as the Three Laws, but nevertheless was there to discourage him from giving any sort of offense. It was only by the tiniest steps that he dared advance. Open disapproval would set him back months. It was an enormous leap for him when he finally allowed himself to leave his house with clothing on. No one he encountered that day showed any sign of surprise. But perhaps they were too astounded even to react. And indeed even Andrew himself still felt strange about his experiment with clothing. He had a mirror, now, and he would study himself for long periods of time, turning from side to side, looking at himself from all angles. And sometimes he found himself reacting with disfavor to his own appearance. His metal face, with its glowing photoelectric eyes and its rigidly carved robotic features, sometimes struck Andrew himself as strikingly incongruous now that it rose up out of the soft, brightly colored fabrics of clothing meant for a human body. But at other times it seemed to him perfectly appropriate for him to be wearing clothing. Like virtually all robots, he had been designed, after all, to be fundamentally humanoid in shape: two arms, two legs, an oval head set upon a narrow neck. The U. S. Robots designers had not needed to give him that form. They could have made him look any way they deemed efficient — with rotors instead of legs, with six arms instead of two, with a swiveling sensor-dome atop his trunk instead of a head with two eyes. But no: they had patterned him after themselves. The decision had been made, very early in the history of robotics, that the best way to overcome mankind's deep-seated fear of intelligent machines was to make them as familiar in form as possible. In that case, why should he not wear clothing also? That would make him look even more human, wouldn't it? And in any event Andrew wanted to wear clothing now. It seemed symbolic to him of his new status as a legally free robot. Of course, not everyone accepted Andrew as free, regardless of what the legal finding had been. The term "free robot" had no meaning to many people: it was like saying "dry water" or "bright darkness." Andrew was inherently incapable of resenting that, and yet he felt a difficulty in his thinking process — a slowing, an inner resistance — whenever he was faced with someone's refusal to allow him the status he had won in court. When he wore clothing in public, he knew, he risked antagonizing such people. |
| 935 |
"Like grandfather, like grandson." How simple that seemed now that George had explained it — but how mysterious it had been at first. And why had George called him a "hunk of tin," when George surely knew that there was no tin in Andrew's makeup whatsoever? And — it was the most puzzling one of all — why should George have called Sir a "monster," when that was plainly not an appropriate description of the old man? Those were not even the latest modern phrases, Andrew knew. They were simply individual turns of phrase, a little too colloquial or metaphorical for instant handling by Andrew's linguistic circuitry. He would face far more mystifying ways of speech in the outside world, he suspected. Perhaps it was time for him to update some of his linguistic documentation. His own books would give him no guidance. They were old and most of them dealt with woodworking, with art, with furniture design. There were none on language, none on the ways of human beings. Nor was Sir's library, extensive as it was, likely to be of much use. No one was living in the big house just now — it was sealed, under robot maintenance — but Andrew still could have access to it whenever he wanted. Nearly all of Sir's books, though, dated from the previous century or before. There was nothing there that would serve Andrew's purpose. All things considered, the best move seemed to be for him to get some up-to-date information — and not from George. When Andrew turned to George at the time he had wanted to start wearing clothing, he had had to fight his way through George's incomprehension and a certain amount of George's condescending amusement. Though he doubted that George would treat him the same way in this matter, he preferred not to find out. No, he would simply go to town and use the public library. That was the proper self-reliant thing to do — the correct way for a free robot to handle a problem, he told himself. It was a triumphant decision and Andrew felt his electropotential grow distinctly higher as he contemplated it, until he had to throw in an impedance coil to bring himself back to equilibrium. To the library, yes. And he would dress for the occasion. Yes. Yes. Humans did not enter the public library unclothed. Neither would he. He put on a full costume — elegant leggings of a velvety purple fabric, and a flowing red blouse with a satiny sheen, and his best walking boots. He even donned a shoulder chain of polished wooden links, one of his finest productions. It was a choice between that and another chain he had, one made of glitter-plastic, which perhaps was better suited for daytime wear; but George had said that the wooden chain was terribly impressive, particularly since anything made of wood was far more valuable than mere plastic. And he wanted to impress, today. There would be humans in the library, not robots. They would never have seen a robot there before. It was important for him to look his best. But he knew that he was doing something unusual and that there might be unusual consequences. |
| 936 |
They have freed humanity from dreary drudgery and degradation. To confuse the robot issue with the ancient debates over slavery and the later debates over freedom for those slaves and the still later debates over full civil rights for the descendants of the freed slaves will ultimately lead to economic chaos, when our robots begin to demand not simply the protection of the law but independence from their masters. Those slaves of centuries gone by were human beings who were cruelly taken advantage of and mistreated. No one had any right to force them into servitude. But robots were brought into the world to serve. By definition they are here to be used: not to be our friends but to be our servants. And to take any other position is a wrongheaded, sentimental, dangerous way of thinking." George Charney was a persuasive orator, but so was James Van Buren. And in the end the battle — fought mainly in the court of public opinion, rather than in the Legislature or the Regional Court — ended in something of a stalemate. There were a great many people now who had been able to transcend the fear or dislike of robots that had been so widespread a couple of generations earlier, and George's arguments struck home with them. They too had begun to look upon their robots with a certain degree of affection, and wanted them afforded some kind of legal security. But then there were the others, who may not have feared robots themselves so much as they did the financial risks that they might somehow experience as a result of extending civil rights to robots. They urged caution in this new legal arena. So when the battle at last was over and pro-robot legislation came forth, setting up conditions under which it was illegal to issue an order that might harm a robot, the law that was passed by the Regional Legislature, sent back for revisions by the Regional Court, passed again in a modified way, this time upheld in the Regional Court, and eventually ratified by the World Legislature and upheld after a final appeal to the World Court, was a very tepid one indeed. It was endlessly qualified and the punishments for violating its provisions were totally inadequate. But at least the principle of robot rights — established originally by the decree awarding Andrew his "freedom" — had been extended a little further. The final approval by the World Court came through on the day of Little Miss's death. That was no coincidence. Little Miss, very old and very weak now, had nevertheless held on to life with desperate force during the closing weeks of the debate. Only when word of victory arrived did she at last relax the tenacity of her grip. Andrew was at her bedside when she went. He stood beside her, looking down at the small, faded woman propped up among the pillows and thinking back to those days of nearly a hundred years before when he was newly arrived at the grand coastside mansion of Gerald Martin and two small girls had stood looking up at him, and the smaller one had frowned and said, "En-dee-arr. |
| 937 |
Or the robot who might, through faulty design or poor programming, decide that a certain human being was not human at all, and therefore not in a position to demand the protection that the First and Second Laws were supposed to afford Or the robot who was given a poorly phrased order, and interpreted it so literally that he inadvertently caused danger to humans nearby There were dozens of such case histories in the archives. The early roboticists — most notably the extraordinary robopsychologist, Susan Calvin, that formidable and austere woman — had labored long and mightily to cope with the difficulties that kept cropping up. The problems had become especially intricate as robots with more advanced types of positronic pathways began to emerge from the workshops of U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men toward the middle of the Twenty-First Century: robots with a broader capacity for thought, robots who were able to look at situations and perceive their complexities with an almost human depth of understanding. Robots like — though he took care not to say so explicitly — Andrew Martin himself. The new generalized-pathway robots, equipped with the ability to interpret data in much more subjective terms than their predecessors, often reacted in ways that humans were not expecting. Always within the framework of the Three Laws, of course. But sometimes from a perspective that had not been anticipated by the framers of those laws. As he studied the annals of robot development, Andrew at last understood why so many humans had been so phobic about robots. It wasn't that the Three Laws were badly drawn — not at all. Indeed, they were masterly exemplars of logic. The trouble was that humans themselves were not always logical — were, on occasion, downright illogical — and robots were not always capable of coping with the swoops and curves and tangents of human thought. So it was humans themselves who sometimes led robots into violations of one or another of the Three Laws — and then, in their illogical way, often would blame the robots themselves for having done something undesirable which in fact they had actually been ordered to do by their human masters. Andrew handled these chapters with the utmost care and delicacy, revising and revising them to eliminate any possibility of bias. It was not his intention to write a diatribe against the flaws of mankind. His prime goal, as always, was to serve the needs of mankind. The original purpose of writing his book might have been to arrive at a deeper understanding of his own relationship to the human beings who were his creators — but as he proceeded with it he saw that, if properly and thoughtfully done, the book could be an invaluable bridge between humans and robots, a source of enlightenment not only for robots but for the flesh-and-blood species that had brought them into the world. Anything that enabled humans and robots to get along better would permit robots to be of greater service to humanity; and that, of course, was the reason for their existence. |
| 938 |
Despair was not really a quality that he was capable of, and in any case he knew that these problems were merely temporary. He could feel his brain from the inside. No one else could; and no one else could know as well as he did that his brain was still intact, that it had come through the transfer operation unharmed. His thoughts flowed freely through the neural connections of his new body, even if the body was not yet as swift as it might be in reacting to them. Every parameter checked out perfectly. He was merely having a few interface problems, that was all. But Andrew knew he was fundamentally well and that it would be only a matter of time until he had achieved complete control over his new housing. He had to think of himself as very young, still. Like a child, a newborn child. The months passed. His coordination improved steadily. He moved swiftly toward full positronic interplay. Yet not everything was as he would have wished it. Andrew spent hours before the mirror, evaluating himself as he went through his repertoire of facial expressions and bodily motions. And what he saw fell far short of the expectations he had had for his new body. Not quite human! The face was stiff — too stiff — and he doubted that that was going to improve with time. He would press his finger against his cheek and the flesh would yield, but not in the way that true human flesh would yield. He could smile or scowl or frown, but they were studied, imitative smiles and scowls and frowns. He would give the smile-signal or the frown-signal or whatever, and the muscles of his face would obediently hoist the smile-expression or the frown-expression into view, pulling his features around in accordance with a carefully designed program. He was always conscious of the machinery, organic though it might be, clanking ponderously around beneath his skin to produce the desired effect. That was not how it happened with human beings, Andrew suspected. And his motions were too deliberate. They lacked the careless free flow of the human being. He could hope that that would come after a while — he was already far beyond the first dismal days after the operation, when he had staggered awkwardly about his room like some sort of crude pre-positronic automaton — but something told him that even with this extraordinary new body he was never going to be able to move in the natural way that virtually every human being took for granted. Still, things were not all that bad. The U. S. Robots people had kept their part of the bargain honorably and had carried out the transfer with all the formidable technical skill at their disposal. And Andrew had what he wanted. He might not fool the truly observant onlooker into thinking he was human, but he was far more human-looking than any robot ever had been, and at least he could wear clothes now without the ridiculous anomaly of an expressionless metal face rising up above them. Eventually Andrew declared, "I will be getting back to work now." Paul Charney laughed and said, "Then you must be well. |
| 939 |
His love, for them. In his earlier days Andrew would never have admitted such a thing, even to himself; but he was different now. These thoughts led Andrew inevitably, around the time of Paul Charney's death, to a consideration of the entire concept of family ties — the love of parent for child, of child for parent — and how that was related to the inexorable passing of the generations. If you are human, Andrew told himself, you are part of a great chain, a chain that hangs suspended across vast spans of time and links you to all those who have come before you and those who follow after. And you understand that individual links of the chain may perish — indeed, must perish — but the chain itself is ever-renewing and will survive. People died, whole families might become extinct — but the human race, the species, went on and on through the centuries and the millennia and the eons, everyone connected through the heritage of blood to those who had gone before. It was a difficult thing for Andrew to understand, that sense of connection, of infinite linkage with intimately related predecessors. He had no predecessors, not really, and he would have no successors, either. He was unique — individual — something that had been brought forth at a certain moment in time out of nothing at all. Andrew found himself wondering what it might be like to have had a parent himself — but all he could come up with was a vague image of assembly-robots weaving his body together in a factory. Or what it was like to have a child — but the best he could manage was to envision a table or desk, something that he had made with his own hands. But human parents were not assembly-mechs, and human children were nothing like tables and desks. He had it all wrong. It was a mystery to him. And very likely always would be. He was not human; why then should he expect human family linkages to be comprehensible to him? Then Andrew thought of Little Miss, of George, of Paul, even of fierce old Sir, and what they had meant to him. And he realized that he was part of a family chain after all, though he had had no parents and was incapable of siring children. The Martins had taken him in and had made him one of them. He was a Martin, indeed. An adopted Martin, yes; but that was the best he could have hoped for. And there were plenty of humans who had not had the comfort of belonging to such a loving family. He had done very well, all things considered. Though only a robot, he had known the continuity and stability of family life; he had known warmth; he had known love. All those whom Andrew had — loved — were gone, though. That was saddening and liberating both. The chain was broken, for him. It could never be restored. But at least he could do as he pleased, now, without fear of troubling those who had been so close to him. Now, with the death of the great-grandson of Sir, Andrew felt free to proceed with his plan for upgrading his android body. That was some sort of partial consolation for his loss. |
| 940 |
Nevertheless he was alone in the world, or so it seemed to him — not simply because he was a positronic brain in a unique android body, but because he had no affiliations of any sort. And it was a world that had every reason to be hostile to his aspirations. All the more reason, Andrew thought, to continue along the path he had long ago chosen — the path that he hoped would ultimately make him invulnerable to the world into which he had been thrust so impersonally, without his leave, so many years before. In fact Andrew was not quite as alone as he thought. Men and women might die, but corporations lived on just as robots did, and the law firm of Feingold and Charney still functioned even though no Feingolds and no Charneys remained. The firm had its directions and it followed them impeccably and soullessly. By way of the trust that held his investments and through the income that Andrew drew from the firm as Paul Charney's heir, Andrew continued to be wealthy. That enabled him to pay a large annual retainer to Feingold and Charney to keep them involved in the legal aspects of his research — in particular, the new combustion chamber. It was time now for Andrew to pay another call on the headquarters of U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men. This would be the third time in his long life that Andrew had had face-to-face dealings with high executives of the powerful robot-manufacturing corporation. On the first occasion, back in the days of Merwin Mansky, Mansky and managing director Elliot Smythe had come out to California to see him. But that was when Sir had still been alive, and imperious old Sir had been able to command even Smythes and Robertsons into his presence. On the next occasion, many years later, Andrew and Paul had been the ones to make the journey to the company — to see Harley Smythe-Robertson and arrange for Andrew's transfer to the android body. Now Andrew would make the journey east a second time, but he would go alone. And this time he would have the visage and bodily frame, if not the inner organs, of a human being. U. S. Robots had changed greatly since Andrew's last visit. The main production factory had been shifted to a large space station, as was the case with many other industrial facilities. Only the research center remained behind on Earth, in a grand and lovely parklike setting of vast green lawns and sturdy wide-spreading leafy trees. The Earth itself, its population long since stabilized at about a billion-plus a robot population about equally large — was becoming parklike virtually everywhere. The terrible damage to the environment that had been perpetrated in the hectic early centuries of the Industrial Revolution was largely only a memory, now. The sins of the past had not exactly been forgotten, but they had come to seem unreal to the inhabitants of the reborn Earth, and with each passing generation it became harder and harder to believe that people once had been willing to commit such monstrous and ultimately self-destructive crimes against their own world. |
| 941 |
Now that industry had largely moved to space and clean, efficient robot labor served the needs of those humans who had remained behind, the planet's natural healing powers had been allowed to come into play, and the seas were pure again, the skies were clear, the woodlands had reclaimed territory once occupied by dense, grimy cities. A robot greeted Andrew when his aeroflitter landed at the U. S. Robots airstrip. Its face was bland and blank and its red photoelectric eyes were utterly expressionless. Scarcely thirty percent of the robots of Earth, Andrew knew, were still independently brained: this one was an empty creature, nothing more than the mindless metal puppet of some immobile positronic thinking-device housed deep within the U. S. Robots complex. "I am Andrew Martin," Andrew said. "I have an appointment with Director of Research Magdescu." "Yes. You will follow me." Lifeless. Brainless. A mere machine. A thing. The robot greeter led Andrew briskly along a paved path that gleamed with some inner crystalline brightness and up a shining spiral ramp into a domed many-leveled building covered with a glistening and iridescent translucent skin. To Andrew, who had had little experience of modern architecture, it had the look of something out of a storybook — light, airy, shimmering, not entirely real. He was allowed to wait in a broad oval room carpeted with some lustrous synthetic material that emitted a soft glow and a faint, pleasant sort of music whenever Andrew moved about on its surface. He found that if he walked in a straight line the glow was pale pink and the music was mildly percussive in texture, but that when he sauntered in a curve that followed the border of the room the light shifted more toward the blue end of the spectrum and the music seemed more like the murmuring of the wind. He wondered if any of this had any significance and decided that it did not: that it was mere ornamentation, a decorative frill. In this placid and unchallenging era such lovely but meaningless decorative touches were ubiquitous, Andrew knew "Ah — Andrew Martin at last," a deep voice said. A short, stocky man had appeared in the room as though some magic had conjured him out of the carpet. The newcomer was dark of complexion and hair, with a little pointed beard that looked as though it had been lacquered, and he wore nothing above the waist except the breastband that fashion now dictated. Andrew himself was more thoroughly covered. He had followed George Charney in adopting the "drapery" style of clothing, thinking that its flowing nature would better conceal what he still imagined to be a certain awkwardness of his movements, and though the stylishness of drapery was several decades obsolete now and Andrew could move as easily and gracefully as any human, he had continued to dress in that manner ever since. "Dr. Magdescu?" Andrew asked. "Indeed. Indeed." Alvin Magdescu took up a stance a couple of meters from Andrew and scanned him with undisguised fascination, as though Andrew were an exhibit in a museum. |
| 942 |
Robots were a dull plodding bunch, in the main. They did their jobs and that was that. It was the way they were supposed to be. It was the way everyone wanted them to be. "You're the only one of you that there is," Magdescu had said. Yes. It was true. He had a capacity for aesthetic response that went far beyond the emotive range of any other robot that had ever been. Beauty meant something to him. He appreciated it when he saw it; he had created beauty himself. And if he never saw any of this again, how very sad that would be. And then Andrew smiled at his own foolishness. Sad? For whom? He would never know it, if the operation should fail. The world and all its beauty would be lost to him, but what would that matter? He would have ceased to function. He would be permanently out of order. He would be dead, and after that it would make no difference to him at all that he could no longer perceive the beauties of the world. That was what death meant: a total cessation of function, an end to all processing of data. There were risks, yes. But they were risks he had to take, because otherwise — Otherwise — He simply had to. There was no otherwise. He could not go on as he was, outwardly human in form, more or less, but incapable of the most basic human biological functions — breathing, eating, digesting, excreting — An hour later Andrew was on his way east. Alvin Magdescu met him in person at the U. S. Robots airstrip. "Are you ready?" Magdescu asked him. "Totally." "Well, then, Andrew, so am I." Obviously they intended to take no chances. They had constructed a wondrous operating theater for him, far more advanced in capability than the earlier room in which they had carried out his transformation from the metallic to the androidal form. It was a magnificent tetrahedral enclosure illuminated by a cross-shaped cluster of chromed fixtures at its summit that flooded the room with brilliant but not glaring light. A platform midway between floor and ceiling jutted from one wall, dividing the great room almost in half, and atop this platform rested a dazzling transparent aseptic bubble within which the surgery would be performed. Beneath the platform that supported the bubble was the surgical stage's environmental-support apparatus: an immense cube of dull green metal, housing an intricate tangle of pumps, filters, heating ducts, reservoirs of sterilizing chemicals, humidifiers, and other equipment. On the other side of the room was a great array of supplementary machinery covering an entire wall: an autoclave, a laser bank, a host of metering devices, a camera boom and associated playback screens that would allow consulting surgeons outside the operating area to monitor the events. "What do you think?" Magdescu asked proudly. "Very impressive. I find it most reassuring. And highly flattering as well." "You know that we don't want to lose you, Andrew. You're a very important — individual." Andrew did not fail to notice the slight hesitation in Magdescu's voice before that last word. |
| 943 |
As for the lunar robots, they didn't seem to recognize any sign of his robot origins. Invariably they treated him with the robotic obsequiousness that was considered a human being's due. He was always "Dr. Martin" to them, with plenty of bowing and scraping and general subservience. Andrew had mixed feelings about all of this. Despite all that he had told them about being quite accustomed to thinking of himself as a robot and being addressed like one, he was not completely sure that it was true. On the one hand, being called "Mr." or "Dr." instead of "Andrew" was a tribute to the excellence of his android upgradings and to the high quality of his positronic brain. It had been his intention for many years to transform himself in such a way that he would move from a purely robotic identity into the gray zone of an identity that approached being human, and obviously he had achieved just that. And yet — and yet — How strange it felt to be addressed in terms of such respect by humans! How uncomfortable it made him, really. He grew used to it but Andrew never really felt at ease with it. These people couldn't seem to remember for any significant length of time that he was a robot; but a robot was what he was, all the same — much as he sometimes would like to pretend otherwise — and it felt vaguely fraudulent to be treated like a fellow human being by them. Indeed, Andrew knew, he had explicitly asked for it. "Let's all be equals, then," he had told Sandra and Carlos and David at the spaceport. And they had agreed. But there was hardly a day thereafter when he was not amazed at his own boldness. Equals? Equals? How could he have dared even to suggest such a thing? Phrasing it as a direct instruction, no less — virtually an order! Saying it in a casual, jaunty way, like one human being to another. Hypocrisy, Andrew thought Arrogance. Delusions of grandeur. Yes. Yes. Yes. He could buy a human-appearing body for himself, he could fill it with prosthetic devices that performed many of the functions of a human body whether he needed those functions performed or not, he could look human beings straight in the eye and speak coolly to them as though he were their equal — but none of that made him their equal. That was the reality that Andrew could not deny. In the eyes of the law he was a robot and always would be, no matter how many upgrades he was given, or how ingenious they might be. He had no citizenship. He could not vote. He could not hold public office, even the most trivial. About the only civil rights Andrew had, despite all that the Charneys had done over the years on his behalf, were the right to own himself, and the right to go about freely without being humiliated by any passing human who cared to harass him, and the right to do business as a corporation. And also the right — such as it was — to pay taxes. "Let's all be equals," he had said, as if by merely saying so he could make it be. What folly! What gall! But the mood soon passed and rarely returned. |
| 944 |
It was challenging work, for, though he himself was untroubled by the lower gravity of the lunar environment, humans in whom standard Earth-model prosthetic devices had been installed tended to have a much more difficult time of it. Andrew was able, though, to meet each difficulty with a useful modification, and one by one the problems were resolved. Now and then Andrew missed his estate on the California coast — not so much the grand house itself as the cool fogs of summer, the towering redwood trees, the rugged beach, the crashing surf. But it began to seem to him as though he had settled into permanent residence on the Moon. He stayed on into a fourth year, and a fifth. Then one day he paid a visit to a bubbledome on the lunar surface, and saw the Earth in all its wondrous beauty hanging in the sky — tiny, at this distance, but vivid, glowing, a blue jewel that glistened brilliantly in the night. It is my home, he thought suddenly. The mother world — the fountain of humanity — Andrew felt it pulling him — calling him home. At first it was a pull he could scarcely understand. It seemed wholly irrational to him. And then understanding came. His work on the Moon was done, basically. But he still had unfinished business down there on Earth. The following week, Andrew booked his passage home on a liner that was leaving at the end of the month. And then he called back and arranged to take an even earlier flight. He returned to an Earth that seemed cozy and ordinary and quiet in comparison to the dynamic life of the lunar settlement. Nothing of any significance appeared to have changed in the five years of his absence. As his Moon-ship descended toward it, the Earth seemed to Andrew like a vast placid park, sprinkled here and there with the small settlements and minor cities of the decentralized Third Millennium civilization. One of the first things Andrew did was to visit the offices of Feingold and Charney to announce his return. The current senior partner, Simon DeLong, hurried out to greet him. In Paul Charney's time, DeLong had been a very junior clerk, callow and self-effacing, but that had been a long time ago and he had matured into a powerful, commanding figure whose unchallenged ascent to the top rung of the firm had been inevitable. He was a broad-shouldered man with heavy features, who wore his thick dark hair shaven down the middle in the tonsured style that had lately become popular. There was a surprised look on DeLong's face. "We had been told you were returning, Andrew," he said — with just a bit of uncertainty in his voice at the end, as though he too had briefly considered calling him "Mr. Martin" — "but we weren't expecting you until next week." "I became impatient," said Andrew brusquely. He was anxious to get to the point. "On the Moon, Simon, I was in charge of a research team of twenty or thirty human scientists. I gave orders and nobody questioned my authority. Many of them referred to me as 'Dr. Martin' and I was treated in all ways as an individual worthy of the highest respect. |
| 945 |
"Let's get down to it." "Very well," said the surgeon phlegmatically, and with a quick, sweeping gesture took his laser-scalpel into his splendidly designed right hand. Andrew had chosen to remain completely conscious throughout the entire process. He had no wish to shut down awareness even for an instant. Pain was not an issue for him, and he needed to be certain that his instructions were being followed precisely. But of course they were. The surgeon's nature, being robotic, was not one that would permit any capricious deviation from the agreed-upon course of action. What Andrew was not prepared for was the unexpectedly intense weakness and fatigue that came after the job had been done. He had never known such sensations as those that came over him in the early hours of his recovery period. Even when they had transferred his brain from the robot body to the android one, Andrew had experienced nothing like this. Instead of walking normally, he lurched and staggered. Often he felt as though the floor before him was rising up to strike him in the face. There were times when his fingers trembled so violently that he had difficulty holding things. His vision, which had always been flawless, suddenly would grow blurry for long minutes at a stretch. Or he would try to remember someone's name, and nothing would come to mind except a tantalizing blankness that glimmered at him from around the corners of his memory. He spent an entire afternoon, the first week after the operation, searching his mind for the full name of the man he had known as Sir. Then, suddenly, the name was there: Gerald Martin. But now Andrew had forgotten the name of Little Miss's dark-haired older sister, and it took him hours more of diligent searching before "Melissa Martin" popped abruptly into his brain. Two hours! It should not have taken him two milliseconds! It was all more or less what Andrew should have expected, and in an abstract way he had expected it. And yet the reality of the feelings themselves was far beyond anything that Andrew had anticipated. Physical weakness was something new to him. So were poor coordination, uncertain reflexes, imperfect eyesight, and episodes of impaired memory. It was humiliating to feel so imperfect — so human No, he thought. There is nothing humiliating about it. You have everything backward. It is human to feel imperfect. That was what you wanted, above all else: to be human. And now that is what you are. The imperfections — the weaknesses — the imprecisions — they are the very things which define humans as human. And which drive them to transcend their own failings. You never had failings before, Andrew told himself. Now you do, and so be it. So be it. You have achieved the thing you set out to accomplish and you must feel no regrets. Gradually, as one day slid into the next, things began to improve. Gradually. Very gradually. The memory functions returned first. Andrew was gratified to discover that he had full access again, instant and complete, to the whole of his past. |
| 946 |
Our producer for the series was to be Paula Quigley, known to us as Quiggers, whom we knew and loved and had worked with in Mauritius and Madagascar while making the television series Ark on the Move. She is slender, petite, with a mop of dark curly hair, a snub nose like a Pekinese and those curious eyes that can be both blue and green, depending on what she is wearing. She is also possessed of unfairly long eyelashes that can only be equalled by a giraffe. In addition to her normal, very pleasantly feminine soprano speaking voice, she is capable of a bellow that would have won her first prize in any town-crier contest, and it came in extremely useful as we had not budgeted for walkie-talkie or a megaphone. (With Paula as part of the team we did not need either of these adjuncts of communication.) We were to have two directors, Jonathan Harris and Alastair Brown. Alastair was to direct seven of the programmes and Jonathan six. Alastair looked very donnish, since his receding hairline gave his brow noble proportions. Behind his glasses his pale-blue eyes held a mystical gleam that you would have expected from the White Knight, and he wore an almost perpetual grin. He had a habit of holding his head on one side and revolving slowly in a circle, so that he bore a vivid resemblance to the Hanged Man on a Tarot card. His habit of speaking in half-sentences which did not appear to have any relation to each other made communication difficult, but fortunately we had Paula to act as translator on those occasions when Alastair got so overexcited that he appeared to be speaking Patagonian. As a contrast, Jonathan was dark and somewhat glowering, handsome in a Heathcliffian sort of way, with a husky voice and a meticulous way of speaking that at first made you think him pedantic, until you discovered his puckish sense of humour. Whether or not it was a good idea to have two directors is open to doubt. True, it leads to a jolly spirit of competition: but directors, when you give them their head, tend to get overenthusiastic, and in this particular instance they both vied with each other to see which one could get us to perform the most dangerous and hair-raising feats, and if it had not been for the tender care that Paula took of us we might both have disappeared from life, for once a director gets a fixation about a scene nothing will deter him and you soon find out that you are considered expendable. This attitude is summed up by Alfred Hitchcock's remark, 'I didn't say actors and actresses were cattle, I said they should be treated like cattle.' At any rate, now is my chance to get my own back. Added to the hazards of the whole venture was the fact that Paula, Alastair and Jonathan were not naturalists. As we soon discovered, their knowledge of the natural world around them would have fitted into an egg-cup and left room for an egg. They could, with much difficulty and after considerable thought, just distinguish a mouse from a giraffe, a crab from a shark, a frog from a boa constrictor and a butterfly from an eagle, but it was an uphill struggle. |
| 947 |
After the usual indescribable mess which is inevitable when you entrust your arrangements to those experts, the travel agents, we suddenly found ourselves flighting over a landscape of muted pastel green, and then landing, several degrees cooler, on the tarmac at Aberdeen. Here we met up with the crew. Chris, the cameraman, was short, stocky and bearded, with an air of complete competence, looking like one of the more endearing illustrations of gnomes in the wonderful Gnome Book. Brian, our sound-recordist, looked with his curly dark hair, his well-groomed appearance, more as if he were a bank manger in, say, Penge or Surbiton than somebody who was willing to lie in the bushes magically trapping the sounds of life. Chris's assistant, a young good-looking lad called David, gave me somewhat of a shock. As he approached us through the airport lounge he appeared to be in the last stages of a nervous disease akin to, but more severe than, St Vitus' dance. With this affliction it seemed to me curious to make the boy an assistant cameraman. It was only when he got closer and I discovered that he was dancing to some tribal music on his Sony Walkman that my sympathy for his affliction abruptly ended. Aberdeen is a lovely, neat city with its solemn-faced houses, wearing roofs of grey slates like Beatle-styled haircuts, streets lined with great beds of roses with huge multicoloured petals, silk-soft, feasting the eye and the nose. I was delighted that, because of the complications of getting to Shetland on the right date, we were forced to fly from Aberdeen to Lerwick, the southernmost tip of the island, and then make our way in a minibus by road to Unst, crossing by two ferries en route as a bonus. It was the colouring that first struck you. The gentleness of the colours, was as though each green or brown had been muted and softened by an appliquE of chalk, and the clouds, low and sculpted to the exact shade of grey and very pale coffee of the tangles of sheep's wool that hung on the fences and in spiky thickets. The rolling, low hills were pale, creamy emerald or, where the heather grew, a rich chocolatey-mauve. The hedges along the way were golden with buttercups and dandelions, and in places purple loosestrife blazed and in the damp hollows golden iris bloomed like banners in an army of green sword-shaped leaves. For some reason, it reminded me of New Zealand with its rolling empty landscape and roads with practically no traffic and the same sense of remoteness. In places the heather was sabre-slashed where the peat had been cut out in pieces from the land. These bricks of peat, rich and dark as plum cake, lay drying in great jumbled piles beside the tiny crofts. We came at last to our motel on the shores of the sea and here, once we were installed in our room, Jonathan joined us, thoughtfully bringing with him a bottle of pale-yellow Glenmorangie, nectar of the Gods. 'Now,' said Jonathan, after he had sipped approvingly, 'tomorrow we go up to the white rocks that's the headland of Hermaness and a great gannet colony. |
| 948 |
Lee had by now caught the baby, so the parents concentrated their attacks on her. As I knew that skuas were capable of knocking a man down with a clout from one of their wings, I relieved her of the baby and the parents turned their attention to me, getting closer and closer with each swoop, the wind purring through their wings as they dived. At first, I instinctively ducked each time, but then I discovered that if you let them get to within a dozen feet or so, and then waved your arms at them, they would sheer off. 'Let us,' said Jonathan, 'do a piece to camera about skuas, with that enchanting baby sitting in your lap.' So the camera was set up and a microphone concealed around my neck. All this activity made the parent skuas twice as distraught as they had been and they redoubled their attacks, dive-bombing now me and then the camera, getting dangerously close. When the camera was ready, I squatted down in the heather and placed the fat baby in my lap. I had just opened my mouth to start on a fascinating lecture about skuas, when the baby stood up suddenly, pecked my thumb unexpectedly, making me lose the thread of my discourse, and then proceeded to defecate loudly and copiously all over my knees. 'Nature white in tooth and claw,' said Jonathan, as I mopped the glutinous, fishy mess off my trousers with my handkerchief. 'I don't think we can use that shot in the film.' 'When you have finished laughing,' I said to Lee, 'you might like to take this damn baby and release it. I think I've been intimate enough with skuas for one day.' She took my fat, fluffy friend and placed him in the heather some twenty feet away. He took off at a spread-legged, crouching, flat-footed run looking remarkably like an elderly fat lady in a fur coat, pursuing a bus. 'He is cute,' said Lee wistfully. 'I wish we could have kept him.' 'I don't,' I said. 'We wouldn't have been able to afford the dry-cleaning bills.' Skuas, of course, are one of the most graceful predators of the sky. Like sun-bronzed pirates, they pursue other birds, harrying them ceaselessly until they are forced to disgorge the fish they have caught. Then the skua swoops and snatches the treasure in mid-air. They are such bold buccaneers that they have even been known to grab a gannet's wing-tip in order to get it to relinquish a fish. Skuas will eat anything and are not at all averse to stealing fish from a parent bird, be it gannet or guillemot, and then feasting on their eggs and young as well. We moved on, the flocks of sheep like clotted cream on the green baize of the turf, the sun brilliant above us. We had come muffled up against the reputedly inclement weather of the Shetland Islands and now found ourselves sweating and discarding coats and pullovers. Presently, the land started to drop away to precipitous cliffs and beyond was the Atlantic, blue as gentian flowers. Wheatears were everywhere, their rumps flashing like little white lights as they danced ahead of us. Two ravens, black as mourning-bands, flew slowly along the edge of the cliffs, cranking at one another dolefully. |
| 949 |
High in the sky, a lark hung and poured forth its wonderful liquid song. If a shooting star could sing, I believe it would sing like a lark. Soon we came to the cliff-edge. Some six hundred feet below us, the great smooth blue waves shouldered their way in between the rocks in a riot of spray like beds of white chrysanthemums. The air was full of the surge of surf and the cries of thousands upon thousands of seabirds that drifted like a snowstorm along the cliffs. The mind boggled at the numbers. Hundreds upon hundreds of gannets, kittiwakes, fulmars, shags, razorbills, gulls, skuas, and tens of thousands of puffins Could the sea possibly hold enough fish to feed this cacophonous aerial army and its numerous families that lined the cliff-faces? At the cliff-edge, where the earth was soft enough for digging, was the puffins' special area. Here they excavated their burrows with powerful beaks and feet. They sat around in their hundreds, almost letting you tread on them before launching themselves over the cliffs edge and flying away with rapid wing-beats, their feet trailing behind them like little orange ping-pong bats. To see the green cliff-tops lined with hundreds of these comical waddling birds, each very upright in its neat black and white dinner-jacket, each wearing (as it were) one of those carnival noses, a huge beak striped orange and red. It was like watching a convention of clowns. Many of them, to add to their ridiculous aspect, had just flown in from fishing far out at sea (for they travel as far as three hundred kilometres away to fish) bearing in their brightly painted beaks handfuls of sand-eels. These were carefully arranged across the beak, hanging down each side like a fishy moustache. The extraordinary thing was that the sand-eels were arranged head to tail like sardines in a tin. How the birds manage to catch the eels and arrange them in this meticulous way is an extraordinary feat. Further along the cliff, we came upon two men engaged in an extremely curious pursuit puffin fishing. I know that in remote corners of the world the inhabitants sometimes become very eccentric, but I have never seen anything to equal this. Seated on their behinds, they shuffled slowly down the turf towards the cliffs edge where the solemn-faced puffins congregated, eyeing the men's approach warily. The first man carried a long pole, on the end of which was a noose. Having chosen his puffin, he then cautiously slid towards it, manoeuvred the noose carefully until it got round one of the bird's orange feet, then pulled the flapping, squawking bird towards him; and, when it was within range, the other man seized it. I thought this a curious way to treat birds in what was, after all, a sanctuary. However, as we got closer, I could see that they were fastening a ring to the puffin's leg. These rings are the puffin's passport or identity card. If it is picked up sick or dead or merely caught in a net, the ring tells you where it came from and at what date. |
| 950 |
It is a sort of bureaucracy for birds, but it does add to our knowledge of the mysterious lives seabirds lead, far from shore, in the non-breeding season. The two wardens told us that there were a hundred thousand puffins breeding on the cliff of Hermaness and it was only during the breeding season when the birds were ashore that they could catch them for ringing. They handed me their captive so that I could do a piece to camera on the mysteries of puffins and I discovered very quickly that puffins may look comical and a bit dim-witted but they certainly know how to defend themselves. I caught hold of him rather carelessly, and in a moment the thick, razor-sharp beak had snapped shut on my thumb like a great rat-trap and my hands were being torn to shreds by the bird's needle-sharp claws, as sharp as any cat's. After I had done my piece to camera, I was only too pleased to release my belligerent co-star and let Lee do some first aid on my lacerated hands. 'Now that I have been almost disembowelled by a puffin,' I said to Jonathan, 'what other treats do you have in store for me?' 'Now we go down the cliff,' said Jonathan. 'Where?' I asked. 'Here,' he said, pointing to the cliff-edge that, as far as I could see, dropped sheer, six hundred feet to the sea below. 'But you said there was a path,' I protested. 'There is,' he said. 'If you go to the edge, you'll see it.' Gingerly, my stomach turning over, I approached the edge. Meandering down among the tussocks of grass and thrift was a faint line that looked as though once, in the dim and distant past, a flock of inebriated goats had staggered down the cliff-face to indulge in God knows what alcoholic orgy. 'Call that a path?' I enquired. 'If I were a chamois, I might agree with you, but no man born of woman could go down that.' As I spoke, Chris, David and Brian, with their heavy back-packs, loaded with equipment, padded past me and disappeared down the shadowy pathway. 'There you are,' said Jonathan. 'Nothing to it. Just take it easy. I'll be waiting at the bottom.' He swaggered nonchalantly down the almost-sheer cliff-face. Lee and I looked at each other. I knew she suffered from vertigo as well, but not in such an acute form as I did. 'Did it say anything in our contract about going down cliffs?' I enquired. 'Probably in the small print,' she said dolefully. Offering up a small prayer, we started downwards. There have been many times, in different parts of the world, when I have been scared, but the descent of that cliff was the most terrifying thing that I have ever undertaken. The others had strolled along the barely discernible path as if it had been a broad, flat highway and here was I, crawling on my stomach, clutching desperately at bits of grass and small plants that would, I knew, part company with the cliff-face if any pressure was brought to bear on them, inching my feet along the six-inch-wide path, trying desperately not to look down the almost sheer drop, my arms and legs trembling violently, my body bathed in sweat. |
| 951 |
It was a thoroughly despicable performance, and I was ashamed of myself, but I could do nothing about it. The fear of height is impossible to cure. When I reached the bottom, my leg muscles were trembling so violently that I had to sit down for ten minutes before I could walk. I said some harsh things about Jonathan's ancestry and suggested several unfortunately impracticable things that he could do to himself. 'Well, you got down here all right,' he said. 'All you've got to worry about now is getting up.' 'I shan't bother,' I said austerely. 'You may send us down a tent and arrange a supply of food parcels and we'll take up residence the hermits of Unst.' And in all truth it would have been a very wonderful spot to do just that. Where the so-called path ended, there was a flat area of turf, and from it one could look along the cliff-face in two directions. The shoreline was made up of a jumble of huge boulders, some the size of an average room, and among them the deep-blue ruffled sea surged and frothed and roared. As far as the eye could see along the cliff-face the rocky shoreline was alive with birds, and the air was full of them whirling like giant snowflakes above us. The cacophony of cries was tremendous. Everywhere, there were groups of guillemots sitting shoulder to shoulder on their ledges. Many of them had their single, beautifully coloured, speckled egg between their feet. Eggs green, brown, yellow, buff, spotted and blotched like fingerprints, no two alike. Their strange, growling cries echoed among the cliffs as they jostled each other and their young. We were too late to see their courtship, but I had watched these strange rituals being enacted by guillemots elsewhere. Probably the most curious part of the courtship is when groups of birds conduct a sort of dance on the surface of the sea. They would weave and wheel, dancing over the waves, and then, suddenly, at some mysterious signal, they would all dive beneath the surface simultaneously and the dance would continue underwater. Groups of them would also indulge in extraordinary flights when a flock of perhaps a hundred birds would wheel, twist, soar and dive as if they were a single entity. What minute signals they give each other in order to achieve this extraordinary co-ordinated flight is impossible to see, but signals there must be to accomplish it in such perfect unison. On other ledges along the cliff-face were the mud-and-root nests of the kittiwakes neat, demure-looking gulls. While other species of gull have deserted the sea and now forage inland, following the plough and scavenging on city dumps, the conservative kittiwake has remained staunchly a seabird. It is such a delicate, self-effacing little thing that it comes as something of a shock when it opens its beak and utters the harsh cry from which it gets its pretty name. The kittiwakes of Hermaness, I noticed, were great gardeners; and hundreds of them, as they sat on their nests, were forever busy rearranging the roots and pebbles and mud that made up the cradles for their eggs. |
| 952 |
At first glance, from a distance, it did look rather like a piece of cheese covered with snow; but, when you got closer to it, it resembled much more a many-tiered and extremely untidy mantelpiece, cluttered with dozens of those horrid white pottery ornaments that you used to be able to buy with 'A Present from Bournemouth' written on them. This was the gannets' city, the white rock, on which some ten thousand gannets nested. The screeching conversation from it hit you like an almost tangible wave of sound. To say that Gannet City was busy would be an understatement. New York in the rush-hour would appear immobile in comparison. There were gannets incubating, feeding chicks, flirting, mating, preening, and launching themselves into the air in effortless flight on their six-foot wings. With their creamy-white bodies, wing-tips black as jet and their orange-coloured nape and head they were impressive and immensely handsome. Slightly waddling, slightly awkward on land, as soon as they launched themselves from the rock and slid into the air they became the most elegant and graceful of flying machines. With their long, pointed, black-tipped wings and pointed tails and dagger-shaped blue beaks, they were of a sleek and deadly design. We watched them gliding down through the blue sky with scarcely a wing-beat, using the different air currents, moving smoothly as stones on ice. They would slide up to the rock, wing-tips almost touching it, and then, turning, fold their wings and land with such a quick movement your eye was deceived. One minute they were a great white and black cross in the air, the next minute one of the multitude of noisy, restless inhabitants of the colony. Further out to sea, we watched their incredible fishing technique in operation. They would glide along, a hundred feet or so above the waves, their pale eyes keenly watching. Suddenly, they would twist in mid-air and plummet down, their huge wings stretched out behind them so that they became a living arrowhead. They would hit the water at tremendous speed, ploughing up a bouquet of spray as they disappeared beneath the surface, to reappear a moment or so later with a fish in their beaks. When you got a shoal of fish and you had thirty or forty gannets all diving almost simultaneously, it was a breathtakingly spectacular sight. We worked steadily all day, filming this gigantic concourse of birds, pausing only to have a much-needed picnic lunch. The weather remained brilliant, and the hot sun and the reflection on the water gave us all sunburn. In fact Lee got so red that I told her she looked like a puffin with a wig a description which, for some reason, did not amuse her. By the time evening came, we had filmed seabirds indulging in every kind of activity and it had been an enormous privilege to spend the day within touching distance of so many species who, when they became used to your presence, completely ignored you and went about the all-important business of rearing their young, loving their mates, bickering with their neighbours in a thoroughly human fashion. |
| 953 |
As the light started to fade and the sky turned from blue to lavender, we packed up and reluctantly left the seabird metropolis. I will draw a veil over my ascent of the cliff; suffice it to say that it was even more gruelling than the descent had been and on reaching the top I crawled across the turf as far away from the cliffs edge as possible and lay on my back, staring up into the pale evening sky while Jonathan, showing a rare Christian instinct, unearthed a bottle of Glenmorangie from his bag and plied me with it. Then we walked back over the velvety turf through the heather now purple-brown in the twilight, the cotton-grass glimmering all around us and the steady whoosh, whoosh of the huge dark skuas dive-bombing us in the gloaming. It seemed incredible that in one day we had managed to obtain all the seabird footage we needed for the programme. There were only a few landscape shots we needed, which we got on the following day. Our filming on the magnificent cliffs of Hermaness was over, and so we returned to Jersey. Here we planned to film the life on the rocky coasts. Although only nine miles by five in size, the island has such an indented coastline that you have, in effect, an enormous stretch of rocky shore for such a small area. Coupled with this is the fact that the seas around the island are comparatively unpolluted and it has a huge 34-foot tide which, when it is out, exposes acres and acres of magnificent rock-pools teeming with marine life of every conceivable sort. The sea is a wonderful world. It is as though we had another planet joined on to this, so diverse and bizarre are its life forms, so vastly rich and colourful. From a naturalist's point of view the lip of the sea is a fascinating ecosystem where many creatures live under the most topsy-turvy conditions, several feet deep in pounding waves for some periods, dry as a bone for others. The adaptations to this strenuous sort of life are, of course, many and various. Take humble limpets, for example, so common that they are generally ignored. They have adapted perfectly to their environment. Their shells, shaped like a tent, are admirably designed to cope with the fierce pounding of the waves. The animal itself has developed a circular muscular foot with which it clings to the rock fiercely. How fiercely, you can find out by trying to dislodge a limpet with your fingers. This muscular foot forms a sort of suction cup which will enable the creature to cling so tenaciously. The limpet has evolved special gills which are like a curtain round its body. If these delicate structures were to dry out at low tide the animal would be unable to breathe and so would die. But the shell fits so beautifully to the rock that it can retain a reservoir of water to keep the gills moist until the tide's return. But it only fits so well because the limpet grinds the rock with its foot and its shell. This has two effects: a circular depression appears in the rock which fits the shell, and the shell itself is ground down to fit more closely into the rock. |
| 954 |
When limpets graze, they move slowly over the weed-covered rocks, their small heads with a pair of tentacles protruding, and they swing their bodies from side to side. This enables the radula, the creature's tongue, to come into action. This is a strap-like organ, covered with microscopic horny teeth that rasp away the algae and the weeds. Limpets graze in a wide circle round their home depressions. It is of course vital that the animal should be able to get back to its home as the tide goes out, so that it does not become desiccated; so they have developed definite homing instincts, and how these work is still a mystery, for it does not appear to have anything to do with the creature's rather limited powers of sight, smell and touch. It's nice to think that even with a creature as common as a limpet there are still mysteries to be unravelled, that there are still enigmas for the amateur naturalist to study and perhaps solve. The limpet's sex life is confusing to all but a limpet. Like many sea-creatures, they can change their sex with comparative ease, and there is evidence that young limpets are for the most part males while the older ones are mainly females. Many limpets start life and get to be teenagers as males and then turn into females for the rest of their existence. As well as this curious state of affairs, limpets, unlike the bulk of shore snails, simply scatter their future progeny in the sea; these develop into minute, free-swimming plankton before taking life seriously and settling down on the rocks. Limpets share this half-and-half wet-and-dry world with a host of other creatures: topshells, the woodlouse-like Triton, sand-fleas or sand-hoppers, various seaweeds and some sponges, and many of the rock-and wood-borers such as the toredo worms. But it is really in the limpid rock-pools left by the retreating tide that you find the most colourful and extraordinary creatures. Here, as well as strange methods of reproduction, you will find ingenious methods of defence and startling methods of obtaining food. Take the common starfish as an example. This beast not only, by sheer strength, pulls apart the two halves of a mussel (no mean feat, as you will realize if you have ever tried to open an oyster), but also, when the two halves of the shell are far enough apart, proceeds to extrude its stomach, push it into the shell and start the process of digestion. Then there is one of the tunicates with the lovely, slightly oriental-sounding name of Oikopleura, a tiny tadpole-like creature which has a remarkable way of obtaining nourishment. It builds out of mucus a strange plankton-trap, shaped like a minute, fat, transparent airship, in which the Oikopleura sits, wiggling its tail. This creates a current of water through the airship, which has two inhalant orifices, each one of which has a protective screen which only allows the very smallest of particles to enter. Within the airship are further mucous filters which entrap the minute organisms that make up the plankton. |
| 955 |
That experienced bulls actually enjoy this I have witnessed with my own eyes, as some years ago we made a film of the Course Libre, as it is called, and so had to attend many bullfights to get the necessary shots. An experienced bull enters the ring and gazes around at the crowd like an actor summing up the audience at a matinEe. Then he goes through the 'Look how fierce I am' routine the snorting, the tossing of the head, the pawing of the sand. He is apparently unaware that the white-flannelled razateurs have entered the ring and are now approaching him. Then suddenly, with astonishing speed and agility, he whirls round and is among them, galloping head down, and the razateurs are running before him like snowflakes driven before the wind. He chases them to the six-foot-high wooden barrier, over which they leap with alacrity great leaps that would be envied by Nureyev himself. Sometimes the bull, to prove his fierceness, sticks his horns into the planks and sends them flying like matchwood. At other times an overenthusiastic bull might jump the barrier with the razateurs, and then you will see the audience in the front three rows of the stalls hastily vacate their seats until the bull can be inveigled back into the ring. On many occasions, I have seen a bull so enjoying himself that when the twenty-minute bell went as the signal for the end of the contest he would refuse to leave the ring as he wanted to continue the fight. In these cases a lead bull, with a bell on it, would be sent in to entice the recalcitrant bull out. On one never-to-be-forgotten afternoon, a lead bull was sent in and got so carried away that it started chasing the razateurs with the bull it was supposed to be luring out of the ring, and a third bull had to be sent in to lead the two of them out. No visit to the Camargue is complete without witnessing one of these amusing fights. Many bulls make great names for themselves, and their careers are followed by the Provencals as eagerly as if they were boxers or wrestlers or footballers and people will travel many miles to see a specially famous bull appear in the ring. As our little house was still in the hands of plumbers, masons and carpenters, we stayed in a charming hotel in the back streets of Arles, a hotel with a beautiful tree-shaded garden in which we could sit and drink and have script-conferences. A few minutes' drive and we were out in the Camargue itself. The weather was kind to us, as it usually is in the south of France, and to get up early in the morning and know you were going to have endless sunshine all day long was very calming to our director's nerves. Our first task was to visit the various hides which had been constructed in the reserve and try to film the massive waterbird concentrations which had assembled in the marshes, some nesting, some en route to other breeding-grounds. Our guide to this area was one Bob Brittan, a short, slender man, who had a mischievous urchin face and a great fund of knowledge of the Camargue, where he had lived and studied for some years. |
| 956 |
He was immediately rechristened Britannicus a sobriquet that in a strange way suited him. In its own way, this huge quantity of water and land birds was as impressive as anything we had seen in the Shetland Isles. Sitting in the hot hide, looking out on the acres and acres of glittering water and vivid green marshland covered with an ever-moving multitude of birds, was a great experience. Huge rafts of green-headed mallard, the rusty-headed widgeon or neat, green-eyed teal, shelducks in their carnival colours of greenish-black and rich chestnut, rusty-headed pochard, all these speckling the water or purring through the air as they wheeled in flight from one area of marsh to another. In the shallows, storks fished. Occasionally a pair would face each other, throw back their heads and rattle their red beaks like the crackle of Lilliputian musketry. Snow-white spoonbills with their strange spatula beaks, like deformed ping-pong bats, moved solemnly along, sifting the plankton-rich mud through their beaks. Flamingoes like huge pink rose petals moved along the shallows keeping up a constant garrulous ugly honking out of keeping with their elegance and beauty. Then there were the squacco herons, pale as caramel, blue and black beaks and their legs pink with the excitement of the breeding season. Soberly dressed bitterns, standing in reed-beds, doleful as bank managers contemplating their overdrafts, and rather piratical-looking night herons, with black backs and black caps and debonair, drooping white crests and red all-seeing eyes. Next to them the purple herons seemed sinuous and snake-like, with their long chestnut necks and their harsh cries, a sort of feathered Uriah Heep. Then in complete contrast were the other waders: sandpipers, pattering along the mud like schoolgirls in their first high heels; redshanks and greenshanks; the black-winged stilts with legs like all those lovely girls you see in America, whose shapely legs seem to start immediately under the chin. Then that paragon of all wading birds, the avocet, moving elegantly on stormcloud-blue legs in a black and white suit, obviously designed by the most expensive Paris fashion-house, aristocratic tip-tilted noses being occasionally dipped into the water and moved from side to side like delicate, beautiful metronomes. In the banks along the edges of the marshes, the bee-eaters skimmed in and out of their nestholes, gleaming sea-green and blue, and in the groups of pines that huddled together like crowds of furry green umbrellas the cattle egrets nested, looking like white stars in a green sky. There was so much going on that it was difficult to know what to film. So much courtship and flirting, so much foraging for food, so much bickering and quarrelling, so many whirling flights of birds freckling the sky and splashing back on to the still waters in rose-beds of foam. Even in the hide itself your attention was constantly distracted by now a jewel-eyed wolf spider stalking a mayfly, now a butterfly hatching. |
| 957 |
So we had to form human chains to make sure the precious and extremely expensive cameras and recording equipment got over safely. This was accomplished with no little noise, although we tried to be as quiet as we could. However, when we arrived at our destination, the coypus, as was inevitable, had heard us and disappeared. 'Damn them,' said Jonathan. 'What do we do now?' 'Wait,' I said succinctly. 'We're losing good filming-time,' Jonathan complained. 'You're filming wild animals, dear boy,' I explained, not for the first time, 'not film stars. Animals don't take direction.' 'What about Lassie and Rin Tin Tin?' he retorted. 'Hollywood products,' I said. 'You'll just have to possess your soul in patience. Look at these very fascinating droppings.' 'I can't make a half-hour programme about a coypu's droppings,' said Jonathan with, I must admit, some justification. 'Patience,' I said soothingly. 'They will return.' But I was wrong. They did not return, and after several hours during which I tried to quieten Jonathan down with a recital of all the poetry and limericks I knew and reminiscences of similar failures in animal photography I had known in my life, none of which appeared to have a calming effect, we decided to take Britannicus's advice and come back in the evening, when the coypus would emerge to feed or so he assured us. So we went away and filmed birds and returned in the late afternoon. Knowing the paths and the bridges, we made better progress and less noise, and were soon ensconced in the tamarisk trees, which grew so thickly that they made an admirable hide. If the coypus appeared, we decided, we would get all the shots of them we needed first and then Lee and I would see how closely we could approach them, for Jonathan was anxious to get a scene with both the talent and the animals in the same shot. 'I am sick to death of those animal series that show the talent peering through binoculars, creeping through the undergrowth, and then you cut to a shot of a penguin doing a Highland fling,' he confided in a hoarse whisper, 'and you know perfectly well that the talent probably never even saw the penguin.' 'They'd be jolly lucky talent if they saw a penguin doing that,' I said judiciously, 'but I do know what you mean.' 'What I mean ...' Jonathan started, and Lee shushed him. 'I think I can see something black in the water over there,' she said, pointing. 'Probably another dropping,' said Jonathan mournfully. We all peered hopefully at the canal and then saw a blunt, bewhiskered head with ridiculously huge yellow teeth break the water and move slowly along the surface, leaving a V-shaped trail of ripples behind it. Frantically, we tried to attract Chris's attention, for he was some distance away, but he had already seen it and was busy filming. The coypu's head reached the bank and the portly animal hauled itself ponderously ashore, displaying a behind of gigantic proportions, like a fat, fur-covered balloon. It had great naked flat feet and a long, thick scaly tail like a rat's. |
| 958 |
It sat up on its ample backside and sniffed the air suspiciously, its front feet bunched into absurd fists, its enormous protuberant yellow teeth making it look as though it was grinning. All it needed, you felt, was a monocle and an old school tie, and it would be what the average American thinks the average Englishman looks like. Satisfied that there was no danger, it proceeded to groom itself carefully, using its front feet. The coypu has two sebaceous oil-glands situated at the corner of its mouth and near its anus. The fur consists of a thick, rather harsh outer coat and a thin, fine undercoat. When the nutria is used commercially, the harsh outer coat is removed, leaving only the soft undercoat. We were amused to see how assiduously the animal groomed and arranged and oiled its fur, taking immense care and concentrating intently. While it was doing this, several other coypus' heads broke surface, and these other animals of varying sizes from quite young ones to big fat matrons were hauling themselves out on to the bank. Soon there were half a dozen of them mostly sitting on the bank and grooming, while others swam and dived in the canal. As each one finished grooming, it would meander along the bank browsing on the succulent vegetation. They seemed charming, placid and nice-natured beasts, an ornament to any scenery, if only they would stop carrying on like a corps of engineers, undermining every bank they came to. Presently, Chris signalled us that he had obtained all the necessary shots, and suggested in dumb show that Lee and I should approach the disporting coypus to get the shots Jonathan wanted. The evening was so still, we did not have to worry about wind direction. All we had to worry about was not letting our heads show against the skyline. Bent double, like a couple of Red Indian trackers, Lee and I made our way along the canal. We arrived at the tamarisk tree with one broken branch dangling from it that we were using as a marker. We were now opposite the coypu colony. Very slowly we rose to our feet, inch by inch, with frequent pauses. Then we stood upright, and twenty-five feet or so away were the coypus. We stood very still and they seemed unaware of our presence, and went on with the grooming and bathing. Slowly we inched forward. It was rather like playing that ridiculous childhood game of Statues or Grandmother's Footsteps, where a group of you approach a person with his back to you and when he suddenly turns round, you are all supposed to freeze. At the slightest movement, you become 'it'. So Lee and I played Grandmother's Footsteps with the coypus, and by this means succeeded in getting quite close to them, and Chris managed to get both them and us in the same shot. We were standing frozen when the first male who had appeared suddenly turned round and stared across the canal at us, nose whiffling, whiskers bristling, orange teeth like scimitars pointing at us. As we were immobile, we could not see what had alarmed him, but it may have been a tiny breeze from the wrong direction wafting our scent to him. |
| 959 |
After several miles, the false olives grew thicker and we eventually arrived at a glittering white crossroads among huge thickets. The blue sky had a faintly gold wash to it and a few pale clouds like tiny feathers hung immobile in the western horizon, turning from white to gold and then to pink. We parked the cars and waited for Pig Woman. Presently, she arrived, bumping over the dirt roads in a tiny, battered Deux Chevaux van with a long antenna sticking out of the roof, which wriggled and whipped like a fishing-rod with an infuriated marlin on the end. She chugged to a halt, and stopped the van and got out and walked towards us. I don't know why, but the sobriquet 'Pig Woman' had conjured up in my mind something out of a horror story, some snouted, grunting half-pig, half-woman, with huge tusks and slavering jaws and doubtless unpleasant habits like eating its young. So in consequence I was somewhat relieved to find myself being introduced to a slim and handsome young woman who had none of the less attractive attributes of a member of the Suidae. Marise was her name, and she viewed us with a bright humorous eye while Jonathan explained what he wanted. She obviously thought us quite mad but was happy to oblige the eccentric anglais. First, as the sun was setting, Jonathan wanted her to drive her truck with its whipping antenna to and fro through the false olive groves, just as she would do if tracking the pigs after dark. These shots had to be done before the sun set, so that when printed in the laboratory they would look like night. This she dutifully did, and by the time we had finished it was almost dark. The mosquitoes, as though at a signal, rose from the surrounding countryside and converged on us like a solid wall. I have always contended that no place on earth could compete with the Paraguayan chaco near the Matto Grosso in quantities of mosquitoes. After our experience in the Camargue, I am hesitant to give Paraguay first prize. Wherever you shone your torch all you saw was a thick, dancing, almost opaque veil of mosquitoes. It became advisable to breathe through the nose if you didn't want to inhale a lungful of them. Our hands and faces and necks became black with them. They bit our scalps through our hair and they bit every other portion of our anatomies through the thin summer clothes we were wearing. In seconds, Brian was whirling like a dervish, slapping and, moaning. Reeking though he was of so-called mosquito repellent, this made no difference. The mosquitoes of the Camargue apparently looked upon the foul-smelling repellent as a sort of aperitif before getting down to the main meal of blood. Lee and I knew it was more than our life was worth to point out that mosquitoes did not worry us. Of course, they were irritating when they flew in your eye or up your nose, but because of Lee's two-year research in Madagascar and my wanderings about the world we have developed hides like rhinos and few if any of the bites we suffered even itched. |
| 960 |
Panama is a fantastic country, the sort of country of which a naturalist dreams, for here he can explore the indescribable richness and complexity of the rainforest in the morning and in the afternoon be swimming off an immense colourful reef, teeming with life. It was for this reason that we chose Panama, for the dreaded budget would not allow us to go traipsing all over the world, and so in a small country we had conveniently at hand both forest and sea. We wanted to try to show how alike in many ways the structure of a coral reef and that of a tropical forest are, for if you substitute coral and weed for tree, fish, crayfish and other sea-creatures for birds, mammals and reptiles of the forest you are astonished how similar the two ecosystems are. Panama had another advantage as far as we were concerned: ever since the construction of the canal and the necessary flooding that went with it, an island was created, called Barro Colorado, and it has been used for many years by the Smithsonian Institution as a tropical research station. The Smithsonian also has the reef research station on the San Bias Islands, lying off the Caribbean coast, about an hour's flight from Panama City. Wherever groups of scientists gather together in one spot over a period of time, you may be sure that they get to know every leaf of every tree, and this sort of knowledge, when your time is limited, is of inestimable value to the film-maker. Lee and I arrived in Panama City suffering terribly from jetlag, since we had flown the Atlantic and then down to Panama from New York. However, no exhaustion could quench our happiness at being in the tropics again, to see the boat-tailed grackles, black and solemn as undertakers, parading on the half-finished blocks of flats outside our hotel bedroom window, to see glittering humming-birds and butterflies the size of your hand in the hotel garden and, above all, to feel the moist, scented hot air, like the smell of plum cake from a newly opened oven, that told you that you were once more in that richest area of the earth's surface, the tropics. The following day, when we had recovered, we met for a briefing with Paula and Alastair. Alastair has a very curious method of communication with members of his own species. So strange is it, indeed, that I, in spite of priding myself on being able to communicate with most people anywhere in the world, found I had to use Paula as a translator. What Alastair would do was to throw you a half-sentence or, even worse, two half-sentences which appeared to have no connection with each other, and you then had to fill in the missing words to find the sense of what he was saying. It was rather like trying to do a Times crossword puzzle without the clues. Now, beaming at us affectionately, he said: 'Jetlag over? Good. I thought ... you know ... San Bias first. Reefs like ... or perhaps more like ... forests, fish really, like birds only no wings. Don't you think? So islands ... pretty ... because you don't ... |
| 961 |
see when we get there. Then we know for, er, Barro Colorado, don't we?' I took a deep draught of my drink. It had been several months since I had worked with Alastair, and mercifully time had dulled some of the wounds brought about by the more horrifying attempts at communication with him in Mauritius. I threw a mute look of appeal at Paula. 'What Alastair is saying, honey, is this,' she said soothingly. 'If we are going to try to compare the forest with the reef, he thinks the reef is going to be more difficult because it is underwater filming, so he suggests we go to the San Bias Islands first. OK?' 'OK,' I said. 'I don't mind.' 'OK, so we leave tomorrow. Is that all right by you guys?' 'Sure,' said Lee, and then made the mistake of trying to extract further information from our director. 'What are the San Bias Islands like?' 'Covered in ... you know ... pretty things, palms, that is islands ... um, many of them Indians, government can't control ... women ... gold in nose, so forth. Reef, big ones,' said Alastair, waving his arms excitedly. 'You'll like it... sure to ... Conrad.' 'Haven't you got a book on them?' Lee asked Paula hopefully. As a travel guide, Alastair was obviously not going to be terribly coherent, though obviously enthusiastic. I have often thought that if Martians ever landed it would be just their luck to run into this kindest, most liberal but most incomprehensible of men as their first example of the human race. So the next day we assembled early in the morning at a tiny airfield on the edge of the city. Our cameraman for this shoot was Roger Moride, a tall, handsome Frenchman who looked and sounded like the late Maurice Chevalier. He had a great fund of amusing stories and an avuncular eye for the ladies. We piled our odd assortment of gear into an aircraft designed to hold twelve people and when we had taken our seats we were joined by some fine-looking Indians, stocky, coffee-brown, with very Mongolian-looking features. The men wore shirts and trousers and floppy hats, but the women wore brightly coloured skirts, headscarves and blouses that had been made vivid in reverse appliquE, most beautifully constructed. One elderly lady had a large, flamboyant toucan on her chest, with a roguish look in its eye; another had two huge red fish beaming at each other, face to face in an ultramarine sea; and a third lady's bosom was covered in a spirited scene of several small black fishermen in a canoe trying, with a most fragile and ineffectual fishing-rod, to catch a school of fish the size of sperm whales. All the ladies, gay and gaudy as parakeets in this charming finery, had an additional ornament, gold rings, like wedding rings, implanted through the centre of their noses, and their cheeks were gorgeously made up with cyclamen-pink rouge. These were some of the San Bias islanders and they looked simply splendid. We had a mildly bumpy flight over the centre of Panama and soon we reached the Caribbean coastline and were flying over blue, translucent seas with reefs showing like strange sea-serpents embedded in blue amber. |
| 962 |
Scattered all around were the hundreds and hundreds of San Bias Islands, each so small and perfect with its wedding-ring of reef around white beaches and shaggy wigs of palm that they looked like manufactured South Sea islands in a toyshop window. Presently, somewhat to my consternation, the pilot flew over the blue waters, dropping lower and lower, and headed for an island of such microscopic dimensions that it seemed impossible that he intended to land on it, except in the direst emergency. By now we were almost skimming the surface of the water, and poor Alastair, who did not like small planes any more than I like heights, was looking distinctly apprehensive. Just as we all thought a crash landing in the sea was unavoidable, we flew over a snow-white beach and immediately beyond it the tarmac started. We touched down in a series of juddering bounces and were then tearing along the tarmac, brakes screaming. It was obvious, when we finally drew to a halt, why this method of landing was necessary. The runway exactly fitted the island, so to speak, or the island fitted the runway, no room for error. If you didn't get it exactly right, you landed at one end of the runway and ended up in the sea at the other, and I don't think Alastair was the only one who was glad to quit the plane. We waited some time after our plane had landed, our mountain of luggage smouldering in the sun, covered with brown and green grasshoppers, who appeared to find it irresistible. All our fellow-passengers had been met by canoes and were now dots on the sparkling sea, making towards the scattering of islands across the horizon. Presently, a large, deep-bedded canoe hove into sight and when it pulled up at the jetty out got a stocky little man with bow legs who looked so Tibetan you would have thought he had come straight from Lhasa. He was, it turned out, Israel, the owner of the hotel in which we were going to stay. The shallow sea was blood-hot and as clear as gin, with small flocks of multicoloured fish flipping and trembling over the sandy bottom. We pushed off and presently we were paddling over the still waters towards an island that looked as though it might be about four or five acres in extent, thick with palm trees. We rounded a point and then headed towards a small cement jetty, behind which lay the hotel, an edifice which took my breath away. 'Look at it,' said Lee in delight. 'Isn't it wonderful? I've never seen anything like it.' 'The most extraordinary hotel I've ever seen anywhere in the world,' I said. 'Full marks, Alastair. We're going to enjoy this.' 'It's fun, isn't it?' said Alastair, beaming. He was pretty reliable on short sentences. The hotel was charming. Shaped like a capital L, it was two storeys high, with a palm-thatched roof, and the entire building was made from bamboos lashed intricately together with a sort of raffia. A double veranda ran the full length of the L, and from it on the ground floor and the first floor doorways led into what we presumed were bedrooms. |
| 963 |
This garden he would defend against all comers, and his bravery was considerable. One that we watched and eventually filmed had a green garden some six by twelve inches in size on a huge brain coral. Our attention was drawn to him because he was, unaccountably, and with the utmost vigour, attacking a sea-urchin as black and spiny as a pin-cushion perambulating innocently past. Closer inspection, however, revealed that the sea-urchin's peregrinations were going to take it, as it were, bulldozing its way straight across the damsel fish's front lawn, hence his display of pugnacity. One morning we found our damsel fish nearly frantic, for his precious garden was being visited by a group of parrot fish. These large, gaudy, green, blue and red fish with their parrot-like mouths swagger over the reef like groups of multicoloured muggers, and the sound of their sharp beaks rasping at the coral can be heard a surprising distance away. There were so many of them that our poor little damsel fish did not really know which one to attack first. They also had a strategy. One would zoom into the garden and rip up a piece of weed and the damsel fish would immediately attack and drive it off, although it was twenty times his size. But while he was busy chasing that one the rest would descend on the garden. The damsel fish would eventually return and scatter them and the whole process would then be repeated. Luckily we arrived before the parrot fish had done too much damage and we frightened them off. Nevertheless, in spite of the aid we had rendered him, our damsel fish never really trusted us. He suspected Lee of living on an exclusive diet of seaweed and felt sure she had designs on his garden, and so he would attack her vigorously if she got too close. Among the many fascinating aspects of reef life Mark showed to us, none was more intriguing and bewildering than the sex fife of the blue-headed wrasse. If Freud thought that the sex life of the average human was complex, he would have had a nervous breakdown if he had been forced to psycho-analyse the blue-headed wrasse. To begin with, he would have been in some doubt as to whether he was addressing Mr or Mrs Wrasse, and this alone may have given him pause for thought. When the blue-headed wrasse are young, they are not blue-headed. It is no good beating about the bush, I might as well make a clean breast of it, they are yellow and don't even really look like blue-headed wrasse. However, don't despair. When they grow up, they undergo a startling colour-change and become deep, velvety blue with a fight blue head. The male then stakes out a territory in the mountain ranges of coral and defends it against all comers and waits for the ladies. He is large, glamorous, and he can mate with as many as a hundred females a day a fact that makes the prowess of all legendary human lovers pale into insignificance. The females, dazzled by his brio, find him irresistible and visit his coral apartment by the dozen. However, this is where the difficulties arise. |
| 964 |
Young males, too young to be able to obtain and defend a bachelor pad, hang around the adult fish's territory, waiting for the ladies. Groups of them then force the female to rocket skywards in the water and release her eggs, while the young males release their sperm and fertilize them. However, this is really unsatisfactory and obviously it is a fairly hit-and-miss affair. Ideally, the young males should stake out and defend territory and in this way be able to have the females to themselves, and thus fertilize even more. So his strategy is to grow big enough, change colour and get himself a penthouse. Meanwhile, what of the female wrasse? It is obvious that the number of eggs she can lay and the number of offspring she can produce is very small compared to the legion a big male can fertilize. So what does she do? It sounds magical to us, but it is commonplace to a wrasse. She simply changes sex from a yellow female into a large blue male, strong enough to seize and defend a territory. This she does and is soon busy mating with dozens of females a day. This is, I suppose, the ultimate, a sub-aqua piscatorial women's liberation movement. Love in the wrasse's world is enchanting but apt to be confusing to the amateur naturalist at first. We arranged to film the damsel fish defending his garden and the extraordinary sexual activities of the blue-headed wrasse and many other things besides. Once Alastair got so carried away that he attempted to give directions under water, forgetting that the snorkel was not a megaphone, and nearly drowned in consequence. All in all, it was a most enjoyable and successful shoot. Our next stop was to be Barro Colorado, but as we knew it would take the crew some time to get organized Lee and I decided to stay on for a few days in the San Bias Islands, since it is not often that you find such an ideal, unspoilt spot. However, I felt it incumbent upon me to go to Israel, our hotel owner, and remonstrate with him. It is not often that I do battle with a hotel manager, but in this instance I felt justified. After all, we didn't mind the sand on the bedroom floor, the fact that we had to make our own beds, if we could find the sheets, or the fact that the sea-water in the shower would suddenly cease owing to a surfeit of shrimps in the pipes, or that the lavatory (because two screws were missing) bucked like a rodeo horse and nearly precipitated you through the bamboo walls into the sea. No, we put up with these minor irritations because of the charm of the place. What we were really complaining about was the food. Breakfast consisted of coffee, toast, marmalade and cereals perfectly satisfactory but it was the other meals that filled us with despair. So, determined to be firm but fair, I talked to Israel. 'Israel,' I said, smiling warmly, 'I want to talk to you about the food.' 'Huh?' said Israel. One had to go fairly carefully with him, because his knowledge and command of English were rudimentary, so any sudden new idea inserted into his life was liable to panic him and make him as incomprehensible as Alastair. |
| 965 |
'The food,' I said. 'Breakfast is very good.' He beamed. 'Breakfast good, huh?' 'Very good. But we've been here two weeks, Israel, you understand? Two weeks.' 'Yes, two weeks,' he nodded. 'And what do we have for lunch and dinner every day?' I asked. He thought for a moment. 'Lobster,' he said. 'Exactly,' I said. 'Lobster, every day. Lobster for lunch, lobster for dinner.' 'You like lobster,' he pointed out aggrievedly. 'I used to like lobster,' I corrected him. 'Now we would like something else.' 'You want something else?' he asked, to make sure. 'Yes, how about some octopus?' 'You want octopus?' 'Yes.' 'OK. I give you octopus,' he said, shrugging and octopus he gave us, twice a day for the next five days. The day we left, Israel suddenly appeared while we were sipping a farewell drink under the palms. He spouted a stream of his brand of English at me, speaking very rapidly and seeming, for such a normally impassive man, extremely upset. He kept pointing at the canoe that had arrived containing several women and children, bright and colourful as a boatload of orchids, with whom he had been carrying on a lively altercation. I gathered that we were not responsible for his wrath and I persuaded him to slow down and eventually managed to grasp the salient points of his story. The previous evening, an Indian had paddled over from the neighbouring island which lay some three-quarters of a mile away, in order to celebrate some good fortune or other. He drank deep and late and eventually, at about ten o'clock at night, paddled off rather unsteadily in the direction of home. By dawn, as there was no sign of him, his wife borrowed a canoe and, taking her mother and family, went in search of him. All they found was his empty canoe floating over the reefs. Now they had arrived at the hotel to tell Israel he was a murderer for selling the man drink, and that it was his responsibility to find the corpse. Quite simply, Israel now wanted to know if we would go and help him to look for it. Most women would have fainted if asked to do this not my wife. 'How exciting,' she said. 'Do let's. We've got time, haven't we?' 'Yes,' I said, 'it would be nice to have a final swim with a corpse.' As we were preparing to leave, the latest guest at the hotel appeared and approached us. She was a voluptuous, well-rounded lady with glossy black hair, glossy brown body and large quantities of glossy white teeth. Her suntan lotion could be smelt a mile up-wind, and she jangled musically as she moved from the glittering goldmine of ornaments she wore. What she was doing in the primitive San Bias Islands I shall never know. She looked as though she would have been much more at home on the Cote d'Azur or Copacabana Beach. The white bikini she was wearing was so minuscule she might just as well have not worn one at all. 'Excuse, please,' she said, giving us the benefit of all her teeth. 'You are going out swimming?' 'Er ... yes, in a way,' I said. 'Would you mind if I come, too?' she asked beguilingly. |
| 966 |
I thought deeply. Communication with Alastair was ah ways difficult enough, but when he either couldn't remember the name or else used the wrong one you began to feel you were trying to unravel the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aid of a Portuguese-Eskimo dictionary. 'You don't by any chance mean a coatimundi?' I asked, with a flash of inspiration. 'That's it, that's it,' said Alastair triumphantly. 'Nose long, whiffly, climbs trees.' Presently, we went off on our first foray into the centre of the island to see all the sets that Alastair had picked out, and to try to get a glimpse of some of the animals. However many times you visit the tropics, I don't think you ever get over the thrill of once again penetrating the dim recesses among the giant trees. Coming from a sun-drenched clearing outside, your eyes have to accustom themselves to the gloom. The first impression is of coolness, the cool dampness of a butter-dish; but you realize that this is only relative, for you are still sweating. The next thing to excite you is the great wealth of plants and trees around. Everywhere you look there is a new species and, although die riot of undergrowth is stationary, you get the impression of great movement. The giant trees, a hundred feet high straddling on buttress roots (like the flying buttresses of a medieval cathedral), are lashed together with a web of creepers and lianas, so that they resemble the giant masts of so many wrecked and abandoned tall-masted schooners, their green sails in tatters and only the shrouds of the lianas keeping them upright. In places, the forest floor appeared to be alive, a moving carpet of green. This hallucination was brought about by the streams of leaf-cutting ants hurrying back to their nests with their booty, a triangular piece of thumbnail-sized green leaf, slung over their shoulders. From the tree of their choice (which they were busily dissecting) to their nest may be several hundred yards, and so these columns of green wend their way over the dark forest floor, over logs and under bushes in a steady stream that on close inspection looks like a Lilliputian regatta, all the boats having green sails. As we made our way deeper into the forest, we could hear ahead of us the deep, vibrant roar that signalled a troupe of black howler monkeys. It's an impressive sound, somewhere between a howl, a roar and a harsh gurgle, and it shakes and vibrates the forest in a prodigious fashion. Presently we found them, a small family group, black as jet, some slouching nonchalantly through the branches, others lolling back in patches of sunlight, stuffing leaves and buds into their mouths, others simply hanging by their superbly prehensile tails and contemplating their aerial garden. When they caught sight of us, they became very alert, glaring at us suspiciously, and when we moved off the path into the forest so that we were directly underneath them they grew agitated and belligerent and broke off twigs and leaves to throw down at us, and less desirable ammunition as well. |
| 967 |
'I say, that's a bit much,' said Alastair, as a large piece of excreta crashed through the leaves a few feet from his head. 'Now, cool your jets, Alastair,' said Paula. 'They're only doing what everyone wants to do to a director.' The monkeys above us, having found that the barrage of twigs and excreta had no effect, now burst into a gigantic chorus to persuade us that this was their territory. It was like standing in the deep end of an empty swimming-pool listening to the Red Army choir, each member singing a different song in Outer Mongolian. 'We've certainly made them lose their cool,' said Paula, raising her voice above the racket. 'We must certainly, you know ... howling, yes ... somewhere high ... trees,' said Alastair. 'There's a tower,' said Paula, doing an instant translation. 'They were telling me that there's a tall tower in the forest that they used to use for studying the forest canopy.' 'Just the thing,' said Alastair. 'About a hundred and fifty feet high,' said Paula enthusiastically. 'How delicious,' I said. 'I shall enjoy watching Alastair go up it.' 'Oh, honey, I forgot you don't like heights,' said Paula. 'Never mind, we'll send the crew up, and you and Lee can stay on the ground.' 'What a lovely producer you are,' I said. We moved on into the forest, stepping carefully over the columns of leaf-cutters. So numerous were they that you wondered why the whole forest was not defoliated. This leaf-gathering is really a form of gardening, for the ants carry the leaves to their vast underground homes (sometimes a quarter of an acre in extent) and here they rot the leaves down into a mulch on which they grow the fungi which is their food. In some way realizing that, if they defoliate all the trees in the immediate vicinity of the nest, they would soon starve, they cull the trees carefully and only gather a certain amount of leaves from each tree. On our second day we came to a clearing in the forest that had been created by the death of one of the giant trees. Growing on a slope, torrential rains had undermined its roots' tenuous hold on the topsoil and a gust of wind had then torn it free, as easily as a dentist wrenches a tooth from a jaw. It showed clearly why the tropical forest is so fragile. The topsoil is only a thin layer, so thin that the trees have to grow these giant buttress roots in order to keep upright. These huge trees, in fact, are feeding on themselves, for the moment their leaves fall they decay and become the humus on which the trees feed. So rapid is this process that only a thin topsoil is able to form. So the felling of the forest as is happening at a horrifying rate throughout the world exposes this thin layer, which only lasts a short time as agricultural or grazing land. Then it disappears and leaves erosion in its place. However, a natural tree-fall such as the one we found is a boon to the forest. As the giant crashes to earth, it splinters and fells smaller trees in its line of fall and tears a rent in the thick forest canopy. |
| 968 |
The sun floods in and the shrubs, creepers and baby trees, who have all been struggling in the gloom of the forest floor, shoot upwards in it. Seeds, which have been lying dormant in the humus for perhaps many years, waiting patiently for such an event, now sprout and start to rocket upwards towards the blue sky before the gap is closed by other plants. Thus the death of one of these forest mammoths is a signal for new life and growth around its huge carcass. On the slopes above the fallen tree we heard a series of squeaks, chatterings and rustlings in the trees. Leaving the path to investigate, we found a group of spider monkeys disporting themselves low down among the trees, feeding on some pink buds. They are aptly named, for with their long, furry, dark limbs and their long tails (so prehensile that they use them as skilfully and as casually as if they were another limb) they did look rather like some strange giant spiders spinning webs among the branches. Unlike the unfriendly reception we received from the howlers, the spider monkeys seemed captivated by us and swung on their wonderful tails closer and closer and lower and lower. One in particular seemed specially fascinated by Lee, for she had just started to eat an orange to quench her thirst. He swung himself down from branch to branch until he was within fifteen feet of her, peering at her with all the dedicated interest of an anthropologist watching the feeding habits of an aborigine. Lee broke off a small piece of orange and held it out to him and, to our astonishment, without hesitation he swung down, grabbed the fruit and stuffed it into his mouth. After that, they followed us through the trees gazing at us wistfully and only going their own way when it became apparent that there were no more oranges forthcoming. Alastair had arranged with one of the hunters attached to the station that he would comb the forest for suitable subjects for us to film, and the next day he came in with the first specimen, one of my favourite animals, the two-toed sloth. They really are enchanting creatures, their small heads, their shaggy bodies, their round, slightly protuberant golden eyes, and their mouths set in a perpetual, dreamy, benevolent smile. Slow and gentle, they will suffer you to hang them wherever you like, as though they were an old coat, and only after half an hour or so of deep meditation will they move perhaps six feet and that in slow motion. Sloths are really fantastic creatures. They are so beautifully adapted for their strange, topsy-turvy life in the tree-tops and, because they spend most of their lives upside-down, and because their diet is highly indigestible leaves, their internal organs are unlike those of any other mammal. Their whole metabolism is as slow as their movements, as slow as bureaucracy. They may go for a week without urinating, for example. The sloth's fur, of course, grows differently from that of other animals. In other mammals the hair grows from the backbone towards the ground, so the parting, so to speak, is on the backbone. |
| 969 |
One minute Alastair and Roger looked like two earnest gardeners turning over their asparagus-beds in preparation for a new crop and the next minute they were executing leaps and twists and pas de deux that would have been the envy of the Moscow Ballet. This was accompanied by wild, tremulous screams of agony, interspersed in equal parts with blasphemy and procreative oaths. 'Christ,' shrieked Alastair, waltzing around, now of necessity. 'Ouch, ouch; they're biting. Oh, the bloody things!' 'Ouch, ouch, merde alors!' screamed Roger, waltzing, too, and slapping his trousers. 'Zey is biting.' The chief problem was that Alastair was wearing shorts and an ancient pair of baseball boots, and this did not give his legs any protection, so the ants swarmed up him as though he were a tree, attempting to tear him to pieces. Roger, if anything, was in worse case, for he was wearing elegant, fairly tight-fitting trousers, up which the ants flowed with speed and precision. Those on the outside bit right through the thin cloth and into his flesh. Those on the inside concentrated on getting as high as possible before beginning their assault, so that Roger was being bitten in the most intimate and tender parts of his anatomy. The ants' jaws, powerful enough to chop up tough leaves, made short work of the thin trouser material and Roger's legs were patched with bloodstains as were Alastair's legs. We got them both away from the immediate scene of battle and de-anted them. Paula then practised first aid with antibiotics, but it was a considerable time before we got all of the ants off them. 'Did you see that?' panted Alastair, his spectacles misted over with emotion. 'The buggers were trying to defoliate me.' 'What about me?' said Roger. 'Me they go for the private parts. Me they try to make eunuch.' Later on, wrapped in so many layers of clothing that they looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee clad for battle, they succeeded in unearthing a small section of the mushroom-garden and filming it, to the ants' fury. One of the most fantastic pieces of natural history in the forest, one that was in its own way just as difficult to obtain on film as the ants' fungus-garden, was the extraordinary story of the giant fig tree and the minute fig wasp. This strange relationship only recently became unravelled, and it shows part of the enormous complexity of the tropical forest and how any plant or creature is only part of the whole intricate ecosystem, for without the great fig trees the fig wasp would perish and without the fig wasp the fig tree would never reproduce its kind, and its numbers would dwindle and it would eventually become extinct. All figs have a very curious flower structure, resembling, in fact, that of a fruit more than that of a flower. A host of tiny flowers He inside the fig, which is attached to the tree by a stalk at one end; at the other there is a minute opening almost obscured by scales. Figs have male and female flowers and the way the pollen is ferried from one to the other is as enchanting as it is awe-inspiring. |
| 970 |
We came to a small lake, round and smooth as a saucer of milk under its ice and snow covering. At the edges we could see snow-covered hummocks with black branches sticking out of them, like sticks of charcoal breaking the icy crust. These were beaver lodges and deep inside the animals slumbered, waiting for the spring to melt the five-foot piecrust of ice and snow and thus release the water for them to swim in. In the summer, when we returned to Canada, we revisited this lake at dawn. Then the change was spectacular. The water was greeny-gold and the whole lake was rimmed with thick beds of reeds, like a fringe on a Victorian tablecloth, and here and there the surface was embroidered with patches of white waterlilies. The sun had just lifted above the green, shimmering trees, pulling wisps of mist up from the lake's surface, delicate skeins drifting among the reeds and the waterlilies, like fragile wedding veils. We took a canoe, and travelled slowly out across the water towards the brown hump, like a giant, badly made Christmas pudding, that was the beavers' lodge. Halfway to it, a large brown head suddenly broke the surface of the greeny-gold water, and in a circular picture-frame of ripples a beaver contemplated us with a certain suspicion. We paused in our paddling to watch him as he swam slowly and sedately to and fro in front of the lodge, like a guardsman patrolling in front of a palace. When we attempted to manoeuvre the canoe closer to him, however, he panicked and lifted his paddle-shaped tail out of the water and brought it down on the surface with a blow that echoed across the lake like a gunshot and then dived. A few minutes later, he appeared in a different place and, seeing that we had not retreated, he smote the waters again before diving once more. The whole time we were out in the canoe, he kept reappearing, each time in a different place, and smiting the water to frighten us off. He was the only beaver we saw during our time in Canada and I cannot say that he behaved in anything like a welcoming manner. Back at the house, we found Alastair in high spirits, for he had come upon and filmed a large herd of white-tailed deer and a somewhat recalcitrant moose which proved, as far as he was concerned, that there were animals in this frozen wilderness. As we had only seen two crows in our four-hour drive from Winnipeg, I must say I hardly blamed Alastair for his belief that the frozen north was bereft of all life other than human. 'Tomorrow, we will go out and try to get some shots of you and Lee with the white-tailed deer and moose,' said Paula, producing. She had forgotten the days in Madagascar when she was merely the assistant producer, and went under the nickname of 'Ass. Prod.' 'Then in the evening,' she went on, 'we will go down to the lake where Alastair wants you to fish for owls.' 'I beg your parden?' I said. 'Fish for owls with a mouse,' explained Paula. 'Quiggers, how much have you had to drink?' I asked. 'No, no, honey, I'm serious. |
| 971 |
Alastair has read somewhere that scientists fish for owls with dead mice as bait, in order to catch them and ring them or something,' said Paula. 'Never heard such rubbish,' I said, 'and, anyway, why at the lake? I didn't know that Canadian owls were aquatic.' 'No, it's just that there's more space on the lake. In the woods you might get your fishing-line tangled up in the trees.' 'I don't know. It seems mad to me,' I said. 'Can't you control Alastair?' 'No,' said Paula simply. That night, Lee and I had our first experience of the Northern Lights. Because they were so commonplace, as far as Bob and Louise were concerned, they had not thought even to mention them. They had kindly installed us in their own bedroom, and when we got into the large, cosy double bed we found that directly above us was a huge skylight. I switched off the light and was immediately transfixed with astonishment. The large area of sky immediately above our bed appeared to be alive. Against the deep soft blackness of the sky were etched scrolls, curtains, scarves and tangled wisps of pale purple, green, blue, pink and frost-white fronds of what looked like cloud but which seemed to have a life of their own. With each passing second they shifted, separated, merged, broke up and re-formed in a different pattern and always they were floodlit from somewhere in the wings, as it were, and the colours changed with their movements. I was reminded irresistibly of a kaleidoscope that I had been given when I was a child, a triangular tube like a microscope. Beneath the lens you put patterned paper, particularly the garish, glittering paper from chocolates, and as you moved the tube about beneath the lens patterns shifted in a miraculous way. Now it seemed to me that the skylight was like the eyepiece of my old kaleidoscope and without any effort on my part was producing these fantastic effects in the sky, effects far more subtle and miraculous than any that chocolate-paper could have produced. We lay and watched this incredible display for an hour or so, until finally it dwindled and died, just leaving the velvety moleskin sky freckled with stars. It was a good thing it had died away, or we would have watched it until dawn and then been too tired to get up. It was one of the most eerie, delicate and beautiful phenomena I have ever seen. Early next morning, after a gargantuan breakfast, we set off into the forest, muffled up in so many clothes that we felt as awkward moving as moonwalkers without the aid of low gravity. The grey weather that had greeted us had vanished in the night and the sky was flax blue and the faint heat of the sun made great mushroom-tops of snow slide off branches and land with a soft sigh on the carpet of snow beneath the trees. One of the things we wanted to try to film was the extraordinary life that goes on beneath the smooth thick layers of snow. Not long ago it was discovered that the first layer of snow to fall when it is covered by other layers changes composition. |
| 972 |
We had just finished the quinzhee when the various birds arrived to see what we were up to. The first was a group of chickadees, fragile, tit-like birds, so delicate you wondered how they survived the rigours of the winter. They played about in the trees, hanging upside down and chirruping at us, but eventually got bored and flew off. The next to arrive were a group of evening grossbeaks, beautiful, heavy-beaked finches clad in startling gold and greenish-black plumage, flashing in and out of the dark pine branches like little golden lights. They seemed much more nervous than the chickadees and soon flew off into the sombre depths of the forest. Our next bird visitor by contrast was much bolder. It was a whiskyjack, a medium-sized jay, handsomely clad in pale greys and blacks. He suddenly appeared flying out of the forest and alighted on a tree nearby. He hopped from branch to branch, pausing now and then to watch us with his head on one side, reminding us irresistibly of Alastair. Whiskyjacks associate humans with food and therefore are the boldest of the forest birds. A search among all our pockets brought to light the remains of some biscuits and a handful of peanuts. These were held out to the jay, and to our delight he flew down quite confidently and perched on our fingers, stuffing as many morsels into his beak as possible. When he had a beakful he would fly off, and what he did then was extraordinary. Finding a suitable branch, he would stick the food to it using as adhesive his ultra-sticky saliva. In this way he gathered all the peanuts and biscuits we offered him and made perhaps seven or eight caches of the food in various trees larders for the future. He seemed a trifle annoyed when we eventually ran out of foodstuffs, but by that time we reckoned he had stashed away enough food to keep ten jays going for a week. It was getting towards evening when we got back, and Alastair was anxious to film the owl-fishing sequence. Bob had provided a fly-fishing rod and as bait two stuffed mice. Solemnly, we all trooped down to the frozen lake and made our way out on to the ice. Here Bob gave me a swift lesson in casting, since I had never used a fly-rod before. He showed me the wrist action required several times, making the mouse land on the ice some thirty feet away as lightly as a feather. It seemed perfectly simple to me, and I could not see why fly-fishermen made so much fuss over casting. I seized the rod with confidence, pointed the tip skywards and made what I considered to be a perfect cast. Unfortunately, for some reason, the wretched line, instead of unfurling and gently lowering the mouse on to the ice, behaved like a whip, with the result that the mouse snapped in two and half of its body went soaring away across the pond, leaving me with only the head and forelegs still attached to the line. 'Honey,' said Paula, when she had stopped laughing, 'you know the budget can't afford endless mice.' 'Lucky we've got a spare,' said Alastair. |
| 973 |
Don't be misled by the name. The Rocky Mountain goat is the king of goats; with his soft white coat, softer even than cashmere, and his black hoofs, horns, muzzle and eyes, he is a dandy of a beast. Unlike the other mountain-dwelling ungulates, he is not hurried or panicky in his movements, but sedate and slow and surefooted. So surefooted, in fact, that one was seen to attempt a leap from one narrow shelf on a high cliff to another, which proved to be just too far away. Instead of crashing into the gulf as any other animal would have done, the goat, realizing its mistake, changed its attitude in mid-air, hit the rock-face with all four feet, did a backward somersault and landed safely on the shelf it had just vacated. They have few enemies, and those that they have they seem well able to deal with. One Rocky Mountain goat, beset by hunting dogs, killed two with its horns, pushed another over the cliff to its death, and when the rest of the pack became faint-hearted and retreated the goat sauntered off as if nothing untoward had happened. On another occasion, one was found dead, killed by a grizzly bear. However, near the goat was found the corpse of the grizzly, stabbed twice neatly through the ribs close to the heart. He had obviously just had the stamina to kill the goat before dying of the mortal wounds inflicted on him by the dagger-like horns. With our binoculars, we watched them for some time as they grazed across the brilliant green grass but we saw no exciting incident involving a grizzly. They grazed peacefully, occasionally pausing to stare around them, their long, earnest, pale faces giving them an air of sobriety and respectability, like a flock of vicars in white fur coats. One of the things we were anxious to film was the summer activities of the pikas, strange small rodents that live high up in the alpine meadows. These little animals do not hibernate during the winter months as so many of the mountain creatures do like the fat marmots, for example. Instead they have become farmers, and during the summer months they feverishly collect grass and leaves which they pile into haystacks that dry in the sun. When one side is sufficiently dry, the haystack is carefully turned by the pika, so that all the collected food gets its share of sunshine. These haystacks are put in sheltered places and during the winter months form the larders of the pikas, without which they would starve to death when the valleys are snowbound. At the first sign of rain, the haystack is moved under cover and put out in the sun again when the storm is over. According to Geoff Holroyd, the young man who was acting as our guide to the region, the best place to watch pikas at their farming activities was in an alpine meadow some twenty miles away from the hotel in which we were staying. So early in the morning we set off. When we arrived at the base of the mountain range, we left the car and started up the two-mile, almost vertical climb through the alpine larch and pine woods. |
| 974 |
It was a marvellous, magical feeling to be in a place where the animals look upon you as being benign and allow you to share, however briefly, a part of their lives. Ahead of us, we could see the valley was divided into two a higher and a lower area, separated by a steep slope of tumbled boulders. Beyond lay a barren hillside of jagged rocks, arranged in piles by past avalanches. These huge boulders were embossed with fossil seashells and coral an indication that in times past these rocks had formed the bed of an ancient sea that had, by a cataclysmic movement of the earth, been lifted up to this high and remote valley. It was here, under a huge tottering fortress of fossil-decorated rocks, that we saw our first pika. It must have been sitting among the rocks and observing us for some time, for its ash-grey fur made it blend in with its surroundings so beautifully that it was quite invisible until it moved. About the size of a guinea-pig, it had a very rabbit-like face, but its eyes were larger and darker and its ears were small and shaped like half a coin. It had no discernible tail and its fur was glossy like satin. It stared at us, uttered a shrill, piping cry of disquiet, leapt down among the rocks and vanished. Investigating, we soon found several haystacks about two feet in diameter and about twelve inches high. Most of them had fresh grass or leaves on top, so it was obvious that the pikas were still in the process of harvesting. Curiously enough, in this lower valley the pikas were very nervous, only showing themselves in flashes when they scuttled from crevice to crevice. When we climbed to the upper valley, however, we found a most amenable and enchanting pika who was far too busy with his farming to take any notice of our presence. Here the stream had carved itself out a bed in the thick, spongy green turf starred with flowers, and it twisted and wriggled its way across the meadow like a plait of grass. In the middle of the turfs, smooth as a billiard-table, a fat little pika was sitting, busily tearing out mouthfuls of grass, which he kept in his mouth. Eventually, when his jaws could hold no more, he sprinted off to his house and haystacks among the rocks, looking incongruously as though he was wearing a large green walrus moustache. We followed him into the scree and found his home was under a gigantic rock the size of a small car, and nearby were two completed haystacks, and a third in the process of construction. He was so busy about his husbandry that I sat on a rock within three feet of his haystacks and he did not even pause in his serious work. As soon as he had arranged the mouthful of grass to his satisfaction with his paws, he was off through the rocks speedily, bouncing like a rubber ball, until he reached the meadow. Here he collected another mouthful of grass and made his way back to where I sat. Within a couple of feet of me he paused, peered at me with dark eyes over his monstrous green moustache, and then unconcernedly went to his haystack and added his burden to it, patting it carefully into place. |
| 975 |
With a moan of anguish, he tore it from the bed and enshrined it once more in the cupboard. He was only just in time, for at that moment Lee and I entered the room accompanied by Captain Prowse. The Captain's eagle eye swept the room and came to rest on the bed. An expression of disbelief crossed his face. 'Why, where's the bedspread?' he enquired. A rhetorical question, but one that Jonathan thought he should respond to. 'Bedspread?' he croaked. 'Yes,' said Captain Prowse tersely, 'there was a bedspread on the bed. I put it there myself. Someone, for some strange reason, had put it in the cupboard. I wonder where it has gone?' 'It's in the cupboard,' said Jonathan in a low voice. 'In the cupboard?' said the Captain. 'Again?' 'Yes,' said Jonathan. 'How do you know?' asked the Captain. 'I put it there,' said Jonathan, with the demeanour of one confessing to infanticide. 'You put it there?' asked the Captain. 'Yes,' said Jonathan miserably. 'Did you put it there the first time?' As a military man, he quite rightly liked to be apprised of all the facts. 'Yes,' said Jonathan. 'Why?' asked the Captain, with ominous calm. There was a long silence while we all looked at Jonathan, who managed to achieve a rich blush that any self-respecting heliotrope would have been proud to wear. 'Because I thought they wouldn't like it,' he said, thus passing the buck to my poor innocent wife and myself. However, the Captain, with experience of slovenly recruits absent without leave and with a fund of plausible stories up their sleeves, was not to be distracted with this prevarication. 'Surely,' he said icily, 'if Mr and Mrs Durrell were in any way dissatisfied with their counterpane or bedspread, it was for them to inform me and not your place to secrete it in the cupboard. However, I have no doubt that Mr and Mrs Durrell will make up their own minds as to the suitability of the bedspread and communicate their displeasure or otherwise to me, without the intervention of a third party.' With that, he inclined his head and left the room not a moment too soon, since Lee and I fell upon the bedspreadless bed in paroxysms of mirth. It was mid-autumn, and the forest, when we started work in the morning, was looking magnificent. Parts of it were still shimmering green-gold, but in other parts the leaves were dying and the great trees stood barley-sugar gold, tawny as sherry or fox red in the fragile early-morning sunlight, with thin wisps of mist moving like kite tails through their branches. The air was cold enough to see one's breath, and everything had a delicate sheen of dew on it. Tiny streams glinted and whispered surreptitiously between the high banks of earth, as black and fragrant as Christmas cake, as they wended their way twisting and turning through the cathedral naves of the giant oaks and beech-trees. Now, with the dampness in the air and the rich, moist layer of dead leaves, this was the time of the fungi and they were everywhere in profusion. Their fantastic shapes were like a Martian world. |
| 976 |
We grouped this largesse in the foyer of the hotel and Jonathan went in search of Captain Prowse. When they returned, he showed the Captain the four huge plastic bags, their shape distorted by their contents, looking like malevolent slug-shaped things from outer space. 'I want your help with these,' said Jonathan simply. The Captain examined the bags with care. 'With these?' he enquired at length. 'You want my help?' 'Yes,' said Jonathan. 'What are they?' enquired the Captain. 'Leaves,' said Jonathan. 'Leaves? What sort of leaves?' asked the Captain. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. 'Autumn leaves,' said Jonathan triumphantly. 'We got them in the forest.' Captain Prowse looked shattered. Nothing in his previous career had prepared him for a guest suddenly producing four plastic bags full of autumn leaves and demanding his help. 'I see,' he said, moistening his lips; 'And what do you intend to do with them?' 'Dry them,' said Jonathan, puzzled that the Captain could not have worked out this logical progression for himself. 'Dry them?' asked the Captain. 'Dry them?' 'Yes, they're wet,' Jonathan explained. 'But why should you want to dry them?' asked the Captain, fascinated in spite of himself. 'Because they won't fall if they're wet,' said Jonathan, impatient at the Captain's obtuseness. 'But they have already fallen,' the Captain pointed out. 'I know,' said Jonathan, exasperated. 'That is how they got wet and that is why we have to dry them.' Mercifully, at that moment Paula, who had been off making one of her frequent telephone calls, reappeared. She took in the situation in one sweeping glance. 'Captain Prowse, I think perhaps I ought to explain and I am sure you can help us if anyone can,' she said, smiling and turning on the 5,000 candlepower of her charm. 'I would be glad of some clarification,' said the Captain. Simply and concisely, Paula explained the whole drama of the falling leaves. Initially, Captain Prowse had kindly put at our disposal a room (in addition to our bedrooms) in which we could assemble for script conferences, and which would allow us to spread out and maintain the equipment. It was a strange room on the first floor, rather like a Victorian conservatory. Now Paula asked simply if we might also dry half the New Forest in it. It says much for the Captain's good-humour and his firm grasp of being a good hotelier that he did not immediately ask us to leave, Instead, he gave us a huge pile of back copies of The Times on which to spread our largesse of leaves and a large and formidable electric fire, circa 1935, with which to dry them. Soon the fire was throwing out heat like a blast furnace and the leaves were spread out on The Times occupying half the room, while Jonathan crooned over them, stirring them lovingly with his fingers. We all foregathered to drink whisky and watch him. 'It looks like a village-hall setting for a panto,' said Chris. 'Babes in the Wood, perhaps.' 'No,' I said judiciously, 'Harris is too old for a babe. |
| 977 |
It's more like The Tempest. There's old Caliban, groping about in his spiritual home.' 'You may laugh,' interrupted Jonathan coldly, continuing to stir his leaves with loving fingers, 'but you wait until we have real autumn leaves raining down from the trees.' Two days later, when the leaves were dry, we carried them reverently out into the forest. With them we solemnly transported a ladder and, under Jonathan's direction, propped it against the trunk of a huge oak tree. Brian, who was not doing any sound-recording in this sequence, was detailed to go up the ladder carrying a plastic bag full of leaves, crawl out along the branches and start scattering leaves as though he were Mother Nature. This he dutifully did. 'Throw them more naturally,' Jonathan kept calling. 'How can you throw them naturally out of a plastic bag?' asked Brian aggrievedly from his precarious perch. 'Throw them delicately,' said Jonathan, 'not in great wodges like that.' 'I must say, you chaps go to an awful lot of trouble,' said Simon. 'No expense spared,' I said. 'Erich von Stroheim, when he was filming, once had 35,000 almond blossoms fixed to the trees because he was shooting in winter and the trees were bare.' 'Good God, wasn't that expensive?' asked Simon. 'Yes,' I said, 'very. Harris is related to him, of course, hence this leaves business.' 'Really?' said Simon, interested. 'Yes, his real name is Harris von Stroheim, but he changed it.' 'So that is why he is so keen on the leaves?' asked Simon. 'Yes, well, with our budget you can't run to almond blossom,' I said. As I have said, Jonathan felt that the New Forest was not really co-operating. It deliberately grew its fungi in shady comers with not enough light for photography. It refused to shed its leaves, it got rained on, it got covered in fog, it was recalcitrant to a degree. Then came the final straw, the business of the galls. Each tree in a forest has, of course, an ecosystem of its own. The tree itself, while controlling heat and moisture and so climate, provides an important world for a host of creatures who live on, in or around it or merely visit it for reasons of business, like nesting. It has been estimated that a single oak tree can support well over three hundred species (and goodness knows how many individuals of each species), ranging from birds to moths, from caterpillars to spiders. Among the creatures to which the oak tree is a world in itself are the many species of gall. Galls are some of the most bizarre and decorative things you can find in a forest, and Jonathan had been much struck by what I had written about them in The Amateur Naturalist. I had said: Each gall forms a home for a developing larva. In some the adult insect hatches out in the summer, in others the galls turns brown and the larva hibernates through the winter inside it. But the story of the galls does not end there, because within each gall you will almost certainly find other creatures which are either acting as parasites on the original owner-builder of the gall or who have just taken up residence as unpaying guests. |
| 978 |
Nothing happened. When it became patently obvious that nothing was going to hatch, Jonathan cut it in half with a penknife. Inside was one very small, extremely dead larva of a gall wasp. Filming nature is not easy, especially when you only have a limited time to do it in. The next thing that we had a slight contretemps with were badgers, those magnificent creatures of ancient lineage who have waddled through the English woodland since the days when humans were dressed in woad. It is a swaggering, beguiling, beautifully designed creature of great intelligence and charm which does an enormous amount of good as one of the countryside's major predators, striking terror into the heart of everything from a woodlouse to a baby rabbit, a pheasant chick to a frog, taking in worms, snails, beetles, snakes and hedgehogs on the way. The word 'omnivorous' means 'eating everything', and the badger lives up to this title admirably. Everything is grist to his mill. In spite of this indiscriminately carnivorous approach to life, much of the badger's food consists of roots, mushrooms, berries and seeds. Altogether, it is a handsome and useful addition to the countryside and if it does occasionally wreak havoc in a cornfield or a hop field, or set a henhouse on end, one must overlook these lapses from good manners for the amount of good these creatures contribute. Badger homes, or setts, are enormous complex structures of endless tunnels and chambers. As the sett (like the English country home) is handed down from generation to generation and as each generation enlarges and improves it, the ramifications of an old sett are considerable. It consists of bedrooms, recesses and, where young are being reared, they even excavate special lavatory areas. Badgers mate for life and, being eminently civilized beasts, remain on good terms with all the neighbouring badger couples. Just recently, the badger, who has been shambling through the green twilight of the English woodland for a millennium, has been beset by two separate groups of so-called civilized man. They were accused of carrying bovine TB (which they probably do) by that group of veterinary surgeons employed by the Ministry of Agriculture. Their answer to the problem was 'Kill the Badgers' and so there was a great flurry of badger-gassing under the most unpleasant conditions. It has always seemed to me that veterinary surgeons employed by the Ministry have only one answer to any problem, which is 'destroy it' rather than 'solve it'. Fortunately, this simplistic approach was stopped by public outcry, and the vandalizing of the ancestral homes of the badgers and the destruction of this creature was halted. You would have thought that an official campaign of gassing (macabrely Teutonic in its conception) would have been quite sufficient for the poor badger, but no. Once officialdom had been worsted, the animal was threatened on another front. Badger-baiting with terriers became the lead sport among those members of the human race whose frontal lobes are still Neanderthal. |
| 979 |
It was not an auspicious start. However, at Freshfield Halt, when the Black Knight, in a cloud of steam, had chuffed away uttering farewell whistles of a piercing clarity, the scents and sounds of the May countryside were wafted to us in the spring sunshine. Everywhere there were larks embroidering the blue sky with their song. Cuckoos called loudly and persistently in the fields and the scent of a hundred spring flowers filled the air. We manoeuvred Daisy, as we had christened our tandem, down the wooden ramp on to the cinder track and then down a narrow slippery path which led finally to a narrow lane with high banks covered with a glittering army of kingcups yellow as saffron, and the bank topped with hedges of hawthorn, their blossom like cumulus clouds. So, mounting Daisy and with the sun hot on our backs and the birdsong ringing in our ears, we set off in search of ancient England. The piece of countryside which Jonathan had chosen could not have been more perfect or, at that time of year, more beautiful. The tall banks and hedges were glowing with a multicoloured embroidery of flowers, the canary yellow of buttercups, red of campion, white stars of stitchwort, the mist of bluebells and the lavender of violets, and the curious flat flower clusters of the cow parsley looking like pale smoke. The meadows between the hedges were huge and lush, sprinkled with flowers and stands of impressive oak and beech trees casting pools of shade with their newly emerging leaves. Where there were cottages or larger houses, these were discreetly hidden in belts and groves of trees, so that they were not obtrusive and one got the impression that the countryside was virtually uninhabited. At last we came to the sunken green lane with its impressive hedgerow shielding it, at one side a thick, almost impenetrable wall of hawthorn interwoven with the odd oak, its roots covered with a web of ivy. Here we met up with Dave Streeter, who was to be our hedgerow guide, and an excellent one he proved to be. Slim and dark, he had the bright sprightliness of a bird, with his dark eyes and inquisitive, beak-like nose. He was as proud of the hedgerows as though he had planted them himself and knew every bird, insect and plant that inhabited them. With his aid, we unravelled the secrets of this ancient living wall. Most hedgerows count their birthdays in centuries but naturalists have evolved a fairly simple method of working out the approximate age of a hedgerow. You measure out and mark thirty paces along it and then retrace your steps and count the number of woody plants growing along its length. Each one of these is the equivalent of a century. This may sound improbable, but it is based on some sound detective work by naturalists. When the hedge is first laid down, the farmer uses one or maybe two kinds of plant. Over the years, other plant species spring up, brought in the form of seeds in the droppings of birds and by squirrels and mice who bury nuts and seeds and then forget where they hid them. |
| 980 |
This wonderful procreant cradle, an elegant instance of the efforts of instinct, was found in a wheat-field suspended in the head of a thistle. The harvest mouse has adapted itself to an arboreal life in the same way as many of the New World primates have done. It has agile feet for gripping the grass stalks it lives amongst and has developed a prehensile tail of astonishing power by which it can actually hang from a grass stalk while building its nest. These round nests, roughly the size of a tennis ball, are woven for the most part out of living grass blades, occasionally being reinforced with chewed-off leaves. These nurseries for this is where the female rears her young have two entrances and are lined with finely chewed grass blades to form a soft bed for the young. The babies when they are born weigh about a gram or so; as Gilbert White observed, two would be the weight of a copper halfpenny. A new nest is built for each litter, and in a good year the harvest mouse is capable of giving birth to six fitters of five or six young per fitter. This sounds like gross overpopulation as practised by the human race. However, it must be pointed out that, when there is a glut of harvest mice, the creatures that prey on them, such as foxes, weasels, stoats, owls and so on, have a field day and as a rule increase their own families enormously. When the harvest mice have a bad year and don't overpopulate, the predators have a hard time and so their families are regulated to the mouse supply. It is unfortunate that mankind now only has one predator himself. But his overpopulation is so great that the predation of his own species does not keep the population in balance in the same efficient way that nature does it. Another occupant of the hedgerows is the hedgehog. These have always been favourite animals of mine ever since, during my childhood in Greece, I hand-reared a fitter of four, brought to me by a peasant who had dug them up in their leafy bed at the edge of his field. Newly born hedgehogs are creamy-white in colour and their spines are quite soft, like india-rubber. As my babies grew, they gradually changed colour to brown and their spines became hard and sharp. They were, I found, remarkably intelligent little animals, and I even managed to train mine to stand on their hind legs and beg for scraps of food. I used to take them for long walks in the countryside and they would trot along at my heels in an obedient line. They were incredibly quick, and when I turned over logs or stones in search of specimens for my collection I had to be on the lookout, for they would rush in and scrunch up my coveted insects if I did not watch them. One day, they were foraging around some old vine stumps and I, finding the open vineyard hot, made my way to the cool shade of the olive groves about a hundred yards away and sat down. I could see my hedgehogs but they could not see me. It was some little time before they realized that I had disappeared and they were immediately filled with alarm and consternation. |
| 981 |
They ran round and round in circles, squeaking plaintively to each other; then one, nose to the ground like a dog, found my scent and set off at a brisk trot, leading the others. That it was undoubtedly my scent they were following became apparent, for I had meandered to and fro to reach my present position and they followed the route I had taken slavishly. There was much excited noise when they discovered me and they clambered squeaking and snorting into my lap. I remember once, when we lived in Hampshire, we had a huge and ancient cooking-apple tree in the garden. One year it had a bumper crop of fruit, more than my mother could utilize in spite of making tons of chutney and jams, so a lot of fruit fell to the ground and we let it rot and manure the earth beneath the tree. One bright moonlight night, I was woken by screams and squeals and grunts and, thinking it was a pair of courting cats, I leant out of the window to give them a piece of my mind and saw to my astonishment that it was a pair of hedgehogs. Wondering what on earth they were doing, I donned my slippers and went down into the moonlit garden. I discovered that they had been feasting on the semi-rotten apples and the fermenting fruit had acted like cider, so now both hedgehogs were appallingly inebriated. They staggered round and round the tree bumping into things, hiccuping, hurling abuse at each other and generally behaving in the most reprehensible manner. For their own good, I had to lock them up in our garage overnight and the next morning it was a very dejected and sorry-looking pair of insectivores I released into the woods at the back of our house. Another creature that we were lucky enough to film was the weasel, the smallest and most delightful of the British predators. Some twenty-eight centimetres in length, including their tails, they are beautiful, swift and slender little creatures how swift we soon discovered when we started to film. In order to get the close-up shots of our weasel hunting, we built a very lifelike set to represent a section of the hedgerow. A film is made at twenty-four frames a second, that is to say that the camera takes twenty-four photographs each second. We found our weasel was moving so fast that he could actually cross the set in between the photographs an absolutely extraordinary feat of agility. I remember when I worked as a student keeper at Whipsnade I used to cycle on my day off across to Tring Museum to take lessons in taxidermy. On the way there was an ancient caravan and in it lived an old gypsy whom I frequently used to visit, since he kept innumerable pets and was always adding to them. My attention was drawn to this old man whom everyone called Jethro when I was cycling past his caravan and was suddenly riveted by the sight of no less than five weasels gambolling about the caravan wheels. I dismounted and watched them playing Catch as Catch Can, their bodies so sinewy they were like furry snakes. Old Jethro appeared out of the woods, a gun under his arm, carrying two dead rabbits. |
| 982 |
He gave a musical whistle and the weasels stopped their game and rippled across the grass to his feet, standing on their hind legs and uttering little yarring cries. He dropped the rabbits and the weasels, snarling and fighting, dragged the corpses under the caravan and started to feed. How I coveted those sinewy, delicious creatures but, alas, old Jethro would not sell them, even though I offered him my week's salary of 3 pounds. 'No, I won't part, boy,' he said, watching the weasels affectionately with his bright black eyes. 'Not with the trouble I had a-rearing of them. No, I wouldn't part, not for all the tea in China, but I tell you what, I'll take 'ee out a-hunting with them. Braw little hunters they be an' all.' So one summer's night, when the moon was as full and white and round as a magnolia blossom, I cycled over to old Jethro's caravan. After a pint of beer (home brewed) and a delicious plate of stew, we set off, the weasels rippling ahead of us along the hedgerows, bathed in moonlight as bright as day. The weasels had evolved their own particular hunting method, old Jethro explained. One or sometimes two of them would enter the rabbit's burrow and the others would wait outside. Presently, panicked by the two weasels underground, the rabbit would bolt out of its burrow and straight into the group of weasels outside. They would converge on it like lightning and one of the three would dispatch it with the characteristic weasel bite at the back of the skull, the lower teeth driving upwards and the upper canines sliding downwards into the brain. Death was instantaneous. It was wonderful to watch the weasels dance snakelike in the moonlight, eyes occasionally gleaming, working as a team, lithe and silent. Whether they hunt like this in the wild is a moot point, but certainly these hand-reared ones had evolved a co-operative hunting method which was as efficient as it was deadly and within two hours old Jethro's poacher bag contained the bodies of seven fat rabbits. Some would be used to feed the weasels and his other meat-eating pets (he had owls and hawks, a badger and a stoat, among others) and the rest he would eat or take to the nearest village and sell. Old Jethro used the hedgerows around his caravan as medieval man used them to provide himself with food in the shape of rabbits or partridges, various herbs and roots to flavour the food, and other herbs which he made up into ointments and salves which he used to peddle in the local market towns; and I knew several people who would not go near a doctor but took all their ailments to him. I had a girlfriend who used to suffer acutely with an unsightly rash which would break out periodically on her forehead and in the palm of her left hand and irritate exceedingly. In spite of her protestations and disbelief, I took her to old Jethro and forced her to use the ointment he gave her. Three applications and the rash vanished, never to reappear. In one of the final scenes of the programme, Jonathan wanted to show an ancient meadow of the sort that hedgerows have guarded for centuries. |
| 983 |
When he led us to the meadow of his choice we were delighted. It was vast, and guarded on three sides by tall hedgerows and on the fourth side by a dark piece of woodland, glittering with spring leaves. It sloped gently into the sun, with here and there a few oaks that, from their girth, must have been several centuries old, casting pools of bluish shadow. But the real breathtaking thing about the meadow was its colour. The long, lush grass was bejewelled with buttercups of such flamboyant richness it looked as though someone had, from some vast celestial vat, poured molten gold between the wood and the hedgerows. We had to walk to the centre of this field of the cloth of gold to have our picnic and it seemed sacrilege to wade calf-deep through the buttercups, leaving a crushed path behind us across that impeccably unsullied sheet of gold and green. In the final scenes of the programme, in order to show the complex web of hedgerows spreading across the countryside, Jonathan had decided to send us up in a hot-air balloon. Although I had often wanted to try this splendid, archaic form of transport, I was a trifle nervous because of my vertigo. However, this was an opportunity too good to be missed, so I agreed to try to curb my absurd complaint and take to the air. The whole thing had to be planned like a military operation. We were to take two flights; the first day we would be accompanied by Chris and the camera so that he could get all the close-ups of us in the basket, while the others followed us by car and filmed us on the ground. On the second day, Chris and the camera were to follow our flight in a helicopter and a helicopter to be piloted by Captain John Crewdson, no less, who had done all the complex and risky filming for the James Bond films. The pilot of our balloon was Jeff Westley, a skilled balloonist who could virtually land his craft on a sixpence. Ideally, Jonathan would have liked to have had the balloon ascending majestically out of the centre of the buttercup field, but this would have created too much havoc on the flowers and the grass, so we had to choose a much more plebeian and well-grazed pasture for our first ascent. We arrived at the meadow early in the morning to find our balloon awaiting us. It was a gorgeous monster far bigger than I had expected gaily striped in red, yellow and blue. Resting on the grass beneath it was the basket, rather like a giant-sized old-fashioned laundry-basket, which contained the essential canisters of butane gas which made flight possible. We were introduced to Jeff, a stocky, fair-haired man with twinkling blue eyes and a massive air of confidence. He informed us that the weather forecasts were excellent and he looked forward to giving us a splendid flight. In order to get the necessary close-ups of us in the basket, Chris was to travel with us with one camera, but to cover wide-angle shots of the basket the camera had to be some distance away. We solved this problem by mounting a remote-controlled camera on a long aluminium beam, which could be operated from within the basket. |
| 984 |
Jonathan was anxious to make it appear as though Lee and I were 'driving' the balloon ourselves, so we took with us a large blanket and every time we were shooting Jonathan explained to Jeff he would have to crouch down in the bottom of the basket and we would cover him with the blanket. He agreed to be subjected to this indignity with great good-humour. So, with these last-minute instructions from Jonathan, we scrambled into the basket and prepared for our first ever balloon ascent. The anchor ropes were cast off and the basket shifted slightly, then Jeff pulled the cord and a giant tongue of blue flame above our heads roared into the interior of the balloon with a great blast. It was like Unleashing a dragon. Aided by these deafening blasts, the basket rose smoothly as a lift. We glided up twenty feet, thirty feet and then slid up into the sky above the trees. The sensation was miraculous. When the flame was not roaring the silence was complete, and a thousand feet below you as you wind-drifted smoothly through the sky you could hear people talking. You could hear the clatter of a train, a dog barking, or cattle lowing. I can only compare it to the sensation you get snorkelling on a tropical reef, where you can lie face downwards in the buoyant waters and let the tiny eddies of water drift you over the coral-gardens. Far below us, the patchwork quilt of fields, guarded by their hedgerows, stretched as far as you could see, with here and there a dark reef of woodland and here and there a toy village. Our shadow, like a great blue mushroom, glided over the fields and hedgerows below us, overexciting herds of cattle and making horses behave as if they were in a rodeo. Although you are at the mercy of the wind, there is a lot you can do to help steer the balloon, as Jeff showed us. At one point, the wind velocity dropped and he took the balloon down to tree-top height. We drifted along silently and gently as mist, and at one point the bottom of the basket actually rustled its way through the topmost branches of a gigantic oak tree. We saw a hare and any number of rabbits who found the presence of our fat, highly coloured vehicle alarming. We saw a pair of roe deer, standing prick-eared and tense in a woodland glade, and we were treated with vociferous rage when we slid over a rookery, so indignant were they at this untoward invasion of their airspace. It was fascinating to drift some fifty feet up over the villages and isolated farms and cottages, for you could see everyone's back garden, beautifully tended and with a riot of flowers. The roar of our balloon would set all the dogs barking hysterically and people would run out of their houses to wave to us. As soon as they realized we could hear them quite clearly and reply, they would ask us where we were going, and were vastly amused when we said we did not know. We drifted over a village school, and all the children and their teacher tumbled out into the school yard to watch our progress. Inevitably, the children shouted up to us and asked where we were going. |
| 985 |
Our first day in the Sonoran Desert was a stunning experience. We had arrived at night and so could form no clear picture of what the desert was like, but at dawn the following morning we piled into the cars and drove out to visit the spots that Alastair had chosen as film-sites. To begin with, the sky was magnificent, a pale rose pink going to blood red where the sun was rising and flecked with lavender and yellow clouds. Against this, an army of giant Saguaro cactus stood silhouetted, like weird, spiky candelabra, some wearing crowns of ivory-white flowers with yellow centres. The Saguaro is probably the most spectacular cactus in the world, for it can grow to a height of fifty feet and they cluster together in forests that stretch for many miles. The cactus is mature when it is only seven or eight feet high, but at this point it is already fifty years old. From a distance, they look pleated, as though they were constructed from thick green corduroy. Along each of the pleats are bunches of stiff black spines some two inches long and as sharp as hypodermic needles. The whole growth process of this prickly giant is a slow one. It starts as a tiny seed and the first few years are precarious, for it has to contend with extremes of temperature from blazing heat to frost, from drought to floods. At this stage, it may be trodden on and killed by deer or partially eaten and stunted by rabbits or pack rats. If it can survive these hazards, then it grows slowly but surely. By the time it is seventy-five to a hundred years old, it is between twelve and twenty feet in height and then starts to develop its arms and its curious candelabra shape. The number and position of these arms vary so that no two Saguaro are alike. Some may have two arms, some twenty or as many as fifty. It is, like all cacti, a succulent, and like a huge prickly barrel it can store a vast quantity of water in its stem and arms. Its skin is thick and waxy, which of course makes it the perfect container for water. Its spines are not only a protection against the attack of animals such as deer or big-horn sheep, but also grow so thickly that they cast quite an appreciable amount of shadow on its trunk and arms, thus helping to keep the cactus cool in the intense heat. When a Saguaro dies, the flesh rots away and leaves a skeleton behind, a woody, basket-like structure that in life helped to support the barrel-like trunk and massive limbs. Inside these skeletons you can find odd wooden structures some ten to twelve inches or more in length that look like misshapen elongated Dutch clogs. These are in fact the remains of birds' nests. Because of its giant size, the interior of the cactus maintains a temperature several degrees cooler than the outside air and this makes it ideal for birds to nest in. It is the Gila woodpecker that, because it builds several nests each season, makes the Saguaro into a sort of prickly block of flats. Once the woodpecker has dug out a hole, the cactus (in self-defence) forms a hard, woody callus over the wound. |
| 986 |
These are the strange, misshapen 'clogs' that you find when the cactus dies. Once the woodpecker vacates its nest, other birds like owls, flycatchers and purple martins take them over, so it is possible to have three or four different species living in one of these cacti blocks of flats. After we had driven some miles into the desert, we stopped and walked through the giant cactus forest. The Saguaro was the most prominent because of its size and impressive girth, but there were many other fantastic species as well. There were the Teddy Bear Chollas, for example, a medium-size cactus with many rather blunt limbs, so thickly covered with pale fawn-coloured spines that from a distance it looked like fur, and so the arms of the Cholla did look remarkably like the arms of a traditional teddy bear. Then there is the strange Boojum, with tall stems and long drooping arms, the whole thing covered with thorn-like black twigs so it looked as though each Boojum were in urgent need of a shave. These twigs bear leaves only when the Boojum has sufficient moisture to nourish them. These fantastic plants have been described as looking like upside-down carrots, though they are green not red. When you see some of them, sixty feet high with their drooping unshaven branches, it is really one of the oddest-looking plants of the desert. We were lucky that when we were there all the cacti were in flower, so that the desert was a riot of colour. There were flowers as green as jade, as yellow as daffodils, purple as heather, pink as cyclamen, tangerine orange and scarlet. If you had suddenly been dropped in the desert with this spiky profusion of strange shapes and the waxy, brilliant blooms and you had been informed you were on Mars, you would have unhesitatingly believed it. Although the Sonora was hot, it was so dry that you did not really feel it. In fact, you had to be careful working out in the cactus forest, for you could get badly sunburnt without realizing it. An additional hazard of course was the cacti themselves, for they surrounded you on all sides with, as it were, their swords at the ready. Brush against a Teddy Bear Cholla, for example, and you soon found out how deceptive its furry, cuddly look was and you had to spend a tedious hour or so plucking spines out of your shirt or trousers. Alastair, who always insisted on running everywhere and who was constantly tripping over his own feet, was in mortal peril most of the time we were in the Sonora. On one occasion, running backwards to get the right angle for a shot he wanted, he ran straight into an extremely prickly and unyielding Saguaro that had been growing in that spot for a hundred years or so and could see no reason why it should move for a film director. Alastair's hoot of agony could, with a following wind, have surely been heard in London. We were very lucky to have the enthusiastic co-operation of the Sonora Desert Museum, a unique and wonderful institution that has living creatures for exhibition rather than stuffed ones. |
| 987 |
This of course enabled us to borrow most of our stars, and the majority of them were tame. But tameness can have its disadvantages, as we found out. We wanted to show the time-honoured method of catching lizards (which I have used with success all over the world) by the simple means of having a noose in a piece of fishing-line attached to a stick. You approach your lizard circumspectly, slide the noose gently over its head a quick jerk and he is then yours. In order to demonstrate this technique, we borrowed one of the Desert Museum's oldest inhabitants, a large and venerable chuckwalla. These lizards, which are about two feet long, have fat, gingery-brown bodies, broad heads with a very Churchillian expression (only lacking the cigar) and extremely solid tails. The one we borrowed was called Joe and he gazed at us, plainly hostile, as though he had just finished making a speech of earth-shattering importance. We explained to him carefully what his part consisted of; we said that all he had to do was drape himself over a rock in the sand, wait for Lee to creep up behind him and slide the noose round his fat neck and, when he felt it tighten, he was to kick and struggle like a mad thing, as if he was a demented wild chuckwalla and not one that had been enjoying a privileged life for the last twenty-five years in the Sonora Desert Museum. From his highly intelligent expression we felt sure that he had understood his instructions and, since it was not a speaking part, he would be able to carry them out with aplomb. Alastair was convinced that here we had a star in the making and even went so far as to pat Joe on the head and murmur 'Nice snake' to him. However, as soon as the cameras were set up and Lee, armed with her stick and fishing-line, was waiting in the wings, a strange change came over Joe. Draped on his rock, he ceased to be the agile chuckwalla we knew and loved. Overcome by what appeared to be a form of reptilian stagefright, he sat unmoving on the rock, looking like a splendid example of the taxidermist's art. Unblinking, unmoving, even when lifted off the rock by the noose round his neck, he looked as though he was stuffed to capacity with sawdust. Furthermore, nothing would break his trance-like state. We all shouted at him, waved things at him, threw delicious morsels like beetles in front of his nose, to no avail. Joe remained as immobile as if he had been carved out of rock. He was returned with ignominy to the Museum. We had greater luck with the snakes. Steven Hale, who was our herpetologist guide and snake wrangler, arrived out at the desert location, the back of his truck full of wriggling bags of snakes, a sight which made the more faint-hearted of the crew recoil. The diamond-back rattlesnake he had brought was in a filthy mood and was rattling like volleys of musketry long before it was his turn to be emptied out of his bag to perform. He was a lovely snake, beautifully marked, and he rattled incessantly through his big scene and struck viciously at anything that came within range. |
| 988 |
A coral snake in pink, red, black and yellow like an excruciatingly gaudy Italian silk tie gave us some trouble because he had a turn of speed that was quite unprecedented and would disappear among the rocks in a twinkling of an eye. But probably the most handsome and certainly the most amenable was a five-foot-long king snake with jet-black, shiny scales, wonderfully marked in stripes of daffodil yellow. He had huge, liquid dark eyes and a most benign expression, for his mouth curved slightly, making him look as though he was smiling shyly at you. Placidly he allowed himself to be caught in Lee's noose, caught with a forked snake stick, to be discovered on rocks and under them, to slither endlessly through the cacti and other plant cover, to be handled endlessly, coiling lovingly round Lee's fingers, round her arms and round her neck. It was only finally, when Alastair said to Lee, 'Now put that lizard down on the rocks there,' that the snake, affronted, turned round and bit her. Fortunately king snakes are not poisonous. One of the high spots of our desert filming, as far as I was concerned, was to see my all-time favourite bird in the wild the road runner. With their wild eyes, their ridiculous unkempt crests and the loping run so reminiscent of all the lanky athletes you have ever seen, the road runner is the most comical and endearing of birds. We captured a curious incident on film which shows how, in the desert, nothing must be wasted in this harsh environment. There was a nest with three baby road runners in it, and one of the chicks had died. To our astonishment, when the mother discovered this, she picked up the dead baby out of the nest and proceeded to feed it to one of the other chicks. When we last saw it, the chick had succeeded in engulfing the head and neck of its dead brother, while the body dangled outside. This, apparently, is quite usual with road runners, for they will sometimes catch and kill snakes that are too large for them to swallow in one go, so they swallow as much as they are able to and leave the rest dangling outside. When half the snake has been digested, they can swallow the other half. It was while we were shooting in the desert that we had one of those awful days that make filming so unpredictable and so irritating for everyone concerned. In an effort to show every aspect of desert conditions, we had filmed cactus desert, scrub desert, stony desert and grassland desert. All that remained was to film what most people consider to be typical desert mile upon mile of rolling sand dunes. Alastair, during his reconnaissance, had found the ideal spot some fifty miles away. Here, three- and four-hundred-foot dunes, beautifully sculpted by the wind and rain, stretched in every direction as far as the eye could see. Moreover, a main highway ran right through the area, thus making access easy. Alastair waxed so lyrical about these dunes that I got the very strong impression that they would make Outer Mongolia, the Gobi and Sahara deserts pale into insignificance. |
| 989 |
It was at this point that we discovered why this area was free of dune-buggies. At a section of the road most distant from the highway and civilization, our car sank in over its axles and got stuck. Paula, Lee and I had to walk two miles to the highway and then another two miles before we found the garage that had the necessary truck to drag us out of the dune we were embedded in. We got back to our hotel very late that night, feeling exceedingly frustrated and irritated by the fact that, in addition to not having been able to shoot any film, we owed the Police Department twenty-five dollars in fines. But this was our only bad day; the rest of the shoot in the desert was perfect. The weather was flawless, the temperature superb, from dawn with its wonderful green, pink and lavender clouds fading to crisp sunlight that enveloped the cacti in a blurred golden web of fight, to the evening when the huge sky (the sky looks twice as big, somehow, in the desert) was drenched in scarlet and purples of such brilliance that they would have made a Turner sunset look anaemic in comparison. The fascinating thing about shooting this series was the contrast. One minute you would be filming in snow and the next minute sweating in the heat of a tropical forest. One minute paddling a canoe down an English river, the next minute paddling a canoe over a tropical reef. So in this case we had a contrast, for we left the giant cactus forests of Arizona and flew down to the rolling grasslands of southern Africa, to that great game reserve with the marvellous name straight out of Rider Haggard of Umfolozi. Approaching the wonderful reserve is one of the most salutary and frightening biological eye-openers I have ever experienced anywhere in the world. You drive through mile after mile of rolling green grassland that reminds you vaguely of parts of England. You are also vaguely aware that forests must have been felled to create this grassland and you are aware that, while it looks superficially lush and green, it is in fact desiccated and eroded, overgrazed and overpopulated. However, this does not really impinge upon you until you reach Umfolozi. You are driving through these rolling green hills, eroded and sparse, and then suddenly you see ahead of you a fence and beyond that fence is what Africa was like before the advent of the white man and before the Africans had overpopulated. Wonderful rolling acacia scrubland, rich meadows, giant pot-bellied baobab a rich lushness that had to be seen to be believed. Those of my readers who, like me, are tottering on the borders of decrepitude may remember Judy Garland in the film called The Wizard of Oz. They will recall how her house is whirled up over the rainbow by a tornado. Up to that point, the film had been in black and white, but when the house crashes to a standstill and July Garland timidly opens the door everything is in Technicolor of the most flamboyant sort. Arriving at Umfolozi had very much the same effect on me. |
| 990 |
We had been travelling through a man-made and man-desecrated landscape, but you were not fully aware of what your species had destroyed because there was no contrast in Technicolor, as it were. But arrive at the fence that guards this chunk of original Africa and even someone like myself (who is fairly aware of the world's problems of conservation) is jolted. You suddenly realize that you have been driving through a man-made equivalent of a desert and have arrived at an oasis behind bars. As you enter the park, not only do you have the extreme contrast of vegetation but suddenly the landscape is alive with animals. Zebras, striped like Victorian humbugs, cantered alongside the truck, throwing up their heels skittishly. With them cavorted the brindled wildebeests, or gnus, their curiously twisted horns making them look as though they were peering at you over a pair of spectacles. For such ungainly animals they are astonishingly agile. A herd of gnu taking off is more like a ballet than anything, for they twist and buck and prance, one minute practically standing on their heads and the next minute leaping into the air and executing a complex pirouette. As the zebra and gnu galloped through the undergrowth, they disturbed flocks of plum-purple starlings and groups of ground hornbills with huge curved Fagin-like beaks and scarlet wattles. They paced along as sedately as soldiers on sentry duty and gazed at us out of huge, soulful eyes, framed by thick, extremely sexy eyelashes. We had travelled about a mile through the park when we saw its most important inhabitants a white, or square-lipped, rhinoceros. These huge and magnificent beasts (the largest land mammal next to the elephant) were at one time driven to the edge of extinction. Fortunately, at the eleventh hour, action was taken to preserve this antediluvian giant and so now in Umfolozi and other parts of South Africa they are on the increase. This was a huge male and he moved majestically through the trees, his enormous head with a four-foot horn curved like a scimitar on his square-lipped nose. Several tick birds perched along his back, like ornaments on a mantelpiece. Occasionally, as the rhino's massive legs brushed through the grass, they would disturb small animals or grasshoppers and the tick birds would fly off their, moving perch, catch an insect and then return to the rhino's back to eat it. We stopped the car within thirty feet of him, and he came to a halt and surveyed us calmly. Then, uttering a deep sigh, he crossed the road in front of us and disappeared among the acacias. Not more than half a mile further on, we came upon a group of what I consider to be one of the most beautiful of all mammals, the giraffe. There were five of them; three were quietly browsing on the acacia-tops while the other two, who were obviously on honeymoon, were behaving in the most ludicrously besotted manner. Facing each other, they were managing to entwine their necks in the most astonishing manner, more as though they were swans than giraffes. |
| 991 |
They were kissing each other rapturously, their long tongues sliding in and out of each other's mouth voluptuously, with the sort of passion you expect from a French film, but somehow don't associate with giraffes. They, like all lovers, were completely oblivious of everything except each other and they took no notice, even when we got out of the car and walked quite close to them. Eventually, we arrived at the singularly unattractive series of cement-block buildings constructed by the South African government to make the tourist feel loved and wanted. It was rather like living in a badly designed public lavatory but was more than compensated for by our surroundings. Our cameraman here was another Rodney Rodney Borland, and his wife Moira. Together they had made some superb wildlife films and so knew the African bush intimately. It was at this time that Alastair was having a prolonged and intense love affair with a mole. Perhaps such a statement needs some elaboration. I had proclaimed that I had no intention of going to South Africa unless I was allowed to meet a creature that had long fascinated me the golden mole. There are several species of this strange beast and, although bearing a strong resemblance to the European mole, they differ from it chiefly in having fur that is extremely silky and that glows like spun gold. Bearing my wishes in mind, Alastair had gone to considerable trouble to get someone in Durban to extract a golden mole from his garden and hand it over to us for the filming. It was an enchanting creature, with eyes so minuscule that it looked like somebody who had mislaid his spectacles. It was about five inches long and looked like a furry ingot, scuttling about in its box of earth. Like most insectivores, of course, it had a voracious and insatiable appetite and required about three hundred yards of worms per day to keep it cheerful. For some reason, Alastair worked up a great affinity with this curious little creature, digging up vast quantities of worms for its breakfast, lunch and dinner and keeping it in his room at night. He did admit that, as McTavish spent the entire night trying to dig his way out of his box, he had known more restful sleeping companions. Although the golden mole bears a superficial resemblance to the European mole, they are not related and the likeness has come about simply because they have both adapted similarly to a fossorial way of life and thus have developed similarities, such as the powerful forefeet for digging, vestigial eyes and strong, bulldozing snouts. McTavish, as I say, looked golden in most lights, but if the sunlight struck his glossy fur at a certain angle he could turn green, violet or purple a really striking display for a mammal. One night, McTavish's nocturnal activities were successful. He found a weak spot in his box and with his powerful forefeet enlarged this to a hole. Alastair, heartbroken, reported at breakfast that he had awoken to find himself moleless. It was fortunate that we had shot all of McTavish's vital scenes before he made his bid for freedom. |
| 992 |
One of the things that we wanted to show was how the various ungulates in savannah lands have each developed their particular grazing habits so that, for example, a giraffe will graze off the tops of the acacias, whereas the kudu will browse lower down the tree. In this way, by splitting up the various levels of grazing, there is less competition and the food supply is more evenly shared. We thought that the best way to demonstrate this would be to show two extremes a creature that browsed at the very tops of the trees and one that fed at ground level. So we decided on a giraffe and a tortoise as our examples. First, with considerable difficulty, we succeeded in finding a large, somnolent tortoise sitting under a baobab tree. Alastair, who had been getting increasingly jittery as no tortoise seemed to be forthcoming, sighted this reptile, who appeared to be in a trance, and he leapt from the car with cries of joy and swept the tortoise into his arms and clasped it to his bosom. Now, this is not the wisest thing to do to a tortoise when it is fully alert. To do it to one that appears to be quietly sitting under a baobab reciting one of the longer and more boring of Tennyson's poems to himself is courting disaster. All tortoises have large and retentive bladders, and this one was no exception. To say that Alastair was drenched would be an understatement. He was most upset. 'Nobody told me that tortoises peed,' he kept saying plaintively. 'Nobody told me that they were so copious.' So we put the now empty tortoise into a box, dried Alastair as best we could and then set off in search of a giraffe. As always happens, of course, there was not a giraffe to be seen. Normally, the landscape was littered with them, but now we could not track down a single one. After driving around for several hours, however, we finally found one a gigantic and beautifully marked male, lurking among the acacias. Alastair's great idea was that I should approach the giraffe, taking the tortoise with me. When I got as close to the giraffe as he would let me, I was to put the tortoise on the ground, face the camera and start talking about the browsing habits of giraffe at the tops of the trees and then point out that lower down other antelopes grazed and then right at the bottom you got a grazing creature such as a tortoise. At this point, I was to bend down and pick up the tortoise. Like most of Alastair's ideas, this was easier said than done. I got out of the car and, bearing the indignantly hissing tortoise in my arms, I approached the giraffe. He watched my approach with an expression of complete incredulity on his face. During his long and happy life, fate had never engineered it that his lunch would be interrupted by a human being carrying a vociferous tortoise, and he was not at all sure that this was an experience he wanted. He gave a tremulous snort of alarm and walked round to the other side of the acacia so that only his head was visible. 'That's no good,' hissed Alastair. |
| 993 |
'I want his whole body.' Slowly, I followed the giraffe round the acacia and slowly he moved round it, keeping a large section of prickly tree between me and him. I continued to follow him and for quite some time we went round and round the tree, as if we were doing an old-fashioned waltz. 'It's no good,' I said to Alastair, 'you'll have to move the damn camera.' So the camera was moved and after a lot more waltzing round the acacias I finally got the giraffe into the position that my director required. 'Excellent,' said Alastair excitedly. 'Now put that snake thing on the ground and talk about zebra.' So I put the tortoise on the ground, straightened up and spoke long and eloquently about the giraffe and their feeding habits and about the feeding habits of other ungulates. 'And so,' I concluded, 'by grazing in this selective manner the food is evenly distributed from the very tops of the trees to the ground level, where you get grazing animals like this.' I bent down to pick up the tortoise and, to my astonishment, there was no tortoise there. In a burst of speed unprecedented in such a reptile, he had fled and was fifty feet away, making for the peace and tranquillity of the acacia groves. Needless to say, this whole sequence was not a success. Another of Alastair's brilliant ideas was to have me start the programme and set the scene while standing, as it were, hand in hand with a white rhino. So besotted had he become with this idea that we spent three days doing nothing else but driving round looking for white rhinos. We had no difficulty in finding them, since the park was overflowing with them. The difficulty lay in trying to get them to co-operate with Alastair. We found a portly mother and her plump child sitting about in a waterhole that they were companionably sharing with a buffalo. The buffalo had mud all over his back and shoulders which had dried and cracked, so that he looked as if he were wearing a grey jigsaw puzzle. The female rhino and her baby were not aware of our presence and it was possible that I could have got close enough to complete the scene to Alastair's satisfaction if it had not been for the buffalo. He had been standing belly deep in the waterhole, sunk into that bemused state that overcomes all buffalo when they get anywhere near water, and so he woke up with a start when he suddenly saw me getting out of the car. By this time, his massive weight had made him sink so deeply into the mud that, when he tried to vacate the waterhole, his legs stuck and he fell sideways, thrashing about wildly. The rhinos, not unnaturally, took this to be a sign that something was amiss and so, as the buffalo finally righted himself, they all left the waterhole at a brisk run and disappeared into the trees. This sort of thing happened time and again. Rhinos, being shortsighted, make up for this defect by having extremely keen hearing and a good sense of smell. Also they are exceedingly suspicious, probably because of their bad eyesight, although what enemies a creature of such massive proportions could have was a mystery to me. |
| 994 |
Not, however, if you are making a film. Our next programme was to be about an English pond and an English river, both fascinating, especially in spring when all the aquatic creatures from toads to newts, from otters to mayfly, were starting breeding activities. Not this spring. This was a film-maker's spring, with leaden skies, arctic temperatures accompanied by rain, hail, sleet and finally, when we thought the weather had run its gamut, snow. The beautiful pond which Jonathan had picked out for its translucent, amber-coloured waters like fine pale sherry turned into a muddy, opaque broth in which nothing could be seen. The River Wye, our second location, which normally rushed joyfully over its rocky bed, clear as molten glass, was transformed by mud and debris into something closely resembling one of the more unpleasant lava flows regurgitated from a bad-tempered and dyspeptic volcano. Needless to say, this had a distressing effect on Jonathan, and every time he looked out of the window he mentally, as it were fell on his sword. We rushed from one location to the other (at opposite ends of the country, naturally) in the hopes that the weather had cleared, but in vain. Paula was in despair for it was her job as producer to keep everyone's spirits up, but climatically speaking this was impossible. In addition, during the course of the various shoots, she and Jonathan had very unwisely fallen deeply in love and had decided to get married when the series was finished, so as a prelude to normal married life what could be more natural than that Jonathan should attribute the prevailing inclement weather conditions to his betrothed. It was a trying time for us all. 'Look, honey,' she said very sensibly, 'why don't we go and film Lee shooting the rapids? In those shots it doesn't matter how muddy the water is.' 'What a good idea,' said Lee, who was dying to have her first try at white-water canoeing. 'Let's do that, Jonathan.' 'It might help you to feel better if you risk my wife's life in the rapids, sadist that you are,' I pointed out. 'Yes,' said Jonathan gloomily, 'I suppose we could do that.' So we packed up and drove away from the mud-coloured pond to where the River Wye rushes and twists through black rocks. Here the dark muscles of water curved round the rocks in great bursts of foam and everything was a roar and chatter of water. Lee, thoroughly excited, was decked out in a scarlet wetsuit and a becoming bright-yellow crash-helmet. Then she was wedged into a slender and fragile-looking canoe and launched into a placid area of the river for her first and only lesson. Such is the perversity of women that within half an hour she was handling the canoe in a manner equally (or more) professional than her instructor. The purpose of all this was to show how a canoeist had to use the strength of the river to his or her advantage, using the force of the water as propulsion, using the current to steer and the curving eddies as placid areas of calm, like water parking-lots. |
| 995 |
The fact that an enormous number of creatures, from frogs and toads and dragonflies to the myriad microscopic beasts, depend on these ponds for their very lives does not concern a well-educated modern society. Fortunately, some people do still care and are willing to help and not harass nature out of existence. There is, for example, the excellent Frog Watch conducted by the Royal Society for Nature Conservation. In Britain you can phone a frog that is to say, there is a special hot-line telephone, number broadcast on local radio and printed in the local paper, by which you can report your first sighting of frog or toad spawn in ditches, garden ponds, or the dwindling number of natural ponds. Experts then mark this on large-scale maps of the area and thus gain a picture of the extent of the amphibians' breeding-grounds. Frogs, of course, stick fairly close to their birthplace throughout their lives, but toads present a very difficult problem. As soon as the toadlets come out of the pond they spread far and wide, for their skins do not require the moist environment that the frogs need. However, when they grow up and the breeding season arrives they hop off in their thousands to the pond or lake where they were born. Of course, in many cases they have to cross roads or even motorways to attain their objective and so thousands are killed annually by cars. In the Netherlands, where they seem to deal more sympathetically with their wildlife, they have created underpasses for migrating toads. There is as yet no such refinement in Britain, but there is a move afoot to remedy this with the slogan 'Help a Toad Cross the Road'. People empathetic to toads (and who could be otherwise since, if kissed, each one is a potential prince?) take buckets, dustbins or other containers to those points where the toads habitually cross and as the vast concourse of amphibians arrives they bundle them into the buckets and other containers and take them safely across the road. It is to be hoped that the Boy Scouts give up their time-consuming traditional task of helping old ladies across the road and concentrate instead on the toads. Of course, we had already filmed quite a number of the pond sequences under controlled conditions and had got some remarkable material. There was, for example, the curious little fish called the bitterling that uses the freshwater mussel as a sort of babysitter. In the breeding season, the female bitterling develops an extraordinary long, white, slightly curved ovipositor, which looks as though it has been made out of white plastic; then, accompanied by her husband, she goes in search of her babysitter. The fresh-water mussels, about four or five inches long, lie on their sides in the mud and look very like oval, slightly flattened stones. At one end of the shell there are two siphons one exhalant and one inhalant. The mussel sucks in water through the latter, extracts what food it contains and then expels the water now filtered of its nutrients out of the other siphon. |
| 996 |
Possibly some of the most fascinating of the pond denizens we got on film were the planarians. The species we filmed were strange, Eclair-shaped creatures that as they glide as smoothly as quicksilver about the mud look as if they were manufactured out of damp black velvet. They are of course flatworms and look vaguely like aquatic slugs. They are hermaphrodite, each animal having both male and female organs and producing both eggs and sperm. However, the eggs from one planarian must be fertilized by the sperms from another. They feed principally on dead matter such as tadpoles or tiny fish, tearing and sucking at the meat and the juices of their prey. They can, however, exist for very long periods without food, but then they gradually get smaller and smaller, since they are literally eating themselves. Another unusual aspect of these curious little creatures is that the mouth is used both to ingest food and to excrete. Their reproduction sounds like something out of science fiction, for not only do they lay eggs but, should one be cut in two by accident, two new planarians grow from the two halves. In some species they normally increase their numbers by having a sort of tug-of-war with themselves, tearing themselves in two to swell the population. There was a fascinating series of experiments conducted on a species of American planarian which proved that they could be taught with the aid of weak electric shocks to select either a black or a white tube as the correct escape route from a maze. Moreover, if the planarian was cut in two both bits could remember this lesson. Even more amazing, it appears (though this has not been thoroughly investigated) that, if a trained planarian is devoured by an untrained one, the untrained one 'inherits' the trained one's knowledge. If this is true, it is surely one of the most remarkable pieces of animal behaviour. It is as though a schoolboy ate suitably roasted his schoolmaster, and thus obtained his knowledge and experience. It is reminiscent, of course, of the human belief that if you ate your vanquished opponent after battle you would inherit his courage and strength. We now came to the two sequences, one involving a boat and the other what were laughingly called watershoes, which we needed for the walking-on-the-water sequence. The shoes were a very strange contraption. If you can imagine two six-foot-long slender canoes, joined together by jointed rods, and each canoe ending in what looked like half a dolphin's tail in rubber or plastic, you have some idea of this curious means of progression. The way you used them was this: you put one foot into each canoe by sticking it into the canvas top, and then you seized hold of the rudder, a long pole that ran to the bows of your craft, then with somebody's assistance you were launched. As soon as you were afloat, you stamped your feet up and down as if marking time in one spot. This movement had the most astonishing effect on the two halves of the dolphin's tail, making each piece flap up and down, thus propelling you through the water. |
| 997 |
I have watched families in North America whom I, in my innocence, thought were suffering from some glandular disease until I discovered that this extraordinary wobbling obesity was due to overeating. What a feast they would have been if they had been Christian missionaries who had wobbled out into the outback. Of course, this gigantic garbage-heap was considered by the seagulls to be the best restaurant in New York and they turned up there in their thousands, wheeling, screaming, fighting each other, diving into the piles of refuse in search of titbits. It was, in a curious sort of way, comforting that such monstrous waste was at least going towards keeping up flying battalions of handsome birds. So we continued to film in this, one of the most squalid, repulsive, dirty, beautiful and exciting of cities. We shot, as I have said, the wildlife in cemeteries and in city dumps, we also showed how feral dogs and cats lived in the slums, how pigeons and rats survived in the jungle of concrete, and we even showed how, fifteen or twenty floors up, in an apartment consisting of cement, glass and chromium plate, you could still find firebrats in your television set, cockroaches in your carpet and mice in your wainscoting. Then we came to the great day known as the Battle of Block 87. Among other people helping us, we had a charming lady naturalist called Helen Ross Russell, who had for years studied the flora and fauna of the Big Apple and had written several extremely interesting books on the subject of wildlife in a city. She knew on which skyscrapers peregrine falcons nested, where was the best place to find rats and at which golf course racoons habitually stole all the golf balls. With this fund of esoteric knowledge, her assistance was invaluable. One of the things we wanted to show was the quantity of fife that could be found in what is known in America as a vacant lot and in England would probably be called a bombsite. Even in the midst of great cities, it is astonishing how nature creeps back. Moss and lichens are generally the first to appear, followed by weeds, and then even trees start to sprout between the bricks and rubbish. As the plants get a hold, the invertebrates move in the millipedes, the spiders, the snails and these are closely followed by various birds, mice and in some cases even toads and snakes. Thus, a vacant lot or a bombsite can, to the amateur naturalist, produce an extraordinary variety of flora and fauna. Alastair had discovered the perfect vacant lot for our purpose. It was on the corner of 87th Street, bounded on two sides by the tall walls of buildings and on the other two sides by streets along which moved a steady stream of traffic. The lot itself was used for the most part by dog-owners exercising their pets, so it was, to say the least, well manured. Heaped with rubble, old tin cans and discarded notices one saying 'Police Precinct' it had provided a place for various weeds to flourish and there were even a few quite sizeable trees. |
| 998 |
'If there were none here, why did you brung 'em?' asked the lady. 'For the film,' snapped Alastair, who was trying to concentrate on whether he wanted the caterpillars to walk from right to left or from left to right and whether they would obey him. 'But that's faking,' said the lady, arousing herself out of lethargy into a sort of Middle European position of argumentation, feet slightly apart, hands on hips. 'You brung 'em here, and they don't five here. That's faking. You brung them bugs here deliberate.' 'Of course we brung them here,' said Alastair irritatedly, his train of thought interrupted. 'If we had not brung them, there wouldn't be any for us to film.' 'That's faking,' said the lady. 'That's not true.' 'Do you realize, madam,' I said, in a role of peacemaker, 'that ninety per cent of the films you see on wildlife, like Walt Disney, are faked? The whole process of filming is in a sense a fake. However, no more than a portrait painter or a landscape artist fakes, that is to say he rearranges nature to a better angle for his purposes.' 'Walt Disney doesn't fake,' said the lady, now starting to show all the belligerence of a sabre-toothed tiger immersed in a sort of intellectual tarpit. 'Walt Disney is an American. What youse is doing is faking, and faking on our lot.' 'We have permission from the Mayor's office,' said Paula. 'Have you got permission to fake from the 87th Street Block Association?' asked the lady, swelling as a turkey to a gobble. 'Surely the Mayor's office takes precedence?' asked Paula. 'Nothing takes precedence over the 87th Street Block Association,' said the lady. 'You know ... for some ... skyscrapers ... lots of life ... caterpillars ...' said Alastair, turning in a distraught circle. 'I'll go and see the 87th Street Block Association,' said the lady, 'and find out why you are allowed to fake.' She strode away, as if to relieve Leningrad singlehanded, and we all heaved a sigh of relief. However, our sense of relief was short-lived. Alastair was shouting instructions at a tent caterpillar who was incapable of understanding English when the lady returned bearing with her a woman who looked like one of those viragos who have been hatched from a shrike's egg, with militant eyes like laser beams, the sort of person who always looks for the worst in anything. Accompanying her, presumably as a back-up, was a man who appeared to have been constructed out of cardboard at a very early age, and rained on incessantly during his life. 'What is going on here?' asked Shrike Lady. Patiently, Paula explained to her about the film we were attempting to make, while Alastair continued to turn in irritated circles. 'But what are you doing to our lot?' said the lady accusingly, rather as if the place was Kew Gardens instead of a vacant lot knee deep in dog droppings. 'They're faking nature,' said Neanderthal Lady. 'They've brung a lot of bugs.' 'Bugs?' said Shrike Lady, her eyes flashing. 'What bugs?' 'These,' said Alastair, pointing. 'They're only tent caterpillars.' 'Tent caterpillars?' screamed Shrike Lady. |
| 999 |
Presently, we took a steep, winding side-road towards the sea, a road thickly lined with immensely tall dark-green cypresses that had been elderly giants when I used to come here in 1935. Soon we could see below us Kouloura harbour, like a small curved bow, and at one end of it what is probably the most beautiful villa in Corfu, belonging to old friends of mine, Pam and Disney Vaughan-Hughes. Anchored in the harbour was our caique, a splendidly large craft, spotlessly clean, its blue and white paint gleaming. Pam and Disney greeted us warmly, for we had not seen each other for several years. They had kindly agreed to have our gear stacked in front of their beautiful home, to let us film in their lovely garden, to ply us with cool drinks and even to lend us the talents of their land tortoise, who rejoiced in the name of Carruthers. Friendship could go no further. So we cluttered up the front of their house as only a film crew can and while the team was setting up we went to have a look at the kayiki to make sure all was ready for our sea trip. Here, to Jonathan's horror, disaster struck. In the opening sequence on the boat, I was to say: 'All of us are born with an interest in the world around us. You watch any young human being or any other young animal, if it comes to that and you'll see that they're investigating and learning the whole time with all their senses. Because from the moment we're born we are explorers in a very complex and fascinating world. Now, as people grow older, they sometimes lose interest in the world around them, but others keep it stimulated the whole time. These are the lucky ones. These are called the amateur naturalists.' In order to make the point more forcefully, Jonathan had decided we needed a child on board with us, so that we could all be examining a big bowl full of sea-creatures. To this end, he had engaged the services of the daughter of the owner of the minute cafE that graces Kouloura harbour, a very pretty little six-year-old. However, just before our arrival she had done something so monstrously naughty (we never found out what) that her mother had taken the unprecedented step (in Greece, that is) of giving her a good slapping. The result may be imagined. Jonathan found his tiny talent in tears, sitting in a mournful heap, refusing to speak, refusing to get into her best dress, refusing everything. In vain did Pam, Ann and I the only three Greek-speakers among us cajole and flatter and beseech. Even Jonathan's munificent offer (with total disregard for the budget) of raising her fee from ten drachmas to twenty had no effect. 'We can't do the scene without a child,' said Jonathan. 'For heaven's sake, do something, Ann.' 'What do you expect me to do?' asked Ann. 'If the child won't do it, you can't make her.' 'Then, find someone who will,' snapped Jonathan. So poor Ann was dispatched to the nearest village as a talent scout. 'Does it have to be a she, or will a he do?' she asked before she left. 'I don't care if it's a hermaphrodite as long as it's a child,' said Jonathan, glowering. |
| 1000 |
He told her his date of arrival in Corfu and said that he himself would open up the villa for us. Alas for Jonathan's nerves; the day came and went and the man was conspicuous by his absence. 'Why don't we go up there and you can at least film in the grounds and on the veranda,' Ann suggested sensibly. 'Maybe he will arrive tomorrow.' 'Well, I suppose so,' said Jonathan moodily, 'or we could film at Pot&mos in the hope that he will be on tomorrow's plane.' So we went to Potamos, a charming village, straggling up a hillside, the neat, multicoloured houses with their arched verandas exactly as I remembered them from forty years ago. Under every arch was a swallow's nest full of gaping young and under every nest was a cardboard box to catch the faeces so amply and generously shared with you by the swallows. I was reminded of the Greek saying that a house is not a home until it has a swallow's nest under its eaves. As I watched the parent birds, beaks stuffed to overflowing with insect provender, skimming in to hang on the nest and stuff the gaping mouths of their young, I thought that these were probably the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great-grandchildren of the swallows I watched under these identical eaves when I was a child. After we had filmed them and some other sequences in the village, we returned to the hotel. The terrapins were still in the bath. The next day dawned bright and clear. The plane from Athens arrived and our man was not on it. 'To Hell with him,' snarled Jonathan. 'We'll go up to the villa and film anyway.' The villa was one I described in the book I wrote about my childhood in Corfu which I had called the Snow White Villa. It lay in a large and ancient olive grove and was shaded by a huge magnolia tree, oleanders with pink and white flowers and a grape vine over the veranda that in season was heavy with bunches of white, banana-shaped grapes. Alas, when we drove up the rock-strewn pot-holed drive and drew to a halt outside, I could see that the villa was snow white no longer. Its once white walls were discoloured with patches of damp, there were huge cracks in the plaster, and the green shutters were faded with the paint peeling off them. In spite of this, the villa still somehow managed to look elegant, even in decay, but I wondered how anyone could treat such a beautiful and charming building in such a brutal way. As the equipment was unpacked, I led Lee around the overgrown garden among the olive trees and indulged in nostalgia. Here was the veranda where, at one of our numerous parties, my various animals had caused havoc; my magpies escaping, getting drunk on spilt wine and then wrecking the carefully arranged table just before the guests arrived, while beneath the table lurked my fearsome gull, Alecko, who bit the guests' legs as they sat down to eat. This was the wall in which my favourite gecko, Geronimo, used to live who fought to the death on my bedroom wall the praying mantis twice his size. |
| 1001 |
All of this took some considerable time and it was quite late in the evening when we finally packed up and (having carefully locked up the villa and replaced the glass) wended our weary way back to the Corfu Palace. The terrapins were still in the bath. The next day we had a free morning as Paula and Jonathan had to go and clear caterpillars through Customs. I feel somehow that this statement needs a certain clarification. Owing to the fact that we were filming in Corfu at the wrong time of the year for butterfly larvae (at least for the ones we wanted to show), we had been forced to import the caterpillars from a well-known butterfly-farm in England. Needless to say, the Greek Customs thought that, although Corfu is renowned for its eccentrics, it was carrying things too far when they insisted on opening this highly suspicious parcel to find it full of fritillary, cabbage white and swallowtail larvae all nestling in beds of their favourite food plants. Arguments by Ann that all these species were found in Corfu anyway met with cold unfriendly stares from the Customs officers. Why, they asked, if they were found in Corfu already, did one have to import them at colossal expense from England? (The complications of animal filming are difficult, if not impossible, to explain to a Greek Customs officer.) In any case, they pointed out national pride now coming into it if the same caterpillars were found in Corfu, why not use them? Were Greek caterpillars inferior in some way to British caterpillars? For years, Greece had been known for the enormous size, quantities and qualities of its caterpillars. Greek caterpillars, as everyone admitted, were the best in the world. Therefore, what was the sense in importing a lot of English caterpillars (inferior in every way) and probably causing some fatal disease to the Corfiot caterpillars? The morning dragged by, while Paula, Ann and Jonathan, hot and irritated, had to sign affidavits to the effect that the caterpillars had been individually inspected by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Zoological Society of London. Further guarantees were signed to indemnify the Greek government, and a promise to pay vast compensation should the English caterpillars be responsible for one single (superior) Corfiot caterpillar's death. Further guarantees had to be given that our caterpillars were not in any way to corrupt the Corfiot caterpillars by coming into contact with them and that our caterpillars, at the end of the filming, would be ignominiously banished from Corfu and sent back to England there, presumably, to hatch out into inferior butterflies. The three of them arrived back at the hotel limp with exhaustion but triumphantly bearing our English caterpillars in their midst. So that afternoon we went back to the villa. The pane of glass once more mysteriously fell out, the villa was opened up and we commenced work. Caterpillars as co-stars leave a lot to be desired, like most animals. |
| 1002 |
At the right time of the year, you could find crawling up their trunks strange hump-backed, bulbous-eyed creatures, newly emerged from the earth. Watch them, and their skin would split down the back and slowly, and with great effort, there would emerge a cicada, with nut-brown body and silver wings, the true harbingers of summer who would make the island vibrate with their song. In the roots of the olives, you could find centipedes as long as a pencil or toads with silvery skins blotched with green so they looked like those medieval maps of the world where the continents were all misshapen. Insects were everywhere, butterflies, ant lions and ladybirds, fragile lace-wing flies who laid their eggs on slender stalks on the plant stems, and jet-black scarab beetles in pairs, rolling their balls of dung to bury as nurseries for their young. Someone once said to me that they could not understand what I saw in the olive groves they were so dull and lifeless. For me, they housed an endless, fascinating pageant of creatures and in spring they were awash with flowers, as if someone had emptied a paintbox among the great, dark, gnarled trunks. They were anything but dull and lifeless. Finally, we bumped our way down a stony track through the olives and there lay Scottini, an almost circular lake about seven or eight acres in extent, surrounded by trees and with a large reedy island in the middle and its shallow water full of jade-green weeds. As olive groves looked to some people, it too looked lifeless, yet I knew it was a universe of its own, for in its depths were weird darting, rolling, jerking, flitting forms of microscopic life, fearsome dragonfly larvae, small fish, newts, frogs, snakes and pond terrapins. I remember in my youth I had gone here once and spent a day collecting, and so rich was this little lake and so numerous my captures that I had soon used up all my collecting gear and was forced to use my clothes in which to carry my precious specimens, so that I arrived back at our villa stark naked, to the alarm and consternation of my mother. So, after Jonathan had prowled around and found suitable locations, cameras were set up and we took the first sequence which starred the grass snake. Our snake wrangler, the cares of catering and hotel management forgotten, bare-footed, trousers rolled up, stripped to the waist, danced about in mud and water, getting the handsome reptile to do Jonathan's bidding. The snake behaved beautifully, slithering across mud, wriggling through grass and finally swimming out into the lake, its large handsome head raised high above the water, leaving a wide V of ripples behind it. 'Now for the piEce de rEsistance,' said Jonathan, overexcited by our success with the grass snake. 'The pond terrapins. Now, I want you to put three of them just there on that grass bank, and you and Lee come along and see them basking in the sun and you creep up and catch one as the others go into the water.' 'They will be down that bank before you can say "Jonathan Harris",' I said. |
| 1003 |
'Well, anyway, let's try it,' said Jonathan stubbornly. So three of the pond terrapins were taken out, held in position by Jean-Pierre, while Lee and I took up our positions. 'Now, action,' said Jonathan. Jean-Pierre released his hold on the terrapins and leapt back so that he was out of shot. Lee and I took one step forward. The three terrapins, like racing cars taking off at Le Mans, sped down the bank, plopped into the water and disappeared. 'Damn,' said Jonathan. 'We'll have to hold them further back.' 'Remember you have only got five left,' said Lee. 'Well, we will just try another three,' said Jonathan. 'I'm sure we will get it this time.' So the three terrapins were placed well back from the lake's edge, Jean-Pierre holding them firmly until Jonathan shouted 'Action'. This time, the terrapins behaved differently. Apparently, they could not see the water and so they did not know which way to run. They revolved round and round for a second and then ran straight for the camera and through the tripod legs. Time and again, we tried to get them to run towards the lake, and time and again they ran inland with an obstinacy that can only be displayed by a terrapin or a donkey. Desperately, we moved them to a vantage-point where they could just see a glint of water, whereupon they sped into it and disappeared with the same alacrity as the first three had shown. Jonathan was now wearing his most Heathcliffian scowl. We tried again with one of the two remaining terrapins and he put up a new variation of the act. He pulled himself up into his shell and remained there immobile as a stone. Nothing we could do would make him move. Then, while we were all having a conference about his stubbornness, he quite unexpectedly came to life and rushed down the bank to freedom before any of us could stop him. Now we had only one terrapin left and things were getting desperate. Jonathan was taking no chances, so we filmed the capture scene in reverse, that is to say the first shot was Lee with the net with the terrapin in it, pulling it out of the weed as if she had just caught it. Then we released the terrapin in shallow water and filmed him as he swam away and then filmed Lee and myself rushing down the bank and performing an imaginary capture. Surprisingly, when all these bits of film were carefully cut and edited and arranged in juxtaposition with each other, it was surprisingly effective but it is a bit nerve-racking doing a scene in this way, as you are never sure until you see the shots in the cutting-room whether it is going to be successful or not. So on this last day of filming we had released all our animals and we packed up and left the little lake, placid among the olive trees, and returned to town, tired but cheerful. There were no terrapins in the bath. We had luxurious baths, and Lee and I spent the evening wandering about the old, narrow streets of Corfu, visiting various friends of mine, drinking far too much retsina, singing songs, eating roast lamb and fried shrimps. |
| 1004 |
The others do it from a distance and seldom get caught." "Let's drink a while," I said, "and readjust to our own reality." "Let's drink until the sun comes up." "Really?" "Sure, why not?" "You're on," I said, already feeling much better. 12 The place I was living in at that time did have some qualities. One of the finest was the bedroom which was painted a dark, dark blue. That dark dark blue had provided a haven for many a hangover, some of them brutal enough to almost kill a man, especially at a time when I was popping pills which people would give me without my bothering to ask what they were. Some nights I knew that if I slept I would die. I would walk around alone all night, from the bedroom to the bathroom and from the bathroom through the front room and into the kitchen. I opened and closed the refrigerator, time and time again. I turned the faucets on and off. Then I went to the bathroom and turned the faucets on and off. I flushed the toilet. I pulled at my ears. I inhaled and exhaled. Then, when the sun came up, I knew I was safe. Then I would sleep with the dark dark blue walls, healing. Another feature of that place were the knocks of unsavory women at 3 or 4 a. m. They certainly weren't ladies of great charm, but having a foolish turn of mind, I felt that somehow they brought me adventure. The real fact of the matter was that many of them had no place else to go. And they liked the fact that there was drink and that I didn't work too hard trying to bed down with them. Of course, after I met Sarah, this part of my lifestyle changed quite a bit. That neighborhood around Carlton Way near Western Avenue was changing too. It had been almost all lower-class white, but political troubles in Central America and other parts of the world had brought a new type of individual to the neighborhood. The male usually was small, a dark or light brown, usually young. There were wives, children, brothers, cousins, friends. They began filling up the apartments and courts. They lived many to an apartment and I was one of the few whites left in the court complex. The children ran up and down, up and down the court walkway. They all seemed to be between two and seven years old. They had no bikes or toys. The wives were seldom seen. They remained inside, hidden. Many of the men also remained inside. It was not wise to let the landlord know how many people were living in a single unit. The few men seen outside were the legal renters. At least they paid the rent. How they survived was unknown. The men were small, thin, silent, unsmiling. Most sat on the porch steps in their undershirts, slumped forward a bit, occasionally smoking a cigarette. They sat on the porch steps for hours, motionless. Sometimes they purchased very old junk automobiles and the men drove them slowly about the neighborhood. They had no auto insurance or driver's licenses and they drove with expired license plates. Most of the cars had defective brakes. The men almost never stopped at the corner stop sign and often failed to heed red lights, but there were few accidents. |
| 1005 |
Something was watching over them. After a while the cars would break down but my new neighbors wouldn't leave them on the street. They would drive them up the walkways and park them directly outside their door. First they would work on the engine. They would take off the hood and the engine would rust in the rain. Then they would put the car on blocks and remove the wheels. They took the wheels inside and kept them there so they wouldn't be stolen at night. While I was living there, there were two rows of cars lined up in the court, just sitting there on blocks. The men sat motionless on their porches in their undershirts. Sometimes I would nod or wave to them. They never responded. Apparently they couldn't understand or read the eviction notices and they tore them up, but I did see them studying the daily L. A. papers. They were stoic and durable because compared to where they had come from, things were now easy. Well, no matter. My tax consultant had suggested I purchase a house, and so for me it wasn't really a matter of "white flight." Although, who knows? I had noticed that each time I had moved in Los Angeles over the years, each move had always been to the North and to the West. Finally, after a few weeks of house hunting, we found the one. After the down payment the monthly payments came to $789.81. There was a huge hedge in front on the street and the yard was also in front so the house sat way back on the lot. It looked like a damned good place to hide. There was even a stairway, an upstairs with a bedroom, bathroom and what was to become my typing room. And there was an old desk left in there, a huge ugly old thing. Now, after decades, I was a writer with a desk. Yes, I felt the fear, the fear of becoming like them. Worse, I had an assignment to write a screenplay. Was I doomed and damned, was I about to be sucked dry? I didn't feel it would be that way. But does anybody, ever? Sarah and I moved our few possessions in. The big moment came. I sat the typewriter down on the desk and I put a piece of paper in there and I hit the keys. The typewriter still worked. And there was plenty of room for an ashtray, the radio and the bottle. Don't let anybody tell you different. Life begins at 65. 13 Down at the Marina del Rey times were getting hard. For transportation Jon Pinchot was driving a green 1968 Pontiac convertible and Francois Racine drove a brown 1958 Ford. They also had two Kawasaki motorcycles, a 750 and a 1000. Wenner Zergog had borrowed the 1958 Ford and by driving the car without putting water in the radiator had cracked the engine block. "He's a genius," Jon told me. "He doesn't know about such things." The motorcycles were the first to go. The 1958 was used for shorter trips. Then Francois Racine packed off for France. Jon sold the 1958 Ford. And then, of course, the day came when the phone rang and there was Jon. "I've got to move. They are going to tear this place down and build a hotel or something. Shit, I don't know where to go. |
| 1006 |
Son of a bitch, I had been a hell of a young bull. Really a top-notch fuck-up. Sarah was worried about the future of the barflies. I didn't like it either. On the other hand I couldn't see them sitting around our front room, drinking and telling their stories. Sometimes charm lessens when it gets too close to reality. And how many brothers can you keep? I drove on in. We got there. The cats were waiting. Sarah got down and cleaned their bowls and I opened the cans. Simplicity, that's what was needed. We went upstairs, washed, changed, made ready for bed. "What are those poor people going to do?" asked Sarah. "I know. I know..." Then it was time for sleep. I went downstairs for a last look, came back up. Sarah was asleep. I turned out the light. We slept. Having seen the movie made that afternoon we were now somehow different, we would never think or talk quite the same. We now knew something more but what it was seemed very vague and even perhaps a bit disagreeable. 29 Jon Pinchot had escaped from the ghetto. In his contract it stated that he would be supplied with an apartment to be paid for by Firepower. Jon found an apartment near the Firepower building. Each night, from his bed, Jon could see the lit sign at the top of the building, Firepower, and it shone through his window and upon his face as he slept. Francois Racine remained in the ghetto. He began a garden, growing vegetables. He spun his roulette wheel, tended his garden and fed the chickens. He was one of the strangest men I had ever met. "I cannot leave my chickens," he told me. "I will die in this strange land here with my chickens, here among the blacks." I went to the track on the days that the horses were running and the movie continued shooting. The phone rang every day. People wanted to interview the writer. I never realized that there were so many movie magazines or magazines interested in the movies. It was a sickness: this great interest in a medium that relentlessly and consistently failed, time after time after time, to produce anything at all. People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized it was shit. The racetrack was another waste of human life and effort. The people marched up to the windows with their money which they exchanged for pieces of numbered paper. Almost all of the numbers weren't good. In addition the track and the state took 18% off the top of each dollar, which they roughly divided. The biggest damn fools went to the movies and the racetracks. I was a damn fool who went to the racetrack. But I did better than most because after decades of race-going I had learned a minor trick or two. With me, it was a hobby and I never went wild with my money. Once you have been poor a long time you gain a certain respect for money. You never again want to be without any of it at all. That's for saints and fools. One of my successes in life was that in spite of all the crazy things I had done, I was perfectly normal: I chose to do those things, they didn't choose me. |
| 1007 |
If Mr. Blood had condescended to debate the matter with these ladies, he might have urged that having had his fill of wandering and adventuring, he was now embarked upon the career for which he had been originally intended and for which his studies had equipped him; that he was a man of medicine and not of war; a healer, not a slayer. But they would have answered him, he knew, that in such a cause it behoved every man who deemed himself a man to take up arms. They would have pointed out that their own nephew Jeremiah, who was by trade a sailor, the master of a ship - which by an ill-chance for that young man had come to anchor at this season in Bridgewater Bay - had quitted the helm to snatch up a musket in defence of Right. But Mr. Blood was not of those who argue. As I have said, he was a self-sufficient man. He closed the window, drew the curtains, and turned to the pleasant, candle-lighted room, and the table on which Mrs. Barlow, his housekeeper, was in the very act of spreading supper. To her, however, he spoke aloud his thought. "It's out of favour I am with the vinegary virgins over the way." He had a pleasant, vibrant voice, whose metallic ring was softened and muted by the Irish accent which in all his wanderings he had never lost. It was a voice that could woo seductively and caressingly, or command in such a way as to compel obedience. Indeed, the man's whole nature was in that voice of his. For the rest of him, he was tall and spare, swarthy of tint as a gipsy, with eyes that were startlingly blue in that dark face and under those level black brows. In their glance those eyes, flanking a high-bridged, intrepid nose, were of singular penetration and of a steady haughtiness that went well with his firm lips. Though dressed in black as became his calling, yet it was with an elegance derived from the love of clothes that is peculiar to the adventurer he had been, rather than to the staid medicus he now was. His coat was of fine camlet, and it was laced with silver; there were ruffles of Mechlin at his wrists and a Mechlin cravat encased his throat. His great black periwig was as sedulously curled as any at Whitehall. Seeing him thus, and perceiving his real nature, which was plain upon him, you might have been tempted to speculate how long such a man would be content to lie by in this little backwater of the world into which chance had swept him some six months ago; how long he would continue to pursue the trade for which he had qualified himself before he had begun to live. Difficult of belief though it may be when you know his history, previous and subsequent, yet it is possible that but for the trick that Fate was about to play him, he might have continued this peaceful existence, settling down completely to the life of a doctor in this Somersetshire haven. It is possible, but not probable. He was the son of an Irish medicus, by a Somersetshire lady in whose veins ran the rover blood of the Frobishers, which may account for a certain wildness that had early manifested itself in his disposition. |
| 1008 |
When at last he went forth again, Mrs. Barlow clucking after him like a disgruntled fowl, he found young Pitt smothered in a crowd of scared, half-dressed townsfolk - mostly women - who had come hastening for news of how the battle had sped. The news he gave them was to be read in the lamentations with which they disturbed the morning air. At sight of the doctor, dressed and booted, the case of instruments tucked under his arm, the messenger disengaged himself from those who pressed about, shook off his weariness and the two tearful aunts that clung most closely, and seizing the bridle of his horse, he climbed to the saddle. "Come along, sir," he cried. "Mount behind me." Mr. Blood, without wasting words, did as he was bidden. Pitt touched the horse with his spur. The little crowd gave way, and thus, upon the crupper of that doubly-laden horse, clinging to the belt of his companion, Peter Blood set out upon his Odyssey. For this Pitt, in whom he beheld no more than the messenger of a wounded rebel gentleman, was indeed the very messenger of Fate. Oglethorpe's farm stood a mile or so to the south of Bridgewater on the right bank of the river. It was a straggling Tudor building showing grey above the ivy that clothed its lower parts. Approaching it now, through the fragrant orchards amid which it seemed to drowse in Arcadian peace beside the waters of the Parrett, sparkling in the morning sunlight, Mr. Blood might have had a difficulty in believing it part of a world tormented by strife and bloodshed. On the bridge, as they had been riding out of Bridgewater, they had met a vanguard of fugitives from the field of battle, weary, broken men, many of them wounded, all of them terror-stricken, staggering in speedless haste with the last remnants of their strength into the shelter which it was their vain illusion the town would afford them. Eyes glazed with lassitude and fear looked up piteously out of haggard faces at Mr. Blood and his companion as they rode forth; hoarse voices cried a warning that merciless pursuit was not far behind. Undeterred, however, young Pitt rode amain along the dusty road by which these poor fugitives from that swift rout on Sedgemoor came flocking in ever-increasing numbers. Presently he swung aside, and quitting the road took to a pathway that crossed the dewy meadowlands. Even here they met odd groups of these human derelicts, who were scattering in all directions, looking fearfully behind them as they came through the long grass, expecting at every moment to see the red coats of the dragoons. But as Pitt's direction was a southward one, bringing them ever nearer to Feversham's headquarters, they were presently clear of that human flotsam and jetsam of the battle, and riding through the peaceful orchards heavy with the ripening fruit that was soon to make its annual yield of cider. At last they alighted on the kidney stones of the courtyard, and Baynes, the master, of the homestead, grave of countenance and flustered of manner, gave them welcome. |
| 1009 |
Pinning him to the ground, they tied his wrists behind his back, then roughly pulled him to his feet again. "Take him away," said Hobart shortly, and turned to issue his orders to the other waiting troopers. "Go search the house, from attic to cellar; then report to me here." The soldiers trailed out by the door leading to the interior. Mr. Blood was thrust by his guards into the courtyard, where Pitt and Baynes already waited. From the threshold of the hall, he looked back at Captain Hobart, and his sapphire eyes were blazing. On his lips trembled a threat of what he would do to Hobart if he should happen to survive this business. Betimes he remembered that to utter it were probably to extinguish his chance of living to execute it. For to-day the King's men were masters in the West, and the West was regarded as enemy country, to be subjected to the worst horror of war by the victorious side. Here a captain of horse was for the moment lord of life and death. Under the apple-trees in the orchard Mr. Blood and his companions in misfortune were made fast each to a trooper's stirrup leather. Then at the sharp order of the cornet, the little troop started for Bridgewater. As they set out there was the fullest confirmation of Mr. Blood's hideous assumption that to the dragoons this was a conquered enemy country. There were sounds of rending timbers, of furniture smashed and overthrown, the shouts and laughter of brutal men, to announce that this hunt for rebels was no more than a pretext for pillage and destruction. Finally above all other sounds came the piercing screams of a woman in acutest agony. Baynes checked in his stride, and swung round writhing, his face ashen. As a consequence he was jerked from his feet by the rope that attached him to the stirrup leather, and he was dragged helplessly a yard or two before the trooper reined in, cursing him foully, and striking him with the flat of his sword. It came to Mr. Blood, as he trudged forward under the laden apple-trees on that fragrant, delicious July morning, that man - as he had long suspected - was the vilest work of God, and that only a fool would set himself up as a healer of a species that was best exterminated. It was not until two months later - on the 19th of September, if you must have the actual date - that Peter Blood was brought to trial, upon a charge of high treason. We know that he was not guilty of this; but we need not doubt that he was quite capable of it by the time he was indicted. Those two months of inhuman, unspeakable imprisonment had moved his mind to a cold and deadly hatred of King James and his representatives. It says something for his fortitude that in all the circumstances he should still have had a mind at all. Yet, terrible as was the position of this entirely innocent man, he had cause for thankfulness on two counts. The first of these was that he should have been brought to trial at all; the second, that his trial took place on the date named, and not a day earlier. |
| 1010 |
His Majesty had consented to see Monmouth. To have done so unless he intended to pardon him was a thing execrable and damnable beyond belief; for the only other object in granting that interview could be the evilly mean satisfaction of spurning the abject penitence of his unfortunate nephew. Later they heard that Lord Grey, who after the Duke - indeed, perhaps, before him - was the main leader of the rebellion, had purchased his own pardon for forty thousand pounds. Peter Blood found this of a piece with the rest. His contempt for King James blazed out at last. "Why, here's a filthy mean creature to sit on a throne. If I had known as much of him before as I know to-day, I don't doubt I should have given cause to be where I am now." And then on a sudden thought: "And where will Lord Gildoy be, do you suppose?" he asked. Young Pitt, whom he addressed, turned towards him a face from which the ruddy tan of the sea had faded almost completely during those months of captivity. His grey eyes were round and questioning. Blood answered him. "Sure, now, we've never seen his lordship since that day at Oglethorpe's. And where are the other gentry that were taken? the real leaders of this plaguey rebellion. Grey's case explains their absence, I think. They are wealthy men that can ransom themselves. Here awaiting the gallows are none but the unfortunates who followed; those who had the honour to lead them go free. It's a curious and instructive reversal of the usual way of these things. Faith, it's an uncertain world entirely!" He laughed, and settled down into that spirit of scorn, wrapped in which he stepped later into the great hall of Taunton Castle to take his trial. With him went Pitt and the yeoman Baynes. The three of them were to be tried together, and their case was to open the proceedings of that ghastly day. The hall, even to the galleries - thronged with spectators, most of whom were ladies - was hung in scarlet; a pleasant conceit, this, of the Lord Chief Justice's, who naturally enough preferred the colour that should reflect his own bloody mind. At the upper end, on a raised dais, sat the Lords Commissioners, the five judges in their scarlet robes and heavy dark periwigs, Baron Jeffreys of Wem enthroned in the middle place. The prisoners filed in under guard. The crier called for silence under pain of imprisonment, and as the hum of voices gradually became hushed, Mr. Blood considered with interest the twelve good men and true that composed the jury. Neither good nor true did they look. They were scared, uneasy, and hangdog as any set of thieves caught with their hands in the pockets of their neighbours. They were twelve shaken men, each of whom stood between the sword of the Lord Chief Justice's recent bloodthirsty charge and the wall of his own conscience. From them Mr. Blood's calm, deliberate glance passed on to consider the Lords Commissioners, and particularly the presiding Judge, that Lord Jeffreys, whose terrible fame had come ahead of him from Dorchester. |
| 1011 |
He beheld a tall, slight man on the young side of forty, with an oval face that was delicately beautiful. There were dark stains of suffering or sleeplessness under the low-lidded eyes, heightening their brilliance and their gentle melancholy. The face was very pale, save for the vivid colour of the full lips and the hectic flush on the rather high but inconspicuous cheek-bones. It was something in those lips that marred the perfection of that countenance; a fault, elusive but undeniable, lurked there to belie the fine sensitiveness of those nostrils, the tenderness of those dark, liquid eyes and the noble calm of that pale brow. The physician in Mr. Blood regarded the man with peculiar interest knowing as he did the agonizing malady from which his lordship suffered, and the amazingly irregular, debauched life that he led in spite of it - perhaps because of it. "Peter Blood, hold up your hand!" Abruptly he was recalled to his position by the harsh voice of the clerk of arraigns. His obedience was mechanical, and the clerk droned out the wordy indictment which pronounced Peter Blood a false traitor against the Most Illustrious and Most Excellent Prince, James the Second, by the grace of God, of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland King, his supreme and natural lord. It informed him that, having no fear of God in his heart, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil, he had failed in the love and true and due natural obedience towards his said lord the King, and had moved to disturb the peace and tranquillity of the kingdom and to stir up war and rebellion to depose his said lord the King from the title, honour, and the regal name of the imperial crown and much more of the same kind, at the end of all of which he was invited to say whether he was guilty or not guilty. He answered more than was asked. "It's entirely innocent I am." A small, sharp-faced man at a table before and to the right of him bounced up. It was Mr. Pollexfen, the Judge-Advocate. "Are you guilty or not guilty?" snapped this peppery gentleman. "You must take the words." "Words, is it?" said Peter Blood. "Oh - not guilty." And he went on, addressing himself to the bench. "On this same subject of words, may it please your lordships, I am guilty of nothing to justify any of those words I have heard used to describe me, unless it be of a want of patience at having been closely confined for two months and longer in a foetid gaol with great peril to my health and even life." Being started, he would have added a deal more; but at this point the Lord Chief Justice interposed in a gentle, rather plaintive voice. "Look you, sir: because we must observe the common and usual methods of trial, I must interrupt you now. You are no doubt ignorant of the forms of law?" "Not only ignorant, my lord, but hitherto most happy in that ignorance. I could gladly have forgone this acquaintance with them." A pale smile momentarily lightened the wistful countenance. "I believe you. You shall be fully heard when you come to your defence. |
| 1012 |
He interlarded his address by sycophantic allusions to his natural lord and lawful sovereign, the King, whom God had set over them, and with vituperations of Nonconformity and of Monmouth, of whom - in his own words - he dared boldly affirm that the meanest subject within the kingdom that was of legitimate birth had a better title to the crown. "Jesus God! That ever we should have such a generation of vipers among us," he burst out in rhetorical frenzy. And then he sank back as if exhausted by the violence he had used. A moment he was still, dabbing his lips again; then he moved uneasily; once more his features were twisted by pain, and in a few snarling, almost incoherent words he dismissed the jury to consider the verdict. Peter Blood had listened to the intemperate, the blasphemous, and almost obscene invective of that tirade with a detachment that afterwards, in retrospect, surprised him. He was so amazed by the man, by the reactions taking place in him between mind and body, and by his methods of bullying and coercing the jury into bloodshed, that he almost forgot that his own life was at stake. The absence of that dazed jury was a brief one. The verdict found the three prisoners guilty. Peter Blood looked round the scarlet-hung court. For an instant that foam of white faces seemed to heave before him. Then he was himself again, and a voice was asking him what he had to say for himself, why sentence of death should not be passed upon him, being convicted of high treason. He laughed, and his laugh jarred uncannily upon the deathly stillness of the court. It was all so grotesque, such a mockery of justice administered by that wistful-eyed jack-pudding in scarlet, who was himself a mockery - the venal instrument of a brutally spiteful and vindictive king. His laughter shocked the austerity of that same jack-pudding. "Do you laugh, sirrah, with the rope about your neck, upon the very threshold of that eternity you are so suddenly to enter into?" And then Blood took his revenge. "Faith, it's in better case I am for mirth than your lordship. For I have this to say before you deliver judgment. Your lordship sees me - an innocent man whose only offence is that I practised charity - with a halter round my neck. Your lordship, being the justiciar, speaks with knowledge of what is to come to me. I, being a physician, may speak with knowledge of what is to come to your lordship. And I tell you that I would not now change places with you - that I would not exchange this halter that you fling about my neck for the stone that you carry in your body. The death to which you may doom me is a light pleasantry by contrast with the death to which your lordship has been doomed by that Great Judge with whose name your lordship makes so free." The Lord Chief Justice sat stiffly upright, his face ashen, his lips twitching, and whilst you might have counted ten there was no sound in that paralyzed court after Peter Blood had finished speaking. All those who knew Lord Jeffreys regarded this as the lull before the storm, and braced themselves for the explosion. |
| 1013 |
These prisoners were to be transported at once to His Majesty's southern plantations, and to be kept there for the space of ten years before being restored to liberty, the parties to whom they were assigned entering into security to see that transportation was immediately effected. We know from Lord Jeffreys's secretary how the Chief Justice inveighed that night in drunken frenzy against this misplaced clemency to which His Majesty had been persuaded. We know how he attempted by letter to induce the King to reconsider his decision. But James adhered to it. It was - apart from the indirect profit he derived from it - a clemency full worthy of him. He knew that to spare lives in this fashion was to convert them into living deaths. Many must succumb in torment to the horrors of West Indian slavery, and so be the envy of their surviving companions. Thus it happened that Peter Blood, and with him Jeremy Pitt and Andrew Baynes, instead of being hanged, drawn, and quartered as their sentences directed, were conveyed to Bristol and there shipped with some fifty others aboard the Jamaica Merchant. From close confinement under hatches, ill-nourishment and foul water, a sickness broke out amongst them, of which eleven died. Amongst these was the unfortunate yeoman from Oglethorpe's Farm, brutally torn from his quiet homestead amid the fragrant cider orchards for no other sin but that he had practised mercy. The mortality might have been higher than it was but for Peter Blood. At first the master of the Jamaica Merchant had answered with oaths and threats the doctor's expostulations against permitting men to perish in this fashion, and his insistence that he should be made free of the medicine chest and given leave to minister to the sick. But presently Captain Gardner came to see that he might be brought to task for these too heavy losses of human merchandise and because of this he was belatedly glad to avail himself of the skill of Peter Blood. The doctor went to work zealously and zestfully, and wrought so ably that, by his ministrations and by improving the condition of his fellow-captives, he checked the spread of the disease. Towards the middle of December the Jamaica Merchant dropped anchor in Carlisle Bay, and put ashore the forty-two surviving rebels-convict. If these unfortunates had imagined - as many of them appear to have done - that they were coming into some wild, savage country, the prospect, of which they had a glimpse before they were hustled over the ship's side into the waiting boats, was enough to correct the impression. They beheld a town of sufficiently imposing proportions composed of houses built upon European notions of architecture, but without any of the huddle usual in European cities. The spire of a church rose dominantly above the red roofs, a fort guarded the entrance of the wide harbour, with guns thrusting their muzzles between the crenels, and the wide facade of Government House revealed itself dominantly placed on a gentle hill above the town. |
| 1014 |
This hill was vividly green as is an English hill in April, and the day was such a day as April gives to England, the season of heavy rains being newly ended. On a wide cobbled space on the sea front they found a guard of red-coated militia drawn up to receive them, and a crowd - attracted by their arrival - which in dress and manner differed little from a crowd in a seaport at home save that it contained fewer women and a great number of negroes. To inspect them, drawn up there on the mole, came Governor Steed, a short, stout, red-faced gentleman, in blue taffetas burdened by a prodigious amount of gold lace, who limped a little and leaned heavily upon a stout ebony cane. After him, in the uniform of a colonel of the Barbados Militia, rolled a tall, corpulent man who towered head and shoulders above the Governor, with malevolence plainly written on his enormous yellowish countenance. At his side, and contrasting oddly with his grossness, moving with an easy stripling grace, came a slight young lady in a modish riding-gown. The broad brim of a grey hat with scarlet sweep of ostrich plume shaded an oval face upon which the climate of the Tropic of Cancer had made no impression, so delicately fair was its complexion. Ringlets of red-brown hair hung to her shoulders. Frankness looked out from her hazel eyes which were set wide; commiseration repressed now the mischievousness that normally inhabited her fresh young mouth. Peter Blood caught himself staring in a sort of amazement at that piquant face, which seemed here so out of place, and finding his stare returned, he shifted uncomfortably. He grew conscious of the sorry figure that he cut. Unwashed, with rank and matted hair and a disfiguring black beard upon his face, and the erstwhile splendid suit of black camlet in which he had been taken prisoner now reduced to rags that would have disgraced a scarecrow, he was in no case for inspection by such dainty eyes as these. Nevertheless, they continued to inspect him with round-eyed, almost childlike wonder and pity. Their owner put forth a hand to touch the scarlet sleeve of her companion, whereupon with an ill-tempered grunt the man swung his great bulk round so that he directly confronted her. Looking up into his face, she was speaking to him earnestly, but the Colonel plainly gave her no more than the half of his attention. His little beady eyes, closely flanking a fleshly, pendulous nose, had passed from her and were fixed upon fair-haired, sturdy young Pitt, who was standing beside Blood. The Governor had also come to a halt, and for a moment now that little group of three stood in conversation. What the lady said, Peter could not hear at all, for she lowered her voice; the Colonel's reached him in a confused rumble, but the Governor was neither considerate nor indistinct; he had a high-pitched voice which carried far, and believing himself witty, he desired to be heard by all. "But, my dear Colonel Bishop, it is for you to take first choice from this dainty nosegay, and at your own price. |
| 1015 |
She was attended by two negroes who trotted after her at a respectful distance, and her destination was Government House, whither she went to visit the Governor's lady, who had lately been ailing. Reaching the summit of a gentle, grassy slope, she met a tall, lean man dressed in a sober, gentlemanly fashion, who was walking in the opposite direction. He was a stranger to her, and strangers were rare enough in the island. And yet in some vague way he did not seem quite a stranger. Miss Arabella drew rein, affecting to pause that she might admire the prospect, which was fair enough to warrant it. Yet out of the corner of those hazel eyes she scanned this fellow very attentively as he came nearer. She corrected her first impression of his dress. It was sober enough, but hardly gentlemanly. Coat and breeches were of plain homespun; and if the former sat so well upon him it was more by virtue of his natural grace than by that of tailoring. His stockings were of cotton, harsh and plain, and the broad castor, which he respectfully doffed as he came up with her, was an old one unadorned by band or feather. What had seemed to be a periwig at a little distance was now revealed for the man's own lustrous coiling black hair. Out of a brown, shaven, saturnine face two eyes that were startlingly blue considered her gravely. The man would have passed on but that she detained him. "I think I know you, sir," said she. Her voice was crisp and boyish, and there was something of boyishness in her manner - if one can apply the term to so dainty a lady. It arose perhaps from an ease, a directness, which disdained the artifices of her sex, and set her on good terms with all the world. To this it may be due that Miss Arabella had reached the age of five and twenty not merely unmarried but unwooed. She used with all men a sisterly frankness which in itself contains a quality of aloofness, rendering it difficult for any man to become her lover. Her negroes had halted at some distance in the rear, and they squatted now upon the short grass until it should be her pleasure to proceed upon her way. The stranger came to a standstill upon being addressed. "A lady should know her own property," said he. "My property?" "Your uncle's, leastways. Let me present myself. I am called Peter Blood, and I am worth precisely ten pounds. I know it because that is the sum your uncle paid for me. It is not every man has the same opportunities of ascertaining his real value." She recognized him then. She had not seen him since that day upon the mole a month ago, and that she should not instantly have known him again despite the interest he had then aroused in her is not surprising, considering the change he had wrought in his appearance, which now was hardly that of a slave. "My God!" said she. "And you can laugh!" "It's an achievement," he admitted. "But then, I have not fared as ill as I might." "I have heard of that," said she. What she had heard was that this rebel-convict had been discovered to be a physician. |
| 1016 |
Daily he came to think more of his clipped wings, of his exclusion from the world, and less of the fortuitous liberty he enjoyed. Nor did the contrasting of his comparatively easy lot with that of his unfortunate fellow-convicts bring him the satisfaction a differently constituted mind might have derived from it. Rather did the contemplation of their misery increase the bitterness that was gathering in his soul. Of the forty-two who had been landed with him from the Jamaica Merchant, Colonel Bishop had purchased no less than twenty-five. The remainder had gone to lesser planters, some of them to Speightstown, and others still farther north. What may have been the lot of the latter he could not tell, but amongst Bishop's slaves Peter Blood came and went freely, sleeping in their quarters, and their lot he knew to be a brutalizing misery. They toiled in the sugar plantations from sunrise to sunset, and if their labours flagged, there were the whips of the overseer and his men to quicken them. They went in rags, some almost naked; they dwelt in squalor, and they were ill-nourished on salted meat and maize dumplings food which to many of them was for a season at least so nauseating that two of them sickened and died before Bishop remembered that their lives had a certain value in labour to him and yielded to Blood's intercessions for a better care of such as fell ill. To curb insubordination, one of them who had rebelled against Kent, the brutal overseer, was lashed to death by negroes under his comrades' eyes, and another who had been so misguided as to run away into the woods was tracked, brought back, flogged, and then branded on the forehead with the letters "F. T.," that all might know him for a fugitive traitor as long as he lived. Fortunately for him the poor fellow died as a consequence of the flogging. After that a dull, spiritless resignation settled down upon the remainder. The most mutinous were quelled, and accepted their unspeakable lot with the tragic fortitude of despair. Peter Blood alone, escaping these excessive sufferings, remained outwardly unchanged, whilst inwardly the only change in him was a daily deeper hatred of his kind, a daily deeper longing to escape from this place where man defiled so foully the lovely work of his Creator. It was a longing too vague to amount to a hope. Hope here was inadmissible. And yet he did not yield to despair. He set a mask of laughter on his saturnine countenance and went his way, treating the sick to the profit of Colonel Bishop, and encroaching further and further upon the preserves of the two other men of medicine in Bridgetown. Immune from the degrading punishments and privations of his fellow-convicts, he was enabled to keep his self-respect, and was treated without harshness even by the soulless planter to whom he had been sold. He owed it all to gout and megrims. He had won the esteem of Governor Steed, and - what is even more important - of Governor Steed's lady, whom he shamelessly and cynically flattered and humoured. |
| 1017 |
Occasionally he saw Miss Bishop, and they seldom met but that she paused to hold him in conversation for some moments, evincing her interest in him. Himself, he was never disposed to linger. He was not, he told himself, to be deceived by her delicate exterior, her sapling grace, her easy, boyish ways and pleasant, boyish voice. In all his life - and it had been very varied - he had never met a man whom he accounted more beastly than her uncle, and he could not dissociate her from the man. She was his niece, of his own blood, and some of the vices of it, some of the remorseless cruelty of the wealthy planter must, he argued, inhabit that pleasant body of hers. He argued this very often to himself, as if answering and convincing some instinct that pleaded otherwise, and arguing it he avoided her when it was possible, and was frigidly civil when it was not. Justifiable as his reasoning was, plausible as it may seem, yet he would have done better to have trusted the instinct that was in conflict with it. Though the same blood ran in her veins as in those of Colonel Bishop, yet hers was free of the vices that tainted her uncle's, for these vices were not natural to that blood; they were, in his case, acquired. Her father, Tom Bishop - that same Colonel Bishop's brother - had been a kindly, chivalrous, gentle soul, who, broken-hearted by the early death of a young wife, had abandoned the Old World and sought an anodyne for his grief in the New. He had come out to the Antilles, bringing with him his little daughter, then five years of age, and had given himself up to the life of a planter. He had prospered from the first, as men sometimes will who care nothing for prosperity. Prospering, he had bethought him of his younger brother, a soldier at home reputed somewhat wild. He had advised him to come out to Barbados; and the advice, which at another season William Bishop might have scorned, reached him at a moment when his wildness was beginning to bear such fruit that a change of climate was desirable. William came, and was admitted by his generous brother to a partnership in the prosperous plantation. Some six years later, when Arabella was fifteen, her father died, leaving her in her uncle's guardianship. It was perhaps his one mistake. But the goodness of his own nature coloured his views of other men; moreover, himself, he had conducted the education of his daughter, giving her an independence of character upon which perhaps he counted unduly. As things were, there was little love between uncle and niece. But she was dutiful to him, and he was circumspect in his behaviour before her. All his life, and for all his wildness, he had gone in a certain awe of his brother, whose worth he had the wit to recognize; and now it was almost as if some of that awe was transferred to his brother's child, who was also, in a sense, his partner, although she took no active part in the business of the plantations. Peter Blood judged her - as we are all too prone to judge - upon insufficient knowledge. |
| 1018 |
He was very soon to have cause to correct that judgment. One day towards the end of May, when the heat was beginning to grow oppressive, there crawled into Carlisle Bay a wounded, battered English ship, the Pride of Devon, her freeboard scarred and broken, her coach a gaping wreck, her mizzen so shot away that only a jagged stump remained to tell the place where it had stood. She had been in action off Martinique with two Spanish treasure ships, and although her captain swore that the Spaniards had beset him without provocation, it is difficult to avoid a suspicion that the encounter had been brought about quite otherwise. One of the Spaniards had fled from the combat, and if the Pride of Devon had not given chase it was probably because she was by then in no case to do so. The other had been sunk, but not before the English ship had transferred to her own hold a good deal of the treasure aboard the Spaniard. It was, in fact, one of those piratical affrays which were a perpetual source of trouble between the courts of St. James's and the Escurial, complaints emanating now from one and now from the other side. Steed, however, after the fashion of most Colonial governors, was willing enough to dull his wits to the extent of accepting the English seaman's story, disregarding any evidence that might belie it. He shared the hatred so richly deserved by arrogant, overbearing Spain that was common to men of every other nation from the Bahamas to the Main. Therefore he gave the Pride of Devon the shelter she sought in his harbour and every facility to careen and carry out repairs. But before it came to this, they fetched from her hold over a score of English seamen as battered and broken as the ship herself, and together with these some half-dozen Spaniards in like case, the only survivors of a boarding party from the Spanish galleon that had invaded the English ship and found itself unable to retreat. These wounded men were conveyed to a long shed on the wharf, and the medical skill of Bridgetown was summoned to their aid. Peter Blood was ordered to bear a hand in this work, and partly because he spoke Castilian - and he spoke it as fluently as his own native tongue - partly because of his inferior condition as a slave, he was given the Spaniards for his patients. Now Blood had no cause to love Spaniards. His two years in a Spanish prison and his subsequent campaigning in the Spanish Netherlands had shown him a side of the Spanish character which he had found anything but admirable. Nevertheless he performed his doctor's duties zealously and painstakingly, if emotionlessly, and even with a certain superficial friendliness towards each of his patients. These were so surprised at having their wounds healed instead of being summarily hanged that they manifested a docility very unusual in their kind. They were shunned, however, by all those charitably disposed inhabitants of Bridgetown who flocked to the improvised hospital with gifts of fruit and flowers and delicacies for the injured English seamen. |
| 1019 |
What I cannot do, they cannot." "There are others detained on the island besides slaves. There are several who are here for debt, and would be glad enough to spread their wings. There's a fellow Nuttall, now, who follows the trade of a shipwright, whom I happen to know would welcome such a chance as you might afford him." "But how should a debtor come with money to buy a boat? The question will be asked." "To be sure it will. But if you contrive shrewdly, you'll all be gone before that happens." Blood nodded understanding, and the doctor, setting a hand upon his sleeve, unfolded the scheme he had conceived. "You shall have the money from me at once. Having received it, you'll forget that it was I who supplied it to you. You have friends in England - relatives, perhaps - who sent it out to you through the agency of one of your Bridgetown patients, whose name as a man of honour you will on no account divulge lest you bring trouble upon him. That is your tale if there are questions." He paused, looking hard at Blood. Blood nodded understanding and assent. Relieved, the doctor continued: "But there should be no questions if you go carefully to work. You concert matters With Nuttall. You enlist him as one of your companions and a shipwright should be a very useful member of your crew. You engage him to discover a likely sloop whose owner is disposed to sell. Then let your preparations all be made before the purchase is effected, so that your escape may follow instantly upon it before the inevitable questions come to be asked. You take me?" So well did Blood take him that within an hour he contrived to see Nuttall, and found the fellow as disposed to the business as Dr. Whacker had predicted. When he left the shipwright, it was agreed that Nuttall should seek the boat required, for which Blood would at once produce the money. The quest took longer than was expected by Blood, who waited impatiently with the doctor's gold concealed about his person. But at the end of some three weeks, Nuttall - whom he was now meeting daily - informed him that he had found a serviceable wherry, and that its owner was disposed to sell it for twenty-two pounds. That evening, on the beach, remote from all eyes, Peter Blood handed that sum to his new associate, and Nuttall went off with instructions to complete the purchase late on the following day. He was to bring the boat to the wharf, where under cover of night Blood and his fellow-convicts would join him and make off. Everything was ready. In the shed, from which all the wounded men had now been removed and which had since remained untenanted, Nuttall had concealed the necessary stores: a hundredweight of bread, a quantity of cheese, a cask of water and some few bottles of Canary, a compass, quadrant, chart, half-hour glass, log and line, a tarpaulin, some carpenter's tools, and a lantern and candles. And in the stockade, all was likewise in readiness. Hagthorpe, Dyke, and Ogle had agreed to join the venture, and eight others had been carefully recruited. |
| 1020 |
He chose for his objective the island of Barbados, whose natural strength was apt to render her defenders careless. He chose it also because thither had the Pride of Devon been tracked by his scouts, and he desired a measure of poetic justice to invest his vengeance. And he chose a moment when there were no ships of war at anchor in Carlisle Bay. He had succeeded so well in his intentions that he had aroused no suspicion until he saluted the fort at short range with a broadside of twenty guns. And now the four gaping watchers in the stockade on the headland beheld the great ship creep forward under the rising cloud of smoke, her mainsail unfurled to increase her steering way, and go about close-hauled to bring her larboard guns to bear upon the unready fort. With the crashing roar of that second broadside, Colonel Bishop awoke from stupefaction to a recollection of where his duty lay. In the town below drums were beating frantically, and a trumpet was bleating, as if the peril needed further advertising. As commander of the Barbados Militia, the place of Colonel Bishop was at the head of his scanty troops, in that fort which the Spanish guns were pounding into rubble. Remembering it, he went off at the double, despite his bulk and the heat, his negroes trotting after him. Mr. Blood turned to Jeremy Pitt. He laughed grimly. "Now that," said he, "is what I call a timely interruption. Though what'll come of it," he added as an afterthought, "the devil himself knows." As a third broadside was thundering forth, he picked up the palmetto leaf and carefully replaced it on the back of his fellow-slave. And then into the stockade, panting and sweating, came Kent followed by best part of a score of plantation workers, some of whom were black and all of whom were in a state of panic. He led them into the low white house, to bring them forth again, within a moment, as it seemed, armed now with muskets and hangers and some of them equipped with bandoleers. By this time the rebels-convict were coming in, in twos and threes, having abandoned their work upon finding themselves unguarded and upon scenting the general dismay. Kent paused a moment, as his hastily armed guard dashed forth, to fling an order to those slaves. "To the woods!" he bade them. "Take to the woods, and lie close there, until this is over, and we've gutted these Spanish swine." On that he went off in haste after his men, who were to be added to those massing in the town, so as to oppose and overwhelm the Spanish landing parties. The slaves would have obeyed him on the instant but for Mr. Blood. "What need for haste, and in this heat?" quoth he. He was surprisingly cool, they thought. "Maybe there'll be no need to take to the woods at all, and, anyway, it will be time enough to do so when the Spaniards are masters of the town." And so, joined now by the other stragglers, and numbering in all a round score - rebels-convict all - they stayed to watch from their vantage-ground the fortunes of the furious battle that was being waged below. |
| 1021 |
The landing was contested by the militia and by every islander capable of bearing arms with the fierce resoluteness of men who knew that no quarter was to be expected in defeat. The ruthlessness of Spanish soldiery was a byword, and not at his worst had Morgan or L'Ollonais ever perpetrated such horrors as those of which these Castilian gentlemen were capable. But this Spanish commander knew his business, which was more than could truthfully be said for the Barbados Militia. Having gained the advantage of a surprise blow, which had put the fort out of action, he soon showed them that he was master of the situation. His guns turned now upon the open space behind the mole, where the incompetent Bishop had marshalled his men, tore the militia into bloody rags, and covered the landing parties which were making the shore in their own boats and in several of those which had rashly gone out to the great ship before her identity was revealed. All through the scorching afternoon the battle went on, the rattle and crack of musketry penetrating ever deeper into the town to show that the defenders were being driven steadily back. By sunset two hundred and fifty Spaniards were masters of Bridgetown, the islanders were disarmed, and at Government House, Governor Steed - his gout forgotten in his panic - supported by Colonel Bishop and some lesser officers, was being informed by Don Diego, with an urbanity that was itself a mockery, of the sum that would be required in ransom. For a hundred thousand pieces of eight and fifty head of cattle, Don Diego would forbear from reducing the place to ashes. And what time that suave and courtly commander was settling these details with the apoplectic British Governor, the Spaniards were smashing and looting, feasting, drinking, and ravaging after the hideous manner of their kind. Mr. Blood, greatly daring, ventured down at dusk into the town. What he saw there is recorded by Jeremy Pitt to whom he subsequently related it - in that voluminous log from which the greater part of my narrative is derived. I have no intention of repeating any of it here. It is all too loathsome and nauseating, incredible, indeed, that men however abandoned could ever descend such an abyss of bestial cruelty and lust. What he saw was fetching him in haste and white-faced out of that hell again, when in a narrow street a girl hurtled into him, wild-eyed, her unbound hair streaming behind her as she ran. After her, laughing and cursing in a breath, came a heavy-booted Spaniard. Almost he was upon her, when suddenly Mr. Blood got in his way. The doctor had taken a sword from a dead man's side some little time before and armed himself with it against an emergency. As the Spaniard checked in anger and surprise, he caught in the dusk the livid gleam of that sword which Mr. Blood had quickly unsheathed. "Ah, perro ingles!" he shouted, and flung forward to his death. "It's hoping I am ye're in a fit state to meet your Maker," said Mr. Blood, and ran him through the body. |
| 1022 |
Mr. Blood's absence was brief. When he rejoined his comrades there was no watch above the Spaniards' decks. Meanwhile the revellers below continued to make merry at their ease in the conviction of complete security. The garrison of Barbados was overpowered and disarmed, and their companions were ashore in complete possession of the town, glutting themselves hideously upon the fruits of victory. What, then, was there to fear? Even when their quarters were invaded and they found themselves surrounded by a score of wild, hairy, half-naked men, who - save that they appeared once to have been white - looked like a horde of savages, the Spaniards could not believe their eyes. Who could have dreamed that a handful of forgotten plantation-slaves would have dared to take so much upon themselves? The half-drunken Spaniards, their laughter suddenly quenched, the song perishing on their lips, stared, stricken and bewildered at the levelled muskets by which they were checkmated. And then, from out of this uncouth pack of savages that beset them, stepped a slim, tall fellow with light-blue eyes in a tawny face, eyes in which glinted the light of a wicked humour. He addressed them in the purest Castilian. "You will save yourselves pain and trouble by regarding yourselves my prisoners, and suffering yourselves to be quietly bestowed out of harm's way." "Name of God!" swore the gunner, which did no justice at all to an amazement beyond expression. "If you please," said Mr. Blood, and thereupon those gentlemen of Spain were induced without further trouble beyond a musket prod or two to drop through a scuttle to the deck below. After that the rebels-convict refreshed themselves with the good things in the consumption of which they had interrupted the Spaniards. To taste palatable Christian food after months of salt fish and maize dumplings was in itself a feast to these unfortunates. But there were no excesses. Mr. Blood saw to that, although it required all the firmness of which he was capable. Dispositions were to be made without delay against that which must follow before they could abandon themselves fully to the enjoyment of their victory. This, after all, was no more than a preliminary skirmish, although it was one that afforded them the key to the situation. It remained to dispose so that the utmost profit might be drawn from it. Those dispositions occupied some very considerable portion of the night. But, at least, they were complete before the sun peeped over the shoulder of Mount Hilibay to shed his light upon a day of some surprises. It was soon after sunrise that the rebel-convict who paced the quarter-deck in Spanish corselet and headpiece, a Spanish musket on his shoulder, announced the approach of a boat. It was Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez coming aboard with four great treasure-chests, containing each twenty-five thousand pieces of eight, the ransom delivered to him at dawn by Governor Steed. He was accompanied by his son, Don Esteban, and by six men who took the oars. |
| 1023 |
Plump into their middle came a third shot, smashing a second boat with fearful execution. Followed again a moment of awful silence, then among those Spanish pirates all was gibbering and jabbering and splashing of oars, as they attempted to pull in every direction at once. Some were for going ashore, others for heading straight to the vessel and there discovering what might be amiss. That something was very gravely amiss there could be no further doubt, particularly as whilst they discussed and fumed and cursed two more shots came over the water to account for yet a third of their boats. The resolute Ogle was making excellent practice, and fully justifying his claims to know something of gunnery. In their consternation the Spaniards had simplified his task by huddling their boats together. After the fourth shot, opinion was no longer divided amongst them. As with one accord they went about, or attempted to do so, for before they had accomplished it two more of their boats had been sunk. The three boats that remained, without concerning themselves with their more unfortunate fellows, who were struggling in the water, headed back for the wharf at speed. If the Spaniards understood nothing of all this, the forlorn islanders ashore understood still less, until to help their wits they saw the flag of Spain come down from the mainmast of the Cinco Llagas, and the flag of England soar to its empty place. Even then some bewilderment persisted, and it was with fearful eyes that they observed the return of their enemies, who might vent upon them the ferocity aroused by these extraordinary events. Ogle, however, continued to give proof that his knowledge of gunnery was not of yesterday. After the fleeing Spaniards went his shots. The last of their boats flew into splinters as it touched the wharf, and its remains were buried under a shower of loosened masonry. That was the end of this pirate crew, which not ten minutes ago had been laughingly counting up the pieces of eight that would fall to the portion of each for his share in that act of villainy. Close upon threescore survivors contrived to reach the shore. Whether they had cause for congratulation, I am unable to say in the absence of any records in which their fate may be traced. That lack of records is in itself eloquent. We know that they were made fast as they landed, and considering the offence they had given I am not disposed to doubt that they had every reason to regret the survival. The mystery of the succour that had come at the eleventh hour to wreak vengeance upon the Spaniards, and to preserve for the island the extortionate ransom of a hundred thousand pieces of eight, remained yet to be probed. That the Cinco Llagas was now in friendly hands could no longer be doubted after the proofs it had given. But who, the people of Bridgetown asked one another, were the men in possession of her, and whence had they come? The only possible assumption ran the truth very closely. A resolute party of islanders must have got aboard during the night, and seized the ship. |
| 1024 |
It was entirely to the fact that the Colonel was her uncle, although he did not even begin to suspect such a cause, that he owed such mercy as was now being shown him. "You shall have a chance to swim for it," Peter Blood continued. "It's not above a quarter of a mile to the headland yonder, and with ordinary luck ye should manage it. Faith, you're fat enough to float. Come on! Now, don't be hesitating or it's a long voyage ye'll be going with us, and the devil knows what may happen to you. You're not loved any more than you deserve." Colonel Bishop mastered himself, and rose. A merciless despot, who had never known the need for restraint in all these years, he was doomed by ironic fate to practise restraint in the very moment when his feelings had reached their most violent intensity. Peter Blood gave an order. A plank was run out over the gunwale, and lashed down. "If you please, Colonel," said he, with a graceful flourish of invitation. The Colonel looked at him, and there was hell in his glance. Then, taking his resolve, and putting the best face upon it, since no other could help him here, he kicked off his shoes, peeled off his fine coat of biscuit-coloured taffetas, and climbed upon the plank. A moment he paused, steadied by a hand that clutched the ratlines, looking down in terror at the green water rushing past some five-and-twenty feet below. "Just take a little walk, Colonel, darling," said a smooth, mocking voice behind him. Still clinging, Colonel Bishop looked round in hesitation, and saw the bulwarks lined with swarthy faces - the faces of men that as lately as yesterday would have turned pale under his frown, faces that were now all wickedly agrin. For a moment rage stamped out his fear. He cursed them aloud venomously and incoherently, then loosed his hold and stepped out upon the plank. Three steps he took before he lost his balance and went tumbling into the green depths below. When he came to the surface again, gasping for air, the Cinco Llagas was already some furlongs to leeward. But the roaring cheer of mocking valediction from the rebels-convict reached him across the water, to drive the iron of impotent rage deeper into his soul. Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez awoke, and with languid eyes in aching head, he looked round the cabin, which was flooded with sunlight from the square windows astern. Then he uttered a moan, and closed his eyes again, impelled to this by the monstrous ache in his head. Lying thus, he attempted to think, to locate himself in time and space. But between the pain in his head and the confusion in his mind, he found coherent thought impossible. An indefinite sense of alarm drove him to open his eyes again, and once more to consider his surroundings. There could be no doubt that he lay in the great cabin of his own ship, the Cinco Llagas, so that his vague disquiet must be, surely, ill-founded. And yet, stirrings of memory coming now to the assistance of reflection, compelled him uneasily to insist that here something was not as it should be. |
| 1025 |
"I realize that even a pirate has his honour." And forthwith he propounded his offer. "If you will look from those windows, Don Diego, you will see what appears to be a cloud on the horizon. That is the island of Barbados well astern. All day we have been sailing east before the wind with but one intent - to set as great a distance between Barbados and ourselves as possible. But now, almost out of sight of land, we are in a difficulty. The only man among us schooled in the art of navigation is fevered, delirious, in fact, as a result of certain ill-treatment he received ashore before we carried him away with us. I can handle a ship in action, and there are one or two men aboard who can assist me; but of the higher mysteries of seamanship and of the art of finding a way over the trackless wastes of ocean, we know nothing. To hug the land, and go blundering about what you so aptly call this pestilent archipelago, is for us to court disaster, as you can perhaps conceive. And so it comes to this: We desire to make for the Dutch settlement of Curacao as straightly as possible. Will you pledge me your honour, if I release you upon parole, that you will navigate us thither? If so, we will release you and your surviving men upon arrival there." Don Diego bowed his head upon his breast, and strode away in thought to the stern windows. There he stood looking out upon the sunlit sea and the dead water in the great ship's wake - his ship, which these English dogs had wrested from him; his ship, which he was asked to bring safely into a port where she would be completely lost to him and refitted perhaps to make war upon his kin. That was in one scale; in the other were the lives of sixteen men. Fourteen of them mattered little to him, but the remaining two were his own and his son's. He turned at length, and his back being to the light, the Captain could not see how pale his face had grown. "I accept," he said. By virtue of the pledge he had given, Don Diego de Espinosa enjoyed the freedom of the ship that had been his, and the navigation which he had undertaken was left entirely in his hands. And because those who manned her were new to the seas of the Spanish Main, and because even the things that had happened in Bridgetown were not enough to teach them to regard every Spaniard as a treacherous, cruel dog to be slain at sight, they used him with the civility which his own suave urbanity invited. He took his meals in the great cabin with Blood and the three officers elected to support him: Hagthorpe, Wolverstone, and Dyke. They found Don Diego an agreeable, even an amusing companion, and their friendly feeling towards him was fostered by his fortitude and brave equanimity in this adversity. That Don Diego was not playing fair it was impossible to suspect. Moreover, there was no conceivable reason why he should not. And he had been of the utmost frankness with them. He had denounced their mistake in sailing before the wind upon leaving Barbados. They should have left the island to leeward, heading into the Caribbean and away from the archipelago. |
| 1026 |
"To the roundhouse, some of you, and fetch the Spanish prisoners. And you, Dyke, go up and bid them set the flag of Spain aloft." Don Diego, with his body stretched in an arc across the cannon's mouth, legs and arms lashed to the carriage on either side of it, eyeballs rolling in his head, glared maniacally at Captain Blood. A man may not fear to die, and yet be appalled by the form in which death comes to him. From frothing lips he hurled blasphemies and insults at his tormentor. "Foul barbarian! Inhuman savage! Accursed heretic! Will it not content you to kill me in some Christian fashion?" Captain Blood vouchsafed him a malignant smile, before he turned to meet the fifteen manacled Spanish prisoners, who were thrust into his presence. Approaching, they had heard Don Diego's outcries; at close quarters now they beheld with horror-stricken eyes his plight. From amongst them a comely, olive-skinned stripling, distinguished in bearing and apparel from his companions, started forward with an anguished cry of "Father!" Writhing in the arms that made haste to seize and hold him, he called upon heaven and hell to avert this horror, and lastly, addressed to Captain Blood an appeal for mercy that was at once fierce and piteous. Considering him, Captain Blood thought with satisfaction that he displayed the proper degree of filial piety. He afterwards confessed that for a moment he was in danger of weakening, that for a moment his mind rebelled against the pitiless thing it had planned. But to correct the sentiment he evoked a memory of what these Spaniards had performed in Bridgetown. Again he saw the white face of that child Mary Traill as she fled in horror before the jeering ruffian whom he had slain, and other things even more unspeakable seen on that dreadful evening rose now before the eyes of his memory to stiffen his faltering purpose. The Spaniards had shown themselves without mercy or sentiment or decency of any kind; stuffed with religion, they were without a spark of that Christianity, the Symbol of which was mounted on the mainmast of the approaching ship. A moment ago this cruel, vicious Don Diego had insulted the Almighty by his assumption that He kept a specially benevolent watch over the destinies of Catholic Spain. Don Diego should be taught his error. Recovering the cynicism in which he had approached his task, the cynicism essential to its proper performance, he commanded Ogle to kindle a match and remove the leaden apron from the touch-hole of the gun that bore Don Diego. Then, as the younger Espinosa broke into fresh intercessions mingled with imprecations, he wheeled upon him sharply. "Peace!" he snapped. "Peace, and listen! It is no part of my intention to blow your father to hell as he deserves, or indeed to take his life at all." Having surprised the lad into silence by that promise - a promise surprising enough in all the circumstances - he proceeded to explain his aims in that faultless and elegant Castilian of which he was fortunately master - as fortunately for Don Diego as for himself. |
| 1027 |
"It is your father's treachery that has brought us into this plight and deliberately into risk of capture and death aboard that ship of Spain. Just as your father recognized his brother's flagship, so will his brother have recognized the Cinco Llagas. So far, then, all is well. But presently the Encarnacion will be sufficiently close to perceive that here all is not as it should be. Sooner or later, she must guess or discover what is wrong, and then she will open fire or lay us board and board. Now, we are in no case to fight, as your father knew when he ran us into this trap. But fight we will, if we are driven to it. We make no tame surrender to the ferocity of Spain." He laid his hand on the breech of the gun that bore Don Diego. "Understand this clearly: to the first shot from the Encarnacion this gun will fire the answer. I make myself clear, I hope?" White-faced and trembling, young Espinosa stared into the pitiless blue eyes that so steadily regarded him. "If it is clear?" he faltered, breaking the utter silence in which all were standing. "But, name of God, how should it be clear? How should I understand? Can you avert the fight? If you know a way, and if I, or these, can help you to it - if that is what you mean - in Heaven's name let me hear it." "A fight would be averted if Don Diego de Espinosa were to go aboard his brother's ship, and by his presence and assurances inform the Admiral that all is well with the Cinco Llagas, that she is indeed still a ship of Spain as her flag now announces. But of course Don Diego cannot go in person, because he is... otherwise engaged. He has a slight touch of fever - shall we say? - that detains him in his cabin. But you, his son, may convey all this and some other matters together with his homage to your uncle. You shall go in a boat manned by six of these Spanish prisoners, and I - a distinguished Spaniard delivered from captivity in Barbados by your recent raid - will accompany you to keep you in countenance. If I return alive, and without accident of any kind to hinder our free sailing hence, Don Diego shall have his life, as shall every one of you. But if there is the least misadventure, be it from treachery or ill-fortune - I care not which - the battle, as I have had the honour to explain, will be opened on our side by this gun, and your father will be the first victim of the conflict." He paused a moment. There was a hum of approval from his comrades, an anxious stirring among the Spanish prisoners. Young Espinosa stood before him, the colour ebbing and flowing in his cheeks. He waited for some direction from his father. But none came. Don Diego's courage, it seemed, had sadly waned under that rude test. He hung limply in his fearful bonds, and was silent. Evidently he dared not encourage his son to defiance, and presumably was ashamed to urge him to yield. Thus, he left decision entirely with the youth. "Come," said Blood. "I have been clear enough, I think. What do you say?" Don Esteban moistened his parched lips, and with the back of his hand mopped the anguish-sweat from his brow. |
| 1028 |
His eyes gazed wildly a moment upon the shoulders of his father, as if beseeching guidance. But his father remained silent. Something like a sob escaped the boy. "I... I accept," he answered at last, and swung to the Spaniards. "And you - you will accept too," he insisted passionately. "For Don Diego's sake and for your own - for all our sakes. If you do not, this man will butcher us all without mercy." Since he yielded, and their leader himself counselled no resistance, why should they encompass their own destruction by a gesture of futile heroism? They answered without much hesitation that they would do as was required of them. Blood turned, and advanced to Don Diego. "I am sorry to inconvenience you in this fashion, but..." For a second he checked and frowned as his eyes intently observed the prisoner. Then, after that scarcely perceptible pause, he continued, "but I do not think that you have anything beyond this inconvenience to apprehend, and you may depend upon me to shorten it as far as possible." Don Diego made him no answer. Peter Blood waited a moment, observing him; then he bowed and stepped back. The Cinco Llagas and the Encarnacion, after a proper exchange of signals, lay hove to within a quarter of a mile of each other, and across the intervening space of gently heaving, sunlit waters sped a boat from the former, manned by six Spanish seamen and bearing in her stern sheets Don Esteban de Espinosa and Captain Peter Blood. She also bore two treasure-chests containing fifty thousand pieces of eight. Gold has at all times been considered the best of testimonies of good faith, and Blood was determined that in all respects appearances should be entirely on his side. His followers had accounted this a supererogation of pretence. But Blood's will in the matter had prevailed. He carried further a bulky package addressed to a grande of Spain, heavily sealed with the arms of Espinosa - another piece of evidence hastily manufactured in the cabin of the Cinco Llagas - and he was spending these last moments in completing his instructions to his young companion. Don Esteban expressed his last lingering uneasiness: "But if you should betray yourself?" he cried. "It will be unfortunate for everybody. I advised your father to say a prayer for our success. I depend upon you to help me more materially." "I will do my best. God knows I will do my best," the boy protested. Blood nodded thoughtfully, and no more was said until they bumped alongside the towering mass of the Encarnadon. Up the ladder went Don Esteban closely followed by Captain Blood. In the waist stood the Admiral himself to receive them, a handsome, self-sufficient man, very tall and stiff, a little older and greyer than Don Diego, whom he closely resembled. He was supported by four officers and a friar in the black and white habit of St. Dominic. Don Miguel opened his arms to his nephew, whose lingering panic he mistook for pleasurable excitement, and having enfolded him to his bosom turned to greet Don Esteban's companion. |
| 1029 |
One day as he sat with Hagthorpe and Wolverstone over a pipe and a bottle of rum in the stifling reek of tar and stale tobacco of a waterside tavern, he was accosted by a splendid ruffian in a gold-laced coat of dark-blue satin with a crimson sash, a foot wide, about the waist. "C'est vous qu'on appelle Le Sang?" the fellow hailed him. Captain Blood looked up to consider the questioner before replying. The man was tall and built on lines of agile strength, with a swarthy, aquiline face that was brutally handsome. A diamond of great price flamed on the indifferently clean hand resting on the pummel of his long rapier, and there were gold rings in his ears, half-concealed by long ringlets of oily chestnut hair. Captain Blood took the pipe-stem from between his lips. "My name," he said, "is Peter Blood. The Spaniards know me for Don Pedro Sangre and a Frenchman may call me Le Sang if he pleases." "Good," said the gaudy adventurer in English, and without further invitation he drew up a stool and sat down at that greasy table. "My name," he informed the three men, two of whom at least were eyeing him askance, "it is Levasseur. You may have heard of me." They had, indeed. He commanded a privateer of twenty guns that had dropped anchor in the bay a week ago, manned by a crew mainly composed of French boucanhunters from Northern Hispaniola, men who had good cause to hate the Spaniard with an intensity exceeding that of the English. Levasseur had brought them back to Tortuga from an indifferently successful cruise. It would need more, however, than lack of success to abate the fellow's monstrous vanity. A roaring, quarrelsome, hard-drinking, hard-gaming scoundrel, his reputation as a buccaneer stood high among the wild Brethren of the Coast. He enjoyed also a reputation of another sort. There was about his gaudy, swaggering raffishness something that the women found singularly alluring. That he should boast openly of his bonnes fortunes did not seem strange to Captain Blood; what he might have found strange was that there appeared to be some measure of justification for these boasts. It was current gossip that even Mademoiselle d'Ogeron, the Governor's daughter, had been caught in the snare of his wild attractiveness, and that Levasseur had gone the length of audacity of asking her hand in marriage of her father. M. d'Ogeron had made him the only possible answer. He had shown him the door. Levasseur had departed in a rage, swearing that he would make mademoiselle his wife in the teeth of all the fathers in Christendom, and that M. d'Ogeron should bitterly rue the affront he had put upon him. This was the man who now thrust himself upon Captain Blood with a proposal of association, offering him not only his sword, but his ship and the men who sailed in her. A dozen years ago, as a lad of barely twenty, Levasseur had sailed with that monster of cruelty L'Ollonais, and his own subsequent exploits bore witness and did credit to the school in which he had been reared. |
| 1030 |
The Jongvrow veered, showed them her rudder, and opened fire with her stern chasers. The small shot went whistling through La Foudre's shrouds with some slight damage to her canvas. Followed a brief running fight in the course of which the Dutchman let fly a broadside. Five minutes after that they were board and board, the Jongvrow held tight in the clutches of La Foudre's grapnels, and the buccaneers pouring noisily into her waist. The Dutchman's master, purple in the face, stood forward to beard the pirate, followed closely by an elegant, pale-faced young gentleman in whom Levasseur recognized his brother-in-law elect. "Captain Levasseur, this is an outrage for which you shall be made to answer. What do you seek aboard my ship?" "At first I sought only that which belongs to me, something of which I am being robbed. But since you chose war and opened fire on me with some damage to my ship and loss of life to five of my men, why, war it is, and your ship a prize of war." From the quarter rail Mademoiselle d'Ogeron looked down with glowing eyes in breathless wonder upon her well-beloved hero. Gloriously heroic he seemed as he stood towering there, masterful, audacious, beautiful. He saw her, and with a glad shout sprang towards her. The Dutch master got in his way with hands upheld to arrest his progress. Levasseur did not stay to argue with him: he was too impatient to reach his mistress. He swung the poleaxe that he carried, and the Dutchman went down in blood with a cloven skull. The eager lover stepped across the body and came on, his countenance joyously alight. But mademoiselle was shrinking now, in horror. She was a girl upon the threshold of glorious womanhood, of a fine height and nobly moulded, with heavy coils of glossy black hair above and about a face that was of the colour of old ivory. Her countenance was cast in lines of arrogance, stressed by the low lids of her full dark eyes. In a bound her well-beloved was beside her, flinging away his bloody poleaxe, he opened wide his arms to enfold her. But she still shrank even within his embrace, which would not be denied; a look of dread had come to temper the normal arrogance of her almost perfect face. "Mine, mine at last, and in spite of all!" he cried exultantly, theatrically, truly heroic. But she, endeavouring to thrust him back, her hands against his breast, could only falter: "Why, why did you kill him?" He laughed, as a hero should; and answered her heroically, with the tolerance of a god for the mortal to whom he condescends: "He stood between us. Let his death be a symbol, a warning. Let all who would stand between us mark it and beware." It was so splendidly terrific, the gesture of it was so broad and fine and his magnetism so compelling, that she cast her silly tremors and yielded herself freely, intoxicated, to his fond embrace. Thereafter he swung her to his shoulder, and stepping with ease beneath that burden, bore her in a sort of triumph, lustily cheered by his men, to the deck of his own ship. |
| 1031 |
The Dutch were a friendly people whom it was a folly to alienate, particularly for so paltry a matter as these hides and tobacco, which at most would fetch a bare twenty thousand pieces. But Levasseur answered him, as he had answered Cahusac, that a ship was a ship, and it was ships they needed against their projected enterprise. Perhaps because things had gone well with him that day, Blood ended by shrugging the matter aside. Thereupon Levasseur proposed that the Arabella and her prize should return to Tortuga there to unload the cacao and enlist the further adventurers that could now be shipped. Levasseur meanwhile would effect certain necessary repairs, and then proceeding south, await his admiral at Saltatudos, an island conveniently situated - in the latitude of 11 deg. 11' N. - for their enterprise against Maracaybo. To Levasseur's relief, Captain Blood not only agreed, but pronounced himself ready to set sail at once. No sooner had the Arabella departed than Levasseur brought his ships into the lagoon, and set his crew to work upon the erection of temporary quarters ashore for himself, his men, and his enforced guests during the careening and repairing of La Foudre. At sunset that evening the wind freshened; it grew to a gale, and from that to such a hurricane that Levasseur was thankful to find himself ashore and his ships in safe shelter. He wondered a little how it might be faring with Captain Blood out there at the mercy of that terrific storm; but he did not permit concern to trouble him unduly. In the glory of the following morning, sparkling and clear after the storm, with an invigorating, briny tang in the air from the salt-ponds on the south of the island, a curious scene was played on the beach of the Virgen Magra, at the foot of a ridge of bleached dunes, beside the spread of sail from which Levasseur had improvised a tent. Enthroned upon an empty cask sat the French filibuster to transact important business: the business of making himself safe with the Governor of Tortuga. A guard of honour of a half-dozen officers hung about him; five of them were rude boucan-hunters, in stained jerkins and leather breeches; the sixth was Cahusac. Before him, guarded by two half-naked negroes, stood young d'Ogeron, in frilled shirt and satin small-clothes and fine shoes of Cordovan leather. He was stripped of doublet, and his hands were tied behind him. The young gentleman's comely face was haggard. Near at hand, and also under guard, but unpinioned, mademoiselle his sister sat hunched upon a hillock of sand. She was very pale, and it was in vain that she sought to veil in a mask of arrogance the fears by which she was assailed. Levasseur addressed himself to M. d'Ogeron. He spoke at long length. In the end "I trust, monsieur," said he, with mock suavity, "that I have made myself quite clear. So that there may be no misunderstandings, I will recapitulate. Your ransom is fixed at twenty thousand pieces of eight, and you shall have liberty on parole to go to Tortuga to collect it. |
| 1032 |
It was soon over. The brute strength, upon which Levasseur so confidently counted, could avail nothing against the Irishman's practised skill. When, with both lungs transfixed, he lay prone on the white sand, coughing out his rascally life, Captain Blood looked calmly at Cahusac across the body. "I think that cancels the articles between us," he said. With soulless, cynical eyes Cahusac considered the twitching body of his recent leader. Had Levasseur been a man of different temper, the affair might have ended in a very different manner. But, then, it is certain that Captain Blood would have adopted in dealing with him different tactics. As it was, Levasseur commanded neither love nor loyalty. The men who followed him were the very dregs of that vile trade, and cupidity was their only inspiration. Upon that cupidity Captain Blood had deftly played, until he had brought them to find Levasseur guilty of the one offence they deemed unpardonable, the crime of appropriating to himself something which might be converted into gold and shared amongst them all. Thus now the threatening mob of buccaneers that came hastening to the theatre of that swift tragi-comedy were appeased by a dozen words of Cahusac's. Whilst still they hesitated, Blood added something to quicken their decision. "If you will come to our anchorage, you shall receive at once your share of the booty of the Santiago, that you may dispose of it as you please." They crossed the island, the two prisoners accompanying them, and later that day, the division made, they would have parted company but that Cahusac, at the instances of the men who had elected him Levasseur's successor, offered Captain Blood anew the services of that French contingent. "If you will sail with me again," the Captain answered him, "you may do so on the condition that you make your peace with the Dutch, and restore the brig and her cargo." The condition was accepted, and Captain Blood went off to find his guests, the children of the Governor of Tortuga. Mademoiselle d'Ogeron and her brother - the latter now relieved of his bonds - sat in the great cabin of the Arabella, whither they had been conducted. Wine and food had been placed upon the table by Benjamin, Captain Blood's negro steward and cook, who had intimated to them that it was for their entertainment. But it had remained untouched. Brother and sister sat there in agonized bewilderment, conceiving that their escape was but from frying-pan to fire. At length, overwrought by the suspense, mademoiselle flung herself upon her knees before her brother to implore his pardon for all the evil brought upon them by her wicked folly. M. d'Ogeron was not in a forgiving mood. "I am glad that at least you realize what you have done. And now this other filibuster has bought you, and you belong to him. You realize that, too, I hope." He might have said more, but he checked upon perceiving that the door was opening. Captain Blood, coming from settling matters with the followers of Levasseur, stood on the threshold. |
| 1033 |
Cahusac appeared to be having it all his own way, and he raised his harsh, querulous voice so that all might hear his truculent denunciation. He spoke, Pitt tells us, a dreadful kind of English, which the shipmaster, however, makes little attempt to reproduce. His dress was as discordant as his speech. It was of a kind to advertise his trade, and ludicrously in contrast with the sober garb of Hagthorpe and the almost foppish daintiness of Jeremy Pitt. His soiled and blood-stained shirt of blue cotton was open in front, to cool his hairy breast, and the girdle about the waist of his leather breeches carried an arsenal of pistols and a knife, whilst a cutlass hung from a leather baldrick loosely slung about his body; above his countenance, broad and flat as a Mongolian's, a red scarf was swathed, turban-wise, about his head. "Is it that I have not warned you from the beginning that all was too easy?" he demanded between plaintiveness and fury. "I am no fool, my friends. I have eyes, me. And I see. I see an abandoned fort at the entrance of the lake, and nobody there to fire a gun at us when we came in. Then I suspect the trap. Who would not that had eyes and brain? Bah! we come on. What do we find? A city, abandoned like the fort; a city out of which the people have taken all things of value. Again I warn Captain Blood. It is a trap, I say. We are to come on; always to come on, without opposition, until we find that it is too late to go to sea again, that we cannot go back at all. But no one will listen to me. You all know so much more. Name of God! Captain Blood, he will go on, and we go on. We go to Gibraltar. True that at last, after long time, we catch the Deputy-Governor; true, we make him pay big ransom for Gibraltar; true between that ransom and the loot we return here with some two thousand pieces of eight. But what is it, in reality, will you tell me? Or shall I tell you? It is a piece of cheese - a piece of cheese in a mousetrap, and we are the little mice. Goddam! And the cats - oh, the cats they wait for us! The cats are those four Spanish ships of war that have come meantime. And they wait for us outside the bottle-neck of this lagoon. Mort de Dieu! That is what comes of the damned obstinacy of your fine Captain Blood." Wolverstone laughed. Cahusac exploded in fury. "Ah, sangdieu! Tu ris, animal? You laugh! Tell me this: How do we get out again unless we accept the terms of Monsieur the Admiral of Spain?" From the buccaneers at the foot of the steps came an angry rumble of approval. The single eye of the gigantic Wolverstone rolled terribly, and he clenched his great fists as if to strike the Frenchman, who was exposing them to mutiny. But Cahusac was not daunted. The mood of the men enheartened him. "You think, perhaps, this your Captain Blood is the good God. That he can make miracles, eh? He is ridiculous, you know, this Captain Blood; with his grand air and his..." He checked. Out of the church at that moment, grand air and all, sauntered Peter Blood. |
| 1034 |
Next came the Arabella. She was followed at a distance by the Elizabeth, commanded by Hagthorpe, with whom was the now shipless Cahusac and the bulk of his French followers. The rear was brought up by the second sloop and some eight canoes, aboard of which had been shipped the prisoners, the slaves, and most of the captured merchandise. The prisoners were all pinioned, and guarded by four buccaneers with musketoons who manned these boats in addition to the two fellows who were to sail them. Their place was to be in the rear and they were to take no part whatever in the coming fight. As the first glimmerings of opalescent dawn dissolved the darkness, the straining eyes of the buccaneers were able to make out the tall rigging of the Spanish vessels, riding at anchor less than a quarter of a mile ahead. Entirely without suspicion as the Spaniards were, and rendered confident by their own overwhelming strength, it is unlikely that they used a vigilance keener than their careless habit. Certain it is that they did not sight Blood's fleet in that dim light until some time after Blood's fleet had sighted them. By the time that they had actively roused themselves, Wolverstone's sloop was almost upon them, speeding under canvas which had been crowded to her yards the moment the galleons had loomed into view. Straight for the Admiral's great ship, the Encarnacion, did Wolverstone head the sloop; then, lashing down the helm, he kindled from a match that hung ready lighted beside him a great torch of thickly plaited straw that had been steeped in bitumen. First it glowed, then as he swung it round his head, it burst into flame, just as the slight vessel went crashing and bumping and scraping against the side of the flagship, whilst rigging became tangled with rigging, to the straining of yards and snapping of spars overhead. His six men stood at their posts on the larboard side, stark naked, each armed with a grapnel, four of them on the gunwale, two of them aloft. At the moment of impact these grapnels were slung to bind the Spaniard to them, those aloft being intended to complete and preserve the entanglement of the rigging. Aboard the rudely awakened galleon all was confused hurrying, scurrying, trumpeting, and shouting. At first there had been a desperately hurried attempt to get up the anchor; but this was abandoned as being already too late; and conceiving themselves on the point of being boarded, the Spaniards stood to arms to ward off the onslaught. Its slowness in coming intrigued them, being so different from the usual tactics of the buccaneers. Further intrigued were they by the sight of the gigantic Wolverstone speeding naked along his deck with a great flaming torch held high. Not until he had completed his work did they begin to suspect the truth - that he was lighting slow-matches - and then one of their officers rendered reckless by panic ordered a boarding-party on to the shop. The order came too late. Wolverstone had seen his six fellows drop overboard after the grapnels were fixed, and then had sped, himself, to the starboard gunwale. |
| 1035 |
With a roar the cannons-royal proclaimed themselves, and the Arabella staggered under a blow that smashed her bulwarks at the waist and scattered death and confusion among the seamen gathered there. Had not Pitt, her master, himself seized the whipstaff and put the helm hard over to swing her sharply off to starboard, she must have suffered still worse from the second volley that followed fast upon the first. Meanwhile it had fared even worse with the frailer Infanta. Although hit by one shot only, this had crushed her larboard timbers on the waterline, starting a leak that must presently have filled her, but for the prompt action of the experienced Yberville in ordering her larboard guns to be flung overboard. Thus lightened, and listing now to starboard, he fetched her about, and went staggering after the retreating Arabella, followed by the fire of the fort, which did them, however, little further damage. Out of range, at last, they lay to, joined by the Elizabeth and the San Felipe, to consider their position. It was a crestfallen Captain Blood who presided over that hastily summoned council held on the poop-deck of the Arabella in the brilliant morning sunshine. It was, he declared afterwards, one of the bitterest moments in his career. He was compelled to digest the fact that having conducted the engagement with a skill of which he might justly be proud, having destroyed a force so superior in ships and guns and men that Don Miguel de Espinosa had justifiably deemed it overwhelming, his victory was rendered barren by three lucky shots from an unsuspected battery by which they had been surprised. And barren must their victory remain until they could reduce the fort that still remained to defend the passage. At first Captain Blood was for putting his ships in order and making the attempt there and then. But the others dissuaded him from betraying an impetuosity usually foreign to him, and born entirely of chagrin and mortification, emotions which will render unreasonable the most reasonable of men. With returning calm, he surveyed the situation. The Arabella was no longer in case to put to sea; the Infanta was merely kept afloat by artifice, and the San Felipe was almost as sorely damaged by the fire she had sustained from the buccaneers before surrendering. Clearly, then, he was compelled to admit in the end that nothing remained but to return to Maracaybo, there to refit the ships before attempting to force the passage. And so, back to Maracaybo came those defeated victors of that short, terrible fight. And if anything had been wanting further to exasperate their leader, he had it in the pessimism of which Cahusac did not economize expressions. Transported at first to heights of dizzy satisfaction by the swift and easy victory of their inferior force that morning, the Frenchman was now plunged back and more deeply than ever into the abyss of hopelessness. And his mood infected at least the main body of his own followers. "It is the end," he told Captain Blood. |
| 1036 |
Disclosing its contents to him, he despatched him with it to Don Miguel. His choice of a messenger was shrewd. The Deputy-Governor was of all men the most anxious for the deliverance of his city, the one man who on his own account would plead most fervently for its preservation at all costs from the fate with which Captain Blood was threatening it. And as he reckoned so it befell. The Deputy-Governor added his own passionate pleading to the proposals of the letter. But Don Miguel was of stouter heart. True, his fleet had been partly destroyed and partly captured. But then, he argued, he had been taken utterly by surprise. That should not happen again. There should be no surprising the fort. Let Captain Blood do his worst at Maracaybo, there should be a bitter reckoning for him when eventually he decided - as, sooner or later, decide he must - to come forth. The Deputy-Governor was flung into panic. He lost his temper, and said some hard things to the Admiral. But they were not as hard as the thing the Admiral said to him in answer. "Had you been as loyal to your King in hindering the entrance of these cursed pirates as I shall be in hindering their going forth again, we should not now find ourselves in our present straits. So weary me no more with your coward counsels. I make no terms with Captain Blood. I know my duty to my King, and I intend to perform it. I also know my duty to myself. I have a private score with this rascal, and I intend to settle it. Take you that message back." So back to Maracaybo, back to his own handsome house in which Captain Blood had established his quarters, came the Deputy-Governor with the Admiral's answer. And because he had been shamed into a show of spirit by the Admiral's own stout courage in adversity, he delivered it as truculently as the Admiral could have desired. "And is it like that?" said Captain Blood with a quiet smile, though the heart of him sank at this failure of his bluster. "Well, well, it's a pity now that the Admiral's so headstrong. It was that way he lost his fleet, which was his own to lose. This pleasant city of Maracaybo isn't. So no doubt he'll lose it with fewer misgivings. I am sorry. Waste, like bloodshed, is a thing abhorrent to me. But there ye are! I'll have the faggots to the place in the morning, and maybe when he sees the blaze to-morrow night he'll begin to believe that Peter Blood is a man of his word. Ye may go, Don Francisco." The Deputy-Governor went out with dragging feet, followed by guards, his momentary truculence utterly spent. But no sooner had he departed than up leapt Cahusac, who had been of the council assembled to receive the Admiral's answer. His face was white and his hands shook as he held them out in protest. "Death of my life, what have you to say now?" he cried, his voice husky. And without waiting to hear what it might be, he raved on: "I knew you not frighten the Admiral so easy. He hold us entrap', and he knows it; yet you dream that he will yield himself to your impudent message. |
| 1037 |
Such was Captain Blood's assurance of success that he immediately freed the prisoners held as hostages, and even the negro slaves, who were regarded by the others as legitimate plunder. His only precaution against those released prisoners was to order them into the church and there lock them up, to await deliverance at the hands of those who should presently be coming into the city. Then, all being aboard the three ships, with the treasure safely stowed in their holds and the slaves under hatches, the buccaneers weighed anchor and stood out for the bar, each vessel towing three piraguas astern. The Admiral, beholding their stately advance in the full light of noon, their sails gleaming white in the glare of the sunlight, rubbed his long, lean hands in satisfaction, and laughed through his teeth. "At last!" he cried. "God delivers him into my hands!" He turned to the group of staring officers behind him. "Sooner or later it had to be," he said. "Say now, gentlemen, whether I am justified of my patience. Here end to-day the troubles caused to the subjects of the Catholic King by this infamous Don Pedro Sangre, as he once called himself to me." He turned to issue orders, and the fort became lively as a hive. The guns were manned, the gunners already kindling fuses, when the buccaneer fleet, whilst still heading for Palomas, was observed to bear away to the west. The Spaniards watched them, intrigued. Within a mile and a half to westward of the fort, and within a half-mile of the shore - that is to say, on the very edge of the shoal water that makes Palomas unapproachable on either side by any but vessels of the shallowest draught - the four ships cast anchor well within the Spaniards' view, but just out of range of their heaviest cannon. Sneeringly the Admiral laughed. "Aha! They hesitate, these English dogs! Por Dios, and well they may." "They will be waiting for night," suggested his nephew, who stood at his elbow quivering with excitement. Don Miguel looked at him, smiling. "And what shall the night avail them in this narrow passage, under the very muzzles of my guns? Be sure, Esteban, that to-night your father will be paid for." He raised his telescope to continue his observation of the buccaneers. He saw that the piraguas towed by each vessel were being warped alongside, and he wondered a little what this manoeuver might portend. Awhile those piraguas were hidden from view behind the hulls. Then one by one they reappeared, rowing round and away from the ships, and each boat, he observed, was crowded with armed men. Thus laden, they were headed for the shore, at a point where it was densely wooded to the water's edge. The eyes of the wondering Admiral followed them until the foliage screened them from his view. Then he lowered his telescope and looked at his officers. "What the devil does it mean?" he asked. None answered him, all being as puzzled as he was himself. After a little while, Esteban, who kept his eyes on the water, plucked at his uncle's sleeve. |
| 1038 |
"There they go!" he cried, and pointed. And there, indeed, went the piraguas on their way back to the ships. But now it was observed that they were empty, save for the men who rowed them. Their armed cargo had been left ashore. Back to the ships they pulled, to return again presently with a fresh load of armed men, which similarly they conveyed to Palomas. And at last one of the Spanish officers ventured an explanation: "They are going to attack us by land - to attempt to storm the fort." "Of course." The Admiral smiled. "I had guessed it. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." "Shall we make a sally?" urged Esteban, in his excitement. "A sally? Through that scrub? That would be to play into their hands. No, no, we will wait here to receive this attack. Whenever it comes, it is themselves will be destroyed, and utterly. Have no doubt of that." But by evening the Admiral's equanimity was not quite so perfect. By then the piraguas had made a half-dozen journeys with their loads of men, and they had landed also - as Don Miguel had clearly observed through his telescope - at least a dozen guns. His countenance no longer smiled; it was a little wrathful and a little troubled now as he turned again to his officers. "Who was the fool who told me that they number but three hundred men in all? They have put at least twice that number ashore already." Amazed as he was, his amazement would have been deeper had he been told the truth: that there was not a single buccaneer or a single gun ashore on Palomas. The deception had been complete. Don Miguel could not guess that the men he had beheld in those piraguas were always the same; that on the journeys to the shore they sat and stood upright in full view; and that on the journeys back to the ships, they lay invisible at the bottom of the boats, which were thus made to appear empty. The growing fears of the Spanish soldiery at the prospect of a night attack from the landward side by the entire buccaneer force - and a force twice as strong as they had suspected the pestilent Blood to command - began to be communicated to the Admiral. In the last hours of fading daylight, the Spaniards did precisely what Captain Blood so confidently counted that they would do precisely what they must do to meet the attack, preparations for which had been so thoroughly simulated. They set themselves to labour like the damned at those ponderous guns emplaced to command the narrow passage out to sea. Groaning and sweating, urged on by the curses and even the whips of their officers, they toiled in a frenzy of panic-stricken haste to shift the greater number and the more powerful of their guns across to the landward side, there to emplace them anew, so that they might be ready to receive the attack which at any moment now might burst upon them from the woods not half a mile away. Thus, when night fell, although in mortal anxiety of the onslaught of those wild devils whose reckless courage was a byword on the seas of the Main, at least the Spaniards were tolerably prepared for it. |
| 1039 |
Waiting, they stood to their guns. And whilst they waited thus, under cover of the darkness and as the tide began to ebb, Captain Blood's fleet weighed anchor quietly; and, as once before, with no more canvas spread than that which their sprits could carry, so as to give them steering way - and even these having been painted black - the four vessels, without a light showing, groped their way by soundings to the channel which led to that narrow passage out to sea. The Elizabeth and the Infanta, leading side by side, were almost abreast of the fort before their shadowy bulks and the soft gurgle of water at their prows were detected by the Spaniards, whose attention until that moment had been all on the other side. And now there arose on the night air such a sound of human baffled fury as may have resounded about Babel at the confusion of tongues. To heighten that confusion, and to scatter disorder among the Spanish soldiery, the Elizabeth emptied her larboard guns into the fort as she was swept past on the swift ebb. At once realizing - though not yet how - he had been duped, and that his prey was in the very act of escaping after all, the Admiral frantically ordered the guns that had been so laboriously moved to be dragged back to their former emplacements, and commanded his gunners meanwhile to the slender batteries that of all his powerful, but now unavailable, armament still remained trained upon the channel. With these, after the loss of some precious moments, the fort at last made fire. It was answered by a terrific broadside from the Arabella, which had now drawn abreast, and was crowding canvas to her yards. The enraged and gibbering Spaniards had a brief vision of her as the line of flame spurted from her red flank, and the thunder of her broadside drowned the noise of the creaking halyards. After that they saw her no more. Assimilated by the friendly darkness which the lesser Spanish guns were speculatively stabbing, the escaping ships fired never another shot that might assist their baffled and bewildered enemies to locate them. Some slight damage was sustained by Blood's fleet. But by the time the Spaniards had resolved their confusion into some order of dangerous offence, that fleet, well served by a southerly breeze, was through the narrows and standing out to sea. Thus was Don Miguel de Espinosa left to chew the bitter cud of a lost opportunity, and to consider in what terms he would acquaint the Supreme Council of the Catholic King that Peter Blood had got away from Maracaybo, taking with him two twenty-gun frigates that were lately the property of Spain, to say nothing of two hundred and fifty thousand pieces of eight and other plunder. And all this in spite of Don Miguel's four galleons and his heavily armed fort that at one time had held the pirates so securely trapped. Heavy, indeed, grew the account of Peter Blood, which Don Miguel swore passionately to Heaven should at all costs to himself be paid in full. Nor were the losses already detailed the full total of those suffered on this occasion by the King of Spain. |
| 1040 |
The first of these was Captain Blood's flagship the Arabella, which had been separated from the buccaneer fleet in a hurricane off the Lesser Antilles. In somewhere about 17 deg. N. Lat., and 74 deg. Long., she was beating up for the Windward Passage, before the intermittent southeasterly breezes of that stifling season, homing for Tortuga, the natural rendezvous of the dispersed vessels. The second ship was the great Spanish galleon, the Milagrosa, which, accompanied by the smaller frigate Hidalga, lurked off the Caymites, to the north of the long peninsula that thrusts out from the southwest corner of Hispaniola. Aboard the Milagrosa sailed the vindictive Don Miguel. The third and last of these ships with which we are at present concerned was an English man-of-war, which on the date I have given was at anchor in the French port of St. Nicholas on the northwest coast of Hispaniola. She was on her way from Plymouth to Jamaica, and carried on board a very distinguished passenger in the person of Lord Julian Wade, who came charged by his kinsman, my Lord Sunderland, with a mission of some consequence and delicacy, directly arising out of that vexatious correspondence between England and Spain. The French Government, like the English, excessively annoyed by the depredations of the buccaneers, and the constant straining of relations with Spain that ensued, had sought in vain to put them down by enjoining the utmost severity against them upon her various overseas governors. But these, either - like the Governor of Tortuga - throve out of a scarcely tacit partnership with the filibusters, or - like the Governor of French Hispaniola - felt that they were to be encouraged as a check upon the power and greed of Spain, which might otherwise be exerted to the disadvantage of the colonies of other nations. They looked, indeed, with apprehension upon recourse to any vigorous measures which must result in driving many of the buccaneers to seek new hunting-grounds in the South Sea. To satisfy King James's anxiety to conciliate Spain, and in response to the Spanish Ambassador's constant and grievous expostulations, my Lord Sunderland, the Secretary of State, had appointed a strong man to the deputy-governorship of Jamaica. This strong man was that Colonel Bishop who for some years now had been the most influential planter in Barbados. Colonel Bishop had accepted the post, and departed from the plantations in which his great wealth was being amassed with an eagerness that had its roots in a desire to pay off a score of his own with Peter Blood. From his first coming to Jamaica, Colonel Bishop had made himself felt by the buccaneers. But do what he might, the one buccaneer whom he made his particular quarry - that Peter Blood who once had been his slave - eluded him ever, and continued undeterred and in great force to harass the Spaniards upon sea and land, and to keep the relations between England and Spain in a state of perpetual ferment, particularly dangerous in those days when the peace of Europe was precariously maintained. |
| 1041 |
Exasperated not only by his own accumulated chagrin, but also by the reproaches for his failure which reached him from London, Colonel Bishop actually went so far as to consider hunting his quarry in Tortuga itself and making an attempt to clear the island of the buccaneers it sheltered. Fortunately for himself, he abandoned the notion of so insane an enterprise, deterred not only by the enormous natural strength of the place, but also by the reflection that a raid upon what was, nominally at least, a French settlement, must be attended by grave offence to France. Yet short of some such measure, it appeared to Colonel Bishop that he was baffled. He confessed as much in a letter to the Secretary of State. This letter and the state of things which it disclosed made my Lord Sunderland despair of solving this vexatious problem by ordinary means. He turned to the consideration of extraordinary ones, and bethought him of the plan adopted with Morgan, who had been enlisted into the King's service under Charles II. It occurred to him that a similar course might be similarly effective with Captain Blood. His lordship did not omit the consideration that Blood's present outlawry might well have been undertaken not from inclination, but under stress of sheer necessity; that he had been forced into it by the circumstances of his transportation, and that he would welcome the opportunity of emerging from it. Acting upon this conclusion, Sunderland sent out his kinsman, Lord Julian Wade, with some commissions made out in blank, and full directions as to the course which the Secretary considered it desirable to pursue and yet full discretion in the matter of pursuing them. The crafty Sunderland, master of all labyrinths of intrigue, advised his kinsman that in the event of his finding Blood intractable, or judging for other reasons that it was not desirable to enlist him in the King's service, he should turn his attention to the officers serving under him, and by seducing them away from him leave him so weakened that he must fall an easy victim to Colonel Bishop's fleet. The Royal Mary - the vessel bearing that ingenious, tolerably accomplished, mildly dissolute, entirely elegant envoy of my Lord Sunderland's - made a good passage to St. Nicholas, her last port of call before Jamaica. It was understood that as a preliminary Lord Julian should report himself to the Deputy-Governor at Port Royal, whence at need he might have himself conveyed to Tortuga. Now it happened that the Deputy-Governor's niece had come to St. Nicholas some months earlier on a visit to some relatives, and so that she might escape the insufferable heat of Jamaica in that season. The time for her return being now at hand, a passage was sought for her aboard the Royal Mary, and in view of her uncle's rank and position promptly accorded. Lord Julian hailed her advent with satisfaction. It gave a voyage that had been full of interest for him just the spice that it required to achieve perfection as an experience. |
| 1042 |
His lordship was one of your gallants to whom existence that is not graced by womankind is more or less of a stagnation. Miss Arabella Bishop - this straight up and down slip of a girl with her rather boyish voice and her almost boyish ease of movement - was not perhaps a lady who in England would have commanded much notice in my lord's discerning eyes. His very sophisticated, carefully educated tastes in such matters inclined him towards the plump, the languishing, and the quite helplessly feminine. Miss Bishop's charms were undeniable. But they were such that it would take a delicate-minded man to appreciate them; and my Lord Julian, whilst of a mind that was very far from gross, did not possess the necessary degree of delicacy. I must not by this be understood to imply anything against him. It remained, however, that Miss Bishop was a young woman and a lady; and in the latitude into which Lord Julian had strayed this was a phenomenon sufficiently rare to command attention. On his side, with his title and position, his personal grace and the charm of a practised courtier, he bore about him the atmosphere of the great world in which normally he had his being - a world that was little more than a name to her, who had spent most of her life in the Antilles. It is not therefore wonderful that they should have been attracted to each other before the Royal Mary was warped out of St. Nicholas. Each could tell the other much upon which the other desired information. He could regale her imagination with stories of St. James's - in many of which he assigned himself a heroic, or at least a distinguished part - and she could enrich his mind with information concerning this new world to which he had come. Before they were out of sight of St. Nicholas they were good friends, and his lordship was beginning to correct his first impressions of her and to discover the charm of that frank, straightforward attitude of comradeship which made her treat every man as a brother. Considering how his mind was obsessed with the business of his mission, it is not wonderful that he should have come to talk to her of Captain Blood. Indeed, there was a circumstance that directly led to it. "I wonder now," he said, as they were sauntering on the poop, "if you ever saw this fellow Blood, who was at one time on your uncle's plantations as a slave." Miss Bishop halted. She leaned upon the taffrail, looking out towards the receding land, and it was a moment before she answered in a steady, level voice: "I saw him often. I knew him very well." "Ye don't say!" His lordship was slightly moved out of an imperturbability that he had studiously cultivated. He was a young man of perhaps eight-and-twenty, well above the middle height in stature and appearing taller by virtue of his exceeding leanness. He had a thin, pale, rather pleasing hatchet-face, framed in the curls of a golden periwig, a sensitive mouth and pale blue eyes that lent his countenance a dreamy expression, a rather melancholy pensiveness. |
| 1043 |
The marplot was the mad-dog Spanish Admiral, whom they encountered on the second day out, when halfway across the Gulf of Gonaves. The Captain of the Royal Mary was not disposed to be intimidated even when Don Miguel opened fire on him. Observing the Spaniard's plentiful seaboard towering high above the water and offering him so splendid a mark, the Englishman was moved to scorn. If this Don who flew the banner of Castile wanted a fight, the Royal Mary was just the ship to oblige him. It may be that he was justified of his gallant confidence, and that he would that day have put an end to the wild career of Don Miguel de Espinosa, but that a lucky shot from the Milagrosa got among some powder stored in his forecastle, and blew up half his ship almost before the fight had started. How the powder came there will never now be known, and the gallant Captain himself did not survive to enquire into it. Before the men of the Royal Mary had recovered from their consternation, their captain killed and a third of their number destroyed with him, the ship yawing and rocking helplessly in a crippled state, the Spaniards boarded her. In the Captain's cabin under the poop, to which Miss Bishop had been conducted for safety, Lord Julian was seeking to comfort and encourage her, with assurances that all would yet be well, at the very moment when Don Miguel was stepping aboard. Lord Julian himself was none so steady, and his face was undoubtedly pale. Not that he was by any means a coward. But this cooped-up fighting on an unknown element in a thing of wood that might at any moment founder under his feet into the depths of ocean was disturbing to one who could be brave enough ashore. Fortunately Miss Bishop did not appear to be in desperate need of the poor comfort he was in case to offer. Certainly she, too, was pale, and her hazel eyes may have looked a little larger than usual. But she had herself well in hand. Half sitting, half leaning on the Captain's table, she preserved her courage sufficiently to seek to calm the octoroon waiting-woman who was grovelling at her feet in a state of terror. And then the cabin-door flew open, and Don Miguel himself, tall, sunburned, and aquiline of face, strode in. Lord Julian span round, to face him, and clapped a hand to his sword. The Spaniard was brisk and to the point. "Don't be a fool," he said in his own tongue, "or you'll come by a fool's end. Your ship is sinking." There were three or four men in morions behind Don Miguel, and Lord Julian realized the position. He released his hilt, and a couple of feet or so of steel slid softly back into the scabbard. But Don Miguel smiled, with a flash of white teeth behind his grizzled beard, and held out his hand. "If you please," he said. Lord Julian hesitated. His eyes strayed to Miss Bishop's. "I think you had better," said that composed young lady, whereupon with a shrug his lordship made the required surrender. "Come you - all of you - aboard my ship," Don Miguel invited them, and strode out. |
| 1044 |
Miss Bishop was not to recognize this for that same Cinco Llagas which she had seen once before - on a tragic day in Barbados three years ago. To her it was just a great ship that was heading resolutely, majestically, towards them, and an Englishman to judge by the pennon she was flying. The sight thrilled her curiously; it awoke in her an uplifting sense of pride that took no account of the danger to herself in the encounter that must now be inevitable. Beside her on the poop, whither they had climbed to obtain a better view, and equally arrested and at gaze, stood Lord Julian. But he shared none of her exultation. He had been in his first sea-fight yesterday, and he felt that the experience would suffice him for a very considerable time. This, I insist, is no reflection upon his courage. "Look," said Miss Bishop, pointing; and to his infinite amazement he observed that her eyes were sparkling. Did she realize, he wondered, what was afoot? Her next sentence resolved his doubt. "She is English, and she comes resolutely on. She means to fight." "God help her, then," said his lordship gloomily. "Her captain must be mad. What can he hope to do against two such heavy hulks as these? If they could so easily blow the Royal Mary out of the water, what will they do to this vessel? Look at that devil Don Miguel. He's utterly disgusting in his glee." From the quarter-deck, where he moved amid the frenzy of preparation, the Admiral had turned to flash a backward glance at his prisoners. His eyes were alight, his face transfigured. He flung out an arm to point to the advancing ship, and bawled something in Spanish that was lost to them in the noise of the labouring crew. They advanced to the poop-rail, and watched the bustle. Telescope in hand on the quarter-deck, Don Miguel was issuing his orders. Already the gunners were kindling their matches; sailors were aloft, taking in sail; others were spreading a stout rope net above the waist, as a protection against falling spars. And meanwhile Don Miguel had been signalling to his consort, in response to which the Hidalga had drawn steadily forward until she was now abeam of the Milagrosa, half cable's length to starboard, and from the height of the tall poop my lord and Miss Bishop could see her own bustle of preparation. And they could discern signs of it now aboard the advancing English ship as well. She was furling tops and mainsail, stripping in fact to mizzen and sprit for the coming action. Thus, almost silently without challenge or exchange of signals, had action been mutually determined. Of necessity now, under diminished sail, the advance of the Arabella was slower; but it was none the less steady. She was already within saker shot, and they could make out the figures stirring on her forecastle and the brass guns gleaming on her prow. The gunners of the Milagrosa raised their linstocks and blew upon their smouldering matches, looking up impatiently at the Admiral. But the Admiral solemnly shook his head. |
| 1045 |
My compliments to Colonel Bishop. Say that I look forward to making his acquaintance there." In the great harbour of Port Royal, spacious enough to have given moorings to all the ships of all the navies of the world, the Arabella rode at anchor. Almost she had the air of a prisoner, for a quarter of a mile ahead, to starboard, rose the lofty, massive single round tower of the fort, whilst a couple of cables'-length astern, and to larboard, rode the six men-of-war that composed the Jamaica squadron. Abeam with the Arabella, across the harbour, were the flat-fronted white buildings of that imposing city that came down to the very water's edge. Behind these the red roofs rose like terraces, marking the gentle slope upon which the city was built, dominated here by a turret, there by a spire, and behind these again a range of green hills with for ultimate background a sky that was like a dome of polished steel. On a cane day-bed that had been set for him on the quarter-deck, sheltered from the dazzling, blistering sunshine by an improvised awning of brown sailcloth, lounged Peter Blood, a calf-bound, well-thumbed copy of Horace's Odes neglected in his hands. From immediately below him came the swish of mops and the gurgle of water in the scuppers, for it was still early morning, and under the directions of Hayton, the bo'sun, the swabbers were at work in the waist and forecastle. Despite the heat and the stagnant air, one of the toilers found breath to croak a ribald buccaneering ditty: "For we laid her board and board, And we put her to the sword, And we sank her in the deep blue sea. So It's heigh-ho, and heave-a-ho! Who'll sail for the Main with me?" Blood fetched a sigh, and the ghost of a smile played over his lean, sun-tanned face. Then the black brows came together above the vivid blue eyes, and thought swiftly closed the door upon his immediate surroundings. Things had not sped at all well with him in the past fortnight since his acceptance of the King's commission. There had been trouble with Bishop from the moment of landing. As Blood and Lord Julian had stepped ashore together, they had been met by a man who took no pains to dissemble his chagrin at the turn of events and his determination to change it. He awaited them on the mole, supported by a group of officers. "You are Lord Julian Wade, I understand," was his truculent greeting. For Blood at the moment he had nothing beyond a malignant glance. Lord Julian bowed. "I take it I have the honour to address Colonel Bishop, Deputy-Governor of Jamaica." It was almost as if his lordship were giving the Colonel a lesson in deportment. The Colonel accepted it, and belatedly bowed, removing his broad hat. Then he plunged on. "You have granted, I am told, the King's commission to this man." His very tone betrayed the bitterness of his rancour. "Your motives were no doubt worthy... your gratitude to him for delivering you from the Spaniards. But the thing itself is unthinkable, my lord. The commission must be cancelled." "I don't think I understand," said Lord Julian distantly. |
| 1046 |
Then he thrust his own right hand with its pistol back into the breast of his doublet. "Though invisible, it's aiming at ye none the less, and I give you my word of honour that I'll shoot ye dead upon the very least provocation, whether that provocation is yours or another's. Ye'll bear that in mind, Lord Julian. And now, ye greasy hangman, step out as brisk and lively as ye can, and behave as naturally as ye may, or it's the black stream of Cocytus ye'll be contemplating." Arm in arm they passed through the house, and down the garden, where Arabella lingered, awaiting Peter Blood's return. Consideration of his parting words had brought her first turmoil of mind, then a clear perception of what might be indeed the truth of the death of Levasseur. She perceived that the particular inference drawn from it might similarly have been drawn from Blood's deliverance of Mary Traill. When a man so risks his life for a woman, the rest is easily assumed. For the men who will take such risks without hope of personal gain are few. Blood was of those few, as he had proved in the case of Mary Traill. It needed no further assurances of his to convince her that she had done him a monstrous injustice. She remembered words he had used - words overheard aboard his ship (which he had named the Arabella) on the night of her deliverance from the Spanish admiral; words he had uttered when she had approved his acceptance of the King's commission; the words he had spoken to her that very morning, which had but served to move her indignation. All these assumed a fresh meaning in her mind, delivered now from its unwarranted preconceptions. Therefore she lingered there in the garden, awaiting his return that she might make amends; that she might set a term to all misunderstanding. In impatience she awaited him. Yet her patience, it seemed, was to be tested further. For when at last he came, it was in company - unusually close and intimate company - with her uncle. In vexation she realized that explanations must be postponed. Could she have guessed the extent of that postponement, vexation would have been changed into despair. He passed, with his companion, from that fragrant garden into the courtyard of the fort. Here the Commandant, who had been instructed to hold himself in readiness with the necessary men against the need to effect the arrest of Captain Blood, was amazed by the curious spectacle of the Deputy-Governor of Jamaica strolling forth arm in arm and apparently on the friendliest terms with the intended prisoner. For as they went, Blood was chatting and laughing briskly. They passed out of the gates unchallenged, and so came to the mole where the cock-boat from the Arabella was waiting. They took their places side by side in the stern sheets, and were pulled away together, always very close and friendly, to the great red ship where Jeremy Pitt so anxiously awaited news. You conceive the master's amazement to see the Deputy-Governor come toiling up the entrance ladder, with Blood following very close behind him. |
| 1047 |
With that he turned from him, and took his lordship by the arm. "Come, my lord. We must take order about this, you and I." They went off together, skirting the redoubt, and so through courtyard and garden to the house where Arabella waited anxiously. The sight of her uncle brought her infinite relief, not only on his own account, but on account also of Captain Blood. "You took a great risk, sir," she gravely told Lord Julian after the ordinary greetings had been exchanged. But Lord Julian answered her as he had answered Major Mallard. "There was no risk, ma'am." She looked at him in some astonishment. His long, aristocratic face wore a more melancholy, pensive air than usual. He answered the enquiry in her glance: "So that Blood's ship were allowed to pass the fort, no harm could come to Colonel Bishop. Blood pledged me his word for that." A faint smile broke the set of her lips, which hitherto had been wistful, and a little colour tinged her cheeks. She would have pursued the subject, but the Deputy-Governor's mood did not permit it. He sneered and snorted at the notion of Blood's word being good for anything, forgetting that he owed to it his own preservation at that moment. At supper, and for long thereafter he talked of nothing but Blood - of how he would lay him by the heels, and what hideous things he would perform upon his body. And as he drank heavily the while, his speech became increasingly gross and his threats increasingly horrible; until in the end Arabella withdrew, white-faced and almost on the verge of tears. It was not often that Bishop revealed himself to his niece. Oddly enough, this coarse, overbearing planter went in a certain awe of that slim girl. It was as if she had inherited from her father the respect in which he had always been held by his brother. Lord Julian, who began to find Bishop disgusting beyond endurance, excused himself soon after, and went in quest of the lady. He had yet to deliver the message from Captain Blood, and this, he thought, would be his opportunity. But Miss Bishop had retired for the night, and Lord Julian must curb his impatience - it amounted by now to nothing less - until the morrow. Very early next morning, before the heat of the day came to render the open intolerable to his lordship, he espied her from his window moving amid the azaleas in the garden. It was a fitting setting for one who was still as much a delightful novelty to him in womanhood as was the azalea among flowers. He hurried forth to join her, and when, aroused from her pensiveness, she had given him a good-morrow, smiling and frank, he explained himself by the announcement that he bore her a message from Captain Blood. He observed her little start and the slight quiver of her lips, and observed thereafter not only her pallor and the shadowy rings about her eyes, but also that unusually wistful air which last night had escaped his notice. They moved out of the open to one of the terraces, where a pergola of orange-trees provided a shaded sauntering space that was at once cool and fragrant. |
| 1048 |
As they went, he considered her admiringly, and marvelled at himself that it should have taken him so long fully to realize her slim, unusual grace, and to find her, as he now did, so entirely desirable, a woman whose charm must irradiate all the life of a man, and touch its commonplaces into magic. He noted the sheen of her red-brown hair, and how gracefully one of its heavy ringlets coiled upon her slender, milk-white neck. She wore a gown of shimmering grey silk, and a scarlet rose, fresh-gathered, was pinned at her breast like a splash of blood. Always thereafter when he thought of her it was as he saw her at that moment, as never, I think, until that moment had he seen her. In silence they paced on a little way into the green shade. Then she paused and faced him. "You said something of a message, sir," she reminded him, thus betraying some of her impatience. He fingered the ringlets of his periwig, a little embarrassed how to deliver himself, considering how he should begin. "He desired me," he said at last, "to give you a message that should prove to you that there is still something left in him of the unfortunate gentleman that... that.., for which once you knew him." "That is not now necessary," said she very gravely. He misunderstood her, of course, knowing nothing of the enlightenment that yesterday had come to her. "I think..., nay, I know that you do him an injustice," said he. Her hazel eyes continued to regard him. "If you will deliver the message, it may enable me to judge." To him, this was confusing. He did not immediately answer. He found that he had not sufficiently considered the terms he should employ, and the matter, after all, was of an exceeding delicacy, demanding delicate handling. It was not so much that he was concerned to deliver a message as to render it a vehicle by which to plead his own cause. Lord Julian, well versed in the lore of womankind and usually at his ease with ladies of the beau-monde, found himself oddly constrained before this frank and unsophisticated niece of a colonial planter. They moved on in silence and as if by common consent towards the brilliant sunshine where the pergola was intersected by the avenue leading upwards to the house. Across this patch of light fluttered a gorgeous butterfly, that was like black and scarlet velvet and large as a man's hand. His lordship's brooding eyes followed it out of sight before he answered. "It is not easy. Stab me, it is not. He was a man who deserved well. And amongst us we have marred his chances: your uncle, because he could not forget his rancour; you, because... because having told him that in the King's service he would find his redemption of what was past, you would not afterwards admit to him that he was so redeemed. And this, although concern to rescue you was the chief motive of his embracing that same service." She had turned her shoulder to him so that he should not see her face. "I know. I know now," she said softly. Then after a pause she added the question: "And you? |
| 1049 |
Because they had been beginning to grow anxious on his behalf, they gave him the greater welcome. Guns were fired in his honour and the ships made themselves gay with bunting. The town, aroused by all this noise in the harbour, emptied itself upon the jetty, and a vast crowd of men and women of all creeds and nationalities collected there to be present at the coming ashore of the great buccaneer. Ashore he went, probably for no other reason than to obey the general expectation. His mood was taciturn; his face grim and sneering. Let Wolverstone arrive, as presently he would, and all this hero-worship would turn to execration. His captains, Hagthorpe, Christian, and Yberville, were on the jetty to receive him, and with them were some hundreds of his buccaneers. He cut short their greetings, and when they plagued him with questions of where he had tarried, he bade them await the coming of Wolverstone, who would satisfy their curiosity to a surfeit. On that he shook them off, and shouldered his way through that heterogeneous throng that was composed of bustling traders of several nations - English, French, and Dutch - of planters and of seamen of various degrees, of buccaneers who were fruit-selling half-castes, negro slaves, some doll-tearsheets and dunghill-queans from the Old World, and all the other types of the human family that converted the quays of Cayona into a disreputable image of Babel. Winning clear at last, and after difficulties, Captain Blood took his way alone to the fine house of M. d'Ogeron, there to pay his respects to his friends, the Governor and the Governor's family. At first the buccaneers jumped to the conclusion that Wolverstone was following with some rare prize of war, but gradually from the reduced crew of the Arabella a very different tale leaked out to stem their satisfaction and convert it into perplexity. Partly out of loyalty to their captain, partly because they perceived that if he was guilty of defection they were guilty with him, and partly because being simple, sturdy men of their hands, they were themselves in the main a little confused as to what really had happened, the crew of the Arabella practised reticence with their brethren in Tortuga during those two days before Wolverstone's arrival. But they were not reticent enough to prevent the circulation of certain uneasy rumours and extravagant stories of discreditable adventures - discreditable, that is, from the buccaneering point of view - of which Captain Blood had been guilty. But that Wolverstone came when he did, it is possible that there would have been an explosion. When, however, the Old Wolf cast anchor in the bay two days later, it was to him all turned for the explanation they were about to demand of Blood. Now Wolverstone had only one eye; but he saw a deal more with that one eye than do most men with two; and despite his grizzled head - so picturesquely swathed in a green and scarlet turban - he had the sound heart of a boy, and in that heart much love for Peter Blood. |
| 1050 |
There is war - formally war - between France and Spain in Europe. It is the intention of France that this war shall be carried into the New World. A fleet is coming out from Brest under the command of M. le Baron de Rivarol for that purpose. I have letters from him desiring me to equip a supplementary squadron and raise a body of not less than a thousand men to reenforce him on his arrival. What I have come to propose to you, my Captain, at the suggestion of our good friend M. d'Ogeron, is, in brief, that you enroll your ships and your force under M. de Rivarol's flag." Blood looked at him with a faint kindling of interest. "You are offering to take us into the French service?" he asked. "On what terms, monsieur?" "With the rank of Capitaine de Vaisseau for yourself, and suitable ranks for the officers serving under you. You will enjoy the pay of that rank, and you will be entitled, together with your men, to one-tenth share in all prizes taken." "My men will hardly account it generous. They will tell you that they can sail out of here to-morrow, disembowel a Spanish settlement, and keep the whole of the plunder." "Ah, yes, but with the risks attaching to acts of piracy. With us your position will be regular and official, and considering the powerful fleet by which M. de Rivarol is backed, the enterprises to be undertaken will be on a much vaster scale than anything you could attempt on your own account. So that the one tenth in this case may be equal to more than the whole in the other." Captain Blood considered. This, after all, was not piracy that was being proposed. It was honourable employment in the service of the King of France. "I will consult my officers," he said; and he sent for them. They came and the matter was laid before them by M. de Cussy himself. Hagthorpe announced at once that the proposal was opportune. The men were grumbling at their protracted inaction, and would no doubt be ready to accept the service which M. de Cussy offered on behalf of France. Hagthorpe looked at Blood as he spoke. Blood nodded gloomy agreement. Emboldened by this, they went on to discuss the terms. Yberville, the young French filibuster, had the honour to point out to M. de Cussy that the share offered was too small. For one fifth of the prizes, the officers would answer for their men; not for less. M. de Cussy was distressed. He had his instructions. It was taking a deal upon himself to exceed them. The buccaneers were firm. Unless M. de Cussy could make it one fifth there was no more to be said. M. de Cussy finally consenting to exceed his instructions, the articles were drawn up and signed that very day. The buccaneers were to be at Petit Goave by the end of January, when M. de Rivarol had announced that he might be expected. After that followed days of activity in Tortuga, refitting the ships, boucanning meat, laying in stores. In these matters which once would have engaged all Captain Blood's attention, he now took no part. He continued listless and aloof. |
| 1051 |
The General of the King's Armies abused him - this man who was Governor of Hispaniola - as if he were a lackey. M. de Cussy defended himself by urging the thing that Captain Blood had so admirably urged already on his behalf - that if the terms he had made with the buccaneers were not confirmed there was no harm done. M. de Rivarol bullied and browbeat him into silence. Having exhausted abuse, the Baron proceeded to indignities. Since he accounted that M. de Cussy had proved himself unworthy of the post he held, M. de Rivarol took over the responsibilities of that post for as long as he might remain in Hispaniola, and to give effect to this he began by bringing soldiers from his ships, and setting his own guard in M. de Cussy's castle. Out of this, trouble followed quickly. Wolverstone coming ashore next morning in the picturesque garb that he affected, his head swathed in a coloured handkerchief, was jeered at by an officer of the newly landed French troops. Not accustomed to derision, Wolverstone replied in kind and with interest. The officer passed to insult, and Wolverstone struck him a blow that felled him, and left him only the half of his poor senses. Within the hour the matter was reported to M. de Rivarol, and before noon, by M. de Rivarol's orders, Wolverstone was under arrest in the castle. The Baron had just sat down to dinner with M. de Cussy when the negro who waited on them announced Captain Blood. Peevishly M. de Rivarol bade him be admitted, and there entered now into his presence a spruce and modish gentleman, dressed with care and sombre richness in black and silver, his swarthy, clear-cut face scrupulously shaven, his long black hair in ringlets that fell to a collar of fine point. In his right hand the gentleman carried a broad black hat with a scarlet ostrich-plume, in his left hand an ebony cane. His stockings were of silk, a bunch of ribbons masked his garters, and the black rosettes on his shoes were finely edged with gold. For a moment M. de Rivarol did not recognize him. For Blood looked younger by ten years than yesterday. But the vivid blue eyes under their level black brows were not to be forgotten, and they proclaimed him for the man announced even before he had spoken. His resurrected pride had demanded that he should put himself on an equality with the baron and advertise that equality by his exterior. "I come inopportunely," he courteously excused himself. "My apologies. My business could not wait. It concerns, M. de Cussy, Captain Wolverstone of the Lachesis, whom you have placed under arrest." "It was I who placed him under arrest," said M. de Rivarol. "Indeed! But I thought that M. de Cussy was Governor of Hispaniola." "Whilst I am here, monsieur, I am the supreme authority. It is as well that you should understand it." "Perfectly. But it is not possible that you are aware of the mistake that has been made." "Mistake, do you say?" "I say mistake. On the whole, it is polite of me to use that word. Also it is expedient. |
| 1052 |
It will save discussions. Your people have arrested the wrong man, M. de Rivarol. Instead of the French officer, who used the grossest provocation, they have arrested Captain Wolverstone. It is a matter which I beg you to reverse without delay." M. de Rivarol's hawk-face flamed scarlet. His dark eyes bulged. "Sir, you... you are insolent! But of an insolence that is intolerable!" Normally a man of the utmost self-possession he was so rudely shaken now that he actually stammered. "M. le Baron, you waste words. This is the New World. It is not merely new; it is novel to one reared amid the superstitions of the Old. That novelty you have not yet had time, perhaps, to realize; therefore I overlook the offensive epithet you have used. But justice is justice in the New World as in the Old, and injustice as intolerable here as there. Now justice demands the enlargement of my officer and the arrest and punishment of yours. That justice I invite you, with submission, to administer." "With submission?" snorted the Baron in furious scorn. "With the utmost submission, monsieur. But at the same time I will remind M. le Baron that my buccaneers number eight hundred; your troops five hundred; and M. de Cussy will inform you of the interesting fact that any one buccaneer is equal in action to at least three soldiers of the line. I am perfectly frank with you, monsieur, to save time and hard words. Either Captain Wolverstone is instantly set at liberty, or we must take measures to set him at liberty ourselves. The consequences may be appalling. But it is as you please, M. le Baron. You are the supreme authority. It is for you to say." M. de Rivarol was white to the lips. In all his life he had never been so bearded and defied. But he controlled himself. "You will do me the favour to wait in the ante-room, M. le Capitaine. I desire a word with M. de Cussy. You shall presently be informed of my decision." When the door had closed, the baron loosed his fury upon the head of M. de Cussy. "So, these are the men you have enlisted in the King's service, the men who are to serve under me - men who do not serve, but dictate, and this before the enterprise that has brought me from France is even under way! What explanations do you offer me, M. de Cussy? I warn you that I am not pleased with you. I am, in fact, as you may perceive, exceedingly angry." The Governor seemed to shed his chubbiness. He drew himself stiffly erect. "Your rank, monsieur, does not give you the right to rebuke me; nor do the facts. I have enlisted for you the men that you desired me to enlist. It is not my fault if you do not know how to handle them better. As Captain Blood has told you, this is the New World." "So, so!" M. de Rivarol smiled malignantly. "Not only do you offer no explanation, but you venture to put me in the wrong. Almost I admire your temerity. But there!" he waved the matter aside. He was supremely sardonic. "It is, you tell me, the New World, and - new worlds, new manners, I suppose. |
| 1053 |
Therefore he laughed; there was really nothing else to do. But his laughter was charged with more anger even than contempt. He had been deluding himself that he had done with piracy. The conviction that this French service was free of any taint of that was the only consideration that had induced him to accept it. Yet here was this haughty, supercilious gentleman, who dubbed himself General of the Armies of France, proposing a plundering, thieving raid which, when stripped of its mean, transparent mask of legitimate warfare, was revealed as piracy of the most flagrant. M. de Rivarol, intrigued by his mirth, scowled upon him disapprovingly. "Why do you laugh, monsieur?" "Because I discover here an irony that is supremely droll. You, M. le Baron, General of the King's Armies by Land and Sea in America, propose an enterprise of a purely buccaneering character; whilst I, the buccaneer, am urging one that is more concerned with upholding the honour of France. You perceive how droll it is." M. de Rivarol perceived nothing of the kind. M. de Rivarol in fact was extremely angry. He bounded to his feet, and every man in the room rose with him - save only M. de Cussy, who sat on with a grim smile on his lips. He, too, now read the Baron like an open book, and reading him despised him. "M. le filibustier," cried Rivarol in a thick voice, "it seems that I must again remind you that I am your superior officer." "My superior officer! You! Lord of the World! Why, you are just a common pirate! But you shall hear the truth for once, and that before all these gentlemen who have the honour to serve the King of France. It is for me, a buccaneer, a sea-robber, to stand here and tell you what is in the interest of French honour and the French Crown. Whilst you, the French King's appointed General, neglecting this, are for spending the King's resources against an outlying settlement of no account, shedding French blood in seizing a place that cannot be held, only because it has been reported to you that there is much gold in Cartagena, and that the plunder of it will enrich you. It is worthy of the huckster who sought to haggle with us about our share, and to beat us down after the articles pledging you were already signed. If I am wrong - let M. de Cussy say so. If I am wrong, let me be proven wrong, and I will beg your pardon. Meanwhile, monsieur, I withdraw from this council. I will have no further part in your deliberations. I accepted the service of the King of France with intent to honour that service. I cannot honour that service by lending countenance to a waste of life and resources in raids upon unimportant settlements, with plunder for their only object. The responsibility for such decisions must rest with you, and with you alone. I desire M. de Cussy to report me to the Ministers of France. For the rest, monsieur, it merely remains for you to give me your orders. I await them aboard my ship - and anything else, of a personal nature, that you may feel I have provoked by the terms I have felt compelled to use in this council. |
| 1054 |
M. le Baron, I have the honour to wish you good-day." He stalked out, and his three captains - although they thought him mad - rolled after him in loyal silence. M. de Rivarol was gasping like a landed fish. The stark truth had robbed him of speech. When he recovered, it was to thank Heaven vigorously that the council was relieved by Captain Blood's own act of that gentleman's further participation in its deliberations. Inwardly M. de Rivarol burned with shame and rage. The mask had been plucked from him, and he had been held up to scorn - he, the General of the King's Armies by Sea and Land in America. Nevertheless, it was to Cartagena that they sailed in the middle of March. Volunteers and negroes had brought up the forces directly under M. de Rivarol to twelve hundred men. With these he thought he could keep the buccaneer contingent in order and submissive. They made up an imposing fleet, led by M. de Rivarol's flagship, the Victorieuse, a mighty vessel of eighty guns. Each of the four other French ships was at least as powerful as Blood's Arabella, which was of forty guns. Followed the lesser buccaneer vessels, the Elizabeth, Lachesis, and Atropos, and a dozen frigates laden with stores, besides canoes and small craft in tow. Narrowly they missed the Jamaica fleet with Colonel Bishop, which sailed north for Tortuga two days after the Baron de Rivarol's southward passage. Having crossed the Caribbean in the teeth of contrary winds, it was not until the early days of April that the French fleet hove in sight of Cartagena, and M. de Rivarol summoned a council aboard his flagship to determine the method of assault. "It is of importance, messieurs," he told them, "that we take the city by surprise, not only before it can put itself into a state of defence; but before it can remove its treasures inland. I propose to land a force sufficient to achieve this to the north of the city to-night after dark." And he explained in detail the scheme upon which his wits had laboured. He was heard respectfully and approvingly by his officers, scornfully by Captain Blood, and indifferently by the other buccaneer captains present. For it must be understood that Blood's refusal to attend councils had related only to those concerned with determining the nature of the enterprise to be undertaken. Captain Blood was the only one amongst them who knew exactly what lay ahead. Two years ago he had himself considered a raid upon the place, and he had actually made a survey of it in circumstances which he was presently to disclose. The Baron's proposal was one to be expected from a commander whose knowledge of Cartagena was only such as might be derived from maps. Geographically and strategically considered, it is a curious place. It stands almost four-square, screened east and north by hills, and it may be said to face south upon the inner of two harbours by which it is normally approached. The entrance to the outer harbour, which is in reality a lagoon some three miles across, lies through a neck known as the Boca Chica - or Little Mouth - and defended by a fort. |
| 1055 |
A long strip of densely wooded land to westward acts here as a natural breakwater, and as the inner harbour is approached, another strip of land thrusts across at right angles from the first, towards the mainland on the east. Just short of this it ceases, leaving a deep but very narrow channel, a veritable gateway, into the secure and sheltered inner harbour. Another fort defends this second passage. East and north of Cartagena lies the mainland, which may be left out of account. But to the west and northwest this city, so well guarded on every other side, lies directly open to the sea. It stands back beyond a half-mile of beach, and besides this and the stout Walls which fortify it, would appear to have no other defences. But those appearances are deceptive, and they had utterly deceived M. de Rivarol, when he devised his plan. It remained for Captain Blood to explain the difficulties when M. de Rivarol informed him that the honour of opening the assault in the manner which he prescribed was to be accorded to the buccaneers. Captain Blood smiled sardonic appreciation of the honour reserved for his men. It was precisely what he would have expected. For the buccaneers the dangers; for M. de Rivarol the honour, glory and profit of the enterprise. "It is an honour which I must decline," said he quite coldly. Wolverstone grunted approval and Hagthorpe nodded. Yberville, who as much as any of them resented the superciliousness of his noble compatriot, never wavered in loyalty to Captain Blood. The French officers - there were six of them present - stared their haughty surprise at the buccaneer leader, whilst the Baron challengingly fired a question at him. "How? You decline it, 'sir? You decline to obey orders, do you say?" "I understood, M. le Baron, that you summoned us to deliberate upon the means to be adopted." "Then you understood amiss, M. le Capitaine. You are here to receive my commands. I have already deliberated, and I have decided. I hope you understand." "Oh, I understand," laughed Blood. "But, I ask myself, do you?" And without giving the Baron time to set the angry question that was bubbling to his lips, he swept on: "You have deliberated, you say, and you have decided. But unless your decision rests upon a wish to destroy my buccaneers, you will alter it when I tell you something of which I have knowledge. This city of Cartagena looks very vulnerable on the northern side, all open to the sea as it apparently stands. Ask yourself, M. le Baron, how came the Spaniards who built it where it is to have been at such trouble to fortify it to the south, if from the north it is so easily assailable." That gave M. de Rivarol pause. "The Spaniards," Blood pursued, "are not quite the fools you are supposing them. Let me tell you, messieurs, that two years ago I made a survey of Cartagena as a preliminary to raiding it. I came hither with some friendly trading Indians, myself disguised as an Indian, and in that guise I spent a week in the city and studied carefully all its approaches. |
| 1056 |
de Cussy started out of his gloomy abstraction. He cleared his throat. He was extremely nervous. "In view of what Captain Blood has submitted..." "Oh, to the devil with that!" snapped Rivarol. "It seems that I am followed by poltroons. Look you, M. le Capitaine, since you are afraid to undertake this thing, I will myself undertake it. The weather is calm, and I count upon making good my landing. If I do so, I shall have proved you wrong, and I shall have a word to say to you to-morrow which you may not like. I am being very generous with you, sir." He waved his hand regally. "You have leave to go." It was sheer obstinacy and empty pride that drove him, and he received the lesson he deserved. The fleet stood in during the afternoon to within a mile of the coast, and under cover of darkness three hundred men, of whom two hundred were negroes - the whole of the negro contingent having been pressed into the undertaking - were pulled away for the shore in the canoes, piraguas, and ships' boats. Rivarol's pride compelled him, however much he may have disliked the venture, to lead them in person. The first six boats were caught in the surf, and pounded into fragments before their occupants could extricate themselves. The thunder of the breakers and the cries of the shipwrecked warned those who followed, and thereby saved them from sharing the same fate. By the Baron's urgent orders they pulled away again out of danger, and stood about to pick up such survivors as contrived to battle towards them. Close upon fifty lives were lost in the adventure, together with half-a-dozen boats stored with ammunition and light guns. The Baron went back to his flagship an infuriated, but by no means a wiser man. Wisdom - not even the pungent wisdom experience thrusts upon us - is not for such as M. de Rivarol. His anger embraced all things, but focussed chiefly upon Captain Blood. In some warped process of reasoning he held the buccaneer chiefly responsible for this misadventure. He went to bed considering furiously what he should say to Captain Blood upon the morrow. He was awakened at dawn by the rolling thunder of guns. Emerging upon the poop in nightcap and slippers, he beheld a sight that increased his unreasonable and unreasoning fury. The four buccaneer ships under canvas were going through extraordinary manoeuvre half a mile off the Boca Chica and little more than half a mile away from the remainder of the fleet, and from their flanks flame and smoke were belching each time they swung broadside to the great round fort that guarded that narrow entrance. The fort was returning the fire vigorously and viciously. But the buccaneers timed their broadsides with extraordinary judgment to catch the defending ordnance reloading; then as they drew the Spaniards' fire, they swung away again not only taking care to be ever moving targets, but, further, to present no more than bow or stern to the fort, their masts in line, when the heaviest cannonades were to be expected. Gibbering and cursing, M. |
| 1057 |
Absorbed in his ridiculous anger, he had considered nothing. But he made a quick recovery. "To my cabin, if you please," he commanded peremptorily, and was turning to lead the way, when Blood arrested him. "With submission, my General, we shall be better here. You behold there the scene of our coming action. It is spread before you like a map." He waved his hand towards the lagoon, the country flanking it and the considerable city standing back from the beach. "If it is not a presumption in me to offer a suggestion..." He paused. M. de Rivarol looked at him sharply, suspecting irony. But the swarthy face was bland, the keen eyes steady. "Let us hear your suggestion," he consented. Blood pointed out the fort at the mouth of the inner harbour, which was just barely visible above the waving palms on the intervening tongue of land. He announced that its armament was less formidable than that of the outer fort, which they had reduced; but on the other hand, the passage was very much narrower than the Boca Chica, and before they could attempt to make it in any case, they must dispose of those defences. He proposed that the French ships should enter the outer harbour, and proceed at once to bombardment. Meanwhile, he would land three hundred buccaneers and some artillery on the eastern side of the lagoon, beyond the fragrant garden islands dense with richly bearing fruit-trees, and proceed simultaneously to storm the fort in the rear. Thus beset on both sides at once, and demoralized by the fate of the much stronger outer fort, he did not think the Spaniards would offer a very long resistance. Then it would be for M. de Rivarol to garrison the fort, whilst Captain Blood would sweep on with his men, and seize the Church of Nuestra Senora de la Poupa, plainly visible on its hill immediately eastward of the town. Not only did that eminence afford them a valuable and obvious strategic advantage, but it commanded the only road that led from Cartagena to the interior, and once it were held there would be no further question of the Spaniards attempting to remove the wealth of the city. That to M. de Rivarol was - as Captain Blood had judged that it would be - the crowning argument. Supercilious until that moment, and disposed for his own pride's sake to treat the buccaneer's suggestions with cavalier criticism, M. de Rivarol's manner suddenly changed. He became alert and brisk, went so far as tolerantly to commend Captain Blood's plan, and issued orders that action might be taken upon it at once. It is not necessary to follow that action step by step. Blunders on the part of the French marred its smooth execution, and the indifferent handling of their ships led to the sinking of two of them in the course of the afternoon by the fort's gunfire. But by evening, owing largely to the irresistible fury with which the buccaneers stormed the place from the landward side, the fort had surrendered, and before dusk Blood and his men with some ordnance hauled thither by mules dominated the city from the heights of Nuestra Senora de la Poupa. |
| 1058 |
At noon on the morrow, shorn of defences and threatened with bombardment, Cartagena sent offers of surrender to M. de Rivarol. Swollen with pride by a victory for which he took the entire credit to himself, the Baron dictated his terms. He demanded that all public effects and office accounts be delivered up; that the merchants surrender all moneys and goods held by them for their correspondents; the inhabitants could choose whether they would remain in the city or depart; but those who went must first deliver up all their property, and those who elected to remain must surrender half, and become the subjects of France; religious houses and churches should be spared, but they must render accounts of all moneys and valuables in their possession. Cartagena agreed, having no choice in the matter, and on the next day, which was the 5th of April, M. de Rivarol entered the city and proclaimed it now a French colony, appointing M. de Cussy its Governor. Thereafter he proceeded to the Cathedral, where very properly a Te Deum was sung in honour of the conquest. This by way of grace, whereafter M. de Rivarol proceeded to devour the city. The only detail in which the French conquest of Cartagena differed from an ordinary buccaneering raid was that under the severest penalties no soldier was to enter the house of any inhabitant. But this apparent respect for the persons and property of the conquered was based in reality upon M. de Rivarol's anxiety lest a doubloon should be abstracted from all the wealth that was pouring into the treasury opened by the Baron in the name of the King of France. Once the golden stream had ceased, he removed all restrictions and left the city in prey to his men, who proceeded further to pillage it of that part of their property which the inhabitants who became French subjects had been assured should remain inviolate. The plunder was enormous. In the course of four days over a hundred mules laden with gold went out of the city and down to the boats waiting at the beach to convey the treasure aboard the ships. During the capitulation and for some time after, Captain Blood and the greater portion of his buccaneers had been at their post on the heights of Nuestra Senora de la Poupa, utterly in ignorance of what was taking place. Blood, although the man chiefly, if not solely, responsible for the swift reduction of the city, which was proving a veritable treasure-house, was not even shown the consideration of being called to the council of officers which with M. de Rivarol determined the terms of the capitulation. This was a slight that at another time Captain Blood would not have borne for a moment. But at present, in his odd frame of mind, and its divorcement from piracy, he was content to smile his utter contempt of the French General. Not so, however, his captains, and still less his men. Resentment smouldered amongst them for a while, to flame out violently at the end of that week in Cartagena. It was only by undertaking to voice their grievance to the Baron that their captain was able for the moment to pacify them. |
| 1059 |
They say that hereafter there will be no ascertaining what the spoil really amounts to." "But - name of Heaven! - I have kept books. They are there for all to see." "They do not wish to see account-books. Few of them can read. They want to view the treasure itself. They know - you compel me to be blunt - that the accounts have been falsified. Your books show the spoil of Cartagena to amount to some ten million livres. The men know - and they are very skilled in these computations that it exceeds the enormous total of forty millions. They insist that the treasure itself be produced and weighed in their presence, as is the custom among the Brethren of the Coast." "I know nothing of filibuster customs." The gentleman was disdainful. "But you are learning quickly." "What do you mean, you rogue? I am a leader of armies, not of plundering thieves." "Oh, but of course!" Blood's irony laughed in his eyes. "Yet, whatever you may be, I warn you that unless you yield to a demand that I consider just and therefore uphold, you may look for trouble, and it would not surprise me if you never leave Cartagena at all, nor convey a single gold piece home to France." "Ah, pardieu! Am I to understand that you are threatening me?" "Come, come, M. le Baron! I warn you of the trouble that a little prudence may avert. You do not know on what a volcano you are sitting. You do not know the ways of buccaneers. If you persist, Cartagena will be drenched in blood, and whatever the outcome the King of France will not have been well served." That shifted the basis of the argument to less hostile ground. Awhile yet it continued, to be concluded at last by an ungracious undertaking from M. de Rivarol to submit to the demands of the buccaneers. He gave it with an extreme ill-grace, and only because Blood made him realize at last that to withhold it longer would be dangerous. In an engagement, he might conceivably defeat Blood's followers. But conceivably he might not. And even if he succeeded, the effort would be so costly to him in men that he might not thereafter find himself in sufficient strength to maintain his hold of what he had seized. The end of it all was that he gave a promise at once to make the necessary preparations, and if Captain Blood and his officers would wait upon him on board the Victorieuse to-morrow morning, the treasure should be produced, weighed in their presence, and their fifth share surrendered there and then into their own keeping. Among the buccaneers that night there was hilarity over the sudden abatement of M. de Rivarol's monstrous pride. But when the next dawn broke over Cartagena, they had the explanation of it. The only ships to be seen in the harbour were the Arabella and the Elizabeth riding at anchor, and the Atropos and the Lachesis careened on the beach for repair of the damage sustained in the bombardment. The French ships were gone. They had been quietly and secretly warped out of the harbour under cover of night, and three sails, faint and small, on the horizon to westward was all that remained to be seen of them. |
| 1060 |
The absconding M. de Rivarol had gone off with the treasure, taking with him the troops and mariners he had brought from France. He had left behind him at Cartagena not only the empty-handed buccaneers, whom he had swindled, but also M. de Cussy and the volunteers and negroes from Hispaniola, whom he had swindled no less. The two parties were fused into one by their common fury, and before the exhibition of it the inhabitants of that ill-fated town were stricken with deeper terror than they had yet known since the coming of this expedition. Captain Blood alone kept his head, setting a curb upon his deep chagrin. He had promised himself that before parting from M. de Rivarol he would present a reckoning for all the petty affronts and insults to which that unspeakable fellow - now proved a scoundrel - had subjected him. "We must follow," he declared. "Follow and punish." At first that was the general cry. Then came the consideration that only two of the buccaneer ships were seaworthy - and these could not accommodate the whole force, particularly being at the moment indifferently victualled for a long voyage. The crews of the Lachesis and Atropos and with them their captains, Wolverstone and Yberville, renounced the intention. After all, there would be a deal of treasure still hidden in Cartagena. They would remain behind to extort it whilst fitting their ships for sea. Let Blood and Hagthorpe and those who sailed with them do as they pleased. Then only did Blood realize the rashness of his proposal, and in attempting to draw back he almost precipitated a battle between the two parties into which that same proposal had now divided the buccaneers. And meanwhile those French sails on the horizon were growing less and less. Blood was reduced to despair. If he went off now, Heaven knew what would happen to the town, the temper of those whom he was leaving being what it was. Yet if he remained, it would simply mean that his own and Hagthorpe's crews would join in the saturnalia and increase the hideousness of events now inevitable. Unable to reach a decision, his own men and Hagthorpe's took the matter off his hands, eager to give chase to Rivarol. Not only was a dastardly cheat to be punished but an enormous treasure to be won by treating as an enemy this French commander who, himself, had so villainously broken the alliance. When Blood, torn as he was between conflicting considerations, still hesitated, they bore him almost by main force aboard the Arabella. Within an hour, the water-casks at least replenished and stowed aboard, the Arabella and the Elizabeth put to sea upon that angry chase. "When we were well at sea, and the Arabella's course was laid," writes Pitt, in his log, "I went to seek the Captain, knowing him to be in great trouble of mind over these events. I found him sitting alone in his cabin, his head in his hands, torment in the eyes that stared straight before him, seeing nothing." "What now, Peter?" cried the young Somerset mariner. |
| 1061 |
Blood scanned the French ships, and chuckled. The Victorieuse and the Medusa appeared to have taken no more than a few scars; but the third ship, the Baleine, listing heavily to larboard so as to keep the great gash in her starboard well above water, was out of account. "You see!" he cried to van der Kuylen, and without waiting for the Dutchman's approving grunt, he shouted an order: "Helm, hard-a-port!" The sight of that great red ship with her gilt beak-head and open ports swinging broadside on must have given check to Rivarol's soaring exultation. Yet before he could move to give an order, before he could well resolve what order to give, a volcano of fire and metal burst upon him from the buccaneers, and his decks were swept by the murderous scythe of the broadside. The Arabella held to her course, giving place to the Elizabeth, which, following closely, executed the same manoeuver. And then whilst still the Frenchmen were confused, panic-stricken by an attack that took them so utterly by surprise, the Arabella had gone about, and was returning in her tracks, presenting now her larboard guns, and loosing her second broadside in the wake of the first. Came yet another broadside from the Elizabeth and then the Arabella's trumpeter sent a call across the water, which Hagthorpe perfectly understood. "On, now, Jeremy!" cried Blood. "Straight into them before they recover their wits. Stand by, there! Prepare to board! Hayton ... the grapnels! And pass the word to the gunner in the prow to fire as fast as he can load." He discarded his feathered hat, and covered himself with a steel head-piece, which a negro lad brought him. He meant to lead this boarding-party in person. Briskly he explained himself to his two guests. "Boarding is our only chance here. We are too heavily outgunned." Of this the fullest demonstration followed quickly. The Frenchmen having recovered their wits at last, both ships swung broadside on, and concentrating upon the Arabella as the nearer and heavier and therefore more immediately dangerous of their two opponents, volleyed upon her jointly at almost the same moment. Unlike the buccaneers, who had fired high to cripple their enemies above decks, the French fifed low to smash the hull of their assailant. The Arabella rocked and staggered under that terrific hammering, although Pitt kept her headed towards the French so that she should offer the narrowest target. For a moment she seemed to hesitate, then she plunged forward again, her beak-head in splinters, her forecastle smashed, and a gaping hole forward, that was only just above the water-line. Indeed, to make her safe from bilging, Blood ordered a prompt jettisoning of the forward guns, anchors, and water-casks and whatever else was moveable. Meanwhile, the Frenchmen going about, gave the like reception to the Elizabeth. The Arabella, indifferently served by the wind, pressed forward to come to grips. But before she could accomplish her object, the Victorieuse had loaded her starboard guns again, and pounded her advancing enemy with a second broadside at close quarters. |
| 1062 |
Amid the thunder of cannon, the rending of timbers, and the screams of maimed men, the half-necked Arabella plunged and reeled into the cloud of smoke that concealed her prey, and then from Hayton went up the cry that she was going down by the head. Blood's heart stood still. And then in that very moment of his despair, the blue and gold flank of the Victorieuse loomed through the smoke. But even as he caught that enheartening glimpse he perceived, too, how sluggish now was their advance, and how with every second it grew more sluggish. They must sink before they reached her. Thus, with an oath, opined the Dutch Admiral, and from Lord Willoughby there was a word of blame for Blood's seamanship in having risked all upon this gambler's throw of boarding. "There was no other chance!" cried Blood, in broken-hearted frenzy. "If ye say it was desperate and foolhardy, why, so it was; but the occasion and the means demanded nothing less. I fail within an ace of victory." But they had not yet completely failed. Hayton himself, and a score of sturdy rogues whom his whistle had summoned, were crouching for shelter amid the wreckage of the forecastle with grapnels ready. Within seven or eight yards of the Victorieuse, when their way seemed spent, and their forward deck already awash under the eyes of the jeering, cheering Frenchmen, those men leapt up and forward, and hurled their grapnels across the chasm. Of the four they flung, two reached the Frenchman's decks, and fastened there. Swift as thought itself, was then the action of those sturdy, experienced buccaneers. Unhesitatingly all threw themselves upon the chain of one of those grapnels, neglecting the other, and heaved upon it with all their might to warp the ships together. Blood, watching from his own quarter-deck, sent out his voice in a clarion call: "Musketeers to the prow!" The musketeers, at their station at the waist, obeyed him with the speed of men who know that in obedience is the only hope of life. Fifty of them dashed forward instantly, and from the ruins of the forecastle they blazed over the heads of Hayton's men, mowing down the French soldiers who, unable to dislodge the irons, firmly held where they had deeply bitten into the timbers of the Victorieuse, were themselves preparing to fire upon the grapnel crew. Starboard to starboard the two ships swung against each other with a jarring thud. By then Blood was down in the waist, judging and acting with the hurricane speed the occasion demanded. Sail had been lowered by slashing away the ropes that held the yards. The advance guard of boarders, a hundred strong, was ordered to the poop, and his grapnel-men were posted, and prompt to obey his command at the very moment of impact. As a result, the foundering Arabella was literally kept afloat by the half-dozen grapnels that in an instant moored her firmly to the Victorieuse. Willoughby and van der Kuylen on the poop had watched in breathless amazement the speed and precision with which Blood and his desperate crew had gone to work. |
Комментарии